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capesandshapes · 4 years ago

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All You Had To Do Was Stay (Adrienette) (2/4)

Summary:

Three years ago, Marinette revealed her identity to him. Three years ago, he promised to wait in a hotel room for her. Three years ago, she opened the door to find it empty.

Now she's expected to play nice with him, since she's the maid of honor and he's unfortunately the best man. But old habits die hard, and old feelings die harder.

"This is a wedding, not a death march, Marinette."

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

They had gone overboard.

Marinette had one job, and they had gone overboard.

Okay, she had five jobs—but at the moment it felt like only one, and at the moment, that job was completely and utterly failed.

Every single surface of the bakery was covered in cakes. Every godly combination of cake, every possible frosting, every style of decoration, every type of vanilla—And that wasn’t even the end of it.

No! Because what if, at the very last moment, Alya and Nino had needed cupcakes or a pie or a tarte. Were they sure they didn’t want cookies? They could include them in the gift bags! And savory cakes weren’t off the table either, Marinette’s father reassured them that he could stay up the whole night and bake enough for Paris if they needed.

Not to mention the eight boxes on the counter behind Marinette—She’d been looking thin! This past week Tom had been worried that she’d been depressed—Never mind the fact that she was—and his little girl needed her favorite treats… Which meant every sweet she had ever so much as smiled at, and so many dumplings that Marinette would have to freeze them and eat them for months to come. Nino and Alya had similar offerings behind them.

Nino and Alya also had strained looks on their faces.

The cake tasting had gone over an hour later than it was supposed to, and there was no possible way out. Nino checked his smartwatch a thousand times, but every attempt he made at opening his mouth found his plate refilled.

“I just love weddings,” Marinette’s father proclaimed, tears in the corners of his eyes.

Marinette couldn’t miss the soft mumble of her mother trying to calm him, “someday, Tom.” She did her best to eat then, if only to soothe the two of them.

Her parents didn’t know what had happened between her and Adrien, only that one day he was there and the next day he jetted out of Paris. It was better that it stayed that way, god forbid they found out. She didn’t want to be there the moment that her father realized; she didn’t think she could stand to have him look at her afterwards.

He always wanted the world to be good to her, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him that it hadn’t been. That she’d faced monsters he couldn’t imagine and had skirted the line between life and death as a hero of Paris. That was one secret he would never know.

“I really do have to go, Mister Dupain,” Nino tried for the hundredth time as her dad placed four more slices on his plate. “There’s this thing and I… I mean, I can’t leave my dude waiting.”

“You could invite them here,” Tom said, serving Alya a slice of spiced rum cake. The young woman teetered between blissful and concerned. “Like I always say, the more the merrier.”

“Yeah, that’s like, a completely valid statement in some cases but…” Nino trailed off, flinching. Her dad frowned. “I mean, it’s not you! Definitely not you guys, you’re amazing—Marinette is amazing!” He quickly added. “It’s just one of those things…”

“We’re not hip anymore, or they don’t like cake?” Tom pushed. “Because I have croissants, croquettes, even a quiche or two! If they’re gluten intolerant, I have a whole spread!”

“No, no! He loves your stuff!” Nino immediately flinched the moment he said it.

The gears began to turn in her father’s head at the same time Marinette nearly choked on her slice of cake. “Adrien!” His face lit up with familiarity, making the obvious guess since the blond’s return was the talk of Paris. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen him, honey!” He immediately turned to her mother, and Marinette could see him quickly begin to recall the young man’s order.

“Three years,” Marinette finally butted in, supplementing the information her father would no doubt demand to know. “It’s been three years.”

“He must have gotten so skinny,” her father said with an edge of concern, “Sabine, we should make a box!” Her mother was already ahead of him.

Alya butted in, swallowing the remainder of her cake in one bite. “I mean, he’s still a model, maybe he shouldn’t come. I mean, the temptation, the…” She looked to Marinette to supplement, all the woman could do was vigorously nod her head, “carbs.” Alya winced.

“Nonsense, everyone knows those diets aren’t healthy,” Sabine began.

“He’s really into them,” Alya insisted.

“Well,” Sabine continued, fully dedicated to the idea of helping such a poor, starving model, “we’ll fix that. Call him up.”

“That’s…”

“—I’m sure Marinette wants to see him,” Sabine finished.

Oh, how utterly wrong she was. “Call him,” Marinette said, trying to make the strange way that she pulled back her lips look more like a smile than a wince of pain, “what’s the worst that could happen?”

****************

The worst that could happen was that he could show up. And he did.

And suddenly, there he was. Adrien. Standing in her parents’ shop door, a familiar blue scarf around his neck tied almost as tightly as her father’s arms were wrapped around him. Laughing, smiling, acting like nothing had happened and like he hadn’t been gone for three years.

Until he saw her.

“You sit next to Marinette, Adrien,” Sabine insisted, “we don’t want to break up the lovebirds.”

She swore she saw him swallow.

He looked different in real life compared to his Instagram posts, she was pleased to see. They’d erased the small bags underneath his eyes, the creasing beginning to form between his brows, and that persistent memory of a smile that hung on his lips even when he was meaning to look stoic and thoughtful. She was a little thankful for it, because that meant that the man she sometimes looked at in the middle of the night, that she spent far too much time on, was fake. She wasn’t crying over the real Adrien Agreste while he was lounging on a beach somewhere with flawless skin and a perfect smile.

“It’s been a long time, Marinette,” he said as he settled beside her, his voice soft and almost inaudible. She couldn’t place the tone of it.

“Whose fault is that,” her response was sarcastic and the smile she put on for her parents’ sake was fake. She’d rather he sat in a dumpster outside.

He winced.

“So,” Tom carried on, loading up a plate for Adrien to the point that Marinette was almost afraid of it cracking, “New York, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, and Sydney! You’re really well-traveled now, Adrien, I’m a little jealous! I’m afraid to say that I didn’t pin you for a globetrotter, but maybe I was a little wrong in that! You’ve done some really impressive things these past years.”

“Yeah,” he said, accepting the plate from Tom with a gracious nod, “I’ve really gone out there, but I’m happy to be home. I always tell everyone that my heart is in Paris. I was sad to leave it.”

“So, you’ll be staying around then?” Sabine perked up.

“For a few months, maybe if I’m lucky a few years,” he said. “It really depends on how things go.” Looking down at his plate, Adrien said, “I sort of left a lot of things up in the air when I left Paris.”

If there was a word for the look Marinette shot him out of the corner of her eye, it was poisonous.

It was Tom’s turn to speak again, he continued his interrogation of Adrien as Sabine shot her daughter a questioning look, and Alya gave Marinette a warning kick from her seat a few inches away. “So, what’s on the checklist while you’re here? Any sights you have to see, things you have to do, friends you have to check in with?”

All anger melted away, dissolving into the utterly terrifying sea of embarrassment. Alya’s eyes widened in mock horror as the color left Marinette’s face, the way he said friends let there be no mistake, her father was going to try to wingman for her.

“I think most of his friends are gone by now—” Marinette quickly interrupted.

“Well, I have my father’s house to sell, I’d like to check in with a few victims of akumatization, and—” he paused at her statement, his eyes quickly looking over to her and catching her gaze for a split second. “I had some friends I wanted to check in,” he said, his tongue wetting his lips in an awkward show of unease.

“Had,” Marinette emphasized, drawing the line.

“Had,” Adrien repeated, a flicker of curiosity in his eyes. He sat up a little straighter, looking back to the Dupain-Chengs. “It’s been a long time.” Indeed, it had been.

*****************

Somehow they made it through all the cakes, her parents sending each home with an additional box of their favorites so that they could be absolutely sure of their selections. Alya and Nino went home together, and there was an option for Marinette to stay at her parents, but one look at her mother’s eyes roaming over her like a crime scene and Marinette knew she wouldn’t take it.

She always liked the walk home anyway, and her parents wanted to speak to Adrien a little longer. So, giving the slightest of waves, she walked out.

She only realized what an awful choice that was minutes later, when she heard the pounding of pavement behind her and a familiar voice calling her name. “Hey, Marinette, wait up!” Adrien.

Maybe if she pretended not to hear it, he would go away.

He did not go away.

“Marinette!”

“I should have just stayed home, I should have just slept in my childhood bed,” Marinette mumbled, cursing the fact that she didn’t live near a tourist destination where she could easily vanish into the crowds. No, instead she was walking down a quiet, empty street; one where it was impossible to ignore him.

“Hey,” he said when he finally caught up to her, and she clenched her eyes shut as tightly as possible as if that would somehow make him go away.

Hey, that was what he had to say? Three years and she gets a hey? “Hey,” she said back, her voice dripping with unenthusiasm. What on earth did he think he was doing?

She opened her eyes to see his hand at the back of his neck, a sheepish expression on his face. “I, uh, just wanted to say hi.” Right.

“Of course,” she said awkwardly, “that’s all you want to say, right. Thank you,” she paused. “Hi,” she reiterated, echoing the statement back at him. As if they hadn’t just spent four hours trying cakes together, as if he hadn’t sat right beside her in her parents’ shop, as if she wasn’t freaking Ladybug and he Chat Noir.

They were on hi terms now. What even were hi terms?

He quickened his pace to keep up with her. “Listen, uh,” he tried again, “I want this to work out.”

He caught the look on her face.

“The wedding,” he quickly clarified. “Their wedding, not ours. Because, you know, there won’t be an our wedding, there will be a… their wedding. And that’s uh…,” he was trying not to ramble, she could tell. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” she parroted back.

“I just want to get through this,” he started quickly, and his eyes immediately widened as he realized what he said and how it could be misunderstood. He tried to open his mouth again, but she stopped him before he could get more words out.

“We will,” she said.

“Right, because we’re…” A team? He’d ended that. “Good at working together,” he said, and even Marinette had to flinch at how lame it sounded.

“Yeah, I’m sure we are,” Marinette replied, letting her eyes drift down to the sidewalk. She didn’t want it to last too much longer, she didn’t want him to see that she still lived in the same place. She didn’t want him to have another part of her life.

She couldn’t afford for him to.

And yet there he was, and she could tell that he wanted it. That he wanted another part of her life, that he wanted—god, what did he want? To ruin her again? To make the fact that it wasn’t going to happen completely clear?

“I missed you,” he said suddenly, his voice low and almost croaking.

“Go home, Adrien.”

#marinette dupain cheng #adrien agreste #adrienette #miraculous ladybug #ml fanfic #miraculous fanfiction #my fanfic #part two

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phykios · 3 years ago

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honesty and promise me part 6 [co-written with @darkmagyk] [read on ao3]

Ah, the age old question: what to get for the guy who has everything and also when you’re trying make up for the fact that you actually missed his birthday entirely while spending as little money as possible?

“Where the hell are you taking me?” Percy asks as they wait their turn to disembark. “I haven’t been to Staten Island in ages.”

Annabeth has never been at all. She knows there’s a handful of Greek revival buildings in the Historic District, but she’s never had a car to get there, or the stomach to get on the ferry. Percy had practically climbed onto the bow, his own personal reenactment of Titanic, arms thrown out to the wind, while Annabeth attempted to keep her breakfast down.

Having spectacularly flamed out last week in Philadelphia, she can’t let Percy’s birthday go without some sort of commemoration. The Staten Island Ferry is just part one. “All in due time,” she says, checking her phone for directions. They still have a bus they need to board, and Annabeth is getting sweaty in her leather jacket. Thank God Percy volunteered to carry the backpack with all their gear; otherwise, when this jacket comes off, it’s going to smell worse than his tights at the end of a long day.

Like a magnet, his gaze is glued to the strips of the bay he can spot through the bus windows, his head resting on his chin, a soft, serene smile lifting his lips. All the tightness, all the stress he’s held in his shoulders the last few times she’s seen him, it melts away at the sharp, salty tang of rust and sea air which suffuses every corner. She doesn’t even mind that he isn’t looking at her.

Hand in hand, finally, they get off the bus, and walk to the overlook. Slinging the backpack off his shoulder, he sets it down at his feet, eyes fixed on the strip of shoreline which can be seen, even all the way over here. “What is that?” he breathes, shielding his eyes against the glint of the sun on the water.

“That,” says Annabeth, “is the Staten Island ship graveyard.”

Still stewing in her guilt over how she missed his birthday--despite the fact that he didn’t even tell her--Annabeth decided to swallow her pride and ask for help. It took an inordinate number of coffee orders and one instance of her actually getting down on her knees and begging, pleading to their long friendship together and swearing that Annabeth would never use this information for evil, but she had finally wheedled the secret out of Thalia: Percy’s greatest love, after the ballet, was sailing. Ship construction, naval battles, maritime history, they were, according to Thalia, the only things which could entice Percy to actually set down the tights and “get some frickin’ sunshine for once in his life.” Annabeth hadn’t believed her, until Thalia had dug up an old photo which had never been posted to his socials--and Annabeth had certainly scoured them for long enough, she would have recognized it had she seen it before--of Percy, on a glittering, jewel-like sea, a rope wrapped around his fist as he leaned over the side of a sailboat, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide in a graceless, unrestrained joy.

“Back in the eighties, there used to be over four hundred ships down there,” Annabeth says, coming up beside him. “A lot of it’s been scrapped or sold, but there are still maybe a hundred or so boats, including the USS PC-1264, one of the--”

“One of the two predominantly African American crewed Navy ships from World War II,” he interrupts, eyes light. “No way!”

“Yes way,” Annabeth grins, unzipping her jacket. The midday sun beats down on them, the air sticky and heavy, and she needs this thing off, pronto. “And, there’s a ship that was supposedly the command post for the General Slocum disaster.” Not that she really knows what that is.

He whirls around. “The Abram S. Hewitt is there? Holy sh--”

His jaw drops. His eyes bug out.

Part two of his present was the ship graveyard. Part three is the outfit.

Annabeth, one hand on her hip, slings her jacket over her shoulder with the other, the leather hot against her bare skin. She has chosen to forgo a shirt entirely, wearing nothing but her nicest pair of black jeans with the thick suspenders and a shiny, red bra. And yes, she had Thalia touch up her hair, five inches of curls lopped off on one side, undercut sharp and severe.

“I thought we could have a picnic here,” she says, a smile curling her lips without her permission. “Then, if you want, we could do some light trespassing? See the ships up close?”

Percy swallows. He breathes in through his nose, shuddering. “Sure,” he whispers, hoarse. “Sounds good.”

Dropping to the ground like a rock, studiously not checking her out, Percy unpacks their picnic, laying out the blanket, something blue, old, but soft Annabeth had knitted in a fit of pre-finals’ anxiety in college. Annabeth had hinted the night before that he should make them some food, as no one could make a grilled cheese like Percy, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to buy them some prepackaged, tasteless garbage.

Percy’s sandwiches, just like the man himself, are stacked: thick, sourdough slices (which she suspects he made himself), bacon, turkey, apple, tomato, lettuce, avocado, mayo for her but none for him. She’d always been under the impression that dancers needed to watch what they ate, endlessly in pursuit of some unattainable ideal of beauty. Nope. Percy eats everything and anything he can get his hands on, high carb and high protein and high everything else. It makes sense, she guesses, for someone who basically has to bench their own body weight daily. Every inch of him is tailored for power and velocity, to propel him out of the grasp of gravity--rabbit food just isn’t going to cut it here.

Munching down, he maneuvers himself into a number of splits and stretches, unable to give up his routine for a single day. “When I was probably thirteen or fourteen,” he says, halfway through a tirade of reminiscence, “my dad took me and Triton and Kym to Cyprus, for some family bonding time.” He rolls his eyes. “You can probably imagine how well that went. Most of that trip was… well, Cyprus was definitely the best part. We went to Kyrenia Castle, which has this amazing museum that holds one of the oldest known ships in the world. Like, this thing was operational during the lifetime of Alexander the Great, and it sank about a mile away from the harbor.” He takes a heroic bite, chewing with his lips firmly shut.

“Cool.”

He swallows. “Very cool. I love really old ships, but you can imagine how few of those are still left, and not just because we haven’t found them.”

Annabeth feels her neck heating up, despite the shade they sit in. “Well, I hope these ones are old enough for you.”

“Oh, these are incredible--don’t get me wrong! I had no idea there was anything like this so close to home. Who needs Cyprus when you have Staten Island?” He grins, placing his sandwich down, throwing his arms in a stretch.

“I know it isn’t Tokyo or Moscow or anything…” she trails off, self-conscious even as she doesn’t actually ask the question that’s on her mind.

Shamefully, she has found that she still thinks about what Will had said at his apartment over a month ago at this point: Percy Jackson, boy toy of the rich and famous. But if she actually asks, it will make her look like some totally jealous girlfriend or something, like she honestly cares about Percy’s past sexual conquests.

She doesn’t care. She doesn’t.

He’s just led a really interesting life, and she wishes she could relate. That’s all.

“It’s not,” he agrees, bending his back with an audible pop. “It’s better.”

“Really? A little ship graveyard is better than the sites of Tokyo?”

“I didn’t see any sites in Tokyo,” he said. “Mostly just Mittie’s hotel room.”

“Mittie?”

Percy looks at his sandwich, suddenly very interested in the crust.

“She’s someone important, then?”

Silence.

Annabeth laughs to break the tension. “Okay, I'll bite--who’s Mittie? Another model?”

Taking a small bite of sandwich, he chews, methodical and deliberate. He swallows, clearing his throat. “Margherita Savoy.”

The name doesn’t ring a bell. “Who?”

“Princess Margherita Elisabetta of Sardinia.”

Her mouth drops open a little. “A princess?”

Percy shrugs. “Technically. The throne of Sardinia doesn’t exist anymore, obviously, but she’s big into the money and the titles and stuff.”

A princess. A fucking princess. “But she lets you call her Mittie.”

He looks a little constipated. “She didn’t… until she took me to Tokyo.”

“Oh,” she says. Because what else is there to say? She’s certainly no princess.

“She was nice,” Percy says, softly. “You know, eventually. Once we got to know each other.”

Her phone is hot in her pocket, like it’s preemptively searching Google for pictures of Margherita Elisabetta of Sardinia, downloading them all so Annabeth can scribble all over her face like a bad high school movie. “A pretender?” She scoffs, exaggeratedly, her fists tight against the grass. “Talk to me when you get a real princess.”

His ears go red. “Um…”

No way. “No fucking way.”

“Look, Eugenie was just kinda pissed when Triton broke up with her, and so she just thought that we’d have some fun.”

“Oh my god.” She says, looking at him in something like horror. And telling herself at least it wasn’t her distant cousin Madeleine.

“It was only for like a week or two,” Percy protests. “We went to a club in Berlin she knew Triton liked to go to so he would see us and get annoyed.”

“A princess dated you because she was pissed at your brother?”

“Only twice,” he says, casual, like any of this is normal and not absolutely insane. “Eleonore is one of Kym’s friends. And she’s technically, like, an archduchess, not a princess. But I don’t know. A couple of his other girlfriends wanted to get back at him, and I was in Europe and available, so we just…” He trails off. She can hear the ellipsis, hanging hot and heavy over them, each dot dropping like a stone. What is this, fucking Mamma Mia?

“When was the last time this happened?” she asks, not really wanting to hear the answer.

He rubs a hand over his mouth, gaze unfocused as he thinks. “Um… not since the week after Frank left, I think. Mittie wanted to go to Bora Bora but she didn’t want to go alone, you know?”

“No, I meant,” she pushes through as her stomach flutters, tight and uncomfortable, “girls using you to get back at your brother.”

His face falls, just a bit. “Oh. Last year, I guess.”

“Who was she?” And where is she so Annabeth can punt her off a building?

“Calypso Atlas.” He sighs, wistful, with more reverence than he had given any of the princesses, and Annabeth’s stomach flops, different from the flutter. Painful this time. “She actually liked me.”

“Everyone likes you,” she says, faintly. Maybe wearing the leather jacket is giving her heatstroke.

“You know, they really don’t. Not how it counts, anyway.” He picks at a blade of grass, rubbing it between his fingers. “Most of the girls who wanted to use me to get back at Triton only did it because they knew how much he liked to bitch about me--the ‘half-breed bastard.’” He rolls his eyes, huffs a laugh. “And even Kym’s friends didn’t actually like me. Like, yeah, they’d fly me all over with them, but they didn’t want to be seen with me. Mittie and I were on and off for years, and she gets photographed constantly. I’m not in any of them.”

Annabeth thinks she might actually be sick.

But he doesn’t stop. “It wasn’t so bad when they went around saying that I was a dancer with the Paris Opera, because I was, and I was proud of it. But it wasn’t… I don’t know. It wasn’t like with Frank, whose family does have a ton of money, but who only ever dated me because he liked me.” He picks another blade of grass, tearing it between his fingers. “Calypso, though. She was different.” And he smiles, a little.

“How?”

That smile grows wider. “She just called me one day, out of the blue, and very publicly asked me to be her date to Milan Fashion Week after she and Triton broke up and he immediately turned around and got engaged. She was super up front about it, didn’t try to sleep with me or anything, even though I know she was friends with some people and probably heard about my various talents.”

She knows exactly which talents he means. He winks at Annabeth, ironic and self-conscious, and she forces out a little laugh, as though the idea of him going down on someone else is charming.

“But then we actually had a good time together, and a few weeks later, she called me up again, and again, and again, until eventually she introduced me to her father--which was a hell of an experience, let me tell you. The Atlas family puts the Olympianides family to shame as far as dysfunction goes. But it was nice, in its own way; if I’d ever asked Mittie to introduce me to her dad, she’d have laughed in my face.”

“Sounds like you were pretty serious,” Annabeth manages.

“That was the problem.” He looks away, towards the sea. Always towards the sea. “She wanted to leave Paris, travel the world. And she wanted me to go with her.”

“To leave the Paris Opera?”

“To leave ballet entirely. I just…” He holds the silence for a moment, lost in the fog of reminiscence, the mist of possible futures long since dissipated. Sighing, he shakes his head. “I couldn’t do it. So, in March, she went to Dubai, and I started making calls back to New York.”

“You broke up with her this year?”

“She broke up with me,” he clarifies, turning back to her. “It was all very romantic. I always left my comp at the box office for her. She didn’t come to my show, but she showed up at the stage door the day before she was set to leave, telling me that she had an extra ticket with my name on it. I turned her down.” And then he looks her in the eye as he says, “I don’t regret it at all.”

She swallows, her face flushing, tongue numb as she searches desperately for something to say to that. “Atlas, you said her family was? It sounds familiar.”

“Oh, you’re probably thinking of Zoe Atlas,” Percy says, easing off for the moment. “You probably know about her because she and Thalia were archenemies in boarding school. Or maybe girlfriends? I have yet to get a straight answer.” Annabeth’s eyes nearly bug out of her head. Thalia, in boarding school? What? “But I like Zoe. She’s an activist, and absolutely hates her father. Like I said, there’s a lot of dysfunction. And she came to my first show way back when, and she wasn’t even weird when I dated her sister when we ran into each other in Paris. So that was nice.”

“She went to your first show?” What in God’s name is up with these one-percenter families? It’s like they all overlap in one big incestuous slurry. And as the daughter of the Chases and the Pallases, she tries not to think where she might fit into that.

“Thalia brought her. Her first not-date. It was Thalia’s first ballet ever, too. It… it meant a lot.”

“What show was it?”

He smiles, wistful. “The Nutcracker. I was one of the kids at Clara’s party. Most scared I’ve ever been. When I got out backstage after intermission, Thalia was waiting for me with my mom. She punched my shoulder, called me ‘Kelp Head,’ and told me I did great. Then I hugged her,” he says, snickering. “She punched me again.”

Annabeth laughs, huffing through her nose. “Good to see some things never change.”

“That’s our Thalia for you--looking out for everyone, even when it kills her inside.” He glances at her pointedly.

It’s her turn to share.

Annabeth’s mouth is dry, like sandpaper.

She grabs her backpack, pulling out a sketchbook and a pencil. Beside her, Percy sighs, deflating a little.

Annabeth flips open a new page, and starts drawing.

Each sketch delivers a challenge: bringing order to the whole through design, composition, tension, balance, light and harmony. Sometimes, buildings spring to life on the page, fully formed. Sometimes the page stays blank, an empty pencil.

Pencil to paper. Letting whatever wants to come out, come out. “My mom invited me to lunch one day,” she says. Her eyes follow the line of her pencil, ninety degree angles and symmetrical shapes. “I had moved to New York like six months before. Single girl, in the big city, to follow her dreams.” She’d gone to boarding school in New York before that, but it wasn’t the same as picking out her apartment and taking the train to the Manhattan skyscraper her office was held in. Sometimes she’d walk down the street, feeling like she was smack dab in the middle of Sex and the City, which she and Piper use to watch in secret, huddled under the covers in the dorms at Miss Minerva’s. “Unfortunately, my mom didn’t love my dreams.”

“She didn’t approve of anarchist architecture?”

Annabeth’s laugh is hollow. “She thought I should have been charting some new path in business for a woman. But not in a feminist way. In, like, a capitalist way. But architecture was not really negotiable for me. And once that became clear, she had her own expectations about that, too.”

Annabeth has always been a prideful know-it-all. If all her mother had wanted from her was ambition, they probably could have made it work. Annabeth wanted to reshape the skyline, she wanted her name on buildings that would last and impress.

But even Annabeth couldn’t do that in six months.

“She wanted the best schools, the best companies, the best projects.” She sighs. “I was lucky to find a job in New York that wasn’t just carrying coffee.” She had gotten a bigger offer from a more well-known firm where she had interned one summer, but it had been for an assistantship, heavy on the assistant. Her eventual Junior Architect label hadn’t been great, but it had been something, being a rising star at a smaller firm. It seemed like a good fit. “I did not make my mother proud. I… she lived in New York, and I lived with my dad all over.”

Percy frowns. “Your mom didn’t have custody of you?”

“My mom didn’t want custody of me,” she laughs, bitter. God, it feels weird to tell someone else this. Piper and Leo and Luke knew, obviously, but they had witnessed it all firsthand. Telling someone else, out of the blue… Well, Percy had divulged his tragic backstory without complaint. It’s only fair that she does as well. “I mean, my dad didn’t either. But when it became clear my mom wasn’t an option, well, there we were. He stepped up as best he could. That wasn’t always a lot, but when compared to my mother, he seems like a perfectly involved parent.”

“Are you trying to make my parental situation seem more reasonable?”

“Is it working?”

“If you ever meet my dad, we can compare notes.” He shudders at the thought, playfully. “So, what happened with your mom?”

“She made her displeasure known.” Annabeth sighs again, shading a corner. “I mean, she’s always made her displeasure known. I wasn’t getting good enough grades, I wasn’t in the right activities, I wasn’t going to get into the right school, yadda yadda yadda. But for a long time… I don’t know, it at least seemed like she was worried about me.” She thinks of the Eta party, of the man in the brown suit, tutting about Athena Pallas’s druggie daughter, and scowls. “My mother has always had an all or nothing outlook. If I wasn’t the best, I might as well be nothing. But the thing was, this time I thought I was making real progress. And when she invited me to lunch after six months in the same city, I thought she would see that.”

She had not. Because to Athena Pallas, having a daughter who was an architect instead of an executive Vice-President on her way to CEO, having a daughter at a small but growing architecture firm instead of the best one in the country, was like having a daughter who was drunk in a gutter somewhere.

And Annabeth had realized as much that lunch.

All her work was never going to earn her mother’s love.

And suddenly, she wasn’t sure what work had been her’s and what had been her mother’s ambitions.

She’d started crying. In the cafe and right now, on Staten Island, with Percy. “I’m sorry,” she sniffs, wiping her nose on her arm. “Wow, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He reaches over and wraps an arm around her, gently, rubbing her shoulder, and she more or less crumples into his side. “It’s fine. Take your time.”

Her arm, still free, keeps moving. The drawing takes a shape that she can’t quite name yet. A tree, maybe, in a box. A window to another world, possibly. She spills tears on the paper.

“She disowned me.” Her thin line trembles, before righting itself. “I ran out of there. I stumbled into the first tattoo parlor that didn’t smell like piss, and got my owl done.” She brandishes her left arm, the grey shape blurry and faded against her elbow. She had had a stuffed owl as a little girl, her protector against the spiders in the closet. “I cut off my hair, got my eyebrow pierced, found a club, and just… had a rough couple of days. Got really really drunk that night.” Like, too drunk. Crying on the floor of a filthy bathroom drunk. “Thalia found me under the bathroom sink, took me back to her place, helped me kick the hangover the next day, and that was that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Annabeth says. And most of the time, she isn’t. She wipes her eyes, smudged makeup getting smudger.

“Your mom sounds like she sucks.”

“She does.”

“What about your dad?”

She sniffs. “What about him?”

“You just haven’t really mentioned him. What’s he like?”

Shrugging, she wipes a tear from her cheek. “He’s a history professor.”

“And?”

“That’s about it.”

“I mean, do you like him?”

She shrugs again. “Sure.” There was a lot to like about Frederick Chase. “I haven’t really spoken to him in a while.”

Mouth in a sympathetic twist, he brushes the curls from her eyes, a gesture so sweet it makes her heart pound. “You should call him,” he says. “I’m sure he misses you.”

Her phone burns in her pocket, heavy with the weight of unread texts. “Maybe.”

“Do you want to change the subject?” he asks.

“Please,” she blurts out, digging the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “God, please. Let’s go back to your cute backstory. Tell me more about your first ballet. I want to hear all about the time you were in the Nutcracker.”

Percy fishes out a napkin from somewhere, handing it to her. Grateful, she blows her nose into it, wet and disgusting. “I hate to tell you this,” he says, “But I have been in the Nutcracker, like, fifteen times.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he nods, “It's the big moneymaker. Have you ever seen it?”

“It's a holiday classic,” she scoffs, a little wetly. “Of course I’ve seen it.”

He snorts. “Like, for real, or the recorded one they play on Netflix with Macaulay Culkin?”

“I've seen it live! My dad lived in San Francisco when I was in high school. They have a fancy ballet there.” She’d seen it as a little kid in NYC, she thought, too. Maybe when her parents were still married, or her mother was still willing to take her for Christmas.

“Would you be willing to see it again?”

“Like, for real,” she parrots back at him, “or the recorded one they play on Netflix?”

“Ha ha. I mean for real.”

“I mean… maybe if they switched things up a bit.”

“It's a classic!” He protests. “I mean, it isn’t like we do the Balanchine everywhere, every time. But… it's a classic.”

“I’m sure the dancing is fine.” Annabeth says. She remembers going with Luke in Boston and thinking it was nice, but also hoping Luke would kiss her at the end of the night, so she hadn’t really paid attention. “But they get to design a land of magic and sweets and fairies, and every time the costumes and the sets are just, like, pink glitter and white gauze mixed with weird racial stereotypes. There’s no imagination.”

“Well, okay then.” There’s something in his smile, in the turn of his head that she can’t quite identify. “What would you do?” he challenges.

She holds his gaze for a moment, looking into those eyes that almost reflect the color of the sea around them. Her eyes feel a little puffy still, but he doesn’t look away. Then, without breaking away, she flips open a new page in her sketchbook.

“Space,” she says. “It needs space.”

“Outer?”

“Negative. Lots of space for dancers to move around.” Her pencil scratches over the paper, familiar blocky shapes springing to life. Doric fluted columns split the wings, because of course. “It’s Christmas, so we want color: no sterile, snowy landscape. We know it’s all frozen over--we don’t need to see it again. Obligatory Christmas tree here,” she sketches a crude triangle off to one side, approximately along the golden ratio, “and a big fireplace in the center, preferably a functional one.”

“You know there was this dancer in the nineteenth century that died because her costume caught fire, yeah?”

Annabeth tilts her head, capitulating. “Fair point. We’ll raise it up on a pedestal, keep it out of the way.” She draws a little platform beneath it. “But color is key.” Up above, she draws a pediment crowning the proscenium. She scribbles in the empty space, a placeholder. “Everyone knows the story, so you lay it out up here, episodes merging into each other from start to finish.”

Percy peers down at her page, his chin perilously close to resting on her shoulder. She can’t draw like that. “Kind of reminds me of the Parthenon.”

“You’ve been?”

He nods, his hair tickling the side of her face. “Couple of times. I thought you said you wanted color, though. The Parthenon’s all white, isn’t it?”

“Not originally,” she says. “Do they not explain that on the tours?”

“Um…” Sheepish, he looks away. “I, uh, I’m not always great at listening.”

God. It’s so endearing. What the hell. She kisses him on the cheek, enjoying the way he flushes lightly. “Me either.” He is so fucking handsome. “But no, the original Parthenon, all those white statues, they were painted. Ergo, color.”

He blinks, momentarily stunned. “Wouldn’t--uh, wouldn’t that distract from the dancers? People would just be staring at the ceiling.”

“Then… it’s only lit up before and after the show. During the show, you turn the lights down, bring the focus back down onto the stage.” She considered it. Something she’d worked on for a production once, a fashion show Piper had done at Pratt. “Or, you set it up so the colors are mostly lights. Lights that shine through during the snowflake dance and when Clara rides off with the prince. But then you also get the white for the frosted look. But, they’re still too pink, so I don’t think some color variety is bad.”

“So, not to kill your vibe,” Percy says, pulling back a bit, “but I gotta say, I don’t see how this is that different from the billion other Nutcrackers out there.”

She glares, lips pursed. He’s trying so hard not to laugh. Dick. “The set is only half the problem,” she says. “You'd need to redesign the costumes, too.”

“Tell you what. Why don’t you come see my show in December, and then you can tell me all about how you’d fix it.”

“Me and every tourist in New York at Christmas time?”

He nods, like he was expecting it. “Then come to my current one. September isn’t Christmas, so it’ll be a lot less crowded.”

“I don’t know,” she grimaces, sketching a star in the corner of the page. “I don’t really think I’d fit--'' Fit in with those people like the ones from the Eta awards, who thought not being her mother’s lackey was the same as being in rehab.

“Annabeth.” Percy takes her drawing hand, lifting it off the page entirely. The pencil is caught between them, an ineffectual barrier to the sweet, rubbing thumb on the mound of her palm. “I want you to come to my show. I’ll leave you a ticket. No one will care what you look like, I promise.” He stares at her, baby seal eyes in full effect.

Fuck.

“As long as you leave me a ticket,” she says, weakly. “I mean, I wouldn’t be able to afford a good seat.” The lie slips out, easy as anything. She can’t help it.

He smiles, soft and warm and way too inviting. “And in the meantime,” he says, softly, you can come with me tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“I’m going to my parents’ for dinner. It’ll be just my mom, Paul, and my sister. They’d love to meet you.”

“I can’t,” she replies, immediately, almost without thinking. “I’ve got--I’ve got work to do.”

She doesn’t. But boys don’t bring girls like Annabeth home anymore. She isn’t meant to settle down. She’s meant for grimy bars and ship yards. She'll leave it to the princesses to be brought home.

He deflates, just the slightest bit. If she hadn’t had so much up and personal time with his naked chest and the movement of his shoulders, she probably would have missed it. “Maybe next time, then?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, not entirely certain if she means to follow through. “Maybe next time.”

#ballet au #percabeth #pjo #the rivalry ends here #darkmagyk #perseannabeth #byima #uhhh whoever else #my fic #pjo fic #look at them having a real conversation and then immediately blowing it

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silentauroriamthereal · 4 years ago

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2020 fic year in review

I was tagged by my lovely @khorazir! Thanks, you!

Total number of completed stories: Three, but two of them were fairly long? I wrote:

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: John/Sherlock, 50,689 words, explicit, John POV. Set in New York, because I was itching to go there and couldn’t, and setting a fic somewhere is the next best thing. Probably my most political fic to date, this one was a deliberate reversal of the fake-couple-for-a-case trope, aka I wanted to create a setting wherein John and Sherlock become a couple during a case but need to keep it a secret for the sake of the case. So I set it at a massive, anti-gay conference in the US. Naturally. :P

Sine Nomine: John/Sherlock, 45,626 words, explicit, mostly John POV with sections of Mycroft and Sherlock POV as well. In fact, though the sections aren’t equal in length, it’s symmetrical: it goes Mycroft POV/John POV/Sherlock POV/John POV/Mycroft POV. This story has a dark premise and a particularly dark setting for one section. It’s based on the concept of Mycroft rewatching the footage of John beating Sherlock in the morgue for the hundredth time or so and revisiting the question of whether John had been the making of his brother, or made him worse than ever. He’s definitely come to the latter conclusion, but decides to give John one final chance in the form of a test. John, for his own reasons, makes what Mycroft deems the incorrect choice, and Mycroft basically sends him into a death trap. The setting of this place is officially set in Serbia with indirect hints at events similar to the Srebrenica Genocide in Bosnia, but the actual setting is Syria, which I’ve just spent the past year studying intensely. Putting a slice of that into the dark core of this story, albeit disguised as another place, was strangely cathartic for me. The title, which is Latin for “no name”, is a double reference to the village here, which Sherlock and Mycroft never name, ominously referring to it only as “the village”, both to each other and to John, as well as John’s never-named or owned feelings for Sherlock. This one is close to my heart for a lot of reasons, but most of all because of Syria. Also, the vast majority of the time in my writing, I choose a singular POV and stick to it very closely for the entire story. Choosing to rotate between these three men essentially allowed me to show how they’re all justified in their own decisions here, and to examine the relationships between all three of them. It’s a story about reckonings and eventual, hard-won reconciliations.

The Secret of Hazel Grange. Sherlock/John, 18,181 words, explicit, Sherlock POV. I’m going to claim that the reason I only managed to swing three fics this entire year is partly that I put another project on hold in order to write this one, lol. This is the third Christmas fic I’ve written and I’m happy with how it came out. It’s also the only story I’ve written that’s explicitly set during this pandemic, and during the second London lockdown, which is eerily similar to the code red lockdown my own city is in, so it just felt right. It’s been a somewhat miserable holiday season for me (so many reasons, including unhappiness at work and an illegally high rent increase that my apartment building is putting through, on top of the pandemic and all of that isolation and all of those cancellations), so writing some happy endings for someone else was pure escapism for me. Hopeful for others, too!

Total word count: 114,496 words of posted fic. 130,796 if we’re counting my work-in-progress that got interrupted for the Christmas fic. :)

Fandoms written in: BBC Sherlock.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected? I wrote about what I thought I expected to be able to write. Right now, I have a full-time job, a part-time job, and then freelance work, all to attempt to make ends meet, so I have very little spare time to write in, unfortunately. So getting over 100k words in is actually somewhat miraculous to me. It feels like not very much when it’s just three stories, but I guess it still amounts to a fair number of words?

What’s your own favourite story of the year? Picking favourites is always tough, but for the Syria connection, I’d have to go with Sine Nomine.

Did you take any writing risks this year? I suppose that going so hard on the whole Republican anti-gay groups thing could be considered “risky” in some circles, but not really hereabouts! LGBTQ+ rights is one of my areas of advocacy (in fact, I’m a founding member of the Rainbow Equity Council at my workplace and spent a crap ton of time this month drafting governance documentation for it), but genocides are the issue that are really closer to my heart, so the Syria connection, even if it wasn’t named outright, could also be seen as a “dangerously” political stance, I suppose. But compared to other writing choices (like Scars, which features actual rape, or any of my Freebatch stuff, or any of the stories where Mary is an overt terrorist (rather than “just” a freelance assassin, lol)), I don’t really think I was terribly risky this year.

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year? The first item on the agenda is to get back to work on Nocturne, my WIP. After that, we’ll see. That said, I STILL would like to get back to searching for an agent for my novel, which is strongly based on Against the Rest of the World. I would also like to write that Johnlock cookbook I keep vaguely promising (it would feature recipes from my fics), and in a quirky “other” sort of project, I also wrote a heap of haikus about Republicans this fall that I’d like to see about getting published. Want a taste? Sure you do. I give you:

Brett Kavanaugh

Brett has a face like

a snarly little hedgehog.

He likes beer, okay?!

Mitch McConnell

Moscow Mitch is a

corrupt turtle who keeps his

balls in his neck pouch

Most popular story of the year? Well, the longer a story is posted, the more time it has to collect hits, kudos, bookmarks, and comments, obviously, so that makes The Four Horsemen the clear winner here.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: From this year or in general? :P I often find that my plottiest, most detailed, most researched stories that I personally think contain some of my most thoughtful writing are the ones that get the least attention. For instance, after series 3 aired, I wrote three back-to-back intensely-detailed series 3 fix-it fics (which all, to their credit, do get plenty of attention, though none so much as Vena Cava, the third of the three). Then I wrote a light-hearted, almost-crack porn fic, more as mental relaxation than any sort of literary genius, and that fic - Best of Three - remains my most wildly-popular story of anything I’ve ever written. It used to frustrate me, but now I’m just grateful to have anyone read anything of mine. But along that theme, yeah: the most complex of this year’s stories (Sine Nomine) is probably the one I feel is the least appreciated, but that’s also fine. No complaints here - I’m very lucky to have the readership I have!!

Most fun story to write: Sine Nomine, for all the reasons I talked about above, though I’d also call this the most emotionally-invested story of mine from this past year. That said, setting any story in Manhattan is always going to be fun, and I loved researching approximately 500 holiday rental properties in various parts of England in order to finally just create my own, aka Hazel Grange, lol.

Most unintentionally telling story: Ha, well, if you weren’t sure about my stance on gay rights, marriage equality, or Republicans in general, The Four Horsemen should clear that up pretty distinctly, lol!

Biggest disappointment: Just that I haven’t had more time to write.

Biggest surprise: Possibly that I felt so able to represent all three POVs in Sine Nomine as equally as I did. By that, I don’t mean being able to write in their perspectives, but rather in presenting their arguments with (I hope) equal persuasion: Mycroft thinks that John’s entire presence in Sherlock’s life has spelled nothing but disaster for Sherlock. He’s arguably not wrong. He decides that John is out of chances, and that he’s justified in being the one to make that call. Sherlock disagrees, hard, and he’s not wrong. John makes the choice he makes for his daughter, not for the choice Mycroft gives him between choosing either Mary or Sherlock once and for all, and he’s not wrong to have done that, or unjustified in wanting to go and demand some answers from Mary, who isn’t dead after all, here. But then I think that their various reasons for reconciliation are all equally justified, too. I hope! Usually when you stick to one perspective, the story naturally gears itself to persuade the reader to identify with that one character and to take their side. Here, I hope I manage to juggle the balance fairly equally.

I don’t know who’s been tagged in this already, but I’ll tag: @totallysilvergirl, @blogstandbygo, @nade2308, @weneedtotalkaboutsherlock, @hubblegleeflower, and anyone else who writes.

#2020 fic year in review #writer stuff #sherlock #johnlock #silentauror

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the-drakeboys · 4 years ago

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Come Back to Me - Part 5

Summary: With Sam still alive, it becomes a race against the clock to get him patched up and right the hell out of that prison. But, as with everything in your lives, it just can’t be that simple.

Still remembering that night all that time ago, you work diligently to find his wounds and stop the bleeding; only to be interrupted by a very unwelcome guest.

Pairing: Sam Drake x Reader

Word Count: 2,352

Warnings: ya know… violence. Lots of that. That and blood. Plenty of blood…

A/N: Bam! Surprise double-upload! Haha - hope you guys like it. Can’t wait to hear what you all think! Thanks so much to my soul sis @peakymarvels for her amazing support as I struggled to get these finished. She’s my hero! :’)

This is a series! You can find the masterlist here.

---

You were moving now, there was no time - there was a chance to save him, and you weren’t gonna let him slip through your fingers.

“I got you, baby,” you promised him, hurriedly unclasping your pack from your shoulders and letting it drop to the ground.

Your fingers were sure as you tugged your gloves and some heavy gauze from the inside, pulling the gloves on and quickly lifting his shirt. You rolled it out of the way and began wiping away at the blood pooling all over his skin. Your eyes trailed over his abdomen, searching through the thick red until they found the wounds - three of them.

“Three bullets, Sam?” you mumbled, pressing towels to the skin. “Jesus. Okay, here we go.”

With a gasp of effort, you rolled him towards you, grimacing at the sharp pain in your arm as you stretched the cut in your skin. You ignored the pain, reaching behind his back and feeling for exit - or in this case, entrance - wounds. Excited relief washed over you as you felt them - all three were clean. You pressed the first of the heavy gauze pads to his back, and let his body roll back to the ground. “You almost didn’t keep your promise,” you murmured, smiling sadly down at him as you replaced the towels with two more gauze pads over the exit wounds and put as much pressure as you could muster over them. “Almost.”

It was then that a pair of boots came around the corner, and your head shot up to find a guard with his gun trained right on you. “Levanta las manos!” he barked.

Your heart sunk.

The two of you were quiet in the small motel bathroom, the Moscow snow flurrying outside and Nate still somewhere in the main bedroom, probably long since passed out. Sam’s hand was still holding pressure around the knife wound for you, and you were moving as quickly as you could to rid him of it.

He watched you as you worked, gently unraveling the gauze and tossing every blood-soaked inch of it into the trash. His eyelids drooped from time to time, and you’d gently tap at him, reminding him to keep them open. He eventually watched as you pulled a slough of new items from your pack - a bottle of saline solution, thick gauze pads, and a thick piece of leather. You noticed his curious gaze.

"Not exactly high-tech equipment, but uhh... little trick of the trade," you smiled softly, sheepishly, holding up the leather and apologizing with your eyes. An immediate 'ah, shit' expression fell over his face as he made the connection. You picked up the small vial and pulled some of its clear liquid into your syringe. "But first..."

"First? God, woman, you are stretchin' this out. You enjoy watchin' me suffer, don- ah!" He let out a sharp grunt as you prodded his skin with your needle, pushing the lidocaine into his flesh just near the wound.

"It's not the worst thing in the world," you quipped with a smirk, setting the needle down as the irritating man in front of you tried to catch his breath. The lidocaine wasn’t much, but it’d numb him enough to get him through the ordeal ahead. "I'm tryin' to make this easier for you, jackass. Now drink up." You handed him the brandy, feeling his exhausted gaze set on yours. As his hand took the drink and brought it to his lips, you returned to the knife, and gently wiped away at the bloodied skin around it. You examined the angle it was in, readying yourself for the next step. He finished several healthy swigs of the drink, and you took it back from him.

"Alright... this is the hard part. Once it's over, it's smooth sailing. You good?" He took in a shaky breath as you held up the leather, questions in your eyes and hope swirling at the back of your head.

"M'good," he sighed, taking the leather and setting it between his teeth. You nodded and pressed one hand against his shoulder, the other wrapping around the handle of the knife.

"Okay, on three," you began, your thumb softly rubbing back and forth over his skin, feeling his body move with his shaky breaths. "One..." You tightened your grip. "Two-"

And that’s when you gave a firm, but gentle yank.

"Ahh! Christ!" Sam yelped, breathless as you dropped the large hunting knife into the sink, his blood spattering heavily over its porcelain surface. You hurried, pressing the fresh gauze pads to the wound.

"You did it, you're good, you're good," you chuckled, looking over at your gear, some part of you just waiting to hear him snap at you for pulling it early.

But he was quiet.

"Alright, okay, we just... I'm gonna start stitchin', we're almost at the end here..." Your eyes were on the sutures and thread, your darkened gloves pressing against him; it wasn't until you felt his body weight lean completely forward into you that your head snapped to him. "Sam? Sam! Whoa, whoa," you hurried, turning your full attention to him, your heart racing in your chest as you tilted his head back and found his eyes closed and jaw slack. "Hey! Sam!"

He was deadweight, slumped into the back wall of the bathroom, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, blood still slowly seeping from under your glove. You smacked at his cheek, calling his name again as your gut sunk. Shit.

Your voice cut through the black, beckoning him back to reality, pulling him forward from the darkness he’d slipped into. Your fingers were at his neck to check for a pulse when his eyes finally fluttered open, breath flooding your lungs with relief as he was able to meet your gaze. "....hey...." he mumbled, slowly coming back, swallowing thickly. "What'd I miss...?"

You didn’t move, your hands pressed tightly to Sam’s abdomen. Your gut was screaming at you. “Ahora!” the guard bellowed.

Your eyes went to the empty revolver at your side. The closest gun was on the dead guard just at Sam’s feet, and there was nowhere you could go.

No. No. This wasn’t how it was going to end.

“Please,” you begged, your hands pressing into the soaking towels. Your chin trembled. Sam would never make it without you alive. He had to listen. You had to find a way. “Por favor, please.”

The guard stepped forward, his eyes full of rage and his arms shaking as he fought to control himself. He hissed his next words, a final warning as his gun remained aimed between your eyes. “Levanta. Las. Manos. Ahora.”

You sputtered out a relieved laugh and shook your head at Sam. "Fuck's sake," you bumbled, grinning as you stood in front of him and rushed to grab at your saline and sutures. "You okay? You with me?" A lazy, barely conscious smile spread over his lips, his head thunking back into the wall as you washed his wound out with the saline.

"Always, sweetheart."

Several minutes passed as you worked diligently at the wound, your hands as steady as a surgeon's with each tug of the sutures through his skin. As you sewed the open cut slowly to a close, Sam grimacing with the pain from time to time, you couldn't help but sneak small glances at him, little moments where your worry and concern for him made you question yourself. Made you wonder about him. Regardless of how mind-numbingly stubborn and irritating he could be, there was a charm and a sincerity about him that had pulled you in from the first moment you met him. Something swimming under the surface that told you there was just so much more to him than met the eye.

"Why don't you take a picture, darlin'?" Sam mumbled groggily through a tired smirk, his head still back against the wall as he peeked at you from the corner of his eye. An intense heat rose to your cheeks as you began another stitch.

"Shut up." He just let his eyes slip closed again, the smile never leaving his lips. There was a long quiet as you finished the final stitch and tied it off, his shoulders dipping with relief once he felt the poking and pulling stop. Your hands shook with your fatigue, but you pushed forward, setting more clean gauze against his skin and starting the bandage wrap around his shoulder. Sam turned his head, forcing you to meet his gaze one more time. Your wrapping slowed to a stop.

"Thanks, doc," he whispered. There was a soft look in his eye that shook you, that terrified you.

All you could see as you looked back at him was that awful moment when the knife pierced his skin; the moment you watched him collapse to the ground. Your heart ached, your brain screaming at you at the thought.

You pursed your lips. "You know, you could've gotten yourself killed back there," you spoke, forcing all feeling from your voice, finishing up the wrap and reaching for the sling. He scoffed at your resistance to his thanks, rolling his eyes and looking away. Of fucking course you were going to be like this.

"What else is new," he shot back, uninterested in hearing about how reckless he was from you. You brought the sling over his shoulder, and he refused to turn and help you slip it on.

"What the hell were you thinking?" you pressed, frustrated and struggling to get the sling to fit.

"That's the whole point, y/n, I wasn't thinkin'," Sam snapped, sitting forward and grabbing the sling from you to fix it himself. "I saw that asshole lunge at you and that was it, there wasn't any thinkin' to do with it."

Clearly frustrated, Sam yanked the sling around his arm and snapped it closed over his wrist, trying to adjust the strap one-handed as you stood there, staring down at him. Not moving from where you stood. Feeling your pulse thumping through your veins, your hands desperate to reach out.

He looked up then, his mouth open to hurl more angry words at you, when he caught the look on your face. The way you struggled to find what to say. The beautiful way you stole the breath from him just by looking at him like that.

He shook his head, anxious to get the hell out of this room and not feel as suffocated by you as he always did, intoxicated by everything that you were and feeling driven to madness because of it. He shakily stood to his feet, using his good arm to prop himself up on the counter. But it was when he swayed, still dizzy and light as a feather, and your arms reached out and softly caught him, holding him in place, holding him close to you, that he realized he wasn't making it out of that room.

That he couldn't take it anymore.

Looking down at you, feeling so close to you, so sick of you, and so utterly out of reasons to fight it, Sam brought his lips down to yours and stole the breath right back from your lungs into his. With his hand cupping the side of your neck, his hip keeping him upright against the counter, he sank a kiss into you that made you forget everything, took away every logical thought you might've managed to have to that moment and threw it out the window.

And you sank right back into him, melting into him and pressing yourself against his chest because any space between you at all was far, far too much. Your lips moved together in a symphony, every beautiful note echoing in your heads as you fell into one another.

"Oh..." he mumbled breathlessly as he slipped back from the kiss, feeling himself get whoozy again and teetering in your arms. Your skin still aflame from the kiss and your heart pounding inside your chest, you let out a soft giggle and pulled away from him, holding him up with both arms.

"Alright, let's get you some rest. We can get back to this in the morning," you grinned softly, hating how you couldn't fight the enormous smile on your lips as you carefully led him out to the beds.

Nate was dead asleep on his bed, legs spread wide across the comforter and face smushed into the pillow. He'd passed out in the middle of putting a fresh shirt on. You brought Sam to his bed and helped him down into the mattress, propping pillows up behind him and feeling his eyes glued to you all the while. You slipped a shirt over his head, gently tugging it down as he grinned up at you.

"You bet your.. ass.. we are gettin' back to this," Sam managed, that cocky grin still playing over his lips as you pulled the blankets over him. "Just you wait 'n see."

The guard’s warning wouldn’t come a third time. You looked down at Sam, feeling your heart ache at the memories and the fears that plagued your mind. “I’m so sorry,” you whispered, shakily lifting your hands into the air and staring the guard down as if you could make him understand.

Sam’s blood coated your gloves, snuck up your arms, and painted your vision with red. Your arm ached, the open cut still bleeding, still burning. Your eyes flitted from side to side, desperately searching for a way, for anything, for something.

But there was nothing. You were utterly out of options.

“D-Dejame,” you tried, hoping it meant what you thought it did. “Por favor.”

The guard was come over then as he surveyed the scene, a dark glint in his eye. He saw the two men, lying dead - one of them with his gun still holstered. A rage burned up in him until you could see it on his face.

He marched right up to you, pressed the barrel of his gun to your forehead, and muttered, “Asesina.”

Bam.

---

Previous Chapter I Next Chapter

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@s4mdrake @landoverthemountains @supernaturally-avenging-hannibal @cassieseraphim @qwertybubbler @darlingsdevil @peakymarvels @missdictatorme @archesa @writersblockincoming @ladamari68 @unchartedterritoria @curious-expectations @creative-diaries

Shoot me an ask, message, or reply if you’d like to be tagged in this series! Thanks so much for reading!

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father-tu · 8 years ago

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nbike · 7 years ago

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livinglikebritishroyalty · 5 years ago

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𝒫𝓇𝒾𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝑀𝒾𝒸𝒽𝒶𝑒𝓁

♕ 𝐹𝓊𝓁𝓁 𝒩𝒶𝓂𝑒: Michael George Charles Franklin

♕ 𝐹𝓊𝓁𝓁 𝒯𝒾𝓉𝓁𝑒: His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent

♕ 𝐵𝓸𝓇𝓃: Saturday, July 4th, 1942 at Coppins Country House in Iver, Buckinghamshire, England

♕ 𝒫𝒶𝓇𝑒𝓃𝓉𝓈: His Royal Highness Prince George The Duke of Kent (Father) & Her Royal Highness Princess Marina Duchess of Kent (Mother)

♕ 𝒮𝒾𝒷𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑔𝓈: His Royal Highness Prince Edward The Duke of Kent (Brother) & Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra The Honourable Lady Ogilvy (Sister)

♕ 𝒮𝓅𝓸𝓊𝓈𝑒: Her Royal Highness Marie Princess Michael of Kent (M. 1978)

♕ 𝒞𝒽𝒾𝓁𝒹𝓇𝑒𝓃: Lord Frederick Windsor (Son) & Lady Gabriella Kingston (Daughter)

♕ 𝐸𝒹𝓊𝒸𝒶𝓉𝒾𝓸𝓃: Sunningdale School (In Sunningdale, Berkshire, England), Eton College (In Eton, Berkshire, England), Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (In Sandhurst, Berkshire, England), Plekhanov Economics Academy at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics (In Moscow, Russia: Honorary Doctorate), St Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences at Saint Petersburg State University (Saint Petersburg, Russia: Honorary Doctorate)

♕ 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓉𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒲𝓸𝓇𝓀: Interests: Armed Forces (Air Force, Aviation, Retired Veterans, Veterans, & World War II), Business (Book Keeping, Economics, Finance, Industry, Insurance, Road Safety, Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises, Specialist Consultancy Advice, & Tourism), Children (Child Care in Asia, Vulnerable Children in Georgia & Russia, Youth in Hackney, & Youth in the UK), Culture (French Language, German Language, Italian Language, & Russian Culture/Heritage/Language), Education (Education in Russia, Colleges & Schools, & Linguists), Health (AIDS, Blindness, Burn Treatment, Children’s Heart Disease, Drowning Prevention, Eye Disease, Health Care in Russia, Heart Disease in Young Adults, Hospitals, & Sight Loss), Maritime (Bermuda, Boating Museums, Dockyards, Operation Dynamo, Training, Yacht Clubs, & Youth Sailing), Nature (Birds, Cats, Conservation in Africa, Dogs, Game in South Africa, & Horses), Religion (Church), Sports (Bobsled, Racing, Rally Driving, Rowing, & Shooting Sports), Science (Automotive, Aviation, Highways, Scientific Instruments, & Transportation), & The Arts (Architecture, Ceramics, Coach Harness Makers, Coach-Makers, Construction, East Asian Art, Leather Making, Media, Painting, Poetry, Print Making, Show-Business Charities, & Telecommunications). Work: A Royal Family by Nordisk Film TV, Battersea Dogs & Cats Home by BBC Enterprises, Chairman of The Founders Board of The Gun Club of Vera Beach, Commonwealth President of The Royal Life Saving Society, Companion of The Grand Order of Water Rats, Competitor of The 1971 FIBT World Bobsleigh Championship, Fellow/Patron/President of The Institute of Road Safety Officers, Fellow for The Royal Aeronautical Society, Fellowship for The Institute of Linguists, Founder Patron of The Genesis Initiative, Freemason, Founder/Patron of The Prince Michael Road Safety Award Scheme, Fundraiser for The Britain’s Charities Aid Foundation Russia, Fundraiser for The Royal Marsden Hospital, Grand Master of The Grand Lodge of Mark Master Masons, Honorary Doctor of The Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics, Honorary Fellow of The Institute of Highways & Transportation, Honorary Fellow/Patron of The Institute of Linguists, Honorary Member of The Air Squadron, Honorary Member of The Bentley Drivers’ Club, Honorary Member of The Bermuda Maritime Museum, Honorary Member of The British Racing Drivers’ Club, Honorary Member of The Club Della Mille Miglia, Honorary Member of Leander Club, Honorary Member of The Romanov Family Association, Honorary Member of The Royal Yacht Squadron, Honorary Professor/Patron of the Sinerghia Institute of Economics & Finance, Led a Bentley Rally from Brooklands Museum to Moscow covering the 1700 miles in 10 days, Liveryman of The Honourable Company of Air Pilots, Liveryman of The Worshipful Company of Coachmakers & Coach Harness Makers, Liveryman of The Worshipful Company of Leathersellers, Liveryman of The Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers, Member of The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst Rowing Team, Nicholas and Alexandra by Network First, Official Non-Traveling Reserve for The 1972 Winter Olympics, Participant in the White Knights Ride in Russia, Patron of Care for Children, Patron of European Heart for Children, Patron of Grandma Flew Spitfires, Patron of Roadsafe, Patron of UK Youth First Gear, Patron of The Anglo-Hellenic League, Patron of The Battle of Britain Memorial Trust, Patron of The Benjafield Racing Club, Patron of The Brazzaville Foundation for Peace and Conservation, Patron of The Bermuda Maritime Museum, Patron of The British Airport Services & Equipment Association, Patron of The British Business & General Aviation Association, Patron of The Brooklands Museum Trust, Patron of The Carriage Foundation, Patron of The Chatham Historic Dockyard Volunteer Service, Patron of The Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin in English, Patron of The Friends of No. 11 Fighter Group Operations Rooms, Patron of The Genesis Initiative, Patron of The Harewood Bird Garden, Patron of The Hyde Park Appeal, Patron of The Institute of Certified Book Keepers, Patron for The Institute of the Motor Industry, Patron of The James Myatt Memorial Trust, Patron of The Kapama Game Reserve South Africa at Camp Jabulani in South Africa, Patron of The Kingston Aviation Memorial Fund, Patron of The Kuskovo Ceramics Museum, Patron of The London School of Business & Finance, Patron of The Maritime Volunteer Service, Patron of The Moscow Academy of Industry & Finance, Patron of The Museum of Army Flying, Patron of The Museum of East Asian Art, Patron of The National Eye Research Centre, Patron of The National Park of Wooden Architecture in Russia, Patron of The New Hampshire Highland Games, Patron of The New Names Charitable Foundation, Patron of The Nochlezhka Charity Foundation of St. Petersburg, Patron of The Oxford Quality Programme for Russia, Patron of The Peter the Great Educational Trust, Patron of The Popular Flying Association, Patron of The Remenham Club, Patron of The Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, Patron of The Royal Lake of The Woods Yacht Club in Canada, Patron of The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, Patron of Russian Arts & Cultural Foundation, Patron of The Russian Poets Fund, Patron of The Springfield Youth Club, Patron of The St. Gregory’s Foundation, Patron of The Thames Rowing Club, Patron of The Transport Trust, Patron of The Variety Club Lifeline Scheme, Patron of The Veteran Car Club of Great Britain, Patron of The Wellington International School in Dubai, President of The Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, President of The Amberly Museum, President of The The Kennel Club, President of The Light Aircraft Association, President of The Motor Sports Association Council, President of The Royal Automobile Club, President of The SSAFA Forces Help, Provincial Grand Master of The Provincial Grand Lodge of Middlesex, Qualified Pilot of both Fixed Wing Aircraft & Helicopters, Queen Mary’s Dolls House by BBC Enterprises, Royal Patron of Remedi, Royal Patron of The Children’s Burns Trust, Royal Patron of The Prince Michael of Kent Foundation, Royal Patron of The Russian National Orchestra, Supporter of The Association des Amis de l’Orgue de St Swithun, Supporter of The Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane, Trustee of The National Motor Museum, Victoria and Albert by Granite & Granada TV Co-Production, & Visitor at the Colfe School

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llaevateinn · 5 years ago

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Short, unfinished figureskating AU i wrote and idk what to do with it. So, yeet.

The first time they found out that Jin Ling spent his time after school and on weekends on the ice rink, the reaction was pretty bad. Jin Ling was braced for the usual "what are you a girl" remarks from anyone who thought that figure skating was "just for girls". However, he was unpleasantly surprised.

"So you're the one who keeps hogging our rink!"

"What?"

Jingyi flailed his arms when words failed him, which was not new. Jin Ling deftly dodged the almost perfect left hook thrown his way.

"My hockey team! We barely have any rink time because of the figure skaters!"

Now Jin Ling was scowling.

"What? You're on the hockey team?" And then: "You guys are the ones scratching up the ice so it's barely usable for me!"

"You're the one making holes in it with your stupid ice picks for skates!"

Sizhui on the side sighed long-sufferingly. These two were constantly at each other's throats enough as it was – add the age-old ice hockey vs figure skating rivalry into the mix and he just knew he wasn't going to have a peaceful minute again in his life.

"Boys," he tried to placate them. "Both of your sports are awesome, and you're both really good. There's no need to fight."

"We're not fighting!" they both shouted in unison.

Sizhui pinched the bridge of his nose. Why was he friends with them again?

Jin Ling had transferred to their school this semester, a grade below them. Initially he had not made any friends. He was gloomy and brash, arrogant even, and he never participated in any after-school activities. Sizhui and Jingyi had jointly made the decision to approach him. They had swiftly become fast friends, despite how they bickered sometimes. At least now that they knew about Jin Ling's figure skating, it made more sense that he barely had time for anything else.

"My grandma on my mother's side wanted me to do ballet," he explained once. "She was a really famous ballerina, and she got my uncle into it too. My mom never really liked it though, and I don't like ballet much either."

"How did you get the idea for figure skating then?"

"Um. That's- … My uncle- …" He hesitated. "It's complicated. But I had another uncle, besides the one you guys know of. Both my uncles on my mother's side used to figure skate, until my other uncle went away. I saw videos once, of their competitions. That's when I decided I wanted to do that."

"And your uncle, Mr. Jiang, is your trainer?"

"Trainer and choreographer," Jin Ling said proudly. "When my mom realized I was serious about figure skating, she said she wouldn't have anyone else train me. And he's the best! I've been competing in the Juniors Championships for a while now, and I even got bronze last year! Maybe next year they'll let me join the Seniors' competitions."

"Wow, that's so cool!" Jingyi exclaimed, rivalry between hockey players and figure skaters forgotten. "You're winning medals? You're awesome!"

Jin Ling blushed a little, though he proudly lifted his chin.

"Yeah, I am. Maybe one day I can even go to the Olympics!"

At fourteen, he already had such ambitious dreams, and judging by how well he was doing, they might one day even come true.

Despite having decided to devote his life to ballet, Jiang Cheng had been on or around the rink for his entire life. It began when his adopted brother chose figure skating as his hobby – and then later, to make it into something more serious. Jiang Cheng, always eager to follow his siblings wherever they went, had followed him onto the ice too. Ballet became a mere accessory to figure skating, as the two trained and showed enough talent to compete.

When his brother continually rose higher, winning medal after medal, trophy after trophy, while Jiang Cheng himself remained empty handed? It did not take much for his mother to convince him to go back to ballet instead.

But the ice never left him. It stayed with him as he accompanied his brother to his competitions. It stayed with him when his brother up and left, after their sister and brother-in-law's near-fatal accident. It stayed with him when his nephew, all of four years old and bright eyed, watched an old recording of the two of them racing over the ice, and said: "I want to do that too!"

Ballet was his work. His blood, sweat and tears were poured into it, to make his mother proud. So that he could take over her ballet studio, once it became clear that he would not excel in ballet either. Despite having studied under renowned teachers in Paris and Moscow, despite having joined famous companies and starring in productions on world tours, it was only enough to lend his name to a small, unambitious and kids-friendly ballet school.

That is, until Jin Ling announced that he wanted to become a pro figure skater.

There was no question as to who would teach and train him. Even though Jiang Cheng's mother clearly disliked it, she could not say no to her only grandson. Or to Yanli, who was the apple of her eye. Or to Jin Zixuan's money that would finance Jin Ling's dream.

"Make sure he wins," was all she said to Jiang Cheng, turning away in disinterest.

Jiang Cheng had not, in fact, made sure that Jin Ling won. He had made sure that Jin Ling would never, ever lose his joy and enthusiasm for the sport, however.

Though he was already too old for professional ballet, much less pro figure skating, he always accompanied Jin Ling onto the ice. He guided him through the basics, ignited his passion for music and choreography, and pushed his limits. But never further than Jin Ling was willing to go.

That he was damn talented and excelled at both the athletic and creative aspects of figure skating was just the cherry on top. That he began to compete in junior tournaments – and began to eke his way towards the medal rankings – was just incidental, in Jiang Cheng's eyes. Because he believed that Jin Ling's success was only due to the fact that he truly loved what he was doing. Without that, Jiang Cheng could force him to do drills as long as he wanted to, and it wouldn't make a damn difference.

When Jin Ling was fourteen, there were a few changes in their lives. Two, in fact, that were the most impactful. They came in the shape of one Lan Jingyi and his cousin, Lan Sizhui. The two boys, who were a year older than Jin Ling, quickly became his best friends when Jin Ling joined a new school that was geared towards young talents in sports and arts. Lan Jingyi was also a sports prodigy, showing a promising talent for ice hockey. Meanwhile, Lan Sizhui was an art major, a musical genius who specialized in traditional instruments.

The two of them became a fixed presence at the edge of the rink and in the stands, accompanying Jin Ling to trainings as well as competitions. Therefore, Jiang Cheng was not surprised to see them sidestepping all protocol and joining Jin Ling in a room below the stadium that was supposed to be for competitors only.

What did surprise him was the third boy accompanying them.

"Who is that?" he asked Jin Ling, only to get a blush the color of chili peppers in return. He sighed. "Just don't let him distract you from your performance today."

"Yes, sir."

Another sigh.

"Go, say hi. But then you come right back and continue your warmup."

"Yes, sir!"

That boy, he thought fondly.

#my fic #my writing #mo dao zu shi #gen #jin and jiang family feels #figureskating au #everybody lives #modern au #obv

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dgcatanisiri · 5 years ago

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So, we’re also gearing up for impeachment of federally appointed judges after the 2020 election, right? Because Moscow Mitch has rammed through so very many utterly unqualified judges who do not deserve a lifetime appointment on a park bench, let alone a judicial one, so we need to fix this, right?

RIGHT?!

#dg talks politics

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lasclleads · 2 years ago

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miss-authorcita · 7 years ago

Text

Why Green?

Summary: Bruce meets someone very interesting.

Pairing: Bruce x Reader

Warning: Cursing

After another endless night in the lab, Bruce decided to refill his cup of tea before diving back into the equation he couldn't crack. He was nearing the kitchen when he heard loud clinks coming from the living room.

"Fuck! Damn it!" Bruce heard a female voice he didn't recognize curse. "Where the fuck is it?" He heard the same voice hiss.

He slowly and silently made his way towards the balcony that overlooked the living room, prepared for anything. He peaked down towards the space where the ruckus was coming from and saw you rummaging through Tony's bar. He had never seen you before. You wore a tight (Y/F/C) dress that fit you perfectly and a pair of extremely tall heels. Your hair was in loose waves down your back, wild and messy at the moment. He noticed that you kept taking out alcohol bottles and placing them on the counter.

"Fuck! Where is it!?" You snapped as you kept going on your rampage.

"FRIDAY, alert the rest of the team that there is an unidentified woman in the living room." Bruce whispered to the IA. He quietly descended the stairs, hoping not to be noticed.

"I'll murder him!" You growled.

Bruce observed from a safe distance, hidden in the dark. He could easily deduce that you weren't much of a threat; your level of intoxication made it possible for even Pepper to confront you. If he wasn't certain that Tony was in a very committed relationship he would've assumed you were a one-night stand. He was going to announce his presence when suddenly the lights turned on followed by Tony and Steve bursting into the living room in full out gear and defense positions.

"Seriously?" You groaned as you shielded your eyes. "Do you have to turn on all the lights?" You asked without even looking up from your ministrations at the bar.

Bruce stepped out of his hiding spot at the same time Clint and Natasha appeared beside Steve and Tony.

"Damn it, Y/N Y/L/N!" Tony yelled, stepping out of his suit.

Everyone else, though confused, followed his pattern and lowered their defenses a bit.

"Do not call me that, Anthony Stark." You spat, putting a lot of emphasis on his name.

Your eyes widened in surprise at the sight of all the Avengers gathered around. You regained your composure quickly and leaned, as casually as you could muster, by the bar. "You brought the whole gang." You stated more than asked.

"Why are you destroying my liquor organizing system?" Tony asked, trying to reverse the mess you'd made.

"I can't find my Moscow imported vodka." You told him with a slight shrug.

Both you and Tony seemed unfazed that your conversation was being witnessed by a confused and curious audience.

Tony sighed and opened a cabinet that seemed hidden. He pulled out a medium sized, blue bottle and poured you a drink. "Why do you need it?" He asked before passing you the glass.

You reached for it but he pulled it away making you pout. "What happened?" He tried again.

You reached for it once more but now you were anticipating his move. You managed to take the drink from him and gulp it down. "Same as always. Men suck." You told him casually, refilling your glass.

Tony rubbed his temples in frustration. You moved away from him towards the couch but stopped by the Avengers. You took the time to check them all out, biting you lip in the process.

"I can't choose which one I like more." You flirted before plopping down on the couch.

Steve blushed at your comment, Clint and Natasha smirked while Bruce smiled at the your antics.

"Y/N/N, could you not, please?" Tony sighed.

"Uh, Stark? Who is she?" Clint decided to butt in.

"His illegitimate sister!" You declared loudly from your position on the couch.

"You have a sister?" Steve asked, shocked. "Howard had two kids?"

"That we know of." You and Tony spoke at the same time.

"She wasn't on SHIELD's files." Natasha spoke, her suspicion evident in her tone.

"To protect her." Tony glared at the redheaded spy. He walked over to the back of the couch and pried the drink out of your hand.

"I was drinking that!" You whined, lifting yourself on your elbows.

"You're drunk. That's enough. Go to your room." Tony scolded while washing the glass and clearing the last of your mess.

"I'm staying here." You said as a final act of rebellion and plopped yourself back down.

"Suit yourself." Tony called and left to go back to his room.

"It was nice to meet you, ma'am." Steve waved towards you.

You saluted him from your position, sniggering at your own attempt of a joke. Steve rolled his eyes at your mocking and walked away. They could all see the similarities between you and Tony. One of them being how easy you could annoy Cap.

Clint and Natasha left right after him without another word. Bruce was about to follow when you called out to him.

"Mind taking off my heels? I'm so drunk I doubt I'll be able to get the straps loose." You pleaded with a puppy face.

Bruce chuckled at your attempt at manipulation. "Of course." He said and walked towards the couch. He sat at the farthest edge, feeling very self-concious all of a sudden.

You scooted down the couch, causing your dress to ride up a bit and then you set your feet on Bruce's lap.

He took a deep breath to calm his nerves and cracked his neck. You were a challenge he wasn't expecting tonight. He fixed his glasses and them moved his hands to take off your shoes.

"Are you always the same shade of green?" You asked.

Your question startled him. First because he wasn't sure you knew who he was till now and second because no one had ever asked him that particular question before.

"Y-yes. The other guy is always the same shade of green." He hesitantly answered.

"Why green?" You asked, your eyes shut.

"I don't really know. It's an effect of the gamma radiation, but I've never looked into the color." Bruce informed you. He had finished taking off your shoes but you hadn't taken your feet off of his lap.

You opened your eyes and studied him. You tried to commit his face to memory. He was quite handsome but he seemed tired. He had bags under his eyes, his shoulders were slumped which was surprising since his whole body screamed tense. His lips looked a bit chapped and he had a few wrinkles. Despite all that you could definitely see the appeal. You liked the sprinkling of gray in his hair, his slightly tan skin and his smile. You had noticed his smile while you argued with Tony.

Bruce squirmed under your gaze feeling uncomfortable. You lifted you feet to free him and curled up on the couch

"Thanks for you help, Bruce." You whispered.

"You're welcome, Y/N"

"Call me, Y/N/N."

This idea came to me while I was day dreaming about the handsome man that holds our favorite big green monster. I have no idea if I'll continue this since I have no idea what could happen next but I'm open to suggestions if any of you actually like it! Thank you so much for reading!

#bruce banner x reader #bruce x reader #hulk x reader #hulk imagine #bruce banner imagine #marvel x reader #marvel imagine #avengers x reader #avengers imagine

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southernoracle · 6 years ago

Text

Mountain Falls

An R6S AU angst creation, for @darkthoughts-curiousplots

(Rated M for heavy gore, blood and cursing, 3k word count. An alternate ending will be posted!)

~~~~~~

~”You don’t need armor. I am your armor. I am your shield.”~ --Gilles Touré

Sirens filled the air, their tone ominous, lamenting. Emergency personnel vehicles littered the streets. Buildings were all evacuated, burning. Moscow was burning, an empty, dying city. Half of the building the White Masks were occupying had been collapsed on top of them, mid battle between the Jointed Task Force of Delta Force and GIGN, all building occupants having been buried. Snow, smoke and soot filled the frigid air of the Russian streets, the sky pale with clouds. The White Masks had taken Russia by storm, Moscow being hit the heaviest and under most terrorist control. Rainbow was stretched as thinly as it could have been, and there was no room for error. Six executively ordered the GIGN and Delta Force into solidarity, both taking the task of clearing the city. It’s citizens had already been evacuated, those who had survived the initial attack. The White Masks didn’t use chemicals this time. They just flooded the city en masse, destroying whatever they could. Their aim wasn’t to turn the eyes of the media to them, or to make a statement. No. They were past that. Now all they wanted was blood. Just blood.

A grating gasp followed by strained coughing came out from under a pile of crumbled concrete and debris, the sediment shifting. A shield had punched through the rubble, followed by a hand, a helmet. Montagne dug the top of his shield into a crevice between two large pieces of debris to anchor it, pulling himself from the remnants of the building they were in. Everything hurt, but he was alive. He lay for a moment to catch a breath before pushing himself to his feet. He immediately favored his left leg, pain searing through his opposite shin. A piece of debris had struck his leg upon collapse, more than likely broke bones. That hardly mattered. His eyes darted around his surroundings. He had to find Kat. The last he had heard from her, she was en route with her brood of Delta force to offer backup for the group he lead. There was no GIGN or Delta left but him. Recruits had been sent on this mission with Montagne, thanks to the lack of operators availability for this mission. His heart sank. At least seven other recruits were with him up to the collapse event. They were buried. “Any available units, this is Montagne.” he hailed a general frequency, gathering his thoughts, “...I need CASEVAC sent to my location, asap. Seven KIA. The White Masks brought the fucking roof down on us all.” he rasped, taking care not to upset his injured leg as he slid down the pile of debris he had crawled from.

“This is Kat, we’re en route to your position now, CASEVAC is gearing up! Stay alive ‘til I get there, big guy!” a transmission had squeaked through his earpiece. “Copy. Be careful. Montagne out.” the man replied, beginning to check his gear now. Le Roc had taken a lot of damage, but the trusty old bitch still stood strong. He patted at his gun holster, gaze snapping down when he felt nothing there. Fuck, his .357 was gone. He wasn’t about to panic, knowing he probably lost it being buried. He would survive without it. After being sure the rest of his gear was intact, or at least operable, he started off towards a nearly obliterated wall, towards the open street. He froze, however, when he heard movement from outside, approaching the opening. Soldiers begun filing in quickly, weapons drawn and glowing red beads fixed on him, “Blue, Blue!!” Montagne barked, a female voice from behind the wall of men chirping, “Ridge!” she answered the verification call as she pushed past the soldiers.

Kat ran up to Montagne, wrapping her arms around him tightly, “Thank God you’re alive!” she said, the Frenchman returning her hug. He was silent, but buried his face in her hair. He shouldn’t be, honestly. He should have joined his recruits. “Let’s just get the hell out of here…” Montagne muttered, meeting her gaze when she looked up at him. She saw the pain in his eyes, and not from his injured leg. She glanced back at the piles of rubble, shaking her head, “You can’t dwell on them now. We gotta move, like you said.” she patted his shoulder. This made Montagne snap out of it, pulling a huff from him before he started for the opening they had come from. He limped, but it wasn’t going to slow him down much. He was going to take point regardless.

What was left of Delta followed closely behind Kat and Montagne, filing into line as they made their way into the streets. It was now spitting snow lazily, and the stench of smoke and blood was ten times more concentrated outside. It was an absolute warzone, more bodies having littered the streets. Montagne took in a shaky breath, but not because of fear. No, this was anger that knotted in his throat. His eyes were sharp as they scanned the area from behind Le Roc’s viewing panel, teeth grinding. He didn’t like being out in the open like this, too many ambush points to be had by an enemy. The Frenchman slowed to a stop now, silent. Kat knit her brows, placing a hand to his back. “What’s up, big guy? Leg getting to be too much--” she started, but she felt sudden weight slam into her back. She cursed before whipping around. Her eyes go wide, however, when she realizes that one of her Delta operators had fallen dead against her. She yowled a curse before laying her teammate down, Montagne craning his head over his shoulder to see. “Merde!” he hissed before letting the lever loose on his shield's handles to expand the rest of it. The slides only clicked and scraped, the sliding half being too damaged to function. Fuck. Where was the enemy?! “Monty, we gotta--” Kat tried to formulate a quick plan, but too many of her remaining team were all dropping like flies.

It was no suppressed firearm, no silent compound bow...each body that dropped to the ground dead all shared one detail; matte black, serrated throwing knives nestled hilt deep into each operator’s torso armor, straight through their hearts. This made Kat pale before yelling, screaming at the streets around her, “Face us like a man, motherfucker, come on!!” she snarled, but Montagne had coiled an arm around her, keeping her behind him, behind his halfway operational shield. He was panicking subtly, searching desperately for any sign of contact, jaw set under his balaclava. These streets were going to be their grave, joining the countless number of bodies that littered it. This enemy was quick, and quiet. Accurate as well. Silence ensued, and no more knives had been launched. Montagne’s pulse was hammering at the sides of his neck.

“...She’s feisty...I like that.” came a raspy, quiet voice from the shadows to their right. Both Kat and Montagne tensed and faced the direction of interest. A small being emerged from the shadows, apparel just as black as them with deep red tones, save for the iconic porcelain mask worn by the White Masks. This one had a crudely painted, deep red butterfly spanning the center of it, and out from the eyelets peered silvery blue eyes. His english was near flawless, tone ominously calm as he took a few more steps forward. “I’m honestly impressed.” the man purred, lifting a hand to rub at the chin of his mask. “You two have shown the most will to live and professionalism, despite being under great stress.” the man paused, tilting his head. Montagne then tensed, immediately recognizing that bloody butterfly. “Kinzhal…” he spat. The small man nodded with an enthusiastic clap, “The Frenchy catches on quick. You oughta hold onto him, Staff Sergeant.” he said, acidicly smooth words now aimed at Kat. She tensed, paled. He knew her name, her rank. What else did he know about her?! “Well, unfortunately for you two, I’m not the type of villain to roll out their elaborate scheme. I just wanted to drop in and say hi, fuck with your minds. Удачи вам, двое! (Good luck, you two!)” Kinzhal cooed before dissipating into the shadows once more, a dry cackle echoing through the buildings. Montagne didn’t waste any time. He grabbed Kat by her wrist, “Run!!” he barked before tugging her along down the street. He was able to sprint, despite his injury, but was still slower than usual. Kat kept close to his back, sidearm being drawn. There was no running from Kinzhal. A black blur clattered against the gun she had drawn, knocking it from her hand, nicking her fingers. This made her hiss and retract her arm, just focusing on running now. There will be no guns brought to this knife fight.

The chase had been brought to an end, ironically enough in the dead center of Moscow’s square. Kinzhal wanted an elaborate show. Kat suddenly cried out in pain, tumbling to the ground. She bit back a scream. A throwing blade had buried itself deep into the bend of her left leg. Montagne stopped, whipped around. “Katerina!” he yelped, dropping to a knee quickly to scoop her up and tuck her to him as closely as possible. “Fuck, let go of me.” Kat hissed. “Gimme your shield. You beat his ass.” she growled, clawing at Montagne’s chest plate. The man complied, setting her to the ground, handing over his shield to her, standing. Now he was livid. A rough, raw scream came from Montagne now as he glared at the shadows cast around them. “Arrête de te cacher et fais-moi face!! (Stop hiding and face me!!)” the large man roared. “Fine, have it your way.” Kinzhal’s voice was terrifyingly close, behind Montagne.

Le Roc had always slowed him down, always was a movement penalty for him. Now that Kat had brandished the shield, it was like she had freed the beast from its shackles. Montagne swung an arm around, behind him like lightning, nearly nailing Kinzhal square in the face if the smaller bastard hadn’t ducked and retreated backward. Montagne turned on his good heel and launched himself at Kinzhal, having drawn a blade of his own. “You think this will be a fair fight with..that pathetic shiv?!” Kinzhal trilled, dodging and side stepping each lunge the larger man executed. Montagne did no talking. He was too pissed for words. He continued to try and snag the quick little man, but Kinzhal was always just a step ahead of him. He was taunting him, toying with him. Another angered roar from Montagne, and he moved his form quick enough to snag him, finally. With a fluid motion, Montagne lifted the Russian clean off the ground, up over his helmet, and hurled him, hurled him as far as his straining muscles would allow. Kinzhal had connected with Le Roc, making Kat yelp as he bounced off of it, but he was resilient. And Opportunistic.

Another yelp from Kat, Le Roc clattering to the ground beside her. Kinzhal had righted himself like a cat in mid fall, landing in a crouch behind her and snagging her up from behind. A blade was pressed to her neck, the serrated, curved metal digging deep into her skin, just a wayward twitch away from opening her carotid. Montagne stopped all movement, even his breath hitching in his throat, eyes glazing with mixed emotions of fear and anger. “Oh...you two really are something, aren’t you…” Kinzhal purred, realizing just how much Kat had meant to Montagne. Kat didn’t dare thrash, knowing any movement against that blade would no doubt open her up. “Monty, don’t let him fucking get to you!! Kill me if you have to, just be sure this fucker doesn’t walk away!!” Kat rasped. Montagne could kill him then and there. He had been trained to toss blades just as much as any other special forces operator...but he didn’t want to risk hitting Kat. “...Let her go...let her go, and I’ll do what you wish…” the Frenchman muttered, an unsettling calm having washed over him. He even went as far as to lift his hands up in surrender, his blade clattering to the ground. Kinzhal wheezed a wry chuckle, “You can offer nothing to me, GIGN...I am not here to bargain. I am not here to exchange. I am here to kill.” he hissed, pressing the side of his mask into Kat’s hair, those cold, silvery eyes locked with Montagne’s. God, please don’t do this. Not now…

“Take me instead.” Montagne muttered, this statement dragging a whine from Kat, “You want blood, fine. Take my life instead. Just let her go.” he said quietly. Kinzhal snorted, “You think your life is worth anymore to me than hers? Rainbow blood is Rainbow blood to me, I don’t care what CTU it comes from--” he started, only pausing to draw his attention briefly to movement behind him. A building that had been smouldering behind Kinzhal had spat debris, concrete clattering to concrete, embers scattering. That was Montagne’s long awaited opportunity. Everything had slowed around him. Sound was muffled to him. He launched himself as quickly, as far as his coiled legs would send him, absolute pain arching across his broken shin, but it felt like a little pin prick at this point. He couldn’t mess this up. A hand was outstretched, latching onto Kinzhal as he threw all of his weight into tackling the man, other hand moving to push the blade from Kat’s neck, all in one motion. He executed the tackle successfully, Kat falling from the White Mask’s grasp, scrambling for the shield, already pushing herself to her good leg.

Montagne landed on top of Kinzhal and pinned him, but the smaller man had curled his arms into himself in the short amount of time in the air. He still had a death grip on that blade, and God damn him if he hadn’t flipped the blade skyward at the last second. Montagne struggled with the man, using tantric strength and absolute will to yank Kinzhal’s bladed arm out from under him, wrestling the bloodied blade from his grasp before pressing it to his throat now. There was a momentary pause, the White Mask gazing fearlessly up at Montagne. “...I still win.” came a feral hiss before the larger man opened the Russian’s throat wide open, blood splattering his visor and balaclava. Kat had used Le Roc as a crutch, hobbling as quickly as she could over to them. Kinzhal lay motionless as Montagne slid off of him, rolling to his side, a stifled yelp coming from him. “Monty!” Kat whined, collapsing to her knees clumsily beside him now, letting Le Roc clatter to the ground once more as she did her best to scoop him up, having to settle for rolling him face up, head in her lap.

Snow begun powdering them, the pure white peppering his armor melting to water as it contacted hot, sticky red against his side. Small, weak puffs of white billowed from his lips as he gazed up at her, lifting a hand. “Kat..” he strained, his fingers clutching at her shoulders shakily. “..You’re okay..” he whined lowly, a sharp gasp coming from him, another weak puff of white as red started staining his lips with a cough. “Fuck, let me see…” Kat stammered quickly, scrambled to unlatch his armor on that side. She managed it, peeling that side of his trauma vest up. The indigo blue of his uniform was greatly discolored, darkened by the red that spilled from him lazily. Right between a pair of ribs, the lack of a proper breath coming from him indicating it punctured his lung. The blade was driven right in the rift between two trauma plates. May Kinzhal burn in hell for having a tactical angle, even upon imminent death. Kat felt the burn of tears biting at her bottom lids and obscuring her vision, feeling her heart drop into her stomach. “Gilles..” she bit back a sob, controlling her breaths as she removed his helmet gingerly, gentle with lifting his balaclava from his face. She knew he wasn’t going to make it. “Gilles, baby…I’m so sorry..” she whimpered, tilting his jaw upward lightly.

He still had a bit of life in those gentle eyes of his. The hand that was clutched against her shoulder lifted, a sharp wheeze escaping him as he caressed her cheek. She felt the blood being smeared against her cheek, felt his hand shaking as she grasped at it tightly. Another strain, gasp as she removed his helmet, balaclava. “Non ... non, mon amour. Les moyens ne s'excusent pas. (No...no, love. Please don’t apologize.)” he croaked, pain becoming evident in his gaze as he sputtered. The world around him was still muffled, sloshing in his ears like a shoreline now. He couldn’t hear the distant helicopter rotors beating, approaching. Kat felt his blood soaking into the side of her pant leg, starting to pool at the ground below. She held him closer, fighting the sons that tried to RIP through her grit teeth.“Tu m'as donné un but dans la vie, m'a donné une raison de continuer ... Tu n'as jamais eu besoin de cette armure, parce que je te protégerai toujours. (You gave me purpose in life, gave me a reason to go on...You never needed any of that armor... because I will always protect you.)” he paused to attempt a breath, only to have fluids replacing it, tasting nothing but rust now. “...Je suis ton armure ... Je suis ton bouclier. (...I am your armor...I am your shield.)” he rasped. All color had left his skin at this point, the life in his eyes fading as he searched her face. He was fading. “Je...t'aimerai toujours…(I’ll...always love you…)” his breath was a small, white wisp in the cold, wintry air as his gaze trailed off.

Montagne’s form then sunk into her arms, devoid of all motion, all tension. The roaring rotors above Kat weren’t even noticed, the snow whipping wildly in vortex around them as the metal beasts above lowered. The will had been sucked from her, she wasn’t even sure she was breathing. Hell, what would it matter if she wasn’t? She finally rested her forehead against Montagne’s, sobbing openly. “...I’ll always love you too, Gilles…” she cried, hugging his lifeless form tightly as the helicopters landed.

~~~~~~

(~*Alternate Ending*~)

Kat collapsed to her knees beside Montagne, “Monty, lemme see!” she chirped in a panic, the man rolling before propping himself up on an elbow. Grunts of pain came from him, arm tucked around his side. Blood stained his bare fingers as Kat pulled his hand out and away from him. “Clipped me with that blade, but I don't think it went deep.” He panted, grimacing. They both worked to unlatch his vest, pulling that side of the vest up. The trauma plating took the brunt of the blade, but his uniform was still stained with blood, just above his hip. She lifted the bottom of his uniform top. A deep puncture, but it seemed to have only sunk through muscle. “Looks worse than it is, I think you'll live. Keep pressure on it.” she muttered, digging out some gauze from one of his vest compartments before pressing it to his side. This pulled another hiss from him, but he helped put pressure on it as Kat reported to Six once more. “You need to tend to your leg..” Montagne huffed, but Kat shook her head. “You worry about yourself, I'm fine.” she said curtly, continuing to put pressure on his wound. Her leg was indeed screaming at her, but she had priorities.

The calm around them was surreal. They had taken down a high value White Mask, given Moscow a second chance at life. Many lives were lost, but none were in vain. Montagne and Kat weren't going to be added to the list of fallen today. “CASEVAC is nearly here, Monty...just hang in there.” Kat said quietly. A wry wheeze came from him, “It will take more than a blade to bring me down, cherí...I'm not leaving you that easily.” he said. Kat frowned. She reached up to cup his covered jaw, caressing it gently. He locked eyes with her hazel gaze, reaching up to grasp at the hand that had rested against his balaclava. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you while I am still alive, count on it. You mean too much to me to lose…” he panted quietly, tilting his head into her hand. He would happily gain another deep scar and muscle damage to ensure Kat was still alive. Helicopter rotors could be heard roaring above the buildings surrounding now, powdery white whipping through the cold air as the large metal beasts landed.

Finka was first out, Tachanka and Glaz following suit. The larger woman now knelt beside Kat and Montagne, glancing between them, “What happened?” she asked, tone calm as she lifted Montagne’s hand and gauze from the wound, observing it. She saw the deadened Kinzhal laying close by, her jaw setting. Kat pursed her lips, her gaze falling on the downed White Mask as well. “Jesus, how did you get Kinzhal out in the open long enough to kill him?!” Glaz chirped over Finka’s shoulder, but she shooed him off. “Can you walk?” she asked Montagne, glancing up at Kat as well once she noticed her bloodied leg. They nodded in collective. Finka tucked herself under the large man's arm and hauled him up, glancing at her LMG operator. “Tachanka, grab Kat. I have to tend to that leg of hers as well.” Finka said. Montagne looked over his shoulder at Tachanka, "Grab Le Roc as well! I cant leave her!" He grunted. The old Russian followed order, helping Kat to her feet, careful not to upset her injury, having snagged Le Roc beforehand. "Ready to move." Tachanka muttered, pulling the shield close.

The buildings towering over them could still house stragglers wanting to get some last minute rounds off on them, Glaz being able to negate any would-be snipers as he took lead back towards the helicopters. He barked a “Clear!” once he made his way to the opened cabin of one of them, motioning for them to move. Finka hauled Montagne, Tachanka taking up rear with Le Roc on his back, Kat in his arms. They all filed into the helicopter, Finka setting to work on cleaning and stitching Montagne’s wound up at first. "Set Kat down beside him, Tachanka." Finka said, the older helping Kat rest beside Montagne. "That leg is mine as soon as I'm done with your boy here." Finka said, offering a small smile to Kat as she begun the cleansing and stitching process. Within minutes, they were lifted off, on their way back to Rainbow HQ.

With Kat’s help, the Frenchman pulled his helmet and balaclava off. "God, you look like hell warmed over.." Kat snorted, Montagne huffing a flat sigh at her. Kat was not one to talk, however. They both were worse for wear, but it was all over now. As Finka worked to stitch Montagne up (with ample squirms and bitten back curses in French to come from him), Kat held his hand tightly. All were silent for a moment, until Kat spoke up. “...Thank you for saving my life, Monty…but you could have died, you know..” she said quietly. Montagne shook his head, “Save it. I was doing my job. And will continue to do my job.” he said quietly, his own grasp tightening around hers. His usual hardened brown eyes were soft with a light, yet exhausted smile touching them as she gazed up at him. Finka noticed this, rolling her eyes as she continued to work. She knew the two were smitten, “Gross. Get a room.” she said flatly as she finished patching up what she could with her limited supplies, scooting over to start working with Kat's injured leg. This pulled a laugh from both Kat and Montagne, the tension throughout the helicopter cabin soon dissipating.

~~~~

#r6s au #angsty shit #bring some tissues #im gonna go yeet myself into the sun now #r6s oc #god help me #alternate ending is coming up next #sobs

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mirkwoodshewolf · 7 years ago

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Chapter 19; The two outsiders

And here is where things take an interesting turn as we are introduced to two new characters which I will provide gifs for face cast since I haven’t told you guys who they were gonna be played by. Hope you enjoy this chapter :)

____________________________________________________

It had been a year since that day and slowly but surely, I got use to the new arm and Bucky was right there by my side if I ever felt insecure of it or needed a little pick me up. We had also received a facetime message from my mother about her progress in finding all of Klaue’s former business partners. She told us that she was down to the last few but these ones have been proven to be the toughest since they were located in Moscow, Russia, but she hoped she would come home to us soon.

She also explained to us mainly to Bucky about the suit she had rescued him in. Apparently shortly after she left Wakanda for the first time, she settled down in South America for several years and the place she lived in was having some problems with thieves and black market people coming in and stealing not only their supplies and food but some of their women and children as well.

In that moment, she had brought to life the Legend of the “Jaguar Warrior” to the village and defended their keep for almost 10 years until finally the threats stopped and the village was once again at peace. When the village didn’t need her anymore, she left South America and that’s when she found herself in Kamar Taj.

But soon something else would happen in Wakanda that would change myself forever.

Bucky was training with some of the warriors while I was training with the Dora Milaje practicing my bow staff and speak skills when we suddenly got a call from Okoye who was traveling with T’Challa scouting the perimeter of the kingdom. Bucky and I walked towards each other and activated our watches and soon Okoye’s image came up.

“Barnes, (Y/n)”.

“What’s going on Okoye?” I asked.

“We’ve found a couple of intruders in the jungle, you need to come right away”.

“Any idea who they are?” asked Bucky.

“I think the real question is what they are? Take the Eastern passage, it’s the quickest way to where we currently are at, and (y/n) make sure you are in wolf form when you come”. She then ended the message as both Bucky and I looked at each other confused.

“What’s that about?” asked Bucky.

“I don’t know, but it sounds like we don’t have much time, climb on quick”. I phased into my wolf form and Bucky mounted on my back as W’Kabi handed Bucky a spear and soon I took off running out of the sanctuary and into the jungle taking the East passage just as Okoye instructed.

When we arrived, we saw T’Challa in full Black Panther gear and Okoye fighting against these mutated animal/human hybrids. T’Challa was fighting off what looked like a hyena and lion while Okoye was fighting off against a gorilla.

“What the hell?” Bucky muttered.

‘I don’t know but right now’s not the time to discuss this, help T’Challa while I help Okoye’. I took a running start before leaping into the air letting out a mad snarl as Bucky leaped off my back and tackled the lion humanoid and I got onto the gorilla hybrids back and bit down onto its shoulder.

The gorilla let out an agonizing roar while Okoye stabbed her spear right into its heart killing right then and there. T’Challa scratched across the lion’s face much like he did to me back during the Civil War while Bucky punched the hyena square in the face and with that they two of them suddenly ran off whimpering in fear.

“Uhh—okay someone wanna tell us what’s going on? What were those things?” Bucky said.

“We have no idea, hopefully when we get back home we can—”

“Help! Somebody help! Help!” A voice cried out from the jungle. I lowered my head in a snarl as I stood in front of everyone then I said through my collar.

‘Slowly step out from the bushes and put your hands up where we can see them!’ Soon coming out of the bushes were two men. One of them had short black hair, he stood about Bucky’s height maybe an inch or two shorter and was skinny but lean and he had some muscle on him and it was good he had it for leaning against his side was another man with long, curly like black hair that reached his shoulders, a hidden scar along his left eye and well built in muscle.

All over this guy’s body he had wounds probably from those creatures and he was bleeding badly. The man holding the wounded man said to us.

“Please help him…..he’s gonna bleed to death”. I phased into my human form and said.

“What happened here?”

“We got lost, we thought there was a village or a town nearby and then out of nowhere those things attacked us, my buddy Rauri tried to save me but those things overpowered him, please—he’s gonna bleed to death”. I turned to T’Challa and Okoye who only looked at me with suspicious eyes.

We were now on the ship flying back to the sanctuary and Okoye muttered to us saying.

“This is a bad idea”.

“In a way I agree but as King I am responsible for anyone who comes into my kingdom, and if anyone is injured then it makes them my responsibility, especially now since we’ve opened up our borders to the world”.

“But T’Challa we still don’t know about those creatures, what if they are a threat to our kingdom and now that they’ve got our scent they’ll be able to track us faster” Okoye stated worriedly.

“She’s right T’Challa, animals can smell ten times stronger than you humans, and since those things were also technically human, if there are more of them out there, we could be facing another war on our hands”. I said as I leaned against Bucky who was sitting on the couch.

“We’ll keep them long enough for his friend to recover, then once he is we’ll treat them as invaders to our lands, as King that is my final say in this matter”. With no other choice, we agreed to T’Challa’s decree and we continued on our way back to the sanctuary.

In the lab, we wheeled Rauri in and Shuri said to her brother.

“Oh another broken white boy for me to fix then huh? I swear big brother I better be getting paid for this”.

“I am your brother I don’t need to pay you”. T’Challa stated. Shuri then flipped him off but went straight to work on Rauri. The man who was friends with Rauri asked us.

“Is he gonna die?”

“Be patient and don’t talk so loud” Shuri stated as she got the vibranium and began to play it along Rauri’s wounds which healed them right up. Once she was done she said, “He’ll live, given time and rest, there is so much that Vibranium can do for these wounds”.

“Now then, why don’t we go upstairs and talk Mr.—”

“Connor, my names Conner”. T’Challa, Okoye, Bucky and Shuri left the lab leaving me to look after Rauri for a bit. As I sat down beside him I got to have a closer look at him and saw his facial features.

Perfect chiseled face, dark stubble along his face, hidden dimples and his scent was intoxicating and seductive to my nose.

I reached out and brushed away a stray strand of his raven black hair and imagined if he spoke with the same accent Connor did, what color his eyes were and what his voice sounded like.

Wait what the hell? Snap out of it (Y/n)! He’s an outsider and could be a potential threat to Wakanda, both of them could be! The last time you let someone into Wakanda, you lost an arm, don’t make that same mistake again!

*3rd Person POV*

A couple days later, Rauri woke up to see himself in a lab of sorts and almost went into a panic attack when someone came up to him and said.

“Don’t even think about it! I just had my lab fixed, I don’t want to repair it again”. Rauri looked around and said in a thick Irish accent.

“Where am I?”

“Wakandan sanctuary, you’ve been unconscious for 2 days, I was almost beginning to think you wouldn’t wake up”.

“Who are you?”

“Names Shuri, and you white boy are in my lab in my brother’s kingdom of Wakanda, you’re lucky to be alive with those wounds” Shuri stated as she prepared him a glass of water. Rauri slowly sat up and said.

“I don’t feel very lucky, my friend Connor and I got ambushed by those Chimeras”.

“So that’s what they’re called, what exactly are they?” Shuri asked as she handed Rauri the water.

“Big nasty sons of bitches with terrible breath,” he took a sip when he stated, “Wait—there was a She-wolf”.

“A She-wolf?”

“Out in the jungle, a black she-wolf who turned into a beautiful woman, and she saved my life”. Rauri said. Shuri grinned and said.

“I think you might’ve hit your head a little too hard my dear white boy. I would suggest getting some air but don’t speak of any she-wolf for you won’t find one here”. Shuri spoke jokingly at first but by the end of her statement, her voice changed from joking to dead serious. With that being said, Shuri left the lab leaving Rauri to himself.

Rauri left the lab and walked outside for the very first time in days. He breathed in the fresh air and took in the warm sun when he heard a familiar voice call out to him. He turned to see his friend Connor running up to him and the two boys smiled and hugged each other before talking over each other.

As the two of them walked around the Black Panther sanctuary, they soon came upon the training grounds and Rauri soon saw a familiar face of the woman he had seen back in the jungle for a brief second before blacking out from his injuries.

(Y/n) was training with some of the men and easily over-powering them and kicking their butts with just her official Dora Milaje spear and her own two fists and feet. As Rauri and Connor both stared at her, Rauri felt this sudden connection with her that made his heart skip a beat almost.

“What a woman” he muttered.

“Yeah mate, she’s a real fighter that one” Connor said to his friend as he clasped his hand to his shoulder.

*1st Person POV*

After beating W’Kabi and his tribe in combat, I heard T’Challa’s voice say to me in his native tongue.

“You keep this up, I may have to retire my whole kingdom and just let you fight my wars”. I smirked and said back in Wakandan.

“You’d have the whole world trembling before you if they found out about me”.

“Indeed”. He said to me in English as the two of us stood side by side. “My sister relieved Mr. Williams of bedrest”. I turned to see both Rauri and Connor standing side by side looking at us and I said.

“He’s up and walking already? If it were me who attacked him he wouldn’t be moving for at least a month if not be dead already”.

“Now (y/n) I know you have more intuition with your animal instincts but there’s no need to pick a fight with them already”.

“There’s something not right though, not just the fact that they’re outsiders but their scent isn’t completely human”. T’Challa chuckled softly and I asked him, “What?”

“Just something my sister told me, she told me that Mr. Williams told her that he was saved by a She-wolf. A magnificent She-wolf who then turned into a beautiful woman”. I stopped my spear checking and looked towards the two boys to see Rauri looking straight at me. I smirked and leaned in close to T’Challa and said.

“And what did she tell him?”

“You know my sister, she never tells strangers full details when it comes to her friends, but if you’re still suspicious about them, then I give you full permission to beat them into submission if either of them step out of line”. I smirked as I pulled out a mango from my lunchbox and took a bite of it before taking my bag and walking off the training grounds.

Later that day, I decided to take a peaceful walk along the jungle trail just to get out and maybe practice some of my magic since I promised my mother that I’d keep practicing while she was away. As I walked through the jungle though, I could smell someone following me. For a while I chose to ignore it, until I finally stopped and said.

“I know you’ve been following me, I could hear you the minute I left the sanctuary”. I turned to see Rauri stepping out from behind the trees and he said.

“I hoped I would, but I should’ve known better than to underestimate a wolf’s nose”.

“What makes you think it had to do anything with smell? I could just have good hearing”.

“I know you do, but a wolf’s nose is ten times stronger than a normal humans, plus I was approaching you from upwind”.

“And how do you know so much about wolves?”

“Because I know how to recognize one when I see one”. Then something happened that shock me to the core. His eyes quickly phased to wolf gold before returning back to his normal brown ones. “That’s right, I’m one too. My name’s Rauri Williams, and I know who you are. You’re (y/n) (l/n), the Bad Wolf”. I stared at him in shock before I suddenly snapped and tackled him down to the ground and press a dagger to his neck and sneered.

“I. Am not. Bad Wolf! She no longer exists to me”.

“Hold on! I didn’t mean no harm, there’s no need to get so defensive”. I glared down at him and slowly removed the dagger from his neck but kept the blade pointed right at him. “The reason why I know what you are is because I was the first Bad Wolf before you, Hydra came and killed both mine and Connor’s families and took us as prisoners to be the first test subjects for the Bad Wolf experiment. Then once the files of both Hydra and Shield went to the public I read to see if they had used anyone else for the Bad Wolf experiment when I found your name”.

“Just because you saw my name on the Internet doesn’t mean that I have to believe you, in fact why are you telling me this? How do I know you’re not a spy of Hydra or in fact the UN coming to find me and take me to a prison cell?”

“Because my animal instincts say that I can trust you, and I know yours is saying the same thing. We’re both wolves after all, and there is safety within the pack”.

“You’re a fool, Bad Wolves are known for deception and lies until the time comes to strike”.

“Indeed but we’re the only two people in this world that went through the exact same torture that Hydra put us under, same tests and trials to unleash the beast they wanted” Rauri extended his hand out and he said, “You know you can trust me, and I can surely trust you. So what do you say we shake on it, Wolf to Wolf?” I looked down at his hand and told him sternly.

“I don’t shake, that’s not how Wakandans make pacts here”.

“Then how do they do it?” he asked. I thought about the most ridiculous thing I could come up with and I grinned softly before answering bluntly.

“You have to endure a bite from a Makiki spider”. Rauri looked at me and I could see his eyes turn from strength to absolute fear as he stammered out.

“S-say what now?”“

You’ll have a high fever, hallucinations, you’ll say things, lots of things. Wanna hear what’s in your heart, then if your intentions are true, then we have a pact”.

“Spider bite and—hallucinations?”

“That’s right”. I stated as I looked right into his eyes intimidating him with my “Romanoff” stare.

“And if I say the truth you’ll trust me?”

“Absolutely, both you and your friend. Well?” Silence came between us as Rauri debated on his answer when he finally said in the most serious tone I had heard from him.

“I’d say that’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard”. I softly smirked and said.

“Maybe you’re not a fool after all”. I backed away from him and walked back towards the sanctuary. “Though don’t get too cocky Irish boy, you step out of line, I have full permission from the king to whip your ass good”.

In the weeks that followed, Rauri just seemed to want to always be around me whether it was during training, in the lab with Shuri or interrupting me and Bucky-bear time and to tell you the truth I was just about to beat his ass in good. I could tell Bucky was about to step in at some moments too.

Like the time I was sparring with Okoye, I had gotten kicked off my feet and banged my head pretty hard on the hard concrete floor and as Rauri was coming up to see if I was alright, Bucky-bear beat him to it and I could hear from my in and out of consciousness telling him along the lines saying.

“Take one more step and I’ll rip your head off!” Or something like that.

After the match, I was in my room being taken care of by my Bucky-bear and when he left the room to prepare me something to eat, I heard a knock at my door and saw Shuri standing there with a flower in her hand.“What’s that Shuri?”

“Found this in the lab at your station from your secret admirer” she teased as she came in and gave it to me.

“What is this flower?” I asked as I took it in her hands.

“That my friend is the rare Violet Wakanda lily. It means “trust and soulmate” I have my suspicion on who it might be from”. Shuri teased as she bumped my shoulder with hers. At her statement I just put the flower aside and she continued, “He really is trying (y/n), he seems to really like you. Don’t you feel at least a little something for him?”

“Absolutely not” I stated bluntly.

#captain america civil war #captain america fanfiction #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x teen reader #bad wolf

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bookofdan · 4 years ago

Text

The Trump-Biden Debate

via Wait But Why (waitbutwhy.com)

In case you missed it, here’s a transcript of the first Trump-Biden Debate:

Chris Wallace: Good evening. I’m Chris Wallace and I welcome you to what I predict will be a very bad personal experience for me. There will be six 15-minute segments, each on a different topic. At the beginning of each segment, both candidates will get two uninterrupted minutes to respond. The remainder of the segment will be open discussion. The audience has agreed not to be trashy. Both campaigns have signed off on these rules, so for sure nothing will go wrong. And with that, let’s welcome the candidates.

[CANDIDATES ENTER]

Wallace: Let’s start with the Supreme Court. President Trump, you nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the court. You say the Constitution is clear about your obligation to nominate someone to the court. Vice President Biden, you’ve called this an abuse of power. To start, why don’t you both explain your positions.

Trump: Amy Coney Barrett is a perfect nominee. Conservatives love her. Liberals love her. Chris Wallace loves her.

Biden: Amy Barrett would repeal the Affordable Care Act. And besides, the new thing is that you have to wait until after the election to nominate someone.

Trump: Not sure what you’re talking about, because last I checked a presidential term is four years, not three. You want to instate Communist medicine.

Biden: I don’t want to instate Communist medicine. I want to expand Obamacare.

Trump: Your party wants to instate Communist medicine, and you’re scared of them.

Biden: I may be scared of them but I am the Democrat Party now, so even if I was and still am scared of them, I’m not anymore. They’ll do what I say now. And how about Covid? The president killed 200,000 people. Roe v. Wade.

Trump: You would have killed 2 million people by not banning China. Not Roe v. Wade.

Wallace: K let’s go back to healthcare for a minute. Mr. President, over the past four years you have promised to replace and repeal Obamacare, but you have never in these four years come up—

Trump: Yes I have.

Wallace: with a plan—

Trump: Of course I have.

Wallace: to—

Trump: Of course I have.

Wallace: replace—

Trump: I got rid of the individual mandate.

Wallace: Oba—

Trump: The individual mandate was a joke.

Wallace: macare.

Trump: The individual mandate was the worst part of Obamacare.

Wallace: I am the moder—

Trump: The individual mandate sucks dick.

Wallace: I AM THE MODERATOR of this debate and I would like to be treated as such. You have never come up with a plan to replace Obamacare. So what is the Trump healthcare plan?

Trump: I’m cutting drug prices. Insulin is like water.

Wallace: Uh huh. How about you Joe? Why do you want to end private insurance?

Biden: I don’t want to end private insurance.

Trump: You’re literally friends with Bernie Sanders.

Biden: No I’m not. I want to—

Trump: You’re a piece of shit Joe.

Biden: I want to make sure—

Trump: A sad little man.

Wallace: Stop picking on Joe, Mr. President.

Trump: You care deeply about Bernie Sanders. You like Communist medicine. Anyway I asked the doctors and they said Obamacare is a disaster.

Biden: He doesn’t have a plan.

Wallace: Changing gears, Joe some of your colleagues are talking about ending the filibuster and packing the court. What’s your stance on that?

Biden: My stance is that voting is good. Americans should vote. It’s easy. You just go to the polling place, you wait in line, and then you go into the booth, and you push the little switch down for the candidate you want to vote for. Sometimes it’s not a switch.

Trump: You gonna pack the court, Joe? Tell us about how you’re gonna pack the court, Joe. The radical Left is pulling your puppet strings Joe. You and I both know it Joe.

Biden: Shut up, man.

Wallace: This is going well. Okay next segment. Covid-19. There have been more than 7 million cases in the United States and more than 200,000 have died. The question is, why should people trust you more than your opponent to handle this public health crisis?

Biden: 40,000 people a day contracting Covid. 200,000 people dead. He has no plan. He knew in February. He lied. He panicked. He complimented China. He has no plan. He’s playing golf.

Trump: I saved lives. It’s China’s fault. You wanted to let Chinese people come here. Dr. Fauci and all the Democrat governors said, “President Trump did a phenomenal job.” And they’re not the only ones. All of the other people said it too. “President Trump did a phenomenal job,” they all said. I did a phenomenal job. The gowns, the masks, the ventilators, you don’t know how to make a ventilator, the vaccine is here, any week now. You could never have done the job I did because you’re a random old man. You couldn’t even do swine flu. Swine flu is a disaster.

Biden: He panicked. People died. And more people are gonna die unless he gets a lot smarter—

Trump: Did you just use the word smart? You lied about going to college at Delaware State. You were the worst student at Delaware State. You’re a dumb fuck Joe. I know it. Chris Wallace knows it don’t you Chris.

Wallace:

Trump:

Biden:

Wallace: Mr. President, you have begun to increasingly question the effectiveness of masks. Are you not in favor of masks?

Trump: Masks are tremendous. I have a mask right here in my pocket. I wear masks when needed. Masks have said I’ve done a phenomenal job. Joe wears masks even when it makes no sense. He wears them when he’s 200 feet away from me. He wears a mask when he’s sleeping.

Wallace: Mr. Vice President, is that true?

Biden: If you wanna open a business, you gotta have a plan.

Wallace: Sir, I was asking about masks.

Biden: Oh masks? Sure, you gotta have a mask.

Wallace: Alright next segment. The economy. Mr. Trump, you go first.

Trump: It’s a big dick economy.

Biden: No.

Wallace: Okay how about taxes. Mr. President, apparently you pay $750 a year in taxes. There’s a girl my daughter knows who’s 15 and she works in a movie theater on Sundays and sells the candy. And she pays more than $750 a year in taxes. So is this true, Mr. President? How much did you pay in taxes in 2016 and 2017?

Trump: Miyyons.

Wallace: Miyyons, sir?

Trump: Miyyons and Biyyons. I don’t pay taxes because the Obama administration said I didn’t have to.

Wallace: Joe, what’s your plan for taxes?

Biden: I’m gonna build this economy. I’m gonna make jobs. We’re gonna buy American. We’re gonna buy American ships. American steel. American buildings. We handed him a booming economy and he blew it.

Wallace: But did you actually hand him a booming economy and did he actually blow it?

Biden: Sure, whatever. He talks about the art of the deal. China has perfected the art of the steal.

Trump: China buttered your son’s belly.

Biden: China did no such thing.

Trump: And then, Joe? You know what happened after that? Your son went to Moscow. And you know what happened there Joe? Moscow buttered your son’s belly.

Biden: Nothing happened there.

Trump: Sure did Joe. The mayor of Moscow’s wife. She buttered his belly slick.

Biden: You wanna talk about families Trump? How about your family. With their grease and their shoes. It’s not about families. It’s about the American people. It’s about families.

Trump: Oh and how about Ukraine?

Wallace: You know what? Time to move on to—

Trump: Ukraine buttered the shit out of—

Wallace: Mr. President.

Trump: Ukraine buttered him up real good.

Wallace: Mr. President.

Trump: Shut your mouth Chris. What about Ukraine Joe?

Wallace: VAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

Trump:

Wallace: Now I’m gonna say something and I want you to listen right to me, Mr. President. I have had it up to here with you. Any more misbehaving and I will put you in timeout.

Trump: And you know what else—

Wallace: I will put you right in timeout, Mr. President. And then you’ll be sorry. Now I want you to stop being a bad boy, is that clear?

Trump: How about him? He should get timeout too.

Wallace: Well frankly, Mr. President, you’ve been the badder boy.

Trump: He’s been plenty bad.

Wallace: For the next segment, we’ll be talking about race. Why should voters trust you to deal with the race issues facing this country? Mr. Vice President, we’ll start with you.

Biden: I’m all for race. It’s about equity. About equality. About equanimity. Equilibrium. Equinox. We need to fix the systemic equity of racism and fragility in this country. And this president has done none of that. He wants to fix the systemic equity of the Nazis.

Trump: The blacks love me. Everyone knows that the blacks love me. I have blacks come up to me on the street all the time and tell me they love me. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and I have done more for the blacks than Joe could ever dream of. Joe won’t say law enforcement. Why won’t you say it Joe? Why are you such a puppet Joe? You’re the radical Left’s toy. You’re a yo-yo. The radical Left won’t let you say law enforcement because they bounce you like a yo-yo, Joe.

Wallace: I want to turn to the subject of protests. In many cities, things have turned violent. Portland, for instance, is a certifiable madhouse. Mr. Biden, have you ever called the mayor of Portland or the governor of Oregon and been like, “wtf?”

Biden: I don’t have their numbers. Otherwise I would have. Do you have their numbers Chris? If you do, text them to me. And besides, they’re taking care of things just fine.

Trump: Yeah Joe? They’re fine? They’re literally murdering people in the streets, which is a disaster, and no one in Portland cares.

Wallace: Mr. President do you like or not like white supremacists?

Trump: No of course not. I don’t not like, or don’t not not like any of the people.

Wallace:

Trump:

Wallace: Mr. President, what is your message to white supremacists?

Trump: Get your guns but don’t fire till I give the word. Anyway the Left is committing 99% of the violence right now.

Biden: Oh baloney. Antifa is an idea, not an organization. I heard it means anti-fascist, in which case heck, sign me up. And anyhow who hasn’t thrown urine at an old lady on a bad day? The Antifas are just like you and me.

Wallace: I’m having an awful time here. I’m really upset and I want to leave and I’m having a bad, bad time. For the next segment, let’s just go with “why should you be president over your opponent?”

Trump: There has never been a leader who has done more than I’ve done. And I don’t mean just U.S. presidents. Mandela. Attila the Hun. Caesar. King Tut. None of them did as much as I’ve done. I unified this country. For the first time in U.S. history, I ended division. I have the first 100% approval rating. And how about judges. I have 300 judges. I have judges up the ass, Chris. You know why? Because Obama and crazy Uncle Joe forgot to fill the seats. Who does that. No one does that. You forget your keys, sure I’ve forgotten my keys, I’m human, we all forget our keys, sometimes I leave my keys. But leaving judges is a disaster.

Biden: This man has made the country weaker, sicker, poorer, fatter, sloppier, and slipperier. When I was Vice President I went head-to-head with Putin, but Trump is Putin’s little puppy. His cuddle-bunny. His bushy-bushy-boo-boo.

Trump: At least Putin’s not my sugar daddy, like he is to your son.

Biden: K speaking of that, fuck off. Second, you talk about the military being losers—my son was in Iraq and he was no loser, he was a patriot.

Trump: Which son, the loser or the dead one?

Biden:

Wallace:

Trump: I don’t know the dead one, but if I recall, the loser got thrown out of the military, dishonorably discharged for having a nice time with his cocaine, only to then head off on his famous belly-buttering tour.

Biden: His belly is dry!

Wallace: Oh for fuck’s sake. Let’s move on to climate change. Mr. President, what do you believe about the science of climate change, and what is your plan to confront it?

Trump: I want clean water and air. As far as the California fires are concerned, the forest floors are full of dead trees and leaves.

Wallace: Okay but what do you believe about the science of climate change?

Trump: I want clean water and air. I’ve planted a biyyon trees. We’ve got to pick the leaves up in the forest in California. Every year I get the call. California’s burning again. Because again they didn’t pick up the fucking leaves. You know in Europe, they pick up leaves.

Wallace: Joe?

Biden: I want to get rid of fossil fuel plants and invest in renewable energy. I want to transition to electric cars and make green buildings and create millions of new jobs.

Trump: He’s talking about the Green New Deal. The 55 quadrillion dollar Green New Deal.

Biden: The Green New Deal is a plan that’ll pay for itself. It’ll work great.

Wallace: Do you support the Green New Deal?

Biden: Of course not. I’m talking about the Biden Plan. Who said anything about the Green New Deal?

Wallace: Mercifully, we’ve reached the final segment of my extremely awful night. Election integrity. How confident should we be that this will be a fair election?

Biden: There is no evidence that mail-in ballots are problematic. Trump is trying to convince people not to vote. Listen to me America. Get out there and vote. If I get enough votes, this whole thing is over and the bad man can’t hurt you. It doesn’t matter what he says, if I get enough votes he’s legit not in power anymore, how rad is that.

Wallace: Mr. President?

Trump: A squirrel’s ass, Chris. That’s where someone found a ballot the other day. A squirrel shit out a ballot in a park in Philadelphia and a man picked it up and guess what? It said Trump on the ballot. Big shocker there. This is what happens with mail-in ballots. They end up in a trash can in a river in the woods in the backcountry and then eventually the trash can gets caught up in an eddy, we both know how eddies work Chris, and it washes up on the bank, and then a squirrel gets into it and eats the ballots. Half the country’s ballots have already been found in eddies and in squirrels, and all of them were votes for me. Mail-in ballots are a fraud.

Wallace: One thing we all know for sure is that this election is going to be a shitshow. Will you accept the results of the shitshow and tell your supporters to accept the results peacefully?

Trump: If there’s no fraud, yes.

Wallace: Is there any foreseeable outcome where you lose and you don’t say it’s fraud?

Trump: No. I’ve already talked about the squirrels. If I lose, we’ll need to end the country.

Wallace: Biden?

Biden: The country can go on if I lose.

Wallace: And that concludes what will end up as a stain on my career even though it clearly wasn’t my fault. Thank you, and goodnight.

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