#my little scientist 🥰

[shoku-and-awe]

Is it hard to see in the bright afternoon sun? Yes. Is it crucial to find the single sunniest spot in the whole apartment and sit facing directly into the sun? Also yes.

[valkyrieromanoff]

WRAP ME UP: Dilf! Anakin x f!reader

synopsis: caught up in the Christmas rush, you took charge of buying all the presents to give your boyfriend a well-deserved break. But as the day winds down, you realize you’ve forgotten the most important gift—his. Determined not to let him down, you scramble to come up with a surprise that’s sure to make this Christmas unforgettable.

warning: MDNI, 18+, unprotected sex, pussy eating, dirty talk, implied age difference.

words: 4.1k

a/n: Hello there, hope you’re all having the best Christmas ever! 🥰💖 I whipped up this lil oneshot as a gift just for you, filled with all my love and holiday vibes 🎁✨ Sending hugs, kisses, and festive cheer your way~ mwah! 💕🎄

So why don't we just wrap me up? A little bow and ribbon, best thing you've been given Baby, come and wrap me up I'll be under your tree, hurry up and find me

Christmas always seemed to come with a whirlwind of chaos—the kind that swept through the house like a winter storm. There were decorations to hang, meals to prep, and endless checklists to tick off. Putting the kids to bed at just the right time so you could sneak the already-wrapped presents under the tree was practically an Olympic sport. Not to mention the milk and cookies the little ones had spent the day making; someone had to nibble on those and leave a convincing crumb trail.

Whew. Just listing it all was exhausting.

This year felt even more complicated, though. Add a divorce to the equation, and you had the perfect recipe for a holiday headache. Coordinating a peaceful gathering between your boyfriend’s ex-wife’s family and your own was no small feat. For Anakin, this was the first Christmas since his split from Padmé that would take place at his

He wanted everything to be perfect. Not for himself, but for his 10-year-old twins, Leia and Luke. He had insisted on getting a live pine tree—a massive, fragrant beauty that now stood proudly in the living room. He’d spent hours stringing lights and hanging ornaments, meticulously ensuring no branch was left bare. But let’s be honest, the finer, more delicate touches weren’t exactly Anakin’s forte. That’s where you came in, adding cute little details like hand-painted pinecones and glittery snowflakes.

Despite all his efforts, there was still so much to do. Anakin even took it upon himself to clean out the attic so Padmé and her new partner would have a place to stay—a task you eventually had to step in and stop. Watching your older boyfriend juggling it all—exhausted and overwhelmed—was enough to make your heart ache.

“Babe,” you’d said, placing a hand on his arm as he tried to untangle yet another strand of lights. “Why don’t you let me take care of the gifts? You’ve got enough on your plate.”

Anakin had protested at first, brushing it off like it wasn’t a big deal. “I don’t want you running around and tiring yourself out,” he’d said, his furrowed brow softening slightly at your concern.

But you’d been ready for that. “We already made a list,” you’d assured him with a grin. “Half the stuff is online—I can knock it out without even leaving the couch.”

That had earned a laugh, the kind that made his shoulders relax and his blue eyes light up, even just for a moment. “Sometimes I forget that,” he’d teased, shaking his head.

“You forget a lot of things, old man,” you’d shot back, your tone playful as you nudged him gently.

And so, the task had fallen to you. You’d tackled it with determination, checking off each name on the list like Santa himself. Leia’s little scientist kit, the one she hadn’t stopped talking about after a trip to the mall. Luke’s robotics kit, perfect for building his dream spaceship. For Padmé, you’d chosen an elegant set of rose-scented moisturizers, oils, and bath salts—practical but thoughtful. Even her date wasn’t forgotten; you’d picked out a bottle of wine that struck the perfect balance between classy and casual.

Each gift was wrapped meticulously in festive paper—greens, reds, stripes, and prints of reindeer prancing through snowy fields. Big, shiny bows crowned them all, turning the pile beneath the tree into a picture-perfect scene.

But as you stood back, surveying the neatly wrapped packages, a realization hit you like a snowball to the face. You’d forgotten the most important gift of all. The one for him.

Your heart sank, and the cheerful glow of the tree suddenly felt a little dimmer. How could you have missed it? After everything Anakin had done to make this Christmas special, after the hours he’d poured into creating a magical holiday for everyone, you’d forgotten him.

You spent most of dinner lost in thought, your mind racing to come up with a way to fix your mistake. Buying something online was out of the question—it wouldn’t arrive in time. The stores had surely closed by now, and even if they were miraculously open, you doubted you’d find anything meaningful enough to give him. You could still picture the chaos that had unfolded in stores that morning, people scrambling to grab last-minute gifts. No, it had to be something special, something that mattered.

“Hey, you outdid yourself, baby.”

Anakin’s voice pulled you from your thoughts as his arms wrapped around you from behind. His touch was warm, steady, and so familiar that it sent a wave of comfort through you despite your swirling anxiety.

You sighed, startled by his sudden presence. You hadn’t even heard him approach. “I could barely get Leia to sleep,” he murmured, his breath warm against your neck. “She wouldn’t stop talking about the scientist kit Santa brought her. And Luke?” He chuckled softly, the sound deep and content. “He’s passed out upstairs, hugging his present like it’s a long-lost friend.”

His satisfaction was evident, a proud smile curling his lips as he nuzzled into your neck. The light tickle of his growing stubble sent a shiver down your spine.

“That’s… that’s great,” you murmured, trying to match his warmth, but the weight of your forgotten gift tugged at you like an anchor.

“Baby?” Anakin’s voice softened, his concern breaking through the comfortable silence. He turned you in his arms, his large hands settling on your waist as he studied your face. His blue eyes, stormy yet full of affection, locked onto yours. “What’s going on? You’ve been quiet all evening.”

You hesitated for a moment, the words catching in your throat. Finally, you whispered, “I didn’t get you a present.” You bit your lower lip, the admission laced with guilt and shyness. “I—I forgot.”

Anakin’s reaction wasn’t what you expected. His smile widened, his features softening as he tilted his head. The corners of his eyes crinkled in that way that always made your heart flutter. “Baby,” he said, his voice low and full of warmth, “you’re my present.”

His words caught you off guard, the simplicity of them sending a rush of warmth through you. You stared at him for a moment, your chest tightening with love—and then, suddenly, inspiration struck.

“Oh,” you breathed, a smile spreading across your face as an idea took root. “Just give me a minute. I’ll be right back—I need to take care of something.”

Anakin raised an eyebrow, bemused but curious as he watched your sudden burst of energy. “What are you up to now?”

“You’ll see,” you said with a mischievous grin, your excitement bubbling over as you slipped out of his grasp and hurried toward the stairs. You moved quickly, your steps light yet deliberate as you tried not to wake the children. Whatever guilt you’d been feeling was now replaced by an eagerness to give Anakin a gift he’d never forget.

A few minutes later, with a few fewer clothes, you were ready. Calling out to him softly, you hoped he would like your surprise gift. The door opened, and Anakin's mouth dropped open in awe as he took in the sight before him. You were draped in red lace lingerie that caressed your curves like a lover's touch, hugging you in all the right places. A crimson bow adorned your curls, and satin ribbons were artfully wrapped around your body - a bow around your slender neck, another cinched around your tiny waist, and delicate strands encircling your hips and thighs. You looked like a tantalizing holiday treat, a gift just for him.

Anakin stood there, speechless, his blue eyes drinking you in like a man dying of thirst. A wolfish grin slowly spread across his face as he closed the door behind him with a gentle kick of his foot. "Merry Christmas, baby," he purred, his voice low and husky with desire. "And what a very naughty, very sexy gift you are."

You smiled coyly, tilting your head up to meet his heated gauze. "Merry Christmas," you murmured, your breath hitting as he closed the distance between you. His lips captured yours in a feverish kiss, the taste of rum-spiked eggnog mingling with the intoxicating flavor that was uniquely him. It made your head spin and your knees go weak.

"Fuck, I love you so much," Anakin groaned against your skin as he trailed hot, open-mouthed kisses down the column of your throat. His teeth grazed your pulse point, making you shiver and arch into him. You could feel the evidence of his arousal pressing insistently against your belly, and it made you ache with want.

His hands roamed your body, mapping out every curve, every dip, every secret place that made you gasp and moan. He palmed your breast through the delicate lace, rolling the hardened nip. Anakin's hands continued their sensual exploration, his fingers dancing across your skin like a symphony of sensation. He cupped your face gently, tilting your head back to claim your lips in another kiss. His tongue delved into your mouth, stroking against yours in a tantalizing rhythm that left you breathless and wanting more.

"You're mine," he growled possessively as he broke the kiss, his blue eyes burning into yours with an intensity that made your heart race. "All mine, my beautiful Christmas present."

His hands moved lower, skimming over your ribs, your hips, the soft globes of your ass. He gripped your rear, pulling you flush against him, letting you feel how hard he was, how much he wanted you.

"I'm going to unwrap you slowly," he whispered, his breath hot against your ear. "I'm going to savor every inch of you, like the rare and precious gift you are."

His fingers found the bow at your neck, and with a gentle tug, the ribbon slipped free, fluttering to the floor. He kissed your collarbone, your shoulder, the swell of your breast as he worked his way down, untying each ribbon, baring more and more of your skin to his hungry gauze.

You trembled under his touch, your body singing with desire, wanting to be touched, claimed, loved by him. Each brush of his lips, each nip of his teeth, each caress of his hands sent sparks of pleasure racing through you, building the heat simmering in your core to a fever pitch.

"Please, Anakin," you whimpered, your nails digging into his shoulders. "I need you. I need to feel you inside me."

He groaned at his pleading words, his control hanging by a thread. "Patience, baby," he murmured, even as his hands made quick work of your lingerie, tugging it down your legs and leaving you bare, save for the ribbon cinched around your waist and the bow adorning your golden curls. "I thought you were my gift, not the other way around," he teased, a mischievous glint in his eyes.

Anakin guided you to sit on the edge of the bed, his large, warm hands on your hips steadying you. He knelt before you, his eyes dark with desire as he drank in the sight of your naked body. Slowly, reverently, he leaned forward and took your breast in his mouth, his tongue swirling around your hardened nipple.

You gasped at the sensation, your back arching to press more of yourself against his eager mouth. He sucked and nibbled, his teeth grazing the sensitive bud, sending jolts of pleasure straight to your core. He lavish attention on your breasts, his hands kneading the soft flesh, his mouth hot and wet against your skin.

Time seemed to blur as he devoted himself to worshiping your breasts, licking and sucking until your chest was flushed and damp with his saliva. Your nipples throbbed with need, craving for more of his touch, more of his attention. Soft, needy moans spilled from your lips, growing louder with each passing moment.

"Shhh, baby," Anakin whispered, his voice a low, soothing rumble. "You don't want to wake the kids, do you?" There was a note of genuine concern in his tone, even as his lips curved into a playful smile. "Can you be quiet for me?"

Nodding eagerly, you bit your lip, determined to stifle your cries of pleasure. Anakin smiled proudly, his eyes shining with adoration. "That's my good girl," he praised, pressing a tender kiss to your belly before trailing his lips lower, down, down, until he reached the ribbon tied around your waist, he undid it with his teeth, letting it gather the pile of clothes on the floor.

Anakin gently spread your legs, his hands firm but gentle on your thighs as he positioned himself between them. He looked up at you with a mischievous grin, his blue eyes dark with desire, before lowering his head and burying his face in your pussy.

His hot breath ghosted over your sensitive folds, sending a shivering through your body. Then, with a low groan of appreciation, he dragged his tongue along your slit, savoring you as if you were a banquet, his first meal in decades.

"Fuck, you taste so good," he murmured against your skin, the vibrations of his voice sending sparks of pleasure racing through you. "I could eat you all day, baby."

He lapped at you hungrily, his tongue delving deep into your wetness, seeking out every hidden crevice. He circled your clit with the tip of his tongue, teasing the sensitive bundle of nerves until you were squirming beneath him, your hips bucking against his questing mouth.

Anakin moaned in approval, the sound muffled against your flesh. He seemed to be enjoying this as much as you were, his enthusiasm evident in every lick, every suck, every nibble of his lips. He alternated between long, slow licks and quick, darting flicks of his tongue, keeping you on the edge of ecstasy.

His hands gripped your thighs, holding you open for his oral assault, his fingers digging into the soft flesh. He pulled back slightly, his eyes locking with yours as he held your gaze while he licked you, the intensity of his stare sending your arousal soaring.

"You like that, baby?" he asked, his voice rough with lust. "You like how I eat this pretty pussy?"

You could only whimper in response, your eyes fluttering shut as the pleasure built inside you, coiling tighter and tighter. Anakin grew in approval, his tongue redoubling his efforts, fucking you with it as he sucked hard on your clit.

"That's it," he encouraged, his voice a low, soothing rum.

"Fuck, baby, I'm, I'm gonna cum" You mumbled, the words getting mixed up and tangled in your mouth, the pleasure he was bringing you making everything else blurry and confused.

Anakin's eyes darkened with hunger as he looked up at you, your words spurring him on. He doubled his efforts, his tongue delving deep into your entrance, fucking you with long, languid strokes. He alternated between plunging his tongue inside you and circling your clit, keeping you teetering on the edge of ecstasy.

"That's it, baby," he murmured against your skin, his voice muffled but still filled with encouragement. "Cum for me. Let me taste you, feel you coming undone on my tongue."

He sealed his lips around your clit, sucking hard as he thrust two fingers inside you, curling them just right to hit that spot that made you see stars. Your legs began to shake, your thighs trembling against his head as the pleasure built to a crescendo.

"Fuck, Anakin," you cried out, your voice breaking on a sob of pure bliss. "I'm gonna- I'm cumming!"

Anakin groaned in approval, the sound vibrating against your sensitive flesh, pushing you over the edge. Your orgasm crashed over you like a wave, your pussy clenching around his fingers as he continued to lap at you, prolonging your pleasure.

You thrashed beneath him, your hands fisting in his hair, holding him in place as you rode out the intense waves of ecstasy. Anakin stayed with you every step of the way, his tongue working wonders, coaxing out every last drop of your release.

As the aftershocks subsided, he gentled his touch, his tongue still stroking over your sensitive flesh, soothing you down from your high. He placed a tender kiss on your mound before lifting his head, his face glistening with your juices, his eyes blazing with satisfaction.

"Fuck, you're delicious," he growled, his voice rough with arousal. "I could never get enough of you."

He crawled up your body, his hard length pressing insistently against your thigh as he captured your lips in a heated kiss. You could taste yourself on his tongue, the flavor mingling with the taste of him, creating a heady combination that made you feel like a shooting star, being burned and then reconstituted by his mouth.

Anakin gently brushed away the damp strands of hair clinging to your forehead, his touch tender and reverent. He gazed down at you, his blue eyes soft with adoration and still smoldering with desire.

"I still want to be inside you," he murmured, his voice low and husky. He pressed a trail of kisses along your neck, his lips adoring your skin. "Do you have the energy to ride me, or would you prefer me on top?"

You shivered at the feel of his warm breath against your sensitive neck, your body still tingling with the aftershocks of your intense orgasm. "I want to feel you deep inside me, but I'm not sure if I could get up off the mattress," you whispered, your voice weak but filled with need. "Please, Anakin."

With a low groan, Anakin settled himself between your thighs, the thick head of his cock nudging against your entrance. He paused for a moment, his eyes searching yours, seeking permission, making sure you were ready for him.

At your nod, he slowly pressed forward, sheathing himself inside you inch by inch. You gasped at the sensation, your walls stretching to accommodate his girth. He was so big, so hard, filling you in a way that made you feel complete.

Anakin stilled once he was fully seated inside you, his forehead resting against yours, his eyes closed in bliss. "Fuck, you feel amazing," he breathed, his voice tight with restraint. "So tight, so perfect."

He began to move, his hips rolling in a slow, deep rhythm. Each thrust sent sparks of pleasure through your body, building the heat simmering in your core once more. You wrapped your legs around his waist, urging him deeper, harder.

Anakin complied, his pace increasing, his thrusts growing more powerful. The bed creaked beneath you, the headboard slamming against the wall with each powerful drive of his hips. He angled his thrusts, hitting that spot inside you that made you see stars, that had you crying out in ecstasy.

Anakin's thrusts grew more urgent, more powerful, his hips snapping against yours with a force that had the bed frame shaking. He braced himself above you, his muscles flexing with each drive of his cock deep into your heat.

"You feel so fucking good," he groaned, his voice strained with pleasure. "So tight, so perfect. I could stay inside you forever."

You clung to him, your nails digging into the hard planes of his back as he pounded into you, chasing your pleasure. The sound of skin slapping against skin filled the room, mixed with your moans and his grunts of endeavor.

Anakin shifted slightly, changing the angle of his thrusts, hitting a spot inside you that made you see the whole galaxy. Your back arched off the bed, a silent scream of ecstasy tearing from your throat. He must have felt it too, because he smiled down at you, his eyes dark with satisfaction.

"That's it, baby," he croaked, his voice a low, sultry rumble. "Cum for me. I want to feel you coming apart on my cock."

He reached between your bodies, his fingers finding your clit, rubbing tight circles over the sensitive nub. The added stimulation was too much, pushing you over the edge.

Your orgasm crashed over you like a tidal wave, your walls clenching around Anakin's thrusting cock, milking him for all he was worth. He groaned, his rhythm faltering as your pleasure triggered his own.

With a final, deep thrust, he buried himself inside you, his cock pulsing as he spilled his seed deep within your heat. He collapsed on top of you, his weight pressing you into the mattress, his breath hot against your neck.

"Fuck, that was incredible," he muttered, his voice muffled against your skin. "You're amazing, do you know that?"

You could only nod, too consumed by the afterglow to form coherent words. Anakin rolled to the side, pulling you with him, tucking you against his chest. His hand stroked lazily over your back, his touch soothing and comforting.

Anakin kissed your forehead softly, the lingering warmth of his lips like a silent promise. His strong, calloused hand rubbed gentle circles on your back, grounding you both in the quiet intimacy of the moment. The glow of the lights your boyfriend insisted on placing in every window in the house spread lightly throughout the room, casting a warm, golden hue over the space.

“You,” he murmured, his deep voice still tinged with the rawness of emotion, “are the best Christmas present I could have ever asked for.”

A lazy smile spread across his lips, his eyes heavy-lidded but filled with unmistakable love. He looked utterly content, his body still recovering from the tidal wave of pleasure that had swept over him. He leaned back slightly, letting his head rest against the pillows as he gazed at you.

You felt the strength of his arms encircling you, his larger frame cradling your smaller body like you were something fragile, precious. Your cheek pressed against his chest, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat lulling you into a sense of peace you hadn’t realized you needed.

“You’re everything,” Anakin continued softly, his hand coming up to gently brush a strand of hair from your face. “Do you know that? You came into my life and turned everything upside down in the best way possible.”

You tilted your head to look up at him, your own smile forming as his words sank in. “I think you’re giving me too much credit,” you teased lightly, your voice muffled by his chest.

He chuckled, the sound low and rich, vibrating through you. “Not even close,” he said, pressing another kiss to your forehead. “You’ve given me something I didn’t think I’d ever have again. Love. Real love. Not just for me but for my kids, for this life we’re building together. You don’t know how much that means to me.”

Your heart swelled at his words, and you reached up to trace the sharp lines of his jaw, his soft stubble prickling under your fingertips. “I love you, Ani,” you whispered, the words full of warmth and certainty.

His lips curved into a wider smile, and his stormy blue eyes glistened with emotion. “I love you more,” he replied, his voice steady but soft.

For a while, neither of you moved, content to simply exist in the moment. The sounds of the house were muffled—the distant creak of floorboards, the hum of the heater, the faint tinkling of Christmas music still playing downstairs. It was as if the world outside your little bubble had melted away, leaving only the two of you wrapped in the comfort of each other.

Finally, Anakin shifted slightly, his hand trailing soothing patterns along your back. “You know,” he began, his tone lighter now, “we should probably get some sleep. Santa left a lot of toys under the tree that will need assembling in the morning.”

You laughed softly, the sound muffled by his chest. “You mean I’ll be assembling them while you ‘supervise,’ right?”

He smirked, brushing a kiss over the top of your head. “I think we make a pretty good team. Besides, I’m sure Luke will take over as lead engineer within five minutes.”

“Leia will be too busy experimenting on whatever she can find,” you added with a laugh.

Anakin’s smile widened, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he imagined the chaos that awaited them tomorrow. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said, his voice filled with warmth and pride.

You shifted slightly to look up at him again, your own smile soft and filled with affection. “Merry Christmas, Ani,” you whispered, your fingers lacing with his.

He tilted his head to press a lingering kiss to your lips, the gesture tender but full of meaning. “Merry Christmas, baby,” he murmured against your lips.

As the two of you settled back into the quiet comfort of each other, the warmth of the holiday filled the room, a gentle reminder of everything you’d built together. Anakin’s life, once marked by loss and brokenness, now felt whole again—with you at the very center.

[lamentationsofalonelypotato]

Chapter 2: I'll Never Let You Go Again Like I Did

Pairing: Soldier Boy x f!Reader, Soldier Boy POV

Summary: With a birthday printed on your wrist that happened over a hundred years ago, you always thought that you were cursed to never meet your soulmate. But when you finally meet the man that's supposed to be the other half of your soul, you wonder if the stars were wrong, and wonder how this man was meant for you. Reader is Hughie's sister, is not a supe, and is a Literature Professor that gets dragged into the middle of things. This fic takes place in an AU set loosely after Season 3 and does deviate from the plot of The Boys

Tropes: Soulmate AU, Little bit of Grumpy and Sunshine, Age Difference (Reader is in her 20s), Protective Ben/ Soldier Boy, Jealous Ben/Soldier Boy

Warnings: Little bit sad, DENIAL, Homophobic Comments (Soldier Boy), Cursing, Mentions of drinking, Mentions of using drugs, Sexism, Mentions of Sex, Mentions of torture (Soldier Boy's Time in Russia) Loneliness, Longing (I mean… as close as Soldier Boy can get to it), Reader wears glasses?, Soldier Boy might be a little OOC.

Word Count: 6.4K

Song Inspiration For This Chapter: Until I Found You (chapter title is lyric from this song) and Coming Back For You

Note: Any references to the reader is made using you or your. There is minimal use of y/n. I tried my best to proofread, but nobody's perfect. If you don’t like, don’t read, but if you do like, you’re my favorite!

Internal Monologue Is in First Person And Is In Italics

Playlist for Series (Spotify)

Series Masterlist

Main Masterlist

A/N: Oh my goodness I'm so excited about this series and thank you so much to everyone for all the wonderful love and support so far! It really means the world to me 🥰

One Year Ago: Ben POV

Ben squinted his eyes as he stepped out into the brilliant sunshine of the early morning, shouldering the strap of his worn backpack with a huff. The people on the crowded, gum covered sidewalks shot him odd looks and gave him a wide birth as he made his way down the path, but he didn't care, in fact he didn't notice them. His mind was somewhere else.

He wasn't sure where he was going, just that something in the pit of his stomach was pointing him in this direction. Ben had started walking in what he thought was the way to Legend's apartment, but the streets looked so different than the last time he was in New York and he was a little turned around, but he wasn't going to admit that to anyone.

And there was something in the pit of his stomach, some instinct or gut feeling, that was telling him he needed to go this way.

It was an odd feeling that prickled on the back of his neck, as if he'd forgotten something. Ben wondered what exactly it was that he'd forgotten. He hadn’t spoken aloud to anyone other than the scientists who kept him locked in a cage so he didn’t exactly have a social calendar to follow up on.

I've been locked in a lab for forty fucking years, what is there to forget?

But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed just out of reach.

Ben raised his eyes from the sidewalk with a sigh to look at the people passing by, taking in their new clothing and different hairstyles to distract himself. He frowned at the bizarre groups of people to him that flit by on their merry way, muttering little things under his breath about how things used to be.

Ben had a feeling that he was going to be doing that a lot.

New York City was different, the same, but different. Even though Ben had been gone for forty years, it still felt like the center of the universe. There were still hot dog vendors on every street corner, still magazine stands with freshly printed newspapers that smelled like ink and were warm to the touch, still coffee shops that lined the streets and caffeinated the masses, and there were still cab drivers who wove through traffic as if they were unstoppable shouting at pedestrians as they went.

The memories he had of old New York City merged together with what he was seeing around him and felt himself slipping into the past only to be jolted back into reality by the strangeness of the future.

He didn't like feeling disoriented, but it was there, brimming just under the surface. His body was tense as he walked prepared for anything, unable to relax as he continued on his way to wherever the hell it was he was going.

The morning sunlight reflected off the glass windows of the skyscrapers that worshiped the rising sun and the sounds of the city vibrated against the brick and mortar. There was a buzz of electricity in the air, the low hum of power that Ben could always hear beneath it all. Cars honked sharply, people shouted in colorful language to one another, and the wind rustled through the long strands of Ben's hair crinkling against his ears and scratching against his neck.

He hadn't had time to cut it or his beard and it didn't seem to be as important as finding Legend and getting his affairs in order.

The smell of hotdogs, earth, cologne, and heavy perfume wafted up with the breeze that tugged and pulled at his sweatsuit. The same stained sweatsuit he had found in a rust covered locker before hiding in the cargo hold of a plane headed back to the U.S that was probably almost as old as him. The plane ride had been long, but when he'd been in a lab for the past forty years it seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. He spent the whole time stewing in his thoughts. He'd slept enough and like hell he was going to drift off and let those Russian fucks take him again.

Ben sighed when he felt his memories begin to unravel on the edge of his mind, unfurling and asking to be relived. It wasn't unusual or unwelcome. Ben was using those memories to justify what he was going to do to his old team. As long as the rage continued to burn against his skin, Ben would have no problem breaking each of them down piece by piece.

Ben didn't understand how his team could have done that to him or why they'd done it to him. He thought that he'd been a good leader, a good American, a good soldier, a good hero, and yet they'd all stabbed him in the back. Sure, maybe he'd been a little rough on them, but Ben saw it as the only way to toughen them up. They needed thicker skin if they were going to survive in a world like this.

All I've done is give my fucking life to this country and what did they do? They gave me to the fucking reds.

His hand tightens on the strap of his backpack as he weaves through the crowds, trying his best to keep to himself when all he can feel is his anger and frustration building and burning hot under his rib cage. His new power stirred beneath the surface, energy beginning to travel through his body, tracing his veins and pulsing in the center of his chest.

I should have seen it coming. I should have killed that entire fucking bunch of pussies the second I had the chance. Especially that bitch.

His frowned at the thought of Countess.

Truthfully, when the two of them started messing around it was only because Countess's soulmate had died a few years before and Ben knew he wasn't going to meet his soon if anytime. He'd messed around with plenty of other women for the same reason and well…

Ben's frown deepened as he stepped around a couple that was walking arm and arm, the dates on their wrists flashing gold in the sunlight. He ignores the feeling that comes when he sees them, pushes it down into the deep recesses of his mind as he has done his whole life.

Since he was a kid, Ben wasn't sure that he believed the "soulmate thing." Sure he'd seen hundreds of other people around him find "the one," but Ben wasn't sure that he was made to be a soulmate. Especially not with a birthdate on his wrist so far in the future. He assumed that it meant he wasn't going to get a soulmate and he'd spent the better part of his life pretending that he didn't care about that. He was a man after all, and Ben didn't want to need anyone. At least, that was what he told himself.

Ben had lived long enough to see other soulmates find one another, witnessed the goofy looks on their faces when they locked eyes for the first time, and had the super hearing to listen to what came next.

But instead of focusing on the impossibility to meeting his own, Ben focused on the lie he told himself, that it seemed ridiculous to be intertwined with someone as soon as he was born. Not to mention that Ben wasn't sure that he wanted to be with someone, not when he didn't age and not when he'd have to watch whoever it was, if anyone turn to dust.

Yes, he could see himself settling down with someone, having a few kids, but Ben wasn't sure that whoever was supposed to be his other half was within reach anyway so why care? Ben knew that he didn't age, but he didn't actually think he'd ever get to meet you or that you would actually ever exist. Not when you were born so far away from him and not when he'd been trapped in that lab.

But that didn't stop a part of him from thinking about the possibility of meeting you. When things were quiet in the lab and he was left alone for a few precious moments, he felt his mind begin to slip into the question of what if?

What if you existed and what if you came for him?

He knew that it was a long shot. The only people that knew he was there were the people who stabbed him in the back. And Ben didn't want to cling to some fantasy, it felt feminine to fanaticize about the person who was supposedly meant for him breaking down the thick metal door and pulling him from the lab.

Again, Ben was trying not to believe in the "soulmate bullshit."

Countess had been a way of passing the time as had the numerous other women, but with them were moments when he'd feel something odd settle in his chest, something that he never could put a name to. In those moments he would raise his right arm and look at the birthdate printed on his wrist, the same one that Ben had kept hidden for most of his life, the one that when he was a boy people mocked him for, and the one his father chastised him for having as if it was Ben's fault that some celestial body had decided to single him out.

All of his childhood friends had found their soulmates and Ben had spent the better part of his life covering it up to avoid the conversation that always happened when someone saw the date. No ones soulmate was born so far in the future and Ben’s father had spent a lot of money making sure that word didn’t get out his son was a freak.

His father already made Ben feel like a disappointment and a fuck-up, but Ben was already thinking it himself every time he looked at the date printed on his wrist that seemed impossible. When his mother was alive she would try her best to make Ben feel better telling him that it wasn't impossible, that one day it would all make sense, but after her death Ben stopped feeling comfort, joy, and anything warm. All he felt was the cold shoulder from his father and the words that Ben pretended didn't hurt when his father was halfway through his second bottle of scotch with a third prepped and waiting on the kitchen table.

It made Ben feel like a pussy every time he looked at the mark and thought about his future soulmate, but he did it in private, usually after he'd had a few glasses of something and a few puffs or snuffs of something else to numb his mind. And he'd allow himself a single moment to think of you, wonder if he'd ever meet you, and wondered if you'd ever actually exist. In those few fleeting moments he believed in soulmates, but then he'd snap out of it and wake up the woman in bed next to him to distract him for another hour or so.

Ben's eyes flick to his right wrist covered by the gray and maroon tracksuit, his brow furrowing together. He was trying not to think about you or rather the possibility of you today. He didn't have time for that, not when all he wanted was to make his old team pay for everything they did to him.

But there was a little whisper of something in his ear, a small wisp of hope that he had finally made it to you, the one thing he didn’t think would ever happen, that he lived long enough to be alive the same year you were, and that you were out there somewhere waiting for him.

No. Ben tenses. I'm not going to think about her, not when those butt fucks need to be dealt with. I'm going to go to Legend's and then I'm going to-

He didn't see you in front of him until it was too late to move out of the way. Your body hits his full on in the chest, sending the bagel between your lips tumbling into the street, but Ben barely feels the hit, what he does feel is the dam he built forever ago burst open and warmth soaks into his body. Electricity skitters along his skin, crackling in the air as his eyes lock with yours only for a second. He feels like he's caught fire, as if the pieces of himself deep down inside are overheating and vibrating until there's nothing left, but you and him.

Any thoughts he had of his team and revenge are lost in the flood of emotions that fill the hole inside he tried so hard to ignore with the lie he continued to tell himself: “I don't believe in soulmates.”

And yet, there you were.

He can hear his heart and yours beating together as one, his own pounding so hard under his ribcage as if it wishes to break free and cross the space between your bodies. Seeing you for the first time feels like taking a bullet to the chest, the sharp jolt backwards when it lands and the pinch of flesh against Kevlar. It was worth the bruise if looking at you was the same way each time.

Ben can feel the world slipping away, going silent, and in that silence Ben is lost in you.

Holy Fuck.

You were the perfect amalgamation of every single beautiful woman that Ben had ever seen and fantasized about in his entire life. And yet you weren't what he was expecting. Over the years Ben had bedded many women, the ones who captured his attention for a night, but none of them were anything like you.

In all the ways those women were bold and dramatic you were confident, but not boisterous, beautiful but not haughty, respectful but not prude, and there was a kindness reflected in the warmth of your eyes that Ben had never seen before, but there it was staring back at him unblinkingly.

You reminded him of the women that came arm in arm with men to his parents lavish parties when he was a boy, the ones who were classically beautiful and reserved with the golden dates on their wrists catching in the light. The exact kind of woman he hadn’t seen for the better part of eighty years and the opposite of the women who had thrown themselves at his feet forty years ago.

Your hair falls forward into your face from the force of your body hitting his and Ben itches to push it back, to touch you, to feel his skin against yours to quench the burning that he can feel in his soul.

All of his instincts are telling him to pull you against him, that you're too far away even though you're standing only inches apart.  That he needs to breathe the same air and feel the warmth of your skin against his rough fingertips.

The birthmark on his right wrist sears his skin and he knows what it means, that you're the woman he's been looking for his whole life, the woman that always seemed just out of his grasp, the woman that was made just for him, and the woman he thought would never exist.

He watches your eyes widen with the same realization about him behind your round glasses, eyes that are the perfect color and eyes that Ben can imagine staring in to every day for the rest of his life. He'd never wanted to spend more than one night with a woman, never wanted more, but all of that fades into you.

The idea of a soulmate no longer seems ridiculous, no longer seems like something he’d never have, not when he’s looking into your eyes and nothing else seems to matter.

Not when looking at you is like seeing the sun sink into the earth at the end of the day and feeling the hope that it'll rise the next morning.

The lie he told himself for so long is slipping away the longer he stares at you, because although he never wanted to want anyone he knows that he needs you. It's an odd feeling for him. He's never once cared about anyone, told himself that it was weak to, that having a soulmate was a stupid idea and not for him, but all of the things he ever thought about soulmates is evaporating in the heat that is consuming his body by being in your presence.

Why now?

The thought makes the world come back into sharper focus.

I've lived decades without her and now the moment I come back to the U.S I just run into her?

It was laughable .

The moment of clarity allows the fantasies of his revenge to come creeping in and Ben feels the anger and rage ebbing on the edge of the wonderful feeling building in his chest when he looks at you.

You weren't a supe. Ben could tell that just by looking at you. He didn't think he'd ever seen someone so soft and yet someone that he wanted to possess so badly that it almost hurt to stand inches away from you.

I don't want her to be apart of this.

The thought is immediate, stirring some primal urge within to protect what's his. Because you were his. You were the missing piece that he pretended not to need and the woman who always seemed to slip into his mind when he was alone and all was quiet,.

The thoughts of what he's about to do to his teammates come surging up and he didn't want you involved in any of that. Not when he knew that he needed to protect you, that he'd drag you along, and you'd see all the ugly parts of him and see the horror of what he was about to do.

He didn't want that for you, he didn’t want the first time that he met you to be like this, him looking like he'd crawled out from under a rock and full of so much anger, rage, and frustration it felt like he was going to explode, him having a new uncontrollable power that meant he might hurt you, and him being unable to give you his full attention when all he could think about was the team that stabbed him in the back.

What he was, was selfish, he knew that about himself.

But I won't be this selfish.

Ben had made many mistakes his life, he knew that, had done some things that he wasn't proud of, but you wouldn’t be one of them. He didn't want to put you in danger and realized that there was only one way to protect you, because after all, he was the only one who knew that you existed.

His eyes trace your face one more time, memorizing it before he does what he thinks is right. Ben turns away from you and forces himself to keep walking. Each cell in his body is screaming at him to turn around, to run back to you, but he can't. He doesn't want it to be like this and he knows that you deserve better.

I won't do this to her.

“Wait-“ He hears you shout over the sounds of the street.

The sound of your voice is a soothing melody, a warm soak in a hot bath, a steady hand against his back, and a salve over the gaping hole where a piece of him was missing for so long, the hole that he tried to ignore  his whole life. He grits his teeth and continues to walk away from you, each step feeling like he's walking through tar the further he gets.

And deep down Ben is hoping that he did the right thing and makes a promise that he'll come back for you.

Present Day Ben POV

Why the fuck am I coming to this thing again?

Ben thought to himself standing outside the closed apartment door holding an expensive bottle of scotch. The same bottle of scotch that he was going to break open as soon as he crossed the threshold to get through this. He didn’t think that Hughie would appreciate it the way he would anyway.

Probably drinks those fucking fruity drinks with the umbrellas.

Ben didn’t understand why Hughie had invited him to this party or why Annie would let him invite Ben to it. Ben knew how much she hated him and the feeling was mutual.

Ben sighs as he stares at the door thinking about walking back to the elevator. 

Invited was a strong word. Ben had overheard Hughie talking about it in the break room with MM and when Ben walked in, Hughie felt the need to fill the awkward silence by inviting Ben to the housewarming party. 

Ben didn't know why anyone needed a housewarming party, but he chocked it up to another thing about the 21st century that he didn't quite understand.

He thought about all the people inside that he saw at work everyday, the ones that he tried to avoid all shoved in the apartment in front of him and groaned to himself.

Fuck, I should just go home.

Ben frowned at the thought of going back to his extravagant penthouse apartment downtown. The one that was two stories with a private balcony, six bedrooms, five bathrooms, a study, a media room, an exercise room, and overlooked Central Park with a view that would make anyone else salivate. His real estate agent had been surprised when Ben hadn't batted an eye at the price, but Ben didn't think about money the same way everyone else did.

He didn't have to, not with the money he'd earned over the years and not with the money his father, grandfather, and great grandfather in his accounts.

When he'd first bought the apartment he had been happy to get out from under Butcher's eye, who had a tendency to watch Ben like a hawk whenever he thought that Ben wasn't paying attention. But the apartment was large and cold, furnished with furniture that Ben had hired some twenty year old interior designer to buy, who charged him an outrageous amount of money to do absolutely nothing. She'd called it "minimalism," Ben called it "a fucking rip off."

Not one piece of furniture was comfortable to him and being there never felt like home. Then again, Ben didn't have a "home" to compare it to. His family mansion back in Philadelphia after his mother died had been cold and most of the rooms were closed off and the apartment he had in New York before he went to Russia was almost as big as his new one, but it never seemed like home. It always seemed like a way station, a place for Ben to entertain women for a short while before he went to a commercial shoot, a party, or on location for a film.

Even his cleaning lady and housekeeper would comment on the little things about his apartment that Ben tried to ignore. Honestly, Ben thought that she was fucking nosy, but she did her job well so he kept her on.

That and because he couldn't seem to remember her name no matter how many checks he wrote.

Ben didn’t like being in his apartment at all, but he knew that it wouldn't change if he moved. It wasn't where he lived that was the problem, it was that you weren't there with him.

It had been an entire year since he'd seen you and every day Ben walked the same path he had the day he met you for the first time hoping to run in to you. He didn’t have your name or your address or anything that he could have someone at work plug into a computer to find you. He'd tried to "google" you, but there was only so much he could do with the little information he had and he didn't understand how to find you other than the old fashioned way.

So he was back to sitting home alone every night trying his best not to notice how empty the apartment was, the one he bought that was more than big enough for two people. Sometimes he tried to stay out as long as he could to avoid going back to it, but each time he went through the front door it only emphasized how empty it was.

Ben's life was empty. He hadn't realized that before, but nowadays he was hyperaware of it. In the past he would have filled his life with women eager to warm his bed, but ever since he saw you Ben hadn't been able to think about anyone else.

Ben couldn't remember the last time he felt this frustrated and it only made everything harder for him. And as much as he tried to relieve the tension it never seemed like it was enough. He needed you.

And after he spent twelve months trying his best and he was tired of feeling restless he tried to pick up a woman in a bar.

Every cell in his body screamed wrong at the top of its lungs when he spoke to her, using lines that he'd perfected since he was a teenager. Ben knew he was good at that, but he fumbled the ball each time he opened his mouth. He tried to shake off the ghost of you, but when he spoke to the woman leaning against the aged wooden bar with a martini in her hand and wearing a dress that left little to the imagination, he got a flash in the corner of his eye of someone coming in through the door and he'd thought it was you.

He hadn't been expected to feel so ashamed, guilty, and embarrassed at the thought of you catching him with someone else. He'd been sleeping with women longer than you'd been alive and he'd never felt that way, but now that he knew you existed and knew there was a possibility of you running in to him, it was all different.

Ben's outlook on soulmates being "ridiculous" had evaporated on the spot the moment he locked eyes with you. He couldn't pretend that he didn't care anymore and couldn't pretend that you didn't exist.

How could he when you were the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen? How could he when a piece of him was with you? How could he when you were always on his mind?

He'd never had a woman have a hold on him so completely in his entire life, but you did.

She fucking does and I only saw her once.

It only made him feel worse. He wondered if he'd made the right decision when he turned his back on you.

Sometimes he liked to think back to the moment of when he first saw you when everything was quiet and he was sitting up in his bed staring down at the mark on his wrist that shone a brilliant gold. His mind would slip into those few moments of bliss and he would wonder what would have happened f he just said "fuck it" and didn't go after Payback, if he'd stopped and asked for your name, and allowed you to let him forget everything that happened in the past forty years so he could start his life with you.

Unfortunately, those moments were usually followed by the same self-deprecating thoughts that Ben had, the chauvinistic ones that he'd carried with him over the years, and the ones that his father had impressed on him from the moment he could walk and Ben couldn't seem to shake.

He'd berate himself about how it was stupid and pussy-like to pine over a woman.

Because that's what he was doing, he was pining over you and he didn't like it.

He didn't want to think of you as much as he did, but he couldn't help it. Now that Ben knew you existed he didn't want to miss out on another moment of your life.

Of course, he couldn't find you and that was the problem. Sometimes he wondered if you were looking for him as hard as he was looking for you, if you walked the same way each hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

The dreams didn't make it any better. He'd never heard of someone living the memories of their soulmate when they slept, but every night he was subjected to watching your life and it only made him want to find you more.

He'd never knew that someone could feel so lonely surrounded by people, never knew that someone could feel so out of place, and never knew that someone could be as sad as you were, but each time he relieved a memory of yours at night Ben could feel his heart twinge.

Ben watched the lonely birthdays you spent with a cupcake and a beer for him, saw the jeers of the people in your hometown and the pitying looks from your parents, felt your shoulders shake when you cried alone in your room and stared at the birthdate on your wrist, and he felt you losing hope as each year passed.

Ben didn't usually allow himself to feel emotion like that, but watching you go through it all hurt him more than anything those Russian fucks did to him. He wasn't used to that and he wasn't used to thinking about other people as much as he thought about you.

But something about him felt different after meeting you.

Ben had asked Legend about soulmates, specifically the dreams, but Legend had muttered something unintelligible under his breath and took another snort of cocaine from the mirror on the coffee table instead of answering. Their relationship had been a little awkward after Ben slept with Legend's soulmate forty years ago, but Legend didn’t seem to be too upset about it… anymore. Mostly because Legend's soulmate tried to pull a Lorena Bobbitt one night and Legend caught her before any permanent damage was done.

She was in prison, and Ben didn't understand why Legend still went to see her for conjugal visits, but he figured that she was as much of a freak as his old handler.

Just rip the bandaid off you fucking pussy.

Ben thought staring at the clean white door in front of him.

Truthfully, Ben was tired. He'd been running himself harder for the last month, throwing himself into his work because he was starting to believe that he was never going to meet you again, and it seemed like work was the only thing that could distract him long enough. But he couldn't escape sleep.

When he'd come back from Russia, Ben had avoided sleeping the best way he could and he got through a few days before he collapsed. The first dream he'd had of you had come on suddenly, but clear as day.

You reading on your bed in your apartment smiling down at the pages as if it the book was telling you a secret.

Ben wasn't a reader, didn't see any merit in it if it wasn't a western or a war book. The most he could tolerate was Ernest Hemingway, but he could have sat there and watched you read forever. You looked so peaceful, content, and happy that Ben was afraid to interrupt you even though it was just a dream.

But whenever he thought about you dreaming his memories, something dark settled in the back of his mind, because what were you seeing? He'd done a few things he wasn't proud of and Ben didn't want you to think that he wasn't a hero or that he was a bad guy.

Ben sighs and raises his hand to knock hard against the door with his free hand, trying not to open the bottle preemptively before entering the apartment.

"Ben?" Hughie says it like a question when he opens the door, eyes wide with the same stupid look on his face that always grates on Ben.

Ben forces his signature tight lipped smile that he flashes around the office. "Hey there sport."

"Hey. Wow, you're here." Hughie clears his throat and looks over his shoulder as if he's nervous about something.

Ben raises an eyebrow. "I was invited."

"Well yes but-"

"But?"

"Um-"

"Spit it out dipstick."

Hughie clears his throat. "I didn't think you would come."

Fuck I should have stayed home. He doesn't want me here, neither does his fucking beard.

Ben frowns listening to where Annie groans under her breath further inside the apartment and talks low under her breath to someone that Ben can't see.

"Well surprise and congratulations or whatever." Ben rolls his eyes holding out the bottle of scotch. He was hesitant to lose sight of it, not when talking to Hughie for less than five minutes made him want to down the whole bottle.

"Oh wow this is really," Hughie's eyes widen as he takes in the label and realize how much money Ben spent on the bottle. "Expensive stuff, thanks Ben."

"It'll put some hair on your chest." Ben claps Hughie hard on the shoulder as he pushes past him into the foyer of the apartment.

The entire apartment could have fit in Ben's living room and kitchen. It was made in a similar fashion to his, sleek white walls, sterling silver appliances, large glass windows that let in the light-

Ben stops so suddenly inside the area that leads into the kitchen that Hughie plows into his back, but Ben doesn't feel it.

He can't move, can't breathe, because he's noticed the person talking to Annie is you. This was the last place that he'd expected you to be, but he doesn't care, because you're here and you're more beautiful than he remembers.

You're standing there pouring ice from a large bag into a pink acrylic bucket with an adorable amount of concentration for such a simple task wearing the same sweater you were the day he first saw you. You're also wearing a little more makeup and your hair is longer, and not pulled back into the messy bun as it was that day, but you’re still you and you’re here.

His fingers twitch with the urge to run his hands through the tangled tresses, to feel if they're as soft as he imagined for so long.

Ben's body swells with emotion, goosebumps flicker over his skin, and all other sounds in the room vanish, because seeing you was like watching the sun rise and feeling the world hold it's breath as it basks in the early morning rays.

And Ben wanted to bask in everything you were, every day for the rest of his life. Now that he found you again he wasn't going to let you out of his sight.

Your soul sings to him as he nears you, the cells in his body vibrating so fast that he can feel every single one begging him to touch you.

You turn into him by accident, sending the bag of ice tumbling to the floor, but feeling your body against his sends him into overdrive and he can't hold back anymore. He reaches out to grab your shoulder as gently as he can without hurting you.

Hurting you was the last thing he wanted to do. And because you weren’t a supe he knew how fragile you were.

You gasp under your breath at the contact from his hand, but to Ben it sounds thunderous in his ears. Ben trails his hand across your shoulder, up your neck, to cup your chin and raise your face to look at him. He feels like his whole body is igniting as he makes contact with your skin.

He can feel an odd vibration in his chest as he does so, energy crackling and pulsing around the two of you, but the rest of the room falls silent. He can’t look away from you, not when seeing you again is like staring too long at the sun and he's left with the imprint of your light and beauty on the inside of his eyelids.

Ben can't focus on anything else, doesn’t hear the awkward chatter, doesn't feel the discomfort he had upon his arrival, doesn't notice the way everyone has turned to stare at the two of you, and doesn't feel the air conditioning turn on and blow cool air against his warm freckled skin.

All he knows is you.

Your eyes are wide and he suspects his are as well, pupils blown but still beautiful and hypnotic as they were one year ago. Ben feels a smile pulling at his lips and he lets it go, because standing in front of you, feeling like this, it’s impossible to do much else.

Your skin is warm to the touch beneath the roughness of his fingertips and he touches you with a reverence that he has never graced anyone else with, because you were his. Every part of you was made for him just as every part of him was made for you.

The your soul was calling out to him, weaving a golden cord of energy in his mind that snagged in the center of his chest and made him feel whole for the first time in life.

You reach out to touch him, the soft palm of your hand falling just over his heart and it makes something inside him break open to flood the space between the two of you.

Hope stirs in his chest with your gentle touch and your unblinking gaze, warmth trailing from where your hand lays against his shirt. His eyes drop to the wrist to see his birthdate, a glowing ember against your skin where the sleeve of your sweater has fallen down an inch.

Your eyes lock with his once more, full lips slightly parted, and breathless.

"I've been looking everywhere for you sweetheart." Ben murmurs, trailing his thumb across your cheek with a gentleness that he's never possessed.

Ben was not a gentle man, but for you he would try. He would be anything you wished him to be, for as long as he lived, because now that he found you, he was never going to let you go.

And he welcomed the challenge of anyone who tried to stand in his way.

As always thank you so much for reading! Reblogs, comments, and likes are not required, but are always welcome and appreciated! I really love hearing what y'all think. ❤️ If you'd liked to be added to the taglist for this series please let me know :)

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[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Where Will All The Martyrs Go [Chapter 9: Some Days He Feels Like Dying]

A/N: Below are your guesses...let's see how you did!!! 🥰😘

Series summary: In the midst of the zombie apocalypse, both you and Aemond (and your respective travel companions) find yourselves headed for the West Coast. It’s the 2024 version of the Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more undead antagonists. Watch out for snakes! 😉🐍

Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, med school Aemond, character deaths, nature, drinking, smoking, drugs, Adventures With Aegon™️, pregnancy and childbirth, the U.S. Navy, road trip vibes.

Series title is a lyric from: “Letterbomb” by Green Day.

Chapter title is a lyric from: “Extraordinary Girl” by Green Day.

Word count: 8.3k

💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🥰

Let’s go back to the beginning of the end of the world.

On the big-screen tv in the Liberty Center at Saratoga Springs, Wolf Blitzer is saying: “We are receiving confirmation of additional outbreaks of the so-called Florida Fever, the first cases of which here in the U.S. were reported in Miami a little over one week ago. Concern is now growing nationally, especially as the modes of transmission, symptoms, and treatment options remain unclear. Let’s go across the country to Natasha Chen for the latest information. Natasha?”

“Hi, Wolf. I’m here outside the UC San Diego Medical Center where early this morning, two individuals suspected to be suffering from the illness were admitted. I’ve been informed by hospital staff that both patients are currently in stable condition, but there is still so much confusion and conflicting information regarding this ‘Florida Fever,’ and of course that uncertainty is leading to fear, rumors, and honestly a bit of hysteria. Even how to refer to the sickness is controversial, with no official name having been decided upon by scientists. Cases in Australia are known as Ragepox, the U.K. has dubbed it the 21st Century Sweat after a mysterious disease from the 1500s, and Russia is calling it the Ukrainian Flu while Ukraine has opted for the Russian Red Rot, inspired by the skin lesions that some patients experience.”

“Can you tell us what we do know, Natasha? Are doctors classifying this illness as a virus, or as a bacterial infection more akin to tuberculosis or meningitis?”

“At this time, what I’m hearing is that doctors are fairly certain it’s a virus, as patients do not seem to respond to antibiotics when they’ve been explored as a potential treatment. But there’s truly very little information at this early stage, and I think we’re all being reminded of those first days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one really knew how to best to avoid contracting the virus or what the long-term effects would be both nationally and globally.”

“There are absolutely some similarities, Natasha, which I’m sure is contributing to the unease surrounding the situation. What precautions are doctors currently recommending?”

“Wolf, doctors are urging the public not to panic, and to exercise common sense measures like avoiding crowded spaces, sanitizing surfaces, and staying home if they’re feeling unwell. Suspected cases of the illness should be reported to primary physicians or local hospitals. Typical symptoms appear to include headaches, fever, gastrointestinal upset, skin discoloration and blistering, and unusual bleeding, as well as behavioral changes, particularly disorientation, aggression, and even violence in some patients…”

“That ain’t what it is,” Rio says. He jabs his index finger at the tv from where he sits on the couch beside you. “Snowflake wasn’t sick, he was dead. He was motherfucking dead, flatline, code blue, crossed the rainbow bridge, he was gone. He was dead and then he woke back up, and he wasn’t a person anymore. He was…something else.”

“Dumbass, people don’t come back from the dead,” Mike says from the ping pong table. People are milling around pretending to play pool, darts, chess, poker, Monopoly, Uno, Parcheesi, but really you’re all here for the same reason. You want to know what’s happening.

Rio turns to you. “Wasn’t Snowflake dead?”

“He definitely seemed dead,” you reply, knees tucked to your chest and still watching the tv. Wolf Blitzer’s voice is calm, but his pale blue eyes have a manic sort of light to them, too large and too rattled.

“Man, fuck Florida,” says Desmond, a utilitiesman born and raised Trenton, New Jersey. “Nothing but psychos and alligators. Saw them off of Georgia and just let them float away.”

“What was that?” Tyler replies combatively. He’s from a trailer park in Tallahassee.

“Ty, why do you care? You’d be fine. You’re already up here. You can stay.”

“They’re lying,” Rio mutters, meaning Wolf and Natasha on CNN. “When the corpsmen called the hospital, they said to be prepared to restrain Snowflake and that he might try to bite us. Why aren’t they warning people about that?!”

Kayleigh, a steelworker from Oklahoma City, looses a frenetic sort of laugh. “Because there’s no non-panic-inducing way to say: Hey, go buy some duct tape and bungee cords to tie up your loved ones, because they might try to fucking eat you.”

Rio doesn’t frown often, but he is now; he slips his phone out of the pocket of his camo pants and types out a WhatsApp message to Sophie. You only know her from photos and quick hellos via video chat, a sweet diminutive woman with white-blonde hair and blue eyes that seem to fill up half her face, as fragile as Rio is overwhelming. She likes baking and romance novels and elephants; whenever Rio finds elephant-themed souveners, he ships them home to Oregon for her, refrigerator magnets and wallets and scarves and snow globes. Sophie wears a lot of long flowing skirts and hand-knit sweaters, and offers strange suggestions when she and Rio discuss baby names: Sage, Fox, Laurel, Coral, Juniper, Karma, Rune, Otter. Otter?! Rio had exclaimed. Babe, if you name our kid Otter, even I’M gonna have to bully them.

“I’m telling Sophie to stay with my parents,” Rio says to you. “They’ve gotten super weird with all the off-the-grid stuff, but they have years’ worth of supplies and grow most of their own food now, and they’re thirty miles from the nearest town. And no one knows how to defend themselves like doomsday preppers.”

“Good idea,” you reply, watching the tv. Now Wolf Blitzer is talking about tornadoes in the Midwest, and you could almost believe the world is normal again.

A few days later all major social media platforms begin censoring content related to the so-called Florida Fever, and then the internet goes down completely, and then the power turns off and on and off again, and finally quits like a car driven to its last mile. The combat units are moved out of Saratoga Springs—never to be heard from again—and the construction projects paused indefinitely, and one of the master-at-arms that Rio is friends with (Rio has a lot of friends, surely you aren’t so remarkable) relays information that he shouldn’t: tales of planned missions, impossible plagues, overrun cities, innumerable deserters in every branch of the U.S. military.

“Hey,” Rio whispers, shaking you awake one night, moonlight streaming through the windows and the pops of distant gunfire you aren’t supposed to ask about. “If I leave, will you come with me?”

It’s a big commitment; it could be a lifetime. You fear he might just be trying not to hurt your feelings. “I don’t want to slow you down.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Rio says. “I’m not leaving without you. Are you going to Oregon by choice, or should I tie you up and throw you in the back of the Humvee?”

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s a young one, maybe a teenager, little buds for horns and only weighing a few hundred pounds. This is good; if it was any heavier, Cregan and Rio wouldn’t be able to drag it back to the ranch. You’re still in Red Desert, Wyoming, and the bison are grazing just off I-80, an asphalt artery that cuts through an endless steppe of sand-colored rocks and tall grass. They gaze lazily in your direction with bulbous dark eyes, perpetually chewing, not terribly intelligent. The Colt pistols of the men who found you at the RV had been loaded with 9mm bullets, the same caliber your Berettas take; there weren’t many, but enough to fill both of your clips, something that feels like winning the lottery. You are lying on the rocky, dusty soil and lining up the shot. If you miss, the herd will scatter, and you’ll watch dinner vanish beneath a blue sky—pale like Aemond’s eye, a weak shallow blue—and rough white scars of cirrostratus clouds.

“Feels kind of wrong to kill a baby,” you murmur. Daeron, Luke, Baela, Helaena, and Ice are back at the house. Aemond, Rio, Cregan, Rhaena, and Aegon are here on the ground with you; Aegon insisted upon being brought along, and Rio agreed to carry him. Aegon had never seen American bison outside of the Oregon Trail computer game, those pixelated brown blobs migrating across the screen no more material than unicorns or faeries or basilisks.

“If the baby didn’t want to get killed, it shouldn’t be made of steak,” Aegon points out. He’s on a lot of Vicodin, the only narcotic Aemond could find back in Ogallala, Nebraska.

“No pressure, Chips,” Rio says, chewing on a long blade of little bluestem grass. “If you miss we’re just going to have to eat each other like the Donner Party.”

Aegon wrinkles his nose in confusion. “The what?”

“She won’t miss,” Aemond says, and Rio snickers to himself and gives you a quick wink that no one else notices.

“I don’t think one 9mm bullet will do it,” Cregan mutters. “Cows got thick skulls, I figure bison are the same way. You’ll have to hit it a few times, and before it can take off and disappear on us.”

Aemond casts him a patronizing glance. “And you’ve killed a lot of cows?”

“Oh yeah. Worked in a slaughterhouse for a while before I got hired by the power company. Hated it, went home and could still smell the blood and brains on myself no matter how many times I showered. Couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

Aemond looks like he regrets asking. Rhaena frowns worriedly at the bison. “Will they charge if someone shoots at them?”

Cregan shrugs. “Probably not.”

“Probably?!”

You squeeze the trigger five times in quick succession, hit the calf thrice, tiny puffs of scarlet mist that spring from its woolly head. It flops over as the rest of the herd jolts into a gallop, kicking up dust and fleeing across the steppe.

“Yes!” Rio booms as everyone applauds. “We’re in business! We’re having ribeyes tonight! Cregan, my good sir, I take mine medium rare.”

“You’re getting well done,” Aemond tells him. “Everyone is. Just in case the bison has parasites.”

Rio groans. “You’re ruining my life, man.” Then he and Cregan trot over to grab the baby bison, each of them taking one of its back hooves.

“So,” Aegon says dreamily. “Now that Rio is preoccupied, who would like to assist me in returning my disgusting, debilitated body to the ranch? Anyone? Anyone?”

Rhaena turns to you. “When we have more bullets, could you give me shooting lessons?”

“Sure,” you reply, a bit startled. “Really? You’re interested?”

“Well…” Rhaena hesitates. “Baela’s always been the brave one. At home, at school, when we were shopping, even when restaurants would mess up my order, Baela would do the talking and make sure I was alright…and I would literally hide behind her waiting for her to solve all my problems. And now…with the baby, with Jace…it’s been really different being the one to help her for a change, and I don’t think I’m very good at it yet. But Baela deserves to have people to lean on, just like I’ve always had her. And…when I stabbed that guy in the RV…I kind of liked it.” She titters nervously when she sees the shock on your face. “No, not like that! Not the killing part, or the gushing blood, that was all super gross. But the fact that I helped protect Baela and Luke? The fact that I wasn’t useless in that situation? That was a good feeling. Baela is clever, and she’s courageous and caring and funny, and she’s always been better than me at everything, and I never minded because she…she was like my own personal superhero, you know? But now I feel like I need to start learning how to do things myself so I can help her. Even if Baela is still better at everything, and probably always will be.”

Aegon grins toothily and pushes his neon green plastic sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. “I know how you feel. It’s pretty impossible to look heroic next to Aemond.”

“Stop,” Aemond says, but he’s smiling, and a bloom of bashful pink blood appears in his cheeks.

“You already took over the driving,” you tell Rhaena encouragingly. “That was a big help.”

“Yeah,” Rhaena replies, a bit pensive. “Let’s hope I can keep that going.” Between the gas Aemond found in Ogallala and what was siphoned from the would-be attackers’ GMC Yukon, you got enough fuel in the Tahoe to take it halfway across Wyoming; but now the gauge is not just at but venturing below the E, and it can’t have more than five or ten miles left. That might not even get you to the next ranch, let alone a proper town. You need a working vehicle. There are nearly a thousand miles between here and Odessa, Oregon.

Aegon is pawing at Aemond like a cat. “Come on, hero. Help me up.”

~~~~~~~~~~

“This is why we’re friends,” Rio tells you as he shovels forkfuls of bison steak into his mouth, juice dribbling down his chin. Cregan gutted the bison and butchered it, then you helped him cook the steaks—not very uniform in size and shape, yet no one is complaining—on a pan heated in the woodstove. You fed the fire with books you found in the house, mostly religious in nature. “You convince me not to commit suicide when we’re stranded on a transmission tower, you share your Cheddar Whales, you’re good at shooting things…”

“How did you two become friends?” Baela asks. You are all arranged around the dining room table; there are just enough chairs for everyone. Ice lies beneath it mauling on bison bones that Cregan set aside for her. The room is illuminated by flashlights. Baela looks great: in good spirits, glowing, alert, wearing a loose cotton dress that Helaena found in an upstairs closet for her. Baela napped most of the day, something she rarely allows herself to indulge in, and the benefits are evident.

Rio says nonchalantly: “I talked to everybody and she barely talked at all. So of course I had to investigate and figure out what that was about. Turns out she’s kind of cool. You know the Wheel of Fortune game at arcades where there’s like a hundred little lights in a circle you have to press the button when the one that says Spin Zone lights up? She’s a freak, she can hit it almost every time. Can’t sink a basketball or sing karaoke to save her life, but you know, we all have flaws.”

Aegon looks up from his map, which he is scrutinizing as he eats his bison steak. “Do you realize that if we could just stop at gas stations like back when everything was normal, we’d be in Odessa or the Bay Area in fifteen hours? Literally less than one day. Fucking unreal. And yet here we are trapped in yee-haw country, freaky giant animals, no civilization but Jesus billboards everywhere, hell on earth.” He holds up a palm. “No offense, Cregan. You’re okay.”

Cregan smiles mildly. “None taken, Fried Foot. You know you’re a little well done yourself these days.”

“That’s ableist,” Aegon replies.

“We’ll find gas tomorrow,” Aemond says. He sounds confident because he has to; he’s not allowed to panic, to give up. He’s seated at the head of the table like a patriarch. His steak is the smallest and the most ragged. He wouldn’t accept any of the others.

You ask Baela: “Have you decided what to name the baby?”

“Kind of.” She rests both hands on her belly, a globe like a full moon. Helaena glances over at Baela, frowning and preoccupied. “If it’s a boy, I’m going to name it after Jace. We had already picked out Theodore…and Teddy for short, isn’t that cute? But now…I’d want him to have that connection to his father. The baby won’t have any pictures of him, or videos, or memories, or papers he wrote in school, or ties or rings or cufflinks, or…anything. But he could have Jace’s name.”

The rest of you nod, eyes downcast and feeling terribly sorry for her. “I really like that idea,” Luke says quietly.

Now Baela is thinking, her gaze traveling around the room as she chews on a cube of streak. “I’m not sure what I’d call a girl. Maybe something naturey like Violet, Rosemary, Ivy, Indigo, Fern…”

“You should name it Otter,” you say, and you and Rio erupt into raucous laughter. Aemond smiles as he watches you.

Baela is grinning uncertainly, trying not to be insensitive. Perhaps people named their kids stuff like Otter where you came from. “Um, sorry, what?!”

“That was one of the baby names on Sophie’s list,” Rio clarifies. “I vetoed it. Or at least…I think she agreed to cross it off…? Oh my God, imagine I finally get to Odessa only to find out my firstborn child has been named Otter.”

“You’d have to turn right back around,” you say. “Total abandonment would be the only honorable choice. We’d have to start over someplace else. I’ve heard Texas is nice.”

Aegon snorts. “You can’t live in Texas. They don’t even have legal weed there.”

Rhaena squints at him. “I don’t really think that’s a concern anymore, Aegon.”

Aegon smacks his forehead theatrically. “Oh no, I forgot about the apocalypse again!”

“So Cregan,” Baela says. “You were planning to vote for Trump.”

Everyone at the table groans. “No politics,” Aemond says.

“They’re all dead now, so it doesn’t matter,” Rhaena adds. “Biden, Kamala, that insane Kennedy brain worm dude, Trump…”

Aegon says: “If I was a zombie, I wouldn’t eat Trump.”

“I just found that interesting,” Baela continues, looking at Cregan like she’s expecting him to explain himself. Rhaena and Luke exchange a nervous glance. Daeron reaches under the table to pet Ice; you can hear her tail thumping cheerfully against the hardwood floor.

“I was a Trump voter, yeah,” Cregan replies between bites of steak. Aemond is studying him uneasily, but Cregan’s baritone voice is calm. “That doesn’t mean I approved of a lot of the things he did and said. I’m not a monster, I don’t believe in mocking people or all that January 6th stuff. But he was good for the economy. Back when Trump was president, groceries were more affordable, and houses were cheaper, and more companies were hiring. If I had tried to move out of my parents’ place in 2023 instead of 2019, there’s no way I could have done it. And I really needed to get out of there. A lot of people feel that they don’t have the luxury of voting for the nicest candidate, or the candidate they agree with on social issues. Something abstract like climate change isn’t even on the radar. They have to vote for their basic necessities.”

You and Rio understand what he means, you’ve both met plenty of people with the same perspective; everybody else seems shellshocked.

“But I don’t want y’all to think that I’m…” Cregan looks around the table, his eyes catching—interestingly—on Helaena, who observes him with a fully present attentiveness that you’ve learned is rare for her. “You know, like a sexist or a racist or that I hate foreigners or anything. Because I’ve never felt that way, and now I’m very happy to have found you guys, and I respect the hell out of you. And I want to be allowed to stay.”

“You can stay, Cregan,” Helaena reassures him.

“Yeah,” Rio says. “Especially since we’d probably starve without you.”

Cregan beams, clearly grateful, and there are chuckles and the tension breaks; and Baela is placidly skating her palm over the arc of her belly, and now that you’ve eaten all you can, Rio is spearing the remaining chunks of your steak with his fork and gobbling them down. He doesn’t ask before he does this; he knows you don’t mind. You’ve never understood why he’s given you so much over the past nearly five years. You are eternally offering him atonement.

Suddenly, Baela asks you: “What would you name a baby girl?”

You have to think about this before you answer. “Well, if you’re looking for something related to plants…I had a friend when I was growing up named Briar, and I always thought that was pretty.”

“Briar,” Baela echoes, intrigued.

“It means bramble, like a thorny shrub where blackberries grow. I remember her telling me that her mama wanted it to be a reminder that people go through rough patches and that life gets hard sometimes, but you have to keep going, and eventually you’ll find your way out.”

“Briar,” Baela repeats. “Yeah, that’s kind of neat. I’ll add it to the list!”

“And you’d have the same first initial,” Rhaena says. “Baela and Briar. Isn’t that adorable?”

Baela smiles. “And a few Rs thrown in there too. For Rhaena.”

Rio turns to Aegon. “Hey Honey Bun, if you had to name your kid after a plant, what would you name it?”

Aegon says without hesitation: “Marijuana.”

Now it’s an hour later, and Aemond is examining Aegon’s burned leg on the living room floor, Helaena holding a flashlight and you and Rio standing by for moral support. Underneath the bandages is a wasteland of red, weeping flesh…and yet there are spots where the skin seems to be hardening into white islands of scar tissue. Rhaena and Luke are keeping watch by the windows, Baela is passed out in one of the bedrooms, Cregan is showing Daeron how to put his wavy blonde hair up in a man bun.

Aemond points to a blackish patch on the top of Aegon’s foot, only a few inches from his ankle. “I have to debride this part here,” he says like an apology.

Aegon is afraid to ask. “What does debride mean?”

“It means I have to cut it out.”

“Cut it?!”

“It’s getting infected. I have to remove it or it will spread to the rest of the foot and you could get sepsis. I might even have to amputate the whole leg.”

“Okay, cut the dead stuff off,” Aegon swiftly agrees.

Aemond doesn’t have any more injectable morphine. He gives Aegon as much Vicodin as he dares and then begins working, carving away layers of dark disease with his scalpel and scrubbing the area with disinfectant. Aegon clutches your hand, squeezing so hard it feels like your bones might crunch, shrapnel-like splinters of marrow-stained organic glass beneath your skin. Rio has Aegon’s pink Sony Walkman—once owned by Ava—and takes one earbud while giving Aegon the other. They sing along to Sean Paul songs together, laughing as tears stream down Aegon’s sunburned cheeks:

“Well, woman, the way the time cold, I wanna be keepin’ you warm

I got the right temperature fi shelter you from the storm

Oh Lord, gal, I got the right tactics to turn you on

And girl, I wanna be the papa, you can be the mom…”

Now you’re curled up in bed, your arms crossed over your belly as you struggle to fall asleep. Aemond comes to bed late now; each night he waits until Baela is sleeping and then teaches Rhaena about childbirth and recovery: what to expect, what could go wrong. She is a good student, borrowing Helaena’s spider notebook to take notes and asking detailed questions. She wants to know everything she can so she can help when Baela goes into labor.

At last, the bedroom door opens. Out in the living room you can hear Rio asking: “Do you have Wagon Wheel? I love that song.”

Aegon scoffs. “No, of course I don’t have Wagon Wheel. Shut up and listen to your Enrique Iglesias.”

“You are so racist, man…”

Aemond sees that you’re in agony, rummages around in his medical kit, and gives you an oval-shaped white pill to wash down with the can of orange Sunkist on the nightstand; Helaena found a case of it in the pantry. “Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?”

“I didn’t want to take any Vicodin from Aegon or Baela. They’ll need it more than me.”

“Your pain is as real as anyone else’s.” Aemond’s weight shifts the mattress as he crawls into bed beside you, his arm settling protectively around your waist, his hand covering yours where it rests on your lower belly. “If the Tahoe runs out of gas, will you be okay to walk tomorrow?”

“Don’t worry about me. I had three periods during basic training, I honestly thought I might die. After that I can power through just about anything.”

“I’ve noticed.” You feel the soft smile on Aemond’s lips as he kisses your temple. “Do you want quiet, or do you want to talk?”

“Talking would be a nice distraction.”

Aemond wastes no time. “Do you like kids?”

“Well, since birth control doesn’t exist anymore, I’d hope everybody does.”

Again, he is smiling; you can hear it in his voice. “Okay, but do you intend to have your own?”

“Yeah, I always envisioned myself having kids. I wanted a normal family and figured I’d have to make one myself, DIY it, you know? I don’t think the plan has changed. Gotta repopulate the earth somehow.”

“I wouldn’t try to sway your decision one way or the other. It’s a burden you should only have to endure if you actively choose it. But if you want to have children one day, I’d help you.”

You giggle in the dim orange glow of a single flashlight. “How self-sacrificial.”

“No,” Aemond says, laughing. “Not like, the making them. I mean, I’d help with that too, that aspect would be fun. But I was talking about the delivery, and recovery, and taking care of a newborn. I don’t know everything, but I know a lot. I could help you get through it. So that’s an option I want you to be aware of, if…you know.” Now he pauses. “If you trust me.”

“I trust you.”

“Sometimes I don’t know if you should,” Aemond murmurs; or at least that’s what you think he says as you lose consciousness, plummeting into sleep as if falling from a great height.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Tahoe runs out of gas just east of Tipton—not a city, not a town, just a collection of service roads linking sprawling ranches to I-80, the only continuous route across southern Wyoming—and Rhaena guides the SUV as it coasts to a halt on the shoulder of the highway. You hike about a mile to the nearest ranch house: Luke carrying the siphoning hose and empty gas can in case you can find fuel, Rio carrying Aegon on his back, Baela walking slowly and with great effort, Ice panting as she lopes across the dusty earth. You can’t spot any cattle or horses behind the endless strings of barbed wire fencing. Perhaps they are in a different pasture, or escaped or were stolen, or died of thirst without being tended to, or were consumed by a wandering hoard of zombies, never sleeping and always hungry. The house at the end of the dirt driveway is modest, old, and painted white. The front door is open; the screen door bangs in the wind.

“Rock Springs is the next real town,” Aegon says when Rio drops him to the ground, reading his map.

“And how far is that?” Rio asks.

Aegon deflates. “About fifty miles.”

“Great,” Rhaena says. “What’s the plan, to fly there?”

“Yeah, start flapping your wings, little bird. You’re light enough, you can make it.”

“No car in the driveway,” you tell Aemond. “Nobody home, maybe?”

He’s scrutinizing the house, his blue eye narrow. “Maybe.”

A thought occurs to Aegon. “Do you think ranchers have golf clubs?” he asks hopefully.

“No,” Aemond snaps. Rio is now on the front porch and pounding the butt of his unloaded Remington shotgun against the doorframe to see if anyone appears. Daeron is nocking one of his makeshift arrows as he trots around the perimeter with his compound bow.

Luke, peering through his binoculars, points to a large cylindrical aluminum structure about a hundred yards from the house, by a small red barn. “What’s that thing?”

“It’s a grain bin,” Cregan says. “Full of feed for cattle.” Ice whimpers at his feet, and he twirls his axe in his large, calloused hands. “Are we clearing the house or not? Something’s in there.”

“We are,” Aemond answers tonelessly. “Luke, Rhaena, stay out here with Aegon and watch for trouble. Daeron, you too.”

“Got it.”

“Baela—”

“Can I go inside?” she asks. “Please, Aemond. I’m so sick of sitting around feeling useless and exhausted. I want to help. I want to do something, I’m going insane.”

“Fine,” Aemond agrees. “It should be an easy one.”

It is easy, but it’s not pleasant. The house smells like dark, sickening decay. In the living room are the skeletal remains of two bodies, both children judging by the size; the maroon-stained bones are notched with indents from gnashing teeth. Cregan shadows Helaena as she searches through closets and drawers. She takes no clothing—it would have absorbed the stench of death—but fills her burlap messenger bag with matches, lighters, batteries, pills. She gives you a bottle of Advil before you can ask her for it.

“Thanks,” you say, a bit startled, as you tuck it away in your backpack.

It is not until Ice leads you to the final room, the bedroom at the rear of the house, that you hear the familiar, blood-chilling hissing and moaning of a zombie. It is in the closet, and emerges one limb at a time: one arm and then another, one leg long like a spider’s, streaked with a thick soup of rotting organs that spills from a gaping hole in her belly like the mouth of a mineshaft. Something has happened to its other leg; it is missing, and the corpse that was once a thirties-something woman—a soccer mom, perhaps, with a minivan and propensity to make meatloaf and fish sticks—drags itself across the fawn-colored carpet towards you, slow and pathetic. Ice growls and barks. Rio raises his Remington.

“Wait,” Baela says. Her hammer is in her right hand. “Can I do it?”

“Of course, be my guest,” Rio says; though you can tell he’s slightly disappointed. He loves clubbing things.

Baela approaches the yowling zombie—jaws snapping, claws swiping—and grimaces down at it, this one of millions of monsters that ended the world, that killed Jace and stole all the rest of her life from her too, all those normal things she was supposed to have, all those strings of fate that the plague cut through like a razor and sent floating aimlessly out into the void of the universe. Then with a scream, Baela swings her hammer and a catastrophic impact crater appears in the side of the zombie’s skull, and it crumples to the floor, its mindless brains spilling out onto the carpet.

“Nothing good?” Aegon asks when you reappear in the driveway, popping a Vicodin into his mouth.

��No,” Aemond replies grimly. “No gas, no bullets, no food, nothing to drink.”

“I knew it would be lean pickings once we got out here,” Cregan says, and Aemond looks like he could kill him.

“Well, fortunately, Luke might have some good news for us,” Aegon says with a grin.

Aemond perks up. “Really? What?”

“I saw a truck out there,” Luke says, using his binoculars to gesture to the grain bin. “It’s parked between the barn and the grain thing, I can just see the very front of it sticking out. And if there’s a truck, there might be gas.”

Aemond ruffles Luke’s fluffy dark hair. “Good job, kid.” And Luke lights up like how cities used to look at night, back when the power was on: Washington D.C., Key West, Corpus Christi, Chinhae. Rio stoops down so Aegon can hop on his back, and all of you trek together across the field.

“Nothing,” Cregan announces as he squeezes the little pump on the siphoning hose after opening the gas cap of the ancient Chevy Silverado and threading the hose inside. “Not a drop.”

“Fucking fantastic,” Aegon sighs from where he’s slumped on the ground. His eyes are glazed; he’s pretty stoned. He gazes pitifully up at you; you pat his shoulder sympathetically. You and Rio have already checked the barn, dilapidated but perfectly devoid of zombies. The roof has caved in; one of the two front doors are missing. “What now?!”

“We can go back to the interstate and walk until we find the next ranch,” you say, looking absentmindedly at the grain bin. It’s much larger up close, and rusty in spots. A ladder runs up one side to allow access to the roof. Ice isn’t whining or nudging anyone’s hands, but she’s sniffing the air as if she’s detected something interesting, unfamiliar.

“Yeah,” Luke replies miserably. “We can walk another five or ten miles and then maybe find a safe place to spend the night.”

Rhaena shades her eyes as she peers up at the sky. “It’s past noon already. Maybe we should just stay here.”

Rio barks out a sardonic laugh. “In a house with no supplies and that reeks of dead people?”

“Cregan, go kill us something to eat,” Aegon commands.

He chuckles in his deep, gruff voice. “It’s Miss Chips who is good at the killing, I’m just the authority on butchering at the moment.”

Aemond is watching Ice, his forehead furrowed. “What’s she doing?”

Cregan whistles. “Hey, princess, you okay?” Ice ignores him, still sniffing, her grey ears straight up in the air. Then it appears from behind the barn: a tiny brown creature, a baby bear.

“Aww, it’s so fuzzy!” Aegon squeals, stretching his arm out to pet it. Rio yanks him away; everyone else is backing up towards the grain bin. A second bear cub has now arrived, padding clumsily along, large cartoonish eyes and a little pink tongue poking out from its muzzle.

“Don’t touch them!” Aemond shouts to everyone. “Get away from them! If there are cubs, there’s probably—”

And around the barn comes the mother, a grizzly bear of 400 pounds. She bares her teeth and snarls, saliva dripping in long gluey strings. Ice is barking viciously; Aegon is shrieking and scrambling onto Rio’s back.

“Baela!” Aemond says because she’s closest to him, urging her towards the ladder of the grain bin. She gets the idea and begins climbing. Then Aemond reaches for you. “Come on, you next!”

“Rhaena, go,” you say instead, and she clambers up the ladder after Baela. Cregan is brandishing his axe; Rio has his Remington in his hands, Aegon still clinging to his back like a baby opossum to its mother. Now Helaena is climbing up the ladder, and Daeron nocks an arrow. You whip one of your M9s out of its holster, aim for the bear’s head, and pull the trigger.

Your bullet hits its skull, Daeron’s arrow pierces its chest; and the mother bear does not die but roars and rises up onto her back feet—taller than Rio, taller than Cregan—and then drops back down and charges towards you and the grain bin. Cregan blocks the way, swinging his axe. The bear reluctantly pauses, testing him with swipes of her claws that he evades. Rio is just a few steps behind Cregan, waving his Remington around hostilely. Aegon is screaming and holding on for dear life.

“Don’t shoot!” Cregan yells. “9mm isn’t big enough, you’ll just make her more angry!”

Aemond finally gets a grip on your wrist and drags you to the ladder. You obey and climb until your feet are several rungs off the ground, then you turn to see what’s going on below. Aemond, Luke, and Daeron are at the bottom of the ladder, their backs to you. Cregan is still wielding his axe.

“Fuck off, Mama Bear!” he bellows, standing as tall as possible and swinging his axe above his head. Rio follows Cregan’s lead and holds his Remington aloft. Ice is barking; the baby bears are fleeing in terror. Aegon is sobbing hysterically and saying he’s going to die. “You don’t want us and we don’t want you! Go on! Go get your babies! I’ll put this blade right between your eyes if you don’t change your stupid mind right quick!”

The bear pounds the earth with her front feet and growls, a beastly subterranean rumble, but she seems to be losing her nerve. The rungs of the ladder creak and groan; you see rust like blood-hued moss around the bolts.

“Get out of here!” Cregan shouts. “Go, you hairy old bitch! Go back to your babies!”

The bear glances back to see her cubs vanish behind the barn. Her mouth is open and panting, spittle gleaming on her pointed teeth; her black eyes are uncertain. As you hold onto the ladder with one hand, you have your M9 aimed at the bear’s left eye, just in case. Aemond is watching Cregan; on his scarred face a sharp severity, fascination and resentment and fear.

“Go on,” Cregan says firmly. “Leave us alone. You belong in the mountains, not down here. Go eat something that’s already dead, a nice easy dinner. You don’t want us. We’ll fight you.”

The grizzly bear shakes her head—flopping ears, shaggy fur filthy with dust and pieces of grass—and whirls, lumbering off to find her cubs. When she rounds the barn, Cregan waits a few long, tense, silent minutes and then turns to the grain bin.

“Alright y’all, we oughta hurry up and leave. I don’t think she’ll come back, but she might.”

From the top of the ladder, approximately forty feet off the ground, Baela begins to laugh. “Did that really just happen?! That was insane! Cregan, buddy, you can vote for whoever you want to. You and I are cool forever.”

He smiles up at her, wincing in the bright afternoon light. “I’m very glad to hear it, ma’am.”

Rio sets Aegon down on the ground and stretches his back; it must be hurting him. Aemond is taking your hand and helping you off the ladder, and you are reminded of the transmission tower where he found you in Catawissa, Pennsylvania, one of those middle-of-nowhere places like Tipton, Wyoming. As Helaena climbs down, you go to Rio and—with as much force as you can manage—knead the small of his back with the heel of your hand like you know helps him.

“You okay?”

He sighs loudly, relieved. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Oh, wow, that’s good. Harder…oh yeah…”

There is a snapping sound, metal squealing as it breaks, and by the time you turn to look she’s already falling: her cotton dress billowing around her, her arms wheeling helplessly. It happens too quickly for her to scream—for her to understand what is going on and what it means—but there is a stunned gasp and then she hits the ground, and you hear a muffled crunch of bone—skull?? spine??—and she is completely, unnaturally still as she lies on her back, no pain, no words, nothing.

“Baela!” Rhaena shrieks, and she rushes down the ladder and runs to her sister. You are all gathering around Baela, petrified to move her—to make it worse—but pleading for her to wake up, examining her with terrified eyes. Baela’s own eyes, dark and glassy and serene, are open only a sliver like obsidian crescent moons. Aemond is asking Helaena for a flashlight and then prying them wide, checking Baela’s pupils.

“There’s no reflex,” he says numbly.

“What does that mean?!” Rhaena cries. “Aemond? Aemond?!”

“She’s…she’s…” He’s in denial; he’s in shock. He’s feeling for a pulse on her carotid, he’s digging his fingernails into her forearm to try to get her to respond to pain.

“Aemond?” you say softly.

“She’s gone,” he tells you, like he doesn’t believe it, like he’s waiting to wake up.

“The baby,” Rhaena says. “Try to save the baby.” And then, when Aemond doesn’t immediately understand, she grabs his backpack and begins ripping it off so he can get the medical kit inside. “The baby, Aemond!”

Now he knows what he has to do. He pulls the scalpel out of his kit as Rhaena moves Baela’s sundress to expose her belly. She was wearing biker shorts beneath, lavender, cute, something you might have picked out in a store. In less than a minute they will be soaked with blood. Cregan leads Daeron away, and he’s telling him that they need to keep watch in case the grizzly bear returns, but you think it is an act of mercy more than anything else. Ice goes with them. Helaena, her face pale and grave, is shining the flashlight on Baela’s belly, just beneath her navel.

“Aegon?” Aemond says.

“What? What do you need?”

“I need people to help hold open the incision once I make it. I have to be able to see the amniotic sac so I can cut the membrane without harming the baby.”

“I get it, I’m here, I’ll help.”

Aemond presses the blade of the scalpel to Baela’s skin and draws a semicircle from the top of one hip to the other. There is blood, but it is slow-moving and thick and dark; it is the blood of a dead woman, not a living one. Immediately, Aegon hooks his fingers under layers of fat, skin, and muscle, and opens the wound as much as he can. You and Rio reach in too, and you do this without thinking, without allowing yourself to feel the horror of it until the work is done.

“I can’t see,” Aemond is murmuring. Rhaena gets another flashlight and helps Helaena illuminate the area. Luke is on his knees with both hands clamped over his mouth, his eyes glistening with dread and disbelief. Aemond is slicing, pausing to probe around with his fingers, cutting again. Then his arm plunges into Baela’s abdomen up to his elbow and, with some difficulty, pulls out the gore-covered baby by its feet, a girl, large and limp and silent.

Rhaena sobs, equal parts grief and joy, a smile appearing on her face. “Is she okay? Aemond? Is she…why isn’t she crying? Aemond?!”

Rio yanks off his shirt and uses it to wipe blood and gelatinous clumps away from the baby’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils. Then Aemond takes the shirt and wraps the baby in it, warming her, rubbing her lifeless little limbs. When she does not stir, Aemond lays her on the earth and begins CPR: compressions with two fingers on her tiny heart, two breaths down the airway she’s never used. There are no sounds except his efforts. There is no crying when the baby wakes, because she never does.

Enough, you are thinking, as if from very far away: an island in the Indian Ocean, the Appalachian mountains in eastern Kentucky. Enough, enough, enough.

Aemond stops trying to revive the baby. He picks her up and holds her against him, and no one says anything. There is only the barrenness of the Wyoming steppe, an anemic blue sky, tall dry grass that bows in the breeze, black vultures that are landing atop the barn and the grain bin.

Aegon jolts out of his paralysis and reaches for his brother with bloodied hands. “Aemond, hey, Aemond, listen to me, it wasn’t your fault. Okay? Are you listening? Aemond, man, you did everything you could. You gave them a chance. You didn’t give up.”

But Aemond doesn’t respond; he only kneels there beside Baela’s butchered body, her dead baby girl in his arms.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Alys?” he calls, seeing that she never came back to bed. He is lying on his stomach, tangled in red sheets damp with sweat. It’s hot, too hot, and there is no humming of the air conditioning. When Aemond picks up his iPhone from the nightstand, it’s still plugged in but only at 87% battery. The power must have gone out.

He gets up, rubs the damp skin by his temple—headache, dehydration—and lifts open the nearest window. It’s odd: there is shouting, distant and indistinct, like the sound of a carnival or a concert. There are car alarms too, and sirens, and horns blaring, all too far away for him to see. It must be because of the power outage, traffic signals thrown into chaos, neighbors relaying the latest information back and forth. That’s the only logical explanation.

“Alys?” Aemond says again, groggy but with increasing curiosity, concern, guilt.

She started to feel sick last night, a pulsing in her skull and chills and powerful nausea. The possibility of it being the so-called Florida Fever barely registered in his mind. Alys gets migraines, and tofu is a migraine trigger, and he took her to a Thai restaurant (maybe he should have known better) and the curry Alys ordered ended up having tofu in it, and by the time she paid the check (as Alys always did) she was swallowing an Imitrex from the box in her snakeskin purse. She said she was going to lie down in the guest bedroom for a while so she wouldn’t wake him if she spent the next few hours dashing to and from the bathroom, a likely outcome, and if he was honest with himself about it, Aemond would admit he was relieved.

He shuffles to the bedroom door—black boxers, bare feet, century-old hardwood floors—and opens it. Now he can hear thudding, like someone tenderizing meat with a mallet. “Alys? Baby, you feeling okay?” There is no answer, only that rhythmic hammering. He realizes that it is coming from the guest bedroom, a door at the end of a long hallway still fuzzy through his half-awake eyes.

It had never felt right, but it had felt good: good in the body when she touched him, good in the soul when she told him he did something right. But lately—especially here, in the vast creaking historic house she shares with her husband and her children, who are presently sailing in Cape Cod—Aemond cannot shake the feeling that this entanglement is a surrender rather than an aspiration, something he fell into and now rests at the bottom of like a swimming pool or the sea, the cold weight of it threatening to pour into his lungs and drown him.

“Alys?” Aemond says, now with profound and inexplicable dread. Outside an ambulance or police car zooms by, sirens blaring. The pounding on the door of the guest bedroom grows faster.

I want to go home, Aemond thinks suddenly. At home, in the Federal-style townhouse his parents rented for him (Criston picked it out, a safe and quiet neighborhood in Beacon Hill, and Viserys paid), Daeron is visiting from California and watching golf tournaments with Aegon on the living room couch, pretending to be interested when Aegon describes the different types of clubs. Helaena, pursuing an Entomology PhD, is researching the Mediterranean mantis, clicking around on her MacBook Pro from the garden in the backyard. Jace and Luke live there too, and so Baela and Rhaena have all but officially moved in, keeping their apartment in Seaport only to have somewhere to retreat to when the Targaryen chaos becomes too much…and so the baby can have its own room. Baela bought a crib, a changing table, a rocking chair, a dresser, and about a million unisex onesies, mostly space-themed. Baela is studying Aeronautics and Astronautics, after all. Maybe one day she’ll work for NASA and fly rockets to the moon.

The door is rattling on its hinges. Aemond’s hand closes around the knob. On the other side is something terrible, and he knows this. But he cannot just leave her. Aemond is not someone who abandons people; he is not someone who turns away from responsibilities.

He opens the door of the guest bedroom, and immediately she is staggering towards him, limp dripping hair and naked like she was interrupted mid-shower: blood bubbling from her gaping mouth and the whites of teeth peeking through the crimson, necrotic skin hanging in strips from her fingers, eyes misty like steam on a mirror.

“Alys, stop! Alys! What’s wrong with you?!”

She’s alive but she’s dead. She’s yowling and clawing at him, but her flesh is the rotting swampland of a corpse. He’s pushing her away; his palms sink into her, places he once noticed and then fantasized about and then at last—euphorically, ashamedly—touched, held, borrowed but never kept. She’s trying to bite him. She’s trying to kill him. None of this is possible, and yet it’s true.

Aemond flings her away, and the woman who was once Alys stumbles backwards and down the staircase, sick wet thumps all the way to the ground floor, bones splitting through dissolving grey skin, organs sloshing around until they spill out. He can hear her still hissing, flailing, trying to get up again.

Without thinking—slipping seamlessly into what he learned during his psych rotation is called automatic action—Aemond races down the steps and grabs her by the skull, cracks it against the antique hardwood floor she once extoled the value of as he fucked her on it: shipped east from Oregon and laid in 1912, the year the Titanic sank. When she lurches up to try to bite him, he slams her head against the floor again and again until she is still.

Then Aemond kneels there alone for a long time, sirens shrieking outside, far-off strangers screaming for help, putrid black blood clotting on his hands.

[la2yn0va]

Hello Sensei! In celebration of me finally beating Shadow of Feixiao. Can i humbly request some Shadow the hedgehog like male reader x yandere kafka, Robin, Firefly, Black Swan and Feixiao? The reader was not born really. More like made to be the ultimate lifeform. The reader is one of the top strongest in the universe, being soo powerful that he has to wear special bracelets to contains his powers. He has access to chaos magic and has a few more powers that only he can use. The reader is a loner and doesn't trust anyone reader being someone hard to approach

CW: Yandere Characters.

Note: This. Is my favorite request to date. Yes, it’s because of shadow the hedgehog 🥰🥰🥰🥰

Also you disrespectful bastard! Those ‘bracelets’ are called Inhibitor Rings! Respect the lore, damnit!!

——

Feixiao

She first learned about your existence from General Yueyu. Some creation made years ago that was given the title of ‘ultimate life form’

A creation made to perfectly counter all abominations on the xianzhou, someone so powerful it would take an aeon or two too defeat. Or so she said.

To say little feixiao was interested was a major understatement. If this were true, where were you? What ship were you in? Why hasn’t she heard of you anywhere else?

When she asked yueyu this, the general had a face of regret and sadness, before saying the information was classified.

Years later, she met you, the fabled ‘ultimate life form’ was an enemy of the xianzhou. She couldn’t believe it, Yueyu spoke so highly of you, so why’re you an enemy?

And just like general Yueyu said, you were STRONG. Hell, possibly the strongest being in the entire xianzhou and universe.

But, as a general, it was her duty to stop you. So you two fight, and she gets utterly defeated. She’d never known defeat like this, power like yours. Just WHAT were you?

For the next days, every general and the astral express crew, even the marshal of the xianzhou had confronted to stop you, all the generals were forced to play a supporting role, as the marshal was the only one able to deal damage to you.

However, it didn’t matter, your plan had been successful. Inputting 7 ancient gems into the core of the xianzhou and causing it to self destruct while having some biological monster protecting it.

Feixiao couldn’t believe YOU were meant to be the great savior Yueyu talked so highly about. But then, once the gems were entered, a video began to play on everything and anything that had a screen, reveling the dark truth.

Your creator was betrayed, his granddaughter killed by the xianzhou military! And the marshal herself being the one who betrayed the great doctor. Showing long lost and thought to be destroyed footage of the dark incident Hundreds if not thousands of years ago. (Not doing the 50 years ago, cause why not)

It was at the point everyone lost hope. The marshal herself was a traitor to one of the greatest scientists and ally to the xianzhou, even the generals will were shaken. And the astral express couldn’t help but feel sorrow for you.

But, with a powerful speech from the marshal, everyone’s will and hope were restored and the generals, the nameless, large almost unending numbers of cloud knights, and the marshal went down to stop you.

But, the bio-lizard got in their way. It would see its creators plan through the very end. It was a monster, all cloud knights were flies it swatted dead, the generals focusing all their strength to defeat the lizard.

Only feixiao and the marshal were able to get past the impossibly defense of the lizard, who was luckily for them, to distracted to notice. The two ran down the hallway and saw you, watching the fight through a holographic screen.

Feixiao tried to move towards you, but the marshal stopped her before taking a piece of fallen debris and throwing it towards you, seeing an invisible death shield surrounding you.

Marshal: M/n!! Stop this madness!!

M/n:…you’ve got some nerve. To betray my creator, get Maria killed! And lock me away for years upon years!!

Feixiao: Tsk…! M/n, we need you! Please help us!

Feixiao blurted out, much to the shock of the marshal and m/n.

Feixiao: You were made to be the strongest force for the xianzhou!! Why are you so intent on destroying it!!

M/n:….Doesn’t matter. It's all going according to plan. There's no reason for me to help them. Besides, there's no way to save anyone. All of them are unsaveable, pathetic, and childish. Only then will the marshal feel the consequences of her betrayal!

Feixiao: Forget the marshal! Hate her all you want, but not the people of the xianzhou! There innocent! Was this maria’s last wish!? For you to become the enemy! Hated, feared, a boogeyman!?

Marshal:….I know what I’ve done to you is unforgivable. I know that you’ll never forgive me. Even if you kill me, you’ll never forgive me. But the people of the Xianzhou are innocent. I know that people fight over the most trivial things. Some people may be selfish, like the professor said... but they're good, if they try their best and never give up on their wishes. They always have a reason to be happy; that's why you should help them out! Saving them is a good thing! M/n, I beg you, please do it for them! Give them a chance!

The marshal pleaded, bowing to you much to the shock of feixiao. To see the marshal like this was almost… fictionally impossible. However, Feixiao’s words seemed to strike you, as you remembered Maria’s true last words.

M/n:….Maria….

You said as the marshal and feixiao looked up seeing a horrified and saddened realization dawn on you, a single tear falling down from your face, before you forcibly ripped out one of the ancient gems.

M/n: I…I have to stop this! I have to keep my promise to her!!

You declared before using your monstrous strength to rip out all the emeralds and jump down from the platform, running towards the biolizard.

The biolizard stopped its killing blow on Yanqing and March as it felt a shift. Something had changed, the xianzhou wasn’t shaking… you had betrayed your creator!!

The biolizard released a horrific shriek of rage, shaking the very soul of everyone who heard it. The lizard turned to see you running towards it with the chaos emeralds, as you focused on your sadness, Maria, the professor, and your promise to her—turning super.

Everyone could only watch as the lizard and you fought, each impact shaking the universe itself. A beautiful spectacle infront of them as your speed and strength left them in awe, wondering if your power could rival that of the aeons.

Eventually, the lizard couldn’t contain its rage nor its own existence as you ripped off the machinery that kept it alive, as it expanded, ready to nuke this whole stellar system. But, you saved them, using chaos control to teleport yourself and the lizard away, FAR away. Managing to somehow teleport it to IX itself, having the lizard be swallowed whole by the black hole of the end as it released its final explosion of energy.

—Okay now that the story is over, let’s get to the point of this request—

Your body was blasted away as IX swallowed the biolizard, killing it as its explosion blasted you away. Your body crashed through multiple planets, destroying the rock and any life forms on it before it crashed down onto the xianzhou’s outer ship.

The ship shook and spun horizontally 5 times before stopping. Everyone was confused at what could’ve cause this. The marshal went outside and saw you. You were still alive! After 50 years!?

She took you in and decided to keep your existence a secret for now. She cared for your body until you awoke. After punching the marshal in the face, she began to fill you in on everything that happened after the Great War with you 50 years ago.

Although you’d never forgive her, you needed to keep your promise to Maria. So, you tell her your joining the cloud knights, not to serve her, but to keep maria’s promise.

She agreed and asked what ship you wanted to join. You remembered that foxian/borisin general. Being the first general you fought, and being…unique, you wanted her ship.

Feixiao was then informed of this which shocked her. But, surprisingly, she accepted with what seemed like… joy? Nevertheless, you ran to the yaoqing and met her at the cloud knights headquarters, where she greeted you with friendliness.

Feixiao would have you on the four front of battles, leading a platoon, but you declined. You refused to work with anyone and you would only work alone.

Feixiao felt a little pang hit her but agreed. You were strong enough anyway, so she allowed it. And over the years, she grew close to you.

The battles and bloodshed you two would spill from the borisin was beautiful, watching as your guard slowly but surely lowered around her, seeing you smile only to her made her feel special.

She keeps you as close as she can. Letting you sleep in her house and bed, cooking for you and even wanting to bathe you. Daily trainings with you at the gym, along with hundreds of spars and competitions a day.

To feixiao, you two were already in a relationship. After all you lived together! And you only smiled at her! Of course you loved her back…!

And since you’re completely distrustful of everyone else, the thought of someone stealing you away was laughable and fictional. It’ll never happen.

So, feixiao never overreacts when someone ogles at you or tries to get close to you. Cause 10/10 times, you’d just teleport away from the area.

Kafka

Kafka heard of you from Elio. Apparently you’re supposed to join the stellaron hunters as its final member.

With the help of Sam, she used her webs to catch you and Sam used his mech suit to slow your pace. Simply trying to stop you from falling took all her strength along with firefly’s mecha suit, which made her even more curious about you.

They’d take you back to their little hideout and nurture you until you wake up. Which would only be a month. You wake up and look around, not recognizing the area around you.

Kafka is there though, and she introduces herself to you, along with the entire deal with the ‘stellaron hunters’

Seeing as it was apparently ‘destiny’ that they saved you, and that this would possibly be the best way to up hold your promise, you accept their invitation.

You go on missions and learn about what’s changed in the cosmos since the battle at the xianzhou. Apparently a lot has changed, but none that you care about.

Kafka slowly begins to become infatuated with you, you were just so adorable. The ‘loner’ demeanor of yours that hid the cutie you were was so addicting to her.

She ain’t afraid to show it. She’s blunt with her desires and romantic at the same time. Oh how your adorable face lights up with a blush due to your emotional inexperience~

Kafka LOVES to dress you up and do your hair. Also, she sleeps in your room with you. She knows you love it despite your cute little struggles.

On missions, kafka takes the time to rub her thighs and tits against you, to show everyone exactly who you belong to.

Kafka likes to puppet you closer to her, making you sit on her lap and bringing you in for a HEAAATED 1 hour make out session. Purposefully leaving lipstick on your lips, chin, jawline, and neck.

Robin

Robin like everyone else, had heard of you. How your power was rumored to rival that of the aeons. At first, she couldn’t believe it, someone so strong existing as a mortal? No way, right?

But then she saw you at the main lobby of penacony. Your appearance matched to what she heard of you, down to your hairstyle and the small details of your clothes.

She was amazed by your beauty, and the fact that you were real. She approached you with Sunday, who had his own interest in you.

You blew them off, not interested in some pop star and her brother. They were slightly put off but decided to chase you, still having some questions of their own.

Inside the actual penacony, robin acts as your tour guide. She doesn’t try to dig into your life, as it’s none of her business. But she does want to stick around you.

Your whole dynamic is her wanting to stick around you, and you trying to get away. Let’s skip to when you two eventually get close enough for others to consider you to in a relationship.

Robin is clingy but will let go of you if you ask, and you never ask her to let go as you don’t want to hurt her feelings.

Sunday, much to his dismay, uses robin to get you closer to him and the family’s goal. He plans to use you to successfully enact his plans.

But, you’re extremely distrustful of him and the family. Something about them is just, off. Sunday and the family grow increasingly annoyed at your intuition.

So, they decide to take you by force. They try to use a smaller type of the Harmonious Choir to make you submit. But you easily destroy the mission and go to kill Sunday, only for Robin to step in, begging you to not hurt her brother.

Your eyes grow feral, robin…. How could you be so stupid!? She was in on this! So, you punch her into her brother, spitting on them and declaring them pathetic and a blight of Xipe before leaving forever.

Robin desperately tried to stop you, make you stay with her, but it was no use. Your mind was made up and you couldn’t care less about penacony, Sunday, the family, or robin.

So with one more punch, you leave penacony forever, and Sunday runs to his sister cursing at himself for his failure and for getting his sister hurt.

Robin wasn’t able to be herself for a full month. How could she? The person she loved had left her and hurt her! And her brother was a catalyst to that.

Sunday desperately tries to make it up to robin, but she just can’t bring herself to forgive him. Why did he try that? Why did her hurt YOU. And she hates herself for it.

She hates how weak she is, not being able to stop you, not being able to clear up the obvious misunderstanding between you and the family/her brother.

So, she leaves penacony. She can’t live with the knowledge that you hate her. She’ll track you down and bring you back to her, even if she has to get in her knees and beg.

Black Swan

Black swan teleported you to her little dimension, watching as you crashed into the ground and made the whole place shake.

She’s so interested in you. Your genetical structure, your story, your memories, and your prowess.

Black swan keeps you with her. As she wants to learn a lot about you. She’s patience, and doesn’t try to read your memories, shockingly.

After all, what would happen to her if she tried to pry the memories out of an…. ‘Aeonling?’ It’s just too risky.

She loves to watch you from a far though. You’re just so adorable. That little ‘loner’ demeanor of yours made you even more of a cutie.

Trying to hide your personality from her made her fall harder for you. Also seeing you try to ‘call out her fraudulent divination’ was cute.

She helps you with your trauma while making you more reliant on her. Making you face your trauma in a healthy manner while also manipulating your memories and putting some memories that never happened into your head.

Such as you two going on dates, playing some games, cuddling. Little did you know, she’d cuddle you everytime you went to sleep.

These memories make you ease up to her much quicker, just as she predicted. She holds you close and hums a lullaby for you, while playing with your hair like Maria did.

Firefly

This one short, cause it’s just like kafka, except she’s much more nervous and reserved as firefly, yet more confident as Sam….

Yes, this is the laziness and tiredness catching up to me…. I’m so sorry. I’m just so tired of this and other shit making my anxiety rise.

[that-blue-vault-dweller]

How do you th>no the fo4 companions would react to sole survivor using all of the junk that the companions called trash to build a bed or something?

A/N: Thank you so much for the request! I hope you enjoy! 🥰

Cait - "Well, at least you didn't make me lug all that crap around for no reason at all. It turned out at least a little useful."

Curie - "Madame... Goodness me, you are quite the scientist indeed! Or perhaps engineer would be a better word to describe your miraculous work!"

Piper - "Wow, Blue! I promise I'll never say another word about your junk-collecting for as long as I live. Unfortunately for you, however, now that I know exactly what you can do, you're never getting out of making me that new printing press. Muahaha!"

MacCready - "Huh. All that junk actually can be used for something..."

Deacon - "Okay, so I'm going to give you a pack of cigarettes, a desk fan, and toenail clippers. Your mission: make a chair."

Codsworth - "My, my, Miss F!Sole, I knew you were talented but this is truly ingenious craftsmanship! Sir would be so proud!!! I now see where young Shaun gets his talent in tinkering!"

Hancock - "You teach the boys back at Goodneighbor to do that, and I'll pay you ten-thousand caps right then. Full amount."

Danse - "I... wow... I apologize for making any negative comments about your garbage-collecting habits. You are truly talented."

Preston - "I knew there was a reason I asked you to be our general. Nobody I know could pull off something this."

Valentine - "Kid... You're one mystery that I might just fail at solving..."

X6-88 - "As... impressive... as it might be that you used those few strange items to make something half-usable, there is really no reason to use garbage to build things. At least not when the Institute has professionally manufactured, clean versions of those same things."

Dogmeat - Is not surprised. After all, he never doubts the amazing powers of his human who can do absolutely anything she sets her mind to. So when she makes him a doghouse, he is unsurprised but very thankful nevertheless.

Strong - "Tiny human make bed out of junk?! Tiny human must have used milk of human kindness!!! WHY TINY HUMAN KEEP MILK SECRET FROM STRONG???!!!"

ADA - "I am very pleased to see all of my findings coming in handy, ma'am. I will continue looking for more useful items."

[lassify]

The Origins of Anya's Name

*Spoilers for Mission 11*

Thanks to the CDA discord for inspiring me to write this.

As someone who shares a name with our beloved main character, I am just now realising that I have taken for granted how 'Anya' goes through several different spelling presentations in the manga. Blame the people in my life who constantly mispell it, which has densitised me to all the versions.😂

So, I know none of you asked for this little etymology lesson, but here you go anyway 🥰

P1: Anya

'Anya' is the Anglicisation of both 'Anja' and 'Ania'. (It is, in my biased opinion, the best version.)

P2: Anja

Anya with a 'j' (still pronounced as a 'y') originates from Germany. On reflection, it's interesting that although SxF is set in a German-adjacent country, we never see this version.

P3: Ania

In the early chapters, many of you noticed that Anya's name was spelled "Ania" on the front of her door. This is actually not a spelling mistake, because "Ania" originates from Eastern Europe (e.g. Poland or Russia, but I lean towards Polish explanations because that is my ancestry).

The interesting thing about this version is that "Ania" is actually the diminutive of "Anna". Eastern European names tend to have a 'formal' version (the name on legal documents), and the 'diminutive' version, which is essentially a nickname that close friends or family would use.

In Polish, other examples of diminutives would be:

'Olka' for 'Aleksandra' (sound familiar?)

'Basia' for 'Barbara'

'Kasia' for 'Katarzyna'

'Joasia' for 'Joanna' (sometimes people will also use 'Asia' - pronounced 'Asha') - As a side note, this sounds a bit familiar to the previous incarnation of Anya's design, which I believe was 'Ashe'. Perhaps Endo just really like diminutives. Perhaps it's a coincidence.

I also think it's interesting that Yor carved this version first. I'm wondering if it relates somehow to Yor's background, for example if her hometown was bordering an Eastern European country, or if she knows anyone with this background.

If I were use the information from Mission 11 to create a hypothesis, it would be that Anya (the character) likely originates from a Polish/Russian/Eastern European country in the SxF world. I think because Endo has used diminutives for other characters (e.g. Olka), a country like this likely exists in this world.

(I've actually HC'd this for a long time, I've just never had a chance to bring it up...)

Secondly, because the name 'Ania' is also used by friends and family, it is also possible that Anya doesn't know that her formal/legal name might actually be Anna. I would like to believe that in Anya's pre-lab life, she learned that her name is 'Anya' because the name was spoken by someone who loved her.

I'm not sure why the scientists at the lab called her 'Anya' instead of her lab number: perhaps the lab is not located in her home country, and therefore the scientists wouldn't know that the actual origin is 'Anna'. Or maybe they use her diminutive because it is a manipulative tactic to get her to comply with their demands (by appearing more 'friendly'). Who knows.

This could potentially make the reveal of her past that much more heartbreaking, as we don't know yet how she ended up in the lab.

Finally:

I've seen so many more hypotheses and theories from this chapter, so feel free to add them on! Thank you for reading and letting me share my piece.

[thelambliesdown1974]

Okay but like walking across 🚶‍♂️ the sitting room 🐒🪑 I turn the television 📺 on 🔛 sitting beside you I look into your eyes 👁️ as the sound 🎼 of motor cars 🚗 fade in the night time 🌝 I swear I saw your face change 😲 it didn’t seem quite right 🤔 and it’s hello babe! 👋 with your guardian eyes so blue 👀 hey my baby 👶🏼 dont you know our love ❤️ is true 🫂 coming closer 👬 with our eyes 👁️ a distance falls around our bodies ⬅️➡️ out in the garden 🪴 the moon 🌙 seems very bright 💡 six 6️⃣ saintly shrouded men ✝️ move across the lawn 🏡 slowly the seventh walks in front 🚶‍♂️🚶‍♂️🚶‍♂️ with a torch 🔦 held high in hand 🤚 and it’s hey babe! 👋👶🏼 your suppers waiting for you 🍝 hey my baby! 👋👶🏼 don’t you know our love ❤️ is true 🫂 I’ve been so far from here 🌄 far from your loving arms 😘 it’s good to feel you again 🥰 it’s been a long long time ⏳⌛️… hasn’t it🤔…………………… I know 🤓 a farmer 👨‍🌾 who looks after a farm 🌾 with water clear 💧 he cares for all his harvest 🥕 I know 🤓 a fireman 👨‍🚒 who looks after the fire 🔥… cant you see he’s fooled you all 😈 yes it’s him again 🤯 can you see he’s fooled you all 😢 share his peace ☮️ sign the lease 📑 he’s a super sonic scientist 👨🏻‍🔬 he’s the guaranteed eternal sanctuary man 🙏 look! 👀 look into my mouth 👄 he cries 🗣️ and all the children 👧🏼 passed down many paths 🛤️ I bet my life you’ll walk inside 🚶‍♂️ hand in hand 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 gland in gland 😵‍💫 with a spoonful 🥄 of miracle 🕊️ it’s the guaranteed eternal sanctuary 🙏 (we will rock you 🪨 rock you 🪨 little snake 🐍 we will keep you snug ☺️ and warm 😊…………………… wearing feelings 😁 on our faces 💁‍♂️ while our faces took a rest 😴🛌 we walked across the fields 🌾 to see the children 👦🏼 of the west 🧭 but there was a host of dark skinned warriors 🤺 standing still below the ground 👇🏻 🌎 waiting for battle! ⚔️ fights begun they’ve been released 😡 killing for for peace ☮️ bang bang bang! 💥 bang bang bang! 💥 and they’ve given me a wonderful potion 🧪 but I cannot contain my emotion 😭 and even though I’m feeling good 😌 👍 something tells me 🧐 I better activate my prayer 🙏 capsule 💊 todays the day 📆 to celebrate 🎉 the for have met their fate 🪦 the order for rejoicing 🥳 and dancing 🕺 has come from our warlord 🤴…………………… wandering through the chaos 🥾 the battle has left ⚔️ we climb up the mountain of human flesh 🗻 to a plateau of green grass 🏞️ and green trees 🌳 full of life 🕊️ a young figure 👦 sits still by a pool 🌊 he’s been stamped human bacon 🥓 by some butchery tool 🔪 he is you 🫵 social security 🧑‍⚖️ took care of this lad we watch 👀 in reverence as narcissus 😌 is turned to a flower 🌸 a flower? 🌸 …………………… if you go down ⬇️ to willow farm 🌳 to look for butterflies 🦋 flutterbyes gutter flies 🪰 open your eyes 👁️ it’s full of surprise 😲 eye one lies like a fox 🦊 on the rock 🪨 in the musical box 🎶📦 there’s mum and dad 👨‍👧👩‍👧 and good and bad 😇😈 and everyone happy to be here 😋 there’s Winston Churchill dressed in drag 👠 he used to be a British flag 🇬🇧 plastic bag 🛍️ what a drag 🙄 the frog was a prince 🫅 the prince was a brick 🧱 the brick was an egg 🍳 the egg was a bird 🦅 have you heard 👂 yes! We’re happy as fish 🐟 and gorgeous and geese 🦢 and wonderful clean in the morning 🧼 we’ve got everything 🤑 we’re growing everything 🌱 we’ve got some in ⬅️ we’ve got some out ➡️ we’ve got some wild things 👹 floating about 🕴️everyone 👦👩🧑 we’re changing everyone 😧 you name them all we’ve had them here 👈 and the real stars are still to appear! ⭐️🤩 feel your body melt 🫠 mum 👩 to mud 🪱 to mad 😡 to dad 👨🏻 dad diddly office ✏️ dad diddly office ✏️ you’re all full of ball 🏀 dad 👨🏻 to dam 🦫 to dumb 😛 to mum 👩 mom diddly washing 🧽 mom diddly washing 🧽 you’re all full of ball 🏀 let me hear you lies 👂 we’re living this up 🆙 to the eyes 👀 mama I want you now! 😩

[mermaidgirl30]

✨Just Breathe: The Dinosaur Diaries - Sticky Situation ✨

Series Masterlist

A/N: This is my contribution to @undercoverpena April Showers Challenge! This was a really fun write, and I loved exploring an AU that is near and dear to my heart 💙 Please consider reblogging or leaving comments if you like this piece ☺️ I expanded and decided to do a little series, so be on the lookout for more parts to this 🥰

Series Summary: After going under the wings of doctor Miller, the hottest paleontologist you’ve ever seen, he takes you on a little adventure as his research assistant. You’ll get more than just knowledge and dinosaurs, you’ll also end up getting the sweet scientist who can’t seem to keep his hands off you.

Chapter Summary: You find yourself in the middle of a sticky situation in the pouring rain, not to mention a large T-Rex stalks the area you’re in. Joel steps in and saves the day, and he’s the best at calming you down.

Pairing: paleontologist! Joel x fem! reader

Word Count: 1.4k

Rating: Explicit (18+ Only)

Tags: Fluff, tension, dinosaurs au, Jurassic Park au, kissing, mentions of smut, paleontologist Joel, protective Joel, cute nicknames

Dividers by @saradika-graphics

Your heart thunders in your chest, lightning crackling through your spine as you lean against the dented RV. Rain pours down like a raging monsoon, raindrops like glass cutting into your skin as you shutter in your drenched sweater. You have no breath, no words in your constricted throat as your eyes stay wide, sheer terror coursing through your veins.

“Don’t move,” Joel whispers as he slips his hand around your wrist, his calloused fingers burning through your skin as the heat of his touch makes you feel a little less like you’re on thin ice.

His movements are slow, steady, composed as he pushes his broad back into your chest, his large frame towering over you as he covers you from view. From the large, starving T-Rex that stands mere inches from your face.

You feel its breath, its slimy drool as it dips its massive head and sniffs for its prey. Which is you. You are the prey, and it’s your own damn fault for going outside when it was dark. You knew it wasn’t safe. You knew. Joel warned you. Why didn’t you just listen?

The dinosaur's leathery skin collides against yours, just barely skimming its scratchy body against the surface of your arm as it lifts its head and lets out the loudest roar you’ve ever heard in your life.

Joel squeezes your hand and presses a little closer as he turns his head carefully and whispers against the shell of your ear. “Stay calm. It’ll go away as long as you're silent. Focus for me, sweetheart. Breathe,” he whispers gently against your skin as you feel his plush lips graze against yours, his pine scent filling your senses as it automatically calms your panicked body.

“Joel,” you whisper out terrified, your mouth brushing against his jawline where his soft salt-and-pepper scruff sits, the area you so hungrily lapped against earlier as he had you pinned against the little wooden table in the vehicle, rutting deep inside you as he painted you shades of white between your sticky thighs.

“It’s okay. I’ve got you. Just stay put, sweetheart. Ain’t gonna let anything happen to you,” he says adamantly as his deep, gravelly voice soothes every aching bone in your body.

Your foot catches on the side of a slippery rock and you freeze as you see the ravenous dinosaur turn toward you as its sharp claws dig into the sinking mud that turns into a dirty swimming pool. You hold your breath and close your eyes, trying your best not to make a single sound as Joel takes a step back, crowding your body as you feel his heat encase you as the rain continues to pound against your shaking body.

You can practically hear his soothing voice graze through your mind. Don’t make any movements. Breathe. You’re gonna be just fine.

You feel the rumbling of the jagged rocks underneath and tense your body as you wait for its teeth to rip into your flesh as it swallows you whole. You sink against the side of the RV just waiting for that awful moment when suddenly, you hear a distant roar in the distance. You feel the T-Rex turn toward the noise as it stomps off into the direction of the roar, saving you from what you thought was your watery grave. You hear the distant crashing of green vines and towering trees that fill the jungle. And then it’s quiet, only the sounds of pelting rain hitting the muddy ground.

You keep your eyes closed tight, your fingers flexed as you concentrate on not falling completely apart where you stand. You feel Joel try to pull you out of your misery, but his voice is far away. That deep rumble in a fog as you pretend this didn’t happen, that you didn’t nearly get yourself killed, along with Joel.

“Hey, sweetheart, open your eyes,” he says softly against your ear as you try to fight him off, keeping your eyes closed until you know it’s safe.

Joel shakes you, stirs you from your anxious thoughts and calls your name adamantly as he cups your face and whispers words of affirmation. “You’re alright. C’mon now. Open those pretty eyes for me.”

You bite your lower lip and slowly peel your eyes open and then gasp at the vision that stands before you. Joel stands there in the pouring rain, deft fingers clinging to your jawline as he cups your face affectionately, soft honey eyes staring straight into yours as rain pelts against his tanned skin. Water slips down his hair, his tousled curls slicked back by the rain as his green flannel sits soaked to his broad shoulders, his biceps flexing as he focuses solely on you.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come out here so late. I knew better, and I…”

He cuts you off as he pushes you up against the cool metal of the RV, one hand lingering on your jawline as his other snakes around your hip. His lips crash against yours as you taste sugar and coffee, the perfect mix that sets your taste buds on fire as you drink him down hungrily.

You part your lips and allow him to slot his tongue in. He laps at the inside of your mouth, your tongues colliding together as you breathe in the smell of autumn leaves and rain water that drips off his lips onto yours.

The kiss is hungry, romantic as you slide your hands through his dripping wet curls, twisting your fingers around him so you can be that much closer to him. He lifts you up and wraps your legs around his torso as you pant into his mouth, his calloused fingers digging into your skin as it burns for him.

It’s like a dream, the pouring rain and muted sparks of lightning across the dark sky mixing together to make the heated kiss that much more romantic. You stay like that for minutes just getting lost in each other, lost in the flavor of him.

When you’re both completely out of breath, Joel sets you down on the ground and rests his forehead against yours as he chuckles lightly, his smile lighting up his honey eyes like Christmas lights that shine bright just for you.

“What’s so funny?” you ask as you push against his broad chest. “I nearly got us killed,” you groan as you sulk into the back of the RV.

Joel cups your chin and pulls your face up to his as he looks calmly at you with a soft smile playing on his lips. “Next time jus’ be a little more careful, sweetheart,” he murmurs as he dips down and places a gentle kiss on your cheek.

Before you can ask why he isn’t mad, he bends down and picks something up against the rocks that sit at your feet. “Besides, I wouldn’t have found this if it wasn’t for you,” he grins as he holds up a broken, sharp black claw that clearly came from the T-Rex.

Your eyes go wide as you trace the edge of the claw. “Is this…”

“Yeah, it sure is,” he beams as he slides his thumb over the sharp curve of the claw. “Came right from that Tyrannosaurus rex. Now I have physical proof. Exactly what I needed to collect to do some data research and some tests in the lab.”

His eyes light up like sparkling fireworks as he places the specimen in the pocket of his denim jeans. He hooks his arms around the back of your waist and brings you closer to his chest as he grazes his lips over the sheen of your rain covered lips.

You grip his damp flannel shirt and smile up at him as you brush your nose over his. “My smart paleontologist finally gets his real life dinosaur experience, yeah?” you hum as he brushes his wet lips over yours.

“Mhm, this smart scientist wants to go make love to his gorgeous assistant in the RV. Maybe take a warm shower first, make some hot coffee, maybe sit you on my lap so I can kiss you again and again and again.” He grabs a hold of your hair and presses his plush lips against yours once more as you fall into his arms, completely and utterly hooked on him. The man you fell head over heels for that first day in the lab.

When you pull your lips from his, he takes your hand and squeezes as he drags you back inside. “C’mon, sweetheart. Let’s get you back inside where it’s warm. Wanna go make love to my girl.”

Tags 💙 @keylimebeag @sawymredfox @amyispxnk @princesatracionera @mountainsandmayhem @lotusbxtch @littlevenicebitch69 @syd-djarin

[nardo-headcanons]

Any AU or otherwise headcanons about Obito fren 🤗🥰

Obito, Obito, what do I do with you? Obito is an intruiging character, and the people who declare him an 'Incel loser' can respectfully suck my clit. I've never really written for Obito before, so please forgive me if this is a little OOC. big thanks to @danceofthexdragons for requesting.

Scientist!Obito Headcanons

The AU that has currently captured my mind is the scientist/researcher AU, and I already have a few ideas.

Obito Uchiha is a renowned physicist with a specialization in particle physics. His favorite particle is the neutrino, they intrigue him.

Once a bright young student, he believed in the principles of academia, the scientific method, everything. He wanted to explore the world and answer all its questions to humanity, his curiosity being his main drive.

As he entered high school, it was the first time he encountered someone as smart as him, if not even smarter. Rin Nohara. He, Rin and Kakashi all went into the same class and eventually took AP physics classes together, entered the same university and attended all the same lectures.

The dark side of academia caught up with him at the latest when he completed his doctorate. His then lab partner, Kakashi, had done everything in his power to publish the paper the three of them had worked on together. With the publication being Kakashi's main focus, far behind the mental health of his friends, he got credit for all the ideas, while Obito and Rin remained empty-handed.

Rin and Obito used to work in a lot of UV labs, and since he always sat next to her to shield her, it has led to one side of his face showing way more wrinkles than the others. One time when they worked on their next big invention, a teleportation device, one of the voltage regulators malfunctioned, getting them both caught up in an accident. While Rin almost instantly died, Obito got away with the right side of his body being scarred and shriveled up.

The shock and stress of the traumatic situation has made his hair turn white, making him a victim of Marie Antoinette Syndrome.

Even though he was deeply scarred, both literally and figuratively, he brushed it off as a single incident. But the longer he worked in academia, the plagiarism, the discrediting of female scientists and the publish-or-perish-dilemma of public research got to him, making him publish all his papers under an alias: Tobi.

[crispytime]

Do you think Gaster’s (Handplates) actions are forgivable?

I know my whole online presence is thristing and praising this stupid skeleton man but joy and whimsy aside, his actions were cruel and not justifiable no matter what you tell me. Whats that one saying that goes like “Those who cry after are no better than those who don’t” or something

Short answer: No, absolutely not 😰

Long Answer: His actions were HORRENDOUS 😭 He knew what he was doing was wrong and illegal yet he still did it “for the greater good.” He shows guilt during and after, even in a Mercyplates variant where he didn’t even do anything he still knew what he was doing was wrong. Torturing 2 CHILDREN, on top of that YOUR BIOLOGICAL children, is one of the worst things you can do 😕 As much as I can go off about everything he’s done to those 2, from a story perspective I LOVE his whole arc, even if it was cruel. my points are all over the place so sorry if its confusing or off topic. Who’s ready for an English teacher rant abt why curtains are blue

I like how his story is KIND OF told backwards. He is seen from the brothers’ perspective mostly as well which influences our perspective of him. He’s introduced as a stoic and cold scientist who will do anything for the sake of scientific discovery and freedom, we get very small glimpses at his true character that can easily be missed behind the mask he puts up and all the torture and head blowing up 😭 As the lab arc continues and he starts making more and more bad decisions fueled off his curiousity, it’s super easy to just say, “he’s a horrible person.”

Near the end of the lab arc as he starts to wear himself out, his mask starts to fade and he slips up more often. We can see him make decisions from his heart instead of what he told himself he should be doing. Of course Sans and Papyrus catch on 🥰 But this also gives Papyrus a chance to reach through to him. This time we are able to see more of who he really is. In his discussion w Papyrus about the little skeleton in the war (that obviously isnt him 🙄 /s) He is plagued with guilt following the war, he believes that if he had done something, he could have saved his family and species. This little snippit of his backstory tells us that this is his main motivater (and later more emphasized in little flashbacks after his fall.) We know the King had to essentially sacrifice himself in order to free his people, and in brief pages we see Asgore means A LOT to him. He won’t let himself “sit around and do nothing” as he is about to lose one of the only people he has left. As he and Papyrus have a debate about if the little skeleton was right or wrong, he does lash out. It’s easier for him to accept that he is a bad person doing bad things and he does take it rough from Paps 😬

We can sympathize with him now because we know he is doing it out of good intention. That he wanted to find SOMEWAY to break the barrier and save Asgore. Despite his efforts, he also grows attatched to the brothers and it sways him to drop the project near the end of the lab arc, ESP after the goopster incident. Even with his interactions with Asgore and Alphys, we see he isn’t really the person he pretends to be. He cares about them, he cares about the brothers. During the goopster incident where he fights for the brothers’ lives against his junk data(?) we also gain another point to sympathize with him because even if his life was on the line, he still jumped to defend the brothers (the whole time denying it and being exposed by his evil goop clone). He is no longer this evil scientist who is torturing 2 little kids for the sake of science. We see he is also a war victim who is doing all he can to protect the ones he cares about (even if it’s at the expense of others). For some people, it gets harder and harder to label him. He is a good (and traumatized) person doing bad things. Does that still make him good or does it make him bad?

After his fall and we become way more brothers focused, we start to get flashbacks into Gaster’s perspective. Parts that we didn’t see before, the war, his relationship with other characters, and his build up to starting the project. To keep summarize bc its already really long, its my point earlier. It builds to his character, we gain more depth and personality. Gaster becomes more “human” yadda yadda yadda 😿

In the void, we see he has been floating between the bonds of reality torturing HIMSELF essentially. On top of the insane guilt he felt after everything he’s done, it all meant nothing. He sacrificed his entire life into a project just for his entire existence to be forgotten and yeah he’s gonna be pretty jacked up. More sympathetic YOU GET MY POINT. He tries to push Sans and Papyrus away but Papyrus won’t allow it. Gaster knows and accepts that what he did was unforgivable and we get this sad anime angst battle between the 2. Gaster has shown a LOT of remorse and Papyrus uses this as hope to “redeeming” him. Sans not so much, he is rightfully angry about all the pain and trauma Gaster has permanently inflicted on them both. From Sans’ perspective, he knew he didn’t deserve what happened to him. He was left scarred and bitter after everything and he cannot forgive him for that. But for Papyrus, being who he is, wants his dad. He’s seen from Gaster’s actions (and memories) that he is a “good person” inside. That he made choices based on his past experiences. Papyrus DOES still recognize that they were bad decisions and he also didn’t deserve any of it but gives him a chance to become better, he knows Gaster WANTS to be better. He makes up with Sans and Papyrus (mostly papyrus) (only papyrus..) and they live happily ever after!….yeah… 🥰

Long story short, Gaster made a lot of atrocious decisions because of past trauma. He cared for people and felt the need to save them in an attempt to heal something broken in him, but in the process he made things significantly worse for himself and the brothers who were unfairly wrapped into his mess. He is a victim who became an abuser, projecting his past experiences onto the brothers in cruel and inhumane ways, hurting and torturing them in horrific ways for the sake of his curiousity and making them “strong enough” to achieve his already impossible goal in a blur of desperation.

He is a morally grey character which causes the big divide of opinions on him. Which is fair honestly, he’s complex. (i probably mischaracterized him in my rant too, sorry 😢)

I don’t think his actions are forgivable, no matter how much remorse he shows or how much he changes and improves. I’ve run out of words to describe how bad his actions were. He can become better, yes. But I will never forgive and forget something of that level.

thanks for reading my ginormous rant, I’m sorry if it was confusing hard to read, or just didn’t make sense 😭 I’m a disorganized person with a chaotic thinking style 💔

feel free to tell me your thoughts! I’d like to read them :)💛

[agoldengalaxy]

🥰🫂 dealers choice for the fandom 👍

emoji drabble prompts

🥰- saying ‘I love you’ without saying it

🫂- comforting hugs

—

It was early morning on the Stan o’ War II, early enough that only the beginning of a foggy dawn peeked through the ship’s windows. Stan was leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, his arms folded over his chest as he watched Ford pore over a myriad of papers spread across the counter, a half-empty mug beside him, forgotten.

“You don’t look so good, Sixer,” Stan finally said, making Ford jump, his head whipping around to look over at him. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Oh. Stan,” he breathed, “you startled me.”

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “And you didn’t answer the question.”

Ford’s eyes were somewhat bloodshot, his hair a wild mess, sticking out in every direction, which Stan knew was due to the way he’d run his fingers through it. “For a little while,” he replied after a much too long pause, then waved his hand dismissively into a gesture toward the pages. “But look! I think I’ve finally figured out a way for us to defeat that kraken!”

Sighing quietly, Stan stepped forward, peering over his brother’s shoulder at the mess of equations and possible machinery and weaponry ideas. “That’s good and all, but have you even looked at yourself?”

Ford faltered. “What, do I have something on my face?”

“No, you knucklehead. You’re…I dunno, all mad scientist-y. It happens when you don’t sleep.”

Dropping his gaze, Ford simply shrugged, pulling his papers all together again, gently tapping the edges on the counter so they’d be in a neat pile. “I’ll be fine. You worry too much.”

“I think I worry the right amount,” Stan huffed. “Now are you gonna tell me what’s wrong, or am I gonna haul your ass to bed myself?”

Ford worried at his bottom lip, still refusing to look Stan in the eye. “I’m…” He sighed, seemingly struggling with the words, for once. “I don’t like sleeping.”

Stan raised a brow. “Yeah, I coulda guessed that.”

“It’s…you don’t understand.”

The words hung in the air for a moment. Stan knew he could get frustrated here, and perhaps he would have done exactly that a few months ago. Instead, he nodded. “I don’t. So tell me.”

Ford seemed caught off guard by that. His brows knit together, and he fiddled with his fingers, seemingly choosing his words carefully as he always did. “Before the portal, Bill would take over my mind while I was sleeping. He’d take my body and punish it when I tried to stop him.” A shiver ran down his spine, as if he were remembering something particularly unpleasant. He continued, “And…I was alone in those dimensions for so long. I couldn’t trust anyone. I wasn’t sure where was safe and where wasn’t safe.”

Feeling his mouth go dry, Stan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Ford, you’re…you’re safe here.”

“I know.” He sighed quietly, finally displaying the weight of his exhaustion on his face. “But for half of my life, I’ve been afraid of sleeping. It’s not a habit so easily forgotten.”

Stan wasn’t sure what came over him, but the next moment, he had leaned forward, enveloping Ford in a tight hug. Ford stiffened beneath the embrace for a second before allowing himself to relax and return it.

“I’m sorry,” Stan mumbled. “Didn’t realize it was that bad.”

Ford chuckled quietly, slightly muffled into Stan’s shoulder. “Well, there’s a reason I kept it all to myself.”

Pulling back, Stan looked into his brother’s eyes; tired, red-rimmed, quietly sad. “C’mon. Up, away from the kitchen,” he insisted, practically pulling him up. “You’ve been sitting here too long. Let’s watch something.”

“But, Stan, what about the kraken -”

“The kraken can circle us for one more day. Who cares. I’ll punch it in the eye again if I have to.” He dragged Ford toward their couch, sitting him down, and grabbed the two blankets that were left folded on the side. He ignored the protests and placed one over Ford’s shoulders, the other on his lap, and then closed the curtains, making it slightly dark. He sat beside him and picked up the remote, flicking through channels until he saw a channel that looked somewhat relaxing.

“Heh. You remind me of Mom right now,” Ford murmured. “Remember what she used to do when we got sick?”

Stan blinked, realizing he must have done it subconsciously. “Yeah. Wrap us in blankets and watch reruns.”

After a quiet yawn, Ford smiled slightly. “Your memory really is getting better.”

Returning the smile, Stan shook his head. “Only ‘cause you helped me, Poindexter.”

For a long few minutes, the only sound in the room was the quiet dialogue on the television. When Stan looked over at Ford, he found him finally sleeping, his face relaxed, his mouth wide open. Stan smiled to himself, lowered the television’s volume, and made himself comfortable.

He wasn’t going anywhere. Ford was safe with him.

[neteyamslovrr]

For your 2k event 😊 (I'm so happy for you btw! 🥰👏👏)

Fluff #9 - “if you cry, i’ll cry ─ and that won’t be fun for anyone.”

With Tsu'tey x h!Reader maybe 😊

Absolutely no pressure though and again; congratulations on reaching 2k! 😁🎉🎉

SKY-WOMEN LOVE GIFTS

here you go lovely!! i hope you enojy. this was actually my first time writing human!reader so eek. but i liked it. tsu'tey being ooc but y'know him being alive isn't canon lmao

It took Tsu’tey a long time to warm up to the left over scientists of the sky people. Like a seriously long time.

While Jake did help get rid of some of the hostility towards the scientists, it was really you that did the heavy-lifting. A small, fragile weak human in his eyes. On a planet where not even the air serves you. Maybe it was pity that drew him closer towards you, or maybe it was your interesting alien self. Who knows?

Months passed as he got to know you. You would follow him through the forest to study more of the flora, involve yourself with the clan’s cultures and always be there to lend him a listening ear.  

He couldn’t deny that his heart grew fond of your company. The way your tiny alien hands would grab onto him when you lost your balance. The way he would have to wait for you to catch up to him every other step. The way you were so committed to loving his home. He found himself constantly thinking about you as a mate.

He wasn’t quite sure how to show his affections towards you. He knew the usually the traditions would not be received as well, as you did not understand them. He didn’t enjoy asking Jake for help, but it was worth it for you.

“What? You want to court Y/N? Didn’t know you were into sky-people brother.” Tsu’tey snarled at him, too serious to be caught up with Jake’s antics.

“I want to court Y/N, I am here for advice not ridicule.” Jake gave him a strong pat on the back followed with a proud smile.

“Sky-women like gifts. All women like gifts! Make her something and I’m 100% sure she’ll treasure it. Especially if it’s from you.” Tsu’tey wondered if something handmade would be up to your culture’s standard, especially considering the odd demon technology your people have built. Would it not be mundane?

He may as well give it a shot. “Thankyou brother.” And he was off, already conjuring ideas in his mind of what to create for you. What would be suitable for someone as tiny as you. He would have to be mindful of the size of his gift. Would you want jewellery? Maybe a knife? No. you don’t need a knife. You would never wear his cultures clothing, too embarrassed because of your culture’s standard.

Maybe a bracelet was the best thing to make. Yes. It’s perfect.

It had been a couple days since you had conversed with Tsu’tey, too busy with your studies and he seemed to be going away to do god knows what. It disheartened you a little, you enjoyed your time with the tall man. Your heart always beat a little faster around him, eyes lingered longer, time felt shorter.

You were standing near some of the plants right outside of the base of the camp the people had set up. You were way too immersed in your instruments, that you didn’t realise the lean man stalking behind you, simply looking down to observe what was interesting you so much.

“That is flefle.” You jumped, grabbing onto your heart as you felt your soul slip you because you were so frightened.

“Oh! Jesus you scared me.” Tsu’tey never really understood your human expressions, but he though you sounded cute saying them at least.

“I have something for you.” You furrowed your brows, confused on what he could possibly give to you. His hands were fidgeting behind his back, nervously rolling onto the balls of his feet and back down again.

“Oh can I see?” Tsu’tey nodded taking one of your small hands in his, delicately placing the bracelet in your palm. You gasped switching your gaze rapidly between Tsu’tey and the beautiful, beaded bracelet that was give to you. The beads had small engravings in them, while they alternated in colours from blue to green. ���This is beautiful Tsu’tey!”

“Do you like it?” You nodded swiftly.

“Of course I love it, I might cry it’s so pretty. Thankyou!” Tsu’tey’s face grew concerned as you mentioned crying.

“Do not cry. If you cry, I will cry and that wont be fun for anyone.” You giggled at his words, the way he was so serious was amusing. Stepping forward to give him a thankful hug, your head resting just below his ribs. He stiffened against your touch, hands hovering over you, scared to hug you too tight.

Letting go of him you held the open bracelet in your hands. “Could you tie it up for me?” Tsu’tey nodded his hands careful as his fingers worked swiftly to tie the knot around your wrist.

“It is not too tight?”

“No it is perfect. Thankyou.”

[bitchesuntitled]

Walk in the Park

Little Dieter drabble for the @dieterbravobrainrotclub ❤️ Thank you @sweetenerobert & @jay-zzle for giving this a look over 🥰

Pairing: Dieter & GN!Reader

Warning: Cussing

Masterlist||AO3 Link

Divider by @saradika-graphics

“Fuck!”

You startle, shooting up from the bench you decided to rest at, as a man stumbles out of the bushes.

“Are you real?!” He asks panicked, scrubbing his hands along the sides of his face, twigs and leaves scattered throughout his dark messy curls, eyes hidden behind alien eye-shaped sunglasses you’ve seen at a local party store.

Great, a deranged stranger. He looks familiar but you can’t quite place him, gripping the mace on your keychain tighter. Wary of his presence.

“I just—“ he says, taking a deep breath and leaning over. Palms against his thighs as he exhales slowly, “I’m all mixed up out here. A friend of mine suggested doing shrooms and taking a walk, to get to know nature, all that bullshit. Horrible idea. Ever seen a frog up close and personal? Scary, unpredictable fuckers. Lead me astray hours ago.”

You couldn’t help but feel sympathetic for the man, having had your share of similar shrooms trips.

“Feeling okay?” You ask, deciding to take the kind route, and sitting back down. The man is dressed in soft pj pants, a threadbare shirt, crocs, and a bathrobe. Interesting choice for a trip to the park but you’ve seen worse.

“I think I’m finally coming down,” The man shrugs, “My name’s Dieter by the way,” he adds, extending his hand for you to shake.

“Nice to meet you, Dieter,” you say, grabbing his clammy hand, giving a small shake, and sharing your name.

“Do you mind if I sit?” Dieter asks, pointing at the spot next to you.

“Go right on ahead,” you nod towards the bench.

You begin making small talk, sharing bits and pieces about each other’s lives. You learn he’s an actor, which is why he looked so familiar. Award-winning actor Dieter Bravo, the trainwreck that he is. The bathrobe should have been your tip, can’t even begin to count the number of times you’d seen that featured on all the covers of gossip magazines.

“Okay, now let’s get to the hard-hitting questions,” Dieter says, clapping his hands together, the alien glasses sliding down his aquiline nose, “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“Negative.”

“What about soulmates?”

“Not sure yet,” you laugh, shrugging, “Never found anyone worth my time.”

“That so?” Dieter asks, eyebrows peaking above the frame of his unique sunglasses.

“What is with those ridiculous sunglasses?” you ask, unable to contain a laugh, “I cannot take you seriously. You’re supposed to be some award-winning actor, yet you’re literally wearing pajamas and costume store sunglasses shaped like alien-eyes.”

“Inspiration, my dear,” Dieter smirks, “Inspiration.”

“Inspiration?”

“Of course! It’s for my next role, I’m a scientist on the search for answers of another life form.”

“So what?” You laugh, “You take shrooms, slap on some alien glasses, take a stroll through the park, and think you’re going to find your character?”

“Next question,” Dieter says, ignoring you, “Do you believe in aliens?”

“Of course.”

“Last question,” Dieter giggles, “Wanna have sex with me?”

You sit back, biting your cheek, looking at him. The patchy scruff on his face, his nose, his hair still scattered with leaves, and the earring dangling off his earlobe.

“Take the glasses off.”

He huffs but removes them, letting you get a good look at his face without anything obstructing your view. You look at those dark orbs, pupils still a little dilated, shaking your head.

“Maybe next time” you smirk, getting up and walking away.

[imagining-in-the-margins]

Do you have any or would you be interested in something where Spencer fucks the reader but doesn’t even take her clothes off all the way? Something about a hiked skirt and panties pushed to the side

Hey friend! I have quite a few fics with partially clothed sex. I've listed most of them here 🥰

Teacher’s Pet: Reader insists on being a problem for her favorite Professor.

My Boss’s Daughter: Spencer’s fling with his boss’s daughter is definitely going to get him fired.

Truce: Spencer doesn’t like his new boss.

Be Still: When Spencer is given the all clear to “exercise” after he was shot, his girlfriend decides to go for a ride.

Jazz & Jealousy: On a visit from New Orleans, Ethan takes a liking to Spencer’s crush. He is not thrilled.

Opposing Counsel: Spencer runs into his childhood rival at trial for a case. Now that they’re older, they found a new way to resolve their differences.

I Like It Like That: Spencer is jealous after a rowdy party.

Funhouse Mirror: SSA Reader promised Spencer he’d be surprised by her costume of the Doctor for the Halloween Party. To her credit, he definitely was.

The Objective & The Occult: Reader is a witch and Spencer is a scientist, can I make it any more obvious.

“Bro Code” Be Damned: Spencer decides that the Bro Code isn’t really a code to be taken seriously when Derek’s girlfriend is feeling neglected.

Devil in the Backseat: Reader is a little too much for Spencer (and he’s into it).

Schrödinger’s Relationship (Part 1, Part 2): Reader finds out Spencer has been dating a kind and cute woman (when he’s not spending the night at her house).

Lily of the Valley ❤️ (Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3): Unsub!Reid. Spencer was found guilty but mentally ill after the torture and murder of several men. He finds solace in his psychiatrist at the institution.

Dark Side (Part 1, Part 2): What can Reader say? Spencer in a prison jumpsuit is just too hard to resist.

As well as several chapters of my series:

[COMPLETE] Here to Misbehave: Spencer meets a girl he can’t get enough of at the nightclub, then quickly realizes she is not supposed to be there. Series Masterlist

[CURRENT] The Birds & The Bees: Prof!Spencer, Virgin!Reader. Reader interviews for a position as Dr. Spencer Reid’s Teaching Assistant, and Spencer learns something special about her. Series Masterlist

I hope you enjoy!

Thanks for reading ☺️

[adilynnyuri]

TOMORROW IS DA ADILYNN BITCH'S B'DAY Y'ALL 😼☝🏻🤭

(So imma do new challenge which even you guys can join🎀)

🪧Note : Never say the word "try" Instead say "imma do my experiments 🤓☝🏻"

if you can't believe something that it/they can actually manifest, my advice is THROW THAT THOUGHT AWAY🥰 COZ IT AIN'T TRUE👺

Be a cute scientist and affirm for things/people for fun and stuffs/people will move to your lap automatically. Why? Because you are fucking precious and you deserve to get your face filled with happiness and your bag filled with money.

Challenge : it ain't no modern technique chill.

💟Can be used for shifting or whatever tf you wanna do.

So what's it?

Exaggeration🗣️

Exaggerate your affirmations as much as you can to make your "logical" Mind to shut the fuck up and replicate exactly what you wanted immediately. You can use umbrella affirmations by saying,

"I am so fast in manifesting that my 3d can never ever dare to show some shit that doesn't resonate with me"

⭐Or even specific affirmations for your sp/dp/df/db

"I have the clearest/perfect face/body in this whole universe which cannot be compared"

"My sp is so obsessed with me that they feel so attached to me unstoppably"

"I got into my desires college/university/school exactly like how I wanted!! They literally pay me to study there!! "

"I have the coolest people around me who give and do every little thing I ever wanted!! "

I suggest you to use umbrella affirmations for you to deny the fact that you are not able to get certain person/thing. There's nothing called you can't get. Everything is yours. People around you are totally controlled by YOU.

No one can stop you or your instant manifesting ass.

You can also use specific affirmations of course! 🎀

The main goal is - never think/expect bad or undesired events or people activities.

EXPECT ETHEREALLY FORTUNATE EVENTS OR PEOPLE ACTIVITIES. ACTUALLY DON'T EXPECT. BECAUSE YOU ALREADY HAVE IT/THEM.

Go slay. Never ever even think of having a small doubt in anything. YOU ARE THE TOP BITCH AS ALWAYS!!!

I will update you guys with results soon! 😉

With lots of love,

ADILYNN YURI🤍🌷