#noone leaves that scenario alive.

[allmightyscroll-swag]

Hey! Ever seen fire that shows you your worst fears?

Ẉ̙̭̯̳̓ͥ͌́́̿̃̆̏̕͢͜͜_̸̨̢̢̛̲̰͇̱̩͊ͧ̅͂̐̊͒̌̕͢͡ơ̴̴̵̸̻͚̙͓̥̙̤̜̪̥͎͚͎͇̭ͧ̃̀͋̊͌̏̅̂̀̂̑̀̏̋̚͜͟͟͝͞û̸̸̩̖̤̼͇͉̹̟̟̯̘̗͍̹͔ͦ̆̋̿̋ͧ̔͐͛̿̂ͮ̄͜͡ͅͅl̴̷̵̷̷̡̠̤̲̱̦͖̯͔̗̘̠̩̱͎̝̉͊̄̈́̈͛̄ͣ͆̊̀͐̾́̂́̈́ͬ̋͒̓̈́̚͠ď̛͉̥͔̻̩̻͇̝͈̓̏ͦ̑ͫͩ͘ ỷ̷̶̡̩̘͔̰̪͎̹̗̜̣̺̝͍̖̬̥̬̪͍̫̯̆ͥ̑̉͑̏̌̿ͩ͆̈́ͭ̏͜o̷̢̻͎̹̙̰͈̫̙̪͚͕͛͋̄̎̌ͨ̀ͣ̌ͫ̒̒̓̈́͆ͤͬͬ̍͋͆̾͗͑̓ͫ̒̂͗͞u̴̡̫͉̰̞̪̜̖̞̦̺̝̭͚͓ͮ̔͋̋͋̇͆̀̋͆́͆̐̌̀ͬ̈ͮ̍̓͌͒͜͝͡͡ ļ̰̯̻͉̉̌̀̀̔́͘ī̴̡̢̻̥͎̩̹̰͙̟͒̇͋̐ͣͬ́̑̄̏̾ͪ͛́̆̓̿͂ͨͥ͘̚͜͞k̝̳̉̀͠e͓̮̰̎͊̔̕ t̸̡̧̜̫̻̯̮̥̻̙͈͕̅̎͂ͫ́̂̊̄͆͆̉̚ơ̴̙̱̮̬̠̠̍̂ͮͯ̓ͬ?̣̥̲̾ͥͯ̔̏ͅ_̸̷̞̺̀͌̆̔̚

-No Fun in Fungus

@tmnt-fandom-family-reunion

CONTENT WARNING FOR BLOOD/GORE, MURDER, AND CHARACTER DEATH

He can feel everything. Every step, every move of his arms, every beat of his heart, every crawl of the kraang tissue. Feel the flesh between his teeth and hear every sob as he tears it off. Every involuntary movement that he can't do anything to fight against.

He screams in his head but no words come out. He wants to throw up but nothing happens. He watches the light leave his brother's eyes and he can't do anything about it.

Leo is a prisoner in his own body as he experiences a slaughter.

[theswissgirl]

from here on until forever - Demetri Volturi

Demetri Volturi was the first ever guy I had a serious fictional crush on on, like it was bad there were so many scenarios I created in my head but there was one that repeated in my head like a never ending movie

And I'm going to write it now

a timeline through the movies like key moments from each film (that obviously features him and my own plot) and the relationship is slowly going to build from there.

And I plan on posting it in parts so New Moon is part 1.

Character:

Name: Evangeline Swan (picture her as you want)

Sister: Bella Swan

status: human (will be changed)

Vampiric ability : seismic sense (later on)

Mate: Demetri Volturi

word count: 3.7k

and obviously all credit to the author of The Twilight Saga and everyone involved in the process of the movies.

___________________________________________________________

New Moon : The Start of Forever

You were sat in the yellow sports car which Alice Cullen had hijacked and was operating with dangerous speed towards the city of Volterra, Italy, where you knew nothing good was going to expect you when you arrived.

Lush green fields of grass and trees could be seen in your peripheral vision, there was something so scarily calming about it. But of course, Bella was too busy bouncing nervously in the passenger seat to admire the scenery, holding onto the dashboard harshly "I'm guessing you didn't rent his car?" she asked Alice.

You snickered quietly.

of course she didn't

"I figured you wouldn't be opposed to grand theft auto" Alice replied swiftly, briefly glancing over at Bella, who was beginning to look a little nauseous from the curves and pot holes in the road, "Not today" Bella rushed out.

Suddenly, you noticed Alice's eyes begin to glaze over and your curiosity was engaged, she was having a premonition.

Bella caught wind immediately.

"What? What do you see?" Bella asked her vampiric friend, a small hint of anxiety in her voice as she slowly feared for the worst and she had a bad feeling her vampire boyfriend had set some sort of plan in motion.

"Alice, are you okay?" you asked her, speaking up for the first time in a while.

Alice brushed you off, "They refused him" Alice said, narrowing her eyes in concern.

"Sooo" Bella pushed.

"He's going to make a scene, show himself to the humans" Alice said, glancing at both you and Bella

"that can't end well" you mumbled, meeting Alice's eyes in the mirror and having your thought confirmed as Alice nodded her head in agreement whilst keeping a steady eye on the prevailing road conditions ahead, steering the wheel smoothly and precisely.

"No.. when?!" Bella's voice was sharp with angst.

"He's going to wait until noon, when the sun is at it's highest" Alice let out a small gasp as her vision came to an end, making you think that she saw something upsetting.

You may not have liked Edward for all the shit he put Bella through, but you weren't the kind of person who would wish suffering on anyone.

"God Alice, you gotta hurry"

"There's Volterra"

___________________________________________________________

Bella rushed off to save her boyfriend through the sea of red coats, as per the tradition of St. Marcus day, celebrating the expulsion of vampires. You however, stayed with Alice and looked for a spot to leave the stolen vehicle.

Alice turned to look at you seriously as she covered every inch of her exposed skin, which was mostly her face, "Evangeline I want you to listen carefully to me, when we get to the castle do not do anything to attract attention" she said, looking you straight in the eyes.

you nodded wordlessly, worry growing within you as you sat still in the backseat of the car and feeling it come to a halt just behind the massive castle where the Volturi resided.

You weren't going to question her, you were about to step into the layer of vampires and you wanted to do everything in your powers to come out alive.

"Come on, let's go" she said and climbed out of the car, prompting you do the same and following behind her as she navigated through the areas covered with shade.

Time felt like it passes too fast as you were suddenly in front of a door with a very old and wooden looking latch "remember what I said" Alice said suddenly before breaking the latch and opening the door, stepping inside and you following right on her tail.

"Come guys, its a festival, you wouldn't want to cause a scene" Alice said smugly, whilst you awkwardly tried to close the door behind you but giving up after 2 seconds when the stupid thing did not want to listen.

Suddenly, your movement froze and you felt like the small hair on your skin was beginning to dance on the back of your neck, making an intense shiver run down your spine before spreading all over your body like a tsunami devouring anything in its way.

You looked up to find the source of this sensation, skipping over the beautiful old and italien structure when your eyes finally settled on a blonde man, dressed from head to toe in black. What actually caught your attention was his blood red eyes and how hauntingly captivating they were, even more as they met yours.

"Enough" a set of footsteps could be heard clacking on the ground and you watched as a young girl approach, pulling her hood from her head.

"Jane" Edward said quietly, acknowledging her presence.

As Edward's voice registered in your brain, you snapped your eyes away from the beautiful blonde individual and averted them to the ground, a small blush growing on your face in the process.

"Aro sent me to see what was taking so long" the girl, Jane, said and looked over Bella and you with bright and bloody eyes, not as beautiful or inviting as the other ones, before she turned around and began walking back to where she came from.

"Just do what she says" Alice whispered to you as you began to walk alongside her, your breath hitching in your throat as you walked past the blond vampire again, even more so when he started walking next to you.

Your heart was having a personal fiesta in your chest, the pace it was pumping at made you think you were about to fall to the floor from cardiac arrest, and it was all because of him.

Butterflies grew rampantly fast in your stomach, your fingers trembled as almost irresistible itch to just "accidentally" touch them to his was difficult to shove aside and your entire body felt like it was coming alive

And no words had even been exchanged yet.

After an elevator ride with a charged atmosphere, you found yourself walking down stone made stairs, the staircase being dimly lit by the light just outside the door.

You tuned out the small conversation Edward and Bella shared, choosing to primarily focus on not tripping and making a horrible first impression on the beautiful you may or may not already have a crush on.

You felt your neves growing as the more you felt like you approaching the belly of the beast that were the 3 king of the Volturi, especially since Alice told you the stories of what happens those who are exposed to the world of vampires of if you betray it.

The receptionist greeting you as you walked out had you snapped out of your thoughts and your eyes, on their own accord, flittered back to the breathtaking individual who walked beside you.

But the off-putting thought? she was human.

"is she human?" bella asked not-so-quietly, looking at Edward in his fancy red robe which you thought looked ridiculous on him.

"Yes"

"Does she know?"

"yes"

"Then why would-" Bella cut herself as realization dawned on her, "she wants to be".

"And so she will be" a shiver went down your spine as you heard him speak for the very first time, and it made your heart palpate faster. His voice was the right amount of deep and adorned with an english accent, making him all the more enticing.

You felt like there was an invisible cord pulling you with a prepostourley strong force towards him, and the more you tried to heed Alice's warnings about the Volturi, you find yourself beginning to lean more and more in the opposite direction.

Suddenly, a hand snaked its way across your back and settled itself on your waist, tracing small and delicate circles on whatever exposed skin was accessible to him. Almost as if to assure that you won't be hurt as long as he was there.

And the surprising part? you felt safe with him.

"Or dessert" Jane said and you found yourself being glad that you were protected.

Jane pushed open two gigantic wooden double doors and walked into a massive throne and of course, on two majestic chairs sat the 3 volturi kings.

Aro, Caius and Marcus.

Aro seemed to be excited.

Caius was glaring at visitors with annoyance and anger.

Marcus looked... well, rather somber.

Alice had tried to grab your arm and make you go in the same direction as her, the beautiful was quicker and pulled you closer with whilst moving to somewhere in the back of the room and away from the action.

Bella sent you a questioning glance, wondering what you were doing but you had no answer for her so you just shrugged your shoulders and smiled reassuringly at her.

"What a happy surprise! Bella is alive after all" Aro said, his tone chipper as he clapped his hands together, a little too chipper for greeting someone who knew about the existence of vampires...

"Isn't that wonderful? I love a happy ending" you watched Aro approach Bella and Edward, biting your lip in anxiety as your sister was dangerously close to having her life ended.

You weren't aware of it, but your hand subconsciously grabbed ahold of his sleeve and squeezed the material tightly in your grasp.

Aro grabbed ahold of Edwards hand, "they are so rare" he said before his eyes widened and glazed over and it reminded you of when Alice experiences one of her visions .

"La tua cantante, both of the swan sisters" he said, eyes flickering over to you in an instant with newfound curiosity bright in his eye before he decided to make his way over to you.

"My dear Demetri, it seems as though you found your mate" He said, stopping in front of you and looking you dead in the eye, making you shift a little closer to you to seek safety.

"So thats his name, Demetri. Suits him beautifully" you thought yourself.

"Yes my lord" Demetri said, his grip on your waist tightening ever so slightly but enough to make you crave more and be closer to him, even if you didn't understand why you wanted to close to someone who eats your kind for breakfast.

Aro's eyes go to you and you freeze, you couldn't decipher that look in his eyes, curiosity but combined with something else and you weren't sure if you wanted to know... or witness.

"Their blood appeals to you both" he started and you noticed a change in his facial expression "it makes me thirsty" you froze and moved closer to Demetri almost automatically.

"Aro can read every thought you've ever had, with one touch" Edward interjects, his voice making you startle in surprise and your gaze went to him, seeing that he's had his eye on you and Demetri, as well as Alice and you sent her a small smile to let her know you were okay.

Aro turned to look at him "you are quite a soul reader yourself, Edward. No, you can't read Bella's thoughts" he glanced at Bella another time "fascinating"

"I would love to see if you are an exception to my gift as well, would do me the hohor?" Aro extends his hand to Bella and you watch her take a tentative step forward, placing her hand in his.

You watch with nervousness and anxiety as Aro lowers his head and closes his hand, most likely trying to rifle through her memories one by one but he won't be successful, you knew that.

"Interesting" he pauses.

"I see nothing".

Maybe that was a good thing.

Aro takes a few steps backwards, interlacing his hands in thought "let us see if she is immune to all our powers" he says and an unsettling grin grew on his face as he looks at jane "shall we, jane?" and you could swear your heart leaps into your throat and panic consumes you.

"No please don't" you breathed and surged out of demetris hold and towards your sister but strong arms wrapped around your frame in an instant and coiled tightly, immobilizing any movement and leaving you thrashing to get away.

"No" Edward growled and lunged at jane, only to freeze on the stop and his body begins to contort painfully, as if his body was being squeezed into a little ball and he falls to his knees.

"Stop" Bella demanded with a fearful tone "no please stop" she pleaded and tried to run to edwards side but was stopped by Jane's brother, Alec.

"Stop, just stop hurting him please, please" her voice grew louder every second that edward appeared to be in more pain, his face completely strained as he fought against the onslaught waves of pain Jane sent in his direction with one steely eyed glare.

"Jane" Aro said that Jane obeyed instantly, stopping her ministrations against edward.

"Go ahead, my dear" aro said eerily softly and suddenly, Jane looked at Bella with excitement.

"This may hurt just a little" she said calmly and you began thrashing in demetris hold again when you realised what was going to happen

"please let me go" you pleaded quietly as you watched Bella prepare herself, a look of determination in her eyes and much like a python, the more you moved in his arms, the tighter he held you to him "please calm down mia cara, she won't come to harm" he whispered softly in your ear, his voice warm and somehow comforting and it sent shivers down your spine.

Aro lets out a laugh and claps his hands "Remarkable" he breathed "she confounds us all".

"So, what do we do with you now?" then, he looked at you.

"With both of you?".

you huddled closer to demetri at the threatening glint in Aros eyes, almost doing it instinctively.

"You already know what you are going to do Aro" the oldest and kind of depressed-looking spoke up first with a monotonous tone in his voice, as if this whole ordeal bored him.

The blonde king spoke next "They know too much, they're a liability" he said before glancing at you "the younger swan will be spared as she is Demetri's mate, but she has to be turned" he demanded and your stomach tightened with dread.

did you want to be changed? were you really willing to throw a whole chapter of your life away to be with someone you met an hour ago?

Aro sighed wistfully "thats true" he agreed before casting a glance to a burly vampire, giving him a look "Felix" was all he said and Bella was released from Alecs grip

only to be flipped so she was standing protected behind Edward and he lunges at Felix, tackling him to the floor with ferocity and then you felt a rush of wind, suddenly feeling cold.

You looked to the side and saw that Demetri had a hand wrapped around Alices throat in a vice-like grip, not letting her escape and you frowned, she must've tried to intervene.

But with Demetri guarding Alice, you felt exposed and unsafe in a room full of vampires which would easily kill you if given the command, damn you really got comfy in his arms.

Every time edward was slammed into the marble floors, small and tiny cracks grew along his skin, like a porcelain vase that was beginning to shatter and you winced as the cracks and tears grew louder.

And then Felix had him in a headlock, ready to tear off his head and bella let out a cry of desperation "Please, no, no, please, plese!" she cried and aro gave the command to stop felix, hearing the plea in her voice "kill me, kill me, not him" she rushed out and inhaled shakily.

your head turned faster than a cobra striking its pray, you couldn't believer her words, how easily she was willing to give up her life for the man she loved but what about you? were you at the center of her priorities too?

"Bella no, don't say that" you breathed and fought the rising tears as you went to stand by her side but you only got a glare from your sister, so this is what it came to be.

Suddenly becoming a vampire didn't seem like the worst idea.

Aro stalked towards bella with slow and deliberate steps, a confused yet a look of awe in his eyes "how extraordinary, you would give up your life for someone like us, a vampire, a soulless monster"

shivers went down your spine and a burning sensation tingled by the back of your head, you turned your head to look and saw demetri had his eyes trained on you whilst still having focus on keeping Alice captive with is hand wrapped firmly and tightly around her throat.

Guilt consumed you when your first thought was not centred around Alice and her safety but rather the man who had the potential to cause her harm if she so much as she attempted to squirm and break free, the thought of that was enough to get you to turn your head and focus on Bella and Edward again.

But all you then saw was a blur wizzing forward and slamming into another member of the Volturi and you quickly realised edward pounced on him, most likely to protect bella.

(skipping ahead)

Edward was spared from being destroyed and stood with Bella once again and Demetri stood by you again, an arm wrapped securely around your waist.

"let us be done with this, heidi will arrive any moment"

the old and frail-looking king spoke up as he stood up slowly "thank you for your visit" he said slowly with a deep rasp in his voice and then then the blonde king spoke up.

"I would advise that you follow through with your promise soon, we do not offer second chances" he said with a sneer on his face, emphasizing the word "chances" to make it sound more menacing you were sure.

Demetri let go of you momentarily to open the giant double doors and led you and the others out of the throne room "goodbye my young friends" Aro said from behind but you did not once stop to think to turn around, you just kept walking and followed demetri.

"Nice fishing, heidi" you heard demetri say and you looked up, a beautiful vampiric woman in a red dress walked past your group with a sea of tourists following right behind her, mumbling curiously and admiring the architecture of the palace and it appeared as though they were completely oblivious that they were being lead to their deaths.

maybe it was better that way, a quick and swift death.

"yes they do look rather juicy" Heidi replied and sent a smirk in his direction and an emotion that mimicked jealousy (or actual jealousy) rose within you, did she have thing for him? but you shook those thoughts away.

and then the screaming and shouting came.

you froze and wanted to turn around to observe what was happening but demetri snaked an arm around your waist and pulled you close to him "don't look its not for the faint of heart, mia cara" his soft voice met your ear and heat rushed down your spine at the close proximity, the effect he had on you making you slowly forget.

A few minutes later and you were outside, the warm sun beaming down on you and you welcomed it without hesitation, breathing in the fresh air and relaxed.

"It's time we go home" Alice stood next to you, a hand on your shoulder as she gave you a soft smile.

you bit your lip in thought, eyes flickering over to demetri.

for whatever reason, the thought of leaving him was like going through a heartbreak and it was like your whole body was protesting and fighting hard against it, leaving him felt like a gloomy cloud was descending upon you and your world would shrouded in darkness.

"2 seconds alice" you told her quietly and stepped over to demetri, your heart hammering violently in your chest.

"what happens now?" was the first thing you asked him as you looked up at his beautiful face, his beautiful red eyes looking down at you with a certain softness and fondness you didnt think you'd ever on a vampires face.

"We will be together again, and I understand that you must return home" He spoke with understanding as he delicately placed his hand on your cheek, stroking the skin softly like you were the most precious thing he had in his possession.

Which is kind of true given your human nature and his vampire.

a sad and small smile rose on your lips as you subconsciously leaned into his touch, his hand burrowing itself gently in your hair "I look forward to it" you whispered before stepping back, his hand falling from your head and you immediately missed his touch.

"we'll see each other sooner than you think, mia cara"

"this is only the start".

and with that, you turned and left with the others and you were damn sure that you wouldn't ever forget him.

_____________________________________________________________

still new at this, hope its nothing too bad

[rewordthis]

for the ask meme, 39 ad 51 with aokaga obv ♥

Love how you said ‘obv’ hehe XD

For Fanfiction Trope MASH-UP: 39 Survival/Wilderness Fic & 51 Accidentally Married

How is this possible?! Bite me!!! Let’s see… how would I write this scenario indeed… 🫠

31 year olds, NBA star players Aomine Daiki and Kagami Taiga are in an airplane with an All Stars team assembled to attend as the opening act of an international Philanthropic Sports Exhibition in Malaysia.

But the flight never makes it to their destination. 

Somewhere along the journey their plane crashes to one of the many uninhabited islands of the Pacific Ocean. Thankfully all the passengers are alive and save for some minor injuries, in mostly good health. When the flight attendants and the two pilots inform the players and the team’s representatives that they managed to successfully send an SOS signal but that they’d have to move locations for their retrieval, the whole of 18 people in the plane are given strict instructions to stay in close proximity with each other until they reach an open plane. They are after all, on an unknown land…

The walk to finding an open area where the rescue helicopters can land, is long and through thick vegetation. One wrong step on a slippery rock and a bone is broken, one minute late to turn and you lose sight of those walking ahead of you…

And as luck would have it, Aomine is the first to get separated from the bunch—

Getting distracted by the mirage of an animal, he steps aside the trail they follow and he loses sight of the line in front of him. When he realises it a split second later, it’s already too late. There is no glimpse of his teammates—no mob of fiery red ahead…

Bothered by the fact that his survival instincts tell him to yell for his companions names or even climb a tree to try and see ahead, their pilot’s first instructions were: “Do not make any noise, you might steer the attention of a predatory animal and don’t touch any greenery, there might be poisonous or severe allergic reactions to their juices…” were warnings that still echoed in his ears.

For better or for worse, though his primal instinct to sigh and grunt as loudly as possible after making what seemed like aimless circles in the blindness of the forest, a loud crunching noise behind him nearly gave him a heart-attack. The leaves and bushes moved, and a perturbed, burgundy set of eyes met his. It was Kagami.

He had looked back to Aomine when he had seen the animal and saw him straying away, but by the time he could reach him he lost track of the others as well. Standing frozen in between, the mere act of looking around made him loose sight of both Ahomine and their team.

After hours of walking, and without a doubt approaching noon, a tired and hungry beyond salvation Kagami was hallucinating of grilled meat. Unable to convince him otherwise, Aomine was forced to follow behind a Kagami dragged by his nose through the mixed cents of wet soil and dead animals—heading deeper in that forest to his horror…

Well, Kagami was right. There was human activity on that island beyond just them and their team members. They ended up finding themselves amongst islanders that were in the midst of preparing what looked like a feast. Animals Aomine could not identify were thrown over fire and pulped seeds were boiling in stone vessels… Aomine decided there and then to never laugh at Kagami’s nose ever again—considering they would make it out alive from here, that is.

The indigenous people of the island—a tribe that had most definitely escaped being discovered by modern world researchers—quickly noticed the intruders and gathered around them, others looking at them curiously and others with terror and ready to attack them!

But who knows what or how, something Kagami did (probably when he pulled Aomine closer by his arm and growled at him to not move along his stomach’s incessant rumbling) prompted them to turn and run around and bring forth food offerings for the two basketball players. Aomine just stared with his mouth open as Kagami literally devoured anything the people gave him.

Like, this could be poison, right???

The minute Kagami’s hunger was sated and fell on his back, they were both urged to get up and brought to a cave. In the cave there were also 3 other village people, an older woman, a younger one and a young man. Once Aomine and Kagami were laid down next to the young couple, the old woman placed from a crystal on each of their chests and then closed their eyes and placed leaves on them and began a slow chanting like a murmur over their heads. Aomine feeling uncomfortable not being able to see, tried to lift one of the leaves—they could be used as sacrifices to some eldritch god for all he knew—but got his hand slapped away promptly and the old woman gave him a warning, which he may not understood the words but he very much understood the tone and that he would get slapped again if he so as moved… But as the adrenalin of being on his feet for more than 16 hours started to wear off and the fatigue to finally set in, the loud snore next to him was more than reassuring that if he was going to become a sacrifice at least he was going with that fucking idiot, that bakagami drilling his eardrums to the other side…

Three days later and to Aomine’s surprise still very much alive, the rescue team finds them fed and to his great dismay… happily married!

I hate you! No I don’t! I went fucking berserk with this! LMAO I’m literally vibrating right now, giIIRL!!! KYAWWW!!! _:(´ཀ`」 ∠):

This is full blown fanfic! GRAHHH!!!

 ＼＼\٩(๑`^´๑)۶//／／

[the-whispers-of-death]

now thinking about the first time teen!stone experiences butcher leave to italy.

it mostly happens at night while the kids are sleeping, and he can just hear a quiet little conversation between sylvester and butcher

something something hearing the line "come back to me alive, okay?"

and then he's gone and its quiet again. sylvester is still up, but is just looking out the window as butcher drives off.

something something he knows the only way butcher can really reach out to him safely is trough actual postcards or mail

something something, maybe stone is getting back from school one day and sees said postcard in the mailbox, addressed to a name he doesnt recognize, *from* a name he doesnt recognize, but the address is all the same

;;;; imagine that maybe he finds the stash of all the postcards under sylvesters bed when home alone for a day or so ((pretending the kids arent here for this scenario))

maybe he sees how careful sylvester was with the new card they got, and wanted to know more

something something imagining how quiet the house is. how stone cant really listen in on any more late night talks from their parents bedroom, because noone is talking

methinks sylvester in general is quieter when he's alone. or thinks he's alone

Teen!Stone, when he and Sylvester are alone: I miss him too. I was just getting used to him being around.

Imagine Stone manages to memorize the address from where the postcards are sent from and he sends one back, because he misses Butcher. He doesn't send anything with information that can be used against them and this is the start of him making up his own code to talk to people with.

Imagine how confused Butcher must be once he gets it.

[nicklloydnow]

“In the first fraction of a millisecond, a flash of light superheats the air to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, incinerating people, places, and things, and absorbing a once bright, once powerful, once vibrant city center in a holocaust of fire and death. The fireball from this 1-megaton nuclear weapon that strikes the Pentagon is thousands of times more brilliant than the sun at noon. People from Baltimore, Maryland, to Quantico, Virginia, see this flash of light. Anyone staring directly at it is blinded by it.

In this first millisecond, the fireball is a 440-foot-diameter sphere. Over the next ten seconds, it expands to 5,700 feet in diameter, more than one mile of pure fire—nineteen football fields of fire—obliterating the nexus of American democracy.

The edges of the fireball stretch all the way to the Lincoln Memorial to the north and into Crystal City to the south. Everything and everyone that existed in this space is incinerated. Nothing remains. No human, no squirrel, no ladybug. No plants, no animals. No cellular life.

The air around the fireball's edges compresses into a steeply fronted blast wave. This dense wall of air pushes forward, mowing down everything and everyone in its path for three miles out, in every direction. Accompanied by several-hundred-mile-per-hour winds, it is as if Washington, D.C., just got hit by an asteroid and its accompanying wave.

In Ring 1—a nine-mile-diameter ring— engineered structures change physical shape and most collapse. Piles of rubble left behind stand thirty or more feet high. The initial thermonuclear flash has set everything in the fireball's line of sight on fire. It melts lead, steel, titanium. It turns paved streets into molten asphalt.

At the outer edges of Ring 1, rare survivors become trapped in liquified roadways, catch fire, and melt. The X-ray light of the nuclear flash burns skin off people's bodies, leaving their extremities a shredded horror of bloody tendons and exposed bone. Wind rips the skin off people's faces and tears away limbs. Survivors die of shock, heart attack, blood loss. Errant power lines whip through the air, electrocuting people and setting new fires alight everywhere.

As tens of seconds pass, the fireball rises three miles up into the air. Its ominous cloud cap turns the light of day into darkness. Some 1 to 2 million people are dead or dying, hundreds of thousands more now caught in the rubble and the flames. "There will be virtually no survivors," the government's nuclear advisory panel has long warned of what will happen in the first ring around ground zero. "There will be nothing recognizable remaining.... Only foundations and basements remaining."

Never in the history of mankind have so many human beings been killed so fast. Not since a mountain-sized asteroid smashed into Earth 66 million years ago has so much global devastation been set in motion in a single strike.

The die has been cast.

The singular, haunting words from former STRATCOM commander General Robert Kehler come alive: "The world could end in the next couple of hours."

And now it is about to.” - Annie Jacobsen, ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario’ (2024) [p. 164 - 166]

[nikonyash]

Home Again || Okkotsu Yuuta

WC: 644

Drabble/Fluff/Yuuta is facing an angry partner after a long mission.

"Did I wake you up?"

Standing in the kitchen, Yuuta's holding a glass of juice you bought this noon. Instead of jumping right onto him, you freeze. Is it really him? He's been away for days and leave you without a single text, which was quite unusual.

"Should I get you a drink, or...?"

Now he's right in front of you. Tilting his head, as you're still processing his sudden existence in your shared apartment. Your gaze's noticing the dark circle under his eyes are getting bigger and darker, his cheekbones becomes more visible than before. Did he eat right? Sleep well, too?

Yuuta stares at you while slowly drinking, hums in approval as the pure mango extract going down his throat.

"Is this new product? This one's good..."

Damn. How could he do this to you? Leaving you alone with endless thoughts of him being killed by cursed-spirit? You have at least 356 scenarios of how he could die in a mission. Now he's here. Sneaking in the middle of the night, apparently using a spare key. Talking innocently as if he just back from 9-5 job. Your chest start to thump louder and gazillions words are waiting to explode.

"Um... Baby?"

You snaps.

"HOW DARE YOU! HOW DARE YOU TO LEAVE FOR DAYS AND JUST COMING BACK SO CASUALLY?" Yuuta flinches at your reaction, trying to find the right words under your burning glare, "W-well, it was so sudden..."

Half-stomping, you walk closer towards your boyfriend, uttering every word with a threatening tone, "Okkotsu. It only takes one text. One Fucking. Line. Text. To tell me you're away and STILL alive."

Calling him by his last name. A cue for him not to retort. Especially, when your face is this close. He'd never know if you decide to punch or stab him in the heart.

"Uhh babe, please understand. It was a really—" Leaving his words hanging, he spots tears are piling up in the corner of your eyes.

A lump of guilt clogging his throat. He realizes he's wrong; the way he made you feeling uneasy being left with uncertainty, spending every seconds in confusion and worst probabilities.

Regret creeps in to his heart. Trying to wipe out the tears, he brings his hand to your face and his thumb moves along the spot where your upper and lower eyelids meet. "Babe, I'm sorry... "

Stealing a moment when he's unguarded, you quickly grab his caressing arm, burrying your teeth on his wrist.

"Hey, that hurts!" Pulling his arm in reflex, he tries to ease the stingy sensation by rubbing the area you bit. Lifting his head, he find you with your reddened face, looking at another direction while gritting your teeth in your effort to not cry.

Ah, how can't he understand yet?

"I... I know you're mad at me. I'm truly sorry for never think about you enough." He lowly murmurs, carefully intertwining his fingers with yours. Feeling no rejection, his one arm wrapping around your waist while the other one softly push your head to his chest.

His scent immediately filling up your nose, miraculously calming and erasing the irritated feeling you felt just a moment ago. You can't stay mad at him. You miss him too much.

"You're such a shitty boyfriend." Muttering, you hug him back and get get chuckle as response. "But you love me, don't you?" Touching you by your chin and make you look up to him, Yuuta kisses you forehead. His heart's fully adoring this stubborn person that holds his heart. His fingers are tracing down your cheek to your jawline with a soft smile.

"I'm home, baby. " Yuta lands a gentle kiss on your lips. A kiss that make you drunk and makes you forget every thing around you. His heartbeat feels like a love song as he tighten his arms around you.

You are home.

[piedpiperslists]

JJK: Idol Boyfriend AU

List of all Jungkook fics under 'Idol Boyfriend' AU:

* s - contains smut sm - social media format

* Last updated: 18/02/2024

D R A B B L E S

[drabble] by 1kook s PWP

[drabble] by holdinbacksecrets

* [drabble] by holdinbacksecrets

[drabble] by soraviie

[drabble] by soraviie

[drabble] by soraviie angst

12:14AM by 7ndipity

1:58AM by 7ndipity

3:43AM/PM by 7ndipity Summary: Jungkook can't sleep without you.

* 11:48 AM by likeastarstar

* 12:21 PM by likeastarstar

20:56 by softiejoon Summary: Jungkook wants to know which hair colour suits him best.

10:05 PM by likeastarstar Summary: OC struggling to say I love you for the first time.

All Over Again by delugguk s Summary: After finishing soundcheck, you could not let him go. Most of all when he looked that good.

Anchor by qqtxt Summary: On a day when Jungkook feels heavy, you make it effortless for him to feel light again.

As It Was by ditttiii Summary: On a sweet autumn noon with you in his lap and his heart in your palm, Jungkook thinks he might finally have it all.

BTS arguing with their loved ones about silly things by justimagineok sm

Don’t Fuck Your Boyfriend at His Best Friend’s Listening Party by yongbokology s

Dork by thecozywhaleshark Summary: Jungkook is a dork what else more can I say.

Early Morning Call by its-mysleepover s Summary: Jungkook’s away on tour, both of you miss each other dearly. You wake up one morning and Jungkook has an idea for making sure you’re staying intimate in these trying times. AKA Phone sex.

Ended As Quickly As It Started by alpacaparkaseok Summary: An argument between you and Jungkook ends just as quickly as it began.

* GCF Osaka by bubmyg

* Here by bubmyg Summary: “Shoulder kiss: I like being near you”

* Golden Closet Bed by bubmyg

* Sore by bubmyg

* “Let me kiss you to make sure” by bubmyg

Give Me Five More Minutes (Loving You) by hansolmates s Summary: Jungkook’s the banker, and he’s investing in your time.

Gluttony by whatifyoulivelikethat s PWP Summary: Kinky smut themed around a deadly sin.

Goodbyes by ggukiepie angst, breakup au Summary: You loved each other will all your heart and tried to keep that love alive, but fate isn’t always on your side. Maybe this is a goodbye.

Green Room by honeymoonjin s PWP Summary: Post-concert jealous Jungkook.

“Half a cookie. And the shirt stays off” by oreomonsterhunter Summary: Jungkook has been on tour for months, and you can’t help the loneliness and doubt that’s begun to haunt you, alone in your apartment.

“I’ll get it.” by minstrivia s

If it’s too much. by pleutbeaucoup

Important Details by moonlightkoo s Summary: Jungkook is mad at you for laughing at one of his bandmate's jokes about him- though they might've gotten some important details wrong.

In which you want to kiss Jungkook's cheek... by seokjinsonlyone

Intentions by thatbangtanbloom

INVU by highuby angst Summary: In which idol!Jungkook calls you while on tour, but his words don’t reach your heart.

Lunch Break by justanotherstarlightmonger

Mindlessly Mine by jinkookspencil Summary: Your online class was going well…. Until Jungkook walked by.

Noodle by alluremin Summary: Sometimes it can get lonely when Jungkook has to leave, and that’s definitely the only reason why you continuously pester him to get you a cat.

On The Other Side by hobi-is-golden Summary: Jungkook hates being away from his partner. But the grass is always greener on the other side, and they miss him too, and one day he knows they’ll come back to him.

Off the Hook by gorechoi-main Summary: Morning bliss provided by Jungkook, the king of chaos and his lovely grumpy baby.

Permission to Pleasure by bangtanbetchfics s PWP Summary: Scenarios where you pleasure each BTS member right after the final Permission to Dance concert in LA.

Please, for me? by delugguk s Summary: When they told you about Jungkook's condition you expected everything but this. His antibodies really do works hard, huh?

Popcorn by taehyung-the-baehyung secret relationship

Relief by junghelioseok s Summary: A celebration is in order.

Shower Me With Kisses by etherealinowrites Summary: Jungkook is pretty much highly whipped for you, or, the one where he can’t seem to stay angry at you.

Shy by 7ndipity Summary: Dinner with your parents leads to a slightly flustered conversation Jungkook.

So Close to Perfect by seok-jinnies Summary: Jeongguk has always been your constant, and even with what seems to be the whole world against the two of you, you can't bring yourself to let him go.

So, Give Me All Your Kisses by koostarcandy Summary: After one long, tiring month, all Jungkook craves is his lover’s kisses.

* Something about Jungkook trying to earn your forgiveness by honeytae

“Sweet dreams.” by sonnenfuchs

“That could have been so hot.” by taetaespeaches

The one where Jungkook is the world's clingiest/softest bf by eoieopda Summary: In which Jungkook fashions himself into a weighted blanket.

The one with Jungkook, the weekender, and the impossibilities by eoieopda angst Summary: In which Jungkook is bad at prioritizing & somehow even worse with words.

The one with Jungkook and terpsichore by eoieopda dancer!reader Summary: In which Jungkook watches you pole dance & goes mildly-to-moderately feral.

Then, Terror by whatifyoulivelikethat Summary: The worst dreams are the ones that feel too real.

Those Eyes by sugarwithtea Summary: You fall in love with your boyfriend a little more every day, especially when he gives you those eyes!

Two for the Show | Encore by ki-yomii s Summary: It’s unfair how pretty he is like this; so wanton and needy, half naked and stretched across the middle of your bed (aka the fic where you catch JK jerking off in your bed with a pair of your panties).

Under the Sun by namii-fm Summary: The summer sun was nearly unbearable.

You are jealous of a new staff member by bangtan-sonyeonddaeng

“You know I’m a light sleeper.” by holdinbacksecrets

* You’re evil, you know that? by honeytae s

“You’re important too.” by seoulnotes

O N E S H O T S

Abundance by xenizaation s wc~4.3k

Bicker by satnin-darling s wc~3.7k / PWP Summary: It’s after the Permission to Dance On Stage online concert and it seems that your boyfriend, Jungkook, had left out a few details regarding the performance under the guise of a surprise. Ordinarily, you were surprised, floored in fact, but this doesn’t stop you from bickering over the details

Castle by satnin-darling s wc~8.1k / polyamory au, PWP Summary: The member’s filmed in the SOOP for four days sometime in the summer but now, they’ve returned for more rest, away from the cameras. With a few days in the cool mountainside, you get the opportunity to experience the aptly named ‘SOOP in the Castle’ yourself along with your seven boyfriends, and it seems that Jungkook has missed you more than he let on.

Castle (II) by satnin-darling s wc~7.7k / ft KTH, polyamory au, PWP Summary: It's another day in the SOOP and there's something about the way Taehyung and Jungkook are talking together beneath the awning that somehow ends up with you on a pleasurable tailspin.

Chapstick by softyoongiionly s wc~5.8k Summary: Jungkook’s had a really long day and the only that can make it better, is seeing you.

Curiosity by yminie s wc~10.6k / ft KNJ, PWP Summary: Jeongguk’s interest is peaked by something he finds on his favourite hyungs computer, so it’s only natural for him to turn to Namjoon for guidance, right?

Distractions by 1kook s wc~3k Summary: “Soft.” / “No shit,” you say, “you’re deep between my boobs.”

Heartcuffed by v-hope s wc~2.7k / PWP Summary: The moment Jeongguk and you saw the pink heart-shaped handcuffs that would be a part of his outfit for the photoshoot that day, you both knew what was coming your way.

Hush by ki-yomii s wc~2.9k Summary: It’s movie night with the boys, and Jungkook’s feeling a little too adventurous.

Indulgence by ppersonna s wc~3.8k Summary: Sometimes your boyfriend Jungkook reminds you how much you love him by doing absolutely nothing at all.

Just One Kiss by bangtsblossom s wc~5.5k Summary: With the dorms empty… there was only one thing you and your boyfriend could think of doing. And that was baking cakes.

King of Hotels by bangtanstanst wc~4.1k Summary: Shall we play a game?

Later Sounds Good Too by satnin-darling s wc~6.5k / ft MYG, polyamory au Summary: It’s a rare day off and when it comes down to it, nothing quite hits the spot like quality time does.

Let You Go by namfinessed wc~2.4k Summary: He doesn’t want you to leave but Jungkook isn’t cruel enough to stop you either.

Like I'm Famous by softyoongiionly s wc~11.2k Summary: It’s New Years Eve and Jungkook would rather be anywhere else than at his company’s massive party. Sure, he’s a guest of honor and his team rented out the nicest hotel in Seoul, but ringing in the New Year with you on the other side of the world just feels wrong. He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to celebrate without the woman he loves, but maybe- just maybe…he won’t have to…

Lollipop by whatifyoulivelikethat s wc~3.1k Summary: You and your boyfriend, Jeon Jungkook, were supposed to have a nice movie date, but somehow get sidetracked once you whip out that strawberry-flavored lollipop. Who would have guessed?

My You by wnderkoo s wc~2.5k Summary: Jungkook calls you into his studio, and you leave with more than just his cum stuffed in you.

Needy by sugarycandies s wc~2.5k Summary: Jungkook has been missing Y/N for a while, two months was too long to go without her. He gets an opportunity when she texts him.

Page 1 by satnin-darling s wc~3.5k / ft KTH, PWP Summary: Jungkook was tidying up in the boat house just as you came down to see him. Obviously, cleaning would be at the bottom of the agenda once you were together. But while Jungkook was confident that you two would be alone to do whatever you liked since his room was apart from everyone else’s, he keeps forgetting that Taehyung liked to go the extra mile.

Press Start by softyoongiionly s wc~5.5k Summary: A night in with your boyfriend Jungkook includes all kinds of things: anime, witty banter, snacks from 7-Eleven and, you know, sex.

Power Trip by softyoongiionly s wc~4.5k Summary: You and Jungkook make a bet to see who can last the longest in bed.

SOOP by satnin-darling s wc~2.8k / ft KTH, polyamory au, PWP Summary: Taehyung was meant to fetch you and Jungkook because it was already time to eat. But he happened to walk into something else and he couldn’t help but join. Oh, and for those who are left waiting, it’s not all bad

Trap by jiminpitys wc~3.9k Summary: In which you show up at your boyfriend's concert soundcheck as a surprise, and to your own, he’s wearing an outfit that’s bound to make you feel a certain way.

Waste It on Me by rockwithwoo s wc~5.6k Summary: After a frustrating day for you, your boyfriend Jungkook offers for you to use him, and his body, to let go of your aggravation.

Your Favourite Game by gimmesumsuga s wc~2.6k / ft MYG, boyfriend!Jungkook, PWP Summary: The one where Min Yoongi and Jeon Jungkook compete to see who can make you cum the fastest.

T W O S H O T S / S E R I E S

In which . . . by onlyswan Summary: Collection of drabbles feat. Jungkook.

Not Allowed by whatifyoulivelikethat s ft MYG, polyamory au Summary: The love of your life, BTS’s very own Min Yoongi, tells you he has a gift for you. But he also says you’re not allowed to refuse. What’s that supposed to mean, hm? Surely not… wild hot sex with the Golden Maknae himself?

Talk to Me in Korean (Limited Edition) | (NSFW Edition) | (Advanced Edition) by softyoongiionly s Summary: Your boyfriend knows English very well however, there are certain phrases he isn’t quite familiar with…

[hawkebegins]

Hindsight part 2

Aaron Hotchner x prosecutor! reader

Summary: Reader goes missing and hotch races against the clock to find them before it’s too late.

Word Count: 2.5k

Warnings: Death, Kidnapping, violence

This one is written in hotch’s pov.

____________________________________________________________________________

“Hotch?” I look up from my desk seeing JJ looking at me with a look of concern.

“Yeah JJ?” She sighs before reminding me that there's a briefing in 5 minutes. “Thanks JJ I’ll be there in a second” She walks out of my office with a concerned look.

I don't know what it is about today but I've been off all day. There's just something not right I've learned over the years to trust that instinct.

“D.C police have called us in on a kidnapping, it happened last night around 11, their boss came over around 11:30 to pick up some case files but when he arrived the victims place was a wreck, the door was left wide open and there was blood on the floor near the kitchen table.” JJ states but she's holding something back, she never says victim she always states the name.

“Why are we being called in on a kidnapping that seems as far as I can see that its an isolated incident” I ask cautiously.

“The victim is a D.C ADA who handles the biggest cases, and the most prolific cases.” I feel my heart stop before I can respond I hear Blake talking,“Whos the victim?” she must have caught on that JJ didn't say the victim's name. My brain is racing with alternative scenarios, it could be someone else there are plenty of D.C ADAS. I feel JJ hesitating so I interject, “JJ whos the victim come on we all know the stats on kidnappings we don't have time to be wasting right now.”

She sighs before responding, “the victim is ADA l/n…its y/n Hotch” I can feel the eyes of the team on me but I brush it off acting as if I’m unphased.

“Alright you guys know the stats on finding kidnapping victims alive let alone the stats of government employees lets go, JJ you'll stay back with Garcia and help her in any way she needs. Rest of us let’s go, I want to be in D.C by noon.

I've never driven as fast as I was driving to D.C, I know the team is walking on eggshells around me. Usually we would be going over theories and victimology but they haven't said a word. They don't understand that I’m fine, I just need them to be okay.

We arrived in D.C within about 45 minutes of leaving Quantico thanks to my speeding and the sirens. We get there and I automatically head to y/n apartment, the one i've been to countless times and it looks nothing like how i'm used to.

This apartment is a mess, their law books are scattered everywhere, not clean and organized like it usually is.

This unsub is unorganized but also organized enough to know when y/n would be home alone and not with anyone, that means most likely this unsub was stalking y/n for a while. A few weeks maybe. I think to myself before I notice Rossi looking at me I walk over to him and harshly ask him why he's staring at me instead of working to find y/n.

“Aaron the team and I are concerned you're too close to this, that you're letting your emotions cloud your judgment.” I scoff rolling my eyes, “I’m not too close to this, y/n and I are nothing, just old friends. That's all there's no emotion clouding my judgment but regardless of that we need to find them. This isn't up for debate Dave, what did you and Reid find?” He looks at me in shock, with good reason I usually can keep my cool.

“We found more blood, there is a sign of a struggle in their bedroom and that looks to be where the struggle started, I think he was here waiting for them to come home.”

This can't be happening, this can not be happening. Not again. I can't lose another person this way.

Aaron come on baby let's go to that park they're having an art festival it might be fun!”

I laugh at them because for a lawyer they are the most spontaneous person I have ever met in my life.

“Aaron? Aaron?”

“Aaron!” I jerk myself awake and look up to see Rossi and Morgan looking at me concerned.

“Yeah hey guys sorry what do you have?” I see pity cross their features. I stand up stretching my legs. “Guys what do you have? Do we have any leads?” Morgan gives Rossi a look before clearing his throat, “yeah Garcia and JJ found something on the security cameras in y/n apartment building and you know them the best do you recognize this guy?” They show me a picture of a guy who looks a lot like a guy they work with who I’ve been to dinner with on multiple occasions. “Uhm yeah he works with y/n I think their name is Liam…wait are you telling me that the guy who took y/n is this guy?” Rossi gives a quick yes and then asks why i'm so shocked at this but I don't answer. Okay I know his wife I’m gonna go talk to her. Can you guys go talk to CSU to see if they've processed the fingerprints we found at the scene.” Before they can answer I’m already gone.

I arrived at Liam’s family home. I take a breath because I need to keep my cool. I knocked on the door waiting for someone to answer, and when the door opened there was a conversation that I wasn't ready for waiting on the other side of the door.

“Agent Hotchner? What are you doing here- oh i'm sorry did you and Liam have plans of some sort?” I sigh because this woman was too good for the scum that is her husband.

“No, Mrs.Dean we need to talk, may I come in?” She looks uneasy but not surprised.

“Is this about y/n, because I haven't seen them? ” I'm confused because how does she know that y/n is missing? It hasn't been in the news for fear that the unsub would see it and rush to kill y/n.

“Mrs.Dean how do you know about y/n missing that hasn't been in the news at all.” She looks at me with doubt and anger cross her face before she admits that Liam told her about it. Anger consumes because y/n trusted him.

“Does he have any other properties or remote places he ever goes to?” She doesn't hesitate telling me where he could be. I rush out the door with a quick goodbye.

“Garcia I need you to tell the team to meet me at Barnaby Woods Liam has a cabin there thats where he's holding y/n” before she can respond I hang up rushing into the woods there's only one place where his cabin could be i'm running from the SUV when I hear a scream; a scream I recognize as y/n’s. I run in, I know I should've waited for the team but by the time they get here y/n could be dead. I kick down the door holding up my gun, my eyes searching for any sign of them. As soon as my eyes land on the kitchen I rush in holding my gun up. When my eyes land on the scene in front of me I feel like throwing up, this can't be happening. Liam is on top of y/n with a gun to their head. I try and ignore the feeling in my stomach, “Liam put down the gun so we can talk.”

He just laughs before retorting,”talk? You think I want to talk to you? No, see here's what's gonna happen you are gonna take your happy ass out of here and let me and y/n have some more fun”

Then he does something that makes me want to kill him right there on the spot but I know that wouldn’t help anything. He kisses them, I guess I got visibly angry because he laughs before starting to talk again.” Oh I’m sorry, kissing them makes you angry, but I have to ask why you don't love them Aaron.” I scoff and that only entices him more to taunt me while holding a gun to y/n’s head.

“Am I wrong? They were getting threats, and so were you and they didn't tell you about it because they were trying to protect you. They were destroying themselves because they wanted to protect you, and you repaid them by abandoning them when they needed you most.”

Look I learned a long time ago to not take anything that an unsub says to heart but in this instance he's right. I left y/n when they needed me the most and that's something that I’ll regret for the rest of my life and I'll be spending my life trying to make it up to them.

“Liam you're right, I wasn't there for y/n when they needed me, and they should hate me bu-”

“Aaron stop thats not tr-”

“SHUT UP SLUT” I hear Liam scream at y/n and then he looks at me with nothing but rage in his eyes.

“This is all your fault, Agent. If you hadn't come along I would have been with y/n, they would have been safe.” I look at him in shock. In all of my emotions I never stopped to think why he would do this but in this moment it's crystal clear, he's in love with them.

“Liam I know it's my fault, you and y/n could have had an amazing life together and I got in the way of that.”

He gets this look on his face that terrifies me, I've seen my fair share of crazy but this terrifies me in a different way maybe because i'm scared of what that means for y/n they could die at any moment and it would be my fault because I set Liam off and if I could I would switch places with them in a heartbeat.

“It's your fault that we didn't have the life that we deserved. But don't worry you'll pay for that.”

Before I can respond y/n grabs Liam's hand and starts talking to them. I make out the end of what they are saying and in that moment my heart breaks all over again.

“I don't love him. Liam, we dont need to hurt him. I’m yours.”

Before anyone can respond y/n’s lips are on Liams and the next thing I know Liams gun is at my feet. I always knew that y/n was a genius but I never thought; especially in a situation like that they would be able to trick him like that. Before Liam notices what has happened I rush over to him and yank him off of y/n.

“Liam Dean you have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney if you can't afford one an attorney will be appointed to you.” I read off his rights while arresting him while walking him outside where the team is just arriving. They look at me in confusion and shock.

“Get him out of here before I shoot him.” Is all that is said before I’m rushing back inside to check on y/n.

I walk in to see y/n sobbing sitting at the table. I rush over to them, not thinking I rest my hand on their shoulder and they jump slightly.

“Shit Aaron you scared me.”

“I’m sorry y/n” they look at me and try to cover up their hurt and plaster the fakest smile i've ever seen on them.

“It's all good, Hotch.”

Hotch

Damn that hurt a lot more than I would care to admit but I brush it off, “y/n come on let's get you to the hospital” this does not make them happy at all because all signs of them being “ fine” are gone and they get panicked.

“No, no please Im fine just take me home.” I sigh and look into their eyes seeing nothing but fear in them. “Fine but you're staying with me tonight just to make sure you're okay.”

They smile and that's all the thanks I get before they start walking out to the car.

FEW HOURS LATER

They seemed fine, or as fine as you can be. Dinner was silent, I was exceptionally worried about them because they never stop talking. Regardless I leave it alone because I know that they have gone through a lot in the past 24 hours. I let her take the bedroom after the day they've had. They deserved a good sleep and I needed to get some paperwork done anyways. It was about 2 am when I finally finished all my work. I was heading to bed when I first heard it. It was y/n, screaming.

I ran into the bedroom to see them sobbing and screaming,but they were still asleep. I rushed over to them, shaking them awake,doing anything to wake them up;that was a mistake.

They jump awake gasping for air. They look extremely panicked and when their eyes land on me they start sobbing. My first instinct is to hold them but I stop myself. I don't want to make things worse so I just start talking.

“y/n i need you to breathe for me okay? it was a nightmare but you’re okay i promise. Everything is okay.”

Unfortunately nothing I'm saying is getting through to them so I continue, “Hey, listen to me. You’re safe. Nothing is going to hurt you. I’m here with you okay?” They look at me and slowly start inching closer to me before I know it they’re hugging me and sobbing into my chest.

“shhh y/n it’s okay just let it out”

“I’m sorry” I look at them confused because what could they possibly be apologizing for, I’m the one who should be apologizing.

“For what love you did nothing wrong”.

They look at me with tears forming in their eyes, “I did though, I lied to you for months. I dragged you into my mess of a life.”

I sigh because I figured this conversation would come up sooner or later. “y/n listen to me, you lied to me yes but you were trying to protect me. I’m sorry for how I reacted. I know you only did it to protect me. I love you y/n. You are the light of my life. I only ever want you safe, when you are gone I was so scared that by the time we found you it would have been too late and that the last thing you would have heard me say was goodbye, not i love you not you make me happy. I am so sorry y/n.” But they don’t say anything they kiss me before whispering “i love you aaron hotchner” i smile before kissing them and responding with “and i love you y/n l/n”

[endlich-allein]

Interview with Till about his life: he fought with his father, killed his beloved dog, swam on a wild river and worked on suffering. How Till Lindemann's mind works

"I will finish you off" and why you fought for the German army.

Werner Lindemann wanders around the room, interrupting the silence with strange questions, writing something down. His motive is to get to know his son and make him a friend. But it's complicated. Generational conflict.

"My island of tranquility is shaken every day. The day before yesterday, a guy pulled on my socks because his were torn. Yesterday he didn't put out a single lamp in the house. Now, with voluptuous delight, he spits cherry pits into the cat's fur. Is this grown boy really an adult?"

The apprenticeship in Rostock, where you have to do window production after graduation, is the limit of boredom. Till Lindemann moved to his father in the countryside so that he could forget about the hustle and bustle of the city and not fall under the article for anti-social attitudes. He thought of a new life, in which there was no pointless work, and arranged an attic in his father's house.

In the mornings over coffee, he scolded life that everything went according to schedule. And listened very loudly to music - electronics and metal. My father didn't understand and grumbled: “I matured late. Naturally, I wanted to listen to the music I liked, but I could not get my hands on these records. For example, my father did not understand when I bought the Alice Cooper record for a month's salary.

Werner Lindemann was a children's writer who went through the war.

At the height of his career he disappeared for weeks on literary tours - his fame spread to teachers and librarians across the country. His father pecked at Lindemann for refusing to work and promised to turn him in:

"My willful child. What doesn't fit his standards is rejected as nonsense or crap." So he took a job as a carpenter, where he made shovel cuttings and cart wheels. The head foreman constantly drank vodka during the day, didn't want to be annoyed with questions and addressed the long-haired Lindemann with the nickname: "Mozart!" This suited him.

Werner Lindemann talked about war, hard existence and limitations. For example, about a grenade splinter that remained in his body. Lindemann did not believe in all these stories - but categorically did not accept service, war and murder:

“After that I objected: “I would hide, I would not go to war. Why did you even let yourself be dragged into this? You could have hidden."

And he said: “It didn't work out. They searched for it and it took away."

Then I said: “I would rather go under arrest. Never in my life, I would go to the front line to shoot people. It's against my nature. It would be better if I went to jail."

Much of the time father and son were simply silent, even while watching television.

"He regularly made me feel guilty, to say the least, he placed himself on a pedestal towards me: I shouldn't complain. At your age, I ran barefoot through the stubble, and in my stomach - a potato in a uniform."

The only acceptance is Mike Oldfield's music: "One day my father came to grumble again. At that moment I was listening to Mike Oldfield, and he sat down and said: "That sounds interesting."

For me it was like a quantum leap: my father sits in my room, listens to my music and thinks it was good. Probably because of melancholy. He was sitting in a rocking chair that I made myself - at the time I was working as a carpenter on a farm. I, too, always sat in an armchair, immersed myself in music and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes."

The conflict was intensified by a fight. Lindemann bought a Trabant car, installed speakers in it and tested the sound - loud as usual. “Then my father came and I had to turn off this fucking music. It was kind of loud for him. He was then fiddling around his cases of flowers, and then suddenly the situation escalated. I think he slapped me while I was still in the car.

He leaned toward me and hit me with the back of his hand. I made some bullshit remarks like, "Leave me alone," something like that. That was a provocation to him, and he said: "If you do that again, I'll hit you for real." And I said, "Then you'll get it back. Because you're crazy. Don't you dare to hit me anymore."

And then he hit me with his palm again. He wasn't controlling himself.

He was exalting himself. Instantly he introduced himself as a boxer - he had boxed in the Hitler Youth - and I just... I thought I didn't hit him, I just pushed him away. And then he stood in front of me again, "Come on, I'll finish you, you haven't got a chance!" Somehow. After that, he went up to the attic and threw all my stuff out the window.

It happened over the weekend, my sister was there, a lot of screaming, serious drama. Then I packed my things, put them in the car, went to a friend's house and never went into his house again. At first I lived with this friend, and a week later I bought myself a house in the village."

His father's book is about his son, which the son will only open up after the death of the father.

Lindemann is a late child. He was born when his father was 36. The gap in their relationship was felt in everyday life and perception of the world. Werner Lindemann woke up early in the morning, worked with the circular saw under the windows and did not understand when his son slept until noon after a working week.

Lindemann's parents then lived separately, but kept in touch. Mom worked as a journalist and discussed her texts with his father. "She still lived in Rostock and always came to see him only on weekends. Mostly on Sundays she came back quite early, because she couldn't stand the stress of being with him, either."

In 1988, the book “Mike Oldfield im Schaukelstuhl Notizen eines Vaters" In this book, Lindemann Senior describes the relationship with his son (whom he calls Timm in the book), who settled with him at the age of 18. The book was written in the 80s and laid on the table until the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany were reunited.

Werner Lindemann wanted his son to take up writing too. But this only amused him, although as a child he wrote poetry. At the age of 13, little Till Lindemann and his father were returning home along the bumpy road to Mecklenburg. They talked about career self-determination:

"You should already have thoughts about what you want to become, boy." My answer: "I don't know yet, maybe a fisherman on the high seas."

But immediately, no matter what I said, objections arose: “But then you have to get a certificate of maturity. But then you will be away all the time. But then you won't be able to start a relationship."

There was always a “but”.

At some point it got on my nerves, as usual. And I said: "Worst case scenario, I'll just become a writer.

I still remember how alienated his face became. "And what do you think then, what do I do! It's a very hard job! In fact, it's not even a job, it's a passion. And it's a job that's supposed to be enjoyable."

I said, "I don't know anybody who works with pleasure."

"Yeah, that's the problem. You have to look for a job that gives you pleasure." Then I say again, "But some people never get to choose..." This gigantic discussion happened because I didn't take his profession seriously. At the same time, he was completely lost, funny!"

Lindemann thoughtfully read his father's book, in which he comprehends their relationship, after his death. Faked for hidden anger and indecision. For example, in a situation where their dog Kurt was bitten by a fox. The father was frightened because of rabies: “At the same time, we did not even know whether he was bitten by a fox or not. The father immediately called the huntsman. But I said: no one will enter this courtyard and shoot the dog. I'll do it myself if I really need it. At some point I really had to kill the dog."

Lindemann is not a monster. The animals he fiddled with are an important attribute of childhood. He had an aquarium and hamsters, brought mice and rats home, and was friends with dogs. “Like many children of new buildings, he felt the need for someone alive, in need of love,” said Werner Lindemann. Sometimes the appearance of an animal in the house was surprising:

“This guy will never say what he's up to. He appears on the doorstep at the same time as me. He gets out from his vehicle, throws his coat open and puts a young black shepherd in my hands. "Your Christmas present!"

Till's father is speechless. My son stands before me like the sun's little brother. Touchingly concerned, he directs me into the house, working out a plan for the animal husbandry, accommodation and diet of our new pet housemate.

With confusion, a question flies from my lips, "Wheredid you get the dog from?" "Timm" is gibbering, "Imagine, the mason in the barnyard wanted to hang him, simply wanted to strangle him with a rope, said he was a worthless eater..."

Werner Lindemann died of stomach cancer in 1993, when his son was 30. They didn't finally reconcile, but Till visited him in his last days and was there for him with his mother: "They couldn't be without each other, even though they lived apart. Unreal, but my mother never had another man afterwards. To this day she can't let go of him."

- Not going to the Olympics in Moscow and ending up in the German ghetto

Lindemann had the knowledge and the potential to be a swimmer. And a shyness that pounded harder three days before the competition than concerts in front of crowds of thousands. "I know how difficult it is to develop willpower and stamina and instill those attributes. In the GDR this was instilled in us by coaches and so-called functionaries."

Lindemann came to swimming at the age of eight and devoted his entire youth to the sport. He would get up for training at five in the morning and pass out in the evening. His grandmother watched him from the stands. At a competition in Leipzig she shouted at the coach, who told Lindemann off for a poor result. The grandmother took the coach by the ear and said: "How do you talk to my grandson?"

Sports tightened up his upbringing and developed self-discipline. “Drilling - probably the boy has already received this experience as a swimmer,” Lindemann's father wrote. - Once he had to take second place in a competition, but by no means first place. Of course, he got carried away, forgot about it, became the first, thanks to which he received a shouting for indiscipline. And whenever he lost in the future, his coach would torture him at practice for a long time and yelled at him: "Even if you win, you're not a winner yet!"

Lindemann swam the 1.5 km freestyle and could have gone to the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Everything was ruined when he left the hotel without permission during a competition in Florence: "I didn't want to run, but just wanted to look at the city. Cars, bikes, girls. I was caught and kicked out of the team, but then I didn't give the required results either."

Lindemann competed at the European Junior Championships, but did not go any higher. After the story in Florence, his career in sport slipped away. Perhaps an abdominal injury influenced his departure. Lindemann is gone, but he doesn't yearn: "I was relatively young. There were no good [memories] left. I was glad it was over."

"The hardest part was getting back to normal. I fell into a real hole. My home was no longer a sports school, but a ghetto in Rostock. Now I stood out through drinking and fighting. I used to be surrounded only by beautiful ladies who were interested in swimming. Now I had fierce women standing in front of me asking, "How come you don't drink?" When I was shy about approaching a girl, it was interpreted as: "Are you gay?"

Lindemann now works with a coach and swims a few kilometers before his tours to get in shape: "When I exercise, I feel a certain lightness - not only physically, but also mentally. I just feel better. The main problem is staying in shape. That's where self-discipline comes into play. Teeth grinding is important."

- Three weeks in the wild and loneliness as a creative tool

Emotionally, concerts = sports:

"How do I go on tour? Hungry. And happy. It is good to compare concerts with sport. You don't want to do both at first. You don't want to go on stage. You don't want to go to the pool. You don't want to go to the boxing ring. It all happens with reluctance. It has to be accepted somehow, that's life: spring, summer, fall, winter.

When it's done, winter's gone, the blooming begins, greenery appears, it gets bright, and you start to get a taste for it. When it's over, you feel happy. Then the body produces a sea of chemistry, a lot of happiness hormones. I think the body rewards itself."

The stage, like sports, is an embarrassment, but a necessity. Lindemann wore dark glasses in order to collect fewer views from the audience. Therefore, a couple of steps before the water, he looked at the pool with a shiver. You need to cope with yourself in order to open up to new emotions.

Lindemann's gut requires solitude and moderate solitude. This is the point:

“Loneliness is always good for a creative push - you drink a glass of wine and you feel even shitier. Art is not complete without suffering; art exists to compensate for suffering."

With his friend Joey Kelly, Lindemann spent three weeks on the Yukon River. They paddled through the wilderness in a kayak for eight to 10 hours each and lived in a tent. Lindemann didn't take a tape recorder with him, so he transferred the lyrics wandering in his head on paper.

They were catching inspiration and atmosphere:

"There were times when we wouldn't say a word for hours, but then: look there, look there! It was breathtakingly beautiful. These relatively fast-changing panoramas and skies, layers of clouds, the colors.

Except for a few bears and wolves, it's hard to see anyone else out there, it's exhilarating. Along the way we saw two hunters setting traps. No one else.

I grew up in the countryside, and I have a very strong connection to nature. I love fishing, hunting. It's an archaic experience that I like to revisit over and over again. When I'm in the city for too long, I start to miss it."

To recreate situations in the Yukon, Lindemann and Kelly trained for nine months on the Rhine river in Germany because of its liveliness.

"We went down the Rhine to where the transport ships create huge bow waves. If we hadn't had a coach with us, we probably would have been sunk by the side wave impact already during our first attempt," Lindemann said.

Together with Kelly, he had four sessions with two coaches and swam from Cologne to Koblenz [more than 100 kilometers by car]. Lindemann trained separately each week on the lakes in Mecklenburg. It's both physically challenging and savage identical to being natural.

In 2015, Till started his solo project Lindemann. On the album Skills In Pills, the song Yukon was released, in which the lyrics appeared first, and then the music.

- "My lyrics come from pain rather than desire."

The country boy is big and not much of a talker. That's how the Rammstein members saw him at the start, when they were hanging out at home. "He looked cool, like a big peasant talking one sentence an hour," keyboard player Christian "Flake" Lorenz recalled. - He always had food and vodka. He'd just steal a couple of ducks somewhere and cook them on a tray. And then, frozen like in Sleeping Beauty, there were people lying in corners and on trunks in his house."

Lindemann loves and appreciates home gatherings. This came from my father, who always had guests. “In my opinion, this is the little bit that I inherited from him. Throwing parties and gathering people. Throwing parties and getting people together. He just enjoyed being a good host. The house was always full of guests from Leipzig, from Rostock, foreign guests, even from Kazakhstan.

It was always exciting for him. He stood at the stove, cooked, bought an abundance of wine, and there was always a fire in the garden. At some point he stopped drinking, then he left the party at 21:00 and the whole company continued to feast. And in the morning he got up at four, cleaned and tidied up."

Till Lindemann is about self-digging, overcoming and childish shyness, which is covered by a pumped-up figure of a swimmer. This is how Lindemann decrypts himself:

• “And I really am like a big child - ill-mannered, but harmless. People think that I am always strong, explosive. This is not true. I am sensitive and easily hurt, but in love I am romantic and passionate."

• “At the very beginning, you sit somewhere in a dark room, open a bottle of wine and figure out how to make the lyrics popular with the music. At first you only have a vague idea of ​​what it could be.

And when, three years after recording, mixing, and more mixing, developing the artwork, all this nonsense, then you stand on stage, and what you came up with then really works, when you manage to get 20 thousand people to raise their hands, then you experience incredible sensations."

• “Art is a kind of therapy.

When I feel that something is arising inside me, domineering and is most often dark, I need to give it a way out, otherwise it will simply crush me. So destruction and self-destruction are the two pillars on which my creativity is based.

But everyone chooses this for himself.

• “My lyrics arise from feelings and dreams, but still more from pain than by desire. I often have nightmares, and I wake up at night sweating, as I see terrible bloody scenes in my dreams. My lyrics are a kind of valve for the lava of feelings in my soul.

We are all struggling to hide behind good manners and outward decency, but in fact we are governed by instincts and feelings: hunger, thirst, horror, hatred, the desire for power and sex. Of course, there is also additional energy in us - this is love. Without it, all human feelings would fade away."

- "When you're constantly living someone else's life, it's very hard to get back into your own skin. I like that in principle, but sometimes you start to get confused - are you out of a role or not yet. You're already Till, or you're still a homicidal maniac."

- "I hate the noise. I hate the chatter. I expose myself to it, which is pure masochism. And then I have to protect myself from it. Noise makes you crazy. You die in it."

• “I think there is no God. And if he is and actually allows all the misfortunes on this earth, then he must punish me along with other sufferings. I will not pray to such a god."

This is how the members of Rammstein see Till - flexible and with a split personality:

Guitarist Paul Landers: "Till is so good that when you let him know that his lyrics should go in a different direction, the very next day he brings a new version of the song."

Guitarist Richard Kruspe: “He's a hell of an extreme man. He dives very deeply into situations where I cannot follow him. Everything he does is very extreme; I don't know anyone who does it. "

Drummer Christoph Schneider: "I would not want to be in Till's shoes: his soul is tormented by doubts and contradictions, he is equally a moralist and a monster."

June 1, 2021 - Translate by Lindemann Belgium

[ohworm-writes]

#02 - Tape Two | series masterlist

⮞ Beta Reader - @jschllatt​ ! thank you so much for proofreading this for me !

⮞ Pairing - Monster!Technoblade x Monster-Hunter!Reader ⮞ Summary - Bugs are not your favorite things to deal with, especially when it’s 10 times your size and chasing through streets after you. However, maybe a sight in the dark is worth the challenging day.  ⮞ Rating - Mature (SFW) ⮞ Warnings - violence , description of bug monster ( centipede ) , cursing , anxiousness ⮞ Word Count - 3.4k ⮞ Taglist - Open! Send an Ask or DM to be added

@ohworm-writes​​​ copyright 2021 | do not repost

Dead leaves crunch under your feet, and while the sound would have been satisfying in any other scenario, this was not the one. The small, nearly inaudible noise is enough to make you stop dead in your tracks, head poking up from your previously hunched position to look around. If you saw it yourself, it could have reminded you of a meerkat. The animals, as meek as they are, are quite the attraction.

Any sound you’d make would go fairly unappreciated. You see, out here, sound was not exactly one to be a best friend. It was an enemy, if anything. If anyone or anything were to hear you, to hear your location, you could be dead within seconds! Minutes, if you were a lucky one. A single noise, much like a fall leaf turning to pieces underneath your feet, is more than enough to cause fear to course through your veins. 

It’s almost a full minute until you move again. Sixty seconds stood in the same, and quite the uncomfortable, position. However, it’s much better to be safe, rather than sorry. Slowly, quietly, and carefully; you let your body move once more. Careful step after step, one foot in front of the other, simply trying to make it from Point A to Point B. Alive, preferably. 

You had set out more than a few hours ago, maybe… 7 hours or so? Given the position of the sun, which was a little further than its previous position in the center of the sky, it was enough to tell you that noon had gone, and the evening was nearing. Oh, how the time had passed, slowly albeit. Your anxiety and cautiousness never faltered. Never once did you stroll down the street, taking in the sights of what once was.

If you did, however, you’d be able to see the beauty of it. How the trees were full of life, spectacularly green leaves scattered across it by the thousands. How the flowers, some of which had poked through the asphalt of the streets, had bloomed in bright and captivating colors of all shades. How the streets, once filled with nothing but cars and people, had now been taken back by the land. Oh, what a sight it is, and what a sight you were missing out on. 

Even though you had overlooked the beauty of it all, you couldn’t deny that being out here was a breath of fresh air. Quite literally, in that sense. No, but especially because you were out here alone. On one hand, you could see it as another factor for you to be more aware than you already were. There was nobody to watch your back, to yell out if they had seen or heard anything. No, that was all your job now. You were the one to have all say in whether you made it to tomorrow. 

Without those thoughts, though, you could admire it. You had never had a moment to yourself, with it being always ruined by judgmental stares or offhanded comments. Now, you could listen to the beautiful silence that was loneliness. A shame, some could call it, how you’d revel to have moments like these alone. Why be alone when you could be out with friends or, hell, even people! Well, when nobody seems to take your side, though, loneliness is your only friend. It’s the only thing that you know won’t leave. 

Well, it’s the only thing you hope won’t leave, especially not now. 

Though, as they say, speak of the devil, and he will appear.

A clicking noise, much similar to the sound of steps, travels to your era. It’s far, but it’s audible. The crossbow, made at home in your hands, directs towards the sound in a fraction of a second. The way your body moves with such violence, it’s a wonder how you didn’t have whiplash from the movement. Everything around you seems to come to a halt at that moment. Not another sound, not a breath, no movement or sound at all. 

You stand at the corner of a street, tacky green arrows signs in the distance held up by a rusting chain to a stoplight to tell you which street is which. ‘4th Avenue,’ the sign ahead reads, and to its right, in the opposite position, reads ‘12th Avenue.’ On your right, there’s a barbershop, the red, white, and blue cylinder set to a stop out front. The windows are smashed in, shards of glass scattered along the pavement outside, and by the smell coming from inside, you can think that a little more than cutting hair happened there.

You hone your senses in on where the noise had come from, eye to the scope as you point your weapon in the previous sound’s direction. The arrow tip points towards the edge of the building, pointing into the street aside from it. When there’s no more noise, that’s when you panic. The worst thing you could experience out on the field was to hear a quite obvious sound, and then nothing. No indication if the sound had been there at all, or if it was something in your head. If it was there, then where had it gone?

To your luck, or not, the sound finds its place in your ears once more, the clicking sound much closer than the last time you had heard it. It’s almost like the sound a rollercoaster makes as it’s climbing the tracks towards a peak, slowing as it reaches the top. As the coaster reaches the top, there’s that brief sense of both dread and relief. On one hand, because you know what’s coming next. You know that soon, that calm would pass, and you’d dive downward into something you’re not sure if you’re ready to tackle head on. On the other, you know that this is the last of the peace, and you want to relish in every moment that you can.

And just like that, the coaster dives. 

From behind the crumbling brick of the likely once lively barbershop, something peeks to look at you. It’s low at first, whatever it was, maybe a foot off of the ground. But then, then it grows tall. Much taller than you, oh by quite a lot, that is. As it comes around the corner in all of its glory, you can see this plunge is far scarier than you’d expected.

The clicking noise had come from the legs of the monster, the skinny limbs coming by the hundred. The plates, like that of armor, plated across its back, face to and away from you, instead, its vulnerable purplish underside facing towards you. Looking up, the beast towering, you see its head. Large half-moon eyes on either side of its face peering down at you, antennas poking through the top. Large mandibles protrude from the side of its face, serrated teeth fully on display from its wide-open jaw.

That was a goddamn centipede, wasn’t it?

Its body wiggles as it reaches its full height, standing above you at twenty feet or so, its long shadow casting down over you. And then it pounces. The beast leaps towards you, mandibles spread wide as it dives directly towards you. At the same moment, you dash to the side, the trigger pressing down as it sends the arrow flying towards the underside of the monster. It pierces before the monster even touches the ground, a loud screech echoing from it.

It recovers quickly, twisting its head sharply, and you’re already bolting, making a violent turn down the street it just came from. It’s abandoned as you’d hoped, but not for long. With that many legs, it catches up with you quickly. The clicking, the thudding its limbs make as they collide with the ground, is something you won’t ever be able to forget. You dash from one side of the street to the other, taking the moments you have to reload the crossbow. 

It’s a task you’d wished was much easier right now, holding the arrow between your teeth as you pull the string back with one hand, the other shakily holding the weapon. To your luck, it clicks into place, and you spend no time loading it. You look over your shoulder, being met with the quickening pace of the oversized bug as it bounds towards you, a green drool dribbling out from its mouth. Now that it’s on the ground, it’s near impossible to get a worthy shot on it. 

You had looked over the file of the exact creature countless times while at the casino. Sleepless nights left to your own devices were all spent the same; hunched over your rotting desk, reading file after file on different monsters. While the words seem to blend before your eyes, the facts stay perfectly separated from one another. 

These creatures, rightfully referred to as ‘Giant Centipedes’, are a common Euclid,  mid-level monster. They tend to find a home in heavily wooded areas and marshes, few can be found scuttling down the abandoned avenues. Avenues, specifically that is. They’re around 60 feet long on average, longer or shorter depending on their age. They molt, which is a strange and unnerving occurrence that you, thankfully, have never seen yourself. When they molt, they’re most vulnerable, the plates on their back much softer. 

But, to your luck, the one chasing you must have been between molts, its plates at their strongest. The brown and purple-colored plates shine as the sun reflects off of them. However, this was not the time to admire it. Making another sharp turn, you race down another street, your friend in tow. It lets out a high-pitched snarl as sweat beads across your hairline, calm muscles burning at the exertion. You can hear your heartbeat in your ears, and your breaths, while even-paced, leave you gasping. 

With the crossbow held tight to your chest, your body at an angle as you sprint, you think about your options. One, fuckin’ hell, you better sprint as your life depends on it. Because it bloody does! Two, however, which is much more of a plan, was to aim for an opening, quite literally. You had to wait for the exact moment where either its underside was exposed, or something else. 

Looking back for a split second, you see it. You see an opening. As you move to aim the crossbow, fast as ever, you do one thing you had been terrified of doing the entire chase.

You trip.

Your body tumbles onto the pavement, with no more grace than a drunken man. You’re still holding onto the weapon, barely at that, but it’s still in your grasp. It hurts like hell, your body colliding with the asphalt, broken glass, and gods know what else. The clicking stops too, and the moment you regain your stability, you realize why. The beast is towering over you, much like before, but now you’re on your ass staring up at it. 

It’s not a pleasant sight, the green liquid dripping from its mouth and mandibles onto the pavement only a few inches away from you. Its body gives a little wiggle, almost giving itself a pat on the back for a chase well done. 

The crossbow, held in your dominant hand, sits to your side. Not because you had given up, ready to accept your demise, but rather because you were looking for an opening to shoot. Bringing the weapon out while the creature drools above you was suicide. You look up at its body, eyes trained for a moment on the arrow you shot at it, which found itself lodged in its middle. An excellent shot, if you say so yourself, especially with the confines of the moment. 

Your eyes trail higher, where its neck started and its body ended, you had no idea. The flesh molds together as one, just a long line of flesh. As you watch it lower its body ever so slightly, almost as if to smell you better, there’s your opening.

You yourself barely even react as you whip the crossbow out with lightning speed, holding it in your grip and aiming upwards. The creature can barely lower its body an inch, a snarl trapped in its throat as the arrow fires, piercing through the easy flesh of its lower jaw and coming up through the head. 

At that moment, all life leaves the beast’s body, its body falling limp above you. You’re barely able to make it to the side as it crashes down upon the place you last were, a dark green ooze dribbling as the wound bleeds out. Your chest heaves as you look at it, your body propped up with one hand as you stare at the dead beast, its lifeless eyes directed towards you. 

 As the coaster car pulls into the station, and all is calm. 

You let your body collapse against the pavement, a soft thud sounding from the action. A dry laugh sounds from your throat, a little noise to tell you that you lived. You let your eyes shut, the warm sun shining down on you as you let yourself relax for the moment. 

All pleasant moments find their close, and you’re back onto your feet. As much as you wanted to melt into the pavement at that moment, falling asleep under the gentle sunlight, you didn’t want to stick around for what other monsters could have heard you. You take only a moment to retrieve both of the arrows, cringing at the grotesque noise it makes as you pull it from the flesh, before heading back on the road. 

Your body is much more sluggish as you walk down the beat-up roads, eyes heavier from your previous antics. Most would feel lucky to be alive after something like that, but smarter people would shrug it off and keep going. Idiots revel at the moment, because as you do, you’re not paying attention, and that’s when the real challenges come for your throat. 

Hours drone on as you make your way down the streets, out of one town and into the next. You couldn’t waste time, especially with the sun falling lower and lower into the sky. Covering ground was the most important thing if you wanted to be back within 8 days’ time, and you did not intend to stay out here even a minute longer than you needed to be. 

Sweat covers your body as the sun beats down on you, the feeling of being not one you enjoy all that much. Your legs burn and add on to the exertion from earlier, you were more than just fatigued. The sky mixes with shades of pinks and purples, small clouds dotted here and there in the sky. It’s beautiful, and you stop dead in your tracks to admire it. 

You’d scold yourself later tonight, half-asleep with emotions roaring, but you take the moment now to watch in awe. As the sun drops lower and lower on the horizon, the colors come in darker shades; you smile. It’s not a fake one like you’re so used to putting on with others around, but it’s one filled with genuine joy. Your mouth falls open partially, a satisfying breeze passing by you, and there’s peace.

As the sun nearly dips fully out of your sight, you decide to call it a night. It was no use going around in the dark, as it would simply and truly be a call for death. So, with drowsiness settling, you make your way to the closest building. The architecture here differs greatly from Las Nevadas and the rural towns you had passed through earlier in the day. While it’s far more urban than anything you’ve passed, tall complexes towering high above you, it’s not a major city. 

The building closest to you is one of the shortest, only a single story to its height. From the burnt-out neon sign on the floor outside, you can tell it was a thrift store in a better life. The windows are, surprisingly, intact. Even with them being covered in dust, as you walk closer, you can see the pristine condition of the building.

Taking it as a safe enough option, you take hold of the dark handle on the door and pull. It takes minimal effort for the door to swing towards you, a smell of mold immediately taking to your senses. You breathe out roughly, pinching your nose as you walk in, closing the door shut behind you.

It’s as much as you’d expect a thrift store to be, which is rightfully not much. Hanger stands with countless dull and colorful items you’d never be caught dead wearing now fill the aisles. Small bookshelves display much more than books, leaving their contents out for you to gaze at. You can almost call the place cozy.

With a quick scope around the place, checking for monsters as well as broken doors and shattered glass, you deem it safe enough to stay in for the night. As if you had much of another option, seeing how all color had gone from the sky and the stars had shown. You set up a makeshift bed in the middle of an aisle towards the front, backpack hung up, and weapons nearby. 

It’s as perfect as it can be, and given the circumstances, you’re more than happy with it. Letting your back fall against the carpeted floor, head dropping against a pillow you had found behind the counter, you let your body sink. It’s surprisingly comfortable, with the rough and tacky carpet and the feather-filled pillow. Yet, it feels like the most comfortable you’ve been in your lifetime. 

As you let your eyes shut slowly, ready to be taken over into the realm of sleep, a soft light emits from the window, disrupting your peace. Your eyes open once more, trained to the ceiling, and you give out a soft huff. Well, if it wasn’t just your luck. Turning your head over, you look towards the dusted window, seeing blows of a bluish-green shade glow from outside.

Your body still lies flat on the floor as you watch the colors mold with one another, several strange blobs glowing from behind the glass. With a sigh, you sit up, all of that previous discomfort coming back to you at full force. You wince at the sharp pain that your back gives as you stand on your feet, muscles tight and sore. 

You grab the hatchet that was clipped to your bag, making your way towards the glass, the colors shining brighter as you near it. It could have been some daylight timer someone had set up in the past, or it could be a monster. Only a foot away, you bring your hand up to the dusted window, shivering. With a single motion downwards, you wipe the glass, ridding it of dust. 

With a row of dust gone, you’re able to look out through the window. It’s confusing when you first look at it, your mind not registering the green and blue figures floating above the street. But then, in a moment of both brilliance and stupidity, you realize. You take no time to hold the weapon at your side, swinging the door wide open as you gaze into the street. 

Gods, was it worth it. 

Glowing fish swim above the street and glide by your face. A green and blue bioluminescent glow radiates off of them, dully lighting up the street. You’re able to see their bodies twisting and their fins swishing if you pay attention close enough. A school of smaller fish comes right by you, moving swiftly by your face and into the sky. 

And, as you watch them float higher, you’re sent into a moment of awe as you gaze into the sky. Whales and fish and sea creatures alike float high up in the sky, moving between the glow of the stars effortlessly. You watch as one of the larger whales floats closer to the ground, tail swishing up and down as it propels itself through the air. Your eyes go wide as you stare, a childlike grin set on your features that even you don’t catch.

It’s… amazing. It’s wonderful in every way you could never imagine by yourself. The glowing creatures in the sky, swimming through its currents, are a sight you’d never been able to see in your lifetime. It’s something a child would squeal with happiness at, something that they, and you, would never forget. 

With a mix of awe, excitement, and delight, you spend your time admiring the creatures above. Wishing, to yourself and whatever gods may have heard you, that you could be like them one day.

⮞ Previous Tape      ⮞⮞⮞      ⮞ Next Tape

⮞ Technoblade Route Taglist - @cutiebear45 @kiki-is-the-name @hololizard @sunshinebutnotrainbows @valkyrieidunn @dominickle @err0rnan0 @lacunaanonymoused @ura-writes @jaciahbabes @mega-trash-cringe @itsberrydreemurstuff @theharborhooligan @maybeshroom​ @caliginous-skies​ @whalerus​

⮞ Author’s Note - A day late, but in my defense, I have no defense. I know I’ve done a lot of world building, but I do promise things are going to start rolling in Techno’s direction next tape! I really do hope that you did enjoy, comments and feedback are greatly appreciated! 

[redux-iterum]

A Kindling: Chapter Three

(AO3 counterpart here.)

“Shut up.”

“Yep.”

“Shut up.”

“Yep!”

Rusty was tickled by Smudge’s expression—mouth dropped open enough to catch a ball, eyes wide as Rusty’s paw. Smudge had listened to his story in complete disbelief, and now was visibly reeling from Rusty’s adventure.

“And they actually meant it,” Smudge said at last.

“I mean, I don’t know why they’d offer if they didn’t want me there.” Rusty’s chest was filled to bursting with excitement. He couldn’t help tip-tapping his feet to release the energy. “But Smudge, the forest—the smells, the plants—it’s amazing there! If I could—”

“Woah, woah, woah.” Smudge held up a paw and shook his head. “You can’t be taking this seriously.”

“Well, they meant it, right?” Rusty said, purring in delight. “So I am!”

“No, not just that they offered it.” Smudge leaned forward, looking alarmed. “You can’t just leave and bugger off into the woods! We have no idea what’s out there. You could get killed, you could get sick, or starve, or—”

He cut himself off, eyes searching Rusty’s face, desperate. The excitement in Rusty’s chest settled down immediately and he softened his voice.

“It’s a possibility,” he said. “I know. But… honestly, I’m willing to take those risks. It’s just…” He looked up and a little sideways, searching for the right words. “It’s not horrible here, but I’m not… I feel like I could be doing more. Seeing more. Just living in this neighborhood, it’s not…”

“Fulfilling?” Smudge offered unhappily.

Rusty nodded.

Smudge looked crestfallen; he didn’t even meet Rusty’s eyes. He drew in a big breath and let out a heavy sigh.

“If you go, we can never talk again,” he said, quiet. “Your new friends won’t let you see me. I’ll have no idea if you’re doing okay or not. Or if you’re even still alive.”

Rusty lifted a paw, halfway to reaching out to Smudge, then retracted it. “It won’t be all bad. I can at least walk by the border once in a while and wave to you.” He tried a more cheerful tone. “And I’ll know that you’re safe in your house, getting fatter and comfier by the day, right? You aren’t going anywhere.”

Smudge made a breathy noise that could have been amused, but he still didn’t look up at Rusty.

Rusty tried again. “I just don’t know if this is the life for me. When I went into the forest… it was like a part of me woke up. I started hunting without knowing what I was going after. It felt natural.” The recollection stirred excitement in his blood, and his voice took on a tone of wonder. “If the Clan cats hadn’t shown up, I-I don’t know! I might not have come back. Not for a while. There’s so much to see in the world, in that forest alone. It doesn’t scare me. Maybe it should, but it doesn’t.”

Smudge’s eyes flicked up to him. Rusty reached out again and rested a paw on Smudge’s head, trying to be comforting. Honesty came out instead.

“I don’t know what could happen to me,” he said. “Or what will happen to me. I could die, yeah, but I don’t know for sure. And I like that. It feels like being alive. Here it just feels… the opposite.” He tilted his head. “Does that make any sense?”

Smudge’s eyes drifted down again, and for a moment Rusty was afraid he’d lost him. Then, slowly, he raised his head. Rusty quickly took his paw away and waited as Smudge regarded him with a sadness he had not seen in his friend before.

“You never were content here,” Smudge finally said. “Even when I first met you. That’s why you wandered all over and pestered everyone by going into their yards. Your home wasn’t enough.”

“Right,” Rusty said softly.

Smudge briefly shut his eyes and sighed again. His sadness was now a little more affectionate.

“I guess…” he started, paused, and then, again, “I guess I’m not willing to stop you from being happy. If you want to be with those ferals… if you really want to live out there and risk your life… if that’ll make you happy, then maybe you should do it.”

Rusty purred, halfway between pleased and trying to comfort his friend. “Thank you. I’m sorry that I have to leave you behind. I really am. I wish they’d let me talk to you, at least.”

“Eh.” Smudge waved a paw with a blatantly false casualness. “I’ve got plenty of cats to talk to here. And you certainly will have company, if they’re really a group.”

An idea came to Rusty. “Maybe… maybe my human will get another cat, and they’ll be even better friends with you than I could ever be.”

“I doubt that,” Smudge said fondly. “You’re pretty awesome. Hard to top.”

Rusty’s tail curled. “Thanks!”

“And I’m pretty awesome too,” Smudge prompted, somewhat sarcastic.

“You’re very awesome.” Rusty stood up and bumped his head against Smudge’s shoulder. “Here, let’s meet at noon tomorrow. We should hang out and play as much as we can before I go.”

“That’s a good idea.” Smudge returned the gesture. “In the meantime, I’m going to sleep. So should you. It’s late and I’m tired from all this life-changing talk.”

Rusty snorted and turned, waving his tail. “I’ll see you here tomorrow.”

“Sleep well,” Smudge said, and a bit of unhappiness crept into his voice again. Before Rusty could say anything, he clumsily hopped off the fence and plopped onto the cut grass, trotting back into his house. Rusty could hear his human cooing over him and shaking a kibble bowl.

Rusty didn’t feel like going to sleep. He felt like running straight into the forest again and calling for the Clan cats to let him join them now. Some small, reasonable thing in the back of his head reminded him that he should still be thinking things over, but the greater part of him was fluffing out his fur in a pre-emptive thrill of exploring the woods. His tail wagged up and almost over his back, and his paws kneaded at the chipped paint on the fence.

His mind ran wild as he returned to his yard, scenario after scenario making him forget the irritating clipped grass beneath his feet. Those cats were giant—would they all be taller than him? Would the kittens be taller? How many members of the Clan were there? How long would it take him to see every step of the forest? What about the other Clans that were mentioned? What were they like? Would he get to meet them?

The possibilities made him shiver in delight. The bell on his collar jingled tauntingly and his delight vanished in an instant, replaced by irritation.

Right, he thought. One other thing to do before I leave.

He stepped through the door-flap, pawing at his collar every other step. It wasn’t particularly tight—his neck was too skinny for that—but it wouldn’t go over his head. A few paces into the house, he sat down and started pushing at it with his back foot, trying with all his might to squeeze his head through the gap. The metal clasp dug into his throat and it became difficult to breathe. The back of the collar pressed against his head, touching his ears. He unconsciously let out a frustrated growl (strained a little by his current situation).

At this, there was a shift of cloth. When he looked up, his owner was walking towards him from the living room and into the kitchen. They crouched down in front of him and tilted their head, making high-pitched, soothing noises.

Rusty stopped struggling and met their eyes. It occurred to him that he had never quite paid attention to them before, couldn’t remember their face—had never even studied their face, really. The moon had vanished and reappeared since he had come here, and it was only now that he realized his owner’s eyes were dark and soft.

Perhaps that was a sign that he should leave.

Rusty was jarred out of his thoughts when their hands came to circle his neck and began fiddling with his collar. He sat still, waiting politely until the collar was unbuckled and lifted away. The human spoke again, a little louder and sweeter, and gently scratched around where the collar had been. He thanked them with a purr and rubbed his cheek against their hand, though the gesture meant little to him. They stood again and walked away, setting the collar down on the counter before moving back into the living room and sitting down on their chair.

Rusty watched them distantly, the image of some animal running around on their lit box. He stood up and slowly turned his head, observing his surroundings. It was all flat and even and perfectly curved or cut with an exact line. The floor under his feet was cold and completely smooth. The air in the kitchen was stiff and a little too warm. The one or two smells he could pick up were stale (his kibble) and nastily foreign (whatever flowers were sitting at the windowsill).

It was plain, he thought. Simple. It was no wonder he had been blown away by the forest—there was so much to it. Here…

Smudge had given him the right word. It wasn’t fulfilling. It was nothing. A life of nothing, he thought, was not one he wanted to live.

  At noon, Rusty jumped onto the rail splitting his yard from Smudge’s. His faithful friend was sitting on the grass, looking morose. Rusty called his name and the look faded instantly when Smudge noticed him.

“I was worried you were going to sleep in again,” he said as Rusty jumped down into his yard. “You haven’t happened to change your mind, have you?”

“I’m afraid not.” Rusty offered an apologetic half-crouch when Smudge hung his head. “But we still have time. What do you want to do?”

“Well…” Smudge stood up. “If you’re about to go, we should go around the neighborhood and say ‘bye’ to the few cats you haven’t annoyed by intruding.”

“They’ll be thrilled that I’m gone.” Rusty puffed out a jokingly dramatic sigh. “I think you’re the only one that will miss me.”

“Then we should get one last pester in,” Smudge said. His tail, still kitten-short for his size, thwapped Rusty’s back leg. “What did the homebody call it? ‘Blaze of glory’ or something.”

“That’s for when you’re about to die.” Rusty led the way to the fence and climbed up again with ease. He turned around and waited for Smudge.

“Where you’re going, that might be appropriate,” Smudge muttered as he clambered after Rusty, making a cheerful face when Rusty gave him a pretend-irritated look.

Once Smudge was on the rail, Rusty led the way down the row of yards, his tail high. Saying farewell to everyone, he realized, was not going to be as sad as he might have thought. To him, it was just a symbol of his transition into his new life.

He just hoped that everyone in the Clan liked him more than everyone in the neighborhood did.

[slutsofren]

Danger Days Chapter 8: Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back

summary: finding shelter in an abandoned home, you try to keep your wits about you and care for the still unconscious Joel until some trouble comes knocking

word count: 3,792

content warnings: mention of gore and impromptu medical care, more canon-typical violence, death, murder, arrival of.... cannibals, y'know the deal hurt/comfort

notes: i didn't mention it last time but yeah, your shit really can kill you if you get your lower intestines punctured lol it's a real thing and gnarly af

read on ao3 / masterlist

You woke up in a start. Heavy breaths taking hold in your lungs. The small, barely considerable amounts of sleep were getting to you as they had been for the last month as more and more night terrors racked your brain. Rubbing at your eyes, you pushed yourself up to begin your usual routine.

It had been a couple weeks since your little group found yet another abandoned home and it took some hell of maneuvering to get Joel into the basement but it worked. The winter snow was coming in full force and it was peritive you all kept Joel as warm as possible, there were too many odds stacked against him.

Walking over to his prone body, you checked on his wounds once more as you did practically every couple of hours. He was looking worse for wear, even changing out the gauze could only do so much. Whatever small amounts of clean water the three of you had went to cleaning it out, hoping to stave off the infection.

Joel was, by all means, not doing well.

To top it off, even with your meager amount of medic training from your days with FEDRA could never prepare you for the long-term haul you were in with Joel, he was dying. The bastard was dying and you couldn’t help but feel it was your fault.

Night after night you were haunted by the image of him falling off that balcony, the sounds of his groans of pain still lingered in your head even when you were awake. It fucking sucked.

He was asleep now, he barely woke up since everything went to shit at the university then at the mall. That in and of itself felt like a lifetime ago. You put a hand against his forehead, feeling how his fever still hadn’t broken. With the chill in the air as winter was fully settling in making your fingers cold as ice, he didn’t even flinch away. You closed your eyes and sighed, still not wanting to give up. Not for Ellie, not for Tommy, not even for the grumpy man himself.

A quick glance out the small basement window told you it was nearing dusk which startled you. Ellie had left when the sun was at its peak, sometime around noon, surely. She had been gone much much longer than she normally would have.

Usually it was you who left to go hunting for food once your supplies dwindled but Ellie wanted to help relieve the burden from your shoulders and you reluctantly agreed. Yo hated to admit you needed a break. She had argued she wanted to get better with her bow and arrow and she certainly did, often bringing back animals of various sizes. It was her way of coping with potentially losing Joel, something she confided in you that was one of her biggest fears.

Thoughts of Ellie swirled your mind and you paced back and forth, chewing at your fingernails. A nasty habit you suppressed most days. A part of you wanted to go find the girl, follow Callus’ tracks in the snow. Another part of you didn’t want to leave Joel by himself.

Fuck, you thought.

Compartmentalizing you figured if she didn’t return within an hour, you’d go looking for her. If you couldn’t locate her within a mile radius, a strict rule you enforced her limited hunting zone to, you’d hunker down with Joel and wait until morning to find her and scold her for being irresponsible.

You stopped your pacing to look at Joel’s face, seeing how his face was still warped in the painful scowl he hadn’t let go of. His features were beginning to slowly become gaunt as the small amounts of food you’d been able to get him to eat the rare times a day he’d wake were coming far and few in between. Even his usual tan skin was slowly softening to a cooler shade of bronze. He looked like death.

Joel, by all means, was a handsome cowboy. Even with his patchy beard that was littered with grey hair in a few spots. Now he just looked like a ghost of himself.

Okay, fine, you admit to yourself. With Joel down, you’ve kind of missed the fool. You missed the banter and arguing with him about stupid shit. He irritated the daylights out of you because he always wanted to jump headfirst into things without a care for his safety clearly but dammit, the lack of his presence was palpable. You hated it.

You sat beside Joel, removing one of his hands from under the blanket to hold. His hands still rough and calloused, mirrors of yours if you weren’t missing a finger. Once upon a time, you remembered hearing that coma patients could sometimes hear what people said to them, that it helped. Maybe talking to him now would help not just him but you as well, to keep your mind occupied. Maybe pass the time a little. Maybe.

“Hey, it’s me, you grumpy bastard,” you started off lightly. “I don’t know if you can tell but you’ve been puttin’ that girl and I through hell and back trying to keep your ass alive.”

A hollow laugh escapes you, feeling a little more choked up than you’d ever dare to admit. Composing yourself you tried to use playful banter. “How do you do it, cowboy? Ellie is a goddamned handful. Shit, I thought I was bad when I was a teenager,” you sniff, feeling your voice waver.

“When I first laid eyes on you two, I think it would have saved me a whole lotta trouble and pain if Maria let me shoot you,” you sigh dramatically. Even though there was a smile on your lips, it didn’t reach your eyes. What did were the tears that were slowly forming. The added stress of Ellie being missing was really wearing you thin.

Amongst other things.

“Y’know,” you sniffled, “you really hurt my feelings back at the university. When you thought I led the two of you into a trap.” You took a sharp inhale. “As much shit as you and I put each other through, that was the one thing that stung. More than anything.”

You squeezed his hand and sighed, closing your eyes. Admitting that was hard, stars know you’d never say that to Joel while he was conscious nor in front of Ellie.

“Don’t die, you asshole,” you begged softly, wiping away the light tears that coated your lashes, reluctantly letting go of Joel’s hand as you tucked the blanket around him tightly.

After you said your piece, your mind became overrun with the little turd you grew fond of. The more you began to worry about Ellie, the more your thoughts swirled rapidly into worst case scenarios.

Before you worked yourself into a much deeper frenzy, a loud metallic bang echoed from upstairs. You ran up the steps and came face to face with Ellie, looking just as frantic. She raised her hand and in it, a tied white rabbit, so white it was nearly silver in the dim lighting. “I got food,” she said breathlessly.

“And,” she shoved you aside and took off to the basement, “I got this. Can it help?”

Ellie reached into her pocket and pulled out a syringe and orange bottle, she handed it to you while kneeling next to Joel as he shifted in his sleep. You were still rather shocked to see Ellie who looked faintly bloodied and tired, before you could comment on the new rifle on her shoulder, you took the bottle and were damn near milliseconds from riding into her until you read the faded label of the glass container.

Penicillin.

“Where the fuck did you get this, Ellie?”

Without waiting for her to answer, you dug in your pack and pulled out some disinfectant alcohol and a gauze pad to clean the syringe and a spot on Joel’s arm. Ellie refused to look up from where she kept her gaze focused on Joel’s face, “‘s not important.”

“If I wasn’t so mad at you right now, I’d kiss you.”

Throwing away all the questions you had for her, you administered the antibiotic as quickly as you could, he sighed as the medicine entered his body. Although, it was likely you were giving him too much, truthfully, you didn’t think it would hurt him worse than he already was.

As he relaxed underneath your hands, you looked down at his wound one last time for the evening. The haphazard stitches were taut on his stomach where the swelling was, hopefully by morning, he’d be better.

You didn’t look up from Joel as you laid into Ellie, “I don’t want excuses about where you were, only that you promise me to be more careful in the future, please.”

“Ye- yeah, I promise.”

“Good,” you covered Joel back up, “Now go get some rest. I’ll take care of the rabbit and wake you when it’s done.”

You turned your back to Ellie, it wasn’t that you wanted her to feel bad for her little disappearing act. You just needed some space to gather your thoughts. Between being Joel’s caretaker, Ellie’s temporary guardian, and keeping yourself sane, you were a wreck. You needed a moment.

Before you took a step on the stairs you paused. “Good work on getting the medicine, kiddo. Joel would be proud of you too.”

She didn’t respond as you walked away, the implication that although you were upset with her, you were still proud lingered in the air. Mindlessly, you focused on the rabbit, doing what needs to be done to cook it for dinner, pushing away those lingering worries. Ellie was safe, you reminded yourself, she came back.

It didn’t take you long to finish with your meager dinner, still pretty damn proud of Ellie’s evolving hunting skills. Maybe you’d offer to teach her a couple snares in the morning to leave out overnight. Although they tended not to gain anything bigger than a rabbit or a squirrel, something was better than nothing and you’d figure it would help Ellie focus on something other than Joel’s condition.

You bounded down the stairs, bringing the freshly cooked meat with you. A small shake to her shoulder and she was awake, “Dinner’s ready.”

Ellie didn’t bring her gaze up to look you in the eye, likely still ashamed. The two of you still sat in silence eating, occasionally looking to Joel for any changes or whenever he shifted in his sleep.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice sounding small.

“I know, Ellie. I’m sorry too, I didn’t mean to snap at you. I was just worried.”

Once again, the silence encompassed you both like a blanket, warmer now than it was before. You broke it first, “I was thinking about teaching you a couple snares in the morning. How does that sound?”

Ellie wiped the grease from her fingers on her jeans and looked up, “I think I’d like that.”

Just like that, the two of you were on even footing. It didn’t feel right to be mad at each other, not when Joel wasn’t there to diffuse. Either way, it was much like when you were the one in between their own fight that day you’d met them, it wasn’t healthy when you all had to rely on each other for survival. At least with Ellie, she was quick to forgive and forget in the face of the larger picture. A quality you kind of admired in the young woman.

Both of you finished with your portions of the meat, saving the rest for the morning or for Joel if he wakes in the night. Simultaneously you shuffled through the remaining ammo together, doling out some spare bullets to Ellie for her shiny new rifle, still not going to ask how she acquired it. Let her have her space.

She took the bullets graciously, reloading her sidearm and long range weapons and placing them in her backpack before getting ready for sleep. You stayed fiddling with your own weapons for a few moments longer before calling it quits too.

You laid down on the opposite side of Joel, biting your lip and hoping for the best. You tossed and turned, not knowing if you could take facing Joel’s sickly frame but you also couldn’t turn your back on him and Ellie who laid on her backpack on his other side.

Please, you wished, let the medicine take.

These kinds of wishes filled your mind until you slowly drifted to a fitful night’s sleep.

By morning, you happened to find yourself shaken awake with Ellie’s face close to yours, “Wake up, I need you awake!”

You jumped up, onto your knees. “What is it,” you ask startled, afraid Joel was worse than he was when you fell asleep. Looking at Joel, he didn’t look like he deteriorated in the night, but he also didn’t look like he improved any.

“I was tracked,” she says as if that explains anything. Both of you have your hands on each other's arms in a failed attempt at communicating the other’s panic.

“What do you mean ‘tracked’, Ellie?”

“Those people I got the medicine from, David and-and James, they fucking tracked me!”

“Ellie, what the fu-.”

“Look, listen, I’m gonna draw them away. Keep an eye on Joel,” she tells you in a rush, letting go of you and bolting up the stairs, grabbing her backpack on the way out.

“Fuck,” you practically shout while getting up and looking out the window. Outside you see silhouettes of a few men, searching the nearby area. Frustrated, you kick the washing machine.

Shit, shit, shit.

You don’t know what to do, you feel tied down once again because of Joel’s condition and Ellie’s neverending saviour complex. You mumble out a few more expletives at this situation just as you see the girl bound down the street on Callus shouting for the intruder’s attention. As she rides away, you hear bullets being shot at her, getting further and further away from you.

You carelessly threw your denim coat on and opted to grab your knives instead of guns, hoping to kill anybody who came close without alerting the others. Out the basement window, you could see a few of the men still lurking about, choosing not to follow Ellie.

Just before you followed Ellie out of the house, you doubled back to Joel, kneeling forward and giving him a kiss on the forehead. “We’ll come back, I promise you Joel. Just please, don’t die on me now.” Another kiss on his warm skin and you left without stopping, barricading the basement door as if it was left unoccupied.

Everything in you wanted to panic, your muscles were screaming to fold in on yourself and heave what little food remained in your stomach but you couldn’t give in. Not when Ellie was in danger. She may have been a pain in the ass, but she was your pain in the ass.

After your conversation last night, you’d be damned if anybody hurts your girl.

Taking a deep breath, you shook your worries free and cleared your mind. Although you were a field medic by title with FEDRA back in the day, working with them turned you into a killer. It was a toxic mindset for you, even when you had joined the Fireflies, they took advantage of your ability to focus on one thing and one thing only, turning it into their own game - death.

It took years to shake off that blank emotionless part of you, even Tommy was afraid of it when he saw the horrendous things you were capable of, what the Fireflies exploited from you, but Tommy wasn’t here and the people you loved were hanging on by a thread.

It was easy to see the outlines of the few straggling men who searched the nearby homes, whatever Ellie did really pissed them off. Now, these people only pissed you off.

You stayed lurking within the shadows of the homes, even with the sun just getting ready to set, it wasn’t too difficult to stay hidden. Especially to those who weren’t familiar with the layout. It was easy to spot how the few men tended to remain within a handful of yards together, opting not to venture out into the buildings alone. Alert and yet unorganized as you could see how they would often turn their backs on each other, giving you such a delicious opportunity to sneak in and out, weaving through them and taking them down one by one.

Was it absolutely horrible this was your instinct? Maybe. But you had two people you wanted to protect, two absolutely annoying yet selfless humans who gave you hope. You did love Joel and Ellie, even if you hadn’t admitted to it yet. Besides, you had a whole lot of stress burdening your shoulders and you wanna hit something.

You watched as the small group approached one of the homes off to the left, allowing you ample room to get close without having to cross the street in the open. You took off running, not bothering to try and conceal your footprints in the snow as you got to the house besides the targets. You entered through a broken window - a common for every single house on this block. Taking lighter footsteps, you ducked by the windows and reached the second floor landing.

The homes in this area were built within close proximity to the others, making it easy for, say, somebody needing to jump between windows without being seen. Perfect.

You listened hard and close as the men shuffled and tossed things around the first floor, looking for any sign of Ellie and ‘those two people she was with’. You growled lowly, really hating the implication that these people knew about the three of you.

Taking another assessment, you noticed there were two men standing guard out the front of the house, idly walking to-and-fro, their conversation remaining on wishing they were chasing Ellie instead.

A deep breath in and you jumped with an ‘oof’, trying to make as little as noise as possible, aiming for a wide open window with a snow covered bed on the other side. Between the snow and the mattress, the noise was cushioned to only a small thud, thankfully concealed by the thuds of the men downstairs shuffling through rooms. You quickly got up and went to the doorframe and saw there was only a hallway and stairs leading down.

You took deeper breaths again, trying to center yourself for what you were about to do as you heard one person come up the stairs - alone.

Placing your body flush against the wall, you waited in stark concentration, drawing your knife from its sheath. The footsteps came close, nearing the room you were hiding in and just as an armed gunman came in, you rushed him. Putting one hand against their forehead, you pulled the other hand and dragged the knife into their throat, essentially cutting off the person from making a noise and ending their life. You pulled and lowered their body as they began to choke out, laying them on the floor gently against the wall, carelessly hiding the body.

Downstairs you could still hear shuffling of the other invader and you made your way to them, silently assessing.

From what you could tell, the other person was banging around in the basement. So you rounded a nearby corner to where the open basement door was until finally, finally, somebody came through. You took him down just the same as his buddy.

So unorganized, you thought. If they were really looking for you and Joel, they were doing a piss poor job of it.

You swiped a bottle from the kitchen as you strolled past, taking aim out a broken window. Giving it a nice little toss, it shattered against the other house and without fail, you heard the tell-tale signs of one of the other men asking ‘what was that’. You ducked behind the faded curtain until one of the targets came into view, watching how he was pensive and alert, fortunately he was by himself which made the next part just as easy.

As soon as the man walked by the window, you jumped out from your hiding spot and jabbed your hunting knife straight into the soft squishy part of his eye, surprisingly facing little to no resistance.

You pulled it back and repeated the motion again once the man made an audible noise, probably alerting his friend. In only a slight rush now, you jumped out the window and removed your blade, now stalking towards the front when you could hear the other man yell the other’s names.

Wrapping around the corner of a house in a whirlwind, you surprised the last one when you stood face-to-face with him. He looked at you, astounded, mouth agape and dropped his weapon - a handgun. Looking down at his body, he whimpered as he took in the sight of your knife now buried deep in his stomach as you yanked them up into his chest piercing his heart.

Copper scent filled the air as the hunter’s body gave out. His blood spilling down your front. Under normal circumstances you would’ve likely vomited all over yourself but considering the innate need to protect Ellie and Joel, all that shit is blown out the window.

All in all, maybe thirty minutes have passed, you wanted to check on Joel but the distant gunshots were making you worried. At the very least, the longer they went off, the longer you knew your little fighter was alive.

Okay, think, you tried to get yourself to focus. You came up with a rapid-fire plan and before you could second guess yourself, you ran. Refusing to stop. Each step in the plush snow found you closer and closer to your hideout.

Entering the home through the garage, you gave Whiskey a pat as you walked on by and headed straight for the basement. You pushed the undisturbed barricade from the door, grateful it signaled that Joel was safe. Entering the downtrodden room you grabbed your holsters, strapping them maybe a little more tightly than you should’ve and throwing your backpack over your shoulders. You double-checked your weapons, making sure they were fully loaded.

Once again, you kneeled next to Joel as he laid on the dirty mattress, huffing from the rising pain from the stitch in your side. “Joel? I’m gonna go back out and find Ellie. I’m gonna go get our girl,” you said.

You hoped you were telling the truth.

[whump-town]

The Safe Side

No pairings

No warnings (surprising, I know)

Hotch is getting older and that scares the shit out of Reid

I probably wouldn't have finished this if not for @genevievedarcygranger

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

His only symptom is memory loss.

Reid sees it, he knows it. The symptoms he’s committed to his memory for better or worse dispelled so easily, so regularly before him but he can’t help but entertain his irrational fears. He’s not sure why. It would not be more comforting for Hotch’s occasional forgetfulness to be Alzheimer’s and not age and yet he waits for the moment that proves him wrong. For the phone call that Hotch is dressed for work and trying to get up to the bullpen. That they’ll lose him to anxiety and aggression, he’ll lose his temperament and comforting nature bit-by-bit until he’s broken down. And Reid will lose him too.

The good things become tainted by his fear.

At Christmas, they go to Rossi’s like they always do, and while the others dance to the music softly humming through the room Reid finds himself watching Hotch. Inspecting the grey hairs growing ever more along his temples, spread now through the rest of his hair. They age him appropriately but Reid can’t help but feel betrayed by their presence like he’s being taunted. No different from the reading glasses perched at the very edge of Hotch’s nose, the ones Hank lightly reaches up for. Old enough not to grab at them but still curiously taking a finger to trail their frames. Reid neglects his desire to be closer to them, to be drawn in by Hotch’s deep voice and the crackling fire soothing Hank to sleep. He stays where he is, hearing the ghosting bits of “Where The Wild Things Are” for the third time.

All he hears is science. Proof in the voice’s Hotch uses for each character -- “Oh, please don't go — I'll eat you up — I love you so!” -- that his language center had no inhibitions. The way Hank looks at Hotch when he bellows that line the first time, giggling and writing about when Hotch tickles him and squeezes him up tight so Hank can’t get away is lost to Reid for what it really is. That the spontaneous tickling and the reading mean other things. The love between them and Hank’s adoration for Hotch boiled down to symptoms Reid can prove Hotch doesn’t have.

Reid is terrified and it won’t let it up.

He finds himself panicking in Rossi’s backyard, surrounded by laughing people. Happy people who have no idea what his problem is. But he sweeps his over the clusters of chatting people and realizes that in all the groups he can’t find Hotch. Amidst them, he’s fairly easy to spot. Sticks to what he knows and who he’s most comfortable with. Diplomatic in that he makes sure he talks to everyone once but if he’s going to be someplace he’s not where he should be.

This is it, he tells himself. He’ll find Hotch confused, ambling about alone and where he shouldn’t be. Not sure where he is or why he’s here.

And then Reid turns around and finds Emily sitting with him on the porch swing. One of Hotch’s legs stretched out over the expanse of the porch, dark jeans a contrast to the concrete as he rocks them back and forth. Emily’s head on his shoulder and his arm around her back, a glass of wine passed between them. Neither saying a word as they watch the teams they built interacting with one another, families mixing together.

Reid can’t enjoy their smiles, the way they look out over everyone like proud parents.

Even his own birthday with books in a variety of languages sitting around him wrapped in an array of papers that so brilliantly display who their giver was. With his fingers tracing the one covered in newspaper, the one he knows is from Hotch, Reid is lost to this rot in the pit of his stomach. The sludge that fills his veins with tension. It leaves him the only person not smiling, with no idea what’s happening, when Garcia and Hotch stand over his cake fussing about which direction to light the candles. He misses the finger Hotch swipes through the icing and dollops right on Garcia’s nose. Looks up to watch Garcia retaliate with the same treatment but can’t enjoy it, can’t feel love or ease when the room erupts in laughter and Garcia and Hotch stand there with their icing-covered noses smiling at one another.

He finally finds the courage to mention it to someone, tells Morgan one afternoon when they both end up at Hotch’s house. Morgan is there fixing some wooden stakes in Hotch’s garden and Reid dropping off groceries. Hotch is sleeping off surgery medication, unaware of the hushed conversation being had outside.

“Kid,” Morgan can see it. The terror eating Reid alive. “They just hacked him apart and put him back together, all right? He’s on some strong shit right now. He’ll be fine in a day or two. You’ll see.” Morgan tells him not to worry about it, Hotch has been knocked around his entire life. Nearly sixty years of severe blows to the head and if he manages to walk out of this life with just a sketchy memory then he’s getting off lucky.

But when Hotch stands for too long in a room trying to remember what he was doing or when he can’t provide an answer for how much coffee he’s had or if he needs eggs or if he had the last bowl of oatmeal this morning it scares the shit out of Reid.

Really, Hotch is fine.

Hotch had to write his doctor’s appointments down and he’s constantly needing some sort of surgery to fix whatever old injury is coming back to remind him of his previous offense but he’s his normal actively grouchy self. He never forgets to stop by Reid’s apartment Thursday around noon or his promise to get Henry and Hank from school when no one else can.

That doesn’t mean no one worries about him.

He would hate to know the collapse wasn’t when they started taking note of his fragile health.

Two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday he pulled a muscle in his chest (moving the couch so Jack could get a Hotwheels out from underneath) and JJ had watched him pause during his coffee run to press his palm into the strain. Her mind had filtered through a hundred scenarios to explain the behavior and they’d all ended with his death. Hotch is the kind of person with a puzzle piece life, whose pieces are spread out over the course of years, meant to be collected and put together by only the most detail-oriented. She knew his father had died of a heart attack and Reid only served to reiterate that fact. It was only a pulled muscle but, not for the first time, she felt utterly terrified of how much losing him would hurt.

There’s a string of these awful moments when his humanity, his mortality, is right there for them to witness. And, as strong as they’d like to believe themselves to be, they look away.

He’s fine now, all things considered.

The janky memory thing isn’t all that bad. He has milked it on more than one occasion. It’s how he keeps missing his physical therapy. Although, that has come around to bite him in the ass. He’s supposed to be using this cane they gave him and now someone shows up every week to take him to the appointment so he can’t even play it off like he’s forgotten. Typically it’s Emily or Derek but Garcia’s shown up and Reid even took him once. It’s very annoying. Doesn’t help that there are roughly thirteen people who he might run into in public who know he’s supposed to be using the cane and who will inquire about it or bring it up to someone else.

He hadn’t realized just how many people could get on his case until he’d run into Matt’s wife in the store and after having their brief, polite conversation where he mentioned Reid had called him not that long ago asking for advice on the BAUs current case, she asked about his knee. She said Garcia had been fretting over this last surgery he had and told her about it, she hadn’t thought that much time had passed. Was surprised he was back on his feet. It had taken six hours for him to get the phone call from Garcia and then Emily came over an hour later begging him to just “for the sake of my fucking sanity, Hotch, take it easy”. That’s when Garcia sat down and made him a calendar and he lost his say in matters of his grocery shopping and responsibility to take himself to doctor’s appointments.

He’s since won back grocery shopping. His doctor wrote him a note and Garcia conceded. She’s not stupid enough to toss their schedule for his doctor’s appointments though.

So, though he loathes it, he takes the cane with him when he leaves the house.

He’s learned his lesson. Penelope Garcia is one scary-ass lady who has far more control over him and everyone else than he’d care to realize.

Hotch hears the doorbell, muffled though it is, from outside. He’d known getting down on the ground was a bad idea with the way his knees have been hurting but he’s got zucchini and cucumbers laying out in the sun and while he ignored them yesterday, he knows he need to get them out today. Reid had expressed interest in them and Rossi’s likely to want the zucchini. He also knows Derek offered to take care of this sort of stuff but it’s a too warm Sunday morning and Derek’s likely chasing around a happy toddler.

Besides, he doesn’t have enough tomatoes to compensate for Derek’s work. That being said Derek would come over and do it regardless, he doesn’t mind.

“It’s about to rain,” Reid informs him the second he gets to the door. Hotch watches Reid’s eyes flick to his empty left hand, to the curve of his limp palm where his cane is supposed to be. Unlike the others, Hotch knows Reid will not say anything directly to him. Emily might ask where the cane is and Garcia would insist on going to get it but Reid will just anxiously flicker back and forth between Hotch’s face and his hand. Twisting and worrying until Hotch gets it himself. Which is surprisingly effective.

Hotch hums his agreeance, he could smell it in the air. Can tell it’s going to be a good storm with the shift and strength of the wind coming in. It’ll cool things off for a few hours then bring back the humidity and the mosquitoes with a vengeance.

“Do you think” Reid follows Hotch into the kitchen. He’s careful to keep a distance, not to push Hotch’s pace. He mills about in odd places to compensate their gates, looks at the book sitting on Hotch’s coffee table. “Do you think it’s going to rain a lot?” He’s a genius with the means to figure that out on his own and likely he already knows what he thinks the answer is. Hotch’s opinion is still important.

Hotch is in the fridge, rustling bags around as he finds the bag of vegetables he’s got set aside for Reid. He’s weird about fruits and vegetables, worries about bacteria and things but will eat a Poptart for every meal if given the chance. The logic is irrational but after twenty years of worrying about Reid’s diet, Hotch has finally found a solution to this particular problem.

“No tomatoes,” Hotch promises as he hands the bag over to Reid.

Reid nods, “I don’t like tomatoes.”

“I know.”

Reid takes his bag, smiles as he thinks about what things he can make with what he’s been given. “How much do you think it’ll rain?” he asks again.

Hotch hums, having heard Reid the first time. “It’ll be a good storm,” he figures, “might take out the electricity.” He only adds the last bit as a warning. Reid’s scared of the dark, a fact exacerbated by big storms that knock out the electricity. A common occurrence but no less startling.

“Oh.” Reid worries his lip, looks to the ground and everywhere but where Hotch is.

It’s likely to start soon, the winds really picking up and the sun’s drowned out by thick, rolling clouds. The storm of the century it’s likely not. Hotch doubts it’s even the sort people pull over on the side of the road to wait out but he decides to think it might anyway. Decides to tap Reid’s elbow and motion for him to follow, “come on.” He’s not even really sure where he’s going but it’ll lend a distraction. “Wait out the storm,” Hotch tells him, glancing back to make sure Reid’s following. “I wanna show you something.”

They spend the storm in his office, leaning over an old law school textbook. Reid has an affinity for them. No matter how many times Hotch uses them for a distraction, pulling them down from their dusty shelves, Reid still takes to them like it’s the very first time. He’ll sit for hours reading over the information but, his favorite parts, are how Hotch they are.

The notes he’s scribbled in the margins. Flashes of yellow highlighter. A coffee stain or smudge where his palm moves against not yet dried ink. Notes for cases or classes. Pages he’s dog-eared. They’re lived in, nearly perfect condition biographies. Of course, Reid gravitates to them.

By the time the storm rolls over Reid realizes he’s been alone in the office for hours. Sheepishly, he gets up and looks around. Makes his way through Hotch’s house until Reid finds him on the couch. As soon as Hotch sees him he takes off his reading glasses, placing a bookmark in his book and raising his eyebrow to inquire if Reid needs something.

“I should probably get going.”

Hotch doesn’t miss how suddenly bashful Reid gets, the way he looks down at the floor. “If you’d like,” Hotch won’t encourage him to leave. He spends a lot of time alone. He doesn’t mind have someone floating around. But Reid’s decided he’s overstayed his welcome so he moves cautiously towards the door. Taking his time because he knows Hotch will see him out.

“Be careful,” Hotch tells him as he opens himself up for a hug and Reid flushes a little under the attention but still steps into Hotch’s arms. Hotch gives him the bag of vegetables and frowns at the state of Reid’s hair. “Stop worrying so much,” Hotch fusses and they’re both aware of how parental his tone has gotten as frowns. He can see grey hairs here and there. Maybe not as present as his but there. “Do you want to talk about it? Whatever’s worrying you so much?”

Reid freezes, confused. Ordinarily, he’d give in, Hotch always fixes things but not this time. “I’m okay,” Reid promises.

Hotch doesn’t believe him but Reid’s an adult and Hotch knows when he’s needed Reid will know where to find him. All he can hope is that Reid comes to him if he really needs help. “Alright.”

They nod once more and Reid steps out but he’s not halfway down the driveway when Hotch shouts “I meant it, be careful driving home!”

Reid stops where he is, struck by the oddness of this situation. He made it his entire childhood without this sort of thing. His mother cared that he got home but he didn’t have friends to be out with. Never needed to stop and figure out how to call home and tell her he’d be home late. Now he’s lost his mother and he’s lost Gideon.

And he’s terrified he’ll lose Hotch next.

“I’ll text you when I get home,” he offers, feels silly the second it comes out of his mouth. Like Hotch would care enough for that. Like Hotch won’t be bothered with him texting him. Like Hotch is going to sit there and wait for the text.

Hotch narrows his eyes, “you’d better.”

Because Hotch will sit there and wait for the text.

“Yes, sir.”

Hotch is fine but Reid will keep watching just to be on the safe side.

[robinofinashiro]

“dear lord when i get to heaven / please let me bring my man / when he comes / tell me that you’ll let him in / father tell me if you can / 

request status: OPEN

pairing: mirai sasaki (sir nighteye) x fem! reader

note: send more MHA reqs. i’m having a mha hyperfixation and i can’t seem to get out of it !! plus for obvious reasons, no s4 spoilers bc i’m a good person who doesn’t want to spoil shit for anyone. 

“uh, Nighteye?” Mirio asked, staring at the front door, shocked, “sir?” he asked again. 

neither Sir Nighteye or Bubble Girl were paying attention to see the face on the high school students face. Mirio didn’t want know whether to interrupt their conversation or keep staring at who just came into the building but eventually, he called for Bubble Girl who finally looked up. 

“do you see what I’m seeing or am I just seeing things?” Bubble Girl said before kicking the side of Nighteye’s leg, “sir, look at who just walked into the building!” she whispered to him. 

finally, Nighteye looked up, feeling his heart come to a halt. you walked into Nighteye’s agency with a flock of fans following behind you as your manager talked to the front desk manager. 

“what is the fourth ranking pro hero doing here?” Mirio asked both Bubble Girl and Nighteye, “yeah Sir, what is she doing here?” Bubble Girl repeated. the two of them could see how Nighteye had yet to say anything but continued to stare at you. 

you were talking with the front desk manager who was blushing when you spoke to her. your smile was very contagious, it was hard not to fall in love with it when you were in close proximity with someone and his receptionist was no exception to that. 

Nighteye walked back to his office as quickly as possible as Mirio and Bubble Girl remained in place. it took a few minutes until Bubble Girl realized something. 

years back, when Nighteye first took her in, she had gotten him to spill a bit of his personal life to her. he had mentioned that he had once fallen in love with someone but due to personal reasons, it didn’t work out. his ex girlfriend had went her separate way around the time that Nighteye had became All Might’s sidekick. 

she had put together a few things that made her suspicious of Nighteye when it came to you. whenever there was a report and you came on screen, he seemed to have turned the TV volume up or shut it off completely. other times, he would see his eye linger on a magazine or newspaper cover when you were on it. 

the biggest indication of this as she now started to put the dots together was the few books or magazine covers he had of you that were hidden behind all the All Might merchandise. 

it was impossible to not who you were. you were ranked fourth in the Japanese charts and were constantly modeling for magazine covers or fashion lines. you were pretty well liked hero, coming up to the popularity standards of Hawks and Mirko. 

“that’s Sir’s ex girlfriend,” she whispered to Mirio. he gave her a confused look, not knowing whether to believe her or not, “how would you know?” he asked back, trying not to catch your attention. 

she quickly explained her theory to Mirio who in turn shook his head, firmly believing what she was saying. the two of them looked at each other before rushing over to the front desk and smiling at you, smiling the hardest they had ever smiled before. 

“hi, we’re Nighteye’s intern and sidekick, how can we welcome the illustrious fourth ranked hero to his agency?” Bubble Girl quickly said. you turned to them and stared for a moment, “nice to meet you Bubble Girl and?” you asked, turning to Mirio. 

“MIRIO!” he practically yelled, “MIRIO TOGATA OR RATHER LEMILLION!” he continued. you couldn’t help but laugh at his over enthusiastic talking, “we’re huge fans!!”

“that means a lot Mirio, say, would you happen to know if your boss is available?” you asked the two before seeing the man himself, walking out of his office. 

Nighteye saw his two employee’s talking to you as you talked to them without much hesitation or hurry. he gulped nervously before slowly walking towards Bubble Girl and Mirio. his hands were sweating and he couldn’t stop fixing his polka dotted tie. 

“Bubble Girl, Lemillion, you can take your lunch,” he told the two. both of them looked at Nighteye before shaking their heads, “no can do, Sir Nighteye. you told us yourself, we head to our breaks at precisely noon,” Mirio reminded him, “now, both of you,” he said a bit more sternly. 

“goodbye Mirio!! here’s my card if you ever want to talk heroics or you know, if Nighteye doesn’t treat you well,” you joked with a wink. he nodded, taking the card and thanking you profusely before Bubble Girl grabbed him by the shirt and dragging him away. 

the two of you stared at each other, you suddenly feeling a bit of tears threatening to spring into your eyes as you stared at your old lover. 

“took me long enough to find your agency,” you finally said with a chuckle. he remained silent, “so you’re going to stand there and not say anything to me?” you whispered to Nighteye. 

the receptionist who was trying not to eavesdrop wanted to yell at Nighteye for not saying anything but in reality, his eyes said everything. he had no idea if it was his brain playing tricks or the air that was blowing in his building but your hair was flowing like it would be in a movie and your smile just didn’t let him say anything. 

“what are you doing here?” he finally said, “what, I couldn’t drop by and tell my favorite hero hello?” you asked with your eyebrow raised. 

he shook his head no, “that’s not what i’m saying. what i’m saying is why did you drop by? did you want to talk negotiations on something?” he asked, “because we can step into a conference room with our sidekicks?” he added on. 

you gave him a look, “Mirai, I think you know why I’m here,” you whispered to him as he saw your tears wanting to spill again. he shook his head, grabbing you by the wrist and dragging you over to his office, quickly locking the door. 

one look into his eyes had you crying into his shoulder as he held you. the stoic man could almost hear the hurt in your sobs as you tried to speak but your cries made it hard to comprehend what you were saying. 

+ 

Nighteye was patrolling the area of town that wasn’t very criminally active. he passed a store that had TV’s by the window, showing whatever it was playing to the civilians who passed by. 

upon first glance, he thought nothing of it but came to a halt when he saw the reports of an incident that was happening a two towns over with top ranked heroes and villains. the report stating that several heroes were down and severally injured. 

he immediately retracted, trying to hear the names of the heroes. his heart steadied hearing names of heroes he didn’t know or was close with but that thought was immediately put away when he heard your pro hero name. 

“( pro her name ) is to be amongst some of the heroes who was saved in the first round of rescue. ( pro hero name ) is the fourth ranked pro hero, her quirk a specialty to these types of scenarios. known for her charismatic and extroverted hero personality, we can only hope she recovers quickly and if possible, makes a come back to the hero scene.” 

Mirai stared at the screen, watching the news channel play highlights of your rescues and a slideshow with a few modeling gigs you had done. he knew you weren’t dead and he had no idea why the news cast was making it seems as if you were but he instantly ran down to his agency, a million thoughts running through his head. 

as soon as he arrived, he turned the TV on again, telling Bubble Girl to head home and pulled out his phone. he quickly dialed your agency, hoping they would answer his call but he was sent to a busy signal. after a few failed attempts, he thought of the next thing, actually visiting you. 

grabbing his keys, he ran to his car, hoping he didn’t get stuck in traffic and luckily, fate was on his side that day because he made it to the hospital that was reported to be where you were at. he knew that because he was a hero, they could probably break the rules a bit to let him in. 

“i’m here to see ( your name ),” he asked the front desk receptionist. her eyes fluttered in confusion, “are you her boyfriend, husband? we can’t let you in if you’re not related to her,” the receptionist replied. 

Mirai glared at her as he muttered that you were his ex girlfriend. the receptionist sighed before signing his name on a sticky with the relation tag being husband signed to it, “I could get into trouble for this but she’s in ICU ward. I don’t think anyone is in there so you’re free to visit,” she replied, giving Mirai the sticky. 

he knew he was too worried to be waiting for the elevator so he sprinted up the stairs, bumping into nurses and doctors, not caring if he hit anyone or not. as soon as he arrived to the room with your real last name on the whiteboard, he saw that the only person in the room was your assigned doctor. 

“how is she?” he practically yelled. the doctor jumped up a bit in fear. he read the sticky with his name and relation to you before nodding, “50/50. if she makes it out alive, she will never return to hero work. her injuries are too severe to ever come back from it. if she doesn’t, well i think you know where we go from there. i can leave you alone with your wife if you’d like?” he asked but came out as more of a statement. 

Mirai thanked him as the doctor shut the door and left him alone with you. he walked towards you, seeing your coma-induced body on the bed, seemingly lifeless to anyone who didn’t know your status. he had no idea when he started crying but eventually, he was sobbing over your body, saying incoherent things through tears. 

“i know i swore to you that i would never use my foresight on you and i’ll keep that promise as long as you promise to make it out alive. if i have to come back to hear that you're on your death bed, i will use it and that will be a future i will be determined to change.” 

you didn’t move as he watched the machine that roared with the status of your heart beat. he remained in the room for a while before seeing the doctor come in again, “we can call you if she wakes up,” the doctor informed him. Mirai sighed, “don’t,” he replied, not giving the doctor enough time to reply. 

knowing that he was better off trying to hide away from the crowd that was forming at the front of the hospital with your fans, he asked a doctor if he could the employee entrance to leave. 

he decided to head home, knowing that he wouldn’t get any work done if he had returned. on his way him, his finger tapped the wheel in anxiety. all he wanted to do was get home and hope that he would hear on the news that you were finally awake and in recovery. 

as he got home, he walked in, kicking his shoes off and going to his room. he went into his closet, pulling out a very old box that he hadn’t thought of in years. it was a box filled with photos of you and him. 

the photos were of a bunch of different dates or events. they were mostly taken by you but a few were from top free lance journalist, Taneo Tokuda. yeah, Mirai felt weird holding onto the photos but he couldn’t depart from them. in the back of his mind, he felt as though that break up wasn’t actually a break up. it felt more like a LONG break. 

in his hallway, he had a few of your magazine covers framed to make it seem like like a poster. he had put a few other hero around you to not make it weird but he every morning when he got up, he stared at the photos. you looked flawless in them. 

after he reminisced on the photos and covers, he shoved the box back into the closet and laid down, taking his tie off with anger and nervousness. 

a few weeks later, you woke up after being moved from the ICU to the regular hospital wing. you woke up to a blaring headache and your doctors immediately checking on your vision and anything else they couldn’t do while you were asleep. 

after they checked up on everything and made sure you were feeling okay, the few nurses left and you were now alone with your doctor. he looked at you with a small smile. 

“your husband came to visit but oddly, it was only once,” he murmured. you eyebrows fluttered in confusion, “my husband? mind telling me who that is?” you asked, now interested to hear the answer the doctor came up with. 

he stared back at you with confusion, “you don’t remember? are you having trouble remembering things?” he asked making you shake your head no, “Sir Nighteye! he came the first day you got here but he informed me not to call him when you woke and only came in that day,” he replied.

you rolled your eyes, of course it was Nighteye who visited you. you nodded, thanking the doctor for answering you as he continued to ask you questions to make sure you didn’t have any kind of other memory loss. 

once the doctor left, you felt yourself continuing to think of Nighteye. you knew better than anyone that your feelings for Mirai had never fully left. after the breakup, you continued to check up on him every so often. you had heard of the nasty break up he had with All Might and was tempted to call him to make sure he was okay but against your better judgement, you didn’t. 

the breakup between the two of you wasn’t nasty, not in the slightest. the both of you understanding that your lives were being lead into different directions for the time being. you congratulated him for being accepted as the sidekick to the top hero as he congratulated you for becoming the sidekick to another. 

you left the night of the breakup with a bittersweet feeling in your heart. you knew this wasn’t the last you would have saw him but it was going to be for a long while. the night ended with giving him a soft kiss and an exchanges of ‘be safe’. 

+ 

you finally pulled away to see Nighteye’s face. he stared at you as he slowly wiped your tears away and tried comforting you without trying to be awkward. 

“why? why did you visit me that day?” you asked. Mirai sighed, “we both know why I did,” he repeated your words from earlier. 

you shook your head, “no Mirai, give me an answer. that’s the least I deserve,” you said, “i couldn’t let you pass away without saying my goodbyes. we both know that’s what we would have done if the situation was reversed,” he responded. 

you couldn’t help but agree. you knew you would have if the situation was turned around. Mirai’s hold on you was still not released as you signed into his embrace. a feeling in your gut was making you think that his intern and sidekick was eavesdropping on the other side of the door. 

the two of your remained quiet, not knowing what to say for what felt like hours. it wasn’t until you noticed your magazine cover for the Hero Chart JP cover from a few years ago on his wall. 

“you hung that?” you asked him. Mirai nodded, “it was a great cover,” he responded with no hesitation. you laughed, “it really was. landed in third spot that year, behind All Might and Endeavor. no surprise there,” you joked. 

the two of you laughed, feeling the slight awkward tension finally drifting away. it wasn’t until you stopped laughing when you realized how close in proximity you were with Mirai when you felt yourself give him a kiss. the kiss filled with that longing feeling. 

it was another while until the two of you pulled away when you leaned your forehead against his. he smiled, wiping the stray tears that came down your face. 

“what does this mean for us? again?” you asked him. Mirai stayed silent for a moment, “it means to pick up from where we last left off,” he replied.

you smiled at him before bringing him into another kiss, “that’s fine with me,” you whispered. 

Mirai nodded as you heard two loud voices, screaming in happiness from the other side of the wall. you laughed, knowing it was Mirio and Bubble Girl who made it known that they were listening to the entire conversation. 

“i think your intern and sidekick heard the entire conversation,” you said playfully. Nighteye shrugged, “what else is new?” he chuckled, “i’ll just make them do overtime for it.” 

the screaming instantly turning into groans and arguments between the two of them as they heard what Nighteye had said. you remained in Mirai’s hug, laughing at both him and Mirio’s/Bubble Girl. 

[rallamajoop]

The Witcher: The Games vs The Books

Coming to the fandom this late, I can only assume the relationship between the Witcher games and the original novels has been long since talked to death by others. But I'm far too fascinated by the whole glorious mess that is this canon not to want to get down some of my own thoughts about how it all fits together.

See, on the one hand, the games (Witcher 3 especially) are arguably only too dependent on the novels to stand alone. They do a wonderful job of picking up a number of unresolved plot points the books left hanging, and a woeful job of explaining so much a player coming in cold would really like to know – Ciri's history with Geralt, Yennefer, her powers and the Wild Hunt itself just to begin with. This is an issue that only increases as the games go along: cliche as Geralt's amnesia may be, it's used to good effect to introduce the world to the player in the first game. By the third, Geralt has all his old memories back and two extra games worth of new experience, and good lord is it all alienating to the newcomer.

On the other hand, so much about the games (again, the third especially) contradicts the novels in painfully irreconcilable ways. That wouldn't necessarily bother me – adaptations are allowed to rework and reinvent, stories can and should evolve in the retelling – except, well, see point one above. So you're bound to come out of the games with a lot of unanswered questions if you haven't read the books, and just as many if you have.

Spoilers to follow, of course, for both the books and the games.

Here's one of the big ones: just how did the world – Ciri included – discover that one of her long-presumed-dead parents was actually alive and well and now ruling the entire empire of Nilfgaard? Fucked if I know. Neither the games or the novels have any explanation. In the novels, in fact, the world at large believes Ciri is married to the emperor of Nilfgaard. Naturally, this 'Cirilla' is a fake, but the scandal were the full truth ever revealed would redefine Emhyr's reign. Yet somehow, in the games, everyone seems to know he's Ciri's father, and that whole awkward incest angle is never mentioned. Continuity has been tweaked pretty significantly, and it's left to the player to guess how. If that wasn’t bad enough, the games apparently still included a Gwent card of the fake!Cirilla (artwork above) just to ensure maximum confusion.

Before I get too sidetracked with all that stuff that doesn’t add up though, there really is a lot to be said for what does work about how the games expand on the plot of the novels. The Wild Hunt itself is the big one. The spectral cavalcade appears several times through the novels and hunts Ciri across multiple worlds in the final book before apparently losing her trail and vanishing to make way for the 'real' big bad, never to be mentioned again. While TW3 left me pretty underwhelmed by the revelation that the spectral Wild Hunt were just a bunch of dark elves in skull armor, the books had introduced the Hunt and let us spend some time on the dark elves' world before we get the reveal that the two may be one and the same. So for all the ranting I could do about missed opportunities regarding the Wild Hunt, they're the natural candidate for the games to pick up on as their new big-bads.

To my surprise, Geralt and Yennefer's "deaths" and subsequent recovery in pseudo-Avalon also comes straight from the novels. That everyone thinks Geralt dead at the start of the first game isn't, as I'd first assumed, a convenient excuse to have him reappear with amnesia, but simply how the novels end. Why Ciri leaves them and goes world-hopping isn't clear, but "because the Wild Hunt was after her again" is as good a theory as any. So, another point to the games there.

And there's so much more. The Catriona plague has only just appeared at the end of the novels, but we know it's posed for a major outbreak – one that’s in progress by the time of the games. The second game in particular does a terrific job of taking the ambitions of the expansionist Nilfgaardian Empire and the still-relatively-new Lodge of Sorceresses and building an entirely new conflict around them – even taking two of the least developed members of the Lodge (Sabrina Glevissig and Síle de Tansarville) and expanding them into major players. Dijkstra similarly ends the novels on the run from those in power, and having already taken the same assumed name 'Sigi Reuven' he's using in the games – while the books assure us that prince Radovid will grow up to pay back his father's assassins (ie. Phillipa) and become Radovid the Stern.

The twisted fairy tale origins of the novels are something the games actually seem to have gotten better at as they went on: the 'trail of treats' to the Crones is the great example, the monster-frog-prince and the land-of-a-thousand-fables of the expansions are two more, and many more are hidden in sidequests. And I'd be remiss not to mention that in again asking Geralt to pick a side in the conflict with the Scoia'tael, the first two games not only recreate a scenario Geralt repeatedly deals with in the books, but a major theme. It's interesting too how much the broad structure of the third game feels like an homage to the books, with Geralt searching for Ciri, interspersed with sections from her POV. You can nitpick the detail of any of these examples, but the intent is unmistakable, and a lot of credit is due for it in the execution too.

Some of the detail that's gone into translating the world of the Witcher books into the games is just insane – not just in the geography and history of the place, but right down to the names of the wine you can pick up. There's the fact the Cat potion makes Geralt see in black-and-white, or the fact the basilisk and cockatrice monsters are clearly based on the same model, but the basilisk is reptilian where as the cockatrice is more avian – which is exactly how Geralt describes the difference between them in The Lady of the Lake. There's a point where Book!Regis recounts a detailed list of all the lesser vampiric species, ending with the only two violent enough to tear apart their victims: almost all can be encountered in the games, and the last two (Fleders and Ekimma) are indeed the most animalistic. This kind of thing is everywhere.

My favourite examples tend to be those that blend into the background if you haven't read the books, but will get a grin from those who have, such as a peasant in Velen who will call out to Geralt (paraphrased from memory, alas) "Sir, sir! We be up to our ears in mamunes, imps, kobolds, hags, flying drakes... oh, and bats!" – which is a lovely little reference to a couple of conversations from Edge of the World wherein Geralt explains that most of the monsters the locals want him to take care of don't actually exist. Or all those soldiers chanting "Long live King Radovid!" – natural enough, but it takes on a whole new life if you've read the passage in Lady of the Lake where the young prince Radovid grumbles internally about having to sit and listen to the city chanting 'long live...' to every other notable figure present except him.

Really, it would be faster to list the things the games introduced that don't come from the original source material in any obvious form, because it's a struggle to come up with very many. The villainous Crones of Crookback Bog and Master Mirror of the Hearts of Stone expansion are the biggest ones that come to mind, along with a great deal of the vampire mythology from Blood and Wine. To the witchers themselves, they’ve added mostly game mechanics: the use of bombs and blade oils, the names of most of the potions, and three new witcher schools (all with their own specialised gear). There are a number of new creatures and monsters – Godlings, noon-and-night-wraiths, botchlings, shaelmaars and so on – and though trolls are mentioned in the books, the games take credit for giving them so much character. Obviously, there are new characters, like Thaller and Roche – but not technically Iorveth, because a Scoia'tael commander of that name is mentioned in the books, if only in passing. And already, short of just listing off every new character the games introduced, I’m running out of ideas. Credit where credit’s due on that front: most of the new characters and locations they’ve created feel authentic enough that Kalkstein or Thaller would be right at home in the novels’ world.

But for all their dedication to the detail, it's hard to feel like the games have really managed to capture the spirit of the books in their storytelling: the mundanely corrupt bureaucracy that does so much to bring the world to life, or their cheerfully cynical sense of humour, or the flamboyant wonder that is book!Dandelion, or their enthusiasm for putting women in positions of power, or the bigger themes about the differences between the story that gets sung by the bards and what really happened – or so much else from the novels that came as such a surprise to me when I started getting really sucked in.

And if we’re going to talk about all the little things they got right, it’s only fair to point out there are just as many little things they got wrong, and sometimes pretty glaringly at that. "I thought you bowed to no-one" says Emhyr to Geralt – almost as if book!Geralt doesn’t happily bow in most every situation where it would be polite or diplomatic to do so. "This would never have happened if the council was still around!" says Geralt upon finding a sorcerer's lab full of human experiments – as if none of his experiences with Vilgefortz or the wizards of Rissberg ever happened, back when the council was very much still around. In TW2, he mocks the idea of a woman like Saskia leading a rebellion – almost as if women like Falka and Aelirenn haven't led some of the most storied rebellions in history (and we can't even blame the amnesia, because Geralt himself mentions Aelirenn later – oh yeah, this one annoyed me particularly).

 Book!verse 'Lady of the Lake' is basically just Ciri being surprised while bathing

Yennefer's studious aethiesm and willingness to desecrate Freya's temple is entirely in character – but only if we forget that she had her own personal religious experience with the goddess Freya herself in Tower of the Swallow. And then there’s the fact the Lady of the Lake is now a literal lake nymph who distributes swords to the worthy, as if no-one writing for the games ever got past the title of that particular Witcher novel (let alone got the joke). And the list goes on. It's easy to get overly caught up in contradictions like this – it's hardly as if Sapkowski's novels don't contradict themselves in places, as almost any long-running series eventually will – but it's going to stick out to those who’ve read the novels nonetheless.

While we're talking about how the games pick up where the books left off though, the big contradiction that has to be touched on comes in bringing Geralt back at all, at least in any public capacity. There's plenty to suggest that Geralt survives the novels' end and even goes on to have further adventures, but it's also pretty explicit that the history books record his death in the Pogrom of Rivia as final. The last two novels by order of publication (Season of Storms and Lady of the Lake) go so far as to feature characters far in the future with an interest in Geralt's legacy, and they discuss the matter in some depth. As far as the world knows, Geralt is dead.

  Book!Geralt fanart by Diana Novich

But it's hard to blame the games for ignoring this – true, thanks to Geralt's longevity, they could have set their conflict many more years after those future scenes – maybe even used Ciri's established time-travel powers to let you pop quietly in and out of the past (and, okay, now I've thought through all that, I'm kind of sad they didn't). But there comes a point where that kind of slavish devotion to preserving the source material really doesn't do a story any favours, and I'm not sure I could name any other successful adaptation that's bothered.

Besides bringing Geralt back at all, most of the bigger changes pertain to Ciri. In fact, as much as I'm about to get deep into the nitpicks below, you can make a surprisingly good case that the games have made only one really big change, and that's in simplifying the prophesies surrounding her. See, in the novels, all those world-saving prophesies aren't technically about Ciri, they're about her as-yet-unborn child. Who gets to impregnate her is the big driving force behind most of the villains of the books – one that all the main contenders seem to see as more of an awkward necessity rather than the inspiration for violent lust, but even so. To Emhyr, having to marry his own daughter is a bug, not a feature – but he's willing to do it to become the father of the savior of the world. But if Ciri is capable of fulfilling those prophesies herself, then Emhyr is already the father of the savoir of the world, and the revisions to his relationship with Ciri start to make a lot more sense.

Ciri's history with the Aen Elle elves seems to have been similarly revised – if not quite so cleanly. Avallac’h and Eredin are, naturally, both book characters – in fact, a lot of personality has been left behind in the books, since Avallac’h originally had a rather camp flair, and Eredin is less the power-hungry kingslayer you might imagine. When Geralt meets Avallac’h in the books – which happens briefly in Toussaint, for one of those "everything you're doing is going to make everything worse because prophesy" conversations – he's busy decorating a cave with fake prehistoric paintings in the hope of confusing future explorers. (Surprisingly, there does seem to be official art of this moment on one of the gwent cards – see above – though the Avallac’h who jokes about adding erect phalluses to the picture and admits his vanity won’t allow him to resist signing it hasn’t entirely survived the transition to the new medium).

We also meet the former Alder King, Auberon, whose death we see in flashback in the game. (Fun fact: Auberon is actually blowing bubbles through a straw in a bowl of soapy water when we first meet him in the books, hence the straw in the illustration below. The books just have more whimsy than any of the games would know what to do with.)

Ciri spends some time in the final book as a prisoner on the world of the elves, who are as keen as everyone else for their king to father her unborn child. Avallac’h eventually convinces her that this is all for the greater good: her child will be able to open gates to allow the people of her world to escape when the apocalyptic White Frost arrives. But their king, like most older elves, is impotent, leading to multiple nights where Ciri allows him to take her to bed (in some of the frankly more disturbing scenes of the series) to no result. Eredin, moreover, doesn't appear to have intended to poison the king: the vial that kills him was supposed to contain some sort of fantasy viagra, and even Eredin seems genuinely shocked to learn its actual effects.

Regardless, Ciri eventually discovers that Avallac’h and the Aen Elle have deceived her, and intend to user her child's powers to invade her world, not save it. Neither world is threatened by the White Frost for at least several millennia, it's just a pretext to make her cooperate. And so she flees, and Eredin (already leading his Red Riders aka The Wild Hunt long before he was crowned king) pursues her.

With the books as context, why Ciri would ever trust Avallac’h is very hard to understand. It's a little easier if that whole awful episode with her and the former king is subtracted out – Ciri's child is no longer necessary for Eredin's goals. So it's odd that the game still references the deadly vial Eredin gave to the king. Are we to suppose the vial genuinely contained poison in this version of continuity? I'd rather it didn't – Avallach's ruse is far more interesting if he underwhelms Eredin's support by revealing a half-truth – but the games aren't telling us.

And then we have to factor in that one last detail I'd forgotten when I originally started playing with this theory: TW3 does contain one last, dangling reference to the time the old king spent trying to impregnate Ciri, when Ge'els very reasonably asks why on earth Ciri would ever trust Avallac’h now. It's a damn good question, and the game offers no real answers. So in Avallac’h, we're left with a character who is vital to the final chapters of the games, who comes out of nowhere without the books as context, but whose role makes no sense with that backstory in mind. Frankly, the writers would have been much better off avoiding the whole mess altogether and inventing some new character to take Avallac’h's place.

The treatment of the White Frost is even more confusing. The books are ultimately fairly explicit about just what the White Frost is: a ice age, most likely caused by the same mundane climactic factors that produced the real ice ages of our history. The only escape is intergalactic emigration, as Ciri (or her children) might some day enable.

In the games, the White Frost has instead become some sort of nebulous, free-floating apocalypse which will eventually reach all worlds, which is basically fine – up to a point. We briefly visit a dead world that the Frost has decimated, and even the Aen Elle are now supposedly planning to invade Ciri's world because it threatens theirs as well (I mean, apparently – their motivations are so underdeveloped you could miss them by accidently skipping just one or two lines of dialogue). When the Wild Hunt appears, it's always in a haze of cold. Their mages can invoke its power still more dramatically through portals which can freeze you in your tracks. So obviously, the Frost has already reached their world, and time is running out, right?

Well, no – you visit their world too (again, briefly – to meet a character who has never been mentioned before and won't be again, for reasons which have also never been mentioned before if you haven't read the books) – and there's no Frost in sight, apocalyptic or otherwise.

So why does the White Frost follow the Hunt around? No idea. It's never explained.

At the very end of the game, a second "Conjunction of the Spheres" occurs (possibly because of the Wild Hunt's appearance?), and the Frost begins to invade (or possibly Avallac’h summons it, so Ciri can go into it and destroy it?) It's all painfully unclear. The game is too busy pulling a bait-and-switch over whether Avallac’h's betrayed you to tell you what's actually going on instead.

But if Ciri could destroy the Frost completely (at great personal risk, but still) why is this not more clearly set up? Why did the Aen Elle think that escaping to another world (which will ALSO eventually be destroyed by the Frost) was a better solution than sending Ciri to face the Frost directly? For which matter, why do the Aen Elle need Ciri at all if sending enough ships to carry an army is no problem? Why does Ciri spend so much of the game questioning Avallac’h's true intentions, if they were ultimately so noble? When did he tell her the truth? If Avallac’h did summon the Frost, why did he pick that particular moment? And if he didn't, and it all just happened spontaneously, we're back to questioning why invading that world ever seemed like a good solution to Eredin – it all collapses in on itself.

None of these questions couldn't have been answered with a little creativity, but then the game would've had to dedicate some real time to explaining its backstory and developing its core conflict – something it's bizarrely reluctant to do. And if you think I may be drifting from the point a bit in the name of getting all my gripes about the ending down in one place, you're not wrong, but I feel Avallac’h and everything surrounding him is pretty much the ur-example of what doesn't work about the way The Witcher 3 depends on the novels: the backstory the writers are building on doesn't actually exist in any format available to the rest of us.

There are plenty of ways TW3 could have incorporated its backstory into its own narrative (yes, even excluding the method "by expecting people to read many many more pages of text from in-game documents", because that's bullshit and always will be). There are times it does this brilliantly, such as in the quest ‘The Last Wish’: everything you really need to know is covered in Yennefer and Geralt's conversation in the boat, and without ever making the dialogue sound unnatural. In fact, TW3 has even more options here than many works with the same problem, because Geralt is famous and people already think they know his story. You could have bards singing Dandelion's ballads, you could have characters confronting him with misunderstandings about his past to force him to correct them. You could also have Geralt visiting people and places he knows Ciri remembers fondly because of the time they spent there together, or include playable flashbacks similar to the time you spend playing as Ciri. You could stick chunks of backstory in optional sidequests or scenes old-school fans can skip through quickly. So many of my questions (how did Ciri get so close to Yennefer if they were never at Kaer Morhen together? Why has no-one tried training Ciri in her powers before? What does the Wild Hunt even do while it's not hunting Ciri? Why is Ciri princess of Cintra if her father is Emperor of another country altogether?) could have been answered so easily.

Seriously, summarising the Witcher books is not that hard. Lots of things happen, but only a fraction of it is really relevant in retrospect, and you could hit all the major plot beats in a handful of paragraphs. (Heck, I’d do it here if this post wasn’t already ridiculously over long.)

But then, TW3 has a bizarre problem with leaving so much of its best material off screen, even from its own story. It's criminal that we never get to see any of Geralt's time (or Yennefer's) with the Wild Hunt, even in flashback or dream sequence. This is material that directly sets up the relationship between the main hero and the main villain, and the most we ever hear about it is a few vague allusions to it being like a strange nightmare. Really? That's it? What was it like? Was Geralt in a trance, unable to control his own actions – was he brainwashed into believing he belonged there, or was he merely unable to escape? What atrocities might Eredin have forced him to commit? Did he visit other worlds? Was he paraded among the Aen Elle as a captive? There is no way this isn’t a part of the story worth talking about!

We never see the moment Ciri rescues Geralt from the Wild Hunt. We never see how Avallac’h convinces her to trust him, we never see the moment he was cursed, or any of her efforts to save him – all these big, story-defining moments are left off-screen, to be vaguely recounted to you later in dialogue. Then there's the entire political situation in Nilfgaard – you hear about it second-hand, and it's all resolved off screen. And the list goes on. Yet you and Ciri still have time to run around Novigrad so she can thank a bunch of throwaway characters you've never even heard of before, nor will again. The priorities on display here are baffling.

The Witcher 3 was such a wildly successful game that it’s obvious these sorts of issues didn’t seriously hold it back, and it’s such a big game that I could have sat down and written just as many words focusing only on the parts that do work without much difficulty. It boasts stunning visuals, addictive gameplay and some truly wonderful characters, and so many parts of the story work brilliantly in isolation that it’s strange to come out of it feeling that it ultimately adds up to so much less than the sum of its parts.

I’m glad TW3 exists – if it hadn’t been such a runaway success I doubt I’d ever have discovered Sapkowski’s universe at all, but for myself, TW3 will probably always be remembered as a somewhat-overlong introduction to the really good stuff, in the expansions and the original novels it came from. I looked up the novels after finishing TW3 in large part because I’d been left with so many unanswered questions – and I’m glad I did, but I’m honestly surprised more people weren’t turned off by TW3′s scattershot approach to its own narrative. You’re allowed to change and rework in moving to a new medium, but I can’t imagine it would’ve hurt games’ success to tell a complete story in the process.

[pathofcomet]

and it’s just around the corner

fandom: stardew valley 

pairing: sebastian/player (female)

summary:  She’s a fool – she tries to tell herself. There’s nothing she can offer Sebastian that would make him stay in this village he so obviously loathes. She’s just dumb enough to have fallen for the man she cannot even bring herself to ask to love her back.

rating: explicit // word count: 25k // AO3

She cannot remember the farm per say, just the proof that she’s been there once: a dusty, yellowed photo of herself, smiling in a pink sundress under the shade of a gigantic oak, 4 years old and beaming. She can vaguely bring back the savour of cranberry jam on her tongue, the authentic, slightly sour taste that only meant home-made. She thinks they had a gray cat, and she can feel the smell of gasoline in her nose, from the long car ride there as a child. That’s all she remembers about her grandparents’ old farm; and anything of that lifestyle is completely lost upon her, or her memories of her grandpa. They haven’t been crazily close either: she was busy pursuing her education too far away to allow proper visits, and the phone signal failed the old man too much to allow even constant communication. When he died, they buried him in the city, next to his wife, and everything about the way he lived his life became hazy and forgotten in the lives of the living.

Which is probably why it is so hard to comprehend what she’s reading now, in her cubicle at work, defeated under her 16th time this month of overwork. Her grandpa was known for being eccentric, which is why she expected to see a card with hey, we all die in the end! or something written on it, and not the dreams of her childhood offered on a plate to her. She stares at the paper, reads and rereads it for 7 times before she’s convinced it’s actually real.

She’s touched at the care in his words, at the oozing affection on that piece of paper. It’s something that she didn’t know she was missing until now. A care sent across generations, to reach her – and when she feels like she needs it most. She doesn’t know if she should scream or cry or laugh.

She looks around: there are only a couple of other workers left in the office at the moment, in the late hours of the night. There’s delivery food all across the others’ empty desks, and a few of the girls switched their shoes, from heels to sneakers. And yet, as she stops, the clanking on the keyboard never ends around her, and the neon light remain buzzing above her, the static noise of her real life nightmare. The sigh coming from a co-worker several seats away is deafening in her ears. As she’s writing her resignation letter, for her boss to find on his desk at the first hour in the morning, she can’t help but notice how her vision shakes, how she can’t quite straighten her back under the pain of hours and hours of being hunched at a desk.

It’s not even the irony of it all, dying in a storm of unfair overworking while those above her wallow in money, that upsets her more. But rather, the way in which she cannot have any satisfaction out of it anymore. As a graduate, she thought she’d find happiness in a corporate job that pays well, but now the comfort of money means nothing when she doesn’t have the time to even spend it, and she can’t even recall what her hobbies are, let alone when’s the last time she did anything else but work, do house chores and sleep.

She cannot recall the last time she met up with some friends, visited new places or ordered online something else but a new pair of heels or a new shirt for work. Gods, now that she hit the brake on her wreck of a life, she can’t stop noticing how pathetic she’s been.

Her hands tremble as she signs the paper, as she tosses her meagre office belongings into her bag, as she pushes the elevator button. She’s already overthinking the decision, but it’s already made and she can only worry about what’s to be done next now. She’s 100% sure she’s not made for this, she has zero knowledge of how to take care of a farm and she still screams when she sees a spider in her apartment. But she’s tired, there’s a tiredness that never seems to let loose, and no matter how much she sleeps on Sundays, she wakes up feeling like she has her hands and feet tied. Even if to only rest for a while, and the whole ordeal would still have been worth it.

Sleep doesn’t come easily to her that night. She reads the letter over and over again, she measures the weight of the keys in her palms, she tries to put puzzle pieces together, from old photos she brings up from hidden boxes. Nothing tells her she made the right decision, though in her old photos, everyone looks so happy while on the farm. Maybe she didn’t even truly get to the end of her patience, just a bad day, maybe she still could have taken it for a while. After all, it’s not like she had that bad of a life. But then, it’s not like it was that good either. And once she started thinking of it, the idea of change became hauntingly tempting. The potential in this new place is infinite, and so, so terrifying.

But a change nonetheless.

She spends the next couple of weeks in a frenzy: selling most of her belongings, keeping only the strictly necessary. She keeps the pictures, of course. A few books, only those that she read during university and she felt like they changed her life, though she hasn’t revisited those stories since. Maybe she’ll finally have the time to, now. She sells or donates all her office clothes, expensive shirts and bags – all gone, because they remind her of some kind of work she never wants to do again in her life.

When she stops to count what’s left, looking at her near-empty apartment, two suitcases and a backpack put aside, she’s overwhelmed at how pointlessly she lived her life up until this point. She has nothing to show for all the efforts she’s made, and she can feel the skin all over her body itch with the realisation, itch for something else to do.

She doesn’t look back, as she’s returning the keys of her rented apartment. She has been paying expensively for the chance to live on her own in the big city, and there’s nothing but bitterness towards that idea anyway. She waits in the bus station with music playing at the highest volume, drowning out an incoming panic attack – as she’s struggling to count up to 10, reassure herself that she’s a grown fucking adult and that she can do something as easy as just moving someplace new.

Still, the scenarios roll in her mind, unperturbed, and she almost throws up thrice before she reaches her destination – and then she almost throws up again, as she’s watching the bus pull away, leaving her alone in the middle of nowhere. The sun is bright, but too bright and her clothes are sticking to her skin, even if it’s barely early spring, and the air is fresh. A fairy-tale start to her new adventure, and yet she feels like crying right then and there, a fain headache booming at her temples from all the anxiety she had to push away.

She’s already exhausted and it’s barely noon. She starts pulling at her suitcases, though the road makes it a tricky and tiring job. Then, just as she’s ready to take her first break, a hand grabs the handle, and she stares up in the face of a kindly looking old man.

Mayor Lewis; she still remembers the face, as he is the kind of person who probably always looked the same. They’ve last seen each other at her grandfather’s funeral, so there’s a bit of awkwardness hanging between the two of them, as she’s allowing him to help her with her luggage.

A redheaded woman is waiting for them in her truck, a bit of a distance away, and she helps them with her stuff. It’s easy to make conversation when friendly people are pushing it forward, and they seem way too enthusiastic about her presence. They don’t even comment about her sneakers, totally unfit for most of the roads in the town, or her outfit, that would rip or get dirty the second she’d encounter a field.

She already has a room prepared at Lewis’ place, there’s no way her old house can offer her proper living conditions just yet. That’s not a jab directed at her, rather at the passing of time and the overgrown state of her courtyard. But there’s nothing mean behind their comments, and they’re even offering all the help they can.

She’s trying to come up with a list of things that she might need, but Robin is already writing one of her own.

“She’s our architect,” Lewis whispers, winking at her in secrecy.

It’s weird and scary and she doesn’t know how to feel about it. Back in the city, she could have crumbled on the sidewalk and nobody would have cared. Here, it seems everyone jumps at the chance to do just that, help and care, and she’s terrified out of her skin. Her thanks are muffled by the weird knot in her throat. When balancing things out in her head, there’s nothing she can give them in equal measures.

The key in her hand feels foreign, but yet it’s that thing that grounds her to the moment, doesn’t let her slip away in that part of her brain that makes her forget things even happened. The house is, of course, a disaster, though someone had the good thinking of covering the furniture. The place is small, and it needs a good dusting, maybe even a new coat of paint. Robin, by her side, is still doing her job.

“Is there anything you want in particular?”

“No, not really. I don’t think so?”

She’s lost and overwhelmed. She’d like to just sit somewhere and start unpacking, maybe go and switch all of her things again actually, because there’s no way she can fit in with these people. But Lewis’ arm is around her shoulder, urging her back the way they came, promising her his special vegetable mix and green tea.

Once finally out of his sight, and comfortably settled in his extra bedroom, she squeezes a pillow close to her chest, hiding her face in it, and starts crying. She sobs – for the grandparents she didn’t properly appreciate while alive, that still left her with so much. For the chance that not many have to switch things around. For the state in which the farm is, and the immense effort she’ll have to put in building it back together. For the pain in her arms, the burn so unfamiliar that it must be only the sign of something new. She’s overwhelmed and scared, and hours pass before she finally falls asleep,

The next morning, she refuses even the breakfast, and immediately heads towards her place, luggage in tow. Mayor Lewis promised he’ll solve the problem of electricity and water running back to the place, so at least she can forget the administrative part.

She greets everyone she passes by, because otherwise the staring just gets too unbearable, and though they’re curious, they also remain polite too. But her courtyard and house are truly disastrous. She’s glad it’s still so early in the year, so the weeds didn’t grow yet on the path towards her door, so at least she can focus on dusting off the room, polishing the floor. She unpacks with nostalgic music blasting from her phone: plates in one drawer, her clothes in the other two. She builds herself a nightstand out of all the books she brought with her, and she washes the curtains by hand, letting them dry out in the sun.

She goes to the town for bedsheets and even more cleaning products, buys a basil plant for the windowsill. The place is small, smaller even than her city apartment, and she has nothing of her own to properly decorate it with, give it a specific charm, so she allows herself to get lost between the small isles of the store, and pick whatever piques her fancy. But this is fine, she thinks. This is, after all, the true definition of a new start.

She watches the sun set from her porch – she thinks she’d like an armchair for the place, it’d make a lovely reading pace if it’s not rainy, and there’s a soft lull from the TV inside, where the weather prognosis for the next day rattles on.

She finds grandpa’s old gardening books, and she starts reading them. She cleans up a small portion of the land, plants some seeds she picked based on Pierre’s recommendations. Gathers wood from the end of the forest that runs almost up to her house, practices splitting it in smaller branches, that she can carry and gather in the small tool shed, for the winter.

During the first night that it rains, she opens her door to a stray, lost dog. She hugs him close to her all through the night, as he whimpers and warms up – and in the morning she names him Max, and buys him dog food and a colourful bowl. She stops feeling so alone, so lost, a purpose forming, even though she can’t quite name it.

When too many days pass with her cooped only at her place, letters and requests for visits start pouring in her mailbox. Sometimes mayor Lewis comes pick her himself, walking around the town with her, stopping to present her to any villager they encounter. She feels like a circus freak being paraded around like this, but she smiles, wonders if Max is getting bored at home or if she could walk through the forest in search of some fruits.

 ***

Then, when the weather prognosis tells of many sunny days in a row, Robin shows up at her doorsteps, can of paint in one hand, brushes in the other – and her son behind her, to help her out.

She watches him, fiddling on the spot, looking like he certainly doesn’t want to be here and she smiles. Well, that’s at least a feeling that she can relate to, even when in her bed after a tiring day, she still sometimes yearns for everything that this place is not. Max helps. In this case as well, as he runs to the door and immediately jumps on him.

“Max, no!” she chides, though he settles calmly on panting up at the man for pats. Luckily, he hasn’t slammed him to the ground, as he tends to do with her, but that’s still no proper way of greeting strangers. “I’m so sorry…”

“Sebastian,” he says. “There’s no problem, really.” He’s scratching the dog between his ears, absentmindedly looking in through the door, at the small place she now calls home. There’s nothing much in there, but she finds herself growing protective over it anyway, at his gaze.

Max, the traitor, is now cuddled down at his feet. From the side, Robin laughs.

Her and Sebastian move the furniture, as Robin tapes newspaper on the wooden floor. She prepares fresh lemonade for her visitors and helpers before they start painting, and she takes a short break just to water her crops. They do the work in silence, mostly, just her phone turned on to fill up the space – and without mayor Lewis’ fast mouth, she isn’t certain what she could possibly talk about. From time to time, Robin asks Sebastian something – regarding his sister, or some things she asked him about before, which sounds a lot like nagging so she prefers to stay out of it.

She thanks them many, many times before they leave for the day. Especially since it was the weekend, and she’s sure they just threw away a perfectly free day on helping her put together her house. She just feels more and more indebted towards all these people. Even if Sebastian didn’t look her way even once.

 ***

She starts going to the local library, borrowing books and learning more and more things about the farm. She accepts the quests from the bulletin board, and in exchange she asks for fishing tips or some town history. She starts taking evening walks, with Max, picking up acorns. She gets stronger and better at all the farm work. She places various orders, starting to gather syrup from the trees near her house – and one lazy day, she makes jam, that she then sells.

She starts counting the money, making plans for the farm. She buys two chickens, and the one day when no one in the town sees her, it is because she struggled all the time to build a fence so that they won’t step all over crops and no fox would reach them during the night.

 ***

Everyone is friendly, showing up at her door with gifts for her new move: a handmade mug from Leah, a beautiful seashell from Elliot, an actual functional first aid kit from Harvey. She suspects the mayor’s doing behind all these kindness acts, and yet it’s with a reverent kind of gestures that she finds a place for all of them in her small house. She starts adding some kind of adjectives to this cast of characters that enter her life.

But with Sebastian, something’s different. She doesn’t know what makes her notice him again; that something that made him stand out from the mass of people she met in the past few weeks. Maybe it’s not even just one single thing, but a mix: like how he is the son of the kindest lady, paler than the farmers or football players, how he doesn’t want to stand out at all, how she has to go out of her way to find him, instead of the other way around.

Most of all, it’s the desperation she can feel off of him. There’s a force in him that cannot make peace with how things are for him at the moment – and it’s the familiarity of it that pulls her in, lets her gaze linger on him for a bit longer, makes her ask about him while smiling in the most innocent way, sipping tea in Robin’s office.

***

They’re not that different; she’s easy to fit in the village life, mostly because she’s so pliable for others, knowing the memory of her grandpa is attached to her as well. She sometimes feels like the older residents of the town look through her, instead of directly at her, and see the ghost of someone else they used to know. And the days pass, things fall together, and yet in her chest, there’s a clock ticking away, counting down the time spent here, because if she was looking for something like belonging, it seems this town buried it away with her grandpa, and things don’t seem that different from how they used to be. She just has dirtier nails now, and some decaying make-up skills.

So she never visits without a purpose, doesn’t get too friendly with most of them. She spends days in a row on her farm, ploughing the land, watering the plants, feeding the animals. Task upon task, she goes through all of them, grateful for how it’s silencing her mind, giving her the time and space to breathe. If she finishes early, she likes to go fishing, the breeze nice against her sun-warmed face, especially as the dusk approaches.

It’s the simplicity of life that lulls her into wanting something more, eventually, tentatively. She visits Robin, as she’s closing the store, so they can share some fresh-picked fruits while watching the sun set. She meets up with the mayor for chess during Sundays, stories of two best friends half a century ago embedded in every sigh, and she wins every time and that’s how she knows he just lets her. When she passes by to drop something for the museum, she spends the remaining afternoon in the library, browsing the collection, reading for the children fresh out of classes that ask her to do so.

But if anyone in Pelican Town would be asked, they wouldn’t be able to tell people that much about their newest villager. In truth, even for those closest to her, there’s an aura of mystery: whatever her life was before, she doesn’t go into details. Whatever and for however long she might remain in their lives, she doesn’t say.

To Sebastian, that’s what makes it easy. He doesn’t expect her to tell him anything, since she’s not pressing her curiosities either. Probably why she opens so willingly, why she creates a routine around his. She always stops at the edge of the river, where she knows she’ll find him in the evenings. They never talk for long, or of important things – but she thinks, the magic is in staring together at the same scenery, feeling much of the same things. After the third time, she asks for a cigarette from him, and she winks at him when he looks just a tiny bit surprised.

This is how it begins. The rest she almost doesn’t even notice.

 ***

She remembers the Egg festival; she’s sure she took part in one of the hunts back when she was little, though the details are foggy in her mind. She doesn’t remember any of the villagers, but she’s been a very shy child, and not even the promise of bunny chocolates was enough to persuade her back then.

Still, she worked for so long in a corporation, at this point the spirit of competition is embedded into her. She wakes up early, and she wears one of her dresses from before, even if she has to match it with grandpa’s old jeans jacket. She even puts on make-up, manages to water her plants as well before she’s walking towards the town.

She officially meets Maru and Demetrius, as they’ve been so busy during her past visits. Marnie clasps her in-between her arms, exclaims how pretty she is when not trying to imitate her house’s looks, and loudly kisses both her cheeks. Gus waves at her, and keeps presenting various plates to her, and by the time she can excuse herself, she’s glad she hasn’t eaten any breakfast. Jas and Vincent come at her yelling tag! and she spends the next half an hour running around, followed by the sometimes annoyed, sometimes happy smiles of the other villagers.

She buys strawberry seeds, more on a whim, because she was craving for some, and gets herself a cute bunny plush, since she’d had trouble sleeping, and she’s sure Max would appreciate her hugging a non-living thing more. She feels like she fits more, now, that she’s surrounded by everyone else, and she realizes that she knows them all, that they know her back – and there’s no outright hostility.

She greets Sebastian, and meets his friends. She compliments Abigail’s hair, Sam compliments her instead. He’s friendly and outgoing, compared to the other two in his group, but she notices Sebastian’s fleeting smile at the toy in her arms, so she straightens her back even more.

As soon as mayor Lewis starts his announcement, Abigail immediately seems more excited, especially since she is presented as the winner for the past decade. However, by the time the day ends, Pelican Town has a new Egg Hunt winner.

The straw hat doesn’t fit her outfit, and it’s not quite yet a necessary accessory, but she’s beaming at every villager that comes to congratulate her, even if she’s already so old and she shouldn’t be so happy about beating a few 10 year olds. Even Abigail is a good sports and promises she will beat her next year.

Next year – she wonders if she’ll even be around for that long. Her saved-up money is slowly trickling down, as she keeps buying things that she needs, and she has no idea yet how much profit she’ll be able to make at harvest time. She feels better knowing her doubts don’t show to others.

She walks part of her way home with Robin and her family. Maru is happily telling her something about her research, though it goes over her head and she doesn’t understand much of what’s going on. Demetrius and Robin walk several steps ahead, arms linked, and it’s a sweet sight to see, that they can be so close even after so many years.

Then, before she takes her turn to her farm, after everyone else said their goodbyes, Sebastian looks up at her.

“It suits you,” he says, so low she almost misses it, nodding his head at her hat. She blushes under the street lamp, but he’s already turned his back on her and he can’t see, so she can go on her own way and pretend it never happened.

 ***

She starts going to the mines, even if everyone tells her she better not. But she needs better tools, more resources and something to do on rainy days, so she goes anyway. She comes out late into the night, dirtier than she’s ever been, spider cobwebs stuck in her hair, but her backpack heavy.

The next morning, she struggles packing some presents for Robin and Lewis, for all the help they’ve showered her in ever since she moved. She doesn’t have much to offer, some syrup and a jar of jam, a few eggs. But as she’s going into town, there are three presents that she’s carefully carrying around in her bag.

She stops by Lewis first, sits on his stairs with a steaming mug of coffee between her hands, as he waters his small garden – and they chat about the weather, the fishing days that Lewis has programmed, their favourite Stardrop meal. The days get warmer and warmer, as they’re slowly rolling towards summer, and she’s feeling peaceful, listening to the mayor’s chatter, his grunts as he digs around, his yelling when she offers to help him around.

She drops by Clint to let him examine some of the stuff she found underground, and by the time she reaches Robin’s place, the older woman is taking her lunch break. She’s exclaiming happily at the gift, and invites her to stay for lunch. She helps her with the plates, and while Robin goes to gather the rest of her family, she sends her to get Sebastian.

She has to breathe deep, count to 10, before she has the courage to knock at his door. There’s the sound of something tumbling to the floor, and she winces; more shuffling, and the door finally opens to reveal a somewhat sleepy looking Sebastian. It looks like he hasn’t brushed his hair yet, as it sticks out in odd directions, and in his own space, he’s wearing some old, washed-out t-shirt that is several sizes too large, and sweats. She stares at him, entirely endeared, but also deeply aware that there’s a line she has just crossed by seeing him like this – and she’s not sure she was allowed to.

“Hi,” she says, at the same time he says “Shit”, closing the door on her. She opens and closes her mouth several times, trying to come up with a proper way to reach to this, but her mind coming up blank.

Eventually, she lamely says “Robin said lunch’s ready,” before she leaves for the kitchen again. Demetrius is already seated at the table, looking up at his wife like she hung up the sun on the sky. Maru refuses to show up, as she’s too invested in her research, but there’s the slam of a door from downstairs, and Sebastian eventually shows up, just as his step-father takes his first bite from his plate of spaghetti. Their guest has not yet picked up her fork.

Sebastian is now wearing actual jeans, and his hair looks a bit more tamed. He sits next to her, and the four of them eat in relative silence, though she’s obsessively thinking of her knee, against Sebastian’s, under the table and she wants to fucking swear at herself, for acting like a fucking cowardly high-schooler.

“So, why did you move to Pelican Town?” Demetrius asks her, in the end. She notices him wincing immediately after the dull thud from under the table, and she imagines that was Robin kicking him from asking a question that no one had dared poise to her until now.

She finishes chewing the food in her mouth, swallowing a bit more painful.

“I needed a change,” she says eventually, entirely too vague.

“From? You should tell Sebastian about your city experience, because he’s obsessed with leaving the town.”

There’s a disapproving tone in his voice that makes her wince, but her head snaps up at Sebastian, who looks both entirely annoyed and disappointed. She’d like to press her finger to the frown now so obvious on his forehead.

“Really?” she mumbles lamely instead. Sebastian’s now looking at her, and although across the table his parents are bickering with each other in low whispers, he doesn’t break the eye contact. He just nods at her question, grabs another bite of food – the words won’t make it any better.

She always thought that the people in this town are happy to live here, heck even she’s trying to understand the charm of the place and why her grandpa never left it. She always thought that if there is someone to leave it, that’d be her, in an example of another of her life’s failures. But here’s Sebastian, burning with a yearning for a city just as hers to leave it was.

He takes her back home, assuring her that his lunch break is long enough to allow him to do that. They’re walking side by side in companionable silence. Sebastian, unlike his father, doesn’t ask her anything, so when they reach her property, she hands him her last package.

“Can I?” he asks, a hand already tugging at the ribbon, and she smiles at him. Inside, there’s an assortment of minerals: quartz, obsidians. She’s found them during her time in the mines, and the only thing she somewhat remembers from her dialogue with Maru is that her brother loves this stuff.

“What’s this for?” he says, voice a little chocked, laughing at the end, embarrassed and overwhelmed.

“Thanks for that day,” she says. Then, more unsure… “And good luck for the future?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

She’s already turned around on her feet, a hand up in the air in goodbye.

The next morning, even if Sebastian never eats breakfast, he makes toast and eats it with strawberry jam, from a jar cutely decorated in stickers, where in cursive, their newest villager wrote for Robin and family <3.

 ***

She goes to JojaMart to buy an electric kettle; she can’t quite yet afford to get her kitchen built in, so she’s been eating at the Stardrop Saloon or lived on oatmeal and salads. But the mornings are dreadful with instant coffee and cold tap water, so she’s finally investing in something to make her life a bit better. This lifestyle reminds her of being a student in the dorms, and it’s not something she thought she’ll ever return to.

Sam looks around for his managers, and when there’s none around, he stops next to her and they chat by the vegetable stall. She’s frowning at the price, way higher than what they can find in the town and what she sells her own products for.

“Capitalism,” Sam says brightly, tugging at his employee lanyard, and she laughs at him.

“Oh, trust me, I know all about that.”

He wiggles his eyebrows at her, which makes her snort. Shane, his co-worker, turns to stare at them, but he’s not telling them on, so she moves one step closer to him.

“I’ve worked in customer care for Joja Corporation.”

Sam mimics throwing up, turning serious again only when she’s elbowing his side. She’s painfully aware of all the cameras in the store, after all this time away from anything of the sorts.

“But for real, you’re way better in Pelican Town,” he says, even if she’s not yet quite convinced.

But he doesn’t continue pressing the matter. Instead, Sam invites her the next Friday for an evening at the Saloon, where him, Sebastian and Abigail are supposed to play live a few of their songs. She clasps her hands together, and agrees immediately. She used to love this kind of thing: but it’s been so long since she allowed herself to take an evening off, both in her life back in the city, and the life here.

 ***

She’s already a regular, so Emily nowadays greets her with a hug. Though this time she whistles suggestively at her outfit. Since it’s supposed to be a more special night, she chose a low cut blouse to go with skinny jeans, and she’s no more a formless body buried under work clothes. The only make-up is a very dark lipstick. Her… friends, she supposes, are already on the side, tuning their instruments. Sam grins at her, waving her at the table Gus saved up for them, where he ordered pizza for everyone.

They’re not playing for a long time, maybe half an hour, but by the end, everyone is loudly clapping at their performance. She’s the only one whooping, and Sam is loudly laughing at her embarrassed grin afterwards, runs to fall into her waiting arms and twirls her around in the air, feet not touching the floor.

“Who knew our biggest fan would be you?” he says, helping her pat her hair pack into place.

“I did. I mean, your band has Abigail.”

The girl in questions frowns a bit at her, suspicious that it’s less of a compliment than she tried to make it, turns on her feet as she moves to the music box, tosses a coin in and picks a song. It takes a few seconds for her choice to start loudly booming in the saloon, but as soon as she does, she moves to grab at Sebastian’s arm, dragging him to the dancefloor, though he looks like he’s a lamb taken to sacrifice.

Sam laughs at the two of them, then turns back to his new friend.

“Do you think these two will ever hook up?”

She chokes on the slice of pizza that she’s eating, punching at her chest so she can breathe again. Someone slides in the chair next to her to the table, a hand slapping her hard on the back until she can breathe properly again. Then, frowning, she turns towards the newcomer, because she can’t bear looking at Sebastian and Abigail, together, dancing. She doesn’t think she can look at them without imagining them doing exactly what Sam asked her about, and it’s a shaming thought that she burns down. Shane, the one sitting next to her now, has already picked a slice of his own from their order, and nodded in greetings at Sam.

Sam leaves to talk with Penny, spending enough time as it is in Shane’s company, so Shane moves even closer to her, so he can be heard over the loud music. He’s a bit of an asshole, as he’s looking nowhere else but at her cleavage and the skin she’s showing with her choice of clothes. He’s not even trying to hide it, licking his lips, speaking without even trying to lift his eyes.

“Didn’t know the sunshine and the emo buy are hiding such a beauty between themselves,” he says, snaking an arm around her waist, shoving the second pint of beer he arrived with in her direction. He already smells like the stuff though, which means he’s at least tipsy, if not outright drunk yet. There’s offense in the way he said those nicknames, horrible on their own as well, but she’s sitting between the wall and his body and he’s a man showing interest in her, clearly going out of his way to make it obvious.

She takes several big gulps from her beer, and then turns towards him, smiling. He can’t tell it is strained.

“Well, I’m here now,” she says, and the hand around her squeezes in response. She lets him talk, mostly shit about the town, then shit about himself, and she keeps drinking and drinking, glass after glass of alcohol, because then at least she doesn’t have to reply. In the dark, they must look pretty cosy to the others, because no one else returns to the table – and by the time she remembers she is supposed to have friends around, and looks around for them, her vision is unfocused and she can’t make out the shapes and figures all around.

But she can notice the slightly grown stubble on Shane, how he’s now so, so close to her, his lips brushing against her ear each time he tells her something. She feels like she’s about to suffocate. But he tells her about how beautiful she is, how hard he makes her – and he guides her hand to his pants, where she indeed can feel her effect, and it’s a surge of pleasure and power. She squeezes him through his pants, and he groans in her ear. Her nipples perk up. And then his lips move closer, to her neck, where his tongue is lapping at her skin, sucking against the space. She feels hot all over, in a way that she doesn’t know if she likes or not. His other hand is now fondling with her breasts through her blouse, and she gasps – which only makes him to go at it harder. His mouth finds her, his tongue moving against hers immediately. She’s lost in time, doesn’t know for how long he does it – her body becoming lighter and lighter with each swipe of his saliva against her lips.

Then, a cough from behind Shane. She snaps out of her daze, looks up. Makes eye contact with Sebastian, which feels as effective as a cold shower to her fogged mind. She yanks Shane’s hands off her, but he’s unbothered, turns to look at Sebastian with something like disgust and boredom.

“Can we help you?” Shane says. She hates how the word we sounds from his mouth.

Sebastian doesn’t bother to even look at the drunk guy, instead addressing her only.

“Do you want to go home? The others left already, but it’s getting pretty late…” He stops to stare at Shane, and she wordlessly nods at him. He starts moving instantly, shoving Shane away so he can grab her wrist and help her out of her chair. She needs a few seconds to stabilize herself on her feet, stop the dizzying headache that hit her at the sudden movement.

“Come on, man, what do you think you’re doing?” Shane asks, though he also has troubles standing on his own feet. He makes do with leaning against the table, doing his best to look as menacing as possible.

In his arms, she shudders at the sound of his voice, clutches her fingers around Sebastian’s leather jacket. He doesn’t move away, but he doesn’t want to touch her either, so he just stands still.

“She’s coming with me,” is all he says, and when he starts towards the door, she follows silently. He offers her jacket, which he picked up earlier, before checking on her, and she hangs her head even lower in shame. The cold, outside air is quickly sobering her up, and she really can’t believe she lost herself, just as if she were a college freshman. She burns with embarrassment.

Once out, Sebastian moves a bit away from her, offering her space, though he always extends an arm in her direction when she stumbles on both existent and imaginary obstacles. The silence now is excruciating.

“Say something,” she croaks, her throat hurting from all the alcohol.

“Are you okay?”

His voice is soft, and he stops, looks at her for the first time since the start of all this situation. She knows she probably looks like a mess, lipstick smeared all around her mouth, clothes hanging awkwardly, but his eyes just search hers. She suddenly feels like crying. He must see it too, because he’s moving closer to her.

“Can I-” he tries, sighs, moves a hand through his hair in frustration. “Can I touch you?”

She nods, but he doesn’t move.

“I’ll need verbal confirmation.”

“Yes.”

She’s outright staring at him now, as he makes his way to her, cups her face in between his hands. His fingers are cold against her flushed skin, but it grounds her to the moment. Sebastian’s eyes are moving now, across her face: stop at her jaw, her neck, where Shane sucked painful love bites against her skin, visible even only in the light coming from the street lamps. He hesitates before moving his gaze downwards, where similar marks were left by his fingers against her tits. She feels like used goods, even if there is no judgement from Sebastian.

“Did you want that?” he asks again, sounding deadly serious, so she’s trying to think equally as seriously about his question. It’s hard, her thoughts all jumbled up, a soft kind of edge to everything going on in her head.

“I don’t know,” she answers finally, her head pressing more firmly against his palm. Sebastian’s thumbs are now moving softly against her jaw, and she wants to purr, just like a cat, maybe hang on to him for more of his warmth.

“God,” he says, and it sounds like a swearword. He unglues himself from her, extends an arm that she gracefully takes as they continue on the road to her house. He doesn’t say anything more until they arrive on her porch, though he looks like he’s thinking very hard. She’d like to press her finger to the frown on his forehead.

Max is happily snoring on the warm ground, and she lets go of Sebastian to run the short distance to her dog. She goes on her knees, grabs Max’s head in her hands and coos at him like she would to a baby, talks lovesick nonsense to the dog, pats him all over.

Her voice sounds fucking cute, Sebastian thinks, but instead he fishes something from the pockets of his jacket, bends down so he can press it in her palms. She immediately turns to look at him, eyes big and questioning.

“Take those in the morning, okay? You’ll need them,” is all he says, raising a hand and waving it in a goodbye.

 ***

Sebastian is right. She wakes two hours later, empties all the contents of her stomach, tears burning at her eyes, and when she wakes again, she thanks all the gods that outside it is raining, because she only gets up to get a glass of water and swallow the pills. Her head is killing her, and her heart aches in embarrassment at the way she acted. She hangs between screaming out in frustration at her own self and complaining about being hangover the whole day, hating herself so, so very much.

She still shoots Sebastian a text, thanking him for taking care of her, in so many ways, the night before. He leaves her on read.

For the next week, she busies herself with work on the farm. She makes another batch of jam jars, which she sends to Lewis for selling. She plants a new tree sapling, harvests strawberries, even builds an ugly-looking scarecrow out of an old broom. She cuts down wood, saves up stacks of it for when she’ll eventually afford Robin’s services. She goes in the mines, once or twice.

Then one of Lewis’ invitations is waiting in her mailbox, for another festival. Spring is coming to an end, already a sweeter, warmer breeze in the air, so the whole town is to celebrate the exact thing.

 ***

But Pelican Town is a small place, and so it never forgets gossip too easily. On that evening, enough pairs of eyes saw her fumbling in the dark with Shane, and so enough pairs of eyes are now watching her suspiciously as she greets the mayor. She’s wearing some city dress again, though more modest, and ribbons in her hair. She’s forcing herself to smile at everyone she encounters, trying not to seem so affected by the outright cold shoulder.

Sam still greets her, though, grabbing her in his arms.

“Oh, handsome!” she says, and laughs when he’s looking around, to check if anyone else heard her. But he is wearing a suit, his hair is gelled down and he smells like his mother. His eyes are searching hers though, and she thinks Sebastian might have said something to his friend. But thankfully Sam mentions nothing.

She looks behind him, at Sebastian, dressed in a costume as well. Her heart starts beating faster in her chest; his hair is pushed back, and his forehead is now uncovered. He sits relaxed, his hands in his pockets, like he doesn’t really want to be there and she hasn’t seen someone look that heartbreakingly gorgeous.

“You too,” she says. Sebastian raises an eyebrow at her. “Look good, I mean,” she clarifies, and she clears her throat before the awkwardness chokes her.

It’s a big understatement, but it’s the best she can do right now. There’s a small smile that she gets in reply. On the other side of the field, by Robin’s side, Abigail, Penny and Maru look absolutely stunning in their festival dresses, with the flower crowns on top of their heads. They’re laughing at one of Abigail’s stories, and they’re just beautiful and young and entirely enrapturing. She wonders if she didn’t fuck it up so badly earlier, she would have been invited to be one of them.

This time around, there’s not as much mingling with the people as earlier in the season; people are a bit warier, though she supposes she deserves it. She’s busy setting down a mat under a blossoming tree, preparing some kind of picnic and viewing spot at the same time.

“You look beautiful,” she hears from behind her, and she turns around to find Shane. A bit behind him, Marnie is engaged in a conversation with the mayor, and by his side, there’s Jas, who immediately shoves her sandals away so she can step on her mat and sit next to her.

She offers her tea and strawberries, places her own hat on top of the child’s head to protect her from the sun, who squeals in delight that she can show off the winning prize of the egg hunt. Then, she turns back to Shane:

“Is she your daughter?”

“Gods, no. She’s my goddaughter.”

She sighs, relieved a bit. In the morning, Shane looks just scruffy, some kind of sober, but his face is still red and puffy, sign of alcoholism. She knows Jas lives with him and Marnie, and it can’t be a good environment for a child, but she’s heard the rumours that he’s not that much at home anyway. She’s worrying for the young girl, but she also trusts Marnie to handle the subject, not really her place to say anything anyway.

Shane moves closer, his hand grabbing the end of the scarf she’s wearing around her neck, tugging so it comes undone between his fingers. She gasps, palm gluing to the skin there, reaching out for him.

“Give it back,” she all but growls it out, eyes frantically looking around, hoping no one is actually looking their way, since everyone is focused on preparing for the dance.

“I did that, right?” he asks, finally stopping, and she takes back her scarf, hangs her head low, so that her hair can cover her movement, as she ties it back in place.

“Yes, you fucking asshole,” she spits, but doesn’t move away from him.

“I was honest, you know. About you looking beautiful. Then and now too.”

“Thank you,” she says, and stays in place even as Shane gets closer to her. He’s also dressed up, wearing an actual shirt and everything, his jaw freshly shaven. He even looks somewhat attractive, and just like last time, she’s grateful for the attention. Back in Zuzu City, no one bothers with any kind of dating, no one bothers to notice someone else at all – no sweet lies, no prelude, just a dick and a cunt. So this feels new and flattering at the same time.

She sits down on her mat, reluctantly serves Shane too with some of her freshly picked strawberries. Jas moved over to Vincent and Jodi, her hands carefully holding on to the hat that’s still a bit too big for her, so it’s only the two of them in this corner. The music can’t start soon enough, because she can feel stray eyes looking to them.

The dance starts, and she watches, transfixed as the pairs walk towards each other, meeting in the middle in an embrace. Almost immediately the dresses flutter in the air, twirling. There’s an admiring exclamation from somewhere in the crowd, Jas happily clapping along to the rhythm. She looks at Sam, all but drinking up Penny’s laughing face. She looks at Abigail, tightly holding on to Sebastian’s shoulders. She looks at her friends dancing with the girls they have a crush on, and something in her chest rips apart.

“Hey,” Shane says. “Wanna get out of here?”

She nods wordlessly, and he takes her hand. No one looks at them, as they discreetly make their way behind everyone else. Once out the field, Shane breaks into a run through the woods. They stop in a clearing, both breathing hard from their run, and Shane grins at her, before straightening his back, walking purposefully her way and deciding to kiss her. It’s hard and rough, much like he’s been handling her until now too, but she still moans.

His hands are already moving at pulling his belt apart, and he takes her hands and moves them towards his dick.

“Come on, play with it,” he whispers breathlessly, as he’s pulling apart her scarf for a second time today, mouth finding the tender skin, reinforcing the fading marks. She’s feeling needy herself, she’d like him to shove down her panties and eat her out, but she makes do with moving her legs one against the other, seeking some kind of friction, as her hands are moving from his tip towards his balls, slower at the beginning, and faster once he starts grunting in her ear, pumping into her hands.

Then, he grabs at her hair, and she has to bite her tongue to stop from yelping.

“On your knees,” he says, already pushing his weight on her shoulders, and more or less willingly, she gets to the ground. The uneven dirt hurts her skin, and yet she has to ignore it, because Shane is already guiding his dick with his hands towards her lips. She forces herself to open her mouth, hopes he’ll better get down to do the same thing for her.

Her mouth is warm, and she’s fucking good at what she’s doing, sucking hard and taking him all in, like a good bitch, even if tears are forming at the corner of her eyes and her throat is burning. He pulls out, just to slam, hard, back inside her wet, welcoming hole – and in just three shoves, he comes undone, half coming in her mouth, half out just so he can have his fantasy of his cum leaking on her face.

Her dress is stained, and almost all her arousal is out of her. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, presses a palm against the painful strain in her jaw. Shane hurries to put his now flailing dick back inside his pants, and he’s not helping her back up.

“Gotta go,” he says, and he’s patting down his pants, where she held onto and left some creasing.

“What?” she asks, suddenly annoyed. “What about me?”

“Solve it yourself, princess.”

He starts walking away. She screams after him.

“Oh, fuck you!”

“My pleasure, next time!” he shouts back, but he doesn’t stop, as he’s making his way back towards the festival.

She shoves the middle finger up in the air, stomping her feet at the same time, shrieking.

“You fucking asshole!”

He chuckles at her tantrum, but he’s spent and satisfied, while she’s there frustrated and fucked over, so he’s not bothering to take her too seriously.

There’s no way she can go back there without everyone else figuring out exactly what she’s been up to. Of course, Shane looks no different than his usual, maybe he’s even surrounded by some post-orgasm glow, but there’s some bleeding from one of her knees, his now dry cum on the front of her dress, and her hair is nothing but a mess. She can’t believe how fucking stupid she can be, and how she fell again in the same old game of “I give you some attention, you give me some sex” that she’s been playing for ages now. It seems like habits don’t change, no matter if she’s in Zuzu City or Pelican Town.

And for what? Just because she felt lonely and jealous, because she felt like no matter how much she’ll try, she’ll never be anything but a passing fancy to these people that know each other inside out?

She makes her way towards her farm stomping her feet, swearing at Shane and mumbling curses all the way. Once back, she draws herself a hot bath and, in the tub, finally somewhere safe, she touches herself, moans out into the air a name she doesn’t dare to even say out loud, and thinks of someone who never even looked at her in any way to indicate she might want her too.

So, she must make do with fucking Shane?

But as she succumbs to her orgasm, moving lower into the water, maybe she can just order a dildo online and leave it at that.

*** 

On the first summer days, she takes up fishing. She buys a bottle of mead, because she’s heard from mayor Lewis that’s the favourite drink of their local fishermen, and she goes down the beach to beg.

She wants to learn fishing, she says. Just a couple of lessons, whenever he can leave his store and he’s willing to – she really just wants some new hobbies. It’s dreadfully awful to have only three functional TV channels, and only a dozens of books. Even Max is just a dog, and there’s a limitation to what he is capable of. Willy is funny and wise in the way only old men who love the sea can be, but he’s patient in his explanations – and sure enough, very soon, she catches her first fish.

She takes a picture of it on her phone, proud of her achievement. She sends it to Sam, to boast a bit and to annoy him, because he’s currently stuck at his part-time job. Then she goes shell hunting, because she’s too giddy to do any actual work. The villagers recently rebuilt the small bridge on the beach, and it’s lovely to get to take a walk like this. She wants her house to have the same fresh feeling, so she visits Robin for an upgrade.

And she knows she’s paying for the work, but with Robin, she feels like she’s asking for a favour, so she must give something back. And because she feels guilty, for having thought so angrily and jealously about Sebastian and his life, she wants to say sorry in a way, even if he has no way of knowing why she’s doing it in the first place.

Robin’s outside the house, just having come back from an exercise class at Caroline’s. She greets her visitor just a bit more strained than usual, and well – there’s no doubt that if there’s a gossip mill in the town, that’s probably the weekly gathering of middle-aged wives.

The farmer sighs, agrees to wait in the house while Robin takes a shower, before they can discuss about work.

“Is Sebastian home?” she asks, and the older woman makes a dismissive sign with her hand, which means she can go and check for herself.

The door to his room is slightly open, and he actually asks her to come in when she knocks. She greets him from the doorway, suddenly shy when he speaks, suddenly guilty that she’s interrupting him. She sits down on the couch, starts by watching him work, and then eventually she gets distracted by the posters on his walls, and the huge book collection he is showcasing on his shelves. It’s work that she’s familiar with, the stuff she liked to read before, when she used to have time for her hobbies, about worlds that she could escape to only by reading about them in books, featuring magic and dragons and robots.

He doesn’t seem to mind her looking around, as long as she’s quiet. Then, he eventually finishes, and sighs, stretching out his arms.

“Sorry about that, had to finish what I was working on.”

“Ah,” she nods. “And what is that?”

“I do freelance programming,” he answers. “I just want to save up enough to move from here. You know, if I’d gone to college, I’d probably be making six figures right now… but I just don’t want to be part of that corporate rat race, you know?”

“As a rat,” she says, a smile already on her face, “I totally agree with you.”

He looks at her; this is the first hint he gets – of something more about her. He’s heard from Sam, of course, about her actual job in the city, but it’s different to know it from her, to know he has her trust, to hear the defeat behind her voice, even as she tries to hide it with humour.

Then the moment is broken, the ping from his IM breaking the companionable silence between them. Normally, he’d have to explain to people why he is not in the mood to meet up with others, his introversion something out of a freak show with the villagers, but she just nods at him in understanding.

But the next interruption is almost brutal, Robin returning to pass on Abigail’s message, so filled with dismissal at his work, and indifference at his preferences. The easy air about him, as he was talking about a work he clearly loves and his dreams, is now entirely stifled – and instead he, defeated, just accepts all of this, even if he complains. She’d like to press her finger to the frown on his forehead.

This situation makes her blood boil, though: because she’s been in his exact spot. She’s had people look down at her choices for as long as she’s decided to walk her path, out there in the city – and now that she knows what it’s like not to, she can’t take to be the witness to it happening in front of her. Of course, some people will always have something to say, but it should be different with those considered friends – considered family, no?

From the kitchen upstairs, Robin is calling out her name – now, suddenly, she doesn’t really want to go, especially when she knows her presence is soon to be replaced by someone else’s. So, she acts daringly. She touches his arm, as she raises to go:

“You know, I think you’re doing an amazing job, especially considering your conditions. And trust me, it really is better than being a clog in the corporate system, and your work is important, even if it’s important for you only.”

As soon as she came, she’s gone and he loses his chance of asking for more. She left behind another sloppily packed present on his desk, a piece of quartz inside. He gets up, moves to put it up on his shelves – and shit, he wonders if she noticed the other stuff she’s given him, up there.

 ***

So Robin starts coming around with her carpenter tools, sometimes so early in the morning that she’s welcoming her still in her Disney pyjamas. They drink instant coffee, warm this time – and they discuss recipes that she’d like to try in her new kitchen, or the kind of animals she’ll grow in the barn. She learns that Robin loves goat cheese, and she shares that she absolutely hates peppers. She asks about Sebastian and Maru’s childhoods, she tells of her grandpa’s favourite magic trick.

The sound of Robin’s hammer accompanies her through her motions, as she’s ploughing the land for the summer crops. She didn’t really understand how lonely she has been all these months, just going through what she has to do. It’s nice to have someone to talk to, even if just for a few stolen minutes.

Sebastian drops by during his breaks sometimes, to bring his mother’s lunch, and both women nag at him so much that he ends up eating with them, Max nestled at his feet under the table.

Once, she walks back with him towards the town; she needs to drop by Pierre’s, to order some kitchen utensils – and by Lewis’ house, to leave him a note with info on her next batch of syrup and honey, that she sells for some good prices. He strains himself to walk in a pace that matches hers, even if he just wants to hurry home and take a nap.

She noticed, how tired he looks lately: hair more dishevelled, the slight stubble on his chin, the dark under his eyes. She knows, from Robin, that he spent even more time than usual in his room, refusing to meet even Abigail or Sam. She’d like to press her palm on his forehead, check for any signs of sickness.

“Are you working a lot these days?” she asks, fumbling with the edge of her t-shirt, feeling shy and worried that she might be overstepping.

“Had a tight deadline, but it’s over now.”

He pushes the hair out of his eyes with his hand, pats the pockets of his jeans with the other. He takes out his cigarettes, and then swears.

“Shit, do you have a lighter?”

In fact, she does. Sometimes, when she goes to the mines, her flashlight flickers and dies out, so she started the habit of carrying candles on her expeditions, and always a lighter in her pocket. She offers the fire; she has to stand on her tiptoes and he has to bend down to make it work.

Sebastian looks at her; she’s determinedly staring at the ground. They’re so close that even in the summer heat, she can feel his breathe on her cheek. Once the cigarette is lit, she almost scrambles away, pressing her palms to her cheeks, complaining about the hot weather.

She starts walking faster, afraid of what she might do if Sebastian looks into her face. There’s a small smile on his face that she can’t notice.

 ***

Pierre’s store is more of a general hangout spot for his daughter, though – Maru is eating her lunch with Abigail in a corner, and she waves at the two of them as she turns towards the counter. Of course, Pierre convinces her to buy several types of flower seeds – and she walks around the town with those in her arms. She thinks she might actually be his best customer. Or easiest, which in his case, it is one and the same thing.

That’s how she meets Evelyn: in the town square, taking care of the flowers. In truth, she never stopped to think about who maintains the town, and now she seems to have her answer. There are many people around; Penny with the kids, playing in the water fountain. Mayor Lewis and Harvey discussing in front of the clinic, Gus sticking a request on the board.

But the old lady spots her shopping, and sits her down on a bench, where she lectures her on the proper way to take care of them.

Then, the tone shifts – and the older woman asks her about the animals she’s growing (they’re well), how she finds Pelican Town (nice) and what’s her favourite flower (hyacinth).

“You know,” she laughs. “I almost married your grandpa.”

She sputters, unsure how to take this wild what-if she’s presented with. Of course, if Evelyn would have ended as his wife, she wouldn’t be here at all. And still, her curiosity gets the best of her.

“What happened?”

“Oh, George – that’s my husband, dear – bought an old farm here in town and moved one day. The next thing you know, everyone was smitten with the new farmer, me included. And by then, your grandpa was already in the army.”

And when he returned from the army, he returned with a wife – that’s a story that she knows. Grandpa met her grandmother at one of the dance evenings organized for young soldiers, and if the story she was told as a child is to be believed, he danced with no one else that night, the next and all the other ones that followed.

“How was he like?”

Sometimes, when it comes to someone you love, it’s hard to consider them from another point of view than the one you were always familiar with. He has always been just her grandfather to her, yet Evelyn here has seen him growing, becoming all those things to all those many people: son, neighbour, husband, father.

“He always worked hard, stirred trouble wherever he went and loved this town like no other,” she says, a faint smile on her face, lost in memories.

That sounds like the old man alright.

“Th-thank you, Evelyn.” Her voice sounds a little chocked. Just a little.

“Psssh, please. Call me Granny.”

The old man takes her hand, squeezes her fingers in hers – and pats her butt when she gets up to go home.

 ***

“Hey, mom,” she says, pressing the phone closer to her ear. It’s the first phone call she’s making from the landline, and there are jitters all over her skin. She hates that she has to stay still, glued to one spot the length of the phone’s cable. Her brain goes in override.

“Darling!” her mother exclaims from the other side. There’s some shifting, the sound of a door closing, then a sigh. “How are you? How’s Pelican Town?”

She tries not to sniffle outright, tries not to cry that she wants her mother when she’s a fucking grown-up adult, but that really is how she feels. It was all okay, the construction almost to an end, her crops growing beautifully – and then Max gnawed at her only good pair of shoes, and the thing sent her into a spiral of self-pity. She really has no idea what on earth she is doing here.

Instead, she asks: “Did you like living here?”

She is grandpa’s only living child. After her older brother’s death, she simply packed her stuff and moved to a shitty dorm in city, got married in two months and had her almost immediately after. Nowadays, her father is drowning in alcohol and her mother is drowning in work – and she wonders if the first coping mechanism may be more useful than the latter, though her last experience seems to point to a no.

“No,” her mother says. “But depends on what you’re chasing, or what you’re running away from. So, do you like living there?”

She tugs at the phone cord, shifts on spot, looks at Max sleeping a few feet away.

“M-maybe? I don’t know.”

“That’s not a no,” her mother says, ending the call immediately afterwards.

She sits on the same spot, with the tone dead in the background for a very long time, just staring out the window at the setting sun.

 ***

With the new barn built, she visits Marnie about filling it with the appropriate animals. She’d like a sheep, just because she thinks knitting would be a useful hobby to pick up by winter. Maybe a goat, so she can make cheese and thank Robin properly for all the overtime work she put in finishing her house so early.

Jas is out with Vincent, but before discussing the price of the animal, Marnie hands her the straw hat and her picnic mat. She burns as she takes those from her, not knowing what to say. It’s been two weeks since she ran from the town’s celebration, and even now, she burns with the shame of that day. She starts looking around.

“He’s not-”

“At work, dear,” she says, and finally she starts calculating and writing down something at her desk.

“So you know.”

“Everyone knows,” she says and sounds forcefully cheerful, although she must understand what weight her words have, because the farmer is slouching in a chair, head hanging in her hands.

“There’s nothing going on,” she wails, looking up at Marnie, begging her to believe her – even if she’s just a stranger, asking for a bias against her own blood relative.

“Nothing going on anymore?” Marnie corrects, moves to pat her on the shoulder, signalling at the same time for the young woman to follow her. She nods her head, defeated, and Marnie has to wonder what exactly did this hard-working farmer see in her drunk nephew. She feels relieved to know that she put an end to it. Maybe exactly because she got involved with her good for nothing boy that she feels a bit more forgiving towards her.

She talks her in getting another chicken too, as an apology for having fucked around with her nephew. She doesn’t have the heart to correct this motherly woman that it was, in fact, the other way around. But either way, she’s forgotten.

She knows that because the next day, Penny calls her and asks her to spend the day together with the kids on the beach. She shouldn’t be that surprised to see Sam there too.

 ***

She asks everyone she gets along with over, after the house expansion is finished. She spent most morning just preparing various recipes, to fit everyone’s taste. Penny arrives first, dropping an apple pie on her kitchen counter and moving around the house to admire Robin’s work. She’s been thinking of doing something about her trailer-living situation for a while.

Abigail and Maru arrive together, with a plate of Robin’s spaghetti. Her and Demetrius decided it’s better to skip the evening, seeing how everyone else there is the same age as their children. She learns that Abigail is supposed to start her second year of university in autumn, and that Maru is going to do her master’s in astrophysics.

She whistles appreciatively, makes fun of her literature degree on the way. The two then huddle together in a corner of the porch, feeding Max stray bits of food and cooing at him when his tail starts wagging.

Sam and Sebastian arrive the last, each carrying a board game in their hands. It’s smart thinking on their side, because she’s not sure what she would have entertained her guests with otherwise. They huddle around the table, filling up plates with at least five different food recipes, passing iced tea and lemonade around. Abigail has this perfect skill of being able to imitate Lewis’ announcement voice perfectly, which in turn makes Sam snort his drink out of his noise. It makes everyone else lose it, and afterwards there’s no awkwardness hanging between them.

Penny helps Sam clean up in the kitchen, and they’re gone for way longer than necessary, though everyone else at the table is polite enough not to comment on it. Abigail and Maru, sitting one across the other, keep looking at each other while the other is not looking, and Abigail might be eating so much chocolate cake that she risks getting sick.

Sebastian sits next to her, smiling softly at a story that Penny is telling, from their time together in high-school. She should, technically, feel left out of the loop, but each time she mentions someone unknown, or a habit they used to have as a teenage group, Sebastian leans over closer to her, and whispers explanations into her ear. His voice, low and smooth, makes her feel like she’s melting down her chair.

Sam and Sebastian go out for a smoke, and she’s following them too, asking for a cigarette from Sebastian, letting her lighter pass around in a circle. The sun has already set, and there’s only the soft buzzing sound of her lamp in the air. The boys are talking about their rehearsal schedule, ask her over sometime, which she happily agrees to.

“Hey,” Sam says, kicking at her leg with his shoe. “Are you single?”

“What the fuck?!”

Sam raises his hands in the air, talking with his cigarette between his teeth. “Don’t shoot the messenger!”

She was ready to punch his elbow, but is now lowering her arm, frowning at him. Behind Sam, Sebastian continue smoking, refusing to get himself involved in this mess.

“Whose messenger?” she asks, though there’s a teasing edge in her voice, clearly proving that she doesn’t believe anything else but his own curiosity brought him to this rudeness.

“Look man – uhm, woman I guess, we’re all friends here, no judgement zone.”

“You just laughed at Maru for liking math two minutes ago!” she points out, this time her kicking his leg.

“You can just not answer the question,” Sam says, pacifying, turning towards Sebastian to offer him his lighter, as he’s already on his second cigarette.

“No, it’s fine.” She feels embarrassed for causing a scene, when it’s not even such a big deal. “I am single.”

She starts walking a bit away, making it seem like she’s inspecting the shrub just next to the stairs.

“So no Shane?” this time it’s Sebastian asking, which is surprising because she did not expect him to care.

“No Shane,” she confirms, her voice a bit weaker than she intended it to be.

Sam punches the air in a victorious movement, grinning at her.

“Thank God, that guy’s a fucking asshole.”

He shivers a bit in the cold night air, wearing only a t-shirt, and with a goodbye thrown over his shoulder, he goes back inside. Sebastian moves his hand in the air a bit, gesturing to his unfinished smoke, but she’s still not making a move to go back.

“But him and Penny… totally a thing, right?”

“Totally,” Sebastian says, and they both burst out laughing.

***

When Abigail phoned to tell her about Luau, she actually mostly whined that summer festivals are the most boring ones, because everyone is so busy tending to crops and making the most out of the long days. The farmer herself was actually taking a break, at the height of the summer heat, with a glass of iced water, but counting down the minutes before she’d be back in the garden, pulling out the weeds and gathering ripened fruits.

She still gets invited to Luau with everyone else; somewhat of a temporary, potentially forever fixture to their group. There’s a gaping hole opening in her stomach when she thinks of this, anxiety bubbling all inside her body making her feel sick. She feels like something terrible surely must happen soon, considering how much joy she gets from all these people.

She has sent some stuff to mayor Lewis, to add to the potluck soup: fresh tomato, some mushrooms, basil. But still, the thing looks completely inedible.

“Are we trying to kill the governor?” she asks, as she’s carefully looking at the bowl in her hands.

Sebastian laughs, turning his upside down in the sand. She’d really like to do the same thing.

“It’s tradition!” Maru explains, frowning at her brother.

“Are we choosing governors based on the quality of their stomach?” she tries again, this time sniffing at the stuff. Its consistency looks absolutely… gluey.

Sam joins the laughter this time, and Sebastian pats Maru’s shoulder in some attempt at an excuse. Abigail is the only one who actually eats the stuff, though her face turns somewhat pale as soon as she is done. The governor looks like he is perfectly fine, and even praises their soup, which makes everyone visibly relax.

 ***

Maru’s birthday was a solitary thing; just another ordinary working day, celebrated only with chocolate cake in the evening with the entire family. Robin builds her another bookshelf, Demetrius and Sebastian get the money for a new telescope. No other guests are invited, though random gifts still find their way to her mailbox: a stray astrology book, a new case for her glasses.

Sam’s not that different, though they all heard the rumours that immediately after his shift, he visited the museum, and spent a very, very long time there. They meet on Friday night at the Saloon though, so that the band can play and the others can cheer. They’re spectacular, as usual, and when doing something they love, all three of them look younger than she has ever seen them.

Penny is at her side, an arm looped around her waist, and they’re both swaying their bodies on the rhythm of the music. Sam winks in their direction, though the redhead pretends she doesn’t see it.

 ***

On one of their river discussions, Sebastian mentions frogs to her once; something she’s been terrified of for as long as she remembers. But there’s just such a soft smile on his face, and his voice is so calm: and as such, she thinks to give it a try. Which is exactly why he finds her one day, as he goes to visit Sam, by the river bank, on all fours, staring into the water.

She yelps when he hears him calling out to her, fluttering her arms in the air in a panic. It’s that movement that makes her stumble forward in the water. She doesn’t know how to swim, but the water is low enough to not be a problem, but as she gets up, sitting on her ass in the middle of the river, she scowls at him.

“I hate you,” she says.

He smiles, and with the sun at his back, it’s the most beautiful sight she’s seen. He offers her a hand, which she accepts gratefully, trying to remain as dignified as possible, considering that her clothes are now stuck to her body and there might be some mud on her butt.

“What were you doing?” he asks, and she immediately reddens under his attention.

She mumbles her answer; she’s a terrible liar, so she doesn’t even try. This time, Sebastian actually laughs at her, and she crosses her hands at her chest, both indignant and cold.

“I hate you,” she says again, this time accentuating each of her words. But there’s no fire behind it, so he ignores her remarks. Instead, he unzips his hoodie and, slowly, places it on her shoulders.

“But-” she starts, already moving to remove it, give it back, refuse the help, her natural instinct kicking in. He hasn’t stepped back, and having him so close, she notices the subtle smell of his aftershave, the dark marks under his eyes. She wants to get on her tiptoe and let her fingers run through his hair, so soft from up this close. Then he speaks, the magic breaking, and she moves her eyes down to her shoes, shy all of the sudden.

“Sam’s living real close, so it’s really no problem.”

He’s trying very hard not to move his eyes away from hers, face burning red with embarrassment – and only then does she realize she’s wearing a white shirt, and she’s wet –

“Oh,” she says, lamely, moving her arms through the sleeves and zipping it up. “I… I’ll wash it and bring it back to you.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” he says, before awkwardly saying his goodbyes. Sam will chew him out for being late, and Abigail will frown at him for not letting them know about this ahead of time.

But their new farmer will stand by the river bank for a long time still, looking down at the water, even when Vincent passes her by and laughs at the wet pool that dripped at her feet.

***

She likes taking the mountain path, especially during hot summer days: less people to stop and chat with under the sun, more shade from the trees, chances to see a wild bunny or a squirrel, maybe picking up some wild fruit. She learnt to enjoy these things, that felt like such a chore back in the day, when she was simply a child helping out her relatives. Maybe because, from start to finish, in everything she does for her farm, she leaves a part of herself in there.

She’s as familiar with Robin’s garden as she is with her own, and that’s why it takes her brain a bit to catch up with what she is seeing.

She didn’t even expect to see Sebastian at all, and especially not like… this. Sprawled under his motorcycle, the picture perfect of her dream boy from high-school. It’s then when it dawns on her that she might have some other reasons too, for visiting Robin today, for picking the mountain path, for going to the mines so often, even if she’ll never admit it to anyone else.

For a second, she hates him so much for having been so kind to her, for having taken care of her, for his beautiful smiles and his unending understanding. For having made her like him so much, when this recluse and silent man seems to dislike everything that she is starting to like lately.

She crushes the feeling coming up in her chest; the despair and the need to go and run as far away from him, before they make eye contact, before her beating heart goes into override.

Sebastian heard her approaching footstep though, and as he’s coming up, t-shirt clinging to his chest, she closes her eyes. God help her not to jump this man right here and now.

“Hey you,” he says, the corner of his lips lifting up a bit seeing her.

She waves, taking a deep breath as she approaches him, taking a seat on the outside bench. He picks up the tool that he needed, and goes back to work. She stays put right where she is, watching him.

“You know, it’s fascinating to watch someone do something I know nothing about,” she laughs, thinking of her useless literature degree as well, her dirt stained nails and her dead-end job back in the city, so opposed to his programming skills and the coppery smell of his motorcycle.

“That’s how I feel when you talk about farm upgrades with mom,” he says, and then asking her for another tool – it’s the round one with a yellow handle.

She shifts closer; he gets out from under the metal labyrinth of his bike enough to nod at her in thanks when she hands it to him. But he understands her feeling better than he manages to put it into words, especially since he’s been an outcast in the village for so long; heck he’s not sure anyone else but her even accepts what he’s working, let alone understand it.

But if there’s someone who can get it, it’s certainly the city girl who gave up everything to become a farmer. Much as he wants to drop everything here just for a shot at the big city. It’s the same strangling hope in his voice, that she’s detected the first time they met, when he talks about his short escapades.

He gets up, wiping his hands on a dirty old rag. There’s a dark stain on his cheek that makes him so incredibly cute, and yet the contrast couldn’t be more obvious with his muscles.

“You could come with me next time,” he says, and he purposefully looks at her, digging out her reactions.

She blushes, all red, prettily and opens her mouth to say something, closes it again. Then, with a bit too much eagerness, that makes her seem just a bit too desperate to do the right thing, she says:

“I’d love to.”

“Great,” he says, and this time it’s a full smile that he graces her with.

They move to enter the house now, the sun setting at their back, and he holds the door open for her. She has to squeeze by him, so close that she can feel the smell of oil mingled with his sweat, and the always present soft aroma of soap.

Robin is in the kitchen, preparing hot chocolate for everyone; Abigail is over too, in Maru’s room, the two’s laughter loud enough to be heard from downstairs. Demetrius is in his office, researching something in one of his biology tomes.

She immediately moves to help Robin; now familiar with the layout of her kitchen, with everyone’s favourite mug. His mother yells at Sebastian to go and take a shower before even daring to enter her kitchen, which is exactly the reason why he moves closer to her instead, loudly kissing her cheek.

Robin shrieks, hitting him with the spoon she’s holding in her hand. Their guest watches the scene with a soft smile; she likes it when there’s no bitterness between the two, which is something that comes way easier when no one else in their family is around.

She presents Robin with her first goat cheese; it’s experimental yet, really I have no idea if it’s any good, but she gathers her in her arms anyway, thanking her from the bottom of her heart. She carefully places it in her fridge.

And while Robin goes to Demetrius’ office, forcing a break out of this man as they plan to drink their hot chocolate together, she’s tasked to bringing up the girls’. She knocks, but it still doesn’t feel like sufficient incessant to stop whatever they were doing, because when she opens the door, Maru’s in Abigail arms, having a somewhat lost look on her face. Abigail’s lipstick is all over Maru’s neck, and smeared around her lips, and both their mouths are pulsing red with the pressure of shared kisses.

She blushes under their eyes, hates to have interrupted what she just did. It’s worse than if they were having sex, because the tension in the air is so thick she can choke on it.

“R-Robin said-” she tries, but she’s so embarrassed that she just leaves the tray on the desk, and all but bolts down the stairs.

Shit, she thinks.

“Shit,” she exclaims out loud as well. She’s so wind up she doesn’t hear the footsteps following her, and she almost screams when Abigail’s hand comes down her shoulder.

“Hey, look, let’s be chill about it and keep it a secret, yeah?”

“Of course,” she nods her head. “And I’m really sorry…”

“Our fault for being daring enough not to lock the door. But in our defence, we didn’t think that would happen,” Abigail says, winking at the other woman, before moving upstairs, probably to calm down her lover.

The theme of her life is that she is a big, stupid, idiotic fool. She’s been jealous for months on a relationship that didn’t even exist, and now she feels guilty and embarrassed all over again for what she did when overcome by those emotions. She stands in the middle of the hallway, hating herself so much that she would burst into flames if she had magical powers.

Sebastian finds her eventually, grounds her back to reality with a soft touch against her elbow and a soft call of her name. She startles like she’s been shot, almost jumping out of her skin, before things start refocusing around her. Sebastian, after his shower, smells like pine and mint, and he’s wearing shorts.

“Come on,” he says, slowly guiding her back to the kitchen, where their drink probably went cold already. At the back of his leg, Sebastian has a tattoo: a man lying face down, ten swords hanging above his body.

“That’s cool,” she nods her head at the design, sipping from her hot chocolate.

“Thanks. Sweet sixteen present, teenage rebellion and everything.”

“I ran away from home when I was sixteen,” she says, and Sebastian rises his eyebrows, clearly sceptical.

“For real!” she laughs. “I came here, to gramps.”

“Can’t remember you ever being up here,” he says, but now he’s curious.

“Well, of course, he called my mom the second I entered the house, and next morning she came to pick me up, but still.”

Sebastian snorts at her story, and she’s beaming at him with the largest smile possible, having gotten such a reaction out of him. It seems like it’s so easy for her to rile him up, or to get him involved enough in what she’s doing that he can’t filter his reactions anymore.

He walks her home that evening; she insisted he didn’t need to go through the trouble, since she’s out even later all the time, but Robin pushed, especially since Abigail was to sleep over, so she didn’t need Sebastian to walk her home.

In the end, she had company on the way home.

“Sorry for the trouble,” she says. Sebastian is smoking again, and only shakes his head. They continue their conversation from earlier, about how they used to be as kids and teenagers, periods in time that feels very far-away. Then she tells him of her past job, how she used to want to kill herself every time she entered the building, how there was no more city around her, and just the clutch of overwork and need for money.

She breathes easier here, she says. She hasn’t seen the stars in years, she adds.

She’s looking up at the sky, but Sebastian is looking at her.

She’s seemed lost on that first day, overwhelmed as she looked around at her inherited plot of land, and he’s given her two weeks maximum to survive in there. And here she is, rounding on six months, looking like she’s always belonged.

She hands him his sweater, thanks him again, in that sweet voice that matches her face, but not her personality when she’s swearing. He wishes the road between their houses was longer, longer than to Zuzu City, so long that they could have the entire night at their disposal.

 ***

“You’re late,” she says, from where she sits on the pier, her feet just a few centimetres above the water surface.

She’s barefoot, and she’s wearing a thin and short dress, and showing so much skin that Sebastian is a bit distracted at first. Technically, they haven’t set a meeting time, but he is indeed the last of the villagers to arrive on the beach for the dance of the moonlight jellies. By now, the others are also grouped together, leaving her alone.

She pats the space next to her. He sits down, yawning.

“Sorry, I was up until 3am reading a new book.”

She lights up then, shoots question after question at him: about his favourite authors and books, hints at the volumes he knows she’s seen on his shelf. They decide to buddy read a book together, and the next day he finds her favourite novel in his mailbox, he sends his instead. His are in pristine condition, while hers are underlined all over, notes scrambled over the margins that he spends a lot of time trying to decipher, corners dog-eared. The first few are a hit and miss, then slowly, as they go through the volumes, writing long texts and handwritten note with their thoughts on it or calling each other late into the night, they start to figure each other’s state, collections growing on each side.

On Penny’s birthday, no one can find the young woman almost the entire day. For that matter, they had the same problem with Sam too.

On Abigail’s birthday, she knocks on the farmer’s door in the middle of the night. The other woman is sleepy, bleary eyed, and she knows that something serious is going on because Abigail doesn’t even make fun of her pyjamas. She opens the door, wordlessly. Makes some tea, as Abigail plops on the rug on the floor, nuzzling Max.

She passes her a steaming cup of tea, sits in front of her in much the same manner.

“What happened?”

It takes Abigail a long time to reply, and when she does, she stumbles over words.

“I-I came out to my parents. Let’s say they didn’t take it too well. Sebastian lives with M-Maru so it didn’t feel like the smartest move, and Sam’s mother already has enough things to worry about. I had no-nowhere else to go.”

She shouldn’t be this surprised when the farmer leans closer, wrapping her arms around her, squeezing her close. Abigail reaches up her hands, tugs at the pyjama top and starts sobbing. There’s a large wet mark on the other woman’s shoulder when she is done, though she doesn’t seem to notice it as she’s running around her house, pulling out a rolled up mattress and building a make-shift bed in the middle of the room. She’s gentle as she moves Abigail to her bedroom, helps her in bed, petting at her hair, and chanting it’ll be okay over and over again.

Abigail’s already asleep when she moves to the kitchen, scrolling through her contacts list. It takes a few seconds before the person at the other end picks up, and Sebastian’s voice sounds muffled. She imagines him for a second, face half-hidden in his pillow, dishevelled hair. Then:

“It’s Abbie.”

The next day, Sam and Sebastian show up on her doorstep at 6am with chocolate cake, and they barely even greet her before moving inside, slamming open the door to the room where Abigail’s sleeping, essentially waking her up. But they also jump on the bed, squeezing themselves in the small space, peppering her face with kisses, even as she screams at them to stop, that they’re gross. But she’s laughing.

Over breakfast (eggs and salad and chocolate cake), they discuss what they should do next. There’s enough space here for two people, and it makes most sense to have Abigail live here for a while, until things calm down a bit.

“Did,” Abigail starts, unsure, playing with a tissue, “Maru tell your parents?”

“Yeah,” Sebastian says, and he feels like he really needs a smoke.

“I guess it went well.”

Abigail ends with a laugh that resounds dry and bitter in the room. Sam’s leaning towards her, holding her hand.

“Your parents will come around,” he says. “They just need to get over the initial shock.”

Except Abigail, everyone else nods. It’s hard to imagine Pierre staying mad at anyone, let alone his own daughter. But Pelican Town is a small enough place that such a thing might take a long time to forgive in the eyes of others. After the guys leave that first day, Abigail spends the entire day in bed. The next one, she joins her host for coffee, asks about the pumpkin patches.

When the Stardew Valley Fair rolls around, she helps the farmer fill Robin’s truck with her products. The older woman hugs Abigail that day like she’s a long-lost daughter, which makes her cry all over again.

 ***

The Fair itself is nice; the trees around had already started to turn orange, and it gives the place a really cosy atmosphere. Almost everyone in town buys something from her stall, and Marnie even comments that she fits right in. She enters Lewis’ competition with her pumpkins, but she loses to Shane’s chickens, which is a totally deserved win on his side, though she hates to admit.

Abigail makes up with her family that day, because the second she steps in town, her mother drops a crane of jars, swears, and runs up to her baby girl to hug the life out of her, cry and apologize. Pierre is sniffling at his stall, next to her – and she passes him her handkerchief.

Then, because Abigail is Abigail, she kisses Maru in front of everyone. George whistles, loudly and everyone laughs, which ends any discussion on the topic. With this scene, the farmer thinks she has just fallen a bit in love with the man herself.

Shane approaches her, to boast his win.

“Congrats,” she says, though she is pointedly not looking at the bow pinned to his chest. Jas has already been over, stopping everyone and showing it off.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says, and she’s glad the stall stands between them, because she knows he would have liked to be much closer than this.

“Glad you took the hint.”

“Is the freak gang that entertaining, little girl?”

There he goes again, with his horrible nicknames and that shit-eating grin. She hopes he’d choke on all the bullshit he’s spewing, some day.

“Yes.”

She sounds firm, serious and soft at the same time. There’s a small smile on her lips as well, and probably it’s that combination that makes Shane realize she’s entirely truthful. So, he laughs. For sure, he must find her stupid and foolish, and yet she only feels relieved as he watches him walk away, shaking his head like he’s disappointed.

As evening approaches, Sebastian stops by her stall. It’s almost empty now, most of her products sold earlier in the day. He sits next to her, smoking, looking at Sam winning the big prize at darts for Penny. She all but swoons.

Sebastian gets up, throwing his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it.

“Do you want to walk around?”

She nods, he helps her up. She asks Pierre to watch over the rest of her stuff, and when they move from stall to stall, her and Sebastian are so close that their shoulder almost touch, though none moves to put more space between them. She keeps stealing glances at him, as he explains to her about his favourite stalls, and how it used to look like back in his childhood.

They eat Gus’ famous burgers, and her heart almost stops beating when he leans closer, pressing a tissue to the corner of her mouth. He starts by looking her in the eye, but then her own eyes drop to the flutter of his eyelids, the curve of his nose, eventually settling on the plumpness of his lips – and his gaze follows suit, tracing the same path on her face. They sit in silence, staring at each other, until Gus’ boisterous laugh makes them both startle.

She mumbles her thanks, looking at her plate, too afraid to look at Sebastian.

They play darts too, though she only manages to hit the target only once, and only on its furthest ring.

“Sam rigged this game, didn’t he?” she asks, which makes him smile.

Sebastian pays for his turn, raises his eyebrows at her when she’s expectantly watching him. He throws the first dart while still looking at her, and it hits bull’s eye. She screams in delight, clapping her hands together.

He moves his hand to the back of his head, embarrassed at her reaction, even if he so desperately wanted it in the first place. He asks her if she wants any of the prizes, but she shakes her head. As cheesy as it might be, for her it’s enough that she can enjoy the fair, and that she can do it alongside him.

 ***

When she counts her savings the next day, it’s not as much as she would have liked. So she starts going to the mine again, because she can sell well everything that she finds in there, and for a couple of weeks, it works out just fine. Until it doesn’t anymore.

She knows the place is old, but the crack of the stair giving way under her weight was not an expected problem. The lurking animals and the unmapped areas, sure. But not the wooden step of the stairs.

It takes her by surprise, and she doesn’t have fast enough reflexes to find another footing, so she falls all the distance to the ground. She lands on her side, and there’s a terrible crack in the shoulder that makes getting up so, so painful afterwards. She’s bleeding heavily from one of her knees as well, and several bruises are already blooming on her legs and arms.

Her flashlight also went out on impact, so at first she is disoriented, her head booming with the sound of her fall. Then she gets scared, her heartbeat in her throat, and before she can even think more of her wounds, she forces herself to count up to 100, as slowly as she can, bringing her breathing back to normal, forcing her body to refuse the incoming panic attack just yet.

No one knows she’s in the mine right now, so technically even if they were to notice her disappearance, it will take a while until they find her. And it was already dark outside, judging from the last time she looked at her watch, which makes searching for her unsafe until at least tomorrow morning. She can’t just stay here and wait for someone to find her, even if that is all that she truly wants to do.

She winces when she finally raises to her feet. She’s unstable and everything hurts, but she’s most worried about her arm. She tried to pick up her discarded flashlight, but the movement hurt so much she left out an agonized wail.

Tears start biting at her eyes when she bumps into the stairs, after fumbling through the dark for it. She tries not to think of all the steps until the surface, and then her walk back home – and instead tries to take it one step at a time. She can support her weight only on one arm, and her legs hurt each time she raises them, the skin at her knee ripping open a bit more with each move of her leg up. She takes it one at a time, stops often to breathe deeply, give some part of her body some respite. She struggles even more when she finally gets to the broken stair, and she has to cover twice the distance.

When she eventually collapses on the ground at the entrance to the cave, she can smell the fresh night air, and she can hear the rustling of the leaves, and she starts crying. Somewhere down there, where the mine caved in, trapping workers under the stones and dirt and in unending hallways, is the body of her uncle. Of course, she could have easily shared the same fate today, if she would have been a bit higher, if she would have fallen on one of the sharp stones littering the lower floors instead.

She forces herself, again, to just breathe. But even as she makes herself stand up and walk the long way home, her mind is drifting further and further away, the pain now more dulled at the edge.

That’s why she doesn’t catches when someone calls out her name, doesn’t realize she’s not alone anymore until said person catches her arm to make her stop. Unfortunately, it is her hurt arm, and she shrieks, tears pooling at her eyes, as she’s stumbling away.

Sebastian stares at her, mouth agape, looking like he’s just seen a ghost. He moves his eyes over her body, taking in her state, though he’s unsure in some spots, if the stains on her clothes are blood or dirt.

“Shit, you need to see a doctor,” he says, moving closer again, but she flinches upon his approach.

He passes a frustrated hand through his hair. Dumbly, she wonders what he is doing out here, by the river, in the middle of the night.

“Can I touch you?” he asks. He’s still keeping his distance, though he’s looking at her in a strange way, like she’ll fall off her feet at any moment. Although she nods, this time more aware, more in tune with her surrounding, this time around he approaches more slowly, careful with his movements.

She leans onto him, sighing in relief.

“This will hurt,” he says, and before she has time to think about it, he gathers her in his arms, head at the crook of his neck, her good arm around his shoulder, as he starts carrying her. She just whimpers pathetically, at his chest, blushing furiously and trying not to overthink the gesture, or her weight, or the fact that they’re stopping in front of Harvey’s clinic at fuck knows what time.

Harvey answers on the second knock, looks at the state she’s in and simply mumbles I need my coffee, allowing them inside. Sebastian is still carrying her the flights of stairs up, before finally setting her down on a bed. He’s breathing hard by now, but he’s not complaining. In the light, she can see how wild and panicked his eyes are, how deep his frown is as he searches her body for wounds.

Now that they can see, her shoulder is at a weird angle.

“I’ll have to set it back,” Harvey says, sipping loudly from a fresh cup of coffee, sitting on a chair next to her bed. He looks up at Sebastian, checks the time on his wrist watch. “You can go if you want to.”

“I’ll stay,” he replies almost immediately, making her shiver on the bed, a movement that both men catch. “If that’s okay with you.”

She nods, pleading with Harvey to let him stay, to which he agrees. His job is not made any more difficult, since Sebastian looks perfectly healthy, the weird sleep schedule aside. She doesn’t notice when Sebastian moves, shifts so he can sit next to her on the bed, wrapping his fingers around hers.

Harvey descends like a shadow above her, snapping her bones back in place. She squeezes Sebastian’s hand in her good one, so hard that his bones crack, her fingers digging in his skin until they draw blood. But she only inhales sharply, letting out a string of soft curses, teeth grinding together in pain. When she looks at them, she feels only betrayed, because they both clearly knew what was to come, and did their best to make it as fast as possible.

Harvey hands her a glass of water and some painkillers, and only then does she realize she’s still holding onto Sebastian’s hand. She lets go slowly, smiling at him, patting his hand in silent thanks, though Sebastian cannot smile back at her.

“So what happened?” Harvey asks, moving on to cutting open the leg of her pants, cleaning up the cuts, disinfecting her wounds.

She speaks, evenly, though her panic shows through in some parts, and Sebastian rubs calming circles on her back with his palm. She leans into his touch, swaying in place, eyes fluttering closed, opening them again at a slower and slower pace.

“You should sleep here tonight, so I can monitor your condition,” Harvey says, and Sebastian rises, helping her lay down on the bed, covering her with the blanket, as she’s already fallen asleep.

The two men move downstairs in silence. The clock on the wall shows 4 a.m.

 ***

She wakes to Granny knitting on a chair next to her bed. It’s such an odd image that it takes her a while to recall all the events of the night before. Then, she startles upright.

“Easy, darling, all’s good,” Granny says, though she didn’t even look up at the younger woman.

She learns that Marnie visited her farm earlier, feeding her animals. Abigail took Max to her place, Penny came by with pie. And Sebastian is downstairs, on his 3rd coffee of the day, not having gone home since he first dropped her at the clinic.

Granny smiles to herself when the patient looks longingly at the door, her skin on fire.

 ***

Harvey keeps her for one more night, though she is feeling alright, and she insists so to everyone coming around to check on her. She thought Robin will pick her up, something that she agreed to after much pestering from the woman, but instead the one waiting for her in front of the clinic, leaning on Robin’s truck, is Sebastian.

“Mom had something come up,” he says, moving to get her backpack, filled with the stuff from the mine and some clothes that Abigail picked for her. He opens the truck’s door for her.

“I could have just walked,” she says, though her leg is still stiff.

He shuts the door on her, and until he joins her in, she has time to mull over what exactly she wants to say.

“Thank you,” she beings. “For everything and I’m sorry.”

She fidgets on the spot, as he starts the engine and begins driving.

“Why are you apologizing?” his voice is soft, the corner of his mouth tilted up just the tiniest bit.

“For all the trouble?”

It sounds more like a question,

“You know I’d gladly be troubled for you.”

She does not know that, in fact. She turns to look out the window, at the stretch of trees on the road to her farm, and she wonders when she became such a person to others.

When they arrive, she invites him in, but he politely refuses. She needs to rest. But he does walk back to the car, fiddling with the gloves compartment, coming back with something in his arms. He presents it to her, carefully wrapped, and watches attentively as she opens it, catching her reaction.

In her hands, she has the first volume of what she knows is Sebastian’s favourite comic.

Abigail will tell her, later on, that before he came to pick her up, he drove all the way to Zuzu City so he could pick a copy for her. So on an autumn rainy day, she makes herself a cup of tea, and curls in her bed, opening the book.

She takes her sweet time, searching every detail in the art, rewriting particular quotes in her journal. Then her thoughts fly without her even wanting to, to a particular someone she’d like to have next to her, to explain her favourite parts. She’d like to have him by her side more than that though, as she wakes and works, a person that makes it so much easier for her to just be.

She’s a fool – she tries to tell herself, hugging the book close to her chest. There’s nothing she can offer Sebastian that would make him stay in this village he so obviously loathes. She’s just dumb enough to have fallen for the man she cannot even bring herself to ask to love her back. But the image is now stuck on a loop in her mind: stray sun rays filtering through the curtain, and Sebastian in the door frame, with her mug of coffee in his hands, offering it to her as she wakes.

She tortures herself with thoughts like this afterwards, whenever she finds a moment of respite in her work, as she hurries to sell the last of her crops, to preserve the mushrooms, fill the sill with grains for the animals and the storage outside with wood.

 ***

The first time she gets out of her property after the accident is to attend a dinner on Robin’s birthday. In the town here, it’s not a big deal, so she feels particularly honoured to have the older woman invite her.

However, Robin sends Sebastian to pick her up. She’s on the porch, bundled up in her favourite sweater and a shawl, petting Max, when he pulls up in her courtyard on his motorcycle. He’s wearing a leather jacket, and as he moves to get her helmet, she’s only staring at the way his muscles are straining under the material.

He helps her put it on, clasping it under her chin, his fingers lingering on her skin, and they stare in each other’s eyes for a few long seconds. Then, he holds out a hand, helping her get up, and guides her arms around his waist.

She’s basically glued to his back, and she wonders if he can hear how loudly her heart is beating. He tightens his hold against her arms, signalling that she should hold on tighter, and she does, even though she closes her eyes to will the embarrassment away.

Robin welcomes her with an enthusiastic hug, and she’s delighted to see Abigail has been invited as well, and she’s now sitting next to Maru at the table, discussing something with Demetrius. She’s sent her present in the mail earlier this day, more goat cheese and a few quartz pieces, and the redhead thanks her happily.

When she passes Sebastian on the hallway, she stops for a few seconds to thank him for the ride, warmly clasping his hand in hers. Then just as quickly she lets go, joins everyone else in the kitchen.

Most of the conversation is just the parents dotting on the newly formed couple, though there is a passing comment of the pumpkin soup currently served being Sebastian’s favourite food, so she makes a note to ask the recipe from Robin the next day. There’s an anecdote about how Demetrius and Robin first met, though it makes both their children cringe at how young and lovesick they still sound recalling it. Abigail talks about her studies, Maru continues, though their degrees are vastly different.

The farmer turns to look at Sebastian.

“What about your work?”

The conversation stills, a bit awkward. No one ever asks what Sebastian is doing, since freelancing is such a grey area in their mind – though they fail to see that almost everyone in this town is the goddamn owner of their own work.

“Well,” he starts, playing with the food on his plate. “Actually I’ve got a promotion recently and a really big project coming up.”

She clasps her hands together, beaming up at him.

“That’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

Everyone at the table nods politely, Robin even congratulation her son. But he thinks of her question, and lately the answer seems to be no, because each of his successes brings him closer to leaving Pelican Town, and he’s not sure he wants to anymore.

 ***

By the end of the evening, everyone is more or less tipsy, made soft by the drink and the warmth of the house. Robin insists that she should sleep over, afraid to let her return home this late. She almost puts Sebastian and Maru in one room, but the daughter refuses so vehemently, that Sebastian instead just tells her he’ll take the couch. Their mother stares for a long time after both of her children, as each turns to their guest, and instead decides to retire for the night, together with Demetrius.

That’s how she ends up sitting on Sebastian’s bed, as he’s searching for a towel and some clothes for her.

“Maru is leaving next spring for a research program,” he explains. “That’s why-”

“She wants to make the most out of it,” she continues.

“Yeah.”

He understands the feeling; it’s why he’s more often than not out of his house these days, afraid that one day he’ll have to root himself out of this place, and he will leave many things behind to regret. And many people he will miss.

He throws the clothes in her direction, points her to the direction of the bathroom.

She’s feeling more awake after the shower, and she’s drying her hair with a towel as she enters his room again. She wears one of his hoodies, but on her it looks almost like a dress, coming down halfway to her knees, sleeves rolled several times over. The sweatpants are equally as large.

“I like your socks,” she says, wiggling her toes, an ugly, green gooey face dancing with the movement.

She’s way too freakin cute, Sebastian thinks, though he only smiles at her as he passes her to go and take a shower. When he returns, she’s snuggled in his bed, a comic book in hands, the sequel to the present he’s given her before. She doesn’t hear him come in until he plops on the couch, and then she looks up at him, cheeks immediately flushing.

“Aren’t you cold?”

He’s wearing a tank top, loose enough around the chest area that she can see his collarbones. She knows she’s staring, yet she can’t tear her eyes away from the skin of his arms, or the taut stretch of his top against his chest. When eventually, finally, she moves her gaze up to his face, he’s smirking, clearly having caught her in the act.

“I never get cold,” he replies, shrugging, though he tenses the muscles on his arm, and her gaze immediately snaps back there.

He’s outright laughing right now, which makes her turn her back to him, pulling the blanket over her entire body and mumble an embarrassed good night.

But she has a very, very hard time falling asleep.

 ***

“I don’t wanna go,” she whines at Sam, pulling at his clothes, dragging him away from the maze.

He just laughs, tugging her harder instead. His little brother scared her as soon as she arrived for Spirit’s Eve, and since then she refused to leave his side, on edge all the time.

The town is decorated in skulls and supersized spiders, and Abigail took to walking around with a witch hat on and a sword in her hands, which everyone agreed was cool but also relatively worrisome.

She swears, loudly, clinging even closer to Sam’s arm, when Sebastian joins them, carrying two glasses of punch. He chuckles, but still passes one of them to her.

“You don’t celebrate Spirit’s Eve in the city?”

“Well,” she says, taking a large gulp of her drink. “There it’s more about getting shit-faced in a club, and less about your heart going for a run when you turn the corner of the street.”

“Amen, sister,” Sam yells, grabbing her glass and downing it all in one go.

“Hey!” She punches his shoulder.

“It made you laugh though!” he says, leaving so he can get her a refill, and well, he’s not wrong, because now she feels way more at ease than before.

Sebastian shifts closer to her, for which she is grateful.

“Is it really that bad?”

“I just hate jump scares,” she whines, again. “And I’m sure the maze is filled with them.”

“You know you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, right? We can just sit on a bench and watch the skeletons.”

“We?”

He’s pressing his palm to his neck. “Well I’ve cleared the maze every year, so.”

So they sit, together.

 ***

Back in the city, she can never tell when it will snow anyway – but here in town, the air is crisp and cold for days before. Robin shows up one early winter morning, and helps her isolate the house as much as possible, around the windows and the doors, so that no cold seeps in, so that all the warmth stays. She might need to renovate the house next year, but for now, it will have to be enough.

Robin sips at the coffee she’s been offered, and pretends not to see Sebastian’s books sprawled all around the farmer’s house, on the kitchen counter, on the bed, next to the TV. She also equally doesn’t comment on one of Sebastian’s jackets hanging on the back of the chair that the young girl is currently occupying. Robin takes another sip, and smiles in her cup.

Back in the city, when it snows, it never piles; part car fumes, part all the people walking around doing their business. But here in the town, when she wakes up one morning, all she can see around her house is a wide expanse of whiteness. Max runs past her, jumps into the snow, comes back in so wet but so happy, that she doesn’t mind having to towel him near the fire from the fireplace.

But she’s left with too much time on her hands; she watches Queen of Sauce almost obsessively, following along in her own kitchen, surprised when her food is actually good. She starts knitting, phoning Granny each time she stumbles through a row. She reads, almost obsessively. And she does go to the mines, but for shorter periods now, scared of not repeating her injury, even if the Adventurer’s Guild repaired the broken stairs.

Then Sam calls her over one day and welcomes her to the world of DnD, him and Sebastian more or less forcing everyone else to start a new campaign with them. It’s the happiest she’s seen them both, so she tries to keep up with the characters, stops to ask about plot holes. They explain things in tandem, finishing each other’s sentences, for almost an entire hour, because you see, this race can’t have this magical power. Sam pulls out his guide, passing it around so that everyone can look up the kind of character they want to create.

That first evening together, that’s all they do in fact: filling stat sheets, searching reference pictures on the internet. And they eat Jodi’s delicious snacks, gossip a bit about Marnie and mayor Lewis’ affair, that the whole town knows about but somehow only the two of them missed this detail.

They turn it into a weekly meeting, rotating their meeting place through all their houses, sometimes the Stardrop Saloon in the days when they know it’ll be more empty and calm. They fight imaginary battles, Sam’s voice guiding them through cities and enemies and friends, saving each other’s asses and forging alliances. It’s the best fun she’s had since arriving in the town, though if anyone were to tell her this a year ago, she would have laughed directly into their faces.

They break the tradition only once, when instead they decide to go ice-skating. Each winter, if the temperatures are low enough, the lake freezes, making it a perfect rink. To be fair, it’s her favourite sport – probably only sport that she’s so excited to do, that she jumps on the spot as she waits for her turn to lend a pair of skates.

She’s looking a bit ridiculous, wearing 3 different layers and one of her grandpa’s padded vests, a beanie on top of her head. Sebastian finds her just really cute. She skates around holding one of Maru’s hands, Abigail the other – because she’s the only one who doesn’t really know how to do it.

Then Sam starts a game of tag with Jas. So they start chasing each other around, yelling when they’re caught only to start again. Penny almost trips, but Sam’s catches her hand and stabilizes her, even if he’s it now. Abigail and Maru skate around holding hands, working more like one person than two separate ones, though Abigail lets go only when it’s her turn to chase someone; and she’s fast as a flash, her turn over in under a minute.

She touches the farmer’s back, and she’s left in the middle of the frozen lake, trying to think who to go after. Her intention is to go after Vincent, his voice shrill with happiness when he realizes he has to run away from her, but her skates catch in the ice.

She only has time to gasp out a swearword, preparing to fall flat on her face. But there’s an arm around her waist, though the angle is awkward and her weight too heavy, so both of them fall to the ground.

She blinks, trying to make sense of the new position. She didn’t hit the cold ice, instead Sebastian’s body cushioned her fall. She’s on top of him, hands on either side of his head, and she’s staring into his eyes. She’s so close that she can feel his chest heaving.

“You good?” he asks, a hand moving to settle around her waist.

It snaps her out of it. “Shit, I’m the one who should be asking that.”

She’s trying to get up, though she’s embarrassed and fumbling, and her first movement just positions her ass on Sebastian’s thighs and crotch area. He shudders, inhaling loudly – and she can feel him stir under her.

“Oh,” is all that she can say, eyes blown wide catching his. Though there’s something more there: curiosity, and a growing interest.

“You guys okay?!” Sam’s voice is distant to her ears, though she waves a hand in the air, to both show that they’re okay and ask for a break from their game. Sebastian says nothing, looking up at her like a man found guilty of murder, face flushed, though he hasn’t moved his hand from her waist.

She grinds her hips, pushing harder against Sebastian’s body, watching in fascination as he’s squeezing his eyes shut, a frown on his forehead.

“Stop,” he says, sounding wound up and chocked.

So she does, rolling from on top of him, pulling herself to her feet, smiling when offering him a hand up. Though he’s not smiling back, he takes her hand.

***

“Happy birthday!” she shouts, when Sebastian opens the door to his bedroom, holding up her present to him.

Behind him, music plays loudly, and she can see Sam and Abigail arguing about who gets the last slice of pizza. She’s the last to arrive, but that’s also partially because outside there’s a real blizzard. Penny comes to hug her in greeting, and she high-fives Sam. Most of the time, they just drink and joke around, chatting about random things, his oldest friends telling tales of Sebastian.

After a couple of hours, Sebastian catches her eyes, motions towards the outside. Sam has given up smoking, being more of a social smoker, just like her. But since he got together with Penny, a fact to which they finally admitted after merciless teasing from Abigail, he quit.

They stop in the hallway, putting on their coats – and she hands him the present again, though he hasn’t noticed her coming up with it.

“You might find useful what’s in here.”

So he opens it to find a matching hat and scarf, in a dark navy. They’re clearly handmade, and handmade by her he suspects – and he’s touched by the time and care she had to put in her gift. Nestled between the material, there’s also a frozen tear.

“God, I-I love this. Thank you.”

She beams at him, obviously relieved. He puts the frozen tear carefully in the pocket of his jacket. She helps him with the scarf and the beanie, her hands lingering on his shoulder for a second afterwards, admiring him.

Outside, in the courtyard corner where they’re smoking, there’s a snowman. Sebastian almost feels like kicking it when she mentions in passing that it’s cute.

“I built a snowgoon but Demetrius made me get rid of it, yet Maru’s cute little snowman still stands…”

He didn’t mean to sound this bitter. She shifts, coming in closer, taking his empty hand in hers.

“If I just disappeared, would it even matter?”

He means it like a rhetorical question, just for himself – but she’s strengthening her grip on him, forcing him to look at her. She wants him to understand that she’s entirely serious.

“It would matter to me.”

 ***

It’s drizzling, a mix of snow and rain, weather suddenly warming up. On the beach, anyway, snow never piles up, and when Sebastian turns around, he finds her standing a few feet away, staring out into the sea. She is drenched, shivering lightly with each gust of wind, and now that her concentration has been snapped by his movement, she’s staring at him instead.

He gestures her closer, and she stops by his side. Now, closer, he can see that she’s shivering more violently than he initially though, and she’s certainly not dressed properly for the weather.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks, softly, pushing some of her hair behind her ear. She closes her eyes, head leaning toward his touch, and he finds himself cupping her cheek without thinking too much about it.

“What are you doing out here?” she counters, blinking up at him.

Maybe it’s the absolutely pathetic state that both of them are into that makes him answer honestly to the question. Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s her.

“Looking out at the bleak horizon… It makes me feel like it’s worthwhile to keep pushing on.”

He shrugs, trying not to look as serious as his statement. Lately, he’s been having more reasons to believe that same thing, but old habits die hard, and there’s a particular calmness in being somewhere where no one else is. Or, he thinks, looking down at her, almost no one.

“I just like the sea,” she says, and any awkwardness that he still felt dissipates with her admission. The water is raging, stirred on by the storm, crashing violently against the pier, and they stand in silence, his hands carefully petting her hair, pulling her closer when she shivers again.

“Fuck, do you want to catch your death?”

He undresses quickly, placing his jacket over her shoulders. It doesn’t make much of a difference, but it’s more waterproof than what she’s wearing, and also carrying his warmth. He pops open the umbrella he’s carrying, and with an arm around her shoulder, pulls her to his chest.

“You know,” he starts, his palm rubbing circles on her back. “I would normally feel anxious doing this with anyone. But somehow, you’re the exception.”

Her head turns, chin resting on his chest so she can look up at him.

“I want to kiss you,” she says, and Sebastian chokes on whatever he wanted to say before. “Can I?”

She’s on her tiptoes now, her lips so close to his that their breathes are mingling, yet she’s giving him the choice of covering the remaining distance. Which he does, hungrily, almost desperate for it, both hands cupping her cheeks as their mouths clash. The umbrella falls into the water, and yet they don’t care enough to notice it.

They stop for a moment, coming up for air, and then they’re back at it, and despite the fire growing at the pit of her stomach, the kiss is languid, exploring, tongue pressing against tongue. Slight movement, a change in their position to deepen the kiss, her fingers now playing in the hair at the nape of his neck, his hands at her waist.

He kisses her like he never kissed somebody else, and went hungry for it all this time. His fingers move under her sweater, and the sudden cold touch makes her break apart. His touch turns comforting, pressing against her skin, and she sighs. Their foreheads meet.

“Fuck, I wanted to do that for so long,” he breathes and she laughs.

“We are two idiots, right?”

“Big idiots,” he nods, and she takes his hand in hers, starts pulling him in the direction of her house.

 ***

She starts the fire in the house, as he’s slowly undressing layer after layer. In the bathroom, the bathtub is filled with hot water, waiting for him. He’s down to a t-shirt and his boxers when he cups her elbow in his hand.

“Join me?” he asks, voice a bit strained, but firm.

She can only nod, dazed, not trusting that this is not just a dream, afraid that speaking will ruin the moment. He sits down on the edge of the tub, gesturing for her to come closer. She’s standing in front of him, and he’s gentle in guiding her out of her clothes, letting them drop to the floor. He strays from his purpose sometime, to press a kiss against her hip, or at the tip of her fingertips.

When she eventually ends up stark naked, his eyes are hungry, but his touch not, as he guides her inside the hot tub. She sighs in pleasure, closing her eyes. She opens them again when she hears the rustling of clothes, to watch him undress. He’s a bit slow, a bit shy, joining her inside the tub. The water almost spills over. She tries not to think of his cock, the precum leaking. She tries to ignore the uncomfortable heat growing between her legs.

She helps him shampoo his hair, he washes her back. They go off track from time to time, kissing lazingly for a long time, his hands massaging her breasts, her teeth grazing his neck. Until she moans, a loud sound. Until he gasps, her name caught between his lips.

Then, with ease, he helps her out. They share one, large towel, huddling together until they reach her bedroom, giggling like children. They’re almost to the bed when he stops, looks at her.

“We don’t have to do anything.”

He’s a liar, because his cock is pulsing with want and she can feel him against her hip. She pouts.

“But I want you.”

He kisses her pout away, pushes at her shoulder until she falls to the bed with a yelp, hands wrapping against him, taking him down with her. She’s laughing, pleased with having him on top of her, when his mouth moves downwards on her body, kissing against her collarbones, sucking at the skin, biting at the skin, until there’s a dark mark behind. He throws her a pleased grin, moving lower yet again.

Sebastian takes one of her nipples in his mouth, a hand moving up to tease the other. Her hands immediately wrap in his hair and she gasps. He pulls at the sensitive area, with his teeth and his fingers, licking it better immediately afterwards, and she writhes under him. He kisses his path downwards, though his lips kiss at her hips, he bites at her thighs, always circling around where she most wants him.

“Seb,” she whines. “Please.”

He stops his ministrations to look at her, frowning and pouting, hair dishevelled against her pillows, her body flushed all over, his marks so obvious against her skin. He feels himself growing at the sight, though he smirks at her.

“Please what?”

She blushes.

“Please eat me out?”

It sounds like a plead and a question and a prayer and a command all at once, and he’s on her in the blink of an eye, tongue lapping at her folds. Her back arches, but his hands are keeping her in place – and he maintains a constant, slow rhythm.

Until he doesn’t, one of his fingers entering her in full, with ease. Sebastian chuckles.

“You’re so wet, baby.”

Her walls squeeze at the nickname. He adds another finger; watches, transfixed, as it disappears inside with the same ease. He starts pumping them inside her, and the sound of her wet pussy taking it all in is so hot, that he groans.

Buried down in her to the knuckles, he opens his fingers apart. She moans, pushing down, searching for more, more, more. He scissors her, spreading her wide – and his head moves lower yet again, lips kissing against her clit at first.

Then, he adds a third finger. He can feel her stiffen under him, so he pulls her clit in his mouth, rolling his tongue around it, just as he starts pumping his fingers inside her. Now her hands are holding on to her sheets, and she’s mumbling some curses, halfway lost to her pleasure, moans louder and louder as he speeds up.

He raises his head just for a second, to chuckle against her heated pussy.

“Come, baby.”

So she does, and he continue pumping inside of her, letting her ride her orgasm. She still sighs when he pulls out his fingers, immediately missing the feeling of being filled up with him. He moves to pepper her face with kisses, petting at her now sweated forehead.

“You did so well, baby.”

He’s teasing her, knowing how much she likes the nickname. So instead she looks down between their bodies, his cock against his navel, leaking – and looking like the most beautiful dick she has ever seen in her life. It’s not the biggest one she’s seen, but he’s thick and she’s never wanted to taste something more than the cum that’d spill out of it.

Still staring, she moves her hands to grab it, her fingers dancing over it, starting with his leaking tip, spreading his precum all over his length, before stopping with a slight squeeze at its base. Sebastian shivers over her, eyes closed, mouth open in an unspoken prayer, because he’s not sure even god can help him now.

Holding his dick in her hands, she helps him adjust at her entrance. At first, he teases against her cunt, pressing his cock between her folds, rocking his hips back and forth as they both moan in tandem. She’s already dripping over the sheets again.

He grabs at her hand, fingers entwined.

“You ready?”

“For that dick? Born ready,” she says, chuckling, but not moving her eyes away from where he’s starting to push inside her.

“Fuuck,” he says, just as she moans, only the tip in. The stretch is painful, but so fucking delicious and she’s a blabbering mess begging for more, pulling him closer with her free arm. He slams inside her, forcing the rest of his length inside in one go, and she swears. He kisses at her eyebrows, at the tip of her nose, apologizing softly.

“Tell me when to move again,” he says, and true to his words, he seems content to just kiss her, tongue at her neck, words whispered and lost in her hair, but making her shiver nonetheless just because there’s the hot breath so close to her skin. She’s trying to adjust to his entirety of him inside her, not hurtful but not entirely comfortable just yet either, and his mouth now licking at her hypersensitive nipple seems to slowly do the trick.

“Move,” she says, and he does.

He’s slow at first, almost frustratingly so, pulling out almost entirely, before slowly filling her up again. She moans, drawn out sounds, with each movement – and she almost doesn’t notice when the speed picks up, when she starts moving her hips to meet his actions. They’re a mess of grunts and moans, gasps and swears – and he squeezes so hard at her hip when she comes again, the orgasm washing over her with an intensity that it’s almost blinding, that she’s sure he’ll leave bruises.

Sebastian looks like a man in pain, inside her as she’s coming back to herself after the orgasm. She kisses his cheek, hands rubbing against his chest muscles.

“Do you want to cum all over me?”

He almost trips with the haste that he’s pulling out of her. She’s waiting, on her back, tongue lolling out of her mouth. Sebastian rises on his knees – it’s embarrassing that he only needs two more pumps to come. Most of it falls on her tits and neck, though she’s happily licking every bit that she can reach with her tongue, swallowing it all like a good girl.

“Fuck,” Sebastian says, falling next to her on the bed. “You’re so fucking sexy.”

She beams at him, getting closer. They kiss for a while, bored and tired and messy, teeth clanking together, tongue at the corner of the mouth. There’s a string of saliva between their lips when they separate.

She gets up, goes to the toilet, returns all cleaned up, before coming back to the warmth of the bed, dragging the covers over both of them. Sure, the sheets are dirty, but that’s a problem for her future self, because right now, all she wants to do is snuggle at Sebastian’s back, an arm draped over his waist. So that’s what she does.

 ***

When they wake, they fuck on the kitchen counter, the angle hitting her just right. Truthfully, half of her butt is in the air, her legs wrapped around Sebastian’s torso, as he snaps his hips up in her, deeper and deeper each time. She’s never been so glad she doesn’t have neighbours in her entire life. Maybe because it’s been so long on her part, or because Sebastian is really just that good, she’s loud – and she loves to feel him stirring inside her, with each of her moans and praises.

“So good,” she gasps, fingers digging almost painfully in his back, and he proves his point by ramming into her, ripping a sob of pleasure out of her.

He’s wearing a condom this time around, so there is no mess to clean up, and they drink their coffee afterwards – talking about this and that, not even skimming the topic of what they’re doing, or why.

He kisses her goodbye though.

And on Winter Star, while she’s getting ready for the feast with everyone else, Sebastian comes by. He welcomes him warmly, and he sits on the side of her bed, watching her finish her make-up and doing her hair, and though he doesn’t move, she keeps catching his eyes in the mirror, looking at her every movement hungrily.

“We’re not fucking after all this effort I just put in,” she says, pointedly plucking her lips and applying a bright, red lipstick.

“I want to take you out on a date,” he says, ignoring her childish theatrics, but shaking his head with a soft smile.

“Sure.”

She tries to sound nonchalant, but her heart is beating in her chest. As much as she’d like to have him bend her over the table and take her like a bitch in heat, she’d much prefer him being her boyfriend while he does so.

“Good, let’s go then.”

“Now?” she yelps, when he grabs her hand and walks her towards the entrance.

“Now,” he says. He helps her putting on her beret, she straightens the scarf around his neck. “I’ve already called Sam and told him we won’t make it to the feast.”

“You did? What did he say?”

“To have condoms on me,” Sebastian says, face serious, which is why it makes her snort.

“And?” she’s wiggling her eyebrows at him. “Do you?”

He slaps her butt as she’s getting out instead of a reply. She turns at him, the slightest darkness in her eyes.

They go for a ride, promise not forgotten. They drive for a long time, and when they finally reach their destination, he tells her to keep her eyes closed, keeps his palms against her eyes as he guides her steps.

When he moves his hands away, she gasps. Spread ahead of her, the lights of Zuzu City against the usual darkness of the night. Sebastian moves next to her, grabs her hand in his.

“I come here when I want to get away from everything and just… think.”

He’s been doing this a lot lately, ever since she came to the valley, became his friend. Torn between his dreams of the city and the familiarity of home, he came here often thinking about what he should do.

He’s fumbling with his cigarettes, before eventually lightning one. Leaning against his motorcycle, she’s still looking out at the landscape in front of them.

“It gives such a strange, sad feeling…”

She’s almost saying it to herself. She doesn’t understand why he is showing this to her, and she can only think of how much he wants to be a part of those lights shining in the distance. She knows, if he is to walk that path, there’s nothing she will do to stop him.

Sebastian gets close to her, slings an arm around her shoulder. His gaze is still fixed to the city out in the distance, but when he speaks, it’s all just for her.

“The city used to draw me in… but now I’m finding myself happier at home in the valley.”

Her head snaps up so fast that it almost hurts. She doesn’t trust herself to say anything, afraid she’s overstepping, afraid she actually misunderstands whatever is going on, afraid to hope too much.

He turns to her, knuckles slowly caressing her cheek.

“You’re the only one I ever brought to this place. You know what I’m trying to say, don’t you?”

She shakes her head; wants to hear it. He leans down, pulling her close with his other arm, covering her sound of surprise with his mouth, kissing her. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to his kisses; he’s a passionate but patient kisser, drawing out the movements for as long as possible, biting and licking at her lips, smiling smugly and lazily at her when he is done.

“I want us to be together. For real.”

She jumps in his arms, the move making him stumble a bit, but they’re not falling. She looks in his eyes, the gaze as touching and passionate as it’s ever been.

“I love you, Sebastian.”

“Wha-”

But she kisses him.

 *** 

She’s obsessed with saying those three words. Now that she has the right to say it, it blooms out of her at his every gesture. She says it out loud without embarrassment or care as to whoever else can hear it. She says it as good morning and as good bye. She says it when he stays the night, and when he asks her over to play a new game together. She says it in front of Maru and mayor Lewis. She says it when he comes inside of her. She says it when he lets her borrow his sweater. She says it when he calls her in the evening after work.

It makes him dizzy with how wanted she makes him feel.

It’s the middle of the night and they’re waiting, alongside everyone else from the city, for the clock to strike exactly 12, and the fireworks to blast into the sky. She’s holding onto his arm, chatting happily with Sam about a cover song they’re planning. Her weight, next to him, is something new to get used to – but she’s always fitting herself right there with so much ease, that it seems almost natural.

The countdown begins, mayor Lewis’ voice booming across the square. At 8, she joins in. At 3, he does too. The fireworks blast with a loud noise, and she squeezes herself closer to him, her eyes to the colouring sky, her lips to his ear.

“Make a wish, babe.”

She closes her eyes, thinking of everything she wants in the upcoming year. He looks at her.

“So, what did you wish for?” he asks.

She tugs at his jacket, kisses him.

“You.”