#note: things to write on my gravestone

[kururreal]

“textbook definition of unhealthy relationships and codependence, the sinner needs the saint like one needs air to breathe.”

𖢷 ۪ ࣪ ﹙☆﹚ ࣪ ִ HEADCANONS ‹3

synopsis: you’re a new villain in to town. your villain motivations? to make the world lazier. “Hardworking people deserve a break too!” you said when you decided to be a villain.

notes: when you have a banger idea but you’re too shy to request it so you decided to lock in and write it yourself

BRUCE WAYNE / BATMAN :

You, the villain, are unassuming, quiet, playful, and not at all threatening in the traditional sense.

Your ideology?

“Hardworking people deserve rest too.”

That’s it. That’s the threat. That’s the infection.

You're not inciting a rebellion. You’re not taking over Gotham.

You're breaking the tempo.

And Bruce, who has survived purely because of his rhythm, his need to act, to control, to do, doesn’t even know why you bother him so much.

You don’t interrupt his work.

You exist beside it.

And that’s worse.

He doesn’t stalk you.

He doesn’t collect data.

He doesn’t care about you as a person.

What he does is this:

Every time you do something visible, Bruce makes himself forget it.

He catalogs the moment. names, actions, timestamp, visuals.. and then buries it in the Batcomputer under a false keyword, as if tucking away a dead language no one speaks.

Why?

Because something in him knows that if he integrates you, your ideas will change him.

And he cannot change.

So instead, he creates a personal information void around you.

He’s aware of you, sure. But vaguely. He reduces you to fog.

He sees the effects of your actions. lower hospitalizations, spontaneous street naps, people smiling on buses, and each time, instead of analyzing it, he tells himself:

“I must have missed something. That can’t be related.”

You’re a file he deliberately misfiles every single time.

He doesn’t think you’re evil.

He doesn’t even think you’re dangerous.

What you are to him is nonfunctional.

You don’t fit in the machine of Gotham, and yet, you don’t break it either.

That’s what bothers him.

You’re like a light in the Cave that flickers at random. Not bright. Not broken. Just irregular.

And Bruce can’t abide irregularity.

You don’t behave like a threat.

You behave like something Gotham didn’t ask for, didn’t want, but didn’t reject.

And so in his mind, you become a corrupted file.

He won’t delete you.

But he won’t access you either.

He won’t say your name out loud.

He won’t acknowledge your philosophy as real.

He will let you float in a corner of his mind like a half-erased name on a gravestone.

not possession, not violence, not protection.

It’s refusal.

You become the one thing he cannot categorize, assimilate, or dominate. and so his mind begins to loop, stall, fracture around you like code that can’t compile.

He doesn’t shift the world around you.

He shifts his perception of the world so it doesn’t include you.

And that is how he obsesses.

He spends energy every day not thinking about you.

He spends time burying every sign of your ideology beneath noise.

He sees the results of your actions and thinks, “That must be someone else.”

You have become a ghost in his operating system.

And no matter how much he pretends otherwise, he leaves a space for you in the back of his mind. a blank, untouched memory folder that he checks and forgets and checks again.

Over and over.

“Must’ve been the wind” aahhh 🥀🥀

Batman’s brand of platonic yandere here is based not on holding you close, but on keeping you mentally un-formed. The obsession lives in how hard he works to push you out of the framework of his reality, and how much space that act starts to take up inside him.

Think:

“If I look at this thing directly, I might change in a way I can’t reverse. So instead, I’ll trap it in the periphery of my mind and patrol that space every night like a prison guard.”

He’s not protecting you. He’s protecting himself from what knowing you would do to him.

And that’s what makes it yandere. because the compulsion wins anyway.

You become a phantom entry in every report.

He avoids naming you, but you’re in every system, just buried, twisted, refracted.

He avoids thinking of your ideology, but it echoes in his decisions.

He avoids, avoids, avoids! but builds a structure of constant micro-management around the avoidance.

Which is obsession.

When he feels anything about you, he instinctively redirects it.

He feels intrigued → labels it “threat curiosity.”

He feels admiration → labels it “disinformation alert.”

He feels challenged → labels it “cognitive tension.”

He feels something like envy → shuts the thought down completely.

He has trained himself to treat emotion like misinformation.

So anything that comes from you is automatically re-routed into threat analysis, system hygiene, containment strategy. no matter how unrelated.

But the mental effort to keep doing that, day after day?

It’s a mental shrine he doesn’t realize he’s kneeling at.

On paper, he doesn’t care.

In his mind, he’s neutral. Unmoved. Not curious.

But the reality?

He’s built an entire moral firewall around you.

He won’t speak about you aloud.

He won’t let others mention you. (Someone brings you up once. Bruce doesn’t look at them and says “Irrelevant.” Conversation ends.)

He doesn’t allow you to become a symbol, but doesn’t allow you to disappear either.

He refuses to define your motivations. but never stops cataloguing them.

He convinces himself you’re just another anomaly.

But he checks for your presence like people check for ghosts. subtly, religiously, never admitting they believe.

He is obsessed in the most existential way.

Not because he wants to own you.

Not because he wants to protect you.

But because you are the only thing he cannot assimilate into his mental universe, and instead of confronting that?

He builds an invisible mausoleum to you in his psyche.

And guards it.

For years.

He isn’t trying to break you or save you. He’s trying to neutralize your presence in his mental ecosystem… and failing.

And because he fails, he’s doomed to orbit you in silence, forever maintaining a structure whose entire purpose is to pretend you aren’t there.

And that’s obsession. That’s love twisted beyond recognition. That’s yandere.

He has built you a throne by refusing to look at it.

Forget usual tropes for a sec. Strip it to its bones.

At its deepest level, yandere means: an overwhelming, irrational fixation on a person

That fixation overrides normal logic or self-control. the individual builds their world around the target. emotionally, physically, mentally. often, the fixation is masked under something else: love, logic, concern, etc.

Yandere doesn’t have to mean “I’ll kill for you” or “You’re mine.”

It just has to mean:

“You exist inside my head constantly and I cannot, will not, let you go. even if I pretend I already have.”

Instead of confronting how you disturb his inner world, Batman builds a system of false neutrality to protect himself from what you represent.

That system is a mental fortress he has to: Maintain daily, monitor constantly, patch every time you appear in the news, a file, a video feed

That’s not analysis.

That’s ritual.

He isn’t simply keeping tabs on you.

He is spending psychic energy to remove you from reality, over and over, because even acknowledging your presence honestly risks destabilizing the framework of who he is.

That’s obsession.

your ideology, your message, “hardworking people deserve rest too”, haunts him.

Why?

Because it presents a world that could have existed if he hadn’t become Batman.

A world without brutal endurance.

A world where people don’t have to suffer to be good.

A world that would have told a young Bruce Wayne: “You can stop now. You don’t have to carry all of this alone.”

That phantom world becomes his obsession.

You’re just the vessel… or avatar of it.

So he locks you, and that world, in a cold vault in his brain labeled “Irrelevant.”

And yet he checks that vault every night.

That’s not indifference. that’s yandere.

MOST yandere want to control the person directly.

Bruce wants to control his mental exposure to you.

He designs internal systems to minimize your impact.

He flags your files as “non-priority” even when he knows they’re not.

He gaslights his own mind, mentally replacing your name with a symbol or error code.

This isn’t disinterest. This is meticulous anti-engagement.

You don’t get this level of anti-contact unless someone is emotionally overwhelmed and trying to stabilize.

So instead of controlling you, he controls the narrative of you in his mind.

Every day.

Without fail.

And that is a form of possession.

Yandere fixation often comes down to one thing: “Even if this hurts me, I will not stop.”

And that is exactly what Bruce is doing.

This elaborate denial system drains him.

He loses time trying to overwrite mentions of you.

He fails to adapt to shifting public reaction because he won’t acknowledge it.

He’s sleep-deprived and short with the Batfamily because your ideology is spreading, and he doesn’t have a plan that doesn’t require acknowledging it.

He could simplify his life by just confronting it.

But he won’t.

Because once he lets you in, even a little, he has to ask: “What if they’re right? What if Gotham doesn’t need me? What if I’ve made everything worse by grinding myself down into a myth instead of a man?”

So he keeps the shrine intact.

Keeps the ghost memory clean.

And tells himself he’s “above it.”

He’s not.

He’s drowning in it.

That’s yandere.

he doesn’t act all that different when you pull another scheme on the town either.

After each scheme, the evidence piles up.

You’re doing real things.

Visible things.

You’re changing Gotham. even if temporarily.

And that should trigger his usual protocols: evaluation, threat assessment, countermeasures.

Instead?

He goes back into his logs from that night… and redacts your name.

He replaces it with [NULL-AGENT], or leaves the field blank.

Even to himself, in his own files, you don’t have a name.

Because names are portals to meaning. and meaning leads to confrontation. and confrontation means feeling something.

So he surgically erases the connection.

But never the event.

Because he needs the pattern.

He needs to keep watching.

He just can’t admit why.

He doesn’t stop you.

He doesn’t support you.

He doesn’t admit you exist.

But he does..

Monitors obsessively

Catalogues everything

Redacts it afterward

Pretends it doesn’t affect him

Leaves space for you in every mental calculation he makes

He never says your name.

But he’s memorized every word you’ve ever said.

Yandere not through violence.

Not through romance.

But through negative space. a haunting, ritualized denial of feeling that takes over his life like rot beneath the floorboards.

He wants the idea of you contained.

And when containment becomes impossible, he builds a recursive denial loop that eventually takes over a significant part of his psychological energy.

He is obsessed with the erasure of you. and that erasure takes more effort, focus, and ritual than simply knowing you ever would.

And that is pure yandere.

self-destructive emotional orbit disguised as control.

NIGHTWING / DICK GRAYSON :

I’m hungry

but thats besides the point ig 💔💔🥀🥀🥀😭😭😭

Dick’s optimism is real. but it’s a choice, not a constant.

Unlike Bruce, whose default is grim pragmatism, Dick forces light into darkness. He jokes, he smiles, because someone has to carry hope.

So when [Name] comes along with this ideology, “Even heroes deserve to rest”, Dick can’t accept it. Not because he thinks it’s wrong, but because if he accepts it, the weight of all the years he’s forced himself to smile and keep going would hit him like a truck.

You aren’t just a villain. you’re a mirror. A personified version of everything Dick has denied himself.

“If what you say is true, then I’ve been killing myself all these years for nothing.”

He can’t let that in. So he splits like a trained acrobat, balancing on an emotional wire.

He holds himself to impossible standards.

He’s not just trying to live up to Bruce, he’s trying to exceed him and not become him. That’s a suffocating duality.

So when you start telling people to rest, to step back from impossible expectations, Dick panics internally.

Because he’s spent decades performing like his survival depends on it. because it did. He fears that if people stop pushing themselves, they’ll become like Bruce's failures.. or worse, get hurt. And maybe.. maybe! they’ll see that his whole life was built on unsustainable effort.

You threaten to unmake the foundation he’s built everything on.

Dick tries to carry burdens solo, just like Bruce.

But unlike Bruce, he hides it with charm instead of silence. That makes him even more fragile, because no one sees the cracks.

When you start gaining influence, maybe even convincing other heroes or citizens to burn out less, Dick takes it personally. Not out of spite, but fear.

If others believe you, they’ll stop relying on him.

He needs to be the one holding it together. He needs to be the one who never stops.

Because if he rests, who picks up the pieces?

If he breaks, who’s left to smile when everything goes dark?

“You’re not helping them. You’re just giving them an excuse to give up. And if they give up… I don’t get to.”

That’s the twist.

He doesn’t stalk you or chain you up.

He stalks your philosophy, kills your influence, because your truth breaks his lie.

Dick becomes obsessed not with saving [Name] … but with protecting the rest of the world from becoming like them.

It’s not “I love you so I’ll keep you safe.”

It’s “I love you, so I’ll make sure no one ever agrees with you.”

Because you are right.

And Dick knows it.

He’s the golden boy who’s been running on fumes since he was ten years old. But if he ever admits that [Name]’s ideology makes sense, he’ll crumble. Gotham, Blüdhaven, Bruce… they all depend on him staying functional. So he splits his mind.

He lets you rest. but never the world around them.

Dick becomes a reverse-yandere, a cognitive paradox.

He worships your ideology. but crushes it in everyone else.

He protects you. but makes sure you’ll always be alone in your beliefs.

He creates a world where only you are allowed to rest. by making everyone else run harder.

He doesn’t hurt you, doesn’t lock you up. He lets you spread your message freely. But every time someone listens to you, he finds them, and breaks them. Quietly. Subtly. Emotionally.

He turns them back into gear-turners.

Not because he wants to stop you. but because he can’t let your world exist.

Dick Grayson is a caretaker to the bone.

Big Brother. Team Leader. Gotham's good cop.

He’s spent his entire life believing that if he’s strong enough, if he just keeps going, he can protect everyone.

And the second he stops?

He believes people die.

He can’t stop. He can’t rest. He’s addicted to being the one who doesn’t fall. Not because of pride, but because he knows what happens when no one catches you. He lived it.

So when you come into the world preaching rest. forced or not, he sees a paradox.

One that short-circuits everything he is.

Because you’re right.

You’re not violent. You’re not crazy. You’re gentle.

Your message is: “You’ve done enough. You can sit down now.”

But if the world sits down, who gets hurt first?

He lets you rest.

You become the only one in the world who gets to stop. You become untouchable. he won’t lock you up, won’t fight you directly, won’t even argue too hard.

Why?

Because he’s built an altar out of you.

He’s made you the sacred space where the truth is allowed to exist. but nowhere else.

Like a church locked in a burning city.

He isolates your ideology into a vacuum so he never has to face it spilling into his world.

That’s why every time someone listens to you, he hunts them down. not violently, not openly, but surgically.

He sabotages their careers. Distracts them with greater threats. Assigns them “just one more mission.”

He puts weight back on their shoulders until they forget what you said.

This isn’t a man who doesn’t believe in you.

This is a man who believes in you so deeply that he has to quarantine your truth to keep from falling apart.

Because if he admits it’s okay to rest… then everything he’s endured becomes grief that didn’t have to happen.

And Dick Grayson, the big brother of the entire damn DC Universe, doesn’t know how to forgive himself for needless suffering.

So instead of letting the world change, he clutches it tighter.

Not for power. Not for dominance.

But because if he lets go… he’ll never get back up again.

A traditional yandere obsesses over a person.

But Dick?

He obsesses over what you represents. their ideology of rest, mercy, and release. It’s not about owning your body. It’s about containing your truth. That’s way scarier, way more insidious.

This is obsession disguised as protection.

Dick does all this not because he wants your love, it’s because he needs you to stay still.

If you moved, if you evolved, if your message grew teeth.. his mind would collapse under the weight of everything he’s been repressing.

So he isolates you like a relic.

He fossilizes you in peace. He builds a shrine around your message and worships it only because it’s locked away.

That’s yandere logic:

“If I can’t have you safely, no one else can have you at all.”

But instead of killing you or locking you in a basement, he does the reverse:

He builds a world around you that ensures you’re always the only one like you.

That’s obsession.

Yandere types don’t just love. they love destructively through control.

Dick’s version is emotional ecosystem manipulation. he isn’t trying to control you, he’s controlling everything else around you, for you.

He lets you believe you’re winning.

He makes the world harder so you stay soft.

He sabotages anyone who listens to you so you never lose your uniqueness.

He keeps your ideology “pure” by strangling it before it grows.

In his mind, he’s not harming anyone. he’s preserving balance. because if too many people follow you, the system breaks. And if the system breaks, he can’t function anymore.

Yandere logic is rationalized delusion.

He thinks he’s keeping you safe and the world stable. But what he’s really doing is sacrificing everything, including truth and progress, on the altar of his fear of emotional collapse.

Traditional yanderes cling to a person.

Dick clings to his role, his identity, his mission. But when you show up, they unwrite all of that.

So he develops a warped dependency:

“I need you to exist. but I also need you to never succeed.”

That’s obsession. A cognitive loop.

He depends on your ideology to understand his own fatigue.

But he also has to suppress it, because if it becomes true for others, he’ll realize he’s spent his life breaking himself unnecessarily.

So he gets trapped.

You become the axis his emotional survival spins on.

“If I destroy you, I’m a monster.

If I believe you, I collapse.

So I’ll protect you in stillness. I’ll love you in silence.

I’ll stop the world for you, just so you never move.”

That’s obsession. That’s yandere.

But it’s cold. Quiet. High-functioning.

It’s not a knife to your throat. it’s a smile at your door, while the whole city outside burns itself out under his watchful eye.

You shut down power to government buildings.

You freeze hospital schedules so burned-out doctors are forced to sleep.

You crash commuter systems so workers have to stay home and finally breathe.

You make rest happen. through crime, disruption, and brilliant techy soft-sabotage.

What does Dick do?

He shows up after.

He sweeps in quietly.

He doesn’t fight you. Doesn’t confront you.

He undoes your work. quietly, efficiently, like a fixer for God.

He doesn’t tell the press.

Doesn’t report you to the League.

Doesn’t even tell the Batfam.

He erases you.

Why?

Because acknowledging you publicly would mean legitimizing you.

“If they know your name, they might listen. If they hear your message, they might agree. I can’t let that happen.”

So he scrubs your fingerprints off the crime scene and tells everyone it was a “systems glitch.”

He redirects citizens to other sources of burnout.

He lies to protect his world from you. while keeping you safe.

If you go too big, like shutting down the entire city for 48 hours, he’ll find you.

He won’t chain you up. He won’t scream.

He’ll interrogate you like a friend, but with that underlying edge of desperation:

“Why are you making it so hard to protect you?”

If Bruce or another hero starts closing in on your identity, Dick pulls strings. He diverts attention, falsifies data, leaks false suspects.

He'd rather lie to Bruce, than let you face consequences.

Because if the world punishes you, that means your message is wrong. and Dick can’t afford to believe that.

You’re a villain, yes. And Nightwing is the planner, the strategist, the one who always has a backup plan.

But you?

You're the one person in the world he refuses to plan against.

He’ll have tactics for if Batman turns rogue.

He’ll have files on every villain in Blüdhaven.

But for you? Nothing.

Because making a plan against you would mean preparing for the possibility of having to stop you.

And he can’t admit he’d ever do that.

So instead of making a plan against you, he makes one around you:

He assigns his own allies to far-off cases.

He keeps the city too busy to notice you.

He works twice as hard to minimize the damage. so that he pays the price for your restfulness, not the citizens.

“You do what you have to. I’ll carry the burden. That’s how we keep the balance.”

He lets you be a villain. as long as it doesn’t break his world too hard.

He obsessively cleans up after you.

He refuses to punish you, because punishing you means admitting your message might be wrong. or worse, that it’s right and the world is too broken to receive it.

And when you do go too far?

He doesn't punish you like a villain.

He mourns you like a temple falling.

RED HOOD / JASON TODD :

Jason Todd, now Red Hood, exists in a perpetual state of restlessness. His experiences, his trauma, his regrets. every facet of his life pushes him into overdrive, constantly vigilant, always in motion. But Jason doesn’t just want to save Gotham, he wants to save the people who don’t know how to rest. This is where the villain, [name], comes into play.

You're a new kind of criminal in Gotham. You’re not here to hurt people. You’re here to stop the grind. You’ve shut down exploitative factories, turned Gotham’s 24-hour systems into 8-hour ones, and made millionaires suddenly lose sleep over their unpaid workers. Your message?

“Hardworking people deserve rest too.”

Your gadgets don't kill; they sedate. Your traps don’t wound; they force naps. You target overworked cops, overclocked servers, hospital staff being stretched thin. and give them "mandatory vacations" by knocking them unconscious and stashing them in luxury pods with automatic IV drips and calming soundscapes. You’re not killing the system, you’re sedating it.

Jason sees your work as both deeply terrifying and a form of mercy. Jason doesn’t love you in the traditional sense. He’s not infatuated with you romantically, but he’s consumed by a need to "protect" you. though not in the way a typical protector would.

He becomes obsessed with you because he sees himself in you, but he cannot comprehend your methods. You’re offering peace in a way he cannot afford. While Jason cannot rest, cannot stop fighting, he understands the value of what you're doing. Yet, he doesn’t believe you’re truly ready for the consequences of your actions. He thinks your idealism will destroy you, and he believes Gotham isn’t ready for the world you're crafting. he’s convinced you’re running a ticking time bomb with your serene philosophy.

Jason doesn’t try to stop you through traditional villain-villain conflict. He doesn’t engage you in a direct, action-heavy way. Instead, he disrupts your ability to rest. Jason sees your "restful" state as a dangerous lull. one that will eventually fall apart when Gotham’s chaos comes crashing back in. To protect you, he starts a bizarre game where he becomes the embodiment of the sleepless world you’re trying to escape.

His presence is a paradox. He invades your peaceful moments, constantly stirring the edges of your tranquility with his aggressive, sleepless energy. He creates an emotional disturbance, testing how well you can truly escape the constant noise of the world, challenging your philosophy by showing you the emotional toll of your ideas. When you induce calm in someone, Jason finds ways to intrude into their peace with intrusive, violent thoughts. not to hurt them, but to make them aware of their own fragility. Every time you successfully put someone into a peaceful state, Jason shakes their emotional core, revealing cracks in your logic and philosophy.

It’s almost like a battle of rest versus unrest. Jason exists to remind people, and you, that peace and rest are always fleeting, never truly attainable, especially in a world as broken as Gotham.

Jason doesn’t just disrupt your peace directly; he wants to get you to rest, but only on his terms. He believes that if you’re truly dedicated to your cause, you need to experience the exhaustion of never resting yourself. he pushes you to the limit, using psychological tactics and subtle actions to make you feel how much it costs to give peace to others. Jason's philosophy is one of balance: people need rest, yes, but they need to earn it. He believes in suffering as a pathway to true peace. so he will drag you into conflict with others, forcing you to witness the world you’re trying to escape, to remind you that peace is never without consequence.

Jason doesn't want to admit it, but the truth is that he is always balancing on the edge of his own philosophy. He’s constantly questioning how much violence he’s willing to accept in the name of justice. He feels responsible for the people he saves, but that responsibility sometimes leads him into morally gray areas that others (like Batman) might avoid.

Your Ideology of Rest offers a form of balance that Jason can’t have. You promote peace. an idea Jason finds both appealing and terrifying. Peace is something Jason craves but feels he cannot have, because in his mind, it comes at a cost. You represent everything that he can never fully embrace. a world where rest, calm, and healing are possible.

Despite his desire to help, Jason sees the limits of his own effectiveness. He constantly finds himself fighting a losing battle. especially when he’s forced to kill or break the rules to get things done. This guilt doesn’t just disappear, even if he justifies his actions. In this way, Jason sees you as a direct reflection of his failings. because your idea of "rest" is a form of escape from the constant cycle of violence he feels trapped in.

Your villainy challenges Jason’s worldview. He wants people to be able to rest, too, but he doesn't think they can without confronting the darkness. The fact that you offer rest and peace without addressing the world’s systemic issues, without violence or force, doesn’t sit right with him. He believes the world doesn’t allow for a peaceful escape, and that by indulging in rest, you're turning a blind eye to the suffering that still exists.

Jason Todd’s relationship with you embodies obsession, though it’s not the romantic obsession seen in more typical yandere tropes. Instead, his obsession is philosophical, emotional, and protective. He becomes obsessed with your ideology of peace, rest, and tranquility. He’s fixated on the idea that you’re offering people an escape from the brutality of Gotham, and he feels that you are naive in your attempt to do so. This obsession goes beyond just being fixated on you as a person. it extends to your worldview, your methods, and the dangerous implications he believes they hold.

A yandere’s hallmark is the intensity of their emotions. Jason’s feelings for you are extreme, but they aren’t purely driven by romantic attraction. they stem from the emotional weight of his own trauma and the desperation to protect you from what he perceives as an impending downfall. The emotional intensity comes from his need to challenge your beliefs and make you see the harsh realities he’s experienced. His obsession manifests as an irrational emotional attachment to your ideology and to the idea of “saving” you, even if it means trying to disrupt your peace in the process.

Jason’s yandere qualities manifest in the obsessive protectiveness he feels toward you. While this is often a romantic trait in yandere characters, in Jason’s case, it’s platonic and ideological. He feels a responsibility to “protect” you from what he believes to be your own misguided philosophy. His version of protection doesn’t involve traditional displays of violence or possessiveness but instead focuses on interfering with your peace in order to teach you a harsh lesson.

This protectiveness is grounded in his belief that the world you’re envisioning can’t exist without consequences. He is obsessed with the idea that if you can’t understand the true cost of rest and peace, you’ll be consumed by the very thing you're trying to save people from. So, he becomes the obstacle to your peaceful ideology. not out of malice or romantic desire, but because he truly believes that you need to be "saved" from your own perspective.

Jason becomes an obstacle to your ideology, and this emotional and intellectual opposition is a form of possession: he doesn’t want you to be at peace until he believes you’ve fully realized the harsh truths of the world. His desire to control your thought process and reality (in terms of what you’re trying to create) is a more subtle, intellectual possession compared to traditional yandere tropes, but it’s still a possession that keeps you constantly aware of his presence, both physically and mentally.

While Jason’s violent tendencies are not typically directed toward you, they do manifest in a way that aligns with traditional yandere themes. He’s willing to create emotional chaos around you and disrupt your peaceful state, even if it means inflicting psychological harm. He may subconsciously justify this as a form of protection or guidance, believing that if you can’t handle the violence and chaos of the world, you’re not truly fit to offer peace to others.

This kind of psychological violence (in the form of emotional and intellectual torment) is a unique variation of yandere behavior, but it still reflects the destructive, obsessive drive to reshape the object of obsession’s reality according to their own ideals.

RED ROBIN / TIM DRAKE :

oh man oh god

You're a new villain in Gotham. No grand heists, no murder, no world-ending plans. Your ideology? “Hardworking people deserve rest too.” You target those who are exploited by their systems. overworked medics, detectives who haven’t taken a day off in years, tech developers being ground down in black-budget labs. You sedate them gently, remove them from the grid, and put them in a hidden “sanctuary” where they’re forced to rest. You’re not killing them. you’re giving them the break they’re too conditioned to take themselves.

But then you target Tim Drake.

And something snaps.

Tim doesn’t “believe” in your ideology. He doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t support you, doesn’t admire you.

But he can’t stop testing your theory.

You’re the most peculiar anomaly he’s ever encountered. A villain who doesn’t destroy, doesn’t corrupt, doesn’t control, just intervenes. Pauses. Unplugs. Your entire mission is enforcing rest on people who can’t or won’t give it to themselves.

You hit him once. Gave him 48 hours of mandatory rest. A blackout, then calmness. When he woke up, he was alone, unhurt, undisturbed.

And yet everything was wrong.

Because it worked.

And now?

You’re not a threat to be stopped.

You’re a theory he’s trying to disprove.

This isn’t affection. It’s not “care.” It’s Tim treating you like a control variable he can’t replicate.

You gave him peace. He doesn’t want to admit it. So now he runs controlled experiments.. on himself.

He denies himself sleep for 96 hours to test what you saw in him.

He simulates your actions in private rooms, carefully documenting if he feels better afterward.

He tracks the neurochemical patterns from the sedative you used and recreates microdoses just to “observe” the mental silence.

He tries to reverse-engineer your ideology purely to disprove it.

But it only leads to more questions.

And it becomes maddening.

Tim stalks you not because he wants to be close, but because you’ve colonized a part of his thinking.

Every action he takes now filters through one question:

“Would [Name] have stopped me here?”

“Would they think I’m too far gone?”

“Is this what they’d call burnout?”

This doesn’t make him softer. It makes him more paranoid.

More fractured.

He doesn’t want you in his life.

He wants to silence you in his mind. but can’t.

So instead, he creates simulations. Replays encounters with you. Runs audio from your speeches. Alters his mission logs to include imaginary counterarguments from you.

You become his silent co-pilot.

Not because he chose you.

But because you infected his process.

He refuses to accept rest as valid unless he can reproduce its logic under his own control. But your rest isn’t logical. It’s disruptive, organic, involuntary. That drives him crazy.

He never confronts you directly again. not out of fear, but because he doesn’t trust himself to stay rational around you.

His obsession is pure analysis, not love. But he’s created an entire side-life where every decision he makes is secretly measured against your ideology.

He still fights. Still breaks bones. But then goes home and stares at a wall for three hours, asking:

“Did I need to go that hard? Or was I proving something to them?”

He doesn’t follow you around in person. he builds predictive models, reads subtle biometric signals from footage, and maps your logic tree. He’s stalking your ideas, not your body.

He keeps this entire obsession secret. Even from himself. He lies to Alfred. Lies to Bruce. He gaslights his own mind, convincing himself it’s “just tactical observation.” But he’s got terabytes of data on you hidden in a server called:

“NON-THREAT_CONFLICT_1197”

He doesn’t want to fix you, love you, save you, or be noticed by you.

He just wants to disprove you.

But every time he tries, he ends up needing the silence again.

That’s the horror.

That’s the devotion.

And he never once admits it aloud.

yandere doesn’t always have to mean a "romantic" obsession or a “classic stalker” who just wants to possess someone. Instead, the obsession itself can be built around any form of psychological fixation that leads to controlling, manipulative, or destructive behavior. often rationalized in some form as being "for the good" of the person they’re obsessed with.

TRAIT 001: The obsessive fixation on the person.

In this case, Tim’s obsession is not about possessing you physically or emotionally. it’s about understanding your mind and controlling his environment through your ideology. You disrupted his sense of order, threw his life into disarray, and now Tim is in an obsessive cycle of trying to understand, rationalize, and prove why your ideology is wrong, how to disprove it, and why it messed him up.

He’s trying to break you down intellectually because, in his mind, you are the key to his peace. And so, his obsession is not simply trying to control you, but control his own feelings and mind in response to you. That level of control fixation is a classic yandere characteristic. He doesn’t want to admit that your ideology might have had a profound effect on him, so he goes to extremes to try and test, analyze, and suppress it.

He can’t stop thinking about you. He doesn’t want to love you, but he can’t ignore the effect you had on him. And that is obsession.

TRAIT 002: Willing to go to extreme lengths for their obsession, sometimes even harming themselves to preserve the fixation.

Here, Tim’s obsession leads him to physically and mentally harm himself. He pushes his body to dangerous limits. denying sleep, taking sedatives in calculated doses to replicate your influence on him, trying to isolate his emotions and just test whether rest actually has an effect on him. These are all self-destructive behaviors motivated by the need to answer the question: “What is it about you that has disrupted my system so completely?”

Tim’s resilience and ability to push past his limits only makes this worse. He never admits how much he needs your ideology to function, but he becomes more and more dependent on recreating it in his life. His obsession with trying to stay in control means he sacrifices his well-being in an effort to “solve” your impact on him.

TRAIT 003: Rationalizing their obsessive behaviors as protective or necessary for the other person’s safety/mental well-being.

While traditional yanderes might directly harm others to keep them close, Tim rationalizes his obsession through self-imposed limits and self-analysis, using your ideology as his lens. He treats it like a protective measure, not just for his own mental stability, but in the belief that this is the “right way” to fix the imbalance you’ve created in him.

Tim has internalized your rest ideology to the point where his obsessive behavior is justified by a warped sense of protection for both himself and, in some cases, Gotham. He believes that if he can just figure out the right answer, the right formula, then everything will click, and he’ll return to the controlled world he once knew. But this is just an illusion. His obsession has trapped him in a never-ending cycle.

He doesn’t want to acknowledge that his need for you is unhealthy. Instead, he tells himself that solving your “mystery” will bring him peace, that it’s a quest for knowledge, not obsession. This self-deception is a classic yandere trait where the obsession is disguised as a rational pursuit.

Tim doesn’t just want to solve the case. This is a personal, psychological conflict. he’s constantly battling himself, wrestling with the temptation to just admit that something about you broke his sense of control. The complexity lies in how he resists acknowledging that he has emotionally (and psychologically) been altered by you. He’s fighting against himself, his feelings, and his deep-seated need for order and control.

It’s not just about the other person being the object of affection, but also about how the yandere’s actions are disguised as a form of care or control. Tim’s behavior is intellectualized, but ultimately, it becomes a twisted form of caring about you. because he feels the need to protect his mind from the chaos you caused.

He isn’t out to control you in an obvious or violent way, but he is still willing to manipulate himself, isolate himself, and make his life a battleground to deal with the psychological impact you’ve had on him. His obsession is dangerous because it turns inward, manifesting as self-sabotage and manipulation of his own reality.

He’s obsessively fixated on you and your ideology, even if it’s intellectualized.

His actions are extreme and self-destructive, to the point of harming himself and trying to replicate the effects of your ideology just to understand it.

He rationalizes his behavior, cloaking his obsession in the guise of control and self-protection.

He can’t escape his need to keep you in his mind, despite the fact that he refuses to acknowledge he’s mentally and emotionally dependent on you.

This is a yandere mentality. it’s about obsession, but the obsession isn’t always in the form of love or possession; it’s intellectualized, twisted control over his own mental processes, a constant back-and-forth battle between logic and emotion, trying to force order and balance into a chaotic, uncomfortable truth: You’ve already changed him.

As soon as you initiate a scheme in the city, Tim’s first instinct is to analyze the structure of your plan. not to stop it outright, but to figure out the rationale behind it.

He’s no longer just a vigilante trying to thwart criminals. He’s an obsessive detective caught between stopping you and understanding you. Tim immediately dissects your actions as if you’re a case study, drawing mental parallels between your methods and his own. In his mind, he’s trying to solve the puzzle of you.

The deeper question he asks is: What’s your real motivation? Is it really just about rest for the overworked, or is there some deeper emotional need driving you? he begins to map your psychology against every move you make. Is this a desire for control? Revenge? Relief from guilt? He tracks the smallest clues. patterns in your behavior, things you've said in passing, the faces of the people you leave behind after your schemes.

He will obsessively cross-reference your plans with previous ones, trying to pinpoint where your logic might have a flaw, where it doesn’t “add up” in his mind. Maybe he’ll find the places where your ideology inadvertently causes harm or chaos, and those are the moments where he feels the most alive. because that’s the piece of you he’s been trying to "fix."

Tim is the king of preparation, and when you pull a scheme on Gotham, you better believe he’ll have deeply researched the specifics of it. He will analyze the infrastructure of your plot and create counter-schemes that are tailored to your ideology. not just to stop you, but to test how resilient you are against what he’s learned from your patterns.

If you’re using a sedative to incapacitate people for “rest”, he might reverse-engineer it to create a formula that forces you to feel exhaustion yourself. Or he’ll track the spread of the sedative and neutralize it with custom-designed antidotes to disrupt your ability to control the masses.

If your scheme involves financial manipulation, like draining corrupt companies of their resources to redistribute to underpaid workers, Tim will figure out how to intercept those funds in a way that doesn’t ruin your overall moral point but forces you to reconsider your execution.

These countermeasures aren’t about brute force. they’re surgical, intelligent, and designed to disrupt the very core of your philosophy without necessarily “defeating” you. He doesn’t want to prove you wrong in the traditional sense. He wants to see if your ideology can survive when he starts to manipulate it in ways you didn’t foresee. He’ll go to great lengths to match your every move with precision, trying to break your emotional or philosophical consistency.

When your schemes start gaining traction in Gotham, Tim’s emotions become muddled. His mission is clear, to stop you, but his deep-seated obsession makes him question himself the entire time. There’s a part of him that is actually rooting for you in his head. Not out of romantic interest, but because you represent the peace he can never have.

While working through his plans to thwart you, Tim may grow increasingly detached from his own emotions. He will close off, thinking: I’m doing this for the greater good. but the more he dismantles your work, the more hollow his victories feel. Every time he disrupts your plans, he’s one step closer to proving that his obsession is right. and yet, he’s driven deeper into the abyss of needing your philosophy.

In the chaos, he might experience moments of internal crisis. After foiling your scheme, he might sit alone, reviewing his actions, trying to convince himself that he’s done the right thing. But in the silence, his mind starts to loop:

Did I stop you because you were wrong… or because I need to be right?

SPOILER / STEPHANIE BROWN:

hey now. hey hey.

Your ideology is deceptively simple: everyone deserves rest. But in practice, you make CEOs sleep for weeks by inducing comas, disable surveillance networks to give overworked security guards peace, and forcibly “retire” heroes and villains alike who never take a break. You call it “compassionate sabotage.”

You're not malicious, just terrifyingly principled. You call your actions “mandatory vacations.”

You aren’t lazy. you work harder than anyone. But your work is making sure everyone else stops working.

Your main tool? A stolen prototype tech: a pulse device that hijacks neural fatigue centers. essentially, a sleep-inducing EMP. You've modified it to create “rest zones” where your targets are forced to nap, collapse, or mentally check out.

Stephanie is deeply independent, not someone who likes being rescued or coddled. So when you, a villain, emerge saying “People deserve rest” and then start enforcing it for her or for others. it clashes hard with her core beliefs.

Her reaction? You’re not wrong. but you’re not the one who gets to decide when people quit.

So instead of trying to stop you with violence, she makes it her mission to prove she can keep pace with you without ever giving in.

Not because she hates you. But because she refuses to let anyone else take her agency away, even under the guise of “rest.”

In a way, she sees your ideology as noble. but incomplete, and dangerously self-righteous.

“If you really believed in rest, [Name], you'd let people choose it for themselves. You don't get to play god just because you're tired.”

That’s the twist. her yandere obsession is a contradiction. She cares about you. But she resents you enough to never let you “win.”

She is a caretaker. She feels responsible for others’ well-being.

In this twisted yandere version, she starts internalizing your ideology as her own. but in her voice.

She starts doing what you do (creating rest, breaking systems, giving people time off), but she does it with exhausting compassion instead of coercion.

She visits the people you knocked out of work and listens to their stories. She starts building support systems instead of just inducing sleep.

At some point, she stops even recognizing where your ideology ends and hers begins.

This is the part. She starts saying things like,

“I know you better than you know yourself. You don’t really want people to rest. You want them to feel safe. I’m the only one who gets that.”

It’s not about power. It’s emotional possessiveness through worldview.

She thinks she’s the only one who really understands what you meant. And that’s how she becomes the “better” version of you.

Because stephanie tends to ramble and overshare, especially under stress, this becomes the mask slipping.

You’ll find her babbling at one of your sleep zones, running through plans she says are yours, ideas you never had, rewriting your philosophy with new rules. her rules.

Her affection bleeds through these overshares, but it’s detached from reality. She’s talking to an idea of you.

It’s not romantic. it’s emotional dependency on the version of you that lives in her head, who “gets it” the way no one else does.

At first, she judges you. “This villain’s just another self-righteous burnout case.”

But then… she starts sympathizing too much.

Because she’s been there. She’s burned out. She knows what it’s like to be drowning in responsibility.

So the twist is, she locks herself in a moral logic trap where the only way to reconcile her loyalty and her judgment is to absorb your mission.

And she becomes possessive of your ideology.

She doesn’t need your presence to be obsessed with you. she’s committed for life, even if she never sees you again.

Her platonic yandere angle isn’t based in presence.

You could disappear. Retire. Die. And she’d keep living by your principles, warped and restructured in her voice, long after you’re gone.

“You were right, you just… didn’t go far enough. But I will. I’ll make sure everyone gets rest. even if it kills me.”

Her obsession is philosophical inheritance.

She doesn’t want your body. She wants your burden.

She’s not in love with you. She believes in you. more than you believe in yourself.

And she’ll never stop trying to prove that belief right.

You're not her enemy.

You’re a problem she refuses to put down, not out of duty. but because you’ve taken up space in her brain in a way nothing else has.

You’re the first villain who’s not selfish or sadistic. you’re compassionate to a fault. And that… scares her. Because she sees herself in you.

She’s constantly torn between admiring you and being horrified by your methods.

She respects you, maybe more than she respects some of the Batfam. You believe in something.

But she also resents that belief because it feels like it’s directed at her.

Every time you disable a system or knock out another hero for their “own good,” it feels like a passive-aggressive intervention aimed at her life choices.

“They’re so tired. I can see it. Every time they do this, I wonder if they’re hoping someone will stop them. I wonder if they’re hoping it’s me.”

She thinks you’re crying out for help, even if you say you're not.

So she treats your schemes as tests. not of Gotham, but of herself.

She thinks: “If I stop them this time, maybe they’ll stop pushing themselves so hard. Maybe they’ll finally rest.”

She never thinks you’re doing this for power or even change anymore.

She’s convinced you’re doing it because you’re breaking, and this is your coping mechanism.

So she responds like you’re a sick friend acting out. not a villain.

Say you pull a classic “mandatory rest” plot: you gas the GCPD precinct with your signature neuro-fatigue fog, knocking out cops mid-shift, replacing their patrols with drones programmed to play soft jazz and deliver pillows.

What does Stephanie do?

She physically drags unconscious cops to safety, takes over patrol duty herself, reroutes emergency lines to her comms.

She's not just stopping your plot. she's doing all the work you made them stop doing, out of spiteful admiration.

Because at her core, she believes you’re better at this than she is.

She’s not obsessed with owning you. She’s obsessed with earning your approval without ever admitting it.

Steph’s the type of person who latches onto ideologies that resonate with her pain. Your “people deserve rest” philosophy touches a nerve in her. the part of her that’s always overworking, overcompensating, always feeling like she has to prove her worth by staying in the fight longer than anyone else.

You present an alternative: people like her shouldn’t have to live that way.

But instead of taking that as healing? She turns it into an impossible ideal to chase, a kind of moral godhood to strive for. by outworking you.

That becomes the obsession.

Obsession not with possessing you, but with surpassing you. by taking your ideology to a self-destructive extreme.

This aligns with platonic yandere, because it’s devotion through identification.

You're not a person to her anymore. you're a mission.

Yanderes often project unresolved trauma or longing onto someone else. and that’s what Steph’s doing, just in reverse. Instead of saying “You complete me,” she’s saying:

“You are me, if I gave up. So I have to save you to save myself.”

You’re a walking contradiction of what she believes.

You're trying to help people, but you take away their choice.

You're trying to reduce suffering, but your methods cause chaos.

You remind her that rest is good, but also that she’s too scared to take it.

She’s locked in an emotional loop. she hates that you’re right, so she needs to carry your burden for you to prove she can do it better.

That’s the yandere core: her self-worth becomes entangled with your very existence.

That’s obsession.

Yandere’s are obsessed with someone. she is obsessed with your ideology and moral integrity.

Yandere’s have an all-consuming devotion. she rearranges her life to become your philosophical rival / ally / shadow

Yandere’s have blurred self-other boundary. She starts thinking for you, justifying your actions, ‘fixing’ your failures.

Yandere’s are willing to hurt others or themselves to protect their bond. She is literally breaking herself to carry your burden so YOU can rest.

Yandere doesn’t always mean “I love you so much I’ll kill.”

It means: “You have taken root in my identity. I no longer know where I end and you begin.”

Stephanie’s version of that is emotionally and philosophically parasitic. she doesn’t just want to understand you, she wants to become your better version.

She’s addicted to your idea of peace, but she’ll only allow herself to bring it into the world through her own pain.

So even when you try to stop, she won’t let you. because she needs the problem of you to exist in order to stay whole.

You say “rest is a right.”

She says “fine! but let me be the one who earns it for everyone. Including you!”

ORPHAN / CASSANDRA CAIN:

You’re a villain, real name unknown, who built your ideology around the belief that "Hardworking people deserve rest too." You’re infamous not for mass destruction but for forcing stillness. you create “zones” across Gotham where time seems to slow, people collapse into dreamlike trances, and all forms of labor, mental, emotional, and physical, are impossible. These are fields of rest: mental euthanasia for the overworked. Gotham calls it terrorism. You call it justice.

You target places like sweatshops, overpoliced blocks, high schools, prisons, hospitals. You don’t kill. You sedate. You erase urgency. The city grinds to a stop around you. Your villainy is lethargy as revolution.

Cassandra loves, but not in the typical way. she’s obsessed with the silence you carry. The absence you bring. You are the only person she has ever met who communicates in the same language she does: non-action as expression. When you step into a space and it becomes still, quiet, slow. it reminds her of the only language she knew for years: stillness = presence.

To Cassandra, your acts of “rest” are not terrorism. They are poetry. You’re the first person whose ideology isn’t just words, it’s movement. Or lack thereof. Your body language, your pacing, your restraint, your surrender, your slowness. it’s all fluent to her.

She becomes addicted to your zones of rest. She seeks them out in secret. She lets herself get caught in your fields, lying perfectly still for hours, even days. She studies how it feels to not move, not think, not protect, not perform. For someone raised to be a weapon, these moments are the only place she feels like a human.

But it goes deeper.

She begins trying to create her own silent fields. Not by tech, like you. but through sheer mastery of space. She builds rooms in safehouses that mimic the psychological effects of your zones: low heartbeat, no light, no sound, temperature-neutral. Rooms where the air feels like your presence. She begins “training” herself to rest the way you “force” others to rest. She fails. But she keeps trying. She's training to be the kind of silence you are.

Cassandra doesn’t want to protect you. She doesn’t want to stop you.

She wants to become a space where you can finally rest without using your skills.

Her obsession is to train herself so perfectly, body, soul, and presence, that she becomes a kind of human rest zone for you. She imagines a moment where you, finally tired, curl up in a room she’s prepared, where her stillness, her silence, her restraint, are enough to hold you.

She doesn’t want you to love her. She wants to be the one place in Gotham you don’t need to change.

That’s the core of her obsession: she doesn't want to possess you. She wants to neutralize the part of you that thinks you have to be a villain to deserve peace.

Cassandra doesn’t see you as evil. She sees you as wounded. Someone who understands pain so deeply you want to anesthetize the world. Her obsession is born not out of delusion, but empathy. You represent a moral contradiction she feels rather than intellectualizes: "If I believe people deserve rest, then why don’t I believe that about myself?"

Cassandra’s behavior doesn’t revolve around harming others for you. it revolves around trying to contain the damage you cause without rejecting you. Every time you put people into “rest zones,” she gets there early and evacuates them, silently, flawlessly, so that you don’t have to feel guilty. She absorbs the guilt you should carry. because she believes you can’t handle it, and because she thinks she deserves it more.

She starts believing that if she can physically perfect herself enough, if she can move so flawlessly, so quietly, so gently, she could “interrupt” your zones by being a “bridge” between them and the waking world. She trains not to be stronger. but to be so neutral, so quiet, that she could walk through your fields without disturbing them. That she could enter your world, untouched.

This becomes an obsession. A spiritual practice. Not to control you, but to understand you. Because maybe if she understands you, really understands the language of your pain, she can find forgiveness for herself.

Cassandra doesn’t want to protect you from the world.

She wants to protect the world from you, without taking you away from it.

She doesn’t stalk you. She studies the void you leave behind. The emotional signatures of your rest zones. The subtle patterns in how your powers work. where they’re gentle, where they’re rough. The nuance. She starts to believe that your powers reflect your mental state, and that if she can just reach you emotionally, if she can be the one person who “rests with you” instead of stopping you or resisting you. you’ll start to change.

It’s not devotion. It’s not love. It’s a compulsion to become your equal in stillness the way she is in motion.

She doesn't see herself as worthy of peace, so she’s obsessed with the idea that you are. even though you’re a villain. well I’m gonna be honest here you aren’t really the most intimidating villain out there

She slowly replaces her belief in justice with a belief in your twisted ideology. but only for you. She wants the world to keep moving, but for you to stay still, so that she can sit beside you and learn how to be still too.

Cassandra’s obsession is not romantic, not controlling, not destructive, but it is deep, consuming, and isolating.

She becomes obsessed with translating you.

Not just your ideology. but your presence, your silence, your belief that rest is deserved. She doesn’t want to be you. She wants to understand what you mean, in a world where no one else listens closely enough to hear it.

That is the thread. she is the only one who believes she can understand you, and the only one who should.

Not because you chose her. Because she chose herself.

She grew up reading bodies, not words. Before she could speak, she could sense intent. The way people moved, breathed, carried guilt or rage. this was her truth.

You are the first person she’s encountered whose ideology is entirely expressed through absence.

Your powers, your beliefs, your villainy. it’s all quiet. No speeches. No violence. Just forced stillness. You’re like a language she hasn’t heard before. but one she almost knows.

So she starts watching. Following. Not to stop you, but to study you. (wow another study I feel so unoriginal please forgive me)

Normally, Cassandra’s guilt makes her obsessed with preventing loss. But with you, it’s different. She sees your actions as a danger, yes. but also as truthful. You make people stop. You force Gotham to rest.

“What if they really do need to stop? What if they really can’t anymore? What if they’re right, and no one’s listening?”

So her guilt doesn’t make her want to kill or capture you. It makes her want to intervene at the exact right moment, with perfect understanding, to protect both you and the world at once.

That need for perfect understanding becomes obsession.

She becomes a master of navigating your influence like a field of tension. Like choreography.

This effort to read you becomes ritualistic. Not to stop you outright, but to be the one person who knows when and how to move in your world of stillness. without shattering it.

She believes that if she fails to understand you, someone else will just try to stop you. and break everything in the process. Kill you. Or worse, never even hear you.

So she trains. Watches. Prepares. Builds her entire sense of justice around the idea of timing her interference to preserve both your message and your victims.

That level of focus, that self-imposed burden, and the fierce belief that only she can walk that line?

That’s yandere.

But it’s Cassandra’s kind of yandere. no delusion. No harm. No identity loss. Just an overwhelming, morally complex need to understand, and to exist in the space between you and the world. Alone.

Cassandra Cain’s guilt complex is rooted in the trauma of her upbringing and her internalized belief that she is fundamentally a weapon. Raised to be an assassin and trained to fight, kill, and survive without room for compassion or peace, she has always been caught between her desire to protect life and her overwhelming sense that she doesn't deserve to. Her entire existence has been a tightrope walk between trying to atone for her violent origins and struggling to find a moral path that she feels is genuinely hers.

For Cassandra, the "language of rest" which is expressed by your villainous ideology, disrupts her entire framework of guilt, action, and self-worth. You, [name], create a philosophy that challenges everything Cassandra has internalized about her own existence. By saying, “Hardworking people deserve rest too,” you’re offering peace as a form of justice. You suggest that the weight of the world doesn't need to be shouldered by people like her, people who’ve been conditioned to keep fighting and keep protecting, even at the cost of their own well-being.

Cassandra's guilt isn't just a passive feeling, it's a driving force. Every life she can't save, every failure, becomes a crushing weight on her conscience. She’s always trying to do more, to be more. whether it’s protecting Gotham or making sure that everyone else is okay. But she always fails to rest. She feels that, because she’s been trained to be a weapon, she isn’t allowed to stop. She isn't allowed to be weak. even if that's what her heart needs.

When Cassandra hears about you, or even encounters your presence, she initially sees you as a threat. But as she watches your actions unfold, she starts to realize something profound: You’re not just a villain; you’re someone who has figured out that rest. the concept of allowing people to stop working, stop pushing forward, stop suffering. is the ultimate form of compassion.

And that’s when the guilt hits her the hardest: Why can’t she allow herself to rest? Why can’t she accept the peace of stopping for just a moment? She sees the people who are caught in your zones of stillness, and while she doesn’t fully agree with the way you’re doing things, she understands the need for rest. She sees that, perhaps, they deserve a moment of peace from the chaos. and she feels this deep, gnawing pain that she’s never allowed herself that same luxury. She never stops.

This is where Cassandra’s obsession with you, the villain, the embodiment of the “language of rest” grows. It isn't about control. It’s not about stopping you, or even about fixing the world you create. It’s about learning your “language” because, at a deeply psychological level, Cassandra is trying to learn how to forgive herself and find peace.

Her desire to understand your language of stillness comes from the belief that if she can translate your ideology, then she can finally find a way to give herself permission to stop—to allow herself to rest without guilt.

She doesn’t want to hurt you. She doesn’t want to stop you. She wants to understand how you find peace, how you can exist in a world that demands action and still say no. She wants to learn from your calm and perhaps, in doing so, learn how to release herself from her own constant cycle of guilt and self-punishment.

As much as Cassandra is drawn to you, she knows you’re a threat to others, even if she understands your intentions. She starts to see your ideology as something dangerous, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s radical. People in Gotham, people she loves, might fall victim to the seduction of rest, to the idea of giving up everything and shutting down. If she doesn’t intervene, they might never know how to return to the world of action, of doing.

Thus, her obsession becomes an act of protection. She doesn’t want to take you away. She doesn’t want to kill you. She just wants to make sure that you’re understood. She believes that the world might need you, but they also need someone to mediate between your stillness and their need for movement. If she can help protect the world from your influence while still honoring your right to be still, she’ll have succeeded in reconciling her own need for rest without letting the world fall apart.

Cassandra’s obsession with your “language of rest” is driven by her own guilt. specifically, the belief that she is too broken to deserve peace. She’s never allowed herself to rest because of the weight of the violence and trauma she’s been through. But when she sees you, when she observes how you create zones of stillness, she realizes that perhaps rest isn’t something you have to earn. It’s something that you can just deserve.

Her obsession is not a delusional need to control you, but a deeply emotional and intellectual desire to understand you. your power, your language, and what it would mean for her to give herself permission to stop. She believes she can only protect you by understanding you deeply, so she trains herself to read your silence and rest in a way that won’t disrupt it, but will keep people safe.

This isn’t about taking you away or forcing you to conform to her values. It’s about becoming the one person who can help guide the world in between your rest and their need to keep moving, while also learning how to give herself the same peace.

In essence, Cassandra’s obsession is about finding balance. between her past, her guilt, and the elusive peace that only you, the villain, seem to embody. She believes that by mimicking your “language of rest,” she can finally let go of the guilt that’s driven her entire life, and perhaps find her own version of peace.

As a protector of Gotham, Cassandra’s primary focus is always on protecting the innocent. She doesn’t view you as a pure villain in the traditional sense; she sees you as someone who is acting out of a distorted sense of justice, someone who’s simply misunderstood. This leads to her very unique response to your villainy.

When your schemes unfold, whether it’s taking control of a building, manipulating a large group of people into “rest zones,” or causing mass disruption in the city, Cassandra’s actions are deeply strategic. She doesn’t immediately go in guns blazing or try to take you down with force, because she believes there’s another way to approach this. Instead:

Cassandra, understanding the nature of your stillness, carefully works to isolate your influence without triggering your retaliation. She saves civilians caught in the chaos, evacuates them from your zones of rest, and keeps them safe, all while not disrupting your scheme. It’s a delicate balance of neutralizing harm without destroying your work.

If she can’t understand you through direct observation, she’ll act more tactically: learning the patterns of your schemes, the subtle ways you manipulate people into rest. She’s not actively trying to stop your plan; she’s trying to comprehend it in a way that prevents unnecessary casualties while respecting your philosophy. Her obsession with understanding you makes her believe that if she can "decode" the true nature of your schemes, she’ll be able to stop the harm caused without ruining your message.

Despite her growing empathy for your philosophy, Cassandra’s moral code still compels her to prevent harm.

Her first instinct is to protect Gotham. She may not agree with your methods, but she cannot stand by and let innocent lives be harmed or disrupted by your schemes. However, this is where her compassion comes into play. because she understands the pull of your ideology. You want to offer people rest, peace, but it’s in a way that she feels may be harmful in the long term. So, as much as she wants to leave you to your plan, she can’t let innocent lives be caught up in it.

Cassandra doesn’t see you as a purely evil person. You’re still someone who, in her mind, could find peace. but only if understood. So, she doesn’t want to destroy you. She doesn’t want to disrupt the rest you bring to people; she just wants to make sure they are safe from the side effects of it. whether that’s societal breakdown, loss of motivation, or violence triggered by people who can't cope with the sudden stillness.

Cassandra doesn’t communicate with words; she communicates through presence, movement, and action. She’ll often work in parallel with you, acting just enough to mitigate damage. Her goal is to interrupt your plans without ever confronting you. She wants to get close enough to understand you, but not close enough to disrupt what you’re doing. She has a unique sense of being in the background, neutralizing the harm of your schemes without ever engaging in a fight.

ORACLE / BARBARA GORDON:

When you, the villain, become a symbol of resilience, carrying the weight of your own struggles and responsibilities, Barbara sees you as someone who needs protection, not from physical threats, but from the constant need to prove your worth through labor and toil. She believes that the concept of "rest" isn't just a physical break. it is a moral imperative, a form of self-care that, in her eyes, becomes a revolutionary act of defiance against a world built on constant expectations of productivity.

As a villain, your mission becomes one of opposing the grind culture and offering sanctuary to those who exhaust themselves in the name of ambition. You argue that society does not allow people to pause, to take breath, and that even the most noble of people need to protect their own well-being to avoid being crushed under the weight of their own responsibilities.

In contrast, Barbara's view of "protection" is warped into something far more controlling and intrusive. She doesn’t seek to break you down, but she seeks to prevent you from ever needing to push yourself too hard again, ensuring that no harm ever befalls you through exhaustion. Her love, care, and obsession manifest as a form of containment and intervention, where she believes that her role as Oracle, the information hub, is not merely to observe. but to subtly intervene in your life whenever you push yourself too far.

Barbara, with her technological prowess, subtly manipulates the environment around you to induce a constant state of optimal rest. Rather than taking direct action like drugging or forcing you to sleep, she reprograms your environment to make it impossible for you to overwork or deny yourself rest. She ensures that your workspaces are constantly interrupted. whether through the careful timing of technology glitches, forcing distractions in your workflow, or sending perfectly timed alerts or requests that disrupt your overworking cycle, giving you no choice but to stop.

Instead of obsessing over your physical safety, Barbara focuses entirely on your emotional well-being and psychological state. She doesn’t stalk you in an obvious sense; instead, she gathers every piece of emotional data about your life and organizes it into a form of emotional record-keeping. This isn't an ordinary obsession with your personal life. it's a deep psychological study of your stress levels, your peak moments of exhaustion, your emotional vulnerabilities, and the signs when you're too worn out to fight back.

She becomes your emotional mirror, using her ability as Oracle to quietly orchestrate moments of introspection. At the precise moments when you start to doubt yourself, when you begin to show signs of emotional or physical fatigue, Barbara will subtly introduce you to the idea of rest by having things around you whisper the importance of balance.

Rather than confronting you with physical action, Barbara becomes the voice in your head. Every time you try to work past your limits, you begin to hear her voice, not as a commanding figure, but as a gentle whisper of reassurance that reminds you of the importance of rest. Her voice is never angry or manipulative; it's simply soothing. a calm and comforting presence that tells you that you deserve time off.

Barbara Gordon’s obsession is not about viewing you as fragile or weak, but rather about seeing them as someone with a critical understanding of the balance between labor and rest. To Barbara, your ideology represents something the world has forgotten, a truth that resonates deeply with her, one that she feels must be protected and nurtured at all costs. She recognizes that you are fighting against the overwhelming expectations of a society that demands constant productivity.

To her, that makes you one of the few who understand the deep moral importance of balance. and she feels a deep, almost reverent responsibility to ensure you never fall prey to the grind of constant work.

Barbara doesn't see you as fragile or too important because of some inherent weakness or need to be protected. She sees your ideology as precious, something that the world cannot afford to lose. Your stance on rest is, in her eyes, revolutionary and vital for the future of society. When she comes to learn of your philosophy, she becomes obsessed. not with controlling you, but with ensuring that you stay true to your beliefs, never falter, and never get swept up into a world that demands you to sacrifice rest in favor of endless toil.

Barbara doesn’t necessarily see you as a villain in the traditional sense, but she does view you as a necessary disruptor of society’s unrelenting work culture. In fact, she admires you for challenging the norms, but she believes you need protection from the consequences of your actions. Barbara's obsession isn't rooted in traditional possessiveness, but more in a protective, almost maternal way, as she sees you as someone trying to "break" the world for the greater good, but is blind to the potential risks involved.

She understands your motivation: your goal is to force society to slow down, to embrace rest, and to dismantle the grind culture that leads to burnout. She sees your ideology as radical, but morally justified, yet she fears that the world won’t be ready for such a drastic shift. Barbara is conflicted, because while she agrees with your cause, she also believes that the world might punish you for your audacity.

her obsession with you isn’t about possessiveness in the traditional sense. Instead, she becomes obsessed with safeguarding the very timeline of your life to ensure that you never fall victim to the overwhelming grind of a society that demands endless productivity. Her obsession isn’t just about protecting you in the physical world, but it’s about protecting your time and ensuring your ideological mission is fulfilled without failure.

She doesn’t just intervene in obvious ways. Barbara starts manipulating the flow of time itself. indirectly, subtly, and through small, almost imperceptible shifts in your environment that allow you to slow down the world around you. This isn’t the conventional ‘she controls your day’ trope. Instead, it’s about creating micro-shifts in time that affect your world without you even knowing it. giving you the space to rest and work toward your villainous goal without ever feeling the weight of external pressure.

ROBIN / DAMIAN WAYNE:

🤯🤯🤯🤯 Imm actually writing this is crazy

Damian does not see you as a person to be worshipped. He sees you as a controlled variable in a long-term psychological experiment. one that only he can run properly. Not because he reveres you, but because he’s utterly convinced that your ideology is flawed, yet correctable. and he is the only one mentally and morally equipped to run that correction.

To Damian, your villainy (saying "hardworking people deserve rest too") is both a philosophical threat and a psychological anomaly. It directly contradicts everything he's been raised to believe. He cannot accept that your ideology exists unpunished or unexamined. But rather than eliminate you like a typical villain, Damian becomes fixated on studying you. long-term, with exacting control and subtle manipulation. because if he can dissect your reasoning and predict your behavior, he can prove something vital:

That true rest is weakness and you’re wrong, or if you somehow prove resilient and coherent under pressure. then he’s the one who’s been broken all along.

So, in essence:

You are not his beloved. You are his test subject. His control. His anomaly.

And he will not let you go until your mind and methods are fully mapped, tested, and resolved.

Damian was raised in a world of rigid cause-and-effect. Pain has meaning. Work brings results. Rest is a consequence of failure. or a brief, tactical necessity.

Your ideology infects him like a splinter in the brain. It doesn’t match anything in his mental model.

He doesn't worship you. he fixates on disproving you. But in that process, he can't help but make you the center of his world. Every move you make becomes data. Every speech, action, or crime you commit is part of the "thesis" he's crafting in his mind about you.

He doesn’t track you because he’s obsessed. He tracks you because he’s testing a hypothesis.

He’s still Robin. Still heroic. Still methodical. But slowly, his motivation shifts from protecting Gotham to solving you. You become the project.

Damian’s arrogance plays beautifully into this version of obsession. He isn’t obsessed with you because you’re special. he’s obsessed because he believes no one else is smart enough or strong enough to see you for what you are: a fault line in the moral fabric of the world.

Everyone else underestimates you. Tries to reform you. He scoffs at them.

They think you're misguided.

He thinks you’re structurally unsound. A riddle. A contradiction.

And that means he must be the one to break your logic. or fix it.

And in his own twisted way, that’s compassion.

Because if you’re right, and hardworking people deserve rest, then what was his childhood for?

What was all his pain, trauma, perfectionism for?

He has to prove you're wrong, because otherwise… he’s the broken one. And he can’t accept that.

He doesn't control your life because he wants to own you.

He exerts subtle, precise pressure on your environment, because he wants to see what you do under increasing moral and emotional strain. He's simulating failure, pressure, fatigue. not to break you, but to force clarity out of you.

He's not trying to keep you safe.

He's trying to force your truth to reveal itself.

Like a philosopher tearing a belief apart from the inside.

He needs you to exist, because without you, he has no framework against which to test the righteousness of everything he’s lived and suffered for.

If you crack?

He wins.

If you endure?

Then he must rebuild his entire worldview.

And that terrifies him.

So he keeps you close. not to hold you, but to observe you until your ideology either collapses or consumes him.

You are not the center of his heart. You are the center of a moral experiment.

He does not protect you. He pressures you in escalating patterns to test the validity of your belief system.

His yandere behavior is not about possession or love. it’s about truth, and how your ideology is the first thing he cannot beat into submission with logic or force.

You are the anomaly. And he will not stop until you are solved.

KEY POINT !!!! yandere is less about how someone expresses love/attachment, and more about how far they go because of it. even if it’s not recognizable as love.

In traditional yandere stories, the obsession is usually romantic or emotional. Here, Damian’s obsession is intellectual and existential.

He builds his entire mental framework around you.

You are the central variable in an internal experiment he cannot stop running.

Every action you take is monitored, processed, tested, and anticipated.

You are not "a person he loves"; you're the fulcrum his entire worldview is balancing on.

That’s obsession. just not emotional. It’s structural. Existential.

Damian doesn’t realize he’s obsessed. It’s rationalized, controlled, and intellectualized.

He’s doing everything a yandere does.

Inserting himself into your life

Manipulating your environment

Isolating you (in a philosophical sense)

Rewriting the narrative around you

He just thinks it’s a mental exercise.

Instead of:

“I love you, I must keep you with me forever,”

It’s:

“You are the most important ideological anomaly I’ve ever encountered. You are too important to be left untested, too unstable to be trusted, and too vital to my self-concept for me to allow you to fade or be resolved by anyone else.”

That’s the energy. just wearing a lab coat instead of holding a bloody knife.

He may not physically harm you or confess to loving you, but he makes your autonomy conditional on his internal criteria.

You can’t rest until he says you’ve passed the “test.”

You can’t “win” until he’s done proving you right or wrong.

You can’t be free of him, because he hasn’t solved you yet.

Classic yanderes often say:

“If I can’t have you, no one can.”

Damian’s version is:

“If I can’t understand you, no one else has the right to.”

The reason why I THINK this still belongs under the “yandere” umbrella is because it follows the same emotional trajectory and internal distortions that define the archetype,

A character loses their sense of boundaries.

They collapse internal identity with another person’s existence.

They override ethical norms to maintain or control the connection.

They believe that they alone can handle or fix this person. whether that’s out of love, duty, or obsession.

Even though Damian’s fixation isn’t expressed through affection, it’s still:

Exclusive (no one else is allowed to analyze or challenge you).

Possessive (you are his to test, his to resolve).

All-consuming (you’re at the center of his private ideological war).

In other words:

It’s yandere, just stripped of emotional romanticism, and rebuilt as a cold-blooded intellectual and moral dependency.

he needs your ideology to function as a mirror.

he needs your continued existence to maintain the integrity of his internal structure.

he needs you to stay active and reactive so his experiment doesn’t break.

If you left, changed, or gave up?

He wouldn’t break down crying.

He would go into internal collapse, because he’d lose the axis around which his entire worldview was rotating.

That’s yandere by architecture, not by emotion.

What makes Damian’s version of obsession so compelling is how unfeeling it appears. yet how deeply entangled it becomes. It’s never about emotion on the surface.

But psychologically? You’re not just "interesting" to him. you’re essential. He needs you to exist, because you're holding up this entire moral paradox in his mind:

“If people deserve rest after working hard… then why have I never been allowed to stop? Why do I keep working, if there’s no rest at the end? Have I been lied to? Or is the system broken? Or am I just… wrong?”

You are the wedge in his psyche, the thing he can’t stop turning over. He has to test you, predict you, control variables in your environment. not because he cares about your wellbeing, but because you’re the final piece of a puzzle he can’t leave unsolved.

And if someone else tries to solve you?

He’ll sabotage them. not out of jealousy, but because they’ll do it wrong. He knows it. They don’t have his experience, his trauma, his methodical logic. In his mind, you can only be understood by someone as broken as him. but he’d never say that out loud.

It’s not “I want you to love me.” It’s “I can’t let you go until I’ve made you make sense.”

When you pull a scheme on Gotham?

he doesn’t stop you immediately.

He’s watching. Monitoring. Logging how citizens react. Tracking who breaks down first.

You’re not just a threat. you’re a pressure mechanism.

“If [Name] believes that rest is a right, how do they choose who deserves it?”

“Do they attack the overworked? The rich? The system?”

“Is this justice or delusion? Compassion or ego?”

He lets the scheme run long enough to study the ideological structure of your action.

He’s not just trying to stop you. he’s peer reviewing your villainy.

He might even let minor chaos happen. People getting evacuated, systems breaking down. He’ll step in before lives are lost, sure, but not too soon. If he cuts it off too quickly, he won’t see the full design.

Damian doesn’t interfere with Nightwing, Bruce, or anyone else doing their jobs. He even plays his part in the missions. But here’s the twist.

He quietly studies how others respond to your villainy.

Who gets emotionally rattled by your message?

Who underestimates your ideological structure?

Who tries to reason with you, and fails?

He doesn't stop them from acting. He just archives their reactions.

You become a new variable in his private, ongoing mental report: “Case Study: The Villain of Rest.”

He lets others interact with you. not to help them, but to observe what fails.

Because eventually, when they can’t stop you effectively?

He will.

And not through brute force, but by proving your model breaks under his terms.

This is where the obsession hits. in the mentality behind his presence.

He’s not trying to control you through force or fear.

He’s trying to regulate your ideology. because your message is too powerful, too destabilizing, to be left unchecked by someone else.

He can’t let Gotham absorb you unchecked.

And he can’t let the Batfam dismantle you without understanding.

So he becomes your buffer.

The line between you and the world.

The one who tracks you, interrupts you, monitors how much chaos you're allowed to create. because only he knows how much is “too much.”

He’s not your protector.

He’s your ideological handler.

When you pull a scheme, Damian Interferes only enough to prevent unintended harm. not to stop the idea.

he shows up consistently not to fight, but to redirect, advise, observe.

he does not interfere with the Batfam’s work, but stays one step ahead of them. so he's always the one who gets to you first.

he builds a system around you in his mind, treating you as a variable he will not allow others to define.

He obsesses over the balance between letting your ideology breathe. and keeping it from mutating.

I realize this is similar to tim’s … oh well 🥀

SIGNAL / DUKE THOMAS:

please god I am so tired

😪 maybe I should follow this ideology too

Duke Thomas, as someone with an intense sense of responsibility and a need to fight injustice, is constantly driven by urgency. His life is often a whirlwind of late nights, constant work, and the feeling that there’s always something else to be done. both as a vigilante and as a young person trying to keep up with everything else.

It’s a never-ending push, an emotional and mental grind that leaves him on edge, even when he tries to find moments of peace. For Duke, balance seems like a distant concept. He thrives on action, but it also leaves him emotionally drained, always caught between the desire to rest and the nagging feeling that he can’t afford to.

Enter YOU! someone who comes into his life embodying everything he craves but can never attain: peace, comfort, and the ability to take a step back. You believe that hardworking people deserve rest, and this philosophy runs completely counter to Duke’s relentless drive. You live by a slower, more intentional pace, where moments of stillness and relaxation are just as important as hard work. You don’t feel the need to constantly prove your worth or fight against every injustice. you trust that things will find balance on their own.

This creates an immediate obsession for Duke. You are the opposite of everything he knows. You are the calm that could soothe his storm, the balance he’s never been able to achieve in his chaotic life.

The more Duke observes you, the more fascinated he becomes, drawn to this energy that seems to defy his worldview. Your way of being seems like the ultimate ideal, something Duke believes he could never fully experience but longs to understand. and ultimately, possess.

Duke's life is emotionally charged with stress, responsibility, and a constant sense of urgency. Everything he does is driven by a desire to help and protect, but there’s always a nagging feeling of inadequacy, like he’s never doing enough. In contrast, you are someone who seems to have found a way to exist without that constant emotional push. The fact that you can take a step back from the relentless pace of life is maddening to him. not in a traditional jealous sense, but in a way that feels like you’ve unlocked something he can’t.

He might watch you (without you knowing), just to understand how you can be so relaxed, how you let go of the pressure that he’s been trained to carry. He doesn’t envy you; he’s desperate to understand how it’s possible to live in a world so chaotic yet still find peace. This, for him, is a form of escape he can’t reach. and it makes you irresistible.

To Duke, you represent the ideal version of balance. someone who isn’t overwhelmed by the weight of the world, someone who has mastered inner peace. He could never be like that, but he starts to obsessively chase after it. He might arrange his life around you, not to control you, but to see if he can mimic your way of being. If your life is calm and steady, maybe his could be too, just by being closer to you. He won’t admit it to himself, but his obsession with you isn’t just about wanting to be near someone like you. it’s about wanting to absorb your philosophy, wanting to be like you.

Every time he’s with you, he becomes acutely aware of the gap between his own chaotic, overworked existence and your serene, unburdened one. This will make him cling to you, but in a way that’s almost paradoxical: he wants to be near you to study you, not in a way that’s invasive or creepy, but with a pure fascination about your lifestyle and how you move through the world so effortlessly.

Instead of an obsession driven by possession, Duke’s fixation stems from a deep need for emotional healing. He believes that you could be the person who helps him find inner peace. not by forcing him to slow down, but by being the calm around which his chaotic life might eventually settle. He might try to subtly influence his environment so that it’s closer to the peaceful vibe you radiate, not for you to notice, but because he’s desperate to create a space where he can relax. That’s why his obsession is so quietly intense. he’s not just drawn to you, but to what you represent: the ability to be content without the need to constantly push.

This makes him see your ideology of "hardworking people deserve rest" as perfect. it’s not just an ideology for him, it’s a rulebook he has been trying to follow but never could quite grasp until now.

Duke will probably start by monitoring your movements and actions, trying to figure out your motivations. He won't just immediately go after you. Instead, Duke might try to gather more information about what you're doing and why. He might even go so far as to shadow you in a way that doesn’t immediately blow his cover, trying to learn from your methods.

He could also be conflicted because there’s something enticing about the way you approach the scheme. For example, you might be pulling off a heist, or perhaps you’re somehow halting the city's productivity, forcing its workers to take mandatory breaks, essentially grinding the gears of Gotham to a halt. It might make him wonder if he, too, can somehow enact a version of your ideology in a less destructive way. one that doesn’t harm people but still forces rest and peace upon Gotham in a controlled, sustainable way.

note: ‘ermmm!!!! this is inaccurate!!!’ ERMMM!!! ykw ur probably right but these r called hcs for a reason aannnddd!!!! i dont car!!!!!

[nr1chaedickrider]

I can only be me when i'm by your side - i'm not a monster.

As time passes recovering, you've seemed to found your place in Jihyo's arms.

cw: fluff, smut, angst, petnames, virgin!reader, sweet girl!jihyo, popular but not so popular!jihyo, basketball player!jihyo, both are 18 but they are students, mentions of death, drunk confessions, they fall in love pretty fast, lwk rushed, lmk if there is more ^_^, ~ 4k words

if you're thinking "hm! i read this fic somewhere... yes! its my heeseung fic from my bg blog @adorwoo ! which i wanted to use for jihyo !^_^ hope you enjoy anyway.

men dni.

It's not your fault.

It's not your fault.

It's not your fault.

It's not your...

Is it really?

The rain beats down on your black umbrella, the lines from Dahyun's letter playing over and over in your head. It feels like you're trapped in a vicious cycle, not being able to think of anything else.

But why?

Why didn't she tell you?

Were all those conversations about the mutual trust between you two a lie? Was it just talk to keep you from worrying?

If someone had told you a week ago that you had to be at her funeral because she had killed herself, you would have laughed at that person. Dahyun was always the happiest person you've ever met.

Even if you had been told that a day ago, you wouldn't have believed it. Because in theory, it's the stupidest thing you've ever heard.

In his letter, she wrote about how much she loved you, how she enjoyed every minute and every moment with you, how it's not your fault that she's not here anymore.

She's probably right, not just probably. She's right, and you know it. But you can't stop blaming yourself. Someone has to take the blame. Someone is responsible.

You could have helped her.

You should have helped her.

Tears run down your cheeks as you stare at her grave. Her family, her friends, they are all gone. You stand here alone, not daring to leave.

'Kim Dahyun

Born on may 28, 1998.

A friend, daughter and lover.

She will continue to live in our souls.'

It feels like your eyes are glued to the writing, you can't look away. You try to regulate your breathing, taking a deep breath.

A sigh leaves your mouth as you place the white rose next to the gravestone.

You take one last look at her grave before turning and slowly walking away.

-

"I'm Y/n, nice to meet you all."

You look at the students in front of you, all of them giving you strange looks. Of course, you are a new student, but you feel uncomfortable under their gaze. The teacher smiles at you and tells you where to sit, next to a girl called Mina.

It's as if everyone has forgotten about you again as the teacher starts teaching. You sit down next to Mina and she smiles at you.

"Nice to meet you," she whispers. You smile at her.

You can't talk to her for long because she starts taking notes for the lesson. You look around at the faces of the others. It actually looks like a normal class, but your eyes land on a girl.

She looks shorter than you, her hair is brown as well as her eyes. She's wearing a white t-shirt.

"Have you laid your eye on someone?" asks Mina, laughing a little.

"No!" you answer, a little too loudly, and you put your head on the table as a few people look at you. "I was just looking at her," you whisper.

"Yeah yeah... that's what they all say" she says.

You slowly lose yourself in your thoughts as memories of Dahyun come flooding back.

Should you even look at other girls? Is it bad?

Would Dahyun hate you for trying to find love again?

It's been more than two months since she died, but you can't stop thinking about her.

Maybe it's normal, your behavior. Your overthinking of everything, maybe you're not the only person who feels this way? Maybe there is someone else who is just as lost in their thoughts as you are.

Maybe you are simply not alone.

However, your thoughts are interrupted by the bell and Mina.

"I can show you a few things here at school if you want," she suggests, and you gratefully accept her help.

You spend the whole lunch break running after her while she shows you around.

"Why did you change schools anyway? Your old one is a pretty well-known one, and much better than here," she asks, before taking a bite of her sandwich.

The question makes you wonder, and you think about whether you should just lie to her and say that you moved, or that you were somehow bullied at your school - but somehow it feels wrong. Because you neither moved nor were you bullied. No, everything was actually fine.

Actually,

Somehow everything changed after her death.

Your classmates started looking at you funny, and you still don't know whether they are looks of pity or looks of condemnation because they blame you.

"I don't know" is your answer, and somehow it's true. Sometimes you really have no idea why you changed schools, but Mina doesn't need to know the whole truth.

She just nods in response as she continues to eat.

"The girl you were looking at in English, her name is Jihyo by the way" she says.

What?

"Why are you telling me this?" you ask.

"Because you were staring at her a lot - you looked really interested in her" she replies with a little grin.

"How many times do I have to tell you, I wasn't staring at her..." you laugh a little, but can't hide your despair. Why does she think you're interested in her?

-

"Watch out!" someone shouts, but before you can react, a basketball hits you.

You fall to the floor, your head hurts and you feel slightly dizzy as you slowly open your eyes.

The girl from your English class is kneeling on the floor in front of you, looking at you, trying to see if you're okay.

It's like a cliché high school movie.

"Are you okay?" she asks, a couple of other girls come over, but she just tells them to get something to cool off and shoos them away.

The things that can happen when you want to visit the gym...

You nod slowly, after a few blinks your vision is no longer blurry.

Another girl comes back and hands Jihyo a cold pack.

"Here, take this," she says and puts it in your hand, her hand on your shoulder to support you.

You hold it to your head, biting the inside of your cheek slightly from the cold.

Before she can say anything else, she is called by his coach, at the same moment Mina comes to you.

"I was looking for you," she says and helps you up.

You watch Jihyo jogging across the field before you leave the gym.

-

New week, new luck?

Every day you tried desperately to talk to Jihyo somehow, but suddenly she was always gone after class and you were never put in a group together.

But it looks like luck is on your side for once.

"Here's the list of groups, you have to give a presentation in pairs on a play of your choice," your English teacher announces.

You look at the picture projected on the wall.

Chaeyoung and Mina,

Sana and Miyeon,

Jihyo and Y/n,

Jeongyeon and...

Wait, what?

You read the list again and once more you see your name and Jihyo's name next to each other.

"Jihyo and Y/n," you say quietly.

"Are you happy?" Mina asks teasingly with a grin on her lips.

"Are you happy that you have to work with Chaeyoung?" you ask back - Mina doesn't answer.

Before your teacher can give you any more homework for the break, the school bell rings and everyone rushes out of the classroom.

You walk (or rather, run) to Jihyo who is packing her things away.

"Hey, I was wondering when we should meet," you say, and she looks up at you and smiles. You feel your cheeks turning red.

She puts on his backpack and stands up.

"How about Friday afternoon? My place?" she suggests and you nod.

She takes a pen from her pocket, "Give me your hand," she says, you are confused but do it anyway.

She opens the pen with her mouth, the cap between her teeth as she gently writes on your hand.

Her phone number.

It feels like she's giving you an autograph.

"Text me and I'll send you my address," she says, and before you can answer, she walks out of the room.

You look down at your hand and see a little smiley face next to her number.

You can't help but giggle as you look at it.

-

You stare at your phone - up to her front door and back down to your phone.

You are 10 minutes early and don't dare to ring the doorbell.

"You know you can just ring the bell?" someone asks you, you look up and see Jihyo smiling at you.

"I'm early, that's why-"

"Not a problem," she interrupts you.

She lets you in and closes the door behind her.

Her house is beautiful, modern and yet somehow old-fashioned.

"My parents aren't here, so I thought we could study in the living room," she says, and you nod, leaning your backpack against the table.

"Water?" she asks and you take it gratefully.

You drink a little before she sits down across from you.

You both leaf through the books, take notes, talk briefly about certain passages, but otherwise no one says anything.

Jihyo decides to break the awkward atmosphere.

"I wanted to apologize again, for the basketball," she says, and you laugh a little.

"You don't have to apologize, things like that can happen," you reply.

"Have you ever had a girlfriend?" she asks, and instead of answering, you are completely silent, thinking.

Memories of Dahyun come back while Jihyo looks at you and waits for your answer.

"Yes, I did, but she died a few months ago," you answer.

She nods slightly, "Can I ask how he died?" she asks in a quiet, polite tone, as if she really wants to make sure that she's asking something that doesn't hurt you in any way.

"Suicide," you say, short and meager, without many details (whether you know many details at all is another question).

She looks at you with a supportive look, one that makes you feel like she's really listening and that she really understands you.

Maybe she understands you even more than you think?

She puts her hand on yours with a slight smile.

"Thank you for confiding in me," she says, your cheeks slightly flushed, hers too.

You both look at each other for a moment before she lets go and you both go back to work.

-

If only the work had gone on for longer.

After the one meeting, you saw her every day of the vacation. Always with the excuse that you supposedly "need to add something" (does going to the movies together add something to your project?).

It's been more than a week since you first met.

"You're in love," Mina says as she parks her car in front of Jihyo's house.

"I-"

"Don't even try to find an excuse, it's all good" she replies with a small grin.

You both get out of the car and walk to her house, the music so loud you can hear it several meters away.

How Jihyo, who is slightly drunk, hears the doorbell is also a mystery to you.

"Hey guys!" she greets you, she shakes Mina's hand and gives her a kind of high five, she gives you a hug.

You smile at her as the three of you walk into the living room.

"I'm going to Chaeyoung," Mina whispers, or rather shouts, in your ear before disappearing.

"Y/n, do you want to play a drinking game with us?" asks Jihyo, you nod.

Maybe it was a stupid decision.

Jihyo and her friends (of whom you only know Jeongyeon) only understand drinking games to mean taking shots and asking stupid questions.

Either answer - or drink.

You always chose the second option.

After about 7 questions (maybe more, maybe less - you lost count of that pretty fast) you get up and say that you need some fresh air.

Since you've been to her house several times, you know where the upstairs balcony is.

It's quite big, with a parasol and two folding chairs. You sit down on one and close your eyes, your head throbs a little.

"Are you okay?" someone asks after a few minutes.

To your surprise (not really a surprise), Jihyo stands next to you before sitting down on the chair to your right.

"Yeah, it's just the alcohol," you say.

You and alcohol, not really a good combination.

Especially not when you're sitting next to the girl you're in love with.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" you ask out of nowhere.

She shakes his head, "I thought it was obvious" she says and laughs a little.

"I love you" you confess.

She turns to you, but before he can answer anything, you keep talking.

"I know we haven't known each other that long... a month?? more? less? but-... I just have this feeling with you that I only used to have with her"

"I thought I'd never feel it again," you say, a tear running down your cheek.

Jihyo looks at you, her eyes slightly watery.

Is she crying too?

"Y/n" she says, interrupting your continued rambling.

She gets up, kneels down in front of your chair, and -

kisses you.

Her soft lips on yours.

She pulls away after just a few seconds and you already feel like you miss her lips.

"I love you too Y/n" she says softly.

You look at her in amazement.

"Really?" you ask.

"That's why I asked if you had a girlfriend" now it all makes so much more sense.

She pulls you up and takes you to the guest room. She tries to lay you down on the bed but you pull her with you and she falls on top of you.

You both stare at each other and laugh a little.

"You're drunk, get some rest," she says, kissing your forehead.

"I'll be here when you wake up"

-

And she really is next to you when you wake up.

"Good morning..." you groan as you rub your eyes.

She smiles at you, "good morning" she says, from the look on her face you suspect she woke up just a few minutes before you.

You pull her closer to you by her collar and kiss her, she kisses you back while her hand is on your cheek.

The kiss is just perfect, gentle, slow, a perfect way to start his morning.

But it can also be perfect in another way.

It gets warmer under the covers as you continue kissing, she kisses down your jaw to your neck, leaving a trail of wet kisses on it. You can't help but rub your thighs together a little.

"What about the others?" you ask.

"I kicked them out yesterday after you fell asleep" she says, continuing to kiss your neck, even nibbling on it, making you let out soft moans.

"Jihyo, I think you should know that I am a virgin" you say, your cheeks heating up a little in embarrassment.

She giggles a little, kissing you on the lips again.

"Nothing to be embarrassed about baby" she replies with a smile.

She gets on top of you, continuing to kiss you.

You think kissing Jihyo is the best thing in the world.

Her hands trail over your body, giving you a soft squeeze here and there.

"Can I?" she asks, her hand playing with the buttons on your pants.

"Please" you answer with a smile.

She complies and opens them, pulling off your pants and leaving you in your underwear.

You sit up a little, your hands on her waist, feeling up her muscles, especially her abs.

"Want me to take it off?" she asks, you nod.

She pulls off her shirt over her head, dropping it somewhere on the floor.

Your finger trails up his stomach to her bra, looking at her like she is a work of art (she definetly is one).

"Done admiring me?" she asks with a teasing grin, to which you reply "never".

She leans down again, kissing your face as she starts to trail them down till he arrives at the waistband of your underwear.

"Can I?" she asks again, "yes" you answer, already out of breath.

She takes your underwear off, her hands placed on your thighs as she leaves kisses everywhere.

You can definetly tell that she has a thing for kissing.

When she places a kiss right on your clit though, you let out a small moan.

She begins licking and sucking on it, making you grab her hair with your hands as your fingers curl deeper into her scalp, leaving a delicious burn.

She drags her tongue down as she circles your core, slowly entering it a little.

You let out more moans as you turn your head to the side, moaning into the pillow.

Her tongue feels so good when you realise that you are closer and closer to your climax.

"Jihyo- I think I'm gonna-"

"Let it out princess" she mumbles against your core, the vibrations of her voice stimulating you even more as you cum into her mouth.

She smiles at you as he sits up, watching you coming down from your high.

You smile back at him as your cheeks turn red again.

"Can I?" she asks, her fingers trailing down your soft skin as her nails scratch you a little.

You look at her hand, a few veins poking out, her fingers thin but long.

You look at her again, nodding.

You pulled her closer as she rubs your clit with her fingers, you suck in your breath as she slowly pushes them in, the little stretch burning in a way that makes you even hornier.

She slips them in completly, you let out a moan in response. She takes your hand with her free one as your fingers intertwine.

She starts to slowly thrust into you, kissing you again as her tongue explores your mouth.

"You're so tight baby.." she mumbles into your mouth.

You can't help but let out louder moans when she starts to speed up a little.

Her fingers drive you crazy, it feels like she is everywhere, you feel her everywhere in your body as she exits and enters you.

"P-please jihyo- faster" you moan out, and who would she be if she wouldn't listen to your wishes?

She speeds up her thrusts, kissing down your neck again as her hot breath hits your skin.

Your hand grips the pillow your hand is laying on, moaning against your arm as you can feel Jihyo curling her fingers.

She thrusts into you again before you moan loudly, cumming as your thighs close around her wrist, panting heavily as she lets herself fall onto the spot next to you.

You both stare at the ceiling, the only sounds the heavy breathing from you.

You move her hand to yours and intertwine your fingers. She moves her head to the side to look at you, smiling.

You think seeing her smiling is something you can never get enough of.

-

Idiots in love, thats how you two can be described.

The next few months were full of love. Kisses here, kisses there. It didn't even have to be sexual, no, it was always romantic, no matter what you did together.

After a few months, she gave you a ring.

"One day I'll buy you an expensive, real diamond ring and ask you to marry me," she said, and since then you've both worn the matching rings without taking them off once.

If only it had stayed that way.

It's late at night, you're lying in bed reading a book when you get a message.

"I love you,

I'm sorry" - from Jihyo.

You sit up and stare at your cell phone.

"What's wrong?" you type and send the message, she replies,

"I can't take it anymore"

She can't take it anymore?

You feel a twinge in your head as you suddenly realize something.

It's too similar to Dahyun's goodbye.

"I can't live in this world anymore" she wrote in her text.

You look at her location, and without hesitation you walk, no - storm out of your apartment and run to her.

She's not far away, a bridge situated over a river only 5 minutes away, and you think you've never been so grateful for anything.

You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to see anything while your clothes get wetter and wetter, the rain completly drenches you.

Again it feels like a cliché love drama.

Only maybe this time you have the chance to have a happy ending.

Your legs are burning from all the running as you arrive on the bridge.

"Jihyo!" you shout, the rain pattering loudly on the asphalt, forcing you to shout even louder for her.

Her bike is right next to her, one leg over the railing, her hands gripping it tightly, as if she's...

Scared?

"Y/n?" she answers, her voice low and shaky.

"Please..." you say as you walk slowly towards her.

She doesn't stop you when you take her hand in yours.

"Why didn't you tell me?" you ask, she looks at you as a tear runs down her cheek.

"I-... I didn't want you to worry. I thought this feeling would go away if I didn't talk to anyone about it," she says.

Whether your face is wet from the rain or your tears, you don't know.

"Believe me, you have to talk to me, then it will get better," you say.

Her face comes closer to yours and, without answering, she kisses you.

You kiss her back, try to grab her so you can hold her closer - but she lets go.

Completely.

You slowly open your eyes, afraid of what you will see - but you see nothing.

No one.

The rain completely overwhelms you.

"No..." you whisper, looking down on the floor and picking up something shiny.

Her ring.

You look out over the railing and see the water turning slightly red.

It feels like you're trapped in a vicious circle, like you'll never find peace again.

You are trapped, with no way out.

-

While other people find the rain soothing, you find it to be more like torture.

While other people would stay indoors in weather like this, you're outside again.

Again in front of a grave.

But this time it's Jihyo's.

Everything feels too similar and you hate it more than anything.

"It's not your fault" is a sentence you started to hate.

You hoped so much that you would never have to hear or read it again.

"Why didn't you talk to me..." you whisper, as if she could hear you.

Your hand clutches the letter, it slowly getting soaked by the rain.

You don't dare to move.

"You knew what happened..."

All time does is passing -

"Why did you hide it from me..." Your voice is full of despair.

And all you ever do is grieve.

"Life without you is no way to live" the white flower falls on his grave -

just like her ring,

engraved with your name.

She helped you recover from Dahyun's death.

You just wish you wouldn't have to recover over her death alone now.

In another universe, you've seemed to found your place in Jihyo's arms.

In this universe, you're left alone,

again.

[mrderofcr0ws]

HEADLOCK

JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES

that was the name written on a gravestone in brooklyn with no body below it since the sergeant had been pronounced dead in 1945.

the body that once belonged to that name was now hydra's most prized possession— but the winter soldier was not the only danger locked away down in the remote siberian facility. you were there, too. a monster made from horrors most refused to believe could be real.

two trained killing machines.

one bound to commands and trigger words.

the other bound to instinct and bloodlust.

it had been a long time since either of you had seen the sun. you could get out with his help in the brief, painful moments of clarity he had. when he answered to that long forgotten name, you could escape together.

but bucky was often buried under that brooklyn headstone-and the winter soldier who slept in the bunk below you nearly every night was a danger to even you.

this is a fic that explores bucky's time in hydra. the content warnings are as follows: torture, manipulation, angst, pain, psychological horror, graphic descriptions and language, poetic comparisons to cannibalism, hurt with minimal comfort at times, stockholm syndrome, smut, degrading, power imbalance, canon divergence. 18+ fic.

— DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT WARNING —

THIS SPECIFIC CHAPTER OF “HEADLOCK”CONTAINS A NEW SET OF POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING CONTENT ON TOP OF THE ONES LISTED ABOVE THAT PERTAINS TO THE TRUAMA OF THE READERS CHARACTER. THE LIST IS AS FOLLOWS: kidnapping, themes of stalking, implied sexual abuse and assault, drugging, mutilation, and trafficking.

bucky x fem!reader (you have a given name in this fic for the sake of making writing easier, but it will be used sparingly)

word count: idk i write on tumblr... but this one is really, really long, guys, im ngl… (roughly edited)

<- previous part

author note: this chapter is heavily inspired by the song “strangers” by ethel cain. i recommend giving it a listen after you read to deepen the experience. on my masterlist, i shared my bucky playlist that i use to write this fic, too. music is a big source of inspiration for me — the title of this fic and each chapter’s title are a direct reference to the imogen heap song ‘headlock’ (except this one) — and a lot of what i write has songs to go along with the emotions that i try to capture and portray. i hope you enjoy if you decide to listen to the song or take a peek at my playlist.

sorry in advance, everyone.

-crow

PART FIVE —

— WITH MY MEMORY RESTRICTED TO A POLAROID IN EVIDENCE.

a girl had been born to a mother and a father in a small romanian town in 1919.

her mother tended to the house and grew the prettiest flowers in the front garden. she had flowers that bloomed in every season and she had the longest hair anyone had ever seen. her father was a factory worker. he helped manufacture car parts like steering wheels and headlights. he was a strong man. strong like an ox who could lift his two children over his head like they weighed nothing at all, even when they grew to be too big.

this girl had a little brother and her little brother went on to become a scholar as they got older. a scientist. a virologist determined to cure the sick. he moved away to a bigger city when he was old enough and had enough money in his pockets. but he was a good boy. a kind one. he always sent money back home. he sent his sister pictures of the city he lived in and wrote to her every month.

the girl stayed with her parents.

she stayed with her mother— and she and her mother opened a flower shop out of their garage together. it had been her idea. her mother was hesitant. she did not see the value others could find in flowers grown from their garden— but the girl had heard the compliments. their neighbors always had nice things to say as they crossed paths. she saw how people would stop and stare outside their house.

with a bit of persistence and a sweet charming smile, her mother came around to the idea.

for years, she and her mother sold the prettiest flowers for the prettiest shiny pennies. they spent the spring knee deep in dirt, planting seeds and dirtying their nails as they giggled together. in the summer, they would fan themselves off and drink cold iced tea under the shade of their garage head, selling out their flower supply in a matter of days.

she had a good life.

she had been a happy girl.

in 1943 at the age of 24, the girl had met a man deployed to her town during world war ii. an officer.

he took a great liking to her and came to visit her every day. she paid him no mind outside of small conversations and pouring him a glass of iced tea when he asked for one. he paid a dollar every time and she slipped it into her pocket. her mother always beamed when he came by. hospitality was her trade and she welcomed the solider each and every time he popped his head into the garage.

her mother would’ve been cross with her if she knew that her daughter was taking a dollar from him for a cup of iced tea— but it was their little secret.

the girl now grown grew used to his presence.

she grew used to his persistence, too.

he wasn’t so bad to be around when he brought chocolates. he had learned how to swoon the stubborn girl who had caught his eye— and the officer asked on her a date.

a man on deployment shouldn’t date but what else was there to do in that tiny romanian town.

and she agreed.

of course, she had. she’d grown fond of him. a foolish little thing with a crush, she had come to enjoy his visits. when he asked her out, he’d brought her a new dress for the occasion and promised to have her home by 9 o’clock.

how sweet things could sour so terribly…

she never returned from her date on july 9th, 1943.

her mother never saw her again and all the flowers in the garden died. her father lost his strength and he could hardly lift himself out of bed. his brother grew sick with grief and he left the city to return home.

it was all a story.

it was a sad story that filled you with dread knowing there was no way to change the fate of the poor girl who had been stolen away.

but that’s all it was.

just a story.

you had no memories of pretty flowers. no memories of doting parents. no memories of a little brother. there was no house you could close your eyes and picture. there was no town to call home. there were no neighbors. no friends. no officer.

the pictures in the folder made your throat sting. the girl in them had your face. it was the face you could not look at in the mirror— but her story meant nothing.

her story was not yours.

yours had only began where hers ended.

that was the difference between you and the winter soldier— and if nick fury was trying to appeal to a better side of you he believed had to exist by handing you that folder, he was wrong.

whatever hydra had done to you in the very beginning, it was different than what they had done to him. you had no memories— but he had his. they were buried under the rubble of the thousands of pieces they shattered him into over and over again. like shards of a broken mirror, everything reflected off of each other. it was too hard to make sense of— and that is why they tortured him.

they made it too hard for him to sort through the pieces by jumbling them up each and every time he got the courage to try.

your mind was void of everything that came before. it was a blank white space like the room you sat in now.

that is why manipulation and brainwashing could not work on you the way it did for him. there was nothing they could toy with. there was nothing they could take away because they already had— so much so that you could only see the blocks that built your story for yourself when they were placed in front of you within the folder.

pictures of the girl named isla were not the only ones paper clipped to the pages holding any and every bit of information there was about her. a picture of her parents. a picture of her and her brother. a picture of their house in romania. your heart ached as you rubbed the pad of your thumb over the picture of this girl’s mother— but there was no lightbulb.

there was no click.

there was nothing you could recall about this woman— of either women in those pictures.

but you knew one face in that folder better than you even knew your own.

as you flipped the page, his face was clipped to the top of the sheet of paper with the red logo at the top.

hydra.

a hydra document.

a hydra officer.

nikta patrova’s face stared stone-cold back at you.

“stop it,” a far, far away voice cried out. “don’t touch me! please, stop! stop!”

you shut your eyes and all you could see was the blank white void. in every direction you looked in the space behind your eyelids, it was nothing but white. it wasn’t anything at all.

“get off me!”

the ground below your feet began to tremble.

the sound that echoed in the space between your ears was the awful, terrible crackling sound of ice giving way. kukukuku.

the void in your mind was not a void at all.

it was a landscape of unyielding winter— and the ice below your feet shattered, sending you sinking into the freezing depths of a darkness long sealed away.

the smell of blood burned your nose as you crawled through the tall grass under a moonless sky. one hand after the other, you heaved yourself across the dirt. across the grass. across the field.

he tugged you back by your ankles and a sharp, petrified gasp ejected from your lungs. you screamed as you twisted and writhed on the ground like a snake with its head cut off. your nails dug into his arms. blood painted your nails as you tore open skin— but he only snickered.

“shhh,” he hushed as he covered your mouth with his large, calloused hand. “come on, don’t be this way.”

you bit down on his hand and blood stained your teeth. he hissed, pulling his hand back. he put the wound in his mouth, grunting as he suckled on the hurt.

“you little bitch…” he whispered.

the dirt suffocated you and you choked on it each time you tried to draw breath. it stuck to your blood stained mouth as he pressed his palm down into the back of your head and held you in place. on a breezeless summer night, the rustle in the grass was no fault of the winds.

you never saw that field by the river again.

you never took the path back into the town you called home.

and you never returned to the house with the prettiest flowers in the front garden at 9 o’clock.

“get up,”the officer said. he grabbed you by your elbow and hoisted you to your feet. “walk.”

it was hard to walk. you had been cramped in the trunk of that dirty, rusty car for hours. the sun was too bright. you stumbled alongside him as he guided you by the back of your neck towards a warehouse.

you hit the floor hard as he shoved you inside. you scraped your hands on the concrete floor. your knees, too. you looked up with tears in your eyes. in the warehouse, men dressed in dark uniforms stood around a circular table.

“nikta,” one of them turned. a general. he glanced at you with little interest. his next words were in a language you didn’t understand. “what is this?”

nikta grabbed you by the roots of your hair. a cry escaped you and you reached up to grab his wrists. he dragged you over to the table of uniformed men and whispered two words you could not understand.

two words that had damned you.

“she bites.”

you cried ceaselessly in that dusty, dirty trunk when he shoved you back inside it.

you cried ceaselessly when he and the group of uniformed generals forced you onto an airplane.

you cried ceaselessly as you were put in chains and led inside one of hydra’s weapon facilities.

you only stopped crying once they put you in a cell.

you stopped crying because you weren’t alone.

“hey,” a low, soft voice whispered.

you turned at the sound. through the metal bars to your left, you saw the silhouette of him. you wiped your face off on your arms and winced as you made your way across the cold stone floor to the bars separating you both.

“you alright?” the pale, blue-eyed man asked you. he had bruises on his face and bags under his eyes. his short, dark hair was a mess across his forehead. “christ, they roughed you up pretty bad, huh?”

“i…i don’t understand you,” you whispered through trembling lips. you spoke no english. you spoke no russian like the guards did. you had been drowning for days in words you didn’t understand.

his eyes widened, “romanian? you speak romanian? i mean— you’re romanian?”

it felt like god had heard your prayers to hear him speak the only language you understood. you couldn’t help but cry. you placed your hands atop his on the bars and wept like a baby.

“yes.” you cried. your head dropped and you curled into yourself. big, wet tears left streaks on your dirty face. “you— you are, too?”

“yeah. my grandparents moved from there to america.” he said with a smile. he squeezed your hands and rubbed them between his, trying to warm up your fingers. you hadn’t noticed how cold you were.

“how long have you been here?” you asked in a whisper, glancing around at the cold, desolate cells around you. he had been the only one down here before you showed up.

his smile faltered but he tried to keep a brave face. “only a little while.”

he was lying and you knew it, but you didn’t push.

“what’s your name?” he asked as he settled down to sit directly across from you.

“isla,” you told him softly. you sniffled and wiped your face on your sleeves. “my names isla.”

“isla,” he grinned as he said your name. “it’s nice to meet you. i’m james but my friends call me bucky.”

“james,” you said with a small smile.

“bucky,” he corrected. he gave your hands a soft squeeze and whispered like a promise, “we are friends now, isla. call me bucky.”

“friends.” you agreed, squeezing his hand back.

they left you to rot in your cell for more days than you could count.

but they always took him away.

like clockwork, they came each morning to take him and brought him back each night. every day got worse. he lost more and more weight. you tried to share the food they would toss at you but he would politely decline. every time he tried to eat it would all come back up, anyways.

he would apologize to you profusely after he tossed up nothing but bile in the corner of his cell. you would have to cover your ears at the sound of him gagging. the air would smell like sickness. he’d apologize for it over and over again as you sat together with the iron bars separating you.

the time passed slow but he made it all a little easier.

he was a talker.

he would talk about anything and everything even when he didn’t feel well just to keep the quiet away.

he hated the quiet.

he told you about where he had grown up. about his parents. about his sister. he told you about his best friend steve and how they had turned him into a super soldier.

captain america.

you knew that name. you had seen a picture of him in the newspaper not too long ago. he was spotted in europe traveling around to boost the moral of the america troops.

bucky took that news as bravely as he could.

his best friend was on the same continent as him— but no one knew where he was and he doubted very much that they had any resources to spare towards looking for him.

he made his peace with it.

it was you who did not.

“bucky,” you murmured.

“hm?” he asked without opening his eyes. he was holding your hand through the bars like always, exhausted and cold. the two of you were trembling, trying to seek each others body heat despite the bars between you.

“do you think we’ll die down here?”

he opened his eyes and met your gaze. he pulled his hand from yours and slipped it through another bar, placing his hand on your cheek. he wiped the tears off your nose and shook his head.

“nah,” he whispered with a smile. “you and me? we’re going to live until we’re a hundred, darlin’.”

you giggled and placed your hand atop his, pressing your face into his touch. “a hundred?”

“at least that, yeah.” he chuckled.

you slept easy that night.

but the next morning, it wasn’t bucky they took.

“let her go!” he roared, slamming against the bars of the cell. he tried to grab at the officers who dragged you out and into the hallway. “isla!”

you reached for him, the tips of your fingers grazing.

the officer who had stolen you away once before stole you away again once more.

that was the last time you saw bucky.

that was the last memory the girl in the pictures had before you took her place.

you opened yours eyes and stared at the folder in your lap. you brought your hands to your face, touching the tears pouring down. you wiped at them. over and over again until your skin was raw, you wiped your face dry.

the imaginary lightbulb above your head flickered.

nikta.

the hydra officer who had stolen you away and made you what you were— it was all him. every single bit.

he chose you to be weapon-v.

he brought you to hydra and threw you at their feet.

you were his project and they froze him year after year alongside you so that he could keep his eyes on you.

and yet in the end, he turned the gun on bucky and you killed him for it…

why would he have done that after all this time?

you could’ve been sick all over yourself at you saw his stone-cold glare in the picture beside yours. you grabbed the picture out of the folder and let out a bereaved scream. you tore it to shreds as disgust spread across your skin and infected the marrow of your bones.

you fell back against the bed and cried into your pillow. your clawed at the mattress. rage vibrated in every cell of your body. you could’ve torn the room apart— but you were weak. fear made you weak.

the despair you felt knowing there were so many more gaps to fill in froze you still on the bed as you shed tear after tear.

you wanted your mother.

you curled into yourself despite the way your wound protested and clutched the photo of your parents to your chest.

they were long since dead by now.

and you should’ve been reaching the end of your time, too, but you were nearly still that young girl they lost all those years ago.

— ☆ —

“i want everything you have on him.”

nick finished placing down your food but you pushed the small table away. you weren’t hungry.

“the files we have on sergeant barnes are classified.” nick said with a sympathetic frown. “sorry, kid.”

“i’m classified,” you hissed out from between your sharp teeth. “give me the damn files.”

nick stared at you for a long, painful moment.

tears were brimming on your lashes and you tried so hard to fight them— but you couldn’t.

“please,” you begged in a broken voice. you closed your eyes and the tears fell free. “i need to know what happened to him.”

“let me make a call.”

you looked up but nick was already out the door. a soft breath of relief escaped you and you turned your head. the food was steaming beside you. freshly prepared.

you swallowed your pride and ate it.

it wasn’t too bad…

— ☆ —

when you saw nick again, he had a file in his hand. not only that but an agent behind him wheeled in a television. your brows pinched together as you sat up.

“here’s the deal,” nick said, holding up the folder. “i show you everything i have on barnes and you tell me everything i wanna know about the two of you. got it?”

you nodded once.

you’d decide whether or not you’d tell him anything of substance when he asked the questions.

his folder felt as heavy as a headstone in your hands.

you placed it down on your lap and ran the tips of your fingers over his name.

SGT. JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES

HOWLING COMMANDO

[ DECEASED ]

you held your breath as you opened the folder.

a massive stack of papers with every bit of information there was of him greeted you. your heart sank as you skimmed the old, aged ink.

his name. his birthday. his height and weight. his birthplace. his parents names. his enlistment papers. his mission logs.

the medical report from the day he’d been brought back to his company.

you had not been with him the day captain america broke into the hydra base and freed his friend.

doctor zola had sent you away three days earlier to the siberian facility in the mountains. when bucky was freed by steve, they were pulling out all your teeth and reconstructing your jaw.

the answer to the longstanding question between the two of you was now answered.

you had been made first.

you bit the inside of your cheek as you picked up the note smooshed between the next two pages. the crumpled, stained piece of old parchment had his handwriting on it.

you touched the words written in pencil.

——————————————————————————

santa,

her name is isla and i need help to find her.

i have to get her out.

i told her we’d live until we were 100.

- bucky 12/25/1944

——————————————————————————

“oh, god.” you cried, clutching the note to your chest.

guilt burned through every inch of you.

how could you have forgotten him?

the sweet-hearted soldier who held your hands and wiped away your tears. how could you have forgotten that? it was as clear to you now as the moment it had happened— but where had it gone?

where had it all gone?

where had he gone?

you brought the note to your lips and held it against them. it smelled old and worn. when you closed your eyes and tried to picture his face, the only thing you saw was winter and his blank, icy stare.

it was hard to imagine them as one person— just like it was nearly impossible for you to see yourself as the girl in those photos.

bucky hated the quiet. you could recall so vividly now how he hummed a soft, jazzy tune each night you both would grow too tired to talk. he would run his fingers through your hair and hum until he exhausted himself.

winter was quiet. far too quiet.

they weren’t the same.

you and isla weren’t the same.

not anymore.

as you flipped the page, you saw the date at the top of the paper and your heart sank.

1945.

bucky had never found you.

though he tried, a years time had passed and there was no trace of you. you where a ghost in the snow and there were bigger missions for him to see out.

you didn’t blame him.

you couldn’t.

because even if he had found you, you wouldn’t have been able to recall his face.

it was fight in the freight-car that got him killed. he was hanging on to the dangling door for dear life as steve tried to reach him. but it broke. and he fell.

bucky was pronounced dead on january 9th, 1945.

the winter soldier project was resumed on january 9th, 1945 when he was found by hydra soldiers who took him to the facility in the mountains.

you were in your first sleep when they brought him in. underneath the floor frozen in a cryochamber, neither of you had any idea that you were together again.

he didn’t know that you had lived.

and you didn’t know that he had died.

a little less so than before, but you two were soon to become strangers to each other once more.

it broke your heart to read that there were no efforts made in finding him. it was accepted throughout the whole of his platoon that the fall had killed him and it was too dangerous to try and find his impact sight in the mountains.

his friends believed that he was alone and broken in the snow all this time.

and you hadn’t even remembered him.

you covered your mouth with your hand and stifled a sob as you saw the pictures of him. a collage of four. a couple paperclipped to the back of the folder. you wiped away your tears before they could fall and you tried through hardest to see through them as you pulled the piece of paper with all of them glued down out of the folder.

“hello, soldier.” you whispered, touching the picture of him in his uniform.

he was handsome.

you had forgotten how handsome bucky was.

you brushed your thumb across the photo of his face with the cut on it. you knew that cut. you had dabbed your sleeve against it to try and stop it from bleeding. it was one of the last things you had done before you were taken away.

how bittersweet it was to know that photo had been taken of him after he had been brought back safe.

you unclipped the two photos on the back of the folder carefully. a soft smile curled across your lips at the picture of him and his buddy captain america.

his best friend steve.

it was nice to put an unmasked face to steve’s name.

it was strange to see him with short hair— to remember him with it. it made it all the more hard to accept that his man was the same man you had spent every single day with up until your capture.

he was the same man you shared a cell with.

he was the same you are every meal with.

he was the same man you showered with.

he was the same man you punched and kicked and bit and fucked.

but it wasn’t the same man it all.

the man in these pictures was someone you hadn’t seen in a long, long time despite the fact that you had been with him just yesterday.

bucky was a ghost.

sometimes, you heard him whisper and you could see the remnants of him flickering in winter’s cold blue eyes— but bucky had died a long time ago.

and so had isla.

there was only the two of you.

you and winter.

you should’ve given yourself the grace to mourn them — bucky and isla — but it was too late to start.

you placed the picture of bucky and steve down and picked the other one up. you hummed audibly at the sight of his smile. it made you smile. something so automatic. something so sincere.

he was with his squad.

with a charming smile and a cigarette between his teeth, he was surrounded by his brothers-in-arms.

you were careful as you put everything back into his folder— as careful as placing flowers into a casket. you took one last look of the photo of him with the cut on his face.

you kissed the small hurt like you should’ve done back then to comfort him.

you held the folders out for agent fury to take. he was sitting in the chair by your bed. he had stayed quiet and let you…

grieve.

“will you keep them together?” you asked in a whisper. it was such a stupid request but it meant something to you.

those were more than just folders.

they were graves.

“sure,” nick said with a small nod.

you swallowed hard and looked anywhere else. your gaze fell upon the tv. “what is that for?”

“you said that you wanted everything we had on barnes.” nick said as he stood up. he clicked the lights off and flicked on the tv. “this is the rest of it.”

your brows drew together and you watched the screen intently as the camera fumbled. whoever was moving it was doing a piss-poor job of it. you could hear the clunky audio of the tripod bumping into things.

when the camera was finally set up, you saw the bar from the picture. it took a moment to find them but the camera settled on the two of them: bucky barnes and steve rogers.

you sat forward and ignored the pain it brought you. you could hear them laughing together over the music. over the chatter in the bar, you could hear his voice. they had no idea they were being filmed. they spoke like teenage boys as they caught up with each other.

“i really don’t like this whole ‘you’re-now-taller-than-me’ thing.” bucky said as he took a sip of his beer. “it freaks me out. i used to be able to fit you in my pocket, little man.”

steve chuckled and glanced over at him, “i like it.”

“of course, you like it. now you know what it’s like to look down at a woman and see her cleavage from above.” bucky said, wiggling his eyebrows.

steve blew a raspberry and rolled his eyes. “you’re a real dog, buck, y’know that?”

“woof! woof! woof!” bucky barked, throwing his arm around his best friend.

the two of them downed their beers together before the camera turned off.

the tv screen flickered and you watched as nick changed the tape. when the next video started, you sat back in your bed and let the tension in your shoulders drop.

it was an army home-video. the cameraman made his way passed each and every person in the squad. you saw him in the background.

shirtless with two human arms.

it made you smile.

he was shaving in front of a small mirror. as the camera man walked around and he caught wind that he was being filmed, he started flexing in the background. he kissed his muscles and winked.

“look at barnes,” laughed one of the soldiers.

“guys, c’mon, this is supposed to be a serious documentary for roger’s whole big thing. we are living through a historical moment in time. it’s important!” the cameraman complained.

“oh, this is important alright.” bucky said as he walked up to the camera. he leaned in close to it and batted his eyelashes. “hello ladies. like what you see?”

the camera turned away. “you’re going to fog up my lens, jackass!”

“oh, great heavens!” bucky cried out in a god awful posh accent.

the camera turned in time to catch him with his middle fingers up. he hid them behind his back and bowed politely, “good evening.”

“roger’s, how the hell did you put up with this guy?” asked one of the soldiers.

“to be fair, bucky did a lot of putting up with me.” steve said as the camera turned towards him.

“he used to be the size of my pinky picking fights with guys who could toss him over their heads like a sack of potatoes.” bucky said. he stepped into frame beside steve as he pulled on a shirt. he pointed at the camera and said, “america, i want you to know that our nations hero used to be an instigator and feral little street rat that used to not only get his ass royally kicked but mine, too.”

“i will not confirm or deny anything at this time.” steve said with a bow of his head.

“barnes when you’re not getting your ass kicked, what’s it like being captain america’s best friend?” one of the soldiers asked. he held the end of a hairbrush towards the two of them and pretended to interview them.

bucky grabbed ahold of the brush and started screaming into the camera. the whole room erupted into laughter.

steve took the fake mic and said, “for those who don’t know, that means ‘i love you,’ in german. isn’t he just so kind?”

the two of them laughed together, smiling at each other before the tv went black.

music began to play.

your breath got stuck in your throat as the melody floated through the air towards you. it struck you in the heart. the trumpet’s melody was familiar.

this was the song he would hum to himself.

clips began to roll across the screen of him. videos that had him in the background. some more soundless videos of him walking around the bunks and sticking his tongue out at the camera. there were clips of him walking alongside his platoon— walking with steve in his captain america uniform.

the last clip of him ever taken was a video of him right before the howling commandos followed captain america onto the train.

he never returned from that mission.

and you couldn’t help but notice how nervous he looked on the screen in front of you.

you wanted to reach out and save him— but nick shut the tv off.

for a moment, the room was completely dark. it was so dark that you expected to feel the bed rattle as he tossed and turned somewhere below you in his bunk.

but he wasn’t here.

and when nick turned the lights on, you were faced with the horrible emotion now pressing down onto your chest for the first time.

you missed him.

you missed winter.

you couldn’t show it because you could not be weak now of all times— but you were afraid. you had been told so much. shown so much. you remembered so much.

all you wanted was him.

and you missed him.

you missed bucky because isla missed bucky and that part of you — no matter how fleeting she was now— had the privilege to know him for even the smallest amount of time.

and that was a gift.

a gift that you promised yourself you would never forget again.

“now,” agent fury said as he sat down beside you. he pulled a recorder out of his jacket and clicked it on. he placed it on the table beside your bed. “i want answers.”

“you told me that shield knew more about either of us than i could imagine. what questions could you possibly have for me?” you asked before he could.

he grinned at you. “your friend agent nikta patrova defecting from hydra to join shield may have bought him a few brownie points, but we’re only selling lemon tarts right now. you, miss constantinescu, happen to have enough lemon tart points to buy out the whole lemon tart bake sale shield is hosting.”

“i’m not fond of word games.” you said with a roll of your eyes. “and don’t ever call him my friend. he is no friend of mine.”

“yeah, i put that together when you threw a knife into his chest and nearly killed him.” nick said.

nick watched your face go pale and your shoulders tense. he glanced behind him, as if he could see nikta from where he sat right now.

“he’s…alive?” you asked in a whisper.

“he is.” nick said.

“go on and ask him all your questions then. he will know more than i will.” you said with a scowl.

“miss constantinescu, im going to be straight with you. the questions i am going to ask you are not to find out intel about project winter or project vampire. you’re right. we know all that. that’s why you’re here with me now.”

“this,” nick gestured between the two of you. “is an interview.”

you recoiled the smallest bit. “what?”

“an interview, miss constantinescu. shield has known about your existence for some time now thanks to agent nikta’s guilty conscious— and it’s taken a lot to find you. it’s a known fact that you and sergeant barnes are highly trained and lethal expert assassins, but all it takes is one look into either of your project files to show loud and clear that you two are only following orders in order to see another day.”

“that is why shield is offering you a chance.” nick said as he leaned back in his chair.

“a chance…” you repeated the word. it didn’t feel right coming off your tongue. “what kind of chance?”

“a chance to do the right thing.” nick said. he crossed his arms against his chest, maintaining a lax posture as to not put you anymore on edge.

if only he knew how much worse seeing him pretend to be casual made you feel.

“and my options are?” you asked softly.

“you join shield today — right now — and your record is scrubbed clean. fresh start. a new life for you while working for us— helping us bring down hydra at its most weakest spots.”

nick shrugged, “or you go to a maximum security prison in the middle of the ocean where you will never see the sun again.”

you closed your eyes and you couldn’t help but laugh. covering your mouth with the tips of your fingers, you giggled.

“something funny, miss constantinescu?” ageny fury asked, raising his brows.

“yeah. yeah, you know, it’s really funny to me that you think i have a choice in all this. you think that just because you showed me a folder of the woman i once was and i shed a few tears over some dead soldier that what? i’m not the monster you’ve been told i am?”

“i am much worse,” you whispered like a reluctant promise, as if you were trying to spare him from the truth. “i know no other life than the one i was made for. i kill, i eat, i freeze, and i do it all again.”

“there is no choice for me, agent fury, because hydra will come for me. they will come and they will find me. i will not jeopardize what little space i’ve carved out for myself in the rock of my cell for a fresh start that won’t last when they find me. when they know i’ve betrayed them, they will take me from him— and that is not something i can live with.”

“aren’t you alone now?” nick asked. he glanced around. “where is the winter soldier?”

you laughed a again. “men like you think you know everything, don’t you?”

“don’t i?” nick smiled at you and scooted his chair closer to your bedside. “you know, i find the nature of you incredibly fascinating. they did a lot of work on you. you are technically a super soldier— but they gave you special teeth and rewired your olfactory nerve. i know of your dietary habits but they use a strange word in your files that i can’t help but think is a bit out of place.”

“bloodlust. that’s what they call it when you fall into spells of rage. you can wipe out of a whole platoon of men all with your teeth, isn’t that right?” nick asked.

you said nothing.

“but see, here’s the thing i just don’t believe. i don’t believe that you become this insatiable, feral monster at the sight of blood. if you did, then you sure kept a tight grip on yourself on the street yesterday when it was raining blood.” he said.

you tried to lie. “my mask was stuck.”

“bullshit,” nick said, pointing a finger at you. “i call bullshit because i’ve spent a long, long time reading each of your files and i’ve gotten real good at reading between the lines.”

“i believe that you have codewords of your own, don’t you, miss constantinescu? just like the winter soldier, when they are said you have no control over what happens next until someone snaps you out of it.” nick said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

you leaned towards him and asked in a whisper, “are you expecting a gold star from me?”

nick smiled. “so it is true then.”

“in situations that seem dire, the winter soldier will do what needs to be done.” you said with very little feeling.

“and what is that?” nick asked.

you took a slow, deep breath and met his eyes.

“he will let me off my leash.”

nick sat back in his chair and nodded. “and is this the only instance you know of that there are words used to control you?”

you swallowed hard. “i don’t know. i used to think not but…i don’t know anymore.”

“sometimes,” you bit your lip to try and stop yourself but it all came rushing out. “it’s like there is more missing than just…just the gaps from the black sleep. my memories from before they’ve always been gone, but sometimes….sometimes i’ll wake up and i won’t remember going to sleep. sometimes i don’t know how long i’ve really been out of the ice for.”

“i applaud you for trying but the reason why you can’t appeal to the side me you’re hoping to reach, agent fury, is because she isn’t there.” you said as you looked at him. you shook your head and shrugged your shoulders, “she’s gone and i have a feeling that most of the time, i am too.”

“and the sergeant? it’s the same for him?” nick asked.

you nodded. “worse. they steal things from him. his past. his memory. his ability to feel. they strip him of it all. but with me, i think…i think they have found a way to put me to sleep while im awake.”

“and thats why it frustrates me when people talk about me and him like we’re different. we’re not. as much as i wish we were, we are one big puzzle. if you tried to put all his pieces together, it would be incomplete. it’s the same for me. to see the whole picture, you have to put us together.” you said softly.

nick said nothing for a long, long moment. you watched as he grabbed the recorder off the table and clicked it off. you lost some of the tension in your shoulders and eased back into the bed.

“do you know what the red room is?” nick asked.

“no.” you said. and it was the truth.

“the red room is hydra on meth and they pump out assassins like seahorses. hundreds at a time. they take these young girls and they put them through the worst of the worst— much like hydra has done to you and sergeant barnes.” nick said.

he rubbed his hand over his jaw, “in the red room, they sterilize the girls so that they cannot become mothers. it’s a way to control them. to make sure they never have anything that is more important than their job.”

“what does this have to do with me?” you asked.

“when you were in surgery,” he stopped himself. he cleared his throat and sat up straighter. “we confirmed the reason behind nikta patrova’s fear. you have a uterus and — from what we know about assassins like you and the girls who come from the red room — it is by no means unintentional that you have it.”

your brows drew tight together. “what are you saying?”

“do you get your period, miss constantinescu?” nick asked.

“sometimes,” you nodded. “but why does it matter?”

“the first piece of intel shield got from nikta of you two weren’t your laundry lists of assassinations or records of your personal projects as the winter soldier and weapon-v. shield received a project folder called winter solstice.”

“winter solstice is hydra’s next step to creating its next generation of weapons like you and sergeant barnes.” nick said. he frowned at you and you didn’t know why.

“so what? they’ll be making more soldiers like him? monsters like me?” you asked.

“not exactly.” nick said, his face twitching with unease. “nikta patrova has done a lot of bad things— most of them to you — but even for the worst kinds of men, somethings are just too much.”

“hydra wouldn’t be making the next generation of weapons themselves.” nick said,

“you and sergeant barnes would be.”

your heart stopped— time had stopped.

you closed your eyes and shook your head. over and over again, you shook your head.

instinctively, you placed a hand over your belly.

“that…that wouldn’t be…” you couldn’t find the words. “that’s not…”

“ethical?” nick listed words off for you. “possible? legal? true?”

you looked at him.

he frowned at you, “shield believes that based off the information nikta gave us that projects winter and vampire were merged in the hope that you two would make…little winters and vampires.”

“that is why you have a choice here, isla.” nick said as he stood up. he crouched down beside your bed and folded his hands beside yours. “it took a us a long, long, long time to find you both and it’s a good thing we did, even if we only got one of you away in the end. we won’t let you go back. we can’t. it’s not safe. most of all, it’s not right.”

“how long?”

“what?” nick asked.

you swallowed hard and asked, “how long has shield known about project winter solstice?”

“project winter solstice was put into motion twenty five years ago and nikta patrova sent it to shield almost immediately after it was drafted and accepted.” nick said.

you pressed your lips together in a thin line. tears stung your eyes and you did your best to blink them away. you opened your mouth to speak but you couldn’t say the right words.

“do…do he and i…” you couldn’t finish as your lips began to tremble. you covered you mouth with the tips of your fingers and stifled a sob. “do we have…”

“as of right now,” nick said as gently as he could, “there are three known children to have come from project winter solstice that belong to you and sergeant barnes.”

you closed your eyes and fought to stomach the idea. you couldn’t picture it. you couldn’t imagine it in the slightest. you touched your stomach and winced as the wound reminded you it was there.

it couldn’t be true.

but it was as true as isla constantinescu story was.

“i want to see him.” you whispered. you opened your eyes and looked at nicholas fury as tears slipped down your cheeks. “i want to see nikta patrova and i want the truth from him.”

nick nodded once and stood up with a sigh. “you’re real lucky that you didn’t kill him with that knife, kid.”

hey, guys, i’m sorry. let me get that outta the way. sorry, guys. i told ya this fic was gonna hurt! anyways, hope you enjoyed as always 🖤! also, i hope the pictures added a little something something to the reading experience. i wasn’t too sure how i felt about it at first but it grew on me. lmk your thoughts and pls lmk if you listen to strangers by ethel cain.

expect another update in a day or two unless something pops up for me irl. as always, let me know if you want to join the taglist. thanks so much for reading, guys. you all make me giggle and i look forward to feeding you with each update.

with the most love ever in the world,

crow. next part ->

taglist: @homiesexual-or-homosexual @carbonnite-copy @valckenaux @itsmadamehydra @normanreedus-blog

[stxrrnightjxr]

(Modern AU) Grave-digger Barty getting caught by (“fuck, is that a ghost?”) no, its just elusive Regulus Black on one of his midnight walks- (because of course Barty’s in the Black family cemetery, that’s where everyone’s buried with hundreds of money worth of shit).

Barty’s heard of the Blacks- they’re terribly behind-the-times, never let their children out… the family’s been liked to a cult by a certain runaway. Barty reads the papers, he’s not daft. He needs to know when his politician father gets a raise, so he can go waste more of his money.

And Regulus, clad in clothes that Barty wouldn’t have doubted were a hundred years old, just stares at him- Barty’s scared this kid’ll start chanting some witch-y demon shit, but all he does is point to another grave, telling him, “that one’s better, if you’re looking for valuables. This one here’s my uncle Alphard. Mother didn’t like him so she didn’t bury him with much.”

Barty, brows furrowed in something akin to confusion and somehow thanks, climbs out of the half-dug grave.

“Thanks,”

He mumbles, and makes his way over to the ornate headstone Regulus had pointed to.

Regulus continues on his walk.

A day later, when Barty returns, he sees Regulus again- he doesn’t say anything to him, and neither does Regulus in return.

Another day, he sees him again. It’s odd, it’s like Regulus is purposefully walking in Barty’s general direction, but he never says anything. It’s weird as fuck, but Barty’s a little intrigued.

Of course, he rants about this odd boy to the Rosier twins- still elites in their town, though they had more freedom than the Blacks- Evan and Pandora knew Regulus through parties Barty’s father could only dream of attending. They told him all about the odd ‘Regulus Arcturus Black’.

The next night, Barty decides he’ll talk to Regulus, but this time he’s not walking- Barty can’t find him anywhere.

What he does find, though, is a small note on on of the gravestones of the grave he’d robbed last night- in obnoxiously pretentious cursive, it’d read:

‘You are Bartemius Crouch Jr. I know that because I saw you in the paper with Bartemius Crouch Sr. Please say hello to me tomorrow night. I will walk by Druella Black’s grave tomorrow night.’

Oh, so he was odd as fuck in writing, too. Barty, unfortunately, found it a little endearing.

(Safe to say, Barty and Regulus meet at Druella’s grave the next night. They continue to meet and Barty tells Regulus all about a number of things he’d never know outside of his family, and eventually Regulus realizes it really is a cult like Sirius said, and manages to get out, with the help of his new boyfriend 😁)

[hot-on-my-watch]

Reading Sherlock Scripts- The Final Problem

As always, here's a video from Erik Voss at New Rockstars for a bit of a refresh and detail spotting from the episode if desired:

What follows will be notes in a few minor differences between the script published on the BBC's website and the finished episode, a few bits of stage direction etc. that I personally enjoyed, and interesting things that I didn't spot before.

I will say that in terms of line changes, I DO realise that scenes need to be shortened, technicsl stuff doesn't always work, and even the best actors get lines slightly wrong - like that one guy that was supposedly amazing as Hamlet but kept mispronouncing "penguin"... so when John says the buffalo gun was from the 40s and the script said 50s... I don't care which is right. I'm not going to google buffalo guns. I'm just writing about bits that amuse me!

Firstly: Mycroft's cheesy noir detective film. I'm not sure I had cottoned on to all the lines about the man "keeping a close watch" on the woman, as Mycroft likes to do, not least on his siblings. Then she refers to "putting (herself) in the hands of the authorities" as Eurus has ostensibly done since TLD.

We then get a few extra lines of dialogue:

Obviously 'Persephone' refers to the Ancient Greek myth of a goddess abducted to the underworld who then becomes its queen, with the use of Greek mythogolgy tying into Sherlock's fake suicide operation 'LAZARUS'. And, "a parade of all the cliches" would have lampshaded the trope-filled nature of the scene.

On to Baker Street! In the script, Mycroft calls himself "an era-defining genius", but in the episode he has been downgraded to "remarkable" and the former label is given to Eurus, who remains "beyond Newton." Poor Myc.

The published script also has Mycroft saying "we played pirates" and describes "an overgrown pirate ship climbing frame", neglecting to mention the "funny gravestones" at this point. Probably Mycroft was too bored and serious to make a show of playing pirates at thirteen.

Something then that I hadn't previously noticed: in the shot of the three children in the kitchen the table is set for four; Redbeard has only just gone missing. In the script, Mrs Holmes can be heard asking where he is.

There's also the stage direction that Mycroft is eating "A LOT", and a description of a following shot of Eurus being interviewed by a policeman following.

Something else I hadn't even slightly noticed - I'd blame the ME/CFS but probably wrongly- the song that Mrs Hudson is vacuuming to. Obviously Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast (which I have seen live) is a fantastically amusing choice genre-wise, but it also cuts off at "hell and fire about to be released."

I'm also compelled to comment at this point on the insanely ridiculous layout of 221 Baker Street and that although I enjoy the transition through the carpet of the living room, that's meant to be where Speedy's is, no?

Anyway, we get these delightful notes for one of the most improbable escapes in television history:

Hahaha, the shipping forecast. We weren't all born Radio 4 listeners, Moftiss! But I love it.

So we go to Sherrinford. Here John has an extra line about seeking work in it as a hospital, to which The Governor replies "it's not a hospital".

Again, I often fail to notice things: this time that the voice radioing for help was John's (even though nothing else would make sense) and that the recorded announcements e.g. "doors opening" are ALL Moriarty. And they planned to have "smiley face insignia" on the doors, and later a "frowney face" on the screens when the alarm goes off- I see why they abandoned that! My favourite bit here is that last sentence about Mycroft:

Mycroft then says in the script that Eurus has been capable of influencing people since she was seven, which has since been changed to five, now fitting with when she would have been institutionalised. In the broastcast episode Eurus gets extra lines now about The Governer's wife: "She smiles at you when you come home...smiling is advertising... I can help you with your wife...I'll fix her and give her back to you." In the published script it is not clear that she has any interest in The Governer's wife at this point.

Rather than being initially compliant to the men with guns and then making his daring escape, the script has John absolutely throwing down. he "lunges" at The Governer in an attempt to stop him from pressing the alarm, and when the orderlies arrive: "Mayhem. Mycroft is already restrained, but John is fighting like a madman. Slams one orderly against the wall, punches another across the room-" Wow.

And then: Moriarty! What a joy! There are a couple of notable changes from final script to episode here. Firstly, the bodyguard on his left has been promoted from "very uncaring in the afterglow" to merely "less caring." And then there's Jim's extra line between "insane criminality" and his question about cannibals:

There's a whole insect metaphor that goes on once our boys are locked in Eurus' cell:

In the Garridebs scene, Eurus gets a few more lines on her view of morality: "

I regret to say that in the script, the phonecall between Sherlock and Molly is even more heartbreaking! Why? How?! Because right before he asks her to tell him that she loves him, she says "for once don't make fun of me." Brutal! My heart!

Continuing notes on the script. The fake cell outside Musgrave has a window with a view possibly involving some kind of visual trickery that I don't understand. The aerial view we get of the London is hauntingly described as "the bomber's view." And to the news that John is in a well Sherlock replies "ding dong dell" which google tells me is a nursery rhyme suitably about a cat having been put in a well by one child and saved by another.

We then get to some of the omitted dialouge that sent me down this script-reading rabbit hole: Sherlock's admission regarding Mycroft.

I also enjoy the insult Sherlock gives Mycroft later in the scene: "he always lies, he's a corkscrew in human form", to which John replies "this time he's been protecting you. *beat* They're not dog's bones." Victor actually gets some lines in the flashback here too "Come on Captain Yellowbeard! We can take the ship and all her treasure! Quick! Quick!" Poor little Victor!

A couple more missing lines here. At the moment of realisation, Sherlock gives us another Greek reference, this time to Homer's The Odyssey: "'And Odysseus replied... Nemo'- latin for no one." Bloody private school kids and their latin ;-) I've written a pretty basic post on the tombstone cipher, but there are far more detailed analyses on here! Then, on speaking to Eurus in her room script Sherlock states the obvious, calling her ritual "a cry for help".

When we get into the closing scenes, we have another moment for the history books: Sherlock calls Lestrade by his actual first name unprompted! Here the script reads "A beat as Lestrade goes- Sherlock has always known his name. He heads away..." But what does this mean? Does Lestrade just think that Sherlock has known his name the entire bloody time, or has he actually? I'm big on the Death of the Author stuff and psychoanalytical readings, and in this case I choose to headcanon that Sherlock really did not know and only memorised "Greg" in The Six Thatchers. I'm open to being convinced otherwise though.

I've written a whole rant on the part where Mrs Holmes says that Sherlock was "always the grown-up" and no one disagrees.

In the script, we also get Eurus acting as violin teacher to Sherlock once again:

I have mixed feelings on Mary's "who you really are, it doesn't matter" speech and was horrified when I first heard it, but the script's shorter version is significantly worse. In the script, she doesn't say "A junky who solves crimes to get high and a doctor who never came home from the war." or "It's all about the legend. The stories. The adventures." She does say "what matters is who everbody else thinks you are. Knows you are." I'm glad they rewrote this!

Also, while the choice of "Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson" mirrors Arthur Conan Doyle's canon and Mycroft's lines at the close of A Study in Pink, it is a bit weird that Mary not only puts her beloved husband second, but also omits his first name. Oh well, they did they thing.

Meanwhile, the montage of the restoration of 221B and life going on. I wouldn't have realised that John is holding the letter on the msntelpiece for Sherlock to stab it, had I not read that bit of script posted by another Tumblr user! Thankyou whoever you were!

A couple of slight differences from the script here. Firstly, the episode has Lestrade and Molly visiting separately, but in the script they come together. One has to wonder why- were they at any point supposed to have been intended as a couple, and it was decided against, given that them arriving together for a professional matter seems unrealistic? Would Molly waiting outside seem like she hadn't recovered from The Phonecall? Did they just want to show her a bit more? Would it have ruined the fun circling camera thing they're doing here? I know, I'm definitely overthinking this!

Personally I really enjoy Cumberbatch's face as he directs Rosie back to johh with an expression we've pretty much never seen from Sherlock! And the fact that where he's pointing at "Daddy" is clearly where the baby's actual father was standing, not Freeman. But it works!

Secondly, Eurus and Sherlock's furious violin jam was intended to turn into: the Sherlock adventure theme! Fun! But, for whatever reason, this seems in the episode to be played by deeper sounding instruments over the top instead.

Finally, the cheesiest of the cheesey. The script ends with these words appearing on screen: The Beginning. That was cool when my friend did it in his children's novel, sure, but I'm not sure it would've worked here. Or would it?

Anyway, if you've made it this far, many many thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed my extremely minor contribution to the rich BBC Sherlock fandom! Either way, I very much welcome comments and discussion. "Obviously."

[1313ablackcat1313]

Water Magic

Water can be used in a variety of ways in different spells. Where you collect the water can also aid in what your intent is for the spell you're trying to make.

Here are some little notes I took from a few years ago and wrote in my witchy journal. I don't mind sharing these with other witches. This is pretty much common knowledge amongst the witch community, but I figured I would like to share what I have written to potentially help any baby witches out there.

Creeks and Streams: purification, harmony, cleansing Dew: general health, eyesight, beauty. Dew is to be especially powerful if gathered at dawn on Beltane. Fog and Mists: creativity, balance, partnerships Ice: transformations, balance, creativity Rain: energy, protection, cleansing. The first rain to fall in May is considered to be sacred to the Water Witch. River: cleansing, moving forward, protection Sea: health, magical power, manifestation of goals. An old Welsh belief states that a spoonful of sea water a day will ensure a long and healthy life. Snow: transformations and balance Spring: growth, holy water, cleansing, protection, prosperity Swamps/Waste: banishing, binding Waterfalls: power, energy, success Well: healing, wishes, intuition Beach: rituals, spells, fascinations, meditation Harbor: to promote abundance and prosperity to serve as an aid in banishing things Riverbank: to increase personal power Tears: healing, compassion, emotional upheaval, blessings, binding, fertility, pregnancy, self-reflection Sun: charged from morning to dusk: positivity, energy, power, strength, masculine energy Rose: rain, dew, or snow collected from roses or condensation collected from boiling roses: love, protection, commitment, beauty, compassion Gravestones: water collected from gravesites: ease of loss, restfulness, burying or releasing feelings Monuments: water collected from monument sites: remembrance, nostalgia, patriotism, loss Rainbow: water collected from a sun shower when a rainbow is present: luck, wealth, happiness, fulfillment, positivity Thunderstorm: protection, banishing, chaos, curses, upheaval, re-build, re-plant

*Seasonal Rains* Spring: new ventures Summer: growth Autumn: gratitude Winter: blessing

Moon Water: In general water charged under the moon is considered sacred to the Goddess and is associated with feminine energies and intuition. Here are some associations with specific phases: New Moon: curses, banishing, divination Waving Crescent: attraction, wealth, success First Quarter: creativity, motivation Waxing Gibbous: good health, attraction Full Moon: healing, cleansing, clarity Waning Gibbous: undoing, cleansing Last Quarter: breaking bad habits, banishing Waning Crescent: wisdom, illness, balance

You can also charge your water under full moons that correspond to your intentions.

How To Use Water: - spread the water along the outside of your property, it will protect you from harmful intent. - protect the garden - protect windows and doorways - enchant jewelry for protection or curse - coat a page in your water and then write spell/curse on page

Zodiac's and Their Moon Water: Water charged under the full moons of these signs: Aries: will have courageous and positive energy. Is great for charging magical weapons. Taurus: will have stable, earthy, fertile energy Gemini: will have energy that will bring about positive changes and facilitates overcoming obstacles Cancer: will have loving, maternal, and protective energies Leo: will have lucky, creative, and successful energy that is great for magic involving the arts, politics, or public speaking Virgo: will have practical energy that will facilitate planning and attention to detail Libra: will have persuasive, balancing energies that can draw love, friendships, and facilitate legal matters Scorpio: will have psychic, spiritual, and banishing energies Sagittarius: will have transforming, spiritual energy that lends itself to meditation Capricorn: will have energy relating to careers, politics, and attaining material goods Aquarius: will have innovative and inventive energies Pisces: will have dreamy, psychic energy that can be useful for astral projection and exploring past lives

[fuji-sen]

hi you don't have to do this if you're not comfortable with it but i saw requests are open. for context my mom passed away in the hospital last night, she was really sick her liver stopped working and my brother and sister made the decision to pull everything and let her die peacefully since we were told there was no way she could be saved at this point and the only alternative was to just wait for her to go into cardiac arrest, when she died i cried really loudly for a really long time, it happened so fast she was only hospitalized for two nights and ever since it happened i've been having thoughts of not continuing in a world without her since i lived with her 24/7 and we did everything together, and xiao and capitano are my comfort characters so i was wondering if i could maybe request a one-shot with one of them comforting the reader after the loss of a loved one? again if you're not comfortable writing about that particular topic you don't have to

Comfort among kindred spirits

content warning: grieving over a loss loved one, death, grief, sadness, angst with fluff, gender neutral reader (you pronoun). either be modern au or in teyvat au, anything in ( ) means that you chose between either of the two, its related to either modern world or teyvat,

character: Xiao / Alatus (featuring Ganyu, Zhongli, Venti)

author's note: I'm sorry this was later than I wanted, and I'm sorry for your loss. I know this might not replicate what you are truly feeling right now, but I hope it comforts you even just a bit. I'm also sorry I couldn't do a oneshot, but I hope the length of these headcanons would be enough.

🍃 it felt so sudden, it wasn't something you could have ever prepared before. they did not die of old age or of natural causes, but they were in so much pain that the only thing that could be done was give them the release of death, a decision that slowly ruined you.

🍃 you felt numb, like a piece of your heart had been taken leaving you incomplete. you often find yourself spacing out, tears escaping your eyes. Sometimes you were in your bed, unable to find the strength to get up, and often times you were just on the ground in front of the tombstone that had the name of your loved one.

🍃 you felt lose, not knowing how to carry on with your daily routines without them, with the knowledge that they wouldn't be their for you, physically at least.

🍃 your feelings began to grow worse as thoughts of leaving the world you inhabit began to fester, your eyes would stray towards the kitchen knife, or (maybe the passing vehicles or the restless mobs).

🍃 ". . ." you stared into sharp golden eyes, no wait, they weren't as sharp as usual, they didn't carry the edge the last yaksha usually had, his eyes were not glaring daggers at anyone. instead they were soft, soft like honey, warm and sweet.

🍃 Xiao looked at you, a husk of who you were once were. You hadn't been taking care of yourself. He knew it, you knew it, everyone knew it. Your hair was messy, you were skinnier than before, you smelled, it broke his heart to see you like this, neglecting yourself and letting yourself wither away.

🍃 He knew that no amount of words could soothe the pain in your heart, it was something that you had to go through alone and come to accept. He was speaking from experience after all.

🍃 Even if he wanted to, he could not take away the pain, all he could do was support you and help you gain closure.

🍃 If you were your usual self, you'd probably be surprised to find Xiao moving into your home. He occupied the homy couch in the living room, and from then your routine changed.

🍃 you used to spend your days in bed or in front of their gravestone. you didn't bother with cooking or cleaning as usual, you walked aimlessly here to there, and there to here.

🍃 but Xiao changed that, the day after he moved in, you find yourself waking up to the smell of some delicious food and a clean home. The wet tissues were in the bin, the fridge was cleared of any spoiled foods and replaced with new groceries, groceries he didn't charged you for.

🍃 you rubbed your stomach that grumbled pathetically,, you licked your lips as you sat down at his guidance. That was the first home cooked meal you had for a long while, and it brought you to tears.

🍃 Xiao planned to help you get back on your feet, but he couldn't do everything. So he asked his friends and family for help, it was Ganyu who helped with bathing you, it was also her who helped with doing the laundry of your delicates.

🍃 He had even asked Zhongli for advice, the man after all was a pool of infinite wisdom. Xiao couldn't be too forceful, he had to let you grieve while also stopping you from neglecting yourself.

🍃 It was Xiao who grabbed your hand first, making you take a walk outside. it was aimless, no particular destination in mind, but he made stops along the way. He stopped by Dawn's (Winery/Cafe), making you take a seat as he ordered for the both of you.

🍃 when [ favorite drink ] and [ favorite pastry ] was placed in front of you, you felt your heart slowly beat once more.

🍃 he'd bring you to the park, near the Grand Cathedral of Mondstadt where in Venti was playing by the statue, the melodies he crafted soothed your aching soul.

🍃 slowly but surely you began to live once again, and you had xiao and your friends to thank for it.

you stood in front of their gravestone once more, but your eyes looked lighter, and your eyebags were lost prominent now. Your body was clean, and your soul was content. Your heart ached yes, but not as terribly as before.

you were going to be fine.

you felt his hand squeeze yours as you let out a shaky breath, "thank you. ."

you didn't have to say anymore words, he understood.

in response, his thumb caressed your knuckles in silence as you both paid respects.

[cq-studios]

Do you have any screenshots of your favorite details from KHUX?

HAHAHAHAHA, yeah I do

Gonna just drop a read more here 'cause if y'all know me at all you know this post is probably gonna be 10KM long lol

So, I'm gonna try to hold myself back a little because I literally have like 10 pages of notes about specifically stuff in the backgrounds and I doubt the internet will find my bench and lamppost count interesting. (Also image limit lol)

I'll list just 4 things for now (in no particular order) and talk about them a bit underneath.

NUMBER 1 || STREET SIGNS

So there are four street signs that we’ve seen in Daybreak Town. Two are in the Fountain Square (A and B), one is in the Marketplace (C), and one is in the Clocktower Outskirts map (D).

For B and D it’s pretty easy to figure out what the represent. B is a clock, probably representing the Clock Tower… or maybe the best place to see the Clocktower because it’s in Fountain Square. The overall shape of it is different from the rest of the signs so I imagine that means something. D is a gondola or canoe of some sort, which makes sense because it’s next to stairs that seemingly lead to the canal that runs through town. Maybe there’s a ferry system of some sort?

A and C I’m less sure about. The designs don’t really bring anything obvious to mind. Maybe C is Munny because it leads to the Marketplace? I’m not sure.

NUMBER 3 || DOOR UNDER FOUNTAIN SQUARE

See what makes this interesting to me isn’t just the fact that apparently Fountain Square is hollow underneath (maybe for pipe repairs or something, I don’t know) but just the general fact that a lot of structures in this town, that maybe shouldn’t be, are hollow.

If you look even some archways have windows, so there has to be an open space inside, right? Most of them seem at least connected to houses so I assume they’re basements or something. (The one by murder house gets me tho, like that’s right under the bridge. Who’s living right under the bridge)

And I also feel like this leads into the fact that, similarly but not as extreme as in Scala, Daybreak Town is kinda built on top of itself. Maybe that’s a symptom of being around so many (and possibly on) mountains but I still feel like it should be talked about more.

NUMBER 4 || LIGHTHOUSE INTERIOR MAP

There is so much to unpack here but I’ll try to keep it brief.

So I’m pretty sure this is one of, if not the oldest building in Daybreak Town. Two reasons.

1. Instead of having little wall lamps, like the rest of the town and buildings, all the light seems to come from mounted candles.

2. There are swords (A) on the walls and not Keyblades. Why would the Keyblade town not have Keyblades on its little shield emblem? Is it possibly because it was there before Keyblades?

This staircase here (B) is also the only known (not sewer drain) way into the waterways. It leads into the sewers then out to the little dock below the Lighthouse with the boat, hence the sign.

There’s these maps here (C) that I don’t really know what to say about, but is definitely worth pointing out. They’re all the same and I assume show the layout of the area surrounding the town (the darker parts being water). It could be a world map though (darker part being continents)… I don’t think we’ll ever really learn lol

And also I don’t know what this is (D) but I think it’s interesting that it has writing on it. It kinda gives me the vibe of those flat on the ground gravestones…

NUMBER 5 || BANNER

Daybreak Town actually has a flag it’s all over the place and you’ll start to see it everywhere if you look for it. They also kind of look like the banners in Radiant Garden. The colours and shape/mounting are the same but the designs on the flag itself (and mounting) is different.

I have no clue what that implies, if anything, but I figure it’s worth pointing out ‘cause it’s interesting.

[st-guliks-fnord]

Any other long term fans of OfHerbsAndAltars currently having their heart ripped out by Exit Note?

The chills I got reading “the truest thing I ever wrote was ‘On my gravestone this is what it said: whenever I’m sober I wish that I was dead’.”

Only 50 pages in, but oh my god. So glad Dorian’s still here. Watching their writing only grow across these 3 books has been a gift.

[nehswritesstuffs]

The Fall and Rise of House Corrodia - Part 5

I'm so glad that I've had these chapters completed for a while now, so I can just post on-schedule and worry about other things I wanna write this month.

Part 1 [AO3] - Part 2 [AO3] - Part 3 [AO3] - Part 4 [AO3]

A secret meeting between the Tonta Chief and a pair of Donquixotes; a prank; a mockery. [4781 words; Third Corazón AU; slowburn LawViola]

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Two days later, Viola and Corazón went for a walk shortly after breakfast. She wanted to visit her sister’s grave, she claimed, and didn’t want to go alone. It meant that the other members of the Family let them be as they slipped into town and made certain they weren’t being followed anyhow before heading towards Flower Hill. Once Viola was able to confirm with her Devil Fruit and Corazón with his Haki there was no one either on their tails or attempting to head them off, they climbed the small plateau and she gathered some flowers, heading to the well-kept marker that served as Scarlett’s final resting place. She knelt in the dirt and placed the makeshift bouquet down before clasping her hands in prayer.

Who or what was she praying to? She didn’t even know anymore. It was not whatever she was told to thank before meals as a child, nor was it whatever the court once claimed gave her father the right to rule, nor was it even the trickster sun whose names were on the lips of the elderly and superstitious alike. All she knew was that it felt right, despite the fact nothing else was, and it made her heart feel heavy as she muttered the Dressrosan rites over the grave of a woman she should have had by her side for much, much longer. It was one of the cruelest things Doflamingo could have done to her—even if it was through Diamante in the end—and she swore it would help inspire her as she found revenge. She carefully wiped tears from her eyes as she stood, just barely catching Corazón crossing himself.

“I… didn’t know you were religious,” she noted. He shrugged.

“I keep it mostly to myself these days,” he said. “Haven’t been in a church in years, though.” She waited for him to continue and he shuffled on his feet awkwardly. “Doflamingo would never approve and the crew doesn’t really understand.”

“Then… you want to go…?”

Corazón did not answer, instead avoiding eye contact. Viola made a mental note to ask the crew about it sometime, though the thought was interrupted by the Tonta Chief popping up from out of the flower field and hopping onto the gravestone to be closer to their height.

“There you are!” he exclaimed. The Tonta Chief jumped into Viola’s arms to give her a hug, the worry on his face apparent. “I feared the worst for you, my dear!”

“Thank you,” she replied, tears threatening to flow again. She tamped it down and held aloft the Tonta Chief in her hands, facing Corazón. “Sir, this is the Donquixotes’ Corazón, as promised. He wanted to speak with you. Corazón, this is Tonta Chief Gancho, the King of Tontattas and Mansherry’s father.”

Then, Corazón did something that neither Viola nor the Tonta Chief expected: he placed his hand over his heart and bowed deeply at the waist, bending nearly as far as he could in respect and deference.

“Forgive me,” he said before straightening, “but I don’t have much good news concerning the Princess Mansherry.”

“Is my daughter…?!” The dwarf couldn’t bear to give the idea life by speaking of it, though he relaxed slightly as he saw Corazón shake his head.

“She is currently a hostage and there is no way for us to free her from imprisonment without angering her captor,” he explained. “It is my understanding that Doflamingo is going to use her as leverage against your people, whether that be sooner or later I do not know. She is safe for the time being, as comfortable as we can manage, and I personally attended to the minor wounds she gained during her capture. I wanted to tell you that in person and directly—it is the least I can do.”

“What does Doflamingo know of us?” the Tonta Chief asked. Corazón gestured with his hands in the Dressrosan manner, spreading them wide as they waved around in his slowly-acquired habit.

“He grew up with legends of the Tonta Tribe being mythical slaves that the Donquixotes lost when they became Celestial Dragons,” he said. “Apparently, most Celestial Dragons know about the Tontatta to some degree, and if pressed some of them might even make the connection between you and the ‘fairies’ Dressrosa is so famous for, but even they wouldn’t go as far as to say you are something that actually exists. Plenty of Founding Families have tall tales from when they ruled their home nations directly that are widely accepted amongst one another as posturing and lies.”

“Makes one wonder what the rest of the stories came from,” the Tonta Chief frowned. He then sighed. “No matter—can you at least tell me if Mansherry is safe as a hostage even in your absence?”

“Far as I can tell, she is safe as long as Doflamingo considers her an asset. Her Devil Fruit is one that has far-reaching consequences and he is not going to want to risk that going where he cannot control.”

“Do you think he is willing to negotiate for her release?”

“I wouldn’t,” Corazón warned. “Doflamingo is shrewd at-worst—he’ll find a way to make the trade in his favor no matter what. House Corrodia knows this well.”

A pain shot through Viola’s heart at the mention of her family’s lineage; it felt worse somehow coming out of Corazón’s mouth than if she was saying it herself. Even Doflamingo saying it in all his smugness likely wouldn’t have the same effect. His eyes met hers for only a moment, and yet it was a moment that was louder and more concrete than anything he’d said before.

I’m sorry.

“Speaking of: have your networks picked up any news on Rebecca or Father?” Viola tried to not seem too sad, yet the Tonta Chief picked up on it, patting her thumb consolingly.

“Nothing of your father, but do know that I have on great confidence that your niece is doing well enough to stay out of Doflamingo’s grasp. She is safe… for the time being.”

“Who has her? Do they know who she is?”

“They are well aware, but I swore not to tell whom she is with or where, even if it is to tell you, Lady Viola,” the Tonta Chief claimed. “What I am to tell you is to have faith, because there are better forces at play than Doflamingo’s tiring power plays.”

“Faith…?” She let out an incredulous chuckle. “Faith in what…?”

“…in whatever it was that made you kneel at this grave.”

Viola felt her knees grow weak as the Tonta Chief hit the issue harder than he realized. She felt a familiar pair of arms wrap around her to keep her upright, while the dwarf leapt from her hands back to the solidity of the headstone. Corazón held her close as she cried into his chest, her tears full of self-loathing and demonstrative pity. He eased them both to the ground while she cried���oh, how she cried—and stroked her hair awkwardly.

What had she been doing this entire time Scarlett had been dead? The entire time their home was being played by a puppet master? These years that their father had been missing? Scarlett’s only child? She cried until she pushed herself out of Corazón’s grip with enough time to vomit into the grass, at which she could feel one hand collect her hair while the other rubbed circles on her back.

She was a failure; a disgrace to her family and her people. Since joining Doflamingo she had done nothing tangible in the effort to get revenge for that night over two years ago now. Two whole years and what did she have to show for it? A fake relationship? An even faker relationship in Prodence if she wanted? An ally she hadn’t seen in over a year? She couldn’t even say she had been able to help sweet little Mansherry—she was absolutely useless.

“You don’t need to baby me,” she croaked as she tried to shrug Corazón off. He tutted at her and gently wrapped a small bunch of her hair around the rest to tie it back.

“I’m a doctor, remember?” he said. “If I can take care of the crew after they try to drink each other under the table, I sure as hell can care for you now.” She grunted sourly. “In fact, I prefer this.”

“No you don’t,” she assumed. He instead opened a Room around them and snapped his fingers, the vomit moving elsewhere the same time her head suddenly felt much lighter and clearer. “What did you just do…?”

“I cleared your nasal cavity and sinuses,” he explained. He helped her sit upright before tilting her face towards him, which allowed his fingers to lightly pass across her makeup-streaked skin. “They’re right here, and excess tears and mucus produced from crying pool there, so to speak. That’s why you sometimes used to wake up with headaches.”

She blinked, thinking about it for a moment. “I haven’t had a headache like that since we…” His face darkened in blush—he was caught.

“I’m sorry for not asking first, but I know too well about what it’s like.” He then turned his attention back to the headstone, where the Tonta Chief was still standing. “I do have a gift for you before we part, if you’d like. It’s not much, and you cannot take it with you, but I recommend you accept.”

“What is it, young man?” The Tonta Chief hopped down from the headstone and sat in the grass as Corazón took something from the inside of his cloak and set it on the ground—a transponder snail. He unhooked the receiver and placed it in the grass before pressing a finger to his lips to signal secrecy.

“This should be a secure line, but nothing about me or Viola, just in case.” He then pressed the button to dial, the snail buzzing until something on the other end caught.

“Uh… hello…?”

“Mansherry!” the Tonta Chief gasped. “How are you?! Where are you?! Have they treated you well?!”

“I’m scared, Papa!” Mansherry sobbed. “People feed me, but no one here is familiar! They took me away from the others! I haven’t seen Miss Viola at all! Isn’t she supposed to still be in the palace?!”

“I’m sure she will visit once she is able,” the old man assured. It was clear that he wanted to hug his daughter and switch places with her, to protect her from everything she was about to endure, and it broke him that it could never happen. “We’re trying to figure out how to get you back home. Until then you have to be brave for me, okay?”

The snail sniffled. “Okay.”

“Just remember: that horrid man who thinks himself the king won’t hurt you because your Devil Fruit makes you very special, but you need to be careful and make sure he doesn’t have a reason to do otherwise.” He paused for a moment. “No one has hurt you so far, have they?”

“Only when they first found us, but they just kinda ignore me. Everyone ignores me except for their doctor—after he looked me over and helped with my cuts, he put furniture and food and this snail in my cell. He seems kind… but I thought that the Donquixotes’ doctor was just like them…? Don’t they call him something scary…?”

“Maybe he’s scary because he has to be,” the Tonta Chief said. Viola glanced over at Corazón to see he was biting the insides of his lips as he tried to stay silent, the corners of his eyes wet. “I don’t know when I can access this snail again; just remember that Papa and the rest of the Tontattas are working hard on a plan to bring you back home, because we love you. I love you.”

“Thank you, Papa,” Mansherry replied shakily. “I love you too.”

The snail went to sleep and the Tonta Chief sighed. He hopped back up onto the gravestone and bowed nearly as deeply as Corazón had. “Thank you, my lad. That was the best gift anyone has given me in a long time. Please continue to take care of her—my wife has been sickly since she was young, and we do not know yet if our daughter has inherited her constitution.”

“I shall do my best,” Corazón swore. He took Viola’s hand in his and raised them so their arms were nearly perpendicular with the grass below them. “I swear on the trust that Lady Viola has found in me. Whatever can be done for Mansherry, will be done.”

“Excellent,” the old man nodded. He mused on that for a moment before deciding. “There is much work that needs to be done in Tonta Land. I shall be in contact with you both soon.”

“We share my sister’s old room,” Viola blurted out. The Tonta Chief looked at her curiously. “In case you leave a note, I mean. I’m no longer in my old room, though no one else is in it. We would not find a message there.”

“Indeed,” he replied. He studied the pair and hummed. “He is a fine lad and an important asset. Do not waste him.” The tiny man then hopped away, vanishing into the grass.

“What did he mean by that?” Corazón wondered. Viola didn’t look at him, instead wrapping her arms around his waist in a hug as she hid her face against his chest. “Are you… are you okay…?”

“I want to be, but I don’t know anymore,” she replied. She felt him place his hands on her upper back, completing the hug. “This is getting so complicated—now the Tontatta are swept up in this for good. Doflamingo’s not going to be content just having Mansherry under his thumb, is he?”

“Time will tell,” he said, “and at the very least: we already have made initial contact and established goodwill with the Tontatta. They will likely turn towards us for guidance before making a major move. That will keep them from making unnecessary movements that might disrupt our plans.”

“They shouldn’t have to,” she said, feeling absolutely sick. “Mansherry should have never been taken; if her father and people want her back, they should be able to have her.”

“We both know it’s not that simple.” His hold tightened into a genuine hug. “In the meantime, we can at least make sure that Mansherry is safe and fed and figure out how to protect the other Tontattas. Doflamingo’s trying to figure out what to do with them now. If I can outsmart him, then we can at least get those captives out of danger.”

Viola slightly pushed away as she looked up at him, not completely breaking their hug. His eyes were sad, yet glinted in that cleverness that made his amber eyes look akin to molten gold.

“How do you expect to do that?” she frowned. He shrugged, allowing the corner of his mouth to twitch upwards in something close to a grin.

“I might be his student, but that just means he taught me everything I know,” he claimed. “If there’s anyone on this rock that can outwit that tacky bastard, then you’re looking at him.”

Her breath caught in her throat; if he was wrong, then that could mean the end of them both.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

As it turned out, the subject of what to do with the non-princess Tontattas was a hot topic amongst the Donquixote Pirates. Some of them wanted to put them to use as manual labor, some wanted them to be used as spies, while others…

“…but I wanna play with them!” Dellinger pouted. He stomped his foot in protest as he attempted to make his case. “They’re dolls that move! I want dolls that move on their own!”

“You do not appreciate the enormity of this situation,” Trebol snuffled. He and the rest of the Executives and Officers were all sitting at the conference table, save for Dellinger and Giolla, the latter had until a few moments before had been attempting to put braids in the former’s hair. “You’re being childish about it; now shut up.”

“He is a child,” Doflamingo reminded him casually. “Of course he’d look at them and want them for dolls.”

“You’re mean!” Dellinger told Trebol. He kicked the man in the shin and scurried back to Giolla, leaving Trebol howling in pain at his half-Fishman strength.

“This is why I don’t like having brats around,” Señor Pink scowled.

“One would think the old man would have learned by now,” Gladius deadpanned. Trebol did not appreciate his sass, but was cut off before he could say anything.

“Whatever we do with them has to be something that will benefit us in the end,” Diamante said, with Pica nodding in agreement. “We can’t just release them all and pretend we only ever had out hands on the princess. That would never do.”

“Then what would we do?” Corazón asked. “The legends say that the Tontatta are extremely strong, but also meek—what sort of work would they be suited to? It’s not like we can parade them out in front of the populace and expose our hand. Their existence has to stay between us and only a few guards.”

“Hmm… he’s right…” Doflamingo hummed. “If these are the faeries that everyone laughs about, then using them for construction is out. Speaking of the princess: Corazón, how is she doing?”

“She’s… adjusting,” the younger man claimed. “I want her to trust and confide in me, so I’ve been careful about how I approach her.”

“You don’t want her to be scared of you, you mean,” Baby 5 snickered. “Whenever I see you wandering around without makeup, I know you’re headed down to see her.” Corazón shot her a glare and she grabbed onto Buffalo in fright.

“As long as he Gets results, that’s all that matters,” Lao G stated, “and that is Get with a capital G!”

“That still doesn’t change what we should do with them,” Doflamingo frowned. He then looked at Viola, who until then had been silent. “Violet, my dear, what do you know about the Tontatta? What sort of work would they be inclined towards?”

“Far as I know, they are good farmers, but not much else,” Viola replied. “It’s part of why when they take their reparations, it’s mostly manufactured things they can’t make themselves.” She still wasn’t certain how much knowledge he had of the Tontatta Tribe, but her explanation was likely enough to keep them from being put to work in sweatshops, and there was no farm in Dressrosa far enough from Humans to justify making them work there.

“So they only steal shit they can’t make? Interesting…” Doflamingo considered her claim seriously; with any luck, the captive Tontatta would be used as bargaining chips at worst. “I heard legends about them as a little kid, but nothing that would have suggested that.”

“It had been a while since a Donquixote was in Dressrosa before we came around, so I’m not surprised that some parts of the tales were lost,” Corazón droned, making it seem like he was clearly bored. He hooked his foot under Viola’s ankle from underneath the table as he shifted in his chair, the act visible to enough people to cement the idea he’d rather be doing other things with her. “They’re strong, but they also don’t seem that bright. I don’t know how truly useful they’d be.”

“Doffy will find a use,” Pica reminded him.

“No, Corazón is right,” Gladius admitted. “They’re worse than Buffalo with a concussion—where can we make use of them where they aren’t a liability?”

“I have an idea,” Doflamingo decided. Everyone else looked at him and waited for him to continue. “Corazón, I want you to scout a location for a factory. I want it to be a bit bigger than the Coliseum.”

“They’d get torn up in the machinery,” Viola started, only for Doflamingo to hold up a hand to silence her.

“I want them to grow fruit trees; North Blue apples, if we can get the internal climate to work well enough,” he continued. “Grown from seeds—I want each tree to be its own thing from scratch.”

“Not to question your vision, Doffy, but what are we going to do with apple trees?” Diamante wondered. “Make pies?”

“No—I want them to show me they can grow something before I consider my next step. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and it may not work, but it certainly won’t if we don’t get a decent-sized orchard going.”

“What step might that be?” Pica asked.

“I’ll clue more people in the closer the plan gets to feasibility. Monet, I want to talk to you. Everyone else, get the fuck out.”

With that, the rest of the Family stood from their seats and shuffled out of the room, leaving the young woman alone with their boss. Some of the younger ones stayed behind to attempt to eavesdrop, while the adults knew better and began to make their way down the corridor.

“I wonder what that’s about,” Machvise mused aloud.

“It must be important if we Executives are not privy to it,” Gladius replied. “Maybe another spy mission since Dressrosa was so successful?”

“Who knows?” Corazón scoffed. “Best not think about it.”

“You’re just irritated because you’re no longer the Young Master’s favorite,” Giolla smirked. Viola held onto Corazón’s arm tighter as he glared at the older woman. “Admit it: you’re jealous of her getting the attention that used to be yours.”

“I’m no longer a petulant child,” he said through grit teeth. “I get enough attention from my girlfriend, thank you very much.”

“Ehehehe, he’s blushing,” Buffalo teased. “Corazón is bllluuussshhhing~!”

“…and you’re about to be scattered across Dressrosa, so don’t test me.”

“No longer petulant, hmm…?” Giolla’s grin became nearly catlike. “Violet, dear, are you sure you enjoy being with him? You shouldn’t put out on a sense of pity.”

“Who says I’m the one who puts out?” Viola cut back. That got the entire corridor in hysterics, all aside from her and Corazón—the latter of whom looked embarrassed beyond reason. He opened a Room and suddenly the pair swapped places with a couple of birds that had been flitting around on a nearby balcony. They were close enough to hear the initial panic the birds brought, though far enough away to where their location was not discovered once the rest of the Family dispersed. Once the shouts and panic had died down, they both giggled at one another as they moved to stay away from the window.

“Serves them right,” she smirked. She looked up at Corazón to see that he was also laughing, a genuine smile plastered across his face as words foreign to her ears left his lips. There was something about it that was so interesting to her—almost magnetic—and she didn’t entirely mind. He noticed she was staring at him and he stopped, looking at her curiously.

“What…?”

“Oh, nothing… just, I don’t think I’ve seen you laugh like that before. It’s nice.”

“Uh… thanks…?” Corazón blushed deeply as the realization hit him. “I don’t think anyone’s complimented that before now…?”

“They should—you have a nice laugh. Better than Pica’s.”

Corazón choked on a cackle. “That’s a low bar and you know it.”

“It could be, but it is what it is.” She watched as he tried to find a way to counteract that; he couldn’t. “At least… it’s good to know that no matter what happens, I’ve found a friend to weather this with.”

“Yeah… a friend…” There was an odd quality to his voice… as though that wasn’t what he had expected at all. “It’s good to have friends amongst allies.”

“It is,” she agreed. “Now let’s move before they find us and that’s another round of teasing.”

He opened a Room without further question, as he could not have agreed more.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

It was honestly through a hefty amount of practice that allowed Viola to not make a face in disgust as she watched a gladiator behead another. The crowd in the stadium named for her lineage went wild, while she stayed silent within Doflamingo’s private box.

“Quite the show, isn’t it?” Doflamingo grinned from his seat on the other side of Corazón. He was clapping blithely; it had been his idea to turn the matches into mostly blood sport, pitting man to man until severe injury or death, and he was clearly enjoying it. Viola instead continued to fan herself, the midday sun miserable despite the shade.

“Gladiators are meant for longer careers than this,” she frowned. The victor hobbled around the ring, pumping up the crowd as they cheered his name in a rhythmic, amorphous chant.

“It’s what my family talked of, back in the Heavens,” Doflamingo replied wickedly. “All I want is to return Dressrosa to its former glory, and you can’t have that glory without a bit of pain along the way.”

“He just wants to trick people into thinking that pink’s his favorite color when it’s really red,” Corazón quipped. Sweat was beading down his face, making her glad he was wearing dark sunglasses that day and not his usual heavy eye makeup—just the lipstick was threatening to sag and only hadn’t thanks to a new sealer she had picked up the month prior. The black fabric of his clothes were hot to the touch and his hair so wet from sweat that it was limply sticking to his scalp.

“In a way,” Doflamingo chuckled. The applause died down as the ring was cleared and new participants were announced; if their attendance hadn’t been mandatory, both Viola and Corazón would have been gone several matches ago.

“You’re in for a treat, folks!” the announcer said jovially. “We have a special match set up for you today! While the finalists are getting themselves patched up and pumped up, a couple of fighters from the Donquixote Family are here to wow you with an exhibition training match! Give it up for Machvise and Señor Pink!” The crowd cheered once again as they welcomed the Family’s fighters.

“Why don’t you participate in the Coliseum matches?” Viola turned her head and saw that it was Baby 5, who was staring at Corazón with a pout. “You could wipe the floor with them!”

“It’s for the same reason Trebol and Doflamingo don’t participate,” he replied coldly. “I can’t let people see my abilities on display so frequently and openly. It would allow for dissidents to plan against me.”

“Very true,” Doflamingo nodded. “Can’t go flaunting our secret weapons so openly.”

“I wanna fight!” Dellinger pouted from his spot on Gladius’s shoulders. “I’ll kick all their asses!”

“You can barely drink from the fountains without a stepstool,” Corazón reminded him. “There will be plenty of time for fighting when you’re older.”

“But I wanna fight now! It looks like so much fun!”

“Corazón’s right,” Gladius agreed. “You probably won’t get into the ring until you’re somewhere around sixteen—our surprise for the audience.”

“I am?!” the little boy gasped happily. He bounced on Gladius’s shoulders, grabbing the man’s hair to hold himself steady. “That means they’re gonna be extra-happy when I start fighting?!”

“You will be one of the Jewels of the Coliseum,” Doflamingo assured. He stood and waited for the new players to enter the field, with Machvise and Señor Pink giving him a bow as he gestured in approval. It made Viola jealous in a way, that he was wearing his thick coat of feathers on such a hot day and not even breaking a sweat. He didn’t seem bothered in the slightest, for he was getting to be the praised, honored, deference-given king he imagined himself. Instead of sitting back down, he leaned on the railing, watching the only exhibition fight of the afternoon with glee. “Isn’t it a great day?”

“The greatest,” many of those in the box echoed. The only ones who didn’t were Corazón and Viola, who instead took one another’s hand. She held his gloved fingers with her own trembling ones, her breath caught in her throat as two of the men she wanted gone from her country played at one of the greatest cultural traditions Dressrosa had to offer. They made a mockery of it, getting those in the audience to laugh at their antics as they deliberately threw punches and tripped themselves.

…and none laughed more than the false king.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

A/N: Gancho is about as fooled as we are, lol.

[gorgon-goddess-of-chaos]

Spirits

In my defense, it was a fantastic pun. And sometimes you just gotta pour one out for the homies. On a different note, I hurt my own feelings writing this.

Ghost!Chase x GN!Reader, TW: alcohol, grief, death, funeral mention, human experimentation mention Words: 870

You get out of your car in the graveyard parking lot, the anniversary of Chase’s death. It’s gotten a little easier over the years, but it’s still hard to believe he’s gone. You take the grocery bag out of the back seat, heading through the gates to find his grave. You know where it is, your feet almost take you there by themselves, you’ve walked the path so many times. That laboratory deemed his death a “non-preventable casualty” and refused to give any details, and something inside you has told you it wasn’t an accident.

You pull your hood over your ears, the chill autumn air sending shivers down your spine. Just like you do every year, you stare at his gravestone, almost like you’re processing all over again that he’s truly gone. Like you never fully believed it. And you don’t even know if you ever will. You set the bag down, getting down on one knee as you rustle through it. From the bag you pull out a bottle of whiskey, an energy drink, and a small bouquet of flowers. Old flowers are discarded, long dried out and abandoned. You hold the beverages in your hands, staring at the labels. They’re his favorites, ironic how the drinks you tried to get him to stop drinking end up being the things you bring to his grave.

You pop the cork of the whiskey and open the can of energy drink, watching as the two pour out onto the ground, sinking deep into the ground. Something about it feels, good almost. Making a danger cocktail for him, exactly like the ones he used to try and get you to drink. When there’s nothing more than a few sips in each left, you down them yourself, making a face but, you do it for him.

You get comfortable, talking to him about how life has been this year. The ups, the downs, how you still check on his brothers for him. Trying to do best by him while also living your life. It’s a difficult balance, but you have support keeping you upright. When you run out of things to say, you set the whiskey bottle on the lip of the headstone, placing the flowers inside. It’s what he would’ve wanted. As you walk away, something inside you pulls you back, looking at his name on the stone. Through tears, you give him one last fistbump, for old time’s sake.

You step away, wiping your eyes on your sleeve as you take your trash back to your car.

“WAIT-“

You stop in your tracks, not believing what you heard. Maybe you shouldn’t have drank the whiskey and energy drink…

“Dude! I know you can hear me!”

You spin around to be faced with an apparition of Chase, ghostly blue but he almost looks solid in the evening light.

“Chase-“

You cautiously reach out to him, hand colliding with his chest. He’s cold, but he’s there. Your hands move to his shoulders, looking at him through tears before pulling him into a hug. All you can manage out are sobs, apologies, scoldings for leaving you without him, anything you can think to say to him now that you know he’s listening.

“Hey, it’s okay. I’m okay. Well, I’m not, I’m a ghost. But I thought you could help me with that…”

The idea of getting your friend back makes your heart leap, maybe, maybe you could fix things between the two of you. Confess the things you always wanted to.

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever you need, dude.”

“My body… isn’t here. It’s still at the facility. I didn’t even know I had a grave, although I guess I should’ve expected that.”

“It- it’s not here!?”

You fish through your memories of the funeral, realizing you never saw Chase in that casket. The top was always closed.

“They said the lid was closed because you were disfigured…”

“Yeah that’s a load of bullshit. They were the ones that killed me. They’re trying to use my body as a vessel for… something.”

Your face is a mixture of horror and disgust, which makes Chase chuckle a little bit.

“So… we’re breaking your body out of prison?”

“I mean, that’s one way of putting it.”

“And your brothers? They’ll want to see you. Want to help.”

“I know! I know! But, I wanted to see you first. I didn’t realize you still cared.”

“I always cared, Chase. No matter what your thoughts said. I thought I was waiting for you to come back to me emotionally, not spiritually…”

“I’m sorry, I wanted to. But, they grabbed me. The facility-“

“You need to talk to Henrik about that, later. Right now, I have my boy back. And we’ll get your body back, I promise.”

“Your boy… I forgot you called me that.”

“As long as you’ll let me.”

“Always. Please.”

You look at each other for a moment, before you pull him to your chest, kissing the top of his head.

“Let's get you home. See your brothers. Marv will be able to help in the short term.”

“You’re staying, right?”

“Wouldn’t leave you even if they decided it was my turn to go to that facility.”

[nimblermortal]

I'm beginning to doubt I will actually write this, due to an acute deficit of creative energy, so here are my notes in reaction to the July 1 SCOTUS nonsense. It plays out in my head as a comic.

The first part is a montage of Trump's campaign, his misdoings, and finally the Court's findings, with a panel of Sotomayor's dissent. In response to this newfound panel, in a way that is neatly foreshadowed, Biden orders SEAL Team Six to assasinate Trump, end chapter. Various pundits worry about what will happen to the country now, etc.

The next page, Biden is lying in bed. He gets up. He goes through his old man morning routine. (It is very important, throughout this, that Biden is always drawn/treated as a Little Old Man.) He sits down at the breakfast table. He tells his aide, "I have spent all my life defending the Constitution. I just don't know, in light of this SCOTUS decision, if I've done enough." There's a wordless panel of his face as he contemplates. Then he says, "Call a press conference."

At the press conference he announces that as an official act he will be killing one Republican per day until the decision is overturned.

A journalist raises his hand. He's from Fox News or similar. He says, "Don't you think that -"

Biden pulls out a gun (Bond Arms Bullpup) and shoots him. He flicks his aviators up on his face.

"I'll be back tomorrow," he announces, leaning into the microphone. And then he hobbles off stage.

The next several pages follow his next days: McConnell. Clarence Thomas. Ted Cruz. The sequence echoes Death Note (which I haven't read) rather strongly, with politicians trying to barricade themselves in ever tighter security, but no private force can stand against the amassed might of the entire United States marshaled behind its executive leader.

There's a vignette among the Secret Service as they question their own loyalty. Should they still be protecting this killer? This isn't what they signed on to do. But... it is what they thought they signed on to do. It's the coolest thing they've ever done, body checking private security out of the way so the president can get through with his [insert fancy gun here - @icryyoumercy I need another fancy gun please].

Note: Biden uses a silencer whenever possible to avoid making a racket. He's perfectly out in the open, he just doesn't believe in disturbing the peace with high decibel levels.

Cue to Biden at breakfast again. His aide is notably more cowed as Biden says, "I've spent my whole life defending the constitution. I just don't know if I've made a big enough impact. Henry..." The panel shifts. "Get me a machine gun."

This transitions to the chapter "President of the United Submachine Gun" which features the most epic action scenes: Biden framed in light as he crouches behind the Browning, clothes blowing back from him, shells scattering around, clearing rooms as he moves through the Houses of Congress.

January 6 featured a mob invading the Houses. Joe Biden will do it all by himself.

(Almost. The gun is too heavy for him to carry, so his aide has to keep moving it and setting up a support structure/turret for him to fire from. "Murrica," says Henry, bolting in the support structure for the executive Browning.)

After this we enter the epilogue and its voiceover narration. It's important that the action de-escalates lightning fast.

A few days later the Supreme Court retracted its decision and in a unanimous 3-0 vote (there being only 3 judges left on the court) declared the president is equal under the law to every other citizen.

Biden gave up his weapons peacefully and retired to prison without argument. He died five months later.

(This is over panels of him walking like a creaky old man into a prison facility, and a gravestone featuring his name, a carved pair of aviators, and the words NO REGRETS.)

In the resulting political vacuum, normalcy slowly asserted itself. Most politicians were either implicated in the rampage, or dead. On January 17, with emergency candidates dug out of obscurity, the president of [that one library that got famous for resisting censorship] was sworn into the highest office of the land.

(This section includes a panel of campaign paraphrenalia, including slogans such as Harris: Still an Option and Cruz: Holy Shit What the Fuck, with the latter crossed out and replaced with RIP.)

Her first act, to enshrine the limitations of the presidency into the Constitution, passed without contest.

[monochromaticskies]

DAY 1: DISTRAUGHT

word count: 521

NEOVERSE: PLANCHETTE MUN

in which planchette, ghost hunter "extrordinaire", goes out alone to find another lost spirit and finds something she wished she'd forgotten.

contains mentions of blood, ghosts, cryptids, death, general horror stuff. author's notes at the end :3

It's Planchette's first time being alone in these woods for a long, long while. Normally Sunny is with her; but Sunny is out looking for aliens or something ridiculous—ghosts I can believe, but aliens? You can't be serious—and the supernatural doesn't stop for petty quarrels. So here she is, alone.

She grumbles to herself as she stumbles over rocks, mostly complaints about the stupid design of woodland paths, the lack of paving, why she ever even considered this as a profession, even though they're earning way more money than they should be between the pair of them, just for taking shitty pictures of creatures that aren't even that scary, and proving people aren't crazy when they hear things go bump in the night.

This week's priority ghost was from Dean Xie, the kid that lived right next to the main church's graveyard. He'd sounded scared on the phone, trying to quell it to make himself sound tougher as most boys that age seem to do—but there was a choked quality to his voice as he recounted the screaming woman in the forest, outside his door, bumping over gravestones and scattering pebbles across his windows (with scratches on the glass to prove it). And of course that had been the morning she and Sunny had their Argument, which brings her back to now.

The days are shortening now it's October, nights mutating into unnaturally lengthened periods of darkness that wrap tightly around the entire town of Normal. It's cold and dull, but Planchette is determined to get this done. The camera around her neck rocks and bumps as she slowly trudges her way through Pinelock, the nature reserve-slash-forest that cuts the town off from the rest of Canada. The wind screams.

Even in the dark, Planchette moves with a confidence only obtainable through years of wondering aimlessly around the same forest, finally able to navigate the tiny, unhelpful paths with signs sticking tilted from the dirt like snapped branches. The gale swirls leaves through her hair, around her crutches, the moon and the torch taped to her left stick the only light visible.

The gale shrieks again, a banshee's wail. Planchette flinches despite herself, at the human quality of its voice, the familiarity of it. She's a child again, huddled against a tree, bleeding. Frozen like the icy mist in the air, she looks around wildly, searching for the source.

Choked-off wails cut through the sharp branches of the trees for the third time, picking up speed like rapid breaths, a distraught mother screaming for her child to come back, Planchette's mother calling her name and Planchette without the strength to even whisper a reply, hidden, shadowed.

Ghost or not, she refuses to find out. The wind calls her name and she moves, fast as she can carry herself, past glades sheathed in darkness, past all the regular haunts of cryptid creatures and ghouls and rumours of dead teenagers sobbing for help. Sunny can catch it herself; she'll return the camera tomorrow, apologise, let the other take over. She doesn't notice her tears until they're frozen to her cheeks.

a super fun start to the 31 days of horror challenge!! i loved this prompt and i had a lot of ideas, this is actually lore relevant and technically canon to my oc universe, which is a bonus! i doubt all of the following writings will be canon or as long, but i had a lot of fun!! please leave any feedback you have, and see you tomorrow for day two <3

[triptanite]

Dear Gortash

This one shot is based on the dialogue option that Karlach has when interacting with the ornate mirror!

Option 3: I'd see the Hells filled with flowers, and my old boss Gortash on his hands and knees tending them for eternity.

the companion crew and co all need a shitload of whatever the faerun version of therapy is after saving the world and everything. this is how I imagine Karlach might find a bit of healing within herself

being real, it is a real therapeutic activity to write letters and the like to yourself or others and then to destroy it in some way afterwards. this can be good for venting, or cathartic when you dispose of it afterwards (e.g., ripping, shredding). so if you're feeling a little pent up and need something physical to do, there's an idea for you!

Pairing/s: none

Content warning/s: none

MASTERLIST

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

I didn't have an answer for her then, but I think I would now.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I see you.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

Gortash.

The crew and I are sorting ourselves out now that the dust has settled a bit. We're rebuilding things, healing and all that. We also get drunk under the stars and eat our weight in stew but I think that's also helping.

Some of us are working on things like forgiveness, and guilt. Some of us are training, socialising, moving on. All of us are grieving.

I struggled for a bit, thinking of a way to find my closure. I lost so much of my life. I was punished so deeply for a crime I never committed. I was put through the ringer, ripped out, and ran through again. One of my friends suggested that I write you a letter, and I won't lie, I laughed. A letter? What the Hells will that do?

But still, I kept it in the back of my mind. I think it's just in my nature to trust the people I care about. I carried a sheet of parchment and a quill in my pack with me for two weeks straight. Except every time I tried, I had nothing to say.

Then I went to visit my parents. I clean their gravestones and sweep away fallen leaves as often as I can make it. I tell them about my adventures, my health, everything really. I tell them about my nightmares, and my daydreams. There's a merchant at the cemetery who sells flowers out of a tiny cart. She's a widower. I pay her thrice her asking price for blooms to decorate my folks place, and ask her about her day. She was telling me about how she still talks to her husband sometimes, when she sleeps. She knows he's gone, but it brings her peace. She asked me about my dreams, and about my peace. I didn't have an answer for her then, but I think I would now.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I see you.

You're dressed plainly, not an adornment in sight. You're crouched low in the soil, joints aching, hands calloused. The knees of your peasant pants are permanently dust-stained, and there is dirt under your fingernails that you'll never get out.

You water an endless field of flowers of every variety gently, there is no other way you are able to do it. There is no company. No conversation. Just a gentle wind meant to carry the pollen of infinite blooms to each other. Light beams down onto you. You've developed deep crows feet from squinting when you look up to note it's movement - the artificial sun is the only way you can track the time here.

You are quiet. Frowning. You're too exhausted to rage anymore. You tend to the flowers, a stark and lovely contrast to the hells that lie just beyond the field. You can never reach the edge, you can never crush the flowers. They simply spring back when stepped on, they simply regrow when ripped out.

You would have spent the first few weeks screaming, ripping roots out of the ground, scheming, plotting, swearing. What else would you have done? But over time, you began to resign yourself to your situation. I hope you find comfort that you're not the only one who knows how that feels.

Far away from the world's living and dead, unable to destroy or devise, this is where you'll stay. You can't sweet-talk the flowers, you can't take advantage of the wind's trust. You cannot leave and you cannot die. You will never hurt me again.

And over time, these dreams will fade with the nights. I replace them with my friends and family. I'll close my eyes and think about meals in the moonlight, about playing with dogs and cats and owlbears, or about nothing at all. I think more about myself now. About what I want to do with every day that I have. I learned to make mince pies, I admire the setting sun. I make more friends. I treat myself. I deserve that. I saved the fucking world. I saved my fucking self.

When I think of you, tending to a field of flowers in the Hells forever, I feel relieved.

One day, I won't think of you at all.

And that makes me smile.

Bye forever, pal.

Karlach.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

my sweet gal Karlach deserves all this and more

ty for the love and kind words/tags on some of my works!!! It's seriously so encouraging to know that actual people like what I do!

as I said in my intro I'm pretty inclined to do bittersweet, wordy pieces so I think you can definitely see that across my works so far

anyway thanks again!! :3

1144pm 3/6/24 1252 4/6/24

[roguephenon]

Hi, I started planning my own KND fic, and started with figuring out the ages and birthdates, and I have to ask. 1. How was it for you the process of coming up with a chronology of a show that doesn't really have a set and consistent timeline? 2. In what year does your fic takes place?

My process and answer is long so have it at under the cut

The first part of my process was deciding if I wanted a set timeline or just to go with what worked for me from fic to fic. Over the years (and after watching the series hundreds of times and taking novels worth of notes and screenshots), I’ve settled on a set timeline that works for me and what I like to do.

(Fun fact: I have 3 different timelines! 1 is the main one I use, and the other two are bit more loose depending on the AU I wrote. In one, the GKND doesn’t exist.)

First, I would decide how religiously you want to try and make sense of the timeline the show tries to give us. There aren’t many, but there are a few events that have specific years that can be pinned down. For example, one is the Great Junior High Rebellion of ‘99 where the recommissioning module was allegedly “damaged beyond repair” (maybe they didn’t try turning it off and back on again?). The next one is 1969 where the KND faked the moon landing so adults wouldn’t discover the Moonbase. They’re small throwaway mentions, but important if you need some dates to anchor to.

Also consider that (probably almost) everything in season 6 that’s not a flashback happens AFTER Op. ZERO due to the shots of the Moonbase being the rebuilt Moonbase Zero.

Now, saying all that, my next piece of advice may be weird, but honestly, I think it’s important: don’t stress too much about it! Details are essential, but getting hung up on them can be a headache and stop the process. As you mentioned, the show doesn’t have a consistent timeline, so trying to make sense of everything will run you up a wall.

Just breathe and pick any year or era you want that makes sense or resonates with you! Wanna set it in 2018 or even in 2024? Go for it!

But why aren't kids/teens seen using smartphones? Maybe there’s super duper strict regulation that keeps anyone under 13 (perhaps even 18 because Father apparently controls the Teen Ninjas) from not having smartphones, and the KND uses 2x4 tech as a way to get around it. There’s already legislation in the works in the US that does this already to ban kids from using social media.

How come sector V are all in the same grade yet are different ages? Again, maybe in this world, there’s some super weird law the adult villains lobbied for that keeps kids in certain grades for extended times. There was literally an episode that ended with a 4th Grade President going to City Hall and coming out and saying, “by the way, school day ends at 8:25pm now. Sucks to suck, also Father is the best.”

Let the show's lack of a consistent timeline be an unexpected strength! Besides one or two cultural nods as the show evolves, there's not too much to date it. For example, they make up corporations and franchises to parody real ones and never give the name of a sitting world leader.

Also, it’s a cartoon, and their world is not bound to the same laws as ours. It’s not real life! Be silly and stretch things if you need to! If trying to take the show and make it more realistic is your goal, then, of course, do that as well! Just for me personally, I try not to get bogged down with “this event or timeline doesn’t exactly match up or happen how it would in real life” because I’m not writing real life: I’m writing Kids Next Door fighting candy monsters or the living avatars of puberty.

I’m getting off-topic. Anyway, the last piece of help I offer is just (if you can) rewatching the show and paying attention to context clues in the background! In season 5, two shots of a gravestone end with 2005. So, with that in mind, we can infer a few things:

1. From wherever you put that episode in timeline, it at least happens during or after the year 2005.

2. The same gravestone appears again in IT, so everything that has happened up to Rachel deciding to call a game of tag, again, happens either during or after the year 2005.

Take that as you will!

For the next part of your question! If you’re talking about Cold Reception SPOILER AHEAD BECAUSE IT WILL NEVER BE DIRECTLY STATED IN THE FIC! ....

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you really wanna know?

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The year Cold Reception takes place is 2011.

Hope this helps! If not, let me know and maybe I can give more specifics! Good luck on your fic! Writing is fun.

[blackjackkent]

Lots, as always, haha

Rasaad

[ 🔒 ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat is a secret they’ve sworn never to tell ?

[ 📜 ]ㅤ.ㅤis there a story they love sharing with others ?

[ 💼 ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat do they always carry with them ?

[ 🖐️ ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat do their hands feel like: soft, calloused, trembling ?

[ 🕯️ ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat memory do they replay when they’re alone ?

Hector

[ 🪶 ]ㅤ.ㅤhow do they laugh ?

[ 💭 ]ㅤ.ㅤdo they believe they’re worthy of being loved ?

[ 🌧️ ]ㅤ.ㅤis there a pain they refuse to heal from ?

[ ⛓️ ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat does guilt feel like to them ?

[ 🪦 ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat would they want on their gravestone but never admit aloud ?

(Headcanon Questions)

Ahhh, my two favorite monk boys. :D

Rasaad!

[ 🔒 ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat is a secret they’ve sworn never to tell ?

Hmmmm interesting. I don't know that he necessarily considers it a Sworn Secret, but I suspect that exactly what happened to Gamaz is probably something that he never ever talks about except with the people who were there with him at the Cloud Peaks.

In my liveblog, I had it be the secret that was forced out of him by the last trial of the Twofold Trust, and he was definitely not happy about it.

[ 📜 ]ㅤ.ㅤis there a story they love sharing with others ?

I don't think Rasaad would consider himself much of a storyteller necessarily. But he's very proud of his friends, and Caden in particular, for their battles against darkness, and I think he's probably much more inclined to talk about them and their victories than about himself.

[ 💼 ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat do they always carry with them ?

Based on The Mystery of the Night, I guess he probably always carried that Selunite holy symbol around that Jaheira ends up giving to Karlach. Overall I suspect he travels pretty light, though; he went from being a street kid to a monk, both of which are not scenarios known for accumulating a lot of personal belongings, and I don't think he really got in the habit of carrying around a lot of stuff afterwards.

In his later years with Jaheira he always travels with that cloak she made him. :D

[ 🖐️ ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat do their hands feel like: soft, calloused, trembling ?

Like everything else about him, Rasaad's hands are thick and sturdy and show the callouses and scars of the fairly violent life he's led. His fingers are surprisingly dextrous despite their thickness; he's not made for detail work but has more facility than one would expect with things like knots and locks.

[ 🕯️ ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat memory do they replay when they’re alone ?

Once again, Gamaz's death (both of them, really) probably tops this list. Other candidates include - the day he was brought off the streets and into the monastery, watching Caden have his soul ripped out, and his confrontations with Alorgoth and with Gahan, including [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] at the end of OYE. XD

On a lighter note, at least in my headcanon, in his later years his thoughts are much more taken up with various memories of Jaheira.

-----

Hector!

[ 🪶 ]ㅤ.ㅤhow do they laugh ?

Hector is not exactly a guffaw-er by nature. Karlach does make him laugh a lot but he tends to do it in a sort of internal way, a soft laugh or chuckle, a little subdued. But (particularly when it's Karlach making him laugh) he does smile very strongly with his eyes. :)

[ 💭 ]ㅤ.ㅤdo they believe they’re worthy of being loved ?

Eventually, yes. One of Hector's big throughlines especially in the early part of the game was learning about his capacity for deep, emotional, meaningful relationships, and recognizing himself as a person with physical and emotional needs that were worthy of being fulfilled.

(Man, there are some major thematic consistencies in how I write about these two boys, huh? I bet it says nothing significant about me whatsoever.)

Karlach plays a very strong role in opening him up to the whole thing, given how sincerely and genuinely she lives within her own emotions. Meeting her was very sincerely one of the greatest things that ever happened to him on multiple levels.

[ 🌧️ ]ㅤ.ㅤis there a pain they refuse to heal from ?

I think for Hector it was less about refusing to heal and more about acknowledging that the pain was there in the first place. Over the course of his adventures (as explored, for instance, in The Center Cannot Hold) he came to realize some of the emotional repression that came along with his upbringing, and it was an ongoing process for him to deconstruct that and distance himself from it.

[ ⛓️ ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat does guilt feel like to them ?

There have been people in Hector's adventures that he could not save. Like many other things, I think he internalizes his guilt over this, strongly shoving it to the back of his mind where it sits like a little burning coal alongside all the other little burning coals of things he has not yet learned how to face.

[ 🪦 ]ㅤ.ㅤwhat would they want on their gravestone but never admit aloud ?

This one stymied me a bit and I'm actually not sure I have an answer. :P Hector is for the most part scrupulously honest, and I can't think of much that he would want announced about himself after death that he wouldn't have been willing to say while he was alive - not to mention that he spent the whole game deeply uninterested in people like Volo wanting to make songs and stories and fame around him.

Since this isn't much of an answer, I will offer an adjacent headcanon, which is that (like my headcanon for Rasaad), Hector lives longer than average for a human given his monk Timeless Body capabilities and perhaps some assistance from Jaheira.

Thus, he and Karlach die around the same time, and very nearly fulfill exactly the wistful wish that she made so many years earlier when she thought her heart was about to consume her:

“If I had my choice, we’d do it all together. Life - a long life. And then we’d slip away one night… side by side… wrinkled and grey, warm in our bed…”

They're buried next to each other in the same graveyard where Karlach's parents are buried. (And where, entirely unbeknownst to everyone involved, Hector's mother is also buried.)