#series tag: til it squeaks

[complicitgirlfrot]

22, 65, 71 :)

This is in reference to this post. I think I’m gonna answer these a little bit out of order. Just so that all the tags are at the end, y’know?

22. What’s the hottest sex dream you’ve ever had?

This one is a little difficult cuz not only do I not remember my dreams very often (or for very long), but I also rarely have sex dreams it would seem. Though Recently I did have one that I made a small post about. TL;DR a tumblr mutual shotgunned be weed for several hours. There was no sex and the dream itself was not that horny but when I woke up I was very wet from it

71. Start typing out your dirtiest fantasy you can think of and don’t stop til you get so embarrassed you can’t go on any longer. Just make sure it’s actually something you’re into!

Hmmmm… because i've been answering over the course of a full day I got more than one for this.

I've been playing a lot of Corruption of Champions II lately (as recommended by a favorite mutual) so a lot of my fantasizing has been related to monsterfucking and demonic corruption and the like. Like the thought of being a demon's favorite fuck pet has been a go-to recently. The idea that a massive and all-powerful demon woman would look at me and see me as a perfect whore for her to get off with. How long would I deny her? Months of her filling my mind with impossible fantasies and pleasures that could only be real if i'd just submit? Weeks of her visiting me in my dreams to make me live them out night after night? Days of her taking an incorporeal form to tease me in public? Or would i just submit immediately? Bound to an eternity of servitude, never not knowing bliss. Maybe i make a deal to bind myself in exchange for my ideal body, and she turns me into the perfect avatar of her influence, that she might take control to walk this earth and fuck Who she pleases when she pleases. My senses still hooked up but with her at the controls, how long would it be before my mind melts entirely and I'm reduced to her perfect priestess pet?

As far as more realistic/achievable fantasies go, I… have tried to write this like 8 times over the course of the day so fuck it. Not gonna get fancy with it. I wanna be tied down, on either a table or bed, and have various areas tested. Experimented on. Blindfolded and bound. Have my world reduced to what I can feel and hear. The hushed chatter of a group of lab techs discussing plans for the day. The padding of feet and squeaking of wheels as someone approaches me. I can almost feel the heat radiating off them as they carefully inspect my naked body, thinking they’re down by my legs then yelping in surprise when they grope my tit, which gives way to moaning as they continue. More hands appear, fingertips tracing my still growing curves before vanishing from my perception, only to reappear somewhere else. Gently choking neck or grasping thighs. One of those dildo gags or whatever they’re called shoved down my throat because my whines are distracting some of the assistants. Nipples getting pinched and then sucked on, whether by machine or attendant I do not know. Ass being spread, first by fingers then by some manner of equipment. I don’t know what it is, but I do know it's cold and smooth and slick and I want it inside me. Small pulsing and thrusting mechanisms for muffing They seem to have some sort of machine for whatever, even slightly, erogenous zones they find. The gag is removed and the hands retreat, followed by the sounds of feet and heavy breathing. A buzzer sounds and I’m asked a series of questions from a speaker somewhere above me. Cycling through which dildo size, texture, and thrusting angle feels best for both ass and cunts. Then trying different combinations. What level of suction feels best on which nipple? Is it the same for your cock? What about vibration? Electro stimulation? Did you know that you’ve come four separate times from having your neck bit? If there is ever a moment where I am too blissed out to answer a question when they pause, they simply start that question over so I can feel the options again. Hours and hours of testing, sometimes with breaks to wrench me into a new position, or to replace the gags. Maybe if I am not compliant enough the blindfold gets replaced with vr goggles and noise canceling headphones, my vision filled only with pink swirls and voices offering gentle praise. Maybe at end of day, each attendant who wants or needs it can have their way with me. After a full day of cataloguing exactly how to make me cum they get to put everything to the test. They note for future reference that they ought to incorporate this kind of work into the testing. Did you know she cums 60% faster with tdick in her mouth? Or that she will lick cum off of herself, and calling her desperate for it will--

For the record i didn’t get too embarrassed to continue… just too aroused

65. What are your top five favourite blogs to masturbate to? Tag them!

Not counting my partner, who I masturbate with, to, and on regularly (not tagging them cuz they don’t have a horny blog so technically they don’t count), my favs are:

@pan-galactic-enby has a wide variety of stuff on her blog with excellent taste in lewd bits. We love lusting over the eroticism of the machine with it. Very fun to flirt with and Very ghey ;) 

@butchcockiness2 writes some amazing t4t erotica that often uses dynamics that I hadn't considered. His posts (specifically this one and this one iirc) are responsible for me learning how to muff myself, and then teaching my partner to do it (11/10 experience btw, I don’t think people talk enough about how mind melting muffing can be). Also I greatly appreciate the COVID posts and masking resources; I’m the last person in my city to mask it seems and they help me feel like I’m not going insane

@blairdsm is just generally really cool? And hot? She has called me out multiple times for my tags on her fursona posts and I haven’t been the same since (you can find those here and here). Both of her fursonas have high-key inspired me to update my own (which I have actually started doing! The first post I have of her is here on my main). Excellent art and erotica blurbs to go with. Also she once offered to do hypnotism stuff with me and like, idk if that offer still stands, but if it does I may take her up on it, especially with a stressful semester coming up. Also also we’re mutuals on both main and side blogs and I think that’s fun and cool. Always a treat to see her in my notes

@slimegirlovipositers is the second ever porn blog I followed (the first was pan-galactic-enby) and I’m glad I’ve been consistently able to find her again through her countless terminations. Awesome taste in porn tho I miss the days when she would post the really niche shit (still does, it’s just less common than it used to be)

@catdog-coyote-butch and @boundbutchbottom are a couple (I think? I could be wrong) that I’ve only recently started to follow (though I’ve been silent mutuals with the former on main for a bit) but I we have similar tastes it seems. Idk, I don’t have a big blurb for these two they’re just hot and have good blogs I really like and I feel it’d be a shame to mention one without the other. 10/10 would recommend

[crackinglamb]

Til It Squeaks, a Series

Today, on the anniversary of its beginning, Da'Fen Carly Mayers Lavellan's story came to an end. Two years, 337,909 words, 7 works. So I thought I would put together a masterpost of the series, with links to AO3, for all of you.

Twist

The fic that started it all. Carly Mayers, a woman from Earth, gets transported to Thedas and becomes the Herald of Andraste. And she decides that canon needs a hammer. A Solavellan fix-it with a happy ending. Rated E for sexual content. Also contains canon typical violence. ~197K words.

The Cutting Room Floor

A snippet fic, full of little bits the main fic had no room for. Includes screenshots of the ensemble cast. Also includes 'deleted scenes' and versions of the first draft that never got off the ground. Rated T for occasional swearing, adult themes and canon typical violence. ~27K words.

Choice, Pride and Trust

A oneshot of Carly and Solas defeating Imshael at Suledin Keep. Rated M for graphic depictions of violence. ~2300 words.

Waiter, There's a Fluff In My Soup!

A multi-ship collection of prompt fills for Fluff-uary 2021. Pairings include Carly and Solas, Varric and Marian Hawke, Dorian and Iron Bull and more. Rated E for sexual content. ~28K words.

Twist Some More

A sequel to Twist. Carly and Solas continue their work rebuilding the Dales, taking down the Veil and having a surprise baby. Incorporates events from Tevinter Nights, but is overall self-indulgent and fluffy. Rated E for sexual content. ~67K words.

Earth Pizza and Qunari Street Food

Takes place four years after the events of TSM. Carly and Solas welcome Dorian and Iron Bull for a visit. Cooking and family fluff ensue. Rated T for some adult themes, but with a happy ending. ~4600 words.

Make It a Good One, Peaches

50 years post-canon, mortality affects Carly's inner circle. A final send off including the generation to follow that of the Inquisition. More sweet than bitter. Rated T for major character death. ~1700 words.

Thank you to everyone who has read these fics and come to love Carly as much as I do. My heart is full. 💕

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

A Place Like This 2

Warnings: this short series will include dark elements including noncon, possible violence, mentions of mental illness, and other explicit content. I’m not your mother, curate your own consumption.

This is dark!Lumberjack!Andy Barber and explicit. Your media consumption is your own responsibility. Warnings have been given. DO NOT PROCEED if these matters upset you.

Summary: You start asking questions but you might not like the answers.

Note: I’m a filthy liar and this is gonna be obv more than two parts and I dunno what I’m doing.

Thank you. Love you guys!

As always, if you can, please leave some feedback, like and reblog <3

Your office was the room across the hall from Andy’s, just beside the bathroom and furthest from your mother’s.

You had a routine; it helped you keep on track. You woke up, had a coffee and a small breakfast, and climbed back upstairs to begin your work. At noon, you took a break, you went for a walk or just sat on the porch with your mother if she wasn’t in her room. You returned to work and later in the afternoon you came down to remind your mother about her pills. Then you started dinner as the day was in its final decline.

Andy only changed that slightly. He woke earlier than you did and was on his way out as you got up. He came home around dinner time and you left a plate for him in the oven if he was late. He was quiet, he ate, and went upstairs. The first week went by as such. You almost pitied him for living in what seemed a crowded isolation.

Then the weekend came. Like the other lumber workers, he had those two days to himself. It would be the first real test of your arrangement.

You woke at your usual time and went down to make your coffee. You only wrote for a couple hours on weekends. Breaks were good. You measured the grounds into the percolator and filled it with water. You turned on the decades old stove and turned as you heard the old stairs groan.

Andy appeared in the door. He wore jeans and a thick knitted sweater. His hair, overgrown and shaggy, was pushed away from his face, his beard a shade darker and starting to puff out from its length. You suspected that as a lawyer, he never looked so unkempt and yet even now, he still managed to look refined.

“Hate to be selfish but you think there’s enough for me?” He crossed to the table and sat. 

“Should be,” You rubbed your hands together. You wore an old sweatshirt with a grizzly on the front and your old faded jeans with the bleach stain on the knee. Unfashionable but warm. ‘“Cream, milk, sugar?”

“Black’s fine,” He said as he scratched his chin. “I was thinking today I could stock us up on wood for the fireplace. Since it’s snowing now, it’s better to get it done before the winter is really here.”

You squinted at him and played with the frayed cuff of your shirt. “So, you got a lot of snow in the city?”

“Not as much as here, I’m sure.” He let out a long breath and you saw the cloud in front of him. 

You paused and listened for the rattle of the furnace. “Fuck.” You pushed yourself away from the counter. “I gotta light the furnace.”

“Where is it? I’ll do it.” He offered. “Since you made the coffee.”

“You sure?”

“Think I can handle it,” He stood. “City boy and all.”

“Basement door’s outside. It’s a pain but this place is old and not very well put together.” You said. “There’s a lighter in the drawer.” You pointed at the counter. “Thanks. Oh, and the key too. Hanging by the door with the green tag.”

“Alright,” He crossed to the door. “Think I’ll figure it out.”

He disappeared down the hall and returned with his big boots. He put them on before the back door and unlocked it. He tramped down the steps as the door clattered behind him and you listened to his crisp footsteps. 

You wrung your hands as you thought. Nice enough, you surmised, but evasive. Maybe he wasn’t running from some heinous offense but he was trying to get away from something. You could tell by the way he always seemed to direct the conversation, especially when it turned on him.

You heard the sudden rumble of the furnace and the vents hissing. You turned as the percolator began to shake almost in tandem and the small glass knob bubbled with brown coffee. You took it off the burner as the basement door squeaked and the jingle of the key accompanied the snowy steps across the yard.

Andy kicked off his boots and slipped through the back door. He hung the key and he shook the snow from his hair and smoothed it back. He left his boots on the mat as you poured two mugs. He approached and you slid one to him. He took it with a soft thank you.

You added milk to yours and sat at the table as he did the same. You regretted it almost immediately. You should've taken it up with you and hid in your office. 

"Any plans today?" He asked. You blinked and he rested his palm against the hot mug. "Sorry, it's none of my business."

"Nah, nothing planned," You replied. "So you just plan on chopping wood on your day off?"

"Not much else to do up here. It's nice. Mindless." He shrugged.

"You have a lot you don't want to think about?" You wondered.

His jaw ticked as he eyed you and his lips curled slightly.

"Don't we all?"

"You'd have to to come all the way up here from wherever you're from." You commented. 

"Hmm," He chuckled under his breath. "You'd make a good prosecutor. You don't miss a lot."

"I'm a writer. I write about people, so I gotta study them closely."

"I thought you wrote about animals."

"That's what I'm paid to write about but… I have my own projects." You lifted your mug and tasted the rich brew.

He sucked his bottom lip in as his thoughts wrinkled on his forehead. "Uh huh," He uttered carefully. "Guess that's true then."

"So… is it too much to ask why you ditched being a lawyer?" You asked.

"You do anything long enough and you get bored."

"And you never did anything else? Never got married?" You prodded.

"Well, what about you?" He challenged as he hooked two finger through the handle of his mug. "Not many fish in this pond, huh."

"Touche," Your lips slanted, "You definitely are the lawyer type."

🍂

Later that day, after you gave your mother her second round of pills, you ventured out into the forest that skirt around the old property. The snow was only just past your ankles, the powder fell in spurts but didn’t seem to get much deeper. When you were met with a block or an impasse in your writing, you always came out to the trees to clear your mind. You were done for the day but you had a long week ahead of you.

You kicked the snow of a fallen tree by the river and listened to those critters not yet in hibernation in the blanket branches above. You thought about the man staying in the room next to yours and the answers he would give you; the questions you were too afraid to ask him. 

He wasn’t telling you everything, perhaps he didn’t owe you everything, but the lines in his forehead, the crinkles beside his eyes, the depth of his irises as they watched you. There were things you needed to know about a person and you feared you didn’t know enough about this stranger you’d invited in. You had been too intent on the money, on your own keeping.

Or maybe you were paranoid. You were starting to sound like your mother when she claimed the birds were listening to her and taking the messages back to the monsters of the forest. When she had barricaded herself in her room and refused to come out for fear you were one of them in disguise. The day it had all fallen apart.

Your nose was numb and tingling. You pulled your scarf up over your face and turned back. The snow was crisper now. The temperatures fell with the sun and that happened quickly in the winter. The sky was a dark grey as you came back to the house, the chimney billowed up toward the quarter moon and a soft amber light shone between the curtains of the front room.

You dusted your boots off before you stepped inside. The voice didn’t stop as you took off your coat, scarf, hat, and gloves. You slid your boots off and listened. The scene was unexpected as you peeked into the front room.

Your mother sat with her favourite blanket over her legs before the fire. A fresh stack of wood sat beside it, the basket full of split logs as well. Andy bent to poke at the embers and send up sparks as he got the fire going higher.

“So, this book you’re reading,” He said as he set the poker aside. “Did she get away yet?”

“I don’t think she’s gonna,” Your mother replied as Andy stood and brushed off his jeans. “I don’t think that’s what the story’s about.”

“That’s too bad.” He looked up and his eyes met yours. You moved so that you stood in the doorway. “But I guess that’s truer to life. Not everyone gets their happy ending.”

“Well, I’ve been taking my time because it doesn’t have an ending. Yet.” She explained. “I’m waiting for her to finish.”

Your blood went cold. You crossed your arms and cleared your throat.

“What book is this, ma?” You asked.

She looked around the chair at you and blanched. Andy sat on the sofa and you pushed yourself away from the door frame. Your mother shook her head. 

“I told you not to read my stuff.” You grimaced as you came closer. “It’s a first draft. Unfinished, unedited. It’s… personal.”

“From what she says, it’s pretty good regardless,” Andy offered. “Can’t blame her for her curiosity.”

You looked at him sharply and sighed as you dropped your arms.

“Whatever. Just don’t look at it again til I’m done.” You reprimanded. “Please. I’ll give you a look when I’m ready.”

“Dunno why it’s such a big deal. You write for the magazine all the time.” She grumbled.

“Because this isn’t an article on leaf fauna, ma,” You rubbed your cheek. “You already eat?”

“Just about to. Andy put a casserole in the oven.” She smiled. “Never knew a man who cooked. Your father, he couldn’t even salt his own eggs.”

“Mmm,” You sniffed as the smell of the burning wood melded with another more savoury scent. “Well, thank you, Andy. That was considerate. I’m sorry I waited so late, I was a bit distracted.”

“No problem,” He shrugged. “Really, the least I can do.”

You glanced between him and your mom. She hadn’t been this awake in ages. Her meds usually had her napping until dinnertime and asleep just as quickly after. She was vibrant and more friendly to this man than people she’d known for decades. You felt as if you’d walked in on something. 

“Well, let me know. I’ll be upstairs.” You backed up. “There’s some strudel left from yesterday we can have for dessert.”

You left them and stopped at the bottom of the stairs as you looked back into the front room. Andy’s voice droned as he spoke to your mom and as she chuckled his eyes found yours. They narrowed for just a moment before he turned back and smiled at the older woman. 

Nice enough, you presumed, but why didn’t you believe it?

🍂

The next day, you watched Andy through the window. The snow was thicker, a harbinger of the storm that had been brewing for over a week. He crossed to the trees, his boots barely higher than the blanket below. He sank down with each step. Only a fool would venture out as the windows billowed and flung the snow errantly.

You tore yourself away and pulled the curtain shut. You crept out into the hall and listened. Your mother slept late that day and when you gave her her pills, she’d just rolled over and fallen back to sleep. 

You neared the door of Andy’s room and your hand hesitated on the knob. You took a breath and twisted it. You entered and were struck by the man’s smell; of his sweat and the deodorant that always lingered around him. The bed was made and the room barely looked lived in. 

You walked slowly to the closet. Flannel shirts and jackets hung within above a single suitcase.

You felt a pang of guilt. Had you not just chided your mother for her snooping? You bent and unzipped the bag. It was empty. You checked the pockets; empty too. You stood and slid the door back into place. You went to the bed, the table next to it with the drawer that didn’t quite shut all the way and you wiggled it open.

The bible your mother left in there as if it were a hotel and pack of smokes. You’d never seen Andy smoke, never even smelled it on him. You took the carton and flipped open the top. Inside, a folded picture. You tiptoed to the window and looked out. His footprints faded into the trees.

You slid the photo out and opened it with shaky hands. It was Andy, shorter hair, trimmed beard, smiling, his arm around a dark-haired woman and a young boy in front of them. You folded it quickly and pushed it back behind the sticks in the pack. You placed it as you had found it and forced the drawer shut. 

Was he running from his own family? Or maybe, what had happened to them?

You fled his room and closed the door guiltily. You were only more confused than before. You descended the stairs and hastily pulled your coat from the hook. Your hat was pulled on carelessly and you tied your boots without thinking. You pushed your hands into your gloves and angled yourself out the door. It was fucking cold; the fleece lining of your coat made little difference.

You grunted as you forced your boots through the snow and followed Andy’s tracks as they filled with a new layer of powder. You weren’t sure what you were doing, why you were doing it. What could he be doing all the way out in the woods which would be incriminating?

You went on, even as the questions floated in your mind. You followed his large boot prints, placing your feet in them as you followed his path. You came to a stop before the river, the overturned tree showed where someone had brushed aside the snow. The tracks veered off away from the log and you looked around.

You were forced back into an upright trunk, the breath knocked out of you as Andy pinned you with his arm across your chest. His eyes seared into you as he leaned his weight into you and you gasped for air as you smacked his shoulder.

“Why are you following me?” He growled.

“What? Andy, let me--” You gasped, barely able to breathe, the snow clumping in your lashes. “And--”

“Hmm? I see you watching me. I see the way you look at me.” He hissed. “I help you, help your mother and what? What do you think I am?” He grabbed your chin, his hide glove rough against your skin. “Am I that villain you write about? Is that what you think?”

“No, I…” You smacked him again and again. “I was just---” He let off just a little as you gulped for air. “There’s a storm. You shouldn’t be out here--”

“You think I can’t handle a storm?” He snarled. “You’re not a very good liar and trust me, I’ve known a lot of liars.”

“Let go of me.” You pleaded. “Jesus Christ, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I followed you, okay? I was just… curious.”

“Uh huh,” He turned you and forced his arm around your neck as he bent you over. You kicked as he dragged you through the snow towards the river. “WHat do you think? I’m hiding some big secret like one of those books you read?”

“Let--go,” Your feet slid through the blanket below. “Stop! What are you--”

“You think I’m what? A criminal? A murderer!?” He pulled you up and spun you away from him. You stumbled backwards as you faced him. 

Your boots slid beneath you and you hearth the hard thunk of your sole against the the ice. Thick but not thick enough. You held out your hands as you looked down at the river coursing below the brittle surface. Your heart raced in your ears. You tried to take a step forward but he was at the bank, watching you.

“Ah ah,” He raised his hand. “You stay where you are.”

“What are you doing?” You pushed your feet apart. “Andy--”

“Terrible accident you falling through the ice like that. There’s just so much snow, you can’t really tell where the water begins.” He smiled and tucked his hands in his pocket as you heard the slow crack beneath you. “Your mother will be devastated.”

You swallowed as your eyes wetted and you looked between him and your feet. You lifted your boot and the snap below you had your heart in your throat. You plunged into the freezing water with a shrill shriek, your arms flying up to grab onto the ice. 

The frozen sheet broke as you tried to latch on and you kicked as the water soaked your coat and dragged you down into the depth further. You flapped helplessly and spun in circles in the waves. The water filled your lungs and you choked and you stared up through the frigid foam, the blurry shadow staring down at you.

The cold bit deep into your flesh and your limbs weakened the more you struggled. The water smothered you and your body spasmed in the thralls of finality. Your eyes rolled back and the dark water flowed around you in welcome.

[lucrezia-thoughts]

Every Story is a Love Story

CHAPTER 15: SO I'M THE BEST?

Pairing: Marcus Pike x (F) Reader

Warning(s): kissing, ludicrously unrealistic and inappropriate office behavior, movie references no one asked for...

Series Summary: You never expected the story of how you met the man of your dreams to start with, ‘He walked in while I was ass up on his desk moaning about how handsome he was…’

Chapter Summary: "Come ON, bug! You can't just say something like that and then not tell me the details!" Sam whined from his position draped dramatically over your desk...

Link to Master List

~~~~

"Come ON, bug! You can't just say something like that and then not tell me the details!" Sam whined from his position draped dramatically over your desk.

"Yes I can." You teased over your shoulder as you browsed through your email and your calendar for the day. You sighed when you saw a new meeting pop up for tomorrow to discuss the few potential findings large enough to warrant bringing the client on-site. The way this audit was panning out it was going to be at least a needs improvement...which meant it was going to be a tense few days.

"Buuuuug, I was the best you had up til now! You KNOW I was the best you had up til now! You have to tell me how he was better!!" Sam continued as if you hadn't spoken.

"I don't have to tell you anything, Sam." You pointed out as you opened the details of the meeting and frowned. "Ugh...that discrepancy in filing we found is turning into a way bigger deal, Sam." You grumbled, finally looking up at him.

"That just means we'll have some interesting stories from this one." He shrugged. "But that's not important right now!"

"Saaaam..." You groaned and poked his side. "Make like Elsa and let it go."

"No can do, bug! I can't lose my title without knowing how I lost it!" Sam countered, but stood up. "Is he bigger? Thicker?" He questioned and you rolled your eyes. Grabbing your laptop from its docking station, you walked around him to head towards your first meeting.

"Was it technique?" Sam continued after grabbing his own laptop and following you to the conference room. "Did he make you squirt?" He whispered in your ear once you reached the room and you turned around wide eyed to swat him in the chest. "Holy shit, he did! Didn't he?" Sam's face was practically giddy as the two of you took your seats and the meeting commenced.

You shook your head as you made your way to Marcus's office after the meeting concluded and you'd run out to beat Sam's questions. You smiled as you stepped inside and shut the door behind you. "Give me one second to finish this up then I'm all yours, baby." Marcus called to you as he typed away at his computer.

"Sam wants you to teach him your ways." You whispered in his ear after you made your way to stand behind him and wrapped your arms around his neck.

"My ways?" You heard the question in Marcus's voice as he finished up entering his report.

"Mmmhmmm." You hummed and nipped at his ear, sliding your hands down his chest towards his belt to tap your finger over it. "Those ways."

Marcus groaned at your attentions, but chuckled when you tapped his belt. "How did that even-" He started to ask, but you shook your head as you walked around his chair to sit in his lap.

"According to him, and I quote, 'I can't lose my title without knowing how I lost it.'" You mimicked Sam's voice and leaned forward for a kiss, but Marcus had his head thrown back in laughter.

"What? His title?" Marcus grinned as he finally got his laughter under control and wrapped his arms around you.

"Oh god-" You groaned and brought your hands up to hide your face. "Yes...his title...that he gave himself." You mumbled, letting your body rest against Marcus's chest. Taking your hands away from your face when you felt Marcus's hands at your wrists, you sighed.

"Sam was my first...and best, until you." You whispered softly, looking into his eyes.

"Baby-" Marcus started, but you leaned forward and kissed him slowly, savoring the feeling of his lips against yours. You could feel Marcus's smirk when the kiss ended. "So I'm the best?" He asked, already knowing the answer and you shook your head as you moved to get off his lap.

"Nooooo, you're just as bad as him!" You whined when he tugged you back against him and tickled your neck with the scruff of his beard. "Marcus!" You squeaked and tried to pull away, but he held you close.

"I love you, honey." He breathed into the kisses he placed on your neck once he stopped tickling you.

"I love you too-" You smiled and leaned down to kiss him when your phone buzzed in your pocket. "Shit." You grumbled and dug the device out of your pocket.

"Everything okay?" Marcus asked as he held you, thumb absentmindedly stroking your hip.

"Uh...I don't know. They're bringing our audit client in next week...and one of their consultants..." You scanned through the new email quickly. "Yeah... some guy named Patrick Jane?" You read off and frowned when you felt Marcus freeze under you.

"Marcus?"

~~~~

CHAPTER 16: MARCUS, WHAT’S WRONG?

~~~~

A/N: So...a 'Needs Improvement' audit is really not good, just an FYI...As always, comments and feedback are love!! Oh, and please let me know if you want to be tagged on updates!

TAG LIST: @sirowsky  @mrschiltoncat  @alberta-sunrise  @fleurdemiel145 @mrsparknuts  @jedi-mando  @styxfan06sworld  @prideandpascal  @what-iwish-you-knew  @paintballkid711  @artsymaddie  @computeringturtle @northernpunk @sleep-tight1

[fiadhaisteach]

Things I’ve Read This Week* - 2021.04.03

New Stories

Hope in the Hand of a Child by Crystal_Grace - Solas & OFC - 65,309 words, complete

Doom Upon All the World by broomclosetkink (@broomclosetkink) - Solas/Female Lavellan, DA4 protag/Lace Harding - 8,146 words, complete

A Knot of Place and Time by Alexis_Trvlyn (@itsalexistrvlyn) & Dore_N - Solas/OFC, OMC/ OFC - 16,037 words, WIP (It's tagged as Solavellan & as OFC, but it's Solas & a twin brother & unclear how the pairings are going to play out yet)

Feral Verse, The S͍̈́o͓̖̖̺͆ͩͣ̑ṋ̻̭̉͋͑g̓ͥ in the Halls by apfelgranate (@notenoughdragons) - Solas/Female Adaar - 1,823 words, complete

No More My Heart Beats Without You by Cracking Lamb (@crackinglamb) - Solas/Female Trevelyan - 5,554 words, complete

miles to go before the fall of night, across the ocean and over the ruins, over hill and dale i return to you by victoriousscarf (@victoriousscarf) - Loghain/Male Surana - 1,558 words, complete

In another world by Noire12 (@noire-pandora) - Solas/Cassandra - 4,670 words, complete

Five Times Everybody Saw It by bluebeholder (@wanderingnork) - Solas/Female Adaar - 2,702 words, complete

Rereads

Hay by Viking_woman (@thevikingwoman) - Solas/Female Lavellan - 12,924 words, WIP

Lightning Struck, Miss Grey by LarasLandlockedBlues (@laraslandlockedblues) - Cullen/Female Trevelyan - 44,078 words, Abandoned/Hiatus HSE WIP (some threads are left untied but the main plot has a nice big bow on it in chapter 14)

Let the Revolution Take Its Toll by gamerfic - Solas/Female Tabris - 9,153 words, complete

Tumblr (re)Reads

Slippery Slope by @thevikingwoman - Solas/Female Lavellan

Why Teach A Dwarf About Magic? by @best-of-the-vein - Solas/Female Cadash

New Fairy Tales: Diver by @dycefic - Original Work, prompt

Subscription Updates

When the World Fell by Psalacanthea - Fen'harel|Solas/Female Lavellan (Ch. 10)

Bloodied and Broken, Dead Pasts and Dread Futures by youworeblue (@dreadfutures) - Solas/Female Lavellan (Ch. 141-142)

miles to go before the fall of night, across the ocean and over the ruins, the forest is dark and deep and i've seen you here before by victoriousscarf (@victoriousscarf) - Solas/Male Lavellan (Ch. 129-130)

Sugar Honey Iced Tea by AntlersandFangs (@thededfa), Beckily (@beckily), & Celtic_Lass (@thecelticlass) - Female Adaar/MBiT, Varric/MGiT, Krem/MGiT (Ch. 27)

No Longer A Game by Here_To_Be (@nolongeragameart) - Solas/MGiT (Ch. 55)

Bloodied and Broken, Ruined Empires and Dust by youworeblue (@dreadfutures) - Solas/Female Lavellan (Ch. 3)

The Calling by SilverQueen (@sadfantasylife) - Solas/OFC (Ch. 26)

Running With The Halla by InArlathan (@in-arlathan) - Solas/Female Lavellan (Ch. 10)

lover, your back is bruised from what you carry, In the face of your light by noverture (@noverturemusings) - Solas/Male Lavellan (Ch. 73-74)

Dissonant Verses, Dread Wolf Guide Us by Alexis_Trvlyn (@itsalexistrvlyn) - Solas/Female Lavellan (Ch. 9)

Til It Squeaks: A Modern Girl's Take on Thedas, Twist Some More by CrackingLamb (@crackinglamb) - Solas/MGiT (Ch. 5)

In Another World by fenkyuubi (@fenkyuubi) - Solas/Female Lavellan (Ch. 52)

This is the New World State, The New World State by bleucrow (@memoriscrow) - Zevran/MGiT (Ch. 19)

Dreams, In Waking Dreams by AParisianShakespearean (@a-shakespearean-in-paris) - Cullen/Female Trevelyan (Ch. 67)

Shit… I broke the game by Elenielwen (@elenielwen) - Solas/MGiT (Ch. 53)

Into the Cosmos, Into the Chaos by Pakhet (@shiver-the-tiefling) - MBiT, Solas/MGiT (Ch. 64)

Just Like Fire by Cracking Lamb (@crackinglamb) - Solas/Female Lavellan (Ch. 12)

I Have Found a Home (Ian x Solas), Who Am I in Your Arms? by theharellan (@theharellan) - Solas/NB Lavellan (Ch. 1), complete, series sub

Death at a great distance by elo_elo (@junkbabelna) - Fenris/Female Hawke (Ch. 7)

» side note - multiple chapters may mean multiple updates; or might just be me refreshing my memory, reorienting myself in the story, or rereading some for fun. 😊

*TIRTW & can recommend (previous weeks)

[desiraypark]

The Family Man

Clyde x Sherri (Non-Linear Series)

Content: Angst; death/death mention tw; cancer tw; abandoment tw; neglect tw; broken home. Author’s Note: After a recent Logan Lucky watch party, I realized just how much Joe and Mellie being together actually creeped me (and others) out, so they’re separated lol. Bye, Joe.

The Day After Thanksgiving (and Clyde’s Birthday) - 2021 Sherri sat on Mellie’s old full-sized bed with a towel draped over her shoulder, as her firstborn suckled at her breast. The baby’s eyes fluttered--open and closed, fighting to look into mama’s loving eyes, but wanting to be engulfed in her protective warmth. Clyde peeked inside the bedroom. “Y’all alright?” he whispered. Sherri nodded and smiled. Just as Clyde opened his mouth to speak, the doorbell rang. “I’m gon’ fix you a mocktail, you want a Moscow mule type thing or somethin’ like a margarita?” Sherri chuckled. “Moscow mule sounds nice and festive, I think.” “What you doin’ here?” Jimmy said in the distance. “Oop,” Sherri said. “Must be Joe.” Clyde looked over his shoulder and walked through the hallway. “I’m back in Boone, now…” an unfamiliar voice responded.

Clyde stepped into the living room. Standing in the middle of the floor with her fists on her hips was Mellie. Jimmy stood at the door. On the other side of the screen door stood their father--gray-haired and thinner than the last time they’d seen him.

“What that gotta do wit’ us?” Jimmy asked. “Jimmy, just let him in,” Mellie said. “Naw, he ain’t about to mess up our holiday.” “Jimmy, this is my house and I said let him in!” Mellie demanded. Jimmy scoffed, pushed the door open for Tim to grab it, and then he walked into the kitchen. Tim walked in and got a look at his two youngest. “Mellie...you look beautiful, darling,” he said. He stepped over to hug her. “Thanks.” Mellie gave him light pats on the shoulders then pulled away. Tim looked at Clyde and walked over to hug him, but Clyde stepped back. “Hey…” Tim swallowed and nodded. “Hey, Son.” Jimmy flew out of the kitchen with Sylvia. He yanked her coat off the coat rack and handed it to her, then grabbed his. Then, he gently tugged her out the door. Suddenly, he stepped back in. “You wanna move your car out the way?” Jimmy asked. Sylvia placed her hand on Jimmy’s chest and used her free hand to turn his face to hers. “Honey…” She tilted her head toward the house, gesturing for him to go back in. Jimmy huffed, and they stepped back inside. ____________________

“Honey, alI hell’s about to break loose,” Sylvia whispered, tipping into the bedroom. Sherri was pacing the room with Chris against her chest, lightly rubbing and patting the baby’s back.    “What’s going on?” she asked. Sylvia left the door ajar. “Their father is here.” “Oh, damn,” Sherri whispered. Sylvia sat on the edge of the bed and watched Sherri walk back and forth with the baby. “Jimmy’s pissed, huh?” “He damn near dragged me out the house with him. I convinced him to come back in. Whatever they’re about to talk about, it’s way overdue,” Sylvia said. “I agree.” Chris began to fuss. “Ain’t that right, baby? I know,” Sherri said in a baby-talk. “You’ve had no trouble latchin’, have you?” Sylvia asked, impressed. “Not too much. Definitely surprised me.” “The quietest little one I’ve ever seen,” Sylvia said. Sherri couldn’t make out what Clyde was saying, but she could hear the low rumble in his voice. The low quiet that could rattle you to your core. That simmering anger that she’d heard dripping in his voice that time she ate up his Mama’s cake recipe. “Uh oh,” Sherri said. She took large steps toward the door. “What?” Sylvia asked, rising from the bed. “Clyde’s getting pissed, I can hear it in his voice,” Sherri answered. She walked down the hallway with the baby on her shoulders and stopped at the living room’s archway. Tim’s hair was low cut and gray. His face was clear of freckles--like Jimmy. But his ears were big. Like Clyde’s. And blue eyes...that’s where Mellie got ‘em from...

“Cuz Mama was battlin’ cancer for four years and you won’t nowhere to be found ‘til she was dead,” Clyde said. “Son, I didn’t know your mama was sick,” Tim said. He glanced up at Sherri and Sylvia. Sherri noticed the slight lift of his eyebrows when he took her in. “If I’d have known, I would have been here.” “That ain’t the point that Clyde is tryna make, Daddy,” Jimmy said. “You shouldn’t have left in the first place. Point-blank. You took your settlement money and fucked off somewhere, leavin’ us down here strugglin’. Now, all of a sudden, you wanna make nice ‘cuz now it’s your turn to die.” “Jimmy!” Sylvia shouted. “Naw, naw. I don’t wanna hear no Jimmy,” he said, jumping up from the sofa. “Come on, let’s go.” He walked to the coat rack again. “Jimmy, I don’t--” Jimmy stopped and turned to face Sylvia. “Baby, I love you and I ain’t about to snap at you, but I said let’s go.” Sylvia sighed to herself and followed Jimmy. They grabbed their coats and walked out the door. “Where are you stayin’?” Mellie asked. “With your Uncle Ray,” Tim said. “Well I figure you’d best go on to Uncle Ray’s house, now,” Clyde said. “You need to move your car, anyway.” Tim nodded and rose to his feet. He stopped and smiled at Sherri. “I suppose you’re Clyde’s wife that I’ve heard so much about,” he said. Heard so much about...Sherri knew that so much probably consisted of. “Yes, I’m Sherri.” He walked over to Sherri, eyes falling to the little bun over her shoulder. “Bye, Daddy,” Clyde said sternly. Tim froze, looked over at Clyde, and nodded. Then, he walked toward the door. Sherri looked past him and saw Jimmy standing outside his car door with his fists on his hips, staring into the house. Tim turned back around. “Son, I want to fix things. And I won’t stop tryin’,” Tim said. “Well, I think you should take your tryin’ to the good Lord, ‘cuz we the last people that’s gon’ help you into heaven,” Clyde retorted. Tim stared into his large, middle child’s eyes. Donna’s dark irises burning into his flesh. Finally, he turned back around, but he stopped again. “Oh, and...Happy Birthday,” he said to Clyde. Clyde abruptly picked up his feet and walked around Mellie and Sherri. Tim’s stare lingered and just when he opened the screen door, Clyde slammed the bedroom door, making Sherri and Mellie jump, and the baby cry. 

Sherri started to shush the baby. “Is it bad that I want to help him?” Mellie asked. Suddenly, the bedroom door squeaked open. “I don’t think it is,” Sherri answered, still patting the baby’s back and whispering a chorus of “shh’s” in their ear. Soon, she felt Clyde behind her and turned to face him. He took the towel, tossed it over his right shoulder, then reached out for the baby. Sherri placed the little one in Clyde’s right arm.

“Shh, shh,” he said, patting the baby’s back as he walked back down the hallway. “Daddy ain’t mean to scare ya.” “Grrgh,” the baby said, painting the towel with spit and milk. 

“I think all three of you need to clear your heads,” Sherri said to Mellie. “There you go,” Clyde said. Sherri heard the smile in his voice. Then, the bedroom door closed more softly.  “Yeah. In fact, I think I’m gonna go for a ride,” Mellie said, walking into her bedroom. Sherri looked out the window and saw Jimmy and Sylvia riding down the street. ____________________

Clyde was stretched horizontally across the bed with Chris curled up in the middle of his chest.

“You alright, Honeybunch?” “I don’t know,” Clyde answered. Sherri sat on the bed beside him, smiling at Chris’s smushed, sleeping face, turned in her direction. “Do you think I was too harsh?” he asked. Sherri shook her head. “I just think you were upset.” Clyde rubbed light circles against the baby’s back. “So he has cancer?” Sherri asked. “Mhm. Only got a few months.” Sherri’s heart sank. She ran her fingers through Clyde’s hair. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.” Clyde shrugged his left shoulder and pouted. “Don’t make much difference to me. When he was here, he was barely around. He when left, he rarely came back to see us. Never told us where he was. Got our own grandma to hide his whereabouts from us. Ain’t gon’ make me no difference when he goes in that dirt.” Sherri felt goosebumps rise on her skin. She’d never heard Clyde speak so darkly. Then, she saw his eyes start to glisten. He sniffled, looked down at the baby, and kept rubbing their little back. “You want me to leave you alone, Baby?” Sherri asked. Clyde shook his head. “Mmph-mm.” Sherri laid down beside him. Clyde slowly lifted his right arm and let it drop to his side, so Sherri could snuggle close to him. She rubbed the baby’s back and heard Clyde sniffle again. Then, she placed her arm over his abdomen, just under the baby’s feet. ____________________ TAG LIST @aloneandsleepless​​ @direnightshade​​ @finn-ray-nal-beads​​ @a-true-janian-reply​​ @thegreenmatt​​ @sister-winter73​​ @loewsy55​​​ @mariesackler​​​ @clydes-hole​​​ @sydneyssmut​​​ @kirah36​​ @lovelyyandtired​ @morby​ @tsarinastorm​ If you want to be tagged in future Clyde x Sherri posts, comment below! Also, visit my Tag List request post to see if you’d be interested in being tagged in other works!

[littledarlinwrites]

Gotta Get Me Some

Biker!Bartender!Bucky Barnes x Reader

Word Count: 1237

Smutty Smut Smut

So I've been wanting to write a biker!Bucky fix for a while, a series actually, and I still might. But right now y'all get a one shot inspired by those set Photos of Seb in leather. Leave me some love 'cause I'm hella needy and that shit brightens my day! y'all can thank my alliebeans for this. @all1e23 you wanted smut and I hope this delivers dear💕

Bucky woke up to a cold and empty bed. His shoulder ached, the phantom limb pain ever present. He squeezed his eyes shut, taking a deep breath before sitting up in bed, wiping the sleep away from his eyes with one hand. It had been months, but he still wasn't used to the missing limb, that's not to say he wouldn't do it all over again, but it had definitely been a change for him. One that he was still getting used to.

He made his way to the bathroom to start getting ready for work. He had picked up one handed bartending surprisingly fast, and it did put a little bit of a pep back in his step after everything. He was close to finishing part of his therapy he had to complete before getting his prosthetic, something he still had mixed emotions about. He missed holding you with two arms. He didn't like that he couldn't wear his ring on his left hand, but rather on a chain around his neck. Although the first time you pulled him by the chain to your shared bed he did see an upside to the situation. 

He got dressed a lot more smoothly than he had at first, however his steps faltered when he went to grab his leather jacket on his way out the door. Your keys were still hanging on the wall and he decided to check the only room he hadn't been in yet and made his way to the garage.

"Babe, have you seen my-" Bucky asked as he walked in the garage, his words getting stuck in his throat when he caught sight of you. You were straddling his bike he hadn't been able to part with yet, high heels, garters, that red lace number that made his heart race, and there it was, covering parts of you he was drooling to see, his leather jacket. A groan rumbled through his chest as he slowly made his way over to you, his hand grasping your hip deliciously as a moan tumbled from your lips.

"Kitten, you're killing me." He whispers against your neck, kissing and nipping along the way.

"You don't like?" A teasing whine escapes you as he nibbles on your ear. A pout adorns your faces as Bucky pulls away just enoughs to see your face.

"Oh no sweet girl, I like. I like very much, but I have to go to work."

"Oh, well I guess you'll need this then, huh?" You say casually as you shrug off and hand him his leather. Bucky can faintly smell your perfume clinging to the lining along with your warmth. His stomach sours, and his mouth is completely dry at way had been underneath his jacket though. The round soft swell of your breasts, your pet nipples under the red lace that just barely covered them, his dog tags dangling between them. A shuddering breath escapes him, and for a moment, Bucky can't help but think that walking away from you like this is more painful than losing his arm. He almost calls Wanda to tell her she'll need to cover his shift, but then he remembers that she went out of town with Vis and curses his luck. You swing your leg over his bike, standing before brushing your lips against his cheek. 

"Have a good night at work Buckyboo." You whisper, winking at him with a devilish grin before walking away with a sway to your hips. Bucky groaned in annoyance before getting in his car and heading to work, closing time couldn't come fast enough. 

Every hour his phone would ping with a message from you. Sometimes a filthy message of you describing in great detail what you want him to do to you or you to him, sometimes it was a teasing picture, and once or twice he got a video that lead to him cursing this damn bar. He ached for an entirely different reason than he had when he woke up. He nearly shoved everyone out the door at closing time and didn't even bother cleaning up, resolving he could come in a little early tomorrow to do it. He raced home barely remembering to throw the car in park before jumping out the door.

The sight Bucky walked into as he opened his bedroom door nearly had his heart stopping. There you were, on the bed, legs spread with your hand causing the sweetest melody he'd ever heard to fall from your lips, well except when he was the cause of the melody, that was definitely the sweetest sound he's ever heard, but this was a sinfully close second. 

You hadn't even noticed he'd entered the room, too focused on bringing forth your own pleasure. You didnt realise a startled squeak until Bucky began crawling across the bed. His lips and stubble grazing your thighs. 

"You have been a very naughty girl, kitten. Sending me all those things while I was stuck at that bar and couldn't do a damn thing about it. Should punish you. Make you beg til you cry. But."

"But?" You breathing question as he licks a long stripe up your folds, tasting your sweet arousal. 

"But I'd rather see you in my leather, straddling me like you were my bike before you ride me for all I'm worth. He whispers huskily against the shell of your ear. A shiver runs down your spine as you hear Bucky start to undress. His hungry eyes never leaving your exposed body. All you had left of the ensemble was the heels, stockings, and his dog tags. As Bucky handed you his leather you sat up to put it on, the smell of him as intoxicating as all the liquor in the bar he worked at. You move to let him lie down before he grabs the jacket in one hand to guide you where he needed you. His cock was pink, weeping, and aching to be inside you, and without any preamble you sunk down onto him. A mewl leaving your body as you felt impossibly full. You could feel the rumble through Bucky's chest beneath your hands. You took a moment before making slow movements. Your clit grazing against him in the most tantalizing way before picking up the speed, chasing the orgasm you had been on the brink of when Bucky had walked in earlier. Bucky's hips matched every single thrust, his eyes watching your breasts bounce beneath his jacket, and his hand bruisingly gripping your hip. He could feel your walls begin to flutter around him causing his eyes to roll into the back of his head. Sounds of panting, moans, the wet sound of skin slapping skin, was drowned out when he could hear his dog tags clinking with every thrust. Bucky grabbed them and brought your lips down to his. The porn star moan had him nearly seeing stars. 

"That's it Kitten, just like that." Bucky pounded harder into you from beneath you before rolling the both of you over, propping himself up with his arm and burying his face in your neck, sucking and biting the spot that made your toes curl. Your nails dragged Rivers of red lines down his back. It didn't take long before you both came together.

"Next time, you wear the jacket." You say breathlessly, the thought making your core ache with want.

[mlovesstories]

Sins of the Father Part 1

Thanks to @luci-in-trenchcoats!

Series warnings: cussing, mention of recent rape, emotions, divorce, cheating, angry teenager, drug use

Words: 3500

Series summary: Reese Ackles loves her parents, but she doesn’t understand why they don’t get along anymore. 

AN- This is NUTS! Danneel comes into the story later.  Grab your tissues, it’s going to be a wild ride!

Tag List

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Masterlist of Masterlists

“Hi, Daddy!”  Theresa, aka Reese, ran into Jensen’s arms.  “You’re home early!”

“Hi, Reesy!  Come here!”

“I missed you, Daddy.”

“I missed you too.”

“Is Jared here?” Reese looked up at Jensen expectantly.  

“No, he knew I needed my snuggle bug, so he went home.” Jensen dropped his stuff by the door and walked into the living room with his daughter wrapped around him.  “You wanna watch a movie?”

“YES!” 

“Hi, Mr. Ackles.  Wasn’t expecting you til tomorrow,” the nanny walked into the living room.  

“Hi, Skye.  Yeah, we ended early.  Weather didn’t cooperate.  Take the night off, I need to have some time with my girl,” he guided Reese to the couch.  

“Yes, sir.  Bye, boo.  See ya, kiddo.” Skye walked toward her casita on the back of the property.  

“Bye, Skye-Skye!”  Reese waved as she snuggled into the couch.  “Where’s Mommy?”

“Should be home from work soon, I think.  You know she doesn’t get home til later.”

“I want her to watch the movie with us!”

“Maybe she will, baby.  I am going to change into my pajamas before we start the movie.  Choose one for me, okay?” He grinned.  She returned his expression and ran toward the cabinet.

“Okie, Daddy!”

Jensen grabbed his things from the ground by the door and ran up the stairs.  As he was changing, he heard the door squeak open.  Jensen quickly pulled his pants up, thinking Reese had followed him up the stairs.  

“Hey, Jay,” his wife sighed, indifferent.  

“Hi, honey.  How was your day?” He went to hug her when she turned away from him and dumped her things into a chair.  

“Fine.”

“You want dinner?  Skye left us some food from yesterday in the fridge.”

“No, I had a business dinner.  I’m going to bed.”

Jensen watched as she quickly took her makeup off and closed the door between the bedroom and ensuite bathroom.  When she came out, she was in her pajamas.  

“What?  You just got home.  The munchkin wants to see you, and we were going to watch a movie.”

“I’m tired, Jensen.  Can you shut the door behind you?” Jensen watched her climb into bed.  

“You can’t be serious.”

“Goodnght, Jay.” She turned the light off.

Reese stood in the doorway.  

“Is Mommy coming?”

“No, baby.  She’s tired. It’s just us tonight.”

“Does Mommy not like me?”

Jensen’s head snapped down to look at his daughter.

“No, don’t ever think that. Come on, I still have to make our popcorn!”

Jensen threw her over his shoulder and hid his gritted teeth, angry at his wife.  He groaned from Reese landing on his shoulder, hurting his back.  Making up for the mom’s lack of interest in their activities, he spoiled Reese with chocolate and popcorn, letting her stay up a little bit later than usual.  

“Okay, bedtime, lovebug,” he whispered.  

“Ungh,” she groaned, curling into her dad’s chest, wrinkling his shirt.  

“I know, but you have school tomorrow, and I know you’re tired.  You can sleep in your clothes, I don’t care.”

Reese grinned into his shirt.  

“You like that idea?” Jensen chuckled.  “Come on,” he slowly carried her upstairs to her room.  “Goodnight, my sweet girl.”

“Nigh-night, Daddy,” she whispered back.  

Jensen quietly walked into the master bedroom where he saw his wife sleeping soundly.  He took his phone out of his pocket and plugged it in to charge on the bedside table.  

“Goodnight, sweetheart,” he whispered, not expecting a response.  

“You too, Jay.” She turned away from him without a loving gesture.  

________

The next day, Jensen woke up to Reese climbing on him.  

“Good morning, sweet thing!”

“Hi, Daddy.  It’s wake up time! You want to take me to school?”

He grew concerned.  His wife never took their daughter to school since she had to leave early, but where was the nanny?

“Where’s Skye?”

“Making me pancakes!  Can you take me to school? Please?” Reese settled next to him.  

Jensen sighed.  

“Sure, Reesy.  Let’s get ready.  Go change.”

“Yeah!” Reese scampered off.  The dad chuckled to himself.  

When he walked down the stairs after getting ready for the day, he saw the nanny standing in front of the stove.  

“Can I have some pancakes?” Jensen asked.  

“Well, you hired me, so I think I can do that,” Skye laughed.  Becoming serious, she replied, “Yes, I can do that, Mr. Ackles.”

“Jensen.  Call me Jensen,” he groaned.  “We’ve been over this before, kid,” he told the twenty-three year-old.

“Mr. Ackles, no offense, but I address you like that because I respect you.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you felt so strongly.  That’s fine, just love my kid.  That doesn’t have to be so professional,” Jensen smiled.  

“I’ve worked with you for two years.  I love her dearly, you know that.”

_________

A few days later, Jared nudged Jensen’s shoulder.  Jensen almost jumped out of his seat.

“Yeah?” Jensen turned in the makeup chair to look at his TV brother.  

“You okay? Daydreaming?”

“Yeah, just thinking.”

“About…” Jared asked.  

“Nothing.  YN’s just growing up.  She turns eight next week.  We have our convention, so I won’t be home.”

“We’ve been over this before.  You can’t focus on that.  She’ll have a party, and you’ll be there.”

“I know.  The life we live, I guess.”  Jensen stood up slowly and gingerly walked toward the trailer door.  

“DUDE! I didn’t hurt you that bad!” Jared laughed.

“Ran with Jason yesterday.  Back is killing me.”

“Oh, yikes.  Sorry, brother.”

“Yeah, I’ll get over it.”

_________

Jensen walked out of the master bedroom holding his left arm with his right.  As he went into the movie room, he put his hands to his sides.  Jared looked at him with a questioning expression and then asked what they were going to watch.  His friend responded with a shrug.

“What has gotten into you? We were going to watch the game, a movie, Stranger Things, and every time, you don’t seem excited.” Jared leaned forward in his chair.  

“What are you talking about?” Jensen crashed into the recliner next to his friend.  “Choose something before I kick you out,” the older one grinned.  

“You’re so passive these days.  What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, why are you so curious all of a sudden?  Just turn something on already.”

“You’re acting weird, dude.  Just- tell me if something’s wrong?”

“Will do, Moose.  Now let’s watch something before I fall asleep.”

Weird.

As soon as they started their TV show, Reese came running into the room with a shriek.  Both men sat up.  Reese ran into her dad’s arms.  

“What’s wrong?” Jensen pulled her close with urgency.  

“Mommy was yelling into the phone.  I could hear her from my room.  What’s wrong?  Did I do something bad?” The girl started sniffling.  

“She’s on the phone? It’s really late.” Jensen looked at his watch.

11:00pm.

“Okay.  Here.  Hug Uncle Jared until I get back.”  Jensen laid her on the younger man’s lap.  She cried with uncertainty into her uncle’s flannel shirt.  The dad exited the room and ran up the stairs.  

“Babe?” Jensen walked into their room after seeing the light was still on.  He thought she had gone to bed.  

She gasped and put the phone behind her back.  

“What are you doing?  It’s late, and Reese heard you yelling.  She’s crying on Jared’s lap.  What’s wrong?”  Jensen approached his wife to hug her, but she backed away.  Jensen stopped and tilted his head at her odd reaction to his affection.  

“Don’t worry about it, Jay. I’m fine.  Just the underlings at work not doing their jobs,” she growled, defensive.

“What are they doing at the office this late?”

“They’re testing the system since no one is online at this hour, now can you leave?”

“What’s-”

“Just go, please,” she gritted her teeth.

“Oh.  Okay.  You look tired.  I’ll get the kiddo to bed.  You go rest.” He kissed her on the cheek before she could resist again and exited the room.  

When he got downstairs, Reese was asleep in Jared’s arms.  

“I got her,” Jared said before Jensen could reach for his daughter.  “I’ll tuck her in.”

“Thanks, man.” Jensen clapped his hand on Jared’s back when he returned to watch the movie.

“Everything okay?”

“Not sure.  Kelly has been acting weird.  If this stuff keeps up, I’ll ask her, but I don’t know…”

“You both have been off.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, but can we finish this?  I really want to see this, and my connection is down at my house.”

“You’re such a dufus, Jared.  Yes, let’s watch it.”

________

Jensen’s phone rang.  

“Hello?’

Jensen heard gasping.

“Uh.  Hello?”

After a few more gasps, Jensen heard, “Kelly Ann!” His eyebrows scrunched together.  

His wife. The sounds increased.  Jensen hung up.  Climbing into his truck after dropping Reese off at school, he sat there for a moment, eyes burning with tears.  

Jensen had the neighbor take Reese for the night.  He needed to talk to Kelly.  What was he going to say?  How was he going to say it? Jensen cooked dinner for himself and waited for his wife to come home.  

“Hi, Jay,” Kelly sighed, walking in the house.  “Can I have some of that?” She peered over to his plate.  

“You’re not going to be hungry after we talk.  Sit down, please,” he stated, serious.

“Umm.  What’s wrong?”

He saw her try to hide her secret, but her red cheeks gave her away.  

“Kelly Ann,” he said plainly.  “Is there a reason why I heard a man gasping your name from a butt-dialed phone call earlier today?”

“What?” Kelly’s face turned crimson.

“You haven’t been late because of work, and you weren’t talking to your underlings the other night.  What will I find if I look at your call history?  And let me guess, you butt-dialed me?”

Her face turned from red to a ghostly white.  

“I don’t know wha-”

“Yes, you do.  I figured it out.  Now, since you decided to play games, I set up my own.  You will tell Reese that you are not in love with me anymore, and you will move out.  Or, you can gamble, since you like games, and see if I can ever forgive you.  IF you stay, you will go with me to counseling so that we can fix this.  If you choose not to work on our marriage, you can walk yourself through the front door with whatever you can gather in the next five minutes.  And don’t you go running to Jared and Gen either.  They already know,” Jensen seethed.  

“What?  Counseling?  You want ME to tell Reese that we aren’t getting along?  This is a two way street, HONEY.”

“You want a metaphor? Your car just crashed into mine in a head-on collision while I was in my lane.  I’ve done everything I can to make you happy. We can pretend that everything is fine for Reese, but you get the guest bedroom.  You gotta be up before her so that she doesn’t suspect anything.  AND- we will be nice to each other.  You’re an actor now too.  Fake it.  Fake that you didn’t just play sheet music with some shit guy who doesn’t care about your family.  Get out of my sight.”

“I have so much dirt on you, Ackles!  I will ruin Reese’s perception of you if you think-”

“You will not, because she has depended more on me than you lately.  She knows she is my princess, and she also knows that you have not paid attention to her.  Reese is not a bargaining chip, so leave her out of this!”

________

Jensen walked into the makeup trailer.  Shawn waited for him to take his SnapBack off. When he didn’t, she raised a brow at him.

“Uh, I gotta do your makeup, Jay. Can you take your hat off?”

“Right, sorry.”

“Your face looks puffy. Not enough sleep last night?”

“Kid was sick.  She and the nanny flew up here so I could see her this week since I haven’t been home in a while.”

“Oh, that’s sweet. Let’s get you ready, huh?  I’ll add a little concealer to hide those dark circles,” Shawn smiled softly.  

“Ouch!” Jensen backed away out of reflex when she put the makeup brush on his face.  

“What?” Shawn laughed.  She saw the scared look on his face.  “Sorry, Jay,” she pursed her lips.  “Did I hurt you?”

“I’m fine.  Reese poked me near my eye yesterday.  Hurt like hell.” He sighed.  “Kids…”

“You got that right.  Here, I’ll let you use your fingers and spread it underneath your eyes.  Make it easier for you.”

“This stuff dries out my skin!” Jensen whined as he tried to wash the concealer off of his fingers.  

“Big baby,” Shawn giggled.  “Here,” she handed him a bottle of lotion.  “It has no scent.  Don’t worry.”

He opened the bottle and squirted some white stuff onto his pointer finger.  After rubbing his hands together and covering his fingers with lotion, he took a deep breath.  

“Better, drama queen?” Shawn raised a brow.

“I AM NOT a drama queen, okay?” Jensen growled playfully.  

“Whatever.  Go to wardrobe.  They need you.”

He smiled.

“Thanks, Shaw.  Appreciate it.” He kissed her cheek and walked down the trailer steps.  

______

Reese noticed that her mom and dad did not converse like they used to. As the days went by, Reese saw her mom withdraw. Kelly couldn’t fake it anymore. Jensen told her what she needed to do. The couple sat Reese down at the kitchen table. Kelly explained that she loved Reese very much, but she and Jensen didn’t love each other anymore. Reese confusedly asked what that meant.

“Mommy is going to live with Gram and Gramps. I’ll still see you lots, but Mommy won’t be living here anymore,” Kelly stated.

“You’re leaving? No, Mommy! You can’t! We have to bake cookies for Christmas! Remember? You promised!” Reese cried hard enough that she was shaking.

Jensen growled in Kelly’s ear, “You did that.” He nodded towards their daughter who stood up from her seat.

“No!” Reese ran in front of her mom’s chair and stopped. She started flailing her body, and she smacked Jensen in the nose, and Kelly in the thigh.

“Don’t react,” Jensen whispered, holding his nose. “Let her get it out.”

Kelly sat there, taking the blows with hands up to protect her face, not verbally reacting to her daughter’s actions.

Reese cried herself to sleep on the kitchen floor.

“I’m sorry,” Kelly turned to her husband.

“The consequences of your actions go far beyond just you, remember that.”  Jensen took a deep breath.  “Get out of my house.” Jensen picked up the little girl to take her to bed.  “I’m done with how you’ve been treating both of us.  You better be gone before I get back down here.”

“Jay-” Kelly tried to stop him.  

“No.  You made your choice.  Get out.”

______

One Month Later

“I hate you!”  Reese threw her backpack on the ground and crossed her arms.  “You made her move out!”

Jensen sighed as he rubbed his temples.  He knew she didn’t mean it, but it still hurt.  

“I want to see Mommy!”

“I’m about to drive you to go see her!  Pick up your stuff!” The dad became impatient. Reese picked up her Barbie backpack and stamped her feet out to the car.  

When they arrived at Reese’s grandparents’ house, she ran to the door and pounded on it with her little fists.  

“Jensen,” his father-in-law greeted him.  “She’s destroyed.  Kelly feels really bad.  It doesn’t excuse what she-”

“NOT in front of her, please.”  Jensen ushered Reese into the house.  

“You’re right.  Sorry.  We’ll see you in a few days.”

“Is she here?”

“Kelly?  No.  Had to work late.”

“Mhmm.” Jensen sighed, not believing the father.  “I’ll be back to pick her up on Sunday.  She has math homework to finish.”

“Got it.  We’ll take care of it, promise.” Kelly’s dad offered a sad smile.  

“Thanks.”  Jensen turned and walked to his truck.  

_______

“Hi, Daddy,” Reese huffed.  She walked slowly to his truck so that he could take her back to the house.  

“Not excited to see me?” Jensen frowned.  

This sucks.

“I don’t like you.  And I don’t like that Mommy lives somewhere else now.  Do I have to go home with you?  Mommy didn’t do anything,” Reese continued to walk toward the vehicle.  Kelly walked up quickly behind her.  

“Yes, go with your daddy.  This is Mommy’s faul-”

“Baby, we don’t love each other anymore.  We are friends, but friends don’t live together, Reesy.” Jensen interrupted his wife.  

“Why can’t you love each other?  You used to.  It’s my fault.  You can have all my presents!  I’ll tell Santa!” Reese started crying.  

“No, Reesy.  Not your fault.  This is Mommy and Daddy’s fault.” Jensen crouched down in front of her.  He kissed her cheek. “Let’s go, sweet pea.”  Jensen took her hand and lifted her into the back seat.  “I’ll drop her off on Friday.  I fly back to Vancouver Saturday.” He turned back to face his wife.  Reese wiped her tears and slouched her shoulders while kissing her mom on the cheek.

“Love you, Mama.”

“Jensen-“

“Don’t. Let me get her buckled in first.”

Jensen lifted the girl into the back seat. He shut the passenger door and then turned to face his wife.

“Yes?”

“Let me come back home.”

“I’ve let you do too many things to me and our princess. No more.” He started to walk away when she slapped him across the face. Hard. Jensen froze. Keeping still as not to react in front of his daughter, he took a deep breath. Kelly turned to look at Reese, taken aback by her own actions. She saw Reese enthralled with Jensen’s phone on her lap.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!” Kelly shrieked.

“If only it were that easy to excuse behavior. You will not be near her any longer. She will not be exposed to your explosiveness, now excuse me.”

Jensen quickly left Kelly standing on the curb. A small raindrop hit her in the eye, startling her. When she ducked her head and turned to face the house, she saw her dad with mouth open and face white. Kelly quickly ran to him.

“I didn’t mean to slap him. I didn’t-“

“Get out of my house. An abuser is never welcome here.” 

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[unlockthelore]

An Unexpected Ambition

When the option arises, Rin decides the best route to protecting herself is one that suits her best.

From the series Affections Touching Across Time on Ao3, and part of the Four Seasons fic. For more updates, follow the affections touching across time tag on this blog. For more of this fic, follow the four seasons tag.

While it may sound strange I learned that fighting is more than muscles and ki - to fight for someone with all of your heart - even if you know you might lose, it takes strength.

Inner strength that many don’t have.

You won’t say it, so I won’t either, but I’m glad that you’ve grown so strong.

Keep fighting with all your heart for whoever you want to protect, so you’ll grow even stronger, and be the greatest daiyōkai of our age.

I believe in you, Lord Sesshomaru.

 ----------

The next morning, Rin awoke to the distant exchange of quiet and gruff murmurings.

For a short while, she shuddered and wriggled beneath her comforter, attempting to slip back into a pocket of sleep. Thick waxy thoughts refused to settle in one form as voices churned them about into different shapes and figures.

“When I was that size, I’d’ve given anything for someone to teach me how to throw a decent punch,” a deep voice said, thinned with exasperation and gruff in its speech. Rin could imagine the furrow in its owner’s brow, and his irritable scowl. “ ‘Sides, world we live in isn’t all that safe, y’know. There were dangers before Naraku, and one of these days, she’s gonna have to face ‘em on her own.”

The voice’s owner spat ‘Naraku’ as if it were a mouthful of poison. Rin’s brow quivered and she pressed her lips together to stifle a whimper, trying to banish the thought of creeping spiders and soulless red eyes.

“… Ye have made yer point, Inuyasha,” another voice, wizened and haggard in exhaustion. It was a tone Rin knew well. Seconds away from a chiding remark. “Just know that if any harm should come to Rin —”

A harsh snort interrupted the reprimand. “Yeah, yeah, you don’t have t’ remind me,” Inuyasha scoffed. “If anythin’ happens to her, he is gonna throw a fit.”

He? Rin’s quivering slowed as the image of a silver-haired figure painted across the back of her eyelids, his silhouette illuminated by the moon. He was the one who stood between her and certain death time and again with naught but a blade in hand even when he possessed only one.

“I was going to say ye will have to deal with me,” the second voice filled the void’s silence and echoed but the daiyōkai seemed to pay it little mind.

Sesshomaru-sama?

“She sleeps in my home, we eat meals together, and she has quite the voice for singing and storytelling…”

In her mind’s eye, he furtively glanced over his shoulder, sparing only a sliver of golden eyes away from the unseen foe before him. His eyes, brighter than the sun, were alight with an emotion she couldn’t put to name. What was he waiting for?

“Did ye think me so cold-hearted not to care for her in more than body and obligation, Inuyasha?”

Nothing was said but the unease Rin felt slowly crumbled away.

It’s nothing, m’lord. I’m fine.

Kaede would look after her just as he trusted she would not so long ago. Sesshomaru stared at her for a moment longer then turned forward. His sword flourished, its blade catching the moonlight with an unearthly silver-green tinge. The markings along its edge luminescent with a green glow as he sheathed it then walked on into the light.

Rin held out her hand, fingers outstretched but she could barely see past them as the fog wrapped around him - obscuring his image in a silhouette.

“Keh, I know that. You took in Kagome when she first got here.”

“She told ye about that?”

“Said you were the first person to treat her kindly, even if you were a stubborn old hag.”

“I believe you embellish.”

“Yeah, Kagome wouldn’t call you a hag. She’d probably sit me right now if she heard me say it.”

Giving up with a huff, Rin groggily shuffled upright and rubbed the grit from her eyes, blinking away sleep’s veil. Past the window’s slats, the clouded blue-black sky wouldn’t allow even the moon’s outline to be seen. In lieu of its luminescence, weak firelight spilled past the noren and coaxed shadows to the room’s far corners.

“She will return, Inuyasha,” Kaede intoned softly, and Rin could imagine her peering across the flames. Forehead creased deeply in concentration and eye gleaming in the copper flames. “May ye not forget how to live the life that she helped to forge with ye.”

Rin squeezed the fluff of her comforter’s lining between her fingers, swaying precariously as she tried to wake. She glanced aside and pouted at Kaede’s folded bedding, shuffling to the edge of her futon to touch her comforter’s corner.

It still felt warm and fluffed.

Had she gotten out of bed recently?

Concern for the elder priestess arose as Rin glanced toward the doorway. Nightmares plagued them both; though Kaede claimed her own were nothing more than smoldering cinders, while Rin’s were still-burning flames. Time is what the elder priestess attributed to her current state of mind, and it is what she told Rin to give to ease her own burdens.

However, Rin learned that the saying that time couldn’t heal all wounds was quite true.

When Kaede awoke gasping for breath and shuddering in the darkness, Rin pretended to stay asleep to avoid embarrassing or upsetting her. Her mother’s words echoed in her ears - to cry as a woman was a sign of weakness that not many could afford.

Rin understood it though she didn’t agree. Kaede was one of the strongest women she knew. If she needed to cry then perhaps it was her wounds that needed tending.

On one such night, when Rin heard Kaede’s sobs, she crawled from beneath her comforter and refused to leave the priestess’ side until she found sleep again. Rin couldn’t rid herself of the memory. Kaede’s hand, large and rough with callouses based on the palm of wrinkled fingers, engulfed Rin’s outstretched hand with trembling might. Tears sprung to Rin’s eyes and she fit her fingers in the crook of the priestess’ thumb, clasping tight til Kaede’s trembling ceased.

They hadn’t spoken of that night since, but when tears were to fall whether her own or Kaede’s, the other remained until sleep could be found.

It was one of the few times that Rin disagreed with the ghost of her mother. Crying wasn't a weakness. Kaede wasn’t weak to shed tears. She was holding onto her strength by alleviating the pressure in her heart.

And for that reason, she would always be strong.

“I know that,” Inuyasha murmured after a long moment and his voice was so soft that Rin barely caught it. Were his ears pressed against his head? Did he look down with guilt for doubting Kagome? Or did he just miss her and couldn’t look elsewhere.

Rin’s heart ached for him. She could recall a time where she had felt much the same. Bitterness toward the ones she felt abandoned her but knowing their intentions were in her best interest. Still, all she wanted was to be with them. Her hands trembled as she grasped her comforter’s edge. Was that how Inuyasha felt?

When the thought crossed her mind, no matter how much she tried to remind herself that their intentions were good, pressure built behind her eyes. Tears vying for a place in the world slipped past her closed eyelids, and her best efforts to wipe them away were futile. It wasn’t hate she felt, or abandonment. They were there but it wasn’t that which squeezed her chest.

It was a feeling she couldn’t put to name.

The noren was pushed to one side and Rin squeaked, her hands flying up to her chest as light poured into the room. Backlit by its glow was not the silver-haired figure who tread into the fog but another donned in red, a pair of ears twitched atop his head while his eyes narrowed at her.

“Kaede didn’t mention you were an eavesdropper,” he grumbled, brushing the noren aside with the back of his hand. His scowl and the wrinkle between his brows eased when he crouched beside her, letting it fall behind him. In the dim light, his eyes glowed and Rin’s heart hammered as her mind unwittingly summoned the image of eyes following her in the forest’s brushwood.

“Hey,” Inuyasha said softly and Rin hadn’t realized how far she’d gotten from him to where she was almost falling off one end of her futon. His look of annoyance had shifted into one of concern, hurt reflected in his eyes as he reached out then hesitated, turning his hand palm-up. “Are you alright?”

Rin blinked slowly, inclining her head. What did he mean by that?

Inuyasha pulled back his hand and gestured to his cheek, tapping a claw beneath one eye.

Her own widened and she reached up to wipe at her eyes, startled when moisture came away on the back of her fingers. Wiping at her eyes furiously, she sniffled, “I’m okay…” and nodded.

When Rin’s hands fell away from her eyes, Inuyasha’s look of concern had been replaced with skepticism. It was strange. Golden eyes, emotional and alight. They were brothers if Master Jaken was to be believed but they were different down to their core. She’d never seen her lord show this much obvious concern for her.

Rin lowered her head and wiped at her eyes again then scrambled up to her feet. Her mind was laden with memory. Her lord’s impeccable countenance presented to her with his back often left for her viewing. Jaken had professed knowing of his moods but he was often rebuked with fierce knocks to the head. Rin trembled at the reverberation of Jaken’s squawks and her lord’s lengthening strides.

On this night too, she missed them dearly.

Rin ducked her head and started to grab the hem of her comforter. Her body tensing when another hand, much larger and clawed, grasped the other end and tugged them gently from her grasp.

“Go on,” Inuyasha muttered, and Rin glanced up at him. His gaze skillfully darting aside when she tried to meet his eye. Guilt ravaged her heart and she glanced down at her hands. Had he been offended by her tears? Or the lack of voicing where they’d come from? Bitterly, Rin thought: it wasn’t his fault that time hadn’t healed her wounds after all.

Before Rin could think of a way to explain, the comforter was slid out from beneath her and she stumbled to climb off of it. Inuyasha gathered the thick fabric into his arms and began to fold it at the corners. The length of the comforter covered his face from view but his ears twitched atop his head.

Without his eyes on her, Rin reminded herself to breathe and fiddled with the hem of her kosode as she slipped past. Inuyasha said nothing, and he seemed so taken with the task that Rin thought he wouldn’t notice her as she pushed the noren aside and stepped out. Yet with a glance stolen over her shoulder, a sliver of gold caught her eye just before the noren fell behind her.

What did that mean, she wondered. Was he trying to give her a way out or maybe he didn’t want to talk anymore. But what was the point of folding her bedding and why did he look at her like that? Questions flooded Rin’s thoughts and drowned out the dull calling barely brushing the surface of her mind. Only when a light touch brushed against her shoulder did she tear her gaze away from the noren and toward Kaede.

The old priestess gazed down at her worriedly. “Yer up early, child,” Kaede tilted her head, her fingers combing through thick sleep-mused locks in a futile attempt to neaten Rin’s hair. She appreciated each stroke and leant against Kaede’s side with a small smile. “I assume Inuyasha began to speak to ye.”

Rin nodded, a backward glance spared before she was led away from the door and toward the fire pit. Her cushion was set near Kaede’s and she knelt upon it with a soft sigh, taking a cup of tea as it was offered. The steam fanned across her nose and Rin took measured sips to mend her frayed nerves.

She knew that Kaede and Inuyasha had been talking about her to be exact, but she couldn’t quite piece together what it was they wanted. Mentions of learning how to punch made her wonder who she would need to fight. And Kaede’s sentiments left her gazing at the older priestess with a deeper degree of fondness. Then there was the slight daydream of her lord which left Rin with the consistent question: what did it all mean?

As if reading her mind, Kaede broke the silence and regarded her solemnly. “From today on, Rin, I’ll have need of ye outside of yer chores.”

Rin perked up and deflated all at once. She did appreciate having the time outside of her chores to play with her friends, or explore new places around the village. “What for, Lady Kaede?”

“The incident with the foxbear,” Kaede began and Rin winced internally. Her discomfort must have shown on the outside because the crease deepened in Kaede’s forehead and she shook her head. “Nay, child. I haven’t called ye to scold or place blame. Merely an act of understanding on this foolish old woman’s part.”

“You aren’t foolish, Lady Kaede,” interjected Rin before another word could part Kaede’s lips. The outburst rendered them both silent but where she might have thought a scolding would come, only a quiet smile was given.

“Aye child, but age and perspective tends to lead one to forget. Allow me to recognize where it is I’ve fallen short.”

Kaede picked up her own tea cup beside the small tray where another emptied cup sat upside down. She took a sip, then cradled it between her palms, closing her eye. Rin looked down to her own cup and sipped in solidarity, allowing the sweet taste to wash down the bitterness of her thoughts. It was an expensive blend if Kaede were to be believed and had come on the last visit from her lord. Perhaps, Rin thought, that is why she thought of him.

“Now,” Kaede said as she began once more, deep shadows pronouncing the wrinkles in her face. “The incident with the foxbear reminds that while ye are safe within the village, elsewhere ye may not be.”

Rin thumbed the ridges of her teacup, her heart pounding. Kaede told her that she wasn’t in trouble for what happened but would she be confined to the village now? The woods were vast, and she was learning the trails better and better everyday. To be without that was unimaginable.

Steeling her heart, Rin murmured. “What do you mean, Lady Kaede?”

Kaede gazed longingly into the flames and Rin craned her neck to one side, attempting to see what captivated the priestess. “An important part of knowing how to live is to defend yerself,” Kaede muttered, and Rin sighed softly, watching the light flicker in a wet brown eye. “What is most precious to ye isn’t always precious to others.”

There was a slight crack in Kaede’s voice, so gentle and soft that it could’ve been missed. Its timing falling in line with the kindling wood cracking and crumbling into the fire pit, its ashes joining others. Rin’s lower lip trembled and she clutched the bottom of her tea cup until the impression of its smooth rounded bottom pressed uncomfortably to her palm.

Before either of them could say a word, the noren swung to one side, slapping against the doorway’s frame. Inuyasha stalked out of the backroom, golden eyes bright with the flames’ glow and some emotion that startled Rin into sitting upright. “What Kaede’s tryin’ to say with all those flowery words is that your life is at stake everytime you run off,” he said brusquely, tossing his head to one side as he bared a firm glower on Rin’s head. “And if you don’t know how to protect yourself, you’ll wind up dead.”

Rin’s breath hitched and Kaede gasped, turning away from the fire sharply. “Inuyasha!”

“The kid’s died twice, she ain’t a pushover,” Inuyasha’s upper lip curled with a sneer as he turned his gaze to Kaede. “Just human.” Rin exhaled shakily and stared down at her cup, seeing her own stricken face in the tea’s rippling surface. “And she ain’t gonna be a kid forever.”

Be that as it may, she can’t behave like this forever, m’lady.

Kaya’s desperate pleas had fallen on Kaede’s deaf ears but they resounded deeply within Rin’s chest. She wasn’t sure what it was that was wrong with the way she was now. Yes, she was young, but she was far from an idiot or naïve.

Don’t be so conceited. Lord Sesshomaru’s honor was challenged, he isn’t doing this for you.

“What happens when she grows up? Going with Sesshomaru, to another village, to hell knows where - who is gonna be lookin’ after her?”

This is a chance for humanity to earn your trust.

Humanity. He’d said those words with such conviction but there was something else beneath it. Everyone talked about her growing up, what she should do, what the world would be like. A chance to choose. Rin braced her hands around the tea cup and soaked the warmth in her palms, trembling slightly. Her lord never told her to fight. He protected her and let her follow along as she was.

Do what you want.

“If you don’t learn how to stand on your own two feet, what’s the point in havin’ them?” demanded Inuyasha, the floorboards creaking beneath his feet as he took a step forward. The red of his suikan ablaze in the fire’s copper glow and Rin slowly lifted her head, staring into golden eyes brighter than the sun.

“Inuyasha,” Kaede snapped, embers crackling and drifting up from the fire as her voice hardened. “That is enough.”

Rin loosened her hold on her cup, her mouth falling open. “I want to protect it…” She could feel Kaede’s questioning gaze, softened and firm at the same time. The old priestess was worried about her but there was no need. “The life Lord Sesshomaru saved… I want to protect it,” Rin insisted, steeling her voice to prevent it from wavering and cracking. Inuyasha’s eyes, although they were bright and sharp in their glower, there was softness to them. A misty sheen as if he were looking at her and not. Rin sighed, allowing her shoulders to fall and her hold on her cup to loosen further until the rim was no longer pressing into her palms. His eyes were just like her lord’s.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone to do that,” she said softly, noting how his eyes narrowed. “Not if I can do something different. Something that only I can do.”

She’s protected people before with only her voice and her body as a shield. It may not have been the right thing to do in Jaken’s opinion or even her lord’s, but she believed it was. And that was all that mattered.

Inuyasha stared at her solemnly, tipping his head up. His eyes glowed as they were cast in shadows from beneath his bangs and she was sorely reminded of the forest and those hungry eyes watching her as she ran desperately. “... And what if you have to?”

Her lower lip quivered and from the corner of her eye, she could see Kaede’s head swiveling to look between them. She seemed unsure whether to let this continue on any longer. Just as she’d been when Kaya and Nishi came. But this time, Rin wasn’t hiding in the crawl space below her hut. She could speak for herself.

She set her tea cup on the wooden floorboards and balled her hands into fists, pressing them to her lap. “Then…” she trailed off as his eyes narrowed, and for a second, she could see the resemblance between them. It was almost as if her lord was staring down at her and waiting for her answer. The answer that she couldn’t give him that day, and one she couldn’t bring to voice when they met again.

I’m alright. I’ll learn how to stand on my own.

“Then I’ll do what I have to in my own way.”

Inuyasha held her gaze for a moment longer. Only the crackling flames and their breaths filling the silence. Then, with a resigned puff of air exhaled through his nose, he turned his head away. “Jinenji…”

“Huh?”

He walked past, his sleeves fluttering with every sway of his arms, reminding her of reddened leaves fluttering on a crisp breeze. “Have you met a demon with big blue eyes, names Jinenji, he’s a farmer.”

Rin blinked at his back then thought about it. She didn’t remember anyone with big blue eyes but the name did seem familiar. “Yes…” she looked away from Inuyasha as he approached the hut’s door, looking toward Kaede instead. THere was solace found in the priestess’ nod and the inquisitive gleam in her eye. “He helped me awhile ago and gave me directions to find medicine for Master Jaken… when he was stung by wasps.”

She shuddered at the thought and how distraught Jaken had been, going so far to even begin bashing his head against a tree trunk. If her fingers had been a bit quicker and if she were a little bigger then perhaps he wouldn’t have had to go through such agony.

“Naraku’s wasps?” Inuyasha asked, his ears perked and head turned to peek over his shoulder at her.

Kaede frowned. “Ye went by yerself, Rin?”

“Yes.” Rin ignored the disappointed look from Kaede, staring down at her hands instead. They were still small. How much could she truly hold in these hands? “Master Jaken needed help and Lord Sesshomaru was gone. I took A-Un with me, and found Jinenji… but he was going through his change and couldn’t come with me.” Her fingers trembled and she curled them into tight fists. How scared had Jaken been when he was on his own? Did he think she wouldn’t have come back? It had already gotten so late in the day at that time. He only had until sundown. And if she’d been a little faster.. More careful..

“I didn’t want to see anyone die anymore… especially not Master Jaken.”

A dull ache throbbed in her chest. She missed the little imp dearly. His heartfelt goodbye every time they visited and the way he would squeeze her so tight almost sprang tears in her eyes. Her sleeve caught on her fingertips and she rubbed at her eyes quickly, trying to stem their flow.

“Seeing as he’s still kicking, I’d say you did alright..”

Rin sniffed, peeking up from her sleeve. Inuyasha had turned to face forward, and she couldn’t gauge how he felt from how his voice sounded. “I’ve been out that way, and the climb is steep… flowers don’t grow near the ground because of all the demons eating at them, so… you had to go a ways to get it..”

“Ye are lucky to have left with yer life, Rin,” Kaede agreed, not quite a scolding but the concern on her face made Rin’s insides warm and tinge with shame at the same time.

She squeezed her hands into tight fists despite their trembling, meeting Kaede’s eye. “I couldn’t abandon Master Jaken,” Rin retorted, her voice pitching as the thought of his bulbous yellow eyes glassy and sightless. “I won’t abandon Master Jaken.”

Kaede held her gaze for a while longer. The thin wisps of smoke rising and the stinging in Rin’s eyes dutifully ignored to keep the priestess’ gaze. She wouldn’t allow herself to be cowed into thinking that her actions were wrong. There was no time to wait for Jinenji, A-Un did all that they could, and Lord Sesshomaru couldn’t be found. She was tired, panicked, unarmed, but even if all she could do was cling to the craggy cliff face and reach for the small cluster of flowers inches from her reach on the ridge - she would.

Because Jaken needed her.

Kaede closed her eyes, then with a gentle smile, she looked to INuyasha and said, “Well, is that proof enough for ye?”

Rin’s hackles dropped immediately and she looked between them confusedly. Inuyasha peeking over his shoulder at her then scoffing, jerking his head forward.

“Hmph. Proof that staff is just for show, more like.”

Rin pursed her lips, pouting. Although Jaken didn’t use his staff very often, that didn’t mean it was for show. He took very good care of it and defended her with it multiple times. Her mouth opened, though before hse could volley words to defend Jaken’s honor, Inuyasha interjected with a soft sigh. “... You did good, kid. That imp owes you his life.”

She blinked slowly, rethinking all of the times Jaken saved her or looked after her. He was grumpy, sure, and in the beginning it was only because Lord Sesshomaru would clobber him if he didn’t — but she appreciated every moment they spent together.

Rin shook her head. “It’s fine,” she said, smiling gently. “As long as Master Jaken is alive and well, that’s all that matters.”

Inuyasha’s face was half shrouded but when he turned his head, chin brushing shy of his shoulder, Rin noticed an upward tick of the corner of his lips. BArely registering it was a smile before it was gone and he’d slid open the door, stepping out into the night and closing it behind him without another word.

“I believe ye have a power all yer own, Rin.”

She looked to Kaede, surprised and confused. “Really?”

“Mm…” Kaede nodded solemnly, her smile sad as she stared at the door. “That’s the first time I’ve seen Inuyasha smile in many moons…”

Rin softened and stared down at her palms. “... I see… was that a smile?”

“Hm?”

“I don’t know why but…” Rin lifted her head, looking to Kaede, the squeezing in her chest brimming tears in her eyes. “That smile… it seemed so sad.”

[sheliesshattered]

Fic meme

I was tagged by @primarybufferpanel​ -- thank you darling, this was a ton of fun to do!

This got a bit long, so I’ll put the people I’m tagging here at the top:  @claraaoswald​, @ambitious-witch​, @someillplanetreigns​, and @junoinferno​, if you feel like playing!

My AO3, my old non-updating fanfiction.net

Fandoms I’ve made fanworks for: Oh lord. I’m only going to count fanfiction that has actually been posted, but if I tried to count up every fandom that I’d started writing for and left unfinished fragments languishing on various harddrives and googledocs over the years, it’d be at least double this list. I have two pseuds on AO3, with the fics roughly organized by fandoms that I post about on this Tumblr account (sheliesshattered) and fandoms that pre-date my time on Tumblr that I don’t post about very much (glasscannon). Putting all the fandoms together in one alphabetized list:

Black Sails - 5 Doctor Who - 8 Firefly/Serenity - 1 Game of Thrones - 1 The Hobbit - 1 The Hunger Games - 1 Iron Man - 2 Law & Order: Criminal Intent - 1 Mad Max - 2 Once Upon A Time - 1 Poldark - 3 Star Wars - 3 Twilight - 7 The West Wing - 1

Number of fics: 38, including a big unfinished epic that I never moved over from ff.n, and don’t plan to unless I finish it someday.

Fics I spent more time on: I’m not even quite sure how to measure this. I’m a slow writer, and a single story can easily hold my attention for years at a time, or be something I return to when there isn’t a newer fandom temporarily consuming me. I don’t tend to keep track of how many hours I put into a fanfic, though. The unfinished epic I mentioned is probably near the top of that list, and was a huge part of my life from 2009 to 2013. Other contenders would be the All Hands series (written with PBP!), and Truth Universally Acknowledged, particularly if you include all the massive world-building that went into that one. 

But really probably the one I’ve poured the most hours into, between research and writing, is a Doctor Who epic that hasn’t yet seen the light of day, called Home The Long Way ‘Round. Because I have such a habit of starting long stories and then not finishing them, I’m making myself get that one completely done before I post any of it to AO3, so I don’t have anything to show for it yet, but I’ve put a ton of time into it over the last five years or so. Hopefully someday I’ll actually get to share it. :)

Fics I spent less time on: Like I said, I’m a very slow writer, so any time I can turn out a story in a matter of days I’m just absolutely shocked. I wrote The Message over the course of about 24 hours, which is probably the fastest I’ve ever finished anything in my life ever, lol.

Longest fic: The All Hands series is sitting at 126,800 words, and PBP and I have more finished for it that we’re hoping to post soon-ish. The unfinished epic made it to almost 119,000 words before I ran out of steam. Truth Universally Acknowledged racked up about 54,000 words before my co-writer and I took a break from it, and probably triple that in world-building bibles and timelines, etc. On the works-in-progress side of things, Home The Long Way ‘Round is sitting at about 40,000 words currently and only about a third of the way done, and the For As Long As We Get series is at 21,000 words between what I’ve posted and what I’m still working on, and will definitely continue to grow.

Shortest story: 10 Seconds, at 208 words. Also one of the very first fanfics I ever finished and posted online.

Most hits: Truth Universally Acknowledged, by like a factor of 20 vs anything else I have on AO3. It’s the only time I’ve written for the main pairing in an active fandom (tho my purview in the co-writing was more on the secondary pairing), and that translated to a stupidly large number of hits. Fanfiction.net doesn’t count hits the same way, but the unfinished epic is sitting at about 3500 favs.

Most kudos: Setting The Stuns’ls, the first in the All Hands series -- which is SHOCKING considering that’s a tiny rowboat of a fandom, for a non-canon background pairing that has literally about 30 seconds of shared screentime, and the two romantic leads don’t so much as kiss over the course of 94,000 words (longing looks, significant hand-touches, mutual pining, definitely, but kissing, not so much).

Most bookmarks: Truth Universally Acknowledged, by a long shot.

Fic you want to rewrite or expand: I don’t tend to edit a story once it’s been posted, beyond correcting a typo or adding a missed word. Once it’s published, it’s finished and I don’t change it significantly. I do have quite a few (so, so many) unfinished stories that I would love to finish up at some point.

Total words combined: Counting only published fics, including the unfinished epic (and a companion piece for it) that lives only on ff.n, I’m currently at 376,542 words total.

Fav fic you wrote: How can you make me choose between my children like this, honestly?? Siiiigh. I’m with PBP, whatever I’m working on currently is usually my favorite. I’m having a ton of fun with For As Long As We Get, and can’t wait to publish the next part of that, hopefully sometime this month. I’m incredibly proud of All Hands, and that occupied such a specific time in my life that I’ll always think of it fondly. I’m exceptionally happy with the character voices and use of language in both Breathe Again and Upon This Rock Will I Break Myself, Until It Shows Me Your Beloved Face, and tend to feel like they don’t get enough love vs how much I love them. But my one true favorite is and will always be Home The Long Way ‘Round, and hopefully I’ll actually be able to finish it and post it someday.

Share a bit of your WIP or idea if you have anything planned: Again, how can I possibly choose just one?? Even just within the Doctor Who fandom, I currently have more than half a dozen stories actively in progress. But since I’ve talked it up so much without being able to link to it at all, and just declared it my all-time fav, I’m going to break one of my own rules and post the whole first chapter (eek!) of Home The Long Way ‘Round behind a read more:

Chapter 1: Orange Dreams

The sound of the wind is whispering in your head Can you feel it coming back? Through the warmth, through the cold, keep running ‘til we’re there. We're coming home now, we’re coming home now. —Home, Dotan

 The winds shrieked and howled around her. Clara had never been in a tornado, but she imagined it would feel like this to stand in the eye of one. She could see gusts lifting the tops off the sand dunes in shimmering ribbons, gold against the orange sky. The waves of airborne sand dissipated a few feet from her, leaving only a jagged grittiness in the air.

A woman with long blonde hair was yelling at her, her words ripped away by the wind.

“Tell me again!” Clara called back to her. “Tell me how to find home!”

“It’s just physics!” the other woman shouted, taking a step closer; they were nearly the same height. “No information can ever be lost! Start from zero, and run the math! We’ll be waiting on the other end of that equation!”

There was something Clara desperately wanted to tell this woman who looked at her with kindness behind the steel of her eyes, but in that moment, the words wouldn’t come.

“Look!” someone yelled behind Clara, and though she didn’t want to take her eyes off her, she instinctively looked up, following the line of the other person’s arm up into the gathering storm-whipped dusk. There, silhouetted against the last of the light, was the unmistakable blue boxy shape of the Doctor’s TARDIS, spinning quickly as it flew away—

Clara jerked awake, her heart hammering against her ribs, already sitting up and pulling off her sleep mask before she realised what had woken her was the sound of the TARDIS materialising in the sitting room of her flat. She took a moment to catch her breath, trying to hold onto the details of the dream. In the other room, the TARDIS’s familiar wheezing and groaning came to a stop with a soft thud, followed by the squeak of the door.

“Doctor?” Clara called, not bothering to hide the sleep nor the annoyance in her voice.

He poked his head around her bedroom doorframe, grey hair awry and his most innocent expression plastered on — which meant he knew he was waking her and felt at least marginally bad about it. “Hello, Clara. It’s Wednesday,” he said pleasantly, by way of explanation.

“Is it?” she asked, deadpan.

“Technically.”

“You do know that I have to work today, don’t you?”

“Not for another six hours. So come on, up-and-at-‘em, plenty of time to go out and save the universe and still be back in time for your morning coffee. I’ve an adventure that simply won’t keep, so come on!”

His excitement was infectious, as he must have known it would be, but Clara clung to her annoyance a little longer, mostly for show. “You have a time machine: everything can keep,” she replied, but waved him off before he could launch into a lecture on all the ways that statement was false, at least from a temporal physics standpoint. He lectured anyway, hovering outside her bedroom door as she dressed, though Clara expected it was mostly to keep himself from pacing in anticipation. She followed more than half of it, and worried a bit over how often she let him babble on about the minutiae of time travel these days.

By the time the universe had been set to rights — or at least one small blue world, home to a race of sentient seahorses, that had been facing imminent extinction in the form of a rogue exoplanet — she had nearly forgotten her unsettling, vivid dream.

--

Given the recent events on Skaro, Clara was unsurprised when bits of her experiences there began to filter into her dreams. Truthfully, she had expected to dream of it more often than she did, but in the weeks that followed, more nights than not her sleeping mind instead conjured up the strange orange landscape. She revisited that screaming sandstorm so often it became almost comforting, and before long, other dreams joined it. 

Clara was leaned against a railing on a high balcony, overlooking a large city coming alight as dusk crept on, a rusty sunset that stretched the width of the horizon bathing the world in amber. The woman with the serious eyes and long, straight blonde hair stood beside her, in the middle of a conversation, as happened so frequently in dreams.

“Alright, but what about the last stage?” Clara asked, elbows resting next to hers on the railing. “That bit depends on us actively doing something, and you know we can’t rely on my knowledge. I can’t take any of the engineering or navigation with me, so it’ll be down to him.”

“And he loves a good puzzle,” the other woman said confidently, flicking her hair over her shoulder with a twitch of her head. “He’ll want to find us. He’ll figure it out.”

“Before I die of old age? Are you sure? My mother was one of his professors at the Academy, I’ve seen his test scores. I think we need a fail-safe.”

“He did graduate,” she pointed out reasonably.

“He passed his exams with a fifty-one percent on his second attempt! No, we can’t assume he’ll have all the baseline information to even consider such a solution, much less actually accomplish the maths. We have to find some way to hide it with me,” Clara said. “Or in his TARDIS.”

The woman was silent for a long moment, her mouth set in a thoughtful line. On the distant horizon, the sun had finished its slow descent, but below them the city was coming to life, the light not so much fading as changing sources, becoming ever so slightly more golden.

“By that point in the timeline,” the blonde woman said, speaking slowly, still thinking it through, “you’ll have been exposed to his timestream and to the crack in the universe, so some of your memories will probably start leaking through. If we structure the extraction the right way, we might be able to embed a particular thought or moment into your consciousness before you go into the Schism.”

“What’d you have in mind?” Clara asked, turning her head to look at her.

“This conversation?” she suggested, laughing, her broad smile transforming her face. “No, a phrase would be cleaner, I think.”

“‘Run the math, you idiot boy’?” Clara suggested, also giggling.

“Oh yes, that’d go over well! No, if you want him to do something, call him clever. Works every time!” she laughed, leaning her shoulder into Clara’s.

“The horrid thing is that I know the temporal physics for this is part of my mother’s coursework,” Clara groaned. “If he hadn’t slept through so many of her classes, this would be a non-issue!”

“Ah, but a Doctor who was always responsible? What a boring universe that would be!”

Above them, the stars were beginning to come out, though the glare of the city obscured them. Through the haze of the dream, Clara couldn’t find any constellations she recognised. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I was the one who helped him steal that box in the first place.”

“And if he could take half a moment to remember that,” the blonde woman said seriously, “he might realise the role of his TARDIS in all of this, and start to think of the solution that way.”

“‘Run the math, you—”

“Clever.”

“—boy, and remember when you met me’?”

The other woman nodded, considering. “That could do it. Your chronodeterminate conjugation won’t work until you come into contact with at least a little regeneration energy. Assuming you choose regeneration on Trenzalore, it might start kicking in then, in plenty of time for the last stage.”

“Run the math, you clever boy, and remember when you met me,” Clara whispered up to the distant stars, cradling her chin on her arms against the railing.

The woman mimicked her position, the golden light of the city and the silver light of the stars catching in her long pale hair. “It’s just physics,” she murmured back. “Start from zero and run the math. I’ll be waiting at the other end of that equation. We’ll all be waiting.”

--

As unsettling as they were, at least the orange-tinged dreams were better than nightmares of Daleks, of being locked in the Dalek casing, unable to convince the Doctor that it was her, it was her, she wasn’t a Dalek, she wasn’t a Dalek! Dreams of the Doctor peering at her down an eyestock, this face or the last, or any of the others buried deep in her subconscious, hearing her but not knowing her, seeing her but not saving her.

Clara grasped for that orange sky, let it carry her away in bronze sandstorms, golden cities slowly coming to life, and starlight caught in tawny hair.

--

Monday morning third period found her Year 10 students taking an essay exam while Clara doodled on a scrap piece of paper, trying to pull images and phrases out of the orange haze that had taken up residence in her slumbering hours since Skaro. There were bits that tugged at her memory, like a song she couldn’t quite place but whose tune was intensely familiar.

She’d written Run the math, you clever boy, and remember when you met me across the top of the page, and her eyes strayed to it every few seconds. The phrase had stayed with her after she woke, and had been on the tip of her tongue ever since, as though it was a message she was meant to deliver. Below it she’d rewritten the phrase, but crossed out six words: Run the math, you clever boy, and remember when you met me.

It was too close for comfort to the phrase that had, in retrospect, changed her life, sent her on her current course. The Maitlands’ mnemonic for their wifi password, which she’d said out loud during that first phone conversation with the Doctor, had caught his attention somehow, and it wasn’t until she jumped into his timestream that she understood. It was the last thing she’d said to him before sacrificing herself to save him. Every fragment of her scattered through his timestream had said it to him at some point as well, the words reverberating endlessly up and down his timeline.

Why her dreams would dredge it up now, and in such a strange context, Clara had no idea. They didn’t feel like random images, but more like memory-dreams, like the bits of echo lives that filtered through to her sleeping mind from time to time. It had to mean something.

Half way down the scrap paper she’d written: It’s just physics. Start from zero and run the math. Below this was the very helpful ??? and Clara idly traced over the question marks again. Physics was still a foreign language to her, despite how much the Doctor prattled on about it at times. She could bring this to him, she mused, but what was it, really? Her subconscious doing backflips in the wake of Skaro, that was all. No grand mystery to solve, no universe-altering secret code, just her. She wouldn’t bother the Doctor with this quite yet.

Besides, she was certain she could tease this apart on her own, follow the clues to their logical conclusion without his assistance. The dreams were insistent, and felt familiar, but Clara was sure she’d never dreamed of the blonde woman and the orange sky prior to Skaro. That was the next clue, then, and she jotted it down on her scrap paper. Something had changed after Skaro, something that caused her subconscious mind to dredge up these particular buried memories. 

She needed more information. Dreams about her echo lives were always stronger when she was aboard the TARDIS travelling in the Vortex, sharper and easier to remember. Maybe these orange dreams would be, too. And maybe the TARDIS itself would have some answers for her.

--

Of course, she didn’t sleep aboard the TARDIS very often, with her insistence on returning home for a week of Real Life in between their Wednesday trips. But the Doctor was never adverse to her sticking around longer than she’d planned, and in the end it didn’t take much to convince him: 

“I’ve a staff meeting at work that I’m dreading,” Clara told him on that next Wednesday, when they returned to the TARDIS after their latest outing. “So what do you say I have a little kip and then we squeeze in another adventure before you take me back to face my workday?”

She thought for a moment that the Doctor might question the change in their routine, but he seemed thrilled about the idea. When he announced that he had some tinkering with the engines he’d been putting off that should keep him occupied while she slept, Clara made an excuse to linger in the console room — “just going to finish reading this chapter, then off to bed” — until after he’d gone. Once he’d disappeared down the corridor and around a corner, she quietly set aside her book, then slipped out of her armchair and down the stairs towards the console. The rotors hummed overhead, and somehow Clara knew the TARDIS was aware of her, and was curious to see what she would do.

Carefully clearing her thoughts, she made her way over to the telepathic circuits, pushed up her sleeves, and slid her hands into the strange interface. Focus was the key, she knew, and she was nothing if not focused. She closed her eyes and held two very specific thoughts in her mind: the sand-whipped orange sky in her dreams, and the clear question, Where, please?

She hoped the please would help.

It was a long quiet moment with the circuits warmly cradling Clara’s fingers, and then something on the console beeped. Her eyes flew open and she carefully extracted her hands from the telepathic interface before pulling the monitor down to eye level.

Gallifrey the screen read in English, below an image of a startlingly red-orange planet. Immediately prior to the Time Lock.

Clara felt her heart thud painfully against her ribs as she read the brief text again. She’d been dreaming of Gallifrey? She knew she’d had an echo life on Gallifrey, but she remembered that interaction with the Doctor, and it happened indoors. She had never before dreamt of the Gallifreyan sky. Had it been buried somewhere in her subconscious with the rest of her memories of that life? Why surface now?

More confused than ever, she clicked the screen back to the desktop, unreadable Circular Gallifreyan floating idly across the display. Perhaps she should bring this up with the Doctor — it was his home world, after all. But the whole point of this had been to dream while they were in the Vortex, and if she didn’t get a move on, he’d be ready for their next adventure before she’d even managed to fall asleep. She could talk with him about it later. 

And if things worked tonight as she hoped they would, maybe she would even have a bit more information to bring to him when she did.

--

“Fire suppressant in Pod Four!” 

The frantic call was quickly overwhelmed by the sound of the requested suppressant dispensing from the ceiling. When it ended, the speaker, dressed in the dark red uniform of a technician, brushed soot and foam off his shirt. 

“It hates me, that one,” he said, nodding at the unassuming gray cylinder in the open pod in front of him. It was devoid of features, even its doors invisible now in the wake of the fire, two meters tall and one meter in diameter, just like all the other patients in the workshop. But somehow it did seem to be glowering at him.

“And it always will, stop wasting your time,” his coworker said flippantly. He was perched in front of a console on the other side of the room, deep in his own repairs. “Just get the Impossible Girl to do it, she’ll have it eating out of her hand by lunchtime.”

Their conversation occurred in the time it took Clara to enter the large oblong workshop and make her way to the far end where the two were working. “I heard that,” she said seriously, earning a guilty-looking jump from the man who had spoken most recently. She continued over to Pod Four and leaned against the outer casing, arms folded over her uniformed chest, one booted ankle crossed over the other. “What did you do now?” she demanded of the first technician.

He looked at her with wide eyes, more out of genuine fear than mock innocence, in her estimation. “I just told it—”

“You what?” she snapped, in a tone she usually reserved for misbehaving students.

He wilted a little but started again “…I told it to—”

“Told it?”

“…to give me access to the logs,” he mumbled, dropping her gaze.

“Told it to give you access to the logs?” she asked, voice harsh. “Well first off, Number Four here prefers male pronouns, respecting that might put you on better footing. And secondly, as with all TARDISes, you’ll get a lot further if you ask rather than tell.”

Behind her, the other tech scoffed. “They’re machines, we shouldn’t have to baby them like that. An access request is an access request.”

Clara turned her head to pin him with an icy glare. “Some days I cannot believe I let you work here,” she told him bluntly. “They aren’t just machines, as you very well know. Yes, there’s hardware we need to be able to work with, but that’s nothing more than a radio, at some level — only instead of radio waves, we’re using oswin waves to talk to pan-dimensional beings so large, they can’t have a physical form in this dimension. Who, with a little extra energy, can take us and an infinite amount of folded space to nearly any point in spacetime. Just think about the massive intelligences that speak to us through each of those machines!

“But more to the point,” she said, turning back to the tech still covered in soot, “you have to understand their viewpoint of the universe, and their understanding of time. A Time Lord telling a TARDIS what to do is akin to creating a fixed point in spacetime. It’s in their nature to want to avoid fixed points. Ask instead, let him find his own way ‘round to it.”

Before the beleaguered technician could reply, there came a polite knocking from the far end of the room, and Clara turned to see a soldier standing in the doorway of the workshop, looking a little out of his depth. “Sorry to interrupt, but I have a message for—” he paused to glance down at the datapad in his hand, “for the Oswin. From the Lady President. Top priority.”

Clara was moving towards him before he’d finished speaking, curious and concerned, her attention focused on the message in his hands. But the dream faded out before she reached him, her mind moving on to something more abstract, more difficult to hold on to.

When she woke in her bed aboard the TARDIS, she stared at the ceiling with fond frustration. “If that was your attempt at help,” she whispered to the ship, “then I do not understand the message.”

--

It still wasn’t enough to bring to the Doctor, she decided later that day, watching him spin around the console room in the afterglow of a successful adventure, people saved, the universe bettered. So she was dreaming of Gallifrey, what of it? Many of the details in that last dream matched up with what she remembered of her interaction with the Doctor in that life. And while he occasionally enjoyed comparing memories of all the times her echoes had met him, she’d found he wasn’t especially keen on discussing the one in which she’d helped him steal the TARDIS and leave Gallifrey. Susan continued to be a point of pain for the Doctor, all these centuries later, and Clara understood him well enough to know better than to pick at that particular scab.

Still. That phrase was on a loop in her head: run the math, you clever boy, and remember when you met me. The emphasis on their meeting hadn’t been part of the original phrase, and now she was dreaming of the life in which they’d met face to face for the first time, from the Doctor’s perspective. Clearly they would have to discuss it at some point. 

Eventually, but not yet.

[kasiopeiae]

2017 Writing Reflection

@heart-attack-harry has tagged me to reflect on my writing from last year, so here we go! (lots of questions, so it’s under a cut for the sake of your dash lmao)

i.  list of works published this year.

Every single piece (minus the 3 in the Firsts series and Let Me Be Your Goodnight) on my Masterlist was written in 2017. So that’s 31 published pieces and give or take 20 more that have since been taken down. 

ii. work you are most proud of (and why): Rings of Saturn. I had been completely unable to write over the summer, which through me for a loop because I had so many plans for writing. I was finding it very difficult to write in second person, but I had this idea that I really, really wanted to put out there. And then Phoebe came to me and I had to write about her. I struggled with RoS, I really did. But I never gave up on it, and I wish I could bottle the euphoric feeling of publishing that oneshot because I have truly never been more proud of myself. 

iii. work you are least proud of (and why): Probably Let Me Be Your Goodnight. It was second person/you/Y/N fic I had ever written. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I like the concept a lot but hate the execution. 

iv. a favorite excerpt of your writing: This bit from You love me, right? really sticks out to me. It felt real to me while writing. I could feel the gut-wrenching disappointment.

“Must have big windows, mustn’t have neighbors close by,” Harry listed over lunch, and you caught the gleam in his eye that said I know it sounds like I’m kidding but I’m not. 

“What about a spiral staircase?” you asked. “Always wanted one when I was little.”

“They are pretty,” Harry agreed. “But not very practical for when we’ve got little ones running around.”

Your heart sank. Little ones. He’d said it so nonchalantly, too. Like he’d known forever that you’d be the perfect mother to his future children.

“Little ones?” you squeaked.

Reading the expression on your face, he smiled and placed a comforting hand atop your own. “Not anytime soon, love, but eventually, yeah? Just don’t want us to buy summat and fall in love with it, and then once the time comes to start addin’ we realize s’just not gonna work for raisin’ babies.”

A lump the size of a softball sat in your throat. A clammy, sick feeling was washing over your entire body. How had this never come up before? The two of you had been dating long enough to have many conversations of all types. You knew each others hopes and dreams, darkest secrets, and guilty pleasures. You knew Harry’s favorite foods and just how he took his tea. He knew your favorite authors and the way you liked reread books until they were so tattered and worn you couldn’t even make out the title. But neither of you knew how the other felt about having children. It’s like, you were perfect for each other in every other regard, how could that one not be the same? Why ask the question when you feel like you already know the answer?

Because, well…sometimes feelings are wrong.

v. share or describe a favorite comment you received. There was so much kindness sent my way for Rings of Saturn, I don’t think I could even choose one comment. Just the fact that people embraced it even though it’s not a Y/N fic really meant a lot to me and has inspired me to continue working on OFC fics. 

vi. a time when writing was really, really hard. From about July til just a few weeks ago, writing was a chore. I wasn’t happy that I wasn’t able to produce chapters in a timely matter, and it honestly kind of bothered me that I’d get so much attention for Y/N fics and blurbs and hardly any love for the characters I poured my heart and soul into. So I dabbled and tried to write some of the other ideas I had, but just couldn’t connect to a faceless character. The Rings of Saturn got so much praise, I felt like I no longer needed to torture myself with a style that just wasn’t working. 

Now, I’ve finally got my mojo back. I’ve written 20k words in a week and a half for my new fic. I’m excited and inspired to write it. I haven’t felt like this about writing or had this much fun writing in ages. 

vii. a scene or character you wrote that surprised you? In the now-deleted This Only Looks Like Love there was a scene where Winnie basically causes a scene at the front desk of Harry’s building. At one point, she’s clinging on to the desk and the woman she’s arguing with is yanking her by the legs to get down. 

I had no plans for that to be in the chapter. It just happened. I was typing and let the characters take me down their road and I think the end result was a lot of fun. 

viii. how did you grow as a writer this year. I learned that if I enjoy writing it, people will enjoy reading it. I spent so much time trying to squeeze my writing into a box to appease an audience I didn’t give much credit to. But having my best work--that was very, very different from anything else I had written--so well received showed me that I need to have more confidence in my readers. 

ix. how do you hope to grow next year. I want to finish a massive idea. As I’ve started writing this fic, the gaps between the action of the main plot have been filled with a lot of fun sub-plots. The fic is growing rapidly, and I am bound determined to finish it this year. 

x. who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc). I’ve got so many, it’s hard to name only a few. Firstly, anyone who has ever liked, reblogged, and/or commented on my writing is a massive influence to me. Yes, I write for myself, but knowing there’s someone out there enjoying my work really inspires me to keep going. 

@haroldsbee was the best cheerleader throughout Rings of Saturn, and I’m so excited for her to beta my new fic.

@permanentcross and I have had so many chats about writing, and each time I come away having learned something new about myself and with some wise advice. 

@70s-harry and I bounced so many ideas off of each other and one of them even became a full blow series (Rotation).

i admire @roseonhissleeve so ridiculously. her writing is the kind that makes me feel like a better writer for having read it. 

and i would be nowhere if it weren’t for the constant support, yelling, and actual friendships with both @hotpinkharry and @therosatour. whenever i have a new idea, these are the two i tell. whenever i’m feeling like my writing is the absolute worst, they both have their own ways of helping me look at it in a more rational light, and build my confidence up. 

xi. anything from your real life show up in your writing this year. so much stuff i couldn’t even begin to point it out. i’m not completely sold on the idea of having children, so my worries came out in the form of You love me, right? i’ve been left feeling broke and used and abandoned like Bubbles in Rotation. i have a crazy love for astronomy and if i were better at math, i’d be the astrophysicist Phoebe is studying to be in Rings of Saturn. i think writing is the best when writers put a little bit of themselves into the pages. 

xii. any new wisdom you can share with other writers. Don’t force it. If something’s not working, take a step back and try again later. 

xiii. any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year. Princess and the Popstar! everyday we’re one day closer to it’s big reveal and i honestly can’t wait to share it with you all. i’ve genuinely never been more excited or more proud of a piece and i can’t wait to hear your thoughts. 

ixv. tag three writers/artists whose answers you’d like to read.

@bribe-the-door // @queenmestyles // @bxdlvckcharm

[crackinglamb]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age - All Media Types Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age), The Iron Bull/Dorian Pavus Characters: Original Child Character(s), Original Spirit Character(s) Additional Tags: Future Fic, Post-Canon, Modern Girl in Thedas, Established Relationship, Family Fluff, Cooking, -Slaps Roof of Fic-, This Baby Can Hold So Many Dads, and languages, Mentions of Slavery, the tiniest bit of angst, Happy Ending Series: Part 6 of Til It Squeaks: A Modern Girl's Take on Thedas Summary:

Da'Fen Carly Lavellan, former Inquisitor, Consort of Fen'Harel and undisputed leader of the Dales, has a craving.

Dorian and Bull, meanwhile, have a small mystery on their hands.

End result? A Thedosian found family pizza party.

---

The kitchen was quiet at this hour.  Granted, the kitchen was quiet most hours now that the Inquisition was long gone from Skyhold.  Carly had shooed Misyl and the rest out a little while ago, requesting only the yeast starter and a large bowl from a high shelf.  Honestly, she really needed to have a talk with her head cook about keeping things where she could reach them.  It was rather undignified for the Consort of Fen'Harel to be climbing on the counters to reach the cupboards.

She flexed her ceramic hand and marveled once again at the magic possible in Skyhold now.  The leather covering was utterly seamless, molded over the prosthetic hand as closely as skin, and just as flexible.  It even nearly matched her real skin tone, but then again, what did she expect?  Little halla, indeed, she snorted to herself as she measured out some of the yeast into the bowl.  She added water and a healthy pinch of sugar and stirred it around with her favorite wooden spoon.

And how strange was that?  She had a favorite wooden spoon.  Misyl would be beaming when she found out.

She was grabbing the large crock where the flour was kept when the kitchen door slammed open and two bodies came through it.  One was large and horned, and the other was...giggling.

“Gentlemen,” Carly said loudly, breaking the pair apart with something very nearly like guilt on their faces.  “My kitchen is not the appropriate place for your antics.”

[bioticgoddess]

The Mountain (5/?)

Nottes; I’m sorry this is so late! I said I’d post Monday and that didn’t happen (loooong story not so fun or fluffy as this.)

Pairings: Bucky x OC (Taryn Lantz)

Series Summary: The Avengers (Tony really) finds the HYDRA base where Bucky underwent surgery and conditioning in order to make him into the Winter Solider. The mission, and its fallout, do not go according to plan and Bucky’s past comes back to bite them. 

Warnings: None. All the fluff in this chapter!

THE MOUNTAIN: Clean Up

The monitors beeped away, they were worse than the slow march of time. Heart rate, breathing, and a half dozen other hospital monitors were hooked up to Bucky Barnes.  Had it been hours or days? As he started climbing out of the drug induced haze he’d been in since taking the bullet to his abdomen. Adding it to the list of wounds he’d earned thanks to HYDRA and the Winter Soldier Program. Groaning, he heard someone on his left shuffling. The movements were slow and the hand that clapped on his shoulder was big, heavy.

“Welcome back,” it was Steve.

Eyes cracking open, he could see the other super soldier. “Hoorah,” Bucky croaked. There’d been a tube down his throat at one point. Speaking even the one word had revealed just how raw is throat was.

There was a cup and some food on the small wheeled table that Steve moved into place over Bucky’s legs. “Doc made sure something was here for when you woke up,” he said as the brunette fumbled with the hospital bed remote. They were still in the Compound – that much he could tell from the décor.

“Woo,” he said, taking the water cup first – that he needed more than anything. Taking a few swigs of the room temperature fluid, he could feel Steve watching. Hovering, like a frantic mother hen. Hadn’t that been his job? Mr. Mom, take care of everyone? Oh how times had changed. Sighing, he asked, “How bad,” pointing to himself and then making a circle with his free hand. He absolutely wanted to know what Arkady had accomplished besides nearly killing him.

Steve chuckled, “Well, I don’t want to be on the receiving end of Taryn’s powers, ever.” Bucky quirked an eyebrow, giving Steve a face that practically ordered him to continue. “She and Bruce – well, the Hulk – took care of the guys Arkady brought with him. SHIELD was able to round them up, well, except for the guy that fell down a few stories. But that was on Hulk. Sam shot Arkady, both are in intensive care. Sam’ll be alright but they’re not sure Arkady will regain consciousness.” No one was exactly sure how he’d survived – between Bucky’s beating and Sam’s bullets.

Bucky interrupted, “Good.”

Shaking his head, Steve continued, “Sam managed to save both of us. One good shot to the back of the neck, near the base of the skull took him down.” He paused, “Don’t think it helped him any that when she saw what had happened, after regaining her sense, Taryn threw an energy pulse at him.” Had Bruce not been there to catch her, Steve was sure the Inhuman would’ve either passed out or started throwing things like kitchen crockery at the prone Arkady.

There was shuffling outside his room in the medical bay’s hallway. As he walked past, leaning on a crutch, Sam yelled, “I still hate you Ice-man!” He didn’t but the snide remark made Bucky laugh. Poor choice – laughing still hurt.

“Did I mention you have a number of cracked ribs,” Steve added when his veritable brother grimaced.

Sighing, Bucky noted, “No, you didn’t. Um,” he started, realizing the Inhuman was nowhere to be found in his recovery room, “1. How long was I out? And 2. Where is Taryn?”

“Three days and I finally had to order her out – didn’t know when she’d slept last prior to this,” it was Steve’s turn to talk with his hands, indicating the hospital room. Bucky nodded in response. Not having her there when he woke up made sense now, it was still disappointing not seeing her face but at least she was okay. After everything that had happened on the Mountain and because of it, he didn’t think he could stomach losing her too the chaos.

--

Natasha found her in the room Bucky and Taryn shared, curled up in a ball on the bed. She had her arms wrapped around one of the hoodies she routinely stole from the super soldier, face buried in it. It was like deja vu - seeing her like this echoed how Bucky had been following her near-death. The only difference was that they knew Bucky would be alright. Or at least that they could help him.

There was a moment when she wanted to sit next to her friend and hold her tight. At least, unlike weeks earlier, she had good news. Swallowing, brushing a few strands of her bright red hair back off her face, Natasha started, “Steve just texted me,” holding her phone up as if showing the message to her friend. “Bucky’s awake,” she continued, plopping down next to the brunette. “So what do you say we get you dressed and down to see the dork.”

For the first time in days, the brunette laughed. It was soft, tired, like she didn’t have the energy for it. “Hey,” she said, gently pulling her braid, “C’mon you.”

“I’m moving, I’m moving,” Taryn said, untangling herself from the blankets and Bucky’s hoodie. “See, vertical,” she said, sticking her tongue out at the other Avenger as she rose up to kneel on the mattress.

Nat laughed. “Doesn’t count ‘til you’re out of bed!”

“Oh my god, you and my mother,” she shot back, sliding off the mattress on the side opposite Natasha. She wasn’t paying much attention to anything her friend was saying beyond the push to get up. Bucky was awake! All she cared about was seeing her friend and lover, wanting to make sure he was okay.

--

Bucky threw his head back – poor choice. It started throbbing again and he groaned, sinking further down into the medbay bed. He hated being bed ridden. It reminded him of all the times he’d had to take care of his siblings or Steve when they were kids. “Can I please go back to my room Doc,” he called out.

No response.

He groaned piteously.

“Don’t sound so blue Sarge,” Taryn said from the door. Natasha was standing behind her, an uncharacteristically dopey gin on her face.

Looking between the two women, Nat shoved her friend into Bucky’s room. Pulling the door closed behind her she blocked Steve’s entrance, “We’ll give you two some privacy.”

“Hey doll,” he smiled, sitting up straight in the bed. At least as straight as the thing would allow. Patting the mattress next to him, he asked, “You okay? Did you get hurt at all?”

Climbing in next to him, Taryn shrugged, “Got shot in the leg, same place I had that gash.” Her feet hung off the side as Bucky wrapped his arms around her, “Nothing a few stitches and a long lecture from Steve about watching my corners didn’t fix.” That got the super soldier laughing. He could see it now: Taryn, sitting on a gurney in the med bay, Doctor Cho or one of her medtechs stitching up the bullet holes,” Wait, you got shot?!”

“Yea...Hulk kinda pointed it out, promise I’ll tell you the story when you’re not on bed rest and recovering from a gunshot wound the chest. Which, I have words for you about that,” her tone changed, eyes narrowed and she gave him a look that would curdle milk. “Don’t ever scare me like that again!”

His metal hand cupped the side of her face and pulled her to him. Lips met and let out a startled squeak, it made him chuckle softly as they kissed. “I’ll shut up now,” she whispered, a smile spreading across her face.

“Still picturing Steve reading you the riot act,” foreheads pressed together he continued, “I can see the annoyed pouty face you made.” As if on queue she made one at him, “That one!” Bucky kissed her again.

She shifted in the bed, cuddling up close to him, “You’re a butthead sometimes y’know?”

“I hate to point it out but -” he started, Taryn’s index finger across his lips silencing him.

“Super soldier serum doesn’t make you indestructible Bucky,” she said, knowing what he was about it say. It was always the argument the brunette made when he took a serious injury like this. Or chose to jump out of a perfectly good airplane - and not use a parachute. The number of times she or Wanda had needed to use their powers to insulate him from hitting the ground at terminal velocity was ridiculous. Or Sam had shot down to grab him before the other Super Soldier hit the ground. “You’re one of if not the best fighter I know but you always fight like there’s something to prove when it comes to anything related to HYDRA or the Winter Soldier Project.”

He’d set his jaw, relaxing some when one of her hands came up to rest against his face, “Bucky. I don’t know what I’d do if you…” She trailed off, unable to say the words. It was a thought he’d contemplated heavily when all reports presumed she was dead after the foray into the Mountain. When their positions were reversed he’d prayed for any opportunity to switch places with and save her. It didn’t occur to him what his potential death might mean for her.

His other arm circled around her waist, “I’m not going anywhere Doll. I promise.”

--

Feedback is welcome! Tags are open! 

[fiadhaisteach]

Things I’ve Read This Week* - 2021.04.24

New Stories

In the Blood by apfelgranate (@notenoughdragons) - Solas/F!Adaar - 8,392 words, complete x2

Jacinth Lavellan, ⚜️A Slip of the Tongue, ⚜️Banister Banter, ⚜️Lost to Night by JadeLavellan (@maythedreadwolftakeyou) - Solas/F!Trevelyan - 17,520 words, 1st & last complete, middle & series HSE WIP

Rereads

Provided it tied you down first by JadeLavellan (@maythedreadwolftakeyou) - Solas/F!Trevelyan - 17,115 words, complete 'ware the tags

Hunted By the Wolf by Goldenpetal13 (@goldenpetal13) - Solas/MGiT - 180,891 words, HSE WIP

Tumblr (re)Reads

You’ve always hated your power to reveal people true opinions of each other prompt by @tweetthang96 - Original Work

You’ve always hated your power to reveal people true opinions of each other prompt by @an-adventure-insanity - Original Work

You’ve always hated your power to reveal people true opinions of each other prompt by @katfeatherly - Original Work

The Assassins of Gilfred by @meg-moira - Original Work

You’ve always hated your power to reveal people true opinions of each other prompt by @only-genius-wit-and-taste - Original Work

Satan Santa prompt by @pajama-nerd - Original Work

Subscription Updates

Monachopsis by Solverne (@solverne-02) - Solas/OFC, Iron Bull/F!Lavellan (Ch. 50-51), Hope Sprang!

miles to go before the fall of night, across the ocean and over the ruins, the forest is dark and deep and i’ve seen you here before by victoriousscarf (@victoriousscarf) - Solas/M!Lavellan (Ch. 135-136)

lover, your back is bruised from what you carry, In the face of your light by noverture (@noverturemusings) - Solas/M!Lavellan (Ch. 79-80)

No Longer A Game by Here_To_Be (@nolongeragameart) - Solas/MGiT (Ch. 58)

Sugar Honey Iced Tea by AntlersandFangs (@thededfa), Beckily (@beckily), & Celtic_Lass (@thecelticlass) - F!Adaar/MBiT, Varric/MGiT, Krem/MGiT (Ch. 30)

Heritage (English), Heritage by Luwan_Kyuu - Fen'Harel|Solas/F!Lavellan (Ch. 34)

Vena Eolas: The Journey of an Elvhen Spirit, Sule Tael Tasalal - Until We Meet Again by faerieavalon (@faerieavalon) - Solas/OFC/Felassan (Ch. 68)

Hero by Tabikat (@tabikato) - Zevran/M!Mahariel, Alistair/OFC (Ch. 28)

Dreams, In Waking Dreams by AParisianShakespearean (@a-shakespearean-in-paris) - Cullen/F!Trevelyan (Ch. 69)

Harbinger of Sacrifice, Harbinger of Sacrifice by nini28326 - Solas/OFC/Abelas, Past Solas/F!Lavellan (Ch. 8)

Blacked Out by Sagoberattare - MGiT (Ch. 18)

As Dreams Fade in the Light by WizardofOzymandias (@wizardofozymandias) - Solas/Dagna (Ch. 3)

Til It Squeaks: A Modern Girl’s Take on Thedas, Twist Some More by CrackingLamb (@crackinglamb) - Solas/MGiT (Ch. 8)

What a Wicked Game to Play by Cracking Lamb (@crackinglamb) - Solas/MGiT (Ch. 2)

The Taming of Fen'Harel by beaubashley (@beaubartley) - Solas/F!Lavellan (Ch. 10)

When the World Fell by Psalacanthea - Fen'harel|Solas/F!Lavellan (Ch. 12)

Do Not Abandon Me by MermaidWhispers - Solas/M!Lavellan, Dorian/M!Lavellan (Ch. 3)

» side note - multiple chapters may mean multiple updates; or might just be me refreshing my memory, reorienting myself in the story, or rereading some for fun. 😊

*TIRTW & can recommend (previous weeks)

[crackinglamb]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age (Video Games) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age), Female Lavellan & Varric Tethras Characters: Carly Lavellan, Varric Tethras, Dorian Pavus, Cassandra Pentaghast Additional Tags: Future Fic, Post-Canon, Modern Girl in Thedas, Old Age, natural death, Grief/Mourning, Reunions, more sweet than bitter, Series Finale Series: Part 7 of Til It Squeaks: A Modern Girl's Take on Thedas Summary:

All good stories come to an end...

  Beta'd by Iron_Angel.

---

“Tell me a story. Make it a good one, with a real splashy ending,” he whispered, his eyes closed and breathing raspy.  He still held tight to her fingers, but he was slipping away.  She could sense it.

“Once upon a time, a woman fell out of a hole in the sky.  She landed on her ass in the middle of a war, and she had no idea what she was doing.”  A faint smile crossed his lips and he sighed.  “But she had a trusty dwarf, and a god pretending to be a hobo.  And they were the best things that ever happened to her...”

[crackinglamb]

Til It Squeaks Masterpost

For the first time in nearly two years I have nothing to post on a Tuesday. It feels...really odd.

Anyway, here's a master list for Da'Fen Carly Mayers Lavellan. These are all complete.

Twist - The one that started it all. The main fic. Carly Mayers has landed in Thedas after an experiment gone wrong. Once she realizes she's really there, she does everything she can to get the happy ending she was always denied in the fictional version. Covers the events of Inquisition and beyond Trespasser. Canon divergence abounds. Rated E, ~197K words.

The Cutting Room Floor - A companion fic to Twist. Includes screenshots, short snippets that had no place in the main fic and a selection of 'bonus material' in the form of alternate takes and deleted scenes. Rated T, ~37K words.

Choice, Pride and Trust - A oneshot. Originally it was going to be in CRF, but it got too long, and the rating was too high, so I made it standalone. Carly and Solas face off against Imshael. Rated M, ~2400 words.

Waiter, There's a Fluff In My Soup! - A multiship romp for Fluff-uary 2021. Pairings include Carly and Solas, Dorian and Iron Bull, Varric and Hawke and more. Most prompts are romantic, some are platonic, because that sort of love is important too. Rated E, ~28K words.

Twist Some More - The final chaptered fic. An extended epilogue/sequel to Twist. Carly and Solas have their happy ending. And a baby. Super fluffy. Rated E, ~67K words.