#so i might just slowly drop the lore in posts along the way

[druidberries]

anddd now we're switching perspectives a bit, meet hades and belladonna crowe. hades is a reaper living in mourningvale with his dog, belladonna. bella passed away many years ago now, but with the help of a spellcaster she can now live on as an immortal skeleton dog!

hades was left at an orphanage in ravenwood as a newborn and spent his entire childhood there. he was always seen as the strange kid and didn't have any friends, until belladonna came along. when he was 17 he attempted to run away from the orphanage but was stopped in his tracks by a near-death experience. when the grim reaper came for the reaping and discovered a teenager- alive and well, it created an...awkward...encounter. grim took pity on the poor boy and realized he could make an opportunity out of this...one thing lead to another and hades has been working for grim ever since!

previous // next

like with lorelai, I have already made a few posts about hades so if you'd like to check those out you can do so here and here!

also because I didn't put it on the pictures: his aspiration is renaissance sim and his traits are macabre, dog lover, loner, music lover, hot-headed!

[thehylianidiot]

Obligatory Spriggan 12 Headcannons Post

I have a list, and I only have one story idea I can explore this stuff for so I'm going to post a list instead:

Zeref first heard of Spriggans from Mavis. However, since he's not exactly an expert on fairy lore, he might have...misinterpreted a few details when he decided his Emperor alias should translate to "ugly fairy."

Once she found out about it a century later, it frustrated Mavis to no end. Seriously, it's a miracle once revived she didn't immediately grab a book on fairies and march right up to Zeref solely to lecture him on how many inaccuracies he made to his face.

Larcade...is actually fully aware he is Etherius. In fact, the idea that he isn't valued and just a stepping stone for END's creation is a massive insecurity of his. The fact that he broke down on being told he was a prototype wasn't because of what was being said but *who* was saying it.

That said, Larcade was once a human child who took a liking to Zeref and Anna on their travels...and ended up dead during a particularly brutal dragon attack. It was the one of two successful human-etherius resurrections Zeref had ever done.

Larcade and August were the Gray and Natsu in Alvarez's baby days. They had to rebuild the palace a few times due to their bickering.

Larcade knows about August's parentage, which is part of why he flaunts the whole "I am His Majesty's son" thing. Unfortunately for the century's worth of drama, August never took the bait.

Brandish, Invel and Ajeel were The Trouble Trio when they were kids.

Brandish outscored Invel in the law exam. Brandish occasionally rubs it in and Invel tries to ignore it ever happened.

Could Brandish have become Chief of Staff? Actually, yes. Did she decide being head of the agricultural division would net her infinite ice cream and was thus the better position? Also yes.

Ajeel grew up with extensive political training from his grandfather but he was a bit of a battle junkie so he signed up for specialization in Alvarez's military instead.

Meanwhile, Invel's family comes from a long line of ice-themed generals, but much to their chagrin he tried to distance himself from that in favor of legal discourse. His ice-armor trick from his battle with Gray was actually his family's specialty.

Invel purposefully gets his glasses frames a size bigger than they should just so he had an excuse to push them up his nose bridge more.

August took Brandish in after she became an orphan, and so she really looks up to her adopted grandfather (poor gal in 100yq on vacation's probably with the lingering guilt of stabbing him thinking it led to his death). She may act aloof but any bad word about the Wizard King and she will threaten to shrink you and drop you in a bathtub.

Speaking of which, since August was essentially the de-facto second-in-command, technically Brandish may or may not have been third in line for the throne. She just made sure to start her vacation before anyone noticed that detail.

Diamara's God Takeover was the result of an failed sacrificial ritual by a group of cultists. Just saying, Vistarion Castle sure does bring in a lot of orphans (now why does that seem familiar to a certain guild in Fiore...)

Post-war, Ajeel decided to take that running gag everyone made seriously and officially remodeled the war room into an orphan daycare.

Bloodman's anti-magic aura slowly killing everything within radius originally led a very depressed etherius. Once he stumbled on the etherius once and found some rather uncomfortable similarities to his own experiences with uncontrollable life-stealing curses, Zeref offered him a position within Alvarez.

Yajeel, August, and Makarov would have gotten along in a the-responsible-elders-are-causing-destruction way and you cannot tell me otherwise.

If baby August had been raised in Fairy Tail....he and Makarov would have been THE ultimate destruction duo that would give Pretch heart attacks with sheer level of destruction caused by their antics.

[macawritesupdates]

Writing Update 10/5/2024

I'm alive! Just I have been doing more art of late which means not as much writing time! Working on two zine art pieces and trying to finish art I owed for something I forgot about 8'3

Also catch up on Ink event for an art server. Got to do that. BUT progress on writing is being made! <3

JJK LONG-FIC UPDATES

CAREFUL WHAT YOU JOKE ABOUT: EDITING NEW CHAPTER AND IT SHOULD BE OUT TODAY! The outline reworks are more or less done other than seeing how many chapters it takes to reach a conclusion I'm happy with. Chapter count is most likely going to change!

BROKEN IN THE WAYS NO ONE SEES: Next chapter is in the works and is full of fluff like promised <3 Can't wait to share it!

WHEN YOU GET TWO GRANDSONS: Next chapter is nearly done so working to finish that up and then edit and post. Get ready to get some Wasuke character lore! hehe!

SPOUSE WANTED: Next chapter is coming along and again, hoping to finish it soon to post up! Going to be one readers have been anticipating!

CULTURALLY INAPPROPRIATE: The sequel to Historically Inaccurate! Continuing Yuuji and Sukuna's journey figuring themselves out while throwing in meeting other vessels and the Culling Games...what could go wrong.

LESSONS IN ACCIDENTAL SEDUCTION: Next chapter in slow progress! Just a lot of moving pieces to handle as we skip to the twins now being older and being Sukuna's assistants in chaos lol

THE YUUJI FILES: Working on the outline for the next chapter...the long-time fans still sticking it out are going to scream when this chapter drops hehe! WHO'S A GOOD BOY: Slowly poking at it. Need to rework some things to get it where I want. MIRRORED LIVES: Need to rework this story and get it more on its own two legs. It was half-baked and parts of its went to other stories in terms of plot so...gotta really get its own identity down.

LONGFIC UPDATES: MY HERO ACADAMIA

JEALOUSY IS NOT A GOOD FRIEND: Good progress for the next chapter! Hoping to get it out this weekend

UNSUNG HEROES: Want to write it SHO bad! AHhh! Need to make time to work on it…

A RUT TIME OF IT: On the backburner for now c:

ONE -SHOTS

Pull Me Along if I Can’t Move Forward: Deku/Bakugo fic that is so slowly being written....

Heatwaves and Curses Don't Mix Slow boat to being done....

Once Upon a Blob: Sukuna, now Blobkuna, has a plan to get his body back and it involves the old fairy tale cliche of love's true kiss. Chaos ensures.

And That's When I knew It (Might change the title though!): A silly Uraraka/Kirishima one-shot where something horribly embarrassing happens and feelings are had (and spice XD)

Rituals of Ascension: ABO in the Heian era involving bitching and just pwp ….

FICS TO COME

Exploration: ABO Modern Sukuita fic on the slow boat to being written

Unnamed: Kugikuna fic because I'm in a mood to write something for em…

We Wretched Few: Fleshing out the idea and preparing it for pre-producting

Law Meets Disorder: Slowing down on it as I work to get it mapped out properly, but it is in the works for pre-production!

The Dragon Story: I am worldbuilding so much for this one…debating if I might try to manga page draw it? We'll see…

[the-s1lly-corner]

Could I get something for eyeless jack with an s/o who's also a demon?

Not the same as him and definitely more human looking, but they are definitely NOT human

What if they fed off human emotions instead of human flesh? Would he get along better with another demon or would he be kind of put off?

Would he feel differently if they turned into a demon in a similar fashion to him

Eyeless Jack x reader whos a demon who feeds off human emotion!

ooooo this one is going to be interesting because while i do call jack a demon i dont think he is one.. at least not fully yet.. i mean oh yeah hes definitely cursed with something in my sillay hc but shrugs; sometimes labels are overrated that said i hope you enjoy this anon!

oh he would be so so put off. like yeah sure he knows he has no where to speak since hes literally slowly turning into something that cant be called human. he admits that he doesnt have much room to speak when it comes to others, but he mostly says that in the face of humans... but to a demon? ohhoho this is going to be interesting

i think a lot of times in the beginning hes going to be very wary of you and maybe even avoid you, its going to take some time for the two of you to get to know one another and get on speaking terms... its probably going to take a real hard shove to bring you two together

while im getting into this i may as well drop my personal lore on demon/non human creepypasta characters that may or may not change a lot of things

i know i brought this up before in a few posts, primarily my zalgo post

anyways tldr; zalgo made all the non human characters in the universe and/or planted a means to make them non human (ex. giving ben the means to come back as a ghost, providing the thing thats fucking up ej, ect ect) i think the only real exception is laughing jack since he was made to be good originally before following in the steps of the kid he was assigned to. shrugs. characters like the proxies get roped in my another character (ex. masky and the others by slenderman); while characters like jeff are your regular old krillers. non human/demon stuff just IS in thiis universe, simply another piece of nature blah blah yeah

^so naturally if we're following that hc for this post the reader falls under this... but even if you dont, you didnt really ask to be a demon , much like jack didnt

ponders

i dont think you can feed off his emotions even if you wanted to/tried, i think after a certain point he stops being considered and recognized as human

GOD can you imagine him receiving that news? he decides to give himself up so you can feed only for you both to discover that hes no longer an option. like an official sign that hes too far gone

though i think overall he tries to push for you guys to eat separately; outside of his offer he doesnt really want to know how you feed... and he doesnt want you to see how he feeds (for obvious reasons)

ponders

i think you would be safe when he goes a lil feral during his feeding/hunger frenzies since he knows youre not a human and/or can still sense youre not even when hes not mentally there fully so hey look at it this way! the chance of him attacking you is very low

back to actual relationship stuff i think it would be a very tense relationship for the first chunk

oooo imagine you tell him about the whole zalgo thing and kind of provide him with knowledge of whats going on; i mean jack is still very much in the dark about a lot of stuff regarding the topic and who knows it might build some trust (winks)

as for that last bit in your request... what if you werent born a demon or created? what if you were in a similar situation as him?

while i do think he would have some sympathy and you guys might possibly bond over having similar trauma; but i think. at least on jacks end. it would serve too much of a reminder of what happened to him

it sounds horrible, and he acknowledges its a horrible thing to think and feel but he cant stop that feeling.. he wouldnt exactly fully turn his back on you, but i do think he would hold his distance at least a little longer than the other option as a means to protect himself mentally

its harsh but it is what it is (slaps ej. this bad boy can hold so much angst potential)

[kozykricket]

some ramblings, appreciating deltarunes "layers" of story/lore

I might have already written something about this before, but something that I really love about deltarune is that it's a game that (from what we can tell) has several different layers to the story that are all enjoyable, for different... levels of players to enjoy! Like, you have the upfront stuff, about oh, dark worlds, the knight, and kris' soul (protagonist vs player and such) but its mostly just some young teenagers goofing off going to fantasy worlds and learning some self improvement then you go a tad bit deeper, still things most people may ask and you have... well what the hecks up with dark worlds logistically, why is ralsei, and what dark worlds represent (escapism woah), and for some, secret bosses expanding on the whole free will + kris' soul shenanigans thats where it may end for most people, and i think thats great, that if you arent someone in extreme brainrot about the history of gaster then... i think the game will be very enjoyable without having to think about meta elements! and of course, as good writing tends to be, hints about one "level above" are slowly dropped to those who are below, to help them understand, but you get what im saying, right? its like, big nerds get thinking about the gaster shit earlier, before the game really is gonna start probably hammering in like hey whats up with that voice at the beginning

I do question whether dess will end up being about as secret as like, jevil is, or as secret as the man behind the tree and the mystery of the eggs is. but i feel like shes also a realy good opportunity for being a mystery thats almost entirely deltarune, without needing prior-context of who a random vaguely mentioned character in ut is. still, a lot of vague info is hidden in the files, so perhaps... hmm, well, there was that one abc_123 file where toby was like "don't share stuff from the files, thanks. you cant have secrets nowadays" and then.. i feel like when he changed it to just be laughter, that was his way of saying "alright, i see the game you want to play. ill play along" and thats why... for some people, hes playing the game of hiding mysterious stuff in the code. he knows what hes doing, of course. he knows people love looking in the games code, so hes trying to make it interesting even if people do that overall though i just like how theres different levels of enjoyment of the story so far. im sure the game will end up telling everyone about dess and gaster and such, in some way, but... for most people? itll be a game about the fun gang and their friends learning to become better people, and having some fun wacky adventures on the way there! tldr toby fox does "having different layers to your story" in a fairly interesting, enjoyable way. EDIT: yeah, ill make a v2 of this post. i more specifically am amazed at how you dont NEED to know the deeper layers than you want to, and its. cool !!

[betweenlands]

Hi! We can explain -- we're actually the person(s) that coordinated the Ghost's Gambit! TL;DR: nobody talked about the fraud, everyone knew about the fraud, and we had a very specific plan. And also if you're looking to find out where this insanity came from we always have MCYTer recs.

If you've read some of our essays, you might know that we've been paying attention to every single round of the bracket -- so we'd been paying attention to Pandora rounds even when she won handily against her other opponents. This meant we noticed some patterns, and when someone asked if voter fraud was on the table we noticed Pandora suddenly surge ahead of the Ghost’s Vault, more or less reversing the ratio for that morning, and figured that voter fraud was in fact afoot.

So! Two facts about us that some followers will already know: we're a former Blaseball fan (we're wearing our team's bomber jacket as we write this right now), and also we are Just Like This. It's not the first time we've coordinated some ridiculous effort involving data gathering and careful planning. That's our whole thing -- I think last time this happened it was for something on Legundo’s server, actually. Operation Full House was a blast.

Anyway, if you know anything about Blaseball -- fan coordination around voting is a whole Thing. It's insanely specialized in this way, in fact, so we have prior experience. We were also around for the original MCYTblr Sexyman Bracket, and had struck up some alliances in other fandoms around that time.

So, the patterns -- for obvious reasons, nobody likes to push super hard when they're winning. It feels bad to totally ratio someone when they're super enthusiastic about their own build, especially in semifinals. When I was coordinating teams for voter fraud, I gave instructions to a bunch of them -- "do it slowly, so it doesn't look like we're frauding, and save your energy for the last day."

Then Viking and Legs found out. For those of you not tuned in to Dominion or Skyblock Kingdoms fandom them suddenly shouting WE'RE GONNA DO LORE might’ve been a shock, but the thing is that those two are literally just like that. They'll "do lore" anyway. The only thing that was mildly surprising was Legs saying he'd release the Nights puzzle solution -- though I think he might’ve been planning to do that anyway, this just incentivized it? Point is, more folks got brought in from that and all of a sudden we were in the lead too early.

I was having fun but I was worried y'all were going to catch on to the counterfraud too soon, so when we dropped from the lead the various fraud teams got new info: keep the Vault votes at around 48.5% and wait for further instructions. It's at this moment I pulled a full Technoblade and started paying attention to timezones, and I figured the last few hours of the bracket were the perfect time to make a comeback. Not a lot of new votes would be coming in -- you'd be in the lead, and you'd be asleep.

Everyone on the fraud teams got new instructions -- push very slowly back up to 48-49%, making it seem like we're too exhausted to fight back, and then go all out in the last two hours. This was coupled with an attempt at total radio silence on the Tumblr end; by this point propaganda didn't matter as much, just frauding, and if nobody reblogged the post saying something about the Vault then nobody with post notifications on would see that we were pushing.

We woke up at 6am and hit the ground running, along with telling everyone else on another team that it was time to go -- the ghosts were here. Instructions were now to go as hard as possible and to keep pushing even if we were in the lead, anticipating pushback -- we figured this would give us just enough of a margin before you could counter us that we'd be totally unstoppable. I put on some video game guitar music (the Wizard With A Gun OST slams, by the way) and got to work, and so did our friends and allies, including one Fluffy Netherite Block Shulker Papaya.

Wait, who? Netherite blocks?

@fluffy-papaya is one of our beloved partners and coauthors, and the thing about Fluffy is they are a grindset madman. Last time we were on a server together they decided to get an entire shulker full of netherite blocks for no reason other than that they could. It took them like a month.

Over the course of the poll, Fluffy cast anywhere from around 300 to 500 fraud votes, pretty much singlehandedly keeping our margins alive. No automation; they did this by hand in their spare time alongside a couple of their IRLs going significantly slower. When we went all out in the final hours, the vote surged not only due to the Ghost's Gambit but also because Fluffy was no longer holding back.

So. In the Blaseball fandom there's technically a term for stealing a wanted blessing at the last minute, though Blaseball voting works via lottery picks and it's a bit different. It's called a wimdy (long story, but yes it does come from that dog meme saying "it frickin wimdy") and, with sincere apologies, you did in fact get wimdy'd. The more accessible term would be that you got Potato Warred. (It could've been worse! We wrote an 11 page document with 11 more pages of supplemental intel for OFH. We are literally just like this.)

The thing is, I can't speak for anyone else, but the Ghost’s Gambit was mostly coordinated in its nascent form before a lot of the bribes came into play. Dominion fandom adores the Ghost’s Vault; it's an iconic location with so much history and nostalgia and a lot of us wanted nothing more than to show the force of that adoration. As a friend joked -- of course it's a prison, this is where all the fans have been stuck for the past two years! More than anything, this was just a great excuse to offer teasers for various projects -- I got to write a miniupdate for the longform Dominion/100 Days Multiverse fic I'd been working on with Fluffy, @autisticlalna got to preview his insanely cool dViking PMV, a couple people got back to working on stuff like animatics as well. (Yeah the Nights puzzle is cool but have you seen Leo's art.) This was an act of getting silly with it, having an excuse to be creative along the way, and making sure that, win or lose, we'd be remembered.

Finally, as we mentioned in the TLDR -- if anyone ever wants to check out Dominion, or Viking’s current server Skyblock Kingdoms, feel free to ask us or just generally ask around for POV recommendations! Dominion may never have gotten a finale, but it still has a lot of fascinating characters to unpack (Piglin Legundo..........) and VODs that contain an entire second arc and full wrap-up streams. Skyblock Kingdoms is actively ongoing and has been going crazy hard on the storytelling front -- custom music, art assets, animations, callbacks to other series, Avid commissioned a four minute long animated music video to one of his songs for a key lore segment. It's super cool and I would especially recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Tales From The SMP; if you're interested in Avid specifically, @fallow-foot and I even put together this playlist that incorporates his miniseries that leads into SBK directly into the watchflow! It's a blast.

Alright, I think that's about it. GGs on a close fight, and we're looking forward to seeing y'all in the finales! Please no voter fraud this time though, I just want to watch the bell noises blondes duke it out over lore.

This is a fraction of what I cast (I won't say my estimate of what my final total was, but it's...not a small number). I only saved 20 in a row bc it sounded funny to have that as proof of my exploits.

I'd love to know what method Dominion peeps came up with to snatch the ground out from under us so hard in an hour and a halfish. We were up by 3-4% before whatever madness y'all cooked up was deployed-- I'm dying to know what sort of coordination and occurred for that to happen!

I love voter fraud p2

[theoraeeken]

what could i possibly request other than vettin smut <3 maybe a cheeky back of the garage bj for one of them?

fic requests are open jay i cannot believe you would come to me with this, my heart is going to explode. yes of course of course. set after the 2022 montreal gp because i'm feeling very lazy about factchecking the lore. why is this 1146 words long. why can i not simply not do this.

-

"Where's Chris?"

It's the first thing out of his mouth when he can finally drag himself away from the media pen, Britta finally taking pity on him and calling cut on the post-race interviews, shepherding him back into the garage. It's a warm day in Montreal, even for June, but it lacks the kind of stifling quality that leaves him uncomfortably sweaty still half-wearing his race suit. Instead, he feels something more akin to a well fed cat lounging in the sun - warm, satisfied.

(Strange how a hard won P5 can feel as good as cruising for thirty laps uninterrupted onto the podium. Maybe he's finally getting older. )

Jack grins and pats his face affectionately before he jerks his head towards the back, "Quick debrief with the team at home," He pauses, snorting, "Nothing he won't put on pause for you."

"I just want to go over some of the numbers," Sebastian says, lying.

"Okay," Jack says, fully aware of that fact.

It's a slow journey to the back, the path littered with mechanics and personnel who all clap him on the back and ruffle his hair and pull him into hugs. He knows he's flushed by the time he gets there - even more so than before - because he can feel the heat in his cheeks, and because Chris raises one eyebrow mid-sentence with whatever strategist he's on the comms with. His blood is pumping and it seems to take forever to wrap up. By the way Chris is watching him with a pointedly amused expression, his impatience is clear to see.

"I'll catch up with you on Tuesday. Okay, thanks, Sarah," he says, finally turning his comms unit off, "Something I can help you with?"

"What was that about?"

"She had some questions about the tire deg before the second pit stop."

"Oh, yeah?" Seb hums, "We should find somewhere quiet, you can tell me about it."

'Somewhere quiet' is a relative term in an F1 garage, but they find an empty corner in Seb's room, where he pushes his engineer up against the wall as soon as the door is closed, and kisses him with the full force of the pent up energy coursing through his veins.

"You know there are better places for this, right?" Chris says, but his hands are already pushing the nomex up so he can stroke along the damp skin of his stomach, fingers tracing the bottoms of his ribs.

"Yeah," Seb grins, and lets his bottom lip drag through his teeth; Chris' eyes zero in on the movement with almost mechanical focus, "but we're not there, are we?"

"That's a fair argument," he says evenly.

He's not wrong though - most people wouldn't dare just wander into a driver's room without permission but it's not completely unreasonable to expect that, at some point, someone might come looking for one of them. Sebastian is more into it than he thought he might be, but that doesn't mean that he wants to test the strength of his and Otmar's professional relationship in quite such a graphic way, so he makes quick work of Chris' belt, and drops to his knees.

There's a hand in his hair immediately, a warm palm that covers most of his skull with a familiar weight, "I should be doing this for you. Congratulations, and all that."

"Save it for the podium," Seb mutters, voice muffled against the skin of Chris' thigh, "Next time. Silverstone. Special occasions."

"What's your excuse this time?"

He pauses, fingers hooked into the waistband of Chris' boxers, "Are you saying no?"

Chris just looks at him.

Seb grins, feels it stretch the skin around his smile, "Yeah, thought so."

He's still only half hard, and it's easy to take the full length of him into his mouth, hold his tongue firmly against the underside and drag it slowly and surely until he's pressing it right to the glands. When he glances up, Chris is staring at the ceiling, breathing through his mouth like he's trying to slow his heart rate.

Sebastian, a contrarian by nature, hollows his cheeks and tongues at the slit.

"Christ."

He's fully hard now, hot and straining the limits of what Sebastian can fit in his mouth with relatively little time to adjust. Luckily, he's well practiced and eager and there's just enough adrenaline in his system to push the boundaries of what's entirely comfortable - it's a line he prefers to wander along rather than on either particular side, anyway, these days, especially with Chris, who presses and protects in equal measure, who knows Seb well enough to give him exactly what he needs and withhold what he wants when necessary.

A foot nudges at his thigh, and he looks up, eyes straining at the angle where his nose is still flush with Chris' pubic bone.

"You should deal with that," he says, breathless, indicating the erection outlined by Seb's racesuit.

He pulls off with a sigh, and Chris makes a sound like he's been punched in the gut, "I don't want to get come on my fireproofs."

"Oh? No concern about my clothes, then?"

Seb bites his thigh in gentle reproach, "I'll swallow yours."

"Okay," he says, nodding, but he barely gets the word out.

Despite himself - and really, getting come out of dark green is a nightmare - he presses the heel of his hand into his hard on, the immediate sensory overload enough to make him breathe in hard, and almost choke himself on Chris' cock. But there's a gentle hand back in his hair, thumb rubbing along the shell of his ear, a soft "easy now" muttered somewhere above him. It stays there, comforting in a way that feels strangely at odds with the desperate way he's feeding Chris' length down his throat, and yet also not, until he groans and shivers, forearm pressed over his mouth as he comes.

Seb is a man of his word and swallows happily, grinding up nto his own palm to chase his own orgasm with Chris' still softening cock in his mouth.

They allow themselves a quiet moment of peace, Chris tucking himself back into his trousers almost sheepishly, which is inordinately funny to Sebastian, who just shuffles around and cringes at the mess in his racesuit. Moment of teenage self-control aside, they both know this is hardly the place to linger for much longer, but the silence as they both get ready to leave is as far from awkward as it can be.

Seb's still not entirely prepared for the hand around his elbow.

"Hey," Chris says softly, "Congratulations for today. You earned it."

He's still sweating inside his suit and hot from his orgasm, but a different kind of warmth spreads out inside him as he lets himself get dragged back, mutters thank you into Chris' mouth in a would-be kiss interrupted by both their smiles.

[feralphoenix]

NO ONE IS HAPPY WITH THIS: Leitmotif & Sound Palette In “Sealed Vessel”

whats UP hk fandom i am back with—“more picante takes?” WOW YES HOW DID YOU KNOW!!!

CONTENT WARNING FOR TONIGHTS PROGRAM: today we are discussing the hollow knight boss fight, and all that entails for all the characters involved. relatedly this post does not have anything nice to say about the pale king, so if you’re very protective of his character, you may want to skip it.

FURTHERMORE, i would like to iterate that this essay is working from a place of compassion for ghost, hollow, radiance, AND hornet, because every single one of them is miserable at this point in the game and doesn’t want the events of this boss fight to be happening at all. this post is not an appropriate place to dunk on ANY of them. if you want to do that, please do it elsewhere.

thanks for your understanding.

ALSO, AS USUAL: if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of radiance and the moth tribe’s backstory is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay, ty

NO ONE IS HAPPY WITH THIS: Leitmotif & Sound Palette In “Sealed Vessel”

A while back @grimmradiance​ made a lovely essay about comparing and contrasting Hollow’s moveset in their Hollow Knight and Pure Vessel boss fights and using what can be gleaned from the differences to speculate about their psychology. (This essay is currently their pinned, but I’ll attach a link in a reblog.) It is extremely good, and it made me want to look at the Hollow Knight boss fight my own self through one of my own areas of expertise, meaning music!

As we are all well aware, Christopher Larkin's soundtrack to Hollow Knight rules ass. There are two specific ways in which it rules ass that are relevant to this essay: Leitmotif, and sound palette.

Quick rundown for folks who aren’t familiar with these terms: A leitmotif is a melody associated with a character or event or mood that's incorporated into songs in different ways based on what's happening in the story. Undertale is an example of a game with an incredibly strong use of leitmotif that’s really only possible because Toby Fox is both the composer and the game creator, so he can synchronize the subtleties of the writing with music and scene scripting too.

The phrase “sound palette” can have a lot of meanings, but in this case I’m using it to refer to specific instruments or groups of instruments that are associated with certain characters. If you’ve watched Steven Universe and seen interviews/production commentary by its composer team Aivi & Surasshu, you’ll hear them talking about part of their approach to scoring episodes being how each main character is represented by certain instruments: Steven with the triangle wave, Pearl with jazz piano, and so on.

Hollow Knight is a small team project rather than a one-person show, so Christopher Larkin can’t go quite AS over-the-top with leitmotif integration as Toby Fox can on simple virtue of Team Cherry having to communicate what they want to him. But Larkin is Hollow Knight's sound designer as well as its composer, so he folds leitmotif and character sound palette together with striking use of stems to create a very immersive and cinematic musical experience that enhances HK’s story and gameplay.

This brings us back to the track Sealed Vessel, which has EXTREMELY tight and cinematic sound design and uses leitmotif and sound palette to not just sock players in the feelings during a charged and dramatic boss fight, but also tell us a lot about what Hollow and Radiance are experiencing emotionally, especially with the gameplay in mind.

So, let’s play the soundtrack version of Sealed Vessel (and some other stuff) and talk about what’s going on in the game during it!

You may want to get out your copy of the OST or visit Christopher Larkin’s Bandcamp page so that you can listen along.

LEITMOTIF & SOUND PALETTE

Before we actually get into analyzing Sealed Vessel, let’s talk about the involved characters’ leitmotifs/sound palettes so we know what we’re listening for.

Both of these things are easiest to identify when characters have a distinct theme song. Ghost does not. However, the main theme of Hollow Knight (see: the title track, Hollow Knight) is used as a leitmotif for the vessels as a whole. Most pieces involved with a vessel character include this leitmotif somewhere. For instance, you can find this leitmotif and variations on it in Broken Vessel’s boss theme. The Vessel leitmotif is led by a cello solo here, so we can identify that the cello is the central part of Broken Vessel’s personal sound palette.

When the Vessel theme is associated with Ghost in specific, it tends to be performed by viola and/or piano, as it is on the title track and in other places like the opening cinematic.

Moving on to Hollow, their specific sound palette is established not in Sealed Vessel but in Pure Vessel, their pantheon boss theme. (Sealed Vessel was composed first, since the Godmaster DLC didn’t drop until over a year after HK’s initial release, meaning Pure Vessel was reverse-engineered/extrapolated from relevant parts of Sealed Vessel. But we’ll get into that later!)

The major instrumental fixtures in Pure Vessel are choir and tubular bells (i.e., those dramatic vertical fellas that sound like church bells or a carillon), with some soft background instrumentation: bass drum, woodwinds (appropriately led by flute in the main melody’s “falling motion” - flute is the centerpiece of TPK’s sound palette), strings, and high/mid brass. Hollow’s overall sound palette has a very Christian choir-esque sound (in the Pure Vessel theme this is very idealized and saintly: soft and slow and tragic) and the beginning of their leitmotif has a very distinctive climbing melody that mirrors their ascent from the Abyss. The Unbearable Vesselness Of Being leitmotif is absent from the Pure Vessel track.

Meanwhile, Radiance’s boss theme is a very fun expression of her character upon which Larkin evidently went ham. Her sound palette is expressed through full orchestra (plus choir and pipe organ) that has a special emphasis on the bass part of the brass section, which does not see much use in the HK soundtrack. Her leitmotif has also got cute and distinctive touches: It’s full of triplets to match her tiara-looking antennae, and also has a repeated “fluttery” pattern of background sixteenth notes as countermelody, often spiraling downwards.

The majority of the piece is loud and bombastic and in a minor key to play up the “resplendent and terrible” wrathful aspect of herself Radi is pushing during this section of gameplay, a very quintessentially moth intimidation tactic: Try to look as scary as possible to keep your enemies from messing with you, since you’re not built for fighting. These blasts of intensity from the brass section match Radiance’s strategy of Overwhelm You With Bullet Hell Spam To Make Up For Lack Of Battle Experience/Poor Aim. But in between said intensity spikes you can hear traces of softer instrumentation and major key, little glimpses of a gentle warmth we can otherwise only infer from her backstory and the implications of Moth Tribe lore.

0:00 - 0:41 - OPENING AMBIANCE

The Sealed Vessel track begins with the ambiance of the Black Egg Temple’s interior: The faint tones of the glowing seals we hear when we pass by them, the only light in a pitch-black world besides the floor lighting up under Ghost’s feet.

Then a slow string tremolo fades in, slowly growing louder. In the track new notes join the tremolo progressively, while in-game a violin joins the anticipatory chord every time you snap one of Hollow’s chains. Which, may I say: A+++++++ sound design!!!!!! Rules ass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The tremolo reaches a peak in dynamics - all three characters present are extremely tense - and then cuts off to allow for Hollow’s boss battle opening, i.e. Radiance screaming. Team Cherry kindly demarcates each phase of the battle with a Radi yell.

0:43 - 1:39 - PHASE 1: HOLLOW ON AUTOPILOT

Phase 1 opens immediately with Hollow’s leitmotif in bells, but with brass, piano, and percussion backing them up; grand and tragic. In the background the bass section of the orchestra's strings flutter in a repetitive pattern of 16th notes, i.e. Panicky Radi Noises. The violins harmonize with Hollow's leitmotif as it climbs, but then join the rest of the string section in fluttering 16th notes, transmuting what in Pure Vessel is the flute leading Hollow back down (8th notes) to a slightly louder “a” from the backseat.

In actual gameplay, the only attacks Hollow uses are their basic nail skills. Building on grimmradiance’s analysis of the window their attacks provide to their psychology, and pairing that with the Pure Vessel leitmotif booming over the metaphorical loudspeakers, we can tell that this is Hollow reacting automatically to a threat the way that their father trained them to. Their conscious mind might still be making dialup noises at Ghost’s sudden reappearance jumpscaring them with murky childhood guilt and trauma, but that’s only let muscle memory take over. Slash, parry, charge and thrust. Their time spent at bee bootcamp (which we can assume because Hornet was trained at the Hive and Hollow’s form while nail fighting is identical to hers on their shared moves) has served them well.

Radiance, meanwhile, has frozen completely for this combat phase, and contributes nothing here except the anxiety of the string section.

As the strings continue to go “a” the piano (Ghost) and woodwinds harmonize on something between Hollow’s personal leitmotif and the Vessel leitmotif in the backdrop.

However at around 1:29ish, the key changes, building into an overall color change for the Sealed Vessel piece.

1:39 - 2:15 - PHASE 2: SHE’S AS SCARED OF YOU AS YOU ARE OF HER

In actual gameplay, the part of Sealed Vessel used for phases 1 and 2 of the Hollow Knight fight is the Entirety of 0:43 - 2:15, possibly because there’s no easy transition spot like there is between phase 2 and phase 3. But the changes to Hollow’s moveset are clearly tied to this specific part of the piece.

Phase 2 is where Radiance pushes herself past her freeze response and starts trying to hit Ghost. Hollow gains two attacks here, which we can tell are Radi because they’re often accompanied by her crying (a softer and more abbreviated sound than her full scream): These two attacks are the Infection blob blast and the Light/Void pillar attack that hits for a full 2 masks damage (which appear to be Radi’s take on Hollow’s Pure Vessel-exclusive moves, their grabby tentacles & silver knife pillars respectively).

In the Sealed Vessel track, this part of the piece is almost entirely Radiance’s fluttering. The strings start by following the descending motion of Hollow’s leitmotif but in 16th notes, then ratchet up to start spiraling down again while straying further from Hollow’s leitmotif. This section ends in a back and forth between hard blasts in a one-two-(rest)-one-two-three pattern and gasps of fluttering between, with piano and low brass building behind it. Eventually the nervous fluttering of the strings becomes less frequent between the blasts: Radiance is inexperienced with fighting and very very afraid, but she’s also FUCKING PISSED and prepared to defend herself.

The OST version of the piece punctuates the break between the first half of the piece and the second with Radiance’s scream.

2:16 - 4:04 - PHASE 3: “I’M HELPING! :)” SAID HOLLOW; “HOLY SHIT PLEASE DON’T,” SAID LITERALLY EVERYONE

Phase 3 opens with Hollow stabbing themself repeatedly, a movement pattern they repeat throughout the phase. It is shocking the first time you see it, and never stops being horrible and sad no matter how many times you do this part of the fight.

Here, Hollow’s mind has finally come back online after their own freeze response, and they choose to destroy themself and bequeath the duty of sealing Radiance to Ghost. Even if they can’t be the one to make their father proud, they can still make sure their directive gets carried out.

Radiance knows exactly what they’re up to and why, and she reacts to this by completely losing her head and mashing buttons in a panic. This is something we see out of her at the ends of her boss fights too, where she’s feeling too threatened and afraid to do anything but spam optic blasts. In the Hollow Knight boss fight this manifests in two horrifying-looking but easy-to-avoid new attacks: The Infection blob sprinkler and the ragdoll.

Ghost does not react visibly because we're in gameplay, but their horror and grief at their sibling’s choice is echoed in the BGM. The Sealed Vessel piece goes soft and sad, with Ghost’s associated viola leading the bass strings in the Unbearable Vesselness of Being leitmotif. At 2:51 the violin comes in with Hollow’s leitmotif, and gradually the choir appears in the backdrop. The ensemble’s overall dynamics build in a slow crescendo, and at the very end of this segment the other instruments begin to join in.

This segment of the piece is also used in phase 4, which occurs if you don't have Hornet’s help or miss your cue to Dream Nail Hollow. Phase 3 ends when Hollow reaches 0 HP; in phase 4 they are for all purposes already dead. But Radiance manifests an extra 250 HP out of terrified, unadulterated FUCK YOU FUCK THIS!!! even though all she can do is get Hollow to fall on their face trying to slash and ragdoll them around. The BGM continues to play as Ghost absorbs Radiance from Hollow and Hollow’s body loses its shape and dissolves into liquid Void.

And there’s one other place in gameplay Sealed Vessel (Unbearable Vesselness of Being) is used: The Path of Pain, the completely evil kaizo-level obstacle course which presumably featured in Hollow’s childhood training, and behind which the Pale King has hidden his last and most terrible secret—that he had realized on some level that Hollow was a kid with feelings who loved him and wanted to make him proud, and condemned them to death despite it all by using them to imprison and torture Radiance as he’d always planned.

The OST version of Sealed Vessel includes the music for both normal ending cinematics, so we’ll be looking at them too.

4:05 - 4:35: ENDINGS 1/2: NO ONE IS HAPPY WITH THIS

In the BGM for The Hollow Knight and Sealed Siblings endings, the Vessel leitmotif is played by violin, viola, and choir while the cellos and contrabasses—and then the brass bass section too—play a slower version of Radiance’s downward spiral. But once Ghost is pierced by the Black Egg’s chains and Radiance’s struggle to free herself ends in failure, the soprano and bass sections harmonize. The animation zooms out of the temple and the seal reforms. They are stuck together now until the end of Ghost’s life. Hooray.

The OST version of the track immediately segues into the BGM for Dream No More.

4:36 - 5:45: ENDING 3: THANKS, I HATE IT

Here, Hornet’s associated instrument, the violin, plays one long sustained note with a few notes of Ghost’s piano alongside as she wakes up.

TPK’s goddamn flute comes in at 5:00 with his leitmotif overpowering the backdrop Vessel leitmotif on piano while Hornet surveys the carnage: The temple has been destroyed, Radiance is dead, and what’s left of Ghost’s corpse is smeared across the floor. The Void may have taken umbrage with his horseshit and unceremoniously vored him, but the motherfucker still got what he wanted in the end; the Pale King has ended the Infection by completing his genocide of the moths, using the children he abused and abandoned as his proxies, and wasting two of their lives. Can I get a hearty THIS SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in the chat.

Given that Hornet herself is canonically unsure if bringing the fight to Radiance is really a just course of action, one can only imagine how she must feel when she sees the cost of that decision.

Our only real moment of catharsis is in this shit situation comes in at 5:13, where the flute gives way to a solo from Ghost’s associated viola, playing the Vessel leitmotif as the Siblings curl up and sink back into the mountain of their corpses. Goodnight, kiddos. You deserved better, and so did literally everyone involved in this whole stupid boss fight.

This is where the OST version of Sealed Vessel ends. Even without the gameplay and story context it slaps, but now that we’ve taken a look at how this 5:45 piece is wall to wall misery and fear on the part of literally every involved character, hopefully it will have even more impact!

[lazyliars]

/rp

DreamXD actually slots very nicely into a working theory I've had for about two or so months now, mainly centering around one question:

What happened to Dream?

Namely, why did Dream change, when exactly did it happen, and was it solely an internal change, or was there an external force at play, specifically a preternatural one?

I think with DreamXD, we might finally have an answer.

Or at least some clues to follow. DreamXD presents a shift in every single paradigm the Dream SMP has had. Like, I think most of it is just being so utterly blind-sided by George Lore Real, but part of it is the massive ramifications of an Actual God* being present in the storyline.

((*On the other resident god of the server, Foolish:

DreamXD is different than Foolish, in that his characterization is so dramatically inhuman - Foolish talks and acts like a (somewhat eccentric) person, and his powers are, as far as we know, limited in comparison to the creative-mode godhood that DreamXD occupies. And whether that is because Foolish is not a "full" god (having been referred to as a demigod) or simply because he's spent so much time around humans, we don't know, but we do know that either way, DreamXD is NOT that.

DreamXD's voice is marked by glitches and dramatic shifts in tone, he seems to lack control over the different aspects of his personality, like the more "Dream" part vs. the darker one that threatens to eat peoples souls. The "normal" part even displays confusion when George references things that the "darker" part said, implying that it may not be fully aware of itself.

TLDR: Foolish acts more human than DreamXD, who has a very eldritch personality.))

To get right to the point:

The Dream we knew before November 16th, and the Dream we know now are not the same. Something changed, and it changed for the worse.

Consider: Dream was always antagonistic to the L'manbergians - he was always imperious to them, and he was responsible for starting a number of fights between his faction and theirs, just as many if not more than they were.

But, he was also not... evil. He'd pick fights with Tommy, the disc wars were still a thing, but the gravity of the spats they had weren't dire. They were fun. They were... actually a game. He wasn't like the way he is now. While in hindsight we can look at these events and detect a serious undertone knowing what's to come, at the time they were far from it.

There is an argument to be made that he had the same tendencies as now, just not expressed as loudly, and while I believe it's a valid argument, I disagree that it's proof of Dream always being the way he is now.

Sapnap, Badboyhalo, Sam. They all remember Dream as their friend - they remember someone who was, maybe a little aggressive and a lot competitive, but not cruel. Not needlessly murderous. Not someone who steals sentimental items and lines the walls of a disgusting museum to use against them.

Dream cut them out. Sapnap was totally blindsided. Bad doesn't seem to fully believe it. Sam blamed himself for not realizing and tried to take the weight of that crime on his own shoulders by becoming the Warden.

There's also the competing theory that what happened to Dream was purely psychological - either the circumstances slowly isolating him from his friends driving him to the do things he's done, or a desire for control that started early and continued to fester until it overshadowed everything else, or any combination of both.

And those theories are still valid, they could still be the case, but I haven't been able to shake the idea that there is something deeper at play. I can't overstate how the exile arc and everything after it have been so inhumane, so cruel, and... not exactly out of character in the sense that I could never see Dream doing them, but in the sense that I could never see him doing them for no reason.

And there really doesn't seem to be one. Dream says himself, it's like a game. He sees people as toys, puppets. And there just doesn't seem to be an inciting incident that could explain how he made the leap from semi-authoritarian leader who, despite being a warmonger, does love his friends, to heartless murderer who wants to reduce everyone he knows to dolls.

There's... ways, he could get there, but nothing that we've seen makes sense. There is a missing piece, something that must have happened from his POV that we didn't get to see because he doesn't stream.

And DreamXD could be it. This godly entity that claims that it is "a part of [Dream]" but that it isn't him entirely. That seems to share the lack of understanding of humanity that Dream has been displaying like when he asks if resurrecting Tommy was “cool.�� But that still loves George. He still, despite apparently not having the same history as Dream, desperately wants to be George's friend.

If I had to pinpoint the moment Dream changed, it would be the day that he revealed that he switched sides, and was going to be fighting against Pogtopia. He was paid for this betrayal in the Revive Book.

I mark this as the turning point in my theory because it is the first time Dream mentions his affinity for chaos in the context of hurting others. However, we also know that this likely wasn't the day he actually made the decision to betray - as he revealed that there was a traitor among the Pogtopians, a fact that he likely would have learned before this.

Now, I mark George's lore stream as the introduction of DreamXD proper, and I want that on the record because it isn't technically his first appearance on the server.

Most people will remember him from Techno's stream, where he logged on to break the End Portal in a panic. I doubt the character was properly written into the lore at that time, but it fits neatly with the rest of what we know about him - a guardian of the server, and the keeper of it's rules. No contradictions.

What less people might know, is that DreamXD has made an even earlier appearance, and it's this one where things begin to get... interesting.

Around roughly October of 2020, Tubbo and Fundy did some improv'd streams centering around Demon Hunting, or rather, "Dreamon" Hunting, and it's during the first of these two streams that DreamXD makes an appearance.

The bare bones of it was - Tubbo is an experienced "Dreamon Hunter" and teaches Fundy his ways. They find Dream, and realize that he has a Dreamon inside of him, which is basically an evil version of him. They attempt to exorcise the Dreamon from Dream via various shenanigans, and eventually, they do a ceremony to free Dream. However, they apparently botch it, and unleash the Dreamon within. After more shenanigans, one attempt to fix it utilizing Fundy and Dream's wedding appears to work, but then DreamXD logs on, flys around at Tubbo and Fundy threateningly, and they end stream on the idea that there are probably more Dreamons to hunt.

Now. There's a lot to unpack here. I'm not gonna go into the nitty gritty details in this post, but I do recommend watching the Dreamon streams, as they have A LOT of details that, if this is getting incorporated into the main story line, could be important - especially the focus on duality, having TWO versions of Dream, which end up being potentially separated from each other.

(Also, they're just really funny streams. Tubbo and Fundy are at PEAK chaos and Dream plays along with their inane bit perfectly, it's just good content.)

At the time of the Dreamon streams airing, they were explicitly non-canon. IIRC Tubbo and Fundy referred to them as taking place In an “alternate universe,” which makes sense considering they would have been on opposite sides at the time (Manburg and Pogtopia.)

However.

And this is where I show you my wall of red string and newspaper clippings.

My singular piece of evidence for this comes from one line DreamXD drops. He simply says: “At least you're not hunting me.”

The Dreamon streams take place around early October. Dream reveals his betrayal of Pogtopia around November 6th-7th. The timeline of the Dreamon streams would line up perfectly with the idea that there was a catalyzing event that put Dream on the proverbial path to hell.

I do not believe that they intended the Dreamon arc to be anything other than a side story at the time, but considering that DreamXD himself was barely canon until now, I don't think it's out of the question that they took a look back at a fan-favorite minor arc, saw an opportunity to co-opt it into the current story line, and potentially fill in some holes regarding Dream's characterization all in one move.

On the question of whether this would be a GOOD storytelling move?

The Dreamon theories were prevalent during the exile arc, and I've got to say, I was never a huge fan. The detachment of Dream's actions from his intentions, and by extension his morality, never sat right with me. It feels cheap to make him a victim and say “a Dreamon did it!” in regards to all of the horrible things that he's done. It strips his agency and makes everything that happened less impactful in my opinion, and I stand by that reading.

BUT. With DreamXD introduced, I feel like it's necessary to look at this from all angles. And with the way DreamXD was characterized in George's stream, I don't think it necessarily ruins Dream's character to say that an external force was involved with his descent into evil.

Namely, the idea that whatever happened to Dream was not really a “possession” so much as a gradual loss of humanity, could be an interesting way to look at this. It implies that Dream was always capable of his actions, but grants us understanding as to why he would actually perform them, and why he might have become isolated enough from his friends that they would let this happen.

The Dream we know now could be an expression of his “worst self” brought to the surface by a Dreamon/DreamXD/other. It also begs the question of what would happen if that force were to leave him, and how it might cause yet another shift in character, especially if it were to be portrayed as less of a switch being flipped, and more of a withdrawal, with a gradual process of realizing how far gone he was.

To close this out, I've been stewing on the idea that Dream hasn't entirely been himself since the climax of the Exile Arc.

I think this theory holds water, but it's also not waterproof... there are plenty of holes, and a lot of that comes from the fact that Dream doesn't stream. We're left in the dark when deciphering his character, and what might appear to be the key, could just as easily be revealed as a red herring, or even nothing at all.

Regardless of the validity of the Dreamon theory, I think that DreamXD is one of the most interesting developments we've had on the SMP in a long time, if simply because his arrival coincides with fucking George Lore Real. God. I still don't know how to deal with that.

I always appreciate people adding to the discussion by the way! Feel free to reblog with additions if you like or leave them in the replies.

And if a single one of you comes to my blog on THIS. THE DAY OF MY DAUGHTER'S WEDDING. And calls ME a c!Dream Apologist to MY FACE..... I will be v sad.

[ao3komorii]

Behind the Blade’s Shadow (Talon/Reader)

Starting posting my league stories! I have 3 atm but plan on writing more, but wanted to post my Talon one first. May have taken some liberties with his personality since there’s not a lot of lore material available for Talon but I’m happy with how it came out. As well, just a warning that there is smut at the end of this one!

----

Noxus was a place of power, a place where the strong rise up and carve their own paths, dooming the weak to cower in their shadows. Power is achieved in many ways, and the powerful always had a place in Noxus, provided that they were willing to defend themselves from those wanting to take them down and take their place.

You learned the realities of Noxus from an early age. Your parents were as ambitious as they came, both rising up in the ranks through their own strength and cunning. By the time you had been born, they had formed an alliance with General Du Couteau, securing themselves high ranking positions in the Noxian army. Their power was unquestioned, and the final piece of their empire was complete when you were born.

You were to be their successor; that expectation had been made clear to you since you were old enough to talk. You were their legacy, and every single thing you did would reflect back on them. You were to be a warrior, a leader worthy of carrying on the family legacy of strength and power.

It had always been a burden that you didn’t want to bear. It all started when your powers manifested; magic was seen as a great asset in Noxian society, a weapon that could be used to gain an advantage on the competition. But as soon as your parents’ excitement rose, it was snuffed out. Your magic could be mistaken by nobody in Noxus for power. The light blue glow that you channeled in your hands could heal wounds, but could not cause them.

Healers in Noxus did not bring prestige upon themselves. Warriors, leaders, mages… they could carve their own paths. Healers were used, but they served from the shadows. They were not to be seen, and were not worthy of the respect and admiration of the masses. Before you could begin to feel any curiosity and pride in your powers, you were instructed by your parents to hide your abilities. They would not be the parents of a lowly healer, that much was made clear to you at the age of eight.

There was so much pressure put on you that it became hard to take. Between combat lessons and lectures from your father about the qualities of a proper Noxian, you had no time to be like the other young girls you saw walk by outside from the view at your window. Your only free time in the day was when your parents finally decided that your wounds from practice were severe enough to end early, and you were sent to your room to heal your own wounds. They knew that you still used your powers, but it seemed to be a comfort to them that you did it hidden away in your room, away from the judging eyes of Noxian society.

When you turned ten, your parents added stealth training to your lessons, as assassins were becoming a larger presence in the ranks of the Noxian military. These were the only lessons that you looked forward to; your teacher was incredibly harsh and ruthless, but you put immediate use to your new stealth prowess by sneaking out of your house at night. What started as an attempt to test your skills turned into almost weekly trips into the city to satisfy your curiosities about the world outside the fortress that was your home.

The nighttime streets of Noxus posed little danger to you. There were always shady things going on, but nobody had any care for one lone child as long as you stayed out of their business. You were careful to be back before your parents noticed you were gone, as you had come to fear their ire more than anything.

What little pocket money you were given was spent on a small bakery that made sweet buns that your parents would never let you have otherwise. You knew they would be unhappy to hear that you were deviating from their plan for you, even a small infraction like sweet buns would likely earn you a verbal lashing or a day without food. Noxian tough love at its finest.

Your training that day had been especially hard; you were fairly certain that your teacher had broken some part of your arm, and those always took you forever to heal and left you feeling exhausted. If there were any day you needed a sweet bun, it was today. You waited only a few minutes after your parents left for a meeting to sneak out of your window. You normally would be more patient, but you wanted your sweet bun immediately. Your parents’ meetings with other Noxian officials usually ran for several hours, so you would have plenty of time to get to the bakery and back with them being none the wiser.

The streets were as busy as usual; Noxus came alive at night with activity. You had made this trip so many times that you could almost do it with your eyes closed. The small bakery was no more than a twenty minute walk from your house, ten if you ran the whole way there. You didn’t see many familiar faces on the way, but that was usual for Noxus. Not a lot of people who came out to play at night liked to openly flaunt their faces to the public while conducting shady dealings.

There was never a long line at the bakery, and today was no exception. The small, unassuming store never saw much late night traffic, which worked out for you as the owner would often give you an extra sweet bun as they would otherwise go bad overnight.

You greeted the owner meekly. As nice as she was, she was still a pureblood Noxian, built intimidatingly despite her profession. You were never sure if she liked you or not, because her face remained stony even as you watched her add two extra sweet buns to the bag before handing it to you. You smiled despite your nervousness; an extra two sweet buns was something to be excited about in your world right now.

The whole encounter had only taken a few minutes at most, and you were confident that you would make it home with plenty of time and have enough sweet buns for the next few days. You were so busy counting the buns that you were caught off guard by a brash laugh ringing out near you. You nearly dropped the bag of buns as you hurriedly backed up into an alley and peeked out to see your combat trainer walking along with several other men.

You couldn’t let him see you. There was no way that he wouldn’t report you to your parents if he caught you sneaking out. You waited for him to walk by the alley you were hiding in so you could run home, but as if fate was taunting you, him and his buddies came to a stop just beside where you were hiding.

Your brain went into panic mode. You had been doing well with your stealth lessons, but you had never managed to beat your trainer in combat. His battle instincts were hardened over time, and there was no way that you could sneak past him when he was mere feet from you. You would have to find another way home.

You didn’t give it another thought, slowly backing farther into the alleyway, your eyes on your teacher, terrified that he would suddenly notice you. But he was caught up with his companions, and your fears were unfounded. As soon as you got to the end of the alleyway, you turned and ran in whatever direction you felt might get you to your home.

The alleyways were all connected, and you found yourself in a maze of grungy walls. You didn’t know where you were or when you would find yourself on the streets again. You only felt like you could breathe when the next turn finally brought you out in the open air again. But with that came the realization that you were definitely lost. This was bad.

You felt tears prick at your eyes immediately. You had never been caught sneaking out before, but you knew your parents would not be forgiving. You stumbled forward, wiping your tears on your sleeve as you looked at your surroundings.

The area was barren; thick, grey stone walls of nearby buildings caged the area in. Your eyes were immediately drawn to a small bridge, one that had not seen water beneath it in a long time, as the soil beneath it looked thirsty and cracked. With how much trouble you had gone to in order to accidentally stumble upon this place, you had to assume that its location was lost to most, hidden by the swirling alleyways.

Clearly some people still found their way here, you assumed, as you noticed some blood on the ground that looked still somewhat fresh. You took another look around, but didn’t see anyone, so you felt that it was safe to proceed.

You were going to walk around the bridge until you noticed a glint of silver from beneath the bridge that drew your curiosity. You changed course, climbing down from the small ledge that separated the two sides connected by the bridge, taking a few steps forward only to fall on your back in shock as a figure rushed at you, their gleaming silver knife just missing the flesh of your chest.

You gasped in fear, holding the bag of sweet buns to your chest as your attacker emerged from the shadows of under the bridge. You were confused… he was just a boy. A boy no older than you were. He had shaggy brown hair, and was wearing a ragged-looking pair of pants and a long-sleeved shirt that was torn and stained red on one sleeve, droplets of red falling from the fabric to the floor as he stared you down, knife still raised high. His eyes were both angry and afraid, and you found yourself more concerned for him than you were afraid of him.

He made no further movements toward you, which gave you a little more time to look at him. He was dirty, like he had slept outdoors for a month or longer. And his exposed arm not only gave you a look at the deep cut along his forearm, but also at how thin it was. What had you stumbled upon?

“Hey…” He flinched at the sound of your voice. “Do you want me to heal that?”

He looked wary and confused, but not like he would hurt you, so you stood up slowly, dusting yourself off. You took a step towards him, and he took one back in return. “Wait, please! I have healing magic and your arm looks like it really hurts!”

He glared at you, his brown eyes full of suspicion, but he didn’t move, staying still as a statue as you walked over to him and took his injured arm and held it gently. You could feel his eyes on you as you placed your paper bag on the floor, his eyes tracking your every movement. You gently ran a hand just above his wound, and watched as the blue glow swirled from your fingertips and began to mend his flesh, leaving not even a scratch behind when you were done.

“You…” he whispered, staring at his arm in awe.

You grinned sheepishly. “I’ve never healed someone else before.”

He put down his knife at last as he lifted his arm up to his face to look at it the second that you released your hold on him. He almost seemed to forget that you were there, and you reached down to pick up your bag of sweets. The crinkling of the paper bag drew his attention from his arm, and you had a brief mental war with yourself; you had been looking forward to the buns, but he was so thin, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that he was hungry.

With a bit of selfish reluctance that you pushed down, you held the bag out to him. He looked a little confused, so you reached into the bag and pulled out a bun. “I got some sweet buns… they’re really good!”

You held it out to him, plastering a grin on your face to try and seem less scary. It was such a silly thought; he’s the one with a knife and here you were trying not to scare him off. As a last attempt, you ripped a small piece from the bun and popped it in your mouth. You had really missed these, and if he didn’t want them, you would eat them yourself!

He snatched the bag so fast that you almost dropped it. You watched as he took a bun out of the bag and bit into it, devouring the whole thing in a matter of seconds. You giggled as you watched him eagerly eat a second bun as well.

You realized that you didn’t know his name, and readily introduced yourself, asking for his name in return. He stared at you, eyes flickering to the paper bag as he mumbled his reply.

“…Talon.”

“Nice to meet you, Talon!” you replied with a grin.

Your focus was then drawn to the skyline, the sun almost fully vanished from the sky. You had to get home before it was too late, but you still didn’t know the way. Maybe your new friend would know?

“Hey, Talon?” you asked. “Do you know how to get back to the main streets? I’m kinda lost and I have to get home before my parents get back.”

You could have sworn he looked a little sad as he nodded. “This way.”

He carefully set the bag of buns under the bridge, where you also saw a few trinkets and a threadbare blanket. You didn’t want to make him sad, so you didn’t bring up his dreary living arrangements, instead choosing to follow him over past the other side of the bridge and through a very narrow alleyway, barely wide enough for you to fit through.

It was a short walk, but the alley was too thin for most adults to get through, so you could see why the spot with the bridge was so isolated and empty. It had probably been built long ago, before all the other buildings had been here to close it off from the world’s notice. Gradually, more and more light began to filter into the dim alley path until you arrived on a street you were surprised to discover that you found to be familiar.

“I can get home from here!” you announced happily, and Talon only nodded in response.

He brushed past you, and you felt sad at the imminent loss of his company. You had no friends; the only kids your age you were ever around were your parents’ friends’ children, and all they cared about was showing off their combat prowess by giving you more bruises than you could count.

You grabbed Talon’s sleeve without thinking about what you wanted to say, which resulted in a short moment of silence. “Can I come see you again?”

He looked at you for a moment before turning his face away. “Do whatever you want.”

“Okay, then I’ll come and see you again soon!” you promised.

You were going to take his answer for a yes, and waved goodbye to him before dashing back onto the streets, keeping a careful eye out for your trainer as you hurried home.

Your heart was racing in your ears as you crawled back through your window, terrified that your parents had noticed your absence or your trainer had seen you. But as you sat on your bed for the next few hours with only your thoughts as company, you didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Not that night, or the next day. You were hyper observant of the behavior of everyone around you, but noticed nothing unusual at all. After a few days, you were finally confident enough to say that you had not been caught.

As soon as your paranoia faded, curiosity took its place. You had never had a friend before, and the fact that he was a secret friend that your parents didn’t know about just made you more excited to see him again. You excitedly counted down the days until your parents would attend another meeting. You had so little to look forward to as of late, and the mysterious boy was just what you needed. A friend that wouldn’t judge you, or report your failings back to your parents. Part of you knew that you didn’t know Talon very well yet and he may end up being a jerk, but the bigger part of you was too excited to have a real friend to think of much else.

You began to visit Talon every chance you got. Your parents had been having lots of meetings lately, and you took every opportunity to go see your new friend. At first he seemed surprised to see you again, like he thought that you wouldn’t make good on your promise. He still didn’t talk much, but you did enough talking for the both of you, telling him about your life and your parents as he silently listened and ate the sweet buns that you always brought him. He never told you much about his life, but eventually he admitted that he didn’t have any parents, which you had suspected. You wondered about him, but didn’t want to make him feel bad, so you never pried. He would often have new cuts or scratches, which you happily healed for him. It felt good to be able to use your powers to help someone, even though your parents had forbidden it. You and Talon were secret friends, and nothing would keep you from seeing him.

In hindsight, you had been overconfident. You were stupid to think that a ten-year-old girl could keep such a big secret from parents that happened to be high ranking Noxian officials. You had been in your own little bubble for the few months that you had been seeing Talon for that you began to get sloppy covering your tracks. Your parents had noticed a shift in your personality, and unbeknownst to you had instructed your stealth teacher to follow you when you were alone.

You had seen Talon as usual before heading home, not knowing that it would be your last visit to your friend. You felt your blood freeze in your veins as you crawled into your window as you always did… only to find your parents standing in your room. The stern glares on their faces told you that something was wrong, and your stealth teacher entering the room sent you to your knees with fear as the assassin calmly gave your parents a report of all that you had done when you were out.

Your parents listened quietly, and your father’s solemn nod made you think that things might not be as bad as you thought until he opened his mouth. “Kill the boy.”

“No!” you wailed. “Don’t hurt him, please!”

“We cannot have you believing that associating with street orphans is acceptable behavior,” your mother added. “Not for a future general of Noxus like yourself.”

Scared tears ran down your cheeks as you pleaded desperately for Talon���s life. “I won’t see him again! Please don’t kill him! I’ll stay here and I won’t leave again!”

Your parents regarded you coldly, and you watched as a smug smile slowly grew on your mother’s face. “See that you don’t. That street urchin is a distraction, and you must have no distractions if you want to succeed.”

You were almost too scared to breathe. Did that mean that they wouldn’t have Talon killed? Even if it meant that you couldn’t see him anymore, you had to save him.

Your father sneered at you. “Stop snivelling. I will spare the boy, provided you do what you must for the future of Noxus. You must learn now to keep to your word or I will be forced to undertake measures to ensure that you do.”

You were so relieved that Talon would be okay that you didn’t think about what your father had meant until the next day when you came back to your room after sparring to find bars on your windows. Your door began to be locked whenever you were in it. You were truly a prisoner in your own home.

Your life became training and sleeping; every little kindness or happiness you had before was stripped away the moment you had been caught. At first, you wept for your lost friend, wondering how he was doing and if he missed you as much as you missed him. You had gone so long without friends, and to have the only one that you ever had ripped away from you took from you the last bit of fight that you possessed. You would be a good little possession and never disobey your parents again, although it wasn’t as if you had any choice in the matter now. Your life had always been in their hands and it was either obey or perish.

As the years went by, you stopped crying for Talon, as it had been so long that your time with him was a fading memory. You sometimes wondered what happened to him, but those times became few and far between. When you had reached adulthood, your parents finally eased some restrictions on you, but by then they had already broken you with years of harsh restrictions. You had no desire to leave your room, even if the door was unlocked.

The main difference now that you were no a longer a child was the political lectures really ramping up. You were forced to memorize names and faces of both ally and enemy to your parents. They would bring you along to lesser important functions and you were expected to have a response ready for anyone who conversed with you. You would be happy to stay home, but now that you were a picture of the perfect Noxian lady, your mother insisted on showing all of their hard work off.

You were starting to get restless with your sudden debut into Noxian social circles; it was painfully obvious to you that you had never socialized with anyone who hadn’t been paid by your parents. You were proper and knowledgeable, but never made any real connections. You didn’t know what to say to the people your age that truly enjoyed engaging in brutal violence for the sake of Noxus, and you certainly didn’t care to talk about which enemy of Noxus had been assassinated that week.

It was at your mother’s insistence that you finally reinstated the previously forbidden walks you had taken as a child, as your despondency to the world had long affected you at social functions you were dragged to. You supposed it would be impossible for her to do anything solely for your own benefit, but you had agreed after she had insisted that you would not be trailed on these walks. So there you were, at the age of twenty-four, taking your first walk alone outside in fourteen years.

You had been places with your parents, but you didn’t stop to enjoy the scenery, so it was a new experience for you. The city had changed and evolved since you had been kept indoors. Now that you had your own agency for the short time your mother had allotted for you to walk around, you found your feet taking you to that same alleyway you had gone through to see Talon so long ago. You knew you were being dumb, there was no way he was still there waiting for you. You had no idea if he was even still alive, the Noxian streets being as they were. But something inside you insisted that you had to see for yourself, but the alley was too thin for you to get through now that you were an adult.

The small alley may have stopped a less capable person, but you had nothing in your life to focus on but training, so scaling a building was nothing for you now. You knew there were people around you, but you would be up and over the building before any of them could stop you and question you on what you were doing.

You nimbly ran along the rooftop before scaling down the side of it to land right in front of the old bridge. You almost felt like you were ten years old again, coming to meet your friend. But that was so long ago, and hope had left you that day. You were simply here to satisfy your unrelenting curiosity, chasing after some closure.

You approached the bridge, some small part of you expecting to see the boy sitting there. But there was nobody and nothing. Not even Talon’s old dusty blanket. No sign that he had ever been here, although you knew that you hadn’t imagined him. You sat down where he used to be, losing yourself in your only recorded happy memories for a few minutes until you decided it was time to leave. Your mother would be expecting you, and there was nothing more for you here.

You began to notice a pattern with when you were being sent out on walks. Whenever you would come back, you would cross paths with associates of your parents who were just leaving. Without fail, your parents always seemed to have company over while you were gone.

Your parents had never hid their work away from you so obviously before, and had been bringing you with them to their strategic meetings before this pattern had started. So what had changed? What were they doing that they were trying to hide from you?

You knew it must be nothing good; your parents were endlessly ambitious, and this time, their plan must be something big. Something they couldn’t risk even their daughter knowing about. You were curious, but more than that, you began to worry. Were your parents getting in over their heads? They were tough, but they weren’t invulnerable.

You had to know what they were getting themselves into. But you knew that they would never tell you if you asked. You tried to brainstorm ideas as you walked around town the next time you had been sent out at your mother’s urging, but nothing was coming to mind. You did everything they asked of you, so why couldn’t they trust you with whatever they were planning?

The streets were too loud, and it was proving to be too much of a distraction for you to concentrate on your own thoughts. You decided to divert your path at the next alleyway, heading down the dingy path once you determined it to be vacant. Almost immediately, you noticed a change in the volume of the world around you; the raised voices and noises of society dulled the farther down the back alley you walked.

Even being in total silence did nothing for your current dilemma. What could you do to discover the truth without your parents finding out? Wracking your brain for ideas only ended up giving you the familiar tinges of pain that you knew would turn into a headache if you didn’t give yourself a break from thinking yourself to death.

You came to an abrupt stop as you noticed a figure slumped against a wall just ahead of you. Cursing yourself internally for not paying attention to your surroundings, you weighed your options. You could turn around and go right back where you had come from; one glance at the person told you that they didn’t even seem to have noticed you yet. They were likely a drunk or a vagrant, and you knew that your years of training meant that if you wanted to escape from them, then they wouldn’t be able to stop you.

But another part of you felt compelled by your mother’s lectures on pride. You shouldn’t be afraid to walk by one drunk passed out in an alleyway. You needed to hold your head up high and show this person that you were not a coward, nor someone to be messed with. You felt embarrassed when you realized you had gotten in your own head again, and a distinctly male groan from the person just ahead of you spurned your feet into action.

You would just walk right on past him, like it was no big deal. But you couldn’t help but scrutinize him as you got closer. You couldn’t see his face, as he wore a long blue hooded cape, the hood hanging down over his eyes. You were surprised to see the cape split into tails that were tipped with sharp blades, as well as the large blade strapped to his wrist and forearm. You knew then that the man wasn’t just a drunk in an alleyway, but the time it took to make that observation cost you dearly.

You took too long to realize the danger he truly posed, as before you could blink, you cried out as you were pushed against the wall behind you, the man’s blade at your neck.

“So eager to die,” a deep voice growled as you stared down at his blade, knowing that he only had to press it a little more into your neck to end your life.

Now that he was right in your face, and much taller than you, the hood did much less to obscure his face from your view. He was handsome, something that may have flustered you if you weren’t in mortal peril. His dark brown hair hung just above his eyes and was cut to his collar. His face was angular, his expression set in haughty intimidation, but something about his face called an almost-lost memory to the surface.

“Talon…” you spoke before you could think.

You were too preoccupied with the past. Now this man would think you were a basket case, and you didn’t think that would improve your chances of surviving this encounter. But you were surprised to see that man stumble back from you with a surprised huff. What had happened? Was there some new threat you would have to worry about on top of the assassin in front of you? Unless… could you dare to hope?

“…are you really Talon?” you asked softly, advancing on the man.

“My name is not your concern,” he growled back at you, and then you noticed the blood.

How had you missed it? There was a large tear in the front of his shirt, which revealed both lean stomach muscles as well as a horrible wound that was gushing blood. No wonder he had been slumped over like a drunk; it was a miracle that he could stand at all with a wound that bad. Just as fast as he had advanced on you, he was now trying to flee using whatever endurance he had left. But you knew that without treatment, he wouldn’t be able to make it very far. And whatever had happened to him, whatever he had become since you had last seen him, you weren’t willing to lose him so soon after you had found him again.

“Please don’t run!” you pleaded, hastily telling him your name in hopes that he would remember you. “You’re really hurt! Let me help you!”

He tried to back up further down the alleyway, but since he was injured, you were faster than he was now. He put his blade up to resist, but then his arm dropped by his side as he felt your healing magic connect with his deep wound. He stared into your eyes with an expression that you couldn’t read as his wound healed rapidly before your eyes, and then he was left with a bare patch of torso that showed no signs of injury at all. Before he could even begin to calculate a next move, you lunged at him, wrapping your arms tightly around him, his surprised grunt echoing in the empty alleyway.

“I didn’t think I would see you again!” you cried, allowing him to push you gently back and create some distance between the two of you.

He was careful not to hurt you, but his eyes were not the same shy boy you had known before. His expression was dark, clouded with the years of pain that you couldn’t even begin to decipher.

“Don’t get any closer to me. I’m not the weak child I once was,” he snarled, and the anger in his voice shattered what hope was still in your heart that maybe he had missed you too.

“Talon, please–” you began, inching closer to him, desperate to not lose him again.

He stared at you for a short moment, his gaze unwaveringly cold, before he turned and scaled the tall wall of the alley in the blink of an eye, and then he was gone.

You could have tried to follow him, but his rejection stung you fiercely. The only person in your life who you ever had a genuine connection with, and it turned out that he didn’t care at all. It had been so long, you told yourself, and he had grown up. He had no obligation to a girl he knew when he was ten, a girl he probably thought had abandoned him. He didn’t have to care about you and you knew that you shouldn’t have put those expectations in your head. Clearly the time you had spent together as children was only precious to you.

You were too stunned to cry as you turned and ran all the way home. Your abrupt entrance startled your parents, who had still been in a meeting with their associates, a bunch of documents spread out in front of them on the table. You rushed past them and to your room before your mother could yell at you, burying your face in your pillow as the tears finally came.

You were so stupid. That was the single thought that coursed through your mind that night and the entire next day. You had trouble focussing on anything else, and had paid the price in training when your teacher had almost dislocated your shoulder. You tried not to be upset, but giving up your secret hope that maybe Talon had been thinking about you all those years too was more than you could take right now. You needed a distraction.

Luckily for you, your parents were finally attending a meeting that wasn’t at your house that night. You had been curious about those papers they had in front of them, which would undoubtedly be kept in their study now. And with your father’s insistence that you stay behind and work on improving your earlier failures in combat, you had the perfect cover to do some snooping around. You bid them farewell with a smile you hoped didn’t look too eager for them to leave. They were none the wiser, and left the home at last, leaving you alone with your plan.

Their study was locked, which didn’t surprise you. But you had been trained in picking locks, even expensive and complicated locks such as this one. You just had to be patient and find the trick to this ones. Your steady hands paid off as you finally heard the click of the lock disengaging after several minutes of picking it.

You carefully hung the lock on the inside of the door as you stepped into the room. You had never been in here before, but it was certainly less exciting than the grand study you had imagined when you had pictured it in your head before. There were two large desks, as well as a simple table with a large map strewn across it. The most daunting part of the room was the sheer amount of papers laid across both desks and even spilling onto the floor.

You were confused; you had never known your parents to be anything but tidy and orderly, almost to a militant level. This level of disorder was so unusual that it was setting off your already frazzled nerves. You felt a deep sense of foreboding settle in your stomach as you bent down to pick up the papers that had fallen onto the floor.

Looking over the papers in your hands, you only had more questions instead of answers. You were looking at a list of meeting dates, as well as the names of those who attended the meetings, some of which you recognized as people you had been introduced to before. The names were generally the same under every meeting, but you couldn’t make any sense of what your parents needed the lists for.

You discarded the papers on the table, choosing instead to look over the map that was spread out over most of the table’s surface. It was an ordinary map of the city, but it had been dotted with arrows and a large circle drawn around the Noxian war command building in the center of the city. Was there something happening there? Could Noxus possibly be starting another war?

Feeling even more worried, you began to rifle through the papers on the desks, paying no mind as to how you would put everything back in its place when you were done. You were desperate for information, but the first few papers you looked at gave you no new insights. A breakdown of the defence budget, a summons for a meeting; you discarded papers left and right, looking for anything that stood out. Just as you were ready to toss a particularly wordy paper to the side, the name at the top of the page caught your eye.

General Du Couteau.

Reading over the document, you discovered that it was a report on the general’s daily activities. Why would your parents need this? It didn’t seem to be provided by the general himself, which meant that your parents had someone following the general’s movements and reporting them back. A quick glance at the bottom of the list told you that it extended to today, and the last note made your blood run cold.

Du Couteau will be in place at the war command building. Assassination will take no more than ten minutes.

The note was written in your father’s handwriting, unlike the foreign scrawl of the rest of the document. You couldn’t breathe; your parents planned to assassinate General Du Couteau, the leader of the Noxian army. Suddenly the scribbles on the map made sense. They had been plotting this for who knows how long, and it seemed like tonight was when they executed their plan.

You forced yourself to move, to sift through the remaining documents as fast as you could; you needed to know why they were doing this. Killing the head of the Noxian army was treason of the highest order; you knew that your parents were overly ambitious, but you never thought that they would plot to kill one of Noxus’ most high-ranking officials simply for their own gain. But the more documents you read, the more it became clear. Your parents were unsatisfied with their positions, deeply jealous of perceived favoritism from others towards Du Couteau, and were ready to do something about it. Tonight.

You had to stop them. This time their greed had brought them to a place where they might not be able to come back from, and you couldn’t just sit here and do nothing. The assassination was happening potentially any minute now, and you had to get to them before they made a choice they couldn’t take back.

You threw the papers back on the desk and turned around to sprint out of the room. You didn’t stop to change or grab any weapons, leaving the house and running towards the war command building in a pair of flimsy shoes and the short-sleeved black shirt and pants that you always trained in. Your feet were hurting, and you were sure that people were staring at you as you passed, but you couldn’t afford to pay any of that any mind.

As you got to the building, you could tell that something was already wrong. You had passed by here sometimes on your walks, and the place was always heavily guarded. But right now, you could see no guards, nobody outside the large building at all. It worked well for you now since you could pass through the gate and approach the heavy doors without any difficulty, but you knew that it was a bad sign for whatever was happening inside right now.

You pushed open the door and nearly fell, skidding to a stop by grasping onto the wall. Looking down, you realized what you had slipped in. The entryway was a bloody mess, and your shoes were now sticky and wet with the blood that ran from the corpses of several guards that lay on the floor.

You now understood what had happened to the guards outside, and the brutality was almost too much for you to bear. Throats ripped open, bones and organs visible, eyes still open, reflecting the shock and pain of their final moments. It was horrible, but you knew that they were too far gone for you to possibly save. You could not bring back the dead.

Things that you could not undo had already happened, and you knew that you had to move on. If you didn’t get to your parents soon, Noxus would lose its most valued general, and the entire country would be sent into a civil war. You steadied your feet, carefully stepping around the blood that flooded the floors and running farther into the building.

You encountered more guards the farther in you went, but they were all dead, just like the others. Whatever had happened here, the responsible parties had already moved on. As you got deeper into the building, you began to follow your ears. You could hear the sounds of a commotion, which gave you hope that you weren’t too late. You finally had a door in sight, and sprinted down the hallway to reach it as fast as possible.

Just as you were getting within reach of the door handle, a scream from within the room stilled your hand. The scream rang out with pain, but you recognized the sound of your mother’s voice anywhere. You forced your hand to move, throwing the door open and rushing inside.

You were too late, that much was clear to you. But not for the reason that you had thought.

It was a bloodbath. Bodies littered the floor, their blood covering the ground in a layer of red. You didn’t see Du Couteau anywhere, but you did see your mother as she fell to the ground, and you immediately recognized the deadly redhead behind her as she collected her knife from where it had been embedded in your mother’s back.

Your mother laid still on the ground, and made no movements or sounds. Your eyes were then drawn to the body that lay next to her… your father. They were both clearly dead. Even without looking at them, you knew that the deadly Katarina Du Couteau didn’t leave targets alive.

Now that you saw her here, you knew. It had all been a farce. General Du Couteau wasn’t here, and it was obvious that he had seen through your parents’ plan and sent his own assassins in to deal with the traitors. Your parents and their cohorts had never stood a chance.

You couldn’t help a gasp at watching your mother die before your eyes, a sound which you regretted the moment it brought Katarina’s attention to you. She twirled a dagger in her hand, the same dagger she had just killed your mother with, sending you a smirk that promised you that you were next.

Before you could blink, she had disappeared, and you were barely able to roll forward to avoid being stabbed in the back with her dagger. She slashed forward with a cry, and you scrambled to your feet to avoid the blow. Since she had appeared behind you, she had cut off your exit. There was very little chance of you getting past her and back out the door. You didn’t see any other living people in this room, which meant that she had singlehandedly executed everyone in here by herself. You knew immediately that this would likely be your tomb as well.

She was so fast, and it was all you could do to keep just ahead of her blades. But your dodging would not save you forever, and she was very obviously backing you into a corner. But you had no weapons, so you had no way to fight back and prevent her from caging you in. You were paralyzed with fear as your back hit the wall; you hadn’t even realized that you were that close to the wall to begin with.

Katarina’s dark laughter sent a shiver down your spine, and you could only watch as she raised her dagger, sauntering slowly over to you as she knew she had you trapped, and there was no need for her to rush. You couldn’t look at her anymore; if she was going to kill you, you just wanted it to be over with. You couldn’t make peace with this awful situation, but you could stand your ground here and not cry. You closed your eyes, breathing in and out as you waited for the impact of her dagger.

You heard her sneer, and braced yourself as best you could, until you heard Katarina let out a disgruntled cry as well as the clang of steel meeting steel. You obviously weren’t dead, so you opened your eyes to see why.

You could barely even see Katarina over the tall figure that stood between you and her. From how you had last parted, you didn’t think Talon wanted anything to do with you, but here he was, blocking Katarina’s dagger with his own blade. You didn’t know why he was here, but you were grateful for his help.

“You want to handle her yourself, Talon?” she asked him, and you felt numb as you realized that they were clearly on the same side. Why was he standing in the way right now then? Did he truly wish to kill you himself?

“Katarina…” Talon growled, and she rolled her eyes in response, sheathing her daggers.

She shrugged her shoulders in a manner that was too casual for being in a room full of people she had just killed. “Suit yourself. I’ve had enough of a workout today anyways.”

You both watched her go, and Talon didn’t turn around until she had left the room.

“Why are you here?”

The question startled you, and the anger in his voice made it hard for you to look at him. “My parents… I followed them here. They…”

He didn’t answer, and you finally looked at him. “Talon… you work for Du Couteau?”

He looked like he wanted to snarl at you again, but your saddened expression made him reconsider his answer. “…yes.”

The carnage around you devastated you, and as much as you wanted to grab onto Talon to remain afloat, he had shown no signs of warmth towards you. You couldn’t read him at all, and were scared to voice the thoughts in your head, scared to ask him if he was going to kill you in Katarina’s stead.

Talon turned away from you again, and you felt compelled to call out to him. “Wait!”

“Go home,” he replied sternly, and you got the impression that he was trying to put a wall between the two of you with his words. “You don’t need to get involved with me.”

“Talon!”

He didn’t reply, turning invisible before your eyes. You had no way to chase someone who was invisible, so you were forced to let him go. You just wished he would tell you why he was so desperate to pull as far away from you as he could.

You knew that you couldn’t stay in this room that smelled so strongly of blood that it was making you feel ill. You kept your eyes on the door, trying desperately not to look at the bodies of the dead, especially your parents. You should feel devastated at the loss of your parents, but you just felt sad. You had never held any great love for them, only respected them out of fear, and the notion that you would no longer be bound to their goals for you gave you a sense of freedom that you had never felt before.

They had aimed their ambitions too high, and the cost had been too great to bear. From what you knew of General Du Couteau, he was not a forgiving man. His ruthlessness and cunning had brought much to Noxus, but it also reflected back on his own people. Noxus stamps out the weak, and your parents were no exception. Their lust for power had made them an easy target for Du Couteau to flex his own power. You didn’t know what you would do now, but you couldn’t stay here. Especially if anyone decided to come back to make sure the job was done.

The way home was a blur. The moment you got home, you realized that you couldn’t recall the walk back at all. The house was silent, which somehow felt more oppressive than when your parents were here. You trudged back to your room, the blood on your shoes and pants leaving droplets behind you as you walked.

You tore your shoes and pants off before grabbing a cloth to scrub at the semi-dried blood on your calves and feet. You couldn’t recall when you had eaten last, but you couldn’t find it in yourself to have any desire to eat. All of your recent stress was collapsing upon you, and you laid down on your bed as you felt all of your energy leave you. You would worry about all of this tomorrow, because you couldn’t keep yourself conscious any longer.

You felt resolved the next morning; you knew what you wanted to do. You would try to talk to Talon one last time. You wanted him to tell you directly he hated you, that he wanted nothing to do with you, something. He had been sending you so many mixed signals that you wanted a straight answer for once. You would be hurt to hear him tell you that he didn’t care for you at all, but then you would know. Then you could stop deluding yourself and clinging to a fruitless hope.

Now that you knew he worked for Du Couteau, you had an idea of where you could find him. The Du Couteau estate was huge, and likely housed many members of the general’s faction, and you were hoping that included Talon. You had to give it one last try. Whatever happened today, your life in Noxus was over.

You knew that it would not be long before the news spread of your parents’ failed attempt on the general’s life, and as their kin, you knew a target would be on your head. You had maybe a full day at the most to grab what you could and flee Noxus before the general’s loyalists stormed your home to claim your head as a prize to present to the general.

You knew that to go to the Du Couteau compound was essentially walking into a den of hungry wolves, but getting one last chance to talk to Talon was worth it to you. You just hoped that it wouldn’t cost you your life.

You bathed and changed into something more presentable before you began to set aside everything you would need to leave this place behind forever. If you had as little time as you thought you did, it would help to have your things ready to grab and go as soon as you returned. You packed lightly for the short trip to the Du Couteau estate, bringing along a single dagger for protection but hoping that you wouldn’t need to use it.

You tried to calm yourself down during the walk over, but you couldn’t help feeling like you were walking to your own execution. You had no idea what would happen when you got there, but you intended to stick to your decision. You wanted to see Talon one last time, if only to say goodbye.

You approached the estate to find two burly guards talking amongst themselves, both garbed in Noxian military uniforms. They didn’t look approachable by any stretch of the imagination, but you didn’t have anything to lose. If they told you to leave, you likely wouldn’t be able to push it.

You forced yourself to at least put on a façade of confidence as you approached the men. You could tell that they were appraising you as you came obviously within their notice, assumedly assessing whether or not you were a threat. You hoped that you looked innocent enough, despite the dagger that you had hidden on your person.

“What’re ya here for?” one of the men asked as he stepped forward, arms crossed over his chest as he stared down at you.

Your mouth felt dry as you realized that you hadn’t really planned what you would say to them. You couldn’t just come out of the gate and say you were here to see an assassin who may or may not live here.

You were taking too long to answer, and the other man raised a hand to rest it on the hilt of the sword at his waist in a threatening manner. “If you don’t have business with the general, I will ask you only once to leave.”

“She has business with me,” a sultry voice rang out as a hand was placed on your shoulder from behind.

You looked back quickly to see Katarina Du Couteau standing behind you, brushing a loose strand of crimson hair out of her face with the hand that wasn’t on your shoulder. She didn’t return your startled glance, staring ahead at the guards with her eyebrow raised impatiently, lips curled downwards in a frown.

The guards’ posture became rigid immediately, and they almost tripped over themselves to open the gate for you. Katarina brushed past you and walked toward the gate, turning back and gesturing for you to follow her when she noticed that you were still frozen in place. You were just making all sorts of dangerous decisions today, but she didn’t seem to be posing a threat to you at the moment, so you followed her onto the grounds of the estate.

She didn’t head into the large building, instead leading you into a small garden at the side of the estate. You didn’t see anyone around, and you weren’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Katarina was a hard woman to read, and you were still trying to wrap your head around why she had helped you out with the guards in the first place.

“I really should kill you,” she said as she examined her nails, before her eyes snapped up to meet yours with a smirk on her lips. “But lucky for you, I’m enjoying seeing a little crack in Talon’s armor at last.”

“What do you mean?” you asked carefully, not wanting to provoke her into putting her initial statement into action.

“Don’t bother pretending,” she laughed. “I know Talon, and he doesn’t stick his neck out for anybody. But he protected you, and I want to know why.”

Her voice was light and conversational, a complete departure from yesterday when she had come at you with everything she had. You didn’t have to explain things to her, but her words gave you hope that maybe she would have some insight into why Talon was acting the way he was. And so you told her your story, probably more than you needed to, but it felt good to let someone in on your secrets. She listened with a thoughtful look on her face, and didn’t interrupt once, even as you described what you found in your parents’ office, and what had led up to you rushing to the war command hall the previous night.

“So he had a childhood sweetheart,” Katarina replied at last, looking smug.

“Um, I don’t think we were…” you trailed off, feeling yourself get flustered.

“That’s not what he thinks,” she refuted smoothly. “I have never seen him protect anyone weaker than him without being ordered to by my father.”

You flinched slightly at being called weak to your face, but Katarina didn’t seem to mean it as an insult, just a fact. It was the Noxian way to be brutally honest, and you couldn’t deny her assertion anyways. Even with all your training, you were a long ways off from the likes of her and Talon.

You were about to reply, but closed your mouth when you heard her click her tongue. You quickly noticed that it wasn’t directed at you; she was looking at a spot over your shoulder, and you turned your head back to see a man exiting the estate through the front doors.

“You should probably leave now,” she muttered lowly. “That’s one of my father’s advisors. He can never mind his own business.”

She began to walk back towards the gate, and you hastened to match her pace. If she didn’t like the guy, and she was on the same side as him, then you didn’t want to be anywhere near him.

As you approached the gate, Katarina signalled for the guards to let you through.

“I’ll tell Talon you came by,” she told you, sounding pleased with herself.

“Okay,” you told her, feeling unable to tell her of your immediate plans to leave Noxus as soon as you left here. As you waved goodbye to her and began your journey home, you decided that you would be willing to wait the rest of the day to see if you could see Talon. You could only hope that Katarina would be able to convince him to see you.

You weren’t sure what you had expected to happen, but having girl talk with Katarina Du Couteau was definitely not something you had expected. You took the time on your walk home to mull over her words. Talon was important to you; he had kept you company as a lonely child and protected you as an adult. But Katarina’s words had awoken something that you were embarrassed that you hadn’t even considered. All this time you had been telling yourself that you wanted to seek Talon out because he represented a happy moment to you as a child. But when you thought of him now, you saw his handsome profile in your mind, and felt the residual tingles on your skin that you felt whenever you heard his voice.

You were so in your head that your body was on autopilot, pushing open the door to your house and failing to notice that the door wasn’t locked. You only broke out of your thoughts when the door to the living room was closed right after you entered… but not by you.

You realized immediately that you were surrounded. A large man garbed in black stood behind you, blocking the door and forcing you to move towards the center of the room to get away from him. There was really nowhere for you to run, as there were at least fifteen men scattered around the room. They all seemed to defer to one man who stood facing you, his shoulders squared confidently. Looking around, you didn’t recognize a single one of them. You didn’t think Du Couteau would send his men after you so soon, but here you were. Though the men looked a little rougher than what you would expect of those who served under the general, so you weren’t sure what to make of the situation other than it was not good for you.

The leader stepped forward, and you were unnerved by the way his eyes roved over your body in a way that made you feel entirely too exposed. You wanted to back away from him, but with his lackey right behind you, that wasn’t an option either.

The leader grinned at your panic. “I’m here to honor our deal.”

“Deal?” you retorted. “I don’t even know you!”

“That ain’t my problem,” he replied dismissively. “We made a deal with your parents. We give ‘em the men and supplies, and they give us their precious daughter.”

“My parents are dead!” you said angrily, shocked and infuriated by your parents’ actions. “What they promised has nothing to do with me!”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong,” he said, and you watched warily as the men around him began to slowly come towards you in an effort to fully cage you in. “I lost a lot of men in that plan of theirs. You got a lot of work to do for this exchange to have been worth my time.”

He wasn’t even listening to you, or he just didn’t care. And his lecherous gaze was sending unpleasant chills along your skin. Looking around, you saw very little ways out of this. Why couldn’t they have waited one more day, when you would have been long gone? Your only advantage would be that you knew your house better than they did.

You couldn’t fight them, not as outnumbered as you were. But you might have a chance to outrun them. Your parents had made this house their fortress, as it had very few weaknesses, but that also meant that there were very few escape routes for you. The men were still advancing slowly on you, and you hoped that you could use the element of surprise to get away from them. There was a small gap between two of the men that led to the stairs up, and you knew there was a window at the end of the long hallway. If you could get out of that window, you could use your speed to get away from them and out of the city. You would have to play this smart.

If you waited a second longer, you would lose your opportunity, so you dashed at the gap with everything you had. They clearly weren’t expecting that, and you were easily able to run to the stairs to a chorus of shouts from the group of men behind you. You heard the leader scream at his men to follow you, and then the air exploded with the sounds of many footsteps following you. But you knew that you were fast, so you continued running as fast as you could. The window was within your sight, and you couldn’t look back now. This was your only option for escape.

You clearly hadn’t thought things through fully as you stumbled with a scream as pain burst in your leg. You turned back to face your pursuers in shock, which was all the time they needed to shoot you again, this time the bullet impacted your chest, just above your heart, and the pain winded you. They were still pretty far behind you, but you couldn’t make it out of the window now, not as injured as you were. The pain was so intense that you could barely think, and you were running out of options.

You had one last option, you realized, as you noticed that you were right next to your parents’ safe room. It wasn’t an escape, but the lock on the room was incredibly tough to crack unless you knew the combination. The men continued to shoot at you, but you were able to punch the passcode in with shaking fingers and crack the door open just enough for you to slip in, the door shutting tightly behind you.

You fell to the floor immediately, the pain raging intensely. You cursed yourself for not noticing that they had guns. You were so close to escaping, and you had botched it. Your consciousness was fuzzy at best, and you knew that you didn’t have the concentration required to call upon your powers to heal yourself, not when it was all you could do to remain conscious. You heard the sounds of gunfire against the door, and the yelling and swearing of the men just outside the room, but it all faded to nothing as you watched blood run from your leg as you began to feel your consciousness drift farther away.

It had been an easy mission. For a trained assassin, his target had been sloppy. He was nothing but weaknesses, his defences so thin that Talon felt like he was felling an injured animal. The targets that were a challenge were always more satisfying, and this one had been a disappointment, both to Talon and likely to whoever had trained him in his mediocre skills.

Talon was silent as he returned to the Du Couteau estate. He didn’t often conduct assassinations in the daytime, usually preferring the cover of night, but he obeyed his orders. General Du Couteau was not a patient or forgiving man, and his orders were absolute. It was the life that Talon had lived for so long that he was used to it. But you were different; you didn’t choose the life of a ruthless assassin, and he had to keep you away from his world.

He never thought that he would see you again. When you had stopped coming to meet him at the bridge, he didn’t know what to think. Eventually, he had accepted that he was on his own and would stay that way. At least until he was defeated by Du Couteau and then joined his ranks.

The only things he knew about you were the bits and pieces that he remembered you telling him when you were children. You had been a brief ray of light in the pitch black of his world. Just like back then, you had healed him without asking for anything in return, which he had never experienced from anyone else in his life.

You were as pure of a soul as they came in Noxus, and Talon had never worked a legitimate job in his life. He had grown up on the streets, thieving and killing when he had to in order to survive. He couldn’t involve you in the danger he faced on a regular basis, and he had pushed you away at every turn to ensure that you stayed away. But he couldn’t figure out why you continued trying to get close to him. Even when he had admitted to being involved with Katarina, who had killed your parents, you had tried to reach out to him. And he had run like a coward.

Every time he thought about you, he felt frustrated. Why were you trying so hard to get close to him after all he had done? He wanted you as far away from this world as possible, even if it meant that you would be far from him as well. He would suppress the part of him from childhood that wanted to let you in and do what he had to do to keep you safe.

As usual, the guards opened the gates for Talon as soon as they saw him. He had a reputation, and both parties preferred if they didn’t have to interact. Not many people went out of their way to talk to him, not when he was one of the three most talented blademasters in the Du Couteau house, and certainly the least friendly.

His plan to head directly to his room was thwarted immediately by one of the few people who did talk to him, despite how little he cared to make casual conversation. Katarina stood just inside the gate, arms crossed and gaze locked on him as if she had been waiting for him to arrive, which was unusual for her unless her father had asked her to pass information on to him. The likelihood of receiving information from the general by way of his daughter was the sole reason his feet stopped in front of her.

She looked pleased with herself, and Talon knew that was a bad sign, especially when she opened her mouth. “Your girl was just here.”

Talon glared at her. Katarina didn’t need to say your name; they both knew who she was talking about. Talon was both impressed and irritated with your courage; coming directly to enemy territory to try and see him was a very dangerous decision. But at the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder what it would take to get you to understand that he wasn’t a good man, and certainly wasn’t worth all the danger he would add to your life just by being in it.

“You should go see her,” Katarina pressed. “She’ll never understand if you just keep acting like a jerk. If you’re not into her, then you’re leading her on by treating her like this.”

“This doesn’t concern you,” he snarled back, the anger clear in his voice. Why was she trying to get so involved in his personal life?

“It concerns her,” Katarina replied back. “What if she comes back here again, Talon? You were lucky I was here. Anyone else would have killed your little girlfriend on the spot.”

Sparks flew in the air between the two assassins. Katarina was grating on his nerves with her nosiness and refusal to back down. Talon was angry, but as little as he wanted to entertain this nonsense right now, at the back of his mind, he had to admit that she was right. He couldn’t let you keep trying to come to find him here. He needed to give you one last shove to keep you away from him. He felt his mood souring, but before he or Katarina could say anything further, their attention was drawn to a commotion at the front gate.

Talon and Katarina both turned to look as the gate opened and one of the house’s messengers rushed in. It was unusual to see the messengers be in such a rush, as there weren’t many emergencies occurring due to the general’s overprepared nature. The messenger was headed to the estate, but stopped in his tracks when he saw the two assassins staring right at him.

He bowed hastily, and Katarina rolled her eyes, prompting him to just spill his news instead of wasting further time. “I was sent to observe the traitors’ house for any movements.”

“…and?” Katarina implored him impatiently.

The man nodded his head too many times; it wasn’t unusual for people to be nervous in Katarina’s presence, but as soon as Talon had heard that it was related to your parents, he was ready to cut the man’s tongue out if he didn’t get on with it.

“There were suspicious movements by a group thought to be allied with the traitors. They broke the lock and entered the home just before the traitor’s daughter returned home. I suspected that they were regrouping their forces to plot against us again, but then I heard gunshots and a woman’s screams, so it seems they’ve turned on each other,” the man reported.

Talon’s ire turned to alarm as he heard the report. You had nothing to do with your parents’ treachery, so that could only mean that one of their disgruntled allies had decided to come after you for their failures. He didn’t have a complete idea of your combat abilities, but he doubted they would be enough for you to take out a group of armed men.

He didn’t spare a moment, immediately running at the estate’s wall and leaping over it, jumping from building to building as he rushed to get to your home as fast as possible. Talon hadn’t felt desperation like this in a long time; he always ensured that situations were under his control, but the thought of you in mortal peril had spurned his feet faster than his mind could keep up with. Here he had been trying not to involve you in his dangerous world, and yet danger had found you anyways. He felt no pity for the men that would soon die by his blade; he could almost feel the steel pulsing with hunger for their blood for even daring to be near you. He could only hope that he wouldn’t arrive too late.

Meanwhile, Katarina watched Talon disappear before turning to the flustered messenger without batting an eye. “No need to report this to my father. I’ll see him myself after we handle this.”

The messenger looked relieved to not have to report to the general himself, but that wasn’t Katarina’s concern. It would be much more convenient for Talon for her father to not hear information related to you. As the man left, Katarina smiled to herself; who did Talon think he was fooling with his uncaring façade? Him rushing immediately to your aid told her more about his true feelings than any of his words had.

But in her brief conversation with you, Katarina had found that she liked you. It was certainly more than dreary around here with all the serious men her father surrounded himself with, and she personally wouldn’t mind having you around again, especially if she got to see Talon acting all lovesick. Talon would likely need help if he wanted to rescue you quickly, so Katarina left the estate as well, following right behind her agitated fellow assassin.

She caught up to him just in time to watch him surveying the scene from the building next to your house. They could both see a group of well-muscled goons patrolling the first floor, but no sign of you.

“Do you think they killed her?” Katarina asked.

Talon’s worry wasn’t strong enough to overpower his battle sense. These men wouldn’t stay at the house if they had accomplished their goal already, which meant that you were likely still somewhere in the house. Talon didn’t need to say his thoughts out loud as Katarina could see the same thing he could.

“I’ll take care of the ones on the first floor,” Katarina asserted, and then they were off.

They both jumped in through an open window, and Katarina stopped to face the group of men. “Hope you boys are ready to dance.”

As Katarina jumped towards them, daggers at the ready, Talon used the distraction to turn invisible and run past them and to the upper level of the house. The sounds of the fighting going on downstairs began to fade, and Talon’s invisibility wore off as he emerged at the start of a long hallway. He didn’t see you anywhere, but zeroed in on several men beating against a door at the end of the hallway.

“Shoot it down if you have to!” one of the men screamed, his face red with fury. “That bitch can’t hide forever!”

“She won’t last long either way with those bullets we got in her!” another man replied with a loud laugh.

Talon didn’t wait a second longer after hearing the men’s words. He moved silently down the hallway, and the men were none the wiser until the sharp end of his blade met the flesh of the leader’s neck, and with one smooth movement, the man’s head had been removed and rolled a few feet down the hall before he could even scream. Blood spurted from his neck as his body fell to the floor, both of his companions screaming when they saw what the furious assassin had done to their boss.

They raised their guns to shoot at Talon, but he was faster, leaping through the men in an instant, the blades on his cape dicing their flesh at the same time he cleaved their heads off their necks to join their leader’s on the floor. Talon didn’t like to be messy, but he needed them dead as fast as possible, and no matter who these lowlifes were, there was no way for them to come back from decapitation.

But if what they had said was true, you didn’t have time to wait. He would have to get to you immediately.

You had been in and out of consciousness, half-feeling like you could hear your mother’s voice telling you to get up, but then realizing that the voice was just a hallucination that your delirious brain had created. By now, your blood had run down your clothes and pooled under you. You knew that you couldn’t lose much more, but that mattered less to you when you knew that you had no power to help yourself. At least you would die on your own terms, far enough from those men that you could die in peace, even if you were in horrendous pain.

You didn’t know how long you had been in the safe room for when the screaming started. You thought it was in your head at first, but the noises continued for a few seconds until it stopped and everything went quiet. You couldn’t heard the men’s voices or them pounding on the door. It seemed impossible to think that they had given up, but even if they did, you couldn’t stand up with your injuries. You were as good as dead.

You felt another wave of intense fatigue hit you just as you heard a new sound from outside the room… a shout of your name. You were willing to write it off until your name was called again, followed by a sound of something impacting the door. The voice sounded so familiar and comforting to you, but you couldn’t place why. It took one more shout of your name to finally put the pieces together in your fuzzy brain.

“Talon!” you cried out, surprised at how rough your voice sounded.

There was a short pause on the other side of the door. “Open the door!”

“I can’t…” you replied sadly. “I can barely–”

You were cut off by another wave of drowsiness, barely able to keep yourself awake this time, your heart pounding in your ears.

“Give me the code!” Talon growled back, sounding desperate.

How was he even here? You still felt like this was a cruel dream. Couldn’t you just die without your brain giving you false hope that you would see Talon one last time?

“The code!” he shouted, his words finally knocking enough sense into you that you were able to focus on listing the numbers to him.

As soon as you did, the door began to open. But you didn’t have the strength to keep your eyes open any longer, and you collapsed fully to the ground, your neck and the back of your head now laying in your own blood. You felt your head be lifted and placed in someone’s lap, gentle fingers brushing your hair from your face.

You forced your eyes to open and saw Talon’s face above you, his clothing stained with blood that didn’t seem to be his. His eyes were focussed on your face, and he stared at you with a gentleness in his eyes that you had never seen before. His mood notably picked up the moment he noticed you looking up at him.

“You need to heal yourself,” he told you sternly.

You shook your head weakly in response. “Can’t…. I can’t focus…”

Your eyes drifted closed again as you felt your body become more and more numb. You couldn’t hold on any longer. At least you had Talon here with you at the end…

Your eyes shot open with a short gasp against his lips as Talon kissed you. You felt like you had been electrocuted by the shock as his lips pressed harder against your own before pulling away at last.

“You’re awake now, aren’t you?” he pressed. “Heal yourself.”

“Talon, you–”

He ignored you. “Heal yourself!” he demanded, and your brain followed the command at last, calling to the power you didn’t think you could use right now.

You watched as the blue glow that you thought was out of your reach grew in your hand. You lacked the strength, so Talon grabbed your hand, bringing it to your chest and watching closely as the bullet was pushed out as your body repaired itself. When he was satisfied that your chest looked much better, he carefully bent you so your hand could reach your leg wound as well, your magic ejecting the other bullet from your skin as well.

The immediate alleviation of pain came as a huge relief, but you realized that using your powers while you were in such a state was beyond anything that your body could cope with. Before you could even warn Talon, you felt your limbs go slack and your head droop, unconsciousness taking you before you knew if Talon had caught you or not.

Katarina pocketed her daggers, flipping her hair over her shoulder as she sauntered upstairs after Talon. Those guys had been all muscle and no skill; she would almost have felt bad if she were a better person. But they were in the way, so they died. They were allied against her father anyways, so there was a likely chance she had just crossed an item off of her to-do list a little early.

Katarina encountered no one until she reached a long hallway, and it was immediately clear that Talon had been here. There were small pools of blood that led to three men, or what was left of them. Their heads had been sliced clean off of their necks and had rolled to various parts of the hallway. Katarina paid them no mind; the sight was no shock to a person like her. Once she got to the bodies, she noticed a door that was slid halfway open that caught her attention.

Walking silently up to the partially-open door, she was able to clearly see Talon kneeling on the floor with your body in his arms. Katarina placed a hand on the door, slowly opening it so she wouldn’t startle him as she entered the room.

“Is she dead?” Katarina didn’t bother to mince words.

Talon looked over at her before carefully standing up with you in his arms. “No. She healed herself in time, but she passed out from blood loss.”

“So you’re bringing her back with us?” Katarina pressed, turning back to leave the room, already assured of his answer before he could say it.

Talon didn’t reply, but followed her into the hall. Katarina began to open doors in the hall, leaving Talon to stare at her, unimpressed that she was wasting time with whatever she was doing.

Katarina caught his stare and raised an eyebrow in return as she walked into one of the rooms. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re both drenched in blood. Unless you want her to wear bloody clothing forever?”

Talon watched Katarina walk over to the bed to look through a bag that was laying there. She rifled through the bag for a few seconds before closing it again and slinging it over her shoulder.

“Looks like your girl was already packed. Guess she was planning to skip town if you didn’t come see her,” Katarina surmised.

“Are you finished?” Talon replied coldly, walking past the room and towards the front door, Katarina easily catching up to him.

“I’ll take this to your room,” she said, gesturing with her chin to the bag she carried. “You might want to take the long way back unless you want people to think you’re walking around with a dead body.”

She didn’t wait for an answer, heading through the door and back to the estate on her own. She was right; there was no way he could scale buildings while carrying you. He stuck to alleyways and less populated areas to not bring more attention to your situation, but he felt relieved that he could see your chest rise and fall slowly as he walked. You had come so close to death that he thought he wouldn’t be able to save you. Having you here in his arms, alive, had calmed his restless soul. His lust for blood sated with the deaths of your attackers.

He had been putting so much effort into pushing you away that he had left you alone and vulnerable. He could only hope that you hadn’t lost too much blood before you had healed your wounds. You were pale, much more than was healthy, but there wasn’t much he could do other than take you somewhere safe and hope that you would wake up.

The walk back was eventless; the few people to cross Talon’s path quickly backed up and fast walked in whatever direction they had come from. He was used to that behavior already, given his intimidating stature and ever-present glower. But he was forced to admit that he did look like some sort of crazed murderer as he carried you in his arms, both of you soaked in blood and leaving a trail on the ground behind him as he walked.

It was early in the evening when he arrived back at the estate, the setting sun falling behind him. Katarina must have warned the guards that he was coming, because they had made themselves scarce. Talon adjusted your body against his shoulder as he pushed the gate open with his other arm.

He took the usual way to his room, heading to a side entrance. Not many people were allowed to be on Du Couteau property, let alone live within the walls of the towering estate, so there was not likely to be anyone in his path. Talon’s room was even more secluded, in a wing where no one else resided, so he always had plenty of space to himself. General Du Couteau put a lot of faith in him, and rewarded his loyalty and skilled service. But even if the rooms in Talon’s wing of the estate were available, his reputation kept people away for fear of angering him.

Talon scoffed at the notion; he would not simply strike someone down for being on estate grounds, not without an order from the general. But he preferred the solitude his area of the estate offered, so the paranoia was convenient for him, especially now as he carried you into his room.

Katarina was looking out of the window, but turned to look at him as he entered. “Took you long enough. You can put her down and then wait outside.”

Talon glared at her, not understanding what she meant, and she laughed. “She needs her clothes changed, so unless you were planning on stripping her yourself…?”

Katarina didn’t need to finish her sentence to know that Talon had at last gotten her drift. Whereas normally he would have argued with her, he walked over to gently lay you on the bed, turning and walking a few paces away and crossing his arms, but not leaving the room.

“Suit yourself,” Katarina scoffed at the overprotective assassin as she began to remove your bloody clothing.

Talon kept his back to the scene, knowing that Katarina was getting a little too much enjoyment out of this. He listened to the sound of his bed creaking, as well as the sounds as different articles of your clothing hitting the floor as Katarina discarded them. It took her a few minutes, but eventually she instructed Talon that he could turn back around.

When he turned back, you were laying on top of the bed in a soft gray dress. Katarina was wiping blood from your forehead with a cloth, your body noticeably less bloody as well. There was still traces of blood in your hair, but it was no longer caked on your skin like dirt. Seeing you looking much cleaner made Talon realize just what a state he was in as well. The scent of blood clung to him, but he was so used to the smell that he was able to easily tune it out.

“She’ll have to bathe to get the rest of the blood off, but I did what I could for now,” Katarina said, leaving the bloody cloth on a table by the bed and making her way to the door. Always eager for the last word, she looked back at Talon when she was halfway out of the door. “Nobody comes by here, so you two can be as loud as you want.”

Katarina left, knowing she wouldn’t get a response from him, heading into the hallway and towards her own area of the estate. Talon began to remove his own blood-stained clothing as his thoughts drifted. Katarina seemed more than willing to keep you a secret, but even if the general knew about you, Talon doubted he would care. As long as he accomplished his missions, the general did not pry into his sparse personal life, and if keeping you here with him was Talon’s price for his service, the general would have no choice but to agree.

Talon did not even entertain the thought of allowing you to go back to your home when you woke up. Without your parents to protect you with their influence, you were incredibly vulnerable to the dregs of Noxian society. Deep within him, Talon wasn’t quite ready to admit that the larger reason for his decision was backed by his desire to keep you by his side.

Talon had never had the desire to be close to someone in a way other than professional respect. General Du Couteau had been the only person to ever defeat him in combat, and so he had agreed to serve under him to learn and improve his own skills. He had moved up from being a skilled thief to become one of the three strongest members of the house of Du Couteau. His time in the service of the general had taken him all over Runeterra to assassinate enemies of the general, and he had never found his life to be lacking, not until he met you again after all your years apart.

Having you here made him want things he had never wanted before. He selfishly, possessively wanted you. His cold demeanor had temporarily held him back from being consumed by his desires, but now that you were here with him, now that there was nothing holding him back from being with you, his emotions threatened to consume him. And while he could assume what you felt, he hadn’t heard it from your own lips… yet.

All he could do was wait and hope that you would recover. He approached the bed, pulling the collar of your dress down to look at your wound. There was only the slightest cut in your skin, not even enough to bleed. Looking at the wound on your leg, he found that it was the same. Katarina had wiped away most of the blood from your injuries, and it was a relief to Talon to see you no longer drowning in your own blood.

He had done all that he could for you at the moment, and so he covered your body with a blanket before leaving his room to do some training. There was no guarantee when you would wake up, but he was reassured that you were somewhere he could keep an eye on you from. Those thugs had been an unfortunate happening, but he would do much worse to anyone that dared to attack you from now on. Very few had ever survived an encounter with the blade’s shadow, and he had no mercy for those who got in his way.

You saw your mother and father. Somewhere in your mind, you knew that shouldn’t be possible; they were dead. You began to wonder if this meant that you were dead as well. The last thing that you remembered was Talon finding you in the safe room… and kissing you.

Your parents didn’t say anything, just stared at you, their faces slowly changing from healthy to gray and dead. You backed away from them as their eye sockets bled black and they stared at you with blame in their eyes. You wanted to run, but found that you couldn’t move. Their deathly figures got closer and closer, and you flinched, closing your eyes as they were almost upon you, but instead finding yourself embraced from behind, a familiar scent engulfing you.

You heard your name being called by his voice, soft in your ear. Talon…

You still couldn’t move, but you wanted so badly to turn around and see him. To kiss him again. To be by his side.

He had shown more care for you in the short amount of time with you than your parents had in your entire life. You felt overwhelmed with desire to see his face, to be able to hold him back. But this wasn’t real, and the ghostly touch against you wasn’t him. You had to wake yourself up. You had to see Talon again.

You realized that your eyes were closed, and your head felt clear. You opened your eyes at last to see soft light filtering in through a window and no shadowy figures around you. You didn’t recognize the room you found yourself in, but considering you weren’t shackled to the bed, you had to be somewhere safe.

You sat up in the bed, which caused a damp cloth on your forehead to fall into your lap. You picked it up, staring at the simple navy blue fabric that reminded you so much of Talon. Was it too much to hope that it was him who had brought you here?

Running a hand through your messy hair, you were disgusted to find flecks of dried blood on your fingers. As you wiped the specks of blood off on the cloth, your full situation came back to you. You were surprised that you were even alive with how severe your wounds had been. You had been prepared to die in that room, a casualty to the ambitions of your parents.

The door to the room opened as you had pulled back the blanket to look at your injures. You looked over to see Talon pushing the door open, wearing more casual clothing than you had seen him in before. He wore a simple pair of black pants and a dark blue shirt which stretched over the muscles of his arms in a way that made you nervously avert your eyes.

Talon paid your sudden shyness no mind, walking over to your bedside as soon as he noticed you were awake. You weren’t sure where to look, so you settled for staring at your hands as they rested in your lap. You noticed a spot of dried blood on one palm that you had missed and began to scrape it off with a fingernail. You were probably too focused on the task, and only stopped when Talon put a hand over yours to move your hands apart.

You looked up at him at last, and he only removed his hand from yours when you met his eyes. You had been so desperate to see him, but having him be by your bedside like this was making it hard for you to function, especially with how casually he was dressed. He was so effortlessly handsome, and here you were all dirty, your hair matted with blood and skin clammy from sleeping off your injuries. The thought sent your gaze downwards again as you began to feel self-conscious.

“How long was I asleep for?” You cringed at how dry and raspy your voice sounded.

“A week,” Talon answered, reaching down to tilt your chin up to face him when you didn’t reply to him. “Are you still in pain?”

“No,” you replied at last, the closeness of his face driving your heart rate up, especially considering you now knew how long you had been asleep for. You must look pretty bad right now, and that wasn’t even touching on how you must smell at the moment.

“Can… can I have a bath?” you asked, your voice coming out as more of a squeak.

Chancing a look at Talon’s face, he didn’t seem to be annoyed with you. In fact, he looked more relaxed than you had ever seen him. At your words, his hand drifted from your chin to brush gently over your tangled hair, and you desperately fought against the urge to shy away from his hand. The moment only lasted a few seconds, and you found yourself missing his touch as soon as he brought his hand back to his side.

Talon nodded, turning back to pick something up as you eased your way out of the bed, your balance a little shaky as you stared at his back. Now that it wasn’t covered by his hood, you had a proper opportunity to admire his hair; it looked much too nice to belong to someone as deadly as he was, and your fingers itched to run through it like he had done to yours. But you didn’t know where you stood with him right now, and feared he might pull away from you if you tried.

Your focus was then put on a small basket that was handed to you. Looking at it, you found what looked like various soaps and bathing oils, which was not something you imagined that Talon would have had lying around.

You looked at him in surprise, and he caught your train of thought immediately, giving you a stony look. “Katarina prepared those for you.”

You couldn’t help a giggle. “Sorry. I couldn’t help but imagine you bathing in roses when I saw this stuff.”

His lips twitched up in a smirk. “I see your wounds didn’t affect your brain. What a shame.”

Your mouth dropped open. Was he teasing you? Talon, one of the most deadly men in Noxus, had just implied that you were dumb.

His eyes glimmered with playfulness for a moment before he turned away, not giving you a chance to reply. Not that you could even think of a reply; his sudden teasing had taken the wind right out of your sails. You hadn’t expected that from him, and he had taken full advantage of that fact.

He turned his head to look back at you, and you took that as your cue to follow after him. He led you out of the room and to a room a few doors down, which turned out to be a bathroom. Talon closed the door behind you, and you waited a few seconds before undressing, realizing that there was no point in listening for his receding footsteps as he had clearly trained himself to move silently.

You turned the tap on, the warm water feeling heavenly on your skin as you sat down in the bath. It was very clear to you how much you needed this bath; as soon as you began to wash yourself, the water grew dirty from the grime and blood that covered your skin and hair. By the time you were done, the water was tinted a light red, which you quickly set to drain. You really didn’t need any more reminders of how gross you had felt prior to the bath.

Putting your clothing back on, you almost felt like a new person. It was an especially big relief that you could finally stop worrying about smelling bad on top of everything else you had to worry about right now.

It was a relief to you when Talon finally went to do some training later on that day. It had taken you some time, but over the day, you had come to a realization; he was definitely flirting with you. You had been hesitant to believe it at first, but over the course of the day, you could no longer have any doubts.

It had started with him being closer than usual, which was already new for you given how hard he had tried to flee from you over the past while. But now he seemed to take every opportunity available to him to sit near you while sharpening his blades, or brush a hand over your skin while checking your injuries. At first it could have been a coincidence, but you caught the ghost of a smirk on his face too many times for it to be innocent, which led you to accept that he was being like this on purpose. But he hadn’t mentioned the kiss, or tried to kiss you again, no matter how amicable you would be to a repeat of that moment.

You felt like a timid alley cat being offered a piece of fish; you wanted the reward so badly, but were scared to open yourself up and be vulnerable enough to take what you wanted from him. His behavior seemed to give you the impression that he would be open to the idea, but it was hard to work up the nerve, and you were just about reaching your breaking point.

You basically had to insist that he go train for a bit, if only to give your cheeks a break, as there was only so much blushing you could take before you felt your cheeks would burn off. You knew that you couldn’t fool him; he knew exactly why you were so determined that he go do some training, but had gone along with your request. If only you could figure out what to do about the sudden tension before he returned.

You couldn’t think of anything. If you confessed to him outright and he just stared at you, you didn’t think you could take it. But at the same time, you had to get some closure. You couldn’t take any more of Talon’s flirty gestures without knowing what you meant to him, what the kiss had meant to him. In the hour he was gone, the only course of action you could settle on was just asking him why he had kissed you. Then at least you could get an insight into his feelings without putting yourself too far out there.

You rehearsed what you would say again and again in your head, and even a few times out loud. Just as you were beginning to feel like you could do this, the door opened and Talon came in, discarding a few blades of varying sizes on the table, and you almost physically felt your nerve break. You felt his eyes on you immediately, and your rehearsed words fled quickly from your mind. How did you ever think that you could do this?

You couldn’t even move an inch from your seat on the bed, almost too scared to breathe. You couldn’t even look at him, and neglected to recall just how good he was at moving silently until he was right before you, his hand on your shoulder drawing you back into reality.

“Have you finished healing your wounds?” he asked, removing his hand when he knew he had your attention.

You looked down at your chest, pulling your dress back to look at the wound. You had entirely forgotten about it, but allowed the familiar blue glow of your powers to light in your hand as you began to heal the last of your wounds. You had healed them most of the way before, but with one more dose of your magic, they were gone as if you had never been injured at all. As you felt your leg fully heal as well, you looked over to Talon, your focus drawn to a thin cut on his cheek that you had only noticed now that he was so close to you.

Without really thinking about it, you reached a hand up to his face, trailing your fingers in a line down his cheek along the scratch. He kept his eyes on you, putting up no resistance to your touch. As you moved your hand back and his cut fully healed, the intimacy of the gesture finally hit you and you retracted your hand as if you had been burned. Talon remained where he was, and the closeness sent a nervous shiver down your spine.

You tried to even your breathing, hoping that would help you bolster your nerves. You had to know. You would just repeat that to yourself until you could make your mouth move.

“Talon…” You used every bit of your willpower to get the words out. “Why did you kiss me?”

You heard an exhale of breath that sounded suspiciously like laughter from the assassin. “I didn’t recall you being this dumb when we were children.”

“What?” you replied incredulously with a frown. “I was being serious, Talon!”

“So was I,” he replied coyly. “I didn’t think that loud girl I knew would grow up to be so naïve.”

What was he even saying? He was clearly trying to say something, but you were having trouble reading past the insults.

“So you’re not going to answer my question?” you asked with thinly veiled frustration.

He leaned down, his arms on either side of you caging you in. You had nowhere to run unless you were forced to put up with his smug smirk as he leaned down towards you, getting close enough to kiss you but holding himself back just enough for your lips not to touch. You couldn’t help but let your eyes flit to his lips, wary of the look in his eyes when he caught you staring.

“If you were paying attention, you would have your answer already,” he said, voice low and more seductive than you had ever heard him sound.

It was taking all you had to keep your eyes on his, especially with how close his lips got to yours with every word he said. You would only have to move an inch and then you would be kissing him again. And with him this close, you couldn’t help but think that maybe he wanted this too. In all the time you had known him, you hadn’t known him to do or say things he didn’t mean. He had been teasing you mercilessly all day, and you just wanted to believe that this meant something to him.

“Can you… kiss me again?” you whispered, closing your eyes as you were too nervous to look at his face.

There was a few seconds of silence, and you opened your eyes to see what was happening just in time to see Talon’s face close in on you, his lips connecting with yours as he used his weight to press you down on the bed. You had been too surprised to resist, but you readily welcomed the contact, your fingers gripping at his shoulders as you closed your eyes.

His movements overwhelmed you; before you could even process it, his hand slid over your breasts, fingers closing around one as you tried to keep up with his tongue. You squirmed under him, moving a hand up to finally get a feel of his hair now that you were fairly certain that he wouldn’t mind. You were just wearing a simple dress and a pair of underwear, but the closeness was heating up your body in a way that only removing the suddenly-too-warm clothing from your skin would alleviate.

It was futile to try and predict his movements; you jerked back from the kiss with a moan of his name as he pressed his fingers against your clit, fingers that you hadn’t even realized that he had snuck under your dress. As his hand slipped in your underwear, he took advantage of your exposed throat, leaving heated kisses on your neck. You found yourself fleetingly curious about where he had picked this up, but the thought disappeared as he pulled back to nibble at your ear with his teeth.

He removed his hands from you, leaning his lower body against yours and supporting his weight with his hands. His lips were still at your ear as you felt the hard press of his cock against your lower half.

“You still don’t know why?” he probed, grinding slowly against you, the friction not even close to enough for you right now. “I tried to keep you away from the way I live, the people I kill. But you were more persistent than I thought.”

“Talon…” you whispered, wishing he would just press a little harder, but he stayed frustratingly light and slow with each roll of his hips into yours.

“You chased after me, so now you can’t complain about what I do to you,” he growled in your ear, his words making you shudder with anticipation.

His fingers crept back under your dress, and you spread your legs as much as you could with him still on top of you to give him room. You blushed as you realized just how wet you were as Talon’s attention moved from your clit to press a finger inside you with ease.

You cried out at the intrusion, pulling his face down to yours so you could feel his tongue against yours again. He seemed more than happy to kiss you breathless as he added another finger, reaching so deep within you that it was making you curl your toes until they began to hurt. You felt like you could barely keep up with the kiss anymore, but Talon’s focus did not waver.

The cotton of his shirt began to brush uncomfortably against you, and you tugged at it, unable to verbalize your request due to how thoroughly he was kissing you. The tugging got his attention and he pulled back at last, looking all too pleased with himself, ripping his shirt off with one hand while the other continued to pump in and out of your pussy. With him now on his knees on the bed, you finally got a look at what was pressing against you earlier.

Talon’s cock was straining noticeably against his trousers, and the sight made your tongue dart out to nervously run along your lower lip. Talon caught you staring easily, and his fingers began to curl inside you, the sensation making you flutter your eyes closed with a moan. Only when you felt a noticeable draft did you realize that he had taken advantage of your distracted state to slide your underwear off completely and discard them on the floor.

You were warm, way too warm, and Talon allowed you to push his fingers away from you so you could sit up as best you could and shimmy your dress up your body. You felt somewhat shy, but you were so overheated at the moment that you couldn’t keep your dress on any longer if you didn’t want to spontaneously combust. It also didn’t hurt to watch Talon’s eyes hungrily follow your movements, and when you noticed him about to dive back against you, you held up a hand, deciding to be cheeky.

“Not until you take off your pants,” you said, staring at him with a challenge in your eyes.

Talon’s eyes looked dark as he reached towards the clasp of his pants, knowing he had your attention fully captured. He didn’t leave you waiting, discarding his pants quickly and leaving him as bare as you were.

He leaned back down, your faces almost touching. “When we do this, you’ll be mine. Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” you replied breathlessly, and he took your legs in his hands, bringing them around his waist.

He needed no further convincing, and you felt the prod of his cock, which felt so much better without any layers of clothing in the way. You had no coherent words as he began to sink into you easily given you were so wet that he didn’t even need to go particularly slow. You arched your back with a gasp, your ears rewarded when Talon let out a quiet groan as he finally bottomed out.

Before you regained your composure, Talon was sliding out and rocking his hips back towards you, shattering what mental facilities you had left. You could do little more than grip at his arms and the bed sheets as you looked up at his dark eyes that were focussed on your own. You couldn’t stop yourself from moaning at the feeling, especially when he brushed his thumb just right against your clit, the resulting surge of building pleasure almost overwhelming you.

As you got more and more vocal, you began to notice how responsive he was to every little noise you made. Every moan or cry seemed to make him thrust into you a little harder than usual, and you decided that you wanted to hear him too. He had been largely silent so far, and you wanted to know that he was as affected by this as you were.

You began to roll your hips to meet his, squeezing your inner muscles every time he rocked back into you. Immediately, you noticed a stutter in his breath, and after a few repeats on your part, his eyes narrowed on your face, and he began to slow his pace as he leaned down towards you, his teeth grazing your ear.

“You think you’re getting away with that?” he growled, sending pleasant chills along your skin with his words. “You really are naïve.”

He pulled back from your ear to kiss you deeply at the same time he began to move at a much harsher pace, every movement sending jolts through you and a flush to your face as he began to hit on just the right spot. He was so close to you that his chest pressed against your breasts, the added friction driving you crazy. His hair was finally close enough for you to tug on, the resulting groan he let out only spurning you on to be rougher in return. You were both desperately close, but Talon’s brutal pace did not slow one bit. You made a brief mental note to tease him about his stamina later.

Talon came first, pulling his mouth from yours to bite at your neck as he stilled for only a moment before continuing at a gentler rhythm, his fingers playing with your clit as he bit and sucked at your neck. You tightened your grip on him, your nails biting into his back as he carried you through the waves of pleasure until you fell back on the bed, feeling boneless. Talon was quick to follow, pulling out of you and wrapping an arm around you to keep you close to him.

You brought your hand back to brush some hair away from your face, brows furrowing in confusion when you noticed blood under your nails. It only took you a second to make the connection, and you sat up, quickly looking over Talon’s shoulder at his back.

“Your back– I’m sorry!” you hastily apologized, seeing the thin streaks of blood that dotted his back from your scratches.

You frantically ignited your hand with blue and healed the shallow cuts on his back. You had been so panicked that you only realized afterwards that your position leaning over his back had put your breasts right in his face. You made eye contact with his blank stare, and almost fell off the bed as you pulled away in a hurry, only saved by his strong grip on your arm.

“Where are you going?” he asked, his face impassive but eyes betraying his mirth.

“I didn’t mean to–” you started, but cut yourself off with a cry as Talon used his grip on your arm to pull you forward to press his lips against yours.

You allowed him to lay you back down next to him as you kissed. You were fully distracted when he pulled back with a smirk.

“Did you really think I’m repulsed by your breasts?” he asked, and you could only answer him with embarrassed stammering.

“Do you need me to prove that I’m not?” he murmured, palming your breasts with his hands, his thumbs brushing over your nipples and making you shudder.

You couldn’t bring yourself to resist the insatiable assassin, kissing him as he flipped you on your back as his touches became rougher. You certainly wouldn’t be escaping him any time soon, and found yourself immensely grateful that there was nobody around to hear the two of you, because it was a while before Talon would let you rest.

[rsmrymnt-tea]

「 🐳 」 hello! i haven't forgotten about your response—i was unfortunately hit with a series of ✧˖˚ unfortunate events ˚˖✧ (yes... pun intended for the sake of lightheartedness <3) shortly after the response, and i needed time to recover. i've decided to join you along the ride for the obm asks!

1.) how did you first get into obey me? personally, i was playing swd games for quite some time before obey me was released in december of 2019, so once i saw an ad for it i told myself, “well! another silly otome game from them to pass the time”, ahh i was so wrong with just how much flavor it had in all of it's terrible, atrocious glory.

satan was the first one to cause me to go into a miserable spiral once i had a revelation of what his birth actually meant, and thus, began spewing my silly little analyses to the small fandom at the time. i no longer go on longer tangents about satan as much as i do solomon (and recently, mephistopheles due to how noble his values are and how little people seem to realize it), but if i dare see someone in favor of obsessive cat-lover satan i have no issues with bashing their head against a digital brick wall and arguing that he is the least likely of the brothers to be obsessive over anything that falls into that category.

16.) what is your intimacy level with each character? i've often gotten a lot of teasing remarks from friends for my levels, but,

lucifer — 25

mammon — 17

leviathan — 20

satan — 34

asmodeus — 18

beelzebub — 19

belphegor — 20

diavolo — 15

barbatos — 22 (slowly but surely making his way up there)

luke — 14 (i am so sorry you are below diavolo, dearest luke)

simeon — 40

solomon — 42, but nearly 43

“i wonder who their favorite is” gee guys thanks i do whatever i can for the sake of my mc's lore ♡ thank you very much /lh

as always, feel free to include dolasach for whatever reason you feel like if something i said reminded you of her hehe~

Whale nonnie!!! So good to see you!! I'm glad that you got to bounce back from whatever happened to you!! I hope it wasn't too bad and that you're fully okay now >w<

Oml the first question though

1. how did you first get into obey me?

THE WEDDING EVENT oough man I don't even recall how I ended up watching videos of the wedding event but I did and Satan's pulled me in so bad that I downloaded the game >.< flavor in the midst of atrocity is such a good way to describe the game dfhkdfg

Also??? Nonnie now I'm curious if I've ever seen your posts omg? I feel like you'd have such good posts on all three... I've got this feeling that I've probably seen a Satan post or that a Mephisto post of yours helped him rise up my ranks >.<

And I feel you so much on thinking he wouldn't really obsess over anything that simple, even more so to the point of it clouding his judgement and rendering him useless in important moments... Just so counter to the core of his character that aspires towards being well-rounded and useful? Anyway I'm trying to stay mostly positive here hdsdfg

16. what is your intimacy level with each character?

GOSH I had to check...

Lucifer - 24

Mammon - 11

Leviathan - 17

Satan - 33

Asmo - 16

Beel - 16

Belphie - 23

Diavolo - 18

Barbatos - 25

Solomon - 31 (only because it took forever to get a Solomon UR I liked the art of, otherwise he'd be the same as Satan lmao probably higher since you can actually get big hearts with him without gifts...)

Simeon - 23

Luke - 2 (dsfjkhsdf sorry I just never use any Luke cards and using him in Jobs feels weird bc ykno... child labor >.>;;)

Surprisingly representative of how much I enjoy their character...? Except that every brother + Simeon needs to be higher than the royals sdhfkjg Barb's bday UR is just too pretty to not use...

Nonnie I feel you with needing the levels for more lore... The calls!! I need the calls!! But it takes sooo fucking long to grind for intimacy

I feel like each time you drop by I get more and more shocked and curious about who you might be... I'm still listening a lot to the playlist you sent and each time I hear Bird Song I think about you suggesting it and what you said about Dola shdkfhdsfg insane really....

[lunarimpact]

I don’t usually have final thoughts posts for any fics which are commissioned. I tend to keep those feelings to my self, and whatever thoughts I might have. But I am having DanAya feelings and I need to just talk about @panyum‘s comm.

The first thing that hit me after completing it was the fear that so much would be missed. That small details like the truth behind the figure in the painting and why the room isn’t described from the get go, why the destruction is handwaved. That the existential dread which is supposed to creep in along side the anxiety wouldn’t be picked up.

But I think, I think it shows itself well on an additional read through.

I was writing about Schrodinger’s Ayako. The room, her paint room, is the box. And if you open the door, what will you find? Will you find a girl dead or alive.

I wanted to portray that this Ayako, who is not supposed to be alive, but is alive, is part of a Möbius strip that is falling apart. Dantes has invented a terrible loop for her, where she is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a girl who is DEAD. And because this loop is folding in on itself indefinitely, there may be a space where the veil between the “living” Ayako and the alternative Ayako’s may cross paths.

What better way than to pull some Lovecraftian shit for such a moment?

I wanted Ayako to experience not just the overwhelming anxiety of living, but also having perceived an Ayako she shouldn’t even know about. The Lovecraftian horror. The Foreigner. I wanted to draw back to how perceiving an Outter God would usually drive someone to madness, or suicide. So I wanted this portrait to be a focal point to Ayako’s slowly building anxiety. That’s why there’s this implication of the being in the portrait being alive.

Of course, I didn’t want to forget that the reason she has no outlet to deal with this dread and anxiety is because she did something stupid in battle, and got her arm mangled. That was, after all, the plot of the whole comm. It was about Ayako having a mental breakdown because she couldn’t paint anymore. She had lost her only outlet, her only way to unwind when everything was just too much. The events, the nightmares, existing.

But with the room, specifically, I wanted the reader to envision a blank room with only a portrait on an easel and Ayako. A claustrophobic moment where there’s nothing but them. And over time things would just manifest in the room. Other paintings, objects, etc. And when it came to Ayako destroying things, I wanted the focus of the destruction to be the picture. To have Ayako kill the other Ayako, metaphorically speaking.

And the trigger had to be something ridiculous, and mundane. To trigger her mental breakdown, her lashing out. To make you feel the same disassociation from all the fucking destruction. So it was just knocking over the mason jar. The paintbrushes. A fumble.

It was also very, very important for me to use the line: “I’m not recovering”. It could be referencing anything, her physical or mental health, her fragmented soul. That she can’t just bounce back from a breakdown at the drop of a hat. The fact that she is starting to, maybe, pick up on how wrong her existence is. That she’s not supposed to be alive. And I wanted Dantes to not really respond to that sentiment, because if he were honest, he would tell her that the reason she can’t recover is because she’s already dead in a sense. The real Ayako, the OG Ayako is dead. And all he’s been doing is prolonging her soul from it’s actual respite.

My inspirations for this fic were Soma, an amazing video game, Lovecraftian horror in general, Perfect Blue, Schrodinger’s Cat, and just an exploration of Ayako’s amazing lore. There’s a little bit of PMMM as well, dealing with the existence of Homura and Madoka.

And I really, really liked Pan’s simple prompt... I just took it and ran with it. Like really, really ran with it. Obviously you can just take the fic at face value and totally ignore this, but like I just needed to ramble so badly.

[random-thought-depository]

Tangent to my last post: a possible problematic Vulcan racial attitude toward humans that I think might be interesting to explore is inferiority complex.

Setting aside ENT and probably various bits of fan lore for a moment and imagining that humans and Vulcans were more-or-less a mutual first contact... I think the Vulcan experience meeting humans might be a lot like this. Vulcans had a tremendously traumatic historical experience, and in response they embraced an extremely radical and tremendously costly bargain. Vulcans aren’t naturally emotionless, they’re more emotional than humans, so the Surakist lifestyle must be a huge and radical sacrifice for them. And then they meet people who just ... didn’t do that, and are more-or-less doing fine and are more-or-less good neighbors.

You know what that makes me think of? Chris Wayan’s Aeps and Angels:

“Quite by chance, most Abyssian vertebrates are six- not four-limbed...

Two factors have so far blocked Terran birds from building civilizations, despite high intelligence, sociability, and communications skills.

Hand-feet are awkward; not only must you compromise between two shapes and functions, you have to balance on one leg to free up a hand. Stand firmly, use your beak, and you can't easily see what you're doing. Or what the local predators are doing...

Flight limits absolute size, and thus brainweight. It's true that birdbrains are way more efficient than mammals'--but growing much past the size of the largest parrots starts to make flight difficult. And that's dangerous, most places on Earth.

But not necessarily on Abyssia! The huge flightless birds that tend to evolve on Earth's loneliest islands will also tend to appear on Abyssia's deeply isolated landmasses. They'll lack both the above limitations. Huge birds like our Aepyornis or Andalgalornis, but with small forehands, are the most likely candidates for intelligence on Abyssia...

...

Aristotle teased his contemporaries with this splendidly unhelpful definition of humanity: "What is Man? A biped without feathers." Undeniably true, undeniably not to the point. It teased generations of philosophers to define personhood by attributes of the mind. With my six points above, I've taken an earthier approach: my six, if they chanted in a Greek chorus, would answer Aristotle with "What is Man? A smart, talking, friendly, adept creature who creates--stories, monuments, science, art..."

But our Aep will be able to tease his or her contemporaries--of any species--with a distinctly Aristotelian definition that addresses real evolutionary pressures: "A flightless biped." (Forget the "featherless"; I doubt we'll be seeing any Naked Aeps. Plucked chickens aren't sexy; unsexy birds don't found nations.)

All it takes (in deep time, at least) to rule the Abyssian world, is to renounce the sky--and thus grow brains. So they'll have mythic tales of the Fall on Abyssia; but not from Eden, or innocence. From wings, and grace, and Heaven. And... stupidity.

...

The core Aepish myth will be the Fall from Flight. But there's a faint chance that a winged intelligence will evolve on certain invisible islands. Well, they're visible of course; but you won't have seen them as islands. In the geology section I've described how the islands and seamounts of Earth, inverted on Abyssia, form thousands of pit-lakes. Most of these are merely deep lakes with hotsprings, anoxic sulfurous depths, and a rude habit of farting fatal CO2 clouds when they're in a bad mood. Still, they're just deep volcanic lakes. Sometimes drinkable, sometimes dangerous, sometimes both. Not profoundly alien. Except...

In the deserts of Pacifica and Agassiz, the driest places on Abyssia, a few of these pits yawn three miles deep. Their lakes have receded until the evaporation off their shrunken faces drops to match their scant inflow. Modern Earth's closest equivalent, the Dead Sea, is just a few hundred meters down. These are thousands! Up to five kilometers below sea level.

And in their depths, on the shores of tiny briny seas, along creeks that are more waterfall than stream, life has adapted to what might as well be another planet entirely. Oven-heat, salty and alkaline soils, yet weirdly humid for a desert, with mild sun and little ultraviolet--you slowly bake but never sunburn in that hazy light. Strangest of all, air pressure rises down in these pits--up to twice as dense as at sea level.

Here, and here alone on Abyssia, the size-constraint on bird-intelligence is lifted; if there's social pressure toward larger brains and higher intelligence in the "handed" Abyssian equivalents of parrots or corvids, here the body can indulge it; the maximum flight-weight is double Earth's.

...

But how would such a desert tribe of fliers impact the world?

...

Maritime nations and seaports have always been centers of innovation on Earth; but can mere sailors compete with fliers able to travel and spread news twenty times faster? And the Aeps' whole mythology will be based on their ancient bargain: renounce flight for brains. Soar in the body, or the mind; not both. And then along come some desert savages who rejected the price! Angels who rebelled, were cast into a hellish Pit... and emerged triumphant, with both brains and wings. Aeps versus angels! Or devils.

Hey, it's a desert tribe, I had to go all Judeo-Christian on you. Miltonian at least. Okay, okay. Will Greek myth work better for you? Prometheus comes out of the desert with the fire of mind and an intact liver--and lookin' vulture-ugly. Embarrassing feather loss...

As an Aep, what do you do? Do you welcome these fliers so future Abyssian civilization will be winged, or do you defend your inferior genes? Does "we" mean "intelligence" or just "my tribe?"

I see a cultural crisis brewing here. If a biologically better person comes along, should you and your lineage bow out, stop reproducing? Why limit your chicks so? Let their souls be born to Pitian parents, let them be ugly--but winged. So welcome the Pitians, integrate them into world civilization, and let them take over--right?

Or, of course, you could kill them out of spite. But that's a rather continental attitude. Europeans, Chinese, yes, I can see them responding so. But the Pacific cargo cults were a different response. And the Tasmanians, facing invaders with impossible, magical technology, just gave up in despair. And these were mere cultural differences; the same exact species! On Abyssia, we're considering the shock of meeting a people you can't interbreed with, a new species of people with powers you long for but can't learn... that you'll always lack.

Darwin? Come on, that shock was nothing. So we have crude, embarrassing relatives! What else is new? But imagine the shock for the poor aeps, facing their legendary angels. Finding they're the crippled, defective, primitive ones. And just possibly dying out in shame.”

[mira--mira]

Oot Ask Does the Summons hatred and adoration of Hashirama and Madara respectively have anything to do with the Bijuu?

Since in your post about the summons, you mentioned how many summons hate bijuu for taking on their form and since you mentioned summons politics, this could end up with the summons just generally disliking the bijuu on principle.

This could factor into why they dislike Hashirama since he enabled the creation of jinchuriki and forced many summons into close-ish quarter with a jinchuriki/bijuu. Madara on the other hand might be praised for subjugating a bijuu and for opposing Hashirama.

Although it could have something to do with the Mokuton, since Katsuyu seemed to hate Hashirama before he founded Konoha.

Cuz I've got some theories about the Mokuton. You mentioned in your post that summons eat chakra, well Mokuton kinda does the same, since it's known as a chakra suppressor. So maybe there's some history there which leads to their distaste for the Mokuton and by extension Madara. (Not sure why they don't actively hate Tenzo then)

For Madara, well I doubt he spent all of his 70+ years in the cave brooding until Obito showed up. It'd be interesting if he spent time in the summon realm and met some of the Firsts. Especially since his Eye of the Moon plan involved permanently sealing away the Bijuu and the summons don't like the bijuu. . . Although this does open up the interesting possibility of a war between the summons and bijuu/shinobi.

I'm getting a tad ahead of myself aern't I Love your work!!❤️✨❤️✨❤️✨

Anon you're going to make me cry, I love this ask! 😭🥰 I love worldbuilding and trying to drop little clues about lore as we go along so readers can start to get the picture before any big reveal but I'm never quite sure if my clues make sense, if they're too vague or too obvious but reading your theories and how you're putting it together makes me incredibly happy! Your thoughts are right on track and it makes me so happy to know you're thinking about it and formulating theories! I'll give a few more details below the cut!

Yes you are exactly right! The bijuu have a big role to play and the reason why/how they took on the summons form is late-game lore but fundamentally they and the summons have never gotten along. The summons have their issues with Hashirama in part because of the jinchuriki that's right but their biggest gripe comes from new lore (that is directly connected to the mokuton, the summons would similarly dislike Tenzo if they were aware of him, thought not as much as they do Hashirama. Another thing Hashirama had going against him was his own larger-than-life reputation. Kakashi's dogs don't have the same reaction to Hashirama or Tenzo because Inu's line split up with the main line becoming the Inuzuka's sole companions. This left the various other descendants in an awkward limbo where they could make contracts but most did it in "packs" like Kakashi's that were separate from other dogs but also locked them out of the wider summons' politics. They're not considered a cohesive group anymore.

As for Madara, you are right again that the collective summons love him because of his actions against Kurama. When Ningame first sees them after he says his piece to Hashirama, he immediately turns to Madara and says something similar to this (it's still in the rough draft stage lol):

“Gai, why do you accompany one of his kind? I tolerated the Shodai out of necessity but I will not tolerate another…” Ningame’s eyes finally slide to Madara. He braces himself for a similar reaction. Mikuzume might like him but she’s a child. If the birds decided he was at fault for the Uchiha Massacre and their contracts unjustly betrayed they might have cursed his name to such an extent that even Ningame would know. “…Uchiha Madara, as I live and breathe. In the flesh, yet a child.” Slowly Ningame walks forward, eyes wide and starry as he stares at Madara. “I do not know how it is possible but I know in my heart of hearts it is truly you. The man who forced the Kyuubi to its knees. It is an honor to speak with one such as yourself.” Ningame lowers his head and kneels as best a tortoise can.

The real funny thing is Madara and Hashirama for Gai, and Ningame low-key has one for Madara. You are also right that Madara didn't spend all his time in the cave (I'm still thinking of exactly how I want those events to play out lol) but in the time between Madara leaving the village and him returning to fight Hashirama...oh he definitely met with a few summons and the fact that the EotM plan involved sealing them away...well, permanent sealing with no way to spring free is the best solution to unkillable chakra beasts. Mikuzume is too young to know, and this'll be my last spoiler, but because of his original actions with Kurama, Kitsune (who is indeed still alive) is indebted to Madara.

I'm still fiddling with ideas on how to tie things together in this AU's version of the fourth war but I really like the idea of there being a summons/bijuu war and I really like the idea that it could come up but the war itself actually predated the Warring States Period! History doesn't start with the founders and I love the idea of building up more world history in broad strokes so the weight of history and past grudges can be felt as we go through them again.

Thank you so much for your comment, anon! I love reading everyone's thoughts and getting to respond! 💖🥰🥰

[impala1967dwinchester]

Sam Winchester: Poetry, my love

*credit to the gif owner* 

Pairing: Sam x Y/n/ Reader 

Pov: Sam

Warnings: Sweet moments, Sam writing, Sam falling in love with the reader, Mention of Sams past relationship (With Jessica), Internal monologue, (Quick mention of Dean), Love confession. 

Summary: Sam tries to write poems. All of which end up being about or for Y/n, and all of them are about just how much Sam truly loves her. 

A/N- All of these poems are from Pinterest! 

Word Count: 1.9k 

Masterlist

Taglist: @sweetdetectivequeen​ 

I remember when I was in middle and high school, how much I thrived in English class. I love to read, but because I’ve read so much in my life. I’ve found out recently that I absolutely love to write.  

I love to write little blurb of what a hunt was like, and I’ve taken up journaling. Some people might say that writing things out can make them come alive, but I I personally think that once it out on paper, then it kind of cleans the mind. Declutter my head if you will.  

Going through my phone my eyes landed on Pinterest. It wasn’t an app I used very often, but I clicked on it anyway. Going through the process of making an account it asked me what I liked and my interest. I assumed based off what I choose the app would give me different things to look at in my feed.  

That is exactly what happened. A few motivational words popped up, and I scrolled through, then a few quotes popped up. But what really caught my attention was the search bar. I wanted to see what other people thought about writing so that’s what I put in the search bar.

I scrolled for a few minutes, and then the word ‘Poems’ popped up. After the years that I’d been writing not once had I tired doing poetry, so I clicked on it. The first poem that was in the stream said the following;  

The most  

beautiful part is,  

I wasn’t even looking  

when I found you.  

Man, that was so calming and peaceful. A true statement. It made me think of Y/n. The way she just was placed into our life, I hadn’t been looking. I stopped looking when after Jessica died.  

I stopped thinking that i deserved to find love. I stopped believing I was worth it. But that was all before Y/n came into my life. She was sweetest person you’ll ever met. She always wears a smile regardless of how bad a situation could get.  

She is nerdy like me, she loved to read through the lore books, making it an effort to help me when I couldn’t quite figure something out on my own. The thing about Y/n is she wasn’t just like me, she disappears for hours, in the kitchen cooking with Dean, or making pie for him. She is the best thing to come into our lives since forever.  

Again, I started to read through posts on Pinterest. I wondered how many of these posts were meant to be about the girl of someone dreams. I scrolled through seeing a ton of different poems. Some were sad, about how breakable a women’s heart really is. Some on the other hand were about falling in love with the girl of your dreams.  

Another poem said;  

If you look carefully,  

She’s slowly falling in love with you,  

But she doesn’t want you to find out,  

Well, not yet.”

This makes me think even more about Y/n. Does she love me? Is she falling in love with me and doesn’t want me to find out? Is she falling in love with me, like I am with her? I have so many questions that I couldn’t possibly ask her.  

I wonder if she sits in bed like I do and fantasize over her. I sound creepy, but I honestly want to know. I pay attention to her, and her actions. When she’s with Dean she isn’t touchy. When we’re on a hunt, she chooses to sleep in bed with me. She talks about everything with me. Let’s me in, let’s me comfort her.  

Is this her way of saying I want to be with you Sam? I once again start to scroll through the feed, looking and reading through all the poems. Coming across another one, this one though made me stop and think. Made me realize a few things more about Y/n.  

“Find Someone who makes you realize three things: One, that home is not a place, but a feeling. Two, that time is not measured by a clock, but by moments. And three, that heartbeats are not heard, but felt and shared.”  

I realized all of those things when I thought of Y/n. When I was with Y/n no matter where we were I felt at home with her. We could be hundreds of miles away from the bunker, deep in a hunt. As long as she was there, I was happy, content, and at peace.  

Number two took me a few times to really figure out. The first time I noticed it was our first Christmas with Y/n. She’d been with us for a whole year, and I couldn’t help but go out and get her something. I went to our local book store, and picked up 3 historical novels, based on what she’d read and what she had with her when she arrived at the bunker. When she opened her gifts, I couldn’t start to describe her smile. And then she dropped her books and run up to me, and crushed in her slender frame. This hug was different than others, the other hugs were ones that were in fear of losing each other, ones that were meant as apologies.  

The second time I noticed it was Dean’s birthday. Y/n and I had gone out shopping for Dean first separate and then together. We wanted to get him a gift that suited him. We walked around the mall, both searching for the best store to choose from. “Oh Sammy... oops sorry I meant Sam. Look over there.” She spoke.  

Moments like this where she was afraid to be like this way with me. “You can call me Sammy, Y/n. It doesn’t bother me when you do it.” I said involuntarily. I little blush rose to her cheeks, “Okay Sammy. There’s a store looks like a cowboy themed place.” She said walking towards the store.  

Rarely would I do something out of my comfort zone, and not ask the other person. But before Y/n could get too far away from me, I grabbed her wrist and slipped our hands together. I made a quick excuse when she turned around and looked down at our hands and then me. “I just don’t want to get lost from you; this place does seem pretty huge.” I had said.  

In moments when we were hurt in hunts. Moments where it seemed like we might say goodbye forever. I had Y/n in my arms in the back seat of the impala, she had a huge gash through her back, thankfully nothing had hit any vital organs or hit her spinal cord.  

She sat in my lap her hands wrapped around my neck, our hearts pressed tightly together, I was grasping tightly to her. Trying to keep myself tethered to her. I focused on her breathing. Focused on the scent of the peach shampoo that still lingered in her hair.  

I would see Dean looking in the back through the mirror. I didn’t have time to deal with his comments so i dropped my gaze, I was trying so hard to not break down, in front of my big brother or Y/n. Y/n needs a strong man, so that’s what I’ll be right now, just for her.  

As  i thought about past moments. I realized that I couldn’t keep the charade up anymore, about I felt towards Y/n. Making myself close out of the very calming app, I clicked on to the massaging app.  

Sliding the small list of contacts, I did I have. I sent Dean an “goodnight” message before slipping out of our conversation and into Y/n and I conversation. I started to type and then deleted it.  

I fell into this rhyme for a what seemed like an hour, of me saying how I felt and then deleting it. I received a “Good night bitch 😴” Message from Dean. I slide it off my screen refocusing on my message to Y/n.  

Then all the sudden it clicked in my head. And I started typing my message out. Careful to phrase words the particular way.  

“In you, I have finally found all I never dared dream I could deserve or have- the kind of love that is rare. Being known in a way that touches the deepest parts of me. Accepted in a way that blows my mind.”  

I sent this part to her. I waited till she has read the massage. Then only a few moments later I saw a message from her pop up.  

“Sammy what are you saying?” Y/n asked. So, I started to write the second part of my message.

“In you, Y/n the love I have always desired to give now has a place to call home, I hope? I have been skeptic, but you are my undeniable miracle. The questions don’t matter anymore.” I sent once again waiting for another message back from Y/n.  

What I got surprised me. “Come to my room, Sammy.” She sent. I quickly uncovered myself from the thin blanket, and slipped on a Henley, along with my slippers.  

I opened my door, and pretty much ran down the hall way, my phone still tightly placed in my hand. I slowed down as I made my way in front of Y/n’s door. I knocked and was granted access.  

“Come in Sammy.” She said in her cute voice. I walked in, and shut the door softly. Before turning on my heels and standing still. “You can come over here and sit down with me Sammy.” So, I did as she said.  

I walked over and sat down next to her. “So, Sammy, what did you mean by your message?” She asked grabbing my much larger hand with her much smaller hand.  

I hadn’t ever noticed that, but instead of answering Y/n question I found our hands more interesting. “Sammy?” She said once again, but her voice was softer and quiet.  

“I hope to god I’m not stepping over a boundary, but what I was trying to say was that I think... Wait No I know that I’ve fallen for you more deeply than I think I can understand. And I hope that you feel the same way?” I said rubbing my calloused thumb over the knuckles on her left hands.  

“Sammy, I think I’ve fallen in love with you too.” Y/n said. Smiling showing off her bright eyes, and dimples on her cheeks.  

“We have finally found each other, and that is enough. Right?” I said still a little worried I might say something wrong and ruin that whole moment.  

“Yeah Sammy, I hop... I know that it’s enough, because when I’m with you I fell at peace and I wouldn’t want anything else then that.” She spoke. I brought my hand up to her cheek cupping it in my hand, and brought her close to my chest.  

I kissed her lips, and god if it wasn’t the most intoxicating thing, I’ve ever tasted. I would be lying, she tasted like dark chocolate, and honey. Our lips didn’t fight for dominance, it was just a sweet kiss. Something that made this moment just so much more real.  

“God, I love you so much Winchester.” Y/n said against my lips. I only smiled and whispered into her lips “I love you too, Y/L/N”  “And don’t worry I’ll keep Dean from teasing the both of us.” I spoke. 

Completed on : 03/14/2021 

[all1e23]

Lemon Pancakes [One-shot]

Summary: Mother’s Day in the Barnes house has changed over the years.

Warnings:  N/A Unless you count a disgusting amount of fluff to be a warning.

A/N:  Sooo... this came out of nowhere, but it’s grown-up Leo. He’s twenty-fourish (math is hard) and working as an RN.  None of the kids are living at home in this one-shot.This is just Beck and Leo in this one-shot and no Bucky. Thank you to my beautiful @moonbeambucky​ for looking it over for me. If you have not read the series Astrophile, THERE WLL BE MAJOR SPOILERS.  

Catch up on the series here!

***My fics are not to be saved or posted on any other sites without my written permission. Reblogs are my jam, though! Thanks!*

Mother’s day 2047

It was the first Mother’s Day in, God, Y/n can’t remember how long it’s been, twenty-five years? Yeah, that sounds about right. The first Mother’s day in twenty-five years that she’s had to spend alone. Of course, the last time she spent this day alone, she didn’t have three beautiful children and a loving husband. It was merely another day amongst the rest that had seemed to blend together. Then she met Orion and Bucky. Suddenly, it was no longer ‘just another day’ and it became one of her most favorite days of the year. Still is, despite waking up to an empty house this morning.

Bucky hadn’t wanted to leave her home alone this morning. He tried everything he could to get out of work, but he couldn’t find anyone to cover his shift. On top of working the entire day leading up, they needed Bucky to fill in for someone else for half the day, and her kids?

Well, they are all grown up and have lives of their own.

Orion is in California, something they all had to get used to long before this morning. It wasn’t so bad. Flights aren’t awful and they are making use of their frequent flyer miles. Leo took it the hardest. They make it work. Whatever it takes for Orion to be happy and she’s the happiest she’s ever been. They have Theo to thank for that. So, California isn’t so bad.  Since she can’t be there in person, there was a sweet text from Orion, when Y/n woke this morning and later that night they have a FaceTime date after Y/n’s Mother’s Day dinner this evening at someplace the kids picked out as a surprise. Cassie’s classes are taking a lot out of her semester, and after listening to her apologize for nearly an hour, Y/n told her daughter to stay home and get some studying in before they meet at six. Despite the agreement, Cassie made sure to shower Y/n’s social media with more posts than necessary to show her affection for her mother.

As for Leo, well, he had been tight-lipped about his plans for this morning. Y/n suspects it’s because of a pretty girl, but she would wait for Leo to come talk to her about whatever has been keeping him so busy, a girl or not. He always does.

Y/n slowly peels herself out of bed to shower and throws on an old pair of jeans and loose-fitting white scoop neck shirt. No need to dress up today. Her only plans consist of those large comfy pillows piled on the couch and one of her books. Maybe Star Lore. It’s one of her daughter’s favorites afterall.  Y/n reaches the bottom of the stairs, and she comes to a halt when she spots the tall, dark-haired man standing at the stove.

This is unexpected.

Leo peeks over his shoulder when he hears the squeaky stair and grins at the sight of his mother’s shock.  “Mornin’, mama. Pancakes should be ready any minute. Got you some tea, or there’s a pot of coffee ready if you want it.“

"I– Morning, baby.”

Y/n’s gaze shifts from her son to the kitchen island where her galaxy mug is resting, along with two place settings and a huge bouquet of pink star lilies. She sits down at the counter and grins at the flowers in front of her. There’s a card that she will read later because Leo can sometimes get a little shy when he’s in the spotlight like that. One thing he does not share with Cassie. Leo flicks the stove off and turns around to stack two fresh lemon pancakes on her plate, Y/n eyes her son carefully as he sits down beside her.

This has Bucky written all over it.

“Did your father put you up to this?”

Leo chuckles but shakes his head.

“No, dad mentioned he had to work till noon because of some extra shift when I talked to him yesterday, and I didn’t want you home alone. I hate when you have to sit here all alone on a normal day, so I wasn’t about to let it happen today.”

He leans over the small between them and presses a kiss to her cheek. Y/n smiles and strokes his scruff covered cheek affectionately.

“My sweet boy. Always looking out for me.“

Leo groans at the soft tone in her voice but keeps his smile. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” 

“I won’t say a word,“ Y/n chuckles. Leo’s teasing her, and she knows that. Leo’s never minded anyone seeing his affection for her or his sisters. He loves his family and doesn’t care who knows, something he learned from watching Bucky love on his family over the years.

“So.” Y/n tests as she picks up her fork.

“So,” Leo repeats, cautiously.

“How’s work? Oliver mentioned something to Steve about some girl you’ve been gushing about non-stop.”

"Ollie is a dead man,” Leo grumbles under his breath and drops his fork to his plate, “Ma. No. She’s… I don’t– We are just friends. Let’s talk about you today. Meet anyone new? Take anyone out on a date? Do I get two Christmases? Let me be the one to break it to Cassie. She won’t handle it well.“  

Y/n snorts and shakes her head. “You really want to hear about my last date? Well, we were going to go to dinner, but you know your dad. We never made it out the front door–”

With his own joke turned back around on him, Leo shudders and quickly shakes his head, regarding her with pleading eyes. “Please, no. Don’t. It’s bad enough you guys are all over each other all the time. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“That will teach you to tease your mother.”

“Trust me, it won’t happen again.”

Leo jabs his stack of lemon pancakes with his fork and tilts his head to the side, staring at the cup of coffee in front of him with a furrowed brow. Y/n lets him sit like that for a while before she steps in and ensures nothing more serious is going on.

“You okay sweetheart?”

His head jerks up at the sound of her voice, and Leo smiles, “Yeah, mama. Just thinkin’.”

“About the girl, you most certainly don’t have a crush on?”

Leo makes a face, showing a playful defeat and hangs his head.

“Yeah, I might be thinking about her.”

Y/n leans back against her chair and waits, letting him come to it in his own time. He’s a lot like Orion in that way, and they both get it from Bucky. No one can push them to say what’s in their head or on their hearts.

“If, uh, let’s just say there’s this girl. She’s smart. So smart, mama and God, is she pretty. Ballsy and has a quick wit. I’m pretty sure she only sees me as a friend, and I’ve been tryin’ to show her she’s not just some girl. I want her to be the girl. I don’t know. I get around her, and I don’t know what comes over me. Maybe I’m missin’ the mark ‘cause I don’t think she even sees me.”

Leo looks over at his mom, and she grins. His face heats up, and he clears his throat, awkwardly stuttering, “I mean, hypothetical… if that was somethin’ that was happening. To Ollie. Not to me… What, uh, what would you tell him?”

Y/n leans forward and covers Leo’s hand with her own. “Ollie? You mean the same Ollie that has been in love with Ariel Tucker since he was seven years old and proudly announced he would marry her one day? If he was struggling to admit his crush?”  

He grinned sheepishly and nodded. 

“Uh, Yes?”  

Y/n had to hold back her laughter. Okay, if he wasn’t ready to admit she wouldn’t force him.

“I guess I would tell him… I would say don't worry about her noticing you. She sees you, sweetheart. You’ve got my eyes and your daddy’s charm. Not the mention that kind heart you wear on your sleeve and give so freely. Trust me, she sees you. Tell her how you feel. Tell her everything you told me.”

Leo’s brow furrows. “That’s it? Just tell her?”

“Surprisingly simple, isn’t it?”

 Y/n grins.

“Ask her out, baby. Make sure she knows it’s a date and be very honest with her.”

“You mean Ollie ask her out?”

Y/n smiles. 

“Yes, tell Oliver I said, tell her how you feel before she thinks you don’t feel anything at all.”

“That what dad did?”

Y/n snorts and gives his hand one last squeeze before letting go. “Let’s just say if we both had been more direct, you probably would have been born a few months earlier.”

Leo cringes and waves his hands back forth to stop any further talk of… this. “Gross. Please stop.”

She can’t help but laugh at her son’s unenthusiastic response. He drops his hands into his lap and stares up at the ceiling, whispering, “You, uh, you really think it will be that easy?”

“I have a feeling about this one, sweetheart. Trust me.”  

He does trust her. The same way the girls do. The same way they all trust Bucky. Leo drops his gaze and meets her eyes, cracking that charming Barnes grin and asks, “I know everyone isn’t here, and Ollie’s girl trouble took up most of breakfast but is it a good Mother’s Day mornin’, mama?”

“Yeah, sweetheart. It was a perfect morning.”