#so I went 'I know what leukemia is‚ there's people around me dying from it' and the gasp that went around the room was audible

[struggling-to-find-home]

Nothing quite like having a grandma who has blood cancer when every single subject really likes talking about blood cancer🤩🤩🤩

I am not doing well

[heythereimb]

B, where have you been?

Hey there I'm B. In December of 2022, Technodad gave me the challenge of finding one good thing in each day no matter how small. For a while there I was posting monthly lists of good things that happened.

Then in March of 2024 I went into remission for sarcoma after almost two years. I tried to keep my lists up but it felt strange. If you've never seen one of my posts, I haven’t posted in a while. I went back to school, got back into the swing of life again after being sick for so long. It was hard. I wish I'd made lists for the last few months.

This past week I was diagnosed with leukemia, a kind of blood cancer.

I went through so much chemotherapy fighting off the sarcoma that my body has rebelled and developed a new kind of cancer.

This time I don't know what's going to happen. It's so different from last time.

The anxiety I feel around this has kept me from sleeping well the last few weeks. I feel like I'm part of study on sleep deprivation. My nights get later and my mornings get earlier. I have laid in bed and watched the sun come up half a dozen times. All the days are blurring together into one long haze of fear and uncertainty.

I've been told some of the worst news a person can hear. I've heard three words no person wants to hear, "You have cancer". I've heard four words no one with cancer wants to hear, "We're out of options" I've also heard good news, "The treatment is working" and "You're in remission".

I've had a lot of doctors tell me a lot of things about how my life is going to play out and how much of it they think I'm going to have. I've been told I wouldn't see the age of 23. I've been told to start getting my affairs in order. I've been told that I was dying.

That I was 22 and dying.

I'm 23 now. I made it through all of that. I fought odds that were never in my favor. I beat a cancer that most people don't get until their 60s. I beat it spreading to my lungs. I beat it without having my leg amputated. I beat it and I survived.

I survived.

I was in remission.

I'm still in remission.

So why am I crying? Why do I have to do this all over again? Why did I have to hear the words "You have cancer again"?

This feels like some kind of sick joke. Like the god I prayed to every night has decided to play a game with my life. Like I am a puppet in a show I didn't ask to be in. A pawn in a game I didn't want to play. A soldier in a war I didn't know was going on.

So here I am. Again. Facing an uncertain future.

This time I'm lucky to have a support system. My lovely partner, my friends, Technodad, and hopefully still all of y'all.

Remember to take the time to appreciate each day that you have. If you can, share a good thing that happened to you this past month.

Until next time.

[fandom-blackhole]

No, ok its been almost 24 hrs since I watched episode 5 of The Last of Us and I really can't stop thinking about it. SPOILERS

Like can you imagine living in and growing up in a QZ that is notorious around the country for having some of the lowest of the low FEDRA soldiers, ones that are known to dish out harsh and cruel punishments, who rape and murder for little reason. Then you find a bit of hope in a man running a resistance, who's trying to make the QZ a better, safer place for the people, someone you find that you can look to, a good leader. But oh no, suddenly your younger brother, who already has a disability that limits him greatly in the world you live in, suddenly has leukemia and the only way you can get medicine that will help him is if you trade someone else's life for his own. Imagine having to grapple with that guilt, with having to make yourself decide between your only family left and a man you see as one of the few good ones left, and ultimately deciding to save your brother. And it works, your brother is safe, healed and no longer sick, but now you're hated by pretty much everybody. So when shit goes down and the resistance led by the man's sister takes over, you know you have to leave because once again, you're brother's life is in danger, so you do whatever you have too, including going into tunnels that are known to have infected and recruit a man you've never met but can tell is very dangerous just from what you've seen. And well things go well, you get through the tunnels without fighting any infected, you've heard your brother laugh and seen him have fun for the first time in who knows how long, things are looking up. But boom, everything goes to shit in a blink of an eye, a whole army shows up lead by the sister, you beg for her to let your brother go and she just sneers about kids dying everyday and that maybe he was meant to die. And welp, boom again, shit gets worse and he'll pretty much unleashes before your eyes and you watch as the infected start taking down everyone around you. But you do make it out, some how unscathed and you feel like the luckiest man on the planet, your brother is here, alive and happy, you get an offer to go to Wyoming with the man that you've teamed up with, everything feels like its gonna be okay for the first time since ever.....what you don't expect is the next morning to wake up to your brother trying to claw and bite at the girl you'd been traveling with, the girl he'd made friends with. You don't expect things to happen so fast and to act on instinct as you shoot your only family, your only reason to keep pushing for better. The kid you've raised and loved and cherished and fought to save time and time again in what felt like a constant uphill battle. You never expected this. You thought you were safe, that HE was safe. What was it all? Nothing? Every decision, every hard choice, every sacrifice for this to be the way he went.....

Idk, just as someone with 2 younger sisters that I played a big role in raising and trying to protect, I can relate to Henry....and I know that I too wouldn't be able to go on if that happened to me, especially if it was by my hand.....

[miss-celestial-being]

In Sickness And In Health- D.M. (pt2)

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request | masterlist

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665 Words

request: no

warnings: dad!Draco, husband!Draco, mom!reader, wife!reader, cancer (leukemia), loss of hair, baby!scorpious

summary: Y/n's first month in chemotherapy

pronouns: she/her

house: any

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I hope you like this pt2!!

previous | next

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Y/n's POV

It has been a few weeks since I first started my chemotherapy and things have been going...fine. I get an IV every treatment so that's fun. My nurse checks everything afterwards and tells me I'm alright, but I don't feel alright.

I've been tired. I've been nauseous. My hair is thinner. Oh don't even get me started on my hair. Every time I wash it or brush it, a clump of it falls out. I try to pretend like nothing's happening, but it is. Something is definitely happening.

No one's POV

One day, Scorpious is watching his mother get ready before she takes him to school and he sees something. "Mama, why's your hair all weird?" Y/n looked at him through her mirror and gulped. "Well..." she couldn't quite find the right words to tell her son she was dying.

"I-I'm very sick and well," she turned to the boy and continued, "what I do to get better causes me to lose my hair." Scorpious looked confused. "Huh?" Y/n looked down. "The treatments that heal me cause me to lose hair." Scorpious' mouth formed an "o" shape in realization. "So that's why some spots don't have any hair?" Y/n nodded sadly.

"Are you ok Mama? You look sad." Y/n nodded as she tried to stop the tears forming in her eyes. "I'm alright, just stressed." Scorpious stood up and wrapped his little arms around her.

Y/n let the tears fall as her son hugged her. She didn't want to, she wanted to be strong, but her body had other plans as she cried in the small boy's arms. Scorpious cried with his mother.

When Y/n pulled back she wiped the tears from Scorpious' eyes and Scorpious did the same to her. "How about, I call you in as absent for school and we go get ice cream?" Scorpious smiled widely and nodded.

Y/n called the school, which were very understanding, and grabbed a hat before leaving to get ice cream. "Mama why are you wearing a hat?" Y/n looked down at the boy, "Because I don't want people seeing my hair." Scorpious frowned. "But you look beautiful Mama." Y/n almost cried again. "Let's go get our ice cream."

When they got back Draco was pacing in the living room. He sighed when he saw them. "The school called to let me know Scorpious was called out of school so I rushed home and you weren't here." Be said in a whisper to his wife. "We went to get ice cream." Draco nodded.

Y/n went to chase after Scorpious, but Drack held her back. "Why are you wearing a hat?" Y/n sighed before pulling it off. She showed Draco the thin hair, the spots with no hair, but Draco just saw his beautiful wife.

"I just- I don't like my hair." Y/n said sadly. Draco had an idea. "Come with me." He took her into the bathroom and left to get Scorpious. "He grabbed out his razor and set in on the counter.

"Let's shave it." He finally said. Scorpious was very excited. Y/n looked at the razor, then at the mirror, and back at the razor. "Ok."

For the next hour, Draco, Y/n, and Scorpious shaved Y/n's head as a family. They cracked jokes, acted out scenes in movies with the razor, it made it all a lot better for Y/n. Because she knew she wouldn't be alone.

That night as Draco and Y/n were getting ready for bed, Draco got under the covers and made grabby hands to Y/n. Y/n laughed quietly and got in bed beside him. He pulled her into him and kissed her bare head. Y/n sighed. "I'm gonna miss my hair." Draco laughed. "I don't care what you look like, as long as you're still you." He said before they both fell asleep. Y/n was happy.

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This one was happy family time so I hope you liked it. Please request something, link at the top.

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Taglist: @mvdbldd @dr4cking @beautiful-yn @a-aizawa @animeways @missryerye @wintermorninghaze

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[godofplumsandthunder]

Twisted Fate

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Warnings: Cancer, both Bucky and reader have cancer, Major Character death, brief hospital terms mainly reffering to cancer treatment. References to amputation.

A/N: This was written for the lovely @eurynome827​ 2k celebration. I got a lovely quote of lyrics from Hadestown, which I wanted to do something that was based off of the musical, but I couldn’t figure anything out. Then I had a big anniversary come up and this was came out instead. It’s very angsty, I cried a lot, and well I hope you like it.

The low, steady hum of the fan fills the awkward silence. The psychiatrist, newly assigned to the case, still doesn’t feel comfortable. “Case number 32557038” was widely known in the health care center. The whispers and rumors floated their way down the hall, past the copy machine, filling the office with this chilling tale. Some regarded it as a terrible series of bad luck, others thought it was an act of some benevolent God, pouring his rage on this poor couple. Dr. Breynord, after reading the notes on the file, Breynord knew that this case was perhaps the worst case of bad luck she ever saw in her career, and, maybe it was her stubbornness or naive belief in medicine, but Dr. Breynord was going to help this poor man get the peace he so desperately needs.

“James,” Dr. Breynord’s voice breaks the silence of the office, “I’ve read what my colleagues had to say about your case, but, I’d like you to tell me what has happened if you feel comfortable.”

Shifting in his seat, James sighs, with a small nod of the head, he starts at the beginning.

Bucky Barnes was used to change. Granted, it was other people’s change, but it was still change nonetheless. The poor folks that sat next to him each clinic visit changed, his caretakers changed, it seemed as if the whole world changed around him, while he was stuck in some perpetual hell. Every day dragged out in the same dull, and nauseating feeling, and at times, Bucky felt he was in an endless loop, forsaken by some deity he didn’t believe in. But, for however long Bucky has left in this fallen and cruel world, he’ll remember when you walked in, shattering the miserable purgatory he was banished to, he’ll always remember the day you changed his life.

It happened during his first transfusion session after his surgery. His arm, still wrapped in bandage, IV tubing leading straight to his heart, pumped his body full of liquids, as he waited for the toxic poison to enter his body. He always found it ironic, the “medicine” that was supposed to save his life, that was too dangerous for the nurses to touch with their bare hands, was willingly flushed into his body. Hair loss, mouth sores, and muscle aches were the better side effects. He can’t help but think about what is coming, especially as he sees his nurse, Thor, come over with the freshly made batch of poison [STRIKE THROUGH], chemotherapy as his doctor would want him to call it. Hanging the bag on his IV pole, Thor looks over at Bucky, giving him the “I’m going to go on a rant about something you should care about” look. 

“Now James, we’re getting a new patient today. It’s their first transfusion. They’re going to be sitting in the pod next to you. I swear to the gods, I best not hear another complaint about your attitude.”

“Me? An attitude? No, I think you got me confused with someone else. I’m the brightest little ball of sunshine here!” Bucky can’t help but chuckle. It’s not his fault he wasn’t a “warrior”, blasting “Fight Song” 24/7, as he sips on a kale smoothie with coffee suppositories shoved up his ass. T

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Barnes,” Thor shakes his head as he cleans up his station, “don’t think I won’t throw your bald ass out of here. That cancer sob story, won’t work on me.” 

Bucky goes back to his phone, already feeling the effects of the chemo. No matter how many anti-nausea meds they fed him, Cisplatin always makes him sick. So, he had the right to act like a grumpy old grandpa. While he scrolls through his social media feed, seeing all the accomplishments, brags, and just shit of his friends, Bucky hears your sniffles, as you make your way down to the end of the Oncology clinic, taking a seat next to Bucky. Even if Thor hadn’t given him the heads up, he would have known you were fresh meat. One infusion, his mom asked him how he could tell. It was easy for Bucky, it all had to do with the eyes. A cancer diagnosis shatters you. It kills all hope, light, and goodness that’s in you. You turn completely numb to the world, to the point where your own wailing and sobs feel muted. Bucky saw all of that in your eyes. Behind the puffy, redness, saw the shards of hope, the fear of the unknown. Before you could reach your seat, you stumble, spilling your possessions that you carried all over the floor. Bucky watches quietly as you quickly pick up your items, collapsing into the chair next to him. 

“Sorry I couldn’t give you a hand, only have the one,” he wiggles his stump, and he's met with silence. Talk about a rough crowd, he thinks, his nephews love his stumpy jokes. “So,” Bucky continues, “what are you in for? I’m a sarcoma, in the arm.” You sniffle as you turn your body to look at this new man.

“Leukemia,” you confess, voice barely above a whisper. It takes a real effort to say it out loud because then it makes all of this real.

“That’s good then,” the “sarcoma” man says to you, and Bucky can see the confusion, and pain on your face.

“How is that good? How is cancer good?”

Using his arm, Bucky points around the room, giving you a tour of the room.

“See him, that’s Riley, he has an inoperable brain tumor. That young kid, with the Switch? His name is Peter, his body is chemo resistant. So yeah, leukemia is good. If you haven’t learned it yet, not all cancers are made equal.”

“Oh,” you barely make out. What were you supposed to say to that? 

=====

Much to Bucky’s surprise, he actually enjoyed having your company. Your treatments lined up and so you both got to know each other well. Bucky enjoyed having someone close to his age that understood his problems. And it also didn’t hurt that you had such a great personality, you got Bucky’s dark humor (and it went without saying that you understood it was his way of coping), and you looked great. Not many people can rock a bald head. And Bucky has seen his fair share, and he can say with confidence, you rocked it. Not covering it up with caps, scarves, or wigs. Because why should you hide away? For the first time since his diagnosis, Bucky had a purpose. So, while his immune system allowed him to leave the house, he picked up a bouquet of fake flowers (neutropenia life, am I right?) and a box of chocolates to take with him to the next transfusion. When he got to the clinic, Bucky was a bit worried to see that you weren’t next to him. Instead, there sat Barb, 75 years old with breast cancer. 

“Oh sweetie, are those for me?” Barb looks at the flowers in Bucky’s hand. 

“No!” He snaps, as closes the curtain that surrounds his chair. He hears some huffs and complaints from Barb, but frankly, he doesn’t give a damn. Bucky only has one thing on his mind: you. 

“Are you alright? You’re not here at Club Med” Bucky texts as quickly as his one hand would let him. Dropping his phone, Bucky stares at it all while the nurses prep him. And because of damn, HIPAA, none of the nurses can tell him where you’re at. Minutes turn into hours, and by the time Bucky’s infusion ends, you still haven’t responded to him or shown up at the clinic. 

“Hope you’re okay. Call or text me. I'm worried” Bucky sighs, realizing how much you made his chemo treatments more bearable. How your laugh could make him forget of the poison he had to take, or how the light in your eyes could make him forget, even just for a bit, how much his arm stump was hurting. You were a drug, more potent than any he’s had before, and Bucky was becoming addicted. He’s picking at the hamburger he got for dinner, not having much of an appetite when his phone goes off. Seeing it’s from you, he rushes to answer. 

“Y/N! I… Where were you? I missed you today. I had to sit by Barb and…” The sounds of your cries cut Bucky off. 

“Are you okay?”

“No, Buck. I… Got some bad news today.” 

“Where are you?” He asks. He knows you’re alone, and speaking from experience, you never want to be alone when you get bad news. He knows from experience.

“Buck…” you sigh, “It’s fine. Really.” 

“Please, Y/N, I know what it’s like to be alone after getting this kind of news. Please, let me be there for you.” Breaking further down into tears, you cry at Bucky’s actions, actions of love. 

“I’ll send you my address,” Bucky gathers the flowers and chocolates as he rushes to your apartment, breaking a few traffic laws to get there faster. When he gets there, the image of you, opening the door, eyes swollen from crying breaks his heart. 

“Oh, Y/N,” Bucky sweeps you into his arm, as he closes the door behind, “tell me what’s going on hun.” 

You both sit on the couch, the bag with the flowers and chocolate lay at your feet, as you stay in Bucky’s embrace. 

“I’m… I’m dying Buck!” You manage to say in-between odds. “Dr. Fair... gave me three months to live. There’s nothing else they can do.” You break down in his arms, that last straw finally breaking, as you tell your newfound best friend, the person you were supposed to beat cancer with. Bucky tries his best to remain strong, to be the rock, the foundation you need, but you’re not the only one that is losing a friend. You sit in each other's embrace, as you mourn. You cry for all the missed opportunities, laughs, and memories that won’t be made. 

“What am I going to do,” you whisper, your voice hoarse from crying. 

Kissing your head, Bucky pulls you in closer, “we, are going to make these three months, the best three months you’ve ever had.”

Bucky lives up to his promise, spending every hour he isn’t in the hospital with you. The time you spent together changed your relationship. Neither had to officially say the words to make your relationship official. It was just you, and Bucky. Holding each other close, as the tempest waged on, trying to beat you into submission. You go on walks in the park, picnics, and one night when you both had the energy, went skinny dipping. Your logic being, what are the cops going to do? Arrest two cancer patients, with one of them being terminal? You threw caution to the wind and simply lived. Lived, breathed, and loved. Things seemed to be perfect until reality hit.

Your body wasn’t keeping up. Your cancer was spreading faster than they predicted. The doctors couldn’t give you an explanation as to why the cancer was spreading so fast. It shouldn’t have been. Soon, home hospice came, to try to make you more comfortable. And like the good partner he was, Bucky spent every minute by your side. That’s why, when you felt the inevitable coming, you felt your body give in to the tiredness of fighting, you grab Bucky’s hand. 

“I love you, James Bucky Barnes,” you weakly say, giving him one last affirmation, as you went to sleep, for one last time. 

As Bucky wakes up from his nap, feeling your cold body, he tries to ruse you back awake. Once he realizes what has happened, the last bit of humanity inside of Bucky snapped. He lets out a blood-curdling scream, as tears stream down his face. He strikes your face, pleas escape his mouth. Pleas to you, to a God he has long stopped believing in. His body shakes, his tears wetting your hair, as he holds you for one last time. 

=====

“Oh James,” Dr. Breynord grabs herself a tissue before handing Bucky the box of tissues. “I truly am so sorry to hear that. I want you to know that I am here to help you get happy again, and to heal.”

Bucky sighs and turns away from the doctor as he wipes his eyes. “You’re just like the rest of them. You didn’t listen to me.” 

Breynord was surprised that this was Bucky’s complaint. The other doctors had warned her that Bucky could be sarcastic, standoff-ish, and even flat-out rude to them. Breynord thought she did a good job listening to his story, what did she miss.

“I… I don’t think I understand what you mean, James.”

Bucky lets out a heartless, empty laugh, “you want me to be happy again. I’m never going to be. Not only do I have to live with the guilt of surviving, when she died, in my arms, but I’ll also never find another soul like hers. We had a connection, you know. It felt like we met before. When I held her in my arm, and her arms would wrap around me, it felt like I had the whole world in my arms. I didn’t need anything else when I had Y/N.” 

“So tell me doc, what’s the point of carrying on?”

[shespeaksinsongs]

You Are My New Fear | Letters To My Mom

TW: MOMMY ISSUES, MENTIONS OF DEPRESSION, SUICIDE, AND ANXIETY.

Me in my game room at about five years old.

I wish somebody would have told me that that smile I used to slather onto my face so effortlessly would soon become something I forced. I'm not sure if it would have made a difference, but it's best to be prepared in any case.

-

"What's your biggest fear?" My elementary best friend asked, kicking her feet giddily under the table. We were still too little to reach the floor.

"Drowning." I'd say, with a panicked look on my face, growing pale at the mere thought of dying that way.

-

"What are you most afraid of, hija?" My dad asked on our regular morning car rides to school.

"Drowning." I'd say, without even thinking twice. The answer was almost prepared, seeing as how casually it rolled off my tongue.

-

"What's your biggest fear?" My friend asked in the comfort of her room, watching as I shifted uncomfortably in my spot on her bed.

"Becoming my mother." I'd say wishing that drowning was the most of my worries.

-

I don't know when my default answer of drowning to death switched to the terrifying idea that I would, one day, become my mother. Still, somewhere along the lines, those little moments that I would suck up to my mom and gift her pretty pictures I spent hours working on and picking daisies from my backyard for her turned into scheduling my crying for nighttime when everyone was asleep.

Slowly but surely, I became uneasy about the idea of marriage, fearing that I'd only ruin it and become a wife like my mother. The idea of having children scared me to the point where I felt I would rather sacrifice my own happiness so that my children wouldn't have to live to see the day I turn into my mom.

Because in my eyes, my mom is a monster. She's not the kind of monster that has big, sharp teeth and scary yellow eyes, and a menacing growl. She's the kind of monster that you would never suspect. She's the bloody hand, but you were the accomplice. She was the screwdriver, but you were the loose screw. Sure, she hurt you, but you let yourself be hurt by her - so really, whose fault was it?

My mom is the kind of monster that uses your vulnerability against you in the worst way possible.

-

"I'm just not feeling good right now. I feel like I'm dying, and I feel tired all the time." My sixth-grade self, awkwardly positioned in the passenger's seat, turning my head away from my mom.

"Well, you know we care about you." My mom said, stoic in her demeanor and ultimately still in how she held her body up.

It was a day I'll never forget. She picked at her fingernails and anxiously tapped the gas pedal, waiting for me to be done talking about my emotions so she could drive back "home."

Warm tears stung my eyes, forcing their way down my face in slow streams. "You don't get it, I-" I stopped, knowing it wasn't worth it to try to make my mom understand feelings she'd been adamant didn't exist.

"Ay, don't be so dramatic." My mom said, waving her hand up to dismiss me and my silly ideas. She was right. I wasn't depressed or anxious, and I definitely didn't look for any excuse possible to threaten suicide against myself. My mom said so.

-

I don't know why I kept running back to her in times of need. Maybe it was my dream version of her that I relied on to justify my ever-growing love for her. Feasibly, it was the person I wanted her to be. And perhaps, just perhaps, my expectations of her drove me to the point where I'd convinced myself my mother was the person I saw when I closed my eyes at night.

I remember telling her things, spreading rumors I'd heard about people in the family, hoping that it would make us closer. The things I did just to make her happy...

-

"Mom, I'm trying my best!" I cried on the floor, cleaning up the mess my new puppy had made. She'd pooped and peed all over the kitchen. I was exhausted, previously knocked out in my bed, when my mom called me downstairs, screaming for me to get my ass down there.

"No, you're not! You never try! You're useless! I should've never had you!" My mom yelled from the bottom of her heart (or lack thereof).

Tears welled in my eyes for the millionth time because of my mother. This wasn't the first time she'd wished me dead, and it sure wouldn't be the last time. "Mommy, please just leave me alone and let me clean up." I begged, letting broken sobs come out of my mouth. I wanted to hurt her, and I wanted to hurt her as bad as she hurt me.

My mom refused to leave, yelling at me, watching as I piteously scraped my dog's contents off the wall.

-

It's sad that the only good memories I have of my mom are those I couldn't participate in. Instead, I have stories of her youth and how caring of a mother she used to be when I was a baby - conveniently so far back that I can't remember it. It pains me more knowing how she was before she had me, her firstborn. If she were this way her whole life, would I take it so personally?

Am I dramatic for wishing I had a mother who could hug me back when I hugged her? Am I a selfish and pathetic bitch for feeling envy when I see how my friends' moms act with them? Why can't my mom love me the way she loves her? Why does my mom have more pictures of her first niece than she does of me? What did I do to her?

-

"Mommy, mommy! Look!" I said, running up to my mother, holding my report card in the air like a shiny new toy - all A's.

"Nice job, Fio. I'm so proud of you. You're doing great. Keep it up." My mom said softly, pulling me into a warm hug. Somehow, that was all I needed - that's all I wanted. It really is a shame that that memory is fake.

-

I have plenty of other fake memories that I store in my head, letting the (also fake) backstories take over my mind when I go to sleep. For one of them, I was romping around on an old swing set, one that made little squeaky noises whenever I swung too high.

Somehow, I lose control of the swing, and my mom comes rushing up to me, worried and begging for me to tell her how she could help. I don't know when or how she got there (my dad was usually the one to take me to the park), but what I do know is she's exactly who I needed there at that moment.

So many real memories I have of me needing my mother most, waiting for the day she would actually turn up in one of them. She was always the first to pick me up in school lines. She was always at my open houses. She attended every grade promotion I had. But she was never there. It was all a facade. She'd said so herself that she craved being the all-star mom, the one who'd win several gold medals if there were award ceremonies for that sort of thing.

Her perfectionism is what makes her corrupt. She has spent my entire life telling me what to do, how to do it, scolding me for not doing it the way she imagined me doing it in her head.

She refused to seek help when that's all I wanted her to do.

-

"What do you want for your birthday, hija?" My dad asked, glancing at me while keeping his eyes fixed on the road, humming along to a Christmas carol playing on the radio.

"Honestly, dad?" I asked, only twelve years old, my green eyes twinkling in hope.

"Whatever your heart desires." My dad said in a goofy voice, making me smile.

"I want Mom to get help." I said sadly, hoping my dad would agree and push the idea upon my mom.

-

My mother went to therapy for four months. My dad had to pay her every session for her to go. In my mom's life, money has never been an obstacle. Her father was a middle-high class socialite in Venezuela who worked in engineering and oil companies. Her mother, who passed away of Leukemia when she was twelve, spoiled her rotten until her very last breath.

Eventually, I became mentally sick to the core. Writing and singing, my two favorite things in the world, became hobbies, and life had lost its zesty twang. Little things like music and the people I passed on the street that waved "hello" at me became nuisances. My mom "gave up" her therapy so I could get help.

I still wonder if she did it for herself or for me.

-

A few times a year, I get asked what my biggest fear is. Sometimes it comes up in conversation. Other times I create the question, not thinking about the consequences if people answer with "Spiders, yours?"

Each time I get asked, I take a deep breath and lie. "The dark." I say now, the idea of death by sea sounding more of tranquility than a travesty.

I look back at the old pictures I have of myself, a smiley and shy little girl who was afraid of nothing and everything at the same time. To her, I ask, "When you have nothing to lose, why be afraid?"

Me, with my baby doll at age three. I loved taking care of her. I used to take her everywhere with me.

[afroherbalism]

"Emma Dupree (1897-1992) was an influential black herbalist from Falkland and Fountain, in Pitt County in North Carolina. She was known locally as “granny woman.”

Because she prays, she brews herbs. Because she brews herbs, she heals. Because she heals, she is the undisputed sage of Pitt County. They say her home remedies can quiet a colicky baby, cure a mean cold and scare lice off a hog.

"All that we see, everything that is growin' in the earth," Emma says, "is healin' to the nation of any kind of disease."

She was the daughter of freed slaves and grew up on the Tar River. She was known for her work with native herbs: Sassafras, white mint, double tansy, rabbit tobacco, maypop, mullein, catnip, horseradish, and silkweed.

Here is an excerpt from an article published shortly after her death:

"From the time she could walk, Emma felt drawn to the land. She would roam the woods, plucking, sniffing, tasting weeds. She grew up that way, collecting the leaves, stems, roots and bark of sweet gum, white mint, mullen, sassafras in her coattail or a tin bucket. She'd tote them back to the farm, rinse them in well water and tie them in bunches to dry. In the backyard, she'd raise a fire under a kettle and boil her herbs to a bubbly froth, then pour it up in brown-necked stone jugs: A white-mint potion for poor circulation; catnip tea for babies with colic; tansy tea - hot or cold - for low blood sugar; mullein tea for a stomach ache. Mixed with molasses or peppermint candy to knock out the bitterness. Her kind of folk medicine dates back centuries. In the 1600s, African slaves brought root-doctor remedies to America. Indians and immigrants had cure-alls, too. In some rural areas, scattered herbalists still practice."

She was born on July 4, 1897, the seventh among 18 siblings, Emma Williams Dupree grew up on the Tar River and was known in her family as "that little medicine thing" because of her early understanding of herbs.

Her parents, Pennia and Noah Williams, were freed slaves farming in Falkland, NC.

She told an interviewer in 1979 that her mother remembered being "on the porch of the old Wooten's farm home when freedom came. She was 16 when Mr. and Mrs. Wooten walked out on that porch and told her she was 'as free as they were, but they loved her just the same.'"

She was married for one year to Ethan Cherry, a farmer. She divorced him and remarried another farmer, Austin Dupree, Jr., who was born in 1892. Emma and Austin moved to Fountain, NC in 1936 and had five children, whose ages in the 1930 U.S. Census are indicated in parentheses: Lucy (12), Herbert (9), John (5), Doris (3), and Mary (1).

They remained married until his death at age 90. She died at home, at 3313 N. Jefferson St, Fountain, on March 12, 1996. She is buried at Saint John's Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, in Falkland,NC.

Emma Dupree's "garden-grown pharamacy" included sassafras, white mint, double tansy, rabbit tobacco, maypop, mullein, catnip, horseradish, silkweed and other plants from which she made tonics, teas, salves and dried preparations. These were cultivated in her yard and gathered from the banks of the Tar River. She told Karen Baldwin that she grew a special tree in her back yard, which she called her "healing berry tree."

She explained, "Now that tree, I don't know of another name for it, but it's in the old-fashioned Bible and the seed for it came from Rome." She also told Baldwin of being an especially alert baby: "They said I was just looking every which way. And I kept acting and moving and doing things a baby didn't do. And I walked early. I was walking at seven months old, just as good and strong. When I got so I got out doors, I went to work. I was pulling up weeds, biting them, smelling in them, and spitting them out. And folks in them days, they just watched me, watched what I was doing.

Awards and Recognition

In 1984, Dupree was awarded the Brown-Hudson Award by the North Carolina Folklore Society, recognizing her as an individual who contributed significantly to the transmission, appreciation and observance of traditional culture and folk life in North Carolina.

In 1992, Dupree received the North Carolina Heritage Award, lifetime achievement recognition for outstanding traditional artists in North Carolina

NOTE:

Here is a link to a video of Mrs Emma Dupree being interviewed by students of the ECU medical research department. This video is Produced by the office of Health Services Research and Development, School of Medicine, East Carolina University.

It is 40 minutes long.

Link: https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/58575?fbclid=IwAR1e22I8_vRfvzI0nZXDBT8XG7Z-4DgiNykjqsbPD8hoD2Aw8haC2uI8vvo#details

Source;https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/ncpi/view/5581

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Dupree

---

Herbalist, 94, Lets Nature Heal

by Paige Williams Feb 20, 1992

Before her came African root doctors and Indian medicine men. People believed their mystical potions could cure body and soul and sometimes they could. Some modern medicines still use herbal derivatives. Few old-time herbalists like Emma are left in North Carolina. Hospitals first forced her kind out of business. Death is finishing the job. Emma Dupree's hanging tough, though, pushing 10 decades. She takes the tonic, see. Drinks it like water. She jumps out of her chair, props fists on her waist and swivels her hips Hula-Hoop style. She holds both hands out flat and squirms her wrinkled fingers all around, crossing and uncrossing, like she's making a million wishes. No arthritis there.

"There's something to that stuff," said her granddaughter, Sandra White.

Joe Exum, town grocer, keeps a Crown Royal bourbon bottle under the front seat of his pickup truck. It holds the slimy remnants of Emma's tonic: oily brown syrup that looks like tobacco spit, stings the nose like paint thinner and tastes like pine tar smells.

"I'd pay $50 for a bottle right now," Exum said. "Two swallers and it'll knock the sore throat right out." He's waiting for Emma to brew another batch. She stewed her last at Christmas. She used to make the tonic right steady, every day almost, the way she learned 80 years ago, when the woods first called her.

Pitt County borders the Pamlico River 80 miles east of Raleigh. Its largest town is Greenville, the county seat, population

44,972. One of its smallest is Fountain, population 445, founded in 1900 on the western rim. Emma Dupree was Emma Williams then, a 3-year-old growing up the daughter of freed slaves on a farm 9 miles east in Falkland, where she was born the Fourth of July, 1897. Emma was the knee baby, second from the youngest of seven girls and four boys, and always hanging on her mama's knee. Early on, Pennia and Noah Williams knew she was nature's child. From the time she could walk, Emma felt drawn to the land.

She would roam the woods, plucking, sniffing, tasting weeds. She grew up that way, collecting the leaves, stems, roots and bark of sweet gum, white mint, mullen, sassafras in her coattail or a tin bucket. She'd tote them back to the farm, rinse them in well water and tie them in bunches to dry. In the backyard, she'd raise a fire under a kettle and boil her herbs to a bubbly froth, then pour it up in brown-necked stone jugs: A white-mint potion for poor circulation; catnip tea for babies with colic; tansy tea - hot or cold - for low blood sugar; mullen tea for a stomach ache. Mixed with molasses or peppermint candy to knock out the bitterness. Her kind of folk medicine dates back centuries. In the 1600s, African slaves brought root-doctor remedies to America. Indians and immigrants had cure-alls, too. In some rural areas, scattered herbalists still practice.

"It's dying out," says Charles Reagan Wilson of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. "People more and more rely on modern science." Pitt County's got both. Modern medicine and Emma Dupree. Her school was God's school; her classroom, the land. While the other children played, she picked herbs. Sometimes she caught the other children talking about her: "There comes that ol' rovin' gal. Reckon where she goin' now?" Yet they always followed her.

When Emma was about 20, she married Ethan Cherry, a farmer. It lasted about a year. The story goes that Cherry went one wisecrack too far about how many women it takes to satisfy a man. Emma whacked him with a chair. Knocked him out cold. Then she divorced him. "He wasn't no good husband." She married another farmer, Austin Dupree. They moved to Fountain in 1936. Old age killed him in the the early 1970s. He was nearly 90. Of Emma's five children, only Doris, 66, is left. She lives next door to Emma's little white-and-green house on Jefferson Street, a longtime magnet to the afflicted.

Herbs' earthy aroma herbs brewed day and night. Their warm earthy aroma filled the whole house. Emma poured her tonic up in glass vinegar jugs and canning jars and kept it in a pantry off the kitchen. Somebody was always knocking on the front door. Emma would fetch it: "Now you take this with faith because it's not me. I'm just the instrument." She never set a price. People paid what they could, sometimes $5, sometimes $30. "It was a common thing for people to literally be waiting in line," said White, 38, the granddaughter Emma raised. People sought advice, too. They'd bang on the door, pull her aside: "Can I talk to you?" Fountain's own Ann Landers. "You can tell her a problem and she can work it out so it don't seem so bad," White said.

Some, she couldn't help. Once, a young girl dying of leukemia and weary of doctors showed up at Emma's door. Emma suspected it was hopeless. Still, she couldn't say no. She gave her the tonic. "I don't want to make her sound like a saint," White said, "but she tried to help everybody." Emma won't take the credit. "Whatever your talent, whatever you is, you come with it," she said. "When you come into this world, God's done fixed you with what you got to do." To townspeople, she's "Aunt Emma."

In December, they made her grand marshal of the Fountain Christmas parade, all two blocks of it. She waved from the back of the long white limousine borrowed from the local funeral home. Only the best for the sage of Pitt County.

Source:https://www.tulsaworld.com/archives/herbalist-lets-nature-heal/article_3b0e06d1-4af9-5567-93ee-bc4b50d5867f.html

[brucewayneargento-moved]

To All My Fathers (Chapter 1)

Summary: Damian Wayne, a fourteen year old with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, goes onto a road trip with the four men who shaped him as a person before his bone marrow transplant.

Fic also avaliable on FF.net

Damian had definitely decided he would not wear a fanny pack.

It didn't matter that it was the most convenient and comfortable way to take a chemo pump iv from place to place. He'll much rather attract attention with a backpack connected to a pump than to regress back to the eighties in the most horrendous fashion. Sure he might pick up unwanted attention from strangers but A) He could always stare at them back; B) He was past the time to care and C) He already didn't have eyebrows so that was kind of a moot point.

The boy was currently seated at the med bed of the 666 room. (Drake had made several jokes about it, which Damian didn't mind and in fact encouraged, because with his diagnosis came a morbid sense of humor and he was also glad at least one person still treated him like a human being). He was practicing violin while he could still hold it and also enjoying the fact that he was wearing actual comfortable clothes and not a paper robe that made his autism completely and utterly fucking lose it.

Some kids from the other rooms had come to see him perform and Damian loved to have an audience. Because he had an ego, not as much and not as evil as people usually thought, but still. Most of them were children younger than ten who just needed some entertainment that wasn't a superhero.

"This was Ode To Joy by Bethoveen," Damian explained. The three children around him applauded. When they stopped he could still hear hands clapping, he looked up and his eyes met his father's.

Bruce came closer to him and the kids left after being called by a nurse. Boy and man looked at each other for a few seconds.

"Are you ready?" Bruce finally asked

Damian might have sounded insane if he said it outloud, but his father and Jon were very similar.

The blue eyes, the black hair and the fact that they both cried before or after entering a room with Damian in it, bonus points if he was being stabbed with a needle right at that moment, then you could see their eyes getting crystalized almost in slow motion.

And it's not like Damian was annoyed by their emotions as one might have thought, it was more of a...sting, (man being stabbed with a needle on a daily basis was really taking a toll on him, wasn't it?) like, something that hurt but it wasn't enough for him to do anything about it more than to grit his teeth and power through it.

Numbness was apparently a common thing among patients. But Damian thought of himself as many stuff, but common wasn't one of them

And perhaps his ego was the only thing keeping him optimistic, perhaps thinking that he was too special to die alone in a hospital room was what made him stronger against the whole GvHD thing.

Leslie had told him that he was lucky to find a donor that was relatively near, in Kansas nonetheless, home of Superman and. So now he had just to keep up with the program: L-asparaginase,dexamethasone and vincristine several times a day and wait.

Or at least that was the original plan.

"Yes." he finally answered, standing up.

When all you receive in your life is gaslighting, you don't even notice the medical gaslighting.

Maybe it was the whole "being indoctrinated since birth by an ecoterrorist death cult" thing but his ability to exercise his free will hadn't been particularly developed.

The bruises? Vigilante stuff. The fever? Probably the flu. Weight loss? Maybe he had gotten a growth spurt that just made him seem thinner…He had to throw up blood to even be admitted into a hospital.

The Wayne-Head name allowed him the finest care probably ever known to man. "Nepotism: where you can die comfortably" that was an actual thing he had said while high on sedatives. He could only imagine his mother's face upon hearing it.

When he woke up both his parents were there. Damian could immediately tell something was wrong. His father was crying and his mother was stoic.

"Oh, ok, so I'm dying" He said, grabbing their attention. Both Talia and Bruce turn to look at him. Damian tried to sit and noticed his arm was cranked to an IV. "Oh, I'm actually dying."

"Do not speak like that." His mother warned him with a threatening voice. Bruce kept quiet but still with a face wet with tears.

Next to them there was a third person. She was an older woman with gray hair and glasses. Doctor Thompkins, his father's godmother. She went over to the medbed and sat on the foot. Damian crossed his arms. She was a smart woman but had the annoying habit of treating him like a perpetual child. Probably the closest thing he had to an actual grandmother.

"Damian," she fixed her glasses and looked at the clipboard she was holding. "Your blood count is in the 200.000 white cells."

Damian's eyes slightly widened, which covertly hid how much of a gut punch he just received.

"I can't have leukemia," he simply stated. There was a slight pained sound coming from his father's mouth which made Damian look him in the eye…that's how he knew it was true.

He started to grin which turned into a giggle which turned into a laugh.

Bruce and Talia looked at him with worry.

"Denial is very common," Leslie stated, trying to remain calm and also sooth Damian up. The teen kept laughing and then stopped to talk.

He had tears in his eyes. "I mean... so much for being an eugenics frankenstein monster, I've failed at even that."

The rest of that afternoon was a blur for him. Except for the being stabbed with needles on his spine parts, that one he remembered very well. Since he had such a high tolerance for pain, the fact that he was casually hurt was news to him.

Of course Dick had been the first one to enter the room.

Damian had hoped that he wasn't but after all it made sense that he did, he was his Robin. He could imagine him punching a wall and screaming when he heard the news. That mental image didn't upset him at all, clearly.

Damian was pretending to watch TV where his oldest brother entered the scene. He had prepared what he was going to say. How he was okay and how he was too stubborn to die anyways. But all of that went to hell when Dick entered the room and immediately ran up to hug him.

All of the walls he had been building up until now feel down hard. Damian just had to press his head against Dick's shoulder for the tears to start running.

"I want a falafel."

They were in the hospital room after a particularly hard session of chemo. His brother was on a chair in front of him reading a book and not looking at him.

"You just threw up on my shoe," he reminded Damian.

"I'm here for a good time, not a long time"

Dick rolled his eyes, now accustomed to the fact that his sibling had developed a morbid sense of humor because of his condition. Right at that moment the door opened and Doctor Thompkins entered the room.

"How are we?" She asked.

"Great." Both responded almost robotically. Damian gagged.

"I wanted to talk to you, Dick, about the bone marrow transplant."

"Why not talk to me?" Damian intervened. "I'm the one whose blood isn't working."

"Because you're still a child," Dick answered as a matter of fact. And despite everything he was glad his older brother at least now had the courtesy of treating him like he had always done. "What's the prognosis, doc?"

"We're considering the umbilical cord transfusion." Leslie explained. "But you will have to ask my godson first.

"Why would he need to...wait...Selina's pregnant?!" Damian asked but then he threw up again. "That wasn't meant to signify my feelings on the matter."

Leslie continued. "But that will still take a few months and...I'm afraid we don't have that much time."

Damian pretended to gag and looked down at the bucket, all to avoid looking at Dick's face.

"But the good news is that we found a match."

Damian hadn't even had time to think about that sentence before he blurted it out, but now it was there, out in the open. For everyone to hear.

"I want to have children."

Everyone being an hyperbole since Alfred was the one who was actually there. His father had to go to patrol so the butler had the night shift to take care of Damian while at the hospital to which the boy was appreciative of. Except for this moment when he was mentally slapping himself for letting on too much. Side effects of being raised to be a killing machine.

"I...did not know that." Alfred admitted. Up to twelve seconds ago he had been standing up listing the symptoms of chemo at Damian's request since he didn't trust Leslie to do it without sugarcoating it and his father might burst into tears in an attempt to do so. Damian had been listening attentively before Alfred mentioned that it was possible that he might wind up being infertile.

The boy simply turned around to the other side of the bed and sighed as tears left his eyes.

Dear Damian

I could not be more content that you are receiving the transplant that you so much need. I wish I could accompany you on the journey to Kansas, but sadly Lady Talia needs me to look out after Bialya...I wish you nothing but a rapid recovery. I implore you to remember that you are not alone in this, to remember that there is a plethora of people that adore you with all of their souls and that you will always have their help. Even when you do not want it.

Best Wishes

Ravi.

Damian looked at Alfred who glanced at him for a nanosecond in the mirror of the car. He knew he was the most active ally he had in this game. Since he not only advocated to his father for this trip to be possible but he also was the only person to always show his compassion in spite of if he actually deserved it or not. Bruce was next to him while Richard sat next to Damian and assesed his condition.

They stayed in comfortable silence in the car with only the sound of "dad music" on the radio for background noise. Damian allowed himself to close his eyes and to feel the soothing bounce of the car against the pavement on his skin...

They stopped suddenly after a while and Damian opened his eyes, he frowned in confusion as Alfred parked the car in front of the airport.

"What are we doing here?" he asked curiously.

Alfred turned around to look at him. "Your father , Master Richard and I thought It'll be a good idea to fly in a friend of yours."

Damian's frown deepened. "A friend?"

Suddenly a tap was heard on the window. They both turned around to look at the front window. It was being slightly knocked on it by a man with a white cane and a bald head who was smiling at them.

"Ravi?" Damian rubbed his eyes and felt them watering up.

Damian knew that he could never make up to Ravi for being responsible for losing his vision. And he also knew that in spite of that the man would still love him unconditionally.

That could be proven easily by the letters that he had written to him when he found out about his diagnosis…

All his father figures were here, suddenly he felt an internal strength he hadn't felt in a while.

[imgoingtohellsofuckit]

When They Had To Say Goodbye

Jasper Hale x Human!Reader

Warning - mentions of death, angst

Summary - the choice is yours live the last of your days with your family or be turned and spend your eternity with him 

Having a human lover was something Jasper never expected. However when he met them he knew they were the only one for him. Pink lips and soft skin. Hair that shaped their perfect face. Absolutely amazing in his opinion. They met in college in a art class. He had been forced into the class by Alice who wouldn't explain why. When he saw them he finally understood. His soulmate. The soft way they spoke and the passion in their eyes. Jasper couldn't help but indulge his once human emotions. His heart racing for the individual in front of him. He knew this would be his downfall.

When they finally introduced themselves to him Jasper couldn't help but notice their bright eyes. His eyes were drawn to the breathtaking color. And when they smiled he felt Cupid's arrow sink into his very soul.

"I'm Y/n," They say offering their hand to him. He smiles at the beauty in front of him. Stunning. Their soft voice was enough to make Jasper melt right there. "You are?"

"Jasper Hale," He says smiling at them.

"Well Jasper Hale I don't suppose a handsome fellow like yourself would want to join me for lunch?" They offer. They are so bold. Jasper was taken back. Someone so perfect for him.

"I would love to," he says offering his hand. They take it smiling at him. That damn smile. Jasper couldn't get it out of his mind.

One date turned into another and then another. Until it finally started getting serious. Unlike Edward and Bella, Jasper was in no rush to bring them into the mess with the Cullens. Instead he used their time together as an escape from the bloodsucking nightmare. Carlisle made him tell his partner after 6 months. Jasper, reluctant to bright someone so perfect into this disaster, prepared for everything to end. How could someone so perfect want to be with him? A life with no future?

"I don't want you to laugh," Jasper starts, "just listen to me please. Okay?"

"Okay?" They reply tensely.

"I'm a vampire."

They chuckle lightly. But upon seeing Jasper's stern expression they realize there wasn't a single joke in the statement.

"Suddenly you never eating makes sense," They reply, "you're the first boyfriend I've had that hasn't cleared my fridge."

"You aren't mad?" Jasper asks.

"I'm surprised but I love you Jasper," They tell him, "a couple pointy teeth and lack of a pulse won't stop that. You're my soulmate." Jasper smiles releasing a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Those are the best words. He didn't expect those. He surely thought they would want to end this. "You okay?"

"So much more now," Jasper says as he moves to their said tackling them in soft kisses. Showing his appreciation in each one. He loves them so much. More than he'd ever be able to show.

They met the other Cullens. Bonding with them. Alice was their favourite by a long shot but they found comfort in Bella's attempts to help them adjust. They loved the family and blended well. After they first met Rose had instructed Jasper to propose before he let the only good one go.

"I mean it Jasper of all the people you've chased they are the only one that is worth it!" Rose exclaims, "if you let them go I'll kill you."

"Trust me i have no such intentions," Jasper says as he shows his family the ring. Alice squeals excitedly as the rest show their varying excitement.

"The oldest one finally settling down?" Emmet says clapping his hand against Jaspers back. "I'm proud of you dude."

"Took you long enough," Bella teases lightly.

"Not everyone fast tracks their entire relationship the way you guys did," Rose says giving Bella a slight glare.

"Can I be a braidsmaid!" Renseime asks him. Jasper chuckles.

"Well I have to ask first," Jasper says, "I've got it all planned out. But I'm gonna need you all to keep it a secret."

And they did. So when Jasper and his partner flew out to his loves hometown Y/n didn't suspect a thing.

It wasn't until Jasper move to kneel before them that they even realized what was happening.

"Jasper," They exclaim as they move their hand to cover their mouth. "Oh my god."

"We've only known each other for a short amount of time but I know that you are my soulmate," Jasper says as he grips their hand, "you are an amazing person. Breath taking, ridiculously sweet. Everything about you is just so perfect. You complete me Y/n. In all my years and I've had a lot. I've never met someone who makes me feel the way you make me feel. All the love and the joy you bring me. I want to spend the rest of my eternity with you. So will you marry me?"

"Yes god of course I'll marry you!"

They where amazing. Jasper knew that.

The wedding was sweet and simple. A forest wedding with all the cullens and their friends blending with Y/n's family. A blend of vampires, werewolves, and a humans. Supernatural would be jealous at this gathering. Jasper and Y/n shared loving vows. Their families couldn't be more happy for them.

The honey moon was over too fast and when they rejoined normal life everyone had one question. When was Jasper going to turn them?

Jasper and his spouse had never actually talked about it. They didn't want to. Jasper didn't really want to change them he knew the horrors they would have to go through and if he could avoid it he wanted to. But he also didn't want to live without them. Y/n on the other hand simply wasn't worried about it just yet. They had things they wanted to do first. They wanted a family and to go tan on faraway beaches. They wanted to taste food around the world first. When Jasper finally reached out to ask when or if  they would want to be turned Y/n have a list to Jasper. A list of everything she wanted to do first. Some where small things like eat the entire menu of their favorite restaurant, others were things like sky dive.

"You made a bucket list to go into your eternal life?" He asks them. Y/n nods their head.

"Yeah," They reply, "I mean technically I'm dying. And everything I want to do I won't be able to once you turn me. Unlike the rest of you I get to pick when I'm turned. So after this list is done I'll turn."

"It'll take years," Jasper replies, "It's perfect." They give him a smile.

To kick off the list Y/n quit their job. They hated the job. Like really hated their job. So they left in dramatic fashion. Crossing off item number one. Next they went to their favorite restaurant. Bella and Edward tagged along. Y/n sat and ate the entire menu. Or at least tried it all. They didn't regret a thing even after throwing it all up moments after getting in the car.

Next they went to Italy and tried hundreds of dishes. They tanned on the beach with their human best friend while Jasper stayed at the hotel room. They competed in sports and spent way too much time and money on changing their hair and getting piercing and tattoos.

The list was almost done the night everything changed.

Jasper had noticed his partner losing weight. He didn't understand why but his family assured him it was only natural. And his partner was still smiling. His worry died as fast as it started. But then more started happening. Soon it wasn't just the losing weight but they were getting sick more often. But this newest thing had raised every red flag.

"Jasper," They call from the couch. As he moves he sees them sitting in pure agony blood gushing from their nose. Jasper starts to move towards them but the sweep of hunger over him causes him to stay back. "Jas?"

"I'm sorry," He says softly, "I'll call Carlisle." They nod as they whip away the blood. Too weak to move from the floor where they fell in the first place. Jasper kept his distance while they waited for the older vampire. Trying to comfort his spouse from the kitchen. He could tell they were upset. They were suffering and it was killing Jasper not to be able to help. But the blood. The damn blood.

"We need to get them to the hospital," Carlisle says as he looks over the shrunken figure. "Now." Carlisle hands a rag to them and they wipe away the blood. The nature to protect his soul mate overrules the bloodlust. Jasper rushes towards his mate taking them and helping them into the car. At the hospital they automatically get her a room. Jaspers left in the waiting room with Esme and Alice who had come to help him. Both watching him carefully.

"I just- I can't believe I did that," Jasper says softly, "I left them there to sit alone because I was hungry."

"It's for the beat," Alice says softly, "if you bite them-"

"I'd never do that," Jasper says in soft terror, "Not like that. Not to hurt them."

"Shhhh we know that," Esme says softly, "we know that."

"Mr. Hale?" The doctor calls. Beside them Carlisle stands looking slightly guilty. Jasper stands moving towards him.

"How are they?" Jasper asks at once, "are they okay?"

The doctor looks to Carlisle.

"I won't lie," The doctor says softly, "their condition is a lot worse than we first thought."

"Can I see them?" Jasper asks at once. The doctors exchange a look then nod. Carlisle leads Jasper back to the room. The first thing the blonde sees is Y/n connected to machines. "Y/n oh my god-" Tears well in his eyes. He moves to their side.

"Leukemia," Carlisle says softly, "it's bad and has spread throughout her body- Jasper I need you to listen to me carefully. The doctor that has been taking care of her is a friend of mine. He's like us- he offered to turn her. I'm leaving it up to you. But with how bad her condition is if she isn't turned she'll die." Jaspers golden eyes widen in the shock. The couple have been avoiding this day and as if a cruel joke by fate what they expected to face years in the future is here now.

"This is their decision," Jasper says softly. His body fighting the venom filled tears. "I can't make it for them."

"Jasper they'll die-"

"It's not my decision," Jasper says more sternly this time, "we have to wait for them to make it."

"Are you prepared for if they say no?" Carlisle asks. His voice his quiet. Jasper doesn't reply. His body tenses in reaction. Truly he isn't prepared for either decision.

"I have to be," Jasper says finally, "if they would rather have their remaining time then I'll be there for them."

"It's gonna be hard Jas," Carlisle says softly.

"Well that's what I signed up for," Jasper says with a sigh, "when will they wake up?"

"Soon," Carlisle says looking to Y/n. "I'll send Alice in. She's better at the support then me." Jasper isn't listening. Instead he's letting the pain and fear from his partners body seep into his. How did he not notice this before? Was he so distracted by the soft smiles that he wasn't paying attention? God how could he let his partner suffer like this.

"Jas?" A tired voice croaks out. He snaps from his thoughts to the worn figure. Y/n. He moves to their side at once.

"Y/n," He says softly, "darlin."

"God that accent is hot," They say giving him an exhausted smirk. Jasper chuckles sadly. "It's bad huh?"

"Leukemia advance stages," Jasper replies softly, "Carlisle says they give you a couple weeks. They caught it way too late."

"Man nature really wants to punish us for the whole vampire human shit," They say softly, "so I'm gonna die Huh?"

"There are options," Jasper starts, "treatment might work but it's a small chance and it will make you feel worse, and well-" Jasper doesn't even want to say it.

"I could be turned?" They ask softly. Their voice barely a whisper.

"Carlisle or the doctor could do it," Jasper admits, "Carlisle is a good friend of the doctor. That's why he brought you here. You won't be able to finish your list but you'll live." Jasper can't bring himself to look at his partner. "But It'll be unpleasant. It hurts like a bitch. You'll have to go without saying goodbye to your friends and family." Tears well in Y/n's eyes. They always thought that they have a better chance to say goodbye to her family. But she can't leave Jasper. It's selfish but damn they went through a shitty life and finally found one thing that made them happy yet the universe wouldn't leave them alone. How's that fair? "It's up to you."

"Why can't you turn me?" The moment the question leaves their mouth they want to take it back. It's a stupid question.

"I can't stop myself," Jasper says softly, "I'd end up killing you." They bite their lip.

"Will you stay with me when they do it?" They asks softly, "please Jas I'm scared."

That destroyed Jasper. Those words made him feel like losing it right there.

"I'll be right here," Jasper says giving them a soft smile.

"Then I want to be turned," they say softly, "just- let me call my mom first." He nods. They dial the number. Explaining a story about a car accident how they didn't have much time left. Sobs left their body. Jasper felt so much guilt in house body. If only he noticed it faster. He'd be able to give them more time with their family. With their friends. Jasper stepped out and told Carlisle.

"I'll do it," Carlisle says softly, "if she's afraid then it'll make her more comfortable to see someone she trusts."

"Fine," Jasper says softly, "she wants me there."

"Are you going to be able to handle that?" Carlisle asks.

"I have to," Jasper says softly, "I'm having her turn herself into a vampire against all her better judgement. She has to leave everything behind the least I can do is be there for her."

"I understand."

As Jasper returns to her room she has her knees buried in her chest. Sobs escaping her body. She's terrified and devastated. Her emotions practically suffocating him. How could one person feel so much? How could they handle this?

"You don't have to If you don't want to," Jasper says as he takes their hand, "you don't have to be turned."

"I want to spend eternity with you," they reply as they wipe their eyes, "I just didn't think it would be this hard to let go." He moves pulling them into a soft kiss. Tears streaming along his lovers face now smearing along his cheeks.

God how did Edward do this? Or think he could rather. Every single part of this makes Jasper want to rip his head off his shoulders. It hurts so bad. Their emotions, Jaspers own. God he just wants to scream enough for both of them. As he pulls away Y/n smiles at him. It's weak. Conflicted. But purely them.

"I'm ready," They say softly.

"Okay," Jasper says softly. He grips their hand tightly. Carlisle enters the room giving the pair a soft smile.

"Are you sure about this?" Carlisle asks the human. They nod. Jasper looks away as Carlisle moves to bite his spouse. Loud painful scream leaves their body. He feels the pure agony seep into his soul. He wants to puke. Not that anything would even come up. Carlisle pulls away and wipes his mouth. Then quickly addresses their wound. wrapping tight bandages. Jasper feels their grip loosen until it completely disappears. He starts to panic but Carlisle holds him back.

"Give them some time. The venom takes a minute," Carlisle assures him, "in the mean time you need to get some things for them to eat. You better prepare to deal with a newborn."

"I know how to handle them better than anyone else," Jasper says looking to the other man. "Trust me."

Jasper wasn't prepared for it to take three days. Three days for his partner to heal. To fully change.

Carlisle brought them home. And when Jaspers eyes set one them. A smile spread across his face. His mate. His other half. Alive and well - or well neither of those. They aren't gone. But they still are dead. He forgets about that part. Guilt hits him. They move placing a hand on Jaspers cheek. Suddenly his negative emotions are washed away. He's happy?

"You Can influence emotions?" He asks. They nod. He smirks at them. Slightly proud of the power. "I love you. I'm sorry this all happened so fast."

"Life is hard and unpredictable," They reply, "we knew we'd have to face this one day. And at the end I'm glad I still get to be with you." He smiles then moves connecting his lips to theirs.

He wouldn't let them go. He'd hold onto them for forever.

[kyber-crystal]

I'm curious on what you could do with 15 and 8, babes! Love goes all to you

8. “Something tells me that’s not the only thing on your mind right now.” and 15. “I hope you didn’t think I was a bad kisser or anything...I did that after thinking a thousand times.”

It’s Okay to Not Be Okay - Steve Rogers x Reader

Words: ~2k Warnings: slight angst, fluff Summary: He’s always there for you when you need him. Even when you claim you don’t, he knows better than that. A/N: i threw in a harry potter reference and now i’m sobbing yAy

As it turned out, balancing a double life as head trauma surgeon for SHIELD while handling the duties of a superhero were much tougher than you anticipated. 

Of course, you knew exactly what you would be getting yourself into when you chose to go down the medical route. You knew what you would be getting yourself into as soon as you accepted the call to join the Avengers Initiative. but what you didn’t see coming was the immense effects it all would have on your physical and mental health.  

If you were lucky, you got a few hours of on-and-off sleep in between missions before you were called to the OR to perform emergency surgeries on injured agents, or were deployed for another few missions back-to-back. So you relished in relaxing on the weekends. It was a rare occasion in which you actually got to kick back and do whatever you wanted without the pressure of saving so many people in a limited amount of time on your shoulders. 

Steve noticed something was wrong from the moment you stepped out of the elevator and lazily slid your coat off your shoulders, hastily tossing it onto the sofa and setting down your duffel bag before trudging up to your room. He knew you had a long day, though, and wanted to help you unwind after your long shift. Chances were that you and him, or Natasha, would be sent off the next day and you wouldn’t get an opportunity to rest like this for the next week or so.

He silently prepared a steaming hot cup of your favorite tea, knowing you were most likely exhausted. Sixteen-hour shifts weren’t kind at all.

You tried to hide all the pills - pills that were supposed to treat your anxiety, the nightmares, the insomnia - but you weren’t subtle enough for Steve. You claimed you were fine, but he knew better. He knew you like the back of his hand - he could read into all those little signs you gave off, a skill nobody else on the team had except him and him alone.

Every inch of your body was aching immensely - the aftermath of rushing around and standing all night without a wink of sleep. Fatigue was tugging at your eyes and if it weren’t for the tiny last bit of self-control you had left, you would’ve collapsed right there on the spot. 

“Hey,” he said softly as you came back down, this time exiting the elevator in a pair of sweatpants and his black T-shirt. He smiled at the sight. “How was your day?”

“It was fine,” you sighed, sitting down at the sofa and curling your knees up to your chest. He came over and wrapped a blanket around your shoulders, gazing at you with genuine concern. “Fourteen-hour transplant operation and another two patching up other injured STRIKE team members.”

“From Rouen?”

“Yeah,” you mumbled, pulling the blanket tighter over yourself. “Look, I’m fine...if that’s what you wanna ask. It’s just been a long night.”

His brow furrowed as he placed a hand on your shoulder, rubbing soothing circles across it. "Something tells me that’s not the only thing on your mind right now.”

“I told you, Steve, I’m fine,” you snapped, blinking rapidly to fight back tears that threatened to spill. You softened your tone as you noticed the look on his face. “Really.”

“No, you’re not,” he murmured, placing a finger beneath your chin and tilting your head up to look at him. “Come on. You really think I wouldn’t be attuned to your emotions by now? Just tell me what’s going on.”

You let out a shuddering sigh, briefly squeezing your eyes shut. You shook your head. “No. Steve, I told you-”

“Don’t lie to me. I know something’s wrong. Now tell me or I’ll have Bruce force the truth out of you.” His voice was commanding yet gentle at the same time. “Please, Y/N, tell me. I’m worried about you.”

You let out a sigh of defeat, shoulders sagging. You nodded and swallowed hard, “Fine. Today..I was in the ICU. There was a patient; an orphaned little girl who’d been brought in after a hostage raid on a HYDRA base up north- Scotland, I think? Katie was her name, I think. She was admitted about a week ago. But she’d been held captive for...almost an entire year. She was severely malnourished. She was losing hair, losing weight - she looked like a skeleton. It was only recently that I had diagnosed her with leukemia, but by the time the diagnosis was made there wasn’t much time left. But no amount of sickness could get rid of her contagious energy and adorable little smile. She reminded me so much of my younger self, it hurt.”

“She was dying. Steve, she was dying and I didn’t know,” you sobbsd, “I can’t believe I didn’t- if I had found out sooner, I could’ve helped. Now it’s too late. I could see the light fading from her eyes. Katies’ grip on my hand was growing weaker by the second and I just - I didn’t want to believe what was happening. 

“She died with me by her side...a mere three minutes later. She died holding my hand. She died without a family...she died, and I couldn’t save her-”

“But she had you,” Steve whispered. “You were there for her, and I’m sure she’ll always be thankful for that.”

“I could’ve saved her!” you yelled, voice cracking. “But I couldn’t! It’s my fault she’s dead-”

“It’s not your fault, Y/N. You didn’t know. And you did everything you could. That’s all that matters.”

You shook your head wildly, feeling more burning tears slip down your cheeks. “I wish I could’ve spent more time with him -”

You tried to open your mouth to speak again but instead, a choked sob escaped your lips. It was like a suffocating pressure was tightly lodged against your chest and prevented you from being able to breath properly. Anything you tried to say came out in incoherent sobs and gasps - you felt so trapped, like you were stuck in a tiny little box with no way to escape. It was draining.

Steve did the only thing he knew how to do and carefully wrapped his arms around you, quickly pulling you into his chest. You slumped against him and continued to sob - burying your face within the fabric of his cotton T-shirt to further muffle the sounds of your crying. When he tightened his arms around your trembling frame you didn’t bother to writhe in his grasp and fight back. There was no fight left. You didn’t want to keep fighting. You were done with it all.

“Hey hey hey. Breathe, darling, just breathe,” he cooed, smoothing your hair back, “you hear that? Listen to my heartbeat, breathe in and out, that’s good...”

You took one shuddering inhale and exhale after the other, until slowly but steadily, the hiccups faded away and your crying eventually came to a halt. You knew you looked like an absolute mess - with puffy, red eyes and tear tracks staining your blotchy red cheeks.

But if he was being honest, none of it made you look any less stunning than you were. Despite your glossy eyes and tearstained face, you looked breathtaking to him - you always did, and always would.

And he gets so wrapped up in gazing down at you that he loses sense of the world around him, and doesn’t realize that the two of you are slowly moving closer and closer to one another until there’s essentially no space left.

Then, he kisses you.

He knows he could’ve picked a better time to do this. He knows. It was wrong of him to choose now out of all occasions - you were emotional and out of the loop. But he couldn’t help himself - he didn’t know what else to do. After months of suppressing his feelings deep down, he was sick and tired of keeping them from you.

So he went with his gut instinct - which was to simply go for it. And he did.

When his lips initially met yours you didn’t know what to do. But then, you found yourself kissing him back, your arms going around his neck and your eyes fluttering shut. He went to cup your cheeks and gently held your face in his hands for just a few more seconds but when you pulled apart, you were left with an aching feeling - wishing it would’ve lasted longer.

Then almost as soon as it started, it was over. Whatever warmth you felt was now replaced with an eerily chilly sensation that uncomfortably enveloped your body. And he felt it too. And he hated it. But he was afraid to make a second move - what if you didn’t react the same way you did as the first time?

Steve looked down at you and wiped the last of your tears from your face with his thumb and reached for your hand, intertwining your fingers together. 

...

You now have Steve’s oversized hoodie on over his shirt you were also borrowing, a mug of tea in your hands as he sat across from you at the kitchen counter. 

You silently picked at the castella set in front of you on the plate as he delicately held one of your hands in his, rubbing patterns across your palm. It was soothing, almost distracting, in a way.

A full hour of silence had passed, and frankly, Steve felt a little relieved. He’d trade your tortured cries for radio silence any day - he hated seeing you in pain. It was like receiving a direct bullet to the stomach - and he knew those things hurt like hell. 

“I’m sorry,” you wiped at your nose with your free hand, “I look gross right now. I’m sorry you had to see all...that.”

“Hey...it’s okay,” Steve reassured you. “Trust me, I’ve seen worse. You remember that day a piece of scrap metal got buried all the way into Bucky’s calf?”

You shuddered and laughed sadly at the thought. You remembered having to treat him and Wanda holding him down as he struggled not to cry out in agony. “Yeah. That was a mess.”

“And you saved him. You’ve saved so many people, Y/N. Don’t feel bad for being unable to stop something out of your control. Think about how many people are out there, alive, because of what you did,” he reminded you. “You saved Bucky, you saved Peter. You even saved me once.”

“I saved your ass multiple times, you mean,” you snorted. He cracked a grin. “Three times, to be exact.”

“You definitely did, sweetheart. And I’m sure Katie knows that. That you’re a hero.”

You felt your heart twist in your chest at the mention of her name. “I really hope so.”

“She knows. Trust me, she knows you are.”

“Thank you...” you muttered, “...you know, you didn’t have to stay awake for me. You could’ve just gone to bed.”

“Without knowing you were alright? That’s not happening, darling,” he chuckled lightly, brushing a stray piece of hair away from your forehead. “I’m gonna be here and I’m gonna wait for you, whatever it takes. I’ll always wait for you.”

“Always?”

He squeezed your hand. “Always.”

Your smile widened ever so slightly - and you felt stirring in your chest at his words. 

Steve then raised an eyebrow at you. “I know this is off-topic and all, but...I hope you didn’t think I was bad kisser or anything. I did that after thinking a thousand times. Though my timing could’ve been better-”

“No, no,” you laughed lightly, “you’re all good. You’re not a bad kisser at all.”

“I hope you wouldn’t mind if I tried again, then?” He let go of your hand, and slid his hand up to the back of your head to pull you closer. 

“Not at all.”

Your lips met, and for the briefest moment in time, you could pretend you were okay - for a moment, everything seemed like it would be okay again.

[nmjd1234isazombie]

The Reunion Tour

This story is for @starr-fall-knight-rise and his Humans are space orcs stories.

Adam Vir, Jim Vir, Sunny, Ramirez, and Maverick all belong to him.

———————–[STORY]———————

Vir raced through the dense underbrush twisting this way and that in an attempt to avoid the sharp thorn-like branches of the alien trees, “Maverick, I swear to God, you better be waiting for me with the shuttle,” he muttered aloud.

The sound of heavy footfall raced closer behind him, “I hate this planet, I hate this planet, I hate this planet,” he repeated, breaking into a clearing he saw his ship, “everyone load up,” he shouted to the few outside as he ran.

“What's wrong?” Sunny asked from the open ramp, she didn't need a response as a monstrous beast erupted from the foliage behind the Commander.

“What the fuck is that!?” Ramirez shouted as he turned and bolted up the ramp and into the cockpit, “Maverick, get us in the air ASAP,” he told her.

The bellow of the creature reverberated through the shuttle, “holy shit!” she retorted, firing up the engines.

Back outside Vir reached the open ramp in time as the shuttle lifted off, “okay, we can tell the GA this planet is a no go, it’s got way too dangerous of wildlife,” he said, panting from his run.

Sunny pulled him in the rest of the way as Remirez closed the bay door, “that thing looked like a pink t-rex or was it just me?” he said.

“No, you're right. It looked like a pink T-rex,” Vir confirmed.

The crew that had been outside burst out laughing, well Sunny looked to the Commander, “what's a T-rex?” she asked.

“It’s a big lizard that used to live on earth, I’ll show you later.”

Once back on the Harbinger, Vir sent word about the creature they encountered, the Councilwoman had not been happy to hear about the animal but was grateful to the Commander for discovering it before the colony ship had been sent. The human ambassador had to leave the room when Vir had described the creature’s appearance, much to the council's confusion.

Once finished with his report, Vir turned to his bridge crew, “alright, people, we are heading back to earth for some maintenance, plot course for docking bay one.”

Two days passed before the ship arrived home, “turn on com’s if you will,” Vir said to his communications officer.

“All set, Sir,” they said.

“Good afternoon everyone,” he started, “as you know we are home for some scheduled maintenance, we will be here for two weeks so for those of you that requested shore leave, the shuttle will be leaving from docking bay one to moon base then to earth two hours after we dock. I know we usually head straight there, but it’s time for the yearly physical, so get that out of the way before heading to have some fun,” he said, almost hearing the crew groan.

“For the skeleton crew staying, we will be having a tour of engineering college kids coming through, so be on your best behavior,” Vir continued.

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

The following morning, Sunny and Vir walked near-empty halls, “it’s weird how quiet it is when everyone is gone,” Sunny said.

“It’s been what four years since you joined the ship, and you say the same thing every time we go in for work,” Vir said from her back, “besides we have a group of students inbound it won't be quiet for long.”

“Ture.”

Lunch came and went before the shuttle arrived from the earth with the students, “sorry we’re late, the professor said upon exiting, “a storm front rolled in, throwing everything off,” they added.

Vir nodded, “it’s understandable. I made some arrangements for you and the students to spend the night if need be,” he added.

“Thank you, but I think we’ll get on down to engineering and poke around then get out of your hair,” they said, ushering more than thirty students from the shuttle, one lingered behind staring at the Commander.  

“Can I help you with something?” Vir asked, eyeing the girl, she seemed familiar, but he’s not quite sure why.

“Wow a year and a half, and he forgets you,” she said, “I do have hair again so I can understand. Adam, it’s me, Nataly,” she said, Vir’s eyes grew wide as the connection snapped into place.

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed, bringing the girl into a hug.

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

Once Vir left, Mr. Ross re-entered the hospital room to find his wife holding their child as she cried, an hour passed the small family holding each over before a nurse came in with a big smile on her face.

Mr. Ross couldn’t understand as she beckoned him from the room, “what's going on,” he asked upon seeing his daughter's doctor along with half a dozen other physicians.

“We just received word that your daughter has been accepted into the Manticore program,” the tallest of the group said.

“I have no idea what that is.”

“It's a program to integrate organic and inorganic material,” the doctor said again, “you know how prosthetics are being made that can feel and move naturally?”

“Ya, have an ex-army buddy who has fake arms, he said it’s like he never lost them,” Mr. Ross said the connections started to make sense.

“The Manticore program is responsible for that, and now they have a new idea for those with cancer such as leukemia. We don't have full detail, but the head of the program would like to meet with you and Mrs. Ross tomorrow to discuss it, before talking with Nataly.”

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

The following day they met with a tall, slender woman, “good morning Hex,” Mr. Ross greeted, “what are you doing here?” he asked, taking a seat at the table where the woman had stacks of papers laid out.

“I’m filling in for the head of the Manticore program, she became indisposed with an experiment last night, and it went into this morning, sorry about that, “she said, “but I am here to talk to you about what your daughter has been accepted into.”

“Really!? We can wait for the department head if that would be better?” Mrs. Ross said, “I’m sure you have better things to do, working with Make-A-Wish and all.”

“That’s my main focus now. I used to do research, and am technically still second in command of the Manticore program. This particular project is my wife Marcel's brainchild after she lost her brother to cancer, she’s been looking for a way to fight it beyond chemotherapy and the such. For your daughter, we would use Nanites to replace the blood-making bone marrow giving her what amounts to artificial blood.”  

“That can’t be safe,” Mrs. Ross said, clutching her husband's hand.

“It’s experimental, yes, but we’ve already done this procedure on another with great promise of success, and…”

“Only one!?” Mr. Ross interrupted.

“Yes, with three others waiting, your daughter would be number five, this could save her life, but there is only an eight percent chance of the body accepting the Nanites.”

“But there is a hundred percent chance of her dying,” Mr. Ross said, “How do we get started.”

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

“A few months later, I had the procedure done, and bam here I am,” Nataly finished.

The duo sat in the observation deck, taking in the view of earth and the stars they could see beyond the metal docking bay.

“My God, that’s amazing,” Vir said, shocked.

“I only started school last month, have a lot to catch up on, but when my uncle said he was taking his class up to the Harbaginer, I knew I had to tag along to say hi,” Nataly said.

Vir drew her close, “well, half-pint, when you finish, I’ll keep my word and have a spot here on board when you're ready. If that's still what you want,” he said.

“I’d love that, thank you!” Nataly said.

The remaindered of the afternoon was spent exploring the ship and meeting new friends.

————————-[~FIN~]———————

Note: Thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed.

Story one: https://nmjd1234isazombie.tumblr.com/post/612075760575971328/wish-upon-a-star

[izzielizzie]

Could you write a one shot in Bronwyn’s POV for directly after the bomb went off? And how she’d be when Nate gets out of surgery? Up until the events of the wedding?

Yes, more angst let’s do it. (I am in such a weird mood good grief) (Now would be a good time to request more angsty stuff since clearly I’m in the mood to write sad stuff) Also, sorry this is so long, but there are notes at the end because of course I need to make it longer. Enjoy!

Nate and I are walking hand in hand behind the restaurant when we hear something fly over our heads and land a few feet away.

“The fuck was that?” Nate asks, interrupting himself. He had been talking about just how much of a dork my little sister Maeve is around Luis, who apparently is her boyfriend now. I have no clue how that happened.

A voice rings out in the night, sounding terrified: “Nate, run! This is Maeve. That was a backpack with a bomb inside, from someone who’s been threatening Eli. You have to run toward the restaurant, now!”

We both freeze and look at each other. “MAEVE?” I call back.

“Bronwyn?”

Nate squeezes my hand and tugs me forward. A new voice can be heard, and I’m even more terrified when I hear it’s Knox. He’s never sounded so scared before.  “This isn’t a joke, you guys! Run!”

For some strange reason, it’s Knox, not Maeve, that spurs us forward, and we start sprinting. I can see Knox with his arm around Maeve from a distance, and he’s pulling her back. She has her arm outstretched towards me, and I can see the fear in her eyes. As I’m running, I’m struck with the sudden realization that if there was anything I could do make that fear in her amber eyes, the ones I love so much, disappear, I would. Maeve has grown up too fast. Finally, Maeve does what she should and turns and runs to the restaurant. I hear Knox call to the people on the deck, and they run into the restaurant.

For one crazy moment, I think we’re safe, and I look at Nate. He’s looking down at me, and I feel I could sink, float, fly in those blue eyes. When he dives at me, for one crazy second I think he’s going to kiss me.

When I come to, I can hear someone groaning next to me, and when I put my palms on the ground I’m startled to find that the ground is slick with blood. It can’t possibly be coming from me, nothing hurts other than my head. I look to my right, in the direction of the groaning, and I almost scream when I see Nate laying on his back, covered in blood. “Nate! Oh my god Nate!”

“Bronwyn,” he groans.

“Oh my God, Nate.” I can feel tears sliding down my cheeks. I crawl over to him, and I bend down to kiss him, my hands on either side of his face.

“My arm.”

I look at his arm and nearly scream again. It’s torn up pretty badly, and his leather jacket, the one he’s had for years, is beyond repair. I grip his uninjured hand and squeeze it tightly. I know, beyond a doubt, that this is my fault. If I hadn’t stopped, he wouldn’t have had to dive for me.

I push his dark hair away from his forehead. “It’s okay. You’ll be okay.” I say it over and over again, like a question, answer, and promise all in one. I don’t know how long I’m sitting here, pushing back his hair. I don’t look away until I hear my sister calling my name. I call hers back, and she comes flying towards us, her dark hair, so identical to mine, streaming behind her. She’s covered in blood and her favorite jeans are ripped at the knees. She crashes to the ground next to me. I don’t look at her. I can’t. If I wasn’t so busy making sure she was okay, then this never would have happened. We would of been okay. This thought makes me cry harder. I clasp Nate’s hand in both of mine. Maeve strokes his hair back. We sit like this for a few minutes before the EMTs arrive. The sight of them makes me cry harder and I barely register that they’re lifting Nate onto a stretcher, and I have no idea how I’m still holding his hand.

“Are you two family?” an EMT asks me.

I shake my head between the sobs. “No. His only family is his mother.” I don’t even mention his dad.

“Okay, can you answer some basic questions for me?”

I nod.

“Okay, that’s good honey. Just take some deep breaths.” I’m following the stretcher now, and Nate’s hand is still in mine. “Okay, can you give me his full name please?”

“Nathaniel Macauley.”

“Does he have a middle name?”

I glance at Nate, who’s looking at me. He shakes his head slightly. “No.”

“Okay. Date of birth?”

“March nineteenth, two thousand and one.”

“Age?”

“Nineteen.”

“Okay. Any prevalent medical history? Does he take any medications?”

I glance at Nate again. His eyes are closed. We’ve reached the back of the ambulance, and before they lift him in, I can see him shake his head. “No.”

“Okay, will you ride with him?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds good. I’m going to stay here and make sure everyone else is okay. Is anyone injured that you know of?”

I’m about to say no when I remember the blood on Maeve’s arm. “Yes. My little sister. Her name is Maeve Rojas, she’s wearing black jeans and a grey Yale hoodie. Her right arm is bleeding.”

“Okay, thank you. Please try to contact Nathaniel’s mother on the ride over, okay?”

“Okay.”

Nate’s mom beat us to the hospital. As did my parents. All three of them are standing together in the waiting room. Mrs. Macauley looks incredibly plain next to my parents, who were dressed up for their charity event. My parents pull me into a hug the minute they see me, and I’m surprised when I realize I’m shaking. My father takes off his suit jacket and wraps it around me. The smell of aftershave and peppermint surrounds me, and I’m instantly calmed. If there’s ever one thing Maeve and I agree on, it’s that safety is synonymous with our father.

A doctor approaches us. “Nathaniel's arm has shrapnel in it,” she tells us, “We have to take him in for surgery right away. If you four want to wait in his room with him while they prep him, you can.”

“Yes. Please,” my mother answers for all of us. She puts and arm around Mrs. Macauley, and I exchange startled looks with my dad. My mother has never liked Nate, or his mother. But I guess when someone might be dying, prejudices don’t matter.

I watch them walk away with the doctor as the sound of pounding feet approach, and someone charges into me wrapping me in a hug. It’s Addy. She’s crying on my shoulder, and I momentarily wonder if my father is cringing at the sight of his suit jacket being cried on. Addy pulls away, and I can see who else she’s with: Cooper, Kris, Ashton, Knox, and Eli. Panic surges through me when I can’t see Maeve. I grip Addy’s shoulders tightly.

“Addy. Maeve. Where is Maeve?”

My dad turns to me so quickly I’m worried he’ll get whiplash. “Maeve was there?”

“Yeah. We were the ones who found the bomb,” Knox says.

Oh boy. Knox clearly does not know what to say and what not to say to avoid a parental freak out. My dad stares at him, and based on the look on his face, he’s way passed freaking out. The last time he looked like that was when Maeve was diagnosed with Leukemia for the first time. He opens his mouth to say something when my mom comes running down the hall, her red curls coming out of their bun. She barrels into my dad. “Nate said Maeve-” She looks like she’s going to start crying.

“Mrs. Rojas, she’s okay,” Cooper says. We all turn to him. It’s clear we all forgot he was there, along with everyone else who just arrived. “She’s with Luis. They’re driving over right now.”

“Who?” My mother asks.

“Luis?” My dad adds, sounding like his usual overprotective self.

But I sag with relief. If Maeve is with Luis then she’ll be okay. “Maeve’s boyfriend.” Addy supplies. My parents adore Addy with all their hearts, but clearly their love is being tested right now. Don’t shoot the messenger is not a saying they live by.

“Boyfriend,” Mom says faintly.

“BOYFRIEND?” My dad echos.

“For like five minutes. He’s nice. You’ll like him.” Addy is unaffected by my parents. Good for her, but the mention of Nate makes me impatient.

“Mom, forget that. How’s Nate?”

My mom grips my arm. “He’s going into surgery in four minutes. He’s asking for you.”

“WELL THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU START WITH THAT?”

I don’t wait for a response, I just take off running in the direction my mother came from. “ROOM TEN!” She calls after me.

I barge into room ten, and I see Nate laying on a bed, there are nurses around him, and his mother is sitting on a chair. Nate reaches his hand towards mine, and I take it.

“You’ll be okay,” I tell him as a few nurses talk to each other. He doesn’t respond. He just closes his eyes, his face turned towards me. Part of me wants him to open his eyes. If is the last time I see him, I want to look into those deep blue eyes I love so much. My parents come into the room a few minutes later, right as Nate’s being taken into the operating room. My dad wraps his arms around me as my mom hugs Mrs. Macauley, who has started crying.

“He will be alright, Ellen. Don’t worry.”

“How can you know?”

“Because he’s a fighter.”

Those simple words bring tears to my eyes. Maybe my mother has finally come around to Nate. Mrs. Macauley hugs Mom harder. “How can people just sit and wait around for their kids? How can you protect them?”

Mom pulls away and looks at Mrs. Macauley. “I watched my daughter battle cancer for seven years Ellen, and every moment killed me. What type of mother am I if I can’t protect my child? But the best thing you can do is just be there. You’ve done great, Ellen.”

I’m bawling my eyes out now on Dad’s perfectly pressed shirt, but I don’t care, and neither does he. There isn’t a dry eye in the room.

Mrs. Macauley recovers first. “I should tell my husband.”

“I’ll tell him. I can drive over. You should stay here.” My dad sounds surprised that he’s offering this, but I guess tonight’s all about forgiving and changing.

Mrs. Macauley nods. “Okay.”

“You’ve got a good kid Ellen,” Mom says as Dad heads out.

“And you’ve got two.”

The waiting room is filled with nearly everyone I love, and my mother and I both make a beeline to Maeve, who’s fast asleep on Luis’s lap. Luis looks up at my mom and smiles.

“Hi, you must be Mrs. Rojas.”

“And you must be Luis.” My mother does not sound nearly as friendly as Luis. I exchange amused glances with Addy.

“What she means, Luis, is thank you for taking care of Maevey.” I say, putting my hands on my mom’s shoulders.

“No I don’t,” Mom mumbles.

“Yes you do,” Mrs. Macauley says, leading my mother to a chair. I pause only for a moment to kiss the top of Maeve’s head and thank Luis again before following them.

Three hours later, Nate’s still in surgery and the news people still keep showing up. The explosion has made headlines, and all reporters keep asking for the boy and girl who saved the day. The boy is curled up on the ground with his back against Eli’s legs, staring into space. The girl is slowly awakening though. She finally sits up after another few minutes and she seems really disoriented.

“Luis?” she asks.

“Yes Maeve?”

“Where-”

“The hospital. Don’t you remember?” Addy asks, placing her hand on Maeve’s knee. Maeve shakes herself a little and sits up straighter.

“Where’s Bronwyn?” she asks in response. Kris points behind her. Maeve turns, sees me, and practically leaps off of Luis’s lap in her haste to get to me. I stand and hug her with all my might, and I think she might be crying. I know I am. I pull away and shake her.

“Oh my God are you trying to scare us?” I practically shout, shaking her again.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Maeve says, her eyes shining with tears.

“Oh really! You stalked a potentially dangerous person, you followed him to God knows where, you crawled into a tiny space, you opened an odd looking bag, you threw a bomb in an arboretum, and then YOU RAN TOWARDS IT!”

“Don’t forget the hiding leukemia thing,” Mom adds sleepily. She and Mrs. Macauley are leaning against each other, and they’re both nearly asleep. I think that’s the weirdest part of my night.

“Oh Mom, we’re over that,” Maeve says. She seems unaffected by my words. “And anyway, no one’s told me about Nate!”

“He’s in surgery. There was shrapnel in his arm.” I say simply.

Maeve blanches. “Is he okay?” There’s real fear on her face, and I’m suddenly sorry I yelled at her. She must feel in over her head right now.

“He should be. There’s no nerve damage, which is good.”

“Oh thank God,” says Maeve right as a nurse walks towards us. Everyone in the room turns to look at her.

“Mrs. Macauley?” she asks.

Mrs. Macauley half stands. “Yes?”

“Your son is out of surgery. He’s stable, and family is allowed to visit, however, I must warn you that he’s a little goofy with the pain medicine.”

Everyone in the room lets out a collective sigh of relief as Mrs. Macauley follows the nurse. I turn back to Maeve, and she’s grinning at me.

“Coffee,” we both say unanimously, and for some reason, we’re laughing so hard we can hardly breathe. There’s something so wonderful, I think, about laughing with someone you love so much when everything is falling apart around you.

Nate is released the next morning, and his mom and I are there to drive him home.

“Is the wedding still on?” is the first thing he asks when he sees us. He hugs his mom awkwardly with one arm. The sight of the sling around his shoulder would make me cry if I wasn’t fresh out of tears. Maeve had told me all about the texting game last night, and watching my sister break down had killed me. After she told me, she locked herself in her room and was on the phone with someone until three in the morning. I think it was Luis. I hope it was, my sister deserves a guy like Luis. Even if he does have a questionable dating history, but Nate told me yesterday that he was planning on having a little chat with Luis about that on Maevey’s behalf.

“Yes, but if you’re too tired, you don’t have to go,” Mrs. Macauley says as she unlocks her car and helps Nate into the front seat. I climb into the back.

“No, I want to go,” Nate insists.

Mrs. Macauley glances at me in the rear view mirror, and I shrug. “Okay Nate. Sure. I need to check in on your father, so I’m not sure who’s going to help you change out of that shirt.” That shirt is the same one from last night. It’s covered in blood.

“I will,” I say. “I’ve already gotten dressed. And Dad’s going to pick up Luis on the way there, he’s Maeve’s date. I’ll just call him and ask him to pick us up too.” My parents had a real conversation with Luis last night while Addy, Kris, Cooper, Maeve, and I went to get coffee. Turns out they love him as much as Maeve does, which is good. But I can’t help feeling a little annoyed that it took five minutes for my parents to fall in love with Luis, and five months for my parents to even acknowledge Nate.

“Well, if that’s alright with you Nate.”

“Of course it is, Mom.”

“Bronwyn I can not get a button down on with this sling. I can’t even get a regular shirt on.”

I’m in Nate’s room, looking through his closet. My parents will be here in ten minutes or so. “Okay, okay. What about this?” I pull a pale green shirt out of the closet.

“Fine.”

I turn and let Nate change, but turn again when he mutters, “stuck”. I laugh and help him de-tangle himself, but somehow I manage to make it worse.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say, and then suddenly I’m crying again. Through the tears, I manage to fix his shirt, and he grabs me by the waist and pulls me into his lap. He doesn’t say anything as I sob onto his shoulder and grip his shirt like a lifeline. His good arm is strong around my back.

“Shh, Bronwyn, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

“I know, but I was just so scared.”

“I know, honey.” He kisses the top of my head, and for some silly reason, I think of Luis and Maeve. “And worst of all, I blamed Maeve.”

“I know you did.”

I pull back and look at him.

“You did?”

“I did. I mean, I guessed that you blamed her. You wouldn’t look at her last night.”

“If I hadn’t stopped then-”

Nate puts a finger on my lips. “I am okay. As is Maeve. And you’re okay too. That is all that matters, okay? All that matters is everyone is safe and it’s a beautiful day and two people we love very much are getting married. Okay?”

“Okay.” I pause and laugh. “Nate, your shirt is soaked. Want a new one?”

“Bronwyn Rojas, I am not changing my shirt again,” Nate says with mock severity. We both start giggling, and we still are when Dad’s car pulls up and we drive to the wedding.

Okay, time for some notes!

I have no idea when Nate’s birthday really is, but the month was mentioned in the first book. I did some math (ew) to figure out the year, and I chose a random date.

The whole Bronwyn/Maeve tension was made up as well, but it kind of felt right? understandable? for Bronwyn to be so worried about her sister that she gets a little angry.

There was no mention of Mrs. Rojas and Mrs. Macauley supporting each other, but I just couldn’t resist

Also, there was no Rojas Parents/Luis interaction before the wedding, but as mentioned in the previous note, I just couldn’t resist.

Okay, I think that’s it, I hope you liked it! 

[maggotzombie]

LIEBE LIESE: ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪᴠ – 𝒲𝒾𝓃𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒸𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓁𝑒𝓈

→ CHAPTERS LIST — CHAPTER III: HONEY LIPS WORD COUNT: 7,5k A/N: The overdue chapter is here (and several hours later than promised). I want to apologize once again for delaying it so much. I have this chapter planned in my head since I first started writing this fic but I couldn’t bring myself to write it for some reason. This is basically a get to know character, hope y’all like it.

HENRY TAKES a deep breath as he slowly wakes up and her scent fills his nostrils. He rolls to his back and, with his eyes still closed, he instinctively reaches out for the warmth of her body but the other side o the bed is empty, cold even, making his eyes snap open right away. Liese isn’t snuggled up in a very small space in the mattress like he wanted to, he’s alone.

Sunlight pours into the apartment heavily, the thin white drapes doing nothing to block it. As his eyes scan the vast open space, Henry is disappointed to not find her hourglass-shaped body anywhere.

He sits up. “Liese?” The man calls, his voice filling the space and bouncing back to him.

No response.

Sighing, Henry clenches his jaw and pushes the covers away from his lap before standing up. At the chair by the corner of the shelving, his clothes are neatly folded, the black boxer briefs on top of the pile. He then notices the blue slip of paper above it.

Without a second thought, he picks it up.

Hi, handsome.

Good morning! Sorry I’m not there. I have to go to work and I couldn’t bring myself to wake you up. You looked so heavenly sleeping. I’ve made you breakfast, hope you like it. It’s in the microwave and there’s coffee on the pot. You can leave my keys with Mr. Ferris at the front desk, he’s trustworthy ;) Can’t wait for our date tonight!

P.S.: I really hope you understand my handwriting because doctors really suck at it and I tried really hard. If not, you’ll find a text in your phone saying the exact same thing :p

Liebe, Liese xo

Henry smiles, still staring at the piece of paper. Her handwriting is really difficult in some parts, especially when e’s looks like i’s and o’s like a’s. But he did understand it and now he couldn’t stop smirking like an idiot.

* * *

Liese rests her chin on the heel of her hand, looking at her friend. “This is a power couple right here, I’m telling you,” Sierra states, holding her phone out to the others.

They have been discussing the success of this year’s benefit gala for the last ten minutes and now the subject is the silver-haired woman. The official photos of the event are circulating the internet and this is totally normal, considering the celebrities that have attended it. But her friends are way more interested in her photo with a certain actor.

“This is like the Queen B and Jay-Z of white people,” Her friend continues, making people laugh.

“That’s Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie,” Kelsie points out.

“They aren’t married anymore,” Sierra makes a face, shaking her head.

“We also have different lines of work,” Liese says. “Beyoncé and Jay-Z are musicians while Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are actors.”

“Girl, I don’t care about that,” Her fellow doctor looks at her like she’s demented. “The point is that beautiful babies would come out of you with this much good genes.”

The woman laughs, shaking her head and standing up. “Great time to start doing our rounds, huh?” She says, walking away.

“We’re continuing this later,” Sierra says, walking beside her.

She shakes her head. “Nope, we’re not.”

They focus on their patients and each visit takes its own time as they pay very close attention and listen to everything they have to say, also making conversation other than the routine questions. Liese gets a text from Henry in-between visits and she replies to him quickly with a smile on her face while walking towards the next room.

Right away, the woman notices something’s off with the little girl they’re visiting. She doesn’t make eye contact with both doctors; her replies are single-worded and her mother does almost all the talking. While she desperately wants to engage in a conversation with her and find out exactly what’s bothering the girl, Liese needs to see other patients as well. So, she returns to her room after she finishes the rounds with Sierra.

A soft knock on the doorway has the two occupants looking at her. “Hey, I’m back,” She smiles softly. “So, I’ve noticed someone is a little upset today,” Liese starts. “And I was thinking: ‘What would I do if I was feeling down?’” She taps her index finger on her jaw, looking up as if in thought. “Then, I remember. Chocolate, obviously!” The woman shakes her head. “So, I went to the vending machine and got this for you,” She slowly reveals the candy bar, finally walking into the room. The little girl beams at her immediately. “But you shouldn’t eat all at once,” The doctor suggests, sitting on the bed and offering her the bar.

“What do we say, honey?” Her mother asks, sitting in the armchair next to the bed.

“Thanks, Dr. H,” Carol says quietly.

Liese smiles fondly at her. “You’re welcome, love,” She says.

Most of the kids call her “Dr. H” because it’s harder for younger ones to say “Hartmann”.

“Dr. H, can I ask you something?” Carol looks up at the doctor, completely ignoring the candy.

She tilts her head slightly. “Sure.”

“Can I braid your hair?” The little girl asks out of the blue.

“My hair?” Liese frowns, taken aback by the sudden request.

“Yes,” She nods. “Your hair is very pretty,” She praises and the frown on the doctor’s face just deepens.

“Well, thanks. But where have you seen it?” She asks.

Liese’s go-to hairstyle for work is a simple bun. It’s practical because it keeps her hair out of her face when she needs to run around the ED and it’s sanitary because, well, she works in hospitals. It’s also very appropriate in a working environment. So, she is utterly confused by the girl’s statement.

“On your Instagram,” Carol replies like it’s obvious.

She immediately panics inside, wondering how many of her patients check her social media.

“Oh,” Her eyebrows shoot to her hairline before she frowns slightly again for a second before snapping out of it. “Okay, sure. But I only have one hair tie,” She points out.

“It’s fine, turn around,” The little girl says excitedly, sitting her chocolate bar to the side.

Liese glances at her mother who shrugs off with a smile before she turns around. She pulls her hair out of the bun and down her shoulders, combing it slightly with her fingers and smoothing down the roots. Carol’s eyes shine in excitement as the silver locks pour down Liese’s back. Then, the doctor rests her hands on her lap, waiting for Carol to start braiding and she does so after shyly asking permission to actually touch her hair.

“It’s so smooth,” Carol beams, running her little finger through her hair. “And shiny!”

“Do you know why I dyed it?” She asks, trying to access how much stalking the girl did on her Instagram.

“Because you lost a bet with Otto,” She replies, starting to braid the right side of her hair.

Liese chuckles, amused by her calling her brother by the name but also concerned. “Yes, you’re right.”

“Who’s Otto?” Her mother asks, frowning.

“He’s Dr. H’s little brother,” Carol explains.

The expression on her mother’s face is of pure chock as Liese nods slightly. “Guess I need to be very careful of what I post, huh?” She muses, trying to make less of the awkward situation.

“And I should start monitoring what this young lady is doing online,” The woman replies, giving a pointed look at her daughter.

“Mom!” Carol whines and the doctor chuckles.

The little girl works quickly, tugging and twisting Liese’s hair skillfully. She braids each side, joining both of it on the back of the doctor’s head with an imperceptible knot. Carol easily convinces Liese to let her take photos of the braid with her phone so she could see it.

“Oh my God,” The doctor says, truly surprised by the professional-looking braid. “This is so gorgeous, thank you so much, Carol,” She looks at the girl.

She smiles, resting her head on her hands. “I wish I had hair like yours,” Carol confesses dreary.

The look on the woman’s face softens. “Is that why you’re upset, sweetheart?” She asks, turning her whole body towards her and giving her full undivided attention. The little girl shrugs, eyes falling to her lap. “Honey, you don’t have to worry. Your hair will grow back and I bet it’s gonna look prettier than mine,” Liese tries to reassure her.

Leukemia is a real bitch. Like any other type of cancer, it makes you suffer throughout the very brutal treatment. When kids experience it, in Liese’s opinion, it’s even worse. It’s hard to explain to them what’s happening and why they can’t be around so many people like before because their immune system is too compromised.

She shrugs off nonchalantly. “I guess,” She murmurs, her eyes still focused on her fidgeting hands.

“You know what you can do while it doesn’t grow back?” The doctor starts, trying to pique her interest.

“What?” Carol asks, still avoiding eye contact.

“You can wear wigs!” Liese says. “Mel from down the hall says it’s very cool to have a different hairstyle or hair color every day,” She adds. “You should talk to her,” Liese suggests.

Finally, Carol snaps her head up and looks at her mother. “Can we do that?” She asks, excited again.

“Sure,” Her mother nods with a smile.

The little girl looks back at Liese with a huge grin on her face in which the woman corresponds. “Dr. Hartmann to the nurse’s station,” The female voice says on speaker.

“Well, that’s me,” The doctor says, standing up from the bed with her phone in hands. “Thanks for the brai – Oof,” She puffs when Carol throws herself into Liese’s arms, hugging her neck tightly.

“I love you, Dr. H,” The little girl says and it surprises Liese.

She then smiles, hugging her small body. “I love you too, Carol,” She replies. “I’ll check on you later today, okay?”

“Okay,” She nods, sitting back on the bed.

“Thank you so much, Dr. Hartmann,” Carol’s mother says when she reaches the door.

“Sure,” She smiles before finally leaving the room.

While Liese was comforting the little girl, Henry walks into the medical facility. Right after he passes through the front door, he realizes that coming there might not be a good idea after all. He has no clue as to where he can find her and she’s working; he shouldn’t be bothering her at work.

“Sir, can I help you?” A young woman at the front desk asks, breaking his thoughts.

“Ah, yes, ma’am,” He smiles politely, approaching her. “Do you know where I can find Dr. Liese Hartmann?”

She makes a face. “I don’t, actually,” Then she chuckles. “But if you go to the nurse’s station on the first floor, they can page her,” She says. “Elevators are through there,” She instructs.

“Thank you,” Henry offers a smile.

“Big fan, by the way,” She adds quickly as he starts to move away.

The man’s smile grows wider. “Thank you,” He repeats, finally walking away.

He follows the young woman’s instructions and gets in the elevator to the first floor. The building only has two floors above the ground level but it looks exactly like a hospital. Nurses and doctors are walking around in scrubs, patients and relatives.

Patients. That’s when Henry is sure it wasn’t a good idea to come there. The patients in that facility are kids from two to sixteen-years-old and he’s fucking Superman. Right now he’s just praying they won’t recognize him because it’s gonna be hell to leave if they do.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Henry says when he approaches the nurse’s station. “I’m looking for Dr. Liese Hartmann. The lady at the reception said you could page her from here.”

The woman double looked at him and her jaw dropped while he was talking. They were talking about him just a few hours ago.

“Uh, sure. Yes, I can do that,” She recovers quickly when he stops talking. “One second.”

“Thank you,” He offers her his breathtaking smile and, boy, she could have fainted.

Smiling at him, the usual effect Henry’s charm has on women, she picks up the phone. “Dr. Hartmann to the nurse’s station,” She says over the phone and her voice is amplified by the speakers. “Give her a couple of minutes.”

“Alright. Thank you so much,” Henry replies, smiling at her again.

It’s doesn’t take a couple of minutes, though. The man pulls his phone from his pocket to check a message and a flicker of silver catches the corner of his eye. He looks up to see the gorgeous doctor coming out of a patient room wearing blue scrubs and a lab coat above it. She looks absolutely stunning with her hair down her shoulders in beachy waves and the waterfall braid.

Liese’s eyes go straight to him and she hesitates for a split second, surprised by seeing him there. Then she smiles, walking towards him.

“Mr. Cavill, hello,” She greets him professionally.

He gets the hint and plays along right away. “Dr. Hartmann,” Henry nods, shaking her hand. “Pleased to meet you again,” He adds and she offers him a mischievous smirk that only he understands in that way.

“Likewise,” The doctor replies. “I’m very glad you took up on my offer to meet the facilities. Should we talk about the details in my office?” She offers suggestively.

Henry nods. “Lead the way.”

With a smile, Liese motions to the elevators he just came from and they walk towards there ignoring everybody gawking at Henry, especially Sierra who was practically arranging their wedding earlier. The elevator ride to the ground level is silent because they aren’t alone but both of them are trying to hold back the laugh.

The walk to her office has fewer eyes on them but it’s only when Henry sees her name on a door that he smirks. She opens the door for him still in a professional way and he walks in. Liese quickly follows, closing the door and having him on her as soon as it clicks closed.

She giggles with his lips on hers. “Hey,” The woman says, before pulling him down at the neck and kissing him deeper.

“Hi,” He breathes out, a silly grin in his face and forehead resting against hers. “You are gorgeous, by the way,” He praises.

She rolls her eyes, moving away. “I’m literally wearing scrubs,” Liese deadpans.

“It doesn’t matter,” The man smiles, looking at her walk around. “So, I’ve come to drop this off,” He says.

Her keys dangle from his hand and the doctor smiles, leaning against her desk. “You could have left it with Mr. Ferris,” She says as he approaches her.

Henry puts his hands on each side of the table, trapping her against it and his body. “I could,” He leans down and kisses her neck softly. “But then I wouldn’t have an excuse to come see you,” Henry adds, kissing the other side of her neck.

She giggles, taking his face with both hands and kissing his lips. “Did you sleep well?” Liese asks, looking into his eyes. “I swear, you looked so at peace when I left that I couldn’t bring myself to disturb you,” She says.

“I did, actually,” He replies, taking a seat at one of the comfortable chairs in front of her table. “Your mattress is wonderful. It’s like sleeping in a cloud,” He says and the woman chuckles. “Matter of fact, it’s the first time in a very long time that I sleep past nine.”

“Why? Kal doesn’t let you stay longer?” Liese asks with a content smile on her lips.

“Well, that and I just can’t stay in bed at all,” The man nods.

“I can think of ways to make you stay,” She starts and Henry’s eyes darken immediately, looking up at her.

“Hmm, I like where your mind is going,” He says, leaning towards her and reaching his hand to caress her thighs. “You have a nice office,” The man adds but he hadn’t even taken a look around her office. “Tell me, have you ever had some fun in here?”

The doctor smirks, pushing his shoulder back and straddling his lap.

Henry’s hands immediately find her waist. “Not today, Mr. Cavill,” She whispers against his lips. “Perhaps when you come back for your visit to see the facility,” Liese teases with a hand caressing his chest. “Right now, I’m afraid I’m kicking you out.”

He was about to kiss her lips when Liese suddenly stands up, making Henry pout. “Seriously?” He asks, looking up at her incredulously.

“Mmhm,” The doctor hums with a nod. “One of my friends was already naming our children earlier. I don’t want to give them the tea,” She confesses. “But I’m looking forward to our date tonight,” Liese smiles at him.

“I’m looking forward to it, too,” He replies, standing up and bringing her body closer to his with one hand. “Our children, huh?” He says as they part their lips.

Liese chuckles. “Yeah. Apparently, our ‘good genes’ would result in beautiful babies,” She makes air quotes.

“Well, I concur,” Henry nods, making the woman chuckle again.

“Let’s take baby steps, okay?” She says. “The date first.”

“Sure. Pick you up at seven?” He suggests.

Liese nods. “Sounds great,” Then she stands on her tiptoes to kiss his lips while resting both hands on his chest. “Now, allow me to walk you out, Mr. Cavill.”

“Please, lead the way, Dr. Hartmann,” He plays along again, making her laugh in amusement.

She straightens her clothes a little before opening the door and walking out with Henry following. At the door, they shake hands again. “Thank you for coming by, Mr. Cavill. I really appreciate your interest,” The doctor says and Henry almost laughs at the real meaning of those words.

“Of course, ma’am. I’ll have my manager to call you with a date,” He replies.

“Great. Have a nice day,” Liese smiles.

“You too, ma’am,” The man smiles before walking away.

The woman watches as he walks towards his car and turns her back when he gets into it. Amelie, the young woman at the front desk, has a smirk on her face when Liese looks at her.

“He looks so much more handsome in person, right?” She says, smiling like a real fangirl.

“I’d say so, yes,” The doctor agrees, chuckling at her.

“And he smells so good too!” Amelie adds excitedly.

Now Liese laughs. “Yeah, okay Amelie. If anyone asks for me, I’m in my office,” She says, already walking back there.

She sighs when she closes the door and a silly smile plays in her lips. The keychain sitting in her desk makes her feel like a teenager as she recalls everything that just happened in her office.

But she doesn’t allow herself to keep doing that as she has a lot of work to get done. So, the woman pushes off the door and walks around the desk, sitting behind it. Liese puts her keys into her purse before focusing on the paperwork that needed attention.

That’s when there’s a knock on the door and then Sierra slips right into the room without even waiting for an answer.

“Nooo,” Liese whines, sitting back on her chair and pitching the bridge of her nose.

“Soulmates, you guys are soulmates, I’m telling you!” Her friend starts, taking a seat at the chair Henry was in minutes ago. “You guys look so good together. Brangelina ain’t shit compared to you guys.”

“Sie, I really need to read these,” She points at the documents.

Her friend nods. “I’ll be quick. He’s just so handsome…”

Liese rolls her eyes and sits back on her chair. For the next forty minutes – yeah, that long –, Sierra explains how they’re perfected for each other, even googling Henry to point out things they have in common. Lunchtime is no different, except this time her friend has allies to convince Liese as to why she should ask the actor out on a date.

In the afternoon, the woman has the desired peace she wanted to go through the paperwork carefully. She gets a lot of things done until the time to leave arrives but she actually goes back to Carol’s room. They talk for a while and Liese asks the little girl to teach her how to do the waterfall braid by herself.

Before she could be late for her date, she gets an Uber home. “Good evening, Mr. Ferris. Got anything for me today?” She smiles kindly at the elder man, leaning on the front desk.

“Dr. Hartmann, hello,” He smiles at her. “Just a couple today,” Mr. Ferris says, turning around to the mailboxes. “A very polite gentleman came looking for you last night and I told him your apartment number because he didn’t seem like a bad person to me,” He says calmly as he turns back around towards Liese with her mail. “I hope it’s alright for you. If not, I’m terribly sorry, I-”

The woman interrupts him, shaking her head and resting a hand above his. “It’s quite alright, Mr. Ferris. Really,” She reassures him. “Also, I’m sure you saw him leaving this morning,” She winks at him.

“Well, I’m not one to pry on anyone’s business,” He shrugs off, making her laugh.

“You’re the best, Mr. Ferris,” Liese leans forward to kiss his cheek. “Thank you so much,” She says before moving away.

The elder man chuckles at her. “He seems to be very nice, Dr. Hartmann,” Mr. Ferris adds.

“He is, Mr. Ferris,” She looks back at him. “And you can call me Liese,” The woman smiles.

“Sure. When you start calling me Carl,” He says nonchalantly, smiling at her later.

Liese waves at him before getting into the elevator. She doesn’t bother to check the mail; she simply discards it on the console table by the front door. The doctor goes straight to the bathroom, taking a relaxing shower. Then she applies a face mask and realizes she doesn’t know what to wear.

The woman panics as she stares at her closet. “Hey, gorgeous,” Henry says as he picks up the call and Liese can sense a smile on his face, making her smile as well.

“Hi, handsome,” She giggles, amused by the exchange. “Where are you taking me? I don’t know what to wear,” She confesses. “And don’t worry about ruining surprises, I don’t know many restaurants and I won’t Google it.”

Henry chuckles at her bluntness and she feels a chill running down her spine just by the sound of it. “It’s a place called Clos Maggiore,” He replies.

“Sounds fancy. Okay, I know exactly what to wear. You’ll love it,” She says, picking a hanger and looking at the dress.

“I’m pretty sure I’d love anything you decided on,” The man replies.

Liese snorts. “I wouldn’t be that sure,” She says. “Anyway, I have to get ready.”

“There’s still an hour and a half until I have to pick you up,” He points out.

“Yeah, well. Some of us weren’t born that handsome,” The woman replies. “Plus, I’ll make sure you will need to pick your jaw from the floor when you see me,” She teases.

He chuckles again. “Okay, I’ll let you go then. See you soon.”

“Bye,” Liese blows him a kiss before hanging up.

The woman leaves the dress on her bed and picks a pair of high heel sandals. She also decides on jewelry and then washes the face mask off. Liese decides on a simple makeup and, by the time she’s styling her hair, her phone starts to ring. Propping it against the vanity mirror, she answers the FaceTime call.

“Hey Gustav,” She says.

“Lis, it’s poker night. You coming?” Her brother asks without even looking at her. “Oh wow, you’re all dolled up,” He says, finally looking at her.

She frowns. “It’s Wednesday,” She points out. “And, no, I won’t come. I have a date.”

Gustav laughs right away. “No, you don’t. I don’t believe that for a second,” He says and she rolls her eyes. “What are you really up to?” He asks.

“A date,” The woman insists. “I don’t have time to talk right now. I will call you later if feel like it,” She says, pulling her curling iron down.

“No, don’t hang up. Come to poker nig-” Her brother tries but she hangs up on his face anyway.

She ignores Gustav calling again and puts on the dress, smoothing it on her body while analyzing her reflection on the mirror. Heels, accessories and some perfume later, the woman gathers a few things in a small clutch. When she picks up a trench coat from her closet, Henry sends her a text, letting her know that he’s waiting for her in the lobby.

On my way down.

She replies before shoving her phone into the clutch. Liese dresses the coat and turns off the lights, waking out of her studio apartment. The elevator ride is very quick and, soon enough, she spots Henry’s large form when the doors open. He has his back towards her and turns around when he hears the sound of heels against the floors.

True to her words, Henry has to pick his jaw from the floor when he sees her. The burgundy velvet dress hugs her form perfectly, the deep V neck showing the curve of her breasts. She styled the silver hair with beachy waves, much like he had seen in the morning, looking very natural.

“Y-You’re… Uh… Wow,” Henry stutters as she walks towards him. “You’re stunning,” He manages to blurt out.

Liese chuckles slightly, greeting him with a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, but I don’t believe it,” She says. “You said the same thing when I was wearing scrubs,” Liese explains with a pointed look and he chuckles.

“It’s not about the clothes,” The man replies with a soft look on his face and she almost melts.

“Well, you’re very handsome yourself,” She praises, a hand running under the lapel of his coat.

Henry’s wearing a deep blue three-piece suit with a gray dress shirt, two buttons popped open to reveal some chest hair. On top of that, he has a thick dark coat. His curled short hair falls over his forehead, making him look both adorable and extremely hot. Overall, he could make Liese wet if he smirked at her.

She’s simply glad that she went all the way because she’d feel extremely underdressed if she had chosen something different.

“Thanks,” He smiles at her.

“Looking very good, Dr. Hartmann,” Mr. Ferris says and suddenly Liese remembers him.

She looks his way and smiles. “Thanks, Mr. Ferris.”

“Shall we?” Henry asks and she looks back at him.

“Sure. Good night, Mr. Ferris,” The woman bids goodbye to the elder man.

“See you soon, sir,” The actor says to Mr. Ferris.

“Have a good time,” He wishes.

“Thanks,” The couple replies at the same time.

Henry leads Liese outside with a hand on the small of her back. “This one,” He steers her to a black Bentley, completely different from the SUV he drove her there yesterday.

“Nice car,” She praises as he opens the door for her.

He chuckles. “Thanks,” He says.

The man walks around the car while she buckles the belt. “How many cars do you have?” She asks, looking at him with a smile.

“A few,” Henry shrugs off and she raises both eyebrows. “I like cars,” He says and she chuckles.

“Sure,” She says.

“How about you?” He asks, starting the car.

“As of now, zero,” Liese replies. “The only car I want it’s my brother’s and I haven’t been lucky these last few years.”

“Really?” He glances at her.

“Yeah,” She nods. “I don’t mind taking the tube, in fact, I don’t care at all.”

“You’re very humble, aren’t you?” Henry chuckles.

“I am, actually,” She says. “I appreciate you taking me to this restaurant, don’t get me wrong, but I also could do a pub with oily snacks and a pint,” The man glances at her again with an amused expression. “I was raised with boys,” She shrugs off.

“At least I already know where our second date is gonna be,” He says.

“Oh, honey. You’re so hopeful,” Liese jokes and laughs at his expression.

The ride to Covent Garden is not long but filled with chit chat. Soon, Henry pulls over in front of the restaurant. He leaves the car and quickly makes his way around it to open the door to Liese. He helps her out and offers his arm like a real gentleman.

With arms linked, the couple gets into the restaurant, not before Henry could praise Liese again. “Good evening,” The hostess smiles at them as they approach.

“Good evening. We have a reservation under the name Cavill,” He says.

She nods, quickly typing on her iPad. “Of course, allow me to show you to your seats,” The hostess says, turning around.

The couple follows her into the bar section, the walls covered by green plants, what both amazes Liese and makes her wonder if it’s real. Red leather contrasts with orange wood and brown seats. Two rooms are just like that before they get into a room with cherry blossoms covering the ceiling with twinkling lights intertwined in it.

“Oh wow,” Liese murmurs, looking up at the cherry blossoms.

Henry has to guide her the rest of the way because she isn’t able to tear her eyes away from it. The hostess leads them to a more secluded table but placed in the same gorgeously decorated space.

“May I take your coats?” The woman guiding them asks.

The man nods and then proceeds to help Liese out of her coat. She’s still mesmerized by her surroundings to the point she doesn’t take her eyes away from the ceiling as Henry helps seat down too. He removes his coat, handing it to the hostess before taking a seat across from Liese.

“A waiter will be with you soon,” The hostess says, holding both of their coats. “Have a nice diner.”

“Thank you,” Henry says to the woman and then looks back at his date when she leaves. A smile forms in his lips. “Well? What do you think?” He asks and she finally looks back at him.

“This place is gorgeous,” She says, reaching out to take his hand. “Thank you so much for bringing me here,” She adds sincerely and Henry smiles wider.

“You’re very welcome,” He starts. “But it’s not as gorgeous as you are,” The man praises once again.

For the first time since they’ve met, Henry sees Liese blushing. At the moment he opens his mouth to say something else, the waiter arrives at their table. He handles both of them menus and waits for them to decide on what to eat. Henry picks a bottle of wine and the waiter praises his choice before walking away.

“Très bien,” Liese says in French in a joking manner.

He smiles at her immediately. “Do you speak French too?” He asks, teasing.

“Non pas du tout,” She chuckles at her joke and he joins her. “I mean, I can remember bits from school but, fluently, only German and English.”

“When did you move here?” Henry asks.

“I’m British, Henry,” The woman giggles, answering his question. “I did live in Germany for a while when I was a teenager, but I was born and raised in Hampstead,” She explains.

“I’d never know,” He shakes his head slightly. “You very German-looking,” He adds.

“Well, my mother is half German and my father is totally German,” She says. “Granddad married a German lady, had my mom, she met my dad in an exchange program she was doing there. When she came home, he came looking for her shortly after.”

The waiter comes back with appetizers and the wine bottle Henry ordered. “Thanks,” The actor says to him. “Cheers,” The actor raises his wine glass to clink with hers.

“Cheers,” She smiles and takes a sip.

“About your parents,” He continues the conversation. “Sounds like a Hollywood rom-com,” Henry says and then, he leans forward on the table. “While we’re in this topic, I’m intrigued,” He starts.

“Okay,” Liese nods, nibbling on the appetizer.

“Do you know that I’ve played Superman, right?” He asks, frowning slightly while looking at her.

“Of course,” The woman nods again.

“Oh, okay,” He nods too. “It’s just because you’ve never mentioned anything related to it and people usually point it out right away,” He explains.

Liese chuckles at him. “I work with and very close to children, Cavill. I’d consider myself a really bad doctor for not knowing every superhero film, cartoons, and animations,” She says.

“It makes sense,” Henry agrees, chuckling along with her.

“I just never mentioned because I didn’t think it would gonna make a difference. Would it?” She asks, resting her chin on her palm.

“Not at all,” He shakes his head, opening a smile. “I’m glad you didn’t, actually,” He smiles. “So, tell me, how long have you been working at the foundation?”

Liese proceeds to tell him that she’s one of the founders of it, that’s why she’s the head of the medical staff. Angela Davies, the little girl that named the foundation, was the woman’s patient at St. Thomas’ and is in remission to this day because of her efforts along with her friend, Sierra Jones. So, the two doctors and the patient’s father, who happens to be a millionaire, started the foundation to help other kids.

Liese’s phone doesn’t stop ringing into her purse and she finally looks at it when their food arrives. There were three missed calls from Gustav along with a bunch of texts of him whining about her missing poker’s night. She ignores all of it and leaves her phone at the table, focusing back on their meal.

The conversation is very easygoing, but the doctor does most of the talking. Henry is trying to get to know her the best he can. She tells him that she practically has three jobs; the formal one at St. Thomas’ Hospital, at the Angela Davies Foundation and a private practice in which she sees patients at home, usually on her downtime. But she explains that she chose not to get paid for the work she does at the foundation and she’s very proud of it.

“I’m really sorry about this,” She says suddenly, taking her phone off the table after the third buzz.

“If you need to take this, I’m okay with it,” Henry reassures.

“No, it’s fine,” She shakes her head, locking the screen. “It’s just my brother annoying me for not coming to poker night,” Liese waves her hand nonchalantly. “He doesn’t believe I’m on a date,” She rolls her eyes.

The man frowns, pretty sure he had seen the name ‘Gustav’ on the screen. “How many brothers do you have, anyway?” He asks.

“Too many,” She widens her eyes slightly, taking a sip of the wine. “After my parents had my older brother,” The woman starts to explain after seeing his face.

“Anton,” He says.

“No, Wolfgang,” Liese corrects him with a chuckle. “Yeah, well. After they had Wolfie, they wanted a girl but Anton came along. They tried again and had me. It was supposed to be it. However, when I was five, my mother got pregnant by ‘accident’,” She makes air quotes. “Identical twins, Gustav and Otto.”

“No way,” Henry chuckles at said ‘accident’.

“Yeah,” The doctor nods. “So, I have four brothers,” She rests her chin on her palm. “This tends to scare guys away,” She confesses, looking at him.

“Well, not me,” He says with a smile.

She smiles at him too. “How about you?” Liese asks, picking up her fork.

“Oddly enough, I have four brothers, too,” The man replies.

“Any sister?” Now she’s the one with the questions because she genuinely didn’t know anything about him.

He shakes his head. “Only brothers.”

“Oh,” She makes a face. “Your poor mother,” The woman jokes.

Henry chuckles. “She’s a strong woman,” He says, clearly proud of her.

“I bet,” She smiles. “Are you older than the rest?”

“No,” The man shakes his head again. “I have three older brothers; Piers, Niki, and Simon; and one younger brother, Charlie.”

“Well, at least you’re not the one who’s always being compared to the others,” Liese chuckles.

“My family is not like that,” He explains.

“Good. Mine neither,” She sips her wine again.

“What do you mean when you said your brother doesn’t believe you’re on a date?” Henry asks, interested in that.

The woman pauses for a bit, licking her lips. “I don’t… Go on dates,” She replies slowly.

“What?” He laughs in disbelief. “You’re one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen in my life. How come you don’t have guys asking you out?” The man asks, completely dumbfounded.

“I mean, they do,” Liese shrugs slightly. “I just don’t go,” She explains. “My last relationship was… disappointing, to say the least. So, I kinda gave up on that and focused on work,” Liese confesses. “I have a lot of that, anyway,” She chuckles bitterly.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Henry says, sounding genuine. “And I hope you didn’t give up on it completely.”

“Well, I’m here, ain’t I?” She smiles at him.

“And I really appreciate it,” He says and gets a wink in response as she takes a bite of the food.

Liese’s phone vibrates on her lap and she has an idea. “This might sound idiotic, but do you mind if I take a photo of you?” She asks out of the blue. “I mean, you handsome as fuck, but I think it’d make my brother shut up,” She explains and he laughs.

“I don’t mind as long as you let me take photos of you too,” He bargains. “I’d love to brag about you to my brothers.”

“Photos?” She raises an eyebrow with a smile. “Well, that escalated quickly. I just need one,” She chuckles, raising her phone towards him. “Give me your best, Superman,” The woman says after taking a few pics of him serious and he chuckles at her words. “Thanks,” She bites her lips, choosing one picture.

“My turn?” He asks, taking his phone from the inner pocket of the jacket.

“Snap away, handsome,” Liese says, cropping the photo so it just shows from his cute chin and below. “Cameras don’t love me as they love you, though,” She smiles, glancing up at him. “I’m not a Hollywood star,” Liese teases him and looks back down at her phone and sending the photo to Gustav.

“I have to disagree on that,” The man says. “You look amazing,” He adds. “But I want you to pose for me, too.”

He’s snapping photos of her since she said he could but she poses to him anyway and he takes quite a few amazing shots. Then, the woman’s phone vibrates on her lap again with a new text from Gustav and she glances down at the notification.

Hm, Jaeger-LeCoultre. Fancy. Very. Fancy. Who’s that? Show me his face.

She rolls her eyes at the text and decides to turn off the phone. “What did he say?” Henry asks, amused by her reaction.

“I think the only thing he saw was your watch,” She says, rolling her eyes.

He chuckles. “So, poker night?” The man furrows his brows.

“Well,” Liese chuckles. “My brothers always included me in everything and my family never had the gender separation nonsense. Like, this is for boys and this is for girls,” She explains.

“That sounds like parenting done right,” Henry says, making her smile wider.

“Exactly! That’s how I want to do in my family, too,” She says.

The lamp goes off in his head as the man sips the wine. Finally, the questions that really matter to know one’s intentions for the long term.

“You want a family?” He asks.

She nods right away. “Of course. And a big one, too,” She replies, unintentionally pleasing Henry with it. “I think I’d feel void without at least three kids,” She chuckles. “I don’t know about you, but my teenage mornings were very chaotic with a family of seven and I honestly miss it.”

“Mine was, too,” Henry smiles, nodding too. “And I quite agree with you. I’d feel like something’s missing.”

“Yes!” The woman doesn’t hide her excitement. “But I’d like to have more than one girl so she won’t suffer alone the pain that is to share the bathroom with boys,” She chuckles.

“Two girls sound nice,” He agrees again. “To be honest, I can’t stand the thought of guys touching my baby girl or girls. So, I change my mind, no girls,” He says and she laughs.

“You’re so silly,” Liese shakes her head slightly. “So, tell me more about that role you’re trying to get. The one that has hair like mine,” She asks and she’s glad she did because Henry’s eyes light up right away.

For the rest of the diner, she listens Henry talking about this fantasy character named Geralt. He explains how he’s annoying the hell out of the producers since he heard Netflix would make a TV series of it.

They share desert and the actor doesn’t allow Liese to pay half of the bill. He helps her to put her coat the foyer of the restaurant and slips his own before they step out in the cold night. Once again, Henry makes sure to open and close the door for Liese before rushing to the driver’s seat.

Henry tries to persuade her into going to his house by saying that Kal misses her, but the woman declines politely. She has to wake up even earlier tomorrow for her shift at St. Thomas’, so, sleeping in his place is completely out of question.

The drive back to her apartment building is much faster but equally entertaining as they continue talking. However, when he parks in front of it and immediately reaches the door handle, Liese stops him with a hand on his arm.

“Thank you so much for the amazing evening, I had an amazing time,” Liese says honestly, a satisfied smile playing on her lips as she stares into his eyes.

“I had an amazing time, too,” Henry says, smiling at her. “You’re a wonderful woman,” He watches as she unbuckles her belt.

“And you’re a real gentleman,” She starts to lean closer to him. “A dying kind,” She whispers against his lips before sealing it with hers.

His large hands cup her face and she pulls him closer from the neck, deepening the kiss. Things start to get heated quickly and, with a simple hand on her waist, Henry pulls the woman over the car console to his lap. She runs her hands on his chest and he doesn’t realize as she stuffs something in the front pocket of his suit jacket.

She stops everything when he slides his lips to her neck and collarbone, squeezing her ass and making her moan. “I have to get in,” Liese whispers, capturing his lips one last time tonight. “Don’t let Kal have this one,” She says, patting his chest and confusing him as she climbs out of his lap. “Have a good night, Mr. Cavill. I’ll call you,” Liese pecks his lips and winks at him before opening the door and leaving his car.

Henry is completely baffled as he watches her hips sway with a semi hard-on into his pants. Then, a few seconds after she disappeared into the building, he chuckles, shaking his head.

“What a woman,” He says to himself, pushing his hair out of his face and restarting his car.

The man drives home and Kal greets him as usual. He puts food for the big bear before starting to undress. His mind was already going a thousand miles while thinking about Liese, but then he finds what she stuffed into his pocket. Slowly, he pulls the small, lacy piece of underwear from it.

Now it makes sense what she said about not letting Kal have that one.

Henry stares at it for a whole minute, wondering at what point the woman slid it off because he didn’t notice at all. She was definitely wearing it because it smells like her and it’s still warm. With his mouth still dropped open, Henry grabs his phone and snaps a photo of the pantie.

Are you kidding me? When did you take this off?, he texts her.

While we’re slightly making out in the car. I hope you liked the gift ;p, she texts back almost immediately.

I did, but I prefer taking it out myself, Henry replies.

I’m sorry, my shift at St. Thomas’ starts very early tomorrow. I’ll repay you soon, I promise xo, her last text says.

The man simply shakes his head with a smile on his face while Liese does the same in her apartment.

* * *

— CHAPTER V: BOYFRIEND MATERIAL

[alarawriting]

The Cold At The Heart of the Light: Chapter One

I’ve decided I’ll post probably the first three chapters of this as I work on it. There’s currently six chapters written and the seventh is started; I have been planning about twelve of them.

This is gonna have to be edited a lot when I finish the whole thing -- it’s too goddamn long, for one thing -- but I can’t spend too much time editing the first draft when I’m not done with it.

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

As soon as the maid led me to the living room and I got my first look at the little girl, I could tell the child was dying.  She was sitting on an overstuffed, white suede couch with brown fringy pillows all around her, at the back of a living room that looked like something out of House Beautiful, all tall wide windows and understated elegance in brown and beige and gold and white. She was maybe about seven, if her disease hadn’t undersized her, feet dangling off the couch and not moving. When children whose feet are dangling are not kicking those feet, and there is neither a book nor a TV nearby to explain the discrepancy, I can generally tell something is wrong. Her blonde curly wig was as expensive as the décor of her parents’ living room, but I’m an expert in these matters – I could tell the chemo had taken her hair. And her skin was dull and dry looking, her eyes vague and unfocused, her expression indrawn and blank, her small limbs painfully skinny.  She showed all the signs of either being abused, drugged, or severely ill, and given that her father had called me in, I knew that at least it was the last. Probably the second as well.  The pharmaceutical industry has never solved the problem of stopping children’s pain to my satisfaction (or, for that matter, the children’s.)

Her mother would have been an elegantly plastic politician’s wife if she hadn’t been sitting tensely at the edge of the sofa, arm around her daughter, clutching the child. Fear and anxiety make even women with $500 haircuts and botoxed foreheads seem human. I’d already forgotten the woman’s name; after checking over the daughter with a quick glance, I turned to focus on her father. Senator John Lightman, one of those politicians who manages to look “boyish” simply by being a thin dark-haired man in his prime when everyone else in the Senate is somewhere between 60 and dead, was walking toward me, reaching out a hand as if to shake it. I saw the look of puzzlement cross his face as he got a good look at me. “Are you…”

“Dr. Mystery?” I filled in the blank. “Yes, of course, I apologize. You couldn’t possibly recognize me like this.”  I had arrived in a stock form, a middle-aged woman of average height, weight and appearance with blonde graying hair in a short fluffy do.  I couldn’t very well drive around town in my working form, but now that I was here, it was time to shock and awe the mundanes.  With a thought, I transformed.

When I first adopted this as my working form, it used to take me ten or twenty minutes in front of a mirror to get it just right, because it doesn’t look human enough for me to use DNA as a model anywhere – I have to brute-force it. But by this time I’d been doing it for so many years, it took only a few seconds. Changing doesn’t hurt – it feels like having a really good stretch, actually.  

In a moment, I was six feet tall, simultaneously busty and thin, with the golden skin of an Academy award, iris-less purple eyes with cat pupils, and flame-red hair down to the small of my back.  I wore a skin-tight black leather catsuit with no shoes, and modified pelvis and leg muscles so I looked like I was wearing high heels even though I was barefoot – an anatomic impossibility for other women, but there’s no point in having total control over your own flesh if you can’t use it to show off a little.  To complete the costume I grew a white cotton labcoat over the catsuit; not exactly a cape, but the name is Doctor Mystery, not Ms. Mystery or Lady Mystery or Sexy Chick I’d Like To Do Mystery.  

Being a supervillain’s all about the power and the respect.  Back when my working form wasn’t quite so do-me hot, I actually used to get less respect as a villain, as if a woman couldn’t possibly really be all that mad, bad and dangerous to know if she doesn’t look like a supermodel.  But when I do the catsuit without the lab coat, I get respect as a badass with dangerous powers and incredible fighting skills, not as a biomedical genius.  Not that I’m not a badass with dangerous powers and incredible fighting skills, but I’m not a teen thug for hire anymore, I’m a bona fide mad scientist and I want people to remember that, dammit.  

Mrs. Lightman’s eyes went wide, and she made a tiny little yelping noise and clutched her little girl… who rather than looking frightened, actually looked mildly interested for the first time since I’d arrived.  Her dad was trying to hide it, but his lips had compressed as if he were trying not to bite them and there was just the tiniest tremor in his hands.  I expected Mrs. Lightman’s reaction, but the Senator could have gone one of two ways – men usually react to me with fear or lust, or a combination.  I didn’t think I saw lust in Senator Lightman, and when I took his hand and shook it, I confirmed it.  He was on the verge of peeing his pants.  I might have believed he wasn’t reacting with any lust because he really had eyes only for his wife, if he weren’t a politician.  But I’ve known very few male politicians to be faithful, and even they couldn’t avoid being lustful.  Senator Lightman was terrified of me because I was a Proxima and he was a Sapien-centric bigot.  Also, probably, because I was a supervillain and a killer and I could drop him dead in a second, turn him inside out, make the skin melt off his flesh or give him cancer, just from the touch of his hand in mine.  But I suspected I’d have gotten the same reaction if I’d been a member of the Peace Force, or even a Girl Scout with purple eyes and gold skin trying to sell him cookies.  He hated my kind, but he needed me today.

And I intended to use his need to my people’s advantage.

“Introduce me to your family, Senator,” I said.

I felt his adrenaline spike through the skin connection of our clasped hands, but he managed not to show it.  He let go of me.  “This is my wife, Dot, and our daughter Mindy.  She’s eight.”

I walked over to Mindy and knelt down in front of her, prompting more tension and white knuckles from her mother clasping her.  “Hello, Mindy,” I said.

“Hi,” she mumbled.

“Do you know who I am?”

“My daddy says you’re some kind of super doctor.”

Super doctor. I liked that.  “He’s right.  I’m here to help you.  I imagine you’ve gotten real tired of being sick.”

She smiled wanly.  “Yeah.”

“Let me have your hands.”

“Will it hurt?”  Her tone was tired and apathetic, as if it didn’t really matter if it was going to hurt or not.  I suspected it was more resignation than apathy.

“Not at all.”  I smiled at her.  “I’m a super doctor, remember?  It doesn’t hurt if I don’t want it to.”  

She gave me her small hands and I clasped them in mine.  I can’t entirely describe what I feel when I examine a living creature, not in terms that refer to the senses everyone else has.  It’s like feeling a symphony or hearing a tapestry.  Everything is very complex and interrelated, and I get signals from thousands of processes in the body, but it all melds together into a single big picture.  The big picture here was that Mindy’s body was attacking itself.  Her bone marrow was busily churning out cancerous white blood cells that didn’t work, filling her bloodstream with useless cells that crowded out and starved the working, useful ones.  The pain signals were overwhelming even with the drugs trying to mask them, and the drugs themselves were dulling her mind as much as the fatigue and weakness from the disease.

Like many terminally ill children, she was quiet and accepting, which is constantly mistaken in glurgy human interest stories about terminally ill children for bravery.  Children who go out with scarves on their bald heads and run lemonade stands to raise money to research and cure their own illnesses are brave.  Children who are too tired to feel fear and have been living with a disease too long to cry about it are just normal human beings.  Mindy was a normal human being, and her leukemia was also perfectly normal, something I’d dealt with a hundred times before.  

I closed my eyes so I could focus better on Mindy’s internal world.  First I triggered the release of endorphins into her bloodstream to mask any pain caused by what I was about to do.  The human body rebels against my power, seeing my authority as a violation of its autonomy, and frequently reacts by tattling to the brain about it in a way that the mind perceives as agonizing, but unspecific, pain.  As I told Mindy, though, no one feels pain in my hands unless I allow it.  As soon as her body was saturated with endorphins and I’d shut down most of the internal sensory trunk lines to the brain, making her internally numb while leaving her ability to sense anything touching her skin, I swept my concentration through her body and killed every immature white blood cell she had.  I then targeted the surviving mature white cells and forced them to rapidly replicate and mature, until she had almost a normal white blood cell count and they all worked correctly.

To finish off, I blocked the drugs that hadn’t been working so well anyway, turned the internal nerves back on, and filled Mindy with a combination of endorphin and oxytocin, and other hormones designed to make people feel good.  This particular cocktail wouldn’t have sexual effects – Mindy’s brain lacked some of the structures needed to process that, yet, and I always took great care with children not to do anything inappropriate to their age.  After what my own father did to me… well, I may be a supervillain, but I am not a child molester, and that makes me better than he was.  What I was going for – what I always gave the children I treated – can be best described, if you remember being a kid, as the excitement from knowing you’re about to go to an amusement park, coupled with the pleasure you get from eating ice cream, and all that combined with the warm snuggly feeling you get when you’re cuddled with your parents.  Mindy wouldn’t know why, in the future, she looked forward to my visits and felt very warm and positive emotions toward me.  She would just know that seeing Dr. Mystery would be the coolest thing ever, and just my presence would be more fun than any doctor’s office lollipop ever was.

Combine such warm and pleasant emotions with the freakish physical appearance of an obvious Proxima, and Mindy would not grow up to share her dad’s bigotry, even if he tried to teach it to her.

“Mindy?” Dot Lightman asked, her voice trembling slightly.  “Are you all right?”

Mindy lifted her head.  Her skin didn’t look any better, of course – I hadn’t done any cosmetic work – but her eyes were refocusing, turning bright and engaged.  “Mommy?  I feel good, Mommy.  I think the doctor fixed me!”

With my endorphin cocktail chasing away her fatigue temporarily, she leapt to her feet.  “Thank you, Super Doctor Mystery!  I feel all better!”  She twirled around, perhaps to prove to all of us that she was fully healed… and stumbled.  “Whoa, dizzy!”

“Slow up there, kiddo,” I said.  “You’re not cured.  You feel a lot better and you’re going to be a lot better, but you’ve spent a couple of years being sick and you’re not going to be back to your full strength overnight.  Take it easy.”

“Is she—is she going to be cured?” her mother asked, looking at me, her lower lip trembling.

“She’s much healthier, right now.  But no, as I said, I haven’t cured her yet.  I triggered a temporary remission and bolstered her immune system to compensate for what the disease did to it, so she needn’t suffer while she’s waiting for a full cure.”  I turned to Senator Lightman.  “To cure her, I’ll need to perform three treatments, about two months apart.  The cost will be $8,000 per treatment.  When we’re done, not only won’t she have leukemia, but the genetic potential for cancer will be purged from her system, so it will be very, very unlikely that she ever get any cancer-like disease again.  Short of living on top of a radioactive landfill, of course, but you understand what I mean.”

“Oh, God….” Mrs. Lightman started to cry.  “Oh, God, thank you…”

“Don’t cry, Mommy,” Mindy said, and gave her mom a hug.  “It’s good news. Don’t cry.”

“I’m crying because I’m so happy,” Mrs. Lightman said.

“I—I don’t know what to say, Doctor.  You have a deal.  I’d pay anything to save Mindy’s life, and your prices… well, they’re much more reasonable than I was led to assume.  I’d pay more than that for hospital treatments, even with the insurance.”  I was pretty sure this was a fib – Senators get damn good health insurance.  But of course Lightman belonged to the party that thought that health insurance was a privilege, not a right, and downplaying the high quality of his own state-sponsored insurance was probably a reflex by this point.  

I smiled at him.  “That’s because most of my payment is non-monetary.”

“Non-monetary?”

“Let’s go have a discussion, Senator.  I imagine you must have a private office in this house somewhere?”

His wife gave me a hard-eyed look. I returned her look with an “oh, please” expression, just the slightest of eye rolls and sardonic smile.  “There’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t say in front of my wife,” Lightman said, his voice hardening.

“Yes, there is,” I said, pleasantly.  “You want to tell her all about it when we’re done talking, that’s your prerogative.  But I am here to negotiate with a United States Senator, not a husband or a father.”

He stiffened.  “All right,” he said slowly.  “We can go downstairs to the den.”

“Is it—is it going to be all right?” Dot Lightman asked her husband.

“I don’t see that I have much choice, Dot,” he said.  “She’s the only hope Mindy has.  You know that.”

“Mommy? Can I play outside?”

“Sure.  Sure thing,” Dot said, her voice breaking again.  “I’ll play with you.”

“Don’t let her overexert herself,” I said.  “As I said, she’s better, not cured, and even if she were cured she’d still need time to recover her energy. She wants to run around and play now because she’s not in pain, but she actually still does need to save her strength.”

“We’ll go for a walk,” Dot said.  “How’s that sound, Mindy?”

“Sure, Mommy. We can do that.”

“The den is this way,” Senator Lightman said.

It was a typical suburban finished basement, not nearly as fancy looking as the living room, if you didn’t count the huge projection television.  I perched on the still-nice-but-obviously-worn couch, sitting on the back of it.  “Let’s get down to it, Senator,” I said.  “You’re a member of the Committee to Analyze Parahuman Activity.  You’re aware as well as I am that the United States government has been investigating or implementing various techniques to control or eliminate the Proxima population, including laws to create a registry for us as if we’re sex offenders, black ops soldiers with power suits to hunt us down, attempting to find cures for us like we’re a disease, secret databases being maintained in an attempt to identify us in the absence of a registry law… so on and so forth.”  I didn’t mention the biowarfare; people who didn’t live through being imprisoned in a government research facility and watching others being injected with various tailored viruses have a tendency to assume that government biowarfare is the stuff of paranoid conspiracy theories, and I doubted anyone had actually let Congress know what was going on there.  The others, I was pretty sure he’d been briefed on, if not actively involved with.  “And you’re an active supporter of the Human Definition Amendment, which would deprive us of any human rights whatsoever on the basis of junk science.”

The faintest beading of sweat broke out on his forehead.  “The United States government hasn’t taken any illegal actions to ‘control’ the Proxima population, as you put it, and certainly not to eliminate you.  You must understand, however, that we do have the right and the duty to protect normal humans from people like…”

He hesitated just a moment too long. “Me?”

“I was going to say, people like Caesar Primus or Optometron.  But if the rumors about your activities are true, then yes, you.  Weren’t you some sort of assassin?  An enforcer for a drug lord?”

While technically the description was almost true, the idea of describing David as a “drug lord” almost made me laugh.  Almost.  I don’t actually have a lot of a sense of humor when it comes to David.  “And I was rehabilitated by the Peace Force and today I’m a fine, upstanding citizen who cures little girls of leukemia,” I said.  

“That isn’t a lot of comfort to the families of the people you killed.”

“Maybe not.  But if I’d been killed by American soldiers in power suits then, your daughter would be out of luck now, wouldn’t she?”  I slid off the back of the couch and paced around him.  “And this isn’t about me.  How many people were saved when the Irregulars stopped that second plane from crashing into the Trade Towers?  When they held up the collapsing building so the firefighters could get out?  When the Peace Force shored up the levees in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina so the city didn’t flood, or when Maui’s volcano went active and they shut it down again?”  The Senator didn’t actually need to know that was a plot of Professor Octohedron’s, if he didn’t already. The Peace Force hadn’t actually broadcast the fact that the disaster had been caused by a Proxima in the first place; I only knew about it because Octohedron continued to believe that he could get into my pants if only he could impress me enough, and he hadn’t actually ever managed to figure out that I wasn’t impressed by grandiose plots to take over the world by threatening to activate volcanoes.  “You might owe your life to a Proxima. You are about to owe your daughter’s life.  So I want your support for our basic human rights.  Oppose the Parahuman Registry, oppose the research to kill us or break us of our powers, and oppose the Human Definition Amendment.”

“The Human Definition Amendment isn’t designed to take away your human rights,” he said.  “It’s designed to clarify the rights you do have.  I mean, there have to be different ways to handle you people vs. the rest of us.  Remember when the ACLU sued on behalf of the Heat Miser?  They said that it was cruel and unusual punishment to keep him continuously drugged in prison. And as soon as they won and the drugs were withdrawn, his powers came back and he burned the prison down. 700 people were killed, over 100 guards and the rest of them human inmates, who’d been sentenced to serve time in jail for their crimes, not to burn to death.”

“Then you redefine cruel and unusual punishment to state that methods intended to block Proximas from using superhuman powers to escape from prison are not cruel and are perfectly usual.  Passing an amendment to the Constitution that declares that Proximas aren’t human is overkill.”

“It actually declares that humans belong to the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, and that the law should not be automatically extended to grant human rights to people who can destroy our entire planet with a thought just because some bleeding heart doesn’t think they deserve to go to jail for killing hundreds of people.”

“Yes, and by declaring that Homo sapiens promixus does not automatically count as human, it effectively says that we’re not, and we can be shot on sight with no one but the ASPCA to worry about our murders, let alone suffer discrimination in every part of our lives.  You do not live with the reality of what being defined as non-human means, Senator.  I do.”

“And you, Doctor, don’t live with the reality of inhabiting a world filled with creatures who can kill you with a thought, steal everything you own, destroy your home without even touching it, or make you believe that up is down and black is white.”  

I could argue that last point, if I wanted to be a smartass – I lived in the world where there was conservative talk radio, and it had convinced any number of people that up was down and black was white.  But that would be sidetracking.  “True.  But you’re so focused on perceiving yourself as a victim of the existence of Proximas that you’ve given no thought to what it would be like to be one of us. And you really should.  Because you have a child, Senator, and she is too young to be confirmed as Sapien or Proxima.  You don’t know what she is, and you’re just assuming she’s Sapien.  What if she’s Proxima?”

He blinked.  “Well, of course I—but she doesn’t have anything in her background – I mean neither her mother nor I have anything unusual, genetically—“

“No one knows what’s causing the sudden explosion in powered humans, Senator, but we do know that it’s some type of mutation.  90% of Proximas have parents who were Sapien.  And the number is that low only because some of us have started having kids.  If your daughter was a Proxima with two fully Sapien parents, she’d be in the same boat as most Proximas. Including me.  So you really need to think about it.”

“Well, I – I certainly wouldn’t treat Mindy any differently if she were – but if she were, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“I didn’t check for it.  But I could, yes.”

“Well, if she turned out to be, you could just fix it, right?  As part of the treatment?”

I stared at him as if I’d just found him on my shoe.  “Of course I could. And if she was black, I could make her white and blonde and blue-eyed. And I could change her into a boy if you decided you really wanted a son.  Have you any idea how offensive what you just said is?”

“I – I didn’t mean to give offense.  I just want Mindy to have a normal life.”

“Most Proximas do. I don't look like this all the time, Senator.  When I'm not treating hopeless cases, I live in a nice little townhouse, with two cats and a cockatiel.  I go dancing with men friends on weekends, I buy groceries, I do my laundry.  I choose to look like this when I'm treating people like your daughter, because I have no desire to be kidnapped and pressed into the service of crime lords or the government."

"Why would the government kidnap you?  Proximas have rights.  If you’ve served your time for your previous crimes, and committed no new ones--"

"--I would still have the power to make old men young, cure impotence and infertility, heal disease and scarring, change people's appearances... come on now, Senator, don't be naive.  If you had a way to make me heal your daughter without paying my price, you'd do it.  And I think you're basically a good man, who’s concerned for the child he loves.  Can you say none of your colleagues would want me to heal them?  To restore lost youth, or whatever they had lost?"  I thought of the white room then, the snipers with guns outside ready to blow my head off if the important old men screaming under my hands didn’t get up and walk free completely healed when I was done. Never again.  

"I... suppose power corrupts.  There are some bad elements in any system, but that doesn't mean the system is evil."

"I didn’t say the system was evil.  I said it’s not designed to protect people like me.  And if you and your fellows have their way, it’ll be even harder for me to live a normal, safe life.”  I shook my head.  "We're sidetracking.  If Mindy turns out to be a Proxima, she could still have an entirely normal and happy life, so long as you didn't reject her for it and the government didn't kill her for it."

"I would never reject Mindy.  No matter what.  If-- if she was a parahuman--"

"Then your opinions on appropriate treatment of Proximas would be rather different, wouldn't they?"

He sighed.  “Look, I have a constituency, Doctor Mystery.  They elected me into office to protect them and serve them, and they have ideas as to what constitutes doing that.  If I do something that they don’t approve of, I won’t have the power they’ve given me for very long.”

I flopped down on his couch again.  “Oh, baloney.  You mean that if you can’t fearmonger about hidden Proximas living among us and the draconian measures the Daddy State will take under your watch to protect the poor scared soccer moms and NASCAR dads, you can’t get elected.”  I sat up and leaned forward.  “It’s all bullshit. The tide of history always favors greater human rights, greater freedoms, greater protections for minorities vs. mobs.  And it always works out better in the end that way.  I understand that you have to protect yourself from lunatics who shoot death rays out of their elbows, but you know, you also have to protect yourself from lunatics who break into the McDonalds’ with a gun and start shooting people, and somehow it was your party who decided it was an unacceptable infringement on your freedom to hunt, shoot intruders, and generally feel like manly men to make people undergo background checks to get assault weapons.”

“The Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms.”

“The Constitution wouldn’t say that if you passed an amendment redefining a ‘well-regulated militia’ as the National Guard.  Which I’m not saying you should.  I’m in favor of your right to protect yourself with a gun. I’m in favor of your right to shoot animals for fun if you feel like it; I’m a Darwinist and you’re a predator.  It’s in your genes.  Go shoot deer if you want.  But the Constitution currently states that I am a human being, because it doesn’t say that I’m not, and I was born in the United States to two human beings, share 99.9% of my DNA with you, speak your language, look like you, and have sex with you.  Well, not you personally, but Sapiens men.  So if it’s so vitally important to preserve the right to bear arms, because it’s in the Constitution, that it’s okay to let sociopaths get guns and shoot up college campuses, then it is vastly more important to make sure that every child born in this country to human parents is defined as human.  

“If you pass this Definition of Humanity amendment in order to protect your constituency, and Mindy turns out to be a Proxima, then she can be raped and her rapist could be charged with bestiality at best, because she wouldn’t be legally a child who can be molested, she’d be legally an animal. She could be killed, and the most her killer could be charged with is animal cruelty. No school would have to take her, no hospital would have to treat her diseases, no restaurant would have to let her in to eat with you.  You would have to fight a battle to get her treated in a way that you humans take for granted, every time.  Want her to die in a car accident because the paramedics didn’t want to treat a Proxima?  Want her to die in a fire because the firefighters didn’t want to risk themselves going into a burning building for someone who isn’t even human?  There are better ways to defend Sapiens than making it legally open season on us.”

“But you’re against those too. The Parahuman Registry would allow us to track dangerous people without having to deprive any of you of basic civil rights.”

“Except I’ve never heard of a version of it suggesting that only parahuman criminals be added to the registry.”

“Well, dangerous parahumans haven’t necessarily committed crimes yet.  But for instance, if your next door neighbor turns up dead of a heart attack and everyone knows you were fighting with him, isn’t it important that the police know you have the power to stop people’s hearts by touching them?”

“If your next door neighbor has a gun, isn’t it important that you know about it so you can keep your daughter from playing in his yard?”

“Most gun owners are law abiding citizens, and if someone is killed with a gun we already have laws on the books to help the police track down the killer.  If someone is killed with a superpower, we wouldn’t even necessarily know to look for a superpower.”

“So educate the cops better on superpowers.  Most Proximas are law abiding citizens.  If you kill your neighbor by hitting him over the head with a frying pan, does that mean you needed to be on some sort of registry of frying pan owners?”  I started pacing again.  “It’s irrelevant in any case.  I don’t care what your personal beliefs are.  I care that you love your daughter and want her to be healthy.”

“So you’re blackmailing me.”

“Blackmail?  I’m demanding payment.  When your campaign contributors give you money for re-election, they’re not blackmailing you to expect that you’re going to show them some quid pro quo. I’m offering you something far, far more valuable than a few dollars in your re-election coffers; I’m offering you your daughter’s life and health.  I think expecting a little quid pro quo is not unreasonable.”

“And what if I refused?  Would you let her die?”

At one point that would have been a tough one; in this line of work you have to appear to be compassionate, but you also have to be tough or the patients will walk all over you.  I had had plenty of experience dealing with this particular conundrum, though.  “Do you know what I did for Mindy today?  Do you understand her disease at all?”

“I don’t know what you did, no. You keep saying you made her better but you didn’t cure her.  But I do know something about her disease.  The doctors tell me that she’s making too many white blood cells, and it’s crowding out and killing the rest of her blood.”

“Close.  They’re immature, cancerous blood cells, so they don’t work to protect her from disease the way mature white blood cells would.  This lowers her general immunity, and yes, it clogs up her bloodstream and takes resource away from working cells.  What I did today was to kill all the immature cells and regenerate some of the mature ones.  She still has leukemia; she’s still making too many immature cells.  Without a full treatment that will never stop.  What I’ve done is to ease her symptoms.  Until she builds up too many immature cells again, she’ll feel better.”  I leaned on the wall, arms folded.  “I’m perfectly capable of doing this every six months and never actually curing her.  She’ll feel better, and she’ll have a happy, normal life, as long as she gets her treatments on time.  The one time she misses a treatment, though – maybe because the government kidnapped me, arrested me, killed me or took my powers away – she’ll have full-blown leukemia again, and within a year or two she’ll die.”  I pushed off the wall.  “So you can support me up front because it’s the right thing to do for the person who gave you back your daughter’s life, or you can hedge and haw and refuse to get with my program, and if so your daughter will be well for exactly as long as I am able to continue treating her.  The very laws you want to pass that will harm me, will block my ability to heal her sooner or later, and then she’ll die, and it’ll be your fault.”

“And how do I know that if I promise to do as you ask, you really will heal Mindy and you won’t just do what you just said?”

“How do I know that if I really heal Mindy, you won’t go back on your word and start pushing for the Human Definition Amendment again?  It’s a matter of trust, Senator.  You trust me, I trust you.  Or you don’t trust me, I don’t trust you.  Tit for tat.  What’s it going to be?”

He took a deep breath.  “I’m not going to just rubber stamp your suggestions.  Even if that was the right thing to do for my constituency, and it’s not.  I’m going to study the situation and try to do the best thing to protect my people and yours.  You can accept that or not.”

“All right, I’ll accept that, with one caveat.  The Human Definition Amendment is totally off-limits.  You can switch your support to the Inclusive Humanity Amendment, or just drop your support of Human Definition, but if you don’t publicly do one or the other within the month Mindy does not get fully cured.  The other stuff, do the studies you want to do, but I think you’ll find that when you look at Proximas as if we are people and not weird animal things with superpowers, you’ll find it a lot easier to come up with ways to help protect your kind without harming mine.”

Lightman nodded.  “All right, Doctor.  Then we have a deal.  When do you want to perform the first treatment?”

“If you’ve got $8,000 lying around in a checking account, we can do it today.”

“I do.  Who do I make the check out to?  I don’t imagine you can cash a check made out to Doctor Mystery.”

“Make it out to Miracle of Life, LLC.”  I had about twenty-seven of these shell companies I used to funnel my various payments through, since even Senators typically had a hard time coming up with $8,000 in small unmarked bills on short notice, and a girl’s gotta eat.  Playing politics is all well and good, but I needed to cover the mortgage and the gas money for my various trips to clients, plus the funds for my various Activities of Mad Science.  Just because you can manipulate any organic tissue with a touch, doesn’t mean you get your beakers and retorts and Petri dishes for free.  “Let’s go upstairs.  I’m sure Mindy is eager to begin freeing herself from this disease.”

“Of course.”

At the top of the stairs, I reached out for his hand.  Too afraid of giving offense to refuse me, he took it, and I shook with him.  “Pleasure doing business with you, Senator.  Go call your daughter in, give me a check and we’ll do this thing.”

“Thank you, Dr. Mystery.  I may not entirely approve of your politics, but thank you for giving my daughter back her life.”

He wouldn’t be thanking me so much if he had known I’d just planted a tiny clump of slow-growing cancerous cells deep in his brain.  It’d be a year from now before he started feeling any symptoms, and that would land in the middle of his re-election campaign.  If he did what I wanted after I finished healing his daughter and we were on good terms, I’d find some excuse to come by and heal him or prune it down again.  If not… there was a reason I was a feared supervillain even though most people knew me, if they knew me at all, as some kind of uber-doctor.  You didn’t double-cross Dr. Mystery and survive it.  Ever.

Well, unless you were Dr. Suryabati Chandrasekhar.  Then you got any number of free passes.

***

The truth was, I was being something of a hypocrite.

I was offended at Lightman’s suggestion that I make his daughter a Sapiens if she turned out to be a Proxima, but not for the reason I told him.  The difference between a Proxima becoming a Sapien and a Sapien becoming Proxima isn’t the difference between black changing to white or male changing to female.  The difference was described by Plato as a man raised in the darkness leaving the cave to see the light of the sun, vs. a man raised in the sunlight doomed to spend the rest of his life in a cave.  Making a Proxima a Sapiens is like giving someone a lobotomy, or a clitoridectomy, or binding her feet until she can’t walk.  It’s an obscenity, a Harrison Bergeron nightmare of breaking the best down to the level of the mediocre, taking away a birthright one was born with.  

Making a Sapien a Proxima is, on the other hand, one of my great callings in life.

Mindy Lightman wasn’t a Proxima before I touched her.  But she would be, before I was done.  I did a preliminary assessment of her DNA while I was performing the first treatment, and I stored a small amount of her cellular matter in a pocket under the skin of my hand, to study at length later. I’d determine how much energy her mitochondria could supply her and which latent powers-complex genes she had, and which powers they were likely to ignite into.  If she had something distressing, like death touch or world-shattering TK or the gene for turning blue, I’d edit the complex over the next two sessions into something more palatable for the child of a public figure, something frilly and unthreatening.  Maybe the ability to make pretty light shows, or fly.  Most flyers loved it, and it didn’t seem to frighten Sapiens as much as some other powers did.

When I left the Lightmans’, now back in my middle-aged lady persona, I headed first to the bank to deposit the check.  Senators whose daughter’s lives are on the line don’t give me checks that bounce, but they do take time to clear, so the sooner I got it in, the better.  And then I dumped the rental car at the airport, changed form in the bathroom, and got on the Metro to head back home.

****

Science fact: There is only one gene that determines the difference between a Sapiens and a Proxima.

To most people this seems insane.  Proximas come in an entire extra range of colors besides the human norm, have powers ordinary humans can only dream of, and get energy to fuel these powers from a source that is frankly incomprehensible.  We just have to be a separate species, in most people’s minds.  When Proximas were first discovered, there was a huge push to label us a fully separate species – Homo superior (thankfully, that one got shot down real fast) or Homo proximus, “the man who comes next.”  Scientists – not me at the time, since I was too young, but reputable geneticists and biologists – had to constantly point out that the definition of a species is that they cannot viably interbreed.  The children of superpowered and ordinary humans were themselves perfectly fertile. Ergo, we cannot be a separate species.

But we hadn’t mapped the genome then, and we didn’t know exactly why Proximas had powers.  So scientists made, in my opinion, a mistake.  They agreed to classify us as a separate sub-species.

You’ve grown up being told that you are Homo sapiens.  What you might not know is that technically, if you’re not a parahuman, you are actually Homo sapiens sapiens.  There were several other subspecies of humans, all extinct, such as Homo sapiens idaltu (elderly wise man).  It is still scientific nonsense to call us a subspecies, when we’re only different by one gene – to put this in perspective, parents and children differ by many, many more than one gene – and in fact the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature keeps debating changing it to Homo sapiens sapiens proximus or dropping the designate proximus entirely. But the scientific evidence that we aren’t even a separate subspecies gets even less play in the media than studies that show that men and women are alike, if such a thing is possible.  And at least the Homo sapiens proximus nomenclature reinforces that we are of the human species.

The trouble is, most people don’t know that the true name of Homo sapiens is actually Homo sapiens sapiens.  So when they hear the short designators – Sapiens vs. Proxima – they assume that our species is Homo proximus.  We’re widely believed to be an entirely separate species, and it doesn’t help that high-profile supervillains like Caesar Primus (who is 2,000 years old and knows as much as any Roman gladiator about science, which is to say, diddly jack), or Professor Octohedron (a brilliant physicist and inventor, but he knows about as much biology as I know about fixing my car, and let me put it this way, the last time I ended up dead on the side of the road I needed a friendly dude passing by to tell me I’d run out of oil) are constantly spouting off about how we are a new, superior species.  Informed laypeople and doctors usually know better, but the truth – that we are different by only one gene – is so appallingly counterintuitive that you almost need to be a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist to get it.

But here’s the truth.

The human genome is packed with genes that don’t do anything.  Most come from our evolutionary history. You may have heard that we are less than 1% genetically different from chimpanzees.  That 1% consists mostly of control genes, which govern when, how and if the other genes turn on.

It turns out that some of those genes generate superpowers, under the right conditions.  One of them turns melanin, the brown pigment of humans, blue in the presence of a hormone called catalysine.  Others use catalysine to activate superhuman abilities.  All humans carry some of these genes.  But only a very, very tiny number – about 1 in 10,000 – have the gene that codes for the creation of catalysine.

Like testosterone, catalysine has two surges in a person’s life cycle.  One is pre-natally.  The amount generated is small and doesn’t pass the placental barrier, so no, pregnant women do not manifest superpowers when carrying a Proxima baby.  That’s an urban myth.  The surge pre-natally does little, usually, except to prepare the brain to control superpowers someday, creating a brain nucleus and appropriate wiring.  In cases where the child has two Proxima genes – for example, the child of two Proxima parents-- the amount of catalysine created pre-natally might be enough to distort the child’s appearance, begin converting melanin into azurin, or awaken a low level of superpower.

When the child hits puberty, the same genes that turn on sex hormones turn on catalysine production.  The superpowers appear, and wire up to the brain structures created in utero.  If the child has the gene for azurin conversion, their pigment changes from brown to blue – so pale red-haired and blonde white children suddenly develop purple, green or blue hair, while brown-skinned children turn blue all over.  (Azurin is also rare.  Only about 5% of all people carry the gene for azurin production, and only Proximas ever display it.  Non-Proximas with the azurin mutation never express it, and end up creating perfectly normal melanin, because they are never exposed to catalysine.)

The “power mitochondria” are another pan-human phenomenon that only expresses itself in Proximas.  All living cells on Earth contain tiny organelles called mitochondria – practically separate living things, with their own DNA, they use oxygen and sugar to generate the chemical that powers all life, ATP.  Power mitochondria vastly overproduce ATP, and no one knows where they get the energy to do it – it’s like they suck potential energy out of the universe and convert it to life force.  But they do this only when activated by catalysine within the cell.  About 1/3rd of humans have power mitochondria.  In the presence of the Proxima gene, these people generate energy above and beyond what they take in from food and air, which is then consumed by their superpowers.  Without power mitochondria, a Proxima must draw from their own life force to fuel their superpower, which makes their powers pretty weak.  The exact same genes for telekinesis can code for a person that can lift 70 lbs with their mind with effort vs. a person who can lift an aircraft carrier out of the water and break it in half, depending on the presence and output of the power mitochondria.  Since mitochondria are passed by the mother, Proximas who inherit their power from a powerful mother will always be very powerful themselves, whereas Proximas who inherit from a powerful Proxima father depend entirely on the hidden status of their mother for their own strength.  

(Funny fact, here: when Proximas were first discovered, male Proximas freely dated, married and fathered children on human women, because our entire society says it’s okay for men to have wives who are weaker than they are. Proxima women, on the other hand, mostly stuck to their own kind.  In the seven years since we discovered the role of the power mitochondria, we have seen a dramatic reversal in which powerful Proxima men will not marry or get serious with human women unless they consider themselves “childfree” or have had the human woman’s mitochondria analyzed for power status, and more and more Proxima women are dating Sapiens men.)

So most of what goes into making a Proxima is actually in a vast percentage of the human population – 30% have power mitochondria, pretty much all of them have powers-complex.  It’s the presence of the single gene that codes for catalysine production that makes a person Proxima as opposed to Sapiens.  My belief was that Proximas would not be safe from the fear and envy of Sapiens unless we were normalized.  The more Proximas there were, the more the law would adapt to and accommodate us and our needs and the less we’d need to fear the mob of Sapiens out to kill or control us.  So my primary work, since I became Dr. Mystery, had been to increase the number of Proximas by giving as many Sapiens the Proxima gene as I can.

In my early experiments, when I used uncontrolled methods like retroviruses to mutate people, there were high casualty rates.  Sapiens adults whose brains have not been exposed to catalysine in utero can’t control whatever superpowers they develop if they suddenly start making catalysine.  So I started working primarily with children, usually terminally or chronically ill children that I could get direct access to.  My power can create new brain pathways, and in a child or teen, with a developing brain, I can do it transparently, with no one noticing.  Adults cannot experience sudden brain growth and change without noticing that something’s wrong – memories suddenly becoming lost, well-developed skills becoming weaker, mood swings, etc—so I only alter adults into Proximas if they request it.  I often modify women of child-bearing age so that all their eggs carry the Proxima gene, ensuring that they’ll give birth to Proximas if they ever have kids.  It’s harder with men, because men are generating new sperm all the time – I’d have to alter the spermatogonia, and since they’re part of the body, the body’s immune system might notice that they are genetically different from the other cells and attack them, making the man infertile.  So I only make men into Proxima-fathers if I have plenty of time to work with them and tweak their immune systems, if necessary – and if they’re likely to have kids.  Gay men coming to me to save them from AIDS and 70-year-olds who don’t want to get Alzheimer’s are usually not worth modifying reproductively.  

The Peace Force were aware of my work, and opposed it.  They believed it was wrong of me to change people’s genes without their consent.  Technically, maybe they were right, but come on, what sane person would object to having superpowers?  The only reason anyone would not want to be a Proxima is the prejudice against us, and I was working on that too.  So I had to maintain a low profile because every so often the Peace Force would take it into their heads to try to capture me.  I’m pretty sure this wasn’t fully legal – I was pardoned for my activities as Megamorph by Bill Clinton (did you know that Hillary Clinton once had breast cancer? No?  Well, neither does anyone else), and nothing illegal I’d done as Dr. Mystery could be proven in a court of law.  But the law hadn’t caught up with Proxima abilities, so the Peace Force never overly concerned themselves with whether they could prove wrongdoing or not.  Their mentor and leader, Dr. Suryabati Chandrasekhar, aka Doctor Sun, was a telepath, and if she said, “Bad guy! Go fetch!” they would jump like puppydogs after a thrown stick.

So I lived in Baltimore, in a townhome in the Woodberry neighborhood, on Television Hill, because living directly under the broadcast tower generated enough interference that Suri couldn’t find me telepathically.  I’d have preferred Little Italy, or better yet, a real city like New York or Philly (and I’d come way down in the world, admitting that Philly is a real city), but New York was far too close to Suri, whose base of operations was in Manhattan, and a lot of my work was done with politicians, making Baltimore or DC more convenient than Philly.  And DC had the Special Service, human police in power suits who patrolled to protect the Capitol from parahuman attack.  I never felt safe in DC.  My Woodberry home had civilians living on both sides and a children’s day care across the street, ensuring that the Peace Force couldn’t attack me in force – they’d know the threat to civilians from a power battle would be too great to risk it politically for my sake (and to be fair, most of them are goody-two-shoes hero types who wouldn’t risk civilians, especially preschool children, even if they had perfect political cover for the operation.)  So I figured that if Suri ever found me, she’d still think twice about siccing her dogs on me.

Also, the Light Rail, Baltimore’s sad and pathetic substitute for a subway, had a stop near my home.  I didn’t learn to drive until I was 28, and I still hated it with a passion.  I was a Brooklyn girl – give me a city with buses and subways and railways, so I wouldn’t have to dodge hurtling chunks of death metal just to get where I was going.  From DC’s Metro, after I dropped my rental car at the airport, I changed at Union Station to the Camden line, took it to the baseball stadium in Baltimore, and changed there for the Light Rail.  This took far longer than a car would have, but didn’t involve me being isolated in a tiny box with no source of living organic matter other than my own flesh and facing careening metal boxes coming right for me.  It also didn’t involve traffic jams, which are brutal on the DC Beltway.  A short walk from my stop later, and I was home.

As I unlocked my front door, Brian the cockatiel chirped at me wildly, flapping his wings in his cage.  I’m really proud of Brian – in some ways he’s my greatest work.  He used to be a man, or the head of a man, who attempted to rape me once.  The truly pathetic thing was that Brian had been a good-looking guy, wiry and blond, the way I like them, and if he’d been willing to wait half an hour I would happily have had sex with him.  But he hadn’t wanted sex, he’d wanted rape – the only reason he dated women and went back to their houses with them, rather than jumping out of the bushes with a knife, was that he was a lawyer and knew that a handsome man with money who date rapes a woman will basically never, ever be convicted.  People think rapists have to be hard up for sex, or have to somehow look evil – the idea that a handsome, charming guy who could get any woman he wanted would actually prefer to hold screaming women down and force them when he could get consensual sex with the exact same woman instead breaks people’s brains.  They assume the woman must be lying, because what man who could get mutual fun would prefer to commit rape?  No one wants to admit how common misogynistic sadists actually are or how normal they look.

I found out from Brian that he’d date-raped ten women before me, that only two had tried to press charges, and the cops had refused to take the charges in one case and upset the other one so badly with their disbelief that she’d dropped the charges.  I found this out while I had him paralyzed but still able to feel sensation, his voice made too hoarse to do more than whisper no matter how much he suffered, on a cot in the basement.  Over the course of the two weeks that I used him in experiments, he told me his entire life story, amidst lots of self-justifications, begging, pleading and promising to change his ways.  Then I started turning his body parts into animals, bit by bit.  The rats and mice I made of his arms and legs didn’t come out right, and they died.  The cockroaches who used to be his testicles were actually very robust, but after the cat knocked over the terrarium I was keeping them in, I had to get an exterminator to kill them because who wants cockroaches in their house?  I was actually quite sad when the puppy I made out of his guts wouldn’t wake up and live – sometimes they just won’t come alive no matter what I do.  Living things are very complex, and it’s more an art than a science to do things like make life into different life.  

Since at that point, Brian had no way to digest food or ingest water, and he was therefore only a day or two away from death, I finally put him out of his misery by turning his head into a cockatiel and his torso into an iguana, a gecko, and a handful of tropical fish.  Nothing lived longer than a week except the cockatiel, which so far had lasted three years.  I often wondered, since I’d used some of the original brain tissue in making Brian’s new cockatiel brain, if he had any dim sense that he used to be human.

I fed Brian a cracker, re-absorbed my shoes into my flesh, and took back my original human form before plopping down on the couch to relax and await my cats.  My actual body was permanently frozen at about age 22 or so; I changed it so often, I’d never really had the opportunity to let it naturally age.  I could have forced it up to 36, where I really was, if I had to, but why bother?  No one was going to see me and think less of me for looking too childish.  My natural form is about 5’4” and built like a gymnast – tiny breasts, thickly muscled legs and arms, a rounded and balanced body with a low center of gravity and nothing sticking way out of line with the rest of it.  For gymnastics – my childhood passion – and for combat, it was a fantastic body, and I used it for years as Megamorph before it occurred to me that maybe I should hide my true face if I was going to be a criminal.  For instantly commanding respect, making men drool and women envy, or sending the signal “I AM A SERIOUS CRIMINAL MASTERMIND”, it wasn’t so good.  It was short, the face looked too young and soft (and too much like a young, soft Gillian Anderson – people in med school actually used to call me “Scully”), and a body perfectly proportioned for gymnastics or martial arts isn’t all that attractive by the psycho standards of our culture.  But it was my body, and in my home, with the shades drawn and the security system on, I went back to it because it was me.  

As I wiggled my toes on my shag carpet and then propped my feet up on my coffee table, I wondered where my cats were.  They were well-fed cats, but their heightened metabolisms made them constantly hungry, and they knew I was a sucker for giving them treats when I’d first come home.  Normally, they’d be leaping on me minutes after my arrival.  This worried me.  If I had accidentally shut them in the bedroom, Angelkitty would probably pee on my ceiling to express her displeasure and Pikachu might have destroyed my furniture with a few good lightning blasts by now.  

My cats were also experiments.  I’d been curious to see if the genetic structures I’d observed in other mammals that seemed related to the human powers-complex were in fact superpowers, so I got myself a pair of abandoned newborn kittens and in between the droppers of kitten formula (I really drew the line at making cat milk in my own breasts; those little things have teeth very early), I modified them to generate catalysine.  The female promptly grew bird wings (which didn’t attach to the right spot on her back and were too small; she’d never have flown if I hadn’t heavily modified them for her), and the male developed the ability to shoot lightning out of his paws, so I named them Angelkitty and Pikachu.  (Technically, if you have seen the Pokemon cartoon, which I admit I have, Pikachu is a mouse that shoots electricity, or something rodentlike anyway, but come on, there aren’t exactly any mythological figures of cats that shoot electricity.)  Angelkitty’s a Siamese and Pikachu is mostly white with some orange. They don’t have power mitochondria – that does appear to be a human thing – so they eat like pigs.  I could feed six ordinary cats off what my two eat, but they remain extraordinarily svelte, almost feral in their slimness.  And so if they weren’t here to pester me for fish treats, something was wrong.

I got up and went out to the kitchen.  To my relief, my cats were still noshing on their tuna fish, which amazingly it looked like they had barely touched before I came home.  (I always fed them human food.  Why not?  I had the money to keep them in canned tuna rather than cat food, and they loved the stuff.)  Pikachu looked up at me, gave me a meow that I interpreted as “Oh, you’re home, good,” and then went back to his meal.

Wait a minute.  There was more food in the bowl than there had been when I said good-bye to them this morning.  And it was beyond the realm of possibility that they’d left so much food untouched for so long, anyway.  And the tuna looked fresh out of the can.  So how—

“I was wondering when you were going to get home,” a woman’s voice said behind me.  I was already spinning to face her, preparing to leap at her, but as soon as I saw her I realized it was hopeless.  “Don’t you ever feed these cats?  They look like they’re starving.”

Ciana Kim, aka Sapphire, my once-classmate and current dire nemesis, was standing – well, floating—above my stairs in her traditional blue bubble, her features slightly obscured by the blue distortion and concealed behind her mask.  The combat leader of the Peace Force was in my house.

I backed up.  I couldn’t take Sapphire directly.  Her power was to generate spherical or toroid magnetic fields, which glowed blue due to the way they bent light, hence her name.  I needed organic channels to send my power through—behind her force field, Sapphire was totally safe from me, because I couldn’t touch her.  I wasn’t safe from her, though.  She could generate a force field around me, trapping me, any time she wanted.  

There was a switch by the door to my basement, labeled “FURNACE – DO NOT TOUCH,” that would actually activate an EMP.  All the computer and electronic equipment I had in my house outside the Faraday cage of the basement would fry, but Sapphire’s power would fail as well, and I could leap on her before she could reset her power.  Or, if I didn’t really want to replace my MP3 player, phones, and the laptop in the bedroom, perhaps I could grab Pikachu and throw him at her.  He’d be startled enough to discharge a bolt, and the electrical surge should pop her field like a soap bubble.  I knew I had a faster reaction time than Sapphire – after years of modifying and tuning up my nervous system, I’m faster than anyone who doesn’t have super-speed as a specific power – so I should be able to grab her and neutralize her power or knock her out before she could get a force field back up again.  I was reluctant to do that because Pikachu was my kitty and throwing him at superheroes seemed kind of mean, even though I knew he wouldn’t be hurt, but the EMP generator could theoretically blow out TV Hill, and then I’d have to dodge swarms of reporters trying to find out why they suddenly couldn’t get on the air anymore.  

I stalled for time.  “They’ve got very fast metabolisms.  I feed them all the time, but they’ll pester anyone they meet for more.”

Sapphire rolled her eyes.  “Oh, stand down, Meg. If I was here to capture you or beat you up, I’d have done it before you knew I was here.”

She had a point. Sapphire wasn’t stupid, and she had completely gotten the drop on me, to the point that I was actually really embarrassed about it.  “So what do you want?  Cooking advice?  I always prefer to replace the generic vegetable oil with olive or canola, it’s easier on the heart.”  The last time I’d been in the same household as her, Ciana Kim had refused to learn to cook, for very similar reasons to her refusal to learn hand-to-hand combat.  

She ignored my jab. “Doctor Sun sent me.  She needs your help and she asked me to ask you.”

I blinked.  Doctor Sun wanted my help?  Cold day in hell.  But it’d have to get a lot colder before I’d say yes.  “She wants my help?  And she actually thinks I might agree?  Excuse me, but the last time I interacted with any of you people you wrecked my lab, ruined four years of work and set me back half a million dollars.”

“You were infecting children’s vaccines with a retrovirus.  Did you seriously think we’d let you just get away with it?”

“All it would have done was make them into Proximas.  What do you think I am?”

“Someone who mutates people against their will.  And how do you know that’s all it would have done?  Retroviruses mutate. Besides, it’s still wrong to change people without their consent.  How do you know those kids would even have wanted superpowers?”

“Oh, be real.  Who wouldn’t want superpowers?”

“If I wasn’t a Proxima, I might have been an Olympic gold medalist.”

She was telling the truth.  One of the things that annoyed me so much about Ciana was how close her life had been to mine, minus the dysfunctional family.  I, too, had had Olympic dreams once, and my coach had told me when I was 11 that I might seriously make it as a contender.  But no matter how good I’d been, I’d never really had a chance; if my parents hadn’t died when I was 13, some other aspect of my family’s screwed-up-ness would have ruined it for me.

Ciana Kim, however, had had a good and loving family who’d pushed her hard in the belief that she could achieve anything.  She was a third-generation Korean American from California and her parents were doctors or something like that, and they’d stood behind her every step of the way.  Even after everything had fallen apart in my life and I’d basically become a thug for hire, I had followed the Olympic gymnastic news, so I’d known all about this as it was happening.  

Ciana was originally to be the USA’s representative to the Olympics in Seoul for women’s artistic gymnastics.  Much was made in the media of a Korean American going to Seoul to represent America, but Ciana had been very photogenic and full of great soundbites about how she was as American as apple pie and she was honored to represent our great country and she was so looking forward to bringing a medal home for the US and she was following in Mary Lou Retton’s footsteps and blah blah blah.  And then, a week before the Olympics, it had come out that she was a Proxima.  They’d finally figured out that doing a blood test for catalysine would find any Proxima with an active power.

The truth is that even now, twenty years later, as an experienced superhero who uses her powers all the time, Ciana still can’t use her powers invisibly.  There’s always a shiny blue blob there. And she had no training with her powers when she was 16, so it would have been even more implausible that she could have somehow used her powers to secretly cheat.  I would be disqualified from a Sapiens competition in gymnastics in any sane world because of what my powers actually are, but Ciana was disqualified solely from anti-Proxima prejudice (and, to be fair, probably some anti-Asian prejudice from the Americans whose job it would have been to advocate for her).  The Americans paid for their prejudices when Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union took home all the women’s gymnastics medals (I don’t like Ciana, but I’m pretty sure she would have won at least a silver in something, if not a gold.) Ciana was recruited by Dr. Chandrasekhar to learn how to use her powers and eventually join the Peace Force, Dr. Chandrasekhar’s UN-supported superhero team.

So it wasn’t that I had no respect for Ciana’s loss, but it irritated me that she saw the problem as being that she was a Proxima rather than that the Olympic committee was scared of Proximas.  And also, that being an Olympic medalist was better than being a superhero.  “Yeah yeah, you could have had your moment of glory, and nowadays you’d be selling sneakers and breakfast cereal to pay the bills, assuming anyone even remembered you at all.  What’s Mary Lou Retton doing with her life?”

“She’s been an Olympics commentator, and she’s a motivational speaker who supports physical fitness.”

Trust Ciana to actually know this.  “And that’s better than being a superhero how?  You save lives, you have an action figure, millions of little girls look up to you—“

“—I wear a mask when I save lives because otherwise supervillains or stalkers might hunt me down, no one knows my real name, my family aren’t allowed to tell anyone what I do for a living, I’ll probably never have a normal life with a husband and kids—“

“--You could marry some guy and quit the superhero business any time you wanted to, it’s just your overblown sense of responsibility that says you can’t quit your job to have babies until your powers give out on you, because you think the world needs you, and if that’s the case where would they have been if you hadn’t been a Proxima?”

“Someone else would have taken my place if I hadn’t been a Proxima.  And all of this is besides the point; no matter how great you or even I might think it is to have superpowers, the fact is that you were planning to infect helpless babies with a retrovirus that would have mutated them.  Some of them might have died of it.  Some might have been killed by their families for being Proximas once they manifested.  You don’t have the right to play God that way.”

“Nobody would have died of my virus,” I retorted.  “I tested it thoroughly ahead of time.  But you also notice, I haven’t done it again.”

“Because you know we’ll stop you.”

“Because I listened to your arguments that retroviruses are unstable and highly prone to mutation, and I decided that maybe you have a point.”

“Then why did you bring it up?”

“You didn’t even try to just persuade me.  You just blew up my lab!  Do you know how many vials of vaccine I hadn’t modified yet you destroyed?”

“All of this is pointless,” Sapphire snapped.  “I’m wasting time arguing with you when Doctor Sun is dying.  Are you coming or not?”

Wait, what?  Dying?  

I had been a half-crazed killer with no self-esteem, no sense of myself being able to be or do anything good, no belief that anyone could ever care about me – at least not without dying for it – after David died.  Dr. Chandrasekhar had taken me in and taught me that I could have a better destiny than being a tool for monsters to use to kill each other with; that I didn’t have to be a monster myself.  I could use my powers for good.  I could help people.  I could be a decent person.

Viewed from her perspective, I suppose, it didn’t last – I freely admit I am a supervillain and I do highly unethical things, up to and including killing people.  But I do it for a cause I believe in.  I do it to save my people from the bio-engineered diseases I was forced to participate in creating at Sonnebend.  I do it so girls with superpowers who are going to medical school to learn how to save lives will not be kidnapped, stripped of their powers except when convenient for their captors, raped, tortured and forced to use their powers to heal enemies and kill their own kind, by agents of their own government.  I do it so my people can enjoy the same rights and privileges as every other human on this planet.  And the fact that I can fight for a cause, that I can see myself as a person with a noble goal of my own… I owe that entirely to Doctor Sun.

No matter what she does to me, no matter what she orders her Peace Force to do, I can’t ever get away from that.

“Dying of what?”

“She was kidnapped and raped by Caesar Primus.  When she escaped, she was two months’ pregnant, but the doctors say it seems more like six months.  The child is growing too rapidly for her to handle it, and it’ll kill her.”

Oh, God.  

My heart started pounding, my throat went dry.  I could feel the adrenaline surging, my sympathetic nervous system revving up for a totally inappropriate fight-or-flight response.  I couldn’t stop imagining the reality behind Sapphire’s words.  It didn’t help that I’d once had sex with Primus myself – consensual, sort of, but I could entirely too easily imagine what it’d be like to be raped by him, without powers to protect you.  And Primus was immune to telepathy, so effectively Suri would have been helpless.  God, no.  I didn’t want to think about that.  

So I was flippant, and cold.  “Doctor Sun’s a woman of the world.  You’re telling me she’s never heard of an abortion?”

“She doesn’t want an abortion.  She says she won’t compound Primus’ act by taking an innocent life.”

“When did Doctor Sun turn into a pro-lifer?”

“She says the baby has a mind and she won’t kill it.”  Sapphire floated herself down onto my dining room floor, still surrounded by a protective bubble but no longer on my stairs.  “Are you going to help, or not?”

“I’m a feminist Darwinist.  I’m morally opposed to letting a fetus conceived in rape live.  It lets dangerous genes persist in the population.  Suri knows that.”

Sapphire sighed explosively.  “Fine.  I knew you weren’t going to be any help, but Doctor Sun believed in you.  I’ll just go tell her I was right and she was wrong.”

“What is this supposed to be, reverse psychology?”

“Nothing reverse about it. I knew before I got here that I would be wasting my time.  You’re a killer with no conscience; why Doctor Sun ever thought you might help, I have no idea.”

“Because she knows me better than you.”  I stepped forward.  “If this is reverse psychology bullshit, it isn’t necessary. I’ve known I was going to agree to help you since you told me she was dying.  And if you really believe what you’re saying, then nyaah nyaah nyaah.  I’m a doctor; everything I do, I do to save lives.  And at least I have to try to persuade Doctor Sun to abort the thing.  Besides, if she was raped by Primus she might have injuries she could need my help with.”  Primus had hammered at me like he was trying to break my pelvis, and without my powers he might actually have done so.  And I’d voluntarily gone to bed with him.  What he’d do to a woman he was raping, I really really didn’t want to imagine.

I didn’t mention to Sapphire that this was partly my fault anyway.  When I’d met her, Suri (Dr. Suri to me in those days, but I feel I have the right to call her by her first name now) had been dying slowly of multiple sclerosis.  She had met me on a good day; she’d only needed crutches and braces to move.  On bad days she’d been confined to a wheelchair, and on really bad days she’d had to stay in bed.  I’d healed her, and in the process I’d turned her from a forty-something woman approaching menopause back to a woman in her prime, young and healthy, physically in her 20’s.  It had been almost 20 years since I’d done that; Suri would be approaching menopause again, but obviously wasn’t there yet.  By now she’d be well past childbearing if I hadn’t de-aged her when I’d healed her disease.

I didn’t know whether Primus had raped her to torture her, to express domination over her, to really make the Peace Force mad at him, or to impregnate her, but I knew he had enough control over his body that if he hadn’t wanted to impregnate her, it wouldn’t have happened.  It was entirely possible that the goal of the whole thing had been to force her to carry his child; Suri was an enormously powerful Proxima with high output power mitochondria, and most women with such energy-full mitochondria would have had a power they could use to fight back against Primus.  Blocking a Proxima woman’s powers while she was pregnant carried high risk to the fetus if it too was a Proxima; it could prevent the fetus from developing the ability to control its powers as an adult.  Suri was rare in that she was incredibly powerful but only telepathic, with no telekinetic abilities, and with Primus’ immunity to telepathy, she’d have had no way to fight back against him even at her full power.  If Primus had wanted a powerful woman to pass her mitochondria to his child, and he hadn’t cared about her consent, there were few Proximas who’d make a better target for him.  And if that was the case, then the whole thing wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made her younger, sixteen years ago.

Sapphire blinked.  “Wait.  You are coming?”

“I just said so.  But we have to bring my cats.  They need to eat more than the average cat – they’d starve if I left them without food for three or four days, and obviously I can’t ask the neighbors to come feed them.”

“Fine.  Sedate them; I don’t need a cat flying all over my car, or meowing and moaning in his carrier the whole time.  We’ll put them in one of the suites and make sure they get fed.”

I took my cell phone – it had all of my appointments and contacts in it, and I’d have to call them all to reschedule once I knew how long this was going to take.  If I could talk Suri into aborting the fetus, this could probably go very quickly, but I knew how stubborn she was.  If I had to save the baby too, I could possibly have to take a few weeks.

Damn Suri.  Why the hell was I taking time off my work and spending four hours in a car with one of the people who most annoyed me in the entire world to go save my greatest opponent anyway?  From a problem she could just fix herself if she wasn’t so damn stubborn?

But I already knew.  I couldn’t let Suryabati Chandrasekhar die; not under any circumstances, and most especially not if she’d asked for me specifically.  Our differences were ideological; what she’d done for me went beyond ideology.  I would fight her and her people when I had to, but if she was dying and she needed me, I had to go.

[red-pill-blue-pill]

You gave me a reason. Ted Logan.

(gif by @mostexcellentkeanugifs )

A/N: This was requested by the lovely @ringa-starr 💞. Sorry it took me so long! I hope you like it. I might’ve shed a tear while I was writing this but I’m on my PMS so whatever. Also, I tried to portray the illness as real as I could. If someone feels offended please tell me and I’ll change whatever you ask me to change. 

 ps: peep the Lana del Rey and the Friends references  👀. 

ps2: i didn’t proof read this so deal with my typos, wrong use of words and wrong verb tenses. 

Summary: A walk to remember inspired. 

Warnings: Angst (like a lot, I’m so sorry), illness, implied death.

Word count: 2.764

You lied in bed, your head rested on your pillow and your black hair was sprawled around like a halo that vaticinated your unfortunate fate. Your heavy-lidded eyes closed against your will and you tried your best to keep them open so you could continue watching the world that unfolded outside your window. If you couldn’t experience it to the fullest at least you wanted to watch how others did. 

This situation was common for you. It felt as if all the energy was suddenly drained from your body, like a dam gate opening and letting the water flow freely. Your limbs turned heavy, so heavy you couldn’t even lift them, and your head felt dizzy. This happened at least four times per week, sometimes even more. All your friends already knew. They had made their peace with it. It’s not like you can hide from your loved ones for so long.

-

The first time you felt something weird was going on was the year you finally became a senior. It was your first week of high school and you were happily talking to your peers. It had been an exciting summer and you were dying to tell everyone you had finally visited Italy. 

You had just gotten through second period just fine when you started to feel uneasy. You started to feel hot, your forehead was burning up and your vision clouded. All of a sudden you were lying on the floor, a circle of classmates around you and a teacher crouching down beside you asking you frantically if you were okay. You internally rolled your eyes at her questions "yes, Mrs. Ford, I'm perfectly fine, I just like falling and hitting my head." You thought.

They rushed you to the hospital and called your parents. You thought it was nonsense, you were perfectly fine, it was just a little fever and nothing else. But when they gave you the results of the physical exam your world seemed to crumble around you.

"It might be Leukemia. We still have to run some blood tests." The doctor said carefully.

Your mother couldn't suppress the cry that broke in her throat, she had always been the most dramatic one. You just stared at the doctor, slowly processing her words and trying to keep your most tranquil façade. Your father kept asking questions to the doctor “Are you sure?” “What can we do?” “When will we know for sure?” you could feel the desperation in his voice.

You knew the doctor’s choice of words was an intelligent one. She was sure the diagnosis was what it was, she just tried to give your family some time to process before fully confirming it, the tests being merely procedural. 

The doctor opened the door and your parents stepped out. You turned around to look at her. “Is it serious? I mean, do I have a chance to survive?” you asked hopefully. A million different scenarios ran through your head, from the worst to the best. The doctor's face gave it all away. 

“I don’t know, as I said, we need to run more tests but we could see on the physical exam that your spleen and lymph nodes are swollen, that means it may be in stage III. I’m sorry.” Her face was full of sorrow and compassion and you felt a weight on your chest as you realized that was the way people were going to look at you from now on.

Weeks passed by and the blood test results gave away your family’s biggest fear: Leukemia stage III. That meant chemotherapy was the only hope for you, and it might not even work. Your parents were shattered over the news but you were oddly quiet, the only thing running through your mind was how you were going to tell your loved ones, how bad it would make you feel to break their hearts that way. You were a conformist person, in a good way though. It was easier to accept that you were going to leave this world than to endure all the pain and suffering of receiving chemo. You had made your choice.

That’s how you ended where you were: enduring recurrent headaches, joint pains, and continuous fatigue. It was alright, you still managed to do everything you had to. You enjoyed life. 

No one besides your friends knew you didn’t want them to. It was enough with the constant attention from your parents and friends, there was no need to add the pitiful and compassionate stares from people who never gave a damn about your existence. 

But there was this one boy, Ted Logan. You had never talked to him before but he approached you in science class asking for private lessons. It was true that you were the best of the class and he was failing almost every exam but you didn’t want to start a new friendship. At first. He kept bugging you every day, telling you how his father would send him to a military academy if he didn’t pass this class, how he would pay you whatever you wanted. 

“Okay, fine. I will teach you. Today at 6 pm at my house. Now please, leave me alone.” you finally snapped. 

He smiled and shook his head to get his hair out of his face. “Excellent!” He did his signature air guitar solo and you smiled at his goofiness.

Eventually, the private lessons became your favorite part of the day. Ted made you forget about your pain and everyday struggles. He had such a bubbly and energetic personality it was almost impossible to be sad or upset if he was around. He was a good student but with the attention span of a small puppy, almost nonexistent. His grades went up in record time and he brought you a treat every time he passed an exam as a way to say thank you since you wouldn’t let him pay the lessons.

You knew you were starting to develop feelings for him but you knew better than anyone you had to swallow them and deal with it by yourself. You couldn’t hurt another person, hurt him; the only though made your heart ache and tears well up in your eyes. What you didn’t know is that he felt the same way about you, he couldn’t hold back his smiles when you were around, you made him happy.

One day as you were going over the last lesson you caught him staring at you with his goofy grin plastered on his face. You mimicked it.

“What?” 

“You are a total babe when you talk about science.” he said and you raised an eyebrow questioningly while your face grew hot. “You always are but you are even more when you are sciencing.” 

“Th-thank you I guess.”

He reached across the table to grab your hand. “Would you like to go, like on a date with me?” 

Your eyes widened and you quickly freed your hand from his grasp. Everything you didn’t want to happen was happening. “I can’t Ted.” saying those words aloud hurt more than you ever imagined. 

“Bogus! Why?” he cocked his head to the side and your heart ached even more. 

“I didn’t tell you everything about me. I don’t wanna hurt you.” by this point tears were rolling down your face, unable to keep them in anymore. 

“Then tell me what’s wrong.” his usually happy face was now shaded with concern, you had never seen him like this. 

“I’m going to die. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but the last thing I need is hurting another person I love. I can’t stand it.” you were a sobbing mess.

“What do you mean?” he was completely shocked.

“I have leukemia, Ted.” you said, your voice cracking.

He didn’t think twice as he stood up and engulfed you in a much needed hug. You sobbed against his chest as you mumbled I’m sorry's to which he answered by rubbing your back and whispering sweet nothings into your hair. 

-

A knock on the door startled you from your deep thoughts.

“Come in.” you mumbled putting your hand over your forehead. Fever was back again. 

The door creaked slightly as Ted made his way in your room, a big smile on his face as he closed the door behind him. 

“How are you feeling?” he sat on the edge of the bed and leaned down to kiss your cheek and you smiled.

“Suddenly I’m feeling a lot better.” You joked as you reached out to comb his hair with your fingers. “How was your day?” You moved, making room for him to lay down with you.

He rested his head on the pillow next to yours and stared at the ceiling. “It was okay. People started murmuring after you left today.” you could feel the anger in his voice. He hated when people commented about you, it was the thing that angered him the most. 

You put your hand on his chest. “It’s okay Ted. I don’t care about what they say.” 

He just stayed silent and put his hand over yours, intertwining his fingers with yours and rubbing circles with his thumb on the back of your hand. 

“I was thinking about when we got together.” you said and he smiled.

You studied his face. His profile was out of this world, his jawline was sharp and his full lips made you feel warm inside. The freckles peppered on his cheeks and nose gave him the sweet aura that characterized him. 

“I do it often.” he said as he turned to look at your face. His eyes were full of love, no had never seen anything like it. He adored everything about you and he always let you know. “I remember when you thought you were going to scare me off by telling me about your illness.”

“Yeah, how stupid was I.” you chuckled and he squeezed your hand. 

You silently stared at each other, studying each other's face and wondering if it was possible to be more in love than you already were. He slowly leaned down to place a sweet kiss to your lips. Your stomach did cartwheels every time he did it. You opened your mouth, granting him more access and he slipped his tongue in, making you instinctively grab the neck of his shirt and pull him closer to your body. His hands roamed your body and stopped at your ass to squeeze it gently. You tried to straddle him but a sharp pain shot through your kneecaps and you winced against his mouth. 

“Are you okay?” he asked after pulling away from the kiss.

“Yes, it’s just this stupid joint pain.” you huffed in annoyance as you let yourself fall against the mattress once again. That was the worst part. It had been three weeks since you last had sex and you were dying to feel him fill you up again. 

“It’s okay, babe.” he smiled reassuringly as he hugged you close to him, your head resting on his chest. 

“If I wasn’t so fucked up I’d fuck you all the time.” you mumbled against his chest, laughter making it rumble. 

“You are the best babe in all land.” he said as he ruffled your hair.

“I mean it, Ted!” you said as you laughed too. “I’m warm for your form.” you tried to put on the best sexy voice you could but it ended up making you both laugh. 

It was moments like this when you felt like all the pieces of your life fit into place. The happiness you felt was enough to make up for the years you were going to miss. A small part of you thought missing good morning kisses from Ted, moving in with him, having your own family with him, growing old by his side. It made your heart break every time so you tried to push it away for as long as you could. 

-

An ambulance rushed down the street. Its bright lights lit up the buildings and the siren echoed through the empty road. Despite the space being so reduced a lot of stuff was going on. One of the paramedics rushed with a bag of serum, another one checked your pulse and the third one put the oxygen mask on your face. Ted was sitting next to you holding your hand. 

You were staying over at his house for the night when you suddenly started feeling sick. Everything happened too fast. First you were rushing to the bathroom and then you had passed out on the floor, no air reaching your lungs. Ted didn’t hesitate one second and picked his phone to call an ambulance that would rush you to the hospital. You squeezed his hand and smiled at him. You were proud of his reaction; not everyone would have managed to stay so calm and poised in his place. 

When you arrived to the ER they called a doctor to check on you. Ted stayed by your side the whole time, talking to you, trying to keep both of your spirits up. Your parents arrived some minutes later and rushed to your side while you waited for the doctor to come. 

After a blood test and some tests a nurse came back.

“You have pneumonia.” she said and everyone sighed in relief but she kept her serious face. “Taking into consideration your medical history and your illness I’m afraid it’s going to be hard for you to recover.” 

You looked at each other, your mother’s eyes filled with tears again and your father held her as she cried. You turned to look at Ted and you caught him wiping a tear away from his cheek. His hand found yours again and you squeezed it softly. 

You didn’t want to die. Not now. Not like this. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. They told you this was going to be slow, it had to. It was so unfair.

“I don’t want to die.” you said as tears slid down your face. “I don’t want to die yet.” you cried.

Your mother hugged you tight carefully with the cables and vials you had attached to your arms. “Mom, I don’t want to go.” She cried with you as your father and Ted watched the scene, unable to hold back their tears. Until then you had always been the strong one, comforting your loved ones as they cried about your unjust fate. Seeing you so broken and fighting the idea of leaving this world was even more heart shattering.  

You had encouraged your parents to go to the cafeteria to grab a coffee so they would leave you and Ted alone. You didn’t know where to start. You still had so many things to say to him, and most of them were inexplicable. 

“Come here.” you whispered, motioning him to lay down with you on the small hospital bed. He obliged and you turned to look at him. He was avoiding eye contact knowing he would burst into tears the second he looked at you but you grabbed his face, forcing him to look into your eyes. You saw how tears slowly welled up in his and you smiled sweetly. 

“I love you so much.” you whispered trying not to force your damaged lungs. A tear slid down his cheek and you quickly wiped it away. “You gave me a good reason to look forward to my future. This illness has ruined my chance of having one but it can never take away all the love you’ve given me and all the love I feel for you.” 

You removed the oxygen mask, instantly knowing its importance, and cupped his face. His eyes darted from yours to your mouth and you leaned down, kissing his soft lips, trying to make him feel what you couldn’t put into words; the immense adoration and affection you felt towards him. 

When your lips parted you put your mask back on as he stared at you. “I love you too, babe. I will always do. You are the most excellent thing that’s ever happened to me.” 

He let you cuddle by his side as he drew patterns with his fingers on your back, his slow traces lulling you to sleep. Your parents came up an hour later to find you two hugged to each other. 

“At least she will go happy.” your mother whispered before more tears fell from her eyes as your father hugged her again.

[robbyrobinson]

IN HEAVEN - A Horror story 

Being a reverend of our local congregation was a family tradition. My father was a reverend. His father was a reverend. His father was one. You get the picture. Sure, I might have had some doubts about the profession, and in life, I had tried to stave it off by furthering my education at some far-away university, but one way or another, the position called for me. I devoted most of my time at the university studying theology and religion. I was at the top of my class.

Soon came when my father passed the task of reverend to me. I recall that before he died, he seemed to be slightly darker in his mannerisms. He was always an optimistic man, even in the face of anyone who criticized his livelihood. But in his final years, he changed immensely. Anywhere he went, he carried grimness with him. He acted as though a rain cloud were over his head. He had grown despondent at his time of death, refusing to accept any prayers that his immortal soul be taken to a place of rest. But just before he succumbed and left the mortal coil, there were reports that he was deeply horrified and hyperventilated rapidly. His heart rate skyrocketed to abnormal leaps, and he died, a look of sheer horror being permanently glued on his face.

My first year as reverend didn't go as well as you'd imagine. For one, there were many young people who were the epitome of smart alecks. They always loved to bring up the supposed contradictions in the scriptures or how God was an immoral being who for all accounts was a tyrannical, mass murderer who was offended that mankind worshiped other gods or that He was simply unfair. This was always something that I was raised to believe: God had his reasons for what he does. What may seem to be bad for us is mere because we view things from our own perspective rather than his. Sure, descriptions of God's firing down burning sulfur and brimstone onto Sodom and Gomorrah were terrible, or God's slaughtering of the Egyptian children in the tenth and final plague that befell Egypt as stated in Exodus sounded horrific, but ultimately, I was convinced that God ultimately saw it as being for the Israelites' good, or how whenever bad things happened in my life, I held onto my faith.

Just last month, I lost my youngest son, Theodore to childhood leukemia. Yes, we prayed fervently for his recovery until he took his last breath. But still, maybe God wanted his precious, precious soul to be with him immediately. My one regret, however, was that he was never baptized. I remember my daughter looked at me with the most frightful expression of concern. That her brother was in Hell because he was too young to understand the notion of turning his life over to Christ. I tried to console my daughter that he was in Heaven, but she only compounded my frustrations by asking then why man was considered wicked the moment they were born.

But with all my trials, I prevailed. I continued to preach God's Word to the masses, saving countless souls. Some didn't accept the word, but if the seeds were sown, I was content. For sixty years I taught the same lesson of God's love for us and how he sent his son to act on our behalf. I also challenged countless atheist and agnostic debaters. To my congregation, I had - in their words - royally schooled them on my knowledge of the scriptures. By the time I retired, my eldest son Samuel took up the mantle. He started out kind of like how I did. He wasn't as bold in what he was saying, but within three months, he was becoming more convicted in the word.

At the age of 64, everything changed. During a monthly checkup with my doctor, I received the news that a tumor was detected forming in my frontal lobe. I had earlier endured severe headaches and I felt more tired than usual. I went to chemotherapy for weeks; anything that the doctors tried to implement simply did not work. On my death bed, my family gathered around. My church congregation had since ceased their prayers for me. Dying never really bothered me. Since I didn’t remember what it was like to be born, this would then mean that dying would be painless. My vital signs started to fade, and after two minutes, I let myself slip away.

A beam of light gently grazed upon my eyes, forcing them open. My eyes beheld the Pearly Gates. Past that was the streets paved with gold and the many mansions that Christ discussed with his followers. As my eyes beheld several of the sights, I noticed that there was something strangely odd about it all. No one was present. I expected to at the very least see old faces once I woke up in Heaven. Instead, the streets were empty. Rather than hearing angelic singing, everything was bereft of the slightest murmur. I walked around the barren streets for quite some time. Right when I turned to head back, a low audible sound crept into my ears.

My legs tightened. Without a second thought, I sprinted towards the site of the audible noises. It took me to the very heart of the city. Right when I was about to make a right turn, my eyes locked onto something. In the middle of the square was the throne of God. The exact White Throne that was attributed to God and the exact one where it was held that he would judge the living and the dead. It was awe-inspiring. It was everything that I was taught to believe. The throne glowed with pure, white light. But with all that breathtaking majesty aside, something felt horribly wrong about it. The throne flickered feverishly. The sounds became more audible. Curiosity crept into me, and I slowly made for the throne.

What I saw made me question everything.

The throne itself throbbed as if it were a nightcrawler thrashing on a fishing hook. Upon closer inspection, I saw the faintest of humanoid attributes on the throne. The throne of God pulsated rapidly, the screaming nearly deafening me. Before my eyes, faces emerged from the throne. Each one bore the same look of terror. Their eyes were wide, almost as if they were observing something, but at a long distance. I could feel the heat of their glares on me, as though they were trying to telepathically beg me to put them out of their misery. They screamed in unison, their shrieks sounding like legions of malfunctioning sirens. I looked further at the throne, seeing that it had a fleshy appearance. It was as though the throne itself was one living creature. The tortured beings frothed at the mouth, making inhuman noises, the sounds of absolute hell.

I could make out that an innumerable number of bodies that comprised the Great White Throne of Judgment. Limbs littered the throne in different places. The light began to fade revealing the throne to be nothing more than a putrid-smelling mass of red meat. Whoever these people were, they had been conjoined. Something must have broken them down and put them back together with gallons of glue. I felt myself nearly vomiting if it were not for a voice.

“Welcome to Heaven.”

I looked up at the throne of God and saw a gargantuan figure sitting in the chair, as though it were completely unaware of the horrid screaming coming from its throne. The voice wasn’t as loud as I’d imagine it to be. It sounded as soft as the wind, but it didn’t comfort me in the slightest. This being was submerged in blinding light. I searched for a semblance of a face on the large entity, but I couldn’t. The further I looked on this creature, I felt a terror bubble from the deepest parts of my stomach. Somehow, I managed to choke a word out.

“Are, are you God?”

While I couldn’t see it, I could tell that the being before me had a wide smile across its face.

“I have many names,” it stated in the same eerie giddiness. “I am YHWH, Jehovah.”

What he said shocked me the most.

“I am also Zeus. Thor. I am Shiva. I am all of the gods that humanity had willfully believed in.”

I stood there, my jaw agape. “But, but, God, what about my life work?”

God chuckled. “You humans never cease to amaze me with the utter ridiculousness of what you’d be willing to believe.”

God had a good chuckle over it as if I had told him one of the funniest jokes in over a thousand years. The joke being my former life. After laughing fervently, God paused to feel the texture of the throne.

“It is a fine throne, isn’t it?” God asked.

My hopes of God somehow being ignorant of the deathly screeches of its throne died at that moment. This god almost got ecstasy from hearing millions – maybe trillions – of souls being melded together as a large blob of disharmony. The urge to vomit arose again.

“Do you know what this throne is made of?” God asked.

I shook my head, not wanting to know. But God was, of course, going to disclose the texture of it regardless of whether it intrigued me or not.

“Years ago, I created the angels,” God shuffled in its chair before continuing, “they were always meant to worship me, but after eons of feeding off their praise, it wasn’t enough for me.”

I flinched as I expected more vivid descriptions from God.

“When I created man in my own image, the angels didn’t want them to suffer as they had.” God sounded noticeably angered, its voice raising an octave to emphasize it. “So, one leader rose up to rebel against me.”

“Satan,” I said.

God scoffed. “Because of their betrayal, I decided the best way to punish them is to condemn them to a life of endless suffering, one of which would make them regret being birthed from the fires.”

I nearly fell backward at the realization. God’s throne was comprised of the fused bodies of nearly a third of the angels who rebelled against him and failed. Now they were being made to be eternally tortured. I tried to rationalize God’s justifications for this disproportionate retribution, but no logical answer would suffice. There were no excuses for what God had done. But the one thing that made me more curious was what became of the human souls of those who had died. If what God had said was true, then the afterlife as we know is just one inescapable nightmare. God apparently read my thoughts, and before my eyes, God conjured up legions of souls. Each soul lacked pupils in their eyes and their skins were a pale grey. They reminded me of the many zombie-related movies in olden times. But they were all people I knew in life.

The one that caught my eyes the most was a small figure. It tilted back and forth; its mouth open as though it were inciting a chant. I could tell that short stature from anywhere; it was Theodore. I ran to my son and hugged him tightly. I opened my eyes fully expecting the hug to be reciprocated, but instead, I felt the slight nibble on my neck. I looked at my son, to my horror, he started to bite down into my neck in a blind frenzy. I pried him off, tossing him to the ground, only for him to emotionlessly pick himself up and stand with the other souls.

I turned to look at God in anger. “That’s not my son.”

God giggled. He merely looked at the souls before him, as though he were an artist marveling at their work.

“No, he isn’t. And he never was.”

Each human soul was a former shell of themselves lacking even the slightest characteristic that made them lively. They had instead become inhuman slaves without their free will. At the time of death, God stripped each soul of their individuality, making them worship him forevermore. This would be the fate of untold many people who either followed the Christian faith or any religion for that matter. It seemed to not even matter if you chose to not pursue a religion because I saw many of my former atheist and agnostic debaters in the masses. It all made sense for why God would masquerade as different gods: the more people he got to believe him, he would bathe in their worship until their time of death when they would be made into the perfect followers by being removed from anything that made them human. This was the fate of my son, my father, and my grandfather. Even if I chose against the profession of a reverend, it wouldn’t have mattered much to God because he’d convert me the moment, I stepped foot in his kingdom.

I felt myself getting lifted into the air against my will. I levitated over the masses of souls and I was back to God and his revolting throne. While again I couldn’t see a discernible expression on his face, something told me that it was smirking.

“Well, time for you to join the heavenly choir, shall we?”

Not expecting an answer, I felt a surge of God’s power penetrate my body and consume me. I screamed in excruciating pain as my world suddenly started to grow dark. I tried to fight against the conversion with all my might, but my rationalization was starting to melt away. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think a cognitive thought. I used the last of my consciousness to curse God’s name before sudden darkness filled my sights.