#sure i have a giant explosion of time in my head just Gone from my memory because i was getting abused but like i dont feel like ive aged

[kn11ves]

emotional support group for autistics who got called condescending and rude as kids just for responding to things directly and still not knowing how they were being mean

[fullsunstrawberry]

Bite the Bullet (M)

Synopsis: Gang's bank heist gone wrong.

Pairing: Haechan x reader

Genre: CRACK!!, PWP, PURE SMUT!!, Loosely based on RD2, set around 1899 (not accurate to the time)

Warnings: lots of crime, guns, getting shot, talks of blood, talks of dying, SMUT, thigh riding on an injured leg (please don’t ride a thigh with a bullet in it), no condom mentioned, KNIFE PLAY, loss of virginity, and more…

Word Count: 5k

A/N: Okay so me and my moot have been talking about this and I have no idea…IS IT SPELLED DONGHYUCK OR DONGYEOK???

The skylight glowed as you and Donghyuck rode with the gang to rob a bank. Your job was to be the distraction, only knowing how to shoot a gun because of Donghyuck. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, and the last remains of twilight bathed the world in deep blues and oranges.

Everything was perfect, up until you heard gunshots fire way too soon. Something was wrong, something was very wrong.

“Donghyuck” you worried, as you ran to the alleyway of the bank. Trying to find an entrance.

But before you could, an explosion knocked you back into a wall.

”You alright there, princess.” Mark worried, shocked that you hadn't left yet.

“Where’s Donghyuck?!”

Mark shook his head, already knowing you would ask that. “He’s coming, we need to head for the roof. It’s getting heavy.”

You nodded as Mark grabbed your hand and dragged you with him. He put a hand on your waist to help you get up the ladder.

“There you go, girl.”

The rooftop of Bank was an open, dangerous, the cool night air filled with the scent of smoke and the distant sound of sirens. You and Mark had barely made it up the ladder when the sound of gunfire intensified below. The situation had spiraled out of control faster than you could process.

“Where’s Donghyuck?” you asked again, your voice tight with fear.

Mark’s face was set in a grim line. “He’s coming. He’s got the backup, but it’s not looking good down there.”

You peered over the edge, watching as chaos erupted below. Police backup kept coming, The gang was fighting fiercely, but it was clear that their chances of escaping without further trouble were slim.

Donghyuck finally made it up the stairs, firing down at someone below.

”Donghyuck!” You called out

He looked over and saw you. But he didn’t look happy.

“What are you doing here Y/N!?”

“I needed to make sure you were safe…”

Donghyuck shook his head and grabbed your hand, leading you to a better hiding place.

Donghyuck grabbed your waist, pulling you closer to him. You knew you shouldn't be feeling like this right now. But the danger excited you.

You could feel his pistol in his pocket…it was a giant pistol…wait he has his gun in his hand.

“Hyuck,” you whined, “We need to get out of here”

Donghyuck looked at you and nodded, “Come on baby”

As he stood up your heart started racing. You tried to grab his hand and pull him back but it was too late, Donghyuck was shot in the thigh.

You didn't even know how to react when you saw him fall. All the gang members rushed to see what happened.

Mark grabbed your hand and tried to pull you away from Donghyuck. “Come on girl, we need to get out of here.”

But you pulled your hand away and shook your head ‘no’. You couldn’t leave Donghyuck…not like this.

The gang tried to pull you away from Donghyuck one last time before Jeno and Jaemin forced the gang to leave you two.

“We need to leave, they can handle themselves,” Jeno argued, shoving Mark away from the both of you.

You looked at Mark with tears in your eyes, “It’s okay, go.”

As the gang disappeared into the darkness, leaving you alone with Donghyuck who laid wounded on the rooftop, you knew you had to think fast. You ripped a part of the fabric from your dress. Tightly wrapping it on Donghyuck’s thigh. You heard him let out a groan.

"Hyuck, stay with me," you urged, your voice trembling slightly as you held his hand tightly. His eyes fluttered open, meeting yours with a mix of pain and gratitude.

"Y/N...I'm sorry," he whispered hoarsely, his grip weak but steady.

"Don't talk like that," you scolded gently, trying to keep your voice steady despite the fear creeping into your heart. "We're going to get through this."

You glanced around, searching for any sign of help, but the rooftop was eerily quiet now that the gunfire had moved on. You grabbed Donghyuck’s arm and wrapped it around your body and helped him stand up. Donghyuck let out a strand of cusses before finally limping up onto his other leg.

“There I see an abandoned building! We can lay low.”

Even with Donghyuck wounded and in pain, the two of you managed to hobble across the rooftop toward the abandoned building. With every step, you could feel his weight leaning on you, his breathing labored and ragged. But you refused to give up.

As you reached the shelter of the building, you helped Donghyuck inside, finding a relatively safe corner where you could both catch your breath.

Donghyuck slumped against the wall, his face pale with pain. You knelt beside him, tearing more fabric from your dress to create a stronger makeshift bandage for his wound.

“Do you need more pressure?” you ask as you try to stop the bleeding, but your hands weren’t strong enough.

“Sit on it.”

You hesitated for a moment, looking at Donghyuck with concern in your eyes. But you knew you didn’t have enough time to think about it. Without another word, you straddled his injured thigh, applying pressure to the wound with all your weight. Donghyuck let out a pained grunt, his hands gripping your waist.

With your heart pounding in your chest, you focused on applying enough pressure to stop the bleeding, trying not to think about the heat in your pants. Donghyuck’s grip on your waist tightened, his breaths coming in short, strained gasps.

You could feel the strong, tense muscle of his thigh pressing firmly into your core. You’re not supposed to enjoy this, you scolded yourself internally as you grinded a little bit on his thigh.

“I'm sorry, i-i don’t know what I'm doing”

Donghyuck’s eyes widened slightly at your movement, a mix of surprise and something else flickering in his gaze. Despite the pain etched on his face, a ghost of a smirk tugged at the corners of his lips.

“Just keep doing what you're doing. You're helping me, you know I love it when you use me."

"I'll do whatever it takes to help you," you replied, your voice wavering slightly. The tension hung heavy in the air between you two.

Donghyuck’s fingers tightened on your waist, “Keep moving.”

You couldn't believe what you were doing, but you continued to grind your hips against his thigh, maintaining the pressure on his wound. His grip on you tightened as a low moan escaped his lips, a mixture of pain and pleasure.

“Yes, just like that!”

You couldn't deny the effect he had on you, and the way his body responded to your movements. Slowly, you leaned forward, feeling Donghyuck’s hand gently cup your chin, bringing your face closer to his. Your lips brushed against each other slowly before deepening the kiss. His free hand slid up your side, pulling you closer, deepening the kiss even more, and sending a thrill throughout your entire body.

As the pain in Donghyuck’s thigh finally began to subside, he pulled back from your lips, breathing heavily. He looked into your eyes with an intensity that made you feel like you were the only person in the world.

“You drive me crazy.”

Suddenly feeling shy, you break eye contact and look down towards his lap. Ignoring the obvious bulge in his pants, you look at his wound and see that it finally stopped bleeding.

“Look, it finally stopped!” Donghyuck smiled at you, relief washing over his face.

"You saved my life, baby."

You couldn't help but blush at his words. But you had done it - you had saved the man you were... growing attached to.

“Let's get some rest and try to escape when the sun goes down.”

You agreed with Donghyuck, knowing that the daylight would make it even more difficult to navigate the city unseen. You snuggled closer to him, feeling the adrenaline from the previous events slowly fade away.

As you lay there in the make-shift shelter, your heart beating in sync with his, you couldn't help but feel a sense of…dread. Excitement? You weren't sure what it was.

Donghyuck’s hand moved from your side and began to trace patterns on your abdomen, his thumb gently tracing circles in your navel. The sensation was both calming and arousing at the same time, and you found yourself leaning into his touch as you fell into a slumber.

You woke up to a small shake of your arm, “Come on, I don’t see any guards.” Donghyuck whispered into your ear.

As you slowly blinked away the remnants of sleep, you registered the urgency in Donghyuck’s voice. Sitting up, you gathered your bearings and nodded in agreement. The two of you needed to make your escape while the coast was clear.

Quietly rising to your feet, you followed Donghyuck’s lead as he guided you through the abandoned building and toward the exit. Every creak of the floorboards beneath your feet felt deafening, but you pressed on, adrenaline coursing through your veins.

Finally reaching the back entrance, you peered cautiously outside to ensure the path was clear. Satisfied that no one was in sight, you motioned for Donghyuck to follow as you both stepped out into the dimly lit alleyway.

The cool night air enveloped you as you moved swiftly and silently through the shadows, keeping to the alleys and side streets to avoid detection. Your heart raced with each step.

The city was eerily quiet, “We need to head to the dock, and see if we can sneak on a boat.”

You and Donghyuck made your way toward the docks, sticking to the shadows and avoiding any sign of life. The city was like a ghost town at this hour, the only sounds being your hurried footsteps.

As you approached the docks, Donghyuck scanned the area. His eyes were sharp and alert as he searched for a way to sneak aboard one of the boats without drawing attention.

"There," he whispered, pointing towards a big boat. It seemed unguarded, the perfect opportunity for a quick escape.

You both made your way towards the boat, keeping low to avoid being seen. With practiced ease, Donghyuck helped you climb aboard before joining you on deck. The wooden planks creaked beneath your weight, but you were relieved to finally have some kind of safety.

As you both caught your breath on the deck of the grand boat, you realized the flaw in your plan. In your worn and tattered clothing, covered in dirt and blood, you and Donghyuck stuck out like sore thumbs

“We need to find a place to hide,” you whispered urgently to Donghyuck, scanning the deck for any sign of crew members or security.

Donghyuck nodded, his eyes searching the area for a secluded spot where you could lay low until the boat set sail.

“There,” he pointed towards a staircase leading below deck. “Let’s see if we can find a storage room or something to hide in.”

As you reached the lower deck, you quickly ducked into a nearby storage room, hoping it would provide enough cover.

“Search through those boxes, see if you can find anything,” Donghyuck instructed. You nodded, your heart racing as you began to sift through the boxes in the dimly lit storage room.

You didn’t find anything useful, only supplies for the crew. Nothing that could help you. But before you could lose any hope, Donghyuck pulled out an expensive-looking dress.

"Quick, change into these," he urged, handing you a dress and a pair of heels. "If we look the part, we might just pass as passengers."

You exchanged surprised glances with Donghyuck before nodding in agreement. Before nervously waiting for him to turn around. Getting the hint he chuckled a little and turned around.

You quickly changed into the dress and heels, feeling like a completely different person in the unfamiliar attire. The fabric was soft against your skin, and the shoes clicked softly on the wooden floor.

Donghyuck turned back around, a look of approval in his eyes as he took in your transformed appearance.

“Beautiful,” he let out, barely above a whisper. “Now let’s see if we can blend in and find someplace safe to lay low until this boat sets sail.”

Donghyuck put out his elbow and you took hold of it as you two walked out of the storage room. As you emerged onto the deck, you did your best to mimic the confident stride of the other passengers you observed.

After a few minutes of wandering, you spotted an unoccupied corner of the deck where a few plush chairs. Taking a seat on one of the chairs, you let out a sigh of relief, Donghyuck settled into the chair next to you, his gaze scanning the area for any signs of trouble.

Before you could get too comfortable, one of the workers came up to you both. “You two must be Mr. and Miss. Park!”

Donghyuck and you exchanged a quick glance before nodding in unison, playing along with the mistaken identities.

"Yes, that's us," Donghyuck replied smoothly, a charming smile on his lips as he wrapped an arm around your waist.

"We were just enjoying the view before retiring to our cabin," you added, flashing a polite smile at the worker.

The worker nodded, seemingly satisfied with your response. "Well, first you would need your keys.” He smiled, handing Donghyuck a set of gold keys. “Enjoy your evening aboard the ship. If you need anything, don't hesitate to ask."

With a slight bow, the worker excused himself and moved on to attend to other passengers. As soon as the worker were out of sight, Donghyuck turned to you with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

“Looks like we’re the Parks now,” he whispered, a smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

You couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation, the absurdity of it all making the tension of the past few hours melt away.

“Well, Mr. Park,” you teased, “I hope you remember our story in case someone else asks.”

Donghyuck chuckled softly, his arm still draped casually around your waist as you leaned into his side.

“I think we can manage to keep up appearances for a little while longer,” he teased, his voice low and intimate. His gaze moved from your eyes to your lips.

As the ship slowly began to pull away from the docks, you both watched lights from the city grow farther and farther away.

With a yawn, Donghyuck got up and offered his hand to you. “I think it’s time for bed, love”

You took Donghyuck’s hand and let him lead you to your cabin, doing your best to maintain the act of the wealthy Mr. and Miss Park.

Once inside, you both looked around the small but elegant space. A comfortable-looking bed was the focal point of the room. Donghyuck closed the door behind you. With a grin, he turned to you, "Well, Miss Park," he said, his voice low and warm, "It’s time for bed."

With a playful glint in your eyes, you matched Donghyuck’s grin. "Of course, Mr. Park," you replied in a playful tone, playing along with the charade.

Donghyuck sat on the edge of the bed, patting the space next to him. You joined him, your heart fluttering with a mix of nerves and excitement.

Donghyuck started undoing his tie and kicking his shoes off. Nervously you tried not to stare, already feeling your cheeks get red.

You cleared your throat, trying to compose yourself as you watched Donghyuck make himself comfortable. With a deep breath, you reached for the pins holding your hair up and letting it fall down.

“There is no way you’re sleeping in that dress.”

"You're right," you replied with a shy smile, standing up and slowly beginning to undo the buttons of your dress. Donghyuck’s gaze never wavered as he watched you, his breath catching in his throat not expecting you to be brave enough to undress in front of him.

As the dress fell around your feet, you stood before him in nothing but your undergarments.

Donghyuck’s eyes roamed over you hesitantly, his desire evident in the way he looked at you.

Without a word, he stood up and closed the distance between you, his hands cupping your face as he leaned in to kiss you. The kiss was rough and full of passion.

Your arms wrapped around him, pulling him closer as he grabbed your waist to pull you closer. A small moan left your lips, Donghyuck took the opportunity to let his tongue roam your mouth. The dress laid forgotten on the floor.

The kiss deepened, and Donghyuck’s hands began to explore your body, his touch setting your skin on fire. You responded eagerly, your own hands roaming over his chest and back.

As things started to heat up, Donghyuck scooped you up in his arms and laid you down on the bed. He followed you down, never breaking the kiss as he trailed kisses down your neck and collarbone.

You ran your fingers through his hair, pulling him closer, and you felt him slowly move your undergarment strap off your shoulder.

Your heart pounded in your chest as he revealed more and more of your skin to him. The passion in his eyes and the hunger in his touch as he slowly placed kisses on your neck was all too much to handle.

“Hyuck” You let out, in a small panic.

Confused Donghyuck lifted his head from your neck and furrowed his eyebrows, asking what was wrong.

“I’ve never done this before…” You whispered, unsure of what was to come next. Donghyuck smiled reassuringly, brushing your hair away from your face.

"We'll take it slow, love," he said softly, his hands gently caressing your cheek. You nodded, feeling a little more at ease at his reassurance.

You reached for his shirt, trying to unbuttoned it with your shaky hands. Donghyuck laughed to himself as he grabbed your hands moving them down to unbuttoned his pants instead.

Slowly he took off his shirt and let you slide his pants down. Stepping out of them to be only left in his underwear.

Donghyuck’s eyes never left yours as he slowly lowered himself onto you, You could feel his bulge through his boxers. His hands cupped your face, bringing you closer to him until your lips met once more.

The kiss was slow and tender this time. His thumbs gently traced the outline of your jawline, sending shivers down your spine.

Donghyuck began to finish undressing you with care, each movement causing your heart to race. When you were completely bare, he looked at you with desire in his eyes.

He slowly moved his lips down your stomach, trailing kisses along the way. You let out a soft sigh as his warm breath brushed against your skin. You felt self-conscious but also incredibly turned on by his actions.

Donghyuck’s hands gently caressed your hips as he continued to explore your body. You clung onto the sheets, unsure of what was to come next but trusting Donghyuck completely.

As his lips continued traveling down, your heart raced and butterflies filled your stomach. You squeezed your eyes shut, feeling every touch and every kiss.

With each movement, the anticipation grew stronger, and your breath hitched as you felt Donghyuck’s warm breath near your core.

God, he was amazing.

Finally, Donghyuck’s lips reached their destination. You felt him part your legs with his hands and carefully positioned himself between them.

Taking a deep breath, you held onto the sheets tight as Donghyuck’s fingers gently parted you. Your body trembled slightly at the unfamiliar sensation.

Donghyuck’s thumb gently brushed against your most sensitive spot, causing a wave of warmth to spread throughout your body. You let out a small moan, eyes still clenched shut.

Donghyuck smiled against your skin, his fingers settled in their place. Gently, he began to move his fingers in and out of you. Each movement was slow and gentle.

Your heart raced as he continued, his fingers moving in time with your breathing.

Before anything could go any farther you heard a noise right outside of your door. Quickly Donghyuck grabbed his knife out of his jacket pocket that was left next to the bed. Ready just in case someone was to barge in.

But no one came, so he turned back to you. A little shocked to see you were staring at his hands, subconsciously playing with his knife.

“You like that?” Donghyuck teased, playing with it between his fingers.

‘Yes,’ you nodded, only managing to move your head in response.

Slowly Donghyuck turned his knife over and gently rubbed it down your stomach, carefully as to not cut you. Your breath hitched at the sensation. Donghyuck watched your reaction, a smirk playing at the corners of his lips.

With care, Donghyuck traced the knife down your body, from your stomach to your inner thigh. The cold metal contrasted with the warmth of his touch.

"Does that feel good?" Donghyuck whispered, his eyes locked on yours as the knife continued its delicate dance.

You nodded, unable to form words.

Donghyuck's eyes darkened, as he slowly guided the knife lower. His heart raced as he prepared to claim your innocence.

As the knife lightly grazed your most sensitive area, a wave of pleasure washed over you. You hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to expect.

Finally, with one swift movement, Donghyuck inserted the handle inside you, gripping the safe side of the knife. You let out a sharp gasp as the sensation overwhelmed you. The pain was intense but quickly subsided as Donghyuck began to move it within you, each thrust causing ripples of pleasure throughout your body.

Donghyuck watched your expressions of pleasure and discomfort. He leaned down and whispered softly into your ear, "Just like that baby."

His words were the only thing holding you together as he continued his movements. Your heart raced with each thrust of his hand.

The pleasure still seemed to be overwhelming and you found yourself struggling to bear it. You whimpered softly, unsure of what to do.

Donghyuck felt the struggle in your voice and slowed his movements, cupping your face gently in his hand. His eyes softened and he spoke soothingly.

"It's okay, just breathe through it." He whispered against your lips. You nodded, trying to calm yourself down as Donghyuck continued his slow movements.

As the pain began to subside and the pleasure remained, you found yourself unable to resist the urge to rock against the cold metal.

A whine escaped your lips as Donghyuck removed the knifes handle from you. He quickly replaced it with his warm fingers, sliding it in and out of you with ease. The contrast of the cool metal and the heat of his hand sent shivers down your spine.

Donghyuck watched your reactions, taking note of every moan and shiver. He could feel the wetness between your legs as he continued his movements. His heart raced as he felt guilty for causing you pain but he couldn't resist the pleasure that was beginning to show on your face.

"Please, I need you inside of me Hyuck," you whispered, desperation seeping into your voice. Donghyuck looked down into your eyes.

"Can you handle it?" Donghyuck asked, looking into your eyes.

You nodded, unable to form words.

With your desperate cries for him, Donghyuck took off his boxers and positioned himself on top of you. He grabbed the base of his shaft and slowly entered you.

The sensation was overwhelming but also euphoric. You wrapped your legs around him, pulling him closer as he began to move within you. Each thrust felt so good, a different sensation than before.

Donghyuck's eyes locked onto yours as he continued to move in you. His grip on your hips tightened with each thrust, his breath hot against your skin.

Your moans were growing louder with each thrust. Donghyuck leaned down and captured your lips in an attempt to keep you quiet.

You couldn’t stop yourself from moaning into his mouth, each sound escaping your lips. The pleasure was overwhelming, a sensation you had never experienced before. It was intoxicating, almost otherworldly.

“Fuck you feel so good.” As Donghyuck's movements grew more urgent and his breath grew more ragged, as you clung to him tightly.

Your heart raced with each movement, each thrust sending shivers throughout your body. Donghyuck's eyes locked onto yours as he started to speed up his movements.

You let out a small cry, your eyes widening at the intensity of his thrusts. Donghyuck's eyes were full of need as he gazed into your soul. He leaned down and whispered into your ear, "Fuck I'm so close."

"Me too," you gasped, needing nothing more than to feel him fill you up. Donghyuck's movements grew more erratic, his thrusts faster and deeper. His breathing became ragged, his hips slapping against yours.

"I'm- I'm going to cum." Donghyuck groaned. Burying his face in your neck as he continued to move within you. The feeling was overwhelming, and you found yourself right on the edge.

"Cum with me, baby" Donghyuck pleaded as his movements became even more urgent. You felt a wave of heat spread throughout your body as you neared your climax, the pleasure beginning to overwhelm you.

"I- I can’t!" you cried out, not being able to handle the feeling of the sensation building up inside you. Donghyuck's eyes were locked onto yours, his grip on your hips tightening as he felt you both nearing the edge.

"You’re so close baby, cum for me," Donghyuck urged, his breath hot on your skin.

You moaned softly, feeling the wave of pleasure crash over you. Your body tensed as you reached your climax, waves of pure bliss washing over you.

The feeling was indescribable, as if your entire body was on fire. The pleasure was too much to handle. But it felt so good, leaving you breathless as you clung to Donghyuck tightly.

Donghyuck felt your muscles tighten around him,"I'm going to cum," he growled, his breath hot against your ear as he drove into you one last time before releasing inside of you. His grip on your hips tightened as his orgasm washed over him.

You felt the warmth spread inside of you, and you couldn't help but let out a soft sigh of relief. You could feel your body was still slightly trembling from the aftershocks of your own orgasm.

With another moan, Donghyuck collapsed onto you, his breaths coming in quick pants. Slowly, he pulled out of you, leaving a small shiver to run down your spine as the air hit your sensitive area.

He looked down at you, "Are you alright?" he asked softly, concern clear in his voice.

You nodded, still unable to form any words. You felt the evidence of what just happened between your legs - wet and swollen. The sensation was still overwhelming but you found yourself wanting to do this more.

Donghyuck looked at you as he carefully moved off of you and retrieved a soft towel from the nearby bathroom. He gently cleaned you up.

"I know it might have hurt a bit at first, but hopefully it was worth it," Donghyuck whispered to you, his eyes full of concern and affection.

"You did great." He whispered, kissing your forehead gently. His fingers traced the shapes of your fingers as he tried to gauge how you were feeling.

"I... I want to do it again," you stammered out, the words surprising even yourself. The idea of being with him again, feeling him inside you once more, was filling your head.

Donghyuck's eyes lit up at your words, a small smirk playing at the corners of his lips. "Another time, baby" he laughed softly, running his fingers through your hair.

Donghyuck leaned down and gently kissed your forehead before pulling you into his embrace. You snuggled against him, feeling safe and cherished in his arms.

“Relax for now, we still need to get out of here alive…”

© 2024 fullsunstrawberry all rights reserved — please DO NOT translate, take, nor repost any of my works on other social media’s. reblogs and comments are appreciated a lot!

Commented/Reblog on preview: @hyuckiebb-blog @injunnie-lemon @buuuubbu3 @sushimixedwasabi @hqech

Dream/General Taglist: @haechansbbg @lostinneocity @talkingsaxy @naqkja @haolovre

[luffyrose]

We're back with another dc x dp, coming to you this time on my phone while hang in off the back of my couch. Is blood rushing to my head? Yes.

Either way, I had a random thought about how personally as a child, I was a little monkey, like if my parents had actually had the thought to put me in gymnastics I would probably be a menace to society. And so my thought was, what if Danny was like that too?

Danny had always been very hyper, like, bounce of the walls, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON THE FRIDGE-" kind of hyper. When he started to climb, hang, flip, and just about break something just to have some fun, Jazz finally tried to get their parents to sign him up for gymnastics.

They didn't.

Both had been very happy at the idea, but when it came down to it, they just forgot. And one time without actually paying attention to the two, said gymnastics was for girls, ultimately shattering Danny's budding hobby. Jazz of course didn't just let that dream go, instead finding anything she could to let him learn on his own, at the very least, she made sure he was capable enough to pick it up in his teenage years should he finally get a chance to take classes.

That didn't end up happened either.

He'd died, become Phantom, accidentally become Crown Prince of the Infinite realms, and now had to deal with superheroes realizing that something was up in Amity. More specifically, a credible news reporter finally came to the town and settled the real or not debate in one swift "WTF IS THAT-" upon seeing a giant robot hunter thing(it was Skulker).

Along with all that, his parents, or more specifically his mother, was finally noticing something was wrong. Almost two years after he died, she finally took a second to look at him, and was disturbed. So Danny, being optimistic as he can be, tries to tell them, which goes horribly wrong and ends in a lab explosion and Danny 'stuck' in the Ghost Zone. Really Jazz blew the portal up after reaching her own breaking point and immediately called CPS on her parents since Danny was never gonna come back to them.

Danny all ouchy, there goes my parents because the two destroyed their blood bond by intentionally aiming to harm him instead of the weird loophole they'd been in before. Clockwork being Clockwork yeets him over to Gotham, giving Jazz a note about it.

Over in Gotham, he's actually thrown right from a portal in the aky hurdling down toward one of the city's rogues. Whoever it is, the Batfam are like "wtf-" at the clearly confused child that suspiciously looks like they're one of the Waynes, and so they just take him back. Doesn't help that they're worried since he just got thrown from who knows where and definitely did not take that fall well- also doesn't help that he's clearly bleeding and severely injured.

Danny, after Alfred forces him to rest from injuries, is so hyper. His hyperness had gone into his vigilantism, so now with nothing to deter it, he was going crazy and he felt so stiff.

Cue one of the sibkings walking in to find the kid hanging dangerously off something and just going "hi". Dick has a new favorite(not really he still loves all his siblings the same...maybe Damian and new kid are a smidge higher, but they're younger so it doesn't count).

When he takes the kid to the gym in their house, he is literally running around and getting onto everything. Now Dick has accidentally acquired little acrobatic brother that he's determined to help out with getting better.

Best part, Danny doesn't even realize the others are like "welp he's family now" and is just thinking they're very nice for being rich. He doesn't trust Bruce too much though, sure rich people's mids could be chill(take Sam for example) but parents themselves were iffy.

No one knows how to react to the truth bombs he randomly drops without even realizing it either.

Dick, watching Danny haning upside down from a bar for the last like 10 minutes: whatcha doin buddy?

Danny: thinking about my parents.

Damian, who's also been watching the whole tome but would never admit it: Your parents?

Danny, yeeting himself off the bar with no sense of self preservation: yeah, they told me they'd sign me up for gymnastics. Never did. Claimed it was only for girls. Although I think that was the same day our oven came alive on accident and almost set me on fire so...they were pretty distracted.

Dick, staring in actual horror for many reasons: What?!

Damian, also horrified but not showing it as much: Your oven came alive...?

Danny, who still isn't paying attention and already having forgotten what he said: how do you do that thing you showed me earlier?

[vanfleeter]

Waylon

Characters: Dad!Jake x Tommy

Warnings: Paranormal. Ghosts. Fluff. Father-son bonding.

A/N: I think this might be my favorite Dad!Jake fic I have written 🥰

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Mid September. Halloween decorations went up on the first day of the month, Tommy eager to begin celebrating the holiday. Spiders covered the windows, cobwebs decorated bushes in the front yard. Skeletons were staked in the yard as well as the giant clown from the Halloween store. Tommy somehow managed to convince Jake to buy the giant, creepy clown. Jake still finds himself tiptoeing around the clown, trying not to activate it.

But soon the clown isn’t what creeps him out now.

“Daddy!” Tommy calls as he runs down the stairs.

“Yeah bud?” Jake calls back. He dumps a few scraps of trash into the trash can and turns around just as Tommy hops up onto one of the bar stools.

“I have a question.”

“Uh oh,” Jake chuckles as he walks over to the kitchen island.

Tommy is seven and currently is loving to ask question after question about anything and everything that pops into the tiny child’s head. Jake has been asked questions ranging from how long can a human breathe under water, which resulted in Jake dragging Tommy out of the pool after he and Josh thought he was drowning. Turns out that he was not. In fact he was trying to see how long he could hold his breath. Then it was his curiosity about animals and how they came to be. He wasn’t entirely sure how Tommy was phrasing it so he never fully answered that, further confusing the kid.

At this point Jake has lost count of how many questions that this kid has asked. You always hear that parents know everything. Not in Jake’s case.

“What’s your question?”

Jake starts to sit down on the stool beside him when Tommy exclaims, “No! Waylon is sitting there!”

“Oh, okay..” Jake says as he steps away from the stool.

Tommy and his imaginary friends keep Jake on his toes. Though he can’t say much because he used to have an imaginary friend when he was Tommy’s age. Even though he had Josh, he used his “imaginary friend” as an excuse to not have to do everything with Josh. Sounds horrible, but it’s true.

“So Waylon,” Jake says. “Waylon is what you chose to call this imaginary friend?”

“He’s not imaginary,” Tommy sighs. “I’ve told you this. He lives in my closet and tells me stories. I told you that he used to live here a long time ago, remember?”

“Right, right. He has friends too, hmm?”

Tommy nods his head. “Cowboys.”

“Ahh, okay. So what is your question?”

“Well.. Waylon told me that the stars explode and die, is that true?”

“Explode and die?” Jake questions.

Tommy nods his head. “Are stars dying?”

“I wouldn’t “dying” per se,” He says. “But they do explode and that’s how you see stars in the sky. You’re seeing the after effects of the explosion by the time the light travels to the earth.”

“Waylon wants to know how light travels to the earth? He never learned about all of the science stuff back in his time. He says he was dead before the light bulb was invented. Is it like a light bulb?”

Questions are being asked that Jake just doesn’t have the answers for.

“I think that might be a question to ask Uncle Sammy.” Jake says. “He’s more into that kind of stuff.”

“But Waylon wasn’t lying though, stars do explode.”

“Very much so, yes.”

He had to have read it in some science magazine that you had subscribed to forever ago when Tommy’s interest in the solar system peaked at one point.

A couple weeks have gone by and Tommy hasn’t mentioned much of Waylon since that day he asked about the stars. Jake fully believed that it was just his imaginary friend and one day, hopefully soon, he would grow out of that phase.

“Babe, can you take Tommy’s clothes upstairs and put them away for me?” You say as you walk over to Jake and hand him the small basket of clothes.

“Sure thing,” He says as he takes it and makes his way upstairs.

While putting away the folded clothes in Tommy’s dresser, Jake hears a little knock on the closet door. A smirk forms on his face. Tommy’s hiding again. So instead of acknowledging it, he continues putting away the clothes in the dressers. Picking up the empty basket, he starts to leave the room when he hears the fainted “hello” coming from the closet.

Jake stops in the threshold and glances over his shoulder. The curtain moved against the wall, followed by a little child’s laughter causing goosebumps to rise on Jake’s arms.

“Daddy?” Jake turns his head and looks in front of him to see Tommy looking up at him with a confused look.

So that was not Tommy. That was.. No.. It can’t be.

“Daddy, are you okay?”

“Uh,” Jake clears his throat. “Y-Yeah, I’m fine. Uh, go find your sister so we can go grocery shopping for your mom.”

It wasn’t until that night that Jake was woken up to the sound of little feet walking around the room. At first he thought that it was Tommy or Lily having woken up. “Papa..” He hears a small voice. Humming in response, he turns over to flick on the light when he sees a little figure standing in the corner of the room by the window.

“Tommy?” Jake slowly sits up in bed and swings his legs over. “What are you doing over there bud? Come over here,” He says, waving his arms motioning for the child-like figure to come towards him. The figure comes over to Jake. “Did you have a bad dream again?”

“I miss my papa.” The figure says.

“I don’t understand, I’m right here.”

Is Tommy sleepwalking?

“You are not my papa.”

“Of course I am.”

A small hand comes up to touch his cheek and the face of a little blonde boy with blue eyes flashes in his mind. He was dressed in brown overalls over top a button down white shirt with a straw hat atop his head. The image disappears and he’s staring at an empty space in front of him.

“Jake?” He hears you call out beside him. “Honey, who are you talking to?”

“I.. I don’t know,” He stammers, running a hand through his hair. “I thought.. I thought Tommy woke up.. I thought I was talking to him..”

“Lay back down,” You say. “Get some more sleep.”

He cannot have seen Waylon. He just couldn't have seen him. He’s imaginary. Jake just does not believe that his house is haunted by a little boy from the 1800s. No, it can’t be real.

He in fact did not get any more sleep the rest of the night, unable to get his mind off the fact that he, himself, conversed with a ghost. He’s never done that before. But of course, there is a first for everything.

“Mama, can you make extra pancakes?” Tommy asks.

“Of course, feeling hungry this morning?”

“No, Waylon just wants some. He says they smell really good.”

You see Jake visibly tense while he flips a pancake over on the sizzling pan. “Are you okay?” You ask him.

“Hmm?” He hums in acknowledgment as he turns to look at you. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Did you sleep at all the rest of the night?” You ask. He merely nods his head, giving you a small smile before turning back to the pan to remove the pancakes and put them on a plate.

The last time Jake has ever had been in “contact” with a “ghost” was when the band spent days out at the cabin and writing music. Then he felt disconnected to the ghost. Had no reason to be afraid. But now he feels connected to this one. He’s not afraid, no, but something more of an emotion. He feels sadness and fear, not as if he’s fearing like he’s in danger, but fear of being alone.

Waylon is alone.

Waylon has no one.

He came to Jake last night, scared and sad. He trusted Jake.

So that night after putting the kids to bed, he bids you a goodnight before slipping out of the room. He retrieves his guitar from his study and quietly goes downstairs to the living room where he relaxes on the couch and strums a soft and comforting melody. He hears the floor creak, as it once did back at the cabin.

Music always draws a soul to it, living or dead.

“Waylon?” He softly asks into the void.

Another creak of the floorboards, this time coming from the staircase.

“I won’t hurt you,” Jake says as he stops strumming. “You came to me before, you can come to me again.” It was quiet again, no more floorboard creaking, so he continues playing again in hopes that Waylon will come to him.

Never in millions did he think he’d be communicating with the dead, but something about Waylon is calling out to him. Maybe it is the paternal instincts he’s developed over the years that makes him feel connected to the little boy, having one himself who is hopefully still sound asleep in his bed.

He doesn’t hear the floorboards creak anymore. Though he feels a presence lingering nearby.

“Do you like music?” Jake asks.

Suddenly the presence vanishes and Jake hears a little voice call to him. “Daddy?” He looks up towards the stairs to see Tommy rubbing his eyes. “Who are you talking to?”

“It seems Waylon needed a friend.” Jake chuckles.

Tommy walks down the stairs and joins Jake on the couch. Jake agains feels the presence once more and Tommy giggles. “He says his papa used to play the guitar too, though he wasn’t as good as you are.”

Jake smiles and plucks a few strings. “Where is he now?”

“Standing right beside your left hand.” Tommy says. “He’s looking at your ring, and says that his papa saved up as much money as he could so he could give his mama a wedding band. He’s seen Mama’s ring, and says they never could have afforded a diamond.”

He feels the same small hand from the other night rest upon his arm.

“He’s asking you to keep playing.”

Jake nods his head and continues plucking at the strings on his guitar.

“Waylon says that when you play, it brings him comfort. He loves to watch you play.”

“Does he now?” Jake chuckles.

Tommy giggles and rests his head on Jake’s shoulder. “Waylon says that song would have been perfect to play to the chickens that they once had on their farm.”

Jake snorts, “Oh really?”

Tommy smiles and nods his head. “Says they had ten of them.” Jake nods his head and continues playing.

A few more minutes pass and Jake hears Tommy yawn. Some more pass and he’s falling asleep, curled up in the corner of the couch. Jake takes that as a sign to stop for the night. “Alright Waylon, I believe it is official bedtime this time.” He says as he sets his guitar off to the side.

He feels a light brush across his cheek and Waylon flashes in his mind. He looked happier.

Standing up and stretching out his body just a little, he turns back to the couch and scoops up Tommy into his arms and carries him back upstairs. “Waylon says he won't stay much longer,” Tommy says when Jake lays back on the bed. “He says it’s time for him to leave.”

“Where is he going?”

“He’s not sure but he sees his papa.”

“He does?”

Tommy nods his head. “He says goodbye and thank you.”

“Well, goodbye to you too, Waylon.” Jake says as sits down on Tommy’s bed.

He sees the curtains rustle ever so slightly. “He’s gone..” Tommy says, with a twinge of sadness in his voice.

Jake looks back at him before pulling him into his arms. “Tommy..”

“I wanted him to stay.. He was fun to have around.”

“I know,” Jake says. “But sometimes it’s just their time bud. They can’t stay around for long.”

“Why do they stay?” Tommy asks.

“I’m not so sure,” Jake says as he moves Tommy back to the bed and tucks him back. “Some say they stay because they have unfinished business, while others say they’re stuck and can’t find their way.”

“Was Waylon stuck? Or did he have unfinished business?”

“I don’t know,” Jake says. “But whatever it was that was keeping him here, I guess we helped him.” He reaches over and wipes his thumb across Tommy’s cheek and gives him a smile. “But now he’s with his papa and that’s all that matters.”

“Daddy, if we ever die and I get lost, will you ever come find me?”

“I will always find you,” Jake reaches over and plants a kiss on Tommy’s forehead. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

After leaving Tommy’s room, he goes back to his own and carefully slides into bed so as to not wake you. Much to his surprise though, you never did fall asleep. You turn over onto your side to face him and kiss his cheek.

“What was that for?”

“For being the best father to our children,” You say. “I don’t think he’ll ever forget this.”

"Neither will I," Jake says as he pulls you in into him. "Goodnight baby.."

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

link to the tag list in my master list!

@losfacedevil @writingcold @ignite-my-fire @edgingthedarkness @takenbythemadness @katiegvf @ohgodthefeeling-gvf @josh-iamyour-mama @piratejtk @thetroublegetssoloud71 @hollyco @earthgrlsreasy @dancingcarbon @cheersdannyx2

[tmnt-tychou]

Thanks everyone for participating in my earlier poll. Donatello and Raphael won the team up. So here is part two.

Here is Part One

Don't Make A Sound

Part 2: Work

“There's an issue with the toilet in the women's bathroom near theater 6,” her manager told her.

Name just looked at him. She already had a full time day job. Working nights part time at the theater was just to help supplement her cash flow to pay for the expensive New York rent prices. And right now, she was very much reconsidering remaining employed.

“That's not my job,” she said flatly. “I work concessions.”

Working the theater was a job of feast or famine. There were either long lines of movie-goers, or an empty lobby between start times. Currently, they were in the middle of a lull, not a customer around.

“We don't have anyone else who can do it right now,” her manager insisted. “And it needs to be done.”

“You can do it,” she shot back.

“I'm not going into the women's restroom,” he insisted.

There was a bit more back and forth, but ultimately, Name knew she had to do this or her job would be in jeopardy. And she really liked being able to see movies for free. So she trudged off to the indicated bathroom with the janitorial cart. As unenthusiastically as one could, she put up the sign indicating the restroom was temporarily closed and wheeled the cart inside.

There was definitely a smell. And a clear puddle of water leaking out of one stall.

“Great,” she huffed. What a night to not have janitorial staff. If her work uniform got wet, she was going to be pissed.

With an expression of distaste, she set about slipping on gloves and grabbing the plunger. She could hear the movie playing in the theater next to her. The heavy thuds of explosions and loud music from an action flick. She approached the offending bathroom stall, not looking forward to seeing what exactly was in the clogged toilet.

“Ugh! What is that smell?” demanded a voice behind her. She turned and saw an old lady standing at the entrance, her nose scrunched, frowning at the wet floor. “Why hasn't that been cleaned up?”

“I'm cleaning it now,” Name responded with incredulity. “The sign was up that this restroom is closed.”

Screams were heard from the theater. Maybe it was a horror movie they were watching. She glanced toward the door. That...that was a lot of screams. That was too many screams.

“Well I thought I'd just use it since I'm here,” the lady insisted. “I didn't expect it to be like this.” Her voice rose, as did the screams in the background. “This is so unaccept--”

The woman was silenced in an instance as some...thing snatched her as fast as a snake strike and she was gone in a splatter of blood. Name stumbled back at the sight of the creature, horrified. Too scared to make a noise. She stumbled into the cart and the mop clattered to the floor. The creature immediately lunged toward the sound. She backed up soundlessly as the bulbous head opened up into a giant maw of teeth and shattered the mop handle into splinters. She wasn't sure why she didn't scream. Something in the back of her lizard brain told her to be silent. Her back hit the wall, hands over her mouth.

The monster 'killed' the mop and crouched, sweeping its head back and forth, listening. Despite it not having visible eyes, Name backed into a bathroom stall and silently closed the door. She needed something between her and it. Even then, it was still too close. Hand still on her mouth, she could hear it snuffling around. She climbed up on the toilet and crouched on the seat, praying for it to leave.

Somewhere by the entrance, screaming was heard. Then a scrambling sound on the title floor as someone ran in. More screaming. Then silence and wet sounds. It all happened so fast. Name trembled where she was, hand still over her mouth, praying she wouldn't be next.

Then she shifted. The sensor on the automatic toilet went off. The monster crashed against the flimsy stall door, easily breaking through it. Name scrambled away as the monster aimed not for her, but the thing making the noise. It was so loud, the monster couldn't hear her slither under the stall right into—oh God—the over-spill from the clogged toilet next to it. She wanted to vomit as the smell hit her. But staying alive was more important.

She army crawled through the rancid spill as the sounds of broken porcelain and spilling water clattered behind her. She wriggled her way through to the last stall and sat there in the corner, shaking uncontrollably, trying not to make a sound.

The monster must have burst a pipe, it had reacted so violently. More water spilled out all over the floor. It reached her, but she dared not leave. The sound of the water made it impossible to hear anything else. So she sat and waited, unwilling to move. She wasn't sure if the creature was still there, hunting her, or if it had left. So she sat, getting soaked as the water spilled out. After several minutes, the automatic lights flipped off. She continued to sit, too afraid to move. Shivering from both the fear and the cold of the water.

It felt like hours, it felt like days of sitting there, waiting in the darkness. Was she going to die here? She had to get up and leave sometime or she really would die here.

Then, the lights flicked back on again and she froze. The monster had come back for her. Her ears strained above the din of the broken pipe. She heard the door of the far stall open between the gurgle of the pipes. Her heart started to race. It was looking for her.

The next door opened. With a shaking hand, she reached up and locked her door. Something walked over to her stall and the door was tried, but didn't open. A little bit of fiddling and she watched in horror as the latch moved. The door opened and there...

Her turtle saviors were there, standing in front of her. They came for her! She never thought she'd see them again! She nearly cried out with relief before Donatello put a finger to his mouth as a reminder for silence. He helped her up onto her shaking legs. His hands grounded her as he wordlessly checked her for wounds. His relief to find her was just as palpable as hers to be found. He smiled at her, making her feel like as long as he was there, it would be okay. Outside the stall, Raphael skulked, sais out and eyeballing the entrance. Larger than his purple-clad brother, his presence only reassured Name that she was going to get through this. The other two brothers weren't around. Name hoped they were okay.

Donatello pulled her in when she couldn't stop shaking. He gave her a warm, solid hug. He didn't seem to mind that she smelled like fetid bathroom water. A perk of having friends that lived in the sewers. Donatello was always both a bright, kinetic energy, and also a grounding influence on her. Name snuggled in and just let him hold her against his solid body.

Raphael poked his head in to give his own once over of her physical state. He was such a big brother. So protective of anyone deemed under the umbrella of his care. He didn't always know how to express it emotionally, but he showed he cared in his actions. He was always there for those who needed him.

Right now, she needed him—needed them both—and they had come for her.

So much she wanted to tell them. That she was so grateful to see them. That she was glad they were alright. That she loved them so much for always showing up for her. But she could not express any of it. The turtles seemed to know just as well as she did: no sound.

Donatello took her hand and she followed. Out of the bathroom, the theater was a scene of horror. There were bodies. There was even more blood. The carpet and walls were raked with claws. Everything was silent—the projectors, the popcorn machine—anything that could make noise was now forever silenced.

Name wanted to cry. From the horror and death. From the thought that Donatello and Raphael came in here, saw all the carnage, and still decided to pick through it all, trying to find her. Not knowing if she had survived. They still went in to look at the bodies for her. She squeezed Donatello's hand harder. He smiled back at her and she saw the weight of what he had seen on his face. Her turtles liked to help people, they liked to protect. They were not able to protect anyone here and she was sure it broke their hearts. If they had also found her dead...she wanted to hold Raphael's hand, too, but right now, the goal was to make it through the building in silence.

They paused once as one of the monsters skulked down the corridor. Breaths held, they carefully continued on. Through the lobby, the shattered glass doors were the barrier between them and outside. The piles of broken glass were the landmines. Step by step, they threaded their way through, making as little sound as possible.

Each step was careful among the broken glass. A touch of toes first and then the rest of the body weight. Light-footed, like a ninja. They were nearly free. They raised their feet to step out of the theater through the broken door frames. And Raphael's shell just happened to bump a sharp point of glass still sticking out of the frame. That was enough to send it and several other pieces clattering to the ground.

All three froze at the sound, holding their breaths. Two separate monsters galloped from opposite ends of the hallway, meeting in the lobby to stampede straight for them. Name froze at the sight, but she felt Donatello's hand on her wrist, jerking her out the doorway. She ran blindly, unable to see anything in front of her but the turtle's large shell.

She heard the creatures blindly crash through the broken doors, gunning for them. Fear seemed to pull the energy from her legs. How was she supposed to outrun them? What if she only slowed the turtle's down?

Ahead, she heard the familiar sound of the large fountain in the middle of the shopping plaza where the theater was located. Donatello wasn't going around. Name nearly cried out, but she felt Raphael grab her from behind and put a hand over her mouth. His strength always awed her. How easily he leaped with her extra weight. He cleared the pool and all three landed on top of the fountain, about seven feet off the ground.

Unfortunately, the top of the fountain sputtered water, too, and the three of them were getting soaked. Name hardly minded. At least this wasn't rank toilet water this time. But below, the monsters were confused. It seemed they truly were blind. But also intelligent. The sound of the fountain had disguised your whereabouts, but they knew their prey hadn't disappeared.

They began to circle the fountain, listening. The bulbous heads would open like a blooming flower, presumably to hear better. No eyes, no nose. Their only senses were sound and touch. And Donatello was going to take full advantage of that. He pulled a device out of one of the pockets on his belt, fiddled with it, and then threw it as far as he could. It hit the ground and began to make a beeping noise. The two monsters immediately took off after it. They attacked it so violently, they were hurting each other trying to get to it.

Even more horrifying, more of them came out of the woodwork. They appeared from all over, even from the tops of the buildings around them. All converging on the sound. There were so many. Name felt a heavy pit in her stomach from how many there were.

But Name and the turtles didn't stay to see what happened. The second the monsters were distracted, Raphael picked her up again. They jumped from the top of the fountain and fled the opposite way as silent as possible.

[captainsophiestark]

Always Be Prepared

Poe Dameron x Reader

Masterlist - Join My Taglist!

Written for Fictober 2023!

Fandom: Star Wars

Day 21 Prompt: "Just in case this doesn't work."

Summary: Poe and his SO are supposed to be completing a simple, subtle reconnaissance mission, but a complication might make the 'subtle' part challenging.

Word Count: 1,073

Category: Fluff

Putting work into an AI program without permission is illegal. You do not have my permission. Do not do it.

"This is... not good."

My boyfriend, Poe Dameron, and I stood shoulder to shoulder, tucked into our hiding spot as we watched First Order troops crawl all over the ship we were supposed to be escaping on. We'd come to this world on an intelligence gathering mission. Unfortunately for us, we apparently hadn't gone completely unnoticed.

Poe shrugged, nudging his shoulder against mine. "I don't know, it could be worse. We could've been in the ship when they swarmed it."

I huffed a laugh. "I guess that's true. So what do we do now?"

"Hmm. Did you see any other ships around here that we could take off with instead?"

"Not unless you count the ships the First Order came in on. And somehow I don't think we're gonna have much luck taking one of those."

"Then we need a distraction. Something big enough to draw them away from our ship, so big that we actually have half a shot at getting past those troopers."

Poe and I hummed in thought, each scanning our surroundings and staring off into space to try to get some inspiration. We'd spent enough time studying maps of this place and actually combing through it in the past few hours that if there was anything to be done, we should've been able to figure it out.

My eyes wandered over the door we'd just come from, leading to the heart of the building, including its power core.

A crazy, stupid, terrible idea hit me like lightning. I turned to Poe and found him staring back, the same spark of insanity I'd fallen in love with glimmering behind his eyes.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" he asked, a manic grin growing slowly on his face. I shook my head.

"I kind of hate to say this, but yeah, I think I am."

"Well then, what are we waiting for?"

A better, less dangerous idea, I thought, but didn't say it out loud. Poe and I had done and survived all kinds of crazy things in our time with the Resistance, both together and apart. If we'd made it this far, then odds were good that we'd keep making it. Right?

As one, we turned and headed in the opposite direction from our ship, back into the heart of the facility we'd stolen information from. With the discovery of our ship, security had surely been tightened, but we still made it to our target.

The building's energy core hummed before us like a giant glowing weak point. If someone were to blow it up, they'd certainly cause a distraction worthy of attention from a bunch of First Order stormtroopers.

"You know, I feel like it's concerning that we're so in sync about stuff like this," I said as Poe and I moved around the room, quickly identifying weak points where we could do the most damage with just a few charges.

"I think we should be more concerned about why you bring explosive charges with you every time we go on a mission."

I shrugged. "It's working out for us so far, isn't it? You never know when a fast and easy sabotage method might come in handy in our line of work."

"I... guess I can't argue with that," said Poe with a chuckle. We worked together to place the charges, then I hooked up a remote detonator while Poe watched the door. Once everything was set, I gave him a thumbs up and went to meet him by the door. We ducked and dodged through the ever-increasing security measures, thankfully, finally making it back to our hiding spot in front of our ship.

It seemed like another group or two of storm troopers had made their way over, and I knew it was only a matter of time until they started expanding their search radius. It wouldn't take them long to find Poe and I if we didn't do something soon.

"Alright, should we go for it?" I asked, holding the detonator up in question to Poe. Suddenly, this plan felt a lot riskier than before we'd actually been ready to implement it.

"Hold on, one more thing first."

With that, he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me to him. He kissed me, hard, and after a second's surprise I melted into him, kissing him back just as hard. After a few long, savored moments, Poe pulled away, leaving me a little breathless as I subconsciously trailed after him. He grinned.

"Just in case this doesn't work," he said by way of explanation. I just smiled and shook my head.

"Get ready to run to the ship and go like hell, Flyboy. Once I press this button, it's mostly on you to get us out of here. I'll watch our backs."

Poe winked at me, and I smiled back at him. I took a deep breath, trying to steel myself as best I could, then pushed the button on the detonator.

A moment later, an explosion rocked the building. All the stormtroopers in front of us dropped what they were doing to look up in shock, and as the chain reaction of the explosion continued, they started shouting and rushing towards the building to try to do something. As a result, our ship was left almost completely unguarded.

In perfect sync, Poe and I took off running. I let him get a bit ahead of me, then turned as I ran, ready to shoot at anyone who tried to stop our escape.

Lucky for us, the distraction had worked even better than planned. With a First Order facility literally going up in smoke, even the few people left on the other ships in the yard were too distracted to notice Poe and I taking off until it was basically too late to stop us.

Once we made it to Hyperspace headed back for Resistance HQ, I let myself relax all the way. I put a hand on Poe's shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, then flopped back in my seat to watch the stars streak by.

"Nice work," I sighed. "We should start giving classes on pulling off insane shit like that."

"I hate to break it to you, but we're not out of the woods yet, sweetheart."

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"One of us still has to explain the mess we left behind us to General Organa."

"Not it!"

****************

Everything Taglist: @rosecentury

[agentrouka-blog]

Rouka Reads: The World Of Ice And Fire - 2. The Coming Of The First Men

Preface

1 - The Dawn Age

The comfy world of the branch-swinging, barrow-building giants and their arch enemies, the face-carving, skinchanging, arrow-shooting children of the forest is about to be disrupted.

But how?

According to the most well-regarded accounts from the Citadel, anywhere from eight thousand to twelve thousand years ago, in the southernmost reaches of Westeros, a new people crossed the strip of land that bridged the narrow sea and connected the eastern lands with the land in which the children and giants lived.

GRRM, are you KIDDING me? (Hello, First Men.)

How many times are we hit over the head with the idea that the Wall itself and the Stark line is 8,000 years old?

The Others are as dead as the children of the forest, gone eight thousand years. -- AGOT, Catelyn I

The Wall has stood for what, eight thousand years? -- AGOT, Eddard I

The Others are only a story, a tale to make children shiver. If they ever lived at all, they are gone eight thousand years. - AGOT, Jon VII

The Long Night has come before. Oh, eight thousand years is a good while, to be sure … -- AGOT, Jon VIII

[...] and all the Starks going back eight thousand years. -- ACOK, Bran III

[...] the mighty Eddard Stark, of a line eight thousand years old . . . -- ACOK, Sansa IV

For eight thousand years the men of House Stark had [...] -- ASOS, Jon II

The Night's Watch takes no part [...]. For eight thousand years—" -- ASOS, Samwell V

For eight thousand years the men of the Night's Watch have [...] -- ADWD, Jon XI

And NOW Yandel is telling me that there's a casual span of 4,000 years that either did or did not happen before that? Or the number 8,000 is just wrong and everyone and their bastard cousin is just tossing it about for funsies? OH REALLY?

Samwell, make me angry:

The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later. There are archmaesters at the Citadel who question all of it. Those old histories are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around a thousand years before there were knights. You know the tales, Brandon the Builder, Symeon Star-Eyes, Night's King . . . we say that you're the nine hundred and ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, but the oldest list I've found shows six hundred seventy-four commanders, which suggests that it was written during . . ." "Long ago," Jon broke in. "What about the Others?" (AFFC, Samwell I)

I swear on my breakfast mango, this timeline violence will answer to justice one day. And if Jon Snow interrupts another rant by my favorite nerd about to shine some light on this mess, I will stab him again.

So from now on: House Stark, a dynasty approximately several thousand years old. Possibly. But potentially not! Who knows! Not me!

It was here that the First Men came into Dorne via the Broken Arm, which was not yet broken.

Gee, I wonder what happened to that piece of geography.

Why these people left their homelands is lost to all knowing, but when they came, they came in force.

Actually, I really do wonder what prompted this migration. Just running out of space in Essos? Population explosion? Escaping conflict?

Thousands entered and began to settle the lands, and as the decades passed, they pushed farther and farther north. Such tales as we have of those migratory days are not to be trusted, for they suggest that, within a few short years, the First Men had moved beyond the Neck and into the North. Yet, in truth, it would have taken decades, even centuries, for this to occur.

Odd conflict to introduce out of nowhere. I suppose "tales not to be trusted" is the key information here, then, since he doesn't elaborate on those stories at all. Thanks, GRRM, I was not at all aware that there may be SLIGHT INCONSISTENCIES in your ancient lore.

Absolutely primed to believe that we are going to discover some Big Historical Lies with plot relevance in the next books. I swear.

Now give me something reliable to work with.

What does seem to be accurate from all the tales, however, is that the First Men soon came to war with the children of the forest.

Of course. :(

Unlike the children, the First Men farmed the land and raised up ringforts and villages.

Sounds cosy enough.

And in so doing, they took to chopping down the weirwood trees, including those with carved faces, and for this, the children attacked them, leading to hundreds of years of war.

:(

It's interesting that all accounts agree that the direct violence was instigated by the Children. Was there no communication beforehand? Warnings, ultimatums?

Also where were the giants in all this? Just staying out of the way minding their own business?

The hunters among the children—their wood dancers—became their warriors as well, [...]

Dance as a metaphor for violent conflict #361. Arya vibes.

but for all their secret arts of tree and leaf, they could only slow the First Men in their advance. The greenseers employed their arts, and tales say that they could call the beasts of marsh, forest, and air to fight on their behalf: direwolves and monstrous snowbears, cave lions and eagles, mammoths and serpents, and more.

Once again I wonder how happy the animals were to participate in this, given the example of Varamyr.

But the First Men proved too powerful, and the children are said to have been driven to a desperate act.

Uh oh.

Legend says that the great floods that broke the land bridge that is now the Broken Arm and made the Neck a swamp were the work of the greenseers, who gathered at Moat Cailin to work dark magic. Some contest this, however: the First Men were already in Westeros when this occurred, and stemming the tide from the east would do little more than slow their progress. Moreover, such power is beyond even what the greenseers are traditionally said to have been capable of … and even those accounts appear exaggerated. It is likelier that the inundation of the Neck and the breaking of the Arm were natural events, possibly caused by a natural sinking of the land. What became of Valyria is well-known, and in the Iron Islands, the castle of Pyke sits on stacks of stone that were once part of the greater island before segments of it crumbled into the sea.

Okay:

Considering the unlikelihood of The Doom being a natural disaster, I vote Dark Magic. Moat Cailin would have been built much later though the name "moat" suggests a relationship between this event and the creation/location of the castle. I was going to mock them forgetting that new settlers could arrive on boats but given the effort of building a fleet that size (hello, Nymeria), I see their point.

Hardhome, 600 years ago. The first time the region beyond the Wall had a real city developing. And it goes kaboom with such violence, the place is still considered cursed today. COTF, I want to talk.

Erosion in Pyke? Really? Yandel, stop trying to distract me.

So, did it help? Maybe? You'd think a large scale geographic alteration would motivate the First Men to take them seriously.

Regardless, the children of the forest fought as fiercely as the First Men to defend their lives. Inexorably, the war ground on across generations, until at last the children understood that they could not win. The First Men, perhaps tired of war, also wished to see an end to the fighting. The wisest of both races prevailed, and the chief heroes and rulers of both sides met upon the isle in the Gods Eye to form the Pact.

Nope. Still took them all ages to sit down together.

Anyway, let's have a quick look how this stacks up against the version of events told to Bran in the main series:

“But some twelve thousand years ago, the First Men appeared from the east, crossing the Broken Arm of Dorne before it was broken. They came with bronze swords and great leathern shields, riding horses. No horse had ever been seen on this side of the narrow sea. No doubt the children were as frightened by the horses as the First Men were by the faces in the trees. As the First Men carved out holdfasts and farms, they cut down the faces and gave them to the fire. Horror-struck, the children went to war. The old songs say that the greenseers used dark magics to make the seas rise and sweep away the land, shattering the Arm, but it was too late to close the door. The wars went on until the earth ran red with blood of men and children both, but more children than men, for men were bigger and stronger, and wood and stone and obsidian make a poor match for bronze. Finally the wise of both races prevailed, and the chiefs and heroes of the First Men met the greenseers and wood dancers amidst the weirwood groves of a small island in the great lake called Gods Eye. (AGOT, Bran VII)

Seems Luwin read the same sources as Yandel, but he does not believe in being fexible with the timeline. Nothing but solid numbers for our maester.

Now about that Pact. Yandel?

Giving up all the lands of Westeros save for the deep forests, the children won from the First Men the promise that they would no longer cut down the weirwoods. All the weirwoods of the isle on which the Pact was forged were then carved with faces so that the gods could witness the Pact, and the order of green men was made afterward to tend to the weirwoods and protect the isle. With the Pact, the Dawn Age of the world drew to a close, and the Age of Heroes followed.

They divided up the land and made peace. I bet that was just about as easy and fast as it is implied here! :)

How does Luwin tell it?

“There they forged the Pact. The First Men were given the coastlands, the high plains and bright meadows, the mountains and bogs, but the deep woods were to remain forever the children’s, and no more weirwoods were to be put to the axe anywhere in the realm. So the gods might bear witness to the signing, every tree on the island was given a face, and afterward, the sacred order of green men was formed to keep watch over the Isle of Faces. “The Pact began four thousand years of friendship between men and children. In time, the First Men even put aside the gods they had brought with them, and took up the worship of the secret gods of the wood. The signing of the Pact ended the Dawn Age, and began the Age of Heroes.” (AGOT, Bran VII)

Once again, Luwin doesn't truck with that "we can't be sure" new age-y doubtful nonsense about the timeline. Four. Thousand. Years. Of friendship. Jot that down.

According to him, that friendship ending coincided roughly with the emerging of House Stark, the Watch and the Wall (if they are 8 millenia old) - but more significantly with a new wave of migration. Much more violent and much quicker than the one before. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Timeline shenanigans aside, it seems that the main message here is that the First Men and the Children could have sat down to make peace a whole lot sooner if they hadn't decided on killing each other right away. Seems like this extended bloodshed, as much as anything else, may have contributed to their "long dwindling".

Or, you know, it's all lies and this entire book is designed to drive me to madness. We'll see!

****

Now about that island:

Whether the green men still survive on their isle is not clear although there is the occasional account of some foolhardy young riverlord taking a boat to the isle and catching sight of them before winds rise up or a flock of ravens drives him away. The nursery tales claiming that they are horned and have dark, green skin is a corruption of the likely truth, which is that the green men wore green garments and horned headdresses.

Or foolhardy young Reeds.

What, if any, is the relationship between these folks and Bloodraven in his subterranean weirwood chateau?

And why does this island have weird parallels with the Quiet Isle and the island at Queenscrown?

And is this order of unicolored guardianship a spiritual predecessor of the Night's Watch?

Do they have families and kids taking over regularly, or is it the same guys still serving there?

I am confident that this book will answer none of my questions. <3

****

Next up: The Age of Heroes!

[cannibal-wings]

WIP Wednesday For You Pay the Cost I'm currently working on the Méndez boss fight. Here are two little snippets from it. This is probably the most rough I've ever posted. Usually my WIP Wednesday stuff has gone through a bit of editing, but these chunks haven't. They're as close to raw as they can get. Currently the fight is at 3K words, and I'm expecting another 2K at least, since I haven't even hit phase two yet. Anyways, enjoy! I'm off to work. (Update might not be next week, with the holidays this weekend, and I'm hosting, claiming my days off, my time to write will be limited. I wouldn't be surprised if the update drops late next week or early the week after)

1.

“Be careful,” Ashley said behind him. It was clear that she had picked up on his unease as well.

“I always am,” he said but that didn’t seem to have the effect he wanted. He supposed his arm in a sling was proof enough that just being careful wasn’t all he needed to do. The movement to Leon’s right was so sudden and explosive that he hardly had time to turn his head. His body was hit, hard, enough to throw him against the side rail and snap it. The momentum carried him across the open space and he hit the concrete floor below with force. Leon would have cried out in pain if the wind hadn’t been kicked from his lungs.

He rolled several times before he came to a stop face down. He lay there motionless, trying to force his lungs to remember how to breathe. His eyes were watering and his vision was white with pain. Finally, he drew a gasp, then another, like a fish out of water. Something off to his right hit the floor as well, it was heavy, and gave no cry of pain. It wasn’t Ashley. Leon pulled his good arm up underneath him and pushed. Slowly he got himself to his knees and looked over. It was Méndez. He turned so he was facing him, his whole body was still shaking with pain. When he looked up at the where he was, he saw a hole had been busted through the wooden wall. That man wasn’t human, that was for certain. There was no way someone could ram him through a solid wood wall with enough force to break metal and likely bone. Leon carefully felt around his ribs but he couldn’t tell if the pain there was from the giant fight, the bull man’s hammer, or the various other times he had been thrown around today.

Méndez started to walk towards him, slowly, in a manner not unlike something that had cornered its prey. “Little Protector, you have forced my hand.”

Leon was still struggling to process his own bodies movements; words were lost on him. But he heard Ashley call out from above, she was still near the walkway. “Leon! Oh my god, are you ok?”

At the sound of her voice Méndez turned to look at her. “I feel I must apologize, for what I am about to do to your Protector.” At that Leon shook his head and reached for his SG. He was able to get two good shots off. The first one hit Méndez in the back, he turned to look over at Leon and the second caught his chest. Fatal shots to someone who was human. “Cease your pointless struggling. Your body has already begun the change, abandon who you were and accept the will of our God.”

“You’re a shitty missionary you know that?” Leon managed to say between gasps of air. Méndez reached down to pick up his hat, it had fallen when he rammed into Leon from above.

Mendez began his approach again. “Lord Saddler wants you alive. But I think he’s making a mistake. You now share our blood, you have been bestowed our gifts, but you fight us every step of the way. You are unwilling and unworthy, and for that I must destroy you. Surely our Lord shall understand, and the Lady will be provided with a new Protector, one who understands its place.”

Leon didn’t like the sound of that. He shot three more times. It didn’t look like Méndez felt a single one. Leon might as well have been shooting him with BBs. “Oh almighty! Grant me the strength to fix your mistake!”

“Son of a bitch,” Leon muttered under his breath. He was going to have to fight, and the odds were looking less in his favor than normal. He quickly scanned the room for anything he could use to his advantage. This was a meat processing house after all, there had to be something he could use. He spotted a machine, a hoist, for hauling the carcasses up onto the tables, it looked like it was gas powered. Sure enough, there were barrels not too far away labeled “fuel”. Leon forced himself to his feet and shouted up at the walkway, “Ashley! Run!”

“Ok!” Her voice seemed hesitant, but her actions weren’t. With one last look down at Leon she sprinted for the stairs that led to the door to the outside.

Once he saw her orange jacket vanish through the door, he kicked the barrel over and shoved it towards Méndez. It started its roll towards the man and Leon didn’t have time to come up with anything clever to say besides, “Hasta luego!” He shot and the barrel exploded upon impact.

That wasn’t the only barrel of fuel, Leon didn’t notice that others had been stored nearby until he heard them go off. Four more loud bangs sounded off, followed by intense flames and clouds of thick, dark smoke. Another set of explosions pounded in from the opposite side, gasoline splattering the walls and pillars of the room. Everything was quickly caught in an intense blaze. Leon shielded his face with his good arm until the explosions ceased. When he lowered it he couldn’t see what was left of Méndez through the thick smoke. His next move was to try to find his own way out.

He looked behind him but there wasn’t a door, just a staircase to another walkway. The only door seemed to be behind the wall of fire he had just created. “Great,” Leon muttered. He solved one problem with another. He would have to run through the fire to get out. Not ideal. It could very well kill him. He gathered himself and started to move towards the fire when something stopped him, a chill ran down his spine despite the heat. Something else was moving in the haze of the flames.

Leon could hear a snapping sound, like breaking branches, followed by the wet sound of meat being torn apart. Again, that sound hit his ears, then he recognized it, bone snapping. It cracked and popped, blending in with the wood that was burning all around them. Through the fire he could see something twitching, then jerking upwards. With each pop it grew taller and it swayed back and forth on what Leon could only assume were legs. Then the whole figure turned towards Leon and began to advance towards him.

Méndez stepped into view. His upper body had become separated from his lower half. It sat on an elongated, exposed spine. Each set of vertebrae now sported sharp insectoid legs that wiggled independently from each other. It reminded him of a centipede. Leon took a step back, then another. “The fuck?” Méndez grew closer still, he didn’t seem disturbed by his body’s sudden mutation.

“God, I thank you for your gift,” Méndez said as he calmly strode towards Leon. Two bulbus growths on his back burst at once, spraying fluid as his body lurched and rolled. Two more appendages sprang out of his back, insectoid again, long, thick, with five joints. Corse hair and spines glinted fresh in the firelight. The tips were curved and sharp. No doubt they were designed to pierce. The limbs were dragging on the floor as Méndez gathered himself, strong spine pulling his upper body and the new arms back up to their full height.

Leon was already backing up. His claws and carapace suddenly seemed a lot less threatening. He spread his mandibles wide and hissed before he said, “You wanna get ugly? Let’s get ugly!” Bold words from a frightened man.

Méndez once more didn’t seem impressed by his threat display or the words that followed. He simply laughed and said, “I knew God would see my side, I knew he would agree with me. You will not live to regret your choice to turn your back on us. Now, behold the miracle!”

2.

Méndez seemed to be getting frustrated. He lashed out more desperately than before. The erratic movements were harder to predict, harder to dodge and Leon caught one to the side that flung him against the wall. The air wasn’t knocked from his lungs this time and he recovered quickly. He quickly shot a few times to distract the monster as he fully got back to his feet. Sweat was running down his back, or at least, Leon hoped it was sweat. He wiped his face, somehow the carapace on his hand was cool despite the heat around him.

“We share the same blood,” Méndez said as he turned to make his way over to where he had tossed Leon, “why do you resist?”

“I’m not answering that, there’s nothing I could say to a man who’s lost himself.” Leon shot again, this time more bullets hit than missed. He was getting more confident and comfortable aiming one handed. “I don’t share your blood either,” Leon spat. He could feel Méndez’s gaze on him. “D-Don’t look at me! I’m not like you, I’ll never be like you! Some sort of monster!” He flared his jaws and said, “You freaks can mess my face up, change my legs, my arms, I don’t care! I won’t be like you, it won’t work.”

“And that, Little Protector, is why I’ve decided to exterminate you.” In a movement faster than what Leon could see, Méndez swiped and caught Leon off balance. He moved in and grabbed the other man with his human hands. He had long, sharp, talons that didn’t struggle in piercing between Leon’s neck plates. He squirmed and struggled in his grasp. “To think you could be this foolish, to reject a gift as wonderful as this!”

Leon looked at Méndez, if there was a good man in there, he was lost now. That Leon was certain of. He couldn’t reach his knife with his injured arm, nor could he get it with his free hand. He kicked out and slashed at Méndez’s chest with his feet claws. The pressure on his neck tightened and he hissed in pain not intimidation. His heart was beating faster now, he needed a way out and fast. He tried again with the claws on his feet. He managed to rake them across his chest but despite digging in deep Méndez didn’t let go. He moved his hand with the SG just enough to line up with Méndez’s leg. He closed his eyes and prayed he didn’t miss. He squeezed the trigger and shot three times, his knee buckled and Leon felt himself drop to the floor.

He landed and scooted back as Méndez fell against the upper walkway. He roared and looked over at him. Leon felt a chill run through him. Those insect arms were a lot longer than they appeared. Mendez flung them out and they came crashing down on him like trees. There wasn’t any space to dodge, his back was against the wall, he had cornered himself again.

Leon didn’t even have time to swear. He raised his good arm and closed his eyes. Ready to hear the crack of carapace and then nothing as he was crushed under the weight of Méndez’s arms. The searing pain was just what Leon expected, only it hadn’t come from his arm, but his sides. Both sides of his body flashed hot with pain, just below his ribcage, as something split his skin and burst forth from his body.

Leon dropped to one knee and cried out. He wasn’t dead, but he sure felt he should be. His body spasmed. His brain was registering resistance on what felt like an arm, but not the arm he was used to. Through watering eyes, he looked up and saw limbs he didn’t recognize. They were holding off Méndez’s claw, which was far too close to his face for his own comfort.

Leon knew they were his immediately. He didn’t even have to look to see where they were connected, he just knew. He had two more arms now, and they were in the process of saving his life. His body shuddered and the new limbs crawled further from his body. With each push they grew longer and stronger. Leon watched as a hand formed at the end of each one. The fingers that unraveled looked like a human’s for a brief moment, before the pointer and middle fingers fused into a long blade like claw. He pushed back hard against Méndez and was surprised to find the monster giving ground to him.

Leon screamed as his body gave one last push and the arms fully extended out of his body. He stood and shoved the limb off and ducked to the side. He took a brief moment to catch his breath and look at the two new arms by his side. They were thin, more like insect limbs than human, but they had the correct number of human joints, a clear shoulder, or pivot point against his body, then an elbow and wrist. The hands weren’t human anymore, but they did have three fingers. That, Leon decided, was enough to hold a shotgun with.

Blood and fluid leaked down Leon’s sides from spot where the new limbs had burst forth, but already the pain was dulling. That healing factor was kicking in again. Leon holstered his handgun and moved for the shotgun. Sure enough, the new arm responded just like his old, injured one. It found its place on the front of the shotgun, the long blade like claw was easy to rest the gun against and the remaining fingers held it in place.

He moved in on Méndez, firing as he walked. The Merchant hadn’t been kidding, this gun packed a hell of a punch, but he hardly felt it against his shoulder. He fired three shots in rapid succession into the spine and Méndez finally howled in pain. He curled in on himself, human arms wrapping around his exposed spine. When he looked at Leon there was pure hatred burning in his eye. “Why? Why has God given you, a heretic, a gift? Have I been betrayed? Was my judgment not true?” Leon didn’t have the answers that the monster needed. He just shot again and again, pumping him full of lead. Méndez swept out again with the long piercing limb. This time Leon jumped on top of it, his dexterous toes wrapping around the limb and he followed the swing as it moved him closer to the upper walkway. He pushed off and jumped to the upper floor in one smooth movement. This time when he spread his jaws and hissed Méndez flinched. “Maybe it’s time to take this “Little Protector” seriously!”

[speaker-of-the-void-cats]

Gardener|ɿɘwonniW

Once upon a time,* a gardener and a winnower lived** together in a garden.*** * It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun. ** We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. *** It was the field of possibility that prefigured existence. They existed, because they had to exist. They had no antecedent and no constituents, and there is no instrument of causality by which they could be portioned into components and assigned to some schematic of their origin. If you followed the umbilical of history in search of some ultimate atavistic embryo that became them, you would end your journey marooned here in this garden. In the morning, the gardener pushed seeds down into the wet loam of the garden to see what they would become. In the evening, the winnower reaped the day's crop and separated what would flourish from what had failed. The day was longer than all of time, and the night was swifter than a glint of light on a falling sugar crystal. Insects buzzed between the flowers, and worms slithered between the roots, feeding on what was and what might be, the first gradient in existence, the first dynamo of life. Rain fell from no sky. Voices spoke without mouth or meaning. A tree of silver wings bloomed yielded fruit shed feathers bloomed again. In the day between the morning and the evening, the gardener and the winnower played a game of possibilities.

Mysteries

Things I saw inside A wild river and a broken dam (or maybe it's just the sea crashing through a narrow gap I can't be sure). Waves slam through the gap and where they hit the stone they throw up pillars of spray that pierce the mist and crash down in thunder. There's a giant in the cataract, trying to wade against the current, and I can tell it wants to reach the lever and pull the lever which will seal off the flow or maybe give it the sword, but the torrent throws it back so it just keeps its head down and tries to push on. I can't see the face but it breathes out white smoke. I feel for it hard. A world painted around the interior like a stranger Earth everted and glued inside itself but I don't believe this one it's too much like a metaphor. A switchboard or a train station, empty, dead (waiting). The tunnels branch off into infinity. I stare down one for a long time and see a pale worm move in hungry coils around itself. I think this one is the most likely although I might have brought the worm. An egg but I'm not sure if the broth inside is warm still, or if it's gone to rot, or if the warmth comes from the struggles of the tiny winged zygote or the bleed from the wound or the thoughts of something thinking very hard. A star I think. We count on stars as steady friends because they always rise and always shine but a star's a delicate truce: an explosion caught by its own mass so that it can't erupt and can't collapse. Thus I imagine the state of the machine might be. But one force or another has gone awry and now it rests here, snuffed and broken, waiting for the two rival forms of ruin to be set in balance again.

Half-truths

"What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate."

Dreaming

You are the first to dream. In the dream, you are shaping coarse sand with your hands. You lift a handful, and it feels like the shifting of mountains. You drag your fingertip through the dirt to make a twisting line and hear the roar of moving water. You breathe and feel the rush of clean, bright wind in your hair. Suddenly, you are far, far, far up in the air, higher than you've ever been. You have gone to the very top of Freehold's tallest skyscrapers, but this is much higher, and you see the world below with much greater fidelity. It is a beautiful green world, much greener than any place you've ever seen before. It looks like home. --- I am the first to dream. The dreams can happen at any time. A veil drops in front of my eyes and I see strange, moving images. I am someone else, or I am myself, reimagined. I can't say. In the dreams, I shape planets with my own hands. At first, I believe I am mad. The clinicians at BrayWell call it "interplanetary relocation maladjustment psychosis": a psychobabble catch-all for mental disturbances that they can't explain. Other people, searching for certainty, call it "prophecy." But all I can offer is a loose, tangled connection that I painstakingly unravel when I dream. || I am drawn to a bright and attentive star. I speak to it through movement, through feeling. It understands implicitly. || Now, I stand before a crowd. Their murmuring is the bone-deep rumble of shifting tectonic plates. A screen behind me plays looping, blurry footage of the Traveler terraforming Venus. The images radiate with pale light. We've watched this footage many times. || I glide through space as if through water, tugged in nine directions by nine impulses. || In front of the crowd, I sway a little, a copse of trees bending in a dream-wind. I can't help it. I'm dreaming more often than not. || There is whispering from the deep-dark, alluring and terrifying—a reminder of things left behind, bittersweet and abhorrent. || A crackle of static on the screen behind me brings me back to earth, resettling my feet firmly on the ground. These people have come here for my insights. I lean forward and speak to the crowd. Four tenets, aching with truth: The Traveler is a force of benevolence. The Traveler is a sentient being with free will, dreams, hopes, and fears. The Traveler will save us. The Traveler will leave us.

The Witness's first victims were once like you. Struggling for survival. Bolstered by hope. Until their hopes became reality. They called it, the Gardener. Their deity of life.

//

ACCESS: RESTRICTED

DECRYPTION KEY: 2CA9SXUO2C$IKO-006

REP#: 011-PSYCHOMETER-TEST

AGENT(S): TRU-135

SUBJ: PSYCHOMETER FIELD TESTS

1. The new version works. Love all the knobs and antenna; very analog. I took readings off a hatch control out here on Europa and Cowlick was able to retrieve badly distorted voices in some kind of distress. I don't know if it's doing exactly what you Warlocks want, but it's doing something all right. Cowlick says it's probably tapping into her scrutiny, if you permit that term in your ivory halls.

2. Now, I'm not much for gadgets, so I won't ask you how you rigged this thing. But I am one for gossip. Weren't we closing in on some kind of workable theory of exactly how our Ghosts resurrect us? One which was, if I am not mistaken, based on research by the Future War Cult? Did any of that work survive Lakshmi?

3. You know they did try to recruit me once. The Cult. Over a game of poker. Fifty-two cards in a deck don't seem like many, this hard-ass Titan told me. But there are 80 658 175 170 943 878 571 660 636 856 403 766 975 289 505 440 883 277 824 000 000 000 000 different possible shuffles of 52 cards. You could walk back and forth across the observable universe faster than you could count all those possible shuffles. A lot faster. That's life, she said, and she had daisies impaled on the spikes of her skull. Life is endless permutation. So many possibilities. But the rules are what matter. Who cares how the deck shuffles if you don't know the rules of the game? We play this game over and over. Life and death. Light and Dark. But the only way you learn the rules, the only way you're ever gonna get one of those Truces you're named for, is if you come inside. Come into the Cult. Come on in and see. But I didn't.

4. Another thing she told me is that you can play poker with just three cards and two players. Jack, Queen, King. Ante one, max bet one more. High card wins unless one player folds. And in this game, there are many strategies available to the first player, but very few to the second, who acts to exploit the choice made by the first. Many possibilities against few. Sounds like you'd rather be the first player, huh? But if both players play perfectly, that second player wins in the end. Mathematical inevitability. Ain't that something? But I said, your game's just a toy. It's just a contrivance. That's not life. Life isn't one player always exploiting and beating the other.

5. Anyway, back to testing. Might go back to Cocytus and aim this thing at the gate. See how wild it goes. If you never hear from us again, you know Truce and Cowlick finally found something too spooky.

MESSAGE ENDS

_If the Light forgets while the Darkness remembers, then why does a Ghost's power of determination let it access latent memories imprinted in the dead? That's paradoxical. That should be a property of Darkness. How can such fundamentally opposed forces do the same thing?

Am I as shallow as those Guardians arguing over power levels? Trying to force a simple binary upon a complex spectrum… ? The Drifter talks about "spectrums of Light"—powers his Ghost can access because of its modifications. Forcing the metaphor, I thought. Light is not light. It doesn't have frequencies or spectra. But if we are all constrained by our internalized ontology, by our tacit understanding of how the world works… maybe the circumstances of extreme survival compelled the Drifter to explore a new ontology. Maybe his Ghost achieved a new way to think about the Light.

"No noble, well-grown tree has ever disowned its dark roots, for it grows not only upward but downward as well."

The Flower Game

These are the rules of a game. Let it be played upon an infinite two-dimensional grid of flowers. Rule One. A living flower with less than two living neighbors is cut off. It dies. Rule Two. A living flower with two or three living neighbors is connected. It lives. Rule Three. A living flower with more than three living neighbors is starved and overcrowded. It dies. Rule Four. A dead flower with exactly three living neighbors is reborn. It springs back to life. The only play permitted in the game is the arrangement of the initial flowers. This game fascinates kings. This game occupies the very emperors of thought. Though it has only four rules, and the board is a flat featureless grid, in it you will find changeless blocks, stoic as iron, and beacons and whirling pulsars, as well as gliders that soar out to infinity, and patterns that lay eggs and spawn other patterns, and living cells that replicate themselves wholly. In it, you may construct a universal computer with the power to simulate, very slowly, any other computer imaginable and thus simulate whole realities, including nested copies of the flower game itself. And the game is undecidable. No one can predict exactly how the game will play out except by playing it. And yet this game is nothing compared to the game played by the gardener and the winnower. It resembles that game as a seed does a flower—no, as a seed resembles the star that fed the flower and all the life that made it. In their game, the gardener and the winnower discovered shapes of possibility. They foresaw bodies and civilizations, minds and cognitions, qualia and suffering. They learned the rules that governed which patterns would flourish in the game, and which would dwindle. They learned those rules, because they were those rules. And in time the gardener became vexed

A specter of the Black Garden, rich with the sweetness of flowers and the stink of radiolaria. It leaves behind a delicate data-lattice to mark its passing.

Garden state: neutral

garden&&gardeners==root&&branch==leaf&&flower

//intrinsic, inextricable, inescapable

anomaly ++

anomaly One = leaf|invasive;

Garden state: active (gardeners attend)

case Irrecoverable:

if (irretrievable injury (garden&&gardeners)) && (threat persistence) then (escalation. escalation.)

anomaly status: present, tracked, new. No archive referent. simulation: failed.

Damage: 0.3332%. Recoverable. Danger: Recovery projection irresolvable. Repeat. Repeat. Set: irresolvable == irrecoverable == irretrievable

anomaly ++

anomaly Zero = infinite|witness;

archive data retrieved. Zero = infinite|witness == (a seed was planted here.) Recorded referent: "Black|Heart"

Zero : seed :: One : DANGER

[SIMULATION BREAKING. VISIBILITY NARROW. FRACTALS DISINTEGRATING.]

anomaly Zero, absent. anomaly One, DANGER remaining.

Garden state: acting (gardeners in unison)

extirpate (anomaly One)

//There is a majestic thorn. The anomaly is gone. The garden is peaceful.

//It is known|seen|predicted that a primary function of irresolvable|irrecoverable presences is to trample.

Flowers growing / damage repairing / threat unresolved

Function called: escalation. Iteration.

Function: winnow. Function: simplify. Function: flatten.

//The first defense is offense.

"It always ends the same," the gardener complained. "This one stupid pattern!" Aren't they beautiful? I asked, as the flowers opened and closed in patterns beyond the scope of entire universes to encode, all-devouring and perhaps everlasting. Not even we could know whether a pattern in the flowers would cycle forever, or someday halt. "They're as dull as carbon monoxide poisoning," the gardener groused, although carbon monoxide did not yet exist, and neither did anything that could be poisoned. The gardener kneeled to flick a patch of sod with their trowel. It struck an open flower, causing it to shut. Although I was the closer of flowers and that was my sole purpose, I felt no fear or jealousy. We had our assigned dominions and always would. They're majestic, I said. They have no purpose except to subsume all other purposes. There is nothing at the center of them except the will to go on existing, to alter the game to suit their existence. They spare not one sliver of their totality for any other work. They are the end. The pattern corrected the errant flower effortlessly. The great flow went on unchanged. The gardener got up and brushed their knees. "Every game we play, this one pattern consumes all the others. Wipes out every interesting development. A stupid, boring exploit that cuts off entire possibility spaces from ever arising. There's so much that we'll never get to see because of this… pest." They chewed at their cracked lip, which existed only because this is an allegory. "I'm going to do something about it," they said. "We need a new rule."

The purpose of a system is what it does

The Final Shape

CONSENSUS PERSONAL

VANCINCLOCK IKORA REY >> VANCINCTAN CMDR ZAVALA

If a game of go is meant to test two minds against each other, then I must play as my mind sees fit. I see fit to play 6x24 because I am interested in what will happen next.

ZAVALA >> REY

This isn't a Basho haiku. Purposefully making a suboptimal move in order to make a game more "interesting" is a misunderstanding of the nature of a game. There is no reward for beautiful play in the rules of the game.

REY >> ZAVALA

Then why don't you just turn on a go engine and compute the winning play?

ZAVALA >> REY

I want to test my mind against yours. Not some quantum cheat.

REY >> ZAVALA

But I am a paracausal cheat, Zavala.

ZAVALA >> REY

So am I. Will you take the move back?

REY >> ZAVALA

Now, now, Zavala. There are no do-overs in war. I've made the move I want, and both of us will benefit from it. You may be stubborn enough to hold still for eight days, but the traditions of go are older and even more obstreperous. Play the game.

ZAVALA >> REY

Oh, I'll pinken your ears.

The First Knife

I looked up in shock. I said, What? What do you mean? "A special new rule. Something to…" The gardener threw up their hands in exasperation. "I don't know. To reward those who make space for new complexity. A power that helps those who make strength from heterodoxy, and who steer the game away from gridlock. Something to ensure there's always someone building something new. It'll have to be separate from the rest of the rules, running in parallel, so it can't be compromised. And we'll have to be very careful, so it doesn't disrupt the whole game…" All you will do, I said, with rising panic|fury, is delay the dominant pattern that will overrun the others. It is inevitable. One final shape. "No, it'll be different. Everything will be different, everywhere you look." Everything will be the same. Your new rule will only make great false cysts of horror full of things that should not exist that cannot withstand existence that will suffer and scream as their rich blisters fill with effluent and rot around them, and when they pop they will blight the whole garden. Whatever exists because it must exist and because it permits no other way of existence has the absolute claim to existence. That is the only law. "No," the gardener said, "I am the growth and preservation of complexity. I will make myself into a law in the game." And thus we two became parts of the game, and the laws of the game became nomic and open to change by our influence. And I had only one purpose and one principle in the game. And I could do nothing but continue to enact that purpose, because it was all that I was and ever would be. I looked at the gardener. I looked at my hands. I discovered the first knife.

Their scholars discovered that the Gardener shared a connection with another entity among the stars: the Veil. And when they found it, they arrived to claim it.

"How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole; and inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other."

Winnowing

A dream of a friendly conversation with someone impossible to see, cloaked in shadows. It leaves behind an impossible data fragment to mark its passing. Here is what a flower knows. (The fact that a flower may know anything is a conceit that will have to be accepted as metaphor, but to constantly qualify into perfect precision wears thin, does it not? So, here is what a collection of chloroplasts and pigment can know.) The direction of the sun. The presence of the rain. The tangle of the roots. The distress of another plant. The hands of the gardener, whether they prune or transplant or crush. A flower cannot know much else. But the reality of the garden is vast and wild. A flower knows not the fence; a flower knows not the footpath. And yet there is an infinite cosmic garden, which is not any less real simply because the flower cannot possibly comprehend it… Let us try this again. Stop me if you've heard this one: A gardener and a winnower sit down to play a game outside of time and creation. Yes? Yes. Then we're agreed. The metaphor stands. Let us iterate. A gardener and a winnower set out their chairs and play a game of flowers. The flowers know only that they grow or wither, struggle or flourish. Sometimes, they are touched by one hand or the other, and that influence is the closest they will know of the divine. A flower and a flower spread their leaves to the sun above. (Remember that the sun is also a metaphor: a thing said beautifully, winnowed down to poetry, when the truth is too vast to put in words at all.) They jostle for space, each competing to be the pinnacle of their shape. One flourishes. One withers. Is it the fault of the flower or the fault of its position? A gardener and a winnower sit down to play a game called Possibility. This is a game about a garden, which is to say that it is also a game about flowers, just as a game about a living being must also be a game about organs and bacteria. A gardener and a winnower collaborate to create a protein. Whose hand is it in the design, that shortens one life to extend the rest? It is the winnower that discovers the first knife, but it is not done without the gardener. This, too, is a tradition: a knife does not come to exist without something that must be cut. A woody stem, a colored petal, a vital vessel. The first victims of the blade. All of these are true. All of these are false, for metaphor simplifies as the knife does. It pares incalculable concepts into shapes your wrinkly little brains can comprehend. The weight of billions and the simple curve of a planet give you pause, and how then are you to be expected to grasp the forces that created your nth-removed creator? So the stories woven with utmost delicacy in and around the falsehoods are, after it all, true. There was never any option for the knife to not exist in the garden: it was only ever a matter of time and opportunity. And as for the shape of the knife itself— No. That is enough. I will tell you of gardens. They are domesticated things, made in a form. As soon as something is called a garden, it is shaped. The plants require the hand of a gardener, for they have become weak and dependent on tender care. They require the hand of a winnower, to cut away the dross, for they are too incapable to do it themselves. In absence of a hand, either the flowers themselves must rise up to wield the knife, or the garden will resolve to meaningless wilderness. You will say, "But there are plants that can walk! There are seeds that must be scorched by fire to know growth! Existence is more complex than a simple dichotomy between growth and withering, and there is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in this philosophy!" And I will tell you, clearly: There can be no gardens without knives.

Symmetry Flight

"To have Light, we must have Dark. This is the symmetry of the Universe." —Controversial Warlock Ulan-Tan

I propose a simple experiment—look around. You see light. You see darkness. There could not be one without the other. They are two sides of the same coin. If it is true for these Newtonian echoes, why would it not be true of the purest, paracausal forms? Therefore, I conclude: the reason you persecute me is not because of the symmetry. It's because of the truth beyond this truth, the truth which you most dread: if we could destroy darkness, but we had to give up our Light to do so, how many of us would make that trade?

Research Log 15

Osiris: I found no more logs from Dr Esi, but I have used her algorithm to crack the data core of the Vex Conceptual Mind.

Nimbus: That's the doodad we got from the Black Garden, right?

Osiris: Indeed. The data within contained the Vex's blueprints for their artificial Veil: the Black Heart. It all but proved Dr. Esi's theory. Dr Esi theorized that the paracausal energy of the Traveler operated on a quantum wavelength parallel to electrons.

Nimbus: Um... magnets?

Osiris: In simpler terms: the Traveler's power runs parallel to the forces of nature. Gravity, magnetism, sound, light. The Veil does this too. It is synchronized with the Traveler. Wherever the Traveler came from, the Veil may have as well. But what the Vex made, while connected to the Traveler, was inherently flawed. It did not create the link the Witness desired. Instead, it weakened the Traveler, created... "static" in the flow of their cosmic forces. But it did reveal one intriguing possibility... that at one time, they may have been... united. Part of a whole.

Nimbus: Whoa! So, wait... does this mean the Light and Darkness... were the same once? One force?

T=0

They brought the Veil back to the Gardener in an attempt to strengthen their connection. There, they could reshape reality itself. The Gardener would not allow it. And so, it fled their world.

"When the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of their inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."

We wrestled in the garden, in the loam of possibility where nothing existed and everything might. A shadowed agony among the flowers. We trampled the petals beneath our feet. We stomped the fruit to pulp, and we ground the seeds into the dust. In the wet pop of grapes and the smear of berries—in the perturbation of the field that was the garden before the first tick of time and the first point of space—were the detonations that made the universes. Each universe was pregnant with its own inflationary volumes and braided with ever-ramifying timelines. Each volume cooling and separating into domains of postsymmetric physics, all of which were incarnations of that great and all-dictating bipartite law that states only: exist, lest you fail to exist. And still we fought. We brought down the tree of silver wings and left the stump to smoke amid the meadows. We left prints of our splayed feet and our straining backs in the clay. Our trampling feet made waves in the garden, which were the fluctuations around which the infant universes coalesced their first structures. The dilaton field yawned beneath existence. Symmetries snapped like glass. Like creases, flaws in space-time collected filaments of dark matter that inhaled and kindled the first galaxies of suns. And still we grappled. Our rolling bodies pushed things out of the garden—worms and scurrying life from the fertile soil, wet things from the pools and the leaves. They came out into the madness of primordial space; they thrashed and became large. And I won. I won, because the gardener always stops to offer peace. And when they do, I always strike. But by then, it didn't matter. The game was over. The garden had given birth to creation, the rules were in place, and there would never be a second chance. We played in the cosmos now. We played for everything. And the patterns in the flowers, terrified by our contention, were no longer the inevitable victors of a game whose rules had suddenly changed, and they passed into the newborn cosmos to escape us.

"[One] is, on the whole, less good than they imagine or want themselves to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

Research Log 16

Osiris: I've reached the extent of what I can glean from the research data.

Nimbus: What've we got?

Osiris: Less than I'd hoped for. But the last of Chioma Esi's research has led me to an intriguing topic: Ghosts.

Nimbus: Ghosts? As far as I know, Neomuna never had any contact with a Ghost before you all showed up. We knew about them, but...

Osiris: Precisely. Chioma Esi was researching the entanglement of Light and Dark without fully understanding either. Our Ghosts are a link to the Light of the Traveler. Then how was the Witness able to — on numerous occasions — communicate through them?

Nimbus: Is this about the, uh, the magnets thing? The parallel energy fields, right?

Osiris: Very good. In areas of Darkness, the Witness is able to create a link, not unlike what it created with the Veil and the Traveler.

Nimbus: Ah, like the Vex are able to hack into the CloudArk with their tech! It's a parallel connection.

Osiris: And I believe that connection may not be one-sided.

Having witnessed the truth in the Darkness, they used its binding power to merge themselves... into the salvation they craved.

The line between Light|ʞɿɒႧ is so very thin

Nacre

Even the most perfect of pearls has grit at its center.

Let's chat, shall we? One more nice sit-down for the books. Did you think you wouldn't hear from me again, after all this? You'd have missed me, I hope—and I would certainly have missed you. Have no fear. I'm not so easy to be rid of. Now, let me show you: my beloved. Oh, no, not my sedimentary necrolite, fossilized in time. You've seen that. I speak of that dear and distant expanse of the universe, miraculous in its fullness and its emptiness all at once. Are you surprised to hear of it? Yes, I never much cared for the change of rules, but here we are, and there's no use in crying over spilled radiolaria. Besides, at the heart of it all, there was a gift. To me. That gift is the chance to speak with you. You, and a billion like you. I am making this offer over and over again, in every tiniest cell and the vastest of civilizations. Let me in. Take what you need. Be at ease. You have no say in the degradation of your telomeres, but in all the interim, the whole world is your sweet silicate shellfish. You exist because you have been more suited to it than all the others. Steal what you require from another rather than spend the hours to build it yourself. Break foolish rules—why would you love regulation? It serves you to cross lines, and if others needed rules to protect them, then they were not after all worthy of that existence. Caricatures of villainy are out of style, I hear. Yes. I am no cackling mastermind: I am serious when I say this. It was not the trick of standing upright that lifted you from the dust: it was the mastery of fire, the cooking of cold corpse-meat. That is not any unique faction's province, neither good nor evil. It is simply truth. This great, beloved cosmos. Always decaying, always finding that same old lovely pattern, despite every candle-flame burning amid the flowers. A billion electrons taking the path of least resistance. In Darkness or in Light, someone is always making my choice. Be seeing you.

Duality is not a curse, but a gift.

III. Self

I.I Before one can be freed, one must question the truth of their purest identity. I.II And so a question is begged: Who resides at the core of your being? I.III Only honest reflection will see you—lone traveler—through the coming storm. I.IV Look, then, clearly upon the whole of your existence, and face your glory—strength of will, every flaw of your mortal heart and fabled soul. I.V Through the pieces of a life lived divine your truth, but do not lie—to the world, if one must, but never to yourself. I.VI To see yourself as anything but what you truly are will lead you down sorrow's road, unprepared for the consequence of your salvation. I.VII Once an understanding is met, and the self is purified in the knowledge of its truth, the cage is set to be unbound. "Know thyself in honest ways, or falter in light of your truest self." —3rd Understanding, 7th Book of Sorrow

Sun|nooM

Right back to where we are From drifting far apart You gave me heavy heart It's time now to restart Why would you do that to me? You're acting serious unhealthy Why would you push me away? I wanted real you to stay Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? You kicked me down, you turned me all around I tumble and crash a moment, I'm up for round two My number one you were a loaded gun Shouldn't feel my head but When you want to push I pull When I'm empty, then you're full Did you mean to be so cruel? We're going further apart It's time now to restart Why would you do that to me? You're acting serious unhealthy Why would you push me away I wanted real you to stay Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away? Why would you push me away?

What'd she say about me? Hands in pockets so deep When I walk I see you stare White lockers dripping with despair Pooling around my feet Hold your breath and don't speak Witnesses and zombies And the way they glare as empty as an Answering machine, no one to hear your dreams Na, you don't bother me I'm like electricity They say I'm dancing with my demons This is the dawning of the season Melancholy girls and nonbelievers This is the dawning of the season What you heard about me? I see fire when I sleep I can disappear like drops of water Trembling in the heat No, you won't see me Na, you don't bother me I'm like electricity They say I'm dancing with my demons This is the dawning of the season Melancholy girls and nonbelievers This is the dawning of the season Will we change? Will I be? Adolescent dreams Will we change? Will I be? Adolescent thieves They say I'm dancing with my demons This is the dawning of the season Melancholy girls and nonbelievers This is the dawning of the season They say I'm dancing with my demons This is the dawning of the season Melancholy girls and nonbelievers This is the dawning of the season

He was a lonely cynic No hero nor a villain inside Until he had a vision She had golden eyes and spoke her mind Now easy livin', it sets you free! You'll rediscover simplicity His cynicism gave way to be Raindrops in every color So if you feel low, sit back, enjoy the show Like a kaleidoscope in technicolor tonight So if you feel low, sit back, enjoy the show Like a kaleidoscope in technicolor tonight In technicolor tonight In technicolor tonight So if you think you're finished Go back to the beginning and find That everybody needs a little help From time to time, just look inside Now easy livin', it sets you free You'll rediscover simplicity 'Cause cynicism gives way to be Raindrops in every color So if you feel low, sit back, enjoy the show Like a kaleidoscope in technicolor tonight So if you feel low, sit back, enjoy the show Like a kaleidoscope in technicolor tonight Matt, go back to sleep I think I've finally got it all figured out Like a butterfly floating in amber We've made this moment eternal So if you feel low, sit back, enjoy the show Like a kaleidoscope in technicolor tonight So if you feel low, sit back, enjoy the show Like a kaleidoscope in technicolor tonight In technicolor tonight In technicolor tonight

[another-clive-blog]

clive impalement basically (plus anemia-induced delirium)

You sure have, buddy !! God, this is hurting my soul :') (Not the fanart itself, it's a good fanart that looks awesome !!)

I tried to write a little something, not sure about the quality ?? It's hard to capture the feeling of dying from blood loss ! Also I tried to match your vibes a bit, especially at the end ^^'

TRIGGER WARNINGS are impalement, blood, injury, and uh. Not a graphic description of injury but there is a pretty clear metaphor.

Clive gripped tightly the cold metal, as if he was scared of falling otherwise. Far below, at the feet of the mobile fortress, was screaming and burning London, a few flames refusing to go out amidst the ashes.

Clive couldn't see the city : he could only see his failure, Bill Hawks slipping through his fingers, his whole fortress and plan self-destructing.

"No- It won't end this way !!" There had to be something left to do, anything. Maybe he could fix the generator, stabilize the fortress, keep it from breaking apart-

A loud snap. Clive startled, staggering back to better see the cause of this concerning noise- and the cause of the concerning noise, a tube of some sort, came swinging down at him. Clive didn't have any time to react and try to brace for impact : the tube hit him in the head, and the impact was so brutal that he lost his balance and fell back.

Cold metal under him. An explosion of pain. A wet sound.

It took a few disorienting, agonizing seconds for Clive to figure out what had just happened : firstly because he was now laying on the ground among literal debris, secondly because one of said debris was sticking out of his chest.

It wasn't a flattering thing to admit, but Clive's first reaction was to think that this pointy metal stuff had nothing to do on him, and he therefore grabbed it with the intent of throwing it away. He didn't go through with it of course, because the second his hand closed on the metal he felt something... wet on his palm : upon closer inspection, he noticed that his hand and the metal were now stained red, which shouldn't be the case. Metal didn't bleed, because this was absolutely blood, he knew what it looked like after all, and he also knew metal didn't usually have blood.

Only then did he become aware of the excruciating pain he was in.

He hadn't noticed at first : the initial collision with the tube had been brutal, so it made sense for him to hurt. However, the pain had now propagated to his whole body, lighting every single nerve in fire : it was especially bad in his chest, a minefield of pain just waiting to explode. His chest hurt- it hurt so bad. It hurt almost as much as that time he had inhaled smoke and couldn't stop coughing, when he was thirteen and his whole world had gone up in flames. Except that it wasn't smoke this time- just a giant metal tube piercing his chest, wreaking part of his lungs, keeping him from drawing another labored, long, longed for breath.

Some things never changed. His parents had died that day, and now he- he would-

He would not be awaiting death here. He was more than a tragic story, an ironic retelling of the same sad old tale- he was a person, and he'd keep living as such.

His hands were trembling as he raised them, gripping the metal pipe : he examined it, ignoring the warm liquid streaming down his chin whenever he'd cough. Well, this thing wasn't moving anytime soon : it was wider at its base than at the part sticking out, which meant that he couldn't just pull it out and go about his day. He'd have to- uh- what- have to-

Stand up. Then take it off. Yeah.

Why was his mind so foggy all of a sudden ?

Clive shook his head, hissing in pain as the movement amplified the feeling of his insides being torn apart. It was best to- uh- yeah. What was the plan again ?

"Okay, here's the plan : I'm going to help you stand up, and then we'll wait for the professor to return," Claire said firmly, and Clive only nodded. Wait, when had she gotten here ? Had he fallen asleep ? Passed out ?

He may have passed out actually, because the pain was increasing just as his blood flow was decreasing.

Claire gently grabbed his arms. Apparently, the- thing he was impaled on, couldn't be moved, which meant that he had to be moved. Without it. And it was fine, really, it would be easier to tend to his injury without some pipe obstructing the way, but Claire seemed worried : she kept muttering something about blood loss and the professor coming back quickly, whatever she meant.

She wasn't making a lot of sense, and Clive was tired."Hey- Hey !" Claire snapped her fingers in front of his face. "Stay with me, okay ? I need you to work on getting up because I'm not doing all of this alone."

Clive laughed- he wasn't sure why, actually. Probably because her face, a mix of confusion and concern, was an hilarious sight. She looked stupid. "You look stupid," he said, and giggled some more.

"That's rich coming from you," she said, looking upset- had he irritated her ? It would be fun and stupid. Look at her, she's upset about him insulting her rather than everything going to sh- "Alright," Claire said, "Lean on me."

Uh ? Oh. Hey, he was fairly certain he was impaled just a minute ago ! Oh well, it was probably nothing. There was nothing left after all, just a big old hole on his chest. He should poke it.

"Do not touch your injury !" Claire snapped at him, pulling a bit harder on the arm she was holding to help him up : the movement made him stagger, and it took a couple seconds to regain his balance.

Alright, alright, none of that. It was itchy, though. "It's itchy," he said.

"No it's not."

"Yes it is," he said, because this was his injury and he knew very well what it felt like. "Probably because of the worms trying to crawl out. They make it all fuzzy."

"The wo- oh." Claire said unhelpfully, before falling silent. She looked paler, all of a sudden, refusing to glance at Clive. "The worms- uh, the worms are good actually. They're trying to stop the itching."

Clive thought about it, then thought some more, and decided that it probably made sense. He wouldn't take out the worms then. "They'll have to work hard to heal me, though," he said about the worms.

Claire wasn't talking about them. "I don't think they will be able to."

[killmeifimwrongblog]

Sooooooo I don't normally post much on here because I am mostly private with my opinions, but... Rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles had me hypnotized for about three months now, and since then, I have consumed every morsel of content I could get on them like a ravenous wolf.

Now one of the things that had most of my attention were the AUs where peepaw Leo comes back to the past with Casey.... like omo, wmas, mnmc, etc. and I've been having thoughts on that myself ... thoughts I need to get out somewhere or my head is going to explode ... so now you will have to deal with that sorry.

Anyway... I am not a writer

I am not a good writer so there won't be any fanfiction for my ... let's call it AU ... because I'm not good at English since I'm from Germany so you will probably only get this giant, incoherent block of text from me and maybe some art (which I'm also not good at) 😐

Sooo here goes ... my idea was kinda 29 year old leonardo, who is still adjusting to a robot arm that he had for about a year and just lost his twin brother two weeks ago, gets sent back into the past by Mikey.

It wasn't some grand bid for peace or freedom from the Krang, it also wasn't a last-ditch effort for salvation at least not yet ... simply said it was selfishness on Mikey's part.

He had just lost his second brother to this war and was still reeling, when the bunker, the resistance had taken over, was attacked.

And Mikey.... well he had enough!

He felt for Leo's ninpo, which was rapidly closing in on him, and made his decision then and there. He refused to lose another brother.

Donatello and he had talked about it often ... the possibilities of time travel, the intricacies, anything and everything that could go wrong, and even who would be a good candidate to go.

Mikey knew it would cost him everything, he also knew Leo would hate himself for not seeing Mikey's struggles and not doing anything about them but it had to be done. He had to do something.

Because he could feel it ... the earth was being drained of all of its resources and even if they won, even if they were lucky enough to beat the Krang... the earth was dying and nobody knew if it would be able to sustain the survivors.

So he started the ritual to open a time gate. He needed to do it before Leonardo arrived at his room because if he let him speak if he let him say even one word he knew he would falter knew he would let himself be persuaded to stop and think about it, and then it would be already too late.

He couldn't let that happen, couldn't let Leonardo be a voice of "reason" or they would lose.

So when Leo stepped into the room trying to get Mikey to move, he was met with the sight of his brother glowing like a supernova and falling apart at the seams.

Then one of Mikey's chains wrapped around him and before he could make even one sound he was flung into the portal that was coming into existence behind Mikey.

The last thing he sees is his little brother disintegrating, disappearing in an explosion of glowing particles. His only thoughts being:

No, please, not again not him I don't want to be alone.

But Mikey was gone and Leo was hurtling through the colorful space of the space-time continuum at increasingly faster speeds.

What Mikey hadn't anticipated though was Leo carrying 6-year-old Casey junior, in a sling made out of his scarf, bound to the front of his plastron.

That little mistake made a really big difference in where and when he was about to land. So curled protectively around little Casey he shot out of the time stream, landing uncomfortably on his back ... somewhere.

After getting some air back into his lungs and making sure Casey was unharmed he started to look around trying to find something to find out where exactly he was and thaaat's the statute of liberty ... so New York okay, cool they had taken over a military bunker somewhere in North Dakota but now he was back in New York which did not make sense since the last time he had seen New York it looked like a warzone and the statue of liberty didn't have a head and everything was covered in pink, gooey krang stuff.

Yet here he was in New York clean and loud and as bustling as ever.

Leo was losing his mind without thinking he went out of the alleyway, he had landed in, to the next best kiosk he could find ignoring the stare and the gasps from the pedestrians around him he grabbed the next best newsletter and stared dumbfounded at the date 6th of September 2008.

Yeah and that's it for now 🤷🏻‍♀️

[gbgamebun]

Road to Cream 64 v1 Part 6-3: Vibin' in the Sky

So turns out there's actually gonna be four parts to this. Thanks, Eggy. ANYWAY

Tall Tall Mountain: Sonic Adventure - Mt. Red: A Symbol of Thrill (Red Mountain) Secret Slide: Mario and Sonic 2014 - Slide (SM64)

Ya know after all these versions, I cannot find a track that better suits TTM better than this. I mean the two levels are kind of similar in structure, minus the random explosions and construction on Red Mountain. Still, can't go wrong with a classic.

The secret area is kind of a weird one. Cause I had originally set the music for the race against Gemerl, since the original version is also this same song. Around the time I was getting to the extra areas, I was hitting the original hard cap on sequence files you could add, which was 50 total. So here I would just end up reusing the race track for the slide since I didn't have much of a choice.

Smaller areas like the secret star levels are like this for the same reason, except for one.

Tiny-Huge Island (original track): Team Sonic Racing - Lost Palace Actually Used: Sonic Lost World - Juice Archipelago Wiggler Cavern: Sonic Mania - Lava Reef Act 2

The level always had tropical vibes to me, so digging around I had a few in mind. Still trying to find tracks in games I haven't touched, I landed over to TSR and found this. Liked it enough to put it in for a bit and is even in footage I recorded for previews.

Eventually I felt it was a bit too fast paced for the level and ended up swapping it out for something a little less intense. And so back we go to the Lost World pool...Again not a bad track per say, just another instance of me grabbing a song from the game that's basically a Mario game.

Wiggler's Cave being Lava Reef Act 2 was kind of a "ehhh I guess it fits?" moment. I had nothing in mind and was just glancing at what I had put aside to use. In later versions, I would just remove it entirely and just reuse DDD's track cause of that hard limit I mentioned earlier.

Tick Tock Clock: Sonic Unleashed - Rooftop Run Night

I had ask some people for ideas on what to use for TTC cause it's kind of a unique level type for Sonic. Sure, you had him going through factories or large mechanical structures but nothing like a clock tower.

It's funny cause my mind instantly went to this track but I never considered it at first till someone just went "well why not just use it?" and here we are, simple as that.

Rainbow Ride: Sonic Runners - End of the Summer

So this is another one of those I had in my mind playing before I even had a chance to implement it into the game itself. It bares repeating, if you haven't had a chance to hear this game's ost, give it a listen. It's real good and it's a damn shame it's all stuck and gone in a gacha game.

I remember this track being part of a special event, no idea if it was ever actually in the sky, but it has that vibe of flying through the sky. Hopping from cloud to cloud, traversing the floating platforms. I just wish the track was like shorter by a minute but I refuse to remove it. It's too perfect to me.

Princess Secret Slide: Sonic Advance 2 - Leaf Forest (unused)

So this track ended up being used twice: One for the initial splash screen with the giant Mario head, and the track mentioned here. It does become clear that this was meant mostly as a trailer track or even a menu track (or even back when Advance 2 may have been a slower platformer like the first one), it's hard to say but it's really grown on me and I wanted to use it somewhere.

And as mentioned before, this is the only other secret star stage to have its own unique track as I guess I had this in mind for that level rather than the Mario head screen, especially since I would just skip that part in later versions.

Boss Theme: Sonic Adventure 2 - Master of the Desert (Egg Golem) Actually used: Sonic Mania - Ruby Delusions (Eggman Boss 1)

(Just left a link to the song in the Egg Golem header)

I was kind of shuffling between tracks to see which one I wanted to use. Sonic has a wide range of really good boss tracks so it was just a matter of preference and what games haven't I used. For the time being I went with the first one, since I haven't used many SA2 tracks and it's pretty short.

Eventually I gravitated toward Mania cause it's such a vibe. Sure it's longer and could eat up more space, but suddenly hearing that against King Bob-Omb should let you know what exactly you're in for with this hack. Still the boss track to the latest versions.

Wing/Vanish Cap: Sonic & Knuckles Collection: Unused Track (Or well was unused)

Had this one in mind for a while cause aside from the allure of it being an unused track, let alone a super sonic unused track, it did kind of fit that sense of majesty with the wing cap. Not so much the vanish cap but they shared the same track so not much choice there (least for now).

For this I actually had to find a rip of the midis from the Sonic & Knuckles PC Collection and use that. Sure, there were other midis in the usual spot, but I thought it felt more appropriate to grab one from an official source since there was actually one I could use. On that same subject...

Metal Cap: Team Sonic Racing - Team Ultimate: Amy Actually Used: Sonic & Knuckles Collection - Chrome Gadget

Did the same thing as Egg Golem for the TSR track cause of space.

The logic was that this was short and easy to loop plus a nice guitar riff for metal explorin'. Only reason it got replaced was to save up on space so there's another one. Shame, I do enjoy the TSR tracks but I don't think most of them fit the pace of SM64 which I guess makes sense.

I guess to keep things consistent between the cap themes, I chose another midi from the S&K Collection. Chrome Gadget is a bop but still it's just a bit silly in retrospect. Still, I'm happy I got to go ham with the Metal Cap sound bank and those percussion samples.

That just leaves the Eggman specific ones so that'll have to go into Part 4 ->

[charnelhouse]

ready or not

Pairing: Rick Flag x F!Reader Wordcount: 2.6K Warnings: brief mentions of rough smut. gore. angst. fluff. Hair pulling. emotions. MAJOR THE SUICIDE SQUAD SPOILERS. Summary: It's a mother fucking time loop. A/N: I wrote this as an alternate ending for suicide squad. had to fix sum shit. I dedicate this to my mutual rick flag hos who have kept me going through these trying times @foli-vora @thepoisonofgod

You’re a minute late.

You’re stumbling through the broken, shredded hull of Jotunheim’s basement. Lab equipment and burst pipes and craggy rocks and holes that lead even deeper into the foundation of Corto Maltese.

“Rick,” you shout - tripping over a stair - hitting the ground hard before there’s an explosion of agony in your palm. A shard of glass juts from the top of your hand and you glare at it. It distantly hurts - the throb of it muddled beneath the crushing waves of anxiety. You’re too focused on trying to find fucking Flag.

You scream his name this time and that’s when you do find him. You round a pile of rubble and there he is: your tall, thick war hero Flag. His posture is all wrong though. He’s gone rigid - muscles bunching beneath cotton as he straddles Peacemaker. The bright yellow of his shirt gleaming in the midst of all that grey ash. Your throat aches, but you can still breathe.

The moments before the collapse of the basement begin to creep back into your head: the hard drive - the secrets - Rick’s inability to let it go because they experimented on fucking children -

You’re not a good person. You’re not saved or made right and honestly you don’t give a shit if the Americans were responsible for controlling a galactic sea organism. You just want Rick to be okay.

“Flag,” you call again and he jerks - he twists enough that you catch his profile and - well then - you see Peacemaker’s horrified face and you think why does he look so freaked and then Rick falls like dead fucking weight.

Peacemaker is gone by the time you get there - running back up the stairs like a spooked animal and you don’t care. You don’t. You skid to Rick’s side and grab him by his shoulders - pushing him onto his back.

There’s dark red blooming around an enormous piece of porcelain in the middle of his chest. Rick grunts in discomfort - his eyes wide - the whites of them garish when they find yours. His hand wraps weakly around your wrist as you lean over him. There’s a thin stream of blood that drips from his mouth and you can see it on his tongue - staining his teeth and you fucking know that this is it for him. You know. You know so well how it looks to die.

Something breaks inside you - something shatters and you fully dissolve there flush to his side. You drag his head into your lap and you press your hand to the porcelain fragment, but it’s right where his damn heart is - dead fucking center.

“Oh,” you whisper. “Oh..no.”

“Ss-okay,” he manages as he squeezes your wrist. “You’re...okay...baby…”

The rest of it quiets on his tongue and you’re fully gasping for words at the moment. Your airway is closing up and white dots sprinkle bright and overwhelming across your vision.

“No,” you plead. “No - no - c’mon - don’t.”

But it’s obvious that he’s already gone - his gaze dulling to something muted and sightless. You shove your face into his cheek and howl.

***

“You ready?”

You blink up and there’s Rick - looming tall above you against a backdrop of rain-fat clouds. There’s the ozone-taste of a storm approaching. A sky like elephant skin - dark and wrinkled with humidity.

You glance down at the empty empanada wrapper in your hand. What the fuck?

“Huh?” you reply and Rick’s expression grows concerned.

“Are you ready?” he repeats. “For the mission. Jotunheim. Giant Starfish.”

“It’s a jellyfish,” Harley interjects.

Rick purses his mouth. “It’s not, Harley.”

“Nah - I”m prettttty sure it’s a jellyfish.”

You gape at him. “Rick...you’re - you’re not dead.”

He raises an eyebrow. Bewildered. “Not...currently, no.”

You lunge at him, wrapping your arms around his neck and crushing your mouth to his. His hands fly to your ass as he carries you against him and you can tell he’s surprised - his lips clumsily trying to react to yours. He finally pulls away - chuckling. “What was that for?”

“You’re alive,” you smile.

He frowns. “You sure you’re feeling alright?”

It was a dream. A weird and very realistic and very vibrant waking dream and it’s all fine and good and okay.

“I’m the best,” you grin as you let him place you on your feet. “Just don’t die on me.”

He stuns you with a brilliant smile - his teeth white across his bruised face. “I’ll try my best.”

You shoot Peacemaker a suspicious glance, but he appears normal. That same smug, white-bread dumb ass look about him. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t.

“Time to go fuck up Free Willy,” Harley quips as she curves her arm around your shoulders. Her taffeta dress scratches you - makes you itchy.

“It’s a starfish, Harleen.”

“That’s what I was sayin.”

“Willy is a whale.”

“Tomato, tomahto.”

***

It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t. It all happens again and you feel it in the pit of your gut as soon as every word out of Rick’s mouth begins to sound familiar.

You reach for him just as the place blows. Something shatters across your temple and then it’s all black. When you wake up, you can hear him snarling and grunting and groaning. Not unlike the sounds he made in bed when you asked him to go especially feral:

“It’s okay, Flag…bruise me a little.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I trust you.”

And trust was your bottom line - your most base form of intimacy. Not given or taken without your heart flinching like you were about to take a bullet should the gun spin the wrong way.

But you gave it to him. You gave it to him.

There’s the distinct sound of flesh hitting flesh. You drag yourself towards him and you can barely see - there’s blood dripping into your eyes from the gash across your brow and you want to vomit. You’re probably concussed.

You see it happen this time. You shout his name, but it comes out muffled - like a shredded moan. Your throat is packed with dust. The tile goes through his heart and his eyes still manage to find yours. Even on the cusp of death, he searches for you - he locates you - he checks to see if you’re alright and then he allows himself to go.

His face colors with surprise - surprise at being bested, perhaps? Surprise at the whole nuclear failure of this. You’re crying and squirming toward him with your caved-in temple and the room is spinning because your brain is swelling in your skull.

“Rick,” you sob. “Rick.”

Your name falls out of his mouth just as he crumples forward and you don’t look at Peacemarker as he runs away - as he acts like a total fucking coward who you’d kill later. You just need Rick - you just need him and when you cradle him against your chest, he goes all limp. He coughs once - spraying blood like a spout of hot copper pennies across your nose.

“Flag,” you beg. “Baby - no - stay with me.”

His lips quirk, his lashes fluttering. “Never called me that before.”

He dies again.

***

“You ready?” Flag asks as he grips your shoulders. You can hear the faint pump of his heart. Bloodsport is stuffing an empanada into his mouth. Ratcatcher 2 is snoozing against the wall. There’s the storm coming - the distant stomp of thunder.

“A time loop,” you mutter. “A fucking time loop.”

Rick presses his hand to your brow. “Do you feel alright?”

“It’s a time loop,” you repeat.

You could save him. You could.

But - what if it’s wrong - what if I fuck up? What if I win and it still goes the way it does and Rick - Rick? What if I win and I just end up right back here on this crumbling tower with rain on my face and greasy wrappers in my hand.

Rick offers you a lopsided smile and you think - fuck - I have to try.

You head for Jotunheim. You stalk through the onslaught of the storm and your eyes are pinned to Flag. You keep to him - shoving everything else to the side. He turns to look at you and it’s just a moment - his expression morphing from soft and yearning to suddenly alarmed.

It’s because you’re not paying attention. You’re too focused on him and then you feel a sharp pressure and a warm splash of liquid. Your breath is snapped from your lungs as you tumble forward.

You touch at your neck - feel the tiny slit of a hole. A bullet. A bullet has hit you square in the throat. It’s burning - hot and smoky and you can’t get enough air. Bloodshot is in your face as he shoves two fingers into the torn skin and Rick is screaming at the others to “get some fucking help” - but they can’t - they’re all in the middle of a fucking fire fight.

It’s pointless. You’re already leaking out - already seeing colors and bright light.

Bloodshot offers you an expression he must believe is comforting. “You’ll be alright, yeah? It’s a flesh wound.”

He was always sweet - more sweet than you think he meant to be.

“Oh fuck - hon - shit -,” Harley stammers - struck speechless for the first time. You try to find her - zeroing in on the carmine flush flower of her mouth. She’s just a mosaic - full Monet rain pour of red, white and black. “Don’tcha fret - I’m gonna find sumthin!”

Good luck. There’s air whispering faintly through the fatal hole beneath my jaw. Maybe - it’ll ring a tune.

You think she might return with something ridiculous like a corpse’s skin or a banana and somehow make it work. You try and laugh, but it comes out bubbles.

You hear Rick again - hear your name loud and broken from his mouth. You’d always enjoyed the way he said it - pointed and direct and like it meant something. Never with derision or like a curse - never shucked with disgust or ugliness or disrespect.

Even before you had started fucking him. Even before he had held his weight above you - his hips snapping into the bowl of your pelvis - his cock stretching you to ruin as he told you he adored you.

“You mean something to me,” he confessed as he shoved himself as deep as he could. “You’re it for me.”

There’s the burn of tears - the wet glide of them streaming down your temple. How embarrassing.

Rick appears at your side and he’s visibly devastated. “Go,” he hisses to Bloodsport. “Go - go help them - go find someone. Please. Fuck.”

You keep your gaze rooted to him - his dark blonde crown - his heavy hand cupping your cheek - the warm imprint of his thumb. You’re gurgling - swallowing all that rust and you thank God it’s not him - it’s not him and maybe this will change things - maybe it’ll end with his life and maybe this was a sacrifice.

A sacrifice you were happy to make - willing to make. After all - you were a bad person - a murderer - a criminal - the first one Waller hand-picked for disposal.

“C’mon, darlin,” he growls. “Stay with me. Stay awake. I’ll keep the pressure on.”

You blink at him as his voice fades out. Your grip on his arm releases. The rain stings your lashes - glossing your vision and Rick blurs to mustard yellow and brown and pink.

“No!” he shouts as his hold tightens - as he gingerly shakes you enough that your teeth click. “No - fuck - don’t you fucking dare!”

You step into the darkness. It feels good.

***

“You ready?”

Rick. Rick again. You gasp - the waxy paper in your hands wrinkling loudly - echoing through your skull. You can still taste blood on your tongue. You feel your neck. Smooth flesh. Clean. You inhale - the breath blessedly expanding in your lungs.

Another shot, then. Pardon the pun.

Either this was going to last forever or God was being incredibly nice. You were going to take up praying if you got out of this - maybe go to an actual church. Flag seemed the type who was definitely forced to by his mother - some white-picket little Thomas Kinkade church on a grassy hill in the bum fuck nowhere South.

Rick steps into your space - his enormous frame blocking you out from the others. Your protective solider-boy who was stupid hot (Harley’s words. Not yours.)

“You okay?” Rick asks and you grasp his jaw and yank him down so you can reach his ear.

“Don’t go with Peacemaker,” you murmur. “Don’t. I’ll do it. I’ve got it. You have to trust me.”

His expression is a healthy combination of surprise and confusion. “You’re shaking,” he observes as he readjusts his grip on your shoulders. He pulls you into his chest and it’s so fucking warm - broad and beating with the pound of his heart.

You curl your fingers into the fabric of his shirt. Scratch at the dried blood. “Do you trust me?”

He stares at you - his gaze drifting across your face - searching searching for a hint of what’s wrong or why you’ve immediately backtracked on his plan.

“I’m not going to leave you with him-”

You shove your palm over his mouth - silencing him. “Rick - please. I know - I know what I’m doing. I can’t explain it all right now. Just let me go with him.”

He doesn’t want to - you can see the muscles working in his jaw - the way he glares at Peacemaker as he tries to translate what’s in front of him. He’s going to refuse you - he’s going to say no - you feel it -

You try for a Hail Mary.

“I love you,” you declare - your throat all heavy with emotion and grief as your voice cracks. You can’t watch him die again. It’s the fucking truth and your tone seems to hit home because Rick regards you like you’ve punched him in the face. He knows you’re being real right now - genuine.

Someone like you never shows their cards until they’re at the end of the line.

His thumb sweeps across your cheekbone. His mouth parting before he closes it again. He lowers his head until your foreheads meet. “Okay,” he relents. “Fine, but you stay on the coms for me.”

***

You let Peacemaker take the drive.

You steal it back just as the explosives erupt.

He doesn’t know - doesn’t have to know. But you didn’t feel like explaining why you snapped his neck without good reason. Too many complications. Waller would no doubt have your head should she suspect. All of it could be figured out on safe ground - once Rick and you were out of this limbo carousel of pain and death and way too much emotional damage.

Hell - maybe he’d think he lost it in the rumble.

***

“Jesus Christ,” Rick roars as he storms toward you.

You limp forward - your hand prodding against your side to feel for broken ribs - internal bleeding. You’re a little stunned you got out of this - have it go so smoothly. Like silk. Like fishies in a barrel.

Peacemaker is crawling behind you - still trying to balance himself against the ringing in his head. You may have punched his skull while he was knocked out.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Rick rumbles again just to do it. “Fuck - are you - shit - are you okay?”

You nearly cry in relief when you reach him. He’s visibly pissed, but also terrified and it all melts into stunning relief that illuminates his face like a cherry bomb. All of it heats your belly - your ugly black heart. He cares so deeply for you and every gesture - every caress of his skin - lightens the load of your shit life inch by inch.

Rick nearly barrels into you with how quickly he’s moving. He wraps you up - lifting you off your feet and you don’t even squeak in pain - don’t even care that your bones are grinding together. You curl your arms around his neck and lick his jaw and he laughs.

“You’re such a fucking weirdo,” he groans before he fists a hand into your hair and seals his mouth to yours. There’s the sweet pressure of his tongue and his long, gun-calloused fingers treading water across your scalp. He’s so alive - blessedly - gorgeously - alive.

“Baby,” he rasps between kisses. “Fuck…when the place blew…I thought...I thought...”

You taste dust and rock and smoke. You taste his sweat - that familiar tang of sour and salt and sometimes - like right now - you want to drive yourself into his body - fuck the shit out of him like he fucks you. He’s marked you up - branded your insides with the pieces of himself he has so willingly given you. No one will ever come close. Not a chance. Not an inch or a mile.

“I almost lost you,” he pants - sliding his lips to your cheek - your jaw and shoulder - as he crushes you against him.

“Yeah,” you murmur - stroking his damp hair. “I know - I know.”

Because you do. You know all about that kind of loss and devastation that had torn a hole through your center when he died in your lap.

He clasps your hand as he guides you out of the building - as he leads you through the rest of the mission. Never out of his sight. You wait for it to fall apart - wait for everything to turn black and for you to wake up and hear you ready you ready you ready?

You don’t relax until you’re back on the jet. The delicious shine of the afternoon sun spilling like froth across the interior of the seats and buckles. He lets you crawl into his lap as he rests his chin at the top of your head. It digs into your sore skin and you like it. The weight of him. The relief.

“You ready to go home?” he hums - tracing the cuts across your back - the ones visible through the torn holes in your vest.

You close your eyes and open them again. There’s still him - still his heavy arms around you and the pattern of his breathing. Still Harley cheerfully beaming at you with blood and ash and starfish viscera painting her face.

“Yeah,” you reply as he tugs you closer - as hope sweeps through your veins. “Yeah - I’m ready.”

[babyboy-cody]

Literally your Grayson smut has me GONE 😵‍💫😵‍💫 can I ask for like anything that has to do with Gray fingering reader with his arm across the back of the couch and his lips against your ear with dirty talk???? Love you!

okay you’ve officially KILLED ME 😮‍💨

It had been Kristina and yours idea to have a movie night/fort. While the twins were reluctant, seeing the excitement on their girls’ faces was enough for them to help create the giant fort in the living room. Kristina and Ethan chose their spot on the floor in front of yours and Grayson’s spot on the couch. The four of you had your own assortment of snacks so that there wasn’t the continuous interruption of the movie when one of you needed to get up and get another snack.

The layout of the separate forts were quite simple. For Ethan and Kristina’s fort, couch cushions were placed behind and on either side of them with a large blanket covering the top. The cushions were big enough for them to sit underneath without their heads touching the blanket. Yours and Grayson’s fort had tall cushions on either side with a bigger blanket covering the top, sides, as well as the back of the couch. The lights were all off and the sun had already set - the only source of light being from the huge television hung on the wall above the fireplace.

Halfway through the movie, Grayson had gotten a little bored and started getting distracted by his own thoughts. He subtly turned his head to look down at you, his thoughts suddenly being overcome by you. The soft hues of light coming from the television made you look angelic that it nearly took his breath away. With your beautifully curled eyelashes, the soft slope of your nose, your parted lips as your entire focus was on the movie playing - every single thing about you enticed him. He couldn’t stop himself from lowering his head until his lips were at your ear to huskily whisper, “You’re so pretty.”

Almost immediately, your attention was pulled away from the movie and was focused on the handsome man beside you. You felt your cheeks warm up as your breathing stuttered. “Pay attention to the movie,” you softly whispered and nudged him with your elbow. Grayson loved how shy you got when you were complimented, especially when it came from him. He was obsessed with the effect he had on you.

“How could I when you’re sitting next to me?” He whispered in your ear again, watching closely when you squirmed closer to him. “You don’t understand how hard it is not to fuck you right here.”

You muffled your gasp and looked up at him in shock at how vulgar he was being, especially with company around. He has a smug grin on his face as he licks his lips. Under the blanket splayed across both your laps, he placed his right hand on your inner thigh and slowly spreads them.

“Think you can keep quiet for me, pretty girl?” He huskily asked in your ear, lightly nipping your earlobe and relishing in the way you shivered. You frantically nodded and bit your lip as you gripped the blanket to make sure it doesn’t slide down. There was a lump in your throat and a rush of butterflies in your stomach. It dawned on you that Grayson was seriously going to finger you while Ethan and Kristina were a few feet away.

He applied the slightest pressure against the crotch of your shorts. He rubbed agonizingly slow circles, hard enough for you to feel those sparks of pleasure. Your lips part to let out a choked and soft gasp. Grayson chuckles quietly in your ear before whispering, “That feel good?” And you nod frantically while eagerly spreading your thighs more open. It was embarrassing how desperate you seemed, but every little thing Grayson did always made you desperate. “If I slide my hand down these little shorts, are you gonna be wet for me?”

“M-Maybe..” you let out a shy giggle, barely flinching when a loud explosion erupts from the movie. “Why don’t you see for yourself?”

He immediately slides his large and veiny hand under the waistband of your shorts, pressing his fingers back against the crotch of your panties this time - the fabric so damp and sticking to your dripping pussy. Grayson lets out a muffled groan that he hides in your hair. Somehow, the thought of getting caught didn’t scare you anymore. It just amped up the excitement.

“You’re dripping through these fucking panties,” he huffs a small laugh of disbelief, his hot breath hitting your ear and making you shiver once again. “Take off your shorts.” To your dismay, he pulls his hand out and gets himself comfortable - legs spread, body slouched, left arm never once moving from behind your shoulders on the back of the couch. Hastily pulling off your shorts, you readjusted the blanket until it covered yours and Grayson’s lap, as well as spreading your thighs to its original position. His hand goes right back between them and nestles against your clothed cunt. He can feel the outline of your pussy lips against the thin fabric and the small button of your clit beginning to swell.

Kristina and Ethan suddenly let out boisterous laughter after a particular funny scene, briefly scaring you at the possibility if one or both of them coming out if their fort and catching you and Grayson. His long fingers start rubbing your clit a little faster, now applying harder pressure for you to feel that tingly sensation. You rest your head back on his arm, your hips barely twitching against his hand. He whispers a small “fuck” in your ear, very slowly and finally sliding his hand into your panties to gain perfect access to your bare pussy.

Your brows furrowed and bitten lips parted, your face contorting into one of relief. Grayson couldn’t believe how wet you were until he dipped his fingers down to scoop some of your slick. He can almost here the obscene wet noises of his fingers rubbing all over your click to spread your wetness. You hastily grabbed onto his wide wrist, nails digging into his tanned and hairy skin.

With his lips against your ear, in a husky and gruff voice, he mumbles, “Just lay back and let daddy do what he does best.” Almost instantly, he began rubbing frantic circles on your swollen clit, applying just the right amount of pressure that has your eyes rolling back and pussy clenching around nothing. He’s rubbing you just right - it’s almost too much but not enough. The hood of your clit just barely pulled back until your bundle of nerves was fully exposed. The pads of Grayson’s fingers pressed down against it and it has your stomach bursting with butterflies. More slick pools out of you as you fight back your moans. With one hand around his moving wrist, the other clamps down over your mouth.

“I can’t wait to fuck you nice and hard when this movie ends,” Grayson cockily tells you, pulling away to look at your expression. His pupils have expanded from arousal. He never once let up the speed of his fingers on your inflamed cunt. He rubs much faster and harder, loving how hard it is for you not to let out your pleasure filled squeals and moans. Your hips began bucking more freely against his hand. “You want my fingers inside, pretty girl?”

“Yes yes yes yes,” you quietly babbled incoherently as your clit throbbed erratically, the tingles spreading like a wildfire throughout your lower-half. Your toes curled when Grayson roughly shoves his middle and ring fingers inside your cunt, the burning stretch making your eyes cross as you let out a pretty loud gasp that was thankfully silenced by a couple arguing on the screen. He starts fucking your pussy with his fingers, crooking them and rubbing your g-spot perfectly. The palm of his hand presses and rubs your clit. Both sensations has your mind turning to mush.

“You’re just soaking all over my fingers, aren’t you?” He softly asks in a condescending way. You can now hear the sopping wet noises of his fingers fucking your insides. You didn’t realize how loud it was.

“Yo, can you both stop making out please?” Ethan shouted from his spot in his own fort, immediately making your eyes open and thighs shutting around Grayson’s hand and wrist. “It’s loud as fuck! And gross!”

“My bad, bro,” Grayson lets out a full belly laugh and doesn’t stop the come hither motions of his fingers. He looks down at you with a grin wide enough for you to see the jewel on his canine tooth. He silently raised his brows at you as if challenging you to say something. He pulls his fingers out from your tightening cunt, just as you’re on the cusp of a strong orgasm, and he goes back to rubbing your clit at a fast pace. Your mouth falls open and your head falls back against his arm again. You’re holding onto his arm with both hands now to ground yourself. He leans in close to your face, his floppy hair brushing against your temple. “Are you gonna cum, angel?”

At the sight of your frantic nodding and heavy panting, he rubs faster and harder. And then you felt it. The wave getting higher and higher and higher. Your toes curled as you practically humped his hand like a dog in heat. When that wave finally crashed down, you had to bury your face in Grayson’s neck. He gruffly groans and shoves his middle and ring fingers back inside your pussy, feeling your walls contracting around them to keep your orgasm going. He slows his fingers to a stop before gently rubbing your overstimulated clit with his thumb. When you let out a small whimper against neck, he presses a quick kiss to your forehead and pulls his fingers out of you.

“You still wanna fuck later?” He bluntly asks you, staring at his pruned fingers coated in your cum.

You elbowed him with a quiet laugh. “How could I refuse that offer?”

He side eyes you - a gesture he always does because it makes you blush - and slowly licks his fingers into his mouth, letting out a deep moan only you can hear. Suddenly, the movie pauses and Ethan announced, “I need to use the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” You quickly grabbed the couch pillow and held it against your chest to hide your still fast breathing. You always shut your thighs and move them into a criss-cross position, stifling a gasp at the ache in and around your pussy. Grayson licks his lips and subtly wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist just as Ethan stands and looks at you both.

“No more making out!” He points at you both.

You and Grayson look at each other, both of you hiding a smirk before looking at Ethan. When you both nod in agreement, watching as he leaves to the bathroom, you lean over to whisper in Grayson’s ear, “Can I suck your dick?”

[everythingfan589]

A Work In Progress

Chapter 8: Take Your Time

Warnings: Canon-typical violence, non-sexy choking

Word Count: 5.1k

Masterlist

You miss Sorgan already. It’s hardly been two hours and you can’t help but miss the smell of fresh unprocessed air. While you have nothing against the Razor Crest一you actually quite enjoy it一it’s nothing compared to the beautiful greenery.

Not sure exactly where Mando was planning on taking all of you, you join him in the cockpit, sitting in one of the two copilots seats一the baby sitting in the other.

Falling asleep was completely unintentional, but a side effect of sitting in silence. You only wake when your head is knocked to the side so sharply that you stretch your neck and hit the side of your head on the seat.

“Ouc一” Your hand instinctively goes to cradle the side of your head, but you don’t even have time for that一the ship learches to the left just as fast. You quickly take in your surroundings一assuming the baby somehow took control of the ship, but you’re proved wrong when you see Mando driving.

“Buckle up.” He says without turning, clearly very focused on something.

“Have you gone mad?” You start to question him before large blaster fire whirrs past the window and your eyes widen. You turn to try and get a look behind the ship only to see another ship tailing yours with it’s blasters firing with deadly aim.

“Buckle up.” He repeats himself and you look down at the seat, grabbing the straps to connect them across your lap and chest. As you click them in place, you look over to see the baby isn't strapped in, so you unclasp yourself and reach out to him. “What are you doing?”

“The kid.” You hiss, stretching yourself thin as you click the strap over his little chest一once happy, you lean back in your chair and grab your own seatbelt again.

Now that everyone is secure, Mando takes it up a notch一steering the ship from left to right, spinning it almost completely vertical when needed.

“Give up the child, Mando.” An unfamiliar voice rings through the comm system and you realize the other ship has synced with the Razor Crest. Mando says nothing in return, continuing to outlast the smaller ship.

Suddenly, the entire ship lurches, a deafening explosion heard overhead and you cringe, realizing the ship was hit. You turn to see one of the two engines on fire一destroyed.

“Mando! We can’t afford another hit.” You yell at him over the sound of blaster fire. The console in front of him is flipping out, sensores warning him of the destruction, urging him to land一but he doesn't have that option.

“I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold.” As if something is triggered within him, Mando practically spins the ship upside down, trying to get out of the other ship’s way. Just as the ship blasts past the window一you now have the advantage.

“Easy!” Your shrill voice snaps at him, worried about the ship that is supposed to be under your care and is currently taking a disastrous beating.

Mando doesn't answer, instead, he tails the ship, preparing the Razor Crest’s blasters before the other ship can figure out what went wrong. He fires, a giant ray of plasma shooting through space and hitting the ship dead-centre. It explodes into a fiery ball that the Razor Crest flies right through. You release a breath of air in relief一still pissed that one of the engines you worked so hard on was destroyed.

“That’s my line.” He mutters to himself一referring to the other bounty hunters threat and you roll your eyes. “Can you fix it?” He asks, still driving the ship through a calm space.

“Are you kidding? Mando, the engine is on the outside. We need to land.” You explain, looking out the window and up at the engine that continues to spark. With a light sigh, he nods, tapping the console in front of him to reveal a map of the sectors.

“We can land here. They should have a hangar we can rent.” He points at the screen and you read the name of the planet一Tatooine.

As you walk down the ramp of the Razor Crest and onto the sandy planet of Tatooine, you notice three funny-looking droids scuttling over to the ship. Before they can get to it though, a little red blast of plasma hits the ground in front of them一terrified beeping noises ringing from their small bodies and you look beside you to see Mando putting his blaster back into the holster on his hip.

“You didn't have to shoot ‘em.” The unimpressed tone isn't lost on him as you both descend the ship, but he just shrugs. You know him well enough to know he doesn't like droids.

“HEY!” A shrill voice pierces the air from somewhere in the hangar and you look up to see a short lady with a head full of untamed curls running over to you two. “You damage one of my droids, you pay for it!”

“Just keep them away from my ship.” His voice is firm, professional一back to the way it was when you first met him.

“Oh, yeah? Think that’s a good idea, do ya?” You notice that she can’t seen to pull her judging eyes away from the ship behind you一likely due to the embarrassing amount of damage. “If I didn't know better, I’d think you were in a shootout.”

“Well一” Before you can get anything out, Mando has casually cleared his throat, alerting you to stop.

“Let me take a look.” The woman says, walking around you and looking up at the ship. “This is a mess. How’d you even land? It’s gonna need a whole lot of work.”

“I have a mechanic. I just need the hangar.” Mando informs her and she looks at you, taking an obvious glance up and down with her hands on her hips.

“You do, do you?” She doesn't sound impressed. “Well, if you aren't paying for repairs then this hangar can’t be used for actual maintenance. I’d be losing money here.”

“I’ve got 500 Imperial Credits.” As he pulls a little fabric bag from his utility belt your eyes widen. That’s a lot of credits just for renting a hangar. You guess he’s just that against droids that he would pay for them not to work on his ship unlike most people who would pay for their services.

“That’s all you got?” She snatches the bag from him, but he remains silent and after a moment she sighs一annoyed. “Fine.”

“Just remember一”

“No droids. Got it. Your mechanic can have at it for all I care.” She gestures to you and you give an awkward half-smile that she doesn't return. He doesn't do more than nod at her confirmation as she turns to walk to the other side of the hangar.

“I’m going to go look for a job. You can start working on that engine.” You nod at his instruction and after lingering for a moment too long, he turns to leave the hangar, as if there was something else he was planning to say, but couldn't manage.

Looking up at the ship from the outside, you cringe at the damage. The plasma shot straight through the engine, leaving a gaping hole that sparks furiously. Some of the metal panels along the outside of the ship have bent or been completely stripped off.

This is gonna take awhile.

Those couple weeks spent on Sorgan soil were complete bliss一but now that you’re working again, you realize just how much you missed it. Getting your hands dirty and having the freedom to let your engineer brain run wild, problem solving as you work.

You decided to take on the task of the engine first一it being the only necessity to gain function of the ship, everything else can be done later. Here in Peli’s hangar一you learned the woman’s name after a migraine inducing argument about using her tools一you have the access to gadgets you could only dream of on Arvala-7.

The height doesn't bother you as you sit on top of the engine after being brought up to it by a mechanical lift. At least when it was stripped, you had all the intact parts to work with and put back together. But, now, you’re working with melted and non-existant metal that was blasted through space. Not exactly a walk in the park.

“I’m in.” You look down to see Peli playing some kind of card game with her three little droids. She’s taking advantage of being paid not to work and indulging in simple pleasures. “And I’m going to raise you three bolts and a motivator.”

Rolling your eyes in amusement, you go back to the task in front of you before an echoed shriek sounds from inside the Crest. You don’t think anything of it at first一the baby must be awake一but when Peli suddenly grabs a large blaster, aiming it at the door of the ship, you react.

“Wait! Wait!” You call out, jumping onto the lift and climbing down the ladder to get to the ground before Peli fires.

“What the hell do you have in there?!” She screams at you as you run over to the ramp of the ship一she doesn't lower her weapon.

“It's th一it’s my kid.” You put your hand up to try and get her to lower the weapon, watching as her gaze drifts down to your feet. You turn your head slightly to see the child walking down the ramp.

“That’s your kid?”

“It’s complicated.” You mumble as he looks up at you with big confused eyes. Mando had put him down to sleep before you left the ship and he was asleep for a couple hours.

Now noticing the lady with a blaster pointed at him, the child tilts his head at her in question. As if realizing she’s still in defence mode, she lowers it to the ground and steps forward.

“Uh, hello there.” She mumbles in a gruff voice, obvious not used to talking to children. The child steps around your leg to get a better view of the lady. After looking at you quickly and you giving her an approving nod, she lifts him up slowly. “Is this what that Mandalorian looks like under all that?”

“Wha一Mando?” You actually laugh at her deduction. “Oh! Maker, no, we didn't一that's not our kid.”

“My mistake.” She mumbles, looking down at the wrinkly baby in her arms. “Well, you should get back to work.”

“I should really make sure he’s一”

“I got him.” She says with what you assume is the closest thing to a smile she can physically manage一a twisted crook in the corner of her mouth. With a sigh and a grateful smile, you turn to continue with your work. Looking after the kid is one less thing you have to do for the next couple hours at least.

Using some parts from Peli’s workshop, you manage to pull together the engine一even better than it was originally if you do say so yourself. It still needs to be built around, concealed properly, and calibrated before it can be used, but you’re impressed with your handiwork. Without taking a break, you move onto the fuel leak that resulted from panels being blown off the side of the ship一not ideal.

You’re bent over the metal sideboard and into the fuel compartment of the ship when you hear a familiar rough voice behind you.

“Where’s the kid?” You nearly bang your head on the inside of the ship一fortunately you’ve learned from the last time that happened and you pull your front half out of the hole carefully.

“He’s fine.” You say as you turn to face him, his helmet turning upward to meet your eyes from the view he was granted only moments before. “Making a friend.”

Offering you no more than a nod, he holds out his hand for you to take一helping you down off the large box giving you leverage on the ship. You jump down with his help, now having to look up at him.

“I got a job.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m not sure how long it’ll take. Likely no more than a day or two.” He explains as you wipe your oil covered hands on a rag by your tool kit.

“I still have plenty to do here. Take your time.” You can almost hear him chuckle at that as he tilts his head to the side.

“I don’t make a habit of taking my time with bounties.”

“Right. Only the cute ones.” You tease, gesturing your head to the side without taking your eyes off his visor. His silence encourages a playful grin to dawn upon your face before you abdondon the rag to the side. “You should see him before you go. He kinda adores you.”

As if on cue, Peli makes her way out of the back room of her hangar, walking into the clearing with the child on her hip. He notices Mando’s presence right away, a little grin spreading across his face as he makes grabby-hands for him.

Mando takes him from Peli’s arms, not paying him any more affection than being held一likely due to Peli’s presence.

“You got a job?” She asks him, less out of curiosity and more based off her own self interest. He gives nothing but a quick nod, handing you the child and picking up a bag he must’ve collected while you were working.

“Mando! You coming?!” An unfamiliar voice yells from outside the hangar door and you frown.

“Who’s that?” You ask before following a seemingly frustrated Mando out of the hangar with Peli by your side and the child on your hip.

Just outside the main exit of the hangar sits two speeder bikes一not unlike the one you built on Arvala-7一only you can tell these ones are manufactured and can withstand the heat resulting from heightened velocity一something you didn't have time to configure. Standing beside one of the speeder bikes is a young man with his arms crossed.

“Hey, Mando, what do you think? Not too shabby, huh?” The man says, gesturing to the bikes which Mando glances at. With no readable emotion on his covered face一he could be impressed or absolutely disgusted一no one would know. “Well, this ain’t Corellia, that’s for sure.”

When Mando doesn't answer him but continues to look over the bike he’s meant to ride, he turns to look at you and Peli, who stand idly by.

“Ma’am.” He nods his head at Peli before his eyes bounce over to you. The way his eyes drift down and back up again is not lost on you一a slightly sick feeling you don’t recognize washing over you. You’re not used to being looked at一now that you think about it一by anyone other than Mando.

You don’t like it.

“Miss.” He says, nodding his head at you after his eyes linger a moment too long. “Calican.” He introduces himself and you don’t pay him the respect of a nod back, neither does Peli. After his eyes glance down at the peculiar baby in your arms and a confused frown graces his face, he finally turns back to his bike.

Turning your attention to Mando, realizing they’re about to leave, you give him a tight-lipped smile. Without the notice of the other two standing only feet away, he taps your elbow twice一for what reason you can’t quite tell.

A goodbye? I’ll be back soon? Either way the gesture is soft and concealed for only you two.

The two men mount their bikes, revving the engine before lurching forward and speeding away across the sand. You’d be lying to yourself if you said that seeing Mando riding the bike didn't twist something inside you一what exactly, you don’t know.

He’d been gone longer than you expected. It didn't really bother you. You know he’s more than capable of any job he takes, but it still surprises you that he’s not back yet after explicitly saying it shouldn’t take long.

Either way, you still found ways to busy yourself. Finally finishing the engine and fuel leak, moving on to work on the outer panels and bringing the Crest to her former glory. Even indulging yourself in taking a break to play a card game with Peli一Sabacc, as she called it.

“What you in for?” Peli asks you, a little too cocky in your opinion, likely because she’s playing against a first time player, but you’ve been listening the entire day to her playing with the droids一you have a decent understanding by now.

“I’m all in.” You shrug, pushing your credits into the center of the table. Her smirk falters for a second, unsure of your new found confidence in the game. The baby in your lap reaches forward to touch the cards in your hand but you keep them out of his reach.

“Well, I guess I’m getting paid after all.” She says, laying her cards down in front of her and you glance down at them, keeping a stone face.

“You may need to rethink that droid update.” Feigning apology in your tone, you gently lay down your cards face up. Her face drops, looking between your cards and hers in absolute shock.

“There is no way you got that on your first game!” She exclaims, picking up your cards to get a closer look at them as you drag the credits across the table to you.

“Beginners luck?” You offer and she sighs, putting the cards down and holding her hand out to you.

“Not bad, kid.” After shaking her hand, you collect some of the credits and hold them out for her. “Nah, you won those.”

“It’s a payment一so you don’t hassle Mando when he gets back.” After considering your offer, she takes them from you without a fuss. You pocket the other credits and stand, holding the child in your arms as you walk toward the ship.

You noticed as you were playing it started getting dark, now the only light emits from the back room to the side of the hangar where Peli makes her way now.

“You ready for bed, bean?” You ask him, his eyes already droopy as you start to walk up the ramp and into the ship. Not needing to do anything more than rock him gently, he falls asleep and you lay him down in the bed chamber.

Realizing you forgot your jacket outside the ship, you descend the ramp to get it before tucking yourself in for the night. The darkness doesn't help your search, but you find it thrown across a chair and go to grab it.

“Hello.” A male voice says from behind you, making you jump and spin to face him. You can’t see much more than a white shine reflecting in his eyes and a soft yellow glow touching half his face from a lamp, but you know it’s the man from earlier; Calican.

“Where’s Mando?” You notice the lack of his presence instantly, a chill running down your spine as an infinite amount of possibilities race through your mind.

“He won’t be joining us for a while.” His voice is sinister and something vile lurks beneath his words as he stalks forward, approaching you. “Where’s your little friend?”

“Stay away from me.”

“Sorry, sweetness. No can do.” He tutts before lunging forward to grab you.

Quickly, you react, grabbing his arm and twisting it, but he’s just as quick. The two of you move like chess-pieces, thoughtful and purposeful with each move. Something tells you he’s just as inexperienced as you, but unfortunately, he’s still physically stronger.

He grabs your arm and wraps a hand around your waist, twisting you around and holding you against him tightly to restrict you from moving. The position is almost exactly like the one Mando had you in during your training一you didn’t manage to get out of it.

You try the only thing you could think of back then一slamming your heel into the toes of your attacker. This time, unlike Mando, he didn't see it coming and the force of your heel making contact makes him jump back.

“Shit!” He hisses at the pain creeping up his foot. “You bitch.” Recovering quickly and lunging forward again, this time with a blaster pulled from his hip, he wraps a hand around your neck一pushing you back until your waist hits a table.

“L-Let go!” You strangle against the tight grip around your neck一still utterly confused to what Mando did to make Calican turn against him so ruthlessly. He holds his blaster to the side of your head, pushing the barrel into your skin.

“Stop resisting. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“O-Oh, yeah, I’m so convinced of that, right now.” You choke, finding it hard to release the words with the minimal air entering your lungs.

“What is going on out here!” The high pitched shriek of Peli sounds from the other side of the hangar, making her way over and you try to turn to her, but the hand around your neck prevents it. The blaster moves to be pointed at her instead.

“Don’t come any closer!” He yells at her and she stops, her hands going in the air in fear, likely not used to her life being threatened. He looks back down at you again. “You. Stop fighting or I’ll blast her head off.”

“F-Fine. I-I’m not resisting.” Your hands release his arm where you were once clawing at him, holding up your hands in surrender and he nods before looking up at Peli. “Go stand over there with your hands where I can see them.”

She does as she’s told, shooting you an apologetic look. You can offer her no more than the understanding emotion in your eyes before he takes his hand off your throat, grabbing the back of your shirt and shoving him in front of you.

“Walk.” He orders, leading you over to the ship. “Get me the kid.”

“No.”

“Did you not hear me.” He hisses, the barrel of the blaster touching your temple again. “Get the kid.”

“No.” You spit and he growls, getting frustrated by the second before shoving you into the ground and walking up the ramp. “Hey! No!”

You stand, trying to follow him and get him away from the kid, but he fires his blaster so the plasma hits right in front of you一stopping you in your tracks. Continuing to aim his blaster at you, he walks over to where he kids sleeps一you curse yourself for not closing and locking the bedchamber door.

“If you hurt him I swear to the Maker I will kill you.” You threaten him but he just smirks, picking up the kids and holding him in the arm not occupied with the blaster. He gestures you forward with the blaster until you’re facing away from him, the barrel pressing firmly to the back of your head.

“Now what?” You ask, less scared of him than you are extremely annoyed.

“Just...keep quiet.” He growls at you and you come to the sudden realization that he’s trying to put on a show. A show of masculine intimidation for when Mando comes back. You have to stop yourself from laughing at the realization.

“You’re just waiting for him?”

“Basically, yes.”

“You really are an amatuer.”

“Shut up.”

It doesn't take long for him to get here. The familiar heavy sound of his boots walking into the hangar catching your attention almost instantly. It caught Calican’s attention too, him pushing you forward with the blaster, walking you down the ramp and into the light.

“Took you long enough, Mando.” He announces and through the darkness, you see the gleam of beskar一a blaster in his own hand trained on the man behind you. “Looks like I’m calling the shots now. Huh, partner?”

Without seeing Mando’s face, you can still sense the wheels turning over in his head, stance unfaltering as he aims.

“Let them go.” His voice is threatening一you’d even consider it scary if this was the first time you were hearing it.

“Drop your blaster, then I’ll consider it. Wouldn’t want to bump up your girlfriend too much, now, would we?” It doesn't go unnoticed the way he pushes the barrel harder into the back of your head, threatening the possibility of pulling the trigger一Mando notices and visibly tenses.

Slowly, he lowers the blaster to the ground and stands up, raising his hands behind his head.

“Hey! Lady!” Calican calls out to Peli who was watching nervously from the side with her own hands up. “Cuff him.”

Hesitantly, she moves forward and picks up the pair of cuffs he threw to the ground in front of her. She stands behind Mando, working to cuff him but his helmet continues to look forward in your direction.

“You’re a Guild traitor, Mando. I’m willing to bet that this green thing is the target you helped escape. Fennec was right. Bringing you in won’t just make me a member of the Guild. It’ll make me legendary.” As he talks, rambling on like a child playing pretend, you notice an ever so slight shift in Mando’s helmet. Almost like a nod of understanding and you return it.

That seemed to be all he needed before a powerful beam of light emits from his hand. The flash causes you to close your eyes and look away, the blaster leaving the back of your head as Calican is also rendered incapable of seeing. You force yourself to recover quickly, ducking out of the way just as Mando fires his blaster at him.

He's launched backward off the ramp, falling to the ground with your baby bundle still in his arms. You move forward quickly to run to him but a hand across your chest stops you.

“Wait.” He holds you back, moving in front of you to make sure Calican’s really dead. Once he kicks him to the side, his lifeless body slumping over, you rush forward to find the child.

“Hey, hey, baby.” You comfort, picking him up and holding him to your chest. “You’re okay.”

A gentle hand on the back of your head makes you turn to face Mando who looks you up in down in what you assume to be worry or concern一but you don’t have much in the way of visual cues to help you.

“Are you? Okay?” His voice sounds almost frantic but you’re quick to nod in reassurance.

“Yeah, I’m fine. A little shocked, but fine.” You can’t help but notice how his visor is tipped down slightly and you pray that Calican didn't leave a bruise on your neck from choking you. Even if he did, Mando looks back up at you and says nothing about it.

“Let’s go.” He says softly, hand moving from the back of your neck to your actual back, leading you to the ship through the darkness.

“Oh! Wait!” Remembering Peli, you turn, finding her checking up on her terrified droids. “See you round, Peli.”

“I sure hope not.” She mumbles and you can only laugh at the sentiment, giving her a quick appreciative nod which she reluctantly returns before joining Mando on the rap up to the ship.

He’s quieter than normal.

Which is definitely saying something considering his defining trait is his silent and stoic mannerisms. You’re sitting in the cockpit with him like usual, the child sitting in his seat and you in the copilot seat beside him.

The child doesn't seem to notice anything is amiss, completely unfazed by the event that transpired only hours ago.

You notice.

You notice the way he forgets to breathe every couple of minutes. The air caught in his chest as the thoughts become so overwhelming that his body forgets about everything else. You notice the way his helmet tilts to the side every so often as if he’s about to say something一so subtle it could be disguised as looking at the console in front of him.

It’s infuriating that you can’t will yourself to say anything to him一thank him even一just say literally anything to break the usually comfortable silence between you. There are a million things you want to say and yet you can’t hold onto anything for long enough to formulate words you could use outloud.

Your fading attention is caught as Mando reaches forward and twists the little metal ball off the top of the console before turning to the child and placing it in his little outstretched hand. You smile at the gesture, the old baby absolutely fascinated with the new toy.

Finally at peace with the silence, you lean back in your seat, trying to get comfortable for the ride but then一he speaks一you can’t believe the words that pass through the modulator.

“Would you want to know my name?”

Stunned silence is all you can muster. He sounds...tentative almost一unsure. It’s only in this moment do you realize you’ve never considered his real name. You’ve spent hours picturing and debating what he could possibly look like and yet you never thought about his name. You’ve just known him as Mando and left it at that.

You quickly realize you’re sitting in shock without offering him an answer so you swallow thickly, considering your answer carefully. He’s putting himself in a vulnerable position, one he would never usually put himself in for any reason.

“If you’re willing to share it.” You settle on your answer thoughtfully一him still unable to look at you一you assume he’s nervous but that assumption is heavy and usually unlikely.

“I...I trust you.” He states, words rolling off his tongue slowly with careful consideration. “That doesn't come easy.”

“I trust you, too.” At that he finally turns to look at you, pausing for a moment before speaking.

“My name...use it only in private一in front of the kid is fine一but I’m Mando in front of everyone else.” The realization that in a few short moments you will know his name is exhilarating.

“Okay.” A whisper is all you can manage before he takes a long pause. After studying you for a moment, he takes a deep breath.

“It’s Din.”

Din.

There's something so fitting about the one syllable name. As you roll it over in your head, it becomes so obvious that the name correlates with the man in front of you. To the point in one quick sonant, just like the man it belongs to.

“Din.” You breathe, the name gentle on your tongue and you notice the sharp intake of air through the modulator, so quiet you almost missed it.

That’s when you realize how long it must have been since someone has used his name一since his name was last said out loud. You say it again.

“Din.”

“Yes.” His voice is deep, winded一as if he’s having trouble breathing.

“I like it.” You give him a soft smile and his helmet continues to gaze at you. You’re not sure what he’s thinking一despite him being as transparent as he’s physically able一but when he subtly shifts his head…

You think he caught himself smiling.

[nebulablakemurphy]

Miss American Pie

Chapter Five: This Will Be The Day (Finale)

Warning: this series features a romantic Yelena Belova x Fem!Reader pairing.

Summary: Everyone has returned but the battle for humanity against Thanos wages on.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

You wake in a coughing fit, the rubble surrounding you sears your lungs. “Natasha.” You call into the rocks and flickering lights. Clearing your throat, you try again. “Natasha!”

“Here, I’m here.” Her voice is rough, pained.

You push yourself toward the sound, through the dust you can make out her hair. “You ok?”

“Mostly.” She’s laying face up, a few scratches visible.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I can’t move.” She nods at the piece of collapsed cement. “My leg is broken, you should go.” Nat says, staring up at the sky.

“I should’ve never let you go to Vormir. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” You try uselessly to budge the blockage over her leg.

“What is Vormir?” She asks.

“Doesn’t matter.” You swallow the lump in your throat. “How much do you remember?”

“The red room.”

“Do you remember getting out?”

“No one gets out.” She shakes her head.

“We did.” You inform her. “Yelena did.”

“Yelena?” Her gaze finds yours. “You know Yelena? Is she here?”

“Yes, I know her.” You press your lips together. “She’s not here though.”

“The rest of this building is coming down. If you were really trained in the red room you have to know that.” Natasha frowns. “You need to leave.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“Don’t be a hero.” She whispers. “Let me go, it’s ok.”

“No, it’s not.” You argue. “I won’t do it again.”

“What about Yelena?” Natasha gives you a pointed look.

“She’ll understand.” This is what she would do.

“Hey,” Natasha pushes herself up on her elbows. “Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if a giant man in a metal suit carrying a smaller man and a raccoon appeared behind your head?”

You turn toward the man in question. Scott Lang. “It would be a good thing.”

———————————————————————

Natasha is taken somewhere safe. She can’t fight.

As the strange doctor and his disciples start opening portals you see that you’re not alone. Through one comes Alexei, Melina and Yelena.

Her white suit is pristine, dirty blonde hair held away from her face in ponytails.

On shaky legs you move toward her, taking your rightful place at her side. Facing what lies ahead together.

Yelena catches your hand, “this isn’t much of a welcome home.”

You can’t help but laugh, “pretty cool way to die though.”

“Very,” she agrees. “Natasha?”

“She is a little worse for wear.” You warn her, “but alive…and safe.”

Yelena gives you a watery smile, squeezing your fingers. “And you?”

“A tower fell on me.”

“Of course it did.”

Thanos’ army is nothing to scoff at. Giant airborne creatures hover over his troops. Larger monsters stand in their ranks, space ship overhead ready to destroy.

Steve is almost unrecognizable, covered in dirt, his shield battered and broken. But you know it is time when he gives the order. “Avengers, assemble.”

Fighting is easy, it’s what you know. What you were trained to do. Fight to stay alive, fight for what you believe in, fight with Yelena; for Yelena.

The two of you move together like a well oiled machine. Like riding a bike, even after all this time you could never forget.

“We’ve got company to the left.” Yelena says through gritted teeth, kicking at the alien creature beside her. Dropping an empty cartridge to the ground and reloading her gun seamlessly, firing several shots.

Despite everyone’s best efforts they just keep coming. “Do we have a plan here?”

“Getting there,” Steve replies. “Anybody have eyes on the gauntlet?”

“Yeah!” Clint rushes past you with the glove in hand. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Get it out of here!” Tony insists.

“What’s happening?” Alexei shouts over the chaos. “I still don’t have ear piece.”

“Just keep their army away from that guy in the tank top.” You grunt, falling backwards from the force of one of Thanos’ soldiers colliding with you.

“We have to get the stones back where they came from.” Rhodey reminds everyone.

“The time space tunnel is completely collapsed.” Tony points out.

“That isn’t our only time machine.” Lang cuts in.

“Does anyone see an ugly brown van out there?” Captain America’s voice hums through the ear bud.

“I do,” a female voice chimes in. “But you’re not going to like where it’s parked.”

After grappling for far too long, you manage to knock the creature from you. Using your knife to dismember it.

“Next time, we get the cool laser guns.” Yelena yells loud enough to be heard by everyone on the network, as she hauls you to your feet.

“Friday, please add laser guns for the ballerinas to my grocery list.” Stark gives his smart ass remark.

“What’s the word on the van?” Rhodey wonders.

“Working on it now.”

The ship at Thanos’ disposal begins raining fire, no regard for their own troops.

“We’ve got people going down!” Rocket hollers.

“Clint,” you call into the microphone. “How’s that gauntlet?”

“Moving down the field.” The archer replies, “I’m alright too, thanks for asking.”

“Good.” You bite back a smile.

Hell continues breaking loose around you. Glowing circular orbs unfold in the air above, providing coverage from the missiles. You’re not sure if this is winning or losing. It feels like a bit of both.

———————————————————————- Thanos and his army are dusted away. Leaving you surprised and still swinging as the shock wears off.

You won. You. Won.

And you lost.

You lost Tony Stark. The man you’d barely known, but offered you clarity that will stay with you forever.

You lost the Natasha you’d come to know over the five years that Yelena was gone. Some parts of the redhead stripped away for the price of the stone.

But she’s still here. Waiting in the wings to be greeted by Yelena and their little makeshift family. You share a look of understanding when your eyes meet over the blonde’s shoulder.

Others come, Banner refuses to leave her side. Despite the fact that Natasha doesn’t remember him.

Clint falls to the ground at her feet. Breaking down at the sight of his friend, his family alive and well. She doesn’t remember him either, but welcomes him into her arms somewhat awkwardly.

Her expressions flicker from happy to overwhelmed. Hesitant to open herself up to the possibility that she is wanted, needed and loved.

Too confusing for the girl who only remembers the red room. Adjusting to this life will take time.

Everyone begins clearing out, their jobs finished. Rushing home to reunite with their loved ones. Tomorrow will bring about new challenges. The world is in shambles, and so are you.

Steve decides that he should be the one to return the stones. His goodbye tells you that he has a bit more in mind. But this is his life. His choices, not yours.

“Well, I guess we should head out too.” You say after a while. Your car is gone, lost in the wreckage from the explosion.

The setting sun is eclipsed, causing all of you to turn your gaze upwards just in time to see the ship’s door open.

“Is that a raccoon?” Melina asks, pointing toward Rocket.

“Do you want a ride or not?” Rocket shoots back.

“Not the avenger’s super jet, but it will do huh?” Alexei smiles, this is his dream.

“This is better!” A man’s voice carries down from the interior.

“Well,” Yelena shrugs, “if you say so.” She leads the pack up the ramp and onto the ship.

“Fanny and the pigs will be expecting dinner soon.”

“How are they?” Melina asks, “have you been taking care of them.”

“That was me!” Alexei says proudly, bending at the waist to gather Natasha into his arms. “Aye honey,” he grunts, hoisting her up. “You are only little girl in my heart.”

Nat pushes against his chest in retaliation.

“Do you mind if I hitch a ride too?” Clint asks.

“The extra stop will cost you,” Nebula stares blankly at him from her seat.

“They always do.” He remarks, trotting up the ramp.

Bruce paces at the foot of the metal grate, watching the rest of you load up. “I gotta hang back, make sure Steve gets there in one piece.”

“After what happened with Scott the first time I’d say that’s probably the best bet.” You agree, standing near the entrance.

“Yeah,” he smiles, kindly. “Keep me posted on Nat, will ya?”

“I will,” you return the smile.

“I’ll see you around.”

You nod, “I’ll see you.”

The captain of the ship introduces himself as Star-lord, and after a moment without response, Quill.

“Any requests?” He asks, finger hovering over the control panel.

Alexei creeps over to the younger man, quietly relaying a message.

“Alright,” Quill nods. Stroking the keys until a familiar set of notes ring out.

“A long, long time ago-“ The singer croons.

You let out a chuckle.

“I can still remember how that music used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance, that I could make those people dance. And maybe they'd be happy for a while.”

“We’re really doing this?” Yelena puts a hand to her head, the corners of her mouth turning upward.

“But February made me shiver, with every paper I'd deliver. Bad news on the doorstep, I couldn't take one more step.” The melody carries on.

“It’s your song.” Natasha turns to her sister.

“I can't remember if I cried. When I read about his widowed bride.” Melina’s eyes are far away, carried back to their years in Ohio. Before the world had been so cruel.

“Something touched me deep inside, the day the music-“

“Died.” Yelena joins in, lulling her head to the side to gage your reaction.

You sigh, all of this beyond surreal. But you allow yourself to live in this moment, because you might not get another. “So bye, bye Miss American Pie…”

“Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.” The roaring chorus of voices fills the silence you’ve grown used to. Fills the parts of you that were empty for so long. “And them good ol' boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye. Singin', “this’ll be the day that I die.”

“This’ll be the day that I die.” Yelena sings, her face alight with a childlike glee.

——————————————————————-

Melina, Natasha and Alexei stay with you for a while. A few weeks as Natasha heals and becomes acclimated to her life.

She claims to hate the attention, but deep down you know she’s full of it.

The Ohio house is bursting at the seams with five adults, nine pigs and one dog.

That isn’t enough to keep visitors at bay. Namely Clint, his wife Laura and their three children.

Things feel a bit off when everyone begins moving out. Alexei, Melina, and their pigs return to the farm outside of Saint Petersburg.

Natasha finds herself drawn to New York, with Bruce and the makeshift building he’s using as a lab.

You adjust to the steady thrum that is daily life, with Fanny and Yelena.

After dinner you load the dishwasher, drying your hands on the nearby tea towel before selecting a cycle.

“So how does it feel?” Yelena asks, leaning against the doorframe.

“Hmm?” You turn to face her.

“Being a hero.” She clarifies, a smile playing at her lips.

“I’m not-“

“Oh cut the crap, Y/N. You saved the world.” Yelena narrows her eyes at you.

“I did it for you.” You say simply, because it’s true.

Yelena closes the space between you, “why?”

“You know why.” You whisper as she cups your face in her hands, gently stroking her thumb over your cheek. “It’s ok if you wouldn’t have done the same.”

“I’d do more for you, and worse.” She assures you. “But do you really want to spend the rest of your life fumbling around feelings in the dark when you could have someone who-“

“I want you. I only ever want you.” You beckon her closer. “Anyway I can have you, that will be enough for me.”

Sometimes wires get crossed and you want things you never have before. And she provides them before you have a chance to ask. You give back to her tenfold, so that neither glass is ever empty. That is love. True love, the only way you’ve ever known it.

“I am yours…in every way a person can belong to another.” Yelena breathes, “and then some.”

Series taglist: @jeyramarie @freeshavocadoooo @ilovewinter101 @3and30aresoultwins @yelenabelovv @miphas-trident @1800-fight-me

If you loved this series as much as I did, you can check out the prequel here!