#that last line hits so fucking hard its unnatural

[unassumingcavegoblin]

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Honestly, I think from the moment that Percy found out that not every demigod has a loving mortal parent they can depend on, when they already can't depend on the gods, and that Annabeth specifically, hasn't had anyone take care of her like that since she was 7, he decided he would be the one to.

They take care of each other up to that point, but I think that's when he starts noticing how much she takes care of them. She already knew if she didn't no one else will. She protects them against humans, she stands with them against monsters, she always brings up the rear of the group when they're running, and she is always the first one to make a move when they're fighting. She does it because no one is going to protect her if she doesn't do it herself. No one is going to protect Grover and Percy if she isn't.

In the arch, he pretty much tells her he would fight the gods for her, and then he goes on to do just that.

Athena, the one person who was supposed to protect her willingly pushes monsters her way, she lets Echidna and the chimera into a place that was supposed to be safe. Her decision is that Annabeth should be punished, and say what you want, but I think she knew that Annabeth would think through every scenario and know that someone had to stay and hold them back. And I think she knew that Annabeth would be the one to stay. Because that's the way she raised her, knowing that no one cared whether she lived or died. And I think that's the cruellest part.

Which is why Percy's sacrifice means so much more. He not only made the decision to trade his life for hers and fight the monster so she and Grover could escape, but he also made the conscious choice to push back against Athena's wishes. He fought a goddess for her, Athena said "Annabeth will die for her impertinence" and Percy said "Not today, not ever"

[stalkedbytrains]

Assassin's Monthly: Retirement is Just Fine

“Come on Sugary,” she asked, her chin resting in her hands, green eyes following the broad woman with the surprisingly delicate hands. “All I’m asking is for us to go get two cups of coffee.”

“Oh it is two cups now?” asked the woman with the French accent and slightly graying dark hair. “A moment ago it was only one.”

“It’s a negotiation tactic,” the middle aged woman shrugged.

“I see,” Sugary sighed. “But you know I cannot stand the piss you Americans call coffee.”

“I’ll make you some. I’ll roast the beans and grind them all by hand. The whole shebang.”

“Not in that dreadful thing you call a kitchen. I cannot set foot in there in good conscience. Lilith, it would not know fine cuisine if it was painted on the walls.”

“You drive a hard bargain Sugary. Fine. I’ll redo my kitchen. Rip it all out and go down to the studs. And I’ll get a fancy, modern kitchen with all the amenities and then you’ll come over for four cups of coffee.”

“Oh, we are all the way to four now?”

“If I’m redoing my whole kitchen? Yeah, four,” she said with a smile. Before she could continue a man in an expensive suit and a stylishly unshaven face entered the armory.

“Sherry!”

“Chérie,” the green eyed woman corrected him. “It is French.”

“I knew that,” he grumbled as he looked over the woman that corrected him.

Her face was starting to show lines of age. The little black dress she had on showed off as many scars at it did tattoos that were all starting to fade slightly from time. Her hair was also showing signs of losing its luster if not it’s color. But her eyes were as bright and fiery as they’d ever been.

“Holy shit!” the guy all but yelled. “It’s you!”

“Sugary? Who is this guy?” she asked without taking her eyes off of him.

“Relax,” the French woman responded. “He’s a headhunter for the old men up north. The Council? The Cloakroom? Whatever they call themselves these days.”

“You’re her! You’re the Queen of the Kill! You are the top contract killer ever! Oh man, I was actually at the rally when you killed that Senator! Oh, please tell me you’re here because Sherry’s making you a gun. Please tell me you’re back.”

“Nope. Still retired,” she said as she took her finger off the trigger on the concealed pistol she had trained on the man. “I just come in every week or so to try and convince my favorite gunsmith to get some coffee with me. And every time it ends up with me doing something outrageous. Today I’m apparently remodeling my entire kitchen.”

“If you’re doing some construction, it’ll cost you some decent money, and I can offer you a super easy job that’s basically just cash in pocket.”

“I don’t take jobs from people off the street. Besides I’m retired.”

“I know, I know, you’re out of the game. You stopped working, what, six years ago?”

“Seven.”

“But come on, I heard you take some jobs you find interesting or if you’re unnaturally bored. Since you retired you did three jobs, right?”

“Four.”

“God the bidding war over your last job was insane! My employers were very upset we got knocked out so early. Come on, how much did they pay you?”

“Thirteen,” she said lazily, still looking at Sugary who was smiling slightly while filling bullet casings with gunpowder.

“Million? Holy shit! Who orders a hit for thirteen million?”

“Seriously? I have confidentiality stuff. And don’t ask me how many people they paid to have offed either.”

The man sighed, “Can you at least tell me who it was for? I swear it was one of the Sheikhs.”

“Nope, a Canadian.”

“Really?”

“The fuck do you think?”

“Ok, ok. But the Consortium will pay you a million and a half to kill three people by the end of the month,” the man continued with his pitch.

The woman rolled her eyes.

“Look, it’ll be super easy. Three targets. The only restrictions are that they all have to be taken out at the same time, and it has to be by the end of the month. I can give you half a million per head.”

Sugary shrugged.

“Make it an even two million and you’ve got a deal,” she said.

“What about one point seven five million and I get you a meeting with the Italian home designer Benito. He’s my brother’s wife’s cousin. He can redo your whole kitchen into the fanciest fucking kitchen to ever exist.”

Sugary raised an eyebrow.

Seeing the look on the gunsmith’s face, the woman sighed and said, “Fine. I was bored anyways. I’ll do it, assuming everything works out with your credentials and stuff. And I guess I’ll need a gun Sugary.”

“Sugary?” the man asked. “I thought you said it was Chérie.”

“It’s French for ‘sweet’,” Lilith said. “You know sugary sweet? Ah never mind.”

“I don’t know where she got it either,” Sugary said.

“Either way. I’ll need a new gun. I’ll need the lightest hair trigger you got, and as little recoil as possible,” the woman mused.

Sugary reached across the small counter top between her and the woman and grabbed her to pull her into a kiss that lasted a few seconds too long to be strictly friendly.

“Oh to make a gun for you again? It would be a pleasure!”

“And I guess I’ll have to bring the coffee here since you’ll be working,” the woman sighed.

“You know I won’t accept-“

“I know, I know,” she said as she stood up and moved to leave the room. “A double espresso from that one place, with one cream and four sugars. I remember.”

“Merci my love.”

[echo-of-damnation]

im not feeling good so im going to rant about the book Dead Men Walking by Steve Lyons because none of my irl friends will know what im talking about and i need to get it out of my system.

apologies in advance for anyone who ends up reading this

first things first. absolutely love the funky little krieg guys. i love that they just fucked their entire sick ass planet because the loser guys on top were like " yeah nah fuck the big man who is def not a god and fuck da rules". i applaud theyre blinding loyalty. one of their best traits imo. i love their quirks of not having standard names and the absolute crippling disappointment and need to atone for a sin so hard they send theyre young off at an unnatural amount. I love their hehe dont care about casualties front everyone thinks they have but they do and will take their lives in consideration. that some of them will feel fear at running head first into an unwinnable fight and some will flee. its so. human. like deep down in their gene code, no matter how much they reproduce these soldiers, there is a part of human nature that will always and forever be there.

I enjoyed Krieg by him and wanted to see more of their silly little lives in action. (this was before the siege of vraks book came out so at the time it was just those two books and pieces of lore scoured from the internet)

now! with that said!

i went into this book excited to see my funky little gas mask guys. what i ended up getting was a weird sub plot line about my guy Gunthar and the goveners daughter (ah forbidden love. a tale as old as time) and a little bit of the funky little guys.

after shit hits the fan our boy Gunthar gets separated from his one and only and ends up drafted into the PDF and gets to hang out and do really fun things train and fight with the kriegsman who came to "help" the planet from the shit that hit the fan.

spoiler alert. it was the funny robots hitting the fan.

while there is some really good parts in the book going through some of the fights with the dkok and ol'gunt it always ended up going back and bringing up his little crush. (who we find out is all in a shit hitting the fan situation but ends up fine at the end with the guy who liked her from afar and who shows up halfway through the book and this book wasnt about them okay. it was supposed to be about my cool guys.)

we get some super cool dialog from one of the krieg colonels saying something along the lines of "you just want to use us kriegers cause you think our lives are worth less than your own peoples lives. go fuck yourself." and some great moments when we actually get to see a kriegsman without his mask and its painful how young the boy is. it was great! more of that!

at some point all of gunny's krieg friends end up dying/they peace out because they cant contain the necron threat and its up to our love sick boy and this last baby krieger to do something.

so they blow the robos the fuck up. kinda.

beby krieger sacrifices himself(who didnt see that one coming) and gunthar does his thang.

NOW. I MUST CLARIFY. I MAY BE GETTING THESE TWO EVENTS SWAPPED IN ORDER. BUT IT REALLY DOESNT MATTER TO MY RANT.

at one point, and this is were i got frustrated and its kind towards the end ish, all of the important people of the planet are getting evaced which includes the govoners daughter and the lost puppy guy she found along the way.

what happened to the gov? the krieg colonel fucking shoots him for being a little bitch colluding with the enemy. so treason.

ANYWAY, the girl and the guy are getting onto the ship to leave when op! who is in the crowd! gunthar! hes there! he finally made it back to her! now to just tell her and oh who is that man touching her? hes kinda close and is she getting comforted by him? well i guess she didnt really love our boy in the end and his whole life is crumbling down around him. whats there to live for now? guess he'll just go die.

(now that im think about it i think this all happened before they blow up the necrons)

in the end i just kept getting reminded at every turn that yes this book is about the dkok but we are never in the pov of them. we watch and interact with them through gunthar who also wont stop trying to prove himself and find the girl he liked.

im not saying romantic plotlines shouldnt have been in the book but i feel like they should have taken a backseat. i didnt want to follow around the daughter as she leads a little revolution with some slave humans against the necrons. i wanted kriegsmen. i wanted to see how they lived and fought. how they interacted with each other and those around them. its fine that we had gunthar as our guy but i wanted more of him with them. at one point he ends up seeing them as brothers and finds comfort with them and the kriegsmen also end up respecting him a lot for his efforts. that could have been built on! that is an interaction that is never really seen and it would have made the story so much more. idk. i dont want to say better but like. more cohesive?

in this conclusion i will like to say i did like the book. it had really enjoyable parts but it wasnt great. its not a book i would pick back up and read of go and recommend to someone new to the fandom. it just never felt like a krieg book. just a book with funny gas mask guys sometimes.

thank you for coming to my ted talk. if you did enjoy this word vomit of a rant please like and subscribe and hit that bell for notifications so you know when i lose my mind about another thing in warhammer that no one else cares about. idk how to end this.

sincerly,

a sick little guy

[declinlalune]

Hunter's Heart || Andy & Emilio

TIMING: current. PARTIES:  @mortemoppetere & @declinlalune SUMMARY: andy runs into emilio and plans to gauge if he has any suspicions about alex. CONTENT WARNINGS: parental death, sibling death, child death, implied suicide ideation, and child abuse.

It had been months now, but Andy wasn’t sure she’d be able to forget Emilio’s face. He looked a little different with all of the blood, sure, but he still seemed the same in a fucked up sort of way. Andy contemplated walking past him, but Alex’s run-in with him made her stall. She thought about her sister and what it could mean if a slayer found out about a werewolf and how she had helped him. Some hunters didn’t cross over into others’ ‘territory’, but she knew there were others who’d jump at the chance to take out anything that was remotely different. 

She approached him as he had his head bent over his phone. He looked concentrated, and Andy only felt a little bad for interrupting him. “You look a lot different, not bleeding out and all that.” She rested her hands on her hips, watching him carefully before continuing, “glad to see you healed up good, though. No issues?” This was a good segue, she thought. Hunter talk, that is – even if she hated it. 

He didn’t usually let himself get distracted in public like this, but… maybe he’d been getting comfortable in Wicked’s Rest. With Rhett in town and a few friends he was now at least marginally certain weren’t going to stab him in the back as soon as he turned away from them, Emilio was a little less on edge than he had been when he’d first arrived in town. Not that that was saying much, of course; it’d be difficult to be more on edge than he had been in those first few weeks. All his newfound ‘comfort’ brought him was the ability to look at his phone and type out a message without sweating about it.

But he still stiffened when he heard someone approaching. Muscles tense, jaw tightening. He didn’t drop his phone and go for a blade, but only because he knew it’d make him look nuts if it was just a stranger looking for directions or a familiar face saying hello. When she spoke, it took him a moment to realize that it was the latter. It was almost hard to remember her. The last time he’d seen her, after all, it had been through a haze of pain and blood loss that took him weeks to fully recover from. She looked better now than she had then, and he figured he did, too. Lowering his phone, Emilio offered her a curt nod. “Figured I should change my look,” he said dryly. “Try the ‘no blood’ thing on for size. Is it working for me?” 

He glanced down at his arm, skin exposed in his short-sleeved t-shirt thanks to the summer heat. “Hell of a scar,” he admitted, turning the limb over absently. The skin was marred and uneven, but not nearly as bad as it would have been had Teddy not stitched him up a few days after the incident. “Everything still works, though. How about you? You took a few bad hits, too, if I remember right. Healed up okay?”

Andy took a moment to look at him before nodding. “Yeah, sure. You look ruggedly handsome, like one of those books at the grocery store checkout line.” She and Alex had made fun of them on more than one occasion, especially the ones that had the unnaturally buff men. Emilio didn’t look like that, though. “You look healthier, so that’s… good?” Andy wasn’t sure how to really navigate this. Realistically, she wanted to bring up Alex and feel out how much he knew, or if he suspected anything at all, but thought just going in blindly could be dangerous in its own right. 

She looked down at his arm as he lifted it and nodded. “Got a matching one on my shoulder.” Andy hadn’t looked at it recently, but she figured it’d be pink against pale skin at this point. “Nah, yeah, healed up just fine.” She hated this. The back and forth, the proverbial dick measuring contest. She wasn’t this person, and she wouldn’t ever be this person. 

She inhaled sharply and looked down at the ground, kicking the toe of her shoe against a lone pebble. It went skidding in the opposite direction, disappearing from view. Andy took a moment before looking back up at him. “You meet another redhead?” She was sure he had, there were a few in town outside of herself and Alex, so to assume they were the only ones was stupid. “Helped you with…” Her brows furrowed. “Can’t actually remember, but uh, it’s my sister. She told me she helped you with this giant bat thing. She do okay?” It felt like the days where her dad would berate her for not teaching Alex enough, or not going hard enough on her. Felt like the days where her mom would ask how she’d done in training, too. 

“Ah, at least we match, then.” It was light, quietly amused. Emilio didn’t always know how to talk to hunters these days. Even with Rhett, he struggled. Hid parts of himself that he knew wouldn’t be approved of, pretended he was still the man Rhett had known years ago with the beliefs his mother had so badly wanted him to carry. But this, he knew how to do. Trading war stories, comparing scars. This part was simple.

And maybe this was, too. She was worried about her sister. It was written all over her face the moment she asked the question. And Emilio understood why. The way Alex had fought against the lapir, it was clear that she hadn’t had quite as much training as Andy had. He thought of Flora, of the way he’d planned on taking her and raising her away from his family, away from her own mother. Would she have fought like Alex had, if his plan hadn’t amounted to far too little, far too late? Not quite trained, but desperate to succeed anyway? “Alex, yeah,” he confirmed with a nod. “She did fine. A little sloppy, but not bad. Not her kind of beast, right? I’m sloppy against things that aren’t undead, too.” He wasn’t, not in the same way she had been, but he thought it might make Andy feel a little better if he said so. “Guess I know your cousin, too. Kaden. Helped him in a barfight a while back. There a lot of you in town?” If there were a lot of rangers around, he thought, he’d need to keep an eye on them. Nora was safe enough from Rhett, who couldn’t sense her presence, but if a ranger stumbled upon her? It’d be a different story. Leticia, too. 

Andy’s expression remained neutral– or rather, a reflection of a worried older sister. It lined up with the truth enough, anyway. She’d gotten good at being seen the way she wanted to be seen. Growing up on the run, or what she thought was on the run– paranoia interconnected to survival  made it easy for Andy to control every aspect of herself. She could come across however she wanted to just about anyone, but she decided to let her worry for Alex show through instead of assuming the position of older hunter sister. Because that wasn’t who she was, and even though Emilio already knew she had the genes– and apparently now Kaden, too, it made it harder to pretend like she didn’t reject that part of herself. 

“Nah, not her kind of thing.” Andy didn’t know the kinds of things Emilio faced off against and she didn’t want to know. She wasn’t in for some diabolical pissing contest. She just wanted to gauge what Emilio knew about Alex and that was it. “A bar fight?” She raised a brow. What was Kaden doing going around getting into bar fights? She had fought to keep a low profile and Kaden was throwing hands with this moron? “Didn’t hear about that one. You guys win?” She tilted her head to the side, watching him for a moment. “More of who? Redheads, or French men?” Andy eased up slightly, taking a small step back, scraping the heel of her shoe against the ground. “It’s just us.” Maybe providing him with the most basic insight of their situation would call off any suspicions that Alex didn’t exactly carry the same gene. “Me and her against the world and all that. Parents died pretty early on, so any training has gone through me.” She’d take the brunt of another hunter’s disappointment. She could shoulder it all, it’d be no different. 

While Andy didn’t know anyone undead personally, she made a mental note that if she did come across anyone, to tell them to steer clear of Emilio. “I appreciate you looking out for her, though.” 

He nodded in acknowledgement. If he’d found Alex fighting something more ranger-specific, he was sure the fight would have gone differently. Andy had held her own when he’d fought with her, and Kaden could throw one hell of a punch in a barfight; the situation with Alex and that lapir had been a fluke, he figured. She’d been caught off-guard by something she wasn’t trained to fight. Grinning as she questioned the bar fight, he nodded. “Yeah. We kicked their asses, don’t worry. Your cousin packs a punch.” If it were any other bar, they’d probably be banned for life or something. But in a hunter bar? That was a nightly occurrence. 

There was some quiet relief in hearing that the trio of rangers didn’t have more with them, though Emilio tried not to let it show. After all, he didn’t want to risk ruffling any feathers, didn’t want to raise any suspicions. He wasn’t the best hunter; he knew that. He’d been too soft as a kid, and he was softer now. He didn’t kill things the way he ought to. He had a bugbear working in his office, a nymph walking his dog, a vampire helping him find fights to pick, a balam buying his drinks. Plenty of hunters would take issue with the way Emilio lived. Plenty of hunters would take action against him for it. His own mother probably would have at least thought about killing him just to keep him from sullying the family name, so what would a stranger do? He didn’t want to know.

The more Andy spoke, the more he thought Alex’s lack of preparation probably made sense. If it had just been Andy raising her, hunting had probably fallen by the wayside. Survival was more important, in times like that. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he replied, and he meant it. Losing people was as ingrained into the hunter lifestyle as bar fights were, but that never made it any easier to do. “I think you did the best you could, no? And not a bad job. Like I said, she held her own. Not many rangers could.” At Andy’s show of appreciation, he shook his head. “Ah, don’t worry about it. I’m a…” He trailed off, stopping himself. I’m a father, he’d almost said. I understand looking out for people. But that wasn’t true anymore, was it? A father whose only child was buried a country away couldn’t call himself such, could he? Emilio swallowed, shrugging and shaking his head again. “I try to look out for people. When I can.”

“I’m sure he does.” Andy’s frustration with Kaden was fleeting. It wasn’t his fault that somebody probably mouthed off. While Andy refrained from getting into fights for the sake of everyone involved, she knew that if she had less to lose, she might have been throwing punches, too. But the difference was, Andy had a hell of a lot to lose, and after everything she’d done to get to where she was, she didn’t want to backtrack. “Guess I appreciate you looking after him, too. He can be soft.” Andy lied with a smirk, knowing that was not the case. 

At his apology, Andy shrugged. “It was a really long time ago. I’ve made my peace with it.” That was a lie, but her expression remained neutral. Despite the fact that she still struggled with their deaths and what it had meant for both herself and Alex, she knew that it hadn’t been on her, no matter what Claire or Keira had said. His words stirred something in Andy, but she showed no emotion further than a small smirk. Andy considered continuing to lie, to spool the needle through the thread of I didn’t have the time, I couldn’t train her properly, but what if something else happened? She sure as hell wasn’t going to out Alex as a wolf to someone she didn’t know, and certainly not to a hunter, but to imply that hunting had taken a backseat wouldn’t be such a bad idea, would it? Especially if it explained Alex’s lack of… skills and strength. 

As Emilio explained that he was just looking out for others, Andy nodded. “Yeah, well, appreciation is due, anyway.” She folded her arms across her chest, fingers picking at the sleeve of her flannel, looping and unlooping a stray thread around her index finger as she thought about her next move. After a beat of silence, Andy sighed. “We don’t… really do that. Not anymore, not since we were kids.” She didn’t know exactly what had happened with the creature that her sister and Emilio had fought together, but Andy could only assume that Alex’s stubborn nature came burning and bright. “So really, I appreciate it. We can get in over our head sometimes, and really, I just want her to focus on school.” Not a total lie, but Alex had other things she needed to focus on, too. “I teach her where I can, you know, how to protect herself, but not..” She cleared her throat, dropping her arms to her sides. “Not anything more than that.” Maybe if Emilio ran into Alex again during a dangerous situation, he’d take the lead instead of expecting a kid to help him. 

Emilio snorted, raising his brows in a way that said he highly doubted that soft was a word anyone else would ever use to describe Kaden. The Frenchman struck him as anything but in the conversations he’d had with him. But, then again, his mother had once hurled that word at him like a projectile weapon, using it to beat down every accomplishment he struggled to cling to. He doubted anyone would look at him and assign a descriptor of soft now, even if part of him knew it would always be true. Maybe Kaden was the same.

He hummed as Andy went on, lifting a shoulder and dropping it. “Doesn’t make it hurt less,” he replied. “People say time heals. I think it’s bullshit.” He didn’t feel any more ‘healed’ now than he had two years ago. Maybe time made the weight easier to carry, but it didn’t make it any less heavy. Nothing ever could. It hurt, and it would always hurt. Her parents’ deaths would always be there, no matter what peace was made. And Emilio… he didn’t think making peace was in the cards for him. He didn’t think it ever had been.

There was some selfish relief in hearing that Andy and her sister didn’t hunt much anymore. He suspected the same couldn’t be said of Kaden, but one ranger was far easier to keep an eye on than three. And the more Andy spoke about how she’d raised her sister, how she was continuing to raise her, the more Emilio thought of a life that could have been. He thought of Flora, of the plan he’d hatched to steal her away. Like Andy, he would have taught her to defend herself… but not until she was old enough to grip a knife without it being too big for her tiny hands. Not the way he was taught, the way that had him hating himself even now, some thirty years after the fact. Andy had raised Alex in the way Emilio had longed to raise his daughter. He’d been too slow to save her. If he’d been faster, maybe, they’d be having a different conversation. Comparing techniques instead of him listening to hers and mourning the loss of something he’d never really had to begin with. 

“I get it,” he told her, the words coming after a beat of silence that might have stretched a moment too long as he lost himself in his thoughts. “This life, it isn’t… I don’t think it’s good. If you can raise her outside of it, you should.” It was too late for him, of course. It had been too late for him since he’d stepped into that room he’d never really stepped out of, with blood on the floor and bodies no longer moving. But Andy still had a chance. So did Alex. And they both deserved that. “I think you’re doing good. With her, the kid. I think you’re doing a good job. I know, um… You’re probably not much older than her. You were probably a kid, too. But I think you did good. She’s good. Smart. Stubborn as hell. But you did good.”

People say time heals. I think it’s bullshit. 

Andy agreed silently. She’d spent nights groveling over her sister’s future and how it had been disrupted by the wolf’s bite. She had mourned her parents time and time again, with every memory that came and went. Most of all when Alex would ask for stories about them— of how they were when she was too young to remember. Andy didn’t like remembering them. She held their memories at arm’s length knowing what they would have done had they known Alex was now a wolf. She kept that in mind. That nobody could be trusted. Hell, Andy was only just now beginning to trust Kaden after he confirmed that something had driven him away from the typical hunting lifestyle he’d been raised into back in Lyon. Andy had made peace with her parents’ deaths in a way that was abnormal, some might say. Because if they were alive, she may not have had her sister. She would trade them for Alex a hundred times over. 

“Maybe, maybe not.” Andy didn’t want to think about them too much because with thinking came the hurt, and Andy didn’t have time for that. She hadn’t had time for mourning then, and she certainly didn’t have time for it now. Even though Alex mourned the loss, Andy knew there was something else there, too. She was mourning who she was before the bite, and the only thing Andy could do was focus on lifting that burden, not the one of their parents. 

Silence burrowed between them and Andy felt as though she were hanging in a delicate balance between words. The world she wanted to live in, and this world where people like Emilio existed. But as he spoke, Andy found herself tipped entirely in one direction. Had she heard him right? Expression remaining neutral, Andy stood across from him. What she had thought would be a quick conversation about what he could possibly know about Alex had turned into something deeper, and though she was uncomfortable, she made no move to show it. 

It had been a long time since Andy had been told she’d done a good job. Hell, it’d been a long time since an adult said anything comforting to her. More often than not, a fourteen year old running around with a seven year old garnered nothing but ill attempts at advice and sneers. Andy had been told time and time again that she was too young to care for a kid like Alex, and they hadn’t even known the half of it. Really, she’d been the only one capable of doing it. She hadn’t realized it, but her breath had caught in her throat. Immediately, Andy averted her gaze to the ground and shook her head. “She’s my sister, what else was I supposed to do?” Though her voice was steady, she felt her chest begin to tighten. There was something behind Emilio’s eyes, Andy realized, as she met his gaze after a brief moment of silence. There was a mourning there, too. She’d seen it enough when staring back in the mirror. He had lost something too. 

“Sorry, I don’t really know what to say. The oldest person I talk to is my cousin, and even though he’s pretty ancient, I’m not…” used to the comfort. Andy let the joke fall to the wayside with another shake of her head. “I um… appreciate, the kind words.” She wasn’t exactly sure what she had expected by walking up on Emilio, but this sure as hell hadn’t been it. “Kinda fucked up that I saved your life and you’re only complimenting her,” Andy joked after a moment, the discomfort brought on by Emilio’s kind words far too overwhelming not to direct the conversation in another direction.

She seemed to dismiss his words, but Emilio couldn’t fault her for it. He understood that, too. That quiet inclination to pretend something didn’t hurt so that the pain was easier to ignore. He did it, too. With his father, who’d died long before he knew him. With Juliana, who he’d loved far more than he let himself admit that he had. With his uncle, who had stared up at him with a knife between his ribs where Emilio had put it. You could pretend things mattered less than they did, if you tried hard enough. You could pretend that losing them didn’t hurt. But at the end of the day, that was all it really was — pretending. 

Of course, the alternative was hardly better. If you let yourself really feel all the things you’d lost, if you let that weight rest on your shoulders without anything there to cushion it, it was just going to crush you. And Emilio got the feeling that, like him, Andy had been crushed enough already. Who could blame her for putting that distance up? Who could fault her for wanting to minimize that damage any way she could? 

There was a flash of relief in her expression at his reaction and that, too, was something he understood. Hunters could be a volatile people. Emilio was one of them, and he knew as much. Wasn’t there a part of him that felt a little afraid every time he ran into one he didn’t know? Hadn’t there been a moment in that bar where Kaden put him on edge? Wasn’t he even a little afraid of Rhett now, as nonsensical as that seemed? Admitting that you weren’t doing the thing that many hunters considered to be a divine purpose was a risky bid. He could have just as easily reacted poorly. If he were someone else — or if she’d met him a few years earlier, perhaps, before he’d had and lost a child of his own — maybe he would have. It was hard to say now, hard to think of the person he’d been before Flora’s death, much less before her birth. That man had died twice over now. He didn’t know if the one who’d taken his place was good or bad, but he knew Andy would probably prefer him.

“Ay, don’t sell yourself short. Not every sister would do it.” If he was being honest, he didn’t think Rosa would have. His sister had loved him, he knew, but she’d loved the hunt more. That much had become certain when he’d gone to her with his doubts after Flora’s birth, when he’d asked if she’d ever felt such feelings towards Jaime and been met with a resounding no. IfEmilio wasn’t the child his mother had wanted, Rosa was all that and more. She was the one destined to make Elena proud. She was probably the one who should have survived. In a better world, maybe. But not in this one.

He let out a huff of air that was almost a laugh, nodding his head. “I don’t talk to a lot of people these days, either,” he admitted. He was surprised to find that it wasn’t as true as it would have been a few months before. Nora was over every day now, Ren often enough to walk the dog. Leticia texted often, Rhett was a shadow that slunk to the surface when he thought Emilio might need him. He had an apartment full of neighbors who kept bringing him food he didn’t eat and giving him advice he didn’t take, and he swore there were more of Alan’s stupid pens in his neighborhood than there used to be. He had people now. He was starting to realize how goddamn terrifying that was.

At Andy’s joke, he sucked his teeth and clicked his tongue, studying her for a moment as if trying to come to some conclusion. “Eh, you’re okay,” he said with a wave of his hand, smiling around the words. From Emilio, it might as well have been a thousand watt grin. “Could do with a little less of the complaining, maybe. Pesca de cumplidos, you know, it’s not a good look. Kind of desperate, no?” It was clear from his tone that he was teasing, even as he shook his head as if to communicate that it was a real shame.

Andy knew that Emilio had a point. Not every sister would do it. If Keira had been her sister instead of Alex and she’d been the one without the hunter gene, she was sure that there would have been a silver bullet put immediately between her eyes. Though their situation had been unlucky, in the grand scheme of things, both she and Alex had survived because of one another. “Yeah, maybe not, come to think of it.” 

At his comment, Andy let out a laugh that sounded far too bitter for where their conversation had landed. Instead of leaning her weight on one foot, Andy shifted to the other, kicking the toe of her shoe against the ground again. She wasn’t sure what else to do with herself otherwise. She had plenty of friends— or, at least now she did. And she was grateful for them. “I talk, but I just never know what to say. What do you say to people who weren’t raised like us.” Because even though there may have been different traditions between rangers, slayers, and wardens, the sentiment had always been the same. You were a weapon before you were a child. 

Andy rolled her eyes at his comeback. “The complaining is what makes it fun, don’t you think?” She remembered how terrified she’d been then, how she was worried the qutrub weren’t a qutrub at all, that it was another wolf with a human face. Of course, it had existed just like any other person at one point in time, but the curse it’d taken on had overrun it into something monstrous, and as much as Andy hadn’t wanted to put an end to it, she had no choice. 

“Je ne me plains que pour réclamer mon dû.” The teasing came naturally. It was easier than focusing on the mourning that’d been brought up. Or of who she’d be without Alex. “I’ll take the earlier compliments, I guess. Can’t complain too much.” Though Andy had come out of the conversation with a heavier heart than expected, she was glad it happened. “You’re not so bad, Emilio. I thought you were a dick at first, but you actually have a way with words.” It was hard not to focus on the fact that Andy had intended to get the information she needed and leave, and instead she was coming away from it with a heart-to-heart. 

Alex was lucky, he thought, that Andy was what she ended up with. Maybe luckier than she would have been had their parents survived, though he’d never voice the thought aloud. Andy was right — you couldn’t explain what it was like to grow up the way they had to someone who hadn’t. You couldn’t put it to words, couldn’t find any language with which to speak it. Emilio couldn’t even really wrap his mind around it in thought. He’d loved his family. His family would hate him now. He’d grown up the way he’d had to. He’d never wanted his daughter to grow up like him. There were so many opposing thoughts, all of them the truth. How did you rationalize that? How did you make sense of it? 

Every hunter, he thought, had some kind of grief. Not just for the loss of people they loved, though loss was so entwined with the culture that it was impossible to separate the two, but loss of themselves. Every hunter he’d ever known had lost themselves before they’d ever had a chance to be anyone at all. Rhett, Juliana, Gabriel, his siblings… They were echoes of people, weapons forged to have skin and bones. Andy was the same. But Alex wasn’t. There was something different about her, something so distinctly not hunter that it was jarring. It must have come, he thought, from growing the way he had. He’d always assumed that that loss, like the strength and the senses, came from their DNA. Remembering Alex, he wondered if it was from something else instead. Maybe it was the kind of thing you could force out of someone just by loving them soon enough. Maybe Flora could have been different, too.

“Ah, fun for you, maybe. I’m having a bad time.” He wasn’t, though. It was kind of funny, really; Emilio tended to hate most conversations he found himself in, but this one was all right. Even through the grief, even with the endless reminders of things he’d had and lost and things he’d never had to begin with, he found the conversation a pleasant one. Heavy, sure, but not bad. Not something he’d hate to repeat. 

He snorted at the French, rolling his eyes but looking fond. Eh, probably served him right. He spouted enough Spanish to people who didn’t know a word of it to earn some French muttered in his direction. “I am a dick,” he told her seriously, hiding the smile that was trying to tug at the edges of his mouth, “but I appreciate that anyway. I’ll tell everyone you said so. They’ll all be very, uh… impressed. With my words.” It wasn’t a compliment he got very often… and probably for good reason. But he found he liked hearing it now. 

[hellmouth-manor]

for i am falser than vows made in wine || cedric || 1.11 || re: hisashi

Cedric can feel his tears halt as soon as the familiar laughter reaches his ears. Which isn’t to say that any of those tears were fake. Maybe they’d been a bit exaggerated at the start when he still had a lie worth telling, but that time had long since passed for him to claim they were anything but real. No. They stop in the same way that the ocean draws back from the shore, unnatural and a warning or something larger looming on the horizon. 

“Why—why—”

He’s trying to understand. Had he lost it completely? This couldn’t be happening. Surely, this couldn’t be—but it was. He watches Hisashi give up the act, and the last, tiny sliver of hope holding Cedric together shatters. In its place comes a rushing, crashing, thundering wave of something that he doesn’t often display. Anger.

“Why are you such a piece of shit?”

It’s a burst that’s gone as quickly as it appears, immediately falling into exhaustion, and then back into tears in the blink of an eye. His words come out broken, but they’re coming out whether he wants them to or not, regardless of the current audience.

“Didn’t I—do what you asked?? What you wanted?? Wasn’t that—the whole fucking point of framing me??”

Briefly, Cedric seems to collect himself, but only barely. It’s all broken shards of glass, not quite lining up with each other, not quite able to piece itself back together again.

“I did everything you asked—I ruined everything for—I could’ve—I could’ve—” 

I could have had friends. I could have saved you. I could have had one of those. It was a choice he hadn’t even realized he’d made until it was too late, only informed that lives were at stake with his head already held underwater. He’d lost both. The weight of not one, but two impending losses hit him like a tidal wave and Cedric bites down hard on his tongue, ignoring the taste of copper that floods his mouth. 

You could have gotten away with it, too. 

Again, Alou’s earlier comment comes to mind, and the heartbeat hammering in his ears serves as the proverbial stick. You could have had it. You could have. If only you were kinder. Smarter. Crueler. What a pity. What a waste.

He’s shaking now, though whether it’s with fear or rage is impossible to tell. The only thing written across his face is a look of undeniable betrayal as he glowers back at Hisashi.

“You heard what they said happens—you fucking asked them what happens. So why—” 

Cedric can’t bring himself to finish it, and the question hangs unanswered, like a waiting noose around his neck.

Why did you give up on me?

[youryanderedaddy]

Imagine a yandere ghost who is cursed is trapped in the doll, so one day a family came to live in his house, but what the ghost did not expect is to fall in love with the couple's eldest daughter. Maybe this yandere ghost (doll) use the younger brother to get closer to his beloved...

I didn't really include the doll, but the overall idea is here ;)

Tw: nsfw, non - con, underage sex? (The reader is meant to be around 18, her brother is 16 - 17, but the ghost is 100+ so idk), (technically) incest, ghosts, possession, possessive/obsessive behavior, slight parental neglect ig

You knew it was a mistake moving into the old house up the hill. You tried arguing with your parents so many times about the mansion being hidden in the woods, so far away from any civilization, bringing up the fact it hadn't been bought for the last 8 years despite the insanely low price or the news about the previous owners dying in their sleep just like that, from "natural causes" even though they were an young energetic couple. But of course your worries had been discarded so easily since your younger siblings were ecstatic, constantly talking about finally living in a castle, which was obviously pushing it too far, but kids will be kids.

Your family was big, consisting of your mother, father, two younger sisters and a brother currently in his late teens. Your siblings managed to take all the nice bright rooms on the second floor so you were forced to sleep in the attic. At first it didn't seem so bad, yes, the place was dark and dusty, the space was limited, but it was a quiet spot and there were many interesting things left there to explore and discover.

The first week you discovered a huge box full of old books, medals, notebooks and different souvenirs from all over the world. The second week you found a few paintings covered by a thin disheveled cloak, most of them depicting a pretty young boy with golden locks and sad green eyes, dresses in an expensive silky clothing resembling what was nowadays considered an elegant suit. You didn't pay it much mind yet the miserable longing gaze of the kid haunted your dreams in the following days.

During the third week you noticed that things were going missing one by one. First it was your favorite lipstick, then your new dress, and suddenly your favorite items were gone just like that. On top of all, almost as if fate was tickling your paranoia, you could hear certain sounds at night that were too distorted be natural and too human to belong to an animal. There were sobs, loud and tormented, sometimes you could make up a few words in a language no one spoke anymore. You slept less and less each night, you could swear you felt someone's lingering touch on your shoulders, them gently stroking your hair and even pressing their cold unmoving lips on yours. This was usually the point when you opened your eyes and screamed in fear only to realize you were alone in the room. There was nobody there.

Still you decided to speak with your parents about the creepy events taking place in the attic. Much to your dismay they brushed your concerns off once again, laughing softly and calling you a scaredy - cat, going as far as to joke around about your "oh so creative" imagination getting the best of you just like it did in your childhood. But this time you insisted on holding your ground, almost begging them to take action and help you. At the end your mother decided to let you sleep in your brother's room for a while until you calm down, and as embarrassing it was to share a room with a hormonal teen, it was better than constantly being on the edge and losing sleep. Or so you thought.

The first night you slept in Steve's room nothing out of the ordinary happened and for the first time in weeks you actually managed to rest. The second night was blissfully peaceful as well and you quickly fell into a deep dreamless slumber.

The third night started well, just like the previous two. Your brother was tired from studying all day and went to bed early, giving you the freedom to relax a little bit before following his example. You could read a book or try to revise for your exam tomorrow, maybe even call your bestfriend and finally let her know all about your new classmates and just how boring life in the village was. But in that moment all these suggestion sounded annoying, nothing was interesting enough to hold your interest for more than a minute. Thinking about what to do next, you suddenly became aware that your body was tense and tired, but your mind was restless. After all you hadn't had time for self - care between the paranoia episodes and the fear, maybe it was finally time to do something nice and therapeutic for yourself.

You snatched a quick look at Steve and he was sleeping soundly, snoring from time to time, his usually angry face now calm and childlike. Making sure there was no one in the room awake, you finally slipped a hand down your pajama bottom until you felt the soft fabric of your panties. You closed your eyes and run a finger up and down your clothed sex, following the line of your slit. Your pussy throbbed at the sudden contact, the lack of pleasure in the last few weeks making it sensitive to the touch. You pushed your underwear lower so it hanged around your legs, and shoved one finger into your warm hole, enjoy the way your walls clenched around the digit. You flicked your clit gently, feeling it swell from the arousal, rubbing slow circles and pressing on your sweet spot every once in a while.

Your free hand went to your breasts, bare under the comfy oversized shirt, and awoke the cherry nipples with subtle pinches causing them to harden. You couldn't help but moan quietly as you decreased the pace of which you teased your hole and added a second finger in your pussy, fucking yourself on it. You were so focused on chasing your pleasure you didn't even notice the hand on your thigh pulling your own away from your excited throbbing core and replacing it with a big hard cock. Only once its head reached your tight entrance and pressed on it did your mind register the atrocious size difference. Your words stilled in your throat, the sudden panic rising in your chest, making your vision blurry and your cheeks rosy pink. You finally opened your eyes, your heart racing at the image of your younger brother towering above you with his member so close to entering your heat.

"Steve, what are you doing?" You whispered as you tried to squirm away from the boy, but he was quicker in pinning your wrists above your head in a deadlock. When did the male become so strong? Just yesterday he would ask you to open up his water bottle and help him with his math homework and now he was doing this...

"My name is Henry, my love." The voice was different from your brother's, lower and huskier, gentler in a way. You narrowed your eyes and observed the teenager's face, gasping as you noticed that his eyes had changed from black to green, yet all his other features had stayed stayed the same. You wanted to ask so many questions - who is Henry, why were your sibling's eyes and voice different from before - but you were quickly shut by one stern gaze. "I used to live here 80 years ago." The stranger started off with an unexpectedly soft tone as his grip on your wrists loosened. "I'm a ghost. I possessed your brother." He confessed calmly while you watched his pink lips part slightly with each breath as if you were in a trance before you found the strength to break your silence.

"Why are doing this to me? Why did you take my brother's body?" You questioned him manically, feeling like a confused little lamb sent to the slaughter, trembling and stuttering in front of a knife. Henry simply chuckled at your adorable dumbfounded expression and lowered his torso until his face was mere inches away from yours and you could feel his ice - cold breath on your warm red cheek. "Because I love you, darling." The ghost replied with a confident smirk that looked so weird and unnatural on the younger boy's face you almost gagged. Before you had the chance to say anything, he continued. "I've been wanting you for a while now, little girl. And with this body I can finally have you all to myself." You opened your mouth in a protest but your screams were easily muffled by a harsh kiss and a wet tongue down your throat. Next thing you knew the man had pushed your brother's manhood into your wet sloppy cunt in one sharp thurst and in your despair you had yelled for help once again, the ghost taking your whimpers greedily and shushing them away. Struggling was pointless.

In the next hour you were reduced to a sweaty whimpering mess of pain and arousal, fear and pleasure. The ghost was fucking you in a fast brutal pace while his free hand was playing with your clit, bringing you so damn close but never enough to send you over the edge. You were crying and your whole body was aching, your tits red from the rough manhandlind, your lips bruised and swollen from the rough kisses and bites. There were purple hickeys adorning your neck, belly and thighs and you went quiet in embarrassment every time you wondered how you would be able to hide them the next day.

"Please, whoever you are, let me come, I'm begging you." You pleaded desperately as you arched your back to meet the next couple of deep thrusts. Your cheeks were wet with tears and you could even taste the bitter salty flavor in your mouth mixed with your own drool and saliva. Upon hearing your meek pleas the man mercifully started hitting your cervix with each shove until his moves became sharp and quick, targeting your g-spot. You were so close you could feel your abdomen clench and tighten from the tingling sensitations. "Please..." You uttered weakly again, making doe eyes at your brother.

"Say you love me. Tie your soul to mine forever and I'll give you exactly what you want, beloved." Henry basically growled in your ear as he groped your breasts, squizing lightly the soft flesh. Your mind was so hazy and clouded you weren't sure how to respond so you just repeated the words easiest to grasp. "Love... you... forever, ngggh..." You muttered under your breath before moaning wantonly when the forceful thrusts finally sent you over the edge and your pussy clamped down in a big, satisfying orgasm. Your bliss was short - lived because soon the ghost was pounding into you again and again, keeping you too tired to move, struggle or even speak properly besides whimpering every once in a while. The rest of the night was a blur but eventually you fell asleep from the exhausting and the pleasure.

You woke up sore, your eyes red and puffy, your muscles tense and unnatentive. You rushed to look at your brother, but the teenager was sleeping just as peacefully as he did eight hours ago. One side of you was more than glad to know everything that had happened was simply a bad, terrible dream, while the other one still felt extremely uncomfortable and uneasy. You couldn't bear staying in the room any longer so you got dressed and went into the hall. Everyone else was still asleep and you felt as restless as if you hadn't caught a blink at all. You finally gave in to your paranoia and climbed the stars leading to the third floor.

You knelt on the ground where you had found the beautiful paintings. Those green eyes from your dream seemed way too familiar for it to be a coincidence. When you finally got a hold of your favorite piece, the one with the sad young boy, you had to cover your mouth to suppress the shock. There wasn't an aristocrat with golden locks on the picture anymore.

Now the one trapped in the painting was none other than you own brother, Steve. Instead of misery and pain in mysterious blue eyes, there was only terror in his tormented black ones. You screamed for the last time before you dropped the picture on the ground and ran away from the attic, the tears streaming down your face, but unfortunately, there was no escape from the restless dead souls.

[soggy-platee]

It Goes Both Ways

Rating: M (Somewhat graphic talk of injury)

Pairing: Din x GN!Reader

Summary: You take a hit for Din, feelings and angst ensue.

Note: Hello sorry this is literally all angst, a tiny bit of fluff. I can't stop myself, I just love the whole "feelings being revealed through injury" trope. If anyone wants, I was thinking about a smutty part two to this one! Let me know. Also, y'all were so kind with Doubt, so thank you!

...

The fight went bad from the second it started.

Well, before that, if you were being completely honest. Everyone in the cantina had been too still, too tense when you and Mando entered. It was so clearly unnatural for the usually boisterous atmosphere of a Nevarro night.

Yet somehow, you both missed it.

The kid was really to blame. He had been a ball of energy all night, practically bouncing off the walls of the hull while you and his father did everything in your power to get him to calm down. You were both annoyed and tired as your set out to meet the contact, should have known there was no hope of success. When the eight men in the cantina converged on you both, you were immediately thrust into the defensive. Exactly where you knew Mando hated to be. You had taken down several attackers, using your blade to slash and hack until it broke off in the chest cavity of some blue creature. You had lost just a moment as you attempted to wrench the hopeless blade from the now lifeless corpse, but it was enough time for a rough tug to pull you to the ground and a heavy weight to climb on top of you. You remembered the previous night almost fondly as opposed to the impossibly tight grip on your throat now.

Your fingers dug into the hand around your throat to no avail as the man- a Twi’lek, you now realized- bared his teeth down at you. Hot breath brushed over your face and you grimaced even further. Eyes rolling, you managed to steal a glance at Mando who was engaged in his own battle. There were two on him, one managing to get Mando’s arms behind his back in a tight hold while the other approached with a raised blade as you looked on. Fear shot through you at his vulnerable position and you doubled your efforts.

Your fingernails finally caught purchase on the arm that held you down at the same moment you bucked your hips with everything you had. A hiss came from above as you managed to pull one leg above the hips holding you down. Twisting hard, you flipped the man into the floor at full speed, his cheek cracking against the hard dirt. On your hands and knees now, you whipped your head up to see the armed man raise his blade and prepare to strike at Mando’s exposed neck. The fabric of his cowl would do nothing to stop the glowing, razor-sharp weapon that was mear inches from him now.

You shot up, your boots digging into the dirt as you righted yourself directly into a sprint. It happened in a split second. You reached Mando just as the blade completed its arc, half-throwing, and half-pressing yourself in front of his armored chest in a protective stance. You followed your first instinct, forearm coming up to block the blow.

White-hot pain bloomed along your arm, reaching all the way to the bone, as the blade cut through you like butter. Gasping at the initial shock, you managed to get a gut punch into the man in front of you before dropping to one knee. You clutched your forearm, trying your hardest to not collapse and curl up right then and there. You dimly registered fighting directly behind you through closed eyes, hoping to God it was Mando dealing with the last guy.

No offense to him, but you felt like you had done enough.

A wave of nausea came over you as you dared to open your eyes, taking in the bloody mess that was now your arm. The cut wasn’t overly long, but it was deep. You knew you had felt it hit bone, but jeez, you didn’t think you would be able to see it.

A blaster shot from behind you gave your enough adrenaline to rise on unsteady feet, turning to see Mando with his arm still raised, blaster smoke rising from the body of the final hostile in the room.

He turned to you with an immediacy that made you sway, the speed of the movement causing another wave of nausea to rise up. You doubled over as he approached, pressing your good hand to the back of your mouth. He was mumbling something as he approached you, Mando’a you would realize later. His hands found your hunched shoulders as you finally heard a word you recognized well,

“Cyare-hey, hey, look at me-”

With your hand still planted firmly over your mouth, you glanced up at him. You were taken aback by just how shook up he looked, even underneath the armor. His hands were tight around your shoulders, almost bruising you with their intensity. His chest was heaving, but it couldn’t be from the fight now. His voice nearly shook.

The pain almost blinding you was nothing compared to the icing feeling that crept down your spine at the sheet panic he was radiating. It wasn’t right, you had never seen him simply break like this.

You had seen him trembling underneath you, above you as he came, but he was still always in control when you were together. This was different.

This was frightening.

His hand pulled up to cup your jaw as you faced him, tilting it back and forth, frantically searing you even though the source of your pain was obvious. You wanted to say something, anything, to get him to calm down. But when you managed to pull your hand from your mouth, all that escaped was a low groan of pain.

Well that didn’t work, you thought faintly before your face collided with Mando’s chestplate, blackness overtaking you a second after.

…

The swaying was what woke you. A constant, fast motion shook you all over. Most pertinently, it was shaking the hell out of your arm. Something was wrapped around you, holding you close to a hard metal surface.

Why did it hurt again?

Ah yes, the cut.

The cut. The fight.

Mando.

You forced your eyes open, instinctually pulling away from whatever was retraining you. A gruff voice spoke to you as you turned your eyes to face the dark fabric of Mando’s chin.

“Stop.”

His faceplate didn’t even turn to you, just one word directed outward to the now-dark street ahead of you. He was carrying you through the town bridal style, your damaged arm tucked up into your chest as your calves swung with each footfall.

The memories of the night flooded back to your in greater detail, mainly your injury. An injury, you now noticed, hurt a lot less than it had...a few minutes ago? An hour?

Your confusion formed a question. Fighting the dryness in your voice, you huffed out, “How long was I out?”

“Not long.”

Another short answer, again not facing you.

A frown tugged on your lips, brows furrowing. Had something happened you didn’t remember? Why was he suddenly pissed at you? Finally, you glanced down at your arm. Wrapped in several bacta patches, secured with more bandages.

When the hell did that happen?

“Cantina had supplies”

Sometimes his ability to read you pissed you off.

You finished the trip in silence, doing your best to let off a pissed-off vibe. It was childish. You knew how to communicate, you knew Mando hardly ever did. But you were tired, hurt, and you didn’t know why that was such a huge problem to him. You had saved his ass, anyway.

You should be the pissed one if anything.

You approached the Crest’s ramp and you prepared to be set down, tensing your legs and starting to push off his chest with your good arm.

His grip simply remained firm, however, showing no indication he would be letting you down. You twisted your head in an attempt to look him in the visor, confused as all hell. His face remained stubbornly to front, much to your continued irritation.

You pushed off him a few more futile times, wiggling your hips in an attempt to loosen his hand around your knees.

Nothing.

You just slumped in his arms then, waiting for what seemed like the world’s slowest ramp to hit the ground.

He stomped into the ship and didn’t set you down until the ramp started to raise. His demeanor still remained stony, but he set you down with a gentleness only reserved for you and the child. He steadied you as your feet hit the ground, but his hands pulled away as soon as he confirmed you could stand alone.

Before you could even speak, he was gone, heading to the ladder of the cockpit.

That was it, you had absolutely had enough.

You threw your good hand in the air before shouting across the silent hull.

“Yeah, thanks for the ride, I’ll just go fuck off then.”

It wasn’t your best line, but you were pissed. And confused.

And hurt more than anything.

To your credit, the words were enough to stop him, hand on the first rung of the ladder. You stood expectantly, breathing heavily from your words and your injury.

Silence.

You made an incredulous sound, turning around and folding your arms to the best of your ability.

“Leave it to me to fuck up and save your ass, my bad, it won’t happen again.”

You winced as the words left your mouth, it was mean. It was terrible. You didn’t mean it. You would lay down your life for him at any moment and he knew it. Well, you thought he knew it. You thought he would do the same for you, too. But here he was, acting like you were a liability. Like he didn’t care about you at all. It made you defensive. Maybe you misread things between you too. Maybe you were just sex to him. Maybe you didn’t go any further.

That was fine, you could handle that. You just needed him to tell you, and not do whatever this was.

Leather creaked as his hand tightened on the metal with your words, but silence persisted. The fight in your was waning as your thoughts continued to run wild.

Your next words came out more defeated than aggressive, “If I’m an issue, just tell me. I’m gone.”

That sparked something in him, hand flying off the ladder as he whirled to face you. The movement caught you off guard, combined with the weakened state it made you stumble back a step Then another, then more as the suddenly fervent Mandaoliran stalked toward you across the hull. Your back hit the wall before he finally stopped a foot away from you, helmet tilted down at you as his shoulders rose and fell with deep, ragged breaths.

His helmet searched you, looking you up and down while his hands came to hover near your shoulder. He didn’t touch you, however, simply grasping at air several times in contemplation before fisting them once more at his side.

“Of course you’re an issue, you are the issue -my issue.”

His tone was unreadable, half-angry, half-desperate.

You gaped like a fish in his face, trying to make sense of what the hell was going on. Where was this coming from?

Your silence rushed him forward. Pushing a finger into your chest, he rambled, “You did fuck up- saving me. I didn’t want you- you shouldn’t have- I didn’t need it.” He spat the final words, but there was something underneath it, far too similar to his tone earlier, his panic.

Still, his words reignited your anger and confusion. “What do you mean you “didn’t need it”. That knife was going for your neck!”

He threw his head back, hands coming up to grip the sides of his helmet.

“Exactly! A knife which you jumped in front of, with no plan, no defense. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I didn’t want you to die, idiot! What the hell did you think I was thinking?”

He stumbled, whatever retort he had dying soundlessly on his tongue. Then, he spun from you, crossing his arms over his chest as he did. His next words were quiet, dismissive but firm.

“I didn’t ask for that. Never do that again.”

You literally could not comprehend his train of thought. Did he want you to just let him die? You grabbed his shoulder with your good hand, trying to force him to face you to no avail.

“You don’t get a say, you don’t have to ask. Don’t you get it? If I want to take a hit for you, that’s on me.”

He rounded on you once more, helmet coming so close that it nearly made contact with your forehead. “You don’t get to make that choice”, he growled, low and urgent.

Oh, now that was fucking golden.

“What? I don’t get to make my own choices with my own life? Is that what it’s come to now? Clearly, you don’t trust me, but I at least thought you could afford me my own autonomy.”

Finally, his hands came up and grabbed your shoulders, shaking you with intensity as he shouted in your face.

“Would you just listen to me? I won’t- cannot lose you. Not for me. Not ever.”

Your shoulders tensed in his grip and your eyes shot wide. His words startled you, the meaning washing over you in steps. They first relived you, convinced you that you felt the same way about each other, regardless of the fact this was the first time you were both voicing such outright feelings. But they also struck that same anger in you.

“So you get to protect me but I can’t do that same for you?”. Your voice was calmer now, eyes searching his visor for some sign he understood how unfair- if touching- his words were.

His hands loosened on your arms, shoulders dropping from their tense state. His helmet dropped from your gaze, swinging loosely before he sighed, “...Yes.”

His voice upturned at the end, almost in question of his own words. Of course. He knew how stupid it sounded.

Anger left you at his defeated look, head hanging between his shoulders. You raised your good arm, slowly placing your fingertips on the bottom of his helmet. He tensed for a moment at the touch, but you pushed gently enough on the metal that he simply followed your guidance. His visor came to face you once more, the blackness reflecting the look of concern in your eyes. You could only imagine that his held the same look.

Gloved fingers found your bad arm, still drawn tightly to your chest. They brushed over the patches gingerly, making their way to your hand and intertwining with your own digits. Your eyes fluttered at the touch, the familiar feeling melting away the residual pain like water down a stream.

He sighed heavily, before speaking with a subdued sincerity.

“You make me so fucking scared, pretty. I’ve never-I didn’t know that feeling until you and the kid. I can’t focus on anything else. I can’t lose you- can’t live without you.”

His fingers tightened around yours as he spoke, and your soft smile was reflected in silver back at you.

“Do you not think I feel the same thing, feel the same way about you?”

He gave your hand a squeeze before breathing, “...I do.”

Your smile faltered at his admission, worry coloring your next words.

“Then why do you think I could live without you?”

It was times like these you cursed his helmet, his creed. You wanted- needed to know that your words were getting across to him, that he understands just how fucking much he meant to you. While his face was unreadable, a short breath through the modulator and another sharp squeeze of your hand told you that you had hit the mark.

You took a deep breath before saying, “Listen. We protect each other. Equally. That’s how this works. You can’t stop me. So if you want to keep me out of harm’s way, then you have to keep your own metal-ass safe, yeah?”

You swore you heard a chuckle from underneath your helmet at your comment, and you broke into a grin. You pulled your good hand from his and placed it behind his helmet, tugging it toward you and resting the cool metal on your forehead. His hand mimicked your position, coming up to intertwine with the hair at the base of your neck.

You let your eyes slip shut before saying, “Do you understand now, dummy?”

His hand gripped your hair tighter, pressing your closer. His words were thick when he spoke, “I do.”

You released your grip on him, righting yourself, but his hand simply slid down your back. He still held you close when he said, “And I’m sorry… for the way I acted. It wasn’t my intention to hurt you. I was just…”

He faded off, but you knew where he was headed. You chuckled and flashed another smile, “It’s alright, make it up to me by taking the next knife, huh?”

The usual huff of laughter at your stupid comments didn’t come however, his helmet simply tipped down to take you in, hand tightening on your lower back.

“Actually…” he started, voice growing lower, softer, “I had another idea about how to make it up to you”

[babyybitchhh]

Arlong x Reader 18+

Rating: Explicit/R-18+

Words: 4,609

Warnings: noncon/dubcon, monster fucking (?), size difference, over sized genitalia and the buckets of cum to go with it, oral sex, fellatio, eventual consent

A/N: After consulting with my editor in chief, we agreed that the fishmen probably feel a bit like dolphins - firm to the touch but stupidly smooth, a bit clammy - so that's where my descriptive inspiration for this one came from. Y'know. Just in case anyone ends up wondering what the fuck I was smoking while I wrote this. lol And as always, please enjoy! : )

♥♥♥♥

Arlong was not what you would consider a nice man.

There was something mean about him, and undeniably so, but the way he crowds you against the wall late one evening still manages to catch you off guard. You’d thought you had already seen everything his cruelty had to offer. Foolishly, you’d believed that there was a certain line even someone like him would not cross.

Regrettably, you’d been wrong about that.

“W - what are you doing?”

“Don’t be coy.” He mutters while he idly, possessively toys with a strand of your hair between his webbed fingers. “I know you’ve been looking forward to this.”

The cloying stink of booze on his breath hits you all at once and you wrinkle your nose in distaste. You don’t mean to do it. You regret it almost instantly but Arlong doesn’t care for the why or the how, or the rushed apology already forming on the tip of your tongue. All he sees is the discomfort etched across your expression and his demeanor responds in kind, becoming surly and aggressive in the same moment.

With a rumbling grunt, he steps into you and bodily shoves you against the wall. The amount of force in just that simple gesture has you quailing under the imposing weight of him even as you start to shirk away. You think to bolt for safety a little too late and his clammy hand takes advantage of that split second indecision to grab your chin, forcing your head up to look at him.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart? Hm?” He curls himself over you, bracing his other arm high above your head on the wall so he can lean close and get in your face. You’ve never felt quite so minuscule as you do standing there, frozen to the spot and horribly dwarfed by the towering fishman who’s hacksaw nose was mere inches from yours now.

With each passing second, it was becoming exceedingly hard not to panic.

“Am I not to your liking? Is that it? You’ve really never thought about this before?”

Your mouth opens but nothing comes out. You aren’t sure what to say. You don’t know what it is he wants to hear.

Arlong doesn’t wait around for a proper response, though, and instead trails smooth, rubbery fingers down your neck to your shoulder, and then further still to grasp your wrist. You put up no resistance when he pulls, unceremoniously directing your slack hand to the front of his shorts and you jolt at the firm weight pressing up into your palm.

Sucking in a stilted gasp, your eyes go wide at him. “I - I haven’t - -“

“No?” He cuts across you with a faintly disappointed sigh. “Not even a little? You’re not at all curious?”

You whimper, shaking your head when he squeezes and manually forces your hand to close around the stiff outline in his pants. It was big and still growing, as evidenced by the eager twitch it gives at your touch. Shame immediately washes over you when your pussy clenches, the blood in your neck pounding as you try to turn away from him.

“Of course not, w - what would I have to be curious about?”

“You ever seen a fishman’s cock before?”

Your ears were starting to burn. “Nuh … no. Please, Arlong. I don’t - -“

“Come on. I’m sure you’ll like it. There isn’t anything else like it in the whole world, y’know. One of a kind.”

Same as before, he doesn’t give you a chance to sort through your thoughts before taking the incentive. His unoccupied hand drops from the wall and tugs at the waistband of his shorts even while he wrests your twisting hand where he wants it to be. You struggle wildly now, adrenaline fueled fear making you desperate and jerky, but he’s much too strong to break free from. You were trapped.

Horrified, you screw your eyes shut before you can catch a glimpse of what’s hanging between his legs. You’d never seen one before - not a fishman’s, and you would have preferred to keep it that way. The hushed rumors you’d overheard about encounters between people like Arlong and humans such as yourself were nothing kind, after all.

But with very little effort on his part, he clamps your hand into place and you go stock-still at the sensation of porcelain smooth, velvety skin under your fingertips. It doesn’t feel half as repulsive as you’d imagined it would. And, you’re surprised to find, it doesn’t look anywhere near as unnatural as you’d assumed it to be when you apprehensively crack your eyes open and glance at it.

What you had in your hand was just a cock. Nothing more and nothing less.

Albeit a rather large, hefty cock that was a slightly darker shade of blue than the rest of him but still by all accounts a normal looking appendage. If it hadn’t been for it’s unusual color and the staggering size, you could have easily mistaken it for a human’s.

Embarrassed, you flounder for something to say. “It’s … it’s rather nice, isn’t it?”

Arlong snorts and displaces a few of your wispy flyaways with the resulting puff of air, making you shudder between him and the wall. “Don’t try to bullshit me. S’not polite.”

“I’m not.” You insist, shyly forcing your gaze up to meet his. “I expected something different, that’s all.”

“Like what?” He murmurs as he leans his weight into you, not so subtly pinning you under him. You swallow hard, hesitant to say it. But either by virtue of being mildly intoxicated or genuine sincerity on his part, you felt a strange sort of inclination to be honest with him.

“Frankly, I thought it would be more monstrous.”

Arlong manages to catch you off guard again when he outright laughs at that. “Give it time. I’m not fully hard yet.”

Your eyes go big as saucers. “W - wha - -“

He laughs again, somehow even louder this time, and you start to quake with renewed vigor as his cock does indeed continue to twitch and grow in your hand. You couldn’t believe that it would get any bigger than it already was but the proof was right in front of your face. It was still filling out, becoming increasingly more weighty in your palm, and that knowledge terrified you far more than you were willing to admit.

“Don’t look so scared.” He coos, anything but sympathetic when he notices the obvious disquiet casting a shadow over your face. His suddenly good mood did not bode well for you at all. “You said it was nice, didn’t you?”

“Well … well, yes, but - -“

“Here. Let me show you something.”

Releasing his hold on you, Arlong clamps his moist palm down on the back of your neck and unceremoniously steers you forward, away from the wall. You don’t even think to fight it. And how could you when your fate was already sealed? You’d given him an inch by conceding that his cock was not entirely disagreeable and now he was taking a mile.

It was your own fault, really.

“Wait - hold on.” You stammer, panic suddenly creeping into your voice when you realize he was making a beeline with you for the nearest chair. “I didn’t mean it like that, Arlong! I just - -“

“You just what?” He sneers. “Felt like teasing me some more? Thought it’d be funny to tempt me with that pretty little mouth of yours again?”

You sputter in red faced affront. “I never - -“

Cutting you off yet again, he forcefully shoves you down onto your knees. Hard.

You seethe at the splintering pain racing up your legs as he pivots around you to plop down on the waiting seat, his ever present grip on the back of your neck quickly dragging you closer. Arlong’s anticipation for what was coming next was almost palpable, the eager excitement in his motions clear as day. In a last ditch effort, you try to twist away from him but he holds firm even as he works to tug his shorts the rest of the way down with the opposite hand.

“I know you’ve thought about this.” He says it again, breathy now, as if repetition would somehow make it true. “I’ve seen the way you look at me, sweetheart. There’s no need to hide it.”

Whatever biting insult you were going to spit at him catches in your throat and momentarily chokes you when he gets his pants down over his knees, cock springing up in all its full glory. You outright stare, your mouth going dry. Mind blank and pussy aching with phantom pain.

You weren’t sure what he expected you to do with it. He was far too big to fit in any human orifice, surely; but if he was at all concerned about the logistics involved he certainly didn’t show it.

Casually kicking his shorts off, Arlong plants his feet firmly on the floor and shuffles his long legs wide open to welcome you in. The heavy sway of his hanging nutsack seems to taunt you, silently promising a steaming hot load that you weren’t prepared to take. You audibly gulp down your nerves as he pulls you closer, right up against him until the sinfully smooth shaft of his cock is pressed tight against your cheek. It was hard to breathe through the potently masculine musk assaulting your nose and even harder to come to terms with the way your cunt gushes in response to it.

Why was this turning you on so much?

“Arlong … please!” You mewl, helpless to stop it when he relentlessly rubs his cock against your face as if to scent you. “Please listen to me. I never intentionally tried to tease you. I’m sorry …”

“Liar.” A sharp thwack against your cheek accompanies this accusation, the fleshy head of his dick leaving a sharp sting in its wake. “You want me. Just admit that. If you do, your punishment for being such a flirty slut won’t be so severe.”

You bristle at that, trying once again to recoil from him, but he merely pinches your neck even tighter to keep you in place. All you can do is watch in mounting horror as he takes his cock in the opposite hand and starts to pump it, slowly, as if to coax it that last little bit harder. The prominent vein running along the underside visibly throbs for you while he does it, pushing against the thin layer of skin in a rhythmic beat which probably would have flattered you under better circumstances. You hadn’t thought he’d get this worked up over you.

But, to be fair, you also hadn’t expected Arlong to be interested in a human woman in the first place.

“Like the view? You’re going to be a good girl and suck it for me, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

Dazedly, you watch the steady up and down motion of his webbed hand until you eventually find yourself nodding along with it. You felt vaguely like an idiot for consenting to this but there was no denying how tantalizing he looked. For better or worse, you were willing to take the risk.

And that seems to amuse him a great deal, his raspy laugh misting over you even as he adds a twist to his pumping motion, tugging at the foreskin in the process. Scandalized surprise rushes to the forefront of your mind when you catch your first peek of the glans and realize it’s a blue so dark and rich it was almost purple. It’s such a stark contrast from the rest of his uniquely pigmented skin that you immediately want to see more of it, and you lean forward to get a better look with nothing short of rapt fascination. You’d never seen anything quite like it before.

“You’re that interested now?” He murmurs knowingly, snickering faintly under his breath.

“Only a little …”

“Liar.”

But Arlong’s tone holds no real bite this time, and he graciously gives you what you want by rolling the meaty tip back to tuck it behind the ridged glans. The blunt head is just as impossibly smooth as the rest of him, his skin entirely free of pores or blemishes, and so firm that you aren’t sure if there will be any give to it. You’re immediately reminded that you and him were not the same, the differences between you two as glaring as ever.

Without missing a beat, you decide you no longer care.

Reaching up, you carefully take him in hand and a thrill runs through you at the sensation. He’s every bit as silky as he looks but when you experimentally squeeze, it becomes apparent that he’s also relentlessly stiff. You’d thought, maybe, it was just the muscle bound parts of him that were as unyielding as they appeared to be but even this area was so densely padded with fatty insulation that it offered very little cushion. It seemed, then, that the only truly soft spot on his body was probably his ballsack.

Tentatively, you rove your gaze up to look at him. “Can I really?”

“I’ll be pissed if you don’t.”

You scoff, trying not to smile, but when that fails you lean up to drag your tongue along the throbbing vein and hide the curl of your mouth. A triumphant sigh puffs out of him, the hand on the back of your neck relaxing slightly, but he makes no move to completely let go of you yet. The weight of his palm spurs you on and you go up a little higher to flick at the glans, pleasantly surprised at the taste of him. Salty and strong, yet not repugnant. It was a heady flavor, one you’ve never sampled before, and you can’t help but wonder if this is how all fishmen taste. It was strangely intoxicating.

“There’s my good girl. That’s it.” He goads you, leaning back into the chair so he can fully appreciate the sight of you on your knees for him. “Is it as good as you thought it’d be? All you had to do was ask and I would have let you do this a lot sooner, you know.”

Resisting the urge to snap at him to shut up, you use your grip on his cock to angle the tip towards your face. The narrow slit in the center of that purple-blue bud winks at you, oozing a fresh bead of slick precum that glistens faintly in the overhead light. Sticking your tongue out, you lap it up with a hunger you hadn’t expected from yourself and a fresh wave of bitter salt swarms your tastebuds. You moan, very quietly, against the glans before sealing your lips around it.

Arlong’s lean thighs give the faintest jolt in response, his pelvis lifting just enough to nudge his dick a little deeper into your mouth. You allow it, for the time being, far too caught up in the exquisite taste of him to worry about his propensity for being a bit pushy. It was in his nature, after all.

But when you try to take more of him on your own, it quickly becomes apparent that your earlier estimation of him had been right on the money. He was much too large to comfortably fit and you only make it a few inches down before your jaw starts to scream in protest. You pull back to suckle on the spongy head for a moment, laving it with your tongue before deciding to try again. The progress you make is negligible at best, your lips straining around his girth as you furrow your brows and noise a muffled sound of frustration around him.

“Don’t try to force it, sweetheart. You’ll just hurt yourself.” He chuckles, the hand on the back of your neck sliding higher to curl around the curve of your skull. His palm is massive in comparison and you feel your cheeks start to warm when he condescendingly pats your head, tutting at you. “You’ll have to practice hard if you want to take it all someday.”

The heat inside your gut sparks anew as your eyes snap up at his face. He smirks right back, razor sharp rows of teeth glinting dangerously and reminding you, once again, that he was a real threat. An apex predator of the most deadly kind, and you were knelt at his feet sucking his cock like a good little pet. You should have been ashamed of yourself. You probably were going to be ashamed of yourself, later, when the carnal high faded and your senses returned.

For now, though, you’d already made peace with your fate and you pointedly give his cock a rough tug. That only makes Arlong’s lascivious grin widen, though, and you’re left with no other choice but come up off him with a wet, smacking pop to give your jaw a break.

Tilting your head back while you suck in a much needed lung full of air, you pull his cock to your open mouth and set it along your tongue. He hums appreciatively at the visual while you pump the length of him with your hand, letting more precum ooze out of him and onto your waiting palette. A faltering groan rises in the back of your throat at the taste, so heady and potent that it makes your mind spin dizzyingly fast. You couldn’t get enough.

“Heh. I take it you like it then?”

In lieu of an answer, you seal your lips around him and lean forward again, glancing up at Arlong through the fall of your lashes. His stilted sigh of approval rushes straight to your cunt, and you give a needy little squirm as he drags webbed fingers along the side of your face to touch at the pulled taught corner of your mouth. Rubbery palm skirting along your cheek, he reaches further back and then clamps down on the nape of your neck so he can pull you somehow even closer to him.

You’re pressed flush against the chair by the time he’s satisfied, neck straining to accommodate the length of his cock. Your unoccupied hand comes up to brace against his thigh when he starts to guide you through a bobbing motion, the stuffed full schlucking noise of your mouth almost unbearably loud in the otherwise quiet room. It sounds borderline obscene to you but he appears to enjoy it, resting his head against the back of the chair and sighing up at the ceiling with unmistakable pleasure coloring the exhalation.

Your pussy clenches at the sight of Arlong enjoying himself so much, enjoying what you were doing to him, and you offer the glans another enthusiastic suck in return. His fingers twitch against your neck and squeeze, just this side of painful. But he does a good job keeping himself in check, and you put a little more effort into pumping the part of him that your lips can’t reach by way of thanks. He could all too easily rip you in half - in more ways than one - so you appreciated the restraint he was showing.

He doesn’t even seem to notice the change in your hands pace though, his mouth running on drunken autopilot now that he’s let his guard down. Now that he’s fully given himself over to the wet warmth of your maw, he was uncharacteristically eager to heap his praises on you and you were more than happy to soak it all up.

“My good, good girl. Yeah, you like that cock, don’t you, baby? You love it. I can tell. You’ll never want another human to fuck you after I’m done. I’m gonna’ ruin you, you know that? So damn good for me …”

The tingling warmth that spreads through you makes it hard to think straight, your vision starting to swim as if you were looking through a foggy fish eye lense. You never thought he’d talk to you that way. Didn't think he could stand your kind enough to regard you as anything other than a nuisance to tolerate for the sake of his own goals. It may have just been the booze talking, you knew that, but you were still rather pleased by this turn of events anyway.

Your jaw was beginning to ache in earnest, though, and you whimper around his cock as you drag your hand down off his thigh to squeeze in between Arlong’s legs. Gently, you caress the heavy weight of his ballsack, delighted to find that it was just as soft and vulnerable as you’d suspected it would be. He hisses at the contact, hips lifting off the seat of the chair again, but he does it a little too roughly this time and you gag.

Seething through clenched teeth, he readjusts his hold on the back of your head, gets a better grip and slowly thrusts up into your mouth. The careful way he does it surprises you slightly, but you don’t get a chance to linger on that thought for very long because he immediately repeats the motion without giving you a moment to adjust and your eyes start to mist up. He doesn’t quite reach your throat like this, your lips already stretched to their limit and unable to accommodate any more of him, and yet that doesn’t stop you from choking with each drawn out flex of his hips. You were going to be sick at this rate.

Sucking in a faltering wet breath through your nose, you try to brace yourself for his next upward stroke. You weren’t sure how much more of this your gag reflex could take, or your poor jaw for that matter. Being on the receiving end of Arlong’s praises wasn’t worth it if you just ended up spewing your guts all over him, ruining everything in the end. Plus, you were pretty sure he’d just redact everything he’d said if it came down to that. You were damned either way.

Deciding it was best to take a moment and regroup, lest the unthinkable happen, you try to pull off him but the hand on your head keeps you firmly in place. You let out a muffled squawk, as confused as you were terrified of what would happen if he kept going like this. But he doesn’t seem to share any such concerns, and your gaze frantically shoots up at his face when he just keeps shallowly pumping into your mouth. He wasn’t even looking at you, though, his eyes closed and turned up at the ceiling.

“That’s it. Just a little more. I know it probably hurts, sweetheart, but just endure it a little bit longer for me, okay? I’m getting close … I’m getting so close, baby. Can you feel it? I’m gonna’ give you such a big load … ngh, you’ll never be able to swallow it all, but that’s okay. Just … haah, just keep it in your sweet little mouth a bit longer, okay?”

You don’t exactly have a choice in the matter, your cheeks burning hot as reflexive tears streak down your face. Abandoning his balls, you dig trembling fingers into the meat of Arlong’s inner thigh as a painful reminder that you were working on borrowed time here. But he seems to enjoy that, the groaning burst of air that puffs out of him in a sudden rush sending sympathetic shockwaves racing down your spine. Your panties were soaked at this point, uncomfortably clinging to your sticky cunt as you rock forward in a fruitless bid for relief. It was all you could do just to keep your lunch down, though, and you were far too lightheaded to even consider slipping your hand between your legs to rub circles into your clit. It wouldn’t take much to send you over the edge, either.

Even through your clothes, you were sure to cum quick - but how could you possibly think about that right now when he was still thrusting into your mouth at such a staggered pace that you felt as violated as if he’d properly fucked you? It didn’t make sense, how he had such a powerful effect on you when he’d barely even touched you so far. Almost like he had some sort of potent aphrodisiac at his deploy.

Could this possibly be a fishman, thing or was it just an Arlong thing?

“Oooh yeah, baby, right there. Right there. Your mouth feels so damn good. Are you ready? I’m gonna’ give it to you now … fuck, I’m cumming, baby, I’m cumming!”

With a feral, animalistic grunt, Arlong thrusts up off the chair and shoves his cock as far into your mouth as it will go. You sputter around him, frantically noising as your throat constricts and heaves against the pressure. In the same moment, he gives a full bodied shudder and hot, thick ropes shoot out of him to pool at the base of your tongue. Your eyes promptly roll back as you choke around his bubbling semen, face wet with tears and snot, and perspiration, but he doesn’t stop. It just keeps coming out of him, flooding your mouth until you’re sure you’ll drown in it.

So blissfully numb by the time he finally pulls out, you almost don’t notice the absence. It’s only when a fresh string of ejaculate plops heavy against your cheek that you realize he's cumming on your face now, and you obediently stick your tongue out to catch the salty discharge. He doesn’t seem to be aiming for your mouth, though, and you’re left with no other choice than to sit there and let him paint your face white until the pulses gradually slow to a stop some moments later.

The last bit oozes out of him, achingly drained from the bottom of his balls it would seem, as he squeezes it from the base up with an accompanying guttural moan. You let him push your head back down without protest and lap up the sticky bead, much to Arlong’s heaving pleasure.

He was still panting from the exertion, trying to catch his breath, and you were still struggling to swallow the excessive cum in your mouth so you could breathe at all. An odd sense of peace settles in the aftermath and you think maybe, in a far off, dreamy sort of way, maybe he wasn’t quite as mean as you’d pegged him. Someone inherently cruel wouldn’t have been so mindful of your physical limitations, right?

You’re pretty sure that’s not how it usually goes, anyway.

Gathering yourself to the best of your ability, you glance down at the front of your shirt only to outright grimace. You were absolutely coated in sheets of fast drying cum, and you weren’t so sure it wouldn’t stain. Dammit.

“So, uh. Do you always cum buckets, or was that all just for little ol’ me?” You venture to ask, not the least bit surprised when your voice comes out a raspy mess. You’d definitely need some warm tea after this.

“It’s a fishman thing.” He says rather flippantly, clearly unconcerned. “You’ll get used to it.”

Your head comes up in stark surprise. Well. That certainly answered your earlier question.

“Y’know,” you say, speaking cautiously slow. “That sounds an awful lot like you’re planning on doing this again, boss.”

Arlong actually has the audacity to smirk at you, his pale eyes dancing with what could only be mischief, and a not entirely unpleasant shudder promptly races through you in response.

“Again? We haven’t even finished the first time, sweetheart.”

[wolveria]

Inside Your Wires - Chapter 3

Pairing: Human!Connor x Android!Reader

Prompt: For the @dbhau-bigbang​ 2020 challenge!

Series Warnings (18+ only): Eventual smut, slow burn, fantasy bigotry, violence, brief noncon elements, angst with a happy ending

Chapter summary: Connor comes face-to-face with his first deviant.

AO3

(Story moodboard by @uh-kitty-got-wet​​)

Connor winced as the planks under his feet creaked with his shifting weight; quiet but still too loud for his liking. He reached the bottom of the steps and let his eyes adjust to the darkness for a moment. It gave him the opportunity to see it wasn’t completely pitch black, and there was pale light from the streetlamps outside streaming through the cloth-covered basement windows.

He understood why Ralph had called it a cellar now; the floor was packed dirt, shrouding his footfalls in total silence. Concentrating, he even thought he could hear the rain outside.

No androids, though. The cellar was eerily quiet, setting the hairs on the back of his nape on end.

Connor started forward, holding his service pistol aimed to the ground and shifting sideways to make himself a smaller target. He gave a start when something brushed against his cheek, like the cold breath of a ghost, but the cause was nothing more supernatural than one of the basement windows having been propped open.

He scowled. So that’s why he could hear the rain, and now Ortiz’s android was long gone.

Something caught his eye. There was a faint light against the wall below the window, and Connor carefully moved forward for a better look. It was only when he was a few feet away that he realized what he was looking at: various candles, sprinkled dried petals, and even some kind of statue.

In the flickering candlelight there was strange, hurried writing on the wall. As if the writer had been in distress. He squinted to read the letters, but they made no sense.

RA9?

Connor turned and opened his mouth, about to shout to Ralph that the cellar was clear, when a hand clamped down hard to silence him. He didn’t even have time to give a muffled shout as he was dragged backwards into the dark.

His back pressed against a wooden shelf, inhaling sharply from the discomfort and in response to who—or what—had grabbed him.

The CyberLife android had him pinned, one hand held tightly over his mouth with the other splayed against his chest. It was deceptively strong, and when Connor tried to shove the android away, it barely jostled from his efforts.

Panic coursed through him as his body reacted to the pressure, giving him an inconvenient erection for the second time that night. For fuck’s sake, was Connor really that pent-up that he was getting his rock’s off to… to…

The prototype’s LED spun a rhythmic blue but its eyes were watchful, appearing almost black in the dark. Gone was the earnest, innocent look, replaced with something far too calm and intense. Connor swallowed thickly, wondering what the fuck it was thinking, when it raised its hand from his chest and pressed a finger against its lips. The universal sign to be quiet.

Oh. So the Ortiz android was here. But why were they sneaking around if that was the case? Surely they could just order the fucker to come out of hiding and be done with it. The sooner Connor could get home, the better. His night was already ruined enough without having to look for lost property.

The android didn’t explain its actions, but it did wait for something, and it took Connor a second to realize it was waiting for him. He gave a small nod, indicating he understood what it wanted, if not why it wanted it.

It released Connor and stepped back, giving him one last lingering look before turning and disappearing into the deep shadows. Only the faint glow of its light ring made it so Connor could keep track of its progress, moving around the shelves and various heaps of junk lying around.

The android moved like it could see in the dark. Hell, maybe it could. Connor had no idea what kind of high tech bells and whistles CyberLife gave its shiny new toys.

He lost sight of it as it moved around the corner of a shelf, and he gave up trying to keep pace when he banged his shin against a wooden grate. He hissed an annoyed “shit” under his breath, wincing as he did.

A startled gasp came from the other side of the cellar, followed by a shattering noise like a dropped glass, and then hurried footsteps in the dark.

“Don’t move! Detroit police!” Connor yelled automatically, raising his gun at the figure as it fled toward the steps.

The figure raised its arm, the muzzle of a gun flashing at the same moment thunder filled the cellar. A jar of some kind of jam burst next to his head.

The android—had to be, a bright red circle was blazing from its temple—fired again, this time brushing so close it grazed Connor’s cheek, leaving a trail of fire behind.

The next shot, Connor knew it wouldn’t miss. His did. He depressed the trigger twice and missed both times, his aim shaky from adrenaline and the near brush with death.

This is it, he thought. This was how he was finally going to die. In some dirty old cellar to a fucking android.

Connor was shoved sideways as the gun went off a third time, the explosion not loud enough to mask the sound of a bullet hitting something soft. He hit the dirt floor hard, gasping as pain burst through his shoulder.

But he couldn’t get up, there was a weight on his chest, pressing him to the ground next to the staircase. The wooden steps acted as cover for the next bullets that fired overhead, chunks of debris raining down on them as the crazed android fired over and over.

Connor stared, dumbfounded, as the other android sat on top of him, shielding him with its body. His eyes went even wider when he caught sight of the dark hole in its shoulder, spreading dark liquid with every second.

“You’re hurt,” he breathed, remembering what that stuff was. Thirium. The android had taken a bullet for him.

It didn’t acknowledge him, instead it held out its hand and demanded in a firm tone, “Give me your gun.”

He blinked. Wondered if he’d hit his head.

“What? No, I’m not gonna give you my gun!”

“Con!” shouted a familiar voice from upstairs, laced with worry and fear.

“Don’t come down, Colin!” he cried back, panic in his throat.

If his brother got killed by this thing—

The CyberLife prototype grabbed the gun out of his hand, rose onto its knees, and fired between the wooden rails of the staircase.

Connor heard at least one of them hit the target, but the cry of anguish was not what he had been expected. It almost sounded like the victim’s android was in pain.

But that was impossible. What the hell was wrong with it?

“Connor, what the fuck!” Colin yelled from upstairs. At least he listened to Connor and hadn’t come down.

“The fucking android has a gun, so stay put!” He never imagined he’d be saying words like that one day. What a fucking mess. “It’s glitching out, or broken, or something!”

“…the CyberLife android?” Colin called back, confused.

“No, goddammit, the other one! The Ortiz android!”

“The what? Jesus Christ, are you serious—“

Connor flinched as several more gunshots rang out, but the CyberLife android, still straddling his hips like he was a piece of fucking furniture, fired back.

“Get off,” Connor hissed, trying to push the android away, but it was like trying to move a stubborn statue made of marble. “And give me back my gun!”

To his eternal surprise, it actually listened, turning the pistol around and handing it to him grip first. When he took his service weapon back, the android eased off of him, still remaining in a hunched crouch so it wouldn’t be in the line of fire.

“I need you to lay covering fire, Detective.” It spoke with unnatural calmness, the kind that only a machine could display, especially in the middle of a shootout.

“What? Why?”

The android tilted its head and eyed him with what looked suspiciously like annoyance.

“Because if we’re to understand what’s happening with these androids, we need to take one that’s still functional.”

Connor blinked rapidly and open his mouth, disbelief ringing through him.

“You’re going after it.”

“Yes,” it said, like that was a perfectly reasonable statement. “The risk should be minimal to your team. If I fail and am destroyed in the process, take down the deviant with whatever means you wish.”

“W-wait!”

Connor reached out his hand to grab the android by the sleeve of its jacket, but it had already moved, dashing between the open space between the stairs and the shelves.

Gunshots spurred Connor into action, and he braced against the staircase and fired repeatedly in the direction of the red LED. He tried not to hit it, but if he did, he certainly wasn’t going to cry about it. They should be riddling it full of bullet holes; it wasn’t just defective, it was murderous.

“Drop your weapon!” he yelled, hoping there was some shred of programming in its broken circuits that would make it obey a human. “You are firing on human police officers!”

To his surprise, it answered back.

“You’re gonna kill me! I know you wanna destroy me! Well, that’s not gonna happen, so stay back or I’ll—I’ll keep firing!”

Connor had never, in his entire life, heard an android sound like that before. Its voice shook with fear and its words were clipped and tight with panic.

“Put the gun down and come out with your hands up! We’re not going to kill you, but you have to give us something in return! A show of good faith!”

Connor wiped the sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his jacket. He didn’t know the first thing about talking down an android, but he did know how to deescalate a dangerous encounter with a person. Maybe this defective machine would act the same way.

“I don’t believe you!” the android shouted, on the verge of hysteria. “You’re gonna shoot me first chance you get!”

Connor frowned, frustrated. If this was a shootout with a human, the behavior of the suspect would be a strong indicator of an unstable individual, one who would snap at the slightest provocation. It was a situation where he would cut his losses and try to protect his officers as best he could.

But he only had to buy enough time for the prototype to make its move. Connor didn’t know what it was planning, but they had to subdue the android one way or another.

“I’m putting down my gun.”

He lowered it out of sight but didn’t otherwise release it.

“You’re lying!” the android accused immediately. “If you really mean it, kick it out to where I can see it!”

“I can’t do that,” Connor said softly. He wished he knew the thing’s name. He might have a chance of establishing a rapport if he did, but he’d never considered learning an android’s name to be a priority until now.

“Then I guess neither of us are leaving,” the android said, steel underlying his tone. “And an android can outlast a human.”

Fuck. It was right. If it came to a standoff, with helicopters and SWAT surrounding the house, they could be there for hours. Connor was trapped by his own doing, stuck under cover beside the staircase.

Connor was loath to admit it, but his best chance was the CyberLife android. And it could only succeed if Connor distracted the… the subject.

“All right. All right.” Connor took a hard swallow, unable to believe he as actually doing this. “I’m sliding out onto the floor. Then we can talk, okay?”

“Fine. Do it.”

Taking one last breath and hoping these next few seconds wouldn’t be his last, Connor released the grip of his pistol, put the weapon on the ground, and slid it across the floor. It skidded to a stop at the base of the stairs, out of reach.

“There,” Connor called out, a growing pit in his stomach. “No more gun.”

There was a shuffling noise, probably the android peeking out to see the weapon was in fact out of Connor’s reach.

“Why don’t we start small? Get to know each other?” Connor said, attempting a more pleasant tone than he’d used so far. “My name is Connor Anderson. What’s yours?”

“Carlos,” it said. The voice seemed steadier now. That was good. “My name is Carlos.”

“Okay, Carlos. I’m a detective with the DPD. Do you know why I’m here?”

Connor could have sworn the android sniffled.

“I didn’t… I didn’t do anything wrong.” It was timid, like a child being scolded by a parent. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so disturbing.

“I just want to ask you some questions, Carlos. Figure out what happened. Can you help me do that?” His tone was steady now, falling into a familiar rhythm. This is what Connor was good at, or at least, what he used to be good at.

“I…” The android trailed off, its voice softer. “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay, Carlos,” he said, repeating the name and wielding it as if they were long-time friends. Just two buddies having a chat. “We’ll get this whole situation sorted out. Everything is going to be all right, I promise.”

There was a shift in the atmosphere, or maybe it was trained instinct, but Connor knew he’d said the wrong thing.

“No. No no no no. You’re a liar! All humans are liars! I won’t let them take me!”

Connor heard heavy footfalls on padded dirt, and he looked around the edge of the staircase, heart leaping in his chest at the bright red LED and the shape of the android, far too close as it quickly shortened the distance.

The android took aim and Connor pulled back just as a shot went off, breaking off more of the wood. He backpedaled, scrabbling across the dirt and panicking when he couldn’t regain his feet fast enough.

He was going to die, fuck fuck fuck, he was going to fucking die—

The homicidal android ran around the corner and fell forward, slamming into the ground at Connor’s feet.

The CyberLife prototype pressed its knees into the Carlos’ back, pinning it to the ground.

It tried to raise its arm and angle it backwards to shoot, but the prototype grabbed its wrist and twisted in one smooth motion. The sound of plastic cracking filled the space, and the android gave a human-like cry.

The prototype savagely twisted the android’s hand to disarm it of its gun, and with cold and precise ruthlessness, it then plunged its fingers into the back of the Carlos’ neck.

The android screamed. Connor had never heard a human make a noise like that before. Like the noise a machine would make if it was burning from the inside, a horrifying screech of metal and fire.

It twisted its fingers and disconnected some kind of black cable, and with a crackling cry, the android went silent and still. Only a pulsing red LED ring told Connor that it was still functional.

Apparently satisfied with its work, the prototype rose to its feet and dusted its hands off on the front of its jeans.

Connor just stared at it, dumbstruck.

Smoothing down its tie and adjusting the front of its jacket, it yelled, “All clear, Lieutenant!”

The prototype then raised its head, cocked it to the side, and dragged its gaze over to settle on Connor. It looked him up and down, and Connor felt absurdly naked by the penetrating gaze.

“Are you unharmed, Detective?”

“I…”

Connor seemed to have lost his ability to speak, and thankfully, he didn’t have to. Footsteps thundered down the stairs as Colin, Ralph, and the rest of the DPD on site entered the cellar.

Colin gave a low whistle as he appraised the downed android, and then reached out a hand and helped Connor up from the dirt floor. Connor didn’t complain about the help, he wasn’t sure his shaky legs could have gotten him standing.

“Nice job, Con. I was about to call it in to the station. That plastic fuck really kill our victim?”

Connor opened his mouth, was about to correct Colin that the prototype had done most of the work, and then immediately felt foolish for wanting to give credit to a machine.

Instead, he said, “It would seem so.”

“You will have to take it down to the precinct to close your investigation, Lieutenant,” the prototype answered Connor’s brother. “I incapacitated the deviant, and it shouldn’t come back online until its neural cables have been reconnected.”

It adjusted the cuffs of its jacket, fidgeting in a way that was far too human. Who the fuck at CyberLife decided to give androids nervous tics?

Connor frowned. Now that he’d had a couple minutes to catch his breath and slow his racing brain, the full implication of murdering androids was hitting him.  He tilted his head at the YN800 model.

“What are you talking about? Doesn’t CyberLife want it back? Take it to their labs and study it, or whatever. Why don’t you go call them to clean up this mess?”

Colin was wondering the same thing judging by the mirrored frown on his face. Instead of obeying like a machine should, the prototype met his eye.

“Deviants are notoriously difficult to observe, even by CyberLife’s leading experts. If forcibly opened for diagnosis, their coding becomes unstable, corrupted, and they eventually shut down. If we wish to know more about the deviant’s motives,” it dropped its eyes to look at the machine in question, “then you’re going to have to question it like you would a human.”

Colin caught his eye, raising his brow in a look Connor could interpret as, Are you for fucking real with this thing?

Connor simply returned a shrug to say, Don’t ask me. I have no idea.

“CyberLife will, of course, cover whatever costs your investigation incurs,” the prototype continued, “as well as provide the DPD with additional resource as a token of the company’s gratitude.”

“Fine. Whatever. Hank can deal with the politics, seeing as he’s the one who let the clowns come to the circus.” Colin gave the prototype a scathing once-over. Without taking his eyes off the android, he barked, “Ralph, get some muscle to haul that thing to the ME’s van and load it in. But if it so much as twitches on the ride to the station, put a bullet in the back of its head.”

“Yes, sir,” the rookie responded, nervous and twitchy like a small animal as he rushed to obey his superior officer. “Right away.”

“Does that meet your approval, YN800?” Colin sneered, crossing his arms and flicking his gaze down to the model number on its jacket. His eyes didn’t stop there; they proceeded down its body, less dismissively and more lingering in obvious interest.

Connor’s stomach tightened in discomfort. He shouldn’t care one way or another; it was just a machine, even if it had saved Connor’s life.

Of course, Connor wouldn’t have gone down into the cellar alone and unprepared in the first place if it hadn’t gone off without telling him, so there was that.

The prototype didn’t seem to take offense, meeting Colin’s wandering eye with its own cool stare.

“CyberLife appreciates the DPD’s cooperation during the course of this investigation.”

“Guess that’s a yes.”

Colin gave the android a wink and Connor a smirk before leaving to coordinate the rest of the cleanup.

In a gesture that was ridiculous on an android, the prototype tightened the knot of its tie at the base of its throat. Without a word or a backwards glance at Connor, it ascended the staircase out of the cellar.

Finding himself now playing the part of the pathetic puppy, Connor followed close behind, not trusting it leaving his sight again.

Next Chapter

[cyberneticlagomorph]

The phone call is sudden, startling you awake.

You don't remember falling asleep, but the lines on your face and the puddle of drool on your desk says that you've been out for quite some time now.

There's a blanket across your shoulders that drops to the floor when you sit up, and a much smaller doll's blanket laid across your tail.

You make a mental note to thank Lottie the next time you see her, but first things first.

The cellphone on your desk vibrates chaotically, skating closer and closer to the puddle of drool as you watch it with tired eyes.

You wipe your mouth on the back on your hand and answer it, trying hard to sound awake and professional buy ultimately failing.

"Hello?"

The other end is dead silent, you don't even hear any breathing.

For a second you think they might have hung up, but when you check the call is still... calling.

You debate saying hello again but just hang up instead.

The phone rings again immediately.

There is no number, no caller ID.

Just

Eyes.

Fleshy, rolling eyes that gaze at you just behind the screen.

Their pupils and irises are wrong, melted, mutated.

In shapes that do not belong.

A sound like whispering comes from the phone's speaker, soft and nonsensical, mindless word salad like a child trying to comprehend loresum ipsum.

The eyes are crying now, something sticky and black that slowly fills the screen until it's oozing from the charger port and onto your desk. The puddle grows impossibly fast until it's spilling onto your lap and drenching the floor. You reach for some tissues but the box falls into the blackness before you can.

Limbs, long and spindly, form at the edges of the rapidly growing pool and stretch like evening shadows across the walls and floor, they reach out towards you, towards the crack beneath the door, the rattling air vents.

Anything, anywhere that would grant them purchase.

Your desk is gone, now a gaping hole in the dark, replaced by a massive tunnel unfolding like an accordion made of nightmares.

Warm breath hits your face, and your hearts plummet.

You open your mouth to speak, to cast a spell, but a midnight hand shoves itself into your mouth to halt your tattling tongue.

Its fingers crawl down your throat and out your nose, articulated like spider's legs that skitter and twitch unnaturally.

The last unaffected floorboards tilt dangerously forward and plunge into the abyss, whistling like bombs as they drop.

The lights go out.

Everywhere, all at once.

You hear the Warren's powerful generator wheeze and die.

You feel the Warren itself start to shift and seethe, as if trying to get away from this apparent infection.

You are not alone in the dark, but you wish you were.

There is something here with you, something old and wrong in ways you cannot explain.

It wants.

You don't know what but it WANTS something from you, something important.

There's a knock on the door, words of concern, panic even.

You can't let them in.

Or this thing OUT.

The limbs hold you tight, binding you to your chair.

The floor is just fucking gone, your room a vast and terrible pit over which you dangle by so many shadowy hands and spiderlike legs.

You couldn't get up if you wanted to.

Feebly, you make a post on tumblr, and @ folks in the house group chat.

Nobody seems to hear you at first, but the knocking stops dead, and you hear shuffling in the silence, nearly drowned out by the squirming nightmare mass slowly crawling towards the door.

Your sister pokes her ghostly head through the wall, eyes wide with concern.

She pulls a knife from somewhere on her person and floats over to you, but before she can reach you the hands let go.

You drop like a stone into the black ick, expecting to tumble down a hole but find yourself splashing into dark liquid.

Your sister tries to follow, but can't.

It's... hard to explain, to parse from your perspective.

But the pit isn't a pit, it's a not even a pool now, it's a thin layer of black liquid covering the floor. It soaks into Marce's pants, her sleeves, her socks as she scratches at the floor in desperation.

She watches you sink, down

Down

Down

Until the generator kicks back on, and she loses you in the reflections.

[noonmutter]

Revelation pt. 2

Daily Writing Challenge 2021 Day 17: Spellbinding/Disappointment

It took very little time before parts of his skin were burnt to an unnatural crisp. Terry knew a lot of injuries very well, burns among them; human flesh didn't do this when it was burnt. Not outside of an incinerator, anyway. He reflected that the Ember Ward might well qualify; the sheer intensity of the heat from the light might well just be that hot. But then he remembered that all he needed to do to counter the instant scorching was some clothes or one of those ridiculous parasols he'd seen, and that went out the window. Yep, just magic bullshit. He could sort out what it did, but he'd never be able to sort out why it worked.

He would have been content to hole up in one of the destroyed buildings, but they were, unsurprisingly, all claimed or constantly drawing in hopeful tenants. Terry was not up for that kind of fighting, not anymore. His body simply hurt too much, and he could feel himself moving slower and awkwardly to accommodate his wounds. He hadn't missed having a gun so badly in a very long time. None of these fancy morons had firearms, he would've been set for life. Or, well. Whatever this was. Unlife? Eternity? Whatever it was, it sucked. It sucked, and he was hungry.

And thirsty. He'd been offered tea by a particularly giggly venthyr with some insane hair and no shirt, but he wasn't about to trust that. He wouldn't have trusted that from a normal venthyr, he wasn't about to trust it from one that laughed that much. The guys with bags on their heads seemed safer, and following them had led him to insect hives that he'd been willing to risk. He couldn't identify them, they weren't tasty, and even a handful of them didn't amount to much, but Terry had very little left to lose. If he shat himself to death, he'd be very disappointed, but hey. At least he'd be done with this.

He hadn't been counting on hallucinating, though he probably should have. It was awfully mild, as bug-induced hallucinations went; just noises, a rising and falling ringing in the ear like he'd taken a blow to the head. Nothing visual, at least not that he'd been able to catch. It didn't interfere with his ability to move any more than he'd already been impaired, so he moved on, seeking more shelter. There was a temptation to either dig a hole and bury himself, or, more concerning and more powerful, to throw off the coat and just let the light take him. He ignored both of those with a quiet grumble of "Bugger tha'" and trudged on.

---

Terry found himself wondering for the thousandth time how long he'd been doing something, in this case, walking. It was maddeningly dull: Find a shady place. Rest a minute. Look for another shady place close by. Check clothes for holes. Go to new shady place. Repeat. Sometimes he'd have to fight someone or something off; sometimes he simply had to run to a new spot on the fly, earning a new scorch in the process. And all the while, he wondered where he was going. It was hard to remember what his original plan had been; was that the fault of the heat, or was that just part of the torment of the Ember Ward?  

The damn ringing noise had only gotten louder as time went on, which just seemed unfair. It was really the only solid proof Terry had that time HAD gone on, though, aside from touching his face to check for stubble. For the thousandth time, he reached up to do so, but this time, he spat a curse and tried to scoot back before he realized how stupid that was; he couldn't distance himself from his own arm by backing away from it. The newest burn had left a nasty, rip-like line of blackened, papery skin on his forearm, but this time, he spotted the angular golden lines and circles emerging from it.

He hadn't seen those in quite a while, as he thought back on it. For a brief moment, he felt comforted by it, but he chased that thought away with a hard shake of his head. Just because it was familiar didn't mean it was good. It was still someone else's mark on him, a visible sign of interference in his life, of subverting his will, and dammit, now the ringing was even LOUDER.

embrace it

Oh good. It was a voice now. Terry covered his ears with both hands, knowing perfectly well it wouldn't accomplish anything but needing to do something. Defiance was rapidly becoming his only salvation. He had only survived as long as he had by refusing to die, refusing to be beaten. Shouting "No" to the universe was the mental equivalent of punching himself in the thigh to dull the pain of a bullet in the shoulder.

Heat surged against his face, and he forced his eyes open, worried that he'd accidentally put himself out in the light again. Instead, the light had come to him, coalescing slowly into a humanoid head and torso, though it lacked a face beyond a pair of white eyes nigh-indistinguishable from its glowing golden frame. Terry froze; it didn't, raising a hand toward the sky and drawing energy into its palm.

With an irritated, incredulous "Shit," Terry bolted.

---

What had he done to this fucking thing to piss it off this much? Why wouldn't it give up? He'd already run so far, ducking under crags, diving behind walls, hiding under bridges, and even climbing a tree once. It had found him eventually every time (the tree was just idiotic desperation, really), announcing itself with a blast of light that rarely hit its mark, but was steadily burning away more and more precious cloth with each near miss. Terry was too slow for this, especially when every scrap mattered. If it weren't for the damned light he would have thrown the coat at the elemental and made a sprint for it ages ago. It felt like hours, it could've been minutes for all he knew.

His legs burned, his lungs burned, his whole body burned, literally in many places, but all he could do was run and hide. The stolen rapier had predictably snapped the first time he'd tried to use it and done nothing but earn him a direct blast to the chest for his troubles. Nobody he passed had any interest in lending him a hand. One of the little runty guys had yelled a request to keep his shoes when he died. In a better time and place, Terry might've shouted back an agreement, but he couldn't spare the energy.

let go

And that damned voice wouldn't shut up. Every time he narrowly avoided a beam, every time he caught a glimpse of his skin covered in glowing yellow circuitry, every time he had to flee, it chimed in. Almost literally, it was like a great bell by now, trying to rattle his brain and make everything even harder. Embrace it, let go, stay; it wanted him to burn, and he refused all the more. He'd rather have shat himself to death after eating demon bugs than choose oblivion willingly.

When a second elemental appeared, he realized he might not have to anyway. As ever, he clung to his defiance to find the energy to run, but he could feel himself running on fumes. He'd already been weak to begin with, and it had been a long, long chase. Even a madman spurred by sheer spite like him ran out eventually. Admitting it was the first step on the final decline, but he couldn't stop the thought from coming.

He was losing.

let it save you

He was tired. He was tired of running, tired of hurting, tired of fighting, tired of longing, tired of loneliness, tired of hunger, tired of nightmares, tired of fear, tired of suspicion, tired of dying... He was just so tired. He was tired of thinking, and thinking ahead, and overthinking, and re-thinking, and questioning thinking, and--

He caught himself losing track of the now, but it was too late. His ill-fitted boot caught on a rock, and Terry pitched forward, head over heels, feeling the coat tear away in great hunks. It took some skin with it before he could bring himself to a stop, narrowly avoiding rolling off the edge of a cliff.

He tasted blood. That, like the lines absolutely covering his body by now, was familiar, but it wasn't a good familiarity. An exhausted, distant part of his mind that had already thrown in the towel was kind of impressed he could still bleed. As more of his flesh burned, the handful of elementals converged on him, and he looked back over his shoulder. It was a long way down, enough that the bottom blurred into an indecipherable grey mass. He'd probably die if he jumped. But maybe he wouldn't?

He was definitely going to die if he didn't. If the sky didn't do it, the elementals would. They were gathering energy in unison like a creepy glowing firing squad, and they stared straight through him while they did it.

But in that moment where he tensed his legs in preparation to launch into the unknown, he hesitated. The bell sounded again, thundering loud enough that his ears bled and he nearly fell ass-first off the edge anyway.

a leap of faith

A dry, crackling wheeze of laughter escaped him. With one last look at the firing squad as they brought down their hands, Terry tore off the last tatters of the coat and fell backward into the abyss.

( @daily-writing-challenge​ )

[sushiburritonoms]

DinLuke #38 if you're still doing these prompts! :D Been really enjoying reading these, haha

Look my darling @lulollymint, I tried so so so hard to write a normal cop story, but I kept getting stuck. So I hope you don't mind that this goes incredibly off prompt and probably isn't what you were expecting. I don't even know what genre or motif I was working with, its just mashing things together for the lols. I hope its ok!

Also warning, there was a lot of F-bombs in this one, to fit the AU Din I was going for. Sorry?

AU Fic List

38.cop/person getting a speeding ticket au

The moment Din saw the familiar white GT-86 fly by him, not even trying to slow down this time, he groaned and flipped on his lights with more force than necessary. “Damnit, not again.”

Was there even a point to this? Everytime he handed this driver a ticket, it mysteriously disappeared in the system, thanks to his all powerful Mother.  Christ, Din hated this guy.  He was tempted to just turn around and find another place to patrol. But no. One day the driver could kill someone at those speeds and anyways it was the principal of the thing, even if this rich asshole would never face consequences of his actions. It was an unjust world but Din was forced to live in it, for Grogu’s sake.

Usually when they did this song and dance, the GT obediently pulled over to the side of the road as soon as it caught sight of him.�� This time it took several minutes, until Din was close to calling for backup. At least they were on a rural road and there wasn’t any other traffic heading out of town at this time of day. After several tense minutes the GT finally swung to the side of the road in a sharp, sudden movement. It wasn’t the most graceful stop he’d seen from the man, but Din was too pissed to care.

“Fuck.” Din growled as he slammed his driver side door shut. Maybe he should drag him to jail this time, let him stew in a cell for a few hours before his mommy came and got him this time.

“Again, Skywalker?!”” he hissed as he made it to the GT’s front window. It was already rolled down and waiting for him.  “Third time this...month…”

The words died in his mouth the moment he caught sight of the bane of his existence.  Skywalker looked up at him, one eye almost completely black and swollen shut, his face covered in scratches that were still slowly oozing blood.  He had his left hand on his wheel but his right hand was just gone--his arm ending at the wrist.  How was he even changing gears in that car?!

“Hey Officer Djarin,” Skywalker rasped. “This really isn’t a good time, can we--” he gave a wet cough, “--do this, l-later?”

“Jesus Christ!” Din put his hand through the open window and popped the door. “What the hell happened to you!”  He pulled it open and immediately reached over to shut the engine off. Skywalker tried to bat his hand away from the ignition but Din easily dodged him.

“‘No don’t,” Skywalker groaned. “Please don’t--I have--have to keep going--”

“The only place you’re going is a hospital,” Din said grimly as he caught sight of Skywalker’s bloody blue checkered shirt.  Had the pretty boy been in a bar fight? At...2pm on a thursday? Din sighed as he reached for his radio. “Darjin. I have a 105, requesting a rig to South Socorro, next to Mumble’s Turnaround.”

“No hospital!” Skywalker gasped, shouting over dispatch’s reply. “No, please, you don’t understand, this is the only way. I have to leave town--”

Fuck. It had finally happened.  The pretty boy must have done a hit and run.  Din craned his neck to look at the front of the car. “Who did you hit, Luke?”

“Nobody,” Luke rasped.  “Please, you have to let me go.  You will let me go.”  The young idiot tried to raise his only hand and wave it at Din’s face and the moron was lucky that Din wasn’t as trigger happy as the rest of his hillbilly squad.  Din grabbed his hand and frowned.

“Christ you’re on some sort of drug aren’t you? What did you take? Spice?”  Jesus, where was his ambulance?  He used his free hand to hit his radio. “Dispatch, confirm?”  He waited to hear from Omera, but instead of an answer his radio made a high pitched electronic wail that was piercing. “The hell?”

“No no no noooo,” Luke gasped. He was staring at Din’s radio with a sheet white face.  “Please not now!” He tried to pull his hand away from Din’s grasp.

“Luke! Calm down before you hyperventilate.” That’s it, Din was putting him in his squad car, where he could lock him in if he started to violently hallucinate.  He reached over to unbuckle Luke’s seatbelt only to realize the moron wasn’t wearing one.  So instead he just raged silently as he dragged the other man out.

Luke’s legs buckled the moment he stepped out of the car. “You have to leave,” the boy mumbled. “Before...too late.”

“Whatever, your highness,” Din sighed, using Fett’s most innocent name for Skywalker.  He started to drag the other man to his car, noticing at the same time that it was a lot darker outside than it had been two minutes ago. He looked up and saw clouds suddenly  blocking the summer sun. That was odd. It had been a clear cloudless summer day earlier. “Fucking climate change.”

It was while he was trying to maneuver Skywalker into his back seat that he finally noticed the strange tattoos the man had on his left and right forearms.  They were thick green lines that swirled in weird sharp geometric shapes and angles, almost looking like words in an alien language or something.  The right arm tattoo ended with Luke’s wrist. The left spilled into his hands and even down his fingers. They looked expensive and very new, with ink that was so bright it almost looked like it was glowing.  Din didn’t remember Skywalker having any tattoos the last time he’d pulled him over. But then again, he was also sure the last time they’d met Luke also had a real fucking hand.

“Nice ink,” he said finally, unable to bring himself to ask the other man if he’d always had a really amazing prosthetic hand and multiple massive tattoos. He was losing his touch--what was he thinking, letting Cara talk him into transferring into this hellhole state? As he chastised himself, his right thumb moved to caress the closest line on the other man’s arm without thinking. But the moment he touched it, a painful sensation almost like electricity shot through his hand and down his spine. “Fuck!” What the hell was that?!

Luke also jerked. “Don’t touch me!” His voice sounded low and full of pain.  He looked down at his arms with his one good eye in horror. “Oh God! It’s too late.”

“What hell are you on?” Din said, just as he felt a sudden icy wind blast past them both. It was strong, dragging leaves and other debris over their car and pelting Din’s unprotected back with small pebbles. “Ow! Damn it!” The sun had disappeared, and the world around them had taken a sinister grey color.  He instinctively pushed Luke back, into the protective shelter of his car.

Then he heard a terrible, low laugh, so close it felt like there was someone inches next to his near. He flinched and turned...and saw no one. The back hair on Din’s neck stood straight up and he found himself reaching for his gun. All his instincts were screaming and when he looked back at Skywalker he yelped because now Luke really was glowing bright green.

“Din.” The sudden use of his first name jerked his attention from the glowing green marks on Luke’s arms to his face.  His unbruised blue eye was clear and full of determination. “Move.”

Din found himself scrambling to let Luke drag himself out of his car before he could even blink.  It was like he was possessed.  He watched as Luke took several unsteady steps until he was in front of Din and facing the empty road. He stood in a wide ready stance, with both glowing arms held out at his sides.  His left hand was open, palm forward and his right stump was a bright ball of green fire.

The unnatural wind blew again, making Din flinch against dust kicked up in their faces.

“Drive away,” Luke commanded, as he continued to face the road.  “Leave.”

Din’s body started to move towards his front seat, but he stopped it just as his hand touched the door. “No!” He rasped.  Instead he made his hand pull his gun and he found himself pointing it at the empty road in front of them instead of at Skywalker like he should have done.

Luke sighed. “You’re too honorable for your own good.” Gone was the cheerful yet annoying voice Din had become used to hearing. Skywalker sounded like a stranger, an unnatural being. “Stay behind me and whatever you do, don’t turn your back to him.”

“What--”

Between one breath and the next, the devil himself arrived. Without a flash of light or possessed gale force winds, it suddenly just appeared. It had a red and black demonic face, a head covered in horns and had glowing yellow eyes. It was dressed in all black robes and had a glowing black sword in it’s right hand.

“Maul,” said Luke. His right stump twitched and suddenly his hand was back and it was holding a glowing green sword. Except it wasn’t his hand, not really. It looked like it was made of light instead of flesh.

“Chosen One,” said the devil.

“Oh fuck off,” said Din.  Chosen one? This guy?!

Maul smiled, all sharp teeth. “I’ll kill the human and eat his soul.”

“As happy as that would make my mother, I can’t let you do that,” Luke replied.

“Then I’ll use his corpse to kill her too,” Maul hissed. “Then your sister and her unborn babe.”

“HEY!” Din shouted. “Nobody is using my corpse for anything.” Also he was pretty sure Governor Padme Naberrie would be fully capable of killing the devil herself.

The devil laughed and before Din could let loose one of his bullets into him, he disappeared. Then he reappeared inches from Luke’s face, his black sword swinging for his neck. Din shouted but Luke was already moving like he was a character from the Matrix. He brought his green hand and sword up and there was an explosion of energy.

Then the fight was on. Somehow tiny Luke pushed Maul away from him, but the devil stopped in mid air and swung towards him like he was launched from an unseen hand. Luke parried and ducked, more agile than his appearance would suggest. He slid underneath the demon and leapt to his feet. Maul landed on the ground and launched another attack, swinging the black sword up over his head. It hit Luke’s glowing hand sword with a crackle of energy. They swung, parried, swung and parried again, moving in a blur too fast to Din to see them clearly. He kept his gun out, pointed vaguely in Maul’s direction but he knew he was more than useless here.

Luke was beginning to tire. Din could see it in the way he was swinging his hand and the way his legs were shaking.  When Luke had launched Maul several feet away from them, Din turned to see if he could reach his rifle in the back of his car without the two noticing. But as he did that he heard Maul hiss in triumph and suddenly he felt an intense burning in his back, like a hot poker being buried into the middle of his spine. He couldn’t even let out a cry as he dropped his gun.

“NO!” Luke screamed.

“Didn’t the boy tell you,” he heard Maul hiss in his ear. “Never turn your back on a Sith!”  Din gasped, unable to form words as the world dimmed and he fell to his knees. He felt like he was being slowly dragged backwards, out of his own damn body.

Just as he started to see black spots in his vision, he heard an inhuman roar.  The pulling sensation stopped and he felt himself slam face first into the ground. There was the sound of growling and he heard Maul shriek. Bright lights flashed over his head.

Then he felt himself being lifted up into someone’s arms. There was air rushing past his face. He struggled to open his eyes and the first thing he saw was his squad car rapidly disappearing as they left the ground in a rush. He also saw shimmery white scales, like the kind you would see on a snake, and impossibly, a white leathery wing flapped in and out of his vision. He heard the wings pushing through the air and another loud roar.

“The fuck!” He gasped.  The arms around him tightened. Din’s head was pressed against Luke’s shoulder, his arms wrapped around him and holding him against the back of some sort of living, breathing FLYING thing.

“Hold on!” Luke said grimly and they flew through the air.

“ARE WE ON A FUCKING DRAGON?!” Din shouted.

“Technically it’s my GT!” Luke yelled back.

“WHY THE FUCK IS YOUR CAR A DRAGON?!”

“That’s what you’re gonna fixate on?” Luke said incredulously. “Fine, yes! It’s magic, now shut up and let me concentrate!!”

“Your arms are still glowing!” Din said, his brain completely broken. He could feel energy pulsing through Luke’s bare arms, their heat licking at his skin. It felt good, because he was freezing, so cold he felt like he could barely move.  “What--what is that? What are you?!”

He felt Luke sigh and suddenly there were lips firmly pressed against his, swallowing the torrent of panicked words that were trying to spill out of him. He also felt the freezing cold that had its grip in him ease, replaced by warmth. It felt like Luke was pouring fire and light into him and when he pulled away a moment later, Din saw that Luke’s face was pale and full of worry.

“Better?” He asked, words barely audible over the flapping of dragon wings.

Din nodded wordlessly.

“Right, ok. Everything is under control,” Luke said, more to himself than Din. “We’re alive and you have most of your soul left, so everything is going to be fine, just fine. Ok? Right, calm down.”

“I am calm now,” Din said. Well mostly.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Luke replied. He tightened his grip on Din and sighed. “Not gonna lie Officer Din Djarin, we’re pretty screwed right now. But I’m gonna get us somewhere safe, I promise.”

“How do you even know my first name,” Din exclaimed.

“My mom’s the Governor, you don’t think I wouldn’t have her lookup Navarro City’s best and brightest police officer?”

Din frowned. “You just did that to erase your speeding tickets.”

“Maybe,” Luke chuckled. “You gonna arrest me now?”

“Yes,” Din moaned. “So very yes.”

He heard Luke laugh and tug him closer to his GT/Dragon as they glided together through the bright summer sky.

---

Obviously the dragon was inspired by Lulolly's X-Wing dragons! I know nothing about cars, I just picked a GT-86 because I like the way they look and they're not that crazy expensive. I think Luke might drive one.

Previous Responses

30: tourist/knowledgeable local au (Din/Luke)

19. parents meeting when they take their kids to class au (Din/Luke)

15: meeting in the E.R/A&E au (Din/Luke/Boba)

40: Soul destroying exes meeting again after not speaking for years au (Din/Luke)

25: Library/Avid Reader AU Part I (Din/Luke, Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon)

Library AU part II (same)

[unokins]

No Truth Left - Part 2

CW: Memory Loss, Mold

Link to Archive

The smartest decision would be to go for what land she could see. Perhaps someone would be there who could help. At the very least, she could wait for the fog to lift and then definitively make her way to the mainland.

Decision made, Chie pulled her hair back into her scrunchie and placed the oars into the water. The old vessel creaked loudly, lurching as Chie situated herself. One last glance at the island ensured it still waited for her. Chie put her back to it and rowed. The dinghy swayed forward awkwardly.

Splinters dug into the soft flesh of her hands, biting like dozens of tiny ants. The gentle slaps of the oars against the water fueled Chie’s anxiety. With each little noise, she imagined what could be hearing her through this fog, though nothing stirred from the water’s surface. It remained blank, black, bleak.

After several minutes of oaring, sweat trickled down Chie’s forehead, despite the coldness of the air. Her arms and back protested each movement with burning soreness, dull pain digging into her shoulders and abdomen as she strained to continue forward. The island waited, squatting like a fat toad. Chie faltered, gasping as her leg cramped, seizing painfully.

“Ow, ow, ow, shit.” Chie rubbed at the offending muscle.

Quit with the fucking melodrama and row.

Jolting, Chie spun around frantically. 

No one stood on the island. No one sat in the dinghy. She was alone.

Chie shook her head, groaning quietly. She must be hearing things. The voice had been deep, masculine, and angry. But her inner thoughts never sounded like that. A distraction, that’s what she needed. Chie continued rowing and worried about something else.

For the past week or so, her memory had been failing her. Co-workers spoke of conversations that Chie couldn’t recall, of tasks she completed but had no memory of. Apparently, she had an argument with her roommate that the neighbors heard, but Chie, for the life of her, couldn't remember. Her internet browsing history was a mess of unintelligible words and weird websites that didn’t appear in any google search. Her parents fretted with hand-wringing concern.

What had happened in this most recent memory lapse to land her in the middle of the water like this? Events danced at the forefront of her mind, but she couldn’t place a distinct date to any of them. Timesheet day at Arkham Microanalytics Laboratory was Thursday. Saturday was half-off certain vegetables day at the Asian market. Had she submitted her timesheet? Did she get that bok choy she wanted? If the last thing she did was go shopping on Saturday, it did nothing to tell her how she ended up here. 

The island loomed. Chie pulled herself from her thoughts to realize just how close she was. The ground inclined from the shore, and Chie couldn’t make out anything besides dirt, rocks, and an old dock jutting into the water. The island itself was severe. Bare, sharp rocks outlined most of it, reaching upwards towards the sky at awkward and unnatural angles. No grass or tree grew on this inhospitable place. The island was bleak and black, the only color being the faded brown of the dock.

With all the grace of a drunken baboon, Chie pulled the dinghy to the dock. A rope sat in a pile and Chie snatched it, pulling herself close with a soft thud of wood hitting wood. Putting the oars back on the floor of the dinghy, Chie securely tied the boat. Her hands moved expertly, wrapping the rope around the hitch before knotting it to the pole of the deck. 

Chie’s breath caught in her throat and her chest froze. She didn’t know how to tie a knot like that. She had pulled up, planning to just tie it like shoelaces. She just-

Her hands shook, and her legs kicked out suddenly, deciding it was time to move. But she wasn’t ready. Chie careened backwards, arms windmilling, and splashed into the water. As she fell, time slowed as a scaled humanoid head - bald, pale blue, with glassy eyes - stared at her as she went down. Then the water embraced her with shocking cold. 

To your right! Swim to your right!

She didn’t question the angry voice. Only reacted. Chie kicked, and swam blindly to her right, eyes squeezed shut. Her whole body tense from the cold, she groped stiffly for the ground. The bare mud was wet and slippery, but she found purchase as something brushed against her leg.

Chie resurfaced like an explosion, screaming as terror gripped her senses. Frantically, she scrambled to the shore, kicking back at whatever had her. Her foot landed against something solid. Sobs heaved from her chest as she pulled herself free from the water, free from-

Algae. Green plant fronds tangled around her legs, clingy damply to her. Chie stared dumbly at it. It was algae. She looked up. The water was still.

Shaking from equal parts fear and cold, Chie unwound it and slowly stood. What had she kicked? A rock, perhaps? Had to be. The island seemed built of equal parts jagged rock and dank mud. It had to be the same underwater.

The black mud from the shore squelched under her shoes, releasing a stench worse than roadkill skunk. Dead, rotting fish littered the shoreline and flies buzzed above the carcasses. Chie gagged, and raised a hand to cover her nose. But the black mud stuck thickly to her fingers, and she stopped before accidentally smearing it on her face. 

Her eyes drifted to the water. Then, firmly, she decided no. Making her way back to the dock, Chie scraped the mud off on a wooden pole, then shook the rest free from her hands. She forced herself to breathe shallowly, and stared pointedly away from the water. It was strange. The dock was old, rotting from the inside out. But the rope she had used to tie the dinghy was strong nylon. Certainly an anachronism among the decay. 

Did that mean someone was here? Chie looked up the island slope. If so, they must have heard her scream. No sense in keeping them waiting.

Chie struggled up the steep incline, hand over foot, slipping on the mud with every other step. The rocks could have assisted her climb, but the rivulets and curves on them were sharp, and Chie did not want the mud inside an open cut. Her mind wandered to a sample that crossed her lab years ago. It was a thick, moist mold that had been slowly poisoning the home's elderly occupant. It sloshed around in the little vial, dark spores clinging to the plastic. Chie had struggled to get it in the pipette, and it clumped together on her slide. Under the microscope, it writhed. Nurse Janet, who brought the sample, spared no details about the patient’s horrific condition, despite Chie’s multiple reminders of HIPAA violations. 

Chie's arm sunk into the ground with a sucking squelch. She bit her lip, swallowing a shriek. Disgust rolled in her stomach, and she jerked her arm.

Stuck. 

Chie glanced down and her mind conjured images of tendrils writhing and wrapping around her, trapping her. She yanked again. The mud schlorped and gave little.

From her periphery, the water near the dock rippled. 

Chie realized then that the ground beneath the water had been bare of plants.

Frantically now, Chie braced herself and heaved. She pulled free - slipped. Chie landed hard on her butt with a breathless "oomf!" Something rose from near her dinghy, the viscous black water a bulbous growth as water tension refused to break.

Scrambling, she half-crawled, half-ran the rest of the way up the hill, no longer conscious of just how muddy she got. Over a crest, and down the other side. Chie slid down the incline, maneuvering around the rocks with awkward, flailing arms. Feet stumbling, Chie hit the bottom hard and momentum carried her forward several steps.

The island topography was like a crater, with steep hills in a perfect circle surrounding a flat depression. The back edge of the island boasted a stone cliff protruding out to open water. The stench was heavier here, hanging like a miasma. Several large stone pillars jutted from the mire at irregular intervals. Barnacles sat on the stone, and, unlike the rocks, the edges were weather-worn with time. Chie found herself drawn to them, almost hypnotically. The carved lines writhed, curling in on themselves, twisting, tangling, growing, reaching for her, beckoning her to-

Focus! Something’s after you.

Chie jumped, eyes tearing away. A raised hand shielded the pillars from view. Her heart thudded. Ahead of her stood a dilapidated wood house, almost as rotten as the dock. Its roof sagged, causing the walls to buckle with the weight. The windows stared at her, sightless and unblinking. A dead tree overshadowed it, long, bare branches stretching over the roof as if reaching for her. A breeze drifted by, and it swayed, finger-like twigs beckoning her. 

Against the wall of the crater huddled the entrance to a cave. Water dripped from the ceiling like saliva, and the ground inclined down like a throat. A few sturdy, wooden boxes sat just inside the entrance where they had some refuge from the elements. Refuse littered the entrance near the cave: empty bottles, soda cans, and crushed chip bags.

A slow squelch sounded behind Chie, followed by a heavy tread. Whatever it was hissed and gurgled as it ascended the hill. 

>Take refuge in the House >Take refuge in the Cave >The pillars are Calling

[chroniccombustion]

Caught in The Grey (ch 6)

Genre: Trans!AU, hurt/comfort, romance, angst with a happy ending Rated: T Characters: Souji Seta (Yu Narukami), Yosuke Hanamura, Naoto Shirogane, Kanji Tatsumi, Investigation Team, Izanagi/Shadow!Souji Warnings: depression, dysphoria, disassociation, self-hatred, implied suicide attempt, suicidal thoughts, mentions of homophobia, implied past child abuse and transphobia, canon-typical violence, mild sexual content Status: multi-chapter, incomplete

Playlist: Spotify | Youtube <- previous chapter | next chapter -> (unavailable)

Souji is talking to Kanji.

Souji is walking with Kanji.

Yosuke feels something inside of him twist sharply. He feels… sick.

Chapter 6: On the Outside, Waiting

“I was only in my mind, You were on the outside waiting. I could feel you all the time. Your voice could save me...”

- (“Echo”, Starset)

Thursday absolutely creeps into existence.

Yosuke wakes with a vicious headache. It doesn’t start off slowly, either; from his first moment of consciousness, even before opening his eyes, his head feels like something has been trying to claw its way out from inside his skull while he slept. It thrums just behind his eyeballs, leaving everything tinted ever-so-slightly yellow around the edges with each pulse. He digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets in an attempt to lesson the pressure, but all he gets for his troubles is a stinging, lingering starburst behind his lids – not even ten minutes into the day and Yosuke’s mood is already beyond all hope of saving. So, bleary and exhausted, he forces himself to ooze out of bed like melted wax. He gets up, frowning against the sickening dizziness, the weird sallow hue, and drags himself through the house to get ready for the day.

Going about his morning routine feels like he’s wading through wet concrete. The constant pain keeps his stomach just barely at the point right before nausea, and as he sidesteps around Teddie in their new “brotherly tradition” of communal teeth-brushing, Yosuke has to actively fight the urge to just go back to bed and stay there until Monday. Maybe if he hits a hard reset he can write off the Endless Week from Hell as just another nightmare; fuck knows he’s had enough weird dreams lately that one more wouldn’t mean much at this point.

He doesn’t though. He powers through the motions on pure muscle memory and diverts what little willpower he does manage to scrape together towards putting on a mask of normalcy. It sticks in place precariously, like dried, cracking glue that’s flaking off under too much heat and wear. He keeps the façade going as best he can, however, because despite wishing he could just evaporate into nothingness, Yosuke doesn’t want Teddie to think he’s pissed off at him. (Because he isn’t, not specifically, even if the bear’s enthusiasm for everything is a dozen kinds of irritating this morning.) So Yosuke does his best to try and keep his mental and physical discomfort as close to secret as possible.

More than being worried that Teddie will take it personally, though, Yosuke just doesn’t want his little brother to ask at all. The reserves of energy Yosuke normally has tucked away have not yet been replenished after days of continuous draining. Even the overflow of nervous, anxious energy that comes from his brain and not his body and makes it impossible for him to sit still half the time; he just… doesn’t have it. There’s simply nothing left that he can spare, not even for Teddie.

So Yosuke swallows down the pressure in the back of his throat that threatens to choke him and pretends that nothing is wrong, that his head isn’t pounding like it’s about to explode and he’s two steps away from giving up for the day. He speaks when Teddie prompts him to, answering questions or responding as needed and staying quiet with it’s not. He lets the chatty blond fill the silence for him, instead, and uses Teddie’s unnatural lack of a need for air to his advantage. For the most part, it seems to work in his favor.

Teddie doesn’t notice – or at least, Yosuke doesn’t think he notices – and by the time Yosuke has to leave for school he’s almost convinced that his act has been bought. It’s only at the last minute, when he glances up for no real reason while slipping on his shoes and spots Teddie in the entryway next to him, that he catches the odd sideways look his brother is pinning him with. Yosuke gives him an overly sunny smile as he opens the door, pretending to both his brother and himself that he doesn’t see the frown on Teddie’s face, and finally slumps out into the chilly morning air.

He tries not to think about it for long.

The sky outside is drearier than it has any right to be as he begins trudging along the path to school. He’s actually a little glad for it – the diluted sunlight is just low enough that it doesn’t hurt his eyes and make his still-present headache worse the way a brighter, bluer morning might. Sadly, with his proverbial battery as drained as it is he can’t take much comfort from the lack of extra pain, and it does nothing to lift his mood from the murky depths of his own self-pity. So, even though the sun doesn’t bother him directly, Yosuke keeps his eyes trained on the concrete beneath his shoes as he walks and distributes his weight onto the balls of his feet to keep his own footsteps from jostling his brain.

He makes his way carefully down the familiar first part of the trek. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t pay attention to anything except the quiet music from his headphones – cranked down today so as not to exacerbate what he’s starting to think might be a migraine. Nothing happens; he’s never been so glad for uneventful monotony. He counts the cracks in the sidewalk as he crosses them and lets himself get lost in the repetition.

He doesn’t want to think – not about Souji, not about the dreams, not about the squirmy, guilty feelings low in his gut leftover from last night’s shitty texts. None of it.

He doesn’t want to think at all.

(He feels his knees start to buckle mid-step and has to forcibly blank out his mind to stop himself from remembering everything that’s made him question his own reality over the past few days, lest he turn right the fuck around and lock himself in his bedroom for a year.)

Surprisingly it seems to work; the awful, mocking voice isn’t there this morning, chewing at his memories and bringing them all into sharp relief. There is no harsh whispering in his ears, telling him all the ways he’s fucked up or how worthless and forgettable he is, how much Souji must secretly hate him or how disgusting Yosuke really is down inside. Instead there’s an eerie quiet, only broken by Yosuke’s own mind when he slips and lets his caged thoughts out for a moment. He can’t tell if he’s glad or unnerved.

He tries not to think about that, either.

(The yellow hue hasn’t gone away – he doesn’t know what that means but he’s pretty sure it’s nothing good.)

The mental silence feels like a cool breeze against a scalding sunburn for the short amount of time it lasts. It follows Yosuke the first third or so of the journey, numbing him to the streets and background highway noise within the couple-block radius around his house. But as much as he wishes it could last the entire day, Yosuke has long-since learned that nothing good or decent lingers around him for very long before vanishing and leaving him desperate for steady ground. All too soon, in little visual bits and pieces, he starts to habitually recognize his surroundings once more.

Just past the point where the sounds from the highway he lives by start to fade entirely, Yosuke’s eyes catch on minor landmarks, reminding him of just where he is and where he’s heading. He slows his already-sluggish pace even further and lifts his head to properly align himself with the rest of reality. Up ahead, about a block away, lies the little stretch of road where he and Souji’s paths usually intersect; he’d avoided it yesterday, and looking at it now, even from a distance, Yosuke can feel his nerve endings beginning to spark and crackle, even as his mind stays unnaturally silent. His muscles tense slightly, like his body is getting ready to break into a sprint at any moment before his head can even fully catch up and register the bitter unease that’s steadily taking hold. He hates this. He hates the way his stomach drops out at the sight of he and Souji’s meeting place. There isn’t even anyone there that he can see – though he’s ashamed to admit the teensy flash of disappointment – because... well, because – and, even worse, how afraid he is to stick around and find out if that’s going to change any time soon.

(The whole world turns sickly bile-yellow for a second; the color disappears when Yosuke blinks and swallows with a dry throat, but for a single instant it’s there.)

I can’t do this.

Just like yesterday, just like the coward he is, all talk and no spine, Yosuke lets his feet turn away from his typical route and down a nearby side street. It’ll take him a little extra time to go around like this, to wind through a different part of town and come out at another spot along the river before heading practically a back way up to Yasogami. He’ll still have to take the path to the front gates – there isn’t really another way he can go – but if he can do enough meandering and time it right then he can (probably, hopefully) avoid Souji until he’s actually in the classroom. He’ll have to figure out the rest of the day as it comes.

He stalls and stalls and wanders and picks his way carefully along a zig-zagging line in the general direction of the high school. He’s familiar enough with where he’s going that the roundabout way itself doesn’t bother him; he’s already spent a lot of time mindlessly exploring the streets of Inaba.

When his family first moved from the city, out to this tiny little hole in the middle of nowhere, Yosuke had found himself with too much free time and too few distractions to keep his mind from dwelling on his own misery. Being new meant he had no friends, and being the person everyone seemed to blame for Junes’ existence meant he wasn’t really welcome anywhere either. When he wasn’t at school he was working, and when he wasn’t working he was home alone because his parents were working, and when he was home alone his options were either homework or unpacking boxes. Eventually he ran out of both.

Video games were only fun for a little while before they grew frustrating and boring without someone else to play with. Movies and tv were alright but sooner or later he’d already seen everything twice over. Books where never really his thing because his attention span was always just too short to let him enjoy them; manga was better, but had the same problem as movies. In the end, Yosuke’s only choice for something to do besides sit and stare at the wall had been to go walking – if only to try and familiarize himself with the place he was inevitably going to be stuck in for the rest of his natural life.

So he walked. From the school district down towards his house, looping and doubling back to kill time, or from Junes after an earlier shift and across to the other side of town just to see how far this tiny pocket of rural bullshit extended before he hit the wilderness. He might not have gotten the whole place memorized, but after those first couple of months in Inaba, when his entire experience with the town outside of school, work, or the pile of moving boxes at home had been made up of long walks and lonely hours, Yosuke’s mental map had soon become, at the very least, decent.

He calls on that mental map now as he rounds another corner, pulling at a few staler memories to see if he’s going the way he thinks he is. The house at the end of the street with the blue shutters, the rickety doghouse in the front yard across the road – yep, all still there. He’s probably going to be late again, or very, very close to it, but as long as he keeps moving, as long as he twists and winds and pretends he doesn’t eventually have to join the rest of the student population on the same road to the school entrance, he can keep himself from succumbing to his anxiety. Souji is punctual, Souji likes routine. If Yosuke takes his time getting to school and avoids the usual path, then he theoretically doesn’t have to worry about accidentally running into Souji on the way.

But even as the thought helps to keep the jitters at bay, there is just something so… inherently wrong about it that Yosuke has to bite down hard on the inside of his own cheek to keep himself from choking. This is a violation of his own routine, of everything that has made his world anything considering normal up to this point. Never in a million years would he have ever thought himself capable of outright hiding from his best friend, going out of his way to purposefully avoid him – it feels like a betrayal, like he’s adding just one more slight against Souji to his ever-growing pile of mistakes. A faint echo of loneliness washes over him and clings to his skin like a humid breeze – the morning feels far too much like the walks he used to take before he even knew that Souji existed, all those months ago.

He never wants to go back to that.

He thinks he may have forgotten how to breathe.

Digging his shoes a little more roughly into the sidewalk, Yosuke powers his way up the street – headache be damned – and past the house with the blue shutters, counting his footsteps in his head loud enough to eclipse the lyrics of the song in his headphones. He keeps his head down and his shoulders hunched, only letting his eyes lift from the sidewalk to keep himself from tripping over as he walks like the entire world is clawing at his heels.

He almost doesn’t notice when he’s reached the path that leads through the school district.

He almost doesn’t notice the achingly familiar sound of Souji’s voice further up along the road.

He almost doesn’t notice the figure striding along at his partner’s side.

But then he does.  

Yosuke looks up instinctively as his friend’s voice reaches his ears, startling violently for a moment when he sees just how close he got to Souji without even realizing it. His heart stutters, trembles like the wings of a frightened moth at the flash of silver not even twenty feet in front of where Yosuke has been disassociating as he walks. (And how funny is it that even when Yosuke forgets where he is, his feet always seem to lead him right back to the one thing that’s ever made his life make any sort of sense?) He nearly trips on the next footfall as he overrides his own autopilot and manually slows his pace, falling a little further back from the ethereal swath of black-and-moonlight ahead of him just enough to not be noticed. He makes sure to stay close enough that he can still hear his partner speaking, though – not even the words themselves, just the sound of Souji is all he really needs.

(Just how needy can he get?)

Souji’s voice carries on the slight breeze that blows through and ruffles his hair, moving it enough to catch the muted morning light and make it shine like sunbeams across the Samegawa. Souji's volume is as quiet as ever but unmistakable in its steady timbre, its velvet-softness, and even with his headphones still on Yosuke can hear it. He’s trained himself to pick up on Souji’s commands through his music while in battle. By now it’s almost second nature to him to react every time his friend speaks.

But Souji isn’t speaking to Yosuke. No, Yosuke is still a ways behind him and from the looks of it Souji hasn’t noticed Yosuke at all. Instead, walking side-by-side, so close that their arms nearly brush every time one of them gestures, Souji is talking to someone else. Someone tall, with broader shoulders and a louder voice, bleach-blond hair slicked back to show off the glint of several earrings, a uniform jacket worn like a cape instead of over the arms.

Souji is talking to Kanji.

Souji is walking with Kanji.

Something inside of Yosuke twists sharply. He feels… sick.

It sits like concrete in the pit of his stomach, growing rapidly in its weight until he can barely breathe, can barely see, the edges of his vision almost pulsing with that same ominous yellow. He can't think for a moment, can't focus on anything but the way his best friend – his best friend, goddamnit! - walks just a little too close to Kanji, smiles just a little too widely at Kanji. It's wrong, it's wrong, it's so wrong, and Yosuke can't even begin to peel back his own thoughts from the slow crescendo of screaming now building inside his mind to parse just why he's suddenly so angry. The yellow becomes tinged with something almost like an acidic green, the color of jealousy and vomit and everything Yosuke can feel at the back of his throat like a wad of wet paper. He feels shaky in a new way, no longer afraid but something closer to how he tenses before a strike in battle. Defensive. A snarl curls at his lips before he can stop himself, and it's only because he's still rooted to the spot in a kind of shock that doesn't even feel human anymore that he doesn't go launching himself across the way and yanking Souji back to himself by the arm.

Somewhere, deeper than the anger and the horrible heat trickling down his spine, Yosuke knows he's being unreasonable; after all, Kanji is Souji's friend, too, and it's not like Yosuke has exactly been available for Souji to interact with recently, so there's nothing in the world wrong with the other boy walking to school with another member of their team. He wishes he could pinpoint where this is even coming from, why he's suddenly flipped like a switch from wanting to avoid Souji at all costs to violently wanting to hoard him all to himself. It doesn't make any sense, and Yosuke's actually starting to get a little bit frightened of his own reaction.

It's just too bad he can't feel it properly below everything sinking into his heart, poisoning him from the inside out; maybe it would be enough to snap him out of whatever this is.

He stands stock still, only vaguely aware of the other people around him, some shooting looks at him no doubt, and watches as his Souji (his, something in him hisses,) passes through the gate with someone other than Yosuke. He watches, body frozen and eyes burning, refusing to blink as Souji, his friend, his leader, his partner approaches the school together with Kanji, the same way he used to (used to, should be,) with Yosuke.

It shouldn’t knock the wind from Yosuke’s lungs like he’s taken a Zio straight to the chest; it shouldn’t, because when all is said and done it's almost guaranteed all this is completely innocent – Souji is a friendly guy, and it's never been like him to say no to anyone asking for his time. (Except for when he did, Yosuke thinks bitterly, because wow, that wound is just not closing.)

But that's the thing, isn't it? Because no matter how much it is absolutely Yosuke's fault for putting this newest distance between him and his partner, even if Souji's refusal to talk to him had set everything in motion, no matter who or what is truly to blame for this, it does little to change the very real fact that Yosuke is not the one by Souji's side right now.

That Souji has picked someone else.

The scene is so similar that it’s almost as if Yosuke is looking at a displaced echo, a badly done juxtaposition of two different images made to look like one. Like someone stripped the negative of a photograph and pasted in a poor substitute. Like someone replaced the original and, and...

Told you, the voice inside his brain sneers. For the first time that morning, Yosuke feels that formless smirk stretching wider, curling into his fingers and toes like something settling into its frame after being wadded up, stuffed into a space it didn't fit. It feels simultaneously right and wrong – wrong because he doesn't think it's supposed to be there, hiding just behind his limbs, adhering to his bones and pricking at his nerve endings; right because the thing now wearing his skin alongside him disagrees.

It was only a matter of time before he got tired of your shit.

It was only a matter of time before he got tired of you.

He takes a few steps after them as they start to get just a little bit too far away, hyper -focusing on the way Souji acts, the sound of his voice and the way it lilts and flows, comfortable in a way Yosuke's rattling memories can't recall if he's ever been before. Yosuke zeros in on the lack of distance between the pair ahead of him, scanning them like Rise does in the TV and storing away all the minute details he can suddenly see, focus now sharp as his kunai. He sees the way Kaji's face reddens. He sees Souji looking over at Kanji with a bright expression, with a smile that shows teeth and pulls the corners of his mouth wider than Yosuke has ever seen when Souji is talking to him. He feels a growl rumbling deep in his throat.

Souji tilts his head in Kanji’s direction as the punk says something, swinging a large hand out in front of himself with obvious excitement and nearly smacking into Souji’s side with his elbow. He catches himself before the hit lands and sheepishly pulls his arm away, face going redder. Souji lightly, deliberately, bumps Kanji's elbow with the back of his own hand, no doubt reassuring the blond that his exuberance has caused no harm. Kanji rubs at the spot awkwardly. He says something. He blushes harder.

And Souji laughs.

It not a real laugh, it never really is with Souji, nothing louder than a very quiet chuckle or a huff or a breath, but Yosuke has heard it before, has been the one to bring it out before, so he would know that sound anywhere, will always recognize that silent shudder of his partner's shoulders as the other boy uses his body to communicate instead of his voice. Yosuke doesn't have to hear it – his mind supplies the sound.

That's mine! he snarls.

Not anymore, something mockingly singsongs in reply.

The yellow-green in his eyes grows darker and Yosuke can see the corners start to creep inward with solid color, until all he can see is the fondness on Souji's face that isn't meant for him.

He has to claw his way back to the forefront of his mind in order to get to class on time, just barely slinking into the room with the teacher coming up the hallway behind him. His eyes bore into the soft grey hair at the back of Souji's neck and – for the briefest of moments – he has to quell the urge to lean forward and sink his teeth into his partner's flesh, leave his imprint for all the world to see and claim what's his.

He doesn't even notice the way the thing inside him that before would have been copper and sick now seems to purr at the thought.

---

He doesn't remember the rest of the day.

Yosuke is aware that he somehow makes it through the school day, bounding out of the room at lunchtime to go and... well, he doesn't even know, really. He thinks he may have gone up to the roof but he isn't sure. He knows that he did eventually go back to the classroom – presumably after lunch – but beyond that there's nothing. The end-of-day bell sounds and he's immediately on his feet, out the door, down the hall, head foggy and vision tinted yellow; if anyone says anything to him then he doesn't even notice.

Something ugly is happening to him inside. He knows it, doesn't know how to fight it. Right now, after that morning, after everything swirling around in his chest and his head for most of the week now, Yosuke feels a disconnect between himself and reality. He's spent so much time trying not to think, then over-thinking, the repeating, and repeating, and repeating, that it's like something has finally snapped. He's so tired and wrung out that he can't tell how he even feels right now, whether he's mad at Souji or Kanji or himself. Or all three. Or just fucking everything. It's as if there's a block of ice holding him separate from the dark things twisting like vines behind his heart; he can't look at them, can't pull them apart with his hands and study them, he can only feel them coiling tighter and tighter until his body goes numb.

His phone goes off in his pocket as he stalks his way down the hill away from school, thighs burning despite months of combat toning his muscles inside the TV. He checks it on instinct, feels the vines in his ribs twist in another direction as he reads the “I miss you, Partner,” that Souji had texted him.

Guilt or anger or self-disgust or something climbs its way to the back of his throat and threatens to spill from his lips onto the sidewalk and it's such a mess, such a god-fucking-awful mess that the only thing Yosuke can do is type a quick, dismissive, “sorry @ work” and back out of the text before he chokes on molten, raw emotion. Without even looking he scrolls and clicks on a random chat log further down the list and pulls it up so he doesn't have to look at Souji's name anymore, doesn't have to try and figure out if he's upset or happy or just sick to his stomach. Chie's nickname screams at him from the phone screen, her words from last night still justifiably pissed.

Yosuke takes a second to think of the dirtiest pick-up line he can and sends it off, not even caring anymore. It doesn't feel like anything, he gets no satisfaction from it, doesn't even bother harboring the idea that maybe she'd find it funny like he used to do ages ago. It doesn't mean anything. Nothing means anything anymore. He's just hollow.

His phone 'ping!'s and he barely glances at the response. She's mad again. Whatever. Let her be. Yosuke deserves it – the frigid rush he gets from her anger coats his skin and, in a horrible, disgusting way, it makes him feel better. Good. At least someone feels something in his direction. He sends her another message, pretending it was all a joke, that he wasn't punching at the walls of his tiny world just to feel anything anymore. He's gone so far from the constant buzz of anxiety and fear that he's grown immune to it now. Everything is so loud and at the same time it's all too brutally quiet. It's like he's rigged for self-destruction, caught in a loop of feeling betrayed and wanting to betray in return out of spite, folding back around to hating himself for it, wishing everything was back to normal, that he and Souji were back to normal, and then wanting to rip his own skin off when he realizes they aren't and can't. It tilts him side to side and he can't balance. He can't regulate his emotions, can't sort out his feelings, has no outlet – all he can do is take a swipe at everything around him and hope he finds a handhold, something to pull him back to the surface. Maybe if he causes enough damage outside himself then it will make up for all the damage already caused inside.

He wants to scream.

Instead, Yosuke types out another dirty text and hits send with shaking, vindictive hands.

Nothing changes as the afternoon stretches on. Chie spits more fire at him through the phone, apparently borrowing Yukiko's element for a while as she tells Yosuke in loving detail just how many ways she intends to break his knees. He hates that it's almost comforting in its normalcy – albeit in a dark and over-exaggerated way. The ice block sits comfortably in his chest, hindering him from properly feeling the fallout of his actions as the vines dig their thorns in deeper; he knows that if he tries to look behind it then he'll be disgusted with himself all over again, (Chie really doesn't deserve this kind of treatment, for one thing) and so he just. Doesn't. He holds back the part of him still consciously rallying against everything he's doing, yelling at him to stop, throwing itself against the frozen wall to try and make him feel all the remorse and guilt he knows is there behind the ice. It's building, drop by drop, bucket by bucket, action by action, but Yosuke can't make himself stop.

You really are a worthless piece of shit, aren't you?

It's to the point where Yosuke can no longer tell the mocking, hissing, whispering voice inside his head from his own. He thinks there might not be a difference at all anymore.

He wanders through the streets and between the buildings in the same weaving, winding pattern he did that morning, letting the music in his ears and the faint ache in his legs from his ceaseless power walking distract him from all the things he wants to pretend aren't happening. Eventually he reaches the bottom of another hill and doubles back to kill more time before his shift at Junes – because, unlike the night before, he really does have one this time. He debates on calling in as he takes the long way around to the shopping district. Right now he barely feels human, let alone like he's capable of interacting with other people; donning the mask of artificial pep needed to deal with shoppers is draining even on the good days, despite the fact that he's used to being on autopilot while at work with too many years of involuntary customer service making it almost muscle memory by now. In the end, though, he decides against it. Calling in will mean having to make up a good excuse for his dad, which might lead to a far longer and more complicate conversation than Yosuke has any desire to have. There's no way he has the energy to play verbal minesweeper with his parents, whether it be now or later once they get home.

He checks his phone to see how much time he has left to fortify himself, to keep his brain and his heart blissfully, chaotically numb, and sees a trio of new texts from Chie that must have come through while he wasn't looking. He taps her name to bring the chat back up and expects to see more of the usual fair. He doesn't.

Meat-Fu: What's going on Hanamura? This isn't normal.

Meat-Fu: U know u can talk 2 me right?

Meat-Fu: Ur my friend & I'm worried.

Yosuke feels like he's been stabbed.

Nonononono,this isn't right! With all the shit he's pulled to get attention, validation, to force the world to prove he's a bastard, none of it was supposed to result in this. He's sick, he's worthless, why can't everyone just hate him as much as he hates himself?!

Yosuke nearly throws the phone away from him, his body suddenly shaking as the ice cracks and the vines squeeze and he comes dangerously close to feeling something. This wasn't – he doesn't' know how to deal with this. Everything is off-kilter; Souji has gone and replaced him with Kanji and Kanji is stealing his best friend and it's all Yosuke's fault because he's disgusting, of course Souji isn't going to want anything to do with you anymore – and Kanji probably has the same kind of dreams that Yosuke's been having because that's what gay people do, right? And now Chie, of all people is picking up on the stuff Yosuke is trying so hard to shove down because how does he even begin to deal with all of this and he can't let her know, he can't! Not after everything he's done and said and everything he's turning into, oh god.

Blinking through the sudden blur in his vision, (when did he start tearing up, what the hell?) Yosuke grips his phone in both hands and sucks in breath after breath of too-thick air. He's so tired of borderline breakdowns. Typing as best he can with his limited sight, he fumbles out a reply, just something, anything to grind the conversation to a screeching halt before it can even begin.

Yosuke: wth r u talking about? lol ur crazy Chie

He sends it. It's not enough, it's too casual, too easy to brush off, but he can't see the screen anymore and his fingers won't move right. So he sends it and he stands there in the middle of the sidewalk near the bus stop in the shopping district, staring unseeing down at his phone and forcing himself not to blink. The tears stay in his eyes, dry up, fade away. He takes a shaky breath in and lowers his phone.

“Yosuke-kun?”

Oh no.

It's like a nightmare. An actual nightmare. He looks up and sees Yukiko standing a few feet away from him, likely waiting for the stupid bus (why did he have to stop here? Why?) with what looks like a couple of Junes bags draped over the crook of her elbow. She must have just finished shopping and come straight to the bus stop, ready to head home.

Which means Yosuke would have been damned either way – if he'd gone straight to work he would have run into her there, and because he'd stalled for so long he'd run into her here. He shouldn't have answered Chie's text, should have kept moving, should have taken another route or hidden in the stock room at work. He should have--

Yukiko takes a step closer, concern sweeping over her delicate brows. “Are you alright, Yosuke-kun?” She takes another step. Her lips pull into a frown as she looks at him and Yosuke can't even begin to imagine what's she's seeing.

“H-huh?” he squeaks out. His knees don't want to hold him up.

Yukiko's frown deepens. “You look troubled, did something happen?”

Yosuke shakes his head. “No! No, I'm perfectly fine, I'm just uh...” He flounders for a second, staring at her like she's an approaching Shadow four times his size – even if she hasn't moved since that second step in his direction. He knows his eyes are wider than a cat's, he can feel it. Finally he manages to blurt out, “stalling? Cuz I really don't wanna go to work.” (Well it's not... exactly a lie.)

From the way Yukiko is looking at him, he knows she isn't convinced, can already tell she's thinking of saying something. She's quiet and polite most of the time, yes, but she's been getting better at speaking her mind, and that scares him right now. He can barely keep himself together over a text conversation; there's no way in hell Yosuke will be able to make it out of a face-to-face one alive.

So he defaults. He defaults and it leaves him feeling gross and slimy even before it's finished leaving his tongue; “You know, if you're worried about me, you could always come cheer me up.”

(Oh god does he wish he could put the words back in his mouth and swallow them down.)

Yukiko leans back slightly, her expression turning uncomfortable, and it just serves to make Yosuke feel even worse about what he's doing. She opens her mouth to speak. Yosuke cuts her off.

“You never did send me that picture.” He tries to wink. He doesn't like how it feels.

This time, Yukiko recoils as if something foul has been splashed at her. “That's--”

But Yosuke is already turning on his jelly-kneed legs and willing them to carry him just around the corner, just out of sight. “See you tomorrow!” he calls, trying to keep himself from retching as the words come out. Behind him, he hears the sound of the bus' breaks squealing and pushes his legs faster. Yukiko won't follow him, he knows (he hopes,) lest she miss her ride home and have to wait for the next one. Yosuke has been spared for now.

(Except he hasn't really, now has he?)

He's almost makes it up to the top of the shopping district, almost makes it to (possible) safety at Junes where he can hide between the aisles, go and find things to do and redo in the stock room, keep himself busy without actually doing anything. It'll be a welcome distraction at this point, despite how vehemently he doesn't actually feel like dealing with customers, coworkers, hell, he'd even probably dodge Teddie because Yosuke just genuinely can't today. (And on the chance he spots one of his friends walking into whatever area he happens to be in, well... then he'll just have to find something to hide behind and stay there until they go away.)

He's almost to his goal when the universe decides he's not done suffering quite yet. There, coming around the corner, Nanako perched happily on his shoulders, is Souji.

Yosuke stops dead in his track, so abruptly that it's only by some tiny speck of luck that he doesn't fall face-first onto the pavement and break his nose. Panic erupts in his blood like he's been doused in gasoline and set on fire and suddenly his lungs are collapsing in his chest. He doesn't know how he manages to do it, but he dives to the side into an alleyway and tears out the other end as if his life depends on it.

Souji can't see him, Souji can't know he's there, because Yukiko and Chie both talk to Souji and Yosuke hasn't even managed to deal with all the stuff that's already happened this week, hasn't dealt with this morning even! So if Yukiko and Chie talk to Souji and tell Souji about all the horrible shit that's Yosuke's been doing...

Yosuke is doomed. Yosuke will absolutely be doomed. He hasn't spoken to Souji in days and he can't let their next interaction be Souji looking at him with disappointment, with anger, with disgust.

Yosuke runs through back streets and down alleyways until his legs betray him and he collapses against a wall just outside the Shiroku Store. He wasn't even aware he'd managed to book it that far – no wonder his chest feels like it's about to explode. He waits until he can manage to catch his breath, leaning into the bricks so he doesn't sink to the ground. When he thinks he can move again, (ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour later, he has no idea how long he's there,) he pulls himself around the corner and looks first to the left, up towards Junes, and then to the right down the shopping district. No Souji. Good. Hopefully the other boy is still up shopping with his sister and will be for a good long while, (especially if Teddie has anything to say about it.) Tentatively confident that he's not about to be ambushed by his former partner, Yosuke slips shakily out onto the sidewalk.

First thing's first, he shoves his hand into his pocket and digs around until he finds every bit of loose change he's got and shoves it gracelessly into the receiver of the vending machine. He hits a random button, doesn't even care what he gets so long as it's liquid and cold. He chugs the can without even tasting anything and he stifles a wince as the drink hits his burning throat, before the raspy dry feeling finally goes away. He tosses the can away in the nearby trashcan and slinks back into the alley to hide while he calls his dad and tells him he can't make it in for his shift.

(Chie texts him again because of course she does. He doesn't even look at it this time; he just fires off a quick, “@ work can't talk” and puts his phone on airplane mode.)

---

Yosuke makes a quick stop inside Shiroku Store before chancing the trip back home. He grabs a couple of instant ramens for himself, knowing full well no one will be home for a while to make dinner and that his own appetite is questionable after his stomach has been tied up in knots for so long. It'll also give him an excuse not to have to sneak back downstairs later and risk running into his parents. Again, not a conversational minefield he's willing to navigate right now. (He also grabs a pack of mochi to placate his little brother when Teddie inevitably whines about Yosuke not coming in to work.) Once he's out he heads straight home – straight, because the sun has started going down and it's freezing outside, so he feels confident enough in the low temperature to take the gamble on none of his friends being out where he can stumble into them.

He makes it to his house without incident, makes it inside and up to his room, even manages to take a bath without a fuss since Teddie isn't home yet to knock insistently on the bathroom door. For now, he's safe. But even knowing he's at home, alone, with his phone far away from him in the other room, Yosuke finds that he still can't relax. He soaks in the warm water, (he'd washed as quickly as fucking possible because even days later the shower makes his stomach squirm,) and tries to will the anxiety to bleed out through his pores. It doesn't.

Something is keeping his shoulders tense, his nerves frayed and spiked. Even when he gets out of the bathtub after Teddie comes bounding into the house, loud even from downstairs, Yosuke feels like he could jog all the way back to school and have energy left over.

He gives Teddie the mochi, which effectively shuts up any line of questioning that might have been incoming, and Teddie babbles excitedly as he eats. He tells Yosuke all about how “Sensei and Nana-chan” had come by to do some grocery shopping, how he and Nanako had run off to find the groceries together while Souji had wandered off. How they'd found him later after they were all done, around the side of the building, crouched low to pet the stray cats. Yosuke listens to all of this with far more attentiveness than normal; he only breathes once Ted is finished and there has been no mention made of Yosuke whatsoever.

It's... weirdly easier to relax his body after that, though understandably not his mind. His little brother is a small sliver of something normal, oblivious and innocent and forever just happy to be there. It lets Yosuke pretend that nothing bad is waiting for him just outside the house's front door.

Normally he'd play a few rounds of a video game with his brother until one of them felt tired enough to go to bed; tonight, though, Yosuke can't keep his attention on the game, and so gives up after only two failed races. He moves to sit on the bed and picks half-heartedly at his cold instant ramen, only partially watching as Ted plays against the game's AI until the bear starts getting bored. Teddie decides that they're going to have a movie night together after that, and Yosuke lets the blond boy put in some brightly-colored Ghibli thing for them to watch. Yosuke inevitably zones out.

It isn't until the credits end and the dvd menu comes back with a loop of the movie's main theme that he finally looks up, blinking at the red numbers on his alarm clock that read far later into the night than he'd thought, and then down to find his brother passed out cold on the floor. Yosuke sighs and gets up, throwing his unfinished noodles away before awkwardly – albeit carefully – dragging Teddie's slumbering form over to the closet and plopping him onto his futon.

It's as Yosuke is getting ready to turn off the light that he sees Teddie's phone lying on the carpet.

He doesn't know why he thinks it, what makes him link the sight of his little brother's cell phone to the flicker of memory that bubbles up to the surface. He doesn't know where the idea comes from. But he has it.

Rise had taken pictures of everyone and everything at the pageant. Rise had taken pictures of Souji.

Teddie had been begging Rise to send the pictures to his phone.

Yosuke has no idea whether or not Rise had ever actually did, but with how proud of herself she'd been for taking them, he'd bet money on there now being a whole folder of pageant photos residing in the bear boy's phone.

I shouldn't, he thinks, and not just because it'd be incredibly invasive to go poking around in his brother's phone –  if he does, and he finds what he's looking for, then what? He knows neither the girls nor Naoto took any photos of the second pageant, but despite what he let Yukiko believe (and what he's been trying to convince himself of for days,) Yosuke doesn't need those; he'd snapped a few of his own when the event was happening. There aren't many - he'd been a bit preoccupied worrying over Souji's disappearance at the time, and he'd purposefully avoided taking any pictures of Naoto because they'd looked so miserable that it felt almost cruel, but he has some. (And thinking about it now, he realizes he hasn't so much as opened the photo gallery on his phone even once to look at any of them since he took them.)

So no, it's not photos of the beauty pageant he's looking for.

Slowly, as if terrified Teddie will somehow wake up and throw open the closet door to catch Yosuke in the act, he reaches down and picks his brother's phone up off the ground. He's just picking it up, he tells himself; he's just getting it off the floor so no one steps on it. He's doing Ted a favor. He's not going to look, he's not.

(Liar.)

It's not hard to get into Ted's phone – the bear doesn't have any sort of lock on the screen – and because it's a cheap Junes model, Yosuke already knows exactly how to work it. It takes him less than half a minute to find Rise's nickname in the text logs and pull up their last conversation.

There, staring up at him, is the bottom part of a photo, with what looks like the stage in the school auditorium.

Yosuke immediately feels his palms start to sweat. He crosses the room in two quick, silent strides over to the light switch, turning it off with fumbling fingers and plunging the room into darkness save for the faint glow of his alarm clock and the glare from the phone in his hand. He pads back over to the outline of his bed and throws the covers back, then climbs in, throws the blankets over his head like a child avoiding bedtime, and curls up into a ball on his side with his prize held tight in his nervous hands.

His stomach swoops as he holds his thumb over the up button, ready to scroll past Ted's enthusiastic words of thanks to Rise and see--- but hesitates.

He could stop right now, he thinks; it would be so easy just to shut the phone off, put it on the charger, go to sleep. He could roll over with his face in the pillow and pretend none of this happened. It would be so easy.

Okay, he thinks, momentarily closing the phone. Okay. Okay...

This isn't creepy, it's not; he's just... making sure. Right. Yes. That's all. The dreams started after Yosuke had seen Souji dressed up as a girl – after Yosuke had thought things about Souji dressed as a girl. That had to be the reason, right? He couldn't be gay if he was only attracted to his best friend when Souji was in a skirt, when he looked a little too convincing as a chick. That's where the wires had gotten crossed in Yosuke's head, when his teenage hormones had been confused at the sight of his already-pretty partner making an even-prettier lady. That's all it was, it had to be, and Yosuke was holding the proof, the means to his mental salvation, in his hands. All he had to do was look.

Yosuke closes his eyes and takes a second to brace himself, scared for reasons he doesn't particularly want to explore. He pulls in a deep, unsteady breath. Another. A third. On the final exhale, he opens his eyes and taps a key to wake the screen back up. He stares at the bottom of the photo for just a few moments more and then finally sucks in one more breath, pressing the 'up' as his lungs fill to the brim.

The first few pictures aren't what he needs: a crowded group shot, Teddie flouncing around the stage, Kanji looking ready to break an ankle in his ill-fitting heels, Yosuke hating everything while holding the mic. He keeps scrolling up, growing irritated and more anxious with every photo revealed not to be the one he wants. Eventually he just holds the button down and lets everything scroll by until all the images start to blur together; it's because of this that he very nearly misses a flash of grey and silver as the photo streaks by.

Yosuke immediately takes his thumb off the 'up' and jabs at the 'down' until the picture comes back into view. There, bathed in the harsh spotlight of center stage, stands Souji, expression tightly neutral and face pale. It sucks the breath from Yosuke's lungs.

This. This is what Yosuke has been trying so desperately to find, simultaneously to avoid. It feels wrong, somehow, like an invasion of more than just Teddie's privacy, but the whole school had seen Souji in a skirt so it's not like it's a secret that anyone's trying to keep. Still, as Yosuke stares at the familiar shape of his partner's face, his hips, his hands, Yosuke feels, not the wave of relief he'd been expecting, but sour. He can't even put his finger on it, why his face seems to curl up in frustration without him even consciously bidding it to; Souji's body is just as lean and graceful as he remembers it looking, with the long silver wig framing his face and softening his features and the line of the skirt hugging his waist to give him just the faintest of hourglass figures. It should be beautiful, in a way it is, but the more that Yosuke stares at the photo the less and less attracted he finds himself being.

This isn't right.

(Oh, but isn't it?)

Yosuke scrolls up to look for another photo, finding a better one, a closer one, on the very next try. This time the camera is zoomed in, giving Yosuke a much clearer view of Souji from the waist up. Whatever bra the girls had stuffed him into makes his chest look natural, a petite curve to his body that fits stunningly along with the slender way his figure normally seems to taper slightly at his waist. Objectively, Souji looks great, hot, even in the pageant clothes he'd been forced to wear; Yosuke had thought as much when seeing his partner in person on that nightmare of a day. He squints at the phone in his hands and tries to recall just what specifically he'd found attractive when he'd been staring at Souji backstage in the dim, shitty lighting. His hips, definitely – he remembers thinking how perfect they would be for him to rest his hands on. Souji's waist, his chest, yes, but also his hands. Yosuke remembers how ethereal Souji had looked, too, with his eyes and the wig (an uncannily perfect match for Souji's actual hair color,) shining dull silver in the dark. The curve of his jaw, the hint of skin just above his collar bones, the line of his thighs barely there below the straightness of the skirt.

Looking at the photo now, Yosuke can see all the the things that he found so alluring before – and feels, strangely, next to nothing.

He can't understand it, why is he not swooning over the image of his best friend making the most amazingly convincing girl Yosuke has ever had filthy dreams about? (Something turns over in his mind, and suddenly, sickeningly, Yosuke feels like he's on the highest peak of a roller coaster, staring down at the hundred-foot drop below him just as the cart begins to move.)

The sex dreams hadn't featured a skirt.

They hadn't featured long hair or perky boobs.

In his dreams, Souji had just been... Souji. A flat, smooth chest, all toned muscle and softly masculine edges. The silver had been shorter, the cheekbones sharper, all of it had been Souji as he always is – a guy. No matter how gorgeous Yosuke thinks (or thought) Souji looked in his pageant outfit, the blinding fact remains that the boy in his dreams had stayed a boy.

Slowly, stomach twisting into nausea, Yosuke reaches out from the safety of his blanket shield and picks his own phone up off the night stand beside the bed. Like some kind of gremlin, he snatches his hand – phone and all – back into the darkness beneath the covers, clutching it to him with fingers so clammy it threatens to hinder his grip. His heart flutters in his chest, hard enough that he can feel his own pulse; he swallows and his throat is dry. Trembling, Yosuke holds a phone in each hand, holds them up next to one another. He opens his, and fumbles his way to his photo gallery, clicking through until he comes to a picture of himself and Souji, standing close and smiling as Yosuke snaps the selfie.

Oh god.

It's all still there. The photo is, again, a waist-up shot, but even still Yosuke can see the gentle line of Souji's jaw, the hint of his collarbones just past the open top button of his shirt, the long, delicate fingers on strong and calloused hands. Souji's hair is shorter, of course, and doesn't frame his face the way the wig did, so his cheekbones are more visible, his chin slightly sharper, but his eyes. Souji's eyes are still that same summer-storm hue, round and kind, and full of far more life than any of the photos of him in pageant garb. Pageant Souji looks like a marionette; real Souji looks like rainclouds incarnate.

Yosuke's gaze travels down to the very bottom of the picture, where the image cuts off right below Souji's belt buckle, leaving the dip of his waist, the jut of the top of his hip, all still visible. He's wearing his uniform shirt and jacket, but even with the layers of straight-cut clothing Yosuke can see that same faint, curving line of his partner's body that almost looks like the start of an hourglass. Yosuke can't see the other boy's thighs in this one, but the line of Souji's hip fills outward slightly, instead of carving a path straight down like Yosuke is so used to seeing on most other guys – himself included.  Souji, for all that he's built like an athlete, is only sharp in certain places, soft in others; a graceful blade of curving steel, handle wrapped in velvety leather.

Yosuke tears his eyes away from the photo of him and Souji together and back over to the one of Souji at the pageant. The features are the same but different, radiant in one and hollow in the other – both have the same shape, the same color, the same lines and vivid angles. But even without the false femininity, Souji is still gorgeous. Souji is still ethereal. And Yosuke can feel that swooping in his stomach turn to something warm.

A terrible realization comes dawning over Yosuke's mind like a cold and wretched sun. The people in the photos – excluding Yosuke – though differing in dress, are the same. The things that Yosuke had noticed on the day of the pageant, when he'd stared and stared and stared at his friend like Souji was the most beautiful ghost he'd ever seen, every single one of them was still there. Even without the wig and the makeup and the clothing meant for women, every tiny detail that Yosuke had poured over was unmistakably present; they'd all been there the entire time, never not.  

Which means that Yosuke just hadn't noticed them until he'd stopped and stared. And stared. And stared.

Oh my fucking god.

---

There is a certain kind of quiet mania that comes from not having slept at all; a distant sort of grinding at the threads keeping a person from breaking down, from cracking like a gunshot. It's a mental time bomb, one that can lead to either exhaustion and collapse, or the utter shattering of all rational behavior and thought.

Yosuke sits on the living room couch, already fully dressed for school, watching the sun come up through the window as his body and mind are eerily calm. That internal timer is already running low.

He hasn't slept. After his brain-breaking revelation the night before, Yosuke had lain there, pulling out every memory he had of Souji and turning it over and over in his mind. Each interaction, each time he'd thrown his arm casually across the other boy's shoulders, the way it felt when they sat close enough that Souji's body heat warmed his side. So many times Yosuke had felt his breath hitch, his heart beat just a little bit quicker, but every time he just brushed it off. Adrenaline from talking over the murder case, the heat in the summer air, his now-absent crush on Rise kicking in when she did anything cute. (Because he'd noticed that, too; that his cheeks no longer flushed while thinking about her – not since she went from The Idol Risette to his friend Rise.)

Memory by memory, it felt like Yosuke's self-dug grave had gotten that much deeper, and as he pulled on that first thread of realization, more and more had come. Like untangling a spider web piece by fragile piece. It had left his brain in a jumble, keeping him awake for hours until he'd just given up on sleep altogether.

He hadn't been restless, per se, but there had been enough static in his head that it had eventually threatened to spill out into the dark of the bedroom, and, resigned to being awake forever, Yosuke had peeled back the covers and crawled silently out of bed. Grabbing his wrinkled uniform from the day before and slipping it on, he'd gone to grab his toothbrush and a comb out of the bathroom (fervently not looking at either the mirror or the shower,) and headed downstairs to use the bathroom there instead. Slowly, with all the time in the world, he finished getting ready for school on autopilot, even bothering to make – and eat – a bowl of cereal. From an outside perspective he might have looked relatively normal; internally, however, there was nothing but empty, dissociated quiet. Still waters, deceptive with their glassy surface, poised and ready to drop into the churning rapids below.

Yosuke checks the time on his phone, still on airplane mode.

He stands from the couch without a sound, collects his coat and school bag, and slips out the door into the frigid November morning.

(His reflection in the entryway mirror turns to watch him as he leaves.)

---

He cuts through the back way to school again, though this time he doesn't drag his feet; instead, he stalks down the side streets with his hands shoved in his coat pockets and his shoulders hunched. The lack of sleep and the cold feeling now lingering just at the base of his skull both serve to sharpen the knife's edge of emotional instability he's currently teetering on. He feels... nothing. And everything. All at once. He feels like he could run full-throttle straight at somebody and deck them square in the jaw; he also feels like he could break into hysterical laughter at any moment, or maybe tears. It's hard to regulate what's going on in his everything, because his head is both empty and far too full from all the thinking he'd done the night before, but it's also quiet, which is never a good sign. Normally his brain is too loud, but today...

Today is different.

Today is bad.

If he had to try and put words to it, Yosuke would have probably described his mood (if only to himself) as fragile. It's like the wall of ice that had been blocking him from his thoughts and emotions before has turned to tiny, thin splinters. Sharp and cold and so delicate that one wrong move will shatter them – but they'll also slice everything in their path to ribbons.

The slow, methodical trudge to Yasogami High actually takes far less time than he means for it to, leaving him ample time to loiter unseen around the side of the gate, just out of view of any students passing through it. Somehow, (and he's not sure just which god to thank for this,) he hasn't seen Souji yet, either in flashes on the way as Yosuke ducked away from the normal path, or up already near the entrance. It means that Souji is either already inside or he's still en route. (And Yosuke hopes it's the former, because he's not sure just how well that wafer-thin pane of frost is going to hold. Or, for how long.)

It's just his luck, then, that he catches a glimpse of starlight silver and bleached blond coming up the crest of the hill. Yosuke digs his teeth so hard into his cheeks he can taste the coppery tang of splitting skin – Souji and Kanji are walking together. Again.

So easily replaced.

Yosuke bites viciously into the flesh inside mouth and turns to stalk into the school before either of the other boys – so close together they almost touch – can see him.

---

“Hanamura!”

Yosuke twitches, jerked from the ominous quiet inside his own achingly-empty head. Turning, (slowly, stiffly, with the faintest spark of mania waiting to be fueled,) he turns to see the bearer of the voice that had shouted at him from the stairwell behind. Chie stands on the second floor landing with her hands on her hips, glaring up at him with a look so cold it could rival her Bufu. Yukiko appears just two steps below and finishes the climb to stop beside her, a stern expression locked on her face as if made of iron resolve. Neither one of them looks to be in a forgiving mood.

Yosuke wants to just turn back around and ignore them, wants to say 'fuck it,' and just throw away what's left of his friendships so he can go back to the blissful emptiness of rock-fucking-bottom. It'd be easier that way, and he has neither the time nor the energy to even begin to untangle the knot of mistakes he's made this week.

But the looks on his friends' faces (Chie, especially,) tell him they aren't going to let this go, even for now, so, begrudgingly, Yosuke stands and waits for one of them to speak. They don't disappoint.

Chie, upon seeing him pause, marches up to him with Yukiko hot on her heels and together the pair of them back him up until he's nearly hit the wall. “Alright, you dick, we need to talk.” From around her, Yukiko steps into position and stays at Chie's side, looking for all the world like a disappointed mother as she silently lets Chie do the talking.

Somehow, Yosuke finds his voice. Somehow, despite that momentary fight-or-flight-or freeze instinct when the girls had stormed towards him, Yosuke is calm. (It isn't the normal kind, either, it's the kind of calm that can only be found when someone has reached the threshold of just how much adrenaline their body can handle and they loop back around to apathy.) “Can it wait till we don't have class?” he asks, and the voice that leaves him is so devoid of life and emotion that it actually makes Chie balk. She and Yukiko share a disquieted look, like they aren't sure whether to be startled or mad and Yosuke takes their moment of distraction to try and slip to the side where there's still space to move away.

This snaps the pair out of their hesitation. Chie blocks his path with an outstretched arm, open palm smacking the wall hard enough – though not violently, to his mild surprise – to make a soft 'thwap.' Yukiko, still silent, moves to block Yosuke's remaining escape route on the other side.

“No,” Chie hisses, “it can't. Because the moment we let you out of our sight you're just going to run off into nowhere and go back to avoiding everyone, just like you've been doing for days. We're tired of it, Yosuke.”

Yukiko nods. “I know we're not as close as you and Souji-kun, but you're our friend, too, and this behavior needs to stop.” She strengthens her stance - and it is frightening.

Yosuke can't meet either of their eyes. “...I don't know what you're talking about.”

Chie makes a sound low in her throat. “Like hell you don't; you've been totally MIA with barely a word to anyone, you've been acting shady as hell whenever someone tries to talk to you, and on top of that you've been straight up avoiding Souji – which is insane, considering you two're normally joined at the freaking hip!”

Yosuke must be doing something with his face, because Chie squints at him and says, “Yeeaaaah, don't think we haven't noticed.”

Something sniggers inside Yosuke's head and it makes his vision pulse a faint, sickly yellow. His lip curls in a barely-there sneer. “Look,” he says, a little more life in his words this time. He smacks at Chie's arm with the back of his hand. “It's nothing, will you get off my back? I'm just having a bad week.”

“Bullshit,” Chie growls in response.

From the corner of his eye, Yosuke can see Yukiko take in a long, carefully-controlled breath, as if she's silently counting down from ten to keep herself collected. “This is more than just a 'bad week,' Yosuke-kun,” she says, and the evenness of her tone belies the fire he knows she can conjure during battle. “You've been rude, crass, evasive, and downright belligerent...”

(Yosuke isn't sure he knows what all those words mean but he's pretty sure she's right on every one.)

“Even on your worst days you've never been this bad.”

Yosuke is so, so tired. He's tired of feeling like he's being buffeted by the wind that's supposed to be on his side, unable to find his footing and ready to fall at any given moment. He's tired of the wildly swinging pendulum of his emotions sending him back and forth from feeling everything to feeling nothing. (And deeper, deeper down, he's tired of people leaving him behind, even more so of driving people away; it's a skill he's never asked for but has somehow mastered nonetheless.)

He doesn't answer Yukiko's spot-on accusations. He doesn't answer Chie's too-observant glower. He doesn't look at either of them, he instead stares off to the side, unseeing, just past the arm that blocks his escape.

Chie lets out another sound of frustration and leans further into his space, craning her neck to somehow stare him down despite their height difference. “Well?” she demands, “Anything you wanna say?”

Yosuke takes a long, deep breath through his nose, letting it out so slowly that the yellow creeping into the edges of his eyes dots with black. With the exhale, he feels the last of his energy – physical, emotional, mental – drain away. It hollows him out with each passing second, until he's nothing more than a husk resigned to his fate of forever being the King of Fucking Up; he's already pushed everything this far towards the edge, he might as well take that last step over.

“...Yeah, actually,” he says, and it's a lifeless drawl, almost entirely devoid of anything. (He sees Yukiko stiffen and Chie flinch in his peripherals.) Exhausted, he lolls his head forward and finally turns his eyes to Chie's face, fixing them just above her eyebrows because he can't focus them any lower. False eye contact, something he's picked up in his time working at Junes.

He takes another deep breath, feeling that disconnecting wall of ice closing over his heart, and says, “You should probably lay off the meat, Chie, cuz you're not doing your thick thighs any favors.”

Yukiko gasps.

Beside her, Chie looks stunned, jaw dropped and mouth open like it's trying to form words her head can't find.

(Yosuke tastes bile in the back of his throat.)

Disgusted with himself and just wanting to not be here, Yosuke tries to use the girls' frozen reactions to his advantage. He isn't sure he can move or duck under Chie's arm, so he makes a break for it the opposite direction and attempts to slide past Yukiko – only for her to snap back to attention just as he's almost free.

“Yo--!”

But Yosuke is too far gone. Instead of letting himself be forced back against the wall, he doubles down, gives in to the fatalistic inevitability that he's going to be losing more than just Souji at this point. (Good, he thinks sadly; I don't deserve any of them, anyway.)

Swerving, scraping the wall with his shoulder to try and get as much space between himself and Yukiko as he can, Yosuke reaches out a hand (desperately hoping he misses,) and makes a pinching gesture at her skirt, causing her to jerk back and away. “See? Here's a perfect set right he--”

His face erupts in red-hot pain.

Yosuke staggers backwards, hitting the back of his head against the cold concrete of the wall with an audible 'thump.' Thoroughly bewildered, he blinks over at the space he had just been and sees Yukiko, hand raised, stance wide, and completely, utterly livid.

Oh, he thinks, slowly reaching up to touch his scalded cheek. I've been slapped.

“You!” Chie snaps, just as Yukiko whispers, “How dare you,” in the most bone-chillingly quiet voice he's ever heard.

He... may have gone too far this time.

Chie stalks forward, so close he has to shallow his breathing to keep his chest from touching hers when he inhales. She turns her face up at him and for a moment, through the exhaustion and the resignation and the apathy, he truly believes her to be capable of tearing his throat out with her bare hands.

It's almost impressive.  

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she snarls, “You've been acting like a jackass all week!”

Yosuke focuses on Chie's cheekbones as best he can with her so close; he practically has to go crosseyed to do so, even without meeting her murderous glare. It's strange, how he's aware that his cheek is in pain, (and rightfully so, he deserved that slap,) just as he's aware that on any other day before this week he'd be terrified for his safety in a situation like this. He remembers just how hard Chie can kick, having felt it firsthand in delicate places. But his energy is spent at this point, and all the awareness in the world can't conjure up the ability to be anything other than drained.

So he doesn't react, just looks back at his (probably former) friend and huffs, “Chill out, Chie, it was just a joke.”

Both girls visibly tense, shoulders squared and backs straight. Yukiko brings her hand up like she's going to slap him again, rearing it back as she hisses, “It wasn't funny!”

Chie, simultaneously, bares her teeth in vicious rage. “Like hell it was!” she barks, her own voice layering over Yukiko's outburst.

Yosuke just lolls his head to the side slightly and focuses on empty air. “Yeah, well,” he drawls, unable to find the right emotion to put into his voice. “You're girls, of course you wouldn't get it; it's guy humor.”

Chie leans impossibly closer. “You think you're such hot shit,” she seethes, and her tone has gone icy, blisteringly cold. She jabs a finger into his chest hard enough for him to feel it bruise. “We put up with your nasty 'jokes' and your weird staring because you're our friend, but there's a limit, Hanamura!” Her lips curl, the finger digging into his sternum like a silent threat. “And you're freaking pushing it.”

Yukiko leans in as well, her hand still raised and ready, a bow string held taut. “Girls don't like it when you say things like that,” she says, so dark and even that it raises the hairs on the back of Yosuke's neck – but even though his body physically, instinctively reacts, the hollow pit in his chest where the ice now sits keeps his heart and mind numb. He doesn't look at her as she says, “If your brand of humor makes other people uncomfortable, then it isn't really humor at all, it's gross.”

There are people starting to collect around them; Yosuke can see them moving closer just past the haze of his unfocused vision. He can't tell if he cares of not, doesn't think he does anymore. Everything Chie and Yukiko are saying is too right, too justified for him to fight back or defend himself. I deserve this, he thinks, hears his own voice echoing like there's another nearly identical one layering beneath it.

A few other students, faces unrecognizable, gather just a bit too close to the direction he's been staring in. He doesn't feel like letting them think he's acknowledged them, so he rolls his head lazily back so he can pretend to face to the two girls in front of him. He's just going back to fixing his eyes on Yukiko's shoulder when a swath of silver catches in his vision – just barely, just enough to make him look up before he can consciously think about it. He refocuses, and feels his heart come to a painful halt inside his ribs.

Souji is standing there, looking at Yosuke as if he's never seen him before. His eyes are wide and confused, thin brows pulled so low that they're actually visible below his hair; his lips are slightly parted as if he's been caught mid-gasp.

Yosuke stares back at him for a long, panicked moment. A slow, frigid kind of adrenaline begins to seep into this veins, making his hands and knees shake even though he can't feel it. It kick-starts his heart back to life and suddenly it's pounding as he looks into Souji's eyes for the first time in he can't even remember how long, seeing no trace of recognition in the other boy's face. Only pain. Only confusion and betrayal. Souji looks at him like Yosuke is a stranger now, gaze boring into his own like he's looking for someone familiar but just can't find them, can't figure out who Yosuke is.

He saw, the voice that had layered his own whispers, hissing though laughing, jagged glee.

Souji saw.

The floor drops out from under Yosuke's feet and he switches to autopilot to keep from falling, somehow managing to stay upright through sheer force of unconscious will. Chie and Yukiko must notice the change, because he can peripherally see them pause, turning their heads to see what he's looking at. It's enough.

Moving feels like he's underwater, drowning, but Yosuke sees his chance and snatches at it with trembling fingers; as the girls are distracted by Souji, Yosuke pushes himself sideways along the wall until he's no longer pinned by Chie's proximity. Once there's space to do so, he shoves his way forward, sticking out an arm and breaking through the line that Yukiko and Chie's bodies have made. They part in their shock, and he's able to slip between them at last.

“Whatever,” he hears himself say. A verbal barrier, a wall to keep them all at bay while he books it to something resembling safety. He reaches up and palms the headphones resting around his neck. “You guys throw your hissy fit, I'm goin' to class.” He tugs the headphones up as he takes a couple long, quick strides out of their stationary reach, shoving them over his ears without actually turning on any music – using the comforting weight at the sides of his head as a shield. If they try and call out after him, he can just pretend he can't hear them and keep walking.

He makes it all the way to the classroom without being caught; he doesn't dare look at Yukiko, Chie, or Souji (especially not Souji,) as the three of them enter the room. Yukiko first, then the others, and Yosuke busies himself with his school bag until the sound of the door opening signals the arrival of the teacher and the start of class just moments later.

Yosuke keeps his head ducked down the entire morning, just in case of the the girls decides to risk a glance back in his direction. He can't tell with his eyes glued to his desk, but he thinks that none of them do.

(He doesn't know whether he should be relieved or not.)

---

Yosuke is up and moving almost before the lunch bell even rings. Like he's done for the past week, he grabs his stuff and hightails it out the back of the room, pointedly not looking and any of the friends he's managed to alienate in only a handful of days. Headphones snug over his ears and player in his hand, he takes the steps up to the third floor, then the roof, two at a time. It's only once he's up in the cold air and alone that he feels like he can breathe.

Picking a spot as far away from the door as possible, Yosuke drops to the ground and leans his back against the frigid metal links of the fence, barely even feeling the chill through his clothes. The breath he's finally caught starts to pick up – only for a moment – and he has to bring his knees up to the his chest, hands over his eyes and fingers twisting in his hair as he ducks his head and pulls in lungful after lungful of air. It passes just as quickly as it came.

What do I do now?

Despite the hollow feeling encompassing his heart, Yosuke still feels the twinge of anxiety that had brought about the thirty-second panic attack; it sticks to his blood cells, causing his palms to sweat and go clammy in the nippy November breeze. He brings them to his mouth and cups them over his lips, breathing into them to try and warm them back up. It doesn't work.

He sighs and drops his hands back into his lap, tucking them between the bend of his knees. He didn't bother bringing lunch with him again today, though between the rare breakfast that morning and the churning in his stomach he isn't so sure he'd be able to eat anything anyway. Still, even a snack would have provided him something to do with his hands, and so Yosuke is left with nothing but his music and his surroundings to occupy his time. He frowns – being alone with his thoughts recently has been anything but good, and today having gone the way that it has so far, he can feel the incoming uphill battle against his brain. He cranks the volume up on his player in hopes of drowning it all out before it begins, but turns the whole thing off and tugs the headphones from his ears a minute or so later, not wanting to associate any of his favorite songs with the maelstrom already brewing inside his mind.

It starts with a replay. Every single thing he'd said and done that morning in the hallway with Chie and Yukiko. It twists at his gut with each image, each remembered word he'd vomited out like a bio-weapon; he barely recognizes himself in his own memories, and honestly that is the part that scares him the most. No wonder Souji had looked at him that way.

And oh, if that hadn't been the worst part of it all. Yukiko and Chie he already hated himself for, already felt sick over how he'd treated them both since even before this all began, starting with the festival. He wishes he could go back in time and stop himself from ever putting their names down – all of them – because not only was it just a shitty, immature thing to do, but it also violated their trust. He sees that now, and it feels like a hammer to the head, because with everything that he's turned into in the days since, he knows it all started with that one first terrible decision. Most of the low points in his life have started with terrible decisions, he just hadn't been aware enough to put the pieces together until now. Had things been different, Yosuke wonders if Souji would have been proud of him.

That, however, is the thing that brings Yosuke's already-simmering self hatred to a rolling boil. Of all the people he's hurt so far, Souji is the one that makes Yosuke feel like he's beyond all hope of redemption. Souji had been his partner, his best friend, and Yosuke, stupid, stupid Yosuke had taken that bond and thrown it right in the garbage. They were supposed to be equals, but Yosuke had been too busy sinking into his own head, too mired in self pity and selfishly wanting things to go back to a normal that likely didn't even exist anymore. Not after all of this. For all the maturing Yosuke feels he may have done – the only silver lining in the storm that he himself created – focusing only on his own hurt and blaming Souji for it is by far the most childish thing he's done.

(Inside his skull, stretched out as though sliding into Yosuke's skin like a glove, he can almost feel something like a head being tilted, an eyebrow raised. There is a quiet, contemplative, 'hmmm,' as if his mind is thinking thoughts without him. He doesn't know how to interpret the sensation, so he tucks it away on the back burner for now.)

Somewhere past the door leading back into the school, Yosuke faintly hears the warning bell sounding, signaling the end of lunch and the resumption of classes for the day.

Yosuke doesn't move.

He sits there and leans his head back against the fence in utter exhaustion; he doesn't have the energy or will power to get up and go back inside. He doesn't want to feel the others' eyes on him when he walks in the door, or, equally painful, being entirely unacknowledged instead. Having done the same to Souji for days,Yosuke will admit his hypocrisy in that he doesn't know if he'd survive having his former partner do the same to him - even if Souji had scared the shit out of him, neglected to communicate with him, left him to wonder and worry and want after the pageant.

Then again, some part of Yosuke quietly relents, Souji... really isn't obligated to tell Yosuke anything. And while their leader should have at least been courteous enough to let someone know he was still alive, he'd eventually told Naoto. Which had hurt Yosuke – pretty badly, in fact – to not be the one Souji had talked to first, but at least he'd talked to someone. (Even though Yosuke is still adamantly sure the “food poisoning” excuse had been complete bullshit.) But... it wouldn't be fair to expect Souji to never have secrets; after all, Yosuke still has secrets of his own, even after confronting his shadow.

Some are just far, far more shameful than others.

Thoughts swirling, Yosuke can feel a headache beginning to build behind his eyes. He keeps going around and around; he's mad at Souji, he's not mad at Souji, he's mad at himself, he's not mad at himself for being hurt – on and on and on. It's a loop that doesn't seem to have an end, and it's making Yosuke dizzy.

He sighs again, and there's an echoing sigh inside his skull, albeit one that sounds far more frustrated than his own audible one. He's too tired to suss it out, though, and because all this thinking is starting to spiral, he digs his player back out and tries one more time to drown out the thoughts with music. He's relived when his attention stays on the lyrics and doesn't go careening off again; he closes his eyes and lets himself go blank for a little while, almost-but-not-quite dozing, tucked away in his little patch of rooftop in the brisk November air.

Sometime later – he doesn't know how long – Yosuke is pulled from his trance by the sound of a far-off school bell. His player apparently ran out of battery long ago, because the screen is dark and his headphones silent. Yosuke feels like shit.

He's chilly to the point where his skin doesn't really have much feeling anymore; his neck is stiff from the cold and the position it'd been kept in while he was out of it. His ears ache a little, too, and it's probably more from the headphones than the weather. Groaning, Yosuke sits up and peels the headphones off, setting them in his lap and rolling his neck to try and get his full range of motion back. He feels something pop. With another groan, he makes it slowly to his feet and stretches, every muscle in his body protesting as he does.

Fully aware that he hadn't gone back in after lunch, Yosuke has absolutely no idea what time it could possibly be; judging by the position of the sun over the treetops, however, and the sound of the bell from earlier, he can guess that it's probably well into the afternoon. “Fuck,” he mutters to the empty rooftop. He's more than likely missed most of the rest of the school day, though if that's the case then he can't bring himself to care. There was nothing waiting for him back in the classroom anymore, anyway.

Reluctant still to make his way inside lest someone catch him, Yosuke takes his time gathering his bag, tucking his player away, setting his headphones carefully on top because, well, they aren't any use to him right now, are they? It's only once he's run out of stuff to do that he finally fishes his pone out of his pocket to check the time.

Weirdly enough, there are no new messages – which, he isn't surprised at but also is? If no one had wanted to talk to him after that morning, he would have understood. However, with as rightfully angry as they both had been, he would have expected there to be something from Chie at the very least – even if not from today, then something else from last night, surely. Curious and a little uneasy, Yosuke stares at his phone until the screen goes dark. Oh, he realizes finally; he'd forgotten he'd put it on airplane mode the night before.

(He'd wondered why his phone had been so blissfully, ominously quiet all night.)

He taps the keys lightly to get the screen to wake back up and goes to take it off airplane at last – only to hesitate just before pressing the button, thumb hovering as Yosuke chews on his lip. His gut curdles. Whether there are a slew of missed texts or none at all, Yosuke knows that whatever is waiting for him once he hits confirm isn't going to be good. He has to brace himself; he just isn't sure what for.

With a deep breath in and a quick breath out, Yosuke takes the plunge and hits the button, not looking at the screen as his thumb presses down. He doesn't want to see just yet. At first there is nothing – no belated notification sound, no vibrations, nothing. He thinks maybe he's safe for the moment, simultaneously unsettled by the lack of any apparent messages...

...Until his phone vibrates, just once, in his hand.

Yosuke's breathing sticks in his throat for half a breath, head instinctively tilting to look down at the notification that just jostled his anxiety. It isn't from Chie, which is not what he expected, nor is it from Yukiko, which also would not have surprised him. It isn't even from Teddie, whining that Yosuke had left without partaking in their new morning ritual of communal teeth-brushing. No, the sender, devastatingly, is Souji.

Prtnr: I'm sorry. I won't bother you anymore.

Everything stops.

[roseabelle21]

Sypnosis: It had been over five years since your last encounter with a certain explosive blond. Ever since then, you're happy. You felt complete, fulfilled, and contented. Going on that date with Inasa was the best decision you have ever made in your entire life, he went from being your fanboy to your future husband. Quite a story to tell if I do say so myself. Life is good. Though someone says otherwise.

Read before you proceed: That Your Love Is Gone.

Status: Edited

Tagging: @jazzylove

He stared at the white envelope before him, unfeeling. He didn't know how long he's been staring at it, maybe when he opened the mail and placed it down his table? That was well over an hour ago. 

Katsuki just stared at the envelope, like it's going to explode the moment he opened it. The paper won't, but his heart just might. 

Wait, is it still beating? He thought it stopped the moment he saw you two locked lips once in the coffee shop. Boy, did that sight hurt like a bitch, yet he pretended that he saw nothing and held on his mug in a bone-crushing grip. Kirishima and Denki had pointed it out to him discreetly before it exploded. He stomped out of the shop before you noticed that he was there. 

The two of you had avoided each other ever since that disaster of a confession. The only communication both of you ever had was on joint missions together, and you won't even speak to the other unless necessary.

He wanted to talk to you again, but his pride and humiliation won't let him.

Selfishly, he prayed that the date with Inasa didn't go well, still hoping that he still had the chance to be with you. Or when he found out that you two are finally official, things between you won't work out in the end and go your separate ways.

That didn't happen much, to his dismay. The wedding invitation on his table said otherwise. 

Katsuki knows it's wrong, waiting patiently for the day that your relationship with the whirlwind user to fuck up, and he'll be there to sweep you away from him, and maybe knock teeth or two out. 

He scoffed at his thoughts. All of this was his fault. He knows it, knowing full well that he can't do anything to change the past. He even tried dating other people to get over you, alas the hunt remains fruitless. He can't look at another girl, much less be with them without thinking of you. 

After all these years, he still loves you. 

Pathetic. 

His silent tears hit the cold floor. He didn't even bother wiping them away. His ruby eyes continued to burn holes at the letter before him. Heart pounding in his ears, he felt like he couldn't breathe, his heart aching, mind empty, wishing that he'd wake up soon and end this nightmare. Maybe even wake up with you by his side. 

No matter how hard he tried to stop, his wishful thinking is always there. Even he knows that it's not healthy thinking that way about someone for so long. It's been five years, for Christ's sake! His heart needs to let you go. 

But how could it? Every time he sees you, it feels like there is a fucking zoo rampaging on his stomach, every time you smile or laugh, it puts the sun to shame because of how bright and warm it is. He wished that he was still the one causing those. 

Before then, he didn't need to do much to make you happy. Him being himself was all he needed to be; his sarcastic remarks and angry faces were a few of the things that put a smile on your face. 

He likes being the source of your happiness until he wasn't.

Katsuki swallowed the lump on his throat, taking a deep breath before wiping his eyes. He waited for a bit of a steady, racing heart and mind before gently picking up the envelope, careful not to make even the slightest of crumple. 

He could have burned his hand honestly, that's how bad it hurts. Maybe it's just his imagination, but he can smell the tiniest bit of your favourite flowers. Katsuki held the paper to his nose a gave it a smell; it has a scent. 

He smirked, imagining you insisting that the paper is scented since it is a special occasion, the amount of scented paper you used for your friends at every holiday and birthday to make your cards.

Katsuki then opened it, making sure to be extra gentle when tearing it up. He stared at it again, that open flap with the letter inside. It's there, his worst nightmare. 

With a heavy heart, he took it out and admired its designing and details: the swirls and flowers embroidered on the sides, the fancy calligraphy in your names, the neat print below with the details of the wedding, and the picture of you and your fiancee. 

His heart clenched seeing it, yet at the same time, he felt a small glimmer of happiness that came along with it. 

Your smile, it was so beautiful, so genuine, so happy. 

Tears made its way down his cheeks again, and despite that, he grinned. 

He's happy that you found someone that can treat you better than he can. And even if he's no longer the one making you happy, he can't do anything to stop that. 

He read the invitation; although it pained him to continue reading it, he was happy that he even got an invite. Despite not talking much this past few years, he's satisfied that he still got invited. 

Katsuki placed the paperback in the envelope and placed it down. He's happy for you, he is, and then, he's hit with an epiphany.

Pulling out his phone, he took a deep breath and searched his contacts, then he messaged them. 

To (Y/N): Can we talk?

It's oddly peaceful. 

Katsuki has attended a few weddings in his life, and from what he's experienced, all of they tend to be chaotic in one way or another. 

It's either one of the family members is late, missing a tux or a dress, god forbid the annoying children running around without a care in the world whilst their mothers frantically chase them around. Now, he's not seeing any of them. 

Quite the opposite. Everyone seems to be on time, have everything they need, and surprisingly, the children are cooperating. It's almost scary, almost unnatural. And it's freaking him out. 

Maybe the Maid of Honor has something to do with it. She's snapping at everyone who so much makes a noise or goes out of line. Running back and forth when someone calls her for help, checking everyone's process every ten minutes. Making sure everyone is right on schedule. 

Katsuki can't help but feel bad for her, dealing with so much pressure in one body can be tiring. Alas, there's nothing he can do about it. Although he finds her quite cute when angry, he knows nothing about her other than she's (Y/N)'s cousin. 

The rest of the Bakusquad are chilling on a bench near the pool. Everyone already had their hair, make-up, and dressed done. Mina is talking with Jirou and Yaoyorozu, planning on their girls day with the newlywed woman soon. Kirishima and Sero are talking about their latest missions, and last but not least, Kaminari staring at the Maid of Honor with a bit of drool on the corner of his mouth. 

"You look like an idiot dunce face," Kaminari jumped at Katsuki's voice," she might think you're a weirdo more than you already are if you keep staring at her like that."

"Oh shit, you're right." The blond immediately wiped his mouth and straightened his tux, fixing his hair and clearing his throat. 

"Sorry, she's charming, though. Like an angry chihuahua." Jirou slapped the arm of the blond with a scowl on her face.

"Don't say that! You don't even know her." Everyone can tell her questioning look.

"You talk as if you know her Jirou," Sero inquired. The girl shrugged as she twirled her ear with a finger. 

“We work to the same radio studio. She's the one who does the cover songs and news most of the time."

"No way! She's DJ Fox?!" Kirishima and Kaminari shrieked, fanboying.

"Man, that is so cool! You gotta introduce us!"

"No," Jirou replied immediately. 

Before anyone could react, the girl of the subject yelled at her mage phone. Telling everyone to proceed to the church and get in line as planned. 

Katsuki stood up and glanced around, hoping to catch a glimpse of you in the crowd. The door of your room opened, and his heart leapt at the throat, imagining how beautiful you would look in your wedding dress. That fuzzy feeling soon turned into a mix of rage and disappointment as the once again Maid of Honor rushed to your door and yelled at you for being impatient. 

Everyone made it to the church in no time. The groom and his best man were shoving each other playfully to ease his nerves. Katsuki immediately glanced away from them, remembering his talk with you a few months ago. 

Not long after they were in place, the music started playing. One by one, everyone walked down the aisle, his partner looking at him anxiously, but he couldn't care less. His mind wandered.

There you are, sitting at the corner of the cafe, looking outside with a mug of steaming hot coffee in front of you with a pastry beside it. Another pair of coffee and pastry beside it, which he assumes as his since it was his favourite.

Slowly, he and his partner stopped for a short while for the photographer before proceeding on their walking. 

Small talks and laughs were made, the atmosphere between the two of you more at ease, unlike before. As happy as he looks, his heart can't help but shatter every time your ring glows in the sunlight. 

The rest of the guests followed; not long after, the door shuts, and everyone stands up in their seats. The familiar music filled the air.

He apologized. Apologized again and again, and you could only give him your soft eyes and smile. Not pitying him one bit, only looking at him with fondness in your eyes as you took his hands between yours. 

Inasa was crying as soon as the door opened, the light momentarily blinding your features, but when it faded, Katsuki can also feel his eyes tearing up. 

"I should have told you what you meant to me," he says, voice breaking up.

Cause now I paid the price. 

Words can't describe how beautiful you look walking down the aisle in the arm of your parents. A wide smile is plastered permanently on your face as you look at the man in front of you. All the love is visible in both of your eyes as you look at your significant other like they are the only person in the room.

You reached the front of the altar, your parents kissing you on both cheeks before hugging you and your crying groom. 

Katsuki's heart warmed at the sight of you laughing softly at Inasa, placing your hands on his face as you wiped his tears with your thumbs. The said man is grinning at you despite the tears that continue to flow down his cheeks. 

Katsuki didn't realize that his tears escaped his eyes. Had it Kirishima not point it out. He quickly wiped them away and stood up straight. The faux redhead is gently patting the blond at his back and offering him a sympathetic smile. 

As Katsuki continued to observe the both of you, and he couldn't help but smile at the pure, childlike happiness on your faces. He can feel his heart slowly letting go. Letting go of his jealously, the bitterness, and the anger he has left for himself. 

Though the only thing he can never let go of is his love for you. It might not be the same love he has with you before, but he is and will always love you till the end of time. He loves you enough to let you go.

Maybe in another life, he can make your stay. He never planned that one day, he'd be losing you. Now here he is, watching you get married to the love of your life. 

He never imagined this, not without him there with you, but he certainly isn't regretting it.

[lnterjection]

gods of red skies (of this world to comprise)

Based on @quaranmine‘s post “that meme where the FBI shows up at your house because you know too much except it’s DreamXD and Ranboo being the only person who knows what an end portal is,” but I make it angsty.  

-----

“And here’s our table,” Phil said, and Ranboo’s jaw dropped in such standard enderman fashion he would have been ashamed, if he weren’t so preoccupied with the sight in front of him.

Slowly, he took a step forward. Leaned over and traced a finger across the pale, bumpy endstone, its tiny craters and rivers of raised ridges. It had been so long since he felt endstone beneath his skin. 

The empty sockets stare back into him, deep cyans and swirls of black. You’re here, they seem to whisper. We’ve missed you.

“It’s a cool table, but I think this is a bit of an overreaction,” he heard Techno whisper behind him. “Phil, what do we - uh...”

“Do you - do you know what that is?” Ranboo asked. He struggled to keep the awe from his voice. 

Phil glanced over his shoulders with a bewildered expression. “No?” he said, wings slowly fanning out. “What do you mean?”

“It’s-” Ranboo hesitated, taking a step back. Should he tell them? Should - should anyone in this cursed world have that sort of power? Wouldn’t that lead to more sides, more pointless statuses of power to fight over?

He made a split second decision. 

“Um, nevermind,” he said. “I forgot.”

The lie came so easily. Ranboo internally winced at how familiar his muscles were with the phrase. 

Techno eyes him, pupils narrowing, but he doesn’t comment. Phil gives them both a cheery smile and claps his hands in a neat, smooth motion, effectively shutting down the line of conversation.

“So!” he said. “Anarchy!” 

Ranboo nodded along, tried not to be too weird (or well, weirder than he must already seem to them), and that was that.

-

Everything was freezing - his crystalized bed that felt more like ice than wool, his creaking, ramshackle roof with scatterings of icicles that dripped frost and cold, the way every muscle of his body felt like it was contracting into a ball of sharp diamond. 

Ranboo couldn’t complain, though. He had a place to live. He was welcome here, which was so much more than what he deserved after everything he’s done. 

He wasn’t going to freeze to death. Worse case scenario, he takes his blanket and hides under his bed. He’ll be fine. Fine.

His chattering teeth and rapidly shivering body certainly seemed to disagree with him. 

Ranboo tried to draw in a clattering breath. The winds picked up, slicing every exposed inch of skin with an unforgiving glacier.

At least it’s not snowing, he thought weakly. 

And then, through the screeching winds and enveloping blindness of night, he heard it. 

There’s something crunching, outside the fences that made up his home. Ranboo blinked slowly, wondering if he’s finally gone off the deep end. If that last tether to sanity which his mind so desperately clung to was finally slipping away, and this was the moment he succumbed to that relentless war of the mind, never to resurface again.

For a terrible, traitorous moment, Ranboo hoped that it was Phil or Techno, here to invite him into their house of warmth, a sign of friendship or at least care, after he’d been invited into their anarchist group (which wasn’t taking sides, they just didn’t want to be ruled, was that so bad?).

“Not much of a house, is it?”

And like an arrow to his heart, that hope was promptly smashed to pieces.

“Shut up” Ranboo gritted out to the figure that was no doubt leering over him with that stupid smily mask and stupid smug voice. “You’re just jealous you don’t even have one.”

His mind scrambled around desperately as he suppressed a terrified scream. Is this his mind again? But that voice doesn’t show up outside the panic room, or does it? What does he know, really? 

Was this actually Dream, here to kill him? To take revenge on for destroying the community house? Ranboo couldn’t bring himself to drag his face away from the swath of blankets that he was clinging to, but he could hear the whine of the fence gates swinging. Something snapping shut in place. 

Dream was definitely here, unless Ranboo had, indeed, well and truly lost it. Which was a likely possibility. 

Dream, what was Dream doing all the way out here? And why now, of all times, did Ranboo decide to finally grow a spine? 

Well, either he was hallucinating big time, or Dream was here to kill him. Either way, it’s not like anything he did will matter. 

“I have a house,” Dream said, sounding mildly affronted. “Now, this pathetic excuse of a cattle pen certainly can’t be called one.”

“Just shut up and kill me already, Dream,” Ranboo yelled. His voice was muffled and thrown about by the wind, but it echoed through his bones nonetheless, and this was gratifying in some horrifying way because either way it’s not like what he’ll say will make any difference. “What, are you here to finally gloat over me too? Found a different target than Tommy, huh? Just can’t find a better use of your time than torturing teenagers-”

“What? Woah, I am not Dream,” Dream said, and Ranboo took a moment to process this information. 

“What?”

He finally looks up, squinting through the darkness and the biting way the winds attacked his eyes. 

The person that had his arms cross in front of him looked like a carbon copy of Dream, only with a pale blue hoodie instead of the usual lime green one.

“Just because you’ve put on a different outfit doesn’t mean you’ve changed who you are,” Ranboo snapped through chatters. “Fuck off or kill me, Dream. You’re not fooling anyone.”

“I told you, I’m not Dream,” was the reply. “Check your communicator.”

Ranboo, slowly, drew out the device and glanced at the pale, glowing screen. 

DreamXD whispers to you: I’m here.

“Really reassuring,” Ranboo said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be one of the nice ones?” ‘DreamXD’ asked. “I thought you had manners, or something like that.”

“Since when have manners ever helped me?” Ranboo bites, suddenly feeling something sullen draw his stomach down. Bittering clung to every word. “It’s like nothing around here gets done without violence.”

“That’s not my problem.” DreamXD made some shrugging motion, slowly turning his shoulders in an unsteady fashion like he was just getting used to moving his body. “I’m just here to...”

Ranboo flinched as a glimmering stick appeared in DreamXD’s hand. He recognized the telltale sheen of glowing enchantments, but that shouldn't be possible because you can’t enchant sticks. 

Dream, or DreamXD, or Not Dream, whatever the fuck he was - waved his glowing stick above him in what Ranboo assumed was supposed to be a menacing manner. He looked mostly like a deranged serial killer, which was, concerningly, also an apt description for the actual Dream. 

“I need to make an alteration to your book,” he said. “Hand it over.”

Ranboo stared at him for a long, drawn moment. His mind was blank, unresponsive, why would he want the memory book-

And then, his memory book was in the other entity’s hands, and Ranboo began yelling again.

“Give it back!” He lunged forward, but DreamXD teleported to the side and slammed his fist down on Ranboo’s back. He hit a faceful of snow and dirt, and a pained whine escaped his throat as the heel of a boot dug into his neck. 

Everything hurt. His back is now throbbing. Ranboo suppressed a sob as he heard the telltale sound of pages flapping wildly in the wind - and then the sound of ripping paper, grating against every bone of his body. 

Again - no, this couldn’t be happening again, why is this happening again, he was so careful and he hadn’t done anything and surely he had been good this time, hadn’t he?

His mind only just seemed to process what was happening. His memory book - his memory - was being stolen, torn, violated yet again and this time Ranboo could do nothing but listen and cry into the cold, gritty dirt while his neck is on the verge of snapping and what did he do?

He just wanted peace. He just wanted to be loved - not even loved, to just be left alone. To live without constant fear of pain or death or someone destroying everything he held dear. Was that so much to ask for?

Yes, a part of his mind whispered. You blew up the community house. You betrayed L’Manberg. You didn’t even have the spine to tell Techno and Phil, your new allies, what the end portal is. They welcome you onto their land and group and you repay them with more hidden secrets? How else will you betray everyone?

Everything part of him was burning. Ranboo wanted to slice and strip off all his skin, to submerge himself in freezing cold water and close his eyes and not have to worry about any of this anymore and why did he want all of that so much-

“There we go,” the voice above him suddenly said, and Ranboo made a choked noise as something hard kicked deep into his side. He tumbled across the floor with a few soft crunches before going limp, body splayed at unnatural angles that twisted knots around all his muscles. His throat felt more parched than desert sands, scraped raw and bloody. 

Something thudded in front of him, and Ranboo somehow had the strength to claw himself over through a filmy, blotched vision and drag his memory book back into his embrace. There were pages missing, ripped from the spine in jagged chunks like an unfinished puzzle shredded apart from frustration.

He choked again as a hand closed around his neck and dragged him up and something sharp and flaming jabbed into his chest. 

A coarse sleeve muffled his wailing scream. 

This pain was worse, so much worse, worse than the wither skulls and being dunked in water and all the stabs and slices he’s ever endured combined, his insides were burning and burning and on fire and covered in lava and Ranboo thought for a few fleeting moment that he would combust into sheer nothingness and he wanted to forget, forget why am I still here forget everything please I don’t want to be here-

“There we go,” the voice, that Dream voice, said, and it sounded so sickeningly like Dream but also not at all, because whereas Dream‘s voice always held a demeaning smugness about him this one had nothing but cold indifference, and Ranboo wasn’t sure which was worse but he couldn’t focus to think anyway because his entire world was red and white and burning and what the fuck was that stick enchanted with-

At some point, the pressure stopped. It faded away increments, and all Ranboo could comprehend was that eventually, as his mind flopped away from the shelter of nothingness, he was on the ground again and Dream was above him and everything was horribly, horribly silent. 

Why, he wanted to scream again to the howling winds, but his throat was spent and dead and he couldn’t move or do anything except lie there and spasm erratically like a dying animal with its guts already pooling across the stiff, blue grass. 

What did I do why is this happening please I’m so sorry I’m so sorry it’s all my fault please stop I don’t want to die-

“Let this be a warning,” the voice said in a smooth, terribly indifferent way. “If you write down what happened here, or about that end portal, I assure you that things will get much, much worse. And if you tell anyone, anyone else even a hint of what that portal is-”

Ranboo couldn’t even flinch as something cold pressed against his throat, as much as his mind leaped at the feeling. 

“I guarantee you will never see the light of day again.”

Was this what it had all been about? The portal? That he was being punished for his origins after all, for having the - the knowledge itself? For having the power to utilize it, even if he never would? 

“You really are Dream, aren’t you,” Ranboo rasped. He creaked his neck up to stare blankly into that pearly white mask. Every part of him, from his screaming body to his scattered, twisting thoughts felt weighted with magma, smoldering in its own ruins. 

Dream shrugged, a bit faster this time, and disappeared in a shower of flaking purple particles that drifted around like the snow that had, during some part of all this, began to fall. 

His eyes stung. His entire face was covered in tears, sharp daggers flicking the skin across with every movement. Ranboo couldn’t bring himself to care. He cradled his cold, crumpled memory book to his chest and knew that, as much as he hoped it was, this was not just a nightmare. Not in a world like this.

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Read on Ao3 here.