#the red thread fanfic

[pastafossa]

Hi! I was just wondering if you got my other ask about a TRT au that I want to write. I want to get the ok from you before I start anything.

I went digging for your asks and found them!

First off I feel like Deadpool when he's talking about fourth walls. A fanfic about a fanfic??? that's like... DOUBLE FANFICS

Second off I'm absolutely DELIGHTED by the idea and also really honored that someone would want to do TRT fanfic??? Just got me like

I am 100% ok with it! Anything that puts more fanfic into the world makes me happy tbh, AND it feels like a lovely continuation of the cycle that got *me* writing fic plus if i eventually take parts of trt and make it a real book as planned i would love if people ficced that IT'S THE CIIIIIIIIRCLE OF LIFE

There are only only two things I'd ask (applies to anyone else who may want to do TRT fanfic, which I'm fine with).

Proper credit back to TRT. If the fic's on AO3, then the 'This work is a remix, a translation, a podfic, or was inspired by another work' option when posting is what to use, and that'll let it pop up at the bottom of TRT under the 'works inspired by this one'. If it'll be posted on Wattpad or Tumblr, a link to TRT on AO3 and an acknowledgment is all I'd ask!

This one isn't specific to your idea (which I looked over and am totally fine with!). This is more for anyone else: please do not try to finish TRT, in the sense of trying to write the next chapters. AUs are fine, Blip fics are fine (I admittedly have a Blip side fic planned but it'll be outside of the main TRT story), various adventures, Foggy musings on canon, shenanigans, NSFW or SFW scenes, whatever, are all fine! I only draw the line at 'Pasta hasn't updated in a bit so I'm going to write the next chapters and post it'.

Other than that, you are free to move about the cabin with my blessing! I'm super excited to see what you come up with!

[pastaxandria]

The Red Thread: Chapter 162

🔥

The Library of Pastaxandria has recorded for its archives: Chapter 162 of The Red Thread.

Ship: Matt Murdock x F!Reader

Chapter Summary:

“It really did bother you, didn’t it? What I said to her.” Her brows rose curiously, the cool fascination of a cat watching the movements of a fluttering bird. “And here I was wondering if it was just a bit of show for her.” “You know it wasn’t!” he snapped. “I get that you may not understand this since everything’s a game to you and we’re all just here for your amusement, but hurting the people we love is generally something most of us try to avoid.” “You think that lowly of me, Matthew?” Her gaze skittered away from him, her fingers beginning to fidget, just a little, with the blanket on the couch. Trying to draw him in, make him feel for her, he suspected. “That I would hurt someone I—” “You hurt me.” Or: in which an old hurt is discussed

Wordcount: 8.2k

Warnings for this chapter: blood, injury care, some NSFW smutty content (grinding, nudity, a hint of fingering)

Read me on AO3 where the penguins are

[scun-gilli]

@i-genuinely-dunno bribed me for a sneak peek with memes that made me wheeze while on a work zoom that could have been an email so….a tiny tidbit of chapter 32 which will hopefully release very soon ;3

[skyview-temple-spring]

A WHILE AGO I ASKED ABOUT A DIRECT TRANSLATION OF GHIRAHIM'S DIALOGUE BECAUSE I ONLY FOUND BROKEN LINKS BUT GUESS WHAT.

NOT A BROKEN LINK. DIRECT JAPANESE TO ENGLISH

[evagreen-stories]

Broken Bonds | Maelor x f!highborn!reader x Aemond x Aegon

Moodboard for upcoming One-Shot (dropping this weekend!)

Summary: Betrothed to Prince Aemond before the war and having fallen in love with the one-eyed prince, the young lady Celtigar’s heart would shatter into pieces as she learns of his betrayal in taking a mistress and siring a bastard with her while away at war.

Unable to cope with being forced to marry him anyway, she chooses to run away, using the chaos of war to disappear forever, or so she thought.

When fate sends her into the town of Bitterbridge one day, she finds herself caught up in the chaos of a giant riot, sheer terror overwhelming her when she spots a familiar toddler screaming amongst the greedy crowd.

Barely escaping the scuffle alive, she takes the boy in as hers, living as mother and son ever since.

The duo grows inseparable until a decade later, when an unfortunate coincidence would result in the two torn apart forever.

Word-Count: 15k

[a-leg-without-fear]

EVERYONE GO SAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO @pastafossa RIGHT NOW!!! SHE IS SUCH A WONDERFUL CARBOHYDRATE AND AN AMAZING AUTHOR. I COULDN’T BE MORE LUCKY TO CALL HER MY FRIEND!! 🎉🎉

(reposting the painting i did of matt for pasta because why not)

[anitalenia]

━━━ .°˖✧ soulmate au ⋆˙⊹

꒰ঌ definition ໒꒱ 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑡𝑤𝑜 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑔𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑏𝑖𝑟𝑡ℎ, 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑦, 𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑙 𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑠.

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ below you will find sub genres under this category, as well as some useful pairings for this trope. for educational writing purposes <3

note: several of these can also be used in other tropes as well, just depends on how you write it and interpret it.

╰₊✧ ﾟOTHER LINKS . ྀི ⊹ masterlist | romance tropes |

taglist | prompt list | symbol packs | dividers page

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulbond

₊˚⊹.* ♡ red threat of fate

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate marks

₊˚⊹.* ♡ alternate universe

₊˚⊹.* ♡ mating / mates — can be omegaverse but doesn’t have to be

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmates who share each others dreams

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmates who share injuries

₊˚⊹.* ♡ the name of their soulmate is tattooed on them

₊˚⊹.* ♡ the worlds colorless / gray until you meet your soulmate and then you see colors

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your birthmark or tattoo matches your soulmates

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you have a watch / time ticks down until you meet your soulmate or you’re given a certain amount of time at birth

₊˚⊹.* ♡ can’t be physically too far from your soulmate or it hurts you both

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you’re soulmates on opposing side of war / your soulmate is the enemy

₊˚⊹.* ♡ the simple one where you feel a spark / sensation when you touch your soulmate and you just know

₊˚⊹.* ♡ there’s a handprint on your body where your soulmate first touches you

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your soulmates voice is in your head

₊˚⊹.* ♡ when you sleep your dreams are what your soulmate is seeing in their real time / their pov

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you form a telepathic link with your soulmate until you find them

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you share a strong physical link where you can feel the same things the other person is feeling while they’re going through them / the sensation of something cold, burning, when they’re having sex

₊˚⊹.* ♡ the closer you get to them the easier it is to find them. ex: colors get brighter and brighter as you approach, their voice closes in, their thoughts get louder / more frequent

₊˚⊹.* ♡ once you hit a certain age / one night a year you swap bodies with your soulmate to find as many clues as you can as to where they are (girllll I’d just book a flight to my body)

₊˚⊹.* ♡ being next to your soulmate heals you from things you otherwise wouldn’t heal from

₊˚⊹.* ♡ only your soulmate can kill you

₊˚⊹.* ♡ two immortal beings searching for each other / immortal soulmates that become human once they get together to live a mortal life together

₊˚⊹.* ♡ human soulmates that live immortal lives once they find their soulmates so they can live forever together / once they hit a certain age

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you grow up with your soulmate and at a certain age there’s a ceremony that finalizes it / you spend those early years learning about the other person and falling in love with them

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your soulmate is the other half of your magic / your soulmates and yours magic is compatible and mixed with your magic it’s stronger than ever

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you keep being reincarnated until you meet your soulmate / once you do you remember all your past lives together with your soulmate

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate who has trauma involving the touch of another person so they hate touching people

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate who is deaf so the other must learn sign language

₊˚⊹.* ♡ a celebrity who has fans always claiming to be their soulmate / celebrity can never find their soul mate because of this and goes on a search + they have major trust issues now

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmates who live right down the road from each other and always JUST miss each other at grocery stores, parties, drive past each other a lot etc.

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmates who live on the opposite ends of the earth / when one is asleep the other is awake

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your soulmate unlocks your magic / makes you more powerful

₊˚⊹.* ♡ one soulmate is blind and can’t see the colors of the world anyway

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you choose from a group of people who your soul mate should be after a series of tests / learning about and falling in love with them (almost like the bachelor )

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate who is terminally ill

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate is in a coma and always has visions / dreams of what their soulmate is doing

₊˚⊹.* ♡ an immortal soulmate who constantly goes through mortal soulmates because they keep dying

₊˚⊹.* ♡ an immortal soulmate who has lived centuries, eons even, alone and searching for their soulmate

₊˚⊹.* ♡ a soulmate with different beliefs / religion from their soulmate and must overcome those differences

₊˚⊹.* ♡ one or both soulmates are asexual

₊˚⊹.* ♡ hopeless romantic soulmate is very gullible to people lying about being their soulmate

₊˚⊹.* ♡ childhood best friends have kids at the same time, and their kids are soulmates

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate who must wait for their soulmate to be born / grow up before they can get together

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmates who stop aging at the same time until they meet their soulmate, then once they meet their lives resume

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your other eye is the color of your soulmates. ex: your soulmate has brown eyes, you have blue. one of their eyes is blue and one of yours is brown

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your soulmate is your boss / you were a lowly worker. it would go against the rules and get you both fired + can be a dystopian kind of thing

₊˚⊹.* ♡ basically any alpha & omega mating stories — omegaverse

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your soulmate always has your favorite song in their head

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you subconsciously hate / love foods / activities your soul mate does

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmates separated by war or something tragic + they write letters to each other and don’t get together until they’re very old

₊˚⊹.* ♡ childhood soulmates separated as kids reacquainted as adults

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you can write to your soulmate as they’ll receive it no matter where they are (writing on paper, the letter will appear to them)

₊˚⊹.* ♡ writing on your skin and your soulmate sees it

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you’re an artist, and your soulmate always has doodles all over themselves that you do to yourself

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your soulmate is allergic to animals and always finds themselves sneezing throughout the day because you basically run a petting zoo (you’re an animal person constantly surrounded by animals)

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your soulmate is a criminal and you’ve been trying to lock them up for years or they ARE locked up

₊˚⊹.* ♡ universe where soulmates are very very rare / thought to be extinct but you find yours somehow and don’t know what it means

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate is an ethereal being whose been watching over you your whole life to protect you / guide you OR they’re just a supernatural deity in general

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you run a cupids business to help soulmates meet each other but you haven’t found yours yet

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you can choose your own soulmate and have a ceremony to officiate it whenever you two want

₊˚⊹.* ♡ you don’t believe in soulmates until you meet yours

₊˚⊹.* ♡ your soulmate is someone evil and your family isolates you from them to protect you + your soulmate has never stopped trying to find / get to you

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate is a powerful being who knows you’re their soulmate, but they know they can’t act on it until you do / you’re a mortal and soulmates are all about divine timing so the powerful being can’t rush it sooner than it’s supposed to be done

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate is an evil being and upon meeting you they turn good (or you can turn evil and join them)

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate au with multiple soulmates at once. you all struggle to adjust to mundane living and romance since you’re dating 3+ people at once + it’s really just a soulmate orgy 😲

₊˚⊹.* ♡ soulmate is someone you used to bully (tease) or vice versa

₊˚⊹.* ♡ in a dystopian setting where your soulmate is considered someone bad and you can be sentenced to death for being together / loving each other

₊˚⊹.* ♡ romeo and juliet au where you and your soulmate can’t be together because of family ties

very helpful soulmate trope link I found by @thegeminisage | took a lot of inspo from them

will update when I think of new ones. hope this helps if you’re not sure what story to tell but you want something new <3

[theblogwithoutfear]

Rereading The Red Thread rn

Decided to read while my pasta (ironic I know) was cooking. Got too caught up in the story and my pasta overcooked, turned mushy and gross lol

Just kidding @pastafossa I love u and ur work, its worth my ruined rigatoni

[catsafarithewriter]

Day 5: Bodyguard

A/N: This is the second (and final) half of the red thread au that I originally posted as Day 1: Red Thread of Fate's prompt. Due to the length, and realising it also related well to today's prompt, I decided to split it. (I'm also running a day late, so I'm using today's 'free day' (usually used for a ficlet of my own choice) to catch up!

x

Muta has watched over Lady Haru Yoshioka ever since he was appointed her bodyguard.

Longer, in fact.

Over the years, he has seen parades of princes present themselves before her. He has seen hordes of heroes make hopeful promises of breaking her curse. He has seen herds of knights riding in, and then riding out when all their bluster came to naught.

He has learnt that, deep down, they're all the same. All men, seeking money or power or glory, and seeing Haru as nothing more than a stepping stone to their success. And he should know: it was an encounter with one such monster that set him on the path of bodyguard.

The difference is, this time around Haru seems to have forgotten that.

This Humbert - not Baron, Muta knows the man is not a baron, for no titled lord would travel with so little, without even the whisper of an entourage - is no better than the rest. He has seen too many of Humbert's ilk to believe otherwise.

"He's a liar, Chicky," Muta warns Haru while she takes a constitutional walk around the gardens. "He's not even a baron."

Haru's stride doesn't break. "You seem awfully sure of this, Muta."

"Well, he can't be. What kind of noble travels with only a talking cane for company?"

"A cursed one, perhaps?"

"A disowned one, Chicky."

"And how do you know that?"

"I heard yer father talking about it."

She looks back then, raising an eyebrow she has perfected from him. "And my father is always right, huh?"

"The source was sound." When she doesn't look convinced, he adds, "He's been here long enough that even your father is gonna look into things. He sent a messenger to Humbert's family. Turns out, he's been disowned."

"And?"

"And, if he's happy to lie about that, what else is he gonna fib over? Yer can't be sure he isn't just like the rest. Saying whatever he needs to get him where he wants to be."

"You cannot be sure of that."

"Nah, but when have any of the wannabe heroes been decent? And he's cursed."

"So am I."

Muta shakes his head roughly. "That's different, Chicky, and we both know it. Men like him, curses like his, they come from a certain kind of action, a certain kind of karma. Beasts, they don't get like that because of some family curse, but because they did something. What do you think he did?"

"I don't know, Muta," Haru says.

"Yer do. Yer know what kind of people get cursed."

"Yes, but he's not-"

"Not what? Cruel? Selfish? With a face like that, he's probably gotten pretty good at hiding it, 'cause it's already on the surface. Yer can't trust him, Chicky."

Haru does pause now. The roses she stands beside are in full bloom, blood-red and clustered with thorns. Despite all this, she rolls a blossom between her fingers. "No one else has bothered to make an effort, Muta." She doesn't look at him. "We both know all the wannabe heroes only try to break my curse because of the gold or the chance to marry into my family. And they've all given up the moment their plans came to nothing. But Baron... he's stayed."

"He's stubborn. It doesn't mean he's honest."

"It means something, Muta. At least to me."

Warning bells ring in Muta's ears, even louder than when he realised Baron had his eyes set on Haru. He realises Humbert has given Haru something more dangerous than proclamations of love or vows of curse-breaking.

He's given her hope.

x

When they rejoin Baron, he's buried up to his elbows in paperwork. An ocean of files and documents floods the desk, and it's only by some nifty elbow-pinning and sheer luck that it hasn't cascaded to the floor yet.

Muta raises an eyebrow. "Natori's gonna have yer head when he sees the mess you've made of his records."

"I have a system," Humbert insists. "I think." He pauses, and glances up. "Which one's Natori? Is he the..." and Humbert gives a wild grin, "one?"

"Nah, he's the," and Muta mimed readjusting imaginary glasses, "one."

"Ah. Duly noted."

Haru approaches the table and inspects the chaos. "Dare I ask what you're doing?"

"The logic, I think, is sound," Humbert says. "There may not be records of the identity of the peasant girl, but there are records of everyone who officially attended."

"And?" Muta prompted.

"And, that means that every eligible lady who officially attended the ball can be ruled out."

Haru perches on a stack of books remaining from a previous spat of research. "So you're trying to identify a single peasant girl out of... how many?"

"Many," Toto says with a tired sigh. "I have try to tell him that the chances of singling her out are next to impossible, but..."

"Next to impossible is not quite the same as actually impossible," Humbert says cheerfully. "Between the two lives a little island of fated serendipity."

"And have you landed on this little island?" Haru asks.

"...No." Humbert retrieves a list that is on the seabed of the paperwork. It's long and every inch is inked with names. "So far, these are the individuals I have identified as being present and eligible in the area at the time of the balls, but who did not attend."

Haru doubtfully takes the list. "And you're going to... what? Contact every single woman here - assuming they're still alive - and ask if they happened to attend a ball several decades back while wearing glass slippers?"

"...Yes." Humbert begins to say something, and then pauses. The magnitude of his task begins to dawn on him. "I didn't say it would work but it's an idea. And a novel one at that."

"What are you going to tell my father? You can't admit you're looking for this woman."

"I shall be sure to give some other clever reason for my search," Humbert says. "I shall disguise the important questions among the rest, so no one realises my true intent." He holds out a hand for the list. "I've just found another possible candidate. May I have this back?"

Haru hesitates. "No one's ever gone to such lengths for this."

"Then I shall be the first. Or possibly the most optimistic." Humbert smiles. "If it can help you, it must be worth a try."

Muta doesn't miss Haru's smitten grin as she returns the list.

x

The search turns up nothing. Of course it does. Muta could have told them that - but then again, Muta could tell a whole lot of things, and none of them will do anyone any good. For instance, what good will it do to tell them that peasant girls become peasant women, who marry travelling merchants and go on to see the world? None at all, and it would only add more questions to the mix.

Still, Humbert searches. It lasts for a good few weeks, nearly a month and to the end of Lord Yoshioka's patience, before he admits defeat. For weeks, Muta watches as Humbert travels out into the city and countryside, disappearing from Haru's side to question woman after woman after woman, all to no avail.

There must, Muta thinks, be easier ways for a cursed noble to earn some gold.

x

"I must admit, there is one thing that has been bothering me for a while," Humbert says, another week into dead ends and wild goose chases. They're in the library, as they so often are, and even Muta has begun to begrudgingly relax. This has become routine. Safe.

(He still doesn't trust Humbert. Not officially.)

"Only the one?" Haru teases.

"Well, one novel thing," he amends. "It's taken me until now to put my finger on it... no pun intended, but when you originally told me of previous attempts to remove the thread, you said that you already knew you couldn't cut it off."

"Yes. And?"

"Your exact comment was that you've known since you were a child."

"Yes. And?"

Humbert doesn't reply immediately, but instead seems to consider his next words with care. "It's merely that... from the official records, it seems as though your father only turned his attention to breaking the curse when you were some years into adulthood."

Haru says nothing and, after a hesitation, Humbert seems to take this as confirmation to continue.

"It only occurs to me now that it seems... odd, chronologically-speaking, that you should know such a thing long before your father sought to break it."

Haru looks away from him, and only Muta catches the bittersweet smile that flitters across her face. "I guess I could tell you that it was merely an accident of youth, that my hand slipped while eating and that my knife should have cleaved straight through it, but..." She shrugs. "Well, would you believe me?"

"Do you want me to?"

She looks to him then, and Muta can read the softening of her shoulders, the guard dropping. "Would you? If I asked?"

"Yes."

She dances her hand over her gloved fingers, brushing past the littlest one and its unseen thread. It's a nervous tic, Muta knows, but one that helps steel her. "When I was a child," she said softly, "I hated what it represented. I hated the choice it took away from me and the stranger it tied me to, but most of all I hated how only I seemed to see it as a curse. For my whole childhood, everyone around me acted as though the fairy had misjudged, that I'd been given a blessing in disguise..." Her little finger curls into her palm. "The funny thing is, once everyone started to treat it as a curse, then it felt like a blessing."

"How?"

"I realised that had I not been cursed, my father would have already had me betrothed, regardless of my own interest." Her hands flit across her finger again. "This curse gave me a little breathing space, the ability to be more than just a bride or wife." She chuckles weakly. "Of course, I became relegated to prize instead, but given that no one seems able to win said prize..."

Humbert lets her trail off. For several moments, there's only the ticking of the library clock and the sound of birdsong from the windows.

"Haru... do you want the curse broken?"

She smiles wanly. "Well, I don't think I get much say in that, either way."

"I could leave."

"What?"

"I am here to break the curse," he reminds her gently. "And if that's what you want, I will stay here until I find a way. But if you don't want it broken, then I should go."

"Do you have to?" Haru asks. "Couldn't you just, you know, pretend to be working on it?"

"Haru, your father is already wary enough of how much time I've spent here. He's only tolerated my presence this far because all reports show I am working to break it." He glances to Muta, as if wondering whether the guard is one of the lord's informants. Muta could put him out of his misery, assure Humbert he reports to no one, not least of all the lord, but he doesn't. "And, if I continue to find novel ways to try to undo the spell, then one day I might just succeed."

Haru is quiet for a long moment. "What did you do?" she asks softly.

"Do?" Humbert echoes.

She nods to his face. "To, you know, get your curse."

He doesn't quite stare, but he does still. His posture doesn't alter, and yet Muta gets the impression that's only hiding the whirring of his mind as the cursed noble tries to make sense of the sudden topic change. "Is that really the question you want to ask?"

"Yes."

His smile is soft. Sad. "Then I'm afraid it's not a flattering portrayal of the person I once was. But, then again, you've probably already guessed that."

"Curses like yours," Haru says quietly, "they come from a certain kind of action. A certain kind of karma."

"An act of selfishness," Humbert translates.

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't need to." Now, Humbert finally shifts, leaning forward to the desk. It looks like a steadying action. A bracing action. "On the estate where I was raised, my father would throw winter feasts – large, extravagant affairs catering to the comfortably moneyed – and when I came of an age, I was charged with greeting our guests. As the youngest of three brothers, I was excited to finally be able to play a part, a role I took to with a good deal of earnestness."

He hesitates.

"An old beggar-woman came to the door that bitter winter night. She was cold and suffering and far from the kind of person my family would look kindly on, and I..."

"You refused her entry," Haru finishes.

"I refused her entry." He doesn't meet Haru's gaze, and Muta wonders if he's still seeing echoes of that night. "I knew my father would be angry if she was seen by our guests on that most auspicious of nights, so I refused on the first time she asked, and the second, and on the third she revealed herself to be a fairy. I prided my family reputation over the life of another, and for that I was transformed into the beast you see today."

Humbert passes one hand over the other, in almost the same way Muta has seen Haru do so many times before - but in Humbert's case, his fingers brush over the gap between sleeve and glove. A sliver of ginger fur is just visible; a fragmented reminder of Humbert's curse, while the rest of the evidence - save his tail and face - is so carefully hidden away.

"How old were you?" Haru asks.

"Old enough to have known better, that's all that matters."

"Such curses can be broken-"

"Not this one, Haru. Not anymore; too much time has passed."

"No, but... at first." Haru's nose wrinkles into a grimace. "If you had met someone, fallen in love..."

"To do such a thing, I would have to meet people," Humbert says. "And my family were mortified by my transformation."

"You're not hideous-"

"Not by the details of my apparance," he clarifies, "but by what it represented. Like you said, a curse like mine come from a certain kind of action." He glances to Muta. "Not incorrectly, but to have acknowledged my enchantment would be to admit one of their own was capable of such selfishness, so I was hidden away. When I eventually decided I had had enough of being a secret, I left, but not before the curse had become permanent and my family disowned me."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was my own doing that left me like this."

"For your family, I mean," Haru says. "They shouldn't have abandoned you like that, they should have tried to help..."

"Yes, well, families are complicated things. Their help can come in all kinds of forms, even the kind you don't want." Humbert pauses, and then adds, "Sometimes, I think the fairy did me a kind of mercy."

"Howso?"

"Well, if life had continued, uninterrupted, I would probably still be there, echoing the kind of heartlessness I was raised in. By forcing me to become an outsider in my own home, I saw their callousness for what it really was. It made me want to be everything they weren't - to help without self-interest, to be kind merely for the sake of it - and it brought me here."

He looks to Haru then.

"I am glad I met you, Lady Haru. But I think we both know it is time I left."

"I don't," Haru says stubbornly. "You don't have to go, we can find a way, a reason for you to stay, even if it's not to break the curse-"

Humbert gently takes Haru's left hand and lifts it to his lips. She stills, cheeks flushed in a way no other do-gooder has prompted before. Humbert sees this, and smiles sadly. "We both know that my continued presence here will only make things... messy. Someday, Haru, this curse will be broken or you will find your soulmate, and in either scenario I can be nothing more than a bystander."

"I can refuse," Haru says hoarsely.

"Your soulmate? The suitors your father has ready?"

"Both. Either. All." She clasps her hands around his. "I want to choose you."

"You don't-"

"I do."

"Even after everything I've just told you-"

"I do," she repeats, this time with heightened fervour. "I want to choose the man who, despite knowing it might make me hate him, told me the truth. I want to choose the man who took a curse and used it to make himself kinder, who grew from it in a way my own father never has." She leans forward, speaking quicker now, as if afraid she is going to lose the moment or her nerve, or possibly both. "I want to choose the man who has spent months trying to break an impossible curse, who picked through decades-old records looking for clues, who saw me as a human, not a prize. I want to choose you, Baron Humbert von Gikkingen."

"Chicky..." Muta starts gently.

"Not now, Muta! I know, I know it's impossible, but I-"

Muta drops a hand onto her shoulder, and the rest of her argument is gone as she looks to him.

Muta has watched over Lady Haru Yoshioka ever since he was appointed her bodyguard.

Longer, in fact.

To some, taking on as a secret godchild the daughter of the man who had broken the heart of the previous godchild would be mere folly. But Muta has always been stubborn. And a bit petty. Admittedly, perhaps a lot petty. Other fairies would have washed their hands of the whole family, but Muta had suspected that the daughter of a man like Lord Yoshioka would need more help than most.

After all, a man who married for riches would surely ensure his daughter did the same.

So what better revenge than giving his daughter the kindness to find love on her own terms?

Because he's discovered that sometimes blessings like golden carriages and glass slippers can be a curse, and sometimes you have to make a curse into a blessing to save someone. Sometimes, the best blessing you can give someone is the abliity to choose for themselves.

"Choose," he says.

A heartbeat passes. He thinks she's not going to understand, or not follow through, but then she's tugging her gloves loose and then Humbert's. Her own she shakes off at the end, struggling against the sudden adrenaline-fuelled trembling, and then she holds Humbert's hands - one cursed palm in another.

She twists the red thread of fate around her fingers and somehow - impossibly - finds an end.

"You," she says to Humbert, and she ties it around his thumb. "I choose you."

[speakofthedebbie]

come on Scungilli on ao3, author of the red thread that binds us, i know you have a tumblr, i liked one of your posts, show yourself i have radioapple fic recs to make

[ednamode1]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51482938/chapters/130108738

Pretty underrated fic ngl

[pastafossa]

Haunted (Matt Murdock x TRT!Reader, Fic, SFW)🌧️

Right, so close to 3 years ago, I had an ask in my box: 'what would happen if TRT!Reader/Jane Hind lost her memory just before returning to Matt after her three months away', aka: just before point where they both confessed their love and got together in mainline TRT. So I wrote up a fairly angsty, no happy ending sort of fic about it, which you can find here. But there just felt like there was more to the story, and the idea of a sequel wouldn't leave me alone, so I've worked on it in little bits and pieces over the past few years and I'm finally ready to unleash that into the world now that it's been edited to my satisfaction.

This will have a happy ending and hurt/comfort, once we swim through a lot of Matt Suffering. <3 Ship: Matt Murdock x F!Reader

Chapter Summary:

Leaving him like that shouldn’t have bothered you as much as it did. You didn’t know him. This man should have been nothing more than a stranger on the street, one you wouldn’t glance twice at, much less feel some ridiculous sense of attachment or obligation to. Yet the memory of walking out of his apartment still left you shaken whenever you allowed yourself to think too long on it.  He… shouldn’t have been alone. That was wrong, somehow.  There was no memory attached to the thought, no blinking sign you could point to that would justify your growing unease. You just knew it. You knew it in the way you knew how to breathe, how to blink, knowledge etched into your very bones over and over by an unfamiliar hand. And no matter what you did, no matter where you went, you were unable to escape the feeling that… that you’d made a terrible mistake, broken something good, tilted the world on its axis until the whole of the city, the earth, the very sky hung just a little crooked like an off-center painting.  Matt was alone.  You’d left him alone.  It was the right choice, one you’d made dozens if not hundreds of times before. Hell, it should have been even easier this time since there were no memories to hold you back. So… why did you feel so very sick?

Wordcount: 11, 805 words so, hilariously, about 3 times the length of Part 1

Warnings for this chapter: angst, alcohol, matt spiraling fairly badly, he throws some things, LOTS of TRT references and spoilers so I wouldn't do this one unless you've finished the Miami arc in TRT.

Sad Matt gif as a reminder that the angst is pretty heavy here because I'm really going to emotionally beat on this poor man for a bit.

At Ciro’s insistence, you gave yourself one month in Hell’s Kitchen. 

A month wasn’t much time, granted, but it would hopefully be enough to see if there was a chance of bringing back the memories you’d lost: memories of friends, of your life here, and of… of whatever it was that you’d had with Matt Murdock. Based on his grief over the loss of Jane Hind—not you, but her surely, the role, the mask you’d worn while here—his attachment to her had been deep and fervent, and those feelings appeared to have been at least partly reciprocated. The dangerously intimate photo you’d found in your memory box was all the proof you needed of that. 

Your past self had already been accustomed to his touch when the photo was taken, based on the way she’d allowed him to press his head tenderly to her temple, his dark eyes warm and fond as he'd smiled in her direction even if he couldn't see her, his arm draped over her shoulders. She should have been put off by the proximity, by such a blatant show of physical intimacy, but instead of looking distressed, she’d been relaxed and comfortable where she’d confidently tucked herself up against his side. Try as you might, you hadn’t been able to find any hint of discomfort, any clue that signaled the obvious affection she’d felt was an act, her shoulder angled in a way that made you think she’d wrapped her arm comfortably around his waist, her grin bright and so very real.

This couldn’t be you.

When was the last time you'd looked that happy?

When was the last time you’d let someone hold you close? 

And when was the last time someone had looked at you like… like they might… 

“Did I… love him, Ciro?”

“I believe that… you might have, yes. Him, and this city. That is why I encourage you to stay, for a time at least. See if the memories return to you. Even should you leave, it would be wise to know of the life you led here.”

Ciro had sent a check to your office, booking you for the month and clearing your schedule. Just like that, you were free to focus on looking for something that might trigger the return of your memories. Though what that something might be, you weren’t really sure. A more thorough examination of the apartment had been your first step. Unfortunately, there’d been nothing there that seemed familiar beyond the same cheap decor and calculated set pieces you’d always used. You’d quickly ruled those out. They were meaningless distractions meant to reinforce the lie of whatever pre-planned identity you’d taken on. In this case, that identity was Jane Hind—practical, professional, detached, likes sailboat paintings and the color grey. Based on the fine layer of dust you'd found coating everything but the kitchen counter and a neat stack of mail, no one else had spent much time here during your months away. That, at least, fit your pattern. You weren’t in the habit of making friends or putting down roots. There was no point in doing so when you’d just wind up cutting them loose and running again. 

What had unsettled you far more were the hints of connection you’d found quietly tucked away:

A fleecy stuffed bear holding a plush crystal ball, the threads connecting the two uneven as if hand-stitched. That kind of time and effort wouldn’t have been spent on anyone but a friend, and the bear’s prominent position on the counter lent it far more importance than any of the other decorations.

A tacky ‘Handsome Devil’ coffee mug, the curling red script and clichéd devil horns design bizarrely out of place amongst the rest of the plain white mugs in the cupboard. An identity like Jane Hind wouldn’t have been caught dead drinking from it, which meant someone else was here with enough regularity to have a mug of their own. Further digging revealed a second decorated mug, this one adorned with the name of the law firm co-run by Matt. You could have written off one mug, but two? Two was a pattern.

An entire drawer in the dresser devoted solely to a pile of dangerously soft shirts that clearly didn’t belong to Jane Hind, the fabric threadbare and worn. They looked about the right size to be Matt’s, though, the faint traces of scent a match for him. The fact that they took up an entire drawer indicated he’d visited often enough to need a space for his clothes. 

You’d… made space for him in your false life. That wasn’t something you did.

Or had you been the one wearing them? 

Maybe…?

You’d spent a long moment holding one of the shirts in your hand, rubbing at the fabric in hopes of stirring something. When that hadn’t worked, you’d even brought it up to your nose to inhale slowly, just in case the traces of scent brought some memory back. 

Clean soap. Salt. Copper. Faint cinnamon. 

All it had done was remind you of holding a grieving Matt in his kitchen after he’d realized your memories weren’t coming back. It was a gloomy enough memory, but ultimately unhelpful.

You'd tossed the old shirt on top of the dresser and moved on. 

While you didn’t know who exactly you’d been here in New York, the longer you searched, the more it became clear what had happened. You’d started to slip, your years of isolation forming a crack in your layers of armor. That fracture had allowed an attachment to form, an insidious connection worming its way in through the open gap like poisonous roots through crumbling pavement. You’d grown weak, and careless. There was no other explanation for why you’d broken so many of your rules, dominoes tipping one by one until it cascaded into a waterfall of mistakes. You’d slipped before, of course—loneliness was natural and expected, which was why you had so many contingencies—but you’d never let yourself get in this deep. Not until now. 

What you didn’t know was… 

Why?

Why here? 

Why these people? 

And why the fuck hadn’t you followed your rules and run? 

If there was an answer to be found in Jane Hind’s apartment, you couldn’t seem to find it, no matter how hard you look, no matter how many of her belongings you dug through. Even your memory box had failed you, the photo of you and Matt at the back of your stack of pictures an outlier you couldn’t explain, this fruit of an as-yet unidentified poisonous tree. You had no real leads, no faint ringing of memory to guide you beyond a vague sense that, somehow, this started with Matt. You didn’t even know where to begin. 

At least, not until some shaggy-haired guy named Foggy—what the fuck kind of nickname was that?—showed up entirely and rudely unannounced at your front door, dressed in a cheap suit and wearing a bizarrely determined look. Despite your doubts, you reluctantly allowed him in. He made it pretty clear he knew you, and if you were lucky he could tell you more about your life here.

“So I know you usually skedaddle when things get uncomfortable, which I imagine they are at the moment. How long are you trying to stay?” 

“One month.” You shrugged casually, a cover for just how warily you were watching him as he paced in your—in Jane Hind’s living area. He knew far more about you than you knew about him, a reversal you were uncomfortably aware of. That vulnerability was almost enough to trigger a retreat beneath that cold, brittle shell you’d used long ago, though you quickly caught hold of that instinct and buried it back down deep where it belonged. Still, you couldn’t quite hide the cool clip to your voice, your walls firmly in place. “Leaving after that. Don’t see the point in staying if the memories are gone. Truthfully I’m not sure why I stayed in the first place, especially once it was clear I was getting attached. No offense.” 

“None taken, my hopefully-still-friend-when-your-memories-come-back.” He abruptly swiveled on his feet to face you, squinting at you thoughtfully. “How badly do you want your memories back?” 

You thought of out-of-place mugs and hand-stitched psychic teddy bears; of faint cinnamon and a worn photo frame; of the way you’d held a broken Matt in his kitchen until he’d carefully pushed you away and asked you to leave, his face closed off and distant despite the tears on his cheeks and yours. 

You’d… been someone here. Someone cared for. Someone whose loss was mourned.  

Even if you left, you needed to know just who that someone had been, if only so you could make sure this never happened again. Not until you reached your island in the sun. 

“Badly enough to stay for the month,” you said quietly. 

“Then put some shoes on. We’re going on a memory hunt.”

Over the next few weeks, Foggy took you all over Hell’s Kitchen. 

You visited Jane Hind’s office, abandoned warehouses, and empty rooftops covered in thick blankets of snow. He reintroduced you to Karen, to your upstairs neighbors, and to a bartender who didn’t seem all that inclined to be introduced to anyone. You drank crappy beer and slightly less crappy vodka, played pool, and went to the zoo to stare for far too long at penguins, which Foggy refused to explain no matter how much you pressed. He had you focus on sights, on smells, on sounds that might trigger a memory. He joked with you in between, and he was just funny enough, friendly and clever enough, that for the first week or so, you were consistently cracking a smile. Hell, you even laughed now and then, much to your surprise. He really did know you, enough so that you gradually began to relax around him, just a little. He was likely hoping the addition of a friend’s voice would bring back what you’d lost, especially when paired with all the other sensations. 

But no matter how much you both tried, your memories remained lost. 

God, you hadn’t thought this would… would hurt as much as it did. Yet with every day that you failed to find your way back to who you’d been, the more that fierce ache, that old longing inside you grew. Your smiles became brittle, your laughter fading, until both finally dried up like withered, crumbling leaves beneath a bitter frost. You couldn't help pulling away really, not when your soul curling up in the dark might protect you from the agony of knowing that maybe, just maybe, you’d finally found what you'd always wanted. How fitting that it had been ripped away from your bloodied, desperate hands like so many times before, one more square for the filthy patchwork quilt of shredded lives and possibilities you’d been forced to leave behind. What was worse: even your memories of that seeming joy had been stolen, too, leaving you with nothing left to carry but the tattered scraps of a ghost and the photograph of a stranger wearing your skin.

It shouldn’t have been possible to miss what you couldn’t remember. Yet here you were missing it all the same. 

It didn’t help that Matt was avoiding you in every way that mattered. You’d thought about calling him if only to ask him questions about your life here, but you could never quite work up the courage to do it. He must have felt the same since he hadn’t reached out to you, either. And why would he? He knew as well as you did that your memories likely weren’t coming back. It made sense to cut that connection, tear it away like a weed before the roots could do more damage—something you should have done sooner, for both your sakes. What you hadn’t expected was just how good he was at dodging you, somehow absent no matter how many places Foggy took you to, places he swore Matt frequented with you when you’d lived here, as if Matt’s mere presence might be enough to trigger some memory in you. Had he been that important? Either way, it didn’t matter. You hadn’t seen Matt once since you’d walked out, doing your best to ignore his hitched breath as you’d opened the door. You’d forced yourself to ignore, too, the broken, agonized sound of grief that he’d let out as you quietly shut the door behind you, leaving him alone. 

Leaving him like that shouldn’t have bothered you as much as it did. You didn’t know him. This man should have been nothing more than a stranger on the street, one you wouldn’t glance twice at, much less feel some ridiculous sense of attachment or obligation to. Yet the memory of walking out of his apartment still left you shaken whenever you allowed yourself to think too long on it. 

He… shouldn’t have been alone. That was wrong, somehow. 

There was no memory attached to the thought, no blinking sign you could point to that would justify your growing unease. You just knew it. You knew it in the way you knew how to breathe, how to blink, knowledge etched into your very bones over and over by an unfamiliar hand. And no matter what you did, no matter where you went, you were unable to escape the feeling that… that you’d made a terrible mistake, broken something good, tilted the world on its axis until the whole of the city, the earth, the very sky hung just a little crooked like an off-center painting. 

Matt was alone. 

You’d left him alone. 

It was the right choice, one you’d made dozens if not hundreds of times before. Hell, it should have been even easier this time since there were no memories to hold you back.

So… why did you feel so very sick? 

Sympathy. 

That was all you were feeling. Matt was grieving a woman he’d cared about, one who’d died and left a cold stranger in her place. It was normal to feel for someone in that much pain, and no one should be alone while grieving. Maybe this was for the best. The sooner you were fully out of his life, the sooner all his friends and family could step in, and the sooner he could move on. He wouldn’t be alone, then. And even if he was, his loneliness wasn’t your goddamn problem. You had more than enough troubles of your own.

Protect yourself. 

Protect what you might one day have. 

All else was irrelevant.

You just… hoped he was doing alright. 

He did his best to avoid you, but that only grew more difficult once your ghost began to haunt his every step.

Even Josie’s quickly became off-limits—something he discovered one night when he stepped through the front door where he was promptly met with the familiar, comforting scent of you floating like a haze beneath the smell of cheap beer and sour sweat. His body went rigid the moment he recognized it, your presence across the room a sharpened knife that only widened the wound carved into him by your death. And if the scent of you was a knife, then your bark of laughter was a cruel twist of the blade, one that left him gutted and shaking there in the doorway. He drank in his apartment after that, waiting for that blessed moment when he would feel nothing, waiting for the very second the glorious shroud of night fell. Only then could he finally escape to the streets and drown himself in a far better kind of pain, taking his rage and his grief out on whatever piece of shit had the misfortune of falling into the Devil’s path. 

But Foggy seemed determined to shove the specter of you directly into his face. 

“You need to talk to her!” Foggy snapped, his voice only just shy of a shout. Matt ignored him as he headed for his office, desperate to retreat from your scent lingering on Foggy’s clothes. Foggy had taken you to a coffee shop that morning, one you’d frequented when you’d lived here, and now each inhalation was a vicious torment. It felt like breathing in shards of glass, the sharp pain of it throbbing with every stuttered, choked breath he drew in. If Foggy noticed, he didn’t seem to care. “Christ, Matt! You love her and we both know it. If you talk to her, it might trigger something—”

“Stop,” Matt grit out, reaching up to scrub his hand angrily over his face. He stalked his way over to his desk, still desperate to escape somehow, even if it was into his work. “Just stop, Foggy. I did talk to her, and you know what happened? Nothing. She didn’t remember anything at all. She’s gone, and you dragging this out is just making everything worse for all of us.” 

“So what, you’re just gonna roll over?” Foggy scoffed, crossing his arms as he planted his feet in Matt’s doorway. “Are you sure you actually loved her? Because I’m pretty sure she loved y—”

Matt slammed his fist down on his desk, the furious crack of it echoing through the office like a gunshot as he shouted, “Don’t you fucking dare!” 

Tension hung thick in the air as Matt’s chest heaved, his teeth bared, blood and adrenaline running hot in his veins as if Foggy were some sort of-of threat. Everything in him shook with rage, or maybe unshed grief, the burden of them both impossibly twisted and tangled beneath the sea of his guilt and his self-loathing until he couldn’t tell which was which. He just couldn’t—how was he supposed to force it all down when Foggy had just come so close, so dangerously close to shattering what few pieces remained of Matt’s crumbling armor?

It was bad enough loving you the way he did only for you to slip through his bloodied, desperate grasp like whispering grains of sand. What was worse, this entire disaster was one of his own making, a series of mistakes whose snarled, winding paths led inevitably back to him just like they had so many times before in his life. This loss of someone who’d truly understood him, accepted him, cared for him had already broken something inside him he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to repair. But that fracturing inside him would surely rise up to consume him if Foggy were right, if you’d truly cared for him that deeply before your memories were taken, so deeply that you might even have…

I miss you, sweetheart.

…loved him the way he loved you. 

Abruptly Matt’s surge of rage drained away and his head fell, leaving him feeling all the more empty and broken. He braced his arms weakly against his desk, drawing in a shaky breath as he forced himself to confess, his voice gone hoarse and ragged with grief. “I loved her, Foggy.” He lifted one shaking hand to his face. “God, I loved her so, so much. I can’t… I don’t know what to do without her now that she’s gone.” “I know, Matt,” Foggy said gently. “I know.” “I loved how she always smelled a little like coffee, and the way she always managed to wind up climbing into the oddest places for a case. She had one of the foulest mouths I’ve ever heard, but I swear she could use it to talk her way out of almost anything or to bring someone up out of whatever dark hole they were trapped in. She was… far kinder than she’d ever admit.” His lips quirked, but there was no humor in it, the expression miserable and gutted. You’d have likely argued with him about how kind you were if you’d been here. But there was no chance of that now, no matter how much the scent of you on the air told him otherwise. “Some days it felt like she was the only thing holding me together, like the only time I could breathe was when she held me in her arms. She was always there when I fell apart, or when it all… when it all started to hurt too much. And I tried to give her whatever pieces of me the Kitchen hadn’t already taken, to be there for her like she was for me, to keep her safe. We were finally going to make our relationship official when she came back, her and me, even if there’d… already been something there for a while now if I’m honest.” 

And it had, it had been there, this soft, tender thing that had developed slowly but surely between the two of you, a tangling that came by degrees rather than all at once. It had sprouted, grown, and blossomed so gradually that even now he struggled to point to any one moment where it had truly begun—the night he found you in the warehouse, maybe, or that first game of Devil Hunt, or when you’d both almost taken the leap before he’d realized you were drunk. But the question of where it began didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was there, something nameless yet still so good and warm and perfect, a connection nurtured in the low light and the blood-soaked soil of the Kitchen. You’d felt it just like he had, and you’d been willing to take that chance with him despite the baggage he carried behind him like an anchor destined to drag him down. You never would have agreed to kiss him when you came back otherwise. Now that chance was gone. 

“How much did she know before she left?” Foggy asked quietly, leaning against the doorframe. 

”She knew that I-that I wanted to be with her, but I never told her that I loved her.” Matt blew out a slow, heavy breath. “I was too scared of chasing her away, I guess. I thought maybe when she came back, if she still wanted me, I would… I decided that I would tell her. But I waited too long. Now she’s gone and I’ll never be able to tell her. All because of me.” 

He finally lifted his head, tipping it at Foggy. Neither of them dared mention the wetness on Matt’s cheeks. Even speaking about this—about how much he’d loved you only for him to ruin it—was almost more than he could bear, the edges of the wound still fresh and raw. Then again, maybe he deserved that pain after how miserably he’d failed you, just like everyone else in his life. “I miss her. And what’s worse is even when she’s right there in front of me, she’s not. She’s not, Foggy. Because I-I fucked up. I’m the reason the woman I knew, the woman I loved, died. I’m the reason she’ll never remember what we had, why I’ll never hold her again, and why she’ll leave New York at the end of the month like she does whenever she’s afraid of forming a connection.” He let out a bitter laugh, waving towards the windows, towards the place you’d once held dear. “I couldn’t even keep her here before. She almost ran last summer and the only thing that stopped her was being kidnapped. That was what slowed her down long enough for our thread to turn red, not me. She won’t let that happen a second time, not now that she’s seen what happens to people I care about. Do you understand?” 

The door to Nelson and Murdock creaked open, Karen’s voice making its way in first. Her voice was followed only a moment later by another’s, one still so familiar. 

“—I mean, winding up in a pool while chasing a kid sounds about right for me, so even if I don’t remember, I won’t argue—”

“I had to keep you here somehow.” Foggy’s voice remained quiet, but there was no disguising the ferocity in it now, the fervent belief. “Get out of your own head and talk to her, Matt. Fight for her. She would want you to.” 

No. 

No, no, no.

Your body may have been here, whole and real, but the woman who’d known him wasn’t. The song of your voice, your sweet scent, the flames of heat and stirred air currents around you flaring into a familiar shape: all of it was nothing but a lie, a snare for his senses, a ghost of his own making, and he wasn’t about to be caught by it again. 

He darted back around his desk, shoving his way past Foggy on the way toward the front door, his heart racing. If he was quick, if he just put up enough of a front, he could get out before they trapped you here with him like they’d planned. He wouldn’t relive this grief again, he couldn’t, not without falling apart. The moment he’d had with you in his apartment had been enough agony for one lifetime. 

“Hey, Matt.” You cleared your throat, shifting awkwardly on your feet where you’d stopped by the front door. Your stance was cautious and guarded, almost wary of him. It was just one more reminder of how uncomfortable he made you now. “Are you—”

“Heading out,” he said stiffly, only belatedly remembering to trace one hand along the wall as if his heightened senses hadn’t given him a clear map of the room the moment his adrenaline spiked. That spike was a curse all its own. It made the scent of you so much stronger, the lie of it fresh and present as it twined around him. His chest hitched just once before he forced himself to breathe his mouth. But that route of escape had been cut off, too. All it did was shift his focus to the taste of you on the air, and the taste of familiar fabric once so tenderly given. 

You were wearing one of his shirts. 

He fumbled for his cane, his hands starting to shake before he finally found it where he’d left it against the wall. He couldn’t let you see him like this. It wasn’t your fault that you didn’t remember him, nor was it your fault that he’d lost you. He’d done enough damage without adding a layer of guilt to what you were dealing with, too. But despite his attempts to hide what he was feeling, his face a hard mask, your fingers still brushed gently against his arm a moment later. It was an offer of help, or maybe an attempt to reach out, to slow him down, to connect. It was a kindness, a sympathy he didn’t deserve. Even now, you read him far too well, this touch the same as it had been that first night he’d met you when you’d gently brushed your hand against his arm. “Hey, do you need… I could walk you home.”

He shied away from your touch, finally managing to roughly unsnap his cane before going for the door. “I’m fine. I just—I have things to take care of. Excuse me.”  

He went straight home and showered, but no matter how many times he scrubbed, he couldn’t seem to wash the ghost of your scent away.

You slowly wandered around Matt’s office, taking it in. This was another place you’d supposedly frequented, a place that should have been familiar, and one you'd avoided until now.

Even though Foggy had assured you it was alright, it felt… almost wrong to explore a stranger’s space like this without them present. But you couldn’t help but brush your fingers across the battered desk and the small labels in braille you couldn’t read, run your hands along the chair for clients that you might have sat in once, and trace curiously the small seashell next to Matt’s laptop. The base scents of Matt were stronger here where he spent so much time, only partly erased by the smell of coffee and paper. The room was clean, cared for, and well-organized despite how rundown the office was. Important to him. You could tell that much, even if the scents and sights had failed to spark any memories.

Maybe… knowing his space wasn’t enough. 

This was about more than just figuring out who you were, now. For some reason, you needed to know who Matt was, too: this man Jane Hind had cared so much about and who’d cared so much about her. You told yourself it was practical. Matt was your best bet when it came to remembering who you’d been. But some part of you deep down recognized the lie. No, there was something in you inescapably drawn to him, a pull you couldn’t quite explain. Maybe that strange, unnatural gravity was what had started this whole mess in the first place. What was it about him that was so different, that had driven you to break every last rule you’d lived your life by for over a decade? 

And why… did you spend so long wondering if he’d ever climbed out his office window?

It had been twenty-nine days, and not a single memory had returned. 

Oh, there were beats now and then when you thought that maybe, just maybe something was coming back, but those moments were painfully few and far between. Even in those moments, you couldn’t say remembered anything, exactly. It was more a frustrating sense of deja vu, a fleeting little itch at the back of your mind like you’d forgotten something important, flashing road markers to warn you of the dark, empty gaps in your memory. That sense was probably driven at least in part by Foggy’s growing desperation as he frantically hunted for something that might trigger a return of your memories. 

But the rest of that feeling… the rest was all you. 

There was no denying a traitorous part of you wanted to remember no matter how ill-advised it might be. You wanted to remember this bizarre little family you’d stumbled into and then lost, just like in Los Angeles. You wanted to remember the love you’d had for this place, this city, this taste of mutual affection that had grown up around you after going so long without. After endless ages and ages of drought, of starvation, you hungered for even these bare crumbs of connection, something to tide you over until you found safe haven on the distant horizon. What a tempting thought it was to slither back into the life of this woman who’d been so cruelly murdered and replaced by a stranger wearing her skin.

Was this what a demon felt like when it took over a body? To walk around with someone else’s face, to speak with the unnatural voice of the dead, tormenting the loved ones that remained? 

That, ultimately, was why it didn’t matter what you wanted. Your presence in this city only spread rot and suffering. It would be better for everyone involved if you left like you should have long before now. Then they could all grieve without you tainting the very soil around them. 

Especially Matt. 

You’d seen him once or twice in passing as your time in New York wound down. Even at a distance, you’d marked the growing circles under his eyes, dark enough to be visible despite the glasses he always wore. The rest of him wasn’t doing much better. It seemed like every time he crossed your path, there was another bruise, another cut across his face or knuckles, a shifting canvas of pain painted across skin grown pale and drawn. He didn’t just look tired—that wasn’t what this was. This was something far worse, a haggard exhaustion, a weariness that couldn’t be solved with sleep, if he slept at all. This was someone being haunted. 

Probably because the ghost of Jane Hind kept crossing his path. But that would be solved soon enough. 

You’d already packed up your things, not that you had much to take. Just your bag and your memory box. You’d be leaving the next day. Foggy was still convinced he had a few more days, but you had other plans. You couldn’t give Matt back the woman he’d lost, nor could you give him a body to bury, a grave to lay flowers across, but you could give him what Jane Hind had carried with her until her dying breath. 

“I thought you might… want these before I left tomorrow,” you said quietly. “I… sorry, it’s… it’s a bag with my—with her things.” 

Matt took it carefully from you, the motion mechanical and stiff. He hadn’t really invited you the rest of the way into his apartment, the two of you now stalled out in the hallway just beyond the closed front door. He hadn’t taken his glasses off, either. It made it harder to read him, his face closed off and impassive, a wall of red glass placed firmly between you. Come to think of it, you hadn’t seen his eyes even once since that day you’d first come back, and you didn’t blame him. You didn’t like feeling vulnerable, either, though that was just a guess when it came to what he might be feeling. 

“It’s the shirts from her apartment, which I think are yours. And the stuffed bear.” You bit your lip and released it slowly, shifting uncomfortably on your feet. “And the… the mug, which Nelson said was yours, too. The one you used at her place. I also put the hoodie in there, the one she had with her while she was traveling. And…” You reached into your pocket, fumbling for a moment. God, you were bad at this, unsure of just how to do this without hurting him any more than was absolutely necessary. It wasn’t a concern you usually dealt with since your goal was almost always the exact opposite, a precaution meant to destroy any threads of connection they held with you. Unfortunately, he wasn’t giving you much to work with, though you didn’t miss his subtle flinch when you drew the key from your pocket. “I thought you might want this, too.”

You cautiously edged forward, daring to breach the ring of radiant heat that surrounded him, the closest you’d come to him in almost a month. He went stiff as you approached, his jaw growing tight as the gap between you both closed. Another step, and his head cocked as if he were listening to your footsteps, or maybe… maybe he was just waiting to find out what you had to give him. But he wasn’t telling you to fuck off or just set your gift aside, which was a good sign. So you hesitantly reached out and brushed your fingers lightly against his bicep, a signal so he knew you were about to pass him something. 

A breath.

He remained absolutely still amidst the sudden, crackling tension in the air as your fingertips skated gently down and around his forearm, stirring all the little hairs, his skin shockingly warm. All you’d intended to do to take his arm and guide it up so you could place the key in his hand, but you quickly found yourself distracted by a ragged scar along the back of his forearm, one your fingers seemingly made their way to on instinct. It was a deep scar, the original cut likely made by some sort of blade, the edges of it rough and uneven from messy stitching. Your curiosity got the better of you, so much so that you missed the way Matt had begun to hold his breath.

“Who fucked up the sutures on that?” You furrowed your brow, your thumb smoothly marking out the jagged line of it. “They did a terrible job. No offense.” 

Matt’s face fell and you only realized too late just who it was that must have patched him up. 

Before you could blink, he’d yanked his arm out of your grip as if your touch had burned him. “Don’t,” he grit out, his chest heaving as he put a few steps distance between you both. “You can—just put your key on the bench.” 

“How did you know—” “Because there’s only one thing left it could be.” 

You nodded weakly, taking a few steps back towards the little bench beside the door. That unfamiliar ache, that sense of wrongness was back, the weight of it settling uneasily in your chest like a stone until you almost wanted to retch. It didn’t help that Matt was just barely holding himself together while you were here. 

Best to say what you’d come to say and leave him be. 

You gently set the key down, and the quiet click of the brass against the wood seemed to echo in the hallway, a graveyard bell tolling with a looming sense of finality. What you were about to tell him would hurt, you knew it would, but maybe one day he’d find comfort in it. This—a sign of what she’d felt—was the real gift you’d truly come to give, the only true token of her you could offer. Your words, when you spoke, were almost as hoarse as his. “I thought you should know I… she wore it. The key. I asked them. She wore your key and she never took it off. Not once. Whatever you both had, she treasured it, and all she wanted was to get back to you. She didn’t leave you by choice, Matt. I hope that… that helps.” 

Of all the things you’d said and done, it was this that finally seemed to break him. His face twisted in a sudden wave of grief, and regret hit you all at once. You quickly took a step towards him, one hand out, though you weren’t sure what you’d do if he reached back—it wasn’t like you knew how to comfort him, and you sure as hell didn’t know if he’d tolerate you holding him again, nor whether he was someone that needed some sort of touch when he was hurting. But before you could take another step he’d flinched away from you, retreating quickly back into the darkness of his apartment, his voice ragged. “Just go. Get out.” 

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, backing away towards the door. “I’m… I’m so sorry.”  

It shouldn’t have hurt as you closed that door one last time. But you cried all the same. 

Somewhere within the apartment came the sound of splintering furniture and a hoarse scream wracked with grief.

“Look, Nelson.” You tiredly adjusted the strap of your duffle bag over your shoulder, reaching up to pinch at the bridge of your nose as if it would stem your growing headache. “I know it’s a day early. But another twenty-four hours isn’t going to make a fucking difference.” 

“I don’t need another day!” he pleaded, his arms spread wide where he’d blocked your front door, ensuring you couldn’t leave your apartment until you’d heard him out. You’d had no idea he even had a key until today and, not for the first time, you cursed Jane Hind’s apparent lack of common sense. You did not give out keys, or at least, you hadn’t before coming here to this ridiculous fucking city. “Just five minutes. That’s all. I’ve got one last thing to try.”

“Maybe I don’t want to try one more thing!” you snapped bitterly, dropping your hand. That anger was a good cover for the way something sharp and prickly had begun to catch in your throat, the incident with Matt still fresh in your mind. “I’ve tried for a month, and it’s gotten me nothing. Fucking-fucking bars and random rooftops and a shitty little duck, goddamn penguins and keys, and none of it did shit! Jane’s gone, ok? She’s dead. And I’m sorry, I know you all cared about her, but I’m done—”

“Have you climbed inside a thread?” 

“...What?” you asked in sudden bewilderment, your rage abruptly faltering in the face of pure confusion. “What the fuck does that even me—”

He let out a whoop, practically dancing on his feet. “Yes! I knew it! I can’t believe no one told you!” 

“Told me what?!” You chucked your bag back onto your couch in sudden exasperation. If this was thread-related, at the very least you could stay long enough to listen. “There’s nothing to climb!”

“Ok, so stick with me.” He rubbed his palms together eagerly, a bright light in his eyes. “Because I’m about to get really metaphysical.”

It took you what felt like hours to climb inside the shimmering honey-colored thread that lay between you and Matt—a thread that sang with his sorrow and your reluctant sympathy. 

It wasn’t right having your soul constricted like this, all of who you were narrowing down into something so small as you squirmed through a barrier that tasted and felt like dirt and earth, chasing after the sound of trickling water. There wasn’t supposed to be anything on the other side. It was an emotional connection, nothing more.

And yet here you were, standing in a place that had no reason to exist.

“Holy shit,” you whispered in amazement, spinning on your heels to examine your surroundings. “Holy shit, he was right.”

Despite the late hour, the air was full of a muted light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once, tinting the world a hazy, eerie green. High up above you roiled thick, sullen black storm clouds, silent flashes of red lightning carving their way between swirls of charred smoke. It wasn’t much light, but it was enough to see by.

And what you saw was heartbreaking. 

You stood in a dry, stony riverbed. The ground beneath you was cracked and brittle where the water had receded, leaving behind nothing but dust and broken branches. The river itself remained though just barely, the thin trickle of flowing water down the center of the riverbed a far cry from whatever immense force had carved its way through the landscape until the banks were a good ten paces from one side to the other. The terrain beyond the river didn’t look much better, wilted, drooping cattails dotted up the bank before giving way to endless forest that stretched farther than your eye could see. Like the cattails and scrub, the pine and fir trees stood withered and brown, casting their empty branches up toward the sky. 

If it had been beautiful here once, whatever had happened to you had destroyed that beauty. 

“Jesus,” you whispered. 

“Can you hear me?” Foggy’s voice sounded distant and far away, tinny like he was talking through a long tunnel. 

“Yeah. Can you hear me?”

“...Ok, if you’re trying to respond, I can’t hear you. But according to Matt, whenever you were here, it felt like memories. So poke around, see what you can find.”

You sighed and started down the riverbed. “Not super helpful, but ok. Let’s give it a shot.” 

The water was the most obvious place to start, and you made your way over to the thin stream that ran raggedly across the parched soil. Much to your fascination, you quickly discovered that what you’d thought was one current was actually two, one layered over the top of the other, each flowing in the opposite direction. The first of those currents hiding on the bottom was fairly calm, steady if a little restless, swirls of pale color that almost felt like curiosity, though how you understood that translation was a mystery. The second current seemed far rougher where it roiled atop the first, its section of the stream cloudy and thick with swirls of black and the red of an open wound. You hovered over the second current for a long moment, working up your courage, before you finally knelt and hesitantly brushed against it with one finger. It was just water. How bad could it be? 

The moment your skin made contact, your chest seized on a sudden swell of agony. Your mouth filled with the taste of grief, with the sound of an empty home, the lack of some familiar scent that meant affection and warmth and softness and safety, the ache of an old wound reopened just when it had started to heal. Alone, always alone, I deserve it, so many gone, he was right, when will I learn? There was no hope for comfort from that pain, no escape from the darkness into tender arms that could hold you just right when it all hurt. All you had to look forward to was more— 

You threw yourself backward, scrambling away from that terrible current as if what you’d felt might rise up and chase after you, snapping its teeth the whole way. You didn’t stop retreating until your back slammed against the dry soil of the riverbank. Only then did you stop, panting, your eyes wide in shock as you cradled your hand against your heaving chest. 

Emotion. It’s emotion.

That was what the water was. Matt’s emotion. Which meant the other current—one now shifting back to yellow despite a momentary surge of twisting, roiling black—was… yours. 

Right. So you could rule the water out. But if that was emotion, where was memory? 

Examining the rest of the river was the most obvious next step now that you’d ruled out the water. Based on what you could see, the original riverbed had been a mix of silt and stones of varying sizes, a firm foundation beneath a once-powerful river. Now, though, the grey, dried-out silt was covered in a strange sea of divots and dips, as if something—a lot of somethings—had been plucked up and removed. You traced one of the indents in the soil curiously, lifting your hand back up to consider the grit as you rubbed it between your fingers. Another glance around revealed the answer. 

The stones. 

There were still plenty of stones remaining in the riverbed, but the divots in the dry silt told you there’d once been far more. If that was what you’d lost, then maybe…  

You rocked up eagerly to your feet, pacing around breathlessly as you searched for a promising stone to start with. Eventually you made your pick, plucking up a stone just small enough to fit in your palm, flat and smooth save for a little groove in it as if someone had run their fingers over it endlessly. Strangely, it smelled like honey and herbs, the surface oddly warm against your hand like the brush of a thumb against your mouth. You waited for a long, impatient moment, and when nothing else happened, you tapped it a few times. 

Still nothing. 

And something inside you… cracked. 

“Fuck!” you screamed, hurling the stone back down the river in a sudden rage. The pain and the loneliness you’d been suppressing for the last month, the last year, the horrible, endless eternity since leaving your family in Los Angeles began to claw its way up your throat, the clouds churning wildly above you in response. A wild rain came next, each droplet sharp and cold and edged like the blade of a knife, bitter and biting as it beat against your skin. You grabbed another stone, one that tasted like shitty beer—Josie’s beer. You threw that rock, too, then another and another, throwing stones that smelled and tasted and felt like your shriek of laughter as he grinned and caught you against his chest, like torn flesh and a needle held by tender hands, like your face nuzzling fearlessly against Matt’s throat as he whispered comfort into your hair and held you close, like synced breathing and hearts and dances between binary stars as you both fell into sleep, fell into safety, fell into one another, phantom sensations that only made the fierce ache in you grow stronger because with every stone you snatched up it became clear that… 

You’d been loved. 

Not your identity.

Not the image you showed to the world. 

Not the walls you’d put up in front of him before he’d found some way past them. 

You. 

And he’d loved you with every part of him. 

You weren’t sure when you started crying, a violent, vicious stream of tears that was just as much a product of rage as grief. Here was someone who’d loved you fully, loved you despite every asterisk and bit of baggage and sharpened edge that came with being a broken hound, with being a former experiment still on the run. But you barely noticed your tears, spitting up at the unforgiving clouds and the howling wind, because you could howl, too, just as violent, just as much a threat as any storm in this place. “I want my fucking life back! I want him back!” 

You hadn’t wanted it before, or maybe you had and you’d just been too afraid to ask for it. But now? Oh, oh, now you were furious, furious and hurting and screaming, because you’d denied yourself connection all these years only to find it in the last place you’d expected. That was what this had been—home, family, love. That had to be why you’d stayed in New York, why you’d risked everything for these people, for Matt. You weren’t an idiot. You’d have run the numbers and the math, made your calculations.

You couldn’t bear to lose this. Not… not again. 

You threw stone after stone, hunting frantically as your fingers bled dry, desperate fury into the air, reddened drops disappearing before they ever hit the ground. The trickle of water in the center of the riverbed had churned itself into a frenzy, but you ignored it. There had to be something here that would trigger a memory, something that would let you remember being loved again, something big enough, important enough, so you grabbed and you grabbed and grabbed and grabbed and grabbed until at last, you found a stone the size of your fist. You snatched it up with a ragged sob, cradling it greedily against your chest as if doing so might let you carry it out of here, because you wanted it, you wanted him, wanted to remember more than anything in the world. 

“Let me have it!” you snarled, snapping your teeth at the howling winds of the storm as if you might catch this place between your jaws and tear it open until you at last found what belonged to you. “Give it back!” 

And with a blink—

He tore one of his bloodied gloves off, his hand shaking as he reached out to you.

You stilled the moment his fingertips brushed tenderly against your cheek, so very gentle, affection layered over blood and earth and hurt. And god, your skin was so terribly dry and cold, the beat of your heart uneven as it struggled to pump blood through your body, but he could feel you react to him, the barest parting of your lips as you dragged in a startled breath. He didn’t want to startle you further or risk you fighting him, so he let his voice drop into a whisper, soft as the brush of a feather.

“It’s me. I’m here.”

‘I heard you,’ he tried to say. ‘I heard you. I’m here.’

And your weakened heart… skipped.

He wasn’t sure if he reached for you or if you reached for him. All he knew was it was the sign he’d been looking for. In a heartbeat, he scooped you up off the floor, stealing you back from that dry, filthy cement and crusted blood that had tried to take you from him. He cradled your cold body against his chest, then, held you there where it was warm and where you were safe. You made the softest little noise, the sound choked and dry, but there was no disguising the heartbreaking relief in it. He pulled you in further, pulled you up until you were curled up in his lap, not an ounce of air left between your bodies, your head laying against his shoulder.

He would never let you touch the floor of this place again.

“D…” you mumbled, not one hint of fear in you despite what he’d just done, the blood on his hands and the burning heat of violence that still lingered in his bones. You wearily slid your head over, inch by inch, until you’d buried your face against the sweat-slick line of his throat, nuzzling in against him with a hoarse sigh that only made him hold you tighter. You inhaled slowly then, heedless of the blood and dirt and sweat that coated his skin, your fingers coming up to hook weakly in the collar of his shirt. “You came.”

And you… smiled.

He buried his face against your hair and let out a shaky breath. As he did, he dug down past blood and dust and dirt, dug and dug until he found the sweet, familiar scent of you, a scent he never wanted to leave him again.

The stone fell from your limp hands, a ringing in your ears you could barely hear beneath the sound of the water nearby, frothing and wild. 

The increased sensory feedback had been bizarre, and there was… there was no reason he should have been covered in so much blood, his body burning as if he’d been fighting before coming to you. But…  

“Hey, you in there?” Foggy called. 

“D.” The letter felt strange, and yet… natural, as you cradled it on your tongue. “D?”

And you knew what came after that letter, shaping the word again in your mind. 

You knew. 

You… remembered. 

“Always,” he’d said. 

“Always,” you whispered, casting your eyes up the riverbed towards another large stone. “Always, D.”

He didn’t know what you were doing or why you’d climbed inside the thread. 

“Always, D.”

All he knew was that it hurt. 

“You’re stuck with me, unfortunately for you.”

He’d thought catching your scent, hearing your laugh, being forced to take back the key he’d given to you had been the worst of it. But no. It was far, far worse having to relive these memories of your time with him over and over and over without pause, his senses filled with you: with your touch, with your scent, with the taste of you on the air. He heard you whisper, laugh, and sigh; felt the brush of your fingers in his hair and your body shaking with laughter when he snatched you up during a game of Devil Hunt and the safety of you as you’d held him so tenderly after his fight with Foggy. All of it was a reminder of what he’d lost, what he’d never get back. 

“Don’t you give up on me, Matt. Ok?”

He was in agony. There was no blocking you out like this, no escaping your memory no matter how much he tried to push back or retreat, until he wound up trapped and spiraling in his kitchen. 

“Kiss me when you come back.”

On and on it went, memories snapping at his heels until all he had left to hide behind was rage. He swept his arm across the counter, glass shattering as he screamed himself hoarse. Eventually he found himself backed up against the wall, sinking down as he hitched out something like an agonized groan, his hands over his ears, his eyes shut tight. “Don’t do this to me, sweetheart, please—”

“Adoringly yours, because I do adore you, you ridiculous man...”

“Leave me alone,” he whispered. “Just leave me alone.”

“...Remember that. if nothing else.” 

In hindsight, it was a really bad idea to give back your key.

“Matt!” you shouted, pounding frantically on his front door. “Matt, let me in! It’s me, I swear, I can-I can—”

Silence. 

And you weren’t willing to wait any longer. This wasn’t something you could explain through the door, out here in the hall where the neighbors could hear. You needed to get inside. You knew he was in there somewhere. 

Red threads never lied.  

You wiped the blood away from your nose and took off for the stairs. It was only one flight up to the roof, and sometimes he left the rooftop door unlocked. Even if it wasn’t unlocked, you’d use the key under the mat. You didn’t remember everything. But you remembered that. And if the key wasn’t there? You’d break that fucking door down.

He sat unmoving in his meditation pose on the floor, the sound of your attempts to get into the apartment distant and far away. Meditation had been the only thing left he could think of that would allow him to escape the pain and the memories of you that had flooded his thoughts. Like this, with his mind and his focus withdrawn until it lay deep within himself, he’d hoped he’d be far enough away from the world that the ghost of you couldn’t reach. 

Yet even deep in meditation, his instincts were set off by the crack! of his rooftop door slamming open.

He was on his feet in a heartbeat, his heart racing as he bared his teeth, his body prepared to face whatever threat had just broken in. The sensations of you, at the very least, had quieted during his meditation, which should have left him enough space for some small margin of peace as he threw himself into a fight. But that peace was nowhere to be found, because you were here again. 

He recoiled from that thought the second it crossed his mind. This wasn’t you, that much had become painfully clear. You’d passed away somewhere far beyond his reach, away from the home, the life you’d lived here. The woman that stood on his landing now was nothing but a ghost, a fading memory and a terrible reminder of what he’d had and lost, what he’d earned by daring to reach for something good. There was no undoing it, no washing away the blood on his hands. If anything, how he felt for you had doomed any hopes of you staying long enough for him to reform that connection with you. He knew how you operated—hell, you’d tried to run on that hot summer night so many months ago after seeing just how much he’d cared, even if you’d ultimately changed your mind. At the time, he’d thought it was Destiny, the hand of God ensuring you remained in the Kitchen where Matt could keep you safe from the Man in the White Coat, here in this place where you both might… might shape something good out of all the broken pieces you’d both been left with. He knew better, now. Even the hand of God couldn’t break the curse Matt placed on those he loved. You would leave, leave like all the others, and he deserved it. 

The only question that remained was why you seemed so, so fucking determined to make him suffer. 

“Matt.” Your voice cracked as you stumbled down the stairs. “Matt, I—”

“Why can’t you just leave me alone, sweetheart?” he grit out, reaching up to fist his hands tightly in his hair. He’d never known you to be unnecessarily cruel, but there was no other explanation. “God, I-I can’t—you can’t keep doing this to me.”

“Matt, just let me—”

“Do you even care how much you’re hurting me?” He hitched out a broken laugh, something bitter and tormented, the sound absent all humor as you made it down the stairs. “All those months, all I wanted was for you to come back. I begged. I prayed to God, over and over again, that he would bring you back to me. And now that you’re gone, you just won’t leave. I can’t get away from you no matter what I do. Do you know what that’s like? To lose someone you love only for their ghost to haunt you every time you turn around?”

A soft intake of breath. 

There it was. Now that he’d said it, you’d leave. There would be nothing more frightening to the You he’d first known than a word like love. 

“I just…” His breath hitched again, something thick building in his throat. It was just another sign of his weakness, the same weakness that had gotten you killed. 

‘I warned you, kid,’ came Stick’s voice, so smug that Matt bared his teeth. ‘I fuckin’ warned you the night I opened up her eye. But you didn’t listen.’

He started to pace wildly, ignoring your voice as he hunted for some opening through which he could escape, flee from Stick’s voice hiding in the corners of his thoughts, from your ghost. With every step his movements grew more frantic, more furious as his rage built like a rising wave: rage at himself, at God, at the monster who’d taken your memories and the possibility of a life for you here with Matt, and at you, too, because you just didn’t get it. “I just want to grieve, and God can’t even give me that much, can he? Is that what this is? Punishment? Revenge? Congratulations. Job well done. You can go.” 

You tilted your head as you watched him pace, the same cock of your head you got when considering your potential routes forward. As far as he was concerned, the only route he’d give was a route out the door.  

“I don’t know why you came back, and at this point, I don’t fucking care,” he told you hotly, nothing but burning smoke and thick venom in each word. “We don’t have a red thread anymore. There’s nothing to keep you here. Leave. Now. I’m not asking.”

Your soft response was a single letter, one that struck directly at the open wound inside his chest. 

“...D.” 

He snatched up an empty beer bottle from the kitchen counter in a sudden rage, turned, and hurled it past you. 

You didn’t so much as flinch as the bottle came within inches of your head. Nor did you react to the distant shattering of glass, the sound of it barely audible over his anguished roar. 

“Leave me alone!”  

And then he froze in sudden horror at what he’d done, his heartbeat almost drowning out the soft sound of your steps. All he’d wanted to do was scare you away, frighten you away so he could break where you couldn’t see, because it had hurt, it had hurt to hear you call him—

Wait. 

You’d… you’d called him…

“My Devil Man, my Saint Matthew,” you whispered, the touch of your hands cool and endlessly gentle as you cupped his face. His skin was wet, damp beneath your thumbs as you swiped them across his cheeks, when had he started crying? You brought his head down until you could lay your forehead against his, the taste of salt hanging in the air. Your voice grew achingly tender, so longed for that he swayed helplessly on his feet, wanting nothing more than to be held like you’d held him so often before when he was hurting. “I’m so sorry, D. I’m so sorry I left you alone, sweetheart.” 

He closed his eyes tight, his breath growing shaky. You couldn’t know that he was two steps away from crumbling in your arms, fractures widening with every breath. He had no energy left to fight your touch, your misplaced mercy, but giving into the lie was another thing entirely. He couldn’t bear to hope again, not when it would crush him if he were wrong. “Foggy told you to… he told you to call me that, didn’t he? To see if you’d remember. But I can’t—you’re going to leave me, you’ll—” “Do you remember what I said before I left? Because I do.” You swiped your thumb gently against his cheek, your uneven breathing skipping and falling into rhythm with his as his hands shakily rose. They hovered hesitantly a few inches away from your face, terrified that you might vanish beneath his hands like a ghost. “I don’t leave my box behind, and I won’t leave you behind, either. I told you that you were stuck with me after Nobu. I meant it. It’s really me. I know you’re tired and hurting, sweetheart, but listen to my heart. What does it say? Truth or lie?”

…Steady. 

Truth.

Could it really be you?  

He held his breath as he dared at last to touch your cheek, stirring the fine hairs as he stroked his way along the familiar shape of your face, one he’d traced so often in his dreams. Your skin was damp with tears just like his, another sliding down to bump against his thumb as your lips quirked up into a brilliant smile. And the moment his trembling fingers passed your lips, you kissed the tip of each with a warm fondness, a mirror of that night you’d held his broken, torn body and he’d kissed your fingers and palm. 

“How much do you… do you remember?” There was a ringing in his ears as the world beneath him seemed to roll beneath him. “Everything?” “Not everything. Some pieces are still missing, with Foggy and Karen and my job, but I-I remember enough. I remember you, and what I had with you.” Your voice grew fierce and fervent then as you drew in a sharp breath, preparing yourself. “I remember you, D. And I remember that I love you. I love you, Matt Murdock, all of you, so, so much. And I will never leave you alone again.” You loved him. 

You loved him. 

The weight of it—being forced to let you leave the city, the ensuing months alone, the agony of the past few weeks thinking he’d lost you entirely, and now this, this, knowing you loved him like he loved you—hit him all at once, and with a sudden groan he started to drop. You caught him in your arms, the two of you sinking to your knees as you held him tight and he wound desperately around you in return. Only then did he start to fall apart in your arms, shaking in your hold, his grief, his hurt, his relief spilling out in choked gasps where you’d tucked his head down against your neck. He fisted his hands in your shirt as you both rocked, and a ragged moan tore free from him, spilling against your skin when you lifted your hands to trail your fingers lovingly through his hair. You knew, you remembered just how to hold him when he was hurting, a balm across every last wound. His shivering, touch-starved body remembered your touch, too, drowning beneath the sudden surge of good, warm, safe, soft after months of nothing but pain, so much so he couldn’t help but gasp out your name. 

“I’ve got you now, D,” you whispered, burying your face against his shoulder until he could feel the heat of your tears against his shirt, too. “I’m here, now. You’re not alone. I’ve got you, Matt.” 

“I thought you were gone.” There was no way for him to truly sync his breathing with yours, not with the way you were both crying, but still his body tried on instinct, tried and failed over and over again. He closed his eyes tighter, burying his face deeper against your throat as he pulled you in even closer, until there wasn’t an inch of space between your body and his, where he could feel every beat of your heart against his skin, as if to make up for the way he’d almost… almost chased you away. “I thought you’d left me and I was alone. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder, and that I didn’t-I didn’t go with you, but I couldn’t—I’m so, so—” 

“Hey, hey, it’s ok.” You kissed shakily at his hair, his shoulder, and whatever other parts of him you could reach, your breath, your tears, your absolution washing over him like rain. “It’s not your fault, D. It’s not your fault sweetheart. None of this was your fault.” 

“But—” “Hey. Listen to me, before you get any further down in that hole.” You lifted his head from your shoulder, cupping his tear-stained face in your hands again. For a moment you both simply breathed with one another, your forehead to his, soaking in the contact, the affection that you’d both dearly missed and needed. “What happened to me outside New York, my memory loss… all of that is not your fault. It never was, D. There are-there are a lot of things we’ll have to deal with in the future, things I need to tell you. Consequences of what we’ve done, and—but this isn’t one of them. Never this. You’re what helped bring me back.” “How? I didn’t…” He let out a breathless, watery little laugh. “I didn’t do anything but try to chase you away.” “Some part of me couldn’t help but be drawn to you. I remembered, deep down, I think.” You gave an amused little huff. “And once Foggy showed me how to get into our thread, all your memories are what brought me back, helped me remember, because I could feel it, how you loved me. That was the key. Speaking of which…” You leaned in to nuzzle up against his cheek, your voice lowering to a whisper. “I think I made you a promise, you ridiculous man. And it’s one I intend to keep.” 

And with one small tip of your head, and a single slow breath… 

“Kiss me when you come back.” 

…your lips brushed against his for the very first time, tender and achingly soft, and so full of love that it would have stolen his breath away if he’d had any left at all. 

It wasn’t the first kiss he’d envisioned months ago just before you left, something triumphant and wild. Nor was it anything like the first kisses he’d imagined before that, the first kiss he’d thought this journey with you might lead to. And God only knew he’d considered kissing you for the first time more than was healthy.

Your first kiss with him was, instead, shaky and gentle, tasting of salt and tears and the fading shades of grief retreating like streamers of night before a welcome sunrise. Slowly, and then more surely, his lips began to move against yours, finally allowing himself to truly taste you for the first time, his eyes slowly falling closed as your fingers ran fondly through his hair, you, it was really you, you remembered. With a quiet moan, he breathed you in deep, calling your grace, your love deep into him until it settled there against his heart, knowing that, no matter what else might come, he would never lose it again, one of his hands rising to tenderly wind around your throat, his other hand finding yours so he could lace his battered fingers tightly with yours.

It wasn’t the first kiss he’d expected, but it felt perfect all the same. 

Because all that was left was him… 

And you. 

[pastaxandria]

The Red Thread: Chapter 161

The Library of Pastaxandria has recorded for its archives: Chapter 161 of The Red Thread.

Ship: Matt Murdock x F!Reader

Chapter Summary:

With it came a sound, one only you seemed to hear. It was a sound you’d never forgotten, one you’d had the misfortune of hearing just once during a terrifying, panicked drive down a rural highway in Texas: a steadily building roar, one you could feel resonating inside your chest; the crackling pop and snap of dry trees and buildings catching light beneath a sudden rising heat and floating embers; the wild gusting of twisting winds heavy with smoke and charred ash that fell like flakes of snow onto cracked streets. The cavalry was coming, and oh, was that cavalry furious. Or: in which 5 muggers have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Wordcount: 5.6k

Warnings for this chapter: blood, canon-typical violence, lil bit of implied gore, scary sexy grr grr feral devil

Read me on AO3 where you can find Matt currently beating the shit out of bad people

[scun-gilli]

Okay I’m literally speechless. @elkaseltzer you started something BIG. You posted Cain today and you mentioned in the tags how you ship him and Gabe. WELL YOU STARTED A MOVEMENT AND IM NOT MAD ABOUT IT.

This is literally stunning???? WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?? IM CONFUSED BUT SO HAPPY ABOUT IT.

LOOK WHAT THE AMAZING @ren-w1shart MADE. ITS SO CUTE I CRIED. IM IN LOVE.

[ariadnes-red-thread]

I'm sorry if this is a repeat! It said something went wrong with my ask when I tried to send it!

Congratulations on 150 followers! That is quite a feat to accomplish and deserves celebrating. Have some confetti!

I have a request for Rex. SFW or NSFW is up to your discretion and if you want to ignore altogether, you can. No worries!

How about a fic with an introverted reader who's more reserved with Rex in terms of affections in public, and not only because of GAR regulations? She might snuggle into his side, hold his hand, hug and kiss when no one's looking, but that's it. Maybe she starts feeling a little insecure over how Rex might feel about it (probably because she sees other girls hanging all over his men at 79's/maybe someone tried to flirt with Rex because it's not obvious that they're together) and they have a heart-to-heart.

Like I said, you can ignore this if you want. It's just that I've read quite a few fics with readers who are much more extroverted and forward with Rex in the PDA department. Haven't read many with us more introverted type girls. Just because we're a little stiff in public doesn't mean we don't get wild for our special someone behind closed doors.

Hi Nonnie!! Thank you so much for asking this, and thank you for celebrating with me! Honestly, I loved this ask, and I completely got carried away. I accidentally wrote 1500 words and I probably could have easily written another 1000 more if I had time. I also haven't written for Rex in ages (a crime!), and I missed it! This was very personal, so thank you for trusting me with this request. I hope I did it justice!

Pairing: Rex x F!Reader

Warnings: Feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy, Jealousy, Sexual themes/implied sex

You and Rex have been dating for a few months now, and it’s been - well - a dream. He was everything you had ever hoped for and more in a partner. Rex was kind, he was caring, he was unbelievably handsome, and he was charming in his own sweet and occasionally awkward way. Even with your busy schedules, he always made time for you with date nights out on Coruscant and surprise flowers while he was away. You thought that the GAR would be more concerned about one of their high-ranking clone officers having a relationship with a civilian mechanic, but you quickly learned that there weren’t any rules against it. If anything, Anakin and Ahsoka had been almost helpful - almost. Rex told you later that the Jedi had teased him so badly about his obvious crush that Obi-wan finally begged him to ask you out so it would stop distracting “those two impossible children”.

The only thing that worried you about your relationship had almost nothing to do with Rex. If anything, it was your problem. You were more introverted. You always have been.  You had your close friends and didn’t mind getting to know new people if the situation was right, but you rarely put yourself out there, except for that one time that Fives forced you to do karaoke with him, and you swore that your cheeks burned red with embarrassment for a week. Up until now, you’d never considered it a fault. Being introverted made you careful, thoughtful, and caring, all traits you loved about yourself. And, of course, Rex had never made you feel anything less than special, but you were starting to worry if you made him feel special enough. Your reserved nature meant you had trouble expressing your feelings for him, especially in public. When you were on duty, the two of you hovered near each other but always kept it professional. Even when you were able to relax, like out at 79’s with the other members of the 501st or on brunch dates to Dex’s, you would steal a kiss in a quiet moment, lean against him in the booth, or hold his hand under the table, but that was the extent. Sometimes, you would watch him laughing along with his brothers, whose partners sat on their laps and hung around their necks, and you wondered if it was enough - if you were enough.

Tonight was one of those nights. Despite the loud music of 79’s, Rex’s hand occasionally grazing your knee, and the antics of Torrent Company, you couldn’t shake this feeling of being too shy. And now, as if you weren’t already feeling insecure, you had a front-row seat to the cute waitress flirting with Rex. You couldn’t fault her. How could Rex not catch her eye? With his close-cropped blonde curls, the tight compression shirt that covered his top half, his cool smile, and his kind manners, Rex stood out, even in a bar full of clones. She had spotted him the moment she came to wait on your table. And the beautiful young woman had made her intentions clear, been dropping hints all night about being single while her lingering eye contact progressed to gentle touches of his shoulder. Now your stomach twisted as she ran her hand along his arm, asking if he needed another drink. You wished you were bold enough to kiss him right in front of her, but even as badly as you wanted to, you knew you couldn’t. Instead, you looked away.

“I’m all set.” Rex gave a nod to the beautiful woman before he leaned back away from her. 

Under the table, his hand found yours and gave you a small squeeze. He nodded to Jesse, who quickly jumped in and began chatting with the waitress.

Later that night, you couldn’t shake the image. Even as Rex wrapped himself around you in bed, his breath hot on your neck and his hands on your hips, you couldn’t close your eyes without seeing how her hand grazed him. 

“Rex,” You whispered his name into the darkness.

“Hmm.” The groggy syllable was quickly followed by a kiss to the back of your neck as if he had been drifting and just remembered where he was. 

“Rex, can I ask you a question?”

“Course.” The reply came quickly. Rex was awake now.

“Does it bother you I’m not…I’m not more extroverted?”

The question came out in a tumbling exhale. As you took another breath, you held it and chewed on your lip while you waited for a response. Behind you, the mattress shifted and Rex coughed as he began to stutter.

“I’m… uh… you’re going to have to give me more than that, mesh’la.” 

You could hear him running his hand along the back of his head, and your heart panged at the nervous tic. You loved him, truly and deeply.

“It’s just… that waitress at 79’s was really flirty tonight, and I’m not mad. I don’t blame her. Like, look at you. You deserve to be flirted with and doted on and all that PDA. I wish I could do that, but it’s just not me, and you… you deserve more.” You stumbled over the words. They felt heavy and tilted as you tried to form them, but you knew you had to get them out. Rex deserved more, and he should understand that.

“Is that what you think, mesh’la?” Rex’s arms found you as he sank in close behind you once again, wrapping around your waist and pulling you tight against him. “That you’re not enough for me?”

“You deserve more.” The floodgates were open, and you couldn’t hold back anymore. “You’re incredible, Rex. You deserve someone who shows you in all the ways, someone who’s brave enough for public displays of affection, and that’s not me. I wish I could, but I’m never going to be the girl that’s sitting on your lap at 79’s or making out with you in a dark corner.”

“Thank the Maker.” Rex snorted into your shoulder. “Far too much risk of running into Fives or Jesse there.” 

“I’m serious, Rex.”

“I am too.”

You sighed. He didn’t get it. 

“Hey,” Rex reached and turned on your bedside light. “Look at me, mesh’la.”

You turned to face the man you loved. He laid his arm out so you could tuck your head in his elbow. The dim light caught his deep brown eyes, and the marbled flecks twinkled as Rex stared at you. His look was serious, but a soft smile settled across his face as he studied your features.

“I… I know what I deserve.” Rex chose his words carefully. “And I know what I want. And I’ve never wanted anyone more than I want you. I love our moments. I love that we can check in with each other over a glance and that when you squeeze my hand, you’re saying I love you. I don’t want big displays. I want you. Don’t I deserve what I want?”

“Yes,” You glanced down at the crumpled covers between you. 

It was true. You also loved how your eyes always found his, even in a crowded room. You loved your own special language of unspoken words and connections. The doubt that had gnawed at you from the inside out began to abate. You’d never met anyone more clear-headed than Rex, and no one deserved what they wanted more than Rex. Time and time again, he always made it clear that what he wanted was you.

“Well then,” He placed the knuckle of his index finger under your chin and slowly tilted your head back up towards him. “What’s the problem then?”

“I guess there’s none.” You gently shrugged. 

“That’s what I thought.”

His hand moved from below your chin and unfurled itself as he clasped your cheek. You leaned into his palm, savoring its heat. Gently, he guided your face up to meet his.

Rex’s lips found yours softly at first, meeting your kiss at the same time you were washed over with a grateful feeling for his love. You had found someone who understood you and saw you for all that you were. Someone as incredible as Rex. The kiss deepened as his hands fell to your hips. You met him as that grateful feeling turned into a breathless need.

“You have to know how much I want you.” He rasped as he dug his fingers into your skin.

“I do, Rex.” You pecked his lips one more time before you pulled away. 

With a hand on his shoulder, you gently pushed on Rex’s broad chest until he rolled onto his back. You sat up and swung your leg over to straddle him, grinding against him as you moved. You could feel him start to harden against you. Rex’s eyes flashed as his hands found your hips again, pulling you even tighter as he instinctively searched for friction. You leaned down to whisper in his ear.

“Now, let me show you how much I want you.”

[wonderlandmind4]

Omg I think it finally happened. I got word limit on a comment on @pastafossa new TRT chapter! 😂😂

I DIDNT THINK IT WAS POSSIBLE WHAT THE FUCK 😂

I’m sure I left longer comments than this!