#the suicide squad fine if you can stomach all the dead bodies. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

gellavonhamster · 3 years ago

Text

cold weapons

Suicide Squad (2016) || Captain Boomerang/Katana || post-canon

ao3 link eng || this was first written and published on ao3 in Russian in 2017 but I didn't attempt to translate it into English back then.

“So, what do you think of them?” Colonel Flag asks.

Tatsu puts the folder containing the rap sheet of Waylon Jones, better known as Killer Croc, on top of three other folders.

“They’re complicated,” she replies after giving it some thought.

The materials in these folders could have formed her first impression about the members of Task Force X – or, as Lawton has aptly put it, the Suicide Squad. Could have, but did not, because they were given their first task earlier than expected. Which is why she doesn’t say “villains” or “scoundrels” or “worst team imaginable” – her first impression of them was formed in combat, and then in an empty bar in Midway City where they all drank together thinking it may be the last drink in their lives. She remembers all of this and says ‘complicated’.

“Very tactful of you,” the colonel chuckles. Then again, what kind of colonel is he now – an unwashed shirt, black circles under the eyes. Just another guy struggling with a deluge of work, a hard-hearted boss, and a troubled relationship with his girlfriend. “But yeah, they definitely aren’t simple,” continues Rick Flag, one of her few friends in the country that will never become her home, and Tatsu cannot suppress a tired smile.

“You like them.”

“They’re… tolerable,” Rick admits, and takes another sip of coffee. Lately he seems to be living only on coffee and whiskey and the verb “must” and (so Tatsu supposes, although they don’t talk about that) the hope that June Moone, who still hasn’t fully recovered from all the horrors she’s been through, will be all right – and will stop isolating herself and avoiding him. These means for not letting yourself just fall down and never get up are far from being reliable, but Tatsu herself lives mostly on revenge and duty and, for that matter, whiskey as well, to a certain degree, so it’s not for her to judge. “Most of them, at least. All of them minus the Australian.”

“At least he’s a good fighter,” Tatsu points out. This is the only good thing she can say about Captain Boomerang with full confidence.

“He’s not cut out for teamwork.”

“When we were fighting the Enchantress, it didn’t look to me like that.”

She does not put much meaning into these words. It’s just that at some point Captain Boomerang saved her, and she saved him – and good thing they’re even, because the last thing she needs is to owe a favour to someone so incompatible with the very concept of duty. She could have said much about the man who tried to escape at the very beginning of the mission and got a teammate killed (and for some reason stood up for El Diablo when Harley Quinn lashed out at him at the bar, and for some reason came back before the battle after trying to desert), but the only thing she’s sure of is that he’s a fine weapon; she can confirm that, being a weapon herself. At the end of the day, that is all that’s required from him.

At the end of the day, that is all that’s required from her, too.

***

It is possible that what she said about Digger Harkness sticks in Rick’s memory, because when the need to comb the area arises during the next mission, he sends the two of them to search through the same building.

“If he gets up to something, do whatever you want to him. No one’s gonna weep for him,” he flings off. This is in the heat of the moment, of course – Boomerang almost got into a fight with Killer Croc on the helicopter over some nonsense. Or rather, it was Croc that almost got into a fight with Boomerang after the latter provoked him. Complicated.

“You heard that, darl?” Boomerang addresses her with a smile so wide as if he hasn’t heard the last remark. “I’m all yours.”

Tatsu looks the other way and pointedly takes her sword out of its sheath – not completely, just a little. No further comments follow, and they part company – Deadshot with Croc, Flag with his team of spec ops, Tatsu with Boomerang – and go on a recce.

In the basement, they discover something that looks like a laboratory – if a place so far from being sanitary may even be called one. All their hopes to move without making a sound crumble as soon as they enter the room: the floor is covered with broken glass. Those who ran the place must have escaped in haste and couldn’t take the entire stock of the serum with them, so they opted to destroy most of it. Tatsu’s attention is immediately drawn to the object on the table in the middle of the room – a metal container with tubes going from it to several smaller vessels. She heads straight for the table, shards crunching underfoot. Boomerang follows her, apparently kicking the largest shards on purpose so that they fly in all directions.

“Looks like a hooch still,” he comments, having come closer, and gives a whistle. “Whoa, fuck, is that blood?”

Compared to the first task of their squad, this one looks almost effortless. Two gangs, the members of one of which possess the formula of the serum that grants superpowers to those who take it. A gun battle, collateral damage, the entire district on lockdown. If a few people weren’t noticed literally floating through the sky, the police would have been handling this. But this is an emergency, which is why they’re here, and the flying gangsters aren’t flying anymore, for Lawton is an exceptionally good shot.

As it turns out, the serum that sparked the conflict is based on metahuman blood – hardly donated voluntarily.

“I’ll contact Colonel Flag,” says Tatsu, eyes locked on the bloodied tubes, and then someone grabs her by the neck.

For the first time in her life, she really has to fight blindly – because her enemy is invisible.

Later, when the dead bodies gradually become visible on the floor like an eerie animated movie, it turns out there were four of them. Before that, Tatsu manages to lose her sword, recapture it, almost choke when an invisible hand squeezes her neck, slash one of the attackers in half, and plunge the blade into another’s stomach. Boomerang takes care of the other two, knocking over the container in the process.

Tatsu is listening to the silence that came after the fight, wondering if any other invisible foes are lurking around the corner, when she feels that something is wrong. Something is wrong with her – she just can't figure out what. Sometimes it happens that one feels unwell but cannot determine what exactly the problem is – she is experiencing something similar now. Until she realizes: the mask. Until she looks up and makes eye contact with Captain Boomerang, who is staring at her and grinning.

“You lost anything, doll?” Harkness inquires innocently, with an emphasis on the last word, and his smile grows even wider and cockier.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The invisible man she fought hand to hand tore off her mask, and she didn’t even notice. But her partner, blast him, did – and picked it up.

“Give it back,” Tatsu demands, hand outstretched. She feels naked. In combat, during the mission, she is Katana, a single whole with her sword. A cold weapon. No one needs to see her face. Truly, if she was wearing only the mask and nothing else, she would have felt less exposed – all right, this is an overstatement, and she doesn’t even want to imagine such a situation. Meanwhile, Boomerang is in no hurry to return the mask.

“What did ya call me when that fucker was about to stab me?” he asks. Tatsu clenches the sword hilt. There is no telling how many enemies drunk on the magic serum are hiding in this house, and he’s dawdling. “You said…”

Damn it, what did she say? She saw one of the invisibles creeping up on him while he was fighting another – a bloodstain was floating through the air. She shouted…

“I said ‘George’”. Isn’t your name George Harkness?”

“You bet it is. It’s just weird. Most people don’t call me George, y’know.”

“How do they call you then?”

“Digger. Boomerang. Boomer. That Prick. All sorts of things, but never George. But you,” he winks, “can call me whatever ya want. I liked the way you say my name.”

“Give. Me. The mask.”

“And the magic word?”

“I will chop your hand off,” as a proof of her intentions, she puts the blade against his extended hand that is holding her mask. In fact, she would face no consequences for doing so. No one’s gonna weep for him.

Harkness makes a helpless gesture and hands her the mask.

“Can’t say no to you, luv.”

The mask helps her conceal her identity, but what is more important is that it helps her conceal needless emotions. Tatsu really hopes that her facial expression isn’t giving away that she’s ill at ease now. This is a weakness; weaknesses are not to be demonstrated. She feels deeply relieved when she puts the mask back on.

“Let’s get out of here,” she commands, turns around, and heads for the exit. Harkness trails behind.

“It ain’t fair, by the way. You know my real name, but I don’t know yours,” he muses. “Care to introduce yourself, eh?”

He asks the same question at least three times more before they return to Belle Reve, and each time she ignores him.

***

A week later, he still doesn’t know her name – but he learns something else.

They do away with the last members of the recent gang on the outskirts of the city. Both wretches have overused the unfortunate serum, in keeping with the best traditions of the clichéd movies about superheroes and supervillains that Hollywood keeps producing for some reason, even though it is more and more often possible to see nearly the same thing on the news. As a result, one of them got puffed up almost to the size of the creature that Superman died fighting, and the other couldn’t control the flames bursting from his mouth. He burned half of the shopping centre with customers, retail workers, and guards. With teenagers in the bowling alley on the second floor and children in the playroom on the first.

Santana… wouldn’t have approved.

Both problems eliminated, they leave: the firefighters and the cops will take it from here. Flag’s spec ops stay behind, because officially it is their victory; the general public shouldn’t know about the existence of Task Force X. Through backyards, they retreat in the direction of the abandoned construction site on the other side of the street; a car has been sent to pick them up there.

There is a workers’ trailer still standing by the construction pit. The door is not locked, and Rick, Deadshot, Croc, and Boomerang go inside. Jones’s arm is broken: his inhuman strength notwithstanding, he still was no match for his enemy – not the fire-breather, but the other one. Tatsu leaves them to figure out how to make a temporary sling, and wanders away. Not far from the trailer, a piece of tarpaulin stretched over the fence has come off, and she can see the building across the street. Tatsu sits down on the ground, puts her arms around her knees, and stares at the dandelions growing by the fence.

In her head, flames are raging.

She doesn’t look up, neither when she hears the footsteps approaching, nor when Harkness – and it is him, no one else in the Squad reeks of the mixture of booze and cologne like that – sits down next to her and cracks open a can of beer.

“You want some?” he nudges her. What extraordinary generosity. It is, however, perfectly possible that if she says yes, he’ll reply along the lines of “Well, then go and buy yourself some.”

“No,” Tatsu replies without looking and, after a short pause, adds, “Thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

With a sigh, she accepts the can from his hands, and takes a sip.

“This is disgusting,” she whispers, and takes another.

Harkness just snorts and opens another one. For a little while, they sit side by side in silence, drinking each from their own can, and study the wall opposite through the mesh of the fence – like out of a prison window. Old advertisements that are half torn off, graffiti, a writing proclaiming that life fucks us all – plenty of things to stare at to avoid looking the person next to you in the eye.

“So what the hell happened to ya?” Boomerang asks, and suddenly she could do with some serum for invisibility or, better yet, disappearing completely. Naturally, it is a fleeting impulse; she has no right to disappear. She has obligations – towards Flag, towards Waller. Towards herself.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You zoned out, Flag shouted himself hoarse before you heard him. Like you were someplace else. Didn’t ya?”

Why do you need to know? Tatsu thinks. If she almost rushed headlong into the fire, it’s her own business. If it only seemed to her that someone was there, it’s her own business. If she’s going to see things that aren’t there for the rest of her life, it’s her own business. He shouldn't have spoken. There is something comforting about being silent together.

“Nah, you don’t have to say if you don’t wanna,” Boomerang assents, and takes another pull on his can. “I just thought that you, well. Might wanna talk to someone.”

And they fall silent again. Yet now Tatsu feels awkward, which makes her angry at herself. She’s not obliged to pour out her heart to anyone who shows something that looks like care.

This silence doesn’t make it any easier.

“I have… bad memories,” she finally says. Now it won’t be as awkward: she answered his question. It won’t be, right? “About a fire”.

Harkness nods, looking at her attentively.

“Someone you knew died, aye?”

“My children,” she hears herself say, and wishes to disappear again.

“Fuck,” Boomerang says, embarrassed, and – unbelievable – looks like he actually feels bad about starting this conversation. “I’m sorry, I… well, uh, I had no idea.”

“It’s okay,” Tatsu says mechanically. Nothing is okay: she can still see Yuki’s tear-stained face, still hear Reiko’s voice, she is still watching the flames run up the curtains that she and Maseo picked together, she is still breathing in the smoke and still cannot believe she deserves a gulp of fresh air. She should have saved them. All of them.

Boomerang looks at her incredulously but doesn’t say anything, and bit by bit, the silence that she doesn’t want to run from returns – the kind of silence in which one is not alone.

Then there are footsteps again, and Flag approaches them.

“There you are,” he says with relief as soon as he sees her. Rick does not let himself overstep the limits of formality – they’re on a mission, after all – but he has obviously been worried. At the sight of Harkness, he frowns warily. “You! Quit getting on her nerves.”

“Who’s gettin’ on her nerves, Colonel? I was just tryin’ to help,” Harkness protests. It appears Rick’s words have wounded him a little.

“He was,” Tatsu says. “It’s all under control, Colonel Flag.”

Flag shifts his gaze to her and then to Boomerang again, and nods.

“Okay. In any case… follow me. We’re leaving.”

Tatsu gives her unfinished beer to Boomerang.

“Don’t talk about this to anyone,” she tells him. This might be an order or a request; she doesn’t really know.

He nods, and she thinks absentmindedly: who would have thought this man knows how to make a solemn face.

“Thank you,” she says again, hoping that he understands that this is not just about the beer or his promise to keep his mouth shut.

***

After a few days, Tatsu comes to visit him. In prison.

Actually, she comes to visit all of them, of course. Not more than fifteen minutes alone with each of them – Waller wouldn’t allow more. This request seems to have surprised her, but Tatsu is certain that Waller is already picturing the new threads she can use to manipulate her special operations puppets. So it is possible that one day this decision will blow up in Tatsu’s face – or in the faces of all of them. But she cannot shake off the feeling that she must do this – so that someone except Rick, who is already dealing with a lot these days, would notice in time if the inmates are treated with undeserved cruelty. So that she knows what’s on their minds, because it is safer to fight side by side with the people whose line of thought she can understand at least roughly. So that there is some kind of variety in their lives between the missions.

This is why she visits all three of them. Killer Croc, who looks like he’s not surprised to see her in the slightest and doesn’t really seems to care that she came, but doesn’t have any issue with that either. Deadshot, who looks like he is surprised, but doesn’t seem to mind answering her questions when she notices a stack of letters in the corner and asks him how his daughter is doing. And Captain Boomerang, who, when she enters his cell, looks like he can’t figure out if he’s dreaming.

“Katana?” he frowns perplexedly. He’s stripped to his waist, so she can see a couple of fresh scars he brought back from the last mission, and he’s got a black eye – when Tatsu saw him last, he had not. Must have quarrelled with the guards again. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.”

For a moment he seems not to understand what she just said. Then he breaks into a smile – or rather a grin, wide and pleased. Very pleased.

“Aha! Knew it would end up like this,” he pronounces in triumph.

“Like this?”

“You,” he looks like he’s just proven a theorem of immense complexity, “missed me.”

“I haven’t missed you, Captain.”

A very, very pleased grin.

“And still you’re here.”

“I visited Deadshot and Killer Croc earlier,” Tatsu says, and sees his facial expression change instantly. Not for long: the grin is quick to return, and she wouldn’t be able to tell right away that he’s disappointed.

“Did ya now? And how are our fellas doing? Better than me, I reckon?”

“So it would seem. Did you fight the guards?”

“Why do you care, gorgeous?”

Indeed, why does she? Most likely, he picked a fight himself – and got his just deserts.

“Make up your mind,” Tatsu says, “if you think that I missed you or that I don’t care.”

Harkness chuckles and really seems to ponder over this for a while.

“Beats me,” he concludes at last. “Care to throw some light on it?”

No, Tatsu thinks, I don’t get it myself and I’m not sure I want to.

Instead of answering, she comes closer to him – so close that she can smell his sweat – and studies his face. She has to look up to be able to do that, which must look comical. Then again, he’s hardly stupid enough to laugh at her height or anything else about her, especially when she’s armed and he is not.

“You lost a tooth. What happened?”

“Didn’t get along with one of the Wall’s watchdogs.”

“You could have tried not to look for trouble for a change,” all of a sudden, Tatsu realizes that she’s mad. Really mad at him. They might get dragged to another mission this instant; whether they like it or not, they have to be in good enough shape to protect the society that the most of them have to atone before at least partially. They shouldn’t spend their energy and health on nonsense. Black eyes and knocked-out teeth are nothing, but it mustn’t come to any of them being out of action when all of them are needed. All their powers, all their skills. All the anger they should rather aim at something other than the people who can just press a certain button at any point – and dispose of the wilful weapon.

Boomerang bares his teeth – not like Croc, of course, but still threateningly. He looks dangerous now – big, sturdy, more than a head taller than her. But he still isn’t more dangerous than her – and both of them are aware of that.

“And they could have tried,” he speaks through his teeth, “not to talk shit about my mother for a change. They wanna talk shit about me, they can knock themselves out. I’ve heard enough ‘bout myself, I don’t give a flying fuck about what else they gonna say. But they’d better leave my mother out of it.”

So that’s what it is. They have found a quick and easy way to infuriate the man who has “MUM” tattooed on his chest. In uneven letters, like a child's handwriting. Tatsu noticed that tattoo as soon as she came in but didn’t look too closely at it. Now she feels like she has the right to look, to let her gaze slip lower, at the ridiculous writing that heaves with each furious breath of his, and then to avert her eyes at once.

“They have power, and you have nothing,” she says. “Do you enjoy being their plaything?”

“Oh, so I’m a plaything, darl? And do I have much choice who to be now? In these four walls, and,” Boomerang points at his neck, at the place where a bomb is implanted under his skin, “with this crap in my neck?”

Tatsu looks up again, right him in the eye.

“You already know who you are,” she tells him. “You’re a weapon. Broken weapons get discarded. And you’re letting them break you.”

He stays silent, just looks at her in an odd manner, as if she’s speaking another language but he has a vague understanding of what she’s saying and doesn’t like what he just heard – because it is the truth.

Tatsu still doesn’t understand why she cares, and with each passing minute she has less and less desire to learn why.

“Also,” she continues, “if you call me ‘darl’ or ‘gorgeous’ one more time, you’re going to regret opening your mouth.”

“Yeah? And how should I call ya?”

“Katana.”

“What, and that’s all? Nah, we might be weapons,” and she probably ought to remind him that there is no ‘we’, but in this particular case he’s right. Perhaps that is why Tatsu feels drawn to all of them: they’re cut from the same cloth, “but we’re alive as well. So far. Seriously, what’s yer real name? You know mine.”

“I should not disclose that.”

“Oh, come on. Listen,” he breaks into a pleased grin again. Another theorem proven. “How about a deal? You tell me yer name, and I will try to keep my temper if anyone else decides to stir me up. What do ya think?”

“As if you’re going to keep your word.”

Boomerang makes a show of putting his hand over his heart.

“For you, ma’am… anything.”

For you. All at once, she recalls Rick’s words: do whatever you want to him. How many minutes of the visit she has already spent on this predictably fruitless conversation?

“My name is Tatsu Yamashiro,” she says, tired, and then he smiles – not the way he did before, but in a calmer and more sincere manner. Gratefully.

“George Harkness,” he offers her his hand with an earnest air. “Nice to meet ya.”

Tatsu hesitantly offers him hers. Her hand looks very small and fragile against his huge paw, and he must be thinking the same because the handshake comes out very careful. He could easily break her wrist. She could easily kill him with one hand afterwards. But he holds her hand gently in his warm, pleasantly calloused palm, and Tatsu hastens to take her hand away, because this is a mistake of an even worse kind than the time he saw her without the mask.

“So you promise not to fights the guards.”

“I promise to try,” Harkness assures, but he’s keeping one hand behind his back.

“Don’t cross your fingers,” Tatsu says sternly. Real mature.

With a sigh, Boomerang repeats his promise, this time holding his hands within her view.

“But I ain’t promisin’ not to call you gorgeous,” he declares in the end.

“You know my name now.”

“But you’re still gorgeous.”

“Time’s up!” shouts the guard outside the door, and Tatsu cannot help feeling relieved that she has to go. She doesn’t regret visiting him, but all of this is too strange and awkward, and both of them might be weapons, but her position is different from his, and it is better not to forget that.

“Can I do anything for you?” she asks him on parting.

“Well,” Boomerang smirks. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“With something I would actually agree to do?”

“Come again. Will ya?” This time he isn’t flirting; this time she can feel his insecurity, even shyness. As if he doesn’t like to admit to himself that what she answers is really important to him.

“I’ll try,” she says cautiously. She’s not going to make any promises: she asked Waller about one time only. She doubts if she’ll be allowed to visit them again – to visit him again.

“Try,” Harkness repeats, as if weighing the word on his tongue. “This means no.”

“This means I’ll try,” Tatsu says firmly.

And she comes again in a week. And the week after next. And a week after that.

***

“Why didn’t you walk away in Midway City?” Tatsu asks him once. “When Rick broke the control panel. You left then; why did you return?”

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the time Captain Boomerang dared to smart off Amanda Waller. Several successful missions, slightly more respectful attitude on his part – and his cell already bears a passing resemblance to a place for living, even if for living quite miserably. Now there is even a table, and a chair that she gets to sit on as guest privilege. Harkness is sitting on the floor opposite her. The question seems to catch him unawares, but only for a moment.

“Huh? Why did I return? Gotta live up to my name, that’s why. Have you ever thrown a boomerang, luv?”

I’m going to throw you somewhere one day, Tatsu thinks, yet without much irritation.

“And jokes aside?”

Boomerang attempts to feign an offended sigh.

“How do ya think? Plenty of options, all right. You gonna try to guess which one?”

Tatsu frowns.

“Is this a psychoanalysis session? Were you bitten by Harley Quinn?”

“Nah, Blondie didn’t bite me, I would’ve remembered. So don’t be jealous,” his voice gets playful again, and Tatsu stifles the urge to roll her eyes. “Lookie here… suppose I suddenly realized that I can’t leave you guys! ‘Cause you’re my mates. One for all, and so on. Don’t believe me?”

“You said something about plenty of options. What are the rest of them?”

He scratches his chin thoughtfully.

“We-e-ell… the second, ‘course, is that I wanted to save the world. Not that the world smiles upon me every bloody day, but I still wanna live! And for everyone an’ their mother to know that the bastards like us can also be heroes. Don’t you like being one of the good guys, eh, Tatsu?”

“I’m not ‘one of the good guys’”, Tatsu protests. “And it’s not me that we’re talking about. Any other options?”

“There was no point in leaving. That was still gonna be the end of the world, aye? So I’d rather meet it in battle and in good company than on the run. All the same it’ll be the end. There you go.”

He stops talking, and in the silence that falls Tatsu can hear the footsteps of the guards in the corridor. Once again she wonders what the duty attendants that monitor everything through the surveillance cameras think of their conversations. They must make for the strangest and most pointless reality show ever.

“The third one,” she says.

Boomerang looks a bit disappointed.

“Why?”

“Not the first one, because none of us meant anything to you then. You had just met us. And it didn’t seem like you were upset about letting Slipknot down,” Tatsu explains. She doesn’t intend to offend him – she’s just saying the truth. Once, he claimed it himself that they understand each other – here’s some understanding, he’s welcome. “Not the second one either, because you’re not stupid – no, stop smiling. You never believed that if people like us stop the Enchantress, someone would learn about that. Only the third option remains.”

Harkness nods slowly.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and his eyes turn pensive, abstracted, as if he is there again, in the night city frozen in anticipation of the apocalypse. As if he sees himself – and makes a choice once again. “And that’s what happened in the end, didn’t it?”

“So the third option, then?”

“So it is.”

But something in his face makes Tatsu think that he was hoping for a different answer.

***

Time flies; weeks and months go by. Tatsu spends them fighting, spilling someone else’s blood, occasionally drinking with Flag at a bar or in his apartment – a bachelor’s home again; reading books – most of the plots seem too naïve and unimaginative compared to what goes on in her life, and that is even for the best, and visiting the members of the Suicide Squad in Belle Reve. Some people go clubbing Friday evenings, and she goes to prison Friday afternoons.

“Don’t get attached to them,” Rick scolds her.

“That is rich coming from you,” Tatsu replies, and he has enough self-awareness not to argue. Lest he gets offended, she chooses not to tell him that sometimes she and Lawton talk a little about him good-naturedly behind his back.

During one of her visits, Harkness raises a topic she has totally forgotten about.

“Hey, come to think of it, we never had that drink,” he points out. Tatsu doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, and it must be written all over her face, because he continues. “Remember I asked you out for a drink? In Midway City, before we fought the witch.”

Tatsu has to make an effort to remember: indeed, he said something of the sort, but it never occurred to her to take those words seriously.

“We had a drink,” she counters. “When… when you shared your beer with me.”

He shakes his head, dissatisfied.

“At the construction site? That’s bollocks. I’m talking a proper bar… nah, a restaurant! With crystal glasses an’ candles an’ shit… Like normal people.”

“Candles,” Tatsu mumbles. She tries to imagine the two of them at the table at a restaurant; the picture turns out pretty absurd. On the other hand, a lot of what has happened in her life during the past few years can be deemed absurd.

“Yeah. Candles,” echoes Harkness, and continues with a crooked smile, “well, that’s me jokin’ around. In the near future,” he gestures in the direction of the small barred window of his cell, “I won’t be able to take you even to a fucking McDonald’s.”

They don’t talk about the hypothetical dinners at a restaurant anymore, but the absurd picture stays with Tatsu, who still feels somehow indebted to Boomerang – for no reason, as she keeps telling herself – for that conversation at the construction site. She doesn’t like to feel the weight of unpaid debts on her shoulders – yes, that’s what it is about.

One day, she finds a way to pay that debt back.

***

She waits for him in the car outside the prison gate. She hears him first; she cannot make out what exactly he is yelling at the guards, but that surely isn’t ‘good evening’. Then the door of the jeep is open, and someone must have kicked him in the rear because he literally falls into the car. Tatsu shrinks back on instinct.

Then Harkness looks up – and notices her.

“Katana?.. Hey, what the hell’s going on? They didn’t let me take the boomerangs, didn’t let me take anything…”

“Close the door,” Tatsu tells him, and when he, still confused, obeys, tells the driver, “Let’s go.”

The car pulls away.

“I still don’t get what’s happening,” Harkness reminds her. “Sure, I’m happy to see ya, but… you weren’t ordered to take me to the woods and finish me off under the radar, huh?”

“If Waller wanted to get rid of you, she would have had you killed in your own cell, and that’s all.”

“Wow, thanks for honesty. So where are we going?”

“To a restaurant,” Tatsu says, and turns away. Yet again it crosses her mind that it is a terrible idea.

“A restaurant?” Harkness drawls quizzically.

“As far as I recall, you said that the beer at the construction site is ‘bollocks’.”

She should turn back to him, of course. The problem is that Tatsu is ninety-nine per cent sure that if she meets his eye now, she will blush. And she is by no means going to give him any sign that might be interpreted as taking an interest… of a certain kind. She has already blundered more than a few times.

Therefore she stubbornly keeps looking out of the window. Then again, she doesn’t even need to look to picture how his facial expression is changing now; she’s seen this rakish grin enough times.

“Holy cow. Tatsu, are you serious? We’re really just going to a restaurant? We’re getting outta this shithole where they only give us porridge with rat crap to gorge ourselves on lobsters and drink wine? Oh, fuck me sideways,” in the end, she turns to him and sees him throw back his head and burst into laughter, narrowing his eyes happily. “I’ll be damned! Am I dreaming? I must be dreaming. Pinch me.”

“I can assure you you’re not,” Tatsu says, and realizes that she is also starting to smile despite herself. She has visited him and the others in Belle Reve often enough to know that porridge with rat crap, unfortunately, is far from being just a figure of speech. After such a diet, a meal at a restaurant must seem like the pinnacle of happiness.

Boomerang shakes his head, apparently still unable to believe her.

“Holy fucking shit. How did you do that? How do you even do all that? I’ve told ya you’re unreal, have I?”

“Yes, you have,” Tatsu confirms patiently. And more than once – too often for her to attach great importance to it, too fervently for it not to please her at all. “Let’s put it that way: this is Waller paying me for a… favour.”

“A favour, then. I take it a lot of some poor suckers died?”

“No,” she shakes her head. And it is true – but there still was a lot of blood. Both the man Waller indicated and his bodyguards turned out to be worthy adversaries. The whole thing went not as smoothly as she wanted it to – not that she wanted to; not that she would kill another person she knows nothing about if she could help it. Nothing to assure her: this one deserves it. Everything turned out rather… nasty. She had to burn the bodies. Then she got home in a haze, tended to a couple of fresh wounds – or rather, just scratches. And then she went to the bathroom and spent a long time soaping herself, as if the invisible filth that bothered her the most could be washed off with shower gel.

Afterwards, she rummaged through her modest wardrobe and dug out the only dress she has about in America. Nothing special: wine red, below the knee length, sleeveless but with a pretty high neckline – very demure. The first and so far the last dress she bought after… after. If she and Rick didn’t have to accompany Amanda Waller to some event once, she wouldn’t have bought this one either. She put it on, combed her hair, still wet after the shower, with her fingers, looked at herself in the mirror – and flew into a rage, pulled off the dress, and could barely stop herself from tearing it to shreds. Restaurant or not, what does it matter? The last thing she needs is for him to think she dressed up for him.

So the situation might be a little less absurd than it could have been. Both of them look like they’re going on another mission with the others, only she isn’t wearing her mask – he has already seen her face anyway – and he isn’t wearing his ever-present coat. It is no wonder he wasn’t allowed to take it – Waller wasn’t going to let him out of Belle Reve armed, and to let him wear his coat would probably be as unwise as to hand him all his boomerangs. Tatsu has no doubt that everyone and their dog have already searched through the personal belongings of the Squad, but she wouldn’t be surprised to learn that somewhere in his inside pockets Harkness has as many boomerangs as he is listed as having officially. She witnessed this man produce from his bosom at least four different lighters, a massive stack of dollars, a pocket knife, small binoculars, flat-nose pliers, and a toy unicorn. She has to admit: sometimes she doesn’t understand how he even does all that either.

It appears that the thoughts of Captain Boomerang also turn to the contents of his pockets.

“Hey, how the hell are we affording this, though? Make no mistake, I’d stand treat, but my stash is in the coat, and these assholes didn’t let me take it, y’know.”

“Don’t worry about that. Waller is paying for everything,” she explains, unable to suppress a grin, because this part, possibly the most unbelievable part of the entire affair, gives her a sort of silly, spiteful joy. Task Force X is a comparatively recent project, but they’ve already cleaned up so much mess for Amanda Waller that Heracles and his labours don’t even come close. A dinner at a restaurant is the least thing she could offer them. So when Boomerang explodes with laughter and gives her a conspiratorial wink, she looks him right in the eye and smiles. Another mistake. Then again, this is not the first time they share a secret.

He puts his hand on her knee, and she shakes it off immediately; this is way too far.

“I see you took your sword with ya,” Harkness observes, not giving any sign that something didn’t go the way he wanted.

“I am to keep an eye on you.”

“Yeah. How about…” he leans in closer, and the smell of cologne blasts up Tatsu’s nose. She can only hope it is due to external use only, “we chop off his head,” he nods at the driver, “and drive the fuck away from this? Huh?”

The driver, who can definitely hear everything, doesn’t turn, but Tatsu notices him tense up.

“You’re kidding,” she says dryly. He may be, or he may be not – with Digger Harkness, one cannot always tell.

“Why kidding, doll? Zip, and done. There’s no way you enjoy working for Waller.”

“I do not. But if you pull some stunt,” Tatsu feels for the sword hilt, and Boomerang sees that – very well, it is good for him to see that, “I will chop your head off. I really hope it won’t come to that.”

“And what’s it to you? Scared of me? But I’m unarmed,” he claps himself on the chest demonstratively, implying that he has no weapons on him. “Why do you care if it does?”

“I just wouldn’t like to do that,” she says firmly, and it’s true. It works well; he doesn’t even mention running away for the remainder of the day.

This might be the strangest evening in her life.

Waller’s man drives them to a French restaurant whose name she cannot read but is almost sure that the phrase was chosen solely because it sounds impressive. They are let in through the back door, so no one among the other guests, who are sporting evening dresses and suits, pays any attention to her crop top and sword or to his… appearance in general. Their table is one of those located in alcoves, away from prying eyes, but Tatsu feels they are being watched. Which means Waller doesn’t trust her too much – well, she can understand that. She is part of a special team composed of deranged madmen, and she must admit she likes these deranged madmen more than she likes certain normal people known to her. Of course, she is Flag’s right-hand woman, but it is most likely that Waller doesn’t trust Flag either. It is doubtful whether there are any people in this world that she trusts at all.

Waller is rich. Their little feast will not shatter her wealth, all the more so since the restaurant she sent them to is not the most luxurious. But they still have a field day ordering loads of food and a bottle of the most expensive wine on the menu.

“To honour among thieves?” she suggests, when they raise their glasses for the first time.

“Didn’t ya say yer not a thief?”

“That is true,” she admits, and adds inwardly, I’m a killer.

In the end, they drink to the Suicide Squad. Then to Lawton and Jones, currently languishing in their cells. Then to Zoe Lawton, who is acting in a school play next week. To a lot of things. He asks her about her life here, in America. At some point she finds herself trying to explain to him what taiyaki is, and him telling her about banana sandwiches, and she can’t remember why they started talking about this at all. The bottle becomes empty, and another appears as if by itself.

They don’t talk about the past. They don’t talk about the future, because there might be no future at all – they can’t know for sure, what with their way of life. That evening, Tatsu laughs and thinks: good thing I’m drunk – it almost gets easier for a while.

When it’s time to leave, Harkness gets pig-headed.

“Whoa, no, no, no. Already? It’s too early, are you kiddin’ me?” he booms out when they exit the restaurant. He protests, but she drags him by the hand and he stumbles along after all, treading heavily like a dancing bear. “Let’s go someplace else, luv. Look at the pretty stars.”

“We are already late. And you… you have to go back to jail,” Tatsu tells him. The stars are pretty indeed, but she regrets looking up at them, because her head begins to spin. Thankfully, she isn’t wearing high heels. Thankfully, she doesn’t have any high-heeled shoes at all, or she could have been possessed to wear them. “Sorry,” she adds when they get into the car and set off. “There is no other way.”

“Back to jail,” Boomerang repeats with disgust. Sprawling on the seat, he unzips his hoodie, and Tatsu is swept over by the smell of cologne again. Weirdly, it doesn’t annoy her as much as at the beginning of the evening. “I’m a fucking Cinderella. I’m not back by midnight, they turn me into a pumpkin.”

“Cinderella,” Tatsu echoes, and giggles: everything is way funnier now. The driver makes a sudden turn, and she is literally thrown at Boomerang. Her cheek presses to his chest – and stays there. Tatsu feels drunk and sated and drunk again, and sleepy too, and he makes for a decent pillow, and she can’t make herself move away.

“Oh, you think it’s funny,” Harkness mutters with mock offence in his voice. It seems he’s about to fall asleep too. “Well, go on, laugh.”

They drive back in silence, and through the drowse Tatsu feels the warm arm around her waist and thinks: good thing I’m drunk, I can pretend I’m asleep.

The road to Belle Reve is long, but it still feels like they reach it too quickly.

“Inmate,” calls one of the guards, “get out.”

Harkness, his eyes still closed, moans with discontent.

“Captain Boomerang,” Tatsu says softly, freeing herself from his embrace. “It’s time.”

There is nothing to be done. He’s already about to step out of the jeep, when he suddenly moves closer to her again.

“Hey, darlin’,” he says, looking her right in the eye. “Aren’t ya forgetting something?”

It takes her some time to realize what he means: he must be expecting her to kiss him. All at once she remembers everything that has happened this evening, and awful shame washes over her: it is no wonder he’s expecting that to happen.

“Inmate, get out!”

She shrinks back.

“Good night, Captain,” she tells him as dryly as she can. He looks wounded but says nothing, and almost obediently lets the guards escort him back to his cell. Tatsu closes her eyes and rubs her temples wearily. Tomorrow she is going to regret drinking so much. She already does – and that’s not the only thing she regrets.

She has to stop seeing him.

***

At first, she even succeeds. Next Friday Tatsu, as always, goes to Belle Reve to see the Squad – all of them save for Harkness. She feels sick at heart because if she did promise him anything, it was to visit him, and now she’s going back on her word because of her own stupid weakness. But there is no other way.

“He asked about you,” Waylon tells her a week later, when she brings him the latest issue of Playboy. Tatsu almost doesn’t feel weird anymore when buying it, and doesn’t try to imagine anymore what the news stand clerks think when she pays them for it. Such periodicals cause her a feeling of light disgust, but Croc, who gets let out of jail only to be thrown into another trouble spot, deserves at least some small joys.

“Who?”

Waylon, no doubt observant like all the quiet ones tend to be, bares his impressive teeth.

“You know who.”

It seems a logical solution to give up on these visits at all – but in that case she would betray all of them. Perhaps this little tradition is much more important to her than it is to the prisoners, but Tatsu is almost sure that it means something to them as well. She has no right to deprive the rest of them of this bit of understanding, companionship, normalcy because she wasn’t smart enough to stop the game she and Boomerang started before it became too late.

At home – not that the apartment she’s renting here deserves to be called ‘home’ – she, unable to fall asleep, unsheathes the sword and runs the tips of her fingers along the cool blade. A tender, habitual movement – like touching the cheek of a loved one.

“I’ve lost my way, Maseo,” whispers Tatsu. The place where the souls of the people struck down by this blade are trapped is still a mystery to her, but she knows that Maseo will come as soon as she calls him – as a voice from afar, as nebulous shapes in the swirls of smoke, as the peace and safety granted by the presence of someone dear. “I’m afraid of my own heart.”

I know your heart, Tatsu. You have nothing to be afraid of.

“It makes me act rashly. Makes me succumb to false feelings.”

I know your heart, Tatsu, and it incapable of falsehood.

Only the ones that are already far away can speak so vaguely and with such unrelenting honesty at the same time.

“I will always love you,” she whispers ardently. Not because she doesn’t want him to think it is not so; not because she herself feels like it is not so anymore either. She knows for sure that she is always going to love him, for she loved him as a lover, as a husband, as the father of her children, as the only thing she had left after all her life fell apart, burned in that damned fire. He will stay in her heart until her last breath – even if she has to close her heart to the rest of the world. Once she used to think that after all she’s been through, it isn’t going to be an issue.

And I will always love you, her husband replies, and Tatsu blinks back tears with a deep sigh.

“I just wish you were alive,” she tells him for what must be the hundredth, or maybe a thousandth time.

If he was with her – not as smoke or a voice, but as flesh and blood – he probably would have kissed her gently on the nape of her neck, as he often used to do.

I just wish, says her husband – no, the soul of her husband, which is already rushing away, deep into the world she shouldn’t hurry to go to if she doesn’t want this sword to fall into wrong hands, that you were happy.

***

Literally the next day there is a message from Metropolis that some giant snake-like beast is terrorizing the city and devouring people. The monster was last seen crawling into the building of the opera – which is where their squad heads to after reaching the city.

“Look at that freak,” Harkness comments in a low voice. The creature is curled up slumbering on stage, and they are watching it from the catwalks above. “Not a family of yours by any chance, eh, ‘gator?’

Waylon steps towards him, and the planks creak under his feet, threatening to break.

“Say that again,” he growls.

Tatsu bares her sword and wedges herself between them. Waylon backs off reluctantly.

“Knock it off,” she tells Boomerang. It feels like everything has come full circle – the day Harkness picked up her mask, he also had a run-in with Jones. The day they were sent to fight the Enchantress, she also put the blade of her sword under his chin. Why did she even think something would change?

“Oh, so you’re talking to me after all?”

“Enough,” Tatsu hisses. She really wants to try to explain everything to him. Maybe if she tries to put her feelings into words, many things will become clear to her, too. But if he thinks they are going to discuss this now, he is mistaken.

On the neighbouring catwalk, Rick is looking at them in a rage, gesturing both of them to shut up. Harkness steps closer; now the blade of the Soultaker is within a hair’s breadth away from his neck. A single careless movement, and blood will be spilled. A wild idea crosses her mind: it looks as if he’s into this. Tatsu licks her lips.

“Y’know,” Boomerang begins, lowering his head a little so that it is easier for him to look her in the eye, “I think you’re scared of me. Or of yourself, hell if I know. Am I right?”

A loud rustle comes from beneath, and the next instant the monster bites through the middle of the catwalk they’re standing on, and both of them are falling down. Tatsu manages to grab some rope, but when she tries to climb it, her hands slip, and she comes tumbling down.

The fall is far from being soft, even though she falls on the tatters of the curtain, which the snake must have torn earlier. She is lucky not to hurt her head, but her left leg and hip are aching. Only the awareness that there is no time to lie around makes her summon up all her strength and get up. Her sword is nowhere to be seen, and Tatsu is overwhelmed by fury: now she is useless.

The snake roars and shakes its head, trying to shake off Croc, who is trying to bite through its scales. Rick is shooting at the monster from above, and Deadshot, who is already on stage somehow, is doing the same from below, dodging the blows of its tail. Tatsu sweeps her eyes weakly over the stage and suddenly notices a hole broken in it. At the very edge of the hole, the hilt of her sword is sticking out of the floor. Moving as quickly as it is possible to do that with a limp, Tatsu hurries there.

The moment she pulls the sword out of the stage, Harkness’s head pokes out of the hole. Not waiting for him to ask for help, Tatsu helps him get out.

“Are you…” both of them begin in unison and drop it immediately, because the snake has managed to shake off the bothersome little crocodile – who is hopefully just somewhere on the floor and not in its belly – and is moving towards them, slower than before but still pretty speedily. They scatter, and Tatsu charges at the monster with her sword drawn. Harkness throws a boomerang at the creature, aiming at its eye, but it dodges at the last second.

Eventually, with joint forces they manage to kill the beast. To be on the safe side, Lawton fires a round into its open jaws. The long body shudders one last time and falls still. For some time, the five of them stand there looking at it.

“Where could this thing even come from?” Rick mutters.

“Remember what the Wicked Witch of the West said when she tried to get us to join her? The world is changing, the time of magic has come, blah, blah, blah,” Lawton reminds him. Rick nods absentmindedly; these are not happy memories.

Jones kicks the dead snake.

“Maybe it meant no harm,” he points out in his deep voice.

“Croc,” Rick says wearily, “it ate people.”

“So did I.”

“But at least you didn’t chew the curtain at the opera like a disgraced diva?” Lawton asks, struggling not to grin.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Well, then it’s okay.”

Rick titters nervously, and the next instant all of them are shaking with laughter.

Tatsu is drinking water straight from the tap in the restroom, when Harkness comes in.

“This is a ladies’ room,” she says reflexively.

“Hey, I just wanna wash my face, is all.”

Without waiting for her to answer, he comes closer and starts washing at the neighbouring sink. Tatsu casts a sidelong look at him and notices that the water is turning red.

“Show me your face,” she orders.

“It’s not a bad face, what’s yer problem?”

“I’m serious.”

He rolls his eyes, but stands still while she examines his face, only wincing when she dabs at the cut on his forehead with a paper towel.

“Just a scratch,” he assures at once.

“Just a scratch,” Tatsu agrees. She scrunches up the towel and throws it into the sink. She would like to keep her hand on his face, pretending that she’s still wiping off the blood, but she’s done pretending.

“How about you?” Boomerang asks quietly.

“Fine. A couple of bruises. You were lucky today,” she says just as quietly, and takes off her mask. Tomorrow they might not be as lucky. “I’m happy for you.”

“And I’m happy you got out alive… darl.”

For a moment she wants him to ruin everything. To reply with a jibe, to crack another dirty joke, to try to grab and kiss her only to get smacked. Not to stand motionless in front of her like he’s afraid to scare her off. It occurred to her once that from the outside their relationship might look like an attempt to tame a wild animal. Perhaps this is a mutual process.

Do whatever you want to him.

She stands up on tiptoes and kisses him.

For an instant, Harkness freezes – possibly trying to figure out again if he’s dreaming – and then pulls her closer and kisses back. Drinks her hungrily, like this is both the first time and the last. Bearing in mind what their lives are like, it really might be the last.

Tatsu doesn’t immediately realize why she suddenly doesn’t need to stand on tiptoes anymore.

“Put me down–” she starts, but gives up and wraps her legs around his waist. Boomerang grunts with satisfaction and switches from her lips to her neck. His beard, fortunately, is softer than could have been expected.

“Stop drinking so much,” Tatsu breathes out, now that no one is trying to shut her mouth. “You taste like…” all English words slip her mind, “like… a beer cask.”

It tickles her when he laughs into her neck.

Someone simply must enter now – Rick, Floyd, Amanda Waller, the president of the United States, but no, no one is trying to stop him from squeezing her hips, to stop her from running her fingers through his hair. Weapon to weapon, blade to blade. Red-hot metal to red-hot metal. Melting until something new is forged – without fear, without regret, without the past, without the future.

Clearly, Maseo wants too much: she remembers what happiness is, and she is sure she’ll never ever be happy again.

But she can take a shot at being alive.

#suicide squad #katana #captain boomerang #tatsu yamashiro #digger harkness #kaboom #captain boomerang x katana #boomerang x katana #dc #my fic #gella talks skwad #talk talk talk #my magnum opus lmao #amazed i managed to translate this. i am not a woman i'm a god indeed #once again i still know nothing about the geography of the dceu!united states #and whether a city like metropolis could have an opera house

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thewhumperinwhite · 5 years ago

Text

Café: Cottage

Previous: Teaser 1, Teaser 2, Hospital/Squad Car, Empty Bar, Used Car Lot 1, Used Car Lot 2, Gas Station, Roadside 1, Roadside 2, Forest, Treetops

Ngl, this one..... genuinely hurt my heart.

TW for: illness/fever, referenced murder of a child (she was a zombie but that still is very much what happened), Sharing A House With A Corpse, panic attack, hallucination, heavily implied past abuse, past suicide attempt, nonsexual nudity, serious PTSD flashback, survivor unintentionally triggered while receiving medical help. I hope that’s everything but please ask if you need anything else tagged.

@whumpitywhumpwhump

Sol stops at the door of the little house so fast he almost drops Kent on his ass; Kent whines sleepily in his ear.

“Oh my god,” he says, staring at Pax in absolute horror. “That’s— are you a fucking sociopath, dude? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

The one remaining mark in Pax’s favor is that at least they don’t look happy about it, either. “What?” they say, sounding harried. “This is the only house we knew for sure would be out here, and her tracks were pretty easy to follow, it just makes—”

“I am not going in there. We are not looting the house of the little girl we,” he drops his voice, even though he knows that’s stupid, “fucking murdered!”

Pax bristles, their hand already on the door handle. “It’s not—” They visibly force themself to relax. “First of all, it’s not looting if everyone who needs it is dead, don’t be a fucking narc. Second of all, it’s not looting if we need it more than they do, and your boyfriend needs whatever they’ve got, baby.”

Sol laughs hysterically. “Kent will literally die before he takes medicine we stole from that little girl’s house,” he says with complete conviction.

Pax has been facing the door, and now he turns back to Sol and raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t doubt that he will, yeah,” Pax says. “You planning on letting him?”

Sol shift’s Kent’s too-insignificant weight on his back. Kent makes a very quiet sleepy groan in his ear.

“Ugh, fuck,” Sol says. “Fine.” Pax nods and opens the front door of the house in the woods from which Leah the Dead Girl came. They take a step inside and go rigid, but then give themself a shake and keep going.

Sol, wanting to do literally anything else, sticks his head in the door and looks around, and immediately stumbles sideways. The door opens onto the living room, and there is a dead man sprawled on the floor in front of the tv with the top of his head blown off.

“Jesus!” Sol yells, and Kent flinches against his back, gasping quietly. “What the fuck, Pax!”

Pax is trying doors off the hallway and does not look back at Sol, or the mangled corpse, either. “I didn’t fucking put it there,” they snap. “That must be dear ol’ dad.”

Sol stares at the dead man. The room smells like blood, but nothing else, yet. Must be— must be new. God.

“Oh, thank fuck. Come on,” Pax calls from the end of the hall, and Sol holds Kent’s legs securely and scurries gratefully after them. “Master with an ensuite. Jesus loves us after all.”

The bedroom is small but blessedly free of corpses. Sol kicks the door shut behind him like that will somehow help him forget there is a dead body in this house.

He backs up to the bed, and crouches so Kent will be close to it, and turns his head, tapping Kent’s arm gently.

“Hey,” he says softly. “We’re here, buddy, you can get off now.”

Kent blinks slowly, his eyes unfocused, and exhales a slow, hot breath into Sol’s ear, and then carefully unwinds his arms from around Sol’s shoulders, and Sol lowers him onto the bed. Sol turns back to him, standing quicker than he means to without Kent’s weight.

The second Sol isn’t holding him up Kent sags sideways, so completely limp that Sol has to grab his shoulders to keep him from falling right off the side of the bed. His head lolls forward like a puppet with its strings cut.

Sol drops to his knees in front of the bed, reaching for Kent’s forehead, which is bone-dry and hot as a pavement under the summer sun.

“Pax,” Sol says, his voice coming out high and scared, and cups his hand on Kent’s burning cheek, resisting the urge to try and shake him awake. Kent’s eyelids flutter weakly.

“Dnnwa— don’ wnnn,” Kent mumbles, his brow furrowing.

“Paxon,” Sol cries, “he’s— “

Paxon appears at his side holding a damp cloth and an oral thermometer. “Yeah, I heard,” he says, sliding the thermometer into Kent’s mouth and holding his jaw. Kent’s frown deepens and he makes a protesting noise, and Paxon leans forward and says, “don’t spit that out,” in a deep, commanding voice. Kent immediately goes completely still.

After a second Sol realizes that Kent is holding his breath.

He leaps up to sit on the bed next to Kent and wraps his arm around Kent’s narrow waist; Kent is a full head taller than him but immediately leans into him like a little boy, grabbing a weak fistful of Sol’s wet shirt. Sol hesitates, and then reaches up with his other hand to stroke Kent’s hair; Kent shivers.

“Kent,” Sol says, trying to remember the utter calm of Kent’s voice when he was first talking to the little girl who used to live in this house. “Breathe through your nose, buddy, come on.”

Kent takes a deep, shuddering breath in. Pax, still kneeling in front of him on the floor, holding Kent’s chin, darts their eyes over to Sol for a second, looking deeply troubled, and then frowns back into Kent’s face.

There’s nothing else to do, so Sol scratches Kent’s scalp lightly and counts the thermometer’s beeps. Pax is completely still, watching Kent’s face with intense focus. Kent trembles and doesn’t open his eyes, but when Sol tightens his arm around his waist and reminds him again, he does keep breathing.

The thermometer goes off after what must be seconds but feels like several years, and when Pax pulls it out of Kent’s mouth Kent sags against Sol’s side, and then turns to hide his face against Sol’s shirt, and Sol realizes with a start that he’s crying.

“That was good, Kent,” Pax says, and Kent shivers against Sol’s chest. Pax looks down at the thermometer’s display, and pales slightly. “Fuck. Okay. Hold on.” They get to their feet and whirl back to the bathroom to rummage through the cupboards some more.

Sol doesn’t pick up the thermometer when they drop it; the specific number is deeply not worth letting go of Kent at this stage. Kent is pressing his head against Sol’s chest, making his tall body as small as possible, and he’s breathing hard, his arms around Sol’s waist. Sol tightens his own arm around Kent’s waist, and Kent’s breath hitches, becoming more like sobbing.

“Hey,” Sol says, desperately. “Kent, it’s okay, it’s— we’re gonna take care of you. Can you relax for me a little bit, buddy?”

Kent shudders violently, and he folds over completely until his forehead is resting on Sol’s thigh; Sol freezes, baffled. Sol can feel his breath because it’s shaking his whole body, and it’s—it might be words, but Sol can’t understand what they are. He bends down to hear better, moving his hand on Kent’s back in what he hopes are soothing circles.

“Sorry,” Kent is saying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

“Okay,” Pax says with forced briskness, striding out of the bathroom. “These should bring his fever down, assuming we can actually get him to— um.” Pax blinks down at Kent, shivering mostly in Sol’s lap, and for a second they look genuinely distressed. “Uh, okay, sit him up, I’m gonna see if I can get him to take these. Hold this.” Pax helps Sol pull Kent upright— though it isn’t hard, he’s limp as a ragdoll— and Sol gets sort of awkwardly behind him to hold him up, supporting the back of his head with one hand, and holding the glass of water Pax hands him with the other. “Kent,” Pax says. Sol’s brain is trying to squirrel away in a thousand directions so it notes that this is the first time he’s heard Pax say Kent’s actual name. “I’m gonna give you two of these, and I need you to swallow them, okay?”

Kent’s eyes open, finally, though they’re bright and reflective as glass, and he shakes his head, his hands opening and closing uselessly in his lap.

“I— Donn’ wwant—”

“Kent,” Sol says in his gentlest voice. “It’s medicine, baby, okay? Will you please take it?”

Kent swings his head unsteadily around to look at Sol. There are big full tears rolling down his cheeks and he looks like Sol has just told him to step in front of a firing squad; even knowing he’s telling the truth it’s still a look that sinks in Sol’s stomach like lead. Then Kent looks back at Pax and finally nods miserably and opens his mouth.

Pax slips a tab of aspirin onto Kent’s tongue and Sol holds the glass up to his lips and Kent swallows obediently, closing his eyes and shuddering. By the time he’s swallowed the second one his silent tears have turned into big hiccupping sobs. Sol— hates this, maybe more than he’s ever hated anything his whole life.

“Jesus,” Pax says, getting shakily to his feet; it’s an understatement but one Sol thoroughly endorses. “I’m gonna run him a bath. Try to get him to finish that water.” They back away, running a hand through their hair, which is beginning to fall loose around their shoulders now. “Christ.”

Sol watches them trudge into the bathroom and kneel next to the tub, to give himself a second to take a deep breath. Kent hasn’t tried to move away, is still leaning against Sol’s side and crying great wracking sobs. Sol hesitates and then very carefully puts his hand under Kent’s chin and tips his chin up so he isn’t hiding his face against Sol’s shirt anymore. Kent lets him, but his eyes are unfocused and he clearly isn’t seeing Sol.

“Kent,” Sol says. “Can you look at me, honey?”

Kent blinks slowly, his long eyelashes heavy with tears, and exhales, his brows pulling slowly into a confused frown, like he’s thinking very hard. “Wh...ere...?” he says in a small voice. “Don’t... I don’t— “

“Okay,” Pax calls from the bathroom. “The bath is ready. Do you need help getting him in?”

Kent goes completely rigid in Sol’s arms, his eyes flying wide; he stares forward toward Pax’s voice, his eyes still blank and unseeing. “No,” he says, grabbing a handful of Sol’s jacket, his trembling turning into huge shudders running down his whole body. “No, please d— I can, I can be better, I’m sorry, please don’t— “

“Kent,” Sol says, alarmed, “Kent, it’s fine, what’s—Kent!”

Kent turns back to Sol, desperate, still not seeing him. “I’m sorry,” he says, the words coming so fast Sol almost can’t understand them. “Chase, tell him, tell him I’m sorry, please don’t let him, Chase, please—”

He grabs for Sol’s arms and Sol lets him, searching his face for any shred of recognition, but there’s nothing. “Kent, that’s not— that’s not me, baby, I don’t know who you’re—” Kent whines in the back of his throat, a horrible trapped-animal sound, and lets his head flop forward onto Sol’s chest. “Pax, what’s— what is he—?”

Pax, standing in the bathroom doorway, shakes his head helplessly. “I don’t— I don’t know. Just— here, get his shoulders and I’ll get his legs.”

“No!” Kent wails, and tries to pull back from Sol, but he’s so unsteady Sol has to grab him by the coat collar to keep him from falling off the bed. “No, fa—father, daddy, please, I’m sorry—”

“Kent, it’s okay, we’re not gonna hurt you,” Sol says desperately, but Pax just picks up Kent’s feet, ignoring his weak and uncoordinated attempts at shaking them off.

“He’s not hearing you,” they say grimly. “Best way we can help him is to get his fever down. Help me get him in the bathroom, at least, and we’ll—” They falter, and then square their shoulders and keep moving. “We’ll get his clothes off and cool him down.”

Kent thrashes in Sol’s grip but it’s distressingly easy to hold him. “God,” he moans. “Do we fucking have to, that’s— that’s—”

“You don’t want him in wet clothes, man,” Pax says. “Here—careful—lay him down here first. Help me with his coat.” Sol stares at Pax, feeling his own eyes burn. Pax looks at him, their face softening. “I know, man. But you can apologize when he’s lucid.”

Kent doesn’t resist, and that’s— much worse, but it does mean that he’s in the bath within five incredibly terrible minutes, his head back and his eyes squeezed shut, every muscle visibly pulled as tight as it will go.

“For god’s sake, sunshine,” Pax says, leaning back against the side of the toilet. “The point is to calm you down. Take a deep fucking breath.”

“I’m sorry,” Kent whispers. “I’m sorry, I’ll— please don’t put my head under. Please don’t, daddy, I don’t think I can—”

Sol, kneeling next to the tub, grabs his hand where it’s dangling limply over the side of the tub, squeezes it in both of his. “Kent,” he says, horrified, “Kent, we’re not— we were never going to do that, Jesus Christ.” Kent squeezes weakly back.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “Thank you, thank you, I won’t do it again I promise, daddy, I promise.”

Sol holds onto Kent’s hand, not looking at Pax. The scars on Kent’s wrists reach halfway up to his elbow, one vertical line on each arm crossed with two horizontal ones. The adrenaline that’s been powering him through since they first came in the front door is running out and Sol lowers his head to rest against Kent’s hand, exhausted.

“We’re not gonna hurt you, baby,” he says, knowing Kent won’t hear him. He’ll say it again when Kent is in the room with him instead of whatever terrible place he’s lost in now. “That’s a fucking promise.”

#whump #original whump #the café at the end of the world #fever #sickfic #delirious #flashback #begging #resisting care #past suicide attempt #scars #past abuse

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celticfeather · 5 years ago

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Akatsuki Fanfic: Campfires

On: FF Ao3 Tumblr

First. 1. Dawn

Previous: 4. Slaughter’s Court

Campfires chapter 5: Kraken Hall

-Hoshigaki Kisame-

Thukk.

Right by his ear. His awakened eyes slid right. The tag of a paper bomb waved from a kunai.

Kisame sprung away in the fraction of a second before its detonation. Adrenaline damped pain: his neck and shoulder had been torn open, he did not know how much. His priority was seizing a few seconds of distance and time.

Midleap he looked for the boy, he was gone, the white cloth that bound him a twisting ribbon snaking to the forest floor.

Flickers manifested into crouching shapes on tree branches. Their animal masks denoted the Anbu of the Hidden Leaf, though the rogues were outside the Leaf's territory. The masks' inset eyes were round and black like a shark's, but leaf ninja moved like ghostly gray leopards. The assailants were three ninja: two men, one woman, and a ninja hound.

He had to get them out of the trees, the leaf ninja the advantage there. They met him on the ground. He grasped Samehada's hilt, and from the reserves of stolen chakra, his steaming flesh began to rapidly regrow where it was damaged. He grinned at the three masked ninja.

"Tell me, am I next to Itachi in your bingo book?"

There was no answer and a lightning jutsu struck at Kisame then. Huge and white and it sucked the air from the ground. He let it strike along Samehada, most of it was absorbed and channeled along the sword's scales, with the rest of the lightning shocking off into something behind him.

He felt Samehada purr. Or perhaps it was more like a stomach growling. As the leaf ninja stared in disbelief, he smashed the sword into someone's body, the shock traveled up his arms, and the exhilaration of combat flooded him.

He quickly dispatched the other two ninja with crushing strikes from his sword. Then the dog sprung at him. Dogs were not pets in the Mist. He grabbed the beast by its forelegs and winched them apart.

One, two, three, dog, down. Done.

He stepped forward to the bodies to make sure the job was finished, but his limbs didn't obey him. He looked down, an ink black shadow had reached to his foot, and somehow he could not move. One of the crumpled men he'd thought dead had wielded a shadow like a tentacle. He tried to budge his leg,

Kisame struggled against the bind. He could move slightly. A few more seconds of fighting and he would break free. He stared inevitable death at the man, and Kisame did not smile.

At that moment a shape, small and angular, inspective and fearless as a crow beside a carcass, appeared beside the crumpled Anbu. The Anbu's head turned to regard the sudden darkness over his shoulder.

"Uchiha...Itachi..."

Well? Kisame wondered of his partner. What will you do?

Itachi's red eyes looked deeply into the mask. Kisame could not know what nightmare was shared. But what he did see was Itachi's kunai strike. The tentacle around Kisame's leg uncoiled, and the fight was over.

Kisame wondered what summoned the assailants. Like a bird Itachi was so visually focused. Last night he had allowed for no fires, no loud noises. But as fine as his sharingan was, it could never see a scent. From their skirmish hours before, the boy smelled like a bloodbath. And Kisame, feeling responsible, knew that he should have been wiser.

Itachi stepped to each of the three corpses and lifted their painted masks. He stared into their faces.

"No member of the Leaf's two ninja hound clans are among these dead," the former Leaf ninja said.

Kisame's eyes slid suspiciously to the surrounding forest. So, their main course was elsewhere.

Then Itachi placed the masks back on. To face the afterworld as they lived, he supposed. The sanctity of a human body never really mattered to Kisame. Dead meat was dead meat. He accepted none of the people in this clearing, alive or not, would ever receive a proper funeral.

Itachi parsed signs and raised a hand. Dozen of crows and ravens and hulking raptors bigger than cats arrived from somewhere. The birds were fearsome, but lightweights by nature, and Kisame wondered what a bird did with a human pelvis.

"You know what doesn't leave bones?" Kisame suggested.

Itachi's expression did not change.

"Sharks."

Icy Itachi looked at his expectant wards and then at Kisame. "Leave them the hound."

Kisame lifted the human bodies and threw them into the river, and summoned four freshwater tolerant sharks. At a scarcely perceptible twitch of Itachi's finger the obedient ravens plunged. His bull sharks needed no such instruction, and when one did not not focus closely, the splashing sounded peaceable in comparison. The ravens, social and hierarchical, argued noisily with each other over the best positions. With a businesslike demeanor, the two ninja turned their backs to the clamor of devouring.

"The Leaf will have sent a second jounin squad after us. I will reroute them," Itachi said.

Itachi intended to bait an informed jounin team alone, in his condition, and probably half his unimpressive chakra with a shadow clone.

Kisame smiled. "Still slightly suicidal, I see."

"I expect no problems."

"Are you gonna say something to me about last night? Or are you just gonna let it fester?" Kisame said.

Itachi's eyes were sharp. "Do you want me to apologize for attempting suicide? Or for abusing you?"

"I want you to acknowledge that you looked into my head, revived my dead-sister's dead-kid, impregnated her, and stabbed her through the spine. To try to get me to kill you, because you decided that you can't cope with the fact that you're a killer. Have I got that right?"

Itachi continued aloofly. "I am different from all of you. Senseless killing bothers me deeply."

"You are so elitist. You think I wasn't bothered by it? You think when I was a boy, I wanted this?" Kisame gestured at himself, huge and beastly and covered in scars.

Itachi was midstride, but he stopped at Kisame's words. Kisame continued menacingly.

"I grew up in the Blood-Mist Village. I was younger than you when I became a killer. I have no family, no purpose, and almost no friends. So what I want to know, Itachi, is why you don't accept it like the rest of us."

"I can deal with the fact that I'm a killer. What I could not accept last night, Kisame, is my continuing existence in the Akatsuki causing dozens of unnecessary deaths. But whatever. It doesn't matter- you were right anyway. Ending myself is not going to solve this problem. It must be fought directly."

"Directly?" Kisame repeated. The word insinuated rebellion. Wars were won with less manpower than that would require for a rebellion against the Akatsuki, and Kisame knew he was under orders to take Itachi out if he did so.

Wisely, Itachi did not elaborate. The dark haired young man looked somewhere and Kisame followed his gaze down. The dog was just a skeleton. The winged scavengers took the bones in their slender beaks and flew away with them.

"We must leave now," Itachi said.

Kisame stepped onto the now-still water to hide his tracks and scent. He showed the scroll between his knuckles. "I'll start Kakuzu's other mission," he said gruffly.

"Hm."

Only a few wind-trembling feathers testified what happened at the scene, and the two ninja vanished with the wind that scattered them.

—Uchiha Itachi—

Itachi broke a twig between his fingers. In this moist climate, a twig would not have snapped naturally. The Anbu would halt to discuss the stick for a few precious moments and come to the same conclusion. Animals could leave smears in the moss. But only ninja leave decoys. Even if they did not have a second dog, they would know it was him.

But these Anbu would have another dog. No Inuzuka had been among the dead. No Hatake had been among the dead...

Ninja who abandon the rules are scum. But ninja who abandon their comrades are worse than scum.

Itachi thought he had embodied the persona of cold parricide. Apparently not. His ruse of coldness had been translucent as ocean water. Strange round, silver and black eyes regarded him from his memory:

You might just be the only friend I've ever had.

He had been cruel to manipulate his partner last night. Kisame had been uncomfortable fighting him, even as easy as Itachi planned to make it. He would find Kisame and apologize properly for his manipulative attempt. Maybe he could convince him to spare some of the bandits, Kisame probably would probably kill most of them if he did not interfere. Itachi hated these Akatsuki kill missions: Kakuzu, Pain, could just try and punish him for leaving some people alive after the goal was achieved. Kisame was right. Death would not solve the problem of Itachi's existence; he would have to think his way out.

That was far enough to cost the Anbu the necessary time. He parsed signs for a shadow clone, and his double unceremoniously continued forward. Last he tested, he could be separate from his clone for two kilometers before it disappeared. The real Itachi jumped some twenty meters to the water, expecting that if he did not touch solid matter, his scent would vanish in seconds in the air.

But he was not sure. He did not see his world through scent. He threw a final glance towards the past, towards the Anbu, towards his old captain Kakashi, then ignited his sharingan and focused on the way before him. Now, to track Kisame.

—Hoshigaki Kisame—

Kisame lowered the hand-drawn map and stared at the island that filled its place on the horizon. It was a fine little place for a bandit camp.

He stepped across the ocean water to where the stolen wooden skiffs crowded the island's white sand shore. He found the cave entrance by smell. Men: those lazy brutes had taken to pissing where they ate.

He walked into the tunnel. It would be inconvenient to swing Samehada in such a small place, but he did not expect the bandits would want to stay there long. Someone saw him and asked him a question. Kisame shoved their head into the wall and kept walking deeper into the cave. The scroll's task had been to 'eliminate the bandit threat,' and he would do that in the way he decided most enjoyable and convenient.

Two bigshots argued in the common area, surrounded by lower members. The two leaders raised swords at him, but he twisted their arms around, and thrust one into the blade of the other. Then the screams started. He threw the trembling survivor to the ground and stepped on his neck. A surrounding man threw a knife, Kisame returned it.

A woman called her comrades to flee. The remaining members streamed around him, out of the cave, down the beach, and Kisame stalked after the prey unhurriedly. They untethered their rowboats and launched them into the waves, running astride their vessels, tossing oars to each other.

He wet his feet in the surf and shed his robe on the beach. A grin slit his lips. He parsed a few signs and a water dragon overturned the skiffs and spilled their human cargo into the sea. He let Samehada's spiked pommel embed in the skin of his palm. What a terrible day to be a pirate, he thought as the cool tide sloshed against his now-sandpaper hide.

He smashed a skiff with a whip of his tail. The electricity in his snout fired ablaze, they were so alive, so frantic, so afraid. This prey was small, a tenth of his weight, almost small enough to swallow whole. Their tender bones waned and crunched in his jaws. He'd bite, tear, release when the muscles flexed limp, and bite the next thing that moved. The blood was intoxicating, heavy, arousing. The meat in his mouth did not taste bad.

He pictured Itachi. The cruel face he made last night shined in his mind's eye. With his grinning teeth and the weasel look in his bloodthirsty, fight-hungry eyes. Bring out Samehada!

An impulse occurred to him. He had not done that before. But that did not mean he could not start. He was frightfully hungry. A chemical of frenzied excitement flooded his brain, no longer fully human, at the prospect.

He identified a target. He sank into the depths for a pregnant moment. Then he snapped the red-muscled braided whip of his tail, shot dart-fast towards the surface, and a second before he breached, yawned wide a razored chasm of death.

—-—

Kisame staggered human out of the waves. He descended from the fogging rausch, the tremendous high. His hands trembled from ecstasy, from shock, from disbelief.

An uncomfortable feeling plagued him. It was the first time in fifteen years that he felt it. Not quite fear, not quite cold, but it gripped him around the chest like those. It was the unfamiliar realization that, maybe, he had done something wicked.

He swung Samehada off his body and flung it viciously against a palm tree, and he leered at it with shark teeth bared.

"Look what you made me do!"

The words felt hollow when they became reality. He knew better than to decry an object. It was not Samehada's fault, it was not Itachi's fault. The deed had been his alone. He knew not which god to pray to forgiveness, or demon for sanctuary.

"Holy Buddha, Amaterasu, Susanoo, fuck it, Jashin, anybody."

He knelt on the sand.

"Why did I do that?"

Kisame's gods, as always, remained silent.

Looking at the familiarity of his own limbs made him want to retch, but he knew retching would not absolve his sin. He did not know the physics of it. If he ate something big, and then he shrank back down to normal size. But he felt gorged and sick and he could not bear the thought of eating. He could not bear the thought of meat, of flesh. Of muscles pulling under skin, of intricate ligaments gently meshed to slippery bones... He looked away from his own body and towards the ocean horizon.

He did not indulge in the sleep his exhausted body craved. He sat on the beach, feeling strangely nervous. He let the surf wash coolly over him, but it brought little relief. Something brushed by his hand on a wave. He feared what it could be. He held it in front of his face to eclipse the setting sun, but it was just a harmless abalone sea shell, and the iridescent mother-of-pearl material glittered gently like mica in his hand.

He stood up from the surf and took Samehada off the tree. The moment he did, he was blasted with the instrument's chakra sensing ability. Itachi was tracking him, and a shock of unease probed him: he did not want to see Itachi right now.

Water crested around his ankles. He rubbed the smooth abalone shard with his thumb like a netsuke. He felt the sharingan-wielder nearing and decided it would be too much effort to evade him.

"Hey." A pause. "Bandits are taken care of?"

"Yeah."

"Do we have bodies to dispose of?"

"No."

Itachi had speared two fish next to a burning, salt-blue piece of driftwood. "You want some?"

"I'm not hungry."

Itachi's vivisecting black eyes probed him. Or maybe it was just a normal look. Kisame feared what he could see with those eyes, if he could read inside his mind, and pluck his nightmares into reality, like he had with Akaei.

Itachi waved his hand. "Come sit by me."

Kisame sat by him.

"Kisame, I'm sorry I attacked you last night. I thought a world minus me was for the best."

"Itachi, the day men like you are the bad ones, is the day this world has gone to shit," he said.

"I manipulated you, and I terrorized you, and I tried to kill myself. Do you forgive me?"

"Yeah. But do it again, I'll..." bite you in half, he would have said to someone else, sometime else, but he found his usual bravado unappetizing. "Don't do it again."

"Thank you, Kisame."

Itachi ate alone, neatly and quietly. Kisame stared at the abalone shard and stroked it between his thumb and finger. It was smooth and flat and not quite triangular, like a tooth, or maybe a teardrop.

"I did something I regret today, Itachi," Kisame eventually said.

Itachi looked over the moon-streaked water. "At times it's hard to live with our crimes. But we need to understand that we are worthy of our own acceptance."

Did he know? Maybe. Maybe those eyes saw every thought Kisame had ever thought. But Itachi did not grasp the crux of the incident that troubled Kisame.

"It felt good."

Now Itachi understood the severity of the problem. The young man bridged his hands before his nose and closed his eyes, and stayed quiet. Somehow Itachi's recognition sobered Kisame.

"I understand if you want to spend a few days away from me, or want to leave altogether," Kisame said.

"If you're sorry, I'll forgive you."

Kisame raised a calm eyebrow, looking down at his sea shell. This was different from Itachi's crime. "I'm not sure this is yours to forgive."

"Then, I accept you."

He contemplated the sentiment. Unlike forgiveness, acceptance invoked no debt, no guilt, and nothing to prove. There was nothing about it he could interpret as ingenuine or undeserved. It was merely a validation of his existence. He did not ask for forgiveness, or was so forward as to say he deserved it. Acceptance… Kisame liked that.

Itachi's eyes slid to the object in Kisame's upturned palm. "What is that?"

"It's an abalone shell." He passed it to his partner.

Itachi's eyes flashed red for a second and he smiled small. "It's beautiful. It has many unique colors, ones humans cannot even see. What kind of animal lived in it?"

"An abalone is a big, ugly, sea snail the size of a rat that eats slime."

"The universe is wise, how even such a wretched creature must not stay ugly at its core, is it not?"

"You can have it if you want," Kisame said. Itachi was a small, pretty man who seemed to like small, pretty things.

Itachi handed it back. "I think you'd better keep it."

He turned the silvery rainbow shard around in his palm. Yes. He would keep it, to remind him of the stupid, ugly, scum-eating, ocean creature that Itachi decided was still beautiful. He was glad Itachi found him this night. He would be miserable alone. The two ninja sat before the glow of the salt-blue flames, and stared up at the thick belt of stars.

"If you're not a bad person, and you've hated killing in the Akatsuki the whole time, why did you decide after this mission to off yourself?" Kisame asked.

"Utilitarian ethics. I had a goal, but I realized that fewer people will die if I was dead."

"Avoiding physical trauma… it might not be the most ethical thing, you know," Kisame said.

Itachi gave him a doubting look. He was starting to not be terrible at reading Itachi's expressions.

"Have you ever thought about what makes you happy?"

"Rarely," Itachi said.

"Maybe this eye of the moon scheme can make the world a better place for people like us," Kisame said.

Kisame noted Itachi's flinch. Of course Itachi would know, he and their leader were related, after all, but it was a privilege for Kisame to know the secret of the Akatsuki's true plan, the Eye of the Moon.

The Uchiha looked at him intensely. "You know the truth."

"That our leader is Uchiha Madara? Yes. He recruited me personally," Kisame said.

"Even I… was not strong enough to kill the Uchiha clan alone. Madara helped me do it."

Itachi's lips were uncharacteristically loose, and Kisame, always a hunter, identified when to act. "History paints Madara as a fanatic for his clan. Why would he cull his own legacy?"

"Some sixty years ago, Madara thought the Uchiha betrayed him when we wanted peace alongside the Senju."

"Then maybe it makes sense for him to kill his clan. But you… I can't explain why you'd do it."

The silence hung. Itachi did not relieve it with an explanation. Kisame's luck had run out and Itachi returned taciturn.

Kisame looked around. It was well into the night. Itachi probably did not like this exposed beach for a campsite. "Where should we sleep?"

Itachi signaled their departure by standing. "I noted a possibility on my way."

Kisame looked out into the blackness. "You can see in this?"

Red eyes gleamed. "Moderately."

Kisame took a torch from the fire for himself, washed the evidence into the waves, and followed Itachi.

With the starfield and ocean on his left, Kisame followed the small swift shadow through the dark hemisphere along the rocky coast. Itachi sprang down the sharp rocks with the same limberness of the Leaf Anbu, and he realized the boy had spent his formative years among their ranks. Kisame felt somewhat clumsier, hindered by the dark and a torch. They found themselves in a tidal cave which overlooked the sea, with shallow tide pools on its sharp floor. He peered into one: an octopus wilted into the cracks at his face.

"Need we be concerned about the tide?" Itachi asked him.

Kisame noted the lack of algae on the wall and the height of the moon. "No."

Itachi leaned his back against the sharp wall and let his legs sink. Kisame doused his torch in an unoccupied tidepool. With the moonlight that reflected in flashing tortoise-shells from the ocean, he could see the silver edge of Itachi's short, angular face.

Itachi stared at him for a moment, as if deciding to say something. He said, "Good night, Kisame."

Kisame was caught off guard. But he too formed his lips around the strange words. "Good night, Itachi."

Itachi closed his eyes and Kisame leaned himself on the wall opposite him. But now Kisame was watchful, and for a while he stayed awake to the sounds of waves. Comforting, hollow sounds, that like the breaths of ghosts, reminded him of a home that no longer existed.

Author's Note:

Thanks for reading!

I am looking for a new Beta for this story. If you are 18+ and might be interested in looking over this story with me for style and plot, please write me a message. I'd love to have a partner to make this piece as strong as it can be. Thanks!

And if you like reading this, please do let me know your thoughts!

Steadfast,

Kelto

#Campfires #sorry im a few days late i had to find a new place to live #and rent an apartment in a language i dont speak legalese of #But I did it because I am unkillable!#and also im flying home for christmas which will be nice #I am also looking for a new beta for this story so please let me know if you are interested #its a lot of fun I think!#thanks for reading #naruto #fanfiction #itachi #kisame #kisaita #celticfeather #keltodier #And again this is super M rated but I guess this chapter is as bad as the story gets

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laurens-lil-fics · 6 years ago

Text

Love Hate Part 2 - Owen Grady x Reader

Summary: Owen seeks out an old friend before leaving on Claire’s rescue mission.

Word Count: 2674

Part 1

Warnings: Some cursing, some angst. Fluffy shit. Some spoilers!

Author’s note: I finally busted this one out! Decided to give it a fluffy ending since I think we all needed one. I really wanna write more family stuff in the future.

Owen remembered everything. Seeing Claire in front of his soon-to-be-cabin brought it all back to him. Those memories he’d been trying to hard to repress, him, Claire, the boys… (Y/n).

After Claire left him alone at the bar he sat there, alone with his thoughts as he had been for the past 3 years. He hadn’t seen (Y/n) since the incident.

Once they both had a moment alone he told her everything. How he felt, how long he had been feeling that way. Maybe it was the predator that had almost ripped them apart, but he wanted her to know. Maybe it would lead to something more.

But (Y/n) only stared at him in disbelief before standing and walking away. He couldn’t blame her, after the events prior of his confession of course she’d be too shaken up to respond. But even once they made it to the mainland she turned away from him when he approached her.

Owen didn’t know much about her, but he knew she was at least somewhat nearby. A quick google search with the help of the bar’s shitty wifi gave him an address to her work. It looked like she was working from home… at least she was keeping busy.

Finishing his beer, he paid his tab and left.

It was about a half hour drive to her place, and he knew it was the right address when he saw her outside, tightening the screws on the little sign outside.

(L/N) PRIVATE SECURITY AND PROTECTION.

Owen scoffed to himself and climbed out of his truck, alerting both (Y/n) and the large, black pitbull at her side.

“Closed for today, unless you have an emergency we’ll be open tomorrow at 10.” She called over her shoulder, focusing on her sign.

The pitbull slowly stood and approached Owen, taking him in as he approached. A low growl had Owen laughing sheepishly and raising his hands at the dog.

“Eaaasy, doggy. I don’t have any treats for you or anything…” He said, glancing at (Y/n) who was now watching him.

“Gimme a reason why I shouldn’t sick Stella on you right now.” She grunted, standing and tossing the screwdriver into the bag of tools at her feet.

“Would you believe me if I said I wanted to take you to dinner…?” He asked, letting down his guard once Stella turned to (Y/n).

(Y/n) kneeled beside the dog, gently cupping her slobbery cheeks while she ordered her to go to her kennel.

Owen noticed the nasty scars stretched across her left bicep and bit his lip.

The ACU squads were dropping like flies, the heart monitors on the giant screen in the control room were flatlining one by one. It was like something out of a horror movie.

Owen could hear the screams covering (Y/n) yelling for what was left of her unit to fall back. He watched her through her POV camera, how she fired at the Indominus to take it’s attention off the remaining squad members.

The Indominus swiped at her, her camera went black. Her heart rate skyrocketed and Owen felt his heart drop to his stomach when he heard her scream echo in the control room.

Her camera was broken but her headset mic worked just fine, so Owen could hear every last scream and grunt and prayer while he watched one of the last survivors attempt to drag her to safety.

With another scream the person carrying her was torn away from (Y/n). The last time he actually saw her was through a random body’s camera.

She was crawling under the thick, raised roots of a tree, pressing her hand to her mouth to stifle her sobs. The Indominus approached the tree, slowly lowering its head to peek under the tree.

(Y/n) sobbed harder and pressed herself into the tree, just out of the Rex’s reach.

Owen snatched the headset from Lowery, hoping (Y/n) could hear him as he spoke into the mic.

“(Y/n) just hold on! I’m coming for you, I’m gonna be right there, wait for me!”

(Y/n) didn’t really remember running out from under the tree. She just remembered somehow ending up at the waterfall with a tourniquet around the upper part of her left arm.

Owen remembered feeling his stomach twist into knots when the tree was vacant. Soon enough Claire pointed out her footprints, but that didn’t help the sinking feeling he was getting.

It was the same feeling he had right now when (Y/n) caught him staring at her scars.

“You come here just to look at the freakshow? Or are you actually here to take me out?” she asked, standing as Stella trotted off to her kennel.

Owen scratched at the back of his head awkwardly, shrugging slightly. “I mean, I wanna talk about some other stuff too, but we can talk about it over some steak… Or burgers? That’s all that’s really out here, huh?” he rambled on.

(Y/n) cocked an eyebrow at him, resting her hands on her hips. “So this isn’t about dinner…”

“No no, cmon. Let’s go, you know I’m buying.” he said, shifting under her gaze.

“I’m not going anywhere till you tell me what this is really about.” she insisted.

Owen sighed to himself, scratching the back of his head. “Look, you’ve heard about Claire’s hippy thing right? The Save the Dinosaurs campaign?”

(Y/n) rolled her eyes, turning to walk to her cabin. “I’m not donating to your girlfriend’s dead charity, Owen.”

Owen quickly grabbed her arm, turning her to face him. “I’m not asking for donations, and she’s not my girlfriend-”

“Remove your hand before I remove it for you.” She cut in, glancing between him and his hand.

Owen quickly pulled his hand back, resting it on his hips.

“She came to me asking if I’d go on this suicide rescue mission… But I need someone there that I trust if I’m gonna go through with it.”

“You’re not serious.” (Y/n) said, shaking her head at him. “This is some sad joke and you’re not actually asking me to go with you.”

Owen shook his head, sighing softly. “I wish I was. (Y/n) no one ever… ever had my back like you did. Despite your nagging and the fighting and yelling, you always had my back. If I’m gonna do this I need someone like that with me. Someone who I know I can count on in a tight spot.”

(Y/n) scoffed, looking him over. “No… fuck no… Im not going back, fuck no and fuck you for even asking me.” she began walking back to her cabin, only for Owen to grab her once again.

“(Y/n) cmon, if not for me then for Claire!”

“Yeah well fuck Claire too!” she snapped, turning and pushing him with all her might, managing to force him back. “You both ruined my life!”

Owen stayed silent, watching her collect herself before sitting on her porch steps.

“You both left me to die in that jungle…” She trailed off, unconsciously rubbing at the scars on her arms. “You can say as much as you want that you came looking for me… But you only came for the boys…”

Owen sat beside her, making sure to leave enough room between the two of them so she wouldn’t be uncomfortable. “I did come for you, (Y/n)... You had no idea how scared I was when you weren’t under that tree… I thought I’d lost you.”

(Y/n) smiled bitterly and looked up at him, brushing her hair behind her ear. “Then after everything was over, when I brought the boys back it was like I was invisible. To both of you. I never got so much as a thank you.

“I thought she and I were close, we respected each other… But you were the one she thanked when her nephews were back home, safe. I almost bled out in the jungle, cold and in pain to save those kids... No one ever acknowledged that.”

The two grew silent, both processing everything (Y/n) had just said.

Owen hated all the press he got after the incident. He hated being paraded around, being called a hero, it was all bullshit to him. He never realized through all that (Y/n) was made out to be a victim and nothing more.

“I bet Zack and Gray don’t feel that way…” Owen said, carefully moving closer to her. “Zack’s probably at college right now… Grey’s in high school… They probably think about you every day.”

(Y/n) smiled to herself and looked down at her feet, jumping when Stella ran from her kennel to join the two.

“Is that really the only reason you want me out there? To watch your back” she asked, glancing at Owen as the pitbull rested her head in (Y/n)’s lap.

Biting his lip Owen rested his eyes on Stella, who had been watching him like a hawk. “I wanted to see you again… At least if you said no I’d be able to see how you were holding up after everything. Maybe figure out why you never called…”

(Y/n) sighed softly, shaking her head as she spoke. “We always fought like cats and dogs… I felt like you just hated me cuz I bossed you around… A really weird day got even weirder when you told me how you felt.”

“I didn’t hate you,” he shook his head, carefully scratching Stella’s head, “I didn’t like getting bossed around, yeah… Maybe I did hate you, a little bit… But I didn’t wanna see you gone. You made the job worth it.”

(Y/n) smiled slightly and finally met his gaze.

A moment passed before (Y/n) sighed and looked down at Stella. “Lets go get that dinner… If I die out there I’m gonna be wined and dined before I leave.”

“So you’re comin then?” Owen’s lips quirked up into a small smile.

“You’ll die without me, Mr. Grady… When do we leave?” she asked.

“Claire says there’s a plane leaving tomorrow morning. I dunno if drinking’s the best idea…” he murmured, pulling the keys to his truck from his pocket.

“Then we better get started.”

“Maise… Maise you’re choking me…” (Y/n) wheezed, earning a soft whine from the young girl who was currently on her back with her arms around her throat.

“I got her…” Owen mumbled, carefully taking her off (Y/n) and cradling her in his arms. “Where should I put her?”

“She can sleep in my bed… It’s right down that hall, first door on the left.” (Y/n) mumbled, dropping her and Maise’s bag beside the door of her home.

Owen nodded, wandering off into the small cabin (Y/n) had called home. Maise curled up in his arms, humming in her sleep once he laid her in the queen sized bed. He took off her little converse and tucked her in, smiling softly as she started snoring.

Returning to the living room, he found (Y/n) laid out on the couch, a beer in one hand and her head in the other.

(Y/n) glanced up at him, tossing an unopened bottle his way and moving her legs off the couch.

He plopped down beside her and sighed deeply, opening the bottle and taking a swig, suddenly feeling a wave of exhaustion hit him.

The two sat in silence, sitting flush against the opposite ends of the couch, neither really knowing what to say.

“... Did we really have to let out the carnivores too…?” (Y/n) piped up, finishing her beer.

Owen stayed silent for a moment before snorting and chuckling, glancing at her as she pulled another bottle from the six pack beside the foot of the couch.

“You sure you’re fine looking after Maise…?”

“I feel like she’ll be safest with me, don’t you?” (Y/n) shrugged, watching Owen relax into the couch. “Besides… I wasn’t as high profile as you and Claire after the incident… No one would really think to look for her with me, right?”

Owen finished his beer and sighed deeply, nodding as he set his empty bottle on the nearby coffee table. “Yeah I guess you’re right… but say someone does come lookin for her-”

“You’ll be the first one I call.” (Y/n) cut in, giving him a slight smile.

Owen smiled back and turned to fully face her, draping his arm over the side of the couch.

“Yknow you were right…” he trailed off, taking the beer she offered him and nodding in thanks. “I woulda died without you.”

“If this is about the jungle… Anyone would have done that, Owen. If Claire were there she would-”

“But it wasn’t just anyone with me, (Y/n). It was you.” He interrupted, setting his beer on the coffee table and moving closer to her. “You carried my tranqued ass through the jungle… You got me out of there in one piece… Yeah, Claire could have done that, or Zara or Franklin. But they didn’t… You were there for me.”

A smile slowly broke out onto her features and (Y/n) looked down at her lap.

“I was an idiot. I didn’t really know what I wanted-” (Y/n) pressed her lips to Owen’s before he could continue. Owen slowly closed his eyes and leaned into the kiss, unable to mask his disappointment when (Y/n) pulled away a moment later.

“You were an idiot… But I was too. We shouldn’t waste anymore time tip-toeing around each other. I know what I want… Do you?”

Owen nodded eagerly and pulled her close, cupping the back of her neck with one hand and her waist with the other. Their lips met, clouding the rest of the world around them as Owen laid her back onto the couch.

(Y/n)’s beer clattering to the floor wasn’t enough to separate them, but the small patter of bare feet on the hardwood floor had Owen leaping off her.

“(Y/n) can I have a glass of water?” Maise asked, unaware of what had been going on in the living room prior to her arrival.

“Yeah! Yeah of course, sweetie. Lemme grab that for you.” (Y/n) scrambled off the couch and went to the kitchen, leaving Maise alone with Owen.

“How ya doin, kiddo?” Owen coughed, picking the forgotten bottle off the floor while Maise circled around the couch and sat down.

“I had a bad dream…” she frowned, her groggy state leaving her oblivious to the light tint to Owen’s cheeks. “I miss my grandpa.”

Owen frowned and set the empty bottle down before sitting beside her. He wrapped his arm around her small frame and gently rubbed her shoulder. “Hey now, you can stay up with me and (Y/n) if you want… I’m sure she’s got something we can watch until you start feeling tired again. Does that sound good?”

Maise smiled softly and leaned into him, eagerly nodding her head and thanking him.

(Y/n) returned with Maise’s glass of water and smiled, sitting on the opposite side of Maise and turning on the TV. “You guys mind if I scooch in here?”

Maise wrapped her arms around (Y/n) and rested her head against her chest and her legs on Owen’s lap.

The two adults stole a glance at each other, smiled, and looked back at the tv. Normally Owen would be upset about the interruption, but some some reason he couldn’t wipe the smile from his face. He had been waiting so long for (Y/n) to be in his life, now she was, along with an extraordinary little girl who already had his heart in her little hands.

All that was missing was Blue. She was somewhere out there. Maybe she’d come back, maybe she wouldn’t. If she did, Owen felt at peace knowing she would have a new family to come home to.

#Owen Grady #owen grady x reader #owen grady imagine #owen grady fanfiction #owen grady fic #chris pratt #jurassic world #jurassic world fic

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whipped-for-kpop-fics · 6 years ago

Text

Protection Squad - Ten

10/15

A kind woman offers you a place of work at the animal shelter she owns and one of the animals seems to take a strong liking to you. You thought Suga was just like any other cat you happened to meet in therapy. You realise how wrong you were when he reveals his true self to you in order to do everything he can to prevent anything hurting you ever again.

Pairing- Reader (Y/N) x Suga [or is it… :)) ]

Genre - Shapeshifter!BTS & magic AU

Warning- multiple possible triggers; Mental disorders talked about and portrayed (depression, anxiety , suicidal thoughts and acts) abuse . near death . plus possibly more . If you are uncertain if you can read, privately message me about what you wish to avoid and I’ll tell you if the story contains it.

Protection Squad Masterlist

Shelter Layout

All at once, consciousness greeted you. The first thing you noticed was that you couldn't feel your hands or any of your left arm. For a moment, you panicked, thinking some kind of irreversible damage had occurred to you but then you shuffled and realised you were laid on your arm which is why it was dead. A little more movement told you your hands were tied together behind your back, a little too tightly hence the lack of feeling. As carefully as you could, you resituated your body until you managed to sit up, realising that your ankles were also tied together. Looking down, you saw rope making your restraints.

A low groan made you jump and your eyes shot up to see a naked male on the floor opposite you. Your eyes widened at the sight. Much like you, he was restrained but in comparison, your rope and tied limbs looked like paradise. He had metal chains wrapped around his wrists and ankles, what looked like barbed wired threaded within the chains. It was only then you noticed the dried blood on his body, especially around where the metal touched his body. Another loop of barbed chain wrapped twice around his slim waist, either end either connecting to the chains on his wrists or ankles.

Pure horror shot through your veins, turning your blood to ice finding three loops of barbed chain wrapped tightly around his throat.

"Ohmygod." You breathed out in a distressed whisper, your hands automatically coming up to cover your mouth, afraid of who might hear your words.

As you realised what had lead you to this moment, the male in front of you suddenly mattered so much less and your head whipped from side to side in search of your companion that you could only hope was still breathing.

Hobi was nowhere to be found and fear welled further up your throat making you feel sick to your stomach.

"No no no no, where is he?" You spoke shakily, forcing yourself up onto your knees to look around the area.

The place you were in didn't even register in your mind. You could've been in a castle and you still wouldn't have noticed, you were too preoccupied with thoughts of Hobi.

As it happens, you were not in a castle but unlike most kidnapping horror stories, you were not in a dingy run down warehouse located in some remote place far away from civilisation with blood stains on the floor. The walls around you were white, the floor and ceiling too. On the other side of the room stood a large metal bench, one similar to the one in the medical office at the shelter but this one had multiple thick leather restraints attached. Behind the bed stood tall a cupboard from floor to ceiling. Beside that a wall mounted rack full of terrifying tools, some looked medical, some looked made for DIY and some pure medieval torture devices. But, you didn't notice any of that.

You realised that besides you and the naked man, the room was empty. As hope began to tingle within at the thought of having a fighting chance, your eyes finally settled on the bars surrounding you and the man. You were in a cage that took up half the room. A crude toilet in one corner consisting of a bucket with a roll of paper beside it.

"Fuck, no." Your voice turned desperate and you fell back against the wall to sit on your backside, holding your knees up against your chest. "What the fuck am I going to do?"

The man groaned again but you were too busy both internally and externally panicking to pay him any attention, at least until he yelped in pain, shocking you back to the present situation.

"D-don't move." You managed to stammer out and he froze. "It's barbed." But, he didn't listen and turned, rolling painfully on the chains, wincing as the spikes dug further into his flesh just so he could look at you. His eyes widened and you could see nothing but fear and pain in his orbs.

"No...Y/N..." He whispered and your heart stopped for a second. "No, why did they have to take you too?" He shuffled closer to you on his side but you moved further away causing him to stop. "I won't hurt you, fuck, the last thing I'd ever want is to hurt you."

"How do you know my name?!" You demanded, all rationality flying out the window. This naked man before you was a complete stranger, you were certain you hadn't even seen him fleetingly in the streets. Strangely enough, though, his voice struck something within your mind, it sounded familiar but for the life of you, you didn't understand why.

"Oh...shit." Realisation washed over his features and he pushed himself up carefully into a seating position, once again ignoring the metal piercing his body. "This is never how you should've found out."

"Found out what?!"

"About me, about Yoongi, about Jungkook and Jimin and Namjoon and Seokjin and Taehyung."

"Y-Yoongi?" Despite the situation being so dire, at the mention of his name, your heart hurt. "Y-you know him?" He nodded. "Who are you?" Your voice was quiet again. You didn't have it in you to yell anymore.

"I'm Hoseok." Your eyes blew wide at the mention of Yoongi's best friend. "Has Yoongi mentioned me?" It was your turn to nod. "Okay, that's good." He smiled awkwardly. "I never wanted to meet you like this." He motioned to his body, only then realising he was naked. "Ah, that's even worse." Somehow, he laughed lightly and you wondered what kind of guy could find any kind of humour in the situation you found yourselves in.

"What about you all?" You prompted. "Are you guys involved in something? Is this gang stuff?"

"What?" He barked out a laugh and you frowned. "No, Y/N, we're not involved with the mafia or gangs or anything bad. We're all just normal guys well, I mean, ignoring our nonhuman sides."

"Your what?"

"We...We're all shapeshifters, Y/N." You stared for a moment before glaring angrily. "I know, we should've told you a long time ago but Yoo-"

"Fuck off." Hoseok clamped his mouth shut. "What kind of a fucking idiot do you take me for? Fucking shapeshifters?!" You laughed humourlessly, the sound is only dry and dark. Hoseok swallowed at the noise, you had never sounded like that and he wanted it to go. Honestly, angry Y/N kind of scared him. "This isn't a movie, Hoseok, fuck, is that even your name? Are you one of them, working to try and get something from me? Well, I can tell you, I have nothing of worth to anyone. If you want to kill me, just do it, I'm done with my life."

"W-what?" He paled at your confession. "No, Y/N." Ignoring your shuffles to get away from him, Hoseok moved over to grip your hands in both of his, his eyes suddenly looking so broken and distraught. "No, you can't be done with your life. You have so much to give. Seokjin-hyung is going to teach you to be a vet. You can help so many animals like you helped Bob!"

"H-how do you know that?"

"I told you, I'm Jung Hoseok, best friend to Min Yoongi." He smiled but it was full of pain. "He'd hate to hear you talk like this."

"He'd hate to hear me talk full stop, Hoseok." You scoffed. "But none of this is important, tell me the truth, Hoseok, none of that shapeshifting bullshit."

"It's not bullshit, Y/N, I swear. All seven of us are shapeshifters." You only stared at him, still not believing his words, jaw tense. "We weren't born this way, we were human at one point but something happened to us all and now we have animal DNA within us. We can take on the form of the animal but it's all us, we just have their bodies. At first, the animal is sort of a quiet presence in our heads, like a humming, but it fades with time." He could see that you didn't believe him and looked down at his hands, pulling them from your own. "You see this?" He showed you the mark on his right palm. It looked eerily familiar to you. "You recognise it, don't you?" An honest nod moved your head in confirmation. "Every shapeshifter has this mark somewhere on their body in both forms. Mine if on my right palm and my front right paw." Then it hit you, why it was so familiar. Your eyes snapped back up to him and he smiled softly. "Yeah."

"Hobi." You muttered and he nodded. "No way."

"I'm Hobi, Y/N. I've been by your side almost every day for months. I was with you at the park, I saw him approach you from behind and tried to run to you but the other guy, he roped me and tranquilised me."

"Why? Why would they do this?"

"Shapeshifters are insanely fucking valuable on the black market. It's partly an ownership thing and partly some fucked up fetish. Some shifters can just change part of their bodies on demand so cat and dog-shifters are especially highly sought after, for the ears and tails."

"Furries." You spoke without even meaning to and Hoseok cracked up.

"Yeah, furries." He grinned, no longer noticing the wire digging into his throat every time he spoke or moved. You did though as fresh blood trickled out from the wounds and down his bare skin.

"Why would they do this to you? This is barbaric." You reached up to run your fingertips just under the bottom row of spines in his throat.

"I can't shift without ripping myself apart." He explained. "But don't worry too much, once it's off, I'll heal fine, the spikes aren't too deep in, nowhere near far enough to do any major damage, I'd not get them money dead or badly damaged."

"Why are you so calm about this?!" You shrieked in disbelief. Practically all fear had left Hoseok and he looked pretty much indifferent.

"Freaking out won't benefit me. It'll only use up energy and make you freak out too."

"Oh..right." You nodded and although it felt practically impossible, you started to calm down. "Do we know anything about the situation?" You asked, looking around to really take in the room that time knowing that Hobi/Hoseok was right in front of you.

"No." Hoseok frowned, turning to look around too. "I imagine they'll torture me for information. You're innocent in this and they figure you know nothing."

"Okay." You nodded before speaking again. "They'll kill me when they get what they want from you, won't they?" Hoseok didn't answer so you looked back at him. His whole body was stiff. "It's okay, I'm not delusional, I know that I'm a liability, that's the only reason they brought me along. They couldn't leave me at the park, I'd alert people to your kidnapping and I saw the guy that grabbed you, I could point the finger and get them caught."

"I don't want to admit how right you are. I don't want anything to happen to you." Hoseok looked desperate at the thought of any harm coming to you but you just shrugged and looked back around the room. "Do you-do you really not care if you die?" You only answered with another shrug as you had spotted a blanket just outside of the cage and got up on your knees to shuffle over. "Y/N." Hoseok's voice reflected his desperation for your safety but you ignored him to squeeze your arms through the gap to grasp the material.

It took a good few tries before you managed to have a good enough grip and pull it through the bars. You went straight back to Hoseok and carefully wrapped the material around his body.

"You take it, shapeshifters run higher than humans," he muttered, trying to fight your hands weakly but you glared at him. He quickly lowered his arms to allow you to finish bundling him up.

"You're naked, Hoseok, you need this more than I do." He made a face showing he was uncertain. "Fine, if not for the sake of warmth, keep it for the sake of me not having to see your penis flapping around everytime you move."

"Oh." Red painted his face and he had the decency to look away in embarrassment while clutching the blanket tighter to his body. "Sorry."

"Not your fault." You settled back down, eyes still scanning the room for anything that could be of use to you two.

"Actually, it is, I never wear clothes when I know I'm going to shift." You looked at him curiously. "The others do but, I prefer to just be naked anyway no matter my form." He chuckled.

"You can wear clothes when you shift?"

"Yeah. Of course, you can never see them but they become like another layer of skin under fur or whatever."

"Oh, they don't get damaged?"

"Only if we get injured." You made a noise of consideration but said nothing and returned to your task of looking around. "What are you doing?"

"Looking for something useful."

"There's nothing, they won't leave anything close enough that could benefit us in any way."

"Blanket."

"That's different."

"How?"

"It's not a weapon or escape tool."

"We could wrap it around someone's throat and strangle them to death," Hoseok said nothing so once again, your attention returned to him.

"Honestly, I think I'm kind of more scared of you right now more than our kidnappers." He chuckled and your lips twitched up into a smile. "You're taking this all pretty well."

"Like you said, no point freaking out, it'll only use up energy and rub off on the other."

"You're trying to plan an escape."

"Well...I've got to do something. I can't just sit here and not keep my mind busy or else I will go crazy."

"True." Hoseok moved closer until he was sat shoulder to shoulder with you and also looked out around the room.

For a good ten minutes or so, you both surveyed the room carefully, discussing potential ideas but inevitably shooting them down upon talking them out until the dead end.

A click of a key echoed around the room so you both looked over at the door as it opened. In walked the man you saw grab Hobi. Your body tensed up at the sight of the man and Hoseok moved closer to you, placing his hand on your high comfortingly so you calmed knowing getting angry would not be worth it. But the second the next man entered the room, nothing Hoseok could do would possibly calm you.

"J-Jeremy?"

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secretadventuresociety · 3 years ago

Text

Episode 30 Recap

It’s that time again, SASholes! I’m Bren, resident SAStorian and Kü enthusiast. Welcome to Episode 30: Fire and Bone.

“Who Broke the Sky?”

On the walk back from the Night Market, our heroes take in the bright swirls of the aurora in the Mardosta welkin. Despite the heaviness of the evening, the sight brings on conversation about the coming festival-- which will necessitate new clothes and money to buy them with. Kess makes sure to impress upon Pearce that he can’t wear his red paint-stained mask, and so the gunslinger turns to Kü and asks if he would take off his helmet; his reasoning being that it would be ‘weird’ if he wore it. Now, I know what you’re doing here, Shooty Boy, and it’s admirable. However, if you ever tell my son how to dress again I will rip your character sheet up in front of you. ANYWAY. The matter is dropped as the party’s attention once again returns to gold (and honestly? Mood.) and they decide to go seek out Norse and Arthur to find out if they found the note and attached moolah that Pearce accidentally slid under their door. They find the couple lounging on their floor-- the whole floor that they have to themselves-- with cocktails in hand. Arthur immediately offers them a ‘Mardosta Mule’, which excites Kü. He turns to Pearce and exclaims that he’s had horses and donkeys, but never this ‘newfangled fusion’.

As they all get turnt, Norse admits she did find the letter and assures the group she did NOT tell Brienne about it, just in case. Relieved, Kess explains the mix-up, then asks what her elders DID tell the detective. Norse reports that they were relatively honest, up until the point where they were questioned about Xarus’ presence in the house. They covered well, however, telling the investigator that he came to work with one of Kess’ brothers. The investigation does not seem to be closed, but the parents think that they are in the clear for now. Kess asks about Vendreth’s reaction, and Norse isn’t as forthcoming. All she will say is that he was fine, just upset that he wasn’t told sooner. Placated, the adventurers start in on their Madosta experiences, which to be fair, are limited because of… you know… all the murder. In any case, it makes a perfect venue for distraction as Pearce and Kess allow the nine year old kobold to drink TWO mules-- which for his body weight HAS to be more like TWENTY-TWO mules-- so that they can possibly talk him into removing his helmet. His skull. His-- skull helmet. Skelmet.

Kü gets to the point where the alcohol is giving him the sads instead of a buzz (which, RELATABLE, amirite?) and he tells everyone he’s just trying to ‘not think about how I feel or feel about how I think’ and realizes the mule is donkey-kicking him right in his racehorse heart. I think I tried too hard on that last sentence but I’m leaving it. Fuck you. In an attempt to make Kü feel better, Kess brings out one of our favorite callback jokes-- the singing bass. She tosses it at the kobold and in his drunken haze he bites at the writhing meat, coming away with a mouthful of dead scales. Did you guys know that thing was an actual, enchanted fish? ANYWAY. With this being the nail in the coffin of the worst day of Kü’s life (which INCLUDES his mom dying), our little buddy nopes out to sleep off the alcohol, leaving Pearce and Kess to their own devices.

The Suicide Squad

Being wary of the dozing kobold, Pearce quietly tells Kess that if Brienne comes after Kü to incarcerate him; he would take the fall for him. Kess counters that they probably have ways to see if he’s telling the truth-- but then realizes that they could eliminate the problem altogether if they separated the being from Kü. The fishsticks from earlier betray our druid-- the combination of the grease and stress forcing them from her stomach and onto the nice guest room floor. She flings a sidelong look at Kü and decides that their ‘stealth speak’ may not be enough to escape Mother’s… uh. Not ears, but-- whatever an evil being uses to listen. I didn’t take Eldritch Anatomy. The pair take off toward the greenhouse, Kess instinctively leading to the place she feels most at home. Once inside, they rehash all that they know about Skugamor.

Pearce looks at the scene around him, soil spotted with Kess’ white flowers with the black iris, and he takes off the dried remains of the one he picked and places it with the others. He asks if Ashe is of a similar type as Mother, and Kess denies it. She says that she thinks her power isn’t tied to the being, but it does help him in some way. This inspires her to grow a flower to try and talk to Ashe to get help with their situation, but no answer comes. Pearce, irate, takes hold of it like a microphone and shouts into it, obscenely demanding attention. In a panic, Kess draws the rest of her strength and grows another flower-- and when it only waves in response, an insidious idea blooms. The changeling tells Pearce she saw Ashe when she was dead (unconscious), and without further explanation the gunslinger refuses to help one of his best friends die (get knocked tf out). He does, however, offer to take her to Rook’s room (you know, where the poison is— the poison to kill Kess. Kess’ poison. THAT poison) so that they have someone else to assist should the whole dying (slight coma) thing go wrong.

As they’re headed back into the house already, the duo go into the guest room to let Kü know their plans. Pearce wakes up the kobold and Kess breathlessly explains her brain blast, asking him if he wants to join them. The sleep immediately leaves Kü’s drooping eyes as rage fills its place. His voice booms with pain and accusation-- unbelieving that she could even think of killing herself (taking a quick nap with no breathing) because of him, especially after she told him she wouldn’t leave him the way that Jendee, Dorf, Augustus, and his mother had. He pointedly asks her ‘Do you know how I would feel if you died trying to fix me? Not that I NEED fixing” and as the anger gives way to sadness, he mutters that he was better off asleep. Effectively having talked Kess out of being near-suicidal, Kü takes this opportunity to relieve himself of his party’s company while he cools off. He storms out and starts to stalk the halls for his nightly watch.

Küdini

Now alone, Kü registers Mother attempting to speak with him. She extinguishes all the firelight around him, and the kobold lets loose a bloodcurdling scream for help. Kess and Pearce emerge from the guest room, the former running to all of her relative’s rooms to ensure their safety, and the latter posting up beside Kü. Everyone on their floor seems to be fine, but before they can let a sigh of relief loosen from their lungs, a scream rings out from downstairs. If you’re feeling deja vu, rest assured, it’s about to get REAL different. Pearce yells at Kü to go outside, but as he tries to comply, it’s soon clear that he and his party members are dashing toward the scream instead of going their separate ways. The lights continue to go out as they bolt through the halls-- stopping finally as the group comes to see two hired hands; one standing frozen in horror… and one being constricted by shadows.

Not knowing what to do, Kü tries to counterspell the tendrils of darkness. When nothing happens, he instead casts fly on himself and throws his tiny body at the Drow chef in front of him-- who is suspended in midair, choking from the pressure on his throat. He succeeds, but only inasmuch as he gets him on the ground. Kü watches as the light dies in the chef’s eyes-- not unlike the lantern fires that now flicker to life around them. Kess, acting quickly, brings out a diamond and uses Revivify to save the fallen housemate. The druid then heals him for good measure; giving him no time to recover from his experience before she and Pearce give him food and drink before asking him to recount the events of the night. He doesn’t remember much, and before the two can dig in deeper, Norse pulls Kess aside to ask what the actual fuck is going on.

Her daughter tells her about Mother, about Kü’s past, about their current predicament. She fears Kü is a warlock, and that the shadowy magic comes from his patron, who is wreaking havoc in their home. Mind clouded by fury, Norse reveals that she was plotting to kill Xarus already, and with this secret out-- a wave of calm washes over her-- and she marvels at Kess having enough magic within her to save a life. It’s then that Norse ushers the younger Shadowmore away to check on her friends. She sees Pearce, and they link up to head outside for Kü. However, once there, they see no trace of him. He’s vanished.

I’ll Fly Away

Unbeknownst to anyone, Kü used the remainder of his Fly spell to escape soundlessly from the Shadowmore manor. It carries him to the treeline of Mardosta, and once it fails, he falls into the snow, sobbing. His shaking arms reach up and lift the helmet from his head-- bringing it to face him. Nothing happens, and the kobold tries to form one word. His heavy heart crushes the ‘why’ rising from his gut, and he lays down on the unforgiving snow. Kü squeezes the skull to his chest and sleep claims him. The green and purple of the aurora above stick behind his eyelids as they close. They twist into a nightmare of screams, slaughter, and ash until everything goes still; melting into a small campfire. The warmth radiates from his mind to his body, and an excited voice calls out to him. Kü attempts to respond, but there is some sort of disconnect. The cry implores him to find them-- admitting they’ve been watching him for some time and are anxious to meet him.

Kü awakens, afraid and unsettled. He reaches out to Mother, who tells him that she’s tired and will talk to him in the morning. The kobold, however, has other plans. He refuses to wait, and Mother fumes at the fact that he thinks he is in any position to be demanding when he took away her kill, but she relents. She asks if Kü doesn’t want her to get stronger anymore, and he timidly replies that he does, but he needs to know who she really is. Her anger rises as she fires back the same question to him-- accusing him of not acting like himself, of being stupid. In recompense for his insolence, Mother tells him that now, HE needs to spill blood for her once a day. If he doesn’t, she will be forced to, and she won’t show any prejudice. Seeing no other way out, the kobold agrees, placing the skull back on his head and sits in silence. After a couple of hours watching the night sky, Kü grows hungry and he decides to try and make his way (SOMEHOW) back to the mansion.

While all this is happening, Kess and Pearce are panicking. Kess shapeshifts into a giant owl and persuades Pearce to hop on her back. In this higher vantage point, they find the missing kobold within twenty minutes, and Kess swoops down to intercept him. Kü assumes he is about to be eaten until he sees Pearce, and Kess drops her form before he can run away. Things escalate quickly from here, and I bet you can guess whose fault it is. Pearce whips out his gun and points it at Kü, assuring the kobold that he doesn’t want to hurt him, but he needs to remove the helmet. Kü relents, placing it on the ground. Kess and Pearce take in their friend’s visage for the first time. He sports small, nubby horns and a long, healed scar from the top of his head to his nose. The gunslinger asks for one reason not to shoot the skull, and Kü tells him he doesn’t think it would stop Mother. The two quickly realize, however, that Kü doesn’t need to be wearing the skull for his powers, which seems to soothe them somewhat.

Mommy Dearest

Because the hits to my heart never stop, Kü voices his decision to leave the group. He tells Kess and Pearce that he wants to go home to his cave, and they agree-- excited to go with him, thinking digging into his past may help. The kobold shakes his head and clarifies he wants to go alone; he is afraid their timers will go faster if they stay with him-- and that as long as he’s in Mardosta, people will continue to die. He realizes he can let go of his anger at Gus, who only left because he thought what he was doing was right. Pearce tells Kü he has effectively paused his timer; and he and Kess aren’t going anywhere. Kess says they can find a way to break it, but Kü dejectedly murmurs, “She’s the only one who won’t leave. I can’t let her leave; not again’. So-- they then discuss other options; Kü wonders if he can find a Scott-like douchebag (and Xarus, just saying) to take out every day to keep Mother away.

Kess brandishes the page she ripped from the library book and hands it to Kü. He sees the illustration of the struggling victim of the shadows but is unable to read the words; so he passes it off to Pearce to read for him. Afterward, Kess asks the kobold if he believes the entity in his mind to still be his mother. Kü launches into the story of what happened to his real mom in answer; saying that a giant spider had stalked him and that his mother gave up her life for his-- and months later he found her skull, picked clean from other scavengers. That’s when he heard her, telling him to pick up the skull and take her with him. Kess, unnerved by the story, switches back into her owl form and flies the trio to a cave she used to hide in-- covered in dusty furniture and knick knacks. They start a fire with the forgotten relics, and from the flames comes the voice that Kü heard in his dream. She introduces herself as Kertilios, encouraging Kü to call her Kerti. They are able to communicate this time, and Kü learns that she is the disowned daughter of Skugamor, the Goddess of Warmth, the Daughter of Firelight. She tells him they can get rid of Mother together, and he took an important first step by removing his helmet; they’ll need to destroy it.

Overwhelmed, Kü admits that his waking hours hadn’t been very good to him, and though the sleeping hours weren’t much better, he needed some time away from the hurt. The kobold hands off his helmet to Pearce and lies down by the fire. Pearce lets Kess sleep as well, watching the skull for an hour or two before the changeling rises from her sleep, unable to breathe. The gunslinger instinctively attempts to shoot the skull, throwing an apology to Kü as he does so. Kü, however, does not hear it-- his mind is an unending echo of questions. The Shadowmother heard Kü talking to Kerti, and she’s not happy. In terror, Kü makes an effort to banish Kess to another plane of existence long enough for her to be out of Mother’s grip, but it fails. Pearce continues attacking the resilient bone, and Kess shapeshifts to loosen the hold the shadows have on her. Out of magical options, Kü gives Mother a warning. He tells her, “Let go of my friend, you FUCKING BITCH”, and when she doesn’t, he pulls the last bead from his Necklace of Fireball and the helmet goes up in flames; Pearce narrowly missing secondhand damage. The shadows recede violently with a howl, and Kü drops to his knees, hearing a small “You’ve done it” from Kerti in his mind.

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TL;DR

I was not ready for Kü’s Molly Weasley moment, y’all.

I think this is an important time to mention that self-harm does not fix anything; even fantasy problems. *cough*Kess*cough*

Can we be done with the Sad now?? What do you mean we still have DADDY ISSUES to explore?!

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Hugs and Kesses my friends, and catch the next session over at twitch.tv/lochness on September 8th at 7:30CST/8:30EST! If you’d like to watch THIS episode, follow the link below:

Secret Adventure Society | Session 30: Fire and Bone

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sserpente · 8 years ago

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A/N: Request from anon. It took me so long, sorry. I was busy with life. :’)

Words: 1017 Warnings: none

It was alright, he was flirting all the time, it was alright.

Fine, it wasn’t. Clenching your fists angrily, you rolled your eyes as Captain Boomerang made another snarky comment about Poison Ivy’s beautiful ginger hair. To you, she looked like she had fallen into a red paint pot but given that she could strangle you to death with her stupid ivory tentacles, you decided to keep your mouth shut and remain in the background while Harley asked her for support and help concerning your new mission.

Your eyes were fixed on Captain Boomerang. The way he moved, the way his eyes darted from person to person, the way he played with the silver ring on his pinky finger… You knew all about his little flaws and habits already, for your favourite hobby among the infamous Suicide Squad was to secretly watch him.

Your crush was ridiculous, really. Actually, the Aussie wasn’t even your type but something about him made your legs go jelly every time he talked to you—and you attempted to get him to do just that as often as possible. Now, however, he was utterly ignoring you, instead exploring Poison Ivy’s barely covered body with greedy eyes. You resisted the urge to gag. What was so beautiful about her anyway? Technically, she was a plant.

“So you want to hide here?” She snapped just then.

“Temporarily.” Harley grinned and flicked her tongue as she crossed her arms, having you roll your eyes in response.

“I didn’t know she knew that word.” Deadshot murmured next to you. It elicited a sneaky grin from you but it faded as soon as Boomerang’s eyes suddenly landed on you. He raised an eyebrow as if he was curious about what you were laughing at, desperate to join the insider joke.

“Fine, you can stay,” Poison Ivy continued. “But by the end of the week you’re gone. I have important businesses to attend to, I ain’t no hostel for homeless people. Make yourself comfortable, just… don’t touch anything.”

Harley clapped her hands. “You’re the best!”

“Can we touch yuh?” Boomerang added innocently, winking at Poison Ivy as he did. This time you actually gagged, followed by an angry grunt.

“I wouldn’t recommend it. They don’t call me Poison Ivy for no reason, big boy.” And with that, she walked away, swinging her hips so much you feared she would lift herself off the ground.

Digger only shrugged his shoulders and turned. He was used to be given a knock-back. In the end, he bedded them all anyway.

You clenched your fists once more, feeling jealousy boiling in your stomach as you settled on an ivory green couch to get some sleep, only to be joined by your infamous crush himself only a moment after.

“Got some space fah me tah?”

“I guess that depends on how much space your insatiable ego needs.” You shot back, sounding crankier than you had intended to.

“Oi, what crawled up your arse an’ died?”

“Nothing, Boomer, just let me sleep.”

“Nah, yah tell me what’s goin’ on, yah always talk tah me so yah ain’t stoppin’ now.” Shifting, he managed to stare straight into your eyes, hypnotising you with his blue ones.

“Fine. I’m just fed up with you constantly flirting with half-naked women and screwing anything with a heartbeat.”

Shocked, the Aussie raised an eyebrow. His eyes widened and his lips parted, only the fraction of a second later, he started smirking so boldly you wanted to smack him.

“Wait a sec, are yah jealous?!”

“Fuck no.”

“Yuh’re jealous. Of course yuh are. Yuh’re jealous I keep screwin’ them an’ not yuh!”

“No! God damn it, I hate you!” Your eyes narrowed as you finally gave in the urge to punch him, he, however, seemed completely unaffected, instead laughed out so loud the whole Squad must have heard him.

“Alrigh’, alrigh’, arigh’, stop, (Y/N), stop, it’s alrigh’. I like yah, alrigh’? I like yah. Didn’t know about yuh though. Could’ve fooled me tah be the type fah rich an’ successful business men until yah ended up in this shithole just like the rest a’ us.”

Instantly, you stopped dead in your tracks. He… liked you?

“Are you… what? Are you serious? Is that some kind of joke?” Rich and successful business men. How could he think you were such a snob?

“Nah. I’m serious.”

“Then why are you doing this? If you like me and if you hoped that I would like you too, then why are you flirting with other women?!”

“Cos’ that’s what I am, luv. I ain’t got no relationship, I’m a free man.” Sinking back into the couch, you shook your head.

“Say you had a relationship…” You began hesitantly, testing what the words felt like on your tongue. A relationship with Captain Boomerang. That was… a dream, right? A dream that would never come true. You were a wallflower, after all.

“Then yah’d have me undah yah thumb.” He replied, winking at you in the process. Before you could respond anything else, he leaned forward, his hand gently grabbing your neck to pull you close. Then, his lips were on yours. Slowly and carefully at first, he kissed you so lightly you feared you were sleeping already, that you were dreaming that this handsome and cheeky man was kissing you. Your eyes fell shut as you pushed him back, your lips never leaving his, and dug your nails into his blue Captain jacket. Oh, it definitely was real.

“Wow, wow, wow, get a room you two! Yo, ese, you owe me a twenty, they’re making out!” Deadshot yelled, both disgusted and satisfied as he walked past the couch. You pulled away, glaring daggers at him. Had they been betting on you? Seriously?!

“Boomer and (Y/N) sitting on a tree. K I S S I N G.” Harley sang happily, jumping around in Poison Ivy’s lair like a doll. Boomerang rolled his eyes.

“Reckon there must a spare room somewhere here, what’yah think?”

“Before or after we beat them?”

“Both.” He replied, grinning cheekily as he did.

#captain boomerang #captain boomerang imagine #captain boomerang x reader #captain boomerang x you #suicide squad #suicide squad imagine #dc #dc imagine #george digger harkness #digger harkness #digger harkness imagine #digger harkness x you #digger harkness x reader #jai courtney

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superteenwolftrash · 8 years ago

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Chaos/Void Stiles Smut

Most of these are taken from my Wattpad account! (Twtrash01)

Send me requests for the following Fandoms: Teenwolf, Vampire Diaries, Dolantwins, OUAT(Peter Pan, Robbie Kay, Supernatural, Suicide Squad, The 100. Basically I’ll write for any fandom. I’ll write non-smut as well

So it's Friday and I'm being Basic and watching AHS on Netflix but I mean it's Evan Peters.

Anyway I'm just sitting here falling in love with a Psycho who kills people but hey it happens. Living in Beacon hills is very unusual you think after everything that has happened I'd be watching worlds cutest animals but no I have a thing for horror. Why am I alone on a Friday night? Well let me tell you everyone else is out looking for stiles but I wasn't allowed to go. Scott said I should stay in case stiles shows up at my house and why would he show up at my house may you Ask? Well because he's my boyfriend and you would think they would let me go look for him but nope no way I have to stay behind. But Lydia is allowed to go and I know she's a Banshee and all but ugh it doesn't even matter. I must have fallen asleep because it 3am and someone's knocking on my door and you bet I ran to that door and didn't even check. You'd think by now I'd know to look but Stiles is missing and I just wanted to find him. I opened the door and it was him only he didn't look totally like him he was pale and it looked like he hasn't slept in days but I didn't care I hugged him as tight as I could but he didn't hug back. "Stiles are you okay? What happened?" I said pulling him inside but he just smirked I remember Scott saying that it was possible that stiles could be possessed. "Oh my little Dove." He said caressing my cheek "Little Dove?" I chuckled Stiles has never called me that before "Stiles what's going on where were you Scott and everyone is out looking for you let me call them and tell them you're here." I said going to grab my phone but as I reached for it the phone sparked and the whole house went dark. "Y/N" he whispered but it came from every direction I knew this wasn't stiles. "What do you want?" I asked like every stupid girl in every horror movie. Cliché I know, "I want you. You are the one your poor little Stiles cares about the most and if I have you he won't fight me." I could feel him right in from of me and I reached my hand out in front of me and I felt his cold cheek. "I want to be with you." I said taking a breath and I could feel the smirk on his face. All the light came back on and he was gone. I felt something come over me as I searched for my phone it was something dark. I grabbed my phone "Call them and tell them to meet at Derek's little Dove" he said in my ear. I called Scott "Y/N we have stiles get to Derek's as you soon you can." He said before hanging up. I turned around to face him "Go there you know the plan." He said before kissing my lips lightly. I nodded and I grabbed my keys and drove to Derek's I knocked and the door immediately flung open it was Scott "Y/N are you okay?" He stared at me as soon as he said it Derek, Isaac, Allison, Lydia the entire pack came to the door and stared. "Of course I'm not okay Stiles has been missing." I say taking a step in "Where is he?" I said looking around. "What are you staring at?" I said to everyone "Y/N your face you don't look so good." Lydia said handing me a mirror. My face was pale as can be and my eyes I look exactly like the way Void Stiles looked. "It's the Nogitsune." I replied "Y/N how do you know about that?" Derek stepped up to me "Because she has it." I heard a familiar voice behind me. He stepped up to me and grabbed my hand "Y/N?" I say Stiles appear from the corner "Stiles it's not Y/N." Scott said And Allison pointed he bow at me. "tsk tsk I was really starting to like you." I said moving my hand and Allison was on the Ground Lydia and Scott Ran to her "Oh she's not dead just unconscious" Void Stiles said "Y/N please this isn't you." stiles said his chocolate brown eyes were filled with sadness but I felt nothing. Derek wolfed out and started coming at me "Derek Stop!" Stiles yelled but it was no use Derek Jumped at me and like that he was on the floor back to himself wincing in pain. The Nogitsune turned and grabbed my face and kissed me and I swear I heard stiles's heart break. "I'm going to kill you!" Stiles yelled "Jealous she'd rather be with me than will weak old you?" Void laughed, Allison woke up and that's when the Oni showed up. Everyone started battling the Oni. "Look at the chaos" void smirked "Isn't it just filling?" I chuckled. Scott got to us and he just looked at me and went after Void but it was no use. More of the Oni appears and Scott turned his attention to them. Stiles was no where to be found. Each oni was fighting one of the pack members they were all occupied. "It's time". Void whispered to me I leaned in and kissed him as I did the Oni all vanished and the packed turned their attention to us but as I was kissing Void I pulled out a Dagger from my sleeve and I stabbed him in the back but as I did I felt a sharp pain through my entire body and I looked down and there was an arrow sticking out of my stomach. Void turned to dust and as I felt my knees give out I felt arms around me and lower me to the ground. "Stiles" i choked out. Allison stood there she dropped her bow and fell to the ground. "Y/N" she whispered Scott ran to her "I'm so sorry I didn't know." She repeated over and over as she cried on his shoulder. She didn't know that I had my own plan to take care of the Void. "Y/N" stiles whispered "I'd n-never betray you. I-i love you" I coughed "I'm sorry I never thought you would God I'm so sorry I love you so much please don't leave me." Stiles cried "Scott!" He yelled and Scott came over and grabbed your hand "It's not working." He panicked "It doesn't hurt." I said before my eyes closed the last thing I heard was Lydia scream my Name. I opened my eyes on a silver table in what look to be a funeral home. I was in a dark blue dress and I didn't feel the same something was different. I sat up and the light it burned my eyes and I heard everything. I could hear Lydia and Allison crying outside the door. "Please we need to say goodbye." I hear Allisons broken voice. I got off the table and my bare feet hit the cold floor. "did you hear that?" I hear Scott say before the door opens. I don't know how but I ran so fast out the window. "She's gone." Scott Announced and everyone ran in but I was out of there. I died but I'm alive I'm so confused. The only place I knew to go to was Stiles's house I waited in his bedroom for what seemed like hours until I heard someone come through the front door. The bedroom door opened and Stiles gasped "Y/N?" He said in disbelief "Stiles." I stood up "How what you died." He said backing away from me "I don't know how any of this happened but I'm here." I said a tear falling from my face. I started to walk towards him "Stay back." He yelled "Stiles what's wrong?" I asked very upset "We need to figure out how you're here. Stay here I'll be back" I nodded and sighed at he left "Scott busted through the door and I wasn't startled because I heard him open the door downstairs "Y/N" he said shocked "Scott what the hell is happening?" I said standing up "We need to get you to The Animal hospital maybe Deaton can figure this out. I followed them to Stiles's jeep and stiles drove and Scott was in the passenger seat and I was in the back. Stiles wouldn't look at me but we finally got to the Hospital and Deaton put me under but I could still hear him. "This is the first I've ever seen of her kind." He said shocked "Her kind?" Stiles and Scott said in unison "A Vampire." Stiles and Scott were in complete shock. "how?" Scott said and Deaton Explained it to him how I was possessed but I killed the Void so I was open to the supernatural and it just happened. I started to wake up. "Is she dangerous?" Scott asked Stiles was just quiet "You need to train her to feed on animals. It's gonna be hard be it can be done." Deaton said before I fully woke up and sat up, Stiles still wouldn't look at me. "How are you feeling?" Deaton asked "I'm really hungry" I stated "That's the cravings" Deaton had told Scott "She needs to feed within the next few hours otherwise she'll die." Deaton announced. Stiles quickly left the room I assume to go to his jeep. "Scott what's going on?" I said nervously "Y/N you're a Uhm well Vampire." He said nervously I wasn't that shocked considering I live in Beacon hills. "So how do I control it because all I wanna do it rip out your throat." I said getting off the table "Scott will teach you but you need to get her somewhere safe if any hunters find out there's a Vampire here Beacon hills will be crawling with them. Scott nodded and took me to Stiles's keep. "Why won't he talk to me?" I told Scott on the way to the jeep "his girlfriend just died and is now back he's shaken up." Scott said opening the door for me. We drove to a warehouse Derek used to train the newbie wolfs. I heard Scott and Stiles talking "You need to stay with her until I can get the rest of us out her to protect her." I heard Scott say "Alright fine." Stiles replied. I was sitting on the ground in this dirty warehouse and then my eyes met with those chocolate brown eyes I remember. "Y/N-" I stood up and cut him off "No it's been hours and you wouldn't even look at me! I get it you're "shaken up" but how do you think I feel? I died and now I'm back as a Vampire so I'm a little stressed okay." I said and I felt pain all over my body I looked at myself at a piece of broken glass on the floor and I had black veins coming from my eyes and my teeth they weren't normal. Stiles backed up "it's my fault." He whispered god I missed his voice "Y/N!" Derek Yelled as he saw I was going for Stiles "You don't want to hurt him okay think of all the memories you have with him." I thought of every last one but I just needed him I ran as fast as I could and Derek ran after me but I got to stiles and I wrapped my arms around his neck and Derek stopped in his tracks "I love you." I whispered and I felt his arms wrap around me. I just started to cry. "It's gonna be okay" he kissed my head. The entire pack was soon at the ware house and I was just there sitting in the corner while everyone talked about what they thought we should do. Not knowing I could hear them, "She's dangerous she almost killed Stiles." Derek whispered "No she didn't!" Stiles yelled "Calm down" Scott Said "We need to be rational about this we aren't going to kill her she's once of us." Said said "Was that even an option?" Stiles said Sarcastically "I can control myself you don't need to worry about me" I said walking towards them. "You've been back from the dead for a few hours we don't even know if it's even you." Isaac fired at me. "If I wanted to I could kill all of you right now but I don't want to do that because we're a pack!" I crossed my arms "Y/N you're gonna stay at my house for a while okay." Lydia said softly. I lived with my Aunt for my whole life and she died a few years back so Melissa acted at my mother and she doesn't know about anything yet and she doesn't even know I died but Scott doesn't wanna put her in Danger and neither do I I don't wanna put anyone in Danger I just went along with what everyone said I didn't wanna make trouble. "She's riding back with me." Stiles butted in. He opened the jeep door for me and he got in the drivers seat. "I'm sorry I hurt you."I said quietly "You didn't-" I cut him off "I saw your eyes when I kissed him. I just needed to make him think I was with him so I could kill him." I said softly "I don't care what you had to do it doesn't matter now" stiles said keeping his eyes on the road. "St-stiles pull over." I said grabbing the door handle "What what's wrong?" He said pulling over I got out just in time I started coughing up blood. We we're in front of the rest of the pack so they saw us and ran over to us "Scott what's wrong with her." Stiles said holding me "She needs to feed otherwise she'll die." He said quietly I felt something warm on my lips stiles placed his arm against my mouth and before anyone could protest I bite into him. His blood is so good I need to stop otherwise I'll kill him but I just its just so good. I forced myself away from him and I stood up "I can't I can't do this!" I yelled blood dripping down my face "I'm gonna kill someone!" I cried "Y/N please we can help you." Scott said coming towards me "Help me? You can't help me!" I yelled and sped off I know I shouldn't go to his house but I need to see him. So I waited again in Stiles's room. He finally got home and opened his door like he knew I was there because he immediately ran over and kissed me "I'm so sorry." I said grabbing his arm and running my hand over the bandage "It didn't hurt that much" he laughed. I needed to hear it I missed it "I want you to spend the night here okay." He said handing me a shirt "I don't want to hurt you." I said quietly "You won't." He smiled I took my dress off and threw the big shirt on and walked back into Stiles's room he was in sweatpants and no shirt. I know being a Vampire heightens your emotions and right now my hormones are sky rocketing. I laid next to him and put my head on his chest and he played with my hair. I leaned up and I left little kisses along his jaw line. I got on top of him and kissed him gently Stiles and I have had sex before but it's been months and I just need him. I pulled away and I took my shirt off and threw it somewhere in the room I wasn't wearing a bra just panties and stiles sat up and took one of my breast in his mouth and he squeezed the other one gently I moaned quietly while running my fingers through his hair "I need you" I moaned he flipped us over and he hooked his fingers around my panties and slide them down and he bite his lip which made me bite mine. He pulled his sweat pants down and I had forgotten how big he was he spread my legs and centered himself at my entrance he took a breath before sliding himself into slowly "God" I moaned "Fuck baby" he moaned as he was fully in he started going in and out slowly "Stiles faster please" I begged He did as I asked and started going faster. My nails dragged up and down his back which made him let out a low groan "I-I'm close" he moaned "Me too" I moaned we came at the same time and he kissed my lips and pulled out and pulled the blanket over us. "I love you," he whispered "I love you too." I smiled to myself. He made me forget about all the bad things in the world

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thekrazykeke · 8 years ago

Text

Run, Devil, Run

Fandom(s): DCEU, Suicide Squad

Summary: Things done in the dark eventually come to the light.

Warning(s): Familial disputes. Implied, ambiguous relationships. Toxic behavior. Violence. Smut.

Tagging: @ask-harleen @meaningful-kisses-are-deadly @metal-mouth-breather

Now, this weird thing is a sum of everything going on in the fandom’s world right now...for the most part. K pretty much stays clear of trouble and is sort of the unofficial, official ‘good girl’ that occasionally hangs around villains to get inspiration for her books when she’s in a rut.

This will have a second part.

Humming to herself, shoes and a bottle of that expensive liquor from Selina’s bar in her hand, K dug through her purse for her house keys. Or so she tried, but then she squinted, looking more carefully at the door, and noticed that it was already open. Alarm bells ringing through her head, she knew it was better to just walk away, maybe stay in a hotel for a few days, but against better judgement, just like those silly twits in movies, she pressed a hand against the flat surface, easing the door open wider, gripping the bottle in her other hand as she tip toed inside.

“And just like that, you’re dead.” The entire apartment was shrouded in darkness, but there was no mistaking the figure of a lean male seated comfortably on a couch. He had a gun pointed straight at her but she didn’t even blink. Flicking on a light switch and the room was illuminated.

“Put that thing away.” Tossing the masquerade mask onto a counter, she shook her head as the gun didn’t lower. “I said, put it away.”

Snorting with contempt and amusement, the copper skinned man lowered the gun, flicking the safety back on. “I’ve….always hated that you never took me seriously.”

“I take you very seriously, Robbie. But you ain’t hard enough to shoot your big sister in cold blood and you’ve got a hiccup about shooting people from their blind spot, which is also stupid by the way.” Placing the bottle in the fridge, carelessly, she tossed the shoes on the carpeted floor. “When did you get out?”

“January.”

“And, what, nobody called me? Told me? I would have been there–” Displeased, she huffed and began pacing.

He cut it off before she could go on an endless rant. “I asked them not to. You’ve got a new life here in Gotham, clean slate. No ties to us, the past or your family, just your books and your dreams. That’s what you always wanted, sis.”

“Then what…? What are you doin’ here now?” Suspicious, she looked at him. Took in the way his hazel eyes couldn’t meet hers. Crossing her arms, K sternly, “Robert Kenshawn, what have you done now?”

“I need your help on a job. It’s a big one. Gonna have me set for life.” Shaking her head, she looked at the ceiling, as if asking for patience. “Please, sis. Nobody in the family as good with computers like you. I just need–”

“Stop talking. I told all of y’all that I was done with that. Done! You’re not getting me involved again.” Jabbing her finger at the door, she gestured for him to get up. “You got to go. Get gone. Now.”

He hit the dining room table, anger causing his body to tremble. “I kept your secret! I went to prison and you’re going to listen to me! Help. Me. Now!” Again and again, Robert struck the table.

“Stop damaging my property!”

“NO!”

“Fine! I’m calling the psych ward on your crazy ass!” Tearing across the room, she was about to pick up the cordless phone when he ripped the plug out of the phone jack. “You fucking nut! Get out of my apartment!” Chucking the phone at his face.

Robert smacked the thrown projectile onto the floor, grabbing her by the arm, shaking the appendage harshly and K retaliated by slamming the palm of her hand into his face multiple times. He shoved her, hard. Windmilling her arms, she tried to keep her balance but fell and hit her head on the table. “DON’T CALL ME A PSYCHO. YOU ARE THE CRAZY ONE HERE. YOU ARE YOU ARE YOU ARE YOU ARE YOU ARE!” Head aching, she sat up and gingerly prodded her fingers where it hurt the most, only to come away with blood splattered fingertips. “I’ma beat your ass.”

“Now, sis, I didn’t mean...” Contrite, Robert lowered his voice and his shoulders hunched. “Where’s your first aid kit?”

“I don’t need you to do a goddamn thing for me but get the fuck out of my apartment.” Still he lingered so she snatched the glass ash tray, flinging it in his direction. “LEAVE, MOTHAFUCKA, GO!” Only when the sound of her front door being slammed shut echoed throughout the empty apartment, signifying that she was alone, did K begin to chuckle, softly at first but quickly getting louder and more hysteric, tapering off into sobs that she tried to stifle.

Eventually she got up from her fallen position, shimmying out of that ridiculous dress, sluggishly walking into her bedroom and falling onto the mattress, only clad in bra and panties. The last thought K had before passing out was that maybe if she died, she’d finally get some peace. The next time she woke up, her head was still pounding in a slow, steady thrum, her face felt sore from crying and her whole body just ached. Stumbling out of bed, Keke walked into the attached bathroom, opening the medicine cabinet and retrieving some Tylenol.

Shaking two of the white tablets into her golden brown palm before tossing them into her mouth, she ran some water from the bathroom’s faucet, leaning down, she slurped at the cool water greedily, swallowing the medicine. Using a fist, she scrubbed the sleep from her eyes, staring at herself in the mirror.

“It’s going to be a good day today. You are going to be productive and write.”

Pep talk concluded, she turned off the tap. Drying her hands with a towel before hanging it back up on the rack to dry. Walking out of the bathroom, she returned to the bedroom, opening the door of her closet, grabbing some new underwear and comfortable clothes to lounge around in, once she had those items, she went back into the bathroom and went about her normal hygienic routine.

Hours passed on her laptop, listening to music on her Spotify account and just letting the words flow. The events of yesterday didn’t even cross her mind. Like most things she just didn’t want to deal with, she wrote it off as unimportant and went about her life as if it didn’t matter. The sound of her stomach gurgling caused K to remove her headphones and she grabbed her cellphone off the charger, dialing the number of the local Chinese restaurant that delivered to the apartment complex. As she listened to the busy signal, nibbling on her fingernail, impatient, the sound of her doorbell being insistently rang irritated her. Pressing the ‘DECLINE’ button, she hung up and tossed the cellular device onto the bed, walking out to the living room.

The person was knocking now.

“I’m comin’, I’m comin’! Je...” Swinging the door open, K’s irritated expression became blank with shock as she stared at the sharply dressed individual nonchalantly standing in her door frame. “What the hell are you doin’ here, Carver?” Raising a finger to silence him before he could speak, K shook her head. “On second thought, I don’t give a damn why you’re here. Nothing good can come of it. You need to leave.”

“That’s cold, girl.” Cheekily, he smiled. “But then again, I love it when you got an attitude.”

Giving him an ‘Are you fucking serious?’ look, K said, “Did you not hear me? I said you need to go.” Then she tried to shut her door but he stuck his foot inside, placing his hand against the flat surface, keeping it open. “Get off my door.”

“Not until you listen to what I have to say.” He was stubborn.

“Listen, mothaf--”

“Do you really want all these boujie neighbors in your business? Hmm, no?” Carver smiled, devious and having little trouble with slowly, steadily opening the door wider. “Then let me in. Right now.”

Abruptly letting the door go, she got a little thrill with how he nearly tripped and face planted into her front door. “You got three minutes. Make it count.”

Carver quietly but firmly closed the front door, locking it. “Putting me on a timer? Classic, K.”

“Starting now. Two minutes and fifty seconds left. If what you say does not interest me, I call the police, maybe get you charged with breaking and entering, hell, I’m feeling daring, let’s try to tack harassment on there too.” Crossing her arms across her chest, K stared him down.

Understanding that she wasn’t joking, Carver began to speak. “Rob told me that he tried to talk to you, get you interested in our latest job but you...What’s so funny?”

“I just find the definition of ‘talk’ for the both of you is so twisted and misconstrued, that’s all.” Far too amused, K let out a derisive snort. “I’ll save you the trouble of saying a long, drawn out speech. My answer’s ‘No’. It will always be ‘No’. I have no interest in getting involved in anything illegal.”

“You stand here like you’re so much better than me, than us, when the truth is that your hands are just as dirty as ours.” Carver gave her a once over and shook his head. Strangely enough, K almost felt inferior before his gaze. “Last I checked, before you got too good for ‘anything illegal’, you were clearing out jewelry and liquor stores with your older brothers and sisters, then y’all moved up to small businesses and banks. I mean, damn. You, you guys were good at what you did.”

“Okay, Carver. Shut up, you’ve made your point.”

“Did I? Did I make my point, K?” He was on a roll now and wasn’t keen on stopping. “Yes, the way Rob handled you was wrong and disrespectful, but you know how he gets when you work him up like that. He did half a decade in prison, for a crime you committed. That has got to leave the guy more fucked up in the head than he was before he went in there.”

“Stop talking.”

“The cops have wrote it off as an accident with the electrical wiring of the Taylor residence but the truth of it is, there wasn’t any accident, was there, hmm, K? Just you and your itty bitty feelings getting hurt...”

“Carver, I’m warning you...” Breath picking up, K tried to keep a lid on her temper. The lights and electric appliances flickered on and off ominously.

“...Because you couldn’t handle the thought of being the ‘mistress’ to Michael anymore and totally lost your chill. His poor daughter and wife didn’t even stand a chance in hell of escaping before you fried them.” Carver finished his words, relishing them.

K let out a wordless, infuriated scream.

All the power in the room, no, in the entire building went out. Then in a shower of glass and molten metal, several light bulbs burst, electric sockets buzzed and ultimately fried themselves. Both hands sparking with white-blue wisps of heat, brown eyes almost golden with power, she looked like a goddess made flesh.

Still, Carver did not kneel.

No. He picked up the nearest chair and chucked it full force at her, giving on the slightest wince as it hit her. All that power winked out of her body as she fell to the ground like a puppet with it’s strings cut.

“And you called Rob a ‘fucking nut’? You really need to look in the mirror, honey.” He spoke aloud, glancing down at her unconscious body. Grabbing her underneath her armpits, he hauled her up in a fireman’s carry, bringing her over to the couch and sitting her down. “The things I do for you and you’re still so ungrateful. But that’s okay. I’ll let it slide...” Carver leaned down, tenderly kissing her lips.

“You’re mine and I’m with your batshit crazy ass for the long haul, babe.”

#misc fics #fanfiction

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