#this is REALLY long and link / image heavy but

[beloveds-embrace]

Omg the dukedom sick reader was amazing. I'm so addicted I just love the thought that they are now realizing how far the relationship with the reader has gone. Will the reader recover? If they do, will the wound (is it on the leg?) be a constant reminder (if its something noticeable, like limp when they walk?) to the guys of what they did.

I really like the fact you put Kyle's perspective in there, how do you think the rest of the guys will react to the reader. Idk I just image a pale, malnourished person. Their face having dark circles around the eyes and just a somewhat sunken in face because of the fact they weren't eating.

How do you think the guys will try and make it up to the reader? I feel as if after that experience of being left in their room to rot, basically, they would want to be outside more, not in the manor. I see John having like a HUGE conservatory or greenhouse of plants that he used to visit just not anymore and just has his workers take care of all that with a courtyard.

I'm sorry for putting a lot

- 🐸

@nes-kopi Thanks to all of you!! I combined the answer to these all together because they are pretty much in the same wavelength, i hope no one mind 😔 linking still doesn’t work otherwise i would be linking the masterlist ueueueueue dukedom masterlist au first part

The manor was eerily quiet, but not the kind of quiet that soothed. It was oppressive, heavy, pressing against you like a weight you can’t shake. The warmth of the fire in your chambers, the softness of the freshly laundered sheets, the smell of fresh flowers arranged by the maids who now came by regularly- it all felt like a mockery. A sharp contrast to the months of cold, desolate silence that had left you here: numb, broken, and hollow.

The room was silent, save for the faint creak of wood under your weight as you shifted on the bed. The prosthetic, heavy and foreign, rested against the edge, and you stared at it with a detached sort of hatred. It wasn’t the prosthetic itself; it was what it symbolized- what you had lost, what they had taken from you without even trying.

Your body ached constantly, even after so long spent under the doctors’ care.

Your heart ached more.

The warmth of the room now- the fire, the clean sheets, the gentle glow of the afternoon sun streaming through the newly opened curtains- did nothing to thaw the frost that has made itself a home in your chest.

They were trying now. Oh, they were trying. Even if they couldn’t bring themselves to look at you in the eye anymore, though you weren’t surprised; you look… horrific. You’ve been avoiding the mirror on purpose for a good while now.

You aren’t sure what is worse; the way they ignored you before or the way they hover now.

Every step you took was a struggle. The prosthetic leg strapped to your stump was heavy and awkward, the chafing unbearable at times. Its mere existence, its mere need, alone was enough to make you balk more often than not.

But you refused their help.

When Simon silently appeared at your side during your attempts to navigate the stairs, you waved him off. When Johnny offered his arm to steady you as you crossed the garden, you shook your head. When Kyle insisted on helping you carry things, you snapped at him to leave you be. You were trying to not rot away again, yet they were making it incredibly bothersome.

And John… John lingered the most, his piercing gaze trailing after you like a shadow. His voice was softer than you’d ever heard it, his every word laced with regret. A tone never, in your entire life, aimed at you.

You wondered if he was sincere. You wondered if it even mattered if he was.

“Let me help you, Duchess.” he said one morning, watching as you struggled to tighten the straps of your prosthetic. You have not called for any help from the maids or anyone even if they lingered, and you weren’t about to ask help from him of all people.

König would’ve helped-

“I don’t need your help.” you bit out sharply, your fingers trembling as they worked against the stubborn leather. You refuse to depend on him, especially for this. Why would you trust him, or any of them, after everything?

His jaw tightened, and he knelt before you, his large hands carefully prying yours away. “Please,” he said, his voice cracking. For once, he wasn’t a presence larger than life. “Let me. Just this once.”

Your instinct was to pull away, to snarl that it was too little, too late. But the exhaustion won. You sat back in the chair, your arms limp at your sides, and let him finish securing the straps. You wished you could feel anything except for the numbness and misery that has been clouding you for so long, but you couldn’t.

His hands were gentle, his fingers brushing against your skin with a reverence that made your chest ache.

Why did it take this much for them to care?-

They tried, in their own ways, to make amends.

Johnny started bringing meals directly to you, ones that catered to your preferences. He’d sit quietly at the edge of the room, cracking jokes or humming soft tunes, never leaving until you’d taken at least a few bites. The plates are always so well-decorated, the food so well cooked, not a single spot burnt or undercooked.

Kyle began organizing the staff, ensuring your chambers were kept warm and your belongings were arranged just how you liked them. He even replaced the stiff linens with softer ones and left books on your bedside table that he thought you might enjoy. You touched none of them.

Simon never said much, but his presence was almost constant. He became your silent sentinel, appearing whenever you struggled, watching over you from a distance. He didn’t speak often, but his eyes held a kind of quiet guilt that spoke louder than words but you decided that just this once, you’ll defean your ears.

And John…

John was everywhere. He lingered outside your door at night, the faint creak of the floorboards betraying his pacing. He watched you with an intensity that made your skin crawl, not out of fear but because you couldn’t reconcile this man with the one who had left you to rot. You had nothing to say to him. You barely had the strength to refuse his help attempts already.

The days blurred together, each one a series of numb moments punctuated by pain. The servants were more attentive now even without Kyle, but you couldn’t bear their pitying looks. The maids still whispered, though the words had changed:

Poor thing. How awful.

You avoided them all.

The manor felt smaller somehow, its walls closing in no matter where you went. You found solace in the gardens- when the weather allowed and you had the strength to navigate the terrain. The cold didn’t bother you anymore; it was the one constant, a reminder that you were still alive, still breathing. Unfortunately.

They watched from the windows sometimes, their gazes following as you limped across the grounds. You didn’t acknowledge them.

Something in you broke when the doctor told you you had to stop those trips for now, for your own health. Like the miserable thing you are, he didn’t even say it to you- but to John. Told him not to let you dilly dally around.

That very same night, after you’d spent hours pushing yourself to the brink- trying to walk farther, faster, to prove you could, even as the prosthetic left your stump raw and aching anew- you collapsed into bed, trembling with exhaustion.

You thought you were alone.

The tears came before you could stop them, hot and bitter as they slid down your cheeks. Pain radiated through your leg, your shoulders, your back. But worse was the weight in your chest- the overwhelming suffocation of it all.

You buried your face in your pillow, trying to muffle the sobs that wracked your body. You didn’t hear the door creak open, didn’t see John standing there, frozen in the doorway.

He stayed there, his fists clenched at his sides, listening to your muffled weeping. His chest ached with the knowledge that this was his doing; that every single tear, every shuddering breath, was because of him and the others.

When your cries finally quieted, exhaustion lulling you to a peace-less sleep, he stepped back, closing the door as silently as he’d opened it.

Several days later, he personally led you outside.

You didn’t ask where you were going; you didn’t have the energy. When the massive glass conservatory came into view, you stopped, your breath catching in your throat. Were those… your favorite flower as well?

“I had this built for you,” John said, his voice low, hesitant. “I thought… after everything, you might want a place of your own. Somewhere to breathe.” Somewhere you can stay and walk around in.

The conservatory was beautiful, filled with lush greenery, colorful flowers, and a gentle bubbling fountain at its center. The glass walls let in streams of sunlight, and the air inside was warm and fragrant. This must’ve been in the process for a while now.

You stepped inside, your prosthetic clinking softly against the stone floor, yet you didn’t hear it. The beauty of the place was overwhelming, almost unbearably so.

“This doesn’t fix anything,” you said, your voice trembling. It didn’t, truthfully. It didn’t bring your leg back, it didn’t wash away the dark cloud clinging to you. It didn’t wash away the pain.

“I know,” John murmured, his gaze fixed on the ground. His shoulders were slumped. “But it’s a start. You deserve something… beautiful. Better. The gardens brought you peace, and I can hope that this does the same.”

You turned to find Johnny, Simon, and Kyle standing behind him, their expressions a mixture of hope and guilt.

“We’ll keep trying,” Kyle added softly.

You stared at them, your chest tight, the weight of your pain and exhaustion threatening to crush you.

“I don’t know if I can forgive you.” you whispered.

“We don’t expect you to,” Simon’s voice was quiet. “But we’re not going anywhere. We’ll be here for you regardless.”

“…don’t expect this to change anything.”

John’s voice was so painfully soft, but you didn’t notice. You were limping towards the flowers, gait uneven but determined. “I don’t.”

That night, as you lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the memory of the conservatory lingered. It was a reminder of what could have been—of what you might have had if they had tried sooner.

You still didn’t trust them.

But part of you, the part that still remembered what hope felt like, wanted to.

[dandylovesturtles]

Using a random number generator for the angst prompts: 20 Starved + 30 Dangerous Temperatures

... and Leo, of course.

OH GOD OK

uh so. I had an idea. and I decided to write it for this ask I got forever ago. And then, uh.

it really

really got out of hand.

This is a pretty dark fic (even for me) and at the current moment in time it is hurt/no comfort. I do intend to write a part 2, probably tomorrow, but as of the time I'm typing this author's note I've been writing for around 5+ hours straight and I need to take a break! So please, if you don't want to read all this without the comfort included, feel free to wait for the next part before reading! I'll link it and the end once it's posted.

Content warnings: Kidnapping, confinement, psychological torture, nonconsensual voyeurism (I guess this is the best way to put this; Leo isn't doing anything sexual but it's still violating), mild violence, HEAVY ANGST, Leo just having the shittiest time possible.

I HOPE?? YOU ENJOY??? hahahaha....

btw this is set between S2 and the movie (though tbh its canon compliance is... /waves hand)

-----

When Leo imagined himself getting captured by some kind of shady, quasi-governmental agency intent on imprisoning mutants, it was never anything like this.

When he let his mind go there, he always pictured that he would be strapped to a table. Maybe muzzled. That scientists would stand over him, scalpels and drills in hand, and start to take him apart. That they'd examine him piece by piece, and wouldn't give him any anesthesia while they did it.

But there is no table, no muzzle, no restraints at all. He's just in a room.

Well, a cell, technically - the steel door is locked, and there are no windows, no furniture but a bare cot in one corner and a lone toilet in another. But it doesn't really look like a cell. It looks like a room.

A very, very white room. White walls. White ceiling. White tiles (with white grout, even). The toilet is white, a roll of white toilet paper on the floor next to it. The only things that aren't white are the cot and the door and Leo himself.

They took his gear and his weapons, because of course they did. Since the door is steel, he already knows he's not breaking it down; he gives it a half-hearted slam anyway, just to say he tried. He should be able to just portal out, except he hasn't learned how to use his portals without his swords to channel his ninpo through, and there's nothing in here with him that he can use to make new ones.

So he's stuck. He's going to have to wait until someone opens that door for some reason. Or, of course, until his family swings by to pick him up. Though, if possible, he'd like to escape before that happens. The image in his mind, of sitting outside his cell and grinning at them as they arrive to rescue him, is too cool to pass up.

He's not sure how long it's been already. He knows that they knocked him out after ambushing him, and he doesn't know how long he was unconscious. The heavy molasses feel of his head and arms when he woke up suggests that he was drugged. It's wearing off now, though, which means he has a clear head to take in the all of nothing that's in the room with him.

He sits on the cot he woke up on and waits for something to happen.

There's no way for him to tell time, but he thinks it's an hour or so later when there's a sudden beep, and then the sound of a metal panel sliding up. It's a slot near the door that has just opened - inside the revealed alcove is a bottle of water.

He comes to it curiously, taking a long look around the bottle. The slot doesn't open straight through, and even if it did, it's not big enough for anything more than his arm or a foot to fit through. He thinks it must function like an airlock, or maybe they slid the bottle down from somewhere above - he feels around just in case, and finds that the slot is enclosed on all sides but his. Probably his airlock theory, then.

As soon as he removes the bottle, the panel slams shut again.

"You're really determined to keep me in here, huh?" he says to whatever hidden cameras are watching him. He carries the water bottle back to his cot, but doesn't open it, instead setting it down on the floor by the wall. The paranoid part of his brain, the one that doesn't miss a trick, is reminding him that drinking the water is probably a bad idea. Who knows what they might have put in it?

He sits on the cot for awhile longer. Still, nothing happens.

"I'm getting pretty bored in here," he says for the audience that must be somewhere. "Come on, you have a one of a kind turtle in here, and you don't even want to talk to me?"

Time passes, slow and quiet. Leo goes through periods where his anxiety spikes and he starts to wonder if he's been abandoned by whoever brought him here, before the boredom eventually numbs the anxiety back out. Another bottle of water is eventually delivered, and this one he keeps in his hands after retrieving it. It's completely unlabeled, not even a "Use by" date printed on the bottle itself, so it doesn't provide much mental stimulation. He spins the bottle to make little whirlpools inside, because it's something to do.

He's trying to make the fastest whirlpool he can when he hears a sudden click, different from the beep of the water bottle hole, and he looks up just in time to see a large section of the wall in front of him turn black, and then light up to show the room beyond his cell.

He jolts, setting the bottle aside. He knew they must be watching him, but somehow he didn't catch that part of the wall was a whole window.

His audience isn't very large - five people, unless there are others he can't see. Two wear lab coats, two wear fatigues... but the one who comes to stand directly in front of the window is wearing a black suit, with steel rimmed glasses. He leans forward, and speaks into a small microphone.

"Inmate 24365," says the suited man. "I am Agent Bishop, of the Earth Protection Force. My subordinates tell me that you can speak and understand the English language. Is this correct?"

"Qué?" Leo asks.

Bishop does not look amused. "Inmate 24365," he says, "you have two options. You can cooperate with me, answer my questions, and we will make your stay here more comfortable. Do not cooperate, and we will make your stay uncomfortable. Do you understand?"

Leo pretends to hem and haw over this. "How comfortable are we talkin'?"

"I'm sure you would like some dinner."

"You know, I'm not really hungry." He says it to be difficult, but it's actually true - the uncertainty of the situation has put his stomach in too many knots to want to eat anything. "Maybe if you offer me some comic books? Or a TV?

To Bishop's credit, his face doesn't so much as twitch. He keeps his steely eyes locked on Leo. "Answer our questions, and you will receive food. Do you understand?"

Leo stays noncommittal. "What are the questions?"

He's expecting Bishop to ask about his family. He's not expecting what comes next.

"How many gateways are there between New York City and the hidden yokai enclave?" he asks. "How are these gateways accessed? What kind of defensive capabilities do the yokai have?"

Leo keeps the surprise off his face. Bishop thinks he's a yokai.

This is, overall, a good development. Bishop might not know about Leo's family, then, or at least not know that they live on the surface. This means the Earth Protection Force likely isn't pursuing his brothers, which means they will be safe until they can help Leo get out of here.

He doesn't let the relief show through, either. Bishop doesn't know anything, and now Leo just has to ride out the next few hours until the calvary arrives.

"You know," he says, "I think I'm good with my current levels of comfort."

If Bishop is mad or frustrated or dismayed by this choice, he doesn't show it. His expression stays stony as he stares in at Leo, sizing him up.

"Very well," he says after a few more seconds. "I will see you tomorrow, then."

The window goes dark, and then turns stark white to match the walls. Leo wants to go over and tap at it, see if it feels different when he touches it, but knowing that Bishop is surely still there, watching him, keeps him rooted to the cot.

He goes back to making whirlpools with the bottle. If they aren't going to entertain him, he isn't going to entertain them, either.

-----

Another water bottle comes some time after his talk with Bishop. He finally opens this one and takes a cautious sip. Nothing tastes off or strange, so he drinks more. They don't want to feed him, but they're fine keeping him hydrated. No reason to stay thirsty, then.

He wishes the water calmed the anxiety still roiling in his stomach, but if anything it just makes him feel even more energized. He bounces his foot and surveys his room again, looking for any weak spots or access points. He can't see anything, though, other than the areas where he knows the water bottle hole and window are; even the vents that relentlessly blow cold air into the room are well hidden.

Knowing that there are people standing just outside his cell watching him, like some kind of zoo animal, puts him on edge. The window is so big that he's pretty sure the only blind spots are either directly underneath it or right by the door on the same wall. After debating it, he leaves his cot and sits on the floor underneath the window, surveying the room from a different angle now and still coming up empty. At least they're going to have a harder time staring at him.

His eyes catch on the toilet in the corner, directly across from the window. It's not in the blind spot, and realizing this makes his insides lurch uncomfortably - hopefully he has a chance to bust out before using it becomes necessary.

Though, he's not sure when that chance is going to come. If they have a slot to pass him water, they could use that to pass him food, too, so it's unlikely that anyone is going to open the door unless they need to take him out.

So maybe his fantasy of being outside when his brothers arrive isn't going to happen. Well, that's okay; he'll just be sure to make some other part of their escape totally rad. That will make up for the embarrassment of getting kidnapped a block from Run of the Mill.

(Seriously, some kind of ninja he is, to let a bunch of human soldiers sneak up on him.)

He drains the water bottle, then starts to roll it back and forth across the floor, like a cat batting at a toy. Leo's not sure what's worse right now: the worry or the boredom. There's nothing to look at and no one to talk to, just an empty room with him and his water bottles.

He's too keyed up to sleep, and the fluorescent lights are still on, anyway. He has no way of telling what time it is, so maybe it just isn't that late yet. And even sitting here, in the blind spot, the idea of closing his eyes while people are watching makes unease crawl up his spine. Staying awake is the easy choice. He'll sleep after he's out of here.

So he sits under the window and rolls his bottle back and forth, back and forth, with only the sound of plastic on tile to keep his thoughts company.

-----

The first three water bottles came pretty regularly, but now there is a very long stretch where nothing is delivered. Leo is starting to think maybe it really is night now. They don't turn off the lights in his cell, though, and he has no controls to do it himself. At least it helps with the whole "staying awake" thing.

Just in case they've decided to suspend his water privileges along with the food, he holds off drinking any more for now.

Speaking of food, his appetite has finally decided to return. His stomach starts to growl at him after several hours (he thinks) of sitting in the floor, an annoying emptiness in his stomach. Knowing there's no food accessible just makes the hunger sharper, but he puts it out of his mind the best he can with nothing else to focus on. He can eat once he's free.

Which should be soon. Seriously, his brothers have to be on their way by now, right?

He's pretty sure it's been the better part of a day, if not a whole day, since he was kidnapped. And, okay, he's willing to give them some leeway; it's understandable if they got a late start. He did storm out of the lair after his latest fight with Raph, and no one ever came to check on him when he did that. Understandably, he thinks, because who wants to be around Bad Mood Leo? Not even Leo wants to be around Bad Mood Leo!

But he'd already turned back into Good Mood Leo by the time he left Hueso's, so surely they knew it had been more than enough time. They would have noticed when he didn't come home. They would have realized something happened. They would be looking for him.

And if they're looking for him, they'll find him! Obviously.

His stomach growls again, and Leo leans his head back against the wall behind him. Maybe he shouldn't think of being at Hueso's. Now he just wants pizza. Pepperoni and mushroom, maybe, or Hawaiian. Mix it up a little with the barbeque chicken.

Another growl. He groans out loud.

He stays awake, twisting and crinkling the empty bottle in his hands, until another full one finally arrives.

-----

No chance to escape comes before using the toilet is necessary.

He tried to hold out, he really did, but he ended up drinking more water to stave off the growing hunger, and it's lowkey cold in here, which doesn't help. Still, the issue of the window sends an uneasy shiver up his spine, doubting that any people outside will feel the need to turn away and give him some privacy. Maybe he should have gone while he suspected it was nighttime.

(Maybe he shouldn't assume they ever aren't watching him.)

He stands up and walks over to the cot, giving it a light nudge with his foot. In a stroke of luck, it isn't bolted to the floor, and it's light enough that he can lift it. The black mesh it's made of is tightly woven, enough that not much is visible through it. It will have to do.

He picks it up and drags it over in front of the toilet, propping it up on its legs so it makes a small wall between himself and the window. It's hardly ideal, but the semblance of privacy makes him relax somewhat.

(He can't think about how there are surely cameras in the room watching him from all angles, making his attempt at a barrier moot. He knows better than anyone that sometimes pleasant lies are necessary.)

After he does his business, he leaves the cot propped where it is; it's not like he's sleeping on it. There's no sink for him to wash his hands, but he's never been the strictest about it, anyway (much to Donnie's disgust). He returns to his spot under the window, squeezing the water bottle to the rhythm of the first song that comes to mind.

Only two verses and a bridge later, the window above his head turns black, then goes clear. Thinking that Bishop might have been watching him just now makes a cold, slimy feeling roll down his spine. Creepy!

"Inmate 24365," comes Bishop's voice through the unseen speaker. "Stand."

Leo doesn't. He stays right where he is, under the window.

Bishop waits only a few seconds. Then Leo hears him say, "Temperature down two degrees."

He gets up at that, turning and leaning his arm against the window. It strangely doesn't feel like glass, even though it must be. "It's already cold enough in here," he says. He wonders how they can hear him, when he doesn't see a microphone on his side.

"You were told your conditions would only be made comfortable after you answer our questions," Bishop informs him. "The same as before: how many gateways are there between New York City and the hidden yokai enclave? How are these gateways-"

"How about you answer my questions first," Leo interjects. "You keep calling me "inmate," but I haven't been charged with anything. Pretty sure you can't detain me without cause."

"The EPF is authorized to detain non-human inmates for as long as deemed necessary for the security of the United States," says Bishop smoothly. "Probable cause doctrine does not apply in this case."

"That's gotta be unconstitutional."

"The constitution does not recognize the rights of yokai. You have no right to counsel, no right to a speedy trial, and no right to protections from cruel and unusual punishments." Bishop's stare is colder than the temperature in the room. "But I am not an unfair man. Answer my questions, and I will provide you with food and clothing."

Leo tosses a glance over his shoulder. "How about a private bathroom?"

Bishop's expression stays ever in place, unimpressed and stoic. "Food and clothing," he repeats.

Leo gives his head a shake. "Then nope," he says, popping the "p". "I plead the fifth."

"As I have already explained, the Bill of Rights does not apply to you."

"That's such crap." Leo bangs his fist on the window. "You can't just keep me here forever for no reason!"

"I do have reasons." Bishop leans closer to the window, his eyes narrowing. "Let's try a different question. What is your relation to Baron Draxum?"

The surprise is fast and sharp, but Leo just manages to keep it from showing on his face. "Who?" he asks innocently, even as the panic sets into his chest. If they know about Draxum, what else do they know?

"We know you are acquainted with him," says Bishop. "What is the nature of your relationship?"

Leo knows they aren't bluffing - why would they bring up that very specific name otherwise? There's no lie he can tell that won't reveal something.

So he doesn't say anything. Instead, he turns his back to the window and sits down, staring resolutely at the opposite wall.

Bishop clicks his tongue. "Very well," he says. "I am a patient man. I can wait." Then, more muffled, like he's facing away from the microphone, Leo hears him say, "Temperature down two degrees."

The window goes dark, then turns back to white. Leo doesn't move for a long time.

-----

The third water bottle arrives, so he guesses that's the end of day two.

He's shaking as he gets up to retrieve it, adding it to his growing water bottle hoard. He's gone through three and a half by now, but he's trying not to drink them too fast.

As promised, no food is delivered, and his stomach growls and rumbles in protest. The water helps, but only slightly. He needs to eat.

He also needs to sleep.

The panicked adrenaline spikes that have kept him awake this long are starting to die down, with more and more long stretches of exhaustion between them. The shaking is near constant, bringing with it the weird jittery feeling he gets when his insomnia gets particularly bad.

The window is still unnerving him. The idea of sleeping while they're watching him feels staggeringly unsafe.

But he doesn't think he can hold out now until his family gets here. Sure, they're probably getting close (they have to be getting close), but they're sure taking their sweet time. And he's just so tired.

After a long internal debate, he lays down on the cold tile floor. It's not at all comfortable, but somehow he doubts the cot would be any better. Besides, even if he moves the cot under the window, he thinks it would be easier to see him if he uses it. So on the floor it is.

He presses as close to the wall as he can, curling up into a ball for warmth. He wishes he had a blanket.

He wishes he was home.

He squeezes his eyes shut tight and forces back the sudden wave of overwhelming homesickness. There's no reason to feel this way. It's only been two days! What is he, a baby?

It's fine. It's all fine. They're definitely on his trail now. Raph is leading the team. Donnie is using some kind of invention to blah blah blah nerd stuff. Mikey is razzing his tazz. April is using her investigative journalism skills to find clues.

They're on their way. He just has to hold out a little longer. He can do this.

He sleeps, and in his dreams, something grabs him tight and drags him down and down and down where he can't escape.

-----

The same routine plays out over the next two days.

Leo gets two water bottles delivered, spaced, if he had to guess, about five hours apart. Bishop comes to visit him some time after the second bottle. Leo refuses to answer his questions. Bishop turns the temperature down and then leaves. A few hours later his last water bottle comes. Then nothing for the whole night.

They still don't turn off his lights, but exhaustion is starting to win over the brightness.

More than a few times, Leo tries to summon a portal on his own, without his swords. If his family is going to take their sweet time in coming, he might as well try to help them out. He tries to summon his ninpo (without glowing), tries to feel the tug inside of him that he always does when he teleports, tries to envision the place he wants to go and tunnel through space to get there.

Nothing. Always nothing.

(Donnie can make his constructs independent of his bo staff. Raph can send his projections away from his sai. Mikey's learning to use mystic powers without his nunchucks. So why does Leo need his katana? Why is he the only one this useless?)

It probably doesn't help that he's so damn hungry. It's a constant companion now, a low and hollow ache that chooses inconvenient times to turn into white hot stabs of urgency, into seizing cramps that steal his breath. The water only helps so much - it keeps him alive but doesn't satisfy, doesn't soothe. In some ways it just makes the feeling worse.

And he's always shaking, too, but he doesn't know if that's the hunger or the cold.

Maybe the cold wouldn't bother him so much if it were at least still. But the vents blow fresh air inside relentlessly, and no matter where he goes he can't seem to get out of the direct stream. The cold wind batters his tired body, and there's places his skin is starting to turn dry and flaky. His nose won't stop running, and he's allowed himself a small section of his one roll of toilet paper to blow it, already stiff and congealed and disgusting.

It's miserable.

And there's still nothing to do.

He stacks a pyramid out of his empty water bottles, knocks it down, then stacks it up again. He tries to come up with some new and exciting ways to demolish it, but it's only new and exciting for so long.

He spends a few hours of day three singing karaoke as obnoxiously as possible. He hopes everyone outside enjoys the performance.

He recounts every issue of Jupiter Jim he knows to himself, then the plot of every movie. Then he goes through Lou Jitsu films, then anything else he can think of. That eats up a good chunk of day four.

By the time he gets his first water bottle of day five, he's out of ideas to entertain himself. He's never been good at this. He doesn't know how introverts like Donnie can go multiple days without talking to someone.

But when Bishop comes back with his daily offer of conversation, Leo once again impolitely declines.

-----

Something new happens on night five.

It's been a long time since the last water bottle. Leo has been trying to sleep, but it's not coming easy; he's exhausted, but the floor is so cold and he's so sore from staying on it night after night. Not to mention, his nightmares have been getting worse, and he isn't eager to return to them.

Add on the hunger, and sleep is elusive.

Suddenly, there's the telltale shadow of the window above him turning dark - this time, though, it doesn't light up as much as normal. Confused and curious, Leo sits up and takes a peek.

The room beyond is dim, only the glow of a green EXIT sign and a small desk lamp lighting the space. But it's enough for Leo to see a man standing there, looking inside. It's not Bishop - in fact, he doesn't recognize this person at all. They're wearing fatigues, but it's not anyone he's seen in the room during Bishop's normal interrogations.

The man catches sight of Leo, and the grinning leer on his face makes Leo regret looking.

He beckons for Leo to stand up. Warily, Leo does, unable to help but keep his arms folded tight over his chest. Not for the first time, he wishes he had some clothes - his gear, at the very least. Anything to not feel quite so exposed.

The man reaches down and picks something up, holding it aloft for Leo's inspection. "Want a sandwich?" he asks into the microphone.

The sandwich looks like white bread and bologna. No cheese, no other toppings that Leo can spot. Maybe some mustard, if anything. Overall, the most boring possible sandwich he could have been offered.

Leo's mouth is watering.

He has to swallow hard before answering. He doesn't trust this. Even if his stomach is slamming up and down at the promise of food, food, food.

"I'm not hungry," he lies.

The man laughs. It's not a kind sound. "Sure you ain't," he says. "You spend every night curled up on the floor like the dumb animal you are. Can you even eat this?" He waves the sandwich for emphasis.

Leo doesn't answer. He takes a step back from the window, like that will put any kind of distance between them. Like that will save him.

The man watches him with a sleezy grin. He waves the sandwich again.

"You want this," he says.

Leo shakes his head.

"You really sure?"

Leo shudders. Stands tall. Nods.

The man watches him for a long, long moment. Leo fights the urge to hide.

Finally, with a shrug, the man says, "Suit yourself."

Then he starts eating the sandwich. Right where Leo can watch.

Leo's stomach growls, loud and angry in his ears, and he has to physically hold himself back from crumpling.

After several bites, the man suddenly reaches out and taps the window, indicating the cot stood up in front of the toilet.

"That," he says, giving another tap for emphasis, "doesn't do shit."

Leo wants to crawl out of his own skin.

The need to hide is suddenly too great. He rushes to the cot, grabbing it and dragging it back to the blind spot under the window. He sets it down on all four legs, so it's as close to the floor as possible.

Then he lies down on his belly and wriggles underneath. It's a tight squeeze, and the cot ends up pushed up by his shell, suspended in the air, but he doesn't care.

He curls up in his pleasant lie of privacy and bites his hand to keep from screaming himself hoarse.

After an eternity, the window above him turns white again. It doesn't matter. Leo knows he's still there. Still watching.

-----

"You look tired," Bishop greets him. Leo answers with a dead-eyed stare.

"I keep telling you, if you want your conditions to improve, all you have to do is answer my questions."

Leo says nothing. He just stares, arms wrapped tight around himself to try and keep his body heat in.

"How many gateways are there between New York City and the hidden yokai enclave? How are these gateways accessed?"

For a moment, Leo considers just... telling him.

His family doesn't live in the Hidden City. The yokai have never exactly greeted them with open arms. What does he care if these military guys go after them? At least then, maybe he can finally eat something.

That's not what a hero does, Leo! echoes Mind Raph disapprovingly. Innocent people will get hurt!

Right. He's a hero. And heroes don't give into the demands of shitty guys like Bishop.

Leo swallows hard. "No comment."

Bishop's face changes ever so slightly: his brow creases. Leo wonders if that's good or bad for him.

"You understand that Baron Draxum is a known threat, don't you?" he asks. "We are aware of his plans to commit mass murder on the human population. We also know that he has been dormant for some time, and we need information on what he is planning."

Leo thinks of Barry's ambitions to be recognized as the best lunchperson in all of America and can't help but laugh. It comes out cracked and wheezing.

Bishop's furrow gets deeper. "Do you think this is funny?"

"Little bit," says Leo.

Bishop has a chasm to rival Raph's now. Leo knows he shouldn't, but he grins. It's his one moment of triumph - only he can be this aggravating.

And then Bishop says, "Temperature down seven degrees," and that wipes the smile right off Leo's face.

-----

The plastic of the water bottles is soft and pliable and feels weirdly good under Leo's teeth.

He chews the top of the bottle, gnawing at it until it's completely flattened out, pockmarked with little tiny indents from his incisors. It's not eating - it won't fill his belly or ease the persistent hunger pains. But something about the motion is soothing. The place-bo effect.

Pla-ce-bo, corrects Donnie's voice in his mind, sounding testy.

Where are you? Leo thinks back.

There's no answer.

He's gnawed his way through four water bottles. There's eighteen in total now, two and a half still full of water. He thought about using one to wash up a bit, but decided against it in the end. He knows he stinks, but the last thing he wants right now is to be wet. Not when he's starting to see his breath.

Oh well. It's not like he has anywhere to be.

He turns his attentions to the lids next. These are harder and thus tougher to chew. Still, if Leo uses his molars, he can eventually crack the lip, and then bend the plastic in and in, chewing until he ends up with a flat disc.

It's just small enough that Leo could swallow it, if he wanted to.

He thinks he remembers watching some kind of wildlife documentary. Or maybe he didn't watch it himself, but Mikey told him about it. Or maybe April? He doesn't know. His thoughts swim in and out and get lost on the way.

Point is. Sea turtles in the wild die all the time because of plastic in the water. They cut open their stomachs and find trash inside.

Well, Leo is a turtle in captivity. Maybe that means he's immune. Maybe he could swallow this plastic lid, and then he'd finally feel full and the pain pain pain of his empty stomach would go away.

He does not swallow the plastic lid. But it's more tempting than he'd like to admit.

It's going to be okay. When his family gets him out of here, they'll have a big pizza to celebrate. Maybe he can even talk them into letting him have the last slice.

It has to be any moment now, right? It's been a week. They have to be closing in. Any moment now, the door will open, and there they'll be to take him home.

The air conditioning blows relentlessly against his skin. He sneezes, then rubs the snot on his arm. He's given up on the tissue paper.

It'll be over soon. It has to be. Just hang in there, Leon, just a little longer.

He picks up another bottle and starts chewing.

-----

He's playing a mindless little game with his flattened bottle lids the next time Bishop comes.

"I'm surprised you still have any energy at all," says Bishop, and Leo wants to punch him.

(Really, he wants to do more than that. But those kinds of thoughts always make him feel weird and bad, so he pushes them away.)

"You should have learned by now," he says, pushing to his feet and trying not to show how badly he's trembling, "you can't keep me down."

"This is all unnecessary," says Bishop. "I'll feed you as soon as you answer my questions."

Leo barks out a laugh. "Sure you will."

"I will," says Bishop. He turns and says over his shoulder, "Bring it here."

One of the men in fatigues steps forward and hands a tray with a covered plate over to Bishop. Bishop uncovers the tray and holds it where Leo can see.

Baked chicken, broccoli with cheese, mashed potatoes.

Leo's stomach twists and cramps so painfully he has to bend at the hips and clutch his midriff.

"This is yours, as soon as you answer my questions."

Leo pointedly keeps from looking at the food. He shakes his head. He can't. He can't.

"Such persistence." Bishop's voice is scolding now. "You understand that you are a known accomplice to a terrorist, don't you? But if you become a cooperating witness, you will be granted some leniency."

Leo barks a laugh, lifting his eyes to look at Bishop's face, and pointedly not the food. "What's the point?" he asks. "If I'm not... protected by the constitution, or whatever. Are you going to let me go?"

"No," says Bishop. "But as I have told you, your conditions will become more comfortable." He waves the tray of food.

Leo stares at him, before a manic smile splits his face.

"You... stupid bastard. I can't even answer your questions." He slams a shaking hand against his plastron. "I'm not even a yokai! Do you get that? I'm not a yokai!"

Bishop looks skeptical. "Obviously you are."

"I'm not!" Leo rages. "I'm a mutant! I'm from New York! I don't even live in the Hidden City!"

Bishop's eyes flash. "I see," he says, "so you do know of it."

Leo falters, his body going slack.

What an obvious, stupid mistake.

(Some face-man he is.)

It takes Leo a long moment to answer. Bishop stays right where he is, holding the food so tantalizingly close and yet still out of reach.

"...I don't know about the gateways," he says finally. "I don't know about their defensive capabilities. I don't know what Baron Draxum is planning."

"Your lies are obvious," says Bishop. "You really don't want this? It's your last chance today."

Leo stares at the food. His mouth is watering so hard it might start to drip. Would it really be so bad to answer? They don't live in the Hidden City. And Draxum dropped him off a roof.

Draxum is trying to change, says Mind Raph. You see what these guys are like. You can't turn the yokai over to them. They'll hurt them!

What about me? he asks. Is it okay if I get hurt?

You're a hero, Leo, says Mind Raph. You can deal with it for a little longer. It's just a room. Just a little cold. Just some hunger.

He's a hero. He can deal with it. He can. He can.

He'll make them proud. Show them they can trust him.

It takes everything he has, but he shakes his head.

Bishop tuts. Then he throws the entire plate in the trash.

"Tomorrow, then," he says. Then the window is gone.

Leo collapses on his cot and tries not to cry.

-----

After his third water bottle on day eight, one of the fluorescent lights over his head flickers and then dies out.

It's not surprising, since they keep them running twenty-four seven. The blessedly dimmed lighting is actually nice, for once. Leo thinks maybe he could get some sleep, if the gnawing hunger and the constant shivers don't keep him awake.

He's just closed his eyes and snuggled up under his cot when it occurs to him: they may come in to fix it. If keeping the lights on day and night is part of their plan to torture him, to keep him exhausted and anxious and on edge, then they have to.

Which means his chance is finally here.

He has to be careful about this. He has to be ready to move, but he can't let them know he's ready to move. He has to let them think he's too weak, too exhausted, to make an escape attempt.

(He can't let himself think that, though. He can't give up before he tries.)

So he stays under his cot, but subtly shifts it so it won't restrict his movement. He has to be ready to burst out as soon as he gets a chance. Get past whoever comes in, then get out the door. It's after the last water bottle, so it's nighttime. There will be fewer people. He can do this. He can do this.

Find his swords. Make a portal. Get out.

Just as he was thinking, after a long time has passed, there is a loud warning beep, different from the water bottle beep. An automated voice says from somewhere unseen, "Inmates clear the door. Security personnel entering. Stay still and you will not be harmed."

Then the door slides open, and someone comes in.

It's a man wearing fatigues. Leo thinks this is the one who "offered" him a sandwich the other day. He's holding some kind of gun with a long barrel. He does a sweep of the room with his eyes, coming to rest on Leo under his cot. He gives Leo the same leering grin, and waves the barrel of the gun in his direction.

"Now you behave, and we'll get along just fine," he says.

He steps to the side, and another man enters, this one wearing the kind of jumpsuit Leo sees janitors in on TV. He's carrying a stepladder in one hand and a long tube in the other. Is that what fluorescent lights look like? Leo didn't know.

The man walks to the middle of the room and sets up his stepladder. Then he walks up and pulls off the light casing. When he unhooks the old bulb, it causes the other bulb to flicker, just for a few moments.

Leo explodes out from under the cot, grabbing the man in fatigues by the legs and yanking as hard as he can. The man yelps in surprise, and Leo hears the sound of the gun going off in a random direction. The janitor shouts and drops the light bulb - the sound of shattering glass joins the cacophony.

Leo jumps to his feet and runs out the door they had been too stupid to close, sprinting toward the EXIT sign. He's exhausted and shaky but he's coursing with adrenaline, and he leans on it hard to keep him moving. Don't stop, don't stop, get out of here. He'll figure out what to do next once he's free.

Past the exit sign there's a large open room with desks and computer monitors. Most of them are off, but one lingering woman in a lab coat, seated at her desk, screams when she sees Leo dash through the middle of the office space.

"Security!" she screams into a device on her chest. "Inmate is escaping! Inmate is escaping!"

Leo doesn't have time to shut her up, he just keeps moving. He pushes through the next door and arrives in a hallway; he only has time to glance one way and then the other before scrambling to the left, hoping it was a good choice.

He rounds a corner and sees another green EXIT sign up ahead. It's not where he meant to go - he meant to find where they're keeping his swords first. But he hears shouting behind him and doesn't stop. Fine, so no portals - he'll figure out something else once he's away from here.

He throws himself forward into the exit door, which leads him into yet another hallway. Another long sprint, with shouting and slamming doors at his heels, and then finally, finally, a third EXIT sign, and he crashes outside.

Where there's snow on the ground, snow on the trees.

It steals his breath away. There shouldn't be snow. It's May.

Where is he?

He takes a breath of air so cold it seizes his lungs, then takes a step forward. He'll worry about that-

BANG!

A piercing pain in his shoulder nearly sends him toppling over. Leo shouts, grasping for the wound and feeling something sticking out of his skin. He grabs it and yanks, pulling it free.

It's a dart.

Damn it, he thinks, before his vision goes woozy, and he collapses into the snow.

-----

"Are you proud of your little escape attempt?" comes Bishop's voice.

Leo looks up from his cot. Bishop has to get so close to the window to see him that his nose is pressed flat against it. It should be hilarious, but Leo doesn't really have the energy to laugh. Or to do much of anything.

He's hungry. He's tired. He's cold. He's still sluggish from the drugs.

And they threw away all his water bottles. Fuckers.

Leo rolls over on the cot and covers his ears.

"What a childish response," says Bishop, and that's funny, too, because Leo literally is a child. Or a teenager, anyway. He doesn't feel like it will help him much to point that out, though.

"All you have to do is answer my questions, and all this will be fixed."

That's the funniest thing of all. The idea that he spills his guts and Bishop treats him to a five course meal to make up for all the pain up till now. Hilarious.

He says nothing.

Bishop sighs.

"You are likely still affected by the tranquilizing agent. I'll return tomorrow."

Before he leaves, he says, "Temperature down five degrees."

-----

The same man is back that night. He opens the window and looks down at Leo with the same leering smile. Leo can't even take satisfaction in the bandage on the side of his head.

"Neat little trick you had yesterday," he says. "Almost got me fired."

Leo wishes it had gotten him fired. But he clearly has no luck in this situation.

"You know, I respect the attempt. And you probably would have gotten farther with a little food in your belly." The man reaches down, then retrieves a sandwich, as mouth-wateringly unappetizing as the last time. "You sure you don't want this?"

And Leo knows he shouldn't trust this guy. Leo knows he should say no.

But he's just...

so...

hungry.

So he gets up. And he turns to the window. On shaking limbs that can barely hold him upright anymore. With a body that is laced with pain and aches and cramps.

And he nods.

The man's smile gets wider. "What do you say?" he asks, in the sing-song tone of a parent scolding a child.

It makes a sick nausea rise in Leo's throat. But he wants the sandwich.

"Please," he gasps out.

"Mmm... not good enough." The man waves the sandwich. "You want this? You beg for it."

Leo stares, eyes wide. But the sandwich... the sandwich...

He gets down on his knees. Feels a searing flush of humiliation. His stomach is rolling and gurgling and cramping with pain, a hollow, empty chasm inside him desperate to be filled.

He lowers his head.

"Please," he says. "I... I want the sandwich. I'm... begging you, please."

The man laughs, loud and long. When Leo finally finds it in him to raise his eyes, the sandwich is already half eaten.

"Hey, good job," says the man, licking a bit of mustard off his thumb. "That was real convincin'."

And then he takes another bite.

Just like that, Leo forgets about the pain, the aches, the cold, the hunger. All that's left is pure, white hot, screaming rage.

Leo lunges at the window and slams his fist into it so hard it cracks. Not enough to break the glass. Not enough to free him. But enough that the man startles and steps back.

And Leo starts to laugh. High and manic and unhinged even to his own ears.

"I'll kill you," he says, and his voice sounds almost joking, and yet- "I'll kill you. You're dead. You're dead, as soon as I get out of here, you're dead, I'll kill you, I'LL KILL YOU!"

The man has dropped the rest of his sandwich. He fumbles for his gun, left somewhere on a table to the side. For one satisfying moment, Leo sees a flash of genuine fear on the man's face.

"Shit," he says, his voice far away the further he gets from the microphone. "Pretty scary, frogboy."

Then he slams a button, and the window goes black, and Leo gets a glimpse of his own reflection.

His face is gaunt and drawn. His eyes are ringed by deep circles, so dark they look like bruises. His body is shaking like a leaf.

And his stripes...

His stripes are lit up like when he uses his ninpo, but they aren't their usual Neon Leon bright.

They're almost black.

Leo gasps and stumbles back just as the window goes white. The full body quakes he feels now aren't from the cold or the hunger or the exhaustion.

He turns and sinks onto the cot. Puts his face in his hands and tries to breathe. Tries to will his ninpo to stop rolling and snapping and to go back to normal.

This isn't what he wants. This isn't him.

This place is breaking him. He's letting it break him.

He pulls his legs up onto the cot and buries his face in his knees. Wraps his arms around them and rocks gently, the way Donnie used to do when things got overwhelming. Maybe he understands that better, now.

This isn't him. He's Leonardo, Neon Leon, the face-man, the jokester! The one who's always ready with a quip and a laugh. The one who can do anything!

Except portal out of his room. Except escape from this building. Except resist begging for a sandwich like he's a dog.

Leo's breath hitches, and for once he doesn't stop himself. He knows the guy outside is probably watching. He knows there are cameras recording this. He hates giving them the satisfaction.

But he's tired, and hungry, and he...

He wants to go home.

He cries, silently, until he's completely rung out.

-----

Maybe they aren't coming.

That's the thought that pops into his head, just a bit after the first water bottle of the day.

He knew they would have gotten a late start, because he stormed out. And he knew it would take them awhile to figure out who took him - he hadn't heard of the EPF before, so why would they? And he knew it would take them time to figure out where he had been taken, which must have been pretty far out if it's snowing outside. But the EPF got him here within a night, he's pretty sure, so unless they have a super fast jet, he must still be on the continent somewhere.

So... so surely they must have figured it out by now, right? Raph is leading the team. Donnie is doing science things. Mikey is razzing his tazz. April is using her investigative skills.

Unless they aren't coming.

Maybe... maybe it's true. Why would they want him back, after all? Leo took Raph's leader position, and since then all he'd managed to do was piss Raph off. Mikey and Donnie hadn't been happy about it, either, and he'd noticed that they'd been avoiding him more and more. April claimed she wasn't taking sides, but she always seemed to be on Raph's anyway. And Dad... well, he was probably disappointed that he made Leo leader only for him to do nothing and then get himself kidnapped.

He doesn't bring anything to the team. He doesn't bring anything to the family. And no one likes his jokes.

So. Maybe they just... aren't looking. Maybe they aren't going to come.

Maybe he's held out this long for no reason. Maybe he's been cold and starving for no reason at all.

Maybe it's time to give up.

---

Don't give up, says a new voice in his head.

You are not alone.

-----

He has no energy left to stand when Bishop comes. The man looks down at him, lips pressed into a thin line.

"You don't look well," he observes.

No shit, Leo wants to say.

"This has gone on long enough. Answer my questions, and we will provide you with food, clothing, and medical care."

The list is getting longer. Leo's fuzzy eyes stare up at Bishop. Medical care. Does he need that?

"You already know what I want to know." Bishop has a furrow between his eyebrows now. "Will you talk to me?"

He could. He could do it. He could finally have some relief from all the pain. All the hunger. All the cold.

But they might hurt the yokai in the Hidden City.

They might hurt Draxum.

They might hurt his family.

And maybe, if nothing else... if Leo could just keep his mouth shut, just this once...

Maybe that would finally make Raph, Dad, and everyone proud of him.

Maybe they'd finally trust him.

Maybe, at least, he can have that much.

Leo shakes his head.

Bishop scowls.

"Temperature down ten degrees."

-----

Leo isn't shivering anymore. That's probably a bad sign.

He can still see his breath, each time he exhales. It rises like smoke, before disappearing into the air.

He doesn't have any energy left, not even to chew on his new water bottles. He hasn't even collected the last two, and they sit crowded together in the slot, untouched.

He kind of wishes they had just dissected him from the beginning. It would have been faster. Freezing to death, he's decided, is a real zero out of ten. Starving to death isn't any better. No stars.

Even though the damn lights are still on, he feels extremely sleepy. It's probably the cold. He wonders what will happen if he brumates. He's never done it before, not like his little cousins, and he has no idea if it's even safe.

Probably not, given he has no calorie reserves left. All it means is he won't be drinking water, either.

But he's so sleepy.

It's going to be time soon for Bishop to come back. Leo doesn't know what the point is anymore. Maybe he'll just sleep through it. Yeah, that would really make him mad. And making Bishop mad is all he has at this point.

And he'll get to sleep. It's a win-win.

So thinking, Leo rolls himself over onto his belly. Then, one by one, he pulls his limbs into his shell.

He doesn't do this much anymore, not since he started growing. His body just doesn't seem to fit his shell like it should - a side effect of the mutation, probably. It's not really comfortable to be inside for long.

But Leo is sleepy. And his shell feels like the best place to be.

So he pulls in his legs, then his arms, and then, finally, his head.

It's not any warmer in here. But at least it's dark.

At least he's not shivering.

Leo sighs, content, and closes his eyes, and drifts to sleep.

-----

(Outside his cell, there's a bang, and shouting, and a gunshot.

The sound is muffled, and Leo sleeps on.)

-----

Part 1 (here) | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Part A |

[pearlywritings]

Hi!! Can I request Dan Heng + Euphonium BUTTT, the reader is the one who's correct 🤭

Took a bit longer, but it was fun to write for him hehe

Overdid it

pairing: Dan Heng x reader

prompt: "I hate to say, but I told you so"

word count: 1.4+ words

~ The Music of the Night event ~

His head is splitting. It feels like he was hit with a giant hammer, and he wouldn’t be surprised if his head was cracked in halves. But he can’t even check - his whole body seems to weigh a tonne, and attempts to lift an arm only makes the overall ache worse.

The eyelids are heavy too and it feels like a total bother to even move his eyes behind them. At this point Dan Heng isn’t quite sure if he is sleeping or is hanging somewhere on the brink between obviously needed sleep and torturous reality. He doesn’t want to be sure. He doesn’t even want to think.

His mind, however, is restless. There are numbers running through it, and who’s to say whether they are a part of some data or they define how many mugs of coffee he’s had in the last few days. Last few days..? And for what reason, he’s turned to such foolish means–

Realization hits him like another blow of a hammer and jade green eyes snap open. The headache immediately intensifies and the man hisses, shutting his eyes and knitting his brows in distress; the head sinks deeper in the pillow.

Wait a moment. It doesn’t feel like his pillow.

Groaning and with laboured breaths, Dan Heng raises himself on an elbow. He forces his hand up to press the heel of it into his forehead. The world around spins.

It’s only on the will’s effort that he manages to sit somewhat straight. Running the palm down his face, the male makes attempts to regulate his breathing. The hand ends up pressed to his chest. It takes some time, but eventually he manages.

His eyes hurt and are so tired, but Dan Heng is conscious enough to take in to his surroundings. In the darkness of the room, - your room, - he makes out the familiar silhouettes of the furniture: the desk with currently turned off PC and the chair over which you almost had to fight Stelle because it was comfortable; the wardrobe with mirror sliding doors, the shelves where you displayed mementos from various trailblazing missions, the walls decorated to your tastes, the bed he’s currently half-sitting half-lying on… And the nightstand with a singular source of dim light in the whole room.

It is kind of a nightlight, but instead of the lamp there is a plastic screen inserted in a wooden base which is filled with colored lights. Totally March 7th’s gift, and he saw you draw on it with a special white marker regularly to have a highlighted image. 

Right now he could swear there is something written and he has to lean to the nightstand and squint to read.

In your pretty handwriting it says: “Take the pill and drink the whole glass. If you want me to come, press onto the bracelet. Love you <3”

There is indeed a glass of water and a pill next to the lamp, as well as a long-distance touch bracelet - one of the pair you got together during the visit to the planet Dan Heng can’t make his brain remember right now. His heart skips a beat, touched by your care, and a small smile graces his lips.

The pill slides down his throat and is quickly rushed by the cool water. The man doesn’t realize he’s chugged down it all in less than a couple of seconds. He feels like really could use more.

Next he picks the bracelet. It’s designed simply and has a moon ornament on the touch panel (yours has sun), but at the moment this little thing feels like the most sacred link between you and him. It’s not often when the vidyadhara allows himself to feel vulnerable, but he is exhausted beyond comparison, so if the press to the rising moon will bring you to him right now, he’ll gladly take it.

He lets out a trembling breath when you send him the same gentle signal.

Ten or a little bit more minutes pass, but he finally hears footsteps nearing the room. With anticipation the man watches the cabin door slide open, lifting his hand to shield the eyes from the bright light seeping into the room from the hall. It is gone as soon as it’s appeared however, and Dan Heng has the pleasure of seeing you.

You are standing there, closing the door behind you and balancing a tray on your one hand. Dressed in a robe over your casual homewear, you are an image of comfort, and your boyfriend wants nothing more than to have you close to him. He thinks he catches the glimpse of the bracelet when your other hand joins its twin and he glances down at his own, still clutched between his long slim fingers. Ah, he’s forgotten to put it back on the nightstand.

“How are you feeling, love?”

Your voice shocks him. Sounds tend to worsen his headache when it’s there - after all, all his inhuman senses are sharper. Yet your soft worried murmur of a question doesn’t aggravate it further. Maybe the pill has already kicked in.

“I…” He swallows, testing the vowel on his tongue, feeling his throat being hoarse. He feels like shit, but he is too polite to speak such unsightly truth. So he does something else - says another truth. “I overdid it.”

He sees how you tilt your head, studying him. Your gaze, scanning his face, his slouched form, brings a strange sense of embarrassment to him. He must be looking horrendously.

“You know, Dan Heng…’ You say slowly, stepping closer and putting the tray onto the nightstand, carefully nudging the night lamp and a mug further. “I hate to say it, but I told you so. Many times.”

Your lover downcasts his eyes. He knows you are not criticizing him, but softly scolding, yet it makes his stomach flip. He made you worry about him. That’s probably worse than you being wholeheartedly mad at him.

The mattress dips under your weight as you sit down, reaching for his face. The man leans into the touch instantly, closing his blood-shot eyes. Your palm is so warm… How can a simple caress bring a sense of tranquility? It will never be clear to him.

“I apologize, my love,” you softly murmur, shifting closer to him, ”I know you are not yet comfortable to sleep somewhere that is not the archive, but I couldn’t let you lie on a barely covered floor. So I made Mister Yang and Sunday carry you to my room.”

“Mhm…” he slightly nods, head still heavy, and accepts your fingers sliding between his, resting in his lap. He hears you sigh. It means there will be a lecture.

“Seriously though, when will you start taking better care of yourself? And I’m not speaking about your questionable choice of bed,” your words hold no malice and the tone is more puzzled than exasperated. “You are not a machine, you know. You do not have to rush. No one expects you to finish a week-worth of research task in a da-” you cut yourself when his forehead rests onto your shoulder. He tightens his hold on your hand.

“‘m sorry. I’ll do better. Promise.”

Your gaze softens. It is a rare sight - seeing Dan Heng like this. Raw emotion and lack of restraint is not what your boyfriend usually is. Moreso, he really looks like he needs a break - desperately.

So you decide to drop the conversation until he feels much better.

“I believe you,” a lingering press of your lips to the top of his head along with your other hand enveloping the lock of his and yours, and you can swear there are pleased dragon noises vibrating in his chest. Sometimes you almost forget he can do that. “I also brought you tea, if you’d like to. And a jug of water. Do you want anything?”

Tea, not coffee. Is he capable of loving you more?

“Can you…stay?”

Just stay with him… That would be enough.

“Stay? Of course, I wasn't planning on leaving. But are you sure you don’t want to drink something?” 

“No,” he shakes his head against your shoulder, his own dropping, “feel sleepy.”

“Must be the pill finally working at its fullest. I'll sit with you, alright?”

It doesn’t take much time to get him to lie back down and adjust the blanket. Once you settle next to him to be able to monitor his condition, with your back leaned against a pillow and the headboard underneath, Dan Heng moves impossibly close to you. His hand ends up wrapped around your thigh and his face - pressed to it. You are so warm and soft. 

He wants to be warm and soft too.

And as your fingers thread through the short black strands, gentle strokes bring him to sleep, letting the anxious mind rest, and the iron-heavy body float.

[takes1]

HI I LOVE UR WRITING

can i req a fic for iwa :000 maybe reader comes w him to the gym and he can clearly see her blushing at him workin out n his body 😔 the rest can be up to u :))

iwaizumi hajime x reader mutual gym thirst

hi!!! thank you so much!! really liked this idea :) i used his timeskip interest to help with some structure here, but i hope i got enough right!

warnings. sfw-ish, thirsty info. iwa's hot bod / charged staring / mutual crushing / questionable touching / will-they-won't-they kinda vibe / oikawa being a nuisance / oikawa moving things along / athletic!reader / injured!reader / 1.4k words haikyuu collection. more here! more links. my ao3. masterlist. requests open!

You never once thought of what your school gym's layout could really do for you before this afternoon.

There was absolutely no reason to, until a certain tall, dark, and handsome brute took a liking to the power rack in front of the treadmill you were tied to for the next half-hour.

Part of your training plan required 40 monotonous minutes of incline walking- so a longer variation of the tried-and-true 12-3-30 became your new ritual after your team's practice. Shin splits weren't going to go away on their own, after all.

So, you and your defective shins were already married to this spot. When he walked his beefy ass to a spot so ideal for watching, you couldn't help but feel a little creepy.

This light dusting of shame didn't stop your eyes from wandering, though. You were too tired from a long practice and longer physical therapy to truly keep your gaze glued to the numbers on the screen.

That near-pornographic muscle-tee he wore at least twice a week was in rotation today.

It was soaked through; light blue now dark, from the cardio that he just finished outside with his partner and current spotter.

"Come ooon, you can get that up," Oikawa smirked, knowing damn well he needed to help Iwa get the bar racked.

He laughed at his friend's shaky struggle, himself even surprised when the bar slammed against the metal holds.

"Fucking prick," Iwa grumbled with very little air in his lungs.

The dark tone on his tongue raised your brow. You looked at the ceiling with a big exhale to get the thoughts out of your head.

This crush was much more manageable when it was confined to passing glances in the hall.

He was panting as he sat up. You looked back down just in time to watch him remove his useless, sticky shirt.

Sure, the hip-deep slits down the sides didn't leave so much to the imagination, but this was still so much better.

You bit the inside of your cheek and squeezed your eyes shut to keep from making any ridiculous faces, but the image of his bouncy chest and twitchy, heavy biceps were burned into your eyelids.

They had to switch out the weight between turns, so when he took the side of the rack closest to you, you were able to stare at his working back muscles without any repercussions. It was akin to crashing ocean waves between his shoulder blades. He set a plate gently onto the floor.

His skin glistened in the moody lighting. The veins in forearms were plump with effort.

"You feeling okay, (Y/n)?"

Oikawa gave an all-too-knowing grin at you when you locked eyes with him.

Heat crept up your neck- as if you needed to feel any hotter- and horribly embarrassed, you couldn't craft a response to his smartass comment.

Thankfully, Iwa glanced back at your downcast expression and scoffed at his friend.

"They're out on injury right now. Chill out, dude," Iwa came to your rescue, thankfully mistaken to the nature of his remark.

Oikawa looked frustrated that his jab didn't land the way he wanted it to.

You stuck your tongue out at him when Iwa wasn't looking and got one right back.

Now that you were under suspicion, you had more motivation to not stare at him anymore. It just wasn't worth getting found out.

This aversion to looking in their direction allowed the more lively of the two to whisper something with a smirk without you catching him.

Only five minutes remained on your screen when Oikawa climbed up onto the treadmill next to yours, despite the four empty ones further away.

An eye roll. You swiped the sweat off of your face and flicked it at him.

He didn't even get the chance to say anything snarky before Iwa noticed his absence.

"Stop being an ass," He grumbled.

"I didn't say anything!"

He wiped down of the rest of the bench, grabbed his shirt, and stood between the two treadmills. He motioned between you.

"You're being obnoxious," Iwa asserted, "Go somewhere else."

He sure as Hell wasn't happy about it, but he gave in to his friend's wishes. This would be interesting enough without him needing to interfere-- he kept a watchful, cheeky eye on both of you from across the gym.

"So, they got you doin' this," He put his hand on the side of the machine, brow furrowed in concern, "God, isn't that a bit much?"

There was no way you could speak to him without ending this. You pressed stop on your workout, thankful to be done with a good enough excuse.

You set your hands on your hips and tried to get your breathing back to normal. Your shins were burning.

"I hope not," You shrugged and wiped the sweat off of your face with the collar of your shirt.

He rested the side of his face on his slick forearm and looked you up and down.

You tensed at the motion and looked to the side.

"Can I take a look?"

A strong twitch of embarrassed confusion on your face forced him to clarify immediately:

"Your legs- I mean," He laughed.

You knew he would assist the head PT every other day for injured student athletes that came through the training room. It was a way for him to get some experience in before he went for a degree.

It just so happened that it never aligned with your schedule, so even though he knew you had become a regular, he never got to assess you.

You tried not to limp on the way across the gym.

"Jesus..." He muttered as you sat your leg onto his lap, "Yeah, that's... fucked."

The little stretching corner was otherwise unoccupied, but you couldn't help but feel like your proximity was too much. Your head was craned around to make sure there were no teachers or staff around to yell at you- but flipped back around with small yelp at his hand.

You laughed and flinched away at his cold fingers, "Thanks."

He didn't react to you.

"I mean, like..."

Iwa was completely taken by how swollen your lower legs had gotten, he wasn't even finishing his sentences. His concentration was super cute. A little concerning, but cute.

He walked you through some new stretches that the head PT didn't care to show you; the more he informed you about the nature of your pain, the less you were trusting the old fellow that you had been seeing.

He supported you as you attempted a tough stretch and quickly reassured you to not push it. You let up as he suggested, hands trembling against his forearms.

"Juuust like that, yeah," He said gently next to your head.

Your face lit up and stopped, too embarrassed to keep this going. Maybe you did prefer that old, crusty, trained professional over him.

Concerned, he ducked to look at your expression, but you quickly evaded.

"Did that hurt too bad?" He asked.

You deliberated on lying but decided against it.

When you glanced back up at him and shook your head, he had a smile on his face that you couldn't quite rationalize.

The focus on 'strengthening' your shins seemed to Iwa like it was just making the issue worse. He recommended resting as much as possible.

His touch and his attentive gaze helped you manage the discomfort you felt going through the motions. He was always waiting for your reaction, gauging how he needed to shift you based on your facial expressions.

"Let me get you some ice," He snapped a couple times, deep in thought, "I wanna try that new wrap, too--,"

He jogged off into the clinic's room and flipped on the light.

In the mirror-wall you caught a glimpse of Oikawa at the free weights. He started blowing kisses in your direction and only stopped when Iwa hurried back out.

"Y'know, I can always make some extra time to check on this after practice."

Your expression softened.

Iwa knelt down next to you. He scanned the damage carefully before sitting, and took one leg into his lap again.

"I couldn't let you do that," You sighed and seethed at the contact.

There wasn't much more room to be gentle, so you just had to endure.

He layered everything slowly, firmly but not too tight, and would take the time to fix the stretchy tape if it got twisted. The actual therapist never spent this much time on you like this.

"Well," Iwa prodded at his finished work, "You can just... give me your number, and we can work something out?"

It may have been the ice, but the chills that ran up your spine were difficult to hide.

"Sure," You smiled.

It felt like you were agreeing to something a little less medical in nature.

He helped you to a stand and supported you for a few seconds too long.

"Sweet," Brushed off his lips in a consumed sigh.

masterlist.

requests/submissions: open

[fireya-x]

— ❥ [ link to my AO3 ]

— ❥ [ requests / asks ] (for requests - john price related preferably - or to say hi! <3)

— ❥ [ my art ]

🌙 nsfw / contains smut

✨ sfw / no smut

— ❥ [ where you belong ]🌙 [3.6k words]

john price knew you'd always obey — no matter how hard he pushed — and that’s what undid him.

— ❥ [ heavy, dirty soul ]🌙 [3.7k words]

after a long mission, john is exhausted, bruised and distant. you take care of him.

— ❥ [ carve your name into my bones ]🌙 [7.1k words]

butcher john price carves through flesh and bone - he never expected a florist’s touch to cut the deepest

— ❥ [ chamomile ]🌙 [8.4k words]

after a painful divorce and unexpected reunion, you and john rediscover a love that never truly faded.

— ❥ [ bite marks ]🌙 [4.4k words]

you show john exactly who he belongs to when other women won't take a hint.

— ❥ [ hold me close and tell me that it's real ]🌙 [4.7k words]

a message to a wrong number turns out to be just perfectly right.

— ❥ [ skin on skin ]🌙 [1.4k words]

a surprise waits for john when he returns home earlier than you expected…

— ❥ [ you could be the death of me ]🌙 [3k words]

disobedience has consequences, especially when it comes to john price.

— ❥ [ coming home ]🌙 [3,5k words]

three weeks apart is three weeks too long for john.

— ❥ [ caught in the undertow ]🌙 [7k words]

john made the right call that day. it could have cost you your life, but it saved a dozen others - innocent men, women and children. he made the right decision. …did he?

— ❥ [ luna sanguinis ] 🌙 [4/8 chapters, 19k words/??]

john price is dragged to a fancy halloween party, where he finds himself captivated by the stunning and mysterious hostess, victoria di corvo. (vampire!AU / kinktober)

— ❥ [ floral misdelivery ] ✨ [2k words]

overwhelmed by the task of gifting his mother flowers, john makes a mistake that turns into a chance to show you, his assistant, what you really mean to him.

— ❥ [ mirror image ] 🌙 [3k words]

john comes home from a training mission with new recruits and desperately needs to feel to be back in control over something (hint: it’s you).

— ❥ [ family dinner ]🌙 [9k words]

john asks you to pretend to be his girlfriend for one night, to save himself from annoying questions from his family. turns out, you're actually who he really wants.

— ❥ [ keep me breathing ]✨ [22 chapters || 73k words]

one day, captain john price brings his team home, a small house in a london suburb, after a mission that changed everything. you didn’t know that you would soon be back in the field again, chasing demons. if only you knew that sometimes, what you believed to be true wasn’t always as it seemed… (alternative ending fic)

— ❥ [ a private lesson ]🌙 [4k words]

your husband, captain john price, insists on teaching you how to shoot at the range. but you soon realize that his instructions involve a lot more than just handling a gun.

— ❥ [ a million miles apart ]🌙 [2k words]

it's the middle of the night, and the phone is ringing. it's john, and something is wrong... but it's a different kind of urgency. (phone sex)

— ❥ [ when lilacs bloom ]🌙 [5k words]

the aftermath of a mission leaves you shaken, and only john's presence can ground you as you face a new part of your life together. (shower sex, pregnancy)

— ❥ [ the fall of crowns ]🌙 [8k words]

as a sniper, you're not exactly known for close-quarters combat. john price wants to test your limits, and you both end up pushing each other beyond the point of no return. (consensual noncon!)

— ❥ [ the wolf and the nightingale ]🌙 [14k words]

witnessing something you shouldn't have, you're thrown into a world of shadows and danger, placing you in captain price's protective custody.

— ❥ [ champagne dreams ]🌙 [9k words]

task force 141 had taken on an unusual mission for a night: they were playing bodyguards for a retired general's daughter. captain john price expected it just to be a quick and well-paid gig - turns out, he and you weren’t seeing each other for the first time, though…

— ❥ [ they say don't open old wounds ]🌙 [3,7k words]

the mask hides more than just a face; it hides a shared past, a love lost, a ghost you thought long buried.

[enterthetadpole]

Enterthetadpole's "Long Awaited" Solo Completed Sherlock BBC Fandom Stories List

Hi everyone!

Now that I am really trying to put focused effort on completing my WIPs, I have decided it may be helpful to create a list of my (for now) finished solo and collaboration stories in the Sherlock fandom. There will be links below, along with a little blurb about the story, and as an extra bit of fun, I will also add some trivia/BTS about the story itself.

As far as the collabs, they will go in a separate post because my collab partners deserve their own posts for me to gush on and on about.

But first, here are the stories that I have battled alone with the help of many cheerleaders.

Ok then, let's go!

Completed Solo Stories

Far Away From Casual

Summary:

One-night stands aren't something that John does anymore. He's too old and Afghanistan took more out of him than he thought was possible. Unfortunately, a night of laughs and lots of drinks changes things.

Words: 19,828 Chapters: 18/18

Johnlock AU Different meeting. Light and comical with a fairly emotionally mature Sherlock, a "still figuring himself out" John, and Harry, Mike and Mycroft in the mix.

Fun Facts/BTS: I spent the better part of a year and a half just trying to get an idea of what this story was going to be about. It was a Fandom Trumps Hate auction story, and I struggled hard as to a plot to go with. Then finally it came to me one day. The visual was of Sherlock Holmes, asleep in bed , naked with a bruise in the shape of a hand on his ass. I laughed, couldn't get the image out of my mind, and a fic was born!

Just Before Christmas

Words: 1,014 Chapters: 1/1

Summary:

John left the clinic after a long Christmas Eve shift to come back to a dark and empty flat.

Small little ficlet about the warmth that comes from caring about the people you are with, and how a little tree can make a big difference. John and Sherlock are friends only, with maybe a little bit of wondering under the surface.

Fun Facts/BTS: This story came after a long bit of writer's block that was helped along by me reading the stories of Berty and listening to @podfixx. The inspiration for the tree came from my own little store bought tree gotten that same year. The book cover for this ficlet also is a photo of that same tree.

Through the Silence

Words: 11,547 Chapters: 12/12

Summary:

John watched the best man he ever knew fall from the rooftop of St. Bart's but refused to give up hope that somehow Sherlock may still be alive. If he was, John would find him. No matter what or who stood in his way.

Fairly heavy angst. John Watson in pain and self-destructive. Multiple POV shifts for the first half of the story. Post Reichenbach.

Fun Facts/BTS: This story was a very difficult one for me to write, not because of the subject matter itself, but because of the mood I would need to be in/get into to keep the overall flow of the story intact. The story is one of my first real attempts at more descriptive and poetic prose. Also, perhaps it isn't noticed, but the POV changes to only John's POV after a very specific realization occurs.

The Sh- Word

Words: 1,971 Chapters:1/1

Summary:

What happens when Sherlock accidentally has both a tranquilizer dart and a John Watson in the same flat? Chaos, and perhaps something more.

Pure crack fic. Out of his depth Sherlock and Understandably Oblivious John.

Fun Facts/BTS: This is technically part of a two-part prompt connected to @elldotsee. I actually used my spouse as a "test body" for this story. My spouse is a wonderful person who knows the insane writer they married.

The Theoretical Argument of Cats and Cake

Words: 575 Chapters: 1/1

Summary:

Cats, cakes, John's exasperation and Sherlock deducing everything. In no particular order.

Small ficlet about John and Sherlock being essentially John and Sherlock. Also featuring Molly's cats.

Fun Facts/BTS: This ficlet was completed at my first @221bcon, and I share Molly's love of cats as a fellow cat mom myself. Have a problem with it? Fight me.

Detachable

Words: 2,563 Chapters: 1/1

Summary:

John has only been dating Sherlock for three weeks. He doesn't deserve this type of humiliation, and yet here we are. Poor John...

More pure crack. Sherlock being peak Sherlock. John being baffled, embarrassed, but still in it for the long haul.

Fun Facts/BTS: The other ficlet that was directly connected to @elldotsee. There is a podfic that goes with this story that I adore so much. This is also one of the fic pieces I direct readers to who are interested in my stories, but unsure of what to read first. This story is my writing style in a small, digestible package. I suggest not swimming for at least three hours after consumption.

The Christmas Notes

Words: 2,821 Chapters: 25/25

Summary:

Sherlock writes notes to John. John tries not to strangle Sherlock. Insanity ensues.

Grumpy Sherlock. Patient John. Feelings realized through passive-aggressive notes.

Fun Facts/BTS: This was a series of writing prompts by Kat for the Xmas 2020 Collection. It was fun having to think of a different letter idea for every day in December up to Christmas. Would do it again. 10/10 no notes.

A Spark of Clarity in a Very Specific Moment in Time

Words: 927 Chapters: 1/1

Summary:

John is a very observant man. When one lives with Sherlock Holmes, one has to be...

Another crack ficlet, starring Sherlock's slumbering nudity and John's internal screaming. I regret nothing.

Fun Facts/BTS: This story came to life because of a photo of Benedict as Sherlock sleeping on the BBC Sherlock famous sofa. Sherlock being starkers was added by me. You're welcome.

Dissecting The Universe

Words: 37,163 Chapters: 29/29

Summary:

Series Four of Sherlock and so much pain has left what Benedict and Martin had in nothing but ruins. However, perhaps things can change if a series of events occur to make everything good, bad and unspoken float back up to the surface.

A real person fanfic that I still placed in the BBC Sherlock section because it is Freebatch (Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman) but it is centered around the Sherlock series. Lots of inside jokes and behind the scenes plot points.

Fun Facts/BTS: It was a lot of fun switching between character perspectives in this story, and how Ben and Martin may have dealt with the fandom and fallout. I understand that RPF isn't for everyone, but I did try to make this story as respectful as possible, and none of Ben or Martin's children ever directly appear in the story.

However Improbable

Words: 15,748 Chapters: 15/15

Summary:

Dr. John Watson had been through many things in his life, but can anyone truly prepare for meeting the world's only consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes?

This is a different first meeting AU. John is freshly out as Bisexual, and Sherlock is very direct about his feelings. Also Harry has both an attitude and a cat.

Fun Facts/BTS: Harry's cat Ginger ended up becoming a real-life cat for me. We adopted an orange cat about two years after this story began, who ended up being named Ginger before we changed her name to Mousaka. However, unlike the Ginger in the story, Saka is a lot less grumpy but just as feral.

Thank you for taking the time to read my fandom stories. I appreciate all, and reblogging is always such a help. Please let me know if you want to be tagged or not be tagged!

@peanitbear @copperplatebeech @naefelldaurk @dragonnan @lisbeth-kk @sgam76 @kettykika78 @binx72 @butterflygrl62 @dw91165 @izhunny @helloliriels @starkraivennemad @wizama @jobooksncoffee @safedistancefrombeingsmart @totallysilvergirl @johnyouareamazingyouarefantastic @discordantwords @ghostofnuggetspast @notjustamumj @friday411 @calaisreno @mydogwatson @redmondcollege @daziechane @chinike @ninasnakie @whatsnext2020 @writeoutloud @kccarmine @lololollywrites @chocolamousse @kittenmadnessandtea @lolcarina @chriscalledmesweetie @7-percent @jbaillier @missdeliadili @meetinginsamarra @khorazir @cumbercurly-blog @13monkton @thalialunacy @221beloved @johnlockismyreligion @imnova @notjustamumj @a-victorian-girl @onesmallfamily @snowfilly1 @readingwithgwen @izhunny

[m-ilkiee]

E-boys Ruined my Life: Toxic! Megumi Fushiguro x Fem Reader

“Coke on his nose, blade on my thigh, man I think this guy’s trying to plan my demise.”

Pairing: toxic! Megumi Fushiguro x female reader

series summary: You had a crush on Megumi for so long, you hoped you would meet him again. But now, as you stand before him, you realize that Fushiguro Megumi is not the same kid as he was at fifteen- he was taller, broader and far more handsome than ever.

And a whole lot more meaner to you.

(Based off a fic I wrote in 2021 for Megumi on my older writing blog. Honestly this theme is best viewed in dark mode but hey, what do I know 🤷🏽‍♀️)

[series warning] college/non-sorcerer AU, Dark content, nfsw, smut, 18+, aged up Megumi, fem!bodied reader, toxicity - toxic megumi, childhood crush to "lovers", situationships, heavy angst with "happy ending", smut, coercion, dubcon, noncon, mean dom! Megumi, sub!reader, misogyny, slut-shaming, depraved Megumi, mutual pining (is it really? is it??), manipulation, alcohol and drug use, gaslighting, drugging, implied baby trapping, semi-accurate potrayals of fraternities, classism

[main masterlist] [taglist link] [spotify playlist] [a03 + extra chapters] [wattpad + extra chapters]

Chapter 1: Love at First Sight

synopsis: Being friends with the IT GIRLS as a first year has a lot of perks; new friends, a popularity boost and crossing paths constantly with your high school crush after many years apart, Megumi Fushiguro

cw: DARK CONTENT, NSFW, aged up characters (18-21 and above), classism - elitism, sexism/misogyny, unhealthy body image, physical and verbal violence, mentions of bullying and suicidal thoughts, slut shaming, objectification of the female body, parasocial relationships, gaslighting, manipulation, sex between character x character (NOT A SHIP), vague, brief mention of teenagers fooling around etc

wc: 13.5k

Chapter 2: Party Hard, F*ck Harder

synopsis: Heartbroken that Megumi hates you, you decide to attend the freshman party to get over him. And end up needing his help after getting drugged… in more ways than one.

cw:

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Chapter 3: Pattern Recognition

Synopsis: Nobara notices two things; One, you’re in love with Megumi and two, Megumi’s budding obssession with your affection.

cw:

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Chapter 4: I Don’t Do Drugs

Synopsis: Megumi realizes you would do anything for him, and decides to utilize this information to his advantage, much to Yuuji’s disappointment.

cw:

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Chapter 5: Sugar Rush

Synopsis: it’s evident you can’t live without Megumi, and so you cave in to his demands against all advice to stay away from him

cw:

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Chapter 6: S♡x Addict

Synopsis: Your grades begin to suffer due to Megumi’s insatiable urges and his inability to keep his hands to himself.

cw:

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Chapter 7: Whirlwind Situationship

Synopsis: Eventually, Megumi grows tired of you and breaks off everything, devastating you completely.

cw:

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Chapter 8: Revelation

Synopsis: You’re finally getting your life back together and start doing well in school again. Meanwhile, Megumi realizes he can’t function without you.

cw: 

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Chapter 9: Relapse

Synopsis: You return his sweater to get closure  But Megumi himself isn’t ready to let his own feelings for you, as twisted as they are, go

cw:

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Chapter 10: I’m not the Right one

Synopsis: Left alone to spend your fifth marriage anniversary for another year, you finally gain the courage to get divorce papers. Megumi, however, reminds you that he owns you. Permanently.

cw:

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author's note: i missed writing for fushiguro! please comments, reblogs, likes and asks are welcomed. if you are a minor, please refrain from interacting with this fic.

taglist (please turn on your mentions in 'settings' before filling the form.): @officiallyjaehyuns @haikyuusboringassmanager @ilybbg @cockonoi @Rindou24689 @short-cxke @kokoch4n3l @GenAwi @getonite @reiners-milkbiddies @gh0stgirl333 @raven-nevra @megumisdivinedogs @fushiqruo @kawaiikoalagarden @raven-nevra @ilovetwodmen @straightfromheaven @manchie55 @matchamilktea-05 @tenjikusstuff4 @Lovelyartistz @lik0

[soobadnoonecanstopher]

Rat Bastard - Part 11

Pairing: You x Kyungsoo 

Rating: M (Mature Smut)

Word Count: 10k

Warnings: There were too many beds, Enemies to Lovers, Slow Burn, Sexual Tension, Idiots to Lovers, Mature Sexual Situations.

Tag: @ilovemyapopbaby

Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11

“Peanuts, Miss?”

In a blink of an eye it was over. 

The swirling, frantic moments inside of the hurricane, with the grime and cobwebs and 100 years of dirt covering every surface. The painful turned magical moments spent inside of that abandoned and run down storm shelter were all gone and you opened your eyes at the unwelcome intrusion; cutting off the vivid memories of the strength of those fingertips that left divots in the flesh of your soft thighs.

A shiny foil packet was left behind in the palm of your hand as her back retreated. That foil reflected the sunshine filtering through the lower third of your window that let in just enough warmth to heat your skin. The higher the plane’s altitude climbed, the further down you’d had to pull the shade; lest the light pink bruises show through this sheer top when the sunlight discovered them. Bruises that a hot mouth pulled into existence and needy teeth bit firmly into place, still peppered certain places on your neck; your chest; and much lower, over other hidden places on your body.

“Something to drink, darling?” Another overly friendly voice lilted into your ears and you inhaled through your nose as your lips pulled into a perfunctory smile, nodding your head and accepting the plastic cup and tiny square of a napkin decorated with the airline’s logo. A sleek silver cartoon fish. A barracuda which now that you really thought about it, had no business existing tens of thousands of feet up in the air. 

It was only a blink of an eye — the both of you inside of that hurricane. One blink and it was the last. It was the story of you and him. After the last raindrop fell and the songbirds emerged from their hiding spots, the first trilling notes from a ringing cell phone interrupted the last real stretch of peace and calm within his strong arms and with that phone call came the signal. The notice that the storm had passed. It was all over. Bags should be packed — don’t worry about cleaning up — resort staff were coming to take care of that. Drawers and surfaces, shelves and cabinets should all be checked for personal belongings you weren’t willing to lose forever; for neither of you would never, ever set foot in this place again. Not in your lifetimes. Not alone and not together. 

That phone call was the beginning of the end and you’d felt blindsided by just how swiftly everything moved once that momentum had been built.

A single call, just one blink. You felt the urge for another; two or three quick ones. You blinked out the blinding sunlight that slipped under the window shade. You slowed a stuttered breath through your nostrils. A futile attempt to command it, but you gave in at once and blinked again. Then once more to clear the slippery and blushing images that pushed against your heart. And once more for the noncommittal questions whispered against your wet lips. 

“What airport are you flying into?”

“How long is your layover?”

“What time do you land?”

You were probably being dramatic. It was something you were prone to, but you had to blink quicker to dispel the wetness that blurred your vision and after the telltale heaviness of the moisture that accumulated along your lash line grew to dangerous volumes you had to blot away the wetness with the barracuda. It came away damp; probably grateful for any moisture a fish could get 35,000 feet up in the air. 

You inhaled another breath, this one going in deeper and coming out slower with just a hint of staccato stutter on the exhale as your lungs fully gave into the ridiculousness of the mood you were feeling right now. You were painfully aware of the absurdity. Any casual observer might think you’d lost out on something precious. The single tear that managed to slip by the barracuda might make them think you weren’t a woman who’d not only just begun a promising and beautiful relationship with someone strong, handsome, and talented in ways you could only dream of being. Someone who also, somehow, by some twist of fate, happened to find you just lovely enough to be worthy of his affection and his time. 

Somewhere under the surface you felt it; familiar old habits of yours that liked to creep up at the worst times. Old tricks of your mind that whispered mean things to you about how very not special you were; how currently unemployed you were; how untalented and unspectacular you really were despite the airs you liked to put on, what a dead weight you would be on his life and what if — what if without the actual life or death danger keeping that man trapped by your side; without the heavy steel door and the cement block walls and the maddening loneliness, boredom, and desperation that warped his opinion of you from deranged harpie to good enough for some easy sex — what if he changed his mind when he got good look at you. What if it had all been an illusion and the spark in his eyes fizzled with the first real look at you in the harsh lighting of the real world. Your next inhale was noisier. Your nose was stuffed up and the tiny napkin wasn’t much help anymore.

Between the crack of the seats of the row in front of you, a tiny eyeball pulled wide and stared at you. A small voice gasped in surprise and you heard a high pitched voice ask, “Mommy, why is that lady crying?” Much too young and curious to know any better and definitely too young to understand volume control, the question hung hard and heavy in the air around your seat row. The child’s mother gasped in horror and you caught her eyes for a split second through the crack. The old man across the aisle to your left visibly stiffened and turned, compelled to look at you, just enough to gawk, just enough to quickly look away the moment your red rimmed eyes met his. The awkwardness grew with the heat that crept up your cheeks and no amount of the child’s mother’s harshly whispered “Shhh — It’s not polite to stare” could extinguish it. 

How could you even begin to answer such a question? ‘Sorry little one. I haven’t had any terrible tragedy befall me. I didn’t lose a pet or break my favorite toy. I didn’t fall down and skin my knee or have someone push me on the playground and call me stinky. I’m just afraid that the brand new boyfriend that I’ve tricked into a relationship that nobody in my life knows about — none of my friends, none of his friends, not even our closest best friends who know everything about everything — nobody knows about — he could cut and run so easily and we wouldn’t even have to make a sentimentally sad instagram post about how we will be moving our separate ways  — that I might as well have stockholm-ed into liking me — that probably only even came to like me because we were trapped together in a last-woman-on-Earth type situation and I’m terrified he’s going to find out real fucking soon that this Earth is full of many, many women who are all far superior to me.’

There was no need for any actual answers to the child’s question because the captain was speaking through the speaker overhead. Some garbled message that had the right rhythm and cadence to get the flight attendants moving. Seat backs were uprighted. Tray tables were latched. You recognized the shift. This flight was nearing its end just as your time in the storm shelter had come to an end. Soon you’d find yourself back at your apartment, back in your same old bedroom with your same old problems and same old you. 

You wished you could go back to that island, back to the eye of that storm in that locked-up cement-walled shelter where he had no choice but to want you and to love you with as much desperation as you felt for him.

All through the airport as you waited for your connecting flight. As you reached the soil of your home country and your cell phone came back to life, pinging and beeping with a week’s worth of notifications from people who you knew and who cared about you. Messages from best friends who wondered about your whereabouts; wondered about the odd silence they’d seen from you online. You had disappeared to them all; except for one single person. At least you had something to occupy your mind with; recounting the tale of your near death experience with a category 5 hurricane; your vacation turned sour. 

You couldn't quite bring it in yourself to discuss him.

You weren’t sure why. 

He felt like a bubble. Fragile and beautiful and if you touched him with your filthy hands he would pop and vanish.

You’d get back home and take a few moments to catch your breath and you’d get him on the phone and talk with him about how you both would handle the fallout of this.

And there was bound to be some. Lines had been drawn. Rifts had grown between groups of friends who all took your side, save for one or two of his long time friends who didn’t doubt him for a second. 

But your words had held so much power against him, you were completely convinced he was in the wrong after all , and you recognized that you’d need to come clean very soon if this messy new relationship was going to go anywhere at all.

It was scary. The more you dwelled on it while sitting on your bed in the comfort and privacy of your own home now, the more humiliated you felt about the whole thing.

Claire, the one who so vehemently apologized for her role in setting you both up on that date. Claire, your kind, sweet, well-meaning friend. The one who took your side completely in your endeavors to pull the wool clear of everyone’s eyes so they could see him for what he really was, a liar, a snake. You had to talk to Claire first, just the two of you, alone. Before she heard about this from anyone else. She’d also been a victim of you too, just as Kyungsoo had been. You needed her to understand the truth about what you had done. You needed her forgiveness. 

Your thumb ran lightly over the string of waiting text messages from her. She had been searching for you, blaming herself for sending you on that silly retreat and lamenting on the timing of it all when she found out a storm had been heading to that very island resort where you were sure to have been trapped. 

You clicked on her name and typed out a quick string of words. Explaining how first and foremost you were alive and well. Apologizing for your oversight with not realizing you’d need an international SIM card to keep your phone alive while you were gone and giving the briefest run-down of the hurricane, outstanding efforts by the resort staff to keep you safe and as comfortable as possible given the circumstances, and you asked if she was available for a phone call — being extremely careful not to mention, at any point in your messages, the presence of another human in this entire recap, a human man who you were both quite familiar with, as his name was frequently the subject of many, many of your conversations with Claire in the past. 

Claire was a responsible adult with a daytime job and she was too busy for a talk now. She also sounded excited to share some gossip with you about something else that had transpired while you were away and so your long list of confessions to the women would have to wait. 

You stared down at your phone. Having to live without it for a solid week seemed to have broken you of some of your bad habits related to the thing and you left it behind on your kitchen table as you busied yourself with unpacking your bags. You started a load of laundry, put back bits and things you never even got to use and carelessly tossed that unopened big box of condoms on your bed.

You should throw them away. 

They were rather expensive. 

Again, your mind drifted to him. 

A glance toward the clock told you that based on the vague travel schedule he’d told you about, he would have landed by now. He would have made his way through the airport, gotten a ride to his office as he said he had some work to do before he would finally be able to go back home and lay down in his own bed. 

You’d dreamed of such a thing while trapped away in that shelter — laying down in your own bed. 

Now the stupid thing looked too big, too unoccupied, too cold, and too empty for you to want anything to do with it. You had a feeling the second you laid down in it your mind would be flooded with too many memories of him to be able to find comfort in anything that wasn’t his arms. 

Oh, what a damned fool you had become. He’d turned you into an idiot. You couldn’t live without him now. You’d be destroyed when he finally wised up and came to his senses.

The thoughts of him had your eyes searching for your phone as a thought suddenly dawned on you. A memory really, from the first quiet minutes after that phone call had arrived. Before either of you pushed yourselves up on your legs, pulled your clothing back onto your bodies and began the painful task of gathering up every one of your belongings to say goodbye.

It was in those first minutes though when Kyungsoo had reached his hands down to pull at the straps of his duffel bag and he lifted the whole thing onto his bare thighs, digging and digging until he pulled out a ball-point pen. As the memories made their way into your mind, you made your way into your bathroom, lifting your top up, pushing at the gauze-like fabric until you found it.  You stood in front of the mirror, touching with gentle fingertips over the marks he’d made on you. You had been giggling. It made the pen marks stutter in their journey and you even pushed with protesting fingertips against his hands as made his first tickling passes over your skin with the pen.  

“Shhh, stop,” he said with his giggling mouth and the pen kept moving over your skin until you’d settled down enough to just let him do whatever it was he was doing to you. 

There, written backwards in blue ink, high up on your rib cage, below where your breast naturally fell was a phone number. Of course he’d have to have given it to you somehow. You could make out most of it as your mind quickly spun the numbers around so you could understand them all. This was Kyungsoo’s phone number. Your Kyungsoo. 

The numbers on the clock, reflected backwards in the bathroom mirror with the help of some quick time zone math, told you it had been 11 hours since you’d last seen him at the airport. You’d both had several hours of travel time, plus he had the stop at the office to deal with whatever next trip he had to iron out details for. One of his clients, some billionaire’s daughter, had booked him for a long trip on a yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean and that was coming up very soon. Soon. like tomorrow. This revelation had set a heavy stone down in the pit of your stomach. 

You’d paid enough attention to the calendar to know that the next time you would see him might not be until Sam and Mari, your mutual friends’ wedding.

Your face had betrayed your disappointment. He pulled your frowning mouth into his lips again and again, promising you that he didn’t always go out of the country for work — that despite the awful schedule he had to keep, it was usually within driving distance of each other. 

Pushing the memory of that disappointment away you left the bathroom to find your phone. You’d made it to the kitchen table when you heard a faint buzzing echoing through the wood. 

You were getting a phone call and it was from a phone number that was not saved in your contacts. You couldn't tell how many times this person had called, nor did you know how many rings had rung, but now that you were looking at it, the number was familiar. You’d just spent the last 10 minutes dreamily running your fingertips from the tips of the 1s down to their pointed bottoms; running rings around the 0s and snaking your pinky finger along the shape of the 9s and the 5s. There was a burst of flutters inside of your belly. Kyungsoo was calling you. 

You swiped to answer before the call was lost and you held the phone up to your ear, pausing to keep your breath from catching in your throat and to keep the stutter of excitement out of your voice. 

You managed a casual ‘Hello?’ as a greeting but what you heard on the other end of the line was a stretch of such quiet that it sent a jolt of worry through you. Perhaps you’d missed his call. You pulled the phone down to check and the call was indeed still connected. You brought the phone back up to your ear and inhaled once more, ready to say ‘hello’ again when you heard the slightest exhale inside your phone’s speaker. 

“Hi.” 

It was him. It was Kyungsoo. 

You didn't even feel your face move into the wide smile that pushed your cheeks up but you were definitely smiling when you responded to his tiny greeting with your own even smaller response; even softer than his was. 

“Hi,” you whispered. 

He didn’t say anything. You couldn’t even hear him breathing, not after that first exhale. 

You had to hold your breath to get control over yourself. You felt like a lovesick teenager and if you hadn’t been tethered to reality with this cell phone stuck to your face, desperate to catch any little sound he might make, you might have thrown yourself down onto your living room floor and screamed at the top of your lungs. 

After a few deep breaths it began to feel as if neither one of you would say anything at all and after enough time passed for it to become quite ridiculous you hummed out a small questioning sound — sort of a preamble as you warmed up your voice for what? You had no idea. Still you eked out a little ‘umm,’ at the same time as you heard the sound of him lightly clearing his throat and inhaling against the phone speaker to speak.

“H-how was—’’ his attempt was quickly and not so smoothly aborted with a small groan. You closed your eyes and you could picture his eyes closing up as he lifted a hand to lay over his forehead. You could practically see the pink in his cheeks from here. 

“Sorry,” he exhaled out through his lips, you heard the air, “why am I so nervous?” The last question was mumbled to himself, but it was out loud enough for you to hear it. 

It brought out a stifled half-giggle from the back of your throat. 

“Why are you nervous, Kyungsoo?” You agreed with your question. Every little bit of the grumpy mood from earlier vanished in an instant with his voice in your ear like this. You laid down on your sofa with your legs propped up over the arm and swung your feet up and down absentmindedly, cradling your phone up to your ear as it was the most precious thing in the world as you ran a hand over your belly, up higher over your ribcage where you’d been tracing his phone number in the mirror mere moments before.

“Right? Why am I? I’ve been with you all week. I was just with you this morning. What is this?”  He laughed once; a hopeless sort of laugh from deep inside of his chest and you hummed into the line, somehow understanding this feeling that must have been surging through him. 

“It’s,” you began, biting down on your bottom lip once before finishing your thought, “it’s different…having you in my ear like this.” 

“Different,” he said softly, his voice lifting just a tiny bit at the end of the word. Less of a questioning sound, but more of his shaky control giving into madness a little. “Different. It’s different. You sound—” 

You listened closely but his words stopped coming. However you sounded to him, he wasn’t ready to talk any more about it. He let out a tiny groan and cleared his throat, inhaling again with more purpose you heard the man rein it in suddenly. 

“Tell me something. Anything. What did you—” a quick exhale left, “What did you do first when you got home?”

“Umm,” you lifted your eyes toward your ceiling, not seeing but recalling your arrival at your apartment. “I brought my luggage in and I unpacked, no, first I had to text Claire and tell her about my trip and let her know that I wasn’t dead at the bottom of the ocean, you know, that sort of thing. She was too busy to talk, though, so I didn’t get a chance to get into … too many details.” You heard the soft hum from the back of his throat. 

He was just listening without asking questions and without interrupting so you kept going. 

“Then, well, I went to my bedroom to unpack my bag. So, I put everything away. Laundry — makeup and …stuff. I was about to change, well, actually, not change because I then remembered, this morning…you and your pen — I was about to put your phone number into my phone, but then you called me before I could do that and, well, now I’m talking to you on the phone and obviously I can’t concentrate on doing anything else, because m-my boyf— umm — because, Kyungsoo called me.” 

Admittedly, you had been rambling. You paused your rapid fire recap of what all had transpired once you’d walked through your front door for some sort of response from him, but also to catch your breath and calm your nerves. 

What came was a long drawn out exhale mixed with the low notes of a groan. His lungs had been full. The exhale wandered over your ears for a long while. 

“I miss you,” he breathed out through the tail end of that groan.

He missed you. 

Your boyfriend missed you.

His abrupt confession stopped you mid thought and you froze with whatever else you were about to say trapped inside of your throat. All that came out, after just a little bit of shock wore off was the softest question for him. 

“You do?” 

He didn't answer. Instead, he asked you another question. 

“Do you want to come over and help me pack for my trip tomorrow?” As far as flimsy excuses went, this one was paper thin. If he really did need help packing, you would be no help. If anything you’d be an obstacle to productivity. 

You must have answered him. A small sound came out of you that sounded like an ‘mhmm.’

“Hmm? I’ll pick you up?” He added this to sweeten the deal and you could feel yourself nodding your head in response even though he couldn't see you. His voice right now…that little hum from his throat.  He practically whispered these words right between your legs

“Yeah. Okay,” you said while still nodding and you swung your legs down off of the arm of your sofa, landing them squarely in front of you on your carpeted floor. 

You had to shower. You were still covered in gross public airport travel germs and you had definitely looked cuter this morning when you’d last seen him. Your hair felt a little grimy and there were things you needed to scrub off, like the marks he’d made on your body this morning with his pen. The marks he’d made with his mouth, well those wouldn’t budge even with some soap and a loofa. 

“Text me your address.” Something had changed deep down inside of you. You couldn’t remember the last time you’d jump if a man told you to jump like this. You couldn't recall every being this agreeable with any of your exes. But you were humming in agreement. Swiping and typing across your phone screen to send him your address the second he’d asked for it. You were nodding your head, leaping to your feet to rush to your closet to pick out something to wear that made you feel beautiful. 

“Umm…give me an hour to get ready?”

You’d expected his easy agreement to your extremely normal request. 

Instead you got a tiny scoff and some ridiculous negotiation tactics.

“Thirty minutes.” His voice echoed out of the little speaker of your cell phone that sat on the counter of your tiny bathroom, “I miss you.” There was a whining tone that you seldom heard from him. You noticed he tended to do this when he really, really wanted you to give into him. 

You pulled the toothbrush out of your mouth so he could understand your argument, ignoring the insane butterflies that you felt moving all through your chest.

“Forty-five minutes, Kyungsoo. I need to shower. I’ve been traveling.” You heard a concerning sound on the other side of this call. The beep that a car might make as it was being unlocked. 

“Twenty minutes.” A car door closed. An engine started up. “I miss you,” he said again, as if this alone was the justification for him to do anything at all.  

“Twenty?!” Much of the exasperation you were going for was drowned out by your own laughter. “That is not how you negotiate.”

“You are going in the wrong direction,” you released a whining complaint that no doubt sounded out through the speakers of his car.  

He wasn't responding. All you could hear was the occasional sound of an engine accelerating or a turn signal ticking. 

You sighed out your defeat, closing your eyes into it. 

“If I'm still in the shower when you get here, the door code is my birthday. If you can figure that out… make yourself at home, I guess.” You knew for a fact that you’d never told him. You did however have a very active social media life and posted some sort of account of your birthday celebration every year. The year might stump him but he deserved to suffer just a little bit for being so impatient. 

When the active phone call vanished, you could see a few notifications left behind on your phone screen. A few responses to some text messages from your many relieved friends, but most tellingly, two other missed calls from that same phone number whose owner was now quickly on his way over to your house. Missed calls all made within the same short time while you were in here running your fingertips lovingly over those numbers written into your ribs, he was growing more and more frustrated and desperate. 

You felt just a little bit silly now. All of those insecurities from hours ago; the tears on the airplane; the ridiculously misread loss of something precious just because you no longer had him trapped inside of some cement walls and steel doors with nowhere else to go. 

Even with the door wide open, it seems he had nowhere else he wanted to go. 

You’d already stripped off the day’s clothes and started the water in the shower to heat up when you’d shouted out those last few words into the phone over the sound of the running water. 

You heard some bits of protestations from him a few seconds before you hung up the call and turned to jump into the shower. The water wasn’t quite warm enough but you soldiered through it, lathering, scrubbing, and sudsing yourself all over just about as quickly as you’ve ever done so and every few minutes you’d dissolve into amused giggles at the nerve of this man. 

About halfway through your shower the water had finally reached the perfect temperature to wash away all of the grime and grit from the long day. The warm water flowed over your face, washing away all of your earlier tears and worries and insecurities and you even found the messy scribbles made in blue ink no match for some nice smelling soap and a good scrubbing. You found yourself taking your time just a little bit. Scraping at your scalp thoroughly and even washing your hair again to make sure to get every last bit of the you from yesterday off. 

It felt like a new beginning. 

You’d quite purposefully lost track of time, going through great lengths to ignore the nagging feeling inside of your chest that asked silly questions like whether or not he was able to figure out the combination to get through your front door, or if you’d find him pouting outside, leaned up against the locked doorway having been defeated by those mysterious six digits. Somewhere in the middle of your final rinses you could have sworn you heard a sound. Perhaps the familiar of the same kinds of door locks all of these units had. Maybe even the sound of a door opening and closing. 

You couldn't be sure though.

It might just be a neighbor coming home from work. 

After your shower you took care of the bare minimum to get out of this bathroom. Underwear and a bra. Tossing a dress over your head and pulling it roughly down into place to cover your ass and thighs. A quick pass of a comb through your wet hair; you’d blow dry it later. A speedy and haphazard application of some lightly tinted moisturizer on your face, ignoring the other bottles with the many steps of your usual skincare regimen. The makeup was mostly forgotten. This half assed attempt would have to do. You were practically vibrating with curiosity. 

If he was here, you thought maybe you might find him sitting on your sofa in the living room. Perhaps he’d pull up a stool at your kitchen counter, one leg crossed over the other with a cold beer from your fridge in front of him as he flipped through the newest L.L. Bean catalogue, one of the ones that came relentlessly because you’d once bought a raincoat as a gift for your father six years ago, that you’d brought in from the mailbox on the first floor of this on your way in. 

What you hadn’t expected, and what your reaction gave away with the startled gasp that erupted from your chest the moment you opened your bathroom door, was to find Doh Kyungsoo sitting on the foot of your bed — a black backwards ball cap sitting on top of his head — a danger you had not once prepared for was how incredibly attractive this man would look wearing a backwards ball cap. This had to be some sort of a trick, right? His sock covered feet sat flat on the floor, his knees, in casual jeans, parted casually in front of him and his biceps popped below the short sleeves of his black t-shirt from where he leaned back on both arms. His posture looked supremely comfortable in your own home that he had never ever stepped foot in — in your very own bed that he had never ever slept in. 

You recovered from the shock as best you could, but inside of your chest you could feel your heart racing. You held your breath for a moment, blinking away the surprise from your face as you slowed yourself down and simply took in the look of him. Your gaze made it back up to the top of his head after the languid journey you took to get here and when you caught his eyes, he moved a little, lolling his head over to the side as he took a slow breath of oxygen deep into his lungs and closed his eyes up, biting down on his bottom lip briefly before he exhaled the breath through his parted lips. He was shaking his head back and forth, his eyes still closed up tight and after a few moments he balanced on his left arm, the impressive muscles working overtime now, lifting his right side to rub a hand quite roughly over his face. 

You didn’t pry. He seemed to be coming to terms with something and if there was one thing you knew was that if you were sitting right where he was; having just given so very much away with his recent, rather desperate and needy, and oh so telling behavior; sitting right smack in the middle of some sort of revelation as he seemed to be, you wouldn’t appreciate someone asking you the one, two, three, four, five — or so questions that you felt needed immediate answering. 

You could only give him so much though. You noticed your big, rather expensive box of condoms that once sat where he now sat was nowhere to be found. He followed your wandering eyes as you zeroed in on the wastebasket that sat beside your dresser between your floor length mirror. You could make out the edge of the black box there in the trash. 

When your attention returned to his perch you caught the slightest micro expression on his face. A tiny shrug with only his lips and eyes. Your own face lifted more dramatically. Definitely not micro. You wore a severe question on your eyebrows and you angled your face to really sell the sass that surged through you. That this man sauntered into your door and threw away your things…

“I cleaned up a bit,” he mumbled flatly, lifting his eyes to break the eye contact now, the corners of his lips pulling into the slightest grin, “threw out some trash.” 

“Kyungsoo, those were expensive. I could have saved them—”  As soon as it came out it felt like the wrong thing to say. You pulled your lips together tightly when his eyes flew over to you, wide at first, then slowly narrowing as his brows furrowed, his expression running the gamut of several competing emotions all at once before he opened his mouth to speak, picking the safest conclusion that his heart could take.

”Do you want me to wear a condom? But, before you said—”

You lifted both hands, taking the three steps it took to close the distance between you both as you shook your head back and forth; opening your mouth to explain yourself, “I was going to give them to my friends.” 

“Single friends. For them to use with other people.” You reached for him with both hands, your palms landing over his cheeks. He was warm. His skin was smooth. Your first soft touches of his skin had his eyes closing up as he leaned his head back, his face begging you down to him like he was the sunflower and you were the sunlight. You’d stepped in close enough to land between his parted knees and in one fluid motion his arms reached for you, wrapping tightly around you, high up around your waist with his left, his right palm landing over the back of your upper thigh, just below the short skirt of this dress. 

You were already moving into him with the words of reassurance you gave him. The lean into his lips came as naturally as the promises you gave him and that first kiss, after nearly 12 hours of missing him, had you trembling and gasping when you pulled away from his kiss, just  enough to speak again. His mouth felt so needy. His hands trembled when they moved over you and gripped you so tightly wherever they paused; as if the time apart might have been even harder on him than it was on you; as if this had been all he could think about for hours now.

“But I don't need to. We can just throw them away and be done with it.” The words came out slower and stuttered a bit. He had moved to kiss along your neck and the deep breaths he took from just below your ear heated your skin, sending goosebumps down your spine. He came back again and again, breathing you in deeply; moaning in response to your scent filling his nose; no doubt getting a face full of your still damp hair but not minding it one bit with the way his mouth opened and he bit you on your neck, and again on your shoulder. 

“They’d probably demand to know who I was dating and I don't know if we should tell anyone else about us before we tell Claire—” you gasped when he bit you again, harder this time. At the same time he pulled you into him — strong hands on the backs of your knees. Pulling you onto his lap, straddling his waist here on your bed. Your sweet little summer dress moved out of the way too easily and you hissed to feel the scratchiness of his jeans against the softness of your inner thighs. 

“Wait, Claire doesn’t know?” He asked from somewhere nestled up against your breast, sounding genuinely surprised to find this out. When he’d pulled his face back up to ask you the question you felt the chilly air blowing over your wet nipple that he’d just been sucking on. You didn't even know when he’d pulled the straps of your dress and your bra off your shoulders. 

You shook your head to answer him, not quite committing to this conversation anymore. He should learn to pick between wanting to fuck you or wanting to have an important conversation because you simply could not multitask like this. Your skin felt on fire. There simply wasn’t enough energy for the critical thinking part of your brain.

You moved your hips over his lap again, feeling the definite arousal below the jeans but unable to get the right feeling with the belt, the zipper, the thick and very scratchy fabric. You had to fix this. You pushed yourself away from him and up onto your feet, quickly lifting your summer dress from the bottom up and over your head in a single motion. You did the same with the bra and panties while also reaching a free hand around the back of his head to grip that hat. It came off easily, freeing his clean black hair. It flew so easily with a little flick of your wrist. Kyungsoo was moving too, his hands making quick work of his shirt; freeing himself of the belt, the button, the zipper, pushing everything down and kicking it all away. 

“Well, when will you tell her?” It was the secrecy that was bothering him. You knew he didn’t like that part. He fell backwards onto your bed, completely naked except for the black socks that still covered his feet. 

The subject matter of this conversation felt vaguely important, but the sight of him still wearing his socks had you giggling and you reached for his feet, gripping the socks and pulling them off as you tossed them away onto the floor behind you at the same time as you made the journey up and over him. 

The dissonance in your mind couldn’t process his words, not really. You only half registered his important question while processing the way it felt for his warm smooth skin slipping against yours like this. The fact that he was still trying to have this conversation was insane. You’d made your way up to straddle over his waist, lifting your hips as you slid up the length of his hardness. You moved up to the tip of him, then switched directions and moved back down again, throwing your head back from the pleasure of feeling him slipping between your legs, sliding within your wetness, bumping and rubbing against your sensitive center. You both felt too much ready for this to last very long. 

His eyes had drifted closed. His hands were digging into your thighs, fingers leaving red marks. His mouth had fallen open with whatever silly topics he wanted to bring up now. Now, of all times, right now?

Those words were suspended somewhere within his throat and you moved over him again, watching the changes his face went through as you did it. 

“Will you give me some time to tell her? I have to do it right.” If he wanted to keep bringing it up, you’d oblige him. “Carefully.”

His eyes didn’t open with your question and he pulled his mouth closed and swallowed once, opening his mouth again, half closing again before breathing out his response. “D-Don’t,” his chest was heaving up and down and you lifted your hips again, giving just a little more pressure against the length of him with your journey. He hissed and bared his teeth. 

“Don't what, baby? Don't do this?” You moved over him again, lifting your hips, letting the tip of him slip inside of you for just a second before moving lower, letting the angle slip and he popped back out of place, slipping out of you. Losing that connection you both so desperately wanted. 

The grip of his hands grew tighter and you heard the smallest whispered ‘fuck’ escape from his lips.

“Don't ask me…

I’ll give you anything you want right now. 

W-What? 

Time? 

Sure. Take all the time you want — just,” that tight grip he held your thighs with shifted and he sat up against you, he pushed hard against the hold you kept over him with your hips in place and he wrapped a very strong left arm around your waist and squeezed too tight, too unexpectedly tight. You ached from the roughness he treated you with. “Just—” he whispered once more.

“—fuck me,” he said this so close to your face you felt his hot breath fanning over your lips. 

His black eyes were no longer closed. He was no longer playing along with this game you were playing. His face pulled back again so he could look into your eyes while he moved his right hand between your bodies. He gripped his dick and paired with the lifting of your body you felt the tip of him slip inside of you. You were released and you sunk down onto his lap. He pushed his hips up to fill you completely in a swift, shocking motion. It took your breath and your mind away from you and you froze, gasping with your mouth open; inundated and overwhelmed. 

Kyungsoo leaned his face into yours again, leaning with hot lips and his open mouth and pulled your tongue into his mouth, sucking you into him, wrapping himself tightly around you and guiding your rhythm over him until he became too overcome to keep up the frenzy and let go just enough, just enough. 

Every inch of your skin felt hot and clammy, especially the parts that touched his skin, and there was so very much of his skin touching yours. The sweat didn’t belong entirely to you and he was glistening with wet when he fell back onto the bed; chest heaving with labored breaths that matched your own and you felt it all over; that desperation for the release that was there — was just there, you could feel it, you could taste it. You sought it out right there on top of him and the glimpses you took of his face before you had to close your eyes— oh, he was watching you with his ravenous eyes. He’d been starving for hours for this. He watched you do it as long as he could stand; until he himself could stand no more. 

You’d made some attempt to move. You were hot and damp, sticky and wet — and yet — you felt so outside of yourself that the moment his soft fingertips reached up to lightly graze over the bare skin just below your belly button, slipping those fingertips around with a purposeful touch on your hip; any desire to escape this discomfort fell to the back of your mind. 

Kyungsoo sat up then, reaching for you, pulling you down over his skin and you simply fell. At some point he’d slipped out from inside of you. At some point there was a mess that was wicked away by the plush fabric of the bedspread below both of your bodies. His hands moved like feathers over your skin and you laid with him on this bed, existing in this moment as the ceiling fan slowly began to cool your skin enough for some of the dampness to evaporate, cooling your shoulder, your hip, your bare leg. He was still touching your skin, looking at your face with warm eyes and leaning in for slow, languid kisses. Slow and delicate enough for your lips and his lips to mold together, sticking together with how hesitant he was to escape your mouth. 

It must have been ages — this kiss with no end. 

You and him — with no end.

He kissed you until the chill began to set in and your skin erupted in goosebumps. He wrapped you up in his arms and his legs and he kissed you some more. Through the giggles and through the silliness that grew as gradually as this unbelievable love, starting deep down inside somewhere, growing, and building until the first few giggles broke free from your mouth, quickly met with his own giggles that made your teeth bump together. 

It was your stomach that finally betrayed you. The loud growling noise echoed out and you both looked down at the interruption before you sought out his eyes that looked into your face with a furrow of concern. 

“You didn’t eat dinner?” 

You frowned your lips down and gave the smallest head shake. His eyes roamed over your face and your frown deepened further. 

“Lunch?” He asked. You bit down on your lip and shook your head again. You’d actually completely forgotten that food existed until this very moment when suddenly it was all you could think about. 

“Oh my god,” he was sitting up. He was pushing himself up onto two shaky legs as he looked around your floor for something to deal with the mess he’d suddenly noticed was all over his belly. His hands were extended away from his body and he spun a little bit, giving you a view of the cutest, perkiest ass ever; and he seemed to be having trouble deciding what his next move would be. 

“Shower.” He said suddenly, taking several wide set and careful steps away from your bed and toward your bathroom. He’d nearly made it into the bathroom when you heard his fingers snapping, “Come on, shower,” he repeated. You hadn’t realized he was talking to you too but you pushed yourself off the bed, reaching for the entirety of your bedspread and pulling it off so you wouldn't forget about this giant wet spot and accidentally sleep in it tonight. 

You heard the water running and you quickly made your way into the bathroom just as he was stepping inside of the water. 

Inside of the water, he was warm. He was lovely and he was beautiful as he cleaned up using your soap and shampoo. You didn’t think he had to wash his hair, it had been so clean already but you followed him lead and did the same, spinning around to take turns under the stream when it was time for a rinse. 

The shower, like the sex had served its purpose and you emerged from both feeling like a new person. As you toweled off and began to pull on another pair of clean underwear you had a curiosity that needed satisfying. 

“How many times did you have to try the door code?” 

Kyungsoo was running your hairbrush through his hair and he caught your reflection in the mirror. 

“Just once. Got it right away.” He said with an air of confidence that you didn't quite buy. You’d never even mentioned your birthday to him. You watched his profile as he stared at himself in the mirror, long after his hair was combed and he was nearly completely dressed save for the socks which you had tossed pretty far— those might take some searching to find. 

“How did you find out my birthdate?” 

He swallowed and he blinked. Then he looked away from you and you made a whining sound, poking him in the ribs a few times to get him to spill it.

“Umm…I found out from Claire—” he started to speak. The moment her name was on his lips, your eyes went wide and you just reacted.

“No, Kyungsoo. Claire doesn't know about us. I need to be the one to tell her, Kyungsoo. I need to say it myself. I have to ask her forgiveness for all the trouble I caused and I have to be the one to tell her first. She can't find out from anyone else -- you don’t know her like I know her, Doh Kyungsoo!” Your panic was evident in your voice. You were speaking fast and your voice was high-pitched and loud. 

He actually flinched three times as you were berating him and his jaw clenched and set hard upon the last usage of his name; his entire name. 

“Excuse me, ma’am—” Kyungsoo raised his voice suddenly. Not shouting but matching your volume quite well, his arms were crossed over his chest and he was looking at you with wide eyes and a seriously admonishing expression on his face. 

You stopped the diatribe abruptly, standing in front of him with your mouth open from the panic that was still surging through you. How would you ever make this up to her? She was your absolute dearest friend and she was very sensitive to things like this. Your eyes roamed over the scene in front of you, focusing on the light switch briefly as you tried to think of something that might fix this. 

Did he seriously call her to ask for your birthday as if that wouldn't raise all of the red flags in the world? One time you’d gone out to get food with friends and you forgot to hit send on her invitation message. She thought you purposefully left her out and didn't speak to you for a month. This was so, so, so much worse. 

You heard a loud snapping noise and it pulled your attention away from the doorway of this bathroom and over to the sudden sound and movement happening in front of your face. It was him. This troublemaker.

“Hey. Princess.” his eyes were wider now, his voice full of sarcasm. he definitely used this word as a pejorative. Filled with that achingly familiar sarcasm that he used to use before — before falling in love with you, before making you fall in love with him, before acting all sweet as shit, before fucking you dizzy and promising to make you something to eat, before pulling you into this bathroom to drop this bomb on you. 

Princess? Really? Was this happening again?

”What?” You didn't want to be answering to this, but he had definitely captured your attention. His head was shaking back and forth quickly and he still had his hand raised from all the snapping to get you to look at him. Did he think you were some sort of a wild animal that needed to be lured?

”I wasn’t finished talking. You asked me how I found out about your birthday. I said—”

”You asked Claire for it.” The defeat was setting in now. It felt hopeless. She would take a year to forgive you, for sure. 

”I said,” he spoke clearer, “I got it from Claire — ‘sssss instagram post from your birthday last year or I would have said that if you hadn’t rudely interrupted me.”

You released the breath you had been holding and you closed your eyes up as the relief surged through you. You placed a hand on your chest as you felt your heart beat beginning to settle down again.

He gave you a few moments of just breathing before he spoke again. 

“When will you tell her?” 

This pulled your attention back on him and away from your own biofeedback session to settle your insides down. You really were starting to feel irrational from the hunger. 

“I’ll tell her soon,” you promised vaguely as you made your way through your home to the kitchen, opened the cabinet and pulled out a jar of nuts.

“Yeah, but when? I understand that you need to tell your friend alone but I don't like us being a secret. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You just said, I could have all the time I wanted,” you said, chewing on a handful of nuts in a very unladylike fashion straight from the palm of your hand; a single index finger, you pointed behind you toward your bedroom to remind him what you both had just been doing.

Kyungsoo shook his head once, on his face a very real expression of confusion. “When did I say that?” 

“Just a while ago,” you said with a shrug. His eyes moved from your face, over to where you pointed and then further around the room you both stood in. Slowly, you watched his face change as the edges of the memory came back to him. He opened his mouth very slightly and his eyebrows furrowed. Then he leaned his face forward toward you and mumbled through clenched teeth. 

“While we were fucking? Did I promise you something while my dick was inside of you—-oh,” he had a grimace on his face, “oh, no, no —“ his hands were waving lightly, “no, baby, no. That doesn’t count. That’s not a real promise. That was not me.” A hand laid over his chest. 

That same hand moved down to cup over his crotch. “That was him.” His penis. The troublemaker, who, it seemed, was somehow absolved from fulfilling promises simply by the nature of existence. 

Nonsense. 

You looked at his face without responding with words. You just blinked, slow and steadily until his grin flattened and he pouted out his bottom lip. 

“What about when you said you needed me to help you pack for your trip? Was that just him talking?”

“No, that is true,” he said, his eyes down on your hand as you shoved another small palmful of nuts into your mouth. You hadn’t quite gotten them all and he leaned forward and captured the two remaining bits with his parted lips, using the same technique as you. Diving right in like a horse with a sack of feed. 

“I do need to pack. I did miss you.” He was chewing as he talked, steering your hand holding the jar of nuts to tip it over and pour some more out. 

“I was spiraling all day. Like, nothing else mattered. Nothing could fix it. And when I finally fell apart and called you and then you didn’t answer—I was…not handling it…well. I wanted to go back. It felt like…something had ended.”

“I cried on the airplane,” you confessed quietly and his eyes widened marginally; his empathy and the emotions attached evident in the downward curve of his eyebrows and his eyes searched over your entire face as you spoke. “Some little kid pointed it out, very loudly, and then everyone was looking at me and that made me cry even harder.”

The little frown on his lips turned deeper. “You missed me that much?” He’d taken the can out of your hand and placed it on the countertop behind you, using that motion to wrap his arms around you, fully enclosing you in a tight embrace.

“No. I missed the spiders,” you mumbled from within the warmth and security of his arms. The words were muffled by his chest muscles and your little attempt at brevity brought out a chuckle from somewhere in his chest. His arms rubbed slow circles over your back. He was everything you needed and wanted.

“Of course, it was you. I missed you.” You had to say it to him. He was so open and so lovely with you, you needed him to know how deep your love ran. He was lovely. He was warm and comforting and you could trust him with your heart. You knew it as an irrefutable fact. 

And he was going to give you all the time you needed to talk to your best friend before anyone else found out about this. 

“We both missed you.” You whispered while pulling your face up to look at him; of course referring to the sex, in the same way he gave his penis credit for his actions earlier. His lips slowly pulled into a grin as he looked down at you; no confusion about who you were suddenly speaking for. Through lifted brows and with a pointed look you added, “and a promise is a promise.”

He stiffened lightly, a tiny jolt of understanding and his lips opened to speak to this, to offer whatever silly opinion he had about what he could and could not tolerate as far as this relationship and you lifted your eyebrows higher. 

“I was talking to him, Kyungsoo,” you said sharply, before he could go back on his word and offer up any more protests. Your meaning was clear. He could give you this much grace. He could be reasonable. You weren’t asking for a year, just a few days.

You reached a hand down quickly and the man actually flinched, angling his hips away from you. Your rapid movements and indirect conversation with his penis had spooked him. 

“Come on, let’s go pack for your trip.” You giggled and reached for his hand, taking a step with him in tow behind you. You felt occasional resistance against your tugging hand as he reached back to grab the ball cap he’d tossed onto the counter after he’d gotten dressed in your bedroom and he turned off the lights he passed along the way. 

You made your way through your home toward the door, grabbing your phone and keys and stuffing them quickly into a purse you had hanging by the front door and you pulled him through the threshold, not once letting go of that hand that held you just as tightly as you held him.

Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11

Rat Bastard Masterlist

[rylem33]

The Plus One

I hope you all enjoy this story. If you end up liking it, head over to my blog (link on my Tumblr homepage) where there are a ton more to read.

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Theo flexed his fingers, clenching them into fists. His hands felt smaller, delicate. It was… weird.

“Okay,” he said slowly, tilting his head. His voice was lighter, smoother… feminine. “So it actually worked.”

Chris stood across from him, arms crossed, eyes wide in sheer amazement. He blinked, trying to find the right words. “Holy shit, dude. I mean… not dude. Wow.”

Theo turned back to the mirror, eyes trailing over the reflection. His hair, which used to be short and messy, now fell in soft auburn waves around his shoulders, framing a softer face. His old t-shirt and sweatpants were loose, almost comically hanging off a much smaller, curvier frame. There was a lot more softness to him now. And, of course… the obvious. His eyes flickered down, where his chest now had actual boobs, sitting perfectly in the loose fabric of his shirt.

He poked at them, frowning slightly. “Huh.”

Chris leaned in, fascinated. “How does it feel?”

Theo blinked. “Uh. Heavy? Bouncy? I don’t know, man. It’s not like I’ve had them long enough to form a deep, personal connection.”

Chris burst into laughter, rubbing his hands over his face. “I cannot believe this actually worked.”

“Yeah, same,” Theo exhaled, running a hand down his side again. “This is so… weird.”

He stretched his arms over his head, the shift in his center of gravity making him wobble slightly. Chris instinctively reached out to steady him.

“You okay?” Chris asked, still grinning, clearly enjoying the absurdity of the moment.

“Yeah, just… new body, new vibes,” Theo muttered, rolling his shoulders to get used to the new weight. “Really wasn’t expecting to be this short, though.”

Chris smirked. “I did tell you the Elixir is fully transformative. It’s not a half-measure thing.”

“I know,” Theo said, giving himself one last look in the mirror. “No one we know has actually taken it, though. For all we knew, it could’ve turned me into a lizard.”

Chris snorted. “I wouldn’t have minded a pet gecko.”

Theo shot him a glare. “You owe me for this, man.”

Chris raised both hands in mock surrender. “Hey, you agreed to this! But yeah, I owe you.  Though it is for a good cause.”

Theo sighed, trying to focus. Right. The reason they were doing this in the first place.

Chris’s family was complicated. The small-town, gossip-loving kind. And unfortunately, they had very clear ideas about Chris’s life. Ideas that didn’t quite fit with his reality.

Chris had come out to Theo years ago, but never to his family. The few attempts he’d made had led to uncomfortable conversations about finding “the right girl” and “settling down.” Eventually, he’d just stopped trying.

But now, with his cousin’s wedding coming up, Chris needed a “plus one” and his family expected him to bring his “girlfriend.”

Enter Theo.

The plan was simple. If you could call magically turning your best friend into a woman and parading them around as your fake girlfriend “simple.”  Maybe “desperate” was a better word to describe the plan.

Chris clapped his hands together. “Okay, we need to get you dressed. We leave in an hour, and I really don’t think showing up in oversized sweatpants is gonna sell the ‘girlfriend’ image.”

Theo grimaced, eyeing the clothes still hanging awkwardly on his body. “Yeah, yeah. What am I even supposed to wear?”

Chris grinned and tossed a duffel bag onto the counter. “That’s why I went shopping.”

Theo eyed the bag suspiciously. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes,” Chris said smugly. “Various sizes, because I had no idea how this was gonna turn out. Dresses, skirts, jeans, even a backup hoodie in case you need some emotional support masculinity.”

“God bless,” Theo muttered, picking up the bag and rifling through it.

“And yes, I did buy you bras and underwear,” Chris added.

Theo groaned, holding up a lacy bra in one hand. “Ugh. You really thought of everything, huh?”

Chris grinned. “Dude, you’re my best friend. Of course I did.”

That actually made Theo pause. Chris had planned all of this, went shopping, and even concocted an entire cover story.

And yeah, it was still deeply weird, but… it was kind of cool too?

Theo huffed, grabbing the rest of the clothes. “Fine. But if anything in here has lace, I’m fighting you.”

Chris smirked. “Oh, definitely lace.”

“Chris.”

“Just try it on!”

Theo huffed again but relented. “Fine, fine.” He began pulling on the clothes, looking at his reflection once more as he slipped into the red lace bra and blue panties.

Chris, who had been watching with a mix of amusement and concern, raised an eyebrow. “So, this is your ‘girlfriend’ look? You’re actually pulling it off.”

Theo couldn’t help but chuckle awkwardly. He sat there, hands on his hips, pulling at the underwear.

“I look ridiculous,” Theo muttered under his breath. It felt weird. “But if it works…”

Chris burst into laughter again, rubbing his hands over his face. “Man, you definitely look like you could be my girlfriend now.  I mean, if I liked girls.”

Theo shot him a glare, half-sarcastic and half-laughing.

Chris raised both hands. “Hey, just remember you get a free vacation and an out-of-body experience.”

Theo let out a long, exaggerated sigh but couldn’t stop the small smile from tugging at his lips. It wasn’t like he had much of a choice now. “Alright. Let’s get this over with.”

Chris grinned, eyeing him up and down. “Yeah, let’s. We leave in an hour. And just so you know, I’m gonna need you to really sell this. No half-assed acting, okay?”

Theo turned to face him. “Trust me, Chris,” he said. “I didn’t go through all of this to leave you hanging.”

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Theo shifted uncomfortably, tugging at the hem of the dress Chris had picked out. The fabric of the blue dress clung to his new, unfamiliar curves in ways that made him want to squirm.

“You’re doing fine,” Chris said, pacing behind him with his arms crossed, a little too chipper for Theo’s taste. “You look great. Just remember, you’re my girlfriend. We’ve been together for two years, okay? Simple backstory. You know it, I know it.”

Theo turned to face him, blinking. “Yeah, I’ve got it, but…” He tugged at the dress again. “I don’t know man.  I just feel odd. I don’t walk like this. I don’t talk like this. Hell, I don’t even sit like this.”

Chris raised an eyebrow, leaning against the dresser. “I know, but you’ve got the looks down. Just act natural.”

“Natural?” Chris laughed. “Chris. Look at me,” Theo said, gesturing. “We left natural back at the apartment when I drank that Elixir.”

“Okay, fair.  But you’re doing to do great,” Chris said, trying to sound encouraging. “They’ll be easy to fool. I’ve been fooling them for years, making them think I’m straight. You got this, man.” His grin faltered slightly when Theo didn’t respond immediately. “Uh, Theo. You’ve got this.”

Theo exhaled, slumping his shoulders. “I don’t know how you do it,” he muttered.

Chris raised his hands in mock surrender. “You’re a great friend. I really appreciate this.” Chris gave him a sidelong glance, grinning. “You’re just making it harder than it has to be. You’ve got this. Own it.”

Theo sighed dramatically. “Alright, alright.” He straightened up and looked at himself again. “Guess I’ll just… act like I know what I’m doing. But first, we need to come up with a name. You can’t keep calling me Theo.”

“Yeah, good point.” Chris followed. “Is Thea too dead on?”

“Yeah, probably,” said Theo. “How’s Athena sound?”

“Athena”, Chris repeated. “Powerful, confident. I like it.”

Theo stood a little taller, taking a deep breath. He was determined to act like it didn’t bother him. His mind was racing. He knew the story they had to sell.  It was only a couple of days.

He took a step forward. “Okay, I’m Athena then. Let’s do this.” He gave Chris a playful, almost sarcastic look. “But, you know, if I trip or something, it’s on you.”

Chris clapped his hands together. “You’ll be fine. Now, we leave in an hour, and we need to work on the backstory a bit. So, we met at college. Our first date was mini golf and ice cream.  I woo’d you. You love me. You know the drill.”

Theo nodded. “Got it. But…” He paused, then shrugged. “Why would I want to be with you, though?”

Chris looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

Theo hesitated, then gave him a sly grin. “I mean, you’re… okay, I guess, but two years? Seems a little unrealistic. You’re not that interesting.”

Chris blinked, clearly taken aback. “What?”

Theo chuckled softly, his hands resting on his hips. “I’m just messing with you. Of course. It was practically love at first sight.” 

Theo gave Chris a wink. 

Chris froze, staring at him for a moment before a slow grin spread across his face. “Wait…did you just… flirt with me?”

Theo blinked, surprised by his own words. “What? No! I was just… acting.”

“Dude.” Chris’s grin grew wider. ���That was… so natural. Holy crap.” He laughed to himself. “You’re already way better at this than I thought you’d be.”

Theo blinked again, his heart skipping a beat. The behavior just slipped out, without thinking. But didn’t hate it. He even felt a little proud of it, which felt… wrong.

Chris was still chuckling, shaking his head. “Okay, you’re definitely in character. Let’s get you ready for the dinner.”

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The door clicked shut behind them, and Chris let out a breath before breaking into a huge grin. “That. Was. Amazing!”

Athena, still swaying slightly from the drinks, collapsed onto the edge of the bed, a lazy smile spreading across her lips. “Told you I had it covered,” she purred, stretching her arms over her head. The motion made the cropped blue top ride up slightly, revealing just a hint more of her toned stomach.

Chris flopped onto the chair near the window, shaking his head in disbelief. “No, seriously, I thought we were screwed at first. You were so stiff, and I swear Aunt Lisa was about to start grilling you like a detective.”

Athena giggled, a soft sound that surprised even her. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, crossing her legs. “Yeah, yeah. But then, you know… a few drinks, a little charm.” She smirked. “They love me now.”

Chris laughed. “Love might be an understatement. My mom was already talking about how adorable we are together, and my dad actually liked you.” He pointed at her, as if that were the most shocking part. “Do you know how hard that is?”

Athena tilted her head slightly, a slow, confident grin forming. “What can I say? I’m irresistible.”

Chris laughed, but the thought lingered. She really was irresistible.

Chris had spent years dodging conversations about dating, carefully keeping his family at a distance so they wouldn’t ask too many questions. And now, in the span of a few hours, Athena had completely shattered that barrier. His mom had called them adorable. His uncle had clapped him on the back and said, “You finally found a keeper, huh?” His grandmother had actually teared up.

And the worst part was they believed it. They weren’t just humoring him. They genuinely thought Athena was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Chris forced a smile. “You, uh… really committed to the role after a few drinks.”

Athena’s stomach fluttered. “What do you mean?”

Chris shook his head with a soft chuckle. “I mean, you were great. But at some point, I swear you stopped acting. You were so… natural.”

Athena blinked.

“You were laughing, flipping your hair, touching my arm. Hell, even I almost believed we were together.” Chris ran a hand over his face, the weight of the situation finally settling in. “I don’t know, man… I think I just made things a million times harder for myself.”

Athena frowned. “What? Why?”

Chris sighed, leaning back against the chair. “Because now? Now my family really thinks I have the perfect girlfriend. The exact kind of girl they’ve always wanted for me.” He let out a bitter laugh. “How the hell am I ever supposed to come out now?”

Athena opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

She had been so focused on how good it had felt to fit in, to win them over, that she hadn’t even thought about what that meant for Chris.

Chris rubbed his temples. “They were already in denial, but now? Now they’re invested.” He let out a dry chuckle. “God, my mom was looking at you like you were a goddamn miracle.”

Athena swallowed hard.

Chris sighed again. “I mean… it’s not like I was planning to come out this weekend or anything. But now? I feel like I just dug my own grave.”

After a few moments of silence, Chris shook his head, then forced a smile. “But hey, at least you had fun, right?”

Athena let out a small, awkward laugh. “Yeah… I guess.”

She suddenly felt warm again, her fingers absently playing with the tie on her top. There was something buzzing in the back of her mind. The way her body felt, the way she had acted tonight without even thinking.

She shifted slightly, crossing and uncrossing her legs, her gaze flickering toward the mirror.

She was really starting to like how she looked and that terrified her.

Chris stood up, stretching. “Alright, I’m gonna take a quick shower before bed.” He headed toward the bathroom, already unbuttoning his shirt. “Big day tomorrow. You, me, and a wedding.”

Athena’s eyes flickered toward him as he peeled back slightly, undoing the first few buttons.

A strange thought slipped into her mind before she could stop it.

Chris is actually kinda hot.

An unfamiliar pang of frustration curling inside her.

Too bad he’s gay.

She blinked, horrified at herself. What the hell was that?

“Right,” she said quickly, voice slightly tight as she watched him disappear into the bathroom.

The moment the door clicked shut, she exhaled sharply, running her hands down her thighs. Her heart was racing, her body humming. A slow, creeping realization settled over her.

All this attention, tonight, has done something to me. Oh god, I’m horny.

She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. No, no, no, that’s not happening.

But it was happening.

The warmth in her belly, the tingling under her skin, the way her body thrived under every compliment, every glance at dinner. She had loved it. More than she should have.

And Chris should have been thrilled. She had saved him tonight. She was perfect, the ideal girlfriend, the woman his family adored. Instead, he was sitting here moping about how well it had gone.

Athena frowned, pacing the room.

I did everything right. I was charming, funny, flirty. I played my role better than even he expected. And now he’s upset?

She folded her arms, jaw tightening.

The way he had looked at her, like she had somehow made his life harder by being too good at this, rubbed her the wrong way.

She had worked her ass off to make sure this went smoothly. He had thrown her into the deep end, expected her to play along, and she nailed it.

Now he was worried he’d “dug too big of a hole.”

Athena scoffed, arms tightening around herself.

Well, maybe I wouldn’t have done so well if you hadn’t expected me to act like your perfect little girlfriend.

The resentment was small, just a flicker, but it was there. A tiny, creeping frustration curling at the edges of her thoughts.

Chris had wanted this. He had asked for this. The Elixer was his idea.  And now he was mad that she had done too well?

She ran a hand through her hair, letting out a sharp breath.

Worst of all, she liked how it felt.

She liked the attention. She liked the way people’s eyes lingered on her, the way she could make them laugh, the way they wanted her in the room.

She liked being Athena.

And if Chris had a problem with that?

Maybe that was his issue, not hers.

Athena turned back toward the mirror, staring at the woman looking back at her.

She didn’t just look like a hot woman. She was starting to feel like it too.

And that thought didn’t scare her as much as it should have.

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

Morning came and Athena stirred, stretching out across the bed, a lazy smile forming on her lips before her eyes even opened.

God, she felt good.

Her body was warm, buzzing with something that had been simmering since last night. She let out a satisfied hum, arching her back slightly as the silky sheets brushed against her skin. Everything felt so much more now.  Every touch, every sensation, the way her curves pressed into the mattress.  It all just felt tempting.

She cracked one eye open, glancing around. Chris was already gone. Figures. He had mentioned something about leaving early for family pictures, groomsmen duties, whatever.

Which meant…

I’ve got the whole room to myself.

A slow, mischievous grin spread across her face as she stretched again, rolling onto her stomach, her fingers toying absentmindedly with the hem of her sleep shirt.

Something had shifted in her last night. She knew it. She had felt it in the way she owned the room at dinner, in the way people looked at her. In the way she liked being the center of attention.

Chris had practically thrown her into this role, and she had done it so well it freaked him out.

That thought made her smirk.

She ran a hand down her side, trailing her fingers over the curve of her waist, the swell of her hip.

It was funny. Just yesterday, she had been awkward, uncomfortable in this body. Now she felt right.

She let out a breathy little laugh, biting her lip as she glanced toward the mirror across the room.

The woman staring back at her was stunning. A slow heat pooled in her stomach.

God, is this what it’s like to be admired? To be wanted? No wonder women love attention so much.

She shifted slightly, legs brushing together under the covers. A wicked thought crept into her mind.

No one’s here. No one’s watching.

Her fingers toyed with the sheets, trailing down her thigh. She shouldn’t be thinking like this. This was supposed to be temporary. A disguise.

And yet…

Athena licked her lips, shifting her hips just slightly.

Maybe I should indulge. Just a little.

The idea sent a delicious little thrill through her. Her fingers teased at the slit between her legs. A dampness quickly slicked the area allowing her fingers to enter with ease. It felt wonderful.

She rubbed with one hand while the other toyed with her surprisingly sensitive nipples. A loud moan escaped her mouth. She paused, looking around the room as if she’d be caught.  But nobody was there.

After that, she let herself indulge in the feelings of this body. After all, it wasn’t like anyone would ever know.

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

Chris knocked once before pushing the hotel room door open. “Alright, Athena, we gotta…”

He stopped dead in his tracks.

Athena stood in front of the mirror, slipping an earring into place, dressed in a sleek, rust-colored dress that clung to every curve. The fabric hugged her waist, emphasized her hips, and dipped low across her chest, showing off far more cleavage than Chris would have expected.

Chris felt his stomach drop.

“What the hell are you wearing?”

Athena turned, tilting her head slightly, her lips curving into a slow, amused smirk. “Uh, a dress? For the wedding? You know, the whole reason we’re here?”

Chris ran a hand over his face. “That’s the dress you picked? You’re showing, like… everything.”

Athena rolled her eyes. “Oh, relax. It’s elegant. It’s classy.” She ran her hands down her sides, smoothing the fabric. “And it looks damn good.”

Chris took a step closer, lowering his voice. “That’s the problem.” He gestured wildly at her. “Don’t you think its a bit too much?”

Athena scoffed. “Excuse me? You think I look too good? Wow, thanks, Chris.”

Chris pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to keep his frustration in check. “That’s not what I…you know what I mean! This isn’t you. The Theo I know wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress like that!”

Athena’s expression darkened. A slow, simmering resentment bubbled up in her chest.

“Oh, I wouldn’t?” she said, voice laced with venom. She took a step closer, her hands resting firmly on her hips. “I wouldn’t be caught dead looking like this? Because I’m doing this for you, Chris. This whole thing.  Me playing the perfect girlfriend, saving your ass in front of your family. This is for you.”

Chris hesitated. “…I know. I just…”

Athena let out a sharp laugh. “You wanted me to be convincing, didn’t you? To make sure nobody suspected anything? And guess what, Chris? They don’t! They love me!” Her grin turned sharp. “And now, what? Now I’m too convincing? Too sexy? Too comfortable?!”

Chris opened his mouth, but she wasn’t done.

“You don’t get to freak out because I did my job too well.”

And then, just to push him further, she grabbed her breasts, squeezing them deliberately, her fingers pressing into the soft flesh through the fabric of her dress.

Chris nearly choked. “What the hell are you doing?!”

Athena arched an eyebrow, her voice saccharine sweet. “What, Chris? Does it bother you? Does it make you uncomfortable?” Her smirk widened. “You know, I could make everyone uncomfortable. I could go downstairs right now and make such a scene. Tell them we had a big fight. Maybe cry a little, say you’ve been awful to me. They’d take my side, you know. Your family adores me.”

Chris felt his blood run cold. “Athena.”

“Maybe I’ll flirt with your cousins. Or your uncle. Hell, maybe I’ll get on the mic and make a toast about how you’re just so lucky to have me.”

“Stop.”

Chris’s voice was firm.

Athena’s smirk faltered.

Chris took a breath, lowering his voice, trying to keep his tone steady. “Look, I get it. You’re having fun with this. But you don’t have to prove anything to me, okay?” He forced a small, careful smile. “You do look good. I should’ve known this Elixir was gonna mess with your head. I should’ve been more careful.”

Athena’s expression twitched, something flashing behind her eyes.

Chris took another step forward. “Come on. This is just for one more day. We get through the wedding, we get back home, and this whole thing is over. You don’t have to… be this forever.”

A beat passed.

Athena exhaled slowly. The fire in her eyes dimmed just a little.

“…Fine.” She dropped her hands from her chest, smoothing out the dress. “But you owe me for this, Chris. Big time.”

Chris let out a relieved breath. “Deal.”

Athena gave him one last look, then turned toward the mirror, adjusting her hair.

Chris watched her, a pit forming in his stomach.

This wasn’t just Theo playing dress-up anymore.

This was something else.

And he was terrified of what would happen next.

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

Athena stepped into the dimly lit hotel room, clicking the door shut behind her. Her thoughts replayed the details of the wedding reception.

She had heard everything.

The bride, whispering to her friends, voice dripping with resentment.

“This is my wedding, and she is sucking up all the attention. Did you see how he looked at her? She’s barely even trying, and it’s working. She’s just a plus one for Chris. And now she’s practically draped over my fiancé.”

Athena had only smiled at the time, playing dumb, offering a sweet, innocent little laugh before twirling a strand of her hair.

But inside?

Oh, she loved it.

She had leaned just a little closer to the groom after that. Touched his arm a little longer. Let her laughter linger in his ear.

And it had worked. He had watched her all night.

Athena smirked, stepping toward the mirror. She ran a hand down the smooth satin of her newly chosen dress. The deep red fabric clung to every curve, the high slit daringly exposing the length of her thigh. She struck a pose, adjusting the straps of her dress.  

If they thought that was bad, they were going to hate this.

She turned slightly, admiring herself.

God, I look incredible.

A slow, creeping thrill curled through her stomach. She had been made for this. The Elixer had turned her into something more than Theo ever was. Something powerful, something magnetic.

She tapped a manicured finger against her chin, her lips curling.

I wonder how long it would take to get him alone.

She didn’t care about Chris’s predicament anymore. He had brought her into this mess, and now? Now he could deal with the consequences.

Athena smoothed her hands down the front of her dress one last time and turned toward the door.

Time to give the bride something to really talk about.

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

Chris slammed the hotel door shut behind him, his hands shaking as he turned to face Athena.

“What the fuck did you do?!”

Athena barely reacted. She was sprawled out on the couch, her red dress still clinging to her body, her legs lazily crossed. She looked up at him with half-lidded eyes, completely unfazed, idly running a hand along her thigh.

Chris was fuming. “You slept with the groom! The fucking groom, Athena!”

She smirked. “Mmhm.”

“The bride caught you two in the kitchen, for God’s sake!” He threw his hands in the air. “And you look like you don’t even care!”

Athena let out a slow, indulgent sigh. “That’s because I don’t.”

Chris froze, his anger momentarily replaced by sheer disbelief. “You… don’t?”

Athena sat up slightly, resting her elbow on the couch’s armrest, her fingers toying with the strap of her dress. “Chris, you’re acting like I forced him or something.” She tilted her head. “He came to me.”

Chris clenched his fists. “That doesn’t make it better!”

Athena’s smirk widened. “Oh, but it does.” She stretched, her body moving with an effortless, sensual ease. “He couldn’t get enough of me. Every time he fucked me, he wanted more. Three times, Chris. Three.” She dragged out the word, watching with amusement as Chris’s face twisted in horror.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, running a hand over his face.

Athena chuckled, completely unbothered. “You should’ve seen him. He was desperate for me. Whispering about how I was the best he’d ever had, how he wished he had met me first.” She sighed dramatically. “Honestly, I almost felt bad for his poor little bride.”

Chris snapped his head toward her. “You’re insane.”

Athena pouted. “Am I? I’m just being honest.”

Chris shook his head, pacing the room like he was trying to process the last few hours. “This isn’t you, Theo. This isn’t…”

“It’s Athena,” she corrected sharply.

Chris flinched at the venom in her voice.

She leaned forward now, resting her elbows on her knees, her piercing gaze locking onto his. “And you don’t get to tell me who I am anymore.”

Chris swallowed hard. “The Elixir… it’s messing with your head.”

Athena laughed a soft, slow, mocking laugh. “Oh, Chris,” she purred, standing up from the couch. She took a step toward him, her hips swaying with practiced ease. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

Chris took a step back. “Get what?”

She stopped right in front of him, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her body. She reached out, tracing a single manicured nail down the front of his shirt.

“I like this,” she whispered, her breath warm against his skin. “I love how it feels to be wanted. To be worshiped.” She smirked, tilting her head. “And it’s never going away.”

Chris stared at her, his stomach twisting into knots. Chris stood frozen, his back against the wall, staring at the woman in front of him.

Not Theo. Not his best friend. Theo was gone. 

Athena.

He swallowed hard. “So… what now?”

Athena tilted her head, considering the question like it was the most unimportant thing in the world. Then, with a slow, sultry grin, she turned away from him, sauntering back toward the mirror.

She admired herself, smoothing out the silk of her dress, adjusting the straps with delicate fingers.

Then she met his eyes in the reflection, her smirk lazy, indulgent. Unapologetic.

“Now?” she mused, running a hand down her curves.

“Now, I live.”

She turned back to him, giving him one last amused glance before stepping past him toward the door. She didn’t stop. Didn’t hesitate. The door clicked shut behind her.

And just like that, she was gone.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - December 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles for 50% off this month!

1. 7 good things humanity did to combat climate change in 2024

“The UK […] closed its final coal power plant in October. [… In India,] the share of power provided by coal dropped below 50% for the first time since the 1960s. [… A non-profit] has provided solar energy to more than 6,000 of the poorest Nigerians.”

2. California Voters Said Yes to Prop 4, a Win for Birds, People, and Our Shared Future

“[…] Prop 4 will direct millions of dollars for water conservation and habitat restoration [… and] includes a requirement that at least 40% of its funding go to lower-income and climate-vulnerable communities.”

3. This Pennsylvania school is saving big with solar and EV school buses

“Steelton-Highspire’s solar arrangement will save it about $3.6 million over the next 20 years. As for the electric school buses, Steelton-Highspire is one of thousands of districts able to access federal rebates from a $5 billion program created by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”

4. Autism Speaks Canada shuts down in January. Good.

“As Canada’s autistic-led advocacy group […] we are relieved that Autism Speaks Canada will be shutting down in January of 2025. This is an opportunity for autistics and our families to collaborate locally to build new, neuro-affirming spaces and projects.” [If you don’t know why this is a good thing, please click here]

5. LA Zoo hatches first-ever perentie lizards, one of largest lizard species in the world

“The LA Zoo is one of only three institutions accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums that have successfully reproduced them[….] Adult perentie lizards can reach more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) in length and can weigh more than 40 pounds (18 kilograms), the zoo said.”

6. Research reveals an inexpensive fix for California's struggling wildflowers

“[… R]aking [“dead, invasive grasses”] is decidedly less labor-intensive and more ecologically friendly [than other management techniques…, but doing so] increased plant diversity overall, reducing invasive grasses […] while increasing both native and exotic wildflowers[….]”

7. A new EV battery could last more than 8 times longer, travel farther

“[… A] typical battery lasts 2,400 cycles, while the new battery lasted more than 20,000 cycles. [… Used batteries could be repurposed] for grid storage on wind and solar farms, the study notes.”

8. Women who are homeless in Boston find safe space and care at 'HER Saturday'

“Women can get lots of other care on the spot — from sick visits and basic health screenings to Pap smears and contraception. [… They also come for] "The makeup, the snacking and the girl talks. And ... picking out a new outfit," said Pinky Valentine [“a homeless transgender woman”].”

9. ‘It absolutely took off’: five UK biodiversity success stories

“[…N]ew methods are emerging to preserve, improve and generate new habitat and, in many cases, attract back or reintroduce species not seen for decades. After a nudge, ecosystems are often doing much of the heavy work themselves.“

10. Personalized gifts really do mean that little bit more to your loved ones, says research

“Research has also shown that receivers of personalized gifts are more likely to take care of them. […] In this sense, gift-giving can be not just an emotional exchange, but also a more sustainable one. A carefully preserved [personalised] gift avoids waste and brings long-term satisfaction.”

December 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[ms--lobotomy]

@men-want-me-fish-fear-me gave me Lucius brainworms. Melt it

Summary: A hunt for a pet doesn't go as expected. Word Count: 762 Content Warnings: Smut, Pred/Prey, Lucius the Eternal, body horror, in my mind this is all consensual but I didn't specify in this fic so dubcon i guess, masc reader, public? Emperor's Children that are even worse than him. Also SMUT and potentially into DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT territory Image Credit: @squishyowl

The link in the chain snapped with a pop, and you knew it was time to run. You tripped over batteries and other such things he considered snacks, leaving marks and gashes in your bare feet. Fuck. You adjusted the small loincloth over your privates as you got back up. He was not only a Space Marine, but a gelatinous abomination and and affront to all gods but Slaanesh. You knew he knew you were free.

You opened the door, paying no mind to how loud it was. There were faces in the wall of Lucius's quarters, shrieking and yowling in pain.

"Run," one of them said.

"I'm fucking trying," you huffed under your breath as you left his quarters.

The ship was empty, eerily so. You felt the fleshy floor under your feet, and groaned as you started walking forwards. There weren't many full faces in here, thank goodness, but you felt a tooth every once in a while.

It wasn't long before you heard familiar, heavy steps. Slaaneshi mutations affected everyone in different ways; it gave Lucius fleshy hooves and made his tongue long and sandpaper-y. You shivered as you fumbled for another door, opening it with even more force than the last one.

There were the Emperor's Children, far away, but a flank was headed in your direction. You shrunk yourself back to avoid notice by them. The only thing more dangerous than Lucius was one of his brothers; in particular, any that didn't particularly like him.

You heard them picking up their pace. Shit. You looked for anything to hide in, hide behind. There was a tentacle sticking up from the floor, but in a cruel act of Slaanesh, it slipped back into the ground.

"What's over there?" one of the Emperor's Children asked.

You froze. You tried to stay still, but they bolted towards you with ungodly weapons in hand. Your eyes widened, and before you knew it, one of them grabbed you by the neck. You tensed up while he lifted you up to his face. His eyeholes glowed slightly, lighting up more as he spoke.

"Hmm..." he said, running a finger along your jaw. "Baseline."

Another one laughed. "Don't see those too often!" His helmet lit up just like his brother's.

The third one nodded. "Might be someone's pet. Be careful."

You were about to sigh with relief before the first removed his helmet. There was a horrid speaker where his mouth was supposed to be, and his eyes were two small black dots right where the bridge of his nose was supposed to be. You felt his breath? Noise? Upon your face. You shut your eyes, prepared for the worst, until a voice broke the silence.

"Hey! That's mine!"

You breathed a sigh of relief as Lucius came after you. His footsteps were rather squishy sounding, even more so than anyone's would be on this floor.

The Emperor's Children dropped you, scurrying away as he brandished his blade at them. His tongue was out, swaying behind him like a stray tentacle. He really did look like the galaxy's ugliest dog.

You tried to get back up onto your feet, but you stumbled on the fleshy ground of the ship. You felt him get closer to you, picking you up by your armpits. He looked you up and down, unhooking one hand to thumb at the bruise the first Emperor's Child left.

"I will deal with this..." he said, and you thought he was going to put you down for a second before he opened his mouth again.

"Later."

You nodded, going limp in his grasp. His green eyes surveyed you further, looking over every inch of exposed skin. He flicked the bruises and cuts on your feet, and you let out a yelp. His skin felt gelatinous on yours. It seemed he was melting as he touched you.

All of a sudden, he dropped you. You looked back at him, inching away. He chuckled.

"Go on. Are you going to run?"

You felt a lump manifest in your throat as your arms and legs failed you. You landed on a tooth near the surface of the floor as you went limp. That was going to bruise later. He let out a full on belly laugh, looming over you. He blocked out what little light there was in the hallway. He leaned down and licked your cheek with that sandpaper-y tongue.

"I'm going to fill you up with more cum than you have organs," he said, grabbing your ankle as you struggled under him.

"Pet."

Taglist: @bispecsual @justeverythingnothingelse @bleedingichorhearts @nekotaetae @historitor-bookshelf

[monosanimegenericzone]

Hunter x Hunter: Conspiracy theory

this is a big leap and a reach and feeds my narrative satisfaction.

and it involves HEAVY troupe copium and apologist things of that nature.

you've been warned. proceed with a grain of salt.

(also gonna. put it under a break bcs this got long as hell XD)

I think the troupe was not solely responsible for the kurtan massacre and are on the Black Whale 1 to show the one responsible that they aren't going to continue to protect his clean record.

allow me to explain, starting with yorknew.

so i have had this theory knocking around in my head that the yorknew auction was meant to be a sort of finale or huge thing. because that was a big deal right, that's the world mafia they're pissing off.

AND it was weird bcs chrollo wanted everything at the auction. the troupe calls him out on that. and since we all know chrollo is a theatrical bastard, there is a meaning behind everything so this is no different.

so why does he want to declare war on the world mafia.

here's what we know.

meteor city was selling their own people to the mafia for a guarantee of safety from the black market. we don't know if these people went willingly or not but it was why the mafia didn't want to continue to pursue the troupe. the connection between meteor city and the world mafia was very important.

we know a few things changed between the troupe flashback and present day.

a) the troupe gained a reputation. until yorknew, apparently no one knew they were from meteor city.

b) the elders learned how to use nen. at the very least, we know of one counteractive nen ability that was used to protect the city's citizens from unfair indictment. there were probably more but we dont know for sure.

c) the mafia had gotten really comfortable with their connection with meteor city, now relying more on the city than the city relied on it.

chrollo was the one who most likely set up this relationship. it was his promise to set up the city as a hub for criminals so that he could personally witness and sift through the absolute scum of the earth to find sarasa's killers.

so based on all of this:

Yorknew City was meant to be the start of chrollo's grand finale to tear down the criminal infrastructure in meteor city.

but, things happened. and he got his ass beat.

POINT IS: Chrollo organizes his attacks with purpose.

.... SO WHY THE FUCK IS THIS DUMBASS TRYING TO ATTACK THE KAKIN FUCKING EMPIRE.

"attack" being an exaggeration but cmon. stealing from is the same thing as coming over and spitting in their food.

here's where the conspiracy theory comes in.

what if the kurta massacre wasn't exclusively done the troupe.

yes this is the part with the troupe apologist bullshit but hear me out. i have something interesting to share.

so at this point we know the troupe doesn't do petty theft anymore. this isn't just a "hey the kakin empire is rich. lets rob them :D" job. chrollo on a mission.

i saw this on twitter and a single post led down this downward spiral. (images are linked to the post)

so these pages stood out to me. the troupe never starts fights? that sounds stupid. sound goofy even.

but it's true.

or, phrased correctly, the troupe doesn't start fights they don't know how to finish. since chrollo is the head, they all function as his limbs, meaning they share his mentality when approaching combat: he will not take fights he can't guarantee he will win.

that being said, as shown in the pages above, they will ALWAYS pick up the gauntlet. if someone picks a fight with THEM, the entire gang will spin the block. aint no one surviving.

in the succession war arc, they were framed for the murder of a char-r member because luini was a toxic fan.

so here's the hypothetical: what if the troupe was framed for the kurta massacre?

we know their hands aren't clean. uvo, chrollo, phinks and pakunoda all recall the killing, so that's evidence they were there for it.

here's some things I don't understand about the event though.

a) the kurta were supposedly super well hidden, to the point that when kurapika was shown in vol 0/the phantom rouge, there were tribe traditions that forbade anyone that couldn't hide their eyes properly from going outside of the village. this was like. i think 1 year or so before the massacre.

b) when exactly did the eyes become relevant to body part collection? if it is believed that the troupe attacked the clan for the money that the eyes sell for, that means there must have been some already on the market. we dont get confirmation of this

c) how was a process for preserving magic eyes conceived at this time? im flabbergasted.

leaning mostly on point b, the kurta clan must have had previous victims of their scarlet eyed members getting got. which leads to point a, heightened protection of the kurtans with scarlet eyes.

but, as is anything in the hxh world, if there is something rare, there will always be a market for it.

now keep in mind what i said before: the troupe never picks up fights unless they know they can win and unless there's an ulterior motive. money doesn't matter to them, neither does infamy. at this point they're grade A bounties so yeah, neither of those things mean jack shit.

so i raise the idea that was in that twitter post: what if someone framed the spiders for the massacre and they took it in stride. that's free street cred, of course they claim ownership.

but let's go back and analyze, because who in their right mind would pick these randoms.

the kakin empire would. or someone associated with a high seat of power that can't afford to be tainted with something like genocide.

let's look at fourth prince tserreidnich.

im not saying he specifically pointed the finger at the spiders, but he was most likely the benefactor that wanted the scarlet eyes in the first place. he would stop at no means and he lets his people handle the dirty work.

he even has a damn head that is probably also kurtan.

so let's go out on a limb and say that tserreidnich ordered a party of mercenaries to track down the kurta clan so he could expand his collection. but, obviously, the group can't take the blame, so they pin it on the troupe or claim to be the troupe.

and because the troupe was wronged all of those years ago, chrollo is now aiming a full frontal assault against the kakin empire. hisoka is just a side quest. chrollo *remembers* how he was wronged.

so to recap. here's how the theory says the story goes.

the phantom troupe is in lukso province for whatever reason. probably to target the large movement of body part collectors to the region or something completely unrelated.

the 4th prince's team moves into the kurta village and starts taking the eyes. the kurtans successfully fight back and demand to know who they are. they answer, "we're the spiders"

and the kurtans, now hell bent on revenge for their fallen, seek out the troupe and pick a fight. and the troupe being the troupe, pick up the gauntlet no questions asked.

(alt. the kurtans seek out a powerful ally in the troupe to fight back against what we assume are trained human hunters and when they fail, beg to be killed as well)

chrollo at the time doesn't question the interaction. it was a gang of violent vagabonds trying to right a wrong that the troupe didn't even participate in.

it bothers him, just a little bit, that someone would try to frame the troupe for an atrocity that they didn't do. sure, it fit their narrative and added to their reputation, but it bothers him that someone out there had used their name.

but come yorknew, he's confronted with a surviving kurta. and the problem resurfaces.

he has his hands full trying to reroute the course of the yorknew heist and has to cut a lot of his plans short. he still completed his goal and started the process of severing ties between the mafia and meteor city.

but now the kurta are a problem in his life again and once he gets that damn chain out of his chest, he has two things to focus on:

a) getting away from hisoka to gather abilities

b) figuring out how to deal with kurapika

he remembers the kurta and is totally okay with shouldering the blame for their elimination. but that means that he's clearing the name of someone else for free.

and he doesn't do shit for free.

since he doesn't have to worry about meteor city immediately (the 10 dons are dead and the world mafia is in shambles), he can move onto bigger fish.

right now, his goal is to figure out the truth behind the kurtan massacre. and his search leads him to 4th prince tserriednich. a man in possession of eyes that the troupe didn't sell and way more than the 36 total that *should* be on the market.

THAT is why chrollo is picking a fight with the kakin empire. THAT is why he is on the black whale one. he's here to settle a 7 year old score, and if he can take hisoka down at the same time? good for him.

anyway thats my crazy conspiracy theory. there are some wrinkles in here that may be defied by canon reveals later in the story.

but damn would this make sense for why chrollo is on that damn boat. bcs i know he isn't stupid enough to send the ENTIRE TROUPE on a suicide mission just for hisoka.

so unless we get a reveal of something else substantial, this is what i'm working with.

[bucketsofmonsters]

Where the Light Enters - Part 1

cw: unreliable narrator, hurt/comfort, slow burn, eventual sex, enemies to lovers, past childhood sexual assault, past sex trafficking, referenced noncon, offscreen dubcon, happy ending, the tags look scary but this is mainly a story about recovery

Cole/Female Inquisitor

word count: 4k

ao3 link

Masterlist

She’d chosen the templars.

It seemed the better option. Or at least the less vulnerable one. 

Frankly, she'd barely understood what a templar was a few weeks ago. The mages seemed upset about them, but surely there were more important things than that in a war. Besides, she'd rather hide herself behind a trained militant force than these rogue witches. 

She still didn’t really understand them if she was being honest. She knew enough to see that people were afraid. No matter how evil the templars may be, at least they were stable. Maybe that was enough. 

She had hoped, assumed even, that Cullen would be doing this part. That she’d point at the templars on the map and he’d set off with his less than stellar army to collect them. That the man who’d been advocating to bring his old comrades into the fold would do the legwork and return with the mage killers and she’d be just that much safer. 

But no. She’d pointed at the map and then been sent off. They hadn’t even given her time to complain. 

Not that she would’ve. It would have ruined her perfectly crafted image of the sweet doe-eyed girl that ensured they wouldn’t throw her to the wolves. The one that changed her from a tool to a manipulable, scared girl. 

She was fine with being manipulated. So long as they thought she was weak-willed, there was no reason to hurt her. She just had to ensure that whatever was best for her was the path of least resistance for them. 

Besides, it wasn’t like she wasn’t returning the favor. The little notebook buried deep under her floorboards ran through the easiest way to get to all of them. Not to endear her to them, just to make her safe. She’d foster pity, camaraderie, desire, whatever would keep her in their good graces for the longest. 

She was always harmless. That was the one thing she had to be. Harmless above all else. Any sign of competency turned to threat under anything but the softest light. 

And yet they’d sent her fragile, bumbling self off to the templars to secure themselves some allies. Josephine had insisted she wouldn’t have to do anything, that she just had to show up while the actual soldiers being sent alongside her would do the heavy lifting. 

Iron Bull had promised much the same, posturing as he normally did. She almost always took him with her these days. He was a beast of a man who threw his weight around like it was nothing, more than happy to take blows for her. And even more importantly, he was growing incredibly fond of her, the kind of ally she needed. 

Their actual leader, the one who made the real decisions, was Cassandra. Cassandra was disinterested in coddling her, more focused on gathering troops than on the strange girl who’d inexplicably been shoved towards leadership because of an ability she’d been given by some higher power. 

Solas, the mage she’d been forced to take with her, was too busy huffing and puffing about prioritizing templars over mages. She thought about snapping at the elf, at insisting that maybe the mages should have been an organized militaristic force if they wanted to be prioritized in this fight. 

Instead, she rolled over like she always did, playing afraid until he stormed off, clearly uncomfortable with the tremor in her voice as she swore she was just trying to get the strongest possible troops so no one else would get hurt. 

Good. Let him be uncomfortable. She had never liked him much anyways. 

But even so, when they arrived at the templar camp she kept herself wedged firmly between Solas and Iron Bull, as far away from the leader of the templars, the Lord Seeker she was pretty sure he was called, as she could. 

She still didn’t fully understand who he was, couldn’t make sense of what he was doing here or why she was meant to care about him. In her defense, she hadn’t expected to be forced to come along. 

Despite her disinterest in him, despite her safe position, despite the way Bull attempted to lead the conflict, when something snapped in the Lord Seeker and he lunged forwards, he lunged at her. 

The world lurched under her feet and it felt like it had the last time, when she'd been pulled through the fade to this awful place and given the strange power that stuck her heading an army. It made her reel in her skin, her muscles and sinews feeling like they were being tugged along faster than she could keep up with, her mind stretching impossibly thin as it did.

And then she was alone. Her warriors and mages were gone, no Bull or Cassandra or Solas to keep her safe. 

Then this Lord Seeker appeared once more, and she suspected that even if she had listened when they’d told her all about the templars and their plight, she would have no better of an idea who this Lord Seeker was. 

This idea was only reinforced when the Lord Seeker began to morph, turning into eerie, hollow puppets of her now absent companions, cycling through her advisors as well. 

She allowed herself the freedom to not perform innocence for these poor mockeries of her cohorts. It seemed probable that this ‘Lord Seeker’ was a demon and as such, unlikely to respond to her usual fawning. 

So instead she got on with things, turning away from the creature that had just decided to morph itself into the face that she tried to avoid seeing in the mirror, and began moving forwards in this strange new space. 

The exploration was slow, the terrain littered with traps. The demon seemed frustrated with her persistent refusal to listen to it menace her. 

The rooms revealed little. Some had puppetted versions of the members of the Inquisition, acting out some situation or another. She decided not to devote her attention to it. It seemed to be intended to display what might happen should she die here and to be frank, she couldn’t care less. She would be dead after all. If Cullen ended up in a jail cell after she died, so be it. It would serve him right for forcing her to come here anyway. 

She explored another room, empty and strange, not sure what she was looking for. It wasn’t like she could just find a way out, she knew she was somewhere incorporeal and beyond things like exit doors. Maybe it was the fade, maybe she was in her own mind, maybe it was this demon’s territory. She didn’t much care, unless figuring it out led her to an exit any faster. 

And then, as she drowned herself in hopelessness and melancholy, a voice sounded from behind her. 

“You.”

The voice didn’t sound harsh nor antagonistic, a far cry from what she’d heard from the demon’s many faces. It was soft, almost curious in its tone. 

She turned around with wide eyes, forcing her face back into the soft façade she’d been free of whilst only under the scrutiny of the demon. 

“Thank god I found someone,” she gasped out, hoping she wasn’t laying it on too thick. “I thought I was all alone in here.”

A young man stood before her. She tried to take him in but it was difficult to due to the frankly absurd hat he was wearing. It covered most of his face, obscuring him from her, the shaggy ends of blonde hair and a stern looking mouth barely peeking out from under it. 

He also, fairly notably, was hanging from the ceiling, which did not help with the matter of the oversized brim of his well-worn hat blocking her view. 

He spoke once more, in that same gentle, inquisitive tone. It was off putting in a way it shouldn’t have been, its softness not quite managing to shield it from that. “It's not the same. Soft words, hard thoughts. You hate me. People do that but you think I’m human and you hate me anyway. Besides it, because of it. It’s hard to see, hard to understand, covered more and more, shying away from the light. The light brings eyes and the eyes bring hurt.”

“Are you inside my head?” Her tone was laced with a spite she rarely allowed to see the light of day.

He looked around. “We’re both inside your head. You’ve guessed that already.”

She shook her head. “Not here, not this place. You, what you’re saying, those are my thoughts. You’re stealing them from me.”

“Not stealing. Just seeing. Hearing.” He paused for a moment, and then said with a decisiveness she’d yet to hear from him. “You’re a bad person.”

“What are you doing in here?” she asked, brushing right past his statements, desperately searching for a way out of this. As much as she hated it, this weird creature that she’d found lingering in her mind was probably her best chance of escape. At least he didn’t seem intent on killing her.

“I grabbed onto you, when you were pulled through the fade. I wanted to go help, but getting out is hard. You made it easy but part of me is stuck up here now. You could help. If you go back I can follow you then too.”

Great, so she’d picked up some sort of mind-reading monster in the fade. She was tempted for a second to take her chances with the demon but she wasn’t stupid. She couldn’t get out on her own, and he clearly knew something. 

“What are you?” she asked, at least wanting to know what she was dealing with before she threw her life into his hands. 

“I’m Cole. What are you?”

That earned a ghost of a laugh from her, the short huff of air barely noticeable. Not that it mattered, Cole could probably feel it as she did. “I’m Rosemary.”

“You’re wrong,” he said, suddenly behind her, standing on the same floor she was on.

“About what? My name?”

“Wandering, alone, unnamed, searching for something soft on the tongue. Rosemary made people see the ghost, not the person. Rosemary earned gentle hands. What are you?” 

This was spiraling out of control faster than she could figure out how to manage it. “Can we focus on getting out of here?” she asked. “Can’t you interrogate me when there’s no imminent threat on our lives?”

Then he breathed a word out like he couldn’t decide if it was a prayer or a curse, like it was a horrible truth that had just occurred to him. “Britches.”

Her head snapped towards him, a tension she’d long since trained out of herself rearing its ugly head. “Where did you hear that?”

“You told me. It echoes in your head, the closest thing to you that there is. It’s so far, fleeting, fading. But it’s almost you.”

“We need to leave,” she practically pleaded with him. “Can we please just get out of here?”

“I’ve never heard someone who wasn’t a who before. Where did it go?”

“I promise I’ll answer all your questions when we get out. Please, we need to go.” She wasn’t above begging. There was very little she was above, in all honesty. 

His head tilted once more, as if considering asking about that thought, before deciding the promise of honesty in the future was worth more. 

“It wants your face,” he declared. “It would hurt more than you ever could, claw the people apart instead of just holding. You want to leave. I can help.”

“You can get me out of here?”

He didn’t even bother to nod, just continued speaking in his strange little riddles. “You need to make it more. Right now it’s just a few. The further you go, the further it stretches.”

“Why would I want to make it bigger?”

“The smaller it is, the closer together the power. You have to stretch it thin.”

Right, so she just needed to keep moving and eventually something in this seemingly endless demon would snap. 

She didn’t need him for that, she could travel on her own. 

His head tilted as the thought passed through her head. “We’re in you already. If you leave me behind, I stay. You want me to go so you can’t leave me.”

He was right. As much as she didn’t want to travel with this weird creature, leaving him festering inside her head seemed infinitely worse. 

“Alright then Cole, we’d better start walking.”

He nodded but did not move. “We will need to fight.”

“You will need to fight. There’s not much I can do.”

“No. You don’t fight, you move softer. Sneaking, slipping, stealing. You only have to roll over if you get caught.”

“I wish you’d stop doing that,” she said, and her voice was instinctually softer. He paid her no regard. 

“I can be quiet. We can move softly together.”

She hoped the creature actually understood what it was saying, that it could be as stealthy as it promised. Or at least hoped that it could fight. 

He still didn’t move and she wondered if he was waiting for her to go first. 

She turned and took a few steps out the door, hearing no footsteps sound behind her. 

When she turned, Cole was nowhere to be found.

A voice came from right behind her, outside of the doorway. “Should we not leave?”

She whipped around and glared at him. He didn’t seem to react to the look at all. 

To be fair, she wasn’t very intimidating. She had little practice at being menacing and she most certainly was not a natural. 

Emboldened by the fact that he did not seem to need to move to follow her, she set out, walking out the door, blowing right past him.

A scream sounded from her left and Cole said, “Keep going straight. It wants you to wind around and around and around so it doesn’t have to stretch.”

His voice echoed and she wasn’t sure if it was an audible noise or not. She turned to where it felt like it had come from and there he was, walking alongside her. 

The sound of her footsteps remained the only ones in the hall as the two of them walked. 

“We should move quietly,” she said. 

He looked around as he moved. “Envy can’t hear me. It doesn't know I’m here. You wouldn’t have either.”

“If not for safety then maybe you should be quiet for my own sanity.”

“You’re not going insane,” he declared. “You are frustrated.”

“You don’t seem to mind.”

“No,” he said. “You can be frustrated if you’d like.”

“No,” she informed him, although she imagined he knew already. “I would not like.”

She turned to look at him and saw a glimpse of his eyes under his hat, a little wrinkle formed between them. “Then you should stop.”

“You first,” she huffed. 

“The Iron Bull is out there,” he said, undeterred by her clear irritation. “He isn’t bad but he brings hurt anyway.”

She decided to try a more direct approach. “Can you shut up?”

“If you let them bite, then it doesn’t count. It only hurts if they take it, if you allow it it's still yours.”

She stopped with a jolt, whipping around to scold him. “If you can see everything in my head, why do you keep talking? You know what’s up there and I know what's up there so what exactly are we achieving?”

“I have thoughts too,” he said, almost wistfully.

“Really? I have yet to hear them. You instead seem intent on airing every thought I’ve ever had as obtusely as you can.”

“It’s hard. Your thoughts are so loud. You’re very angry.”

She huffed as she stormed onwards. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“I don’t know. I think the hurt would make me help. It just makes you want to dig your claws in and hold.”

“Fucking irritating little creature, that’s what you are. I’ll be glad when I get out of this and I never have to see you again. Then you can stew on my rotten thoughts as long as you’d like.”

His head cocked to the side. “You’re not convinced we’re inside you. You still hope this could be the fade. You think I may belong here, that I might stay.”

“Frankly, I don’t care where you go. I know you’re not staying with me though.”

“We’re tethered.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. You can see in my head, right? Do you really think they’re going to believe a demon over me? You’ll be killed in a heartbeat. Which is fine by me, no skin off my back.”

“A bad person,” he muttered to himself, hands flexing and unflexing slowly, rhythmically as he spoke. She wasn’t sure if he even knew he was doing it. 

He went silent as they heard the shouting of troops. Cole faded away and she took to the shadows. 

If this really was her mind, which she was not ready to wholeheartedly believe on the word of some creature, then she had no idea how stealth worked here. Was it really as simple as being quiet and hiding away? Surely in this space that the demon allegedly created, it could sense where she was. 

And yet she watched soldiers run in front of her, looking desperately for someone to fight as she slunk further into the artificial landscape. 

Cole made himself scarce from there on out, occasionally warning her with that strange, disembodied voice to turn now or to avoid the room ahead, although never in such clear terms. 

Eventually, she realized where she’d ended up. She was where she’d begun, where the Lord Seeker, or perhaps the envy demon, had lunged at her past her several bodyguards, most of which were standing protectively in front of her.

It wanted her. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe because of her perceived position of power. Maybe because of whatever this ability was that the fade had given her seemingly at random when she’d been pulled here.

It didn’t really matter, at the end of the day. She just needed to get out. 

And at the top of all those staircases was a dead end where she had been attacked. 

She looked around as the sound of battle-ready troops got louder. 

“Cole,” she hissed. “Where do I go?”

His voice sounded from above and she looked up to find him in the palm of a massive statue. 

“You remember it wrong. The statues don’t have faces here. You didn’t care to look.”

“I still don’t. We have more important things to be worrying about than what some weird statues look like.”

“It should end where it began. You must escape in the center.”

She made the mistake of turning her head, of looking nervously towards the false templars that resided down the stairs. 

When she looked back up, she was alone again. 

Or at least she hoped she was, looking around nervously, checking for any signs of an aggressor. 

But demons didn’t play fair. 

Before she could so much as catch sight of it, the faux Lord Seeker was slamming her back into the wall, hands tight around her throat. 

The face looking back at hers was the half-familiar one from the mirror once more, one she tried to avoid looking at at all costs. 

It was typically unfair, she supposed. To be forced to look at an imitation of herself as she died. 

She kicked and flailed, trying to break from his grasp, to get away by any means possible, but she knew it was a losing fight. She could feel the strength in its hands that far exceeded hers. 

Cole’s voice sounded from right beside her. “He is afraid of you.”

She could see no sign of him out of the corner of her eye as she thrashed in the demon's hold, but she could hear him perfectly. 

The fight began to drain out of her, sinking into herself as her kicks lost all their power. 

And then the hands around her throat went stiff and the world folded in on itself. 

She collapsed to the ground the second she saw Iron Bull in front of her, pulling the Lord Seeker away from her. She heaved in air where she sat, clutching her chest as she did, eyes beginning to water. 

It wasn’t her best performance, a bit overdone. She honestly could have just reacted as she would naturally but the sudden appearance of her companions had thrown her. In her defense, it was a sudden shift and she’d been preoccupied with other things. 

The strange creature with the stupid hat was nowhere to be seen. She wasn’t sure if she hoped he was still trapped back wherever they had been or not. She certainly didn’t want him lingering in her head but having a mind-reading creature roaming around would prove an ever greater problem. 

Bull carried her inside as the other two talked about a demon and some transformation she hadn’t been privy to, instead caught up in her own dramatics. 

He tucked her away on a chair in the corner as Solas said something, probably whining about her. Cassandra gave her a firm order to stay put and they left her inside, amidst the templars.

She stayed tucked in her corner, choking down any panic that might want to arise. 

She didn’t like being alone with groups of men, let alone groups of men that she didn’t know and hadn’t built any repertoire with.  

The fight was over fast. She stayed dutifully in her corner, not one to disobey orders. When it was over, Cassandra and Bull returned for her, Solas presumably off worrying about more important things than her. 

Cassandra did not let Bull carry her any longer, insisting she was fine without giving her the chance to speak. She rose to her feet, despite her plan to feign weakness a little longer. She didn’t want to upset Cassandra.

Cassandra dragged her back to their control room to debrief about the mission, where she would inevitably try to pull something approximating leadership out of her once more. 

It wouldn’t work. She knew any attempt to lead would upset more people than it would please.

It was safer to be weak. 

Cullen was upset about something, which didn’t make sense to her considering she’d helped his precious templars first. Josephine was upset too, not that she’d ever admit it. But a liar recognizes a liar and that calm voice was as put on as it could be. Leliana was endlessly practical, so presumably she was telling her something important. She barely listened to any of it, instead focusing on clutching her uninjured stomach in faux pain, hoping that the hands that had been around her neck left bruises, despite having been in that world between worlds. 

And then their typical, predictable chatter turned to something more panicked and she looked up to find Cole sitting on their table.

Her eyes shifted from an impression of someone trying to be brave about their pain to a very real panic, lurching away from him before she could think. 

Swords were being drawn in the blink of an eye and she did her best to position herself behind Cullen. He was already the fastest to the draw and Cole was too dangerous to her. Hopefully, if he felt he had something to protect he would be even more likely to end this creature now, before Cole could become a problem. 

“You left,” Cole said, looking straight at her, the weapons pointing at him not seeming to concern him at all.

All heads turned to her. “Rosemary?” asked Josephine hesitantly, waiting for an explanation. 

“He helped me against the demon,” she said reluctantly. “But I don’t think we can trust him.”

Cole’s head cocked to the side. “Fleeting, fearful, frantic. You need me to be gone, they can’t see what I know. We both will stay.”

She prayed the others didn’t understand that as the threat it was. 

Leliana glanced between the two of them and asked, “A spirit helped you?”

A spirit. It made sense, she’d apparently picked him up in the fade and he hadn’t done anything truly menacing so it was unlikely he was a demon. At least not yet. She wasn’t sure how Leliana had deduced this but she stored the information away. 

She nodded. “He did. And maybe I was unfair. He was nothing but kind to me, and he saved my life. We could give him a chance.”

Cullen scoffed. “Trust him? He’s a demon and you just said we shouldn’t trust him! Now you want to set him free in the camp?”

“Wasn’t it you who said I could stand to be a little braver, Commander Cullen?” she said, sitting up a little straighter. She needed to do this, if Cole was inside her head he could get her killed. “He saved me, and I say we give him a chance.”

Cole was gone before she finished defending him, disappearing with hints of fade green in the air where he’d sat. 

Josephine looked nervous but she seemed the most content with their situation, saying, “He could be a useful resource-” 

Before she could so much as finish her sentence, Rosemary bolted out the door to go find the ticking bomb that had invited itself into her army.

[somethingforsenro]

today, i found out about b1gc4lgut.

some would be tempted to take this as a sob story about the dangers of online communities, and see the world as a darker place for having encountered this person. but i find something inspiring in the story of b1gc4l and how they were run off.

cw: incest and homophobia, under the cut

looking at their behavior… the squid sisters incest part didn't really surprise me, but how can you be homophobic and a splatoon fan? how does that work? literally everyone in the game has ✨queer energy✨, thats like a huge part of the reason why it's a unique game in the first place (other parts including the unique gameplay and the heavy social commentary of the story, both of which are celebrations of queerness and also neurodiversity in their own ways)

like, if you look at their blog, they say bye to the splatoon fandom and bigcal is canon. you'd think they got driven out for shipping bigcal, but… no, you got driven out for spamming people asks with an image of callie and marie kissing, making homophobic comments, and making a new account to harass people who previously blocked you. sit DOWN.

now, there are many bad things that can be said about the splatoon fandom, most of which are not unique to splatoon. but what really got bigcal laughed out of the community is not some great failing of the internet – it's a great success story of the splatoon fandom; one trait we have in spades, moreso than any other community i've ever been a part of.

in the splatoon fandom,

we look out for our own.

if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us. if you act like a child and harass people, then we're all going to come together and block you until you can't get away with it anymore. if you make an alt account, we'll call you out on it and ID you, and we'll make sure that all our mutuals hear about it before you can get to them.

it's not just a tumblr thing, either. on a discord server i'm in – a crossover server, in fact; not even a splatoon server – a new person joined in recent memory who had a callie pfp. i recognized it as splatoon and got a little excited – it's a fellow splatoon fan! so, i approached them, but… they didn't really react how i expected.

they acted a bit strange – they barely acknowledged me, which is weird, since splatoon fans in my experience are generally excited to see each other in the wild. another person in the server, a fellow splatoon fan, thought the same thing… and also noticed the new person seemed rather familiar, even though the account wasn't one he'd seen before.

so, he asked them if they knew each other. all of a sudden, they got super evasive and suspicious, then suddenly went offline. not a good look!

that other long-time member and i had only really had one conversation before, where i chatted with them about splatoon lore. we barely knew each other. but, when it became clear the new guy was hiding something, that other person DMed me and asked what i thought. i told him, truthfully, that i didn't recognize the new person at all, but i had a real bad gut feeling about them.

in minutes, we'd gotten in contact with a team of at least 10 other splatoon fans we knew, and all of us worked together to figure out what was up with this person based on publicly available information. the discord account on which they joined was just weeks old, and no one recognized it; it linked to a social media account, probably just to get past account verification, which was made the same day as the discord account and had zero activity.

it rapidly became clear that this was a very high-effort throwaway, created by someone who really didn't want us to know who they were, painstakingly crafted to dodge even the strictest verification algorithms while giving no information about the person behind the screen.

as it turns out, the person we were so suspicious of was a highly dangerous individual who had previously been banned from the server multiple times on multiple different accounts. this was just their latest, and most subtle, attempt to worm their way back into the server.

and they might have gotten away with it, too, if only they hadn't made one crucial mistake: they used a splatoon pfp without talking the talk, and that got the actual splatoon fans' attention.

i've never been prouder to say: don't fuck with the splatoon community. if you do, a plague upon thy house, woe upon thy relations, and shame upon thee. all hope abandon, ye who enter here; look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair.

never underestimate the power of community.

[felassan]

Game Informer:

"A Deep Dive Into Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Combat, Abilities, Skill Tree, And More by Wesley LeBlanc on Jun 18, 2024 at 02:10 PM If you're at all familiar with the Dragon Age series, you likely already know BioWare has experimented quite a lot with its gameplay. From Dragon Age: Origins' real-time strategy RPG approach to Dragon Age II's mostly-set-within-one-city action experience to Dragon Age: Inquisition's strategy-action mix, BioWare hasn't quite defined the franchise's combat. However, a through-line is apparent from Origins to Inquisition: BioWare seemingly wants this franchise to be action but has attempted to shift to that without abandoning its longtime fans.  With Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare has completed its transition from strategy to real-time action, but thanks to an optional tactical pause-and-play combat wheel that harkens back to the series' origins, I feel it's found a great (battle)ground for Dragon Age combat. Of course, it's hard to tell how Veilguard's action will hold up over what is sure to be a dozens-of-hours-long RPG, but if what I've seen so far is any indication, the studio is on to something. A Shift In Strategy"

""I think the first thing to keep in mind is that combat [...] in the franchise has been an evolution," game director Corinne Busche tells me within BioWare's Edmonton office. "Every single entry reimagines what combat is like and I would say our goal was to make sure we had a system that allowed players to feel like they actually were able to step into the world of Thedas. They're not a player observing from afar – they are inside of this world. Being this authentic world that's brought to life, the combat system needs to support that, so you are in control of every single action, every block, every dodge, every swing of your sword." Busche says players complete every swing in real-time, with particular attention paid to animation swing-through and canceling. On the topic of canceling, I watch Busche "bookmark" combos with a quick dash. With this mechanic, players can pause a combo's status with a dash to safety and continue the combo where they left off afterward. Alongside the dash, there's a parry for some classes, the ability to charge moves, and a revamped healing system that allows players to quickly use potions by pressing right on the d-pad.  Busche says each character will play the same in a way, regardless of class, in that you execute light and heavy attacks with the same buttons, use abilities with the same buttons, and interact with the combo wheel in the same way. During my demo at one point, we use a sword-and-shield Warrior Qunari that hip-fires and aims their shield to throw it like Captain America while hammering down big damage with a sword. Pressing the same buttons as a mage might throw out magical ranged attacks instead of a shield. [embedded link to DA:TV gameplay reveal video] Abilities, like a Spartan-like kick from a Warrior or a Mage's firewall that deals continuous damage, add to the player's repertoire of combat options. Warriors can parry incoming attacks, staggering enemies in the process. Rogues have a larger parry window, and Mages can't parry at all but instead throw up a shield that blocks all incoming damage so long as they have the mana to sustain the shield.  "That is just the baseline that allows us to get that level of immersion of, 'I'm actually in this world; I'm a part of it,'" Busche says. "But again, the abilities, the strategy, linking my companions' abilities together to perform devastating combos, that is really where the depth and the complexity comes into play." Abilities And The Skill Tree"

"[caption for image above] Warrior Rook Skill Tree This extends to companions, who, at your choosing, bring three abilities (of their five total) into combat, executed either with quick select buttons or the pause-and-play combat wheel. Every time you rank up a companion's Relationship Level, you unlock a skill point to spend specifically on that companion – this is how you unlock new combat abilities.  Though companion skill trees pale in comparison to Rook's expansive tree, which features passive abilities, combat abilities, and more, as well as paths to three unique class specializations, there's still some customization here.  You can find the skill tree for Rook and companions within Veilguard's start or pause menu. This menu contains pages for Veilguard's map, journal, character sheets, and a library for lore information, too. Here, you can cross-compare equipment and equip new gear for Rook and companions, build weapon loadouts, and customize your abilities and builds via the aforementioned skill tree, which looks relatively easy to understand."

"- Large circle: Class - Diamonds: Abilities - Medium circle: Major Passives and Ability Upgrades - Small hexagon: Traits - Small circle: Minor Passives and Stat Boosts You won't find minutiae here, "just real numbers," Busche says. In other words, a new unlocked trait might increase damage by 25% against armor, but that's as in-depth as the numbers get. Passive abilities unlock jump attacks and guarantee critical hit opportunities, while abilities add moves like firewall and spartan kicks to your arsenal. As you spec out this skill tree, which is 100% bespoke to each class, you'll work closer to unlocking a specialization (which doesn't take reaching the max level of 50). Every class has three specializations, each with a unique ultimate ability. Busche says BioWare's philosophy with the skill tree is "about changing the way you play, not the statistical minutiae."  Companions In Combat"

"If you completely ignore companions in combat, they will attack targets, use abilities, and defeat enemies all on their own. "[Companions] are their own people, "Busche says. "They have their own behaviors, they have their own autonomy on the battlefield, they'll pick their own targets. As their plots progress, they'll learn how to use their abilities more competently, and it really feels like you're fighting alongside these realized characters in battle." Speaking to companion synergy, Busche adds, "I see all the abilities Harding has, and I see everything that Bellara is capable of. And sometimes, I'm using vulnerabilities synergistically. Maybe I'm pausing or slowing time with Bellara so that I can unleash devastating attacks with Harding, knocking down the enemy, and then me, as Rook, I'm rushing in and capitalizing on this setup they've created for me. It is a game about creating this organic sense of teamwork." Busche says there are more explicit synergies, with intentional combos where specific companions can play off each other, and you can queue up their abilities to do just that. That’s what the pause-and-play combat wheel is for in Veilguard.  In this screen, which pauses the camera and pulls up a flashy combat wheel that highlights you and your companions' skills, you can choose abilities, queue them up, and strategize with synergies and combos the game recognizes, all while targeting specific enemies. Select what you want and release the wheel to watch your selections play out. Putting It All Together"

During a mission within Arlathan Forest after Veilguard's prologue, Busche utilizes Veilguard's dual-loadout mechanic. As Rook, you can create two weapon loadouts for quick switch-ups mid-combat. As a mage Rook, she uses magical attacks to add three stacks of arcane build-up to make an Arcane Bomb on a Sentinel, a mechanical set of armor possessed by a demon. If you hit the Sentinel's Arcane Bomb with a heavy attack, the enemy will take devastating damage. Once the Sentinel has an Arcane Bomb on it, Busche begins charging a heavy attack on her magical staff, then switches to magical daggers in Rook's second loadout, accessed with a quick tap of down on the d-pad to unleash some quick light attacks, then back to the staff to finish charging its attack. She then unleashes the heavy attack, and the Arcane Bomb explodes in a liquidy whirl of green magic.  "I've seen [Veilguard's combat] refined over time [and] I love it," BioWare general manager Gary McKay tells me. "I love that balance of real-time fluid action, but also the ability to have the depth in the RPG, not just in terms of pause-and-play, but the depth in terms of how you bring your companions into the battlefield. What are you going to do with their skill points? What's the loadout you're going to use? Everything is about bringing Rook to the center of the battlefield, and I love it."  Former Dragon Age executive producer and Veilguard consultant Mark Darrah feels Veilguard is the first game where the combat is legitimately fun. "What I see in Veilguard is a game that finally bridges the gap," he says. "Uncharitably, previous Dragon Age games got to the realm of 'combat wasn't too bad.' In this game, the combat's actually fun, but it does keep that thread that's always been there. You have the focus on Rook, on your character, but still have that control and character coming into the combat experience from the other people in your party."  I get the sense from watching Busche play several hours of Veilguard that BioWare has designed a combat system that relies heavily on players extracting what they want out of it. If you want to button mash and use abilities freely when their cooldowns expire, you can probably progress fine (although on the game's easier difficulties). But if you want to strategize your combos, take advantage of elemental vulnerabilities, and min-max companions and Rook loadouts, you can do that, too, and I think you'll find Veilguard rewards that with a more enriching experience.  For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below."

[source]

[onechicagolife]

ALWAYS | JAY HALSTEAD

Detective Jay Halstead is a senior member of the Intelligence Unit, where he is partnered with Detective Hailey Upton after his former partner and girlfriend transferred to the FBI and moved to New York. Still adjusting to the loss of his former flame, all the while dealing with emotional scars from his time in the Rangers, his world is once again turned upside down when a case brings up an odd connection to a woman from his past. want to be tagged? link in bio <3

Epilogue

Mia lay on her childhood bed, restless and tangled in sheets that smelled faintly of the lavender laundry detergent her mother always used. The room is bathed in shadows, the soft glow of a streetlamp outside casting faint patterns on the walls. It feels strange being in her old room, but there is some comfort in the familiarity of it. Her mind races, replaying fragments of the last few days, but when she closes her eyes, it settles on one image: the look in Daniel Reid’s eyes as he strangled her. Her mind plays it over and over again, unwilling to let her rest.

Mia huffs and rolls onto her back, pressing a palm to her chest as if that could calm her racing heart. She takes a slow breath, but her lungs still feel too tight, and she can practically feel the memories crawling under her skin. It has been this way since the hospital: long, sleepless nights filled with images she can’t escape.

Reaching for the phone on her nightstand, her thumb hovers over her contacts. She hesitates, debating whether she has the energy to speak. Finally, she taps the screen.

It rings twice before a groggy voice answers, "Halstead.” Jay rubs the sleep from his eyes, confusion stirring when no one responds. He pulls the phone away to check the caller ID. His breath hitches before he brings it back to his ear, “Mia?”

Mia’s eye fall shut in relief at the sound of his voice. “Hey,” she finally says, voice just above a whisper. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have woken you up. Go back to sleep.”

He settles back against the pillow, his voice losing some of its foggy edge. “No, it’s okay. What’s up?”

She swallows, her throat tight, “I just… can’t sleep. I keep thinking about…” Her voice trails off, and the silence speaks for her.

Pausing, Jay tries to stop his own memories from surfacing and clears his throat. “I’m here,” he prods gently. “Talk to me.”

“It’s like,” Mia exhales shakily, pressing the heel of her palm against her closed eyes, “I’m back in that cabin.” Her voice is raw, pained as she nearly breaks. “I close my eyes, and I see him. I see what he did… to Lindsey, to Kyla… Because of me.”

A heavy sigh escapes his lips. “Mia,” Jay begins, his tone gentle but insistent, “what you went through... it’s unimaginable. But none of it was your fault. I know that doesn’t mean much right now, but I need you to hear me. It wasn’t your fault.”

She tightens her grip on the phone and closes her eyes to stop the tears. The conviction in his voice softens the sharp edges of her fear, if only by a fraction. “I know,” she says quietly, letting the words linger. A part of her does know—logically—but it doesn’t stop the guilt from gnawing at her.

The silence between them is heavy yet reassuring, his quiet presence helping in a way she can’t really explain. Like it always used to. After a few moments, Jay breaks it, his tone lighter, “Hey, remember that time we pranked Will into thinking that ER got canceled?”

Mia lets out an unexpected snort as the memory washes over her. “We? I was just an innocent bystander,” she giggles. “God, he was so mad at you.”

“Well, yeah, because I made him cry in front of a girl,” Jay chuckles, “even if it was just you. Still embarrassing.”

She smiles, a warmth seeping into her chest as they reminisce over the many times she’d been caught in the middle of the Halstead brothers’ antics. The small, welcome distraction makes the air feel a little less stifling. Eventually the laughter fades, replaced by a hesitant curiosity. “Jay,” she murmurs, “do you ever think about what would’ve happened if you never enlisted?”

He goes quiet for several long seconds, and she imagines him rubbing a hand over his face, trying to gather the right words. “I don’t regret joining the military,” he finally says, voice low. “But yeah, I do. I think about how I hurt you. About what you said that day—that I was trying to fix something broken in me. You were right.”

Mia shuts her eyes, a twinge of shame tugging at her heart. “I was so angry,” she admits. “When I found out I was pregnant, I—I was terrified. But I knew in my bones that no matter how scared I was, you’d be the best father to our daughter.”

A strangled breath escapes past his lips, tears burning at the corners of his eyes. “Daughter?” he echoes, his voice cracking.

“I’m not sure,” she clarifies softly, blinking back her own tears, “I just always pictured her as a girl.”

He nods to himself, a small, sad smile pulling at his lips for a second at the image it conjures. “I didn’t know,” he manages, choking back the emotion that threatens to drown him. “I didn’t know about the baby or realize how much I was hurting you. I got so wrapped up in what I thought I needed—what I owed myself—that I never stopped to think about what you needed. And if I had known about her…”

"Jay, I know,” she furrows her brows, trying to convey her understanding with the softness of her tone.

He runs a hand down his face, his voice thick with regret. “I’m so sorry. For all of it. If I could go back and do things differently, I would. I meant what I said. I chose wrong.”

Mia sniffles, tears dripping onto the soft, faded pillow beneath her head. The quiet over the line stretches, brimming with what she can’t bring herself to say yet.

I forgive you.

I want you.

I love you.

“Jay,” she whispers instead.

He swallows audibly, his next words raw. “Honestly, I think a part of my heart has always been yours. No matter what’s happened or how much time has passed. I think about that day at the airport all the time—about the promise I made. And I should’ve fought for you. With everything I had, I should’ve fought for you.”

She inhales unevenly, trying to piece her composure back together. Finally, she breathes again, “I should’ve fought, too.”

The words hang in the air, leaving them both lost in what could’ve been. When Jay speaks again, his tone is carefully measured, “It’s late. You should try to get some sleep.”

She nods even though he can’t see her. “Thank you,” she mumbles. “For always answering.”

He pauses a moment, and she can hear the smile in his voice. “Get some rest, okay?”

“Goodnight, Jay,” she says softly.

“Goodnight.”

As Mia hangs up, the shadows in the room seem less daunting, the quiet less suffocating. Rolling onto her side, she closes her eyes, the ghost of Jay’s voice lingering in her mind. For the first time in weeks, she feels like maybe, just maybe, she can find her way back to herself through the darkness.

Mia hesitates outside the door, her heart thudding so loudly that each beat seems to echo in her ears. She swallows hard, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear with trembling fingers as she fights the overwhelming urge to just leave a note and run. She hasn’t seen or spoken to Austin since the hospital, having asked for some time to herself. Truthfully, she hasn’t known what to say to him—she still doesn’t. She wishes she could keep delaying the inevitable, but she knows that wouldn’t be fair—to him or to herself.

Summoning her courage, she raises her fist and knocks. Within seconds, the door swings open. Austin’s face brightens with a warm smile, and she feels a pang of guilt twist in her stomach. “Hi,” he says lightly, stepping aside. “Come on in.”

Mia manages a small nod and crosses the threshold into the hotel suite. She folds her arms tightly over her chest and moves near the window, as though distance alone can shield her from what she’s here to do. Behind her, she hears the door click shut. His footsteps pad toward the minibar, and his voice drifts across the room—something about contractors, remodels, timelines. She barely registers the words, her own thoughts a frantic hum in her mind. You can do this.

“…He thinks they can have everything done in a few months,” Austin explains. “I know you’ve been wanting to redo the kitchen anyway.”

She finally hears him and closes her eyes, inhaling a steadying breath. “I’m not going back to that house,” Mia bites out harsher than she intended, cutting through his words. How can he think they could just go back to normal—like the last few months never happened when it takes everything in her to forget, just for a moment?

He pauses, clearly taken aback. “Okay,” he responds slowly, tone laced with caution. “That’s fine. I can have the realtor give us some insight on what updates will sell best, and then maybe we can—”

“Austin.” Her voice is firmer this time, and she turns to face him, pulling a small object from her pocket. She stares at it silently, rolling it between her fingers as she takes a few steps forward. She places her engagement ring on the coffee table, the metallic clink jarringly loud in the quiet room.

His features shift, his tentative smile fading completely. He sets down the glass he’s holding, the faintest tremor visible in his hand. “What are you doing?” Austin asks, tone almost disbelieving.

She swallows against the knot in her throat. “I meant what I said before,” she says quietly. “This isn’t working anymore.”

His eyes flick from her face to the ring, then back. “Look, I know you’ve been through a lot,” he offers quickly, stepping closer. “If you need time, if you need space, that’s fine. I’ll give you whatever you need.”

She shakes her head, tongue poking out to wet her lips, “It’s not about that.”

“Then what is it about?” his voice rises slightly, something flickering in his eyes. “Is it about Jay?”

Her stomach clenches, but she tries to keep her composure. “Austin—” she begins.

His frustrated voice cuts her off, “Did something happen I don’t know about?” He runs a hand through his hair, eyes flaring with a mixture of hurt and anger. “Just tell me.”

Mia takes a deep breath, knowing that she can’t dodge the truth any longer. “I slept with him,” she says, her voice uncertain as she waits for a reaction.

The room is silent, the color draining from his face. “What?” Austin visibly recoils, a sharp edge to his tone. “When?”

“When you were in Portland,” she admits as she forces herself to meet his eyes. “Before… everything.”

His jaw tightens, and he takes a step back, as if the distance might lessen the blow. “So, what? That’s why you wanted to take a break? So you could have sex with your ex-boyfriend and not feel guilty about it?”

“No! No, that’s not—” Mia protests, but he interrupts her.

“Don’t,” he snaps, raising a hand to cut her off. “You told me there was nothing going on, Mia. And like an idiot, I believed you.”

She flinches slightly. She feels guilty for hurting him but at the same time, she doesn’t regret it. “I know it sounds cliché,” she tries to find the right words to explain, “but it just… happened. You deserve the truth. And, yes, Jay coming back into my life played a part in me wanting a break, but it’s not the only reason.”

“Then what is the reason?” he demands, exasperation bleeding into his tone. When she doesn’t respond, his anger wavers, replaced by a desperate plea. “Mia, I love you. You've been through a lot, so if you need me to give you some grace right now, I will. I’ll do whatever it takes—therapy, time apart, I don’t care. If forgiving you for this means I get to keep you, I’ll do it.” He swallows hard, “Just tell me what I have to do.”

Her eyes fill with tears, but she knows she is doing the right thing. “There’s nothing you can do.”

Austin stares at her, heartbreak etched into every line of his face. “Are you still in love with him?” he asks in a voice that trembles under the weight of the realization that he already knows the answer.

Her throat tightens, and she is unable to meet his eyes as her own catch on the diamond reflecting under the light. “You’re a good man, Austin,” Mia avoids the question, voice quiet yet somehow deafening in the silence. “You deserve someone who can be all in, who can truly love you the way you deserve. I wanted to be that person for you—I tried to be that person. But… I’m not.”

He follows her gaze to the ring before searching her face for something—a sign, a glimmer of hope—but finds nothing. “I’m so sorry,” she adds unsteadily. “I never meant to hurt you.”

His shoulders sag, the fight leaving his body. Austin exhales, the sound hollow and resigned. “Goodbye, Mia,” he finally says softly, a pained finality to his tone.

She feels a tear slip down her cheek, and she quickly swipes it away. “Goodbye,” she whispers.

Mia steps past him, the door looming ahead like a final threshold. The hallway is cold and silent as she emerges, the door closing behind her with a heavy thud. Guilt tangles with a strange sense of relief, leaving her legs unsteady. There’s an ache inside her chest where her future with Austin used to be, but she also senses something else blossoming: the faintest spark of freedom. Because that future was never real. It was an escape. For the first time in a long time, she feels like she can finally breathe.

O’Hare International was a whirlwind of hurried footsteps, rolling suitcases, and muffled announcements echoing from overhead speakers. Mia stood near the security checkpoint, her fingers twisting with each other nervously. She swallowed against the tightness in her throat, feeling the sting of unshed tears. Her stomach churned, her heart aching in ways she couldn’t quite describe. It felt familiar, though—something she had only ever experienced once before. When she was thirteen and realized that her father wasn’t coming home.

A few yards away, Jay stood beside his older brother, his duffel slung over his shoulder and his new uniform freshly pressed. His hair was buzzed shorter than she was used to, and it made him look older, more serious. As if that should somehow make him more prepared to be sent off to his possible death. But his eyes—those deep, familiar eyes she’d fallen in love with before she even realized—still held the same softness, even as they searched her face with a mix of guilt and longing.

Will squeezed his shoulder in farewell when he noticed Mia and shot her a small, reassuring smile, before giving them some space.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Jay mumbled as he stepped closer. His voice was careful, like he was afraid one wrong word might send her running.

Mia crossed her arms over her chest defensively, fighting a shiver that had nothing to do with the cool blasts of airport air conditioning. “Neither did I,” she answered, her tone edged with bitterness and hurt. It had only been a week since she found out about his enlistment—but the short time without him already felt like a lifetime.

His posture stiffened, shame written clearly across his face, “Mia—”

“You lied to me,” she cut him off harshly, her voice wavering despite the determined anger on her face. “For weeks. You let me plan our future—a future you had no intention of sharing.” She couldn’t stop the tears that began to gather in her eyes and blinked furiously to keep them at bay.

“I know,” he swallowed hard, every word heavy with regret. “I messed up. I thought maybe you’d try to talk me out of it, and I was… I was scared of losing you.” His voice cracked, and that small vulnerability only made her heart clench harder.

She exhaled a shaky breath. “Of course I would have tried to talk you out of it!” her words came out sharp, but beneath the anger was an overwhelming sadness. “You don’t just get to decide something this huge without telling me. We were supposed to do things together. You shut me out instead.”

Jay bowed his head under the weight of her words. “I know,” he repeated quietly. “And now I’m losing you anyway.”

He lifted his gaze to hers, and in that single look, she saw the regret, the longing, the fear. Another announcement came over the speakers, but the words drifted into the background. All she could focus on was Jay—the slight quiver in his breath, the desperate set of his jaw. Her eyes softened slightly, tears stinging as she blinked them back.

Suddenly, he dropped his duffel and closed the distance between them, cupping her face in his hands with surprising gentleness. Mia stiffened at first, but his thumbs brushed away the tears that she fought so hard against, and her anger splintered into grief.

“I can’t,” he started, voice breaking, “I can’t do this if you’re not with me. Please.”

Everything around them momentarily faded, and there was only Jay’s earnest gaze and the warmth of his hands on her skin. She wanted to fight it—wanted to hold onto the anger because it was easier than facing the heartbreak—but she couldn’t. She inhaled a shaky breath and wrapped her arms around his waist, clinging to him desperately as if it would somehow keep him from leaving her.

“I forgive you,” she whispered against his chest, her tears dampening the fabric of his uniform. “I hate that you’re doing this, but I forgive you. We’ll… figure it out.”

Jay lowered his head, pressing a tender kiss to the top of her hair. His breath stuttered, and she realized he was fighting back tears of his own. “I love you so damn much,” he managed, voice thick with emotion.

Her hold tightened. “I love you too,” she mumbled.

Overhead, the final boarding call for his flight crackled through. She felt that sting of reality slice through her chest, an ache that warned her time was almost up. She looked up at him, tears shimmering in her eyes as she framed his face with both hands. “Will you come back to me?” Mia asked, the words trembling on her lips, fragile but full of hope.

“Always,” he answered without the slightest pause, his gaze steady and resolute, as if his promise alone could protect them both from whatever lies ahead. Then Jay leaned down, capturing her lips in a kiss that tasted of both a goodbye and a vow.

Jay sits on the edge of his couch, the remote resting idly in his hand as the Blackhawks highlights replay for the third time. The volume is low, the commentator’s voices blending into a murmur that only emphasizes the otherwise quiet apartment. His phone lies face down on the coffee table, s if hiding it might banish the temptation to call her—or at least stop him from staring at the screen, willing it to light up. For the past week, Mia has called every single night when she can’t manage to silence the memories that haunt her. They’ve talked about everything and nothing, staying on the line for as long as it takes for her breathing to even out.

He glances at his watch. 12:00 AM. The city seems to have wound down—as much as Chicago can—but he’s still wide awake, leg bouncing restlessly. The last time he sat like this, unable to stop worrying about her, she had been handing herself over to a serial killer. The thought still makes his stomach twist. Maybe she was finally able to fall asleep early, which he knows she desperately needs. Maybe she doesn’t need him tonight, which hurts and reassures him at the same time.

A sudden knock at the door jolts Jay to his feet, heart thumping against his ribs as he approaches the door cautiously to peer through the peephole. He can’t fight the smile from tugging at his lips as he unlocks and pulls open the door, and everything slows.

Mia stands under the dim hallway light, cheeks pink from the cool night air and dark hair a windblown mess. Her green eyes shine with a mixture of vulnerability and determination, and that look alone sends a tremor through his chest. He hadn’t realized just how badly he needed to see her until this very second, having thought about it every day since the hospital.

“Mia,” he breathes, relief and surprise tangling in his voice.

“Hi,” she replies softly, offering a small, unsure smile. He steps back, wordlessly inviting her inside. “I wasn’t sure if you’d still be awake,” she says, pausing near the couch. Her gaze flicks toward the TV, still playing the sports channel.

Jay shuts the door, rubbing the back of his neck. “I was… waiting for your call,” he confesses with a quiet laugh and sheepish shrug.

She bites her lip, fighting back a smile. “I was lying in bed, staring at my phone,” she trails off and turns to face him, her soft expression catching the light, “but I needed to see you.”

His pulse quickens at her words. He takes a step closer, searching her face trying to gauge where this conversation will lead. Arching a brow, his mouth quirks slightly, “Want to sit down?”

She nods, rounding the couch and settling onto the cushion. He follows suit, leaving a small space between them. Mia shifts to face him, drawing in a shaky breath before tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I’m just,” her shoulders deflate, her weariness palpable, “so tired.”

He doesn’t move, afraid to shatter the moment. But he has to ask, and he clears his throat gently, “Of what?”

Mia inhales through her nose and lifts her head, glancing around the apartment as she tries to find the right words. Her eyes trail up to the ceiling, and she rubs her lips together before meeting his gaze. “For the last week,” she continues, voice trembling, “you’ve been the only thing keeping me grounded. For the last few weeks, actually. Even when I…was with someone else, when everything around me was crashing down, the only person I wanted was you.”

His chest constricts from the weight of her confession. He aches to reach out, to hold her, but he resists the urge. A wave of familiarity crashes over him, remembering that night in the safehouse when everything between them shifted. Back to the way it used to be.

“You saved me,” her voice catches as the backs of her eyes sting, but she blinks back the tears and lets out a watery laugh. “Not just from… You saved me from myself. That day you walked into my office. And it terrified me.”

“Mia,” he starts but cuts himself off when she lifts a hand, nodding for her to continue.

“I’ve been scared, Jay,” she confesses, leaning forward. “Scared of letting you in again because you broke my heart. Twice.” Her voice wavers, and she notices the flash of regret in his eyes. She pushes on, though her throat feels tight. “And I let you, because I wanted so badly to be with you. But you weren’t ready, and I realize that now.”

Her voice cracks and Jay can’t help himself anymore. He shuffles closer, reaching out to grab one of her hands in his and giving it a reassuring squeeze. “I’m not the same person I was ten years ago,” he promises.

Lips curving into a sad but hopeful smile, she nods and squeezes his hand back. “Yeah, I’m starting to realize that.” Mia glances down at their entwined hands, eyes focusing on his thumb as it traces over her knuckles. After a few moments, she lifts her chin and inhales deeply, “I don’t want to be scared anymore.”

His throat constricts, heart beating rapidly against his chest, “What are you saying?”

She bites her lower lip, searching his eyes. “I’m saying that I’m in love with you,” she admits, lifting a weight off her shoulders that she has felt for over a decade. “And I don’t care if that means risking getting hurt again, because it’s worth it. You’re worth it.”

It’s all he can do not to pull her into his arms right then. In one fluid motion, Jay closes the space between them, gently cupping her face in his hands. His fingertips brush against the smooth skin of her cheek, swiping away a strand of hair. “Mia,” he says, voice a desperate plea, “I’ve loved you since I was sixteen. Probably earlier. That never stopped, no matter how many mistakes I made, no matter what I tried to tell myself. And I promise you, I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure I never hurt you again. Not if I can help it.”

A tear slips down her cheek, and she lets out a trembling laugh. “I believe you,” she whispers, her fingers clutching his shirt as though he might disappear again if she lets go.

“Do you?” he asks, voice laced with uncertainty and hope.

“I do,” she repeats, a light shining in her eyes he hasn’t seen in what feels like a lifetime.

He leans in slowly, touching his lips to hers in a featherlight kiss, almost like a question. Mia answers by pressing closer, her breath hitching as she finally gives in. The intensity builds, every unspoken apology and promise as he licks across the seam of her lips. Her free hand curls into the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer still, as if she can anchor herself in this moment. She parts her mouth, letting him deepen the kiss and sighing into his embrace.

When they finally pull apart, Jay rests his forehead against hers. A hand threads through her hair, brushing it back over her shoulder before resting firmly against her neck. “I still can’t believe you came back to me,” he whispers in awe.

Her eyes shine with tears, and she doesn’t even try to fight the grin taking over her face. “Always,” she murmurs, echoing the promise he once made and renewing it all at once.

A relieved laugh escapes him, and Jay presses a lingering kiss to the crown of her hair. “Good,” he breathes against her skin, “because I’m not letting you go this time. Not for anything.”

Mia nods, hand coming to land atop his still cradling her face, her touch warm and reassuring. “Neither am I,” she promises.

They stay like that—wrapped in each other’s arms under the soft glow of the table lamp—letting the echoes of past fears and regrets slip away. Instead, a quiet sense of hope blooms between them. It is overwhelming but after how long it took them to find their way back to each other, there’s a lightness to it. That after everything they’ve been through, everything they’ve fought for, this would finally be it. That whatever happens next, they could face.

Together.

Always.

Forever.

prev . . .

well... thank you all so much for coming on this journey with me!! i've been writing for years but original characters was something new and i'm glad you all seemed to love mia as much as i do 🥹

it's bittersweet but i'm mayyyybe close to stringing together an actual plot for a sequel? 

stay tuned 😘