#this is what I was vaguely venting after internally screaming about

[nightmarewing]

I've told everyone who needed to be told privately, and we've started disseminating it a bit more widely, so I'll say it here: I'm getting married next month, tentatively January the 9th, and then, if all goes well and the visa gets approved- I will be moving to England in as soon as a few months.

This was supposed to happen probably more like the end of next year, but the UK government screwed us and countless others over by planning to raise the sponsor's minimum income for family visas from £18.6k a year to £38.7k. In... spring of 2024. They announced this the literal day that we made our plans for the next year.

There is no other schedule we can work on besides "do it right now" and still get this particular shot at a life together. There are various reasons we want it to be the UK, but chief among them is- he's actually happy there right now, with his job and his every day life. It's been wonderful seeing him come out of a rough time and start to really flourish. I want him to be able to keep doing that right where he is.

On the flip side, I've been... straight up miserable lately. Y'all know how my job has gone in the past few years. I badly need a change. It didn't need to be this extreme or this soon, but then again- why the hell not? I've never had something in my life that I wanted badly or needed to fight for. I've never felt enabled to make choices and take risks for the sake of my own happiness. I spent the first three decades of my life living in survival mode.

So it's not how we wanted or how we originally planned, and it's going to be an incredibly strange and overwhelming time for a good long while, but right now? I'm really starting to feel like I can be excited about this. Like I can be happy. I'll do whatever I have to to get this chance at a life with someone so infinitely precious to me.

[slashbitch2]

Extra Complications

never expected to be crushing on an animated character but here we are

Next Chapter

It was sneaky. Perhaps cheating by some standards. But from your perspective, it was a damn good plan.

Ironically you'd seen the advertisement for the Alchemax internship right after being flung into a wall by the very same woman who'd likely approved the broadcast. Olivia Octavius, or Doc Ock as you ought to refer to her in costume. Though she'd given you little time to read up on 'how to apply', as moments later a car was thrown in your direction, which was very inconsiderate of her, but was also all the persuasion you needed.

At this point, you'd be willing to do anything if it contributed to thwarting her, surely, very evil plan. Of course you admired the woman for her general genius and eccentricity, but the constant unprovoked conflict was becoming tiresome. It felt as if she were trying to determine how much of a threat you posed, whereas, you liked to think your legacy as 'that Spider-Person who sometimes saves the day' was all the evidence necessary.

Honestly, you weren't certain as to what exactly her, no doubt, villainous plan entailed besides patrolling the streets in green swimming goggles and black spandex with ridiculous plastic tubes jutting out of her back. In fact, it was ridiculous that no one had made any attempt to stop her yet. Unlike your identity, kept secret by a more modest spandex suit, hers was public knowledge.

Sometimes, it seemed as though you were the enemy here.

Which is precisely why infiltrating her team of scientists was more than appropriate. You were about to single handily take down an international threat, one hidden in plain sight, but left untouched due to the company's vast money, leverage and prestige.

Someday the city would thank you for your many sacrifices. Specifically for voluntarily working another job without pay. Y/N Y/L/N, broke intern by day, friendly neighbourhood Spider-Person by night.

"Excuse me?" A voice called from the left, your vision of them obstructed by an inconveniently placed potted plant. "Are you the new intern?" The person stepped closer, briefly glancing up at you, then back down at a sheet of paper. "Y/N Y/L/N?" The woman's timid appearance hardly screamed villainous scientist, but then again, looks can be deceiving.

"Yes, that's me." You stood, reaching out to shake her hand.

She sighed in relief, shaking your hand a tad too enthusiastically. "Lovely to meet you. I'm Marie and I'll be getting you settled in for the first few days."

A spark of disappointment flashed across your mind. Olivia hadn't been there for your interview, nor had any sway in your hiring, and now she wasn't even the person greeting you on your first day. Although you had no right to be, you felt rather offended by the lack of challenge she was providing. It was almost too easy.

---

To be fair, Marie was the perfect candidate to give you a tour of the facility. She was kind and patient, but not condescending. She seldom spoke beyond what was required of her, unless you asked something work related, when her lengthy response would affirm her status as an epicure of scientific knowledge. By midday, you'd decided she was someone to befriend, and subsequently accepted her invitation to have lunch together.

You were also hoping that the team would eat lunch as a group, but alas, more disappointment. Instead, you spent the break sitting in an awkward silence with Marie, who seemed to loose basic communication skills when presented with food. In spite of her lack of engagement, you still took the opportunity to try and ascertain information about the project you'd be working on, though each time she expertly diverted the interrogation, or ignored your question entirely.

Who knew working for an evil, secretive corporation would be so boring?

It was a test of patience to be sitting in the same building as Olivia Octavius, while forced to shadow an incredibly kind, but slow eating woman. Realistically, you knew there'd be plenty of time to investigate, though you were reluctant to end the day without any progress. So, while Marie was still distracted by her lunch, you excused yourself to go to the bathroom.

She dismissively approved with a wave of her hand, allowing you to slip away from the dining hall. You vaguely remembered the location of Olivia's office as being on the top floor, indicated by Marie's imprecise pointing. She'd explained that very few had clearance to get in, but you'd already thought of a way to get passed the security.

Who aside from the highest ranking scientists had access to every room? Janitors, of course. Because, for some reason, cleanliness was more important than security.

It didn't take long to locate a cleaner, or much effort to pickpocket the security card. To be on the safe side, you even had an excuse ready: that the man had dropped it, that you were simply looking for him to return it. And if Olivia caught you in her office, well, she wouldn't (Spider-Senses and all). Again, it was almost too easy.

There was a minatory silence as you walked along the final corridor toward her office. Part of you felt as though this was some kind of elaborate trap, the repeated phrase 'too easy' coming to mind as you reached the door. Though the logical part of you must've known this was a fatuous suggestion, and took control.

With a final pause to confirm nobody was approaching, or was already waiting inside, you scanned the key card. The action was rewarded with a satisfactory beep, followed by the door sliding open so fast it appeared to have vanished.

The office was smaller than you anticipated. Or maybe it was the bareness of the room that caught you off guard. The woman was insane, yet her work area hardly reflected her deranged mental state. Everything was so perfectly neat that you began to wonder if you'd actually walked onto a movie set, or a photoshoot, which would've explained the strange ring lights hanging from the ceiling.

Upon reaching the centre of the room, you were struck by the realisation that you truthfully had no reason to be here. Even if the office had been as messy as you'd expected, it was unlikely that she'd leave her super evil plans lying around. Rather, It'd been some morbid curiosity that had lured you here. To see where The Doc Ock worked, where the alter ego was likely created. The reality was underwhelming to say the least.

Deciding that you'd spent enough time admiring an incredibly bland office, you exited back out into the empty corridor, nonchalantly throwing the security card behind you, certain someone would eventually return it. Then, as if right on cue, you sensed somebody approaching, soon followed by footsteps resonating from around the corner. With no way of avoiding them, you kept your head down with the intention of blending in.

Olivia Octavius rounded the corner, not sparing a glance up. She was frowning at a piece of paper, her full attention directed to it, blissfully unaware of your presence.

Instinctively, your entire body tensed at the sight of her lithe frame and mass of hair spilling out of its messy bun. Any other circumstance and you'd have fled by now, through a vent, out of the window, it didn't matter. Though you had to remind yourself that there was no reason to be afraid now. There was no possible way she could know your identity.

Nonetheless, as you passed her with less than a metre of space, you held your breath. She said nothing and you both kept walking in opposite directions.

It seemed the coast was clear. You released the breath you'd been holding and kept moving until. "Hey, wait a minute."

You froze, aching to ignore her and escape. Her voice was deep, more so than you were prepared for. While fighting, few words were exchanged, and even then they were unintelligible. Although, now was the worst time to be thinking about previous interactions, so with much difficulty, you cleared your mind. As far as anyone knew, including yourself, you were just the intern.

You ran a hand through your hair nervously, straightening out your lab coat and turning to face her. She was stood at the far end of the long white corridor, entirely unthreatening when compared to Doc Ock, who would've loomed over you menacingly.

Remembering the role you were meant to be playing, you choked out a response. "How can I be of assistance?"

"You're the new intern, right?"

"Yeah." You considered approaching to shake her hand, but the idea of awkwardly marching the length of the corridor to greet her was rather unappealing. "That's me." You settled for a polite smile and shoulder shrug instead.

She screwed up her face in consideration before crooking a finger. "Come with me."

Swallowing any concern, you nodded hesitantly. The prospect of returning to the office you'd broken into only moments ago had you dragging your feet.

She waited patiently until you were by her side to continue. "Don't worry." She scanned her key card. "I don't bite." Her tone was playful, her eyes kindly mocking.

"Good to know." You muttered, following her inside. You took a second to look around the room with mock curiosity, feeling her eyes trace your every move. Like a predator, eyeing up its prey, determining your weaknesses. Unlike the encounters with Doc Ock, it was uncertain who had the high ground here. Her gaze was putting you on edge, not dissimilar to how your character of 'the intern' would react.

"So..." She shuffled some papers around on the desk, finding what looked to be your application. "Ms. Y/L/N right?"

You confirmed with a nod, summoning the resolve to amble toward her desk.

"Take a seat." She gestured to the chair opposite, letting you sit before proceeding. "Tell me about yourself, Y/N."

You started to think of an adequate answer, but she interrupted a second later, contradicting her initial inquiry. "Are you okay with me calling you Y/N?" She leant her head on a closed fist, narrowing her eyes.

Although the question sounded considerate, you didn't feel the implied sincerity. Even if you wanted to say no, that didn't feel like a suitable response. "Sure."

Somehow, it felt like she was establishing dominance through the polite act, and combined with being under her scrutinising glare, the performance was working.

"Great." Suddenly, she leant back in her chair, all evidence of the hostile act disappearing instantaneously.

"What'd you want to know?" Mirroring her relaxed posture, you attempted to re-establish some control.

"Oh, anything." A flicker of something passed in her eyes, piqued interest possibly?

You began routinely rattling off some basic facts about yourself, nothing too specific or personal. Facts that would answer any follow up questions she might have, and yet said nothing about you. Surprisingly, she seemed hooked on your every word. The thought crossed your mind that this might be the real interview, that everything else up to this point had been a sham. But you settled on a more unsettling justification. That she was committing everything you said to memory.

Coming to the end of the informative monologue, you decided to take a risk. "Do I get to ask a question?" You raised an eyebrow challengingly.

"Inquisitive. I like that." She stated, folding her arms on the desk. "Go ahead."

You decided to see how far you could push your luck. "Tell me about yourself." You smugly repeated her vague first query. It was the Doctor's turn to come up with an answer to the ambiguous demand.

She scoffed, realising your plan to make her struggle. "Touché. But I'm rather busy, so how about you pick a more specific question."

Narrowing it down, there was only one thing you wanted to ask. "Can I see the-" You waved your arms around, imitating tentacles. "the suit?"

She chuckled, slowly standing. Judging from her lack of surprise, this was likely a request she'd heard many times.

First, she removed her glasses. Then slipped out of her lab coat. Next to go was the shirt, which she pulled over her head while maintaining eye contact. You wanted to look away, out of respect, yet you didn't. Without the shirt, you noticed she was already wearing the suit underneath and had the harness strapped to her back, confirming your suspicion that she always had access to the weapon. As she was stepping out of her trousers, the arms (tentacles?) inflated, and within moments were threateningly extending to their full potential.

She smiled proudly, enjoying your stunned expression. "As good as you expected?"

"Better." Unable to resist any longer, you stood to investigate the suit in further detail. You'd never seen it stationary, or had the opportunity to try and gauge the details of how it worked. Although you argued this would be beneficial for your next fight, in reality you just wanted to admire the contraption. You circled round, marvelling at the simplicity of the design. It was convenient, yet elegant. "It's beautiful."

Coming to a stop in front of Olivia, she had an unreadable expression. A mix of emotions, most prominently confusion. To your delight, a faint blush coloured her cheeks. Whatever unspoken game you'd been playing, you were winning, or were until she said. "How'd you like to intern for me?"

You quickly recovered. "I already do."

"No." She sighed. "I mean personally. As my assistant? You'd get your own desk, an almost guaranteed job at the end of it and so much more experience than you'd bargained for." She leant forward, a little too close for comfort. There was an unhinged look in her eyes more reminiscent of Doc Ock that both convinced and deterred you. "So what'd you say?"

She genuinely wanted you to work with her.

This hadn't been part of the plan. You'd expected to spend no longer than a few months working at Alchemax. To uncover their evil scheme, figure out how to stop it and hopefully take down the company. An optimistic plan, sure, but one you'd been assured you'd stick to. Although, the opportunity to work closely with Olivia Octavian, with the Doc Ock, was too good to pass on. Not to mention, infinitely more interesting.

You grinned, embracing the insanity that your answer would incur. "I'd love to."

She clapped her hands together. "Great!" Then offered her hand for you to shake formally. "I'll sort out the paperwork and details this evening, but right now if you'll excuse me, I have business to attend to."

She left before you had the chance to say anything else, still in her suit, which left you confused for the following half hour. You finally understood upon catching a glimpse of a news alert on your phone.

Doc Ock Seizes Bank, Has Taken Hostages!

You sighed. Today was going to be a long day, and things were only going to get more complicated.

[fanfalc-616]

The Rights Of A Nindroid

Chapter Thirty: Whatever Master Wants

(Previous Chapter Here)

Hey so I’ve been coming up with a more detailed outline and I like the titles I’ve come up with and before they were only on Ao3 but now I’m adding them here.

Also I’ve already completed 31 and 32 before this so yay you guys get three chapters in three days (yes this is the second time this has happened lol)

Cryptor takes a deep breath, trying to ground himsel- itself? He- that, it… uh.

The nindroid tries to redirect the thoughts to something else, but it- he- the. Cryptor- or, General?

Teeth gritting, the nindroid wishes that things would just make sense for once. Everything is such a blur, a mix of conflicting memories and orders and feelings. Or, well, the feelings are just programmed, so they aren’t real feelings…

Are they?

Sighing, the nindroid leans its- his head against the back of the locker. Life- or the digital program that mimics it- has never been so frustrating.

Well. That he can remember. It’s pretty sure that it’s missing some of his memories. They’re all so blurred- it can only faintly remember anything from before he was here.

The most prominent memory of before is about another nindroid. General doesn’t remember much else, but he can remember the other’s face, and a name to go with it.

Sentry.

But besides that… it’s all so glitchy. He thinks it can recall something about gold armor and a purple snake, but even that is hazy.

From the memories it has of the facility, it knows that he’s had some kind of connection to Original. Some gut feeling makes it think that he knew the other before, maybe even by a different name. But nothing is clear enough to make sense of.

It’s about to try and unscramble more of his past- hopefully remembering more about Sentry- when he suddenly registers footsteps coming from outside the locker.

Tensing, it stands up straight again, making sure to wipe away any and all emotion.

It’s really not in the mood to get hurt today.

He remains quiet and compliant as it’s taken out of the locker, keeping his gaze blank and straight, not risking any kind of eye contact.

It feels itself trying to frown as it recognizes them seemingly going towards the training room. They- General hasn’t been taken there in a while, usually it’s only when he does something wrong, but… it can’t recall disobeying any orders recently. What else could it have done? It’s been doing what it’s supposed to, why-

When he’s chained down, he feels another wave of confusion hit him. It thinks he can vaguely remember the official in front of him, but they definitely aren’t one of his prioritized masters. So why-

His thoughts are cut off by a sudden blast of electricity, and it can only barely muffle a curse at the intensity. Still, his mind is racing as it stares at the chains holding him.

They still haven’t told it what it did.

Shaking, trembling, Cryptor can only just barely stay quiet. Teeth clenched and gaze lowered, it takes everything it has to hold himself together. What-

A particularly sharp and painful blast finally tears a real cry of pain out of his chest, leaving him panting.

Trembling, it finally looks up at the official. He knows it’s not supposed to make eye contact but at the moment, he’s too confused and stressed to care.

“Master?” It gets out, hoping that the way his voice is cracking will be ignored. It pauses, waiting for the official to reply. But much to his dismay, the only response is another painful shock.

A low pained gasp leaves it at the sharp pain, and in that moment, Cryptor makes a decision.

Fuck the rules, he wants to know what the hell is going on.

“Master!” He repeats, louder this time. “I- what am I being punished for? I- I want to know to avoid it in the future.”

As soon as the words are out, it curses itself internally. No, he’s not supposed to say ‘want’, they don’t like it when he implies he can feel or have desires, it-

The official studies him for a moment before he replies. “You didn’t,” he answers.

The confusion only increases. “What?” It questions, fighting the desperation that begs for it to strain against the chains. “What- what do you mean?”

“You haven’t done anything, General.”

“Then why-“

“Because.” The official glares. “You’re not alive. It doesn’t matter what I do to you. I’m human, and I’ve chosen to bring you here, and that’s all that matters.”

Shock floods through his systems. Staring, he tries to wrap his head around the words. What- no! No, it’s one thing to be punished for a mistake, but that- he can’t-

“That’s not fair!” Cryptor snarls out the words before he can stop himself. “If I didn’t do anything wrong, then-“

The words are cut off by his own cry of pain as the voltage is abruptly raised, a wave of agony flashing over him.

Gasping, it can feel its power source heating up in panic. Okay, okay, this- usually when he’s punished, there’s something he can do to lessen it. It’s not allowed to beg for mercy, but usually if it accepts the punishment and agrees that it deserves it and acknowledges the mistake then that’s considered good enough. What is he supposed to do here? Just… suffer?

Cryptor lowers its gaze, trembling. Everything inside it is screaming, screaming to resist, screaming to submit, screaming incoherently to the point where it can barely even register the world around it, the only thing that even seems to exist in that moment is the pain flooding its systems.

It’s times like this that he wishes he was allowed to lower his sensitivity. It’d be really helpful if he could just numb himself to these unfairly painful shocks.

Every moment that passes feels like an eternity. It doesn’t have anything to focus on, no behaviors to reconsider, no rules to remind itself of, no realizations it can make. The only thing he can do is just sit there with the agony.

It’s not allowed to beg for mercy, either. As a nindroid, he shouldn’t be able to have these wants or desires, and definitely not enough to cry for it.

Shaking, General feels himself slowly losing more and more control. Everything inside is a mess, everything is so murky and blurry and confused and it hurts-

Faintly, he can hear a door open. It’s a struggle, but he manages to direct his attention towards it- a thing that thankfully becomes easier as the shocks lessen some. Master had probably gotten distracted by whoever had-

Kyle.

Shit.

The blond walks into the room, glancing around the scene. “Hey, wh-” With a sudden pause, he looks between the official and Cryptor. “Wait, what's going on?”

Cryptor keeps his head down. It knows that it’s not supposed to have preferences- he thinks- but Kyle has always been a source of fear for it. Or, well, digital fear.

Even though it’s not looking directly, it can still see the official turning to look at Kyle. “Training program,” he answers. “Out of your jurisdiction, I believe.”

“Out of my- What do you mean? I work on this project, I should know!” The blond looks over at Cryptor again, and this time it makes sure to avoid any kind of reaction, even as the shocks continue.

He sounds annoyed and maybe even a little angry- both things that never end well for General.

Although Kyle has been acting differently recently… it’s not really sure why, though. Probably some other kind of test.

He risks glancing up to see the encounter. Something important seems to be going on here…

“My orders came from above you,” the official glares. “This is none of your concern.”

While maintaining eye contact with the blond, he hits General with an even more intense shock- and this time, it’s only just barely able to prevent itself from crying out.

“Oh, I can promise you it is,” Kyle growls, the words pointed enough to almost make the nindroid start trembling.

“What the fuck is going on?”

The electricity seems to be increasing in power- another test. Or, well, it probably really is just the official trying to vent- Kyle doesn’t seem to be helping the matter.

Through the rising pain, Cryptor keeps his teeth clenched, forcing it down. The official doesn’t seem to be backing down, and it’s kinda starting to hope Kyle wins whatever argument this is- Cryptor thinks it prefers tests and punishments to being used as a punching bag.

“Look, why don’t you go back to your job?” The official sounds almost condescending, now. “I’m sure your supervisor is looking for you.”

“Oh, my supervisor? So you think I'm just some intern?” Kyle chuckles dangerously, the sound all too familiar to the nindroid.

“Does the name 'Kyle Griffin' ring any bells for you?”

The words are spoken conversationally, but there’s a sharp underlying threat beneath them.

General can only barely see through the pain at this point- until it suddenly stops, and he can only barely stop the relieved gasp from escaping him at the sudden release.

The official stumbles back, looking at the blond with a horrified expression. “Wh- wait, you’re…”

“Yep, it's me. I know I don't look like what people might expect.” Kyle wears a tight, forced smile, even though he doesn’t seem to be trying to hide the threat in his voice. “And if you don't want to know what you'd look like fired, I suggest you go report to your superior before I go report to Marth- Ms. Finch.”

Cryptor feels programmed shock settle into him as he watches the official nod his agreement and start backing towards the door- even picking up his pace when Kyle intensifies his glare.

When he’s gone, and the footsteps have fully receded, the blond sighs with a small shake of his head. “Can't believe I still have to pull out the 'Martha' card these days,” he mutters to himself.

It has to force itself not to tense up when he comes up to it, crouching down to the nindroid’s level.

“Hey. Have the shocks stopped?” He prompts, wearing an almost sympathetic smile.

For a moment, all it can do is stare. After that, the realization that he’s ignoring a direct question hits him like a bucket of ice water, and it quickly nods. “They- they have, Master,” he confirms.

“It hurts, what they're doing to you, doesn’t it?” Kyle shakes his head ever so slightly. “I mean, I know for a fact it's been worse than before.”

Cryptor ignores the way the blond’s eyes scan over him in favor of trying to figure out if he’s supposed to answer that. Was that a rhetorical question? Or does he actually want to know if it hurts? Well, obviously he knows it does, but-

It quickly pushes the thoughts from his mind and chooses to try and answer. Better safe than sorry, right?

“Yes, Master,” it agrees quietly. How could any of this not hurt?

Kyle sighs, still with that sympathetic look. “But you're stubborn. You won't let yourself go, even when you know it'll lessen the sting.” The words sound almost consoling, somehow sounding so wrong and so right at the same time.

“Maybe it's time you let go, you know,” he says gently. “Because they won't stop until you do."

It’s a struggle to keep itself from shaking. This is just… it’s the crux of the war that he’s been waging all this time. Stay or go? Yes or no? Fight or yield?

“You can stop, now,” Kyle assures. “It's way easier. You've been fighting a losing battle. Don't you think it needs to end?”

After hesitating for one final moment, General nods. “Yes, Master,” it gets out, the waver in its voice steadying towards the end.

Looking back down at the ground, it feels an almost peaceful feeling overtake it. A calmness after the war that’s been raging for so long.

“It does,” it says simply.

And it has.

[entitynumber5]

hurt never meant

Chapter 1: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29723250/chapters/73101963

Summary: Jon and Martin enter a battle of wits regarding the hiding of injuries.

Content warnings: paranoia, blood, injury, canon-typical worm mentions, descriptions of wounds and scars, stitches, needles, internalised ableism, swearing, arguments, toxic work environment, nausea, food mention.

It was very fun to write Martin being petty and stubborn but my god, having Not!Sasha in this fic was PAINFUL!!!!!! Hopefully the second chapter will be finished soon. Full text below the line. I hope everyone’s having a great day <3

The Tube is choking with artificial heat, pumped unregulated through the vents so that inside in late November, cocooned in coats, the passengers shift and sweat and mumble in discomfort. Martin tries to remember the mundane cycle of complaints and platitudes he follows in circles every morning: the air is drying out my contact lenses. At least it’s not summer. I wish I wasn’t wearing a coat. You’ll be grateful when you get outside.

Each circle is broken, just before he completes it and begins again, by the sensation of heat crawling beneath his skin, a tingling upwards motion. It ripples across his face, inducing a drowsiness like fingers dragging his eyes closed, before the prickling across his scalp sends him spiralling into discomfort once again.

He tries to force himself back to his commuter’s hymn, but the heat feels internal, spreading outwards as if attempting to meet the warm air of the Tube. It’s different from the normal unpleasantness. It’s too distracting. He shifts his weight between bursts of dizziness—he gave up his seat three stops ago for a person with a tiny baby strapped to them, and now he is squeezed against the door by the passengers who have joined him since—and a fresh wave of stars burst across his vision at the sharp slice of pain through his left foot.

Martin clings tighter to the bar as the pain wraps around his ankle and flares up the outside of his calf. For a moment, he thinks his whole leg might collapse beneath him and he is almost grateful for the way they are all shoulder-to-shoulder in the compartment.

Perhaps he should have called Rosie and told her. But a deep-rooted part of him cannot bear to take time off, remembers the times he had dragged himself to work feeling much worse—smiling from behind the till even during a bout of flu that made his entire body ache, carrying plants to cars at the garden centre a few days after he dislocated his shoulder helping his mother up after a fall. At least, at the Institute, he has a desk and a chair and very few opportunities for heavy lifting. Given time to take some weight off the injury before lunch, he is sure no one will even notice. And by tomorrow, he will be fine.

The next stop is his. Outside, the cold air takes some of the unbearable flush from his cheeks and he walks the rest of the journey with his coat open to counteract the heat of the train. He resolutely ignores the throbbing in his left leg as he joins of the parade of commuters, bustling in tandem along narrow pavements. The Institute isn’t far.

Martin fights the instinct to immediately make Jon a cup of tea. He knows it takes Jon a while to warm up to him each day, withdrawn and nearly always absent in the mornings. By the afternoon, Jon is slightly more receptive after enough time co-existing without incident, slightly more willing to drink the tea offered to him even if he always smells it beforehand. Morning tea is fed to the plants; afternoon tea, Jon tolerates.

He should stop by the staff room, anyway. The first aid kit inside is well-stocked. He knows this because he did it himself, spreading the task out with extensive research on the empty, boring workdays before Jon and Tim had returned from their leave. There are painkillers inside and the sort of durable bandages Martin doesn’t have at home. But the urge to sit down drags him past the door and straight to his desk.

“Morning, Sasha,” Martin says, supressing a loud exhale of relief when he lowers himself into his desk chair.

Sasha glances up distractedly from her computer and pulls out one of her earbuds. “What was that, Martin?”

Martin tries to fight an unfamiliar nervousness, an old friend from his early days in the Archives where he wasn’t sure where he stood with Tim and Sasha. “I was just saying good morning.”

“Of course.” Sasha smiles, although her expression is blank, almost cold. “Good morning to you, too.”

Martin gives her a tight-lipped smile in return. Sasha pops the earbud back in and returns to whatever work she is doing on the computer. He wonders if she can hear the noise of the repeated error notification over her music, wonders what she is doing to make the computer so combative.

Before Prentiss, he has a vague memory of there being a radio on Sasha’s desk. She wouldn’t turn it on everyday—sometimes, she could only get work done if she was wearing noise-cancelled headphones—but whenever she did, she and Tim would sing along to cheesy ’80s hits. He thinks he remembers them dancing together, the middle of the open plan office becoming a makeshift dance floor, but he cannot hold the entire picture in his mind. It’s like a reverse polaroid, fading out of view rather than in. Perhaps he only dreamt it.

He shakes himself out of the fuzziness filling his mind and tries to focus on checking his emails. He left leg throbs dully beneath his desk, but the pain becomes peripheral as each email dredges up the irritation he tries to avoid indulging on weekends. Elias has sent a motivational Monday email about the importance of teamwork and rallying together, especially after a difficult few months for all of us. Rosie has forwarded a fundraising form from his old supervisor in the library, who is apparently raising money for Dementia UK. He tries not to think about how difficult it had been to explain to the aforementioned supervisor why he needed time off to help his mother settle into the care home in Devon. And there is no email at all from Tim, who has stopped bothering to even send his apologies for being late with each new blow to his and Jon’s relationship.

“Martin.” Jon’s voice, slightly raised to catch his attention.

Martin looks up. Jon’s door is open just a crack. Before he can reply, Jon adds stiffly: “My office. Five minutes.” And then he closes his office door firmly once again.

Martin resists the urge to groan and lower his head to his desk. While he’s glad that telling Jon about his faked CV seems to have been a small but significant turning point, he isn’t sure he can manage another complicated conversation dredging up old anxieties today. He doesn’t want to reveal each shameful, painful secret he has in a futile attempt to make Jon trust him.

He can’t concentrate for the next five minutes. He alternates between watching the second hand on the clock across the office and refreshing his emails. He resigns himself to giving a fiver to the library fundraiser and eating the leftover takeaway in the fridge for lunch rather than getting a meal deal. He tries not to think about where Tim might be or what sort of mood he will be in when he finally arrives.

As soon as five minutes have passed, Martin stands. But with his stomach twisting in anxiety and his thoughts spiralling, he has managed to relegate the pain in his leg to the bottom of his mental priority list. Now that he’s standing, it’s demanding first place again. He has to grab the edge of his desk, almost sending his nearly-dead office plant and pot of pens flying across the floor. His monitor, still displaying emails, wobbles dangerously with the desk. He stands completely still for a moment, trying to breathe around the wave of nausea induced by the pain.

The prickling hotness is back. He hopes his face isn’t red when he finally plucks up the courage—and energy—to knock on the door of Jon’s office. It wouldn’t be the first time, he supposes. No matter how hard he tries, he finds himself blushing quite often whenever it is just him and Jon in the latter’s office.

“Come in,” Jon mumbles from behind the door.

Martin creaks open the door carefully and steps inside, trying very hard to make himself smaller, non-threatening. Jon sits behind his desk, staring at his computer screen. He doesn’t look away, but he waves Martin into the spare chair opposite him.

Martin has a feeling that sitting down would be a dangerous decision. He clears his throat. “Actually, I’ll—I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.”

This finally draws Jon’s eyes away from his monitor. “Alright. Although I can assure you that, unlike some of its brethren in Artefact Storage, that chair doesn’t bite.”

Martin tries to smile. Jon has been doing this more since the confrontation and subsequent reveal over his CV—trying to make jokes, or some approximation. An attempt to diffuse the tension, even when Jon’s body language is nearly always screaming: I see you as a threat.

“I’m sure it doesn’t,” Martin replies, “But I, um—I was just reading this article about the impacts of sitting at a desk.”

“A productive start to your workday, then,” Jon mutters.

“And so I’m gonna try standing up a bit more,” Martin continues, deliberately ignoring Jon’s comment, “Around the office.”

“Around the entire office or my office specifically?”

Martin can feel the irritation—stirred by the emails, deflated initially by Jon’s joke—rising inside of him again. “Does it matter?”

Jon sighs. “I suppose not.”

“So, what did you, um, what did you need from me?” Martin asks, trying not to shift with nerves. He knows it will aggravate his leg.  

“Sasha still appears to be having difficulty with her computer, so I was hoping to delegate the task of digitising the disproved statements from 1995 to 2000 to you,” Jon says.

Martin tries not to visibly bristle. Jon has been doing this a lot lately, too—far more frequently, in fact, than the half-formed jokes. He hoards the statements that won’t record digitally, combs them again and again for details rather than delegating this task to any of his Assistants, and only asks for very vague follow-ups.

But Sasha had volunteered to digitise the disproved statements. She said she liked the clear structure it gave to her day, always able to take a full hour for lunch to visit her new boyfriend, and how it led her to different places within the Archives. Besides, she has a transcribing qualification, although she had asked Martin the other day how to insert line numbers into a document. Brain fog, she had explained with that same thin smile.

Martin is quite happy to do whatever minuscule tasks Jon would sporadically trust him with, as long as it meant he had some idea of what Jon was currently putting all of his energy into. He doesn’t want to digitise statements from the ’90s.

“Will that be a problem?” Jon asks after the silence drags on.

“Nope. Not at all,” Martin lies, “It’s just that…”

Jon raises an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“I thought I could perhaps… do some follow-ups on the statements you’ve been reading.”

Jon sighs again. Distractedly, he lifts his left arm, his sleeve rolled up to his elbow, and scratches at the slightly-raw but almost-healed wound along his forearm. The stitches have dissolved, but Martin can see the pink scarring where they were placed across the wound, which is raised in comparison to the flat worm scars surrounding it.

“Don’t scratch it,” Martin tuts, “You’ll reopen the wound.”

“Martin,” Jon replies, exasperated, “It’s almost completely healed.”

“Completely healed? It’s not—it’s never going to be—you needed five stitches!”

“Yes, as you keep reminding me.”

“Because I—” Martin splutters, trying to find the words. “Because I worry about you.”

“Your worry is entirely unnecessary.”

“Is it? Because I think you’ve given me more than enough reasons to be worried about you lately.”

Jon’s jaw twitches angrily, but his expression is level when he forces his eyes to Martin’s. “I didn’t call you in here to have yet another pointless conversation about my mental or physical health.”

“Of course not. You called me in here to…” To do a completely meaningless task because you don’t trust me with anything else. He takes a deep breath and knows he cannot say that. “Digitise the 1995-2000 disproved statements.”

“Well remembered.”

Martin manages not to roll his eyes. “I’ll get started right away.”

Martin turns to leave. The first step is easy. The pain arrives on the second, taking him surprise, a direct strike to his ankle. He stumbles and has to steady himself again, this time against the chair Jon had offered him at the start.

“Martin,” Jon says, a hint of something like surprise—or worry—in his voice. He is half-standing from his own chair when Martin looks over his shoulder at him.

“I’m fine,” Martin insists.

“You’re clearly not fine. Are you injured?”

Martin leans into the chair so he can turn to face Jon again. At this angle, Martin catches only a glimpse of the healing wound where it snakes behind Jon’s wrist. But even with a limited view, the memory of the first time he had seen it grips him.

It had been near the end of the day. Martin went to use the toilet before he headed home, but the moment he was inside, all he could smell was blood. And for a moment, all he could think was the worms, they must have missed some of the worms, where did I last see Tim, oh, god, Jon hasn’t left for the day yet, is Sasha still in the office, the worms, worms again, always worms, it was only a matter of time. It was like walking through the Archives after the siege to give his statement: the musty smell of the worm carcases and the metallic hint of blood beneath. Jon and Tim’s blood.

He had lifted his sleeve to his nose to block out the smell and tried to gather some semblance of calm. The blood was in the sink. One of the bathroom stall doors was closed but not locked, a shadow just visible underneath. When Martin called out a cautious hello, the door creaked open at the behest of the occupant’s foot and Jon stood sheepishly inside, pressing a wad of red-stained tissues against his arm.

“Ah. Hello, Martin,” Jon had said. And then, “Heading home?”

Martin had shouted. He can’t remember what. His voice was always higher than it was loud when he was upset. After that, it had been a blur of the same lies. “I’m fine,” as Martin tried to apply pressure to the wound. “I don’t need stitches,” when Martin insisted on taking him to A&E. “It’s really not that bad,” while the doctor was injecting the anaesthetic and stitching the wound. “Why would I lie, Martin? For the last time, I cut myself on a bread knife,” repeated in the days after, again and again, no matter how much Martin pushed.

“Martin,” Jon says again, interrupting his train of thought, “Are you injured?”

Jon is lying to him. Jon is playing a game. Perhaps unintentional, perhaps well-meant, but nonetheless—two can play and Martin has thrown his hat into the ring. The irritation scratching against his ribcage is replaced with a petty sense of satisfaction.

“I sprained my ankle on the way to work. Tripped while I was getting off the Tube,” Martin tells him, “You know me. Clumsy as anything. It’s nothing serious.”

“Well, it doesn’t look like nothing,” Jon snaps.

“It’s fine.” Martin smiles. “I’m sure it will clear up on its own,” he adds, since Jon had something to that effect to him while bleeding profusely in the bathroom stall.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t be digitising the statements, after all,” Jon murmurs, almost to himself, “Sasha hasn’t yet transferred them to the office and the boxes can be rather heavy.”

“Honestly, Jon, I can manage,” Martin interjects. The satisfaction has faded slightly, replaced with that desperate urge to prove himself, to show he doesn’t need time off work. He won’t go home. And he won’t be a liability while he’s here. “Besides, what else is there for me to do? Unless you want me to follow up on that statement?”

Jon looks down at his desk. A flash of panic crosses his face when he realises the statement folder is open and Martin, at any time, could have read it. He closes it, deliberately slow, as if trying to hide the reason why. “I’m sure I can find you something else to do at your desk.”

Martin knows this has become a different point of pride now. A dangerous point of pride. He doesn’t want Jon to fuss over him. He doesn’t want to be handled. He will do his job as usual and no one will know he is in pain, no one needs to assume he is anything other than fine.

“I’ll digitise the statements,” Martin says, “In fact, I’ll get started right away.”

“Martin, I—”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“If you insist.”

“I do.”

“Then…” Jon hesitates. “Have a good day, Martin.”

Martin almost folds at the softness in Jon’s voice. For a moment, he considers taking it back—the stubbornness, the bitterness, the insistence that he’s fine. Would it hurt to give in, for a day, to the urge for rest? But it would. He knows it would.

“You too, Jon,” Martin murmurs, dismissing himself from Jon’s office and managing to make it out of the door without flinching every time he puts weight on his left leg.

*

Jon refreshes his emails. He deletes Elias’s aggressively positive bulletin before panicking that he will somehow know and transferring it back to his inbox. He flips through the statement on his desk. He makes sure the pages are in order, properly aligned. He takes the tape recorder from the drawer. He takes a sip from the sealed water bottle he keeps in the same locked drawer as the tape recorder. He lifts his thumb, letting it hover above the button to start recording.

Martin, he thinks. And he can’t begin the statement.

Martin is not fine. Jon is going to prove it. He had decided this before the emails, the statement, the water. But at the crossroads of burying himself in work or investigating Martin’s denial, he realises that it was never really a choice. He needs to know.

Perhaps Martin is hiding an injury related to Jon’s clandestine investigation. The tunnels are dark and, in places, littered with debris. A person visiting without the right equipment—or, at the very least, without a torch—could easily hurt themselves. Or likewise, if the tables had somehow turned, Martin could have lost his balance in the station while following Jon. The best lies always held some element of truth.

The worry eating at him is for this scenario, Jon tells himself. Not for Martin. He is not worried for Martin.

Jon props his door open slightly with his shoe. Now that he has taken to working in his office, door closed, he no longer worries so much about working in only his socks. He never liked the feel of his firm work loafers, and it’s easier to sit comfortably in his chair when his feet aren’t covered. He checks to see if any of them have noticed him, but in the bullpen, Sasha doesn’t look away from her malfunctioning computer, earbuds in. Tim has yet to arrive. And Martin’s desk is empty.

He goes back to his own desk and sits down. From this angle, he can see through the small gap where his shoe is holding the door open. A direct view towards Martin’s desk. He will know when Martin comes and goes, will be able to examine his reaction to movement and pain. Jon begins a timer on his phone—he should keep a record of how long Martin takes, that might give him an idea of the extent of the injury—and then throws himself into scouring the evidence that Basira left the last time she visited.

Jon keeps stopping to check the timer. At fifteen minutes. At eighteen. At twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-four. Martin has been gone for far longer than Jon had expected.

At thirty-seven minutes, Jon steps out of his office.

Sasha gives him a brief wave as he passes, but the other two desks are still empty. Jon feels himself frowning. He checks the staff room, but it’s empty and the kettle is cold when he touches his fingers to it. Next, he forces himself to walk slowly to the stacks where the original statements, even disproved, are stored. It is light and temperature controlled here, adjacent to the room where Martin had once stayed for months while they waited for Jane Prentiss’s attack. Because he knows now that was what they were doing: waiting.

Jon keeps his pace slow and measured. He realises he’s still not wearing shoes, which makes it easier to walk quietly along the stacks looking for the right dates. 1980-1985. He’s getting closer. He stops just before 1995-2000, listening for any clue Martin is there.

The first thing he hears is heavy breathing, every other inhalation hitching in pain. Jon grips the shelf behind him, digging his fingers into the wood, focusing on the sensation of the grain. He grounds himself, refuses the first and overwhelming urge to check on Martin. And then, shifting his weight very carefully, he leans forward so he can see through a small gap in the shelving.

Martin is sitting on one of the wheeled, plastic stools used for reaching the higher shelves. His left leg, the one he couldn’t put weight on earlier, is extended in front of him. The hem of his left trouser leg has hitched up slightly, revealing Martin’s sock—covered in tiny dinosaurs and padded as if hiding bandages beneath. His body trembles, almost like a slight blurring around the edges. He is gripping his thighs tightly, digging his nails in as he squeezes is eyes shut.

Jon’s heart clenches. He knew, in his office, that Martin was injured. But this is something else entirely. Beneath the sickly lighting, Martin is pale, almost grey, his skin shinning with a thin layer of sweat. Jon recognises the tightness at the edges of his mouth, the way his throat works against a rising nausea.

“Martin,” Jon says, stepping into view before he can think about what he’s doing.

Martin leaps off the stool, but the motion sends him immediately careening into the opposite shelf when his left leg won’t hold his weight. He catches himself before he falls fully, but he lets out a breathless “shit” that Jon attributes to both the pain and the shock. He tries to pull himself back up to his full height, but Jon can see the toll the sudden movement has taken on him.

“Christ, Jon,” Martin gasps, struggling to regain his breath.

“You’re lying to me,” Jon says. He stops himself before he adds: again.

Martin’s eyes widen slightly in alarm, a look of panic washing out his features further. “Jon, I—I thought we—I’m not—”

“About your injury.”

“Oh.” Martin deflates. “Oh. That.”

Jon is so angry he doesn’t have energy to spare on being embarrassed by his lack of subtlety. “Martin, you look awful.”

“Thanks,” Martin mutters.

“You should take the day off, at the very least.”

“Jon, I’m grateful for your concern, I really am, but—”

“If you say you’re fine again, I swear I will—”

“It’s a sprain,” Martin interrupts, insistent, “Nothing I can’t handle.”

Jon sighs. His anger leaves him, replaced with a sort of sadness he can’t quite place. Nothing I can’t handle. That sentence implies a comparison, a time before that hurts Jon to think about. “Let me get the boxes, at least.”

“No,” Martin says quickly.

“Martin, you clearly—”

“I’ll get them,” Martin insists, “Your arm—”

“Is almost healed. The same cannot be said for your allegedly sprained ankle.”

Martin rolls his eyes. “Allegedly?”

Jon doesn’t dignify his echo with an answer. “My physical therapist says I’m ready to start—”

“No, see, that’s exactly why you shouldn’t be here!”

“I know my limits, Martin. You, apparently, do not.”

Martin laughs humourlessly. “Oh, for gods—”

“What?” Jon bristles. “I attended physical therapy, didn’t I?”

“Because I texted you every day to make sure you went. Because I sent you home when you tried to come back into work too soon.”

“I am more than capable of looking after myself.”

“You stabbed yourself with a bread knife!”

For a moment, a rebuttal sits on the edge of Jon’s tongue. He almost reveals the truth—the door, the blade of Michael’s finger tearing through his flesh when he tried to go after Helen. But no, that would be too much. That would be giving Martin exactly what he wants.

“So you finally believe me,” Jon says calmly.

“I’m finally starting to believe you’re never going to tell me the truth,” Martin replies.

“I’ve already told you the truth.”

“And so have I.” Martin looks him in the eye, unwavering. “I sprained my ankle. I’m fine. I can do this.”

Jon sighs. He rubs at his eyes, wishing he had gotten more sleep for the past—well, the past year. “In that case, I’ll leave you to it.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Jon echoes, although he has no idea why, and leaves before Martin can question him.

Back in his office, he paces. He checks the timer on his phone. It’s been an hour. He sits down, glancing between his computer and the door, the computer and the door, the computer and the door. Eventually, he hears Martin drop a large box of case files on his desk, far louder than he would ever usually allow himself to be. Jon sighs again. He is not sure what battle they are locked in, but he knows it is going to be long and hard-won.

Jon goes back to scrutinising Basira’s evidence. A collection of statements taken from people in the vicinity of the Institute during Jane Prentiss’s attack. A profile on some of the employees who had frequent contact with Gertrude, including Martin’s old supervisor in the library. He had sent a reference of thinly-veiled insults across with Martin’s employee record and, for some reason, Jon had never liked him since.

He is disturbed by conversation outside.

“Afternoon, Tim,” Martin says.

“Afternoon, is it?” Tim replies bitterly. “I didn’t realise.”

Only then does Jon realise it is after midday and Martin still hasn’t badgered him about getting lunch.

“Can I get you anything?” Martin asks, his tone much softer. “A cup of tea, maybe?”

“Thanks, but I prefer coffee these days.”

Martin laughs, a small, quickly fading sound. “Believe it or not, I do also know how to make coffee.”

“I guess I…” A loud, exhausted sigh from Tim. Then, in a smaller, kinder voice: “A coffee would be great. Thanks, Martin.”

Through the half-open door, Jon watches as Martin grips his desk and uses it to leverage himself up. The change of elevation clearly makes him dizzy and he stands for a moment, breathing deeply while he reaches an equilibrium. But when he walks, he is mostly managing to mask the pain, at least until he leaves Jon’s field of vision.

Jon listens. He hears the familiar squeak of the staff room door swinging closed. After a fortifying breath, he forces himself out into the main office. Sasha’s desk is empty; she’s probably on her lunch break with the boyfriend who works at the wax museum. Tim is sitting in his chair, hands in his lap, staring blankly at his computer. The screen isn’t on.

Tim blinks. Pulls his dull gaze away from the computer. The shadows beneath his eyes are deep and purple, and he doesn’t even attempt to smile. “Can I help you with something, boss? Must be big if you’re willing to leave that office of yours.”

“Have you noticed Martin behaving strangely at all?”

“Oh, bloody hell, Jon, not this again,” Tim hisses, “I’m not helping you spy on—”

“No, no, not that,” Jon interrupts, “I believe Martin injured himself on his way to work, but he won’t tell me how severe it is.”

“Wow. Sounds kind of like someone else I know.”

“Tim.”

“I suppose he learnt from the best.”

“Tim,” Jon snaps, “Did you notice anything?”

“No.” Tim sighs. “No, I was a bit distracted, to be honest. I was sort of hoping Sasha would be here. I, uh, I need to talk to her about something.”

“Will you keep an eye on him?”

“I already told you, I’m not—”

“It’s not spying.”

“It’s as good as!”

“It is not.”

“You would know.”

“Tim,” Jon says, lowering his voice for impact, “If you are not going to do any work, at least—”

The staff room door whines open. Martin walks out backwards, holding the door open with his shoulder as he shuffles into the office a mug in each hand. One is the novelty mug with a celebrity and slogan on it that Jon doesn’t recognise, no matter how many times Tim has tried to explain; the other is the plain, sunny yellow one Martin always gives to Jon.

“Oh,” Martin says, pausing when he sees them both, “Is… everything alright?”

“Fine,” Tim replies, “Jon was just interrogating me about why I was late. And I was just telling him how I was passing by London Zoo when I heard a scream and I immediately began running—”

“Alright,” Jon interrupts, “I’ve heard enough.”

Martin lifts the hand holding the yellow mug slightly. “I made you tea.”

Jon tries to push away the warm feeling that unfurls in his chest, every time Martin says this. “Thank you, Martin. Let me take those from you.” He adds, firmly, “Both of them,” for good measure.

With some manoeuvring, Jon manages to relinquish Martin of both the mugs. He places Tim’s down on his desk, receiving a mumbled thanks, before walking the distance back towards his office door. Martin lingers in the doorway to the staff room, looking casually at Jon, but there is a stubborn set to his shoulders.

“How are the files?” Jon asks.

“Terrible,” Martin replies with a slight pout, “I’ve already read five statements about three separate Oasis concerts.”

Jon shudders. “I never liked the ’90s.”

Martin chuckles. “Yeah, well, at least they weren’t getting up to anything actually spooky.”

Jon hesitates. He knows, if he moves first, he will have lost this particular battle. But the war is still all to play for. He assesses the determination on Martin’s face and decides that, on his occasion, he will concede. Just this once.

“Well,” Jon says, clearing his throat, “Good luck with the rest.”

“What, you’re not going to make him put a quid in the jar for saying ‘spooky’?” Tim interjects.

Jon startles. He had almost forgotten him and Martin were not alone. “It’s a first offense.”

“It is not,” Tim calls after him, but there’s something playful in his tone, at least, “That’s preferential treatment!”

Jon goes back into his office without replying. He keeps the door open.

For the rest of the afternoon, Tim doesn’t exactly keep his word, but he does do everything in his power to prevent Martin from getting any work done. Tim isn’t subtle about it, but Martin tries to resist. He only plays two rounds of online Battleships with Tim before insisting on returning to the disproven statements. Tim then attempts to throw pens from his pot into Martin’s, scattering most of them around the office. When Sasha comes back, he quietens slightly and they all fall into some semblance of productivity. Jon does catch Tim playing solitaire when he passes his desk on the way to the bathroom, though.

Sasha is the first to go home. She leaves without stopping by Jon’s office and the absence scratches at his consciousness, some long-buried sense of rejection that he soothes and smothers with the knowledge that this is what he wants. He wants space to work. He wants to snap the lines of connection that might lead him towards betrayal.

Less than twenty minutes later, Tim is next. And he tries to take Martin with him.

“Come on,” Tim whines, his voice carrying through the barely-open door to Jon’s office, “Just one round. On me.”

“Tim,” Martin replies, his voice gentle but holding his position, “I really can’t. Not tonight.”

“We could grab something to eat instead? I’ve been meaning to try this sushi place right near—”

“I can’t eat—”

“Oh, right.” Tim clicks his fingers in remembrance. “You’re allergic to fish.”

“Not all fish,” Martin adds, like an apology.

“Not all fish,” Tim echoes, “But no sushi, just to be on the safe side.”

“Yep.” Martin sighs. “Sorry.”

“No, no, don’t apologise.”

From his office, Jon can hear Tim shifting slightly. The floors are hardwood, carefully maintained over the years, and despite taking some damage during Prentiss’s attack, Elias insists on keeping them. They creak. He remembers Martin mentioning it once in passing, when he was staying in the Archives, how sometimes he thought Jon was there even on the nights when he left before it got dark.

“At least let me walk you home,” is Tim’s last attempt, “A sprain is definitely not nothing. I sprained my wrist years ago climbing and it still plays up sometimes. Especially when I’m caving, actually, but that’s a story for another time.”

“Well, um… I won’t go climbing any time soon, then?”

“Are you just saying that to make me feel better?” Tim says in his most flirtatious voice.

Martin laughs. “I appreciate it, Tim. But I’m—I just want to finish this off. Before I leave.”

Through the crack in the door, Jon sees Tim raise his hands in surrender. “Well, I tried.”

“I’ll be alright,” Martin adds, almost guiltily.

“You better be.” Tim hesitates again. Jon watches him pat the pockets of his coat, searching for his phone or perhaps his keys. “You got my link? The NHS website one about strains?”

“I did. Thank you.”

“And you know about calling 111?”

“Also yes.”

“And you can call me if you need me?”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll go,” Tim says, resigned, “Just—take care of yourself.”

“You too, Tim,” Martin replies softly.

Tim heads off, again without stopping by Jon’s office. And it’s habit, by now, it’s not unusual for Tim to do this, but Jon taps the desk lightly with his fingers to try and dispel the feeling of wrongness sitting on his chest. He watches Martin go back to the computer, a tension around his eyes that suggests at a headache and the same pallid, nauseous look visible even in profile.

Jon considers the work he has left. The work he knows, realistically, he will never quite finish because every statement, every piece of footage, every lead, only stirs up more questions. He could stay. He could push himself on into the night, as he has done so many times before. He could find another reason to go into the tunnels. But deep down, he is exhausted—by the need to know, by the itch at the edge of his knowledge where uncertainty lingers and festers. He wants to rest and he thinks if he leaves now, Martin might, too.

Jon gathers his things, stuffing a few statements inside his messenger bag before shrugging on his coat, his scarf, his gloves and his hat. The cold air hurts his scars and dries out his skin until they become tight, small movements made increasingly uncomfortable without intervention, so he’s resorted to wearing more layers. Finally, he puts his shoes back on, retrieving the left one from the door and then closing it behind him when he steps out into the main office.

Martin glances away from his computer. “Heading home?”

“Yes,” Jon replies, as casually he can, “I thought I would call it an early night. Would you—I thought—perhaps you would like to join me?”

Jon tries not to notice Martin’s cheeks flushing pink. “Oh, um, I—I was actually—I think I should stay. Just for another half an hour or so. It’s just, I’m nearly finished with October to December 1999 and I know it will bother me if I leave it.”

Jon quirks an eyebrow. “That interesting?”

“Hmm.” Martin shrugs. “Mostly just a lot of people worried about the turn of the millennium.”

“Ah. I remember that.” Jon doesn’t let on that he spent October to December 1999 researching that very phenomenon obsessively, walking the line between intense curiosity and deep dread at the possibility of catastrophe. There are some things—many things—Martin doesn’t need to know about him.

Martin smiles. “Well, I… I better get on.”

“Martin,” Jon says, trying to keep his voice measured. He feels like he is wavering between an offering and an argument. “I know I stressed the importance of digitising those files this morning, but there is no reason to spend overtime on—”

“There is, though,” Martin interrupts, “A reason.”

“Oh?”

Martin looks him in the eye and almost smiles. “I want to.”

“Right,” Jon sighs.

“Right,” Martin echoes.

“I suppose I’ll—I’ll be going, then,” Jon murmurs, tapping Martin’s desk just once in deference to the slight tremble in his body, the way he isn’t quite sure what to do with his hands. “See you tomorrow, Martin.”

Martin smiles, this time. A full smile. “Bye, Jon.”

Jon turns. He begins to walk away. In his mind, he sees an alternative: going back, asking Martin to walk with him to the station, an offer he knows will, at least, make Martin think again. The both of them squeezed among commuters, hands stuffed into the pockets of their coats because of the cold, elbows knocking against each other every so often as the crowd tightens and expands. The awkward, protracted moment of goodbye when they part to separate platforms, the glimpse of the other walking away and the pang of sadness that comes with it.

It’s manipulative to ask, a cruel trick, and yet—is it? Is it, if that is something Jon wants, too?

Jon doesn’t turn around. He keeps walking, even though he knows—somewhere deep and hidden and insistent—that he will regret it.

[allmydokkuns]

Long post but uhh I don't know if you can insert a cut on mobile so sorry in advance, skip if you're not abut reading about Lan Xichen and ABO-verse characterization I guess? Vague spoilers for MDZS if you haven't read or watched it yet too, lmk if I miss a smth u think I should tag for

Okay y'all don't come at me with a pitchfork or anything but like... I've read my way through so. Much. A/B/O fic in MDZS/The Untamed ship tags and I kinda can see y'all Alpha Twin Jades if I squint, and I have opinions on the stereotypes/tropes but I can't focus enough to pin down why it bothers me so I'll just drop this take for y'all:

Instead of alpha Lan Xichen, how bout omega Lan Xichen who's supersensitive to pack/intersect dynamics growing up in the hyper repressive Cloud Recesses that further encourages him as sect heir and then leader to not make ripples and just compromise or mediate like the world's gonna end bc he just doesn't feel safe on a biological level if tensions are high and shits bout to go down?

Like hear me out, he leaves his home on fire never knowing if he'll return or ever see his family again and he feels uprooted in all the worst ways, head and heart screaming in equal measure that is your pack, you were sworn to nurture them how could you let it get this far with Obey shufu, that might be his dying wish and If anything happens to Wangji, Gusu Lan will need another heir and suddenly, he runs into Meng Yao, who smells like a safe haven, someone he can trust, someone who is not a threat.

Like you can even interpret his status as the number one ranked gongsi as him refining a natural talent through overcompensating because internalized biases? I like to imagine Wangji being petty when people say shit like that about his big brother around him from a very young age, because in comparison to Wangji's more distant personality, xiongzhang's warmth and natural empathic drive to take care of Gusu Lan is obviously much better suited to the role of leader (less stuff said about the fiasco that was Qingheng-jun's marriage, the better, and this is an interesting dynamic to have no matter what Wangji ends up presenting as).

It would fit in well with why Xichen seems to still believe in Meng Yao for far longer than anyone else does, why he always seems to walk a tightrope between trying past the point of no return and failing to reconcile, and why he tends to emphasize the group to the detriment of the components of said group. Him equating the well-being of his pack(s) with safety is just a hornet's nest of unresolved issues just waiting to become angst fodder. I'm aware this is more of a cultural thing, but honestly the aggressive independence of an alpha don't jibe for me for him (though it might be interesting to see someone interpret how his emotional repression interacts with alpha Xichen instincts, and how that all comes to a head instead?) because Xichen's seclusion after Guanyin Temple like this has more angst potential if his secondary pack disintegrates so spectacularly (and he blames himself) while at the same time Wangji has finally found Wei Wuxian again and while on some level Lan Xichen is happy for his Didi, on some instinctual level Lan Huan is going DANGER DANGER DANGER bc this is the guy that Wangji would have broken himself for, no one is allowed to do that to my brother and especially not you, guy who's been playing with his heart with a little dash of why are you leaving? All these years I know you loved him but why do you get to be happy at the cost of my own happiness? I have no brothers left, not you, not Huaisang, not the ones I've killed. Where is my safety now?

Alternatively, him failing to reconcile his sworn brothers + Wei Wuxian coming back into their lives just to rip a Jin Guangyao-sized hole in his life takes on a different flavor if Xichen is an alpha or a beta like imagine him getting real protectively aggressive over the one brother left that he can still claim as his without reservation. Like he's inclined to think more kindly about Wei Wuxian after everything but boy oh boy what a great time for all that repressed anger, despair and guilt that you didn't have time for when you were bandaging your baby brother's back and being a caregiver for a recovering young'un and being Sect Leader at the same time to suddenly come out, huh. I think Xichen got robbed not being able to actually get fucking pissed at him on Wangji's behalf. We could use some cathartically mad Xichen in the fandom. Like I know y'all like to joke that Jiang Cheng is angry grape but 1) let them both have some kind of venting mechanism because that's better than simply containing it, arguably and 2) I'd argue that when Jiang Cheng actually does get mad and not just irritated it's not without some reason. I've seen sad Xichen, happy Xichen, smooth af Xichen, drunk Xichen, "I know something that you don't" Xichen, etc., but angry Xichen? Also, guilty Xichen is a rare flavor hereabouts

Like you could also interpret Xichen as a beta who's always kind of skirting the edge of the dynamic between the other 2/3rds of 3zun who are each one of the other two secondary genders (one of each in the Triad) which might also explain how he seems to be so unruffled all the time; rather than sublimating his instincts or leaning so hard into them he doesn't know how not to be politely protective, he kind of exists in a space where scent/genders doesn't subconsciously play in as much to his behavior (or even make that a Gusu Lan Sect specialty idk) and just. Steers people into that which tends to be kinda mediating in a nudging way I don't know I'm getting fuzzy on the details but world building fam.

Anyway I think the idea of Xichen having to navigate a world in which he has to deal with people who pepper him with microaggressions about his secondary gender if he presents as omega or a world where his status as a beta blinds him just enough to the degree and real nature of the tension in the brotherhood is kind of fascinating, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

[artificialqueens]

Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor, 6 (Branjie) (and background everyone) - Ortega

a/n: hi hello hey. how did this happen? I actually wrote this way quicker than I expected. thank u so much for ur patience during the rewrites fam, hopefully i won’t have to do any more!!!! so so so hope u like the new chapter :)))))

fic summary: Strictly Come Dancing enters its 18th series and its producers, after being goaded by a rival dance show on its inclusivity, commission it to be an all-female cast. Unlike Akeria who’s just here to bone her potential dance partner, dancer Vanessa is ready to act like a professional.

And then TV presenter Brooke Lynn walks into the rehearsal room.

***

11th October 2020

As it turns out, Vanessa meets Monique and Akeria for lunch earlier than she’d expected. Okay, it’s at her flat instead of a cafe and it’s dinner instead of lunch, the three of them all easily agreeing to go back to Vanessa’s after the pro dance rehearsal on Sunday evening. Akeria had wanted to go to The Ivy but Vanessa had decided to make pernil in the slow cooker that morning after a facetime with her Tia had made her particularly homesick, and there was enough for the three of them anyway. Monique had been glad of the fact that they would be safe from any rogue journalists at Vanessa’s, and Vanessa had laughed and objected to the idea that any journalists would be interested in what was going on in their lives anyway.

Then again, that hadn’t appeared to be the case last year when everything kicked off with-

“V!” Akeria shouts over to her and interrupts her from the dreamlike state in which she’s fluffing up the rice. “You got any more wine?”

Vanessa laughs at her friend as she tips the pan over three bowls consecutively. “You’re rehearsin’ tomorrow morning, calm the fuck down.”

“Aw, let a bitch live! I did good last night, I deserve to celebrate.”

Vanessa thinks about how Akeria ended up fourth on the leaderboard with Asia and rolls her eyes. “Yeah, rub it in, girl. It’s fourth place, not Vicks.”

“Stop bein’ salty,” Akeria scolds her as Vanessa carries their dinner over to the huge sofa they’ve chosen to sit on instead of her tiny dining table. “You had a couple bum weeks, so what? This week’ll be the one.”

Vanessa wants to point out that it was really only one bum week and the other she was undermarked for, but she doesn’t. She lets it drop and instead turns her attention to Monique. “Right, bitch, let’s break bread and spill tea. What’s goin’ on?”

As Monique lets out a heavy sigh while she stabs at her food, Akeria claps her hands together and threatens to spill her dinner. “Yes! Thank God you said it, ‘cause I didn’t want to seem rude, but that’s the reason we’re all here, right?”

“God, I beg you both shut up,” Monique groans. “Okay so…me and Monet. You know we did that Waltz, right? And it was very…romantic, very intense.”

Vanessa and Akeria bob their heads like nodding dogs in response. Monique gives another heavy sigh and Vanessa is on the edge of her seat. “Well, it was like…our last full run before we finished up on Thursday. An’ we were both very much like…well, final run, let’s just give it all our energy. And it just got so intense, like, all the eye contact and the moments where we were all like…close, the bit where she picks me up and spins me-”

“Oh my God…did you kiss?” Akeria blurts out excitedly. Monique rubs both her temples with her hands.

“Akeria,” she raises her eyebrows. “We had sex.”

Vanessa lets out a scream. Akeria almost spills the entire bowl of pernil over herself as she reacts, waving her arms about so much Vanessa thinks she might give herself whiplash. “Sorry, sorry, sorry…WHAT?!”

“You cannot tell a single fucking soul on God’s green earth!” Monique groans, and Vanessa still isn’t sure if she’s over the information she’s just been given.

“HOW?!” Vanessa screeches out, ignoring Monique’s plea but promising her internally.

“It was my own damn fault-”

“FAULT?! How is this in any way a negative situation?” Akeria teases her friend with a shit-eating grin on her face.

Monique pouts in self-pity as she carries on with her sentence. “I kissed her. At the very end. I just got so caught up in everything, Jesus, I don’t know.”

“Tell me it was like the musical where there’s all the fuckin’ horn section and everything goin’ off in the background,” Vanessa butts in, remembering when she saw The Bodyguard on the West End last year. Monique knows the exact bit in I Have Nothing she’s talking about, because she nods her head.

“It was exactly that part.”

Vanessa lets out a cry identical to Akeria’s. She’s picturing the scene in her head and it sounds like the most romantic kiss that’s ever happened to anyone outside of a fictional setting. “M’nique, that’s adorable, oh my God.”

“What happened after? Well, she obviously liked it,” Akeria shrugs, and Vanessa splutters a laugh. Monique looks vaguely like a babysitter that has to deal with a pair of five year old twins.

“She just kissed me back before I could even break away out of fuckin’ embarrassment. She was just holding me and kissing me for what seemed like ages…and then when I had to get air I was panicking and apologising and she…oh my God. She asked me if she could take me home.”

Akeria raises her eyebrows. “Damn. I have got flutters.”

“So you went back to hers? OH my God. You’ve been to Monet X Change’s house,” Vanessa gasps, impressed. Akeria gives a snort of disbelief, turns to look at her.

“She’s been inside her fuckin’ pussy, never mind her house!!”

They both howl, and Monique rolls her eyes before apparently admitting to herself that what Akeria had said was funny after all and giggling.

Akeria leans forward with intrigue. “And did you…have a nice time?”

Monique now can’t wipe the smile off her face as she puts both hands to her cheeks, an attempt to cover her blush. “Yes. We both did. It was a very nice time.”

“So what’s the problem?” Akeria asks her, blasé and black and white as ever. Monique gives a sigh of exasperation.

“Because we’ve not…spoken about it, we’ve not addressed it!”

“It didn’t seem awkward last night, you did a great job!” Vanessa frowns, spearing a chunk of pulled pork. Monique lets out a tiny helpless whine.

“Yeah, that’s because…” she begins, then trails off. Vanessa knows what she’s going to say already, but Monique finishes her sentence before she can properly connect the dots. “We did it two more times before the actual dance.”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” Akeria shouts through a mouthful of dinner. “This ain’t fair! How come a God-fearing, good lil’ Christian girl like you can get laid three times in the space of three days an’ I get nothing?”

“Jeez Keeks that’s so far off the mark. Christian? Uh-huh. Good? No way,” Vanessa teases. Monique, for perhaps the twelfth time this evening, looks as if she’s severely regretting telling her friends anything at all, so Vanessa decides to be helpful. “When’d you bang again, then? Thursday night was the first. You stay over?”

“Yeah. We did it again the next morning and then in the studio on Friday.”

“IN the studio!” Akeria screeches. Vanessa wonders if she should apologise to her neighbours the next day. She, herself, has had sex quieter than Akeria’s screeching. “You are nasty as fuck!”

Monique has the good grace to attempt to look embarrassed before a proud smile takes over. “It was Monet’s idea. She told me she couldn’t keep her hands off me.”

“Well she’s nasty too. Y’all are well suited,” Akeria shrugs, and the three of them laugh.

“So why’re you pressed?” Vanessa asks her friend. She draws from her own experience as she follows up. “You in your feelings?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know!” Monique gives an anguished cry, dramatic as ever. “I just want to get to know her a lil’ more. I don’t want her to think I just wanna sleep with her because she’s Monet X Change, y’know? Like sure, I have a crush on her, but it’s not like I ever had sleep-with-my-dream-girl on my bucket list.”

“Maybe on your fuck-it list,” Akeria supplies unhelpfully.

“Why don’t you ask her out?” Vanessa shrugs. It seems so simple when she’s giving it as advice but if anyone had suggested that as a solution to her feelings for Brooke she would’ve laughed them all the way to Oxford Circus.

Monique gives Vanessa a long-suffering stare. “We both know it ain’t that simple, V.”

“Well, why don’t you tell her what you’ve just told us?”

This time Monique pulls a face. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. Monet don’t seem like the type to catch feelings, though.”

“You don’t seem like the type to catch feelings. Shit, you don’t catch feelings,” Akeria reminds her, Vanessa giving a laugh as she remembers every time Monique has had to pry girls off of her at a bar.

“Shut up. To be honest I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’m glad to have vented about it,” Monique shrugs in resignation, takes a sip of her wine. “Anyway Kiki, what’s the story with Miss Asia? Thought you were gonna sweep her off her feet an’ show her your Hitachi or whatever line usually works for you.”

Vanessa snorts as Akeria gives a smirk. “I wish. Nah, we get along great but we’re honestly just better as friends. It’s almost like all the hours spent rehearsing with our bodies pressed up against each other kinda ruined the magic a lil’. She’s great though. Could set her up with you, though, Vanj?”

In any other context, Vanessa would have a smart remark. However, the thought of being set up with someone else when Brooke Lynn seems to fill her every waking thought these days isn’t a desirable one, so she opens her mouth. “Well, uh…I mean, obviously Asia’s cute, but I’m not really…y’know-”

“Oh my God,” Monique cuts in, trying and failing to suppress a laugh. “You’re crushin’ on Brooke Lynn. You are! Oh my God, Kiki, look at that blush.”

Vanessa frantically shakes her head, willing the blood to flow away from her face. “No! No, it ain’t a crush. Shut up.”

“You’ve gone so red. Jeez. I’d hate to see the colour you go when you are in your feelings, then,” Akeria laughs.

“She is so in her feelings! C’mon, deny it, bitch. Try an’ deny it.”

“Jesus Christ will you both shut up!” Vanessa exhales with exasperation, now highly regretting the amount she’d wound Monique up. “Fine! Fine…it’s not a crush, but I just find the girl attractive, an’ it’s nice gettin’ to know her, is all.”

“That’s literally a crush,” Akeria stares incredulously at her. Vanessa rolls her eyes to the ceiling and aquiesces.

“…fine, maybe it’s a crush, god damn.”

The two girls opposite her explode. Vanessa stuffs more pernil and rice into her mouth with a feeling of resignation.

“Don’t tell me you two’ve been bangin’ mid-rehearsals as well?”

Vanessa breathes a laugh. “Stop it. No, just a couple hugs in the corridor after our dances. We went out for lunch together last week.”

Monique gasps. “You went on a date?”

“That’s not a date, Mo, shut up.”

“It is a date! You took a girl you like out for lunch, how’s that not a date?”

“Because she wasn’t aware it was a date. And neither was I! It was honestly the furthest thing from a date. It was a fuckin’…raisin.”

The three girls giggle, and in the conversational lull something occurs to Vanessa. “The only other thing is, uh…well, both weeks we did our dance for the judges, after we finished, she, uh…she kissed me.”

There’s another bomb of screaming from the girls that detonates in Vanessa’s living room. World War Two hasn’t got shit on Akeria and Monique.

“What?!”

Vanessa shrugs. “I mean it ain’t a massive fuckin’ makeout sesh, obviously! It’s just a lil’ cheek kiss, top-of-the-head kiss, that sorta thing. You can see her doin’ it, the camera got it both times.”

(There’s a fan account on Instagram dedicated to her and Brooke’s Strictly journey, and it’s posted the footage of the kiss Brooke gave her last night. Vanessa will not admit to the girls that she has watched it too many times for it to be explained away as normal.)

“So she likes you back,” Akeria states, as if it’s a fact and not something Vanessa’s been wondering about at random intervals throughout the day every day for the past week or so.

“We don’t know that.”

Akeria’s face turns scheming. She’s clearly got an idea. “Well, why don’t you choreograph a big sexy rhumba or something where you gotta grind up on her an’ get all nasty an’ shit? That’ll speed things along.”

Monique points her fork at Akeria in agreement. “Yes! ‘Cuz Jan and Jackie did that in, like, week 1, and they’re already fuckin’.”

Vanessa screws her face up. “Jan and Jackie ain’t sleeping with each other, shut up.”

“Oh my God, girl, I beg you buy a pair of glasses,” Akeria rolls her eyes, causing Monique to let out a laugh.

“Yeah, they absolutely are.”

Vanessa shoves another mouthful of dinner in. She’s hungry, and it doesn’t help when she’s trying to talk and eat. “Well, Strictly curse aside, it’s our Jive week this week, so that’s operation sexy dance out the window for at least another seven days.”

“Ugh. That’s annoyin’,” Akeria consoles her. After that, talk immediately turns to movie week and dances, and the conversation has moved on.

But it’s nice now that she’s admitted her crush on Brooke Lynn to Akeria and Monique. She’s got her girls to vent to when Brooke gives her a smile that comes with an extra added twinkle in her eye that sets Vanessa’s insides on fire, or to squeal to when Brooke brings her a coffee from the cafe they’d visited for brunch last week “just because”. She can’t take her eye off the prize too much though, even in the excitement of movie week. They’re doing their Jive to Runaway Baby from the Madagascar franchise (Brooke insists it’s niche and Vanessa insists it’s not) where they’re dressed as animals breaking out of huge cage props and “running away”. It’s not going to be as iconic as Plastique and Scarlet’s Dirty Dancing-themed Salsa, nor will it be as hot as Crystal and Gigi’s Rhumba (to License to Kill, no less), but it’s theirs, and it’s fun, and it’s hilarious watching Brooke get to grips with the insane amount of kicks needed for a Jive to be a Jive.

“My feet feel like they’re going to fall off,” she groans, lying flat on the floor after a particularly intense Wednesday rehearsal. Vanessa hides a laugh behind her hands, sneakily pulls out her phone to film her.

“What?”

“I said my feet feel like they’re about to fall off,” Brooke repeats louder, for the unknown benefit of the camera.

“You ain’t much of a soldier, are you?” Vanessa scoffs affectionately. Brooke sits up on her elbows, noticing Vanessa’s phone.

“Are you filming this? You’re filming this,” Brooke asks and then confirms without Vanessa even having to say anything. “Well to anyone that follows Vanessa, I’d just like to say that this is human exploitation and you should not be supporting this.”

Vanessa howls with laughter, tries to ignore how good her name sounds in Brooke’s mouth. “She loves me really.”

“I love her really,” Brooke rolls her eyes, and Vanessa’s heart jumps at the words even though they’re part of a joke.

She stops filming, posts the video to her feed and leaves it as they keep practising. When they stop for lunch and they’re sitting scrolling, Vanessa’s eyes widen at the comment Monique has left, her friend taking her stirring to new levels:

moheart: you two are so cute omg branjie 5 ever xxxxx

As Vanessa’s contemplating using the cables that line the floors of Elstree Studios as garotting wire when she sees Monique at the show on Saturday, she taps on the comment’s likes (it’s got 85 so far). Her heart stops when she sees the familiar blue tick of bhytes at the top of the list. Vanessa darts her eyes Brooke’s way as if her face gives anything away, and of course it doesn’t. Brooke’s scrolling casually as if she hadn’t liked a thing, and it manages to mess even more with Vanessa’s head. Vanessa enjoys the feeling though, this experience of having a crush on a cute girl again. She is so used to healing (she’s had to do it for the best part of a year now), and it’s nice to have butterflies in her stomach instead of an endless churning ocean.

Her feelings for Brooke aren’t helped by Cheryl and her ridiculous quiz on It Takes Two on Thursday night after their rehearsal. Okay, Vanessa supposes- every couple has done one, so it’s not exactly as if they’re being singled out. But when they finish their usual interview (how they felt regarding last week’s comments, how rehearsals are going, how they feel about the week ahead) and Cheryl pulls out two sets of glittery pink paddles (one saying me and the other saying her) with an excited grin on her face, Vanessa does a bad job of masking her horror.

“Oh my God. Cheryl, what is this?”

“Welcome to…Mrs and Mrs!” Cheryl announces with a small flourish, and the film crew give a cheer. Brooke snorts beside her, just as dumbfounded. Cheryl continues. “Okay, Brooke and Vanessa, I’m going to ask you both a series of questions and you’ll need to hold up your paddle to show me who you think is the best fit as the answer- you, or your partner. Every time you both give me the same answer, you get a point. For example, if I asked you…who sweats the most in rehearsals?”

Vanessa rushes to hold up the paddle that says her and as soon as she’s done it she cranes her neck to look at the one Brooke’s held up. She squeals when she sees me staring back at her, a blush appearing on Brooke’s face as she giggles.

“I sweat! I’m very sweaty! I never wear grey in rehearsals!” Brooke pouts in anguish, and Vanessa gives a laugh. She leans into her in a show of sympathy, trying to ignore the way her pulse races as she catches the scent of her perfume. It’s not the Flash that she wears at the weekends, but it’s still just as intoxicating.

“Not sure we needed that much detail, love, but you get the idea! You’d get a point, because you both said Brooke,” Cheryl pokes fun at Brooke, before her gaze snaps back to the camera, all charisma and TV-presenter-smile. “Okay, your score to beat is five, that was set by Gigi and Crystal on Monday’s show and none of the other girls have beaten it so far! Ladies- are you ready?”

Vanessa raises her eyebrows, tries not to look at Brooke who she knows will be smiling like an idiot. “As I’ll ever be, I guess.”

“Okay. Let’s play…Mrs and Mrs!” Cheryl announces dramatically, and immediately holds up a set of glittery cards that the questions are written on. “Question one- who’s the most patient?”

Vanessa laughs and she can feel Brooke being set off beside her. She’s held up her, and Vanessa’s held up me.

“She’s so laid-back she’s horizontal!” Brooke laughs, and Vanessa swats her. She melts a little as Brooke’s gaze turns affectionate. “It’s why she’s such a good teacher. I’ve said it before, but I’m really lucky.”

Cheryl moves on before Vanessa can react to the compliment. “Who’s the best dancer?”

Vanessa hears Brooke scoff. Sure enough, Brooke has once again held up the her paddle, and Vanessa has voted for herself too. Brooke laughs as she looks at Vanessa’s paddles. “Of course it’s her! Has any celebrity voted for themself?!”

“Willam and Yvie both did!” Cheryl giggles, and Brooke rolls her eyes so much that her body tilts back with them. “Okay, next question- who is the better cook?”

Vanessa holds up me, and Brooke’s held up her. It definitely shouldn’t make Vanessa feel as good as it does.

“Brooke is like the kinda person who would struggle to keep a cactus alive, never mind her own damn self,” Vanessa laughs, and Brooke laughs along, agreeing rather than being offended.

“And Vanessa should go on Celebrity Masterchef one year. I swear to God.”

Vanessa looks at Brooke and smiles, happy for the compliment. She’s sure she’s not imagining that Brooke leans into her a tiny bit.

“Three points so far ladies, you’re on a roll!” Cheryl comments, impressed. “Who is more of a perfectionist?”

Vanessa fumbles with the paddles in her haste to hold up her. Brooke has indeed also voted for herself.

“She will make, like, one mistake and she’ll make us run the entire thing through until she gets it right,” Vanessa explains, Brooke giggling beside her in embarrassment. “I thought it was meant to be me that worked her hard, not the other way!”

Cheryl laughs from her interviewer’s chair. She reaches the next card and her eyebrows fly up her face. “Ooh, one for your massive egos here- who’s the most attractive?”

Vanessa’s heart gives a little jump and her brain thinks almost a hundred thoughts at once. She could play things off and vote for herself (because ultimately, she’s well aware of the fact she’s cute, she’s got a mirror), but part of her wants to see how Brooke will react to the compliment. Deciding all this in the space of about two seconds, Vanessa holds up the her paddle. To her surprise and poorly-concealed joy, Brooke is also holding up the her paddle. Vanessa’s trying to hide her smile and Brooke’s expression suggests she’s doing the same.

“I mean, I’m not gonna be big-headed,” Vanessa plays it off. Cheryl is looking at the both of them with a little scheming smile on her face.

“Well, nice to see that the first time you drop a point is because you’re both just too busy trying to compliment each other, in’t that sweet!” she grins. Vanessa wishes she had one of Cheryl’s cards to fan the blush away from her face. As Cheryl moves on to her next card, her mouth drops open. “Oh, right, this one’s a good ‘un. Who is most likely to have a crush on someone in the cast?”

Fuck. Vanessa can feel Brooke giving similar amounts of hesitation beside her, and the two of them share an awkward glance and a laugh. Without really knowing what she’s doing, Vanessa slowly holds up the paddle that says me. She’s almost scared to look at Brooke’s, but she leans forward anyway. Staring back at her from the paddle is the exact same word as the one she herself had held up- Brooke has also said me.

Cheryl gives a reaction much as if she’s reporting on breaking world news. “Ooh, now that’s interesting! You’ve both said yourselves. Any reason? Do we actually have any crushes flying around the studio?”

Vanessa holds a tight, awkward grimace on her face, hoping she can avoid the question. She almost feels her soul leave her body when Brooke crosses her legs and sits straight. “You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.”

As Cheryl appears to stave off an aneurism, Vanessa cuts in with the best way of diffusing the situation she could manage. “Aw, you know I gotta crush on you, Cheryl, stop pretendin’ like you don’t know!”

Cheryl howls with laughter, turns to the camera and appeals to her wife who’s presumably sitting at home. “Blu, babe, don’t listen to her!”

Vanessa joins in with the laughter, suddenly willing the interview to be over.

“Okay Brooke and Vanessa, at the end of Mrs and Mrs, you have scored…four!”

The production team claps them, and Brooke turns to Vanessa to hi-five her. Vanessa accepts with a laugh. Cheryl shuffles her cards and turns to the camera.

“Well they might not’ve won Mrs and Mrs but they’re still gonna be dancing on Saturday- Brooke and Vanessa, everybody!”

There’s another clap, and their interview is finished. Thank God.

It’s only when they’re walking back outside afterwards after a little bit of small-talk about their plans for the rest of the evening that Brooke quirks a bashful smile at her. “So, uh…you think you’re more likely to get a crush on someone in the cast than me? Does this mean you’ve got one on somebody?”

Vanessa suddenly feels as if she might vomit up her own heart. She plays it off, narrows her eyes at Brooke. “Alright, Cheryl, damn! I thought the interview was over. Jeez.”

Brooke gives a small laugh. They’re walking close, and every time Brooke’s body brushes against hers Vanessa swears she sees sparks flying off them both. “Just asking. I said myself, remember?”

Vanessa already feels ever so slightly giddy, so she takes the risk. She cocks her head at Brooke as she walks. “Alright, since you wanna talk about crushes so much. Who’ve you gotta crush on?”

“I asked first,” Brooke shrugs easily, stopping as they both reach the doors to the exit. Vanessa lets out an exasperated laugh.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, we are full-grown adult women.”

Brooke splutters a giggle as she leans on the door and opens it, the freezing cold air smacking Vanessa across the face. They both leave the building and Brooke stands still, her face wearing a hopeful expression. The wind is whipping her long blonde hair over her shoulders.

Damn, she looks so beautiful.

“So you’re not telling, then?” Brooke smirks. Vanessa thinks about it. She thinks about what Brooke’s honest to God reaction would be if she actually turned around and said yeah, I’ve got a crush on you. The thought of doing so almost makes her laugh.

“Well I’m not a fifteen year old high schooler, so no. Sorry to disappoint,” Vanessa smirks back at her. Maybe this is flirting. She’s not even mad about it. Thinking again, she cocks her head curiously as she shoves her hands in the pockets of her huge hoodie that she’s pulled over her interview outfit. “You gonna tell me?”

Brooke’s smile is still there, still cheeky. “No.”

“But you’ve got one.”

“I never said that,” Brooke shrugs easily. For a moment they’re both standing biting back smiles at each other, and Vanessa feels as if she’s caught in some form of stalemate. It’s Brooke that breaks it first, because of course it is, and she brushes some hair out of her face as she shrugs at Vanessa again. “Well, have a good night, anyway! See you tomorrow, bright and early.”

“Yeah, you too. Get home safe,” Vanessa says, the two of them sharing the usual friendly wave that comes with their goodbye. In spite of herself, Vanessa watches Brooke turn on her heel and walk in the opposite direction to her. Just as she’s about to start making her own way home, Brooke pauses, turning to look back over her shoulder.

The pair of them share one last bashful smile before they make their way back home and it feels as if Vanessa floats home on a cloud.

Saturday rolls around quickly, and Brooke has managed to transform herself from having feet made of concrete blocks to someone with featherlight ankles, so Vanessa is confident that they’ll score well tonight. She’s not really got scoring or the judges at the front of her mind, though, because movie week is entirely too much fun. It feels as if she’s at Universal studios as she walks through costume and hair and makeup, everyone dressed up in variations of movie characters. The best by far, though, is Jaida and Yvie’s. Any part of Jaida that isn’t clad in a grey leotard and skirt is painted entirely in grey body paint, with her hands in black gloves. Her hair has been expertly twirled into two long “ears” on the top of her head, and makeup has painted a blotted white stripe down the centre of her face. Yvie is wearing an orange and black striped morph suit, on top of which costume have given her a little red and white striped waistcoat with a buckle, a red cape, and, of course, a pair of boots to dance in.

And her face is painted like a cat.

“I’m going to see that in my nightmares this week,” Scarlet pipes up from across the green room, looking every inch the iconic Baby in her pink dress and glittery silver heels.

“More like your dreams,” Yvie winks at her, and Scarlet laughs, presumably to offset the pink blush on her cheeks.

“Yeah Scarlet, don’t you want her pussy?” Willam joins in from where she’s getting her hair swept into a low ponytail. Her costume is nowhere near as extravagant, but it’s classy nonetheless- a fitted tuxedo suit for her stint as a spy as part of her and Phi Phi’s dance to 4 Minutes. Courtney laughs from her position sitting on the dressing table beside her. Even though she and Blair were voted out last week, Courtney’s role as a pro means she’s still part of the show’s group dances. It’s something that Vanessa thinks Willam is particularly grateful for (she’s seen the hand-holding when they think no one is looking). Courtney starts singing Livin’ La Vida Loca under her breath absent-mindedly.

“Hey, listen, at least neither of us are Shrek,” Jaida consoles Yvie, who doesn’t look as if she needs much consoling.

“You guys, Courtney’s right there,” Willam pipes up again, the girls laughing as Courtney swipes at her playfully. Willam flinches in her chair, much to the irritation of the hair stylist.

The costumes aren’t all ridiculous, though. There’s a murmur of admiration when Gigi and Crystal emerge from wardrobe in skin-tight floor-length velvet gowns (one red, one black), each with a huge slit up the side. Akeria whispers something to Vanessa about Crystal stealing her idea of a big sexy rhumba, and Vanessa tries to laugh from her current position in the hairstylist’s chair but the two thick plaits they’re weaving her mane of brown locks into makes it difficult. She can’t help but let out a gasp when Jan and Jackie emerge from their costume fitting, though, and neither can the rest of the girls: Jackie is dressed in black leggings and a red waistcoat and tails, covered in shining gold brocade and black detailing. It’s Jan, though, who takes Vanessa’s breath away. She looks like a muted version of Lily James’ Cinderella in a gorgeous, floaty powder blue dress which hits her calves, little dimantés and tiny butterflies stitched into the light fabric.

“Janet, holy hell! It’s Strictly, this ain’t fashion week!” Jaida cries, sticking her tongue out at the end to let her friend know she’s joking. Jan gives a shy laugh, sweeps her immaculately curled blonde hair over her shoulders.

“Yeah, all you’re missing is a tiara,” Scarlet agrees enthusiastically.

“Hey, I thought we were meant to be showing off our celebrities!” Akeria pipes up with a raised eyebrow. Before Jan can reply, Jackie takes her hand and smiles.

“I’m happy to let this one steal the show for this week. She looks gorgeous, she deserves to be in the spotlight,” she shrugs. Vanessa doesn’t miss the look Jan gives her partner or the way she squeezes Jackie’s hand. She thinks back to what Monique had said at dinner on Sunday. Maybe something is happening between those two after all.

“Vanessa! You’re up please, fitting,” one of the costume girls calls out for her, and Vanessa obediently dashes towards the room in question. Brooke’s been squirrelled away in her own dressing room having to do some prep work for her filming the next morning, so when Vanessa sees her in her own costume, it’s not what she expects. She can’t find the words to describe how Brooke looks.

“Don’t…say…anything,” Brooke warns her, but it’s too late- the laugh is already coming out of Vanessa’s body before she can stop it, and it turns into a howl when Brooke grabs her tail- her stripy, white and black tail- and gives a twirl. She is dressed entirely as a lemur.

It’s not long until Brooke is spluttering a laugh herself. “Don’t tell me this isn’t the hottest you’ve ever seen me look.”

Vanessa’s cheeks hurt from laughing. “I don’t think I can keep my hands off you, boo, I’m gonna be honest.”

“Well luckily you’ll be wearing the exact same thing in about five minutes,” Brooke quips back at her, and Vanessa pouts and groans. She doesn’t really mind though. Mad, extravagant costumes are a staple of Strictly movie week, and she’s just happy she gets to experience it with a partner this year.

Soon enough the show is starting, and Vanessa watches the first dance from the Divinatorium with her hand entwined in Brooke’s. Neither of them mention the contact- it’s apparently just another secret. That and both of their crushes. Willam and Phi Phi are first and it seems as if Willam’s technique is a little better after her somewhat dismal scores in the weeks prior. Monique’s told Vanessa she’s seen Willam getting extra lessons from Courtney during her lunch breaks, so she suspects that’s what is making the difference. It seems to have paid off, and they get a score of twenty five altogether. After they see that dance, they can’t stay to watch Aja and Farrah as they’re on third, so while Farrah lives her Disney princess fantasy waltzing to Someday My Prince Will Come, Vanessa is marking the steps with Brooke backstage.

“This is gonna be a good week. I can feel it,” Brooke smiles at her, and Vanessa believes it. They’ve coped way better with the Jive than they did with the Paso, so she’s eager to show the judges what they can really do. Farrah and Aja get their critiques and their scores (a disappointing 17), and just like that, Brooke and Vanessa’s VT is playing and their massive cages are being rolled out onto the stage. There’s a distance between them in their two separate props, but Vanessa knows that Brooke’s feeling confident and so, in turn, does she.

“Dancing the Jive…Brooke Lynn Hytes and Vanessa Mateo!”

The electric guitar slices through the quiet of the room and with it sends an electric shock through Vanessa’s veins as she starts to dance. Her eyes are focussed on the audience, ever the professional, but she hopes Brooke is coping as well as she’s done in rehearsals. As soon as it comes to the part of the music where they “break down” the door of their cages and land into hold with each other, Vanessa can’t help it when the fake performance smile on her face turns into a real one as she faces Brooke (whose face, like hers, is painted like a lemur, complete with bright yellow eyeshadow). Brooke’s face is concentrating hard, and Vanessa knows she’s nailing all the steps as they reach the section where they figure-eight their ankles then change and do the same with their other foot.

“See I ain’t try’na hurt you, baby, no, no, no, I just wanna work you, baby…”

There’s not a whole lot of the dance spent in hold as it’s essentially a test of their synchronicity, Vanessa doing the rightfootflick, leftfootflick, flick, flick, flick, PIVOT and hoping Brooke’s doing the same beside her. But it’s fast and it’s fun and she knows her choreo is good and fuck it, they’re both dressed as lemurs, so they’ve got a fighting chance of doing a decent job this week. Brooke takes her hand and spins her round all while doing the most complex footwork Vanessa’s taught anyone before, and her face is showing it. Vanessa knows she’ll get pulled up for letting her concentration show, but everything else, technically, has gone really well so far, which is just as well as Laganja is standing up to take in every single inch of the footwork.

“Your poor little heart will end up alone, ‘cause God knows I’m a rolling stone, so you better run, run, runaway, runaway baby…”

On cue, Brooke slides herself down on the floor then jumps up, and Vanessa puts her hand on her shoulder right on the final beat. The audience erupts, the clapping envelops them, and Vanessa can’t help but freak out a little. This is the first dance they’ve done where she really feels they completely nailed every single part of it, and she’s punching the air as Brooke picks her up by her waist, spinning her round and round on the ballroom floor. When she puts her down, Brooke pulls her into another hug, and Vanessa can feel the kiss she plants on the top of her head. It’s strong and insistent and Vanessa wishes it had been pressed to her lips, but she supposes she can’t wish for everything all at once.

Vanessa barely even takes in Michelle’s interview with Brooke, she’s simply too happy. As Michelle asks the judges what they thought, Vanessa hopes and prays their comments will reflect the dance they completed.

And they do.

Vanessa listens to them all in a happy haze- the words “immaculate footwork”, “light and precise”, “turned a corner”, and “breakthrough” all pop like fireworks in her head, and she can’t help but squeeze Brooke’s hand every time the judges give them a new compliment.

“Just one very little thing,” Shangela says at the end of her critiques. “You were concentrating so hard on that, and rightly so because it’s hard! But I’d love to see more of the chemistry you have with Vanessa, because you’ve got about two minutes to tell a story out there, and to see you both connecting with each other would be lovely!”

Vanessa tries to suppress a smile at her comments, and Brooke nods affirmingly at Shangela’s words. The incredible feedback is ringing in her ears so much that she hardly knows what she even says to Divina when they both run up to the Divinatorium after their dance is done, and when it pans to the judges for their scores Vanessa can feel her own hand unbearably sweaty in Brooke’s.

“Will the judges please reveal their scores. Bianca Del Rio.”

Vanessa sees the paddle that she holds up and screams. “Seven!”

She’s so busy squealing and hugging Brooke in her delight that she almost misses the next few scores.

“Kennedy Davenport.”

“Eight!”

Vanessa’s jaw drops so far open she’s momentarily scared she’s dislocated it. This changes everything. This is night and day to the scores they’ve had previously.

“Shangela Wadely.”

“Seven!”

“Laganja Estranja.”

“Eight!”

Vanessa can hear the other couples cheering and clapping for them both and she can feel a bunch of hands patting her on the back, but all she can focus on is Brooke’s heartbeat through her chest. She is euphoric. There’s no feeling like it.

“That’s a score of thirty!” Divina tells them, and when Vanessa pulls away she can see that Brooke is crying happy tears. The sight almost makes her want to start crying too. Divina pulls a sympathetic face. “Brooke, you’re clearly happy!”

“I am! I’ve just said from the start that I don’t want to let Vanessa down, and finally we’ve done really really well!” she sniffs, and Vanessa pouts and squeezes her waist. Thirty. Their score was thirty. Thirty out of forty. They’ve only dropped ten marks and it’s week three.

This is good.

As Divina carries on interviewing them both, Vanessa feels her concentration drift away. She’s remembering Shangela’s comments about chemistry. Next week is their Salsa week. Vanessa remembers her conversation with Akeria, and operation sexy dance, and in that moment she decides to make it her mission for the week to show the judges just how much chemistry she and Brooke have.

[rotatemp3]

Ok I know you said not to talk about the translation issue but I just found out about it and want to share my two cents on this from experience in another fandom.

As a carat aka seventeen fan, I have seen what can sadly happen when we, international fans, don't have a full context of what was translated. Sometbing that was more vague or quickly translated without proper explanation (yes I know these are two different scenarios but both relyed HEAVILY on fan translations) please, please and once again please be careful with translations if you do not understand things because honestly not including something or not doing the proper translations can cause the house of cards to collapse. I thank the anon who gave proper context to what changkyun said as well as the 2nd translation tweet you provided because the original made me scream in frustration. They did the similar thing like in the carat fandom, left after hours with no mention of the meaning of some phrases. Cue chaos and we have what we got. Since me and others do rely on translations, we have to trust the fans who do them do it correctly. People who have a full understanding and such. While I am forever thankful for fans who do this, I know that I have to be careful with them as well. Its why I wait for official translations from respected fan translation groups or even from the company. As the anon explained, some things are going to be tricky to translate and I speak this from experience! Trying to translate my native language to English can be tricky since there are some wording that just doesn't fit well within the English language. So do I think changkyun meant ill will? No, I think he simply was venting his thoughts to fans where he was comfortable in his native tongue. Kfans didn't see any wrong because they got what he meant where us oversees fans well, we couldn't help but feel confusion.

Idk i feel like I am rambling, I am sorry for the bother and you can for sure delete my ask! I don't want to make any uncomfortable as fans are allowed to feel hurt and confused. I just wanted to share my thoughts on this with some similar experience of fan translations causing some issues. I feel bad for the entire situation because all of this could have been smoothed out if OP who did the translation added context, not just quick tweets to get things out there due to demand. No, put a screenshot if needed of the full detail about what was said. Maybe changkyun could have worded it different but again, in Korean it may sound chill and ok but as someone who doesn't know Korean I wouldn't have that full understanding. As you mentioned, after the last issue with no word (sadly a common issue. Even in seventeen we had this struggle) i think it just caused the water aka fans to react and flood with it all.

hi there!!! thank you for taking the time to share this with me. from both of these situations we can see how easy it is to come to a certain conclusion about someone as a result of mistranslations... which is concerning as many fans rely on these translations to find out what’s going on with their idols. these fans who do the translations, while i appreciate everything that they do, have a responsibility to relay the correct information to fans. mistranslations can lead to many misunderstandings... and we know when the mistranslations paint the idol in a negative light, it spreads and spreads until it reaches non fans and by then it’s too late to stop it... and i have seen plenty of instances where even when the information has been proven to be untrue, it still the follows the idol around. i know fans want to be the first to share things and this goes with translations too, but i hope fans can appreciate how much responsibility they have when they share this information and take more care with it.....

[fabllama02]

That Superhero AU

Dagur the Deranged dives into Jackson’s path during the hazy dusk of a weekday. Jackson’s been patrolling for hours now; he suited up straight after school, webbing his backpack full of civvies and calculus homework to the underside of an apartment building’s AC unit before taking to the sky. He’s chasing a couple of thugs who’s held up a local 7/11 when Dagur makes a grab for him.

Jackson flips safely out of the way. Dagur cackles, and chases after him, mouth full of wet, pointed teeth.

“Get a hobby, you maniac!” Jackson calls over his shoulder. Dagur forces him to duck and roll to the left. Those thugs and their bundles of cash must be long gone by now.

“You’re my hobby,” Dagur says.

“Yeah?” Jackson yells back. “You want me to come with you to the craft store? Help you pick out some wool, some watercolors; maybe we could pick up a model airplane to build together-”

Dagur snags his arm. He’s intimidatingly larger than Jackson. His hand wraps entirely around Jack’s bone thin wrist, almost obscuring his entire hand beneath that meaty fist.

“Uh oh,” Jackson says, right before Dagur throws him through the air and into the side of a building. Cement cracks under the force. “Ow.”

Dagur chases it with a punch. Jackson back-flips out of the way, crouching low on the pavement. The street is bustling with people rushing home from work, all of them skittering backward with fright.

“Come on, Dagster, can’t we talk this out like the rational people we aren’t?” Jack offers.

Dagur rises back up on his feet and- yup, oh yeah, he is definitely stupidly taller than Jack. He’d be getting a complex if he wasn’t too busy dodging deadly, swiping hits and ignoring the screeching whine of his spider-sense.

Dagur bares his teeth. It’s not a smile. “I don’t want to talk, little Angel. I want to see what your insides look like.”

“Thank but my insides prefer to be on the inside-”

Dagur grabs Jackson again, nails digging into the soft skin of his throat, and bodily throws him. Jackson doesn’t just crack the side of a building; this time, with a hitch in his breath and a scream of his spider-sense, Jackson goes careening through the storefront window, glass shattering and customers inside shrieking, and then straight through the solid far wall. Jackson’s been thrown through walls before. It never stops being so painful, so disorienting, like a boulder has been smashes over his head.

“Ugh,” Jackson says. He lies in the nest of fractures cement and shards of glass and wonders if numb, tingling limbs is a blessing or a very, very bad sign. Probably the latter. “Ughhhhhh.”

“My boss is going to kill me!” The middle-aged manager in a polo shirt stands behind the broken wall. The glare he wears is anything but sympathetic. Geez, a guy can’t even get thrown through a window and a wall without upsetting someone in this city.

“My super-villains are going to kill me,” Jackson snipes back.

“Look what you’ve done,” hisses an older customer, tiny, glinting glass shards in her hair. She’s not hurt, though, thank god. “I just bough this shirt! Are you going to pay for it?”

Jackson hauls himself out of the Jack Frost shaped hole, stumbling over shaking feet. “When the deranged guy comes back, I’ll probably be paying for something. With my blood.” The manager and the customers go back to cursing him out. The sharp, accusatory bite to their words sounds vaguely venomous. “Are none of you concerned about the guy that was just chucked through a solid wall? And has a giant, murderous super-villain on his tail? No?”

“I should sue you for-” says the manager. He’s several inches taller than Jack and uses his height to bare down on him, arms crossed.

“Why is it that everyone who hates me is tall?” Jackson wonders. “You, Dagur’s ugly butt. And people wonder why short people all have tempers and complexes-”

“I like your height,” Dagur says, clambering into the broken electronics store. Looks like Jackson’s lunch break is over, then.

The manager and the other customers shriek and rush for the exits. The deranged man ignores them, all his attention focused keenly on Jack- hooray for him!- as he shifts, grins, continues, “You’re conveniently small. So easy to throw. To manipulate.”

“Well, hey,” Jackson says, “at least one of us appreciates my height.”

Dagur snatches Jackson’s hand; he’s too off kilter from being ditched through a store to dodge or shake him off but Dagur doesn’t throw him again. His fist tightens, and Jackson’s spider-sense drags a warning up his spine, and then he snaps Jackson’s fingers backward.

Jackson howls and throws himself backward. Dagur is too strong- Jackson dangles from his grip, four fingers of his left hand broken crookedly, panting against his mask.

“See?” Dagur remarks as Jack gasps through the pain. “So fragile and small.”

“Go jump into the Hudson,” Jackson says.

Dagur leans in, shark-like teeth brushing against the vulnerable, hidden curve of Jackson’s ear. “I’m going to kill you next week,” Dagur promises. It’s low, not a whisper, but a quiet exchange passed only between them. “You’re going to come to come, and I’m going to pull you apart until you’re gasping, and bleeding, and dead.”

“I would never go to you,“ Jackson spits. Dagur readjusts his hold on Jackson’s hand, and yanks again. His glove twists, and his skin burns- his wrists isn’t sprained, but it’s a near thing, accompanied by stinging, heated pain.

“You will,” Dagur says like the condescending asshole that he is. He drops Jackson, and the teenager skitters away from his hold.

“And if I don’t?”

“Well, then I guess I’ll just have to come to you. Do you think the news channel would be horrified by a man being ripped open on a public street, or do you think, in lieu of an obituary, they’ll publish an article blaming you for dirtying public property?” That smile- it’s going to crawl it’s way through Jack’s nightmares like the haunting, damning thing he knows it for. “I doubt anyone would even mourn.”

Jackson’s breath is hitched, his wrecked hand cradled to his heaving chest. Dagur laughs once more, a victorious sound, before taking off into the darkening city, leaving Jackson to the approaching sound of police sirens, the judging eyes of surrounding civilians, and a growing, cancerous dread.

The injury in his hands had vanished quickly, but Dagur’s promise stayed with Jackson. He tried to ignore it, but there was something unsettling about Dagur, more so than any bullies, or criminals, or even super-villains that Jackson faced before. The deranged man is a different breed of villain. He rattles Jackson; it doesn’t matter how hard Jackson tries to ignore it, the man always manages to crawl under his skin.

But, over a week later, when Jackson flips past Oswald Tower and his spider-sense blares to life, Jackson doesn’t think about Dagur. His senses direct him downward, into a hatched window on the lower floor. His hearing picks up begging, someone crying, and then a choked off scream- and Jackson’s running before he thinks about where he is.

Jackson just wants to help. It’s all he’s ever wanted to do.

It’s uncomfortable to search out a crime like this. His spider-sense naturally urges Jackson’s body away from danger. To rush against it like this, sprinting further into the winding hallways, having it build louder and louder in his head, makes him uneasy. It’s like the world’s worst game of hotter/colder. Jackson’s colors slowly melts into his surroundings; making him invisible.

It’s late, and Jackson thinks nothing of the hallways being almost entirely abandoned, only a few interns shrieking at the sudden sight of him crawling along their ceiling like something out of a horror movie. He shushes them and points towards the nearest exit that isn’t blocked. They nodded in thanks before rushing past him and he turns invisible once more.

His spider-sense takes him to a closed set of doors. Jackson crawls in the room through the vents. He found two men inside. One is knelt as though in prayer, drenched in blood and shaking visibly. The other- impeccably dressed, all sharp angles and too seeing eyes- smiles before looking up. At his direction. His grin only grows, his head cocks, and when he takes one testing step forward, Jackson’s spider-sense flinches up his neck like a panicked animal and his invisibility falls off.

“Always a surprise,” the man remarks. “Always exceeding my expectations of man’s ability for blind, foolhardy heroism.” The man’s visage flickers before it completely falls and reveals-

“Dagur.” Jackson says through gritted teeth.

“Permafrost!” The man on the ground tries to reach for Jackson. “Help-”

“Oh, shut up.” Dagur bends down and slams the man’s bleeding head into the floor. Jackson’s spider-sense is a haunting, distracting thing, urging him to run.

“Get away from him,” Jackson says.

The deranged man looks down at the slumped, unmoving man. “Whatever you say, little Angel,” he says, taking a pointed step away, towards Jackson. “He’s just a scientist that out grew his usefulness, anyway.”

“I’m more heroic each time; you’re more vague and creepy each time. We’re a match made in heaven.” Jackson doesn’t leave. He knows Dagur would only take it out on the helpless man on the floor. From the glint of teeth, Jackson guesses Dagur is well aware of the responsibility Jackson has to the unconscious man, too.

“I didn’t even have to enact the second part of my plan. You came straight to me, sought me out through the twisting burrows of my Tower. A dog returning to his master.”

“That’s not very nice,” Jackson says through the building fear. “And after all the effort I made to come visit you…”

The deranged man wearing Oswald’s skin smiles. The click of the reinforced door behind him and the spray of gas shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. The villain straps a gas mask over his smile.

Jackson rushes Dagur. He doesn’t make it to the man before chocking on his breath and collapsing into a pile of weak, useless limbs. Jackson passes out there, goes lax in the bowels of Oswald Tower, spread out at Dagur’s feet.

Jackson comes to with a weight against his throat and heavy limbs. His legs feel like they’ve been dipped in tar, a sticky, moving wetness on his legs and arms. His spider-sense is still with him, screaming incoherently at the base of Jackson’s skull. It gives a rough indicator for just how screwed exactly Jackson is.

He tugs against the wet slime. It shifts, pins him down. He tries again, but the thing doesn’t move and his palm is clenched firmly closed inside it so he can’t frost his way out of this either. It’s like being held down by chains made of molasses.

“Sssssstay,” the Venom-like thing gurgles. His spider-sense shudders down his spine at the sound. Of course, this is why his senses had freaked out; not only was someone in trouble, but a symbiote is involved. They always set Jackson’s spider-sense off, too loud, almost painfully so.

And whatever Dagur’s planning must have been a factor, too. Maybe his spider-sense wasn’t hightlighting the pain the scientist was suffering. Maybe it had sniffed out Dagur’s plan and lit up like a Christmas tree in fright.

“You walked into this one, Jack,” Jackson croaks around the dryness in his throat (how long was he out?). “You idiot.”

“With an IQ so high, you’d think you’d see a trap before you walked blindly into it.” Jackson’s head tips against the tiles to see Dagur, stood above the lain out teenager, looming like a skyscraper over pedestrians. “Hello, Jackson.”

Jackson freezes. Splutters, “I’m- I’m not-”

Dagur holds up his red mask. Jackson realizes, stomach dropping, that his face is bare.

“I’ve known for a while, Jackson,” Dagur says. “A long while.”

“You weren’t good for this city. You’re good for me.”

“Yeah, well,” Jackson says around his panic, “you’re not very good for me. I want to take this relationship back to the shop and get a full refund. The receipt is still in my other tights-”

“Your incessant babbling isn’t as sharp when you’re this panicked. And here I thought you’d be slinging clever puns until the sun burnt out.” Dagur crouches down next to Jackson’s pinned form, grin as slippery as the symbiote holding Jackson in place. He thumbs at a square piece of metal held in one hand. “Maybe I can make you shut up for once. Let’s see, shall we?”

Jackson opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, the weight around his throat tightens, buts off his air and his words, before it pulses electric shocks down his nerves. This is different from the familiar sting of the police’s tazer shots aimed at him- this burns. It scorches. Jackson doesn’t have enough air to scream.

Jackson feels floaty. Distant. When he come back to himself, his chest is heaving. Fingers card through his sweat damp hair.

“You shouldn’t wear that mask,” Dagur admonishes. “It’s too nice, seeing your face. Do you have any idea what you look like when I do this?” He presses at the remote and Jackson is lost beneath another wave of encompassing, red hot pain.

“Bet- bet I still don’t look as ugly as you,” Jackson pants when the sensation ebbs. Dagur’s right- his jokes aren’t as good.

Dagur ignores that. “I’ll tell you; you’re pale. Your eyes roll back in your head, leaving only bloodshot white, and your mouth slips open.” The fingers drift from his hair to trace Jackson’s cracked lips, pressing in. Jackson tastes his fingers on his tongue. He tries to bite him, but Dagur retracts his hand too quickly. “Your whole body convulses…”

“If that hand drifts any lower, Dagur, I really will bite it off.”

Dagur laughs and plucks his hand from Jackson’s clavicle. “You’re lovely, like this.”

“Gross,” Jackson says. “You’re so, so-”

Dagur presses down on the remote. Jackson throws his head back with all his strength. His cranium bangs loudly against the hard floor. But he barely notices the tingling pain or the blood pooling there. He won’t notice the concussion until later.

It continues like that. Dagur leans in, brushes his fingertips over Jackson’s panting, sweating face, looming over the wreck of a teenager and grinning like he wants to devour him whole. The remote is twisted, the collar tightens in warning and then-

Jackson tries fighting, but he feels like he’s underwater. The symbiote holds him down. So, too, does the shocking, sporadic pain and the piercing weight of Dagur’s eyes.

“I made you this way,” Dagur whispers as Jackson gasps for air, shaking violently under the billionaire’s hand. “I made you what you are. I own the spider serum, I own you; my collar belongs around your throat.” The symbiote gurgles. It moves, crawls like a seaworm, like it’s fidgeting. Dagur laughs at the sight, “Your brother is jealous of my affection, Jack, you should be grateful.”

It’s not Dagur’s sugary words that make the half-formed symbiote anxious. It’s the collar. Each flick o Dagur’s thumb on the trigger makes the symbiote skitter along Jackson. He didn’t pick it up in the beginning, too blinded by the waves of pain that swept over him, but after a while, after even Dagur has grown impatient with this method of torture, Jackson is numb enough to recognize the symbiote’s fear. It stays away from where his nerves are the thickest- his feet, his fingertips, the inner curve of his thighs (places that, unfortunately, Dagur is not afraid of touching).

Jackson remembers; Venom had been frightened of pulsing waves of sound, like Church bells. Electricity- this one doesn’t like electricity.

Jackson upper body surges like he’s going to attack Dagur, and the villain reacts instinctively, thumbs slamming down on the collar’s remote trigger. It tightens in warning, leaving him breathless, and Jackson twists on his side. Rather than going lax, surrendering to the inevitable rush of pain, he curls and presses his lips to the writhing, black mass pinning down his arms. When the bundles of nerves beneath his skin flood with electricity, the symbiote screams with Jackson.

It’s just enough. The symbiote flinches off of him and Jack rolls, shuddering with the aftershocks, and punches the shock off of Dagur’s face. As the two monsters recover, Jackson skitters across the lab floor. His free hand reaches up and freezes the collar before crushing it. The bulky metal cracks and energy crackles inside the ice but didn’t fully reach Jackson. It hurts, burns like spitting oil, but it’s nothing like before.

Dagur roars behind his teeth, one hand pressed against his broken nose, spurting blood against his fingers. Jackson smiles victoriously, feeling a little feral.

Take that, Dagster. Jack, 1. Dagur…probably more than 1, come to think of it-

The symbiote is still squirming, but makes no move towards Jackson, skittering away from it’s master’s hands.

I kissed the symbiote, Jack thinks, staring at it. I kissed Venom’s less developed cousin.

And Dagur, Dagur- his eyes are dark and wild. He runs at Jackson and he sees a flash of metal, a loud warning from his spider-sense, before the much taller man barrels into him.

They tumble to the ground, Jackson beneath Dagur. He’s burnt out and exhausted, his collar still spitting toned-down shocks of electricity through his fried nerves at random intervals. Dagur’s teeth are red. His blood drips from his nose and wets Jackson’s maskless face.

He hasn’t don his villain’s suit yet, but he’s still the very picture of Jackson’s nightmares.

Dagur’s elbow digs into Jackson’s chest. It hurts. It pins him. Jackson makes a grab for it, but his spider-sense screams, and Dagur shoves a knife between Jackson’s ribs.

“There it is,” Dagur pants, his blood splashing onto Jackson’s wet cheeks. Some of it gets into the teenager’s open, screaming mouth. It doesn’t taste coppery; all Jackson can taste is pain. “That open, lovely expression. I don’t even need this.” He fiddles with the collar, but snatches his hand back when it splutters and chocks both him and Jackson.

Jackson grapples with Dagur, knife still embedded in his side. Dagur blocks easily enough. Jackson’s strong, but clumsy with pain. The deranged man is still not wearing his gears, but coherent and running on the high of victory.

Dagur grabs his hand and twists. Jackson feels something crack, and Dagur drinks in Jackson’s scrunched expression and breathy cry of pain.

“This wasn’t the type of father-son bonding I was picturing,” Jackson says through his teeth, because he has to, because the other opinion is to scream or cry, giving Dagur what he wants. “I thought- I thought we were going to go fishing, maybe watch some baseball, play catch out the front-”

Dagur punches him across the face, fist closed. Jackson knows how to take a punch.

“You need to watch more American family films, dude, because this? This is not how adults interact with teenagers. There’s a severe lack of baseball mitts and nicknames like ‘sport’ and ‘sonny’-” Dagur hits him again, harder. His lip splits open, and Jack swallows a mouthful of blood and spit. He slants a glare up at his villain. “You’re kind of an asshole, I ever tell you that, Dag-fart? Ha- oh my god, Dag-fart the Deranged, that’s my new name for-!”

Broad hands wrap around Jackson’s neck, ignoring the metal collar and squeezing. Jackson squirms against the chokehold, he tugs at Dagur’s hands and promptly spread frosts along his forearms but strangely enough, he didn’t budge. Even as skin seems to darken in blue at the beginning of a frostbite, Dagur’s sharp-nailed fingers dig into the soft column of his throat. He splutters up at Dagur’s face- purpled in rage, eyes wild, grin as manic as ever- and tries to form words.

“I prefer you quiet,” Dagur tells him. His grip tightens. Jackson’s fingers scramble at the tiles, at Dagur’s hands, desperate for air. “Ah, I think I like this face even more than the last one. You’re so beautiful, desperate. Dying under my hands…”

Dag-fart, Jackson thinks through the airless haze. Dag-fart.

Dagur relaxes his grip enough for Jackson to take in rattling, shallow gasps. His lungs burn. Dagur’s hands go soft, his spread fingers rubbing circles along Jackson’s shaking throat. This deceptive gentleness is sickening.

Their faces are inches apart. Less than. They’re breathing in each other’s air, and Dagur can feel the violent trembling of Jackson’s body, can feel how warm the blood beginning to seep from his stab wound is. That, after everything that has happened today, is what pushes Jackson over the edge.

His legs snap out and he kicks Dagur off of him with all the strength of a bucking, enraged horse. The billionaire’s ribs crack with the force. Jackson yanks the knife out. He resists the urge to curl around the injury or spend any more precious seconds tearing at the collar that keeps spitting electricity. With adrenaline thrumming through his blood, he clambers up and makes for the door. Dagur is still curled on the floor on the other side of the room. The symbiote lays still, as harmless as spilled out, spoiled milk.

Jackson hastily activates his invisibility and limps out of the door and down the long, dark corridors as fast as he can with a bleeding side and a malfunctioning collar.

Dagur isn’t down for long; Jackson can hear the man’s chocked off shouts of rage through the walls. He limps faster, puffing little breathy gasps with each jarring step.

His torso feels soaked through with the blood even as he iced his bleeding side. Wall crawling may be faster and give him the rare higher ground on his too-tall enemy, but it’d paint a path to Jackson. Dagur would just have to follow the dripping, bloodied handprints along the wall to find him.

No. Walk-limping would have to do.

“JACKSON!” He hears the shout muffled through the wall. Dag-fart sounds pained. Good.

Jackson’s been hurt as Jack Frost before. Concussions, jarred fingers and sprained ankles, bullet wounds to the thigh, even a stab wound or two. But there’s something different about this- something that’s visceral and real. Too raw, too much. This, limping through evacuated, empty halls, nerves burnt out and a head wound beginning to make itself known, a concussion pressing nauseous into his throat and blurring the edges of his vision, frostbite beginning to take place on his badly bleeding side, the echo of Dagur’s manic voice ringing through the walls-

It’s too much. Jackson clenches his mouth shut, teeth trapping any noise he might make, and breathes raggedly through his nose. He won’t succumb to the jagged whimpers he can feel in his throat, won’t cry, won’t let panic attack pressing against his ribs take him down.

He has to get out of here.

Dagur is a distinct point; Jackson can just hear his rough pants and the slick-slide sound of his button down and slacks against the villain gears he wears as Dagur the Deranged. Jackson just has to… stay out of his grasp. And find help.

An adult, his mother would say often, driven by worry that her tiny, fresh in his teens, son would think he had to deal with anything awful by himself. She knew he was too selfless. Too stupid to draw attention to his problems. You tell an adult if something bad happens, okay? Promise me, Jackson.

 Jackson, tiny and trusting and sick of these too familiar lectures, had nodded his promise. Had sworn it.

Jackson hates the idea that he’s not enough as he is. He hates being told he’s too weak or not capable or should be protected cause he’s 15 years old and still impatiently waiting for a growth spurt. He’s a superhero. His fists are small, but they pack a mighty punch.

But even stupid, stubborn Jackson has to admit that he’s in a bad position here. Fingers clenched tight to his iced stab wound, Jackson relents; his mother was right.

Jackson needs an adult.

He finds the phone in an empty lab a few levels down. Dagur had taken him to the basement levels, floors hidden beneath the concrete ground of the city, buried in the soil. The man assumed that, after escaping, Jackson would’ve limped up. Tried to find his way out into the sunlight.

But Jackson’s seen enough animal documentaries. He knows about the feral, sharp toothed predators that wounded their prey and then stalk it down, waiting for it to slow, to eventually succumb to their injuries, before capturing and devouring it. He’s not going to crawl and get inches from safety, only to have Dagur snatch him back up.

So Jackson winds his way down to even lower levels. It buys him time.

The scientists usually manning these labs must have been told to abandon them in a hurry. Bags are still left at workstations. There’s no one here to stop him from rifling through their belongings until he finds a phone without a passcode to crack.

With shaking, wet fingers, Jackson dials the closest hero. The one that had- after snapping at him for going out, young and untrained- reluctantly handed over a phone number. Not a name, not an address; a phone number. For emergencies.

It’s one of the few numbers Jackson has memorized, outside of his mother, and his little sister, and a few other dozen friends, and-

“This is Matt Murdock’s phone!”

 “Um,” Jackson says. The voice doesn’t sound like Daredevil; it’s too chirpy. “I’m looking for Daredevil…?”

The man on the other end of the line sighs. “Of course you are.”

“Is this the wrong number? Are you, like, his secretary?”

“Sometimes I feel like it.” Jackson has no idea what that means. “How did you get this number?”

 “Daredevil gave it to me. We’re…we’re colleagues.”

“Winkwink, nudgenudge colleagues?”

 Jackson stares blankly at the lab wall. He’s starting to feel floaty again. Out of body. Like nothing, not even a phone in his hands, not even the warm voice in his ear, is quite real. “I’m a superhero, I’m not sleeping with him or anything. That’s gross.”

“No, no, I got that-” Something shifts in the background. The man murmurs gently, urging someone back to sleep. When he returns, he asks, hushed, “What do you want? Daredevil isn’t available tonight.”

 “He needs to be available,” Jackson says through his haze, heart thumping like a frightened animal. His collar shocks him every ten minutes or so, sending out a weak, painful pulse of electricity that makes him jump and lose his train of thought. “I-I need his help. I’m in tr-”

“Foggy?” Someone in the background says, words badly slurred. “Who’s on the phone?”

 “No one, buddy!” says this Foggy, this man who acts as Daredevil’s secretary, this man who’s keeping help from Jackson. “Go back to sleep, you’re still too injured. It’s just a prank call.”

 “Is that him?” Jackson begs. “I need to- I need-”

“I’m sorry, kid, but running around in spandex can wait. You’re going to have to be patient for a few nights.”

 “Wait-” Jackson begins, but Foggy has already hung up. Jackson tries to call again, but the phone rings out. Foggy must’ve turned it off. Figures.

“Okay, Jackson,” Jackson tells himself around the chattering of his teeth (either blood loss or fear, the jury is still out). His lungs feel tight, like they’re stuffed full of cotton wool and there’s no room for his sharp, shallow inhales. “Don’t panic. So Daredevil hired an asshole secretary who won’t take your calls, you’ve faced stuff like this before. Who else do you know? Who else?”

There’s a group. A group, in their gleaming building with their famous name, who Jackson’s been snapchatting and texting, who’s number his scrambled, fried brain remembers.

He lowers himself to the ground, one hand around his bleeding middle, the other dialing quickly. E. Aster Bunnymund answers with a gruff, “Hello?”

 “Bunny? It’s-it’s Jack Frost,” Jackson whispers. His mouth is wet and dripping; there’s too much salvia in his mouth like he’s about to throw up.

Bunny laughs on the other end of the line. “Frosty? Is this another prank call? Because, I tell ya, I ain’t gonna fall for it a second time around-”

 “Bunny,” Jackson says, “listen, I need the Four’s help with something. Now.”

“Come on, Frostbite. You don’t call, you don’t write- I feel neglected-”

 “Bunny!”Jackson’s voice pitches too high, gone crackling with panic. On the other end, Bunny audibly winces. “Sorry. Sorry. I just… I really need your help. Please.”

“Sorry, Jack, but the Four and I are off-world. We’re actually on our way out ta deal with another spacial anomaly thingy. Ye just caught us; we’re going to fly out of the range of Earth’s satellites soon.”

 “Talk about a long distance call,” Jackson says idly, almost distantly, as though his heart isn’t trying to fight it’s way past his ribcage. The too wet feeling in his mouth worsens. Maybe he really will throw up, this time. Would that attract Dagur? A loud, retching sign of weakness- blood in the water, calling out to the hungry, hungry sharks.

“Good thing ya didn’t call on yer cell,” Bunny agrees. He laughs again. Jackson doesn’t laugh with him. “It’d be phone bill out of this world.”

 “Do you know a phone number that will get me into contact with the other Guardians?” Bunny hums, doubtful, and Jackson begs, “Does North know? Does he have Ombric’s phone number? Someone else, even- any unknown vigilante currently living in this city?”

“No and no to da last two, I think.” Bunny leaves the call briefly. Jackson can hear him talking to the others briefly. There’s a click over the line and the telltale crackle as Jackson is put on speaker phone.

“Jack Frost!” North greets joviantly. “What’s the problem? Is it something we can advise you on? If it’s a strategic battle I could walk you through-”

 ”No, no.” Jackson chokes on the words, around the congested, panicked feeling building in his chest. “I need actual physical help. I need the cavalry, North.”

“We’re pretty far from being able to help, Frostbite.” Bunny’s voice is light, on the edge of a joke. It makes Jackson feel like crying.

“Do you know how I can contact the other Guardians? Or a- a superhero helpline, maybe?”

“I’m sorry, Jack, but my superhero contacts are all saved in the Workshop servers on Earth. There’s nothing I can give you-” North says.

“Nothing?” Jackson asks. Beneath his mask, tears drip down his nose. He didn’t cry when Dagur loomed over him and made him shake and whispered awful, awful promises, but this? Knowing how well and truly alone he is? It’s choking. A hysterical, knife-edged sob crawls it’s way out of Jackson’s throat without his consent.

“Frosty?!” Bunny’s voice is back. Jackson bites at his bottom lip, and curls up tighter around his knees, and presses the phone closer, like he can climb into the screen if he tries hard enough. “Are you- are you crying?”

 “Jack, what’s wrong? What’s happened?” That’s Toothiana. Her voice is hard with worry.

“Blyat,” North says, panicked. Jackson is growing numb and distant and cloudy, the way he does when a panic attack is really brewing, thick and heavy, in his chest. “Is he-”

 “I’m on my own, then,” Jackson cuts North off. His words are shaky and strained; concussions are awful things, especially when coupled with blood loss. Jackson swallows thickly. “It’s- alright. It’s alright.”

“Frosty!” Bunny says. “Snowflake, wait a second-”

 Jackson hangs up.

The phone rings almost immediately. He silences it by denying the call, but it rings again moments later. It doesn’t even occur to Jackson to turn the thing off. He picks it up and crushes it between shaking fingers. It doesn’t ring after that, scattered as it is in warped, useless parts.

“It’s going to be alright,” Jackson says, just once more, and gets to his feet.

Jackson realizes, belatedly, that he should have used that phone to call his mother and little sister. He really may not make it out of this, not if Dagur catches him. A phone call to apologize and say goodbye would have been nice. Then again, the sound of both of their voices may have made him break down for real, and Jackson can’t afford that right now.

The pain is distracting, but the accompanying immovability is what makes Jackson grit his teeth. His whole body feels stiff. He can’t limp away from this. He can’t jump from a window and flips his way to freedom.

The collar goes off again. Jackson freezes the damn thing again and ignores it. He doesn’t have the time or coherency to pull the thing apart.

The blood running thick and slippery over his shaking fingers is alarming. Like a red flag, it shouts Jackson’s own stupidity back at him. He shouldn’t have gotten caught. He should have fought harder. Been faster. Shouldn’t have even gotten out of bed that morning-

Dagur is back.

A door opens and shuts a few hallways over. Dagur’s wearing an expensive grey suit, but beneath it, hidden from prying eyes, is the synthetic gears of his villain outfit. The same way Jackson’s suit is usually tucked away beneath hoodies and t-shirts.

Daredevil’s secretary may have denied him, but Jackson’s still grateful for the hours the older man had spent helping Jackson hone his advanced senses. He can hear the slick-slide of the deranged man’s suit against slacks as loud as a warning bell.

Daredevil may not know it, but he just saved Jackson’s life. Even if it may not matter, in the end.

Jackson immediately activates his invisibility again and wedges himself into a maintenance closet, and holds his breath, and silently begs Dagur doesn’t find him.

He doesn’t- the slick-slide of fabric passes Jackson’s hiding place and disappears further down the corridor. Jackson hasn’t stopped to hide yet, so Dagur has no reason to check all the rooms. He knows that will change the longer he evades the older man. Soon, Dagur’s going to stumble over him, and Jackson’s going to be in no condition to run or fight him off.

But, for now, Jackson shuffles further against the wall, curls into an impossibly small ball, and , with hands smothering his loud breaths, lets his looming panic attack finally crash over him.

The slick-side sound returns. Jackson is exhausted in the aftermath of a panic attack, the vinyl beneath him a sticky red, showing off his blood loss. There’s no air vents in the closet, no hidden nooks for him to disappear into. When Dagur inevitably finds him, he’ll-

“I don’t care how many laws it breaks, scan the corridor. Find whatever experiment Dagur is doing down here.” The voice isn’t Dagur. It’s warmer, a part of him thinks. It doesn’t send shivers down Jackson’s spine. “Who cares about lead lined walls? What are you, Superman? Oh, come on, Fishlegs, you’ve trained better than that-”

An intruder, Jackson thinks. Dagur’s enemy. An ally, in a nearby corridor, starting to wander away from Jackson and his hiding place.

Jackson clambers to his feet and stumbles into the hallway before he can stop himself. His spider-sense has been active since he first burst into the building, and it’s still simmering on low. A reminder that something is coming, that danger looms on Jackson’s horizon. But it doesn’t raise it’s warnings when Jackson started towards the voice,

“Wait!” Jackson blurts. The slick-slide sound fades out. For the first time today, Jackson desperately wants it to come closer.

Jackson hobbles after the voice. The stiffness in his legs is worse after sitting still for so long. His torso flares with old, inhibiting pain with every hurried step. His head lolls, too heavy. Jackson’s fighting through mud, not air, limping after the one person who might actually be able to help him.

The ache in his legs finally, finally gets to him; Jackson stumbles and falls. Shaking tremors work up his body, so violent Jackson has to lean against the wall to keep himself upright. He can’t stand. He should at least be able to sit. The cream wall behind him is smeared with red handprints, where his messy hands struggled to keep him upright.

“Wait. That’s- that’s not right.” The voice, that deep nasally voice- Jackson chokes on the hot lump in his throat. “There shouldn’t be any heat signatures. All the workers were evacuated from this part of the building, and it’s too small and bright to be a fully grown-”

The slick-slide of fabric. Fat, brisk steps. The faint whir of a machine working overtime. A tall young man rounds the corner and freezes, eyes blown wide. He flinches violently back at the sight of bloodied spandex and folded limbs.

“Help,” Jackson slurs. He thought the shaking would abate if he found another ally, but it doesn’t. It worsens. He’s too overstimulated. The shock is like a dam, blocking any relief and putting hot, prickling tears in his eyes.

The man sprints the few meters between him and Jackson. The slick-slide sound is so loud- why does this stranger sound like Dagur? The intruder’s suit is somewhat bulky yet light. Maybe- maybe it’s another kind of undersuit? Something he wears under there like an armor? Or maybe-

“Hey,” The man says, and he sounds panicked. “Hey, can you hear me?” Jackson hums, yes. He tries to nod his head, but it flops, rolls to the side, and doesn’t co-operate. “What happened?”

“Dagur. Turns out, he was right.” An arm snakes around Jackson’s neck, and the taller man tugs him closer. Jackson’s wet, ruined face presses against the man’s suit jacket. “No- no- I’m too dirty-”

“I don’t care,” The man says. The taller man is vehement, oddly so. He presses gentle fingers over the bulky collar, with it’s warped pieces sitting snug against the base of Jackson’s throat, finger-shaped bruises blooming on skin beneath it. “Oh, my gods…”

Jackson’s ruined fingers latch onto the man’s shirt. He doesn’t feel safe yet, but the guy is warm. He’s not hurting him. He’s an anchor to Jackson, who’s been floating and lost all day.

“Did you come for me?” Jackson chokes. Maybe the Big Four had managed to call someone under the Guardians before being out of the Earth’s satellites. He didn’t think anyone was coming. He didn’t think he was allowed this kind of help.

The guy hesitates for a long moment. “No,” He admits, and Jackson swallows, “I’ve been suspicious of Dagur for a long time. I knew he was up to something, and I’d been in his servers, so when I got the report that he had his basement levels evacuated without reason, I snuck in.”

“Sorry. No big conspiracy. ‘s just me.” Jackson’s fingers slip from the man’s button up. He feels less like he’s going to hyperventilate again, less stressed, just this heavy, empty kind of tiredness. “I’m a pretty sucky Christmas present, I know. You wasted your time for nothing.”

The man doesn’t let Jackson go, though. He holds on, even as Jackson’s thoughts haze over, body going loose. “Stay with me,” The guy whispers against his bloody forehead. “I’m going to get you out of here if it’s the last thing I do.”

Concussions really do suck. Or maybe it’s the extended exposure to electric shocks; that cant be good for the human body. Or maybe it’s the knife wound, or blood loss, or good old fashioned shock that’s sending Jackson in and out of awareness, everything blurry and distant. He tries to grab hold of his surroundings and pull himself into coherency, but his body won’t co-operate. For the first time in a while, his spider-sense is quiet. His body takes that as a sign to shut off.

Jackson barely registers that he’s being carried. He barely hears the sound of a vehicle door opening before he’s slid onto leather seats.

Someone sucks in a sharp gasp. “Gods, what happened to him? Is that a collar?!”

Jackson’s head lolls. He squints up at a blonde young woman, peering over the front seat at him. “Dag-fart,” he informs her, seriously.

The man’s surprised bark of laughter is nice. The other woman smiles, but the edges are wrong; she’s too sad for it to be real. “Heroes are really all the same, huh?” she says.

“Yup,” The guy says with delight. “Dag-fart. Oh, that is too good. Remind me to change his name to that in absolutely everything.”

“I’m surprised Dagur let you leave, Hiccup-”

“He didn’t, Astrid. I had Fishlegs map us a path back up to you so that we avoided the snake. I’m not sure he would have let me leave with him, and I couldn’t risk fighting Dagur. Jack Frost needs help too badly.”

“How long did he have him?” Astrid asks. She doesn’t sound very happy, Jackson notes.

“I don’t know,” Hiccup says with a choked tone Jackson’s soupy, useless mind can’t quite understand. “I didn’t even know he was missing. He didn’t even call for help-”

“I did,” Jackson says. He’s half-guessing that they’re talking about him, but he needs them to know that he’s not this useless. He can tie his own shoes, fight his own baddies, and knows when to call for reinforcements when necessary. Even if he doesn’t have any reinforcements available to him just yet. The concept of real, dependable allies- outside the sudden, accidental appearance of this stranger, who’s assistance is born from moral responsibility rather than anything more tangible, like friendship- is still foreign. An unlockable feature Jackson hasn’t gotten to yet.

“Daredevil’s secretary is bad at his job,” Jackson slurs up at the man.

“Yeah, you’re definitely concussed there, Frost. Take it easy.”

Jackson squirms in his seat. “Thought I was- was going to die,” he admits, and then frowns. “Don’t let Dag-fart get my comic books, ‘kay?”

“Your comic books are safe,” Hiccup reassures. To the blonde young woman, he says, “Fly us home.”

“Got it,” says the woman, accompanied by the soft thrum of a powerful engine as they rocket away from Oswald Tower and the monster stalking it’s halls.

Hiccup lets Jackson go limp against him. His stab wound drips onto expensive leather, and he’s wetting the guy’s fancy suit, and he’s probably a bony, uncomfortable weight on the guy, their relationship not close enough for this easy contact, but the guy doesn’t push him off, just gathers him closer. And when fingers card through Jackson’s damp hair, he leans into the touch, relaxes, and doesn’t think about the monster hidden beneath Dagur’s skin.

[writeyouin]

Swerve X Reader – Changes - Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - The New You

A/N – Here it is, I really want to thank the anon who inspired me with that message, it was really great. I’m sticking with you too. As usual, a special thanks to @rocksinmuffin​ without whom, this story wouldn’t exist.

Warnings – Mentions of suicide.

Rating – T

Swerve sat tight lipped in the boardroom, surrounded by the newly found ethics committee who were discussing his actions regarding you. Rodimus, Megatron, Ultra Magnus, Drift, Rung, and Ratchet were to decide what punishment best suited a crime of this nature.

Quite frankly, Swerve didn’t care what this newfound committee did to him. All he cared about was returning to you in your time of need. Ever since you woke up screaming, you had been placed under sedation. Evidently, it would take some time for your human mind to integrate with your new Cybertronian body. When Swerve had proposed the idea of a new body, Perceptor and Brainstorm had warned him about the possible repercussions, but he had trusted their combined intellect over any statistical probability of things going wrong.

As it was, Brainstorm and Perceptor were both under house arrest until the ethics committee had time to decide what to do with them as well.

“SWERVE!” Ratchet barked, making the mini-bot look up dolefully, “I ASKED IF YOU EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT THE RESULTS OF YOUR ACTIONS.”

“Oh…” Swerve frowned. “No, not really. Please Ratchet, is (Y/N) alright?”

“(Y/N)’s in the best servos available, Swerve,” Rung answered. “Please, focus on what we’re saying and answer our questions to the best of your ability. Were you ever planning on warning (Y/N) about this?”

“What does that matter?” Rodimus asked incredulously, his engines revving in frustration. “Face the facts, Swerve did what anybody else would have done to save a Conjunx. He saved her life, and she’ll be fine if we all just pull together and build up her psyche, right?”

Megatron hummed thoughtfully.

“You got something to say?”

“…No. I don’t think I have a place upon this ethics committee, considering my past choices.”

“Perhaps that is why you ought to speak up,” Ultra Magnus offered. “You have seen most clearly the line between right and wrong. Are you sure you do not wish to comment upon the matter?”

Megatron avoided Ultra Magnus’ gaze, and the matter was dropped.

Finally, Drift spoke up, “Has anybody considered the spiritual implications? As Cybertronians, we have Primus to put our faith in, and although I myself am not sure about (Y/N)’s spiritual beliefs, what if this affects her, now delayed, ascension to the afterlife?”

As an argument between Rodimus and Drift broke out, Ratchet tuned into the incoming call on his internal feed. “WHAT?!” He cried out.

All optics fell on him.

“Meeting’s over everyone. (Y/N) is missing from med-bay, and wherever she’s taken her old human corpse with her.”

Swerve immediately ran out of the room, beginning his search for you.

“HOW DID SHE EVEN WAKE UP?” He asked Ratchet through his comm-link as he transformed.

“It could be a myriad of reasons. I don’t know what kind of features Brainstorm and Perceptor added to her.”

Swerve cursed and tried to connect to your new internal communicator. The call came up as blocked, leading him to fear for your life. Before, he could have just lost you; now, he risked putting you through psychological torture as well as losing you.

Opening up the call to everyone he trusted, Swerve explained his plight, pleading with them at the end of the call. “Please guys… I lost her once, I can’t lose her again.”

It was Rodimus who answered first, “We’ve got your back Swerve. Wherever (Y/N) is, we’ll find her.”

Alone and scared in the dark, you hugged your previous human corpse to your chassis. You wanted somebody to tell you what to do, and yet you needed to be alone. Normal reasoning was not working anymore, and you only had enough sense to wonder whether this was what insanity felt like.

“Swerve,” You whimpered, unsure whether to love or hate him. “What have you done to me?”

Words started forming before your very eyes and you realised this was how some thoughts were going to appear on your internal feed, at least until you gained control of your new body.

‘Repair damaged corpse.’

Coolant leaked from your optics, “I can’t.”

The writing dissolved into nothingness and new words appeared in their place, ‘Dispose of corpse.’

“No…please God no.”

It seemed like the first thought had come from what remained of your fractured human mind, and the second from your new processor. Somewhere, deep down, you knew you were still who you used to be, yet it felt like parts of yourself were buried under the possibility of a new you.

Two new clashing thoughts wrote themselves before your visual feed, followed by an error message at the opposing opinions.

‘UPLOAD PRECIOUS PERSONA’ vs ‘PURGE OLD PERSONA.’

‘ERROR IN PROCESSING UNIT. INITIATING COOLDOWN SEQUENCE.’

You shuddered as air passed through your body. When you had seen mechs do this in the past, you had assumed it was like breathing, but it felt more like a ghostly apparition passing directly through you.

Was this your new life? Would your chest never rise and fall with the filling of real lungs? Granted, you could feel the steady thrum of your spark, but it was nothing like a human heartbeat.

Gently, you rested the corpse on your knees, squeezing your optics shut as if to remove the incoming words and thoughts. It didn’t work. Even through the darkness, your thoughts materialised before you, torturing you with their presence.

‘Make it stop. Make it stop. MAKE IT STOP. MAKE IT STOP!’

Frustratedly, you pounded your servos against your helm in a clumsy attempt to stop the incoming feed. While you were doing that, the search for you grew ever more frantic.

Whirl casually approached the Rod Pod, opening the ramp and walking inside. Sure enough, there you were, curled up on the floor, the corpse beside you.

Whirl took a blanket out of his sub-space, wrapping the corpse as gently as he could inside it, “Thought I’d find you in here blood-bag… Huh, Guess I can’t call you that anymore.”

“Whirl?” You asked, confused ever since your optics had shut off shortly after your breakdown.

“Yeah… It’s me flesh stick.”

“How did you find me?”

Whirl sat down beside you, drawing you into his arms, “I can always find a hider, you ought to know that by now. Besides, I remember when those fraggers stole my face and servos… The first thing I wanted to do was hide.”

“How did you fix it, Whirl? Everything feels wrong. I can’t tell anymore- What part is human and what part is-”

“Hey, don’t think of it like that. You humans are gross, teeth literally fall out of you, but when another comes back, it’s all okay, isn’t it? You have to let the changes become you. It’ll hurt for a while, but maybe if you let the nerds help you, it won’t hurt anymore.”

“What if it doesn’t get better? What if it will always hurt?”

“Then I scrap everyone who took part in doing this to you.”

“Whirl, I can’t turn my eyes back on.”

“Alright, stay calm and just think of the light and everything you want to see. Better yet, think of how handsome I am, then you’ll get there.”

You felt air vent through you as if you were taking a deep breath, then after doing as instructed, your optics flashed on.

“There you go. Now, do you want me to radio the others and tell them where you are, or…?”

“Can you give me a few minutes. I- I don’t think I’m ready for the others yet.”

“You got it bone bag. Want me to take uh…” He gestured to the wrapped-up corpse.

You nodded, “Yeah, I don’t want to see that again.”

“Do you at least want me to tell Swerve that you’re okay?”

The question upset you. You vaguely remembered yelling various obscenities at Swerve between screaming when you woke up. He hadn’t deserved it, but you wanted to hurt him as much as you were hurting at the time. “I don’t- I need to see him myself Whirl. I was so horrible to him. I never thought I’d hurt him like that. It disgusts me… I disgust me.”

“We’re all hideous when we’re hurting. What really matters is that you’re feeling bad about it. You wanna make it up to the orange guy? Go back to him.”

You nodded, “Yeah, okay. I’m just gonna need a little bit longer to figure some things out… Cover for me?”

“You got it meat wad,” Whirl said, getting up and carefully taking the corpse with him.

After a few minutes of trying to assess your new body, you got up and decided to get a good look at it. You still felt fractured, but after the conversation with Whirl, it was almost like your mind was starting to heal, at least on reasoning anyway. At the driver’s seat of the Rod Pod, you could see yourself in the mirror Rodimus had installed for motivational speech practice.

“It’s not so bad,” You said aloud. “I wonder how I transform and drive this thing.”

“Drive sequence initiated,” The Rod Pod’s automatic computer said, sealing the doors and rumbling as it took off.

“WHAT?!” You squealed. “NO. HANG ON A MINUTE.”

“Hangar doors opening.”

“STOP CHANGING MY WORDS. STOP ENGINE. LET ME OUT. I HAVE TO GET TO SWERVE.”

“Ship taking off, course locked in.”

You banged your fists against the control panel, “DON’T YOU DARE TAKE OFF.”

“Take off confirmed. Please, sit back and enjoy the new autopilot, Captain Rodimus.”

“I’M NOT RODIMUS. LET ME OUT, RIGHT NOW, YOU ABSOLUTE HEAP OF- ARGHHHHHH,” You screamed as you were thrown forward by the ship’s hyperdrive. Fear overtook you while memories of the last time you were launched into space surfaced. Back then, you thought you were going to die. This time, you were afraid Swerve might, if he thought you had abandoned him.

In an attempt to fix the situation, you tried to use your internal communicator to call Swerve and leave a message for him. You cried his name, telling him that you were coming back, over and over again, and that you loved him; it was a message Swerve would never receive.

Swerve sobbed hideously on the floor of his hab-suite, holding one of your old shirts to his face. By now, everybody had seen the footage of the Rod Pod flying out of the hangar, with you at the helm, looking all manner of furious.

He should have told you about the body. He could have a million times over, and yet pure cowardice had held him back, and now you had left him. From the moment the two of you started a relationship, everyone had said it was doomed, but Swerve had dared to dream, and look where it had gotten him.

This time, Swerve was sure it was the end. As soon as he stopped crying, he knew he would finally end his life. He had attempted it before, multiple times, but this time would be different. He wouldn’t simply wait to waste away. This time, he would take the kill shot. One bullet to the processor ought to do it; one bullet would end the pain.

Whirl kicked at the brig door, roaring all manner of creative insults that should never be repeated. Of course that idiot Getaway would report him for stealing your corpse, and of course nobody would listen to him after he beat the hell out of Getaway for trying to take it away from him.

He had to get out and warn everyone that you hadn’t left the ship and that you were going to go back to Swerve, but how could he when the brig was soundproof? He didn’t know exactly what had happened, having only caught the beginning of the announcement before being apprehended, but he knew in his spark that you hadn’t left on purpose.

Either some kind of accident had happened, or something had forced you off the ship. One way or another, Whirl would get out and warn everybody about you. Well… There was only one way out of the brig and Whirl had never needed to do it, but he would now, for you. He had been your mech of honour, and that hadn’t changed just because your wedding was over.

Whirl glared at the only camera in the brig, knowing that it wasn’t constantly monitored, but that it was checked once or twice per cycle. Turning his pain receptors off, he retrieved a knife that he had hidden in the brig long ago for just such an occasion, and he stabbed himself in the chassis. It was an injury fatal enough to be noticed, but not so damaging that it would kill him. As an extra precaution in case he passed out, Whirl used his own energon to write on the walls.

(Y/N) NOT GONE. SHIP TOOK OFF BY ACCIDE-

Shock overcame Whirl as his vision faded. Evidently, he was wrong; he had hit something fatal, and unless someone checked the camera soon, he was going to die.

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[juju-on-that-yeet]

Careful What You Wish For

Whumptober 2020 Day 11: Psych 101 Prompt: Defiance, Struggling, Crying

Summary: After Bingiplier and MarkBop bring new clues about Oliver's disappearance to Ego Inc., Chrome finds a potential trail to where Oliver might be hidden. He, Yandere, and Yancy go investigate on their own, and manage to find Oliver - but get much more than they bargained for. (continued from “Catch”)

Warnings: Blood, violence, tasering, amputation, mind control

Read on AO3 (Full Whumptober 2020 series)

Enjoy!

~

After Bingiplier and MarkBop bring news of a failed kidnapping, strange tech, and an encrypted laptop into Ego Inc., Chrome hopes it’ll finally get them somewhere closer to finding Oliver. It’s been too long since he went missing. Chrome’s spent too many nights awake, too angry to charge and too tired to keep working. Plus’s been too quiet and morose, Google’s been too frustrated and worried. Chrome is sick of Oliver being gone, and he’s determined to get answers out of the materials Bing and Bop brought back.

Chrome looks over the evidence, the IDs and the powerful laser and the file. He tries to get into the laptop. But of course, Plus and Google do the same, and they all have the same experiences: The IDs are useless, the laser doesn’t even have a serial number, the file has no identifying information, and the laptop is so heavily encrypted that it takes hours to extract even a modicum of data.

Eventually, though, while staring at the IDs for the hundredth time, Chrome has an idea: If there’s no obvious information about where the laser, files, or laptop came from, the only lead left is the people. The IDs may be useless on their own, but the people who had them were real. He confirms with Bop that the photos in the IDs match the faces of the people he and Bing saw, and it further solidifies his idea. He takes the ID of the man first, scans over the photo, and scours the internet for photos of him.

There’s a lot of false positives. People that look very similar at first blush but after a moment of scrutiny reveal themselves as the wrong man. It doesn’t help that the man’s appearance isn’t particularly distinctive, meaning that there’s people everywhere who look like him. But after hours and hours of trawling through endless Facebook photos and the “Meet The Team” pages of various companies, Chrome can’t find him anywhere. Frustrated, he’s forced to stop and charge, but once he’s powered up again, he does the same process with the woman’s ID photo.

For a while it looks much the same, until he gets to a particularly unique photo: The woman – and he’s certain it’s her – alongside a group of others, all cutting the ribbon in front of a large facility. Everyone is dressed professionally and smiling, and it looks like any other grand opening photo. But Chrome is sure that the woman is the same as in the ID. The photo comes attached to a blog post, and it’s there that Chrome gets a name: Enigma Data, supposedly an IT company. The building in the photo is its third location, according to the post. Interestingly, there’s no link to a website for Enigma Data and no address for the building. Post comments are turned off and there’s no tags. The rest of the blog seems fairly ordinary for an adult career woman, and seems to be continuously updated to this day. It’s an odd little blip, but Chrome suspects it’s not a coincidence. Chances are the woman tried to scrub her blog of references to her work, but was unable to find this one due to the lack of tags.

But then again…it’s not very conclusive. There could be any number of reasons for the strange post. But Chrome can vaguely recognize where the building is from the environment in the photo, and it wouldn’t be hard to get there. And if he’s right, he can find out for sure that Oliver is there and a rescue can be planned. If he brings this to Google and Plus and they dismiss it, then Oliver will continue to be stuck there. And they could very well dismiss it, Chrome could certainly be wrong. But he’s willing to take the risk, even though he knows his brothers won’t be.

Which is why he charges himself up and leaves the next morning to investigate on his own.

Or at least, that was his intention.

“Where are you going?” asks a voice from behind him the moment his hand touches the doors of Ego Inc.

Chrome turns to see Yandere standing there, arms crossed, and Yancy beside him.

“How did you even know I was leaving?” Chrome asks in return.

“Because I know you, Aka-kun,” Yandere says, “I knew you were coming up with a plan to find Kiiro-kun. And if you think you’re doing that alone, you’re mistaken.”

“Yeah,” Yancy adds, “If these people want androids, it ain’t safe for youse to go alone. We’re coming, too.”

Chrome sighs, but decides he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. He explains the situation and his theory to Yandere and Yancy as they walk down the streets of LA.

“We’re just investigating,” he finishes, “We’ll get as close as we can and scope the place out, see if we spot anything useful.”

“We’re not going in?” Yandere asks as though disappointed, eager for a fight as always.

“No way,” Chrome says sternly, “We’ll go back home and tell the others so we can make a proper plan.”

“How much farther are we going, Red?” asks Yancy, a little nervous, “If we go too far, my tracker’s gonna go off, and I’m gonna be in some serious trouble.”

“Not if others are with you,” Chrome reminds him, “And besides, we’re almost there.”

The area gets less and less populated the farther they go, and eventually, the building Chrome saw in the photo can be seen in the distance. It makes sense for the area to be quiet; if people knew what was happening at Enigma Data, the place wouldn’t have been able to take Oliver in the first place. The idea that Oliver could be in that building somewhere, probably hurt, probably scared, probably terribly upset, makes Chrome’s blood boil.

The group turns into an alley to prevent being noticed in the quiet streets. They’re halfway down when Chrome starts to hear things. He stops walking. Yandere and Yancy follow.

“What?” Yandere asks, though he’s quieter than usual. He recognizes the look on Chrome’s face. Yancy doesn’t, and looks at him curiously.

“We’re being watched,” Chrome breathes.

At the back of the alley, a group of people appear, dressed in SWAT-like body armor and carrying similarly-themed weapons on their belts and strapped across themselves. Chrome turns around, but sees another group of them at the mouth of the alley where they came in, blocking the exit. Chrome turns towards the back of the alley again, and Yandere and Yancy look to the front, the three of them back-to-back. They already know they’ll have to fight their way out of this, and that it won’t be easy.

“We were hoping for more,” says a man from the front group, stepping forward, “But at least one of you showed up.”

“That photo was a trap,” Chrome growls, a sinking feeling in his gut.

“You came right to us,” the man, possibly the leader of this operation, says, “With a bit too much company, but that will be easily dealt with.”

Chrome snarls, but stops in an instant when he sees someone else step out of the group alongside the leader. This person isn’t wearing armor like the others. This person doesn’t have a short buzz cut and slight stubble like the others. This person has fluffy dark hair, glasses, and a yellow t-shirt with a “G” emblazoned on the front. This person is familiar, someone Chrome hasn’t seen in weeks, someone Chrome has been missing for just as long.

“Oliver?” Chrome gasps.

Oliver doesn’t look like he should. His face is more stoic than Chrome has ever seen it look. His eyes are even worse, glaring and glowing yellow and without a spark of light or love in them. This is Oliver, but it’s not Oliver, not anymore. Chrome can feel Yandere and Yancy moving against his back, hear them gasp at the sight of Oliver and try to talk to him, but he can’t focus enough to understand what they’re saying.

He tries to send a message to Oliver through their internal server. The message bounces back as a failed delivery.

“Ollie, what did they do to you?” Chrome asks aloud instead, taking a step closer. Some of the men chuckle.

“Don’t bother,” the leader laughs, “He’s fully conditioned, and soon you will be, too. Google Yellow…” Oliver’s head whips to the leader. “…Subdue the android.”

Oliver looks back to Chrome. His eyes narrow. He pulls out a taser – the same kind of taser that Bing and Bop brought back.

“Run,” Chrome orders Yandere and Yancy.

“Chrome, no!” Yandere cries, “There’s no way we’re leaving you!!”

“Run!!” Chrome yells as Oliver charges.

Chrome manages to dodge Oliver’s first jab with the taser, and the second, and more. He can hear Yandere and Yancy running away, stabbing and punching their way through the set of men at the end of the alley. The men on Chrome’s side move forward, but Chrome can’t concentrate on them. He’s too busy avoiding Oliver, avoiding the taser as it crackles and hums with electricity. Oliver is single-minded in his drive to get Chrome, eyes still narrowed, still glowing, still blank and empty.

“Ollie, come on!!” Chrome shouts as he dodges, “It’s me, Chrome! You have to remember! We’ve all been looking for you, me and Plus and Blue and everyone else, you have to–”

Oliver lands a lucky jab on Chrome’s chest, an inch above the left side of his core. As soon as the taser’s prongs touch Chrome, his world becomes fire. His entire body seizes, muscles contracting tight, too tight. His vision goes white. He’s not even sure if he screams. It’s only electric fire, and he can feel every tenth of a second as it passes, feel the waves of electricity flowing outward from his chest. His core shudders, he can’t breathe.

When Oliver pulls the taser away, Chrome collapses bonelessly. He can still barely breathe, but he tries his hardest to gasp in air. Warning notifications pop up across his vision, telling him that he’s too hot and his vents won’t open and his core stopped pulsing for a few moments and there’s a burn on his chest and a hundred other alerts. Oliver leans over Chrome. Chrome looks up at him, vision blurred.

“Ollie,” he wheezes.

“We need him unconscious,” the leader says from somewhere Chrome can’t see, “We can’t risk him recovering and escaping.”

Oliver nods.

Then he kicks Chrome in the head.

Chrome doesn’t even have time to realize what just happened before he’s unconscious.

~~~

Yandere and Yancy run.

Yandere didn’t want to, but he knew as well as Chrome did that he and Yancy wouldn’t stand a chance against Oliver like this. His mind is still reeling from seeing Oliver in that state, from having to leave Chrome in his clutches, as he and Yancy break through the group of men at the mouth of the alley and flee for home. The men follow not too far behind, but if Yandere and Yancy can make it to Ego Inc., the magic of the building will hide them, and the men won’t be able to get inside.

“Kuso, kuso,” Yandere mutters as he runs, pulling Yancy along by his arm.

“Fuck, this was a bad idea,” Yancy pants, trying to keep up, “We should’ve stopped him–”

“No,” Yandere cuts him off, “We know where Kiiro-kun is now, we’ll go home and tell the others–”

Something sails over their heads and lands on the ground ahead of them. Before either of them can ask the other what it is, it goes off, spilling cloudy smoke into the air, smoke that the pair run right into.

“A smoke bomb!” Yandere yells, already coughing a little, “Keep running!!”

But he’s already let go of Yancy’s arm and slowed down from surprise. He can’t see through the smoke, and breathing is a little harder. The lost momentum means he can’t run fast enough as the men close in on him, and in moments, both his arms have been grabbed. He kicks and struggles as he’s pulled back, out of the smoke cloud but into the group’s clutches. Yancy is already with them, caught as well, fighting like Yandere is. But it’s all they can do as they’re forced back the way they came.

“Let us go, ya fuckin’ pigs!!” Yancy yells, face starting to flush with rage.

“Fuck you all!” Yandere screams, kicking at the legs of the men dragging him, “You’re all going to pay for this!!”

Though both of them are strong, Yandere is unnaturally so. There’s a couple times that Yandere almost breaks out of his captors’ grip, but they tighten their hold and watch him carefully. In the end, the pair are taken back to the alley they escaped from. Oliver is still there, holding a cruel-looking taser in his hand, and he looks at Yandere and Yancy as they’re brought over. Several men are supporting something, and it takes a moment for Yandere to see that it’s Chrome, unconscious. There’s a hole burned in his shirt above his core and a black mark across the skin, along with an awful bruise on his forehead. The sight of him sends a jolt of rage and terror through Yandere’s body.

“Aka-kun!!” Yandere cries, fighting ever harder against the men holding him, “What have you done!?” he screams at Oliver, who continues to regard him passively.

“Fuck you!!” Yancy yells. Whether at Oliver or the group of men, Yandere doesn’t know.

“We got them,” says one of the men holding Yancy, ignoring his swearing and kicking.

“Good,” says the leader, “Well, we have our protocol for civilians that interfere.” He reaches for one of the firearms strapped to his chest.

“I have a suggestion,” says one of the men holding Yandere, “This one here–” He gives Yandere a shake that makes him growl. “–is really strong, stronger than most. I’ve held back men twice his size that weren’t half as hard to control.”

The leader considers for a moment. He looks at Oliver.

“Google Yellow, analyze him.”

Oliver stares at Yandere, eyes glowing yellow.

“He is inordinately strong,” Oliver says, voice monotone. His gaze flicks to Yancy. “There is something strange about them that my systems cannot define. They do not appear to be entirely human.”

Yandere and Yancy both stop struggling in shock. The leader whistles.

“Guess it makes some sense,” he muses, “Who else would hang out with a bunch of androids? Let’s take them both back then, see if the higher-ups agree, then they can get conditioned.”

Yandere doesn’t want to know what “conditioned” means, but he shares a furtive glance with Yancy. It’d be bad for them to end up in that facility, having who-know-what be done to them, but Yancy has a tracker in his arm. If the signal carries through the building, the other egos will be able to follow it to rescue them.

The men are starting to head away, through the alley to the facility Yandere and the others were headed to in the first place, when Oliver speaks again.

“We cannot take him with us,” he says, pointing to Yancy.

“Why not?” asks the leader in a warning tone, “Did you forget who calls the shots here, Yellow?”

“No,” Oliver replies without lowering his pointing finger, “He has a tracker embedded in his arm. My scan discovered it.”

Yandere’s heart sinks. Yancy’s expression melts from fury to fear.

“Dammit,” the leader mutters, “He’s been broadcasting his location this whole time!”

“Maybe it can be removed,” puts in one of the men holding Yancy.

“There’s no time,” the leader says. He looks to Oliver. “Can it be destroyed?”

“Not without destroying the arm,” Oliver says, “But if it were to be destroyed, it could still display the last known signal for some time after. It would be best to leave it intact to avoid raising suspicion, and to leave it somewhere far from here.”

“We can’t risk taking him inside for someone to remove,” the leader sighs, “Do you have a plan?”

“I do,” Oliver says, “Would you like me to explain it? We will unfortunately not be able to take him with us afterward.”

“You know what, just go ahead and do it,” the leader says, “The other one’s the strong one, so at least we’ll keep him. Google Yellow, handle the problem as you see fit.”

Oliver nods. He approaches Yancy. Yancy shrinks back, but there’s nowhere for him to go.

“What are you doing?” Yandere gasps.

“Please release his right arm,” Oliver tells the men holding him.

“Ollie, c’mon,” Yancy pleads, “You don’t gotta hurt me, you know me, dontcha?”

His words are ignored as the man on his right releases Yancy’s arm and Oliver takes it immediately after. He places one hand on Yancy’s upper arm, the other on his forearm. Yancy stares up at Oliver in fear, and Yandere watches helplessly.

There is no warning before Oliver bends back Yancy’s arm, breaking it at the elbow. The crunching snap isn’t half as loud as Yancy’s scream. He kicks wildly against the pain, but Oliver’s grip doesn’t budge. Yandere screams as loud as Yancy does, fighting against his own captors.

“Stop it, stop!!” he screams.

Oliver doesn’t stop. He changes his grip, moves both hands closer to the now-broken elbow joint, and twists. Yancy howls as skin rips, then muscle. Blood spurts up, drops flecking Oliver’s glasses. Yandere hollers too, but he can only watch as Oliver finally severs most of the skin and muscle from the two halves of the arm and pulls the forearm off with a strong yank. Yancy’s scream raises an octave before dropping away as his eyes roll back from pain. He sags, semi-conscious, as Oliver lets his arm – the half that remains attached to Yancy – go, letting the man who held him previously grab him again. Yancy doesn’t react, wheezing faintly against the agony. But Yandere doesn’t stop screaming, doesn’t stop kicking.

“Kiiro-kun, how could you, how could you!!” Yandere wails, the gravity of the situation fully sinking in as he starts to cry.

“Please give him to me,” Oliver says to the men holding Yancy, “I will take him and the arm to separate locations away from the facility. I will stay hidden as I travel, and this will not be traced back to us.”

“Brilliant,” the leader laughs, “You heard him,” he adds to the men holding Yancy.

They give him up, and Oliver slings Yancy over his shoulder. He uses one arm to hold him there and his free hand to carry Yancy’s severed forearm. Blood pours from Yancy’s wound down Oliver’s back, but Oliver hardly seems to notice. He walks off, leaving a blood trail in his wake. Yancy is motionless, probably unconscious from shock and blood loss.

“Yan-kun!!” Yandere screams anyway, sobbing now, “He’s going to bleed to death, murderers, murderers–!”

“That’s enough out of you,” the leader growls. He pulls out an assault rifle from a holster on his back and approaches Yandere.

When he gets there, Yandere spits in his face.

“We’ll be missed,” Yandere growls through his tears, “And we’ll be found.”

For all his bravado, he’s not sure he even believes it.

“Doubt it,” the leader says, before hitting Yandere between the eyes with the heavy butt of his rifle.

Stars explode before Yandere’s eyes, and then the world goes dark.

[creativeskullcreations]

HTaHHQ Episode 1: First Meetings(part 2)

Okay, so this was originally gonna be a two part thing, but part two ran long so now it's gonna be a three parter! Which is fine, since each "episode" is gonna be it's own little fic anyways, though it does mean a little more time before I can work on Outside again. Shouldn't take too long though, as part three is already written out and just needs edited.

Stacy was vaguely aware that Lydia and Riley could turn their attention to her any moment, but she remained frozen. She stared, with wide eyes, at the space where Riley's puppeteer should've been. Rather than a human, like there should've been, there was instead a strange, wheeled, metal stand. Between the wheels was a joint of some sort, since the stand was tilted forward as Riley leaned over the counter

'WHAT THE SHIT?!' Stacy stared silently, hand resting on the fallen beaker as her heart pounded in her ears. 'Are all of them like this?! Was Mortimer?!' She swallowed thickly. 'What was really on that paper he wanted me to sign?!'

The stand started to tilt back, and Stacy quickly stood up, beaker in hand. Without a word she put it back in place and quickly left the room, shoving her hands into her shorts pockets to keep them from shaking.

Luckily, nobody seemed to have noticed, as they simply restarted the scene without saying anything to her about anything. Taking advantage, she rushed to the bathroom, locking herself in one of the stalls.

'-shitshitshitshitshit-' Was the current commentary going through her head at the moment as she paced in the small space. Her hands covered her mouth to keep the sobs in as tears streamed down her face and she tried to will herself to stop crying. 'I can't! I can't stay here! Oh god...' She sniffed, rubbing at her eyes and sitting on the closed toilet lid. 'I want to go home...'

"Hey! Hey, Human!" Stacy's head snapped up just in time for something to fall on her face. She flinched and it slid off, landing on her lap and giving her a good look at it. It looked like a rather large hand puppet, like the ones given to the guest children at the end of filming. Only this one was moving on it's own, like Riley and, possibly, the others.

"Uh..." Was all Stacy could think of to say. It had snapped her out of... whatever that was, but this was yet another Puppet. Granted, it was certainly more adorable than the others, but still...

"Why are you in here? Shouldn't you be out there, doing Human stuff?" It -she, she had a female voice- asked, "standing" up in her lap. When she started to tip over, Stacy reached out a hand to help keep her steady.

'I felt like I was literally going to die because I discovered you guys have no puppeteers.' Yeah, no. She wasn't going to answer with that. "Well, this is the bathroom, so..."

"Yeah, but you aren't doing bathroom stuff. You're just crying." The Puppet dismissed, and Stacy felt vaguely offended at being called out so bluntly. "Why were you crying, anyways?"

"No reason..." 'That I will ever tell you or anyone ever.' She rubbed at her eyes, trying to get rid of the tears. "Where did you even come from, anyways?"

"The vents." She pointed up, and Stacy looked to see an open vent right above her. She would've said something about it, namely how creepy that was, when the Puppet spoke up again. "Anyways, my name's Scout! What about you?"

"Uh, Stacy. Stacy Al-Stein! Stacy Stein..." She looked back down at Scout. "What were you even doing up there?"

"Escaping, duh!" She then covered her mouth, looking almost sheepish. "Uh, please don't tell anyone, though. I'm not actually supposed to be out here right now."

"Don't worry. Nobody will hear about it from me." The girl promised. 'Not that anyone would even believe me, anyways...'

"Awesome!" The Puppet gave a open-mouthed grin that, in Stacy's opinion, killed any cuteness she had. "I'd still better go, though. Just, like, close your eyes or something."

Stacy did as asked, and felt the light weight vanish. She looked up in time to see the Puppet disappear from sight. '... That was really weird. I kinda hope I see her again before I leave, though...'

Feeling somewhat better, thought not really knowing why, the girl finished up and left the bathroom. Somehow, she felt confident enough to try and finish out the day. And, with any luck, she could convince Mary not to make her come back ever again.

Moving quickly, she managed to find Lydia again. To her relief, nobody seemed to have even noticed she was missing. Thus, she was able to smoothly rejoin Lydia as she led the kids over to the next segment.

"Ah, there you are Stacy!" She was greeted cheerfully. "We're just setting up for the next next segment. Then we've got Daisy's bit, and then it'll be time for lunch."

"Okay..." Stacy helped get the kids in place at the many different easels, making sure everyone had their markers and pads of paper. She paused briefly, staring when she saw Nick Nack helping a girl set up her paper. He was leaning over the table, showing her the proper way to put her pad on the easel. It was almost sweet, watching the usually stuck up Puppet help a kid out.

But knowing what she did now, Stacy found it pretty creepy.

But she ignored it. She helped Lydia make sure everyone had what they needed, and then moved off set so the cameras could get rolling. But even though she wasn't on set, she kept as close an eye as she could on the Puppet without being obvious. Danny was around somewhere, and like hell would she let these things get him.

The segment went as they normally did. The kids drew something and Nick Nack sang some stupid little song about being creative or something. It made Stacy scoff internally. 'I could write a much better song than that. I thought Nick was supposed to have standards.'

"Hey, kid." Lydia leaned in, trying not to be caught by the mic. "Head on over to the kitchen set and help Daisy get set up." Stacy gave her a horrified look, but it was misinterpreted. "Look, I know you're supposed to stick close to me, but she always needs the extra help. So if you could give her that today, I'll make sure she saves some pie for you, okay?"

'It's not like I have much of a choice, do I?!' The girl nodded mutely, and quietly started to sneak over to the proper set. She paused when she reached the edge, the angle allowing her to watch Daisy without being seen herself.

So far, it didn't seem the Puppet was doing anything sinister. She was just "pacing" back and forth behind her counter, setting out ingredients for whatever she would be baking on the segment. Most likely it would be pie, but from what Stacy knew she did occasionally make cake, and at one point she made donuts. She was also humming the theme song as she worked, which made her seem just a little bit more... human. At the very least, it gave Stacy enough courage to actually approach, making sure to make a bit of noise as she did so.

"Oh!" The Puppet jumped as the girl kicked a pen someone had left on the floor, turning to face her. "Well hey there Stacy! I didn't expect to see you here yet."

"Uh, Lydia said that you, y'know, might need help getting set up before all the kids showed up." She couldn't quite keep her voice from shaking, and prayed that it wasn't too obvious. Luckily, the southern belle didn't seem to notice, though Stacy wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.

"Well shoot, I sure could. Some of these assistants just put my things far too high on the shelves." She pulled a pad of paper and pen from her apron and scribbled out a quick list. "If you could just get me these out of the storage closet, I'd be ever so grateful." She handed over the list,, which Stacy took with some hesitation. "The closet is right over there, sugar. Shouldn't be too hard to find it."

"Yeah." She said, but Daisy had already moved on, disappearing from sight as she ducked under the counter. It left the girl feeling very much like character from a video-game.  Still, she shook it off and went over to the closet, finding it easily as it said Kitchen Storage on the door.

Entering with only a brief hesitation, she found the entire small room completely unorganized. "Jesus Christ! Did a hurricane come in through here?!" She glanced between the list and the mess piled around her with a heavy sigh. Even though there were only three items on it, she felt her heart sink as she looked around the room. "This is gonna take forever..."

"Stacy!" Came a cry from above, followed by something soft landing on her head. The girl gave a stifled scream as the Hand Puppet from before slid off her head onto a box in front of her.

"Scout?!" She struggled to keep her voice low. "What the hell?!"

"Are you getting stuff for Mom?" The Puppet asked, "hopping" from the box she was on to a lower one.

'... Mom?' Stacy's mind went blank for a moment, trying to figure out the logistics. "Uh..."

"Cause I know where everything is in here." She climbed up onto a set of boxes set up like stairs, ending up at almost eye level with the teen. "Sometimes Bonzai likes to hide stuff, but I always know how to find it. Just tell me what you need!"

"Uh, okay!" Stacy perked up, not one to ignore a miracle when it happened. She looked over the list again to make sure she got it right. "Okay.. First thing she needs is a hand mixer."

"Over there!" Scout pointed to a shelf and Stacy made her way over. Right there, underneath a box meant for a set of mixing bowls was the mixer. She picked it up, then looked at the list again.

"She also needs some measuring spoons, and some sort of special rolling pin, I think." Stacy scratched her head, confused, but Scout nodded.

"I know what you mean! The spoons are in here, and the rolling pin is way up there." Stacy could feel her hopes shatter once again as she looked up at the tall shelf the Puppet pointed to. "But don't worry, I can get it for you. You grab the box of spoons!"

"But-" Stacy looked back, only to find Scout had vanished. "Okay, then." She picked up the box and put the mixer in it. After a moment, she also dropped the list in too, in case Daisy needed to double check.

"Look out!" Stacy caught the falling objects in the box as well, said objects being Scout and the rolling pin. "Awesome catch! Totally saved my life there." She climbed out of the box, and the girl watched in concern as she dropped to the floor.

"Uh, don't you want to, I dunno, come with?" Stacy asked as the Puppet crawled away behind some boxes.

"Nah, I got stuff to do, vents to map out." She answered flippantly as she disappeared from sight. "I'll see you later, though!" Stacy looked behind the box, but couldn't see the Puppet despite there being nowhere she could go.

"Huh..." She chose to ignore that for now and left the closet, not sure if she was leaving or entering the Twilight Zone. She went back over to where Daisy was, hefting the box up onto the counter. "Um, here you go. This is everything you needed, right?" She backed away quickly as Daisy sped over to where she was, rifling through the box.

"Yep, sure is sugar!" She had a beaming smile on her face, but it just made Stacy uncomfortable, so she looked away. "Thank you so much for your help. Now I can get everything all set up before the kids get here."

"No problem..." Stacy muttered, backing up slightly. She watched as Daisy set everything up, unsure of whether to help or not. On the other hand, it felt wrong to simply stand there doing nothing. On the other, well...

Stacy had seen the older episodes of the show. One wrong move, and she was "burnt toast, sliced thinly" as the quote went. So she just stayed back and watched, waiting in case she did need help.

In the end, however, she didn't make a move to help. Not that it mattered much, as soon Lydia had showed up with the kids, and Stacy had her hands full helping get the in their places and sitting still.

"Thank you so much for doing that." The woman muttered as they helped everyone get set up for recording. "Seriously, it's making everything go so much faster."

"No problem..." Stacy said, wondering how much worse things would've been if she hadn't helped. 'It really didn't take that long. Although Scout did help me out. Maybe they should ask her for help next time they need stuff from in there.'

She helped finish getting things set up, then hurried out of the way so they could film the segment. She sat nervously next to Lydia, watching as the kids ran around "helping" Daisy bake a pie while she sang about it. It was all very typical for the kid's show, and Stacy found herself bored again very soon.

"Y'know, after this it'll be lunch time." Lydia whispered when she noticed her fidgeting. "Why don't you head on over to the cafeteria and get something to eat. I'll meet you over there when this is done."

"Are you sure that would be okay?" Stacy questioned. It wasn't that she didn't want to leave, but what Mary or Lydia's boss might say if they saw her just "wandering" around.

"It'll be fine. If anyone complains, just tell them that I sent ya on ahead to save me a seat." The woman told her with a wink and a grin which Stacy hesitantly returned. "It's down that hallway over there, and is the big room with the big windows. You can't miss it!"

"Okay." Stacy went off in the indicated direction, dodging around a few other workers. Nobody said a thing, or even seemed to take notice of her as she made her way down the hall, easily finding the cafeteria. Looking in the large windows, she saw a buffet style set up, not unlike the one at her school. The only difference was that it looked, and smelled, far more appetizing.

She was just about to open it, when she heard voices coming from the room across the hall. Before she had even registered who exactly was talking, she was already making her way over to listen in. Carefully, she opened the door just a crack, then crouched low to look through the opening.

"I can not believe those children! They ruined my set, and refused to listen!" Stacy watched as Riley wheeled back and forth, looking and sounding madder than Stacy would've thought possible for the seemingly nice Puppet. Nick Nack also watched her from where he was leaning against a desk, looking quite bored.

"Riley, please, he knocked over one empty beaker. The new girl even picked it up for you. It's fine." He sounded exasperated, but quickly backed up with an almost fearful expression as the scientist got in his face.

"Shut up you paint covered fool! I value each and every tool!" She shouted, making Nick and even Stacy flinch back. "One day a brat will make a mistake insurance can't cover! This is why I prefer working with children that are older." She hissed out.

"Yes, well, these segments are still integral to the show. The parents love them, more than the kids I think." The artist had recovered quickly, now looking unfazed by the rant. He took a paint brush out of his pocket and examined it, making a show of not looking at his fellow Puppet. "Besides, we're recording the actual story after the humans eat, and you're on first again. So surely you can keep a hold of yourself until then."

Riley just grumbled, crossing her arms. Nick sighed, putting his brush away, and Stacy ducked to the side when he turned to face the scientist and, consequently, the door.

"What do you think of the new girl, anyways?" He asked. "She seems rather shy to me."

Riley scoffed. "It's her first day Nick Nack, and she's being taught by Lydia of all people. Just give her a week, and I'm sure she'll, uh..." Riley trailed off, and Stacy found herself trying to think of what could possibly rhyme with "people".

"Talk yourself into a corner, did you?" He asked smugly, and Stacy looked back to see the absolute smirkiest smirk on his face. Riley was on him instantly, smacking him with both hands.

"Shut up shut up SHUT UP!" She snarled with every hit. "At least I actually try! Not my fault you can't continue the rhymes!"

"Now you wait just a minute there!" The artist snapped as he backed away from her, but anything else he would say Stacy didn't hear, as something - or rather, someone - once again landed on her head. She snapped her head forward and caught Scout as she fell.

"Hi Stacy!" The hand Puppet greeted, a little too loudly for the girl's taste. She felt her heart stop as the argument beyond the door did, and quickly backed away.

"Hey, Scout..." She said quietly as she hurried away. The cafeteria, while not full, did have people in it. Which meant it wasn't a good hiding spot so long as she had Scout with her. Instead she ducked around the corner, hoping the two Puppets wouldn't be curious enough to look very far. Her heart sank when she noticed it was a dead end, but she ignored it for the moment. "What were you up to?"

"Looking for you." The Puppet said. "How'd Mom's part of the show go?"

"Uh, good?" She winced at the questioning tone. "I don't really know, Lydia sent me over here, so I didn't get to see all of it."

"That's too bad." Scout said, then almost deflated as the squeaking of wheels approached. "Oh no."

Stacy felt everything go cold, and started to hold Scout tighter. Her heart pounded, and she backed up as Riley came around the corner with a glare.

"Scout!" She snapped. "We have told you before, during the day you're not to venture beyond your door!"

"Indeed." Nick said as he joined the scientist. Together, they managed to block a good portion of the narrow hallway, blocking any escape. Stacy felt her throat constrict, heartbeat quickening as she realized she was cornered. "You should know better by now."

"But I wasn't seen!" A pause as the small Puppet glanced at the human holding her. "By more than one person. But Stacy's my friend! She's cool with it! Right, Stacy?" Scout looked up, frowning when she gave no answer. "Stacy?"

Pupils shrunk and breathing quick and shallow, the girl was staring straight ahead and clutching the Hand Puppet in an ever tightening grip. It was starting to hurt, actually, and Scout was beginning to worry about her new friend. "Um, Stacy..."

Riley ignored the girl and simply sighed, approaching and reaching for the Puppet. "Enough of this nonsense! It's time to-"

Stacy shrieked, flinging Scout at Nick and catching him in the face. While he stumbled back, scrambling to grab the Hand Puppet, she shoved Riley to the floor and bolted. The three of them watched  as she vanished around the corner, the sound of her footsteps fading fast as she raced away.

"Well." Nick said, holding Scout as he stared after the girl and Riley struggled to pick herself up off the floor. "That was certainly... something." He cleared his throat, desperate to think of what he should do, but nothing came to mind.

"Man, I can't believe you two chased off my only friend!" Scout lamented, interrupting his tumbling thoughts. He stared down at her as she flopped over in his grip in the most over dramatic way possible. "She was so cool! Didn't talk down to me or anything. And now I'm never going to see her again!"

"Er..." He blinked, now even more confused. He wanted his paints back, as at least he understood those. 'Blasted humans, making a mess out of everything. Father, at least, was never this bad!'

"Just help me get off the ground!" Riley demanded, shaking the artist from his thoughts and confusion. "And don't worry about the girl Scout, I'm sure we'll see her around."

"But, not you." Nick told the Hand Puppet as he helped Riley up. "You, I'm sure, will be grounded."

"Boooooooooo!" But Scout didn't complain beyond that, letting Nick haul her back to Daisy's room. Riley, meanwhile went in search of another human. There was a human child now lost somewhere in the studio, and proper procedure was to tell the adults so they could handle it. And Riley wasn't one to ignore proper procedure.

[softlyjiminie]

ambidextrous | k.n.j

⇢  pairing(s): soulmate!kim Namjoon x reader.

⇢  word count: 2.4K

⇢  genre: fluff, friends to lovers!au, college!au, soulmate!au.

⇢  summary: soulmates were a common thing in this world, yours could hear the thoughts in your head. the only way to know when you’ve met him, is to hear that one keyword.

⇢  warning(s): please read! nothing major, probably swearing.

⇢ author’s note(s): hello babies! long time no see, here’s a little friday fic for you! i’ve had this in my drafts for almost a year so i hope you like it mwah.

Soulmates were a common thing in this world, some liked the idea of having someone that they were destined to be with and some disliked being bound to someone eternally. You didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

You remember when you met your soulmate or rather heard him for the first time. His thoughts growing louder and louder in your head to the point where it caused you to stop playing with the dolls you had out. You had been nine.

You remember screaming and crying to your mother that night, after hearing his sort of inappropriate thoughts and you remember your poor mother having to explain to you from an early age what the birds and the bees were.

It was obvious then that your soulmate was a year or two older than you, you remember being too scared to ask him to cut down on his fun time so writing a letter to recite in your head seemed to work.

‘I-uh... I’m so sorry,’ said his voice after you finished reading, and you blushed at the unfamiliar feeling of a boy’s voice in your head. ‘I’m Namjoon.’

You smiled, finally getting a name. ‘It’s okay, and I’m YN.’

The pair of you became good friends after that, as much as you could without meeting each other in real life. The thing about soulmates was that you’d never know when you’d meet them until they’d said a keyword out loud. It was said that a wave of pure emotion; happiness and love was to crash over you as soon as you head it. You couldn’t wait for the day that you met Namjoon.

He was your best friend, practically; you recalled a time when you were twelve and he’d calmed you down from a panic attack after you’d lost your parents on a family holiday. There was also that time that he stayed up with you until the early hours of the morning; whispering sweet words to you after your ex-boyfriend publicly embarrassed you when you were seventeen.

Namjoon was always there for you; and you for him. There had been many nights when you’d cheered him on at his lowest, Joon was a smart boy and had so much pressure on him. It was easy for him to doubt himself. Though, as intelligent as your future partner may have been; he was also very clumsy and over the years you had spent many a nights scolding him through your mindlink when he’d ended up in A&E.

Sometimes; Namjoon was very analytical. Often sending you into spiels of existential crisis’ with his thoughts. One time, when you were eighteen, you’d spilt coffee all over a customer when Namjoon started thinking about the meaning of life. You had to spend half an hour explaining to your boss what had happened whilst receiving frantic apologies from the supposed love of your life.

So now; aged twenty and at three AM you were lying wide awake as your soulmate rambled on about society and a few other things that you couldn’t quite register. You loved how Joon could always see a deeper meaning in the simplest of things and how he could find beauty in everything, but it was 3 AM for Christ’s sake, and you had a lecture at 9 the same day.

‘Namjoon... you know I love you...’ you started, speaking your thoughts with a tired expression and all his late night ramblings ceased, causing you to smile as you rolled onto your side.

You imagined him smirking on the other side of your mindlink and you wondered what he looked like. ‘Why do I feel like I’m about to be roasted?’

‘Maybe it’s because it’s almost 4 AM and you won’t stop with the philosophical bullshit,’ you teased back, giggling into your pillow. There was a pause before you could hear Namjoon’s melodious chuckle in your head. ‘Your laugh is so pretty.’ you mumbled and he stopped laughing.

The silence caused you to bite your lip as you hugged your pillow to your chest. ‘You’re so pretty.’ he countered, softly.

‘You don’t even know what I look like...’

‘I don’t need to, you have a beautiful personality and I’m in love with you.’

You sighed in content, deciding so utter back a small thank you. You didn’t go back to sleep after that, opting to stay up and not go to your lecture tomorrow. It was just one lecture, you’d be fine. You liked times like this, where you could talk endlessly to your soulmate and it made you almost sad that you weren’t meeting any time soon.

It was five AM when you randomly decided to paint your nails, chatting happily to Namjoon about his plans for the day. You had just finished painting your left hand, the red nail polish contrasting against your beautiful skin tone. Now, you struggled to paint your right hand causing you to pout in frustration.

‘YN, what are you doing?’ Namjoon asked and you almost forgot that you were talking to him. Setting the nail varnish down, you glared at your messily painted nails before blowing on them lightly to dry the colour.

You sighed slightly and leaned back into your plush pillows. ‘I’m tryna paint my nails, the right hand looks so messy, ugh,’ You rolled your eyes when Joon laughed at you. ‘I wish I could paint my nails with both hands, and write too, what’s the word? I wish I was...’

‘Ambidextrous?’ your soulmate finished for you with a smug tone in his voice. ‘If you listened to my philosophical bullshit then maybe you’d know that.’

‘Shut up!’ You grumbled, a coy smile tickling the seams of your lips. You thought about how Namjoon was probably smiling too, a breathless chuckle falling from his lips as sat at a desk or lay on his bed. You sat up, leaning against the headboard of your own bed and listened again for your soulmate’s voice. ‘Say it again for me?’

You asked sweetly, trying to suppress a giggle as Namjoon sighed. There was a slight pause in the conversation from where Namjoon was preparing an accent before he spoke. ‘Ambidextrous...’ he whispered in a low and husky voice before you burst out laughing, feeling the happiest you’d been in a while.

Almost a week later; you found yourself at an all time low. Final exams for the semester had begun to roll in and your college roommate had decided to move in with her partner; leaving you alone to make ends meet. You had acquired the position of barista at the campus cafe due to your short employment in the coffee shop back home. To top it off, you hadn’t heard from your soulmate since that night, leaving you alone with no one to talk or vent to.

Instead you spent most of your days studying behind the counter whilst one of your coworkers took orders. A ticket came in for a tall vanilla latte and peach iced tea and you quickly set to work mixing the syrups and bases. A frown twisted on your lips as you made the drinks, your mind drifting to Namjoon, he had told you that his favourite drink was the Vanilla latte, and it only made you that slightest bit sadder.

Once the drinks were made, you set them on the counter and let your coworker call out the orders, sitting back down, you begun to stare blankly at the study notes you held so tightly...your thoughts now suddenly caught up on Namjoon. That’s when you heard it. A deep, smooth and luscious voice chatting away as they came to collect their drinks; you sat up, easing your hearing into the conversation as their voice sounded vaguely familiar.

“I’m telling you, Jimin , she’s perfect for me... I can’t get her out of my head.” the original voice gushed, causing you to perk up ever so slightly.

His friend sighed, seemingly unamused. “That’s kinda how soulmates work hyung...”

“You know what I mean.” the deeper voice snapped back and the conversation drew to a close as the pair presumably went to find a table. You sunk back into your seat, notebook outstretched on your lap as you tried to focus back on studying. ‘Must be nice’ you sighed to yourself, a little part of you hoping that Namjoon would hear. You were met with silence.

“YN!” you jumped at the sudden shout of your name, dropping your work to the sticky floor behind the counter and you internally groaned as you pulled it up from the floor and offered a sheepish smile to the team manager for today’s shift. “What are you doing?”

Studying. What does it look like? “Nothing,” you beamed, whipping down your apron. Your manager eyed you suspiciously, before shoving a tray of drinks in your hand.

“Table five. The jocks. Now.” She grunted. Bitch.

The table was just as rowdy as expected, with the University’s prized football squad getting their daily caffeine fix before practice. You’d served them quite a few times before, having become their favourite waitress on a Sunday morning, you weren’t sure if it was because the youngest, Jeongguk from your psychology class, had a crush on you or if it was because the boys genuinely liked you. Either way, you got good tips.

“Morning boys, big game coming up?” You chirped, setting out the iced coffees and frappes in front of each designated boy. They all barked out a sweet or cocky reply as you worked.

An orange haired boy grinned up at you. “Why of course Miss YN, have you noticed that I’ve been working out extra hard? I wanna impress you during our match on Friday.”

“Hyung, She has a soulmate!”

“So what? A man can flirt can’t he?”

You chuckled at their antics and rolled your eyes, sliding over the boy’s drink with a mischievous look. What? It was fun to play along. “Ever the charmer, aren’t you Hoseok? Too bad I’m not interested.”

The jocks let out a series of ‘ooo’s as you sashayed away from the table, mentioning how you’d be right back with their breakfasts. You trailed back to the kitchen, grabbing their orders of piping hot hash browns and full English breakfasts before walking through the cafe to reach the boys again. You couldn’t help but zone into the conversations of surrounding customers, one in particular catching your attention.

“You type really fucking slowly with your left hand hyung-” the voice from earlier, Jimin, commented with a slurp of his drink. You heard his friend audibly sigh with annoyance as you walked by and couldn’t help but to smile to yourself. “It’s stressing me out man.”

“Well I’m sorry Jimin, not all of us can be fucking ambidextrous!”

You froze. The small hairs on your skin rising high as a wave of goosebumps crashed over you. The tray in your hands clattered to the floor, as heads whipped in your direction but their judging gazes didn’t matter to you. Nothing mattered. Nothing except him. A sweet taste melted on your tongue and all you could smell was him; pine cones and Earth, candle wax and old paper books. It was all him. All Namjoon.

Slowly, you turned around, arms shaking and body trembling. A boy around a head or so taller than you, stood across from you in the aisle of the cafe, blonde hair parted and swept over his forehead. His skin was a delicious tone that screamed warmth and kisses under the sun and you felt an innate desire to run your finger tips over its supple plains. His eyes were like molten pools of chocolate, his lips so plump and kissable. He was Namjoon, he was your soulmate.

You felt your heart rate increase as the pair of you cautiously approached one another, being mindful to step over shard of broken ceramic plates and pools of baked beans. You met each other halfway, with hesitant smiles and flushed cheeks but Namjoon was the first to break the ice. “Y-YN?” He stammered out, his eyes searching your face and drinking in your features like it was his last meal. You nodded shyly, eyes bulging when the taller boy pulled you into his chest, his arms encasing you. You felt warm and safe and at home. “Wow...I-...I can’t believe you’re really...y-you!”

He pulled away, and you grinned up at him. “Hi,”

“Hi,” he smiled back, still holding you in his arms. “I can’t believe I’m actually holding you, and that we’re in the same university? How have we never met before? How is this even possible? I’m just so-“

You rolled your eyes at him playfully, pressing a finger to his lips to silence his ramblings. “Are we starting with that philosophical bullshit again, Joonie?” You whispered, savouring the sound of his low chuckle that bounced around in his chest.

“Yes, we’re soulmates now. You’re stuck with me,” came his quick-fired response, his hand coming up to encase your own. “And now, I finally have you.”

Never in your life had you felt so much love and it was all for you. The way Namjoon had glanced down at you in that second had filled you with so much happiness, before he was just a voice in your head and now he was a physical form to hold you and care for you. He was yours. “You’ll always have me...” Trailing your finger tips across his broad shoulders, you let them trail up to he hairs on the nape of his neck as the blonde leaned in, his plump lips gently brushing your own before he kissed you, softly, his hands curling around your waist to draw you closer. “Namjoon... I-I, I love you,”

And he smiled, kissing you again, right there in the cafe in the middle of your Sunday morning shift. With your boss and the jocks and all the other students watching, but it felt like you were the only two people in the world.

“Wait.wait, wait...what the fuck?” Jimin called out from the table, an incredulous look plastered on his face, his brows furrowed. The pink haired male looked around, just as confused as his fellow peers, before making eye contact with Namjoon. “Please don’t tell me you just met your soulmate by saying ambidextrous-”

You smiled, still in Namjoon’s arms, who only offered his friend a sheepish grin, sending Jimin into a series of eye rolls and complaints of disbelief. Never him mind though, at least you had your soulmate now.

[the--sad--hatter]

Name Calling (21)

FANDOM - MARVEL MCU

PAIRING - BUCKY X READER (female reader, no physical descriptions)

WARNINGS - ALL OF THEM, SMUT, VIOLENCE ANGST

DESCRIPTION -  In which the ongoing and bloody war of words between you and Bucky turns in your favor when a disgruntled one night stand of his lets slip a secret when you run into her in the elevator… Now you have all the ammunition you need to destroy your enemy but you don’t plan on killing him quickly. Oh no, Bucky Barnes was going to suffer and you were going to enjoy every second. You just didn’t count on how much you would enjoy it.

Current Word Count -  61,976

MASTERLIST

Chapter Twenty-one - A Kitten In A Birds Nest

It was kind of a relief to realize that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. You may have handed your virginity over on a sliver platter to him and enjoyed every second but make no mistake, You absolutely hated Bucky Barnes.

“Bucky, get up!” You hissed at him.

Yes, waking up in his arms had been the most transcendent experience of your life. His warmth had surrounded you all night so even deep in sleep you knew you were safe and protected. His arms, one metal, one flesh had cocooned you perfectly, never too tight. Seeing his sleeping face, his expression peaceful and his hair spread over your pillow when you opened your eyes had made a warm fuzzy feeling blossom in your chest.

Then you had looked at the time. It was past dawn and since most days you were woken up by someone walking into your room, he could not be here. He was awake, there was no way he wasn’t. You’d been whisper shouting at him for the last few minutes as you raced around the room, picking up his clothes.

“I swear to god Barnes!”

Still nothing. He was defiantly ignoring you and you’d had enough. Standing over him you attempted to shove at his shoulder but suddenly there was a sensation of falling and the whole room was spinning. You blinked at Bucky in surprise. You were flat on your back on the bed, his forearms resting on either side of your head while his body hovered over yours.

“What the fuck Bucky?”

He didn’t answer, just lazily nuzzled into your neck. You realized with a start that Bucky Barnes was adorably sleepy and was trying to buy your silence with affection.

“You have to go to your own room.” You whined half heartedly.

“You got shot doll, nobody is going to want to wake you up this early.” He groused, his voice thick with sleep.

“But if they do...” You stuttered, his stubble was rubbing against the skin of your neck and it was distracting.

“If they do, what?” He asked.

“They’ll see you.”

“And?”

“That would be bad, very very bad.” You sighed.

He lifted his head to look at you. There was a flash of hurt in his eyes.

“James...”

“I get it, can’t have people thinking you don’t hate me.” He said and rolled off at you.

You were suddenly very cold and it wasn’t just because of the loss of his body heat.

“Nobody can know this happened, because of Tony’s parents.” You stated and he stilled.

It was something you had never discussed or brought up with him before.

“Because I killed them.” He said sadly, resignedly.

“Because Hydra killed them and they used you to do it.” You corrected.

“It was still me. And Tony Starks daughter could never be with the man who murdered his parents.”

“He knows it wasn’t you, he does. He’s not angry, he doesn’t hate you. But the last the last thing his parents saw was your face and thats something he can’t forget. Every time he look at you he remembers it and it hurts him. I can’t risk him feeling that way when he looks at me Bucky, I can’t.” Your eyes were wet as you pleaded with him to understand.

“Don’t worry doll, Tony will never know you’ve been tainted by me. I’ll just be your dirty little secret.” He snapped, pulling his jeans on.

The tears spilled down your cheeks when you heard the way he said those words. Such anger and loathing but it wasn’t aimed at you, it was all for himself.

“Buck wait that’s not what I, Bucky stop!” You yelled the last part when he headed for the door.

You didn’t know what to say, you had just wanted to stop him leaving like this. So you tried honesty, you let your feeling pour out, unfiltered.

“Tony didn’t have to rescue me, he could have let the X-Men do it. He didn’t have to keep me or give me a home, he didn’t have to be so fucking patient with me. He never once snapped at me when I was asking him benign questions every five seconds or when I followed him everywhere, he didn’t make me feel weird when I crawled under his desk or wouldn’t go into a room without listening at the door first. I was freak, a broken thing and he took me in and he didn’t fix me, he stood by me and helped me fix myself. I can’t hurt him Bucky, I just can’t. But I never meant to hurt you either.”

He looked back at you and his eyes were so full of pain it knocked the breath from your lungs.

“You deserve better than me anyway sweetheart. No hard feelings.”

And then he was gone. You wanted to chase after him, to scream at him for saying such things about himself, to kiss him and show him how much you cared. But you just sat on the bed and cried because sometimes, when you hurt someone, you can’t fix it.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Eventually hunger drove you from the sanctity of your room. Your heart was aching and you felt heavy with regret and grief. You dragged yourself to the kitchen with a blanket round your shoulders, the soft cotton acting like a shield between you and the world. You raided the cupboards for some protein bars and grabbed a bottle of water before trudging back to your room.

You were so distracted by your grief you didn’t even notice Natasha watched you from the sofa, noting your dejected body language. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion as you waddled away. Something was wrong with you and she was going to figure out what.

“Post mission blues?” She called out.

You paused before poking you head back through the door, you eyes red and puffy.

“I’m fine. Just tired.” You croaked and scurried away before she could call you out on your lie.

You heard her get up knew she was following you so. Natasha could read someone with a single look, she was like a ninja Sherlock Holmes. You couldn’t face her right now so like the brave super soldier mutant you were you ran away, your blanket flapping behind you like a cape.

You raced along the corridors searching for somewhere to hide, you obviously couldn’t go back to your room now. You couldn’t go to the lab, your dad would want to know what was wrong. In fact you couldn’t hide out in someone else’s room for the same reason.

“Psst.” Someone said.

You craned your neck back to see Clint leaning out of the vent in the ceiling.

“Hiding from Nat?”

“How did you know?”

“Nat’s the only one who could put such a fearful look on someone’s face.” he explained, offering you a hand.

You only had a few seconds max before Natasha caught up but if you accepted you’d be stuck in the vents with Clint. Who was much more gullible and easier to lie to. Or threaten into silence. You shoved your water and protein bars into your pockets and jumped up to grab his hand, letting him pull you into the vents. He replaced the grate and held a finger to his lips to silence you. You peered out of the grate to see a silent red head walk underneath it and internally breathed a sigh of relief.

Clint grinned and gave you a thumbs up, pointing behind himself and motioning you to follow. He crawled away and since you didn’t have many other options you followed him. When had your life become this strange? You were following a killer archer through a ventilation system to hide from a deadly former assassin because you didn’t want her to know you’d slept with another deadly former assassin. You couldn’t make this stuff up, It was like some lonely, depressed maniac with an overactive imagination and too much time on her hands was in charge of your decisions……

You followed him for a few minutes before he led you a corner that he’d made a nest in and you snorted. He looked back over his shoulder at you with a raised brow.

“Sorry, it’s just you have an actual nest.” You chuckled.

It’s my man cave, where I come to hide from Natasha. And keep my stuff where Wilson can’t mess with it.” He told you.

Sure enough, there were arrows scattered around and piles of magazines and books.

He settled down and waved around.

“Make yourself at home, me nest su nest.”

“Thanks.” You replied, sitting cross legged and pulling your blanket cape around yourself tightly.

You dug your protein bars out of your pocket and ripped one open with your teeth but before you could take a bite Clint snatched it out of your hands with a look of disgust.

“No. Bad Kitty.” He admonished, bopping you on the nose.

You were close to biting his finger off if he tried that again when he shoved a bag of M&M’s into your hands. You cooed happily and tore them open, digging in. Clint grabbed a handful and settled with his back against the wall, watching you thoughtfully.

“So what’s got your panties in a bunch?” He asked.

You almost flinched at his phrasing but caught yourself. You couldn’t tell him everything but you had to tell him something so you opted for a watered down version of the truth.

“I think I might want something I can’t have and I went after it. Now I’ve hurt other people and I don’t know how I could have been so selfish or stupid.” You admitted.

“Is this about you going after Docherty alone?” he wondered, perplexed by your vague problem.

“Yes…..” You lied.

“Well, it was stupid. You messed up but you know you did and you can’t take it back but you can try to do better next time. But it’s a complicated situation and you did what your heart was telling you to do. That doesn’t make you a bad person, even if people got hurt in the process. Those people you’re worried about love you and would do anything for you, they’ll forgive you.” He said.

You were both talking about very different problems but someone what he said applied to your situation with Bucky. At least you hoped it did.

“If one of your kids did something they knew would hurt you but they didn’t do it because it would hurt you, could you forgive them?” You asked.

“It depends on what it was and whether it hurt them I think. I just want my kids to be happy and safe, that’s all that really matters.”

“So if it made them happy, really really happy and it would hurt them not to do it… You’d forgive them, even if it hurt you.” You clarified.

“As a parent there’s very little your kids could do that you wouldn’t forgive. Even if it breaks your heart, it’s very hard to stay angry at them.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I’m scared of Tony hating me, being mad at me but I’m more afraid he’d just keep loving me, even when I was causing him pain.” You admitted.

“Ok I’m lost. What are we talking about again?”

“Nothing Clint, it’s fine.” You sniffled.

“Whatever it is, you’ll figure it out. I have faith in you, after everything I’ve seen you achieve.”

“Thanks Clint.”

“Maybe, if you need advice ask Laura. She’s better at this sort of thing. You and Wanda are still coming for the weekend right? I’m flying us to the farm tomorrow morning.”

“You know what? I don’t think this trip could have come at a better time.” You admitted, shoving a handful of M&M’s into your mouth.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

After spending a couple of hours in the vents with Clint, throwing M&M’s into each other mouths and seeing who had better aim (him, obviously) you had finally emerged only to land directly in front of a waiting Natasha. You sighed heavily.

“Please don’t. Not yet. I promise I’ll tell you what’s wrong, but I can’t yet.” You admitted.

“Alright Kotonok, you can tell me at the farm, away from here.” She allowed, offering your hand for you to shake on it.

You shook her hand, sealing the pact and knew you would have to admit everything to her soon but at least you had a little bit of time to process it first.

You waved at her and headed off to your room, changing into your sweats and a tank top. You weren’t allowed to spar or work out for at least a week, until your shoulder healed up but you figured that you could at least use the treadmill. Even if you weren’t supposed to, what Bruce didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. Besides, you really needed a way to release all the pent up energy inside you, you needed an outlet.

The problem was, you weren’t the only one. As soon as you walked into the gym you saw him. He was going to town on a punching bag, like it had personally offended him. Probably imagining your face on it. He stilled as he heard you come in, the muscles on his back tensing. He stood like that for a second before continuing like nothing was wrong.

You couldn’t do this, you couldn’t be in the same room as him. Every single cell in your body was begging you to run to him. It was like there a string tied around your heart and he was tugging on it.  You turned on your heel and walked back out but you couldn’t bring yourself to just leave without saying anything, there was something he needed to know.

“You said I deserved better than you. That’s not true. Even when we were fighting, when I was being cruel to you, you dragged me away from those journalists. You could have just got me away from them and called it your good deed for the day but you took me to the one person who could help me. You had my back in the field, leaving the main fight so I wouldn’t be alone. You have never once mentioned what you must have seen that day, when you saw Vernichtung. You came after me on a date because you were worried about me. You forgave me for hurting you and held my hand at my mothers funeral. I don’t deserve better than you, I don’t even deserve you at all. But Bucky, I want you. I need you.” You told him, sighing and walking away.

“You have me.” He whispered, but you were already gone.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I DID IT! I got the chapter done! WOOOO! Fuck you mean anons, and thank you nice, kind people who helped build my confidence back up. All the private mesages and anonymous kind words made me feel supported. 

Next Time On Name Calling - Reader and the girls go to the farm and reader finally meets a chicken. 

I write Clint as a weird blend of MCU Clint and comic Clint, I don’t really know why. 

@nerdandproud-86 @harrison-shot-first@chook007@thejourneyneverendsx@thelostallycat@inquisitor-selvala@the-corruptor @iovher@kendrawr-kitkat@phoenix-whiskey-tears @the–real-wombat@buckitybarnes@fairislesheets@angieptt@meganjonezzzz

@dugan365 @fluffeh-kitty@memanda17@krystallynx@theonelittleone

@piscesbarnes @free-as-fishes@tarastudiesalot@captainamericasbeard

[secret-engima]

We need more Hardwire LOVE! (Flails) give me 'Wire meeting the Wreckers for the first time in his predacon form. HCS?

XDD Okay but before I start this since this is something that MIGHT come up in AMOSC later, this is probably not going to be canon depending on how the story changes, but hypothetically-

-Much, much terror on the side of the Wreckers, hidden under macho behavior that doesn’t fool Hardwire’s dragon senses for even a nano-klik.

-Probably first sighting was in battle.

-Probably just after one of them said something Really Dumb about the rumors that the Autobots have a Predacon now. Something to the order of “Oh please, we all know that’s propaganda. Predacons are myths. What- you expect the Prime to come swooping down from on high riding a mythical, fire-breathing beast?”

-Cue Hardwire carelessly King Ghidorah-ing his way through a nearby building, breathing fire and roaring loud enough to wake the dead three star systems over while Optimus, who hitched a ride on Hardwire only because he really needed to get to some part of the field and the rubble was too thick to drive and it would take too long to run, clings to his back and somehow manages to look Epic™ rather than the truth like he’s screaming internally like the meek Archivist he used to be.

-Hardwire slams down onto the pavement like- twenty yards away from the Wreckers which, when one is the size of a freaking predacon, might as well have been inches from their faceplates, bites a decepticon in half, flings the half in his mouth at group of decepticons and then proceeds to set everything not an autobot on fire.

-Optimus slides down from Hardwire’s back in the moment of Horrified Silence that follows, pats Hardwire’s neck in thanks, and then runs off, picking his way through the molten slag with care as he does so.

-All the Wreckers are .... the absolute quietest they’ve ever been. There is not a peep out of them. It’s just a huge gaggle of buff, adrenaline-junky autobots all ... standing there doing the cybertronian equivalent of holding their breath and bugging their eyes out.

-Ultra Magnus is now the only bot with the Slightest Bit of Chill in this entire square block of city, having been warned by both his sparkchild and by an official PSA sent to all Autobot officers that Hardwire Is A Predacon Now, No We Aren’t Kidding and Yes He’s Still Friendly.

-Ultra Magnus takes several moments to relish in the blissful, hauntingly dead silence and probably sneak a few pictures of the Wreckers all doing impressions of bristly, bug-opticed mannequins, then dares to clear his vents to get Hardwire’s attention.

-Hardwire immediately snaps his head around from where he was happily indulging his instincts to Shred the ruined frame of a Decepticon super-tanker with his claws and teeth (yes he knows it’s already super dead and no he’s not trying to eat it, but his Instincts Demand Action and sometimes Wire just needs to Indulge). Ultra Magnus, with all the unflappable poise trained into him via surviving and managing the Wreckers, calmly asks Hardwire to drop the leg he was chewing on please and thank you.

-Hardwire casually spits out the leg and huffs at Ultra Magnus, behind him he hears his Wreckers whisper-begging over the coms for him to please just RUN AWAY THEY DON’T WANT HIM TO DIE. Ultra Magnus does no such thing (though he kinda wants to) and instead pats Hardwire’s nose and politely asks if Hardwire would like to help the Wreckers break through the decepticon flank.

-Hardwire looks past Ultra Magnus to where the Wreckers are trying their absolute hardest and failing not to look scared out of their armor, then laughs, a deep, gurgling noise that probably sounds like Death to every primal cybertronian instinct. Hardwire nods curtly and Ultra Magnus calmly tells the Wreckers to follow Hardwire’s path through the city, and for the flyers to give him backup.

-The flyers Do Not want to give him backup. They do not believe Hardwire Needs Backup. They do it anyway because they are Wreckers and if their superior officer can mech up and interact with the Giant Mythical Creature of Death then so can they.

-The fear doesn’t last very long after that. By the time the battle is over and the decepticons have been Thoroughly Routed (while screaming about the Wreckers having a literal Thing of Nightmares on their roster now) the flyers are doing aerial tricks to try to impress Hardwire and the grounders are all arguing over who gets to ask for a ride (more than one Wrecker has yote themselves off a building at this point to hitch a temporary ride on Hardwire’s back/in his talons, Hardwire thinks its hilarious but also irritating).

-The Wreckers beg to keep him. Hardwire finally transforms back into his mech form and firmly says he is not a pet to be kept.

-Wreckers being Wreckers, this means nothing, and the whining that they want a predacon of their own lasts for at least another vorn, much to Ultra Magnus’s vague exasperation.

[as-write-as-rain]

Once Upon A Dream (remix) - Chapter 4

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Summary: A Sleeping Beauty/Winter Soldier remix, featuring the reader as a SHIELD agent who might have powers (or just a really finely tuned intuition)

Warnings: None. If you’ve seen and enjoyed the Captain America films, you shouldn’t find anything troubling here.

The fourth chapter of my Fairy Tale AU for @moonbeambucky’s 5k Writing Challenge! 

Chapter 4

While the droning computerized voice monologued, your feeling of danger had increased. And you’d been correct, as always – but it turned out things were a lot worse than even you had expected.

Still, the new information you’d obtained from the computer-claiming-to-be-a-man did serve to answer a lot of your lingering questions about why things at SHIELD had felt increasingly off, and precisely why all of you were now being hunted by your former colleagues.

As you drove back down the same highway you’d driven up only a few hours earlier, Nat napping in the backseat and Steve dozing beside you, you couldn’t help but mentally berate yourself for your inability to have foreseen this situation.

What good was an acutely sensitive sixth sense if it only told you something was up, but not what to look for? That’s like a fire station whose alarm only says there’s a fire somewhere, good luck finding it yourself. You depended upon your intuition, and your team depended on you – and you were letting not only them down, but the whole freaking country at this point.

“You alright?” Steve’s voice was a low murmur, careful not to wake Natasha; yet it startled you out of your internal diatribe.

“Yeah.” You paused and shook your head. “I mean, no. I mean – I just don’t even know anymore, you know?” He stayed quiet, listening, so you rushed to fill in the silence. “I just…how did I not see this coming?” You hated how your voice sounded strained, like you were on the verge of tears. There was no way you were going to cry.

“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself. None of us saw this coming.”He reassured you.

“Okay, but I’m supposed to see stuff – stuff like this. And I’ve known for a while something was up, but this….this is so much more than what I’m used to. I just feel so far out of my depth, Steve. And I feel like I’m letting everyone down.”

“Y/N.” His voice was so calm and so serious you heaved a sigh and took your eyes off the road for a few seconds to glance at him. Even in the dimming twilight, the kindness in his eyes almost made you break. “Nobody blames you for this. Nobody expects you to see everything. Your quick thinking in there, shoving us into that vent shaft or whatever before the missile hit? That saved our lives. Nobody cares that you didn’t see this coming ten years earlier.”

You took a shaky breath and let it out. His words made sense; was it possible you were being too hard on yourself?

“Hell, if you wanna blame someone, blame me. I’m the one who failed to stop Zola all those years ago; if we’d managed to take him out then, this never would have happened.”

Stunned, you glared at him, quicker to leap to his defense than to your own. “Now you’re just talking crazy.”

Giving you that small, sincere Captain America Believes In You smile, he responded, “No crazier than you.”

“Steve. How could anyone think Zola’s actions – or HYDRA’s actions – were your fault? You did everything you could and then some. You were Captain Freaking America, the biggest hero of World War Two. You punched Hitler in the face like a million times! Nobody could possibly hold you responsible for anything that happened while you were in the ice.”

The volume of your whispers climbed higher, threatening to wake Nat, and Steve motioned for you to keep it down.

“What I’m trying to say, Y/N, is that the only people we can blame for Zola’s – or HYDRA’s – actions are Zola and HYDRA. Sitting around pointing fingers, even at ourselves, is a waste of time. It doesn’t matter whether any of us could have seen it coming – not that I’m even sure we could have done something to prevent it. This was put in motion long before you were even born; and even if you had noticed it last year or five years ago, would that even have made a difference?” He shook his head firmly, as if to answer his own question. “Ultimately, what really matters is what we do next, now that we know the threat.”

You made a face and chewed on the inside of your lip. There was a definite logic to what he was saying. The seeds of this had been planted eons ago. And regardless of whether you could have seen it coming, you hadn’t – so every moment spent beating yourself up about the past was a moment not spent figuring out what to do about the present. Continuing to waste time and energy on self-flagellation was far from helpful, and could honestly only make the situation worse.

“I guess you’re right,” you finally mumbled. The smartest course of action would be to immediately put all your focus into your intuition – to be fully present so you could know what to do. After all, tuning into your sixth sense took a lot of concentration, so being distracted by a self-inflicted guilt trip was bound to make it hard to hear. “Thanks, Steve.”

“Hey, what are friends for?” He gave you a wider, warmer smile; you tried to return it, but ended up yawning instead. He chuckled. “Here, pull over at the next rest stop and I’ll take over. You need to get some sleep.”

You napped until the sun came up, but couldn’t really get much more rest. Your dreams were once again full of searching – this time through a wild, tangled forest where thick branches choked out the sun and every strange sound felt menacing – so even though you slept for a good chunk of time, you still woke up exhausted.

Now the three of you were parked in a parking lot near the Tidal Basin, keeping an eye out for a guy Steve knew, a former Air Force pilot he thought might be able to help out. Apparently he jogged along the same route every morning, since Steve had seen him here on more than one occasion. Just as you were about to voice your hope that he’d pass by soon (you were in dire need of a shower and some grub), Steve turned the engine back on and started to exit the parking lot. Glancing around, you spied your target not far ahead, and sighed in relief. Steve slowly and covertly followed him back to a small complex in VA, and the three of you threw yourselves on his mercy.

One hot shower and one hot breakfast later, you’d found yourselves a fourth team member, and had at least a vague plan. You’d been impressed by Sam from the moment he invited the three of you into his home without hesitation. And his willingness to join the cause, knowing the risks involved, definitely endeared him to you.

Tracking down and threatening that jerk Sitwell had done wonders for helping you work out some of your frustration about the whole situation, and you were riding happily in the back of Sam’s car, listening to the traitor whine, when suddenly your intuition went absolutely haywire. Tensing, you grabbed Nat’s knee, and one look at your face told her to stay alert; Steve caught your expression in the rearview mirror and did the same. Sitwell was screaming some nonsense when suddenly something or someone jumped on top of the car and dragged him out of the window. You ducked instinctively, grabbing your knives from your boots and narrowly avoiding the bullets the assassin emptied into the seats.

Sam hit the brakes, and suddenly your attacker was skidding to a surprisingly graceful stop on the road in front of you, as though he hadn’t just been hurled though the air. He stood there menacingly, all black leather, metal arm, and muscle, a creepy mask covering the half of his face that wasn’t obscured by his long hair.

With a gasp, you rolled yourself into a ball, suddenly anticipating a collision. It came in the form of a heavily armored Hummer, which slammed into the back of Sam’s Impala and shoved it back into motion, propelling it directly towards the masked figure. He leapt back over the car, landing on top of it and shattering windows with the force of his impact.

“Sam!” you screamed, but you didn’t even have time to finish your warning before a metal fist penetrated the windshield and snatched the steering wheel through it, as easily as grabbing a handful of candy.

The weight on top of the car lightened considerably, and you knew the metal man in black had disembarked once again. However, the damage had already been done, and you braced yourself, knowing that it was only a matter of seconds before you were forcibly ejected from the vehicle.

Sure enough, mere moments later the four of you were rolling across the asphalt, trying to keep your injuries to a minimum. The other three jumped back up, but you lay there a minute, gasping – your head was screaming every time you looked at the assassin, and you couldn’t piece together a single coherent thought.

Once four men exited the Hummer and opened fire, marching forward with an almost mechanical calm, you dove behind a vehicle to shield yourself. The bullets tracked you relentlessly, and when Steve got flung off the bridge, you and Natasha immediately headed in opposite directions, hoping to split their barrage of bullets.

The meaty metal-armed guy – what had Nat called him? The Winter Soldier? – went after her, while the four agents focused on you. You drew your glocks and tried to return fire when you could, but their machine guns had the advantage. Luckily, Natasha swung off the bridge and managed to get in a nice shot at her pursuer, giving you the distraction you needed to deploy your own utility belt and join her at street level.

Taking a couple deep breaths, you looked around, trying to gauge exactly where in the city you’d landed. So many of the federal buildings down here looked the same, which meant it was often difficult to get your bearings.

But with enemies hot on your trail, you knew you didn’t have time to dally. You picked a direction and ran, praying your intuition would guide you to the location least likely to be filled with civilians. Luckily, it was still the middle of the workday, so you were counting on the fact that most people would be safely ensconced in their office buildings.

You spied an abandoned gift shop with a small park beyond, so you ran around its corner and knelt behind the trashcan conveniently located there, ready to ambush anyone who followed you. Your ploy paid off immediately, as two figures hurried around the corner and past the trashcan, eyes sweeping the grassy area. If it had been lunchtime, there might have been more people on the benches surrounding the bronze statue at the center, but right now it was empty.

You pounced silently from your concealed hiding place onto the shoulders of the closest agent, swiftly incapacitating him with a blow from your electrified gauntlets – Nat had given you a pair once after catching you admiring hers, and you never tired of using them.

Your assailant’s partner whirled around, but you were ready, and with a few swift kicks you managed to knock him unconscious too. Quickly checking both bodies, you disarmed the men and then used a length of cord you’d found on one of them to tie them up, back to back.

Hopefully when this was over, your team would be able to question these men and formulate a better plan for how to beat HYDRA. But for now, no new enemies arrived, and you realized the rest of the assailants must have decided to follow your friends instead of you.

You desperately wanted to get back out there and help them, but first you desperately needed to pause and get a handle on what your intuition was trying to tell you. It was something about the guy in the mask, but you couldn’t put your finger on it.

Cursing your sixth sense for the 600th time that day, you gathered yourself back up and headed in the direction of the gunshots and screaming.

You reached the action just as Steve and the Soldier were fighting one-on-one in the middle of the street. Cars had been abandoned left and right, and a battered bus lay on its side at the closest intersection. Luckily, it appeared that any civilians who might have been in the area had managed to flee. At least that much was a relief.

Natasha and Sam were nowhere in sight, though that didn’t stop you from scouring the area hoping for a glimpse of them, before finally turning your attention back to the main event. Creeping carefully behind the parked cars lining the street, you kept an eye out for an opportunity to shoot. Unfortunately, the two men were fighting at near lightning speed, literally inches apart – making it nigh impossible to get a clean shot.

Sure, Steve would likely survive if you shot him by accident, but you’d rather not help his attacker if at all possible.

Watching the action intently, you noted with interest just how evenly matched the two of them were. Usually Steve took out every opponent with ease, sometimes five at a time. But this guy was able to block a lot of his hits, and get in more than a few of his own. You quickly deduced this was no ordinary human, that he was probably enhanced in much the same way Steve was. Maybe it was gamma radiation? You’d heard some scientists had had spotty success creating superhuman strength that way.

Finally, Steve got in a few good punches and threw his foe far enough away from him that you knew it was the perfect opportunity to shoot – though you were admittedly unsure at this point whether your bullets would even make a difference, you had to at least try.

And yet, as you raised your gun, time seemed to slow down, and you suddenly found yourself unable to pull the trigger. Because when you glimpsed his face, you recognized it in an instant, and your heart leapt.

You knew every inch of that face.

You’d seen that face every night for the better part of 10+ years.

 I guess he wasn’t really dead after all.

[trickkombowerskru]

The Bowers Gang With Soft Sweet Boyfriends

Request: Anonymous: Bower gang guys? Their boyfriend has this soft boy aesthetic going on and just seems soft, as in their voice, eyes and just the way they smile. Just really calm and comforting to be around but damn can they kick ass if need be. Kind of like looks like a cinnamon roll but can and will actually kill you and just relationship hc of how they got to together and how are they together please

Warnings: Mentions of sex, Mention of Henry's internalized gay panic, and a mention of Butch's homophobia

Henry

Henry Bowers was a lot of things

Gay however was one thing he never expected 

Nor wanted

Funny enough he first saw you, he had no idea how sweet you are

That's because you were beating the shit out Tozier who had really annoyed you earlier with his trash mouth

He thought you were tough

But his head was swimming in thoughts of arousal and fear when he first saw you

A little voice in the back of his head was taking in every detail of your face and making him think about what you would look like with your lips around him

Another screaming for that part to shut the fuck up because he absolutely couldn't be gay

Especially because of Butch 

When he actually sees how nice you are he is even more shook

And also gets more dirty thoughts about you now that he knows how sweet you are

You two start to hang out and you at the same time try to talk yourself out of feelings for Henry

Mostly because you don't wanna get punched

But then one night after Butch laid into him for getting into trouble at school and he really didn't wanna stay there tonight so he needed someone's place to crash, Belch was busy, Vic's parents hated him staying over on school nights, and he didn't feel like dealing with Patrick's bullshit so he called you

You were half asleep when you answered, but as soon as you heard how he was trying to hold back tears you became more aware of what was going on

You happily agreed to let him stay over

When he got there he was holding back

And you could tell

He was tense 

Well tenser than usual and littered with all kinds of new injuries 

"Thanks man."

"Yeah of course."

You tell him he could shower if he wanted and borrow some of your pjs for the night

He accepts your offer and as your in the shower you put two and two together

When asking Henry he nearly breaks down about it

Trying to hold back again because he hated seeming weak

You tell him it's alright and that he is welcome at your place anytime

One thing leads to another and before you know what's happening Henry's lips were on yours

You pulled back shocked 

"Henry..."

He turns away 

"I'm already a fuck up and a disappointment might as well be add fucking gay on top of that right? Just get kicked out all together?" 

You caress his cheek 

And he melts in your touch before you kiss him again

"Henry you are unbelievably cute and funny and I want to be with you, but the last thing I want is to cause you trouble."

"Should've thought of that before you looked hot as hell beating fuck out of Trashmouth."

You laugh 

"I promise if you ever get caught and kicked out you always have a safe place here. And I know that one of the boys would totally let you live at one of their places."

It's his turn to laugh.

"Fuck....why do you have to be so damn cute?" 

You give him a sweet smile and lay down with him

Holding him in your arms

You two secretly dating 

Only being sweet in private and with the guys 

Snuggles after he comes to you after Butch 

Him absolutely eating up your sweet side

Kicking so ass together when people piss you off

Sneaky kisses 

Looooots of hand holding 

And patching each other up 

Henry kinda showing affection in public for you by putting his arm around the back of your chair or side of the booth when you are sitting

Always being there for him to vent to 

Honestly just being each other's rocks 

Getting lucky that Butch never catches on 

And getting Henry away from him when you go to college

A nice balance of rough and tough and sweet and soft

You two just work so well together 

Patrick

He saw you at church

And man oh man the things that went through his mind

And while he was interested

What solidified it was when he saw you beat Henry's ass

Henry was pissed

But impressed

So he asked you to hang out with the boys

And that was the moment Patrick knew he had to have you

And soon enough he put a plan to work

He makes his move on you at a party

Because he KNOWS you're into him

You two are talking when he smashes his lips onto yours

You are absolutely shocked but kiss back because hey he's hot

And from then on you two were a thing

Patrick getting off on your sweet and softness

Him being handsy as FUCK in church

You trying to get him to stop it

Which of course he doesn't

So you two will sometime skip out on a sermon to go have sex in an empty confessional booth

Trying to calm him down when he gets TOO intense

And being shocked at the times it actually works

I mean this one is a given but PDA galore

You trying to be cutsey and romantic and Patrick just not giving a fuck -unless he thinks you're real- but telling you it's "real cute"

You two are the definition of opposites attract

And for sure have a spark filled passionate relationship

Vic

Ooooof okay so we got two cinnamon rolls who could kill you here

You two met when you were new to Derry

Henry considered going after you

But once he and the guys saw kicking ass he went against it

Deciding to recruit you for the gang instead

And once Vic takes a look at your soft features the boy is a goner

He falls for you so HARD so FAST

It's kinda adorable watching him try to not stutter and stumble around you

You two get together when you get paired up for a history assignment

Where during the meeting at your house you're cluelessly flirting back and forth

And then you just decide to go for it

You kiss him and he just melts into it

No but for real you guys are so cute and sweet together

The rest of the boys can roll their eyes and tease him all they want because the boy loves you and isn't afraid to shout it from the rooftops.

Lots of hand holding

Cute nicknames

Snuggles galore

Vic preferring to be little spoon

But if you need to be held he won't hesitate to switch

Sweet dates

Adorable complements

You guys just being one of the healthiest relationship's in the gang

Belch

Oh dear lord

This boy

You two are on opposite spectrums of cinnamon roll

Because he looks like he could kill you and is actually a cinnamon roll

When he meets you he just thinks you're a really cool dude

But then time goes on

You hang with the gang more and more

And he slowly realizes he has feelings for you

Which is so new to him he's never liked a guy before

So it makes him like ten times more nervous

He asks Vic for advice on what to do

Since one Vic has had a boyfriend before

And two Henry would probably insult him and Patrick wouldn't be any help

Takes his advice to heart

Tries his hardest to impress you which is honestly the sweetest

He is just pining in oblivion until you make the first move

It's at the quarry and the rest of the guys were busy so it was just you and him today

Reggie trying to be vague to see if you're into him

You quickly catch on but play dumb for a bit

Until he looks at you with the sweetest eyes

And you can't keep it up anymore and just kiss him

When you pull away he is so red and asks you out

Alright now this relationship is not only the healthiest in all the gang

But also the sweetest and the purest

I mean what more did you expect?

Reggie is always a gentleman in a relationship

And this is his first time with a guy and he likes you so much

So he really doesn't want to mess it up

You kinda gotta take the reigns at first

But then it evens out between you two

Long rides in Amy

Also making out in Amy probably parked right near the kissing bridge

Sweetest compliments

His mama being totally accepting if your relationship

And loving you

Happy that Reggie found someone so sweet

Any PDA is initiated by you because as mentioned before the boy is a blushing nervous mess

Kicking ass of anyone who tried to invalidate your relationship

Henry included

You best believe with this boy as your boyfriend you get cuddles

Because he is just the biggest teddy bear okay

Overall you two just being so pure and sweet and loving