#thrown upon these fucking assholes a hundred fold

[weyounpussyindulgence]

If this post gets 5 likes, I will dox the three bitches who yelled at me and called me ableist slurs at work

[ashintheairlikesnow]

His Name is Nine

For @dr-dendritic-trees who had a rough day and needed a pick-me-up... here is a drabble about Upstairs Guy!

CW: Referenced dehumanization, pet whump, recovery from dehumanization/assault, briefly referenced past implied noncon, referenced past violence/abuse

At first, everyone assumes it’s a trick.

The box arrives one day, addressed to the actual owner of the house, a man who lives four states away and only visits a few times a year. Jenna and Ben argued for an hour over whether or not to simply destroy it - what if it’s a bomb, what if it’s anthrax, what if what if what if going in circles until Nine was ready to scream at them both from his room up in the attic where he could still hear you, assholes - and finally they took the box out to the end of the walkway, where it sits, nearly in the street.

They come inside, sheepish and quiet now, and ask Nine to come outside and look. 

And of course as soon as he does, they ask him to open it, too.

“Why me?” He asks, standing on the porch with his arms crossed, staring at the two of them. Jenna is in a big t-shirt and little gym shorts, so it looks almost like she’s wearing a dress, and Ben still relies on what Nat called -the uniform-: baggy shirts and baggier pants, designed to hide your body from view. Perfect for people who had, whether they had ‘signed up for it’ or not, lost all control for too long over what of themselves was on display. 

“Well… you don’t seem scared of it?” Ben suggests, and Nine sighs heavily, rubbing at the top of his scalp with one hand. “I mean, you don’t.”

“Because it’s just a fucking box. Nobody knows what we are, nobody’s going to blow us up. This is a safehouse. The word safe is literally in the name of what this is.”

“You don’t know that we’re safe,” Jenna snapped. “That fucking Romantic could’ve turned us in already. He still went by his fucking pet name. We wouldn’t know until the fucking cops showed up to haul us all back that he’s still just a sl-”

“One more word and I fucking kick you out on the streets, Jenna.” Nine does not raise his voice. He does not even change his tone at all from its usual slightly aggravated patience. His face stays flat, unimpressed, devoid of emotion.

But inside, he’s a riot of anger on behalf of someone he had never actually seen in person. Of course, it’s not really about that kid, in the end, and he knows it. Jenna and Ben don’t - it’s none of their business, it’s none of anyone’s business - but Nine knows.

“I don’t get why you’re so damn defensive about it,” Jenna says, but her voice has dropped into a mumble, and Nine just rolls his eyes and thumps the rest of the way down the steps in bare feet, letting the warm sun hit him for the first time today. “It’s not like you were a Romantic.”

“How do you know I wasn’t?” He asks tone slightly lighter this time. Ben’s eyebrows raise nearly to his hairline, and the two of them take Nine in in a whole new way. He stared right back, keeping his grey eyes perfectly flat. 

He knew what they saw - average face, maybe a little on the handsome side because pets were usually at least a little nice to look at, it’s in the brochure. Darkish hair, grey eyes, square jaw. What they don’t see - what they aren’t going to see - are the scars in layers across his back and thighs, evidence of the discipline he had taken once upon a time so that Eli did not have to. 

“Because…” Ben clears his throat, a little nervously. “Well, because Romantics are usually pretty.”

“Well, I’ll give you that. You’re right, I wasn’t a Romantic.” Nine shrugs, picking up the box and shaking it just to see Ben and Jenna jump like he was handling dynamite on a kids’ cartoon.

I wasn’t a Romantic… but my bonded was. 

Is.

He’s still an ‘is’, I know it.

I know he is, even if he had to go back home-

Not home, 598999. 

The box isn’t all that big, and it’s light. Something definitely rattles around the inside of it, and there’s an odd metallic clinking sound he can’t quite place. Nine frowns, thinking that over. The sound is familiar, but still strange to him. He can’t name it, but he knows… some part of him knows what that sound is. 

Nine drops into a crouch, right there on the sidewalk, and picks at the edge of the packing tape along the top with his fingernails, until he can pull up a corner and finally, with a loud ripping sound, tear it the rest of the way off to open the box up.

“This didn’t come with a return address?” He asks, without looking up.

“No, just our address, handwritten.” Jenna and Ben back slowly away, peering at him from behind the chainlink fence, as though it could in any way protect them if Nine were blown to smithereens. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know, give me two fucking seconds to check, okay?” He turns over the flaps, and doesn’t hesitate - he’s not afraid of whatever could be in this box, even if it’s the worst thing. 

It isn’t. It isn’t the worst thing it could be, or even the second-worst. It’s not a bad thing at all. 

Nine laughs.

Jenna jumps about a foot in the air in the sound, and it occurs to him she’s never actually heard him laugh. Neither has Ben, but he peers with curiosity and more than a little confusion, as though he thinks perhaps Nine has been possessed by the vengeful spirit of someone with a sense of humor.

“Look at this.” Nine picks it up slowly, carefully, and the clinking noise changes once he has it held up in the air, the breeze catching the little metal bits and causing them to create high-pitched, beautiful notes in the air.

It’s a windchime.

Nine smiles at it - genuinely smiles, he hasn’t seen one of these in years, not since he ran away in the first place, not since they got separated, he and his bonded, the one who got a name. “Who the fuck would send this?” He asks out loud. “Who sends windchimes to a halfway house for braindead pets?”

“I’m not braindead,” Jenna rolls her eyes, but she can’t quite keep the interest off her face, and she’s moving closer and closer to get a better look. When Nine flicks the chimes and sets them to ringing even louder, even Jenna’s perpetually scowling face picks up a slight, barely-there smile.

“Yeah, me neither,” Ben says, but he’s fascinated, too. “I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen those before.”

“I don’t know if I have, either,” Jenna says softly.

“I have,” Nine replies. His own voice has gone low and thoughtful. “Eli used to hang them all over his room. When I was allowed to be with him, he would set them all to ringing for me. All different shapes and sizes.”

He leans in, digging further into the box, ignoring the look Ben and Jenna give each other, a mix of confusion and a growing suspicion that neither is yet willing to voice, to ask him about. 

Both of them have lived here in this safehouse for months now - Nine was here before they arrived and he’ll be here long after they’re gone, unless he shifts to a new attic somewhere else. Maybe they’ll get fake identification and try to integrate back into lives that don’t quite fit their new skin.

Nine will still be here, looking.

But maybe Eli is still out there looking for him.

He looks again at the handwriting on the box. Just an address, with no name even. Sharp angular letters, written in a hurry. 

Handwriting he knows. 

They used to pass notes under the dinner table when Master wasn’t looking, he and Eli. Hurried little notes written with the pens they could hide in the padded dining room chairs, on scraps of paper Nine was always keeping in his pockets. 

598999. Eli needs more water, don’t you think?

Yes, Master. Of course.

That’s a good boy. Refill my wine, while you’re at it.

The way it felt to walk with a folded paper in his pocket with Eli’s quickly-written little scrawl, burning like a curse, like the perfect secret it was... opening it in the kitchen while refilling the pitcher with fresh water to read whatever little message had been left for him.

Eli is out there.

And Eli knows where he is.

He traces a fingertip over the street number, the name, the city, the zipcode, his smile growing and growing, centimeter by centimeter. When he digs back in, he pulls out a small paint-your-own suncatcher kit, another windchime that sings a slightly different set of notes, lower-pitched. When they both get going, they harmonize. Eli always had a good ear for harmonies… that wasn’t what Master wanted him for, and he and Nine had used the windchimes to give him music, in their own way.

“Eli,” Nine breathes out, softly. “Eli, where are you?”

How did you find out where I am?

Why did you send a box and not come here yourself?

There’s a folded paper still in the box and he digs it out, unfolding, knowing already the handwriting he’ll see there, a perfect match to the address on the top. 

Someone helped me send this, the note reads. I had to go home. Don’t stop looking.

“I never stopped before,” Nine whispers, as though Eli can hear him through space, as though his voice could travel maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of miles to find his bonded, the boy they had thrown him into a cell with and trained them together. The boy he’d been tied to inside the box for delivery, whispering reassurances even as the drugs took hold. “Why would I stop now?”

He had been a number and not a name, but Eli had been the first to call him Nine for short, to give him something like an identity again. 

Eli, the boy he’d woken up with, sweat-soaked and curled around each other, their wrists tied together and blindfolded but the first thing they’d seen when Master woke them was each other.

“... Do you know who sent it?” Jenna asks, moving slightly closer, tilting her head, neck stretched to try and see the words on the paper. Nine quickly folded it and pushed it into his pocket, dropping everything back into the box and picking it up.

“Nope,” He answered, quick and easy.

He didn’t have to lie to them - it did him no good to lie, although no harm either - but he lied anyway. Honestly, Jenna just got on his fucking nerves.

Maybe because… because he hoped that if Eli got free, no one would turn him away just because he didn’t recover the “right” way, fast enough.

They trail behind him as he heads back to the house, and it’s only when he carries the box inside and starts heading up the stairs that Ben speaks up. “Hey… wait.”

Nine stops on the third stair, glances over his shoulder. “What?”

“... what are you doing? Don’t windchimes hang on, like, the porch?”

“... not these windchimes.”

They don’t say anything else, just stare at him as he goes upstairs, turns a corner. They stay on the first floor and Nine pulls down the little stepladder to the attic in blissful silence. He sets the box on his bed - just a mattress with sheets and blankets and pillows on the floor in the corner of the huge attic room, mostly full of his computers all hooked together to let him do different things on each one, saved to a couple of larger CPUs - and looks around.

The attic has just one window, but it’s a pretty huge one, and he makes quick work of hanging the windchimes up there. Finally, grinding his teeth against the effort required to move the ancient frame, wincing at the nearly-shrieking wood-against-wood sound it makes, he forces it open a few inches.

It’s not enough to ring the chimes, but it lets some fresh air in. 

He’ll let the suncatchers wait until later. 

Nine heads over to his chair and flops into it, the wheels rolling across the floor a little, until he has to dig his heels into the floor to stop. He picks a monitor at random and pulls up the communications program - encrypted, deletes everything you send at a specified time, usually thirty seconds or so after being viewed. He’d written the program himself, five or six years ago, when he first lived with Nat.

He’s not supposed to be able to write computer programs, but he can.

Eli wasn’t supposed to remember music, but he did.

His bonded is still out there somewhere, with Master, in some new place. But he’s alive, and that means… that means Nine can maybe find him.

Don’t you worry, Eli, Nine thinks, chewing on his lower lip as he starts to type the message, set to send out to all the local safehouses and request they send throughout their own networks, too. I won’t stop looking. I’m going to find you. 

They made us care about each other, but they can’t make me stop.

In the window, on the other side of the room, just enough breeze makes it through to set the chimes to ringing.

[anthropwashere]

deadfic: welcome the unknown

Another one for @goodintentionswipfest, and the oldest of the lot I’ll be posting by a significant margin! As in written in 2009 old. You’ve been warned.

Gonna put the whole fic under a readmore because JTHM fics have one setting and that’s Upsetting, so have some naval gazing from me first.

2009 was uhhhhh, some kind of year for me. It was the year I graduated high school, and the year I was a little bit homeless, and the year I wished I was a little bit homeless for longer so I could have avoided some bananas shit, and the year I spent waiting on tenterhooks mid-recession before I could run from a ehhh home life off to the military.

18 year old anthrop was working through some shit while writing this thing, is what I'm saying.

This was intended as a prequel to a fic I was working on in high school, while also being kind of a stand alone fic? If you've been with me since my JTHM days (wow) you'll recognize what it might have been for, but otherwise don't worry about it. This is a bit all over the place but there are still a lot of pieces I'm fond of and honestly, it's nice to see where I was as a writer and how far I've come in comparison? Too many of us fandom writers destroy huge swaths of our work out of this terribly sad and unnecessary shame for liking "cringy" things, and to this day I regret doing the same to virtually all the things I wrote for my first few fandoms. Cheesy and heavy-handed as this fic is, it's nice to have around still, you know? I cared about this fic. Working on it kept me sane during an extremely shitty summer. I dearly wish I still had the first draft, which I remember writing in different colored markers on folded sheets of computer paper hunched up in any random little corner I could get some time alone. Alas, like 98% of the rest of my things pre-military, it's gone for good.

Title comes from Robbers on High Street's "The Fatalist," which sure was a song I had on repeat a lot back in 2009.

=

Everywhere is dirty. Filth and stink and dead particles on everything he touches. He'd fallen asleep, and somebody had broken into his house and poured the offal of a thousand trash cans onto everything and smeared it in deep. 

Asshole. 

Really though, they are all assholes. Shit-smeared animals groping around on all fours, blind and deaf and desensitized to whatever little good was left in the world around them. 

They make so much noise. All they do is scream, and whenever someone manages to gasp out a non sequitur the whole world applauds, casting them into the history books for the next generation to draw penises upon their photographs. It is all a matter of course.

It can't just be him that sees this. One look outside is enough to prove his point. Why else would he board up all the windows? To keep the assholes from looking in, of course.

The assholes are everywhere these days, screaming and fucking. Fucking. They're good at that too. Reproduction. Bucking hips and nails across skin and incredible, terrible intimacy, the exchanging of fluids. Disease of the flesh, fever of the mind. A new generation born in every positive pregnancy test, a new generation dead in every street corner abortion clinic. Babies. Disgusting, germ-ridden things. Oh God, don't let it touch him with its fat little hands shiny with saliva and the green ooze that won't cease dripping from the holes in its face. He doesn't know what'll happen, what he'll do if this thing gets too close, but he has ideas, and none of them are pleasant.

He always has ideas.

He blinks, and the baby and the stinking slut mother cooing at it with too-red lips and salon-styled hair and the bus and the roaring all vanish. He stumbles and knocks an elbow against the dresser.

The smell in here is somehow worse now. Like old vomit in high summer. Is it vomit? Is it his vomit?

He decides it's better not to now, at least not now. He feels a strange mood coming. High tide comes to drown the starfish, already dried by the sun. Perhaps it is a mood he needs, but then again, perhaps it comes too late.

Something cracks, and the edges go soft and drip in a puddle of wax.

He burns his fingers by candlelight.

=

"Johnny?"

"Bunny?"

His throat burns. It hurts to breathe.

"Oh thank God, you can hear me again. You're back."

"What—" He breaks off, coughing. Blood in his mouth, on his teeth. He licks them clean and swallows. "What are you talking about?"

Bunny sounds small and tired in his ears—

Mind?

—and there was fear, Johnny can hear it licking at the corners of Bunny's— 

His?

—voice, but it has faded with time. Johnny suspects he has been asleep for a very long time.

 "I've been trying to reach you for… God, I don't even know how long." Bunny trails off.

He looks around, his eyes struggling to see in the pre-dawn light trickling in through a dozen half-circle windows on the floor above wherever he is. More by the smell than anything, he realizes he is surrounded by blood and bodies. A part of him knows he shouldn't be comforted by this, shouldn't find this scene familiar.

And yet.

"I was scared, Nny."

He hiccups, chokes, and spits out three bullets.

=

The mirror is laughing at him.

He sneers at it. Squints as two left hands do two different things, almost identical but the blur is still visible, still there.

He was wrong, he knows that now. There isn't just one person, one world, one reality on the other side of the mirror. There are dozens, maybe hundreds. Maybe thousands. Not all at once, of course, but there seems to be another pair of eyes staring back, another mouth talking at everyone and no one, each time he looks hard enough, long enough. The edges blur, fingers drag in slow-motion arcs, teeth where teeth shouldn't be, a hundred shades of skin and hair and eyes.

He can't remember the last time he showered.

=

“You look like shit, Nny,” observes the Burger Boy.

“Yes.”

“You really should do something about it.”

“Yes.”

He drives the pen through the paper and carves something into the wood that later he won't understand.

=

Greasy. He is so greasy. The others in the mirror bow out of the way to let him see the unwashed, true reflection of himself. He makes a face, drags his cheeks down to his jaw and waggles his tongue, and the reflection follows accordingly. No blur. 

Yep, that’s him all over.

Devi screams, her face set in a terrified, furious, how-could-you-you-shithead expression, and smashes his face against the mirror. His nose breaks on impact, glass stabs, digs, and catches, and drags down his cheeks and forehead. Blood everywhere, his blood. A tooth goes flying as his chin hits the dressing table’s pitted surface with a crack that sickens him even as the edges of his sight turn black, and the pain is more than noise can express. Blood on Devi’s knuckles. Fingers ripping out his hair.

No.

Everything pauses, then it all reverses in an instant, and he is left standing before a dirty mirror with too many faces looking back.

That already happened— a long long long long time ago

—and he is better now. Devi is better now too. He hasn’t talked to her in awhile but she is around, she is there, and everything is okay now. There is some blood dried into the floorboards still—was that were the stink is coming from?—but his scars have faded. He has forgiven, and he thought he had forgotten.

He’d gotten a new mirror and everything.

=

“Hi Nny.”

“Evening.”

Squee leans back on his heels before the underbelly of a machine Johnny has no understanding of and glares. With his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, smears of engine grease on his hands, sweat on his face, and looking like a mix of engineer, mad scientist, and responsible adult, Johnny has no idea how to treat the boy-now-man-next-door.

"How've you been? Whatcha been up to these days?"

There is something unspoken, something furious and accusing underneath the easy drawl of the questions. He can't imagine what Squee could be angry with him about. He is at a loss, also, at how to respond to the heavy questions thrown at him so casually. He struggles under their weight, unable to answer, unable to keep quiet, unable to lie.

Squee chuckles as he stands in one smooth motion centered on his knees and cleans his glasses with a rag from his pocket. "It's okay, shit, calm down. Not like I got a gun to your head or anything."

For some reason, he feels himself flinch. Squee's eyebrows knit and relax in an instant.

"Let's see," Squee muses. "You look like you, I'm pretty sure your car still works, and I'm currently over at Pepito's for some headfuck or another. Okay, I think I know what year this is. Awesome." He puts his glasses on and shares a smile that could cut glass.

"What are you talking about?"

Squee looks surprised, but after a moment laughs a quiet little laugh. "That's right, I forgot. This is the year you do your weird losing-time thing, yeah? Haha, you freaked me out even more all summer. I think I slept on the roof more than I did my own room. Oh God, this is even better!" He laughs again, louder, and claps a hand on the shoulder of the strange machine.

He can't think of any kind of response to this before Squee speaks again. "Fuck, Johnny, you really think seeing me at nine one day and twenty-three the next is normal?"

He thought about it. "Noooot really. No."

"That is exactly—what—How did you even recognize me?" He gestures at himself, and his eyebrows do something halfway between emulating surprise and gut-busting dislike.

"Who else could you be?"

This time his laugh is loud and body shaking, and he thumps the machine as if Johnny has said something incredibly witty. "Wow, okay, if that logic works for you it works for me, you crazy fuck."

He did not just hear that. "What did you call me?"

Squee smiles again, but his eyes remain cold and flinty and full of hate towards something—Johnny suspects—he has done in the future. Goddamnit, future self, way to ruin a good thing. But his hands still clench, his joints lock. How dare Squee? How could he?

But the boy-now-man-next-door acts as if nothing has changed. "So I can't remember how your art or lack thereof is working out in this little slice of time. You paintin' with any other color 'sides red?"

Why was Squee acting like this? "Of course I am."

He isn't.

Squee scratches his neck, scratches at scabs over long, thin lacerations in finger-shaped bruises, and Johnny wonders if what he's feeling now is how the man felt when he had still been a boy, and the scary neighbor man once crawled through the window to tell him a bedtime story. 

"You know, somehow I doubt that."

=

His fingers itch for activity. He hasn't left the house in days, maybe weeks. Does it matter?

He licks his lips and swallows, fighting down familiar urges. He can beat this.

=

"Do you have a problem with me?"

"Oh god oh god oh god why are you doing this—"

"Excuse me, I asked you a question."

Gently touch the controls, tack the pressure on, oh, just a little more. Just enough to make them scream.

=

The back of his head itches, and when he scratches his fingers come away red. No pain, just blood. So it isn't his then. But he can't remember killing anyone.

He looks away from his hand and out the window, at the outside world creeping in through the cracks between the boards. Outside there is no sun, no moon, no stars, no anything. His breath hitches.

It's raining.

He exhales.

The door is open though he doesn't remember leaving it so, so he takes the hint and walks outside. He inhales, tasting the hot summer smell of wet concrete and the cloying reek of decomposing bodies in his front yard. The million million light bulbs of the city throw their energy skyward, and the roiling clouds eat the light whole. A weird, orange glow from above casts the city into an otherworldly scene, and, feeling a little silly, he wonders if tonight might be the beginning of the apocalypse, and the idea doesn't sound half bad.

In the driveway, the concrete is slick with oil. He stands there a while, letting the rain wash the human grease out of his hair. It takes him just as long to realize his car is missing.

"That's funny," he says aloud, wiping the rainwater out of his eyes. "I don't remember teleporting home. Unless—was it Tuesday yesterday? I don't think it was, but—"

There is a soft, scared inhale of breath, a backwards scream. He turns, and there on the sidewalk is a gray woman in a bathrobe, faded coffee stains and food crusts all down her front. She is pointing at him, her face wide, frozen in a rictus grin of fear.

"What?" he asks, reality crashing into place with a shatter of glass ripping through his ears.

Her mouth moves, but the sounds that come out are backwards and insulting, and her eyes are fish eyes, wide and lidless and staring.

"What?" he asks again, sharply, his voice ugly and tasting of ashes.

"M-mon—" the woman wheezes.

Her throat is in his hands, and he doesn't recall moving from his empty driveway.

"What are you staring at? What do you want?!" he screams.

She gags and gurgles, her tubes for eating breathing talking standing bleeding; all of it collapsing under his fingers—

which hadn't been so thin a few weeks ago

—and the grin on his face is a mile wide. 

"Monster!" she whimpers as something cracks in her neck.

Monster? His hands loosen, cradle her jaw, as his mind tries to grapple with this. Why… Why would anyone call him that?

The pounding of feet, and someone wrenches the woman out of his grasp. "Jesus jump-roping Christ, Johnny!"

Dazed, he stares at the newcomer as if he's looking at everything through the wrong end of a telescope. The reek and the roaring of the public transit system returns with a bang of pneumatic doors, and Squee's mouth moves in angry shapes but the slut-mother's cooing comes out instead.

=

"You gonna pay or get off my bus?"

He looks at the bus driver, at the thick rolls of fat ballooning out underneath his sweaty, undersized uniform, a sneer pulling back the heavy flesh around pearly white teeth. He imagines jamming the steering wheel through the man's dislocated jaw and feels slightly better.

It's safe to imagine such atrocities. Imagine, but nothing more. He has to remember that.

"Hey kid! I'm talkin' to you!"

"Sorry," he manages through grinding teeth and a throat hot and restricted with anger. He deposits the required fare into the automated tray and darts across the yellow line before he can act upon his ideas.

He always has ideas.

He stumbles into an open seat as the bus jerks forward with a belch of black exhaust he can't see but can taste, heavy and gritty on his tongue. On his right, a plastic mommy bounces her little dolly on her knees. They are dressed in matching summer dresses. Disgusting.

How long has it been summer anyway?

He glances at the pair again and thumbs the volume on his CD player a little higher, fighting to keep his face neutral. He has never been fond of parents who treat their offspring like objects rather than the people they are going to be.

Something tugs on his sleeve and he recoils, crashing into the metal bars on his left. It takes everything he has not to retaliate against the foreign touch. His headphones are knocked askew by the impact, and Mozart's power vanishes, becomes tiny vibrations around his neck.

The baby, the child, the dull-eyed little girl has the ragged end of his sleeve in its shining, soaking wet hand. Through the fabric, he can feel its dampness, its heat. It babbles at him incoherently, green ooze dripping from its squashed little nose into the gaping, grinning mouth below.

"Oh, she likes you!" The mother cries, swooping in for the kill. Her smell washes over him—of heady perfume, hairspray, hysteria. He can see the makeup creases, the scars of plastic surgery, the shadow of a bruise on her shoulder half-hidden by her yellow sleeve. His mind jumps to all sorts of conclusions, and each one of them sickens him more than the last.

"Uh," he manages.

His hands twitch.

=

He is sick of this life again. All the old signs are there, everything points to one fact, but he can't bear going down that path, not yet. Later, later.

"'Later,' he says!" Crows the delighted Burger Boy. "Yes, perhaps when the scabs from the old shackles grow over the new he'll get off his scrawny ass and attempt to do something about all this!"

"Fuck you."

The Burger Boy looks at him imploringly, its meaty little hands clasped, its fangs retracted, the perfect image of a concerned friend in hideous checkered overalls. "In all seriousness, Johnny-boy, this is not something you can put off any longer. You must act now, or not at all."

"Go die in a hole."

"We both remember how effective that was the last time you tried that. Now, please—"

"Don't make me get the sledgehammer."

At least it had the decency to flinch at that, the little fuck.

The Burger Boy sighs, obviously frustrated. "I don't understand why you find it necessary to fight me so, Nny."

"Maybe it's because, oh, I don't know, you're trying to enslave me to my own kidneys?" He bites on the straw of his cherry Freezy hard enough to tear it. The plastic tastes like artificial fruit and latex gloves. "And don't call me Nny."

The Burger rolled its eyes, which shouldn't have been possible because it was pretending it was still ceramic. "So I'm no longer allowed that special little privilege, am I? Only the ghost of your dead, levitating bunny rabbit is?"

"Leave Nailbunny out of this."

"And those pathetic Doughboys as well? The very ones that conspired against you to 'serve their master', who, in case you've since forgotten, was the very creature you were charged with imprisoning behind a wall of blood and plaster?"

"That was D-Boy. Eff just wanted freedom. And really, can I blame him?" He bites the straw in half and spits it into the bathroom sink. In the mirror, his reflections mimic him, ten thousand mouths a-grinning.

"You're missing the point, though I'm hardly surprised."

A thought strikes him, and it's out of his mouth before he can think twice about it. "You know, if they ever started talking again, I think I'd still let them call me Nny. Sure, they were both exploiting my ever-increasing insanity and all that, but they were mine in the beginning. Unlike you."

It ignored the jab. "If they ever start talking again, it will be far too late."

=

There wasn't any soap in the bathroom.

=

"What the hell were you thinking?"

He blinks. "What?"

"Give me one goddamn reason, one very good goddamn reason you had for strangling my mother, or so fucking help me Johnny—!"

Squee is definitely reminding him of himself now. Great. Fantastic. Fuck.

"Um."

=

The Burger Boy scowls, its face transmogrifying into the fanged, drooling thing it really is. "You remember how terrible it was to toil under the merciless whip of the System! I know you do because I am a part of you, though you refuse to believe as such! And though you hate what I have to offer, you must realize that I am far more preferable as I am now than what I could become unless you tear free of the System's grip now!"

"I AM FREE!"

With a snap of ceramic he breaks it's right arm off, and the two of them scream in pain and hate, in the same voice, in one voice.

"I." He jabs at his chest with the arm, feeling it squirm under his fingers.

"Am." He drops it to the bloodstained linoleum.

"Free." He grinds the arm to dust under the heel of his boot. His reflections are too blurred, too scattered, to see how many follow suit.

Gripping the hole where a limb had been seconds ago, its ugly face twisted further by agony, the Burger Boy pants, "There is no such thing as freedom! No!" It screams, harsh and violent, as he opens his mouth to retort, "Listen to me. Hear me out. Please."

A heartbeat passes. Five. He closes his eyes, suddenly exhausted, and nods. The figurine sighs and leans against the faucet, settling its insect eyes on the spilled Freezy in the tub.

"Let's get one thing straight. I don't want you thinking that the puppet masters are singling you out for sport. God knows you aren't anything special. Everyone is a slave to one thing or another." It pauses to laugh bleakly. "Perhaps even those who fancy themselves the masters of this game of Monopoly must bow their neck to the chopping block one day. Who am I to know? I am but a series of chemical reactions created in the misfiring neurons of a sick man's brain. But never mind that. What I'm trying to say here is that there has been no other way. Ever. There has been no freedom, no choice. It is all preordained. This is the way of all things."

Every part of him rebels against this. No free will? Impossible. His life is his own, now more than ever. Yes, he had been a slave, once. But that had just been the luck of the draw, an accident, like winning the lottery or getting hit by a truck. It was… unpredictable, impossible to preordain. Heat in his chest, his jaw tight and creaking. "They told me—" He begins, his voice ready to rise into a shriek.

"It was only temporary. Even stone must crumble, Johnny."

His legs turn to jelly at a terrible, terrifying thought. He grips the sink, licks his lips and tastes salt and cherries and fear. In a soft, weak voice he barely recognizes as his own he finally asks, "Are they going to make me a flusher again?"

"They already have."

=

"Mom, can you make it back to the house on your own?" As he speaks, Squee performs a quick once-over on the gasping woman clinging like a burr to his chest. His face betrays him, showing the extent of the damage done even as he keeps his voice upbeat, a stream of happy reassurances pouring out with the rain even as his eyes confirm a far more dire prognosis. "Johnny and I need to, um, talk."

"Who—" Her voice fractures in her collapsed throat, and she chokes and dry heaves until her face is purple with strain. 

Squee holds her until she calms. "Johnny's our neighbor, Mom. We've lived next to him since—for as long as I can remember."

"O-oh. He looks ni-ice. I-is he a friend o-of yours?"

Squee makes a face remarkably comparable to the one a particularly vehement guest made once after Johnny had made him swallow a pound of nails. "Just—go inside, Mom. Go see if Dad's awake, okay? See if he'll call 911 for you."

"Okay sweetie." Her voice is wet and crackling, like stiff paper going soft beneath a steady drip of water. He recognizes the sound, and suspects now that he may have squeezed too hard. But she had insulted him, hadn't she? Called him a fucking monster. How could he let that go without proper retaliation?

"And tell Dad I'll be in in a min—oh festering whore tits, your eyes are bleeding."

"Don't swear, honey." 

"Sorry. Johnny?"

He can't help but flinch. "Yes?"

Squee swallows, looking almost frightened before setting his jaw and glaring hard at him. "You are going to go in your house, sit your ass down on your couch, and you are going to stay the fu—stay there until I can get Dad to give me the keys so I can get Mom to the ER. See, betcha I gotta do it 'cause Dad is an incompetent, loveless douche with a heart of coal. But I'm gonna do it fast, 'cause you and I? We need to talk."

"I—" 

Squee got him off with a sharp gesture. "Uh-uh. Not today. Not gonna play that game. Get in your house."

He got in his house.

=

"Slavery is inherent in all things, Johnny. It is only a question of to what. Once before you were selected to be a Flusher—"

"And I failed. Miserably, I might add."

The Burger Boy shook its head firmly. "You excelled."

"Clearly we're remembering my experiences in the After Life differently."

"Clearly you forget what kind of monster was imprisoned behind that wall."

"I never saw it. I died before I had the chance."

"It doesn't matter whether you saw it or not! What you had to do to keep it locked up should tell you more than enough."

"I—"

"I think somebody with a say in things liked what you were doing down here. Otherwise, why else tether you to this particular yoke a second time? If your memories of what Satan said to you are correct, you are practically the very antithesis of Flusher material!" It hobbles towards him, it's ungainly waddle exacerbated by its missing arm. Drool spills freely from between jutting fangs that cut at its lips with every overeager exclamation. "Take a good look at me, boy. The very moment the System slapped the manacles back on your wrists it began to take me as well. These changes are the result of your inaction."

His reflections smile bitterly. "You claim to be mine one minute and admit you're not the next. One or the other; it can't be both."

It stares at him with a steady, curious expression. "Can't it? The System is trying to take me from you. That is one truth. Another is that I am fighting it as best I can. Just as your Doughboys did, not so long ago."

He sneers and says nothing.

"I am resisting," the Burger Boy continues, "but I cannot win. The changes done to this form you've assigned me are the result of every foot of ground lost. You must see how much faster the transformation is in me compared to the Doughboys! You must understand that you are no longer a mere Flusher! For the Wall Monster remembers how effective it was to use your own madness against you, and now an eye is upon you, Johnny! The merciless, unflinching eye of the System in its entirety, and the System is more powerful than either of us can possibly comprehend."

He locks his fingers around the lip of the sink to keep from shaking. Slowly, the words trickle out of his mouth, pooling in a pile of warm paranoia in the drain. "Everything you say only goes to prove how much they have already conquered you, taken you from me and twisted you into some… thing. Some monster braying about hope even as it settles its jaws around my neck." 

He drops his gaze from the figurine, from the mirror, afraid of the triumph he knows he will find there. "I can't trust you."

The Burger Boy positively beams. "Now you're catching on."

=

"Nailbunny, what should I do?"

resist

"Who? Who do I fight? Him? The System?"

resist

"Whether I like it or not, he's my only source of information. Even if he's manipulating me, he at least has the decency to forewarn me, unlike his predecessors. If push comes to shove, I think I could beat him. But what—what if he's telling the truth? What if he can help me?"

resist

resist

"Nailbunny?"

resist

resist

resist

resist

resist

re—

=

"Please! Oh god, this hurts so much! Stop!"

"Shut up. The machine's barely even warmed up."

The sobbing blob tied to one of many torture devices he keeps humming at the ready cringes as his hand floats above the dial. He allows himself a brief smile.

"W-what do you want? Jesus Christ, I just m-met you! What did I even do?!"

He opens his mouth, a speech rife with injustice suffered under the merciless hands of a society dead from the neck up on the tip of his tongue, only to find himself unable to remember who this woman is and why he has her strapped into the Needler.

He laughs, and turns the dial up anyway.

=

—sist

=

The baby, the child, the dull-eyed little girl releases its iron grip on his sleeve and forgets him instantly, yet the mother perseveres, eager to speak with another human being. It seems he has no choice but to participate in a conversation with this woman until his stop, as every other seat is taken. And besides, it would be rude to just stand up and walk away.

You could kill her.

He frowns and ignores the voice, but nevertheless finds it unsettling. Meat's all for living and talking and eating and fucking and being an actual human, not murder. This is very out of character. Still pondering over it, he glances at the woman and finds her staring at him, expecting something from him.

"What?" he asks, itching to put his headphones on again. He really likes the piece vibrating against his collarbone. 

"Where did you buy your shirt?" the woman asks, as if she's repeating herself. She probably is.

He peels his eyes away from her surgically swollen lips long enough to glance down at himself. Black and gray, with an obnoxious splash of color amid the stripes that makes his head hurt. He doesn't recognize it.

"I, uh, don't remember," he says.

"Oh, that's too bad! My little brother loves that show."

He nods mutely, allowing his thumb to play with the volume of his CD player. The woman keeps talking, and Carl Orff rages at fate in a whispered rise and fall of Latin and violins.

The girl touches his hand again, and he accepts without protest that he will kill these two in their matching summer dresses with an eager blare of trumpets.

=

"Slavery to a broken machine or slavery to life and all its pains and pleasures." Meat touches his arm with its remaining hand. Through his sleeve, he can feel its dampness, its heat. "Decision time is now or never, Nny."

He laughs. "I am a broken machine."

=

Sometimes other people appear in the mirrors. Just brief flashes, overlapping the current other-self dominating the rest, and he knows it's foolish, but he can't help but wonder.

What is it like to have friends?

=

"—and it's being called the worst crime in the tri-county area since the café massacre two years ago. With twenty-seven dead at the scene and another twelve in critical condition, we here at the Channel 4 News Network can't help but agree. What do you think of it, Jeff?"

"It's a real atrocity, Nadine. The man who did this must be a real psycho, a total monster."

"Oh yes. And speaking of the killer, a woman—who has asked to remain anonymous—has stepped forward, claiming to have been at the club when the murders were committed. She also claims to be the one who halted the massacre by shooting the killer three times, despite having already been wounded."

"It is true a thus-far unidentified blood sample was recovered from the scene, as well as the bullets matching the woman's gun, but nothing conclusive has been determined yet. However, the woman has agreed to meet with a sketch artist once she's recovered from the attack, and a drawing of the killer will be sent to all media coverages when available."

"In the meantime, if anyone has any information regarding the killer or his whereabouts, we would appreciate it if you would call the number at the bottom of the screen. Please, don't hesitate—"

The reporter's face freezes for an instant before exploding in a supernova of white noise. Jolted out of a daydream, he instinctively reaches for the remote to mute the atrocious sound, but pauses before letting his hand fall. 

The sound is… oddly pleasant.

He leaves it on for three days.

=

He decides to call it Reverend Meat. It just… seems to fit.

=

He pauses at the couch only briefly, wondering what happened outside and what kind of reaction he should be having, but his legs give out and once he hits the floor it doesn't seem to matter anymore. Something skitters away, startled by the sound and vibrations of his body striking the wood. A minute passes or maybe five before it skitters back, probing his fingers with inquisitive antennae. His nerves won't respond to the signals his brain sends, to flinch away or crush the insect before it has a chance to grow bolder. He panics briefly, fear and helplessness clawing their way through his chest cavity, but then, as if a switch is flipped inside him, he relaxes.

The insect, whatever it is, takes a cautious nibble at the calloused tip of his ring finger. There is a tiny flash of pain, but no instinctive recoil from the source of the hurt. He is truly unable to move, than. The insect continues to bite, finding the outer layers of his skin tasty enough to merit further excavation. A second insect, crawling out of some unseen hole beyond his limited vision, joins the first, and is quickly followed by a third, a fourth, a dozen, too many to differentiate by feel alone and before he knows it an entire colony of carnivorous insects are biting into him, eating his flesh, burrowing under his clothes, his skin, crawling in his mouth and into his soft, wet insides, and he can't do anything to stop it.

It hurts, God it hurts, and he thinks wildly to himself that if he manages to live through this he will never ever strap a jar of bugs between another guest's teeth, ever again, because this is beyond torture, beyond ironic justice, beyond what words can describe: it just fucking hurts.

But then they reach his spinal cord and, like a city-wide power outage, his pain receptors begin to shut down, and then it's only the sounds of thousands of tiny mouths chewing. Until the insects turn their attention to his face, at least, being eaten alive isn't quite as bad as movies would lead him to believe. It's certainly slower, for one thing, and it lacks the nerve-wracking horror soundtrack, but perhaps that's for the better. The sounds he does hear are far from pleasant: squishing and crunching and gnawing and if he still had a stomach it'd probably be heaving by this point. He can see nothing but the dusty edge of darkness beneath his couch, but it's easy to imagine how gruesome he must look.

He's seen the results of this kind of thing with his own eyes, after all.

By the time they reach his head, they have already chewed through something vital in his chest and nowhere can he feel anything, any ache any pain any sadness any anger any loneliness and God is that an improvement. Consciousness fades to a dull spark somewhere in his increasingly exposed ribcage, perhaps somewhere just behind his collarbone, and he is hollowed out as rapidly as a properly upgraded power tool can scoop the mush out of a pumpkin. He is home to a colony of army ants, or a vast nest of ravenous, newborn spiders. That buzzing he hears could be the many vibrating wings of mating flies, or the first comb of a beehive being constructed among his bones. Certainly this is some species of insect that won't hesitate to swarm over a piece of meat—however stringy—before it has a chance to defend itself. Maybe it's even a school of land-bound piranha. He can imagine all sorts of culprits and has little trouble believing in all of them.

He wonders if honey from a human hive would be any good, but immediately discards the idea, revolted. He's practically thinking cannibalism here! Or, rather, self-cannibalism. Can a person self-cannibalize when they no longer have a digestive system? He'll have to try that sometime.

He wonders.

"Johnny?"

He blinks with magically undevoured eyelids, and is whole.

=

Sometimes, if he focuses hard enough, long enough, on these days when others flicker by in the mirrors, sometimes these flickers steady, become memorable faces, re-memorable people. And if memory serves, most of these people are dead.

The implications leave him with aching knuckles.

=

"I am not a monster."

"You just keep telling yourself that. Hey, maybe if you wish hard enough it might even come true one day!" Meat cackles and kicks his toothbrush into the toilet bowl.

"I wasn't always like this. I haven't always lived here. I haven't always been alone."

"How can you be so sure?”

Frustrated. Does he really have to state the obvious?

"No one is born knowing how to speak or read or write, or how to drive a car, or how to use money. Inherent knowledge is limited in humans. I may no longer have the memories of being taught, but the result is still the same. I know how to mix paints because I probably took classes in high school. I know how to use a camera, order dinner at a restaurant, do my own laundry, because someone else was there to teach me. Fuck, someone hated me enough to give me you."

"Who?"

"What?"

"Who gave me to you?" Meat's smile tries to appear kind, yet it is condescending, as if it is speaking to a child. "It's a simple enough question, dear boy."

"I—you said it was a girl—that we—" He swears. "You know I don't remember."

"Who gave you an understanding of the English language? Where is the license that proves you once passed a test at the DMV?"

"I—"

"Can you prove that you did not simply read the directions in some art books, or on the camera's packaging, or in a Laundromat? Perhaps, on the same strange whim that made you steal some Styrofoam Pillsbury Doughboy figurines, you came across my body yourself?"

"You said—"

"I thought you didn't trust me."

His knuckles burn white.

"Well, Johnny?"

"You know I can't prove any of that."

Meat's eyes glitter with delight. "Then, dear Johnny, how can you be so sure?"

=

At the edge of a stage bright with colored lights, he curls his hands around a microphone and smiles. The audience—

so many eyes watching him, and yet he couldn't be more relaxed

—has hushed; yet their screams still ring in his ears. 

He is not alone on this stage.

He doesn't dare turn to see who is playing softly behind him, afraid it'll be people the mirrors have shown him that are alive in some other Johnny's life but dead dead dead in his. His heart pounds, and for once the ache in his throat feels good. This is all so wonderfully terrifying, sickeningly familiar. Has he dreamed this before?

He comes to a stop inches from the audience's reaching hands. Good God, he has them right in the palm of his hand.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he breathes into the microphone, and every spark of life in this vast room is shining its light on him, and it is all so beautiful, so perfect, so alien. 

"What we have here is a moral conundrum."

=

"Bunny, I'm worried."

"I'm glad I'm not the only one. But really, there's so much to worry about. Please, elaborate for me."

"I haven't gone anywhere I might run the chance of killing someone in months. Just drive-thrus and that fully automated shopping center. Until recently, the only other people I've interacted with haven't bothered me or have been out of reach. It's only been these past couple weeks I've attempted anything more. Walking in parks, public transportation. You know."

"I know."

"What I can't figure out is how I ended up in that club at all."

The television is on, too low to be heard. In its pale blue glow, he carefully touches his chest, wincing when his fingers press against three tender circles: one on his sternum, another between his sixth and seventh ribs, and the last just beneath his ribcage. Tiny puckered scars ache in the center of each purple bruise.

"If I remember correctly, you recognized something who went inside and followed after."

"Why would—that doesn't sound like something I'd do."

"You stalked Devi for nearly a year."

He scowls. "Unnecessary, Bunny."

"Is it?"

He thumps his boots onto the coffee table and says nothing. Bunny presses on.

"It was a woman. Short hair, glasses, surprisingly compassionate to your… cause."

"Wait, do you mean that one woman with that shitty boyfriend I Tazered once? When I saw that movie—"

"Yes."

"Wow, really? I figured the Wall Monster got her after reality collapsed." He taps his chin thoughtfully. "What was her name? Did it start with a… a T?"

"Tess."

"Yeah!" He pauses. "She… recognized me first."

"Uh-huh."

"She practically ran into the building. They didn't even card her. She must have been a regular."

"Or she worked there."

"Or she worked there," he agrees. "That anyone could recognize me—" he trails off. A beat passes, and he continues on a different vein. "But what set me off? What caused me to break again, after I'd been doing so well?"

"That shouldn't be your chief concern, Johnny."

He looks at the disembodied rabbit head, little more than a skull now, and tiny and fragile-looking without it's maggot-riddled skin. "Oh?"

"You should be asking why you were sent back again."

=

Those other people in the mirror, those strangers, those friends, those dead bodies in motion, would sometimes pause beside his reflection. They smile, laugh; get mad and fight back and actually live; attack and be attacked; get scared and fight back and die. Some of it looks fun, some of it looks ridiculous. A lot of it scares him, more than he'd like to admit.

He wishes one of them would notice him.

His fingers touch glass.

[bunslakes-artblog]

Yo, time for some more additions to my “how to hurt Kirishima” text collection

A while ago I posted a longass textpost with kiribaku themed little snippets of stories, scenes, and general ideas and scenarios. This is more of that! This time it’s even angstier and a couple of them are actually kinda gore-y so watch out for that if that’s not your cup of tea. I’ll write out a warning before those.  Stories under the cut! 

This is a sort of alternate route for how the kamino rescue could’ve turned out, if Kirishima hadn’t been able to convince any of the others to come with him.

No one showed up. He hadn't expected many, but at least Todoroki had felt like a safe bet. Of course he couldn't blame them, never his friends. This was such a stupid, dangerous and impulsive idea after all. But he HAD to. 

So he went alone. 

It's a big city. How was he supposed to find anything in here? He was so stupid, how did he think he could do anything by himself? Everything feels hopeless and the minutes are ticking by in a terrifying speed, one by one. 

But he keeps going. He HAS to. 

It's so overwhelming. The situation. The stakes. The fear. 

He's pressed against a wall, holding his breath, trying to stop his body from shaking like a leaf in the wind. He's so close, but fuck. If he's seen now he will die. There's no question about it, they are too many, too strong. He wouldn't even have time to take a step. But Bakugou. He's in the middle of it all, still fighting. Not trembling, pressed against some rubble, frozen in fear. He's out there, wild, Alive. 

For now. 

Kirishima can see the muscles in his arms twitch from the strain of quirk overuse. 

Time is running out. 

And yet he still can't move. He's alone. Nailed in place by the humongous, almost primal, raw feel of fear. Fear for himself, what will happen if he acts. What will happen if he don't. 

And suddenly there's no time left to doubt. He hears the zing of metal cutting through the air. Something splashing on the ground, and the short, hoarse cry. That blade cannot reach its target a second time. 

A loud clash is heard this time as the knife search for its target, followed by a yelp of surprise from its wielder. With hardened arms still raised in defense, he forces his voice to work, throat yet again tight with fear. 

"Bakugou- ..Help.." 

And he does. The brief distraction Kirishima's sudden appearance had caused gave Bakugou enough time to let out an enormous blast, big enough to put up a smokescreen that would shield their escape.

Except that it didn't happen like that. Of course not. Kirishima was alone. With no plan. No strategy. Unfitting quirk. Useless. But he HAD to act. 

So his friends had to watch on the TV, screaming as they saw a familiar red flash of hair, the red belonging to the one they had denied, refused to cooperate with. Refused to help. They didn't think he'd go by himself. But of course he had. Of course. 

They had to watch him get mauled by the villains the second he'd made himself visible, just as they'd been about to aim a finishing blow towards the snarling blonde. 

Hands hardened around wrists, ankles, anything they could grab. Holding them still like a vise, forcing them to focus their attacks on him, and noone else. It burnt, it stung, it HURT. But he had to. 

"EIJIROU" 

He understood. And hardened even more, bracing himself. 

The explosion had taken time to build up, and it showed by its mere size and power as it sent the closest villains flying, the ones further away pushed back. More than enough for bakugo to grab the torn, smoking and, he gulped, slightly sizzling shape on the ground and blast off, leaving a free space for all might to go all out.

____________________________________________

This one is sort of a continuation of the previous that I wrote way after the first one. Here I focus more on the theme and repeating phrase, making it more experimental I suppose. 

I didn't want you to be here alone"

Those words rang through his head, over and over as he sat by the hospital bed. The words had been forced out, almost whimpered with a voice close to cracking. They had saved him. 

They had flooded his body with strength after having been close to breaking down from exhaustion, arms twitching from the strain and breaths heavy and shallow, forehead dripping with sweat. 

Kirishima's eyes had been wider that he'd ever seen them before, shiny and filled with terror. But they had been steady, so solid. 

His rock. 

His sudden appearance had thrown Bakugou's attackers off rhythm a bit, and it had given him a much needed second to breathe and rearrange his thoughts. With a shaky blast, he's thrown himself over to Kirishima. 

"Kirish- how- what the FUCK are you doing here??!" he'd hissed, voice raw and gravely with all the intense emotions going on. 

And then Kirishima had said those words. So terribly, terribly honest and sincere. So simple, but with such an enormous meaning. Bakugou's heart had felt like it had both frozen and swelled to its bursting point at the same time, chest filled with an indescribable emotion.  

He'd wanted to grab the redhead, wrap him tightly in his arms and hug him flush against his own body just to feel that the other person was really there, really there in this awful awful place with him. FOR him. 

But there was no time for such selfish things. Bakugou's attention had snapped to the approaching villains, feeling the panic gnawing in his chest. They were going to get him. Please no. 

Then Kirishima had done the second incredible thing that evening. He'd takes Bakugou's trembling, sweaty hand in his own, equally trembling but warm and strong hand, and squeezed it tight. And that did everything. Now Bakugou could see. Now he could think. Now he could do anything. 

The fight was a blur to his emotionally raw mind, but he remembered how different it was now compared to when he was alone. They knew each other, knew each other's movements, didn't even need to talk. It had been such a relief. 

But these were real villains. Strong ones. And they were exhausted, scared, and 16.

About 45 seconds in, Kirishima had taken a hit for him. It had been fast, unexpected and HARD. Bakugou wouldn't had survived it, the battle would have been over. He hadn't even seen it coming. But Kirishima, his rock, had. And he'd stopped it. 

The impact had sent both parties flying in opposite directions, and that created their opening. Their chance to escape. No, to WIN. Win by not letting those assholes reach their goal, which was them. 

Grabbing Kirishima, hoisting him up over his shoulder in one not-so-swift motion, he let out two enormous, concentrated explosions that had let them both take off, away from this hell. 

They had landed a couple blocks away, Bakugou letting out a final blast to ease their landing, before crashing down into the street. He'd dropped Kirishima, himself following shortly after as his legs folded in on themselves under him in fatigue. On his knees, panting, he looked over the the redhead, managing to squeeze out a skew smile. 

"You idiot.. we could've both died". 

He waited for the other to weakly lift his head from the asphalt, look over to him and fire off one of his signature warm smiles and tell him something about having to do the "manly thing". 

But Kirishima wasn't breathing. 

Bakugou's smile dropped. 

-

"Bakugou-san? Don't you want to go back to your own bed? You should get proper rest after all that stress you've gone through". 

Light fingers were gently touching his shoulder, and he jolted awake. Shit, he'd fallen asleep. He looked around, orienting himself in both room and thought. Right, the hospital. His eyes fell on the bed he'd been resting his head on in front of him. Kirishima's bed. 

"Fuck off" he grunted, voice much more raspy and weak than it would've been in any normal situation. 

The person who had woken him up, a nurse, sighed softly, walking around to the other side of the bed to take a closer look at one of the machines there. Bakugou's eyes followed her for a few seconds before snapping to the boy in said bed. 

His hair was down, fanning out over the pillow around his sleeping face. Aside from a few shallow scratches, the face looked normal, mouth slightly open, exposing a few sharp teeth. Dark lashes hiding those sincere, reliable red eyes. 

His arms laid resting upon his stomach which was gently rising in rhythm with his breathing, the breathing Bakugou was infinitely relieved was back to stable condition. 

Under his hands were a hospital blanket, a blanket Bakugou knew covered the horrible wound that stretched across his whole body. The wound he'd gotten by taking that hit for him. Fuck. He'd almost died. 

Kirishima almost DIED. 

That minute before the pros had reached their landing spot with security and ambulances, that minute had been hell for Bakugou. Easily a hundred times worse than the entire fight they'd just escaped from. Kirishima wasn't breathing. He wasn't fucking breathing. This wasn't real. This wasn't happening. Not KIRISHIMA. Kirishima who had come to him. Who'd come ALONE, with no one to hold his hand. Just for Bakugou. So he wouldn't had to go through this alone. Like he'd had with the sludge villain. He'd come for him, been THERE with him. 

His rock. 

That wasn't breathing. 

The pros had had to physically pry him away from Kirishima's limp body. He'd apparently been in shock, hysterically screaming at them to fuck off, trying to defend his friend but had been to confused and exhausted to do any real damage. He'd been swept away in one ambulance and Kirishima in another. 

Bakugou had woken up in a hospital bed, abruptly and with an ice old stone in his stomach. The doctors had immediately swarmed his bed, and soon they had let him know his friends condition. He'd somehow convinced them to let him sit by the others bed, and there's where he'd been ever since, glued to the chair, fingers intertwined with his. 

His rock.

____________________________________________

This is the first one that gets kinda gore-y. Not that indulging in juicy details, but might be uncomfortable to read if you’re sensitive to bones breaking and stuff like that. It is kinda silly and not very well written lol, I wrote it in the middle of the night if I rememebr right. 

As usual there's a battle going on, and Kirishima and Bakugou has been fighting side by side until something happens that distracts Bakugou away from his partner for a while. Suddenly there's a loud rumble followed by a boom and then Kirishima can't be seen anywhere. 

Bakugou finds him as the dust settles, nailed to the ground by more or less a wholeass building that's fallen on him, and he's fully hardened as to not get immediately crushed into soup.

He's so stuck in there it's literally impossible for anything less than a full team to get him out, and Bakugou is livid having to sit there unable to do anything when Kirishima is RIGHT THERE in front of him but could have just as well been miles away and still been just as reachable.

Kneeling on the ground as to be able to see underneath the rubble that's holding his friend captive, he does his very best to mutter encouragements and pleads for the other to keep going, stay hardened and endure until help arrived. But it's a lot to hold up, and Kirishima is tired. Being fully hardened is draining enough, but having to also hold up such monstrous weight is not helping in the slightest. 

"Bakugou, I can't- it's so heavy" 

A horrifying crack is heard as the boys quirk wavers for a split second causing the weight to squish down a bit more. Bakugou's pulse is going into overdrive from stress, fear and frustration. Fuck, fuck, FUCK. He can't let Kirishima get crushed like this. 

"I- I don't want to die, but.. I really can't hold my whole body hardened any longer. I'm gonna have to- I'm gonna have to let something go.." the trapped boy gasps between forced breaths. Bakugou feels his chest going ice cold. 

"Shit, you're not gonna-" he's interrupted by a wet crack and squish, followed by the most soul ripping, horrifyingly heart wrenching scream. Bakugou uselessly tries to lunge forward to get to his friend but of course he can't. He screams the prescious name over and over, panicking. Kirishima is breathing heavily through gritted teeth, face shiny with sweat. 

A bit of blood is leaking out from under the rubble. He'd let go of his hardening on one of his legs. 

Once he'd gotten his breath somewhat back in control, his now slightly dazed eyes met with Bakugou's once again. 

"Fuck, Kiri.." he could see his vision starting to blur with tears building up. " You're so fucking strong, you can do this. You can't just let this lameass bullshit rock win. You-" 

"Bakugou. I'm gonna have to do this again. I need to conserve and focus my last energy to keep my head and torso hardened if I don't want to die right now. But fu-"Kirishima stops to take a long shaky breath. " It really hurts. I don't know if I can take it without.." 

"Don't you fucking dare pass out Eijirou. Don't you FUCKING dare." Bakugou's red eyes are glowing with fear. Kirishima releases a gaspy huff, maybe an attempt for a laugh, or maybe a sigh. It was impossible to tell. 

"I'm gonna need help to.. to stay awake. To not drift away when the pain becomes.. overwhelming."

He doesn't get a chance to clarify before his eyes are nailed shut with a wince, immediately followed by another crack and stomach-turning squish. 

"Fuck. FUCK. Please, please stay with me. You can do this, this is nothing, just listen to my voice and don't you dare drift away, you hear me?!" Bakugou screams out between sobs.

This repeats a few more times. The last one is the worst, when Kirishima is at the very end of his rope, letting the hardening go around his lower body and his pelvis snapping under the intense weight. That makes him scream louder and more distorted than any of the previous screams and Bakugou didn't think a human could produce such a sound. That time Kirishima almost passes out, but through screaming, pleading and an arm reached in under the rubble as far as possible, Bakugou manages to somehow keep him awake. The red puddle leaking out from under the rubble grows larger. Time is very much just about to run out. 

Now the only things hardened left are the head, torso, and most of the stomach area, but not for much longer. Cracks are increasingly rapidly appearing in his face and he can no longer speak due to having his head so wedged between the ground and the rubble.

The story will either end with the rescuers making it just in time, or Bakugo hearing a faint whisper sounding something like "get your arm out of here" before the small space under the rubble thundered down like a beast snapping its jaws shut around its prey, erasing all evidence that someone had been there aside from the red puddle and a few red splatters across a shocked face.

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A shorter one coming up! And Kirishima doesn’t even get hurt in this one? woah..

It's Kirishima's first time visiting the Bakugou house. Katsuki and his mom gets into an argument almost immediately, as expected. Kirishima is concerned but doesn't say or do anything since this seems sadly quite normal for them, as their speech patterns seem to go on almost on autopilot, throwing harsh insults and criticism to each other while the dad sits quiet at his own corner of the table. The mood is tense and uncomfortable but then Katuki mutters something under his breath and Kirishima sees to his disbelief how Mitsukis arm raises above her son's head, preparing to strike. 

She's barely started to swing down before her wrist is abruptly caught in motion. Due to the initial shock of having been stopped for the first time in forever makes her freeze. Her wrist is held in a vise-like grip, not tight as to hurt her, but so solid it's completely impossible to pry the rough, rock hard fingers off of her. The one holding her, the THING holding her, is standing in front of her son, her son who's standing there, wide eyes and equally as shocked as herself, eyes glued to the thing in front of him. 

In his fury, Kirishima had gone full Unbreakable as he'd reached out to stop this woman from hitting her child. He knew it was overkill, to use his quirk at all, but his protective instinct had gone into overdrive when the woman had threatened what was so precious to him, and his body had reacted before his mind could catch up. 

After what felt like forever of intense staring, Unbreakable's distorted sharp features morphed back into the soft, kind face it was supposed to be, the hand holding the wrist let go of it's iron grip, letting both arms fall to their respective sides. 

"We're spending the weekend at my house, Katauki."  he mutters as he gently grabs Katsukis hand and determinedly takes him out of the house. 

Katsuki has never seen Kirishima's eyes so dark, heard his voice being that cold. His body is buzzing with... Something. He doesn't know what, but the hand holding his is warm and steady, and he knows he'll hold it until the end of the world.

I’m aware of the discourse surrounding Mitsuki. Is she a good parent who just got introduced in a shitty way, or is she abusive? I don’t carea bout the discourse and I enjoy reading both portrayals. In this particular portrayal she is abusive though.

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Okay! Time for the first gore-y one. Warning for blood, big wounds and mention of exposed guts.

There's a big battle, and the class has of course been right in the middle of it. Kirishima and Bakugou had gone off to the side, pursuing an especially nasty villain (read: Bakugou ran after while Kirishima tagged along yelling at him to keep with the group). Things were going alright until one wrong move was made and everything suddenly changed. Somehow, Bakugou found himself blown away, lost in a huge dust cloud. The villain they had been hunting was gone, and so was Kirishima. Or so he thought. Once the dust had cleared enough to see, he found Kirishima's characteristic shape laying on the ground among some rubble and glass shards. With an uncomfortable tightness in his chest, he'd ran over and once he got there, the world spun. 

In Kirishima's abdomen was a more or less gaping hole, ominously pumping out a steady stream of blood. Bakugou's vision went fuzzy around the edges and he felt his knees buckle under him when the wet, shiny surface of exposed guts peeked through the slashed up skin. He fell to his knees next to his friend who was somehow still conscious. 

"K-katsuki..?" 

Kirishima's voice comes out gravely and wet. His breaths are so short and shallow. Bakugou's eyes snap to Kirishima's. 

"Katauki, what happened? Where are w-" he grit his teeth as he winced. "Fuck, this really hurts". His gaze wanders down to inspect the damage on his body but Bakugou quickly, but oh so lightly, grabs his head and forces him to look back up at him.

"Don't- don't look" he manages to sputter out. But Kirishima already saw. The look in his eyes makes spoken words unnecessary. "This is really bad." 

Blood is still flowing freely and Bakugou has to make a decision. Either wait and run the high risk of letting Kirishima bleed out, or do something about it himself. He's have to cauterize the wound. 

"W- I..the blood.. we can't let it flow like that." He couldn't force the word out of his mouth, but Kirishima seemed to understand. 

He can't. He just can't. This is Kirishima. If he fucks up- if he miscalculates even a little bit, everything will go to shit. He'll kill Kirishima. He could fucking kill Kirishima. Bakugou is getting lightheaded, forehead dripping and hands shaking. This is so much pressure and so little time. 

No class has prepared him for this. There was once a brief mention of cauterization and how people with heat quirks could perform it if needed, but nothing could've prepared him for what it would be like to actually have to to it. And so soon. And on Kirishima. Who's body seemed to have made it a sport to evacuate all its blood as quickly as possible. 

His thoughts were spinning and he could feel the world closing in on him. All noises were too loud, distracting. He couldn't concentrate. His hands were hovering directly above the main source of the bloodflow, shaking visibly. And Kirishima, the fucker, had with his own slightly trembling hands reached up to hold them slightly above Bakugou's, hardened. Bakugou later realized that was the stupid fucking redhead's attempt to shield Bakugou from any possible damage he could receive from the blast he was about to create, and to focus the heat downwards. Who the fuck would thing about something like that in this situation? No one but Kirishima fucking Eijirou. 

"Okay, im- I'm gonna do it now" he choked out, the uncertainty not even a little bit concealed. Kirishima's eyes were closed in a frowning anticipation of the pain to come, but he still managed to reply.

"I trust you Katsuki". 

The pressure was so high. He could kill Kirishima. He could die. It would be his fault. The blood was booming in his ears so loudly he couldn't even hear his own sobbing gasps for air as his breathing became more and more like hyperventilating. It was like his ability to make the decision had been locked. He knew he had to do it, but the consequence for messing it up, it was too great. He couldn't do it. And yet, the seconds kept ticking away, dripping by one by one just like the blood keeping his friend alive. Kirishima let out a choked whimper and it was like jamming a stick in a bear trap. In a split second Bakugou's brain flipped to a decision. A decision his body was not ready for. 

BOOM

His vision goes white, or maybe black, he couldn't tell, and he feels something warm and moist splatter in small dots on his face. His ears are ringing. The edges of his vision blurry, spinning, unreal. 

He'd fucked up. 

-

Why are his hands red and wet? 

What is that sizzling noise? The burnt smell? Below him is a blurry mess or red and black but his gaze can't focus on anything. That annoying ringing in his ears drown out all other possible noises. 

He fucked up. 

Shock takes an iron grip on him and prevent him from wrapping his head around what is going on. There was something urgent. He had needed help? Recovery girl. 

And that's how they were found. Bakugou sitting with wide, unfocused eyes, tears running down his cheeks unnoticed by himself. Gaze locked on the body in front of him. The body with a big hole blown up in the stomach area, its contents basically soup. 

Midoriya is the first one to reach them, immediately recognizing the unfocused stare and uneven breathing. 

"He's in shock. Deep in shock. He doesn't move or respond to anything, what the hell happened?" 

"Oh my god, Kirishima"

The sound of his name seemed to feel at least part of Bakugou's consciousness back to his body because he let out a sudden, deep sob and barely loud enough to be hard, he whispered. 

"I fucked up"

So yeah, even the best sometimes fuck up when such immense pressure is put on them. Kiri got his gut blown to shit yo. I do think he survives though. How will Bakugou deal with having fucked up so badly? Maybe I’ll write some angs about him dealing with it lol

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This one is the real gore-porno lol (not actual porn tho, dw), warning for blood, guts and ANGST. In a huge explosion or other type of great force, Kirishima is almost split in half. On one leg getting mostly ripped off, all the way from the very base of his thigh, along with a bit of his side and stomach. Sort of like this, but the leg still being attatched to the body by some bits of skin and flesh.

Kirishima's perspective:

He doesn't understand what's going on really. His body has gone in shock and he doesn't feel pain, just kinda numbness and confusion. He don't know why he can't move when he’s laying there on the ground. He feels both hot and cold at the same time, and he can't really tell where his arms and legs are. 

"Bakugou, what's going on?" He asks. But Bakugou doesn't reply. He just sobs as he pets his cheek and seems to be in great distress.

Bakugou rummages around a bit, still sobbing and gasping, gritting this teeth, and eventually somehow manages to hoist Kirishima's limp body onto his back. Huh, he must be hurt then, Kirishima assumes.

"Are we going to recovery girl?" He asks, head slightly bouncing on Bakugou's shaking shoulder as he runs.  Bakugou manages to choke out a quiet "ssshhh, don't talk now" between sobs, and Kirishima gets more worried now. Bakugou is really distressed, what's going on? 

He tries to look around. Has it gotten this dark already? There must be sweat or something getting in his eyes, because his vision is getting darker and blurrier. And he's so tired. Maybe he'll just take a nap. Bakugou is here so he's safe. Hell just close his eyes for a moment...

Then it switches to Bakugou's perspective, and we are back when he's just picked Kirishima up.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. He can't deal with this. Why hadn't he been there?? How did this even happen? This fucker was supposed to have the best defence in the entire hero force, what the fuck?? 

He can't stop his sobbing. Why would he? This is real. Kirishima will die any second and the only thing he can do is run. Run for his friends life. 

He'd been scared to his core when he'd found Kirishima laying on the ground, unmoving. He'd sat down beside him, too in shock to even begin to know what to do. And then Kirishima had startled him half to death by suddenly coughing and grunting out something that sounded like "Bhkgh, ws gngh nh", voice wet with blood. The relief of realizing his friend was still alive, there was still time, was overwhelming. But it was also quickly replaced with the fear of fucking this up and letting time run out. He had gently brushed Kirishima's cheek, the redhead seemingly unknowing of the situation he was in. 

Now he was running with the most precious cargo on his back, trying to control his breathing so he could run steadier and faster, not making the weight on his back bounce too violently. The hand holding the body on his back were wet with blood, and his heart got caught in his throat when one of his hands felt slippery guts on their way out between his fingers. His focus starts to slip. It's too much. Suddenly he feels a breath on his cheek, followed by a wet choking noise and some blood splatter on the side of his face. Kirishima is still alive. Trying to say something even though his body is falling apart. 

"Shhh, don't talk now" Bakugou sobs. 

Somewhere along the shock takes overhand for Bakugou as well and his sprint turns into a jog.

Eventually they stumble into the secured area and are seen and approached by the others, who get a real shock when they see the state the two are in. Turns out neither Bakugou or Kirishima had been really present during this traumatizing event and neither's narrative was reliable. The scene is gruesome. Bakugou, stumbling forward in an unfocused and not seeming to have a plan for going in a direction in particular. Blood covering most of his face from a wound on his head, probably having a concussion. When asked what's going on or what he's carrying he just answers in short sentences like "I don't have time" or "I'm supposed to get recovery girl", seemingly not having registered the questions at all. The biggest shock is when they see what he's been carrying though. On his back hangs Kirishima. He's seemingly unconscious at this point, body limp and.. one leg dragging behind on the ground, guts on their way out from the hole it left behind.

When they manage to pry Kirishima off Bakugou's back they realize he's cold and completely unmoving. He's probably been dead for a while. Bakugou had been too far gone in shock to understand this rescue mission was over.

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I’m sparing Kiri from getting hurt in this one lol.  "What's going on?" 

Kirishima came rushing to the place where a few of his classmates along with their teacher had gathered around a certain explosive student. 

"I don't know? We were in the middle of an exercise and I just grabbed him and he freaked out!" 

Kirishima quickly made his way into the center of the gathering and saw what had caused it. 

Bakugo was having some kind of panic attack, breathing going in and out of hyperventilating and eyes frozen, staring at nothing. His skin was shiny with sweat and his whole body was visibly tensed to the maximum, even vibrating slightly, hands popping ominously. No one could even get close without the red eyes immediately snapping to them, explosions growing bigger and more threatening. Bakugou was completely lost in his own head, reacting to every sound like a threat. 

Kirishima could tell the others were afraid. Afraid for their friend, but also of him. No one could get close. 

Well, no one except Kirishima. 

“Aizawa, I think I can help.” he said, eyes not leaving the blonde. 

The teacher could’ve canceled the blonde’s quirk, could’ve made it relatively easy to overpower the out-of-control student and taken him to recovery girl. but he knew his students well enough to know that would be devastating to his current state, only adding more panic, fear and humiliation. He knew about these two’s bond. Knew Kirishima could take the blasts. It was worth a shot.

-

"Bakugo? Can you hear me?” Kirishima asked softly. No reaction from the blonde aside from maybe a few extra heavy breaths. He would have to grab his attention somehow.

“ I am going to place my hands on your upper arms. I will not grab you, just lightly touch you, okay?"

The blond's gaze was turned inwards, eyes frantically darting around, following things that weren't there. Kirishima gently placed his hands on his friend's upper arms, making sure not to squeeze or grab, as to not trigger him up even more. He could feel the body slightly tense up under his palms, but he didn't violently flinch away or explode like he had when their teacher had attempted the same thing to try to calm him down. Kirishima swallowed once before speaking again, voice soft but strong. 

"I am going to move my hands down to your hands and then hold them to my chest. My hands are going to brush along your arms on the way down so you can feel exactly where they are, okay?" No response from the shaking body so he proceeded with his plan. 

"I'm going to lightly take hold of your hands now." 

Gently, he placed the sweaty, shaky hands on his chest, placing his own hands on top to keep them from falling down. He searched for the deep red gaze and finally managed to catch it. He caught it and held it. 

"There you are." 

He could see the turmoil behind Bakugo's eyes, the panic and feeling of being cornered. He held his gaze steady, grounding. 

"You can feel me breathing, right? Can you feel the rythm of my breaths? Let's breathe together, alright? In.......and out.." 

Slowly, Bakugo's hyperventilating slowed down into a more stable pace, matching up with Kirishima's, and his gaze started coming back to the real world, still locked onto the others eyes. Kirishima let out a proud smile.

"There we go! I'm glad to have you back!" He let his hands fall back and so did the blonde, as expected. What he didn't expect though was the blond letting himself fall into him, resting his forehead against his chest. 

"Thank you.." he could hear his friend mumble, letting out a deep breath. Kirishima felt a hand fumbling for his and he grabbed it and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

"Don't worry about it" he breathed into the spiky hair.

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Aaaaaaand I’m finishing this monstrosity of a post off with some fluff. You deserve it if you read this far haha! 

Among other things, kissing had been a new thing added to the list of things kirishima enjoyed a lot, after he and Bakugou had started dating. It could be so intimate, but also so casual. The perfect way of showing your loved one affection! It could be done in so many ways too! but there was one particular type of kiss that had grown to become Kirishima’s absolute favorite. It was not one of those deep, tongue-exercising kisses, even though he enjoyed those too! No, this was actually something that had started out as a joke, but had turned into something so much more special and fun. 

It all started one day when Bakugou was heading to the showers after a training session and was going to give Kirishima a quick kiss as he passed him by in the common-room. Kirishima didn’t know why he’d done it differently that time, but het way he had shaped his mouth as they parted had created the most cartoonishly loud smack that the whole room had gone silent. The surprise in Bakugou’s eyes had slowly morphed into a face of immense satisfaction and manic joy. 

“Dude” was finally heard from Kaminari who’d decided to break the silence. “That was loud as FUCK”. 

Bakugou’s red eyes immediately snapped to him. 

“Damn right it was! Louder than your sorry ass could ever make it!” 

And after that it was on. 

Bakugou made it a sport to, of course when they were in the most public places, make the loudest possible smack when parting from a casual kiss. As much as to show affection, the goal of these kisses were to make an as loud noise as possible, sort of as a flex to any unfortunate classmate that happened to be around when it happened. Of course Bakugou had made it into some kind of personal challenge to figure out the way to make the loudest kiss possible during his time at UA and he was well on his way already. Kirishima thought it was a bit silly but he would lie if he didn't admit he also felt a smug satisfaction when they parted with a loud plop, having perfected the way he pouted his lips, creating a suction cup effect when colliding with Bakugou's similarly shaped ones. A comedic display to say the least. But much manlier than a subtle peck on the cheek. ____________________________________________

If you got all the way down here, thank you so much for reading! I’m not a writer, but sometimes I get little ideas that I write down, and then I might as well share them ^^ 

[sinsofafangirl]

Chapter Three.

"You're just a stupid little girl who has done nothing but ruin everything I've ever worked for - your father would be ashamed"

"I'm glad your father's dead, he doesn't have to see what a wretch and a cancer you've become"

"Police Academy?! Ha! Maybe I'll get lucky and someone sensible with half a brain will shoot you like your failure of a father"

Ava woke with a start, her body jolting upright, her eyes still heavy with sleep unable to focus on her unfamiliar surroundings as her heart pounded erratically and her chest heaved as she struggled to shake off the remnants of the all too familiar dream. Too caught up in regaining her composure she never noticed the bucket of water or the person throwing it until she was drenched and spluttering. Her hands came up to rub her eyes in an attempt to once again clear her vision before throwing a glare at the offending person "'bout time you woke up, almost thought you'd died and saved me a whole lotta trouble" a roll of her eyes indicated she'd heard him, she just refused to give him a reaction. Of fucking course it'd be Jacob Seed to get her wet in the frosty early morning air and not in the good way. "Fuck off, Seed" came her irked reply mentally slapping herself for actually responding to him "someone wake up on the wrong side of the cage this morning?" a question asked without an ounce of genuine care and a smirk so fraudulent it made her old Barbie dolls seem a hundred per cent real in comparison. Ava didn't reply and instead huffed in annoyance; she was exhausted and her entire body ached from having to sleep on the dirty floor all night so she was in no mood for being patronised by an asshole choosing to focus on trying to untangle the mess of brunette hair with nothing but her fingers - unsuccessfully I might add which only worsened her already sour mood. Refusing to give up her hands continued as best they could to untangle some of the easier knots and avoiding the still tender area of where she'd been struck a few hours earlier.

Cerulean blue eyes watched as she stubbornly refused to give up enjoying the small huffs of frustration he'd hear occasionally. If he was any sort of gentleman he'd offer her an extra set of hands but he found watching her struggle much more entertaining. Instead the former army marksman took the opportunity to study the young woman sitting awkwardly in his cage; always know your enemy he thought as his gaze wandered over her. Now that it was daytime he could get a good look at her; hair a chocolaty brown and even though it was currently a mess you could see she took care of it, she must have been about 5"2 and a hundred and five pounds if that which surprised him considering she put quite a bit of force into the kick to his face last night - not enough to hurt him too much but she still managed to draw blood. That didn't mean anything to him though, she was still weak and he looked forward to putting her through her paces and beyond but for now his studying continued now noting her eyes that were a sea green "you getting off on this, Seed?" then there was that mouth of hers always too quick with a smart remark and a sarcastic comment - that would soon change, he'd break that bad habit first. "You could have avoided all of this if you and your friends had just walked away" which was true but Ava wasn't about to admit that especially not to Jacob who currently sat upon a metal chair, his large arms folded across his chest whilst his legs stretched out before him crossing at his feet; dickhead came to mind as she finally gave up on trying to tame her unruly hair and turned her attention to the eldest of the three siblings. Easier to see him properly within the early morning rays of sunshine peeking through. The photos provided within the manila folder didn't give much detail; too grainy to actually make anything out but now in the morning light she noticed just how beautiful his eyes were and yes, she hated herself for admitting it and yes, she almost threw up in her mouth but she couldn't deny that they were strikingly beautiful and one of the first things she'd noticed. His scars and his burns weren't even on her radar as she casually studied him whilst his attention was momentarily elsewhere, of course they were noticeable and of course she was curious about them; how had he gotten such severe scarring? Did they bother him? Then she snorted realising what a stupid thought that was - it was Jacob Seed as if anything bothered him.

Her snort caught his attention and his eyes snapped back to her making her look away "somethin' funny?" completely ignoring his question Ava rose to her knees and shuffled until she was at the front of the cage "to answer your previous statement. If you and your freakshow of a family acted like decent human beings none of this would have happened" she spat venomously, her facial expression twisting into something that conveyed hatred. Within an instant Jacob's demeanor changed from one of mild amusement and boredom to that of white hot rage, his hands came up to slam on the bars of the cage as he shot forward making the young woman fall back in fear and shuffle as far back as possible - everyone knew not to slander his family in anyway but apparently Ava didn't get that memo and instantly regretted running her mouth as she saw the sheer anger in his glare and the way his hands gripped the bars hard enough to turn his knuckles white. She wasn't afraid to admit that she was terrified right now but her wide green eyes couldn't look away "don't ever talk ill of my family" his voice despite being low was filled with rage and a fierce protectiveness that almost sounded like a growl, it made a chill run down her spine. If making situations worse by running your mouth was an Olympic event Ava would get gold everytime, it was a talent and right now it was one she wished she never had.

His gaze lingered on her for a few more moments as if contemplating his next move and Ava just prayed to whatever higher power that existed that it didn't involve him opening the cage. Instead Jacob released his grip, stood swiftly from the chair and moved towards two of his Chosen; unable to hear what he was saying Ava closed her eyes and made a mental note not to mention his family again. When she reopened them she noticed Jacob had headed inside the Veterans Centre and the men he'd been talking to heading her way "time to get cleaned up little lady, brother Jacob's orders" cleaned up? Wonderful she thought knowing it wasn't about to be a warm bubble bath waiting for her. When she hadn't moved quickly enough the cage door was wrenched open and a dirty hand grasped her hair making Ava his in pain as he dragged her kicking and screaming across the compound "quite ya flappin' girly, it ain't doin' ya no good" she didn't listen and despite her ankle throbbing she managed to get a lucky hit on the shin of the second man who cursed loudly before regaining his composure and back handing her for the trouble making her head swing back, almost seeing stars from the impact.

Ava was thrown unceremoniously onto the hard floor of a dimly lit concrete room, her hands and knees stinging from taking the brunt of the impact, this made her glance over her shoulder and glare at her two 'knights in shining armour' but they'd already left leaving her to her own devices for the time being. Her mind wondered what their version of 'getting cleaned up' was because judging from the state of them and the smell she had to endure on the way over they hadn't bathed in quite some time; hypocrites.

Ava noticed the medium sized drainage hole in the middle of the room and the large hose pipe hanging neatly on the wall near the door but her muddled mind didn't put two and two together and paid no attention to it, instead she focused on the door and wondered if they'd been stupid enough to leave it unlocked. It couldn't possibly be that easy to get off here, right? As if she'd be able to just open the door and go? Seeing as she was cold, exhausted and hungry Ava didn't think she had much of a choice and even with a bad ankle she could suffer through the pain long enough to get away from this place.

Without hesitation she slowly pushed herself up off the unforgiving floor and hobbled towards the door; her ankle protesting every step she made but she wasn't about to let that stop her when her freedom was so close that she could almost taste it.

A shaky hand reached out towards the handle, her fingers brushing it gently but to her horror it moved and the door began to open making her recoil from the fiery haired brute who had just stepped inside "goin' somewhere, pup?" he asked, his face showed no emotion and neither did his voice which didn't bode well for the brunette now sat on the floor - the momentum of trying to move away quick enough meant she fell ass backwards and her ass had no padding so no doubt that would be yet another bruise for her.

"Strip" came his clipped demand, his gaze fixed and hard on the woman in front of him. His arms were folded across his chest again and Ava wondered if that was a natural stance for him or if it was to stop him from possibly murdering her. Her brows furrowed in confusion at his demand "what?" "you heard me, I said strip" again, his tone was short and clipped but that didn't stop Ava who scoffed and point blank refused. There was no way she was going to strip for him "and if I don't?" she asked raising an eyebrow as if to challenge him which with all things considered was probably pretty stupid on her part but up until this point her life had been a series of stupid events so why not continue?

It was then she realised her mistake and her eyes widened in absolute fear as Jacob stormed across the room and it was in that moment she saw that rage within his eyes from earlier and prayed that whatever death was coming it'd be quick. All of a sudden she found herself pinned to the cold, harsh floor with one of his hands around her throat, his grip hard enough to leave bruises whilst his other hand pinned both her wrist above her - she had nowhere to go because her legs were useless at this point and even they weren't she doubted she'd have enough strength to fend him off long enough to reach the door. His face was now right above hers, his breath hot on her face as she struggled to for air "you'll learn why I'm the best at what I do and you'll either play nice and fall in line remembering that you're nothin' more than meat that's expendable" as if to emphasize his point his grip around her throat became that much tighter that she'd started to squirm beneath him, panic mode had kicked in as her vision became cloudy. She truly thought she was about to die and in the back of her mind she found she was okay with that because that would mean she would finally meet her father. In her current situation she was completely powerless to stop him from choking the life out of her and snapping her neck like a twig but apparently he wasn't feeling that murderous today and released his grip just enough for her to gasp for air " - or you'll be culled, tied up and used as live target practice for my Chosen, so what will it be, princess?"

Ava gasped and spluttered again fighting for air unable to give him a physical answer Ava weakly nodded as much as his grip allowed making a cruel smirk replace the scowl he'd been wearing previously" good girl, you know what to do" within an instant he'd relinquished his grip on both her wrists and her throat and had returned to his previous position. His gaze hardened and cold as watched her pathetically regain her composure.

With no other option but to do as she was told the young brunette cautiously and fearfully began to slip out of her deputy uniform as shaking hands fumbled with zips, buckles and buttons. His never wavering gaze didn't help her much either and not knowing if he would strangle her again also didn't help but soon enough she'd managed to discard her uniform leaving her in nothing but her bra and underwear; surely I can keep these on, right? This made Ava look over towards him and in return he merely nodded making tears spring to her eyes as she tentatively reached for the clasp of her bra at the back to unhook it before letting it drop to the floor. Ava gulped down the feeling of nausea before scrunching her face in pain as she winced - her throat would be sore for a good while and no doubt the bruises he left will last weeks before they fade.

Refusing to let him have the satisfaction of seeing her cry, Ava thumbed the elastic of her underwear before tugging them down over her hips, thighs and legs before discarding them with the rest of her clothes. Every part of her was open to him, she felt extremely vulnerable wished she was anywhere but here. Her earlier bravado had been stripped from her and now she naked and exposed in front of him. A face full of cold, harsh water soon broke her train of thought as the force of the pressure slammed her against the nearest wall making her cry out but this only resulted in more coughing and spluttering from the woman. Not that she could see but she could already tell that her skin had probably turned a nice shade of red if pain was anything to go by.

No matter how hard she tried to cover herself from the onslaught of water it just never made a difference, instead she gave up and pressed herself against the cold wall waiting for it to be over.

After what felt like an eternity the water stopped and she was left sore, drenched and very, very cold if her shivering was anything to go by. It's the type of cold that works its way into your bones and then it's icy tendrils wrap itself around your core and you genuinely wonder if you'll ever feel warmth again. "Get dressed" a flurry of definitely used clothes that consisted of ratty dark jeans and a fade flannel shirt hit her but Ava was that cold she would have worn a garbage bag to get warm at this point so she hurriedly threw them on making a note of just how big they were on her, not that she was about to complain especially if it meant being stripped again.

By now Jacob stood in front of what he could only assume was a drowned rat, her hair now forcefully untangled hung dripping onto the flannel she wore as he grasped her jaw he noticed how she flinched but said nothing, his grip just hard enough to have her attention and possibly leave bruises "when you behave yourself you get privileges like clothes but if you keep running that mouth of yours and misbehaving those privileges get taken away and you'll get punished. I'm sure my men out there would love to see the sight that I just saw and I mean, who knows what would happen if I'm not around" his not so subtle threat was quickly understood; the possibility of getting raped wasn't something she wanted "have I made myself clear?" "y - yes" Jacob quirked an eyebrow and gripped her jaw that little bit harder; more bruises to add to the collection she thought as she painfully cleared her throat "y - yes, sir" her voice was hoarse and it hurt to talk but her answer seemed to satisfy him because relinquished his grip and strode to the door, an arm keeping it open as he glanced at the sorry state of a deputy.

"Time for your trainin', let's go, pup" Ava meekly nodded; too tired and too fearful at this point to put up a fight. Her stomach filled with dread as she made her way towards the door.

It couldn't get any worse, right?

[beautifullymoor]

Love Reincarnated

Trez: *the Brotherhood and the trainee program sometimes was no better than a either a group of teenaged human girls or a bunch of old human women in a knitting circle. The mansion and compound had been buzzing about Ania and Rhage being out in the field with the Lessers. The good news was that after spending the day at Havers’ hospital both @BeautifullyMoor and Rhage had come back to the mansion and Doc Ehlena was keeping Ania in the hospital wing down by the trainee program. Rhage wasn’t having any of it and was back in his chambers but avoiding me like the plague. After knocking on his door to find out what he was thinking taking a trainee into the field with him, his only response, through the door without opening it, was for me to talk to @BeautifullyMoor. Something I could not do, since I had been banned from being anywhere near the hospital wing or even the trainee program. Both Wrath and the Rehv had put their foot down and told me that I was not to go anywhere near the wing. The ban from Wrath was bad enough, but they knew that having Rehv back up Wrath meant that I was honor bound to follow their orders. I knew that it all stemmed from Ania. I never had the chance to apologize to her after what happened with Assail. Could I guarantee that there wouldn’t be an “I told you so?” Or maybe a hundred! Of course not. That stubborn female proved my point for me. Even though Doc Ehlena told me that Ania would recover and be fine - I needed to see her myself. See that @BeautifullyMoor wasn’t damaged in anyway. I could not rest or not drive myself and everyone else crazy at the Mansion till I could put my mind at ease. And perhaps her over my knee. But, until Ania lifted my ban, I didn’t stand a chance in hell. So what would the next best thing be? Take out some Lessers! Killing Lessers would solve the idle hands issue, and the more I took out the less risk there would be for Ania once she came out of hiding.* Ania: {I was being a bit petty. After all I had made a promise to Rhage. And I knew if I didn't follow through soon, Rhage would tell Trez himself. And as mad as I am with Trez and the way he acted, I didn't want him to find out from anyone except myself.} {I wasn't sure if he'd be at the mansion still. Or at the palace. Maybe out fighting. I was counting on him not being in the mansion, so I could tell Rhage I tried. That I just needed more time.} {rounding the corner, to where iAm and Trez’s rooms were, I ran right into a brick wall of hard muscular male. Dark skin beneath my hands as I pushed myself off the wall of muscles. } i’m sorry I wasn't paying attention. {my words trailed off as I caught his mahogany gaze. Lost in those beautiful dark eyes. I forgot what I had come for.} {it wasn't until I severed our connection and put distance between us that I was able to remember I was mad at this male before me. That I had something to discuss with him.} it wasn't Rhage’s fault. {that was a start, right? What exactly had I promised Rhage? I lowered my eyes to the floor between us. I couldn't put a finger on the way I felt around Trez. I was always thrown off in his presence. Thoughts all over the place. First it had been the dreams, but it's gotten worse since we started being around each other more.} I just came to tell you that. {maybe it would be better if I just avoided @TrezTheMoor, I left those words to myself... because selfish.} Trez *her scent hit me before I saw @BeautifullyMoor in front of me - I’d been in a daze not looking where I was going - before my hands reached out and grabbed her … held her. It was like being hit by the big black Escalade parked in front of the mansion. It almost knocked me over. Then I looked down but instead of looking at me she was intently looking down at the floor. One hand released her arm and gently tried to guide her chin and jawline to tilt her face up to me* Ania please, I need. *letting out a sigh* I need to, no - forget what I need. Are you alright Ania? Wrath and Rehv banned me from going to the medical wing to see you and Doc Ehlena refused to tell me anything. Rhage, fucking asshole, has been dodging me. If I’m upstairs, he’s downstairs. You’d think the brothers were purposefully keeping us away from each other. The point is that no one has told me anything. I’ve been going crazy. *Damn this woman. I knew that she could be stubborn, but who knew that she could be worse than iAm? She refused to look at me, talk to me, anything. The only anything was that muscle in her jaw, twitching. But there was something else. Something that apparently she couldn’t control. Her scent surrounded me and filled me at the same time.* I’m sorry @BeautifullyMoor but you leave me no choice. *before she can react, fight me or even scream, my palm reached around to cover her mouth and I pull her into my quarters locking the door behind me and I lay her down on my bed. Looking her over at first as a parent does their young making sure that all the parts are there and in working order. Then @BeautifullyMoor’s breathing becomes faster and my gaze is drawn to her breasts rising and falling. I kneel down on the bed and move closer. Now her eyes meet mine as I hover above her, so close. In all the time that I had spent with Ania, her scent had never been this strong. Of course, we’ve never been in a position like this before. Hovering over any female since I lost my Selena was the farthest thing from my mind. But I am strangely drawn to @BeautifullyMoor. I close my eyes and breathe her in. I lean in closer and kiss her. What starts out as a soft tentative kiss takes on a life of its own. I lower myself on top of her and wrap my arms around her, everywhere that our skin touches feels like electricity shocking me. Her kisses are the air that I need to breathe.* Ania {one minute you're yourself. The very next, a male is kissing you. You've wanted that since you laid eyes upon him, but now that it's happening nothing else around you matters. All but this very moment. This moment is everything. The reason I had snuck out. The very reason I become an emotional idiot every time I am in @TrezTheMoor’s presence.} {this was what the other girls talked about and why they wanted it so desperately. The touch of a male, this male, was like lighting a fire inside your very soul, that you never knew wasn't awake; until the moment it was truly awakened.} {I should have kicked Trez in the leg, screamed or even been upset that @TrezTheMoor had drug me into his chambers. And now the muscular planes of his ripped chest rubbed down mine body and all I could feel was undiluted desire.} {I felt like my body was split into two, the feelings were so intense. This was wrong. Another voice, the voice clearly egging @TrezTheMoor on, was begging him not to stop. Our hips arching into one another.} {all the anger fleeing me as emotions I've never felt before, consumed me.} Trez *feeling @BeautifullyMoor’s body responding to me this way, I loosen my hold on her and let my hands explore her perfect body, caressing her skin, pulling her to me as our bodies move as one. A perfect fit. I begin to lose myself in @BeautifullyMoor, until I remember what happened and worse; what could have happened. I pull away slightly and wait till she opens her eyes and I have her attention.* Never again! No more of this putting yourself in harms way @BeautifullyMoor. *my body has a mind of its own as my hips grind into her again, I can’t keep my hands off of her. It’s like a need, a necessity that I kiss her, touch her, claim her. All it would take is a slight adjustment of our bodies and I could take her. This need, is something I haven’t felt since…* Ania {and a red light on a highway, “Never again! no more of…” his words tuned out. When Trez ducked his head back in to finish the kiss that he had both started and stopped I had to fight with everything I had.} How about this {motioning between Trez and I with my hand} never happen again? Clearly you think I'm a weak female that isn't good for anything. So I don't know why you brought me into this room. Or why you kissed me {shaking my head, I fought back the tears.} it's like one moment I know you and the next I don't. {I wasn't making sense. Of course I didn't know Trez. I barely knew him! Someone tell my body that because my pushing away from him was more like grinding against his hardness.} {the slightest touch of Trez would make my brain glitch. My body saying one thing and my mind another. I so badly wanted to, just for once, give over to my body. Let Trez consume me. Breathless I begged one last time,} No more words between us. {I meant both in this moment and after it as Trez’s hand brushed over my sensitive flesh.} Trez *caught up in the moment that is @BeautifullyMoor, I lower myself down onto her body, my lips tasting her skin as I kiss my way down her neck, over her collarbone and breathing in her scent as I sense her arousal meeting mine own. My right hand reaches between us to loosen and untie her robes, separating the material and revealing all to me. @BeautifullyMoor’s breathing quickens, but she doesn’t stop me as my lips and tongue continue their travels, flicking the tip of my tongue over her nipple before pulling it between my lips, my fingers travel lower - lightly pushing her legs to open for me.* I need to show you Ania, I need to make you feel things. Let me be the one to make you feel these things.* My finger caresses the inside of her thigh. The skin so soft, moving higher till I reach her warm folds, the lightest of touches and @BeautifullyMoor’s breath catches and I claim her lips in a deep kiss. The kind of kiss that makes you feel your partner’s feelings and emotions to your touch. You can almost read their mind as you pleasure them. In my mind, I return to her - “Yes, yes. That’s it. Release yourself to me”. My finger slipping between her folds and lightly touches her bud, a light circular motion - feeling Ania’s body begin to loosen up and relax as she falls under the spell of my kiss and touch, I slide down her body spreading her legs apart as I move closer to my destination. I kiss the inside of her leg as I slide myself up between her thighs, spreading her lips with my fingers my tongue flicks over her nub - the taste of her arousal coats my tongue. I moan with approval at her taste and hold her by her hips as I settle myself in.* Ania {lost in the most perfect moment. A moment I had dreamed of since the very moment I had laid eyes upon @TrezTheMoor. I felt myself drift, like an out of body experience. I didn't want to leave. Not while his fingers were doing amazing things to my body. Making me feel things I had never felt before. But, much like the first time I laid eyes upon Trez it was like I short circuited.} {“Ania.” My name always sounded better when it fell from his luscious lips. But it wasn't the same sex induced tone as before. This was full of worry. I felt his arms lift my body. Yes. Take me to the bed. Wait. Weren't we already there.} {Memories. Strange ones of Trez. Looking at me with so much love in his dark eyes, came flooding back to me. Memories of Trez that weren't mine. I knew his body like this before. I knew how to please him. Yes, I wanted to make him….it went completely black.} Annalise: *it had been decided. My time as scribe was over. There was nothing to feel over the matter. The war was over. The King had finally taken his throne and was now fixing the old laws. He was feared and loved. The thread, that was needed me, was weakening. For the sake of those I cared for all these years, to continue it was a must that another take on the duties of the race. Taking one last look around, at the now bright colors that made up this side, there was no use of it of the now. The chosen were all with the primale. He treated them well. A true male of worth. A letter to those I gave birth to, though of what use it would be, would still be up to the new scribe. A new thread to be bound. A new destiny to be written. A story weaved as mine unraveled. Not everything I did would be so easily undone. Some things were more permanent. The new scribe would find his duties to be just as weighing as I found them. As I met the angel’s gaze, I nodded.* Be well, Scribe. They will need you back at the mansion. *and with that my time here was over. Mine own story able to be restarted as I dematerialized to a place no one could find me. Missing only the sound of my birds.* Lassiter: {standing alone now on the other side after Annalise dematerialized to I don’t know where - I look around and can’t understand what she saw in this place. It made perfect sense to me why all of the Chosen had decided to come over to our side once Rhage as the new Primale gave them the freedom to choose.} Neither Dr. Phil or Oprah ever covered this. {taking a deep breath and glad that none of the Brothers are around to see this} Baby steps. {Although - we might need to do something about my new title. Scribe Virgin might have worked for Annalise, but I wasn’t feeling it. I needed something cool. Something dramatic. Something that brought fear to my enemies and love and adoration to my… followers? Children? Definitely something to think about. I run through different options in my mind as I dematerialize back to the mansion.} Trez: *pacing the room in the medical unit down in the Training area as Doc Ehlena examined @BeautifullyMoor. Doc tried to get me to leave the room so that she could do her thing but there was no way that I was leaving Ania. Suddenly the doors to the medical suite swung open and that damn pain in the ass angel stomped over to the gurney and looked over @BeautifullyMoor and spoke low to the Doc. Storming his ass in here was one thing, but when he laid his hands on Ania - that was the last straw.* Just who the fuck do you think you are? Take your hands off of her! *as I grab Lassiter’s shoulder and pull to turn him away from the gurney and Ania. Till he turned and faced me with those white eyes.* Lassiter: {turning to look at @TreztheMoor as he attempted to pull me away from @BeautifullyMoor - my eyes boring into his to make him understand} Trez, trust me and let me help you. Help her. Help them both. Ania and Selena! {pushing @TreztheMoor back against the wall and holding him there as my words hit home I could sense that I was about to lose him.} Trez, the Scribe Virgin is gone - well Annalise is gone. I’m the new Head Honcho - I’m still working on the name. So what I’m trying to tell you is that Selena is Ania - or at least a part of her. I can fix her and you can have your love back. Not sure if I’ve figured out my “powers” yet. So you might get Selena but just in Ania’s body or she’ll be Ania with some of Selena’s memories. But you’re cool with any of that right? Sure you are. So just stay over here and let me work my mojo on @BeautifullyMoor. {heading back to the gurney, I lay my hands above her body and try to figure out what I’m doing.} Ania / Selena: {voices were all around me. I knew them. I knew I was safe, but where was...that's when I heard Trez. The only one I cared to know their whereabouts. He was here and didn't seem too happy. What had happened. I struggled to remember how I had got to this bed. My body felt tight like it had before; before when I was with the disease. I couldn't move. It was like my limbs were once again a stone. But, how could that be? I felt myself drifting. A warm light surrounding me. Comforting me. Pulling me back to something else.} Christmas Day {it took everything I had not to stick my tongue out and catch the snowflake that fell on my nose and cheek and lips. Snow! Cold. Who knew how wonderful it was. I welcomed the cold. Even if it did make my bones a little achy. It wasn't everyday an angel gave you a second chance at love.} {Trez had been more than wonderful the last month. We both had a lot to learn. I mean the entire brotherhood had gone through so much. The King finally took the throne. Layla was sequestered. Then three new inductees were made brothers and two new trainee groups were formed. Both allowed women. One of which allowed Ania. Well myself, and that allowed me to be reunited with the love of my existence. The Virgin Scribe stepped down and Layla was finally going to get to be around her and Qhuinn’s young. So much had changed not just in the last couple years, but in the last couple weeks. And who knew how great that Angel really was. You’d never know it listening it V. Smiling at the thought while so many other flooded me. So many to be thankful for. It was as if I missed nothing. I had all the lost memories of Trez’s love. And I still had the love I had for him.} {Whoever said they loved someone didn't love them twice.} {Love was all through the mansion. It was a beautiful time of year. Jurnee and Luke. Gabriella and s’Ex. And now Trez and I. It didn't matter that I was Ania because Trez and I had formed a love. But, now that he knew I held all the memories of Selena as well; our love grew leaps and bounds. I was his Selena reincarnated. And I would be his forever. Lassiter saw to the balance that was needed so Trez would never know loss again. Funny how destiny sees to ensure your rightful path. I needed to be in the trainee program to see Trez and know him for myself. I needed to fight with him so i’d sneak out and get hurt. We needed everything bad to have happened so we could now have the good that was happening.} {a shiver ran down my spine. It was cold, but it felt good to feel. It felt even better to bundle up in the arms of the one I love. Snuggling into Trez, I felt his strong arms envelop me. Everything was finally perfect, as it should and would always be from here and forward.} Trez *I didn’t see any of that coming, that’s for sure. I lost the love of my life and sunk into my own personal hell. Then met @BeautifullyMoor and she drove me insane in every imaginable way possible. Till the day when I thought I was going to lose her too. Cue the fucking angel. Damn bastard sticking his nose in everyone’s business all the time. Turns out he will forever be my favorite member of the mansion household - don’t tell any of the Brothers that I said that. Thanks to him, not only did he save Ania - but as it turns out Selena is Ania and Ania is Selena. I’ve never been happier. @BeautifullyMoor and I took the time to get to know each other again, letting our love grow stronger than it was before. Here it is Christmas Day, the favorite holiday of those two legged rats, and I finally understood. The grounds of the mansion covered in snow, @BeautifullyMoor and I walking through the snow, dropping on the ground and making snow angels together. I’d been given a gift like no other. A gift of love, happiness and forever. There was only one person responsible for my HEA, Santa Lassiter. He might have the worst taste in television shows, but I owed him everything. Sighing happily, I hold @BeatifullyMoor closer as we head back to the mansion, the little ones were anxious to open their presents and I was anxious to unwrap @BeautifullyMoor back in our suite of rooms.* #LoveReincarnated