#tw: referenced child abuse

[let-your-chaos-explode]

Okok. Listen

LessoxReader where R is Leonoras' best friend back in gavaldon. But they both like each other,they're just too scared to face rejection.

But then when lessk goes to the SGE R is devastated. Pretty much dead but alive.

THEN,THEN R GETS SELECTED TO GO TO THE SCHOOL. But she's an ever . They reunite and they tell each others feelings that never faded.

The rest of the plot is yours to make♡♡

IT HAS BEEN SO LONG BUT I GOT IT STARTED FOR YOU!!!!

I couldn't keep it brief, so it is broken up into a part 1 and a part 2 will be coming later! Stay tuned.

The day Leonora disappeared, you were devastated. Nobody knew how, or when, or why. All you knew was that your best friend was gone. 

When you were five-years-old, some girls from town had started making fun of you for being dirty. Children are dumb, and it didn’t matter to them that your family was struggling. They didn’t understand that you could hardly afford food. How could you afford new shoes, fitted clothes, or anything more than a basic necessity? 

Leonora Lesso was a year older than you and your savior sent from above. Or from below. It didn’t really matter which. She found you crying in an alleyway following another round of harassment from the girls in town. She had told you to suck it up and then offered to kick them in the shins in the same breath. You were inseparable ever since. 

“Leo, come on. It’s not worth it.” You begged, pulling on her arm. 

“It’s worth it to me.” She growled as she yanked out of your grasp. 

“Oh look, the little piggy has a lion to protect her! Must be, with that matted mess of hair.” 

Leonora sent you an exasperated side eye. You sighed and raised your arms in surrender before she slung out her arm and decked him. She shot you a toothy grin and kicked him once more for good measure. 

You rolled your eyes and pulled at her hand. 

“Leo, we need to go.” You said as the boy groaned in pain. 

She leaned over and spit on his writhing form. With a satisfied nod, she curled her fingers around yours and walked with you back to the center of town. 

“What?” She asked under your disapproving glance. 

“You shouldn’t have done that.” 

She blew a raspberry at your chastisement. “I was just defending your honor.”

“My hero.” You swooned sarcastically. 

She laughed and bumped your shoulder with her own. You couldn’t fight the smile any longer and let it break, warm affection bursting through. She truly was your knight-errant, if not in shining armor. It was no wonder you had fallen for her. But in Gavaldon, you were an outcast enough, already bringing her down from her association with you. And you weren’t even sure she would ever look at you the same way you looked at her. Instead, you hid behind jokes and friendly smiles. You would be happy with any piece of her she was willing to give. Best friends would be enough. 

That night, the light tapping against your window pane pulled you from the most wonderful dreams of being caressed by a burnless flame. You looked around in a daze before catching sight of her outside. You quickly opened the window and beckoned her in. 

“What are you doing, Leo?” You hissed, helping her climb through. 

She snorted angrily and collapsed onto your bed. In the light of the moon slanting through the window, you caught sight of a motley of bruises littering her cheek. A sharp cut split her upper lip and the dark red contrasted violently with the paleness of her skin. 

“Oh my god. What happened to you?” You asked as you tenderly brushed your fingers against her cheekbone. 

Leonora shrugged with self-depreciation and offered you a halfhearted smile. “Peter showed up at my house with his father. Told him I jumped him while his back was turned. And, well, you know how my father is.” 

She kicked up the covers and slid underneath, lifting them up in an offer for you to join. You needed no convincing. You climbed in and snuggled into the warmth of the cocoon she created. Her long figure wrapped around yours and pulled you tightly to her chest. 

“Do you ever wish you could run away from this place?” Leonora whispered into your hair. 

You chewed on the thought for a long minute. You were thankful your back was to her chest…it was easier to say if she wasn’t looking at you. 

“No…that would mean being without you.” 

You felt her rest her forehead against the back of your neck and sigh. 

“I can’t stay here, Y/N. I want to burn this whole shithole to the ground. I know there’s more for us out there somewhere. We just have to find it.”

You found her hand and threaded your fingers through hers and squeezed tightly. 

“Would you go with me? If I asked you?” She asked tentatively into the night. 

“Of course.” You answered immediately. 

Without a doubt. Without even a second of consideration. Wherever she went, you would follow. Even if it meant to the ends of the Earth and back. You wouldn’t be leaving home, you would be following it. 

The conversation between you quieted as you felt her relax at your declaration. Eventually, her breaths evened out and you knew she had fallen asleep. You took the opportunity to turn in her embrace. In sleep, the harshness of her features softened. An occasional freckle peppered the bridge of her nose and dark lashes fluttered against her sharp cheeks. In the light of the moon, her long, curly, red hair seemed to almost glow. 

“I would do anything for you, Leo.” You whispered, knowing she wouldn’t hear you. 

If only you had the courage to tell her in the daylight. 

You awoke the next morning to an empty bed. You knew she had to be home before her father found her missing, but the emptiness still left you feeling cold. You finished your morning routine with familiar ease and walked the dusty path from your house to the main road. A smile broke upon your face at seeing Leonora standing there waiting for you. 

“Good morning!” You greeted her brightly. 

Leonora simply pinched the bridge of her nose and rubbed at her eyes. In the early morning sun, the bruise under her eye seemed less severe, but had already soured in color. 

“You are way too chipper for this early in the morning.” She groaned. “Do you sing with the birds, too?”

“Only when I know the song.” You quipped back. 

You linked your arm with hers and began the trek to the schoolhouse. 

“No more fights today.” You warned at the stone steps of the building. 

“If they keep your name out of their mouths, we wouldn’t have to worry about it.” She muttered darkly. 

“Promise me!” 

“Fine. I promise. Can we go become educated, now?” 

Together, you climbed the steps and parted to your respective classrooms. 

You always enjoyed school. It gave you a reprieve from the grueling work at home and opened your eyes to far off worlds and innovation. School was an escape. 

As you found your chair, Peter’s shoulder roughly connected with your own. 

“Watch out little piggy. Lesso won’t always be around to protect you.” He hissed as he walked past. 

You shivered but ignored the pointed barb. That wouldn’t happen. Leonora wouldn’t abandon you. 

The rest of the day passed by at an agonizingly slow rate. As the bell rang for dismissal, you let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding. Your classmates streamed out of the schoolhouse like ants fleeing a flood and you got carried along by the surge. Outside, Leonora was waiting for you once more. She gave a sarcastic bow and offered you her arm to escort you home. 

You walked in silence for a solid ten minutes before you mustered the courage to ask, “You wouldn’t ever leave without me, would you?”

The question was odd and the vulnerability was plain in your voice. It made her pause in her steps and the suddenness jerked you to a halt beside her. 

“I wait for you every day, don’t I?” She asked you with a confused frown. 

The expression was rather cute on her face and you wanted to smooth away the pinched expression. 

“Of course!” You laughed. “I just meant if you ever left this place. You wouldn’t forget about me, would you?”

“Impossible.” She scoffed and a devilish smile grew on her face. “You’d be coming with me! I couldn’t possibly leave without my traveling pack.”

She lunged at you and tossed you weightily over her shoulder. A surprised shriek fell from your lips and uncontrollable giggles followed. You certainly wouldn’t complain. You had a marvelous view from your new angle. 

“Besides,” Leonora continued with a more subdued tone. “You’re my conscience. I wouldn’t survive out there without you.” 

Climbing the last hill to your house, she set you down gently and shot you an impish wink. A thrum of longing flared in your chest. You wanted to tell her everything. 

“Leo, I…”

But the words felt caught in your throat. The bruises that littered her face mocked you. Gavaldon was unforgiving and completely intolerant of anything different. And the violence of the world’s reactions that adorned Leonora’s beautiful face were only the tip of the iceberg of what could come. 

“Yes?” She dragged out in a sarcastic imitation of your hesitation. 

“Nothing. I just…thank you. For being my best friend.” You stuttered lamely. 

A small, almost sad smile pulled at the corners of her lips. 

“Yeah.” Leonora said awkwardly. “Me too.” 

The response felt heavy in the air and you suddenly felt like you had made a mistake. 

“I’ll see you later!” She added after a beat, turning to head down the hill toward her house. 

“Bye.” You called softly. 

You watched her walk until her form faded into the sun. 

Nightmares plagued you that night. Vague images of a smoky red sky and screams in the night. You felt exhausted when the sun rose the next morning. Thankful that tomorrow was the weekend, you dressed robotically for school. 

When you made it to your gate, Leonora wasn’t there waiting for you. Unease buried itself low in your belly. She was never late. Even when she was sick, dead, or dying…she was at your gate to greet you every morning. You waited. And waited. And waited some more just for good measure. 

You made it to the school halfway through the first period and ignored the stares as you found your seat. Your unease grew to monstrous anxiety that clawed at your gut. The buzz of the whispers around you fell like a fog until her name cut through the haze. 

“The police were at the Lessos’ this morning. Maybe that’s why Y/N is late. They probably think she had something to do with it.” 

“Do with what?” You asked, whipping around in your seat. 

“Lesso’s gone missing. Parents seem to think she ran away.” The girl behind you whispered dramatically. 

“She wouldn’t do that.” You adamantly denied. 

But even as the words escaped your mouth, it felt like your heart tried to reach up and strangle them. To pull them back. 

Not without me. 

Suddenly, you couldn’t focus. The air felt thin and your ears began to ring. Was this what heartbreak felt like? 

You stood and the ringing in your ears grew to a thundering roar. The voices of your teacher and classmates drowned in the same waves that seemed to crash over you. Ignoring the presence of everyone around you, you stumbled back out the door and sprinted home. You ran past the outskirts of town, ran up and over the hill of your house, and down the sloping curve to the Lesso family home. You didn’t stop until your fists were pounding against the rotting wood door, echoing the beats of your heart. 

“What did you do to her?!” You screamed through the trembling pine. 

The door swung open to reveal the hulking form of her deadbeat father. 

“Get the fuck off my porch.” He growled as he shoved you off the step. 

“What did you do to her?”

“I ain’t touch her.” He hissed. 

“We both know that’s not true.” You said lowly through clenched teeth. 

He looked at you through narrowed eyes and straightened his back. 

“Bed was unmade this morning and window wide open. Ungrateful brat finally took off. If she knows what’s good for her, she won’t come back.”

He said no more and slammed the door. 

Your feet blindly carried you back to your front gate where you collapsed into a heap against the post. Sobs suddenly crawled up your throat and broke free in an agonized scream. 

She left.

[official-lex-luthor]

*sprays you with water*

Bad billionare

*sprays you with water*

Bruce Wayne is out here abusing kids, and I'm the bad billionaire?

[aftgficrec]

favourite fics featuring halloween? (thank you guys for all your work!)

Here are some spooktacular fics for you! You may notice we often point out where a fic has been recced before. If you like the theme or mood of a fic, chances are you will find more like it in the ask where it was featured. -A

previous recs:

Staff Recs Oct 2020 Halloween/Spookiness here

Staff Recs Oct 2021 - Halloween here

Staff Recs Oct 2021 - More Halloween: Costumes, Fluff & Crack here

foxes in a haunted house here

supernatural compilation here

autumnal/spooky fics here

Flavors of Fall by NikNak22 [Rated E, 146194 Words, Complete, 2022]

Previously recced here

…Neil’s not the only one with secrets in this town. Everyone seems to have something they’ve kept hidden in the dark. And as soon as one thread gets pulled, they all seem to come unraveled… Featuring second chances, making mistakes, budding relationships, and as many fall shenanigans as possible – welcome to the smalltown world of Palmetto!

tw: implied/referenced rape/noncon, tw: panic attacks, tw: homophobia, tw: violence, tw: implied/referenced child abuse, tw: self harm, tw: animal abuse

Fang and Stake by darkbluebox [Rated T, 2658 Words, Complete, 2020]

Previously recced here

For most hunters, it would have been a wet dream: his quarry beaten, bleeding, trapped and prone before him. He might as well have been holding a stake on a silver platter. If it had been any other vampire in the world, Andrew wouldn’t have hesitated to drive the splintering chunk of wood through his chest and be done with it. Unfortunately, Neil wasn’t any other vampire.

tw: blood, tw: implied/referenced abuse

swing me your bones by sundowne [Rated T, 3447 Words, Complete, 2022]

Ditched parties, neglected movies, cold cocoa.

Sugar & Spice (and everything... nice?) by Willow_bird [Rated T, 7468 Words, Complete, AFTG Exchange Fall 2020]

Previously recced here

“I’m not going as Tombo.” He’d end up looking like Where’s Waldo if he’d been a short angry bodybuilder and no one wanted that. Renee’s little smile hinted at her having a similar visual. “I think I may have something that would require few changes to what you’re wearing now and would be minimal hassle altogether.” Andrew accompanies Renee to a Halloween party, allowing his best friend to dictate his costume because he really couldn’t be paid to care. Then he gets there, and yeah, his crush is wearing the exact same costume. Feelings happen.

deadly encounters by jeanyvesmoreau [Rated T, 4012 Words, Complete, AFTG Halloween Zine 2022, Locked]

Neil, trying to avoid Halloween celebrations once again, finds his way into the dark corner of a bar. There, he meets Andrew. Or, how Neil Josten discovers vampires are real after hundreds of years he's been alive.

tw: violence, tw: blood

Cryptid Serial Killer Witch Man by attfna [Rated M, 17008 Words, Complete, 2020]

Previously recced here

Just a story about your typical, spooky cryptic and his curious gardener.

tw: scars, tw: explicit sexual content

open season by nomadicdeer (someonestolemycoffee) [Rated G, 2287 Words, Complete, 2017]

Previously recced here

Dan declares open season just before Halloween. Featuring andreil kisses, misuse of brussel sprouts, Matt in lingerie, and more.

5 times realisation struck Neil & 1 time he acted on it by alex_wh0 [Rated T, 7503 Words, Complete, AFTG Fall Exchange 2020]

Previously recced here

"Neil looked across the room at Andrew and felt a surge of affection so intense that it stuck in his throat. He wondered how someone who had rolled out of bed barely an hour ago could have the audacity to make him feel like this." or Five times Neil Josten had a realisation and one time he did something about it.

if you're just tuning in walk into the light by orphan_account [Rated T, 8824 Words, Complete, 2020]

Previously recced here

Andrew runs a small shop in Palmetto with his brother. It's monotonous. He takes care of his plants, makes tinctures, provides minimal customer service, and teases Kevin for his heart eyes over Aaron. It's boring, but it's good. And then Wymack hires someone new, and some things change.

The endless mental math required to simply survive. by melbopo [Rated T, 17400 Words, Complete, 2021]

Free booze and candy at Seth's expense for his frat's Halloween party on Friday? Say no more, Andrew will be there, mandatory costume and all. Perhaps Matt's new Exy loving stray will even occupy Kevin for the whole night so he doesn't give Andrew inane lectures about wasting talent and potential on intramural teams, leaving him to drink his free alcohol in blissful peace. Really, the simple mental math checks out in his favor on this one. ~~~~ (alternative title: Andrew Minyard and his acquaintances [that are actually his friends])

tw: homophobia

aaron's lament by nanatsuyu [Rated T, 9061 Words, Complete, AFTG Fall Exchange 2021, Locked]

Previously recced here

It's the first holiday Katelyn and Aaron have hosted in their own apartment. Katelyn thinks it'll be fun. Aaron thinks there are far too many people in his home.

An Unpleasant Surprise by justdk [Rated T, 3689 Words, Complete, 2018]

Previously recced here

Neil's visit to the haunted house is not fun. At all.

tw: panic attacks

best thing by exactly13percent_OLD (hymbeaux) [Rated M, 4117 Words, Complete, 2019]

Previously recced here

Aaron has 48 hours off. Kevin has a party to attend. They both have unanswered questions.

firsts by exactly13percent_OLD (hymbeaux) [Rated G, 6270 Words, Complete, 2019]

Previously recced here

Andrew and Neil have fostered Clara and Riley for a little over a year. It's their first Halloween. It's taken a while for both kids to become comfortable, and tonight is for them.

Say something, say yes by DeyaAmaya [Rated T, 2851 Words, Complete, 2018]

Previously recced here

'I can't leave. I need to say goodbye to your son. I can't leave like this.' Mary smiles. Andrew feels a shiver down his spine. Her lips don't move, but he can hear her voice clear as a bell. 'You're not saying goodbye to him.'

tw: major character injury

House To Haunt by moonix [Rated M, 65356 Words, Complete, 2023, Locked]

This fic is a choose your own adventure game! Follow Kevin as he explores an abandoned mansion with a Fox companion of your choice. You can discover different parts of the mansion, learn about its previous owners' history, romance Kevin's companion, collect interesting items, solve puzzles, rescue Kevin and his friends from a variety of sticky situations... and then do it all over again! !!Please make sure to read the instructions at the beginning before you start playing!!

Something Out of Nothing by Aquared46 [Rated E, 20831 Words, Complete, AFTG Fall Exchange 2024]

Fox’s Hollow had attracted tourists for decades with its haunted history and Halloween festivals. A resident for many years, Andrew doesn't believe in ghosts or hauntings, but when his workplace is being investigated by ghosthunters, he spends his early hours with a man far more intriguing and haunted than a ghost could ever be.

tw: implied/referenced self harm, tw: implied/referenced torture

it's almost halloween by reaching_my_summit [Rated T, 2677 Words, Complete, 2017]

the Foxes celebrate halloween together at Eden's. someone flirts with Andrew. Neil is not about that.

do you like scary movies? by Ominous, Stjosten [Rated T, 22519 Words, Complete, 2020]

Previously recced here

To say Andrew has never seen the benefit in the make-believe would be a lie. However, he finds less and less use for it as he grows older. He especially fails to see the benefits of anything from the horror genre; he’s made plenty of his own mistakes, has seen more than enough to terrify him in his life. He doesn’t need to rely on jump scares and idiotic protagonists. But when he meets Neil, self-proclaimed horror archivist, he finds that maybe he never gave the genre the credit it was due, and he ends up thanking the dull movies eventually… They lead him to Neil, the realest thing he’s ever known.

pumpkin heads by moonix [Rated T, 4278 Words, Complete, 2023, Locked]

Tonight is the night. Halloween, Andrew and Neil's last night working at the pumpkin patch, and the night Andrew is finally going to ask Kevin out. If only they could find Kevin... (Based on the graphic novel Pumpkin Heads, but you don't need to have read it to understand the fic.)

Andrew Minyard Loves Fall (and will fight anyone who doesn’t) by mareofthesky [Rated G, 11074 Words, Complete, 2022]

Andrew is trying to enjoy his favorite season in peace, but a certain Mystery Man keeps popping up out of nowhere. With a long string of aliases, an infuriating mouth, and striking features, he's managed to catch Andrew's attention in a way that not many can. Andrew can't seem to get the menace out of his head, but he's beginning to think he doesn't want to.

NB: author’s fall spotify playlist here

skylight by djhedy [Rated T, 5560 words, Complete, AFTG Fall Exchange 2020]

Previously recced here

neil moves to a pro team, a new apartment, in a new city, and is held up by his friends. and by a series of mysterious gifts left on his doormat.

What if We Held Hands in our Pyjama Pants by transjorts [Rated T, 9301 Words, Complete, 2021]

A very soft, autumn-themed high school au in which Andrew, Aaron and Nicky are the new kids and Neil accidentally catches feelings.

tw: dysphoria, tw: transphobia, tw: implied/referenced child abuse

Art

aftghalloweenzine cosplay by @foxy-exy

your favorite emotional support sapphics art by @kashjsnsndnan

Renison as Witch and vampire art by @pria-png

adoptive!Bee halloween and happy halloween! art by @deklo

andreil halloween costumes art by @manekkii-art

andreil halloween costumes art by @lunapiq

All family together art by @kurra

the foxes in their costumes art by @jojen-hewitt

Neil and Andrew in Eden’s outfits + Halloween art by @fabulousmisfits

happy halloween, foxes art by @jeannemaybedarc

Put ‘em up and Neil costume comic art by @emry-stars-art

Halloween party… art by @stiigex

Halloween andreil makeup meme art by @jesperandwylansittinginnatree

AngelJean and DevilJeremy art by @blablablabel

[bloody-bee-tea]

A truth for a truth

Shouta can tell that something has Shinsou agitated the moment the boy steps into the gym. He doesn’t even try to hide it, which makes Shouta think that for once maybe surprise wins out over fear or pain and the need to hide them, like it so rarely does with Shinsou and yet Shouta still waits until he’s standing right in front of him to speak.

“What?” Shouta asks, not worrying about his tone in the slightest because Shinsou has been training with him for weeks now, so the kid knows how Shouta operates.

And they have found that usually less words work well between them. As if to prove him right, Shinsou huffs out an annoyed breath before he looks Shouta in the eyes.

“Your hell-class has accused me of being your kid,” he states, and it prompts a frown from Shouta.

“They know I teach you. That would make you one of my problem children as well,” Shouta easily says, because he’s long past pretending that he doesn’t use the moniker with great fondness but to his surprise Shinsou shakes his head.

“No, I mean—they accused me of being your actual love child, with an as of yet unnamed woman,” he clarifies and oh. Yeah, okay, that makes more sense, considering that his hell-class is involved.

“As of yet?”

“That guy with the double quirk certainly has theories,” Shinsou almost spits out and Shouta bites back a laugh.

Yeah, Todoroki has shown a tendency to obsess over one tiny detail for far too long and then come up with the most outlandish theories. It’s kind of hilarious, most times, so Shouta fails to see how it could agitate the kid so much.

“And that upsets you?” he asks, because he’s not a mind reader, despite what the rumors say and Shinsou huffs out another breath.

“What upsets me is that half of your class nodded along with that guy’s outlandish theories but then they laughed all straight in my face when I told them that it’s highly unlikely, seeing how you and Mic-sensei are almost disgustingly married.”

Now that brings Shouta up short. The staffs knows of their marital status, of course, but they make it a point to keep it a secret from the kids and to be found out so easily, doesn’t sit right with Shouta, despite the fact that it’s just Shinsou. He doesn’t mind at all if the kid knows about their marriage but still. He shouldn’t have been able to figure it out in the first place.

“Now what would make you say that?” he wants to know and levels Shinsou with a look; one of the few that still work on the kid.

It works now as well, because Shinsou drags his shoulders up to his ears and shuffles from one foot to the other.

Shouta raises an eyebrow when Shinsou stays silent.

“Permission to speak plainly,” he finally mutters out and it almost makes Shouta laugh, because for all that he’s giving the kid a hard time right now, it’s hardly that serious.

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to promise me that no matter what I say next will not get me expelled or punished or—I don’t know, make you mad at me. That I can talk freely.”

Shouta immediately tenses as he’s reminded that Shinsou clearly did not grow up in a loving home if he has to clarify that, but this, at least, is easily rectified.

“Permission granted to say whatever you want,” he gives back and Shinsou takes a deep breath before he goes off.

“It’s just—so obvious,” he almost spits out and before Shouta can ask for more clarification, Shinsou goes on. “You go all—soft around him, and I don’t just mean the way you slouch when he’s in the room, because your slouch becomes more relaxed when he’s there, but your face—” Shinsou points an accusing finger at Shouta’s face and Shouta almost feels as if he’s done something wrong. It’s a novel feeling. “I’m pretty sure you don’t move a single muscle but whenever Mic-sensei is there your face does this thing, where it goes all soft, here,” Shinsou points to the corner of his eyes, “and here,” and then his mouth.

In all honesty, Shouta wasn’t aware he’s doing any of that, and Hizashi hasn’t pointed it out either, but maybe the kid is on to something. It’s worth inquiring after, later.

“Mic-sensei took a phone call in the middle of class one day, and he very loudly and very clearly called out ‘Shou-chan’. As far as I am aware Shouta is your first name so—” he trails off with a shrug but then seems to find his groove because he ploughs right on and Shouta is way too entertained to interrupt him, no promise at all needed in the first place.

“You always carry something for his throat around and he has your eyedrops at the ready and you may think you’re all subtle with the way he always just conveniently carries two cups of coffee when he arrives at school, but let me tell you, you’re not. Not to mention that you always get his cookies from the vending machine when you go for one of your jelly packs.”

Shinsou takes a deep breath, but he’s clearly not done yet.

“And you’re so—you’re always slightly annoyed with Midnight-sensei, though in that way that only friends have, and then you’re barely tolerant of Vlad-sensei and you’re downright hostile with All Might and really, Mic-sensei should be the same, because they are both loud blondes with blinding smiles but you’re just so—unbearably fond of him. Sure, you snap at him and he riles you up on purpose and you threaten him with your quirk when he threatens you with his but it’s so—” Shinsou lets out a frustrated groan. “It’s like you’re dancing to a song only you two can hear and you’ve been doing that for years, you have to, because it makes no sense otherwise. You wear a ring around your neck, at all times and even though Mic-sensei hides it well with his gloves, he's literally wearing a wedding ring all the damn time, too and you bicker! Like a disgustingly married couple. Which you are!”

Shinsou takes a few deep breaths before he completely deflates again.

Shouta is almost disappointed, because while all of that is true, Shinsou didn’t mention the most damning facts. Shouta has not been trying to keep his relationship with Hizashi a secret around him and he knows Hizashi is the same, though really, Shinsou should have picked up on so much more than he already has.

And as if just to spite him Shinsou speaks up again.

“And I’m only deliberately mentioning the things everyone can see. You all but said to me in private that you’re married. I know what it means when you say the staff knows you at that one restaurant, when you tell me you two have favourites together, when you leave training together. I’m not stupid.”

“Clearly,” Shouta drawls out and waits for anything more from Shinsou, so he doubts that he still has something up his sleeve.

“I’m done now,” he hoarsely whispers and it’s an unwelcome reminder that Shinsou is clearly not used to talking so much or so loudly without being interrupted and this might not be the right choice right now, but Shouta has to take a chance here.

“Am I wrong about any of that?” Shinsou wants to know when Shouta is too busy formulating his plan to speak but that finally gets him going.

“How about a deal?” Shouta asks and he clearly has Shinsou’s attention with that already. “How about I’m allowed to speak plainly for now as well, without you yelling at me, or getting angry, or shutting down and running off, and after I’m done we both tell the other if we are right or wrong?”

His words have left Shinsou tense and worried, Shouta can tell, and he almost wants to take it back, knows that it’s almost unfair, because the stakes are not at all the same for the two of them, but they’ve been dancing around this topic for so long. And Shouta is tired of it.

Tired of Shinsou flinching after several days at home, tired of spotting poorly hidden bruises, tired of faint marks on Shinsou’s face. He just wants him come to him with this, to ask for help, to accept help. Shouta just wants to get the kid out of the house he’s currently in and take him home, to his husband and his cats and a life he deserves.

And if he has to go about it this way, then so be it.

“Fine,” Shinsou bites out and Shouta doesn’t waste another second.

“Your home life is shit,” he plainly says and doesn’t let Shinsou’s flinch stop him. “They are keeping necessities from you; clothes that fit, stuff for school, money, even food.”

He personally made Shinsou’s meal plan, specifically tailored to him and the amount of training he’s doing and he should have put on so much more muscle than he actually has which can only mean one thing. He’s not eating enough and Shouta would bet his hero license on the fact that it’s not voluntary.

He’s being starved at home.

“They hurt you, physically but also verbally.”

Shouta doubts that Shinsou came up with half the insults he calls himself almost daily on his own.

“Sometimes they don’t allow you to come home at all. They threaten you with punishment. You’re not allowed to ask questions, probably not allowed to speak much at all and if you do, there’s a—”

Shouta’s voice fails him here briefly because he still remembers the tears running down Hizashi’s face as he makes helpless sounds behind the muzzle strapped too tightly to his face and the knowledge that it’s happening still, and to one of his kids, is almost unbearable.

“There’s a muzzle,” Shouta manages to finish and he doesn’t miss how Hitoshi ducks in on himself, as if he has to brace for a hit.

“You know it’s wrong, and you hate it there, but you’re too scared to say something because you don’t know where you’ll end up next and it could mean you have to pull out of U.A.,” Shouta goes on, and he’s certain in this, because he has seen Hitoshi’s file.

There are too many foster homes to count, too little time spent in too many of them and he doesn’t even want to think about the amount of trauma the kid must have accumulated.

“Are you done?” Shinsou spits out when Shouta is quiet for a moment too long, and he guesses that’s fair.

“I am,” he agrees and watches how Shinsou jerks his head to the side, and he pretends he doesn’t see the tears glistening in his eyes.

“Great, then how did I do?” Shinsou demands to know and Shouta gives him a small smile, because this right now, is the second part of this entire spiel.

“Not too bad, kid,” he admits. “Hizashi and I are married and have been for almost ten years now. But there is one thing you don’t know.”

“And what’s that?” Shinsou asks, still too rough, too sharp but Shouta’s smile doesn’t waver.

“We both have foster licenses. And we’re more than prepared to take in a kid, or, let’s say a stubborn, sassy, diligent, hard-working teenager from Gen Ed with a mob of unruly purple hair. Under the Emergency Foster Protocol at first, because that way the teenager would have to go home with us on the very same day, but we’re prepared to go through the proper channels to make it permanent. And then later official.”

It prompts a shuddering breath from Shinsou and Shouta is not too alarmed when he sees tears sliding down his cheeks.

“So, how did I do?” Shouta throws Shinsou’s words right back at him and for all that he knows that this is emotionally very difficult for Shinsou he was not quite prepared to find himself with an armful of sobbing teenager, so they both fall to the floor in an undignified heap.

Not that he minds it much, because Shinsou is clinging to him and surely that must mean something.

“They also sometimes lock me into the closet,” Shinsou gets out between his sobs and Shouta bites back his almost automatic response of ‘Wonderful’.

He and Shinsou have an understanding, sarcasm and sass one of the things they share between each other, but he doubts that the kid has even a thought to spare for that right now.

“Not anymore, kid, not anymore,” Shouta reassures him, because there is not a single universe out there where he will allow Shinsou to step back into that environment ever again.

Shinsou only clings tighter to him, hiding his face in Shouta’s chest as he cries and cries but not once does Shouta tell him to stop, because clearly Shinsou needs this out of his system.

It takes him a while to calm down again, time Shouta spends cradling the crying boy to his chest, but eventually Shinsou falls silent.

“Mic-sensei won’t mind?” he rasps out and Shouta shakes his head.

“I can call him right now, if you’re worried. He’s on his way to the radio station but since you’re coming home with me now, he’ll want to be there anyway.”

“He can’t cancel his show for me!”

“Kid, he cancels his shows all the damn time, that’s just the risk of being a teacher and a pro hero. It happened before and it will happen again and he won’t mind at all, I can promise you that.”

“I don’t—he’ll be mad.”

“He won’t be,” Shouta gives back and then takes the decision out of Shinsou’s hands, because he has no idea just how excited Hizashi will be.

Shouta gets his phone out and presses the speed dial before Shinsou can even think to protest and it takes Hizashi less than three rings to accept the call.

“Shou? Everything alright?” he greets him with, his voice tinny because he’s clearly still driving and Shouta can just picture him balancing the phone on his thigh.

“Shinsou is coming home with me today,” Shouta plainly states and feels how Shinsou tenses against him.

“Finally,” Hizashi breathes out, the relief so stark in his voice that there’s no way Shinsou can miss it. “He finally asked for help?”

“More like Aizawa-sensei cornered me,” Shinsou speaks up and Shouta pats his head.

His hair really is soft. Maybe he’ll have to do it again, and often at that, he decides when he notices how Shinsou leans into the contact.

“Hey, there, little listener, how are you doing?”

“Have been better,” Shinsou admits between sniffles.

“He figured out that we’re married,” Shouta tells Hizashi because he’s still very proud of him for that and it makes Hizashi laugh.

“Yeah, if anyone would, it’s him. I told you he’s smart.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Shouta sighs out when Shinsou ducks his head in embarrassment at hearing that. “You coming home?”

“Of course I am! I’ll bring take out, what are you in the mood for?”

“Can you drive to that diner next to the cat café? The staff knows our orders, and you like their food as well,” Shouta suggests, because he thinks it might be a bit much, forcing Shinsou to think about anything right now and Shouta has taken him there enough times after training to know that the kid likes the food there.

“Sure. I’ll also call Tsukauchi, to get the ball rolling. Shinsou, kiddo, you’re safe now and I’m very proud of you for letting yourself get cornered.”

It prompts a new sob from Shinsou and Shouta decides it’s much more important to hug him close again than to say goodbye to his husband, so he simply hangs up and throws the phone down, so he can better gather Shinsou up in his arms.

“We’ve got you now, kid, it’s going to be okay. I promise.”

He doesn’t expect Shinsou to respond, not really, because clearly the kid has other worries right now—mainly breathing—but he still speaks up.

“I trust you.”

Shouta wasn’t prepared for the way that simple statements makes him feel warm all over but he’s beyond glad that it’s the case.

And he and Hizashi will make very sure to never do anything to make Shinsou regret that decision.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Why Not Us?

Bleeding in Moonlight: Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six |

CW: Memories of mass murder, some internalized dehumanization, survivor’s guilt

-

Misae made it to the little bedroom before the moon rose, thankfully. He nearly tripped over the strange mattress on the floor, the one they’d blown up with air and then thrown blankets and pillows on. It was meant to be his bed, he thought, which made sense.

Anaya might let him on the real bed, but not to sleep. Wolves, like dogs, slept on the floor. It would be lonely, but it would make sense. Almost nothing did, now. Sitting in chairs, eating pizza instead of having to shift to eat the raw meat thrown into the kennels, wearing clothes and being asked if he would like something to drink… they didn’t seem to know what he was, to understand. 

He could hear them now, Eden, Anaya, and Vanessa, from down the hall. They talked and laughed, and Misae felt hollowed out at the sound, wishing he could be there with them.

Maybe there would be more pizza.

He laid one hand on his stomach. It felt… almost rounded. He’d never eaten so much or so well, not in all the life he had lived. He hadn’t had to fight over any of it, either. There hadn’t been the need to snarl and posture, or crawl on his belly and lick at an older wolf’s mouth, hoping they’d give him a few scraps out of pity or some dim affection.

The moon’s slow rise made him restless, bouncing on his toes as he tried to decide where he could safely change. The room was small, but he could fit under the big bed if he was smart about it. 

But then the humans would get into the bed, and if the mattress dipped low it might force him back out.

The call to shift prickled under his skin, and Misae stripped his shirt and pants off before it could take hold and leave him confused and trapped in the cloth. He tossed the sweatpants and shirt onto the bed just as he felt his spine begin to bend.

It always felt so good, when the shift started. Like waking up after a good sleep, coming back to where you belonged. He had always been meant to walk on four legs, and the human side was only what he was allowed for good behavior.

He leaned over, a sensation like goosebumps running up and down his arms and legs, setting his hair on end. The healing wound in his leg throbbed but some of the pain felt more distant as he changed.

It wasn’t that the wound disappeared, it was only that his wolf body knew how it felt to be injured with silver far better than his human body did. It knew how to ignore the pain, how to keep moving, because to let the pain take you was to be singled out to die. Wolves who were too hurt to keep going were wolves that starved, his instincts knew it. Wolves who starved died.

Everyone died anyway. It hadn't mattered how good they were when Bill didn't want them any longer.

He shuddered and shoved that thought aside. He couldn’t think about his family, not now. It would overtake him and he’d just be trapped in the grave in his mind, even if his body was here still breathing.

He couldn’t think about dozens of flat blank eyes, frozen in mute horror. He couldn’t think about the warmth still lingering in the stiffening bodies pressed all around him, about how Nina had tried to cover him and hide him from the shots even as she had been bleeding to death herself. 

Had Nina been his real mother?

It was possible. Their fur was the same, their eyes were the same. But some of the other wolves had fur and eyes like his, too. But... maybe Nina had been his mother.

Maybe she had known it, if only at the end, and tried to save the one pup she could.

The humans had tried to ruin them to each other, make them hurtful and hateful, but the wolves had found a way to love, anyway. In secret, when it was safe, and at the end when nothing was safe and it didn’t matter any longer there was one more way to love that Bill couldn't take from them.

It made no difference if you loved when you would lose each other anyway. In the end, the werewolves had loved each other, and it hadn’t saved any of them.

Except him.

Misae closed his eyes, stretching his shifting muscles and forcing himself to leave the dead behind, for now anyway. For as long as he could. 

Bones cracked and broke beneath his skin, painlessly reforming. Misae dropped to a crouch and leaned his weight forward on his hands, feeling bare, vulnerable fingers change to rougher paw pads and clicking nails. He stretched his front legs until the muscles stretched and burned and sighed, contented by the feeling.

Canine teeth lengthened and his ears grew. He twitched one just to feel it, exhaling a rough sigh as his tongue briefly lolled out. Fur spread over skin like a blanket, a little patchy but still warming his chilly body, and the bed on the floor called to him. He was tired, and the killing back at Bill’s house kept trying to worm its way past his moments of comfort and warmth in this new place, with these new people.

If he laid still, it would catch up with him, and he didn’t want Anaya or Eden to hear how wolves mourned, how they cried. He didn’t know if they would still comfort him then, or if they would turn angry at the sounds, or learn to hate him. Bill’s family hated the sound of the mourning wolves, beat them for their weeping in human form or for their howls as wolves. 

Who knew what regular humans would do? 

Misae only knew that Anaya and Eden had been kind, so far. But so had Aaron, sometimes - Bill’s youngest son had been known to scratch behind a wolf’s ears when none of the other humans were looking. Even Austin had once bandaged Misae’s leg after he’d gotten it caught in a fence and bled.

That didn’t make them any kinder when the werewolves broke the rules, rules no one ever said out loud but simply expected the wolves to learn by being beaten when they were broken until they figured them out. It had never stopped Austin from calling them all names, or laughing when they fought.

Human kindness always had limits. 

Always.

Even as he became the first form he ever knew, the stalking werewolf that Bill had never been able to separate from the boy whose body the wolf shared, Misae knew he had to hide. Not from Anaya or Eden, who had already seen him as a wolf. Not because he feared them.

He had to hide because they didn’t know to fear him.

Misae’s nose turned black and scents exploded into the world around him. What had before been just the light smell of cleaning products and maybe a pumpkin-scented candle was now a collection of stories he could read in the air and along the ground. Vanessa had walked in here to set up the mattress, having forgotten to take her shoes off after getting the mail. Misae could smell the grass she had stepped on, scent the slight shift in her smell of frustration when it took a long time to get the air pump working to set up the mattress. He could smell, on the mattress, long months spent idle with no need to be used. The faintest smell of a camping trip, some time in the past - the last time the air mattress had been needed.

The way his sense of smell changed was always what gave away when it was time to find somewhere to hide, before the silver light could touch his fur and call to him. It would make him want to run, to howl and see if any other wolves were nearby to answer.

What would he do if they were?

He had known only his own family. He’d never seen any werewolves that didn’t huddle together in the kennels, fighting over the barest hints of kindness shown to them by Bill and his family. If he met a free wolf, he might simply lay down, show his belly, and wait for them to tear out his throat when they smelled the kennels on him. 

Misae paced restlessly around the small room, limping and trying to keep weight off his injured leg, snuffling against the ground, tracing the hints of Eden and Anaya in here and then following the softer smell of Vanessa until he found the closet door was cracked open.

Perfect. Like a den.

He had to paw at it, whining softly with his ears flat against his head, looking nervously at the patch of moonlight that seemed to head inexorably in his direction. His heart raced beneath his fur at the sight. 

Bill had always said, over and over again, never let the moonlight touch you. It was the only rule the humans told the werewolves, and taught to the pups before they were put into the main kennels. During the full moon, for three nights, they would huddle together inside big wooden boxes that formed a kind of den. Anyone caught outside the den, by Bill or by the cameras, would be punished.

It was the first thing Misae remembered learning, while still toddling around on four short legs, a few weeks after birth. Never let the moonlight touch you. He'd broken the rule running from the guns, from the grave of his family. He'd broken the rule running from Austin. But… that had been different, hadn’t it?

Hadn’t it?

Misae clambered clumsily over a pile of cardboard boxes, blowing harshly through his nose as things packed inside clattered around. He pushed at them with his snout until he had made for himself a sort of barrier, protecting him from the world outside this tiny space. He turned in a circle and then laid down, ears flat, shimmering amber-brown eyes watching the silvery light that cut across the bed through the open doorway.

Beneath his nose, soaked into the floorboards years ago, he could smell a hint of a rose perfume. Left by some other person, long before any of the familiar smells of Vanessa's life had entered this place.  

The scent made him shudder, heart going cold.

Bill's wife Ada wore rose perfume. 

The smell of roses, for the children in the puppy kennels, meant one of you might vanish that day. Ada sometimes took them, luring them out with treats and soft words until she could get the loop around their necks to pull tight, leading them on the leash inside.

She mostly brought them back, after sticking needles to take blood or give what she called 'medicine' that put the puppies to deep sleep and left them groggy and confused upon waking. She mostly brought them back.

But not always.

Rose perfume drifting on the air was sometimes all the warning they got before a pup disappeared. 

The memories made him tremble and he whined softly, but quieted the sound as fast as he could. It was something all of them learned, not just how to hide from the moonlight but also how to be so quiet that none of the men and women inside the house could hear and think of them.

They all learned how to be, if only temporarily, forgotten.

Now Misae was the only left for Bill and his family to remember. He wondered if Bill would come for him, still. Try to find him. Or if, now that he'd outrun Austin, he'd let Misae go into a world where nobody was left to even love him in secret any longer.

It was Eden and Anaya he needed to hide from now. Not because they might hurt him, but because he might hurt them. Wolves were most dangerous when the moon was full, calling on their nonhuman blood. 

It made them monsters - hungry, mindless killers. 

Everyone knew that.

Bill made sure everyone knew that. 

He watched the moonlight’s slow crawl along the small room until his eyes drifted shut and he dozed off, his tail flicking occasionally. Once the moon began to set in the morning, just as the sun rose, he’d be able to be a boy again. Until then, he could relax into the form he was far more comfortable in even if he had been painstakingly taught to fear what it was capable of.

He slept deeply enough to have fuzzy, formless dreams. He was beneath all of his family, trying to crawl out from under them. They called for him, cried for help, whined and whimpered and shouted and cursed. 

The air was being slowly crushed out of him, and he desperately tried to get out from beneath the weight of their deaths, their memories.

He looked up to see straight down the barrel of Austin’s shotgun, the black within the metal circle, holding his death.

Found you, Austin said, softly. Time to go, Rusty.

Fingers touched the top of his head.

Misae?

He jolted awake and snapped out of sheer instinct, ears flat in a flash and teeth clicking together. He didn’t quite catch anything, but as his eyes opened, he saw Anaya looking down at him, eyes wide, her hand jerked back against her chest. 

“Misae?” She repeated, voice a little shakier this time. She was wearing sleeping clothes, and Eden was just behind her, wearing only a pair of low-slung sweatpants that had Misae looking in jealousy at skin only scarred along the underside of his chest, two odd half-circle shapes that didn’t mean anything to Misae’s mind. “Holy shit.”

“DId he bite you?” Eden asked, an edge to his voice. “Anaya, if he bit you-... isn’t that how it-... it spreads?”

Misae curled up tighter, whimpering, his heart picking back up into a pounding race that made him dizzy. He tucked his tail as tightly as he could and looked up with his chin pressed against the floor, licking at his chops nervously.

 “Naya? Did he-”

“No, he didn’t,” Anaya replied, frowning back at Eden, before dropping into a crouch. “And we don’t know that that's how it spreads, or whatever. Or even if it does spread. Who even knows what’s real and what isn’t about werewolves?”

“Before yesterday, I would have told you nothing is real about werewolves,” Eden said, hovering behind her. 

“And you would have been wrong, wouldn't you. Besides, he was asleep. I woke him up, that’s on me, not him. Hey, Misae. Hey there, honey.” Her voice softened, and she shoved some of Misae’s barrier of boxes aside, until she could hold out her hand and lay it down with knuckles on floor and palm facing up, between them. “It’s okay, honey. It’s just me. Are you good? We were worried when we didn’t see where you’d gone. You were making some noise in here, I thought maybe something was wrong.”

Misae’s nose twitched. He eased forward, belly to the ground, until he could slowly lay his chin in her palm. She let one finger gently scratch at the soft fur there and he whined. 

“He’s okay,” Anaya whispered. “I scared you, huh? You were having bad dreams, I bet. Don't blame you, this has been a really weird day. Just... the weirdest. Can I ask why you're here in the closet?”

“There’s a joke about being a closeted werewolf in there somewhere, but I’m honestly not awake enough to make it,” Eden said, but he moved back until he could sit on the bed. He didn’t quite relax, not yet, but the space helped Misae to feel a little safer. Eden didn’t look - or smell - angry. 

“Oh, shut up,” Anaya said, rolling her eyes, but the corner of her mouth twitched into a smile. She wasn’t angry, either. “And don’t spend all night coming up with it, either. I don’t want to hear it when we wake up.”

“Well, now I have to come up with something. I have to come up with something and have it be the literal first thing I say to you when we wake up,” Eden teased, flopping himself backwards onto the bed and wriggling under the blankets, sighing happily when he was covered up. “Oh, this comforter weighs a ton. Perfect.”

“For someone who likes to sleep in the absolute wilderness like a caveman, you sure love a weighted blanket.” Anaya snorted.

"If I'm a caveman, that means you like a caveman." Eden grinned. "Ha ha, you're in love with a Neanderthal," He sing-songed. Anaya threw up a middle finger over her shoulder in his general direction, and Eden's smile only widened.

Misae wondered what a Nee-ander-tal was as his eyes flicked to the side, taking in the window, looking for the moonlight. To his relief, the curtains were closed.

The room was dark, now, except for a small lamp they’d turned on by the bed. There was no chance of the moon catching at his fur, calling him to hunt, to rip and tear and rend. 

Misae pushed himself slowly onto his feet, ignoring his throbbing back leg. Anaya smiled at him, and it felt like a reward. His heart beat faster for new reasons, and he followed her as she eased back and away from the closet, pushing past the boxes. 

When Anaya sat on the air mattress on the floor, Misae moved slowly onto it as well until he could lick at the corners of her mouth with his tail tucked underneath him. She laughed and pushed lightly at him, and he moved to lay on his side, paws curled to show her his stomach, baring his vulnerable throat.

“He likes you,” Eden commented idly from up on the bed. “Pretty sure that’s wolf for ‘you’re cool, let’s be buds.’ Also I think it means he thinks you're in charge."

"I am in charge," Anaya said, voice haughty, but there was laughter lining every word. "It's good that both you boys know it."

Misae shifted back onto his stomach and curled back up until his tail covered his nose. Anaya smiled at the sight, reaching out to scratch the top of his head. Misae sighed, eyes drifting closed again. He relaxed under the gentle affection. “There you go. All right, what matters is that you're okay. Let’s try to get some sleep, yeah? All three of us.”

He watched her stand up, ears drooping as she climbed into the real bed, next to Eden. He watched her get under the blanket, laying next to Eden. He laid on the floor where wolves belonged, missing the warmth of his family. Missing the den. Alone, here, on the ground. Werewolves weren't meant to be alone - he knew that, not from Bill or Austin but from how perfect it had felt in the den, in the kennels, when they were all together.

Anaya turned off the lamp, and darkness overtook the room.

The humans, he thought, would be blind in the dark. Misae could see everything, though. He could see the silvery moonlight held back by the curtains, could see Eden’s chest rise and fall, slowing as he slipped into sleep. He could see that Anaya stayed awake a while longer.

He listened to her breathing, holding back his whimpers until it slowed and deepened and he knew he wouldn't wake her. He could lay here, alone.

Well.

Not entirely alone. 

His family was here, even if they weren’t. They would never leave him, not fully, not all the way. Even now he could feel them nosing around him trying to find a comfortable spot. He knew the pressure of their bodies around him like he knew his own paws. He could feel their chill breath on his neck, the soft nuzzle of affection that he would never really feel again. He could sense snuffles and whines, jostles for position that sometimes ended with playful snarling and rumbling growls. He could feel Nina’s weight on top of him. Feel her body jerk with the shots she had taken that he hadn’t. He could hear them, in his heart, howling just outside the little house.

He could hear their cries, begging him to join them. He should have slept for the last time in the big grave with the rest of them. He had been meant to die with his family. He wasn't the fastest in his family, the smartest, the best hunter. He wasn't anything better than anyone else.

There was no reason for him to survive, no special ability or way of being he had that made him deserve this bed with its soft blankets when everyone he loved was quiet and cold in the ground, covered in dirt and decomposing now.

He hadn’t deserved to meet kind humans. He didn’t deserve to eat pizza until his stomach ached and sit in chairs. He didn't deserve hot water to clean the dirt and blood from his skin. Others in his pack had deserved it so much more, and they had been given silver bullets instead, and now...

Now Misae was the only one left who remembered them.

He closed his eyes against the way the darkness wanted to change shape, to make him see his dead family with all the blood and bullets. He listened to their wistful, spectral howls, just outside the window. Calling and calling and calling, crying to him and to each other.

Why you? Why not us, instead? Why not the little pups, why not the mothers, why not the older wolves who had been good for so long? You were never all that good. What about you deserved to live? Why not us?

Why was it you?

Anaya and Eden slept together.

Misae slept with ghosts.

-

@finder-of-rings  @burtlederp @deluxewhump @scoundrelwithboba @shrimpwritings 

@yassifiedinformation @wildfaewhump @whatwhump @honeycollectswhump @tundra-tiger

@dont-look-me-in-the-eye @there-will-always-be-blood @fangedcinnamonroll @pigeonwhumps @yassifiedinformation

[sunnixsunshine]

Here’s the animatic stills!

I’m so proud of these, I had a lot of fun with the rendering and just drawing Sanji in general. Might repost these without the text but I dunno if anyone would want em :d

[queermentaldisaster]

Simon's ma was Catholic. Not a good one either. Kept letting her husband harm Simon in hopes it would 'turn him back to normal'. Their fights were explosive and horrible.

She taught Simon to never have sex outside of marriage, she instilled those harmful beliefs upon her son.

The first night after Simon's rape at the hands of Roba, his sobs could be heard throughout the building, and those neighboring his cell listened to those repeated prayers of ‘Oh Lord please forgive me’ again and again.

He still thinks that way and can still be found praying for forgiveness every so often. Soap brings him back to reality. Promises that the God(s) up there made Simon the way he was and that they are not blaming him for what has happened to him.

[comm-services]

By definition and in theory- yes, I am

Is that so? Who is this child?

Hellooo! |˶˙ᵕ˙ )ﾉﾞ

You're a new person! I'm Malitae :D

-@god-of-expression

What is it with all of you coming to bother me-

What do you want?

[mugloversonly]

Silver over Gold

Ch 3: Kintsugi - Final

Ch.1 Ch.2 AO3

Summary:

Steve and Eddie finally talk.

Steve stood outside Eddie’s door horrified by what he heard on the other side. Eddie was sobbing and his inner omega was whining weakly. “Eddie? Baby can I come in?” He pleaded.

“Alpha?” Eddie cried softly. “Door’s locked.” His voice was fading into a whisper. “I’m sorry alpha.”

Steve didn’t think twice about ripping the door of the hinges; he'd fix it later, he just hoped Wayne would understand. His omega needed him and his alpha would stop at nothing to help him (for once he was in total agreement). The smashing of the door echoed through the whole trailer but Eddie didn’t seem to notice. He was curled up on his side in the corner of the room with his head tucked against his knees, shaking violently. Steve rushed over to him and gently swept his hair out of his face. He gasped when he saw his beautiful omega. “Oh, Eddie.” He whispered. He was paler than usual, practically translucent. His lively chocolate eyes were red rimmed and puffy, empty as they stared up at him. Steve wasn’t even sure if Eddie could see him right now.

“I’m sorry alpha.” Eddie whispered. Steve stared at him hoping for some awareness in his eyes but there still wasn’t anything. He must be speaking unconsciously.

“Sh,” Steve cooed. “I’m right here, omega. Your alpha is right here. I'm not going anywhere.” He ran his hands up and down Eddie’s arms and kissed him on the forehead. His skin was freezing to the touch and if Steve didn’t know better he’d think he just came out of Lover’s Lake.

He took him into his arms, laid them back in Eddie’s nest, and removed their shirts for skin contact, pulling the blanket over them for good measure . Steve made sure to hold the omega’s nose directly onto his scent gland. He didn’t know much about rejection sickness, but from what he learned in school one way to cure it was through comforting touch and scents. Eddie barely moved and didn’t acknowledge Steve at all. Steve was having a hard time staying calm but the whines and howling of his omega were helping him to stay focused.

H is shivering finally subsided and Eddie fell into a light haze. He pulled back from Steve and his eyes were a bit clearer. “Stevie?” He asked. At Steve’s nod he threw himself back. He didn’t deserve to be held like this. He was a bad omega. His alpha didn’t love him and it was all his fault. Steve didn’t let him get far before he was yanking him right back in. He ran his fingers through his tangled hair and nuzzled his neck. “I’m sorry Steve. I should’ ve trusted you . I'm a bad omega.” He sobbed but Steve clapped a hand over his mouth.

“You're not a bad omega Eddie. You're my omega.” Steve said. He felt more than heard Eddie’s gasp and watched as his wet eyes widened. He reached up and pulled Steve’s hand off his mouth.

“I’m still your omega?” He whispered hopeful yet terrified.

“Yes, darling.” Steve replied caressing his cheek. Eddie put his hand over Steve’s and held it there.

“You still want to be my alpha? After everything I put you through?” Steve looked deep into Eddie’s eyes and kissed him on the nose.

“You didn’t put me through anything. I will always be your alpha. Even if you decided you wanted nothing to do with me, I will be here waiting. There is nothing you could do that would drive me away. I will never leave you.” He promised. “Let me apologize now.”

“No, Steve you don’t owe me anything.” Eddie said clutching his shirt. “I was the one in the wrong.”

“No you weren’t. I was scared. I didn’t stop to consider that I was stringing you along.” He bowed his head as tears finally spilled over. “I love you, Eddie. I never want you to doubt that. I’m sorry I didn’t say it sooner. And I’m sorry the first time I said it was in an argument.” He grabbed Eddie’s face and tilted it until their lips were barely a millimeter apart. “I would never lie to you. I know why you would think that. Wayne told me. Just know, that the most important person in my life, is right here in my arms. Okay?”

“Except Robin?” He knew it was shitty, but he needed to know.

“No my lovely omega. Even more important than Robin.” He kissed him then. A quick press of lips, there and gone in mere moments. “Robin is my best friend and I won’t stop loving her or change how she and I are with each other. But you’re my future mate, and nothing is more important than you feeling secure in us.” Eddie surged forward and kissed him hard practically shoving his tongue down his throat.

“I don’t want you to stop being friends with Robin or anything like that, Stevie. It’s just…” Eddie knew he had to let Steve hear some of this from him. “The pups constantly tell me how you two were made for each other and how it’s only a matter of time for you two to mate.” Eddie looked down. “I guess, with you wanting to keep it a secret and when I ask about courting you brush it off, mix that with Dustin asking me to find out if you’re secretly dating Robin and I thought it was only a matter of time before you stopped what we had and went with her. And when I saw you two together, I thought it finally happened and you didn’t even have the decency to tell me first.” His voice broke on that last word.

“Wait a second...the pups have been saying what?!” Steve yelled out startling the omega and causing him to whimper. “Sorry.” He took a few calming breaths before asking again. “The pups have been telling you that Robin and I are secretly together?”

“Basically.” Eddie admitted.

“No wonder you didn’t believe me.” Steve scoffed. “Don’t worry my love I’ll set the record straight as soon as I can.” He snuggled Eddie closer and kissed his hair.

“You don’t have to do anything you’re uncomfortable with Steve. Not for my sake.” He understood that it may be hard for Steve since he had only dated female omegas before. But his alpha just rolled his eyes.

“I’ll put an ad in the newspaper try me.” He laughed. “It’ll say something like: I, Steven Anthony Harrington am courting and plan to mate with the beautiful” he leaned over and nuzzled against Eddie’s scent gland causing the omega to giggle. “Wonderful, remarkable, one of a kind, Edward Wayne Munson.” He nipped lightly at his neck. “I will don’t tempt me.”

Light finally returned to Eddie’s eyes. “Thank you.” He whispered. Steve knew he was thanking him for much more but Steve didn’t want him to feel grateful that Steve treated him like a worthy partner.

“No thanks necessary. I’m not going to hide any more okay? In fact, close your eyes.” he said. When Eddie did so, he reached into his pocket to pull something out that he fastened around Eddie’s pale throat and kissed him softly. “Open.”

Eddie opened his eyes and gasped. It was the most unique courting gift he’d ever received. Pure silver because he mentioned to Steve once that it was his favorite precious metal. The pendant was a perfect copy of his warlock with small rubies creating the red lightening. As he took a closer look, he realized the neck of the guitar was actually Steve’s nail bat. It was the perfect combination of them.

His chest no longer felt tight and his nose tickled as his blood orange scent began pouring out of his scent gland. It was faint, but it was there. Steve beamed and pushed his nose to the source and took a big inhale. “Thank you, Alpha. I accept your request to court.” Eddie said in the traditional manner. He pulled away. “I’ll give you something I scented in return once it gets back to normal.” Eddie promised. Steve nodded and pulled him into another kiss. This one was more heated and while Eddie did feel better and the sickness was receding, he wasn’t ready to go very far. He leaned back slightly but stayed close so the alpha knew he was okay. “Is it alright, if we take it slow?” He couldn’t meet his eyes.

“Whatever you need.” Steve said tilting his head up. “What ever you want. It’s yours.” He said more like an oath than a promise.

“I threw away your yellow sweater. I’m sorry. I know it was your favorite.” He admitted ashamed. Steve slid away and for a second Eddie thought he was leaving, but before he could let out a single noise of protest he was getting hit in the face with soft cotton. In his hands was the best thing he'd ever seen.

“Wayne said he saw you throw it away and figured you were just upset.” Eddie smiled.

“He knows me so well.”

“I’d hope so, he is your dad and all.” Steve said. “Speaking of, I’d like to formally ask him to court you. I know you already said yes, but it’s traditional to ask an omega’s parent.” Eddie beamed.

“You really do love me, don’t you?” He asked.

“I do. I love you so much. I want to court you and mate with you. I want to see you round with my pups.” Steve replied and laid down pulling Eddie with him. “I want us to smell like one another so there’s no mistaking who we belong to.”

“How long have you had this necklace by the way?” Eddie asked the pendant clutched in his hand.

“Since right after spring break.” He admitted. At Eddie’s raised eyebrows he sheepishly said “I told you, I’ve wanted to court you for a long time.”

The two talked a bit more about their insecurities and about Eddie’s past trauma with alphas. When the alpha that hurt him came up again, Steve growled. “Give me a name.” The fire in his eyes would have scared Eddie if it was directed at him. But at the moment, it may have made him a bit slick. He’d never had an alpha want to protect him like this.

“If I tell you, can you promise you won’t do anything crazy?” Eddie asked.

“No.” Steve said. “I promised no lies.” He defended at Eddie’s snort.

“You did, you did. Okay, just promise you’ll be careful.” Steve agreed to that and motioned for Eddie to continue. “It was Tommy Hagan my first senior year.” He admitted. The scent of burning woods filled the his nostrils.

“When?” Steve growled. Had he still been friends with Tommy?

“We started courting in August. The heat we spent together was in November.”

“You were the omega he couldn’t shut up about?” Steve asked. Eddie shrugged.

“I guess. Weird that he couldn’t shut up about me when he cheated on me with Carol.” Eddie said meekly. The faint blood orange Eddie was finally emitting was turning sour and he was trying to pump out calming omega pheromones to calm Steve, but it didn’t seem to be working well due to the dull nature of it.

“Sorry, sorry.” Steve said as he willed himself to calm down. “It’s not important right now.” He stood and pulled Eddie to his feet.

“What is important is getting you checked out by a doctor. Let’s let Wayne know and we can go okay?” Steve asked. Eddie nodded and the two got dressed with some difficulty since they refused to let go of each other. Steve wore his yellow sweater so it would smell like him again and Eddie pulled on his favorite band tee. On their way out of the trailer they wrote a note for Wayne and Steve walked Eddie to the passenger side. He opened the door and kept a firm hand in Eddie’s until he was seated. Eddie watched on amused as Steve practically sprinted around the car so they could spend the least amount apart as possible.

~ ~~

At the hospital, the Doctor that saw him last time was able to see him again. “Eddie, this one could have killed you if your alpha hadn’t come when he did. To help you get back on your feet it’ll be good for the two of you to spend the next 48 to 72 hours together. Now for cases like yours we have a new type of medication that can stop rejection sickness from getting worse once it starts. I’m giving you a prescription for that. And I want you to go back to taking the preventive ones for a while.” He looked between the two men knowingly. “I’d say until you’ve mated. After that, you should be okay to stop them. But, keep the emergency one on you at all times. It could be the difference between life and death.” He said before leaving them with a nurse. She gave Eddie some fluids in an IV that were supposed to help him return to normal and then they were on their way.

“So, what now?” Eddie asked. Steve took his hand again.

“Let me take you out on the town? Then we can go back to the trailer and cuddle?” He asked. Eddie blushed and his blood orange scent finally filled the car in full force.

"I'd like that."

@v3lv3tf0x @lexirosewrites Final part!

That's a wrap on this one. But I do have plans to write some Robin POV and what Steve does the next time he sees Tommy.

[riality-check]

Max, Eddie, and found family feels

Summary:

“He was such a prick,” Max whispers. “And I hate that I feel bad, and I hate that I don’t feel bad.”

Eddie sits back down across from Max and tries to wrack his brain for an intelligent thing to say.

He settles on, “You’re allowed to feel however you feel.”

Max snorts. “But isn’t it fucked up either way?”

“Welcome to Hawkins, Red,” Eddie says dryly. “We’re all fucked up here.”

OR

On a Sunday morning, Eddie and Max talk about survivor's guilt, cycles of abuse, and good ways to feel big.

[isla-morningstar]

I don't have a choice what he does

maybe it would have been simpler if I died

Mo- Isla? Are you there? I wanted to wait in case your comm fixed.

-@wilted-feathers

what do you want

[thedo0zyslider]

I Love You (I'm Not Supposed Too) - Chapter Ten: Wither Rose - 10k Words

Fwhip sends Jimmy out to the fields like he said he would, and also gives the cod a deeper look at his home life then he ever would have hoped too.

A03 Link

Fwhip does as he says he would a few days later, and sends Jimmy out to the fields. As soon as breakfast ends he’s being led out of the dinning hall, and practically forced outside. The half dragon says he’ll show him where the fields are, introduce him to the farmers, and then he’ll be done with the cod until the evening. He’s very excited at the prospect of a fish free workshop, it seems. Jimmy lets himself be dragged along, probably responding to everything Fwhip says with something sarcastic. Though he is grateful to get out of the manor for once, instead of sitting inside all day bored out of his mind.

He does, in fact, end up spending most if not all of his day out in the farms, and nearly every day after that as well. The cod enjoys his time greatly, since farming was something he never really got to do before. Because the Ocean Empire was, well, in the ocean , there wasn’t a lot to plant. The Cod Empire had fields of wheat and the occasional patch of carrots that needed harvesting, Jimmy didn’t have much experience in the way of farming beforehand.

The farmers were generally quite nice to him, once they accepted he wasn’t a permanent stay, and learned he would be going home within the month. They paired him with one of the more experienced farmers, understandably wanting him to be supervised while he learned the ropes. Jimmy also didn’t want to destroy any crops, considering this was one of the village's main food sources. Plus it’d get him kicked out of the farms forever probably, which would be super lame .

He spends a good chuck on the first day there, from about mid-morning till dusk he is in the fields. And it’s rewarding work, he has to admit. Even if the cod doesn't really do much, it’s still nice. The Prince will have to start helping around the Codlands farms, even though they say such a job isn’t fit for a royal like him. Which they have, multiple times before, despite his insistence. He had a government to build instead, or whatever. Though next time he will just insist harder, and say that the Cod Council and his mother can wait.

Around mid-afternoon, while he is helping another farmer checkup on some of the newer potatoes, Jimmy catches sight of another fishfolk a few feet away; he stiffens almost on instinct. It seems, that before sending him out there, Fwhip had failed to mention one farmer being a salmonfolk. And now he was stuck in the same work environment as one for another few hours. And he probably would be coming down here again, unless the manor got less boring, lest he want to go in the village for entertainment and see even more of them…

Well, this was certainly gonna suck big time.

The older merfolk glares at him from across the field, tail flicking in displeasure. Jimmy looks back for a few seconds, before abruptly turning his back on them. He’s not going to be intimidated by a bloody salmon , not in a million years. Besides, the farmer next to him was saying something, and he had to pay attention to them and the potatoes now. The salmon says nothing behind him, doesn’t even let out a snarl. But the air in the field is tense regardless, in a way all the other farmers definitely know. But all Jimmy can do is act like the tension isn’t there, and keep tending to the growing potatoes. 

The salmonfolk ignores him, and Jimmy ignore them right in return. It is a mutual ignorance, for they both know even throwing an insult will be a bad idea on the farm. That can be saved for outside of work, if they ever see each other outside of it. Which, based on Jimmy’s limited village access, means they most likely will not. They will most likely be moved to different tasks on the fields as well, at least until the cod leaves. Though he;s sure the salmon will complain to everyone they know about the Cod Prince that dared show up at their work. It’s what he would do if the roles were reserved, after all. No one would ever, ever hear the end of it from him, if he was stuck in such a horrible situation.

The salmon’s name is Sage, he learns from his potato farmer, and they’ve been on the farm for almost a decade. And they’re the only farmer to notably avoid him whenever he comes around, even though some do so in more discreet ways regardless. Which is fine by Jimmy, because he wants nothing to do with the other merfolk as well. Which is why they are ignoring each other. And he thinks everyone here is aware enough of the…. tensions between the cod and salmonfolk to not make any comment on it; leaving the issue to fade into the background over the coming weeks.

And just because one issue fades into the background, doesn't mean the universe has to throw another one at him! Unless the gods just like seeing him suffer, which would be a theory with a lot of evidence, unfortunately. (Why can’t he just have fun farming! Why does there have to be problems! Why does this trip suck so bad!)

On day three of farming work, Jimmy reasons he needs to take his binder off. Something that’s unusual for him, because he’d rather die than go without it most days. But it simply wasn’t possible to wear one when doing farm work, especially with his asthma. He’d done labor, granted not very intense labor, while binding at the Cod Empire, and had just been a little sore at worst. But this time was much different. Both days prior he’d felt chest tightness, and his ribs had ached something fierce after he took the binder off. The only problem is, he didn’t really bring a bra with him, because he hadn’t expected to be doing any physical labor.

Great, now he’s gotta ask Gem. or something. He doesn’t know. Asking Gem really the only option he has, even if asking to borrow a bra might be a little weird of a question. He thinks people do that. Bra sharing is like, one of those things you vaguely hear about happening, but never really see it in real life. And usually those things are real, but there’s an off chance this one isn’t and he’s about to look weird and ruin his friendship with Gem or something.

But he doesn’t have any other options right now, Jimmy reminds himself. And so, that night after he comes back from the fields (in that hour before Fwhip leaves his workshop and before dinner usually begins,) he makes himself go find Gem and ask. He knows she’s here today, thankfully, the wizard taking a day off from her magic studies. A rare occurrence, Fwhip noted, and she liked spending those days holed up in her room with a book. So that was where Jimmy went, his walk towards it uncertain the whole way.

“Hey Gem?” Jimmy asks, peeking through the bedroom’s slightly open doorway when he reaches it. He hopes entering like this is okay, and that he didn’t need to knock on the door first or something. Even if it was already ajar when he got here, meaning that, logically, she probably wouldn’t mind a visitor. Jimmy still worried over being a nuisance regardless.

“Oh, Jimmy!” Gem jumps a little, startled by his unexpected appearance. It seems she’d been buried in a book, one with a blue cover resting on her lap. The young wizard is in a more casual outfit today, wearing a shorter skirt than normal and a loose fitting green shirt to match, while her hat rests on a nearby chair. Jimmy wishes he could feel that comfortable in his own clothes. “What is it?”

“Okay so, kinda weird question here,” He starts, immediately getting the urge to fidget in a million different ways. But he doesn’t, not really, other than an anxious leg bounce. Gem’s expression changes to one of curiosity, and she sets her book down on the best next to her. Hopefully this goes better than the scenario in his mind is. “But I’ve been helping out on the farms, and wearing a binder kinda hurts and it’s messing with my asthma…”

“..I kindaaaa wasn’t expecting to not bind so I didn’t bring any bras with me, so, can I, um, borrow one of yours, if that’s okay?” He finishes, and can tell exactly what awkward smile is on his face right now. Jimmy feels that mortifying kind of embarrassment starting to creep up on him, and wants to sink into the floor for a thousand years and die . That would be so much better than standing here right now, anything would.

Gem’s face seems to soften, and she hops off her bed rather quickly. All to the cod’s great and long lasting surprise. “That’s more than okay!” She smoothes her skirt down as she stands, and marks the page in her book before placing it to the side. The young wizard is totally unaware to the cod’s utter astonishment behind her, at least for now, 

“You mean that wasn’t a weird question? Like not at all?” Jimmy blinks, more than a little befuddled by her easy answer. He had expected her to have a worse reaction. He had expected her to call him a weirdo, tell him to get out of her room, something like that. Not in a million years did he think she’d actually lend him a hand here.

Gem shrugged, walking across the room and to where her dresser sat. “Unexpected, but not weird.” She began looking for something to give him, opening a drawer, and Jimmy figured now was as good a time as any to admire the decorations on her wall. If only to make himself feel less awkward, because frankly Gem didn’t seem to give a single fuck about any of this. A trait he admired greatly. (And also the hand painted constellations and symbols on the wall were cute, even if he knew what none of them meant.) “It’s really not the weirdest thing as long as they’re washed. I know girls at the Cliff’s private schools do it all the time.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.” The cod hums, startled by the new information. Wow, okay then. So this was actually a decently normal thing people did, good to know. He wishes he’d known that beforehand somehow, if only to save himself some of the awkwardness and nervousness he felt. But it was too late now, and at least he’d found out eventually. 

“Yeah. My friends from there share strapless ones for more formal parties and stuff like that.” Gem says, closing the drawer she was looking through. At least that’s what Jimmy thinks she’s doing, since he’s still staring at the ceiling. He was surprised he actually recognized a few of the constellations she’d painted, and was pretty proud of himself for it.

“That makes sense.” Jimmy nods, remembering how certain dress times tend to show a lot of the shoulder area. It was one of the reasons he used to hate them so much, it made him feel way too exposed. And, ya know, never having a good bra for it. When he did wear bras, that was. But he hadn’t needed to deal with all that for a few years now, and never planned on dealing with it ever again. Not if the cod could help it….

While he’s not paying attention, far too lost in his own nervous thoughts, Gem hands him a white sports bra; and all Jimmy does is just stare at it for a good second. He doesn’t know what he was expecting, really, and why he stares like an idiot. It wasn’t like he could borrow a traditional one, with cup sizes being a problem and all that. Sports bras were a pretty good substitute for binders anyways, and he was sure Gem had either known that beforehand, or gone out of her way to research trans issues after he came out to her. The latter probably happened regardless of what she knew or not, actually.

“I picked a white one so it wouldn't attract any heat!” Gem says as he takes the bra from her hands. There’s a smile on her face, a wide one in fact. She seems so genuinely happy to help him out, it loops back around to making Jimmy feel extra bad for his anxiety. It’s not the wizard’s fault of course, but the cod can’t help feeling the way he does.

“Oh, good idea!” Jimmy says, doing his best to return her smile. He doesn’t want the young wizard thinking he’s ungrateful for this, because he’s certainly not! The cod feels like he’s indebted to her, really. She totally didn’t hae to help him with this, but she did anyway! Hell, Gem could’ve called him weird and shooed him away, and he would’ve been perfectly fine! A little panicked about what to do tomorrow, because he’d said he would show up the next morning, but overall he’d have been fine!

“What’re you doing in the farms anyways?” Gem asks, watching as Jimmy clutches the item in his hands; still looking at it like an idiot. Though she doesn’t watch him for long, seeming more eager to get back to her book. It must be a really good one, by the way she’ll distractedly glance towards where it’s laying. And it also gives Jimmy an easy excuse to leave this conversation, and go curl up in his own from embarrassment. 

“Fwhip was being boring , and I wanted to do something with my hands.” He explains, feeling his tail flick behind him with lingering annoyance. Her brother was a real pain in the arse when he wanted to be, and he had been the day he had sent the cod out to the fields. 

“Ah, that makes sense. He never leaves that dumb workshop.” Gem nods, already walking over to where her book is. Fwhip had said she liked to spend her days off by herself, and the wizard was making that pretty clear by her movements. Thankfully Jimmy hadn’t planned on staying for a chat, and wanted to do the opposite. 

“Tell me about it.” The cod snorts, taking a few steps back towards the door. He isn’t as nervous as he was when he first walked in, but part of him was still begging to leave and go scream into a pillow. It was his brain's number one priority at the moment, really. “Thank you for letting me borrow this.”

“No problem!” Gem waves to him as he walks out the door, that smile on her face again. Again, Jimmy can’t help but return the beaming look he gets back in full. He’d still feel bad if he doesn’t, and worry about not doing so, even if they are just saying goodbye to each other. Curse him and his dumb anxiety or whatever. “Bye Jim!” “Heh, bye!” He calls, deciding to leave the door just ws he found it. Slightly ajar, so anyone could walk in if they needed anything; just like he had done. Then Jimmy basically books it down the fall and into his own room, shutting the door behind him so quickly it almost slams. He needs to like, lay down for a minute, because he’s still embarrassed over that for some reason. Even though Gem had been perfectly happy to help, he’s still embarrassed!

So Jimmy sets the sports bra down on his own dresser, and then flops face first onto his bed for a few hours. He needs to rest for all the day's work, and recover from what he just experienced. And also mentally prepare himself for the next day, because it’ll be his first time not binding in like….two years at least. And he’ll be doing it in public…

Yeah, he’s definitely gonna need some extra energy to deal with all of that tomorrow.

_____________________________

Jimmy gets to the farms the next day, and immediately feels himself being stared at. At first, he thinks nothing of it. The farmhands could’ve thought he was a cis guy, and then he just shows up with tits one day. He wouldn't blame them for doing a double take or two at first, honestly. But these stares are clearly not from that, they are clearly akin to the nasty ones he receives at home. He’s experienced enough transphobia to clock it by now, even when people think they’re being subtle. (They’re never actually being subtle, by the way.)

He ignores them the best he can, and keeps himself busy and entertained. The older farmers are still friendly with him, for the most part, probably having more things to worry about than a temporary worker's appearance. Winter was in a few months, and they needed a harvest before that. If any of them notice him spending far too long feeding the livestock, where no other farmhands are, then none of them say a thing.

The farmer giving him the nastiest looks is an elf boy, who doesn’t seem to be much older than Lizzie. He’d only recently learned of the Grimlands small population of elves, most likely due to the Crystal Cliffs’ influence. But he can’t really tell where this elf might be from, especially since Jimmy isn’t the most knowledgeable on the differences between types of elves. But this one wasn’t from Rivendell, his ears were noticeably less pointy, and the northern elves were simply not built for more humid environments. Which rolled out the Cliffs as well, even if that part of the mountain range was much warmer than Rivendell’s.

He was a bit younger when his kingdom's disagreement with elves had been occurring, but he can see why it happened now. The boy was already glaring at him before he stopped binding, and it seems being a codfolk and trans was somehow worse than just being a codfolk. And, when they ended up working close together that day, he seemed very eager to make his dislike known to the whole field. Unless someone somehow hadn’t caught on already.

“So, ocean boy.” The elf is standing next to him all of a sudden, looking the cod up and down. It’s not a nice look, not by a long shot. Jimmy does his best not to seem unsettled by this, and isn’t sure how well it works. His tail often does things without him telling it too, and he prays it hasn’t moved an inch. “What’s up with….all of that?”

“What do you…mean?” The cod asks, keeping everything about him as neutral as possible. He keeps his face still as he can get it, and stops any movements his fins might make. Jimmy also fights the urge to fidget. He knows the elf probably wants him to be nervous, to be scared. He will not let him see that, won’t let him have that victory.

“Ya know the….appearance change?” The other boy flicks his gaze over him again, and Jimmy feels himself stiffen even more. (It lingers on his chest for just a moment too long. Jimmy wants to snap at him for staring.) He didn’t think he could be intimidated by someone almost a foot shorter than him, but it's currently happening. (You also think a random, normal elf wouldn’t mess with literal ocean royalty who has the height advantage on him, but there’s a first time for everything.) “You one of… them people? ”

“Why’s it matter?” Jimmy mutters, narrowing his eyes. Yep, it’s going that way. It almost always goes that way when he meets new people, sadly, and Jimmy has come to accept it and expect it at this point. It’s why he knows to stay so calm. He’s done this song and dance a million times before, and will do it a million times after. They don’t get to win anymore, most of the time nowadays. He will not let them win.

“It doesn’t really, I was just asking!” The elf says, sounding strangely defensive all of a sudden. They always get defensive, like they would never think that way about people, even when it was so clear that they did. (Because they believe they are good people, and good people cannot hate others like the way they hate his people, unless his people are the bad ones. Unlike them, the good people.) Bigots were weird like that, Jimm finds, or at least this kind was. “So, why the appearance change?”

Jimmy decides to politely skirt around the “ one of them people ” comment from a moment ago, even though he really shouldn’t, and goes with the only answer that won’t out him immediately. (Which is hard to do when you were obviously wearing a chest binder the day before, but whatever.) And it’s the truth too, making this, like, the only time he hasn’t lied to avoid being ousted. “The other outfit was triggering my asthma.”

“Why was your chest so restricted then? Anyone who has breathing problems isn’t allowed to endanger themselves like that, the head farmers won’t have it.” The elf replies, his arms now crossed. Jimmy does not know what to say to that. The elf is gonna get his answer one way or another, because there is only one answer to that question. The blonde has a feeling any lie about self consciousness he can make up will be dismissed, because of how masculine the rest of him has started to look. There is no way out of this.

“I-” The cod starts to respond, not even sure what he’s going to say when he opens his mouth, before another one of the farmers cuts him off. Either his guardian angel has come to his rescue or another person has come to drag him down with the elf boy, and the cod is going to find out which one that is uncomfortably soon.

An older voice comes from their right, one belonging to one of the farm’s managers, if Jimmy remembers correctly. For a brief moment, the cod feels his stomach drop. He’s sure this is about to get worse, and now there will be two people targeting him. But thankfully, that turns out not to be the case this time. “Artemus, what’s going on here?”

“Mris, Tamara, hi-!” As he greets the older woman, the elf, Artemus, becomes noticeably panicked. Like he knows he’s been caught red handed. It seems that the cod has gotten a guardian angel after all, in the form of a very cranky and upset looking old woman. “We were just, er, talking! Yeah, talking!”

“Right, fishboy?” He asks, turning to Jimmy. He glares at him, a look that tells him to go along with the plan, or else. The elf is glaring at him, sending an unspoken threat his way, and the cod can’t help the fear that surges through him. He knows he can’t go along with this, can’t lie and say they were “ just talking ” when they obviously were not “ just talking .” He can’t do that again, knows he can’t keep letting people get away with treating him like this.

So, fighting back to the fear in his bones and the lump forming in his throat, Jimmy does not play along with the elf’s game. Not anymore. The downright murderous glare he gets for it will haunt his dreams. “...No.”

The look in his eyes is what makes Mrs. Tamara snap, it seems, and she focuses all her anger on the troublesome elf in front of her. Jimmy is barely spared a second glance as she yells, thankfully. He's not the best with people yelling at him, thank you Ocean Queen. “Leave the Prince alone and get back to work! We have a fall harvest to prepare for!”

“Yes ma'am! Sorry!” Artemus says, and is shuffling away from them before Jimmy even knows it. He leaves like a naughty child that’s just been caught misbehaving, and slinks back into the fields without another word. Or without another nasty glance back, much to the cod’s surprise. Horrible people usually do that to him when they walk away, as if they’re trying to get the last lick in. Even if they’ve already won the fight.

“I’m terribly sorry about him.” Mrs. Tamara says, placing a comforting hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. He does his best not to go rigid again, still pretty on edge from Artemus, as he now knows that's what the elves name is. “He’s always been…..like that about other people, no matter how many times the Count and Countess reprimand him for it.”

‘It’s…fine.” The cod mumbles, hugging his arms to his chest again. He hadn't paid much attention to it before, how it felt like to not wear a binder. But since Artemus’ comments, he had become acutely aware of it; and would be for the rest of the day. Dumbass transphobes always having to ruin everything…“Why haven’t they fired him yet?”

“He’s too good of a farmhand to lose, sadly.” Mrs. Tamara sighs, shaking her head sadly. It seems she might want the elf fried as well, secretly at least. And Jimmy doesn’t blame her, if he’s gonna act like that during the workday. If you wanna keep your job, at least wait until you’re off the clock to harass your co-workers or something. “I do try to keep him in check though.”

“Well, thank you for checking on me.” Jimmy says, shifting away from her a bit. She takes her hand off the cod’s shoulder once she notices, probably sensing his uncomfortableness. Jimmy pointedly ignores the look of pure pity that follows it, and ignores the resentment he’s already feeling because of it. He hates when people pity him like that..

“No problem.” Mrs. Tamara starts to move away as well, somewhat in the direction she came from. She can’t just sit there and comfort the cod all day, after all, she has a farm to help run. Jimmy doesn’t want her to stand here and keep pitying him anyways, so the farm’s manager leaving is quite fine with him. “You can head over towards the livestock if you want, it’s almost time to feed them again.”

“Right. Thanks.” He mutters back, and is left alone with his farm work again. The cod doesn't get much done afterwards, not much at all. Instead, he heads out early, saying he feels sick. No one questions it, and he's sure a bunch of the farmhands are more than happy to have him gone for the rest of the day too. And for the next few days as well, because he doesn’t have the energy to come back for at least a week. (Artemus does end up getting yelled at for costing them a worker, so that’s something at least.)

(And when the cod does show up to work again, not just hangout with a certain half dragon, he’s back in his binder and has his inhaler in his pocket. He uses it a lot more than he should, but it’s fine, because at least that way he’s not getting stared at and asked uncomfortable questions. At least this way he feels safe.)

_____________________________

The next time he goes out to the farms, Jimmy manages to get Fwhip into the sun for once. It’s truly a groundbreaking achievement. Gem would be so proud and impressed if he was here, even if he did just nag and complain every second that he wasn’t inside. Really, you’d think he was a vampire, with how much he feared the sun hurting him or something.

He doesn’t actually do much work, with Fwhip there, because the farm managers will not let the future Count do work. Mrs. Tamara agrees it is good for the half dragon to finally see the sun, but sends the two boys off. She tells them to have a wonderful day on the outskirts of the area, not working. (Plus, Jimmy’s short absence will relieve some tension in the workers, he knows, even though that part goes unsaid. If it was even what Mrs. Tamara was implying at all.

At least he doesn’t have to see Artemus or Sage again.)

They end up a little ways away from the fields, far enough for no one to overhear anything they say. Far enough for them to just be themselves, no marriage attached. And they are themselves as they walk through an open area, the ground caked in podzol and dirt. The heads on spikes are back, decorating the pathway and its surrounding land; still giving Jimmy the creeps. But he ignores the lifeless eyes staring back at him the best he can, and focuses on whatever the half dragon is complaining about beside him.

Well, he halfway focuses, more interested in watching the nature around them as they walk. The plants get more strange to him the further inland the cod goes, and he is currently very inland right now. He’s sure he’ll get used to all the new flora eventually, in a few years at least, but for now most if not all of it still mesmerizes him so much. 

Speaking of new flora, Jimmy has seen a few flowers dotted around as they walk. Not many, probably due to the amount of podzol and strange lack of grass in this part of the empire, but a few are still flourishing nearby. And one catches his eyes as they walk past, one that’s nothing like he’s ever heard of or read about in all his stolen nature books. So out of curiosity, the cod stops their walk to investigate it, and Fwhip only realizes a moment later. After he’s already walked a few feet away and no one's been absentmindedly humming at all his ramblings. The cod barely pays him any mind as he sheepishly trots back, far too transfixed by the unknown flower before him. 

"What is that?" Jimmy asks, crouching down next to the flower. He’s never seen, or heard of, anything like it before. Sure, he’d known flowers could appear to be black in nature, actually being some dark hue or violet or red. But this one seemed to actually be black and gray, no tint of any other color being visible in the sunlight. It was beautiful and also the most unnatural part of nature the cod had ever seen before; if that made any sense.

"A wither rose." Fwhip says, crouching down next to him in the grass. Though Jimmy doesn’t notice this detail, he is actually not as close as the cod thinks he is. He keeps a firm distance away from the flower, and makes sure any of his limb

“Is it a native plant?” The cod asks, inspecting the flower closer. He’d managed to talk flowers and stuff with Katherine, once they’d added each other on their communicators, and she’d hadn’t mentioned this one. Meaning, unless she had forgotten, it was one of the rare flower breeds the Overgrown’s magic couldn’t grow. And Katherine knew a lot of flowers too, like, a lot a lot . Jimmy didn’t even know that many subspecies of plant could exist on land before that day. It was seriously up in the thousands and then some..

“Yep, it only grows here.” The half dragon says, his voice strangely cautious. The cod, in a moment of pure (and unknowing) stupidity on his part, ignores that caution and reaches a hand towards the flower. He’s curious to know what it feels like, if it feels different from other flowers (the rather unique name being what makes him think that,) and maybe take one back home to show Lizzie. Or Joel, he would like that; he loves plants and all that stuff. But thanks to the ginger beside him, the cod does not get that far in his silly little idea.

"Ah!" Fwhip exclaims, grabbing the cod’s arm and tugging it back in a panic. Jimmy almost lets out a yelp from how hard he’s grabbed, sharp claws starting to dig into his shirt and scales as they pull him back. "Don't touch it! You'll start withering away!"

"I'll what!? " Jimmy exclaims, quickly jerking the rest of his body away from the flower. He practically scrambles away from the thing, limbs flailing as he puts as much distance between him and the plant as possible. The half dragon moves back with him, though in a much less panicked and more elegant way than the cod does.

Fwhip gives him a weird look, like everyone in the world knows about this one thing but him. Which was also entirely possible, considering the cod had to steal books from his family’s own library for anything resembling an education. ( Did everyone else know this but him? Was he just being a stupid idiot again..?) "Have you ever heard of that before? Or seen it?" 

"No! There's not many flowers in the ocean! Or things that wither you away, whatever that means!" Jimmy snaps, his gaze flicking between the half dragon and the apparently dangerous plant just mere inches away from him. And the thing was out in the open too! Where anyone could just walk by and touch it! That was bloody dangerous, apparently!

"Right, I forgot you lived in water." Fwhip sighed, momentarily pinching the bridge of his nose. As if he was dealing with someone incompetent. Jimmy tried his best not to make a face at that. "Well, withering is when someone starts to get hurt by an unknown force, and parts of them start to kinda decay while living. The effect is triggered by the flower and also some magic thingy. Usually they'll need instant medical attention. Eventually, if the effect is bad enough, you just turn into like, black dust and die. Or it will stop on it’s own, if you’re lucky"

Jimmy gaped at him, absolutely opened mouthed and bewildered for a few minutes, before his brain could even try and form a response. "And the flower does that!?" He exclaimed, his voice unknowingly getting higher. He knew some plants were carnivorous, but not to anything bigger than a mouse, if that! The cod was having a hard time believing that such a small, beautiful looking flower could kill a full grown person in just a matter of hours, like Fwhip had made it out to be. There was only one way to find out though, and he wasn’t going to try his luck. (Even if there was a chance he was being pranked right now, though Jimmy didn’t think that was the case for once. The half dragon’s genuine concern at the start said otherwise)

"Well touching one can't necessarily kill you , but it would leave you bedridden for a few days at best." Fwhip explains, sounding like that’s any better than the damned plant just one- shotting somebody right away. It isn’t, by the way, because what the fuck . Why can a flower just do that, what the hell . Why is that normal in this weird, fucked up little empire where they have mob heads on spikes. Why is the Grimlands just like this?

"And you keep such a dangerous thing in the open?" The cod exclaims, now almost yelling. Fwhip silences him with a pretty hard smack of the tail, getting an equally harsh glare back in response. If Jimmy was standing, he would’ve hit him back, right in the shins.

"The first thing Grimlands children are taught is to not touch the flower. Most people are smart enough to not get near one! It’s a cultural decoration!" The half dragon hisses, grabbing Jimmy and moving him to his feet. The blonde makes a sound at that, something like a swear or two in codlish, and stumbles to regain his balance once he’s upright again. He hadn’t wanted to be helped up just yet, and would’ve preferred to be asked instead of being manhandled , thank you very much.

"Well I'm not from here." The cod huffs, glaring at the other. He quickly dusts himself off, feeling like dirt and podzol are all over him from his time on the ground. The half dragon just watches him do so with a roll of his eyes, not even offering to help in any way. Not that the blonde would want him too, but it would be nice ! Especially after startling him so hard in the first place, with all that creepy flower knowledge!

Fwhip turns away without him, and starts to head in the direction of the manor. The half dragon has clearly had enough of the field and unexpected near death experiences for the day. And they didn’t even do any kinda labor like the cod had planned to do, just walked around a bit like losers did. "And I would like you a lot more if you were."

"And you would be a lot more pleasant if you had fins and a tail." Jimmy says, and wastes no time following behind the future Count, his original purpose for being out here now long forgotten, even if he will be a bit sour about it later. Arguing with Fwhip for the millionth time suddenly seems far more important than any farm work or stroll they’d be dissuaded from. 

" Blegh . No thank you. I prefer not being all slimy and gross." Fwhip says, probably scrunching up his face as he speaks, for extra insult. Not probably, actually, the cod knows he;s doing that. Even if he can’t see the half dragons face right now. He just does that when he’s disgusted by anything, which happens a lot when he’s with the Ocean Prince.

"I am not slimy and gross! You know that! You've touched me before!" Jimmy protests, and quickens his pace, until the both of them are walking side by side again. They are heading back the way they came, past the farms and towards the manor. Which means they’re gonna have to pass all those creepy heads on spikes again, something the cod is not looking forward to. He really, really hates those things.

"Yeah, the human parts." Fwhip snorts back, and Jimmy gawks at that. He’s pretty sure the ginger has touched his fishy parts before, and that he’s lying. He’s lying straight to his face, that’s what he’s doin’! The bastard! The absolute sausage he is! He’s just making up things to complain about at this point, really.

"My fins aren't slimy!" He says, the noise almost coming out in a whine. Which he is fairly certain of, because he’s a codfolk and not some dumb dragon thing like Fwhip is. Merfolk in general aren’t even slimy, because they’re part fish. And for the most part, fish have scales and skin and fins, and are not covered in slime!

"Well you wouldn't know that, because you're used to having them." The half dragon reasons back, and Jimmy hates that he makes a good point there. But still, he’s not slimy! That’s not a thing his species is! Maybe like, the salmonfolk are slimy and that’s why Fwhip thinks that, because the codfolk and merfolk are definitely not! He would know!

"Well at least I don't breathe fire or whatever." Jimmy retorts, nudging the other with his shoulder. Before dignifying that with a response, the half dragon nudges him back even harder. It almost sends the cod stumbling to the ground, and he’s lucky it didn’t. Jimmy would’ve been livid if he had to clean even more dirt and grime off him.

"I don't breathe fire! I'm not a full dragon hybrid!" Fwhip exclaims, sounding offended by the comparison. Which is the worst comparison to sound offended by, in Jimmy opinion. He just made his species sound way less cooler than another one, and he’s getting all offended by it. The future Count was a strange guy indeed.

"That's like the one cool thing about dragons and you can't do it!?" The cod exclaims, giving Fwhip an unimpressed look. He also ignores the urge to shove the half dragon back, and do so with enough force to send him toppling over. Mainly because he knows the ginger would just take him down with the ship, and he kinda wants to avoid staining these clothes with even more dirt. He’s been doing way too much of that back in the Codlands. 

"We can fly!" Is Fwhip’s lame response, and all he has to say for the impressiveness of half dragons. He’s getting proper embarrassed about it too, his whole face starting to turn red with the emotion. Finally, a win for the poor codboy in this conversation. It had taken long enough and way too many comments about slime for it to happen.

"Some fish can fly! Birds can fly!” Jimmy says, gesturing with his hands to emphasize the words. “ Insects can fly, dude!” A lot of things could fly, but those are the main ones, sans the fish part. Or, well, the only ones the cod can remember right now. He’s pretty sure there's a bunch of animals he’s forgetting. But, anyways, being able to fly is not as special as Fwhip thinks it is. Especially considering elytra exists, and those things allow even normal people to fly. When he points this out a second later, the half dragon just groans, and looks for something else about codfolk to make fun of. And Jimmy fires back the best he can, prolonging their dumb argument for the whole walk past the farms and all the way back into town.

They end up bickering the whole way back to the manor, the argument getting arguably more and more stupid as it goes. Anyone who overheard them would think the two Princes were crazy. And they would be right, they were both crazy. Just in different ways, and Fwhip was crazier than Jimmy! That was for certain! And the half dragon would tell him just the opposite, and they would bicker about that too, all the way until they reached the manor’s front door.

The cod barely noticed, but Fwhip got quieter and quieter the closer they got to the house. His responses became less witty, his volume lowered until Jimmy was the only one being loud anymore. And, yeah, Jimmy lowered his voice once he realized, but the blonde didn’t think anything of it. He figured Fwhip was probably just being weird or something, because the half dragon was always being weird in some way. In fact, he kept going along with the conversation as normal. Right until they went to enter the building now in front of them, that is.

As soon as the front door is pushed open, Fwhip’s whole demeanor drastically changes. And it’s not a very subtle change, either. His whole body goes rigid, and his movements get noticeably more coordinated. Like he’s trying to make less and less noise with every movement. Jimmy knows that look, and knows that feeling, way more than he is comfortable admitting too. Something has to be wrong in the manor.

He starts to speak, but is quickly cut off by a very aggressive half dragon, whose tail has now started to lash in what looks to be fear. (Which is totally not making an anxious knot form in Jimmy’s stomach, nooo , not at all. This isn’t a nerve wracking situation in the slightest! He thought not at all sarcastically.) “Fwhip, what’s-”

“Shut up!” Fwhip hisses, whipping his head around to face the cod. His eyes are blown out, wide like a cornered prey animal. Jimmy knows that look well, for it’s one he’s probably worn too many times to count. But his brain is still lagging a bit behind, caught off guard by the sudden shift in the ginger’s attitude, and does not shut up like he knows he desperately needs to do right now. Jimmy will only feel mildly guilty about it later.

“Why-”

“Shut up! Be quiet!” The half dragon throws a hand over Jimmy’s mouth, shutting the cod up pretty effectively. You can’t really protest when there’s a hand halfway shoved in your mouth, after all. Which is kinda gross, by the way. “Just….follow me and don’t say anything, okay?”

Jimmy nods after a moment, and Fwhip stops covering his mouth. Any disgust he might’ve normally shown over the action is eerily missing, and only makes the bad feeling in the blonde’s gut worse. The half dragon moves to hold his hand instead, to better drag the cod through the house, and he ignores how tight the hold is. Jimmy, stone silent and more than a little terrified, lets himself be dragged through the manor’s foyer, totally unprepared for what he catches a glimpse of next.

They have to walk by the kitchen to get to either of their rooms. And the dining hall, and basically every main area in the house. Fwhip just hopes when they do, Jimmy doesn't see whatever bottles might be lying out in the open. His hope doesn’t do much, in the grand scheme of things. Jimmy catches sight of a few, and has to rip his gaze away quickly. He’s being dragged away before he can even fully register what he just saw, and is left reeling in his mind as they move further down the hallway.

(He has never noticed the vases of wither roses decorating the kitchen and dining areas until today. Jimmy sees them clear as day now, and wonders what a plant of decay could possibly mean in a home like this. Because that has to mean something. )

They get to Fwhip’s bedroom before any of the other rooms, the half dragon seemingly beelining for it as if on instinct. Jimmy has no choice but to follow him as he’s dragged across the hallway, and finds himself being shoved into the room before he even knows whats happening. The half dragon stumbles in behind him, and gently shuts the door. The cod gets the feeling he normally would’ve slammed it, if now was not the worst possible time for that.

The two of them stand there in silence for a moment, before the blonde decides to bite the bullet and say what they’re both thinking. “Is your dad….?” Jimmy trails off, but the question lingers heavily in the air. They both know what he’s asking, for the answer is rather obvious. Finishing it would add nothing to the situation but put more tension and weight out into the air.

“Yep.” Fwhips responds, popping the p . He sounds despondent, like this is a normal occurrence. He looks despondent too, his blue eyes glazed over and unfocused. The cod can’t help the way worry twists at his heart like a knife, and doesn’t even feel anything complicated when he realizes that he’s worrying for Fwhip . This was much more important than their dumb rivalry or whatever they had going on right now.

“Does he hurt you?” The cod asks, glancing at the door only a few feet behind him. While Fwhip answers, and also musters the energy to do so, Jimmy goes and locks it. The door being simply shut doesn’t make him feel safe enough. This way, no one can barge in unexpectedly. At least for now. He makes a mental note to unlock it later before he inevitably sits down, considering they’ll probably be in here for a while.

“Emotionally.” Is all the half dragon responds with, moving even further into his bedroom while Jimmy’s back is turned. His wings are held close to his body, and his tail has started to curl in on itself. A sign of how upset he truly was, if the ginger’s tone of voice didn’t display that perfectly enough. The body language is just the cherry on top of this sad , sad sundae, really.

“Okay.” Jimmy frowns, watching the other. He seems a little lost in his own bedroom, like his mind is still trying to figure out what to do. The half dragon glances around for a moment, his gaze lingering unusually long on the cod, before his brain decides what to do. Which is to collapse, apparently. And honestly? Same.

Fwhip says nothing else, and just sinks to the floor. He doesn’t even try to go for a bed or chair or anything, just lets himself go slack and slide down the wall. He buries his head in his knees, and Jimmy genuinely thinks the half dragon is going to have a breakdown for a moment. But he doesn’t. Instead, he just makes a pained, muffled cry that honestly hurts the cod’s soul to listen too. It’s what makes him realize that he can’t just sit there and watch, he has to do something. He had to be comforting, just like Fwhip was to him all those weeks ago. And, thankfully, he knows a thing about dealing with a shitty home life.

But before he can do that, Jimmy remembers the other twin who might be in this house, and feels a sudden wave of concern hit him. “Where's Gem?” He asks, not bothering to hide any of the worry in his tone. She’s dealt with this whole… situation a lot more than the cod has, definitely; but that doesn't mean she’s completely safe right now. Things can still get bad for her despite any prior experiences…. 

“Her room or out on the town.” Fwhip says, and shrugs as if he doesn’t care where his sister is right now. Which isn’t true, he absolutely cares a lot more than he’s letting on. He wouldn’t have dragged Jimmy in here so fast if he really didn’t. “I haven't known her exact visiting times since the fight.”

“Okay..” The blonde says, and finds himself just standing there for a moment afterwards. He doesn’t want to upset Fwhip even more with whatever he does next, since he’s probably pretty upset right now. So he waits, until Fwhip lifts his head up again and begins to stare blankly at the wall. That is when Jimmy decides it’s a good time to start on the whole comfort thing he’d planned on, since the ginger is no longer making any upset noises.

Jimmy sits next to the half dragon, and quickly makes himself comfortable. Fwhip raises an eyebrow, cautious, and the cod rolls his eyes. He has to communicate all his intentions verbally, it seems. (Even though they never sat next to each other like this unless they were trauma-talking, but whatever.) “I trauma dumped on you, so now it's your turn. If you want to, of course” He says, giving the other a slight nudge with his arms. The half dragon blinked owlishly at him a few times, and took a minute to gather his thoughts and old memories together.

Fwhip starts by clearing his throat, his words coming out a little shaky. He isn’t really sure why he’s going along with this, but supposes it’s fair. He’d lent a shoulder for Jimmy to cry on, and the cod seemed determined to do the same in return. “My parents had a….very bad divorce a few years back. Before we met you.” 

Jimmy nods, an invitation to keep speaking. A sign that he’s listening. Fwhip takes another breath, and continues on with the rather horrible story he’s laying out. “It was um, it was bad. Like, so bad I considered running away, but I didn’t.” He knows he sounds a little….stiff as he talks, but can’t really help it. The half dragon doesn’t like thinking about that time in his life much, and detaching himself for a few moments is a good way to get through it. His other option, and his least favorite one, is to have a bit of a breakdown.

“My parents weren’t the best before the divorce, and they got worse after it. Mom got more…distant and pushy, and Dad well….dad started drinking a lot more.” Fwhip keeps talking, and Jimmy just listens in a sort of horrified silence. This was all way, way worse than he had thought. Holy moly. He knew this family had some issues , but didn’t know how deep they ran. Until right now, that is. “They don’t really talk to me much….only sometimes. Mom talks to Gem though, but it’s mostly about her studies and how she needs to work harder or whatever.”

(Maybe if I wasn't such a failure, they’d still be married. Is the thought that runs through Fwhip’s head as he tells everything to Jimmy, just like it does whenever he thinks about all this. It makes his stomach turn in upset knots every time, but he just can’t help but wonder. ) 

(Logically, he knows the thought is really stupid. His parents had problems before him and Gem, all his extended family had told him as much when they’d last seen them years ago. But still, Fwhip’s  traitorous mind couldn’t help but wonder what if… )

They fall into silence once the half dragon trails off. Fwhip has nothing more he wants to tell, and knows he wouldn’t be able to say most of it even if he wanted to. The cod, however, has things to say. He just needs to turn all the words and thoughts over in his head a bit more, so he doesn’t misspeak. That whole process takes a lot longer than expected, leaving the two in relative silence, with only the creaking of the house to accompany them. Until the blonde finally speaks his mind that is. It is the only thing he can think to say.

“I see her in Gem.” Jimmy admits quietly, fiddling with his father's pendant again. It brings him a lot more comfort that it probably should, considering he never met the man. He doesn’t fiddle with the rings from him as much, simply because their presence on his hand is enough to bring him comfort. Necklaces are also a good fidget toy in general, he’s found, especially when they mean something to you.

“Who?” Fwhip asks, lowering his tone to match the blonde’s. He looks suddenly concerned, worried even. And the cod can’t really blame him, that was a pretty ominous thing to say about his sister. But he fears the actual explanation will not give the half dragon any comfort, and will probably just upset him more. Like it upsets Jimmy. 

“Lizzie. And I see bits of my mom in yours.” Jimmy holds the pendant in his hand, grip tightening around it tighter with every word he speaks. He feels that anger and frustration bubbling up again, but shoves it down for now. He can get it out of his system later, when he’s alone in his room and isn't having another weirdly heartfelt moment with Fwhip; of all people. “It’s been pissing me off so much.”

Fwhip says nothing for a long minute, and then moves his gaze towards the wall. He keeps it there for a good while. “You get why I was so grumpy at the castle?” He asks, his voice and overall posture now very tense. The cod feels kinda bad for upsetting the half dragon like this, but he felt like he couldn’t keep that to himself any longer. It felt like the information would’ve left him one way or another, and at least this way was better than it leaving him during a breakdown or something.

“Yeah.” Jimmy mumbles, and stops holding onto his father’s pendant for dear life. When he lets go, his palm has turned red, and an oval shape is pressed into the area. He stares at the mark for a moment, before hugging his arms closer to his chest. That one action that brings him comfort so often, just like the pendant normally does. It only helps a little today. They also don't say anything for a minute after that, both of them needing a moment after all of that .

Fwhip hums softly, leaving his head against the wall and staring up at his bedroom’s ceiling. (He seems to be over his funk from a few minutes ago, which is good. That’s good; Jimmy didn’t upset him too bad...He really hoped he hadn’t.) “What’s it like…without a dad?” He asks, tentative and his tone still quiet. There’s clearly some kind of curiosity hidden under there too,  the innocent kind. The cod has gotten to the point where he can tell that sort of thing.

“I don’t know.” Jimmy mutters, half of it coming out as a laugh. It’s not a funny question, not really, but he laughs anyway. He thinks it because of how unanswerable and unexpected the question is.  He’s laughing because Fwhip just asked him to describe something he’s never had, and has only been able to mourn the absence of.  “What’s it like having one?”

“That was probably a bad question..” The half dragon sounds sheepish now, embarrassed by his little question. Jimmy just laughs again, and assures him that it's fine. Then, he goes silent, and the half dragon goes silent with him a few seconds later. Lateral, he does need some quiet to think about his answer. It’s a very hard answer to give, and requires the cod to rattle his brain around a bit. Fwhip seems willing to wait a while why Jimmy thinks, shifting until he’s in a more comfortable position. He will not have to wait long at all.

“It’s like….well, it’s like…” The cod turns the words over in his head for a few moments more, really looking for an explanation that makes sense to someone who isn’t him or Lizzie. It’s a lot harder than he thought, and he already knew it would be a little bit of a challenge in the first place. “Like I’m missing something. I don’t know what, but I know I’m probably missing something. Maybe like, fatherly love or something sappy like that.” 

“And you only have one parent, you know? Other people have helped raise me n’ stuff, but I really only have one parent who really cared for me. At the end of the day, I just have mum.” He continues on, a small frown starting to stress across his face. Jimmy didn’t like that he just had his mother, he didn’t like it for a lot of reasons. But it’s something he has learned to live with. “It’s not like that for everyone without a dad I don’t think, just me…”

“Was your mom….better once?” Fwhip asks, sounding nervous to do so. He’s glancing over at Jimmy now, slightly curious. The cod notices, and tries not to feel self conscious (or blush red) under his gaze. Which is a little hard when he’s obviously being studied, but whatever. It’s fine, he has a pretty hard question to answer anyways….

“When me and Lizzie were younger, yeah.” It’s Jimmy’s turn to stare at the wall a bit, his voice starting to sound distant. But not too distant, he’s still close enough to reign back in if needed. “I kinda miss it.” His mother is always quite the hard subject, so it’s no surprise when he doesn’t add anything else afterwards. The half dragon decides to move the conversation away from all that, for both their sakes.

“...Having a dad is like….well, I don’t know what it’s like. I guess it’s like having both parents.” Fwhip starts answering Jimmy’s earlier question, of wondering what having a dad is like, without any prompting. It feels like the least he can do in return. “Dad’s kinda like me, when he’s around, so it's kinda like having a mentor and a dad wrapped all into one. And when he does something wrong it…it stings . Same with mom.”

“This question probably would’ve been better suited for, like, Joey or Scott or something.” Fwhip says, his explanation clearly failing him. Which makes sense. Jimmy doesn't think there’s really a good, universal way to explain what having a parent (or lack therefore) is like. And by the sounds of it, the half dragon has also kinda forgotten which of their peers also have fathers. If Jimmy’s memory serves him right, he forgot to add Joel and Kattherine to that list as well. And Pearl, he thinks Pearl has a dad also.

“Heh, yeah.” Jimmy says, finally looking over at the other. He gives the other boy a friendly nudge as he speaks, tail flicking happily across the floor next to them. The half dragon’s own tail even starts to mirror his, and starts moving as well. Not that either of them notice it, though. “We can be lacking in the dad department together, though.”

Fwhip smiles at him, a real one, and lets a giggle slip past his lips. “Yeah, we can be.” Jimmy returns the smile, and this feels like the first good moment they’ve had together during the whole week of the trip so far. For a moment, he wonders if there will be any more moments like this. A part of him, one normally shoved very deep down, kinda wants there to be. But Jimmy doesn’t want to think about that, so he shoves it down again, and resigns himself to lounging in comfortable silence with Fwhip. This is the only good moment they’ve had so far, it would be such a shame to waste it. Especially when you are praying and praying over and over again in your head that one never ever happens ever again.

Shyly, a wing is wrapped around Jimmy’s shoulder, drawing the cod closer to its owner. Fwhip didn’t say anything, and he didn’t need to. They both clearly needed something like this after today, one more than the other. And Jimmy didn’t say anything either, even when he leaned into the contact; only doing so after a moment’s hesitation. He liked being held, more than he would ever admit, even if the person currently holding him is Fwhip .

The two of them stay like that for a good while, until they are sure the coast is clear, and it is no longer dangerous to walk around the manor. He doesn’t even care when Gem is the one to open the door, walking on them partially cuddling. She’s there to tell them dinner is ready, and also that she needs help with something. Fwhip says they’ll be there in a minute, and ignores how she looks at them; her brother’s wing wrapped around the cod and Jimmy almost laying his head on Fwhip’s shoulder.

This isn’t going to help the crush allegations in the slightest. It’s only going to make them worse, probably. (And Jimmy can’t really blame her. If he saw Lizzie getting all comfortable with someone, his big sister would never hear the end of it. It was simply his duty as a sibling, to make fun of whatever crush his sister might have, just as it is Gem’s.) But Jimmy can’t be bothered to care anymore, everyone thinking they’re in love just makes this whole thing easier, and neither of them really needed anything else weighing down on their shoulders.

It would please their parents, at the very least, and that was more than enough. Pleasing them like that would have to do, even if it took pretending to do so. (It’s not like Jimmy didn’t pretend all the time already, and this was nothing different. So yeah, he’ll play along, just to make his life and Fwhip’s less of a living hell. It was the least that could be done, after all.)

Fwhip gets up from the floor a few minutes later, and reaches down to help the cod up. Jimmy takes his hand, and knows he’s ready to get the rest of this day over with, and spend the rest of his trip out in the fields; alone with no one but the crops. And the twins, if they want to drop by. That would be nice. That would be really, really nice.

When he goes into his room that night, after hauling himself in the library post-dinner for some much needed thinking time, there is a vase of wither rose sitting on the nightstand. They were never there before. They are clearly for him to keep, and maybe even take home when he leaves. They look beautifully deadly under the moonlight streaming in from the window.

Jimmy just stares at Fwhip’s gift for a second, before moving it to the slightly open window seal. He thinks the plant will like the moonlight and nighttime breeze, much like their gifter seems too. The cod will have to ask how to care for them in the morning, probably from one of the farmhands, but now it is time for bed. He’s ready to finally get this day over with, and start all over again in the morning. But with a few new flowers by his side instead...

[schrijverr]

Eddie Didn’t Come to Pick Christopher Up?

Divergence from chapter 21, where Shannon comes back. She shows up at the firehouse expecting to catch up with Buck, not knowing what has happened between him and her ex-husband since she left. She gets confronted by Eddie and suddenly they all have to cope with old wounds getting torn open, while the 118 witnesses this soap opera playing out.

On AO3.

Ships: Buddie (pre-slash), past Shannon x Eddie and Shannon x Buck

Warnings: internalized homophobia, referenced homophobia, referenced misogyny, referenced emotionally abusive parents, referenced child abandonment

~~~

It’s already November and it’s getting cold, so they’ve had some hypothermia calls from people not dressed for the weather or unable to find shelter. Thankfully it hasn’t gotten so cold that there’s ice on the roads, because that’s just asking for accidents.

Chimney is puttering around upstairs, walking around to get warm, while Hen cradles a warm mug of hot chocolate as she watches him with amusement. Bobby is in his office catching up on paperwork, Eddie has gone to lie down and she can hear Buck downstairs, cleaning the trucks.

He doesn’t have to clean them, it’s not really necessary, since they’re all already clean, which is why no one is down there helping him. He’s been jittery since before Halloween and even more so with the other holidays approaching.

Hen thinks it has something to do with Maddie, but she hasn’t asked. If Buck needs to get his energy out by doing chores, she’s going to let him. He’ll come to them when he wants to talk, he always does.

She is distracted by Chimney stopping, peering over the edge of the loft, before he rolls his eyes. It is understandable, because Hen can hear a distinctly feminine voice say: “Evan? Uhm, hi.”

It’s not the first time this happened, though it’s been a while, unless you count Maddie. However, Hen doesn’t, because that wasn’t a hook up of sorts showing up. Still, her curiosity is piqued by the use of Buck’s given name. He never introduces himself with it to anyone, so how does this mystery woman know it?

This curiosity only grows when they hear Buck response. He sounds absolutely shocked, as if he’s seen a ghost almost. He chokes out: “Shannon?”

Her and Chimney share a look as she leaves the couch to watch what is happening down below. They can see a young woman, who has long brown hair and bangs, and Buck… Buck- Holy shit, is Buck okay? He looks be absolutely gobsmacked, but in a bad way.

“Yeah, hi,” the woman smiles, seeming not to notice this as she tucks her hair behind her ear. “It’s been a while, huh? I- I saw you on the television and I thought I’d check in, catch up.”

The words appear to snap something in Buck and he starts shaking with anger. They’ve never seen him like that and share worried looks as incredulously Buck scoffs: “Catch up?

His reaction makes the woman, Shannon, curl in on herself slightly and Hen wonders what the history between them is when she says: “I am sorry, for the way I left things between us. I really am. But if I told you, you would’ve-”

“I would’ve stopped you?” Buck fills in bitterly while cutting her off. “Yeah, Shannon, most people would when you try to abandon your four year old with them.”

Now Hen’s eyebrows are on top of her forehead. Abandon a four year old? Was Buck a dad? Had it been his kid? Or worse, not his kid? A look at Chimney tells her that he is as clueless as she is. She wonders if she should step in, make their presence known, but she needs to know more, so nosiness wins out. No one is in active danger, it’s fine.

Beneath them, Shannon straightens up, righteous anger hardening her spine. “You do not get to judge me for that, Evan. You don’t know what it was like to be hated by everyone, constantly judged and told you weren’t good enough, unwanted and belittled. Spat at.”

“I? I don’t know what it’s like?” Buck laughs, humorlessly and slightly hysteric, his voice raising. “Oh, that’s rich. Do you even know what happened after you left? No. You don’t. Because you didn’t look back, but I did.”

“Eddie didn’t come to pick Christopher up?” Shannon asks, horrified.

Wait, Eddie and Christopher? As in their Eddie and Chris? Again her and Chimney share a look. She remembers Eddie talking about his ex-wife – a Shannon, she recalls now – who signed over full custody to him. If this is her, it sounds more complicated than just signing over custody. And they still don’t know how Buck is involved.

“Of course he came to pick him up,” Buck snaps, annoyed with Shannon’s question. “He came to get Chris in an absolute panic. That’s what happens when you find out someone, who was supposed to be your co-parent, left your child with a fucking stranger.”

Holy shit, this is way more complicated. If Hen is puzzling everything together right, Buck knew Shannon. She left Christopher with him before she left. Eddie had to pick Chris up from wherever Buck was after finding out Shannon had left. They must have known each other for years.

With all the information in a row, Hen is about to go down and break this up. This is highly unprofessional and Buck shouldn’t be fighting with her in their workplace.

Before she can, however, Shannon escalates the situation further: “Why the hell are you so pissed off?”

“I’m pissed off, because you left! You left when it was so easy to stay,” Buck yells, making everyone, including Hen and Chimney, take a step back.

“Wh- What?” Shannon stutters.

“You walked out and you left a massive hole behind. And guess what? I stayed. I stayed. Me. I’m the one that took Chris to his PT, I’m the one that sat by his bedside when he had to have two more surgeries you weren’t there for, I’m the one that took care of him when Eddie had to go another tour to pay those medical bills, I’m the one that has had to deal with Helena hating me for helping. You think it was hard to be a divorced single mother in El Paso? Fucking try being the filthy queer that’s perverting an innocent family and bringing a child into his lifestyle while his father is off being a real man.”

Buck rants, almost looking as if he is incapable of stopping himself. The emotions that are bubbling out are raw, hurts that run deep and Hen’s heart aches for him. She has no clue what his relationship with Eddie is exactly, nor his relationship with Shannon, but she knows homophobia.

Hen can see how both Eddie and Bobby are appearing from different parts of the firehouse, likely having heard the ruckus. Hen can see how Eddie pauses when he hears the tail end of Buck’s tirade. A complicated look crosses his face and the only emotion Hen can make out is guilt.

However, neither Buck nor Shannon seem to notice him. Shannon gapes at Buck, before tears well up in her eyes. With a thin, fragile voice, she asks: “You stayed?”

Buck swallows thickly, anger gone for the most part and just hurt that is left behind. He nods and confirms: “I stayed.”

“And- And Christopher…” she starts, clearly wanting to ask, but unsure if she’s allowed.

“Christopher is doing fine, no thanks to you,” Eddie suddenly speaks up, having recovered himself from what he overheard. Both Buck and Shannon spin to look at him, while he moves to be beside Buck, crossing his arms as he scowls: “What are you doing here, Shan?”

“Uh,” Shannon suddenly looks caught and Hen remembers how this conversation started. Shannon obviously wasn’t expected to run into her ex-husband.

Buck squares his jaw and grits out an answer for her. “She was coming to check in after seeing me on the TV. Probably regrets that now.” With that he turns around and storms off, barely missing Eddie and forcing Bobby step out of his way.

Bobby looks so confused, looking up to Chimney and Hen, who both give confused looks back, before his eyes go over to Shannon and Eddie, who are just staring at each other.

After a few seconds, she softly says: “I’m glad Christopher is doing well.”

Eddie scoffs and shakes his head, mostly to himself, before also turning around and following after Buck without a word, leaving Shannon standing there, quite perplexed and dazed, as well as clearly upset.

“Uhm, would you like some tea, maybe sit down for a second?” Bobby offers, making a decision to focus on her and letting Buck and Eddie cool off somewhere. He doesn’t have any more context than Buck yelling at her, maybe even thinks she’s a past hook up. Hen supposes that might not be too far off.

“I- I-” she starts, gesturing vaguely as she tries to come up with a reason to leave, before her lip wobbles and a tear slides down her face. She wipes it away, before sniffling: “That might actually be nice, if it’s not a problem.”

“Here, I’ll make you a cup,” Bobby says paternally, putting a hand on her shoulder and ushering her up the stairs.

Without missing a beat, her and Chimney jump away from the banister, scrambling to the kitchen and pretending to have been standing there all along. Whatever the context is, Shannon just had a very uncomfortable confrontation and she doesn’t need more people gawking at her.

Bobby goes to make her tea and she leaves Chimney to catch him up on what they heard as she goes over to the couch where Shannon is sitting. With a gentle smile, she says: “Hi, I’m Hen, I’m a paramedic. Are you okay?”

Shannon gives her a watery smile back. “I’m fine, just a little overwhelmed. Shannon, by the way.”

It hits Hen just how young Shannon is now that she’s up close with her. Sure, she knows Eddie is young and he is a father, but the army and his posturing always make him feel older than he is. Shannon doesn’t have that, though there is a deep grief etched in her eyes.

“That was quite a confrontation, it’s okay to be a little overwhelmed,” Hen says soothingly, sitting down next to her and giving her hand a comforting squeeze.

“God, I’m so embarrassed,” Shannon chuckles without humor, wiping her eyes again. “I don’t know what you must think of me. I’m such a horrible mother, I can’t even tell you what happened with my own child.”

“I don’t think that,” Hen assures her.

“It’s okay if you do. Everyone always seems to sense how horrible I am at being a mom,” Shannon says, sounding heartbroken.

Again with the horrible. It’s clearly something she has heard before, something she is repeating, not something she came up with. Hen doesn’t believe it’s the case, but just to check, she asks: “Did Eddie ever tell you that you’re a horrible mother?”

“No, no, not Eddie,” Shannon assures her, blushing slightly in embarrassment. “He’s such a good father, honestly. And I’m glad he found someone, found himself. That he’s not trying to my husband anymore, that he’s not lying to himself. I just- I just didn’t expect to be confronted with it.” She sniffles again, wiping away more tears. “God, I loved him so much.”

Okay, so Shannon clearly thinks Buck and Eddie are together, maybe even married. She doesn’t find this a revelation at all, despite everything else that has been slung at her today. She thinks Eddie lied to himself when he was with her, that he is gay and stopped pretending.

Hen can honestly say she sees where Shannon is coming from with Eddie, but she doesn’t think that he is done lying. “That must be hard.”

“I didn’t mean to just barge back into his life like this, I know I have no right,” she tells Hen, as if to convince her that she isn’t a bad person. “I didn’t know. I mean, how could I have known? Why would Evan stay?”

“Why wouldn’t he stay?” Hen asks. “We never got the story.”

“Oh,” Shannon blushes and looks away. “I suppose I- I dated Evan for a while. Right after my divorce. Eddie was still in Afghanistan and I was really alone. I don’t know how much of that screaming you heard, but… it wasn’t easy. I didn’t know anyone in El Paso and everyone-” she tears up again “-everyone knew I got pregnant before we got married.” Whispering, she confesses: “They weren’t nice to me, even more so after I divorced Eddie.”

Hen’s heart breaks for this young girl, who got spat out by a community that is built on hate. Hen knows the feeling. She might not have grown up catholic herself, but most people she knew went to church. “You didn’t deserve that.”

“Thank you,” Shannon says with a watery smile.

Bobby and Chimney are already more than done with the tea and Hen supposes they’re not coming over, because they don’t want to interrupt. All of them want to know what was going on there, how Buck and Eddie know each other and why they reacted so strongly to Shannon being here. Hen would feel worse about being nosy, if she didn’t know the two had been lying to all of them for god knows how long.

“So what happened?” Hen asks after a moment.

Shannon looks down in shame and answers: “I couldn’t do it anymore. My mother had cancer and needed me and everyone there seemed to think I was only ruining Christopher’s life. So, why stay? He had his father, who loves him and didn’t seem to fuck up everywhere, grandparents that dote on him. What was I even doing there anymore, you know?”

She sighs and hugs herself, before guiltily admitting: “I got custody papers drawn up, signed it all over to Eddie, then dropped Christopher off with Evan. Said I had a family emergency, got on a plane without saying goodbye and left. I planned to come back after my mother died, but I never did.”

Hen can’t help but suck in a sharp breath at that. She remembers all the times Buck knew a lot about custody, the way he had strong opinions about it, how he hated that teen mom that flushed her baby down a pipe. It all makes sense now.

It’s almost unimaginable to leave her child behind, maybe because she fought so hard to have him, to not lose him. To just sign him over seems as impossible to her as it did when Eva did it.

Beside her, Shannon flinches at the reaction and while Hen is still trying to makes sense of her emotions, she apologizes anyway.

“That’s alright,” Shannon smiles bitterly. “I would react like that too. I hate myself. For doing that to Christopher. I know it was wrong. I just- How do you come back from that? I have already hurt him so much, why risk making it worse?”

“Why risk never taking the chance to make it better?” Hen points out kindly. She now has enough information to understand why Eddie and Buck wouldn’t be pleased to see her, but she can still sympathize with Shannon too. If Hen never got to make her mistake right, she would’ve lost her family, she doesn’t wish that on anyone else.

Shannon looks to be considering the words with an awe-like shock, as if she had never considered the possibility that she could make it better, that her absence wasn’t the good thing she thought it was. In a timid voice, she asks: “You- you think… You think he could forgive me?”

Hen isn’t sure if she means Eddie, Buck or Christopher, but she is confident in all three when she answers: “Yeah, I think he can. Want me to go talk some sense into knucklehead 1 and knucklehead 2?”

“You don’t have to be on my side, I don’t want to cause trouble,” Shannon says.

“It’s no trouble and I’m on both your sides, or on Christopher’s side, if you will,” Hen tells her, hoping it will open her up to the possibility.

She considers it for a second, then gives her a small, hopeful smile: “If you’re sure it’s no trouble.”

“It’s not,” Hen assures her, before ushering her to Chimney and Bobby, hoping her look communicates that they shouldn’t be giving her a hard time. Though she’s pretty sure they won’t, they’ve probably been listening in the whole time.

With Shannon safely in Bobby and Chimney’s custody, she makes her way down the stairs, gives a cursory glance around, then makes her way to the bunk room when neither Buck nor Eddie can be found anywhere else.

Hen stops in the threshold for a moment, watching them. Buck is anxiously pacing around the room, brow still furrowed and shoulders tense. Eddie is sitting on a bed, his hands are clenched into fists and he appears to be trying to make a hole in the ground with how hard he’s glaring at it.

“I get why you might be angry, but do you think you two are capable of not screaming at her for a moment?” Hen breaks the silence, getting the attention on her as two heads snap in her direction.

“Why?” Eddie scowls. “I don’t know what she told you, but you don’t have to believe her sob story. She abandoned her child. Our son. Do you have any idea what that did to him? Do you know what it’s like to sit in a hospital and have to explain to a five year old that mommy isn’t going to come and hold his hand as the doctors poke at him? Do you?”

“Eddie…” Buck starts, trying to comfort him and reign him in before he punches something. She has never seen him like this.

“No,” Eddie snaps. “You know what she did. I know it broke you to see Chris like that too. Don’t deny it now and don’t ‘Eddie’ me.”

Buck holds his hands up in surrender, placating Eddie. “I’m not, I’m angry too. I know I forgive too easy, but this will take a while. And I’m not saying we trust her, or just bring her along immediately. But Chris loves her, he missed her. Shouldn’t we think about that?”

Hen watches the scene, unable to help but feel weirdly off kilter by how familiar and at ease these two look when discussing what is best for Chris. What is best for their kid, because there is no denying that it is their kid. She wonders how they missed it. How she missed it.

“Fine,” Eddie huffs after a few beats of having a staring contest with Buck, throwing his hands in the air as he gives in. “But I’m not going to like it.”

Fondly, Buck smiles at him and assures him: “You don’t have to.”

Then they seem to remember Hen is in the room with them, still observing them with quirked brows. As they look over again, both seem to cringe and Hen says: “So, with that settled. How long has this been going on?”

She almost laughs at how caught they look, like two school boys with their hand in the cookie jar, but she manages to keep her face neutral yet curious.

Buck speaks first, frantically tripping over himself as he says: “What? Huh, I don’t- Between us? Something? No. I- I think-”

“You really think Shannon didn’t mention you two already knew each other?” Hen asks rhetorically, before she can’t help herself. She needs to poke the bear a little and figure out what exactly the thing between them is. “She was really happy you stopped lying to yourself, Eddie. That you two found each other.”

At that, both faces go through a series of complex emotions. Eddie goes from shocked to guilty to ashamed to angry, while Buck goes from surprised to realization to heartbreak to resigned.

Eddie crosses his arms and scowls: “Shannon has no clue what she’s talking about. It’s not like she was there.”

“It’s really not like that, Hen,” Buck backs him up, but gentler and kinder. “Me and Eddie, we’re not together or anything like that.”

Somehow that half sounds like a lie and Hen wouldn’t be surprised to find out Buck is carrying a torch for Eddie, for his… Well, she still doesn’t know. So, she asks: “Then what is it like?”

They share a look, silently communicating what to tell her. It’s something they often do, wordlessly communicate with each other. It’s the first time Hen really thought about it. She wonders how much more similar things they missed.

After a few seconds, Buck says: “We’re co-parents. It has always been about what’s best for Chris. I adopted him about two years ago now. Stepparent adoption.”

Oh. Oh wow. Hen knows stepparent adoption. It’s how Karen adopted Denny after Eva signed over custody to Hen. You have to be married for that. Seems like Shannon wasn’t too far off.

Her face must have done something, because Eddie forcefully repeats: “Co-parents.”

“Okay,” she nods, deciding to take it in stride. Shannon is still here and she doesn’t have the time or energy to get into whatever Eddie’s deal is. She’s not his therapist. “Well, then you two co-parents can go talk to the mother of your child. You need to have at least one civil conversation with her before you write her off completely.”

“Fine,” Eddie grits, getting up and marching out of there.

Buck immediately follows, but Hen stops him before he can leave, quickly seeking eye contact and asking: “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he gives her a tight smile. “It’s just a lot. I’m not going to yell at her again. Promise.”

“I know,” Hen says kindly. She can’t imagine Buck flipping out like that again, it’s not his nature. “Are you okay with Eddie being so defensive. Come on, Buck, I’m not stupid.”

“Wha?” Buck says wide-eyed. He looks like he’s going to play dumb for all but two seconds, before he drops it and assures her: “I’m okay. I know what it looks like, but Eddie’s been put through the wringer his whole childhood, especially by his dad. He tries so hard to be better for Chris. But he just got jumped with something too, you know. It’s not just Shannon, who just got overwhelmed and surprised by her ex-spouse. Old hurts.”

“Alright,” Hen gives in, “just take care of yourself too.”

“I will,” Buck promises. “Now lets go, before Eddie does something stupid.”

They quickly hurry after him, but thankfully, Eddie hasn’t done anything stupid. He’s just standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking conflicted about going up. They can vaguely hear Shannon talking with Bobby and Chimney, though they can’t make out what they’re saying.

“You good to go up?” Buck asks, nudging Eddie slightly.

Eddie blinks, before a determined look comes over his face and he wordlessly makes his way up the stairs with Buck and Hen following behind.

Shannon is mid-sentence when she spots them, cutting herself off and biting her lip. After a few moments of her and Eddie just staring at each other once more, she says: “I’m sorry for just showing up like this. I didn’t mean to barge into your life without warning.”

At that Eddie scoffs. “Oh, that’s what you’re sorry for?”

“Of course I’m also sorry for more than that, but I have to start somewhere,” Shannon snaps. “What do you want me to say, Eddie? Sorry for choosing to take care of my dying mother? Sorry for believing what your mother always said about me and thinking Christopher would be better off without me?”

“Really? You’re going to blame my mother for everything?” Eddie says disbelievingly. “You could’ve talked to me before you left, you could’ve picked up my calls instead of blocking me. We could have worked something out, made sure Chris got to see you at Christmas or his birthday, or when he was in the fucking hospital.”

“I know,” Shannon screams, overwhelmed and needing to get it out.

Everyone flinches away from the noise, except Eddie, who barely blinks and seems to gear up to continue the argument. Hearing the two of them fight now, they’re starting to see why they got divorced. It’s not even that either is wrong, but it escalated really quick.

Out of all of them, only Buck is brave enough to step in saying: “Why don’t we all take a breather for a moment. We’re not here to scream at each other, remember?”

“Oh, so you’re on her side now too?” Eddie asks, sounding heartbroken and angry. “I thought we weren’t going to forgive easily.”

“No, I’m not on her side or just forgiving her, but we were going to hear her out,” Buck reminds him calmly yet forcefully, not immediately matching Eddie in his anger like Shannon had, but remaining patient.

“I know me and Evan hooked up in the past, but I’m not here to steal your man. I just want to talk about our child,” Shannon pleads and Hen winces, that was probably not the right thing to say.

“Steal my man?” Eddie repeats almost incredulous in his upset. “Buck is not my man. He’s my friend and he stepped up when you left. A near stranger had more compassion than you. And that wouldn’t have been necessary if you stayed.”

“Really?” Shannon chuckles, surprised but also entirely unsurprised. “You’re still doing this to yourself?”

“Doing what to myself?” Eddie asks uncomfortably.

“Lying,” Shannon answers. “I thought you finally admitted to yourself why we didn’t work out. That you never loved me and would never be able to. Because I loved you, Eddie. I loved you so much and divorcing you hurt.”

“Well, you didn’t have to divorce me, because I did love you too,” Eddie scowls.

“No, you didn’t. You took every reason to not be anywhere near me after we found out I was pregnant; the military, work, Christopher. And you never touched me,” Shannon points out.

“I went into the military to support us! I don’t know if you remember, but we were eighteen with a kid on the way and it’s not like we had money. Did you want Chris to grow up like that?” Eddie retorts harshly.

“And you loved being in the military. You were more excited about your unit members than me,” Shannon yells.

“I was never unfaithful to you,” Eddie says forcefully, pointing a finger at her angrily. “And I’m not fucking gay, Shan.”

“Okay, and that is enough,” Buck steps in again. “Eddie, go take lap.”

“What?” Eddie chokes, almost indignant at the order.

“Go take a lap, punch the punching bag, I don’t care. But you gotta walk away before you start saying shit you’ll regret. You’re sounding like your father,” Buck says, pushing lightly at Eddie’s chest as he does. He isn’t just targeting Eddie, however. As he pushes Eddie back, he also turns to Shannon and says: “And you calm down. We came to hear you out, not fight. You know you were wrong. Stop being defensive, take a breath.”

“Fine,” Eddie scowls after it’s clear that Buck is targeting both of them and is on his side still. Hen tries not to raise her eyebrows knowingly at him, before he can retreat.

“Okay, so that was intense,” Chimney breaks the tense silence after a few moments.

Buck is the only one capable of laughing at that, saying: “You can say that again. Never been in a room with both of them before.”

“I’m sorry,” Shannon collapses at the counter. “I should have just walked away. I only ruin things and now I’m coming in between you two.”

“Look, I’m not going to say that it’s okay, because it’s not,” Buck sighs. “But Chris still loves you. He cried his whole fifth birthday, because you didn’t come back. He wanted you in the hospital with him and he still draws you sometimes. Me and Eddie do all we can, but you were a part of his life too. You know he loves you, so why did you leave?”

Hen and the others try to make themselves as invisible as possible while they all await Shannon’s answer, hoping the two won’t usher them away. It’s oddly strange to see Buck like this. They’ve seen flashes of maturity, but with the introduction of Eddie, those have decreased. The Buck in front of them, is Buck from a serious and difficult call.

This Buck is somehow harder and easier to rhyme with Buck as a dad. On the one hand, he is capable of making the harder decisions, to be the adult in a situation. However, on the other hand, this is very unlike how he is with kids on calls, which always made Hen think he’d be a great father one day. Bit of a chicken and the egg situation in hindsight.

Shannon takes a deep breath, then says: “I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt trapped and stuck and I hated myself. I felt like I was failing every day. Helena just kept saying how good of a father Eddie is, how horrible I was. And then my mom called and she needed me and I thought: Christopher is taken care of, he has people that love him and my mom only has me. If I was a bad mom, why not try being a good daughter instead?”

Buck nods quietly to himself for a few seconds, then asks: “And why didn’t you come back? Is your mom still alive?”

“Uh, no. No, she passed.”

“My condolences.”

“Thank you.”

Shannon is quiet again, so Buck prompts again: “So why didn’t you?”

She looks guilty, but honestly admits: “A part of me thought it would be better for Christopher. I wanted to come back, I did. Truly. But I had already hurt him and I wasn’t the best at raising him. I didn’t want to fuck up more and you can’t do that when you’re not there. Then the longer I stayed away, the harder it was to come back. So, I never did.”

He looks thoughtfully at that, processing her words. He doesn’t seem to judge her, but he doesn’t absolve her either. It’s probably easier for him, since he has a different history with her. He asks: “If you planned to come back, why sign over custody like that. Why block Eddie? Hell, why block me?”

“I left my four year old with you, Evan,” Shannon deadpans, not answering the rest.

“Buck. My friends call me Buck,” Buck says, it’s an olive branch. The first one he’s given outside of hearing her out.

“Okay, Buck,” Shannon smiles, taking it gratefully.

Hen spots Eddie coming back up the stairs, seeing the two of them smiling at each other and turning right back around. Fists clenching again. She mentally adds a tally in the Eddie loves Buck too column, but stays silent. She doesn’t want to ruin this for everyone.

Shannon explains: “When I left, I knew that was I was doing was wrong. I knew I’d go back, if I had ties to that place, the people there, and I couldn’t. If I came back before I was ready, it would have killed me. And as for you, I didn’t want to drag you into this after everything I’d already done to you. Not when I didn’t love you as much as you deserved.” Buck flinches at that last part, but pushes it away.

“You didn’t expect to suddenly be brought back today,” Buck points out, focusing on what is currently the important part. “Is this still coming back before you’re ready? Because we can’t let you come back only to break Chris’s heart again. We can’t put him through that again. He’s had to say goodbye to enough to his parents. Both of them. If you want us to seriously discuss you seeing Chris again, you got to be sure and you got to be all in.”

“I-” Shannon starts immediately, but Buck cuts her off with a gesture.

“No. Think about it. Deeply,” he says.

Her mouth snaps back shut and she nods, before thinking. Hen is really impressed with Buck. The situation is different, but she doesn’t think she would have been this civil with Eva. Hell, she knows she hasn’t been. He’s handling this really well, but she is truly wondering how he is going to communicate whatever Shannon decides to Eddie later.

After a few beats, Shannon nods. More confident and less rushed than before, she says: “I want to see him, I want to have the chance to make it better. I want to be a part of his life, even if it’s just a weekend every two weeks. I’ll do anything to see my son again.”

A smile breaks out on Buck’s face and his voice is warmer, when he says: “That’s good to hear. I can’t promise Eddie will be on board, but I’ll talk to him. Might be best if I make your case.”

“Probably,” Shannon says apologetically. “I honestly didn’t mean to cause so much trouble. Not at your work and not between you guys.”

“It’s alright,” Buck assures her, always forgiving. “It’s just a sore spot. Especially for Eddie. It was really rough when you left, Shan. He thought he drove you away, that he took his son’s mother from him, and that was before we got into financial hot water. It’s going to take a while.”

“I understand,” Shannon says timidly.

“Thank you,” Buck says, getting up. “Do you still have the same number?”

Shannon follows his lead. “I do.”

“Cool, maybe unblock me and I’ll text you after I talked to the Hulk down there,” Buck jokes.

His lighthearted attitude relaxes Shannon and she actually laughs for the first time since they’ve all met her. “I’ll do that. Thank you.”

“Course,” Buck says, leading her to the stairs.

The others collective let out a breath when they leave and Chimney breaks the silence as he says: “I still have no clue what is going on, but that was wild. Like are we sure that was Buck? Our Buck?”

“Buck is an actual adult,” Bobby reminds him.

“Yeah, but still, who was Mr. Peaceful Conflict Resolution over there?” Chimney counters. “And did you see the way Shannon and Eddie yelled at each other? Jikes. I can see why divorced.”

“Don’t be an ass, Chim,” Hen scolds him fondly, before saying: “From what I understand, Shannon divorced Eddie, then dated Buck, but then Eddie came back and Shannon couldn’t take it anymore, so she left. She thought Buck would also leave, but that lovable idiot stayed behind to help with Chris. The two of them are co-parents and friends. Buck adopted Chris a while ago. Stepparent adoption.”

Both heads snap to her, as an almost stepparent himself Bobby knows what that means and Chimney was there with Denny.

Stepparent adoption?” Chimney asks.

“Yup.”

“But then, they’re…”

“Yup.”

“Holy shit.”

“They didn’t disclose that they were married,” Bobby frowns.

“They didn’t even disclose they knew each other, Cap. That’s a step below marriage, don’t you think?” Chimney points out.

“Why would they do that?” Bobby wonders.

“I don’t know, but we’re still on shift,” Hen says. “They’re gonna come back up here at some point and then we can ask all the questions we couldn’t earlier.”

“Eddie might not like that,” Chimney says. “I mean, are you okay? Did you see how he snapped at Shannon the way he did when she even suggested he was gay?”

“Oh, I saw,” Hen says. “According to Buck his dad put him through the wringer as a kid, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. Also because I know him better than that, but if he starts up again, I will kick him. Hard.”

“I’ll pretend not to see,” Bobby promises.

“Thank you, Cap.”

They make their way to the the edge of the loft collectively after that, unanimously deciding to see what is happening when they don’t hear yelling. Peering over the edge, they can see Eddie doing a number on a punching bag while Buck holds it, talking lowly to Eddie as he does.

After a few minutes of punching, they seem to come to some sort of agreement. Eddie stops punching and Buck smiles, clapping him on his shoulders, before gently pushing him towards the showers.

He keeps the smile on his face until Eddie disappears then takes a deep breath and massages his temples and slumping on a bench. He sits there for a few seconds, before taking another deep breath and shaking it off, pulling himself together and pulling out his phone instead to play around on it for a little bit.

“You think they’re going to stay downstairs and hope we don’t have a call until the end of the shift so they can run?” Chimney asks after a while.

“Nah, you think Buck could stand leaving here thinking we might be upset with him?” Hen counters. “He is waiting for his back up.”

She is almost immediately proven right by Eddie returning freshly showered, causing Buck to get up without question, putting his phone in his pocket again. They spot all of them standing there when they go up the stairs. Buck blushes brightly with embarrassment, but Eddie just juts his chin defiantly.

As they approach, Buck speaks for both of them: “We’re so sorry, Cap. We didn’t mean to drag our personal life into work like this. It was very unprofessional.”

“I’m not going to be angry at you for that. You didn’t control that coming into work,” Bobby starts and Buck prematurely sags in relief. “I am, however, angry at you two for lying to me and the department for months now. Not stating that you were married can be a serious legal and safety hazard.”

“We weren’t thinking. It seemed reasonable at the time,” Buck admits honestly. “Can we still do the paperwork? You know we can work well together in the field.”

“I’ll see what the brass has to say, but you two are on latrine duty for the next month. At least,” Bobby decides.

“Thank you,” they both say, clearly relieved this is their punishment.

“Now, with that out of the way,” Bobby claps his hands. “Do either of you feel like elaborating?”

“Not much to elaborate, Cap,” Eddie says curtly. “My ex-wife decided to show up and it became a rehashing of the way she abandoned our son and our divorce.”

“And of the way Buck was apparently involved in all that,” Chimney adds, unfazed by Eddie’s standoffish attitude.

“And the way Buck was involved in all that,” Eddie agrees without giving any further information.

Buck rolls his eyes at both of them, before tiredly saying: “Just ask what you wanna know, man. Today has already been exhausting enough.”

“How long have you been a dad?” Chimney asks without missing a beat at the permission.

“I’ve known Chris for four years, didn’t start parenting him until three years ago, but I only adopted him two years ago,” Buck answers.

“Damn.”

“Thanks for the confidence, Chim,” Buck snipes, almost resigned at the dismissal. Hen feels bad for him, she can’t imagine it’s been easy to raise Chris with what she heard today. She wonders if they’ve spoken about it yet, or if that’s a thing for at home, since they probably have a home, which is another wild realization of today.

“Sorry,” Chimney grimaces.

Bobby diverts the attention, getting the next question in, which he directs at Eddie. “Can I trust you not to make this work environment unsafe for your coworkers?”

Eddie looks confused for a second, before humiliation burns in his face. Quickly he nods: “You can,” then he turns to Hen much to her pleasant surprise. “It wasn’t my intention to make you uncomfortable. I am sorry. It won’t happen again.”

That’s more the Eddie she knows, but she lets him sweat for a few seconds, before she smiles. “Alright, I believe you. Apology accepted.”

“Thank you.” Eddie gives her a relieved smile back.

Seeing her opening, she can’t help but prod again: “Why did that make you so angry anyway?”

The flush returns and Eddie stops meeting her eyes. His hackles raise and he grunts: “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated?” Hen repeats, slightly judgmentally.

“Yes, complicated,” Eddie says slightly harsher, before realizing and taking a calming breath. Then he explains a little more. “She always said it was my fault we divorced. That I didn’t love her right. I tried everything to do right by her, but I was eighteen when she got pregnant. She’d been in town on a pre-college road trip.”

A pre-college road trip, Hen thinks, shocked. She kind of guessed high school sweethearts, but this is worse. They barely knew each other, just stupid kids, who had a fling like a lot of teens do, but theirs ended in something way more serious.

Meanwhile, Eddie continues: “I barely knew her when she was suddenly my wife and in my family, you provide for your family. I didn’t want to be a soldier. I didn’t want to leave my son behind, but what else was I supposed to do?”

Hm, didn’t want to leave his son, nothing about his wife? Curious.

“I know I wasn’t a great husband, but I tried. And it hurts that she thinks I didn’t. I gave everything to that marriage and I did not just fuck off, because I wanted to and be unfaithful. Those vows meant something to me. For her to imply that it didn’t, hurts. Nothing to do with the gay thing,” Eddie explains.

Hen still thinks he’s lying a little about that, but she isn’t going to point that out to him. It’s not something you can force on someone. Besides, there is a lot more hurt wrapped up in that than just internalized homophobia.

“That’s understandable, Eddie,” Hen says kindly. “But it would be okay, if you tried and it didn’t work out, because you are gay, you know that right?”

Something vulnerable flashes over Eddie’s features, before he closes himself off again. His voice is a little weird, but not extremely so when he replies with a tight smile: “It’s not, but I know, Hen.”

“Good,” she says.

Before they can interrogate them further, the alarm starts to go off. Eddie runs down and away from the conversation quicker than usual, while Buck just groans tiredly, which is out of character for him, but they all drop it to go rescue whoever needs it now.

Throughout the rest of the shift they ask more questions, fill in more of the blanks to a story they didn’t even know existed until Shannon came into their lives. It’s weird to have to adjust the mental image of Buck this much and to fully get Eddie’s story. But overall, it’s probably good for them. Clear the air.

~~

A/N:

Fuck this was a hard one, ngl. There is so much history and hurt on both sides, as well as valid reasons behind messy decisions. So it was a lot to try and get everyone’s side highlighted as well as fit in the characters that don’t know wtf is happening and I know I didn’t get everything in

Also, haha, remember that time Eddie got divorced in this verse… crazy…

[ashintheairlikesnow]

His Word Goes Forth

CW: Referenced past child abuse, some emeto references (brief, vague), some dissoci@tion towards the end, alcohol references, prostitution references. Just a whole load of references. But I am so excited to finally be able to write this chapter and introduce... Gilly's children.

Bones in the Ocean Masterlist

The Hotel Import, Grand Island, the Colonies

Guilford Wentworth the Fifth - who went by Ford and told everyone who didn’t already know his parentage that his name was Wilford Prose, simply a cousin to the illustrious Wentworth name - woke up to sunlight streaming in through the gauzy curtains, bright like daggers against his closed eyes.

He’d been meant to go to the symphony last night and make some sort of connection with a man whose properties his father admired, a man named Hogarth or something who owned too much land and not enough good common sense to know to avoid anything to do with the Wentworth businesses. Ford had been told to convince him a visit to the Continent would do him good, to stop by the Wentworth estate and meet the elder Guilford.

He’d been told to make many such meetings before, and usually he did as he was told. Ford had ceased to be treated as a child and had become just another tool in his father’s toolbox since his mother died and could no longer shield her children. He’d been good at it at first. 

But now… He was only eighteen and already he was tired of this.

And last night, he’d decided to let tired win the day.

Instead of making contact at the symphony, he’d instead allowed himself to be distracted by the promise of further liquor in a dark men’s club down the street, and spent his night in pursuit of new ways to forget his hated name.

He had succeeded, however briefly.

Unfortunately, the end result was that Ford woke up knowing his own name very well still, but with a headache that threatened to split him in two from temple to chin, a tongue that felt like cotton stuffed into his mouth, and a stomach that was either threatening to empty itself or ravenous for food and it couldn’t seem to decide which.

“Damn the sun,” He groaned, still feeling the ebb and swell of the liquor from the night before within him, stretching against the sheets. There was an ache in his hips that he enjoyed more than he disliked it, and when he tried to open one eye to look down at himself, there were marks of red from someone’s rouge, he thought, along the insides of his thighs. “... huh.”

Rubbing his face, he slowly sat up, squinting against the pain. There was a bottle with at least two good drinks left in it on the table next to the bed, and he drank it all, feeling it burn all the way down.It would help hold off the worst of the ache, though, at least until he could find somewhere darker to hide away from the daylight and a draught of laudanum to send him back to sleep.

Then, when he woke up once more, he’d need to come up with an excuse for why Hogarth Whoever wasn’t already boarding a ship for the Continent, to be swayed by his father’s monster like everyone else was.

That could wait, though. At least for however long it took to sleep off last night, both the alcohol and the pleasures that came with the darker bars and the seedier places in the city. Ocean air and warm nights made pleasures easy to find, and there were plenty of people who wanted money to eat more than they wanted their own virtue intact.

Ford had plenty of money.

Although even the money wasn’t really his.

He sighed, dropping back into the bed. There wasn’t anyone in the bed, although there had been when he went to sleep. Or passed out. Whichever it was that he’d done.

There’d been a young man, his own age - what was his name? It didn’t matter. None of their names mattered. Once they had coins in hand he could call them anything he wanted and they’d do anything they were told. Nothing there beside him now but empty space.

 When he laid his hand there, it was still warm.

“Damn,” He whispered, then checked the other side, where there had been a lovely woman. Had the two known each other? He couldn’t remember. Well, in any case, that space was equally emptied, and it wasn’t warm at all. 

She’d left long before the man had. 

“Well… double damn,” Ford said, voice a little rasping. One of his last clear memories had been shout-singing along with the sea shanties sung by the sailors come on shore to drink and whore with the rest. Had the young man been a sailor on leave? Might have been... “If he told me his name, I forgot it. I rather liked them.”

His eyes drifted closed again.

“Of course you did,” His sister’s voice came, warm as the ocean nearest the shore, dry as the desert wind, breaking through his thoughts. “You like them all, because you are an idiot with money and that makes them like you.”

Ford gasped, his heart half-stopped before his mind caught up and he realized she wasn’t actually in the bedroom, but out in the sitting area where he couldn’t see her - and more importantly, she couldn’t see him. Even so, he felt himself flush and yanked the blankets up to cover himself, sitting upright all at once.

“Nathalie! What in the gods’ names-”

He heard the rustle of the morning paper. “Good morning,” Nathalie said, without even the slightest change in tone. “How are you, dear beloved sister? Oh, I’m fine, Ford, thank you for asking. Did you just arrive, Natty? Why yes, Ford, I did, it is so lovely of you to ask after my health-”

“Fine, fine, Nathalie, I get it. Just-... hold on, let me dress and I’ll join you.” Ford snorted, reaching blindly towards the floor and grabbing at the first pieces of clothing he found there. The suit he’d been meant to wear to the symphony, now a wrinkled mess - but it wasn’t like his sister would care, or even as if it were the first time she’d seen him in disarray after a night wasted. He had to fight a swell of dizzy nausea as soon as he was on his feet, leaning against the wall and letting his fingers scrape the textured wallpaper there, a series of flowers in dim pastels against cream. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

“I asked at the desk if my brother was here carousing with whores,” Nathalie said. The paper rustled again as she turned the page, as if punctuating her sentence. “And the sweet young man at the desk informed me that you were, indeed, carousing with whores. I paid him to let me in and threw out the whore.”

Ford swallowed thickly, walking with slow, careful steps along the cool wooden floor to the doorway, his shirt half-buttoned and the linen a mess of wrinkles. “There were two.”

“Of course there were.” Nathalie set the paper down and turned to look at him. She looked like their mother - both Ford and Nathalie looked like her, thank any god who might have been responsible. They had her delicacy, her bright wide eyes. Nathalie looked the most like her, though. And now she turned their mother’s look of solemn, disappointed judgment on him just like she had. “There was only one when I arrived. I sent him away.”

“Hmph. I thought he was quite nice, I was hoping to seek him out again. I can’t recall if he told me his name, though.” He dropped into a chair at the little breakfast table she’d set herself up at, slumping against the hard wooden back and tipping his head back. The world swayed dangerously around him when he did.

“His name was Darren,” Nathalie said, and when he opened his eyes to look at her, he found that the disappointment had become the slightest hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “Darren Meander.”

“That… He cannot have been speaking true to you.”

“I don’t care if he was or wasn’t, it’s what he told me. There, now you have a name if you want to find him again.”

“Thank you. Why did you bother?”

“You get on better with the whores than you do with your own class,” Nathalie said, as if the answer were obvious. “And you’re going to seek them out anyway. Besides, I use you as proof positive to myself of something I have always known.”

“What…?” 

“That I, Lady Nathalie Wentworth, shall never marry, since any man of means or with a good family name may be as dissolute and pointless as you are.” She winked at him, and he might even have found it in himself to laugh if his stomach hadn’t twisted angrily at the thought. “I do enough picking up after you, I don’t think I am in need of any other man to deal with.”

“I’m sure you can find a pious man and get to him before he joins the priesthood,” Ford muttered, his face hot with guilt. She really did so often have to handle things for him, things he should have handled himself as the eldest.

Nathalie was younger than him, only just now sixteen, but she’d always seemed older, more second mother than sister some days. Maybe because, since their mother had died - when he was eleven and she was only nine - she’d done all the mothering of the twins, all the hiding them from the attention of their father, holding them in the night after nightmares or when the coastal storms raged. 

Ford’s job, back then, had been to take the brunt of his father’s anger, keep Guilford’s eyes - and his fists - on him, and only him. It had kept Nathalie and the twins safe, for years… until their lordly father had split them all apart and declared the twins were old enough for finishing school, Ford was ready to take over the business interests in the Colonies, and Nathalie was old enough to run her own household and prepare for marriage.

Still.

They were all still far, far away from their father, and therefore safe from his direct influence, his attention, and his damnable monster.

Still.

Ford sighed, watching a shivery little rainbow from the sun shining through a window just right bounce off the ceiling. “In any case, I’ve hardly caused enough trouble to cross the channel and find you. What are you doing here, anyway?”

Nathalie didn’t look up from the paper she was scanning, but she gestured at a carafe before her. It had freshly-brewed coffee that steamed as he poured it into a teacup, and he sighed happily at the first sip. She hummed. “I came to see you.”

“You’re meant to be up at Howe House.”

“I was up at Howe House. I’ve been supervising it for months. It’s nearly habitable, which is lovely, considering I’ve been habiting there amongst the dust and the mouse droppings all this time.” Nathalie finally set the paper down, crossing her arms on the table and looking Ford over. She was pristine, in a light-blue linen dress made for the hot island days, her hair pulled back in a chignon to keep it from suffocating the back of her neck. “Oh, Ford. You look awful.”

“I feel awful, thank you ever so much for noticing.” He drained the first cup of coffee and poured a second, his tongue flat and numb from the too-hot liquid. He didn’t care. “So if you were at Howe House, why aren’t you there now? It’s a four-day sail to get here from there, and you sent no warning-”

“I absolutely did send you a notice, you shattered teapot of a man. You just haven’t been home in a week, I checked when I arrived. Your servants haven’t seen you since last Wednesday and not a single one had a clue where to find you except your butler.”

“Yes, well, he’s the only one I told when I left that I was going to stay here.” Ford exhaled. His sister’s constant piercing stare wasn’t helping his headache even a little bit. His stomach turned over itself and he fought back the urge to simply be sick all over this lovely table and Nathalie’s lovely dress. “... I hate the house. I avoid it whenever I can.”

“Clearly.” Something in his sister’s bristling manner softened, a little. She reached out to lay a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Ford. I know this… wasn’t how we hoped it would be, when we were young.”

Ford laid a hand over hers. His fingers felt chilled and numb - hers, by contrast, felt bright and warm and full of life. “We thought we could go farther from him, that he wouldn’t follow us. But…”

That had been when their mother was alive, and they had thought they could bring her with. Neither of them said it. Both of them heard it, anyway, even unsaid.

Ford cleared his throat. “... but if this is what our father wants, we must help to build and maintain the Wentworth name and fortune.”

“I know.” She squeezed his arm, brief but firm, and then let go of him, glancing back down at the paper. “I know. And we are, however we hate our parts, we play them. For the twins, at least.”

“For the twins. They’ll… be out of school in a few years, and by then, maybe-”

“Maybe.” She cut him off. She poured herself a coffee, then, holding it in both hands. Her nails were bitten nearly to the quick, the one bad habit that had never been broken in her no matter their father’s rages. “I should tell you, Ford, this is not a social visit. I was… sent here to pick you up.”

“You were?” Ford sat up straighter, and felt a frisson of dread like an electric eel moving inside of him. “By-... Nathalie, not by-”

“Yes. By… our father.”

He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. “... why?”

She took in a breath, wincing and pressing one hand to her side as the mere expansion of her ribs pushed against the tightly-fitted bodice. The style of the times, for wealthy young women, and Ford had spent more than a few nights undoing laces of young ladies wondering if ‘style’ was just a pretty way to avoid saying suffocation. At least the lower class women he spent most of his time with were allowed to breathe. 

Nathalie’s voice was so soft it was nearly a whisper. “You were supposed to be packed and ready to go when I arrived, Ford. I was supposed to explain it to you on the ship.”

“... what?” He blinked.

"Father's letter to me made it clear I wasn't to tell you until we were underway, but-... but I meant to regardless, just-... I expected you to have seen my letter."

"... Ah." The mere mention of his father had made his stomach try to rise up in his throat again, and the idea of going back on a ship - the weeks of seasickness and then the week of land sickness afterward when he had to get used to being solid and still once again - made it much much worse. He had to swallow hard as bile rose and lean over, resting his forehead on the cool surface of the table and pressing one hand over his belly to try and calm it with the pressure. 

The morning breeze blew in through the windows, bringing the salt-scent of ocean air with it. There came with the welcome salt the faint hint of dead fish, a simple fact of life everyone tried to ignore. You got used to it. Ford had gotten used to it, in the end. But it didn’t help his stomach feel any better now, or stop his heart from racing. “Father sent you... to pick me up? I am to live at Howe House with you now?” He groaned against the tabletop without looking up. “That house is full of ghosts!”

“It is not.” Nathalie rolled her eyes. He could hear her shoe tapping impatiently under the table and her cup clatter against the saucer as she put it back down. “That’s an old wives’ tale, I’ve never met a single one and I’ve been living there for more than a year.”

“Yeah, because you aren’t the heir, they don’t loathe you like they do me.”

“There are no spirits haunting Howe House,” Nathalie said firmly. “And if there were, why would they hate you?”

“The same reason I have such hatred for myself, due to the blood in my veins! His blood!"

Oh, he’d spoken too loud. The pain in his head spiked with his voice's volume, and he had to close his eyes tightly and breathe in quick, shallow pants until it ebbed again. 

Nathalie was silent, but her hand laid on his back, then, rubbing gently up and down. Just like their mother had, when they were young and came to her with sickness. She gave him a moment or two of quiet, which... it helped, honestly. “You cannot help the circumstances of your birth,” She murmured. “And remember what Mother said."

"It is only blood," Ford muttered, mouth barely moving. "She had no idea how deep the ties of blood run."

"Yes she did. And... I understand, Ford, I wish as much as you that we could change our names and be gone, but you know we can’t."

"The twins need us."

"Yes. Besides, Father-”

“Why, why would Father even think of me? I’ve done everything I can to get him to forget me entirely, Nathalie!”

“Oh, is that what the drinking and whoring were about? Being easily forgotten?” Nathalie’s humor was sharp, but it never quite cut deep. He knew her too well for that, and she was still gentling herself for his sake. He made himself sit up and look over at her. There was something in the set of her face that had his nerves singing in worry. “Listen to me, Ford. You aren’t coming to stay at Howe House.”

“Well, he can’t have sent you to scold me about… this.” He gestured at the wreckage of the hotel suite around him, bottles emptied or half-emptied. It looked as though at least one of his guests the night before had left their shirt behind. Or maybe that was one of his, and it had been unpacked… He’d never seen it before, but that didn’t mean much. Ford’s clothing was bought according to his father’s specifications, he never knew of it until he was sent for tailoring. “He doesn’t even know about it.”

“You cannot be sure, but… no, no, it’s not about this.” She licked at her lips, looking uneasily over to the window. Outside, the sun shone in a perfect, cloudless blue sky. The sound of people going about their lives down there filtered up to them. “... Ford. He calls us. We have been summoned... home.”

His heart chilled at the word. "No."

"Yes." Nathalie exhaled, folding her hands in front of her. She looked everywhere but him, and he tried without success to follow her gaze. “He’s… sent for us, Ford. You know why. You know what that means.”

“Either of us, really.” His voice was a whisper, airless. The hotel suite around him seemed suddenly transparent, as if he weren’t even seated here within it. As if it were all a pretty fiction, a daydream he had at night with Wentworth Manor crowding ever closer, his father’s eyes everywhere searching for faults, always finding them. His father’s monster with teeth bared and loathing in its dreadful eyes. “It could be for either of us. You’re sixteen, I’m eighteen, it could-... it could be for you, or for me, it could be-”

“... I think it’s for you.” She took his hand in both of hers again, and this time she held on tight. They looked at each other, with their mother’s eyes, and Ford felt the wave of fear he had spent his time here on the islands trying to escape breaking over his head, to drag him under again. “I think Father has found you a wife.”

The sun shone. Birds sang. The ocean was a constant dull, reassuring roar just outside the window. Despite the heat, Ford shivered with a depthless chill and felt water closing over his head, drowning him in the dark with all his fears coming suddenly to life.

“How-” His voice broke.

He had to swallow down terror, just like he had done since he was a child, and straighten his shoulders. He had to tell himself the world was only a play, and he was only a part his father had imperfectly cast. He had to keep his own life at a distance, and not feel it, or he would feel too much. The world had too many sharp edges, and he must stand apart from them or be slashed to ribbons. “Nathalie-”

“Please,” Nathalie whispered. “Please don’t ask, Ford. Don't, I won't know the answer, none of us know."

“How long?”

She didn’t answer, only looked away. He could see the glimmer in her eyes, knew it for what it was. It made the world feel even more distance, as if he were adrift in a lifeboat, the tide carrying him away from his own body. The escape was a gift or a curse, and he didn't know which.

His mouth still moved, without his consent. Without his decree. It asked the question neither of them knew the answer to, the question that haunted every Guilford Wentworth but the first.

“After I’m married, Nathalie... after he has given me to his bride, and the monster has taken my mind and will from me... after he has me shut up in his house again..."

His voice felt like someone else's. His body was only a creation that carried blood to a new generation, to give his father more power. He was far, far away from it.

"Nathalie-"

"Please, Ford-"

"How long will he... let me live?”

-

Taglist: @grizzlie70 @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @theelvishcowgirl @whump-for-all-and-all-for-whump @bloodinkandashes @squishablesunbeam @mj-or-say10 @apokolyps @wildfaewhump @shrimpwritings @there-will-always-be-blood @latenightcupsofcoffee

[sunnixsunshine]

@rowdyknives oh boy do I have thoughts….

I’ll post the individual stills tomorrow I’m tired lmao

[chizue-witchery]

⚜️. *. ⋆ Fandom: Noragami

⚜️. *. ⋆ Rating: Teens And Up Audiences

⚜️. *. ⋆ Archive Warnings: Major Character Death

⚜️. *. ⋆ Character/s: Yukine, Yukine's Father, Miyaike Yuka (mentioned)

⚜️. *. ⋆ Summary: Haruki sees the wild expression on his father's eyes, yet there's also a relief in them.

"See ya, Haruki," the man says with a smile as he closes the only way he can escape from.

Haruki opens his eyes wide, a deep unsettling fear in his bones at the sudden darkness. "Wait—!"

⚜️. *. ⋆ Word Count: 1,207

⚜️. *. ⋆ Tags/Warnings: Manga Spoilers, Noragami 87-99 Spoilers, Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Claustrophobia, Hurt No Comfort, Angst

⚜️. *. ⋆ Prompts/Squares Filled: Left for Dead || @whumptober 2024 Day 14

Whumptober 2024 Masterlist

AO3

A/N: this contains noragami chapter 87-99 spoilers. those chapters contain yukine's life before he became a regalia. anime only's should not press read more if you don't want any spoilers.

Haruki hears the sound of heavy breathing as he feels his body being carried off somewhere. However, he is still too tired to open his eyes. His entire body hurts and he feels something wet in the back of his head.

He feels his body being dropped to the ground, and he painfully groans, his legs shuffling around.

A loud creaking sound and then he gets picked up again. He gets carelessly dropped somewhere, but this time it's a limited space. His body feels cramped together and uncomfortable. He hears sheets of paper being torn and thrown towards him.

"This is all on you, you know…" Heavy breathing, inhaling, and exhaling. The voice he recognizes to be his father is exhausted. "For bad-mouthing me in your letters…!" he continued.

"You dying ain't my fault." His father throws more paper towards him. Haruki wants to open his eyes, but he fears what his father will do once he does. "It's divine punishment. It's what you get for disobeying your parents…"

He hears his father's footsteps moving farther from him, and that is when he slowly opens one of his eyes. He sees the wild expression in his father's eyes, yet there's also relief.

"See ya, Haruki," the man says with a smile as he closes the only way he can escape from.

Haruki opens his eyes wide, a deep unsettling fear in his bones at the sudden darkness. "Wait—!" he screams as he pounds on the hard surface.

His father's footsteps are getting further and further away until he can't hear him anymore. He screams, begs, and pleads to be let out of this place, but no one frees him.

He breathes heavily, feeling the walls closing in on him, and he wonders why his father trapped him in this closed space and left him to die.

He still feels something wet at the back of his head and he moves his hand towards it, wondering what it is. Although the place is quite dark, he knows it's his blood by the smell of sickly iron and by how warm it feels on his fingers.

He feels nauseous, finally remembering what happened before this.

He was just minding his own business, looking out the window, when his father suddenly burst inside his room. His father began yelling at him, demanding to follow him outside. He didn't why, but back then, he felt a sense of dread and fear for his life. He was reckless and shouted back to his father. He tried running away from his father, but the small room made it impossible to do it.

He was grabbed by his father with his shirt, and he looked furious.

The last thing he remembered was his father bringing his fist to his face and then pain.

He cried out as he was beaten by his father until he passed out, and that must have been when his father decided to carry his body and head off somewhere to drop him into this space he was trapped in.

He covers his mouth, swallowing the bile rising to his throat. Tears prickle at the corner of his eyes as he sobs.

He is beaten and trapped in this little box with no way to escape. He can't feel any handles when he tries to feel for them, so he resorts to slamming his fists onto them.

"Help!" he cries out as more tears stream down his face. "Please, I'm stuck! I can't breathe!"

He continued to beg and cry until he could no longer speak anymore. He curls on himself, as much as he can in this limited space. He sobs, hugging himself as his body shivers from the cold.

He doesn't know how long he's been stuck in this box, but his vision is swimming. His headache is becoming worse and the bruises on his body are aching. It hurts whenever he tries to move, even if it's just by an inch. The wetness on his head has dried off.

He thinks of his sister, wondering if she knows what happened to him. He thinks of how he never got a response to his letters and how he continued to write them despite it.

He shifts his body, and he groans painfully at the corners of the paper digging into his skin. He pushes the torn papers away, and that is when he sees his own writing on one of the torn papers. They're all torn and crumpled, but he can still vaguely recognize his own writing, even in the darkness.

His hand shakes as he grabs the torn and crumpled pieces of paper, more tears streaming down his face.

Oh.

His letters never got sent to his sister.

All of his days of staying up at night or watching the mailbox at the window from his room in hopes that his sister to send a letter of reply to him was no point because the letters never got to her.

He tried keeping himself as discreet as possible from his father whenever he wrote letters and dropped them at the postbox.

… Maybe he was too hopeful when his father never confronted him about it.

"Ne-chan…" he whispers brokenly while a sob escapes his lips.

He wants his sister. He wants to be held by her once again, holding her tightly even when she tells him to let go.

He wants to live.

He wants to grow up.

He wants to be as far away from his father.

He wants, he wants, he wants—

…

… he can't get them.

He'll never be able to get what he wants.

"I'm going to die here," he brokenly whispers to himself as his voice cracks.

He didn't want to believe it, but he knew he wouldn't survive.

No one would come looking for him.

His stomach rumbles, hungry for food, while his lips are chapped, thirsty for something to drink.

With nothing else to do, he closes his eyes.

Haruki opens his eyes to the darkness once again. He doesn't know how long he's been trapped in this enclosed space, but he is getting tired.

His body still feels sore. He feels the back of his shirt drenched with sweat, his hair covering his face.

His stomach rumbles again in hunger and the only thing he can do is to hug his stomach and hope the pain won't last that long.

His eyes glisten, but he feels no tears.

He is too tired to cry.

He is too exhausted to move.

He can't even speak because of how dry his throat feels.

He's cold and his body trembles uncontrollably.

With the little strength he has left, he grabs the torn pieces of his letters and holds it close to his chest.

He wants to go home…

It wakes, and it's cold.

It wanders endlessly, wondering what it's meant to do.

It doesn't know how long it wandered.

It floated and floated.

It floats until it finds itself in front of a postbox.

It doesn't know why, but the postbox feels important.

It has a letter.

The letter is important.

It wants the letter to be sent to someone.

…

…

Who is this 'someone'?

…

…

…

It doesn't know, but it believes that 'someone' is important.