#vegetable processing machines
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The Allround hydro cooler is designed to cool down the produce, especially carrots, before transportation. Hydro cooling dramatically increases the shelf-life of the vegetables. Allround is able to deliver hydro coolers that are capable of cooling vegetables and other produce from a very low volume, to very large quantities.
#vegetable processing line#processing machine#vegetables#potato#hydro cooler#hydro cooler for vegetables
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#industrial vegetable washing machine#commercial vegetable washer#food processing equipment#nexgen hygiene stations
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Top 10 Small-Scale Food Dehydration Business Ideas
✨ Turn your passion into profit! Discover the Top 10 Small Scale Food Dehydration Business Ideas that can make you high profits. Don’t miss out—follow us now for more game-changing ideas! 🚀 #FoodDehydration #SmallBusiness #ProfitableIdeas #Entrepreneur
Food dehydration is a process that helps in preserving fruits, vegetables and herbs and increasing their shelf life. Nowadays, the demand for processed and packaged food is increasing rapidly. Yes, people are paying more attention to healthy and natural foods. So, dehydrated food also has a huge demand in the market. Also, the market for dehydrated food is growing rapidly in India. According to…
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The Motherfucking Lizard King
No one at work trusts my boss.
He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town.
Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse?
I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed.
He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now.
So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it.
---
My job has glue traps.
No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life.
If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just
You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you.
People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out.
I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me.
I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps.
And just because of that, they're willing to follow me.
---
My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.
People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was:
Do NOT mess with animals in the building.
So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences.
I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop.
Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve.
And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went
I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover.
So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell.
So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair.
I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.
I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.
A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right?
And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes.
And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said
Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil?
I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question.
Who grabbed the snake? I asked.
Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right.
ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No.
---
The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago.
We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again.
You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think.
But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be.
That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.
---
The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.
Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read
"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."
I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.
How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.
You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.
I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.
Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.
---
The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.
We'll see if he squanders it.
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Bf!Skz reaction to you randomly spanking them



pairing: ot8 x gn!reader
genre: fluff, suggestive
warnings: none i think? (lmk)
a/n: just a little something while i decide what to write next bcs i have too many ideas🥲
~ check out: Masterlist
Chan:
You're at your boyfriend's studio, and as much as you admire his process of writing and producing songs, you're becoming bored.
It looks like he completely forgot about your presence as he works away while you sit on the couch, playing with your phone.
You huff but Chan doesn't even budge and at this point you're sure he's teasing you on purpose.
He stands up and leans over the table to grab something and you take that as your chance. You quickly stand up and slap his butt as hard as you can, hurting your hand in the process and making him jolt forwards as he grabs at the end of the table.
Chan turns around to look at you, a mix of surprise and slyness on his face, his cheeks dusted in pink.
"I sure hope you know what you just started, love."
Lee Know:
You and your boyfriend are in the kitchen, cooking dinner together. It feels like both of you have fallen into a trance, working together like you were a well oiled machine.
Some light music plays in the background as you cut some vegetables while Minho prepares the meat.
He turns his back to you slightly as he grabs some spices and you look up from your task, your eyes falling to his ass.
You smirk and lift your hand up before smacking his ass and watching it jiggle. The way he turned around slowly like a cat, his eyes judgy and a sly smirk on his lips.
"What are you doing kitten?"- he asks.
"Learning from the best."- you shrug nonchalantly.
"Hold that thought until after dinner."
Changbin:
It's a chilly autumn Friday night, but you're not cold at all.
In fact, you're sweating because your boyfriend suggested for the two of you to spend the evening in the gym.
You protested at first, but he was adamant on blending two of his favorite activities together in his rare free time; spending time with you and working out.
You slowly get into it and the physical exertion, the heat in your body plus your sexy boyfriend looking extra delicious while he works on his muscles bring a different kind of warmness between your legs.
Changbin moves around before bending over to pick up the bottle of water he left on the side and you can't help it, your hand flying on its own and smacking his ass so hard that you think your hand might fall off.
"Yah!"- he yells out, clearly startled as he grabs at his ass. "What's that for?"
"You're so hot, Binnie. I couldn't resist."- you bat your eyelashes innocently at him as he narrows his eyes and smirks.
His face is flushed from the work out but you swear it looks even more red now.
"Yeah? Wanna go home and show me how much you can't resist me?"
Hyunjin:
Hyunjin and you decided to avoid the summer heat by going to the pool.
Sadly, the sea was too far away and you didn't have much free time to actually make a trip there, so the pool had to suffice.
Both of you didn't mind though, you were happy to splash around and play in the water together, enjoy your time like you had no worries on your mind.
You stayed in the pool for a fairly long time and Hyunjin swam towards the steps first. You followed him and watched as he stood up and walked out of the water, his body on display for you, his muscles tense as droplets of water slid down his spine.
His cute little perky ass got your attention and you hurried up as he turned and waited for you.
"Let's get changed."- you ushered him to the showers and he chuckled at your sudden eagerness to leave.
As soon as you were as far away from other people as you could be, your hand collided with his ass, echoing in the empty hall.
Hyunjin yelped, doubling down dramatically and almost falling to his knees.
Even your hand burned because of the impact on his wet swim trunks.
"Why would you hurt me like that?!"- he whined, grabbing at the wall and making a show of it.
"You've taken worse."- you smirk at his antics and he chuckled, his cheeks red.
"Don't talk about that in public."- he smacked your arm lightly and you laughed.
"Well let's find a more private place where we can talk."
Jisung:
The two of you are walking home from a movie date, your hands swinging together as you discuss the film you just watched.
The evening is quiet and peaceful and you can't wait to come home, shower and get under the covers with your sweet boyfriend.
Jisung takes his phone out of his pocket to show you something but since he never wants to let go of your hand, the phone clatters as it hits the floor.
"Shit!"- he exclaims, letting go of your hand and bending down to pick up the device.
Your eyes fall on his cute ass instantly, looking extra cute in his tight black jeans. You smirk as you land a hard smack against his flesh, making him shriek and almost fall over.
"Damn. Do that again."
Felix:
It's your first time sleeping over at Felix's place and since both of you love baking, you decided to try out a new recipe.
The problem was, you needed to run to the store to get some ingredients.
"I'm sorry, I should've prepared these beforehand."- Felix pouts cutely at you and you chuckle.
"Bubs, it's okay, I don't mind taking a little walk to the store. It'll be like a little adventure."- you smile and he chuckles, his cheeks dusted pink.
"Alright, that sounds way more fun now."- he nods.
The two of you make a short 10 minute trip to the nearest store. As you walk through the aisles, in the bright fluorescent light you notice just how tight your boyfriend's pants are, his ass and thighs prominent in them.
He even dares to bend down to pick up an ingredient from a lower shelf.
Your mouth waters at the sight and without thinking you smack his ass, ending it with a nice handful of his flesh as he squeals and lifts up quickly.
"Hey!"- he whips around so fast, his face morphed into a look of surprise before it becomes a little smirk, his eyes glinting at you.
You giggle at him as he points his finger at you.
"Just you wait 'til we come back home, honey."
Seungmin:
You're backstage with your boyfriend before his next show.
He's been looking extra delicious lately, his arms on display and the leather pants hugging his figure perfectly.
He's getting ready for the performance and when he turns his back to you, your eyes rake all over him. You look around, noticing that everyone's going about their business so you decide why not just spank him once?
Just one tiny little smack, you think as you lift up your arm.
"What are you doing?"- Seungmin asks and you groan.
"How did you see me? You back is turned!"
"The shadow, silly. Are you trying to smack my ass?"- he turns to look at you with a smirk.
"No."- you say.
"No? It's okay, you can do it."- he turns his back to you again and just as you lift your hand up again, he slides away from you, snickering and running away.
"Hey get back here!"- you run after him as you both giggle.
"Catch me if you can!"- he screams back and both of you get too excited before the staff has to calm you down.
And ofcourse, you use that chance to smack him lightly.
"Happy now?"- he rolls his eyes playfully.
"Ofcourse."- you smirk.
"Mhm. I might just have to return the favor later."
Jeongin:
"Innie, I'm bored."- you huff, moving your arms and legs like you're making a snow angel on your boyfriend's bed.
"What?"- he looks up from his spot, his eyes were glued to his phone.
"I said I'm bored."- you pout.
"Didn't you tell me to be quiet so you can read your book?"- he smirks.
"I can't concentrate anymore. The letters are all becoming screwy."- you keep pouting at him.
"Alright, what can I do to make it better?"
"Entertain me?"- you try to look sweet and innocent and he laughs at your attempt.
"However shall I do that?"- he leans closer to you.
"Give me a fashion show!"
"A what now?"- Jeongin laughs again, caressing your side.
"You bought new outfits. I wanna see them."- you sit up.
"Fine, if you insist."- he rolls his eyes jokingly and gets up. You reach for him and smack his cute butt, making him jolt.
"I hope I'm getting paid well for this fashion show."- he jokes.
"Oh, you are, trust me."
✨Taglist: @moonchild9350 @janepg @velvetmoonlght @hwanghyunjinismybae @jehhskz @laylasbunbunny
#stray kids#stray kids x reader#skz x reader#skz fluff#stray kids fluff#bang chan x reader#bang chan fluff#lee know x reader#lee know fluff#changbin x reader#changbin fluff#hyunjin x reader#hyunjin fluff#han x reader#han fluff#lee felix x reader#lee felix fluff#seungmin x reader#seungmin fluff#jeongin x reader#jeongin fluff#skz soft thoughts#skz soft hours#skz ot8
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It infuriates me so bad when people view a character like Eddie who lives in a trailer park with traits such as: unclean, rowdy, creepy, aggressive, etc.
Not everybody from a trailer park is like that. Yes, I can tell you with certainty, these people know how to fend for themselves. Yes, these people know how to cook. Yes, these people know how to take care of their hair and their bodies.
There's this, like, perpetual idea that Eddie uses only 3-in-1 because it's all that he can possibly afford. No, guys, I can tell you right now as somebody who came from an impoverished family, we could definitely afford shampoo, conditioner, and body soap all separately—these things are just not going to be top quality brands. I fucking hate the way people write Steve approaching him about it like all high and mighty about knowing how to properly take care of Eddie's hair, being thoroughly disgusted with the products Eddie uses, showing off that his products are 100% better than whatever Eddie's got in his shower. Like. Okay....if the 3-in-1 is really what Eddie is putting in his hair, then so be it? That's what works for him, that's what he can afford, that's all he has.
Or, like, when Eddie can't cook? That because he didn't have access to all these nice foods that Steve has: fresh fruits and vegetables, bigger containers of milk, non-canned goods, products in the freezer that aren't frozen meals; just based off of what he has, he seemingly can't cook. That he's not making real food just because it comes from a container and it's processed.
But like...my mom was on the WIC program when I was growing up. My favorite meals, which we called our struggle meals, were things like chili dogs on plain white bread because regular hot dog buns were too expensive. Or when packs of chicken were too expensive and pushed us over our limit, my mom would just pick up a pack of lil' smokies and fry them up and toss them in a box of generic store brand macaroni—just to make sure we had our protein. No, I'll tell you right now, we didn't get a ton of fresh produce; namely because that fresh produce was expensive by the pound. But I'd take home apples from the school cafeteria and use them for an after school snack with a bit of store brand peanut butter. And, like, sometimes the frozen meals were all we could get and so that's what we had—and we made fun with it, too, where we'd all pile up in the living room and we'd watch a movie from our local Blockbuster or Redbox machine and my mom would braid my hair while I had my Banquet's brownie. Kix was my favorite cereal growing up because it was, like, the only name brand cereal we could get with WIC.
Just because a food isn't fresh or name brand doesn't mean that it's not food. It's edible. And it tasted good. No, it wasn't always healthy, but we were trying our best. We were getting by. I loved when we'd go to the local food bank and find little containers of frozen peaches—or even better, when we'd find the holy grail within the last can of name brand Spaghetti-O's on the food bank's shelf. And we also had Meals on Wheels delivered to us, which cost us the tiniest bit, but we'd end up with house made salisbury steak with mashed potatoes or turkey with mashed potatoes and carrots—those were so easy to make after long days with extracurricular activities, or when we didn't have any other meal options.
Eddie can be appreciative of Steve's food, y'know. But having this constant idea that only Steve will know how to cook because he can use fresh ingredients or because the food Eddie had was gross and canned—I don't know, it rubs me the wrong way, I guess.
But like saying that Eddie smells just because he lives in a trailer is nuts. It's plainly crazy. If he doesn't have a washer/dryer unit, then maybe he knows how to do them manually or maybe he goes to a laundromat when he and Wayne find enough quarters in the couch. Or that he can't afford name brand hygiene products, so he just must stink. Or shaming him for using a cheap Axe cologne (because compared to something like Calvin Kleine, that's inexpensive) all because it's cheap.
I love a version of Eddie that knows how to fix things around the house because they couldn't afford plumbers or repairmen—my family was like that, too. You know how many times I've been able to fix something like a garbage disposal out of self-winging and spite? Or how many times I've unclogged a drain by using a handyman's guide or some YouTube tutorial? Yeah, Eddie probably does have these skills, and these skills are really useful.
Maybe he can't make top of the line meals, but he can make things. He can make hot food. That's important to him, hot food, I feel like. Programs like EBT/Food Stamps/TANF/WIC don't cover hot food items like the rotisserie chickens you may see at places like Costco—even though those would be so damn helpful for meal prep.
I think it's also just wrong and rude to make a pessimistic narrative about his clothing being older and used. Or hand me downs, god forbid. Those are well loved, well cherished things. He probably knows how to make a patch, how to stitch, he knows the best way to remove a stain from a beloved shirt. He probably is shopping at thrift stores for clothing pieces instead of constantly going to the mall for new things, and that's okay! You just have to get by like that sometimes! It's okay, too, if he has the same clothes as he did the year before in school—it's unreasonable to ask of a low poverty person to buy a whole new wardrobe just for the new year.
Parts of this fandom just completely dehumanize Eddie when it comes to him and Wayne being lower class people. They're trying their damn best to get by, that shouldn't be shameful. It shouldn't be shameful to live certain ways just because you can't afford the luxury of new and fresh and popular things. I think overconsumption in the modern age is bleeding into this fandom space and decimating the image of Eddie—this very real version of a person living in rural 1980s America—all because he isn't keeping up with things like Steve probably is; I often see the lifestyle Steve flaunts as praised and likable, while Eddie's lifestyle is mucky and disturbing and grotesque just because he's poor.
It's weird.
#I'm sure I have many more thoughts on this#but I am going to stop there for now before I truly blow a fuse#stranger things#eddie munson#wayne munson#steve harrington#steddie
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Hey. HEY. We aren’t good at understanding how bodies work. I spent five years in undergrad (I was indecisive; graduated with six years’ worth of credits), two in my terminal master’s program, four in med school, and three more in residency. I know a whole lot about how bodies work. I am qualified to tell you that we don’t know a lot more than we do know.
This means that, when you encounter a claim, you need to weigh it against what you have experienced.
I have met doctors who were sure fibromyalgia, or “muscle hurty disease,” from the roots of the word, was just women being crazy. Turns out it’s probably at least partly due to autoimmune dysfunction. Or maybe not! Sure would be nice if we knew! But I sure as shit know it’s real, because I have it and so do the women in my family. Our bodies don’t work right, somehow. They don’t work like other people’s bodies work. I experience more pain than I “should” based on what stimuli other people find painful. I have less ability to build and maintain muscle strength. This has not kept me from doing what I love most in the world, which is have opinions, to the point where I went through the horrifically awful process that is medical training in the US just so I could have opinions all day long and get paid for it. I gain nothing from saying I have it, and in fact risk the opinions of my professional peers if I do admit to it, since it is still seen as a disease of mental or moral weakness. I’m perfectly qualified to self-diagnose, as a board-certified family physician.
And yet I believed people in positions of authority for a long, long time who said it was a mental illness and not a bodily one. As if those even can be distinct, when our brains are part of our bodies and our experience of reality is filtered through their circuitry. But I believed that I was somehow to blame for being in pain.
Life has been better since I accepted that I just need to do some things differently. If I lift weights, I need to use machines, I need to start on the lowest possible setting, and I need to increase very gradually. If I do cardio, I need a low-impact model like an elliptical trainer; running outside, every time I have tried it in my life, results in incapacitating shin splints, even if I try to work up slowly. I no longer buy laundry bins that don’t roll. My home is all on one level. I go to physical therapy. I stash freezer dinners that contain (shudder) vegetables, my least favorite thing, so that when I do feel like shit, I have an alternative to starving (or eating a block of cheese that upsets my stomach).
Accommodate yourself. This society isn’t going to help much, if at all. In your good times and days, be the person whose help you’ll need in your worst days.
#the attending dr. kristophine#once again I am not asking for anyone’s advice#don’t tell me how you think I can start running#that’s not the point and it’s a real dick move
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#I have an idea but no time: what if "cultivation" in MDZS world really means... "farming"?
Based on this post: @dramatic-dolphin , I think you view things in the right direction! 😁❤️
Modern AU, where five powerful agricultural corporations practically rule the life of the country, dividing the workforce and resources for the best food production:
Cloud Recesses Inc. in Gusu — organic vegetables, strictly no pesticides, no chemical fertilisers; only straw mulching, complementary crops, attracting of natural predators for pests (ladybugs and other entomophagous predators), natural irrigation etc. Centuries-long history of family business, no outside high-level management at all. Organised the famous agricultural academy, where share the knowledge about organic farming.
Lotus Cove Company in Yunmeng — fisheries, lotus growing, for seeds, roots and making the dyes (famous "Yunmeng Lotus Purple), river pearls and others; the company unites many small local farms and proposes them the processing and manufacturing of finished products and logistics. Regular searches of new initiative talents for company from local residents, but they keep the controlling stake in the main family.
Jin Golden Carp Corp. in Lanling - floristic and orchard business, have huge greenhouses with exotic fruits; M&A the lands from small landlords and enterprises by cheap prices and in general lead the tons of leasing and funding financial operations. Not clean reputation, but the huge PR&GR and legal departments helps with this a lot.
Butcher's Saber Ent. in Qinghe — meat and dairy production mostly. They propose the best salaries on local workforce market and due to that acquire a strong loyalty among the residents — but have severe corporation policies about the industrial espionage and thefts . And also BS Ent. has the strictest (except Cloud Recesses Inc.) safety standards for all product cycle.
Wen LLC in Qishan — broiler poultry farming, second big competitor of meat production after BS Ent. in region; breeding of new sorts and seed selling business (here we have uncontrollable usage of GMO, chemicals and pharmaceutical products, but all experiments keeps in secret from public). Due to the excessive usage of pesticides and fertilisation, they faced with pollution and soil depletion, therefore actively expanding their cultivation areas by raider attacks and property fraud. Payed the good salaries but have a catastrophic penalty system for keeping the mouths shut, but you must be Wen for obtaining even the middle management position.
Maybe the story begins, where the prominent student WWX (who thinks about agricultural technologies in non-traditional way, for example — builds robots and automatisation programs for harvesters machines, searches the solutions in nano-biology and something similar) entered the Gusu Lan academy as a part of sharing experience delegation from Lotus Cove.
Or from the moment, when Wens decided to attack their competitors, using the false accusations about owners, cyberattacks, sabotage and brute force?
Or when the little WWX's innovative company in the most infertile lands of Burial Mounds became way too bottleneck due to progressive researches of someone's brilliant mind, that the other big corporations collectively decided to wip the unwanted competitor from the market at all?
Maybe in the classic way, when WWX, who was in a coma for thirteen years after a huge fire in his laboratory, received the organ transplant and new face from unknown beneficiary — and waked up? With clear suspicions who was really behind this incident that also killed his shijie and her husband? Now he's unrecognisable for his friends and enemies and can investigate the case freely. Maybe, the little help from LWJ, the second heir of Cloud Recesses Inc., could be useful? They were just-step-before-good-friends in his previous life...
Do you know, guys, that there are real wars in agricultural business nowadays? Maybe, they are even more dangerous, than in imaginary magical world of jianhu...
#i have an idea#i have an idea but not time#mdzs#mo dao zu shi#writing prompt#fic prompt#modern au#wei wuxuan#wei wuxian#wei ying#cloud recesses#farmcore#farming#grandmaster of demonic cultivation#founder of demonic cultivation#fuck corporations#wangxian expected#mdzs au
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[[addict]]
Series: Daredevil || Pairing: Matt Murdock x Fem!Reader || Rating Explicit

summary: Your life revolves around Matt. His does not revolve around you
Or: depression skews reality
wordcount: 5k
tags: depression, explicit sexual content, blood, angst, p in v sex, oral (male receiving)
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Monday
You wake up alone.
This is of no surprise to you, and you force yourself out of bed despite your desire to bury yourself into your covers and stay there.
You stumble into the kitchen, feeling bleary and still half-asleep, and start the process of making coffee. You dump still warm grounds into the trash before filling the basket with your preferred blend and starting the little machine. You wash the mug lingering in the sink, then start making your breakfast.
You don't need to think about your routine as you do it - you've done it hundreds and hundreds of times. You just do it.
Coffee. Bagel. Orange.
You watch the morning news highlights, listening but not taking in the various stories that flash on your screen. Fighting in Paris, all sorts of elections, Hollywood, and political scandals - it all washes over you without leaving an impression. None of it matters to you. None of it concerns anything Matt would be involved in.
Once you finish your small meal, you clean it up and switch your laptop over to your work VPN.
It is nothing glorious. You translate legal documents from English into Spanish as a contractor for a handful of firms around the city. Very rarely is it anything of interest - a majority of it is human resources based - but it makes good money, and you don't need to commute. You stay in the apartment most of the day, trying your best to make it into a home.
As you think over word choice, you do chores. Laundry gets hauled down to the basement, the sink and shower get a deep clean to wash away any trace of blood, and you write out a grocery list. You dust and air out the apartment between paragraphs. You don't exchange many emails. You don't get any calls.
The hours pass in silence until your phone alerts you it is a quarter after five. You shut down your VPN and return to the kitchen. Chicken, rice, and vegetables will be tonight's dinner - you know it is a favorite and you've worked out the unspoken schedule to know this is the ideal day to serve it. You work quietly, half focusing on your knife work and half zoning out.
Five minutes to the hour, the door to the apartment opens and Matt is home.
“That smells wonderful, sweetheart,” he says as a greeting, dropping his things off at the front door. You can hear his practical movements as he puts everything in its right spot.
“It should be done in ten minutes,” is your soft reply. That is just enough time for him to get settled in and drink about one third of a beer. It took you a few weeks to get the scheduling down right, but now you have it down to an art for various recipes. “How was your day?”
Without completely breaking attorney-client privilege, he tells you about the ongoings at the office and catches you up on whatever happened with Foggy and Karen over the weekend. As he does, he loosens his tie and takes a seat at the table. You place an ice-cold open bottle in front of him without fanfare, then flit back to the kitchen.
Dinner switches the conversation to Daredevil. Matt tells you his plan for the night and you silently convert his words into future actions for yourself. He's going out with Jessica, which means more surveillance than fighting. You'll need to have ibuprofen ready, as spying tends to stress his senses rather than his body.
You get a kiss before he goes to do his pre-Devil work out and another before he ascends the stairs to go into the night. He tells you not to stay up, but it's part of the script and you both know you'll be waiting for him right where he left you.
Tuesday
“Foggy isn't going to believe me,” Matt grumbles as you gently pat concealer around his eye, covering the blooming bruise.
“It's just absurd enough to be believable.”
“But it's the truth,” he huffs before his lips turn into a pout, “How does it look?”
You step back and examine the man in front of you. He has the start of a massive black eye and you can't help but feel bad for him. For once, this is not a Devil related injury - there was a freak accident with the shower. The water pressure in the building has somehow been cranked to maximum and your poor pipes are not equipped for that - the threads holding them together are barely there. They had no chance against suddenly being slammed into and there was no way Matt could have been prepared for the shower head to shoot off the wall and right into his face.
You frown and your mood must shift because he deflates, “Foggy is not going to believe you.”
You set the makeup you specifically got to cover up his nightly hobby aside and push Matt's coffee towards him. He takes a long sip from it before throwing his head back with a groan.
“I've been doing so well,” he complains. There is some sort of swear jar-esque deal the two of them have going on about Matt's bruises, but you don't know all of the details. You do know Matt's lost a fair bit of money from it, though.
You pat his shoulder sympathetically before getting up and heading towards the kitchen to finish packing up his meals for the day, “This doesn't count.”
“Will you tell that to Foggy?”
“I'll tell that to Foggy,” you promise.
You see him get up in the corner of your eye and disappear back into the bedroom to get dressed for work and you can't help but sigh. You'll give Matt's friends a heads up text so they don't freak out on him. Misunderstandings are bound to happen otherwise and they'll probably all have a laugh about it once the Devil's Pride is soothed.
You finish up packing lunch, a midday snack, and the ingredients for a hearty protein shake. Matt will be going to the gym right after work today, then from there will go out as the Devil. You aren't keen on him carrying his black suit around in his gym bag, but it's not something you're going to argue with him about.
With how busy the office has been lately; he's been a bit scatterbrained about the smaller things.
You've convinced him to at least drop off his bag on the roof as he starts his patrol, so he doesn't leave his day clothes at Fogwell’s overnight. You'll go up and collect them at some point, so they don't end up staying up there and getting forgotten about.
You won't see Matt again until he comes home to sleep.
You hope you'll be able to figure out how to fix the shower by then.
Wednesday
You put away the last of the clean dishes, then turn to face the apartment in front of you.
It's a beautiful day and light is streaming in through the windows, highlighting how stark everything is. Your laptop is waiting for you on the table, along with a mental list of things you need to get done today.
But you don't want to.
You don't want to do any of it. You don't want to do anything. You don't want to think. You don't want to feel.
You just don't want to.
So you wipe your hands on a dish towel, then make a bee line right back to bed and crawl in. You curl on your side, place your phone on Matt's pillow, close your eyes, and just Don't.
You drift in and out until your bladder starts to demand you get up, so you do. You use the restroom then return to bed, checking your messages as you settle back in.
There's one from Matt, asking if you would like Thai for dinner. You have no will to think about what you'd like to eat - honestly you don't want anything - so you tell him that Thai sounds great. You double check your alarm is set, then return to your nothingness.
It's easy to get lost in Blankness. It's nice to not feel anything. The crushing negativity you are so used to is gone and all your disgusting thoughts are silent.
You don't simmer in doubt that every action is wrong.
You don't question why your life revolves around Matt. You don't think about how you would crumble without him or how he'd be fine without you.
You don't consider what love is to him and how deeply rooted it is in just staying. You don't wonder if he just doesn't want to be alone again.
You don't feel completely consumed in your feelings.
You just are.
Sometimes, you wish you could stay like this forever - suspended in emptiness.
But then your alarm goes off and you have to be human again.
You check your messages to make sure you really did get a text about dinner, then finally drag yourself to go shower.
You have to be presentable before Matt returns.
He doesn't comment on your still wet hair or lack of conversation. You eat in mostly silence, occasionally commenting about the food.
Karen calls as you're gathering up leftovers to go into the fridge. Whatever she has to say to Matt has him swearing and going to the wardrobe to start getting his suit out. You don't ask what is wrong, you simply gather up the dress shirt he tosses towards the couch as he begins to change.
He doesn't kiss you as he rushes up the stairs.
He doesn't tell you to not wait up.
The door slams shut as he disappears into his own Darkness, and you sit on the couch to await his return.
There is no silence. The city mocks you with each siren, scream, and honk.
Thursday
You're putting away groceries when your phone alerts you to a text.
It's from Matt and simply states, “I hate baseball bats.”
A small noise of sympathy comes up from your chest. He had gotten a few good whacks with one last night to the point he let you wrap his chest. Luckily, nothing had been broken, but it had not been a pretty sight.
You've already put the ice packs in the freezer for when he gets home. You don't think he'll be going out tonight if he's actually admitting he is in pain.
Maybe you can listen to the next few chapters of the audio book you've started together instead. The thought makes your stomach turn in a nervous hopeful way.
You return his message with an inside joke of sorts, typing out the words, “Baseball bat emoji. Heart break emoji.”
He replies back seconds later with, “Sad face emoji.”
It pulls a little smile to your lips, and you think about Matt dictating the text to his phone for the next hour.
Friday
“You smell so good,” he purrs as he nuzzles against your neck, his scruff scratching you just lightly.
You tilt your head to the side to give him better access and you can practically feel his pleased hum in your chest. His fingers dance at the hem of your shirt, pushing under to barely just feel your skin. He's got you crowded against the front door, so all of him overwhelms you while he teases.
He's been like this all night. As soon as you stepped into Josie's, he had his hands all over you - your thigh, your lower back, wrapping his arms around you from behind. He's only had two beers, but they have loosened up his tense shoulders quite a bit.
You know what he wants and you're more than happy to indulge. You've been craving his touch. His attention.
You don't care if it's a quickie before he leaves you to belong to Hell's Kitchen again, you just need something from him.
Anything.
You dig your nails into the shoulder of his suit jacket and whine out your inner desires, knowing he'll give in when he's like this, “want to get on my knees for you.”
He moans in response, grinding against you to let you know how much he also wants that, and you lower yourself down to be trapped between him and the door. Skilled hands make quick work of his belt, and you don't bother to push his pants and briefs down. You get his half hard cock free of its confines only to swallow it.
Above you, Matt throws his head back his head, gritting out a long low, “Fuck.”
You give him no time to adjust, knowing exactly what he likes in these moments, and begin to work him over. One hand grips his tree trunk of a thigh and the other loosely circles around the base of his cock - the first keeps you steady and the second from him slipping out of you.
You focus on his head, pushing your tongue up as he slides out of the depths of your throat, then swirling it before you begin to suckle. He buries his fingers into your hair, swearing more, as you do so. That only encourages you and you begin to pump him as you work to get him to full hardness.
His musk is dotted with the saltines of precum, and your mouth begins to water. You do nothing to stop the drool gathering in the corners of your mouth and let it spill out as you enjoy yourself.
Self-control is out of the question - the moment Matt’s hips begin to twitch, you encourage it, tugging at his thigh. He doesn't need to be told twice.
You close your eyes and relax your jaw as he starts to fuck your throat.
All of you becomes encompassed in him. He's all you feel, all you smell, all you taste, all you hear.
He grunts and groans as he thrusts in and out of your mouth, holding your head steady so you can't chase him as you want to. You want to be held down; his cock buried deep in your throat until the heaviness of him is imprinted on your tongue. You want him to coat your insides with him, so you never forget his taste.
You want him to use you and that's exactly what he does.
“Fuck, sweetheart, fuck,” he chants, and you don't want him to stop. He's not ruthless, but he isn't kind with it, barely giving you a chance to breathe between each movement, and making your brain start to blink in and out of awareness.
You feel him start to twitch and pulse along your tongue and you whine in distress around him.
You don't want this to end so soon. You need him. You need this.
Before you can process what is happening, Matt is pulling you back up into standing and directly turning you to face the door. Your brain automatically clicks with what he is doing, and you scramble to undo your pants. You barely get them unbuttoned before he is yanking them and your panties down your thighs.
You arch your back with anticipation as he lines himself up. You expect him to tease you, to rub the head of his cock over you to spread around the juices you've soaked your panties with, but he doesn't. He pushes into you in one smooth motion and your eyes roll into the back of your head.
He grabs you by the throat from behind, just under your chin, and turns his hand so he can also stick two of his fingers into your mouth and continue to make you drool. You're practically pinned to the door as he slams into you over and over, hitting that sweet spot each time.
“So fucking wet,” he growls into your ear, squeezing your throat just enough to make your vision go spotty. “About to cum from just sucking on my cock. Don't even need to touch you, do I? You'd be happy being my little cock warmer.”
You would. You yearn for it - sitting under his desk while he works, keeping him happy. You just want to be with him. You need him.
You need him.
He breathes your name, then demands, “Cum on my cock.”
Saturday
Matt has taken the spot at the dining table while you've curled up on the couch. You both have your respective workstations set up and have been buried in reading for hours.
A strange, pleasant calm has washed over you and wrapped you up in a lightness.
These are the days you dream of.
Soft, quiet mornings where you can just be with Matt - there's no distractions or chaos or vigilantism. It is just the two of you, together.
Whenever he has gotten up to get something, on his way back to his seat - he always makes sure to check in on you all and it sends your brain into an absolute tizzy. Acknowledgement from him makes you feel warm in so many ways. You don't think you could ever get enough of the way he says your name when he wants your attention. It's like an angel’s song - or the Devil's.
You know it won't last long - he has a meeting with Foggy after lunch to meet some people who can't meet during the week - so you bask in what you have. You've been stealing glances all morning because you love to watch him work. He gets this little crease between his brow when he's listening to a transcript, and it really is the cutest thing. You just want to go over and kiss it and remind him to relax his forehead.
But you know he's so very busy and you don't want to distract him with something so silly. He barely has enough time in the day as it is, between all the ways he helps the people of Hell's Kitchen, and lately he's just been adding more and more to his plate - more clients, more patrols, more everything except you.
You aren't jealous. You know how needed he is and you are grateful to be in his life at all. You get to be the one to take care of him and be in his bed at the end of the night, even if you spend many of those nights alone.
It just makes moments like these so much sweeter.
So, when he gets up again and heads to the kitchen, you can't help but turn and watch him. He starts another pot of coffee, and your eyes just go heart shaped as you admire how his shoulders move under his shirt.
“Anything interesting?” He asks with a bit of cockiness, and you know he's aware you aren't focused on your work.
You place your chin on the back of the couch and hum, “This company has one of the best sick leave policies I've ever seen. Think I might quit my job and go raise plants in Arizona.”
Matt snorts at your answer and teases, “Do you know anything about raising plants?”
“For three weeks guaranteed paid vacation and two paid sick days a month, I'll learn.”
He turns to face you, tilting his head to one side in disbelief, “Two paid sick days a month? What is the catch?”
You nod, then pretend to huff, “You have to live in the middle of nowhere Arizona.” Matt makes a face of disgust, and you laugh into your hand, a smile blooming across your face, “That's why I'm only considering.”
“I'm glad, I'd prefer it if you stay here. I'd miss you too much if you were in the middle of nowhere Arizona.”
You spend the rest of the day practically glowing over Matt admitting he'd miss you. The words will live in your heart and head forever.
Sunday
You've never been stalked and hunted by a wild animal, but this is what you imagine it would feel like.
The Devil has come home earlier than expected and it looks like he crawled his way out of Hell. He's in his black suit, or what's left of it, and is covered in his own blood. His nose is dripping, probably broken, staining his mouth red. His shirt is barely hanging together and various fresh shallow cuts litter his torso. His Muay Thai ropes are dirty with grime and what you expect to be others’ blood.
He slowly came down the stairs from the roof then began to circle around the couch, each step deliberate and calculating, and he has not let up.
The air in the room is so heavy. You can't breathe because you don't have a protocol for this. You can't tell if he's angry or upset - he hasn't said a word and he's not expressing himself in any way, but Danger is exuding from him.
You sit straight backed on the couch as the Devil continues his path around you, his head tilting in different directions ever so slightly. You don't know if he's tracking something or waiting for some sign. You can't tell when he's like this.
Finally, he stops in the spot halfway between the couch and the bedroom, only partially angled towards you. He begins to undo the ropes stabilizing his wrists, letting them drop to the ground without acknowledgment. You watch them like they are snakes, ready to slither at you with an attack. His gloves quickly join the pile, but then he raises a hand towards you, palm up like he wants you to take it.
He confirms his intentions with a low, “Come here.”
You're worried and confused with how he is behaving, but you don't dare disobey the Devil.
You slip out of your seat and make your way to him in silence, reaching to take his hand when you get close enough. To your surprise, he brings it up to his face and places a light kiss to your wrist, over your pulse point.
“Do you know who I am?” He asks, voice low and laced with an unsaid promise.
A shiver runs up your spine and you manage to answer, breathing out, “Matt Murdock. Daredevil.”
He pulls his lips back into a snarl and you fear you've got the question wrong somehow.
Keeping your hand in his, he steps towards you, one achingly slow step at a time, until you are practically chest to chest. He dips his head and brushes the tip of his nose against your neck. You can hear him inhale.
“I hear their frightened little whispers. I hear what they call me - not just the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. King of Hell - this is my territory and I protect it with a ferocity,” he whispers into your skin. You close your eyes and try to keep your breathing from going shaky.
It is not just fear and confusion coursing through you now. His words, his rasping, is going straight to your cunt. You haven't encountered The Devil in so long you've forgotten what it does to you.
He presses his free hand against your lower back, moving you so you are flush against him. Your hand goes to his chest, just under his shoulder where his shirt is still intact and not sticky with who knows what.
“Do you know what that makes you?” he growls against you and all you can do is shake your head.
You don't interact with many people, and you doubt anyone in Hell's Kitchen is talking about you.
You are of no interest to anyone.
The Devil bumps his nose against your earlobe before giving it a light nibble and telling you, “My Queen of Hell.”
Air catches in your throat and it feels like your entire being short circuits. What does he mean, you're his Queen?
You've never done anything to deserve such a title, but you aren't going to disagree with him. If he wants to call you this, you will relish in it.
As you are still trying to process things, you are suddenly lifted into the air by your thighs, and you have to quickly wrap your legs around the Devil so you don't start flailing. Like you weigh absolutely nothing, you are carried to the bedroom and with care you do not expect, laid out on the bed.
The Devil, mask, boots, batons, and all, crawls over you, going straight for your throat. He starts with his lips but quickly dissolves into dragging his tongue and teeth wherever he can get. It's slow, methodical, like he has a goal with his lavishing.
You don't care about his intention - you are melting into the bed under him, desperate for him to not stop. Whatever he is doing, whatever has got him in this mood, you want more of it.
Hesitantly, fearing you might disrupt the atmosphere, you wrap your arms around the body above you, one hand going to scratch at the back of his neck, trying to silently encourage more attention to your neck. He obliges and teeth scraping against you turns into biting. He wastes no time in leaving his first mark on you, then another, and another.
“You're mine,” he tells you as he starts on the other side of your throat, “Belong to me. You're mine.”
You arch at the words, cunt clenching around nothing. He is correct. You are his - you've belonged to him the moment you met, and you will until the day you die.
He is your everything.
“I'm yours,” you agree, barely above a whisper.
The Devil drags his lips from your neck only to crash them into yours. It's like being pulled under by a wave - a force you can only just accept and go with. He tastes like smoke and copper, but you don't care. You only want more.
You want to be consumed.
And it feels like that is what he does. You kiss until you feel like you can't possibly breathe any longer, then he is pulling away to start moving down your body. He pushes your shirt up to start a trail of kisses and bites towards your stomach.
“My Queen,” he growls, and you can only throw your head back with pleasure at his words, his actions, “My Persephone. Mine. Whatever you want, it's yours. Anything. Give you Fisk's head on a platter. Or do you want his heart? I'll rip out his throat with my teeth for you.”
You want to comment it looks like he already has, with the state he came in in, but all you can manage to say is the truth.
“I just want you.”
Your shirt is pulled off and tossed to the side before he is on you again, biting at your lips as he does what you want. He grinds his cock into you, and you can feel just how hard he is. You tug at the remains of his shirt, and it is also quickly discarded.
You can feel him moving over you, probably trying to get out of the rest of his armor, but you don't pay attention. All your focus is on the way his mouth is moving with yours - dominating and controlling and firm but in no way actually hurting you.
Nothing to ever hurt you.
When he pulls back, he does so enough to sit up.
You whine at the loss of his touch, but it is balanced when he finally removes his mask, and you can see his beautiful face again.
It's a little sick, but you like him like this - bruised and battered and bloody. You like the physical reminders of who he is and what he is capable of.
You reach up to press your hands to the mottled skin around his ribs, still healing from the baseball bat. He hisses at the contact, but his now free cock gives a violent twitch. You know which reaction to trust.
Your sleep shorts and panties are unceremoniously removed, and you and the Devil are left nude. You are hauled up to be on your knees with him and once again you are held against his chest. He cups your jaw with both hands and kisses you firmly.
“Take such good care of me,” he mumbles between nips and bites, “Let me take care of you, my Queen.”
You want that.
You want that.
You want him to take care of you - to focus on you - to be his everything. You desperately nod against him, shaky whispers of “please” coming from you.
He lays you back down and guides himself into you with far more care than you'd expect in the moment. It's steady until he's fully sheathed in you, then he is over you again, burying his face into your neck.
“Mine.”
“Yours.”
He starts moving then, slow, steady, and deep, like he's trying to savor every roll of his hips.
It's heady and with the way he's back to worshiping your neck, you're quick to sink into a place of pure bliss only he can send you.
He starts to mumble against you as he devours you. You hear catches of your name and ‘my Queen’ and ‘mine’, but you hear something about Sin and love and need. Your brain refuses to link the words together and you don't need it to understand them right now.
You just need Him.
You roll your head to the side so he can dig his teeth into a new spot and through half lidded eyes, you spot the mirror you've added into the room. Using it, you watch the Devil make love to you, his body half shrouded by shadows.
He's so fucking beautiful.
As your thighs begin to tremble and pressure builds up in your core, you notice smears of darkness on your face, your neck, and your arms.
It is the same darkness that the Devil is drenched in.
He's covered you in his blood.
You're coated with him.
Inside and out.
The realization sends you over the edge and you scream his name for all your subjects to hear.
Monday
You wake up alone.
This is of no surprise to you.
a/n:
I see this with multiple interpretations ;)
a/n2: theres not a baseball bat emoji
#soulie writes#fanfiction#daredevil#matt murdock#matt murdock x reader#matt murdock x you#gently places this down
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The worst ending 17 : Digital Chains

The worst ending 16 | The worst ending 18
Yandere!Idia Shroud x GN!Reader
A/N : The ending was so bad I don't know why. I was like, huh and huh. How did I do that? Excuse me?
If you finish reading it and feel confused about it, that's okay, I'm confused too ( and I don't like it -_- )
Warning : psychological horror , digital imprisonment, and loss of autonomy. It explores manipulation , isolation , and an unsettling descent into , A writer who is very lazy because he has too much work to do.
Tags :
@iris-arcadia @yuu-twisted
If you want me to tag you please tell me.
English is not my first language.
The dim glow of a computer monitor flickered against the walls, casting strange, shifting shadows. You sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the small boy curled up in front of the screen, his bright blue hair glowing faintly in the darkness. He had been quiet since you brought him home—never speaking, never responding to your questions. He only tilted his head when you called out to him, as if processing the words like a machine booting up for the first time.
" You don't have a name, do you? " you asked softly, reaching out a hand toward him.
The boy turned to face you, his golden eyes wide and glowing like embers in the dim room. He didn’t speak. He only blinked slowly, as if waiting for you to continue.
" Then I'll give you one. " you said, offering him a smile. " Idia. How about that? "
He tilted his head again, then slowly, cautiously, a small smile stretched across his lips. He nodded once.
" Idia it is. " you murmured, relieved. " I hope we can stay together. "
Raising Idia was unlike anything you had experienced before. At first, he was silent, expressing himself only through slight nods, shrugs, and the occasional twitch of his lips. But as time passed, and as he spent more time glued to the screen, he began to mimic the voices from his games—first in short, awkward phrases, then in full sentences.
" You need to get out of your room sometimes, Idia. " you scolded one afternoon, standing in his doorway with your arms crossed.
" I'm grinding... " he muttered without looking away from the screen, fingers tapping furiously at the keyboard.
" You've been grinding for three days straight. "
" So close to max level... "
" Idia— "
" I'm in the zone, y/n! "
His voice had that mix of dramatic desperation and excitement that only a true gamer could muster. You sighed, rubbing your temples.
" This isn't healthy. You need sunlight. "
" Vitamin D supplements exist. " he countered.
You rolled your eyes and grabbed his legs, dragging him toward the doorway.
" W-Wait! No! I'm going to the room! " he shouted, clawing at the doorframe in sheer panic. His fingers tightened their grip with a strength fueled by desperation. With one last burst of effort, he twisted free and scrambled back inside, slamming the door behind him.
Damn...
If Idia had one weakness, it was his love for instant noodles. Every night, long after you had gone to bed, you would hear the soft creak of his door, the shuffle of slippered feet, and the rustle of plastic as he rummaged through the kitchen.
One night, you decided to catch him in the act. You waited in the dark, listening to the familiar sound of the microwave beeping. The second he tore open the lid, you flipped on the lights.
" Aha! "
Idia flinched, eyes wide like a deer caught in headlights. " y/n—! "
Before he could react, you snatched the noodles from his hands.
" Don't take it! " he wailed, immediately lunging forward and wrapping his arms around your leg like a child throwing a tantrum.
" You need to eat real food, Idia. " you chided, lifting the noodles out of his reach.
" These are real food! "
" You need vegetables. Protein. Not just sodium and regret. "
He clung to your leg with the strength of a desperate man, burying his face into your knee. " Please, I'll die without it! "
" You won't. " you deadpanned.
He groaned dramatically but eventually let go, shuffling back to his room in defeat. You placed the noodles back in the pantry, shaking your head.
This boy was hopeless..
As the years passed, Idia’s attachment to you deepened. He was still a recluse, still reluctant to leave his room, but he always kept tabs on you. Whether it was through cameras he secretly installed around the apartment or through hacked security feeds, he always knew where you were.
It was subtle at first—offhanded comments about what you were doing, even when he wasn’t in the room. But then, he started interfering.
" y/n, you shouldn’t go to the convenience store today. " he said one morning, not looking up from his laptop.
" Why not? "
" There’s a…um, 73% chance of encountering creeps today. Just stay home. "
You narrowed your eyes. " How do you even know that? "
" Instincts. " he said quickly, hiding his screen.
It was creepy, but you figured he just worried about you. After all, he didn’t have much experience socializing.
If only you had realized sooner.
One day, Idia’s behavior became noticeably strange. He stopped gaming as much. He barely spoke. He didn’t even attempt to sneak out for noodles. He just…watched you.
" Idia, are you feeling okay? " you asked, peeking into his room.
He sat at his desk, unmoving, his golden eyes flickering with unreadable emotions. He didn’t respond immediately.
Finally, he murmured, " I had a nightmare. "
" What kind of nightmare? " you asked gently, stepping closer.
" One where you left me. " he whispered. " Where you disappeared. And I couldn’t bring you back. "
You sighed, running a hand through his messy hair. " Idia, that’s not going to happen. "
He let out a bitter laugh. " You say that, but humans are unpredictable. Reality is unfair. If I could just…keep you here forever… "
Something in his voice sent a chill down your spine.
" Idia… "
His fingers twitched. " I found a way to make sure you never leave. "
One night, you woke up with a splitting headache, your body feeling heavy and unresponsive. The room around you was unfamiliar—cold, metallic, filled with blinking screens. A monitor in front of you flickered to life, revealing Idia’s face.
" Ah…You’re awake. " he murmured, his golden eyes glowing softly.
" Idia…? What’s going on? "
He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. " Okay, so, um. Don’t be mad. But I kinda…uploaded your consciousness into a digital simulation. "
Your blood ran cold. " You what...? "
" You kept trying to leave, y/n. " he said, his voice uncharacteristically serious. " I couldn’t risk it. So I made sure you’d always be here. With me. "
You struggled, but your body wouldn’t move.
" Don’t worry. " he continued, his tone almost soothing. " I made it nice. Just like our home. You won’t even notice the difference after a while. "
Panic surged through you. " Idia, this isn’t right! You can’t— "
" But I can. " he interrupted. " And I did. "
The screen flickered, distorting his face into static. " You’re mine now, y/n. Forever. "
And just like that, the simulation closed in around you. A perfect, digital world where you would never escape. Where Idia would always be watching.
Smiling.
Waiting.
Loving you in the only way he knew how.

#yandere twst#yandere twisted wonderland#yandere twst x reader#yandere idia shroud#yandere idia x reader#au doll#I think I got married at 2am?
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Jayce wouldn't have survived the fissure.
The below shots were shown almost back to back. Originally I interpreted this as straight up horror, but what if it's secretly Jayce's unknowing solace? What if the infection isn't meant to harm, but to heal?
This would explain Jayce's miraculous recovery. He FULLY broke that leg, it was severed at the bone and jutting out the side, it was awful and it was bad. But immediately after he sets it and starts a fire, he nearly sees the Mage and immediately after that we see this shot of the wound.
Now, granted, we don't know how much time passes, but this seems intentional. Viktor wouldn't come just to watch Jayce suffer, when has he ever come into any scene to simply watch passively.
Now, what does this mean?
First, it hints at an interesting change within the post-apocalypse Herald that I haven't seen dissected yet.
The return from machine to man
This older version of Viktor literally seems to reside by Jayce's statuesque pseudo-corpse's side on top of the ruined Hexgates, all that's left of their dream, in a beautiful but grotesque garden above the clouds. You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be etc etc but. Here's the ringer. Why the garden? People have speculated it's for comfort and beauty, if not for himself then for what remains of his Jayce.
But if you look closely, it's almost as if the vegetation is eroding the metal of Jayce's body while simultaneously springing from it. What if Viktor is slowly undoing what he's done?
Why does the Herald seem to be made of flesh when he meets Jayce now, and as a child? Because he's not a Machine Herald anymore. Corroding all the metal and returning it to nature is part of the process. The way he wields the arcane now is far more biological, and even here--
--we see that the metal from the bracelet remains, centers the rune, while the majority of added material seems chaotic and biological. In the impact frame it almost looks like a creature, like something living.
I'm willing to bet that his Jayce said the exact same thing to him among the stars and souls. He did show Viktor, and Viktor did become his partner again.
It was just too late by then.
Bonus because it made me suffer :)
Jayce looks forward when Viktor touches him, but when the command comes to give Jayce his hammer, he looks away before moving. I fully believe this is because he knows Jayce will use it to try to kill his own Viktor.
They've assumed it was inevitable, that in every world one of them must kill the other. And they would have been right if not for Ekko.
#i'm unwell can you tell#arcane#arcane meta#jayvik#jayce talis#viktor#viktor arcane#mage viktor#arcane herald#arcane spoilers
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The string grader is designed to separate smaller from bigger size produce. In a string grader produce rolls over the strings to the outfeed. Undersized produce falls between the strings.
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How to Start a Fruit and Vegetable Powder Manufacturing Business
Start your own Fruit & Vegetable Powders Business today! Perfect for health-conscious consumers, long shelf life, and booming demand in the wellness market. 💪✨ #BusinessIdeas #FruitPowder #VegetablePowder #Entrepreneurship #HealthyLiving
Fruit and vegetable powders are versatile ingredients used in a variety of food and beverage applications, including smoothies, baked goods, snacks, and nutritional supplements. Fruit and vegetable powders are typically made by removing the moisture content of fresh fruits and vegetables through a process called dehydration. The fruit and vegetable powder manufacturing industry has seen…
#banana flour processing machine#banana powder making machine#banana powder processing plant#banana powder production line#business ideas 2025#food business ideas#fruit and vegetable powder manufacturing business#how to make tomato powder#new business ideas 2025#onion powder business#onion powder machine#potato powder manufacturing business#potato powder production line#small business ideas#startup#sweet potato starch machine#vegetable powder manufacturing business
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Memory Loss
Alastor x female reader
Summary: The reader (you) somehow gets your memory wiped and can't remember ANYTHING, so Alastor is chosen to "babysit" you as the others go find a cure.
A/N- For those Supernatural fans out there "Regarding Dean?" Anyone?? Anyways enjoy. ALSO, I ONLY SKIMMED THROUGH SOO SORRY IF IT MAKES NO SENSE

Something had happened. It was either when you had to defeat that very powerful witch in the battle a couple of hours ago, hexing you, or it was just to piss off Alastor with a prank by the Vees. Either way, it led to damage, not towards the hotel but to you. Your memory was completely wiped out, and you didn't know anyone at the hotel, where you were, or who you were.
After a group meeting, which you had no idea had happened, Charlie and Vaggie volunteered to go find answers or even just a cure. Angel was at Valentino's studio, and Husk was nowhere to be found (probably passed out drunk in a closet somewhere), leaving Alastor to "babysit" you until Charlie and Vaggie returned.
"Charlie, Husk, and Vaggie are on the hunt for a cure," Alastor said with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. "In the meantime, it looks like you’re stuck with me!" Now, Alastor isn't one to babysit, and even though you're a grown adult, you had the mind of an infant at that moment.
You blinked at him, tilting your head in confusion. "Who are you again?" you asked as you sat on the couch in the lobby, tense, on high alert, and most of all, afraid. But your eyes were filled with curiosity as you looked at the strange tall man in front of you.
Alastor's smile widened, and he chuckled softly. "I'm Alastor, darling." He saw the wheels turning in your head as you tried to process his name and his face, trying to remember.
Hours passed with no sign of Charlie and Vaggie, and Alastor didn't want to wait any longer, so he took up the challenge, taking a more hands-on approach. He disappeared and reappeared with a pen and post-it notes. You tilted your head like a puppy trying to understand.
He began labeling everything in your room with brightly colored post-its: "Bed," "Mirror," "Closet," "Lamp," and even "Door." You watched with wide eyes as he methodically placed each note, explaining their purpose with an amused grin. You followed him around the hotel like a lost puppy, listening as best you could. Finally, you stopped in front of a door. With one arm behind his back clutching his microphone, he used his free hand to gesture to it.
"See, my dear? This is a door. You use it to enter and exit rooms. Quite ingenious, don't you think?" he teased, his tone light but his gaze attentive to your reactions. You followed his explanations with innocent curiosity, nodding earnestly at each one.
Just in case Charlie and Vaggie didn't arrive by daylight, he brought you over to the kitchen and showed you how to use the coffee maker, which was labeled with a colorful and bright neon sticky note. The word "coffeemaker" was scribbled in the radio demon's handwriting. The buttons on the machine were also labeled, and he even wrote down the steps.
All the concentrating and thinking made you tired. He sat in his armchair, reading a newspaper with an old tiny radio playing soft jazz quietly on a small table next to him. You had fallen asleep on the couch and woke up sometime later to find he was missing. Getting up and pretty much getting lost in a place you had once known, you heard humming and figured it was him. So you followed it, and it led you to the kitchen. You forgot you were in there earlier.
Alastor was preparing dinner in the kitchen. You stood close by and then peeked your head in, watching his every move. "What are you making?" you asked, your voice filled with innocent wonder.
"Just a little something to keep us energized," Alastor replied, glancing at you with a fond smile. "Would you like to help?"
You nodded eagerly, stepping closer. He handed you a knife, standing behind you and guiding your hand as you chopped vegetables. Your concentration was intense, and Alastor found it adorable how seriously you took the task. After you finished dinner and cleaned up, which he helped with, it was delightful. Charlie and Vaggie returned with a cure, and your memory soon went back to normal.
#alastor#hazbin hotel#alastor x you#the radio demon#hazbin alastor#alastor x reader#alastor imagine#i have an obsession
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Closing Time
Summary: For pricklenettle, Phandom Holiday Truce 2024
With twenty minutes left in his shift, an unseen ghost shows up to make his night harder. Tucker does not get paid enough for this.
Word Count: 2074
Also on AO3 and Fanfiction.net
Note: Happy Truce! This story is for @pricklenettle. I went with the Prompt 2: Danny being a creepy, mysterious fellow somewhere normal like a gas station. Prompt 5 inspired me to have Tucker be the pov character, though.... well, you'll see. 😉
Enjoy!
Just twenty minutes. Twenty minutes before closing time.
Tucker sighs, repeating the words in his head as he sweeps the front of the supermarket. The broom’s bristles scrap against the floor, the sound grating against his ears. Ten feet away, his manager surveys the square of self-checkout kiosks. One lone customer, a middle-aged man, swipes his chips and soda. The machine chimes harshly as it processes the man’s credit card.
The boy lifts one hand to massage his forehead. Just twenty more minutes.
The shopper exits passed Tucker and the teen’s gaze follows, trailing to the wide glass window, to the pitch-black outside. The doors slide open, the sound of rain crashing through the front with a spray of cold droplets.
Tucker winces at the sensation. Please, please let it stop soon. Fervently, he begs in his head. Please let it stop before he has to run to the bus stop.
“Go sweep the produce section.” His manger’s nasally voice cuts through the silent pleading.
With a nod, the teen complies. He pushes the broom’s long head around the banana stand. The bristles scrape harshly as the lights illuminating the vegetable stands buzz sharply. And Tucker again rubs his forehead, gritting his teeth at the building headache.
Those stupid lights, this stupid broom. If his boss wouldn’t give him crap about it and would just let him wear headphones at work….
Tucker hums under his breath, repeating the chorus to his favorite Dumpty Humpty song in his head. Normally, that is a decent distraction from the overstimulating sounds. But this night….
The pounding of rain on the roof crescendos. Tucker shivers, suddenly cold. A draft blows through, from the outside doors at the front of the store, he assumes. The chill tickles his nose and he sneezes. Tiny, wet drops spray on his face.
Great. The boy huffs, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. He’s getting the cold Danny has too, isn’t he?
At least he can go home soon and collapse on his warm bed.
Tucker goes back to sweeping, humming the same Dumpty Humpty song. He sweeps up little bites of onion peel, fallen leaves from the poinsettia display, dried mud tracked in on someone’s boots. He moves in front of the carrots and cucumbers, wrinkling his nose as water mists over the produce and sprays him.
The teen comes to the end of the produce section, to the first fridge of meat. He surveys the pork chops approvingly. Oh, those ones are on manager’s special. Maybe he should-
Suddenly, the sound of a cough cuts through his thoughts. Tucker looks up, drawn to the noise.
Two aisles over, someone about his height in a red hoodie stands with back facing him. Huh? How hadn’t noticed that person before? The clink of cans shifting in a pile sounds as they pick up a can of soup.
Tucker goes back to sweeping, eyes fixed on the head of the broom as he carefully maneuvers it between the horizontal display fridge filled with pork ribs and a shelf with an offering of barbecue sauces.
The heavy thump of a can falling and Tucker’s head jerks up again. The person in the hoodie is gone, a can of chicken noodle soup rolling across the floor.
Brow winkling, the teen approaches. He picks up the luckily undented can, returning it to the display. His head tilts, peering down the pointedly empty aisle. Where did the person in the hoodie go?
Before Tucker can contemplate the mystery, the intercom crackles. “Clean up! Aisle 10!”
Tucker sighs, rolling his eyes exacerbatedly. Really? This is the second time this shift. Please don’t be throw up again, he mentally begs. Still, he carries the broom back to the supply closet near the restrooms, collecting the bucket and mop.
The teen jerkily pulls the yellow monstrosity through the store. One of its wheels refuses to spin. “Come. On.” He mutters under his breath, annoyance growing.
He passes the lunch meat and the cheese, the butter and eggs. Approaching the aisle in question, Tucker takes a breath, preparing himself for what will hopefully be a small mess. He rounds the corner and-
Milk… all over the floor. The teen’s jaw drops. Half the length of the aisle, a good twenty feet section of the floor is covered in the white liquid.
“H… how?” He can’t help but stutter. How could someone even manage to spill this much milk?
Eyes blown wide, Tucker approaches the nearest jug. Tentatively, he prods it with his shoe. The plastic crunches at the touch, jagged cracks scrapping against each other. It looks almost shattered…as if dropped from a great height.
His eyes trail over the scene once more. A dozen more crumpled jugs litter the floor, their contents all explosively dispersed.
But…. How? How could one person do this? A flicker of unease leaps in his stomach. If he didn’t know better, he would think it was the Box Ghost’s doing. Expect these are plastic jugs, not rectangular cartons. No boxes have been touched, not cardboard the cartons of eggs come in, the microwave dinners, or the sticks of butter. And most tellingly, there are no shouts of beware.
Tucker’s nose wrinkles. It would be just his luck for Boxy to show up for the end of his shift.
The teen shakes his head, dislodging the thought. That hypothetical doesn’t matter right now. He frowns hopelessly down at the now quite insufficient mop. He’s going to need those blue absorbent puppy pads. A lot of them.
Tucker turns around, leaving the mop and bucket and starting back towards the storage room. He passes the butter and eggs again. The sign for the bathroom looms in front of him. He quickly comes to the open doorway, across from the clearance rank, and-
A puff of cold on his neck. The boy stiffens. A low whisper echoes to his right, behind him. Movement out the corner of his eye, a flicker of maroon red and neon green.
Tucker freezes, head jerking to the side to look. But… nothing.
There is nothing beside him, just the freezer of meatballs and chicken nuggets.
The lights above flicker and pop, flashing brightly at the same another whisper crackles, on his other side and full of static. Tucker’s head jerks to the sound, catching another flicker, this one of something black. His body follows the movement of his gaze, turning back the way he came.
No farther spills, no customers, no annoying boss. No one to mutter or dart passed him. The walkway is the same.
Except… a spot of neon green.
Annoyance swirling in his gut, Tucker marches up to the spot. He kneels and his brow furrows at the object. A tissue, stained with globs of glowing green.
“Freaking ghosts.” The teen curses under his breath. Of course! Of course it’s a ghost.
He picks up the tissue between two fingers, nose wrinkled in disgust. What is this? The ectoplasm looks sticky and wet, glowing between the folds of the crumpled kleenex. Like some kind of ghostly booger. From what? A ghost of the common cold?
“The store closes in five minutes!” His boss’s false cheery voice cuts through the scene. “Please bring your purchases to the front.”
Tucker groans at the words, standing. Ghost or no, he still has an aisle to clean. He hurries to the storeroom, grabbing a wad of absorbent pads. He manhandles the big black trash can with wheels, pushing it out of the closet and through the open doorway.
Then a flash of green light. A crash reverberates around the corner, back in the milk aisle.
Unthinking, Tucker takes off running. He rounds the corner, the spilled milk puddles appearing in front of him once again. A burst of cold and his legs fly out from under him.
The teen falls, landing heavily on his behind. Sudden adrenaline pounds his heart, the sound deafening in his ears. He shivers, not just from any dread but… the cold. His hand reaches for the white covering the floor, goosebumps prickling his skin. It’s frozen.
Shakily, Tucker puts his hands under him. He rises to his feet; thank goodness he’s not hurt any more than his sore tailbone. Still, his eye dart side to side, on alert.
“Look.” The teen sighs, annoyance growing. “Whoever you are, just-”
From outside, thunder crashes. The building shakes with the sound. The lights flicker, blinking out across the store.
Great, they just lost power. It’s a fleeting thought. Except-
His eyes widen at the freezers, still humming. Their fluorescent white light eerily illuminate the aisle.
“Alright.” The boy mutters, taking a step back from the slippery floor. “Dude, just turn the light back on so I can clean this.”
Ominous whispers answer, the words lost to static. To his side, a shadow passes over the freezer’s light.
Tucker turns, fumbling in his pocket. “You know what, I don’t care about the lights!” Come on. Come on. Where is that wrist ray? “Just go!”
Another boom of thunder rattles the air. The PA system shrieks, a deafening dial tone. The boy grimaces, covering his ears. Again, a shadow flickers out the corner of his eye.
The sound cuts out. The teen jerkily swivels to face the flicker, pulling out a lipstick blaster. “Don’t make me-“
The freezer door behind him slams open, the force of the glass on his back sending him to the ground. The blaster goes off, the laser sailing through the air. Harmlessly, it pings off a bakery display. Meanwhile, Tucker’s momentum sends him sliding across the slick floor on his front.
“Dude, I just want to finish my shift and go home!” The teen complains, slamming into said mid-aisle shelf.
He rolls to his side, groaning. Those bruises are going to hurt in the morning.
Neon green streaks across his vision. Again, Tucker shoots. Again, the laser flies free. And still, it fails to impact.
In response, more glass doors fling open. Three shelves collapse, dozens of frozen meals crashing onto the floor.
“Not my Hungry Man too!” The teen cries.
Back pressed against the wooden bakery shelf, Tucker pushes himself up to sit. With frustration-gritted teeth, he holds the blaster in front of him.
Static pops, filling his ears as the hum of the freezer crescendos. The ghostly fluorescent light flickers bright and dimmer. But… no hint of shadow, no ghostly green.
Eyes still intently focused ahead, Tucker reaches for his PDA. “That’s it. I’m calling Danny.” He scowls, finger over the button. “He can deal with you-“
The PDA sparks, to the technogeek’s horror. He flings it away. At the same time, a screeching reverberates, like long skeletal fingers scratching styrofoam. A milk carton rises from the open fridge. The teen stares with narrowed eyes as the plastic warps. It explodes. Drops of white liquid hang in the air for a drawn out second, before flinging across the room.
Something in Tucker snaps. He’s cold, tired, and bruised. His head hurts. His shift is almost over. Enough is enough!
“Seriously!?” He shouts, frustration giving way to rage. “I have to clean all this up?!”
In one surprisingly fluid motion, he stands. The shadows hiss, two glowing green orbs flashing into sight. They linger, just a second. But it’s enough.
Tucker shoots the blaster. And it impacts.
A pained yelp sounds. The darkness solidifies, person-shaped between one blink and the next. The green orbs, eyes, widen.
A flash of light blinds Tucker. In the next second, the store’s lights are back. The freezer doors all slam closed.
And a boy in a red hoodie crumples, falling to his knees five feet in front of him.
“Wha- Tuck?” The boy blinks, looking up.
Tucker’s jaw drops. “Danny?”
“I was in bed. What? How did I get- Acho!” A sneeze interrupts, Danny whipping glowing green snot away with his sleeve. “How did I get here?”
Tucker stares, mind churning with surprise. Then… understanding. “You!” He points accusingly. “You did this!”
“What?” Dazedly, the half ghost looks over the destruction.
“And you were, what? Sleeping haunting?!” His hands lift, exacerbated. “This is gonna take an hour to clean up!” He marches forwards, grabbing the mop and bucket, and shoving the handle at his friend. “You’re doing it!”
“But…but…” Danny stutters, blinking disbelievingly at the mess
Still, Tucker stomps away. He doesn’t get paid enough for this.
Note: Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed.
I debated whether to end it with Tucker storming off or if I should show more of the aftermath but decided the quick ending worked best with the prompt I was going for. Rest assured though, like two minutes after storming off, Tucker comes back and feels really bad about losing his temper. There are mutual apologies as both clean up. Danny flies Tucker home (yay for not having to wait for the bus in the rain!). And the next day, they're laughing about the entire thing.
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Universal Tongue
Pairing: Shigadabi
Rating: Explicit
Summary: Commissioned by @norsetenko, Dabi has been the science officer on the ESV: Ingenuity for three years, their vessel currently undertaking a five-year-long exploratory surveying mission. He never tires of going to new planets and seeing new things, though it's usually from a distance in the initial sweeps. But the jungle on this one is too thick for their rovers or drones to breach, which means he has the rare opportunity to go planet-side himself to collect his samples. Unfortunately for him, a heavy storm rolls in fast, and his pod is trapped in the mud.
Fortunately for him, there is a cave system nearby to take shelter in. And very, very fortunately, the strange reptilian humanoid who lives there is open to negotiating sharing his shelter for the time being.
Contents: Absolutely inaccurate sci-fi bullshit, language barrier, voice kink, brief descriptions of violence, anal sex, oral sex, xenophilia, non-human genitalia, double penetration, organic lube, oral fixation, tail fucking, grinding, cumming untouched, multiple orgasms, wet and messy, size difference
Word Count: 19,435
The ESV: Ingenuity has been his home away from home for three years. Exovin Explorations became his home at eighteen when he decided that even being on the same planet as his father and his constant belittling was too close. He put up with it getting so much worse for the two years that it took for him to study, improve his health, and eventually apply and test to join the program. It had been a grueling process to train his body, heavily scarred and stapled together from when he'd gotten into one of the labs at the Endeavor Institute of Interstellar Advancements and had gotten caught up in a volatile reaction. But he put everything he had into doing it, and had made it. And the day he'd gotten his acceptance letter, Toya had packed his shit and left.
He went through his basic training, broke off into his specialized training, and at twenty, he had been assigned to the crew and the ship he would be acting as the Science Officer on. Burning the letter that had been addressed to him from his father trying to make him 'give up on a stupid dream' and go back home to at least be somewhat useful at his father's company, had earned him the callsign 'Dabi' and he had all but put 'Toya Todoroki' into the flames too. His official ID doesn't even say 'Toya' anymore, and of the names that he could have gotten saddled with, he's really not begrudging Dabi as his new one.
"You almost ready, Dabi?" Spinner's voice crackles through the earpiece that's already comfortably in place as he finishes making sure that his suit is fully sealed from head to toe, and his full case of equipment is in order. At least he didn't end up with a name because everyone watched him fuck up the calibrations for one of their machines to the point it spun so fast it nearly decapitated someone.
"Yeah, I'm doing final checks." He responds.
Compress's voice crackles through next. "The radar is showing a forming stormfront about ninety miles off."
"Are we postponing?" He doesn't really do a good job of keeping the slight disappointment out of his voice. The only reason he's getting to go down to the surface of this planet ahead of schedule is because the jungle biome that stretches across the southeastern quadrant of this continent has such dense vegetation that none of their rovers have been able to get in, and the canopy is too dense for their other sensors to scan. So far there haven't been any signs that the planet wouldn't be habitable to humans, but until every section is cleared, they're not supposed to go down to start cataloging anything for possible use. This mission got special clearance and Dabi always loves taking his first step onto a new planet, so he was excited to get to do so before everyone else.
"No, it's still a ways off and it seems pretty localized, just collect the early samples." There's a wry warning in that tone, because it's been three years and the rest of the team on Ingenuity knows that he can, and will, immediately get distracted by any alien flora or fauna that he sees that is especially different from anything he's ever seen before.
"... Am I still being dropped off in the lake?" Based on their scans, that's the only place that he can get dropped if they don't want him to have to hike into the jungle himself. He chooses not to comment on the warning as he ensures that he has his extra case of specimen jars just in case.
"Yes." But he can practically hear Compress rolling his eyes.
"Cool," He secures his gear and gets into the single-person pod and straps in. "Starting launch procedures."
It still takes another couple of minutes for his vessel to be lowered out of the belly of their ship. They've been holding just outside the gravitational pull of the upper atmosphere for the better part of two weeks now, and Dabi is excited to get to watch the descent out of the windshield as the pod slips lower and lower, into the cloud layer and then beneath it. The path that Compress programmed for his descent is smooth, though he does see the dark clouds and crackling lightning of the distant storm raging as he goes.
It only takes a few minutes for his pod to be half-submerged in the lake, and with just a few flicks of switches across his control panel, it is starting to putter to the nearest shore. When he gets to the shoreline, another switch is able to get the mechanical legs to unfold from the chassis and bring it just up to the tree line before he checks in again, "Landed without issues. I'll be disembarking to collect air, soil, and water samples." He says mostly for the official logs. Then he pushes his luck just a bit. "Should I set up a collection container to try and get a sample of the rain in case it gets here?"
Compress sighs. "We'll see. It's going to depend on how fast the storm moves. Be careful."
"You got it, Cap."
He disembarks with his specimen bag in tow and starts by collecting some of the rich earth that's on the bank of the lake. One of the best things that he's learned since he started training for this position is that life on other planets, no matter how strange it is, is also all so similar to one another. Planets with carbon-based lifeforms, which is Exovin's primary interest, are all made of the same building blocks no matter what else has changed. In the soil he takes from the bank, he sees that it's mixed with clay, and when he moves up a little closer to the tree line, he's greeted with with plants with pale woody trunks and tall splayed branches, though the leaves on this planet are extremely dark-- nearly black-- and fanned out in large bunches. The shape is different, the color darker than anything he'd ever seen on Earth, but he knows that he'll find cells in these leaves that aren't all that different to what he would find on Earth.
The little insects that he finds skittering around are all mostly clinging to those trees, steadily making their way upward to find a feast in those dark canopies, and the sounds of life filter in from every inch of the world around him. The buzzing of flying insects, the distant songs of birds that have chirps and whistles lower and longer than the ones that he's heard before, and the rustling of leaves above that make it abundantly clear that there are other creatures moving around in the foliage. He begins to take his samples, letting the pack on his hip begin to run a diagnostic on the makeup of the air. The gravity, according to their tests, is about one percent higher than the gravity on Earth, but it's not really noticeable as he moves around. Gathering the samples he was supposed to take is easy and quick, he's finished in twenty minutes before he asks for clearance to set up a way to collect water from the rain.
He tries to find a spot that hopefully won't be too intrusive and begins to set that up as well before Compress's voice crackles in through his speaker again, "That stormfront is starting to move and it's picking up speed. Finish up what you're doing and return to the ship."
"Got it." He doesn't dilly dally, though he wants to. He's the first human to ever set foot on this planet; he cannot be blamed for being curious and wanting to catalog literally everything he finds. They have another nine planets in their quadrant that they're supposed to finish doing these initial surveys on over the course of the next two years, and then they'll report all of their findings back to Exovin and return home for a year of rest and reevaluation. After that, they'll hopefully be given clearance to go to the planet that seemed the most likely to be able to sustain interplanetary resources and spend a few years there where he'll be able to explore and catalog new life to his heart's content. But for now, this little jaunt will have to do. He finishes up and starts to move back in the direction of his pod as he starts to hear the distant crackle of thunder.
He's just stepping out onto the bank as a cavalcade of movement starts to come from alongside it and Dabi half tucks back into the trees to hide from whatever creatures are trying to take cover from the oncoming storm. The beasts that come through have six legs, and he's guessing they stand nearly as tall as a giraffe, their eyes are set into the sides of their skulls and their bodies have long, irregular stripes of white and gray across them, the color darkening and growing more solid as it reaches their heads which must be up in the canopy most of the time. The herd of nearly a dozen of them are moving fast as they go, and for a minute, Dabi is caught up in the majesty of seeing a species that it's possible no one else has ever seen before.
And then they plow into his pod.
"Shit!"
"Dabi? What's happening? Your pod just sent a distress signal--" Spinner's voice comes through sharply worried, but Dabi is just wincing as he watches the herd of megafauna trample his pod into the thick clay at the bank of the lake. He doesn't dare try to shoot them or set off an alert out of fear of starting a full stampede, and instead resigns himself to watching the metallic structure sink a third of its body into the earth. The pods are sturdy machines and he flicks a heads up display to switch to a live feed to show the rest of the crew on the Ingenuity what's happening.
"Oh dear." Compress's voice sounds as shocked as Dabi feels, but then he starts to troubleshoot as the herd moves on and Dabi chances slipping back across the freshly trodden earth to get a look at his poor pod. "Spinner, are any systems reporting significant damage?"
"No, it looks like everything is still intact, but two of the legs are wedged into its body like this. I might be able to remotely activate the third to try and dig it out, but I'm not sure."
Dabi moves around to the side of the pod that may be able to help-- "The foot is underground on this side too." He warns before the other can activate it and make the situation worse. "I'll dig out this side and we'll go from there?"
"You need to get inside for now," Compress tells him. "The storm is moving fast, the winds are charting at category four."
"I can't get in," the pod would be the safest place to take shelter, "The hatch is buried--" he takes out one of the smaller drones that he has in his kit and launches it, sending it to scan between the trees and the rest of the area, looking for shelter for him. His readout is more simplistic than the ones they should be getting back on the ship and in a matter of minutes, he's seeing a strange blob of a structure about half a mile from the lake. "Is that a mountain range or a cave system?"
"Both," Compress tells him. "It's the only enclosed structure within walking distance-- Do you think you can make it there?"
Thunder rolls through the sky and Dabi's chilled just from how that noise has silenced the insect and birdsong. "Yeah, moving now." He has supplies to last him a week in his pack, just in case of something like this, and he knows how to set up for basic survival in case of situations like this, he'll be fine. He starts to make his way through the jungle again, having to turn on his headlamp even though he hates making himself a beacon for predators. He doesn't have a choice if he doesn't want to make this whole situation even worse by breaking an ankle tripping on a root.
Dabi moves as quickly as he's able to through the foliage, but it still takes him ten minutes to find the cave system he's being guided to, and by that time, the rain has already started to fall thick and heavy. He ducks inside of the opening, large enough that he's got at least another six feet before hitting the ceiling, and calls his little drone back to him from where it must have been scanning the full system. The little bot takes a few minutes to come back as he checks in with the others on the ship.
"I'm here, looks like it's high enough that hopefully it won't end up flooded with the rain."
"Alright, good, it looks like there might be some thermal vents deeper down, so make sure to run a full air quality test before you remove your helmet-- if you need to."
"Got it." He moves a few yards deeper into the cave and then does get out his on-site testing kit and starts to test the air quality and the soil and water samples he'd gotten from near the lake. If rainfall like this is common, then those samples should show him if there's anything particularly dangerous for him if he's exposed.
It takes about twenty minutes for him to determine that the air is breathable and that the rainfall must be something truly torrential during these storms from the minerals he finds that have been deposited in the water through the erosion of stone. But it's not dangerous in it of itself. This is a perfectly habitable planet for humans and at least twenty three of the seventy eight cataloged species who work with Exovin. Spinner, a gecko-like humanoid called a Varqix, would actually love this part of the planet based on the temperature and humidity levels.
Dabi takes off his helmet and cuts off his oxygen tanks to ensure that he doesn't waste what he has, just in case, as he sends that information back up to the ship. He settles in to watch the storm and run any other tests that he can on what he's gathered so far. He doesn't know how long this will last, but at the very least he can be productive while it's going.
///
It's been about two hours with the sky still a riot of activity drenching the planet below, when Dabi's proximity scanners built into his suit start to beep. He glances up at the mouth of the cave, turning on the flashlight built into his wrist to see if there is a creature that calls this place home that he needs to be mindful of. But there's nothing at the entrance. He reluctantly turns to the deeper darkness of the cave and shines his light there, but he doesn't see anything coming from that direction either. The proximity alarm goes off more insistently, and Dabi hates every atom in the universe that has led him to this point as he preemptively brings a hand slowly and shakily to cover his mouth before he takes a timid breath and looks up towards the cavern ceiling.
The hand was a good call, because even anticipating something being there, does not let him fully trap the scream that tries to tear out of his throat as that ring of light falls over the edge of the creature watching him from the ceiling. The alien is clinging to the rock, its skin as pale as the tree bark outside, and easily ten feet tall, and even longer than that as he sees its long serpentine tail coiling around one of his legs and across the irregular cragginess of the cavern. Its head is swiveled around to look down at him, solid red eyes from lid-to-lid save for the dark spot of his pupils. It's definitely a reptilian species, given the more slitted nostrils that are part of his nose and the longer slits that extend his mouth past the place it should naturally close at the corners. The creature opens its mouth and puts two rows of wickedly sharp teeth and that exaggeratedly large mouth on display in a frankly terrifying show, but Dabi has training for this.
He fumbles to push the button on the neck of his suit, and before the creature can drop down to hurt him. The speaker in his suit crackles to life and it starts to chirp out different ways of saying 'safe' in as many languages as Exovin has been able to register throughout the decades of interstellar travel. It takes about nine of them before they hit one that has the creature tilting its head and clicking back lowly. His translator locks onto those sounds and the earpiece he's wearing hums back to life.
"What are you doing in my den?" The speaker translates the low growls and chuffs that make up this creature's language and the sound that his translator chooses to use is rude, frankly. The creature was already terrifying as it lowers itself from the ceiling. His body is mostly humanoid and densely muscled, his hands and feet ending with four digits on each, though his hands have one finger that is longer than the rest that seems armored, all of the appendages having wicked talons on them. Long white hair spills across the creature's scalp, reaching across its face, over its shoulders, and halfway down its back. Its long tail slithers languidly across the ground towards Dabi's things and he does his very best not to flinch as his translator takes in the language sample it's received and extrapolates a bit more to work off of from the language that the creature seemed to recognize.
"I'm sorry to intrude," he starts carefully. The creature tilts its head to the side slightly as his translator parrots the words back in its own attempts at this guttural language, though it doesn’t make his voice as deep as the speaker made the creature’s. "I got caught in the rain and was looking for somewhere safe to stay. I don't mean you any harm."
The creature listens, and then responds, "Do you feel safe here, little one?"
Dabi does his best not to bristle, not wanting to potentially get himself into any more trouble. "From the weather? Very."
It tilts its head to the other side, its tail swishing languidly across the ground as it looks down at him. "You don't belong here." Dabi is about to ask for clarification, but the creature goes on, "The sky egg, on the bank, that is yours, yes?"
There's an immediate relief from that. At the very least, if the creature knows that it's possible for other creatures to come from their sky, he isn't going to have to handle first contact with a species that's going to be convinced he's a god or demon, or something else absurd. "Yes, I was visiting to learn about this planet," he gestures at his kit and the little vials of soil and cuttings of plants he was trying to process, "When a herd of six-legged tall creatures with long necks knocked it into the mud." He explains carefully. The translator will get better the more they speak and the more information it takes in from the other creature.
"Aindrul," The creature tells him, and the translator tries to run that species name through their databases, but it comes up blank. It really was a new species then.
"Aindrul," Dabi agrees. "I can't leave until I can dig out part of my ship." He explains. "And I can't start to dig until the storm stops. I was hoping that I could stay here until the rain stopped? Then I'll go on my way. I'll do my best to stay out of your way." He will do his best to not annoy the creature with too many questions, though he has a million. Their scans of the other parts of this planet didn't show any signs of civilizations, which must mean that if this is the dominant species on the planet, then this species must not be very social, to the point where any information about culture that Dabi can learn will be especially interesting. It's always fascinating to hear about the cultural practices of species that are so completely different from humans.
"...That is a long time to linger, little one."
Dabi frowns slightly, "Does the rain on your planet last a long time?"
The creature frowns at him in return. "This is the storm of the tri-moon." He explains like Dabi is a child who should know better. "The rain will fall until the three moons are high over the lake."
Dabi has to run some calculations in his head based on what Magne told him. She's their navigator and focused astrologist. This planet has four moons, none anywhere near the size of Earth's, with mostly two being visible at a time depending on what phase all four of them are in. Three can happen, but it would have to be the next time that they lined up to all not be waxing at the same. He tries to remember more specifics, but it wasn't his area and he was definitely more focused on and excited about the plant and animal life to have been as interested in the moons. "How long is that?"
"A month, little one."
Dabi blanches and the creature chitters at him. The translator picks up on the sound, but just informs him that it means 'sympathy, comfort' when his distress is so apparent to the creature. The planet rotates its sun a little faster than Earth does, the days are a little shorter too, but not by very much. Enough that a month here is three weeks of his time. Three weeks. Oh shit. "I, uh--"
The creature chuffs at him again and then turns to start to go deeper into the cave, "You may stay so long as you do not get in my way, little one. But when the rain clears, you will leave, or my hospitality will end in a far less pleasant manner."
His translator beeps to alert him that he was threatened, but the words and the slight growl to them was more than blatant enough for Dabi to pick up on that on his own, thank you very much. "Right, thank you!" He calls after the creature as he disappears into the dark.
Dabi sinks back down to the cavern floor and pulls his helmet back on, calling back to the crew. Oh he is so beyond fucked.
///
No one is happy to find out how long he's going to be stuck planet-side. It throws a wrench in their schedule, of course, requires a bunch of reports from Compress, and will definitely make him have to do a shit ton too when he gets back to the ship, but that's the long-term fuckery he has to deal with. In the short-term, Dabi is in a tight spot as far as rations go. He has a water bottle that is made to filter out any potential parasites, bacteria, toxins, and the like from just about anything he puts into it, and the rain itself is already, according to his tests, not too different from rain water on Earth, so he feels pretty safe about that. but he isn't as certain about food. It's standard practice for anyone on an away mission to take a week of rations with them, and he has that. He can stretch that as much as he can, but it won't be pleasant. What becomes far more pressing is that, as he gives these updates to the crew and they try to figure out what his next steps are, Dabi starts to notice that the temperature is rapidly decreasing.
An aerial scan proves he's not insane about that, and the reason he's noticing it even in his thermal suit, is because it's dropped twenty degrees since the rain started two hours ago. The cloud cover is apparently so thick that any light and heat from the planet's sun is being dispersed in the upper layers of the cloud cover, leading to the ground cooling rapidly. Dabi is going to be in a rough spot if it gets too much colder at night even with the supplies he has.
He talks to the rest of the crew for a few more minutes, but it's ultimately decided that he's probably best off going and talking to the reptilian alien again to see if it could tell him anything about surviving these harsh conditions. Dabi hesitantly starts to move deeper into the cavern and calls out, "Excuse me?"
His voice, and the translator's approximation of it in the new language rings out around him, as he moves deeper, and it only takes until he's gone maybe thirty feet before he starts to feel more warmth in the air. Their scans didn't say this structure was connected to a volcano or anything like that, but Compress did mention there were other geothermal vents somewhere within the system.
"What is it, little one?" The voice comes from higher than he's expecting as he finds himself stepping into a wider cavern, an oblong chamber that seems to have a hole in the ceiling that's been dug out at an angle so that water can drain into what appears to be a carved pool in the floor. He turns to the left and sees that the creature has dug out a section of the rock too, about five feet up from the floor, and seems to have made it into a burrow. It's filled with leaves and other foliage from outside and the alien had been tucked into it, but now is poking its head out from the opening to watch him intently.
"My name is Dabi," he tells the creature. "Do you have a name?"
The creature waits for the words to be translated and then responds, his voice a low rumble that buzzes through Dabi's skull, "Tomura Shigaraki."
Which gives Dabi a little more information about his species than he expected. "You have a clan name? Do you have a family?"
"No. What do you need, little one?"
"I'm sorry," He waits for the translator to repeat that, not wanting to offend the creature with his misspoken words. "... I wasn't prepared to be trapped through this storm. I wanted to know if there's any time when the rain lets up? I was hoping I could try to gather some supplies."
"There are short lulls." The creature tells him. "Do you have enough to wait a few days for that? If so, I will take you hunting with me then."
Relief goes through him, "I'll be good for a few days. Thank you, I really appreciate your hospitality... Shigaraki?"
"Tomura."
"Tomura." He hesitates but still asks, "You told me before about the aindrul, I'm a human, what is your species called?"
"Kir." As soon as the species is said, his equipment starts to run it through the database, but like the aindrul, this one turns up nothing.
"Thank you. Humans... tend to like company. We like to talk to each other and spend time together when we're cohabitating with other species. I can do my best to make myself scarce if that's something you want, but if you're open to it, I'd like to know you more while I spend time in your den."
The kir listens to the translator make his language understandable again and then considers him, its tail moving languidly where it's hanging out of its burrow, long enough that it's dragging against the cavern floor. "We can talk, little one, but not now. I spent the day preparing for the storm and I wish to sleep."
"Oh! Okay," Dabi straightens, "I'm sorry if I woke you."
"Humans apologize a lot." The kir remarks, pulling its tail up into the burrow and shifting so that the bulk of the pale body is hidden.
"Can I ask one more question before you go to sleep?"
"Hmm?"
"What sex are you?"
"...Are you looking for a mate, little one?" There's amusement in the deep growl of the creature's voice as it lifts its head to half turn back to him and pin him under that strange red-eyed stare.
He hopes his burns hide the heat that goes to his face, "No, I just wanted to know what pronouns to use." Pronouns are hard across species, some not having any concept of them at all, and others having dozens with the punishment for getting them wrong being execution. But he would like to know so that he can report back to the others with as much detail about the kir as possible. That should help to make identifying this species against their database, if it's been entered under a different name, a little easier. "I'm male, I use he/him."
"As am I, you may use the same for me, little boy."
"I'm an adult," he stresses even as he starts to move back towards the cavern entrance so that the kir can sleep.
"I suppose that means you won't get any bigger, what a pity for you. A little one forever." And Dabi cannot believe he's barely talked to this creature for ten minutes and he's being called short and a baby in one fell swoop. But the kir is amused instead of annoyed with him, and given the wicked claws and sharp teeth that he has, Dabi would rather be a source of amusement than a source of nourishment.
Dabi leaves his main chamber and goes back down the long tunnel to the entrance, the air getting colder and colder again as he does. He is quiet as he packs his equipment back into his kit and brings it with him this time as he returns, taking out the small thin thermal blanket that is in his pack of supplies and trying to curl up as comfortably as he can on the hard rock floor. He sends a written report of the conditions, what he's learned about the kir, and then settles in as he listens to the storm rage in the distance and tries his best to fall asleep on the hard ground.
Oh, this is going to be a hell of a time for the next three weeks.
///
Dabi wakes, with something poking at his shoulder what feels like five minutes later, and he immediately palms the trigger in his suit that will electrify the outer layer to make whatever's touching him drop him if it proves to be hostile. Tomura sees his eyes open, and he takes hold of Dabi's arm, pulling him off of the floor.
"Wha--"
"Your teeth are chattering so loudly you're keeping me up." The alien pulls him, blanket and all back into the cavern and brings him over to his burrow. Before Dabi can say anything else, his tail coils around his waist in two thick wraps that covers him from sternum to the tops of his thighs. And when he's held tight by his tail, Tomura lets go of his arm so that he can use his claws to climb back up into his bed, pulling Dabi up with him.
"Wait--"
The kir chitters at him, and his translator doesn't have a word for the sound, so it simply tells him 'exasperated'. He pulls Dabi into the burrow, and even with the larger creature inside with him, it is big enough for both of them, though the kir curls his body and tail around him, tucking his blanket up tight between them too. He looks over Dabi, who is still a horrible cocktail of bewildered and humiliated, and then he tucks his head into his arms and closes his eyes, a very low purring starting to hum through his body. It's so low that it's a mild hum, but so deep that it rumbled through the kir's entire body and into Dabi's too. His translator tells him 'soothing, contentment' and Dabi really does mean to protest. But the burrow is filled with layers of soft material, grasses, leaves, and a strange shredded pale fluff like the head of a dandelion, which is much softer and warmer than the stone he was laying on before. Maybe the kir can be a communal species and aren't for some reason during the storm.
This alien clearly feels empathy and has gone out of his way to express kindness, no matter how pushy that ended up being. That's a good sign, he reminds himself as he tries to relax against where his back is resting against the creature's long tail. There are plenty of creatures in the wide universe who don't feel or express those sentiments at all, regardless of species. He's a lot better off if he's trapped on a planet where this one would see his discomfort and choose to help him instead of leaving him to suffer or killing him for the inconvenience.
He settles in and closes his eyes, listening to the creature purr and their deep even breaths echoing softly in the burrow.
///
The next morning he finds the kir has already slipped out of his burrow by the time he's woken, and isn't in the cavern where he can see him, and Dabi does ensure that he checks the ceiling immediately as well. He checks in with the others first,
"Good morning,"
"Morning sunshine!" Magne answers back. She and Twice should have taken over for Compress and Spinner in the past two or so hours, and she still sounds fresh and cheerful. "How are things planet-side? How's your big, scaly roommate?"
"It sounds like it's still raining," he tells her, glad that his suit has enough lightly glowing element for him to see by even without using his full flashlight. "And he's nice. Any luck looking up his species?"
"'Kir' didn't trigger any of our systems," she tells him apologetically, "but if you can get him to hold still for a scan or get a sample from him, we'll run it again."
"I'll see if he's up for that." But probably not right now. The creature is already putting up with a lot from him. He doesn't want to push his luck and outstay his welcome when he apparently has weeks left of this. "Any sign of the storm letting up from there?"
"Not that we can tell. The winds have held at forty miles per hour for the past few hours, but it hasn't stopped thunder storming. Sorry, firecracker."
"Tomura said he'd take me with him to get supplies," he tells her instead. They had no idea that this storm would be a persistent problem, and there was no way they could have predicted that his pod was going to get smushed into the ground by the aindrul. There's no reason to linger on it, especially when, at the moment, there doesn't appear to be any significant and immediate threat to his life. "He also has definitely seen a ship and stuff before, because he's not really confused about it. Didn't Proximacard Multinational also do a brief tour of this sector? Any chance that we can send a request to them to try and find out if they logged the kir?"
"I'll reach out, but it'll probably take a week or so to hear anything."
"Not like I'm going anywhere."
"I guess we can't abandon you there." She contemplates with a sigh. "You're the only one who gets excited about soil nitrates."
"They're important!"
"You have enough battery for long-range calls for two weeks, so we should start to ration your battery." She says, quickly deflecting from the rant he's definitely gone on before. He always had the doubt in the back of his mind that he would never see another world, so every small piece of these other planets he's gotten to explore has excited him. Even after years of it, every part of each world is a new, delightful mystery to unravel and observe.
They talk for a few more minutes, deciding on stretching it to the four weeks they hope they'll need by only having him call in once every two days, Ingenuity time, and only for five minutes unless there's been a significant development. The only other calls he'll make are for emergencies. They'll keep an eye on the storm and let him know if the cloud cover thins enough and the lightning pauses long enough for him to leave before the tri-moons are in the sky. When they've done that, the call ends to start preserving his battery and Dabi carefully moves to the edge of the burrow and lowers himself down to the floor. That's not too difficult to do, though it was a little unnerving to back out of the opening and into the barely-lit cave without being able to see it, but he gets onto the ground without any trouble. He leaves his blanket up there. He doesn't know if it's going to get warmer again or if it will stay so chilled throughout the rest of the storm, but if it stays cold, he'll probably need to sleep there with the kir until he's able to leave.
He moves out of the chamber to go back to his kit and he finds Tomura sitting on the floor, his tail coiled around his legs, as he looks at all of his little specimen jars and tools. His kit is three interconnected cases, one with tools to gather his samples, one to put his electronic equipment, and one with his supplies, like sample jars. His planet-side standard pack is also there and has been opened as well.
Tomura has laid out everything from each of the packs in neat, clean rows that seem to correspond with which pouch or pocket he'd taken them out of.
"Hmm, you know, I would have been happy to show you my things if you'd asked." It's not even really an admonishment. He doesn't know this creature, he doesn't know his customs, he's not about to tell him that to humans it was inappropriate for him to touch his things without asking.
"You sleep for a long time, I will put them back when I'm finished." The creature picks up one of his ration packs. "This is... food?" He hasn't opened any of them as best as Dabi can tell, so he thinks that the kir must have just smelled the food through it.
Dabi sits down with him on the cavern floor. "Yeah, I need about one more week's worth of food to last through the storm without discomfort." He won't starve, that's not going to be an issue unless things get really, really fucked, as far as the storm and his departure plan go.
Tomura gently crinkles the package that looks tiny in his hand, especially with his one long armored talon. "...Does your food have to be... dry?"
"No, our rations are dried so that they last longer without going bad. I can eat food with moisture in it."
Tomura hums and puts the package back down on the neat pile of them. Then he turns his attention to the cuttings and other samples he'd taken the day before. "What are you doing with these?"
"I'm a scientist. The group I work for has people, like me, go to different planets to try to learn more about them. I came here to take a few small samples so that I could bring them back to the bigger ship and see what they're like and how they grow."
Tomura hums and picks up one of the jars with a cutting of a small plant he had found growing at the base of the trees. "Be careful with this one. When it's mature, it releases a cloud of burning dust."
Well. He's glad to have found that out now rather than later and Dabi picks up the little tablet that Tomura's already laid out and scans the lid of the jar and makes a note about that. "Can you tell me about the others?"
The tip of Tomura's tail lifts from its coil and swishes across the floor slowly and Dabi has hung out with enough cats to know that's a sign of aggravation, though he's not sure if it's something reptiles do as well. Though he does purr. Maybe he's got a little cat in him too, spiritually. "Why does your group want to learn about my planet?"
Well, guess he does have to do this part of the pitch, though it's really his least favorite thing to have to try and make sound appealing. "We want to find planets that are safe to explore and learn more about. Not just humans, like me, but lots of different species who want to see new worlds. My crew just visits for a very short amount of time to find out what other species could come here for longer research studies. Sometimes the planets we visit only have a little plant life and some wild animals, but no people. When we find people already living on a planet, that other team will visit and talk to them to see if they can be allowed to study there." He explains carefully and then waits for the translator to do its work. After another beat he adds, "Do your people have a government that the other crew can contact?"
"We live alone, unless a mother is rearing her young, but a group could be assembled to meet these other people." Tomura doesn't say anything else about that topic and instead picks up one of his laser cutters that's no bigger than a pen. "Is this a weapon?"
"I guess it could be, but I use it to take samples of things that I can't get with my clippers," he points to those and then puts his hand out for the laser cutter. Tomura hands it over without protest and Dabi picks up a loose rock from the ground, sets it in an empty space between them and turns on the cutter. He still can't hold his hand still enough to get a perfectly sliced line, given the flare of the laser can't cut anything more than three inches from it, and even touching the rock, Dabi cannot draw a straight line to save his life, but Tomura still chitters when the stone splits in half as Dabi finishes. 'Interest' his translator tells him. Dabi puts the laser back into the row Tomura had it in.
"Do you have the means to hunt?"
"Not really," he admits. "Humans don't usually have to hunt, and I'm a scientist," he says again, "I'm not normally supposed to hurt the plants or animals I find on a planet."
Tomura considers that. "You should stay put then, little one. I'll bring back more food."
His face burns but he doesn't protest. He doesn't know what other kinds of creatures call this jungle home, and he has no idea if he'd be able to keep up with Tomura, especially if he crawls through the trees the way he's so easily able to scale the cavern walls. "I'm really sorry about causing you so much trouble. Thank you so much for everything you're doing to help me. Your hospitality is greatly appreciated." He hopes that the mechanical chitters and chirps that the creature hears are able to express that sentiment clearly. Things would be much worse for him if he was alone, sitting here watching the rain fall and talking to the crew, sure that it would let up soon.
Tomura listens to the clicks and his head tilts to the side slightly, still pinning him under those strange red eyes. "You're welcome, Dabi. You're a... curiosity. It's worth a few small inconveniences to sate that." The kir starts to put back the items in his kit, and yeah, they were laid out so he's able to pack them back inside exactly as they were. Dabi is guessing that if he didn't wake up, he wouldn't have ever even known that Tomura was in his stuff. "Do you eat meat?"
"I can, plants too, but I'll probably have to cook them, my teeth aren't as sharp as yours." He just means for it to be an easy explanation, not really wanting to see if this creature knows about the risk of germs and parasites that could be in the meat of the other animals he hunts, but Dabi finds himself stiffening suddenly when a large hand shifts to his face.
The kir's skin is cool against his own and, Dabi finds, is covered in fine scales along the back , the palm tough, smooth skin. his long taloned finger rests against the side of his neck, as his two others hook under his chin and his thumb moves to his lips. He pulls gently on his bottom one. Tomura makes him bare his teeth and then clicks softly in the back of his throat.
"Much blunter." Dabi's entire face goes hot as he pushes his large finger between his teeth, testing his canines lightly against his skin. Holy fuck. his thumb is the size of three of his own fingers and Dabi really doesn't even know where to start with the inappropriateness of this touch, but he really doesn't want to examine it either because then he might have to worry about the inappropriateness of the flickering warmth that goes through him at being manhandled so easily by this creature. "It's a wonder you can chew anything at all." He takes his finger out of his mouth and lets go of him and Dabi has to grapple for a second with that misplaced heat. Fuck, yeah it's been years since someone put something in his mouth like that, but he really doesn't need his body misbehaving like that. "Wait here, I'll bring back enough for you to eat." He instructs.
Before he leaves though, he shows Dabi around the other parts of the cave system. A bit deeper in, there is a large pool that is being filled from three vents dug into the ceiling to let the rain water flow into it, creating a pseudo shower and bathing area, that Dabi is happy to be shown, because that means he will at least be able to be clean and clean the clothes beneath his suit while he's here as well. He shows him two other paths, one that goes deeper into the mountain that they can retreat to in case of flooding, and the other as a secondary exit in case the first is not viable for any reason. Then the kir leaves him to his own devices and goes out into the storm. Dabi watches him go, but with his coloration and the rain so thick and heavy, he loses sight of the alien in a matter of seconds as he takes off into the trees.
///
Dabi's been alone for a few hours. The cave, even though the sky is still black save for the flashes of lightning splitting the sky, has warmed up significantly since last night, and he thinks that means he'll at least be safe during the day to take off his suit and just wear around his standard issue black thermal sweats and gray t-shirt for a while. He goes and tests the water in both chambers to see if it will be safe, bringing a small electric lantern with him. This, at least, has enough battery to last for months at a time given the simplicity of the device, and it makes it so much easier for him to see by. There are no notable parasites or dangerous contaminants in either of the pools, so Dabi does fill up his water bottle and let those filters take care of any additional microbial contaminants. He also goes back to the creature's bed and finds a few little foot holds in the wall and uses those to step up high enough he can actually look into the bed with the lantern. The cavern he's carved out for himself in the wall is an oblong shape with a domed ceiling that is at least nine feet deep and about four and a half feet tall at the highest point of the ceiling. It's been stuffed full of leaves and dried grasses like he'd noted before, but he is more interested in the white papery stuff. He takes a little sample of that out, putting that in the jar he has, and then reaching to touch it without his gloves. It feels soft and papery, and he figures the shreds of this must be what gives the rest of the bedding its fluff.
He goes back to his equipment and sits down, beginning to go through his samples one-by-one, and doing whatever field tests he can with what he has on hand, writing everything down as neatly as possible in an actual notebook by hand. At least this way he'll be able to photograph these pages and send his work back to base during his next check-in to save power. And he waits.
///
It's starting to get chilly again and he's gotten back into his suit when Tomura comes back into the cave. He hears the change of the cadence of the falling rain and gets to his feet, going to greet him at the mouth only to find himself gaping as he sees the large predator dragging an even larger animal behind in his tail. His arms are full of round, nearly bowling ball sized fruits, and he's completely drenched, not that that's a surprise, with his long hair plastered to his face and down his back.
"Little one," he greets, but moves past him, inclining his head to get Dabi to follow, which he does, a good yard and a half behind him as he tries to take in what he can of the beast that the other killed. This creature also has the pale coloring that the other animals on this planet have had with the majority of its body being white, and pale shades of gray, in splotches and stripes, but the back and head of this creature is dark like the canopy above, the color split like that of a shark. It is a quadrupedal creature that he guesses must live among the higher tree branches because its feet and hands are structured the same, like with monkeys and chimps on Earth. It also is scaled rather than furry though, and its corpse is bleeding sluggishly as it's dragged deeper into the cave from the wounds in its neck and side that look like they're from Tomura's teeth and claws, its head rotated at a sharply unnatural angle that Dabi guesses is what actually killed it.
They move into the main cavern and Tomura drops the beast from his tail and then uses that and his arms to set down and stack the bulbous fruits. Dabi hadn't turned off his lantern when he heard him approaching, and Tomura blinks at the light, but doesn't comment on it. The fruit are the deep red of an apple, though the color is almost uncomfortably uniform across all of them. He expects fruit to have variation in it, and the stunning lack of change aside from a slight difference in size is very strange.
"Do your tests, find what you can eat. I will take whatever you cannot."
"Thank you." He really doesn't have better words to express his gratitude for the other creature's hospitality, so he tries to at least just be fast about it.
Dabi goes and gets his kit and uses his tools to take samples from the beast. He does test the meat, and over the course of the next hour he determines that the meat is edible, and will remain so after it's been cooked. He's glad that he did get survival training though, because as he carefully butchers a section of the large carcass, he feels Tomura watching him from his burrow. He hopes he doesn't look too inept. He has a small flash cooker with him, only big enough to contain 20oz of whatever he puts in it at a time, but it can also work as a dehydrator, and Dabi determines how much meat he'll need to stretch his rations to make it a full month, just in case something else goes wrong.
He takes what he needs and it's barely a quarter of the meat on one side of the creature's body, then he moves off to the side so that he can work on cutting it into strips and making it into jerky.
"Little one, surely that isn't enough."
"I'm little," he says, with some amusement when the creature seems to be admonishing him. "And I don't hunt, I don't need as much energy as you do."
He huffs softly, but does move over to the carcass himself and begins to take his meal. Dabi watches between changing out strips of meat in the small chamber. Tomura's mouth is large, despite how it looks when he's just talking, and he uses the way his jaw can seemingly unhinge to take large bites out of the creature's body, focusing on the areas that are covered in the most muscle tissue. The two rows of teeth carve deep grooves out of the creature and, like Spinner, he doesn't really chew his food, just making sure the chunks he takes in are manageable and then swallowing them down. He also can, apparently, eat bone, though he does tend to break open the bigger ones first to lick out the marrow with a long forked tongue. It's a little gross to watch, but no different in concept to any wild predator taking a meal, and by the time Dabi has finished dehydrating most of the meat and flash cooking the strip that he is going to eat fresh tonight, the kir has consumed half of the corpse. He purrs and the translator tells Dabi 'content', though he could have guessed that on his own.
When he finishes with the carcass, Tomura takes the last of his kill out of the cave again, but he takes it through the other tunnel that he showed Dabi earlier and then doesn't come back immediately. Dabi takes that opportunity to have a bite of the meat himself. It has a toughness and a gaminess that Dabi has heard is common in wild game, and has a deeper umami flavor than beef alone usually does. It's definitely palatable and Dabi is certain that if it was prepared with even a bit of salt, it would be an easy staple meat and livestock on this planet if it were ever colonized. He is eating when Tomura comes back after about ten minutes, the blood and gore cleaned from his skin completely.
He sees Dabi is eating and nods to himself before going over to the fruits. He uses his long index finger to break open a small part of the shell, and given the force he uses for it, and the way that the accompanying crack sounds as it echoes around the room with them, has him guessing they're as hard as a coconut at least. The coloration has also started to wash out slightly, getting less vibrant as Tomura puts the fruit back on the ground and kicks it towards the pool that is still filling with rain water. It rolls easily across the stone until it splashes into the little pool and then Dabi jumps out of his skin as it explodes with a loud pop, spraying a foot around the puddle with displaced water.
Tomura lets out a hissy little chitter. 'Laughter, mockery'. Dabi glares at him, but the kir just chirps in reply before going over to the shallow pool and fishing out the fruit with his tail. It's cracked nearly all the way in half now, and the color of the outer skin is that vibrant rich red again. The inner flesh looks to be mostly a papery, stringy pulp, but he tears that away and pushes it to the side before extracting a fist-size mass of paler pinkish flesh that's dripping with a semi-translucent fluid before coming to sit down beside him. He offers him half of the flesh and Dabi takes it and puts a small pinch of the sticky flesh into his scanner. It takes a minute for it to work and firstly determine that it's not poisonous. Then it begins to break down the nutritional components inside of it.
After another few minutes it beeps again and Dabi has to read the output twice to make certain that it's correct. The fruit is rich in vitamin C and D, with nearly double the amount of protein as guava, and it has more than ten percent of Ladreynyx per ounce. Holy fuck. Ladreynyx is one of the most sought-after substances in the wider known universe. It tends to occur on planets that at one point had a higher concentration of radiation, and early lifeforms seemed to develop this secretion to help counteract that and neutralize the negative effects of the radiation, healing their own cells and insolating them from the worst parts of it, so that they could thrive. It's such a hard to find substance, and one that medical professionals want in abundance so that they can test out how much good it can do helping to treat and prevent cancer and other forms of radiation sickness. All of which are becoming more common given how many people are going off-planet and getting exposed to the radiation of different planets and their atmospheres.
"What's this fruit called?" He asks as he brings a small bit of it to his lips. Ladreynyx isn't poisonous unprocessed, but he is a bit concerned that it may be bitter and medicinal. The flesh has the texture of slightly unripe mango, and a sharp citric flavor that is bright on his tongue, but as he chews it mellows into a softer sweetness that reminds him of dango.
"Uzut, they can only be harvested during the rain." Tomura explains, seeming satisfied with Dabi eating the flesh. "They wither quickly once they've been removed from the water and the inside becomes foul when the skin ashens."
"And they explode?"
"Only when their shell is compromised in water. But it is a faster way of getting to the pits. It kills the fish that try to eat them."
Dabi takes another bite of the flesh and then asks, "And what kind of creature was that?" There is some hesitation in the question. Some species find constant questions unpleasant, some find them outright rude, and he really doesn't want to piss off his host.
Tomura doesn't get aggravated though. He answers any question Dabi asks him and asks his own in turn as the night gets colder and the thunder keeps booming outside. And they spend their evening talking about anything and everything that either of them can think of.
///
They spend the next two days together, with Dabi sleeping in the creature's bed with him against the chill, and the kir being as amused and interested in learning about humans as Dabi is about learning as much as he can about this planet. Being on a surveying crew, he doesn't usually get to become so focused on the worlds they visit. Usually, he only gets to take a passing interest, but this, for as unorthodox and unforeseen the circumstances may be, is giving him the opportunity to learn as much as he can about this planet as possible.
They're sitting together on the floor of the main chamber, Tomura curled around him, his tail easily fully encircling him, though not touching, just close so that he can watch as Dabi lays out his samples in order of what he wrote about in his notebook so that he can send his pictures back to base. He's learned that Tomura can change from being an endotherm to an exotherm, mostly at will, and during the day he tends to be endothermic and delights in having Dabi's much hotter body as a way to soak up some extra warmth when he can. When everything is all ready, Dabi turns his communicator back on and turns off his translator. He doesn't necessarily want the other creature to hear everything that he's saying, especially if they've turned up something interesting about the kir from past expeditions.
On the hour, the connection opens up and Dabi immediately starts to take and transmit the pictures of his notes before Compress even opens his mouth.
"Dabi--" he pauses in his greeting as he starts to see them coming through. "I take it you're doing fine then?"
"Yeah, I'm good. Tomura has been super helpful and very nice." And the creature immediately pokes his head up from it resting on the circle of his arms when he hears his name and enters the frame slightly. He clicks at the screen and Compress smiles at the other creature.
"That's good." And they launch into the rest of their check-in. No news yet from Proximacard and the storm is as thick as ever from their scans, but other than that, there hasn't been too much disturbance on their end either. They filed the paperwork to deal with the sudden delay in their schedule, and they may be rerouted to dock at the nearest space station afterwards so he can get a proper check-up and they can restock on the supplies they're going to be down because of the delay, but it doesn't sound like they're in any trouble over it so far.
Dabi hopes they'll be in even less of it when he uploads his notes about the Uzut and their abundance of Ladreynyx.
///
The storm rages on outside and time slips by. By the end of the first week, Dabi feels gross enough that he needs to bathe and preferably clean his clothes as well. The only thing that keeps him from it initially, is that it's dark and still fairly cool in the cave even during the day, and he's worried that he won't be able to get them dry again. He voiced the concern to Tomura and the kir considered for a little while before he disappeared for a few hours. Then he'd come back with a few strange mud-covered bulbs like that of a tulip, that were as long as Dabi's forearm. Tomura used his claws to tear them open and inside had been a fibrous tissue that Dabi had been able to light with his laser tool, creating a small fire near the second entrance to the cavern that he could use to dry his clothes over. That was a fantastic bonus, but he wasn't prepared for the kir to follow him into the second pool to bathe.
His face had heated, but he stripped down anyway, only leaving his translator, the speaker wrapped around his throat, and the earpiece in place so that he would be able to understand what the creature said as he bent over the pool and sunk his arm in up to the shoulder. He pulled up an egg-plant shaped fruit from inside of the water, that was bleached as white as so much of the vegetation that grows near the ground on this planet. He squeezed it, and it started to ooze out a thick viscous liquid that smelled strongly herbaceous, and Dabi had to pull his clothes back on to run a sample through his scanner to determine that it wouldn't melt off his skin before he'd accepted it.
It definitely wasn't quite soap as he was used to it, but the way it lathers and how it does help to leave his skin clean in a way he guesses isn't dissimilar to the way bitter ginger nectar can on earth. He washes himself and his clothes, and then wraps himself up in his thermal blanket as he waits for them to dry. And Tomura stays with him, his eyes linger over his body, but Dabi can't begrudge him that. He's been looking at the alien's body whenever he can, fascinated by every inch of pale flesh and patch of scales, the curve of muscles beneath, his single armored finger on each hand, his sharp, bright eyes and large, dangerous teeth. Tomura is far from the first alien species he's ever interacted with, but this is different from meeting a foreign species in one of his classes or on an established planet. This feels... special. So he doesn't protest when he finds the creature's strange eyes lingering on any patch of his skin, and when he chitters at him inquisitively about the scars littered across his body, Dabi explains what those are too.
It's especially amazing how he takes that in stride and it doesn't change the texture of his glances. There is no pity that sours his looks. It's been a very long time since Dabi met someone who could manage that.
///
The first week is the most difficult, and even then, it's only a challenge because they are starting to put together a routine. Not because there is any real hardship. He learns that aside from hunting when he's hungry, something he usually only has to do once a week given the volume of what he eats during his meals, Tomura spends most of his days sleeping. It's not uncommon for species that haven't developed other kinds of entertainment, and since the kir are intensely isolationist to maintain their territories, they don't have any kind of society or trading. Dabi talks a little about his, how humans are a social species, how they have laws and things that they have to abide by so that they could invent agriculture and industry. He's not trying to convince the kir that is the way things should be done-- the earliest humans who wanted to explore the stars had definitely tried that, and there are chapters after chapters dedicated to them in every textbook for every beginner course on space travel that talks about how they were slaughtered for trying to colonize other sentient races. Which is why Exovin's policies are to make contact and enter discussions, meeting the dominant species on their terms before anything else.
Tomura asks about how humans live on Earth and in their societies, so Dabi tells him. And in turn Tomura tells him things about his species.
"Our mothers lay and hatch a clutch of usually two to three young at a time."
"You have siblings?"
"One, a sister. I haven't seen her since we left our mother's den when we were of age. I believe she makes her territory in the desert."
"Will you ever visit her? Or your mom?"
"No, females are fiercely territorial. She would probably tear off my head long before realizing who I was." He chitters, but the translator says he's amused by the thought, so Dabi figures that his species must not get lonely, must not crave connection the way humans do. "Do you have siblings?"
"Yeah, I'm the oldest of four. I have one younger sister and two younger brothers." And on and on their conversations go.
Tomura doesn't seem to have any concerns about having their long talks, especially not when Dabi doesn't protest to him wrapping around his body the same way he does when they are laying together in his burrow at night. And Dabi never protests, even when he is made to feel so small because Tomura's voice is always so low. It rumbles through his chest in his chitters, growls, and purrs as he speaks, and they send a low, steady hum throughout the room. The vibration of them as he speaks sometimes makes gooseflesh crawl along his skin... and sometimes it puts a little heat there too.
Dabi really does his best to not think about that, but he can't quite help it. He recognizes the growl that he lets out when he says 'little one' even without the translator now. Fuck, maybe three years without any sexual contact that wasn't his own hands is more than he thought it was. He never broke down or hooked up with any of the others, though he thinks that they may have been on and off throughout their voyage. He wasn't usually aching for it, but something about Tomura, something about the way he watches him, the way he leans in close and speaks too him so low that Dabi can feel the echoes of his voice in his own chest, that's making the celibacy a far more noticeable inconvenience.
But he doesn't know how the kir mate, and he is not about to ask. Besides, he's damn sure that Twice and Magne won't let him live it down if his 'first contact' has to have the 'Kirk Clause' added to his final report.
///
At the midpoint of the storm, the howling winds, crashing thunder, and torrential rain somehow get even worse. His check-in isn't until tomorrow, but Dabi has a sneaking suspicion that they're getting into a severe enough storm that tornados would be possible if this were Earth. He asks Tomura if they have tornadoes here, and he seems flabbergasted by the concept, which leads them to discussing the different natural disasters that they can have on their opposing planets and Dabi watches Tomura dig out another little hole in the side of the wall, easily breaking through the stone and scraping away the contents.
He had been thinking, given it was a smaller structure, that it was going to be a bed for him, because the kir wanted him out of his space, but when it's finished, it's just big enough for Dabi to store his kit and suit so that they aren't tucked off at the side of the room anymore. Tomura still lifts him into his bed at night and holds him close as they sleep, his purrs rumbling through them both.
///
It's still cool and late when Dabi wakes hearing his communicator chirping frantically from its place across the room. Tomura grumbles, but unwraps his tail from around Dabi's body, relinquishing his hold around his waist as well when he recognizes the sound. Dabi slips out of his burrow and goes over to retrieve his tablet, taking it into the bathing chamber so that he doesn't disturb Tomura any more than he already has as he answers with a yawn,
"Hey Mag--"
"Dabi," her tone is strained in a way that has him sharply shaking the last lingering threads of sleepiness.
"What is it? What's going on?"
"Are you alright? Tomura hasn't hurt you?"
He blinks. "No, of course not-- Why?"
Her face is pale and drawn as a file comes through for him. "We got the communication back from Proximacard. They registered the dominant species as REH-129, and marked the planet as 'unsuitable' for foreign life because the species was extremely hostile. Six of their people died."
Dabi opens the file, trying to make sense of what she's telling him. He mutes the video file that's been attached to the report, leaving the subtitles on, and watches as the Proxima crew lands and starts to comb the jungle, taking their own samples and exploring. It's sunny and bright in the video, but the footage has clearly been edited down to show the first contact with-- Tomura. There's no mistaking the creature. He knows his eyes, his hair, recognizes the way he holds himself as he looms over the crew in one of the trees and clicks and snarls at them. He asks them who they are, why they're in his territory, and Proxima tells him that they've arrived to enter the planet into the rest of the interplanetary community, they say they're looking for useful things, that they want to find the government if there is one here, they hold themselves firm and strong in the wake of Tomura's increasing agitation.
They open fire when he moves too quickly into their space. The phaser blast hits his skin and dissipates across it harmlessly. And Tomura opens his mouth wide enough to show off all of his teeth before he lunges. The footage is shaky and awful then, a horrible blur of violence as he watches Tomura easily tear through their suits, through flesh, as he cuts down the members of Proxima. They learn quickly enough that they need to run, and the last of the footage shows Tomura dragging their dead deeper into the jungle. His stomach twists.
Based on the feedback they were able to get from the suits, he'd eaten a fair amount of the remains before the signal stopped transmitting.
"They tried exploring other regions and they found the other REH-129's to be as aggressive if not more so." She warns. "Are you sure you're safe there?"
He was positive of it up until ten minutes ago. "He hasn't ever hurt me." Is all he can think to say. He doesn't want to elaborate too much about how close they've been so far.
"That may not always be the case. The Proxima members who survived their other interactions found that phasers didn't work, but electricity and laser weapons could do some damage. If you need to protect yourself--"
"Okay." He cuts her off, his stomach gone sour from this new knowledge she's saddled him with. "He hasn't made any aggressive action towards me. He said his people are territorial-- they don't even visit family members to keep out of each others' space. They may have just been scared of how many people were showing up in their domains." He tries weakly. But that doesn't take away seeing how bloodthirsty Tomura could be if the mood struck him.
Magne doesn't look satisfied with that. "Make sure you're wearing your monitor for your vitals, alright?" So they know if he gets killed. It's not as if they can get down here to help him if they think he's in trouble.
"Okay." He agrees, but they don't stay on the call much longer than that. He doesn't return to bed for a long while.
///
He can't help but keep replaying those clips over and over in his head as Tomura stretches and readies himself for the day. He yawns wide and shows all of his too many teeth-- and then he licks his lips like a cat when he's finished. He tilts his nose up and scents the air, opening his mouth again to get an even better read on the room, and Dabi sincerely hopes he can't literally smell the discomfort under his skin.
"Hmm, I'm going out to hunt. I'll bring back a feast for us, little one."
He has never felt so relieved to be alone as he does now. "Oh, you don't have to worry about me--"
The creature titters at him in that low grumble, leaning down a bit to nose at his hair for a second before moving on. "You will like what I return with." He promises, and then moves out to the edge of the cave. "Stay in this chamber. The weather may be worse before I return." If Tomura had said that yesterday, Dabi would have asked if he had to hunt today, or if he could hold off until things got a little better, but he doesn't now. Now he's worried about what Tomura will do if he gets hungry, so he says nothing. He goes and Dabi tries to put it out of his mind.
It's worse than failure when he watches the videos over, and over, and over again, as if that will somehow make the horrors he's seeing less real instead of more.
///
He's alone until it's starting to get cold again, and Tomura returns with his kill. He made sure to bring the same creature as the first time, knowing that Dabi can eat that too, and an array of other fruits. He waits patiently for Dabi to test them to see what he can eat and what he can't, and he does have to put one aside for containing a nearly lethal dose of arsenic around any of the flesh that touches the seeds. But otherwise, he's able to try the four that are presented to him. Tomura watches him, his tail slithering languidly across the floor, a constant purr in the back of his throat. 'Happy' the translator tells him when Dabi lights up as he finds one of the fruits tastes like fresh strawberries and citrus. 'Content' it says as they eat together. He tries to pretend that he isn't scared when his mouth opens to tear into meat and fruit with the same ferocity.
Tomura takes the remnants of their meal and disposes of them and he wonders if he goes to the spot where he dumps the remains of his kills, if he'll find anything he can bring back to the ship of the Proximacard crew, something to send their families, maybe. He tries not to think about that. He waits for the other to clean the blood from his skin and return and he cuddles up in his burrow with him when they're both full and starting to really feel the bite of the cold air as the storm rages on.
///
Dabi wakes to Tomura nuzzling into his neck and purring loudly, he shifts a little to hit his translator, usually leaving it off at night to save battery, and is immediately told 'hungry', which sends ice flooding his gut.
"Tomura," his voice is thin with his sudden, sharp terror as the kir coils his tail tighter around his body, pinning his arms to his side and forcing him still as he nuzzles in closer to his neck. His tongue flicks over Dabi's skin as he takes a deep breath, scenting him more thoroughly than he ever has before.
"You smell so good, little one." He purrs, nuzzling his skin again. "Smelled like this all day. What's different, Dabi?"
'Hungry' the translator tells him again as Tomura purrs, the sound of it rumbling through Dabi's body and trying to shake loose his arousal alongside the fear tinging his veins. "I-- Tomura--" He squeaks softly as one of his large hands moves around his waist, slipping underneath his shirt and meeting his skin with cooler flesh and the barest prickle of his sharp claws. Tomura's tail moves, trying to wrap a little tighter around him, as he shifts so that they're not laying curled around each other anymore, but the other creature has his weight over him. And his tail drags over the inside of his thighs as it rearranges itself, putting a pressure somewhere that's had none for so long. Preparing to die by being eaten alive is really not the appropriate time for his body to start to warm, but Dabi lets out a whimper as it happens, two sharp spikes of heat in his cheeks as he feels his face begin to blush.
The translator clicks something out in Tomura's language and Dabi stiffens, terrified of how that was translated. Tomura hears it and then lets out the loudest, deepest growl that he's ever heard from him which should be pants-shittingly terrifying, and instead only makes Dabi's body go a little warmer from hearing it echo around the enclosed space. His hands are firm as they pull at him, forcing Dabi onto his stomach and before he can ask what he's doing, he's got one of his elongated, armored fingers between his teeth. his mouth stretches around the intrusion as it pushes into him, back until it's filling him, the tip making his throat flutter as it sits just at the point of breaching him. It's been long enough that he's had something there that Dabi gags weakly, his head going into a dizzying spin of terror and arousal.
Tomura presses his face into the back of his neck again as his tail wraps around one of Dabi's thighs and pulls it up, making him tuck it between his chest and the floor, his other hand around his hip and pulling those up and back so that he's spread wide. 'Hungry, hungry, hungry' the translator tells him, but Tomura is growling and purring. The hand that isn't in his mouth moves over his hip and up his back, pushing his shirt up with the movement.
"I thought that things may be different for humans-- but you smelled so good, little one. This is good, isn't it? This is what you're hungry for, isn't it, Dabi?" His voice ripples through him and Dabi doesn't know how to think past that sound, past the fullness in his mouth to find fear when Dabi is hungry. Hungry in a way that the translator doesn't understand in its coolness. Not for either of them.
He moans weakly around the intrusion in his mouth and timidly rocks his hips back. The growl that Tomura lets out has Dabi's cock hardening as the kir presses in even closer, putting his hips flush to Dabi's ass. But he's never seen the other's sex organs, and he can't feel anything now. He whines around his finger, licking and sucking at his claw, and making the alien purr even louder as he does. He doesn't protest as he pulls at his waistband and the sweats and his boxers slip over his hips, leaving him open and exposed to the other, his cock already half hard.
Tomura purrs and leans in close again, nuzzling against the back of his neck as his hips move against Dabi's bare skin again. And this time, he feels something slick starting to spread over his skin. It's hot and viscous, and Tomura's tail uncoils partially from his limbs so that the thin tip can move between his legs. It pauses on its way to his hole, finding his cock and rubbing along him. "That's it, little one. I'll give you what you need."
Dabi feels certain he's going to when that tail leaves his cock, which has him whining and reaching his hand between his legs to touch himself, as his tail slithers over his balls and to his hole, spreading around more of that slick over him. He's happy to have it because all too soon, the tip is prodding at his center, nearly as wide as two fingers and Dabi is moaning again. It's been so long since he's had anyone else touch him there and he is desperate for it now. Has been desperate for this creature's touch since he first caught his chin. He tries to stay relaxed as his muscles are rubbed at gently. For all that Tomura is so large, such a violent predator, he seems to know how to be careful where it counts and Dabi will take that if he can get it. He still doesn't know what the other's genitals look like and he's not even sure if they're compatible like this, but he's willing to try.
The tail spreads that slick inside of his hole, moving against him in serpentine, undulating motions that makes all of those nerves light up in a way his own fingers haven't been able to since he's been on this excursion. His tail isn't like his fingers, it's so much longer and it gets perfectly thicker as Tomura feeds it into his body inch by inch. He had been hoping for a cock, but Dabi won't complain if this is what he gets instead. He squeezes himself at his base when Tomura's tail rubs just right and he finds his prostate, the loud moan that comes out of him is muffled around his finger as his whole body goes tight and he jerks his hips back against the alien's strength to try and get more of that sensation where he wants it.
Tomura growls again and that does not help Dabi's leaking cock. Fuck. It's been so long since he was fucked-- he's pretty sure he's not going to last very long at this rate. He forces himself to let go of his aching cock, clutching onto handfuls of the bedding instead as Tomura's tail thrusts inside him a few more perfect times. He feels helpless, useless in the creature's grasp, and tries to show that he can be worth his time, sucking on his finger, swallowing around him, and running his tongue along the chitin-like armor plates along it, careful of the sharp tip of his claw against the sensitive tissue inside of his mouth. It earns him another low purr and his tail starts to retreat.
He wishes he could speak, but his talon is too deep in his throat for him to manage it, instead whining as he's made suddenly empty. Dabi tries to push back, wanting to be fucked full desperately, and going stiff as he feels his ass rub against Tomura's hips. It hurts a little and he has to nip at his finger to get him to pull back just enough so that he can peek over his shoulder, but as soon as he does, he thinks his brain may melt.
Like most reptilian races, Tomura has internal sex organs. Or internal until they're needed, and they both need them now. The two cocks are pressing out of a slit between his legs, stacked on top of one another, thicker than Dabi's and longer too, proportional for his body, but holding the same familiarly phallic shape that he expects. There are bumps along the top, ridges that move up his lengths to frame his head, and he's soaked, that thick slick dripping translucent from his heads and his slit. He whimpers. He wants to be full but-- but they're so big.
Tomura's other hand cups his ass, pulling him open wider, his thumb brushing the edge of his flushed, puckered hole, and opening those stretched muscles again so he can dribble more of his slick inside. "Such a pretty color, little one." He purrs and makes Dabi tremble as his voice sinks that praise all the way into his bones. He presses forward, his heads rubbing against his hole, and he goes absolutely breathless with his anticipation. There's no way that he can fit both of those inside. A thin panic starts to go through him, terrified he'll be torn open, but the kir seems to recognize the tightening of his hole as nerves, seems to see the difference in their size, and he shifts to just focus on his lower member, letting the other glide between his cheeks instead as that blunt head starts to push inside of him.
His cock is thicker than the amount of tail he was given, and the stretch, even through the slick, makes Dabi moan. Tomura starts to chitter too, purring his pleasure, and the translator can only tell him 'good' and 'hungry' as the kir slowly feeds his first cock into Dabi's body. He hopes that the other understands how good he's feeling as well, and tries to lave his tongue along his finger like he would if he had one of those thick, gorgeous cocks inside his mouth. It takes a moment before he's inside as deeply as he can go, purring the entire time. But once he is, he starts to gently rock his hips, and that immediately makes Dabi desperate for it. He doesn't know if he's ever wanted to be fucked harder in his entire life, and he can't stop himself from trying to immediately twitch his hips back to get more.
For a split second he thinks he must have done something very wrong because Tomura snarls, his grip tightening everywhere. He's certain for a moment that he's about to die impaled on this creature's cock, but then he's pulling his hips back and snapping them forward into his body. Dabi lets out a loud cry of pleasure, his cock twitching and begging for release as the kir sets to a fast, brutal pace that pushes Dabi deeper into the bedding.
He's blinded by his pleasure, by the rough thrusts of the other man, and he can't even swallow around the finger in his mouth anymore, drool slipping out past his lips. But as he gets more pliant, Tomura must think he's ready for more, because he draws his hips nearly all the way back on one thrust, and then there are both heads at his hole again. He doesn't have a chance to tighten, to fear, this time because it's a smooth movement, eased by his slick, and unrelenting in the even pace he uses, as he fucks both of his cocks into his hole.
Dabi has never been this full before. Hasn't ever felt such blinding, perfect pressure against every inch of his inner walls, a constant, hard press against his prostate just from how deeply his cocks are reaching and how wide they're stretching him. And he can't hold on. Dabi gives a broken sob as his balls tighten as he's made so, so full, and he cums all over the creature's bed.
"That's it, little one," Tomura chitters, his other hand going to Dabi's softening cock and cupping him, keeping his sharp talons far from his skin. "Such a good boy, showing me how good you feel. Show me again."
He doesn't have the breath, or the use of his tongue to tell the other that he can't again immediately, but it doesn't matter. Tomura keeps fucking him, his cock pushing pleasure along every inch of his nerves until Dabi thinks he might tear around it. And he doesn't stop until Dabi is hard again and moaning and sobbing constantly as Tomura's thrusts and growls go through him and make him so, so hot. He didn't know he could feel like this-- he's never wanted someone like he wants Tomura right now. and it's with a fresh sob that he finds himself going impossibly tighter around the kir's cocks as his own pulses with pleasure as he spills across the bed a second time.
The tightening of his muscles again seems to be what pushes Tomura over the edge, his hips slamming hard into Dabi's, putting his cocks as deeply inside of his body as possible, and then he snarls. The sound should be terrifying, but it only makes Dabi keen with an animal pleasure he's never felt before, as his cocks twitch and he soaks his insides with his cum.
It takes so long for him to stop spilling, and by the time he has, both of their breaths are just starting to calm from the way they were echoing around the little burrow. He pulls out and Dabi mewls as he feels the flood of him go down his legs and soak the bedding. But Tomura doesn't seem to care. He purrs and chuffs at him, 'content, content, content', pulling Dabi's exhausted body in close as he licks the tears from his cheeks, but he doesn't take his finger out of his mouth. Dabi doesn't protest it, slumping against his chest and letting himself be soothed to sleep by the happy purrs deep in his throat.
///
When he wakes again, he's horribly sticky, and still cuddled up tight against Tomura's chest, his jaw aching a little because he still has the tip of his finger between his lips. Dabi tries to shake the last of the sleepiness and reaches up to pull on Tomura's wrist. The kir looks at him, his tail twitching with his agitation, but he hesitantly lets him take it from his lips. A low, clicky, chirp leaves his throat as he does, and Dabi frowns as the translator tells him 'fear'.
"What's wrong?" His throat feels a little thick, and he really is gross from the mix of sweat, cum, and bedding stuck to his skin, But he does not want Tomura to be scared, or threatened, by him. He doesn't even want to imagine how badly that would go.
"...Typically, we don't stay with our mate after we've finished." He says carefully, watching Dabi like he might be the dangerous one. "Females try to incapacitate males once they've finished mating. They often tear or bite off their mate's--"
Dabi blanches. "Humans don't do that," he tells the other quickly. "Humans can stay with their partners if they want to, they raise their young together sometimes, no one gets hurt in our mating unless they want that, or unless... something else is going on that's not okay." He doesn't want to elaborate on that now, not when he's trying to put the other at ease. He catches his hand, lacing their fingers together, running one of his along the heavily armored one. "...You keep females gagged so they can't.. bite?" And clearly evolved this as a way of doing so.
"Yes... Do humans not eat their mates?"
"Not like that." Dabi explains. "Why do kir?"
"Once impregnated, it becomes hard for a female to hunt, if a male can't escape before she's recovered from the coupling, she kills and eats him to sustain herself until she's ready to lay her clutch." He's fairly certain that sounds like the mating practices of some spiders on Earth and arachnid-like races that have been registered. He'll have to ask if female kir exhibit that same kind of sexual dimorphism later, but not right now.
"Oh. Well, you don't have to worry about that with me. I'm not a kir and I'm not female. Humans don't use our mouths to hurt each other when we have sex, and we mate for pleasure, not just to make children." He explains carefully. A flicker of warmth goes through him. "I can show you what we use our mouths for."
Tomura considers him for a moment, his other hand coming up to his jaw, his thumb catching his lower lip again. Dabi presses a kiss to the pad of his finger, waiting for him to decide. "Alright, little one. Show me."
Dabi is still careful and slow as he moves up the creature's chest so that he can start by pressing a kiss to his cheek. His skin there is cool, but not covered in one of the thicker patches of scales that seem reserved for along the tops of his thighs, his back, chest, stomach, and along the backs of his arms. He peppers those little kisses along the seam of his elongated mouth, showing that there's nothing dangerous in the action before he takes a little breath, tries to push aside the flesh he's seen the other rend with his teeth, and gives him one against his lips. Tomura is still beneath him, letting him do what he pleases, and Dabi pulls back a little.
"We use our tongues too-- just not our teeth. Can I?" He figures he's better off asking than having his tongue abruptly removed.
"Be careful, you're so delicate, little one." The kir purrs and the sound of his voice, the soft concern in it, makes Dabi want to show him that his softness is good. That he can make it good for the other as well.
He presses back in and seals their lips together, going slowly, but deliberately as he shows the other how to kiss him back. Tomura still hesitates when his tongue prods lightly at the seam of his lips, and Dabi tries to soothe away that concern by running his hands over his skin, along his chest, down to his waist as he all but climbs on top of the creature instead of just being cuddled against him. Tomura opens his mouth a little and Dabi slips his tongue inside, careful of his very, very sharp teeth. It takes some coaxing before their tongues are moving together, and Tomura's is so much longer and more flexible than Dabi's own, and he tastes like the fruits they'd eaten the night before, though mingled with the staleness of sleep.
They kiss, and kiss, and the longer it goes on, the longer Dabi proves that his mouth isn't any danger to the other, the more bold Tomura grows, eventually even chancing slipping his tongue between Dabi's teeth and licking into his mouth the same way that Dabi had his. He moans, his cock starting to harden, because Tomura's tongue is longer, bigger, and settles inside with a weight that makes Dabi hungry for something else.
He pulls back a little and when Tomura sees his cock starting to flush, he begins to purr loudly again, his tail moving up Dabi's thighs to prod at his hole again. Those nerves are so sensitive from being fucked before that Dabi immediately moans, rubbing himself against those questioning little touches, and then watching with his own fascination and arousal as that slit starts to show on the kir again. His skin separates along an invisible seam between his legs and a translucent fluid starts to leak out. His tail moves from Dabi's hole to tease along the lips of his sheath, making more of that slick ooze out, and when his tail is shiny with it, it goes back to Dabi's body.
He hums, pleasure sparking down his spine, and a recklessness deep in him when he murmurs, "Humans kiss there too."
Tomura chitters, a sharp surprised sound. "Do they now?"
"Mmhmm," he agrees, trying not to get distracted as the tip of his tail slips inside. "Can I? Please? I like to lick my partner's cock-- cocks." He corrects. "I promise I don't bite."
The kir hesitates a second but then lets out a low breath. "How can I deny my mate anything that would bring him pleasure?" And the words alone are doing it for him as he moves down Tomura's body. His tail stays stretching and teasing his hole, but Dabi is mostly focused on how badly he wants to have Tomura in his mouth.
His heads are just starting to press out from his slit and Dabi gathers some of the slick dripping out across his fingers and gently slips one along the lower head and up into his sheath, just a bit. He glances up to make sure he isn't causing any discomfort, but Tomura is growling and purring as his cocks start to press out a little more. Dabi teases his fingers along and around him, finding the one place of Tomura's body that is as warm as his own. He licks his lips before bringing them to the head of his upper member, and then he licks gently against that sensitive part of his anatomy. The flavor of him is overwhelming. It's a sharp citrus flavor like so much of the fruit here, but it has a musky bitterness to it as well that tempers the flavor somewhat. It's a strange taste to have on his tongue, but not one he'll complain about, especially not when he hears the strained little chirp that the kir lets out as Dabi laves his tongue along him.
He's more than wet enough with his natural lube for Dabi to be comfortable kissing him along his lengths as they continue to press out until he's fully erect again. And then Dabi leans in, and completely wraps his lips around the head of the upper one. Tomura growls as Dabi moves his tongue over him, reveling in just how soft his skin is. He forces himself to pull off, even though he wants nothing more than to have the weight of him in his mouth, stretching his jaw.
"Can I keep going?"
"Yes," The other sounds half crazed, a hand moving to catch his hair and pull him, trying to get more.
Dabi laughs, pressing another teasing kiss to the one he hasn't sucked on yet. "I can't get both into my mouth, is that okay?"
"Little one, anything you do with your mouth is more than enough."
"If I tap your thigh, it means I need you to let go so I can breathe." He warns, but trusts the other not to hurt him, and too impatient to have his jaw stretched open again to wait for confirmation.
Dabi figures he's representing the whole human race and their persistent love of both giving and receiving oral sex, so he doesn't do anything by half. He does his best to keep his head on and not drift away and just fall into the haze that having his mouth so full can put him into. He moves along his upper length, his hand wrapping around the lower one and stroking him in time with each movement of his head as he slowly bobs down lower, and lower, his tongue working over him. The ridges and texture along his cock feel as good in his mouth as they did when he had him inside of his body before, and he drools constantly against his tongue as he chitters, chirps, growls, and purrs in such a messy string of noises that goes straight to Dabi's cock and has him leaking against his stomach too.
He lets himself warm up a bit longer before he takes a breath and then sinks down until his head is pressing past the tight ring of muscle into his throat. Dabi can immediately feel the stretch there and it has him moaning, sending those vibrations along Tomura's length and his hand tightens in his hair as he snarls again, his tail in turn, fucking deeper into Dabi's body. He tries to hold onto some sense of rhythm after that, but it feels impossible. He just can't stop himself, moaning and rocking, trying to be fucked from both ends, and Tomura obliges him. He starts to move his hips, lightly at first, but when Dabi sucks and swallows so hungrily around him, the movements get faster, harder, and Dabi is floating, taking in little sips of air between movements and moans as they move together.
Dabi doesn't get a warning, forgot to say he would want one, when the kir is close. He just gets a sharper deeper flavor of citrus and salt on the back of his tongue, and then Tomura is holding him in place, holding himself deep in Dabi's throat, as he cums. The gush of it makes Dabi dizzy as he does his best to swallow and swallow, but it still feels like there's too much and he taps his fingers frantically against Tomura's thigh. The kir chitters and pulls out, and Dabi feels his cum drool across his chin, as he gasps for breath, moaning from how close he is to his own orgasm.
Then Tomura pushes his thumb back as far as he can on one side of his jaw and keeps it spread open, "Give me your tongue, little one," he growls and Dabi can't do anything but moan deliriously and open wider, letting his cum-soaked tongue lull out over his lower teeth and sore lip. Tomura shifts, bringing his second, still hard cock, to his mouth and fucking it inside. he doesn't push into his throat this time, but being used like this, just held open for the other's pleasure makes Dabi's entire body burn with his need. He finds himself moaning and shifting, spreading his thighs around one of Tomura's and rubbing his dripping cock against the texture of his cool scales there. That sensation makes his nerves scream, and Dabi chases more and more of it. Tomura fucks his tail and cock into him at the same frantic, unrelenting pace, and in a matter of minutes, his cum is splashing across Dabi's tongue again, and Dabi is following him, cumming hard against his thigh as he tries to swallow as much as he can with his mouth held open. More of it just spills down his chin and onto their skin, but the kir is purring the entire time that Dabi shudders through his orgasm.
"Gorgeous, little one. So beautiful, so wonderful. My mate," he praises, gently removing himself from inside of Dabi's body. Dabi can't even hold himself up anymore from how good his whole body feels in the wake of his orgasm. Tomura just gathers him up again, and holds him close, licking up the mess from his skin as he purrs and purrs.
///
They can't keep their hands off of each other once they've started, and Tomura learns to wrap his serpentine tongue around Dabi's cock and lick, squeeze, and stroke him like that until he's falling apart. He delights in learning about his prostate and that his tongue can be as good as his tail or cocks to stimulate the gland as well, and make Dabi feel good too. And they still talk, they still share meals together when Tomura goes out to hunt, and Dabi grows accustomed to the creature purring and purring all day, every day, getting even louder whenever they touch.
But for as good as the sex is, as kind as the kir has been to him, Dabi knows, and when he goes out to hunt again and Dabi is left with only the dwindling storm as company, he finds himself thinking about that again and again. He sits with those thoughts making him colder and when the other comes back with more fruit and a smaller reptilian quadrupedal corpse, Dabi knows he has to shatter this soft thing between them that feels so good.
"Tomura?"
"What is it, little one?" He asks, setting down the food and coming to get into Dabi's space, licking over his cheek as he scents him deeply.
"...I'm not the first human you met." He says carefully, watching the creature's strange eyes. "Another group came here, right? In orange suits?"
Tomura's lip curls back and he gives an unhappy hiss. "Yes. They were not like you. They were many and violent. They encroached on my territory," His tail flicks with his agitation. "They wanted to take my land as their own and claim the spoils of it."
"...You killed them."
"Of course." He doesn't sound concerned about that, but when Dabi doesn't say anything for a second, Tomura nuzzles in a little closer, chittering at him softly. "They were different from you, Dabi. You came to my home and asked for permission, you ensured you were not hurting me or my land. You met me with kindness, not violence. I will meet you in kind for as long as you stay here with me." He promises.
Dabi lets out a shaky breath. Well, he guesses when he calls Fuyumi next time he's on the ship, he's going to have to actually thank her for smacking him all throughout high school until he finally grew some manners and tact. "The storm is going to stop soon, isn't it?"
"You could stay anyway." Tomura offers, "I would never begrudge your company."
He can't, but the kir seems to know that even without making him reject the offer outright. Instead Dabi wraps his arms around his neck and the other purrs softly before he leans in to give him a kiss.
They don't eat until, much, much later.
///
The rain does stop after another three days and Dabi watches it happen with a hollowness in his gut, even as Tomura brings him outside so that he can see the three foreign moons sitting high and lovely in the sky. He sits close to him as he calls back to base and Compress tells him that if he can retrieve his pod, then he should be ready to go as soon as he's able, the kir scratching at his neck almost constantly as he listens. They're already so far behind schedule that they really can't afford to linger, and they're sure he's ready to come home too. The Ingenuity has been his home for years, he should be excited to go back. There's a pit in his stomach as Dabi puts what he's taken out of his pack, back inside, and Tomura ensures that he's leaving with samples of every fruit that he's given him.
He walks with him out through the mud that Dabi really would have expected to be thicker given how much rain they had, but it seems as though the temperature creeping higher and higher is sending it evaporating and choking the environment with humidity and fog. Tomura keeps an eye out, ensuring no creature is brave enough to try to hunt him. The lake is, unsurprisingly, flooded, coming up to the tree line, but with a press of a button, the submerged pod is able to dislodge itself from the soft earth and crawls up to where they're standing. And then there's really no stalling anymore even though it feels like there's lead in his chest. He's only just started to turn to Tomura when the kir wraps his tail around his waist, and cups his face between his hands and kisses him. Dabi meets it just as desperately. Fuck he's going to miss Tomura. It's a sharp burning ache of that deep in his chest.
"Be safe in your travels, little one," Tomura murmurs, resting their foreheads together. "And if the moons allow, come back to me again?"
He feels his throat tighten. Two more years of his trip surveying this sector, then a year minimum back on Earth, waiting with baited breath to find out if this planet will even be considered for deeper study given how hostile the kir can be. Another four months to travel out here again. That's so long. Tomura might not even still be here when he gets back-- if he does. "I'll try. Thank you, for everything. I wouldn't have survived without you and I'm so glad that we were able to meet." He gets up on his tiptoes, and Tomura gives him another kiss.
"...Be safe, Dabi." He seems reluctant to let go of him, but he has to, and Dabi steps away and seals up his suit and puts on his helmet.
He doesn't dare watch out the window as he gets inside and does his final checks for launch. He is not gonna walk back into the Ingenuity crying.
///
When he arrives back, he's immediately put in full quarantine. It's standard procedure for an extended stay on a foreign planet and Dabi subjects himself to it without complaint. Twice has him go through a barrage of medical scans, even as all of them talk to him through the glass like he's a zoo animal about how happy they are he's back. And he is happy to see them again. He did miss the familiar halls, their faces, but he doesn't think he does a very good job of hiding his melancholy. Definitely not when Magne and Compress come to see him at around midnight the third night that he's in quarantine and they pour him a shot before carefully passing it through one of the special hatches in his containment unit, before they both take a seat on the other side.
"So Twice reviewed your vitals data from while you were planet-side." Magne starts. "I tell you a guy killed six people and you immediately have to get on that as fast as possible?" She teases carefully.
But Dabi doesn't want to tease, doesn't want to make light of something that felt so... solid. Real. It only was a week and a half and Dabi is pretty sure it's the only romantic entanglement he's had in his life that made him want to stick around and find out how much more that could be. He drinks instead of answering her and Compress takes that as his cue to step in.
"Dabi, whatever happened on the planet... if you're in need of counseling or assistance--"
"Wasn't forced, Mister," he says flatly. "Tomura was good to me. He didn't like that the Proximacard crew tried to pull their colonizing bullshit. I was polite, he didn't see me as a threat, and we got close." He puts his cup back into the slot, waiting for it to be decontaminated before Magne can pour him another. "I've started writing my report, I'm being as thorough as possible."
"...I'm sure there are things that you won't be including in that report. And that's fine, Dabi." Compress tells him gently. "But we're here as your friends. If that's something you need right now."
Magne pours herself and Compress a shot and then puts the whole bottle in the chamber for Dabi. "Come on, firecracker, tell us about the scary lizard boy you had to hump and dump."
"He purrs like a cat." He grumbles, taking the bottle when it's relinquished. "And he's got two dicks."
"Oh, well, I could overlook murder for that too," she agrees sagely and Dabi tries to unravel the knot of sorrow that's been living in his gut.
///
It's not years before Dabi is touching down far closer to the cave system that he spent so much time in before. It's only six months. Six long, agonizing months negotiating his contract. He'll still have to go back to the nearest base in a year and a half if Tomura lets him stay, and he'll be responsible for trying to find a way of harvesting the fruit of the uzut to try and find a sustainable way of getting more of the Ladreynyx for further study-- but he can stay here if Tomura lets him.
He disembarks with a shaky breath. He has his own ship now, not a pod. It's small, only big enough for him and maybe one other person, and it won't be able to travel long distances, but it's his, and it can take him away if he's not welcome anymore. God, Dabi hopes he's still welcome. He takes off his helmet before he steps out of the ship, hoping that seeing his face will ensure that he doesn't draw any undue ire from the kir.
"Tomura?" He calls into the forest, into the cave. Things are so quiet for a second and then he hears twigs snapping, and before he can fully turn, the kir is breaking through the tree line and rushing up to him. Dabi has a split second of terror that he'd mistaken what happened between them, his heart going to have to break before it stops beating-- but then he hears Tomura's familiar purrs as his hands catch his face and his tail wraps around his waist as he's hoisted from the ground so that the kir can chitter and purr at him as he brings their mouths together in a series of frantic, needy kisses.
"Dabi," his name is spoken with such reverence between the kisses that it leaves him breathless. "You're back--"
"I'm back," he agrees, warmth blooming in his stomach as he curls his hands over the kir's shoulders. "I can stay, if you'll let me--"
"I regretted letting you go the moment you left." And Dabi thinks, maybe, if he didn't know the other creature so well, that might be a frightening sentiment. But instead he feels so warm.
"I've been trying to come back ever since. I have obligations, my company wants me to send more samples, and I'll have to leave again for a little while to check in, but I can stay," his voice still goes small. "I can stay?" Because this is for so much longer than before, this is asking a lot of a creature whose race typically lives in solitary.
"By my side forever, little one." Tomura promises him, leaning in to nuzzle at him and scent his skin. "So I never have to miss you so fiercely again."
Dabi doesn't know if kir have a word for love in the romantic sense when they barely hold ties to their families. But Dabi hopes that a year and a half to start is long enough for him to figure out how to explain the concept.
Thank you so much for reading and thank you @norsetenko for commissioning this piece! If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment, they brighten my day!
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