#It’s gotta feel like one last slap in the face in the cosmic joke that is his existence

[scriblesandbits]

So god created us in his image, right? And that’s cool and all but what if it turns out god, like, hates his own image??? What then????

[hedonisthierophant]

Unveiled eyes and bloodless lips -A skarsgard multiverse thing.

A universe of many Bills, a couple AHAs, and a few others.

@grandpa-sweaters You asked for fic with The Kid and instead I somehow came up with this monstrosity. I’m not sure if you’ve ever read my writing before but I’m sorry.

Dedicated to my literary soulmate @ill-skillsgard I hope you don’t hate it.

Warnings: Smut, mentions of pregnancy and childbirth, gore, spit kink, cuckoldry, degradation, injury, death.

   Unveiled eyes and bloodless lips

The witch had lost this game long before she even started playing, the final result such a foregone conclusion that it might be more accurate in fact to say she had lost before she had even been born. Forces much larger than her, to call them even titanic in scope would be an understatement, had been attending to the moves of the board since time immemorial. To say her fate such as it was had been decided back then is to grievously misstate the situation. Her exact destiny was fiercely contested on the board of play, it could’ve turned out completely differently, unfolding along anyone of the infinite myriad of paths of kismet. But her doom? That became inevitable she drew the attention of the game’s players. Naturally she remained unaware of the inescapable quality of her demise, she fought against it until the very last moment, her ferocious zeal, her skill and talent, all of it amounted to naught, For what hope does in an insect have against flood? Through no fault of her own, her perspective on this eons-long contest she had the misfortune of being prescribed to enter was…limited. In actuality the word “limited” doesn’t begin to convey the magnitude of her ignorance, imagine if you will placing your eye at a keyhole and attempting to catch a glimpse of a room darkened to pitch black. Some less astute souls might say that her involvement in the affair was rather like bringing a deaf person to the symphony but you dear reader know better, I should hope. Someone who cannot hear will have a different experience with music to be sure, but an experience they will have, the concepts on display remain within the realm of understanding. In our case a young woman became the toy of forces so far beyond her ken that she was to them as an amoeba might be to one of us beneath the prying lens of a microscope. As you may have surmised the tragedy that brings my voyeuristic audience to me unfolded slowly, spanning two lifetimes. Of course, this is only slow from the mortal point of view, to the beings that brought this about such a timeframe was less than the blink of an eye might be to us, for their machinations make glaciers seem to move with haste. Oh yes, they lack celerity but in exchange their actions carry the gravity of unquestionable certainty. However, I have indulged myself long enough. It is time that I recount, to the best of my ability the story which is brought you here today…whilst I remain able to do so.

           Her mother was possessed of a nearly singular lack of the talent that had been at the disposal to members of her family as far back as records would go. She did retain the gift of foresight. In the hands of anyone else this boon guaranteed an interesting life, if not necessarily a good one. The ability to see the future meant that so much of the world could be bent to your whim, fortunes raised, mistakes avoided, enemies destroyed before they even had the opportunity to transgress. For her mother though the only thing her visions brought was infinite sadness. She was many months pregnant you see. The result of an impetuous liaison with an excitable and impassioned thief several years who junior who quite literally stumbled into her lap, betrayed by his gangly limbs at a luxurious hotel bar he happened to be casing. He must have absconded with a waiter’s uniform for nothing about his outfit fit his exquisitely lanky form properly. Remembering the bowtie that hung limply and sideways from his collar still brings a smile to her face. The knave proclaimed she was the love of his life, his goddess and that he would devote his life to securing her happiness. It was quite a scene the tableau made certainly more…unconventional due to the fact that she was celebrating her first wedding anniversary at and sitting directly across from her husband at the time. Their marriage had been mostly a business arrangement, not entirely loveless but more cordial than intimate, but she thinks she could have grown to love him for the smirk that wound its way across his face after the blubbering young would be waiter realized his presence. She recalls watching the scene like a member of the audience at the theater, her face impassive, one brow raised. Her husband had a reputation for an incredibly violent temper, if you ever witnessed it though but she could never convince herself to entirely discredit the rumors. Both she and the scoundrel were frozen, he in fear, she in surprise. Her husband stood up, declare that their food had been awful and they were taking the waiter as recompense. Her husband, she couldn’t stand the pain that thinking his name brought even all these years later. He had made his fortune as proprietor of the “last heir to the great circuses of old, the man was a showman to his core and could have sold sin to the most pious of people. Sitting in the stands watching that man bewitch everyone around her, she certain she could’ve learned to love him had she been given more time with him. Her brother-in-law put a stop to any happy fantasies she might’ve entertained though, fratricide had a way of casting a pall over such things. Death took him from her, but that night he had been so very alive. He threw the reprobate onto their sumptuous marriage bed and ordered her in a voice that was equal parts chilling and gleeful to fuck him within an inch of his life. She did, hips canting madly as she struggled to match the thief’s exuberance for all he was worth, she was the only thing that grounded him as he shuddered through orgasm after improbable orgasm. His soulful eyes stared up at her as though she had hung the stars. After one particularly fierce climax she turned to look at her husband across the darkened room for all the while he had been orchestrating the performance as though being its sole audience member also burdened him with the role of conductor, she may have been having extraordinary sex but for all that the two of them were just  toys for her husband. He controlled them with such precision a note here,  a whisper there, advice for the two of them ghosting across the room. He was a master puppeteer, they may have lacked physical strings but that did not stop him. He ruled over them with the same exactness he employed with his beloved elephants, compelling them through routines to astound and amaze basking in the dazzled worship of the onlookers. That night though, he was taking full advantage of being the only onlooker. She still remembers the manic smile on his face and how his hair looked like flame in the moonlight spilling through the window as hysterical (euphoric) laughter echoed off the walls of their manor, as though her husband were the only one in on some wonderfully hilarious joke of cosmic proportions. Looking back on it, he may well have been. Following their final crescendo as her husband’s euphoria slowly waned into giggling, the criminal professed his love for her for the umpteenth time and begged her to come away with him to Florida, promising to dedicate the rest of his days to making her happy. His stirring gaze brimmed with imploring tears he unabashedly let fall from his eyes, his voice quavering beneath the immense wait of his need to keep her in his life. The scales she used to weigh her options were suddenly dashed as her husband took a great gasping breath, sprang up from his seated position in the sumptuous armchair he’d been occupying and began to flit around the room gathering things to him, mania rolling off him in waves. He’d hoisted the nude crook off her with little apparent effort despite being smaller than the rangy younger man. He spun him around and  slapped the sex drunk visitor’s bare ass as the man squawked in surprise and indignation, pale globes of flesh flushing an angry shade of red and leaving a print in the form of her husband’s hand at the sting. Her husband crouched for on his haunches for a moment to admire his impromptu work of art. She couldn’t see him but she could clearly picture his eyes growing wide with fascination as the mark took shape, his hands twitched with restrained desire, she could practically feel him warring with the impulse to throw him onto their marriage bed yet again, but this time for the purpose of sowing sharper and deeper blossoms of suffering across the entirety of the canvas that was the other man’s body. Disturbed smile still in place as he ground his teeth he muttered to himself in hushed tones. “No Jer, be a good boy. Almost done now, you can do it. Just gotta ape him. He straightened the conflict within him tucked away beneath the impeccable veneer of the consummate showman’s mask. “Would that I could have joined you crazy kids. I’d have loved to use all my fun little tricks on a tall glass of water like you. I’d have driven you crazy, stark raving mad really, shown you just how wild gingers can get, I’m talking showing you where the animals go.” He said with a grin that was only matched in lascivious by it’s lunacy and air of danger. She was certain the young man with the innocence and coordination of a newborn fawn would not have survived such an encounter He clapped the sex drunk young man on the back, sensually garbed him in a ludicrously expensive silken kimono, handed him a duffel bag of cash as though he had one standing by for just this occasion. That torn expression came over his face yet again, this time he surrendered to his urges. Quite suddenly he brought their lips together with the force of a devouring hunger, grinding his crotch against the other man’s leg. Judging by the surprised sound that issued from their visitor, her husband’s tongue had embarked on an enthusiastic exploration of the other man’s mouth. Then as suddenly as the whirlwind of passion had come, it stilled. He stepped back, a deranged smile lighting up his face. A single thin and determined cord of saliva still bound them together in remembrance of their embrace, her husband broke it with his middle finger, and then brought the digit to the other man’s lips. He sucked on it with a dazed expression for a moment before her husband withdrew with out warning. He clapped him on his back, said in perhaps the most jovial tone a cuckold has ever used with his competitor “I’ve always loved a good fireworks show.” and sent the befuddled young paramour on his way with a wink. The next day her husband left on “family business” to some crime on the east coast submerged seven layers deep in corruption and crime, this business ended in his demise. She remembers looking at him in the casket, smirk fixed in place as though even in death he had gotten the last laugh after all.

That had all been eight months ago exactly. Now here she was at a comfortable cruising altitude of 30,000 feet returning from a sojourn to the place where so many of her sisters had famously died along with innocents and hapless victims of circumstance. She buried her husband in the cesspool city and then communed with nature and the spirits of the sisters who came before her in Salem, now all that was left for her to do was return to her family’s modest estate in Canada and continue puzzling over the odd provision in her husband’s will for any child of hers regardless of whether that child was part of their union or not. The trouble began in earnest on that flight which should’ve been an entirely unremarkable trip from Salem to Halifax.  The first unusual occurrence was that her water broke and quite suddenly she was in the process of bringing a life into the world some 2000 stories off the ground suspended in what she’d always considered to be fragile contraptions held aloft by little more than a prayer. Her situation was odd and certainly less than ideal but not unheard of. The flight attendants rushed her to the back of the plane and by what many would like to think was a happy accident there were several members of an obstetrics team present aboard that very flight. The delivery was much more difficult than expected for the culmination of what had been by every reckoning a model pregnancy, with nary an over-enthusiastic kick. Whatever creature was inside of her head suddenly gained the claws of the most wicked of fairytale crones, and the weight of a giant every movement brought only piercing agony and precious little relief. Her screams echoed through the craft that was a dedication to mankind’s hubris as her pain intensified so too did an incredibly unforeseen bout of bad weather, the radar which just hours ago prior to takeoff had promised skies wonderful for flying was now proving itself to be a liar. It was as though passing above some insignificant little town in Maine that caused the storm spring up around them. Their vehicle was buffeted from every direction by winds and frost that were unseasonable even for harsh winter in upper North America. Around her people cursed and prayed, screamed and shouted as the pilots fought to deliver their charges to the ground in the same amount of pieces as they left it, rather than in so many more as was becoming increasingly likely. The town against all sense did have its own infinitesimally small airstrip, it wasn’t until many years later that she would begin to understand just how long ago the pieces had been set in play. As they began their harried descent people were struck by falling luggage and other debris that comes when you compress the lives of hundred people into the space of an aircraft and then turn it into a topsy-turvy. Some were killed, she even took a piece of glass to the jaw but any object that got within striking distance of the newborn child swaddled in a washcloth suddenly lost all momentum and dropped to the floor, this sort of power was most definitely beyond her she had no gift for telekinetics but she was simply too alarmed at the gravity of their situation as Earth’s own gravity began to make its power and its displeasure at having been flaunted known to the passengers. Someone with much more than was at her disposal was looking out for her daughter. And so, their airplane limped down from the sky thoroughly chastened by Zeus and his ilk for its trespass into their domain and Moira and her mother crashed into Castle Rock.

Moira and her mother had always been considered oddities by the town. Two outsiders literally cast out of the heavens and dropped into the midst of unwelcoming townsfolk. Her mother had made the best of the situation, for she had tried, made a very valiant attempt to leave this town but the moment that she crossed the boundaries she was wrapped in agony which would not abate until she took a step back into the town, this phenomenon persisted whether she tried by car or on foot and she refused to give air travel another attempt. She was no fool, she knew well that some incredible force was bent on keeping her and her daughter entrapped in this little nothing of a hamlet. She may not have had the gifts that her family had taken for granted but anyone could make rituals work with enough determination, she used her dead husband’s well to secure a small cottage on the outskirts of town for her daughter and set about turning it into a mystic fortress brimming with occult defenses. Oh the villagers looked at her askance when she went asking strange herbs or when rumors, true in this case, swirled about that she desecrated graves looking for bones or danced in the moonlight bared skin flashing as she circled her home and chanted in forgotten tongues. Castle Rock had a history with which is in their neighbor town of Salem’s Lot you see, they knew the signs even if many had forgotten precisely what they meant. When her mother realized she was potentially in the territory of other practitioners her theory became that a powerful coven existed here and they wanted her for as of yet unknown reasons, but the more she doubt the more it seemed that any true coven had long since died out or moved on to more fitting pastures. The occult in community the town consisted of one or two charlatans, and a few like herself with barely an iota of true power between them, capable of little more than the simplest cantrips, certainly not the massive feats of magic required to both down and trap her here. The first night she performed a ritual of crying beseeching a cracked bowl she’d stolen from the motel to connect her with her mother. Her family had always been a nest of vipers they were immune to their own poison but that did not stop the backstabbing that took place as soon as one was no longer able to defend oneself. Her mother made it clear imperious tones bringing out into the forest and stirring the leaves although in truth she was many miles away, that by allowing herself to be brought low and trapped in a backwater with even a lesser one of her families grimoires by unknown parties she had shamed the family and would be forgotten. They would not come to her aid. Cast out of the one coven she had known since birth she went about forming a tighter knit one as its replacement. She had asked the two charlatans out of town and gathered those with inklings of true power to her, she lacked her family’s innate command of the mystic arts, but her deficit had made her a master ritualist. And so she doled out their precious secrets to a few peasants in this town and made herself a new family. With helpers at her disposal she was able to enact more complex magic and had soon carved out a niche for herself and her followers as the area’s sole authority on matters of the arcane. People flocked to see her from all corners of the continent and a few from even further. She didn’t doubt that her mother, the rest of her family and their retainers were trying their best to end her life but as the years went by it occurred to her that whatever was keeping her here was also keeping her alive, the town seemed to repel anything more than passing outside influences and her family feared to enter its boundaries and become trapped themselves, better to let whatever invisible enemy had brought her there finish her off eventually. Their judgment proved correct.

Moira was an unusual soul, daughter of the town witch and perpetually mistrusted. Despite all that she had a sunny demeanor and those that matter couldn’t help but be charmed by her. For as long as she could remember her mother had forced her, even as a barely aware child to partake in odd rituals, from filling purple gossamer bags of strange herbs sends unknown objects and placing them in various spots throughout the house to keeping a bowl of water by the door and flicking a drop against the wood once it was shut to bathing in oils and strange concoctions by the light of the moon. She did all this because as she told Moira “Something was out to get them.” Moira always found it odd that her mother chose to say something as opposed to someone. Moira had always dreamed of being a doctor but her mother forbid her to leave town for any reason and although she could not explain why to herself even after all these years she’d never even thought of disobeying that particular rule. Her few friends in town and her mother concurred that she would’ve made a brilliant doctor but in a town like Castle Rock the closest she could manage was to be a nursing assistant at the local prison. Some days she bemoaned her life stuck in this little town, so small that it did not even merit a dot on most maps of the area. But she would gather up her natural cheer, take her sketchpad and pencil, sit in the park and draw on those days. Since Moira began drawing she’d been a prodigy, but even from earliest childhood when one has no attention span to speak of after she would dally with the subject and that she would return always to her first. A pair of haunting blue-green eyes, a slightly upturned nose, and your whispering pair of lips, cracked and dry, parched even to the drawings one got the impression that no words passed between them for a long time. The drawings of course worried her mother but try as she might she could puzzle out no theories as to their significance, the last time she’d tried describing ritual on the mysterious subject her bowl had been gripped by a powerful kinetic force shattered from the inside out embedding pieces of cheap ceramic into the wall around her and a few into her body as water that had been cool and tranquil moments earlier became scalding and improbably rose up to splash her in the face. It was then she decided that the drawings were out of her power.

Whenever she was outside of her house Moira always felt the faintest buzzing against her skull, the local doctor had considered it a prodromal symptom of a migraine, but the element never progressed beyond an irritating sound. Until the day she disobeyed one of her mother’s rules. She always looked forward to Fridays, it meant that she have the weekend to draw, but more importantly she would get to see Adrian. Adrian she suspected, that been an enigma from the moment he was born. A Scandinavian street rat with far too much charm and intelligence for his own good and somehow grifted his way across the Atlantic and ended up in her life riding a steed of criminal charges for allegedly attempting to traffic young women across the border. Adrian claimed he had been trying to rescue them and the promised jury of his “peers” such as it was appeared to have bought that story, but Adrian could sell water to a drowning man. Even Moira was unsure what the truth of the matter was. Still Adrian was a charmer, and incorrigible flirt and she had fun bantering with him, although when she asked about his plans his thoughts always turned to getting out and making enough money to support his little boy. About a month ago, Adrian had complained of awful whispering noises splitting his skull during the day while Moira was not on shift. She walked into his cell the later at the start of the graveyard shift and found him sitting as though he were a wounded lion whose legs had been caught in a trap, through his quick pained breaths he greeted her in a melodious accent that was related to but unlike Adrian’s own. She saw that his legs were twisted, broken and fractured at various intervals as though someone had taken a chisel up and down the length of bone within his limbs. No one at the prison could explain the origin of his injuries and beyond a cursory visit from the institution’s uncaring physician no one tried to. As long as word did not escape these walls no one cared, Moira had thought about telling but who was there to tell? How did one even begin to do that? She’d never even left this town once in her twenty-something years. He been an able-bodied, athletic young man at lights out, and had awoken as…

“A cripple! I am but a poor humble cripple and I throw myself on your mercy, my dear sweet Moria. How must I abase myself before you to obtain another of these wonderful puddings? I am willing to do quite a lot, to serve…no that’s not quite the right word, oh your language is so silly…Service! I am willing to service you in oh so many ways!” He said in his singsong voice, appearing quite proud of himself for hunting down his lexical quarry. He he had used the provided spoon merely  an implement to tear the thin film of plastic keeping him from his prize, flung it away and for lack of a better descriptor… began preforming cunnilingus on the pudding pouch in his hand, his performance was complete with moans and groans and little contented sighs. All the while never breaking eye contact with her, blue orbs burning into her own filled with indecent proposals. Unwilling to tolerate his antics anymore she snatched the offending pudding cup from his grasp, for the shadow of an instant she could have sworn a terrible look of feral rage had flashed across his countenance but it was gone before Moira could register whether or not it ever truly been there. “I am so terribly sorry dear Moira for my offense, it is just that in my day, we did not have such…culinary delights. He’d slowed to get the word “culinary” out properly but hadn’t stumbled and looked satisfied. In his day, that was the other thing, in the month since Adrian awoken the entire prison wailing about whispering in his cell, according to the doctors he developed a dis-associative identity. The young man that now occupied the cell which officially belonged to Adrian, called himself Ivar Lothbrok. He had been doing his best to convince Moira that he was the spirit of a long dead Viking who had for reasons unknown even to himself woken up in a body that was so similar to his own that it had frightened even him. The prison psychiatrist couldn’t have cared less about the situation in that cell, but to Moira it was quite the engaging mystery.

Today Moira decided to challenge him. “If you really aren’t Adrian, prove it if you’re not him then your innocent of the crimes that got him put in here and you should be angry, you should want out.” The smile that split the face in front of her should have been a warning. “I may be innocent of his petty crime dealing in flesh and weird…potions,” Moira decided to let the odd word choice go to spare his pride. “But I have killed and maimed, and lied,  and stolen, and coveted many times over. You’re correct though, I do want out of the cell but for the moment I’m right where I want to be.” Moira, ever quizzical couldn’t stop herself from asking “Why do you want to be here?” “Because here is where you are.” he said as if he were speaking to the dullest child in all the world. “I will indulge you however, I am not Adrian, Adrian had pure wholesome thoughts about you, he was going to be free, tell you that he wanted you to be his little boy’s mother, beg you to start a family and run away with him to whatever little speck of a town he found someone foolish enough to care for the child while he was here. He’d have trafficked poison and flesh slaves or slaughtered swine for the rest of his days for you. He used to touch himself here in the dark fantasize about reaching through the bars of the cage and touching your skin, used to dream of having pure loving sex with you on a blanket by fjords illuminated only by the stars and the moon, lest he seemed to greedy to want to see you in all your glory. He wanted to fill your cunt with his seed over any over until the two of you made a brother or sister for precious little Patrick. One big happy family.” He spat out the infant’s name like a curse most vile, and treated the world family as though it was unconscionable poison on his tongue. She took a breath intending to halt whatever sick game he was playing, but the moment she drew breath and opened her mouth his eyes blazed with danger. “Keep your tongue behind your teeth if you wish to keep it all wench!” He roared. “You asked for this, now you will listen. I am not Adrian because never in his wildest dreams would he have contemplated the fantasy of using your uniform to tie you down and spitting on your face over and over forcing you to swallow what you could, and what you couldn’t would slide down between those perfect breasts of yours and they would glisten as I played with them, sucked and bit until they were raw, then I would have kept spitting until your cunt was drenched from the inside out, I would have laid siege to it like it was my traitor brother’s last stronghold. Oh, the sounds and squeals I would have pulled from you. I would have lavished you with my tongue and fingers, bit and sucked and twisted and slapped and pulled and made you come over and over again until you understood what it is to be ravished by a god!” He broke off into a fit of chuckling then capped with a wistful sigh. “But alas all that is denied to me, and indeed you, for you belong to someone else, and as sweet as you would be, you are not worth the effort of challenging his claim.” He stated this with such nonchalance that it broke the terrible spell that she had been under and she fled the prison with eyes burning and tears streaming.

Ivar smiled as she fled, finally, finally. he was one step closer to being free of this accursed in-between place, he was getting home to his beloved Eira and their little girl. Or perhaps another sojourn through life with his healer who had the body of a tower. Or maybe he’d meet that lippy little puppy of an entitled young man in Pennsylvania again who secretly craved discipline. Whatever happened he would be home again, nothing would stop him.

In her haste, she entered her home, ran to her bedroom and threw herself down on the bed without observing her mother’s rules. Had she been paying more attention she would’ve noticed that the water in the bowl she was supposed to flick at the door suddenly evaporated and the gossamer bags filled with protective elements suddenly caught flame and turned to ash in moments. It was then that she heard his voice. “Please don’t cry. I’m here now, it’ll be alright.” His tone was nearly plaintive. She didn’t bother setting up she knew that the voice came from no place within her home. “I’ve been waiting…eternities for you Moria,” He whispered inside her skull. “Let me make you feel better.” There was a hand stroking her face. Her eyes shot open and she beheld a figure that was both present and absent, there was wait to him but light seemed to pass through him through him as though he was merely a projection. Even trapped in the in between as he was, he was gorgeous. Her angel. A completely bare towering figure with the chest and leg and back and ass seemingly having been sculpted from the highest quality marble by da Vinci himself, with cheekbones that could reduce adamantine diamonds to dust, with lustrous hair and sinfully plump and pillowy lips. His eyes, so soulful that she believed he had lived a thousand lifetimes, she realized she’d been drawing this face for as long as she could remember. To feel his touch was to experience euphoria. He kissed her and all her senses were expanded beyond human potential, she saw a kaleidoscope of colors behind her eyes, he smelled and tasted of every single enticing thing at once but instead of a riotous discord of scents and flavors, they were balanced in perfect harmony. His voice alone could reduce her bones to jelly in a way that would make Ivar fear she intended to stake a claim to his epithet. He worshiped her with his entire being, fingers and hands and tongue and colossal endowment yes, but in the midst of their lovemaking she was certain that their spirits were melding even more intensely than their bodies. He spat upon her face one and she felt as though she were being anointed in holy oil by a deity. He scored her flesh with his sharp straight teeth the color of shining bone, drew blood, and she was happy to give it. His enormous hand encircled her throat closed her airway and if she hadn’t already been experiencing what she thought might be Nirvana, the oxygen deprivation would’ve taken her there. After fucking her through more than 20 orgasms and claiming all her orifices for his own each first with the gentle fervor of a virginal lover at the end of an idyllic courtship and then with a harsh brutality as though fucking her two within an inch of her life was the only way he could properly express the hatred for her that filled his entire alien being. He finally unburdened himself of his seed deep inside her and sighed contentedly .

When she awoke after their tryst, he was seated in a chair opposite her bed dressed in a suit and other finery looking for all the world like a high-powered professional instead of some cosmic entity to take an interest in her. He then told her of the tragedy of Henry Deaver, how a Titanic battle with his wife over his infidelity with a young woman he had met at a business engagement led to him driving fueled by rage and sadness while rain pounded the car and obscured his vision, he’d crashed into the lake and been thrown into a myriad of alternate realities, “other heres and nows where the dominos fell in different patterns. His stories of lives spent with Charlotte, Oliver, Westly, as a professor, a soldier from West Virginia, a bounty hunter who fought for his life in a dystopia, the life he’d almost lived of a Viking, a philanderer with a beer-based pick-up strategy, a gangster, the searching for true love based on a scientific assessment ,they all brought tears to her eyes. He entreated her with every fiber of his being to free him from his cage and put an end to his cycle of loneliness, to save him and others trapped in this limbo. She swore to do it.

That was the day the matriarch without a clan descended on the prison, her chariot of choice, a limousine flanked by a motorcade of four SUVs each bearing the insignia of an elite private security firm denigrated the world over for unsavory activities, their detractors though couldn’t question their effectiveness. She and the battalion she paid for advanced through the prison like a storm, the guards normally employed were deferential and out of their depth. The only sounds echoing through the prison with a click of her heels and the thuds of the jackboots that accompanied her for she had brought silence to the prison with her mere presence. Moira had heard of her, the interim controller of a ludicrously wealthy and secretive biotech firm following the scandalous disappearance of her son and heir. Allegedly, the young man whom the newspapers referred to as the Brat Prince had somehow veered off the course of normally accepted philandering ways among the ultrarich and powerful and become involved with someone his mother deemed unacceptable. The matriarch had come because the vast network of informants that she plied with riches and sharp promises had imparted to her knowledge of a prisoner found here who almost matched her son’s description. The only thing he had left behind was a wheelchair covered in the blood of its owner, a crippled faggot whom he had dared to take for a lover. He would pay for his insolence, for the damage down to her reputation and company, she would break this mysterious prisoner and learn all that he knew, she swore it. When she reached his unusual cell a young woman in scrubs was fumbling with the keys, her son’s face taken on a different path through destiny than the one she knew stared back at her. He spoke to her in an antiquated dialect of that language from the Balkans she had left behind so many mortal lifetimes ago, she was not that frightened, trusting girl from Wallachia anymore, she nearly charged the cage to make him pay for daring to address her this way, but the meaning of his words stilled her. “Madame Olivia, I believe we can be of help to one another once this insect has served its purpose.” Moria broke the lock.

He nuzzled into her touch aching a contented sound as she ran her hands through his hair, it had been eons since he felt the touch of another, his eyelashes fluttered and tears swam in his eyes, he would allow himself this one indulgence. “Loyal Moria, you have played your part well and in appreciation I give you the greatest of gifts, the fulfillment of your destiny.” When he spoke it was with the voice of 100 different people at once both cacophonous and whisper quiet. She screamed as his lips brushed her forehead, for this feather-light touch broke everything inside of her all at once. She fell as her skin froze and burned all at once, her muscles liquefied and her bones turned to jelly, her ears, nose, and eyes ran with blood, then her eyes began to boil in their sockets fluids running down into her still shrieking mouth as her body contorted it this way and that trying desperately to contend with suffering that was beyond human comprehension.

The last thing she saw before death mercifully claimed her were a pair of unveiled eyes atop bloodless lips, her final sight was one she had been drawing her entire life.

As the wretch finally had the good sense to expire Olivia Godfrey watched as the death seemed to fill out the prisoner’s gaunt and wan features until she could almost confuse him for an older version of her son. He drew in a deep breath, stooped to kiss her hand and issued a request, eyes glittering with dark promise: ��Take me to Derry.”

[return-of-a-space-cowboy]

Little L part 1

(Yandere Johnny Joestar X Female Reader)

Warning: mentioning of attempted suicide

A fifty-million dollar cash prize was enough to have anyone sign away their life to a race as daring as the Steel Ball Run but to you it was more the money at the finish line, it was the promise of health and safety to your older brother whose life had been completely changed after miraculously surviving a horrible case of rabies. What made I worse was that your parents had abandoned you both shortly after, they didn't want a son that may have been quadriplegic for the rest of his life and they surely didn't want a daughter that had a weird eye deformity that made your irises have strange white specks in them. The money was the only way that you believed that you would be able to provide for the two of you. So you brought a horse from a farmer you knew near by. A dark stallion which you named Cosmic girl and then you registered for the Steel Ball Run.

🐎🐎🐎

"Hey (Y/n), look at this guy!" One of the others contestants said as he nudged you while pointing the scene in front. A man was being dragged around the paddock by a horse as he clung on for dear life.

"What the hell is he thinking? He's gonna get himself killed!" You nearly yelled as you started pushing through the crowd in front of you. You gasped in horror as you saw a large piece wood go straight through his leg, but yet this didn't stop him. You hopped over the fence and slowly walked along the edge of the pen. The horse noticed you and slowed down and paced towards you. You held your hand up to it's snout, you felt it take in your scent before lowering it's head as a sign of loyalty.

"I could have gotten on her just fine without your assistance!" The blonde haired male hissed at you.

"Obviously not if you have a large splinter of wood jammed in your leg" you spat. He turned his head behind to look at his leg and sure enough he saw it. You questioned how he wasn't feeling that, surly that must of hurt.

"How are you not feeling that?" You asked, he only gave you a death glare before responding.

"Is that any of your concern!" His voice was filled with anger. This guy was a total jerk but you still wanted to help him for some reason. You held out your hand for him but he simply slapped it away.

"What kind of sick fucking joke are you pulling" he hissed.

"I'm try to help you!" you yelled at him.

"I don't need your charity you star eyed fuckwad!" He screamed before crawling away.

"A cripple has no reason to be here"

"That's Johnny Joestar, he use to be a pretty amazing jockey awhile ago..."

"But after the incident... Well... You know"

"He probably entered to make some big comeback"

"But it's pretty stupid, I bet he won't even survive the first section" the voices muttered in the background and that's when it all started to link up. You began to feel a idiot for holding out your hand when he couldn't even stand himself but it also explained why he was so quick tempered. You just hoped that you could make things up to him.

🐎🐎🐎

You looked at the leaderboard for the first section with a small smile of content on your face. Since Gyro had been disqualified you had slipped into a cosy sixth place, of course it's wasn't the first place that you had been training for but it was a start.

"Move it shortie!" You heard an British accent say as you were pushed aside. He let out hiss in disgust as he saw himself at third place.

"What was that for?" you yelled at him.

"You didn't get out of my way" he bluntly stated as he turned to face you. It was Diego Brando, AKA the prince of British horse racing, total arrogant prick. He shoved past you again as he walked away.

"Fucking twat!" You yelled at him while mimicking the British accent. He stopped and turned back again.

"What was that?" he hissed.

"You heard her you wanker" another mocking British accent chimed in beside you. You looked to see Johnny in his wheelchair beside you.

Diego scoffed.

"Well I have more important things to do then argue with a midgit and a cripple" he huffed as he walked off. You laughed as you pulled your finger and your thumb into the shape of an L on your forehead. Which earned a giggle from the him.

"You did pretty good today" you commented on his fifth place.

"I told you that would been fine" he snickerd.

"You've proven a lot of people wrong" you sighed.

"You did pretty good yourself" he said with a small smirk on his face.

"But if you want to win then you've gotta get past me" he taunted.

"Is there any other way?" You asked retoriclly as you held out you hand, he shook it before replying

"Then let's push ourselves to the limit and give it our all"

🐎🐎🐎

On horse back you two would taunt and slag each other off but once you were off you two were a tightly knitted duo, or trio if you added Gyro into the mix. It seemed like the events that occurred in the devil palm had intertwined your fates. Slowly you climbed up to the top of the leaderboard while still managing to not get killed by any of the assassins that you had crossed paths with and that was with the help Johnny.

Over time a sort of attraction towards you developed. It's wasn't what he would call admiration and it wasn't one he saw as plutonic, it was something more romantic

🐎🐎🐎

"It's a tight one ladies and gentlemen! Diego, Gyro and (Y/n) are neck and neck! If (Y/n) wins it'll be the second first place in a row!" You heard the yell into the microphone, that alone was enough to make your blood pressure skyrocket but you had to keep calm because if you didn't then cosmic girl would lose her stable mobility, in most cases you wouldn't mind but with Diego on you back you knew you couldn't give him that opportunity.

You rubbed Cosmic's sides and whispered.

"We can do this... Just keep calm". You closed your eyes as the the finish line was only metres away.

"(Y/n) and Gyro cross the line then Diego!!"

"It was to close to call! A photo finish!" The announcer howled. You opened your eyes to see that you were over the finish line, Gyro right beside you giving you a thumbs up with his signature smile.

"I totally won that" you slyly responded with a smug look on your face.

"Don't get cocky" he simply replied. You two waited a little while for Johnny to join you both.

"What was that you slowpoke you yelled to the blonde male that was approaching.

"Yeah I though you were better then that" Gyro chimed in.

"Come on give me a break" Johnny replied as he got closer. He then snickered before pointing in Diego's direction, you could see the look of disgust on his face.

"Someone isn't happy coming in third place again" he commented.

"Well look at his horse, they say that if a horse has a asshole of a rider then they'll also be an asshole" you chuckled as you saw his horse stomping and kicking around like a spoilt brat.

"Let's go to the saloon, I dying for a drink" Gyro commented.

"I agree with you there" you replied.

"But I'll check in to our room first" you said as you parted ways with the duo.

🐎🐎🐎

"Mrs (L/N) your in room 34" the lady at the counter said as she handed you the keys.

"Thank you ma'am" you replied as you walked away.

Just as you were about to walk up the stairs you heard a voice call out your name, you turned back to see a messenger running towards you.

"(Y/n)...(L/n)" He he paused between your first and last name, obviously out of breath.

"Yes, that would be me" you responded. He placed a letter with a piece of paper attached to it. Your heart stopped as you saw what the paper was, a telegram, the telegram you feared... You brother had died.

"I'm sorry for your loss" he said before leaving. You quickly ran straight to your room, tears running down your face. He was gone, he was dead, all of this had been a pointless pursuit.

🐎🐎🐎

It had been half an hour since you said you would get the keys to the room and you hadn't shown up, Gyro was already getting disoriented and Johnny was starting to get worried. It didn't take half an hour to to get to the saloon. Thoughts started to swirl in his head, did you you get hurt? Did one of the assassins attack you? Were you being harassed by some of the other competitors.

"Gyro, I'm gonna look for (Y/n)" he said as he tapped the intoxicated Italian's shoulder.

"All right, go ahead..." He replied with a slight slur.

"Just don't go messing around with her, you know danm well that she's like a daughter to me..." He continued.

"As if I can do that" Johnny said  before wheeling himself out of the saloon. Now that Gyro had said that he couldn't stop his mind wondering.

'if a mosquito bite came up so prominently then how would a love bite come up' He bit his lip and a shiver went down his spine as he thought of it.

'you're meant to be looking for her! Not thinking about her in such lewd ways' he mentally screamed as he made his way to the hotel.

When he finally arrived, he asked the lady at the counter and she told him which room you were in. He then let out a groan as he saw the staircase.

'great, just fucking great!' He thought as he pushed himself out of his wheelchair and began to drag himself up them. It took awhile but he made it. He hear sobs coming from the room, he pushed open the door that was slightly ajar.

He saw your silhouette sitting on the the bed closest to the door, one hand holding you head, the other reaching for something. It gleamed in the light, he squinted his eyes to make the object out, a pistol. You brought it up to your head.

"(Y/n)! No!" He yelled as loud as he could before summoning Tusk and shooting the pistol out of you hand.

"Johnny!" You yelped in shock.

"(Y/n) what on earth were you thinking!" He questioned as he crawled to the bedside. You bursted into tears, you hands pulling at you hair.

"My brother's gone!" you nearly screamed.

"Why must god do this to me! He betrayed me! He dismissed my prayers!" You continued.

Johnny was absolutely shocked, he felt such a dreadful and grim feeling wash over him as he watch you scream and cry over your deceased brother.

"Why... Why... Why must life be cruel" you sobbed.

"Hey, (Y/n)... I know how you feel, I lost my older brother too but that doesn't mean you should kill yourself" he said he placed his hand on your thigh in a comforting manner.

"I may have never met him but I'm sure he would have wanted you to live your own life" he continued.

"I'm sure a few drinks might help you make sense of everything"

"I don't know I just-" you were saying before you were cut off by Johnny abruptly pulling you down to his level and planting a kiss on your lips before you pushed him away out of pure suprise, you couldn't even form a proper sentence. So many thoughts swirled in your head, you didn't know how to make sense of what just happened.

It seemed like you had both been frozen for minutes, Johnny looking into your eyes with an endearing expression as he waited for his feelings to be returned. You then finally found you composure and spoke.

"Johnny... I don't know what to think right now, this is all just a bit to sudden... I'm just not so sure how to feel about you right now"

"No I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that... I'll just leave you be since I'm sure I'm just unwelcome company now" he sighed as began to crawl away, hiding his displeasure.

"No! I didn't mean it like that!" You exclaimed as you grabbed onto his arm.

"I... I'm not rejecting you but I'm also not saying yes, I just need some time... Some time to figure out what I'm gonna do for myself"

[cross-roads-blues]

You Made Me Believe

Title: You Made Me Believe

Pairing: Sam x Gabriel,  Sam-centric

Word Count: 4,476

Warnings: Fluff, some angst (i think??? i tried???), the usual tattoos on the skin soulmate au, so some unwanted body modification

Summary: Sam Winchester didn’t believe in soulmates. However this is about to change as Sam encounters his soulmate and goes on a long journey of accepting his feelings.

Square Filled: Soulmate AU

A/N: For @spnfluffbingo Round 2. Ah, this took me a while to write, but I think it turned out pretty well. Please no hate comments. Not beta-read, so excuse any bad grammar please. 

Sam Winchester didn’t believe in soulmates. As simple as that. Everything about an idea of a person being assigned to you by cosmic powers through a tattoo on your body disgusted him. It was the predefined destiny, it was the total and absolute obsession with finding one’s soulmate, hell, it was having something on your body that you didn’t consent to. It was because of all these reasons and a little bit more that Sam wasn’t happy on his 16th  birthday. He layed in bed in some crappy motel, being too afraid to open his eyes and see his soulmark. His Dad told him and Dean about soulmarks. Soulmarks were a black and white tattoos that became coloured once you touched the skin of your soulmate. The drawings represented your soulmate  and the completed pair was supposed to represent the relationship with your soulmate. Dean got his soulmark 4 years prior, a pair of angel wings stretched across his chest. Dean wasn’t as negative as Sam was of the idea of soulmates, but he also wasn’t overly fond of it. He wasn’t overall fond of the idea of settling down with someone, so the older Winchester never put much thought in finding his soulmate. “Sammy, this mark? It don’t mean squat. It ain’t worth shit. It’s just a mark. You can lead your life the way you want it. Don’t let some cosmic powers define it,” said Dean the evening before Sam’s 16th birthday and Sam held on to his words in the sleepless night, dreading falling asleep and dreading waking up to see something… foreign and permanent on his skin. Eventually, of course, he did fall asleep and now he was laying in bed, stalling the moment when he had to open his eyes.

“Sam! Wake up, we gotta go!” he heard his father’s voice from the other room. Right, they were on a hunt. He couldn’t afford to pretend to be asleep any longer. He slowly opened his eyes and the first thing he did was glance at his hands and check that there was no mark there. He saw people who had marks on their hands and he was terrified of the idea of everyone just being able to see his mark. The soulmark felt way too personal to be exposed to the world. Thankfully, the skin of his hands was clean. Sam exhaled with relief. He slowly got out from the bed, glancing down at his body clad in pyjama flannel pants and a tank top. The mark wasn’t visible anywhere. Sam quietly laughed, relieved. If he couldn’t see his soulmark, it means that other people can’t either and he can happily spend the rest of his life with his soulmark covered by clothes.

“Happy Birthday!” Dean barged into the room. Sam looked up at him and immediately saw Dean’s face change. His eyebrows shot up as a slight frown appeared on his lips.

“Dean, what’s the problem?” asked Sam, still examining his body on the subject of a soulmark. “I can’t find my soulmark anywhere, you think maybe it just didn't appear on me? That’d be nice.”

Dean cringed and gently took Sam by the shoulders and led him to the bathroom.

“Please don’t freak out.” With these words, Dean opened the door to the bathroom and turned on the light. Sam quietly gasped as he gazed at his reflection. From the start of his neck up to his eye covering most of the right side of his face, going above the brow stretched a branch with fourteen tiny roses on it that had angel wings instead of petals.

“Oh shit,” murmured Sam, examining the tattoo. As he traced the outlines of the branch with his fingers, he felt his hatred for the soulmark grow as he tried to keep himself from scraping the tattoo off with a razor.

Sam Winchester never seeked his soulmate. It was against his rebellious nature to give in to the cosmic powers and live his life with destined soulmate, so he preferred to have as much of his skin covered as possible to avoid accidental touches. The floral soulmark earned him a lot of glances and unwanted attention, so let his hair grow out to cover the soulmark, which wasn't doing much, however. When Sam got together with Jess, he couldn't help but notice that her mark - a guitar covering most of her left thigh - was already coloured, while his roses stayed gray. When he asked her about brown guitar, she just shook her head solemnly and quietly said that things don’t always work out. They never spoke about that again. His soulmark didn’t glow up when he touched Sarah. Nor did it color up when he slept with Madison. Perhaps that was for the best, considering the circumstances of their meeting. And then there was this case.

The case was crazy from the very beginning. The aliens, the crazy spirit, the alligators. Bonkers. Ultimately, it all boiled down to the confrontation in the stage room. The ‘monster of the week’ turned out to be a Trickster. A rather handsome one, if you ask Sam. Not that Sam was into… guys, or anything. But objectively - objectively - the janitor Trickster was cute. Anyway it didn’t matter, the guy was dangerous and was killing people. They had to take him out.

“Nice toss, ladies! Nice show!” The Trickster stood up and clapped his hands, as the illusions of the women threw Dean at a row of seats. Sam was being strangled by one of Trickster’s illusions, but both he and Dean spotted the spare stake that was lying close enough to be tossed by Sam to Dean.

“Dean... Dean, Dean, Dean. “ The Trickster almost looked pitiful and Sam couldn’t help but notice he had cute eyes. “I did not want to have to do this.”

At this moment, Sam got free of the chokehold enough to toss the stake to Dean who caught it and masterfully wielded it, stabbing the Trickster. “Me neither,” replied the older Winchester, as he stared down the body.

As they were driving in the Impala away from the city, Sam couldn’t help but feel just a little bit sad. Sure the fight was brief, Sam didn’t even get anywhere near the Trickster, the guy was taken out, case closed, but… there was something about the janitor that made Sam just a tiniest bit sad that they had to kill him. Just the tiniest bit.

And then came the clusterfuck of the demon deal. Sam had never felt so lost and in despair, as Dean’s borrowed time was ticking away. And a hundred plus worth of Tuesdays worth of Dean’s deaths didn’t really help. And then it hit him. It hit him with the strawberry syrup and non existent wormholes. Sam raced after the guy and pinned him down with a stake.

“Mister, my name is Ed Coleman, my wife's name is Amelia, I got two kids, for crying out loud I sell ad space—” stuttered the man, still acting his role.

“Don't lie to me! I know what you are! We've killed one of your kind before!” Sam further pressed the stake to the man’s throat.

“Actually, bucko, you didn't,” with a smug grin informed him the man, as he morphed into the Trickster.

Sam exhaled loudly, irritated. “Why are you doing this?”

“You're joking, right? You chuckleheads tried to kill me last time. Why wouldn't I do this?” The Trickster raised his eyebrows and smirked.

“And Hasselback, what about him?” added Dean from the background.

Trickster’s eyes darted to the upper right, as if trying to figure out who Dean was talking about. “That putz? He said he didn't believe in wormholes, so I dropped him in one.” He chuckled, happy with his trick well done.

Suddenly a frown appeared on his face, as he angrily continued, “Then you guys showed up. I made you the second you hit town.”

“So this is fun for you?” Sam leaned forward, feeling murderous rage boil in his veins. “Killing Dean over and over again?”

Trickster thought for a second. “One, yes. It is fun.”

Sam couldn’t take it. The guy crossed the line. Talking like that, doing this to his brother, nobody does that and lives. Nobody. And in that moment, Sam didn’t think that he was facing a demigod, a creature powerful enough to warp reality to its whims. He just saw a guy who was killing his brother over and over again and laughing at it. Sam acted on the heat of the moment and slapped the Trickster on the face. “You don’t get to do that to my brother and laugh about that,” he whispered, a menacing light flickering in his eyes.

And as a red handprint appeared on the Trickster’s face, Sam felt the right half of his face burn as his right eye barely registered a flash of golden light. Trickster’s face went from smug to terrified, as something glowed right underneath the collar of his shirt.

“What the hell…” Sam touched the source of burning on his face and winced from the sensation.

“Sammy…” Dean stared wide-eyed at him. “Your soulmark…”

Sam gazed back at Dean, with slightly open mouth and raised forehead. “What’s with my soulmark?”

Dean produced his mobile and snapped a quick picture of Sam, still holding the Trickster to the fence. He then showed the result to Sam, with slightly shaking hands. “It’s golden.”

Sam stared at the picture of himself, dumbfounded. Sam’s face on the picture, with a horrified expression, was decorated by a hickory branch with medallion golden roses on it.

“Aw, shit.” Sam touched his soulmark once again and turned around to face the Trickster, who was looking at something under his shirt. With one swift movement, Sam  tore the shirt open to reveal a currant red, with a metallic touch, Taurus PT92AFS tattooed on Trickster’s chest.

“That’s my gun…” murmured Sam, not believing a thing that was happening. “Is this another one of your tricks?” Sam nearly jammed the stake into Trickster’s throat, but the latter one just shook his head.

“I’m all out of tricks for today, chuckles.” With these words the Trickster vanished into air, leaving Sam and Dean just standing there in confusion.

“What the-” Sam was cut short, as he once again woke up in the motel room.

“Promise me I'll be back in time...”  roared the radio, as the calendar displayed Wednesday.

“It's Wednesday,” murmured Sam.

“Yeah, usually comes after Tuesday. Turn that thing off,” commented Dean, as he stuffed his clothes into his duffle.

Sam quickly got out of the covers and gave Dean a long, perhaps way too long hug. He was just glad to be out of the Dean Dying Tuesday loop.

Dean laughed quietly. “Dude, how many Tuesdays did you have?” he said, patting Sam on the back.

“Enough.” Sam pulled out of the hug and furrowed his brows. “What, uh, what do you remember?”

“I remember you were pretty whacked out of it yesterday. I remember getting up with the Trickster.” Dean hesitated for a moment and glanced up at Sam’s face. “I remember his soulmark being your gun and I remember it turning red. Becoming colored. Just like the roses on your face. That’s it. He must’ve knocked us out.”

Sam sighed. “They’re still golden?”

Dean nodded with a frown.

“So it wasn’t a dream.” Sam huffed. “Can you believe it? My soulmate being a frigging demigod and an asshole. Peachy! Joy!” he exclaimed sarcastically, pacing around the room. The fact that his soulmate was a man didn’t bother him at all, it was the major doucheness of the said soulmate that was a problem.

“Sammy.” Dean caught him by his shoulders and stopped him. “Remember what I told you? The mark is just… a suggestion.” Dean looked him dead in the eye.

“Yeah, but now I have to walk around with yellow roses on my face! At least they were grey before, now they are freaking yellow!”

Dean gave the roses on Sam’s face a judging look. “They match your inner sunshine,” he finally commented and, laughing, headed into the bathroom.

Sam groaned. “Jerk.”

“Bitch!”

Sam Winchester didn’t see his soulmate for a while after that. Sam’s been… busy, way too busy to care about his soulmate. Dean going to hell, angels, Dean getting his soulmate (those wings were frigging glowing when Dean got out of hell and were constantly changing colors up until Dean finally met Castiel in that barn and they finally set on being ebony color with hints of silver and grey in them), Sam’s little addiction, Ruby, Lucifer, Horsemen… Stuff has been happening and Sam hasn’t been caring much about his soulmate. Not that the latter one was acting up particularly. The Trickster’s been quiet, seriously quiet.

Next time Sam saw his soulmate wasn’t in real life. One day Sam found a Casa Erotica 13 on his bed with a label “For you from a dearest friend”, assumed it was from Dean, questioned why Dean would give it to him, since he always joked on Dean for watching those and decided to watch it just to see what his brother got him. He pressed play on the TV. It started as usual, with a ‘Dear Diary’ narration from the woman. Sam furrowed his brows and with a frown looked at the screen.

“What you doing?” he suddenly heard Dean’s voice in the halfway.

“I, uh, found your gift and am questioning the logic behind it.” Sam paused the video on his laptop and turned it around to show Dean.

“What do you mean, I didn’t give it to you.” Dean dumped his leather jacket in the corner and settled on the couch near Sam.

“I found it on the bed with a “For you from a dearest friend” label. I thought it was from you,” Sam raised his forehead. “Who put it there, then?”

“Cas?” suggested Dean.

Sam huffed. “I really don’t think so. Anyway…” He resumed the video. On the tape, the door to the hotel room, where woman was sitting opened and the Trickster  appeared, wearing a mustache and a service waiter's outfit.

“I've got the kielbasa you ordered,” he said with a weird accent.

“Ooh. Polish?”, said the woman, leaning forward.

“Hungarian,” replied Trickster with a smirk and threw ��the dish onto the mantle as the tape cut to black and exaggerated smooching sounds that Sam assumed to be produced by Trickster kissing the woman could be heard.

“Well that is disturbing. I don’t think- I don’t think I can unsee that,” mumbled Dean, as his eyes followed the Trickster on the screen passionately making out with the woman, accompanied by moaning sounds.

“What the hell's going on?” muttered Sam, as the video cut to black again. After a second, an image of the Trickster appeared on the screen, who was sitting on the bed of the hotel room, with the woman behind him. He turned to the camera and removed his mustache and begun to speak, addressing the camera.

“Sam, and may I assume Dean as well. You're probably wondering what the hell is this. Well, if you're watching this, I'm dead. Oh please! Stop sobbing, it's embarrassing for all of us. Now, seeing as I am dead, I got a couple of revelations to make. I am…” The Trickster sighed. “I am Archangel Gabriel. Been wearing this pretty face as witness protection.”

“Okay, what?” Sam turned around to Dean. “What the hell?”

Dean made a not bad face and nodded. “The guy is good at disguises, I give him that.”

Gabriel went on to explain how he fled Heaven and how to trap Lucifer using rings of Horsemen. The information proved vital in defeating Lucifer, but there were two things that didn’t let Sam rest easy for years after that day. He couldn’t stop thinking about that even while in Hell, even while suffering from hallucinations, even during his time with Amelia. These two things were that his soulmate was an Archangel and that his soulmate was dead.

Sam Winchester knew his soulmate was dead. And he also knew that all romantic relationships in his line of work were largely a risk. So he just kept going on and on and on, disregarding any opportunities of a family life. And to be honest, life didn't give him many. He just couldn't get a break. At least they moved into the bunker, which was nice. That day Sam was returning to the bunker after one more false lead on removing Mark Of Cain, which was largely disappointing. Dean decided to take a solo hunt - an easy salt'n'burn - in Oklahoma, so Sam expected an alone night. He wasn't particularly disappointed about, he was able to be most productive alone. As he descended into the bunker, he, however heard some jazzy music and smelled chocolate.

“Dean, why are you back so early?” he shouted to no reply, as he made his way into the kitchen, which seemed to be the source of music. He recognised the song to be Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and was surprised to say the least at Dean’s choice of music. Unless Dean decided to have an impromptu date with Cas, he couldn’t think of a reason for his brother to listen to Leonard Cohen.

“Dean?” he called out once again and got no reply again. He walked into the kitchen and to his surprise saw nobody other than Gabriel there.

“Hey there, sugar.” Gabriel was sitting on the table, casually eating chocolate candies from a heart-shaped red box. He gestured towards it. “I gotcha a little gift, but they turned out to be freaking delicious and you live on rabbit food anyway so I thought you wouldn’t mind me eating one or two of them.”

Sam stood there, dumbfounded as he female choir sung hallelujah. He stared at the archangel with a slightly opened mouth, raised forehead and wide eyes.

“Gabriel? Didn’t you die, like a while ago?”

Gabriel furrowed his brows and shook his head. “I faked my death. Couldn’t surface because angels still have a warrant on my head.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Sam blurted out.

Gabriel smirked. “Thought I’d drop by to get to know my soulmate.”

Sam squinted. “How did you even know about this place?”

“I hear things.” The archangel raised an eyebrow.

Sam slowly approached Gabriel. “Don’t assume that just because you’re my soulmate-”

“I don’t assume anything, cherry pie.” The archangel gracefully jumped from the table and stared right in Sam’s eyes. “I know that we got a history and I know I didn’t make the best first impression.”

“The best?” Sam scoffed. “You killed my brother over 100 times!”

“And then I helped you stop the Apocalypse! I feel like I redeemed myself!” shouted Gabriel. They both didn’t say anything for two seconds after that.

“You do know that I don’t believe in soulmates, right?” Sam walked up to refrigerator and took out two beers.

Gabriel huffed. “Believe me, neither do I. When I got a frigging gun as my soulmark while all my brothers got something cool and elegant, like swords or fire, I nearly frigging scraped it off with my own nails.”

Sam slightly smiled, remembering his own urge to scrape his soulmark off with a razor and then narrowed his eyes. “But you could always change your vessel?”

Gabriel shook his head. “The soulmark doesn’t just appear on our true form as a binary representation of the picture, it also scorches itself in every vessel we use for the time we use it. I guess it really is cosmic power thing.”

The song changed to Humbled In Love and Sam smiled. Gabriel really knew how to pick a playlist. “Then why are you here?” asked the Winchester.

Gabriel slightly smiled. “I always liked you, Sam. Willing to bet you did too.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “I’ve met you like twice, and you’ve tried to kill my brother both of these times. Oh and the third time I met you, you were starring in porn.”

Gabriel grinned. “That wasn’t porn, that was art!”

Sam’s mouth’s corners twitched up. “Anyway continue on why are you here before I banish you.”

Gabriel raised his eyebrows and leaned a bit closer to Sam, who, to his own surprise, didn’t move away. “Feisty,” said the archangel and waggled his eyebrows, “I like it!” He smirked. “I wasn’t looking for my soulmate much. I mean I did kind of want to find the jerk who gave me a gangster tattoo as my soulmark, but I never overstressed about it. Just… living the good easy life.”

Gabriel walked around the table and sat closer to Sam. “And then came you. To tell you the truth, even back at that theater, I liked you. You’re cute to say the least. But you know me, I show my love through annoying the crap out of the subject. So that’s why Dean-Killing-Tuesdays happened. I kind of wanted to see you react to an extreme situation first hand. Plus being stuck with you in 100 Tuesdays wasn’t so bad.”

Sam laughed. “Have you been crushing on me since 2006?”

“Yeah, so you can see, why I’m trying to get it over with.” Gabriel moved even closer to Sam.

“I don’t believe in soulmates,” restated Sam in a hushed voice, however, slightly leaning towards Gabriel.

“What about matches made in heaven?” muttered the angel, maintaining steady eye contact “Cause I can arrange that.”

Sam smiled slightly. “I bet you could.”

Gabriel hesitantly reached out and tucked Sam’s hair behind his ear, moving slowly, carefully, but when the hunter didn’t flinch or move away, the movement of the angel’s hand became smoother, as he brushed against Sam’s hair. And even though Sam would never admit it, he liked the feeling. Most of his previous hookups were just jumping straight into the hot part of the process and skipping most of the touchy-feely stuff. Sam liked the hesitation with which Gabriel ran his hand through his hair, he liked the way the angel’s eyes lit up when he didn’t back away, he liked the way Gabriel’s hands felt, the warmth that came from them.

“So do you want to give it a try, Sam?” The angel lingered for a moment near Sam and then leaned slightly back.

Sam didn’t reply anything, just silently drank his beer. “So,” he said after ten seconds of silence, “Gabe, tell me about yourself.”

Sam Winchester actually got along well with his soulmate. Gabriel was dropping by the bunker every now and then, sometimes bringing some almost romantic sweet gifts, like chocolates in a heart box, just like the ones he was eating on their first meeting in the bunker, but he never was too pushing with his affections. It was almost as if he was restraining himself. Months went by and nothing changed.

It was a rainy morning and Sam was outside of the bunker, sitting on the porch, drinking his coffee. He liked to be up early and maybe either take a walk or go for a run, but that morning all he wanted to do was just to sit there and drink coffee. It was then that he heard a familiar flapping of wings behind him.

“Gabe,” called out Sam, without even turning around. He knew it was the archangel.

“Samsquatch.” The angel walked up to him from behind, sat near him and swung an arm around him. “You’re all brooding and pensive today, huh? Intense staring at the rain?”

Sam laughed and playfully shook Gabriel’s arm off his shoulder. “Oh, you!”

Gabriel laughed as well. “Mind if I join you?”

Sam shrugged. “Not at all.”

They spent the next few minutes in silence. After some time the angel spoke up, with a bit hesitation at first. “Hey Sam, I’ve been thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t really know how to say this-” Gabriel giggled “-first time in millennia that I am actually speechless, so I’m just going to say this. Life is short, I guess, so might as well make the most of it.”

Intrigued Sam put aside his coffee and tilted his head gazing at the angel’s face.

“Now, if you say no and stuff, and this flops, can you promise me that nothing changes and we keep our friendship?” Gabriel intensely stared at the hunter’s face.

“I don’t know what you wanna ask, but I’ll do my best to keep the promise,” with some hesitation replied Sam. In all this time he had really grown accustomed to the archangel and he thought of him as of the closest person he had after Dean.

Gabriel took a deep breath. “Sam Winchester, I love you. And I’m tired of hiding it. I just- I’m tired of constantly holding me back. I love you. And I want to spend my life with you.”

Sam’s heart plunged. Angel’s words were certainly not what he was expecting, but the were something he was hoping for deep inside. Even though Sam denied it even to himself, perhaps because of his rebellious nature and refusal to accept the idea of soulmates, Gabriel was very special to him. In the romantic kind of way special. Sam didn’t want to make the first move, because he just couldn’t accept that he had actually fallen in love with his soulmate, a thing he thought would never happen to him.  But now that the angel had actually confessed to him, all Sam’s feelings finally made sense to him.

“Gabe…” Sam felt a lump in his throat forming. “Gabe, I- I love you too.”

Taking that as his go ahead, Gabriel slowly leaned closer to Sam, then hesitated for a second, but then saw Sam lean in as well and proceeded, running his hand through Sam’s gorgeous hair, pulling him closer at the same time and then Sam felt his lips collide with the angel’s and Sam could swear that that was the best feeling in the world. Sam swung his arms around Gabriel, pulling him tighter and letting his body relax in Gabriel’s secure arms, as Gabriel’s usual scent of chocolate filled his senses. They stayed like that for at least five minutes, finally letting the pent up feelings act, releasing all emotions that they’ve been holding back.

They finally came apart, just to get some air, and then they kissed again, holding each other tight and feeling like letting go was physically impossible.

“I- I love you, Gabe,” muttered Sam once again just to hear himself say it and be comfortable with it.

“I love you too, Sam, I love you too,” murmured the angel as he pulled the hunter closer to him. “I love you too.”

Sam Winchester believed in soulmates. His soulmate made him do it.

[spideyxchelle]

love is universal. it spans time and distance. and sometimes, on the rare occasion that love doesn’t quite get it right the first, love spans for more than one lifetime. this is that story.

in their first life they are called Femi and Marcus. in this, their last life, they are called Peter and MJ.

[part 1] [part 2] [part 3] [part 4] [part 5] [part 6]

This is the life she remembers.

Not all at once, but it comes to her in waves, at first like daydreams. She remembers Rome first when she’s ten years old, and then England at eleven, and France by twelve, and Russia when she’s twelve and a half, and by the time she remembers their last life she’s convinced it’s real. She knows in her heart that these memories she has are more than daydreams, they are her past, and whoever this boy is going to be in this lifetime is going to be her future.

She’s fourteen years old when she gets accepted to Midtown High for special students. She’s fourteen years old when she storms into Midtown High and stumbles right into Peter Parker.

She wants to yell at the idiot that knocked all of her books out of her hands, but when she looks up she has no words. That’s a lie, she has two, “It’s you.”

He knits his eyebrows together in confusion and gives her the same sloppy grin he’s worn in every life, “Sorry, do I know you?”

Her heart drops in her stomach at the sickening realization that he doesn’t know her, he doesn’t remember. Fate’s greatest cosmic joke.

She picks the broken pieces of her heart off of the ground and shoulders into him without another word to go and cry in the bathroom.

She locks herself in a stall and sobs. For all the pain in all her lives, this was the most acute. Michelle had never considered, not really, how painful it had to have been for Peter in all of their lives before to look in familiar eyes he loved so much and to see nothing but unknowing stares back. It damn near destroyed her.

MJ hates this curse. She hates that for no particular reason fate flips the roles around on her. Why this life? Why now?

Why them?

Once she’s cried herself raw, she picks herself up, dries her face with a scratchy, cheap towel and decides to throw herself head first into school. She’s a freshman in 2015. The world is her oyster. There is more to this life than loving Peter Parker; there has to be because he doesn’t even remember her. In this life, she can find a new purpose: to educate herself. 

She’s never been to school. She’s had a smattering of homeschooling over her many lives, but education for girls was always scarce and inconsistent. She remembers when science was hailed as witchcraft. This world, this time, is better than that. 

Well, mostly. 

MJ is less than impressed with social progress. The world is still always at war and people would rather fight over differences then celebrate similarities. She’s lived long enough that this exhausts her and she’s only fourteen, which is why she goes home from school that day and announces to her family that she’s decided to dedicate her life to social justice. 

This life she knows better, this life she can do better, and this life she will. 

Michelle’s new found mission of saving the world from its stupid self does not go over super well with her classmates. High school, even an academically superior one, is not a conducive environment for breaking status quo and Michelle defies every single convention she can. 

She’s never lived a life with makeup and so she refuses to start now. And she’s fine being somewhat of any outsider. She’s lived plenty of lives with plenty of friends. She is not lonely, she is motivated and fierce and brilliant and driven to make the most out of this life she is given. 

The only habit she cannot seem to shake it watching Peter. It’s nearly impossible not to look at him with his nearly auburn hair and heartbreakingly familiar sloppy smile. She always finds her eyes drifting to him in every class or sketching him at academic decathlon practice and when his Uncle Ben dies the middle of their freshman year she gives him a fleeting hug in the hallway before scurrying off to hide in shame. She doesn’t miss how the brief contact makes her skin burn for the rest of the day. 

She also doesn’t miss how sometime after his Uncle Ben dies Peter Parker starts hitting the gym. She sees him try and hide it under his baggy sweaters and his ill-fitting jeans, but she can tell. There is no person on the planet that knows his body better than she does. 

And this transform coupled with some confidence due to a sudden and very prestigious internship with Tony Stark puts Peter Parker on people’s radar, which bothers Michelle. She knows people pretend they aren’t interested in him but she sees the way both boys and girls alike start to watch him, hoping he’ll turn his fierce, loyal gaze on them. 

MJ is not immune to the wandering eye and neither is Liz Allen-Toomes, which shouldn’t make her flare with jealousy but it does. She has known him, every part of him, for each of his lifetimes and the thought of someone else getting to know this version of Peter is almost crippling. 

And then, Peter’s eye shifts to Liz, too. 

It’s like fate is having fun torturing her in this life. She wonders if there were lives that Peter had to watch her fall in love with someone else, but she sorely doubts it. In every life they have ever lived, Peter pursues her. He loves her so dearly and distractedly that he never waits to make his intentions clear. 

Michelle is different. She hesitated that first day they met. Instead of opening up to him or smiling at him in that way that said hey, its you, and I love you, she ran. She turned inward on herself and became an advocate for free speech and change instead of picking him and most days she doesn’t regret it, but others are harder. 

Especially when she overhears he’s Spider-Man. This life brought on more changes then just the script being flipped on which one of them remembers their past lives. In this life, MJ sees ordinary men become Gods. She hates that she cannot help but think back on Egypt and wonder if this new breed of superhero is actually the Gods walking the earth once more. It’s ridiculous. She’s a woman of science. And yet. 

But of course, in the world’s most epic war to date, Peter would somehow get himself wrapped up in battle. After she hears him and Ned chatting lowly about his new powers, she notices how he’s always longing for battle, to throw himself head first into danger like every life before this one, and she can’t help but curse him for his stupid, honorable nobility. You don’t have to fight, she wants to scream at him every time he misses decathlon, but she refrains. 

Mostly because, in this life, he doesn’t know her very well. 

At Homecoming, he wanders in with Liz and her heart flares in such anger that she slaps a sardonic smile on her face and shoots him the finger. It only makes her feel better for half a second. Her relief is short lived when she sees him rush out of the school gym, away from the dance and away from Liz. Whatever he is running to, she thinks, could kill him. 

That, at least, remains the same from life to life.

She spends the rest of the dance gnawing on her fingernails in worry and when her phone alerts her about the attack on Coney Island Pier she almost faints until she sees the one god-sent line: Spider-Man Apprehends Armed Weapons Dealer. 

He’s alive. 

Michelle’s knees give out on the dance floor. Sally is at her side before she hits the ground and she whispers a thank you. 

Sally tugs her under her arm and squishes MJ, “You need to eat something. Can’t have you passing out at the dance.” 

MJ’s eyebrows knit, “Why are you helping me?”

Sally glances back at the academic decathlon team and, then, smiles down at MJ flopped lazily in her arms, “Because we’re friends.” 

So, its easy the next day at decathlon practice to correct Mr. Harrington, “My, uh, friends call me MJ.” 

She avoids looking directly at Peter when she says that. Even so, she can feel the heat of his gaze on her face. He’s looking at her, for the first time, like he sees her and she’s terrified if she looks at him, if they meet eyes, the bubble will burst and the moment will be gone. 

His phone rings and destroys the moment all on its own. He distractedly looks down at his phone and starts to spin off the bench, “Uh, I gotta go.” 

“Hey, where are you going?” she pushes, leaning forward on the table. He vaguely points behind himself, like his gesturing is enough of an answer to her question. She raises her eyebrow and asks, “What are you hiding, Peter?” His mouth falls open and she can spot a sheen of sweat starting to pool on his forehead. Ned even tenses beside her. She snorts, “I’m just kidding, I don’t care. Bye.” 

He looks shaken by the exchange, but he gathers his things and hops off to save the world or whatever it is the Avengers are doing today. As he walks away, she can’t help herself, she gazes at his back. Her insides screaming for him to turn around and look at her. Come on, sweetheart, her heart cries, just look at me. 

He doesn’t. 

When he comes back to school the next day he seems unburdened as if the world is clear blue skies for him again. He jogs up beside her in the hallway and grins, “Hey, MJ, wait up.” 

She steels her heart and rolls her eyes, “I’m walking, Parker. Keep up.” 

He takes two long strides until they’re walking together in unison. He’s effervescent, “I, uh, didn’t really get to congratulate you yesterday. And I didn’t want to, you know, make you think just because I ran off I’m not proud of you or whatever.”

“Proud of me?” she drawls, “Why would I care if you’re proud of me?”

“We’re friends,” he says like its the simplest explanation in the world. Her heart hastens. 

She swallows the lump in her throat, “Are we?”

“Yea,” he smiles, “So when I say congrats on making team captain a normal, average friend would say thank you.” He teases, “Go on and try. I promise its not that hard.” 

She bites on her lip to keep her smile hidden, “Thank you, Peter.” 

He dips his head in a pseudo bow, “You’re welcome, Michelle.” 

She can’t help herself, she laughs. And he looks like he’s been clobbered over the head with a bat at the sound. Self-conscious and shy, she tucks some of her bangs behind her ear, “What?”

“Nothing!” he shakes his head free of whatever cobwebs are taking up free storage in his brain, “You just, uh, you have a nice laugh.” 

Her insides warm, “Oh?”

“Yea,” he squints like he’s trying to piece together some great puzzle. She remembers in their previous lives she used to call all of Peter’s vague nonsense riddles. She dampens the hope in her heart that maybe he is smarter than she is and he can put together the pieces of their missing puzzle and remember her. 

She still foolishly hopes beyond hope for them. 

Yet, while she hopes he finds some way back to remembering her, she wishes more than anything that he’ll stop being Spider-Man. Michelle knows what its like to lose him– she’s done it more times than anyone should ever have to lose their soul mate– and the thought of it happening again is paralyzing. Especially because Peter Parker is good. 

Marcus had told her once that he was not a good person and, as Femi, she had believed him. But Peter Parker? Peter Parker is the definition of goodness. He is everything good in this world wrapped up in one slightly goofy teenage boy and even if she didn’t have several lifetimes worth of love for him she’s certain she would fall in love with him anyway. He’s perfect.

However, perfection seems uninterested in Michelle Jones. Not that she tries to move beyond being friends with Peter Parker. After she becomes president of decathlon, Peter seems to promote them to school friends but nothing more. She’s not indoctrinated into his super, secret life with Ned or invited to weekend movies or even a study party at the Parker residence. Their friendship is confined to the walls of Midtown High and, frankly, Michelle is glad. 

It’s damn near impossible to keep the stars out of her eyes whenever Peter is within fifteen feet of her and she is praying he doesn’t notice. So, during decathlon practice she’s taking to blatantly ignoring him. 

She is two hundred pages deep in The Awakening when Peter slams her book closed. MJ jumps back so the pages don’t nip at her fingers and she tilts her chin up to glare at him, “What gives, Parker?” 

“Have I done something?” Peter leans down so they are practically nose to nose. MJ’s stomach turns; she has to kill the overwhelming need to kiss him.

Michelle crunches her eyebrows together, “I don’t-”

“Because,” he talks over her, “I thought we were friends, but lately you’ve been literally ignoring me. So, uh, have I done something?”

MJ yanks her book out from under his hand. He flushes in embarrassment as she shoves it in her bag. “I haven’t been ignoring you,” she lies. 

Peter doesn’t look convinced and she can’t quite meet his eye because he’s right. In fact, she has made it a habit to ignore Peter Parker because he makes her heart beat out of her chest. He sits on the edge of her desk, “You have.” His face falls, “I really did think we were friends, MJ. Or, uh, at least on our way to being…friends.”

Michelle sighs, “We are friends.”

He perks up, “Great. Friends go to the movies together, right?”

The suggestion sounds suspiciously like a date. MJ startles. “W-what?”

Peter’s lip curls upward, “Great. Glad that’s settled. See you Saturday.” And Peter Parker has the audacity to wink at her. Her mouth falls open from the shock. She fumbles for some witty remark or some coherent thought to piece out what exactly happened but she cannot think fast enough to speak before he is gone. 

Later that night he sends her a text that reads: i’ve been trying to ask you out for months, fyi. 

It feels like the start of some Shakespearean tragedy, one she has lived too many times already, but in spite of how she knows this has to end, MJ curls over that night and smiles. 

She goes through five different outfits before she settles on a black girl magic t-shirt and jeans. It is understated and easy movie watching attire, besides she does not want to get her hopes up for this date. If its a group date or if, somehow, she misunderstood his intentions she does not want to have her dreams dashed. It is self-preservation plain and simple. 

Peter gives her the dopiest, most endearing smile when she arrives outside the theater. He reads the lettering on her shirt and grins, if possible, even bigger. “I like the shirt,” he remarks. 

She eats the compliment up and stores it away to examine and re-examine to death later. “Thanks,” she tucks some hair behind her ear, “I got it in DC.”

“At decathlon?” he innocently asks.

MJ nods. “Yea, you know,” her smile turns feral, “after you disappeared and before Spider-Man showed up to save the day.” 

He swallows thickly, “We were, uh, very lucky he was there that day.” 

“Or she,” she teases.

Peter shakes his head, “No, Spider-Man is definitely a guy.” 

“Could be a girl,” she shrugs. Keeping her eyes on his reactions, she adds, “I’ve heard their voice is kind of high.” 

He scowls, “No way. I’ve heard it’s crazy manly and, like, intimidating.” 

She laughs out loud at her own private joke and he looks confused but the sound of her laugh makes him smile back. It is such a simple gift, she thinks, spending time with someone who thinks her laugh is worth smiling about. In every life, she remembers him smiling at everything she did. She had taken it for granted. In this life, she did not intend to; she would cherish him and every minute they had left. 

Peter, emboldened by her laugh, reaches for MJ’s hand. The laugh dies on her lips and she turns to him, eyes blown wide in terror. He is so soft with her. Gentleness comes as easily to him as breathing does to everyone else. “What is it?” he asks.

She gnaws on her lip, “I, just, I didn’t know you liked me, is all.” 

It is his turn to tease her, “Who said I liked you?” MJ swipes at his arm and his face explodes in a sunny grin. “Kidding,” he clarifies, “I definitely do.” His face turns red but he does not try to explain away his comment. He lets it sit between them, the truth laying between the space between their interlocked hands. 

MJ squeezes his hand, “I, uh, like you, too.” 

“Oh,” he shrugs, “I know.” Her eyebrows shoot up into her hair, offended. He continues, “You spent way too much time in decathlon pretending I wasn’t there. So, you know, you either hated me or liked me a lot. And when you showed up today…I figured it had to be the second one.” 

“Oh yeah?” she scoffs, trying to pull her hand out of his grip. 

“Yeah,” he smirks, inching closer to her face. This is the sort of bold move that Peter would have pulled in a past life. He was always aching to kiss her or touch her or have some kind of deep, personal connection with her at any given moment. When she thinks back on their previous lives he always steals their first kiss relatively early on in their courtship– something that scandalized her in some lives and thrilled her in others.

In this life, his presumptive action makes her mouth dry and her head spin until the very last second before his lips hit hers. And when, at last, he slants his mouth over hers the cosmos opens before them. A kiss has never felt as enlightening and life-changing in any life before this one. This is the kind of kiss that won wars and made great cities fall; this was the kind of kiss that civilizations built their foundations on; and, the kind of kiss that tasted like regret and agony and deep, deep love. 

When MJ pulls back, her lips turn upward and her eyes flutter open to reveal Peter’s shell-shocked face. Whatever she expects him to say it is not what comes next: 

“I remember.” 

Her blood chills, “Excuse me?”

He takes two steps back from her, his eyes pinched in pain. She sees all of the memories rushing back to him, several lifetimes flooding back into his system. Whatever is happening to him is sensory overload and he doubles over in pain. 

MJ grabs his torso to keep him upright. And then, he starts to yell. Scream, actually. It hurts. She knows the kind of pain that fate can shackle to them and it destroys her to watch it happen to him. On-lookers look on in vague concern as MJ rocks him back and forth in her arms and whispers, “Shh, its okay, I’m here. Peter, it’s okay. Tell me how to help.” 

When he starts to cry loud, woeful tears, Michelle leads him back to her car and ushers him into the passenger seat. She lays his head in her lap over the gear shift with some maneuvering. He shakes with the pain until, finally, an hour later it stops. 

He heaves like he might throw up and Michelle kisses his sweaty forehead. Her voice is soft, “Peter, are you okay?” 

Once he has regained his faculties, he woozily lies, “I’m fine.” 

“No,” she shakes her head, “You’re not.” She squashes the hope that he might remember. While his reaction was an extreme one it did not mean for certain that he regained any of his memories, she lies to herself. He had said that he remembered but that could have meant anything, she reasons. Another lie. 

He keeps his head in her lap and mutters, “God, that sucked.” 

“What sucked?” she prods. 

He turns his head so that he is looking up at her and she sees the war in his eyes. She sees him measuring something and she wonders, if he has remembered, if he is thinking that this life is like the past lives and she does not remember him. Or remember what they have been through together. 

Peter settles on, “My stomach ache.”

“Your stomach ache?” Michelle whispers. Those three words had dashed her hopes to pieces. Perhaps it was wishful thinking to hope that he had remembered. Wishful, stupid-

“Do you remember?” he asks. His eyes are searching hers desperately and sadly for answers. The flickering in his eyes match the feeling of dread she feels whipping up in her stomach, like he is as frightened as she is and it is drowning him down in torturous worry. 

Michelle bites her lip and takes the plunge. She nods. Color returns to Peter’s pale face and he forces himself out of her lap so they are sitting face to face. Her eyes well with tears and she tries to banish them away but they keep coming until she is crying in earnest. “I remember,” she finally says, putting him out of his misery. 

Peter chokes on a sob and pulls her mouth roughly against his own. They are crying and kissing and, for the first time in any lifetime, they both remember. It is not a welcome relief. It feels like this moment of clarity could be ripped away from them at any moment and Michelle is terrified. 

She grips onto his shirt and fists it in her hands. He deepens their kiss. 

“I missed you,” he huffs against her cheek as he begins to kiss down her face to the column of her neck. “Fuck, I missed you. And you were here the whole time.” 

“It killed me to see you with Liz,” she admits. “It killed me to see you happy with anybody but me.”

“Never,” he assures her, sucking on the pulse point on her neck that has her mewling in acute pleasure. “There is nobody but you for me. Oh god, MJ.” 

“Peter,” she replies. “Oh, Peter,” she sighs. He bites down on her shoulder and something in her snaps. She climbs over the gear shift and straddles his lap. This is a game that their bodies know well, a connection that exists over lifetimes and wars and time. 

He flattens his hands on her back and pulls her flush against him. “MJ,” he growls, “You’re-” He suddenly pulls out of their kiss and gasps. “MJ,” he repeats softer.

“Yes?” she says impatiently, trying to pull his lips back to her. He refuses. 

She pouts. He looks up at her in amusement and lands a peck on her pouting mouth, “You’re cute.” 

“Then, why did you stop kissing me?” she runs her hands down his chest. He grabs her wandering hands and kisses her knuckles. It is such pure gesture that her heart expands with warmth. 

Peter runs his thumbs over her knuckles and watches his handiwork, reacquainting himself with the simple joys of her touch. “I’ve called you Michelle and MJ before. Not in this life…but the past ones.” 

She is so pliant and warm and happy that she beats away the bells of dread of his words with a wooden bat. Choosing instead to revel in the happiness of this moment, “Did you know? Do you know, I mean? How this life goes?”

He shakes his head, “No. It’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” MJ says.

He kisses her knuckles again like he cannot stay away, “I used to get these, I don’t know how to explain it, echoes, I guess. In my head. I’d hear things, conversations in my mind, things I hadn’t lived yet. So…when I called you Michelle in France…I-I swear, I didn’t know we would end up here. It’s hard to explain.” 

Michelle forces herself to look at him, in eyes that now remembered her and knew her and, possibly, loved her. “I know what you mean,” she admits, “I used to get those whispers, too. Of things that hadn’t happened yet. I remember in Russia, before I died, my last thought was your name.” 

“Dmitry?”

“No,” she shakes her head, “Peter.” 

He brushes her hair reverently back behind her ear. “MJ,” Peter swallows, “MJ, I have to….I have to tell you something.”

Michelle shakes her head and pulls him back in by the scruff of his shirt to kiss along his jawbone. It had been tormenting her for years, jutting out enough to tempt her but staying firmly out of her reach, and now she wants to make up for long, lost time. It always comes back to time for them. “It can wait,” she bemoans impatiently. 

“No,” he hisses when she sinks her teeth into the patch of skin under his chin. “MJ, damn it, I’m trying to talk.”

“I don’t know why,” she complains. She dips her hands underneath his shirt and runs her deft fingers up his superhuman torso. Some things are the same life to life but this is a new adventure and one she plans to map out with her tongue.

Peter gulps, “Em, you’re distracting me.”

“Apparently not,” she quips, “You’re still talking.”

His muscles strain as he unwillingly pulls her away from him, “MJ, please.” The pleading in his voice makes her listen. She sits back in the driver’s seat and gives him a chance to breathe. Michelle is outrageously proud he wrecked he looks from a simple make-out session. “I…there’s something you should know about me. In this life, I mean. It’s hard to explain and I can’t even believe it sometimes. It’s, like, awesome, don’t get me wrong, but weird. Not that it’s as weird as being reborn every a hundred or so years. Basically, what I’m trying to say-“

“You’re Spider-man,” she finishes for him,

His eyes blow up to the size of drive-in movie projectors. “You know?”

“Please, Peter. You and Ned don’t know how to whisper.”

He looks besotted with her, she revels in the feeling. “You’re brilliant. You know that?”

“Mm,” she jokingly ponders and throws her leg back over his lap to settle on him. He doesn’t hesitate snaking his hand up the curve of her back this time. She purrs, “Say it again?”

“You’re brilliant,” he whispers and kisses her neck. “You’re wonderful,” he observes and kisses the corner of her mouth. Her breath hitches. “You’re gorgeous,” and he ghosts a kiss against her mouth. 

MJ nudges her nose against his, “And you’re stalling.” He winks at her and the time for talking is done. They have a lot more to discuss but, for now, they decide to give in to the present because everything beyond this moment feels less than certain. It feels fragile because at any moment it could be taken away from them. 

They walk into school the next day with their fingers intertwined and MJ tries not to fall into the comfortable, normal feeling it elicits in her stomach. This life is easier than the previous ones without question. From things as rudimentary as indoor plumbing to things as revolutionary to her as the Black Lives Matter movement, this feels like the kind of life they could be happy in.

Except, Peter’s Avenging looms a gigantic, red flag over their potential happiness. It’s a bloody red, too. The same red that dripped through her fingers when she ran Dmitry through with her knife. MJ does not have nightmares, she has memories instead.  

Ned notices their hands first and freaks out. To be exact, he shouts at the top of his lungs when he sees them. MJ scowls. Ned trips into them, grabs their hands and lifts them in the air like they have won a boxing match and Michelle tries to wiggle her hand free, but its too late. The entire hallway has seen them.

Peter is immune to embarrassment in this respect. In every life, he’s stupidly proud of being seen on MJ’s arm. It would be endearing if she was not so mortified.

“AH!” Ned yells, “LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT IT!”

Peter laughs. MJ’s frown deepens. “Okay,” Peter pulls their hands down mercifully, “That’s enough, Ned.”

Ned throws his arms around his friends, squishing them into his chest in a hug, “This is, no exaggeration, the greatest thing that’s ever happened.”

Peter raises his eyebrow, “I thought the other thing was the best thing that ever happened to you?”

Ned shakes his head, “Nope. I’ve changed my mind. It’s this.”

It is impossible to avoid the stares of the rest of her classmates after a display like that. The rest of the day drags by in thinned veiled questions about her new relationship and occasional squealing from Sally and Cindy.

And Ned.

Peter takes it in stride because he’s wonderful but it feels suffocating to Michelle. She is not one for spotlight or prolonged attention. The only person she has ever wanted to give her a kernel of attention is Peter Parker.

He senses her discomfort and nudges her in decathlon practice, “You okay?” She exhales. He nods, “Cool. So no.” Michelle shakes her head. His hand finds hers under the table and its ridiculous how calming his touch is to her. “You want to get out of here?”

“No,” she speaks, “No, I’m okay.”

“It’s okay if you’re not,” he reasons. “I’ll only judge you a little.”

His face gets that goofy, teasing smile that makes her roll her eyes but smile all the same. “I hate you,” she says.

He mouths, “No you don’t.” And he is right.

It is the last, beautiful glimmering moment before it all goes to shit. She wishes she would have known that at the time; she would have held on to it longer and cataloged every, single minute.

Ned’s phone lights up. He distractedly reaches for it and glances at the message written there. Then, he looks at it harder. MJ feels her stomach drop as the hateful grip of fate latches on to the back of her neck. Ned spins to look at Peter.

Cindy’s phone beeps. Then, Sally’s phone. And Abe’s and Peter’s and, finally, hers. She shakes but conjures the strength to pull it out of her pocket.

There is an alert. A state-wide alert for people to go home and find shelter. Someone, something called Thanos has touched down in Manhattan and is killing people by the hundreds. She feels Peter stiffen beside her.

And she thinks, no. No, god, not like this.

He turns his eyes to her and they are so defeated she wants to hold him, but then his resolve steels and she sees him move right past the grieving stage to acceptance. He is going to do something recklessly stupid.

The team starts to call their parents and scatter out of the room, but MJ is planted in her seat. Safety is not a High School, safety is the loving embrace of family and friends.

“MJ,” Peter says, “We have to go. I have to get you home.”

“No,” she shakes her head, “No, I’m coming with you.”

“MJ, I don’t have time to argue with you!” his voice rips. His phone vibrates with another new message. She doesn’t want to know what the Avengers are asking him to do. She already knows the answer. They want him to die.

“Then, don’t,” she challenges. “Peter, please.” He wars with himself, she sees it, but ultimately he gives her a gift—he offers his hand. And she takes it.

They rush back to the Parker residence and its, mercifully, empty. She does not need May listening in on whatever fight might erupt between them. Screaming about past lives and Roman centurions can not be explained away. Peter locks the front door. If an alien decides to demolish the building, locking a door will not protect them, but if it gives him a feeling of control over this situation she won’t kill that feeling. Sometimes the perception of safety is as important as actual safety.

“Peter,” she whispers, “Peter, I know what you’re thinking. Please-“

“They need me, MJ. Tony needs me.”

“You’re not even an adult. How can he ask you-?”

“What do you know about it?” he cuts her off bitterly. “This isn’t a game, MJ. People are dying.”

“That doesn’t mean that you have to!” she pleads. She reaches out for him, but falls short when he steps out of her range.

“How many times do I have to die for you before you get it?” he shouts and the room shakes with the fury of lives lived and lost. 

MJ narrows her eyes and pushes at him lamely with her forefinger, “I never asked you to die for me, you stupid, bullheaded-”

“This is how the story goes, Em. Every life. Every time. You can’t keep me from fighting, just like you can’t keep me from dying, just like you could never,” his eyes soften, “never keep me from loving you.” She wipes away angry, hot tears. He presses on, grabbing her hands with a ferocity of a hundred years of love and war, “I promise you– I fucking promise you, Em– I will find you in the next life.”

“I want you in this one,” she yanks her hands out of his reaching grip. “I don’t want a soldier or a martyr.” They are careening toward an inevitability and all she can do is hold on to this moment and rage against fate. He may have given up, but she can’t. She won’t. “You’re not an Avenger, Peter. You don’t owe them a damn thing.” 

He wipes a lose curl out of his eyes and smiles in that sad, infuriating, all-knowing way that he has done in every life they have shared, “But I am Spider-man. And that means I have to go.” 

“It’s a trap, Peter.” She repeats it softer, “It’s a trap.” 

“It’s not a trap,” he corrects her, “It’s my duty. I have these powers for a reason, MJ. And if I don’t do everything in my power to save them….what’s the point?” He looks so certain and so defeated that MJ wants to scream. So she does. She screams so loudly it feels like it claws out of her chest and echoes into eternity. 

He scrambles for her and she can vaguely feel his hands grabbing her shoulders to steady her, to be her rock in the middle of a listless ocean of feeling. His words reach her gently, “Breathe with me, MJ. Breathe. In and out.”

Femi, breathe with me. Femi. You have to breathe with me. It’s okay. In and out. In and out.  

She grips onto his hands and sucks in gulps of air, which does nothing except make her more anxious, more frantic. He shakes his head and coaxes a sweetness out of her that only exists in his arms, “Michelle, my beautiful girl, breathe.” 

And she does. 

She shutters at the simple freedom of her lungs filling with oxygen and he looks so relieved that she wants to smack him. This peace can only be short lived if he’s determined to go off and die, like always. “If you do this,” she hiccups, “I’ll never forgive you.”  

He steels himself, she knows what he looks like when he’s going off to battle and it is the look he adopts now, before he says, “I can lose you today…so long as I don’t lose you forever.” 

“So what?” she shrieks, “The plan is to hope in our next life I forget? That way this conversation never mattered. You go off and die and I’m supposed to just deal with it?”

“Damn it, Michelle,” he yanks her into his chest and drops a furious kiss on her parted lips. She bites him, not melting into the familiar softness of his lips, however tempting. He reels backward from the assault and, then, his eyes darken.

She feels her palms sweating. She knows this look. This look is always the beginning of their circle of tragedy. “Don’t,” she whispers. She’s not sure what she’s asking him. Don’t come any closer. Or don’t stop. It feels like a little bit of both. 

He decides to risk her wrath, even welcome it, when he closes the distance between them, tips her head back and licks a kiss into her mouth. She hates how pliant she is to him. She hates how she bends and snaps under the pressure of his hands. She hates how desperately she loves him. 

Her voice is a ragged, emotional mess when she hisses, “Let me save you, you stupid idiot!” 

He easily lifts her off the ground and she brackets her thighs around his back. His chin is tilted up to kiss her as she hovers over his face dropping kisses to every inch of exposed skin. She briefly wonders if perhaps the reason he always dies is because she loves him into ruins, ravages his body until there is nothing left for him to do but die. 

She feels tears on her face and she’s not sure which of them is crying, she suspects the pair of them. MJ clings to him tighter. 

His hands slid up the jagged bones of his spine until they brace at the back of her neck and, oh, it’s good. It’s always so good.  “Peter,” she runs her fingers through his thick curls. 

A primal growl rumbles from his chest and her back suddenly hits the wall of his bedroom with a thud. She’s breathless and he’s distraught and they kiss like the world could implode and they would scarcely notice. 

She has always loved him, she supposes, but never like this. He may be the super-powered one, but under the attention of his hands she feels invincible. In this life, she knows better, she knows how this ends and she still wants him. 

He wants her too, she can tell, because he rips her clothing away like a fever dream. Her head drops back against the wall and he makes work of her clothes and she stares at the ceiling seeing deep, vibrant colors. Red when he bites at her neck. Blue when his hand moves between them. And white when he works her into the fastest release of any lifetime. 

They suck in air once the aftershocks of rapture start to fade and seep past their muscles into their bones and, finally, into their memory. Michelle rolls over to look at him and she thinks offhandedly that his hair is a floppy, tangled mess. The way she had tugged at it did it no favors. 

He smiles sleepily and sated. It’s that soft, serene look that pushes her to wrap her arms around his middle and press her nose into his chest. He leaves a lopsided kiss on her head and she radiates happiness that edges on tragedy. It cannot last, this tentative peace between them. “Peter?” she runs a searching finger down his torso and his muscles tighten. 

He reaches for her hand and drags it upwards to the safety of his chest. Any lower and the game will begin again, she knows it. “Hmm?” he kisses her thumb. 

Michelle lip quirks, “That was the best first go of that we’ve ever had.” 

He rumbles a roaring laugh, it shakes her willowy frame tucked into his chest, “Is that right?” 

“Oh yea,” she nips at his neck and is pleased when he sighs, “Way better.” 

“I dunno,” he muses, tilting his chin up to the ceiling to stare at the muted colors painted there. “Egypt was pretty good.” 

Wolfishly, she grins, “The vanity at the ballet wasn’t half bad either.” 

“Half bad?” he feigns upset and rolls her over onto her back. She squeals in laughter and offhandedly thinks that the intimacy between them is always good, but the fact that they laugh together is the best. It has been so long since she’s laughed like this– unburdened and joyful. 

MJ kisses his chin once he settles on top of her and she spots him gazing down at her with over a hundred years of love flowing between them. It fills her heart with so much feeling it threatens to burst. The depth of emotion between them is almost too much for her seventeen year old chest. Fear clutches at the edges of her subconscious and it begs her to protect him, to keep him safe. 

He sees the shadow of despair cross her features and he kisses her nose, “Come back to me, Em. Come back.” Her eyes prickle with tears and she turns her head in the pillow to hide them there. “Oh, MJ,” he heaves and hugs her close, nearly lifting her off of the bed and bowing her body into his like a perfect puzzle piece. 

“Don’t go,” she implores him. 

In the crook of her neck, he gives, “You can’t fight fate, MJ.” 

“Fuck fate, Parker,” the strength of her voice surprises her. He yanks his head out of her neck to look down at her and she cups his cheek. She feels the patches of unshaven hair starting to grow there, lightly rough to the touch, “Isn’t that what we’re good at, anyway?” 

She sinks back into the bed when he lets her go and sits up. The blankets slide down his body and pool at his waist. She reaches a hand out to touch the back that faces her and he stiffens. Atlas, she remembers thinking once, he always looks like Atlas with the weight of the world on his plucky shoulders. 

“I love you,” he reiterates. Even after a couple of lifetimes of earth shattering love, these words still manage to humble her. 

“I know,” she utters back. 

He looks over his shoulder at her tucked cozily into his bed with his worn-out blankets strewn over her body, “And do you love me?”

“You know I do.”

“Then.” His voice sounds like a trap, “You have to let me go.” 

“Bullshit,” she curses. MJ sits up and brushes his blankets away, reaching hopelessly for her clothes. She hears him sigh from where he is seated on the bed, but she does not stop tugging on her clothes. She can’t stop. Motion is the only thing keeping her together and sane and from the edge of a break-down.

The bed creaks, “MJ-”

“Don’t you fucking MJ me, Peter Parker.” 

“What do you want from me?” he asks. “Huh? I didn’t pick this for us. I didn’t shackle us to this curse.”

“Oh,” she laughs without humor, “Are you saying I did?”

“No,” he gripes. “God, every lifetime you’re like this, you know that?” 

She throws his shirt in his face and Peter takes the hint and tugs it over his head. “You have no idea what this curse is like for me?” 

“Excuse me?” he gapes at her. “Are you serious? I literally die.” 

MJ whips him with his jeans as she throws them across the room at his stupid, gigantic head. He flinches but pulls them on. Michelle sits on the edge of his desk and starts to lace up her boots, her eyes welling with angry tears. “You know, Peter.” She faces him and repeats, lower, “You know. Every life. Every life you get to remember the last. And okay, fine, maybe that’s a curse. But its also a gift because you get to remember the laughter…and our first kisses and, fuck, every special moment. But I never do. Ever. And, sure, I fall in love with you all over again…but then you die. And I feel it. And then, once the pain has stopped radiating through every muscle in my freakin’ body, I have to live the rest of my life without you. With more questions than answers. There is no peace for me after you die. Only despair and so many questions.”

He watches her in awe and sadness. She dips her chin to the ground and sees a wet tear drop off the edge of her nose and plop on her shoes, “So, yea, fine, you literally die, but Peter Parker…I challenge you to live a life where I die first and then tell me you’ve been the cursed one.” 

“MJ,” he reaches for her. 

She shirks her body away, “No. Go fall on your cross, Peter. After all, I’m used to it.” 

Michelle wants to feel some kind of victory when she slams his bedroom door closed behind her but all she feels is the ripped out hole of agony in her stomach. She expects for that anguish to eventually give way to some other emotion but it never does. 

Her phone buzzes incessantly for the next hour and she’s tempted so many times to answer but she resists the urge. She sees Peter’s name flash on her phone for the tenth time and that’s when she turns it off. MJ doesn’t want to hear his excuses. She deserves better than a half-baked excuse explaining away his borderline suicide mission. 

Besides, she doesn’t need to face him dying over the phone. Bitterly, she thinks, she’ll feel it when it happens. 

She knows she’s being reckless. There is a war going on one burrow away. She should be inside, she should be keeping safe, but if is planning to die then what does it matter if she’s safe? It’s a horrible, sickening thought, but she has lived too long to think any other way. Life stops mattering so much when it happens on a loop. 

MJ finds refuge on a park bench and tucks her knees into her chest, eyes cast down. She hears the body flop down beside her but she doesn’t bother to look up.

Ned nudges her shoulder, “MJ?” She leans her forehead against her knees. “MJ,” Ned repeats, “Peter’s tried calling you a dozen times.” 

“I know,” she mumbles into the denim of her jeans. 

“You know?” he says slowly, “And you’re not gonna call him back?” 

“If he’s determined to get himself killed, I can’t stop him.” 

Ned tsks, “That’s a load of crap.” Ned softens and puts a steady hand around Michelle’s shoulders. She quickly hides her face in his shoulder and shutters out a breath she’s been holding since leaving the Parker’s apartment. “MJ, he’s scared,” Ned whispers. “He thinks he’s gonna die.” 

She can’t help herself, she laughs. Ned gawks at her. She covers her mouth to stop the out pour of laughter. And then, something in her shifts and shatters. She cries for the second time that day in the span of two hours. Once she begins to cry she cannot stop herself from sobbing in earnest. She nudges her nose in between her knees to muffle the sound but it hardly helps. 

Ned pulls her against him, “MJ, please, tell me how to help you.” 

“I don’t know how to stop it, Ned,” she hiccups back her tears. “It’s a loop, you know? Where does a circle end?” 

“I don’t und-”

“It doesn’t,” she talks over him. “It just goes around and around and around. Never ending. Torturing me.” 

Ned clears his throat, “Michelle, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But.” And Ned weighs his words. He makes her wait for whatever modicum of wisdom he has to impart on her. She cynically thinks he’s a child with the knowledge of one life time and she is a cursed lover with the experience to know the world is always at war and death is the only end for her story. “-if you accept this, whatever it is you’re talking about, how can it end? You have to be the one to find the courage and stop it.”

She realizes the common thread between each of her lives. MJ rips herself free of Ned’s embrace and stands, her body so wound up with energy that she could not dampen if she tried. She whirls on Ned and kisses his cheek theatrically. “Ned,” she wipes away her tears, “You’re a genius.” 

“Thanks?” he blinks. 

She has to think quickly. MJ has to find him. There is no time to waste this life. She could already be too late. No, she banishes that thought, she cannot think that way.  

MJ begins to flip through her useless catalog of Peter Parker knowledge. She has been observing him for over two years now. There has to be a place he would go before he-

And it hits her. 

Peter Parker will not walk feet first into death without saying goodbye. She runs, muscles straining and cold wind whipping at her face, to the last place Peter Parker will go before battle. 

Calvary Cemetery in Queens is eerily silent. There are no groundskeepers or mourners in sight. MJ knows people are hiding from Thanos, from the war to end all wars. She realizes she has lived two lifetimes now with two wars to end all wars. There is a poetic symmetry to her lives that she loathes. 

Peter is standing, boldly, in his Spider-man suit looking down at Ben Parker’s grave, his mask in hand. She squints and sees him whispering something to his uncle’s grave.  

Michelle Jones rages against fate. She batters against the bars of destiny. And steps forward. 

“All I have to do,” she approaches him, “is stop you.”

Peter’s shoulders tense and he whirls around to stare at her. She is still wearing the same clothes he had painstakingly took off of her earlier. She sees him take it all in, recording what he thinks will be their last conversation. She cannot accept that so she says, again, “All I have to do is stop you.” 

His eyes well in sadness, “MJ-” 

Her words make Peter shake, so she repeats them, “All I have to do is stop you.”

“MJ,” he starts, “that’s not how it works.”

“Bullshit,” she says and she can feel the excitement building in her stomach. A flutter of hope, “We don’t know how this works. Peter, think about it, in every life…I let you go. I didn’t stop you from fighting in Egypt or England. I didn’t free you in France or Russia. Every time you died I could have saved you. I can save you.”

“MJ-“

“No,” she interrupts, wildly, “I feel you die. Every single time. It’s agony. And I know, I know in my gut, the reason I feel you die is because I let it happen. It’s my punishment. I failed.”

“I have to go,” he yanks his mask over his face. She will not accept his decision in this life. He is so boorishly stupid– her wonderful boy. She can save him and she will. 

MJ takes two long strides and pulls off his mask, “I’m not done talking.” 

“Yes, you are.” He tries for his mask but she keeps it from his grasp. 

“No,” she says louder. “No,” she repeats softer with feeling, “Let me do it this time.” 

“I don’t-” his eyebrows knit. 

“Let me go instead,” she explains. His eyes widen in realization. She nods and cups his face in her hands, “Let me do it, baby.” 

“You don’t even have,” he fumbles for the right words, “You’re not…you can’t fight Thanos.” 

“You have the suit. I’ll use the suit.” 

“It doesn’t work like that!” he shouts.

“It works that way for Tony Stark. It can work that way for me, too. That suit has tech I can use. Let me go instead.” He is shaking his head as she nods. She knows this can work, she feels it in her bones. If fate wants to take Spider-Man who says it has to be Peter Parker? Michelle Jones can put on the suit and she can do this for him. He has died for her life after life. Now, its time they shoulder the burden together.

He can see her resolve, she can tell. He grabs her hands on his cheeks and speaks clearly, like the tone of his voice will walk her away from the edge of shared destruction, “MJ. You can’t climb on walls. You can’t…” 

“I can swing with the webs. I can use the suit to help me with what I don’t know. I can do this,” she nods, a watery smile gracing her tired features. 

“No,” he swallows, “I won’t, I can’t. You can’t ask me to do this. To live without you.” 

“That’s what I’ve done every life, Peter. Lived without you. It’s time to switch the script,” she talks gently to him, like addressing a child. 

He shakes his head, “No.” 

“There is so much life to live, Peter,” she explains. “You wouldn’t know. You never make it past twenty-five. You’ve never had a 30th birthday or had children or grown old. You have never lived. Not in a single life. Dying for love doesn’t make you noble. It just makes you dead. Over and over again.”

“MJ, you can’t,” he swallows down his tears. “I won’t give you the suit.”  

“I have to go, Peter.” 

“We can’t do this, MJ. They’ll use you to hurt me. No,” he corrects himself, “They’ll kill you and it will devastate me. Thanos and his legion are not going to show us any mercy.” 

“Maybe, after everything I’ve done, I don’t deserve mercy.” 

“How can you say that?” he grabs her shoulders and crushes her into a hug. They sway at the edge of Ben Parker’s grave. Life and death always intertwined with them. “How can you even think it?” 

She wipes a lock of his hair back off of his face. There is so much love in her every last touch, she infuses it so he has some memories he can hold onto after she’s gone. Michelle leans forward and knocks her nose against his, he reluctantly presses their foreheads together. They both close their eyes and breathe together. “Don’t worry,” she whispers, “I’ll find you again.” 

“MJ, no-” But the time for talking is over. MJ gathers all of her strength and throws it into a punch at his temple. Her hand aches from the hit. His eyes widen and then roll back. He collapses on the ground and MJ falls to her knees to cradle his unconscious head. 

She kisses between his eyes and whispers, “I love you.” 

Michelle steals his suit and armors up for battle. 

When she goes online as Spider-man she hears the crackle of a dozen voices shouting in her head. One comes through stronger than the others, “What the hell, Parker? Where are you?”

“Peter can’t come to the phone right now,” MJ weakly jokes. 

The whole line goes silent as she shakily starts to web her way downtown. She nearly falls to her death a hundred times, but some AI named Karin always catches her before she falls by instructing her gently on how to websling. She knows whatever voices were on the other end of the line have cut her off, probably fighting and discussing what to do with the person who stole Peter’s suit. 

She is terrified but Karin helps. 

Finally, the voices filter back into her head and Tony Stark asks, “Where is Peter? Is he okay?” 

She decides to be honest, “He’s half-naked, passed out on his uncle’s grave, but beside that…he’s okay.”

“What?” a second voice joins their conversation.

“And who are you?” Tony inquires.

Michelle lands deftly in the middle of the action. Avengers all around her are fighting for their lives. MJ swallows, “What you’ve got.” 

Iron-Man flies around to look at the Spider-Man impostor and inclines his head, “Okay, what-we’ve-got. Web ‘em up.” 

She has never been in a battle before. The French Revolution she is not sure counts as war. She was never on the battle lines or in the trenches. She was a spy and marched for her country, but actual war is not something she has ever experienced. It is a sensory overload. Every single scream and shot and building collapse feels like the end of the world. She cannot filter out the noise. It all waves over her in a wash.

Peter could focus. He has done this for several lives. He is a soldier.

He is war and she is love. She is not suited for this ravaged battlefield, but, as she said, she is what they have here, today, and that will have to be enough. She will make it enough.

MJ shoulders the responsibility she has been running from for over a thousand years, makes her peace and shoots his web.

Peter Parker has lived many lives. In each of his lives, he is shackled with the burden of remembering his previous lives and the responsibility of a soldier. He has drenched his hands in blood to protect the innocent. He knows very little goodness save one thing—the woman who wears as many lives as him, Michelle.

When he wakes up at Ben’s grave, he is cold and terrified. His body aches from the scratch of the dirt but he forces himself to stand. He has to know what happened, he has to go and help MJ if he can. It cannot be too late, he prays.

Stupid, maddening, wonderful woman.

When he finally makes it to his apartment, he is bewildered, eyes searching for a trace of MJ. “Michelle?” he shouts. “MJ!” he slams the front door closed.

Aunt May comes ripping around the corner of their kitchen, her eyes red with tears and chokes out, “Peter?”

“May?” he raises his eyebrow. Aunt May runs across the living room floor and yanks him into a crippling hug, sobbing. He eyes widen and he softly pats the back of his aunt’s head. She is hysterical. “I didn’t mean,” he whispers, “to scare you. I’m okay.”

“I saw you die,” her back shakes in his arms. “On the news. I saw Thanos kill you.”

His knees give out.

May scrambles to keep him upright but he is falling, falling, falling. He bends over and grips at his hair and screams. He was certain, he was so sure, he would feel it if she died. They were connected. She wasn’t allowed to die. That was his burden. That was his moment. That was his destiny. She was supposed to live, grow old and find him again in the next life.

Dead.

It hits him like a bullet to the chest. She is dead.

“Oh my god,” he suffocates. “Peter,” May panics. “Baby, breathe.”

“I-I,” he clutches at his chest, “I can’t…I can’t….I can’t breathe.”

“Peter Benjamin Parker, you will breathe for me.”

He does. And his whole world crumbles around him with every breath he takes instead of MJ.

He searches his heart for echoes of her, like a second heartbeat. He starts to hopelessly think that perhaps May is wrong; perhaps May didn’t see what she thought she saw; each hypothetical scenario fleeting comforts him in-between nasty waves of the truth. Michelle Jones is dead. She is dead because of him.

The world is muted colors. The world is a little less without her. His world is nothing.

When May finally gets him off the ground—it takes too long but every time he tries to stand he sees flashes of her laughing face and he collapses—she shows him the video. She gently suggest he does not have to look at it, but he needs to see it. He has to see how she died. He has to know.

It’s horrible. The crude footage off of someone’s phone is not so terrible that he can’t hear the crack. He does. It snaps like a twig. Her swan-like neck that he had peppered with kisses earlier that morning. He wonders if her body still has the marks from him, like a ghostly kiss.

He plays it on a loop. The crack is the only sound he hears for hours.

Somewhere across town, Tony Stark pulls off the Spider-Man mask on MJ’s body. Her head lolls to the side lifelessly and Tony turns his face away. He cannot stand to look. He had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that whoever had donned the suit and mask would have been an adult, but this girl looks no older than seventeen. He isn’t sure how he knows, but this is Peter’s friend. Someone close to him.

He has to leave. He cannot stand to look at her much longer. He flips he lights off and goes.

Her body is mostly in tact. Her neck hangs unnaturally to the side, but she still looks like MJ.

Destiny watches on in despair. Whatever otherworldly power created the loop, now broken, feels no joy at the end. Poetic justice is not the same thing as justice. They deserved to live a soft epilogue, to have the credits of their lives roll without consequence. Instead, all Peter Parker has is the humming tone of her snapping neck playing on repeat across town. That is not soft. That is tragedy personified.

Time, space and grace all convene. There is nothing left to gain from the never-ending circle of Peter and MJ. So they decide to end it.

And, miraculously, MJ breathes.

[renaroo]

Double Time (12/24)

Disclaimer: Red vs Blue and related characters are the property of Rooster Teeth. Warnings: Language, Canon-typical violence Pairings: Tuckington, Chex Rating: T Synopsis: [Hero Time Sequel] After the events of Hero Time, the city and Blood Gulch are prepared for the true return of superheroes in a big way. But while Washington is attempting to adjust to a new relationship and a new living arrangement, the call of new heroes and a new mayor mean major changes for his professional life as well as his personal one. How will the balance of values fare when his new partners come to test everything he’s made of.

A/N: Once more, sorry there was a bit of a wait to this chapter, but it was an absolute blast to write and I hope that comes across in the writing! Because I really did have a lot of fun with this one. And hey hey hey, look where we’re getting in the plot ; ) I’ll give you a hint: IT THICKENS

Special thanks to @notatroll7, @secretlystephaniebrown, @analiarvb, @thepheonixqueen, @icefrozenover, @washingtonstub, BetaZack, Yin, and Enmuse on AO3 and tumblr for the wonderful feed back! I truly appreciate it more than you know.

Suspicion Rises

Junior might have been bouncing off the literal walls but it could have not been more opposite of the reaction that Tucker was giving Wash at that moment. His boyfriend was staring at him like he had just announced that he was going to kick him out of the apartment. 

“You want Junior to be the leader?” Tucker demanded, all but throwing a bloody steak onto a plate and handing it off to the chattering alien child. “Of your ridiculous superhero team? What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“It’s not my team, they are their own team. I’m just training and guiding them at the behest of the local government which... seems to know my identity,” Wash responded awkwardly.

“Sure that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that, like an idiot, your codename is your last name? Seriously, Wash, who does that?” Tucker asked, throwing his hands in the air.

Scratching at the back of his neck Washington shrugged. “I... guess it was poor planning. To be honest, a lot of the days between me being a protege and joining the team and the team deciding to self-implode during the Invasion is sketchy.”

“Dude, I was friends with Tex at the time, alright? Sketchy doesn’t even cover half of it,” Tucker responded. “But that doesn’t detract from the point that you think a five year old can lead a team of teenagers. How is that the best option for everyone involved?” Tucker demanded. 

“You’ve not met these teenagers,” Wash argued. When he saw that the attempt at levity was not appealing to Tucker, Wash sighed and leaned back against the kitchen island. “And it’s not a for sure thing. It’s something I’m debating at the moment. There’s no reason to panic.”

“I’m not panicking because I’m not letting it happen,” Tucker said plainly. “Don’t you need a permission form signed or something? Yeah, it’s not happening. Case closed!”

Completely thrown off, Wash crossed his arms and just looked at Tucker utterly perplexed. “Tucker, it wasn’t even my idea. It was something recommended to me, and I’m just considering it. Junior has the most natural talent of the team, he’s the one making the most progress, and in general he’s just really good at this compared to everyone else. Not to mention I have the most one-on-one training with him. I don’t know why you’re reacting so badly to this!”

Tucker turned on Wash with a nearly offended look to his face. “Because things are moving too fast, Wash!” he snapped.

Washington stared at Tucker for a good long moment, then glanced toward the table where Junior was happily tearing his steak apart. Then he looked to Tucker again. 

"We’ve not been talking about the same thing, have we?” Washington asked lowly, doing his level best to keep the conversation from Junior.

A break in Tucker’s expression flashed for a moment and he looked off, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I guess not.”

“I need more than that, Tucker,” Wash responded plainly. “It’s not fair to me to have no straight answers from you lately.”

“Dude, more is the problem,” Tucker explained with a defeated sigh. “You want more from me, cool, but you’ve gotta give me more first. More like actually trying to spend time with me and my friends. More like letting me in when you decide to travel across the city and do something stupid. More like letting me decide what’s right or not for my son.”

Wash frowned, doing his best to accept the words no matter the stinging they left. “If you want more then we can’t be moving too fast, you know,” he pointed out somberly.

“It is when you say shit like love you and haven’t even started tolerating my friends yet,” Tucker said lowly. 

Realization began to dawn on the hero. “You’re freaking out because I said I love you first,” Wash said almost in awe. 

“Dude, that’s not... No. Just that--”

“Tucker, we’re living together,” Wash pointed out. “How this the part you’re freaking out over?”

“Because we’ve done everything backwards! It’s like the story of my fucking life!” Tucker cried out. “Kid before I have so much as a fucking date, dude inviting me to live with him before we fucking kiss, I love you before fucking... It’s too much! And now you’re coming home and telling me decisions you’re making for Junior before you even refer to him as your own kid? Like, Wash, goddamn, give me some sort of bar for normal.”

“Normal?” Wash almost laughed. “I’m a superhero. There is no normal, Tucker. I thought that’s why we’ve been working so well since we met. We are both in the category of exceptional.”

“Please, the only thing exceptional on my end is my ass,” Tucker snorted. “And my calves. And my kickass car--”

“That’s debatable,” Wash muttered. 

“I just feel like this relationship is both... running ahead of me and also hitting a wall at the same time. We’ve gotta change something,” Tucker all but begged.

"Okay, fine,” Wash said, sounding more defensive than he initially meant it. “You’re right. Something needs to change here. But I’m out of suggestions for what that should be. What should it be?”

As if Wash’s life was not already the butt of some cosmic joke, his phone began ringing on the kitchen island right behind him, drawing both his and Tucker’s looks at the same time. 

“I don’t know, maybe that?” Tucker said with an eyebrow quirked. 

“Don’t be smug,” Wash admonished his boyfriend as he reached for the phone and answered it. “Who is it?”

“You’re lucky I’m not in Blood Gulch right now or I’d punch you for that. Way to answer a phone like a complete dick, Washington.”

Straightening up, Wash turned toward his side some and walked away from Tucker and Junior. “Tex? Where are you? What’re you--”

“Investigating something. Getting some assistance. Whatever answer’ll make you ask less questions,” she responded distractedly.

“None of those answers lead to less questions,” Wash pointed out. “What’s going on?” 

“What’s going on is that something is up, alright? Something is wrong in Blood Gulch right now, and it’s about to get worse,” she answered.

“Going cryptic is supposedly my job, Tex, what the hell’s happening?” Wash continued, instinctively heading toward his secreted away uniform. 

“It has something to do with your new buddy Locus,” Tex explained. “I don’t know what. Just know that he’s been in Blood Gulch before, and my information’s telling me he’s in Blood Gulch now. So why don’t you do the block a favor and stop babysitting the mayors’ pet project and instead be a bit of a suiperhero.”

“Wow, speaking of rude,” Wash replied unimpressively. 

“Yeah, don’t get your ass kicked by Felix this time,” Tex cautioned.

“Wait,” Wash stopped in his tracks. “Felix was the other hero. Locus was the one who set the building on fire.”

“Whatever, who cares, I’m telling you to watch out,” Tex said, again sounding extremely distracted. 

“Tex, that’s an important distinction to make!” Wash cried out. “Did you mean Felix has been in Blood Gulch before? Why would he have been in Blood Gulch before? What is going on?”

The most aggravated noise in the world came through the phone. “Wash, if I knew all those answers, why the fuck would I be doing what I’m doing now and not telling you what to do?”

And with that, Tex hung up abruptly. Wash pulled his phone from his ear and glanced toward it appraisingly.

“What’s up? Tucker asked almost cautiously. 

“I think I’m finally learning what Church and Tex see in each other, and it isn’t pretty,” Wash replied. 

“Yeah, I was there for it, I watched the slow motion explosion and everything,” Tucker said with a full body shrug. “But what’s up with you? You’re not going out, are you? We’re, like, having a moment.”

“And we can continue to have it when we--” Wash began only for Tucker’s hand to slap itself over his mouth. He let out a muffled few choice words before pulling Tucker’s hand away. “Tucker, what the hell?”

“You were about to say famous last words, and I’m fucking tired of living a tragic cliche. So how about don’t,” Tucker snapped angrily.

Wash blinked a few times before nodding. “Okay. So... you just don’t want me to say anything while I get ready to leave?” 

Tucker’s frown grew more concerned. “I don’t know what I want.”

“Well, that makes two of us, Tucker,” Wash answered before grabbing his things. “Junior’s trying to suit up and sneak out of his room, by the way. So watch out for that.”

“How--”

“Cat-like peripheral vision,” Wash responded only half jokingly. He looked toward Tucker seriously. “I don’t regret saying I love you. It was time someone did. Maybe fast is just how we are. We’re the only couple in our group who’s actually trying to work past things and make them work. So maybe we should just rely on instinct.”

Putting a hand to his chin, Tucker hummed, “I don’t know, Grif and Simmons seem fine.”

“They’re not a couple,” Wash said before stopping. “Wait, they are? I didn’t see it--”

“You’re a moron,” Tucker responded casually. “Lopez and Sheila are doing fine. I heard Donut’s dates with Doc are heating up. And--”

“Okay, stop, I get it. We suck, but we’ll work through the suck,” Wash replied. “Can I at least say goodbye?”

“You have permission to say see you later,” Tucker quipped. 

“Alright then,” Wash said, suited up and heading toward the window. “See you later.”

He was already on the window ledge and leaping down to the alley floor when Tucker ran to the window and stuck his head out. “Seriously, Wash! You die or something out there, I’ll kill ya!” he called after him.

The smirk on Wash’s face could not have been larger, even as he raced to cover ground and find the supposed problems in Blood Gulch Tex was mysteriously aware of. 

Wash couldn’t help but wonder if they had had more time to get a decent explanation if they hadn’t been shouting at each other, but his attention was soon spared for more realistic problems. Like how a shadowy figure across the street seemed to move with uncomfortable dexterity to the rooftops. 

“That is far too close to my home,” Wash growled out before racing across the street and leaping to the fire escape with catlike grace. 

In no time, Washington was landing on the roof and ready to chase down the figure when, to his surprise, it was waiting for him, standing cockily with his arms crossed. 

“Felix?” Wash questioned, taken aback. “What... What are you doing here?”

Checking his location, Wash was relieved that the laundromat was not visible, still around the block. But it was too close, and they were halfway to Church’s junkyard haven. A few more blocks from Sheila’s diner. 

A near perfect triangulation of the places Wash held dearest. And the mysterious new hero he knew next to nothing about was standing right there.

Felix tilted his head, smirking. “Guess I could ask you the same thing, huh?”

Though the effect was lost with his visor on, Washington raised an eyebrow. “No. Because everyone knows that I patrol this neighborhood. It’s... It’s like being surprised that Daredevil is in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Snorting, Felix waved his hand. “Oh my god, you are such a nerd. Wait... Haha oh this is almost too good -- you think you’re some kind of real life Daredevil!” He clapped his hands together. “Oh, that is just too good. I see it all now. The hardly shaven jaw. The attitude. The martial arts. Regularly getting your ass handed to you but still coming up on top at the end. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.”

Washington stared at him, though his hand did subconsciously reach up to test his stubble. “If you’re wanting to commandeer another training session, I’m afraid you’re late for the day. And I’m still only considering the recommendation,” Wash explained. “You don’t know the team as well as I do--”

“And what exactly is there to know, Wash?” Felix asked. “They’re a bunch of losers. You know that, I know that. They have flashy powers but no talent. They’re around in ridiculous costumes to help whoever’s mayor at the end of the day look like they’re being productive with the current superhero nostalgia this city’s been feeling.”

Narrowing his eyes, Wash felt an impulsive anger take hold of him. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t talk about my students like that,” Wash told him. “They’re young, they’re kids, but they’re learning. And more than that they want to do good with their powers. That’s more responsibility and awareness of potential than most adults have well into their lives. They’re definitely getting started on the right path sooner than I did.”

There was something unnerving about the way Felix’s smile refused to falter. “And just what path is that one, Wash? Is it the one where you don’t even notice that Locus has been scouring your neighborhood looking for you ever since your little encounter?”

Taken aback, Wash tilted his head. “How do you...?”

“Because I’m the best at what I do,” Felix responded casually, shrugging his shoulders. “Want to know what it is, I do?” 

Wash glared at him. “Are you here to take more glory for going after Locus? If so, you can have it. But I’m going to be looking for him, too, He’s on my streets. And I’m going after him because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Wash, Waaash, you’re reading me all wrong,” Felix explained. “I’m not insulting kids -- even if their talent is... minor at best! I’m not even really trying to step on your territory. I’m just reaching out a hand for you to take,” Felix explained, offering said hand. “Because, buddy, I’ve been fighting Locus across the world for a long time. And to take him down, you’re going to need a partner. One who knows what he’s doing. One who has his partner’s best interests at heart. What’d’ya say?”

Looking Felix over, Wash wasn’t quite sure what he was feeling like saying. He didn’t need another partner. He didn’t even need another hero. And allowing someone access to his time as a hero was dangerous -- he had never anticipated the potential overlaps of his identities to cause so much danger to the people around him. He had never assumed the time of Heroes and Villains would return again. 

And yet... There was an urge for him to reach out and accept that hand. It defied his logic and instinct. 

Because Felix was right... He needed help with Locus. 

But that train of thought keyed Wash into something that snapped him out of the moment. He stepped back and tilted his head at Felix. “What do you mean that you’ve been fighting Locus across the world? Why haven’t I ever heard of either of you before then?”

Suddenly, for only a moment, Felix dropped his complacent face, an unreadable emotion taking the cockiness’ place for just the blink of an eye. “What?” Felix laughed it off. “You want my whole backstory? Kimball’s vetting not enough for you, Mister High and Mighty?”

"This doesn’t have to do with the mayors, this has to do with you dodging a simple question,” Wash pointed out. “And the more you dodge it, the more my suspicions grow, Felix. So I’d like an answer if you have one to give--”

Before either of them could carry the conversation further, Wash felt the hair rise on the back of his neck, and he had just enough time to glance over as a bright spark dropped onto the rooftop by them. 

“What the--” 

“Get down! It’s Locus!” Felix ordered, leaping toward Wash.

But there was a thunderous boom and Wash could barely hear anything or see anything. He was certain that the ringing of his head was from having been caught in the explosion, but as he blinked and looked around, he found himself on the sidewalk opposite of the building where fire was now pluming from the roof. Standing straight, completely unharmed. 

Confused, Wash looked around himself, patting on his unsinged uniform and scratching his head. “What the hell?”

Another explosion caused Wash to jump slightly and he looked up toward the source just in time to see Locus walk out from the flames, dragging an unconscious Felix beside him. He stopped at the ledge, gazing down at Wash as people began to gather to see what was happening.

“That was meant for you,” Locus announced, dropping Felix to where he hung over the ledge. “These results are... unfortunate.”

Without further commentary, Locus disappeared before their very eyes and Washington was left standing as stunned as the citizenry around him. 

After a few moments, one of the people looked warily at Wash. “Um. Shouldn’t you be pulling that other costumed freak away from the fire before he... like burns and dies?”

Wash let out a full body sigh and shook his head. “Some partner,” he groaned, starting toward the building to do just that, and leave himself open to wonder just what the hell had happened to keep him away from the explosion that Locus had seemed so intent on getting Wash with.

“And why didn’t he kill Felix if they’re nemeses,” Wash wondered out loud, landing on the rooftop and checking to see if Felix was actually unconscious.

To his shock, the other hero seemed to be. 

“Well...” Wash grunted as sirens began to be heard in the distance. “Fuck. I don’t know what’s going on in my personal life or my superhero life.”

[fortunatowrites]

The Statue in the Desert

Part 1 - Goji the Dealer

"Like the berry?"

"Like the suave poker dealer laying down the tools in your battle against Lady Luck," remarked Goji as he spread cards across the felt table.

The eccentric man smiled and waited for all the cards to be laid out. Goji watched as the three other people reached out to pick up their cards. Starting at his left, he simply kept track of them as numbers instead of names. Number 1 was a young woman that seemed very excited to be here. Number 2 was a man who was just there to play and didn't seem interested in anything else. He was quiet and reserved. Number 3 was the eccentric man that seemed to be drawing interest in Goji. Number 4 was a woman who exuded a similar energy to number 2, except she didn't mind butting in to deliver some verbal jabs. Goji took a quick look at them and then slid the Dealer Button to number 1, the woman on his left. Each of them were reviewing their two cards as he burned the burn card and then proceeded to deal the flop. The eccentric man picked up his hole cards and then the four of them began the game, reviewing the cards on the table and those in their hand before announcing bets.

It was a standard game of Texas Hold 'Em and another day for Goji in this casino he called his second home. The eccentric man seemed to be watching Goji as much as he was watching the game and it was starting to make him a little nervous. He was hoping these high rollers would leave considerable tips and make him forget about it.

"Why do they call you Goji?" asked number 3. "It's my name." "Did your parents name you that? Who taught you how to deal? I am feeling so unloved with these hands." Goji forced a chuckle as he burned a card, "Actually, my parents didn't name me Goji. I was renamed Goji after I become the greatest card dealer in the world."

The man cocked an eyebrow as Goji made a flourish of shuffling and burning.

"You do seem quite skilled at your craft." "Well, a long time ago I was thrown out into the desert. There I journeyed to find myself and instead I came across an oasis. Inside of it was a lake and I thought I was finally saved from the harshness of the desert!" "You must have been if you're back here dealing cards," spoke number 1. "Clearly you didn't learn how to tell believable stories from whoever taught you to deal cards," spoke the other lady, number 4, with a stern tone. "In the oasis I dove deep into the water. At the bottom there was a lamp that I pulled free. After bringing it out, a genie was awoken!" Only the eccentric man and the lady on Goji's left seemed to be listening while the other two focused on their cards and dealt with the betting.

"The genie looked upon and said 'I judge you to be worthy!'," Goji began in his impression of a deep voice. "'For your deed this mighty day, I grant you the skills to survive and to become the grandmaster of your craft!' I told him I considered my craft to be making chairs, but he used his cosmic power to know that I was a part-time card dealer. After that, he told me I was now Goji, Grandmaster of Card Dealing." "Boy, this casino is lucky to have picked you up then," chided number 4 before drawing attention back to the game at hand. "Indeed they are..." remarked the eccentric number 3. As the players did their part of the game, the second player finally spoke up. "Why would a genie's lamp be dumped into an oasis?" "It's probably what made the oasis," spoke the eccentric man. "Don't be foolish, that doesn't even make sense," spoke the stern woman. "Oh, but a being of cosmic power able to bend reality and grant wishes being trapped within a little object meant for storing oil makes sense?" joked number 1. "The magic of great beings can affect the world around it. Ambient magic that exists off of their own, like the fumes from oil. Create little ecosystems meant to thrive with life or contain their prison," said the eccentric man ignoring her. "Many deserts are already full of magic, so whoever dropped the lamp there inadvertently made that oasis by allowing the genie's ambient magic to mingle with the desert's." "I guess that would explain how an oasis would have a deep pond of water instead of a shallow reservoir?" number 2 asked Goji. Goji didn't know how to feel about the players seriously discussing his story. "I suppose. I just knew that I was out in the desert and if not for that genie, I would have died. Or at least never become this amazing at card dealing," he said with a wink.

They played another hand and Goji kept burning and dealing. Finally, it was getting to the last hand and the remaining two players were the eccentric man and the stern woman. "Let this river guide me to victory like your genie did, Goji," spoke the man. "I'm relying on you to save me from losing fortune today." "I merely arm you against Lady Luck," Goji began as he burned a card. "Your strength is what will get you victory." The man placed a hand on the table and leaned forward, making it very clear his piercing gaze was aimed not at Goji's eye, but deep to his soul. "Goji, I need you... to arm me properly." There was no smile on his face now. "I'll do my best," Goji uncomfortably joked as he laid down the river, the final card. The man glared at the card and then slowly turned his angry gaze up to Goji. Goji gave a nervous smile. The two of them played their hands and it was clear luck had been in the woman's favor. They gathered their winnings and left tips before heading off. The man who had been player 3 simply walked away. Goji collected the winnings and began to reset the table. He reached for his earpiece to give a call to the floor staff, but found it missing.

"Huh?" he seemed to ask no one at all. He reached back down to the cards to find they were gone. Confused, he glanced around the floor which was empty of people. He looked back down and found the table gone. Looking up, he saw the clock across the floor, but it was missing all of its hands.

"What is going on?" he choked out before he turned around.

Goji tripped a little and regained his balance. He was no longer in his work uniform, now he was dressed more formally and walking across the cement of the parking garage. He looked back into the elevator he had just stepped out of. Turning around, he looked down the row of cars and saw the eccentric man walking towards him. Quickly, he reached back in the elevator and hit the button labelled security; then he waited for the doors to slowly close. The man approached him.

"Heading out?" asked the former poker player. "I'm waiting for a friend to carpool with," responded Goji. "This area is for employees only, y'know?" "Oh I know." He simply stared at him for a minute. "Cool," Goji replied nervously. "You really messed up in not giving me the tools I needed to win, Goji."

Goji excitedly pointed to the security officer approaching. "I'm so sorry to hear that, but I think I see my friend approaching!" "Mister Goji, what did you do with the genie's lamp?" asked the man. "I dunno, it went away," Goji lied. "You seem capable of finding great things. I think I know a way you can make up this loss to me." "Well, I'd love to talk about it, but I gotta meet with my friend."

Goji stepped past the man and walked over to the officer. "This guy is making me super uncomfortable," he said pointing to the man. "Goji, that's not your friend." "Huh?" "He's mine."

A taser went off and everything went black for a moment. Suddenly, Goji found himself sitting in the back of a helicopter. There was all sorts of stuff strapped to him, he was dressed in his work uniform, and his hands were bound by plastic zip-ties.

"Wait... Didn't this... happen?" Goji muttered as drugs coursed through his system. His vision had a pulsing light shining through, but he shook his head and it went away. "Where... am..." he began to struggle before the man turned around. He gave a crooked smile through jeweled dental grills. "You have everything you need. Find something great for me and bring it north. You'll find my camp or get close enough that we'll find you! If you show up without something good for me, you'll find the same result as not coming to me." "...what...?" "You'll die out in the desert." "Why...?" Goji struggled, with his words and body, through great confusion. "The genie! I know you were telling the truth. It all makes perfect sense." "I...lied..." Goji choked out and began to laugh. "N...n...not...real..." The man furrowed his brow angrily. He stood up and cut Goji's wrist-ties before lifting him up. Goji immediately tried grabbing at him, but the man kept slapping his hands away and then shook him violently. "Tell me the truth! Tell me you found that genie!" Goji wide-eyed and scared spoke the truth. "It's...n...not...real..." The man pulled him closed and glared at him. "Then make it true."

The man then literally kicked Goji off the helicopter. As he began to scream and look up at the sun, his vision broke apart as the pulsing light shined back through. He found himself struggling around in the sand and going through the backpack that was strapped to him.

"Oh right... I'm dying," he said aloud to himself.

He was stranded in the Sahara Desert and his life was flashing before his eyes.

[jaxxonpollux]

“why do i always pick people that don’t want to be with me?”

this is completely cliche. i know it, probably everybody knows it. it’s something you’d hear on an episode of Degrassi, or maybe occasionally on Full House. poor Uncle Joey, let’s give him a throwaway line to say to, i don’t know, Bob Saget or twin baby Michelle so that they can monologue something heartfelt over our staple sentimental TV show score. that’s like, our thing. or, let’s have this teenager guy say this to his lady bff so she has a reason to look sad and throw herself at him. something that would never happen irl except under desperate circumstances.

and i know why i said it too. not because i truly felt it, in all honesty. i mean, i did felt some semblance of rejection from a variety of people i had spoken to or heard from or looked at in the past 24 hours, but the notion that i’m so pitiful that i’m just “picking the wrong people” and wearing blinders is kind of a a joke. i can just as readily give up on somebody as i can be obsessed with them. it’s some ugly cosmic power i have. i always allude to my vague sense of pride, and that’s a part of it, a refusal to be desperate. i’d rather be alone forever than be desperate! you don’t say things like this because you mean them.

it’s intentionally pitiful. manipulative. again, not a word that i like to wear, but it fits nice and snug around the ol’ waist. and i tap into it even during the smallest interactions. i don’t know why it’s a part of me. maybe it’s the way i was raised, maybe miasma is really a thing, and i’m just converting all of my dad’s alcoholic guilt-trip energy into something equally ugly and not yet as sinister. sometimes a conversation is like an experiment. sometimes you just say things because you wonder about the response, not to get things off your chest.

i said it and she paused for a second, and then said “i’m sorry.” like she was complicit in the crime, a #metoo with an entirely different meaning. an admission that she never wanted to be with me either. which, like, doesn’t really bother me at this point, but it’s interesting to hear people react that way. not a supportive “aw shucks pal, you’ve got the right person for you just around the corner! and besides, i love you tons, c’mere you big pile of marshmallow!”

or maybe she could just smell the manipulation. i do that too, like, when homeless people go on a tangent to explain how much of a christian they are before they ask for money. i met one guy who crossed his chest, pointed at the sky, and made a cross with his fingers all within the span of 5 seconds. it kind of made me feel like a vampire or something. anyway, when you smell a manipulation tactic, the first instinct is always repulsion, and it’s usually the one you go with. maybe that’s why she said what she said the way she said it, a casual brush away. not playing that game. it makes the whole probe kind of a dud, but that happens with probes, doesn’t it?

it’s peculiar, treating conversations like experiments. trying on personalities and characters like masks. you can’t really do that without some kind of cost. it ruins your image, to the people you don’t want to be ruining your image for. you can’t have any fun anymore! as i recently said to someone else i know. there’s no rehearsal when it comes to this kind of stuff. no rewind. you just say it and let yourself be destroyed. for science, i guess.

---

anywho, i think i’m becoming more comfortable with being an awful person. like, just letting the floodgates loose. i had a girlfriend when i was 14 who was very catty and loved to gossip, one day she said she was gonna try not to do that anymore, it made her feel bad. i begrudgingly went along. i think it destroyed the magic. and anyway it didn’t last very long, people can’t really make choices like that for themselves. i mean, maybe some people can. i don’t really know. but i’m just accepting some of those evils now and letting them boil on the stovetop. all the things i try to hide or not be. all the things i don’t want people to see when they look at me. i suppose it’s a victory for “being yourself,” isn’t it? isn’t that the ideal everyone tries to reach? or is that just another piece of teenage tv melodrama advice that doesn’t really mean anything? i saw a clip from the new spider man movies, spider man was like “you’re right, i should just be myself,” and his fat friend was like “c’mon peter, nobody wants that.” he might be right, and maybe a lot of people aren’t themselves because they know they suck.

i still feel like i don’t know who myself is. there are some people out there that spend every waking moment worrying about what other people think about them, about trying to put their best face on every day, trying to be a really good person, under the assumption that it will also make them feel good. be kind, love, and be loved. constantly wondering what the best thing to say is, and constantly drawing a blank. people like me! i feel like half the time i hear somebody i don’t have any reaction inside. it’s not that i have secret hateful thoughts that i bottle up or anything. i just have like, a lot of undeveloped land in there, somehow. i could run a kid over on his bike and shrug it off. i could be having sex with a beautiful woman and not feel a hint of arousal. my mind goes blank a lot.

or maybe i just have a lot of cellophane over certain parts of myself. does that make sense? i haven’t had the experience that required me to unpack that box there in the back. i’m sure if i actually ran over a kid, went to court, had to face their sobbing parents, got slapped around by some interrogating police officer, spent time stewing in a jail cell, my heart would be bleeding with guilt and regret. i just haven’t gotten a chance to make that mistake yet and unlock that part of myself.

or maybe when i’m faced with things that i ought to care about, a big shield pops up, a wave of protection, and everything goes blank. a sort of dissociation, which i really hate in other people when i want to know them, but maybe it’s something that i have too. like a wall of fear that doesn’t let anything in or out. it’s paralyzing, being put in a situation, and not knowing what you would do in that situation. your head doesn’t let you know the next step, so you wait there, dumb and sweating. it’s only until directly after that everything comes flowing through, kind of like that “oh, THIS is what i should have said, this is what i should have done” feeling that is so incredibly common in everybody.

or maybe i’ve just locked the front door, but the back door is still wide open. and things only get to me through specific channels, ones that i wouldn’t normally count on but are tried and true. i don’t know what i’m doing in a bed with someone, but i come alive naked in front of a webcam. i’m a wallflower at parties, unless i get a specific concoction of drugs and drinks in me that pulls everything out, wit charm guts and all. i can’t talk for shit, but i can write up a real enthralling tale. who knows what’s going on in there?

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i feel like i’ve been trying to get to know this girl through the back door, the front door is locked. like, talking to her, when she makes herself available (scarcely), doesn’t bring me any closer to knowing her. KNOWING her, whatever the hell that means. so instead i’ve been digging around in everything she tells me she ever liked, movies she watched, books she read, things that had a profound effect on her. trying to put together machine parts and figuring out what potions were sloshed together to make her. it’s a backwards way of trying to get to know someone.

i want to get to know people by living with them. i feel like it’s the purest way, learning a person’s diet and mannerisms and how often they do the dishes. it says a lot about how someone feels inside, i think, the time they wake up for work, or the food they have for lunch. every person i’ve ever met, i wish i had gotten to live with them for a while. i want those nitty gritty details, i thrive off of them. sometimes i even want to become people for a while, like some psychotic twist on method acting. 

actually, that’s probably not true. i tried to think of why i would want to be somebody else and it’s just exhausting. and i think i only want to understand other people so i can shape myself to be the best for them, again that kind of manipulative “i’m trying my best to be perfect for you” desire. the problem is, i’m never going to figure anyone out, and even if i did, i don’t think i have the proper judgment to decide what would be best for them either. i need to figure out a better way to interact with people, clearly. letting people just be themselves and not thinking about it drives me nuts sometimes, but it’s obviously the best. i just don’t want to be one of those Men that goes through life steam rolling everyone else under whatever my personality ends up being, just being unabashedly unashamedly “myself.” that kind of person gets on my nerves too. i get the feeling some people really love that kind of person, but oh here i go again trying to decide on “kinds of people” like i’m trying on shoes.

it’s honestly a mess. maybe i’ll grow out of it. like maybe i’ll have a kid and the only person i’m allowed to be is a good dad, for the rest of my life. there’s some comfort in that, knowing who you gotta be and just committing to it. right now, i could still be anybody. i don’t know if i’m a baker or a writer. i don’t know if i’m an artist or a mindless consumer. i don’t know if i’m a bad boyfriend, a libertarian, a genderfluid fruit basket, or just a total sack of shit. and that really bothers me. i mean, obviously.