#man........... it's really strange to think about

[onbearfeet]

This is something that genuinely fascinates me about certain storytellers.

If you've ever been in a real emergency situation — blood and screaming, people will die if someone doesn't do something NOW and probably some of them will die even then — then you know that a lot of people will instinctively run in to help. They'll do it whether they actually can help or not. It's hardwired into a lot of humans, especially if the people in danger are children. (No shade. Mammals are often protective of their young.)

But not everyone will do it. Some people won't be physically or psychologically able to ... but some will have the knowledge and ability, and they just won't. Do. Anything. I grew up in earthquake country, so I think of it in terms of earthquakes; when the walls start to crack, everybody runs for cover, but not everybody grabs a baby on the way.

I'm a runner-in, always have been, so I'm fascinated by the stayers-out. I'm not usually interested in judging them (I can't honestly say staying out of, say, a burning building is a bad idea), but I do want to know what's in their head where I have the voice of an ancient primate screaming at me to save the troop.

The only stayer-out I've ever gotten to study up close was my probably psychopathic sibling, and I don't consider him representative of anything much. But the presence of that trait in a storyteller — much less one who takes on Superman of all characters — is baffling. Is there some kind of lack of empathy at work? Certainly Snyder seems to pick and choose who gets to be fully human in his movies, but that's a strange trait to find in a professional storyteller. Does he see stayers-out as heroic in and of themselves, as makers of difficult choices? If so, Superman really isn't the character to explore that through, what with his literal comic-book levels of power that enable him to save almost everyone most of the time. Maybe he was trying to make the best of Superman after Christopher Nolan comprehensively claimed Batman for a solid decade, and transplanted a Batmanesque moral dilemma like "Should I save the Joker?" onto a character for whom it makes far less sense?

The best hypothesis I have so far is this: Superman is a fantasy of power and goodness. It's a story about an incredibly powerful man who uses his power for good, and whose problems mostly arise from his power, his goodness, or both. Maybe Lex Luthor opposes him out of jealousy or fear of his power; maybe his goodness forces him to take on burdens that damage him psychologically; regardless, the best Superman stories turn on that axis. Perhaps Snyder was trying to question the legitimacy of that premise, or criticize the idea of a power-and-goodness fantasy itself in the way that some really good superhero fiction engages with those sorts of abstract concepts.

But given how much of Snyder's work seems to glory in fantasies of power and cruelty (300) or power and corruption (Watchmen) or ... call it power-and-badness fantasies, I guess ... I do have to wonder why he chose that particular fantasy to aim at.

I want to study that man like a bug in a jar, and I'm not sure I'll like what I find there.

not to shit on zack snyder again but it's really funny that he tried to make a big, grand, complex moral quandary on where superman should stand when he saves people around the world and then james gunn is like "he wants to do it because he thinks it's the right thing to do". sometimes going simpler means you get to the crux of what the character is all about much more efficiently. like wow it's really that easy

[lizziesfirstwife]

Inevitable

pt.2 to Guardian Angel

jinu x fem!reader

warnings: mentions of death and blood, depressive themes, possessive jinu, thirsty reader, suggestive language, use of Y/N, banter, slow burn, not proof-read

word count: 4807 (sorry not sorry)

authors note: listened to Ms.Whitman by Bhad Bhabie & watched the Korean Pop the Balloon or find Love halfway writing this. Fought writers block like crazy to bring this out, so enjoy! 🤍

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

It was quick. In most cases.

The air smelled of rain and cherry blossom. The hem of her dress was soaked, her shoes wet from running through the soaked grounds of the forest she had been hiding in for the past few hours.

Sunshine crawled its way through the canopy that the trees created. A desperate consolation, sympathy for her impending doom.

Tears streamed down her face, blisters adorning her feet like a plague, blood and mud sticking to them. She wanted to scream. So many things left for her to do, things she had carelessly written in her diary before going to bed.

I don’t know how to fix this.

The ground gave way beneath her, mud crept further and further up her legs, the lower part of her dress now completely wet.

Silence.

She stood still.

The air smelled of cherry blossoms and death. Her hands, which had once been white with cinnamon and flour, were now stained red.

Was it blood?

I fear that I will love you more than I will ever be allowed to.

Her hair had long since come loosw from her bun, the strands knotted and frizzy from running through the rain. Her barrette was lost too far away to retrieve, buried under mud and tears.

Birds were chirping. It was supposed to be a gift. She cried when she found out the price of the hanbok, made of lace and pure silk. Pink silk, hand-dyed with chrysanthemums and madder root. Lace, which was reserved for noble brides only.

She wanted to be a bride so badly.

Out of love for you, I have forgiven the world for what it has done to me.

A tear rolled down her face. She would have made a beautiful bride. An extraordinary one.

Now the dress that was supposed to be her wedding dress, was stained full of blood.

Her feet gave way and her body met the mossy forest floor. The sun shone golden down on her, as if to…comfort her.

Horse galloping. Screams.

Her hand closed around the diamond on her necklace, the only thing not stained by her blood.

She had always known that she would die first. It was inevitable.

˙⋆✮

Her cat jumped off the bed when she woke up screaming.

A week had passed since the strange encounter in the bakery.

She hadn't thought about what the encounter might have meant or why the strange man looked so familiar to her. Thinking about it would bring no clarity, only confusion.

Taking a deep breath, she threw back her blanket and took a sip out of the water bottle she had put on her bedside table. It was rare that she woke up before her alarm, but this dream had shaken something inside her that she didn't know was dormant.

After the meeting a week ago, she went to the post office to send her boss a letter demanding her contractual 14 days of paid leave.

Sonder.

The realization that every soul on this planet has their own story, their own pains to carry silently, ambitions that might never come true, dreams that were shattered, love that was forbidden to be expressed.

She wondered what he was doing with his life. Was he a shop assistant like her? No, he hadn't shown enough feigned niceness for that. When you had to deal with people every day and your survival depended on how convinced they were of you, you quickly learned how to manipulate people.

He didn't come across to her as the kind of person who needed to lie to people in order to survive. Maybe health care? Y/N imagined him in a white coat with a stethoscope slung around his neck.

Doctors didn't really lie, they didn't need to. They earned their living without lying to their patients, mostly. There would always be senior citizens with blood pressure problems, young women with iron deficiency, couples with fertility problems, and more than enough accidents.

She bit her lip before spitting her toothpaste into the sink. He would look good in uniform.

The smell of sandalwood and rain caught her nose, a crow cawed outside.

The sun was almost completely up, the dew still fresh, the sound of rain hitting the streets. The truth was, she didn't know why she had taken vacation. She took her necklace from her jewelry box on the dresser and clasped it carefully around her neck. It was an heirloom, at least that's what her great-grandmother told her before she died. It certainly looked old enough. The silver had a few scratches, the diamond hanging from it a bit dull.

Maybe she wanted to sleep in for once, or stop baking any more cinnamon rolls.

She took her perfume bottle, and wrapped herself in a cloud of sakura and dreamy vanilla. Her hair looked dull. The circles under her eyes were darker than usual, her skin dry from the lack of moisturizer.

When she was little, her mother used to say that her beauty was her greatest weapon. Not her knowledge, or her kindness.

Beauty was like a bullet that you could shape until it fitted into a weapon. You could polish it, improve it, maintain it.

Aim.

And fire if necessary.

In a selfish world, only the selfish could succeed. Y/N was never selfish. She didn't have it in her. She wanted to be. Too many cruel people were wronging humanity, too many evil people became successful. It seemed as if people had to hate each other in order to survive day after day, as if there was nothing left for the good souls in this world, nothing for those who recognized the strength in being kind and did not give up being so.

Sometimes she felt like she could snap, shout at everyone who treated her like shit. But did she want to be admitted to a ward? Hell no.

So she didn’t.

Rain beat against the glass of her windows. A sigh escaped her lips, applying the last bit of blush before going to her coat rack. How could it be that it was raining for the seventh day in a row? Y/N looked down and grimaced. She didn't like her rain boots. Not one bit. They weren't ugly, a simple shade of black, but whenever she had to put them on it felt like she was waddling. Just because it was raining didn't mean she wanted to feel like a duckling.

She loved the rain. The sound made her think a little less about just everything, her personal white noise. It was already warm outside, the early morning hours heating up the air. At work, she had no choice but to wear long clothes. It wasn't a company rule, but she had made the mistake of putting on an expensive dress on her first day at work and had to take it straight to the cleaner afterwards.

There was an indescribable emptiness inside her that she didn't know when or how it had taken root, like a virus trying to claim the happiness inside her for itself. She turned away from her coat stand.

She didn't bother to lock her apartment as she walked out the door.

˙⋆✮

It was Sunday again. But the emptiness, the feeling of not having earned waking up, did not rise with Jinu.

His throat felt dry. He hummed a song as he fished a shirt out of his closet, a black one made of silk, and sprayed a little perfume on his neck and in his hair.

He was leaving the bathroom when he paused.

Two steps back, one reach up. He put the bottle of perfume back in the cupboard, now that his wrists also smelled of sandalwood. Jinu didn't know why he even owned perfume. It wasn't as if demons stank, or needed anything other but their sheer will to bring people to their doom.

He frowned as he looked in the mirror. In the past, before his time as a soul hunter, he used to steal pastries from the palace kitchen, breaking them in two and using the contents as a perfume. He knew that no one would understand why he would have done such a thing, when he was in a good position as a musician at court. He didn't have to steal food from the kitchen to smell good. The most extravagant, expensive and unique perfumes in the whole of Joseon were at his disposal.

Jinu shut the bathroom door harder than necessary behind him. There were things in his past that not even he knew why he had done them.

The sun shone bright when he left his apartment. It had stopped raining half an hour ago, birds were flying around, more pedestrians roaming around and prattling than usual.

Even if he couldn't feel hunger himself, human food still tasted good to him. Paying for something in order to devour it made him feel less guilty than actually devouring lost souls.

Cinnamon, cherry blossoms.

He shook his head.

Since their encounter a week ago, he couldn't stop thinking about the woman in the bakery. How she smelled, how she talked, how she looked at him. She didn’t spare him a second glance. She didn’t scream when she saw him, he wasn’t sure if she even recognized him. And strangely enough, Jinu liked that. It was a change from the fans who usually fawned over him and acted like he was their promised husband and father of their future children.

He didn't want to, he didn’t plan to. He just wanted to stop by the next day, seeing if everything was going fine. The smile on her face when he chose the cinnamon rolls were still etched in the back of his mind. But when he peered through the shop window the day after their encounter, she was nowhere to be seen. So he walked around the block. Maybe she was in the back, in the kitchen, or the storeroom. But when he finished his walk and looked through the window again, the only woman in the shop was an employee over 40.

The wind blew through his hair, begging him to return to reality. There was no reason to think about a bakery employee who had simply sold him a cinnamon roll. He didn't want to be a stalker, like those in the movies he had seen becoming popular over the decades.

Jinu bit his lip. If that were the case, he would also have to think about the saleswoman in the clothing store and the manager for their concerts.

But it couldn’t be described as mere thinking anymore. He was almost embarrassed to have so many thoughts about someone who’s job was to offer him a service.

Get a grip.

What Jinu had learned in his more than 400 years of existence, was that peace, reliability, and good company were characteristics he utterly valued in his life. The second and third were areas for improvement, but he implemented the first into his life as best he could. As peaceful as a demon could exist.

He had been on Earth for several weeks now, their mission to destroy the Honmoon as close to being completed as possible. He was here to steal souls, to destroy them, not to care about their well-being. And he was exceptionally good at stealing souls. Demons could see the worth of a soul just by glancing at a person. There were souls that carried no light within them, souls that were not worth saving. Souls with no value.

These souls were easy targets.

There were hardly any souls left with light within them, souls that tried to live, that protected the flame of purpose within them despite the horrors this world carried.

He had never seen a soul like hers before. Pain, hopelessness, buried under an even greater longing to live, to survive.

A soul written in textbooks. Exactly what they needed.

He tilted his head back.

What was wrong with him? She didn't deserve to be seen as an ingredient. She wasn't a puzzle piece he could grab and adjust until the whole picture was right.

He took a deep breath. She wasn't important. There were plenty of other souls. Weaker souls, souls he didn't have to search for. More work for him.

He didn't care.

The wind blew cold as he turned into a quiet street. He wandered aimlessly, no purpose to his walk.

He stopped. Wind blew in his direction, caressing his face with utter care. Was that... no. He shook his head and walked on. Another gust of wind. A familiar scent, surrounding him, enveloping him, caressing him.

˙⋆✮

"And what did you answer to that?"

Y/N took a sip of her hot chocolate and sighed. She hated coffee; the taste was too bitter to drink every day. But she had a penchant for anything sweet. Her parents used to make snaky jokes about the tooth fairy loving her, because she was going to be her most loyal customer with how much sugar she consumed.

"That I didn't see why I should work another 12-hour shift on a Saturday for the third time in a row, alone with the intern, just because he wanted to go to a resort in Incheon with his mistress."

The man across from her laughed and leaned back in his chair.

"How did you know that the woman next to him was his affair?"

Y/N raised her eyebrow. "Women have a much better sense for these things than you think Joon. I have a sixth sense for shady entities. First of all, I knew he was married, because every year since I started working for him, he took a weekend off in June for his wedding anniversary. Second, his real wife was here last year for the reopening after the big renovation.”

Y/N hummed. Her boss’s wife was a real nice lady, small with a kind smile. What a shame to be tied to an ungrateful cheater who you had children with.

“And third... no man who has been married for 30 years would still deal with the trouble of taking his wife away every week and spending an entire spa weekend on her, three times…back to back.”

She raised her eyebrows and poked her apple pie with her fork.

"I hate men. They will say all women are the same, yet they get upset when you point out their oddly similar and reoccurring behavior."

The man shook his head and took a sip of his cappuccino.

“So you’ve given up on them?”

Y/N shrugged her shoulders. "Difficult to give up something you haven’t even started." Shaking her head, she put her face in her hands.

"I don't know what to do with myself either. On one hand, I don't want to be taken advantage of. I don't want to become one of those crying women who eat tons of ice cream whining about some douchebag. Just thinking about it disgusts me. Being with someone, only for him to break up with me a few weeks later. Or better, a year later! More wasted time."

She sighed.

"But God... I don't want to be lonely. I don't mind being alone, but I don't want to give up the dream of finding someone for myself." Her eyes twinkled as she leaned back in her chair.

"Kind of funny, isn't it?"

Joon just shook his head and sighed. "I'm afraid I can't help you there sweetheart."

Y/N took a sip of her hot chocolate and looked out the window.

"Kind of weird to be the only one not being in a relationship." She shrugged her shoulders and watched people wandering around outside the café.

Her companion eyed her and leaned back in his chair. "You do realize that you're amazing even without someone by your side?"

She laughed, laughed deeply, and put her cup down. "I guess I do. I guess."

Outside, a few teenagers sat drinking juice and eating scrambled eggs with bacon. A mother and her baby sat at a table shaded by a tree, stroller pushed to the side, a cup of steaming something in front of her.

Babies. Y/N hummed and drank the last sip of her chocolate. She always knew she never wanted to have children. The idea of being responsible for another living being, for more than 18 years, was cruel to her. Children were great. She herself had become an aunt two years ago, her older sister now living in Busan with her husband. A niece. Y/N smiled at the thought of her and looked into her empty cup. She loved her, a little angel. But she never wanted children herself. She saw how little time her sister had left for her real family. A repeating pattern.

Y/N shook her head as she looked out of the window again. She would rather put up with 12-hour shifts every Saturday of the week for the rest of her life, than have children of her own.

Her friend sighed and put on his jacket.

"I really hate to leave you alone already, but I still have to pick up the cake for Eric or I won't be able to get everything ready in time."

Eric was Joon's boyfriend from Australia. His family didn't know he was gay, the stigma in South Korea still far too great. You weren't persecuted or arrested for loving the same gender, but it wasn't welcomed. So Joon told his family that Eric was an Erica, and that she was studying in Goyang and therefore couldn't visit him often. His family bought it. He was their only son and they didn't want to scare him away.

Y/N sighed and placed her saucer on his, their cups next to it. "I need to go for a walk anyway. My head's buzzing around like there's no stopping anytime soon." She looked outside and smiled faintly. "Enjoying the five seconds without rain before the flood attacks me again."

Joon laughed and stood up. She looked up at him, stretching as she did the same.

"Is he still calling me halmeoni?"

Joon raised an eyebrow and reached his hand out for their tableware, only to have it slapped away by her hand.

"I could lie."

Y/N rolled her eyes at his answer, somehow managing to put the 2 plates and cups on her left arm.

"Tell the kangaroo I said hi."

Joon laughed and gave her an obscene gesture as he left the café, leaving her behind with the dishes in her arms.

"Idiot."

She shook her head as she placed the dishes on the dish rack. Joon really was a complete idiot, but a nice one. She grabbed her purse and left the café.

The sun was now shining so brightly that she felt ridiculous for taking an umbrella with her when leaving her apartment. Luckily, it was one of those small foldable ones, so she could stow it in her purse.

The teenagers had long since taken off, the weather too nice to stay sitting somewhere the whole time. Y/N frowned. The stroller was still in the same spot under the shaded tree she spotted it in as she looked out the window earlier, but the mother was nowhere to be seen. She hadn't seen her go into the café either.

Y/N sighed and looked to the right and left before approaching the stroller. Her suspicion was confirmed when she spotted a small bundle wrapped in a pink blanket inside, brown button eyes and tiny hands greeting her. Y/N furrowed her eyebrows and looked around again.

"Strange."

She looked down at the baby again and turned back to go into the café. One hand wandered to her necklace as she asked the waitress that has been taking her order earlier, if she had seen a young woman enter the café in the last 10 minutes. However, the waitress just shook her head, saying there had been no new guests for 30 minutes.

Y/N frowned as she thanked her and bowed shortly, then went back outside to the stroller. The baby was still lying there, making little whining noises.

She almost wanted to slap her forehead. Of course the baby hadn't suddenly grown wings so it could fly away. But Y/N was glad that no one had taken it.

"I didn't know you had a daughter."

Her body whipped around, bumping into something big and solid.

A chuckle.

“Easy there darling. No need to rush.”

She looked up, an insult already on her tongue, when she faltered. Dark brown eyes. Sandalwood.

"You?"

Jinu laughed as she looked up at him with confused eyes and glanced to the stroller.

"You remember me? Didn’t think I made such a lasting impression on you."

She pursed her lips and looked away.

"I have many customers. Of course I remember those who buy my pastries."

He tilted his head and hummed.

"You look tired."

Her head snapped up, and he quickly raised his hands in appeasement.

"You still look pretty."

His cheeks were now a light pink color, and Y/N had to fight to hide the small smile that threatened to escape her.

He cleared his throat and ran a hand through his hair. "Are you planning to cuddle up to me all day? Not that I'm complaining."

Y/N's eyes widened when she realized that her upper body was still pressed against his, and she quickly took a step back. Or two.

Jinu looked her up and down, and this time it was he who had to smile. "Nice rainy weather outfit."

Y/N narrowed her eyes and looked down at herself. She had put on her black rain boots, which were now making her feet sweat rather than protecting them from the wetness.

And...the dress.

Black with spaghetti straps, barely covering half of her thighs.

Y/N cleared her throat. Suddenly even the little fabric she had on, felt too hot.

"You look good for being an eomma already."

Her eyebrows furrowed before she widened her eyes.

"That's not mine. I think her mother left her here."

Now it was Jinu's turn to look confused.

"She was sitting here the whole time while I was inside with my friend, and suddenly she was gone when I came out. She didn't come back to the café either," she explained.

Jinu frowned.

"Have you called the police yet?"

Y/N sighed. Why hadn't she thought of that?

She just shook her head and pulled her phone out of her pocket.

But the police officer on the phone told her they couldn't send a patrol at the moment. An armed robbery in the city center had required all their officers. If the mother had been gone for more than 30 minutes, they should take the child to the nearest police station and call child protective services, CPS, from there.

Y/N huffed when she ended the call.

Jinu looked at her with a raised eyebrow. He had excellent hearing and could hear everything the man told her on the phone, but of course he wouldn't tell her that.

What harm was there in listening to her voice a little longer?

Y/N threw her cell phone into her purse and sighed as she looked at the now whining baby.

"Police is busy with a robbery right now. Armed and stuff. We're supposed to take her to the nearest station and then call child protective services."

Jinu hummed and nodded.

"But we have to wait another 10 minutes until half an hour is up. He said the mother might come back."

Jinu frowned and shook his head.

"The baby doesn't even look older than 3 months. Who leaves their almost newborn alone in a stroller?"

Y/N shrugged her shoulders. Her heart almost broke as the little girl's cries grew louder.

She tapped her foot on the sidewalk. She looked up at the sky. Watched how the birds flew around the trees.

"Screw it."

She stretched out her arms and carefully lifted the little creature out of the stroller, taking care to support her head, and laid her against her shoulder.

“You! Take my purse and the stroller. I don’t believe a bit that her mother will turn up even if we wait the whole day.”

Jinu raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

If he was being honest, he liked her bossy tone. But only if he was being honest.

He took her pink purse off her shoulder, careful not to touch her arm, and placed it in the stroller.

There was silence between them as they walked down the street. He was all too aware of the stares from passers-by. He had forgotten to pull his hood back over his head, which he had taken off when he spotted Y/N in front of the café.

He wouldn't have minded if she had a child.

He narrowed his eyes and looked at the path ahead as he pushed the stroller in front of him. He didn't need to care about something like that.

He could already see the headlines in the fan magazines. Tilting his head back, he groaned silently. He didn’t want to listen to his groups lash-out tomorrow.

"So I guess you don't have any children?"

She looked up at him, and God, the way she had to crane her neck up to look at him, did something to him. He quickly looked away, but his gaze found hers again immediately.

"Nope. But I have a niece. She's 2, so not quite a baby anymore."

Jinu nodded and looked back at the road ahead. "I have—had a little sister. She was nine." He smiled painfully at the thought of her. "I was over the moon when I found out I was going to be a big brother. Unfortunately, I could never get her to be interested in my hobbies. She was always a free spirit."

Y/N smiled, and he couldn't look away when he caught it. She didn't dwell on the fact that he had spoken of his sister in the past tense, stroking the baby's back reassuringly.

She had no right to probe further.

Relief washed over her as the police station came into view.

Inside, they already knew about their arrival and immediately notified CPS. When the lady arrived, she smiled politely when she saw her before taking the baby into her arms.

"You could almost think it was yours."

She looked at the two of them and hummed a tune as she carefully placed the baby in the stroller and gave her her handbag back. She was fast asleep, tired from the morning sun and the clouds that were now gathering again.

Y/N blushed and wanted to say something, but Jinu beat her to it.

“It was good practice”, he thanked the woman.

Y/N blushed even more, stepping on his foot to make him finally shut up.

Jinu had to bite his lip.

This woman.

No, he would not steal her soul. And should anyone even try, he would banish them to depths deeper than hell.

Y/N sighed as the woman pushed the stroller out to her work vehicle and strapped the baby into an infant seat in the front passenger seat.

"What will happen to her now?"

The woman turned to her and smiled weakly. "Well, she'll probably be placed with foster parents until we find the mother or father. The mother will likely be charged with child endangerment."

She looked at the two of them one last time before getting into her vehicle.

"It's nice to know that there are still good people out there."

With that, she drove away, the child now being in safe hands.

Jinu shuddered.

Good people.

He didn't know if that applied to him. Either of those words.

"What's your name, anyway?"

The soft voice beside him woke him from his thoughts, making him look down at her standing there all squeaky on her tip toes.

"Jinu."

Y/N raised her eyebrow when he didn't say anything else.

God, he was tall. At least 6 feet, muscular through and through-

She cleared her throat.

"And what can I call you?"

She looked up at him and struggled not to lose herself in the depths of his eyes.

His voice was like a hand between her legs.

"Y/N."

Y/N.

He knew the name. Something buzzed inside him, something that had been asleep for a long time.

She cleared her throat and reached for her necklace.

"I guess it was nice to see you again, Jinu."

With that, she turned and walked down the street. Jinu stood still, the sound of his name on her tongue mesmerizing.

Y/N.

This time, she was the one to leave first.

Leaving the other speechless.

Distraught. With an incredible urge not to let the other go.

Then the headlines came.

𓍯𓂃𓏧♡

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy reading this, I would appreciate a like, reblog, or a comment! I love that there are more stories about the movie out now. I still have to read them all. I’m still hopeful for a second movie <3 Sorry if I forgot to tag anyone, tagging almost took longer than the actual writing ᥫ᭡.

Comment if you would like to be tagged in a potential part 3! Requests for this movie are open ⋆˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆

What do you think will happen in ch.3? Vote here!

tag list: @lunaria1 @owe-143 @yaezger @iamatinydinosaur @thaliasnicket @omgsuperstarg @chauchirem @lizzymizzy-blogg @aise-30 @rohjaewonlvr @miffysoo @vvhira @gloomuri671 @purplefluffycows @shoyomybeloved @yue-caelum @yourjustassaneasiamx @mafiulaputaama @ri-eveowe @sheicadaartista @justanindiangirl12 @mimiu3usoft @sparky2020sworld @mayuri-san @mcueveryday @ilovebtsstuff @l4nordina19 @obsessed-tyrant @kangsae-byeokfan @stupendousprincessengineer @thesimppotato11 @kelsxxyawn @zhentheraven @fava-boi @enerofairy @maximillienne @yoongi-tunes @crescent-z @loidswife27 @vieniee @jeewhat @miffysoo @calmmell @hihowareyou456 @koobiiiistar @asgwendollie @vivid11y @gina239 @imloveswans

˖ ݁𖥔 ݁˖ 𐙚 ˖ ݁𖥔 ݁˖

[scannainscanrula]

shadowed corners

remmick x reader (18+ mdni)

You're a romance author suffering from insomnia, writer's block, and strange nightmares. Your publisher offers to send you to Maine for a short sabbatical to clear your head. It's a quaint town with charming locals, and a mysterious man running the lighthouse that nobody seems to know much about... [part two here]

author's note: well well here we are again. this is MUCH longer than my other fic and i intend to have at least 3(?) chapters for it, so strap in girlies. no smut just yet yous have to earn it first by sitting through all this fucking exposition. grma enjoy! warnings: horror elements, discussion of animal death, discussion of shark attacks, sexual themes

You sit at your desk in front of an empty document, the cursor blinking at you mockingly. Your eyes are tired and your head feels heavy, and the last time you fell asleep at your desk you had drooled on your keyboard, and you really don’t want to find a place to get it fixed. 

“An old-school computer always helps me when I have writer’s block,” one of your colleagues had told you at a cocktail party when you lamented about your publisher’s insistence on a new concept.

You had a very embarrassing and uncomfortably visible breakdown in her windows-only corner office. You began word-vomiting all over her sleek carbon fibre desk about your writer’s block and insomnia– leaving out the extra embarrassing detail of your recurring sexy nightmares– and she had patted your back and attempted to comfort you with corporate jargon. When the tears started she lowered some blinds and lowered her voice, sitting against the edge of the desk in front of her.

“Look, kid. You’re a hell of a writer, okay? Nothing sells like your stuff. I mean, I don’t get it, but the girls love this… creepy vampire stalker shit.”

Dark romance, you want to correct her, but it’s futile after four years working together. 

She sighed, crossing her arms.

“How about… I give you a company card and you go… rent on the coast somewhere for a few months? We have some contracts to draft because these streaming services are just chomping at the bit for rights to adapt. So you go pack your things and take a break. Get an Ambien prescription, fuck a fisherman, whatever you need to do.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll bankroll it.”

She taps her manicured acrylic nail on the cover of your most recent title, Shadowed Corners. It was a total and complete success, where your first two were mafia romances set in the same universe, SC was a dark romance with a vampire love interest stalking your adorable main character. You love red flags, and Milo was covered in them.  

“You’re a money-printing machine, babe.”

So here you are, not relaxing, not on sleeping pills, and completely unfucked by any hot guys. You press your fingers to your temples and sigh, closing the pages and pushing the circular off button for the computer. You slide back and lean forward, stretching your creaky back. You miss your cozy little setup at home, your comfortable chair and the souped-up gamer style keyboard. You sacrificed comfort hoping it would make you work harder, but you think you’ll just finish this little sabbatical with more lower-back pain than usual. 

You fill your water bottle with the filter in the fridge, admiring the stickers all over it. Among the logo of your publishing house and the ones about writing, you have fanart of your books and quotes from your own characters. Ones you’ve found at book fairs and second-hand stores as well as online. A handful were sent along with fanmail. Your laptop and idea notebook are covered too, because it drove you mad to know people liked your stuff enough to make art out of it. 

You huff and trudge up the stairs, feeling exhausted and dreading the next day. You sit in your bed and look at the sticker of Milo with his signature phrase I’d like to see you stop me, babygirl. 

You turn the bottle away from you as you open the bedside drawer. Inside of it are two options. A scent-proof bag that holds your pipe, grinder, and bud, a vape, and a few edibles. The other is a vibrator. You wonder what the point of this vacation was. You could get high and get off at home in the city. And at least there you could order munchies for delivery after you’d fucked yourself silly thinking about the made-up vampire in your head.

You just shut the drawer, rolling your eyes as you lay back. 

Two hours later, you can’t sleep. You’re “jerking off your ego” as your friends would call it, looking through positive reviews of your last title. You know you have detractors, people who think your work is trash or anti-feminist. It’s a little trashy, but it’s just for fun. And you’ve had your share of shitty boyfriends like any girl your age, you know the difference between right and wrong. God forbid a girl wants a hot vampire to follow her home, you think. 

You sit up and put your phone face down. You need fresh air. You need a walk. So, you bundle up and stick in headphones for a brisk, freezing, 7 PM wintertime mental health walk. The New England air isn’t just cold, it’s thick and wet with the marine layer from the ocean, which you’re a short walk away from. It’s not nice, but it does invigorate you as you follow the path from your little cottage down to the beach. It’s pretty private, tucked away in a little alcove– which you were warned not to enter when the tide is too high. You peek over to see it’s not. So you climb down and skirt around the rocks to walk on the main beach, which is empty. Obviously. The recently released audiobook of one of your peers’ newest titles plays in your ears, narrated by a sultry English man. You should have gone somewhere else for inspiration. You vaguely remember hearing someone at a book release party talk about how inspiring their trip to France was, and another person responded about their time in Ireland. You’ve mostly just met fishermen and townies, and none of these men had the Milo quality about them. 

Milo was inspired by a stunning man you saw while at a nightclub in New York City. You were very, very drunk on espresso martinis, but you saw him and his adorable girlfriend– who also served as your muse for Annmarie, SC’s protagonist– at the bar together. His arm was around her waist in a way that was possessive but romantic, his hand rested over her tummy, and you saw his thumb rubbing circles into her skin lovingly. 

“Oh my God, girl, are you seriously drooling? You are so drunk,” your friend had half-sighed, half-laughed as you wiped a little drool from your chin with the back of your hand.

“We have got to get you some dick, queen,” another friend joked.

“I am perfectly fine being single,” you protested.

“Nuh-uh, I read that last book of yours. All work and no dick makes you fucking crazy. How did you come up with that shit anyway?”

“She’s totally sick in the head, that’s how.”

Your back straightens up as you think you hear a voice.

“Miss!”

You pause the book and turn around to see a man jogging behind you, holding something in his hands. You freeze with terror until you realise it’s your notebook he’s holding.

“You dropped this,” he says, handing it over. He stays a nice distance away from you.

He has some sort of Southern accent, not New England. 

And he is very, very attractive. He wears a tight black t-shirt and black athletic shorts. His short hair is semi-dark, and probably reddish from the way it looks in the blue moonlight. He smiles politely at you, his dark eyes are hard to see. There’s a scruff of facial hair on him.

“Thanks.”

“Sorry, I… I woulda tapped your shoulder, but I was worried you’d sock me in the nose if I scared you.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Are you uh… you okay? It’s pretty dark out here.”

“Yeah, I know. I was just clearing my head.”

“Right.”

You take a breath and introduce yourself quickly.

“I’m Remmick,” he says.

“So, what are you doing out here, Remmick?”

“Well, I work at that lighthouse. Just takin’ a jog before I head up there.”

“Oh.”

Hot lighthouse worker. That could be a love interest.

“You on vacation? I think I’d remember your face if I’d seen it before.”

Charming lighthouse worker. 

“I’m uh… on a sort of sabbatical.”

“You a doctor or something?”

“God, no. I’m a writer.”

“Yeah?”

The tone and timbre of that yeah have your head spinning. 

“Books or what?”

You nod.

“What kind?”

You hesitate.

“Can I guess?”

“Go for it.”

He thinks for a second, his tongue darting out to wet his lips as he does, which makes you flush. 

“Are they scary?”

“Parts of them are scary,” you admit. 

You remembered researching for SC and finding out that a lot of people only have a little over one gallon of blood in their bodies. You felt lightheaded and queasy at the visual of a plastic gallon bottle full of blood.

“But they ain’t all scary, huh?”

“Nope.”

He eyes you and smirks.

“Are they dirty?”

You hesitate and suck in air through clenched teeth.

“Yeah. They’re pretty dirty.”

“You must make good money, huh?”

He chuckles and you shrug.

“I do alright.”

“Yeah, I bet you do. Where’re you stayin’?”

You pause and he holds up his hands.

“That probably sounded creepy. I only meant… there’s some nice places, and there’s a Holiday Inn.”

“Well, it’s not the Holiday Inn.”

He looks at the watch on his hand.

“Shit. Well, I gotta get goin’.”

He says your name and your chest fills up with a weird feeling. Half-elation, half-dread.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah. You too. I’ll see you around,” you respond.

“Only if you keep walkin’ at night. Boats don’t need a lighthouse in the daytime,” he explains quickly, jogging off toward the beacon.

Hot lighthouse worker who’s charming and funny. Now that could work.

You go home and open the fridge. Time for boxed wine in a mug as you power-write for the next forty-five minutes until your hands cramp up.

You put the notebook down and pull out your favorite pen. You need certainty when you put book ideas down. You write in quick, messy bullet points, only getting down little ideas. You heard that coastal New England towns are famous for gruesome murder. Your instincts take you to the mafia but one glance at your water bottle has you thinking otherwise. SC was such a success, and you’re the vampire girl now. 

So you begin to pen the vague outline of a dark romance with a steamy, stalkery vampire lighthouse worker. A man in thick knit sweaters with a messy beard– that could get messier covered in blood or buried between a writer’s thighs–

You pause and see you’ve written writer on the page. You cringe and scribble that out. You had your humble beginnings with composition notebook self-insert fanfiction as a tween, but you’re a big girl now. And you’re already writing prose over a guy you just met, you really don’t need to make it any weirder. Your mind goes through some humble, wholesome occupations to compliment a love interest like that. Baker? Too cliche. Schoolteacher? Too male gaze. Big city corporate lawyer? Too Hallmark movie.

You tap back of the pen against the page rhythmically and sit up. Investigative journalist. Still technically a writer, but the only things you investigate are late-night Twitter links on a private spam account not even your best friends know about. 

Your pen dashes across the page, scrawling wildly. There’s not even any music playing, just the not-so-distant sound of the ocean, the radiator, and your own hand brushing against the paper. Soon, you’ve filled five pages without realising and that doubles in a blink. Shit! Your hand cramps up and you lift the pen finally, massaging your other thumb into your palm. It’s time for bed now, as three hours have passed and your back is killing you. 

You ascend the stairs again and just go to sleep, hand and wrist sore and content with your productivity.

You wake up surprisingly early the next day, and decide to go into town to get some groceries. Your fridge is looking sparse and the pantries are basically empty. You buy some frozen stuff and some supplies to make coffee. You see the honey is placed on the highest shelf you’ve ever seen and huff. No workers around. You can probably get it on your tiptoes. You strain to reach it and hear a man’s voice.

“Can I help you with that?”

You almost fall dropping to your feet again, and a shooting pain goes up from your heels.

“Ow, shit.”

“I’m sorry.”

It’s a man in a lifeguard’s hoodie with red swim trunks on. Maybe you hit your head and you’re having some sort of insane Baywatch fantasy.

“Yes. Please.”

“Yeah, I honestly don’t know who puts this stuff up there. The lady who owns this place is like, four-eleven.” You laugh at that as he hands you the honey.

“Thank you.”

“No problem. I’m Chris, by the way.”

You give him your name and shake his hand. Fucking hell this guy is strong. 

“Are you visiting?”

“Yeah. For a few months though. I’m working on a book.”

“You write horror?”

“Sorry?”

“Um, Stephen King’s from Maine. I feel like horror writers are always trying to… come out here and get some of that inspiration.”

“I think the inspiration he had was-”

“Cocaine?” he says at the same time as you. He shrugs. “At least you can recognise that. Half the other writers are ready to climb into the sewer.”

“Shit, well there goes my day at the rock quarry,” you joke. 

He laughs at that and you grin. 

“I’m a lifeguard on the beach for the next six hours, if you um… feel like you need some fresh air. Sunlight isn’t really a November specialty.”

“Are people really swimming this time of year?”

“Oh, they are. But so are the great whites, so, I’m mostly on seal watch.”

“Right.”

“I’m in tower Four,” he tells you eagerly. It’s like the words just jump right out of his mouth. “It’s right by the lighthouse. Nobody swims there, so… if you wanna tell me about your book or something… my job is pretty boring.”

“I’ll see you out there, Chris.”

“See you.”

You check out and ride the bike the homeowner left for guests back to the cottage. You feel insane. Maybe you were hospitalized after that breakdown and this is all some elaborate, drugged-up daydream you’re in. You pull out your notebook after the groceries are put away and flip to a new page. You click your pen and write HOT LIFEGUARD at the top of the page. 

A love triangle sounds awesome.

Later on, after you actually manage to type some words on a new, more permanent outline document, your vision drifts out the window. It is actually kind of a nice day, even though it’s overcast and windy. You stand and squeeze your hands together, stretching out. It is time for another brisk walk, this time to Tower Four.

Chris sits up there, slumped in his chair and holding his rescue tube in his lap. His tanned, toned legs are wide as he sits back.

“Would it scare you really bad if I started yelling ‘help’?” you joke, peering up at him from the ground.

He chirps your name, sitting up and sliding his sunglasses on top of his head, pushing back his hair. 

“You made it.”

“I brought you a snack,” you say, handing up the small bag of chocolates.

“Wicked,” he says, taking it from your hand. He swings down like a monkey and sits with his feet dangling off the side of the tower. You share the candies and look out on the water.

“So, you gonna tell me about your book?”

“Yeah, I’m not a horror writer.”

“What do you write?”

You hesitate. You know this song and dance, the divulgence of your career and the weird stares and uncomfortable shifting that follows. It’s ruined all sorts of dates and first impressions. Fuck it. You’re on sabbatical.

“Um… dirty romance books.”

“No shit? Is it like that crazy mafia stuff online?”

“Yeah, it’s exactly that.”

“Killer. You make a lot of money?”

“Enough to stay here and not work for three months.”

“So… you’re not writing a book?”

You shake your head.

“My creative well is completely dry. I came out here for-”

“Don’t even say it.”

“-some inspiration.”

“You are such a liar,” he teases. “You’re just like all those Stephen King wannabes,” he jokes, turning away from you.

You laugh at his silliness. You remain for a while, chatting about life and the town.

“The city is wild. I’m getting used to the silence, I think,” you tell him, having moved to– illegally– sit on the tower with him.

“Is the crime really so crazy out there?”

“Yeah, I mean… most of that is just there’s so many people crammed into such a small place. People go nuts.”

“Damn.”

“No crime here?”

“Not here, no, but um… about twenty miles north there’s this beach town, it’s a complete tourist getaway, but they got rocked by some shark attacks a few years back.”

“Some shark attacks?” you repeat his casual wording, shocked.

“Sorry. That sounded insensitive, it was really scary. That place is on its last legs now.”

“Well, yeah. Who wants to stay at the Jaws resort?”

“Bull shark, probably. The same thing happened in nineteen-sixteen. It was pretty gruesome.”

“Are you fucking with me?” you question him seriously, eyes squinted.

“I’m being serious, look it up.”

“Huh. Shit.” You sit back, eyes wandering to the lighthouse.

“Have you ever met the person who works up there?”

“Yeah, he’s fucking creepy.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“You met him?”

“Mhm. Last night.”

“Remmick? The lighthouse guy? You met him?”

“Yeah…? He was jogging.”

“Fucking weirdo,” Chris mutters. “He’s a complete shut-in.”

“How long has he been here?”

“Couple years? I don’t really know when he got here, he just… was there one day.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah, well. We used to have a night lifeguard, and– listen, I can admit having a girl out here on her own was pretty stupid– not that girls are… incapable or something-”

“I get it.”

“Right. And… full disclaimer, this girl really liked shrooms, but she swears up and down that she saw that guy covered in blood and eating a seal.”

“Whoa.”

“I mean, there was a dead seal on the beach, she was right about that.”

“Great white?”

“Oh, for sure. I’m think he was probably just doing that creepy-ass night jogging by the tower when that seal washed up, and… sometimes the sharks don’t fully kill the things-”

You grimace.

“I know, it’s pretty sad. Anyway, probably it was yowling and her fucking shroomed out brain conjured up that pretty picture. But he’s just a weird guy. He’s totally nocturnal. I’ve never seen the guy in the daytime. I’ve probably seen him six times and talked to him like… two, maybe?”

“Jeez.”

“Yeah. Anyways, sorry. That was a lot. I’d just stay away from the guy if you can. I don’t know what his deal is.”

You swiftly change the subject to movies and TV, which is good, because you two seem to share the same interests. Strangely enough, vampires are among them.

“I have sisters, so, I’ve seen Twilight about a hundred times? Maybe more?”

You laugh at that. You see him grinning and you check phone, seeing that two hours have passed.

“Shit. I have got to get back.”

“Right.”

“Thanks for the company. And the advice,” you add, nodding to the lighthouse.

“Um… would you want to grab a drink, tomorrow?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. Um… where?”

“It’s called The Weasel. It’s definitely a townie bar, but… the drinks are cheap.”

You are fiending for an espresso martini, and you fear you’ll have to settle for an old reliable at a dive bar. 

“Alright.”

“Cool. Um… eight o’clock sound good?”

“Eight o’clock sounds great.”

“Awesome. See you there.”

“I will see you there.”

Your back hits a tree as you pant, unable to run anymore. Your lungs burn as you gasp for cold night air in a dark, damp forest. You’re barefoot, in a wet nightgown that sticks to your skin and you’re terrified. 

You tremble, feeling the looming presence of something evil and ancient, rising up in front of you. Met with words in a language you don’t understand, a clawed hand grips your jaw. They’re wet and sticky, hot with something you realise is blood. The creature laughs at you cruelly and on the other hand grabs a handful of your nightgown, claws ripping through the fabric as it tears a strip down the center. The hand cups between your legs. It splits your lips carefully– almost reverently– brushing a knuckle between your folds, claws away from your most sensitive skin. You gasp and shiver, hands against the tree. You’re wet, though. Soaking the creature’s hands as it coats your skin in blood. It’s so dark and your vision is blurry with tears, you only see two red spots staring at you, and the glint of pearly fangs as the jaw of the creature opens and lurches forward.

You shoot up and sigh, panting as you try to catch your breath. You’ve been plagued with these “psychosexual night terrors”, as your therapist calls them, since you finished writing SC. Some weeks they’re sparse and other ones you can’t sleep without waking up sticky and horrified. Your cortisol levels are through the roof and your sex drive is in the stratosphere. The running theory is that your frantic writing for the deadline of SC drove you just a little bit crazy, and your panic and arousal from writing about Milo’s sexy antics while your publishing house breathed down your neck combined and manifested as the scary void creature in your nightmares.

You take a cold shower that morphs into an everything shower when you remember your date with Chris. Not a date. Just grabbing a drink. Could be a date.

You feel like a kid again, having a cute summer fling with a boy at sleepaway camp with the distant bitter sweetness of knowing you’ll leave in three months. Except you are an adult woman and if you do fall in love, you could just move here forever. 

But that’s wishful thinking.

You wait at the bar patiently. You’re a punctual girl, your agent adores that about you, so you are a little early. You chat with the bartender. She’s an older woman with a thick Mainer accent. 

“Let me guess-”

“Not a horror writer,” you joke back. 

She laughs at that. Her laugh is creaky but comforting, and you can tell she’s a smoker.

“You look nervous.”

“I’m meeting somebody?”

“Yeah?”

“I won’t say who, because I’m guessing you know everyone.”

“Well, I also know who’s single and who isn’t. If you’re worried he’s married, just give me a name.”

The bar is quiet, some men play pool and a group of vacationing dads drink beers and watch some sports on an outdated television. 

You order another drink as you watch the clock behind the bar tick on.

By eight thirty, you’re sufficiently buzzed. You didn’t even get his phone number to text him.

By nine, you decide you should go home. You thank the bartender and leave her a generous tip. You’ll be too embarrassed to come in here for a while.

You take the bike home, slumping on the sofa in the living room as you kick off your heels. You feel tears pricking at your eyes and rub them away, not caring about your smudged eyeshadow or makeup. You wipe it off in the bathroom and change out of your clothes. You need another walk. Maybe you’ll run into the allegedly very creepy lighthouse man and you’ll get some inspiration. 

“I’ll show you Stephen King wannabe, dickhead,” you mutter to yourself, pulling on your coat and shoving your notebook in your pocket. 

You follow the familiar motions, down the path, out through the alcove, and down the beach. You have some angry music playing this time as you stomp down the beach and pass the lifeguard towers. Shrooms girl better thank her lucky stars she’s off night shift, because you look pissed off right now. You stalk all the way down to tower four and roll your eyes. This is a tantrum. You’re an adult.

“I thought I might see you again,” a voice calls. Remmick is on a ledge above you, leaning on the wooden railing. 

“Can I come up there?”

“I’m not gon’ tell you what to do, sweetheart.”

You try to ignore the fire that lights in you and climb the sand and rock stairs, joining him on the ledge. He sits on a bench and pats the seat next to him.

“I heard a lot about you today, from a couple locals,” you tell him, lying about it.

You get the feeling Chris was being insecure, or maybe Remmick’s stolen one too many girls from him. 

“Yeah, I’m a seal-eating nightwalker, you got me,” he jokes, his hands up in mock surrender.

You exhale through your nose. You wish you could laugh harder.

“I’m just a solitary kinda fella. People here, shit, they tight knit like fishin’ nets. They think everybody’s gotta know everybody’s business. Nobody knows mine, so they’ve been makin’ things up for the past three years.” 

“Sorry I brought it up.”

“Hey, I’d rather you hear it from me.”

He looks at you for a moment and rubs a hand over his knee.

“You look upset.”

“Yeah. I uh…”

You hesitate, and see him lean forward, actively listening.

“It’s stupid.”

He holds his hand out, gesturing for you to speak.

“I got stood up,” you admit.

“For a date?”

“Not exactly. Just drinks.”

He clicks his tongue.

“That’s no good. Must be a pretty dumb guy, to stand you up.”

“Yeah. That was a dickhead move. I’m just hoping it was more of a… ‘oh shit, I totally forgot’ kind of thing.”

He eyes you and you cross your legs.

“Still. You musta gotten all dolled up for it.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Well, I uh… I’m not so much a bar kind of fella, but if you wanna come out here sometimes all dolled up…” he leans in, “I got some good whiskey and two glasses.”

You lean in too, close to him.

“I might take you up on that, Remmick.”

“I gotta get up there,” he murmurs, looking at your lips as he speaks.

“Right.”

He doesn’t move, locked in place for a moment. He seems to shake off the spell and sits back, scrubbing a hand down his face, wiping his mouth. It almost looks like he’s wiping away drool. He stands up.

“You uh, you alright to walk home on your own?”

Words flash in your mind, the scene from SC where Milo promises to stalk Annmarie home, which results in him watching through the window as she touches herself. You’re drunk, you realise, as the neurons in your brain flicker out and blood rushes down your body.

“Yeah, I should be fine.”

“Right.”

He starts to walk away and turns back.

“I mean it. You come up see me sometime.”

“I will.”

You mean that, too.

Remmick thumbs through your notebook. How can you even understand this stuff? Your messy handwriting is charming. He reads through descriptions of vampire lore and fangs and turning that make him chuckle. He thinks of the smell of you, that hot scent of desire and the buzzing of your intoxicated body as you sat together. He’s so fucking cold in Maine, and he hasn’t been touched in years. He imagines you’d be hot to the touch. He knows you’re frustrated, you’ve been dissatisfied with pleasuring yourself. The descriptions of sex scenes have him biting back groans and palming himself through his pants. 

He flips to the final page.

HOT LIFEGUARD

His eyes narrow as he realises who it was that stood you up. He turns the page back over, scanning through your previous writing. 

LIGHTHOUSE VAMPIRE LOVER. CLAIMS TO KILL FOR HER. STALKERY? MILO PART II. LESS TENDER. MORE EVIL.

Oh, you’re fucking crazy. 

He grins, his fangs sliding down.

He can make do with crazy.

You wake up early, painful early. You dress groggily and decide to get some air on the beach before the dickhead lifeguard starts his shift. You’re slightly hungover as you traverse down the path and through the alcove to walk on the beach. 

The light is pale and you have to watch your step for kelp as you walk down. You see something up on the sand, and your heart sinks.

It has to be a seal. It’s not breathing, so you look at the nearest lifeguard tower for the animal control. You dial the number and wait patiently.

“Hello?” a voice that sounds just as groggy as you feel answers.

“Hi, I’m um, I’m on the beach right now and I think there’s a dead seal by the first lifeguard tower.”

“Oh, hell. Sorry, miss. It’s too damn early. Do you see any marks on it?”

“It’s hard to see with the fog. Is it safe to get closer?”

“Seals aren’t half as aggressive as sea lions, miss, so go ahead.”

You step closer, squinting with the fog. It’s absolutely dead, not moving at all. You approach it cautiously, worried about what other creatures might be lurking around.

Your heart drops to the pit of your stomach.

This is not a seal.

This is Chris the lifeguard, and he’s missing an arm.

[mydeimoed]

It wasn't Mydei's plan to walk you home. But the decision was pretty much made for him when you began stumbling and twirling between different people's arms, clearly looking for the right set that would carry you away.

His only guided you to steady yourself as he nudged you away from stumbling on a crack in the pavement.

The sneer in his face was obvious, and something you couldn't help but laugh at, even if it made a pang of something hit in your chest. "You act like you've never been drunk before. Don't you know how to have fun?"

Mydei huffs, and doesn't stop you when you stumble next. You catch yourself just fine- maybe he knew you would. "I haven't." His voice is deep and smooth like always.

"Haven't? Haven't what?" You ask, utterly distracted with the buzz in your skin and ... everything about Mydei being the one to make sure you got home safe.

The prince gives you another look. "Haven't gotten drunk before. I don't know why I would do that to myself."

At this information, you balk, slightly swaying as you stop walking to look him in the eye. "You haven't? Why?"

"It's bad for you. Keep walking." He doesn't like the idea of stopping, and his hand is baren from its usual gauntlet when it holds your elbow and moves you forward to keep walking beside- or more so in front of him. You feel like you're being patrolled by an officer.

"But you drink wine. Whenever we go out, you've got a glass full. I've seen it."

"...It's juice."

You can't help but snort, and then you chortle, and then you laugh. All one after the other, unable to keep your entertainment at bay. You hold a hand up to your flushed face.

"You're a child," you try to slander him, but he merely raises an eyebrow at you.

"The only one acting childish is you. Why are you walking?"

"Because you told me to?"

"We're at your house already. Are you really so helpless?"

You blink, and when you look up, you realize that Mydei is right. He's already brought you all the way up to your porch, which means the night is over. Your body sags in realization. "Aw... I don't want to be home yet." The words slip out thoughtlessly.

Mydei doesn't seem to understand, his eyebrow furrowed. "Why not? You look exhausted. Come on." Seemingly out of nowhere, the man jangles your key in hand and unlocks your door, waiting for you to step inside. When you make no move to, he just sighs and opens the door himself, his hand on your back as he nudges you forward.

It doesn't help with the prisoner feeling, like he's your warden who's bringing you back to your cell- but how would Mydei know just how uncomfortable you are at home?

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

You blink. "Like what?" You ask, and Mydei doesn't look pleased. That same scowl as always that you like to pretend doesn't bother you.

Wordlessly, he steps in, and you can only stand dumbly in place as you watch him take a seat on the footstool you have set up in the doorway. He begins to take off his boots- ever the respectful boy- and then he looks up at you expectantly as he holds out his hand. "Your foot," he says, voice low.

It's rather hard for you to think because of the alcohol in your system, and you're grateful for that. It's much easier to do as you're told, and he seems pleased as well, helping take off each shoe with a gentle touch that's hard to process at the moment.

"Get to bed. I'll bring you water and medicine." Mydei says once he's finished, coming to stand and towering over you once again. The way he so easily orders you around feels strange, but perhaps it's just simple work for him. He's a Prince, after all, more than used to commanding people much more stubborn than you.

But he doesn't treat you like his soldiers, you know that. It's much easier to think of it that way, because it stops the flutter in your stomach that can easily be confused with nausea if you're not careful.

When you find yourself in your bed, successfully coddled and cared for, Mydei leaves only after he gives you a stern instruction to finish all your water before going to sleep. Maybe you won't remember this in the morning, but you don't think you're that far gone.

In fact, you don't think you drank nearly enough to justify this amount of care from Mydei, but maybe you'll exaggerate a little further to convince the both of you that you needed it as much as he seemed to think. You'll pretend to forget in the morning, and that will be the best way to thank him.

[spearbxcheol]

SpiderHan!

｡･:*˚:✧｡ ૮₍ ´• ˕ • ₎ა ｡✧:˚*:･｡

Spider-Man!Han Jisung x Reader.

𖤐 drabble/one-shot?, action, mild violence, implied hostage situation.

𖤐 SpiderHan really had its moment in the fandom and honestly?? we need that comeback, maybe i'll write more of him? 💭

Jisung rolled his eyes at the guy who tried to run away from him on the street. He had just caught him stealing from the 24/7 grocery store — and that wasn’t happening. Not on his watch.

“Hey! Do you seriously think you can outrun me?” Jisung’s voice rang out as the man started gaining distance. “It’s almost 3 a.m., and I promised myself I’d sleep early today. Don’t ruin this for me!”

As he finished complaining about the guy — now nearly turning the next corner — he pointed his hand, and the next thing he knew, his web shooter launched him forward at high speed. His spider-sense kept him safe, guiding him past obstacles and avoiding the lamppost just in time.

The thief didn’t even notice Spider-Man hanging from the lamppost ahead. Jisung could feel a smirk forming under his mask the moment the guy almost tripped from the shock of seeing him there. Jisung gave him a little wave.

“Oh my god!”

What neither of them noticed was you — standing there, frozen, eyes wide in shock. You’d only ever seen Spider-Man on the news, chasing bad guys... and now he was right in front of you. You snapped out of your trance when your dog started barking wildly, reminding you why you were even walking down the street at this hour in the first place.

But before you could grab your dog and walk away, the thief was faster. He yanked your arm, pulling you in front of him and pressing a knife to your throat. You gasped and shut your eyes.

“Back off and I’ll let them go!”

Jisung’s mind raced. It had all happened in a split second. Then he looked at you — and his eyes widened. You were Y/N. The same Y/N who always sat next to him in the class you both shared. You two would laugh at the dumb jokes the professor cracked mid-lecture. You weren’t close, but shared a mutual friend.

“Are you deaf, Spider-Boy?”

The man was holding you tightly, using your body as a shield between him and Spider-Man. Your dog — now off-leash because you’d dropped it — was barking non-stop. You opened your eyes and met the superhero’s gaze.

“Help me, please.” you mouthed.

Jisung didn’t hesitate. He aimed and shot a web at the man’s hand, pulling the knife away and tossing it aside. Then he leapt down from the lamppost, landing right in front of the two of you.

In one swift, precise move, Spider-Man pulled you behind him. You let out a breath, your heart racing. You stepped back as he grabbed the thief by the collar and punched him hard in the face, right on the nose.

The adrenaline surged in Jisung’s body. He had never saved someone he knew before — and now, with you, it all felt heavier. The real weight of his powers. It scared him.

He turned to you. You were holding your dog in your arms again, and even from where he stood, he could see you were shaking. When your eyes met the white lenses of his mask, you took a deep breath.

“Thank you,” you whispered. “I almost ruined everything.”

“No, you didn’t ruin anything,” Jisung said, his voice a little tight. He shook his head. “He’s the one who’s in the wrong here.”

“Are you okay?” he asked, and you nodded. “And what about this little guy?” He extended a hand toward your dog, but was met with a bark.

“Sorry about him!” you apologized, trying to calm your dog, but Jisung smiled behind the mask.

“That’s good! He’s a good boy. Honestly, if I wasn’t here, I bet he would’ve saved you all by himself.” You let out a small laugh and nodded.

“Yeah…” The air between you both was strange. Your body was still trembling after what happened. It hadn’t been a great experience being held hostage at knifepoint. Spider-Man seemed awkward, completely unlike the reports you’d read online. Like he didn’t know what to do once the fighting stopped. And the thief? Still unconscious on the ground.

“I’m going home” you said. “Thanks for saving me, Spider-Man.”

Jisung felt his cheeks heat up at your smile and words. The only thing he could think to do was raise both thumbs up like an awkward teenager as you walked past him, heading back the way you came.

“That was painfully weird.” he muttered to himself, glancing at the guy on the ground. “Please don’t post anything weird about me on the internet…”

He sighed, walked over to the man, pinned him to the wall with webbing, and called the police. Another job by the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

[amarguerite]

Other Emily of New Moon thoughts-- I'm very fascinated by what LM Montgomery was trying to do re: all of Emily's many suitors. Some kind of vague thoughts under the cut:

Now, ever since there have been professional women writers in the Western canon, they have been reflecting on and writing about what it means to be a person your society categorizes as a woman and as a professional writer, since the two are not a natural mix socially-speaking. Hell, even today there's a lot of genre-writers who identity as or who are assigned as female who get denigrated for it in unthinking and weird ways, i.e. the devaluation of romance as a genre, fantasy/SFF writers automatically getting described as YA writers even when they aren't, clearly documented and demonstrated gaps in book advances, weird interview questions about 'having it all' or 'balancing home life and creative life' that men don't get. A lot of 19th century/ early 20th century female authors write a lot about what seems to be a sometimes mutually exclusive drive between marriage and authorship. This is strange and interesting to me because I don't see as much debate about it these days since I think... it's very rare these days in the US for two married people not to both work, and though the strict social divide between male public sphere and female private sphere isn't as prevalent. Even trad wife content pushing for it involves this weird public exploitation of so-called 'private' work-- like how private, how unemployed are you, when you are a literal content creator for the public for money? That's not to say that household work, childrearing, caretaking etc does not fall disproportionately on women but it isn't expected that a woman give up public life upon marriage, and that in many circles (most?) the major issue is not a question of propriety but of domestic labor or day job labor impeding creative work.

I could be misreading this-- maybe the question is not competing social categories, but a question purely of labor, and the difficulty of being a professional woman writer AND running a household, instead of, Austen-like, being a spinster with other female relations who run the household.

However, if we do just think about 'wife' vs 'writer' as discrete social categories, I think all the beaux Emily has are a really interesting way to disprove a then-prevelant stereotype that a female author becomes an old maid through lack of other options. Her choice of profession, or the personality that drove her to it, alienates the men around her, or makes her ineligible in some way. The basic lived reality is entirely different. It's less that writing extinguishes the more conventional passion, it's just that it can be SUCH a passion with people that anything that does not rise to that level of... emotion, or interest, or what have you, feels fundamentally incompatible with the times where you feel most alive, i.e. writing. I don't think I've ever felt more uncomfortably seen as a writer (one who is always trying to figure out, Emily-like, if I have or can ever earn the title of 'professional' with all my magazine work-- and good God, it's depressing that the pay rates are still EXACTLY THE SAME), when Emily miserably confesses that writing is a compulsion. She can't not do it. There is no choice for her but the alpine path. It is a miserable one. She is often in bleak despair about all the rejections she gets and the reviews that contradict each other, but she can't NOT climb it. She can't get off it for anyone, even a Japanese prince or for the man who almost successfully groomed her (Jesus Christ Dean Priest. That's another post.) It's one of the most... real to me. Like, yes there are other options but... are there really? When you are that called to a specific kind of work, you just can't stop it, any more than you can stop breathing or being allergic to peanuts. Why do I keep slamming myself head-first into the wall of rejections? I have no idea. I just can't not do it.

And though I don't entirely think she succeeded (in large part because we don't see enough to Teddy and understand why he's so great in the last book), I do think it's very telling that LM Montgomery points out that for this specific kind of personality, the role of 'wife' can only be a good fit when the role of 'husband' is taken on by someone who ALSO has this artistic compulsion and knows that it does require long hours of work at odd times, and a certain withdrawing from domestic concerns to get into the right flow state. Dean was a poor fit for a lot of reasons, but the primary one was that he crushed Emily's artistic spirit and impeded the real journey of her life because he wanted to BE her whole life-- Teddy was the right fit because, having been in a similar relationship with his mother, I don't think he's someone who will insist he became Emily's whole life. He's probably happier that they can both go into their creative flow states, and do their own work as they wish without the other feeling abandoned or unhappy. It just becomes parallel play. It's Art Time in the Kent Household, where we don't talk to each other for the next six hours and stay holed up in our separate rooms and we're both extremely happy with that-- that kind of a thing.

tl; dr-- I'm very compelled by how Montgomery puts her own spin on the old, old Western canon debate of wife vs writer and how she reconciles the two, even if I don't think she entirely succeeded in the execution of it.

[greentea-and-honey]

literally fuck it here we areeeee. um the gravity falls hunger games au belongs to @aroace-get-out-of-my-face , i originally dmed this to her and she said i should post them so heeeeere we are. sorry thats its long i didnt want to post on ao3. licherally cannot stop thinking about this, its the only hunger games au that hasnt made me think suzanne collins was right to make sunrise on the reaping. if you want background, i highly suggest going to her blog and scrolling through the 'hunger games au' tag, its a fun read!!! okey dokey anywho:

“Be smart,” their mentor, a man who had insisted on being called ‘Nep��� had told Stan and Darlene. “Do what I told you to do, and don’t fuck this up.”

Darlene had frowned, because the strategy that Nep had insisted on for her interview had been to play up her youth and innocence, to really tug at the audience’s heartstrings and play the scared little girl who missed her family, but had a well of inner strength that she was going to draw from. Darlene had protested, wanting to paint herself as a fierce warrior, and could not be persuaded that she was going to be laughed off stage. She was fierce, sure, but she was also twelve years old. It was darkly comical, and had Stan been home with Ford, safe in their house, they would have looked sadly at each other during her desperate attempts to seem like a worthy opponent, instead of easy pickings.

“And you?” Nep glanced at Stan, and gave a sort of crooked half-smile. “You keep doing what you’re doing.”

“What I’m doing?” Stan repeated, surprised. “What…what’s that?”

“The cocky, ne’er-do-well persona you’ve been playing up since you walked on that stage,” Nep said. “I saw the Reaping. Volunteering for your brother gets you a lot of points from the Capitol right off the bat. And you’ve not shown any fear, at least on camera. You’ve spent most of it being insufferable to everyone but the Capitol. Frankly, you don’t need me for camera points.”

“Aw,” Stan had grinned. “You think I’m insufferable?”

Nep grinned, and Stan decided, not for the first time, that he liked Nep well enough. He had been the winner when Stan was just a kid, maybe six or seven years old. Nep had been fourteen at the time, a younger winner, and a lucky one. The games that year had been in a coastal arena, similar to home, and when a tsunami came and washed most of the tributes away, Nep had managed to tough it out, and then waited for most of the other tributes to kill each other before proving his skills with a knife, gutting a girl from District 7 with efficiency unlike anything Stan had ever seen before. 

Nep was a mentor now, and both he and Daphne were a bit surprised by his quiet nature. Nep was shyer than the cameras had implied. He tended to back away from any more interviews that focused on himself, and when asked about himself, his victories, or most strangely, ‘We haven’t seen your mother in a while, how is she?’ Nep would smile in a tense way, and say “We’re here to talk about my tributes, did you know Stanley is a talented boxer? And oh my, I’ve never seen anyone move quicker than Daphne.”

“This is the worst part,” Nep assured them, adjusting a heavy necklace around Daphne’s neck. “You get through this, it’s smooth sailing from here on out.”

“This dress itches,” Daphne whined, wriggling in a shimmering turquoise gown that reminded Stan of the tiny fish that danced in the tidepools back home. “I don’t wanna wear it.”

“I know, I know,” Nep said. “It’s not for long. Now listen close, the both of you. Stan, quit making eyes at Carla.”

Stan’s attention snapped to Nep. “‘I’m not doing anything.” 

Carla, halfway through brushing over Stan’s eyelid with some kind of shimmering powder, scoffed. 

“This is the Capitol,” Nep said. “These people have been following your journeys since you got up on that stage. Some of them are invested in you already. Your triumphs, defeats, the rest of it. This is the first and only time you’ll be able to speak to them directly like this. This is your chance to endear them. Follow my instructions, and you’ll only improve your chances.”

“I don’t wanna act like a scared little girl,” Darlene said. “I’m not scared.”

Nep’s face snapped to her, and for the first time, he looked well and truly frustrated. “Yes, you are,” he said tersely. “And if you’re not, you’re stupid. This is a game, Darlene, and you’re treating it like one. But it’s not a game for you. It’s a game for them. I’m in the business of keeping you two alive for as long as I can, but I can’t do that if you insist on sabotaging yourself! Play the damn game!” 

Darlene looked surprised, but went quiet. For the first time, Stan thought he saw nerves behind her eyes. Maybe they had always been there, hidden beneath the exterior of a little girl who had been spoiled rotten. He wondered if her family was crying for her back home, already preparing for her funeral, or if they were delusionally holding onto the same dream as she was–that she would be the youngest victor ever. 

“Stan,” Nep said, and Stan almost jumped. “Remember what we talked about?”

“My ne’er-do-well self?” Stan asked, and Nep nodded. “Right, got it. Um. Cool.”

Nep frowned, maybe hearing something in Stan’s voice that he himself had yet to identify. He nodded something at Darlene’s stylist, and the stylist pulled her off to the side, fussing with her hair. “You alright?” Nep asked Stan, lowering his voice.

“Yeah,” Stan said, and his voice sounded high-pitched. “Peachy.”

“Stan,” Nep said. “I’m on your side. I’m one of the only people in this godforsaken place that’s truly on your side. What’s wrong?”

Stan swallowed, suddenly feeling dangerously close to breaking. “I-I dunno if I can do this,” he whispered, wobbly. “It’s…it’s easy when no one’s directly looking at me, but I’ve seen the interviews, I know what it’s like. I don’t want to talk about Ford, I don’t want to talk about home, I don’t want-”

“Okay, okay,” Nep said, putting his hand on Stan’s shoulder. He was missing his pinky, which was strange, because he hadn’t lost it in the games. “Okay, deep breath. I know. Like I said, this is the worst part.”

“Second worst part,” Stan said. “You know, the games.”

Nep smiled thinly. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Shandra Jimenez is…she’s an interviewer. She’s going to ask those questions. The ones you don't want her too. That’s her job. And it’s a shitty one.”

Stan looked at Carla, suddenly nervous that Nep might have said something dangerous. But she smiled in agreement.

“She enjoys this, breaking down the weaker tributes,” Carla said. “But she doesn’t think you’re weak. She’s going to let you do this over the top persona you’ve been crafting because she likes it as much as everyone else.”

“Exactly,” Nep nodded. “Go with that. Just pretend it’s me or Carla you’re talking to. Not the whole Capitol. Play a role. That’s all this is, after all. A role. And that role might keep you alive.”

Please, Stan thought, almost amused. This idiot doesn’t even know he’s talking to a dead man.

But Nep had been kind. He had held Darlene’s hand when she stepped off the Capitol train and was failing in her attempts to not be scared. He had promised Stan that the first chance he got, he was going to find Ford and do everything he could to keep him out of trouble. He had been nice to the other mentors, who each had an exhausted look in their eyes as they marched their pigs to the slaughterhouse, even as other Career tributes sneered at him. He didn’t deserve to be stuck with a doomed and hopeless tribute. 

Stan nodded. “...okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Nep nodded once, tense, and Stan realized abruptly that there had been no winners from District 4 since Nep. They had all gotten pretty far, but were the first to go when the Careers inevitably turned on each other. Maybe he was imagining Stan’s grisly death now. The life of a victor suddenly seemed a lot less glamorous. 

“You’re going to do great,” Nep said. “Everybody already loves you.”

That seemed a bit silly and untrue, and Stan was already turning that final encouragement over and over in his head as he waited next to Darlene for the interview. Most of the tributes were silent and pale, staring at the ground or whispering to their district mates. Darlene was trying to make nice with the other Careers, far older than her and looking at her like she was a particularly feisty kitten. 

“Quit it,” Stan whispered to her, unable to watch the boy from District 1 barely conceal a laugh as Darlene bragged about her spear skills. “You’re making yourself a target.”

She glared at him, hostile and looking exactly like her brother. “At least I’m trying!” She hissed. “What are you doing? Moping?”

“I’m strategizing,” Stan said, and Darlene rolled her eyes. 

“My brother says you’re an idiot who doesn’t know a net from a knife,” she said, folding her arms.

“Yeah well, your brother still does the ‘L’ trick to figure out his right from his left,” Stan snapped, exhausted. “So there.”

Darlene opened her mouth, probably to argue more, but then paused, noticing something behind Stan. “Uh oh. Got a crier.”

Stan heard soft sniffling, and looked back to see a little boy, about Darlene’s age but no doubt half her physical strength, crying desperately, apparently unable to take the stress anymore. By Stan’s count, he looked to be in District 10. He was in a bright red suit, tears dripping from his ears, desperately trying to reign them in.

His district mate, an older girl with wild dark hair mostly concealed by a red silk scarf, was kneeling next to him, looking nervous. “Stop crying,” he heard her say, in a fervent and distinctly uncomforting sort of way, but he couldn’t really blame her. “Stop crying, they’ll see.”

“I’m trying,” the little boy said, hiccuping and only working himself up more. “I’m trying, I’m trying, Emma May, I wanna go home–”

Emma May’s ears were inflamed around her drop earrings, and Stan wondered if she had been forced to pierce her ears right before the interview. Her dress was bright red, flowing around her like a slit throat.

Stan saw a few Capitol camera people perk up at the sound of muffled sobs, and whisper to each other. Stan’s heart dropped. Crying was bad enough when you were reaped. But crying now, so close to the interview? Someone would whisper it in that witch’s ear onstage, and she would bring it up, goading the tribute to see if they would have another meltdown.

Darlene tutted something disapproving, and Emma May looked panicked, trying to shield the little boy with her body. The tributes from the lower districts looked sympathetic, but no one made a move to help. Stan could hardly blame them. 

The Careers looked back, starting to get curious, and Stan could bear it no longer.

“Gotta piss!” He said loudly, stepping out of line. “I’ll be right back, just give me a second-”

“Get back in line,” a Peacekeeper growled, and all eyes were on Stan. All cameras too. 

“What, a man can’t piss?” Stan asked. “Thirty seconds in the bathroom, that’s all I ask. I won’t even wash my hands.”

Stan heard a few younger tributes giggle, and he grinned, playing it up. Nep wanted a show? He’d get a pre-show too. 

“Line,” the Peacekeeper growled, unamused. 

“I can even go in a corner real quick,” Stan said. “I mean, I’ve seen your buddies doing the same thing–”

The Peacekeeper drew a baton, and Stan backed away, hands up in surrender. He certainly didn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those again. “Okay, okay! If I piss my pants onstage, it’s on you.”

He stepped back in line next to Darlene with an easy smile. She looked at him like he was crazy. “What was that?!” 

“Nothing,” Stan said, glancing back in line. The extra time had given the boy a chance to get a hold of himself, and while his face was ruddy, it should clear up by the time it was his turn onstage. Stan locked eyes with Emma May, and gave her a thumbs up with a smile. She looked perplexed, and glared back at him, suspicious.

“What was that?!” Darlene demanded again.

Stan shrugged, and she scowled. “You idiot. You can’t be making nice with lower districts, they’re always the first to go! You couldn’t do much worse than 10 either, even the 12s look stocky this year at least. If you don’t start making allies, you’ll be out faster than you can blink–”

“I’m not here to win,” Stan said, and then blinked. That was the first time he had said it out loud.

Darlene blinked, looking shocked. “What? But–”

“I’m here to play,” Stan said, falling back onto an easy smile, even if it felt plastic now. “That’s all a game is, right? Let’s try to have some fun with it.”

Darlene stared at him like he was insane. Maybe he was. He felt like it. “...whatever,” she decided. “Just…just don’t get in my way.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Stan muttered, and then the crowd outside, awaiting their final words, erupted in applause as Shandra Jimenez walked out onstage, grinning and waving at the audience.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she crowed. “Happy Hunger Games!”

“Showtime,” Darlene said quietly, and for once, Stan agreed.

All in all, District 4 was probably one of the best places to be when it came to the interviews. 

Stan was far enough back in line where he didn’t have to shoulder the monumental task of being one of the first tributes to face Jimenez and the entirety of Panem, but he was close enough to the front where the moneymakers wouldn’t become bored, and they would remember him if he made a big enough splash. Enough time to learn from the mistakes of his fellow tributes without stewing in nerves.

Not that there were many mistakes. The Careers from 1 and 2 had apparently been given media training, because they smiled and laughed with Jimenez without ever allowing the joke to be on them. They chatted without coming off as unserious, made threats to their fellow tributes that they could back up, and seemed almost good enough to be Capitol. Almost. Stan could see the edge on Jimenez, the tightening of her smile when the tributes tried to get too cozy. No matter what, they were still district trash. Distract trash that had been gussied up, but a polish turd was still a turd.

The District 1 boy in particular–Preston, Stan though his name was–was especially annoying. He had been the one laughing at Darlene. Stan already found him extremely grating.

By the time they dropped to 3, the difference between the Careers and the rest of the districts made itself apparent. For kids from 3, a notoriously weedy bunch due to a lifetime of bending over microchips in dusty sweatshops, they weren’t too bad looking. Maybe they hauled cargo, Stan didn’t know, but they were older and looked like they might get a few good hits in before they were taken down. Ada and Coil, Stan was pretty sure their names were.

But they were scared, even though they tried to hide it. Stan could see it in their eyes. They knew what awaited them in the games, and it struck them nearly insane with fear. But they answered their questions meekly, even as Ada picked at her painted nails and Coil kept looking around like a trapped bird.

It was funny, really, how Ford had complained that he should have been born in District 3. Stan, for his part, couldn’t imagine anything other than the coast. Life in 4 could be miserable, but a lifetime of painstakingly putting computers and heat-seeking missiles together as you breathed in silica seemed even more miserable. Coil was already clearly trying to hide a cough. 

“Let’s give him a hand, folks!” Jimenez said, and Coil walked offstage, clearly motioned over by his mentor. “And now, let’s get back to our final set of Careers. Everyone give a warm welcome to Darlene Crampelter of District 4!”

Darlene flashed Stan a winning smile, unafraid, and bounced up to the stage, her curls practically floating, gleeful and chomping at the bit to spill blood. The crowd roared, and Darlene waved to them, perfectly lady-like. To her credit, Stan couldn’t tell if she was truly that unafraid or just hiding her nerves extremely well. It could be either. He hoped it was the second, surely she wasn’t that stupid.

“Well, my dear,” Jimenez said as Darlene sat down. “You’ve had quite the journey. Your district has been struggling to pull in volunteers for the past few years, but now we have two! And you volunteered before the name was even finished being called! And not to mention, you are the youngest tribute in this year’s games!”

Darlene smiled. “I just couldn’t wait, I suppose. Can you blame me?”

“How do you like the Capitol, sweetie?” Jimenez cooed, and Darlene’s smile tightened slightly at being treated like a child.

“Oh, it’s dazzling,” she said. “You know, my grandfather visited the Capitol on business when he wasn’t much older than me. He used to tell me and my brother stories. He said that one day, we’d see it, and one day we might even live there.”

The crowd murmured in surprise, and though Stan didn’t doubt her story, he instantly winced. Darlene smiled, unaware of her faux pas, perhaps thinking everyone was quite impressed with her. But there was no admiration, only disgust. District trash, getting too big for her britches, thinks she’s one of us instead of an animal that we caged and then released to watch it die.

Jimenez stiffened, and leaned forward. She looked like a smiling shark. Stan had seen a few in his time. “And you’re not frightened to be the youngest tribute?” Jimenez asked. “Historically, anyone younger than fifteen doesn’t last long.”

Darlene scowled, straightening up. “I’m not afraid of anything, I–”

“RAH!” Jimenez said, jerking forward like she was about to lunge. Darlene flinched back on instinct, her eyes wide and confused at the sudden false attack. The audience roared with laughter, and Jimenez joined them. “Maybe you’re a little bit frightened, sweetie!”

Darlene blinked once, twice, and then realized the joke was on her. Her face flushed bright red, which only made the audience laugh harder. “That’s not fair, you don’t–”

“Oh, this is the games!” Jimenez cackled. “Fair doesn’t have much to do with it, seems like the odds might not be in this particular Career’s favor this year! Maybe you should have waited to see who was going to volunteer before you did it, right?”

Darlene tried to argue, but her words were lost among the shrieking hordes, jeering and finding her impending death absolutely hilarious. Something changed on Darlene’s face, a crack in her facade unlike anything Stan had seen before. She had been overwhelmed and frightened before, but that had been because she had stage fright, or was nervous about the Capitol’s over-the-top presence. Now, though, the crack was something deeper. A crack that made her realize that she was far deeper than she thought, and these people were not her friends. They weren’t even her enemies, not really. They didn’t give a shit about her. Stan didn’t think she had ever been faced with such indifference before.

Jimenez, maybe sensing that Darlene wasn’t going to give any more good content, spent the rest of the interview poking fun at her, asking her if she still smelled like fish, wondering aloud if District 4 was really Career material if this was the best they could offer. Finally, the bell chimed, and Jimenez smiled like they were great friends, shooing Darlene away. “That’s all the time we have for today, sweetie, good luck! Everyone clap for our youngest and, ah, bravest tribute!”

The audience erupted into raucous laughter, and Darlene flinched again. Stan saw Nep standing in the wings of the stage, frantically motioning for her to come offstage to him. After a long moment, she stood, head hung low, practically sprinting offstage to get to Nep. He tried to hug her, and she pushed him off.

“And next up, our second volunteer from 4,” Jimenez said. “Everyone please give it up for Stanley Pines!”

The crowd began to cheer, and Stan’s legs began to move on their own accord, carrying him up to the stage. He saw Carla in the front row, and she gave him a thumbs up, motioning for him to smile.

Something about seeing her there snapped Stan into performance mode. Nep said they needed a show. Fine. They were going to get a show. 

He grinned, cocky and relaxed, throwing out a far more exaggerated wave than Darlene had, unrestrained. The crowd went wild. Stan sat down in the chair, winking at Jimenez. She looked surprised, but didn’t comment on it. 

“So, our second volunteer,” she said. “And for your twin brother no less! Tell me, what was that like?”

Oh no. Knowing they were going to ask about that didn’t make hearing it any easier. “Well,” Stan said, with a shrug and a smile, hoping it still looked real. “When you’re a twin, you gotta share everything, you know? Birthdays, toys, achievements. Sometimes you want to strike out, be your own man, you know? Couldn’t let my nerd brother have all the glory.”

He found a camera and winked at it. “Hey, Ford, how’s it feel to be doing my chores? I’m living it up at the Capitol!”

The crowd cheered, and Jimenez laughed. “So how do you like the Capitol, then?”

She was trying to trip him up, get him to make the same mistakes that Darlene had. “Oh, man,” Stan said. “Incredible, it’s just incredible. You know I’ve never had turkey before? And on the train up here, the first thing I get is a turkey sandwich. You people have everything! Incredible!”

“You eat a lot of fish then?” Jimenez asked.

“Eat so much I’m probably half fish,” Stan said, and leaned forward. “How’s my breath?”

The crowd cackled, and Jimenez joined them. “Oh, just fine, Stanley, I promise.”

“Stan’s fine,” Stan said, and threw an easy grin at the audience. They whooped. “Horses too, never seen a horse before, and now I got to go right up to one and pet it.”

“They don’t have horses in 4?” Jimenez asked.

“What’s a horse gonna do, Shandra?” Stan asked, taking a risk with a first name. “Pull a cart through the ocean?”

The audience laughed, their biggest reaction yet. Jimenez looked slightly annoyed, but didn’t try to trap him or humiliate him. “So, how’d you like the horses?” 

“Oh, loved them,” Stan said, and tried to imagine he was talking to Ford. He would have loved the horses. He would have loved most of the Capitol if not for them wanting him dead. “It’s…their noses are like petting velvet, but their whiskers kinda feel like cat whiskers, you know? When I win, I want one of them in Victor’s Village. In my house. It can just walk around.”

“When you win?” Jimenez asked. “Awfully confident. What’s your strategy? Sources tell me that you may be from 4, but you’re not strictly Career trained, are you?”

There it was. She was trying to psych him out. Stan smiled back, unafraid. It wasn't like he meant any of it anyway. “I wouldn’t count anyone out of this game, Shandra. There’s a good crop this year, tell you that, and I gotta say I respect the competition. But I’m strong. I’m a heavy hitter. I’m not afraid to take a few blows. I’m a boxer, boxers gotta learn how to get hit and get back up. That’s me. I get back up. You don’t have any idea how valuable that skill is. Our strongest traits might not be the ones you see immediately. You know that, right? You’ve been doing this for, oh, a hundred years?”

The crowd howled, and Jimenez’s smile twitched. “Well, Stan–”

“And by the way,” Stan said, on a roll now. “By the way, you can’t count Darlene out either. What’d you expect, someone’s not gonna jump if you come at them? You’re lucky she didn’t punch you in the throat, that girl scares me. She's my biggest competition by far, I’m real lucky we’re district mates and she probably won’t go for me immediately.”

Jimenez’s face looked tight. “I don’t tell you how to do your job, so don’t tell me how to do mine.”

“Maybe if you did your job right I wouldn’t have to,” Stan said, and then instantly regretted saying it.

The crowd ‘ooh-ed’ appreciatively, and the bell sounded. Jimenez smiled, the shark look back. “Well, I suppose that’s all the time we have for today. I’d wish you luck, Stan, but it doesn’t seem like you need it.”

She didn’t implore the audience to cheer for Stan, but they did it anyway, whooping and hollering like he was the cure to all their ills. He winked again, and heard some more cheers and shrieks. It made him a little sick, but it wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t like he would ever see these people again. He was a dead man already.

Nep was still dealing with Darlene when he stepped offstage, and she was speaking quickly, almost nonsensically, and Nep was struggling to hide her from the camera. 

“My cat,” Darlene said, almost feverish. She was shaking, and Nep was desperately trying to calm her down. The cameras were sweeping the area like buzzards, looking for reactions. “My cat, h-he’s at home, I need to go home, no one will take care of him–”

“You think your dumb brother’s not gonna watch him?” Stan asked, and Darlene focused on him. He couldn't get her home, but he might be able to keep her from panicking too badly. It was oddly scary to see her so openly frightened. “Please, I bet that mangy thing is sleeping on his bed right now. You need to worry that he's gonna eat the cat food and not leave any for the damn cat.”

Darlene blinked, snapped out of her spiral, and glared at Stan. “I bet you already know what cat food tastes like,” she sneered, and Nep sent Stan a grateful look.

“You,” Nep said to him. “Just love to toe the line.”

The weight of what he had been saying, in front of all of Panem, crashed down on Stan. “Is…” he swallowed. “Am I going to get in trouble? Did I put Ford in danger?!”

Nep shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was a risk, but it paid off. It’s too much trouble to replace you now, and they would punish you for that kind of trangression. Not your family.”

“Okay,” Stan nodded, uneasy. “O-okay.”

Nep smiled at him, reaching forward to pat Stan on the shoulder. “You did good,” he said. “I’m proud of you. It’s not easy, but you were a pro up there.”

In spite of everything, Stan’s heart swelled at the praise. “...thanks,” he said. “Can we, um. Get out of these costumes?”

“It itches,” Darlene agreed, still looking shaken. Nep subtly drew her close, arm around her shoulder, and she didn’t pull away this time. 

“Alright,” Nep said, looking relieved to get out of there. “Let’s see what we can do about a change and a snack.”

By the time Stan was in more comfortable clothes, all of Carla’s hard work scrubbed off his face, the girl from 10 was on stage, looking bored with Jimenez’s antics.

“Any family watching back home?” Jimenez asked, prodding at her.

The girl, Emma May, shook her head stiffly. “My mama and daddy died some time ago. It’s been just me for a while. Don’t got no one waiting on me at home.”

“No one?” Jimenez asked, leaning forward, searching for a crack to spring upon. “There’s rumors that–”

“Just rumors, nothing more,” Emma May said placidly. “You oughta know about rumors, Miss Jimenez. Why, if I believed every rumor I ever heard about you, I bet it would paint quite the unflattering portrait.”

The audience tittered, slightly less entertained when District 10 trash was poking at their beloved host, but amused all the same. Jimenez almost looked exhausted by this routine. Stan wondered if other tributes had had the courage to bite back at her. He hoped so.

“What makes you think you can win?” Jimenez asked. “Especially with no one back home rooting for you.”

Emma May’s face pinched, and for a second Stan thought she was done for, but she smoothed her skirt out. “I’m fighting for myself, and that’s enough. And I’m from 10. That ain’t a weakness, it’s a strength. We grow up ‘round life and death. I seen death a million times over before I was able to speak. We kill, not ‘cause we wanna, but ‘cause it’s our job. I seen blood, I seen guts, I seen bone marrow cracked open and spilled out for the cattle dogs to lick up. I've killed animals, for mercy, food, or ‘cause they was coming at me. And people are just a different type of animal. I ain’t scared to kill. I’m only scared to die. And a cornered, scared animal is the most dangerous type.”

Jimenez blinked, maybe not expecting that answer. Stan certainly didn’t, and the crowd whispered nervously. 

Emma May looked sharply at the camera, sensing that she had the floor completely. “And if you wanna talk about rumors,” she said. “Why don’t you show the unedited footage of my reaping–”

The bell sounded abruptly, though Stan was pretty sure she had about thirty seconds left on the interview. “That’s all our time!” Jimenez said quickly. “Thank you for joining us, Emma May Dixon!”

Emma May frowned, but did not argue. Almost serene, she stood up and walked off the stage. They clapped, but no one cheered. 

Stan got the sense they were afraid.

*** *** ***

Nep was about to leave Stan and Darlene’s cozy prison cell disguised as an apartment for the day when Stan stopped him, clutching six envelopes. 

“Stan?” Nep asked, looking perplexed. “You’ll want to at least try to get some sleep, the games are tomorrow–”

“Can you get to District 4 if you took a train right now?” Stan asked.

Nep blinked. “I…probably? It’d be an all-night train, for sure, I’d get there real early. I don’t think I’m technically supposed to leave though.”

“Will you get in trouble for it?” Stan asked. 

Nep paused, considering it. “...no, I don’t think so. Why–”

Stan shoved the envelopes into Nep’s hand. “I need you to take these to my family.”

Nep blinked. “What? But-”

“There’s one for everyone,” Stan said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “Ma and Pa, Shermie and his wife and kid, Ford of course–”

“Stan,” Nep said slowly. “If I leave, I won’t be able to see you off tomorrow before you go into the games. I know Darlene doesn’t care, but I figured you would–”

“I want them to have these before I go,” Stan said. “I…I asked them not to watch me.”

Nep looked even more confused, and then he frowned. “...you don’t think you can win.”

Stan said nothing. 

“Why…?” Nep shook his head. “Stan…”

“I’m not gonna,” Stan gestured vaguely. “You know, I’m not gonna step off the platform before the countdown finishes. I won’t seek out the Careers or anything like that. But I won’t…I can’t do it, Nep, I can’t kill someone.”

“I didn’t think I could either,” Nep said, and Stan shook his head.

“It’s not that, I…I can laugh and joke, right? Sure, whatever, but I didn’t come here because I thought I could win. I came here because I knew Ford would lose. And I…I couldn’t let that happen. I just couldn’t,” Stan whispered. “And I…I don’t want him to watch me die.”

“You’re not going to–” Nep started, and then realized he couldn’t make that promise. “Don’t count yourself out.”

“I don’t want to be in at all,” Stan said. “I don’t want–I don’t want to play at all. I just…”

Stan swallowed hard, suddenly dangerously close to crying. “...I’m tired, Nep. I just want this to be over.”

Nep said nothing for a long moment, and then moved forward suddenly, hugging Stan tightly.

It was like the floodgates burst open. 

Stan choked once, twice, and then wrapped his arms around Nep tightly, unable to hold back his sobs, terrified and exhausted in equal measures. He never thought he would miss home this badly. He had spent most of his life wanting to take to the ocean and see what lay beyond Panem. But now there was nothing he wanted more in the world than to be back in a bed that was too small for him, hearing the ocean whisper outside his window, Ford in the bunk above him.

“I’m sorry,” Nep whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Stan wondered if he had grieved for every tribute he had waved goodbye too. It seemed likely. Nep was too soft to be a mentor. And yet they kept parading him out. 

“I won’t be able to see you off,” Nep said again, pulling back to brush some hair out of Stan’s eyes.

“That’s okay,” Stan choked, though it didn’t feel okay. “I just…I want them to have it before it starts. Please.”

“...okay,” Nep said, taking the envelopes. “Okay.”

“Thank you,” Stan said, relieved. 

“...good luck, Stan,” Nep said. “You’re a good kid.”

And when Nep said it, Stan could almost believe it.

*** *** ***

There was someone walking up to Shermie’s house, Ford realized, as he walked back there.

He had been living with Shermie since Stan was dragged away, unable to take Ma and Pa’s different approaches to grief. Ma spent her days tirelessly cleaning the house, buzzing with a strange and stressful energy, and Pa shut down entirely. He wasn’t working, either in fishing or his black market pawn shop he ran from the basement. 

Shermie, at least, had to pretend to be functional. He had a wife and baby to look after, and he had been unable to refuse Ford’s pleas to sleep on his couch, just for a little bit. Just until something changed.

Ford made himself useful. He helped Nora around the house, went with Shermie to help on the boats, even though he was terrible at it. He watched the baby, and found himself absurdly jealous that his nephew was perfectly cheerful, completely unaware of the horror show playing out within his family. 

Last night, Ford and Shermie had gotten in a fight over something or other, tensions high and everyone already grieving. Ford had taken it too far, and yelled at Shermie for how cruel he was to have a baby, to bring another kid into this goddamn world that needed more blood to oil their machine.

Shermie had gone quiet, and Ford’s face had burned. “I-I didn’t mean–”

“Take a walk,” Shermie said. “Go cool off before we both say something else we regret.”

And Ford had taken that as an invitation to walk around 4 all night, seething and panicked the entire time. 

And now there was a man outside Shermie’s house, hours before Stan was set to be released in the arena, to kill and be killed.

He looked nondescript, with thick black hair that hung just above his chin, tan skin and dark eyes. He was wearing long sleeves, even in the hot July early morning, but when he saw Ford, he perked up and waved. 

Ford jogged forward, suddenly recognizing him. The mentor for this year, Neptune Garza, smiling nervously like he thought he might be attacked. “You must be Stanford,” Neptune said, nodding. “It’s nice to officially meet.”

“Mr. Garza,” Ford said, feeling sick. “I-is Stanley alright, why are you here–?!”

“Stan’s fine,” Neptune said. “You can call me Nep. Everyone does. Hey, your brother wasn’t lying about the six fingers.”

Ford frowned, but Nep smiled, holding up one of his hands. The pinky was missing. “Ever consider donation?”

“Um,” Ford said.

“Sorry, people keep telling me I’m not funny, I should listen to them,” Nep said. “He wanted me to give you this.”

He extended a hand out to Ford, holding a thick envelope. Ford took his, seeing his name on the front in Stan’s handwriting. “W-what’s this?” 

“A letter,” Nep said. “He has them for everyone in your family. He wanted me to deliver them in person, before the games started.”

“Why?” Ford asked. Nep shrugged.

Ford stared at the letter, tracing his name with his finger. A flash of anger went through him, sudden and sharp. “How could you just let this happen?”

Nep looked confused. “What?”

“How could you just let this happen?!” Ford demanded. “Year after year, sending people to their deaths. And you’re okay with it? You just let them kill people?! You’re going to let them kill my brother! You’re going to let them murder him! We need to do something, we have to do something, we have to stop them-!”

Nep suddenly covered Ford’s mouth with his hand, looking panicked. Ford tried to smack his hand away, but Nep held fast. “What the hell’s the matter with you?!” He demanded. “Are you crazy?! You don’t know a damn thing about what happens to you when you speak like that. Are you trying to get yourself killed?! Your family?! Stan?!”

Ford managed to smack Nep hand away, glaring at him. Nep glared back, and held up his hand with the missing pinky. “This is the least of their punishments. They go for the people you love. They pick apart your head, disfigure you, turn you into their lapdog. You want to help your brother? You shut up and keep your head down.”

Ford blinked, startled. Nep looked surprised with himself after a moment too, and hid his hand behind his back. “...what…” Ford started, and then re-gathered his courage. “What happened?”

Nep shrugged, eyes distant. “...I said no to something I shouldn’t have, when I was around your age. A lot of people paid the price.”

“But…” Ford said. “You were a Victor then. They leave you alone after you win.”

Nep shook his head. “They bring me out every year, to parade me around so I can watch my tributes die. That’s the rest of my punishment. They’ve made a damn good lapdog out of me. You don't say no to the Capitol. I learned that the hard way.”

“...it’s supposed to be over,” Ford said weakly. 

Nep smiled, and it reminded Ford of a grinning skull. “My games were almost a decade ago,” Nep said. “I’m still there. Every night, I’m back. Every night I’m surrounded by people who want me dead, people who are dying, and a gleeful audience who’d toss me into hell if they thought it might stave off boredom. I never left. I’m still there, fighting, cold, and terrified.”

Ford felt sick. “Why…why are you telling me this?”

“Because whether your brother wins or not,” Nep said. “He’s gone. He’s already dead in that arena. And if he survives, the version of him that comes home will be a stranger. You’ll still have to grieve him. And the faster you come to terms with that, the easier this will be for you. Trust me. I’ve seen it before.”

“That’s not true,” Ford said weakly. “You haven’t seen anyone win.”

“I’ve seen others win,” Nep said. “I’ve seen myself win. It’s not worth much. Sometimes it just takes away whatever you’re fighting for. So don’t be the thing that makes them take whatever he has. Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not stupid,” Ford said. “And I can’t…I can’t. I can’t just sit around and do nothing. I can’t try to convince our neighbors to send him sponsorships because that’s all they can do. I can’t watch TV and just…just watch them die. I have to do something. I have to. It’ll kill me, Nep, watching this helplessly, it really will.”

Nep said nothing, looking nervous. Even in the early morning, he already looked uncomfortable in long sleeves. “...there’s a rumor,” he said, and then shut his mouth, looking tense.

Ford stepped forward. “...a rumor?”

“...yes,” Nep said, looking reluctant. “I heard it some time ago, and then never again. That…that District 13 is still alive.”

Ford blinked. “They…they bombed 13 into oblivion before the Capitol was even the Capitol.”

“Yes,” Nep said, nodding. “So it’s just a rumor. A rumor that they retreated underground and formed a resistance. A rumor that they’re waiting for the right time to strike, watching year after year. A rumor that…that they live north, in the wilds, in the wastelands. Dangerous to set out there alone. Not even because the Capitol will kill you and everyone you love, though they will. But there’s abandoned mutts out there, wild beasts, and the people who live there are not…friendly to outsiders. But you never, ever heard that from me. Alright?”

Ford nodded fervently, something like hope swelling up in his chest. “Alright.”

They stood there in silence for a minute, and then Nep offered three more letters to Ford. “I’ve already placed the ones for your parents in their mailbox. Hand these to the rest of your family?”

“I will,” Ford said, taking the envelopes. He paused. “...do you think Stan can win?”

“...it doesn’t matter what I think,” Nep said. “What matters is if he thinks he can.”

*** *** ***

Ford,

Sorry to make fun of you on live television. I figured I could get one dig in. I’m not really that sorry.

I AM sorry for breaking your project. I know you don’t believe me, but I want you to know it was an accident. I would never do that to you, no matter how afraid I was of being left behind. I guess I can’t really blame you for wanting to do it. I don’t know if Pa’s plan of moving up through districts was even possible, but you deserved to try. If anyone deserved it, it would be you. And I spoiled that for you.

I don’t regret volunteering. I never did for one moment. I would have done it a million times over to keep you from all this. I’m sure you’ve seen it on TV by now. Trust me, I know I make it look easy, but it’s not. I miss home. I miss the ocean. I miss hearing Ma spouting bullshit to her clients. I even miss the smell of fish. It’s crazy what things make you homesick. Most of all, I miss you. I think I always knew it would be the case.

I’m okay, though. Nep’s cool, and Darlene’s not as obnoxious as I thought she would be. There’s a makeup artist named Carla who’s been assigned to me, and she’s pretty cool too. I think it’s some kind of Capitol University assignment, but she’s treating me like a person, which is nice. I really don’t want you to worry too much.

Ford, you’re my best friend in the whole world, the best brother someone could ever hope for. I know we’ve been in a bad place this year, and I wish I could have fixed it. But I don’t hate you for it. I was never even angry at you for it. I know this letter isn’t the same as me saying things face to face, but I hope it counts for something.

Please don’t watch the games. I know they make you turn on the TV, but don’t look. I know you’ll want to, and you’ll think you’re a terrible person if you don’t watch every awful thing happening. But please. I don’t want you to. Please don’t make yourself watch. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something awful was the last way you remembered me. 

I love you, Sixer. Stay safe. Stay alive. Stay smart. Stay weird.

Your brother,

Stan.

[anotherhomelanderblog]

Ichor

Summary: Homelander returns to you bleeding after his confrontation with Soldier Boy goes awry. Seeing your lover injured is a new and disconcerting experience for you - and, unfortunately, sometimes panic makes your tongue stupid. Content: Homelander x Reader | established relationship | angst | hurt/comfort | set near end of S3 | mild injury | blood Word count: 2.7k Author's note: Hello again, lovely people! This is just a standalone fic since I wanted to post something and I figured this would be one of my shorter ideas. However, it has still turned into a psychological minefield for me to navigate - and now, my own sanity in tatters, I cut it loose! I just thought Homie could do with some reassurance after Soldier Boy rejects him near the end of S3. This fic is also a birthday present for @themeraldee, who is so sweet and kind and has the absolutely galaxy brained ideas planned for this awful man! I hope you have the best day! ❤️

ao3

You’re not thinking when you say it.

You’re running on adrenaline, trying to be the grown up, hold the fort together. He’s bleeding, for Christ’s sake. You’ve never seen him bleed before. He hasn’t even specified why out loud to you. What on earth are you meant to be thinking?

He’s barely said a word since thundering back into the penthouse, where you were anxiously waiting, with a bleeding Ryan and a team of even more anxious medics in tow. His gloved hands haven’t stopped twitching at his sides for at least ten minutes, something the medics clustered around Ryan on the sofa seem all too conscious of.

You want to ask Homelander what happened, who did this to him, to both of them, but there’s a silence in the air that’s got your nerves on edge. Homelander’s eyes are irritated when they flit recurrently around the room. There’s a light flickering above that you can tell is bothering him.

He’s probably right – of course he is – when he mutters to no one in particular that Ryan doesn’t need checking over. Ryan is like him. But then, that gash on Ryan’s forehead would concern any father, wouldn’t it? And you can’t see who else but Homelander dragged the medics up here while the rest of the tower is under evacuation orders.

And it’s not as though he’s stopped you from dabbing his left ear with a cloth. It’s not as though he is invulnerable to injury either, apparently.

Blood. Homelander’s blood. You can smell it, or maybe that’s just panic. A droplet of it is smeared across the meat of your hand. You don’t know whether this makes you feel sick or honoured.

The Homelander is bleeding. He bleeds.

And all you can do is fucking dab, dab, dab at the evidence.

You’re furious with yourself for taking his invulnerability for granted in the past. He bleeds. How can such a thing surprise you? You're really not thinking straight. You get about half a second’s worth of internal warning that you’re about to say something stupid when a strange little laugh bubbles up from somewhere panicked in your chest. But it’s too late.

“So it is blood and not ichor running through your veins then,” you blurt out.

You can’t take your eyes off the redness leeching from his ear.

At once, Homelander’s restless gaze snaps to you. He looks unimpressed – you have made a bad joke – and an apology is already forming in that same panicked place inside you. You can’t imagine what your own face is currently doing.

But then, lo and behold, his expression falters. His brows pull together, and he tilt his head slightly.

“Why– Why would you say that?” he asks.

He sounds wounded in a way that makes your heart knock with guilt. You freeze and withdraw the cloth from his ear. His ego is worryingly fragile for a man of his abilities, yes, but tonight of all nights you shouldn’t be tripping over the cracks.

“I–”

“Just forget it,” he interrupts you.

He curses under his breath and turns towards the invitingly lit wall of mirrors lurking to the side of you both, his eyes glistening. Oh no. You know the signs of what – and who – may be bargaining for a visit if he’s eying those up. Fortunately, Ryan seems too distracted in conversation with the medics to notice the change in his father’s demeanour.

You pivot after Homelander, grabbing his padded arm. He doesn’t stop you. You feel him trembling. A muscle in his jaw spasms in warning. He’s clearly caught between storming off and drawing Ryan’s attention or staying put for more public humiliation.

“I’m sorry,” you say. You sound more grounded this time.

He doesn’t move. If you were anyone else, it’d be imperative you run a mile right about now. But you both know you’re in far too deep for that.

Instead, you walk directly into the blast zone: stepping in front of him, you take his face in your hands. His eyes are downcast, purposely avoiding yours. He scrunches them shut as you start to stroke his cheeks.

“Hey. I am sorry,” you say in a softer tone. “Sometimes I say stupid stuff when I’m shocked, but I really didn’t mean anything. Will you please tell me what happened tonight? Hm?”

On the one hand, he’s fine: his hearing doesn’t seem to have been affected by what must be a ruptured ear drum. You know he has unimaginable experience in dealing with pain, but you don’t think he’s masking anything here. No, what’s bothering him is more mental than physical.

Isn’t it always?

His eyes open again as a rogue tear finally spills down his left cheek. For the sake of his pride, you ignore it. His gaze becomes distant, honed on one of the mirrors; it’s from behind that protective glass he’s recounting events. He gestures vaguely to his ear.

“This was Maeve. She got my nose as well.” He shrugs nonchalantly. Then he sniffs despite himself. “She’s dead now. Soldier Boy too.”

You’d figured he was gone when that terrifying explosion destroyed half the tower. The fact Homelander could fly you to safety at a moment’s notice, should the whole structure collapse, is one of the only things keeping you brave enough to stay up here.

But Maeve…

You’ll have to decide how you feel about that later.

Homelander closes his eyes once more and finally lets himself lean into your touch, as needy for your affection as the first time you offered it.

“Did you get to talk to him?” you ask, brushing your thumbs along his jaw.

That was supposed to be his play for the meeting: try to get Soldier Boy to switch sides now they knew their familial connection. Who were Butcher and his ragtag band of criminals in comparison to Compound V and blood? It was a wishful scheme borne from the desperate, impulsive part of your lover that increasingly gets the best of him, but you wouldn’t have dared suggest an alternative. He’d gotten that look in his eye.

And then Noir ended up dead.

Right here, however, in the cold light of reality, something in Homelander’s face crumples for a second time. You’re getting close to the raw core of this. The bleeding you’ve witnessed very literally pales in comparison. He’s avoiding your gaze again.

“Yes,” he says, and his voice is quieter than you’ve ever heard it. “But…”

You don’t like the emphasis he puts on that word.

Your mind runs through every possible nightmare scenario until you find your arms are enveloping him of their own accord. You bury your face against his chest and inhale deeply. A soft, surprised noise breezes over your head, then you feel one of his hands reach up to gently stroke through your hair.

You pretend you don’t also feel the vice-like grip of his other hand as it snakes around the base of your neck, keeping you wedged to the Vought-branded padding of his suit. His. It really is far too late for running, but this element of him you can handle.

As long as he’s standing. As long as he’s alive. You don’t try to resist him; you press a kiss to his chest.

What happened at that confrontation? It’s times like these you wish you had powers too, so you could stand alongside him when the crunch comes. You knew something was going to go wrong in there…

“You deserved better,” you whisper.

You’re not expecting this comment to make him flinch like you’ve burnt him, but it does. His hand stills in your hair for an instant before he’s petting you like nothing stopped him. If you listen carefully enough, you’re sure you’ll be able to hear the muscles behind his face filtering through several conflicting expressions.

“What?” he eventually asks, bewildered in that unworldly manner of his that surfaces when the world gets too genuine. You know he can’t help it; most of the time, it only endears him to you more.

“You deserved better than to find out you had a father and then lose him like that,” you clarify.

Truth be told, you’re not particularly saddened by the demise of Soldier Boy. Finding out he was Homelander’s biological father might’ve been enough to turn Homelander’s world on its head – how could it not? – but, to you, he remained the scarily powerful supe trying to depower and murder your lover. Forgive you if you’re not his biggest fan. With his death, at least he can’t pose that threat anymore.

“Yeah, well…” Homelander’s voice sounds choked all of a sudden. Because he feels touched by your words or is freshly grieved about his father, you're not sure. He sighs and clears his throat. “Let’s just say, he didn’t see it that way.”

Now you frown.

“What did he say to you?” You let go of him and try to pull back to properly gauge what he’s getting at, but that’s the wrong response. He doesn’t let you. You hope Ryan is still distracted enough not to notice any of this. “Homelander, I swear to God, if he’s been filling your head with bullshit–”

“I’m a fucking disappointment, apparently. Imagine that.”

He snarls the words into your ear, and his fist tightens in your hair as he does. The whiplash of his vitriol would make you flinch in return, if you didn’t already feel his hold on you finally loosening – though you’re still not free.

Clinically controlled, he tilts your head back like you’re a precious china doll for him to position, and one of his thumbs strokes your jaw as yours did his earlier. But there’s none of that anger in his voice marring his face. Instead, he stares into your eyes – scrutinising you, yes, but – with a wariness that should be unbalancing.

“Well? Am I a disappointment to you too?” he asks.

He’s trying to project bitterness. You sense the undercurrent of him pleading for your assurance mixed in too, never able to just ask outright without lashing you too, so you know better than to think this means you have the upper hand here. After all, this isn’t a fair question for the strongest man in the world to ask a person whose life he could crush between the fingers of one hand. But that isn’t his fault, you tell yourself, and you meet his desperation with an intensity you can only have learnt from him.

“No, you're not,” you say firmly. “And I know you much better than Soldier Boy did.”

It takes a lot for you to hold off sneering his father’s name. Still, if anything, this measured response seems to upset him further – you’re not giving him opportunity to escalate. How unfair.

With a curt sigh, he slides the arm not gripping your jaw downwards to take the bloodstained cloth from you. It’s been clenched in your grip, but you relinquish it without fuss to watch in confusion as Homelander draws it up to his face to wipe something from his right cheek.

Foundation? Concealer?

Your brow creases, but he doesn’t speak. His eyes bore into yours as he drags the cloth over his skin. His movements are rigid, like you’re forcing him to do this. Is this a test of some sort? Gradually, the makeup smears with the blood already laced into the cloth’s damp fabric, revealing the not-quite invulnerable skin underneath is… inflamed.

You blink.

Homelander has a bruise below his right eye socket spreading the length of his cheekbone – and, from the state of the discolouration, you’d wager it’s not a fresh one. Your mind starts to fly once again with questions, when the culprit hits you.

Herogasm. That fucking ambush.

“Fuck,” you whisper, staring transfixed at the unwanted souvenir.

You don't want to imagine how hard someone would’ve had to hit him to leave a bruise like this. You reach up to caress the injured cheek, but he turns his head away. Your heart clenches.

“Oh, sweetheart–”

“Don’t be embarrassed? Right.” He scoffs, forcing the fake nonchalance back, then releases his hold on you entirely. His eyes close, and when he reopens them, they’re glassy and irritable like earlier. “I mean, you signed up to date a god, didn’t you? Don’t you wish my veins were filled with ichor? You can be honest.”

You bristle. “Of course not. I told you. I didn’t mean–”

“Because I fucking do.”

There’s an accusation in his gaze – and, if you’re not mistaken, a millisecond’s flash of red. Fortunately for him, you spy the pitiful and humiliated creature lurking underneath it, and it gives you pause.

“Blood is more than good enough for me. Especially the blood that runs through your veins,” you tell him, stepping closer as if to prove it. You jab his chest. “You’re not the disappointment in this situation, understand? Soldier Boy is. Stop expecting me to reject you too.”

He blinks several times in quick succession, but, this time, when you tentatively reach out, he lets you trace over his cheek with the pads of your fingers. He hums, which you take to be a nonverbal sign of his approval. He’s actually barely resisting the urge to nuzzle against your touch.

Relief floods your system.

Chuckling, you lean in and kiss the part of the bruise that appears the least tender for good measure. Despite the fact you don't have the strength to make it any worse, that isn’t the point.

“You have a family who loves you, Homelander. We’re not going anywhere,” you whisper. “I chose you. I’ll choose you every day. You’d better believe me.”

A huff leaves his lips as you start peppering little kisses across his face. His hands slip comfortably around your waist, and he offers you a soft look. You offer him a smile in return. His lips meet yours like nothing is wrong in the world.

And, for one blissful second, nothing is.

“Uh, dad?” Ryan calls over.

You jerk back in surprise, your face warming. It doesn’t take an emotional genius to hear the awkwardness in Ryan’s voice. There’s a brief glimmer of amusement in Homelander’s eyes at your reaction before he’s plastering on his most reassuring, fatherly smile.

“Yeah, buddy? Everything alright?” he calls back.

With a needlessly dramatic swoosh of his cape, he strides over to his son, dismissing the medics with a warning flick of his wrist. None of them need telling twice.

Crisis averted. You hope.

The source of your anxiety finally settled, you take to inspecting your hands in an effort not to eavesdrop on father and son. The small streak of Homelander’s blood that had so bothered you earlier catches your attention. You find yourself more at peace with it now. What was previously crimson liquid is turning a dry brown in the fine lines of your skin, nestled into you as snugly as you know he’d like to be in his ideal world.

You observe this tangible proof of his humanity that connects you both on a level you’ve not had access to before. The sight of it fills you with a strange compulsion, one you’d normally consider morbid. You raise your hand to your lips, casting a quick glance across the room to make sure you’re not being watched, and lick at the blood.

…What exactly were you expecting?

The taste is faintly metallic, same as your own. Ordinary. Authentically human. Nothing artificial, to your palate. Nothing divine either.

You glance back over at Homelander. He’s reverted to form – hands clasped behind his back; superhero assurances that he won’t ever let anyone hurt Ryan like this again, he will not let them; that William Butcher doesn’t deserve Ryan, that Ryan deserves better, is better, innately better, than everyone who caused him this pain; that Homelander isn’t going anywhere; that they’ve got this, they’ll be fine.

Your lover may now know he isn’t as synthetic as he was led to believe, and he may know you love him, but you’re not so sure he’ll ever accept that he isn’t of the divine.

Homelander bleeds blood and not ichor, and you wouldn’t have him any other way.

[hahaifolded]

hello!!!!!

I don’t know if this is a stupid or unnecessary ask but how would Kyle and the team react to Soap and Reader’s break up? Would they notice a difference since Soap wouldn’t be so happy and loud anymore? Maybe he would just whine and complain the whole time, and it happened too much that one of them pushed him to confess what happened (I would believe that to be Kyle since we called him and not the captain or such). I might be going off topic and beginning to rant right here, I am so sorry!!!! 🫶🏽

Enjoy this rough, continuation of Cellophane (Johnny "Soap" MacTavish x POC!GN Reader

Warnings: MDNI, ANGST (racism), comparatively not as bad as the first part, Johnny still sucks however, mid-writing, abrupt ending Author's Note: You know what, I wasn't going to do a part two but I read this and boom... thoughts! Thank you for the ask, @shitaaba

Has the sun ever felt better on his skin? Gaz doesn’t think so.

What a perfect day! No early meetings or training. Sun is shining, the town isn’t too busy, and Kyle finally has time to hit that coffee shop you and Johnny showed him all those months ago. 

You and Johnny… what a beautiful couple. Well mostly you but Kyle will keep that to himself as he doesn’t need Johnny on his back for “fucking you with his eyes” again. His teammate sure is a lucky man, especially since Kyle isn’t a homewrecker, because if Gaz had his way, you’d be right next to h— 

“Ah!” Kyle quickly grabs at the poor soul that he smacked into. 

“Shit, so sorry. Are you ok… oh, it’s you!” he first apologizes then gleams. What a strange coincidence. Is this manifestation? 

You look up and immediately pull away from his grasp. Your eyes are wide as they wander for a quick getaway. “Don’t even worry about it. If you’ll excuse me,” you rush out as you side-step Kyle. 

Kyle blocks you and throws you a warm smile as an attempt to ease your embarrasment. “Woah, woah, why the rush? It’s been awhile. What, Johnny has you caged up?” Gaz laughs at his own joke. He thought that would for sure make you laugh. It doesn’t.

Your face falls, and for the first time ever, Kyle sees you shrink. Your energy completely dissipates as discomfort overtakes you. 

“Hey, everything okay?” Kyle softens his voice and reaches out, laying a gentle hand on your upper arm in an attempt to lift you up. You slowly step away from it which only worries Kyle more. “What happened? Did Johnny do something?” 

“John and I broke up.” 

-- -- --

“Up for drinks tonight boys? My treat,” announces Price at the end of the team meeting.

“Sure.”

“As long as you pay, I’ll follow you anywhere.”

“Can’t.”

“Again Johnny? This is the fifth time you’ve bailed on us,” Ghost remarks. 

Soap lets out a deep laugh. “You’re just bitter that I have something sweeter waiting for me at home.” Ghost rolls his eyes while Price laughs. 

“Wanker.” 

Soap, Ghost, and Price all turn towards Kyle. Did he just call Soap a wanker? Why?

“Just a wee joke. Meant no harm,” Soap yields. Gaz just rolls his eyes and continues packing his things. 

Instead of engaging with Gaz, Johnny decides to concede and continue packing. Clearly something is bothering his fellow sergeant but Soap knows it's better to wait until Kyle opens up. And if he’s honest to himself, he really doesn’t have the capacity right now for other people’s problems.  He has enough of his own. 

“Before I forget, ma has been nagging me to bring you guys over for dinner again. Worried that we’re starving or something. Think next week works for all of ya?” 

“Sure.”

“Should I bring anything?”

“Your mom okay with me coming?”

Ghost and Price do a double take as Kyle’s question catches them off guard. Kyle pays them no attention as he stares down Soap who’s smile drops. 

However, as fast as it dropped, it immediately reappeared. “What kind of question is that? Course she knows,” the Scotsman smiles. 

Kyle chuckles in disbelief. “Really? So she knows about me but not your bird?” 

“What?” Soap’s entire demeanor changes. His confident, go-lucky self crumbles, now replaced with shame and discomfort. “What are you on about?”

“Mate, you can’t be serious?” Kyle barks. He takes a step forward towards his counterpart but is stopped by a confused, but attentive captain. Price steps in and asks for an explanation. 

Kyle stares Soap down and bites, “you want to tell them or should I?”  All color drains from Soap's face

“That’s enough you two,” Ghost jumps in, unable to take this anymore. “Whatever problems Johnny is having with his bird is between him and—“

“They broke up two months ago!” Kyle finally exclaims. Ghost’s eyes widened. Price’s jaw drops. That made no sense as just last week, Johnny went on and on about the perfect getaway you two went on. Ghost and Price look to Johnny for answers, but with the way Johnny is standing, head down, shoulders slumped, their questions are answered. 

“Johnny, what happened?” Price tries to comfort the Scotsman. He saw how happy you made the sergeant happy. He even had a heart-to-heart with Johnny when he expressed his desire to marry you. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I’ll tell you why.” And with that, Kyle goes off. He tells the team how Johnny, despite claiming to love you more than life itself, refused to fight for you. ”I bet you’re just like your parents,” spits Kyle. 

“You don’t get it,” counters Johnny. His face twists in despair. 

“What’s not to get? Your parents are fucking racist and you refuse to do anything about it.” Kyle couldn’t believe it. Johnny is his friend, his comrade, his brother in arms; despite everything they’ve gone through, Kyle thought he could trust the Scotsman. And worst of all, he wasn’t the one who got hurt, it was you, sweet, beautiful you got hurt. “You’re pathetic. You never fucking deserved them!” 

“That’s enough,” Price puts his foot down. His face stern. He gestures to Soap and sends him to his office. Soap drops his head and nods in defeat. As Johnny walks away, Price lets out a deep breath and asks Ghost to watch Kyle before heading off himself.

The lieutenant and sergeant stand in silence as Kyle is way too angry to speak and Ghost is just uncomfortable by the entire situation. Did Johnny really lose you because of his parents? Ghost couldn’t believe it. He’s seen firsthand how Johnny furiously defended you during late nights out at the bar when other soldiers got a little too crude with the way they spoke about you. Ghost personally has had to rip the sergeant off one too many times from rude allies. What made Ghost even more uncomfortable was the amount of time he’s spent with Johnny’s family and never once got the feeling that his parents were racist. They’ve always been kind to the Lietenant. He assumed it was because of his rank or even his own past, never for… 

“Kyle?” Kyle cocks his head towards Ghost, eyes still buring with rage. “Has his parents ever…”

“No,” Kyle admits. He exhales deeply, his shoulders easing a bit. “I mean, there's been some weird comments here and there but I just assumed it was cause they’re old, never…” Kyle trails off, clearly affected by everything. 

Ghost just nods. He stays quiet for a bit until another question pops in his head. “Are they okay?” 

Kyle shrugs his shoulders. “They’re alright. Still hurt but they’ll survive” 

Ghost hums. He has a million other questions but decides to stay quiet. As much as he wants to know how Kyle found out or what (but really who) you’re doing these days, Ghost sees that Kyle is just exhausted. So with that, the two men finish packing in silence. With their bags in hand, they both leave the conference room, walking side by side in the hallway. 

Kyle pulls out his phone and lets out a small chuckle. Ghost can’t help but give Gaz a weird look. What’s so funny? 

“You know something, L.T., I don’t even feel bad anymore.” Ghost tilts his head as Kyle shows him something on his phone.

You: Saturday works for me! 

Word Count: 1246

Thanks for reading! - Fold's Page Guide + Masterlist

[dee-writes-anime]

The Art of Homemade Gloves

FEATURING Choso Kamo x Reader

SUMMARY When you handed him a heat pack and told him to get some rest, you didn’t think anything of it. But Choso had never really been given warmth before and now he doesn’t know how to stop bringing it back to you.

CONTENT WARNINGS choso is awkward (!!!), not much other than cute fluff :D

AUTHORS NOTE some cute choso fluff I wrote to break up some request posting. Sometimes, you just gotta let those creative juices flow freely. ;)

It starts with a mission and a sore back.

The fight hadn’t been brutal, but it left everyone scraped raw—too much cursed energy in the air, too many small injuries that didn’t need a healer, just rest. By the time Choso finds a quiet hallway in the safehouse to sit down and breathe, the adrenaline’s long gone and a strange stillness is settling into his bones. Not peace. Not exactly. Just quiet.

You find him there, sitting against the wall like an abandoned shadow, elbows on his knees, head lowered. You don’t say anything right away. Just sit beside him with a soft grunt and stretch your legs out. Close, but not too close. It’s that subtle kind of closeness he’s noticed about you—natural, like you belong where you are without needing to ask permission.

You’re both quiet for a moment. Breathing in the same air, letting silence do what it does best: make space.

Then, you nudge something into his lap.

He looks down.

It’s a heat pack—one of those soft, microwavable ones, stuffed with rice or seeds, a faint trace of lavender clinging to the fabric. It’s warm. Still holding the heat from your hands.

“You looked tense,” you say. “Helps with the soreness. Just pop it in the microwave for like thirty seconds.”

He stares at it, confused. “You’re giving me this?”

You shrug. “Yeah. You didn’t look like the type to grab one for yourself.”

That’s… true. He wouldn’t have.

You stand, stretching your arms overhead, the hem of your shirt lifting just slightly. Choso looks away.

“Rest up, Choso,” you say over your shoulder, and then you’re gone.

He stares at the heat pack a while longer before pressing it to his chest like it might teach him something.

The next day, you find your favorite bottled tea sitting on your desk.

No note. No explanation. Just a single can, placed neatly beside your papers.

You glance down the hallway in time to see Choso disappearing around the corner.

The day after that, it’s a bag of spicy chips—the exact kind you’d mentioned craving once after a mission, in passing, weeks ago.

You open the bag and pop a chip into your mouth, chewing slowly.

“…Huh.”

When you see him again in the common room, you raise an eyebrow.

“Choso,” you say, arms crossed. “Are you… bribing me?”

He freezes mid-step, holding another drink can in his hand. You’ve caught him in the act. His eyes dart to the tea, then to you.

“No,” he says immediately, too fast. Then he pauses. “…Is it working?”

You try very hard not to laugh. “Maybe.”

He nods, completely serious, and sets the can down carefully before turning and walking away with the stiff posture of a man fleeing a crime scene.

You’re still laughing ten minutes later.

The gifts don’t stop.

They’re not flashy—never flowers or jewelry or anything extravagant. Just little things. Snacks. Canned drinks. A fresh roll of wrist tape after a tough training session. A pair of soft socks when the weather turns colder.

One day, it’s a neatly folded cotton scarf. You recognize it from the vendor stalls near the school—simple but warm, and in a color you once said you liked. Choso doesn’t even stick around to see you open it.

You don’t know what to do with it all, exactly. You try to give things back. He refuses every time.

“No,” he says, like it’s obvious. “It’s for you.”

Sometimes he hovers after dropping things off, pretending he’s not hovering. He doesn’t talk much, but his presence fills up the space slowly, like steam curling through the air.

Eventually, you stop pretending you don’t enjoy it.

One evening, after a mission with a few too many close calls, you sit outside the safehouse, elbows on your knees, cooling off under the open sky. The stars are just starting to emerge—faint and flickering. You rub your thumb over a small cut on your palm, mind wandering.

Choso appears quietly beside you, holding something wrapped in a soft cloth.

You blink. “Another peace offering?”

He sits without answering and sets the bundle in your hands.

You unwrap it carefully.

Inside is a pair of gloves. Hand-stitched, soft, warm. The seams are slightly uneven in a way that makes your chest hurt. Not messy—just… real. Like someone had done their best, even if they weren’t used to doing things like this.

You slip them on. They fit perfectly.

“You made these?” you ask, voice soft.

He nods once.

You flex your fingers and stare down at your hands, searching for words. Before you can find them, Choso speaks first.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he says quietly, eyes fixed on the horizon. “After you gave me that thing.”

You look up at him.

“The heat pack,” he clarifies. “You gave it to me and… didn’t ask for anything. You just did it.”

He pauses. His voice is low and steady, but you can hear the tension underneath, like a bowstring drawn tight.

“No one’s ever done that before,” he says. “Just… gave me something. Because they wanted to.”

Your heart pulls, slow and deep.

“I didn’t know how to say thank you,” he adds. “So I started… bringing things.”

You swallow, touched in a way that’s hard to describe.

“I noticed.”

His hands twitch in his lap. “I didn’t mean to make it weird.”

“It’s not weird,” you say gently. “It’s… really sweet, actually.”

He turns to look at you—cautious, uncertain.

“You didn’t have to do any of that,” you continue, “but I’m glad you did.”

He’s quiet. Then, after a long pause:

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” you say immediately.

He exhales, quiet and almost imperceptible.

“…Good.”

Things shift after that.

Not dramatically—just slightly. Like a door left cracked open. Choso starts lingering more. Sometimes he doesn’t bring anything at all, just sits with you while you read, or trains quietly nearby.

He doesn’t speak much. But when he does, it’s careful. Intentional. Like he weighs every word before offering it to you.

And sometimes, he watches you.

Not in a way that feels heavy or uncomfortable. Just… watchful. Soft-eyed. Like you’re something he’s trying very hard to understand. Or maybe memorize.

You don’t push. You just let it be. And quietly, you start giving back.

You bring him little things, too. Not out of obligation—just instinct. His favorite onigiri. A new set of hair ties. A small bottle of eucalyptus oil for his aches. The first time you brush a leaf out of his hair after a mission, he goes so still you think he’s stopped breathing.

Then he thanks you in a voice so quiet it barely makes it past his lips.

One day, you find a new heat pack on your bed.

It’s handmade. Soft fabric, the same color as your favorite hoodie. There’s a note tucked underneath, the handwriting small and oddly careful:

For when you’re sore. Or cold. Or both. —Choso

You press it to your chest, smile, and feel warmer than the pack itself.

You don’t realize how normal it’s become—this strange rhythm between you—until you wake up one evening from a post-mission nap on the common room couch and find Choso sitting on the floor beside you.

He’s reading. His legs are crossed, and there’s a mug in his hands. The book’s upside down, you realize after a moment.

You blink groggily. “How long was I out?”

He glances over, calm as ever. “Not long.”

There’s a blanket draped over your shoulders.

You frown, tugging at it. “Did you…?”

He looks vaguely guilty.

You smile. “Thanks.”

You sit up slowly, rubbing your eyes. Choso sets the book aside (right side up this time) and watches you for a moment. Not saying anything. Just… looking.

There’s something in his gaze tonight. Something quiet and vulnerable and very, very present.

You decide to ask the thing that’s been sitting in the back of your mind for weeks now.

“Choso,” you say, “are you courting me?”

He freezes.

You swear you see his soul leave his body for a full three seconds.

“…I don’t know,” he says finally, voice small. “Am I?”

You bite your lip to keep from laughing.

“I think so,” you say gently. “And if you are—I don’t mind. In fact, I kind of like it.”

His eyes widen slightly, like you’ve just handed him the moon and asked if he wanted to keep it.

Then—slowly, like a cloud parting—he smiles. Just a little.

“…Okay,” he says.

You reach out and take his hand.

It’s warm.

So are you.

[boobertronian]

EPISODE 1 : CYAN

Wonyoung's Episode - HENSHIN : A KAMEN RIDER STORY

Proofread by @vorrentis, big thanks to @kise15 for the ideations with Kamen Riders-related contents Word counts : 12305 words All works are fiction

ENJOY !!

EPISODE 1 – CYAN

“Ok, let’s start. It’s me, Tyler Nakamura, video log today is Tuesday, time is 23:00, the day is 03/04/2171, location is Ichijou Hotel.”

“I’m back, back with some news. And this news will either shock you or make you. A few weeks passed by after my clues and leads, even though they weren’t much, but they led me to the small town of Godai Town.”

“Never heard of it my entire life, but worth a try, I’m in for the thrill anyway. Took me a long drive for this, about an hour? yeh, something like that, my lower back was sore thanks to that. But my curiosity backed me up for it, so it was worth the drive, at least the scenery is quite nice.”

I finally got to this town. It’s a small one, near the coast.

The weather is quite nice, cool and windy, not very sunny, but the sounds of the coals waves is music to my ears, reminds me of those fishing trip with my granddad back then.

But I’m not here for sightseeing or for a vacation, I’m here for that goal, to find those mysterious beings.

I started to walk around to look for some clues.

The town seems like a peaceful one, not many activities here, people is going on with their normal daily lives, doesn’t seem like a place with “dangerous” situations.

The local shops around the blocks are quite nice, lights being decorated around the area, some banners for local events, some outdoor markets, seems like your normal small town.

I stopped by a diner, name’s Amadam. Not many guests here, but the owner seems friendly enough to say hi.

“Welcome to Amadam’s Diner! How may I serve you young man?”

“Bacon & egg please! With apple pie and milk please!”

“Anything else? How about our local’s treat, it’s on the house today!”

“ I’ll take that too! Thank you!”

“Be right with you in ten minutes!”

Nice lady reminds me of my elementary school teacher, Ms. Kent.

I started to settle myself to a table near the window. I took out my notepad and laptop to search for some info about the locals, while waiting for the food.

My workaholic self didn’t let me eat in peace.

“There you go! Bacon, eggs, apple pie and a glass of milk!”

“Thank you so much! I’m quite starving!”

“Enjoy your meal! I will be back with our local treat!”

“Thank you!”

“You’re very welcome!”

I started to chow down my food. Man, good old bacon & egg, nothing more high protein than that. Gotta fuel my energy first before anything else happen.

“Here’s our local treat! Home grown chicken salad with  teriyaki sauce!”

“That’s dope!”

“Say, you’re not from around here aren’t you, young man? I live in this town longer than anyone here, well not everyone but yes, long enough to remember some faces, and to recognize some new ones!”

“ You’re a natural detective! Yes, I just got here!”

“Why here in all places? This town surely isn’t the most famous tourist spot!”

“ I’m a journalist! A freelance one! And I’m here for some clues to my story!”

“Oh?”

“Have you heard anything about some mysteries, about … strange creatures?”

The owner squints her eyes a bit

“Huh... never seen anything like theses before … too blurry? Is this some of those cryptid photos that the kids normally post online?”

“ I… read some info online . I saw pictures, and some news about mysterious events happened here. My curiosity led me here because I want to know about them, let’s just say, I’m a thrill seeker.”

“ Really? well Sorry I can’t help you with that young man “

“How about these things, you ever heard of them before?”

I showed her some pics of the round-eyes beings but seems like even them are a mystery to her.

“ I ... don’t know about these things, but ... I think Old Bill from that art shop knows more. The guy seems to be into these sorts of stuffs more than anyone here, you can ask him, I think? He’s down the road a few blocks!”

“But thanks for the info.”

DING

“Starship Delivery! I have some parcels for you Ms. Kent!”

A women came in, quite tall, holding onto some big boxes and in cyan-colored uniforms.

“ Yujin! Thank you so much dear !! You can leave it next to that corner please! I’ll be right with you !!”

The owner then walked back to her counter, man, that lady sure was fast for her age.

“How are you Ms. Kent? You sure have lots of packages today! take two of us to bring it here!”

“ Thank you for helping this old lady out! Those are gifts for my grandkids! I wish they can grow up as you two! Care for something to go?”

“Sure! I would love those apple pie! Hey Wonyoung, you care for something to go? Gonna be a long day!”

Another woman walked into the diner. She’s, well, I would say very pretty, both are, but this one sure has a different vibe.

“Oh hi Ms. Kent. Here are the rest of your packages.”

“Wonyoung! How are you? Love your new hair!”

“Oh, thank you Ms. Kent. I just redo my hair a bit that’s all. I would like an apple pie like Yujin too “

“Two apple pie coming right up!”

The two women stood there a bit. Gotta say, I’ve never seen visuals like that in real life. I probably should make a move, but they might think I’m a creep.

“Here you go! Two apple pie!”

“ Thank you, Ms. Kent! Man, I always love these cuties you did!”

“Say Yujin & Wonyoung, you two will attend that dance night?”

“ Yes, I will! Not sure about Wony here though, it’s a true challenge to get here ANYWHERE ha-ha”

“ I think I’ll pass. I have things to do.”

“See Ms. Kent? This girl is quiet in everything!”

“Oh well, guess I’ll see you there Yujin! This old lady still has some moves!”

“ Right on Ms. Kent !!”

“You should get to places sometimes Wonyoung! It’ll be fun !!”

“Oh thanks Ms. Kent, I’m doing ok, I like quiet places more anyway.”

“Suits yourself ! But I won’t mind familiar faces at the dance!”

“Alrighty! Well, we must get going for our next locations! See you here Ms. Kent!”

“See you girls!”

Such a nice convo, I like it. For a town this quiet they need that energy, if not everything will be bored don’t you think ?

But oh, look at the time, seems like I need to go too, that new clue seems interesting, got to pack myself up and go. No time for too much chit chat.

As I was about to reach the door, Ms. Kent then stopped me a bit

“Hope you’ll find what you’re looking for young man! Come here again if you want more of our delicious meal!”

“ I will, and thanks for the meal!”

I then walked fast past several blocks. The rain started to fall as soon as I enter the antique shop.

“Bouken Antique” I read the sign

DING

“Hello, is anyone here?”

AN old man slowly walked out, his hands were dirty with dust from craft works. Wiping his fingers on his pants, he gave me a smile

“Eyyy welcome to Bouken Antique, how can I help ya? Ya looking for some treasures? or some souvenirs? We have it all here with a decent price!”

“ You are old Bill right sir?”

“Old? Young man, I can break that tree out there with my bare hands ha-ha!”

“ Ms. Kent from Amadam’s Diner showed me the place . I’m here for some information actually . Have you seen theses?”

I took out the photos and gave to old Bill . Suddenly, his face changed

“Where… where did you get this ??”

“ Many sources. Mostly internet. Took me a while for theses ones? You’ve seen them before?”

Old Bill then ran fast to the door, closed the windows, turn the signs into close. Then he ran back to me with full speed, quite surprising for a man his age

“Come here, I want to show you this.”

Old Bill then guided me into his workshop. To my surprised, it was full of equipment, laptop, cameras, PC, like … those superhero’s secret cave? If you know what I’m talking about.

“ I know this, because … I took it.”

“What?”

“Yes. I was the one uploaded all these pics.”

“So... were you also the one who gave me the location?”

“Yes . That was me, and I’m surprised you came here, no one did before.”

“So... you’ve seen ... it, the creature.”

“Yes, I’ve... seen It many times. But I never knew what it was. One night, I was closing my shop, then I heard some noise nears those bushes & trees over there. I thought it was just some small animals but then I heard larger sounds, like something being crushed. I rushed to it because I thought someone might got into trouble. And then I saw…”

“That thing?”

“ Yes, it was that … creature, it … looked like a human, and its eyes were glowing. The moment it noticed me... it…. jumped & ran away. I could barely take a pic, hence the blurriness, but it wasn’t human, that I can be sure. And I saw it many times more, but I couldn’t catch it nor approach it. It was like, it was looking for something... or it just ... had a fight with something.”

“Do you think, it involved in many of the missing cases?”

“Yes, I think so too. A few months ago, police noticed us about some missing people, the only thing left they could find were their clothing. Then those cases stopped for a while, then they resurfaced again, more missing people with the only thing left were their clothing, or even worst, being either hung or fell from the tree or coastal cliffs over there. They gave it a try to figure out what it was, but then they couldn’t find any for a while, and since those cases weren’t happening too often, and with this small town, don’t think the police force around here could do anything much.”

“And these cases, from what I’ve been researched, partially from your info online, are not only in this same area, but many other places too.”

“Exactly, don’ you think … there’s something in common about this? like... do you think that... thing is making people disappear all over this country?”

“That’s what I want to find out.”

“Ok, then update me if you have something, be careful young man”

“Will do.”

“Strange isn’t it. I thought things like this only happened when I was younger, but now, I’m about to hi 10 feet below ground and we still have unsolved mysteries in this time. People around here none of them believe me, well, except Ms. Kent, she’s always nice.”

“She is a nice lady. But yeh, you’re not the only one into mysterious things old Bill. That is in my blood too. I will try to find a place to stay around here for some days, will let you know”

“Sure, please do take care, things aren’t like what it seems around here.”

I exited old Bill’s antique shop. The rain didn’t seem to stop.

I managed to find a small hotel, like you already know, Ichijou Hotel, near to where Ms. Kent’s Amadam. I settled in for the night, but I hardly slept thinking about that … thing.

The next day I woke up, it was already 10 am in the morning. I quickly rushed down to the streets to see if anything happened over the night.

Nothing

People were still going on with their days.

I took my brunch over Ms. Kent’s again, same meal, nothing changed. The day just went by fast. I barely had anything to do beside ... waiting for something to happened.

I went to the coast to look for some clues. Nice views, the waves, the scent of salt, the wind was breezing through my body. I went up to the hill, the trees were quiet and such, some birds, some squirrels were running around. I guess the day would pass by quietly just like usual.

I passed by Ms. Kent for some food and just to say hi, she still greeted me just like how I first came. The delivery girls were there too for some reason, so I put myself up and said hi

“Good evening Ms. Kent, you seem to have some companies ?

“Hey there young man! Tyler, right? Did I remember your name correctly?”

“ Yes, it’s Tyler, good memories though!”

“Who’s this one Ms. Kent? Seems like a friendly one!”

The girl with the shoulder length haircut suddenly stood up and greet me

“Hello there stranger! Who would you be? The name is Yujin btw! Nice to see some new face around here!”

“Tyler, Tyler Nakamura! I’m a freelance journalist, been here since yesterday for some scoop!”

“Ooooh !! Sounds exciting! What sort of scoop? This town is rather though?”

“Well, I want to keep it a secret, will let you know if I can ever publish though “

“Mysterious guy huh? I like it! You have any plans beside being here for your gig? Oh, btw here’s my bestie Wonyoung!”

“Hello.”

“Hello there!”

The girl with longer hair nods with a small smile.

“I’m sorry she’s a bit of a quiet type but don’t worry about it! Anyway, Tyler you’ll go to the festival tonight?”

“ Uh… I’m not sure I should go honestly ...”

“Come one it’ll be fun! I’ll go with my friends and all, you should join !! Maybe you’ll find someone you’ll like hehe.”

“Oh, ha-ha thanks Yujin, guess I‘ll go then, haven’t been to festival that much in my life.”

“Then no reason to not go right ?? well then, see you there! We’ll  be there at 6:30! Now me & Wony here going to be off for our last shipments and ready to partyyyyyy!”

The two girls then stood up and left, onto their daily duties, leaving me with Ms. Kent again

“Such beautiful young girls aren’t they, back in my day I used to have that energy too ha-ha”

“ I trusted you on that Ms. Kent.”

“Btw, I heard old Bill told me, you met him. Were you able to find what you need?”

“ I did yes, not too much but I got what I need.”

“Ok, I don’t want to stop you but be careful young man.”

“I will Ms. Kent.”

A few hours later, I finally dragged myself onto the festival.

I must say, for a quiet town, they really do know how to decorate the streets . A totally different vibe from the usual quiet and rather bland town during the day.

Kids are running around with their treats, people are dancing and taking food courts, if I’m telling you this was the exact town during the morning you might think I’m bluffing.

“Heyyyy Tyler !!”

I suddenly turned myself around, a group of people men & women were approaching me in colorful attires.

“Oh hey… Yujin, nice outfit!”

“Heyyy everyone, this is Tyler !! I met him this morning !! Here are my buddies : Gaeul, Rei, LeeSeo, Liz, Chad, Eddie  and Jimin!”

“Oh, hi everyone, you guys look prepared!”

“Of course we do !! It’s party time !!!!!”

“Come join us, Tyler !! Let’s go, don’t want to waste our time here !!! Gotta take some boozes and goooooo!!”

I followed the crew, damn, they were loud, or maybe I was being too quiet? I kept following them through the food courts, got some good ones myself, then ended in a barn where they had loud live music.

“Good evening, folks !! Welcome to Godai’s Town festival !! This year is our 50th Anniversary so we’re going to hit it big !!! Foods are all here for you with any cultures and any flavors from Ms. Kent right there, and be careful, don’t drink too much !! We still have some safety laws here! But other than that, have a great night folks, enjoy !!”

The mayor seemed like a jolly one, not that much different from Ms. Kent. I guess this town is more interesting than I thought, more than meets the eyes, I guess.

The festival went on for a while, surprisingly an introverted like me lasted that long with that many noises, so was my bladder.

“Is it fun Tyler ??? You like it ???”

A girl from Yujin’s group asked me, her name was Liz, I guess?

“Oh, yeh it’s fun! I can’t believe this place can be this loud!”

“Glad you like it !!! Now come, you can go there and dance with us !! “

“Oh, I think I need a bathroom break a bit! Would you know where it is?”

“Ohh, down to your left !! Hurry !!, The dance competition is about to start !! “

“ I’ll be right back !!”

Little that she knew, something even more eventful, or, even worst, something terrible would occur that night.

I got out to the bathroom and done my ”duties;” man, I drank a bit much than usual. At least I got some break from the loud noises. If I stayed there longer my head might exploded.

Then I heard some sounds while walking back. Something rather … well, erotic over that empty space behind the barn.

“Hey, you are sure this place is empty? No one is going to go back here?”

“Hehe yehh, now come on baby give it to me.”

Ok…. What was that? Some teenagers were doing something silly.

My curiosity self then walked over the bushes, slowly and quietly. Then I saw two people are standing around that big tractor.

What were they doing there? Too much booze? Needed some private times, or... oh no, I think I know what they were getting into

“Come on baby show me your asses, fuck I want to see those cheeks  !!! “

“Gimme that big cock of yours and I’ll do that.”

Well, now that was something I was surprised I bumped into . This was not the “mystery.” I was looking for sure.

“See, I showed you my dick, now how about you make me feel good baby, you’ll love this big meat hehe.”

“Oh, really, ok, I’ll suck your cock, you better fuck me good later if not I’ll drop you off got it?”

That … was wild

Like those pornographic stuffs I occasionally look at sometimes, well, excuse-me for that, single life could do that to you

But yeh, better leave those two to their … “activities.”

I turned my head back the other direction, giving those two some “privacies.”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!1”

A loud scream was tearing up the sky where those two were

I ran back fast, as fast as I could to give some help

“What just happened ?? You’re, ok ??”

That scream did not sound erotic at all, it was a scream for something terrifying, something straight from those horror movies

Once I leaped over the bushes, I saw Yujin screaming her entire lungs out. Her face was full of shock, sweats and full of terror, looking up to the sky

Then I looked up

The sight, I can’t describe you, how horrifying it was

A creature

Yes, I wasn’t joking

A creature, crawling from a giant web, with the man’s body being entangled in the middle of it

That creature, looks humanoid, with big red eyes.

At first, I thought, did I finally encounter those creatures in the photos ?

But something … was different

The creature kept on crawling towards the man, with him also screaming while being muffled, barely forming any words

“Mppphhhh... Helppp… Mpphhhh… someone…. Help meeee.”””

“Barry !!!!!!! NO Let him go !!! “

The woman screamed in horror, in desperation

The creature, in full speed, bit onto the guy’s neck. He screams in pain, the most feared scream of the night. Then, in matter of seconds, his body … melted down to the ground, with his remains burnt the grass below into a dark spot, only his clothing left.

No bodies, no blood, nothing, just a dark spot was what remained of his poor fate.

“OMGGG !!! BARRY NOOOOOOOOO !!! NOOOOOOO !!!! “

The woman cried out, she scared, shocked, crying with full tears, hurrying back towards my direction, running at fast as she could

“Miss, I’m here !! Come on !! I’ll cover you!”

“OMG !!!  That thing… omg … that thing killed Barry… !!! “ The woman cried out while did her best to form some words

“Come on let’s get out of here!”

I helped her on her feet, and we both ran as fast as we could

But it was in vain

The creature, swinging over the trees above, caught up to us in a few leaps. It jumped right in front of us, eyes wide open, fangs were full of dark venom liquid dropping down to the ground as its was approaching us slowly.

“OMGG STAY AWAY !!! STAY AWAYY FROM ME PLEASE !!!! “

I took my courage, I grabbed a log from the side of the street, and in a desperate move, I swung at it, with the best of my self-defense knowledges.

“Get away you fucker!”

SNAP

That was the dumbest thing I ever did tonight

The creature wasn’t phase at all; he broke the log like a toothpick once I swung at his face.

At that moment, I thought maybe my curiosity really killed me

The creature then grabbed onto my jacket, then threw me away to the grass like I was a small baseball, let me fly away a few feet and crashed onto a mudhole next to it.

That hurt a lot, I could barely get up for a while.

The creature then kept on walking towards the woman, now dropped on her knees and crawling away in fear

“STAY AWAYYYY !!! PLEASEEEE !!! PLEASE DON’T KILL ME !!! ANYONE HELP ME PLEASE!!!”

The woman was screaming her heart out; she was crawling backward till her back reach the tall tree behind. The creature didn’t stop, it kept approaching her, like an apex predator cornered its prey.

The creature literally shot a giant web net into her body, then, it snatches its mandible onto her.

“PLEASE... plea-ea-...”

The woman’s body fainted to the ground, shit. Poor girl, she couldn’t handle the shocks.

And I couldn’t do anything; I guessed my useless self couldn’t be the hero today

SMASH

Something smacked towards the creature’s head, made it fall back a bit

Immediately, a figure ran towards the creature, then kicked to its body, hard. The impact made the creature flew a few feet away to the ground.

I finally got myself up from the mud, and to my surprise

The figure, in humanoid shape, with glowing pinkish eyes and cyan-colored upper body,  same with his leg armors, or … “skin”.  

It was him, the one I saw in Old Bill’s blurry photo.

I wiped the mud on my face to see it more clearly, and it was him.

The figure was more of an insect like, but the color was the same from the pictures. On his arms were a pair of weapons, looked like tonfas ?

The creature rose up from the ground, it seemed angry from the sudden hit, leaped towards the figure, as the two engaged in combat.

They traded blows with each other, with both launched punches and kicks towards each other violently, but it seemed like the figure somewhat got the upper hand.

The creature was no slouch, it used the webbing substances to evade and strike back at the figure, hence made it more difficult. Its venom melted the grass or any objects it touches, making the figure had to dodge left right.

The figure was able to fend back with his weapons, landed many strikes towards the creature. Each swing of his weapons accurately hit the creature in many areas on his body, making it growled in pain.

In a careless moment, the creature aimed its webbing and venoms towards Yujin, still lying unconscious over the tree, making the figure had to rush towards her to block the attack, ended up injured himself on his left arm

Taking the advantages, the creature charged in and repeatedly punched the figure, leaving him in defense mode while doing his best to wrestle it away from Yujin, still unconscious.

He was struggling for a while, as his injury seemed quite a severe one, as he seemed to be slower than few moments before

“Gotta help him” I said it in my head, then quickly pull my butt up and ran towards where woman was, with all my might carry her up and ran towards the side

“ I got her! Kick that thing ass!” I shout out

The figure, seemingly understood what I said, taking it as a cue to strike back. He used his left weapon and hit straight into the creature’s abdomen, then his right one slammed hard into the creature’s jaw, breaking the left side of its mandible.

And with a quick move, he kicked the creature away from himself and let it roll over the grass in pain.

The creature seemed to grow more feral and angrier; it created a giant web to cover the area and climbed to the top of it. In a feral move, it dove down from the top web and lunged itself over the figure.

The figure, got to his stance, his body then glow up with hazy cyan aura, his eyes were flashing, and the circle around his waist were charging some sort of energy that I couldn’t believe in my own eyes, somewhat powering him, like those finishers in video games.

In a quick movement, as the creature were close to kill the figure, he then immediately used his weapons and slammed it from both side of the creature’s body

“BAAAAAMMM”

The creature was being stuck in midair, growling in pain with the two weapons around his waist, burning him, as blue light running all over his body and ended up with an explosion.

“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM”

The creature’s body engulfed in blueish flame and reduced to dust, falling down the grass.

Holy bloody hell

What did I just witness ?

A fight between … two paranormal forces? Like how my grandad used to show me in his old tv series?

I couldn’t believe I just witnessed that

As I let the women’s unconscious body down to the soft grass, the figure slowly turned towards us, kneeled from where he stood, right arm covering his left one, seemingly in quite painful moment.

A blue light ran from the top of his “antenna,” slowly dissolved the “shell,” or the armor on his body, down to his leg, reavealing a person whom, caught me in full surprised.

“Wait. wait a minute ?? You’re... you’re that girl ?? That delivery girl with Yujin ???? Wonyoung ??”

The girl then slowly looked up to me, still having hard breathing out of tiredness from the battle.

“Worry about me later, that woman, how is she?”

“She was just too shocked I think, I think she’s ok. Wait, oh no ....”

The woman’s body melted right in front of me.

“She’s gone isn’t she.”

“That was… no… I thought we saved her...”

“There’s nothing we can do about it. It happens ... Ah...”

“You look injured, we need to get you to the infirmary.And we should report to the police ”

“No, don’t go there, there’s nothing they can do for me there, police or hospital. They won’t be of help. I … must get out of here, I mean it,  ah...” Wonyoung talked while still covering her arm

“But let’s cover your injured arm first, it looks dangerous, quite infecting …”

I then took my jacket and made the torn pieces into a makeshift bandage for her. Once things done, Wonyoung then insisted me again

“ I’m ok now, go, get outta here,  ah …” The scar on Wonyoung’s started to spread throughout her arm darkening her biceps and forearms.

“Ok, but we need to treat you too, that injury seems to be serious, if you’re heavily injured that would be even more troublesome. If you can’t go to hospital, where should we go? And I don’t think you can get there alone in this state.”

“Ok... Guess ... I have no choice... follow my lead, I have a place, it’s outside of the town “

 “My car is near here, I can drive you there, can you hold yourself up to it?”

“I can.”

We took the shortcut path towards the bushes through the parking lot. We had to be very careful not to be spotted by the partygoers. Once we got into my car, I pushed the pedal in speed just to get out of there

“Ok, go straight down that road, outside the border of the town and then make a right turn “

“ Is it, some sort of secret hideout?”

“ It’s a place where we can hide her from those creatures, for now”

“Those?”

“Just drive...”

“Ok sure.”

We got to a lodge deep inside an abandoned factory.

Wonyoung then pushed the buttons next to the fences, and an old elevator then pulled up from the ground, arm was still covering the wound while I was doing my best helping her out of the car.

As the elevator descend the underground, we got into a room, full of martial art gears and sandbags, some wooden weapons on the walls.

As we walked past it, we got into a computer system, looked quite high tech for the place.

There were some notes on a giant board, with pictures that looked like those from the online sources I saw.

Wonyoung’s wound seemed to take its toll onto her, as her body started to loosen balance, dropped down from her knees again.

Until a small totem, looked like made from stone, started to glow in blue light. The light then started to flow onto her wounds, slowly nullifying the poison running through her veins.

The process seemed to be quite painful, as she had to hold down herself just to get through it for a few moments, her eyes squinted and her teeth grinded to themselves until it stopped completely.

“You’re, ok?”

“I’ll recover soon.”

“You mind telling me… what just happened?”

“It’s hard to explain to you, things are complicated.”

“At least, well, let me know why all this happened . I mean, I just witnessed two people being killed, and you in your ... transformed state just fought off that creature, and that magical stone just “cure” you. I think I would like to know what I was dealing with?”

Wonyoung stayed quiet for a bit, then she opened her words.

“How can I trust you? We just met.”

“Well, I think it’s up to you then, at least so far, I did everything you’ve been telling me right? I guess I’m partially involved into this debacle now.”

“it’s hard for someone to believe in what just happened, and I can’t trust you that fast.”

“Well, I do, because I was looking for this this entire time here. I followed the rumors and information, pictures I could find online about this mystery, I’m just surprised You are the one I’m looking for.”

I then showed Wonyoung pictures, info on my phones, my notes, everything I could tell her about my trip until now.

“Even with your information, I still don’t know if I could fully trust you to tell you what happened.”

“I think if I even spill this out, hardly anyone going to believe a total stranger not from this town too, right? And according to you the police didn’t do a good job Like I said, I’m involved in this already and, I do want to help too, if not I already ran away after you got injured from the monster and I didn’t . So please, you can trust me on this, even if it’s just a little.”

Wonyoung stayed quiet again for a few secs, then she started her explanations.

“It was a healing process, the stone used its power to cure the poison, and it can only be cure by that light.”

I sit down to the bed next to me, then walks towards Wonyoung who was still in the process of catching her strength.

“That monster, it ...”

“That wasn’t the first one, I defeated many before.”

“Woah... ok, like, only you?”

“Yes.”

“And … that form, is it... some sort of armor? or … are you a human being?”

“ I am a human, and that was part of my body, I change into it at will”

“Oh... ok, but… how did you find us?”

“ I can sense the creature, but I should’ve got there earlier, now that Chad was being killed, it will cause some more rumors . We cannot tell the local police about this, they won’t believe us, believe me I tried before.”

“Oh ok, so, I mean, what now, what should we do now?”

“We must find the last one, so others won’t suffer the same fate. I know that thing is still out there.”

“There are two of them?”

“3, counting the one I defeated today, was 2, so the last one is still out there somewhere.”

“That sounds dangerous, should we notify the police.”

“The police won’t help you much, believe me, I tried. They listed them as missing people or someone playing pranks.”

“But we could let them know to protect people, right?”

“I can protect them; with my abilities I will do at all costs. This isn’t for debate.” Wonyoung looked at me with fierce eyes

“Ok, I guess we have to keep it to ourselves then.”

“That was also a risky move you did there, two risky moves actually.”

“But … You were struggling and I was trying to fight back”

“ I get your effort, and thankfully it did work out, but do not be that risky again. Those things won’t hesitate to kill a bystander”

I then sat down to a chair, stayed quite a bit, then I opened myself again

“So... that creature, what was that thing?”

“They’re called the Gara, they’re creature from a long time ago.”

“How do you know?”

“The belt here talked to me.”

Wonyoung showed me the belt forming around her waist, then it disappeared

“So, you transformed into that … form, through that belt? Is it some source of magic?”

“ I don’t know about it, it seems to come from ancient time, and to my understanding, there are some links between it and the monsters.”

“So, this belt, it gives you powers to transform? how long have you’ve been doing this.”

“Nearly a year, I hunted down many before the ones targeting Yujin. Keeping it a secret to people, until I recognized Old Bill were able to take pictures of me, so I had to do my best to deter the attention of others from his posts.”

“You ... hacked into his network?”

“Sort of, I used ghost accounts to stray his information, I guess, I doesn’t work with you.”

“Well, to be fair, my curiosity nearly killed me if you weren’t there, but hey at least I met you.”

“You got thrown off hard by that Gara, you good?”

“A few scratches and bumps but I’ll be good, don’t worry.”

“Good.”

“But Wonyoung, that thing it can track people, how are we going to get there faster than it can?”

“I have my ways; I’ll beat him for sure. I will make sure I will get to him being anyone being killed.”

As Wonyoung finally eased down Yujin and taking care of her, Wonyoung then turn up her PC system, then opening some files.

On the screen, there are multiple sightings of those creatures, with some videos, blurry photos from different sources online.

“You told me, you got the information about the Gara online, right? Have you seen theses too?”

“Yes, I did. and some of theses old Bill gathered online.”

I then showed Wonyoung more pictures through my tablets. She squinted her eyes at some of them, then zoom in and out on three specific photos

“These 3,they look similar to me.”

“They? I thought they were all you?”

“No, my belts and colors do not show these colors.”

“So ... does this mean, there are someone else ... with the power like you?”

“Possibly. I’ve never seen anyone around here with similar power like me. I can’t sense their presence.”

“So maybe theses are from different places outside of here? Do you think we should look for them?”

“The belt did give me a premonition about it.”

“Oh really?”

“The first time I got this power, when it awakened in me that day, I got a premonition about other people with powers like me, but it was blurry. Since then, I’ve been looking around here but I couldn’t sense anyone.”

“Should we look for them? I mean, I can help you more since now there’s two of us?”

“Why are you so interested about this?”

“Because my reporter’s blood is boiling to find the mystery, but, after today, I think, you need some companies, to help you fight back these things. And I think the other three are part of that solution. These “Gara” thing, they are dangerous, and I think we need more hands to protect people.”

Wonyoung stays silent a bit before letting out a deep breath.

“Ok, I trust you on this part, no further. Once we’re done with it, we’re also done with everything, you got me? I don’t want to drag more people into this mess. But I warned you, any sign of double-crossing, you know where it will end ” Wonyoung stared at me with a stern voice.

“I don’t think I dare to do that after seeing how capable you were today honestly.” I tried to calm her down.

“Okay.”

“So Wonyoung, do you know why they only target some people, like, not on a large scale?”

“I’ve been wondering about it for a while, and from I’m seeing, there’s a... pattern.”

“Pattern? Like they ... only kill specific people?”

“I noticed by the way I could sense them. The victims, they often had a larger aura of energy projecting from them. The Gara seems to target only those. And ...”

“And?”

“I was one of the victims too. The day I awakened my power, one of them found me, and I could sense it when that Gara attacked me, right here.”

“How did you survive?”

“I managed to defeat it, since then, I take these responsibilities seriously to not letting anyone suffer that same fate. I saved some but also lose some too.”

“Must’ve been hard for you, all that time.”

“I’ve toughened up over time. There’s no room for weakness.”

“But you can use some help, right? I mean, even if you’re capable, I think you should let others help you too. Not like you cry for help all the time don’t you think?”

“For now, I’m doing the best I can, and I want to keep it that way. Once we’re done with finding the others, and hopefully we do, we part ways.”

“Sure, whatever you say, won’t argue with you on that.”

Wonyoung finally healed from her wounds. She stood up and did some shadowboxing to test her strength. Quite impressive movements I would say, for someone her frame

“You sure trained a lot huh?”

“Since before this power in me, I’ve been training my entire life.”

“Very hardcore I see, I guess I can… spare with you sometimes? I got some moves on my own!” I tried to loosen up the tension with Wonyoung, but she seemed unfazed.

“I’ve seen your moves, very lacking.”

“Ouch, that hurts.”

“If you have nothing else to show me, I suggest you leave. I can take care of my own now”

“Sure Wonyoung, but do you think tomorrow we should get to old Bill’s, for more evidence? I think we can dig up some more there?”

“I told you I don’t want any more people involved.”

“Look, I get what you’re trying to say, but I think we should get some more leads to this, I mean, some of his leads helped me to find you, and now his photos helped us to know there are more like you in different place, I don’t think it would hurt if we check with him.”

“Old Bill, is an old friend of my late father, I want to keep him safe from all this.”

“So, you haven’t told him about any of this?”

“I want to but could never find a proper occasion.”

“I think, well, I think you should let him know. He can be the best help we can get around here.”

“I ...” Wonyoung startled for the first time that night talking to me. She paused her moves for a few minutes, then, she took a deep breath again with her decision.

“Then, if that’s the way, I’ll meet you in front of his shop tomorrow after my work” Wonyoung sounded a bit reluctant.

“Will do, I’ll see you tomorrow”

I then left the place back to my motel. The party were still going on, so nobody noticed my presence, of course beside the receptionist

“Going back so soon? The party is still on my friend! Go enjoy!”

“Oh no thanks, I feel like I need to hit the bed. Night!”

I lied.

I couldn’t sleep well that night.

So many thoughts in my head.

“Where will this going to go, what is going on, who is the Gara really is anyway? etc.”

My thoughts were running wild through the night

The morning finally came. I kept going on through my day, acting as normal as possible: loitering around, chatted to Ms.Kent about the festival last night without telling her any of those “eventful” details

I even saw Yujin and Wonyoung again, but she seemed to not noticing my presence much

Until the evening

The town seemed like it had a bit more fun than usual, lots of cleaning were on the way from the aftermath.

I rushed myself to Old Bill’sshop, and Wonyoung was already there with her motorbike, right at the door, not in her usual delivery outfit, but in a university jacket and jeans.

She looked ... well, amazing. She made me kept looking at her for a bit until she woke me up with her voice

“You’re late.”

“Got here the best I can.”

Both of us entered the shop, while Old Bill was in the process of setting and packing his stuffs and brewing his drinks.

“Ohh hey you again young man! And ... Wony, my dear, been a while seeing you here.”

“Hey Bill, you’re doing good?” Wonyoung greeted him with a smile and softer tone.

“Very well my dear, look, I just got some new collections !”

“You’re always the same Bill, reminds me of my dad all the time.”

“He sure was a fine collector himself too! So, what can I help you two? Seems kind of odd you’re in here together?”

“Remember those pics you gave me Bill? We want to talk to you about it.”

“Oh ... What happened, did you find anything else about it?”

“Actually, we do.”

“Bill, there’s ... there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, since the day my dad passed, I... discovered something.”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Something I’ve been hiding from you for a while, that was why I didn’t meet you much. I think it would be dangerous for you to know.”

“My dear, you’re like a daughter of mine. Your father entrusted me to look after you even if we don’t have many interactions, I want you to know you can trust me with anything.”

Wonyoung stays quiet for a bit.

“Then Bill, this is what I wanted to show you.”

Wonyoung stepped back a bit. She held her palms around her waist, forming a cyan light turning into the belt, with the cyan ring glowing around the circular gem in the middle.

Wonyoung then raised her right arm in diagonal across her body, palm pointing towards the left side of her body. She then spelled out a word in a calm but powerful tone.

“HENSHIN!”

As Wonyoung swiped her right palm over the circular glowing ring, the armor started to manifest from the belt, spreading across her limbs like forming a shell all over her entire body, then finished with a “melting down” process, revealing the armor from the molten shell, finished with a glowing action from her rounded bug-like eyes.

It was... unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Her body, now cladded in some sort of exo-skeleton armor, with a dominant black color, cyan over the breast plate, arms and legs. Even the “Face,” or helmet I think, is in cyan, with two antennas formed from the forehead, like an insect, and glowing pink eyes, almost if a grasshopper and a human cross-species.

Around her neck is a scarf-like piece folding down like wings behind her back, created the visual of those dirty bike rider.

“My word... Wonyoung, you’re... you’re that one, the one I saw that night!”

“Yes.”

“And the one in the pics, it’s you ... right my dear?”

“I know Bill, this is why I kept a secret. I’ve been fighting... monsters, monsters that attacked people. I use this power to protect them. They targeted people, only specific ones, and... you were one of the targets too. That night, I was protecting you from one.”

“Woah Wonyoung, so … Bill was one of the victims too?”

“Yes, luckily, I beat that one before it could get to him”

“So, the rumors online are true, there are monsters attacking people. And this, I never thought, it would be you my dear Wonyoung, who’s been protecting me and people all this time.”

“I am not sure if I’ll be able to protect everyone, but, I’m willing to carry that burden.” Wonyoung de-transforms immediately.

“My dear Wonyoung, you shouldn’t hold this to your own, I’m here for you. I won’t tell anyone about this. You can trust me, like how you dad did.”

“Promise me you will Bill.”

“I will my dear, until this old man out of his breath.”

“So Old Bill, you told me, you got more info online, right? The pics that you found, the other three humanoid creature.“

“isn’t that you my dear Wonyoung?”

“No Bill, that’s what we’re trying to find out today.”

“Come here you two, let me close the door.“ Old Bill hurried himself to close the door, then open his PC to show us his files

“According to what I found, these photos are being taken from different locations, this magenta colored one, it’s in … yes, San Wataru town. And the yellow-ish one right here… hmm, Arakawa town. And this one, huh, this one doesn’t seem to be a known location.”

“So, we located two, the last one, is still a blind mystery.”

“Yes, I’m still finding sources for the last one. But to no end. But I can keep going on.”

“While we’re going to find the last monster from this town.”

“There’s more?”

“Yes Bill, I think from what I can sense, that one will be dangerous. Don’t go anywhere much until I defeat it. Even though I already defeated the one targeted you, there’s no promise that new on will not targeting you. I must find the other victims too.”

“Sure, my dear, anything else I can do for you?”

“No Bill, please stay safe, I can .”

Suddenly, Wonyoung turned her head over the door in suspense

“The Gara, I can sense it.”

“What the, where is it?”

“I got to go, stay here.”

“Wonyoung I’ll go with you “

“NO, just stay here.” Wonyoung rushed through the door

“I can’t let her go alone Bill, she got injured yesterday, she needs help”

“Go, take this thing, go help her”

Old Bill then pulled out in his closet, a blaster, then gave it to me.

“Pull this lock, and it will activate the bullets for you.”

“What the, how the hell you have this?”

“I’ll tell you later, now go help her!”

“Ok!”

As I rushed out, Wonyoung already hopped on her motorcycle, speeding up towards a direction as I also did my best to follow her in my car.

“Wonyoung wait for me!”

I hit my pedal and speeding up after her.

Wonyoung sped up towards the direction of the coast, took me a few moments to catch up with her, but no way I could match her side by side.

Once we both reached the coastline, Wonyoung ran fast down the hill to the sand beach, where we could see a Gara monster, looked like the last one I saw, but with some noticeable difference.

This one, while visually similar, had some sort armored texture on its torso, bigger mandible and spider-like eyes, carrying a claw weapon from its right arm.

When we’re close to be there, the Gara almost attacked a small family, scared them running away and on the verge of killing them, if not for Wonyoung’s interruption by jump kick on the side.

“Run! All of you run!”

“Ok … kids, get away from here!!!”  The parents yelled out to their kids.

The Gara enraged, it growled a loud sound before lunging towards Wonyoung, in which she dodged to the side, with the Spider Gara hit his claw to the sand, poisoning it wit its venom, making a dark spot in the sand.

Without hesitation, Wonyoung then striked her pose, like how she did in front of me and Old Bill.

Her belt appeared on her waist, glowing in cyan color. Swiping her palm towards the belt, she spelled out her word

“HENSHIN!”

And with that, her body started to glow in Cyan light, transformed into her full suited up, or armored up state, eyes glowing in pinkish color.

The two then engaged in a brutal fight. The Spider Gara were full of strength, delivered huge blows towards Wonyoung

“BAAM”

“WHACKK”

Wonyoung wasn’t afraid of any of its strikes, she countered his moves with her weapons, giving him hits after hits with her kicks and from her weapons.

Her hits were raw and brutal, aiming to its face and torso, with its blood bled out to the sand.

“WHACK”

“POW”

The Spider Gara even more enraged, shot out his webs to block Wonyoung’s strike, neutralized her weapons and her arms.

It repeatedly slashes its claw towards Wonyoung, as she did her best to counter with  her legs by doing some kicks.

“WHACK !! BAMM”

The Spider Gara countered back, it caught onto her legs, making her lose some balance, then it slammed her down hard to the sand.

Wonyoung struggled to get up due to its left arm pinning her down, even if she did her best using her now freed left arm to hit its mandible.

I rushed it, pulled the lock from the blaster, then aim at the Gara’s head.

“BOOM”

The recoil of the blaster shook my hands a bit, therefore the shot hit its thigh instead of its head, making the Gara turned its head towards me immediately in full anger.

Taking the chance, I kept shooting at it, giving Wonyoung the chance to break free from its grip.

She used her leg to kick into its abdomen, enough force for her to escape its claw, then with her now freed right hand, hit its face in full force

“WHACK!!”

The Spider Gara fell back a bit, but it recovered right await due to its stamina.

It then delivers a shockwave through the sand by punching its fist, creating an avalanche, with Wonyoung had to shield herself by doing the same with her weapon, slamming them to the sand and created a cyan colored force field.

The shockwaves clashed into each other, knocking both down and flew away a few feet, with the Gara stuck in a sand hole while Wonyoung rolled her body down to the seawater.

I then rushed towards Wonyoung to help her the best I can without caring about the danger we were having.

“Come one Wonyoung! Let’s bail! That thing is too strong for you! We need some plans!”

“I told you to stay back! Why did you follow me ??”

“Call me stubborn, whatever, but that thing we need a plan to beat him, you’ve been fighting him for that last 15 min, and it still didn’t even feel much, come on let’s hide inside those caves over there !! We need to figure something else!”

I hurried up Wonyoung as we both escape the Spider Gara, about to escape the sand hole, angrier and full of rage than ever. I shot back at the Gara with my blaster, distracting it enough for us to hide.

“Come here Wonyoung! We should hide there!”

Me and Wonyoung ran into the hidden part of the cave, where the Gara couldn’t see us. Then we cowered down behind a large rock, with the Gara was still lurking around looking for us

“Ok, what’s the plan, should we trap it here? Lure it inside here?”

“This one is probably the strongest I ever faced. The ferocity is dangerous; I couldn’t beat it with my usual strikes like the others.”

“Then that’s the reason why we need a plan . What do you have Wonyoung?”

“I think it has a weakness.”

“Can you pinpoint it?”

“I noticed, when you shot into its thigh, I could feel that it felt something more painful  than the usual hit. If I can strike a harder hit towards that same spot, I can beat it.”

“Then you need a distraction, me. I’ll distract it while you wait for the time to strike.”

“No, I will do it, you stay here.”

“Again Wonyoung, if you keep going with this pace, the fight will get longer, and that won’t end well. This one like you said, it’s way stronger, we need a teamwork, and we need it now”

Wonyoung stays quite a bit, then she peeked out towards the rocks nearby the sand, in which she found something.

“Ok, you see that part of those rocks.”

“Yeh, I see that, there’s a slump down.”

“If I. .. I mean, if WE can lure it to be trapped in between those rocks, I could hit it with my strikes. Can you distract it long enough until then?”

“Sounds like a plan, a daring one, but it’s a plan, let’s go!”

We both got out of the cave and proceed with the plan. Once I saw the Spider Gara, I gave him a few shots just to get its attention

“Fuck you asshole !! Come here and get me you piece of shit !! “ I screamed out and ran fast towards the rocks while the Spider Gara, using its spider-like abilities to swings and pursued me in full rage and growl.

Luckily for me, I had a good record of stamina to run as fast as I could, if not, I might turn into dust by now. Never thought one day I would encounter such vile creature.

Once I ran over the rocks, the Gara caught up with me. It shot the webs to my foot, made me stuck there.

“Oh shit.” I thought my life would end right there once its approached me with its poisonous claw and venoms.

Suddenly, Wonyoung, from the side, lunged herself towards its thigh.

With her charged up weapon, she hit it with the hardest hit, breaking it leg.

Dark blood spilled out to the rocks, as the Gara’s other leg were being held from the lump of the rocks due to the impact.

“GRAAGHAGHAHAHGHAGAAGGHA!!!!”

The growl of the Gara pierced through the sky. The plan worked.

Wonyoung then continue her strike, repeatedly hitting it with her weapons, weaken its strength, then in one blow, she hit it down to the sand below.

“WHACK !! BAMMM !!!! POWWW !! WHACCKKK !!”

The Gara, now severely weakened, crawling down towards the beach with its limping body just to hide from her.

But Wonyoung, in one final move, charging up the energy from her belt into her right leg.

The energy from the belt glowed in cyan, running down her ankle, making her right foot condensed of energy.

And in quick succession, she jumped up in the air, did a marvelous forward somersault towards the Gara. Then, she delivered a flying side kick towards its body, sending the Spider Gara feet away to the water.

“BAAAAAM “

A giant explosion came right after the final blow, finally destroyed the Spider Gara

“KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”

Its body engulfed in Cyan flame, created a huge explosion, signaling our victory.

I finally get rid of the web comb on my foot, then ran fast towards Wonyoung down the sand.

“Did... did we ... did we win?”

“It’s done.”

“You beat it Wonyoung!”

“No, WE beat it. Thank you.”

Wonyoung then reverted and gave me a slight smile, the first one since we met.

Some bruises and such were visible on her body, with her trying to catch her breath from the tiring encounters.

“You’re the heroine Wonyoung, you saved everyone!”

“And... I couldn’t beat it without your assistance, you... did well, Tyler”

“No biggies, I’m glad I can help . Now come one, let’s get you back to your hideout. Can you ride back there, or you need a ride.”

“I can, let’s go, we shouldn’t stay here long.”

The two of us then walked out of the beach, then quickly getting back to Wonyoung’s hideout.

A moment later, I was helping her with some bandages for her wounds and bruises. Surprisingly, she was also a bit more open to me

“Ok, I think this is pretty ok, the wounds will heal later on.”

“Glad I can help you out Wonyoung.”

“I’m sorry I was being quite harsh and distant with you. It just, I’m not used to have companions

“Non-taken Wonyoung.”

We then settled down a bit until the night comes in.

“So, Wonyoung, you think there will be more?”

“I couldn’t sense any of the Gara’s Presence here anymore. Since we beat that one, their “senses.” were quite gone.”

“Huh, maybe that’s a relief. I hope we won’t encounter any of them anymore.”

“I hope so.”

“But Wonyoung, why are you so determined to work alone like this?”

“Because…”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

“NO, because… Because my father, he was the one who awakened the power before me.”

“What?”

“My father, he was the first one that … the Gara attacked in front of me. But his body couldn’t handle it over time, and ... he did his best.”

“So, you, and your dad, were supposed to have the power together?”

“I... think so. People thought my dad passed due to illness and such, and I wanted to keep it that way. Once it was my turn awakened my power, I worked through it, I trained hard for it, I kept it a secret from everyone, because I wanted his passing wasn’t in vain.”

“So, if your dad could awaken his power, does that mean, there were more people that could awaken their powers  than just the other three we’ve seen on those pics?”

“And they might suffer that same fate as my dad too. Maybe not everyone can control the power”

“Do you think, the Gara attacked the people, who could... you know, have the power?”

“Could be, because I can sense the energy, through the victims, but not as strong as mine. I never encounter anyone with similar energy sense, or power like me.”

“Well, I guess now we’re kind of know why they were attacking only a few people.”

“And now, with the premonitions, I think, I should find the other three. We might solve the secret of my power even more.”

“I think that’s a plan, we should meet old Bill again tomorrow before we go. I’m with you Wonyoung.”

“Sure”

We stayed quiet for a moment, then I did my best to break it

“You know, for a handmade cave, you sure packed a lot of stuffs!”

“I invested in everything here, I like it.”

“It looks cool though! Man, I wish my place is this big ha-ha. Say, you want to spar with me a bit? Since, you know, you’re... kind of healed physically.”

“Are... you sure?”

“I mean, I might either get wiped by you, or I wipe you off the floor aha “

“Sounds like a challenge.”

We both stood up and walked to the mat, where I tried to impress Wonyoung by doing some shadowboxing

“So, you know how to do that.”

“Of course, I learned through some classes myself!”

I then face Wonyoung, then trying to strike a pose

“I can go easy on you.”

“Nope! Go hard on me if you can Wonyoung! I can take it!”

I surely did not know what was in my head that moment. Imagine trying to beat the person who could beat a vile creature with her bare hands.

I tried to give her some jabs, she blocked it with some counters

“Nice punches, but not good enough for me.”

“Oh, then you will love this !!”

I then lunge myself towards her, giving her a flying punch.

But, with a swift move, Wonyoung used her skill to pin me down with her arm-lock technique, pin me straight down, face up the ceiling, with her sitting on top of me.

“WHACK”

“Ouch, that hurts.”

“Told you so.”

For the first time ever, we looked at each other eyes to eyes. She looked beautiful, even with her slightly messy hair. Her features were mesmerizing during that moment; her round eyes and lips were sexy and alluring.

Something sparked between me and her while we were locking eyes

Something that made us kept staring to each other for a long while, before…

Before… this happened

In an unthinkable moment, our faces reached each other, then we gave out a kiss.

Then one kiss after another

Our kisses were slow and sensual, urging us to do more.

“What… are we doing?”

“I don’t know Wonyoung.”

“But... you seem to like it?”

“And you too Wonyoung.”

“So... are we doing this?”

“What if we do?”

“If we do this, no strings attached between you and me, got it?”

“No strings attached.”

We continued our kisses. She pinned me down with her hands, while I held onto her back, my hands moved along the silky smoothness of her dark hair, then ran down along the length of her waist, down to backside.

Clothes were starting to be removed while we were making out. I kissed her along her neckline while she was removing my long sleeve shirt, then I proceeded to remove her jacket, top and sport bra, kissing her breasts passionately.

Her scent was addictive, her skin was smooth, made me eager to do more.

Wonyoung didn’t go easy on me either, she kissed me along my chest, down to my abs, then quickly removed my pants, with my bulge couldn’t stop protruding to the heat of the moment. She didn’t wait for any sec to remove the last piece of clothing on me, then taking my hardened “friend.” and her beautiful lips.

Her movements were slow at first, and she took it deeper, made me let out a sound

“Ahh... shit... Wonyoung... that’s very good ... ahhh”

I gave her signs, she understood quickly. Then she stood up, remove her lower pants, then her thin strap undies, leaving us both naked on the mat.

We got in too far now; there was no going back.

She got to my face, then slowly dropped down her lower body onto me, letting me taste the sweet scent of her vagina, while she continued with my erected rod. My tongue ran along the softness of her folds, while her tongue was swirling around my rod in faster pace.

Her walls were tight, and sexy, my tongue couldn’t stop taking her deeper, with the help of my fingers, while Wonyoung also didn’t leave my shaft a break with her mouth, taking mine down to the base.

“Ahhh... fuckk... Wonyoung... you ... you suck me deep... fuckkkk that’s … so good…”

“Ahh... your tongue… ahh… I… I feel good... so good down there … ahh. Oh shit... ... it’s so good “

We did not stop there, not like that

She once again rode on me, this time, with my rod slowly entered her tight wet walls, leaving us both an erotic moan in unison

“Ahh… that’s... shit... that’s so tight... Wonyoung you’re so tight….”

“Ah….shit… that’s ... so big and hard... inside me... ahh...”

Wonyoung started to bounce on me. Seeing her like this, breathing in and out through the motion while having my hardened shaft inside was a sight, a beautiful sight. Her face was reddened through the bounce, her breathes were harder with her paces, while me down below enjoyed the moment with pleasure. Sweats were forming from both of us, our breathings collided with each other, so were our louder moans

“Ahhh… fuckkkk… Wonyoung… holy fuckkk... you’re… so good with this… ahhh fuckk you’re so hot… ahh fuckkk…. You’re soo tight… you’re wrapping me good... ahhhh”

“Hahh… ahhh..., fuckk. I couldn’t stop… ahhh bouncing… ahhh. … I couldn’t stop my body anymore… ahhh fuckkk …. yours are piercing me hard …fukk ahh…”

Our lips joined each other again, then I pounded her hard upward, making her moan louder, arched her body, face up to the ceiling, hair was defying gravity.

Our bodies kept on slamming into each other, our moans and pleasure reached its maximum, before we had to come to an end, at least, for this round.

“Ahhh fuckkkkk... Wonyoung… I’m … I’m gonna cummm… Oh fuck I’m gonna cummmm !!! I... can’t hold it any longer!!!”

“Hahhh… Me... me too… Oh fuckkkk … ahhhh... I’m… reaching it !! Ahhhhh”

There was nothing that could stop us at that moment anymore

Our liquids shot into each other, loud and full. My cum and hers blasted into each other, filling her up with both of ours. I couldn’t stop myself from cumming, with some of it leaking out of her, as Wonyoung stayed in the position there, enjoying her orgasm, once she didn’t have for a long time.

That was the best thing, beside this “Adventure,” that I had for a while in my boring life. My mind went blank from it.

Wonyoung then dismounted from me, lying next to me, with both of us breathing in and out like we had some hard sparring.

Sweat was running on our bodies, our skins were reddened post-orgasm, making us lie there for a while, before we were able to form some words.

“That was… woah... that was… great.”

“I ... couldn’t believe... we just ... did that.”

“Yeh …”

“You... did better than the sparring…”

“Hah... I guess... I did something good then… don’t you think?”

“Yeh... but... I don’t want to stop... not like this.”

“ME neither… I want more ... Wonyoung… it’s too good not to.”

“No, we won’t stop... not until we both want it to ...”

And we didn’t stop.

We grabbed onto our sweaty bodies again, with sloppier kisses, as if we didn’t care of anything anymore.

Sex was the only thing in our mind at that point.

I let Wonyoung in an all four position, kissing along the back of her neck, then her sexy backline, down to her backside. There, I saw her vagina was still throbbing, still leaking with my cum. The way she arched her back in this position, her sweaty body, her erotic scent, made me feel even harder and wanting to try more.

My hands then grabbed onto her butt cheeks, kneading and kissing them, then I opened them out, revealing her pinkish and small anal hole. I then dove in with my tongue, licking and circling it around her tiny entrance, with Wonyoung let out a moan

“Ah… that place... ahhh...”

“Hmmm... you’re tasting so good Wonyoung… I… I want to take you here…. Can I …”

“Hah... at this point... just do it... take me in there...”

That was erotic, even for her.

I lined up my hard shaft towards her tight entrance, then I slowly entered her.

It was too tight, tighter than I could imagine, but that didn’t stop me to keep trying.

I could feel her breathing were getting harder once I finally put my tip passed her entrance, and even harder and more lewdful once my inches went deeper inside her crazy hot and tight hole.

“Ahhh... ahhhhhh… ahhhhhh... oh fuck… … so.. so tight…”

“Fuckkkk. Omg…. Wonyoung…. Soo tight... so warm…”

“Go... go for it…Don’t stop there.”

And I didn’t stop

I thrusted into her, letting her use to the penetrations. The slow motions made me feel like heaven, her warmth were killing me with pleasure, her walls wrapped tightly around my shaft. I went deeper and faster, pounding her with the best of my abilities from behind, with Wonyoung letting out the loudest sound that I ever heard of her.

“HAHH... AHHHHH… Oh shitt... ahhhh … so hard… so hard and big in me…. AHHHHHH... Oh fuckkkk … Oh…. Aahhhhh... oh FUCKK IT’S SO HARD … AHHHH... that… so good… AHHH”

“FUCKKK Wonyoung… ahhhhh...  FUCKK THIS IS FUCKING GREAT… AHHH Fuckkkk I couldn’t stop…. Ahhhh”

I pounded and pounded harder ; I didn’t want to stop this sensation. I was fully enamored into it, I couldn’t think of anything but breaking her tight anal hole. Her moans were once again colliding with mine, echoing around her hideout.

I grabbed my hands tightly on her waist, leaving some handprints, while my lower body were attacking her non-stop. I gave her kisses from behind, stimulated her vagina, pulling her hair a bit while pounding into her.

Wonyoung’s palms gipped hard down to the mat, her head curved up and down through the pleasures, her breathings were mixing with her loud moans. AT this point, we were close to our climax once again, and our bodies erotically confirmed it.

“FUCKK ... WONYOUNG ... I’M CUMMINGGG !!!1”

“AHHHH... GOOO… DO ITTT.”

My cum shot out again.

My hot cum filled her whole.

Once again for the night, I filled the beautiful girl in front of me

My cum again blasted inside her in shots, made me lose the counts.

Our minds gone really blank with the orgasm

Her juice was also leaking down the mat, so was me cum from her tight hole once I pulled out.

I gave her kisses, and so did she.

We did not waste any moment that night.

We continued our heated moments together through the night, any positions, anything we could think off with each other, until we ran dry.

 We let ourselves wrapped inside our lustful desires with each other, until we couldn’t do no more.

Me, and Wonyoung, both lying on the messy mat after our “battle”.

We just stayed there, until she opened the convo

“That... was ...”

“Yeah... I ... seriously couldn’t believe... we went this far...”

“But... I like it…”

“Me too...”

“All this time, fighting alone, … I closed off to a lot of people… I didn’t want any to get close to me... even my close ones. Sometimes, I like it that way… but some days… I wish I could tell them...”

“Well... at least now... you have my help... and I’m willing too... So… don’t close off to me, ok?”

“I’ll try… but... not that fast... like I said... no strings attached.”

“Got you … on that.”

“Tonight... I like it… but... just keep it that way. Nothing further than this, deal?”

“Deal”

“I also been thinking...”

“Yeh?”

“We must find the other 3. The more this being delayed, the more stakes are rising. And, I feel like, this is only getting started. The Gara, they may be gone from this area, but I don’t believe they’re done for.”

“Sure Wonyoung, I’m with you. Any plans?”

“We will go tomorrow, it’s time I look for the others, let them know, that there are others like them, and we have to do this, together”

“We can do that Wonyoung, like I said, I’m already into this, so you have me as your ally.”

“Thanks Tyler”

“You know, the way you fight, how you look in that ... armor, reminds me of something.”

“Something?”

“Actually, not something, but someone. It’s a superhero show’s character, and my grandad was very into it.”

“Oh?”

“You might find it’s silly but, would be cool if you have that codename, just like that character!”

“And what would it be.”

“How about... KAMEN RIDER? How’s that sounds?”

Wonyoung stayed silence for a while, with myself thought it was a dumb idea to tell her, but to my surprise

“I like it.”

“Well then, from this day on, you will be known, as KAMEN RIDER, sounds cool?”

“Cool”

EPISODE 1 : END

[followingthebutterflies7]

Still With You

Spencer Agnew x Ghost!Reader

Word count: 9.5k

Summary: After dying on the land that now hosts the Smosh office, you haunt the space quietly. That is until Spencer Agnew arrives and slowly, unknowingly, becomes the one person you can't help but love... even from the other side.

Warnings: Themes of death and grief, brief medical emergency, and supernatural elements.

--------------------------------------------------------

You’ve been dead for so long that time no longer makes sense.

Seasons drift like smoke through your memories, fading and reappearing in strange ways. Your name had long since faded from records, your story from memory. The world outside had changed shapes and colors, but the walls of this building have always remembered you.

You are bound to them. Not cursed. Not angry. Just… tethered.

You’re tethered to the Smosh office, though it wasn’t Smosh when you were alive. Back then, it was something quieter. A small plot of land, tenderly taken care of by an elderly man. Then the land was sold, and built on top was a studio. It was small, private, a dusty dream filled with morning light and handwritten notes. Now, a giant building lived on top of the land with its noise and laughter and ringing phones. And yet, somehow, it still feels like home.

You don’t remember how you died. Only that one day, you stopped. Breathing. Moving. Speaking. But you stayed on this mortal plane.

So you would watch. You watched the world rotate through the windows. You watched the building change hands, colors, seasons. 

In the beginning that was all you could do. Watch as new people came and went, carrying mugs and laptops and bits of their lives into the space that once held yours. You didn’t mind them. You didn’t feel much, really, just vague flickers of memory, like the echo of warmth in a long-abandoned blanket.

Then he walked in.

Spencer Agnew.

You noticed him the moment he stepped into the room. He didn’t move like the others, he didn’t demand attention. He didn’t take up space loudly. He wasn’t always making jokes or trying to be heard. He was quieter. Softer. His eyes were thoughtful, quiet in a way you understood. Something about him stirred something in you.

And so you began to watch him.

At first, it was simple. You’d hover near the ceiling when he stayed late, watching the soft blue light from his laptop paint shadows under his eyes as he worked in silence. He always looked a little tired. A little lonely. You recognized the shape of it in him.

One night, he left a mug on the counter of the kitchen, too focused on finishing editing a video to know he missed the sink entirely. It was stained, forgotten, probably destined to be left there for days.

You stared at it. You’d never moved something on purpose before. But you wanted to.

You reached for it, focusing everything you were on the smooth ceramic. It took all your strength. But slowly, slowly, it slid across the counter and settled right next to the sink.

He didn’t notice the next day. But it didn’t matter.

You felt a rush. A flicker of something that hadn’t stirred in decades: purpose.

So you did more. You began to help, just little things, gestures so small he might think he was imagining them.

You straightened a stack of papers that had scattered across his desk, organizing them subtly. You gently nudged his chair back under the table after he left, knowing he would’ve tripped on it when he came back. You tucked his forgotten hoodie, soft and crumpled, onto the arm of the couch for him to find later.

When no one was watching, you’d float close and tidy the notes on his whiteboard, straightening them and placing the schedules in chronological order. Turning off his monitor when he forgot. Plugging in his phone before it was about to die.

It took a lot of your ghostly energy, so your little things to help happened sporadically and would go unnoticed. You told yourself it didn’t matter whether he noticed or not. That doing it for him was enough.

But when he paused one day, just paused, and glanced around the break room after finding his favorite snack already laying out on top of the counter? You felt like sunlight cracked through your chest.

He didn’t say anything. But he smiled. Soft. Confused.

It made you want to do more.

Weeks passed.

You figured out how to move light things without exhausting yourself. You got better at it, more subtle and more careful. You learned the hum of his routine: when he came in, when he needed quiet, when he needed comfort. You adjusted the thermostat on cold days. Nudged his chair into the beam of sunlight in the late afternoon.

You noticed he liked Mountain Dew Kickstart, but with all his late nights he would keep forgetting to buy more. So you pushed the last can to the front of the mini fridge. He drank it the next day and murmured, “Huh. Thought I was out.”

You nearly burst.

You had never been able to help someone like this before, not even when you were alive. And now? Now you were part of his life in little ways. Hidden ways.

And it made you happy.

Eventually, you got bolder.

You pushed his keyboard back when he started dozing off at his desk. You lowered the lights when he had a headache. You turned on a calming playlist, some lo-fi and soft piano, when he seemed overwhelmed.

You started caring. Not in some abstract, ghostly way.

You tried to take care of him. Because it was the only way you could. You worried about him. About how late he stayed, about the knots in his shoulders, about how often he put others first and forgot himself entirely.

You wondered if he was lonely.

Because you were.

But you didn’t feel so alone anymore when he was here.

And sometimes, just sometimes, you let yourself think: Maybe I’m not just helping him. Maybe he’s helping me too.

Months passed.

Spencer paused more, noticing the little things you did for him around the office. No one noticed but him. And even then, he never said anything. But he saw.

The way his hoodie never ended up on the floor, even when it was completely hanging off the back of his chair. The way his spilled pens on his desk always found their way back to their cup. The way the room was always just a little more comfortable than it had been a moment before.

He started to pause longer. Smile wider.

Spencer came into work one morning to find his desk completely clean and organized. He had swore he left a mess the night before, having  an extremely long day of meetings and editing. He thought he hadn't bothered to clean, just wanting to go to bed and whispering under this breath that he would deal with it in the morning on his way out the door. 

He now stared at his spotless desk, tilted his head and muttered, “Weird.”

But he wasn’t scared.

He was curious.

That night, you sat by his desk long after he left. You hovered just above the surface, fingers ghosting over the place where his hand had been.

You ached. Not painfully. Not tragically. But in that quiet, hollow way you ached for something just out of reach.

-------------

The moment it changed forever was so simple.

Spencer was in the kitchen by the microwave, heating something up. Leftovers, maybe, you weren’t sure. You were just happy he remembered to eat. He looked tired. His hair was a mess, one shoelace undone, wearing that old sweatshirt he loved so much it was practically unraveling.

He turned toward the sink. The plate and fork he needed was already there, clean and waiting.

He hesitated.

Looked around.

No one else was in the office.

He stood there for a second, his brow furrowed. And then, so softly, like it might break something-

“…Thanks.”

Just one word.

But it shattered through you like thunder.

He didn’t even know what he was thanking. Maybe he thought it was a coincidence. Maybe he was humoring himself. But it didn’t matter.

Because he said it.

He felt you.

And you, a ghost lost to time and memory, smiled for the first time in years.

You weren’t just echoes anymore.

You were real.

To him.

After he says thank you, you don’t move for a long time.

You hover in the corner of the kitchen, soaking in the sound of his voice. You play it back in your head again and again. How he said it without sarcasm, without fear. Just softly. Like it came from somewhere quiet and sincere.

Like he meant it.

For months, you’d done things in secret. Left no proof, no trail. You’d given yourself a hundred small joys watching him smile at the results without ever asking why.

But now? Now he knows someone is here.

And you want more.

That thought terrifies you.

You don’t know if it’s allowed, ghosts wanting more. Longing for something beyond flickering lights, clean dishes, and folded sweatshirts. But it’s too late. The want is already there, blooming like ivy in the corners of your soul.

You start to leave signs. Small, gentle things. A tiny paper heart on his desk made from the corner of a Post-it note. A thumbprint in the dust that spells a crooked hi.

You think he’ll laugh. Maybe roll his eyes. Pretend it’s someone messing with him.

But he doesn’t.

He pauses. He stares. His lips curve, but not in mockery. In awe.

“Okay,” he murmurs one night. “So you’re real.”

Your breath, if you could take one, would catch.

You’ve never felt so seen.

You get braver after that.

You leave little notes. Tiny, careful things. Never too much, never enough to frighten him. A single word here. A short phrase there.

Rest.

Eat something.

You’re doing great.

He starts talking back.

Not every day. But when the office is empty, and the lights are low, and the moonlight spills through the only two windows in the office, you hear his voice.

“You’ve got good timing.”

“Are you watching over me?”

One night, he leans against the doorway, cradling a tea you left him, and says, “You’re the best coworker I’ve ever had.”

You laugh. Not out loud. But the kind that ripples through your whole being like a warm wind.

Because you are more than a ghost now. You are company. You are comfort. You are someone.

The next note you leave him next takes all your energy. You pour everything into it, into forming the words on a sheet of printer paper you drag slowly into place. Just a simple sentence in your old, looping script:

I see you too.

It sits on his keyboard when he arrives the next day.

He freezes when he sees it. You watch the color drain from his face. He picks up the note like it might vanish. His thumb traces the edge of the paper. For a moment, you think he might cry.

Then, softly, reverently, he whispers, “I believe you’re real.”

You want to reach for him. To touch his hand. To tell him that you’ve never felt more real than you do right now, standing unseen beside him in this strange little office that somehow became your shared home.

He folds the note gently and presses it to his chest.

You stay with him the rest of the night.

Not just in spirit. In feeling. In presence. In love.

Because that’s what this is now, isn’t it?

It’s love.

It’s gentle, impossible, bittersweet love. And you would stay in these walls a thousand years more if it means being near him.

-------------

You don’t remember what death felt like. But you’re starting to wonder if it felt like this-

The moment Spencer falls.

He’s alone again, editing late. You’ve settled in your usual corner, watching the glow of the screen cast soft halos over his tired face. You’re learning to read his expressions; the little lines of stress, the way his eyes dim when he’s too tired, the way his fingers pause when he forgets he hasn’t eaten.

But this time… his hand falters.

One second he’s typing, half-lidded with exhaustion, a sandwich uneaten beside him. The next, his hand seizes up. His posture wavers. You see it before he even knows something’s wrong. That subtle drop in energy. The sharp breath. The way his fingers fumble over the keys.

You float forward, immediate and desperate.

He breathes sharply and leans forward, gripping the edge of the desk. A sound escapes his throat, tight and strained.

“Spencer,” you whisper, though you know he can’t hear you.

He tries to stand from his chair. Doesn’t make it.

His knees buckle. He crumples.

You scream. No one hears. You reach for him out of instinct, but your hand passes through his arm as he collapses hard onto the carpet.

Spencer slams against the floor, his head missing the edge of the desk by inches.

You’re at his side in an instant, panic coursing through every particle of you. You can’t touch him, can’t feel his skin or press your hands against his chest or scream into the void loud enough to make anyone hear.

He’s not okay.

He’s not okay.

His breath is shallow. Quick and weak. His face, flushed minutes ago, is now pale and clammy.

You hover over him, trembling. Your edges begin to blur.

You don’t know what’s happening, only that it’s urgent. Only that if someone doesn’t come, you’ll lose him.

You can’t lose him.

You just got him.

You scan the room wildly. There has to be something. Some way to reach someone.

His phone’s too far. You can’t move anything heavy. You can’t scream loud enough for the walls to echo.

But then-

His laptop.

Open.

Slack window still up.

Angela’s name glows green in the corner.

Your energy is limited, condensed and fleeting, but desperation changes things. You hover above the trackpad and pull yourself together into a single point of energy.

This isn’t like pushing a chair or flickering a light. This is control. This is direct.

You’ve never tried anything like this before.

But love has made you bold.

The mouse jerks once. Unnatural. But it moves.

You almost lose yourself.

Then again.

Your vision flickers. The edges of your world tremble. 

You focus. Channel everything you are.

Click.

Message box open.

You slam yourself into the keys.

come now

spencer need help

please

It looks garbled. The grammar is wrong. The punctuation disappears midway. But it’s enough.

You hit enter.

You see Angela type back almost instantly.

who is this???

is this a joke?

what’s happening??

Your response is rushed. Broken.

help now

office

please

And then the light beside her name disappears.

She’s gone.

Running.

You collapse next to Spencer’s body, your energy flickering dangerously. You feel your connection to the room beginning to slip. That took everything you had, and you were fading. 

But Spencer’s breathing.

Barely.

Enough.

You whisper to him, though your voice has no weight.

“You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

The paramedics arrive five minutes later.

Angela bursts into the office first, crying and frantic, stumbling when she sees him on the floor. Shayne is with her, shouting directions and keeping her out of the way. The ambulance’s lights reflect in the windows, painting red streaks across your vision.

Angela is sobbing. “I don’t even know who sent it,” she says to Shayne, shaking her head. 

They watch with you as paramedics lift Spencer gently, strapping him onto the gurney. Words are called out that you don’t understand. Vitals. Stabilization. Glucose levels. Dehydration. Stress.

“Geez,” someone mutters. “If we’d been just two minutes later-”

But you don’t let them finish the sentence.

Because he wasn’t two minutes too late.

You saved him.

You did.

Even when you shouldn’t have been able to. Even when death told you there was nothing more to do.

You reached across the veil. And he’s alive.

He’s alive.

You don’t have a body to cry with. No hands to wipe your face. No breath to shudder out in relief. But when they roll him past the reception desk, you follow, your essence weak and fading.

You stay in the doorway, unable to go any further but wishing you could. You watch until the ambulance turns the corner and disappears into the dark.

And then you collapse onto the floor, drained of everything you are, but relief warms you like sunlight through a dusty window.

Because he’s not gone.

Because he’ll come back.

Because Spencer is alive. 

-------------

Three days pass before Spencer returns to the office. 

He moves slower than before. He’s quiet. Each step is measured, careful. There’s still a faint shadow under his eyes, and his shoulders slump like they’re bearing the weight of something heavier than just recovery. But he’s here.

Breathing.

The air changes the moment he walks in.

Everyone gathers quickly, Shanye, Angela, Amanda, the crew from the bullpen. They welcome him back like sunlight breaking after a storm. There are jokes, half-hearted attempts at teasing, but they’re coated in a layer of concern that no one hides particularly well.

“I swear,” Shayne mutters, “when Angela called me, I thought- man, I thought we were gonna lose you.”

Angela wraps him in a hug a little too tight, eyes wet. “You scared the hell out of me.”

And then come the questions.

“How did you get a message out?” “Did you call her somehow?” “Was it a scheduled message or something?” “Did you crawl to the computer or…?”

Spencer just blinks. Tries to remember. 

He frowns faintly, brow furrowed.

“I… don’t know,” he says honestly. “I barely remember. I just… I swear someone was there.”

His voice goes soft. Almost reverent.

He glances upward, looks down the hallway, and his eyes land directly on your corner.

The one near the old filing cabinet. The place you always hovered, where the sunlight painted quiet gold against the wall. The place he’d instinctively grown to glance toward when he needed peace.

And this time, he smiles.

Something in him settles.

When the others finally drift away, back to work and editing and noise, Spencer slips into his chair. 

You’re already there. Waiting.Hovering in the corner of the room like you never left, watching with bated silence, terrified that maybe this will be the time he moves on. That the memory of that night, the miracle, has blurred like a dream.

But he turns his chair.

Not toward his screen. Not toward the door. Toward you. Right into that golden patch of afternoon light.

And he smiles again. Soft. Certain.

“I know it was you,” he says.

Not a question. A statement. A fact. 

You blink the fairy lights above him. Just once. A slow, gentle pulse.

It’s the only way you know how to say: Yes.

Later that evening, when the office empties and dusk begins to settle into the corners, Spencer doesn’t touch his laptop. He just sits. Not editing. Not working. Just... being.

The lights are low. The room hums with the last warmth of the day. A soft breeze rustles a sheet of paper on his desk. You stay nearby, coiled in the silence. 

“I don’t know how you did it,” he murmurs into the quiet. “But I’m still here.”

He reaches forward slowly. His hand, still pale with recovery, hesitates over the desk before he lays it palm-up against the wood.

“If you can… if you’re listening,” he says,  “can you touch me?”

You don’t move at first. You're afraid.

But then you float closer. Closer still.

You hover just above his hand.

You know it won’t be like skin on skin. It never will be. But maybe, if you try hard enough. You gather everything you are;  memories of sunlight on your skin, the warmth of a summer laugh, the feeling of his breath as he sleeps on the couch beneath you.

And you lower your hand.

The tips of your fingers brush his palm.

He gasps.

His breath stutters, sharp in the quiet.

“I felt that,” he whispers, stunned.

His fingers curl slightly, like he’s trying to hold the feeling in place. It’s not solid, but it’s there. Like static. Like the whisper of wind across skin. Like the warmth that lingers after someone’s hand has already let go.

He looks up and straight at you. Right through you.

But his gaze is clearer now. Sharper. Like he almost sees the shape of you.

“I don’t care what you are. Ghost, spirit, angel- I don’t care.”

His voice cracks at the edges.

“You saved my life.”

And in that moment, you want to cry. You want to scream. You want to fold yourself into him and say everything you’ve held in silence. That you watched over him. That you listened to every word. That he brought you back to life in all the ways that mattered.

But you can’t say it.

So instead, you reach again. You let your hand hover just over his chest, where his heartbeat flutters beneath the fabric.

And he places his own hand there.

They pass through each other, flesh and air. But you swear, in that moment, the space between you shimmers. It’s not a pulse. Not exactly.

It’s a promise.

You’re not alone.

Not anymore.

And neither is he.

-------------

Spencer starts leaving the lights on when he leaves the office. 

Just in case you want to see. Just in case you get lonely.

He knows it’s silly. There’s no switch in the afterlife. No bulbs to warm a ghost’s hands. But still, he can’t bring himself to leave you in the dark. Not after everything.

He brings two mugs of tea from the kitchen now. One filled with his favorite, and the other one with what he always imagines you’d choose. He sets yours down gently across from his laptop before settling in with his own. And even though he knows you can’t drink it, he still waits a beat before sipping, like he's toasting you in some invisible ritual.

It’s simple. Soft. Like he’s sharing something special with you.

He talks more now. Quiet, half-hushed confessions between midnight edits and the blue glow of his monitor. It starts with little things. Just how his day was. What he saw when he went out. How he's trying to cook more, write more, be more.

“I used to be scared of being alone,” he says one night, absentmindedly. “Not scared-scared. Just… aware of it. Too aware.”

He glances toward your corner, the one you always linger in and where the light hits gold across the carpet. And for the first time, he smiles at it without sadness.

“But I don’t feel alone anymore.”

Your energy shimmers, soft and warm, and the fairy lights in your corner flicker just slightly in response. The room sighs around him. You stay close.

You always do. 

After a month of your quiet cohabitation, your shared silence, your rituals and rhythms, Spencer begins to research.

Not obsessively.  Not out of fear.

But gently. Curiously.

Like he’s learning the language of someone he’s falling in love with.

You hover over his shoulder as he scrolls through pages titled things like residual hauntings and spiritual anchors. He takes notes on post-its in his quick, looping scrawl. He scribbles questions into a spiral-bound notebook:

Why this building? 

Why me? 

Why now? 

Sometimes he types into the search bar and deletes the words before finishing. Sometimes the questions are too big, or too honest.

You ache to answer his questions. But you’re still bound to silence.

So you respond in the ways you know.

You flip his notebook to a page he skipped. You nudge his pen toward symbols he's overlooked. And one night, you spell the word DREAMS across his keyboard with old magnetic letters from the whiteboard wall.

He sees it.

Stops.

And whispers, “Okay.”

He dreams of you for the first time a week later.

He’s asleep at his desk again. Hishead tucked into the crook of his elbow, soft breaths shifting the papers beneath him. You hover close, heart aching with a love that has no voice.

And then-

You slip in like fog through a crack in the window.

The dream isn’t the office. Not exactly.

It’s an in-between version of it. An echo of what it used to be. Before the paint. Before the furniture. The air is gold and slow, drifting with dust like snowfall. The windows are tall and cracked. The floorboards creak under memory.

You’re already there. Standing in the warmest patch of sun.

Then Spencer appears.

Lighter. Softer. Dressed in one of those worn hoodies you always fold for him. His hair curls at his temples. He looks around-

And he sees you. 

Really sees you.

He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t speak.

He just smiles. A smile so full of wonder and warmth, it nearly breaks you.

Like you’re not just a ghost.

Like you’re a miracle.

You raise your hand.

And this time, in this dream, it connects.

He doesn’t hesitate. He laces his fingers through yours like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“Hi,” he says, softly.

You try to say it back. But the dream is already slipping. You feel it pulling. Fading. You hold on as tightly as you can, but the light stretches and bends. Your feet lift.

His voice chases you into the dark. “Don’t go.”

The next day, Spencer stares at his mug for a long time. 

He doesn’t speak at first. Just runs a thumb around the rim, lost in thought. Then, so quietly you almost miss it-

“I saw you.”

Your energy brushes over his shoulder like wind through leaves.

“I felt you,” he says, eyes glassy with wonder. “In the dream. That was real, right? That was you.”

You answer the only way you can. You reach for the blinds and tilt them ever so slightly. Let the sunlight fall across his desk the way it had in the dream. The warmth touches his hands.

He nods. “Okay. Okay, good. I’m not losing it.”

He places both hands flat on the desk, grounding himself in something that isn't quite the real world anymore.

“You’re trying to reach me,” he says. “And I want to help you back.”

Over the next few days Spencer starts meditating. 

He lights candles. Reads dog-eared library books about crossing veils and tethering souls. He whispers to you in languages older than cities. Draws quiet circles in chalk he wipes away before anyone else arrives.

You watch it all with quiet awe.

He’s not afraid. Not even a little. And when he opens a fresh notebook and titles it Ways to Communicate, you nudge it open to the first blank page before he can.

That night, he asks gently into the silence:

“What’s your name?”

You hesitate.

It’s been so long. 

But you remember the shape of it in your mouth. The rhythm of it on paper. The way it used to sound when someone called for you in another life.

You gather your energy. Press your fingertip into the condensation on the window. And slowly, you write it.

Your name. 

Old. Beautiful. Yours.

Spencer repeats your name under his breath. Like it’s sacred. Then again, softer:

“It suits you.”

Days pass like this.

Nights blur into mornings. He finds little ways to talk to you. You leave answers in signs and shadows. He answers with notes, whispers, the way he leaves half a sandwich on the desk just in case.

You start appearing in his dreams more often, and each time is a little longer, a little brighter. You never speak. But your hands always  find his. And it feels like everything.

In one dream, he brushes your cheek with his thumb.

You cry. You didn’t know you still could. 

He leans forward.

His lips almost meet yours.

But he wakes up before you can feel it.

You do too. 

Both of you left aching with the same unspoken question.

What are we becoming?

One afternoon, he stays late just to read. Not scripts. Not edits. Just a thin book with silver foil lettering titled Crossing. The subtitle reads: When Spirits Choose to Stay. 

You curl beside him on the couch, your energy sinking into the cushions like warmth into fabric. He doesn’t look at you, but he speaks.

“I don’t think you’re stuck,” he says. “I think you chose this.”

He sets the book aside and looks at the place where you always sit.

“You stayed for me.”

You don’t answer with light or movement. You don’t need to.

He hears it in the stillness.

He blinks once, slowly. Then smiles.

“I want to stay for you, too.”

He reaches out, fingers brushing the space beside him.

“Will you keep meeting me in dreams?” he asks. “Until we figure this out?”

You press your hand to the couch cushion next to his. It dips, just slightly. Enough for him to feel. 

He exhales like it’s the first full breath he’s taken in years. And when he lays down, resting his head on the pillow you quietly fluffed behind him, his hand falls into the space where yours would be.

And when he drifts off, you go with him.

Hand in hand.

Step by step.

Somewhere between.

-------------

Spencer buys a candle shaped like a heart.

Not a soft, cutesy heart. A real one, grooved and raw, sculpted in red wax with ridges like veins, chambers twisted into shape. It’s grotesque and honest. Anatomical. Human. 

When it arrives in a cardboard box stuffed with black crinkle paper, it feels more like an offering than a purchase. A typed card inside reads:

To bind what has already been bound. To reach what already reaches back. Burn with intention. Burn with belief.

You hover beside him as he opens it, watching the way his hands hold it like it might shatter.

That night, Spencer sets it in the center of the conference table after everyone else has left. No cameras. No lights but the overhead glow and the soft flicker of flame. No audience.

Just him. 

And you.

Faint music hums from a speaker somewhere in the room, low, lilting, familiar. A song you once drifted to in his dreams. Something sad and warm.

“You don’t have to do this,” you whisper, knowing he can’t hear but hoping he feels the thought anyway.

He lights the candle. The flame curls up like a sigh.

Then he closes his eyes.

“I don’t want to just feel you in dreams,” he says, voice low and trembling. “I want to hear your voice. I want to see your face. I want to know you.”

He takes a deep breath. His hands tremble.

“I don’t care how long it lasts. One hour. One minute. I just want to give you something back.”

Your energy wraps around him, warm and shimmering.

You can feel it. The magic hums like a heartbeat.

The veil is thinning.

And then the world begins to unravel.

Color stretches at the edges of your vision. Light blooms. The walls of the office blur and twist like smoke. You feel your essence folding inward, being woven together. Condensing. Sharpening. And then-

Your knees buckle.

You hit the floor.

You hit the floor.

You feel the floor.

You feel the scratch of the rug beneath your palms. The pulse of the candlelight is warm against your cheek. The weight of the air in your lungs. Breathless, dizzy, real.

You hear the hum of the fluorescent lights above, the creak of the old table, the sound of-

“Hey- hey!”

Spencer’s voice. Closer than you’ve ever heard it.

You lift your head. Slowly. Disoriented.

And there he is. Looking right at you. 

Not through you. Not at your shimmer. At you.

His eyes go wide. His mouth parts, breath caught in his throat. He drops to his knees beside you like gravity has yanked him down.

“You’re real,” he whispers, the words crack as they leave him.

You blink. Try to move. Your fingers twitch, shaky and slow. You try to speak.

Your lips form the word.  “You…”

Spencer reaches out, but stops. His hands hover just shy of your shoulders, as if afraid you’ll vanish the second he touches you.

“You brought me back?” you whisper.

He nods. Shaky. “Can I-?”

You nod before he even finishes the question.

And when his hands land on your arms, warm, solid, grounding, you both gasp at the contact.

It’s like touching something holy.

It’s not perfect. There’s a faint shimmer around your form. You feel fragile, like blown glass or like spun sugar. But you’re here.

He pulls you into a hug before he can think better of it. And for the first time since you died, you feel held.

You fold into him. Arms curling around his back. Your face presses into his neck, and you breathe him in. He smells like citrus shampoo and the worn sweatshirt you always fold. And something else.

Home.

His arms tighten around you like if he holds you hard enough, you won’t slip away.

“I don’t know how long this will last,” he murmurs into your hair, voice thick with disbelief. 

“I know,” you whisper. 

“I’m not going to waste a second of it.”

He helps you to the couch, half-guiding, half-carrying you as your legs remember how to be real. The world feels too big. Too solid. Too beautiful. You sink into the cushions together. He doesn’t let go of your hand once.

“Tell me something about you,” he says. “Anything.”

You hesitate. You have so many lifetimes stored up. You think back to your first one, when you were actually alive. 

“I used to write poems,” you say. “Bad ones.”

He laughs like you just told him his favorite secret.

“Tell me more.”

So you do. 

You tell him about the building, about what it was before. The windows before they were replaced. The peeling wallpaper in the hallway, long painted over now. The way you used to dance barefoot on the floorboards when no one was watching, long before they were covered by concrete.

He listens with the kind of reverence people usually reserve for prayers.

And then it’s your turn.

You ask him questions. What he wanted to be when he was a kid. (A cartoonist.) What his favorite sound is. (The clink of ice in a glass.) What he thinks about when he’s editing at 3AM. 

“��Mostly you,” he says, almost shy.

Your heart stutters.

“Me?”

Spencer nods and leans closer. His thumb traces the inside of your wrist.

“Always you.”

Your body feels like it’s glowing. You don’t know how to carry this kind of love- not with hands so newly real. Not with a body made from borrowed time. But you try.

You try to hold it all.

The candle’s flame starts to flicker.

You feel the shift. A tug at your edges. A soft unraveling. 

Your vision fades around the borders. Your fingers blur. You’re slipping again.

“It’s ending,” you whisper, your voice barely holding.

Spencer shakes his head. “No. Not yet.”

You try not to cry. But tears spill anyway.

You look at him. At this beautiful, quiet boy who spoke to empty rooms and trusted there was something listening.

“I don’t want to go back to being a shadow,” you admit. “Not after this.”

“You won’t.” He grips your hands tighter. His forehead presses to yours. “I’m going to find another way. I swear it. This- this is only the beginning.”

But you both know.

The candle’s flame gutters low. 

Your fingers begin to pass through his again. The grief in his eyes is sharp. Bare.

But just before you vanish completely-

He kisses you.

A trembling, desperate, perfect kiss.

And you kiss him back.

And then you’re gone.

The office is still. Dim. The candle extinguishes with a soft hiss.

Spencer doesn’t move for a long time. He sits in the dark, hand pressed to his lips.

And slowly, softly, he smiles.

“She was warm,” he whispers.

Then he leans back, eyes closed, and lets the last curl of smoke wrap around him like your arms once did. He doesn’t cry. Not because he’s not broken, but because he isn’t afraid.

You came to him.

You held him.

You let him hold you back.

And that means something has changed.

-------------

Spencer doesn’t treat the office like an office anymore.

He moves through it like it’s sacred ground. Like every scuff on the floor and groove in the desk might hold part of you. His footsteps are softer. His routines are slower. Reverent.

He starts whispering your name when he walks in. Not every time,  but when it feels right. When the weight in his chest swells a little too much. When the air smells like dust and lilacs, like the dream where you laughed in the sun.

Sometimes, he doesn’t say anything at all. He just looks toward the corner where you always hover and nod. A quiet “I know you’re here.”

He leaves space for you everywhere. Extra room on the couch. A second chair pulled up to the desk. A mug waiting across from his, cooling slowly but lovingly untouched. Not out of hope now. Out of habit.

And you?

You haunt him. But not the way ghosts are supposed to. You don’t slam doors or rattle pipes. You don’t chill the air.

You haunt him gently.

You fog the mirror in the bathroom with your name when he brushes his teeth after late-night shoots. You flicker the hallway light twice when he’s spiraling in edits. You press your energy into the couch cushions beside him so they dip under your invisible weight, just enough for him to feel you there. 

And sometimes, when he’s half-asleep, half-lost in thought, he reaches out. His hand finds the spot where your thigh would be. He leaves it there, steady, like he's grounding himself in your presence.

You stay as long as you can.

The haunting grows stronger.

Not louder. Not scarier.

Closer.

It’s not about a ghost and a boy anymore. It’s something else. Something in-between.

Spencer dreams of you more often now, and each dream is clearer than the last. Sometimes you speak. Sometimes you don’t need to. The two of you understand each other in ways that don’t require words.

In one dream, you lie on his chest, your head tucked beneath his chin, both of you just listening.

“This is the sound I missed the most,” you whisper, your hand spread over his heart.

He kisses the crown of your head and says, “Then I’ll keep it beating for you.”

He always wakes up with his hand on his chest, right where you rested yours, like your ghost left a handprint behind.

Then, one night, Spencer does something new.

He brings a small book to the office. Leather-bound. Gold-trimmed pages. He sits at the desk and opens it carefully. On the first page, he writes in careful, deliberate ink: 

Things I Know About You

He flips to the next page and writes:

You don’t like cold floors.You always nudge my chair toward the sunlight in the afternoons.You fold my hoodies the way my mom used to.You smell like lilacs when you’re close.You laugh without sound, but the air warms when you do. You saved me.You stayed.

You hover over his shoulder, reading each line. And if your ghost-heart could beat, it would pound. You ache with a kind of love you didn’t know you could still feel, something that belongs not to memory or grief, but now.

You leave him a message that night, etched softly into the condensation of his water glass:

I will never leave you.

He sees it. Reads it. Smiles. He presses his palm to the glass, like he’s pressing it to you. And you stay there, with him, through the night.

From then on, the haunting becomes something shared.

You start to appear in photos. Only in the corners. Only when Spencer’s in frame. A shimmer of light. A shadow that doesn’t belong. 

Once, Angela looks at a selfie and frowns. “Weird blur behind you.”

Spencer grins. “She’s camera shy.”

He never explains. But he doesn’t hide you either.

And you? You start to leave more of yourself behind. Not notes, not objects.

Moments.

A chair rocking gently when he’s anxious. The exact song he needs playing the moment he touches his phone. A soft breeze across his neck when he says something kind.

It’s not control. It’s companionship.

You are no longer the ghost of a girl who died here. You are the presence of someone who stayed. And Spencer treats you as such.

One night, when the office is hushed and full of moonlight, Spencer speaks into the quiet.

“I think we’re tethered together now,” he says. He looks at the corner where you float. “Not cursed. Not stuck. Just… chosen.”

You brush your energy over the back of his neck in response.

He shivers. Smiles.

“Do you want more?” he asks.

You pause.

Because it’s not about being seen anymore. It’s about being known.

And yes, you do.

You want more.

More dreams. More kisses that almost happen. More haunting that feels like coming home. You want to be part of his life in every way you still can.

So that night, when he finally sleeps deep and safe, you drift through the office.

You press yourself into its bones.

The floorboards. The drywall. The wires and frames and vents and baseboards. The lights. The doors. The couch that cradled your borrowed body. Spencer’s desk that holds your name.

You whisper into every inch of it:

Let me stay. Let me stay. Let me stay.

In the middle of the night, Spencer wakes up with a jolt. His heart is pounding. His skin prickles. He blinks in the dark.

You’re not in the dream anymore. You’re in the room.

The lights aren’t on.

But he sees you.

A shimmer of form. A girl in a soft shadow. You’re curled into the chair by the door, legs tucked under you and your chin resting on your knees. 

You’re sitting the same way you used to sit when you were alive.

He stares.

You tilt your head.

And smile.

“Hi,” you whisper.

The word is faint. Barely there. Just a shape in the air.

But real.

Real enough to shatter something in him.

He crosses the room without thinking. Sinks to the floor at your feet like it’s a prayer.

“I missed your voice,” he says, hoarse.

You reach out. 

Your hand doesn’t pass through him this time.

It lands gently in his hair. Fingers threading through the soft curls. 

He leans into your touch like it’s instinct. Like he always knew what your hand would feel like. You don’t know how long it will last. Minutes. Seconds.

But it is lasting.

“You’re really haunting me now, huh?” he says, voice low.

You laugh, quiet and light and human.

“Yes,” you say. “And I always will.”

-------------

You try not to count the days.

The ones where Spencer touches your name in the condensation and murmurs good morning. The ones where he reads aloud from books just so you don’t feel alone. The ones where he falls asleep on the couch and your form curls up beside him, half-dream, half-memory, full heart.

But they start to blur.

And lately... they start to ache.

Not because anything is wrong. But because nothing ever really changes.

He lives in motion. And you are stillness wrapped in light.

It’s getting harder to pretend you don’t notice.

At first, it’s the little things.

He laughs less when he’s alone. He comes in a few minutes later. Leaves a few minutes earlier. Sometimes he stares at his phone for a long time before setting it down and whispering, “Later.”

It’s not distance. Not disinterest.

It’s life.

He’s alive. Still tethered to a thousand possibilities. He has improv shows, dinner plans, the occasional weekend trip to see his parents. Sometimes you watch the calendar notifications pop up on his screen, and you feel your energy pull thin.

He still comes back to the office. Still reaches for you. Still lights a candle on the desk and opens the notebook of Things I Know About You.

But you feel it.

The shift.

Time is moving.

And not for you.

Spencer tries.

Good heavens, he tries.

If anything, he leans in harder. Like he can hold time still by sheer devotion.

He starts consulting with mediums, quietly. Secretly. Not the showy kind. He finds the ones with old eyes and softer words, who talk about energy lines and rituals that respect what already exists.

You watch as he carries home books with brittle pages and ribbon bookmarks. He draws runes in chalk under the conference table. Reads aloud words older than the building itself. Always asking permission. Always looking to build, not break.

You ache as he reads aloud:

To anchor a spirit: bury an object of theirs beneath a shared threshold. To hold them here: offer them a part of your blood. To tie yourself in place: give your body to the space as they did.

And none of it works.

Your form flickers brighter when he tries. You feel the pull. But it never holds. Not for long. You never stay. 

And you know why.

Because you didn’t die for him.

And he won’t die for you.

Not yet. Not for a long, long time.

One night, Spencer curls up on the couch. His hoodie is too big. His eyes are red. He looks younger and older all at once. He tucks his knees to his chest, face turned toward your corner.

“I don’t want to live in a world where you’re just… gone again,” he whispers.

You’re already beside him. You always are. Your form rests in the cushions, curled up like memory. You press your hand to his, soft and fading.

“I’m not gone,” you whisper.

He hears it. 

Barely. 

Like a song softly flowing through a wall. A hum against his ear.

But his chest shakes. He covers your hand with his, knowing where it is without seeing it. 

“I don’t know how to let go of something I never really got to hold,” he says.

You press a kiss to his temple. Your lips don’t land. Not really. 

But he closes his eyes like they do.

-------------

The realization comes one soft afternoon in early spring.

The window’s cracked open. A breeze rolls through, warm and sweet. Spencer’s desk is scattered with papers. He’s humming, absently, tunelessly, as he looks over something.

You hover nearby. You smile.

Until you see what he’s reading.

A job listing.

Head Writer - East Coast. Full Time. Relocation required.

You hover closer. Your energy dips cold for a second. 

It’s not jealousy.

It’s knowing.

He will leave.

Not because he doesn’t love you.

Because he’s alive.

And the living are meant to go.

To grow.

To move.

To live.

You remember the sensation of it. You loved it, once. That sense of possibility. Of forward motion.

But your motion ended long ago.

You’re tethered here.

To these walls. To these floorboards. To the past. To this place.

No to him. 

And Spencer-

He belongs to the world beyond it.

That night, you don’t show up. Not really.

You dim your energy. Stay hidden in the beams and corners. Drift like smoke through the rooms he isn’t in. You can’t bring yourself to look at him.

It hurts.

Not like dying.

Worse.

Because this time, you know exactly what you’re about to lose.

You know the smell of him. The sound of his laugh. The warmth of his voice when he says your name like it’s always belonged to him.

And you know he won’t stay.

Because he shouldn’t.

Spencer notices. Of course he does.

He walks in alone. The air is heavy, too quiet.

“Hey…” he calls gently. “You here?”

Nothing moves.

No light flickers. No gentle wind. He pauses. Sets down his bag. Runs a hand through his hair.

“Are you mad at me?”

Still silence. He sits at the edge of his desk, blinking at the glass.

“I saw the job listing had moved,” he murmurs. “That’s what this is, right?”

Still, you say nothing. Not yet.

“I haven’t applied,” he says quickly. “I don’t know if I will. I- I don’t know anything right now except that every time I think about leaving, my throat closes up like I’m walking away from something I can’t ever get back.”

You flicker, weak.

Then, you gather yourself. You solidify, just enough to show yourself in the glass reflection of the cabinet behind him.

He turns toward you instantly, relief cracking through his face.

“There you are.”

You drift closer.

“I’m not mad,” you whisper.

He swallows hard. “Then why are you hiding?”

You hesitate. Then say it.

“Because I know how this ends.”

His face crumples. “Don’t.”

You reach for his hand. Press yours into it. The contact is faint. But real.

“You’re going to grow up,” you say. “You’re going to fall in love again. You’re going to leave this job, this building. You should.”

His voice is hoarse. “Not if it means leaving you.”

“You will. You’ll have to.”

You look at him with everything you have left.

“But that doesn’t mean you didn’t love me.”

His breath breaks in his chest.

He grips your hand tighter, even as it flickers, even as your form starts to thin at the edges. You’re not dying. Not again. You’re just fading.

It’s time.

You stay with him for one last hour.

You sit together, side by side on the couch, your hand barely touching his, your presence flickering warm in his lap. He talks. You listen.

He tells you the things he never had time to say. That he liked you from the first time his chair tucked itself in. That your laugh in his dreams made his heart ache. That every time he drank tea, he pretended it was a date.

You smile through the blur of your form.

You tell him things, too. That you loved the sound of his typing. That you memorized the smell of his sweatshirts. That you will never haunt anyone else, not the way you haunted him.

That you don’t regret a single second of your forever if it meant spending part of it with him.

When it’s time, you press your lips to his cheek one last time.

It lands.

It lands.

He gasps.

“Don’t forget me,” you say, even though you know he never will.

“Never,” he swears.

Your hand brushes his cheek. Your form shimmers in the glow of the dying desk lamp. You smile.

And then, like a final breath-

You’re gone.

Months pass.

The office changes. New shows. New desks. People come and go.

But Spencer never lets anyone take down the string of fairy lights you once flickered on for him.

He doesn’t talk about you often. But sometimes, just sometimes, he stops in the hallway and smiles at nothing.

And once, years later, when he brings someone new to visit, they swear they feel a warm breeze down their back. A faint whisper of laughter when they’re alone in the kitchen.

He doesn’t explain it. Just sets down two mugs of tea on the counter.

And says, softly:

“She’s still with us.”

-------------

Time passed.

As it always does.

Spencer lived a full, beautiful life.

He stayed at Smosh for years, longer than most expected. He created, laughed, grew. He made people smile even on the worst days. But he was never quite the same after you. Not in a broken way. In a changed way.

Then, he moved on; writing, performing, traveling, and living. He kept your memory quiet but never forgotten. You became the unseen rhythm of his life. A haunting, yes, but the gentle kind. A part of the melody that never played loudly but was always there, humming beneath the louder notes.

Spencer kept your memory quiet. Sacred. He never tried to replace you.

He loved again, yes, because you would’ve wanted him to. And he let himself be happy. He married. He raised a family. He said goodbye to people he loved, and found laughter again in their echoes. He was the kind of man who gave the world more than he ever asked for in return.

But even after all those years, every candle he lit, every quiet moment he sat alone with tea, it was always you he thought of.

And when the world finally grew quiet, when his hair was silver and his breath came slower, when his fingers trembled slightly as he wrote one last note in a shaky hand, he said your name aloud for the last time.

To no one.

To you.

“I’ll see you soon,” he whispered.

And then, with the kind of peace most people never get to earn, he let go.

The other side isn’t what he expected.

There are no gates. No trumpets. No crowds. No blinding light.

It’s quiet. Warm.

He finds himself in a hallway, lit by sunlight he can’t find the source of. Painted the same soft white as a memory. The air smells like lilacs and library pages. There’s music, but it’s distant and soft, like someone humming a lullaby in the next room. The floor feels cool and smooth beneath his feet, but somehow still familiar.

He walks.

No hurry. No fear.

Every step feels like coming home.

And then-

There you are.

Sitting on a wide window ledge, barefoot, legs swinging just a little, your chin resting on your knees. There’s light in your hair and starlight in your eyes. You look exactly the same and completely new, like a memory rewritten in clearer ink.

You’re just as he remembers.

But brighter. Realer.

You look up.

And you smile.

And it hits him in the chest like music. Like a favorite song he forgot he knew.

“You’re late,” you tease, your voice like sunlight on old wood, like the last soft breeze of summer.

Spencer chokes out a laugh. It breaks halfway through and turns into a sound closer to a sob. “I took the long way,” he says.

He moves toward you.

So do you.

And then you're in his arms.

For the first time in this life, or the last, or all the ones in between, fully and completely. There’s no flicker. No strain. No time limit. Just warm, solid, and perfect. Your hands on his back, his lips at your temple, the full weight of him folded around you like you were always meant to fit.

He buries his face in your neck, breath hitching.

“I missed you,” he says, voice thick.

You hold him tighter. “I never stopped waiting.”

There are no clocks here. No meetings. No deadlines. 

Just the two of you.

You and Spencer walk through fields made of light, curled up under trees that hum with memory, fall asleep on cloudless hills and wake to laughter that doesn’t need a punchline.

You talk for hours. Or maybe years. Time bends in soft, lovely ways here.

Spencer tells you everything. The people he loved. The places he saw. The books. The friends. The way he sometimes smelled lilacs for no reason. How often he looked up at a flickering light and smiled.

You cry a little. He holds you through it.

You tell him about the in-between. The quiet. The waiting. The way you watched his life bloom, even when you couldn’t be a part of it. The way you never stopped loving him, not even for a second.

He presses his forehead to yours.

“I never forgot you,” he whispers.

“You never had to,” you say. “I was always with you.”

Sometimes, you both visit that old office. Not as ghosts. As dreamers.

It’s always golden there, soft with late-afternoon sun. The couch has a permanent dip where Spencer always sat. The lights twinkle gently above, even though there’s no electricity. The two mugs are clean. The air smells like old memories and vanilla tea.

You sit together on the floor sometimes, shoulder to shoulder, just listening to the echoes of laughter through the walls.

No one’s afraid here. No one fades. No one has to let go. 

You’re not a ghost anymore. You’re not a haunting. 

You’re just you.

And Spencer, kind, complicated, loyal Spencer, is finally yours in full.

-------------

You once believed that death was the end of your story. That your chapter had closed while everyone else’s continued.

But then Spencer walked into your orbit with starlight in his eyes and made you believe in beginnings again. And suddenly, everything opened.

And now?

Now you have all of forever.

To kiss him without fading.

To hold him without breaking.

To sit beside him in the quiet, no longer waiting for the clock to run out.

To tell him, as many times as you want, that loving him was the best thing you ever did.

And the best part of eternity?

Was waiting just long enough for Spencer Agnew to walk through that door.

And you finally, finally, stay.

[loonarmuunar]

I really hate aroace Katniss headcanon, said with NO DISRESPECT TO ANYONE WHO ENJOYS THE HC…. As an ace person (maybe aro? Arospec??? Uh) I just don’t like it. I don’t see Katniss’s struggle with romance as an aro thing I see it as her struggling to let people in and reciprocate emotions clearly, because of her lifelong trauma and struggles, going back to her father’s death. Or if I wanna get headcanony, she has autism bc I love projecting.

Also it just makes her ending really really depressing to me. The idea that she only stays with Peeta because she feels pressured to, that she only acts to reciprocate his romantic love for her. And that also really sucks for Peeta, who was LIED TO ABOUT KAT LOVING HIM IN THEIR FIRST GAME… her just lying to him about loving him AGAIN.? To make him HAPPY? Which…. Def wouldn’t… especially after being hijacked and not knowing what’s real and what isn’t… It just feels so dismal. And. Entirely strange. I don’t think Katniss would ever do something that could hurt him so much just because she felt pressured. I think her love for Peeta (however you interpreted it) is too powerful for her to really do something like that just to spare his feelings.

Also it just feels. Really uncomfortable to me with the implied loss of autonomy. That even after she’s free from the pressure and expectations brought on by the games and the revolution, she can still never just be free to love who she wants, if nobody at all. That she has to give up the choice to please a man and fit into the role expected of her.

Once again it’s fine if you like the headcanon, all the more power to you, and whatever interpretation you take (Kat knowing or unknowingly acting to reciprocate Peeta’s feelings, them having a complicated and/or queerplatonic bond, Kat being aroace spec, etc etc), just saying that I don’t, and these are the reasons why it makes me uncomfy 👍

[bcacstuff]

Tobias Menzies: 'The royals live a lifetime like they're on reality TV'

INTERVIEW As he stars with Brad Pitt in F1, the British actor talks about his role in The Crown, his hippy childhood – and why he has just the right face to play baddies

“Like theatre on steroids” is how Tobias Menzies describes shooting his first scene with Brad Pitt on the grid at Silverstone for this summer’s blockbuster movie, F1. “We did it before a real race, because there would be no other way to capture that atmosphere of adrenalin and chaos… the rev and squeal of tension… the roaring depth of 50,000 spectators.”

The 50-year-old British actor – best known for playing Prince Philip in The Crown (2019-2020) and Frank/Jonathan “Black Jack” Randall in historical time travel drama Outlander (2014-19) – says the race organisers could only give the film crew seven minutes to nail the moment when his character (smarmy Formula One team board director Peter Banning) meets Pitt’s reckless old rock star of a driver (Sonny Hayes) before the latter steps into his car to screech through one of the film’s many high-speed track sequences.

Tobias Menzies, right, as Peter Banning, a tech bro-style racing executive, with Javier Bardem as Ruben Cervantes (Photo: Warner Bros/Apple TV+)

Directed by Joseph Kosinski – who also brought us Top Gun: Maverick – F1: The Movie is an unabashed bro-fantasy in which a man old enough to be his rivals’ grandfather uses his superior experience and timeless reflexes to beat the boys at their high-tech games. And like Top Gun: Maverick, it relies heavily on the daredevil charisma of an A-List star to pull viewers along for the ride. But catch it in a big multiplex and it’s impossible not to find yourself sinking low into your seat, throwing your body into the chicanes and clutching your popcorn like a steering wheel. 

“I don’t own a car myself,” says the gentle, watchful Menzies, “and I still don’t find myself taken with the sport. But I found the whole, dramatic world of F1 really interesting. I was surprised how small – like children – many of the drivers are. Obviously that makes sense because they’re like jockeys and every pound counts. I got interested in the strategies they use, both on the track and off of it.”

Menzies found playing Prince Phillip in ‘The Crown’ gave him a deeper compassion for the royals as humans (Photo: Sophie Mutevelian/Netflix)

He trained a beady eye on the money men in the corporate boxes and noticed they were “very expensively dressed in soft leisure wear in soft colours”. So although Peter Banning “was written as a wily British gentleman, all suited and booted”, he approached the filmmakers to suggest the character might be “more of a tech bro, because that culture has crossed the Atlantic”.

Over coffee in a North London cafe, he explains that “I thought Banning would be one of those guys who talks about ‘wellness’ in a really weird way… A man who sees a weird conjunction between ‘wellness’ and massive corporate power in a way that I find quite repulsive.” Hence those hippy bracelets? “Yes! I’m glad you noticed the bracelets.”

There’s an interesting power struggle between Banning’s money and Hayes’s physical prowess that pries open tensions seething within the patriarchy. Does Menzies think the wealthy geeks still feel they need to prove something to the jocks? Like when Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight? “Yes. That was so strange. I don’t really understand it. But I guess there are old wired ideas about power and masculinity that they fall for…” he laughs and the distinctive long lines that bracket his mouth bend, briefly.

Menzies suspects his “strange face grooves… or the world’s longest dimples” may be the reason he’s so often cast as baddies: from Brutus in HBO’s Rome (2005-07) to the powder-keg patriarch in Alexander Zeldin’s reimagining of Antigone at the National Theatre last year. These lines – which he said “appeared on my cheeks in my mid-teens, maybe as part of a growth spurt because nobody else in my family has them” – can be usefully twisted into the service of a character’s cunning or cruelty. 

Menzies and Brad Pitt at the European premiere of ‘F1: The Movie’ at NoMad London this week (Photo: Dave Benett/Getty for Apple TV+)

“One of the reasons I’m an actor,” he says, “is to access an arena in which you can turn the dark and difficult stuff into something interesting, a conversation, an art. I find the process of representing dark or troubling or uncomfortable material cathartic.”

Back in 2022, Outlander star Sam Heughan said he felt “betrayed” by the creative team who asked him to film a nude scene in which his character was raped by Menzies’s character. The scene was cut from the episode when Heughan argued that his full frontal nudity “sexualised a horrific experience”. Today, Menzies says he’s glad Heughan was heard. He’s sympathetic to “the pressures on Sam, early in his career”. The consent of actors in such scenes is “essential”, he says.

But he’s also not keen on viewers being “shielded from darkness: drama without darkness is anodyne.” He points out that “we use fairy stories as a way of introducing kids to the fact that the world is a complicated and scary place sometimes. It isn’t all happiness.”

Menzies’s own childhood sounds pretty cool, though. Born in London, he’s the elder son of a drama-teacher mother and BBC Radio producer father. “They were 70s hippies,” he says, so he spent his early years in their Victorian flat watching vinyl spin on the record player at the end of the hall. He smiles gently, recalling the album sleeves. “The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Kraftwerk’s Man Machine.”

They divorced when he was six and his mother moved with Menzies and his younger brother Luke (now a solicitor) to Kent, where the boys attended a Steiner school – a type of independent school with a holistic educational style and an emphasis on creativity. “I got a lot from that,” he says. Although he was more interested in tennis than acting as a boy, he says he was always an enthusiastic student – “a hand-up kinda kid”. He adds that “at Steiner schools you get used to standing up and reciting poems with the class. It normalises performance.” His mother took him to see lots of experimental, physical theatre and dance, which led him to audition for Rada barefoot. “I liked getting my shoes and socks off,” he says.

As ‘Black Jack’ Randall in historical time travel drama ‘Outlander’ (Photo: Aimee Spinks/Sony Pictures/Channel 4)

“I’ve always been the kind of actor who has ideas about how I need to do things. So when I did Rome – my first big TV series – I was knocking on the show runner’s door and suggesting Brutus needed to be more agitated and fearful after killing Caesar. That scene was originally written quite sedately, and I think one of the problems with TV can be that you’re often asked to come into scenes and deliver info without the apparent need for it. If you can weave more character into that plot then it starts to spark.”

Did he have any input into how he portrayed Prince Philip in The Crown? “That was different because he was a real person,” says Menzies. “But yes, I brought some thoughts to the moon landing episode. I felt the scene where Philip met the astronauts needed more ups and downs – first he had the hope that these men would meet a part of him that was lost, then he had the heartbreak of realising that they’re just kids who’ve been trained to go into space.” He sighs and tugs on his baseball cap.

As a “small ‘r’ republican”, Menzies thinks “it would be more grown-up of us as a country not to have all that [monarchy] sat on top of our country”. But he found filming the series gave him a “deeper compassion” for the royals as humans. “Do I agree with Prince Philip’s politics, many of his views? No. But I think he was a really thoughtful, smart guy. If he hadn’t married the Queen he would have had a very successful career in the navy. He put all that misplaced reforming energy into an institution which did not welcome it.”

Menzies also shudders at the way the royals live “a lifetime like they’re on reality TV”. He’s had his own brushes with celebrity gossip after he was reported to be dating Kristin Scott Thomas in 2005. He hasn’t ever discussed his private life in print and wince-nods a little when I ask if he gets recognised more on the streets since The Crown. “But I can still get around,” he shrugs, gesturing to cafe life flowing obliviously around us.

Unlike Brad Pitt? “Yeah,” nods Menzies, polishing off his drink. “The rest of us could go out for a bite to eat,” he says. “But Brad – who, despite being every bit as charismatic as you’d expect, seemed to be a lovely guy, quite un-statusy and a very easy-going scene partner – was just stuck in the hotel.” Menzies shakes his head. “I don’t know how he copes with that at all.”

[baba-is-blog]

hi baba do you have more thoughts on i am your beast ? it is one of my favorite games maybe ever and i am a very big fan of everything its publisher, strange scaffold, puts out. i also really recommend el paso elsewhere and clickolding by them ^_^

speaking as cyanmod here: holy shit dude IAYB is my game of the year no question. as I was watching the credits roll and contemplating how I'm ever supposed to play another movement shooter, I went "hey wait holy shit is this the Bass Reeves guys???" and I checked and it was so. (rip Bass Reeves Can't Die you would have been glorious, if I ever win the lottery there will be signs)

I've already seen someone play clickolding and I think I'm all set on that but I might check out el paso elsewhere since I've heard wonderful things about it and haven't been spoiled on anything. man. I think everyone should play I Am Your Beast. for baba.

it has literally the best voice acting in any video game I've ever played, it has like three named characters (two of whom I love SO much and the third one I want to punt into a cold river) and it's just. it's just so good. play I Am Your Beast

[irondadfics]

do you have any fic recs where either the avengers team or the media/press speculate on the relationship between peter and tony? ex: they assume peter is tony’s child or something

Here are some

5 Times Someone Thought Peter Was Tony’s Son by slaylinski

... and 1 time he was. or the one where everyone thinks Peter is Tony's son.

He Was Actually Really Being Truthful (For Once) by orphan_account

Natasha looked more closely. She first saw hints of a second person in the sock poking out of the blanket at a strange angle, and the pale hand with curled-up fingers resting on Tony’s chest. Then she found a head of what looked like brown curls, tucked snugly under Tony’s arm. And eventually, a second set of sleeping breaths, slow and light.  OR The Avengers return from months of missions to find a child fast asleep on the lounge, with Tony snoring beside him. A mystery ensues. Is Tony Stark a father? (It looks like it!) How have they never discovered the kid until now? I mean, Iron Man has always been good at keeping secrets, but a whole CHILD?

I'm telling you, he's not my son! by Ashfirebolt

5 times people think Peter is Tony's son and the one time Tony says he is. No Endgame spoilers

Papa-Paparazzi by niniblack

The top story on Buzzfeed on February 16, 2017, is “Everything We Know About Peter Parker, Who May or May Not Actually Be Peter Stark.” Turns out Tony Stark might have been hiding the fact that he has a kid all these years. We’re just as shocked as you are, the subheadline reads. It should be an easy rumor to dispel, seeing as it’s not true. But, it turns out, nothing is ever quite that simple when dealing with a celebrity scandal. - - - In which Tony is Very Famous™️ and that bleeds over into fans paying attention to the people around him as well. Which includes Peter, now. And would be fine, if they would all just stop assuming that Tony is his dad.

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant by ellyerin

Steve agrees to hang out with Nat while Clint is gone. They're in an Italian restaurant when they spot Tony at another table, with a woman and child. They try to figure out who the kid could be.