#yes this is based off mr. and mrs. smith

[ideksams]

the flower looks good in your hair 🪷

[yutarot]

1999. l.mk

.𖥔 ݁ ˖ husband!mark, assassin au, romance, enemies to lovers

wc. 10k

warnings. violence, suggestive, lots of fighting, they literally spend half the fic tryna kill eachother idk, mention of alcohol, guns, angst, heavily inspired by +82 pressin and mr and mrs smith (2005)

synopsis. after accidentally nearly killing another assassin, you both get assigned the task of taking eachother out. but what happens when the assassin you’re after turns out to be a lot closer to you than you had ever expected? do you ignore your feelings? or do you listen to your heart, risking both of your lives in the process.

notes — hiii!! i rlly enjoyed writing this it was sooo much fun. i sorta got this idea after seeing the mv for +82 pressin and ive been wanting to write something based on mr and mrs smith for a whileee so it sorta worked perfectly in my head. i hope u enjoy!!! (p.s. thank u @sungbites for being my writing motivation hehe love u)

it’s a night like all the rest, darkness falling through the window like a shadow with nowhere to go: lost, helpless. you’ve always liked night-time, enjoyed the tranquility of the silent hours as thoughts pass through your mind with no clear destination. you lie there, a moment of peace stilling within you as you slowly begin to fall into slumber. 

your peace is cut short, all tranquility lost when a voice from beside you arises. ‘babe, can you turn off the light please?’

you roll your eyes in a secretive protest before turning to face your husband, a smile now plastered on your face. 

‘of course, honey.’

you hate mark. every single moment of every day, you spend each waking hour questioning yourself of why you ever married him. whether in detestation or disgust, you hate him. but your marriage isn't based on love or hate, so you do what you must: you hide it, conceal your hate behind joyful smiles and the blissful art of routine. after all, you’re good at keeping secrets.

abruptly, he rolls back over to face away from you and you do the same.

‘goodnight, babe.’ he murmurs.

‘goodnight.’

you don’t acknowledge each other again, drifting to sleep in nothing but your own mind.

a night like all the rest. 

each morning is always the same: wake up at 7, cook breakfast at 7:30, wave off your husband as he leaves for work at 8, always accompanied by a quick kiss as he walks through the door, and each morning you suppress your hatred just as much as the last. this morning was no different.

as you sit at the dining table, your breakfast laid out before you, you both eat in silence. this is how it’s always been, this marriage, days of simple routine and empty discussion. you don’t know anything about him, not really. yes, you know where he grew up, what movies he likes, what his favourite kind of bread is, but you don’t know what goes on in his mind. evidently, you're okay with that, because it means that he doesn’t need to know what goes on in yours. it’s a marriage of mutuality, an understanding that your life is your life, and weirdly neither of you question it. neither of you question if the love is fake, or if it just isn’t there at all.

however, there’s one, tiny detail which you know you’ll never share with him, a side of your life untouched, undisturbed. on the outside, you’re the symbol of a perfect housewife, compliant, clean and kept, staying home during the day whilst he’s out at work, tidying the furniture and cooking up dinner by the time he gets home. that’s all he sees, thats all he knows. but what he doesn’t know, is that you’re none of that, not a single bit. 

after finishing your breakfast and placing down your cutlery, you look up at your husband. 

‘delicious, sweetheart, just like always.’ he says, reaching for a napkin to wipe the corner of his mouth. he always did sound patronising when he compliments your cooking, but you give him the benefit of the doubt; its the only thing, besides your looks, that he can compliment you for. it's the only talent you show him.

you feign a smile in response, ‘i know just how you like it.’

‘you do.’ he grins back.

you’re not sure how much longer you can keep up this act, pretending like you’re in a happy marriage, and you wonder how much longer he can do the same. but you have to, you’ve done it for the past four years, you can suffer the restriction of a few more. 

all for the sake of concealment.

mark gets up from his seat at the table, ‘i had better go, baby, i can't be late; we had this huge data crash at work last night, and there’s lots to fix.’

‘of course, honey. i'll make your favourite for you tonight.’ you lean in to give him a kiss on the cheek as you hand him his jacket, waving him out the door. 

its tiring, the act of deception. you watch as his car reverses off of the drive of your house before driving around the corner. you wait a few moments, making sure he really is and truly gone out of your sight. or more importantly, you're out of his.

and once you are, your real day begins. 

untying the apron around your waist, you walk steadily and with purpose, climbing the stairs and walking into the room which you call your closet. only it's not only a closet, not really.

pulling back a few items of clothing, you expose the keypay at the back of the room, pressing in the passcode. 

0417. the date you got married. 

the lock springs open, giving you access to your secret, and highly personal safe.

as always, laid inside are two items of significant importance.

your work phone, and a gun. 

you pocket the gun before picking up the phone and selecting the first number in your phone book. 

‘agency.’

you hold the phone to your ear, it doesn’t even ring once before the other end picks up; they expect your call, just as they do each morning. 

‘i am now alone, will be there in 15.’ you speak, before hanging up and placing the phone in your other back pocket. 

the agency is a grand, foreboding building, dark shadows cascading between its outer walls and falling over its glass panels like a shroud. you walk inside, scanning your keycard through the main entrance before making your way to the front desk.

‘yn lee.’ you recite your name. ‘im clocking in.’

the receptionist nods. ‘mrs K wants to see you in her office.’

‘what for?’ you ask. 

the receptionist shrugs, implying that whatever your boss wants you for is confidential, and therefore, important.

after a quick journey to the 10th floor via the elevator, you make your way through the white lined corridor, the shiny black marble at your feet causing each step to echo, bouncing off every wall as you step further and further towards the door looming ahead of you. 

you knock the door twice before she calls for you to come inside, which you do so quickly, closing it behind you. 

she motions for you to sit down, her short, black and perfectly cut hair framing her face and emphasising the gap between her neck and the shoulders of her pristine, grey suit. 

you sit, looking at the woman in the desk in front of you as she speaks. 

‘it’s an interesting life you lead, agent lee.’ she says, head tilting to the side. 

presuming she’s talking about the faux relationship with your husband, you respond quickly. ‘i’d get lonely in that house by myself.’

‘that’s not what i'm implying.’

oh?

she speaks again, standing from her desk as she does so.

‘this job; you’ve been a level 2 agent with us for four years, and despite countless attempts at recruiting you for level 1, you’ve always declined. why is that?’

you take a moment to ponder her question, to truly decipher what she's asking of you. 

‘i'm comfortable.’ you reply. 

‘nothing about this job is comfortable.’

she’s right. your job is to kill. being a level 1 just means you have to do it alone, estranged from working in groups, harder jobs and more secretive clients. you stay silent as she continues. 

‘the reason i wanted you here, mrs lee, is because our agency has discovered an almost identical rival agency in the market. same jobs, same asking price and same level agents. what i mean, in short, is that we now have competition, and that doesn’t happen by coincidence.’

‘you think someone’s leaking intel to a rival agency?’

‘not think, know.’ the red of her lips twist into a scorn of seriousness, as if shes trying to intimidate you. 

‘and you think i have something to do with it?’ you ask, disbelief briefly cascading over your thoughts. 

she sits back down behind her desk, reaching for a drawer and shuffling through files and files of paper. 

‘quite the contrary.’ she replies, and you look at her in confusion before she continues. ‘actually, you're one of the few that i know don't have something to do with it.’

finishing her sentence, she slides an envelope across the desk, nodding for you to take it. 

she gets back up from her desk, looking you directly in your eyes, a shift of tone in the air around you.

‘once i've left the room, you’re going to open the envelope, mrs lee. i have two armed gunmen outside the door, under my command, waiting for you to leave. think of it as a little test of what that envelope contains. and, agent lee?’

you don't say a word, looking back at her to continue.

‘this time, i'm not asking.’

her smile is sickening. but you have no time to reproach her before she's out of the room, leaving you with nothing but the cold envelope in your hands and the ever-impending threat of death which falls over you. 

after your limited amount of time, frozen in your seat, alone in your bosses office, your mind finally goes back to the envelope in your hand. you open it, pulling out the contents inside. your mind is a state of anger; in your hand lies two pieces of paper, one, a picture of a man in his late 50’s, a cool, silver moustache lining his lip, and one, a letter, addressed directly to you. 

agent 1270.

with this letter, i have enclosed a portrait of your first job as a level 1 agent. configurations confirmed him a regular gambler at the artemis casino on 34th street. don’t fuck this up. if you do, i won't hesitate to get rid of you; we have a lot on the line. 

K. 

p.s. my gunmen are inpatient. 

moments after you even get a chance to finish the last word of the letter, two men in black suits burst through the door of the office. you roll under the desk, pocketing both items as gunshots ring out around you. 

‘shit.’ you hiss, reaching for the gun in your back pocket. with no time to waste, you emerge from the side of the desk, aiming your gun at the head of the man furthest to you, using your momentum to swing your heel swiftly into the closest man's chest as your first bullet flies through the air. with one man down and the other one winded on the floor, you take your opportunity, walking up to him as he struggles to breathe. 

you kick the gun out of his hand. 

‘why is she doing this? why make me a level 1 agent?’ you ask, the gun pointed towards the man below you. 

he gasps for air, shaking his head. with nothing but raw frustration and pent up hatred at the woman forcing you to do this, you pull the trigger. 

anger boils within you, years of working for the agency and never have you stooped so low as to have been forced to kill one of your own. she’s testing you, seeing what you can do, and you’re going to find out why.

you find your way to elevator, pressing the button for the 5th floor. checking your freshly ironed suit for any specks of blood or evidence of your previous fight, you step out of the elevator. you’re instantly met with the level 1 offices, people in suits everywhere, some sat at desks and some engaging with conversation. everyone notices you, but noone says a word. its a very private industry, the industry of assassination, no questions are asked and none are answered. 

you walk over to what looks like the main desk of the floor and the woman checks you in, showing you swiftly to your new office. the walls are a pristine white, with a glass desk and an illumination of light that's almost blinding. you set down the documents from K’s letter, examining the mans face. you don't know who he is, you never do, and it’s in your best interest not to care. all that matters is getting the job done, and under current circumstances, it matters more than ever. since, unlike before, it's not only the hidden identity from your husband that's on the line, but as is your life. 

you’re not sat at your desk for long, K’s threat looming over you. 

you check your watch. 3.14pm, exactly 14 minutes since the artemis casino opened its doors for the evening. tonight, you’ll make sure that someone will never leave them. 

after being assigned your own personal assistant, who you've learned to know as agent 4916, you request only three items for your plan to work smoothly and quickly. a dark red satin dress, a vial of poison and it’s respective antidote - not that you expect it to go wrong, but you can never assume the best in a job like yours. even so, you've never once failed a mission, and you were not about to take the risk of failing on the only mission where you don’t give yourself a backup plan; that’s what the knife strapped to your thigh is for.

you thank your assistant with a nod as you step into the taxi you ordered, covering your shoulders with a thick fur coat you acquired secretly from the evidence room. 

‘where are y’ headed?’ the taxi man asks, puffing an exhale of cigarette smoke out of the window. 

‘artemis casino, please.’

the man grins, ‘you a golddigger, huh?’

you roll your eyes, ‘im married.’ men like this disgust you, always assuming the worst of women. if only he knew. 

‘what does he do?’ he asks. it’s at this where your confidence is knocked; you can't exactly say ‘i dont know.’..

so instead you pause, waiting until the car comes to a halt outside the front of the casino before stepping out, replying back with a sly yet dismissive response as you pass him his money through the front window. 

‘none of your business.’

the casino is a lot busier than you had hoped, groups of old men and rich couples sauntering amongst the tables. there’s an indistinct mumble of voices, layering perfectly over the chime of jazz music, not enough to drown it out, but just enough to make you listen out for the instruments. 

you keep your mind fixated on the picture of the man you're looking for, but as you wander around, a sharp eye scanning all the faces, you spot him, sitting and smiling cruelly in a circle around a poker table. you label this as a perfect opportunity; there’s nothing like the emotion of overconfidence to blind a man's senses. 

walking over, you lean a hand on the back of his chair. 

‘that’s interesting.’ you say as you peak over his shoulder at his cards. 

you catch his attention as he looks up at you. 

you continue, ‘i won’t expose you,’ you giggle, feigning emotion comes natural to you now, ‘don’t worry.’ continuing your act, you walk off and head straight over to the bar. 

just as you planned, he walks after you. 

‘what are you playing at?’ he asks. you ignore him. 

the bartender looks at you expectantly, waiting for your order. 

‘vodka. neat.’ the bartender nods but the man beside you turns to you in disgust. 

you laugh at his reaction before catching the bartender's attention, ‘make that two.’ you say.

the man speaks up. ‘wai-’

‘unless.. this man can't handle his drink?’

he stops talking. 

after a moment of silence the bartender brings you your drinks. 

you stand up, your drink in hand. you’ve done this many times before and each is as flawless as the last. 

you walk around him, slowly, and as if unplanned, you trip, your drink flying straight across his blazer, soaking its expensive lining with the sweet stickiness of the clear liquid.

he stands up, a suppressed rage emerging from within him. 

‘oops,’ you say innocently, ‘here, have mine.’

he nods in reply. ‘leave it on the side.’ he says, before storming off to the bathroom to clean himself up. 

perfect.

it's then that you set the final action of your plan into place, it's then that you slip the poison into his drink. 

not wanting to be with him when the poison takes action, you hurry yourself out of view, climbing to the second balcony floor and placing yourself with perfect vision of the bar you were just at, the drink sitting there, a note you placed reading ‘bottoms up, pussy. i'll be watching’, tucked under the glass in attempts to urge him on. 

you watch for a minute, then two, and when it gets to the third, you begin to grow anxious. 

but it’s not the extent of time that makes your worry flutter; it's the sudden man sitting at the bar, at the exact seat where the glass is placed. 

the wrong man.

you can’t see the stranger's face, only the sharp outline of his back as he slumps over the drink, reading the note you placed under it.

you watch intently as he looks around, his face still under too much shadow to properly decipher his features. the shine of his all black suit glimmers from the point of his shoulders as he reaches for the drink. your stomach drops.

shit.

you stand up in vigour as his lips touch the glass. 

you were about to kill the wrong man. 

you were about to kill yourself. 

clenching your jaw with an abandonment of your mission, you stealthily follow the man from the bar as he clutches his stomach, breathing heavily as he swings himself into a bathroom cubicle. you stand outside the door, listening to his laboured breaths and the sudden bang as his body slumps over the toilet bowl. you can’t see him, but you decide suddenly that you can’t let him die, you can’t fuck up this job and kill the wrong guy, you’d look like a fool.

you slide the antidote under the door of the cubicle with your foot, hearing a breathless, pained whisper of ‘the fuck?’ from the other side, but you don't stick around to exchange pleasantries, not when you nearly killed the man. 

you turn to leave, but just as you take a step towards the main door of the bathroom, something on the floor catches your eye, something that the man had dropped in his haste to reach the cubicle. 

a business card.

you pick it up, slowly peeling it from the floor.

your face grows stern.

dread envelopes you. your legs grow weak, feeling as it tries to weigh you down.

on one side is a logo you know all too well, the rival agency your boss had warned you about. 

on the other side, one word and one number. 

agent 1999. 

the man you had nearly killed was another assassin.

an assassin from a rival agency.

and he had just fucked up your job. 

you’ve been sat at your dinner table in silence for the last ten minutes and mark hasn’t come home yet. part of you is relieved, not having to uphold your character as his wife under all the stress that you're under after failing your mission. however, there’s a part of you that’s waiting for him, the abruption in your daily routine throwing you off, despite how much you hate him. 

that’s when you hear the front door click shut, mark coming through to the dining room.

‘honey? what are you doing awake?’ he asks, setting down his briefcase, the tie to match his brown, tartan suit loose around his neck, top button undone. he looks dishevelled, whatever had made him late had ruined him.

you stand up, rubbing your eyes out of exhaustion. ‘you can’t just come home late like this.’

‘im sorry, baby. a lot happened at work, okay?’ he says, walking up to you. he leans forward to catch your eye contact. ‘some idiot sent me the wrong file and the whole network crashed.’

you nod, pushing in the dining table chair as you prepare to leave the room and go to bed. 

‘goodnight, yn.’

‘goodnight.’

you can’t help but feel that something is off. 

like usual, you wake up at 7, cook breakfast at 7:30 and wave your husband off as he leaves for work. each morning is the same, a list of routined actions you perform, a pretend life you wish you could lead. only this morning, you fear it could be your last. 

as you tread down the white hall of the 10th floor of the agency, eventually standing at your bosses door in anticipation, you knock. 

she calls you in and you shut the door behind you. there she sits, black bob swaying above her shoulders and thin, red lips pressed into a straight line of discontent. the bullet holes on the desk from yesterday still remain, a reminder of what your boss had promised would happen to you if you had failed to complete the job.

not only had you done that very thing but to make matters even worse, you had also accidentally held an attempt of assassination on a man from the rival agency.

‘good morning, agent lee.’ her voice is stern, deep.

you nod, taking a seat. 

‘you know why you're here? yes?’

you nod, not daring to say a word.

‘then i believe you understand the vitality of the situation we are now in because of your mistake.’

again, you nod. 

‘words, mrs lee.’ her voice raises, causing you to sit up in your seat.

‘yes.’

she nods, crossing one leg over the other. ‘good. then you shall be pleased to know that i'm giving you a chance to redeem yourself.’ 

your mind is going a million miles an hour, thoughts racing each other in a swirl of confusion. the perplexion must have been evident on your face as K begins to explain. ‘the agent that intercepted your mission is agent 1999 of the sparta agency. we have reason to believe that he is the source feeding our information to his agency, that’s how he knew you were going to be there.’

it all makes so much sense yet none at all. why would a random stranger pick up an unattended drink at a casino and drink it? unless..

a thought sparks in your mind. ‘you think he drank the vial on purpose?’

a small grin peaks at the corner of K’s upper lip before she continues. ‘he gambled that whoever was on the mission would have had an antidote on them. sparta agency aren’t to be messed with, agent lee, they will use any means to intercept our missions, and with this intel they are our biggest liability.’ she rises from her seat, walking to move over to her wall-panel window, scouring the view that lays beyond it. ‘after this, whoever agent 1999 is will most likely be given the task to kill you; they can’t risk the fact that you might know what he looks like.’

her back is still facing you as you reply. ‘but i don't know what he looks like, i didn’t see his face.’ 

she turns in your direction, a smirk which you haven’t seen before now plastering her features. ‘and he didn't see yours either. that’s why i'm giving you the task of taking him out, it’s a race of who can find and kill who first, if he’s smart, he’ll always be where you are, it only makes your job easier.’ 

to take out a criminal is one thing, but to take out a highly skilled assassin is another. you stay silent, conflict in your mind overwhelming you. you love your agency, and you love your job, but you fear that this task is nothing but fated suicide.

K steps back to behind her desk, sitting again to face you as she speaks. ‘if you do this, mrs lee, you would have regained my approval.’ she shuffles through the files on her desk, looking up at you through her brow at her next words. ‘not just anyone can take out two of my men with just a pistol and two bullets. i'm trusting you with this. you have 24 hours to complete the job.’

you check your watch, it’s 10:45 am.

12 hours.

12 hours to take out a high class, heavily skilled assassin. 

she really was testing you.

you waste absolutely no time deciding what you’re going to do, rushing to your office and calling for your assistant. 

‘give me whereabouts on agent 1999 of the sparta agency, i want all the information you can find.’ you say, and she nods before scurrying out the room. 

you’ve never questioned a kill before, knowing nothing but their faces, merciless in all aspects. but there’s something incredibly ironic about this one, something that you’ve never had to deal with before.

he’s just like you. 

your assistant returns and you sort through the printed files until you find his personal profile. like the rest of your jobs, you expect to see his face, printed in the top corner, usually a CCTV picture or a mugshot if you're lucky. but much to your surprise, you’re faced with nothing but a grey square, a question mark placed in the middle, almost mocking your lack of knowledge.

you look up at your assistant, a brow raised.

‘there’s no record of what he looks like. not a trace.’ she says.

you nod, a forced sense of acceptance. this man knows what he’s doing. 

continuing to search the files, one catches your attention: his previous kills. 

671. 

‘he uses a revolver..’ you murmur to yourself. 

this fact, this small, minor detail, changes everything; revolvers are exceptionally loud guns. meaning almost each and every one of his kills would have been done in private, in basements, elevators.

if you want to lure him in, get him somewhere he will follow, you need to find somewhere private, somewhere you can confront him one on one. 

that’s when the perfect idea hits you.

you grab your car keys from your desk drawer, pocketing them in the inner pocket of your blazer. a motel, somewhere far enough from the city but somewhere close enough that he will follow you there. 

you’re just hoping that, right now, he’s sat outside your agency waiting for you to leave, waiting to follow you home. 

but you’re not going home. not today. 

your suspicions are correct when you reach the border of the city, a blacked out mercedes maintaining its speed a few cars behind you. you know it’s him, agent 1999, you don’t need to see his face to be sure.

you pull up to the first motel you see, the lack of cars in the parking lot signalling a perfect place for the job you're about to undertake.

before he can swing into the motel behind you, you step out the car, sprinting to the reception. 

you push open the door in eagerness, rushing to the front desk. the receptionist looks up upon hearing the bell on the door ring at your arrival.

‘one night. please.’ you say before sliding a $100 bill across the desk. ‘keep the change.’

the receptionist looks at you in disbelief as she hands you a key with the number 8 engraved on it. 

you waste no time, rushing round the corner to the stairwell. it’s just as you make it past the line of sight that you hear the reception bell ring, that agent 1999 has come through the front door. 

your curiosity is screaming at you to peek around the corner, to find out who this man is that you’ve been given the task of killing before he kills you. but you refrain, your urge to survive overwhelming you as you begin to climb the stairs, past room 6, past room 7 and past room 8. instead, you go to room 9, placing a gamble that it’s that room that the receptionist will assign him. 

you don’t move, don’t waver from your stance outside his door. 

not even as you hear the door to the stairwell open, not even as you hear the slow, antagonising echo of his footsteps.

not even as he comes around the corner.

fear. 

not the kind that paralyses you, but the kind that makes you regret. that’s what you feel when you see him, that’s what you feel when you look down the barrel of his gun: fear. 

but it’s not the gun that scares you.

it’s who's holding it. 

the assassin you’ve been hired to kill, the man who's been hunting you down, is none other than the man you had least expected it to be.

your husband..

you lock eyes with him, but you see none of his usual warmth, his usual empathy. all you see is the eyes of the man trying to kill you. 

‘mark.’ you breath, raising your gun at him, a mirror of his pose.

slightly, ever so slightly, you see him flinch as you say his name. he’s holding back. 

‘babe.’ he says, sarcasm lining his tone. ‘why aren’t you at home?’

a smile of annoyance lines your lips, eyes rolling. ‘could ask the same of you.’

you’re ever so aware of the guns you have pointed at each other. his eyes never leaving yours, he speaks again. ‘i have important business to attend to.’

of course you do, you think to yourself. 

its a pity you never liked him, never got to know him. atleast now, you understand why.

‘as do i.’ 

suddenly, gunshots blast through the air. 

amidst the confusion and fear of who shot who, you run to the door labelled ‘8’, turning the key and quickly running inside. but your attempts to shut mark out are quickly abandoned when he swiftly places his foot between the closing door and it’s frame.

you jump back, reaching in your back pocket for the small knife you stashed earlier, hiding around the corner of the room. he kicks the door open, standing in the doorway, gun still in hand. he walks in slowly, treading lightly as he scans the room with his aim. 

but just as he gets into the room, you stop him, grabbing his arms from behind him and twisting the gun out of his hand. 

he attempts to kick you off his back, mind increasingly aware of the knife you have placed to his throat.

hesitantly, he turns, putting his hands up. 

once you’re face to face, you take no time in tackling him. he grunts, the wind knocking right out of him as he hits the floor. 

straddling his waist, both of your faces are emotionless, void of any of the pretend love you were used to maintaining.

‘did you know?’ he grunts, breathless, eyes glancing slightly at the blade you have pressed to his throat. ‘did you know it was me?’

you push the knife closer to his skin and he winces. 

‘answer me, yn.’ his voice is hoarse, struggling to speak. 

you take a deep breath, deciding to tell him the truth. 

‘no.’ you say, but curiosity peaks in you again, and this time, you’re taking no chances at missing out. ‘did you?’

his jaw clenches.

with a sudden sense of energy, he kicks you, causing you to fall on top of him, your knife going slack in your hand as he knocks it to the side. he flips you both over in the process so that he’s now above you, taking a hold of both of your wrists. 

‘no,’ he says, anger lining his words. ‘well,’ he chuckles, ‘i knew one thing.’

you furrow your brows. 

he continues, ‘you’ve always hated me. i’ve always been able to see it in your eyes. you detest the thought of ever marrying me.’

you go to speak, but before you can reply, he cuts you off. 

‘i wouldn’t worry, it’s a mutual feeling.’

with that, you reciprocate his anger. all those years of marriage, of putting up with a man you hate in order to give yourself a sense of security, all of it, has come down to this. pushing him off of you, you crawl to his revolver, laid out across the other side of the room. 

your hands gain purchase to it, lifting it up to point at him. 

your finger rests on the trigger. he’s in perfect shot. there’s no one around, you would complete your mission and regain your boss's trust back. but somehow, something stops you. 

as you look into his eyes, the deep brown hue of his pupils looking at you in disgust and anger, you snap. 

you just can’t do it. 

because whilst his eyes may be looking at you in a new light, it’s those same eyes you have grown accustomed to seeing everyday. nearly every other set of eyes you see, looking back at you, you only get to see once before they’re closed forever, no one being granted the experience of ever viewing them again. but his, you’ve always known that, no matter what, you’d see them at the end of the day, that you’d wake up to them after every nightmare. 

you just don’t think that you could let them go. 

that you could let him go.  

he notices your hesitation, a hint of a smile now making it’s way to his features.

‘you can’t do it, can you?’

you stay silent, finger still hovering over the trigger. 

‘over five-hundred kills and now you’re hesitating.’ he taunts. 

you stay still, shaking with anger. ‘you’ve done your research.’

‘had to make sure i knew what i was dealing with. although, nothing could have prepared me for this.’ he laughs, as if this whole situation is funny to him. 

‘okay then,’ you say, lowering the gun. turning it in your palm, extending the handle out towards him. ‘kill me.’

he looks at you, a stern expression on his face, as he takes the gun from your hand. 

but what he’s not expecting is for you to put your palm to his shoulder, making him sit himself down on the bed as you climb to straddle his lap. 

he looks up at you, a mix of hatred and annoyance lining his features. slowly, you take his left wrist, guiding his hand to hold the small of your back. his eyes travel to the curve of your waist before looking back up. even slower, you take his right wrist, the one holding the gun, moving it so that the barrel presses firmly against your temple.

you let go of his wrists, the index finger of his left hand drawing circles on your skin, something he used to do years ago, in the age where you used to cuddle up to each other to watch movies. then, you accepted it because you had to make eachother think you loved the other. now, he’s doing it because he knows you don’t.

his face is close enough to yours now that you see the golden specks of his eyes as he looks at you, they swim in the pool of colour, drowning in the light that reflects off of them. 

gun still pressed to your temple, mark lets out a deep breath. ‘you really want this?’ he whispers. 

barely there, you nod, eyes falling to his lips. 

he chuckles, hand at your waist now tracing its way up to the back of your neck. 

his eyes flutter as he leans in. it's smooth, gentle but so incredibly angry as he kisses you. in all the years of your marriage, you’ve never kissed mark like this, never shown him enough emotion to be able to connect this deeply with him. your mind soars into a place of nothingness, beyond your world of killing and death, but it’s quickly brought back when you hear a sudden click from the pressure at your temple. 

the gun.

you pull away, marks face a look of irritation as his eyes travel between the empty gun and you.

he had tried to distract you. 

he had tried to kill you.

you slap the gun out of his hand before climbing off of him, dashing for the half open door. 

you hear his footsteps clamber after you, chasing you down the motel hall. sprinting down the stairs, knowing he’s behind you, you keep running and running and running. 

but it's not the fear of death that's urging you on, it’s the fear of knowing you didn’t have it in you to kill him.

and he did.

you didn’t go home to cook dinner that night, the image of his eyes on you scarring your memory, the feeling of his lips invading your mind. 

instead, you go home with nothing but one intention. 

this time you’re not going to let him distract you. this time you’re not going to let him leave. 

his eyes were not going to stop you. 

driving down your street, an invigorating anger consumes you. a resurgence of betrayal floods your actions as you press down on the gas pedal as though your life depends on it. all because now it’s evident that if you don't kill him, he will kill you. 

pulling your car sharply around the corner and onto your driveway, you step out the car, pistol in either hand. you scan the building with your eyes, the warm exterior of your house now a cold shell, a place for death.

someone, tonight, is going to die here, and you will not let it be you. 

as you creep around the house towards the back door, silence swarming you, you see a sudden flicker of light from the kitchen. 

there he is, usual home comfort clothing, usual messy hair. to him, you’re not a threat; he’s seen it first hand, witnessed your hesitation. 

but not anymore, not after he had tried to kill you. you won’t let him take your life away from you anymore than he already has. 

you slowly walk towards the back door, twisting the handle to pop it open, but just as you do, the kitchen light switches off. the entire house turns to black. 

he knows you’re here. 

you walk inside, past your immaculate kitchen, past the stairwell. but it’s when you get to the living room that you hear a shuffle amongst the furniture. 

and you’re right next to the light switch. 

you reach your hand towards the switch, inches away from turning the light on before a hand clasps around your wrists. you twist, shooting blindly at the figure behind you, an attempt to defend yourself. 

‘nice try, honey.’ you hear his voice whisper from beside you. 

you turn again, trying to gain an idea of where he is, but before your eyes can focus, a rally of gunshots explode at the wall beside you. unfortunately for mark, he misses, similarly blinded by the darkness surrounding you, but fortunately for you, the fire of his revolver illuminates from the barrel, signaling exactly where he’s positioned from across the room.

moving before you can even think, you run towards him, launching yourself in his direction. you meet the hardness of his shoulder as you knock you both onto the floor, rolling away from each other. you attempt to regain your balance on your feet, but a sound from across the room stops you in your tracks: the chilling swipe of a knife being drawn from the kitchen drawer.

mark has never deviated from his selected weapon before. 

he is desperate.

still unable to see each other, you speak out as you eventually stand up. 

‘have you ever considered couple’s therapy, sweetie?’ you taunt, hoping a joke would distract him as you crawl across the room to find one of your pistols. 

he laughs in reply, ‘with you, or the fake wife i’ve been married to for four years?’

‘i have no idea what you're talking about.’ your voice is sweet, an innocent persona you’ve been willing to upkeep. 

his voice sounds closer, raspier. ‘you know, i always wondered why you hated me.’ he says, the sound of his words circling you as you freeze. ‘i thought, maybe you knew what i did for a living, that you despised me for it.’ he stops walking. ‘but now i know that you really do just hate me.’

with that, he lunges in your direction, circulating his arms around you from behind, knife held firmly against the front of your neck. you feel his breath on your cheek, hear his heartbeat. 

and it’s racing.

‘you won’t do it.’ you say, fear consuming you. 

you feel his lips twitch into a smile from beside you. 

‘you’re naive, baby.’

‘then do it.’

there’s a moment of stillness, mark’s breath halting, his heart still pounding. 

the pressure at your throat lingers, but it doesn’t increase. 

instead, it’s the silence that speaks volumes.

the knife drops to the floor, clattering at your feet, his arms still enveloping you. 

he turns your body by your shoulders, and the stillness of the room allows your eyes to focus.

there he is, hair dishevelled as he looks down on you. it’s almost impossible to tell, but amongst the flood of darkness you think you see a hint of a smile in his eyes. 

he looks down at the floor, his arms falling to his sides. 

‘im sorry, yn.’ he says. 

you furrow your brows in confusion. 

‘wh-’ 

but before you could ask what he means, you feel the warm embrace of his arms around you, head falling into his chest as he pulls you towards him, a hand running through your hair. 

you stay like that for a moment, basking in each other's comfort, memories of the start of your marriage flooding back to you. 

it’s now that you realise the extent of your fear, it's now that you realise what you really feel. 

it’s not mark’s eyes that reel you in, not the warm brown or the golden specks that you urge to drift away with, no, it’s just him. 

the man you have despised for all these years, for this entire marriage, is the man you don’t.

before you could have it in your heart to figure out why, a high pitched screech blurs around you, a whistle you both know all too well. 

‘yn!’ mark pleads, pulling your wrist towards him as he ducks behind the wine cabinet, its bronze structure serving as the perfect shield as he holds your body towards him. 

you don’t know why, but you trust his embrace.

as if perfectly timed, the hot surge of the explosion traces your skin as the kitchen falls to ruin, the cabinet protecting you both from the heat of the blast. it’s only a small explosion, erupting only a meter within itself, but your heart pounds at the nature of it.

you look up at mark as you pull away from each other. 

‘that wasn’t me-’ you begin, but a shock in mark’s eyes stop you from talking.

you turn, facing the direction of the explosion. 

emerging within the rubble of your kitchen wall, is a figure. 

the smoke conceals them, hiding the details of their features from you. 

but as the second figure emerges from the dust, you recognise their silhouette almost immediately. 

agent K. your boss.

‘fuck.’ mark mumbles to himself as he holds an eye contact with the first person so extreme that it has you questioning. meanwhile, you do all you can to avoid K’s glare, feeling her eyes burn into your skull.

both yours and marks. 

K and the man you don’t recognise both stand in what’s left of your kitchen, eyes trained on the proximity of you and the man beside you.

you don’t dare to speak first. 

‘agent 1270. agent 1999.’ K begins, breaking the silence. 

you check your watch, fear and terror consuming you as you read the steady pace of the clock hands.

10:44 pm. 

it’s been exactly 11 hours and 59 minutes. 

you’re completely and utterly fucked.

K continues, ‘there's a little someone i would like you to meet.’

after her cue, two men in black walk towards you, dragging a half limp man between them,  black cloth over his head as they place him on his knees ahead of you. 

after receiving a nod from K, one of the two men reach for his hood, lifting it off his head and revealing the terrifyingly familiar face of the man it belongs to. 

he smiles, his silver moustache smiling with him. 

it’s him, the man you were supposed to poison when you had accidently poisoned mark instead. 

mark clenches his jaw beside you, hands digging in his pockets as he glares at the man in front of him. 

and suddenly it all pieces together. 

your mind draws back to your conversation with your boss.

‘it’s a race of who can find and kill who first.’ 

that is what she told you when she gave you the task of killing mark, that is why she gave you the job. 

because he was set to kill you too. 

you were set to take out eachother.

‘this was your plan all along.’ you say, eyes flickering between K and the stranger beside her, completely ignoring the man as he gets dragged away again out of sight. ‘this is what you’d hoped for. you knew, this whole time, what you wanted.’

mark looks at you, and you can see the pieces falling together in his head. 

K looks angry, livid even, but it only adds fuel to your flame, so you continue.

‘there was never a rivalry between our agencies, was there?’ you ask, not waiting for the answer; you already know what it will be. ‘there was never any competition.’

K’s anger slowly morphs into a smug look of distaste as she begins to speak, slowly walking towards you. 

‘mrs lee, do you really think i would have assigned you such a task? you, an inexperienced solo assassin set to murder a gambler at a casino?’ her eyes search yours. ‘it was all under the plan i had constructed. i instructed you to slip poison into the gentlemans drink, under oath that if you fucked up i would get rid of you, and agent H here,’ she points at marks boss beside her, ‘was to instruct agent 1999 to take a sip of the drink, reasoning it as an interception of rival plans and promising him an antidote he wasn’t going to receive. killing both of you in the process.’ you feel the anger in mark shift beside you. ‘what we didn’t expect, however, was for you to give it to him yourself. so, by all due means, we had to improvise. if we couldn’t take you out, then you would have to take out each other.’

by this point, K is directly in front of you, the scent of her navy suit filling the air around you with an aroma of sweet spice. 

but as you look into her eyes, you decide that, really, you’re not scared of her. 

you peek at mark beside you, his attention elsewhere, trained on his boss as he remains across the other side of the room, a smug look on his face.

mark speaks up. ‘why? why go through all that trouble to kill us?’ he says, directly aimed at his boss.

agent H comes forward, until eventually, he is side by side with agent K. 

your boss smiles, ‘because marriage is a dangerous sport, agent 1999.’

your heart thumps in your chest, your skin crawls.

she knew. 

she knew everything. 

‘a distraction.’ she sneers, ‘a liability.’

you don’t say anything, you can’t.

‘and though you liked to pretend you hated it, mrs lee, i knew, truly, deep down, there was a vow more important to you than any job you could have been given.’

the silence is deafening, scorching the air around you. 

but its not K that finishes the sentence, it's the voice of the man beside you, the voice of the reason behind all of this. 

he’s breathless, but the words are laced with nothing but raw honesty as he whispers them, a realisation sparking from within him.

and now he’s finally aware.

‘till death do us part.’

it’s only after those words are uttered that the whole world breaks loose. 

shots erupt from wall to wall, glass smashing around you as you follow mark, his hand wrapped firmly around your wrist. 

you both burst out the door, his hand letting loose of yours so that you can sprint your way over to mark’s car. 

‘get in!’ he yells at you from the driver's seat, but your mind betrays you, a plan of strategy forming in your wits.

‘hang on.’ you yell back at him and with little time to spare, mark rolls his eyes.

he rolls down the window. ‘we don’t really have time for this, yn.’ mark grunts through his teeth, anger enticing him to just drive off without you, to let you die. but he can’t, not like this.

you ignore him, legs close to giving in as you run to the keypad on the gate to your driveway. urging mark to drive through, you press in the numbers, closing the gate before climbing over, jumping into his car on the other side.

‘go, go, go.’ you yell, gunfire belting off the metal of the cars exterior and you shut the door.

skidding the car round the exit of the street, the rubber of the tyres producing a thick layer of smoke behind you, mark calls over to you, ‘what did you d-’

but before he could finish his sentence, your entire house explodes in a massacre of flames. 

you grin at him in succession, ‘self destruction code.’

he laughs back at you, ‘you’re crazy.’

‘i know.’

as you begin to gain speed on the highway, mark sliding the car skillfully between the cars around you, you start to notice three other cars doing the same behind you, gaining speed, and the familiar black tint of each window signalling who they belong to.

‘shit, they’re after us.’ you wince, mark looking in the rearview mirror and cursing at the sight. but before he can suggest anything, he peeks over at you, watching as you reach under the seat and find yourself a set of machine guns.

noticing his questioning look, you turn to him, ‘what? that’s where they are in my car, so i could only guess.’ you shrug.

he laughs, in awe at this new version of his wife, ‘i think i can get used to this side of you.’

‘you’d better.’ you reply, before reaching up at the sunroof and pulling it across, making a gap for you to emerge out of. manoeuvring yourself so that you're kneeling on the centre console of the car, you push your upper body out the top of the car, aiming the gun at the cars chasing after you. 

beginning to fire your guns, aiming for the cars’ tyres and successfully stalling one of the drivers, you seem to start to lose your balance.

‘mark!’ you call. 

‘you okay, baby?’ he yells back, noticing your struggle.

you roll your eyes. ‘you’re driving like a coward’

‘you’re kidding, right?’

you look down at him, peeking your head back through the sunroof. ‘let me drive.’

he sighs in acceptance before you reach your legs over to his side of the car, swapping places with him. 

but mark has better ideas. 

‘open the trunk.’ he demands, picking up both machine guns from the passenger seat and climbing to the back. 

you press the button, the trunk opening up and giving mark a full view of the cars behind him. 

you speed up the car, weaving through the traffic in an attempt to divert their bullets. 

‘it’s too busy, babe, i can’t aim like this.’ he yells back to you. 

‘hang on.’ you call as you speed past cars until you find a junction in the road. you turn the car, slipping across it and nearly flipping the car in the process. 

‘holy shit.’ mark yells, clinging onto the handle on the car roof.

you laugh, ‘sorry.’ 

now with a clear aim of the cars behind you, mark crawls on the backseat, shooting desperately after them.

you begin to grow eager, listening as mark wastes all the bullets you have at your disposal. that’s when an idea begins to form in your head, an impossible yet incredibly daring plan. 

amidst all the chaos, you call for him again. ‘mark!’

‘yeah?’ he says, ducking behind the seats to avoid the other cars’ oncoming gunfire, panting in exhaustion. 

‘you got any explosives?’

mark’s head tilts, ‘under your seat. why?’ 

you reach under your seat, grabbing the grenade and passing it back to mark. 

‘i need you to open the left door at the back.’ you yell, and he does so, other hand holding on by the seat belt to keep himself upright. 

you continue, ‘when i tell you to, throw it out that door.’

‘shit, okay.’ he replies, leaning back against the seat, wincing in pain at the strength to keep himself going. 

noticing a straight length of road up ahead, you ready your hand on the car’s parking brake. when you gain enough speed, you quickly turn the steering wheel to the left, forcing the car to a stop in the process. in a whirl of gravity, the car spins on its side as the cars behind you are forced to stop. it's then that you call for mark to throw the explosive. 

a bright white light erupts from beside you, a hot breeze brushing past your skin.

the cars go up in flames, both of your bosses inside them. 

it's over.

everything is over.

after a few moments of tranquility, mark is already outside the car, pulling you from the driver's seat and bringing you to your feet. 

‘you okay?’ he turns to you, eyes searching yours in a second of sincerity that you’ve never seen from him before. 

it’s cruel, the way he looks at you, as though nothing has changed, as though you're still that same innocent wife you once were. the thick atmosphere of reality struggles to set in between you as you look back at the damage you’ve made.

both physical and not.

‘they’re gone’ you whisper, ‘it’s all gone.’

he feels everything you feel, he always has, every thought, every emotion, all of it. so he does what he knows he also needs the most, as he pulls you into his chest, resting his chin on the top of your head and wrapping his arms around you in warmth. he knows you're hurting, and for once in his life, he has the power to stop it. 

side by side, you walk. not a word is uttered, not a thought exchanged. you don’t need to, you both understand. it’s bittersweet, but yet terribly foreboding, so you don’t say a word. 

you had managed to find yourselves in a nearby town, not a care where you had ended up, home no longer a fortified place, destroyed and abandoned. you stand, complete yet broken, at the front of the town's local church, looking up at the grand design of its wooden doors. 

it’s as if you both had gravitated here by some external form of fate, woven into your lives, repeated like a mantra, forcing back to you everything you had seemed to have forgotten. that’s how you find yourselves where you are now, feet facing each other as you stand at the altar at the front of the church hall, the echo of the stone walls reflecting your silence. 

for once in your life, you look into his eyes knowing that they’re his.

‘till death do us part.’ you whisper, and you know K was right; you do mean it.

he smiles back at you, dimples showing.

‘till death do us part.’

mark looks at you, really looks at you, a softness in his features and a new found sincerity in his heart. 

it was at that exact moment that you realised why you had hated marrying mark lee.

it was attachment: something so incredibly forbidden yet increasingly enticing. all you wanted, all you really wanted, was to love in honesty, but it wasn’t mark that you wanted to love.

it was agent 1999. 

two weeks later 

the room is plastered in an ugly hue of grey, carpet stained and window forcing a breeze to flow through the curtains. mark sits beside you, listening to the question of the woman before you. 

‘so, what made you both want to come here for couples therapy?’

mark turns to you, a smirk lining his lips. you smile, trying to conceal your laugh.

‘i guess you could say we kept a few secrets. isn’t that right, mark?’

he looks at you, eyes wide and heart full. 

‘something like that.’

[daylighted]

i seriously did not want to do this but if i'm gonna be talked abt behind the scenes, and if ppl i follow are going to start turning on me because of one actual psychopath that has not left me alone for 3 weeks, i'm gonna say my piece because it is not fair to know that i am being painted in a bad light, when i have been a victim, and my friends have been dragged into this because every time, it is made public.

all of this has happened in a span of twenty one days. here's my proof.

this is a server that one of my close friends and most adored people (who, again, like anyone else mentioned in this, should not have been dragged into this fucking tirade) created for spn fans on discord to cultivate a fun little community and to make friends. she acquired the link, i don't know who invited her or if somehow she just found the link if it was posted and joined herself, but she showed up.

four days into her being there, i tell the server, i'm making a mr. & mrs. smith inspired jackles bot. i'd more say 3, because i posted it at midnight that day. eleven hours later, she says 'i wanna make a mr. & mrs. smith dean bot.' so my whole idea. and i am not a confrontational person by nature, so i was trying to lightly discourage without straight up saying no, because i did not know this girl. it'd been a little over 3 days.

i have the person i was replying to blurred because i'm actually sick of people getting dragged into this that did not have any reason to be put in between her shit with me, whatever the hell that may be.

here is me lightly trying to deny it but not outright saying no, and maybe that's on me, but who in their right mind sees someone else's idea and eleven hours later just blatantly copies it?

and she did copy it. word for word. this is my intro message on the left, and this is hers on the right. it's literally word for word, practically, with the lines lining up and everything.

so i'm angry. i don't care abt follower account but now i'm going to look like the thief because at this point, i'm not anywhere near big. like 300 followers. which again, don't care about, but sometime between the span of this above and what's coming, she'd been posting abt a milestone very close to 1k. that is a clear difference, and an abuse of the writing channel, that is supposed to have been a safe place for us to share our ideas.

i don't say anything about this, though. my breaking point is when she discovers my bonnie & clyde au and says she wants to make a bot based on it. which maybe i would have said yes to someone else, but she'd stolen my idea already before, word for word, and i wasn't in the mood. so i politely told her no, and that i was planning on making bots out of all of my aus. and she goes something like, "oh, that's fine, i just really liked the idea is all." i have deleted our dms on discord because i didn't want her reaching out to me again, which does come up!

anyways, i think it's cool. i'm thinking she's not going to take anything else, because i denied her one thing, so maybe this was just a one-off.

she posts this into the writing server, like she's showing off that she made the bot anyways / had made it already in the short span of time it took me to reply to her, and was trying to get hype for it??? or something?? or rub it in my face that she made it anyways? i don't know her motives. for anything that happens in this.

not to mention, she made a mr. & mrs. smith dean pt two in this time, for some reason. again, not her idea.

but going back to the above screenshot, that's her chatting with bonnie & clyde!dean. please look here at a screenshot of my fic, literally making it clear that whatever the intro she used for this, it was identical, because the interaction here is identical to my writing.

the day before this, december 1st, she was also asking me to tell her abt the au, but i'm not going to downright say that it was to stake out stuff to steal, but looking back, it seems like it.

so by this point, i'm angry! really angry! because every idea i mention in that chat, gets stolen by her. so i make this post. kind of infamous when it comes to future things.

immediately, she knows it's about her, because she's messaging me everywhere. i. do. not. engage. behind the scenes, i'm talking to people in the server abt it, because i literally am being stolen from and expected to take it! so she gets kicked.

this causes her to message me even more. this causes her to make an entire post ( now deleted by ppl in the server's request, because we thought once 'resolved', it would be resolved ) tagging every single person in the server. not just me, not just the people who came forward or the server's owner, but everyone who has no idea what's going on. trying to pitch her case.

her case being, by the way, that the reason she copied me was because of photographic memory. i feel like i have a screenshot of this but can't find it, and also don't want to keep using all my limited picture spaces. but if i find it and you want to see it, i will show it.

she gets let back into the server on a warning. it's like a 3 strike system, i imagine, which this is where things get psychotic! like genuinely!

the very day that i tell her no to the bonnie & clyde thing, i get this in my inbox.

on god, never before have i been told this ever. and i'm supposed to believe that it's not a coincidence, when the only person i've 'wronged' on tumblr so far is her, and just for calling her out on her shit? i've literally been on tumblr for maybe 2 months maximum at this point. like i only know a handful of people, and most are in this server.

so i move on. whatever. one of my friends from the server makes a post ( that i rb-ed, but i'm not gonna link it because again, i'm keeping them out of this if i can, but it's also on my page still ) in my defense, because genuinely, it is not that fucking serious to tell a fanfic writer to kill themselves.

after she posts it, she gets an anon telling her to track them. and then one telling her to kill herself. again, i'm not posting who's doing this, but she responded to it, and it's on her account if you need to see more proof.

so you might be thinking, how do you know this is her? it's a lot of circumstantial evidence and gut feelings. and yes, i did doubt it at the time that maybe it wasn't, and i was just paranoid, but literally sometime last week, she not only:

messaged me 4 times privately on discord to reply to a question i already answered (being like do you think i'm a bad person? or something like that. but i answered it! and she added something on the end that i didn't see because i was busy and in a different timezone.)

tagged me twice in the server to try and get my attention for this question.

private messaged me here on tumblr.

sent an ask, which i do still have & a screenshot in case it gets deleted btw, about it.

MADE. A THROWAWAY ACCOUNT. BAITING ME INTO REPLYING TO IT. it was a comment abt a fic, so i said thank you, and within 3 fucking minutes max, she sent me ANOTHER message on discord saying "please stop ignoring me." THE ACCOUNT NOW, IS GONE. SO THAT'S HOW I KNOW IT'S HER. you will see later, too, that this is fitting for her character.

i know that screenshot is not much to go off of, but that account did not follow me, did not even like or interact with that fic. i remember taking that screenshot because i was like, there's no way this is her, like actually no way, because the first message to get me to say anything was just like a compliment. and the moment i replied, she messages me, and after i message back, i get the above response. i hope this makes sense.

this is her strike 2, by the way, because i was getting harassed and i wasn't going to sit there and be like yeah this is fine that this is happening to me. i am six hours, maybe more, behind her timewise. as you can see in the screenshot, it was 1:27 am for me.

so all of this happens, and she's getting increasingly more passive aggressive. she keeps bringing up CONSTANTLY that none of us interact with her things anymore, which is crazy to me, because she hardly interacted with ours but expected things back for her. not to mention, of course i wasn't going to interact with someone the same after that someone stole my shit.

all of this leads to december 17th, which yes, was yesterday. which i'm assuming is her big crashout because it's the only reason i can think of anything else that it could be??? but me and a lot of the other server members get anons like this. which is why, like i said earlier, i am convinced the kys is her. this one is the one i received.

and these are a couple that my friends did.

none of us reply, and she's spamming in the chat asking if we got anything, and we all deny it, because we know it's her. like, who else comes into other people's asks to talk shit on someone else? it makes no sense. especially people that the anon wouldn't have known? that she was friends with? i wasn't even in her little intro tagged post, like a lot of the server was before now, so it's literally a dead giveaway that this is her.

when she gets to me, though, after being told i think twice that no, none of us received anything, tumblr must have eaten it, her message changes. and she's like "i just got a second ask telling me that you definitely got one." and when i asked to see the screenshot of the ask that name drops me, she says she deleted it. like how convenient, right?

so this is where things get absolutely mental. more so than they are.

the dani era. shortlived but absolutely insane. suddenly she's leaving her account, as you probably saw from one of her posts that's now deleted, but i might have a screenshot.

you can't really see it but she changed her server name to dani too, and you might have seen her account before literally this afternoon, was daniisms. so again, she is kicked, because suddenly handing off your account to a stranger is weird and violates the rules. i am not in charge of the kicking, by the way, if for some reason you think i am. i literally am just a person in the server who for some reason was targetted? idk.

i don't want to air out her shit but this is the reasoning she provided for why she was quitting and 'dani' was taking over. sorry it's so small i was on my laptop n so it's just. like that.

in a later message, she brings up how specifically she is depressed... because of lack of engagement from us. literally. and i get that that's upsetting, but she just handed over her whole account allegedly? because of it? that's insane to me.

so after she's kicked, she starts messaging some of us on discord, i got an ask.

this, also, is still in my drafts, because i was going to privately be like arty this is actually clinical please seek help, but it wouldn't let me post it privately so i didn't! because i never wanted! any of this! public! from the very beginning!

also you can see there, the username change. so a lot of us block her. i didn't because i wanted to see if being kicked and no longer apart of the server would make her give it up, which yeah, i should have, but i give a lot of benefit of the doubt if you can't tell, when all it does is bite me in the ass.

because a lot of people got blocked, she made an account called bella-oftheball, and only followed two people from the server, commented on one of my random fics, and on the account right now, her only like is another person from the server's. not to mention, the header on the account is literally exactly her edit style. again. blocked.

so this morning. all of us are getting messages from arty again, suddenly back on her account, and claiming that all of this is a hacker. that she hasn't even been here for weeks. so this is the first time she's seeing any of this allegedly and she's confused, doesn't understand why she's gone from the server, her discord account's deleted...

still here in my friends list. lol. and she's in my asks, as you can see where i answer it. so you can see her exact defense and then her in the comments.

now i just want you to tell me why a hacker would:

post all of her drafts

target a spn tumblr writing acct??? like?

and none of her sideblogs ?

make up ANOTHER persona aka the friend named dani.

go through the effort of liking some of our things when she did, and interacting with all of us in the server???

because hackers usually idk. delete the entire accounts. or post awful things on someone else's accts. they wouldn't just run it like their own ??????

so yeah. she's back on tumblr btw, as artyandink, as arty. i'm posting this because her intro message has changed to no longer have any of the server ( not me, never me, and i wonder why! ) but people that i know she's telling all of this too and painting not only me as a bad guy, but also my friends who literally only are involved because they were defending me. dragged into this shit for daring to believe me.

i am making this both in my defense and as a warning. please be careful around this person! she switches identities on a dime to fit her narrative, will harass you if you don't answer fast enough, will harass you if you say anything she doesn't like, and will literally torment your entire friend group if she deems fit, as a form of sick pleasure or something. again, i don't know her motive, just that i've been going through this behind the scenes for 3 fucking weeks, all for it to lead up to this, and to have me being pinned by her to people that do not know a thing about this because it was NEVER MEANT. TO BE PUBLIC. OR THIS INSANE.

<3 please stay safe ily guys.

[hazelsmirrorball]

Mr. and Ms. Piastri 

summary: Y/n Piastri and Oscar Piastri have been hiding things in the relationship, so they go to couples therapy. Based on the movie Mr. and Ms. Smith

pairings: oscar piastri x Wife!reader

a/n: Excuse any errors english isn’t my main language. Also this story will be several parts. Hope you enjoy!

The sound of Oscar obnoxiously chewing his gum bounced against the walls making Y/n grip on the leather chair sending a forced smile towards him and their  therapist. They had debated several times about doing this. Both of them had created such a tall wall around themselves not letting anyone through, not even each other. Adding a third person in their life was something neither of them expected when they got married. But it was their last resort. But adding another person just builds up the facade they had in their relationship. 

Couples counseling. 

The only “date” they were forced to have with another person, in this case their therapist.

She thought of a coherent sentence  to describe their relationship without insulting him right then and there. The intention wasn’t to ruin their relationship, even though at this point it was to the point where they were desperate for something to save it. She couldn’t lie, she loved him, she loved him with all her heart. But as the years passed the only thing somewhat stable in their relationship was the dinner they always had at seven pm.

After six years of marriage, their relationship had turned monotone and nothing excited the pair. They used to be spontaneous, both of them love traveling but now they found themselves invested more in their work than in their relationship. Now the only quality time they spent together was eating dinner in silence with the occasional critique of her food from her husband.

It’s not that they wanted their marriage to fall apart. At least on behalf of Y/n’s she wanted her relationship to succeed. She was a perfectionist and her marriage wasn’t going to ruin her streak. She had worked a lot for her marriage to be perfect, everything in her head was calculated to the max to make the relationship as good as the books in couples counseling.

They had tried everything, taking advice from their friends, reading “how to fix your unfixable marriage” articles. So that’s when they decided to get help from professionals and do couple’s counseling. The Verstappen family from next door had claimed that the therapist had worked wonders for their relationship, so why not try it?

“I wanted to start with the fact that we don’t have to be here, right Jane?” Oscar tapping his wife’s shoulder forcing a smile her way.

“Yes, John. It’s a funny story actually” she replied, forcing a chuckle subtly moving her shoulder to take Oscar's hands off. He quickly took the hint resting each of his hands on the arms of the leather chair he was sitting on anxiously tapping it.

“We were at a charity event, specifically a charity auction slash race viewing” Oscar started while looking at his wife for her to continue.

“Our friends the Sainz. They live across the street”

“Anyways the grand lot was…”

“A mystery lot” both continued in unison with a pained expression covering their faces.

“I had sunk a few, wasn’t driving so I started bidding” Oscar said, pinching his nose knowing where this conversation was heading.

“John, here is a tiny bit competitive,” She replied, tapping his thigh while forcing a smile. Oscar bites his tongue trying to avoid saying  anything  he will regret later.

“As I was saying, the upshot is we end up blowing four hundred bucks on the mystery lot”

“we? I think we, is a lot of people, honey. Don’t lie to Dr. Wexler”

“The important thing here is that we won four sessions with Dr. Wexler!” Oscar clapped back with fake joy wishing to be anywhere else but here.

“The Sainz have a great humor.” Y/n said sincerely laughing this time followed by Oscar laughing as well with her.

“But…you didn’t have to come” Dr. Wexler said finally breaking his silence. He looked up from his notes scanning the couple as if he was looking for every single flaw in their relationship.

“Right” Oscar replied, his once happy demeanor changing abruptly into an awkward one.

“Absolutely, but we as a couple strongly believe in a theory” Y/n said still smiling at the Dr., quickly reaching for Oscar hand and intertwining their hand together.

“we do?”

“of course we do silly, the oil check”

“Right! The oil check. See we’ve been married for five years…”

“six.”

“Five, six years, and this is like a check up for us. Pop the hood, nose around, change the oil, maybe replace a seal or two. Who knows, a lot of things could happen”

“Okay, then. For this so-called “oil check” I'm going to ask some questions. On a scale from one to ten how happy are you as a couple?” Dr. Wexler replied, pushing up his glasses and taking an attentive look towards the pair analyzing their body language.

“eight”

“wait, so like ten being perfectly happy and one being…totally utterly miserable?”

“Just respond instinctively, John” Dr. Wexler answered, wanting for his reaction.

“Ok. Ready?”

“Ready”

“Eight.” The couple replied at the same time with a proud smile adorning each of their lips.

“Next question, on a scale of one to ten how happy would you say your partner is?” The doctor continues his question this time reading from his notes.

“eight.”

“wait. are we allowed fractions?” Y/n asked with a slight smirk staring to see the fun in this session, even if this session could be the end of their relationship.

“it’s what’s instinctive”

“well then, i’m all set. Are you all set, John?”

“one, two, three…”

“eight.”

“Okay, well i’m seeing repetition here. So let me ask a different question, how often do you have sex?”

“ i don’t understand the question” y/n fakes confusion as she rests her chin on her hand.

“wait. okay, i’m lost. Is this a one to ten thing?”

“Right. I mean, because if it is, does “one” equal “not much” or “one”, like, nothing. Because strictly speaking zero should be nothing”

“Exactly. Plus, if we don’t know what one is, what’s “ten”?” Oscar continues trying to test the doctor's patience.

“Right…is ten…you know”

“constant and unrelenting…”

“…twenty for seven…without a break. For anything”

“not even to eat”

“like sting”

“Exactly. Look at Sting’s day job. Who else has sixty hours a week to put aside in the sack”

“This is not a one to ten scenario. It’s a  straight question, how often do you guys have sex”

Oscar didn’t want to be a pain in the ass. He loved his wife dearly, he would do anything for her. Even go on a pointless couples therapy session knowing that it was going to do nothing. He was certain that with her there wasn’t a margin for error. Everything was calculated and no risks were involved, that’s what brought their relationship into the position where they currently stood.

“Are you guys completely honest with each other?”

In the back of her head Y/n thought that there could be a tiny possibility that her job was what made their relationship the way it was. Maybe it was the constant lying or the adrenaline rush that her job gave her that their relationship lacked. She knew Oscar, and she knew him well and as much as she wanted to deny it, Oscar brought her the “normal” things to her life. But she was gripping onto that to make their relationship last. She just hoped that this couple counseling will heal whatever they were going through. 

[got-a-new-recipe-for-poundcake]

I just watched a Christmas Story so I wrote this. Happy holidays :)

A Bully Christmas Story:

A fic based on the flick pole scene but it's Gary

“Come on Petey you’ll be fine,” Gary grinned, while Petey shook his head rapidly. 

“I’m not doing it Gary,”

“Come on, don't be such a girl.”

“What's going on here?” Jimmy asked, approaching the two of them. 

“Nothing, just that femme boy over here is being wimp,” Gary responded, clapping Petey hard on the shoulder. 

“He’s trying to make me lick that pole, but I don't wanna get stuck,” Petey answered. 

“You're not gonna get stuck,” Gary said, brushing it off.

“Oh yeah, well why don't you try it Gary,” Petey retorted, a bit nervous but standing his ground. 

“Um well,” Gary gulped, short of a snide remark.

“Yeah come on Gary do it, after all if Petey can handle it surely you can,” Jimmy grinned, crossing his arms. By this point a small crowd had formed around the trio, which seemed to make Gary even more nervous. 

“Alright fine,” Gary snapped, stomping through the snow over to the poll which was about 10 feet away from Jimmy and Petey. Gary stuck his tongue out, and then flinched back when he got close to the flagpole. 

“Come on Gary, it's perfectly safe,” Jimmy taunted, which caused giggles from the crowd. No way in hell would Gary let these morons laugh at him. In a move of bold stupidity, Gary stuck his tongue against the cold metal. This wasn’t too bad. A smirk began to appear on Gary’s face, but as he tried to pull back, his smirk quickly faded. 

“Shit,” Gary muttered, but it came out as ‘thit’. 

“What’s wrong Gary I thought you said it was harmless,” Jimmy smirked as the crowd laughed. 

“Ok, ok I gut it, jus helpt ne mowon” Gary grumbled. Just then the bell rang. 

“Sorry Gary, I gotta get to class,” Jimmy shouted, as he ran off. Gary yelled a long string of profanities after him, and the rest of the crowd cleared except Petey. 

“Peey come on you can hulp me,” Gary pleaded. 

“Sorry Gary, but I have to go,”He responded before running off. 

—

Mr. Hattrick was taking attendance when he noticed something odd,  Gary Smith wasn't causing a scene? Puzzled, he decided to ask the class. 

“Has anyone seen a Mr. Gary Smith?” Everyone looked in different directions besides Hattrick, and out the classroom window. 

Hattrick frowned at this. “I said, has anyone seen Gary Smith?”

“Mr. Hattrick?” Hattrick turned towards the doorway to see that twerp Sheldon. 

“Yes?” 

“You might wanna come see this.” Sheldon gulped. Hattrick sighed as he headed out of the classroom. 

The class rushed to the window to see what was going to happen. Gary was still out there in the snow, his tongue stuck to the poll, trying as best he could to free himself.  

“Holy cow it’s all the prefects,” Pedro gasped “Oh wow Dr. Crabblesnitch!”  Sure enough all the prefects, and Crabblesnitch were gathered around Gary. Finally Nurse McRae came with some warm water, freeing Gary, who’s pulling had caused him to bleed a bit. 

After a while, Gary walked into the classroom, tongue bandaged, and looking very embarrassed and annoyed. The class snickered, as Mr. Hattrick walked back up to the front of the room. 

“Now let’s get to your math homework.”

[coiller]

[based off mrs. and mr. smith movie, an american classic] [this has been edited multiple times since initial posting]

johnny and simon after a very good time together, cuddled in bed.

j: “you know i was married once before”

simon tenses in johns hold. all air leaves the room as the worlds most possessive bastard starts up (imagine old windows computer :) )

there is a long silence before simon breaks it

s: “you what?”

j: “it was a drunken vegas thing,” as he just continues tracing shapes on simons back, “me and a few mates had taken a trip to america for some sports event… i think maybe ? five - six years ago?”

simon leans up to stare at john who inturn takes a single finger and starts running it across simons face; brows, cheekbones, jaw, cupids bow., uneffected by pretty brown eyes

j: “i cant believe it was even legal, but it was a good laugh. Met her at a bar on the las vegas strip, and we were married by elvis!” he adds with faux enthusiasm. “got it annulled the next morning”

s: ”whats her name and address?”

johnny grabs his face with both hands to pull him in for a kiss.

j: “you cant kill her dearest”

simon pouts, johnny starts playing with his blond hair as he leans down to rest again.

end of story, hope it is understandable 🙇🙇well aware that simons reaction would not have been calmed from that simple sentence. dont wanna fix it though xx

also wouldve put social security # like in the og scene, but do british ppl have social security numbers? yes right? or some equivalent anyway

[bropunzeling]

Mr and mrs smith mattdrai au when

Leon has a problem. Several, in fact. The plans he was supposed to steal were not in the place they should have been. The security system he was supposed to override was not the make and model he was promised. And now the very dangerous guards of a very dangerous man, the ones he was supposed to never alert to his presence, are very, very alert.

But there is a nice, expensive, luxurious but not exclusive hotel three blocks away from where the alarms are going off, and a nice, expensive, luxurious but not obscenely so hotel bar where he can get a drink, chat with the bartender, and make sure it seems like he's been here for quite a while. A little bit of smiling goes a long way to securing an alibi.

The bartender is busy at the other end of the bar, though she definitely spots him and definitely looks appreciative. Leon pulls at his shirt, making sure it isn't sticking to his back and chest, and stiffens when someone slides onto the chair next to his.

"Did you order already?"

Leon glances over. His new companion is unfamiliar, not on the roster of guards and assets Leon has been memorizing, but that doesn't mean much. Danger often is. And the way this man -- around Leon's age; unruly hair that's been carefully tamed; garish shirt; tanned forearms; strong profile -- has casually inserted himself makes Leon uneasy.

"No," Leon says, light, wary.

The man smiles at him. And that --

Smiles don't mean much. Anyone can be charming. But this one is very charming. A little sly, a little gleeful. "Well, someone should take care of that," the man says. "A man like you shouldn't go without."

"A man like me," Leon repeats, dubious.

His smile gets wider. There's a dimple punched in his cheek, near the corner. "Handsome," he says, leaning in a tiny bit closer. Almost conspiratorial. "Handsome men definitely should have a drink in their hand."

Leon hasn't been in this business for years to not know when he's being flirted with. Most of the time, he's the one doing the flirting. But it's disconcerting to have it happen with no apparent angle, or hidden meaning, or any effort on his part. Just a random stranger, here by happenstance, liking what he sees.

"What kind of drink do handsome men like?" he asks, to keep the unusual moment going.

The stranger considers him. His eyes are very blue. That's not something Leon should be noticing, when he should be on the lookout for his target's guards, or other interested parties who might be on his trail, searching for the drive concealed in a secret pocket of his shirt.

But Leon is noticing.

"I have a guess," he says. "Want to see if I guess right?"

Two hours later, spread out in a hotel bed, sweat cooling on their skin, Matthew rolls over and traces the bruise he left at the base of Leon's neck with one finger, occasionally scraping the skin with a nail. "So," he says, and his breath no longer smells like rum and lime, and his hair is no longer tamed, but his eyes are still so very blue when he looks over Leon's face. "Did I guess right?"

Leon is certain already that Matthew will be unbearably smug if he says yes. So he doesn't. Just rolls him over and kisses him again.

(and then they elope and then a year later discover they are rival agents and go on the run and rediscover the spark in their marriage send tweet)

[hanasnx]

fav romcoms

1: memorable. 2: liked. 3: favorites.

disclaimer: i am in no way an expert, nor a critic. i'm going based off of my personal faves.

1st category: romantic comedies

10 things i hate about you (1999) 2/3

13 going on 30 (2004) 1/3

50 first dates (2004) 1/3

a knight's tale (2001) 3/3

adventureland (2009) 1/3

angus, thongs and perfect snogging (2008) 2/3

bride wars (2009) 1/3

burlesque (2010) 2/3

chocolat (2000) 2/3

clueless (1995) 3/3

crazy, stupid, love (2011) 1/3

easy a (2010) 1/3

ella enchanted (2004) 2/3

employee of the month (2006) 1/3

enchanted (2007) 1/3

focus (2015) 2/3

fun with dick and jane (2005) 2/3

gentleman prefer blondes (1953) 1/3

hairspray (2007) 2/3

how to lose a guy in 10 days (2003) 2/3

john tucker must die (2006) 2/3

just go with it (2011) 3/3

knight and day (2010) 1/3

leap year (2010) 3/3

legally blonde (2001) 2/3

letters to juliet (2010) 3/3

maid in manhattan (2002) 2/3

miss congeniality (2000) 1/3

miss congeniality 2 (2005) 1/3

mr. and mrs. smith (2005) 3/3

no hard feelings (2023) 1/3

no reservations (2007) 2/3

no strings attached (2011) 1/3

only you (1994) 1/3

overboard (1987) 2/3

picture perfect (1997) 1/3

pitch perfect (2012) 1/3

playing it cool (2014) 1/3

pretty woman (1990) 3/3

romancing the stone (1984) 1/3

scoop (2006) 1/3

she's the man (2006) 1/3

someone like you (2001) 2/3

the devil wears prada (2006) 2/3

the nanny diaries (2007) 3/3

the other woman (2014) 3/3

the parent trap (1998) 2/3

the prince & me (2004) 1/3

the princess bride (1987) 2/3

the princess diaries (2001) 3/3

the princess diaries 2: royal engagement (2004) 3/3

the proposal (2009) 2/3

the tourist (2010) 2/3

the wedding planner (2001) 2/3

this means war (2012) 2/3

to all the boys i’ve loved before (2018) 2/3

two can play at that game (2001) 3/3

vibes (1988) 2/3

warm bodies (2013) 1/3

what's your number (2001) 1/3

why him (2016) 1/3

yes man (2008) 2/3

2nd category: romance movies, or romance adjacent

entrapment (1999) 1/3

ever after (1998) 3/3

good will hunting (1997) 2/3

little women (1994) 2/3

my fair lady (1964) 2/3

pride and prejudice (2010) 3/3

sahara (2005) 2/3

somewhere in time (1981) 1/3

the king and i (1956) 3/3

white christmas (1954) 3/3

great ask <3

[yuricks-rarepair-central]

Okay, ideas! And thanks for saving me for accidentally making a ship that shouldn't be made, soooo ideas! :D

— Durin and Bennett, adventure duo and exploration buddies! :D both get into trouble a lot yeesh, and knowing Bennett's clumsy, bad-luckish tendancies, Durin has to be prepared. I really hope hoyo keeps Mini Durin's personality in the new Durin, i want silly characters to they can have silly dynamics.

— Okay remembering how Kagemaru adores the strong and gets disgusted at the weak, wanting excitement and hardcore battles all the time. I think he and Yelan would get along in a mutual or romantic way in whatever style you pick. I mean please if they are paired up, they would be nice-looking couple by the day and then chop each other's asses off to satisfy the need for both pain and excitement in the night. Mr & Mrs. Smith type shi 😭 (Akiyasu ain't paid enough to be contracted with this bitch-)

— I actually want Tatsuomi to be paired up or have a buddy based on traits, personality, and so on. (My boy may be labeled as bland but if he was able to snap at his loved ones who lied to him for like idk how LONG they kept secrets from him he would he unstoppable.) Since my character knowledge limit is somewhat limited to Genshin, HSR, and TWST, idk who fits his good morals and nature + can tolerate his awful fashion sense.

Got these ideas in the bathroom :D

Oooooh Durin and Bennett my Babies! Yes they would 100% be adventure Buddies,though i can See Bennett being Hesitant(because of His Bad luck) but also so excited to have someone other than Razor,Fischl and Traveler as a friend to explore with. As a Little extra Imagine Wanderer watching over the two from afar to make Sure they don't get into Trouble(He's Durin's dad Trust)

Aahh yes,the good old "Have been married for 10 years and are still trying to kill each other" trope. How lovely! I can See this being a intresting couple because both are Mysterious and more Held Back when it comes to their Backstory or themself in General so imagining the two trying to figure the other Out while hiding their own Secrets is such a funny Thought.

Now Tatsuomi...a Bit of a hard one cause i have Not played in so Long and He was one of the characters i wasn't that intrested in(i was more of a Koga and Yura girly-). But from what i do Remember i would say Caelus/Stelle would be a good fit! Their chaotic personality being abit balanced Out with His more calm and sweet one you know? Another,more funny and platonic one, would be Phainon because they both have horrible Fashion Sense(and someone who fixed/tried to fix Said Fashion Sense)so they can be horrible Fashion besties!

[madfantom]

Curious, do you believe in the interpretation that Fritz Smith is one of many alias Michael Afton takes on? If so, I really like how you switch the MCI names between Foxy and Freddy (canonically being Fritz and Gabriel respectively) to be Gabriel and Fritz in your AU! Although I wonder why Michael would choose that alias? is it something he came up to honor his friend? Or is it something Mr. Afton chose for him, in mockery of honoring his friend?

I didn't change the names for Foxy and Freddy on purpose. I'm actually starting to get mad at this theory that masks from FNAF 3 are superimposed on graves because the comments in Pinterest under the post with my memo about MCI children literally say the same thing

I took the names from the graves, yes. But I made my own designs for them. And Fritz seemed like a good name for Mike's friend, so I did what I did. Besides, my logic for creating the appearance of these four children is different. I haven't released a post on this topic yet because I haven't finished it

But when I was doing this, I forgot about this theory ( that I first wrote) and then when I remembered, I realized that it was bullshit in my opinion

Well, just because you can't make a theory in which one variable doesn't work. So the theory doesn't work either. I mean, the golden Freddy mask doesn't fit over the grave behind the grass or the grave on the mountain, so it doesn't work that way

I've done enough mainstream fandom shit here to avoid being asked questions, but regarding names, it's just one big schizophrenia

It really pisses me off. Names are just names. Initially, I also called Evan like Cassidy (At him first art) because this whole theory with the logbook was such a giant crutch for people to invent something that wasn't there. His name still comes out through a crutch, no matter how much people want to believe in nonsense

I don't want to apologize for my words. I just shielded myself by saying that AU. I'm angry at people who promote everything that the fandom thinks is true with some kind of aggression. Why the fuck can't you shut up the fuckers and consider other options without poking in the face that :"you're wrong, but here's exactly how to do it if you didn't know, you're a stupid person, you're not wrong. I'll give you the truth."

The truth that doesn't fucking add up. Just mainstrim theory with flaws

The same applies to Michael and his million aliases. Because in fact, when applying such a theory, we simply lose all the guards as characters. And Michael becomes a sucker who, after many attempts over many years, has not found his father and has not disassembled the animatronics. He just sat at work for a week, quit, and tried again after many years. No, really, it sounds like idiocy. And this postscript about being fired "because of the smell" is just a dumb reason for me that Fazbear could have attributed to get rid of someone

Again, I don't see any problems for Michael to get involved in pizzerias this way, to take on pseudonyms. But I'm still thinking about how to arrange it interestingly. So far, I can say that Jeremy is a separate character, but Fritz will be someone

Probably the guard from FNAF 3 will be another character too, but with a note that I'm still thinking about the plot for FNAF 3.

I have about a plot for FNAF 2.

As for Fanaf 1, I don't know yet if it makes sense to add Mike insted Schmidt. There is one idea, but it includes the fact that there will be two Mikes and they will be different characters

I understand that I said that this au is based on the history of FNAF itself. But there are many gaps in the history of FNAF that can be interestingly redone or added stuff. There's enough space that the fans themselves are cutting down it for some reason

And yes, Cassady wasn't originally planned. I only added it because I didn't want any questions. I had enough shit when I talked to people about why I called Evan what I thought was right. But now he's Evan, and I have a baby girl named Cassidy in my arms. I'm sure some one 'will write to me a million more times in when I release her reference "why she doesn't have black hair" but that's another story because it seems like only one person noticed that Carl has changed his skin color since the minigames lol

[korgbelmont]

Male MC (Will Redgrave) x Charlie Smith

Part 2

Will and Charlie have been transported to the modern age, and first and foremost is seeing to Charlie's survival...

Written in the present tense

Part 1

Tagging: @choicesficwriterscreations, @jerzwriter

Warnings: Talk of death

Word Count: 1354

Notes: I don’t own these characters, they are the property of Pixelberry Studios.

An Alternate Path made on cooltext.com

I was thinking about this post I made ages ago, and decided to write a story sort of based on it

With no choice but to sit in the waiting area, Will grabs his phone, switching it on, but it switches off straight away. Getting to his feet, he goes over to the reception desk.

Will - Hi, do you have a lead I can use to charge my phone?

She quickly checks the shape of the charging port of his phone.

Nurse - Uh.. yeah. Here you go.

She hands him the end of a lead and he plugs his phone in. After a few seconds, he switches it on and takes a step out of the way whilst the nurse returns to their work. Opening up his photos, Will smiles at the one he took of the entire crew, Axton, Adelia, Charlie, Edward, Ginny, Jonas, Maggie, everyone. He sets the photo as his new wallpaper and also emails it to himself so he can do the same on his computer.

Doctor - Excuse me, Mr. Redgrave?

Will sets his phone down and turns to the Doctor.

Will - How is she?

Doctor - She'll be okay. We were able to counteract the poison, but we'll need to keep her here overnight.

Will - Can I see her?

Doctor - She's unconscious, but if you want to sit with her, that's okay.

Will - Yes please.

Doctor - This way.

The doctor leads Will to the room they're keeping Charlie and he finds her sleeping. Her arm hooked up to what Will guesses is the antidote to the poison. The doctor leaves them and Will closes the curtains around them to give them some privacy. Standing at her side, he takes her hand in his and smiles in relief.

Will - I'm so glad you're alive, Charlie. You changed my life in ways I never imagined possible. You all did.

He takes a seat, settling in for what is probably going to be a long night.

Groaning as she blinks awake, Charlie looks around to find herself somewhere she doesn't recognise. Looking over, she sees Will asleep in the chair and sits up. Will opens his eyes and rushes to stand, wrapping her in a tight hug.

Will - Charlie!

Charlie winces and he steps back.

Will - Sorry!

Charlie looks at the screens around her and at the tube connected to her arm.

Charlie - So we're really in your time?

Will - Welcome to the twenty first century. How much do you remember?

Charlie - I remember being at the temple and there was a woman.

Will - Magdalena. She was the reason we had a chance to say goodbye to Edward and Oliver.

Charlie - So what happens now?

Will - A new life. Together... if you'll have me.

Charlie laces her fingers with his and pulls him closer, capturing his lips with hers in a soft kiss. When they part, she smiles, giving his hand a squeeze.

Charlie - You're al mine, love.

Will laughs quietly, bringing Charlie's hand up and kissing her knuckles.

The next morning, Will and Charlie arrive at his home via a taxi and as they get out, Charlie looks at the vehicle in shock while Will pays the driver. They head in and Will hands up his coat while Charlie looks around.

Charlie - This is all... so strange... I don't even know where to begin.

Will - Wherever you want.

He sits on the sofa and Charlie sits with him, looking at their clothing and then seeing some of Will's hanging up.

Charlie - I guess I should consider some different clothes.

Will - We can order you some to be delivered.

Charlie - You can do that?!

Will - Yeah. Yeah, that's a thing these days.

Charlie - It's strange to think, yesterday we were in the nineteenth century, and now here we are.

Will - I know the feeling. But I'll help you get used to technology and other parts of this time.

Charlie - Thank you. For saving my life.

Will - That wasn't me, that was the Doctors.

Charlie rests against him and he wraps an arm around her, holding her close. They sit in silence for a while before Charlie breaks it with a whisper of three words.

Charlie - I love you...

Will - I love you too.

A few days later, after getting Charlie a few clothes as well as showing her a few things for day to day life in the modern world, Will sets a few parcels down on the floor next to him before taking the last one from the delivery driver and giving a signature.

Will - Cheers, have a good one.

Driver - You too.

He closes the door, setting the parcel in his hands down by the sofa before grabbing the others. He goes through them, and one in particular contains two phones. He grabs his sim card and puts it in one of them before plugging both in to charge. A few minutes later, Charlie steps out, running a brush through her hair.

Charlie - One thing I'm definitely enjoying about this time is the showers.

Will laughs, wrapping an arm around her. She looks over at the parcels, along with the two phones charging.

Charlie - Is that...?

Will - One's to replace mine. The other's for you...

Charlie picks up the phone for her, looking it over.

Charlie - You'll need to guide me in using one of these.

Will - Sure thing. I also found something else, I thought might be of interest to you...

He points at the computer screen and she sits down, reading about a museum exhibit.

Charlie - This is...

Will - Yeah. Wondered if maybe you wante--

Charlie - Yes! I need to know what became of them...

That afternoon, Will and Charlie arrive at the exhibit where they find a painting of the Poseidon's Revenge, along with a portrait of Oliver and Edward hanging side by side.

Curator - Good afternoon, I was told you were interested in the exhibit. To be honest, it has a lot of mystery surrounding it.

Will - How so?

Curator - Well, there is the mystery of what happened to the Quartermaster. We've been lead to believe that she died during an exploration, along with one of their crewmates.

Will and Charlie share a knowing look.

Curator - But what it known is that after their disappearance, they took the ship belonging to Admiral Cochrane, renaming it the Charlotte.

Charlie - The Charlotte?

Curator - After their Quartermaster.

Will - Wow...

Curator - There are also these drawings made their youngest crewmember, Ginny.

The Curator leads them over to a series of drawings. Each one of each member of the crew, including Will and Charlie.

Curator - You know, you two bare a resemblance to these two.

Will - Uh, coincidence.

Charlie - What happened to them?

Curator - Well, going by a journal kept by Captain Mortemer, as the world changed, so did they. Oliver returned to the navy after his father passed, and it seems there was an arrangement made between the two. The crew sailed, distributing their wealth to the people. But eventually, as time passed, so did they. One of the pages speaks of how Edward returned to his home, Gorvershire to live out his last few years. He left the Charlotte under the command of Ginny.

Charlie - Good for her...

Curator - Is there anything else I can help you with?

Charlie - No, thank you.

The Curator takes her leave and Charlie takes a shaky breath as she looks at the drawings. Will laces his fingers with hers, giving her hand a squeeze.

Charlie - Do you know where Grovershire is?

Will - No, but it won't be hard to find.

A few days later, Charlie and Will stand before Edward's grave. Charlie lays some flowers down before wiping some dirt from the headstone, reading the words.

'A life well lived'

Charlie - Thank you for everything, Edward.

She stands and Will kneels down, laying his own flowers down.

Will - We'll follow your words and live well...

[mariana-oconnor]

The Golden Pince-Nez pt 2

Oooh map! We have the map. I love maps.

This is a really weird looking house, though. I mean, those two corridors just go from that 1 room directly to either the outside or to the guy's bedroom? That's an unusual layout.

Love that we have a little x to show us exactly where in the room Smith's body was. O Willoughby, Willoughby, Willoughby Smith. We didn't know you and now you're a stiff. O Willoughby, Willoughby, Willoughby, say, From whom did they come, those golden pince-nez?

Apparently a very visually impaired woman whose eyes are remarkably close together and whose nose is rather wide, according to Holmes' assessment anyway.

We saw the cold winter sun rise over the dreary marshes of the Thames and the long, sullen reaches of the river, which I shall ever associate with our pursuit of the Andaman Islander in the earlier days of our career.

Do we know about the Andaman Islander? Am I forgetting something? Is that from one of the novels rather than the short stories, because it's been a long time since I've read those. Also, Watson is clearly feeling uninspired this morning. This is probable because he was up until stupid o'clock last night and then had to be up on time to catch the morning train before breakfast. Poor life choices.

I saw an intent look pass over Holmes's face. “You say that she must have come back this way?” “Yes, sir; there is no other.” “On this strip of grass?” “Certainly, Mr. Holmes.”

Alright... so there's something off about the marks in the grass. The grass is only bent in one direction, perhaps? Idk how tracking in grass works. You know who you need?

"This garden door is usually kept open, I suppose? Then this visitor had nothing to do but to walk in."

I like locked doors. The idea that anyone could just walk into my house at any moment is very upsetting to me. It is the role of the door to prevent that from happening. I could not live like this.

(I literally just tried to undo something and deleted more than half of this post, wtf Tumblr? I will try to reconstruct it from memory)

"Halloa! what is that scratch upon the face of it? Just hold a match, Watson. Why did you not tell me of this, Hopkins?” The mark which he was examining began upon the brass work on the right-hand side of the keyhole, and extended for about four inches, where it had scratched the varnish from the surface. “I noticed it, Mr. Holmes. But you'll always find scratches round a keyhole.”

I was going to defend Hopkins at this point, but then I read that the scratch was 4 inches long and presumable fresh, so nope, sorry, can't help you there. That's kind of a key piece of evidence.

I wonder if the professor is an alcoholic...

Sorry, couldn't resist that one.

"Halloa, Hopkins! this is very important, very important indeed. The Professor's corridor is also lined with cocoanut matting.” “Well, sir, what of that?” “Don't you see any bearing upon the case?"

So many Halloas in this part.

I expect the bearing is that it means the murderer could also have left down this passageway without their footsteps being heard. Which raises suspicion of the Professor.

It was a very large chamber, lined with innumerable volumes, which had overflowed from the shelves and lay in piles in the corners, or were stacked all round at the base of the cases.

Interior decor goals. I mean, I almost live like this already, but still, goals.

The bed was in the centre of the room...

(From This Tumblr Post)

Clearly the Professor is evil. No one else could sleep in a bed like that, unmoored from the world, surrounded by space, adrift from good reason and sanity.

I have seldom seen a more remarkable-looking person. It was a gaunt, aquiline face which was turned towards us, with piercing dark eyes, which lurked in deep hollows under overhung and tufted brows. His hair and beard were white, save that the latter was curiously stained with yellow around his mouth. A cigarette glowed amid the tangle of white hair, and the air of the room was fetid with stale tobacco-smoke. As he held out his hand to Holmes I perceived that it also was stained yellow with nicotine.

'Curiously stained with yellow' > proceeds to immediately explain why it is stained with yellow.

"I can recommend them, for I have them especially prepared by Ionides of Alexandria. He sends me a thousand at a time, and I grieve to say that I have to arrange for a fresh supply every fortnight. Bad, sir, very bad, but an old man has few pleasures."

This guy... this guy imports 1000 cigarettes a fortnight. 1000 a fortnight. That's over 70 a day. That's 3 an hour if he doesn't sleep. 4.5 an hour if he gets 8 hours a night. Sure, the internet tells me it takes about 5 minutes to smoke a cigarette, so he isn't actually chain smoking. He could totally smoke more. Really the take away from this is that he needs to work harder at this and stop his reliance on such unnecessary things as oxygen.

70 a day... yikes.

And he knows it's bad for him, too. What? 40 years before the first study in the US saying the same thing? 60 years before it became big news? The tobacco companies really messed with our understanding of things, huh?

Also, the fact that he can afford to import 1000 cigarettes every two weeks and still has the money to have servants, a nice house, and a secretary. This guy has way more money than any academic I've ever met, that's for sure.

“Alas! what a fatal interruption! Who could have foreseen such a terrible catastrophe? So estimable a young man! I assure you that after a few months' training he was an admirable assistant."

Maybe it's because of how unpleasant his introductory description was. Maybe it's because it was preceded by the implication that the murderer could have got into his room unheard. Or maybe it's just that he asks a rhetorical question here and I can never hear a person in this sort of a situation say 'Who could have forseen such a thing?' without my brain automatically answering 'You, I bet.' But Professor seems sus.

Or maybe it's just his bed.

“I shall indeed be indebted to you if you can throw a light where all is so dark to us. To a poor bookworm and invalid like myself such a blow is paralyzing. I seem to have lost the faculty of thought. But you are a man of action—you are a man of affairs. It is part of the everyday routine of your life. You can preserve your balance in every emergency. We are fortunate indeed in having you at our side.”

Yep, super sus. That's way too much complimenting of Sherlock and way too much insistence upon his own infirmity.

I observed that he was smoking with extraordinary rapidity. It was evident that he shared our host's liking for the fresh Alexandrian cigarettes.

I suspect that this is for a different reason from the one Watson is thinking, but also NO HOLMES, do not be sucked into the 70 imported cigarettes a day pipeline.

“That is my magnum opus—the pile of papers on the side table yonder. It is my analysis of the documents found in the Coptic monasteries of Syria and Egypt, a work which will cut deep at the very foundations of revealed religion. With my enfeebled health I do not know whether I shall ever be able to complete it now that my assistant has been taken from me."

okayokayokay Tentative theory:

The professor's research is based on a lie. Everything he's worked on is based on some incorrect fact about a historical 'she' being somewhere or not being somewhere, and he has (or had) evidence that it was incorrect in his desk. WIlloughby worked it out and was breaking into the desk to get the evidence when the professor snuck up behind him and stabbed him in the neck, then scarpered back up the passage-way as fast as his tar-filled lungs would let him.

“I am a connoisseur,” said he, taking another cigarette from the box—his fourth—and lighting it from the stub of that which he had finished.

OK, now that is chain smoking. I really hope there's a reason for this and it isn't just a weird thing ACD put in for no reason.

"What do you imagine that this poor fellow meant by his last words: ‘The Professor—it was she’?”

That his research was a house of cards, built on nothing but hot air. That he was a fraud and his thesis fabrication. That his entire life's work would be worth more as kindling than as an academic paper.

Maybe I'm basing things on vibes again, a little bit. Sorry.

“Susan is a country girl,” said he, “and you know the incredible stupidity of that class."

Nope. Fuck that shit. Not sorry at all. I hope the Professor is guilty. Patronising, classist, intellectual elitist piece of shit. I'm all-in for Team 'The Professor Did It' and even if he didn't do this crime, he's definitely done some other crime somewhere.

“Possibly an accident; possibly—I only breathe it among ourselves—a suicide. Young men have their hidden troubles—some affair of the heart, perhaps, which we have never known. It is a more probable supposition than murder.”

Yeah, because stabbing yourself in the back of the neck is such an efficient way to do it? No wonder your research is so terrible when this is the amount of thought you put into things. Wow.

An accident? How very Final Destination of you.

“But the eye-glasses?”

Fine. Those I can't explain. Maybe they were what was hidden in the drawer and Willoughby found them? But why would the professor then leave them in plain sight? Maybe if Willoughby was the only person who knew what they meant?

So, secondary theory. The Professor's work is still rubbish and based on lies, but it's not Willoughby who found out, necessarily, it's some unknown woman with terrible eyesight and eyes very close together and a big nose, and she came to confront the professor then went missing. Willoughby knew about her going missing, but the professor claimed she'd never been to see him and the pince-nez are the proof the professor was lying.

And the woman is... dead in a ditch somewhere?

Needs work.

“Ah! I am only a student—a man of dreams. I cannot explain the practical things of life."

Oh shut up with your false modesty nonsense. Ugh. You're terrible.

...he continued to walk up and down for some time, lost in thought and consuming cigarette after cigarette.

Is Holmes trying to get through the Professor's entire supply so he has to order more? Wtf?

“Tell me, Professor Coram,” he said, at last, “what is in that cupboard in the bureau?” “Nothing that would help a thief. Family papers, letters from my poor wife, diplomas of Universities which have done me honour. Here is the key. You can look for yourself.”

Well obviously he's removed anything incriminating from it now. Pah

“It depends upon those cigarettes that I smoked,” said he. “It is possible that I am utterly mistaken. The cigarettes will show me.”

I have no idea how the cigarettes are involved in this, I confess. Is the professor involved in a smuggling ring?

I may have remarked before that Holmes had, when he liked, a peculiarly ingratiating way with women, and that he very readily established terms of confidence with them. In half the time which he had named he had captured the housekeeper's goodwill, and was chatting with her as if he had known her for years.

You mean he's good with people? Good at talking to people? Particularly women?

*side-eyes adaptations*

Is this the passage that they had in mind when they did that whole Enola Holmes lawsuit?

“I suppose the Professor eats hardly anything?” “Well, he is variable. I'll say that for him.” “I'll wager he took no breakfast this morning, and won't face his lunch after all the cigarettes I saw him consume.” “Well, you're out there, sir, as it happens, for he ate a remarkable big breakfast this morning."

Is he keeping a secret woman under his bed? Does she sneak in and have breakfast with him?

So weird.

"Well, it takes all sorts to make a world, and the Professor hasn't let it take his appetite away.”

Because he's a terrible human being.

Alright, at the end of this part, my current theory is that the Professor has some kind of secret meetings with a woman with very close-set eyes and terrible eyesight. Willoughby found out and the Professor lied to him about it, then Willoughby found the woman's glasses in the drawer and the Professor, or the unknown woman, killed him for it. Who she is, why she was meeting the professor, why it was so paramount that no one find out, I don't know.

Also, the Professor's research is terrible and founded on lies, because I just want him to fail at life.

And there are cigarettes... or something.

Yeah... there may be some gaps. I'm working on it.

[eldritchmochi]

oh fuck this is my time to shine!!!

- any of iron circus' smut peddler series. theres 8 volumes currently, all anthologies, with a wide variety of themes and individual comic styles/relationships/vibes

- yes roya by c spike trotman & emilee denich. f/m/m with a femme dom, set in the 50s iirc. absolutely beautiful art, and very fun

- *i want that twink obliterated!! an anthology produced by bona books, all based around taking (typically kinda homophobic) camp horror tropes and reclaiming them. not 100% smut but there are some explicit stories within

- *heckin lewd anthology edited by mx nillin lore. trans and nonbinary specific smut

- patience & esther by sw searle. absolutely beautiful sapphic regency erotica, does not shy away from the reality of the era for its characters

- *chromatic fantasy by H. A. transmasc erotica in this kinda medieval illuminated manuscript style? i havent read my copy yet but its absolutely beautiful to flip thru

- crossplay by niki smith. beautiful vignet style stories based around a group of cosplay friends at a con, and what happens in the hotel. features Neat Things with gender play and presentation

- *les petites morts, edited by evelyn freeling. sapphic erotic horror anthology

- anything by chuck tingle tbh. there are physical editions of his books and surely ebooks are available

- microcosm publishing has their whole queering consent line, which has a wide variety of queer erotica

- rolasarian has a handful of print editions of their comics, which may be available to some libraries. the ones i have are "darlin its betta down where its wetta" sapphic mermaid smut, "this book is full of filth" and "adult activity book", and "hexual fantasy vol 1" and theyre all a ton of fun

- sunstone by stjepan sejic. its a fairly long and fairly accessible (since its published by image comics). sapphic bdsm

- the pervert by remy boydell & michelle perez. very lovely melancholy comic about a transfemme character and her journey through early transition, relationships and iirc sex work

- *best lesbian erotica (yearly volumes) edited by mr sexmith. i just ordered these so i havent flipped thru but i do know theyre less "soft", based off the other work ive seen of mr sexsmith

i have not read all of these, i just have an absolutely massive collection. if its marked with an * i havent read it. everything has been published within the last 10 years so shouldn't be a struggle with out of print issues (i have other things that i didnt list that WOULD be an issue)

I talk a lot about requesting queer books from the library, but someone reminded me that requesting queer smut is specifically important.

So please recommend queer smut books for me to request from my library!

[stainlesssteellocust]

Excerpt from a chapter of my alex/cassie fic that I haven’t finished and don’t think is good enough to post (just doesn’t sound right) with a surprise appearance from bob’s fake name

”…Yeah, and he was obviously just trying to get in my pants, too. Like, I get the mutual interests thing but it’s not a ticket to score, right?”

Oh, Alex thinks as his stomach curdles at the idea of Cassie with someone else, so this is what getting defensive feels like.

“- and I was like sure, Jeremy, it’s great we both agree the Suitors’ characters get butchered in adaptations. Yes, I also think that Lucy deserved better. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna fuck you, and it absolutely doesn’t mean I want to hear you drone on about The Lair of the White fucking Worm for an hour straight while I wonder why the actually cute boy I invited stood me up-“

“Sorry.” Says Alex automatically.

“It’s okay. You came back.”

“You know,” While it was nice to hear Cassie call him cute, Alex would rather like to change the subject now, “I read a story once called The Coming of the White Worm. It was a Lovecrafty sort of thing. There was a w-“

“Alex if you say ‘a white worm’ I am going to kick you.”

“No! Well,” At this point honesty compels Alex to admit that there was, in fact, a white worm in it. It had something of a starring role, even. And so his girlfriend, who grew up in the Host and was taught the importance of keeping your word, kicks him, however lightly, in the ribs.

“Ow! Right, that’s it, no more foot rubs for you until you learn to stop jabbing me with them-“

“Nooo!”

Negotiations are held. Once they’re done, and Alex has been thoroughly wrapped around Cassie’s little finger in exchange for some minor concessions, he remembers what he’d been talking about.

“A wizard!”

“What?”

“There was a wizard,” Alex says, lost in recollection, eyes off in the middle distance as his fingers trace circles in the fluffy fabric of Cassie’s bat-themed Halloween socks, “and he meets the white worm, which lives on an iceberg with some other wizards and zooms around the sea freezing people with magic. I don’t think it was actually a Lovecraft story, though…”

This conversation is entering dangerous territory. Because if Alex keeps talking about Lovecraftian monsters then he’s going to start wondering if this is one of the ones based, however loosely, on a magical reality. And that will lead him to think about the displays of entropic magic that relate to the concept of fimbulwinter, and to the theory of what dwells in dead universes, and to a few of those reports from his boss Mr. Howard’s early career that he’s been cleared for, which Pinky had obliquely made reference to and Alex hasn’t gotten round to really digging into yet, and from there it’s a very short jump to Cassie’s very specific recollection of what started the war which ended her people and her planet.

But thankfully he distracts himself. “…it was one of the other ones. Y’know. Frank whatshisface Long, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith…Bob Howar…

“Wait a second-“

[surferspider]

ISSUE #001: A PROLOGUE, PROTRACTED

tl;dr: on the cusp of college-connected change as they come to the age where childhood ends and endless disappointment begins, earth-45013’s versions of ben and richard parker discover the existence of alchemax. content warnings for swearing, spiders, blood, mentions of drowning and death, physical aggression, and brief potty humour, because if a sibling relationship is going to be realistic…

(also bendis speak + claremont narration. send help.)

BRUCE Palmer would have died for his brother. In the same vein of sibling sentimentality, he was determined to kill his brother. There. Then. On the crowded beach with the picnic sponsored by the nursing home. With the glorified barbecue stick Rafferty had glued that stupid cardboard parasol on during his class for the industrial arts instead of, he didn’t know, actually completing the woodworking project Mr Smith assigned every year to every student who dared to breathe in the general direction of his whittling course. If the pathetic timber slice was stable enough to support a patchwork canopy of paper mache, it was sturdy enough to stab the precious baby boy of the family in his fifteen-kilometres-thick skull. A fifteen-year-old was leagues across from a baby, in Bruce’s humble opinion, and that line of thinking among many, many others would be reflected in his prison-call hesped for the mourning period. And the radius of bloody sand kids would be making urban legends on. 

Focus on the here and now.

“Get your official, wonderful Super Sackman wares here. Catch the current Quirky Quartet comics before they blow up into pee-nomenal popularity.”

One of the comics, inked on the same paper mache that made up Rafferty’s deprived excuse of a vendor, flew straight into Bruce’s face. He stomped forwards onto a conveniently dramatic twig.

“Oh, good grief and grawlixes, something’s really blowing up,” Rafferty said, continuing to exchange crude paper bag masks with his bright-eyed, barely-toothed clientele. The boy hadn’t expected Bruce to show up to any of their regular haunts just yet, even if skipping his last few classes on parents’ night was blase past both their limits. Half his mind believed Bruce might’ve still been at his graduation ceremony, the festivities lasting as long as necessary for the Southern hemisphere to congratulate him with cake and handshakes and internships at Oscorp Industries. Seriously. Internships.

Bruce peeled the paper off to reveal the trademarked Palmer scowl. He slammed it on top of the parasol, which spasmed in response. “You think?”

Rafferty punched him in the gut. Something about his salesperson act made him a lot better at punching. “Hey, that wasn’t alliterative.”

“Your face won’t be alliterative when Mum’s done with you.”

“I’ll still be the spunk of us, though.” Rafferty grinned. His chin was still the teensiest bit lacerated. 

The less work for an infection to crawl in, the better, Bruce thought. He managed to think better than to say it out loud, though. According to the studies he’d done in the past week, empty nest syndrome was the second leading cause of death among younger siblings. You know, aside from their older siblings and parents, who were, based on empirical evidence, currently hysterical as they dressed up for parents’ night.

“What is this? What are you doing?” Bruce asked, waving the soggy, sorry cover of Quirky Quarter’s seventeenth issue in the stifling summer air. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t have gotten more revenue on a weekend?”

“Yes. The elders love me, champ. They say I’m a grown brain betwixt their sagacious calibre and their bodily prowess.”

“Marjorie needs new diapers! Raffy, cuddlepie, won’t you get some from the duffel there?”

Rafferty included two entirely new teeth in his gnashing smile, saluting Marjorie’s screeching sister as he marched to the bag. Bruce followed, footsteps heavy on squishing piles of seaweed and less describable matters from the great brine, and then felt severe regret for that decision. Surrounded by flies and paper plates on the abandoned table, the duffel was home to a variety of incontinence pants, including full ones. To his credit, Rafferty didn’t seem bothered until he picked up a very full one. Bruce stifled a snort behind his already-pinched nose.

“Hey, you can’t deny they love me,” Rafferty said, tossing the fresh underwear to Bruce’s hand. Allegedly fresh, anyhow. There was still a touch of moisture in the critical areas. Whatever. Bruce was never going to get the chance to wear them, if Rafferty and his antics had their way around his pulmonary health.

“Maybe not, but I cannot believe you put so much effort into making these failsafes in case of your disownment. Which is definitely going to happen, by the way, unless you show up this evening in a graduation gown with a Guttchalk medal and a few billion dollars.” 

“Eh, been a long time coming. Either the disowning or the medal.” Rafferty shrugged, hauling the duffel bag over his shoulder. Said shoulder sagged and popped in protest. Evidently, spending all his waking and sleeping hours either drawing, surfing, or arguing with his family wasn’t enough to get him more than a sliver of muscle. “I hate you, you hate me. I thought you’d be glad to see me out of our prestigious mansion.”

They approached the site of the picnic, sidestepping sharp, multicoloured wrappers for brands they couldn’t afford. There was something poignant, about how all those puckering strangers getting sand in their unflattering prescription glasses got along better than Bruce and his family these days, however happy most of them claimed to be about his admission to the University of Melbourne. Guess who the exception was?

“None of that now. If you went, neither of us would get to enjoy having a real, individual room for once,” Bruce replied, appealing to worse sensibilities. “Mum might even have it rented to Mr Tommasi.”

“No. No. Don’t even joke about that. You’re a horrible person. I reckon that guy’s a reincarnation of Peeping Tom from Coventry,” Rafferty said, making a great show of choking on whatever saliva managed to pass down his toothpick throat. “Look, just… could we leave all this stuff about Mum and teachers behind?”

“What, in the five minutes of past since we started talking?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Bruce said. “You cut class. You almost made her start a search party. You’re selling half-made comic books about a ‘superpowered’ unit of scientists with unrealistic hairstyles on the seashore to hospice escapees.”

Rafferty shoved the duffel bag on Marjorie’s table harder than strictly need be, expression taut. Right on cue, a miniature tornado spun the amateur writer’s precious works to the farthest corners of the continent.

“Pissing pufferfish,” Rafferty cursed. Thank Garpike that Marjorie hadn’t taught him any real expressions of vulgarity yet.

“See, even the winds want you to go to the conference. It is fate. Destiny. Whichever one you pretend to be in those comics,” Bruce said, slapping his brother’s back into a somewhat acceptable posture. “Mum knows that you are smart. Would it kill you to act like it until you get to college?”

Rafferty bit his lip so hard that he could taste blood. It was becoming a nervous habit, with the sheer quantity of SeriousTM talks they were having about his future. He was smart. More importantly, he did not have the immaculate patience needed to hear another gang of academic geriatrics insist otherwise, erasing all hopes of a decent future. Most importantly, he wanted to hear that compliment from his brother. One first and last time, before they were going to be separated for good by the real world.

He smiled again. “But does she know I’m smart enough to find a brand new waterfall in the park rainforest?”

Bruce’s jaw unhinged. One muscle and destroyed molar at a time, he shifted it back into position. He was an adult. An effigy of maturity. He was not going to be some gullible enabler to Rafferty’s self-effacing delusions. He could not, would not, break his mother’s trust in him. In them. “You’re lying to me.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

“Not.”

“Are.”

“Not.”

“Are.”

“Are?”

“Not. Oh, fuck me dead.”

“There are totally mermaids willing to do that, where we’re going,” Rafferty said. “They’ve got real low standards, only having these tiny algae-covered rocks and mutated fishing spiders for company. That’s how I got my first girlfriend.”

“You are totally lying now,” Bruce chuckled, the sound of bemusement coming out on its own accord. In his defense, the grannies nearby were cracking up, too, though perhaps not for the same reasons. Marjorie’s pruned hand reaching for the duffel bag solidified that hypothesis into fact.

“Yes, I am. Nobody could ever, ever have standards low enough for you,” Rafferty proclaimed. Bruce thought of May Riley—valedictorian May Riley, going to university overseas May Riley, nuclear power plant princess May Riley—and flinched. “But I promise you there’s a new waterfall. There’s this gorgeous rock face around it, cracked like some Renaissance-level mosaic. You know how tall the trees are near Ditko’s Grotto? Imagine those trees’ grandparents, strong and towering dancing in the wind. And the cool, salty wind splashes cool, crystal water on your feet as you treat yourself to dozens of berries, sweet and sloshing in your mouth like hypnosis if it was liquid.”

Bruce sighed. Weighed his options. Resolved to get Rafferty into a first grade creative writing class one of these days. Ran a calloused hand through tangled hair. “Fine.”

And so Rafferty bolted through the spinning driftwood gates of the nature reserve, kicking sand upwards of Bruce’s dress shirt. A race, then. Bruce sprinted close behind, bounding across the beaten sandstone path with each wind-shocking stride, getting closer and closer to his brother’s slow, inelegant, scrawny figure, so easy to despise in close quarters but regard with wonderment when it was running like a wild animal. A hundred thousand ultra-saturated hues of vegetation and bark and red flags marking safety blurred to become nature in abundance. 

They skipped across streams and stone and leaped past logs and piles of leaves. Logs hirsute with moss dropped into mud at their precipitate pace. The deeper they went, the fresher and wetter the mud, wildly splashing over unruly, virulent roots, encroaching on the territory of saplings whose necks snapped under their feet. After hours spent in clinical, cerebral rooms with metallic air and metallic people, Bruce was happy to be free, in spite of such liberty being weighed down by his worries about parents’ night.

Bruce slowed. Parents’ night. He gulped. Better to not think about it. Best not to think. He stepped forward onto a pile of verdant leaves. He did not step forward with his best foot, and the ground gave way to colloidal clay in a vivid russet. Oh, a brilliant plot twist. It was his death all along. Creative enough to be in a Quirky Quartet comic strip, that was for certain.

The first reaction from the boy he’d cooked for, cleaned for, been a punching bag for? Laughter. “How’d you fall down a hole that tiny?”

Bruce swallowed down a quip about their ambiguous parentage and gestured to the leaves surrounding him. “It might have been a trap.”

Rafferty kneeled down. There was a thin rope tied to a peg, but nothing else that suggested the presence of some incompetent poacher. “For what, bonehead?”

“Little brothers who keep asking questions instead of helping their Vogal laureate older brothers out of quicksand.”.

“Well, then, it’s not very effective.” Rafferty stood up, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. Oh, great, now Rafferty was thinking. Enter hearse. “That’s not quicksand.”

Bruce tried to throw a wedge of sediment at the bastard’s face. His throwing arm being stuck underneath liquefied doom was not helping the situation. “Then why am I sinking very quickly?”

“Because you’re moving at all, maybe? But the texture’s wrong.” Rafferty’s eyes disappeared into a frown. Bruce was just waiting for the evil cackle, and the scenario would be complete. An evil scheme Marjorie’s anus would be proud of, concocted between all those skipped classes and accomplished by his very own greed. “Try standing up.”

Bruce rolled his eyes so far back he could see his brain disintegrating at the very suggestion. If he was going to be humiliated into perishing, he was going to make it as guilt-inducing as possible. One leg after the other, he pushed downwards. The pressure was pounding, throbbing, dull in some places and sharp in others. It almost felt as though there was something the size of his hand wrapping itself around his ankle, skittering across his shin with prickling legs. The surface was developing a swampy, bubbling tone directly above where he’d felt the crawling sensation. He thrust his foot down the final distance, and found that he could, in fact, stand up.

“That was not quicksand,” Bruce said, releasing himself from the tenuous grasp of the wet dirt. Take that, spectral scythe-wielder breathing down his neck wherever he went, whether that be interviews with college admissions officers or the rainforest housing sixty different kinds of bats and all kinds of gruesome endings.

“Man, you’re getting old.”

“If you do not wash my shirt until it shines later, I am telling Marjorie you said that, you age-treacherous dipstick. Where to next?”

A flash of green light burst from underneath the mud. Bruce’s eyes were screwed as shut as he could manage, but there remained coruscating streaks of viridescence, blinding, burning into his retinas. An intangible substance felt acrid in his nose and mouth, as though something rancid had entered the atmosphere and was currently spreading itself across his interior flesh. When he tried to cough, he couldn’t open his mouth, his jaw too heavy and slow, the hinges of his bones anaesthetised. But there was still such serrated pain shooting through his head–

A shove. “Um, hello, Earth to granddad. You going back to the chemist for your meds or going with me to the best waterfall ever?”

Bruce opened his eyes. No more pain, no strange phenomena obstructing his senses. Just them and the rainforest. It must have been global warming. “Sure.”

Regardless of the alacrity with which Bruce composed himself in a series of clothes-destroying motions, Rafferty must have detected his discomfort with the situation, because he took the lead with the same bulk of hesitation dragging his feet down. Their track twisted and turned at every opportunity, with their seamless weaving through the thickets slowing to account for the labyrinth of strangling vines they’d stumbled into. At several points, Rafferty’s incessant excuses about having travelled the path, which was a term being used in the loosest possible manner, became far too convincing for Bruce’s liking. In their childhood, he’d been tasked with yanking Rafferty’s gangling limbs out of pudding and vending machine slots. In the bowels of their present scenery, he was wrenching the boy from thorns and woody stems crackling like lightning around their ankles and precious heads of hair. He supposed he couldn’t complain. It’s not as though he knew any better.

“I forgot to tell you about this part.”

Bruce tilted his head, careful to not get any more of his luscious locks snagged on the congregation of withies to their side. In front of them was the clearest land they’d ever come across in the reserve, with even grass and minimal puddles. The view would have been idyllic if not for the blanket of translucent snow over everything in sight. Considering the sweltering temperatures of the summer, though, it couldn’t be snow, sleet, or graupel. The greyish fabric of indescribable matter threaded together from the branches of trees above them. In the centre, a congregation of dark forms jumped.

Spiders. Gigantic spiders with legs thick and black enough to be leeches, fattened glossy abdomens infested with boils, and beady eyes that shone with intelligence or hopelessness. Gigantic spiders that were inching towards them with clicking, hungry chelicerae.

“They’re alive?”

“For now.” Rafferty’s voice already spanned five octaves, as the synagogue choir had been delighted to discover. Nevertheless, it cracked into an operatic soprano as he attempted to explain himself. “It wasn’t this bad before. I think it’s happening all over the eastern states. Something to do with, um, hurricanes. Past fifty years, climate change changing things. Jonah from school told me it happened to his vacation house in Victoria over the electricity poles and fences. It only took a few days for them to blow away again.”

“I trust that Jameson kid as much as his so-called moustache could throw him,” Bruce said. He proceeded to whip his head around, creating a fault line in his collarbone that would haunt him for millennia to come. “Wait, a few days?”

“A few days.”

Bruce’s eyes must have fallen out of their sockets and done an Irish jig as he bled out on the lush, arachnid-covered ground.

“A really few days, I swear. Like…” Rafferty bit his lip. The scabbing ruptured anew.  “Eighteen at most.”

“I’m going home. I’m going home right now. I’m going home and telling Mum you were devoured by a pack of wild spiders that are going to be the harbingers of the apocalypse because there wasn’t enough meat on you to be considered a proper sacrifice.”

Rafferty dragged him closer and, with surprising force, shoved him to face the spiders as a kind of meat shield. He did implicate himself as having more meat, when push came to shove in the literal sense. “We’re so close. At least stay to see them season me.”

Before Bruce could formulate any further arguments, he was face down on the floor, eyelids and mouth covered in webbing. He scrambled to get back onto his feet, launching his arms to what could have been his sides or the abyss at the edge of reality or both, but couldn’t land on anything other than a spider leg. A spider leg without a spider body. Oh, this was it for him, and he didn’t even get the grace of insulting Rafferty’s insensibilities one last time. He tripped over his own feet, landing in a patch of gossamer layered with a profusion of webs to the point where it felt solid. No, no, no. He had so many more professors to bribe with his kale and broccoli muffins. He had so much to tattle on Rafferty for. He had so much life left to waste.

Unable to spend his last moments without sight or one last jab at his mother’s amazing prodigal fuck-him-dead son, he tore at the adhesive sewing his lips and eyes shut using his jagged, dirty fingernails. His breath came in short, loud bursts as he looked straight ahead. Safety taunted him from too many feet away. Then again, being negative one million feet in the spider flood would be too close for comfort for Bruce ‘Built a Makeshift Flamethrower in Science Class to Kill the Daddy-Long-Legs in the Cafetorium’ Palmer. And as the cherry on top of the suffering sundae, Rafferty was right beside him wearing that idiotic grin of his.

“Race you there.”

An announced race? A momentous occasion. A tempting offer. “Prize?”

“Not being pushed back in the spider pit.”

Bruce demolished the disgusting track no matter what skin-prickling obstacles stood in front him. His shoes tore through webs and their spinners alike, a sickening crunch and splatter of clear fluid against his ankles alerting him to when the latter occurred. Which was every other millisecond, between him and Rafferty, who congratulated himself with every corpse left in the forest ground. The flat ground led to a short hill, a stream cutting the spiders’ tyranny short. They both fell in face first. The Palmers’ misfortune was able to bend gravity as well, apparently. They stood up, flicking the gravel on their faces onto each other’s clothing.

“Wasn’t that fun?” Rafferty asked after shaking his so-incredibly-empty head dry, holding his fist out.

Bruce made no effort to disguise his trembling. He did, however, return the fist bump. “No. We see this place the one time, and after that, I turn Oscorp into a demolition contractor so I can replace this entire area with a trashy shopping centre full of people who will sell you basic necessities at five hundred times their regular price.”

Rafferty gave him a two-fingered salute. “Aw, aren’t you sentimental?”

The remaining terrain was clear and flat, to Bruce’s (and, if either of them were to be honest with their observations, Rafferty ‘Stole His Brother’s Flamethrower to Kill the Googly-Eyed Clay Ant Model From the Kindergarten Arts Display Because He Mistook It for a Spider’ Palmer’s) unadulterated relief. He was on the verge of frolicking as he crossed yet more puddles and pebbles. The trail was so easy to follow that an armoured truck could have navigated it without issue.

They noticed the tire tracks at the same time. Rafferty noticed the armoured truck first.

Armoured was doing the truck a grand disservice, in reality. Truck was doing whatever it was a terrible insult, presumably punishable by being blasted with whatever came out of the massive mechanical cannon on top. Geometric plates in camouflage print lined its surface area, an exoskeleton somehow unblemished by the daggers of overgrowth encompassing every other area in the rainforest. The sole element ruining the vehicle’s stealthiness was the series of pulsating green veins running between the plates’ gaps. Bruce blinked once, twice, thrice. It must have travelled backwards from aeons into the future. Just fifteen years ago, the country’s military had been stuck with rusty museum fare to fight their battles, and now wheeled tanks could take casual strolls through the park without anyone noticing.

And where was his brother, the science fiction connoisseur, the superhero superfan? Rafferty was working on puncturing the truck’s tires with a stick shorter than his forearm. Bruce swore, there and then, that he wasn’t even going to attempt coaxing the cretin away from his grave.

“What are you doing?” Never mind, he was going to attempt it, and he was going to do so with incredible volume.

Rafferty glanced at Bruce before continuing to press and prod at miscellaneous bumps on the truck’s side. “Checking if we can steal anything.” 

The truck’s posterior doors unfolded in a brief series of whirs and ticks to reveal a laboratory. A more experimental configuration of alien-looking apparatus next to pedestrian microscopes, weights, and friability testers. Bruce had seen the same brands during his tour of his college, but he’d never seen test tubes containing black, metallic materials that slithered around the truck’s interior without kinetic influence. Were there magnets nearby? In the tubes, even? That didn’t justify the physics-defying acrobatics of the substance, combining and separating after forming polygons as if sentient. But obviously they weren’t sentient. There had to be someone controlling them with a remote of sorts. There had to be someone watching them.

Watching them. Shit.

Someone in a lab coat was approaching them at a stroll. Bruce recognized the placement of the pockets, the pompous aquamarine detailing on the collar and cuff. It was one of the tenured professors at the college, the one who had boasted about being the chief of neurosurgical oncology at an American hospital. She was holding a radio transceiver. 

Grabbing his brother’s arm, he hissed, “We need to go.”

The prospective burglar remained immobile, transfixed on the body leaping to Bruce’s wrist. Bruce looked down to find a redback spider with a sticker reading 45001 on its abdomen fording the back of his hand, rearing its head. He did not understand why he stared at the number. He had another hand, twitching next to him, conscious and usable. Yet even as its legs needled past his palm, he was still, staring, still staring. If it was labelled, it was important. If he killed it, there would be consequences. He was smelling the smell from the quicksand hallucination.

“–eed to go!”

Rafferty smacked his hand, cracking his wrist and annihilating the redback’s form into a snarl of sparking wires. The professor was yelling something at them, and Bruce made note to drop her class as soon as his entrails got back to campus. An engine revved in the distance. Underbrush gave way to rock staircases as the harshing wind ripped through their lungs, and the rock was soon gashed and waterlogged, cut in places where even the most harrowing weather couldn’t reach. They were approaching a body of water at last.

“Have to tell you the truth,” Rafferty gasped out. “There’s no new waterfall.”

“What?”

“No. New. Waterfall,” he said. “Lied to you. Your fault for believing me.”

“No.”

“New waterfall, you’ve got it.”

“No.”

“New waterfall, we’ve been over this.” “You’re not funny.”

“And I’m not joking.”

It was a tragic production, yet Bruce sensed a laugh writhing in his chest. All of that time, mocking Rafferty’s deficiency in sense and committing such a grievous offence as enjoying himself for once, had led to a waterfall bereft of the water, full of the fall. Rafferty was rambling on. He was vehement, urgent, carving chasms between them. The noise shot into empty space, a vacuum without anything to carry his waves of nothing. Why was he talking? What was he saying? Why had he lied? Why did Bruce care?

There was no time for answers that Bruce had the patience to accept. Rubble crashed onto metal from metres away. Rafferty, cherished by the prophets of the Genesis flood as one of their own, reaped what he had sown, received what he wanted, never to experience hardship alone. Conviction crashed into postulation, tyres slashed through mud behind them. Between whatever greenhouse gases were combusting in the engine and the hot air escaping Rafferty’s mouth, breathing was impossible. The trees couldn’t breathe, either. They’d been turned to stumps, most of them. Bruce turned around. There was a rope bridge hanging from the cliff face just beside them.

“Bridge,” he said, breathless in spite of all the time they’d stood doing nothing but breathing. “Go.”

Rafferty wavered. Then they hurtled towards oblivion for the five hundredth time that afternoon. 

The sun was no longer thrashing their eyes, but in its place came shadows from the truck and the towering sets of trees across from them. Smears of purple obscured parts of broken planks and frayed cords, blurring the line between the unstable from the demolished. Bruce wheezed and hacked as Rafferty’s elbows knocked into his spasming diaphragm. Why were there so many of them? Why was he smelling the quicksand again?

The truck was no longer following them. That was fine. That was good. His eyes were assaulted with darkness, shooting upwards from the shadows of the bridge, and then they were on the other side of the bridge, Rafferty waving goodbye to the gaudy professor. That was neither fine nor good. Bruce was to be a college student, though. It would be prudent to acquaint himself with passing out every now and then. Fun fact: coping with humour was a Palmer family pastime. So was being a horrible person.

Whooshing water seeped through the soles of Bruce’s shoes. Rafferty elbowed him (two elbows, then, thank God) and together, they shut the hell up to look at the waterfall.

They didn’t deserve to see it. There was beauty, and then there were the cascades of hydrous heliotrope before them. Its plunge pool swallowed up an untold amount of land, white froth covering clear waters. Motley birds, large and small, soared at their arrival. They were disturbances in this place that was unfettered by civilisation’s progress. Expunge the excavations of unnatural evolution, preserve

“Let’s split up.”

Bruce choked out the question forever to be asked of Rafferty’s behaviour. “Why?”

“So only you’d get killed if the truck came back,” he said. “Because we’d have more of a chance to find the way back to the beach. And because you’d only slow me down.”

The beach. Of course. Environmental hedonism knew no bounds. Every syllable he coveted the courage to put into speech came to fight on the tip of his tongue. Rafferty had never cared for the park, or the adversity faced by activists on a global basis as a result of mass ignorance to the carbon footprint of their favourite corporation, or Bruce’s feelings, which didn’t mean to exist, with Bruce being a permanent role model/servant/adult to his beloved, sacred baby brother. Every syllable lashing out from between those bloody teeth was a performative, a means to an end. Rafferty was obsessed with good stories, with good times, with good jokes. Bruce’s fault for believing him. Of course. Air was not welcome in his lungs. He nodded.

“I’ll go left, you go right?” You’re always right. 

Rafferty nodded back. “Right. Don’t tell Mum a thing.”

The badinage was no bandage. He pushed Rafferty into the lake. Volleys of aquatic thrusts embraced Rafferty’s flopping figure in a way Bruce could have never done. That was the best decision he had ever made. That would have zero negative consequences for their dynamic, aside from their dynamic being extinguished. That would be fine. That would be good.

“Do you like being lied to about something you find important, Rafferty?”

Bubbles popped in silence. An ungrateful, petty slippery dick until the end. That was right, two could play at wrangling wrasse names into vulgarities. A few more steps to his right, and he would be free to rehearse his posthumous offerings of peace in peace.

Rafferty staggered onto shore, prying Bruce’s heel from its socket.“Something’s pulling me back down.”

“Are you lying to me?”

A jetstream of water spewed out Rafferty’s mouth mixed with a quarter-formed scab.

“I will take that as a yes. Thank you for your time.”

“No, please, there’s something on my leg pulling me under. Bruce, wait!”

Classic Rafferty, offering basic decency on the condition that he was in life-threatening circumstances. Bruce looked back to find no signs of life in the lake. He squinted. Rafferty knew how to swim, but he didn’t know how to dive any further than he could drown. Rafferty could be drowning. Rafferty could be lying. His hands were sticking to his sides with sweat. Was he actually going to kill his brother?

Bruce took the plunge, eyes wide open. The novelty of the aquamarine waters fled when he saw Rafferty blind and flailing. A scorpion with the breadth of his brother’s chest had latched itself onto the bottom of his leg, dragging him down as it luminesced in the dits and dahs of a code they had no time to decipher. Stroke after stroke cleaved through the surface of the water as Bruce went deeper. With great power came great responsibility. He would not allow himself the responsibility of having murdered his brother.

Rafferty was wrestling with the scorpion–metal, order Eurypterid, supposedly extinct over four hundred years ago–and losing. Its chelipeds extended at freakish velocity, claws snapping at Rafferty’s panicked face. Bruce plummeted past biting hydrilla to use all his strength for a better cause. His corneas were being scratched past their limits, but he had to focus. In one painful pull, he put the scorpion under his arm, letting it create gashes in his stupid fancy dress shirt for as long as it took Rafferty to get back up. Which was awfully long, but he wasn’t about to complain.

The surface was a blessing neither of them deserved. Yet, they sprawled across the rocky soil, drenched in confusion, denial, and a radioactive, mutated horror show version of happiness.

“I hate you.”

“I’m sorry.

“I’m sorry too.”

“I hate you too.”

Voices homogenised until the commotion was nothing more than croaking chuckles. Bruce stood up. The beach beckoned them.

Karma got to him first. Electricity shot through his veins, causing him to drop the scorpion. On its shining back was a black emblem, some kind of arrowhead, possibly an initial. Underneath it was text so sans serif it might have come from the same era as the truck: ALCHEMAX. A speaker buzzed to life.

“You have activated the self…” a robotic voice stuttered, pronouncing each vowel as though it was contractually obligated to pronounce all the other vowels in less than a second. “destruct mechanism of this device, created by Doctor Rushwell. Have a nice death.”

Neon numbers flashed on the belly of the scorpion: 18,396,036 seconds. There was a smiley face in the middle of the zero.

Bruce blinked. “That’s seven months.”

Seven months to figure out what Alchemax was, who Doctor Rushwell could be, and why his professor had.

“Then we come back here in six months and thirty days.”

Without awaiting approval, Rafferty shoved the scorpion down his shirt with a satisfied flourish. It was best to let it be. Him coming home with a baby on the way was more plausible than the majority of their day’s affairs.

Rafferty sighed wistfully. “I’m so dead.”

“No, we’re so dead.”

It was the closest they would ever get to saying they loved each other.

. . .

PORTER Palmer was going to die, and his uncle was heading the guillotine. Which, by the way, was a primary subject of his next test in social studies, which, if you even care, was scheduled first thing Monday, which was a period of time starting in approximately seven hours and fifty-one minutes. And Porter was going to spend seven hours and fifty minutes of that preparation time in the middle of a nature reserve with nothing save a flashlight and a protein bar. And the protein bar was banana flavoured. The inhumanity was unbearable.

The situation had escalated at an unprecedented rate. On the alleged authority of his uncle’s ruptured eardrums, the silence of a child reading up on the constitutions of circumflexing, decapitated clergy was nothing short of deafening. Responsibility rang in those bald cochleas like a curse, and scholarly success was worthless to a man who had dropped out of the University of Melbourne to become a genuine washed-out documentarian. Now his uncle was capsizing their seaside property, filling up antediluvian backpacks with knicknacks of nothing.

“We’ve both gone there tons before,” Porter said. He had prepared his speech for hours at that point, and he was going to make his uncle listen to his pleas if it was the last thing he did.“I just think that, respectfully, in the grand scheme of the universe, there’s, like, such little point in seizing me from my studies that your sojourn’s tip is comparable to the teeth of a whale shark. Pointless.”

What remained of his uncle’s eyebrows ascended to what remained of his uncle’s hairline. The reaction was unmistakable as an admittance of defeat. In twenty-three short words that he would regret shortly, the old man’s pride became comparable to the teeth of a whale shark: vestigial. Maybe the joke had overstayed itself within Porter’s archives, but with options so scarce to begin with, could you blame it?

A smile. Humoured in loss, that was the Palmer motto. “This is a new place.” 

Pissing piranhas. The reaction was not a permanent sign of surrender, either. Porter fiddled with the systems in his occipital lobe, the ones in charge of matching the angle of a philtrum or the curve of the spine to those unpleasant, twisted ailments called feelings. It had to indicate desperation, a corrosive emotion. Desperation led to deflection, and deceit was deflection’s secretary of state, like Jean-Frédéric de La Tour du Pin Gouvernet had been for a short period of time in the eighteenth century before he was sentenced to death in 1794 for his support of the monarchy.

Porter adopted a firm position on the dull-getting-duller point: arms crossed, eyes narrowed. “Then I don’t think it exists.”

“New to you, Port. Your dad discovered it when we were younger. He loved it there.”

Ignorance was the bane of any scientist, and against his better judgement, Porter wanted to be a scientist. The abstraction of his parents’ pasts and personalities, their ultimate goals and unfulfilled dreams that would be imposed on him via football camp or creative writing classes, didn’t bother him, exactly. But there was still curiosity. On some level, he found that he disliked knowing more about species that died over thousands of years prior to humanity’s existence than his parents, who died some number of years ago that would be, in tandem, too much and too little, if he ever found out. 

Porter looked at the crooked canines that glinted in the blue of his nightlight. Uncle Bruce was lying, as he had been about inventing the adage about the moral culpability of those in power, which was an adage nobody listened to anyways. Lying seemed to be a relevant theme in revolutionary politics, so, respectfully, whatever.

The arms dropped. He cleared his throat. “Then there’s a marginally greater possibility that I will like it there.”

[revasserium]

Hello, hello! I would like to request a drabble with Leona Kingscholar and the prompt, "after a gunshot wound" + fem! reader, please. Make the ending happy, please. I can't stand sad endings.😥 Thanks!

reqs are open :) @savanaclaw1996

after a gunshot wound (mafia!au for my 31 days of aus)

leona; 2,147 words; angst w/ a happy ending bc... u just said that the end had to be happy, right? lol; also cw for blood and guns

clean hands.

no one would mistake him for a murderer, not by the soft of his hands, the tenderness of palms, but as he tears off his ruined gloves with his teeth, the blood still warm and dripping even as it coagulates against his skin, he wonders what the world might think if only they knew the truth — that being a prince to a dying empire also means courting death.

and he has never been one to fuss over keeping his own hands clean.

unlikely savoir.

if you were to ask him why he saved you, why you of all people, leona doesn’t think he’d be able to find an answer. because the answer — the true answer — is far too pedantic: that his body moved before his mind could catch up. that before he really knew what he was doing, he was already at your side.

“this… isn’t how things are supposed to go —” you cough, feeling the pain ricochet through your whole body from the base of your spine, the side of your waist wrapped in layers and layers of bandages.

“yeah, i know,” he says, one leg propped on the other, his hair twisted in a hasty braid, tossed over his far shoulder. he’s cleaning a gun — one of his favorites, an old smith and wesson 29 — wiping down the sides and the handle with a meticulousness that people would never usually associate him with.

“daddy always said —”

“— that if you needed more than six shots to kill someone… you’d probably end up dead first,” leona finishes, a smirk quirking his lips as his hands pause over the glinting metallic barrel. “i remember… he taught me too.”

you sigh and lay back on the pristine white sheets, staring up at the hospital’s linoleum ceiling.

“do you miss him?” you ask, not really looking at him.

“what kinda question is that?” he asks, and his voice is a low, seismic rumble, almost too quiet to hear.

“it… you should’ve… i mean —” your words catch in your throat and your hand shoots up to cover your mouth, almost dislodging the iv hooked up to the back. leona tuts before gently tugging your hand back down.

“i should’ve saved him? bullshit — he’d kill me himself if he got outta there and you didn’t.”

“but —”

“shh… don’t think about that… you need to rest.”

you’re vaguely aware of the buzzing warmth spreading through your limbs from your right arm before your eyes fall shut and your breathing evens out once more.

by the door, ruggie cocks his head.

“when’re you gonna tell her, boss?”

leona slates him a dark look, “when she’s ready to hear it.”

not where but when.

“mr. kingscholar, back again today?”

“yes, room —”

“i know the one, sir. uhm… it’s just —”

the nurse purses her lips, her eyes flickering from leona’s deadpan face to the room down the hall, the lights always kept low, the blinds always drawn.

“just say it already.”

the nurse jumps at leona’s voice, but she swallows and nods.

“it’s almost been… a whole year now… don’t you think we should move her to the longterm ward? the rooms are bigger up there — and there’s more natural light — i’m sure she would —”

“no. that one’s fine. and… she can’t be moved.”

he doesn’t look up as the nurse nods tersely, watching as he makes his way to the end of the hallway, the last door on the right. he takes a breath as he stands in the doorway, his eyes catching on your sleeping form.

he pulls a revolver from his pocket, drops into the seat next to you, turns down the dial for your sleeping drugs, and slowly starts to clean.

when you wake up this time, your eyes are a little bit clearer, but your gaze is still unfocused when they land on him.

“l-leona? wh-what happened?”

“you were shot,” he says, matter of fact as he turns his eyes back to his gun.

“yeah… i feel that. but… where… when…” you frown, trying to feel along the side of your body where the bandages are. they feel stiff, and somehow, the pain is too far away. leona tuts as he tugs your hand away.

“don’t mess with your bandages — you’ll never heal properly that way.”

you purse your lips as your hand goes slack in his.

“you got… new gloves.”

“huh? yeah — course i did. i couldn’t keep my old ones.”

you nod, letting your head fall back onto the pillows, staring up at the barren landscape of the hospital room ceiling.

“leona…?”

“hm?”

“i… i want to go home.”

leona goes still, his whole body feeling like a wound spring, his stomach clenching inside him as he stares at the gun in his hands. he has to curl his fingers into his palm to stop himself from shaking.

“ye-yeah. we’ll get you home. i promise.”

“when?” you ask, turning towards him, your eyes wide and hopeful.

he casts you a smile, and somehow, even after all this, it’s the bravest thing he’s ever had to do.

“soon.”

time warp.

“you can’t keep doing this.”

“the fuck i can’t.”

“boss — it’s not fair —”

“don’t talk to me about fair —”

ruggie winces as leona’s fist smacks into the punching bag, nearly knocking it completely sideways as he lets out a frustrated snarl, ripping off his boxing gloves.

ruggie takes a deep breath, “it’s been almost two years. the hospital bills alone are getting insane —”

“so what? it’s not like we’re strapped for cash —”

“but how’s this doing either of you any good? i mean —”

“oh, you think i want this? you think i enjoy this fifty first dates shit? this… this — weird, time-warp where every time i go to see her i’ve gotta pretend that — that everything’s just happened? that i’m not the reason she’s in that bed to begin with?!”

leona’s chest is heaving by the time he finishes, his face pushed up against ruggie’s almost nose to nose. and still, ruggie steels himself to hold his ground.

“you’re not the real reason she’s in that bed.”

“i was the one who shot her!”

“you were the one who saved her.”

leona shakes his head, sinking his now-bare fist into the punching bag once more. ruggie chews on his bottom lip, resisting the urge to turn tail and run. but he’s had enough running for a lifetime — this at least, is something he needs to do.

“she — she deserves to know,” he says.

but leona only swallows and shakes his head.

“i… i don’t know how to tell her.” and it’s the first time that he’s admitted it to himself, out loud at least. and even the words are crippling — the breath seeps from him as he sinks down against the wall, letting his head thunk back, his hair falling loose from it’s haphazard ponytail.

“well…” ruggie says, joining him on the ground, casting his eyes up as well, a light grin pulling at his lips, “you start with one word, and then the next… and then sometime after that, it should get easier.”

and try as he might, leona can’t help the laugh that stumbles up and out of his throat — torn from him almost like ripping off a scab, leaving him feeling red and raw and restless. he shakes his head, letting his shoulder bump against ruggie’s.

“you’re a shit best friend.”

ruggie smiles, “and you’re a shit boss. but hey — we can’t have everything, can we?”

the first time.

and the next time he goes to see you, he tells himself that it’s the last time he’ll do this. but when he walks into your room, it’s to find you already awake, staring up at the ceiling. when he breaches the threshold of the room, your eyes slide over to settle on him, and a faint smile graces your lips.

“hey you.”

leona blinks.

“uh — h-hey… did the sleep drugs wear off?” he can feel his heartbeat thrumming a too-quick baseline at the back of his throat and he wonders if one of the nurses had screwed up your daily doses of anesthesia.

“they must’ve… what time is it?” you look around for a clock in the room. there isn’t one but leona looks around with you.

“not that late,” he says, dropping into the chair next to your bed, “are you… hungry?”

“starved,” you say, laughing as you try to sit up and he reaches out to wrap an arm around your shoulders. you’d never been fragile, not even when you were a tiny little girl, but just now beneath his hands, he laments at how breakable you seem.

“i dunno if you’d like any of the hospital food but… i could try paging for one of the nurses.”

“no, it’s okay. the only good stuff at a hospital is the jello anyway.”

leona laughs, nodding as he props you up on a pile of pillows, sitting back and staring at you in mixed awe and trepidation. it’s the most he’s heard you say in… god — years? years. and he can’t help marveling at the sound of your voice, just as sure and strong as it’s always been. he used to jam a finger in his ears and yell that you were too loud but now, he thinks he’d like nothing more than to fall asleep to it, just to hear it and hear it and keep on hearing it.

“then… how about we get outta here later and i take you to a proper dinner?”

your smile is sweet and just on the other side of teasing.

“leona kingscholar. are you asking me on a date?”

he sighs, shaking his head, pressing his thumb and forefinger to the top of his nosebridge as he pinches.

“yeah — sure, if that’s what you want to think.”

you regard him for a moment before you drop your gaze to the back of your hand, the iv needle still taped firmly in place.

“i’m… not quite sure what to think… i mean — what’s a girl supposed to think of a guy who’s been lying to her for the past two years?”

leona feels his whole body go cold, but you’re still smiling as you look at him, your hands folded neatly in your lap. so, he forces himself to move, to lean forward and reach for your hands, and when you don’t stop him, he doesn’t question why your touch feels a little bit like salvation. why you’ve always kind of felt like that to him.

“i — i’m sorry.”

“i know… i know you are,” you reach up to tug at the ends of his hair, “it’s gotten way longer y’know… it’s one of the things that gave it away.”

he laughs, the sound both helpless and mercifully light as it spills from him.

“shit… i should’ve known it’d be the hair. you always were so damn obsessed with it.”

and when he looks up, it’s to find your cheeks tinted with a color he hasn’t seen in two long years and it takes everything inside him not to reach out and press his palm to it, to reach out and catch it, to save it and cup it close to his chest like a firefly’s dying light.

“can you blame me? you’ve got gorgeous hair,” you say, even now running your fingers through it and he lets himself sink to the sanctity of your touch.

“so… i guess i owe you an explanation,” he says, finally looking up as your hand drops and he bites down the urge to grab it and press it back to the side of his face, to kiss at the patch just inside your wrist.

“yes, that’d be nice,” you say, your voice as casual as it is light, and he knows, even before he starts speaking that he is forgiven, and it’s all he could’ve ever, ever hoped and prayed for.

you, alive; him, forgiven.

and, given those circumstances, he thinks that he really has no other reason to keep on deflecting anyways. so, leona takes a deep breath and tries to remember ruggie’s words — one word, and then the next —

“so two years ago… your dad came to tell me that there was going to be a coup…”