bensonsbreakdowns

[bensonsbreakdowns]

SINFULLY

summary — it’s been a tantalizing exchange of passion and tension for seven days. they’ve pushed you to the edge, forced you to the cliffs peak, but in a moment of weakness, you become the problem in need of solving, and it only spirals from there

warning(s) — porn with plot, established relationships, threesome, dom/sub, bdsm elements, age gap relationships, professor maximoff, personal trainer natasha, beefy!natasha, innocent!reader, brat taming, choking, pussy inspection, punishment, daddy kink, professor kink, faux pity, manhandling, pussy spanking (w/ rings), spanking, edging, verbal humiliation, light anal play, plugs, ruined orgasm, orgasm denial, masturbation, voyeurism and exhibitionism, threats of bondage, vibrators, dildo, mean dom wanda, crying, begging, dirty talk, name calling, praise kink, subdrop, anxiety, aftercare, men/minors dni

authors note — i definitely missed some tags but i think you get the hint that this is absolute filth regardless of if i mention anything else. enjoy ;)

“Sorry.” You apologized when your phone pinged with a message from your girlfriend. The one with fiery red hair that encapsulates the effects of her unrelenting passion; not the one with blonde hair that falls around her shoulders in a choppy cut she did herself two weeks ago. Your eyes glance down at the screen, not needing to guess what Wanda had found to warrant texting you so randomly in the middle of the afternoon.

You’d been waging an internal bid since that morning, when you’d enveloped her waist in a tight possessive claim and rested your head on her shoulder beneath her craned head so sweetly she didn’t notice your hand dipping into her pocket and discarding the yellow panties she’s picked out for you that morning, wondering if she’d notice then, or in the car, or in the middle of a lecture with students around to watch her flush and darken with lust. Natasha hadn’t noticed then either, and she’d been standing at the front door, already halfway outside with a thermos of coffee and a yoga mat under her bulging bicep as she waited. She dropped Wanda off at campus on Fridays. You should know. The first time you’d established that the cute girl you were seeing at the gym was your college professor's girlfriend, was on the street corner at 7th and Park on your way to a Spanish lecture. Natasha had all the windows down, but the roof still protected her sports car from seasonal rain, and her hair had been red at the time, peeking out through the windows as the wind blew. She was wild, reckless. Wanda was never that. Wanda had sat in the passenger side of the car with her hair pulled back in a bun. You’d known it was her because her side profile is haunting, encapsulating, delicious. You see her on campus, from down the hall, around the corner, across the parking lots. It’s not a big school, not by any metrics, but its big enough to never have her classes. It’s big enough for you to have swallowed the guilt of fucking a professor to allow you to boldness to leave your panties in her pocket before a lecture.

“Are you okay?” Kate frowns, glancing at you from across the table. You're in the library, a free period granted by your American History professor who actually has a brain on his shoulders and recognizes that sometimes students just need structured time to get their assignments done, or at least started. Your paper is filled with notes scribbled in purple ink, and the document you have opened on your laptop is highlighted with that dusty pink color that’s third from the bottom on the color gradient in Google Docs. Even with the lack of panties between your legs, the wetness you can’t deny dripping onto your denim shorts that feel like a nightmare against your sensitive clit when you twinge just slightly in your seat, you’ve been productive enough to make Wanda proud if she asks how you day at school went. ”You’ve been kind of quiet today.” Kate frowns, her eyes squinting like she’s trying to find an answer beneath the surface of your features. It’s not something that she can directly name. You’ve laughed at all of her jokes, smiled and teased her all like normal, but there's something that hangs over you that she knows isn’t right. “Oh god, is Wanda sexting you?”

Your face flushes. You’re suddenly aware that you’re not empty, not entirely at least. Your core clenches, slick walls pleading for friction, but your ass is full. It clamps down hard on the flared base of a silicone plug Natasha worked into your ass before she’d peeled herself out of bed to take a shower. It’s not one of the bigger ones, not one of the red princess plugs that came in a set of five that Wanda seldomly pulls out for intense scenes you’ve already discussed at length. It’s small, insignificant enough to be worn daily without much interference. It’s more a reminder of control than an interference, but right now it sparks every nerve in your belly and reminds you that you’ve been wanting for days. Four days.

Four days ago, on Monday, Natasha had pinned you up against the wall and touched you for the last time. She’d dipped her fingers beneath your denim shorts because it had been warm enough to bare your legs for her to ogle, and she’d worked you up on her fingers until arousal was dripping down her knuckles. She’d pulled away before you could cum. That was the third time she’d done that. The edging started Saturday night. For no reason. Wanda had come home from a pilates class at Natasha’s gym, which ironically was never run by Natasha but instead of best employee Pepper, who is actually named Virginia, and had taken you on the couch without even consulting Natasha who’d watched from the door frame with yearning eyes. She said nothing when she fucked your cunt with her tongue, her nose inhaling your scent as it bounced against your clit clumsily, and then she’d stopped and walked away like nothing happened, going into the kitchen to finish up dinner that Natash had thoughtfully already started. It hasn't ended since. It happens like this sometimes. It’s days of edging and denial until eventually Wanda explodes, but it’s never been like this before. It’s never reached the seventh day and still nobody’s let you cum. It’s thrilling. You think. Kate’s question catches you off guard. You’re emboldened by their experience, you allow them to corrupt you however they want, but in the absence of their dominating presence, you're just the innocent girl they plucked up off the streets.

“No!” You snatch your phone off the table like if it sits there any longer, Kate might develop a sixth sense for deception and absorb all the contents of your text chain with Wanda. You’d die if that happened. You have a hard enough time telling them what you want in explicit enough details to satisfy their vulgar desires, you wouldn’t be able to look at the Kate the same if she knew what the text said.

You decided to be a whore today, huh?

It’s simple but chilling. Eight words have unraveled you entirely, but you still have twenty minutes before you can sneak away to your car and drive back to Natasha’s house. It’s not their house, despite having been together for six years. Natasha had told the story as such — one day Wanda came over to spend the night and she never went home, the end. Legend has it, the redhead has a highrise apartment somewhere upstate, but she’s never ventured there with you in tow, and you’ve never seen a picture to prove it either. It’s basically your house now too though. Like Wanda, one day you’d gone over to spend the night, and then you’d never returned back to your dorm where Kate basks in the glory of single living. You think she’s pushed your beds together at this point and made a Queen for herself out of the two Twin XL’s, but you haven’t been back to check on the state of your belongings to know.

“She’s just telling me that Natasha wants meatballs for dinner, so she’ll send me money to get something on the way home.” You shrug, and it feels bad to lie, it makes your belly burn with guilt you don’t typically feel so intensely, but with your period four days off from ruining your entire month, you don’t dwell on the intensity of tears thrusting to prick your eyes and you deceive Kate for no reason. There’s no reason to lie, but you find yourself doing it anyway. There was no reason to leave your panties in Wanda’s pocket and risk her job, but you did it anyway. You’re impulsive without them guidinging you. It’s been months since you’ve been distanced enough to remember that.

“I wish Yelena would sugar mommy me.” Kate sulks, and you make a face as if to say they’re not even together, but Kate pointedly avoids glancing into your eyes to find the unspoken taunt. “Who sugar mommy’s you more? Natasha or Wanda?” She questions, and amusement fills your cheeks with hot air as you close your laptop and throw your highlighters and pens back into your pencil case, aiming to start wrapping this conversation up so that you can get home once your phone pings with the end of the allotted essay period.

“Well, Natasha owns her own business and Wanda’s a teacher so…” You break down the logistics of their finances, because it feels imperative that you remind Kate that regardless of anything else, Natasha still trumps both you and Wanda with inconce rates. Kate should know that though, she’s been obsessed with Natasha’s younger sister since your freshman year, and Yelena’s only finally giving her enough attention for lunch dates to be delusionally morphed into plans of marriage. You’re going to hate the day she learns Yelena’s asexual, and she has a better chance of fucking a fire hydrant than the blonde.

“She’s a professor!” Kate interjects, and your eyes roll. “They get paid more, and it’s hotter.” She’s had the hots for Wanda since she took Slavic Languages last semester on a whim after failing Spanish for the second time. You’ve only ever heard impeccable things about Wanda’s reserve when she’s giving a lecture, so even though your blood boils every time you remember other girls think about Wanda the way only you get to have her, you never can say you blame her for fantasizing about the lengths the redhead goes to romantically.

“Neither one of them really sugar mommy me.” You shrug, finding your voice again after Kate. You hope she doesn’t notice how your hips shift against the leather cushion beneath your awkwardly distributed weight, but you don’t think you’re entirely subtle as you attempt to alleviate pressure on the plug. Thankfully, you’re entirely certain Kate doesn’t even know the first signs to look for. She talks a big game, but you’re certain her last kiss was some douche bag at NYU before she was expelled. “I mean, I guess Wanda pays for dinner when we go out, but other than that it's pretty even.” Your words are a breathless huff when you move and the cushion expands without your pressing weight, and presses against the plug when you least expect it.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Kate frowns, once again drawn to how something just isn’t completely right with you. It comes in waves, and it makes her uncomfortable for a reason she doesn’t know. You don’t even notice the way she shifts like she wants to retreat to basic elementary school survival skills and go find a trusted adult to confide in. You’d find it funny that sexual tension makes her uncomfortable, especially because all she does is yearn after Yelena Belova and some girl in her chemistry class named Maia, but it doesn’t even crash upon the surface of your mental shorelines. You’re so far from what's actually happening she could call you out on your horny bullshit right now and you wouldn’t know she saw through you.

You’re not great at being deceptive, in fact you’re pointedly bad at selling a lie even when you believe it fully, but something keeps you on your toes now, something like Natasha’s quick wit and self-preservation skills finally rubbing off on you. You find something in your head that’s not entirely a lie, and it falls off your lips before you can consider the implications of this potentially backfiring on you later on. It’s not a big deal, she’s not going to care that you’re horny because you’re in a lovely, healthy relationship where you try new things, but you’re making it a big deal and you don’t know why. ”Yeah, I just remembered I left the Zyrtec in Wanda’s trunk.”

“Oh, you’re still dealing with those allergies?” Kate frowns, and you deflate in immediate relief that you’ve managed to salvage the conversation and her worries all in one go. You let her guide the conversation from there, because you’re not sure you can focus on much of anything outside from how your clit graces against the inseam of your shorts when you cross one thigh over the other and shift your weight until your thighs become one. It’s humiliating. You’re humiliating yourself without their influence. Your cheeks burn. How have you fallen so far? How did you get to this point? If Natasha were beside you, you know she’d be grinning like a devil watching you squirm. If Wanda were here, you know she’d scold you for being so naughty in public, for being so needy that you can’t even sit still like a good girl while your friend tries to talk to you. They’ve ruined you.

Kate walks you to your car despite trying to part ways at the door. She’s kind as she tells you about all the events coming up on campus that you’re certainly going to avoid going to at all costs, but she tells you any way so that you feel included. It wouldn’t have bothered you any other day, but you’re certain that the crotch of your shorts is a shade of blue darker than the rest of the denim material, and you can’t face the realization of her knowing you’re so honry yoru thighs are slick with arousal and it’s your fault. You can’t help but think that you should’ve never left those panties in her bag, because now your thighs glimmer beneath the sunshine of June, and your arsenal that slips down your thighs in tantalizing beads are like high beams for anyone to lock in on at their own will. You’d never know if someone stole a glance from across the parking lot, if they took that image home with them and got off on it in secret, or if they didn’t even wait, just slipped into their office and worked it out then and there. You hate that Wanda’s convinced you that’s a hot possibility. You hate that it only makes the coil in your belly grow more and more until you’re clenching your fingers into fists and forcing back tears as Kate drags out her goodbye at the driver's side door of your little car with hardly any life left in it.

The commute back to Natasha’s has never felt so bumpy, and you’re ashamed that by the time you pull into the driveway, you’ve broken out into a hot flash that turns your cheeks cherry red and threatens to push you over the edge into a touchless orgasm that shatters you completely. The plug in your ass has nearly been pushed out twice, but the force of your ass meeting the seat as you bump against the unevenly paved highway forces it back into place. It’s never been a distraction like this, but your senses have also never been on overdrive like this away from your bed or the exotic spots chosen by your girlfriends with caution. It feels like there are fireworks before your fingernails, burrowed deep into your cuticles and unwilling to move. There’s an agonizing pressure in your belly that is enough to riddle you with tears and hiccuping sobs. You’re desperate, on the verge of an orgasm from roadside construction instead of your girlfriends, but just like they’d been doing to your body all week, the drive home ends before you reach your peak, and for the millionth time, you're edged and left stranded in the middle of blinding electricity and somebody forgot to flip the breaker.

Wanda isn’t home yet. She should be, but she’s not. A part of you is worried that she got fired, That she pulled the panties out at the wrong place, or at the wrong time, but she’d never texted you again, and you have the slightest hope that if she were facing unemployment she’d at least give you a heads up. When you’d slipped the panties into her pocket, you’d wanted someone to see them, but that thought swallows you up and echoes in the back of your head now like a demon willing you down a tainted path. It’s too late now. You’re already down it.

Natasha is home though, and the light gleams through the window and tells you she’s waiting in the living room. Maybe she’s not waiting though. She might just be watching TV, she might not even know that its one o’clock and you’re never home any later than one-thirty. You push through the front door like it weighs a million pounds, and there’s not one second to consider if Natasha knows what happened today or not. The minute you glance at her all comfortable on the couch, her biceps bulging as she crosses her arms over her belly and hides the handfuls of skin on her hips from you, you know that she knows, and she knows that you know that she knows. It makes your head swim. You want her with a burning passion.

“Oh, you’re home?” She asks, already rising from the couch though her tone feigned disinterest. You swallow thickly, shrinking beneath her stare. It feels so hot, so heavy. She’s unmaking you entirely, and yet she doesn’t seem to give a fuck whether you’re coming or going or somewhere in the middle. Her eyes sweep over your frame, and you know she’s reading every miniscule emotion portrayed across your demeanor, so you try your best to appear unassume, innocent, even if your belly churns knowing evidence of your disobedience stains your car seats now and your inner thighs. Your denim shorts feel heavy around your waist, the center weighed down by arousal that continues to collect. It’s uncountable, sticky. There’s no hiding the difference in hue anymore, sodden denim exposing your desires.

“I’m home.” You whisper, your throat bobbing as you swallow dryly. It doesn’t help anything. Your head is no clearer and you find your words no easier, but you force yourself to swallow again and hope that this time it helps. Natasha quirks an eyebrow, and the uninterested reserve drops entirely as her green-blue stare — you can never decide which color she wears more authentically — darkens into mystical lust that almost resembles charred ashes.

“Were you proud of yourself?” Natasha backs you up against the door. She’s not a tall woman, she’s only a handful of inches taller than you depending on what kind of shoe you’re wearing, but you feel impossibly small beneath her right now as your back meets the hard wood of the door and one of her buff arms comes up to frame the side of your face. It slams against the wood at first, hard, aggressive, aimed to startle you, and then it slides so slowly you think she may be tracking a fly, before it settles on your cheek with a burning weight that has you itching for more. It doesn’t last there for long. Natasha’s never been a woman skilled with stillness. She’s always moving, always finding ways to keep herself busy, so it doesn’t surprise you that she can’t even keep her palm on your cheek for long enough to capture your attention the way she wants. Instead, she trails it down to your throat, and you know then that you’re entirely screwed. She squeezes, not tight, but firm, and your eyes become wide as your reel beneath the easy dominance. “Were you proud of yourself when you snuck those pretty panties into Wanda’s jacket? I bet you wanted everyone to see them, huh? You probably couldn’t help but think about them falling out onto the floor during her lecture, or maybe you thought she’d find them during her meeting. Yeah? While she was sitting right next to Eleanor Bishop talking about you, and your major, and the future of your program.” Your belly is suddenly filled with a weight you know is guilt, and Natasha can see that. She’d aimed to let the reality of your decisions wash over you, and only when she’s satisfied that you’ve sat with the realization long enough does she lean in to kiss you and simultaneously work the button of your shorts open with the hand that's not around your neck.

“I didn’t think-“ When she pulls away from the bruising kiss that makes your head spin and the coil in your belly threaten to wind up again, you desperately try to find confirmation on your tongue that will assure her you’d never wanted anything to happen to Wanda outside of a little frustration. Even then, you weren’t sure what your aim had been this morning. Maybe it was to get her back. To make sure she knows how much this is killing you. Maybe you’d just wanted the attention. You don't know.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it, moya lyubov? You don’t think. You just let this cunt tell you what to do, even if it gets you in trouble. I bet she’s wet, huh? Oh yeah.” Natasha groans when she cups your core through the denim shorts, not even having to attempt to prod at your entrance through the thick layers, she can feel the moisture and heat radiating onto her calloused skin just from the possessive grip she’s initiated. “You’re always wet, always so easy to fuck. It doesn’t take much does it? I bet that plugs been driving you crazy all day, and you thought you were gonna be a brat and outsmart Wanda, but I bet not having any panties on only made it worse, huh, princess? I bet you’ve been wet since you left. Did you break my rule, baby? Did you touch this cunt without permission?”

A gasp falls off of your lips when Natasha cups your core harder, grinding the heel of her palm into your clit just hard enough to move the inseam of your shorts with it, forcing pleasure on you thats too rough and too intense all at once. Tears prick your eyes, but there’s still a question to be answered, and you’re not gone enough to have forgotten that if nothing else, she expects you to find an answer for her. “N-No!” You wail, frustration bubbling up inside of you when the pressure ebbs into nothing and your clit is left unsatisfied again. “I didn’t!”

Natasha’s tuts, clicking her tongue against her front teeth as she cranes her head at you sympathetically. The hand around your throat eventually trails away, cupping your face and then wiping the tears off your cheeks. “See, I don’t believe you, detka. I’m gonna have to check for myself. Open your legs wider.” She removes her hand from between your legs all together, tapping your hip in warning as she gives you space to comply with her request. When you just stand there, floundering for something to grasp onto and pull you through the dark waters with, Natasha huffs. “Open your legs wider. Now.”

You do as she asks, because it’s only natural that you do. You had half a mind this morning to do that exact opposite of what they asked, and yesterday, you’d pointedly avoiding doing what Wanda asked until there was no other choice but to comply or stand beneath her disappointed glare from across the kitchen, but that wingless push of confidence has evaded you now. It’s nowhere to be found even when you try to find the courage to stand up to her in your fingertips.

Your zipper doesn’t stand a chance against the force of her fingers dipping beneath the waistband of your panties until he bypasses your clit and france’s her fingers along your labia. There’s a distinguished squelching sound that meets the air when she dips just one knuckle into your entrance, filling you up for the very first time since Monday afternoon, and you gasp with so much relief that you don’t even recognize the sinister smirk on her lips as she reads your expression like a book she’s memorized dutifully.

“You’re so wet.” She comments, “Are you sure you didn’t touch yourself?” She knows you didn’t. The way you contract against her fingers as she eases another one into your walls and spreads you out like she’s preparing for a game of rock paper scissors tells her that you’ve not had an ounce of real pleasure since the last time she’d allowed it. She thinks it was two days ago. You’re unaware that she’s seemingly lost in a haze of days and mundane adult routine.

“I didn’t! I didn’t! Daddy, please!” You gasp, your back arching off the door when her fingers scrape along your walls. She makes an interested sound high in her throat, like she’s surprised to find that your sensitive there, and does it again, this time with full intention to overwhelm you with pleasure.

”Oh, are you sensitive right there, detka? Is that your spot?” She coos, and it feels so wrong so be treated like this by her. Natasha isn’t soft, but she’s not cruel, and right now she’s wearing Wanda’s condescension with her blonde hair that tickles your cheek when she drops her forehead against yours. “I didn’t know.” She pouts, and you wonder why for a second, but then it makes perfect sense when she pulls her fingers away and you’re left clenching around nothingness. She’s apologizing for giving you pleasure with nothing else. She’s pretending to care that she’s just wound you up for the hundredth time this week and left you high and dry in the middle of a puddle with wild electricity sparking in the close distance.

A broken sob leaves your lips and your hips chase her fingers but its useless. Natasha doesn;t care that you're desperate, she doesn’t care that nobody’s fucked you good in days, it’s not about that right now. You lost the right to her sympathy when you decided to be a brat. Again. She remembers the last time you were in this position. She remembers leaves changing colors and apple cider always being in the fridge because you love it more than apple juice in the middle of October, and she remembers how your ass had gleamed red for days after Wanda bent you over the island because you just wouldn’t watch your mouth and mind your damn manners. It’s been a while since either one of them had dished out a punishment that actually forces you to think about your actions. It’s been a while since either of them have really fallen hard on their swords as dominic acts and truly sacrificed you to the wolves of letting go.

Natasha will never apologize for loving you to deeply to keep her roles separate. She will never apologize for loving you so much, she gives into your pouting face and crying eyes when you just need her more than anything else in the world. Wanda won’t either, and she’s notorious the hardest nut amongst you to crack. None of you care that your dynamics have been muddled with pathetically sweet domesticity and romance for months at this point, but its beginning to catch up with all of you now. You have all of these limits beneath your belts, all of these wild impulses that you only ever indulge in with each other, these kinks and desires are derived from real trauma, and real connection, and real willingness to be the most unapologetic version of yourself no matter how socially unacceptable, and she’s allowed all of you to forget that the beauty of building a dynamic outside of romance is the freedom to hold grudges and correct behavior. She won’t give in so easily anymore, because before you, she never would’ve allowed anything less than perfect obedience and that had been the one thing that lured you back to her workout classes.

“Please, Daddy!” You beg, and Natasha can’t help but smile at how desperate you sound for her already. She’s barely touched you, and she knows that's your problem,that the root of your begging is the pointed lack of attention her and Wanda have been giving you since Wednesday night in her head, but there's nothing you can do about it right now when she has the cards and its her body that pins you to the door and keeps you immobile beneath her.

“Turn around.” She muses without interest for your tears, she’s already wiped them away once, it wouldn’t be the first time she told you to strop cry before she deems it acceptable. Your cheeks always flame when she does that, like its your fault that she’s unmade you to the point of tears.

“No.” You choke on a desperate cry, reaching out to attempt to tangle your fingers into her hair, but she intercepts before you can succeed, and her grip on your wrists is strong as she pins your hands above your head and glares deep within your eyes like she can see every part of your soul and the privilege doesn’t astonish her. It does astonish her. She can’t believe that you;ve given all of yourself to her like this, but who would she be if she allowed you to read the gratitude rolling off of her so easily? “No, I want to touch you!” You cry out, trying to fight her, trying to convince her to let you win. Natasha knows you well. She knows when you’re being bratty, and she knows when you’re just so overwhelmed with pleasure and emotion that you just don’t even process what they’re saying to you. Sometimes she thinks you make up conversations in your head, but she knows that you’re just drunk on sensations they’re withholding and your body is desperately trying to make up for the lack of stimulation however it can. You’re somewhere in the middle right now. It’s not bratty defiance that keeps you and her in a standstill, wasting precious minutes before Wanda gets home, but its not entirely blind submission either. Your trying to keep yourself above the tide, key word is trying, because you’re failing faster than you even register, and Natasha knows if she plays her cards right you’ll be putty before Wanda even gets in the door. You’ll have no idea whats in stores or you then, and she knows you need that. You need to be caught off guard. You need to be grounded, and humbled, and reminded of your place beneath them. “I want to touch you, Daddy!”

“Daddy gets to decide when you’ve earned the privilege to touch me, and you haven’t yet, little girl, so turn around and stop whining before I give you a reason to stick that lip out at me.” The threat hangs in the air before you and it paints your face white with shock as your eyes meet hers with crystals of tears brimming in your waterline. You don’t have to think about complying on your own regard, because Natasha tugs you how she wants you against the door and doesn’t think twice before pushing your shorts down your legs once your cheek is flush with the wood she’d once thought about painting green after moving in.

You gasp when her hands brace against the globes of your ass, not making any pointed moves, but you know what she’s aiming for when she pulls your cheeks apart and allows cold air to assault your dripping, glimmering core. A whine escapes your lips when she drags a finger down the crack of your ass to your entrance, collecting wetness of the pads of her fingers that she then spreads around your puckered hole that holds tight to the princess plug keeping you open. She circles the jeweled base of the plug with disinterest almost, never grabbing at it, never pushing at it, she just circles it to remind you that it's there, that she’s the one who placed it there and gave you firm orders to keep it where it was until she took it out. At least you’d listened to her. She’d know if you didn’t. You can’t get the plugs in yourself, and it enrages you to no end when she’s away on a business trip and Wanda has no desire to pull them out of the closet where you keep all of the toys you cycle through routinely and healthily. This is Natasha’s fortier, it's one of the only things that she can give you that you haven’t learned how to give yourself. She hopes you never get comfortable enough with the plugs to put them in yourself. She hopes you always gasp and squirm like it's the first time anything has ever breached your puckered hole when she bends you over to do it herself from time to time. It’s intoxicating. you’re intoxicating.

The jewel is a baby pink color, shaped like a heart, but what matters most is the shade that you’d never thought specifically about until Natasha leaned in close to kiss you with lips glittering in arousal to tell that it matches the pink of your cunt after Wanda fucks you raw with the strap and she gets to lick you clean. You’ve never been able to keep your composure around baby pink since then. You still can’t now just imagine the sight she’s seeing as she spreads you open for her and fiddles with you however she pleases.

“How did it feel? Wearing this pretty plug to class today?” Natasha asks, leaning in to let her lips trail along the clammy skin of your neck that only aquires a thicker sheen the longer you stand without any airflow on parts of your body that matter. It’s hotter than hell in the house, or at least it feels that way to you, but the air that continuously brushes against your core is cold and unwelcoming.

”We had a study period in the- in the library.” You gasp when Natasha grabs the base of the plug and turns it clockwise just slightly, enough to let your ass feel the stretch of the plug as sit spins within you. The pleasure is intense, but only because anything would be enough to push you over the edge right now. “I— Daddy, please.” You beg when she presses the plug deeper into you once, and then twice, and then it seems like shes setting a tempo as she taps her fingers against the jewel.

“Keep telling me about your day.” Natasha directs, unbothered by your frustration and arousal, unaffected by the fact that she knows it's hard for you to think straight with her hands holding you apart like you’re some object to ogle, not even considering your prolonged frustration and desire. “Be a good girl for me.”

“I couldn’t sit still.” You whisper and your cheeks flame with embarrassment that you know she enjoys every second of. “Gave Wands m-my panties and was so sticky, Daddy! Please, it hurts. It was dripping all down my legs, and I just hope Kate didn’t see. Please Daddy, I need you.”

“Oh, so now you gave Wanda your panties. Spinning the narrative, are you?” Natasha quirks and eyebrow, and she pulls your gaze back to look at her with a tight grip on your hair. You whine, wince, your entire body tenses and becomes a light with electric sensitivity that has you gasping and moaning and writhing against the door with no reprieve. She slams you back against the door, her tongue clicking against her teeth as she reminds you to stay still, to be good for her, you’re not being good right now.

“I don’t know!” You cry out, dropping your face against the front door again when she lets go of your hair and instead grabs the base of the plug and plucks it free from the confines of your ass without any chance to adapt to the stretch or subsequent emptiness.

”You don’t know anything, because all you are is a slut for Daddy to play with.” She sighs against the shell of your ear like this isn’t a new development for her, and your chest burns with shame as you moan and thrash.

“No, please! I want it back, please Daddy. Please, I want it back. I want to feel good. Please, please. I want to feel good, I want you to make me feel good.” You're a mess of tears and pleas when it finally dawns on you that your ass spasms and clenches around nothing — that the only consistent pleasure you’ve found all day, for the first time in a week, has now been ripped away without so much as a soft, fake apology.

“Shh, come away from the door.” She guides you away softly, affectionately — the gentlest she’s addressed you since you first stepped inside the house. You think it’s because she’s giving in, letting you win, getting ready to led you to the couch or the bed nad make up for seven days without relief, but instead she forces you to stand still beside the front window where Wanda’s somehow appeared despite Natasha’s car still being in the driveway beside yours. She didn’t pull you away from the door to cut you a break, or even pretend to feel pity for your tears and quivering lip, but only so that Wanda could come inside and destroy you in her own way. “Hi, my love.” Natasha smiles brightly when Wanda steps inside the house, her hair glowing with the radiance of summer sunrays brightening her naturally vibrant waves. She drops her briefcase by the door, and you notice for the first time that she brought the meeting bag with her, not the bag she brings that had daisies on it and is filled with extra handouts she expects her students to have lost between their last meeting. You hadn’t noticed that this morning. You’d been too consumed with need that was left untouched.

“Hi.” Wanda smiles, drawing Natasha in for a warm kiss that makes you wonder if she’s still frustrated and mad about your disobedience and boldness. It’s evident that she’s still mad when she doesn’t glance in your direction, instead keeping her eyes on Natasha as both of them pretend like you’re not within ear shot. Wanda fishes the panties out of her pocket, and your cheeks burn as she holds them up to the light for Natasha to see clearly as well. “Ten minutes in these and they’re ruined.” She hums, and you whine like you’re incapable of formulating any kind of response or rebuttal. It’s futile, they're not talking to you, or even paying you any ounce of attention, but you still feel the need to interject because you just haven’ t learned that they’re not going to cave yet. That’s their fault, but you’ll learn.

“She was humping my fingers like a bitch before. I’d say she only made it worse for herself. The little exhibitionist was hoping that people would see her. Was hoping someone would notice that she’s dripping down her thighs like a slut. Couldn’t even behave herself and sit still in the library with Kate, apparently she was all over the damn seat trying to rub one out.” The words are vulgar and they cut against your sharply, enough to have you shaking on your feet by the television, hardly even aware of the face that your ass and your hips are in perfect sight for anyone outside to see.

“Oh yeah?” Wanda quirks an eyebrow, and it takes you a minute to realize she’s addressing you. There isn't an ounce of warmth in her tone as she crosses her arms and unmakes you with a cold sweep of her crystal eyes across your half naked frame, but she’s not looking at you like she hates you either. It’s sheer dominance and lust that overcomes her now, and it's a combination you’ve never seen so deadly and aimed solely at you. Natasha's been on her shit like like this before, but never you, never their good girl, their angel who has only ever seen herself over their knee for punishment four times in an entire years long relationship. Someone should be picking up on the signs, but nobody is. Not you, not Natasha, not Wanda. “Come here.” Wanda arches a finger when she realizes that you’re directly in front of the window and don’t even seem to register it. It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve toyed with the idea of giving the neighbors a show, but even with the cold reserve she’s giving you, untempted by her love to go easy on you, it unsettles her to take your vulnerability for granted in any way, especially like this. If you seemed to realize you were giving anybody a show, if it seemed like showing off was an underlying current in the scene, maybe she would’ve left you there for a while after realizing, but she can’t stomach to do that now. She’s mean, she’s cruel, but she’s not a monster and there’s still boundaries to her wild fantasies that unmake you from the very inside out.

You only come close enough for her hands to reach you if they try, but she doesn’t invite you any closer when you stop to look at her uncertainty, so you take her silence as rejection and continue to stand on your own — cold, but so uncomfortably hot. “Is Daddy telling the truth? Were you acting like a slut in the library? Hoping anyone could see how wet you were?” She taunts, and the words creep up your veins until they reach the middle of your belly where pleasure and frustration and emotions you’re too hazy to name take over entirely.

“No!” You plead with her to believe you, because it had never been your intention to be anything but good for them in the library, but you just couldn't help yourself when your clit caught on the inseam of your jeans or you shifted just right on the chair, and you’d hoped Natasha would see the honor and integrity in your coming clean, but instead she’d weaponized it into this. You were in enough trouble without her meddling, and it turns your lips downwards, but you never have any leeway to say that it’s more than just the teasing that’s weighing you down, so Wanda never stops to consider your pout or sparkling eyes.

“So now Daddy’s a liar?” She digs deeper; sinks her claws into you unrelentlessly without even touching you at all. She doesn’t need to touch you to own you. You’re beneath the wings of her control so beautifully right now she almost hates to be so cruel. Almost. It’s a fleeting moment of hesitation that allows you to think you’ve found reprieve from punishment for a moment, but then she remembers that this is what she really loves when you peel her layers back like an onion, and just like an onion she makes you cry but you keep coming back for more because it adds something, it spices things up, it makes dishes complete and she completes you. And for a moment you think that maybe she’ll bend, that maybe she’ll wind you up with this teasing and condescension and then she’ll let you down soft, let it all be some elaborate mind fuck that renders you a blob beneath their touch, but then she sets her gaze on the staircase beneath your body, and her jaw is locked so tensely you think she might chip a molar. “You’re digging yourself a deeper hole the more you open that mouth, so why don’t you keep it closed and go wait for me upstairs. I want you naked and on the bed waiting by the time we get up there.”

“But I want—“ You’re ready to tell her exactly what you want. It takes a lot to get you to this point of open communication. You’re their shy girl, their innocent angel that still blushes when it comes to asking for sexual acts from your girlfriends, but they have you wanting enough to throw caution to the wind and scream to the entire town that you’re a whore; their whore. You haven’t been broken down entirely, but you’re so close to the edge of fuzzy bliss that you have no morals to stand firm on. You’re malleable in their hands, and they know how to make you into exactly what they want.

“I didn’t ask what you wanted. I gave you a direction, and I expect you to follow it. Am I clear?” Wanda takes a step toward you. Just one. She’s taller than Natasha. You know this, and you love this, but sometimes you forget that she’s only a couple inches away from reaching six foot, and she towers over you with a completion and complex you can’t even begin to mimic to even unsuspecting strangers. She’s alluring. That’s the simplest way to put it, and she unmakes you even further as she sizes you up and makes you feel small like you’re nothing to her. It’s been a while since you’ve fallen so heavily into these roles. It’s been a while. It’s an echo in your head, a warning to tread carefully, but you don’t see it as anything more than a reason to fight harder, claim victory and finally find release in your center.

Your head bobs — just once. It feels so simple to think about motions as numbers right now. One pass of Wanda’s eyes over your exposed thighs and hips. Two taps of Natasha’s heel on the hardwood as she waits for you to comply with the direction you’ve been given. Four seconds before you realize that Wanda’s waiting for words, and that you still haven’t moved even with your nonverbal acceptance. “Yes.” You whisper when you find the words on your tongue, and you think that it’s going to satisfy Wanda, that maybe she might praise you for finally finding the right choice to make, but instead she clicks her tongue against her teeth, and she cranes her head to the side, and her eyes squint as you like you’ve just done the worst thing you could do; not try at all.

“I know it’s been a while since we’ve played like this, but I didn’t think my angel was dumb enough to forget such a simple rule. Are you dumb, princess? Or are you just too needy to think straight?” Wanda sneers, and your face flushes with heat that makes your belly twist with something sickeningly sweet. It’s all encapsulating. You can feel it in your toes, and your gallbladder, and your left lung all the way into the very back section of your brain that probably does something really important and specific. You don’t know. It doesn't matter. The sky could be green and chickens could be flying, and still all that would matter to you would be Wanda and Natasha.

“Not dumb.” Your voice is breathy, soft enough to be delicate and breakable. Wanda knows you, she knows what you can take, and so she lets her eyes sweep across your body until they meet your eyes, and when she finds nothing but bubbling tension beneath your surface, she hardens her glare and crosses her arms over her chest, forcing her tits farther into your line of vision. She’s wearing a generic t-shirt, but she’s dressed it up with a pair of black slacks, kitten heels, and a blazer that you think she’s probably only worn for the commute there and back. Her bra is black, the thin strap sticks out from the collar of her shirt when she moves her arms, and the cups push her full breasts up even further. It's almost considered sinful by your standards, and that's a hard metric to meet, but Wanda does it without breaking a sweat.

“Then address me properly.” She settles you, and there’s nothing you can do to get out of this corner you’ve backed yourself into, so without any other choice, you submit to what she wants of you, and with that last ounce of control out of your grasp, your brain goes fuzzy around the edges until you’re taking the stairs one at a time at a pace that's almost robotic, but Wanda and Natasha are tuned in enough to know that you just can’t move any faster without your thighs creating friction that gets you in even more trouble. They laugh as you retreat, and the sounds of their echoing amusement following you into the dark, empty and cold master bedroom leaves a chill in your bones that you're not sure is ever going to warm again.

“Yes, Professor.” Your words echo in Wanda’s head even after you’ve disappeared into the bedroom. She assumes you’re doing what she asked, getting further undressed and settling into the bed with full intentions of being good for her, but she gives you time to marinate regardless. She kicks off her heels, kisses Natasha twice, three times, four times, until they’re backed up against the wall ripping off layers until it's bras and panties on both of them and t-shirts scattered on the floor beneath slacks and leggings. They don’t go any farther. As mean as they’ve been, as cruel as they still plan to be, it feels premature to go any farther when you’re waiting upstairs and Wanda hasn’t touched you since Sunday.

She thinks that Natasha took care of you. She was under the impression that you’d been given as many orgasms as you were allowed by Natasha while she was at work, handling end of year papers and exams that she just couldn’t focus on in her office at home. Her absence at home had been planned for weeks, she’d forearnderd you the day before she packed up all her favorite red pens and headed for the office that the next couple of days were going to be long without her home, but you had persevered and she had thought that your lack of whining over text meant that Natasha had satisfied you. Natasha just couldn’t keep the days straight without Wanda home to be nagging in her ear about recycling day and bulk collection day and how Pepper always goes to Yoga on Thursdays so she needs to stop counting on her to get finances in for the pilates class at her gym. She hadn’t realized that the last time she touched you was cruel and unsatisfying and four days ago, she has no reason to dwell on the specifics and she doesn’t even now. Not when Wanda breathes against her lips that she’s so happy its Friday, that she’s so relieved the semester ends next week and exams are two weeks afterward. It’s a small tidbit left undiscovered in a glass bottle on the coast. Her eye hasn’t caught the sparkling reflection of sunbeams bouncing off like warning signs.

Natasha enters the bedroom first. She glances at you, and she almost smiles when she finds you on the center of the bed, naked like Wanda asked, but holding a yellow throw blanket over your body as you shiver in direct line of the air conditioner that points toward the bed. She pads over to the thermostat without saying a word, turning the air off entirely though she knows that’s a dangerous game to play for later on when you’re all hot and sweaty and too tired to peel your bodies out of bed and deal with numbers and math and perfect temperature debates that never get settled but instead mulled over with compromises and grumbles of annoyed and reluctant compliance. For right now, she’s okay to sacrifice future comfort for present comfort, but there’s hardly enough time to take note of her wordless gesture because Wanda comes stalking in after her, and she pushes the door closed with enough force to have the sound reverberating through the bedroom. You flinch, grab the blanket a little bit tighter, and for a moment Natasha frowns, narrowing her eyes, trying desperately to see if there’s something beneath the surface that she’s missing, but your eyes are blown with lust, and you crane your body towards Wanda’s with a yearning desire that is so automatic you don’t even seem to realize you’re closing the gap between your bodies until the mattress dips beneath your ebbing weight and you nearly topple off of the bed.

“Drop the blanket and come here. Edge of the bed.” She clicks her tongue, her fingers too. It’s degrading. It makes your belly do flips and your eyes glaze over. “Spread your legs. Wider. Wider. Stop trying to hide from me.” She growls and the first touch of her skin against you is harsh and cruel and demanding as she spreads your thighs wider and opens up your cunt completely. Arousal drips from your entrance onto the bed sheets, pearls of glittering desperation unable to be hidden between your thighs any longer, and now that the moonlight shines upon those inches of skin too, evidence of lust is painted against your skin and it looks like it’s been that way for hours with the way your skin is red and raw with moisture. It’s pathetic, and it’s so unbelievably hot that Wanda isn’t even embarrassed to moan wantingly.

”She’s dripping.” Wanda hums, glancing over her shoulder to look at Natasha who hasn’t taken her eyes off of you yet, though she isn’t intent on unmaking your inner emotions anymore, but rather watching as Wanda sinks a finger between your thighs, spreads your labia, and prods your weeping hole with a featherlight touch only long enough to collect a bead of arousal on her fingertip and hold it up to the light. She pinches her fingers together, rubs the moisturized pads together until they’re both effectively lathered in slick, and then she pulls her fingers apart like they’re a sizzling mozzarella, and the pull of arousal following both of her fingertips makes your cheeks flame worse than any cheese pull ever has. You whine. It’s desperate, and wanting, and so small, but it only fuels Wanda further. She needs to feel you now. She needs to have her way with you for the first time since Sunday and remind you that you’re hers until the word goes up in flames. “You’re so sweet, princess. I could just eat you, but I won’t. No, I don’t think you’ve learned your lesson yet. Right now, I’m going to spank that pretty pussy raw, and then I think I’m going to fuck Natasha, and you’re going to watch it happen, and you’re not going to get more than I give you, and you’re not going to break me down, and you’re not going to complain. Do you understand me, detka? This is your only warning.”

You don’t have the words to answer her, so instead your fingers tap against your thigh twice, and for the very first time her lips curve into a smile and she nods like you’ve done something right. “Can’t find your voice? Too dumbed down to think straight?” She sneers, and her eyes are filled with something that you can’t decipher. Natasha knows its pride. She can practically see it dripping off of Wanda as she basks in your obedience even after deliberate disobedience for days on end. Again, neither of them realize that it’s been nearly a week since you’ve found peace with their touch. Again, neither of them realize that they’ve failed to communicate with each other and in turn left you stranded out in a sea you don’t know how to navigate on your own.

Neither of them realize you are giving them exactly what they want right now because it’s the only thing you can think to do to get any ounce of attention anymore.

Your fingers tap against your thigh again. Two times. Wanda nods acceptingly. “Good girl using your signals.” The praise washes over you like a blanket, and if you’d forgotten how you got into this mess at all, you remember now with every sense you have left in your head. The praise is warm, like sunshine or cinnamon rolls fresh out of the oven and homemade in the dead of autumn. It wraps around your bones first, just hot enough to warm them for a moment before the feeling travels and it drowns your sensitive little heart in lightness that can only mean good things. It’s a momentary encouragement, but it’s enough to get you further into the scene at least. “Show me what stop is.”

Your fingers tap against your thigh twice, and then you stop, and then they tap three more times. Wanda doesn’t acknowledge you at first, so you repeat the action, and this time she nods with satisfaction that you remember. She doesn’t offer you any ounce of praise again, instead she just sinks behind you on the bed and wraps her arms around your waist until you’re flush against her chest and even more spread out than you were before.

There isn’t a warning before her hand comes down on your core with full force, her palm open, aiming to hit all of your sensitive parts with cruelty. It only takes one hit for you to realize that she wore rings today; more than just the promise ring Natasha had gifted the both of you on your respective one year anniversaries. The sting of metal is conflicting. It’s cold, sharp, what you imagine a venomous snake bite to feel like in the wild when it catches you by surprise and flashes through your veins with lighting speed. It’s a quick sensation, but it lingers on your labia and your clit and your weeping cole that caught the brunt of the friction from her palm that’s always rough with dryness.

Your hips jerk upwards, they chase her palm because the sensation is sharp, and it's painful, but as it ebbs away, it’s so sweetly pleasurable that your core jolts with burning desire to find more, to drown in it until there’s nothing left to feel or process besides euphoria. Wanda doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like that your hips jerk, and she wasn’t expecting them to. She doesn’t like that you’re still finding ways to misbehave even beneath her touch.

“Stay still.” She warns, her teeth nipping at your earlobe sharply. It stings, and she never soothes the ache with her tongue, and you whine so earnestly that Natasha almost feels bad, because she’s mean, but not as mean as Wanda, but she doesn’t feel bad enough to save you, and so nobody tends to the ache in your ear, or the pinch in your cunt when another slap doesn’t land in quick succession like you’d hoped. “Can’t even take a punishment. It’s like you’ve forgotten everything I taught you. Did you forget, detka? Do we need to start from the beginning? Reintroduce everything? Do you want to go back to only getting Daddy’s fingers because your tight little cunt can’t handle the strap?”

Your head shakes frantically, and you must look absolutely wild beneath the light that spills in from outside. The city is bright, shiny, dazzling, but Wanda Maximoff is a burning star and Natasha Romanoff is the very universe she explodes in and lights up with brightness that’s too hot to touch let alone look at nad see the full picture without being blinded and breathless and useless and you’re spiraling, you’re spiraling so far down into darkness that your train of thought abandons you and in the very moment that you lose all sense of where you are, drowning the scent ofWanda, and your arousal, and Natasha pacing across the room, apologetic but not enough to intervene, another slap lands between your legs and you howl with pain that becomes licks of tantalizing pleasure you can’t get enough of. You manage to stay still this time though. You don’t jerk, don’t chase her palm. You tense, you tighten, you bite down on your bottom lip until you almost taste copper, but you never move a single muscle.

Another slap comes down, and then another. She didn’t ask you to count them, so you lose count after the sixth. There must’ve been a nineteenth, because that number always makes Natasha laugh, and through thick tears in your eyes you registered her shoulders jostling from across the room before she’d turned away from the sight of you so completely unmade against Wanda’s chest to rummage through the closet. It weighs on you that she doesn’t even stick around to watch you be taunted and pulled apart so slowly and cruelly, it burns in your belly like shame, and for the first time you gasp in pain that has no pleasure, but before you can spiral, grasp onto sensations that have always been beneath the surface, that have fueled your every action since Wednesday afternoon, your brought back beneath the current of lust and willingness to do whatever the the hell they want when a slap comes down on your pussy that perfectly hits your clit. You're close. So close. Wanda knows. Of course she knows.

“Little sluts gonna cum from getting her cunt spanked!” Wanda calls out to Natasha, and your face burns with humiliation when you hear the thick laughter rumble from the closet. She slaps your core again, directly against your clit again, and that’s enough to have you dangling over the edge. You’ll take this orgasm. This orgasm that's going to be painful not just right now, but tomorrow morning when there's no pleasure left and only swollen lips and bruised skin, but for right now you’re willing to take it because it's the only thing they’ve given you outside of half asleep cuddles since Monday.

A gasp falls off of your lips when Wanda’s hand slaps against your clit again, but not with the same cruel pressure. It’s light. Deliberate. Your hips attempt to follow her palm when she retreats, her skin sparkling with slick, but she’s faster than you now, more coherent and intune with her body and its functions. She holds your hips down, forces your thighs wide. Your orgasm crashes over you and then it's gone, ebbing away into waves of pleasure that never dwindle, but never quite crash against the surface either. You’re sobbing, a mess of snot and tears, but no words escape you, and your fingers never tap your thighs, and your hands desperately shoot to Wanda’s wrists and try to pull them back to your core that weeps and drips lips a faucet or a widow, you’re not sure which one it is at this point — an inconvenience or a tragedy.

“Oh, you didn’t think I was just going to let you enjoy that orgasm, did you?” Wanda frowns, cupping your cheeks and bringing her thumbs against the damp skin, clearing away tears that are like diamonds on your flush skin. “Silly girl, you didn’t even ask for permission.” She clicks her tongue, and your brain is too fuzzy to comprehend that she’s blaming you for the ruined orgasm. She’d expected you to ask permission when she knew from the start that you couldn’t vocalize your wants even if you tried. It’s a thick blanket of something uncomfortable that smothers you when you realize that it had been a trap from the very beginning. You can’t handle another trap, another bout of teasing and creautly, but Wanda still has half of a plan to hatch, and you know she’s not going to stop unless you call it completely, but no part of you has the cognition to do that right now. Your brain is muddled, your thoughts aren’t your own, and the only thing you can process is them. Professor and Daddy. Professor and Daddy. Professor. Daddy. You need them. You need them fully and spiritually. You need them sinfully.

“Get on your belly.” Wanda moves away from you until her feet are on the floor and it's just you in the bed that feels too big for just your body. You do as she asks, even if you barely comprehend the task, and let your weight sink into the mattress as you finally lay down. It dawns on you now how tired you are, but Wanda can’t see your face, and Natasha watches your hands closely, but they never tap at your thighs in any fashion. You’ve always spoken up when something was too much. You’ve always used your signals when you were too deep into subspace to drop. She trusts you, and you’re showing clear trust in them, so they keep going, their reserves don’t break, and nobody sheds an ounce of pity as you whine and drip onto the comforter beneath your knees that Wanda props up like you’re just a doll for her to manipulate.

Somebody settles something between your legs, and only when your knees are guided back down and your hips are repositioned do you realize that it's the vibrator Wanda apparently bought three weeks after meeting Natasha. It’s big, and bulky, and you think superpowered though you have no proof, and when somebody flicks it on, you’re not sure who, it nearly sends you flying over the edge before somebody taps the button once, twice, three times and changes the setting to a low pulse that fades and goes at an uneven and deeply unsatisfying rhythm that you think must’ve been invented by a clueless man with no hobbies in life.

“You move a single muscle and I tie you up, understand?” Wanda waits for your fingers to tap against your thigh, even when it takes a full minute for you to process that she asked you a question at all. You tap twice, a silent confirmation of your understanding and acceptance, and so nobody thinks twice before they move on, Natasha pouncing on Wanda and stripping her out of her bra and underwear whilst Wanda does the same with her. They work in tandem. They always have. Wanda moves one way, Natasha moves the other. Even when Natasha’s searching for something dominating in Wanda, allowing her softer edges to shine through, they still move in harmony like its a practiced dance they’re showing you and ever so slowly teaching you. Even though you can’t see them, your face still buried in the blankets as your hips fight to remain still, you can imagine that they’re not moving with any less harmony and unity right now than any other moment you’ve witnessed them in. It makes everything ten times harder to handle, but when you finally do glance to the side, needing air that wasn’t restricted by the fabric that genuinely attempts to smother you in plain sight, you erupt into a whole new world of isolation when you watch Wanda hammer a dildo into Natasha’s cunt while the blonde’s fingers are burrowed between her legs, aiming to pull a quick and harsh orgasm from the redhead who doesn’t seem to have any complaints about not wasting time.

“Please!” It’s the first time you’ve spoken in a while, and your throat is scratchy and dry as evidence. You sound utterly pathetic, you look even worse, but there’s something soft about you as you fight to keep your head held up, twitching and jerking and so utterly helpless but in full control of your body. It’s addicting, alluring, intoxicating. It fuels Wanda on, but she doesn’t say a word, just rubs her thumb harder against Natasha’s clit and works the dildo faster, rougher, angling up to hit that spongy part in her walls that makes her head spin.

You can hear the vulgar squelches of their cunts as they work each other to orgasm, but you can’t distinguish which incessant squeak is Natasha’s and which is Wanda’s. They’re both moving too fast, with rhythmic paces that appear chaotic and unorganized to you right now. The soft tufts of hair between Natasha’s legs are red, ginger really, and they curl just slightly when she lets the bush grow out in the winter, but for summertime, her bikini line is cleanly waxed and her mound is adorned in only short strands of coarse hair that Wanda finds intoxicating to run her fingers over in the middle of the night aimlessly.

You’re still watching them when Wanda leans forward and captures Natasha in a kiss that looks bruising and rough and all encompassing, and your reserve breaks entirely when you watch them both come undone in climaxes that look satisfying and rewarding and soft as their fingers move slower and their wrists snap softly and they work each other through the height of blinding pleasure sweetly and tenderly — everything that you want, that you’ve been denied. It’s like they don’t care about you anymore. Do they not care about you anymore?

Suddenly it's hard to breathe, and even though Wanda never followed through on that threat of tying you down, you feel like your limbs are shackled to the bedpost and even though every nerve screams with oversensitivity from sensations you haven’t even been awarded yet, you can’t seem to move away from the vibrator that still torments your clit.

Natasha catches it first, the way you break,the way your knees lose their tension and your elbows unlock and your head drops against the bed like you just can’t bear the weight, and its confirmation that you’ve been off all along that has her rushing to your aid on the bed and quickly pulling the vibrator out from between your legs. “Hi, my love.” Her words are soft, sweet, so gentle you don’t recognize them and you continue to sob, gasping for breath, clawing at your throat, looking at her like you can’t even see her, twitching beneath her hands like you can’t feel them at all.

Natasha pulls you up into her lap, and apologizes when your clit catches on her thigh and pleasure shots through you so intensely that it hurts and you cry harder, coughing, spluttering, probably covering her with splatters of saliva but she doesn’t even flinch, doesn’t close her eyes and try to avoid the spray of your unruly emotions. She just lets you feel, and she lets herself feel, and she grounds herself in this moment because how did she not see it before? You’re never bratty. You’re never blindly disobedience nor are you rash or sexually impatient enough to do something as bold as slip Wanda your panties.

“It’s Friday.” Natasha blanches, her eyes trailing toward Wanda. She doesn’t let go of your cheeks, but she recognizes that you can’t hear her right now, that over the blood rushing in your ears and the sensitivity in your core not just from arousal but from Wanda’s unrelenting spanks too, you can’t even begin to process anything she’s saying. “I… I knew it was Friday, because I drove you to work, but I was convinced it was Wednesday because Pepper rescheduled the newsletter. Fuck.” Natasha pales, but Wanda’s still confused. Wanda still doesn’t know that you haven’t been properly touched in a week, or shown any kind of affection really, and so while she has sympathy and concern for your state, and her heart aches wondering where she went wrong, she’s not picking up on what Natasha’s trying to get across to her.

“What?” Wanda stalks closer. She’s unbalanced, slightly wobbly, but she doesn’t let it bother her anymore than she can control. You’re her entire priority, her entire world, and Natahsa’s scaring her immensely the longer she dances around the truth in burning shame and personal disappointment.

“I.. the last time I touched her was Monday. Did you let her cum at all?” She whispers and Wanda’s face pales, it’s her turn to realize that they’ve neglected you for days after scenes that warranted aftercare all on their own, let alone when they were strung together so closely and pointedly. She’d wanted to drive you crazy, she’d wanted to fuel you up, but then life had gotten busy, and it’s no excuse, but she’d forgotten all about your sexual escapades because it was just easy to move on with you. You take what life throws at you, and you always do it with a smile on your face — even when it’s breaking you apart.

“No.” Wanda shakes her head, and her hair falls over her shoulder and tickles her cheek as it sways and shifts with the motion of her head. “No, I told you to let her cum. I thought you did. Oh, my baby.” Wanda frowns, rushing the bed with a desperate urge to feel you and protect you. She can see it now, what she couldn't before, or perhaps didn’t want to. The blind devotion, the emotional withdrawal, the attitude and bratting. All the signs were there in theory, but you were just too damn good and appealing to their every desire. You were too damn good at sacrificing yourself for them even when the entire premise of your relationship is to do exactly the opposite. “It’s all done, moya lyubov. All done. Come back to me.”

It doesn’t happen right away. Not for a couple of minutes. But, eventually you begin to recognize hands on your cheeks, and you recognize hands on your lower back and thighs. Wanda touches you everywhere; wherever you can reach. Natasha stays in one place, she never moves, never even brushes her thumbs against your cheeks to clear your tears, she just holds your cheeks and keeps your eyes on hers even when Wanda moves around in your perphieral vision.

The ginger appears entirely calm, cool, and collected in your peripheral and hazed sense of cognition, she always appears so perfectly put together, but you know that she’s not somewhere deep inside of you. That small voice of reason doesn’t find a way out in this moment, instead, you drown in the promise that Wanda knows what to do, that Natasha won’t let you fall, and that they’re the only things that exist in this entire world even if they’re mean. that’s all you can think. Mean, mean, mean. You’ve stopped crying, but then your bottom lip begins to tremble again, and Natasha makes quick work of shaking her head and guiding you back to calm collectedness.

“Can I ask you a question, honey bee?” Natasha whispers, scared to hurt you, to scare you, to break you anymore than you already has. She recalls how you’d flinched when Wanda slammed the door unnecessarily and her heart clenches. She should’ve stopped the scene then. She should’ve trusted her gut in that single moment and stopped before it got to this point. Before it broke you so sinfully. She may like to see you cry, but she hates when it’s because she’s hurt you, failed to see you fully like she promised she always would. She loves when you tremble, when you twitch and jerk beneath her, but not when it’s from anxiety, when it’s because you’re so on edge and wound up that you don’t even know how to regulate your own emotions without her full guidance and attention on you. Wanda fares no better, but she can handle the mistake with grace because she has to, but Natahsa’s one tear away from joining you in your deep pit of darkness — dom drop. Wanda’s about to be playing a dangerous game if she doesn’t get the both of you under wraps before chaos really ensues.

“Natalia.” Wanda cuts in, and your eyes shot to her in alarm, a whine falling off your lips at her harsh tone. Wanda melts beneath your attention, scooping you up into her arms and leaving Natasha alone on the bed and still half dressed. “Idi, perevedi dukh i prinesi yey stakan vody. Tebe nuzhno uspokoit'sya, poka ya ne poteryal i tebya, ladno? (Go take a breath, and get her a glass of water. You need to calm down before I lose you too, alright?)” Wanda lets the words fall out naturally, like it takes no effort to switch back to Sokovian Russian and dance with Natasha intimately and personally. It dazzles you, it’s the first true glimpse at relief you’ve felt, and Wanda’s not lost on how you always seem to fold whenever her native tongue or accent comes out. You’re worse when its Natasha, and there’s evidence in your reaction as you whine and melt into Natasha like you’re just a little kitten desperate for warmth.

“I’ll be right back, printsessa.” She whispers, and her words are husked with a twinge of Russian that drives you absolutely crazy and clears the fog in your head just a little bit, but not enough to earn your voice back or pull away from Wanda’s chest at all. You nod, blink slowly, and grab at Wanda’s bra strap desperately until your knuckles are white and there’s no chance she can leave.

“I’m sorry we didn’t realize sooner, angel.” Wanda whispers once Natasha is out of earshot. Natasha may not be an outwardly emotional person most times. You can count on one hand the amount of times you’ve seen her cry, but you’ve learned that she’s more sensitive to failure and human mistake than Wanda is. If you were any clearer headed, you would’ve recognized that she’s beating herself up over this, but you don’t, so instead you just accept Wanda’s apology and believe her when she follows up with a whisper of, “It’ll never happen again.”

When Natasha comes back, she’s carrying two glasses of water and a protein bar that she only makes you eat when you don’t have enough energy to fight her because you hate the chalky taste. She feels like an asshole for bringing it to you now, but she always worries about you eating enough, call it a Russian stereotype, and she definitely would have brought Wanda one if she thought the ginger would’ve humored her for a second and even grabbed the bar when she handed it over. You weren’t as tuned into your surroundings, your cheek flush against Wanda’s chest as you cuddle as close as you can into her, desperately leeching her warmth. That’s another sign she missed, or maybe wanted to ignore. You’re always hot, their little furnace, but the second she’d come up to you shivering and hiding beneath the yellow blanket, she should’ve known something was wrong. She can’t change it now, and she can tell that Wanda’s already amended all that she can when you’re still so floaty, so she doesn’t waste time on another apology when you’re only half awake as it is, mindlessly chomping your teeth together because she’d fed you a bite of the protein bar when your eyes were closed.

“Off.” The first word off off of your lips is a breathy plead for more contact with Wanda, and she doesn’t hesitate for a second before she’s reaching behind her and unclasping her bra with one hand, freeing her breast for you to cuddle into all while Natasha merely admires the sight like she’s never seen it before. Not Wanda’s breasts, although she does spare a couple of seconds to admire them, but just how tender you are with them, how you let yourself be loved and comforted even when they caused it. She doesn’t deserve you, but she cherishes that you picked her regardless of her worth.

“Take a sip of water.” Wanda coaches when Natasha raises the glass to your lips but you refuse to drink, keeping your lips firmly pressed together and your hands on her breasts, squeezing, touching, just trying to feel as much as she’ll let you. She shifts when your weight becomes too much for her thighs, pins and needles shooting through her limbs, and you gasp when your clit catches on her thigh, and you're reminded of the sensitivity that is simultaneously blinding need. “Nu uh, not tonight, my love. Tomorrow I’ll make it all better, but we’re all done tonight. You were so good for me, so good, but it’s time to rest, so have a sip of water, and then were going to lay down and rest our eyes. We’ve had a long week, huh? You just need some cuddles and sleep to make it all better. I know. I know everything, baby girl. You never have to think when I’m here, so just stop, okay? No more thoughts, take a sip of water.” Wanda pauses, waits for you to comply, and when you do, greedily gulping down half of the glass when you realize how thirsty you are, she smiles. “Good girl. Such a good girl, my perfect girl. My best girl. That’s it, one more and then we’re going to lay down.”

You push Natahsa’s hand away after the last sip you take, feeling full and probably very buoyant fi you tried to go for a swim out back, but you don’t even think to move when you realize you have to pee, or that Wanda and Natasha haven't peed yet despite always going after a scene. You don’t have the entry to remind them, and Wanda, the stickler of the two, doesn’t seem to mind, so you don’t say anything that doesn’t need to be said. She guides you down into a laying position, soft and slow, cautious of the sensitivity in your head after so much crying. It makes you dizzy regardless, and you whine into her chest as she shifts and gets you comfortable.

“Shh, I know. I know. You’ve had such a long day, my brave girl. It’s all over now. All you need to do is close your eyes.” Wanda’s fingers tickle your back, gentle patterns that mean nothing but hold the potential of everything luring you to sleep until you jolt with sudden anxiety, reaching out for Natasha who seems too far away and too clothed.

“Off.” You huff again, and she laughs, but this time not like she did before, when it was cruel and mean and uncomfortable to handle and stand beneath without wilting. It’s soft now, charming, that laugh that fills you with light and love and energy, but there’s no energy right now. You’re tired, burnt out. You settle equally into her chest and Wanda’s when she takes her bra off, throwing it onto the floor to be added into the laundry later on along with your clothes and hers and Wanda’s that are still downstairs in the living room in a heap.

When your eyes finally close, and you fall asleep, you don’t wake up until one o’clock the next afternoon, but Wanda and Natasha are still beside you, wrapped up in bedsheets and t-shirts that drown them and conceal their chests from sunlight. For the night though, their skin is yours to feel fully beneath every inch of your body, because it had been far too long since they gave into this instinctive pleasure that keeps you all going. Never again would they let a week pass without prioritizing this — you. You’re everything to them, and Wanda tells Natasha as much before her eyes close, sleep winning the battle as you breathe deeply and evenly between them.

[bensonsbreakdowns]

LIGHTNING BOLT

summary — before there were the thunderbolts, there was a girl as fast as lightning in a small ohio town

warning(s) — platonic relationship, practically sisters, aroace!yelena, childhood friendship, kidnapping, child trafficking, mentions of the red room, red room typical violence/assaults/inhumane treatment, mention of mind control, mention of the blip, mention of endgame events, slight/potential thunderbolts spoilers, grief, trauma, alludes to depression/mental health struggle, reunion, fighting, hand-to-hand combat, russian dialogue, healing, jeff the landshark mentioned, natasha romanoff is not alive but she makes an appearance, friends to child soldiers to strangers to sisters, comfort, angst

authors note — happy birthday, @nameforthemain !! early (and not the straight fluff i promised) but alas the road led me astray on the journey. definitely needed to sleep, wrote this instead. not edited. not proofread. aura’s 2am yelena thoughts.

The elementary school playground has the fastest slide in Mount Vernon, that is a known fact amongst everyone who had grown up in the public school system. It’s yellow like a lightning bolt, or a yellow jacket, and you whirl down it like a twister every time you set your course.

Yelena hadn’t been your neighbor in preschool. Not when you’d been in Ms. Cindy’s class at the elementary school and had gotten to explore that yellow slide every day at morning and afternoon recess. But, she’d been your neighbor in Kindergarten and you made up for the lost time quickly.

It had taken three days for Yelena to realize that nothing she did could help her beat you. You had the fastest record in all of Mr. Jones’ class, let alone the fastest record on the block when summer came around and your friendly competitions carried on into the change of seasons.

When Yelena was six and you were seven, although she’d always felt like she was bigger than you, she joined a soccer team. They had practice behind the elementary school, and Natasha would walk you and Yelena there with her bike. Melina never came. You remember asking Yelena if that upset her, but at the time she’d only shrugged and said Natasha was watching from up high with the forest stars. You remember she named that soccer team the thunderbolts. A persistent little body on the field when she wasn’t at your side babbling on the sidelines; probably disappointing Natasha who was always drilling the rules of the game into her head on the walk to the practice fields.

She was. Natasha always was. Sometimes, she walked you to the playground even when your parents said you could make the journey alone, trusting fully in their almost first-graders as summer came to an end. But, Natasha was a worrier. Yelena said as much when she slept over at your house.

It was October when you slept over at her house for the very first time. It was the weekend before Halloween. Last Halloween, she hadn’t come out to trick-or-treat with you, even though you saw that she had a costume because Melina brought it inside from the grocery store outside of a shopping bag. Natasha had answered the door and given you three handfuls of candy, not looking all too glum about missing out on the thrill of the hunt. You never did understand her as a kid.

Yelena was obsessed with My Little Pony. She knew the whole theme song by heart, and she always carried around a purple Twilight Sparkle figurine that your father said you couldn’t have. She let you hold it sometimes, but that day wasn’t one of them.

Natasha had shown you how to do a backbend in their backyard after school, and Yelena had cheered you on from her own upside down position near the swingset. You scraped your knee in the crash landing, and the tears had been an immediate response to follow. Natasha rushed your left side, leaving the right for Yelena to fill as she shrieked for Melina to come outside and tend to the blood bubbling over on your kneecap.

You’d eaten two bites of the dinner Melina made with a My Little Pony bandaid on your knee when Alexei corralled you and Yelena outside without even your shoes on. Your father was just getting home from work. He was pulling into the driveway, his tie already undone around his neck. You waved at him through the window of the backseat, eye bright, hopeful. He didn’t so much as smile in return.

You never saw him again. There’s been gunshots, screaming, blood. The sun was hot wherever Natasha landed the plane. You don’t know where that was. You’ve never known where that was. Yelena had held onto you the entire time. She wasn’t a brave kid. She hated the dark. She was scared of spiders even though she told Natasha she thought they were cool. She doesn’t like the wind at night because it sound like wolves. But she’d been brave in that moment. She’d been brave when she’d held onto you, Natasha holding onto her. She’d been brave when she raised her chin, mimicking Natasha when a man reached out for you, seeing you as the weakest link. She never let go of that Twilight Sparkle toy. Not until it fell from her unconscious hand and was abandoned on whatever island you’d landed at, but her bravery didn’t waver even though it had been tethered to such childhood innocence.

Yelena’s bravery hadn’t wavered from that day forward, even when yours had. Yelena never cowered in the face of discipline and structure. She never let the lashings of a cane unmake her entirely, or the assault of a guard strip her of her autonomy. You’d been together until you were eleven. It had been some cruel joke by Madam B. The first installment of their mind control experiments that eventually led to Yelena’s undoing. Not that you knew that. No, you hadn’t known how deep Dreykov’s claws had been into her mind until you were twenty-six and suddenly free of the same prisons.

Were you ever truly free through? One minute you’re walking away from Yelena on the battlefield, one last hug from Natasha the only reason you’d lingered amongst the debris for as long as you did, and the next thing you knew you were surrounded by things you didn’t know and people you weren’t familiar with, being told that Natasha Romanoff had sacrificed her life to bring yours back after five years being just… gone.

You’d been gone before. You’d been gone in your head, in Dreykov’s mind games and his serums. You’d been lost in the traumatic replaying of your assaults and your beatings. There’s been a three week period of clarity in the red room when Madam B had weaned the dosage of your mind control. You’d been near comatose in a psychotic break. Whimpering and muttering nonsense about a closed-quarter assault that had taken place seven years ago, but only resurfaced in your memory at the ‘reward’ of conscious thinking.

After the blip, it had felt impossible to carve a path for yourself with no lead. Yelena was in the wind until she suddenly wasn’t, on your radar after an altercation with New York’s own Katherine Bishop. Eleanor Bishop’s incarceration following a scuffle on the ice rink was the news that pulled you to New York at all, chasing the only ghost that remained from your past life.

Your father had lost his life in a collision not even a year after Melina and Alexei disappeared off the face of the earth with you; a collision he caused after having one too many drinks at the bar and then insisting on driving home himself. Not an abnormal routine even when you had been around to kiss goodnight. And your mother had killed herself shortly after your tenth anniversary, unable to bear the weight of your disappearance and lack of recovery.

Natasha was dead. Gone. Not even on this planet anymore if your sources proved accurate, not that you trusted anyone enough to ever fully know the truth of Natasha’s final chapter. You hadn’t wanted to accept that it hurt you when you did find out of her passing; that it ripped something apart in you, you held onto the image of Natasha Romanoff as a big sister in Ohio, even though mind control and chemical subjugation.

Yelena didn’t fare a much better lifestyle after Natasha’s death had broken her either. She threw herself into work with Valentina when she wasn’t tending to Natasha’s grave or going on walks with Fanny. You’d tailed her to Milan once, hidden in the shadows. You’d almost been disappointed in her for not noticing you until it dawned on you that it was a sign of healing. Somehow, Yelena had healed from the traumas of the red room enough to only look over her shoulder when she felt it necessary for survival.

That’s how you ended up face to face for the first time in nine years. You’d snuck into a New York City apartment. A high level pimp in an underground sex ring operation. It wasn’t the cleanest line of work. Your hands were still bloodied at the end of every day. But it gave you peace of mind to know that you were taking out the good guys while still utilizing your skills. Melina and Alexei had taken you away from your life with no consultation, and you refused to let it be in vain. You refused to lose your way any more in life than you already have.

Yelena had been watching you. Not just Yelena, but the entire ‘New Avengers’ team that you’d seen officially deemed on nationwide television. You weren’t blind to Valentina’s objective and manipulation. You’d seen her blubbering for what it truly was, a cover up, a way to save her own ass that she’d initially never even foreseen, but even if that wasn’t her goal, you’d nodded quietly from the sidelines as you watched Yelena play her game.

She’s a lot better at this hero thing then she ever was at soccer. You know Natasha would be proud. You know you’ve healed in some capacity that you can think about Natasha at all without crying.

“Chto ty zdes' delayesh'?” Yelena questions, her cheeks flushed, her hair slicked away from her face, giving you the perfect and clearest view of her eyes and the few hundred emotions racing through her stare. Hurt, confusion, hesitation. She’s blocking every punch you throw at her, but she’s not giving any back. She was a higher level then you when she was still beneath Dreykov’s thumb. You know that she could win this fight in four minutes if she wanted to. But she doesn’t want to, because you’re still you, and she’s still Yelena, and somewhere out there in the universe there’s little six year old girls skipping to the playground together, a solemn blue haired pre-teen leading their way.

When you don’t stop fighting, your target just minutes out from returning to his apartment, Yelena grabs your wrist, spinning you into her chest until her biceps lock around you protectively, keeping you still even when you flail like a deadly catch out of water. “Ty mozhesh' ostanovit'sya? YA ne khochu prichinyat' tebe bol'.” She seethes, and while Russian is neither of your mother tongues, not like it was Natasha’s, it feels like a piece of homecoming off of her lips. It’s been over two decades since you’d been just a little American fourth-grader with neglectful parents at the best. You hardly resonate with that girl anymore, but somehow you think it’s the only thing Yelena can see right now. “Stop it! Stop it.”

“Let go of me.” It’s been almost ten years since Natasha freed you from the confines of the Red Room with Yelena’s help, but neither of you have lost even a touch of the russian accent that Dreykov and Madam B drilled into you despite wanting perfect and seamless transitions between accents and dialects. It’s one of the many reasons you know, and have come to terms with the fact, that your entire life had been a rigged system from the time that you were seven-years-old and kidnapped from right beneath your parents noses. “L-Let go!” The feeling of Yelena’s arms around you is suffocating. It brings you right back to that last day in the Red Room before she’d advanced and you’d stayed behind at the same infuriating level, only kept around by Dreykov because of the experimental serum running through your veins.

It gets harder to keep the objective of your mission clear in your head the longer Yelena keeps you wrapped up in her embrace, reminding you of how much you’d missed her over the last five years. The blip had stolen half a decade from you, but it had been your own fear of rejection that had kept you away for another four.

“Tebe bol'she ne nuzhno borot'sya. My svobodny. Natalia osvobodila nas.” There’s a thickness in Yelena’s voice, an indication that Natasha is not an easy topic to hold, even though it’s been four years since the weight of her absence had reached Yelena. It will never get easier to live without her. To know that she sacrificed the idea of everything she deserved without even getting to have a taste of it at all before she died haunts you. It haunts you enough to let you believe that this is what she would want for you. It’s not. Natasha would be horrified to know that she’d plunged head first off a cliff and you’re still fighting, still adding red to your ledger when all she’d wanted for you and her and Yelena was to wipe it out entirely.

You were good kids once. It’s not your fault that the world was so cruel.

Your knees collapse, sobs shake your form, but Yelena does not let go of you for even a second. She sinks to the floor, holds you as you cry the way Clint had held her. It’s an intentionally restrictive position, one learned in the Red Room from handlers that go on to teach other handlers. Your wrists are grasped between her tight, unwavering hold. You can’t break free and claw at her wrist no matter how many different ways you move your knuckles. Your back is pinned to her chest, giving you the disadvantage to blindness. It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t have stood a chance anyway. You needed this.

She doesn’t even bristle when your target walks through the door. She shoots him with her stun gun, a single pulse to the chest, and he crumbles to the ground like a sheet of paper. The sight sobers you, reminds you of your purpose even if it doesn’t have to be just that anymore.

Yelena helps you to your feet, and the minute her eyes fall upon you without the constant punching and scratching, she’s back in Ohio like she never left.

“Hey, lightning bolt.” She smiles coyly, and your own lips quirk into an emotional smirk. It’s easy with Yelena. Everything is. It doesn’t matter how many years pass, there will never be another person like her by your side. She’s your best friend, your sister, your thunderbolt.

“That is still stupid nickname.” You mention, and Yelena scoffs, shaking her head. Her stubborn persistence has not faded, even when it had been unmade temporarily by chemical subjugation imparted on her (and you) by her own mother.

“No. What is stupid is that… thing on your shirt. What is that? Shark with legs? Ridiculous.” She narrows her eyes on your appearance, realizing that despite surrounding yourself with the same workload and guilt, you’d grown into a version of yourself that was alike the child she’d known once. You think there are glimpses of that blonde girl in her too, even if her hair is bleached, slicked back with grease.

Your lips pout, “It is a landshark. I have read all about him. He is better than that vest you had.”

“No, no. My vest was practical. So many pockets. I put so many things in those pockets, I tell you. Should never have left it to Natasha. You know, she is very bad at keeping track of things.” Yelena’s voice strains when she remembers that Natasha will never actively be bad at keeping track of things anymore. It’s been years, but it never gets any easier to remember.

“My mission.” It dawns on you that this is a fork in the road. A clear split between what you’ve always known, and what you can remember dreaming about before you were anyone important. Your eyes trail back to the predator on the floor. You’d justified this job for four years because it was doing more good than just sitting around, and you feared letting your skills get rusty, but it wasn’t what you wanted. Not anymore.

“Come with me.” Yelena pleads, and you know that it’s the first time you’d heard her say anything like it since the last time you’d visited that yellow slide in Ohio. She’d begged to know the trick to going faster. You told her that she has to swing herself down from the bar, because there never was any secret keeping with Yelena. Not when you asked the right questions at least. “Come back to the tower. You can meet Fanny.”

“Fanny?” Your eyes crease, because you’d followed Yelena for years, but the name of the dog had never sparked your curiosity.

“Fanny Longbottom. She is named after Natasha.” Yelena nods before her face sobers, and you know that time has passed just by that level of composure and self awareness. You don’t possess it. She’s paced the path to recovery after Dreykov, but you still linger by the entrance, terrified of what awaits you when you finally accept that it’s all over and done with. You don’t know how something like that can just end and be over. It will never leave you, just like it’s never left Yelena. “You do not have to be alone. You are not alone. I am here with you. And, and I do not believe in Gods, or, or Jesus, but I believe that Natasha can see us. I have to believe that, because… because she is my sister, and if I do not believe that she is still here, then… then I do not know what to do anymore. But, we can figure it out together. Because Natasha did. And we can do anything she does, just not as good. It is infuriating.”

“I do not know how to start over.” You sniffle, stealing one last glance at the man on the floor before you decide that it’s worth it to see where freedom leads with Yelena.

“You do it with one step forward at a time.”

Chto ty zdes' delayesh' — What are you doing here?

Ty mozhesh' ostanovit'sya? YA ne khochu prichinyat' tebe bol‘ — Would you stop? I do not want to hurt you.

Tebe bol'she ne nuzhno borot'sya. My svobodny. Natasha osvobodila nas. — You don’t have to fight anymore. We are free. Natasha freed us.

[bensonsbreakdowns]

i was gonna get sober and take a t-break but literally fuck it who cares refill the cart i don’t want to be conscious

[bensonsbreakdowns]

seeing all my friends make their senior year posts and here i am, new major, new school, no where close, and i can’t even pass a damn class i put my all into for the entire fucking semester. i literally just want to be okay at something.

[bensonsbreakdowns]

˚☆ it was the end of an era, but the start of an age ☆˚

[bensonsbreakdowns]

And I never think of him... except on midnights like this...

[bensonsbreakdowns]

SIGNS AN ANGEL

summary — when your sister gets attacked in her manhattan apartment, your entire world is turned upside, but you don’t miss the signs of angels all around you as the case progresses and a certain ada takes interest in you

warning(s) — slight slowburn, strangers to friends to can i have your number, canon typical content, mentions of assault, alludes to rape/sexual assault, injuries and blood, medical jargon, trauma, shock, panic, anxiety, grief, ptsd, death, mention of child loss, parent death, slight mommy issues, interrogation, police questioning, slight legal jargon, murder, comfort, elements of fluff if you squint and believe in delusion, crush, slight pining, mention of potential flirting, alex cabot goes out of her way to be a shoulder to cry on, one mention of committing, repeated mention of nausea (not detailed), crying, breakdowns, violence, useless lesbians, alex cabot in glasses, olivia benson appears, amanda rollins appears, sonny carisi appears, fin is there, he’s always there, comfort and angst (i mean it), plot twist?

authors note — this is a long one, like over 20k long, so plan accordingly, maybe grab a snack or a drink, roll a blunt or just get comfy. i was going to split this up into thirds, but there was no good stopping period. so enjoy the twists and turns of realizing your developing a crush on the worlds finest ada. feedback is always welcome and appreciated. enjoy :)

Mercy General was crowded, but being the closest trauma center to Times Square, that was predictable. It was late enough for the majority of admissions to be teenagers and adults, so when Olivia Benson picked up the call about a new victim being transported to Mercy, status emergent, she was relieved to be reassured by dispatch that it wasn’t another impossible case with a minor at the center of their investigation being dropped in her lap once more. They’d just come off of one of those cases, and the precinct needed patching up after the emotionally draining endeavor for everyone involved. They’d gotten their win, but that hardly felt like a consolation prize knowing what else lies around the corner. Trauma, therapy. Olivia’s job was done, but that child didn’t even know what the rest of his life would entail yet. The thought haunts her in moments of found quiet.

Thankfully, there’s a steady beeping coming from the machines their current victim is hooked up to. After years on the scene, Olivia has some concept of medical equipment and their uses, but there are so many chords keeping the young woman— probably younger than thirty-five — alive, that she didn’t even know where to begin. What she could assess through the thick panes of glass, the fluorescent light overhead creating an ugly glare if she took just one step to her immediate right, was that an assault had definitely occurred. Olivia believed her victim always, until she was proven multiple times that she couldn’t and even then it was hard to be fully against the possibility, but there was nothing to put hope into right now.

Blood splashes the young woman’s cheeks. She’s pale, ghostly even, but there’s color on her skin where blood has pooled and poured out. Discolored patches speckle her like camouflage, it’s unsettling; ugly. Olivia would’ve winced years ago. She would’ve unconsciously rubbed her arms and grimaced in sympathy. Now, her jaw sets. She’s mad, but that anger is calculated, channeled. She’s learned a thing or two about finding a path and plowing it down without remorse, and coming off of the last seven weeks she’s had, every negative inkling in her tingling veins is set on prosecuting whatever jackass marred a woman so severely her face is unrecognizable beneath swelling and blood.

“Names Juliette Mills. Unconscious, but EMS said she was breathing at the scene and on the way in.” A Doctor, probably two decades older than Olivia, spoke knowledgeably. There was no emotional inflection in her tone, something noteworthy to the detectives who listened close. This was a woman who’d been on the scene a while, a woman who would make a compelling witness should they need to extort her involvement in patient care and injury assessment. Always thinking, always three steps ahead. This is a game Olivia plays to win, and rarely do the dice serve her less than the opponent.

Amanda Rollins is not so sharply composed, but her considerable lack of experience excuses the fire that’s visible to Olivia who knows her well and fondly. Amanda is a sight when she’s mad. The personification of anger when she’s beyond herself and comprehending the stupidity of others. That’s not how she appears right now, with the hospital lights washing over her hair like an incandescent halo, but the frenzy of their last big case has her warped. Her eyes are like daggers as they try to cut through the Doctor, bouncing back and forth between the open door of the patient's room and the white lab coat that’s somehow clear of blood.

If anyone else were to sweep their eyes across the scene of two of Manhattan's finest, they’d have probably told a friend or colleague they’d witnessed an investigation going down in it’s glory, they wouldn’t mention how Olivia’s eyes glare Rollins down until she breathes in deeply and restabalizes her ebbing patience, forcing out a smile that is so fake it makes her nose scrunch in condescension that the Doctor somehow excuses with her own resilient understanding. They’d have no idea, because these women are trained professionals, they’re dedicated to this craft and responsibility, to the victims and their families, and they are prideful in that, protective of it. But they’re also humans, mothers, daughters, sisters, women… this job isn’t only for women like Juliette Mills who they’ve already decided to help until they have nothing else to offer, but for themselves, because the only thing keeping them out of that bed and position is dumb luck.

“Do you know what made her unconscious?” Amanda asked, inclining her head. It felt like an obvious question, it was an obvious question, but too many people breeze over the details in their haste to explain what they could. Even a suspicious bump on the head could lead to a conviction, but only if the Detective on the case knew what to dig into. So, Amanda didn’t care if she seemed full of herself or impatient, there was a woman who had already lost a handful of hours of her life to pain and suffering, and she was going to make sure that the rest of what had to come would be as quick as possible. That’s the job.

“Her sister found her beaten up with duct tape over her mouth. The nose is broken; it would've been nearly impossible to breathe through it. We don’t know how long she was without oxygen. We’re doing an EEG to assess brain activity.” There was no name sewn into the women's lab coat, but Olivia had learned a long time ago that answers were often anywhere she needed them to be if she just thought abstractly. It’s hard to see through the reflection of herself and Rollins in the window, the bright lights painting a scene of the hallway against the pane of glass at first glance, but Olivia’s eyes strained to find the whiteboard on the wall inside, and she hummed when she broke down the three syllable name. Mulligan. She pocketed it for later.

“Have you found any DNA? Rape kit?” Olivia asked, she attempted not to sound to hopeful, more times than not DNA evidence was either slim to none in a case, the perpetrator too smart or somehow just irritatingly lucky, or it led to the wrong signs, the wrong person. But, when it was a shot in the dark, oh that was basically a grand slam.

Mulligan sighed, clearly discouraged that she had nothing to offer the detectives aside from what was glaringly obvious. “No hair or fibers. No fluids.” She confirmed the worst, though not entirely discouraging to Rollins and Bensons who had worked with a lot less time and time again. “Then again, the paramedics say her hair was soaked when they found her.” Rollins glanced at Benson at the detail, and both of them nodded slightly. The first place they’d check would be the apartment, namely whatever bathrooms had a shower. “As soon as I know anything more, I’ll call you.”

Rollins nodded, thanking Doctor Mulligan. “Uh, is the sister here?” She asked as an afterthought, realizing that in all of this, the woman in question hadn’t been pointed out, nor were there any unis left around to leech information from.

“Over there. Yellow sweater.” Mulligans let her finger guide Olivia and Amanda’s attention to the waiting area, and though the discretion of your yellow sweater was helpful, it took no genius to guess which one you were. Had Amanda really taken the time to look, she’d have concluded it easily, but confirmation was always a pleasure to have in open court.

Your hair was disheveled, tousled and frizzy. Amanda would’ve assumed you’d gotten caught in a storm, blown around and swayed by a strong current in the breeze carrying the promise of destruction, but she recognizes the kinks in your hair that can only come from the pressure of knuckles grabbing tight. Your fingers are busy now too, but on your lips, pulling and plucking at skin that bubbles with blood before you lick it away, trying to focus on the sting that you create, control, manipulate to ebb and flow with the strain of your heart, but it doesn’t work as well as you need it too. It doesn’t distract from you finding your sister unconscious in the bathroom, naked, holding onto a pink rubber duck that you’d never seen stained with anything but bubble bath residue. It was pink, a soft pink, the kind of pink you’d see at a fair, or on the walls of a nursery, but when you’d found her it was red, and the officers who swarmed the apartment when you’d called hadn’t even let you rinse it off before they took it away. Your breath trembles, you wheeze.

There are tears streaming down your face, they’re hot and uncomfortable. They tickle your nose, your lips, they create a cold sensation on your chin where they dry down or drip onto your sweater. Your sweater. It’s stained with blood, your sister's blood. When you’d found her, the first thing you’d thought to do was check her head. It was bleeding, weeping profusely, but you’d pulled it up into your lap and tried to see where it was bleeding from the most. You hadn’t noticed the duct tape, against the palette of blood, it hadn’t been too eye-catching, but when you’d found it and pulled it away, her blood had stained your sleeve.

Amanda looks at Benson, Mulligan's depiction of how Juliette Mills was found sparking every cop instinct in her brain all at once. “Victim was wet?” She muses, and Olivia hum, seeing the same red flags out of nothing, something so small, but so unbelievably . “Perp must have tried to clean her up.”

“So much for trace evidence.” Olivia sighed, confirming what Rollins couldn’t. All they had now was the physical evidence of an assault, and whatever recount you could give that led to any direct paths to follow. Amanda wanted to put her faith in you, but you didn’t look all that promising as you shook like a leaf in a tornado and gnawed at your nails.

Olivia made the first move, and Amanda took that as incentive to fix her face once again. She thought about tightening her ponytail, feeling the elastic slip away from her scalp every couple of seconds, but the appeal of seeming put together outweighed her need to feel it. It wouldn’t matter in a week if a piece of two fell from the hair tie in the middle of speaking to you, but it could make all the difference if her one ounce of humanity swayed your ability to trust in them right now. It felt far fetched, overdramatized, but there was no sense in these situations, no rational way of thinking or right or wrong. She had a role to fill, and appearing as confident in herself and her skills was what mattered, not the comfort of a tight ponytail. Had the Amanda that joined the academy known she’d be debating over whether a ponytail would make or break her case, she would've thought the world was ending, but Special Victims had changed her perspective, softened her edges and her unconscious movements. She was grateful for it, even with the heartbreak and the stress, she was grateful for this chance to be a stepping stone to recovery.

“Hey,” Amanda was the first to speak, and Olivia had anticipated such. The blonde was emotional, erratic sometimes when she got emotional, she was impatient and was learning that her actions could impact a case even if they were derived with good intentions, but she was the first on the squad to make herself available to a victim. There had been many reasons for Olivia to see Amanda for more trouble than she was worth as both a detective and a best friend, the gambling, the baby daddies, the self sabotage, but there was even more of a reason to keep pouring time into her. Amanda Rollins was going to outshine them all one day, and maybe, maybe a part of that journey to reform came from helping you. Olivia had learned that every case had the potential to teach, but it was Amanda’s turn to reel the lessons of its hardships and triumphs. “You Juliette Mills’ sister?” Confirmation was a good thing, a necessary thing, so Amanda asked the obvious.

Your head bobs, up and down, like a buoy on the water. Your colors are dimmed, bleached from the sunlight, but you’re still a buoy, you’re still floating. Amanda can work with that. “I’m Detective Rollins, this is my Captain. Can we ask you a couple’a questions?”

Her words panic you, and you’re not sure why. That sparks a sudden desperation for air, but the gasp that you aim to take is stifled by a blockage in your throat, maybe it’s all in your head, or maybe the numbing sobs have overfilled you with mucus. The possibility disgusts you, everything about sadness has always disgusted you, but it follows you, clings to your footprints in the sand that you’d wanted to be a beautiful thing, but had just become a path for it to follow at your every sharp turn. You shake your head, because answering questions feels impossible right now, but Amanda doesn’t let you take that panic and run away with it into the confines of your head where hurt doesn’t exist and this isn’t real, isn’t happening.

“What’s your name, honey?” Amanda redirects, changes her strategy. Getting you talking at all is important, it’s insightful, but if you shut down, this case goes cold faster than they can get to the apartment. Mulligan hadn’t seemed all that hopeful on your sister's recovery. She hadn’t counted against it, but there’d been no utterance of any hope to get you awake in her synopsis of injuries.

The words don’t feel like your own when they roll off your tongue, but Amanda smiles anyways, and she nods her head encouragingly. Her hands take yours, you don’t know when you pulled them away from your mouth, but she holds them in her own grip and makes you feel her next to you. “Can you tell me what happened, Y/N?” She asks again, squeezing your hand when she recognizes the panicked look in your eye that screams to bolt, to run, to avoid this and reality for as long as you can. “Just what you know, what you saw. Or, maybe you can tell me about Juliette? Would that be easier?” She glances up at Benson in a flicker of a gaze that you don’t catch, hoping that this is okay, that you have the time to derail important questioning for information that paints a story to tell a jury.

Amanda waits for you to nod, to recognize her question. You do so hesitantly, your head jerking as you consider it. It’s never been hard to talk about her before, she’s been your best friend since, well, as long as you could remember, even through her teenage years when she should’ve thought you were annoying and obsessive. “Anything you want to tell me.” She promises that nothing is too small, too insignificant to name right now, and it comforts you. You don’t know what’s important, don’t know what they’d care about or what you should say at all regardless, but that helps.

“J-Julie’s my older sister. She moved to Manhattan five years ago, with her ex-fiancé James. She’s a guidance counselor at the elementary school. U-Um, I don’t, I don’t know what you want to know, I’m sorry!” Your eyes sting with tears, another wave of fresh sadness coating your waterline visibly. Amanda frowns sympathetically, squeezing your hands again.

“That’s good, honey. That’s really good.” Amanda nodded, and Benson confirmed the usefulness of your short explanation with a nod of her own, her lips set into a neutral expression that doesn’t outright provoke panic, but isn’t necessarily a comfort. You know that’s tactical. She doesn’t want to sway you in any way, but it’s unsettling. “I know it’s hard to think about, but we really need to know about what happened today.”

“I got laid off a month ago, budget cuts.” Your voice trembles, it's hoarse, raw. It burns to speak, to force to words out into the open space between you and Amanda, not just because your throat has been stripped down by your wails on the drive over, but because the memory of finding her paints your memory with blood, and it trickles down the back of your throat like a nasal drip, uncomfortable and irritating. “Julie’s been taking this pilates class with me to take my mind off of it. I… I texted her that I forgot my water bottle, and she told me to just come upstairs instead of meeting her by the curb. I live in Harlem, and the bus was late, so I told her we could get lunch and hit the second class instead, because we weren’t going to make it to the first one anymore. She didn’t answer, I… I thought that she was just annoyed, or that she’d gotten caught up with her neighbor, Mr. Ferris, b-because sometimes he comes over to borrow sugar. He’s old school, still keeps an address book, still has a phone book, and J-Julie helps him out sometimes. I-I didn’t know that something was wrong!” You sobbed again, dropping your head into your hands, unable to comprehend that you’d missed all the signs. Julie wasn’t the type to ignore you, even if she was pissed off, and definitely not when you were on your way to see her. She answered her phone at a moment's notice if she could, and you should've known that when she didn't answer, when your notification was on delivered for ten minutes, then twenty, something should’ve started to ring in your head.

“Alright, that’s good, sweetheart. That’s good.” Amanda comforted, and Olivia sank into the chair beside you, her hands on her knees as she listened to your recount, the pain twinging your voice cutting through her. You were young, not a kid, not a college student still learning about life and everything that it came with, but young regardless. There was an edge of youth to youth to you that wasn’t dissuading or rough, but rather just innate, something to note. She felt for you, she really did. ”Did you go right up to her apartment after you got off the bus?”

You nodded, wiping your cheeks, glancing over at Olivia who, for the first time, smiled at you with a softness that held no candle to her badge of honor. Amanda didn’t waver in her reserve even though Olivia was finally allowing herself to approach you with warmth that would draw out more details. It was a slight manipulation tactic, good cop bad cop if you wanted to apply classic terminology, but it got you where they you needed without a meltdown or a breakdown, and you’d thank them for that later even if you realized this was the goal all alone at some point.

“There’s a bellhop. I told her it was r-ridiculous that she moved into a building with a bellhop, b-but it made sense at the time, and she felt safe there.” You blanched at the words. Julie had felt safe in that apartment. Safe enough to start a family. “Ricardo, he said good morning, and that I was late, and I told him what happened and he laughed, but after that I went right up. I promise.” You don’t know why that gets tacked on at the end, you hadn’t meant for it to, but Amanda deflates at the desperateness of your plea just slightly, enough for Olivia to know she has to play her role better.

“We know.” Benson aids, a hand falling onto your knee, squeezing it comfortingly. It should’ve been comforting, but instead, you feel a dull ache that you had been too distracted to lean into before. It comes back to you, in a flash, with the pain on your mind and the intent to remember how it stemmed encouraging the memories to pulse like beams in your memories, you remember a small detail you’d somehow glazed over. You’d hit it on the corner of the lid of the toilet when you’d bent down to check her head. It hadn’t occurred to you then. Only she matted then, and only Julie matters right now. You don’t let yourself think about it. “We know. It’s not your fault. None of this was your fault.”

“Keep going. You’re almost through.” Amanda brought your attention back to the question at hand, and while her coaching was gentle, there was an unmistakable command beneath her delicacy. You didn’t really have a choice whether you told them all of this or not, it didn’t really matter to them if you were ready for this or not. You swallowed dryly, suddenly uncomfortable, discouraged.

“I d-don’t know if I can do this.” You say instead of anything helpful, feeling like your body has just gone from sixty to zero. It gives you whiplash, the sincerity in her tone but the ‘all business’ execution of her timing. You want all of this to be over, you can’t handle it.

Amanda knows she messed up, Olivia knows it too, but the Special Victims Captain would be the first to say that your withdrawal from compliance was not Amanda’s doing. She would’ve responded the same way. They’d been putting your pieces back together so stably since they’d first approached, it felt right to encourage you to finish strong and be allowed to rest for a while, but they hadn’t considered a hidden variable that all your life you’d been forced to mask your emotions. They hadn’t been building you up at all. Not even in the slightest. When you’d told them that you were only taking this pilates class with Juliette because it was a distraction from your recent dismissal, they should’ve been clued into the fact that you aimed to please. You’d been aiming to please them this entire time and they’d fallen for it. Some decorated detectives they are.

“You can.” Olivia squeezed your knee, reeling you back in. Not with the elaborate role she’d created to just slightly manipulate you, not coerce and that needed to be stressed significantly, but with genuine encouragement that sparked something in your heart. It didn’t rewrite the hurt that had already scorned you, but it was a gentle push to keep going that well, kept you going.

”I have the only spare key. The door was locked, but the deadbolt wasn’t latched.” You swallow thickly, feeling like there are shards of glass lodged in your throat. “Nothing looked… nothing looked like I was supposed to notice that something was wrong.” Your voice trembles, Amanda’s exhale is shaky. “I grabbed a water bottle from the cabinet, and I called for her, but she didn’t answer. I thought… I thought she was getting changed, she can never… she can never pick something, if you give her the chance, she’ll spend three hours making sure her outfit is perfect and we’ll miss the entire event, so I went to find her, because, because, she thinks I’m slacking off, falling back into old habits. She thinks me getting laid off is the last straw but…” You can’t finish that thought, you can’t let yourself say this is the worst thing, the final straw in you, because it’s not over yet. Nobody has come out to tell you that she has no chance at bouncing back, so until then, this is just something that's happening, something that's pending classification in your head. Regardless, it’s going to be traumatic. “She wasn’t in the closet, but her outfit was still laid out on the bed, so I thought she was only just getting out of the shower. I wasn’t even going to look, b-but the door was open, so I went to peek my head in and let her know I made it, and that’s when I found her.”

“And what did she look like when you found her?” Amanda was soft this time, truly soft, and you found that you melted into the acceptance in her tone. She hadn’t tried to negate a single element of your story, hadn’t tried to question you or insist on blame. Even if you don’t trust her, can't trust her, she’s not all that bad of a confidant because you can’t keep this on your chest. It’s gone from avoidable to burning hot in minutes, and the longer it sits on you, your skin becomes branded by its influence. Julie wouldn’t want that for you.

”Dead.” The words make you shiver, but they’re true — painfully true. When your eyes had first swept over her, you hadn’t been able to tell if she was even alive. She was pale, she’d been pale every day of her life including the three months she spent living in Hawaii on a whim after college. Not even the hottest sun could bring color to her body, but somehow, she’d looked even paler on the tile floors with blood pooling around her head and smeared all over her body until you couldn’t even make out what was skin and what wasn’t. “She looked dead. She wasn’t breathing, and she… she was pale. The b-blood was by her head, or, or at least most of it was, so I just, my first thought was to just,” You took a deep breath, willing yourself to get through this. “I know that a head wound is one of the most dangerous injuries, our Dad was a nurse before he passed away, he would let you cry over a broken arm for an hour before he washed his hand and took you to the hospital, but he didn’t play about head injuries. That was all I could think about when I saw the blood, but then I noticed the duct tape. I pulled it off, and she still wasn’t breathing, but, um, I got my CPR certification in high school, I remembered how to do it, so I um, well, after she… she grabbed my arm, and she grabbed on tight, her nails broke my skin. She tried to tell me something, but I, I told her to hold on, that I needed to call an ambulance, and then she passed out. Hasn’t woken back up since. I forgot to tell the paramedics that she woke up before they got there, um, um, will you tell them?”

“We can tell them that.” Olivia nodded, a hand settling on your bicep. It’s weight was warm, and you didn’t outright lean away from it, but it did little to comfort you right now. “Is there anyone else we can call for her? For you?”

“No.” You whispered, swallowing hoarsely. “She hasn’t spoken to her ex in months, last I heard he had gotten a job in Brooklyn. And our parents passed away. It’s just us. It’s just me.” You hadn’t meant to insinuate that Juliette wouldn’t make it, all you’d meant was that you were the only one she had to see this through with, but then the hypothetical crept up on you and you wanted to sob all over again even if your body wouldn’t let you, too burnt out to even let the sound ripple through your aching chest. You sigh, dejected with your own wandering conclusions, “Am I allowed back in the apartment? I don’t… I don’t want to go back to Harlem, I want to be able to be with her.”

Olivia frowns sympathetically, shaking her head. “Not until CSU has everything they need. In the meantime though, we can get you set up at a hotel for the time being. Rollins can give you a ride while I get out ADA on the phone, alright?”

“I don’t know who would’ve done this.” You whisper, your eyes peering right through Benson. It’s not often anymore that the family of a victim gets beneath her skin like this, especially not so soon, but there’s something about you that she can’t shake. Maybe it's the color of your sweater. Olivia had always heard that yellow was a happy color. When she’d first adopted Noah, everything she bought was yellow because she couldn’t get away from the idea that she was encouraging positivity even when his life started out so rough. She hates that yellow didn’t bring that same comfort to you, or maybe it did. Maybe you’d chosen this sweater because it brightened your spirits, and you needed that while you were going through this off period, maybe yellow was ruined for you now. Maybe it wasn’t the color of your sweater at all. Maybe it was the fact that you sat in this waiting room looking like you expected the world to crash down onto your shoulders, like you were used to this pain.

”That’s our job to figure out, and if we have any questions, we’ll reach out to you.” Olivia promised, and Amanda guided you up. It didn’t feel right to leave the hospital now, to let the Doctors be the only ones to care for your sister, but there wasn’t anything you could do about that right now. You couldn’t go in there and run the tests they needed, and you couldn’t snap your fingers and have her wake up right then and there. So, you just let Amanda guide you.

Her hand was warm on your back, and you wanted to apologize for the blood she’s trying to avoid but the words fail you. You can’t think of a single thing to say, and she doesn’t make you try. You sit in silence the entire drive to the hotel, some random one that you’re sure is fairly nice, but you won’t be able to enjoy because how could you? It doesn’t matter if the room comes with a tub, or a King sized bed that sucks your weight up greedily. Juliette would’ve loved those things, those amenities and luxuries, but you can't even tell her about it. She can’t even curse you out and call you a bitch because all she has is a shower and a bidet she refuses to install because it was ridiculous when her ex told her about it and even more so when he ordered it on a whim.

Amanda stopped at the door, “Here’s my card. If you need anythin’, just let me know, alright?” She couldn't stress that enough, but all you hung onto was the twang in your voice that told you she didn’t quite belong in bustling Manhattan. You don’t know who would choose to come to the city of dreams and work in sex crimes, but clearly it's a path she’s paved for herself as she forces the cardstock between your shaking fingers.

“Is Julie going to die?” Your voice rattles, and even though you want nothing more than to go inside the room, drop your weight onto the bed and cry until you have nothing left inside of you, you find yourself seeking her validation that everything is going to be okay, even if she doesn’t know that at all.

Amanda falters, her hands slipping into her pockets warily. “I’m not a doctor,” She trails off, shaking her head, apologetic hesitancy in her tone. You almost smile at her care, her worry for how you’d react to that reminder, but it feels to hard to smile right there when everything is turned upside down.

“No, but you’ve seen a thing or two, and those doctors told you a lot more than they told me.” You sniffle, wiping at your eyes, trying to get rid of the evidence that you just can't seem to pull yourself together. “So, off the record Detective, do you think my sister has a chance?”

Amanda’s lips quivered, and that was the only thing you needed to know. The blonde caught your elbow before you could turn away, her eyes pleading, genuine, soft and willing to connect on a level she had forced herself to close off before. It was too late. That failure to assess the situation correctly had driven an unmovable wedge between you. “She might. You said she woke up, that might mean it’s not as bad as you are convincing yourself. But, she might not. Whatever happens, you have to keep living.”

You chuckle dryly, shaking your head. “We’ve lived in New York our entire life. My birth mothers from Queens. I’ve been here my entire life, but I was sixteen before I saw my first play. It was Hamilton, Julie took me as a birthday present. Our parents thought Broadway was a tourist trap, and Julie never cared enough to argue about it with me at the dinner table, you know…” You laugh, but there’s nothing funny about the situation. “There’s this line… ‘Dying is easy, young man, living is harder.’… I never thought that would become my life.”

“It’s not your life yet, so don’t condemn yourself to grief you don’t need to feel.” Amanda was trying, but you wouldn’t hear it, scanning the keycard and watching the red light flicker to green before the lock clicked. She sighed, let go of your elbow. You disappeared into the hotel room, not even saying goodbye as you let the door close.

You’ve always hated how heavy hotel doors are. You hate how some of them have no tension built into the hinges, banging closed and reverberating through the entire room at whatever speed they deem. This door has tension, but you think that’s even worse, because you’re not expecting the loud sound to send shockwaves through the floor when it eventually happens, and it shatters everything inside of you all at once. The sob that cuts through you is loud, unforgiving, unabashed. You can't even begin to filter your sadness, so you do the next best thing. In your clothes that are stained with your sister's blood, you drop into the bed, on top of the white blankets, the wrinkleless pillowcases. They’re red in a moment, but you can’t care. You bury your face into the pillows and sob. You don’t kick off your shoes, or pull off your sweatpants even though you hate outside clothes on the bed. You can’t move enough to take off your sweatshirt — sweater, workout coverup, whatever — or roll onto your back and catch a breath that’s not muffled by the fabric of the pillow. You feel immobilized by sadness and panic and confusion and grief, and Amanda’s words hit you now. She’s not gone yet, she’s not on the other side where you won’t be able to reach her until the reaper comes for you next, but it feels like she is because you know there is nothing in this world that can fix her enough to bring back the woman that she was this morning. Juliette had thought you were the one hanging on by a thread, but you’ve always known that it was her. She’s your big sister, but you’re the protector, the one who sacrifices everything in order to appease, the one who constantly worries about validating feelings and being present when it counts. This is going to ruin her, and you’re going to have to watch it happen silently as it ruins you too.

At some point you must’ve rolled over onto your side, your body unconsciously preventing your death by negligent suffocation without your knowledge or consent after you’d fallen asleep. Or, maybe you’d cried so hard you’d lost consciousness and sleep had just come naturally afterward. Regardless, you couldn’t say that you were thankful to have avoided certain expiration when the sun streamed into the hotel room the next morning, accompanied by the ringing of your cell phone that you’d never taken out of your back pocket. Everything overwhelms you at once, but you try to find your phone through the spring of tears because the pitch is going right through your ears and splitting your brain into thirds.

Your eyes squinted at the numbers blurred together on your screen, trying to rub sleep out of your eyes with one hand while your other fumbled for the business card you don’t remember putting down last night after coming in from the hallway. You find it beneath your pillow, slightly crumpled from how your palm had gripped it unconsciously, but legible nonetheless. The area code was distinguishably New York, but a simple glance at the numbers beneath Amanda’s name in midnight black ink confirmed that it was her — special victims — requiring your presence and coherent consciousness before nine in the morning.

The ringing stopped, but only because you’d swiped at the glowing green button with desperation when it seemed to never stop ringing. You’d missed a few hundred phone calls in your life, all because it never seemed to ring long enough when you were preoccupied, but now… now it felt like it had been singing you a death wish for hours.

Amanda’s voice is chirpy despite the early hour, and you wonder briefly if she’s a morning person, or if she’d just been up long enough to have been hit with a dangerous second wind. Your name is weightless on her tongue, and in your half-awake, exhausted, drained, entirely disorderly state, you can’t make out if that’s a good thing or the lead up to something devastating. “I’m sorry to be callin’ this early, but we have something we need ya to take a look at. How fast can ya get down to the precinct?” There’s genuine sincerity in Amanda’s words, and you can almost imagine her wincing as she requests for you to come in and help untangle whatever evidence they think they’d found since last night. You can’t imagine they’ve accomplished much, but then again, you’re not sure you have the most tuned in perception of law preceding and investigations to gauge how far they could’ve come in this investigation with only nine hours between when you and Amanda had left the hospital. You’re far out of your depth here, and it’s probably obvious.

“Um,” Your cheeks flame at the croak in your voice, a telling indication of the emotional distress that’s weighing on you. Again, if you could see Amanda, last night was enough to say she was probably the depiction of sympathy with her bottom lip bitten. After she’d let her guard drop, let the rouse go and had just been in the moment with you on the drive to the hotel, you hadn’t needed to say anything or hear her spew anything else to know how she felt. The emotion was written broadly against her cheeks and her downturned lips and her sad eyes. You’d always been exceptionally good at reading people, Juliette and her psychology degree said it was a trauma response to the ways your parents failed to mold you as you aged, but you just liked to say it was something of a superpower, a radar that you cherished and trusted. Amanda was good, but you couldn’t trust her, and it scorned you to remember that you and Juliette were all alone together. “By ten?” You suggest, because that feels feasible. You’ve walked this area a few hundred times, you know the traffic and the route, but then it dawns on you that you don’t have any clothes, that you’d let Amanda lead you here last night without anything but your workout bag. You swallowed your pride, not wanting to sound incapable if you told you needed more time.

“Do you need me to send a ride?” The consideration was appreciated, but you declined. Your throat contracted at the thought of being in another squad car. That was an experience you never wanted to relive, even if you’d been in the front passenger seat and Amanda had the radio on to distract from her static squeaking radios.

She can’t see you, but you're so out of it that you shake your head anyways, gnawing on your bottom lip. “No. Do you need anything from me?” You asked eventually, finding that Amanda was evidently not going to end the call until she had confirmation that you were okay. You considered that maybe that was standard training, you figure that people can become pretty unpredictable in these moments, you’re pretty unpredictable right now, but then you ponder if this is just Amanda tryna to compensate for the deceit last night — the very stereotypical cop behavior that you get the sense neither her or Olivia stand for, but fell victim to because that’s just how life works sometimes. You don’t always realize when you become the thing you’re running from, it just happens along the way. “I don’t know how this works, h-how I can help.”

“Coming down and answering some questions for us is enough.” Amanda doesn’t think you realize how much your cooperation affects this case, how much you’re already contributing just by trying to appease time constraints you’re not even aware of. You don’t know that they’ve detained a suspect, that you’re not only going down to the precinct at Amanda’s request to answer some questions about Juliette, but to confirm the identity of who they think is a crucial element of this case.

The confirmation does little to ease your anxieties entirely, but its enough to get you out of bed and heading towards the duffle you mindlessly dropped by the door. You can’t really remember putting it on your shoulder after you stood up in the waiting room, but you don’t remember putting it down when you’d gotten there either. You took it with you because you’d shoved Juliette’s insurance card in the front pocket, thankful that she’d kept it in the same drawer of her kitchen since she’d moved into her first apartment at twenty-four. “Okay.” You're spacey, and you know Amanda is probably getting impatient, but your thoughts aren’t coming coherently, you haven’t given your body enough time to actually get moving and processing and masking, but the words come off your lips eventually and your hands pause on the straps of your duffle bag. “I’ll see you soon, Detective Rollins.”

“You can—“ You assume she was going to insist you call her Amanda, but your finger found the red button in the center of the keypad and hung up before you could finish. Guilt shot through you for a moment before it was outweighed by numbness. You couldn’t care about whether your chosen hostility upset Amanda, not when your sister was fighting for your life and Doctor Mulligan hadn’t called you with an update. You might not know if Amanda’s questions are good, but you can guarantee that Mulligan’s silence does not indicate anything positive for your near future.

You have a single pair of shorts in the side pocket. They’re lilac, short and form fitting, a purchase that you’d made in college and held onto because a good pair of workout shorts is never not needed, or at least that was Juliette’s motto in high school, and you’d adopted it as your own when you came of age to care about getting a gym membership. The only top you had was an oversized t-shirt from college, but you silently praised whatever guardian angel had decided to wake up and look after you at least enough that the shades of purple in the makeshift outfit didn’t entirely clash when you put them on after your shower.

The travel size brush you kept with you was perfect for touch ups, and you and Julie frequently passed it back and forth in the mirror after pilates, but you found that it did nothing for your knotted hair that desperately needed a conditioning treatment after your fingers had weaved and pulled into it. The thought sent you into a rage, and you punched the mirror in front of you when your frenzied eyes looked up and Julie wasn’t right next to you like she should’ve been, like she always was. The glass didn’t shatter, and somehow its resilience taunted you enough to make the rage worse, until you were on your knees, howling into your hands.

It must’ve been twenty minutes before the tears stopped coming, nothing left in you anymore, though there hadn’t been much there to start. The energy that you’d found upon stepping beneath the scalding water was gone, diminished to nothingness that left you hollow and cold. But, somehow you found it in you to stand up again. You didn’t glance in the mirror, nor did you pick up the brush. Who cares that only half of your hair is brushed? Who cares that the back is halfway matted? You don't. It doesn’t even tickle your skin to know that you look like a disheveled mess. There are bigger problems at hand, larger stakes than public opinion.

All that you stumble out of the hotel room with is your keycard. Your phone is basically dead, and what good is it if the only person you speak to isn’t awake to use her own. Your wallet hadn’t even been a thought. You couldn’t conceive needing anything. The only thing you’d brought was what would allow you to return to isolation, but you didn’t feel bare as you walked down the streets. You didn’t feel anything, or maybe, you felt everything at such an impeccably high rate that it became just pulsing in your nerves.

The precinct is closer than you remember it being, you get there before you’re ready, but are ushered inside regardless of your readiness by a crowd of arriving officers, your body somehow swarmed between theirs until you were inside and sheltered from the breeze and overcast sky that looked like it could open up at any moment despite how the sunlight that did still paint Manhattan was golden and crisp, sending beams down onto skyscrapers and bodegas when the wind blew just enough to displace all the clouds in the sky at the perfect angel. You have always loved these days. These days that felt like a piece of Florida sun showers without the gators or the statewide stupidity. Sometimes, you’d stand out in the downpours and accept your fate, other times, you’d find a playlist and ride the subway, aiming to see if you could hear the patter of rain when the flash flood warnings sounded. Perspective had changed so much, so quickly, since the last time the weather had turned like this. What you’d always considered forbearing signs from your parents, felt like an omen of approaching doom, the promise of something wicked even if the sky was still bright with sunshine.

It was hard to breathe in the precinct, but it was hard to breathe everywhere right now. Nowhere you went opened your airways, every change in scenery just made your suffering worse. You persevered though, because if you didn’t, nobody would for Julie. You didn’t have a choice, an out, another body in your shoulder to help carry the weight of being the sole witness and emergency contact. Julie’s your big sister, she’s always been bossy, and a little bit indecisive, but you’ve always thought it your job to protect her. It didn’t matter to you that she was bigger, taller, had friends that were older than you and stronger, you’d always stuck your neck out for her, because as you got older, you realized how easy it would’ve been for her to hate you the day you came home and allowed the resentment to grow. Juliette’s the bigger person between you two, and without her, you know you’re going to misjudge so many people upon first impression. Suddenly, your pockets feel empty. You’ve made it this far without your phone or your keys, but it dawns on you how utterly stupid that decision was. Now you have no identification, no way of calling for help, and you’ve never felt so unsafe in this city you’ve always called home even with the outstanding crime rates and rising violence. Those tears want to come again, they want to fall in hot streaks down your cheeks until the collar of your shirt is damp from them dripping off of your chin. You feel so vulnerable everywhere you go. Juliette was at home, in her apartment. She hadn’t even gone anywhere yet that morning, but somehow… she was attacked before she got dressed. You’re absolutely certain this will never be something you get over with time. Even if Juliette walks away from this as reformed as she can be, there will be no amount of recovery that will allow you to forget your big sister looking so small.

Your feet find the way to sec crimes little hub in the corner of the precinct, if only because you follow the steady flow of officers hoping that it’ll lead to a map, or at least numbered guide of the building, but instead found that the traffic was going directly through Special Victims itself. It surprised you but it shouldn’t have, you’ve spent your entire life being lectured about how to avoid becoming a victim, that was just the reality of being a kid in New York, but somehow, seeing the repercussions of what frequent assaults and rapes meant made it all so much more real. Anyone could tell you that assaults and sex crimes happen daily, hourly even, you’d believe them in a heartbeat, but watching thirty officers scramble to fix paperwork, to switch orders, to meet on the terms of an updated warrant or seizure… it’s sickening, harrowing, it hollows you out like a melon, but you’d already been scraped pretty bare. You’ve already received the worst reality check when needing a water bottle turned into needing to figure out how to stay above water for two people, not just one anymore.

“Can I help you?” A male’s voice cuts through the precinct, and while it’s not harsh, not aimed to startle you and entice you to scramble back to whatever alleyway you crawled out of, it still makes you jump, feeling so disconnected from reality that someone directly addressing you is unexpected, foreign.

“I’m here to speak with Detective Rollins,” You whispered, because you didn’t think you could get your voice any louder even if you tried. You’d always hated submitting to authority, and while you’re not the one they’re looking into, and you have no reason to mind your tongue when there’s not even a way for Olivia to tie you to this crime if she wanted to, but it feels like the right thing to do — to just let them throw you around and pull whatever they needed until your sister had justice. You hated it, but you’d do it for her. “about the Juliette Mills case.”

“Detective Sonny Carisi.” He held out his hand, willing to shake yours even though the tremble in your fingers was glaringly obvious. You don’t know why it takes you by surprise that your distress rolls off his shoulders the way it does, but you’re certain he’s trying his best not to snicker at your floundering lips that just can’t seem to get a name off your tongue. He knows it anyways, you’re almost certain that he does, and that he knows your third grade teacher and your home address, but it feels impolite to not give back the same introductional courtesy, so you force the syllables off your tongue and shake his head with a weak, clammy grip. “Can I get you a coffee? A water?”

“A water, if it’s no trouble please.” You don’t particularly need a drink, nor do you think liquid sitting heavily in your stomach is necessarily a great idea right now, but you’re not going to be able to get through this with the lump in your throat and the dryness that comes in waves when all of this gets too real. You sound pathetic now, asking a decorated detective to trouble himself with searching down a water for you, but you can’t help him if every other word is a rasp between a sob and a plea to understand so you don’t have to say it again.

“Of course.” Detective Carisi confirmed his willingness, guiding you toward what you assumed to be Olivia’s office if the name plaque above the door was up to date and accurate. A pit formed in your stomach, you swallowed harshly, freezing.

“The hospital still hasn’t called about my sister. I-I should’ve gone there first, I have to make sure she’s okay! I didn’t even bring my phone!” You don’t know why that dawns on you enough to stare wide eyed at your reflection in the pang of glass that’s covered by layered blinds. Your eyes are sunken in, purple and discolored, your cheeks are flush, raw from tears that you’ve rubbed away aggressively. Your pale all over, color drained from your features, blood pooling in your hands and your feet, turning them purple, twinging them with the evidence of collected blood.

You know that your commotion reaches the inside of the office where you’ve gather Amanda is already waiting for your dutiful cooperation, but nobody breaks the seal of the door, and Carisi doesn’t usher you inside regardless. You think that you should take a deep breath, the throught is fleeting, a whisper of Juliette’s tender instructions on how to handle your panic floating through your head, but the voice is too far to reach so instead you freeze, and you let yourself stay frozen even when Carisi claps a hand on your shoulder and tries to get your attention.

“…call the hospital.” You catch the tail end of his suggestion when every sound you’ve been blocking out comes rushing back in, loud, overstimulating, noisy. It sounds like a cartoon backing track, mindless chatter that blends into random noises with no distinctive consonants or vowels. It drives you crazy, paralyzes you even more.

“What?” You turn your gaze to Carisi, and you almost swear there’s a shadow of amusement on his lips as he watches you actively try and process his kindness and the situation. Nothing about this is funny, but you think if you worked with these odds and these weights every day, you’d start looking for lightness in the little things too. God knows you devote your life to searching for signs in the little things without valid reason to do so. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

”I can call the hospital for you.” He repeats, and you nod, affirming that you agreed with that suggestion, that you appreciated the suggestion. “Are you ready, now?” He asks you considerably, and your heart stutters at the implication that it's truly now or never. You can’t outrun this, can’t outlive it. If you run, they run after you, and not only do you end up answering their questions anyway, but you remember your father telling you a failure to comply with police investigations can lead to your own detention. So, no matter what you want to do, no matter what direction your heart feels most pull toward, you have no where else you can be but here until they deem that you’re free to go, even if technically, you could remand the right to a lawyer. There was no reason for that, that would only make this worse, more complicated, a longer endeavor for Julie to deal with when she woke up. So, you nodded at Carisi’s question and drew in a breath that rattled in your rib cage.

“Yes.” You confirm even if it’s the last thing you want to do, and Detective Carisi nods acceptingly, letting his hand reach for the handle and twist until you’re able to see Amanda’s face at a circle table next to Olivia. There’s another body in the room, but you can’t make out who it is with the door obtaining half of your sight. It’s a woman, undeniably, the pantsuit is telling even if the body is faceless, and the sleek leather kitten heels are the next best indication that this woman holds power in your sister's case.

“Thanks, Sonny.” Amanda is on her feet and stalking to the door in seconds, and its suffocating to watch her step closer and closer until she’s guiding you into the room, closing the door on Detective Carisi who nods and utters a reminder to you and a note to Amanda that he’ll be back with a water and information n your sister. It doesn’t ease the panic and the intensity of this moment, but it does something to tame the fires raging in your belly at least. “This is ADA Cabot, she’s going to be prosecuting your sister's case.”

Your eyes flickered upward at Amanda’s informative introduction. Now that the door was closed and Detective Rollins had guided you deeper into the room,standing with you beside the circle table that handfuls of papers were spread across, a black tablet sitting on top of everything else, the screen dimly lit, ebbing away the longer it went untouched.

ADA Cabot wasn’t tall, but she had a couple inches on you in her two inch heels that accentuated her legs. They were long, but her torso seemed shorter than others, evening out the imbalance of her height. You weren't great at guesstimations, though thankfully they never really mattered much, but for the hell of it, because these people were about to know everything they wanted about you and your sister, you let yourself consider that without the heels, she was probably around five-six, but in them, a steady five-eight seemed reasonable.

The colors of her outfit are bland, neutral tones with dark elements all except the white collar that peeks out of her blazer. You think its a blazer, though you’ve never really needed any extensive knowledge on suits and courtroom attire, so you're not sure if there’s another name for the jacket that covers whatever white button up top she’s wearing underneath. The brightness of the color sparks her complexion nicely, and even though your eyes find thick rimmed glasses when they trail up to find her face and examine that closely too, her eyes are the most piercing blue shade you’ve ever seen another person bear. She seems to be analyzing you just as intently, her jaw locked, visibly tense as she rubbed her teeth with her tongue in contemplation.

Just the natural act of her authority threatened to unmake you, to reduce you to the hysterics you felt prickling you nerves and your muscles and your bones, but then in an instant she smiled, and there was no edge of authority in that wrinkle of a grin that forced her glasses to comply with the twitch of her nose.

“Alexandra Cabot. With the DA’s office.” She holds out a hand for you to shake, and you don’t hesitate, mostly because you don’t you know if you even could’ve with her blue eyes looking down at you so intently, commanding you to do what she said so naturally. It was never any wonder how people like her ended up in the careers that they did. She was naturally alluring, persuasive, she had you in the palm of her hand with a rehearsed sentence and she knew it proudly.

“Y/N.” You muse softly, because even though her influence is getting you through this introduction, you can’t bring yourself to speak any louder than a whisper, certain if you bring your voice up to an octave even just one above where you are now, the world will burn in an instant.

“Please, have a seat.” Olivia captured your attention, directing you to a rolling chair at the edge of the table, closet to the door. You think that’s intentional, a way to insist you still have your freedoms in this situation, but it doesn’t comfort you and she can tell.

You inch toward the table, taking your seat slowly. You don’t mean to drag this out, you’re sure they have more pressing matters to tend to in regards to this case and the others that are open, but you don’t know how else to get through this without trying to avoid it. That’s just what you do. You avoid, avoid, avoid, until somehow the task gets easier in the face of procrastination, or somehow it falls off your shoulders. It’s not healthy, it’s stressful actually, a habit that nearly had you dropping out of college because of the stress, but it's the only thing you know how to do right anymore.

“I told you everything that happened last night, I don't remember anything else. I’m sorry.” You start off with that, because that feels safe. You don’t remember anything else about last night outside of what you’ve already disclosed, but you’re glad you’ve done that part already, because already you’re beginning to forget the specifics, the order of events. Julie grabbed you, she woke up and talked to you, or tried to at least, but right now you can’t distinguish if that was in the ambulance, or the bathroom, if that was before you’d called the police or whist you’d been rambling to dispatch. You don’t know.

Alexandra was the one your eyes caught, and you found that she was a great distraction to zero in on. Her fingers moved constantly, they pressed for pressure, pinched for pain, wrung together just to pass the time you figured. Either way, you focused on her moving, her fidgeting, not on the way your heart hammers in your throat and nausea rises in your stomach. That won’t do you any good.

“We know, and that has been very helpful. We have a couple of questions about a suspect. But before we get into that, can you tell us about Juliette’s ex-boyfriend?” Olivia gave you a place to start, just like she’d done last night, and your eyebrows pull together. You hadn’t thought about James much in the last few months, probably even close to a year now if you had a clear enough mind to remember the date. It’s springtime, that’s all you know, and the last time you’d spoken to him personally or heard Julie mention him was summer.

“James?” You asked, because maybe she wasn’t right, maybe she meant a co-worker, or a boyfriend from the far past that Julie still kept in touch with. There was a guy from college, Kevin Jones, you remember that he’d taken her to homecoming during her sophomore year, and she’d puked on the car ride home after drinking too much unknown flask alcohol. He laughed about it, and didn't attempt to embarrass or humiliate her once. You think he’s married now, with two little girls and a wife in cosmetics, but you’re not sure. Julie was the one who kept up with him, not you.

“James Mills. They had a daughter together three years ago. Erica.” You blanch, the color in your face that had already ebbed away to your hands becoming a sheen of pale ghostliness that discreted your every account of being fine, okay, able to get through with this line of questioning without walking away a shell of a human. Alexandra noticed the look of horror on your face, the trauma in your eyes that burned brighter than the sun in Australia where the ozone layer had shrank away. The sun is hot, and you’re a buoy again, bobbing up and down in the water, no tether to keep you still, your plastic bleached from the sunshine. It’s haunting, a sickening cycle.

“Erica died last summer.” Your voice is raw, it’s fragile, there’s no hiding how much that event had ripped you apart when it happened last June even if you wanted to, even if it could change how everything happened. “Sepsis shock. James and Julie got a divorce three months later.”

“And they haven’t had any contact?” Amanda reaches forward, aiming to grab your hand, to steady you, but you pull away before she can succeed, remembering yesterday how she and Benson had tried to build you up with false roles just to make this easier. Maybe that tactic worked on some people, you’re sure that it does, but all it had accomplished was making you feel like shit. That feeling still lingers, even now hours later.

Alexandra inclines her head at the subtle motion of your withdrawal, a tick in her jaw that you don’t know how to perceive. You shake your head, deciding that answering the question at hand is the best thing you can do to understand this situation even a little bit. “James walked out. Erica was Julie’s world, she was meant to be a Mom. I never questioned that once. The second she found out she was pregnant, she already had a name picked out, she already knew what kind of car seat she wanted and what bottles aren’t BPA free. When Erica got sick, she brought her into their pediatrician. They said she was fine, it was probably just teething. James never wanted to believe something could be wrong with her. He thought Erica was perfect, their miracle. She wasn’t a baby to him, she was a possession. So, when she didn’t get better after a couple of days, he told Julie it was just teething, that he knew his baby and she wasn’t in any more pain than a toddler wasn’t naturally equipped to handle. Julie brought her back to the pediatrics anyway, and when they told her that Erica was fine, she brought her to the ER. She called me, it was a week before Erica died. James was in a mood, he thought they were wasting money, but Erica was only getting worse. She was sleeping more, she wasn’t eating. She threw a fit whenever Julie changed her diaper. She thought it was a UTI, and she brought that up, and every physician told her it was just viral, that it would clear up in a couple of days and if it went on, they’d prescribe antibiotics. Erica was admitted again the day after, diagnosed with sepsis, they moved her up to PICU, I… I left work early, met Julie in the hospital. James was gone, he showed up the day she died, told Julie that it was her fault, that she killed their baby. When we got back to the apartment, he was gone and so was all of his stuff. My sister has not spoken to him since they finalized the divorce, she would’ve told me. Losing Erica broke her, and losing James on top of all of that was like somebody had twisted the knife in her back. We tell each other everything, and the last thing. I heard her say, was that he could fuck off to hell and she still wouldn’t send a Christmas card.”

“Do you recognize the man in this picture?” Olivia reached for the tablet, and your eyes watched her intently. It was somewhat shocking to realize that the iPad didn’t have a keypad, her finger dutifully swiping the device open until she was showing you a picture of your sister's apartment hallway, the camera angled down at her door catching the top of a man's head. His build was wide, built with muscle that was evidently taken care of. You couldn’t see his face, though you don’t think that was intentional. His hand fixes a baseball cap, one that you don’t need to think about to recognize. Juliette had purchased it on the first father’s day that she and James had spent with Erica. It was simple, a black hat that said Dad on it, but it was hit hat, and the bleach stain on the bill declared that, because he’d gotten the same stain when he’d taken over laundry obligations one night and had foolishly dumped the bleach straight into the washing machine. Weaponized incompetence was one of his favorite workarounds to getting Julie to do everything in their relationship, but you hadn’t noticed until it was too late, until you were charged with picking up the pieces of what his absence shattered.

Your mouth is dry, and you wonder where Carisi went to look for that water, because he hadn’t come back yet. You swallow thickly, hardly able to accomplish the task, but you do so without anything else coming up afterwards, and that has to be good enough. “That’s James. James Mills.” You say the words slowly, because you can’t seem to get them off of your tongue even if they are the truth. You haven't seen that hat in nearly a month, but the sight of it in the presence makes you feel like Erica is still here, like not that much has changed. “W-When was this taken?” You know, something inside of you knows exactly when this was taken, but you can’t bring yourself to accept that on your own.

“Yesterday morning.” ALexandra speaks, and your eyes snap to hers, intent to listen to whatever she has to say because hasn’t lied to you yet, she hasn’t manipulated you yet, and that has to mean something right now. “We seized all surveillance from your sister's apartment and her phone records. James visited your sister's apartment three times leading up to yesterday, and they’ve been in communication for the last month. All conversations about Erica.”

“That doesn’t… that doesn’t make any sense. Why would he be visiting her?” You hadn’t known that, you hadn’t even considered it was a possibility. You’d thought James Mills was far removed from not only your life but Juliette’s as well. You’d made peace with that, overcome the grief that had spiraled from his initial absence and overcome it all. But, clearly you hadn’t. Clearly you didn’t know Juliette as well as you thought you did, because before this moment, you’d never thought her capable of lying to you, or specially withholding the events of her life when you were away in Harlem building something for yourself. Was this a punishment for finally separating your path from Julie’s? Your entire life you’d tried to be like her in every way, but you were an adult now, an adult with a job and her own apartment and a desire to start a life for yourself that included kids and a partner just like Julie’s did for a time. Was this all some cruel joke? An elaborate plan to get you to regret ever budding your own wings and learning how to fly. It feels that way, and it burns you.

Alexandra didn’t answer, not verbally anyways, or right away. She reached to her direct left, to a stack of papers that she didn’t even have to glance at to know what they were, and she handed them over to you with a grimace of sympathy.

Your eyes read the words, studied them even. Your jaw, at some point, unlatched, hanging

open as you dissected the words, the threats, the direct blame and manipulation to convince. Your bones shivered, deep within you, through your entire body until you were shaking like a leaf, your eyes brimming with tears. You’d made it longer than you’d thought you would without their appearance on your face, but it didn’t feel good to cry even if you’d made it twenty minutes standing strong.

The messages were vulgar. In about every explicit word that James Mills could find in a dictionary, he’d painted your sister as the villain in his life story. In every account of their years as parents, he’d told her she sucked the air out of the room. He'd called her a bitch, a whore, a useless, insufficient, joke of a mother. That was what really enraged you, because even if they’d always had their problems, Julie had never let Erica see them. That little girl, not even two and a half, and thought her Daddy was a hero, had clung to his neck, and climbed up his back, and in every tantrum, she called for him confidently even if he never came because Juliette had talked him up so good, Erica was blind to the carelessness of his conditional love.

“You think he did this.” You don’t look at Amanda or Olivia, you don’t want to, don’t feel any pull to gauge their independent reactions to your awakening. The only person you look at — to — is ADA Cabot, and her face is the pinnacle of certainty that they have the man they're looking for, that the man you’d called a brother-in-law, is now the man that derailed your sister‘s life and yours more than it already had been. First your parents, then your niece, now this… what do you do with this, how do you grow from here?

”Yeah.” Alexandra was soft, but she was firm. She would not give you the hope that this could all be explained away into a misunderstanding, even if she could say definitively that James had never put his hands on Juliette, that his anger is not what hospitalized your sisters, you will never look at your family pictures the same. You will never look at the video of your sisters wedding, the last piece of your mother that you have, with the same soft understanding that you did before. Everything that he’s touched is tainted. The memory of Erica that you keep alive is tainted. She’s half of him. Even if she was nothing like him, your eyes have been opened to the harsh reality that he’s touched everything you have in some way. Nothing will ever be entirely free of him again, and you're sure he hasn’t thought about you since the last time he’d seen you in the hospital.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Captain. I have your water, and I spoke with Doctor Mulligan. Juliette will be fine until you get there.” Carisi assured, coming into the office carrying a plastic cup of water. You can’t smile to thank him, but you try anyways, and he pretends like your quivering lips are enough of a thanks as he sets the cup in front of your body.

“She’s awake?” There’s hope in your face, and you don’t notice how Alexandra winces, shrinks into herself, anticipates your reaction to realizing that Carisi had specifically avoided saying that she was awake or even in a good condition. You didn’t know that his words were pointedly organized to take weight off your shoulders. Juliette was going to be fine until you got there was not the same as saying she was awake and responsive, but what did you know about selective police jargon that aimed to defuse any situation.

“You know what, we’ve got everything we need right now.” Aelxandra’s voice is the only thing you pay attention to, but you don’t quite realize that she’s releasing you, or attempting to release you. In other circumstances, she would’ve repeated herself, maybe even demanded that Rolllins see you to the hospital because she still thought the blonde was dispensable at points even if Amanda had proven herself time and time again, but instead she hummed, collecting all of the papers that were hers, that she needed to get back to the DA’s office, and stood up. “Why don’t I give you a ride back to the hospital?”

“I-I can go?” You stutter, and your cheeks flame in embarrassment, but Alexandra doesn’t wilt at your lapse in reserve. You’re the best witness they’ve had in a while. Your story has been consistent, your details insignificant but going to the character of all parties, so inherently helpful in the end even if details about their divorce wouldn’t help with a straight conviction. Alexandra appreciated the efforts you were going through to make her life easier, even if you seemed to think that there was still so much left undone on your part.

Her lips twitched, a budding smile on her face as her blue eyes pierced through you. It wasn’t a harsh feeling, one that left you feeling vulnerable and exposed to her, rather you found it kind of comforting, like a spark of something hopeful in the blackness of your life that’s been painted in greyscale for a while. “You can go.” She assures lightly, and Amanda confirms the truth in that, nodding her head and taking the tablet back.

You take a sip of water because you don’t want Carisi’s efforts to be in vain if you leave here without even picking up the cup. It’s refreshing, even if it settles in your stomach in a way that allows you to feel every slosh of it just sitting there. You take another sip, not realizing how thirsty you were, and Alexandra smiles, not rushing you, not even bothered by the fact that you haven't stood up. You don’t go in for a third sip, certain that you’d be pushing you luck at that point, so instead, you stand up and let Amanda take the cup with her outstretched hand.

Your palms are clammy, and you rub them down your purple shorts, suddenly aware of how underdressed you are in front of these women. “Sorry,” You blush, thinking that Alexandra is looking at your outfit. You’re not blind to the way her eyes sweep across your frame behind her black frames, nor are you unaware of her she lingers at the sight of your hands, but you construed that she’s assessing the disarray of your appearance, the knots in your hair, the shades of purple that don’t clash, but belong more on a six-year-olds body than a grown adult who knows how to match an outfit and dress according to the event their attending. “All I had was my workout bag, this was the best I could do.”

“And we cannot begin to tell you how much we appreciate your cooperation.” Olivia stepped forward, guiding you and Alexandra toward the door, the ADA quiet at your side, evidently not willing to acknowledge your apology now that Olivia has jumped for the gun. “If anything else comes up, we’ll call.”

“I don’t… have my phone. But, um, I don’t plan on leaving the hospital, so you can call there?” You asked hopefully, hoping to god you didn’t sound like the biggest idiot ever. You know people cope in all different ways, that there’s no right way to go through trauma, but you still feel ridiculous.

“We’ll find a way to reach you.” Olivia nodded, not deterred by your disheveled state and chaotic life. You were doing what you could, and that was enough for her.

”Okay.” You whispered, willing to leave the conversation at that. Amanda smiled one last time, but you didn’t return it, rather, following Alexandra out of the office and precinct.

She was quiet for a while, and you didn’t do anything to intervene with the silence, but then she looked at you and her features melted. “You’re sure you don’t have anyone I can call for you?”

“I’m sure.” You huffed, not because you didn’t want to kill time and talk to her, but because the reminder of your isolation was haunting. Julie had always warned you that you needed to make friends, establish connections, plant roots, but you’d always told her that was futile, that so long as your lives entertained, her company was plenty for you. She’d always said the same, but the difference was Julie had her own life. She had friends that she got coffee with, she met colleagues for lunch and attended weekend barbecues even if it didn’t sound that all appealing. Your roots were in her, and hers were in everything she’d built for herself. “Julie’s been my best friend since we were kids. Our Dad died when I was in middle school, Julie was a freshman in college at NYU. I spent a week at her dorm and not a single one of my friends realized, even though they all knew my Dad died because it was in the papers, and there was an announcement in homeroom. I wrote them all off after that. Julie was the only person that mattered. And then we grew up, and she was even more my best friend, and when our Mom died after her wedding, I’d just often out of a relationship, and that felt like a sign I should quit while I was ahead, so for the last five years, my life has been work, Julie, Erica, and sleep. No deviation, no individual path. The only person I still have is my sister, and she’s not going to answer the phone if you call.”

Alexandra was silent for a beat, but then she nodded, her gaze cutting through you. The wind swept through her hair, the blonde cut straight and even, all the same length. The differentiation came at her roots, some were splashed with darker tones of copper and a grey-toned brown, but most were blindingly blonde, nearly platinum when the sun hit. “You have me.” She hummed, her jawline sharp, her features cunning. She’s a sight, a true beauty, and somehow the sharpness of her profession adds to the experience of walking beside her at your lowest.

“Why?” You question, hyper aware of how she was obligated to do none of this. Walking you to the hospital when she’d realized just how far off track you were in your frantic state had been one thing. You’d been able to rationalize it as her wanting to assure your wellbeing, given it is her job and all, but this was beyond just professional courtesy. Offering to be your shoulder of support in all of this, your person to call if you need an out… you don’t come back from that, that permanently impacts the basis of your relationship because your emotional enough to take that as an advance for friendship.

Alexandra is the kind of person who always has an answer, you can tell just by looking at her. She doesn’t have an answer to your question, not a valid one, and she doesn’t seem thrilled to have been rendered speechless by you. Her eyebrows furrow, and her glasses jump on the bridge of her nose when her lips press into a scowl of defeat. It distracts you, for a single moment, but it's enough for you to consider that life would go on after this. “Am I wrong to assume you could use a little support?” She turned the tables, pointed the question at you. It only further amused you, and that seemed to rattle her.

“If I let you in, does that jeopardize Juliette’s case? I don’t need a shoulder to cry on more than I need justice for my sister, ADA Cabot.” The tremble in your voice is back, and it’s chilling, it strips the lighthearted mood that Alexandra has established, but you don’t care enough to apologize for your hostility or draining exterior. There’s too little left inside of you to appease everyone you see anymore. Julie would be shocked to know how far you’d fallen in so little hours.

“Alex.” She interjects, undeterred by your reluctance to let her in. She doesn’t blame you, she can’t blame you. Though she’d never walked this path, didn’t have a sister to watch go through hell, or a dead niece to get dragged through an open investigation, she’d been down the road of hell herself, and its misery loved company. She’ll never forget the look on Elliot’s face when she’d stepped out of the car, bundled up in a scarf and a pink blouse, dead to everyone in New York City at the time, including him. She can’t understand fully, but she can a little bit. “Everyone calls me Alex, even if they don’t want to accept my number.”

“I’m sure all your emails are answered at a moment's notice.” You don’t know what comes over you, what spark of personality flames in your belly, but the quip falls off of your lips in a moment of weakness, and all that keeps you from backtracking is Alex’s warm laugh.

“They make my ice cream order first too.” She quips back, and you note that this is easy, that it feels familiar and comfortable enough to ease the nausea a little bit. She distracts from the searing pain just enough to get the blood rushing through your body correctly again.

“Of course they do.” You grumble, because if there’s anything you're passionate about, it’s ice cream. You’d anticipated the day that Erica was old enough to steal and take for a quick bite since the moment Julie had called you and showed you the positive test in the bathroom of your childhood home. You’d gotten to indulge in three seperate Aunt/Niece dates to the ice cream parlor with her before the end had come, and now, you always get Bubblegum if they had it, even if you don’t like how sweet it was, or how your tongue was blue for hours if it happened to be the kind of a stark swirl. It was Erica’s favorite, though she’d only ever tried two flavors, but bubblegum was the proclaimed winner if the choices were between chocolate and that. So, you got it anyways, with rainbow sprinkles and gummy bears, and you forced yourself to think that she was giggling right next to you, her little pigtails slipped out and disheveled from hours of cuddles and affectionate roughhousing.

Alex laughs, and you’re close to letting yourself laugh too, but then the hospital comes into view and everything you’ve established disintegrates. “I have to see her.” You whisper, because it feels like you need an excuse to leave Alex behind and you don’t know why.

“I’m the sixth extension at the DA’s office if you need anything. And I mean anything.” She tells you because you’re too stubborn to take her number like she’s suggested, and she has an inkling handing you her card will be a dying fate as well.

Her insistence to assure that you know how to reach her makes you falter, and your head inclines slightly, “Thank you.” The words are genuine, representing more than just her walking you to the hospital, and Alex knows that, she nods, offers a smile, she squeezes your wrist before she walks away, turning back in the direction of the precinct, crawling back to the DA’s office where she needs to make miracles happen for you, although it doesn’t seem to be shaping up to impossible.

What you’d never been informed of, was the fact that they’d already detained James Mills. He’d been sitting behind the closed blinds throughout your entire conversation in Olivia’s office, and as of now, he still hasn’t requested a lawyer. Fin and Carisi have been handling him, dragging questions out of him left and right still without an admission or any physical evidence tying him to the crime. Alex should be worried, a defense can make a lot out of this if they were smart enough, but she was smarter, the text conversations were telling, leading to intent, to guilt, the fact that he talked himself in circles with Fin and Carisi even if he’d somehow evaded blame was helpful. She could see this win through for you, and she knew it, she just had to prepare herself for one hell of a fight if it came down to swaying a journey without evidence. She had no DNA, no fibers, no hairs, no fluids, but the defense had no exculpatory evidence, and Alex Cabot had learned that not all hero’s wore capes, but good things still happened every day without them.

Even when you’d gotten upstairs to Juliette’s room where Doctor Mulligan was conveniently already waiting, running tests and checking injuries, you thought about Alex. She stayed in the back of your head all day. Her haircut, how the blonde all came to a neat end just below her shoulders. Her glasses, how they added so much depth to her features, and forced you to look at the blue in her eyes. Her jawline, how sharp it cut when tension clenched it tight. She was a sight, a true sight, you’d admitted it to Julie’s unconscious body in weakness, though you know that if she could hear you, she’d be enjoying every moment of your floundering to entertain her whilst also tell a story, something you were not, and had never been, good at.

Mulligan came back around one o’clock, and she hadn’t been bearing good news. The blunt force trauma to your sisters head was worse than they’d thought, the swelling was extensive, the bleeding nonstop. She would more than likely never wake up, Mulligan had told you that clearly, in that many words, but it was undetermined if she could hear you right now. You’d sobbed at the information. Your head on Julie’s thigh over the railing of the bed, craned at an angle that was uncomfortable, but all that kept you going. She wasn’t warm, and Julie was always warm, but you tried to convince yourself that her thighs were warm as you sobbed into them.

You’d begged with her until you’d lost your voice to pull through. Your hands had grappled with the blanket thrown over her thighs, at her hands, you’d pulled at her fingers, twisted her knuckles until you’d thought you broke them. Your dad was a prankster. He loved a hard less joke, and when you were in third grade and Juliette was in tenth grade, he’d discovered what his co-workers called an indian rug burn, only, he didn’t know what it entailed, or how to actually do it. You’re still not sure if that’s even the correct name, it feels offensive, like something another culture has entirely overlooked, but it hits your memory anyway and you cant forget it. He’d loved to grab your arm, twist until you whined through giggles, your skin pink when he pulled away. That had led him to twisting your fingers in the middle of a handshake, and one night, Julie had asked him to help her with a business project. All he needed to do was sit down and shake her hand, answer questions that needed no thought, and just stick it though until she said cut. You remember screaming, loud, unabashed, hormonal screaming. He’d twisted her fingers, had thrown her off script, and she'd been near animalistic as she yelled at him. When he died, Julie had marched up to the casket with her hand in hers, and she’d sobbed openly about how she wished he could twist her fingers in a handshake one last time.

If anyone were to come in, they’d think you were insane. Your body was arched over Julie’s, her fingers purple in your grasp. You pulled away, suddenly scorned. You were hurting her, or maybe, they were just purple because her entire body was swollen and discolored, but the thought of you bringing any more pain over her was enough to have you sitting by yourself in the corner, shaking like a leaf, sobbing into your hands, falling apart at the seams.

Mulligan came in at seven o’clock for rounds. Julie’s condition hadn’t changed, but it hadn’t improved either, and that was not a good sign. Mulligan hadn’t told you that in so many words, but her face was enough to know that Julie wasn’t going to get better, time was running out before hope was lost and it became a matter of how and when she died.

At nine o’clock, when visiting hours ended, though Mulligan had dragged you to the front desk and had demanded they let you in at any hour of the night of their job would be in the line by the time she stumbled in for wrong at six am, you found yourself walking back to Juliette’s apartment. Mulligan, though having every sign to lose hope in your sister, had insisted that some patients in a coma will respond to familiar stimuli over time, and then she’d left you alone. It hadn’t come to you at first, the idea of grabbing her perfume, the one your mothers always wore, the one she’d been gifted on her sixteenth birthday after ten years of begging and being told no, that she wasn’t mature enough or responsible enough to possess a two hundred dollar bottle of perfume. She’d worn it seldomly back then. At weddings and family parties, on your parents anniversary and fourth of July because it was pungent enough to counteract the smell of beer on her breath when she staggered inside, but now she wears it every day. She wore it the day Erica was born, and while controversial, the day she’d brought her home she’d sprayed it on the best of the onesie because that was the only way you’d both been able to confidently say your mother was with you and watching. It was the only thing you could think of that could help, so you decided that a shower couldn’t hurt, even if that meant closing your eyes and praying to god nothing happened to you next.

You were on edge the entire time you stood beneath the stream, but the only reason you persisted was because CSU had finished their search, and Amanda had relayed a message to you through two of the charge nurses that everything was cleared for entry and safe, that had been the keyword in her message relayed verbatim by the nurse. You knew it was verbatim because he’d been shaking like a leaf, evidently being warned to assure you knew everything in its correct and formal order. They thought James was good for this, was good for sealing your sister's fate after she was finally starting to show the slightest signs of moving forward, and you could assume that meant they had him detained.

You were in the shower for longer than you realized. Two hours flew by like minutes as you stood beneath the pressure of the shower head, crying, sobbing, staring blindly at the wall until everything repeated again. You had the fleeting thought to call Alex when a pang shot through your heart and you were certain death was coming for you, but it was already ten o’clock, and you doubted she was still holed up in her office wasting personal hours on your life. So instead, you sank to the floor of the shower, let the water run over your body and wash shampoo into your eyes. You don’t remember rinsing that out, or conditioning your hair, or washing or body, or dragging Juliette’s razor over your body because she changes it every week after her pre-pilates shower and there's no reason in saving it when she’ll never use it again.

It’s eleven o’clock before you step out and start brushing your hair, but you don’t know that. You haven’t looked at a clock since Mulligan told you it was nine, and you don’t even know where there’s one in this apartment outside of the alarm clock in Julie’s bedroom. You stumble there naked, water dripping down your body. It doesn’t even register in your head, not really. There’s no consideration for water damage as you pad through the hallway, there’s no inkling of modesty. You hadn’t remembered to bring a towel in with you, and you hadn’t remembered that you forgot it when you’d stepped out from beneath the hot stream and brushed your hair back into a ponytail. You’re numb, so painfully numb, and you don’t know what to do about it.

You don’t pay attention to what you put on, just throw the first thing on your body that you find in Julie’s dresser. It’s sweatpants and a t-shirt that says ‘Mama’, tears prick your eyes all over again. You don’t know how you have anything left in you to cry out.

The perfume bottle you need isn’t in Julie’s bedroom. It hasn’t been in Julie’s bedroom since she’d cleared out what used to be her office and made it a nursery. The walls are a light pink color, and the wash across you with familiarity as you open the door. You haven’t been in here in months. Julie stopped coming in, not able to face the fact that nothing in the room ever changes anymore. She’d gone on a cleaning spree when Erica was sick. Every toy had been sterilized, every blanket soaked in disinfectant and washed three times. The room was in perfect order, and you know that haunts her. It shouldn’t be. There should be toys scattered all over the floor, torn out book pages should be shoved into the crib — the crib should be gone, it should be a big girl bed by now, a pink one, probably one that looks like a princess, but there’s no big girl bed because there’s no toddler to sleep in it, and pretty soon, there won’t even be a crib, because pretty soon, there will be no Julie to keep the lights on or the lease going.

The perfume bottle you're looking for is on the dresser, right next to a family picture from your childhood. It’s the best one you have, both you and Julie think so. You’re only six, two missing front teeth and pigtails encapsulate that fact, but Julie is thirteen, and she’s smiling for once. It feels like every picture from that time paints Julie as the monarch of sadness, but the truth is that you can’t remember her without a smile on her face, but she claims that was her edgy period, and youre inclined to agree if the Pierce the Veil shirt in the picture is any indication of her headspace of the time. Your parents stand with their arms around each other. Your father is slim from the cancer treatment, his facial hair is patchy, but he was too stubborn to shave it off entirely, so he accepted the mess for whatever it turned out to be each morning. Your mother was plump, a factor of stress as she took him to treatment, you and Julie to school, herself to work. You hadn’t known how much was on her shoulders back then.

Julie only ever had one bottle at a time. Your parents saving had gone to you. She’d arranged that herself because taking their money felt too much like accepting their death after her wedding. You hadn’t touched it, certain that she’d eventually come to her senses and want some of it, at least for Erica, for her future and her education and her babies, but that had left it untouched, and both of you like any other young adult in New York. She made the room for her perfume purchase, Julie lived a comfortable life even without her inheritance, but she prioritized Erica knowing who your mother was instead of remembering her for herself. There was one small roller bottle in the bathroom that she used daily now, but this was what you wanted. This was the bottle she sprayed every morning after getting Erica up for the day, this was the bottle that would stand a chance in changing her status if anything could help.

You can’t get out of the nursery fast enough. It feels wrong to stand in here when Julie never could, when you know the toys should be messy and all over the place, but they’re perfectly lined up waiting for their owner to let her imagination loose on them. If Julie could replicate the chaos of what Erica created when she played, she would’ve by now, but nothing she did as a grown woman could replicate her two-year-olds impulsivity.

There’s a knock at the front doors and your world stops spinning. You think for a second that it’s Julie’s neighbor, the little old man that she lends sugar to and shares deviled eggs with at Easter, but when you open the front door on autopilot, protectively gripping onto the bottle of perfume that you’re about to bring to the hospital, its Alex Cabot, and she does not look like the same woman you said goodbye to that morning in front of Mercy General.

“Alex.” You breathe, taking a step back, one that she takes as an invitation into the apartment. You don’t protest, you don’t feel the need to, but your stomach churns constructing possibilities for why she’s here at this hour. “What are you doing here? Did you have more questions? Detective Rollins kind of alluded to the fact that you have James in… custody, I think that’s the term.”

Alex tries to smile at your stammering, she wants to find your willingness to help paired with your lack of any criminal knowledge cute, but instead, it twists her heart and makes this harder. Her name rolls off her tongue, but it's more of a croak, and you hadn’t been scared before, but you are now.

“What’s going on? You’re scaring me.” You say, but it's futile, the fear is evident in your face, in the way your eyes go wide and they look directly through Alex as you try to demand answers, information, insight. Your lip is bitten the second there are no words left to say, held hostage by your teeth that are unforgiving in their assault. Your fingers tremble, and you're aware of how little you’ve consumed today now that your nerves are alight. Carisi gave you water at ten that morning. You’d taken two sips. You haven’t had anything else. Not since you ate breakfast before catching the bus. You think you're going to be sick, but there’s nothing for you to expel. It’s a feeling worse than endless puking. It’s one that sits in your belly, rises up your throat, it steals your breath regardless of whether you’re heaving or not, and it doesn’t go away.

She clears her throat, and in an instant she’s not here as a friend, she’s here as an assistant attorney and you know that something changed with the case, you’re just too frantic to figure out what. “We’re changing the charges against James Mills.” She tells you, and your eyebrows furrow, anger pools in your belly. Are they giving up ?

“What?” You question, taking another staggering step back. You don’t know why, but the farther you get from Alex, the easier it is to breathe. Her eyes are suffocating, they’re peering right through you, but you don’t hate it. You don’t understand the feelings clouding your mind right now. They try to outweigh the panic, the frantic anger, but they don’t come close, and all it leads to is every emotion settling numbly in your gut.

“We’re changing the charges from second degree assault to first degree murder. Juliette… Julie died half an hour ago.” The world stopped turning, the breath was stolen from your lungs. Alex was still talking though, her lips were still moving. “The texts we seized go to show intent to cause bodily harm, but a voicemail was traced to a burner phone purchased an hour before the attack by Mills. He’s good for this, and I am not going to rest until he’s behind bars for the rest of his life.”

You don’t hear her. You can see her lips moving, she’s still talking, but you can’t hear a damn thing she says over the beating in your chest and pounding in your ears and the buzzing in your fingers and… Julie’s dead. The words repeat on a loop. Dead. Julie’s dead. She died. Your sisters is dead. Your big sister, your best friend, your only remaining family. Dead. She’s dead. Killed. Murdered. James killed her. You’re sister is dead.

The perfume bottle drops. It falls to the floor, shatters into a million pieces. The stench is strong, uncomfortable, overwhelming. Your feet are wet, doused in alcohol. Your sister is dead. Your niece is dead. Your mother is dead. Your father is dead. Your ex brother-in-law killed your sister because he’s deluded enough to think she killed their daughter. Two hundred dollars of perfume on the floor. On your feet. The perfume bottle fell. It slipped from your hands. The floor is wet. It broke.

“No, no, no, no,” You're moving before you can really process that you’re moving, dropping down onto your knees before you can consider that the floor is covered in shards of glass. Your fingers are nimble, trembling as they reach to try and fix this mess somehow. You don’t know how you’re going to fix this. You’ve never dropped Julie’s perfume before, not even when you’d been in middle school and you’d texted her asking if you could sneak into her room and borrow it for the Spring Fling dance. “What did I do? What did I do? No, no, no!”

You don’t recognize Alex getting closer until she’s crouching down in front of you, forcing your hands to remain cupped between hers protective. Blood warms her skin, your fingers bleeding from where sharp points had nicked your fingers. Juliette’s dead. Your wails are piercing, but Alex doesn’t shrink away from them. She guides you to your feet, and in the middle of your sisters apartment, she lets you sob into her chest until there’s nothing coming out of you other than hiccups and gasps. She doesn’t talk. There’s not a single thing she can say right now that would fix for you, and you appreciate the thoughtfulness in her chosen reserve.

Her shoulders are surprisingly soft, cushioned by weight that dispersed evenly across her frame. She holds your back like she’s done this a time or two, but you’d be surprised if she did. You’d be surprised if the Manhattan ADA with about a million fish to fry by the end of corporate hours spent her midnights comforting strangers whose sister had been murdered by their ex-lover. If she had done this before, you’d buy her a drink, but you know she hasn’t somehow. You know this is her first. That means something to you, even if you can’t feel it in your heart right now.

“Can I help you clean up?” She asks, because you’d been hesitant to accept her advances before, and she can't imagine how this has changed things for you. She is not going to jeopardize this case or your mental ability to have company right now, but she’s not going to run away either. It feels wrong to run away. “Can I stay for a while?”

You nod, because you can’t let go of her even if you wanted to. Your fingers are wound into the fabric of her t-shirt and only now do you realize that at some point, she’d gotten undressed and remade into a whole new person. She was lacking leather and expensive materials, buttons and tight fabric. Instead, she wore pants that you think are soft, but can’t tell with only the hallway light on to show you. Her t-shirt is grey, and it casts the same hue onto her eyes. You don’t know what you expected her to dress like when she wasn’t presenting as a knowledgeable, trustable, powerful lawyer, but this hasn't been quite it.

You move past the initial confusion, the surprise, the shock of the news. It doesn't come easily, you want to burst into tears at many moments that pass as Alex helps you wash your hands and then sweep up the broken glass. She sits on the couch with you for an hour, you know that because you’ve found the only other clock in the apartment, and the hand ticks steadily even though you wish it would stop. An hour has passed, and you’ve not died. The world hasn’t ended. But Julie is still dead. You’d never thought this was possible.

“I don’t know what I do from here.” You whispered eventually, because it felt wrong to have Alex sitting beside you and not fill the silence. You’d learned that it was easy with her, and you hoped it remained that way now, because you couldn’t listen to the clock tick anymore, but nothing else felt right. If you went to bed, that meant tomorrow was the first official morning without Julie. If you went into her fridge and grabbed your favorite protein yogurt, satisfied the hunger you know is there somewhere beneath all the other emotions, you’d be finishing some of the last groceries she’d ever bought. It felt silly to consider all these milestones, to force yourself to remember that just as you’d once learned to do everything with her, you were now not only going to have to learn how to do everything alone, but unlearn how to learn the things you somehow could only do together and master them yourself.

You’d lied in New York City your entire life, but you still can’t navigate the subway for shit. Julie can’t either, not when she’s not with you. It’s like your brain's short circuit once you step onto that platform, and the only way you can get anywhere is if you're laughing together and stressing out, though it had never really been that stressful. Even when you got off at the wrong spot, Julie found something to do or see.

Alex mulled over her answer, trying to decide which standpoint to come at this from. “You sit in this sadness for a while.” She sighs eventually, and your eyes snap to her in surprise. You did not anticipate that being her response to your defeat. “It’s unrealistic to bounce back from this. You are allowed to take your time in healing. You’re allowed to not know what comes next.”

“Is that in the best interest of the case?” You ask, and Alex sighs, a humorless smile on her lips as she shakes her head.

“No, not in the slightest. I need you ready and prepped for anything. I basically need you in my back pocket until we get a verdict. It’s not a fair system for the victims and their families, it’s a fair system for the perpetrators. We’ve come a long way in the name of civil justice, but some things just aren’t that easy to rewrite, no matter how quickly my emails get answered when they’re signed Alex Cabot.” She tries to lighten the scene, and you appreciate the efforts even if you don’t have the energy to smile. “ I know it’s not fair that I ask you to put your grief aside, but the sooner we get an admission or another piece of solid evidence that ties what we have to the crime scene, the sooner you can put Juliette’s name to rest in this light.”

“I was never very good at acknowledging grief.” You hum tastelessly, your mouth dry. “Our Dad died and I decided to take the emptiness and turn it into idolization for Julie. Our Mom died and I doubled my hours at work. Erica died and I…I threw myself into about every little thing I could find that took the edge off. So, if you need me in your back pocket, Alex, I’m there for the long haul because I cannot face this right now. Not when I’m going to have to tell her neighbor he outlived her too. Not when I’m going to have to call her school, and her landlord, and go through not only her bedroom, but my nieces…There are not enough hours in the day for me to take care of what needs to be done and feel the weight of her death without never getting out of bed again. So if you need an ace up your sleeve, I’m ready.”

The words perfect witness came to Alex’s mind, but she couldn't say them. Instead, she just smiled and fixed her glasses. She tells you the time frame she’s working beneath, but there’s a plan on the horizon that apparently Rollins hatched after deliberating with Carisi on their fifteen. It involved a wire, and a meeting with James. You wouldn’t be alone, but Alex wouldn’t be with you. She said she’d be there though, in the same breath as she’d told you that Amanda and Olivia and Carisi would be there too, like she felt something she shouldn’t at the prospect of only naming herself. You wouldn’t dwelled on it, but the realization that you too were hyper fixating on the specificities of her speech was haunting, humiliating.

She left shortly after that, stumbling out of the apartment at two in the morning with a flush on her cheeks that you think is just natural, just something about her that she tries to hide when the fate of New York civil justice is on her shoulders. You have plans to meet up tomorrow at the cafe down the block from the hotel. You’re going to tell James that Julie died. You’re going to act like you have no idea his hands are the ones that sealed her fate.

You have no idea how you managed to fall asleep, but you did, and you’re thankful for the hours that passed you by like seconds when you wake up. The first thing on your mind is that the hunger you’ve been ignorant of is back, sitting at the forefront of your mind. You're rested, as much as you can be, but it doesn’t feel like anything substantial when this is now day three of eating nothing. Your head spins with black spots when you sit up, and then it all hits you. Julie is dead. You slept in your dead sister's bed.

You’re surprised to find that no matter how long you spend staring at the walls, repeating the same words in your head over and over and over again — dead, dead, dead, dead, dead — the tears never come, You dont cry, don’t moan in unimaginable pain. You’ve thought you’d known what numbness felt like before, but you’re meeting it fully right now.

You move through the apartment on autopilot. You eat a bowl of yogurt standing by the sink, unblinking, unbreathing, only shoveling it into your mouth from the carton with a spoon you’re not even sure is clean. It was on the counter by the sink, and your hand grabbed it without thinking. You don’t think when you rinse it off, not even really cleaning it, not even bothering to rub your finger over the metal and pretend like you cared if your germs were gone or not. You were going to throw it out anyways. You had your own silverware and Julie wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

You take another shower, even though it's pointless, even though it won’t wash away the reality you live in now. You get dressed in another outfit of Julie’s, but you make sure there is no mention of Erica anywhere on the clothing. James doesn’t deserve the comfort that she lives on in everything you do. He doesn’t deserve to see you, to know that he killed your sister, and still get to think about his daughters sweet face. He lost that right.

You stumble your way to the cafe, only certain that you’ve found the right place when you find the van that Alex told you to look out for. She pulls you into it, her hand on your wrist when you pace up the street. It calms you instantly, and you don’t realize. She doesn’t either. Olivia does.

You have an hour before James shows up. Detective Odafin Tutuola, who you had not had the displeasure of meeting, had apparently released him at three in the morning to hatch this plan and you’d done your due diligence at sometime between getting yogurt and getting in the shower to lure him here with a twenty second phone call using Julie’s phone. He hadn’t thought anything of that, you’d explained it away by saying you had her possessions and his number had gotten lost in your contacts, which was not a complete lie. James wasn’t smart enough that you’d read the messages he sent to Julie, and made no reference of them when he agreed to meet at eleven am, also mentioning nothing of his arrest or suspected involvement in Julie’s death. If you hadn’t thought he was guilty before, you know he is now.

Alex didn’t give you a pep talk before she sent you out, but she had squeezed your hand, and you assumed it was meant to reference her unspoken good luck, not that you needed it. Your shower had been helpful, even if you still felt like shit, and you’d been preparing to channel all of that pent up energy into ripping James apart if he gave you the chance to get a good bite.

You were at a table by the window when James stumbled in, looking too smug for his own good with his hands shoved into his pockets. He greets you with a familiarity that makes your skin crawl, but you hug him anyway, because it wouldn’t be like you if you didn’t return the embrace, and then you sat down. He ordered a coffee, you ordered a water. You hate the he can drink that, that when the waitress sets it down in front of him, he rips open a half and half packet and pours it in like he didn’t just ruin your life.

“So, what’d you wanna talk about, berry?” You shiver, the nickname rolling off of his tongue too comfortably. You’d always hated when he called you that, when he used his relationship with Julie to somehow assert claim over your life and your choices. He thought he could manipulate you because he pulled out the childhood nickname you’d earned during a strawberry shortcake phase, but it never worked, and it certainly didn’t know.

“Julie…” You didn’t expect for this to be so hard, for the words to get caught in your throat, but it sells the point, it gets James right where you want him even if you can’t say that the emotion you release is intentional. The wire is hot against your skin, the pulse of electricity evident in its temperature, and you’re uncomfortable, but you can’t stop before you’ve even begun. “Somebody attacked Julie two days ago. I’ve been with her at the hospital, I went home last night to get her some things, and… and she died, Jimmy. W-Whoever did it, they hit her over the head with something. Her brain swelled, it… she…she died.” The last two words are a whisper on your lips, and they stick with you even when you reach for the water and take a sip. Julie’s dead. She’s gone forever.

“Somebody hit her?” James frowns, taking another sip of her coffee. “On the head?”

You can’t help but scoff, “That’s all you got from what I just said?” You should’ve been dumbfounded, shocked at his stupidity and lack of empathy, but this was just classic James, this was the guy that had been hiding beneath sheep’s clothing for years, luring Julie in farther and farther.

“I’m just saying, that’s what the doctors say happened? Somebody hit ‘er and she died?” You're shaking, but not because you're overwhelmed, devastated, beyond yourself with grief. You're shaking with rage, and even though you’ve only had two conversations with Alex, even though you’d only met her yesterday, there’s something in your head that warns you she’s telling you to calm down from somewhere inside the van parked across the street.

“Yeah, Jimmy. They think somebody hit her and she died. Is that not enough for you? The mother of your child is dead. She’s never coming back.” The worlds fall off your lips like venom, and they aim to poison you just as much as they do you. You feel suffocated, trapped. You're sure that your face is flaming with anger, but James is blind enough to only see your sadness, and he’s self-absorbed enough to not care.

“Well, she coulda fallen.” He gets defensive quick, and you can’t help but think he’s telling you exactly what happened to Julie in not as many words. “Bitch was clumsy.”

“Don’t call my sister, the woman who gave you a daughter, the woman who stood like an idiot at the end of a rose petal covered altar and said she’d spend the rest of her life devoted to you in sickness and in health, a bitch. Am I clear about that?” You seethed, hands slamming down on the table. It wasn’t often your fuse blew like this, but James had gotten beneath your skin successfully and he hadn’t even been aiming to try. “I said am I clear!” Your voice raises when he doesn’t answer you, and when he rolls his eyes, annoyed with your anger, it only further infuriates you.

“I forgot how testy you are.” He huffs, shaking his head.

“And how do you propose she fell, Jimmy? She’s had two feet her entire life. Nobody just wakes up one day and falls so hard in the shower they die of brain damage the next night. And besides, she was raped. So, clearly somebody was in there with her. Why does it matter to you if she fell or if she was hit?” You scoff, and you know that you’re playing it close, that this is all getting to a point where you either get the confession, a full and clear one, or you seal your sister's fate to an endless future of not having any kind of justice.

“Cause, can do a lot’a harm with lyin’ on a good man's name.” You hate the way he speaks like he’s never been to college a day in his life, meanwhile that’s where he and Julie met. You hate that he had a good paying job, and an apartment that he can pay for with said salary, and your sister is dead. You hate that he plays everyone so well, and it's taken this long for it to catch up with him. “She fell, and she probably deserved it.”

“You haven’t even spoken to her since Erica died. How did you end up hating her so much.” You can’t understand it, because even though they had their problems, and there had been many red flag you’d failed to notice, they had still been happy on the good days, and until there weren’t any good days left, you’d always thought a relationship had a chance at surviving.

“She killed my baby.” His eyes are cold, not an ounce of love or affection in them. Julie’s eyes brim with fondness whenever she brings Erica up… or, Julie’s eyes brimmed with sadness whenever she brung Erica up in conversation. She’d never once looked like there were endless weeks separating the last time she’d seen her daughter alive. James didn’t look the same.

“She fought harder than you ever did for Erica. Julie brought her to the doctors. Julie pushed for antibiotics. Julie brought her to the ER. Julie stayed with her in PICU when you were doing god knows what as your daughter, my niece, was dying. She did not kill Erica. The damn doctors that you listened to because it didn’t really matter to you at all if she got better killed Erica, and when you realized what that meant, you ran. It terrifies you that you don’t know how to love another person, doesn’t it? You convinced yourself that you hate Julie, that this is all Julie’s fault, but it’s not. It’s your fault. You killed Erica. You told Julie she was fine. You told her to stop going to any doctor that would take her. You told her that ‘the kid’ would get over it in a couple of weeks. You killed Erica, and when you couldn’t blame Erica anymore, you blamed yourself, and when that got old, when you didn’t know how to live with that on your conscience anymore, you went after the one person who would’ve forgiven you if you’d just apologized for being wrong. You killed my sister. And you killed my niece. And I fucking hate everything about you.”

James grabs your wrist, and your eyes widen, that fear you’d faced when you’d first stepped into the apartment last night coming back. He did this to Julie, what could he do to you. “And I’ll kill you to. Julie fell, and you know what I did after that? I slammed her head into the tile and left her there. It’s a good thing she’s dead. I hated the bitch anyways and I always have. All she had was her cunt, and that was never the same after she had that damn baby that only ever cried. I’m glad she’s dead. And when I come for you, because I will, because now you’ve forced me to tell you, just know, nothing will ever hurt more than what I did to her. You should’ve heard her scream. Had to tape her damn mouth shut.”

A violent sob tears through your chest, and you stumble out of the cafe. His fingerprints bruise your wrist, but you don’t recognize the dull pulse of pain beneath your skin even though your fingers rub at it frantically. It happens suddenly, the nausea you’ve been fighting wins. You don’t even know what’s coming out of you considering you’ve only put yougurt into it, but suddenly youre aware of hands holding your hair back as you wretch onto the sidewalk.

Alex’s voice is in your ear a moment later, and for a while, you can’t make out the words she’s saying to you, but when they got through, when eventually they clear the fog in your head and restabilize you, you realize what you’d done. You’d gotten an admission, a full confession of not only guilt, but how he’d seen the end of your sisters life with his own two hands, even if he wasn’t the one to so specially kill her. His actions had, and he would be punished according for it with or without a trail. Alex had warned you that if this went as planned, a plea would be on the table, but that didn’t matter. Whether he got life or forty years without the possibility of parole, just knowing you’d stood up for her sister one last time… it healed something in you that you’d expected to remain broken for a long time.

“Can we, um, can we go to the van?” You ask after a moment because the scent of vomit is even stronger than the perfume had been when it shattered, Alex smiles softly, and you almost smile when she takes the time to fix your hair, pulling away all the pieces that stick to your cheeks.

She leads you there, with one hand on the small of your back. There are cruisers all down the street now, lights on but no sirens, officers waiting for Benson to drag James out of the establishment in cuffs. You don’t want to be around to see it. You have no interest in seeing his face ever again, so your thankful that Alex closes the door to the van before she steps outside with him in tow.

There’s so much that you want to say to her, but you don’t know where to start. She’d been here for you in way that she hadn’t needed to be, and for whatever reason, you coulnd’t just let her go now that it was all over. Juliette would be infuriated if you just walked away from this, from her, from the potential that maybe you hadn’t been misreading her signs last night.

“It’s over. I bring this to him, he settles for a plea deal. There won’t be a trial.” She tells you, but that’s not what you want to hear. An hour ago, that would've been enough for you, but its not right now, and you think, or maybe hope, that there’s something more waiting to come out, but it doesn’t, and you think that’s because you’ve already turned her down.

“Um, it’s not still too late for that number though, is it?” You ask shyly, and you’re expecting her to say no, to turn you down and apologize for giving you the wrong idea, but then she blushes, and she holds onto the frame of her glasses, and you know definitively that you hadn’t misread a single thing.

“No. No it’s not.” She smiles and she pulls a card out of her pocket, like she’d been prepared for this moment all along. There’s a number on the card, her business number, you almost speak up, tell her this isn’t what you meant, but then her finger falls into frame and she points to ink at the bottom that you hadn’t noticed. What you also hadn’t noticed was her manicure, and it glimmered beneath the lights in the van. “Call me, anytime for anything.” Her words are like an echo of the people you were yesterday but would never be again. You expect it to smother you, for Juliette’s death to crush you. It hurts, your chest pangs, but nothing else happens, the world doesn’t end.

“How about you call me when you’re off and done for the day, and I can take you to dinner. Before you say that this is your job, I know damn well ADA’s don’t volunteer to ride along in a smelly cop van.” There’s a twinkle in your eyes that Alex has never seen before, but it only further entices her. “Dinner, and a drink. I don’t know how you do this job without one, and Julie was always a believer that wine isn’t a bad call for any function. So, what do you say ADA Cabot?”

“I say, I’d kiss you right now if your breakfast wasn’t still hanging onto your lips.” She teases, but you don’t realize she’s teasing you until you panickedly bring a hand to your lips and she giggles. “Dinner sounds nice. Seven o’clock.”

”Can’t wait.” You smile, only because you don’t know what else to do, and then you leave. The wire gets left behind and then there’s nothing connecting you to Manhattan SVU at all anymore, but you think something always will, you think Alex will be the bridge that keeps Julie’s memory alive even when it hurts to accept she's gone. Because she is gone, but you think Alex Cabot is the first sign she’s sent you that death isn’t as permanent as history has led you to believe.

[bensonsbreakdowns]

my toxic trait is i know hamilton word for word but the second i try to apply it to any historical context i suddenly don’t know what any of the lyrics mean

[bensonsbreakdowns]

‘the prophecy’ is for the mirrorballers and the dreamers and believers who keep going but don’t know why because they continue to give love but don’t receive the same back and they keep holding onto hope but lose themselves in this vicious cycle of empty promises and false hopes </3

[bensonsbreakdowns]

— Revolution 0, boygenius

[bensonsbreakdowns]

But you know I'd stand on the corner, embarrassed with a picket sign if it meant I would see you when I die (x)

[bensonsbreakdowns]

been so fucking numb lately. spend my days crying to pink skies and phoebe bridgers. spend my nights high as hell trying to distract myself from how bad i want to end it all but not actually wanting to end it all. fun fun fun.

[bensonsbreakdowns]

YOU LITERALLY WATCHED ME GO THROUGH A MILLION DIFFERENT ERAS AND REBRANDS !! THAT'S LIKE AWARD WORTHY IDK HOW YOU PUT UP WITH THE THREE URL CHANGES A DAY

made half of my mutuals on here when i was 15/16 years old... i turned 21 two days ago. i think most of you should feel old as hell !!

[bensonsbreakdowns]

ITS OKAY YOURE STILL YOUNG TO ME !!

made half of my mutuals on here when i was 15/16 years old... i turned 21 two days ago. i think most of you should feel old as hell !!

[bensonsbreakdowns]

made half of my mutuals on here when i was 15/16 years old... i turned 21 two days ago. i think most of you should feel old as hell !!

[bensonsbreakdowns]

21…. can you do something for me ??! 🎉🎊

[bensonsbreakdowns]

okay apparently i’m never going to change my pinned post/theme again because tumblr is literally not letting me edit the post on mobile 💀 i finally come back and this is the treatment i receive???