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purelyfiction · 2 years

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All Fun & Games ♧♤♡♢ 3.2

Robert ‘Bob’ Floyd x F!Reader |1| 2 | 3.1

Word Count: 5,496 words

Summary: In a rather spontaneous fashion, Bob has invited you to take a glimpse into his routine - one that you don’t normally get a good look at while up in the air.

Content Warning: This story will have TopGun: Maverick plot line elements to it and will possibly spoil the movie for you. Please be aware. This - and all of my stories - is 18+. By continuing to read you agree that you are 18 or older and that any content you come across is by your own decision. || Mild NSFW subjects

Author Note: .... don’t hate me. This has taken such a long, long time to get out because of work, life - so many things kept piling up. Thank you so so so much for your patience, I think it was early July the last time I updated, so this is long awaited. And because of that - I’ve double updated. This chapter has an extension to it, PLEASE READ THE FIRST PART BEFORE YOU READ THIS ONE!! since I am a madwoman and can’t stay under 8k words and ended up writing nearly 11k words for one part. So, please enjoy more Bob x Vegas content - and please please thank @callsignthirsty and @deadratio for being my editors, sounding boards and generally great friends. You’ll likely see them again soon. Without further adieu: All Fun & Games - Part 3.2

Attention: If you would like to be on the tag list please see the pinned post on my blog for the document. If you’re not able to access it please message me, I rarely find any tag requests in my notifications!

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Bob and Copper have stopped at the peak of the trail, and you navigate Goldrush beside them - only to witness why they’ve stopped.

At the top of the hill is a clearing that looks over the cove that is created from the terrain surrounding the rural areas of San Diego. It’s stunning.

“Wow…” Part of you is out of breath from the nerves of riding, the other from this view. “Have you ever seen something so pretty?”

“This isn’t my first time up here, y’know?” Bob teases, making you push his arm.

“You know what I meant.” You grin, sitting in peace with him, both of the horses entertained with dry grass around the path. “How far from the stables are we?”

Bob shrugs. “I think we’re five or six miles out?”

Your eyebrows raise in surprise. “Really? I feel like we’re closer than that.” He chuckles at your confession.

“I think you’re underestimating how fast a horse moves. C’mon, if we make it quick Casey might still be at the ranch - she always brings in these great sugar cookies.” As Bob guides Copper back the way you’d came, you can’t help but giggle at his excitement over a cookie.

Bob was such a different person when he grew comfortable with you. There’s a part of you that wants to boast it to the others, how well you know him now, but maybe that would just fuel the rumor mill.

Your attention is still on the view between the trees as you descend, and maybe that’s why you don’t see what it is that makes the next few minutes go by in a blur. Before you can even blink, there’s a squeal from the horse under you as she kicks her front legs in the air, gravity pulling you out of the saddle and straight onto your back.

All of the air shoots from your lungs when your body makes contact with the ground and you cough as you try to get oxygen back into your lungs. Your head is ringing, but you swear you didn’t hit it off the ground. Despite the distortion of sound, you can hear Bob’s voice. His hand comes to your shoulder and guides you onto your side, hands gentle as the ground vibrates from Goldrush’s hooves on the path as she runs the opposite direction.

“V… Vegas, can you hear me?” You’re rolling onto your back again, your eyes shut from the minute you hit the ground. Though, they open when you feel his hands cupping your face, gentle taps encouraging you to open your eyes. “There’s those pretty eyes. Hey... what hurts?”

You’re looking side to side, attempting to find the very thing that got you here in the first place.

“Where… where’s Gold-”

“Don’t worry about her right now, ‘kay? Let’s focus on you.” Hands are pulling your head to look forward again, making you look directly to his own blue eyes. “What hurts? Legs good?” When you nod, he continues, “arms? Head?”

“Yeah - yeah, I’m just winded is all.” Bob seems to calm down at this.

“Alright, careful now.” He’s cautiously helping you sit up, only to take a seat next to you in the dirt. When you’re sitting upright, you’re surprised to see Copper happily munching on grass, untethered, simply waiting for Bob to remount.

“That’s a loyal horse,” you mumble as Bob starts to poke at common injury sites. He continues to do so until he’s convinced you’re okay. “Bo, I’m all good.”

“I still think we should get you checked out before we head back to Miramar. Just to be sure.” He speaks with such concern and you smile at him.

“I’ll be fine - hell I face seven to eight G’s each day, I think I can handle a little fall.” He’s got his hands under your arms as you stand, keeping his cautious demeanor about him.

“Okay… okay you’ve got a point with that one.” With his hands on his hips, he’s looking up the path. “Gold got spooked by something in the brush. Which is very unlike her. Kinda worries me.”

“Well… how do we find her?”

It’s then that Bob is helping you up onto Copper, still being exceedingly careful after your fall. Once you’re up, you look at him. “If I’m up here how are-”

Your question is cut off when Bob climbs up behind you, sliding onto the saddle, flush against you. It’s a little tight in the saddle since it was meant for a single rider, but you’re sure you could handle this.

“Like this. Now, to find Goldrush,” he hums, wrapping his arms around you to get to the reins.

As you start the journey back uphill, Bob’s hips are moving with each step - and against you. You’re really trying to blame the dizzy feeling coursing through you on your fall, but with each bounce, you know that’s not true. You’re gripping onto the saddle with a near death grip, Bob’s arms shifting around you every now and then. His forearms rest on your thighs, eliciting a less than platonic feeling. Bob’s voice startles you out of your reverie.

“There she is.” As you crest over the hill, Goldrush is trotting along, mowing on grass and dandelions and keeping to herself. Bob carefully inches toward her, only for her to start off into a gallop. “Son of a bitch- hold on!”

In quick time, Bob is kicking his heels into Copper’s side and the horse breaks into a gallop.Your knuckles are white where they grip the saddle horn, the surrounding brush melting together into a single green blur as Copper chases after Goldrush. And despite the steady press of Bob against your back, you can feel yourself beginning to slip. Bob's quick to wrap an arm around your waist and one of your hands leaves the horn to anchor onto him, latching onto the sense of security that his arm brings you. "I gotcha."

As you begin to catch up to the other horse, Bob moves his free hand to the side of the saddle where a length of rope is tacked to the leather of the seat. With nimble fingers he’s undoing the snap that keeps it secure, pulling it into his hands. Reins are long abandoned as he rapidly fashions a knot in front of you. Bob can’t even see his hands as they’re tying, yet he’s moving at the speed of light, quickly looping into a cowboy’s lasso. Before you know it, with a swing of his arm, the rope’s flying through the air, and catching Goldrush. Bob’s pulling with most of his strength to get her to slow, until he’s sliding off of Copper, and continuing to tug Goldrush closer to him. He keeps his voice low as he approaches her at an angle, and carefully tries to calm her down.

It takes a few minutes, but eventually, despite her rapid breathing and flared nostrils, Goldrush’s nuzzling into his hand. “I haven’t got the faintest idea what set you off,” he murmurs to the mare, before he turns his head back to you, “It’d probably be best to keep her on leed to get her back to the stable. This isn’t like her.”

You simply nod, unsure of what else to say - more so still frazzled by the full-fledged cowboy you just witnessed. He’s returning to Copper’s side, guiding Goldrush toward the other horse in hopes they’ll be able to ease Goldrush off whatever anxiety that’s taken over her.

A few miles later and an unbearably long ride back, you return to the stables. One of the stable hands is coming out to help with Goldrush - a horse with no rider isn’t encouraging.

“What happened out there?” It’s the same woman from earlier, Jennifer — or maybe it was Jenna?

“She got spooked by something in the brush along the trail. Threw Vegas right onto the ground.” The graying redhead looks at you with concern as Bob dismounts and reaches up a hand to help you down. You take his hand with caution, and slide off trusting that the male would catch you if you fell.

“I’m fine.” You wave her off when she gives a skeptical glance in your direction.

Despite your words, the older woman looks at Bob. “Casey’s here if you want to have her look your girl over,” she offers. You can see Bob visibly release some lingering tension. Before you can correct Jennifer — you’re not together-together — Bob turns to you.

“It’s up t’ you, but it probably is a good idea to get checked out.” He then tacks on a note: “Casey’s a physician. For the record. I’m not sending you into the hands of a vet or some farmer,” he reassures you with a laugh that leaves you giggling.

“Yeah, yeah okay.” You heave a sigh but willingly let him guide you toward the volunteer that had been mentioned, leaving Jenna — no, it was definitely Jennifer — to return the horses to their stables.

After having a flashlight nearly blind you and being asked a million questions, you’re cleared by the doctor on property, leaving both of you with less worry. Bob wouldn’t have to explain to Maverick why you couldn’t fly tomorrow. You wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not you’d ended up with a concussion.

“You’re lucky you managed to escape a fall without an injury, most riders who are thrown off like that end up with a wrist or an ankle sprain at the very least.” Casey stands after her assessment, moving to the tupperware container on the counter and opening it before holding it out to you. You give Bob a knowing glance with a smirk as you pick up one of the cookies, seeing him all too happily taking one as well once he’s offered.

With a subtle nod of thanks, Bob speaks with his mouth full of cookie. “Thank you ma’am. For making sure Vegas is okay. And the cookies, of course.” You stand up as he speaks, Casey waves him off with a grin.

“Of course.” Though she turns to you. “However, if anything changes, go see a medical professional as soon as you can,” she reminds you, and you smile in reassurance.

The two of you step out and are greeted with a new face, an older gentleman. “I heard you took a tumble.” You shrug, but look over at Bob.

“Yeah, I did, but I was in good hands.” He smiles in turn, before the other man speaks once more.

“You sure you’re alright?” With a smile, you’re reaching over and grabbing Bob’s hat off his head, carefully tugging it on your own.

“Sure am.” The gray man lets out a hearty laugh, slapping Bob’s back as he begins to walk away.

“Reel your girl in, Robert,” the man says with a cheeky smile as he tips his hat in your direction. It’s then that you see the cherry red that floods Bob’s face as he clears his throat.

“Yes, sir,” Bob chokes out, quick to steal his hat back and direct you to the lockers again, a hand on the small of your back. Glancing over your shoulder, you seek clarification from Bob.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” you ask somewhat annoyed, still looking his way as Bob grabs your shoes from his locker, as well as his jacket.

“Um, well, you uh- you’re not supposed to take a cowboy’s hat.” He keeps his answer simple, his actions rushed as he locks back up and guides you by the elbow this time toward his truck, but his ears are still stained red.

“Why not? Seems harmless enough, unless you’re worried about lice or something. Not that I have lice. I just don’t have a hat and I-”

“There’s a rule, and it’s kinda stupid -” he stops at the passenger side door to the truck, knuckles white as his grip on the handle tightens. Yet he continues: “if a girl takes your hat it- ugh.” He licks his lips for a moment. He’s trying to delicately approach this without sounding completely crass — his momma would slap him upside the head if he did.

“Out with it Floyd.” You’re trying to encourage him, but it comes out a little firmer than you intend, leaving him to blurt it out,

“It means you want to sleep with them.”

The two of you sit in a tense silence for a few moments. Both of you are likely thinking the same thing, but neither of you dare to speak it. Instead, you give a slow sigh, mumbling under your breath, “that would’ve been good to know.” Bob catches his bottom lip between his teeth as he leans against the truck, but releases it to give a click of his tongue.

“Don’t worry too much about it, yeah?” With a tug on the handle, he’s opening your door and you’re seeking solace from the burning of the embarrassment you feel.

While you're sure Bob's truck can carry the weight of the lingering elephant in the cabin, nothing — not even the AC cranked to max — can filter out the tension that has made the air heavy. So, Bob takes a crack at smoothing it over before it can spill out at the seams.

“Jenna was saying that a few of the volunteers are going to Outlaw’s tonight. She invited me - er, us, I guess.”

Damn, it was Jenna.

Pushing the intrusive thought to the side, you nod as you watch the pavement disappear over the hood of the truck. “And Outlaw’s is…” you prompt, seeking more detail from him.

“It’s a bar. Well, a cowboy bar? It’s more western than Penny’s is, I’ll give it that much. There’s usually dancing and way too much beer and a lot of loud music so if it’s not your scene-”

“I’d love to come,” you cut him off before he can give you too many reasons to say no. Yet you can’t think of many that would keep you from Outlaws, so long as Bob is there.

“Great! Um, they have food there, so I wouldn’t worry about eating — I’ll drop you off and swing back to base and change, then come back and grab you. We’ll leave from there?” he suggests.

“That sounds perfect. What’s the vibe? Aside from double denim.” You’re able to sneak in a jab at him, which earns you a chuckle.

“Well it depends on your mood, I mean boots are a bit of a given, so no more sneakers -”

“Noted.”

“But… I hate to say denim but…” He glances at you and you let out a high pitched laugh.

“What about a dress?” you inquire, and he thinks on it.

“I think that would work?” The truck slows to a stop, making you realize you’re back at your rental. Turning from your window, you look toward the driver and grin.

“Great. I’ll see you in what, an hour?”

“An hour it is.”

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You’re taking this new opportunity in full stride. Never in your wildest dreams would you have thought you’d spend your Sunday on a horse - let alone in a red floral dress and cowboy boots that aren’t even yours.

Yet, here you are: patiently sat on the stoop of your rental’s front porch, waiting for Bob to roll up. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t keep you waiting long.

What is surprising, however, is the small bundle of flowers in his hand as he leaves his truck, walking through your front yard decked out in his boots, hat, and a pair of jeans. He’s topped the fit with a black undershirt and a corduroy jacket. You’re all too surprised at the ensemble that you don’t immediately recognize that something is missing. Not until he’s standing in front of you with a toothy grin, holding out the flowers to you.

“Oh my god!” you’re nearly squealing, covering your mouth with your hand as you take the flowers absentmindedly. “Don’t tell me you drove over here blind, Bo.” Your teasing demeanor makes him laugh, throwing his head back with amusement.

“No, no, I didn’t drive here blind, Vegas,” he shoots back at you as you take his chin, playfully moving it side to side, taking in his face.

He looks strange without his glasses. It’s not a bad look by any means — you really aren’t complaining, he looks gorgeous — but it definitely took you by surprise. Like this, without his glasses in the way, you get the full effect of those baby blues.

“I had no idea you wore contacts,” you remark and he leaves it with a shrug.

“Don’t really wear ‘em often. I’m not permitted to wear them to work so they are probably older than they recommend.” It’s only now, as his eyes shift toward the bouquet, that you take in the flowers: a bundle of sunset-orange crystahimums. You look back at him over the petals, his hands have tucked themselves into his pockets and he rocks onto the heels of his boots.

“There was a guy with a cart and I had my window down and-”

“They’re gorgeous, Bo,” you laugh, seeing him scratch at his neck, an anxious tick you’d noticed first at work - now on your doorstep. This was more of the Bob you recognize, though you’re more than happy to see him comfortable around you. “Let me drop these inside and we’ll go?”

Once the flowers are deposited in a rouge bucket (vases were far and few and you would have to dig around for one later) with water, you find yourself in his passenger seat again.

“You look really nice, V.” It’s a genuine compliment, you can tell. His smile meets his eyes, which are shining more than the chrome on the side of his truck.

“Thanks, Bo.”

There’s a country track playing softly, the AC circulating the scent of Bob’s body wash through the cabin of the truck until it’s all you can focus on. It’s not the first time you’ve smelled it, as there have been a few times he’s come in from flying and gone straight to shower before coming to the trophy room to listen in on the other pilots.

There’s something within the familiar scent that you can’t place, though. Like someone had been baking something with oranges and vanilla, but had left the door open after a fresh rain. Then you realize it’s coming from Bob. Had he put on cologne?

No, no. That couldn’t be it. It didn’t make sense. You’re just coworkers. Yeah, that’s it. Two coworkers who went horseback riding together. Who are carpooling to a bar together. He was just a coworker. Who let you borrow his sister’s boots. Who bought you flowers because he was considerate and supported small businesses. Whose hat you’d stolen earlier. Who has seemingly brushed his teeth before coming to get you because he smelled a little like mint when he looked at you with those big blue eyes and the shyest grin and - what the fuck did he say?

“Yes,” you blindly answer a question you’re unsure was even asked.

“Yes?” He glances at you with a bit of confusion spelt out on his face.

“I- sorry I was kind of spaced out,” you admit to him, picking at the hem of your dress.

“I asked what station you want to listen to since we’ll be listening to a lot of country music at Outlaw’s…” His voice fades out and you’re quickly replacing it.

“No, no it’s fine. Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts their mouth.” You dismiss him with a small smile, watching as the light you’ve been idling at turns green, a glow spreading over the pavement and the black paint of the truck.

“Okay… I’m glad you came with me to Limbo today. Despite completely eating it thanks to Goldrush - I still don’t know what got into her. I’ve never seen her act like that.” You’re hearing the sentiment, you are but the name is sticking in your head.

“We were there for over five hours and not once did someone explain what the hell ‘Limbo’ meant,” you point out, causing him to launch into a fit of laughter. When he’s caught his breath, he starts to explain.

“Limbo. Like in limbo? They’re between homes and their goal is to get them from the spot they came from to a good home. There’s also a fundraiser every year but-”

“A limbo fundraiser? And you didn’t think to tell me? Bob, I need to mark my calendar tonight, this is vital information.” There's a levity to the cabin after the laughter clears — light and easy in a way that hadn't thought possible earlier, after the hat incident. But you're happy to be proven wrong. Grateful, even. Bob pulls off the road and into an absolutely packed parking lot. There’s trucks - far too many to count - and many cowboys heading to the entrance of the building.

When Bob open’s your door and helps you out, you can feel the music reverberating through your chest before you hear it clearly. There is a flood of light that greets you when you step into the building, neon signs left and right, a bar built around a square dance floor and a DJ blasting any and every country song known in existence. He’s guiding you to a pair of empty barstools - which is surprising considering how many vehicles are in the parking lot - though you come to realize most of the patrons are on the wood floor dancing.

“Bob, I think there's a glitch in the matrix,” you joke, looking at the massive group that is moving simultaneously with the music. Currently, it’s some Thomas Rhett song you’ve heard once or twice prior to tonight. It’s got a good vibe to it and Bob’s singing it under his breath - until he has to respond to your comment.

“It’s called line dancin’ darlin’. I told you there’d be dancin’ didn’t I?” he asks as he finally has the attention of a bartender.

“Yeah, but I thought you meant, like, normal dancing. Not… flash mob dancing.” You’re watching the dancers in a trance until Bob is nudging your elbow, handing you a shot glass filled with amber liquid. “What’s this?” You cautiously take it from his hand, and he grins, leaning forward to speak in your ear as the music changes, the volume increasing

“Liquid Courage. Drink up sweet girl.” Within seconds he’s downing his glass and setting it on the bar. You are a little frozen to start - but soon enough you get the alcohol down and you’re recognizing the burn that is Fireball. You guess it’s better than tequila, but at what cost?

When your glass has been returned and Bob has opened a tab, a slower country song comes on and he nods rather quickly. “Alright, cowgirl, time to break in those boots.” He’s quick to grab your hand and pull you through a crowd that seems to be ditching the dance floor.

“Bob, this seems to be no one’s favorite,” you comment with a smirk as you and a handful of other patrons stand on the floor.

“It’s ‘cause it’s slow. Which is exactly what you need in order to learn how to do some of these.” As the song starts up, Bob lines both of you up with one another, looking at your feet carefully. “This one is pretty easy. So you’re stepping to the left, and want to swing your right leg back…” As he explains each step, he’s physically doing it, leaving you to follow as best as you can. As you get into the rhythm of it, he starts to speed up the steps, which you’re surprised to find aren’t as difficult as they look.

When it looks like you’ve finally gotten the hang of it, Bob begins to mirror your movements he’s taught you, moving in an opposite direction, before joining you in the middle again, quickly taking your hands and spinning you - winning him a giggle - just as the song starts to slow it’s tempo. You can feel the way your heart is racing from the cardio of moving around the floor, and you can see the mile wide grin on your friend’s face. The eye contact you make is strong, but it doesn’t last that long before he’s moving back with the music, and finishing out the song. You smile as he steps away, clapping in recognition of your efforts, making you mockingly curtsey as the music switches.

The song is all too familiar - and is seemingly one of the bar’s favorites. As evidenced by the sudden flood of dancers. You nearly lose Bob in the crowd, but he is quick to grab your waist and pull you to the side of the floor.

“This one is a little more high speed. You wanna try?” he offers, already starting in step with the other dancers. You stand off to the side, watching as his feet move in time with everyone else - the mass of strangers that dance behind him - all doing the same dance despite never meeting before.

“No, I think I’m gonna sit this one out.” You find yourself leaning up against the bar, far from the floor now, happily watching as Bob finds his element. There’s so much confidence dripping from him with each slide of his boot on polished wood. While he may be dancing with another girl on the floor, blue eyes keep drifting to you on the leather bar stool, waiting for the next low-tempo dance to learn. You’re happily spectating as the song continues on - until a tap comes from your shoulder. Turning around the bartender is sliding a beer to you, and pointing at a man in a flannel shirt and a trucker hat down the bar. Oh.

When Bob finishes his turn, he finds himself on the stool next to you, leaving him pointing at your drink. “I didn’t know you drank Coors?” he huffs, leaning back against the bar. You’re quick to scratch your wrist with a glance to the man who bought the drink before looking at Bob.

“It’s because I don’t,” you’re nearly snarling, which makes Bob sit up a little straighter. He glances around the room, brow furrowed as he pushes up the top of his hat to get a better look at the crowd.

“Who was it.” It’s not a question. There’s no inkling of it, not even a persuading tone to patch it. It’s accusatory, and hard.

“No one, okay, don’t let it bother you. It’s fine-”

“It’s Banquet, who the fuck buys a girl Coors Banquet?” He’s scowling, stewing in what you can only assume is annoyance on your behalf. You’ve not even bothered to pick up the beverage, simply letting it sweat out on the resin top.

“Not gonna worry about it, Bo. Not worth either of us ruining our night.” He’s still hunting the guy down with piercing eyes - and it seems like he’s found him. With a sigh, you’re checking to see who he has tone on only to find flannel-guy and Bob are staring at each other dead eye-to-eye.

Bob’s always been a good WSO. That includes, among other things, killer aim.

With a slow hand, Bob lifts the glass to his lips and downs it in one go, eyes locked firmly on trucker boy.

The music has changed by now, but this time it’s a very upbeat song, “Couldn’t agree more.” He’s slamming the bottle down and wiping at his mouth before a large hand takes yours, pulling you back to the dance floor.

“Bo I don’t-”

“We’re not dancin’ with them, sweetheart.” Your heart skips for a second as he locates a clear enough spot on the floor for the two of you. His hand finds a comfortable spot on your waist, your hand in his still. “Just follow my lead, pretty little lady.”

In less than two seconds, he’s gone from Bob, your coworker with a heart of gold, a pair of glasses and a sheltered personality - to Bo, a horse wrangling, line dancing, beer chugging, and heart breaker. A real rodeo romeo.

Bob is quick to spin you out of your thoughts as Alan Jackson’s Good Time blasts through the speakers. Boots move in time with one another despite any hesitancies you had about dancing - it felt like you’d been dancing for years.

He’s stepping with you, in, out, side to side, and being extra careful not to step on your toes. After all, he promised nothing has ever stepped on his toes, and nothing would step on yours - which was a promise he intended to keep.

Unbeknownst to you, Bob has amassed a sizeable crowd of co-volunteers around the bar, watching as the two of you spin about the floor with Bob’s guidance - if only they knew you were holding onto him for dear life, trying your damnedest to make it look like you knew what the hell your feet were doing.

As the fiddle fades out to piano and guitar, Bob slows to a stop, happily dipping you as applause erupts in the bar, cheers and whistles as he pulls you upright again. A drum kicks off above the applause, it slowly dying out as you and Bob stand chest to chest, catching your breaths.

“Well damn, Robert. You’re just full of surprises aren’t you?” The shock of it hasn’t quite slipped off of you the way beads of sweat do, but the smile on his face is enough payment for him to get away with it.

“Wonder what Banquet bitch has to say about that?” he snarls, looking over his shoulder as the two of you begin to step into a mix line step/waltz as Morgan Wallen echoes through the bar.

“Oh, I am sure he’s second guessing his choice of beer. That’s for sure.” A giggle leaves you as he tugs you closer to him as the music picks up further. His lips are nearly on yours, which has your already racing heart rattle in your ribcage.

“Sucks to be him.”

Sure does.

The building might be named Outlaw’s but it might as well be called Sauna’s with the way your skin seems to be steaming. As the music continues through the floor of couples dancing to the slow song, you’re leaning in to him. “I’m roasting, can we step out for a second?” you propose, which he’s quickly obliging, weaving the two of you through the crowd and out the side door of the bar.

The air is finally cold for the night, a welcome exchange to the stuffy interior of the bar. There’s a few folks out for a breath of fresh air, passing a lighter between them as they light each other’s cigarettes.

“Bob Floyd,” you speak with a bit of exasperation, witnessing a smirk erupt on his face.

“That’s what my momma named me.” He chides, leaning against the railing of the steps the two of you are perched on.

“I have learned far more than I ever thought I would about you, in no less than forty-eight hours.” You’re leaning up against the opposite wall, watching as the door swings open and nearly crushes into Bob. He’s quickly changing his footing so that he’s out of the door’s radius, and suddenly closer to you instead.

“Is that a bad thing?” There’s a worried expression that takes his features - but it’s only there for a second. Guess that was what the whiskey was for.

“Not particularly,” you hum, looking at him with a dazed grin. “I’ve had a spectacular time finding out about Robert Floyd.” Blue eyes have locked on yours at this point, both of you standing in the yellowing light above the doorway. He’s about to say something as someone comes up behind him, pushing him toward you leading to the inevitable.

Bob’s hand catches himself just by your head, but his lips crash onto yours with an intensity that you haven’t felt since you tugged him into Payback’s closet. This isn’t the first time, and you’re not about to let it be the last. Which is why an encouraging lift of his chin guides him to step a little closer, paired with a tilt of his hat further back so that it blocks out the light and both of you can get lost in the depths of the kiss.

As his tongue slips past your lips, his hand cupping your own chin, whistles and groans come from the smoking crowd surrounding you, leaving Bob to rip the hat from his head, and use it to shield the two of you away for just a little longer.

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#bob x reader #bob floyd x reader #robert floyd x reader #robert x reader #bob x vegas #bob x f!reader #bob floyd x f!reader #robert floyd x f!reader #top gun fic #top gun fanfic #top gun fanfiction #top gun maverick fanfiction #top gun maverick

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dreamescapeswriting · 2 years

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Sit Back And Relax~ KTH [M] [Request]

⤜WORD COUNT: 2.2K

⤜PAIRING: Taehyung x GN!Reader

⤜GENRE: Smut, please don’t read if you’re underage. This piece includes Oral (male receiving) established relationship, reader being the eighth member of the band,

⤜Copyright: © DreamEscapesWriting - May 2022

⤜MASTERLIST

A/N: Not long at all my love! I love when you guys add details to what you want to happen so it’s okay! I hope you enjoy this

It was getting far too late for Taehyug to still be sitting hunched over at his desk, hair in disarray as he stared at the screen of his laptop. How the hell did Namjoon, Jimin, Hobi and Yoongi do this? It felt near possible to Taehyung as he stared at all of the different tracks laid out in front of him. Google had been less than useful to him and it wasn't as if he could just go and ask for help. It wasn't an option since this was supposed to be a new challenge for everyone within your group.

With the new project, you and Taehyung were working on all eight of you were set into subunits and given the challenge of creating your own works. Fully produced, recorded and filmed by those who were in your unit. The only outside help that you were allowed to get was from specific staff members who were only allowed to give hints or little tips. It had been harder on you and Taehyung since neither of you had any prior knowledge of editing a track together.

"Fuck!" Taehyung bellowed out as he stared at the screen, whenever he would try and move a certain track to overlay with his it would only give him the same prompt.

"This action cannot be completed" Without any information as to why the stupid computer wasn't going to let him perform what he needed to do. The message made him want to punch the laptop or throw it out of the top floor window at the very least.

Taehyung didn't want to be this stressed, he never got this upset over his work but the song was supposed to have been finished last week and yet it wasn't. The two of you were still working till the early hours of the morning trying to make sure that the tracks and sound were perfect for the album.

From rerecording to deleting and starting all over again the two of you were behind and it was getting more and more obvious that you couldn't buy more time.

The rest of your members were starting to get impatient with waiting for the two of you to finish and bring the song to them. Jungkook even told you both you should have been disqualified from the challenge but it hadn't worked. Jin allowed you to get some more time and you had another week's extension...Which was soon to be up.

"Hey, I bought coffee and I even cheated a little," You admitted as you walked into the dark studio. The only thing that appeared to be lighting up the room was the laptop that Taehyung was currently staring at. Your stomach sank seeing your boyfriend looking so defeated by something but you hoped what you'd learnt from a friend was going to help you both today. A deep sigh left your throat as Taehyung clearly hadn't heard what you said, you set down the cups of coffee in front of him and searched for a chair.

"Here, move over." You whispered as you began pushing a chair between you both and sitting down in front of the laptop. Taehyung had been so stressed he'd forgotten he'd even called you at 2 am and woke you up, begging for you to come and help him with all of this. He hadn't even meant to stay this late, he just wanted a little time to work on the track while he had it.

"Babe, I didn't mean to wake you up. I was-"

"Shh, we're a team. If I'd known you were working late I would have stayed to help," You glanced in his direction and he could have sworn he felt his chest flutter from the look in your eyes. You looked exhausted and he felt guilty that he'd even dragged you out of bed and all the way down here. You knew that now was a better time than any to let him know about the cheating you had been doing regarding the work.

"I cheated a little, I got advice from a friend." You told him as you began to click away at the computer, bringing up a completely new and blank workspace where you began to edit some of the work.

"Who did you get help from?" Taehyung had to laugh a little, who would have helped you? As far as he knew everyone knew that you weren't allowed help. Your eyes stared at the screen and he smiled in amusement as a frown began to embed itself on your forehead. It was something that always happened to you whenever you were in deep concentration and he couldn't help but find it adorable.

"Chan," You whispered even if no one was around to listen to you. The truth was you had gone to Chan in a last-ditch attempt and made sure that the project was done on time. He'd told you that the two of you should have gone for an easier concept since you needed to sing, producer and create - then edit - an entire music video together.

"Will he-"

"Keep it a secret? Trust me, I have that man under lock and key," You teased kissing your boyfriend on the cheek and chuckling as his face began to flush bringing his cup up to his lips and drinking.

The two of you had been together - secretly - for about six months now and your relationship was moving slowly. You both wanted to take things slow since you'd worked with one another for so long, you didn't want to risk damaging the good friendship that you had,

"Should I be jealous that you have a man that will keep your secrets?" He was only half-joking, Taehyung was a little worried that you would find interest in someone else. Someone you didn't have to hide or take things slow with but at the same time he knew and trusted that you were never going to hurt him. Just as he was never going to hurt you.

"No, never. Chan is like a brother," You promised him as if you could tell he was still nervous at the thought of it. Leaning across you quickly kissed his lips softly, humming a little at the feeling of him against you.

There was still a hint of stress behind Taehyung and you bit down on your lip, you had to do something to help him relax a little. You hated seeing him like this, so pent up with stress and anger that he looked fed up with everything around him,

"How about we take a break? Just for a little while?" Your voice dropped a little as you ran your fingers over his chest trying to channel your inner seducer as you looked at him. Taehyung's nostrils flared a little as a deep rumble sounded deep in his chest. His breathing began to grow deeper as you travelled your hand down to his pants, stroking him softly as he grunted a little,

"Babe..." He breathed out heavily, "You're playing with fire." He told you as he looked at you. It wasn't as if the two of you hadn't touched one another before but that was as far as it went for either of you. Grinding up against one another fully clothed or only ever touching each other through your clothes. This time you wanted to do something for him, something that would help him unwind.

"I want to relieve your stress. Sit back and relax," You told him as you slid down from the chair, setting yourself down in front of him as you smiled up at him,

"Shit," He breathed out watching you as you brought your hand up to the waistband of his pants, slowly undoing the buttons and smirking. You could already feel the heat of his cock as you took him out from his pants, gliding your thumb over the slick slit as he let out a strangled moan.

Truth be told, this would be the first time you would give him oral and you were more than ready for him. Your mouth practically watered at the sight of his cock in your hand, you'd dreamt of this moment a lot...Not that you would ever tell Taehyung that.

"Yn...You don't...Not if you're not ready," Taehyung could barely string his thoughts together enough to form a coherent sentence and you smirked to yourself. It was as if it gave you a boost of confidence hearing how undone your boyfriend had become when you'd barely even touched him yet.

"Relax," You whispered with the utmost confidence despite the fact that your heart was racing faster than a stampede of cheetahs but you wanted this. A bead of arousal leaks from the tip of his red cock and you lost all sense of yourself as you licked him from the base of his cock all the way to the tip.

Gliding your tongue over the pearly white drop that was already leaking from him and Taehyung whimpered, his grip on the edge of the table tightening as he looked down at you.

"T-This is better than-" He swallowed the lump in his throat as he stared down at you, "Than anything I could have imagined," Your heart soared as you stared up at him, he'd imagined this before?

"Think of this often?" You teased, feeling your entire body burning at the thought of him having dirty thoughts about you.

"All of the time," He showed a little regret in his tone, Taehyung didn't want you to think that this was all about sex for him. There was so much deeper meaning behind you being together,

You parted your lips wide for his cock, there was no way you were going to be able to fit all of him in but you did your best. Letting him in the back of your throat as you gagged around him. It didn't stop you from moving your head through your hands gripping onto his thighs to steady yourself as you alternated between sucking and tracing his dick with your tongue.

"Yn," He rolled his head back against the headrest of the chair as he moaned out your name. You were thankful each of the studios had soundproof walls. The last thing you needed was for someone to hear him moaning your name out like this and to ask questions about it. Things needed to stay hush for a little while longer, just until you were both sure it was the real deal.

"O-Oh fuck," Taehyugn's head snapped down to look at you as you took one of his balls into your hand causing his hips to buck up. You held back a gag as you stared up at him, you felt powerful like this. Holding his cock in your mouth as you watched him lose himself in the pleasure of your touch.

"You're so fucking good," He grunted looking down at you with darker eyes.

"Taking me so well." He praised as he ran his hand along your cheek, your insides clenched as you continued to suck on him. Taking your hand away from his balls and stroking the rest of his cock that couldn't fit into your mouth. The saltness of his precum only drove your determination to please him deeper.

"Just like that. Fuck, Yn." He looked at you and you hummed around him,

"Are you going to swallow every drop I give to you?" You had no idea where this side of Taehyung was coming from but you had to say you enjoyed it. The praise only made your mouth move quicker around him. Dragging your tongue along the underside of his cock where he was most sensitive, you paid more attention to it as he choked out your name.

Grunts and groans fell from his lips as he began to rock his hips against your mouth but you allowed him to fuck your mouth. Smirking as he let out deep guttural moans as his cock throbbed against your tongue. Cum spurted from the tip of his cock hitting the back of your throat and you whimpered tasting him. It was hot, salty and a little bitter but you pulled away from him. Parting your lips to show him that it was him that coated your tongue before swallowing every last drop that you had in your mouth.

After clearing yourself up you and Taehyung sat on the sofa within the studio, your head was resting against his shoulder as he smiled happily at you.

"Thank you," He whispered a little, breaking the silence that was between you. It wasn't as though he needed to thank you for what had happened but he wanted to. It had been such an intimate step for the two of you and he was going to make it up to you however he could.

"Tae, you don't need to thank me...Do you feel less stressed?" He thought about it for a couple of seconds before nodding his head. Your smile beamed from ear to ear as you stared at him,

"Good, give me five minutes of extra rest and I'll help out with the track." Your promise, leaning up and kissing his burning cheek.

The track had been produced to perfection and the video was filmed perfectly after Taehyung's stress relief and the two of you were excited with ARMY's reaction to the video when it would drop. Everything had gone perfectly and Taehyung and your relationship had grown stronger.

Tagline: @lyoongx @mitzwinchester @rjsmochii @taestannie @sw33tnight @sweeneyblue1 @jin-from-the-block @acciocriativity @mwitsmejk @taeechwitaa @justbangtanthingz @stillwithlix @kookiekuu @lolalee24 @hopeworldd-2 @totallynoanalien @yubinism @ethereallino @heyjiminnie @aerastus @tinyoonsblog @cherrybubblesandvodka @kimahnjung98 @halesandy

#bts #bts x reader #bts imagines #bts imagine #bts smut #kim taehyung #taehyung #taehyung x reader #taehyung imagine #taehyung imagines #taehyung smut #kim taehyung x reader #kim taehyung imagine #kim taehyung imagines #kim taehyung smut

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ichayalovesyou · 3 years

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THE BIG VULCAN BIOLOGY POST (aka Vulcan is a Hell Planet)

DISCLAIMER: I am not a biologist, astrophysicist, neurologist, animal psychologist or literally anything that would qualify me to talk about this with 100% confidence. This is the result of dozens of headcanons and obsessive deep dive research. I don’t want this post to be three miles long, so after I address the planetary stuff I will oblige y’all with a Read More.

Adsfasdkfjhaslkdfh I’ve been working on this post for almost a month SO HERE WE GO!

First of all, Vulcan (aka T’Khasi) is a HELL PLANET, which is part of the reason they’re so badass, I say this for the following reasons:

No moon(s) (natural satellites)

Sodium (Salt) is so rare on the planet that Vulcan’s oceans are freshwater

It’s a “Super-Earth” (as in big chonkin’ planet of similar composition to earth in the “goldilocks region”)

Let’s do this.

“Vulcan has no moon Ms. Uhura.”

-Spock, The Man Trap

Tons of things change about our planet if there was no moon:

Much darker nights (no moonlight)

Much lower sea levels since there is no gravity from the moon to pull it upward.

Lower and weaker tides because the water is pulled by the sun instead of the moon, and it depends on how large the Vulcan solar system’s sun is for how big the waves are.

Stronger winds from faster planet rotation.

Depending on whether the axis of the planet would straighten or tilt further without the moon’s pull, combined with the faster rotation would lead to more severe seasons (strong tilt) or no seasons at all (no tilt)

The first factor may lead to Vulcan eyes being very catlike even if they aren’t nocturnal (I think they’re crepesucular but we’ll get into that later). Which given the likely nature of their blood and their herbivorous eating habits they probably aren’t. The sky would still be so dark that our human eyes couldn’t even see our hands in front of us, being blind when the sun goes down could be a death sentence. Alternatively, if they didn’t develop strong night vision that may be one of the reasons why they have such strong senses of hearing.

The stronger winds, faster rotation, and stronger (or nonexistent) seasons come from the lack of resistance and friction that stronger tides and the moon’s pull create on our planet. I suspect that Vulcan is larger, or at least denser than Earth, but I’ve been informed that according to the TMP novelization that it does rotate faster. I also think that Vulcan’s tilt is on the more extreme end to get the hostile extremes like storms and heat that we see on Vulcan.

If you look at this image of Vulcan, water covers way less of the planet’s surface than Earth. I don’t think this is necessarily because Vulcan has less water, but that it isn’t spread as far because of the lack of moon, and the fact that the oceans are freshwater, I’ll get into that shortly.

“My ancestors spawned from a different ocean than yours.”

-Spock, The Man Trap

In the Star Trek: The Original Series (third) pilot The Man Trap, there is a creature that kills its victims by draining their bodies completely of salt. Spock encounters the creature but does not die, implying his (and Vulcans overall) body contains little to no salt. His justification is that his species did not evolve from a salinized ocean.

What does it mean to have oceans with no salt?

This has to mean that sodium is a very rare mineral on Vulcan, as the reason our oceans are so salinized is due to erosion of minerals by rainfall, carried from river to ocean. Salt in the ocean is also generated by submarine volcanic activity, which means either that the volcanoes on Vulcan (which we definitely know exist) somehow don’t produce salt, or the vast majority of the submarine volcanoes have been inactive for millions if not billions of years. The active volcanoes on Vulcan must be very far inland and/or Vulcan has almost no rivers, which given how hot the planet is, wouldn’t actually be too much of a stretch of the imagination.

Which means every single lifeform on T’Khasi, including Vulcans, evolved biosystems that exist without (or with very little) salt content. Any salt that exists would likely be deep beneath the planet’s surface, and within volcanoes.

No saltwater has a ton of consequences:

Plants (like underwater algae) are rarer and may not photosynthesize the same way Earth plants do, meaning less oxygen and more carbon dioxide, which means more greenhouse effect, which means higher temperatures.

The lack of salt would also mean less diverse plant life (at least as humans know it) and given the lack of visible rivers and vast swaths of desert on Vulcan, we can safely say vegetation must be hardier and infrequent.

Lower sea levels as the oceans would have lower density due to lack of salt.

Little to no water convection, which salt is crucial for on Earth. Which means warm ocean water doesn’t move to cold regions and vice versa. Creating extremes, the equator being obscenely hot, and polar waters freezing at the poles more extensively.

Lack of convection means more frequent and stronger storms like hurricanes.

If you thought the lack of a moon made Vulcan inhospitable, compound it with the low sodium factor and you’ve got a planet of even more severe extremes than before. The heat, and the decrease of plant diversity definitely explain why the vast majority of Vulcan is rocky desert, even being near the water poses more extreme dangers than it would on earth due to the increased frequency of hurricanes.

“Mr. Spock is much stronger than an ordinary human being.”

-Kirk, This Side of Paradise

I am almost 100% sure that Vulcan is either bigger or denser than Earth. Which would explain why Vulcans are so much stronger than Humans and other species that exist on similar gravity worlds.

Effects of a high-gravity planet or “Super-Earth” include:

Everything is shorter or has very strong foundations, plants, animals, structures, and people.

More “Armageddon” class asteroids would hit the planet (like the one that killed the dinosaurs and created the Gulf of Mexico)

Larger liquid mantle under the planet’s surface, higher pressure under the surface as well.

Weaker magnetic field due to lack of convection in the planet’s core (not to be confused with the mantle interacting with the planet’s crust). Which means a weaker atmosphere, lower magnetism in surface metals, and increased vulnerability to solar flares.

More volcanically and seismically active due the the increase in the mantle’s size and generated heat, more earthquakes, and more volcanic eruptions.

Would have to have a smaller sun but be closer in orbit to it than earth.

Extremely deep oceans, potentially with water under so much pressure at the bottom that it becomes solid like ice. Luckily Vulcan is not an ocean world, because the pressure would block the planet’s core from interacting with the atmosphere, which would prevent life as we know it from happening.

There is plenty of evidence for this on so many levels. We never see any plant life similar to trees on Vulcan. Nor animals significantly larger than Vulcans, the ones that are bigger are much more muscular. Vulcan’s sky is more red than blue because of the lack of oxygen molecules for the light from the sun to filter as blue. I actually headcanon that Spock is unusually tall for a Vulcan because of his human heritage (Leonard Nimoy was around 6ft tall) , and may have had heart and muscle problems in his teens and early adulthood while on Vulcan.

Perhaps Vulcans are the result of many more extinction level events than we are, contributing to their hardiness. Perhaps they are, evolutionarily, not too much older than we are, and had more incentive to develop extraterrestrial technology than we have, so that they could repel Armageddon Class meteors and defend their planet against Solar Flares? Space travel being born out of self-preservation rather than curiosity. Which would absolutely account for their attitudes in the beginning of Star Trek: Enterprise.

It could be that Vulcans still maintain a semi-nomadic lifestyle even today because their planet is so incredibly volatile. Unsentimental and utilitarian in anything less than the most sacred of architecture long before they adopted the teachings of Surak. Their own survival more valuable than any structure that would inevitably be damaged or destroyed by their planet’s harsh environment.

In summary, Vulcan is a Nightmare Planet because:

So, so many much natural disasters, like, so many, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, twisters, just, so many more than Earth.

Water is relegated to specific locations in the world rather than spread across it due to lack of flow and lower sea levels.

Extreme temperature changes, intense heat, intense cold, hard to breathe, stronger gravity.

Due to the planet’s hostility, there is a smaller diversity of life than we have here on earth, which means fewer and hardier food sources that, like Vulcans, are very difficult to kill.

So… How do they handle it? What features have they developed to adapt and thrive in such an inhospitable place?

First thing is first, lets talk about

BLOOD

“My hemoglobin is based on copper, not iron.”

-Spock, Obsession

Funny thing is Spock, it’s not hemoglobin at all! It’s hemocyanin! In fact, there are earth animals that have it, among them Horseshoe Crabs, crustaceans, mollusks and spiders!

Hemocyanin is blue when it hasn’t been exposed to oxygen, and blue-green when it has, according to some sources on Vulcans their blood is orangey red when unexposed to air and that’s why they have pink lips and so on, but we can brush that off as chemical variation within their hemocyanin. Better yet, maybe it’s trendy for Vulcans to wear pink lipstick nowadays, ‘cause Surak knows how horny Humans and Vulcans are for each other XD! Anyway!

Hemocyanin does quite a few things that our blood can’t, it’s uniquely built for high pressure, low oxygen environments, as well as endure temperature extremes like cold (not unlike nights on their planet). Not only that, but it coagulates and clots WAY faster than our blood. Which means wounds seal themselves off from harmful bacteria and stop bleeding much faster than hemoglobin. Pair that with the Vulcan ability to enter a healing torpor, no wonder Spock keeps surviving environments and wounds that would definitely have killed a human.

Now, the animals I listed don’t have veins, which for us carry oxygen around via hemoglobin, so it’s possible that the same difference that causes Vulcan blood to be a coppery orange-red beneath the skin, is the same reason they have veins. Allowing them to look more like us and lack the exoskeletons and deep ocean delving that their earth blood cousins have.

“The ship’s temperature is increasingly uncomfortable for me. I’ve adjusted the environment in my quarters to 125 degrees.”

-(Elderly) Spock, The Deadly Years

Oh goodie, the Vulcan blood temperature discourse has arrived, the age old question, are Vulcans warm-blooded or cold-blooded? The answer to this question is

YES

I am firmly in the small (but hopefully growing) camp Vulcans Are Heterothermic. Among the earth animals we know to be heterothermic are bumblebees, several species of bats, the opah fish, and the arctic ground squirrel. Of all these animals, despite the opposite temperature intensity of Vulcan’s environment, I’m basing how Vulcans function on the last one, the arctic squirrel.

Which means they can deliberately control their body temperature in accordance to the needs of their survival. I imagine, just as arctic ground squirrels can drop their body below zero as needed (entering what is called a “daily torpor”) Vulcans can do the same. In turn, they could possibly skyrocket their bodies to temperatures that would be a lethal fever for humans. Which makes both McCoy’s “nonexistent Vulcan metabolism” comments in various episodes, as well as describing his blood as “ice water” make sense. As well as Spock being able to handle the heightened body temperature caused by Henoch in “Return to Tomorrow”. It also explains why Spock was in far better shape than Bones in the freezing temperatures of the planet from “All Our Yesterdays”.

However, like arctic squirrel newborns, they start out as ectothermic (cold-blooded) which lends itself to the Vulcan infants needing even more skin to skin to survive than humans theory by @acesexualspock. Being born cold blooded would prevent them from immediately dying the second they were exposed to the dangerous extremes of Vulcan’s heat. I also think they slowly lose the ability to control their metabolic rate as they grow older, slowing down dramatically as they age, which is why Spock gets increasingly colder as he ages rapidly in “The Deadly Years”.

“The brightness of the Vulcan sun has caused the development of an inner eyelid.”

-Spock, Operation: Annihilate

I wanna thank @tribbleland for inspiring this part in particular.

I want to offer a special congratulations to furries people who let their love for anthro-cats bleed into their love for Vulcans, turns out Vulcans are very catlike! Like our feline Terran friends, Vulcans have what is called a Nicitating Membrane. It’s functions that would serve Vulcans well in their desert home include spreading moisture across the eye, protect the eye from small water and small debris (like sand for example), as well as protecting the eye from ultraviolet radiation, which is more or less what Spock said in that episode. Other animals that have Nicitating Membranes aside from felines is actually the majority of the animal kingdom, and primates (like us) are the exception and not the rule. I also subscribe to the idea that Vulcans have other desert dweller features like thick hair and eyelashes, sealable nostrils, big feet, a crepuscular sleep cycle (avoiding extreme midnight and midday temperatures), and a tough as nails digestive system!

As an added bonus fact since this section is pretty short: It makes purrfect sense for Vulcans to purr! In cats purring is an emotional regulator when they are angry or scared (Vulcans are ALL about regulating their emotions) as well as purring when they are happy. It is also a mechanism for healing themselves, their kittens, and their owners, the frequency at which cats purr (25-140 Hz) cover the same frequencies that are therapeutic for bone growth and fracture healing, pain relief, swelling reduction, wound healing, muscle growth and repair, tendon repair, and mobility of joints. I’m over here getting emotional about the mental image of like, Spock or Tuvok or smth sitting next to a wounded crewmember and just like, purring with a completely straight face and that is soft and just a little funny and I am emotionally compromised.

“And are it’s natives predatory?” “Not generally, but there have been exceptions.”

-Spock to Trelaine, The Squire of Gothos

Surprise! This isn’t just going to be about Vulcan dietary needs, it’s gonna be about animal behaviors and self-domestication as well! I was trying to think of herbivores that are capable of eating meat, and then this idea hit me like a bomb going of in my head-

Vulcans are like Hippos!

I don’t mean I think they used to be hippo-like (visually anyway) somewhere along the evolutionary line. I mean that they were probably big, extremely aggressive, pack roaming herbivores that are able to eat carrion when food is scarce. Have you ever seen a video of a group of Hippos smashing an alligator to smithereens? They kill more humans than any solitary predator on the African continent! What about a murder of crows killing a cat that injured one of them, or a group of bison saving a calf from a lion?! Herbivores can be insanely aggressive while still being social, plant-eating animals.

With that in mind, let’s talk about self-domestication! This is something that we humans (and to an extent, cats too) did way back in our biology according to some studies, we bred out aggression and bred in cooperativeness and curiosity. Cats, while partially domesticated by us, started looking for mates that were more sociable so that their offspring could exist closer to humans (and their food) as well as to tolerate other cats. While I do think Vulcans self-domesticated to a degree, I do not think they were able to do so nearly to the same extent as humans or our deliberately domesticated companions. Vulcan is a harsh, violent, and unforgiving planet, even more so than Earth, if Vulcans were naturally as friendly and curious as we Humans are now, they would not have survived as a species.

I believe this is why their emotions are so primal and strong, and things like Pon Farr and their unusually high wariness of the new and unexpected still exist so strongly. How do they live together in such high numbers and develop a functional society? They developed other means of coping as a work-around the impracticality of decreasing aggression!

“Call it a deep understanding of the way things happen to Vulcans.”

-Spock, The Immunity Syndrome

So, how do you have a species as aggressive, unforgiving, and frighteningly strong as Vulcans keep from completely destroying itself (aside from Surak’s teachings)? You take the empathy that humans already have, turn it up to 11, and tack on every evolutionary possibility to increase it. We already know how the Earth comparisons for Vulcan empathy: the extreme vitality of touch for the survival and emotional stability, cats purring to heal each other and themselves (and regulate emotions), nonverbal communication, the ancestral instincts of an infant animal being able to walk days after its born. What if we had all of these traits in remarkable spades, Vulcans certainly seem to! (Be prepared, the science starts getting a little squidgy because there are no real world comparisons and neurology research is very jargon heavy)

Electricity is a fundamental part of the biology of nearly all living things, it allows synapses to fire, regulates our internal organs, and gives us our senses of touch and movement. Skin to skin is so incredibly vital to the survival of infants, and the emotional stability for adults, that needing any more touch could be impractical and counterintuitive. So what if we got more from less? What if our sense of touch, and the acuteness of being able to read the emotions of others from body language and touch manifested as a form of what looks like from an outsider’s perspective, telepathy!

Now what if the radius of the sensation of touch could be extended much farther, say being able to sense someone to the same intensity I described in the last paragraph, like, through a wall or from across a room? What if you could connect to other lifeforms with the same ability like a chain circuit that could connect a whole species together in one giant circuitboard? I just described what Vulcans call the kwar’ma’khon, the telepathic energy that connects all Vulcans to each other!

Imagine having this same intense telepathic connection to someone for an extended period of time, like a t’hy’la or Bond Mate. What if you had a relatively easy to master non-lethal attack against other members of your species, that comes to you easily due to your intrinsic understanding of nerves and touch, like the Vulcan Nerve Pinch. In turn, what if, through the intensity of this connection you could transfer everything you knew and saw and felt to another person in the event of your death. That way, if you survived the harshness of your world without dying violently or unexpectedly, you could deliberately pass on that knowledge and those instincts to your next of kin, like the Katra. (thanks @distractedducky @spacedancer1701 & @find-me-in-outer-space)

Now, that’s A LOT of empathy on top of A LOT of aggression, if you don’t have a work around for any of these, as a species you’d be rendered a complete emotional wreck pretty much 24/7 (or whatever the time cycles for Vulcan are). Which is where @ineffablebuddies theory that Vulcans can control, or at least mitigate their incredibly strong emotional reactions the same way they control their nervous system and metabolic rate. Which is how they are able to be touch telepathic, able to enter a torpor at will, and be heterothermic in the first place. The only reason Vulcans come off as unemotional to us is because we simply do not see and feel the way that they can. Unlike us, because of their ability to control their own internal chemistry, if they follow Surak’s teachings and/or Syrranite ideology, they can take that emotional regulation to the extreme.

(BIG EXHALE) Congratulations on getting through this insanely long post! I hope you enjoyed it, if you want sources on any of my non-tumblr post research just let me know in the notes. LLAP! 💚🖖🏻💚

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babyboibucky · 3 years

Text

The Match - Part 9

Pairing: CEO!Bucky x Fem!Reader

Summary: Bucky brings you and Mackenzie with him to an important meeting.

Word Count: 3.3k

Warnings: Uhhhh hmm work tension, sexual tension, idk Bucky and Mackenzie being annoying as usual lmao

A/N: ALSO I know I haven’t mentioned what the fuck Bucky’s company is all about because c’mon, I didn’t expect I’d get this far lmao so IDK there might be continuity issues or inaccuracies or whatevah, just ignore it lmao it’s fiction. ANYWAAAY, I just want to say how GRATEFUL AND OVERWHELMED I am with the amount of attention that this series is getting. I appreciate every feedback, every ask and every freaking debate about this shit lmfao. I love you guys. I can’t put into words how much I appreciate you all askcnasjkcnak bye

The Match Masterlist || MAIN MASTERLIST

Don't let Bucky or Mackenzie get to you.

Mark's advice rang in your ears like a chant as you watched Bucky and Mackenzie's exchange about the project. Joining them in the conference room for a major brainstorming session was you and a couple of people from your team with Beverly taking down the minutes of the meeting.

The upcoming project was a huge one, given that Barnes Group of Companies was a huge name in the automobile industry. Meanwhile, Wilson Enterprises is one of the biggest autonomous vehicle technology companies out there. This partnership was one for the books, possibly an industry changer too.

You wanted to be a part of it, wanted to spearhead the entire thing and watching Mackenzie take the reigns on this one was truly making your blood boil.

"That sounds like a nice idea, Kenzie." Bucky praised, nodding his head.

Mackenzie shrugged, "It's what I do, Buck." she said.

"Yeah, it's a great idea. I do have some comments though, if you don't mind?" you asked.

Bucky and Mackenzie exchanged glances before turning to you. You glanced at Bucky for a quick second before ignoring the way he was eyeing you with genuine interest.

"I know that bringing in a celebrity to endorse this brand new model would definitely create noise around the partnership. Although I think that would take the spotlight away from the actual product we're creating here. We want customers to focus on the brand new car model and the technology that Wilson Enterprises will be providing it with, not on the celebrity endorser." you explained.

Mackenzie hummed, "I get where you are coming from. That's a good point, actually. But a celebrity endorser will pretty much do everything for the brand. Have him up on billboards and different advertisements and you're all set." she further explained.

You chuckled, "But then how will people understand what the entire partnership is all about? Aren't we supposed to be communicating a certain message to our consumers? Wouldn't it be better to hold an event to launch the product instead? Invite the press and key opinion leaders to spread the word. Have Bucky and Mister Wilson talk about this partnership. They're famous and powerful enough to get the message across. Why waste the budget on a celebrity when we literally have everything we need to make noise?" you shrugged.

The entire room was silent after your feedback, even Mackenzie wasn't able to respond to your suggestion. Glancing over at Bucky, you saw that he was giving you the look-- the one with half-lidded eyes matched with a head tilt, the one that often resulted to him giving you a very nice reward once office hours are over.

Feeling your breath hitch in your throat, you quickly looked away and shrugged your shoulders, "I mean, that's just my two cents. Having worked here for years, I just based it on my experience. You're the expert here, Mackenzie." you offered a proud smile.

Mackenzie tried to brush it off and turned to Bucky, "What do you think, Buck? I'm still into the idea of hiring a celebrity. That's good publicity. And let's not get worried about the budget now," she said, placing a hand on top of Bucky's that was resting on the table, "I have a lot of connections so I can definitely get an endorser for a much lower rate." she reassured.

"We may have a huge budget for this, but that doesn't automatically mean that we have to use it all up. We can allocate it somewhere else, maybe start a CSR campaign as well? We are, after all, coming out with an environmental-friendly model." you suggested.

You heard Bucky when he took a sharp inhale, bringing his hands up to rub his lips as if in deep thought. He then turned to Beverly, however, his eyes remained on you.

"Take note of everything she says." he reminded her before standing up.

He asked everyone else in the room of their opinions, whether it was your or Mackenzie's idea that the company will go for. The team was divided in half, some of them preferring Mackenzie's celebrity pitch probably because they didn't want to do a lot of work.

Bucky nodded, "Well, I guess we'll have to discuss both ideas with my partner Sam and let's see where we will go from there. I have a meeting with him this afternoon, I need you and Kenzie with me there." he said, looking at your before turning to Kenzie with a charming smile.

Don't let them get to you.

You've never wanted for the ground to swallow you up until this moment as you stood behind Bucky and Mackenzie in the elevator. This felt so much more uncomfortable than when you shared it with Bucky after swiping right with him on Tinder. There was still tension and it felt so much worse now because you didn't know whether it was between you and Bucky or him and Mackenzie.

Fucking Mackenzie and her nicely manicured nails which always seemed find its way around Bucky's arm. You eyed her hands as they squeezed his arm, the both of them talking in hushed voices as if you weren't standing behind them.

"I've been dying to try this restaurant, I heard they serve good food. Do you want to go have dinner there sometime this week?" she asked Bucky.

"I'll check my schedule, which restaurant is this?" he asked.

When Mackenzie uttered the name of that restaurant where you celebrated your promotion, you and Bucky choked on your own spits at the same time. Warmth crept up to your cheeks at the same time Bucky's ears reddened.

"Oh, what's going on?" Mackenzie asked with a nervous chuckle as she looked at you and Bucky, struggling with your coughs.

You recovered first and shook your head, "Sorry, I get allergies. Anyway, I've been to that restaurant. They do serve good food, the staff was very hospitable as well. I'm sure Bucky would enjoy it there." you said with a smile, pushing your way past them when the elevators door slid open.

Mackenzie asking Bucky whether he was up for dinner was the last thing you heard. Good luck explaining to her why he's banned from there, you thought to yourself.

Bucky led the way to his car and it instantly brought certain memories back. You weren't going to lie, you missed the fucking and how Bucky always made sure to take care of your needs. Seeing his car was enough to make your thighs clench at the memory of him fingering you as he drove.

His gaze was on you when he opened the door to the passenger's seat, his eyes inviting as you approached him. And just as when you were about to slip in, he turned over to Mackenzie and gestured for her to get in.

What a fucking asshole, you thought to yourself as you took a step back to ride in the back instead. You tried to keep your expression stoic when you saw that Bucky checked for a reaction. He seemed perplexed when he saw that you didn't react that much to what he did.

One hundred points to Gryffindor.

The location for the meeting was at a nearby restaurant so you didn't suffer that much during the entire ride. Mackenzie was busy with her phone anyway, typing out messages with those manicured fingers you were beginning to hate.

By the time all three of you arrived, Sam was already there. He donned a navy blue suit and he was rocking it. You'd seen his photos on the internet and knew that he was good-looking, but seeing him in the flesh, you were stunned at how gorgeous he was. Sam stood up when he saw Bucky, offering a kind smile to you and Mackenzie.

You weren't sure whether you were just being assuming or what, but you noticed how his eyes lingered on you longer that it did with Mackenzie.

"Sam." Bucky greeted, shaking his hand before introducing you and Mackenzie.

Sam shook Mackenzie's hand first before he turned to you. You took his hand and introduced yourself, "Mister Wilson." you said.

"Please, just Sam." he told you as he gently squeezed your hand before letting go.

"Have a seat." Sam said to Bucky and Mackenzie before pulling out the chair next to him, motioning for you to sit down.

You thanked him and sat down; straightening up, you were met with Bucky's watchful gaze as he sat down across you. Your attention was taken away when Sam asked what you wanted to order, he even suggested a certain dish and immediately went to discuss that it was his favorite thing to order.

This was going to be an interesting meeting.

And interesting it truly was, because you didn't expect for Sam to be so laid-back and easy to communicate with. He wasn't one of those uptight CEOs who were very intimidating to work with. Simply put, he was the complete opposite of Bucky. While Bucky was ice cold, Sam was sunshine and warmth with his attitude.

When it came down to pitching your and Mackenzie's ideas to him, you suddenly got nervous. Sam wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth; from what you've read, he started off working regular jobs before he climbed his way to the top. He was a self-made man and he had extensive knowledge in the marketing industry, having a doctorate degree in the said area.

Mackenzie was the first to discuss her strategy about hiring a celebrity endorser. She said it was fast and straight to the point. When it was your turn, you started off a bit shaky but eventually found your pacing.

"We wanted to ask you how this should go on about. I know that the offer for a partnership came from our end and that we're supposed to pitch the details for it. But we wanted you to be involved in this as much as we are." Bucky further explained.

Sam nodded and let out an amused chuckle, "I really appreciate this, Buck. I was going to ask you if I can contribute with the planning as well. I'm very particular when it comes to marketing our products." he said.

"That being said, I loved both ideas. I think hiring a celebrity endorser is good." he said, making Mackenzie smile proudly.

"But I would rather hold an event to launch the product. You understand the product and what we want to do with it. It's not just a brand new car, it's an innovation and the messaging is very important. I'm very impressed." Sam said, his attention geared towards you.

"Wow, I'm honored." you laughed. "Coming from you, I mean I've read about the marketing studies you did. Pretty big deal to receive a compliment from you." you admitted.

It was meant to be a genuine reaction, really. You had no ill intentions for it, you didn't do it to make Bucky jealous or get the upper hand. However, your passion for your career and area of expertise seemed to favor you. It had Bucky on edge, seeing you and Sam get along so well.

You didn't even need to check for Bucky's reaction because he simply cleared his throat and excused himself to go to the restroom. Mackenzie seemed unbothered though, when Sam favored your pitch over hers. You couldn't read her, sometimes she'd come off competitive but right now, she was unaffected.

When Bucky got back, he was quick to finalize the meeting, "I guess it's a done deal then. We'll work on the details of the launch and maybe we can set another meeting for the major presentation for your approval?" he asked Sam.

"That sounds like a plan. I'm looking forward to working with you." Sam told everyone, although he did seem to be directly addressing you.

"Alright, I'm leaving too." Mackenzie announced after Sam left the restaurant.

"Oh, you're not heading back to the office with us?" Bucky asked.

Mackenzie shook her head, throwing her bag over her shoulder, "I have another meeting. You know how it is with freelance work." she said as all three of you stood up to head outside of the restaurant.

"My Uber's here, I guess I'll see you both sometime this week." she said and waved at you before turning to Bucky and pressing a kiss on his cheek.

"I'm counting on that dinner, okay?" she reminded before slipping into her Uber, leaving you and Bucky to head back to the office together.

Alone with Bucky. In his car. The exact same car where plenty of fucking happened. Again, you chanted Mark’s advice in your head over and over again.

Don’t let Bucky get to you. And most of all, don’t cave in.

You quickly slipped inside the front seat of Bucky’s car before he could even open it up for you. The air was thick between you and Bucky and it almost felt like it was suffocating you. Reaching for the seatbelt, you tugged at it but it wouldn’t budge. Cursing to yourself, you tried again but to no avail.

“What’s wrong?” Bucky asked.

“Nothing. Seatbelt’s just stuck.” you grunted, using both your hands to pull down at it.

“Here, let me.”

Suddenly, Bucky reached over to your seatbelt and tried to fix it. His face was inches away from yours and you literally felt your insides jump at how you were immediately drowned in his perfume. If you moved forward so much as half an inch, your lips would already be pressing against the corner of Bucky’s mouth. And that thought was sending your senses into overdrive.

Do not. Cave. In.

The loud click of the seatbelt made you relax and thank goodness that Bucky was quick to move away from you, fixing his suit before starting the engine. The office may just be nearby but the fact that you and Bucky were together was making it feel like it was going to be an hour-long drive.

“So what do you think about Sam?” Bucky asked out of the blue.

He was gauging you, trying to get a reaction from you. Maybe he was expecting you to be flirty with your response, or be defensive even? You weren’t going to give him that.

“I think he’s great. Like I said, I’ve read his marketing studies and they were very insightful. I learned a lot.”

Plain, simple and safe. There was no hidden meanings and no malice; you were doing great at this whole not letting Bucky get to you thing. You made a mental note to thank Mark for his advice.

“He seems interested in you.” Bucky said again, shrugging his shoulders a bit and trying to be as nonchalant as he could.

“Well we are in the same field of expertise and I was very straightforward about admiring his skills. I’d be disappointed if he brushed off my ideas.” you slightly chuckled.

“I liked Mackenzie’s idea better, honestly.” Bucky blurted out.

By this time, you had Bucky’s plans figured out. He was coming for your job, using it as a bait to get a reaction out from you. He knew how much your career meant for you, how competitive you were in your field. Whenever his other tactics wouldn’t work, he’d always go for the career aspect.

“It was good.” you agreed, turning to Bucky with a small smile. “I think we can do that for other campaigns. Just not with this partnership. I like her.” you said.

“You do?” Bucky asked in surprise before he cleared his throat upon realizing that he sort of broke his facade.

You shrugged, “She’s a headstrong woman. She reminds me of myself actually.”

If you were alone, you would have given yourself a high-five because that statement truly made Bucky think. His forehead creased as he drove, his hand rubbing his chin and his jaw clenching as if he was in deep thought.

It was silent inside the car for a brief moment, before it was interrupted by the trilling of Bucky’s phone. He fished it out of his pocket but before he could even answer it, it slipped out of his hand and disappeared beneath his seat.

“Fuck.” Bucky cursed, both his hands on the steering wheel as he continued to drive, his attention divided between driving and searching for his ringing phone.

“Shit.” he hissed again, not knowing how to get his phone while driving. He quickly glanced at you before focusing on the road again. “Baby, can you get it for me?”

You almost missed the term of endearment. Almost. It was obviously a slip of the tongue because he genuinely didn’t seem to realize that he called you that. Bucky was more focused on the road rather than processing what he just said. You chose to ignore it the same way you did to the butterflies that erupted in your stomach.

“Yeah, okay.” you said and reached over to him, bending down to look for his phone.

In a split second, your face was right in front of Bucky’s crotch as you tried to reach beneath his car seat. You tried to ignore the bulge that was staring right at you and let your hand do the searching.

“Can you reach it?” Bucky asked.

You straightened up, “No. Can you pull aside?” you asked.

Bucky checked the surroundings and then the rearview mirror, “We can’t. We’re at a no loading and unloading zone.” he explained.

The phone continues to trill and it doesn’t seem like it would stop any time now. You sighed and removed your seatbelt before stretching your body over Bucky, slipping underneath his arms on the steering wheel so you can fully reach under his seat.

From another car’s view, you looked like you were giving him a blowjob. Not that you haven’t done that before, in this same car.

Finally, you felt his phone at the tip of your fingers and stretched further, your free hand coming to grip Bucky’s thigh unintentionally. It was only when you felt his muscles flex beneath his trousers that you realized how near your hand was to his crotch.

“Did you,” Bucky cleared his throat. “Did you get it?” he stammered.

You still have a certain effect on him, how very nice. Biting back a smirk, you hummed in response before pulling back and then handing him his phone casually. Mackenzie’s name was flashing on the screen as the phone continued to ring.

“Sorry, can you answer it and put it on speakerphone?” Bucky asked again.

You shrugged and did as you were told, holding the phone near Bucky as he continued to drive.

“Hey, Kenzie. Sorry, I dropped my phone. What’s up?” Bucky asked.

“Yeah, so my meeting got cancelled at the last minute. I was thinking maybe we can grab that dinner tonight instead?”

Bucky stole a quick glance from you but your face remained stoic, your hand steady as you held out his phone.

“Sure, how does around 7pm sound? I can pick you up.” Bucky offered.

“Sounds great. So are we checking that restaurant I was talking about?”

Bucky’s ears turned red again but he quickly recovered, “I was thinking of trying out a different one. I honestly didn’t like their dessert.”

Huh, that was weird. You and Bucky didn’t even make it to--

Fuck, he was talking about you, you realized. Clenching your jaw, you tried to keep calm. He was trying to get a rise out of you, don’t give in. Don’t react. Bucky’s conversation with Mackenzie didn’t last long and ended when they settled the location for their dinner.

The ride back to the office was quiet again, until your phone lit up from a notification. Bucky was already parking in the basement when you checked your phone, an audible gasp slipping past your lips upon reading the notification from LinkedIn.

Samuel Wilson wants to connect with you.

The Match Special Tags:

@marvelslag @weird-mumbling @propertyofpoeandbucky @lostinthoughtsandfeelings @mostly-marvel-musings @squishybabies @megzdoodle @suchababie @annathesillyfriend @xhollycowx @sweetkingdomstarlight-blog @5-seconds-of-mendes @gogolucky13 @countonthesun @iloveshawnieboi @learisa @borikenlove @scarlet-natasha89

Everything Bucky Tag List:

@ddowii @jessou893 @stealapizzamyheart @bagelofthelord @mxnt @dontputyourfckingdrinkonmytable @jeeperky @ohladymacbeth @wildflowergubler @supraveng @twinerd14 @buckysmar @bakugouswh0r3 @sweetcoldharmony @wintersfilm @charminivy @amelia-song-pond @iamvalentinaconstanza @mcubqrnes @im-squished @tcc-gizmachine @sipsteacasually @prettyintopeerpressure @weloveyasmin @est19xxshit @bloodhon3yx @dressed-in-prada @lizette50 @thatfangirl42 @sunflowerbunny2 @unmagically @okiegirl24 @sugarpunch-princess @enlyume @vvipgotbb @slimeyderp @lyoongx @just-deka @nobody-will @jaziona92 @elisebuitron @dpaccione @suvikamahes98blr @buckybarneshairpullingkink @earthtonav @x-judyjude-x @nani-kenobi @just-here-to-escape-from-reality @belladonnabarnes @iloveangstposts @weenersoldierr @asemistablehundredyearoldman @reidbuck @lizzarooni @girlfriday007 @bonkywobble @lost-in-the-stars03 @its-yasbxtch @whoth3hellisbucky

#bbb writes #the match #bucky barnes #bucky #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky x reader #bucky x you #fem!reader #bucky barnes smut #bucky smut #sebastian stan

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strawberryspence · 3 years

Text

A Dinner and A Future

Fluff | Spencer Reid x Reader

Summary: Spencer just wants your first date to be perfect and surprisingly, it goes really well.

Word Count: 3,7k.

Warnings: some cursing, first date nerves, but that's it. just pure mindless fluff.

Writer’s Note: Hello! I've been going through a writing dry spell and the thing that solved it was writing this. I've been seeing a lot of edits on tiktok about Spencer's traumas and I just wanted to give him something simple and happy. I was also listening to Kodaline on repeat while reading this, so yeah it's going be hella sappy. Enjoy! <3

Gif is mine. Lesley Smith-Juniment, you have my heart.

Spencer is nervous.

Wait no, scratch that, nervous is not good enough. He was brimming to the edge with worry and queasiness. What other synonyms does nervous have? Spencer was antsy, anxious, perturbed, uneasy, at this point he can recite the whole thesaurus.

Spencer closes his eyes and takes a deep breathe. He can do this. He has waited for this for a long time and he won’t waste it because of burnt pasta.

Okay, he looks back at the note that David Rossi himself wrote in his own special handwriting.

1. Cook 1 pound pasta until Al Dente. Boy Genius, Al Dente should be firm when bitten. You cook it on a boiling water with salt and oil. SALT AND OIL.

2. While that’s cooking, do nothing. LITERALLY DO NOTHING. Watch it. Do the sauce later. In some miraculous way, if you don’t watch the pasta you’ll burn it.

A grin spreads across Spencer’s face as he puts down the paper and reaches for the fettuccine pasta and dropping it on the boiling water (which he measured with measuring cups he borrowed from JJ)

“Okay, now I wait for it to boil.” Spencer stares at the pasta as it cooks. Did he buy enough parmesan cheese? or enough pecorino cheese? Oh no. He looks over the other side of his counter where all the (complete) ingredients sit and he sighs in relief as if he hasn’t checked it 15 times since he started.

The pasta was still cooking and isn’t going to be firm anytime soon. Spencer ponders if he should just cook the sauce while waiting but he knows he’s going to mess it up if he doesn’t give it his undivided attention.

He looks at the watch on his wrist as it ticks to 5:21. He has one hour, thirty nine minutes and forty six seconds. He still has time before the date. The date with you.

It took him nine months, Derek and Emily annoying him to death to just ask the pretty librarian out, one extensive background research from Penelope, two separate talks of the “You deserve to be happy” advice from JJ and Hotch and one lecture about marriage from Rossi to finally ask you out.

He’s kinda annoyed really because he spent so much time thinking about you and thinking of the perfect way to ask you out but he shows up at the library you work at one day with a cup of coffee in hand and his heart on the other.

You didn’t even hesitate. There was no pause to process what he asked, there was no questions following the embarrassing stumbling of the words, “W-will you go have d-dinner with me? L-like a date... Date?” You immediately said yes with a small hop and the biggest smile on your face.

This date has to be perfect. He asked you to come to his apartment at 7. Spencer would’ve picked you up but he was making you a home made dinner and the date was taking place on the rooftop of you apartment, which Penelope and Derek helped him decorate with lights.

He tries the pasta and when its finally firm to the bite, he takes this as his queue to read the paper again. Of course, he can remember all of the instructions but Rossi still wrote it down and reading it calms his nerves.

3. If its cooked, drain your pasta water but leave a little pasta water on the side. Then you can continue.

4. In a pan on MEDIUM heat (just around 2-3 on the stove setting) cook one pound diced pancetta and 1 cup chopped onions in olive. Put this down and chop chop!

Spencer puts the paper down as he follows the instructions to drain the pasta. After he was done with it he puts the pan on the stove and starts chopping up the ingredients he needs.

Cooking is strangely calming. He never thought he’d find it calming. He always found himself burning stuff. So he sticks to the microwaveable meals and fast foods, even if he knows the statistics about these kinds of food.

After finishing the chopping he reaches over the paper and reads it again.

5. Are you done? Okay. Put the chopped stuff on the pan with olive oil and cook it until the pancetta is browned and onions are soft.

He immediately follows the instructions written. The onion and pancetta create a silent hiss as it hits the pan. As it cook he looks down again.

6. That’s going to take a while, so leave it but stay by its side. I am giving you permission to do two things at once. Dr. Reid, please be mindful of it.

Spencer rolls his eyes before proceeding to #7.

7. Combine the two cheeses. Then divide it in half. Then pour the half into 4 egg YOLKS. Just yolks! The yellow ones! Then beat it lightly until its really combined.

He has already separated the egg yolks from the whites (a job he didn’t think would be that hard but was surprisingly very hard) before he started cooking. He adds the combination of cheeses to the eggs and lightly beats it as he watches the pan of onions and pancetta sizzle.

When done with the egg and cheese combo, he gives the pan a stir before looking back down.

8. Is the egg done? Yes? Good. Is the pancetta and onion good? Yes? Good.

9. Okay, now you put your pasta in the pancetta pan.

10. REMOVE IT FROM THE HEAT! REMOVE IT!

Spencer follows the instructions to the T. He puts the pasta on the pancetta, gives it a stir and immediately removes it from the heat. He sighs in relief. He hasn’t burned anything yet.

11. You haven’t burned anything yet? I am proud of you.

12. Now, pour the egg mixture into the pan and toss the pasta until coated. TOSS IT GENTLY. If you’re scared use tongs.

13. Pour about 1/4 cup of the pasta water I told you to set aside earlier. You don’t have to pour all 1/4 cup, just until you get the creaminess you want.

Spencer reaches over the nearest tongs. He’s not going to toss anything tonight that involves pastas or pans. He’s taking the safe road because he wants everything to be perfect.

14. Add the rest of your cheese! Toss some more and then add salt and pepper as NEEDED!

15. You can serve it with parsley.

16. Now, go take a shower and change into some cleaner clothes.

17. Just be you and have fun, Spencer. Goodluck! :)

Spencer smiles as he puts the paper down and makes the finals touches to the pasta. He starts doing what was instructed and it surprisingly, ends up in the perfect texture. Just like the one he tasted when Rossi had a pasta night.

He was proud of himself as he takes it off the stove and makes sure that all the stoves are turned off. There was this report he read in 2018, that cooking and leaving the stove open was the leading cause of home fires.

He takes the food, puts it into a fancy tupperware (another thing he borrowed from JJ) and puts it in the microwave. He cleans up a little and stuffs the pans and pots to the dishwasher, because you are coming in his apartment even for a second.

He starts getting himself ready for the date with a shower. As the warm water glides through his body he thinks of how funny life could be.

Spencer first meets you in the library. He has not slept well in weeks so instead he opts to go to the library to get some reading done. But as soon as he sits in one of the (surprisingly) comfortable leather chairs, its as if sleep knocks him out. It wasn’t until the closing time that you wake him up and he thinks that you were an angel sent for him. This elicits a giggle from you.

“I am sorry, I am not an angel. I am just the librarian and we’ve been close for over an hour now. I just didn’t want to wake you up. You looked like you really needed that sleep.” Spencer immediately jumps to his feet as he apologizes profusely to the kind librarian, “Oh, it’s okay! Don’t say sorry. I was also reading so I didn’t mind the peace and quiet.”

That’s how Spencer meets you. He comes back a few days later after a case with coffee, croissant and an apology. You immediately become friends and thats how all of this started. Spencer finds himself falling in love with the kind, gorgeous, clever librarian faster than he expected.

Every week after that, Spencer comes to the library with pastries and coffees for his favourite librarian and every week, you welcome Spencer with a warm smile and a new book for him to read. He can read it in one sitting but he reads it in the slowest pace he could so it can last for a week.

Spencer comes out the shower and stares at his closet. Should he go casual or formal? Casual or formal? Its just dinner, he’s chill and casual is the way. He picks one of the few plaid shirts that he has and puts it on with a white shirt underneath. He tries to brush his hair, it sits for a moment before it starts curling again. He cringes but leaves it be.

Spencer proceeds to the kitchen to start packing the food into a wicker basket (that he also borrowed from JJ, he basically borrowed her whole kitchen). He packs the utensils in a table napkin that comes with the basket. The main course for the date was the carbonara, and the dessert was a tiramisu Penelope made.

He reaches over his sofa where the bouquet of paper flowers are. He made it a few nights ago with Penelope’s help. He stayed up to make more of it with old books he found in the BAU.

Because what kind of flowers is the best flowers for librarians? Origami flowers made with old book pages.

He shouldn’t be nervous. You’ve been friends for all the months that he didn’t have enough courage to ask you out. You’ve taken trips to old bookstores together for book hunting. This shouldn’t be different from your other trips.

The pitter patter of rain against his window takes him out of his thoughts.

“Shit! Is it raining!?” Spencer yelps, before opening the closed curtains. Beads of water runs down his windows and if its any other day he would love it. But not tonight, when he planned a rooftop date. He cringes as he thinks of the fairy lights hanged up and the table set up that is probably soaked now.

“Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Think, Spencer, think.” Spencer thinks fast. He finds the extra table cloth that JJ gave him because “Just in case.” He reminds himself to buy her a bottle of wine as a thank you. He places it in his small kitchen table before taking the utensils out of the basket and placing it on the table in a fancy way.

Candles. Does he have candles? Spencer scrambles around his kitchen, like a chicken without its head, looking for candles and he finds it underneath the kitchen sink. He lights some of it up and props it into some glasses (he doesn’t have a candle holder he realizes after lighting it up).

With the lights dimmed down leaving the light from the window and the light from the candles, his dark apartment gives off a romantic, kind of comfortable, vibes. It was kind of perfect because with the books on his shelves and the lighting, it actually has the same vibes a library gives off.

He was ready now, bouquet of paper flowers in hand. He can’t believe how smooth things are going, minus the damn rain. Only thing that’s missing is you.

A knock comes to the door and he instantly opens it. There you were, hair a bit wet and messed up from the rain.

His future was bundled up in a cozy cardigan and a pair of jeans right in front of his eyes and he didn’t even know it.

“Hi.” Spencer smiles.

“Hi.” You smile.

“A little to the right. No. No. Too much right, now give it a little bit to the left.” You sigh, your hand under your chin, “No, no, baby, its crooked.”

“Love, can we do this later? The pancetta is going to burn.” Spencer laughs as he climbs down the ladder with the frame.

“But you said you’ll help me with putting up the frames!” You pout at him, Spencer chuckles before kissing your nose, “I know but you also asked for my famous carbonara and I can’t do both at the same time.”

“Hmmm. I still don’t think you can call it yours when its originally Dave’s.” You follow him to the kitchen, zigzagging through the boxes of books you’ve both barely opened.

“What he doesn’t know, won’t kill him.” He winks at you before giving the pancetta and onions a stir.

“It already smells good, love.” You snake your arms through his waist and lean your head on his back. Spencer lets go of the spatula and spins around to face you.

“Thank you, sweetheart. Go unbox some of the books and I’ll call you when its cooked so we can fix the frames. Okay?” Spencer kisses the top of your head and lets you go.

You walk out of the kitchen to the hallway full of boxes full of books. You chuckle as you open the nearest box and its just full of chemistry books. You push it to the room where Luke, Derek and Spencer has built shelves for all of your books. An olive green couch sits in the corner beside the built in fireplace.

Hmmm. This is your home library but as a former librarian the dewey decimal is calling you. But then again, the books you and Spencer have doesn’t have classifications on them. You began unpacking the chemistry books and placing it on the shelf. You can hear the distinct hiss of the pan and Spencer humming Kodaline’s The One.

You push in another box from the hallway to the room and its another one of Spencer’s, this one full of philosophy books. You start unpacking it to the shelf below the chemistry books before stopping as you pull out a book that doesn't belong with the philosophy books. A smile graces your face as your hands glides unto it. It was the book Spencer bought for you on your first anniversary.

The Peter Pan cover is a bit tattered, it was an older edition he found in your favorite old bookstore. You open the book and Spencer’s messy writing greets you with nostalgia.

“We are most alive when we are in love. Thank you for making me feel alive everyday for the past year. Happy Anniversary, love. I live a full life as I love you fully.”

You smile at the book before hugging it to your chest. You sigh deeply as you looked around the room and how it felt so surreal to be in the new home you share with Spencer.

“Love, I am finish. Come meet me in the hallway!” You leave the book on the shelf as you hear Spencer calling you.

“Are you helping me with the frames?” You clap, excited to finally put up the frames. Spencer smiles as he sees you excited to put up the pictures.

“Yes, okay you need to tell me if they’re straight okay?” He instructs before climbing the ladder.

“To the right, just a bit. Oh! Perfect!” You scramble to reach for another frame as he comes down the ladder to move it, “Here! This one.” He climbs again and you instruct him with directions for the frame again.

After a few more frames, he finally comes down and looks at the frames you asked to be put up.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Spencer smiles down at you and gives your cheek a kiss as he wraps his hands around your waist, “It is. Thank you for framing them.”

The frames comes in different shapes and forms, the biggest one in the middle is the picture of your wedding day. Your wedding took place in a library you immediately fell in love with when looking for places to get married at.

In the picture, you were smiling, your head rested on Spencer's shoulder as he reads a Harry Potter book he found in the kids section. It was a candid moment, both of you running to the back of the shelves to get a moment to yourselves after the wedding and the photographer snapped it before leaving the two of you in peace.

Beside it are pictures with the team on the wedding day, some on thanksgiving, christmas, new year with the BAU team, some with your family, some with Diana and in the corner is a shadow box containing the paper bouquet that Spencer gave you on your first date, the same exact flowers that was in your hands as you walk down the aisle to him.

“So, how's the first six months of officially being a Reid-Y/L/N?” Spencer teases as he lets you go from the back hug to face you and you roll your eyes at him, “Oh very hard. They hear Reid and they immediately expect greatness.”

Spencer laughs, “Same as the last name Y/L/N.” This time your the one who laughs at his statement, “Uhhh. I am not the one with 3 PhDs and 3 BAs.”

“And I am not the one whose a New York Times best selling author.” Spencer laughs even more when he sees your nose crinkles, making his heart dance and swell in glee.

“Hey, let’s dance.” He takes your arms and leaves it on his shoulders as he wraps his arms on your waist.

“We don’t have music, you silly goofy boy.” Spencer rolls his eyes at the endearment used, “I’ll sing.” He hushes you down.

“You make my heart feel like it's summer when the rain is pouring down.” Spencer’s singing voice was soft and sweet in the edges. Most nights you lull him to sleep with your humming to keep the monsters at bay and some days, his better days, he’s the one who sings and these were the days you treasure the most.

“You make my whole world feel so right when it's wrong, that's how I know you are the one... That’s how I know you are the one.” He sways you to the gentle buzz of his voice. You close your eyes as he sings the same song he sings to your ears on the dance floor for you first dance as a married couple.

“When we are together, you make me feel like my mind is free and my dreams are reachable hmmm.” Spencer hums as he runs his hands on your back. Your head on his chest and your ear listening to the way his heart is beating for you.

“You know I never ever believed in love, I believed one day that you would come along and free me.” Spencer feels at ease as he sways and sings, knowing that he’ll have you in his arms for the rest of his life.

The song ends but you and Spencer continue to sway to the music of silence.

“Can you believe its been 4 years since our first date?” Spencer asks, in disbelief of how fast time is running when he’s with you. You pull away from his chest so you can face him. You find a small spark in Spencer’s eyes as he thinks fondly of the night.

“Really? 4 years since our first date got rained on and Penelope cried because we broke all her fairy lights?” Spencer laughs before protesting, “Hey! I paid for that!”

"4 years later and I still can't get enough of that damn carbonara." Spence cackles, like an evil villain, "Don't tell Rossi that I stole his recipe for my beautiful partner."

"4 years later and I am still completely in love with you." Spencer smiles as he leans down to place a small kiss on your temple.

"4 years since I almost completely lost my mind because I was so nervous about our date." You roll your eyes, "Love, our first date was perfect. We've had this debate how many times now?"

"19 times." Spencer answers and you pinch his nose before looking around the room that’s still full of unopened boxes, “See. We should probably eat lunch and unpack. Why do we even have so many boxes of books?”

“Honey, you were a librarian and you are a writer. I am a professor and FBI agent that can read 20,000 words per minute.” Spencer answers as he looks around the unpacked house.

You smile fondly at him before standing on your tiptoes a bit to reach him and give him a kiss and he immediately steadies you with his hands. Kissing you was intoxicating and Spencer loves every bit of it. You only pull away when the kiss finally takes away your breathe.

“I love you, Spence.” You smile as you hold his face in your hands, “I love you more, sweetheart.” He smiles at you as you untangle yourself from him.

“Let’s eat your famous carbonara and unpack the rest of our house. It doesn’t really feel like home when all we can see is boxes.” You giggle before dragging him to the kitchen, making Spencer sit on the island as you prepare the pasta he cooked. Spencer watches you as you sing and dance through the kitchen in one of his old cardigans.

He doesn’t say anything but you were wrong. Home is not four walls with unpacked boxes and hundreds of books.

Home was when you showed up bundled in a cardigan, wet from the rain for your first date with him and home is still you, four years later, bundled up in his old cardigans and singing songs that magically fills and heals the crevices of his heart.

the recipe i copied for the famous carbonara!

taglist (if you want to be added, please message me 🥰): @all-tings-diego @shemarmooresfedora @averyhotchner @samuel-de-champagne-problems @bingereid

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acerace · 3 years

Note

...you have opened my eyes to a vast universe of VintageBeef lore that I was unaware of. I knew about the New Hermit Order, of course, and the UHC invention, and I've watched a few of his CTM things but -- I will take all the info and lore you feel like giving out because Beef is amazing and my knowledge is so small.

Vintagebeef my beloved <3

So the thing is, right, until about 2016 I only watched two (2) youtubers- Vintagebeef for Minecraft and aDrive for Pokemon (and funnily enough both of them are named Dan irl). So I've watched most of Beef's videos over the years and have a general knowledge of most of his stuff, except because it's been like a decade I don't remember where most of the lore comes from XD

The thing with him is that he doesn't do Lore tm the way other mcyters often do lore- he doesn't have an extensive RP series to draw from like Grian, doesn't have a solo world with steadily increasing amounts of lore like Etho or Zisteau, and while he's played on SMPs and been involved in storylines before it's not really the focus of his episodes unlike with Evo or Legacy or Empires

So where does that leave us?

IRL, Beef always has multiple series running at the same time. Often he's playing on an smp while doing a singleplayer, often modded, series as well as a CTM or modpack with a group of friends. For example, right now he's playing on Hermitcraft, doing weekly Pixelmon and Building a Zoo episodes, and a CTM map with Slip. And to me, this translates to one thing: Beef is an adventurer. He travels frequently- he explores a world and when he decides he's done, he leaves for the next one. That's the basis of my personal interpretation of his series and his character for my writing.

Ok so reading this back, this got extremely long and didn't explain much in the way of lore, somehow? If anyone has any additions to add please do so, I am very definitely leaving out a lot and would love to see what other lore people remember and are using for Beef! I didn’t include the Hermitcraft stuff since my memory of season 4 is blurry (his base was themed after the Martian, that much I know, and he and Iskall were buddies :D) and most of the s5 NHO lore is best watched from Bdub’s perspective from what I remember, and the only s6 stuff is a single line in Hermitgang and then the Area 77 arc with its possibility of an NHO reunion which we did not get rip. And s7 of course had the cloning machine and also the Podzol Party as the main lore. So all the original rambling is still below the cut though it is very long, and I'm gonna bullet point the main stuff here instead:

Actual canonical things:

Invented UHC and was the only survivor of the first ever uhc (Mindcrack UHC s1)

Married to an ender dragon (one of the UHCs I think), later father to a different dragon (Mindcrack season 3? I think?)

Might not have legs if you choose to take that joke as canon (Mindcrack s2)

Was a wizard (RAD)

is a zookeeper (Building a Zoo)

Had a wife and kids (Sims in Minecraft)

Part of the Trial of the B Team court case (Mindcrack)

NHO founder, founder of the Podzol Party (Hermitcraft)

Created a cloning machine that sort of works (Hermitcraft)

Played the Forest which is I believe the first time he and Keralis played together (look up the trigger warnings for this one, it's a horror game)

Was the creator/owner of Sourceblock SMP (featuring some familiar faces if you know Legacy, Empires, or MCC) and there is literal magic from a mysterious sourceblock of water that teleports people and summons mobs and probably more stuff that I haven't seen yet since I'm still watching it myself

Things you can infer:

Good with animals (Life in the Woods, Pixelmon, Ark)

Is a car nerd (irl and all of the car games he's played)

Is a highly experienced adventurer who has traveled through dozens of worlds both vanilla and modded, across multiple dimensions (Twilight Forest, the Aether, the Betweenlands, Limbo), completed dozens of monuments, fought in blood sports, survived apocalypse after apocalypse, tamed dinosaurs, and played a lot of prop hunt and golf with your friends

If you're looking for what to watch for lore purposes, I'd say the Mindcrack UHCs and Team Canada's RAD series are pretty good, definitely Sourceblock and HC s5, plus the Diversity CTM maps and Ruins of the Mindcrackers maybe? And Mindcrack Prank Wars for the chaos and the origin of Team Canada. And if you can handle horror than the Forest is fun and if you don't do horror you can watch the Pojkband play golf or prop hunt they're hilarious I love them sm I want a Pojkband reunion So Bad

Beef's first series was a singleplayer series in beta 1.4_01 though he had played the game extensively before that, and was a big fan of Guude, having watched his own Minecraft videos. The series was functionally a hardcore one where if he died Beef would delete the world and start again! I haven't actually Watched this series so idk if he died or how often lmao. When Guude made Mindcrack, which was btw one of the very first Minecraft SMPs, he also hosted a competition for people to join, and Beef submitted a video (which is still viewable on his channel I believe!) and won, and was added to Mindcrack in season 2 :D (fun fact, Guude said that even if Beef hadn’t won he would have added him anyway)

Two running jokes emerged from Mindcrack- pulling a Vintagebeef and Beef doesn't have legs. The first is a reference to Beef dying of fall damage (I believe the exact instance was him trying to jump into his swimming pool and failing spectacularly) and after the incident, every time someone died of fall damage they were pulling a Vintagebeef. The second joke comes from Guude, who joked that the reason Beef wasn't going to a convention was because he didn't have legs, and then he pranked Beef's base by building a giant pair of legs at the entrance to his castle so you had to walk between them to get into the base. This joke has long since died and both Beef and Guude feel pretty bad about it iirc because there were people who genuinely thought Beef was disabled and were emailing him supportive messages and stuff oops. So if you go looking on the Salad or find old Mindcrack fics, you might see references to Beef having prosthetic legs!

Mindcrack also brought about the creation of several Player groups- Team Nancy Drew, Team Canada, and GOB to name a few relevant to Beef. Team Nancy Drew consists of Beef, Pauseunpause, Guude, and Baj, who formed to investigate a prank on one of the members but I forget who. They're named Nancy Drew after the detective! Team Canada also formed in retaliation to pranks, with it consisting of Beef, Etho, and Pause, the three Canadian members on the server (not including Adlington who moved to Canada but never joined the group). There was also a Team America who pranked them with American flags everywhere. GOB is Guude, OMGChad, and Beef, who played stuff like the Ragecraft, Pantheon, and Monstrosity ctms together but that's way down the line lol

Team Nancy Drew is also notable for inventing UHC. It was Beef's brainchild but it was the four of them who first played it! The first UHC had the four of them working to kill the dragon with no natural regen, with everyone dying but Beef, who "won" the UHC. The second uhc was still dragon focused and iirc is where Beef married the dragon? Memories are hazy but they do kill the dragon in this one I think. UHC was then revamped as a pvp event and became a regular Mindcrack game every few months, featuring most of the Mindcrackers and several special guests, including Dinnerbone, who as we know Thanos-snapped Doc's arm out of existence as a result of Doc killing him in one of them

In one of the seasons of Mindcrack, Beef invited swedish Mindcracker and good friend Anderzel to go caving with him and invented ABBA Rules caving, where the winner takes it all. ABBA Rules is a game where each ore (and also dungeon loot like nametags) is assigned a point value and the person with the most points at the end wins and gets to keep all the stuff collected from the game.

In Mindcrack season 3?, Beef punched the ender dragon in an... awkward area, so when the dragon died and left the egg behind, Guude said Beef was the father of the egg XD I don't remember if I watched s3 so I have no idea if anything Happened with this concept but *history of the world voice* you could make lore out of this!

So Team Canada has played a Lot of CTM maps (which fun fact were pretty much invented by another Mindcrack member, Vechs, with his Super Hostile series! Super Hostile has a bunch of things called "Zistonian", which are references to another Mindcrack member Zisteau, who has a very wild singleplayer series with even wilder lore but I digress). In Ruins of the Mindcrackers, they had a running joke that Beef was Etho and Pause's mom, which is a joke we can leave in the past actually /lh. They also played all the Diversity maps, Sky Factory, Terra Restore, Uncharted Territory uhhh and a couple more ctms and adventure maps! Each map kinda has its own story so in Diversity 3 for example they were trapped in a simulation? I think? Team Canada also recently played the Roguelike Adventures and Dungeons modpack, aka RAD, in which Beef was a wizard with a magic staff that could do anything from summon lightning to control hostile mobs.

Sourceblock SMP is a vanilla survival 1.14 series that ran for one season and the series starts with each of the Players being drawn to a strange sparkling water source that, once they touch it, brings them to the Sourceblock world. It also summons a giant zombie at one point. There's probably more lore for this series but like I said I haven't watched it all the way through yet

He has a Patreon server called VintageCraft and has done a series or two on there as well, and played a few UHCs with them, so lore that how you will!

Beef also played a few popular mods, notably Pixelmon, Life in the Woods, and Feed the Beast, with LitW being singleplayer and the other multiplayer. He's also recently played the Zoo and Wild Animals mod a lot. He did a short series with the Minecraft Comes Alive mod where he married one of the villagers and had two children, so that's canon now :D he’s played a Lot of Pixelmon starting when the mod first came out iirc (he chose Turtwig in his first series and built a Grass gym, then made a Normal gym in another series in uhh 2016) and he still plays to this day. Quite a few Hermits played on his Pixelmon servers with him, like Wels, Etho, Iskall, Stress, Slip, Zueljin, and also Guude and Phedran (a Mindcrack adjacent player and creator of the LitW modpack) and a few Mindcrackers on the older servers

Mindcrack and friends played a lot of other games too- 7 Days to Die, Ark Survival Evolved, Unturned, to name a few, so you can pull a lot of lore out of these as well. Speaking of friends and non-Minecraft games, Beef teamed up with Pause, Keralis, and Slip (a former Hermit) to play the horror game the Forest, which saw them stuck on an island trying to survive against terrifying mutated human... things. They played it a few times as the game updated but as afaik it's the first time Beef played with Keralis and possibly Slip and since the game starts with the Player's airplane crashing, that could totally be how Beef first met them in-universe

I... think? that’s everything I mentioned in the tags? There is probably way more stuff I’ve forgotten that stems from inside jokes and things that happen within each series, but I hope that was a) helpful and b) at least somewhat comprehensible lmao

#hermitcraft #mindcrack #vintagebeef #mcyt #long post #asks #redwinterrises #that was so many words #kudos to anyone who reads the whole thing lmao

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leiawritesstories · 3 years

Text

Give Me Wings

Rowaelin Month, Day 24: Missing scene from canon

Designing Aelin’s new tattoo in Kingdom of Ash because we deserve that. It got a little emotional...but so was their reunion...so......

Word count: 1304

Warnings: Emotions. Lots of them.

~~~~~

Every mark on his mate’s body had been erased--the scars from Endovier, from the years as Adarlan’s Assassin, the calluses, bruises, and bumps she’d earned during long hours of training, even the faint burn marks she carried from learning to control the wildfire that raged inside her veins. And her tattoos, the three scrolling lines of Old Language that told the story of how Aelin Ashryver Galathynius conquered the darkness that threatened her brightly burning existence.

The tattoos Rowan had poured his heart and soul into. Gone.

Aelin had barely spoken in the days since their reunion, the invisible scars Maeve had inflicted still too fresh, too deeply engraved. He watched her with Fenrys, the silent language they shared in the blinking of their eyes conveying so much more than speech. He watched how she curled against him in the nights, her eyes brimming with all the things she wanted to tell him but couldn’t yet bring herself to say. In the darkness of the night, Rowan gladly shared his body heat with Aelin, hoping his silence was comfort, hoping she could read the unspoken promise that whenever she was ready, he was there for her.

As they passed through the caves, guided by the Little Folk, Rowan sensed a spark of Aelin’s flame returning. When she mustered a smirk, an offhand snarky comment, his heart swelled with joy. And for the first time in months, a pulse of her own happiness slipped down the bond in response. It would take time, time they might be borrowing, before the queen of Terrasen was once again her fiery, sharp-tongued self, but she had started to move from the blackness of the past months into the hope of the future.

He knew some of it was for show, knew she was making herself smile and swagger and tease and lift Goldryn to stop the “fussing.” Yet he was more than happy to train with her on the small deck, to steal her focus for a few hours and keep her mind from falling into despondence.

There were nights when she woke up in tears, shaking, always silent but always in pain. Those were the nights when she either burrowed closer into his side or quietly got up and curled against Fenrys in his wolf form. Rowan couldn’t hold anything against Fenrys; after all, he too had suffered at Maeve’s hand and if his presence could comfort Aelin, she deserved the companionship.

Every night after they’d exchanged rings in the treasure cave, Rowan kissed the obnoxiously large emerald on her left hand. To whatever end, Fireheart. Though she didn’t respond verbally, the tears that welled in her depthless turquoise eyes spoke more than words ever could.

The night they saw stars, signaling they were almost at the end of the cave passages, Aelin produced a small, soft flame in her cupped hands. Rowan sat next to her, watching as she played with the flame, gradually expanding it into a sphere of flickering light that cast warmth around the whole small group. Ever so gently, he placed his hand on her back, offering support. I’m proud of you, Fireheart.

For the first time in too long, she responded. To whatever end, Rowan.

To whatever end, my queen.

Later, as everyone was drifting off to sleep, Rowan slipped paper and charcoal out of his pack. Knowing Aelin was still awake, he brushed a hand down her back. She rolled over.

“What’s that for?”

Seating himself next to her, he spread out the page, revealing Old Language symbols sprawled haphazardly across part of the paper. “This is your story.”

“Is that…is that your sketch of my tattoo?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him, tears pooling in her eyes. “Rowan, it’s gone.”

“I know, Fireheart. I know.”

“She rutting stole it from me. My tattoo. My link to you.”

“You’ll always have a link to me, Aelin.” He touched his heart. “Here.”

Aelin twisted her ring around her finger. “Rowan?”

“Hmm?”

“Would you tattoo me again?”

“Of course,” he breathed, “of course I would.”

A soft smile crept across her face. “I want a hawk. A buzzard, just like you.”

“Aelin--”

“I’m serious, buzzard. Like this.” Taking the charcoal, she traced a series of swooping curves onto the page. “Look. This shape, Rowan.” She cast a soft golden light over the paper.

Rowan gazed at the design she’d created, a set of hawklike wings with three longer lines, like rays of light, underneath. “It’s gorgeous, Fireheart. May I?” He held out his hand, and she gave him the charcoal. Carefully, he added a light curve linking the three rays and a Terrasen knot above them. “What do you think?”

Tears dripped down her cheeks. “I love it. I love you. How soon can I wear it?”

“I need a few days to work out the script, but we can start the process in about four days, I think.”

“What are you writing this time?”

“Your story.”

“I want you in it.”

He blinked. “What?”

“You are part of my story, Rowan Whitethorn. Put us in my tattoo. Tell my story, yes, tell all of it. Sam, Endovier, Adarlan, Doranelle, our bond, everything. I want it all.”

Rowan swept away the tear before Aelin could see it. “Of course, Fireheart,” he managed, his voice husky with emotion.

Aelin picked up the charcoal again and sketched an elegant symbol onto the page.

“What’s that one?”

She smiled. “The Wyrdmark for home.”

Every free moment he had, Rowan worked at the tattoo, filling Aelin’s graceful lines with Old Language script. As promised, he told her whole story, the tale of a young princess who loved her kingdom and the Fae prince who loved her. He labored over each character of the ancient Fae calligraphy, rendering every word precisely.

All the better to intertwine Wyrdmarks with the Old Language.

The home mark Aelin drew for him…it made him wonder if she knew his plan to include a centuries-old spell in her tattoo. He’d discovered, while combing through Aelin’s extensive library of Wyrdmark books and scrolls, a series of marks that could act as a map between mates. It was a simple enough line of markings, and as long as they were all in the same line, it didn’t matter what else wove around them.

So he sketched the chain of Wyrdmarks across the wings of his mate’s tattoo, one mark in each feather, to let her fly home.

After four days of careful sketching, Rowan had a finished design. He took the design, his tools, and ink to Aelin’s tent when they camped for the night and tapped on the post.

“Aelin?”

“Come in.”

She was perched on her cot when he entered, a map of Erilea spread on her lap.

“Is that the design, Rowan?”

“Yes, yes it is. It’s finished. I wanted you to see it before agreeing to have it inked onto you forever.”

She scanned the page, tears springing to her eyes. “It’s perfect.”

“Where are we drawing it, Fireheart?”

“On my back, of course. Wings across my shoulder blades.”

Rowan nodded slowly. “Are you ready?”

Aelin folded up the map, pulled her cot into the center of her tent, and spread an old sheet over the top of it. “I am.”

“Shift for me, my love. It’s better to tattoo you in your Fae form because of the salt and iron in the ink. And you heal faster in a Fae body.”

Aelin closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

I believe in you, Fireheart.

She inhaled a steadying breath. And shifted.

I love you too, Rowan.

The smile he gave her flooded her heart with joy. “We’ll do the wings today; the rest either tomorrow or the day after.”

Aelin pulled her shirt off and lay facedown on the cot. “Then give me wings, carranam.”

~~~~~~~~~~

In case anyone wanted to see my concept of Aelin’s tattoo:

https://leiawritesstories.tumblr.com/post/663357987153379328/in-case-anyone-was-wondering-what-my-concept-of

#my writing #rowaelin month #day 24

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jawllines · 4 years

Text

“You’re really gonna go in there?” Y/N queries gently, and Harry only nods his head in response, reaching for the door handle. An urgent, delicate touch of Y/N’s hand startles him, looping around his wrist and dragging his attention toward her, “Shouldn’t we have a game plan if something is behind the door?” She asks, her hold on him tightening just a little, and Harry notes how soft her palm feels against his skin, “Like, let’s say we open the door and a behemoth is standing there, what do we do?”

“The only behemoth that could fit in this tiny room is the band from Poland, Babe, and I reckon they have better things to do on a Thursday night,” he retorts, clenching around the knob and tilting it down, “Now unless you want to hold hands in there. . .”

She lets go before he can finish, and he doesn’t have to look back at her face to know she’s irate. A small smile quirks at his mouth as he pushes his shoulder against the heavy door to aid him opening it, bracing himself to see something potentially horrid. . .

And there’s nothing.

Harry and Y/N are witches, they hate each other, and something’s coming

19K+ words

(A/N: Hiii!! So, I’ll be honest I know absolutely nothing about real witches at all, so what is in this story is not fact! it’s just an AU and doesn’t speak toward any of my real witches out there unless i accidentally got some things right. Happy reading, I really liked writing these guys I hope you like them just as much!!)

It was dark.

Both in the state of the sky and the feeling that slithered through Y/N’s body while she tended to the Brugmansia finally flowering in her garden. The shift in the air could have easily been inculpated by the cool breeze that blew past her face, shepherding clouds thick and heavy with autumn rain, but Y/N knew better than that. Those feelings typically bring her peace; the rattle of thunder soothes her aching bones while fat drops paint the pavement, wet the dirt to mud, and feed the drying grass.

This feeling made her bones rattle. It crawled beneath her skin like billions of tiny beetles unearthed within her vessels; her stomach churned, her shoulders were weighed down, there was a gnawing pain at her temples, so fierce she held her hand to them. The cold brass of her ring cools her heated skin. This feeling was vile, it was awful, for fuck sake what was causing it?

She stood from her crouched position and slid back into her store. Technically, she’d closed about three hours prior so she should have been home well by now, but when she’d finally gathered her things in her duffle at 12, she looked out the back window and noticed some of her moonflowers had begun to bloom. There was a small part of her that had been reluctant to step outside at all, but she needed to greet them and water them, no matter the odd, unfamiliar troubling sense that had initially confused her. She ignored it -- she thought maybe she was just nervous to say hi to them, sometimes she was.

(Flowers and plants hold a special connection with their caretaker, from a tiny seed to a flourishing garden, they place their lives in the care of the earth or a human. If not properly nursed, their wilted petals appear so quickly, a silent plea for water, or sun, or even a little attention -- Y/N found that plants liked a little attention. That’s why she spoke to them, she cooed and gave them well-wishes when she left them alone. They felt just a part of her family as any blood relative had, from the moment she had sliced the tip of her finger in a torn brush and the petal she’d touched afterward fused together her tiny wound. Her nan had always told her that maybe she was a bit closer to plants than others were, so she probably shouldn’t share this with kids in her class because they might be jealous of her (Y/N knows now her nan just didn’t want her getting picked on.)

It was clear to her now that this feeling was a bit more than that when her goose pimples sunk back into her skin after stepping into the warmth of her store. Though it was not just because she had been keeping her shop pleasantly warm as the nights grow colder and longer; she kept herself protected in here. In between these walls lied a sanctitude that kept all evil out, in all manners, of all species, besides two.

One of which is her bunny, Thumper, who in all ways but emotionally was her familiar. He was a ghostly white Holland lop, with big dopey ears that she slid her fingers beneath and flipped up and down in spare moments. She accuses him of being evil because he’s always nipping at her fingertips, demanding food with a stomp of his foot, and gives the silent threat that he’ll nibble on her plants if she really pisses him off (he stands by them, twitches his little nose and shows his two front teeth until she gives him what he wants -- it’s usually more hay). He’s nothing but a little, greedy nuisance that showed up on her step one day and hadn’t left since.

The other. . .well, the other was Harry Styles.

Y/N liked most witches, no matter their point of interest. She knew that there could be a certain level of distrust amongst the syndicate -- hexes, and curses placed upon one another, but she tried to stay out of that -- she held no disfavor toward most of the others either. Everyone connected with things very differently, what she may connect with might not be that of what her neighbor connected with and that was okay. Her nan’s emotions had been in accord with the sea, and even though Y/N spent most of her life fearing water, she bore no judgment.

What she does is done in the mind of good favor, of bettering oneself with the world around them in a way that would beneficial to not only them but the people in their lives. Open up otherwise closed eyes to the beauty of the spirit and soul they possess, and the beauty and soul that the world around them held. The town she had moved to at 20 was so rich in natural beauty, ponderosa pine and hemlock trees grew tall in an extensive, juniper green forest almost always clouded with thick fog, the soil was soft and fertile, the air was crisp and clean. She felt happy here and wanted the others around her to recognize how lucky they were to be in an area so free of sordidity.

There was an empty shop up the brick road of the older part of town, that had been crowded in cobwebs, leaves that had blown in from the broken window, and animal droppings. Her nan came to help her clean it up (her mum had too, but she was dog tired after her workweek so spent most of the visit asleep on Y/N’s couch), and did something short of absolving the land so that she could grow a garden behind the store, in the clearing of 200 or so meters before it meets the mouth of the forest. She sold herbs, people came to her for intricate, meaningful bouquets with flowers that could not be found in just any store (and she was good to her plants, so if she asked very kindly, and sent them with a packet that produced a very special brew when dumped in the water, they would live very, very, suspiciously long), plants that would liberate people of their aches and pains so long as they tended to them, journals of reused paper, scrubs, oils. . .there were many things. She offered classes too, to help people learn how to better cater to their flowers.

That had been a year ago, so she was still finding her footing, but not six months into this happy reality she had created for herself, Harry Styles had come to town. It took nothing but a few minutes of coming to contact with him that he was a bad apple, and when the once sweet-tempered town had begun mottling with dark splotches, she knew for sure. Harry was like her, but his book of shadows had pages filled with wicked words of revenge, conjuring demons and letting them wreak havoc. His business was more under the cuff -- he posed as a writer who needed a scenery change for his work, but Y/N knew it had to be more than that -- but he did his bidding in the night, seeding through clubs, in alleyways, in the forest. . .if someone knew about Harry, it was because they knew a guy who knows a guy.

And for some reason, unbeknownst to her, he refused to leave her be.

This is why it almost makes sense that the bell of her store would jingle brightly no matter the fact she’d locked the doors hours ago, and her attention would be brought to the pest himself. He wore a sweater that threatened to swallow him whole, and baggy, holey jeans he rolled at the cuff showing off his bat printed socks, stuffed into grandpa-Esque loafers. The necklace he always wears around his neck (a small pendant that she had never gotten close enough to make out) is sat atop of his sweater today rather than hidden beneath it as it usually is. His hair is getting longer, more unruly with his warm brown curls than it had been when she first met him -- she really hadn’t known he’d had curly hair until the more recent months when it had started growing out.

His eyes were always the same soft, crystal green that matched his character none, and a pawky smirk on his mouth as he dragged his fingers along the lavender jars placed on her shelves, “Shouldn’t you be home by now? I figure it’s past your bedtime.” He leans down like he is about to pick something up, and when Y/N peers over the counter, she sees him slide his hand beneath Thumper’s soft white belly and pull him up to his chest. That was another indicator that Harry was just no good -- he was the only human that he liked, and the little creatine didn’t even like her.

“Shouldn’t you?” She flips it, continuing to gather her things so she could head home for the night.

“You know these are my typical hours, Babe -- everyone wants to curse someone at 1 AM, there was a study done in the east end.” He pets between Thumper’s ears as he sets him down on the counter beside the cash register, before he reaches out for the wooden crafted incense burners, “Have these cheap little things been selling any?”

“Piss off,” she stuffs her phone into her purse, then flips through her things to make sure her wallet was tucked in there as well, “What do you want, Harry? I’m about to go home, if you wanted to come around to bother me you should have hours ago.”

Harry feigns a gasp like he does any time she curses, “Thought good little witches didn’t have such foul tongues?” He flicks the candle jar on her counter, an apple scent had been melting around the wick for the better half of the day, “I don’t want anything in particular, just passing through. You know you’re right in the way of the forest, don’t you? S’kinda of obnoxious when you’re trying to summon imps at the cave -- they hate the bloody “stench” of the flowers.”

“Good,” she retorts, “You shouldn’t be summoning around here anyway, this area’s off-limits.”

It was barely an agreement but still an agreement nonetheless -- if Harry left her be, she would leave him be because Y/N wasn’t an idiot. If he wanted a fight, Harry could start one and he would fight dirty. All she asks him is to stay away from her store and her flat, and to keep away from certain areas of the forest where the soil was always soft -- in return, he would do his activities, sometimes he would need her flowers for different spells and she would turn a blind eye to what he was doing. She does a few gentle protection spells here and there but otherwise, he’s a free man to do as he pleases, just so long as he respects her request. He’d seemed perturbed by the conditions none -- had even chuckled and said as long as he let her keep her “pretty little flowers” he could get away with murder.

A heavy, weary sigh leaves him, “Yes, I’m well aware,” he rolled his eyes before crossing his arms on top of the counter and tucking his face in his elbow, “Gimme a moment though, it’s warm in here and I was freezing outside.” He muffles into his sweater.

Y/N had almost forgotten what she had felt prior to coming back inside, but his words bring it clearly to the forefront of her mind once more. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, hearing the floorboards creak beneath her as she wondered if he’d felt it too. It couldn’t have been him -- no, he was powerful but by no means powerful enough to conjure up something like that. And she’d like to ask him, but Harry has never been someone who took her seriously -- he would just make a joke of it, probably, or tease her. It wouldn’t be worth asking.

But the feeling that she’d gotten is chewing on her memory, so she asks anyway, “Hey,” she began and the only indication that he was listening to her is the fact his fingers stopped tapping against the wood beneath them, “Did you. . .when you were outside, did you feel that?”

He picks his head up from the crevice of his arm, “You’re gonna have to be a bit more descriptive than ‘that’,” his brows are raised as he continues, “Are you talking about the new pleasant but cold breeze we’ve gained for autumn, or the gut-twisting odious one?”

Y/N looks at him impassively, “The latter, idiot.”

“Yeah, I felt it,” he ignores her insult, “What about it?”

The skin between her brows pinches, “Are you not concerned? It felt. . .bad,” she couldn’t think of a better word to describe it, “I didn’t like it at all.”

“Are you scared?” There is delight swimming in Harry’s gaze as he stands up straighter, “Don’t tell me Glinda the Good Witch herself is scared of a little frightening feeling? I thought you were tough as nails and all that, hm?”

“Never mind, forget I even brought it up,” she tried to dismiss it, as she slings her purse over her shoulder and plucks Thumper up to sit him in the cradle of her arms -- she knew better than to ask him like she might get any comfort at all from his words.

He steps up and in front of her before she could start toward the door, “Oi, listen scaredy-cat, I don’t know if you’re aware but I deal with shite like this all the time, which means I’ve got a few banishments spells up my sleeve. If it’s really something that awful, I’ll cast it back to hell, easy as that.” Harry follows close behind her as she exits the door, feeling the same shiver of fear slither through her body, “I do want to see what it wants first though.”

“Of course you do,” she utters in disappointment, “Just keep it away from my garden, please.”

“I’ll try,” he tells her just as she reaches her car before he dips into his pocket and reveals that he’d stolen a baggy of chamomile, “If I didn’t keep your precious garden safe, then I wouldn’t have anywhere to get enchanted chamomile, and it works lovely in a sleepy time tea, I’ll tell you that -- your lavender is shit though. Never puts me to sleep like it ought to.”

She pops open her car door, “Stop taking stuff from the store, or I’ll start lacing it with laxatives.”

“While you’re doing that, won’t you plant them Clathrus mushrooms? I reckon the imps would prefer them way more than the mums.” He looks serious -- not a trace of a joke laced in his features and somehow that leaves Y/N more irritated than if he were laughing at her as he spoke.

Her response is blunt, “No.”

“Listen --”

“Harry, I’m not going to plant mushrooms for the damn imps!”

. . .

When Y/N had met Harry, she was angry.

She had never been a very angry person. Seldom has someone or something truly has gotten so deeply beneath her skin that she felt the need to yell or grump about it -- mild irritation was never off the table, but true, unadulterated wrath and resentment? It was rare she ever felt the need to even make a snide comment. And that wasn’t to say she was better than anyone else, she was just mild-tempered and forbearing. . .it took a little more than a remark or two to make her angry.

But when she was angry, she was an amalgamation of vexation and fire, and there was no surer way to disrupt her peaceful demeanor than to compromise her flowers.

The day had been uneventful up to that point. It’d been a week since Harry had moved into town and Y/N was surely feeling the negativity that followed in his wake, but she was focusing on maintaining the tranquil, idyllic environment that she had around her previous. As much as she would have loved to seek him out, ready to squabble, tell him off for bringing any dark energy into such a calm place -- she had to come at it pragmatically. She and her friend Niall (who wasn’t a witch but knew about her) had both agreed that while it was aggravating, they didn’t know him. They did not understand the depth of his power, or what he was here for, nor had they understood wholly what he was capable of. Y/N had felt his presence, but Niall had confirmed it after hearing the underground chatter of a dark witch who made promises to turn glitter to gold.

She was on her way to her store. Though she was closed on weekends, she always went by to check on the flowers, water them, tell them about her day, and with her was Thumper who would be hopping around the grassy field and gnawing on the blades. It was very peaceful -- the time she spent with her plants -- so she always looked forward to it, but that day she was filled with trepidation as she parked her car. Something was off. . .not in the air, but with her flowers -- she could feel it deep in her marrow that they were in pain.

So she huffed it to the back of the store, and there she found Harry, two of her purple vervains nestled against his palm. He noticed her before she could even think to say anything, and something short of relief had flushed through him, “Oh thank fuck, you’re here,” he sighs, referencing her garden with a wave of his hands, “I cannot for the life of me remember what hazel looks like.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Y/N demanded, stomping toward him, but instead of shoving him to the ground like she wanted to, she dropped to her knees and caressed the remaining vervain, “Why would you pluck them like that? They aren’t ready!”

“Ready? They’ve flowered haven’t they?” His brows had been tilted while his mouth dipped in a frown, “I need them for an incantation, figured you wouldn’t mind if I borrowed these two. Aren’t we meant to help each other out?”

“You should have asked, you prick,” she pointed up at him, “And even if you had, I would have said no. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you’re really disturbing an otherwise pleasant place. I wish you would leave.’

Harry feigned hurt, placing a hand to his chest, “You wound me,” he mocks her, “Listen Glinda Good Witch, we all gotta get by somehow, yeah? Not all of us talk to plants or whatever it is you do. So do you want me to pay or --”

“Those won’t work for whatever it is you’re trying to do,” she cut him off, “If it’s something with cruel intent, it won’t happen -- they were grown to do good.”

“Which is exactly why I needed them from you,” he wiggles them in her direction, “Well, I need to get going. You’re awful in particular about a garden that is subpar at best. Wish you well, see you later.”

Then he left. No guilt, no apology -- he just up and left, and Y/N was livid.

(Later that night when she had explained the situation to Niall, he was nothing short of outraged, so they had tried to find out more about Harry. Anything about him, really, but he leaves a very little paper trail in his endeavors -- from public records they find that he’s 25 and from Holmes Chapel, and from a google search they find he has two books out, published online, and doing decently well. There was nothing else apart from that, he kept his socials pretty dry, and what he did post was nonsensical drivel.)

Y/N thinks about this, as she sinks into her tub, the burning water scalding against her skin. Harry had always driven her mad but he has never seemed half as angry as she was -- hell if anything he always seemed like he enjoyed it.

He was just absolutely rotten.

. . .

Harry thinks Y/N is just absolutely rotten.

There were many reasons that he had classified her as such, but namely what he was concerned about now was how she kept her shop closed on the weekends.

Who kept their store closed the entire bloody weekend?

It wasn’t so much that he wanted to see her -- Harry actually found the girl quite plaguy. Her opinions on his practice were priggish, not unlike the others like them he had met in the past. There has always been an unfaltering stigma that was carried with what he did, one that was quite hard to shake within the factions of other witches that are sprinkled across the world. He’s seen as careless, cruel, greedy, and selfish -- he doesn’t practice magic for the love of the world around him, to feel a deeper, spiritual connection with the fecund soil that covered the earth, or with the water gently slipping past rocks along a stream bank. They look at him and see someone who shakes hands with the devil and ruins lives for a cookie.

Harry lets them think as they wish, he has no patience to attempt correcting them. If they’d bothered to learn an inch about him at all before passing their judgment then they would have a clue about his true character, but the jury had already made the decision before Harry even realized he was on trial. They never really wanted to give Harry a chance, so he knew he would be hated no matter where he decided to reside. The pack mentality that they carry is the reason he has to move around so often though (more than any 25 years old was typically doing) he gets run out of a lot of areas because a group of soft witches decides he’s no good.

That’s what drew him to this place -- there was practically nobody. He could sense when there were more like him loitering around an area, and made an effort to keep a decently low profile so that he could stay around longer (but they always managed to find him), but here, he only sensed one. That had been good enough for him to know this was the right move -- the beautiful scenery surrounding them; the soft bed of dirt that Harry’s feet would sink into easily; the dense, damp fog that covered the forest floor in the early mornings; the lush, green trees and how life seemed to remain there when it was meant to be waning in the colder months -- all of that, had only been a plus.

When he’d met Y/N, he knew that she disliked him, but Harry had expected as much so it disturbed him none. If anything, he was delighted to have a purer witch than himself around, all things considered. There were no others that she could develop a hive mind with to drive him out of town, but she was no competition to the businesses that he provided, and when a decoction called for an obscure plant or an unsullied petal -- well, a Garden witch was not the worst kind to have nearby. She may be devout in her notions that Harry was a disagreeable, repugnant being, but she was good at what she did. Anything done with her plants was twice as effective as any other person’s flowers he’d used in the past, so it was necessary he bothered her often.

She refused to sell to him -- something about her doing business with a demon, or whatever she’d said -- but so long as he doesn’t go and cut them from the stem himself, she helps him out. Will give him the plants he needs, and in return, he doesn’t taint certain areas of the town and the forest that she declared were off-limits. It was a spoken commercial agreement that both of them went by and because of it, their lives near to one another were comparatively peaceful to any other situation Harry has found him in prior.

That didn’t come without its faults. They butt heads often, their bickering is nonstop, and Harry could think of many things he would rather do than have to stay in a room with her for longer than the ten minutes it takes him to get what he needs. It was fun to fluster her -- getting beneath her skin was an easy feat that he found a lot of joy in, and sometimes she gave him a run for his money. He always kind of liked making a normally mild-tempered person grump at him a little, if not for his impish ways, then so he could get to know them as their full self.

So he wasn’t mad that she was closed because he particularly wanted to see her, no, he was mad because he was exhausted. Absolutely drained. The business was incredible when you’re the only dark witch willing to do some questionable, immoral things, but that also meant long nights and incredible emotional toil -- it wasn’t a walk in the park to conjure up a bloody demon!

Ever since Harry had started this path, he’d had immense trouble sleeping at appropriate times, if he could fall asleep at all. He guesses this was what he gets in return for what he practices, and it could be worse so he doesn’t mind it too much, but it was still a hassle. It had been a good four years since Harry just had a good, peaceful night of sleep.

Up until he had moved here, of course, because the same little garden witch that thought he was the devil incarnate, made a tea he could brew that set him right to sleep. Kept him asleep the entire night too, which had always been an impossible endeavor spanning back to when he was a child, but there was something about her chamomile -- hell, it really knocked him out.

He tested his theory -- part of him thought that maybe chamomile was suddenly working for him, but no matter the brand that he tried, or the amount of tea he drank, none of it could compare to what Y/N’s did. When he visited her store, he took what he could to hold him off to the next time he came by. He hadn’t realized how low he was though when he had seen her last and she threatened to lace it with laxatives -- he should have taken two because he used his last bit the night prior to the one he’s suffering through right now.

And he could have gotten more this morning if she didn’t close her stupid shop on weekends!

If Harry were not positive that he needed to rest, he wouldn’t bother to be trying. There was nothing worse to him than the laying in his bed and waiting for sleep that refused to come...it felt like he was being stood up by a date. It hasn’t happened often, but enough that Harry could match the feeling low in his stomach, indicative of discontent and sadness while he waited. . . . .and waited. . . .and waited. . . .and waited.

It was useless -- the universe’s retribution for summoning spirits to the living world left him with what a doctor might diagnose as chronic insomnia, but none of the treatments did him any good. No mortal medicinal could soothe him of this ailment. So one would think he would be smarter about keeping a hearty stock of it at his disposal rather than one at a time, but Harry never claimed to be the best at planning ahead.

And now here he was, staring at his ceiling fan whirl, his cat at his side while he contemplated if breaking and entering her shop was against his morals (he had a few left, surprisingly).

God, she was so rotten!

. . .

“Have you felt weird lately?”

“Hm?” Niall’s face scrunches up in confusion, his mouth stuffed full of noodles he just slurpped into his mouth, “Wha’ d’ya mean?” He muffles out, reaching over to her side of the table for a napkin to dab at the corners of his mouth.

The record store that Niall worked at wasn’t too far from Y/N’s shop so if her day wasn’t too busy, she would step away from the store for her lunch break and seek him out. It was never a planned ordeal; Y/N would stop off somewhere to get them something to eat and appear at his storefront, the sharp ding of the bell knotted on the door alerted him of her presence. He was always one of two places: in the back, tuning the old guitars the owner would bid on different websites, or he was in the front thumbing through the record baskets, organizing and reorganizing them by name. Sometimes he would be sat behind the counter, with his feet kicked up just beside the register but Y/N scolds him for that (he’s always wearing a dingy, scuffed pair of shoes that have no business seeing the light of day, let alone be shown off to others).

His head would perk up, he would look toward the door, and his face would bloom into one of sheer delight as he would call over to her, “Oh, thank fuck! Thought I would go crazy if I had to listen to myself think for one more second.”

Today was no different. She brought him ramen from the place three buildings down from his own, where she bends down a street that feels more like an alleyway and the door is hidden beneath a brassy fire escape. The owners were always very kind to her, and since she came often and tipped well, they would give her free bowls if they were in the mood. Y/N never liked the idea of a one-sided relationship with a business, so she always brought them herbs, and gardenias to plant at home (they were the husband’s favorite). She takes their fliers and posts them up in high traffic areas too, and when they have their business cards made and an extra hundred or so, she slips them in the paper baggies that she gathers her customer’s things in before sending them on their way.

Niall was grateful. He did a little cheer, left his spot from behind the counter, and urged her to follow him to the back where the break room was located (if a customer came around he would hear the bell and duck his head out to greet them, but for the most part their Tuesdays were pretty uneventful). He told her he had sensed her coming so he already had two stools set out for them to sit on, and napkins placed in the middle of the table, but she’s almost a hundred percent sure they had been left like that last time she was here.

Try as she might to let her mind flee from the dark, hazed feeling that had overcome her last week, she couldn’t. Even as she listened to Niall prattle about some Gibson Les Paul custom that the owner purchased a while back, she struggled not to wonder what it was that was worming itself into her brain; slick tendrils of dismay overcame her. The true, unadulterated, execrable feeling only truly hits her in the night if she is outside the safety of her home or her shop, but otherwise, it was memories of this haunting aura that struck her throughout the day.

She couldn’t place her finger on it though, what it could be. There are feelings she garners when Harry summons certain spirits, but she can typically tell when he’s doing that, and they’ve never felt so. . .evil, before. What Harry deals with is evil, sure, but this was so smothered in turpitude that she couldn’t make it out. Like spilling black ink over a letter written in blue.

That’s why she asks Niall -- it feels too strong for it to be something only felt by her and Harry. It would also soothe her mind if someone had felt it as horribly and heavily as she did, considering it wasn’t affecting Harry enough that he would try to banish the damn thing before things went sour.

“Like, do things just not feel. . .off, to you?” She didn’t want to feed him any impressions of what she might be speaking about -- she would like to know if it were true to him. Niall is sweet as he could be, but not always when it was appropriate; he would tell her he did just to spare her from feeling foolish. It’s why she thought berets were her thing for about a month when really she looked like a washed-up indie artist trying too hard (Niall had agreed they weren’t her best fashion venture, but he certainly didn’t think they were that bad).

His face contorts in a pout as he mulls it over in his head, stabbing his fork into the noodles and catching a bit of pork on two of the pronks, “Hm, let’s see. . .” he looks like he’s spinning through a Rolodex, “I have not for the life of me mustered enough energy to have a wank in about a week, that’s some cause for concern,” when she responds with a blank stare, he holds his hands up, “Okay, fine -- Butternut was biting at the air when I took him on his walk the other night -- like. . .chomping at it, I was actually gonna ask you what that might be about.”

Now, don’t get Y/N wrong, any other time Niall would have told her that his great Pyrenees puppy was yapping and chomping at the wind, she would have brushed it off. “Niall, you’re just going to have to accept that he’s going to be a big, sweet dummy when he’s older.” But she was so desperate for something, anything -- because if something felt it other than she and Harry, then she wouldn’t feel quite as crazy.

“Sometimes it feels a bit like something’s watching me,” he tacks on at the end, taking the brown napkin from the stack in between them and dabs roughly at his mouth, “At night, when I’m walking Butternut, I get these chills but there’s no wind around.”

Y/N leans forward, thankful, “Yeah?” she presses, “Is it like -- describe it. What does it feel like?”

“Y’know, I do forget you’re a witch until times like these,” he leans back in his chair, a heavy sigh slides from his lips before he closes his eyes like he’s trying to place himself back at the moment, “I’ll tell ya what, it’s fuckin’ -- it’s a bit like I feel it right down to my bones, but then --” he opens his eyes, raises his closed fists and flicks his fingers out at her, “Poof, s’gone as quick as it came and I forget about it. My nan used to tell me that was the devil patting your shoulder, but if it went away quick s’because an angel kicked his arse out of there.”

It’s enough, Y/N decides, so she nods and relaxes back in her seat, “Okay, good.”

“Good?” His brows furrow, as he reaches for his can of soda and the aluminum can crinkles beneath his fingers, “Tell you that I get chills and you’re relieved? Should I be relieved too, or worried?”

“It isn’t anything to concern over, I don’t think,” she explains to him, “If anything changes I’ll let you know.”

Niall uses one of his fingernails to dig the dirt from beneath the other, “Did that Harry bloke muster some horrible demon up again?” His voice is laced with vexation. Niall wasn’t a hard guy to get along with -- he was loud and Irish, could chat up a storm about anything and everything, and while he could be scrappy at times, it was for all the right reasons. He was equanimous in most situations, even-tempered to a fair degree; if Y/N were in a situation where a cool, calm collected head would be the best approach then Niall was definitely the person she wanted on her side.

(Like when they had to drive home from a day trip to the massive lake just north of them, but the roads hadn’t been pretreated for the icy sleet that gripped the pavement. He drove them the whole way on the windy roads with little traction from the tires to the road, and was still bobbing his head and singing along to Ed Sheeran on the radio).

But Harry Styles? Oh, the mention of his name could dig right beneath Niall’s skin. Y/N would like to think that it was because he was so cruel to her, but she knows that there are two main reasons Niall is not too fond of him nor his craft. One of which is the fact that he slept with Liana (she happened to be one of Niall’s flings at the time -- there were plenty, but Y/N only remembered this one’s name because she shared it with a woody stem rooted to the forest soil that made for easy climbing), and the other, the fact that he had helped the captain of the opposing summer footie team with one of his enchantments to make them win. There are few things Niall cares for so deeply that he would dislike someone, but his sex life and his footie were two things a person just couldn’t mess up for him.

“No, it wasn’t him this time,” she clears her throat, pushing the rest of her ramen around idly, “It’s a bit too strong to be his doing -- more sinister too. He conjures mostly petty demons; the little ones that don’t have much better to do anyway. This is something. . .I don’t know, it just feels different.”

Niall sighs heavily, “Well, thanks for that, reckon I won’t be sleeping tonight,” he pushes the container away from himself to signify he’s done and when she takes a peek inside and sees nothing but a few noodles limp along the sides, “I like that you keep me in the loop, but sometimes I wish you would let me live in ignorance.”

“You know, I would apologize, but you’ve gone into an in-depth description of your arsehole to me so I thought any boundaries and forms of secrecy were long gone by now.”

His brows furrow features contorting into that of the same desperation he had come to her with two months ago, “Ugh, c’mon! You’re practically like a witch doctor or somethin’, I thought you would have a cream or something for it.”

“You had a hemorrhoid, Niall, for fuck sake! Even if I were a “witch doctor” then I would never let you put anything that came from my plants on your filthy bum.”

Niall stands, gathering their trash from the break room table but using his free hand as he passes her, he swats her shoulder, “You better be nice to me, or you’re gonna have to start eating lunch with Styles.” He steps on the level for the waste bin, throwing the trash in the bag, “Though I think you two would just end up hate fucking and the food would go cold.”

“No,” she rolls her eyes, “I would never let that Gremlin near my naked body.”

“Listen, I’m not saying I want the guy anywhere near your naked body,” he plops back down in his seat, “What I am saying is that you lot have such unbridled sexual tension it is practically palpable when I’m at the shop with the both of you. Maybe it’s ‘cos the two of you are the only witches, and opposites at that.”

Y/N snorts, “Maybe if we were in some enemies to lovers film, sure.”

After they finish their break, and Y/N realizes that she’s been with him for a little over an hour, they make plans to meet up tomorrow for a movie and she heads out. The air was cool -- when she had made her way over here the sun had been glittering rays down that bathed the world in gold, but it was now hidden beneath an overcast of thick clouds. Rain always carried a familiar scent just before it started to pour and Y/N had forgone a jacket, so she huffed her way back, breathless by the time she made it up the hill and saw Harry leaning against her door.

The sight of him makes her exhausted, but not in the usual way it does. He looks awful -- and typically he doesn’t! Y/N could admit that Harry was gorgeous; his hair always appeared soft, loose curls dispersed along the brunette strands, his eyes are a sea green, tender in his gaze when he wasn’t being an absolute prick and always bright (even when he was). His lips were pink, shaped perfectly, and his skin is typically smooth but even when he grows out his facial hair it still manages to look good. He had dimples. . .hell, Y/N would place a bet that he’d made a deal with the devil to look like that.

But today, he just looked worn down, and exhausted, like he might not have slept the entire weekend. His eyes were closed, his hands were in his pockets and his chin was tilted down towards his chest. If not for the way his head perked up immediately when her foot crunched into the gravel pathway leading up to her store from the small parking area (that was more so a beaten down, once grassy area now just dirt with tire tracks in it), she would have thought he was asleep standing up. There’s relief in his eyes when they meet her own, which she isn’t used to seeing from him, “Thank fuck.”

“You look horrible,” Y/N slides her hand into her pocket, pulling out her keys so she could unlock the door, “Budge over.”

“I feel it,” he rubs tiredly at his eyes, “Go on and open up quickly then. Why the hell do you keep your store closed on weekends?”

Y/N fits her hand over the knob, twisting it and shoving the door open with her shoulder. Thumper greets them at the door, nudging the top of his head against her ankle, “Do you work every night?”

“No --”

“I keep it closed on weekends for the same reason why you don’t work every night,” she heads toward the counter, settling her things down and reaching in for Thumper’s hay stash so that she could give him some, “What’re you here for? You usually come around to bother me later.” She chances petting at Thumper’s head for a moment, and since he was preoccupied with his hay he would allow it.

“Fuck!” Y/N startles, popping up from behind the counter, looking back up only to see Harry with wide, disgruntled eyes, “Where’s your chamomile?”

Her brows dip, “I’m out right now, so --”

“How the hell did you run out? Shit, what am I going to do now, hm? Shouldn’t you keep up with shite like this?” He’s going a mile a minute, he’s walking closer to her, distress was written all over his face and Y/N is alarmed to a fair degree -- Harry’s always seemed very collected and calm, it was seldom she ever seen him have more emotion than pure elation to fuck with her or displeased with her presence.

“ -- so I’m going to make more today. What’s going on with you? Why are you so pissy over it?” She finishes her previous thought, watching as he leans against the counter, propping his face up with his hand and she could now more clearly make out the bags beneath his eyes.

He rubs at his temple with the finger closest to it, “The only way I can sleep is with your bloody tea,” he grumbled, “That’s why I come around all the time -- well, that and to fuck with you, but mostly the tea.”

“Oh?” She reaches down, plucking Thumper from where he’d been positioned by her feet and setting him on the counter. He thumps his foot at her once but eventually makes his way over to Harry, sniffing at his chin before resting right before him. Y/N wasn’t necessarily doing it to be nice, but the energy he was exuding could really dampen the growth rate of her plants, and Thumper had a soothing way about him that drew all that negativity out. It was one of those odd little familiar powers that went unexplained for the most part. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“Dunno,” he shrugged his shoulders, but the tension in them begins to dissipate as Thumper snuggles beneath his chin, “Reckon I pissed off some demon or summat -- usually it isn’t this bad. Without your tea, I can at least get to bed for three hours before waking up and catch cat naps during the day, but nothing was working this weekend. I think I’ve slept a total of two hours?”

“Christ,” she tuts her tongue, but her brain starts churning, “Do you think it has anything to do with that. . .with that thing, that’s around? That feeling?”

Harry huffs a sigh, “Fuck, here you go again -- Babe, listen, I can barely keep a coherent thought, so why don’t I just give you some money and you make that tea for me, alright?”

“That’s no way to ask,” Y/N chastises him, and though she is already beginning to gather the supplies she needs so she could go out and harvest her leaves, she taunts him, “You’ll have to say please, or I might just decide to wait on this batch.”

“Please,” he wastes no time in saying, “Pretty please harvest the chamomile so that I can sleep and I promise I’ll sit and theorize with you over whatever the fuck thing you’re feeling.”

Y/N could go through the trouble of doing a blood binding with him to ensure that he wasn’t lying to her, but she felt that was a little on the extreme side so she took his word for it. She could easily harvest her chamomile here at the shop -- she had two doors behind the counter, one that led to her garden, the field, and the forest outside while the other led to a backroom that was made into a little kitchen area. It was easier for her to do things here rather than at home and have to risk tainting them in transport; for the best results to any enchanted item, one has to seal it immediately and it should only be reopened prior to use.

She wouldn’t allow Harry to hover over her while she worked, so she sat him behind the counter and told him to not speak to any customers if they come through (“Wasn’t planning to,”) while she went to work. Y/N gave Thumper a look when he had started to follow her, and with a small thump of his foot (his way of saying Fine!) he hops himself into Harry’s lap and settles there. The tension once again eases from Harry’s features, soothing the pinch in his brow and the way his lips had been pursed in a frown.

It was silent as she set to work, and save for a few customers who filtered in and out (at least a dozen of them, only eight purchased something but her Mondays were always pretty slow so that was expected), there wasn’t much to disturb what appeared to be a dozing Harry. He looked much more peaceful than she’s ever seen him, and for a brief moment she contemplates sending Thumper back home with him, but she shakes her head physically as if to expel the thought from her brain. What was she going on about? She would give him his tea and send the heathen on his way. No matter how empathetic she felt for him (she had struggled with issues sleeping when she was a lot younger), there was no need to go out of her way. . .even if she could admit that the sight of him cuddling with a bunny was a little too sweet not to be documented somewhere.

She’s finished drying the leaves and carefully stirring them in the fine powder that she still had leftover from her last batch (there were many flowers from her garden ground up and enchanted with an incantation, which sounds like a simple enough task but the entire process took a little over a week -- the magic had to be purified several times, and the potential adverse effects had to be mollified. . . if she didn’t, instead of pleasant dreams of floating in clouds, her customers would be in an unsolicited astral projection) in a little over an hour. Y/N takes care to bag them delicately, adding a little extra in the two bags she would be giving Harry so that he would bother her less over it.

By the time she’s retreated from the back preparation room, she finds that Harry is awake now, eyeballing her Intimacy and Romance section. When he sees that she’s returned to the front, he holds up the small, cardboard parcel, “I didn’t know you doubled as a Pulse and Cocktails.”

“That’s a natural aphrodisiac,” she tells him, walking over to her empty chamomile shelf before she begins to fill it, “You might want to take some so your partners will actually desire you for once.”

“Oh, Honey,” he shakes his head, a look on his face almost like he pities her, “Don’ know a thing about how people desire me. Barely have to take my cock out for them to be gagging for it -- kind of how you are, but won’t admit it to yourself.”

Y/N kisses her teeth, “Alright lecher, come and get your chamomile then,” she plucks the two remaining bags from the box she brought them in and holds them out for him, “You should look into some spells to combat that though -- if a demon is purloining your sleep, then it’s probably still hanging around and like deluging your flat with negative energy.”

“Dunno’ if you know this, but I work with demons often, I’m always surrounded by negative energy,” he plucks the chamomile from her grasp, before reaching in his pocket and producing a small wad of cash that he places in her palm-- Y/N opens her mouth to decline it (she felt that his money was earned in a dishonest way and would not accept it for her flowers, because it felt as if she were disrespecting them. . .she would much rather give it to him for free), but he cuts her off, “Oh, hush and take the money. This is from a care package my Nan sent me, so it wasn’t earned in any rotten way, you spoiled brat.”

She sighs, clutching the money in her hands, “You still better keep your end of the deal,” Y/N tells him, “I want to talk about this. . .whatever that feeling is, around here lately. And I want you to be serious about it!”

Harry was already retreating, waving his hand up at her, “Yeah, sure thing, I’ll have my secretary get in contact with you --”

“Harry --”

“M’only joking. I’ll come around Friday.”

. . .

Later that night, with Thumper snuggled in her lap snoozing, Y/N looks into purging a home of sleep stealing spirits.

She’s only curious.

. . .

Sleep comes gradually, then all at once, like the shift between summer and fall.

Wind whistles past window sills singing shallow songs of change, while red apples ripen on their branches in the orchard during harvest season. The air grows colder in the mornings and at night, the day is still steeped in the sun’s benevolent kisses of heat at first until even that begins to wane. An aesthetic of reds, oranges, forest greens and golden hues occupy the minds of many as the leaves start to stain with color. Everyone waits with bated breath for true autumn to come around the corner.

And when it does, it’s with a cold slap of air against the face when they step outside. The air carries that distinct autumn smell, the world is chilly enough for thicker jackets and long socks, rain comes in sheets during the evenings, and the colorful leaves that had drooped from the trees adhere to the concrete, or in matted piles on the forest floor. Suddenly, the warm drink in everyone’s hand is a little less for the excitement and impatience for fall to begin, and more so to warm their cold palms from the onslaught of biting wind.

It isn’t autumn, and then it is -- just like sleep. Harry’s awake one minute, and then he’s passed right out.

Well, with Y/N’s help, bless her. Sure, she had been rotten before, but she made him a new batch and sent him off with two hearty bags full of tea that would soothe his worries and put his arse to bed. Plus, he had cuddled with her sweet little bunny Thumper for a while and he had a feeling the little bugger was exuding some sort of her soft magic unto him in the form of calming waves. When the rabbit sat in his lap, all the tension eased from his muscles and he sank into an otherwise uncomfortable chair like it was the softest mattress he’d ever been privy to. So by the time he came home, started the kettle, drank a mug full, and hot tailed it to his bed, he was asleep before his head could even quite hit the pillow.

It was so good. His dreams were pleasant, his sleep was heavy, and deep, and lasted around fifteen hours -- which in the grand scheme of things, made him feel a bit like a sloth, but he knew he needed it. He still couldn’t quite pinpoint what had happened that he just couldn’t sleep even a little bit, but he has no interest in investigating now that he had a full night’s (and partially day’s) rest. Plus, there was no time to do any exploring when he needed to make up for the work he’d missed in his time exhausted -- his powers are nowhere near as strong if he is tired, and it’s incredibly dangerous to be working with little sleep. He could mess up, and a mess-up could mean someone would likely end up possessed and -- albeit how interesting they are -- Harry’s intrigue with exorcisms ended after the seventh one he performed.

After he woke up, showered off, and ate brekkie, he sat down with his kitten and they cleaned his crystals and a few amulets before he set on preparing some of his finer elixirs, that he always waited until he was down to the last drop to begin making more canisters of considering how extensive the process was. It would be easier if he had someone else to help out, but the only other witch within 160 kilometers of him, he wouldn’t label as the type all too willing to help him break into a blood bank.

But he did have his kitten Oat. He was his little miracle -- Harry had been so sad when he learned that witches could have familiars, but the animal would come to him and he was supposed to just know. At that point, he’d been practicing for three years and the only feelings he could sense from any animal around him were fear and disdain, so he had thought that maybe he just wasn’t meant to have one. Which felt horrible. . .he loved animals.

One day, when the chill in the air rosied his cheeks and the cardigan he sported did little to shield him from the cold, he was taking a walk in the forest nearby. He’d left the trail, but not because he was working. . .if he were honest, he thought that the garden that Y/N kept out there was quite magnificent. It flourished even in the winter, a meadow of flowers that’s petals never frost, and the ground never grew hard. There was an air around it that made him feel warm and pleasant, so he visited often without letting her know. Which was what he was doing, walking through the small path that she had created so that she could tend to them (he’d seen her water them once when he’d come unknowing that she was there to cater to them).

And one moment he was looking at what he believed to be an oat grass, he heard a rustle from the bushes to his left that he looked toward (it was a bird flying away), and when his gaze returned to where it had once been, there a small kitten was laying. She was the kind of small that made his heart ache, with her eyes barely open as she yawned and stretched very wide -- she wasn’t there, and then she was. Harry always liked to say she was born from the soft soil of Y/N’s garden which was why her grey fur felt like clouds and she always smelled sweet as heliotrope. . .and, well, she smelled a lot like Y/N too. He may not be all too fond of the girl, but she did always smell nice.

She hadn’t grown bigger than one of his boots, the tiny little thing, but not because she was malnourished in any way (Harry always made sure she was well-fed), he just thinks she’s finished growing. He couldn’t tell her breed, but if he had to guess she was some mix between a munchkin and a ragamuffin cat. Harry knows all familiars have their duties and special abilities, but he wasn’t quite sure what hers was -- he just knew that he loved her to bits and pieces, and couldn’t ask for a better little ball of fur to sit on his shoulder while he made coffee in the morning.

What Harry did know, was that none of the demon’s he had ever conjured had ever bothered her, and she loved to be rubbed behind her ears.

So Thursday night, when the town grew quiet and the air was still, Harry ventured out with his tote bag slung over his shoulder. It was easy to move about relatively unseen in a place like this, that wasn’t so big there were people constantly looming around the corners of every nook and cranny, but wasn’t so small that everybody knew everyone’s business. It was a pleasant in between, where he could snake through the mouth of the forest, walk a trail and end up on the other side of town without having been seen by more than a few critters. He typically made this journey relatively late, without a worry or stressor in sight -- it only took him about an hour and a half to get everything done.

Today though -- today, he felt off. It hadn’t been immediately when he’d stepped outside, but after some time in his walk, goosebumps prickled his skin and the hair at the back of his neck stood on end. He couldn’t quite decipher what was making him feel like this when the wind hadn’t rustled the trees in a few minutes, but it put him on guard. He disliked the feeling and had only truly sensed it to this degree that night Y/N had originally questioned him about it. It was an unsavory sensation, and for it to even make him feel uneasy was saying something tremendous.

He attempts to ignore it, even though it only grew stronger the closer he was to his destination. He weaves through the trees, stepping over the thick roots, crunching over fallen leaves, and appreciating the scent of autumn as he goes. It was a nice night, despite the chill that ran just beneath his skin. . .it was the kind of night that he might go out on his balcony and sip on his tea until he grew weary enough to step inside. Oat liked to sit outside with him, curled peacefully in his lap and resting without a care in the world (she made him feel not so lonely all the time, which he appreciated immensely).

Harry was thinking about how that was precisely what he was going to do as soon as he returned home after he had emerged from the trees and walked through an expansive field, toward an old road that led him back into town and entered the blood bank (after melting the lock with one of his crystals). Though he sensed something strong when he was walking down the cold, dark hall. . .or someone that is, who -- before he could register their presence -- ran straight into him as they were peeling around the corner and nearly knocked him on his arse (but definitely knocked them on theirs).

“Fuck sake!” He cried out, steadying himself, looking down at the assailant, “Watch where you’re going, mate, or you’ll -- oh, Y/N?” He pauses, confusion laces through his brain as he recognizes her, “What’re you doing here so late?”

Y/N was on her bum, scowling at him as she gathered herself before flattening her palms to the cold, white tiled floor and pressing up to a stand, “I could ask you the same question.”

“It would be a silly one if you did, ‘cos you and I both know what I’m doing for a living,” he watches as she swipes her bum of the dust adhering to her sweatpants -- he had never seen her so dressed down before, in a dark-colored hoodie that just about swallowed her whole. She appeared much less ferocious this way -- not that she appeared very ferocious before, but he is always intrigued to see typically put together people in their sleep clothes. . .he thinks it says a lot about a person. From Y/N’s choice of pajamas, he could tell that she probably kept her flat on the side of too cold because she liked to bundle up. . .she felt safe that way, he would guess, and he would bet 50 quid that there was bunny hair all over it because -- despite his grumpy tendencies -- Thumper loved a good cuddle.

“I felt it again,” she says after a moment, her voice only above a whisper, though there was no security here -- or anyone, for that matter since the place closes at 7 PM, but her eyes still shift around like she’s a high schooler ditching class and the headmaster's down the hall, “. . .that thing, y’know, while I was getting ready for bed, so I followed where it felt grossest and came to check it out to see if it led me anywhere.”

Harry’s brows furrowed, “Well that was stupid,” he derides her, fixing the tote around his shoulder and shifting weight from one heel to the other, “What were you going to do if you found something, hm? Fight it off with your bunny and rose petals?”

Her scowl returns, “Piss off,” she utters before her gaze flickers to his tote and the reason he’s here becomes clearer to her than it had been before, “You shouldn’t be stealing blood. Isn’t that unethical?”

“It’s either this or siphoning it from a live vein, Babe, and while I’m aces at plenty of things, I have not been properly trained to set up an IV. I only take the blood that’s about to expire anyway,” He nods down the hallway, toward the refrigeration where they kept all of the baggies, “You might as well continue investigating while we’re here because it’s coming from that way -- plus you can make yourself useful by keeping the door propped open for me.”

In all honesty, Harry expects more fight than he was given considering how often she seems to object to every move he makes, but she merely rolls her eyes and starts ahead of him. The feeling does grow stronger the further they descend into the hallway and he knows Y/N can feel it too, from the way she shuffles just a little closer to him, and he can hear her breathing hitch to a small halt as they stood before the door and it felt like it had all been focused just behind the door. As strong as the taste of frozen orange juice concentrate, it made his face pucker just slightly as he raised his fingers toward the keypad and began punching in the code.

And there’s nothing.

Actually, as soon as they open the door, the dark, odious feeling that had been encompassing both of them disappears entirely. “Whoa,” Y/N pushes her hand against the door and keeps it open, taking one step inside of the room, “There’s a lot of blood in here.” His gaze flickers back at her, as she looks around, looking more intrigued than disgusted -- there was a lot of blood, 8 by 5-meter room just filled with it, so he could understand some of the awe. The more he returns, the less awe he feels, but he reckons that was to be expected.

“There are about five other refrigerators in this building too,” he tells her as he lowers to his knees, cracking open his tote, “This one’s computers are easier to get into though, and doesn’t say the date and time the amount was changed so nobody knows anything is missing. Easy peasy.”

Y/N nods, “Right. Stealing blood -- easy peasy,” she leans against the door, “What is it that you use it for?”

“It really depends,” he murmurs as he pulls out a rack, counting out the baggies he needed, “Some demons like blood more than ash, so they come when called and are more willing to help you out when given a little gift. There are a few spells that call for it, and elixirs are twice as potent — sometimes I have to drink it, which is...unpleasant,” he hears her shiver, “—but it makes the outcome better. All in a day's work.”

“Oh wow,” Y/N hummed, “That’s...different. I think the weirdest thing I’ve had to drink for a spell was doe milk and I felt guilty the whole time. Like I was taking it from a fawn that needed it.”

Harry huffed out a laugh — Y/N was a soft little thing, comparing drinking blood to milk — sometimes he forgets how sheltered her world of magic is compared to his own. It was easy to forget with all the spiteful words she could throw his way, but to see her out of her comfort zone. . .it’s refreshing. Not because she is less confident in her surroundings, but because she is more open to his own If someone would have told Harry they would be even remotely civil with one another in a room full of blood, he would have snorted before asking what they were snorting.

“I oughta call you Bambi then.”

He was on his last baggy of blood, checking the expiration date, and logging it into the computer when the dreadful feeling returned. Like a fly to rotting meat, it clings back to the room they were in tenfold. From behind him, a sharp clatter and Y/N’s squeal startles him to look back at her, “Harry!” She cried, pointing ahead of her, “The walls! L-look at the walls!”

Harry follows her finger, watching as a thick, black substance oozes from the wall’s coving. When Y/N had noticed as much, she knocked down a stray IV pole that had been left in here, and it lay at her feet where the same black ooze had begun seeping up from the trim of the floors. In all his time doing what he does, Harry had never seen something so odd, nor had he ever felt something this grotesque overcome his being. It makes him act quickly, and while he doesn’t speak, he does fix his tote over his shoulder and practically jog the short distance to Y/N, knocking her out of the room, grabbing the door by the handle, and swinging it shut. He had hoped to seal it in there, whatever it was, but when they look down at the floor, the goo bleeds beneath the door and they both take a startled step back, “Oh fuck me,” Harry mutters to himself, shaking his head.

“What the hell is this?” Y/N is panicked -- it’s very clear in her voice, and while Harry was a tad thankful not to be dealing with this alone, he can’t say that a soft which, who planted pretty flowers and made sleepy time tea was necessarily the backing he wanted in the event he had to exorcise a demon. He didn’t even have the proper tools for it. . .he didn’t know what he was exorcising, fuck sake -- “Harry, shouldn’t we --”

“We need to leave,” he states, pivoting on his heel and hustling down the hall, Y/N was quick to scurry behind him, though she still murmurs some protest.

“We shouldn’t just --”

“Listen, unless you have any idea what that is and how to clean it, let alone banish it to hell, I saw we have a better chance through those doors than we do staying in here for even a second more,” he told her, holding out his hands to the crash bar, shoving the heavy door open, only looking back to make sure that Y/N had made it through, seeing that the black ooze had been following them before he promptly slammed the door shut.

This was one of the back doors, so it spits them out to the graveled employee parking lot that dances along one of the many mouths of the forest that surrounded them. They’re both out of breath, adrenalin zipping through their veins in a tidal wave as their chests heave and they stare at the door. They wait for it to crawl beneath these doors. . .they wait for the building to either be overcome by sludge or combust from whatever sinister being had decided to preoccupy this space.

But nothing happens.

The wind picks up, the leaves rustle against the branches, and as if it were a gift from the Earth, the sordid feeling blew right away with it.

“What the hell was that?” Y/N asks for the second time.

Harry straightens out from where he’d been crouched, inhaling the cool air, appreciative to be in it.

“Do you think for a second, with my reaction, that I have any fucking clue?”

. . .

Y/N doesn’t have people at her flat often.

Actually, apart from Niall and a few maintenance men, nobody had ever really come over. Not for any particular reason, really, and not because she didn’t want them to necessarily -- the opportunity just rarely arose, or more so, she didn’t often allow it to. If she were going to meet someone then she would meet them somewhere else, and they would part ways after they were finished (again, apart from Niall, who would simply follow her home, kick his trainers off, and head toward her couch which he had told her was simply the comfiest he’d ever been on). Her home was her humble abode. . .it was where she came to destress after a long day, and where Thumper sometimes waited for her debating whether or not he wanted to nibble her bathroom rug to shreds.

Not to mention she had plants growing here too, and flowers that she held dear to her, and while people are more reluctant to go touching what isn’t their business at a store, they are much less disinclined to give that same respect to her plants. Once Y/N had a maintenance man over to fix her faucet and she’d walked out from her room to see that he was caressing her snake plant’s leaves. She couldn’t blame him -- the plant had a very encompassing presence about it and had a way of drawing people in if they weren’t careful. . .hypnotized by the way it made them feel. All of Y/N’s soil and seeds are charmed with special incantations and concoctions that took her years to perfect, she would be disappointed if they weren’t causing people to leave all semblance of professionalism to even for a moment feel as if they were in a room with such clear air, their lungs felt renewed and they deemed it necessary to get closer.

But then she had to apologize to her snake plant for nearly two days after! It had been so upset with her, she could feel it, so she started being even more careful about who she let in. If she was going to go out of her way to have someone over, then there was a good reason for it. . .or it was Niall.

And a demonic, gooey substance sweating from the walls of a blood bank, was well enough a good reason to have Harry over.

It took some coaxing on her part -- he was convinced that they needed to just go back to their respective flats and go to bed, but Y/N was adamant in vetoing the idea. “We’re supposed to talk tomorrow anyway, so we might as well just go ahead and do it tonight -- and you are not leaving me alone after whatever the fuck that was!”

After a good ten minutes, he finally relented as long as they could stop by his flat so he could get his kitten. Y/N hadn’t known that he had a kitten and thought maybe he would bring out some ragged-looking thing, but she was surprised to see through her windshield window that Harry was approaching her car with a small grey kitten. Her face contorts in the way everyone’s face might when they see something small and cute, “Look at her,” she coos once Harry opens his door, “What’s her name?”

“This is Oat,” he answered, holding her out for Y/N to pet, “Be careful, she’s vicious.”

Y/N pet at her head and Oat’s eyes shut as she nuzzled into her palm, “Oh yeah, what a panther.”

Apart from the nerves that had already materialized from what they had seen in the blood bank, she was a little worried about inviting him into her home. When she visualized her safe space, Harry was not typically who she saw sitting on her couch when she came in from the kitchen, holding mugs of warm tea. Yet there he was, introducing Thumper and Oat to one another (who merely sniffed each other, then immediately cozied against her olive throw blanket on the end of the couch), and Y/N is handing him his steamy mug.

“I’ve been thinking,” he began, immediately nursing the mug between his palms and lifting it up to his mouth for a small sip -- the steam disperses around his face in plumes, “And it wouldn’t make sense for. . .for whatever that is to just be a demon.”

“What?” She inquires, taking her seat beside him on the couch, her body twisted so she was facing him entirely. Y/N had adjusted the temperature to something that would be a bit more suited toward having a guest -- when she’s alone, she keeps it ungodly cold so she has an excuse to bundle up in her clothes and blankets. There’s nothing like feeling safe in a cocoon of various fabrics with Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the telly.

Harry strategically places the mug between his knitted socked feet, steadying it there as he begins to play with the thick, brassy tiger ring on his index finger, “Demons are strong, sure, but if they’re gonna be that strong there’s typically two reasons for it: they have already inhabited that area, or someone is controlling them behind the scenes. I would be more inclined to believe the prior, but I’ve been going to this blood blank for about a year now and unless there were some pentagrams I’ve missed or a gruesome ordeal that never made the papers in the past two weeks -- then there’s no reason for that to have happened at the hands of a spirit. Even a blood demon isn’t strong enough to make what happened in there happen, and they literally feed off the substance in the room.”

“So you think someone summoned it or something? I thought you were the only one around here that did that?” Y/N probes, trying to look in his eyes but she keeps getting distracted by his rings -- how many did he have? She thinks he nearly has one on each finger, and he’s plucking them off and placing them on different knuckles as he speaks. Y/N wonders if it’s something he does in response to a stressor, like how she picks at her nails.

“I’m the only witch that summons things around here, but not even I could conjure something that feels that vile.” He explained, fitting the last ring against his knuckle before he pops the bones in his fingers, and Y/N watches as the skin stretches and moves around the muscles in his hands, “I think someone is trying to manifest something without the proper safeguards in place. . .the lack of protection charms, crystals, and spells can invite much more heinous creatures to the living world. They feed off shite like that -- naivety. . .thinking that any person could decide they’ll have a demon carry out a job for them. It’s easier for them to take advantage of them that way.” Harry exhales, running the pad of his thumb around the rim of the mug— she’s given him the one that has intricate, realistic drawings of beluga whales on it, not for any other reason apart from that one was her favorite and she liked to see it in use, “And with a full moon coming up? Recipe for disaster.”

“Oh shit,” Y/N holds her tea closer to her being, “That’s why the feeling is so profuse and disagreeable in the air then, ‘cos they aren’t containing it right? When I was looking into a little bit of what you do, I read that there are containment spells so the demon or spirit doesn’t have free range to do as it pleases, but the spell is dependent on the demon in question and the severity of its power.”

Harry looked pleasantly surprised, ��Yeah, that’s right -- what’re ya looking up what I’m doing for?” He settles into her couch, “Have you got a crush on me or summat?”

If Y/N rolled her eyes any further back, she thinks they would have done a 360 in her eye sockets, “I fell down a rabbit hole the other night when I was trying to figure out why you couldn’t sleep,” an impish grin slides onto his mouth, “And not because I’m “in love with you” -- I just thought it would be interesting to know if your insomnia was the reason of a demon because that would mean one of my items combats against that and wins. My. . .most of my magic is based on prevention when it comes to dark things like that, not really to fight what’s already there.”

“So your flowers don’t like -- I dunno, Little Shop of Horrors it?” He teases, motioning to her Hoya plant that had just begun to bloom for her, “I reckon when I think of plant magic, I think of you snapping your fingers and thorned ivy whipping around to slow assailants.”

“No, none of that,” she laughs lightly, shaking her head, “They’re much too nice and gentle. . .they only want to help. And I’m rarely in a situation where I would need thorned ivy whipping around.” Y/N locks eyes with Oat for a moment, whose eyes close nice and slow before she reopens them and Y/N thinks she might just melt, “What do we do then? How do we stop it?”

He slides a ring with teddy bears from his pinky and spins it between his forefinger and thumb, “There’s nothing to do -- if we don’t know who the problem is, then we can’t fix anything.” Harry shrugs his shoulders, and the action makes his already loose cardigan slide down his arms, revealing more of the cream-colored shirt he wore with Smokey the Bear on the front reading Only YOU! can prevent forest fires, “All we can do is wait for the next fucked feeling and hopefully run into the person causing -- oh,” Harry pauses, motioning toward her, “You’ve got a new friend.”

Y/N’s confused, brows knitted until she feels a paw press against her shoulder and the telltale purr of a happy kitty. When she turns her head, she finds that Oat has snuck her way up to her, and is now attempting to perch on Y/N’s shoulder. She presses closer to the back of the couch so that she had a better footing, and in return Oat bumps at her cheek with the top of her head, “You’re so cute, stop it,” she murmurs, and when she takes a breath through her nose, she smiles, “She smells like my heliotrope flowers too! How are you the familiar of such a grumpy, cruel lug, huh?”

“Oi,” Harry mutters, “I resent that. I’m not grumpy or cruel, you’re just rotten.”

A retort plays at Y/N’s mouth but her phone screen lights up from where it’s sat on the coffee table and strays her attention. She’s confused -- the only person who would be messaging her this late was Niall but she’s almost a hundred percent certain that he was supposed to be out at the bar tonight. It is him though.

Fuck me, have ya looked at the news? Is this that thing we were talkin bout?

Harry is a nosy bugger, and after reading the message with her he reaches for her remote, “You told him about it?” He turns on her telly, quick to open her TV guide, “So he knows about you?”

“Yeah, he knows -- turn to 3,” she tells him, and soon enough the local news is playing out, big bold letters on the blue band stretched across the bottom of the screen.

MAN TO BE CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER ON GIRLFRIEND

He turned the volume up, so they could hear the news reporter who was on site. There was yellow caution tape stripped around a house, police lights, cops walking around in the back, and frightened neighbors who had left the comfort of their homes to investigate what was happening. The woman on screen had long blonde hair that whipped when the wind blew and muffled her microphone feed, her face set stony as she recounted the events as the police had told her, “. . .has no recollection of the event, and is claiming the “walls” were dripping in blood and demanding that he do it. Jacobs is being taken in for further questioning and pending a psychiatric evaluation -- his girlfriend Amanda Wilson is being rushed to hospital that’s all anyone knows right now. Back to you Tom...”

“Oh, fuck sake,” Harry groaned, shaking his head, “Now this is a problem, problem innit?”

“Was it not before?” Y/N takes the remote from him, turning the volume down, “Do you -- does that sound like anything you’ve dealt with? That would try hurting someone like that?”

He presses his knuckles to his eyes, sighing, “Not that I remember -- I’ll have to do some digging. . .this is bollocks, you know how bad this is for business? Nobody wants to mess with dark magic when shit like this is going on.”

“Aish, don’t think so selfishly. People are in danger,” she tsks at him, “And we’ll need to -- what are you doing?” She asks as he removes his feet from where they had been on the couch, reaching down for his loafers like he was about to put them on.

“S’getting late,” he responded, “I was g’na head home --”

“No you’re not,” she told him, her face dropping in borderline disgust as he seemed genuinely confused with her, his face twisting, “We experience something like that, then see the news, and you not only want to separate, but you want to walk all the way home, alone, in the dark? No way, that’s too stupid, you’re staying here.”

Harry’s brows dipped in, irritated, however, he did stop reaching for his loafers, “But --”

“Listen, we may not be fond of each other but I’m not letting you put yourself in danger,” she tells him, before adding quickly, “And you are fucking not going to leave me alone after that! Are you mad?”

“I’m sorry, I thought I’d be doing you a favor without bothering ya with my presence. Never thought Miss. Good Witch of the North would want me breathing her air for too long.” He ripostes and it reinvigorates any distaste for Harry that had been easing throughout the night the more they spoke. He always did that -- always made her feel like she was some stuck up prick who never gave him a chance, but she would have if he hadn’t started out being such an arse to her. Sure, the circumstances they had met under weren’t fantastic. . .she snapped at him for taking her flowers without asking, but he could have just apologized -- could have said sorry, and they could have started over but he was immediately put off by her she presumes, because ever since he’d been nothing but cruel to her. His knocking her out of the room in the blood bank was probably the first kind thing he’d ever done for her, and she isn’t a hundred percent certain that she wasn’t just in his way while he was trying to get out.

So she glowers at him as she pushes from her couch, “Sod off. I’ll get you some blankets.”

He almost immediately replaces the spot that her body had been with his legs, stretching out as far as he could and his feet flop on the arm of the sofa, “Reckon you should make me some of that tea though, so I can sleep.” He called after her. Thumper hops off and follows after her, while Oat finds her spot at Harry’s side and cuddles into where his cardigan’s extra fabric bundles. Y/N goes to the closet in the hall that leads to her bedroom, pries it open, and reaches to the top shelf where she keeps her extra blankets and pillows. Despite how irritated he makes her, she grabs him one of her heavier quilts, because even with her heat kicked up higher than normal her flat has very poor insulation, and the night’s into early mornings get pretty cold. She’s about to grumble at him that he better thank her for this and the bloody tea, but when she returns to the living room. . .he’s asleep.

Harry just fell right to sleep.

She’s confused -- understandably, she thinks, because she remembers how much of a fit he’d thrown about her tea and how she was closed on weekends so he couldn’t have any of it. Had whined how he wasn’t able to sleep without the tea, and she had only given him peppermint tea tonight, so there was no reason that should have put him to bed.

Yet there he was, fast asleep with his arms crossed over his chest.

Tutting her tongue quietly, she unrolls the blanket she had chosen for him and strategically places it over his legs. She is careful to move Oat so that she doesn’t suffocate under the covers as she pulls them over, up to Harry’s chest before replacing her in the spot she had snuggled prior. She pauses for a moment before she leaves them, taking in a completely relaxed Harry -- not that he doesn’t seem relaxed all the time, but he’s just. . .calm. His muscles have melted against her couch cushions, his brow has soothed and his amaranth pink lips are soft and parted. Gentle, easy breaths slip through his mouth. . .Y/N thinks that she likes him like this. Not spiteful, or crass -- this Harry doesn’t seem to hate her. This Harry is warm and comfortable enough to just fall asleep on her couch.

Thumper thumps his foot against the floor, his not-so-silent request that they go to bed and Y/N snaps out of whatever hypnotic state she’d been in watching him rest. She feels creepy but shakes it off, reaching down to pick up Thumper by his belly and cradling him to her chest as she leaves the living room, keeping her lamp on for him in case he wakes up to have a wee or anything.

It’s when she goes to the kitchen to grab him a bottle of water to leave at the coffee table for him, that she can feel Thumper judging her. This is only confirmed by the way he is looking up at her when she looks down at him, his small, pink nose twitching, and she can just sense him repeating Harry’s tease of have you got a crush on me or summat? -- it’s not like he hasn’t questioned her before. She reckons if Thumper could actually speak and not just implant little thoughts of his in her head through whatever little bond they have, he would be very free with his accusations about who she might have feelings for.

Y/N rolls her eyes.

“No, I don’t,” she disagrees with him quietly, “What do you know about crushes, hm? You’re just a bunny.”

. . .

It had been a while since Harry had worked.

Though he was always hesitant to call it work, all things considered. Y/N had once described to him that what he did was lurk around seedy clubs and wait to be recognized by a sorry sap that wanted something they didn’t want to put much effort towards, and Harry can’t necessarily say she’s wrong. He preyed on the lazy; men and women who couldn’t be arsed to obtain a goal without the help of a little magic no matter how negative, and Harry couldn’t really fault them for it. One, because sometimes goals are unattainable with literally anything other than a demon's help, and two because he gets a hefty wad of cash in his pocket for his trouble. How hypocritical could he be to deprecate their usage of dark magic when he is doing the same thing. . .when he relies on that more than anything, even the silly little romance novels he writes so that nobody questions where his money’s coming from.

It was a Friday night, and since he was no longer tied to the commitment of meeting Y/N to discuss the horrible, no good, terrible thing that was slithering its way through town and apparently spurring bouts of attempted murder -- he was able to visit a club. Though Y/N had made him lock pinkies with her that morning, telling him to keep his eye out for anything suspicious that may or may not have led to the events from the night prior.

Promise me that you’ll keep informed on what’s going on there, okay? And promise me that you’ll tell me about it.

The club he’d visited was one of the more popular of the four he frequented, and within the walls, amongst the gyrating bodies in scant clothing and sweat-drenched skin, were many of his regular clients. One of which had been blowing up his phone for the past week telling him how he desperately needed help, and he needed it ASAP. Harry finally replied to his message with a simple time that he would meet him, and that they would discuss the cost once he’s explained what is being asked of him. This guy, in particular, wanted many frivolous things, and typically his requests revolved around wealth, though Harry thought he had more than enough. And while Harry could do a few simple spells that would bring the money gradually and don’t come with the dangers that a demon will, he refuses. Harry has always told each of his clients that a spell and a demon could do the same thing, but demons brought faster results, albeit potentially precarious consequences.

And when it comes to summoning, things can get a bit tricky. If the person who is summoning is the person who will benefit from the demon’s will directly, then it may come with a price, and that price may or may not be hidden between the lines. Especially when it is someone who has no clue about the actual process, offerings that could be made without including their soul for the taking, and spells that could be done that would protect them. After doing this for so long, Harry had developed and harnessed enough power that it was rare a spell every backfired or a demon ever bested him, but if Bradley Evans tried this himself, he’d be good as dead.

This is why, no matter how this man grates every open end of his nerves with a dull blade, he continues to help him. Again, Harry gets paid an obscene amount of money for what he does, so he sucks it right up -- and it’s not as if this money is just for him. He has people to take care of, his own personal gripes with the smarmy, rich, meat-headed pricks that want him to summon Clauneck for a trip to the Bahamas matter very little in the grand scheme of things.

He’s leaning against the far back corner, at a table that he’d claimed for the night and a cherry mango cocktail that wets his lips and stains them red. He really isn’t scouting for suspicious behavior like he had promised to, only because his mind had floated elsewhere entirely. Like how, after so long of only ever being able to rest with help of Y/N’s chamomile, he was able to fall asleep without the help of anything. He had asked her about the tea that she and he drank prior to him passing out unprompted on her couch, but she told him it was just a store-bought strawberry tea that was a guilty pleasure.

It perplexed him greatly. He only remembers her demanding him to stay the night because she didn’t want to be alone (and if he’s honest, neither had he after the night they had), he remembers her standing and him stretching out on her couch, and he remembers asking her for the tea that would help him sleep.

And then he remembers waking, feeling refreshed, and renewed. Confused, but reinvigorated, he had a wee before poking around in her kitchen for something to satiate his grumbly stomach. Y/N was still asleep -- he’d peeked his head into her cracked open door only to find her dreaming peacefully, relaxed, and content. As creepy as it felt to stare at her as she slept, he did watch for a moment. It was different to see her without the accompanied scowl he usually coaxed upon her face -- the blissful gleam that exudes from her now is the same that he sees when she’s tending to one of her gardens.

He brewed two chai lattes in her Keurig with Oat on his shoulder like a bird and she woke as he was taking the second mug, setting it on her kitchen counter, “G’morning,” she yawned, Thumper hopping behind her, looking just as sleepy, “Did you sleep through the night? I made you a cuppa and kept it in the microwave in case you woke up.”

His heart had lurched. . .a genuine clench that Harry had not felt in a while.

“Oh,” he blinked at her owlishly, “I slept just fine, but thank you.”

“Mm, good,” she was so sleepy still, Harry remembers wondering if she was even fully awake speaking to him, “I have sliced fruit in the fridge if you want, for brekkie.”

It was a domesticated scenario that Harry had not been privy to.

Had it been her flat? Maybe the plants that she had strewn about the room were all enchanted, singing sweet songs of sleep that lulled him to sleep without him knowing. All he could recall was feeling so unbelievably comforted and no matter how cold it was in that damn flat, he felt so warm. . .so warm, and it smelled so good, and Oat was snoozing happily at his side. Plus she had wrapped him in this quilt that was heavy and smelled nice -- he thinks, in that moment, he finally understood why babies liked feeling contained in a swaddle blanket. Regardless of what happened at the blood bank, and what they found out on the news, Harry felt safe in her flat. And he probably wouldn’t have left either, if he didn’t have to work.

He’s so caught in his reverie, that Bradley’s arrival truly startled him. A clearing of his throat catches his attention, dragging his unfocused gaze from the crowd of dancers to Bradly, dressed in a Lacoste polo that thought was ugly but he would never say it aloud, “Oh,” he straightened up, bringing the rim of his glass to his mouth and taking a small sip of it, “Right then, what can I do for you? Another trip to Barbados?”

Bradley shakes his head a little frantically, and it's only then that Harry takes in the actual appearance of him, that surpasses the Lacoste and zeros in on the panic that decorates his face, “I need like -- like a demon protector or some kinda spell or -- I don’t fucking know, or something.”

“Oh --” his brows dip, “What’s wrong? Is something bothering you?”

He starts to nod, then switches it to a shake of his head, and that morphs into a shrug of his shoulders, “I don’t know man, I just don’t feel -- I don’t feel safe. I wondered if one of those demons from before were like. . .after my soul or summat.”

“Not possible,” Harry dismisses the idea, setting his glass down on the high round table, “When I work with them we make a spiritual, contractual agreement that they are bound to. If your soul was not on the table, then it will never be on the table -- it must be something else,” he thinks for a moment before a slither of realization stokes the fire in his brain, that sets the coals aflame and heats the cogs to a churn, “What -- explain to me what you’re feeling?”

“Like something is watching me,” he blinked, crossing his arms on top of the table and leaning most of his weight onto it, the scent of liquor wafts over Harry’s face when Bradly breathes, “It’s heavy and. . .it’s like swimming in ink. It’s horrible and frightening, and I’ve never -- I’ve never been one to rely on vibes, but mate, they were bad. . .they were like -- vile. Vile vibes, man.”

Harry thinks, while his description is repugnant, he knows exactly what he’s talking about, but there wasn’t much he could do. Harry can make protection spells that are generalized but he doesn’t believe that any of them are strong enough to fend off whatever this thing is. In cases like this one, sometimes dark magic is not good to fight dark magic, it can only make it grow and fester like a nasty, infected wound. He really did not want to try that out on Bradley. . .he may not be fond of the guy, but he didn’t wish anything ill on him.

“You wouldn’t come to me for a protection spell, for something like that,” Harry begins, “You would need --” You would need Y/N -- is what is about to leave his lips, but it drops away. As much as it’s true -- as much as Harry knows that the reason he felt the safest he’s ever had in Y/N’s presence was whatever protection spells she had put in place and strengthened -- he couldn’t. The thought of sending someone like Bradley to someone like Y/N, makes him feel sick. “Give me one second, yeah? Stay here.”

Y/N gave him her number that morning, telling him that it was silly for them to be unable to contact one another. Harry saved it into his phone and sent her a picture of Oat so that she would have his, but left it at that -- he had assumed, until this moment, that he would never have a reason to have her number. If he ever wanted anything from her he would just show up at her store.

But here he was, scrolling through his contact list to find her, pressing her number and holding his phone up to his ear. It only rings twice before she’s answered it, “Hello? Is everything okay Harry, did you get a lead?”

Harry laughs in disbelief, “What’re you, a detective?” He cleared his throat so he could speak over the music clearly, “I need you for something, and I’ll give you half. And before you get all high and mighty, it isn’t for anything bad -- one of my regulars is experiencing the same fucked thing we have only it’s more vile vibes opposed to blood seeping from the walls. Need a protection spell -- whatever you use for your flat and store.”

She’s quiet for a moment, long enough that Harry questions if his service dropped, but her voice reappears.

“Where are you?”

Fifteen minutes later, Harry is flagging Y/N down to his spot in the club where he stood next to Bradley whose friends kept coming around wondering if Harry was his pull for the night. Her jumper with a printed bunny right in the center made him chuckle to himself -- it was more than clear that she had not planned on coming out tonight, and if not for Harry, he thinks she would have spent three more hours at her store tending to the garden there if not for him. When she sees him, noticeable relief makes her shoulders slump, and as she gets closer, she reaches into her pocket, “Thank god,” she called over the music, “I’ve been in here for three minutes and if I got knocked into one more time I was going to lose it.”

She produces two things -- one is a tiny vial, with an unidentified green liquid, and the other is a small baggie of her tea. Harry takes both from her hand, “Thank you,” he murmurs, before dipping down closer to her ear, “Go over to that empty table near the bar, I don’t want this guy seeing you clear enough that he could ask you for anything ever again.”

Though she was confused, she listened to him, slinking her way over to the table while Harry turned to Bradley who had been looking at his phone, before both were placed in front of them, “Thank you,” he tells him, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. How much?”

“850,” Harry says without batting an eyelash. Typically his business runs closer to the thousands but he cuts the guy a break since he’s scared.

“Each or what?” Bradley asks as he fishes his wallet from his pocket, flipping the leather open and beginning to thumb through his bills.

“No, just 850,” he takes the bills from him, folding it between his fingers, “I shipped your crystals last week, did they come?”

Bradley nods, a big grin on his face, “Oh, fuck yeah dude, I almost forgot! I already transferred you the money for them right?”

Harry thinks it’s a shame that he doesn’t keep track -- he could really scam him if he wanted to, with these black crystals bathed in the water of Asmodeus (they increases stamina and aids them in not being shit in bed; it was a fucking full-day event to get Asmodeus to recognize the clear stream water, in an incubator that he checks every 15 minutes or so to see if the water has been touched red) “Yeah, you sent double the amount ‘cos your buddy wanted some too, right?”

“He loved them, mate, he’s way less narky too now that he’s getting his dick wet.”

Harry holds back a grimace, “Alright then, stay safe. You know how to contact me if you need anything.”

Bradley bids his goodbye and Harry seeks out Y/N, who is picking idly at her fingernails and bobbing her head slightly to the music. When he gets close enough to her, he starts on his spiel as he waves the money toward her,

“Listen, Babe, you used your plants to help him, honestly you deserve way more than this -- a fucking Nobel Prize probably,” he holds it out to her, “Here.”

She shakes her head, but not in the way she would if she were refusing it because she was disgusted by him -- no, instead she closes his hand around it again and presses it closer to his body, “No, no, you keep it, he’s your guy or whatever.”

Harry tilts his head, brows knitted, “But they’re your plants.”

“Yeah, but I would just feel guilty taking it from you so --”

He sighs, counting out 450 of it, taking her hand, opening her fingers, and sliding the bills into her palm, “Even split then. If you’re going to utilize something precious to you to help someone like that fucker, you deserve a little compensation for it. “

Y/N must realize that he wasn’t going to let it go, because she finally folds it in her hands, slipping it into her pocket, “What’s with that guy then? Why do you not like him?”

Harry can see it clearly; the image of his childhood self, his family struggling to make ends meet but going to primary school with the wealthier kids. The ones who laughed at his faded shirts, and holed winter coats -- who would ask him to their birthday parties and talk shit about the gift he’d scraped up coins for doing miscellaneous work around the neighborhood. He thinks about how he knew they would go home to kitchens full of food, and bountiful dinners that they would never appreciate, while Harry never took seconds because no matter how hungry he was, he made sure their bellies were as full as they could be. And Harry remembers how the headmaster did nothing to quell his worries because those kid’s parents could buy out the school if they wanted to.

He sees it all, and he hears it all, and for a moment -- selfishly -- it makes Harry wish he had never given Bradley the protection spell at all.

But he only shakes his head, “He’s just a prick,” he answers simply, before nodding his head toward the door, “Reckon we should get out of here, it smells like piss.”

It’s always a little easier to leave the club than it is to enter it, so they’re out in the cool air soon enough. A small line had formed outside since Harry had been in there last, and as they step out, a group of three is let in through the rope chain that the bouncer is policing. This part of town is always bustling late into the night, so neither feel the cold brush of fear they have been when they’re out in the dark -- or at least the relaxed way Y/N is looking around tells him that she’s pretty content.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” She asks him, pointing at the 24-hour diner right across the street, that had been strategically placed there because people who are drunk and high who just sweat out half their body weight love greasy food, “I skipped dinner today.”

“What a coincidence -- so did I.”

They got a booth in the far back corner, where the white and maroon tilted floor glistened wet from a recent scrub from the mop, and the air smells of lemon pine-sol. This along with the fact that the black leather seats were dusted of the crumbs that usually mottles them, Harry would assume that they had come just in time for their 12 AM clean up, where the first batch of besotted clubbers had left a mess and they were waiting for the second wave to come through. He didn’t miss the eye that the waitress had given them, looking them up and down like she was trying to decipher what state they were both in, but when neither of them wobbles in their stance, or slur through their words asking for a table, she relaxes and asks them where they’d like to sit.

After they get settled and order their food (Harry convinces her to get one of their malted milkshakes with him -- his favorite was strawberry and after she confessed that she never had their strawberry malt, he was insistent on her trying it), Harry’s curiosity is suddenly piqued as he thinks of something he hadn’t thought of before, “How did you make it over to the club so fast, hm? Do you just have jars of this stuff made laying around?”

Y/N sticks her clear straw in the icy glass of water she’d been poured, stirring it like there was anything to mix, and the ice cubes clink together soundly, “No, no, I actually don’t make protection spells unless I’m asked directly -- or usually that’s the case, but I was already in the middle of making some for you and me, so I had a little leftover.”

“For me too?” Harry inquires, genuinely surprised by the concept that she would make him something to keep him safe. She nods though, like it was silly that he thought she wouldn’t have, only this time she reaches into her purse and retrieves two much larger vials with little cork tops, and one bigger bag of the dried leaves, accompanied by a smaller one tied with red ribbon.

“I was doing some research while I was at work --”

“You do a lot of research, don’t you?” He cuts her off and she nods.

“Mhm -- and there’s this like. . .there’s this elder witch who lives an hour or so drive away from us who I think might be immortal, but that’s beside the point. She has this blog that I was scrolling through and she linked her email, so I messaged her and she sent me her number and told me to call her immediately.” She slides one of the vials over to him, along with the tree leaves, “When I did, she told us that we were in a little more danger than everyone else ‘cos like -- whatever this thing is could start trying to feed off of us, especially you. Said that we needed a potent protection spell, and I told her about mine. You feel safe in my store and in my flat right? Like -- like whatever that thing is couldn’t get to us?” He nodded, eyes fixed on hers, “So this is a version of that suitable for our bodies. The tea leaves are for your flat, and then this little bag here --” she points at the one tied closed with the small strip of red ribbon, “-- this is a tea version of it safe for Oat to drink.”

Not only had she made him some, but she also made Oat some too? As much as he disliked her before, he can’t help how this warms his heart, zipping through his body and makes him feel just as safe as he did when he was wrapped in her quilt snug on her couch. Harry wonders if this is what she’s like all the time with her friends. . .he wonders if this side of her, that researches and makes protection goodies, brews him a cuppa just in case he woke up in the middle of the night and comes out in the depth of night to the seedy clubs she despises just because he called and asked -- if that’s what they get to see. If that’s what he would have seen had their meeting been any different.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, taking the vial and the bags, looking at them against his palm, “A lot. You didn’t have to do this for me.”

“I did though,” she takes a drink of the water through her straw, “I may not agree with what you do but we’re the only two witches here and there is power in unity, even if our versions of magic are different. We have to be there for each other -- Thumper agrees, and that’s a lot coming from him because he doesn’t like much of anybody. . .he barely likes me,” she holds her hand up, the index finger of her other going from finger to finger as she lists off the ingredients, “So we’ve got fern, anise, leaves from the ash tree in the forest, fennel -- the nice old woman told me to hold off on the mugwort unless we’re planning on astral projecting or doing anything with divination, but if we felt that it was necessary we could wear a wreath of it around her necks. That’s an old wives tale though, I’m pretty sure.” She wiggles her fingers, “All that and a little bit of moon water, and we have ourselves a little protection spell! I dipped my finger in for a taste test and I’ll be honest, it’s awful and plant-y but I reckon we can toss them back like a shot and chase it with a sweet drink like juice or something.”

It hits Harry that he gave Y/N very little credit for what she did, but now as he’s looking at something that she’d made specifically with him in mind, that wasn’t just a glorified sleepy time tea, it puts some things in perspective for him. Sure, she’s been a dick to him in the past, but he was a dick too, about her magic. While he isn’t going to start kissing the ground she walks on, he decides then that he’ll be more mindful of her craft. Plus, from the amount of time that they’ve had to spend together in the past two days, she’s tolerable when she isn’t on her high horse about him summoning spirits and ruining the town. She’s even helpful.

“Thank you,” he repeats, “I really mean it, I appreciate this a lot.”

Y/N smiles at him and it’s a smile that he’s never been gifted before. A smile that makes him smile back, as she places her elbow on the table and holds out her pinky toward him -- she’s big on pinky swears, he’s finding.

“We’re looking out for each other, okay? I’ve got your back if you’ve got mine. . .I swear it.”

Harry locks his pinky with hers without a second thought.

#WRITING #WOOOOOOOOO #SPOOKY #YAHTZEE #I HOPE YOU GUYS LIKE IT BECAUSE I LOVE IT LOADDS #AND I LOVE YOU LOADS #HAPPY READING :D #HARRY STYLES

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silkenstarlight · 3 years

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a night in crimson valley

Summary: Reader is a bartender at the Crimson Valley Motel. After she is accosted by a drunk John Walker, a familiar face offers her protection and comfort.

Pairing: Biker!bucky x bartender!reader

Warning/s: language, violence, alcohol use; sorta fluffy end

Word count: 5.6k

Author’s note: I’m unsure whether I want to turn this into a series; please let me know your thoughts!

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Her nose burned with the scent of blood and cheap vodka, no matter how hard she scrubbed.

In the early days, when she had first been stationed at this bar, she had stocked the cupboard beneath the register with supplies. Lemon-scented bleach, candy-blue windex, a dried up tube of wet wipes. Every night before closing, she had tugged on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and gone to work. Rubbing, scouring, swabbing away every spilled shot, every stray fingerprint. The dirt and spit and grime seemed to accumulate instantly, and yet, she continued her sisyphean housekeeping, trying to paint over the bar’s run-down reality with a layer of chemical gloss. But, all of that effort was to no avail; this was a roadside establishment, so there would always be sloppy drunks, and there would, most assuredly, always be bar fights, new stains to replace old. No use in hiding it.

Now, she’d grown numb to it, the cleaning supplies below the register covered in an ever-thickening coat of dust. The once shiny, lacquered surface of the bar now reflected dully beneath the low light, encrusted with old dirt and sour deeds. The floor was sticky, a years’ worth of spilled cocktails accumulating in a tacky glue trap. The mirror behind the bar, its surface cloudy and warped, reflected the late-night debauchery of men in desperate need of respite.

Every night, she wiped foggy glasses with the same gray, fraying rag, watching the same blurred, bearded faces pass through. The Crimson Valley Motel, owned by (Y/N)’s father, was a dependable option for truckers looking for a night away from the cramped quarters and lumpy cots of their vehicles. With its low nightly fares and extensive parking, and her father’s promise of discounted drink prices at the attached bar, customers returned without fail. Even still, she tried not to grow too attached to any patrons. They were just passing through, after all, with separate lives waiting for them beyond the road and the walls of the motel. But, sometimes, she just couldn’t help herself.

Bucky Barnes was one such case.

The first things she had noticed the moment he walked into the bar two years ago were his eyes. Piercing blue, stern and ever-watchful, set beneath the overhang of his perpetually furrowed brow. That first night, he had nursed his whiskey glass with two gloved hands, staring at the bar’s surface as if he were trying to memorize every intricacy and flourish in its woodgrain. She had appreciated his presence ever since, so quiet and watchful, a stark departure from the raucous drunkards and wild military men who usually frequented the Crimson Valley Bar. And, despite the fact that he drank as much as the other patrons, he never seemed affected by the alcohol, his gaze as clear and haunting as ever, even well into the dark hours of morning. It almost made her laugh, his perfect stoicism and strong jaw, the classic image of unperturbed masculinity. But she could sense the ghost of some deep sadness in the downturned set of his mouth. His shoulders always seemed tense, and he continually shifted his weight in his seat, peering over his shoulder every once in a while, as if suspicious that he was being watched. It made her swallow any skepticism about his demeanor, instead deciding that he was likely a very broken man, deserving of the space and quiet his countenance demanded. For that reason, she never asked him any questions, never made a move to satiate that burning curiosity within her. Better to keep a respectful distance than stir up unwelcome memories.

She had never even really spoken to him, and only knew his name because she once caught his signature on a receipt. By the time she read it, he had whisked away to spend the night in his motel room and prepare for departure early the next morning.

Whenever he came back, it was like she could sense his presence, could feel his steely gaze sweeping the bar. It was comforting, a sweet bubble of solace beneath the humming neon and peeling rock n’ roll posters, a space of quiet surrounded by the pressing screech of electric guitar and deep boom of drums. She never knew when he would return, his trucking routes and schedule difficult to predict with such minimal information, but she secretly looked forward to it. Another day, another opportunity to unwrap the quiet mystery of Bucky Barnes.

Tonight, the bar was crowded. Hopeful thoughts of seeing Bucky retreated to the very back corner of her mind as she poured sparkling streams of amber liquid into lines of waiting glasses, shaking and stirring and swirling again and again in the rote, mindless motions that a full house required. She had no room to daydream, not on a Saturday night, when more lonely truckers sought out the bar for company, and when the local military base flooded in on their night out. In a room full of loud men with wanting mouths, she needed to work quickly.

On nights like these, the men mostly left her alone, too absorbed in their own festivities to take much note of her. Beyond the simple “pleases” and “thank yous,” they seemed to recognize that any attempt to strike up a conversation would interrupt her flow and leave her begrudging, frustrated, and not exactly an ideal conversation partner. But, some men couldn’t take a hint.

She had been cutting lemon wedges, concentrating on creating an even slice and avoiding her fingertips with the dull knife blade. She counted each slice before pouring the wedges into a chilled metal bowl, her movements precise and rhythmic. 1, 2. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, pour… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, pour… 1, 2, 3--

“Hey, bartender! I asked you a question.”

She knew it was John before she even bothered to look up. She sighed heavily, placing the knife on the counter and wiping her hands before tilting her gaze upwards.

John Walker was another regular here, but her opinion of him was very different than the tentative infatuation she harbored for Bucky Barnes. To put it simply, she did not like John. Whenever he swaggered past the bar’s threshold, flanked by his two favored cronies, she shuddered. Unlike the relatively polite regulars who frequented the bar, John was demanding, expecting (Y/N) to cater to his every whim without complaint. He was, apparently, a favored recruit at the military base. She just thought he was a privileged asshole. One time, he refused to tip her because she didn’t smile at him when she served his drink. And, another time, he broke his glass on purpose just to watch her clean it up.

Now, he was staring at her, head cocked and arms crossed, expecting an answer to a question she hadn’t heard him utter.

She sighed again, leaning against the counter. “Sorry, John. Didn’t catch your question.” Her voice was flat, lacking in genuine sympathy. “Mind repeating it?”

“Can’t even listen,” he said to himself, shaking his head in disappointment. “As I asked earlier, did you water down my fuckin’ snakebite?”

She stared at him, eyes boring into his cold blue ones, and she thought for a second. She was annoyed by his interruption, but this could go poorly if she didn’t handle it with care. If she said the wrong thing, he could get offended, and she was the only woman in a room full of men. She could hold her own in a fight and had some experience with self-defense, sure, but that wouldn’t hold up against a man with John’s stature and training. She couldn’t predict if any of the other men in the room would come to her rescue if things went south, but she couldn’t really blame them. He was tall and strong, and had a temper to boot. But his fragile masculinity, which compelled him to talk down to her and order such ridiculous drinks as a snakebite, wouldn’t survive if she talked back. So, her decision was made.

“Well, John,” she said, her voice low as she smirked. “Usually, you’re already plastered by the time you make it to my bar. I always have to water down your drinks because you can’t hold your fucking liquor.”

His face darkened, brows drawing downwards in a chilling expression of anger. He gritted his teeth together and pushed back from the bar, motioning to turn away from her and back to his friends. “I can handle my liquor just fine, thank you.”

She cleared her throat, catching his attention. “Actually, just last weekend, you threw up all over the parking lot. My poor Pops had to clean it up.” She chuckled at the memory of her father, grumbling with a bucket and mop in hand, as John sat with his head in his hands in the front office. “You might not remember it, John, but I do. We all do.” The incident had occurred well before closing time, so many of the bar’s customers had seen it with their own eyes. One or two had surely caught it on camera.

“Are you fucking mocking me?” A vein popped out on his neck, his face growing read and hot.

She felt her pulse rise in fear, but she ignored it, hand resting next to the knife on the counter. “Maybe I am.” She leaned forward, leering at him. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What am I going to do about it?” He laughed incredulously, picking up his half-full glass and examining its amber-colored contents briefly before hurling it at the mirrored wall behind her.

She ducked, shielding her face from splattering liquid and broken glass. “Shit.” She dropped onto her hands and knees and crawled, frantically clambering below the bar for the cleaning cupboard. She knew how this encounter would go, but she was starting to realize that she shouldn’t have pushed it. He had never actually threatened her physical harm before, resigning himself to simply being an asshole. Tonight, that had obviously changed.

“Nuh-uh, where the fuck do you think you’re going?” His voice was still loud enough to pierce her eardrums over the pulsating music. He reached down to where she was, grasping for Windex in the dusty, cavernous cabinet, and roughly gripped her hair in his fist. He pulled up harshly, causing an unpleasant sting to radiate down her scalp. The breath caught in her throat.

She had fucked up. Badly.

He wrenched her close, until their faces were just inches apart. He examined her face, his own visage arranged in an unpleasant sneer. She looked straight into his eyes, unwilling to back down, even though she was frightened of what he might do.

“I should put you in your place.” His voice was quiet, only audible to her. She shuddered, lip curling in distaste. The sour taste of bile rose on her tongue at the violating way his eyes scanned her face, as if he were a predator examining his prey. A few patrons were watching, pausing their conversations to watch the show. But, none were helping, jumping up to arrive at her aid. A dark pit grew in her stomach at the observation.

He loosened his grip on her hair and she moved to pull back, but before she could, he spit in her face, a thick, hot wad of saliva landing on her cheek. Her mouth gaped in disgust, nose flaring, and she stepped back, wiping the insult from her face with her sleeve and slipping the knife she had been using earlier into her hand, concealing it behind her back. She retreated until her back was flush with the mirror behind her, eyes flitting wildly, trying to find a gap in the crowd where she could disappear and distance herself from him. But all she could see was his face, his hooked nose and hooded eyes, that awful, sneering expression, as he prepared to jump over the bar and bridge the gap between them.

But, before he could, his head slammed into the bar’s wooden surface with a sickening crack!

Her mouth dropped open in confusion, the rushing bout of adrenaline quickly waning in her veins as she took in the sight of John, head pinned to the counter by a gloved hand. Wait, is that--?

Her suspicions were confirmed when she looked up from John’s floundering figure to find Bucky, his hand firmly wrapped in John’s hair, his face contorted in an expression of rage. She had never seen him like this, nose scrunched, eyes dark. His eyes briefly flickered to hers, and when their gazes met, his face softened slightly, as if to provide her with some sense of reassurance. The breath stalled in her throat, but before relief could flood into her limbs, she saw John stirring in Bucky’s grip.

“What… what the fuck, man?” John turned his head, cheek pressed against the bar’s cool surface, to stare at Bucky out of the corner of his eye.

“Watch yourself, buddy.” Bucky’s voice was gruff and uncaring.

“Buddy?” John scoffed.

“Well, what’s your name, then?”

A laugh rose in John’s throat, bubbling over into a bitter, joyless sound. He was trying to intimidate Bucky into backing off, shifting his weight below him in an effort to distract him.

It didn’t work. Bucky simply pressed John’s face even harder into the counter, until the breath whooshed from John’s lips in a muffled, defeated gasp.

“I asked you a question.”

“Fine-- fine. Name’s Walker.”

“Well, Walker,” Bucky replied, leaning in close until his face obstructed John’s vision. “Keep your fucking mitts off my girl here.”

“What?” She couldn’t help it as the question left her lips in a surprised gasp. Bucky’s eyes flicked up to her again, lips pulling down in an embarrassed grimace, as if he hadn’t meant to call her that.

That moment was enough time for John to act.

Bucky grunted and stumbled back a couple of steps as John pushed out from under him. There was no time to think, no time to act, before John strode towards Bucky and socked him straight in the nose, Bucky’s head whipping violently to the side.

(Y/N)’s heart plummeted into her stomach. She stayed anchored to her spot in front of the mirror, unable to move. There wasn’t much that she could do. Now that John had initiated a physical fight, he likely wasn’t going to stop throwing punches until either he or Bucky collapsed. And with Bucky eliminated as a threat, there would be no one standing between John and her. With that thought, she brought the knife out from behind her and clutched it to her chest like a lifeline. She watched Bucky and John with rapt attention, waiting for the fight to turn back in her direction again.

Blood began to gush from Bucky’s nostrils in a thick stream, staining his lips a wet scarlet and dribbling down his chin. But, he smiled, shaking his head slightly and chuckling darkly.

“You’re really askin’ for it now, Walker.”

Before (Y/N) could even blink, Bucky sprung, landing a jab and a right cross that hit John square in the chin. He grabbed John by the collar and slammed him into his knee, the pure force knocking the wind out of John’s chest with a meek groan. Bucky pushed John roughly into a table and John stumbled, causing a chair to clatter and fall, but he remained upright, leaning heavily against the table.

“You going to fight back at all?” Bucky’s goading tone took (Y/N) by surprise. Why was he egging him on?

John snorted and cracked his neck, trying to shake an encroaching sense of uncertainty from his limbs. He pushed off from the table and began a slow, circling orbit around the center of the room, sizing Bucky up with a violent, wolflike gaze, pushing the other customers flush against the wall. Bucky simply stood in place and watched, trying to anticipate John’s next move.

John stopped circling when he was directly across from (Y/N), Bucky between them. She felt John’s gaze slide from Bucky to her, his eyes languidly raking over her body, sensing out her fear. When he saw the knife in her hand, he raised an eyebrow in disapproval, shaking his head. Her heart pounded, adrenaline beginning to thrum through her veins once more.

John widened his stance and bent his knees, assuming an athletic stance in preparation to tackle Bucky. Bucky imitated his movement, planting his feet firmly into the floor. John inhaled deeply through his nose, once, twice, and then, he took off, running towards Bucky at full speed.

The room watched in silence, holding a collective breath. The only sound was the pounding of John’s boots against hardwood, the music paused long ago.

He hit Bucky with the force of a mack truck. It was enough to knock anyone off their feet, even someone who had fared as well as Bucky in the fight so far. John hit him so hard that they went flying, suspended in the air for a moment. For (Y/N), it felt so much longer, watching her savior struggle against the grip of his opponent in midair, uttering a quiet “Shit!” as his back slammed into the floor. And then, Bucky was still, John crouched over his immobile form, a triumphant smile plastered on his face.

(Y/N) felt her body move off its own accord, pushing away from the wall, past the safety of the bar’s counter, towards the aftermath of the fray. Her legs quivered, a hard lump rising in her throat as she pushed towards the edge of the crowd. She couldn’t see Bucky’s face, his head concealed by John’s hulking body. A shudder wracked her body, her hope waning.

It was like John could sense her presence. He looked up, his sickening grin showing glistening, too-white teeth. She flexed her fingers, adjusting her grip on the knife. John’s eyes caught the movement, sensing the glint of low light against the blade, and he smirked. He was about to rock back onto his knees, to get up and finish what he started, when Bucky’s head slammed into his.

Disoriented, (Y/N) stepped backwards, once again flush with the crowd. One moment, she had been preparing to fight, to let the blood-soaked evening devolve into even more violence. Then, the next, Bucky had suddenly reanimated, an almost superhuman force driving power into his limbs. He bucked John, still reeling from the unexpected headbutt, off of him with an aggressive, thrusting twist. John tumbled and collapsed on the floor next to Bucky, who slowly knelt, then stood, eyes on John the whole time. When John didn’t budge, splayed on the floor with a distant, vaguely dazed expression, Bucky turned his gaze to (Y/N).

The room was dead silent, save for John’s labored breathing and the sound of Bucky’s boots against the hardwood as he slowly walked towards (Y/N). The room seemed to fade around the two of them, the confused, awed, and fearful faces of the spectating patrons blurred together in an anonymous mass. It smelled of sweat and rust and spilled liquor, but she didn’t care, because Bucky was okay.

“Anyone else?” Bucky asked the rest of the room, not taking his eyes off of (Y/N), even for a moment, lest she disappear, or worse. But she didn’t, staying rooted to the same spot, eyes glistening with gratitude. And no one responded to Bucky’s challenge.

When Bucky came to a stop a foot in front of her, the other customers began to quietly file out, afraid to utter any remarks that may provoke another altercation. John’s two cronies picked him up from the floor, hefting his arms over their shoulders and bolting for the exit, his boots dragging on the floor. (Y/N) watched them exit, watched them stuff John into the backseat of their car before they peeled out of the parking lot and took off with the screeching sound of retreating rubber.

“You know,” Bucky said, his voice soft in spite of the evening’s violent course. “You don’t have to worry about using that. You’re safe with me.” He pointed at the knife, still clutched in (Y/N)’s hands.

She looked down at the knife in her hands and then looked up at him, formulating a response, when she noticed that he had a gash on his jaw, as well as a still steadily-flowing nosebleed. The knife clattered to the floor as she reached for his hand. “You’re bleeding.” Her voice was thick with worry, regretting the fact that he had suffered for her sake.

He shook his head. “I’ve gotten worse.”

“Let me help you.” She glanced urgently around the bar, now empty save for the two of them. “I can close up and bring the first aid kit to your room. I owe you, after all of that.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” He paused for a second, considering. “But, sure. A couple of bandaids wouldn’t hurt.”

She smiled. “I’ll be there in ten.”

His brows creased together slightly, a chagrined smile curling his lips upwards. “Oh, I’m not leaving you alone just yet. We didn’t see where Walker went. He could be waiting just outside with those two other guys.”

She knew that both she and Bucky had seen them drive away, but she nodded anyways. “Alright. Just let me grab the first aid kit and my keys.”

“Deal.”

She picked the knife up from the floor and walked back to the bar, placing it gently in the sink. As Bucky walked towards the entrance, surveying the parking lot outside from the small, frosted window, she reached into the cabinet of cleaning supplies, pulling out a rusted, white box with a blaring maroon cross emblazoned on its front. She blew off the thin layer of dust that coated it and stood, grabbing her keys from the hook next to the mirror and joining Bucky at the entrance.

He turned towards her, noting the first aid kit, and grinned. “Room 102, here we come.”

She returned his smile as he opened the door, midnight air washing over them in a brisk, drafty waft. They stepped outside, engulfed in nighttime chill, and she shut the door and locked it, fumbling with the cold metal of the keys. Bucky stepped closer to her, his arm brushing against hers, his body emanating an intoxicating warmth. She welcomed his proximity, wondering if he could sense the fact that she was cold, as they walked across the parking lot to his motel room.

He pulled his key from his back pocket and slid it through the card swipe, the door unlocking with a crisp click. She was looking out at the parking lot, at the trees and darkness beyond, wondering if John and his friends were in fact lurking out there somewhere, biding their time for the right moment to strike again. He was definitely the type to hold a grudge for a night like this. If he didn’t retaliate tonight, he would soon, would let her soak in the fear for a few days and then arrive at the bar unannounced with dues to pay.

Bucky cleared his throat, and (Y/N)’s attention snapped back to him. She looked up at him, eyes wide and surprised, and found that his smile was gentle and knowing.

“You’re safe with me. Come on, let’s get inside. It’s cold.”

When they stepped inside, they were greeted with a welcoming warmth. The door shut behind them. He walked over to the little oak nightstand next to the single queen-sized bed and turned on the bedside lamp, its bulb washing the room in a dim, glowing halo of amber. She sighed, muscles relaxing, seeming to melt into the warmth, into the comfort of being somewhere besides the bar. She placed the first aid kit on the bed and shrugged off her cardigan.

“So, doc,” Bucky teased, approaching her at the foot of the bed. “What’s the plan? How’re you going to fix me up?”

“Well,” she said, squinting as she examined his face. “We’ll have to wash all that blood off first, so I can assess the damage.”

He gestured to the bathroom with one hand. “Lead the way.”

They walked into the bathroom and he flipped the light on, its white fluorescence a stark contrast from the soft light in the other room. She grabbed a bleach-white washcloth from the shelf above the toilet and turned on the faucet, dampening the cloth under the steady stream of water. She turned off the faucet and stepped back as Bucky leaned against the sink, crossing his arms.

“This might sting,” she said quietly, stepping into the space between his legs, his stance framing hers. He simply nodded in response. She tried not to think about their sudden proximity, the fact that she was alone in a motel room with a man who had risked his own safety to protect hers, a man she had been secretly pining over for a while now. Instead, she smoothed the wet washcloth in her hands and brought it up to his face, dabbing gingerly at a stream of blood that had dried on his cheek. When she brushed against the cut on his jaw, he winced, a sharp huff of breath leaving his nose.

“Sorry,” she apologized, trying to handle the cloth with light fingers. “He really got you there.”

“Even if that’s true, part of me thinks I should thank the guy.”

(Y/N) paused. “W-what?”

“Well, he’s an absolute ass. Deserved what he got,” he chuckled. “But now, I’ve got the pretty girl who works at my favorite bar taking care of me. It was definitely worth a couple of scrapes.”

“I--” her response died in her throat, choked by the deep blush that was creeping up her neck. She paused dabbing at his face, looking at him quizzically.

“Sorry,” he said quickly, noting her creased brow and parted lips. “Too soon.”

“No-- no. It’s okay.” She shook her head and smiled, moving the washcloth to his upper lip as she wiped away the evidence of his bloody nose. I just didn’t think you felt that way, too.

After a few more minutes of tense silence, (Y/N) trying to avoid direct eye contact the whole time, lest her blush return, his face was clean. She stepped back and examined her handiwork before throwing the bloodied washcloth in the waste bin and leading Bucky back into the main room. She sat down on the bed, its springs groaning in a rusty bounce beneath her, and she opened the first aid kit, searching for a suitable bandage for his jaw. He knelt on the floor in front of her, placing his hands on the bed on either side of her, caging her in with his arms but refusing to let his touch drift any closer without permission. He watched her fingers flit indecisively between the different band-aid choices.

Finally, she plucked one from its box, carefully unpeeling its wrapping. Bucky tilted his head slightly, allowing her easy access to the cut on his jaw, and she delicately placed the band-aid over it, careful not to press too hard against the tender skin. Her touch unconsciously lingered a moment longer, lightly caressing his face with the pads of her fingers. But after a few seconds, when she didn’t pull away, they both inhaled sharply, his face quickly growing hot. Their eyes met, and she dropped her hands to her sides, his piercing blue gaze boring into hers.

He blinked and stood, walking over to the door and hunching down to glance at the parking lot through the peephole.

“I should get going,” (Y/N) said, voice hushed as she snapped the first aid kit shut. She stood, grabbing her cardigan, preparing to meet the cold outside and run to her permanent room. “Thank you. For everything.”

He turned away from the door. “Hold on.” His voice was grave, a stark contrast to the light, flirty turn of the evening since they had entered his room. “We still don’t know if he’s out there.”

(Y/N) bit her lip and shifted her weight, silently grateful for his hesitancy to let her be alone. “What are you suggesting?”

“You can take the bed.” He gestured to the spot on the carpet between the bed and the door. “I can take the floor.”

“A-are you sure?”

“If I was in your position, I wouldn’t want to be alone,” he said, voice rough and quiet. “But, it’s your decision to make. I can walk you back to your room, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

She thought for a second. She agreed with Bucky’s observation that John may still be out there, lying in wait, and he had been spot-on with the remark that it would be frightening to be alone after tonight’s violence. So far, Bucky had proven himself to be good. She felt comfortable around him. He didn’t try to touch her, and he still gave her options, despite the fact that he seemed oddly protective of her. She knew that he wouldn’t hurt her, that he wouldn’t try to slip into bed next to her in the darkest hours of morning. He was a good man. He would live up to his promise and give her space, acting as a blockade between her and the outside world. For tonight, he would be the promise of warmth, of comfort, of safety.

“I think I’d be more comfortable here. With you.”

“Alright.” He offered a simple reply, walking over to her and taking the first aid kit and her cardigan from her, placing them on top of the dresser. “You’ll be safe with me,” he reassured her, bending down to look her in the eyes when he said it, uttering each word with heavy truth.

She nodded and bit her lip. When she felt her blush creeping back up her face, those stern, icy blue eyes of his fixated on her, she turned away, directing her attention towards the bed, hands smoothing over the covers. She grabbed a pillow, its blanched case stiff and rough from continual washing, and handed it to him. He smiled and took it, humming a low laugh and placing it on the floor next to the bed.

She pulled back the sheets as he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. Her eyelids were suddenly heavy, her body absolutely exhausted, but grateful for a safe place to rest after the day’s peril. She felt herself lull into a hypnotic state of rest before she could even pull the covers over her body, listening to the rumble of the motel’s heater and the whoosh of cars driving past on the distant highway.

Bucky finished in the bathroom and tiptoed to the closet. He grabbed the extra blanket from the top shelf, its woolen fabric starchy and coarse, and plopped it onto the floor next to his pillow. Then, he looked down at (Y/N), curled up on the bed, already halfway into a dream. He sighed, a soft smile gracing his lips, and he reached for the blankets on the bed, pulling them up over her sedated form. She shifted under the covers, settling into their warmth, and he turned off the bedside lamp, the room submerged in a sudden, but not unwelcome, darkness.

✧

She woke to light streaming through the gap in the curtains.

The room smelled of lavender detergent and carpet cleaner, and of something distinctly masculine and unfamiliar, the scent of mint toothpaste and rainfall. She stretched, her body grateful for a restful night as memories of the previous day trickled back in. John’s threats, Bucky’s heroism. Her shyness, her inability to tell him how she felt, despite the fact that he so clearly reciprocated those feelings he had hinted at.

She sat up in bed and looked around the room. On the floor next to her, the spare blanket was folded neatly, the pillow she had given to Bucky the previous night stacked on top of it. His duffel was gone from its perch on the dresser. Any trace of him had disappeared, save for the scent that hung in the air and the memories that clung to (Y/N)’s brain.

She sighed, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and standing up. She had a lot of work to do today. She supposed that she should probably clean up the bar after last night’s incident, and should break open the cleaning supplies that she had left untouched for so long. She wished that she had had the chance to say goodbye to Bucky before he left, a faint sense of longing gripping her throat. But, at least the cleaning would take her mind off of that, for the time being.

As she stood, she brushed through her hair roughly with her fingers, gathering the first aid kit and her cardigan. She surveyed the room one last time, bathed in soft morning light, when a square of white on the nightstand caught her eye.

Brows furrowed with confusion, she walked over, abandoning her things on the bed. On the nightstand was a notepad, an uncapped pen sitting next to it. A brief note was scribbled on it.

Call me if he comes back.

Or, if you need me. For anything.

-Bucky

The message was followed by a phone number.

(Y/N) ripped the note from the pad and stared at Bucky’s slanted, spiked handwriting for a moment, noting the sharp angles and rushed script of his letters.

She stuffed the note in her back pocket and smiled.

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