#(PRIMAL II - MAIN)

[claramelooo]

WOVEN FATES (13/20)

A little bit more of this. I really think we deserve a break, right?

Enjoy <3

MINORS MUST NOT INTERACT

Pairing: AgathaRio x Reader

Summary: being alone with Agatha was smoother than you imagined.

Hey! Now I've a masterlist

Fragile II

The studio was in a silent frenzy, like a living organism preparing for a moment of pure intensity.

Lights were being adjusted, cameras positioned at precise angles, microphones tested to capture every nuance of the pain about to unfold in the scene. Everyone knew this was the scene—the emotional climax of the story.

You sat in a corner of the set, watching everything with sharp eyes, feeling the charged energy in the air. The crew spoke in hushed tones, moving carefully so as not to break the bubble of concentration Wanda had created around herself.

Agatha stood at the center behind the cameras, the main crew gathered around her. Her long fingers toyed with the hem of her blouse, her square-framed glasses resting perfectly on the bridge of her sharp nose, highlighting her well-shaped brows, now drawn together in a small crease as she observed, analyzing every detail.

At the center of the stage, Wanda stood frozen in the doorway—too afraid to step inside and face her worst fear. The lighting cast harsh shadows that deepened the tragedy etched into her expression.

The set was devastating: the boys’ room was in disarray, colorful toys scattered everywhere, a toy car overturned near the door, the beds—messy in a way that felt wrong—held two small, familiar bodies.

Silence fell over the set like a heavy veil.

The scene began.

At first, Wanda only looked. Her eyes widened as if her mind refused to process what was in front of her. One hesitant step, then another. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. And then, it hit. The absolute recognition of loss.

A scream tore through the air.

It was a sound that made your stomach twist—something primal, ripped from the depths of the soul. A wail that couldn't be faked. Wanda threw herself over the bodies, her fingers trembling as they brushed over her children's pale faces.

"No, no, no… my babies…"

The words came out in choked sobs, her body shaking with despair. She rocked them gently, as if they could still wake up, as if there was still hope. But there wasn’t. And that realization shattered her before your eyes.

Her cries weren’t just acting—they were raw, visceral, something that made even the camera operators swallow hard. You hugged your own arms, feeling every word like a blow.

You wrote this scene. Deep down, you knew this was what you wanted. You wanted your mother to feel the pain of losing you—but it had been the complete opposite, hadn’t it?

You created this pain. But you never expected to see it like this, so real, so alive.

From across the room, you saw Agatha inhale sharply, her gaze sharpening as she watched. Her hands gripped the arms of her director’s chair tightly. As focused and composed as she was, when you looked at her, you found something rare—vulnerability.

Maybe it was Wanda’s performance, or maybe… maybe Agatha understood that kind of pain.

Thick tears ran down Wanda’s green eyes, her body curled protectively around children that were never truly hers. She buried her face in their hair, as if afraid they would disappear.

And your heart pounded in your chest, the air in the room growing thin.

Who was Wanda?

Her performance felt too real. It hurt.

“Mommy’s going to bring you back. She will… She’ll do whatever it takes.” Her voice broke, and in that moment, there was truth.

Tears burned at the back of your throat, desperate to escape. This—this was everything you had wanted.

This was it.

The words you had longed to hear. The ones you had waited for, in vain. But she never came back. She never fought for you.

So you had to save yourself.

And now, those words existed.

But they weren’t meant for you.

The knot in your throat tightened.

“Cut!” Agatha finally called out. The entire studio remained still for a few moments, as if no one was sure they were allowed to move, to breathe again.

Wanda remained on her knees, her breath still ragged, her eyes glistening with tears. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, the emotion vanished. Her breathing steadied, her shoulders squared, and the vulnerability disappeared behind a neutral, almost cold, expression.

She rose with a fluid motion, lifting her chin as she ran her fingers through her hair. A crew member rushed forward to hand her a plush robe, which she slipped on without hesitation, crossing her arms as if trying to push away any remnants of the scene she had just lived through.

Her forest-green eyes swept across the studio before briefly landing on Agatha, who gave a small nod of approval. Then, they found you.

You watched the shift in her demeanor with a weight in your chest.

How could someone break apart so completely, and then, in the next moment, act as if nothing had happened? The answer should have been simple: Wanda was a brilliant actress.

But for some reason, it felt like more than that. As if she had been trained to bury her emotions the moment they were no longer needed.

Without another glance, she turned on her heels and walked off the set, heading for her dressing room.

Before you could fully process everything that had just happened, Agatha’s assistant hurried over, clutching a tablet against her chest.

“Hey, can you take the twins for lunch? They need some time to relax before the next scene.”

You blinked, taking a second to register what she was asking.

Your gaze flickered toward the two boys sitting in foldable chairs, distractedly playing on their phones, oblivious to the emotional wreckage their last scene had left behind.

They were talented actors—but at the end of the day, they were still just kids.

“Yeah, of course.” Your voice came out softer than you intended.

The assistant smiled gratefully before hurrying off to handle something else.

You exhaled, the weight of an odd exhaustion settling on your shoulders. But your mind wasn’t completely here.

It was still stuck on Wanda.

On her eyes.

On the way the pain had felt real.

And how, suddenly, it didn’t anymore.

Sitting at a table with the twins, you finally felt like you could breathe. The studio’s in-house restaurant had a refined atmosphere, with rustic wooden tables and walls lined with framed posters of old films.

As you chewed your sandwich, you watched the boys devour their generous portions of mac and cheese, as if they hadn’t eaten in three days.

“So, how’d you guys get into acting?” you asked, taking a sip of your juice.

Twin #1 didn’t hesitate, pointing at his brother. “It was his fault. He wanted to be famous. I just went along because I’m a loyal brother.”

“Hey!” Twin #2 protested. “That’s not how it happened! I wanted a new video game, and my mom said she wasn’t going to waste money on that. Then, I saw a casting call for a commercial and thought, ‘Easy. I’m charming and good-looking, they’ll pick me right away!’”

You raised an eyebrow, resting your chin on your palm. “And did they?”

He rolled his eyes, shoving another bite of mac and cheese into his mouth. “Of course not. They picked him!” He pointed at his brother, pretending to be indignant.

Twin #1 grinned triumphantly. “But I made a brotherly pact and said I’d only take the role if they let him in too.”

The brother sighed. "And that's how I became an actor. I just wanted a PlayStation..."

You laughed, shaking your head. "And now here you are, the children of Hollywood’s biggest star."

"Yeah," Twin 2 said with his mouth full. "And I still haven't gotten my PlayStation."

Before you could continue the conversation, Agatha’s assistant approached, holding a tray with an elegantly packaged meal.

"Can you take Wanda’s lunch to her dressing room?"

You blinked, suspicious. "Huh? Me? That’s job stacking, you know. I’m a screenwriter, not a food delivery girl."

The assistant shrugged. "You’re an intern."

Your expression darkened instantly. You narrowed your eyes at her, as if thinking: If only she knew.

You knocked on the dressing room door without much patience, balancing the tray with Wanda’s lunch. "Come in!" her voice came from the other side, and you sighed, turning the doorknob.

The room was intimate. Warm lights illuminated the large mirror, surrounded by small bottles of makeup, a half-empty coffee cup, and a script covered in scribbled notes.

Wanda sat in the red velvet armchair, legs crossed, still draped in her plush robe. Her hair was slightly damp, as if she had quickly run a towel through it.

But her eyes? They were just as piercing as in the scene she had just filmed.

You walked over to a small table beside the mirror and set the tray down. "Your lunch."

Wanda tilted her head slightly, a small smile playing on her lips. "Is this part of your job too?"

You rolled your eyes. "Apparently, today it is. Need anything else, Your Highness?"

She chuckled, a low, soft sound. "I think I want company."

Your eyebrows furrowed. "Company..." You stopped, realizing she wasn’t joking. "You should’ve put that on your list of demands earlier. I’m just an intern."

"Oh, yes... An intern." Wanda ran her fingers along the arm of the chair, her gaze never leaving you. "But you’re not like the others, are you?"

Your body tensed at the way she said that, like she was studying you. "And what does that mean?"

"It means you’re getting special treatment, and we can’t let that continue, can we?" she said, standing up, walking toward you like a lioness.

"Wanda," you said in a warning tone, as if she knew the line she was about to cross with you.

"Tell me the truth. What do you have with them?"

The tension in the air became almost palpable, and for a moment, you had the impression that she could see beyond what was allowed. As if Wanda had the ability to pull the answers from you without needing to ask directly.

"I... I could ask you the same thing! After all, what were you doing at their house?" You crossed your arms, keeping a safe distance between you. However, you feared what Wanda's answer might be.

But the answer never came. The redhead just analyzed your face with curiosity, searching for something. A flaw.

Her green eyes slowly drifted down to the pendant on your necklace—the small silver lock glinting under the dressing room's warm light. It was a subtle detail, but one she didn’t miss.

Wanda tilted her head slightly, her expression wavering between curiosity and sudden understanding. Her eyes returned to yours, narrowed.

"Interesting..." she murmured, a small laugh escaping her lips. Before you could react, she stepped closer and took your hand.

Her touch was warm, her fingers gliding over yours with deliberate slowness. But then… she stopped. Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly, as if she had felt something unexpected. Her hand released yours as if she had been burned.

You blinked, confused, watching as Wanda clenched her fingers, her gaze distant for a brief second.

And then, she laughed. Low, almost humorless, shaking her head as if she had finally understood something.

"You really have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into." She let out a disbelieving chuckle. "Go."

The word came as a sharp command. Wanda gave a half-smile, but her eyes said something else—as if she was considering something, pondering over you.

You hesitated. You didn’t know if you wanted to ask what she meant by that or if you should just turn around and leave. But the weight of her gaze made it hard to move.

After all, what had Wanda seen in you?

Leaving the dressing room, you sighed. The day had been so intense and chaotic, and you felt like you desperately needed to rest.

Your phone vibrated in the pocket of your shorts, and you already knew who it was.

Agatha.

My trailer.

You swallowed hard, feeling your palms sweat. You knew you should be used to interacting with Agatha by now, but your mommy could be unpredictable. That both scared and hypnotized you equally.

Without thinking twice, your feet carried you to her trailer. You opened the door slowly, peeking inside, expecting a disapproving glare or a reprimand.

But instead, you found Agatha sprawled on the divan, barefoot, with the same relaxed posture you saw at home every day, her eyes half-lidded as if lost in distant thoughts.

"Come here, baby." Her voice was lower, almost a whisper.

You hesitated but approached, sitting beside her on the divan. She slid her fingers over your wrist gently, as if checking if you were really there. Then, her eyes met yours, and for a moment, you saw something different in them.

Something more... tender.

"I missed my baby," she murmured with a small smile, her hand reaching for your cheek, the touch warm and comforting.

Your heart clenched at the unexpected confession. You looked away, feeling warmth rise to your face. "I thought I did something wrong."

She chuckled softly, shaking her head. "You worry too much about that. Not everything is punishment, my dear. Sometimes, I just... need you close."

The confession caught you off guard. She didn’t say things like that. Not like this.

Silence settled between you, thick, until Agatha let out a long sigh and lay back on the divan, her gaze lost on the ceiling.

"Sometimes, I find myself wondering how lonely you must have felt." Her voice was lower now, but it carried weight.

You turned your head to look at her, but she was still staring at the ceiling.

"Everything you wrote," she continued, twirling her finger in the air in a vague gesture. "That’s a lot for a girl like you, sweetheart."

You let out a brief, almost humorless laugh. "There are thousands of girls like me, Aggie."

The nickname slipped out before you thought too much, a test. It hung in the air between you, soft, intimate.

She blinked slowly but didn’t comment. Her mind seemed far away.

"No." Agatha whispered. "Not to me."

You held your breath.

She finally turned to you, her expression carrying a kind of confusion that seemed to unsettle her. "I just… I don’t understand how she let you go."

Oh.

You understood.

Slowly, you turned onto your side, lying down next to her, your gaze fixed on the ceiling, ignoring how her eyes were still on you.

Talking about it was never easy. In fact, you weren’t even sure you could put it all into words.

She didn’t leave me all of a sudden," you began, your voice low. "It wasn’t a dramatic abandonment, nothing that felt movie-worthy. It was slow… almost imperceptible."

Agatha didn’t say anything, just watched, waiting for you to continue.

"At first, it was the little things. She forgot to pick me up from school. Forgot to buy my favorite candies. Then, she started spending more time away from home. She’d say she was coming back, but she wouldn’t. And I saw my dad losing his mind because of it." You let out a small, humorless laugh. "Until one day, she just didn’t come back."

The silence in the trailer seemed to stretch.

"I was five," you murmured, the bitter taste of the memory lingering on your tongue. "I had to put my dolls aside and learn how to cook, how to take care of myself. To be an adult before I even understood what that meant."

Agatha didn’t look away. Her eyes, so blue and always full of secrets, were soft now.

"You shouldn’t have gone through that," she said, her voice gentler than usual.

You let out a short, dry laugh. "But I did. And there was no one to stop it."

She took a deep breath, a gesture that felt heavy with something deeper. "And your father?"

You shook your head. "He was never exactly present. He worked too much. We were six kids. He had to make the American Dream happen." You stated rationally, but you didn’t even realize how unsteady your voice was. "I can even understand him. I can understand her, too. No woman should be forced to go through so much."

You were crying. Your lips trembled, unconsciously pulling downward.

"No," Agatha whispered, her voice firm yet strangely soft. She leaned forward slightly, just enough for your eyes to meet. "Don’t try to understand them. Don’t look for justifications. Just… feel this pain. This anger."

You stared at her. Above you, she looked like a dark oracle, an expert in what she was saying.

"You were alone all that time."

"I always was."

"You’re not anymore."

This time, there was nothing enigmatic in her blue eyes. They were open, intense, filled with a vulnerability you didn’t know she possessed.

She took your hand, feeling the soft, pink palm against her own. "Do it." She wasn’t looking at you, and that made her even more beautiful. "And maybe I’ll ask you to make me a list of your favorite candies."

"Oh. The mean director is being more understanding of the intern’s need for sweets, huh?" you teased, even with your eyes still full of tears and vulnerability.

She hummed, kissing your forehead and sighing against your hair. "Only because it’s you, darling."

The warmth of her kiss on your forehead lingered even after her lips had pulled away. Such a simple gesture, yet heavy enough to make your chest tighten again.

You closed your eyes for a moment, absorbing that rare moment of softness. No matter how fierce, dominant, or cruel Agatha could be, there were lapses when she simply… was.

No masks, no ulterior motives. Just Agatha.

"If I’m an exception," you murmured, your eyes still closed, "then I think I should take advantage of it."

"Oh?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah." You opened your eyes, turning to look at her with a playful glint. "Does that mean we can have pizza for dinner?"

Agatha sighed theatrically, but you caught the shadow of a smile on her lips. "You really have no limits, do you?"

"Of course, I do," you said, resting your head on the arm of the couch, your eyes shining with amusement. "Pizza just isn’t one of them."

She let out a quiet chuckle and gracefully got up from the chaise lounge, grabbing her phone to check the time. "I’m picking the flavors."

"As long as it’s nothing with artichokes, I’m in," you replied, closing your eyes again, exhausted but comfortable.

And after that, the day felt lighter, and before you knew it, it was time to leave, and you were already getting into Agatha’s car at the usual bus stop.

[...]

The movie was halfway through, the screen’s glow casting soft shadows across the trailer. Fight Club was a classic that both of you, surprisingly, loved—the intensity of the story always sparked discussions about identity, control, and desire. But at that moment, a comfortable silence settled between you.

You were chewing on a piece of pizza, nestled against the cushions on the couch, feeling the weight of the day finally melt away.

Until your phone vibrated beside you.

A message.

Alice: "Are you coming?"

You stopped chewing, staring at the screen for a moment.

Agatha’s gaze remained fixed on the movie, but you noticed the way her jaw tensed slightly.

"Who is it?" she asked, not taking her eyes off the screen.

You swallowed the bite of pizza and cleared your throat. "Alice. She invited me to a party tonight."

Agatha lowered her gaze for a moment. "Hm." The response was neutral, but the tension in the air said otherwise. "And are you going?"

The question felt like a test.

You hesitated.

Should you go?

Alice was your friend, and you knew the party would probably be fun. Right? You’d dance, meet her friends. But the day had been long. And more than that, something about Agatha’s posture felt just as vulnerable as you did.

"No." You shrugged, grabbing another slice of pizza. "I had a long day. I’ll stay here with you, Mommy."

The sparkle in her blue eyes was instant.

She didn’t smile. She didn’t say anything. She just took another sip of her diet soda without looking at you. But you knew you had hit exactly where you wanted.

Her heart.

You opened the chat and typed:

"Hey. I’m really tired today. How about another time? :)"

Before you even sent it, you felt Agatha’s gaze on you. When you looked up to meet her eyes, she simply raised an eyebrow, looking pleased.

The silence between you was comfortable, only the sound of running water and the soft glide of a toothbrush filling the space.

After the movie, Agatha was sitting at the vanity, legs crossed in front of the mirror, spreading lotion over her arms with slow, meticulous movements.

You watched her through the reflection, her skin still damp from the shower, hair loose over her shoulders. She looked calm, lost in her own thoughts.

You spat the foam into the sink, rinsed your mouth, and wiped your lips before speaking:

"You know, you never talk about your past either."

Agatha paused for a moment but didn’t look up.

Before she could say anything, you added:

"The past before Mama."

She closed the jar of lotion slowly, her fingers still tracing the lid as if they needed something to do. "There’s not much to say."

"There is." You turned, leaning against the vanity and crossing your arms. "And I’d like to hear it."

Agatha finally lifted her eyes to meet yours. The blue of them seemed darker under the dim bedroom light. She hesitated for a moment, as if weighing whether it was worth giving in to your curiosity.

"My mother…" She began, her voice lower than usual. "She was a difficult woman. Rigid and unpredictable."

You frowned, taking in every word.

"She had… rules. Lots of rules. I learned early on that love wasn’t free. That there were conditions."

Your chest tightened upon hearing that. You knew that cruel logic better than you would like.

"And your father?" you asked, your voice soft.

Agatha averted her gaze to her own hands, pressing her fingers together. "It doesn't matter."

You took a deep breath, stepping toward her. "Nothing was easy for you either."

She let out a humorless chuckle. "Easy was never something I expected."

Silence fell between you for a moment. You felt like you were treading on delicate ground, but you didn’t want to stop.

"Have you ever thought about—"

"Enough." Her voice came sharp, cutting. You froze.

Agatha stood up abruptly. Her eyes were dark now, the previous vulnerability replaced by something much colder.

"I'm not your curiosity project, darling."

"That’s not what I meant," you argued, feeling frustration rise.

"But that’s how it sounded."

She said, walking to the bed without looking at you. She lay down, the thick sheets swallowing her, and your chest sank.

You sighed, feeling the weight of silence crush your shoulders. You didn’t mean to push so hard. You knew Agatha didn’t handle these things well—being looked at so closely, having someone trying to decipher her.

But you wanted so badly to understand her.

With a sigh, you turned off the lights and walked to the bed, hesitating for a moment before slipping under the sheets. She lay with her back to you, her body rigid, as if still in defense mode.

"I'm sorry." Your voice came out low, hesitant. "I shouldn’t have pushed."

She didn’t respond.

Silence stretched on, and you forced yourself to close your eyes, trying to calm your racing heart. Then, after minutes that felt like hours, Agatha finally broke the silence.

"It's her fault."

You frowned, opening your eyes. She was still facing away, looking out the window, but her voice was heavy with something that made your heart clench.

"It's because of her that I'm like this. Harsh. Severe. Mean."

The last word came out harder than the others, as if she truly believed it.

And then, without even thinking, you said:

"You're not mean."

Your voice was firm but filled with emotion; it felt like a spell of confidence and love.

That made her finally turn to you. Your eyes met hers, intense and full of something you couldn't decipher.

For a moment, everything seemed suspended. As if the air was thick between you, charged with something too big to name.

Suddenly, you missed Rio.

Someone to mediate. Someone who knew how to handle the hurricane that was Agatha Harkness.

But Rio wasn’t there.

It was just you and Agatha, navigating a sea of unspoken words.

You and her.

You and Agatha.

She furrowed her brows, letting out a disbelieving chuckle before closing her eyes, as if trying to ignore you and all the nonsense you were saying.

"You don’t know what you’re talking about."

But you did.

You had gotten so much from her in just one night, and that feeling wouldn’t go away. It only grew, like a plant pushing through the cracks of concrete.

You took a risk once more.

"You're not mean, Aggie. You just accepted the role she imposed on you."

And just like that.

She went still.

For a few seconds, it seemed like Agatha didn’t know how to react.

You moved closer, feeling her breath brush against your skin. Neither of you knew what to say now. Neither of you knew what to do with this closeness.

Your lips brushed against each other.

The touch was almost accidental, but you felt the softness, the warmth of her breath against your mouth.

And then you made the move.

It was a kiss of gratitude.

For everything she did today and always. How she took care of you. How she cherished you.

It was intimate.

Unique.

Agatha didn’t pull away. On the contrary, you felt her fingers slowly glide over your face, holding it with a gentleness that didn’t match the hardened image she insisted on maintaining.

When her lips finally responded to yours, it was like a relieved sigh in the darkness.

And for the first time that night, you felt that maybe, just maybe, you were seeing the real Agatha Harkness.

The first tear slipped down before she could stop it.

You caught it with your lips, salty and warm, as your hands trailed down the valley of her ribs like a pilgrim on sacred land.

"You're so beautiful," you whispered against the pulse where her past throbbed in blue veins.

Courage filled you, perhaps from the confidence of seeing this powerful woman surrendering entirely to you. Your fingers slid lower, to where she was wet and perfect.

The beautiful woman, with her robe completely open, her medium-sized breasts and hardened nipples exposed, made you salivate. And you simply couldn’t resist. Your mouth found her perfect nipples, drawing a sharp inhale from her below you.

"Honey..." Her skilled hands found your hair, long fingers threading through the strands, tangling them—urging you to go deeper, to savor the feeling.

The emotion that took over you was dangerous. Forbidden. You shouldn’t feel like this… Capable of impossible things. But when Agatha was moaning beneath you, writhing and encouraging you to give her more, that’s exactly how you felt.

Desire consumed you like a flame that couldn’t be contained. You moved, adjusting yourself over Agatha, your legs intertwining with hers in a fluid, natural motion. The scissoring position—intimate, intense—placed you face to face, breaths mingling.

"Mommy," you moaned, voice needy, lips brushing hers as your bodies aligned, clits pressing together in a hot, wet friction.

"Fuck." Agatha let out a low sound, almost a choked moan, her hands gripping your hips tightly. "My good girl," she murmured, her voice rough, laden with something that made your stomach tighten.

You started moving, slowly at first, rubbing against her in a rhythm that made both your bodies tremble. The sensation was electrifying—the heat, the wetness, the perfect friction. You felt every shudder of Agatha, every ragged breath she released.

"Just like that..." she whispered, fingers digging into your hips, guiding your movements. "You're so good for me, darling." Her sharp cheekbones flushed with arousal. "Oh. God—Fuck!"

Your heart raced at her words, the reverence and desire blending into an overwhelming wave. You quickened the pace, bodies colliding with growing intensity. Agatha’s breathing became faster, more labored, and you felt her heat rising, the slickness dripping between you.

"You're perfect," you murmured, lips finding hers in a deep, devouring kiss. "So beautiful, mommy. All mine."

Agatha arched her back, pressing her breasts against your torso, her hardened nipples grazing your skin. Her hands roamed down your back, nails digging slightly, leaving marks you knew you’d wear with pride.

She claimed your lips, thrusting her tongue in deep, the movements rough and filthy. A woman who needed to take and be taken. The kiss had no meaning anymore, just a mess of teeth, tongues, and bites.

When you pulled away, a thick string of saliva connected you.

"More," she ordered, her voice a low growl that echoed through your ribs. "Give it to me, darling." Your sweaty foreheads pressed together. "Give mommy everything."

You obey, quickening the pace, your bodies moving in perfect sync. The room fills with wet sounds—high-pitched, needy moans and the soft creak of the bed. Agatha is close; you feel it in the way her muscles tense, in the way her fingers dig into your flesh.

"I’m gonna—" She chokes, her face buried in your neck, teeth grazing your skin. "Fuck— Baby, you’re gonna make… make mommy come.”

The drawn-out, desperate whine is your breaking point. You move faster, thrusting deeper, grinding against her with an intensity that makes both your bodies tremble, as if you’d fused into one. Because you did—you followed her right over the edge.

The orgasm hits you like a tidal wave, your bodies arching and shaking in wild, unrestrained desperation as she muffles your name into the sheets.

You don’t stop, keeping the rhythm, prolonging every ripple of pleasure until she collapses, exhausted and spent, against the mattress.

When you finally still, you lower yourself over her, lips meeting hers in a soft, tender kiss. Agatha wraps her arms around you, holding you like she never wants to let go.

"My good girl," she whispers, her voice gentle, laced with something that makes your chest tighten. "My sweet girl."

You curl into her, breathing in the warmth of her skin, the scent of her perfume mingling with sweat and sex.

"That was…" She inhales sharply, trying to steady her breath. "So good."

You laugh, humming in agreement, nuzzling into her chest. But your stomach still buzzes. More of her. More of Agatha.

You kiss her collarbone, and she shudders, oversensitive.

"Baby," she gasps, fingers tangling in your hair, gently tugging you back. "Mommy’s too sensitive right now."

But you don’t want to stop. Can’t. The need for Agatha still burns in you, a flame that refuses to die. You shake your head, lips finding her breast again, kissing every inch of skin you can reach.

You murmur a muffled sound, your voice hoarse and thick with want.

Agatha lets out a laugh mixed with a whimper, her grip tightening in your hair. "My insatiable little girl," she whispers, her voice soft, laced with something that makes your pulse race.

You don’t answer, too focused on exploring her body with eager hands and lips. Your fingers slide down Agatha’s trembling thighs, tracing the slick, swollen folds still wet and tender.

"Baby…" She arches, fingers knotting in your hair. "You’ll kill me."

"I’ll take care of my mommy," you whisper, lips brushing the soft skin of her inner thigh, nipping gently. "So you’ll never have to cry again."

Agatha moans low, her grip on your hair tightening. "My good girl," she rasps, her voice frayed with something that twists your stomach. "So… so precious."

You keep going, fingers gliding over her slick heat, electrified by the power to make Agatha shatter, to strip her of control.

The broken, needy whine she lets out undoes you. You speed up, thrusting deeper, grinding against her with a ferocity that makes both your bodies quake.

Agatha gasps as your middle and ring fingers slide into her entrance—slow, deliberate, a procession, not an invasion. Her body opens like a night-blooming flower, drenched in dew and secrets.

"Slow…" she orders, but her trembling voice gives her away. "Mommy needs to feel… everything."

You obey. Your thumb circles her clit while your fingers curl inch by inch, seeking the spot that makes her legs shake.

"Like this, mommy?" You kiss her neck, where her perfume mixes with sweat. "Want me to worship every part she’ve ruined?"

Her answer comes in silent spasms. Her nails claw your shoulder, leaving half-moon crescents blooming red.

Then you quicken the pace.

The room fills with slick symphonies. Your fingers move at a precise angle now, a deep massage she’d never allow in any other context. Her head thrashes wildly, as if even she doesn’t know what’s coming, her chestnut hair fanning like a shattered halo.

"P-please…" The plea is choked, almost pained.

You pause, fingers still inside her. Stunned that the word left her lips. Agatha turns her face away, her icy-blue eyes glossed with unshed tears.

"Please, baby. Mommy’s begging."

Fuck.

It destroys you. Destroys whatever shred of sanity you had left.

Your wrist twists in an ancient rhythm—fast, slow, fast again. The bed creaks in Morse code. She’s close; you feel it in the way her muscles clench like a fist around your fingers.

"Baby, I’m gonna— Oh. God! Fuck, that’s—"

Before she can finish, the orgasm splits her in two. Her furious blue eyes roll back, hips bucking, trembling legs locking around your waist.

Hot pulses soak your hand, the sheets drowning in wave after wave. You hold her hips aloft, dragging out every spasm until she screams.

You don’t stop, moving relentlessly, stretching every aftershock until she collapses, wrecked and full, into the mess.

"Fuck, baby!"

You keep going. Just a little more. Just to prove what you do to her. That she’s as ruined as you are.

"Oh my god. God. Again!" The laugh that spills from your lips is cocky, like you’ve won a marathon. "You’re ruining me." She moans loud, and suddenly you wish your other mommy were here. She’d be proud, you can tell.

You leave your fingers buried inside her even after the second climax, studying every tremor that racks her body like a hunter assessing prey. Sweat drips between your pressed breasts, your breath mixing with hers in a haze of possession.

"Do you even know what you do to me, mommy?" you whisper against her thigh, teeth sinking into soft flesh. Your voice cracks, a plea disguised as a taunt.

Agatha tries to turn her face, but you grip her chin hard. The tears streaking your own cheeks drip onto her chest.

"Say it. Say you’re as fucked up as I am."

She laughs—a raw, desperate sound—as her legs quiver around your waist. "You little fucking piece of shit…" she snarls, but the heaving of her stomach betrays the truth.

You curl your fingers inside her, finding her G-spot with the precision of someone who’s memorized every inch of this territory. "Say it."

The moan she lets out is nearly a howl. "Yes! Yes, fuck! Happy now?! You make me… make me insane, you psychotic little slut—From the goddamn beginning."

You speed up, turning words into animal sounds. "How much?"

Agatha grabs your wrists, nails drawing blood. "To the bone. To the soul. Until I forget what I am—"

The third orgasm plows through her. She writhes like a wounded animal, fluids dripping down your hand like a river of shame and surrender.

You watch, hypnotized, as the woman who shaped your private hell unravels under your touch.

"Look at me," your voice is steel, yanking her hair until her tear-drenched blue eyes meet yours. "You wanted this all along? From the moment you saw me? Huh?"

Her trembling lips form the answer in slow motion: Yes. Fuck. Yes. My sick little slut. Your innocence. Your youth. Your energy. You’re mine!

The laughter that escapes your throat is wet, triumphant. You lick her fluids from your fingers, maintaining eye contact, each suck a period in your private war.

When you collapse onto her, it's Agatha who envelops your burning body, her hand tangled in your hair like diamond shackles. "You destroy me," she whispers into your neck, tongue licking the salt from your tears. "And I let you. God, I let you."

You slowly retract your fingers, bringing them to your own mouth without breaking eye contact. The taste is amber and electricity.

"Hmmm, delicious, mommy," you say, now completely unfiltered, and she lets out a breathless laugh.

"You are unbelievable."

You chuckle, burying your face in her cleavage. "But you loved it."

"I tolerate it," she corrects, but you feel the hidden smile at the top of your head. "Besides, who’s going to explain to the staff what happened to the sheets?"

"Mama's fault?" You look up with a cute pout and puppy-dog eyes.

"It's your fault," she rolls her eyes, trying to maintain her tough facade, but there’s a small, genuine smile peeking through. "You and that… finger technique you learned God-knows-where."

"On the internet. I watched some videos on Pornhub, you know, with MILFs and everything." You almost unconsciously mimic Rio’s accent, and Agatha rolls her eyes.

Agatha pushes your face away with the palm of her hand, laughing despite herself. "You're insufferable."

"But you adore me."

"I tolerate you," she repeats, but pulls you back into an embrace. "And maybe… I should give the staff a raise."

You snuggle into her neck, smiling against her skin. "We can say it was an accident with the tea," you suggest, knowing Agatha’s passion for drinking tea at night.

"Two boiling cups of tea on my king-size bed?" She wets her lips with her tongue, the corners pulling into an ironic smile.

"They were very aroused cups. They couldn’t help themselves."

Agatha lets out a grunt, but her fingers trace soft circles on your back. "You’re the worst intern I’ve ever had."

"And best and only baby?" You blink several times, turning up your charm.

The silence lasts half a second too long. You lift your head, worried, but find her soft blue eyes—now with a hint of green bleeding into the irises, mixing with the sky blue—almost… shy.

"Maybe," she murmurs, covering her face with her hand, pushing your body off the bed. "Now shut up and get me some water before I change my mind." Her voice ends in a dry rasp.

You leap from the bed, naked and disheveled, striking a superhero pose. "Sparkling or still, your highness?"

"With ice. And… bring my phone and the ice cream from the freezer."

"Ice cream!" You cheer, jumping, bumping into a chair, and nearly knocking over a lamp.

"Rum raisin!" she calls over her shoulder, already adjusting her robe with royal dignity.

"But I don’t like that one!" you grumble with a pout.

"I pay, I choose."

You pout but don’t argue. You knew Agatha well enough to know she always won these little battles.

As you walk to the kitchen, you feel the lingering warmth on your skin, as if her presence had left an invisible mark on you. And maybe it had.

Opening the freezer and grabbing the damned rum raisin ice cream, you roll your eyes. Of course Mommy would choose this flavor. So… old. But deep down, you loved her demanding ways. She always knew exactly what she wanted—and now, that included you.

With the water and ice cream in hand, you return to the bedroom and find Agatha reclining on the bed, glasses perched on the tip of her nose, the blue glow of her phone screen reflecting on her face. She was texting, probably Mama. Or maybe firing someone—who knew.

She looks up at you, assessing your nakedness with a gaze almost too clinical to be innocent, before letting out an exasperated sigh.

"I should scold you for walking around like that in the house."

You smile, setting the things on the nightstand before crawling back into bed, nestling against her. "But you love it."

"I tolerate it," she corrects automatically, but the arm around your body tightens just a little more, contradicting her words.

She picks up the ice cream and the spoon, but instead of eating, her eyes glimmer with mischief. "Want a bite?"

You wrinkle your nose. "Rum raisin? That tastes like old people."

"Oh. You cheeky thing. Have you ever tasted old?"

A mischievous grin spreads across your face. You arch your eyebrows, pretending to think.

"Well…"

"Argh, your Mama is influencing you too much," Agatha exclaims, feigning indignation, but there’s an indulgent smirk behind her accusatory words.

"Taste it," she says, holding the spoon to your lips, challenging. "If I have to tolerate you, you can at least share my impeccable taste."

You roll your eyes but comply. As soon as the ice cream touches your tongue, the strong rum flavor takes over, and you regret it instantly.

"Ugh!" You make an exaggerated grimace. "This is horrible!"

Agatha laughs out loud, a rare and genuine sound.

And, for some reason, hearing that uninhibited, unrestrained laugh does something to you. Without thinking much, you snuggle closer, resting your head against her chest.

She hesitates for a moment—a second too long for someone like Agatha Harkness—but then, without a word, she wraps her arm around you, her body warm and firm against yours.

The silence that settles this time is different. Comfortable.

You close your eyes, listening to the steady rhythm of her heartbeat beneath your ear, inhaling the familiar scent of lavender and something warmer, something more Agatha.

You stay like that, breathing together, letting the world outside wait.

Then, in a soft, almost distracted tone, Agatha murmurs against your hair:

"I adore you, darling."

Oh.

Your heart stumbles for a second, a beat out of sync.

You pull back just enough to look into her eyes, gaze locked with hers.

And then, with a small—but genuine—smile, you answer, voice low but full of certainty:

"I know."

And you did. After what happened today, maybe Aggie had shown it beyond words.

Just for you.

She rolls her eyes, but you catch the corner of her mouth curling into a little smile.

And that’s enough.

~*~

I always wanted say theses words to Agatha. She really wasn't that bad. You aren't bad, my readers and I hope you know that <3

Tag List <3

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[sweetwolfcupcake]

Gaze

Secret Garden

Part II

Category: Drabble

Yandere John Wick x Reader

Warning: None really

The GIF does not belong to me; credit to the original owner.

Unedited

The place is grand. All glitter and gold, clinking glasses and trays floating around with formally dressed staff offering appetisers and drinks to everyone. This ‘party’, if one can call it that, is beautiful to you like a classic piece hanging on the wall of a reputed art museum. You can admire it all you want, but from afar. Admiring the technique and beauty with your limited knowledge about art would be futile, though you can come up with a story .

You are technically a guest because you are accompanying your friend, who is seeking to expand the reach of his art gallery. His collection has caught the eye of a man well-known in the circle, and so came the invitation.

You glance at your friend speaking to... well, you don’t remember. From above, you can see every individual walking into the main hall, mostly with a ‘plus one’. And only a few, alone. You count the people entering out of sheer boredom-

One

Three

Five

Seven

Nine

Eleven

Twelve

Thi—

You stop midway, just looking.

Because this is the first guest who has looked up, directly meeting your gaze. He is handsome, no doubt, but not more than the magazine-worthy faces you have seen today. Yet he stands out somehow. Dressed in all black, ebony, chin-length hair and a maintained patchy beard that calls for your fingers to run over them, he could have easily become one with the crowd. But he does not. 

There is just something about him that strikes out in a way that you straighten up, as if something primal is bringing you to alertness. It’s pure instinct, something years of evolution could not suppress, or perhaps had nurtured. You don’t know, but you stand slightly straighter, more alert, and you look into his. 

Ah, yes. It is his eyes. A strange and alluring studio of softness and steel with a tinge of melancholy that one can miss if they do not look for long. They are observing and assessing you. And you just know that he already knows that you do not belong here, that you are bored, and a silly part of your brain goes the extra mile to be afraid that he can read your thoughts. 

Yet something about his gaze is electric and awakening. What has awakened within you? The sharp heat that takes your spine and your abdomen before warming your cheeks? Or the realisation that you might be somewhere you should not be. His gaze is disarming—not like those giggly romance novels; it is disarming like a dark surrender. As if you know what ever you do, wherever you go, you are powerless here; there is no other option but to surrender.

You want to look away. At least a part of you does, but you simply cannot, you feel compelled to keep looking, drinking in everything his gaze has to offer–dark, soulful eyes—hypnotic, electric gaze, and you are caught, butterfly in a jar.

With sheer will, you manage to drop your gaze to your drink and turn around, baffled and flustered. Maybe it is about time you get laid; hopefully, those eyes will not haunt you the way they have imprinted themselves in your mind at the moment. Every time you close your eyes, you see his them.

Maybe you will find him again.

Maybe he is a stranger to you, but to him, you are not.

Maybe you will never find out that your friend has been explicitly instructed to bring you along in exchange for his gallery’s expansion.

He will only look for now, as he has been doing for so long.

****

Thanks to @johnwickb1tsch's Donaka bots, I got the idea of involving an art gallery. Whew! It has been a while since I wrote a John Wick drabble.

[nonsscrapheap]

TFP: Universal Obversations

WE ARE BACK BABY

so sorry for the long delay! i kinda hit a writer's block with this chapter and au, but i managed it after focusing on other things! like ttp and dofb!

i'm still very much invested in this reaction story so don't worry! there's a little bit of plot here- you'll see what i mean! but ON WITH THE SHOWING!

ACT 1: Show Acting - II -

[ ----- TP : UO ----- ]

The Nemesis

It hasn't been that long since they found the mysterious unknown relic and already it has caused more ripples within his Lord, within the other Decepticons and within him.

Soundwave had been similarly apprehensive when they found the unknown relic within the warship's storage unit, he had been doing a routine check throughout the Nemesis' camera system that he noticed the spherical object clearly through the screen in a place that he had distinctly remembered it not being there before.

Immediately on guard, he had called for Starscream to retrieve the object to be examined while he tried to figure out who stored the object there as well as what it was.

Unfortunately, Soundwave couldn't find who stored it nor how it appeared in the first place, even through extensive searching through the security footage there was no sign of tampering or any sign of someone breaking into the Nemesis just to leave the sphere in their storage room. 

Inevitably he and Starscream presented the object to their Lord and Master, and as expected, Megatron was not pleased. 

It was with an aching spark that he dared to counter Megatron's order of trying to find out who left the damnable thing with the fact that no one knew where it came from, what it could do, nor who left it in the storage room. The Autobots were, of course, the top suspects yet it still begged the question as to why? And how? 

And then the sphere began to glow and it began to show things that were… 

A smiling, blue-optic Starscream. A kinder, blue-optic Megatron. Arachnid gently handling humans. Humans on the Nemesis, not hunted down. Soundwave with green biolights and a synthetic voice and a visor covering the faceplate he was missing because Optimus Prime—

To borrow a certain Decepticon's (who may or may not be dead, he had his doubts about it because of a certain Seeker) usual phrase; it began to show things that were illogical.

Yet at the same time, it was, undoubtedly, fascinating. 

They now knew the main function of the silver and gold sphere with Primal glyphs carved into its face, it was a powerful observation device, one capable of glimpsing into entirely other worlds. Universes where things were shifted, different, a world where it seemed like the morality between factions had flipped on its sides.

Give me your face

And now… now it was showing a world where Soundwave's world was of fiction, a play, a show. In a world where it seemed that humans and cybertronians were co-existing peacefully, unbelievably enough. 

While Soundwave has never really found humans to be that bad, they've created some amusing things and Soundwave did enjoy a good amount of their music (music was music and Cybertron's music has stagnated since the war…) even he was more than surprised to see the flesh-made organics working together in such a way.

Or he would be if the preceding and more important fact of Soundwave's world was a show in that world didn't come first. His alternate was… so free and young. Showing his faceplate (he still had his faceplate) with a smile on his derma.

They all were so…

The 'actors' that played his Lord and the Prime, the Autobot femme scout and the spiderbot- they were all young and free in a way that Soundwave refused to acknowledge as envy. 

He does not remember being that young.

He does not remember being that free.

All there was was Kaon, and the gladiatorial pits, and freedom in loyalty.

Loyalty to Megatron, to the Decepticons.

His optics, hidden behind his visor (he has his faceplate) dart over to his Lord whose own red optics are wide then they narrow and there's a curling snarl barely held back on his derma as the viewing continues. Only changing when the human woman mentions the words 'season one finale', immediately he and Lord Megatron understand the implications of what was about to be discussed;

Their future.

Important information that needed to be heard despite the way it was presented being… like this. 

As Lord Megatron orders the Decepticons to pay attention to their near future, Soundwave starts recording the holographic screen, he was not going to miss one second of information from this. 

[ "The natural conclusion of Unicron, The Unmaker, Cybertron's version of Satan- being Earth itself. Or at least the core." Caster finished with a slight laugh, sounding somewhat but only a little bit hysterical.

"Cybertron's Satan is the Earth's core, yeah." Jackson nodded with his fellow humans, "No one was expecting that." ]

There is a chorus of noise at the revelation as the screen pauses for some reason —

( "Jack, Raf, Miko! Pause the screen! Pause it right now!" "I- okay?! Why uh- SCREEN PAUSE?!" "What's wrong?! Why's everyone freaking out?!" "Cybertron's Satan is a Unicorn???" )

[ OBSERVATION PAUSED. ]

"-a trick! A lie! Earth's core cannot POSSIBLY be Unicron—" "-weet Primus, no wonder this planet is so chaotic—" "-at does it mean for us? What the frag do we— "-ashed landed on this Primus-foresaken planet—" 

"ENOUGH!" 

Soundwave stiffened, and while he hadn't been part of the cacophony of mutterings with his fellow Decepticons, he couldn't help but hold in a vent from his Lord's command. Lord Megatron's optics were glowing brightly, no sign of dark energon in his system quite yet, but there was a near-manic look of interest and a tight grin on his faceplate.

( Elsewhere, a Prime and a medic explained what 'Unicron' was to three human children. Retelling a prophecy of doom, the medic was quickly trying to figure something out on their base's console. It's a chilling realization as they try to comprehend the fact their planet is essentially the devil of cybertronians everywhere. )

The commotion is immediately silenced as Megatron turns back to the frozen screen with a newfound hunger. Yet there was some conflict hidden in those optics, a conflict that Soundwave was unsure about. "This blasted planet… Unicron is its core? Truly?" 

Soundwave said nothing as Megatron began to chuckle, the other Decepticons showed signs of being discomforted but Soundwave stood still. Not even shifting an inch when Megatron's chuckle turned into hearty and harsh laughter, as if hearing a joke that only he could understand.

Perhaps that was the point, only Megatron had successfully bonded with dark energon. Only he could understand anything that involved Unicron. 

"Soundwave."

Soundwave tilted his helm, giving his Lord his full attention. 

"Whatever it takes, get full control over the sphere. Find the human spawns if you have to." 

He added those orders to his priority tree, his tentacles unwinding out of his chassis to connect with the Nemesis. However, just as he was about to connect, the projected screen in the air finally started moving once more.

("If we want to know more about Unicron." Jack said grimly, "We're going to have to continue watching what's happening… so,,, uh, orb? UNPAUSE." )

[ OBSERVATION UNPAUSED. ]

"The Autobots clearly want to know more about this." Starscream muttered the obvious, why else would it continue? His intake clamped shut at the look Lord Megatron gave him.

Soundwave considered his priorities before halving his attention, letting his tentacles connect to the Nemesis while he continued to watch the screen and continue recording the shown universe.

[ "Like Orion said, big shock in the middle of filming." Venami told Caster, "We all suspected something was up with the 'dark energon' aspect of the show, we knew at some point Unicron was going to show up because- it's dark energon. It's Unicron's blood, the anti-spark, etc. etc. But we were expecting the usual depiction of a planet-sized planet-eater. Not, y'know, dormant Earth which held these little mongrels." She gestured to the human actors who just grinned at her.

"Speaking of dark energon, what does it taste like?" Polly couldn't help but interrupt, looking very curiously at the actors.

"No idea about actual dark energon but I liked the stuff the props-crew made." Orion said with an easy grin, "Amethyst-flavored with a pinch of bismuth." 

Caster's optics blinked, "You actually ate the prop of dark energon?" 

"Only the liquid form, the dark energon crystals are strictly visual props." Dion told her, "It's actually a pretty popular snack around the crew." ]

Lord Megatron didn't look too pleased with the way the conversation was heading on the screen, getting impatient with the lack of actual useful information being shown.

Soundwave however was picking apart the conversation for anything useful or at least interesting- the world of that universe was fascinating. Not only was the Autobot-Decepticon war had long been over, but the culture must have grown to the point that multiple depictions of old legends and myths were popularized. 

'Usual depiction' meant that Unicron was a regular thing in Cybertron's media, or even Earth media at this point. The tales of Unicron in this universe were old, from beyond Cybertron's Golden Age and there were tales of Unicron as a planet-eating monster, but not many. 

Thankfully, the conversation goes back to 'Transformers: Prime', speaking of events that had yet to come.

[ "Antonio," Polly spoke, gaining the young boy's attention. "Antonio, your character, Raf, nearly died near the season finale. We're all wondering- was he supposed to die and they changed it or…"

A brief series of clips showed as she spoke, of Megatron shooting at Bumblebee with Raf in the backseat with dark-energon powered blasts. Of him getting hit. Of a small hand slipping ominously lifeless in Bumblebee's mirror. Of the Autobots on some human military area, fighting and confronting Megatron only to look back and see the yellow scout forlornly stepping forward, cradling a small, pale and motionless body in his servos, barely breathing. ]

A dark chuckle comes from his Lord, a pleased look on his faceplate as he sees a possible glimpse of the future only to scowl as he remembers the words 'supposed' to being used by the human caster. "I'm almost impressed, the Autobot's human pets are resilient little things aren't they?" 

( Elsewhere, both Autobot and humans cried out at the sight of their youngest being shot at. And the chilling scene of Bumblebee cradling a seemingly lifeless Raf. Said scout took Raf into his servos again, beeping rapidly. The youngest human tried to reassure him, his friends and the other bots that he was okay while the Autobots promised to never let what they just saw, happen to him. Not in this universe. )

[ The clips continued to show Raf on a gurney, vitals unstable, of being wheeled into a chamber after Ratchet took some energon from Bumblebee to use against the dark energon infecting Raf. Blue light shining from within the glass and Raf's vitals stabilizing afterwards. 

"So sorry about that my boy," Dion said to Antonio who laughed at his fake-solemn nature, "Evil villain must be evil after all."

"It's okay! Well, we don't actually know if Raf was supposed to die there? It was just part of the script, you'll have to ask Rung about it. But he won't answer! We've all tried to ask him stuff but he's tight-lipped on certain details about his story!" Antonio answered Polly, "I didn't really like that scene- mostly because I had to be covered in all this make-up to look all sickly and almost dead. And I had to retake a lot of my scenes because THESE guys kept being too dramatic!" 

Antonio gestured to his castmates, they all grinned and laughed. "You'll uh, you'll see what he means when we upload the blooper content we have online- we got permission to do that." Rumi mentioned, smiling and waving shyly at the camera. ]

"Even if the dark energon mostly being absorbed by the scout, it's rather remarkable that the human managed to survive long enough to be healed from it." Starscream muttered, sneering at the soft-sparks on the screen. He couldn't believe that this… 'Dion' was Lord Megatron's actor of all things…

He couldn't help but wonder about his own actor. Was he… Was he content with his life as such?

Meanwhile Soundwave was more focused on this 'Rung' that was mentioned, this was the second time they mentioned the 'creator' or 'writer' of Transformers: Prime. Who was he? Who was this mysterious person (cybertronian or human?) who 'wrote' the universe that he and the others resided in? 

[ "This question is for the entire cast present; what do you think of the character you act?" 

Almost immediately, three cybertronians and human children turned to look at Dion who leaned forwad. "Oh, here we go." Jackson said with an amused and exasperated look on his face.

"Um…?" Caster glanced between both sets of actors. 

Orion laughed, "Pretty much all of us are content with our characters and have our own opinions of them but Dion… well, he's got a lot to say since the finale. Take it away Dee." 

Dion sat on the edge of the cybertronian-sized couch, "First off- I love Megatron. I love acting him out, I'm honored to be able to, he's genuinely one of my favorite characters from the show. He's strong, he's powerful, his design is badass and if anyone has been keeping up with the show, they'll know that Rung also released like- these little booklets and comics featuring the backstories of certain characters. Megatron was one of them. We learn his old name was like- Megatronus, after one of the original Primes and- he was a gladiator and stuff, love it. Absolutely love him."

A comic depicting Megatronus of Kaon artistically standing in the middle of a cheering stadium. ]

Optic ridges rose up at sight of the comic, Soundwave felt nostalgic at the sight of his Lord's past as a gladiator being shown.

"Man I remember those days, went to see one of his matches before when I was younger." He hears Breakdown mutter to KnockOut, "It was- well, it was awesome." Starscream scoffed but looked at the comic with a calculating yet critical eye, clearly remembering the reason why he came to Megatron in the first place like the rest of them.

Arachnid eyed the comic with a snort, but looked impressed nonetheless. 

Megatron huffed, but held his helm high with clear pride. Despite his counterpart merely being an 'actor' in that other universe, he clearly recognized greatness when he saw it. He should be honored to play his part as Lord Megatron in a fictional show.

( Elsewhere, an ex-archivist silently sighs at the sight of the familiar mech on the comic. While his human charges start asking questions of the past that he and Ratchet will answer. Only Ratchet could truly hear the sadness and nostalgia hidden in his tone. )

[ "Which is why I was so disappointed in him during the season one finale. " Dion said with a deep sigh, his castmates snickering around him. ]

There was an abrupt, short laugh (Starscream) that was quickly shut up from Megatron's furious voice. "What." 

( "Excuse me?" Deadpanned an unimpressed medic- it was hard to listen to an alternate Megatron, actor as he was, say it was an honor to play him in a fictional version of their universe. )

[ "Disappointed?" Polly echoed incredulously, sharing a look with Caster.

"Disappointed." Dion nodded, arms crossed. 

Caster leaned forward against her desk in interest, "Why were you disappointed?"

"He's disappointed Lord Megatron did the most illogical thing ever and knelt before Unicron and tried to become his servant." Cycla said sarcastically. 

"Essentially." Venami nodded while Dion grumbled with Orion leaning against him with clear amusement. ]

"He did wh-" Starscream started to say but forced himself silent with a flinch at the deep rumbling growl that came from the warlord. 

The Decepticon Leader looked incensed. Optics glowing a bright furious red at the floating screen showing the other universe. 

( Autobots and humans alike stared at the screen, optics and eyes wide and disbelieving. )

[ "Look- I just- I don't like the thought of Megatron. Lord Megatron! Gladiator from the pits of Kaon! Becoming a servant to anyone! Even towards the Chaos-Bringer himself!" Dion argued exasperatedly, "It doesn't make sense! Yeah sure, the mech's addicted to dark energon now, which- okay, another thing for me to be disappointed about but seriously! He called Unicron master! His Lord! That's not the gladiator of Kaon! That's not the Decepticon Warlord who waged war for millions of years against Optimus Prime! That's definitely not the revolutionary who wanted to break free from his masters in his backstory back when he was a miner!" 

"We've heard this rant about a hundred times at this point." Jackson said to a nearby camera as Dion continued.

"I'm starting to think Starscream was right in the show- those three years in space, in solace, messed up his processor or maybe the giant chunk of dark energon he found messed it up further. He became obsessed with dark energon and Unicron and that dumb doom prophecy in the show."

Orion spoke up, clearly very amused by Dion's words. "One could say he never really intended to become the servant of Unicron, that he was trying to deceive the god."

"I certainly hope so!" Dion huffed, "Still doesn't change the fact I'm disappointed in him. Hypocrite as he is, revolutionary to a tyrant, I love Megatron. I really do, but mech, he sometimes just… doesn't live up to the name he, himself, made." ]

Soundwave tried not to let the words affect him, though it was a little hard considering Dion looked so much like his Lord and played his Lord in that universe. An outsider criticizing his Lord's actions- he did not understand. He may act out Lord Megatron's role, but he has never been in the mech's pedes. 

Unlike him, however, Lord Megatron was clearly affected by the words of his counterpart. Canon powering up, a snarl on his faceplate as he quickly aimed at the orb.

Even Soundwave was alarmed by the sudden action, instinctively moving away from the incoming blast radius. "Lord Megatron?!" Starscream shrieked, throwing himself away with Knock Out, Breakdown and Arachnid close behind. Optics wide and frantic.

Soundwave could barely try and string together a sequence of clips to warn his Lord to do otherwise, the orb was far too useful intact than destroyed! "Lord Megatro—"

PHWOOM!

The world turned bright blue for a brief moment, blinding everyone within the room. 

However, there was no sound of explosion, or something breaking. Just a strange hum in the air as the light died down to show the orb… completely unharmed. A strange blue holographic shield covering it and the screen that floated above it paused.

( Elsewhere another orb glows brightly. "WOAH!" "What happened?!" "W-Why's the screen paused? We didn't do anything!" "Wait… who is that?" )

"Impossible." Megatron hissed, glaring vehemently at the orb, canon whirring to life once more. 

Soundwave had to intervene this time. His Lord was obviously displeased, about to no doubt berate him yet Soundwave pointed at the screen in urgent silence.

[ "Oh my." 

The screen was frozen over Dion's faceplate, a 'PAUSE' symbol stamped over it. The camera panned out to another screen and a thin cybertronian sitting at a desk in a strange office. Model ships lined the shelves on the wall, but the one that stood out the most wasn't a model ship. But an exact replica of a familiar orb. It was glowing.

The cybertronian in question was thin, lanky, clearly not a combative mech. He was painted in orange and white, with blue-tinted goggles covering his optics. Strangely enough, the mech had a spark window of all things, thankfully tinted though. 

The mech was looking at the glowing orb and then suddenly he was looking at them. ]

Them.

Through the screen.

Soundwave was unable to explain how or why, but he just knew the mech was looking at them through the screen. And he wasn't the only one.

Weapons were being activated, aimed suspiciously and cautiously at the screen and the orb. 

(Elsewhere, the Autobots were in defensive positions. The humans children being set behind them protectively. )

[ "Such hostility and confusion I sense, it has been quite a while since this thing operated on its own…" The mysteirous mech said, tapping the screen. "Curious." 

Clearing his throat, the mech gave a gentle smile, "Settle down you all, I mean no harm. Even if I could, I can't. Your relays are incomplete, damaged. I can't do anything in your world, nor can you do anything in mine. My name is Rung, it is a pleasure to meet you all… Somewhat." ]

[ ----- TP : UO ----- ]

WE HAVE A LITTLE BIT OF PLOT AND REASONING BEHIND THE ORBS! SPHERES! THE UNIVERSAL OBSERVATION DEVICES! just a little bit because i desperately wanted to write rung- ever since i mentioned him as the writer of the actor au's show... did he write it using the orb? maybe. maybe not. he has a sphere of his own!

and he can talk to them! kind of. you'll see in the final actor au chapter next time! which will hopefully be sooner rather than later this time.

the highlight of the chapter was definitely dion's opinion of megatron- what do you do when the actor that plays you says they're a fan but they're disappointed in you. not angry, not sad, just- disappointed? also i find it, fucking hilarious. (i may have projected a bit to dion there about my disappointment in tfp megatron. its unreasonable ik.)

it's a very good thing the spheres have a defensive mechanism!

ALSO! i am going to PREEMPTIVELY give you all a choice on the next au they'll be reacting to after the actor au! just so i can prepare in advance. it won't be for a while since i do have other fics to focus on but here we go!

you get FIVE options. next AU reaction is going to be way longer depending on which AU gets pick.

im honestly rooting for Mecha AU to win, bc there is a scene there i desperately want to write but i can't until i get through the very end of the reaction. im just torn whether to write it now or later.

then again, Sparkling AU (No Mecha) is SO interesting. like hahaha, THAT is going to cause some d r a m a on both sides!

Criminal Minds Crossover AU is again, a self-indulgent thing for me.

Apocalypse AU... oo that's also very good. has a very good established MegOp I'd say, but very surprising for everyone to watch >:D

Sparkling AU (Mecha) is kinda eh, it's the weakest of the bunch, i haven't thought about it as much but it could grow if i decide to work on it.

also all the aus are STILL mostly centered around / will involve the tfp kids.

anyway, hope you all enjoyed! thanks for reading and i'll see you again here... at some point.

[NEXT]

[PREV]

[START]

[padfootagain]

Love in Verses (II)

Chapter 2 : ‘Through me the way to the City of Woe’

Hi, everyone!!! Here we go for a second chapter! Drama is upon us, the plot is plotting! Let me also introduce you to Samantha, Andrew’s partner… I’m sure you’re going to love her a lot…

I hope you like this series! Tell me what you think!

****

Pairing: Hozier x fem!reader (professor!AU)

Warnings: slow burn, angst, hurt, hurt/comfort, tooth-rotting fluff in later chapters, some scenes in later chapters will have heavy sexual themes even if it’s not explicit nsfw description, so minors here

Summary: Your life seems perfect. You're engaged, your career is thriving as you become an assistant professor at Trinity College, and this Andrew Hozier-Byrne you're sharing an office with seems to be a nice guy you hope to call a friend soon. Life seems to be smiling at you... until everything goes sour. When your fiancé breaks up with you, your perfect world shatters. And when your colleague also gets his heart broken soon after, your shared office seems to be a curse rather than a blessing. But Andrew seems determined to mend your broken hearts... Will things finally go according to plan?

Word Count: 4510

Masterlist for the series – Hozier’s masterlist – Main masterlist

Through me the way to the City of Woe, Through me the way to everlasting pain, Through me the way among the lost. Justice moved my maker on high. Divine power made me, Wisdom supreme, and primal love. Before me nothing but things eternal, And eternal I endure. Abandon all hope, you who enter here.

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy : Inferno, Canto III, 1321

Andrew was tired, but then he was tired all the time.

As he prepared himself a strong coffee that morning, Sam was busy on her phone, probably going through her social media or reading the news. It didn’t really bother him, he was quiet in the morning anyway, liked to start slowly, to emerge into the world in a silent and gentle way. He was naturally a night owl, it was a struggle every morning to get out of bed early. At least, before the new year of classes started, he could go to work later, no classes schedule early these days.

Elwood was sleeping again. After an early walk around the neighbourhood, the dog was back on his comfortable bed, curled in a black and white ball, softly snoring. Andrew looked at his dog with love, refraining from petting his head, choosing to let him rest instead. He was a good boy, he deserved all the sleep he wanted.

He thought of you as he poured some coffee in his favourite mug. The meeting to distribute classes for the upcoming year was today. Of course, there had been one already before summer, so lecturers could begin preparing their classes if they needed. But some new arrivals would change a few things, some negotiations between lecturers too. Andrew himself was going to switch a class with Colm, another professor from the English department, inheriting a class about Yeats’s poetry instead of biblical studies. If he wasn’t against some religious metaphors – and given the weight of religion in Ireland, Andrew reckoned that he could never escape from it anyway – he was happy to avoid teaching about it.

But you were new at Trinity, and he wanted you to enjoy yourself during your first year. Upon his arrival, Andrew had lacked a guide, someone who would explain to him how things worked, especially the more selfish and ruthless side of the institution. If Trinity was wrapped in traditions, it was also filled with professors who cared little about their colleagues thriving in their academic pursuits, especially if that meant compromising with their own wants. Some professors were kinder than others, more willing to compromise. He’d help you navigate through the meetings, and hoped you could get to choose your classes too…

“My mother wants to invite us on Sunday,” Sam broke the silence that covered Andrew’s kitchen. A blank silent, an emotionless one; neither uncomfortable of comfortable, one that was there to settle on the furniture and in the corners of the room and simply lay there, undisturbed.

“I can’t on Sunday, I’m helping Jon with his film project, and then I’ll have lunch at my parents’. You were supposed to come to lunch with me.”

Andrew turned to Samantha then, sipping on his coffee and grabbing an apple as a breakfast. She said nothing, but her frown spoke volume. She was annoyed, maybe even angry.

“It was planned, baby. I’m sorry, we can go next week.”

“I think I’ll go see my parents anyway,” she said, her tone cold and firm, the one Andrew knew meant that he had no chance of changing her mind. He heaved a sigh, rubbed at his tired eyes with the back of his hand.

“As you wish, I’ll warm my mom.”

“You’re really not coming with me?” she asked, and her eyes were throwing daggers at him.

Andrew bit on the inside of his cheek, his stare growing sterner as well.

“I had planned to spend time with my family, and my brother needs my help. I’ll come with you another time.”

We had planned to spend time with my family… but he didn’t say that out loud, unwilling to start an argument.

She mumbled something under her breath, turning to her phone again; something about ‘a useless film’, and Andrew didn’t want to hear her comment, he knew he wouldn’t like it.

“Won’t you be late for work?” she asked, her voice calmer again, but the remark annoyed Andrew anyway.

“I don’t have classes, and the meeting is at 1pm, I can take my time.”

She could have added a comment on his time blindness, but she didn’t, and he was grateful for it. He relaxed a bit thanks to that.

“Busy day for you today?” he asked, and she heaved a sigh in response.

“Yeah, I don’t think I’ll come over tonight. Besides, we might go for drinks with the guys from the tech company we’re working with at the moment. Do you remember? I told you about them.”

“Of course, I remember, honey,” he answered with a soft, tender voice.

“I still haven’t finished that bloody logo for them…”

Andrew was brought back to their university days then, when she studied art and he studied literature. When she longed to paint all day long and he fumbled through notebooks and broken guitar strings. When they both had dreams that were too big for them. They had made a choice, had decided to finish their degrees, and not to make the hardest of the sacrifices that would have opened the gates to a life filled with art. Andrew had changed major from music to English during his first year, had passed his exams instead of spending his time in a studio. Samantha had specialized in design and publicity, and had given up her brushes that painted the coasts of Ireland in favour of simpler shapes created on a screen. Andrew couldn’t say that he had regrets about it. He liked his life like this, on the outskirts of Dublin, sharing his love for poetry, writing his own poems, waking up most days by Samantha’s side, even if after all these years she still didn’t want them to move in together, and he couldn’t fathom why. He loved his job beyond measure, always finding a fascinating detail to study, something new to read that would shake his world. He still sang with friends when he felt like it, sometimes wrote music to fit his poetry. He had a full life, a happy one, he couldn’t complain, really.

He thought about the engagement ring he had bought once, when she wasn’t ready to get married. She had said no, it had broken something inside of him. But he loved her, he would be patient, he could wait, and anyway, that was years ago…

“You’ll do an amazing job, you always do,” he encouraged her, but she rolled her eyes.

“You’re too sweet sometimes,” her words were spoken as criticism, not as a compliment. He clenched his jaw.

“Anyway, I’ll be pretty busy too, today,” he said, even though she hadn’t asked about his plans for the day, but then she hardly ever asked. She listened when he spoke about it though, and that ought to be enough. “We have our final meeting to select the classes we’re going to teach. I’m a little worried for Y/N, though.”

“Why? I’m sure she can take care of herself.”

Sam’s tone was a little dry still, he wasn’t sure if she were jealous or simply still annoyed.

“Trinity isn’t always filled with the nicest people. A lot of academics are quite selfish sometimes. I want her to have a nice time teaching. She seems very nice. And I arrived only last year, I know how stressful this situation can be.”

Sam nodded, but didn’t seem convinced.

Andrew threw the core of the fruit in the bin, finished his coffee, washed his mug. He didn’t want to argue, didn’t want to fight. Still, for some reason, he really wanted to talk about you. He had been worried upon learning that someone would share his office now, and he was relieved to find that you were kind, smart, and everything but annoying. He hoped the two of you could become friends.

“Y/N said that she found a poster for the office too! Can’t wait to see what she’s chosen.”

“Nice,” Sam nodded, and Andrew knew she wasn’t paying attention anymore.

He let out a long exhale through his nose, and she didn’t notice. He grabbed his water bottle, crossed the room, stopped to drop a peck on her head as he walked by her.

“Have a nice day, babe. I love you.”

“You too. Love you.”

She didn’t look up from her phone, and it sounded automatic, the way she answered. Andrew remembered when they started dating, about seven years ago. Both in their early twenties, young and naïve and heads full of dreams. She used to stare at him for hours, she used to look him in the eyes every time she said she loved him, to make sure he knew she meant it. He wasn’t so sure she meant it every time she said it anymore…

He pushed the thoughts away; he reckoned that this was his busy, anxious brain talking. Instead, he put on his shoes and his denim jacket, grabbed his bag and slung it over his shoulder. He stopped thinking about Sam, and thought about you and the poster you had promised you would bring today, and he walked out of his flat.

The meeting was over, and you seemed happy. Actually, you seemed ecstatic. And it made Andrew happy as well.

He had managed to get the class about Yeats, as planned. He had helped you through the meeting, discreetly, in whispers, but it was enough for you to secure classes you were interested in teaching. This year, you would teach three classes bound directly to your research, a general introduction to 19th century English literature, another about revolutionary writings in which you planned on including a fair share of pamphlets about women’s rights, and another about 19th century novels. You were buzzing with excitement as you walked back to your office, chatting with Andrew and his good friend Colm.

“I have so many things to prepare, but also… I feel very confident in these subjects,” you grinned at the two men.

“You can’t be happier than Andy finally teaching only classes he wanted,” Colm laughed, bright and loud, throwing his head back like a child despite the fact that he was middle-aged man.

Andrew nodded, heaving a relieved sigh.

“I thought Lydia was about to make a scandal…”

“She didn’t want you to leave one of the difficult classes. You’re too popular a teacher for that.”

Andrew rolled his eyes.

“I definitely am not.”

“You are too! Students love him,” Colm added, turning towards you. “And I will easily admit he’s a good professor, great at explaining things, and always very calm. But let’s be honest, the fact that most of our students are attracted to him helps a lot.”

Andrew looked away, trying to hide that he was blushing, but you laughed anyway.

“Such a pretty mug!” Colm teased, trying to grab Andrew’s chin, but he merely pushed his friend away, laughing.

“Quit your nonsense, would you?” Andrew laughed. “Don’t listen to him, Y/N. He loves talking shite about others.”

“That is not true! Y/N! Please, with your feminine point of view… tell him I’m right.”

You chuckled, shied away, but answered anyway.

“Oh, I’m sure Andrew must be popular, yes. I would have definitely preferred staring at his face when I was a student, compared to the old dinosaurs I had to put up with.”

Andrew was blushing so hard, even his ears were turning a bright shade of red, but he couldn’t refrain his grin nonetheless.

“Please, tell me I don’t fall in that category!” Colm protested, making you laugh.

“No… not quite yet. You still have a couple of years ahead of you,” you joked, and Andrew burst into laughter, while Colm mumbled something under his breath, rolling his eyes.

“Well, children, this is my stop, have a good day,” he mumbled, entering his office while Andrew and you continued a bit further.

“I’m glad you’ll give classes you’re interested in,” Andrew said, giving you a warm smile.

“Thank you so much for helping me throughout the meeting. It was… a lot to take in.”

“Yeah, some people here are proper gobshites.”

You laughed at that, entering your shared office.

“Hmm… I have noticed, yes. You seem particularly fond of Ian,” you chuckled, and Andrew rolled his eyes.

“I’m a very peaceful kind of lad, but that arsehole deserves to get some sense being punched into him.”

You raised a surprised eyebrow at that. If you had been teasing, the fact that Andrew had turned more serious as he answered made you intrigued now, rather than playful.

“Really? What did he do?”

Andrew stared at you for a few seconds, wetting his lips before he would answer.

“Nothing illegal, don’t worry. But he’s an arsehole. He will destroy your career and reputation if it serves his interests. Especially if you’re a woman.”

He saw you clenching your jaw at that last remark, and he heaved a sigh.

“I’m sorry,” he shook his head, and he hoped you could see that he meant it.

“Don’t be sorry, it’s not you who is at fault. Anyone else I should be cautious about?”

“Mahon, O’Reilly, Evans, Hillstone and Patterson.”

You raised a surprised eyebrow.

“You’ve got a whole list ready,” you pointed out.

“I’ve been here for a year. Fool me once, shame on you…”

You slowly nodded, Andrew sighed again.

“Don’t worry, the rest of the bunch are nice though. Most of them are nice.”

“I’m used to it.”

You shook yourself out of the conversation, a smile growing on your features.

“I have something to show you!”

Andrew frowned a little at that, bending to avoid the lamp hanging from the ceiling as he walked over to your desk. He had grabbed his thermos filled with his favourite brand of tea.

“Really?”

You pulled out a rolled poster, and he laughed.

“Oh! So you did settle on some decoration!” he pointed out, while he opened the buttons of his grey tweed waistcoat. He buried his hand in the pocket of his tweed pants while you fumbled with the empty frame.

He put down his thermos on the edge of your desk, then pushed back a strand of hair that was falling across his eyes, readjusted his glasses upon his nose. You were quick to place the poster in the frame, and you grinned up at him once you were done, right before turning the frame around to show him the poster.

“I love this illustration. I had it hanging in my dorm when I was a student, and then in my first apartment. But my fiancé finds it a little… dark. And he’s not particularly interested in literature so… he doesn’t really get it. Anyway!”

You stopped your little rambling, grabbed the frame, and showed it to him.

Andrew raised a surprised eyebrow, immediately recognising Gustave Doré’s illustration of Dante’s Inferno.

The black and white print showed Virgil and Dante standing on the edge of a precipice, staring at a hurricane carrying the souls of sinners, talking to a couple crying in their everlasting punishment. Andrew had not read the book since his own college days, but he remembered that this was the punishment for those guilty of lust.

“Do you like it? Can I hang it?” you asked, an excited smile he found adorable on your lips. “I thought the black and white would fit your poster quite well.”

“Sure, go ahead. Need help?”

But you were already placing the frame against the wall.

“I have to admit, I’m quite surprised by your choice,” Andrew inspected the print, leaning against your desk, his hands still in his pockets. “I didn’t picture you as a fan of Dante… especially given his… conservative thoughts.”

“I love Inferno. I’m not going to pretend that I love the entirety of the Divine Comedy, but I love Dante’s image of hell. The haunting part of it. The way it is structured. Of course, it’s medieval thinking about issues that have radically changed now, but… It was a long time ago. If I don’t appreciate all of his thoughts, I do admire his imagination. Besides, it was a heavily political book. I’m surprised you don’t give him more credit for that.”

He answered your teasing smile with a genuine one.

“I do remember a little bit of that. Last time I read it, though… I was a student and hadn’t chosen to suffer through it. Besides… I think I was a little too young to understand it fully.”

You nodded.

“I’ve read it many times. I don’t know, there’s something… something about it that draws me in. Not the Christian moral lessons, of course. But just… I don’t know… there’s something fascinating about it. And I often wonder what our version of hell would be today. If we kept the structure, if we kept the place Dante created… how would we view those who are imprisoned there? Would we find their pain justified? Would we find it unfair to punish them like this? And who would we place in there? If we replaced the references to people Dante knew by people from our world, who would be stuck in Hell?”

Andrew pondered on these questions while he kept on listening to you. He had a few names in mind, for sure. He smiled at the thought, didn’t interrupt you while you babbled away about the book, about the things you loved and disliked about it.

“And I love Doré’s illustrations so much! They’re haunting, just like the book. And this one in particular, with Francesca and Paolo… like… their story is so sad, but even Dante was touched by them. Even if the moral in his book is outdated now, goes against what I believe… I’d like to think that we’d turn their story around today, that we wouldn’t condemn their love or include such a warning towards fiction through them, you know… with the whole reference to Arthurian myths and everything… don’t know if you remember that… but anyway… what would we think of them today? I’d like to believe we would find their punishment in hell unfair.”

You trailed off after that. You were nervous when you looked at him, pushing some of your hair behind your ear.

“Sorry for the ramble,” you apologised, but Andrew frowned in response.

“No need to apologise. Why would you?”

“I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“You’re not bothering me at all. Your thoughts are very interesting.”

You blinked at him, as if surprised. You gave him a bright smile, growing a little shy.

“Right, thanks. But we should get back to work.”

Andrew nodded, moved away from your desk and bent again to avoid the lamp hanging from the ceiling.

He looked at you as you stared at the poster for a moment. He was happy you were the one sharing his office, you were getting along well, you were so nice, you were so smart and always seemed to have something interesting to say. He just wanted to talk to you more about this book you loved, but you were right, you both had a lot of work to do. He should focus on this article he was reading before the meeting. Instead, he looked at you for a moment longer. And before his brain pushed the thought away, before Samantha was on his mind again, he didn’t fail to notice how beautiful you were.

He looked for his thermos across his desk, furrowing his brow when he didn’t find it there. He rolled his eyes, annoyed at himself when he remembered where it was.

He walked over to your desk again, reached for it while you were still focused on the poster. But his fingers got clumsy as he threw you a glance, and it fell across your desk. Some of the warm beverage was spilled on the wooden surface.

“Shite! God!”

You turned around at the sound, but Andrew didn’t see your eyes growing slightly round. Instead, as a reflex, he had grabbed your phone and papers to secure them, was already looking for some tissues to clean the mess he had made. You reached for some Kleenex tugged inside your backpack.

“Christ, I’m so sorry,” Andrew profusely apologised, hurrying to clean your desk too. “Sorry, I’m so… long, clumsy limbs… I’m so sorry…”

He cursed at himself under his breath, didn’t look at you, fiercely blushed. Always count on him to ridicule himself…

“That’s nothing, don’t worry about it,” you reassured him, and when Andrew looked up again, you had an earnest smile on your lips. “It was just an accident, don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry…”

Andrew was so flustered, so embarrassed… He finished cleaning, handed you back your things without making eye-contact, rubbed at his collarbone through his shirt as soon as his hands were empty again.

When he finally looked up once more, you were still smiling.

“It’s nothing, Andrew. It’s merely a little bit of tea. Besides, you’ve saved the most important items on my desk. Nothing to be so upset about.”

The anxious side of him had kicked in, he couldn’t help it. He ran his fingers through his hair several times while he forced out a chuckle.

“I know, sorry…”

Andrew walked back to his desk, looked at his computer screen while he heard you chuckling lightly. He saw in the corner of his eyes that you were fondly shaking your head at him.

Why did he have to always make a fool of himself, huh?

All you wanted to do was to rush home to share the good news with Frank.

You had managed to get interesting classes, including some linked to your research… you were so excited to get to work and begin teaching in October.

When you came home, Frank was on his computer, working. He kissed you when you leaned closer, but focused on his screen again, and so you decided to wait for dinner to talk to him about your day.

You took a shower, prepared dinner. Frank was still working, he only stopped when you told him dinner was ready.

“Smells nice,” he said with a smile, squeezing your hand, and you took the gesture for a silent thank you.

“Thanks!”

Frank remained silent as he started to eat, and so you jumped on the opportunity to speak about your day.

“The meeting about classes and lectures was today. And it went so well!” you started babbling away, Frank looking up at you with an emotionless gaze. “I’ve managed to get topics I’m interested in, and I’m going to teach about my research too! I mean… not directly about my research, but problematics bound to it! I’ll have a class about the male gaze and female gaze dynamics, another about feminism and feminist essays…”

“That’s great, babe.”

“Yeah! Andrew helped me navigate through the meeting quite a bit, and he got the classes he wanted too, so…”

“That’s nice.”

“Yeah! And…”

“Could you hand me the salt, please?”

“Sure. I’m also gonna work quite a lot on the 19th century, which is great! I like that period, especially for novels. And that means that I can include lots of female writers, like Austen and the Brontë sisters, obviously… but I can also spend some time on feminist movements, cause that’s really an important century for them.”

“Good, good…”

“Yeah, that’s grand, and…”

He heaved a sigh, and you grew quiet.

“You’re alright?” you asked, trying not to show your disappointment.

You knew that this question meant that the conversation would focus on him for a while, and you might not be able to talk about today again.

“I… Y/N, we need to talk.”

Your heart sank.

That was not the answer you were expecting…

“Talk?”

“About us.”

“What? What do you mean? About the wedding, you mean?”

“No, I…”

He hesitated, looked at you for a moment, before putting his fork down.

“I think we should break up.”

And that was it. Words that were shattering your world spoken like they were easy to let out, like they didn’t mean the earthquake they produced. You merely stared for a moment, waiting for Frank to tell you that he was joking, to take his words back. But he didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he went on. “But I think we should go our separate ways.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? We’re engaged! We’re going to get married!”

“I’m sorry, Y/N… I know it’s pretty sudden…”

“PRETTY SUDDEN! WE’RE ENGAGED! YOU’RE EATING MY FUCKING FOOD!”

“There’s no need to shout…”

“NO NEED TO SHOUT! OF COURSE, THERE IS A NEED TO SHOUT! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!”

“I’m sorry… but it’s best if we don’t stay together.”

“Why? What happened? You… We’re supposed to get married…”

“I’ve met someone else, Y/N.”

Your eyes grew round, and suddenly all air had left your lungs.

“You… you’re cheating on me?!” you asked, your voice lowering again, your emotions bubbling too much, tears rising to your eyes.

“No! No! No!” Frank defended himself, shaking his head vehemently. “Nothing happened. I swear, nothing happened… but… Y/N, if I am able to feel this way for another woman, then we shouldn’t get married.”

“For how long have you known her? Who is it?”

“You don’t know her. We’ve met through work.”

“How long?”

“Not long… a few weeks.”

You raised an unimpressed eyebrow, crossing your arms before your chest.

“A few weeks? You’re trying to make me believe that you want to leave me for a woman you’ve met weeks ago?!”

“You don’t understand, we’re in love…”

You felt your head starting to spin, you had buried it in your hands.

This was a nightmare, just a bad dream, you would wake up and everything would get back to normal, you would tick all the right boxes again…

“What do you mean in love?”

“I love her. I know that it sounds… mental, but I do. And if I can fall in love with someone else like this… then you and I shouldn’t get married. It means that I… that I don’t love you enough to marry you.”

“You’ve got to be joking…”

“I’m not. I’m sorry, but I’m serious.”

“What’s her name?”

“Does it matter?”

“No, no… Do you want to be with her?”

“Yes. But I don’t know if she’ll want to be with me.”

“Really?”

“She’s not single either.”

You laughed then, tears streaming down your face too, unable to cope with the tidal wave of emotions that was drowning you.

Denial, pain, betrayal, anger, sadness…

“I’ll gather my things,” he said, standing up while you started shaking on your chair, struggling to breathe.

You didn’t even notice that he was moving away, that he was packing… you remained frozen on your seat, sobbing, while Frank was gathering fragments of your lives and tearing them away from your space.

He only reappeared about an hour later in the kitchen, the rest of your meal was cold. You hadn’t moved an inch.

“I’m so sorry, Y/N.”

And then he was gone.

[halcyone-of-the-sea]

To Hunt a Silver Stag (II)

AU MASTERLIST || PART III

PAIRING: Knight!Kyle 'Gaz' Garrick x F!Fae Princess!Reader

WORDCOUNT: 5.6k

WARNINGS: Arranged marriage, talks of childbirth, traditional views of women & men in medieval times, talks of war, death, heavy religious imagery/symbolism, blood, gore, sword wounds, stitches, etc.

*I do not give others permission to translate and/or re-publish my works on this or any other platform*

The wedding was fast approaching. 

Your nightly conversations had now taken the tone of urgency—a newfound anxiety that perpetuated every inch of the courtyard. Discussion of all manner of flight; boats and horses, magic, and the simple act of dashing away in the small hours. Gaz would not be able to come with you, but he would give you all the time and distraction you would need when the time was right. The best option right now was the horses in the stable—cloak yourself as your knight made a commotion about an intruder on the opposite end of the castle. It was coming together, day after day. Until tonight. 

Until you’d been summoned to have supper with the King and his court. 

You sit now at the very opposite of the table from your betrothed, many eyes darting from the sides of sockets for even a glance at your face. Your crown is still present, along with your belt; your dress is of your collection, and you had seen the looks of disdain when you proudly wore it in—Gaz trailing behind through the main doors of the dining hall.

No one has called in the food yet. Now is the time for talk.

“I imagine you’ve had time to settle in, My Lady?” The King smiles like a snake, and your silver eyes miss nothing as the lines of his face contort; harsh leather and the dunes of sand. “Has my castle become a home to you?” In the corner of your vision, Gaz stands with his hands behind his back at the side of the room along with many other knights. A show of strength? Maybe. 

But you don’t feel nervous about your confidant, though. The time for hesitation between the two of you has passed—it was all or nothing. 

You speak slowly and clearly, face the picture of calm.

“It is a great thing to be able to see the works of mortal hands. It is an achievement, to be sure.” Your lashes move in a slow blink. “Yet, nothing can be a home such as the one I came from.”

“Ah,” Michael takes it in stride, nodding as the men at the sides of the table glance at one another, sneering. As if saying that you were homesick was a sin of some sort. Brown eyes continue to be locked on your measured body—sitting straight and your hands in your lap. “Yes. I understand. Many have heard of the splendor of your homeland.” 

The sconces on the walls flicker. This feels like more of an interrogation than a supper. 

“It is a place very few see,” you speak slowly, thinking what this game might entail. “Those that do are left changed. Such is how it has always been.”

“My children will have equal claim, then?” Michael smiles, and the court’s eyes glint. “To the lands?”

Your body stills, gaze unwavering as your piercing orbs level across the table. The very air shifts in an instant.

“Repeat yourself,” you order slowly. 

The court blinks quickly, some even straighten in their chairs. Gaz’s feet shift near the window—his lips flattening on his face as he takes a low breath down his nose. Your tone made the hairs on his arms raise by themselves, something primal in the way you articulate. 

Yet, the King seems to not know that there’s a line not to be crossed with you. He can’t understand the nearly inextinguishable loyalty to your own—to your people. No rat-like mortal man would ever amount. No kingdom made of stone and iron. 

Your fingers tighten under the table, sharpness breeding in your skin.

Any further insinuation on his part was suddenly very detrimental to his survival rate. Your magic flows through you, and the sparse, and nearly dead, potted plants near the corners of the room quiver. Gaz notices immediately, his jaw subtly clenching. 

Not here, he wants to tell you, his feet shifting with anticipation. Fucking hell, not here, Stag.

But he served a King that he could never love—you served a kingdom that you would give your immortal life for in an instant. 

His Highness tilts his head, eyes glinting as your silver hue sparks up like a candle’s flames. 

“It’s an honest question, is it not?” Michael huffs, moving one of his hands to call the servants to bring in supper. Your senses go into overdrive as the large doors open, blinking quickly at the humming in the air that only increases as the staff moves closer. 

Your mouth opens and closes for a moment, eyes lightly flinching as a headache begins to form. You can’t even answer the King, and your magic halts itself immediately as your head snaps to the side in horror. 

Iron. 

You can’t see the King’s slow smirk as the iron platters are carried in, placed on the table in great heaps of glorious spoils. Large pigs and birds stuffed with vegetables—on the very material that makes your hands begin to shake as the tops are taken off with great showmanship. As if this was an achievement. 

A platter is dropped ahead of you with a clink of metal to wood, but your eyes only stare at the dead ones that smugly look right back as your heart constricts. 

Gaz’s wide expression is frozen on his face, body immobile at the cruel display so openly perpetuated by the court. His hands tighten into fists, eyes darting back and forth from you to the iron and the death on the table. He can see the way your muscles tense, the way your fingers twitch and flinch. 

“So,” the King motions again. “I ask, will my Heir have a claim to the Fae thrown?”

“Not in a million years,” you say slowly at first, your mind addled and skin beginning to sweat. The King stills—just like everyone else in the room. A shiver of rage filters behind those rat eyes as you continue. “Not in the seasons of the Mothers, not in an hour of contemplation, a day of rage, or even the seconds it would take for a Basilisk to devour your wretched corpse.”

It was a wonder you kept your composure as your hands rose from under the table—heart palpitating as a low growl raised from the table. Yet, everyone is shocked at what you do next. 

Your hands grasp the ironware and Gaz has already set a firm step forward in a mute panic of wide eyes and a sucked-in breath—but he’s too late.

You ignore the burn; the agony that rips through your hands and your bones, killing your soul and making your skin itch like it was on fire. Maybe it was. The iron is heavy in your hands as you glare at the King with every ounce of hate a creature as old as you can hold. 

You stab at a piece of food, hold the fork aloft, and hiss on a tight, strained breath. 

“Not even if the cold iron in my palm turns to pure gold will I see any child of yours growing in my womb.” Your hand moves forward, and with a slow bite, you take down a piece of the greasy and roasted corpse; holding back a gag as your skin boils and blisters under the iron’s hold. 

The food slams into your stomach as if a rock.

It’s a curse you level with no magic besides your hatred, and that in and of itself is far more potent. 

The King’s shocked nature turns to confusion, and then to a swift and all-consuming rage.

“Chain her,” he whispers at first, a quiet murmur above the horror of the faces of the court. Then he screams and stands up, slamming his hands to the table with actions half his age. A petulant child. A greedy little boy. “Chain her!”

A hand grasps yours and rips the fork from your grasp, hurling it halfway up the table by the time you can register above your blackening gaze that Gaz is forcing a ripped strip of his cape into the weeping flesh. 

“Christ,” he gasps, quickly glancing at your face as your crown dips and moves as your head does. Everything is buzzing—even being close to this much iron leaves you weak. 

You suck down large breaths, but there’s no time for this.

“Chain her!” King Michael screeches. “I want her in the dungeons!”

Your arm is taken up, your feet sliding over the floor as Gaz drags you up, shoving you behind him. The sound of a sword being drawn is enough to momentarily snap you out of your agony, your hand shaking violently as you breathe hard and bend your spine forward slightly. 

You blink wildly, gasping at the scene ahead of you.

Your knight stands firm ahead of you, his back wide and shielding you from the risen court and the King. The other knights in the room watch with wide eyes, hands on their weapons in utter confusion. 

“I’d stay back if you knew what was best for you,” Gaz eases out, casual in his delivery but you can hear the rapid pound of his heart. He’s nervous. Incredibly so—adrenaline striking through his veins just as it does yours. 

This wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t right; he wasn’t supposed to be involved. 

“Gaz,” you stutter, so strange to hear yourself in a state of anxiety after so many years of calm and elegance. There’s nothing elegant about you now. “Do not.”

He was throwing away everything he’d worked for. 

“Stay behind me,” the knight mutters, his dark eyes searching the room for anyone to move forward and attack—none do. “Don’t move until I tell you to, yeah?” He had a reputation for being a skilled swordsman; no one here would risk rushing without more weapons at the ready.

Gaz’s sword rests easily in his right hand, the left going to unsheathe his dagger and let it rest at his side, fingers twitching around the hilt as he takes a slow breath, eyes traveling the room.

They land on the King, face contorted into the picture of wrath, wrinkled, and old body shaking. 

“Step aside, boy,” Michael says lowly. “And I’ll let you walk with your head.”

“Wouldn’t be much good to me if I allowed this to happen, would it,” Gaz tilts his skull, a flicker of a smirk on his lips. Seriousness slips back in on the backs of knife edges. “Cut your losses. Let her leave, she doesn’t want this.” 

“I don’t care what this creature wants,” the King shouts, moving out from the table and taking firm steps forward, his knight flanking him as the court goers, back up quickly; panic in their eyes. “It’s going to give me power.” 

A greedy gaze finds yours behind the swell of Gaz’s back—hearing your Knight’s growl at the next words to enter the tense dining hall. 

“Whether she agrees to it or not.”

Your face twists, a sliver of fear making your legs back up a step. Magic, you needed your magic. But the iron—there’s so much of it here; it’s infecting your mind like a bug in the back of your brain. Buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. 

You shake your head, uninjured hand coming up to dig your fingers into your temple.

Gaz spits, “Not fucking happening, you old bastard.” His silver sword raises, and with a twirl of his wrist, sending the blade in an arch, the tip is leveled into the air. “You’ll have to get through me first, won’t you?”

“I will not—!” The King stumbles for a moment, body shaking and legs loose. One of his hands snaps to his chest and he blinks to himself, cape dragging across the floor. A ragged cough moves out of his mouth. 

You move forward sluggishly, hand resting itself on the back of Gaz’s armored spine as he startles and looks over his shoulder at you. 

“Stag,” he warns in an accented mutter, but your eyes are not gazing at him. They’re on the King.

On his failing heart and its broken beating. 

The man’s breath is in a gasp, his orbs snapping to and fro like a rabbit as he reaches out a hand, a swift cry from the other men making the knights dash. They grab at him just before he slams to the ground, but one of the court’s men shouts out fearfully, “It’s her—she’s done something!”

“Grab her!”

“Cast her into the irons!”

“She’s killing out King!”

Gaz dashes on his heels, hooking an arm around your waist as you pant, unbelieving as to what is happening. Killing? No, you hadn’t even done anything—this wasn’t your fault!

“Run,” the knight barks, shoving you out of the door and into the hallway. “Damnit, Stag, you need to bloody go. Now!” His browns lock with your silver eyes, stiff until they soften at your blatant shocked fear. A beat of nothingness comes back to the both of you—memories of a courtyard and a cape around your shoulders. You stare, fingers shaking and blood pooling into the makeshift bandage of your palm.

“No, no! What about you?” He shakes his head, and in a swift moment, his gaze goes back to the clamor of commotion—of horrible cries of ‘the King is dead! The King is dead!’

A thin smirk makes your face burn with panic.

“I need to give you an exit, remember?” A tiny wink. “Thank me later, Princess, when you’re safe. Go home.”

He nods pushing on your shoulder delicately. Backing up and twirling his sword again as he licks his lips. You watch, crown more heavy than it had ever been before.  

Gaz looks at you as if you’re the only person to ever exist—just as he had when you’d restored the courtyard to glory he’d never seen it in before. He glances down your face, down your body, in all of the time those few seconds were before the yells from the other knights start up—angry, furious, from behind.

He calls firmly, bluntly, but the words are more layered than even you can know. Gaz whispers, his eyes so light and open it leaves you breathless like all of the air has turned to water. You’re drowning in it. 

“You don’t belong here.”

You try to step forward, desperate in a way you’d never been to grapple for this mortal man, but the door has already shut right in your face with a heavy boom. An iron bolt is locked in place.

—

The trees try to pull their branches aside as you rush through them, but your fast feet are too quick. Sharp wood slaps your cheeks, pulling at the long strands of your dress and the broken straps of your corset. 

You run over rocks, and feel the earth guide you along deep in your soul, not once do you stumble, not once do you falter besides once—to turn and glance. To cast your wide eyes on the fading fire-light of the castle; the sounds of bells ringing out.

Gaz.

He was still back there—fighting. When you had to rip yourself away from the door and rush down the stone corridors, you’d heard the clash of iron and silver against one another; shouts. Like battling wolves, all rabid teeth and a flurry of slitted eyes. Such violence here—such baseless malice. 

A King was going to put you in chains, and by whatever deity is truly out there, his heart had given out just in time. And your knight. Your sacrificial knight was left behind. 

He can take care of himself, you try to ease, bare feet jumping a stream as your injured palm burns with a thousand suns. I have to place my trust in him. I have to.

He had told you to go home—flee. Back to your castle that touches the sky, back to magic and trees older than any man, woman, or child. Sliding along the ground, you halt. 

Atop your head, your crown is crooked, and some of the gems have fallen off, glinting behind you in the upturned earth. Panting, you twist on your feet, moving them like a deer and unable to properly think. This had never happened to you before—this…this pain. Not just the one in your hand but the one that emanates from your heart. 

Gaz. 

In such a short time, day, weeks, he’d grabbed your immortality and made it stop. You had become mortal with him, and a part of you is mortal yet. He’d touched you—he’d grappled into the place between your ribs and made you care about him. His wonder; his awe for no other reason than he was kind. Hand coming up to grasp at your neck, you fight the burn in your eyes, something that had not happened in decades, trying to drag you back into tears. 

You cover your mouth, eyes shut tight. 

No, no.

“This cannot be happening,” you gasp in a whisper that moves the trees; eyes watch from bushes. “No, no this isn’t true, do not speak of it,” you whimper to the branches, to their hidden words that pierce your heaving lungs. “I need to go home, I must see the ages pass with no bias—I can not grow attached to a knight. Not to one that death can touch so easily! Do you not understand?!”

Shouts ring into the trees, and your head snaps up, face tight. 

Why can’t you go any farther? No curse holds you here! No spell, no enchantment! You are a God to them! You make the world grow with only a word, you carry life and death as if it is a suggestion! This is not probable—it isn't logical. 

And then you think about the man who had freely given up everything for you in chains, and your sob echoes over the woods like a brand.

Fleeing once more, you go not in the direction of home, a place so very far away, but in the direction of a large mound of stone—speaking to them through bitter tears and making you lick at the sides of your mouth. Torchlight moves through the trunks of silent sentinels as the rock itself splinters and breaks, your body slipping inside a cage of your own making before you collapse. 

The stone groans and breaks and it is like you were never there as the ground shifts—moving the tracks you’d left behind in newly tilled earth. Countless horses rush past, their knight riders with iron bindings swinging from their fists, oblivious. 

But the stone you panic inside of is no worthy prison. Even you knew: there was no greater cage for a Fae than love.

—

Gaz stumbled through the woods, his right leg dragging behind as he gritted his teeth harder, panting through the drops of blood that slipped over his lips. 

“Fuck,” he grunts, collapsing against one of the tree’s trunks and resting the side of his head against it. “Fuck.”

He’d barely made it out. 

The castle was overrun with knights, guards, the people, and the court—all of them. The King was dead. Dead, and they were blaming it on you.

“Serves him right,” Gaz pushes on, eyes fluttering shut as blood slides over his armor. He doesn’t know where the wounds start and where they end, but he does know that he has to keep walking. There’s a trail to follow, and the earth is showing it to him.

The man can’t stop until he knows you’re alright.

Panting, the gems on the ground are one by one plucked and pocketed, kept safe in the same pouch that once held his sigil ring; an achievement he’d been proud of himself for. 

A knight, he’d told his family—his friends. It was a station of the highest honor.

Look what that had gotten him. Serving a bastard who called himself a God. Who pushed judgments and demanded utter loyalty to them. 

Gaz would rather hang. 

Coughing, blood splatters to the ground, and on the bank of a small river, his dragging feet fail him. Falling forward, the tattered remains of Gaz’s cape fluttered around him as his hands splattered through the water. A chilled breeze rushes through the trees, waking them.

He restrains himself from crying out, eyes clenched shut as his forehead skates the water. The clear liquid goes crimson with every wave, like the remnants of a fresh kill. 

Body too weak to move, Gaz growls in defiance, slamming a fist into the mud and shoving forward.

He had to find you. He had to make sure you were making your way back home safely—he…he had to fix the wrongs that he hadn’t even been a part of. Even by association, the knight was layered with a horrible guilt. Gaz can’t forget your eyes—your silver tint and the way your head moved; the way you spoke. 

A stag. A deer. A hart. A creature that needed to be set free from the confines of stone and iron. He’d do it all over, but that was just his nature. Gaz was just—he was good. Kind. 

Even the trees knew that. 

Raising his head, vision blurry, brown eyes lock onto the tiny body of a white dove. 

Staring, Gaz’s face slackens, blinking through the water and the blood until the image in front of him becomes clearer. 

“L,” he stutters, voice failing before he clears his throat and forces himself further upwards as his arms scream at him. “Lysander?” 

The bird has its head cocked to the side, a black obsidian orb stuck on him. It doesn't coo or flap its wings—it watches. Waits. Without anything, it takes to the air and flutters over to a large stump, body hopping until it rests once more with tapping feet.

Again, it stares.

Gaz gapes at it, moonlight over his armor, making it glint and shine even with the dents and long cuts. A flicker of hope beats in his breast, and with a deep breath and a broken groan of pain, his failing body is once more on its two feet. 

“Take me to her,” he pleads in a breathy exhale.

Gaz may not be able to stalk like a wolf, or even walk like a human now, but if there was a sliver of a chance that a Fae princess was waiting for him, he’d follow even if he had to drag himself there on busted legs.

Lysander’s beak clicks and the bird flies from one landmark to another, following the trail of gems and leading the broken knight behind him. 

On and on Gaz walks, not able to stop for fear he may not be able to get back up again. His pouch becomes heavy, his body likely to give out any second, when Lysander flutters atop a large stone face and finally stops. Collapsing to the ground, the knight coughs up blood to the ground, body a heap on the ground earth as he rests his head and pants like an animal. 

“Christ,” he gasps, eyes fluttering as darkness begins to swallow him; a maw of a dragon right over his form, waiting to chomp down. “Where…” Gaz begins to ask, flesh shivering even through all of the layers of sweat he carries.

Where are you?

Brown eyes move from the bird to the trees, through the gaps between the trunks and the spilling moonlight. You were nowhere—nothing to be seen except the eyes of animals and the wind moving the branches of the silent watchers of this place. The trees here move, trying to tell him something. Ever since he’d met you, everything had taken on new meaning.

Gaz tried to focus on breathing, but it was getting harder and harder to keep conscious. 

Lysander was doing something at the rock face—tapping his beak against the surface in steady intervals, only pausing to look down at him and tilt his head as if to ask, ‘Still alive down there?”

The knight glares at the bird, body losing strength until his chest connects down to the ground, eyes gazing off into the trees as the wind caresses his cheeks.

It was calm here. Gaz’s ears twitched at the sound of rock and stone, but the rapid hands on his cheeks captured his attention more than anything. His body is forced onto his back, a wide, terrified face blurred in front of him. 

But that voice…

“Gaz!”

Oh, he could fall into this abyss happily if the last words he heard were you calling his name.

—

You rip the last of the hem of your dress to use as bandages and see your hands quiver in all of their blood-stained glory. Along the cuts in Gaz’s skin, you had threaded through the gold that had once belonged to your antlered crown—the needle, a fragment of the very same bone you had broken along a rock. You’d raced to the river and asked the water for help, and it had followed swiftly with the help of the wind to clean wounds and aches. 

Now, you were wrapping what was left, the night beginning to slink back into the morning as you kept the break in the cliff face open to the air. The grass was awash with blood. 

You both can’t stay here if you want to live by tomorrow.

Lysander had brought Gaz to you, and now, he lays on the ground with his cape under his head—your hands healing him the best you can. You poured your magic tirelessly, hour after hour, but you had to focus on the worst wounds first. 

The slit on his stomach, namely—from an axe or some larger weapon, you know not, but it had left most of the carnage that needed to be attended to. If you were anything less than Fae, Gaz would be dead.

The thought ravaged your mind like a boar through undergrowth.

“You were not supposed to do that,” you mutter, fingers running the length of his tunic and grasping it, pulling the article down to hide the large scar that now moves up his stomach. Your head is light from the power it took. Plants and animals were so much easier; less to work with than human flesh. “Damn you, Knight. I would damn your name as well if I had the horrific pleasure of knowing it. Damn you.” 

Such words were below you, but you can’t help how they come out.

You stare at his face, the light of morning barely giving it illumination. He breathes softly, and it is your only relief to watch his chest rise and fall—broken armor discarded to the side by your panicked fingers. His heartbeat.

Bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump.

Your eyes flutter to it, trying to ease yourself as you take a deep breath and think.

You’re still too close to the castle for your liking. But he’s far too broken to move so soon.

Finger reaching out, your tips trail the raised skin of your glinting stitches, gold stuck between the flesh, peeling it back together along the forearm. All of it will scar. Violently so.

Your chest constricts, and you glare at his face.

“Why would you do that,” you hiss, growling in a tone that is foreign to you even if it still sounds elegant. A Fae’s wrath is one to behold. “Why? You owe me nothing, do you not understand that? You’re supposed to be a beast—a little man who…who…” you trail, teeth snapping as your head raises and whips away, nose to the air.

Yet, your crown had been broken just to save this human’s life. Willingly.

Mortals were supposed to be selfish. They were supposed to be like King Michael—that was what you’d been taught; that was what you knew. 

But everything Gaz did was the opposite of that. 

Love is a cage, you tell yourself again, and keep your face to the side. Unwilling to look down at the body that had been so eager to defend you.

You don’t like the wild feeling it makes breed like rodents in your heart, little claws moving up your throat and scratching at your teeth. 

“...Gonna finish that sentence, Love?” 

Your body startles, head snapping down to meet half-closed browns in an instant—you hiss. “Don’t speak, fool.” 

“Fool?” A weak chuckle wafts out, a hoarse voice as a head tries to shift on numb bone. “That’s not very nice, then.”

“I should make your lungs turn to dirt,” your sentence makes his brow flinch upwards, amused despite it all. “Change the very fabric of your muscle into oak wood.”

“Moody, are you?” 

Your eyes flash, and the grass around you shudders in answer as Lysander cleans his feathers a short distance away. Gaz tries a low smirk, softening his voice as his mind tries to focus above the noise in his head. “Joking.” 

Your face is troubled, jaw clenching. You can’t admit to yourself how much at ease his open eyes put you. You sigh, blinking away the sharp edge of your expression—it shifts back to the perfect calm it always wears. 

Gaz watches, your clothes torn and your palm still hidden away behind his cape’s cloth. He grunts suddenly, and the pain comes back in sharp pins as his face tightens. 

You can only watch, mind trying to come up with a solution that you know you don’t have. Magic can only do so much...but you have to try. He’s earned that much from you, at the very least. Your hand goes and hovers over the man’s cheek, pulling back only once before it captures the swell of it. 

Gaz swallows hard, and his eyes shift back through the haze of his shaking agony.

A kiss is leveled on his forehead, and it’s like the wounds cease to exist. He sags back onto the ground after a moment, skin tingling as magic runs its course through him like a stream of fire. It burns away the bad bits—keeping only the sensation of a princess pushing away his ails with a willing gift of her lips. 

A small noise is made in the back of his throat before Gaz takes a long and steady breath. His eyelids flutter. 

You pull back and place a hand on your head, grunting as the strength drains from you one wisp of magic at a time. Your skull pulses, and you know you’ve reached your limit. There was nothing more you could do. 

A calloused hand runs up to grasp at your wrist, and you let Gaz pull it back, his fingers twitching with healing nerves as he takes the limb and levels it at his lips. He holds it there until you open your eyes and look at him, a line of sweat running your temple. The knight watches it fall, skin hot.

“Thank you,” he whispers into your hand, only letting it move away when he knows you understand his words. Gaz whispers even as his eyes fight sleep. “Are you hurt, My Lady?”

“Right now,” your injured hand still burns—it always will. You restrain a flinch because of it. “You must focus on yourself, Knight. Such concerns are not needed. You almost gave your life for me.”

The last sentence is uttered no more than a squeak of a mouse in an open field. The thought…troubles you. It…it makes you want to run. 

Gaz smiles slowly, body mostly still. 

“Well, I can’t let a beauty like you get hurt now, can I? That would just be bloody wrong of me.” A pause. You don’t seem to find his jokes very funny. Gaz’s heart skips beats when you look at him like that. He softens, and your hand once more runs the length of his bandages, making him shiver. It was addicting: touching him. Feeling the heat of his flesh. 

“I’d do it again,” Gaz mutters. “I took an oath.”

“An oath to a King that was worth less than a rock on the bottom of the ocean,” you whisper. “It means nothing now.”

“It was never nothing to me.” Gaz’s eyes don’t leave yours. “Fighting for you will never be nothing.” 

You shake slightly, face heating up. All of this is wrong to you—foreign. But why does it make you feel like everything will be okay?

“I didn’t ask for your protection, Gaz,” you try once more. One final attempt to keep your slipping self-control. Weak fingers skate your chin, usually such a high and mighty thing, now stooped low and bent just to gaze upon the feeble body of a broken mortal man.

A man who will die in a blink. A man that should never have made a dent in your unbreakable mind; your knowledge of lives innumerable. A man that you can’t look away from as he smiles at you like that. Softy. Openly. 

Kindly.

Love is a cage.

“You never had to ask me, Stag…I would give my name to you, even if it was the last thing I had left of me.” 

Your eyes widen; your breath hitches as if you’d been stabbed in the heart. You nearly reel back, horror and something more trapped in every vein in your body. Ludicrous. That…that was absurd. Laughable!

His name? No, no never. That was a lie; a trick. Something so powerful, just to be uttered away like that by a bloodless mind. No. 

But not a single part of him is lying. Your jaw is slack in pure wonder. Struck dumb.

He wasn’t lying.

A low breeze goes through the trees—it slips past tattered clothes and the crimson grass. Whispering; talking in tongues you can’t understand at the moment above the noise from Gaz’s eyes. He’s still smiling at you, a knowing glint in his orbs as his fingers squeeze your chin. You catch his hand before it falls, grasping it without looking away. His pulse sings, and his throat releases a hum.

If love is a cage, you’d never wanted to be a prisoner more.

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[whxtedreams]

Chapter 6: A Fragile Existence

Blood Runs Thicker than Water - Joel & F!Reader (Platonic DBF!)

Summary: Four years after the outbreak, you're travelling through the new world with you dad.

Word Count: 3.6k

Tags: reader age: 8, violence, death, fear, typical outbreak emotions and actions, swearing, separation, reader isn’t a helpless kid, Joel goes feral off screen.

Series Masterlist - Main Masterlist - Read on AO3

PART II

THE RAIDER AND THE GUILT - 2007

Chapter 6 - A Fragile Existence

If nightmares had music, it would sound like the storm that rages above you.

The wind howls, the rain lashes your skin and the thunder roars. Each sound blending together in an eerie melody that infiltrates the very core of your being.

Your small hand is held firmly by your father's, guided along the cracked concrete surface as you trail behind the rest of the group. The road is paved with fractures and blemishes, bearing the scars of time and destruction, yet it remains a path that you navigate together.

The roar of thunder pierces the air, sending vibrations through the very foundation of your being, creating an unsettling symphony that echoes the fear reverberating within you as you clutch the torn green sweatshirt two sizes too big for you. The ground trembles with each thunderous clap, almost as if mirroring your own internal turmoil. Your heart races in response to the primal force of nature, each strike of lightning illuminating the darkness with a fierce brightness, only to plunge everything into a deeper, more ominous shadow once the brief flash subsides.

The storm had made its presence known overnight, settling into an unsettling, overcast morning. To your father's dislike, the group had decided to press on, disregarding his concerns about moving through the city under such unfavorable weather conditions. Frustrated, he had lashed out, hurling expletives and curses, calling them reckless and ignorant. Yet his protests fell on deaf ears as the group's decision overshadowed his worries, leaving him to begrudgingly swallow his concerns as they braved the storm-ridden city.

Your father had sat you on a log at the edge of the makeshift campsite. He sat beside you watching the others rush about. Their urgency palpable as they hastily packed up their belongings, preparing for the journey ahead. You, on the other hand had long ago abandoned unpacking, knowing well the need to be ready to flee at a moment's notice. The constant state of readiness had become second nature to you, a reminder of the fragile existence you now navigated.

Shoes always on and tied tight as you slept.

The pattern was familiar to you, a cycle repeated time and time again. The group would accept you and your father, allowing you to travel with them for a while. But inevitably, after a few weeks, doubts would set in, and those who once welcomed you would now question your presence. It became a predictable journey, as you never managed to stay with a group for longer than a month, making it impossible to remember names or faces when every encounter seemed fleeting.

Your father leaned in, his voice barely above a whisper as he shared his plan with you. "We stick to the back of the group, and once we're outside the city limits, we slip away, head out on our own,"  He kept his voice low, careful not to attract the attention of any wandering ears that might overhear his instructions.

“You got your knife?” He asked and you pulled it from your belt to show him before securing it back safely.

You had asked your father why he didn't suggest leaving right away, doubting anyone would notice your disappearance. Your eyes followed the clumsy movements of the group, witnessing someone drop their bag's contents, scattering them in the mud. Confusion mingled with frustration on your father's face as he surveyed the scene, clearly weighing the options in his mind.

Your father sighed heavily, his frustration evident as he witnessed the group's behavior. "Cities are dangerous," he reminded you, his tone filled with concern. "It's safer for us to travel with a larger group. It'll be easier for us to slip away if we encounter any trouble." His hand found your shoulder, gently pulling you into a side hug, a gesture of comfort and affection amidst the uncertain circumstances.

"The only trouble we'll encounter are these stupid fuckers," you grumbled quietly, your eyes scanning the disorganized group before you with a mix of annoyance and disbelief.

His eyes gleamed with amusement as he playfully chided you, shaking his head slightly. "And what have I told you about that language?" he teased. A chuckle escaped his lips as he jokingly threatened, "If I had soap right now, I would wash out your mouth." He punctuated his remark with a playful shove, his lighthearted gesture indicating his attempt to alleviate the tension.

"I wish you had soap, you stink," you remarked, wrinkling your nose in exaggerated disgust. His eyes widened at your retort, a mix of surprise and amusement evident in his reaction.

Your father's playful shove sent you toppling off the log, and you landed face-first into the mud with a startled shriek. Mud splattered across your clothes and face, adding another layer to your dirty appearance. You couldn't help but burst into a fit of laughter as you tried to wipe the thick mud from your face, your amusement outweighing any irritation.

With a smirk, you threw mud from the ground at your father.

Every ounce of laughter had faded as the crumbling city looms before you, casting an eerie shadow over the once cheerful atmosphere you shared with your dad. The mood shifts dramatically, the change palpable as if crossing that invisible line brought with it a sense of foreboding. The once-cheerful air turned heavy and uneasy as the reality of the city's dangers became more real, dampening the earlier lightheartedness.

Your father's eyes dart around anxiously, scanning the surroundings with a watchful gaze. Every noise and movement seems to catch his attention, causing his head to turn incessantly. His sweaty palms and quick breathing betray his inner tension, a clear indication of his nervousness. You cling tightly to him, feeling the unease that radiates from his tense form.

A shout from ahead disrupts the howling storm, its sound swallowed by the gale. The group comes to a halt, and your father swiftly shields you, positioning himself protectively between you and the approaching figure. A woman emerges from an alleyway, her hands clutched at her stomach, a desperate plea for help escaping her lips as she reaches out to the group, pleading for their aid.

Your thoughts race as you recall the name of the person rushing towards the wounded woman in the alley - Jack, you remember. Your father's reaction, marked by muttered curses and rapid eye movement, conveys his growing sense of unease and apprehension. He appears to be on high alert, scanning every corner of the street, anticipating potential danger lurking in the shadows.

Your voice trembles as you call out through the relentless rain, seeking reassurance from your father. "Dad?" you cry out, your panic evident in the urgent tug on his sleeve. In response, his gaze turns toward you, and you're met with a disheartening sight - the sorrowful look in his eyes betrays the fear he had worked so hard to conceal.

Your father's urgent cry rings out above the chaotic sounds of gunfire and screams. "We gotta run," he hollers urgently, his desperate plea piercing through the chaos of the alley. Your eyes snap back to the group, where the once wounded woman now holds a gun, firing at Jack who collapses onto the ground. The unfolding scene is a terrifying sight, as more people brandishing weapons emerge from their hiding spots.

The iron grip of your father's hand around your wrist tightens into a bruising hold as he forcefully yanks you away, urging you into a sprint. The adrenaline surges through your veins, heightening your senses as your legs strain to keep up with his pace. Fear drives each stride, fueling your determination to flee from the unfolding chaos behind you.

Your vision blurs as tears mix with the relentless raindrops cascading down on you. The alleyway becomes a maze as you dart into it, only to glance behind you as you hear the sickening sound of the group's demise on the street. Fear grips your heart as heavy footsteps draw nearer, their presence a sinister reminder of the impending danger. The echoes of bullets striking the slippery brick walls send a shiver down your spine, mingling with the sound of your own desperate screams reverberating throughout the winding alleys.

Your father hastily locates a potential escape route and forcefully kicks open a door, propelling you inside before reluctantly unclasping his grasp on your wrist and drawing his firearm. In a moment of urgency, he drops to his knees in front of you, his heavy breaths mirroring your own panic. His hands cradle your face with an intensity that speaks volumes, holding your gaze firmly as he locks eyes with your frantic gaze.

"You run," he pleads, his voice firm and commanding. Yet beneath the stern words, there's a hint of desperation. His desire to keep you safe shines through his steely expression. But your defiant head shake tells a different story, the love and fear interwoven into your expression, refusing to budge from his side. The sound of approaching footsteps and shouts serves as a chilling reminder that time is of the essence.

Your tear-streaked face stares up at him, your voice shaky with emotion as you firmly declare, "I'm not leaving you, dad." Your fingers clutch onto his arms, anchoring yourself in the fleeting sense of security he offers. A sob wracks through your body, the weight of the situation pressing down upon you, and your father pulls you into his chest, wrapping his arms around you. In that embrace, all the fears and anxieties pour out, finding solace in his protective hold.

His grip on your shoulders tightens as he pulls you off him, his voice filled with a mix of determination and vulnerability. "I'm right behind you, baby," he assures you, his weak smile unable to conceal the trepidation in his eyes. "You keep running and don't look back," he urges, desperation lacing his words. "Promise me you won't look back, no matter what you hear." In that moment, his plea hangs heavily in the air, the weight of his fear for your safety echoing through the tense silence.

“Dad-”

His voice rises, breaking the fragile silence as your father's desperate plea echoes in the air, "Promise me!" His grip on your shoulders tightens, his gaze filled with intensity as he gently shakes you, his voice quivering with anguish.

Your voice catches in a sob as you echo his words, "I promise." The pain of separation is evident in your trembling voice, mirrored in the tears streaming down your face. With a mix of love and determination, your father gazes at you one last time, his eyes filled with a bittersweet resolve before he gently pushes you away, standing up once more.

His voice blares like a siren in your ears as he bellows "Run!" The urgency in his voice is unmistakable, and you instinctively spin on your heels. Tears fly from your cheeks as you begin to sprint, knowing that the sound of your father's voice may be the last you hear it.

As you crawl through another gap in the wire fence, a curse escapes you as the rough edges catch on your sweater, causing yet another tear. Though the storm has subsided to a soft sprinkle falling from the sky, the ominous sounds of shouts and gunfire continue to drift from the distance, hinting at the dangers that lie in wait. Despite having put several blocks between you and the hostile group that attacked you, the lingering sense of unease remains as you press on.

As you struggle to wipe away the caked mud that clings stubbornly to your skin, you let out a frustrated huff and lean against the wall, feeling the rough bricks against your back. The impact of your head hitting the wall is a testament to the exhaustion that seeps through your bones, and a wave of weariness washes over you. Just for a moment, you tell yourself. Just one brief moment to rest, to clear your mind before pressing onward. The adrenaline that had fueled your escape begins to subside, leaving you feeling drained and vulnerable in the deserted backstreet.

Your eyes fixate on a broken sign swaying in the breeze across the street, marking the location of a pet store. Deciding it would be a safe spot to rest, you summon what remaining energy you have, pushing yourself away from the wall and moving across the deserted road. As you reach the entrance to the pet store, you reach for the knife at your belt, grasping it firmly in preparation for any surprises that may await you inside. The anticipation courses through you, leaving a sense of unease mixed with determination as you step into the unknown confines of the abandoned storefront. 

The chime of the bell announces your arrival as you push open the door, causing you to roll your eyes in annoyance. It seems that every single store has a bell to signal newcomers, and you're growing tired of its relentless presence. As you step inside, the sounds of the city outside fade into the background, replaced by the eerie silence that pervades the abandoned pet store.

The sight of lifeless animals behind the glass cases evokes a mix of pity and discomfort, and you try to suppress the emotions that surface. Resolutely, you push forward, forging a path through the store. As you reach the back, you hesitantly push open the door, the creaking noise it emits adding to the already eerie atmosphere.

The room is illuminated by a soft glow, with sunlight creeping through the window as day breaks through the night, casting a faint luminescence on the surroundings. What captures your attention, though, is an unexpected sight - a light bulb hanging from a string on the ceiling, gently swaying in response to an invisible draft.

That’s strange, there’s no wind?

A searing panic shoots through you as you're suddenly blindsided, hands wrapping around your mouth, effectively silencing your cries and effectively cutting off your air supply. Your body instinctively stiffens, adrenaline flooding your system as you fight against the unexpected assailant.

Your teeth tear into the flesh, a desperate attempt to defend yourself from the unexpected attack. Simultaneously, you bring your leg up, planting a powerful stomp on his foot. A guttural groan escapes the man behind you as he stumbles back, releasing his suffocating grip on your mouth. "The little fucker," he curses, his voice filled with surprise and irritation.

In a swift motion, you spin around, brandishing your knife and slicing it across his chest. He lets out a cry of pain and instinctively kicks you backwards, sending you stumbling into the room. Quick thinking leads you to kick the door shut as you land on your back to buy yourself some time, trying to create a barrier between you and the hostile stranger.

Your breath catches in your throat as panic floods your system, causing a wave of unease to wash over you. You force yourself to your feet, desperately trying to regain control over your breathing. Drawing upon the knowledge your father bestowed upon you, you steady your breaths, willing yourself to remain calm. With determination, you shove a fallen chair under the handle of the door, silently hoping it will buy you precious time to find a means of escape.

Your heart skips a beat as the door begins to shake and the chair creaks under the relentless battering, signaling the futility of its defense. Acting on pure instinct, you swiftly push away the strands of hair plastered to your sweaty face, your body propelled in a frenzied dash toward the window.

Their voices filter through the crack in the door and a woman's voice chimes in, tinged with the unmistakable undercurrent of mockery. She chuckles as she addresses the other assailant, her tone dripping with derision. "What happened to you?" she taunts the man, her voice carrying a hint of amusement.

The man's annoyed growl fills the air as he kicks the door in response, his voice laced with irritation. "Little shit had a knife," he mutters, the anger evident in the force behind his kick. Desperation claws at you as you spin back toward the window, attempting to pry it open. However, your efforts are met with resistance, the window stubbornly refusing to budge. In frustration, you bang your fists against the glass, the fear within you swelling as the seconds tick by.

The distinctive chime of the door echoes through the air once more, announcing the arrival of further assailants. Your mind races, desperately scanning the surroundings for something, anything, that can aid in shattering the glass barrier before you. A fallen brick amidst the rubble cascading from the damaged wall catches your attention and you quickly grab it, a flicker of triumph seizes your emotions as you clutch it in your trembling hand.

Chaos erupts in the adjacent room as a heated argument escalates into the eruption of gunfire, its echoes reverberating through the air. Realizing there's no time to waste, you swiftly hurl the brick through the window, shattering it into fragments. Without hesitation, you hastily retrieve a piece of wood and begin frenziedly slamming it against the remaining shards still clinging to the broken windowpane, determined to create an opening large enough to squeeze through without cutting yourself.

Just as you prepare to climb through the shattered window, the door behind you explodes open with a jarring crash, signaling the end of your desperate escape attempt. A shout rings out through the chaos, followed by the thundering footsteps that approach at a rapid pace. Unrelenting panic grips your throat as a hand snatches your foot, exerting an iron grip and forcefully yanking you back into the room.

Your voice rises defiantly as you howl, "Get off me!" In a desperate bid to break free, you miraculously manage to land a solid kick to his face. He lets out a pained groan, frustration palpable in his response as his grip tightens on your wrists, seizing control over you. He violently flings your knife across the room, its metallic clatter blending with the chaotic symphony of sounds. The man is uttering words, but his voice is swallowed by the tumultuous roar of your own screams.

The touch of a calloused hand on your face surprises you, as it feels inexplicably gentle against your skin. In your frenzied screams, the dichotomy registers, and you stop abruptly. With a sense of confusion, you open your eyes, your heart still racing from the adrenaline-fueled panic that consumed you moments ago. 

"It's me," he exclaims, his eyes locking onto yours, pleading for recognition. A note of urgency tinges his voice as he tenderly pushes aside the strands of hair that cling to your face. "Baby, it's me."

Time seems to stand still as the oxygen leaves your lungs, rendering you momentarily speechless. A sense of disbelief washes over you, wondering if this is a cruel trick played by your mind, if his face is merely conjured up by fractured memories. In this surreal moment, you entertain the possibility that you're already in the afterlife, and he has come back to guide you. But the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the undeniable sign of life itself, confirms your reality - he's alive, and it's truly him.

“Joel?” Your disbelief transforms into a tentative hope as his name escapes your lips in a whispered question. As he rises to his knees, your struggles come to an abrupt halt, freeing him from your desperate attempts to break free. In this moment of ceasefire, your eyes meet his, and the tension that had gripped you melts away, replaced by the mutual relief mirrored on both your faces. His chest rises and falls with the weight of his own labored breaths, a testament to the intensity of the struggle.

The image of his battered form burns itself into your mind - his body a canvas of smeared blood and dirt, his soaked hair clinging limply to his face as blood drips from him. Despite the mess that surrounds him, there's an undeniable familiarity in his presence. No matter how beaten and bloodied he may be, the unmistakable essence of Joel remains intact, a glimmer of recognition flickering through the turmoil.

It's him, Joel, kneeling before you, battered yet unbroken.

With sudden urgency, you push yourself off the ground, rushing into his embrace. His arms encircle you with a powerful and desperate hold, as if he fears that you might disappear if he lets go. His grip tightens, holding onto you as if his very existence depends on it.

His words, spoken gently into the crook of your shoulder, hold a soothing promise. "You're alright, princess. Everything's alright," Joel reassures you, his voice a balm to your frightened heart. He pulls you closer, nestling your head against his chest, his own head resting upon yours as he slowly rocks you. The steady rhythm of his heartbeat seems to steady your own racing pulse, serving as a grounding presence amidst the whirlwind of emotions.

As your eyes slowly flutter open and rise, they are met with the gruesome scenes that surround you. The room across from you is marked by a stark display of violence and devastation. Your gaze falls upon the splayed bodies, their limp forms spread lifelessly on the ground, starkly contrasted against the backdrop of sticky blood that drips silently down the walls.

With gentle and soothing motions, Joel's hand begins to stroke the length of your back, offering a comforting presence. Your gaze remains fixed on the still form of the dead man, his lifeless eyes staring back at you as blood drips from the hole in his neck. Joel's voice breaks the tense silence, whispering reassurances once more. "Everything's alright." The repetition of his words serves as a soothing mantra, a lifeline that grounds you in the face of shock and terror.

You’re not sure if he was telling you or himself.

Click here for Chapter 7 - Comming soon

Notes

I had way too much fun wrirting this. It's been a while since I wrote anything within the outbreak so it's nice to write scenes in this world again. I havent written anything like this since The hardest part is who we are and it's been a while since i wrote anything for that series. Since the year is 2007, reader is around 8 now - a 4 year time jump. also looking over joels shoulder to see what he did, yikes.

Next chapter Sneak Peak!

And now in this moment, as he cradles her tightly in his arms, a tear runs Joel’s face. The bittersweet feeling of contentment washes over him as he gazes down at her, the sight of her clinging to him echoing the memories from years past. He realizes that his tumultuous journey, marked by the shadows of guilt and the weight of his past transgressions, has somehow led him back to his girl - his reason, his purpose. In this tender reunion, everything he's done, both good and bad, suddenly seems worth it, leading him back home to her, breathing and alive.

If you want to be tagged, please comment on the masterlist for this series and I will add you. If you want to be taken off, please DM so i don't miss your request.

Every comment, like and reblog means the world to me. please let me know your thoughts about this, i want to ramble about this story so much.

tags: @sunandmuun , @rain-soaked-sun, @frootloops1213 , @samarav , @geralallfandoms , @joelmillersblog , @severussimp

[myreia]

Desiderium

CHAPTER ONE: THE LIGHT IN THE DARK

Chapter Rating: Teen (full story Explicit) Characters: Aureia Malathar (WoL), Thancred Waters Pairings: Aureia/Thancred Chapter Words: 2,927 Notes: Set during early Endwalker, spoilers for the start of the expac. Summary: After arriving in Old Sharlayan, Aureia wants to see Thancred’s old haunts. He could not be happier to oblige, but his thoughts are occupied by something else entirely. Prompt: ii. hands | blush Chapters: one • two • three • four • five Read on AO3

Grey clouds gather above Scholar’s Harbour as the sun slips below the horizon, a silent herald to a change in the weather.

Aureia observes the sea from the Last Stand, forgoing a seat to instead balance on the railing that lines the café’s perimeter. She turns her mug in her hands, warming her palms against it, and raises it to her lips. For her first night in a new city, she feels a surprising amount of calm. The others have all retired for the evening or otherwise disappeared—G’raha and Y’shtola to the library, the twins to the home of some old friend from the Studium, Urianger to wander the Agora, Krile back to the Baldesion Annex, Estinien to some private place to swing his lance around… They agreed to reconvene in the Annex’s main hall later to discuss their plans before bed, but she can’t bring herself to venture indoors yet. After two moons on a ship, the wide, open boulevards of Old Sharlayan are more than welcome.

The trip was fine, all things considered. One day in and she was jokingly referring to it as a much-needed holiday; out on the open sea life came a standstill, all emergencies put on pause while the wind and the waves carried them to their destination. By the end of the first week, it was less of a joke, the cramped space and lack of activity putting unwanted stress on her mind. By the end of the second, it was no longer enchanting.

Her friends were well-meaning. Estinien tried his best, talking the captain into letting them attempt a training regiment adjusted for the ship’s deck. That ended the day Alisaie joined them and almost knocked him overboard. Alphinaud sought an alternative route, advocating the merits of engaging one’s mind rather than the body. He manifested several tomes on summoning—she doesn’t know from where—and encouraged her to sit and read, arguing that this was as good as any a time to fill the gaps in her knowledge.

Weeks of study and she has yet to summon a simple carbuncle.

With little to do but sit, read, walk the deck—sit, read, walk the deck—and cycle through the same conversations again and again, it’s no wonder she was beginning to feel a little loopy by the end of it. The suffocating stale air of the lower cabins, the endless rock of the ship, the inability to pick a direction at random and take off… She once thought sailors had the most freedom out of any, but now she thinks it an illusion of choice. The ship may go where she pleases, but the people onboard? Trapped.

At this rate the vision she saw this morning may have very well been a hallucination. Hydaelyn has been silent to her for years, her presence a faint whisper around the edges of her mind at most. The woman she saw—tall, proud, ancient, observing her with kind eyes and an even kinder smile—was little more than an echo, fraying at the seams. It is strange to finally put a face to the voice after so many years, and she can’t express how wrong it feels.

Those eyes… She can’t get them out of her head. Intense blue, sharp and passionate and unyielding. She saw them reflected in Minfilia once, then again in Ryne. Love that does not need to be spoken, love that is as enduring and boundless as the sea.

The love of a primal. The love of a god.

Love that can as assuredly drown as much as it can soothe.

A part of her wishes she had never seen it.

Perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she made it up.

We shall meet again… and soon.

The promise echoes in the corners of her mind. What does it mean, they will meet again? Hydaelyn herself? Or this mortal image of her? Both? She wants nothing more than to tear it free and let it go, casting it to the winds like a fallen leaf ripped from her hands on a cool autumn day. Lost and forgotten. 

“Is it to taste?”

The sound of Thancred’s voice snaps her back to the present. She blinks, the warmth of affection washing over her as she notes the familiar trudge of his steps and senses his presence behind her.

Aureia rests the lip of the mug against her mouth, hiding her smile. “It’s fine, I suppose,” she replies. “A bit too dark and bitter. Not even a healthy dose of milk can save this. Over-steeped and scalded with boiling water, if I were to guess. Sharlayans seem to have many areas of expertise, but brewing tea is not one of them.”

“Always a critic, I see. You could ask for sugar, you know.”

“And ruin it even further? Please. You know sugar in my tea is an offense I take personally.”

He snorts with laughter and sidles up beside her, resting his folded arms against the railing. The wind plays in his hair as he looks outward to the harbour, hazel eyes bright and observant in the dusky rose light. “You know, Aureia darling, you were never this opinionated in Ul’dah,” he says. “I don’t recall you caring much about your tea.”

“I may have picked up some opinions in Doma. Hien and Yugiri’s influence, of course.”

“Hm. I think not.”

“You think not?”

“The change began sooner than that. Ishgard, if I recall correctly, with a certain Lord Commander, no?”

“Aymeric may have changed my tastes in some regards, but certainly not with tea.” 

He chuckles and kisses the top of her head. “If you say so.” 

Together they fall silent, observing the shifting crowd. A scattering of people makes their way across the piers—gleaners and merchants, most like—moving with purposeful intensity. The city is busy in a way other major metropolises are not. Ul’dah’s streets are cramped and congested, sticky with suffocating heat and the scent of crime. Limsa Lominsa’s are open and chaotic, her people as unpredictable as the seas that surround her. And Ishgard wavers between the stately judgement of the Pillars and the brazen instability of the Brume.

But here in Old Sharlayan, everyone seems to have a purpose. A goal. United in their diligence, content with their place in society. She is certain there are the outliers—those who do not fit, who are not so easily shoved into a convenient box—but they seem few and far between. Twelve hours in the city and she has never seen anything quite so… harmonious. Even the Crystarium was not this cohesive.

It’s a little uncanny.

Aureia takes another sip of tea and glances sideways at Thancred. What does he see, she wonders? She’s an outsider to Sharlayan, her observations clouded by her limited understanding and her experiences with the abandoned colony in the Dravanian hinterlands. But he was raised here, educated here—a home of sorts, though he has never referred to it as that. He is in tune to the rhythms of the city, its complexities and intricacies. He will see something she does not.

“You didn’t get anything?” she remarks, testing the waters as she searches for a lead into her real question.

He shrugs and adjusts his coat, tugging his collar high enough to hide his tattoos. “Dickon had some grandiose idea about fine wines to follow up with after a fine meal. I had to extricate myself before his suggestions became too tempting.”

“Hm.” She taps her fingers against the side of her mug, recognizing the weary irritation in his voice. They both have not touched alcohol in years but leaving it behind was far from an easy thing to do. A few years ago, she would never have batted an eye at how present it is in the lives of most, but now she cannot have it… It is inescapable. 

A knot twists itself in her stomach. Not wishing to dwell on where her thoughts have taken her, Aureia turns sideways and proffers her mug to him. He takes it without question and sips quietly, brows drawing together with distaste.

Or perhaps it’s not the tea at all that is bothering him so. Perhaps it’s the couple he is staring at, eyes fixed on their passage as they walk through pier, smiles bright and laughter ringing across the harbour. A Miqo’te and an Elezen—students, by the look of then, content to be done class for the day. They pause halfway down the path, the Elezen sweeping the Miqo’te to the side to kiss her. 

“You were not wrong,” Thancred says with a grimace. “That is… awfully bitter.”

Aureia raises her chin in challenge. “You can have it, if you want.”

“I think this is more to your taste than it is mine.”

He looks her dead in the eye and takes another sip.

She snorts with laughter and shakes her head, turning back to watch the passersby. The air is grey with the promise of snow, the wind still as if it is holding its breath. Boats creak in the harbour, bobbing up and down on gentle waves, their mariners returned to land for the night. Shadows flicker down the street as the lamplights ignite one by one, preparing the city streets for evening.

“Is it strange?” she asks after a moment. “Returning here after so long…”

“Not at all. Or… aye, perhaps it is.” He lowers the mug, swishing the remaining tea back and forth. “Time will pass—and faster than you expect—yet the haunts of your youth will remain uncannily the same. Were I to recall the tale of every misadventure that has befallen me since I left these shores, we would be here well into the early hours of the morning. And yet when I look upon this place, it has both been years and none at all.”

The wooden railing creaks beneath her as she shoves herself a little closer to him. “Any charming stories to share of your misadventures here?” she asks, crossing her ankles, her feet dangling in the air.

He chortles and raises the mug. “Aye, though I doubt you would consider any of them charming. Questionable, on the other hand…”

“Oh? Embarrassed to share the highlights of your rambunctious youth, are we?”

“Embarrassed? No. Restraining from making a fool of myself by speaking openly of them in public? Yes.”

She catches his eye, noting the sly smile hidden behind the mug. He is unexpectedly playful this evening, his spirits high, all the grumbling and the groaning he did about their time at sea vanished the moment he stepped foot on land. Good ol’ Sharlayan, he called it as the ship pulled into harbour.

His gaze is trained on her with an intensity she hasn’t seen in moons, as if they are a step out of time with the rest of the world. The Last Stand may be crowded with its evening rush, but in this moment, she is the only one who exists.

Aureia pauses and rests a hand on the railing, her fingers brushing against his elbow. She breathes a sigh and turns back to watch the harbour. Though it is now absent of workers, the wanderers have emerged—people there by choice to enjoy the promenades, some alone, some together. There are more than a handful of couples roaming arm-in-arm, bundled in thick cloaks and heavy coats.

Her heart pangs, aching unexpectedly at the sight, and she shoots a sideways glance at Thancred. The desire to be close to him flares in her chest. They had weeks of proximity on the ship, but it was different in such confined quarters. Close, yet far away.

Not that she can imagine them strolling through the streets or being so outward with their affection. Especially in public. They would rather not have more eyes on their relationship than necessary. Even the Worldly Affairs official wasn’t told of their marriage, though she suspected it would have made passing through immigration easier. She wasn’t keen to leverage her weight as the Warrior of Light or the Champion of Eorzea here—big, important titles with an even bigger and more important meaning, and exactly the kind that fall flat on the ears of tired bureaucrats chained to proper procedure.

And yet defining herself as his spouse—as an Archon’s wife—left her feeling odd, as if she were dependent on him. They are a pair, true, but their partnership does not cost them their independence. She can handle her own problems. Besides, she needs to stand with Estinien as the only other non-Sharlayan washing up unasked on its shores.  

Aureia wrinkles her nose. She is still annoyed at how easily the Archons among them breezed by—and how close Estinien was to being ejected altogether if Krile hadn’t shown up. Damn Sharlayan and its closed borders. After seeing the remnants of their colony, she carries some disdain for the nation. To prop themselves up as cultivators of knowledge, only to hoard it and file it away, shutting out the outside world. They could do so much good with what they have learned. And yet they keen to keep their neutrality, tucked away safely on their little island, away from calamity, away from strife…

Let it go, Aureia. You barely know this place. Reserve your judgement until you have seen more, yes?  

“Gil for your thoughts?” Thancred asks after a moment, observing her with concern.

She arches an eyebrow, leaning in close. “Think you can afford them?”

“We share finances, Aureia darling, if I can’t afford them then I know you’ve spent an outrageous fortune on another gaudy replica of a weapon you are never going to use and I may have to ask Tataru to stage an intervention.”

“…I thought you said you wouldn’t bring that up again.”

“You drag me through the dirt on a daily basis, I must return the favour now and again. Considering you and Urianger have such easy access to ammunition for attacks on my character, I have precious few defenses on which to fall back on. I’m not going to give this one up so easily.”

She grins, her laughter disappearing into the breeze as the wind picks up. It tugs at her ponytail and chafes her cheeks, blowing a strand of hair across her face. The scent of brine washes over her, crisp and salty and fresh, and the first few flakes of snow fall at last.

The cold of the Northern Empty is a different, kinder cold than what she knows. The frozen wastes of Garlemald are harsh and brutal, as eager to conquer and dominate as the empire that rose there. The snows of Ishgard and lonesome and severe, their saving grace the warmth of Coerthan hearths and the way they push strangers together. But here in Old Sharlayan the cold is light and airy, as magical as the northern lights winding their way across the heavens.

Thancred grunts in protest and lowers the mug.

“Something wrong?”

He looks away, expression soured as he observes a pair of Viera. Gleaners, by the looks of them—the uniform is unmistakeable, as are the packs on their backs. They could have been any couple—friends, colleagues, something else—if not for the small touches. Brushing hair off the collarbone, a hand on an arm. A lingering look, a small smile. An affectionate laugh, wholesome and private.

His eyes flick away, staring listlessly into the middle distance as the couple passes the Last Stand. “Bitter tea I can stand,” he says finally. “Bitter and cold tea, I could do without.”

She reaches for the mug, her fingers brushing the back of his hand as they pass by. Neither of them has had time to change; they are still in their travel clothes, which in his case means his usual kit—heavy coat, boots, armguards. The metal and leather are cold to the touch, but she can sense the warmth beneath. He tenses, stirred by her touch, an aching yearning hanging in the passing seconds before—  

The moment breaks.

Aureia exhales as her fingertips touch the porcelain, summoning a gentle ball of fire-aspected aether. It warms the mug in a brilliant blaze and puffs out. “There,” she says, lowering her hands and folding them in her lap. “Better?”

He catches her eye. In answer, he tilts his head back and drains the rest of the mug, finishing it off. He sets it on the table behind them (ignoring the mumbled protests and dirty eyes of the couple seated there), places two hands on the railing and leaps over it. He drops down the far side and lands on the stone walkway, his white coat flaring out around him.

Her mouth twitches. “Must you always play the part of the overdramatic fool?” she grumbles. “There’s a perfectly reasonable set of steps over there, you know.”

Thancred glances over his shoulder at her and smirks. “If we’re discussing dramatics, you’re not one to talk. Besides, this is the best avenue to avoid Dickon. I… suspect I may have caused offense. Earlier.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably not.” He proffers a hand. “Shall we?”

She snorts with laughter, grinning from ear to ear. With an affectionate sigh, she pushes off the ledge and lands beside him, ignoring the strange looks they attract from passersby. Taking his hand, she loops her arm with his and allows him to pull her away, steering them down the path and away from the café.

[styrmwb]

Rambling About Magic the Gathering X Final Fantasy - Final Fantasy XIV (Part 1)

Oh boy. Square's OTHER golden child. I do love XIV, don't get me wrong; but its... all consuming nature, is bothering me as of late. ESPECIALLY here. I'm gonna enjoy these cards, but I will also be upset at these cards. Sorry in advance. (also XIV is the last of the 4 games to get a Commander deck, it's a highlight for sure.)

Cloudbound Moogle

Kupo. This is definitely a moogle, toe to tip. I do like seeing the pom in the back, and the Churning Mists background is cool.

Delivery Moogle

Another Moogle, but a lot more interesting! He goes through your mail to bring you a fun item! I do really like this card, and the art has those letters flying behind, giving him a great illusion of movement.

Dragoon's Lance

I'm gonna go ahead and get this complaint out of the way now. The fact that other than I, XIV ate ALL the job switch equipment, and didn't give ANY to III, V, or XI, is horrible. Now that my great anger is out of the way, let's stick with an actual card review. Art is cool, love how the dragoon has the blood of the dragon effect around it, and flying for jumping.

G'raha Tia

I love G'raha, but I don't know if his stupid young version needed a card on top of the modern version in the Commander deck. Good art, though.

Machinist's Arsenal

This art is pretty incredible, it's like an action movie poster. I'm a big fan of the hero and the Queen looking in different directions, and the auto-crossbow looks sick as fuck.

Paladin's Arms

I'm really glad they used the Endwalker armor in this one, it's the best Paladin set in the game. Plus, Passage of Arms is SUCH a cool pose.

Summon: Primal Garuda

Out of anyone, Garuda absolutely is the summon to use from XIV (or XI but I'll give this one a pass cause this one has far more character). I love that alt art, the greens and whites are very visually appealing. It also feels like the Garuda you summon as a Summoner, since it enters with Aerial Blast, and creates a little Slipstream to stand in.

Ultima

When this card was revealed, I wanted to be mad at a series wide card being put in XIV. Could have been II, the game that made it. But. I get it. The art is amazing on both of these, AND we get the funny Gaius quote. I can't be mad at that. Though, the fact that it ends the turn means you can't do some VII nonsense and cast it four times, terrible card.

Venat, Heart of Hydaelyn/Hydaelyn, the Mothercrystal

I have never seen a card where I feel completely opposite about the art. I do not like the base art, it just feels like an in game screenshot (which could also be a compliment), but I LOVE that alt art, mainly of Venat. That stylization, it reminds me of the Wind Waker/Phantom Hourglass/Spirit Tracks cutscene style. Her effect is also perfect, where Venat exiles Zodiark, then blesses a Warrior of Light. This card is amazing.

White Auracite

I really love this art, I wanted more of this from the set. Look how realistic Minfilia looks. This is also one of those cards that gives a character an appearance without making them a person, and I think ARR Minfilia is great for that. It would suck if she didn't appear at all. Of course, it traps somebody in it, which is awesome.

Astrologian's Planisphere

I love that third card effect. Putting card games in card games always leads to some fun ideas, and this is no different.

Il Mheg Pixie

Another case of "really great art, this is a generic mook for filling out armies, could have gone to a different game". I do really like this art though. You could have removed the FFXIV from the bottom and I'd believe that this is a normal Magic card.

Louisoix's Sacrifice

I love this card, but the MAIN "critique" I will give it is that it isn't the image of Louisoix smiling as he gets Smash Bros World of Lighted. That's not even a critique, this art is great I just want the funny. I do like how the sacrifice has to be a legendary. You better be saving this card for something BIG if you're gonna kill your grandpa for it.

Matoya, Archon Elder

I am very mad at this card. This card is like, one of the examples of XIV gluttony. Instead of acknowledging the original Matoya, who could have also used the same effect, and would have given a game that doesn't have a lot of characters one of its few characters, you used the version in the game with everything.

Rook Turret

This is like, the XIV version of VII's Valkyrie unit. Why? I just don't understand why it's here. It's gotta be gameplay.

Sage's Nouliths

I think untapping a target creature on attack is such a cool way of adapting Sage's "healing by attacking" gimmick. A part of me thinks that the Sage should have been the III Sage, since that's one of the two busted jobs, but I'll forgive it since the gameplay factor is so cool and unique.

Sahagin

fishy. Sahagins could have been in any game, but I do think XIV has the coolest design, so this is another pass on my divine anger. I love this art, how you can see the western half of western La Noscea, with the Sahagin land in the back. I don't really get the effect? Maybe like, cast water at the enemy? Which makes their attack stronger.

Sidequest: Card Collection/Magicked Card

This is really funny. At first I was like "why did XIV get the triple triad sidequest", but it's not really that. It's to represent an MMO grind for a mount. It's not worth it at all, but you get A Mount!!!! It could have really been anything else, as long as it gives that mount, that's all they needed. And like I said earlier, card games in card games leads to cool effects.

Y'shtola Rhul

I like this Y'shtola a lot more than her Commander card. She's CLEARLY doing Flow here, which is the most Y'shtola thing possible. I also like how her original ARR gear is being used (yeah there's the alt art, but I'm not really partial to it).

Circle of Power

I thought we left the black mages cards behind in IX, but they're back with a vengeance with Ley Lines, but this time, instead of just one, EVERYONE gets to join in in the stand in place fun. I do like this card, and I think out of any ability to turn into a simple spell, Ley Lines is the one for sure.

Dark Confidant

A reprint from Magic's past, that comes in the form of really really good art, both main and alt. Not really representing any Ascian in particular, just a generic one. But I do think this was a good card to texture as an Ascian.

Dark Knight's Greatsword

Black mana and Dark Knights just work together so well, I swear. I like how it's a lot more offensive than Paladins, but with a lack of toughness increase, it just helps my argument that this should have been a previous game's incarnation. ZEID COULD HAVE BEEN HERE. The art is cool though, and a Hrothgar gets to show up.

So many cards, part 2 here.

[wildstar25]

I would love to see the breakdown of Arsay’s timeline through the expansions!!!

WEEEEELLLL if you insist... My basic timeline break down is as follows: Keep in mind a few things are still kinda in flux, and if I ever contradict myself in the future literally don't worry about it

1.0 -> Calamity 6 months End point in the 4th umbral moon lining up with what is now the rising event (calamity memorial). Now that I’ve switched up arsay’s birthday, she turns 22 during the 1.0 campaign.

Calamity -> ARR 5 Years Arsay is stuck in the lifestream with the mother crystal for that 5 year period. Her memories of 1.0 and everyone's memories of her are largely erased. Arsay wakes up on a boat to Limsa Lominsa believing it is still her first voyage to Eorzea.

ARR->HVW ~6 months The base story including job quests take 3 months in total. The next three months are dedicated to the patches: Primal Trial series -> Coils of Bahamut -> 2.1. ~3 weeks Crystal Tower Raids, LoTA -> Syrcus Tower ~1 month 2.2-2.3 -> Crystal Tower Raid WoD ~2 weeks 2.4->2.55 ~3 weeks

HVW->STB ~4 months Main story starts a day or two after 2.55 and takes ~1 month total Patches take ~3 Months: 3.1->3.2->Void Arc ~1 month ->Arsay gets really into pvp and does nothing but frontlines and CC for a week -> 3.3->Alexander Raids->3.4 ~3 weeks Warring Triad->3.5->3.56 ~1 month

STB->SHB ~6 months Main story picks up a week after 3.56 and takes ~3 months time. (The first trip to Kugane takes 3 weeks off screen, after that travel time is reduced to a few days to a week using the East Aldenard Trading company boats (it would make sense that lolorito has better boat tech imo)) Next 3 month period is all the patches: Ivalice raids->Omega raids->4.1-4.2 ~1 month Eureka exploration->4.3->4 lords ~1.5 months 4.4->4.56 ~2 weeks

I know the ARR to Shadowbringers lead up is a mad dash but if it happened any slower, I don't believe Arsay would have be the character she is by that point. It is incredibly vital that she has almost 0 down time for herself. Her days and nights are PACKED full by choice. Job Quests, Hildebrand stuff,PvP, Hunts all get squeezed in throughout.

SHB->EDW ~8 months Main story picks up a few days after 4.56 and takes only 1.5 months to complete. Its a non stop emotional roller coaster for Arsay to be completely fine and normal about the whole time. Patches take 6.5 months, notably there is more downtime between patches: Chill relaxing after 5.0->Eden I->5.1->Neir raid I ->5.2-> role quest/shadowkeeper->Eden II-> 5.3 ->chill relaxing/recovery time for scions->Eden III->Neir raids II & III->Werlyt->Bozjia->5.4-5.55

EDW->DWT ~1 year (time spent in Elpis is not counted) ->Main story up to credit roll ~1 month ->Recovery time for injuries sustained in Ultima Thul ~4 months ->After credits - Scions Disband, everyone goes their separate ways - 1 day 🙃 ->Rest of the roll quests now that Arsay can mostly fight again(she can't cast mudras😞 ) ~1 month (casting>healing>tanking>aiming>bonus all role cap off) -> 1 month of nothing to do, Arsay still can't cast mudras, character development dictates she can no longer repress every bad emotion she feels, she has no proper coping mechanisms and quickly spirals into a mental breakdown over feeling like she's worthless and that no one will need her anymore now that the world isnt ending constantly and that she's worried without the scions being the scions everyone she cares about will slowly forget her and she'll be all alone again. Y'shtola and G'raha manage to get Arsay talking after a bit of self destructive lashing out. Things are sorta resolved?? Y'shtola and G'raha reassure her of a lot, and do their best to get it in her little kittycat head that she's not a burden on them even when she's sad. Not an automatic fix but Arsay does make the commitment to better her mental health and to work on her self image issues and communication skills! It'll be a process for her. ->5 days round trip to her home island in the southern seas to visit her Aunt and catch up ->6.1 starts when Arsay gets back from that ->Endwalker patch content takes up the final 5 months of that year period. Things are mostly interspersed with how they are released except for pandae which happens all in one go for Arsay between 6.3 and 6.4. Arsay has done all the variant dungeons, Tataru's grand endeavours, completed Island Sanctuary, and Myths of the Realm. ->The gap between 6.55 and 7.0 will probably only be about a week? Maybe 2? It depends how much it seems like the early arrivals to Tural have been there compared to Arsay and her crew.

That's my timeline! Thank you for asking and reading 🙇 hopefully that all made sense haha ^^

Have a picture of them for the road <3

[captainmullin]

Mullin's Guide to Their Captainsona: A Totally Complete Guide*

*with a few exceptions

hi I'm Not Normal about the main story quest and gbf gripped me by the shoulders and now I have a traumatized danchou with a story that's supposedly about love! and grief! and loss, and family, and etc etc

I wanted to give a little baseline of who my danchou is, why you should read their story, and uhhhh yeah!

Part I: Who is This Guy?

(comm from @/solarpire) ^ that guy. Guy of all time actually. This is Mullin, elder sibling to twins Gran and Djeeta! Their journey is a little wild, ranging from being a mercenary with Sturm and Drang, to stowing aboard cargo ships and finding a family they never knew they needed. Their story officially begins during the Nalhegrande arc of the MSQ, taking the job of captain of the Grandcypher after Gran and Djeeta took down the Erste Empire.

Mullin is chronically sleep-deprived and has quite a few anxious ticks, but they are fiercely loyal to their family and friends. They enjoy writing and never know when (or how) to take a break...

Part II: Writings About Them

I have a multitude of short drabbles about them you can find on my masterlist (here) but their main story is called The Journal of Captain Mullin! I'm debating on whether it will be a 2-part or a 3-part series (I loooove trilogies) that will follow through the rest of Wayfaring Astral and the eventual finality of the MSQ.

During their journey they eventually meet Belial, whom they form a (reluctant) primal pact with out of desperation for survival. A lot of their story centers around dealing with family, the consequences of burning yourself out, and managing grief/loss. There's also a love story between Mullin and Rackam in there, I SWEAR- (it's a painfully slow burn <3)

I am also working on events/side stories with them, so if anyone has any ideas, feel free to send em by!

I did have an early version of TJOCM up on Ao3, but after going through some writing style changes, it's been deleted and I hope to upload the first new chapter sometime by the end of summer!

Part III: Mullin Propaganda

so why should you care about my silly little guy? well. they're silly. local captain so emotionally repressed they make a deal with a demon. guy who tries so hard and somehow manages to fuck it up over and over (self fulfilling prophecy) BUT IT IS ALL ABOUT LOVE!!! there's familial love, there's romantic love, there's platonic love (my best friend has a Draph danchou⁉️) and also. The Vibes.

THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TEDTALK GOODNIGHT

[musezieren]

A rewrite of Act II's Tollhouse

The Tollhouse stands as a grand, imposing structure, more mansion than mere office. Originally built to handle the mundane tasks of toll collection and paperwork, it quickly evolved under the influence of Lady Gerringothe Thorm. Unwilling to be confined to a humble workplace, she expanded the Tollhouse into an opulent mansion, claiming it was necessary to impress merchants and travelers passing through Reithwin Town. The building's grandeur masked the corruption and dark dealings within, its lavish facade concealing the sinister reality of Gerringothe’s insatiable greed and the horrors lurking in its depths.

Introduction:

In the desolate Shadowlands, hope is a scarce commodity, confined to the sanctuary of the Last Light Inn, protected by the divine power of Selune. The land is a wasteland of ruins, haunted specters, and memory orbs filled with nothing but grief. As the party embarks on their journey towards Moonlight Tower, they will encounter the ominous Tollhouse. Upon crossing its threshold, they are engulfed by a blinding light and the maniacal laughter of an unseen entity, setting the stage for a nightmarish ordeal.

Main Quest: The Tollhouse of Illusions

Upon opening their eyes, the party finds themselves no longer in a ruin but in a grandiose Tollhouse, part bank, part mansion. The opulent interior is adorned with gold and lavish decorations. Chandeliers of glass and gold illuminate a hall filled with masked guests and a haunting orchestra. To their shock, the party’s attire has transformed to match the setting—some wear luxurious gowns and suits, while others are garbed as servants.

They are greeted and either welcomed as honored guests or hurried to assist in the kitchen for Lady Gerringothe’s grand birthday banquet. Attempts to break the illusion result in searing headaches, and any deviation from their assigned roles is met with freezing stares that evoke primal fear. The exit is sealed, trapping them in this eerie masquerade.

To escape, they must uncover the dark secret of the Tollhouse, expose Lady Gerringothe's corruption, and bring her to justice.

Parts of the Quest:

Talking to the NPCs:

Servants: Only those in servant roles can converse with the servants, who speak of the ongoing war, missing family members, and subtle hints about Gerringothe’s corruption. Whispers of something terribly wrong in the basement may also surface.

Nobles: Nobles will engage with those in noble or merchant roles, expressing relief at the distraction from the dreary war. The war has not yet impacted the upper class, who complain mainly about distracted servants.

Merchants: With enough persuasion, merchants reveal their fear of Gerringothe and their entrapment in Reithwin Town. They mention the mysterious disappearances of those who could no longer pay for their stay.

Finding Evidence:

Gerringothe's Office: Search the ledger for proof of Gerringothe extorting more toll than Ketheric ordered, and find a diary filled with her curses against him.

Basement Horrors: The true horrors lie in the basement—where holding cells house servants in a state of half-lucidity, their limbs, faces, and insides grotesquely transforming into gold as if afflicted by a horrific illness. In other cells, piles of mutilated corpses lie, their bodies robbed of limbs and organs. The party can release these tortured souls from their suffering and search the bodies for lockets, papers, and other forms of evidence. Further exploration reveals a macabre vault filled with gold, jewelry, and golden body parts—the grim remnants of an unfinished spell intended to transform entire bodies into gold. This chilling discovery exposes the full extent of Lady Gerringothe's malevolent sorcery and the atrocities committed within the Tollhouse.

Judging Gerringothe:

With sufficient evidence, the party can disrupt the ball, claiming to be sent by Ketheric or a merchant guild. Presenting the evidence, they must confront Gerringothe and force her to face the consequences. This can be achieved through persuasive speech checks, making her realize her downfall, or through combat.

Upon her defeat, the servants, merchants, and ghosts of the basement’s victims will bow with smiles of release, and the Tollhouse will revert to its ruined state.

Conclusion:

The eerie glamour dissipates, leaving the party standing in the dilapidated remnants of the Tollhouse. The ghosts are at peace, and the dark chapter of Gerringothe’s reign of terror is finally closed. The party is free to continue their quest, having uncovered and vanquished one of the malevolent forced that haunted Reithwin Town.

Alternative Ending:

A different method might involve confronting Gerringothe in secret and blackmailing her for gold and safe passage without paying a toll. This morally dubious choice ensures the party's escape but leaves the souls tied to the Tollhouse, forever trapped in the endless illusion. This selfish decision condemns countless spirits to an eternal nightmare, their suffering a haunting reminder of the price of greed and cowardice.

[cyrah-is-cool101]

Guess what!

I just made some songs for Punch Out now! This all happened when I stumble upon a song ai site called Riffusion and it's amazing. Here is the link to my Riffusion project playlist for Punch Out:

This will also follow a list of all the boxers in the Punch-Out universe and I'll have to describe each. As well as the songs that I have gotten for them.

Branch A: is the main branch where the main Punch Out characters are (Songs: 'Fight Mode' [Main] and 'Fight For Love' [Side about Mika's 'love square' with Glass Joe, Don Flamenco, and Aran Ryan]).

Little Mac (Songs: 'Champion' [Doc Louis' POV] and 'Champion's Rise)

Star Mika (Songs: 'Wings of Valor' and 'Soul Fighter')

(Minor Circuit)

Glass Joe (Songs: 'L' amour' and 'More Than')

Von Kaiser (Songs: 'Stand United' and 'Breaking Walls')

Disco Kid (Songs: 'Groove Fighter' and 'Breakthrough')

King Hippo (Songs: 'Island Life' and 'Island King')

(Major Circuit)

Piston Hondo (Songs: 'Rising Path' and 'New Heights')

Bear Hugger (Songs: 'Nature's Teachers' and 'Earthbound')

Great Tiger (Songs: 'Awakening' and 'Ascend')

Don Flamenco (Songs: 'Arena' and 'Dancing Hearts')

(World Circuit)

Aran Ryan (Songs: 'Fight Right' and 'Rebellion')

Soda Popinski (Songs: 'Inner Strength' and 'Bubbles')

Bald Bull (Songs: 'Peaceful Fights' and 'Heartbeats')

Super Macho Man (Songs: 'Tidal Ride' and 'Wave Rider')

Mr. Sandman (Songs: 'Wide Awake' and 'Fight On')

Branch B (Super Punch-Out): the 2nd branch, also known as the 'Super Branch', is dedicated to the secondary fighters (Songs: 'Unity' and 'Guiding Stars').

Birdie (Songs: 'Ring Lessons' and 'Fight School')

(Minor Circuit)

Gabby Jay (Songs: 'Rise Up' and 'Rise Together')

Piston Hurricane (Songs: 'Thunderclap' and 'Thunderstorm')

(Major Circuit)

Bob Charlie (Songs: 'One Love' and 'Full Stride')

Dragon Chen (Songs: 'One More' and 'Rising')

Masked Muscle (Songs: 'Estrella' and 'Rivals United')

(World Circuit)

Heike Kagero (Songs: 'Unveiled' and 'Duality')

Mad Clown (Songs: 'True Space' and 'Punch Line')

(Secret Circuit)

Narcis Prince (Songs: 'Fight Back' and 'Legacies')

Hoy Quarlow (Songs: 'Timeless Fire' and 'Enduring Power')

Rick and Nick Bruiser (Songs: 'Fight Together' and 'Unbreakable')

Branch C (Arm Wrestling and Others): the 3rd branch, home to the most unusual bunch there is, also known as the 'Beta Stars Branch' or 'Cirque Branch' (Songs: 'Rare Fit' and 'Greatest Show').

(Minor Circuit)

Alice and Ape III (Songs: 'Heart System' and 'Code: Heart')

Vonnie (Songs: 'Fight Free' and 'Rising Higher')

(Major Circuit)

Arm Candy (Songs: 'Knockout' and 'Game Changed')

Frank Jr. (Songs: 'Unbound' and 'Break Free')

(World Circuit)

Texas Mac (Songs: 'Texas Ground' and 'Boots')

Kabuki (Songs: 'Spirit Rising' and 'Together'

Branch D (formerly known as the opponents from Frank Bruno's Boxing): the 4th branch, home to warriors and great fighters, known as the 'Starlight Branch' (Songs: 'Rise Again' and 'Breakthrough')

(Minor Circuit)

Bud Lumberjack (Songs: 'Urban Bloom' and 'Urban Fight')

Fang Lee (Songs: 'Feast Fight' and 'Street Wisdom')

Mr. Baker (Songs: 'Pressure' and 'Heatwave')

(Major Circuit)

Queen Nzinga II (Songs: 'Warrior Queen' and 'Royal Rise')

Madam Spider (Songs: 'C'est La Vie' and 'Karma)

Don Marco (Songs: 'Respecto' and 'Street Code')

(World Circuit)

Dean Outback (Songs: 'Unleashed' and 'Wild Heart')

Stanley Gold (Songs: 'Gorgeous Fighter' and 'Two-Sided Glitters')

Branch E (Crossover): the 5th and latest branch, better known as the 'VIP Branch', home to beloved fighters who are given a chance to fight (Songs: 'Same Ring' and 'Standing Together')

(Minor Circuit)

Princess Peach (Super Mario) (Songs: 'Stronger' and 'No Fairytale')

Donkey Kong (Donkey Kong/Super Mario) (Songs: 'Island Ties' and 'Primal Code')

(Major Circuit)

Balrog (Street Fighter) (Songs: 'Rebirth' and 'Redemption')

Pete Zepasta (Pizza Pasta) (Songs: 'Break Bones' and 'Burning Souls')

Dudley (Street Fighter) (Songs: 'In The Garden' and 'Fire Within')

(World Circuit)

Steve Fox (Tekken) (Songs: 'Take Flight' and 'Cornerstone')

Juzo Sakakura (Danganronpa) (Songs: 'Reveals' and 'True Bloom')

So what do you guys think? I hope to make more of these later on but for now, this is it. Leave a request at the ask box if you want me to make a song for your PO OCs as well and I will make a separate project on it with each of its own unique branches. And speaking of branches, what would you like to describe your own branch? And don't forget to also add a description for your request because I will be using it as a prompt for the song. Please enjoy!

[1ore]

speaking of deserts, im sad this article isn't available to read publicly because it whips ass, but i can do what i always do. quote heavily

From 'Without Form and Void: The American Desert as Trope and Terrain' by John Beck:

The Hebrew word tohu is usually translated in two ways. It can denote an arid wilderness, a desert, and it can refer to chaos. In this latter sense it is usually paired with bohu, which signifies emptiness, desolation, formlessness, confusion. Tohu-bohu, desert and desolation, chaos and confusion, or “without form and void,” as it is translated in Genesis. Chaos itself denotes a vast chasm, an abyss; in other words, it is a gap. Yet can a gap be without form, since it exists as the opening between things, as the interval that separates? [...] the abyssal chaos, which is also an arid wilderness, is far from being the vacuum of worthlessness it is often read as being. It is, instead, the ground of potentiality, the necessary generative stuff of creation. The void, then[...] is a place rather than a nonplace, and, as the place where God performs His differentiating acts—dividing earth from sky, sea from land, day from night—it is the location of differentiation itself, the place of infinite multiplicity. An actual desert place is thus burdened with a double conceptual significance: it is read at the same time as evidence of an absolute void and as the place for boundless free play, and deserts invariably elicit responses of both terror and ecstasy, of disgust and liberation. The idea of a desert, then, at least in cultures that draw upon Hebrew and Christian traditions, involves a cluster of notions including vacancy, expansiveness, and fearful potentiality. Not surprisingly, actual deserts carry the burden of this metaphorical overlay, a burden that manifests itself not just in the artistic responses to the physical space but in the institutional practices that govern its economic and political uses. The impact of this metaphorical construction of landscape is nowhere more pronounced than in the deserts of the southwestern United States.

[...] From the overarching conception of the desert as vacancy, at least five main rhetorical tropes emerge[...] first, that acceptance of the desert’s emptiness, and thus its uselessness, allows the space to become the venue for unhindered experimentation, a testing ground both physical and spiritual. Second, the desert is a metaphor of apocalypse, evidence of the ultimate wasteland. Third, the desert is often apprehended as the limit to reason, its vastness and tendency to alter habits of perception making it a physical challenge to expected modes of comprehension. Following from this, the desert can become either a venue for an escape from modernity, an elemental alternative to the rational order of “civilized” life, or, conversely, representative of the chaos of an unordered primal “nature” that must be resisted and expunged. Finally, as the American desert lies within the economically emergent post–World War II “New West,” the desert can increasingly be seen as representative of aspects of contemporary capitalism: a space without boundaries, unhindered and unregulated by old practices and habits[...]

[...] What is striking is how these rhetorical constructions accommodate both negative and positive readings at the same time. The desert is glorious and horrible, a refuge and a danger, horizonless and thus a threat to sanity, and so on. These paradoxes not only appear irresolvable, they tend also to be intrinsic to the ways in which the terrain is put to use, both figuratively and literally. This is a space of everything and nothing, a space of visual intoxication and invisible toxicity. In this ostensibly most exposed of environments, exposure functions, perversely and disturbingly, as a form of concealment.

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[...] For a nation concerned with agricultural expansion as the primary civilizing force, hitting arid lands meant that “the project of mastering the continent seemed to have reached a non-negotiable limit. By all the conventional standards of value and habitability, the desert was an irrational environment, a betrayal of abundance fulfilled everywhere in North America."[...]

[...]The American desert, like its biblical counterparts, could be a site for testing, for challenging and overcoming the temptations of civilized life. While the desert became, after the mid-nineteenth century, a site of economic value due to the discovery of minerals, by the turn of the century monetary gain was not the only attractive force drawing people toward a reconciliation with the desert West. Growing dissatisfaction with American capitalist culture among the well-off, educated middle classes made the deserts inviting as a purgative space of romantic sublimity and aesthetic purity. Even as the evangelism of Progressive irrigationists began to display an increased confidence in the possibility of redemption for the terrain through cultivation, as if technology could finally fill the gap and convert the land to the righteousness of agriculture, aesthetes like Rutgers art historian John C. Van Dyke were writing about the visual splendor of a land that should remain untouched by base economic interests.

The conflict between contesting impulses toward either exploitation or conservation of the land is, then, present from the beginning of U.S. interest in its desert dominion, yet both positions derive at least part of their authority from the imposition of ideas of vacancy onto the terrain. Both read the space as empty and see this emptiness as its source of value, whether it be to extract from, build upon, or contemplate as evidence of some cosmic truth. Yet this notional vacancy, saturated as it is in the Hebrew and Christian traditions of desert iconography, functions also as a form of selective blindness that eliminates consideration of native inhabitants, indigenous traditions, and other, alternative spiritual and utilitarian values that may have prior claim to the land. Speculators and aesthetes alike need the tropes of emptiness and uselessness in order to validate their construction of the landscape as available space. Do the Pueblo Indians, for example, see the terrain they have inhabited for thousands of years as a gap, a vacancy, a howling wilderness?[...]

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[...]Given the persistence of desert readings that seem to find apocalypse in the terrain even before the military managed to enact one, is it possible that the landscape somehow invites thoughts of destruction? For a topography that reveals to the human gaze the elemental resistance of the nonhuman to recuperation must then suffer the vengeance of a frustrated conqueror. Is the pursuit of desert destruction an implosion of anxiety in the face of the inscrutable landscape? Faced with a space that refuses settlement and that, in its taciturnity, overturns the logic of expansion and ownership, reason folds in on itself and results in the mentality summed up by the now infamous comment of the general during the Vietnam War that “we had to destroy the city in order to save it.”[...] Could the desert, as a particular topographical site, stand for the terminal point in an entire history of U.S. pursuit of a tabula rasa? Such a history would include, but would not by any means be exhausted by, policies of deforestation, the extermination of Indians and of buffalo, the gridding of the territories, and the marking-off of national parks as managed wilderness. Manifest destiny is here rewritten to mean an unlimited attack on the desert as Other, which culminates in the desert as all-encompassing, the obliterated, uninterrupted space of absolute power.

[...]This is precisely what Leslie Marmon Silko’s Tayo, traumatized by battle and captivity in the Pacific, perceives in a moment of clarity as he cries with relief “at finally seeing the pattern” that connects the alienating deterioration of his southwestern Laguna Pueblo community and military operations overseas:

He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that its simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now... There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid.

The apocalyptic power of America’s nuclear weapons has not only been achieved by yet another assault on Indian sovereignty, cordoning off and irradiating great swathes of terrain; this power has, in an inversion of crushing irony, brought everything together in one final communion. After Los Alamos, “human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.”

[dany36]

well, i did it! i finished the main story for granblue fantasy: relink :) junk thoughts below (with spoilers)!

first, the things i liked!

the gameplay. i love love love how dynamic and fast-paced it is! i'm boring and my main character throughout the entire playthrough was djeeta: i tried playing as katalina but idk lol i think i was just too used to djeeta to fully switch to her. plus i think her CPU does a much better job of playing as her. when i played as io during one of her sidequests was also pretty fun but i just had to stick with djeeta! leveling up her Artes and then going ham on enemies with them all leveled up never got old. also doing link attacks and skybound arts is soooo satisfying, especially when it would deal the final blow to a boss! i have to admit at first it took me a while to get the hang of it, especially dodging/blocking enemy attacks and i kept going into critical condition or whatever, but once i got better at it, doing quests and fighting bosses was something i would really look forward to.

the bosses. ok i gotta say, granblue fantasy:relink has some of the best boss fights in a video game i've ever played. i mentioned it in my previous posts but i swear almost each boss had a different interesting gimmick instead of it just being "keep attacking until it's dead". i think my favorites were excavillion, when you fight the machines using rolan, fighting as bahamut, and of course the final battle where you're trying to rescue Id. like the boss battles were just so insane and a lot of stuff would be happening at once especially when they'd go into overdrive, but running around jumping trying to evade their attacks, although intense, is part of the fun of these battles!! idk i'm just really impressed with how dynamic these boss battles were and just gotta say hats off to the team that designed them, just super fun and satisfying to play through.

main character selection. ok as someone completely new to the series and not having looked up anything about this game beforehand other than what i saw in the official trailer shown in one of the state of plays, i had no idea you could choose the gender of the main character, so this was a pleasant surprise! i mean, other than her atrocious first outfit before you get to chapter 4 or whatever it is when you get your real armor, it's cool that you can just decide what gender your character is cus i mean, it doesn't really affect the story in any way so at least i'm not stuck with the default silent male protagonist :P

the music. coming from having played the last few entries of the tales of games, it was definitely great to hear some music that actually makes me feel something and isn't just background noise. i'll have to give the full OST a proper listen without me being distracted with a fight, but yeah for sure looking forward to reliving the experience with the music! edit: ok now that i'm listening to the OST with headphones on i can honestly say this is one of the best video game soundtracks i've ever heard in a game. like, i knew it was good and i knew there were some bangers in there but my god i just wasn't paying enough attention to it because i was too focused on the battles. like yeah the folca theme and the first forest section you entered i remembered being so good but like. excavillion primal III. managarmr primal II. seedhollow castle battle. ruined city vallion battle. and i'm not even done yet. what the hell what the hell the OST alone is enough to make this into a fantastic game holy shit.

post-ending content?? ok i only did the first quest as Id but i thought it was cool that, although the main story only took me 19 hours to complete, it looks like there is a LOT left to do as part of picking up where rolan left off + new quests?? plus i still need to finish the side chapters for the characters i'm interested in, so yeah, even though i finished the main story, there's still much to do!

rolan. what a cool chill dude. i mentioned in my post that i thought it was really neat how he turned out to be one of the most powerful characters in the game (i thought he was going to betray us or something), and was so sad when he first "dissolves" when fighting angra. i thought it was Id who was going to be sacrificed at the end but, glad that Id joins the party even if that means that rolan is now...floating in between dimensions or whatever. but don't worry, we will save you, mr fix it dude!

the story. again, as someone completely new to the series, i think the game did a pretty good job at catching you up with what happened in the previous game and giving you the background story of each of the crew members that are already there. and even so, the main story that develops throughout the game was interesting enough to keep me hooked. i mean it's nothing out of this world like i'm used to with other JRPGs i've played: there wasn't really any character development other than Id and MAYBE Rolan (Zathba also?? idk), since the crew that you're traveling have already traveled together in the previous game so they all know each other and whatever development had to happen happened in the first game (from what I understand), so i mean, i guess that was also different but can't complain too much since it looks like this game was born from a mobile game.

ok just something i thought was cool was in the final battles where your former enemies (i forget their names...it's the sword lady and the huge dude) join you in the fight and THEN zathba + other people you helped along the way bring their ships and help you against angra...like...damn, that shit was cool! another instance of these boss battle keeping it interesting!!

and now....for the things i didn't particularly like + other misc. thoughts.

the character side chapters. ok i think the first two or so of each starting character are great for catching up us newcomers, but then after that....idk, i wasn't really interested in the story that they'd be trying to tell. like, i know i'm not done with all of the chapters for any of the characters, so my mind might still change, but so far, not really impressed lol. they aren't really engaging enough for me yet and can...actually be quite boring with the storytelling! but oh well, we'll see if my mind changes once i'm done with the starting characters quests!

the overworld. i can't say i really missed having an overworld that would connect all of the levels. thinking back, most of the overworlds of other JRPGs i've played are quite boring to traverse through and the only reason you go through them is for treasure or finding new armor, which here in granblue you get them through quests. so, while not having an overworld is not something i'm used to, i'd say for this game it was fine not to have it.

the town sidequests. i mean, they're your typical fetch sidequests/defeat X monsters which don't really involve any interesting engagement with the NPCs that are requesting your help, so i'm a bit disappointed that that's all these sidequests are instead of something a bit more appealing.

the characters talking during boss fights. A LOT. like, i decided to play it in japanese and man, sometimes it'd be hard to keep up with what they were saying + paying attention to what's going on in the battlefield. especially in the last battle lol rolan was going on and on about...idk SOMETHING and i'm out here trying to stop Versa from fucking destroying the world haha. i mean just a minor nitpick but yeah

ok this is getting longer than i thought it would lol but despite the few negatives there at the end, i gotta say, i'm now a fan! i DOUBT i'll play the first granblue since...it looks like it's a turn-based game and i am terrible at those, but i'm really looking forward to where the series goes from here! i'm glad i decided to pick this up and kinda regret not getting the deluxe edition lol but oh well! there's always next time! :) but heck yeah, just overall had a pretty damn good time and can't wait to do more quests!

[positivelybeastly]

She's kicked back on one of those fancy, overstuffed Xavier couches--shoes off, of course. Her legs dangle over the side, and she's propped comfortably on a pillow, gazing at the ceiling. A battered, paperback copy of Murder Ballads--one from Booker's library decades ago--is in her hands.

All at once, she lets out a "fuck," tossing the book onto her stomach. It lands with a little flop and rustle of cover and paper.

"I just remembered James Horner is dead."

The swear has Hank glancing up from his own book - a rather tattered but well loved copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, gifted to him by Logan a good many moons ago - and blinking at Tess. He would ask what's wrong, but he knows her answer will be forthcoming.

Tess isn't the type to misuse her swears, after all. Deploy them in a cluster pattern for maximum efficiency, or with the deadly efficacy of a long range tactical nuclear device, absolutely, but misuse? Not usually.

Then she speaks, and his face falls, too. He brings his book down and taps at the spine, thinking for a moment before sliding his bookmark into place and leaning over to take her hand and squeeze in a way that's the kind of intimate only best friends can manage.

"Have I ever told you the story of when I decided I wanted to be a scientist? I was . . . eight years old, at the time. My father brought home a copy of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan on VHS, because that was in the time period when VHS was actually dominant media and not merely an artefact of the before times. I was absolutely enraptured from moment one. The opening narration arrested me - in the 23rd century. I was in. And then, Main Title."

"Enterprise Clears Moorings!"

"Kirk's Explosive Reply!"

"Incredible track after incredible track, set to the single best Star Trek story ever told. William Shatner's single best acting performance, achieved only through sheer bloody persistence by director Nicholas Meyer. A performance of the original Spock by Leonard Nimoy that was good enough that it made him want to return to the role! But. More than anything else, it was the quiet scene in the middle of the film."

"Kirk has nearly been killed by a son he had almost forgotten he had, who is so very much like him, and yet not. Has just seen a man die, pointlessly. He believes he's been marooned on a moon, buried alive, buried aliiiive . . . he lets out a primal scream of agony. He's near the end of his rope, and then, Doctor Carol Marcus appears."

"The entire film is about . . . life, death, birth, rebirth, age, youth, revenge, letting go. And she and Kirk have this incredible conversation. I've never forgotten it, in the twenty nine years that have come since I first heard it."

He puts on his best subdued, mature William Shatner.

"'I did what you wanted. I stayed away . . . why didn't you tell him?'"

And then he shifts his voice. He can't do Bibi Besch, but he can replicate the tones of her voice, the exact moment he fell in love with what science was, with what it could achieve, with what it represented.

"'How can you ask me that? Were we together? Were we going to be? You had your world and I had mine. And I wanted him in mine, not chasing through the universe with his father. ... Actually, he's a lot like you. In many ways . . . please, tell me what you're feeling.'"

Switch back to his Shatner. It's - passable.

"'There's a man out there I haven't seen in fifteen years, who's trying to kill me. You show me a son that'd be happy to help him. My son. My life that could have been ... and wasn't. And what am I feeling? ...Old. ...Worn out.'"

There's a certain mistiness to his eyes. He clearly holds this moment very dear to his heart. These are the words. This was the moment.

"'Let me show you something ...that'll make you feel young, as when the world was new.'"

There's an uncharacteristic crack on the word young.

". . . And then she takes him by the hand, and they walk into the Genesis Cave. The hollowed out interior of an asteroid, turned into a veritable Garden of Eden. Paradise. 'You did all this in a day?' 'The matrix formed in a day. The lifeforms grew later at a ... substantially accelerated rate.' And Carol has this look of absolute pride, and honour, and accomplishment on her face.

Can I cook or can't I?"

"That, was the exact moment I decided I wanted to be a scientist. James Horner gave me that moment, with those strings and that flourish and that sense of wonder. James Horner, and Nicholas Meyer, and William Shatner, and Bibi Besch, every part of it, made me the man I am today."

There's no 'for my sins' or twinge of self-deprecation. This is a moment of pride, and surety, and happiness.

He squeezes Tess' hand again.

"Another Doctor McCoy pointed out, at the end of the film, 'he's really not dead. As long as we remember him.' So. Let's remember him together, Tess."

[osterby]

My main job when I'm on Ostercat is White Mage, and that's close enough to canon that it's the short answer for his main job.

The not unshort answer is that he's a spooky blood magic reskin of White Mage, tanks via Ardbert's WAR jobstone which lives in his soul, and carries a sack of jobstones with him everywhere to equip as needed (and before Ardbert, he was helpless without that bag of rocks).

The long answer is as follows: Ostercat learned the basics of Conjury and magic theory as a schoolboy in Gridania. At one point (as a young adult, around the same time as the Calamity), he got hold of a Necromancer's job stone which mind-controlled him until a memory wipe from a mindflayer broke the connection. The Necromancy enmeshed itself with the Conjury, both disciplines dealing directly with the aether of life, and the Necromancer in the job stone also used very unseemly blood magic that would probably get you hanged in Gridania.

The memory wipe made Ostercat forget the formal education and theory and terminology of Conjury, and also the experience of being ridden by a Necromancer stone, but he didn't lose how to actually do the spells. This left him able to cast cast an amalgamation of Cure I and blood magic, but unable to tell the disciplines apart or to talk shop with other casters.

He gets around the issue of White Magic drawing too much aether from the world by simply converting his own blood into mana. This is unsafe and very frowned up, but most people wouldn't be able to see that that's what he's doing without special aether-measuring equipment. A skilled caster like Urianger can sense that there's something unusual about his use of aether, but can't pick up enough specifics to know what he's actually doingand just puts it down to a different school of magic. Y'shtola, however, can see exactly what he's up to with her special eyes, and his blood magic is their little secret. He didn't even know it was dangerous or socially unacceptable until she told him to please stop nearly bleeding out every time they ran into a new primal; he thought it was just how magic worked because it's how he always remembers doing it (cf the memory wipe). He just uses his own blood to make more mana to restore the blood he used to make the mana in a never ending loop, and didn't stop to consider you can't actually use the infinite chocolate hack in your own veins.

The White Mage class quest isn't canon, but he canonically has access to blood magic fueled versions of that full set of abilities. The blood lily is, indeed, bloody.

The wings WHM gets at lvl 80 (Temperance) happened because after spending all of Shadowbringers overbrimming with Light, he understood that element more intimately and was able to channel and use it productively once he was dealing with it in manageable quantities again.

Stone I through IV is closer to telekinises than anything (though it does involve directly manipulating wind), with him progressively being able to throw larger rocks and clods of dirt, but the rocks are never quite as big as the in-game animation would suggest; stone IV is a fist-sized lump of whatever is to hand (indoors, Stone might pick up candelsticks or crockery; anything made of mineral). Aero I and II is similar but with sand instead of dirt clods and somewhat lower effort.

Replacing Stone and Aero with with Glare and Dia is a result of the Light he absorbed in ShB; in the early stages of being a Light sponge, before it got debilitating, he figured out that he could manipulate the Light outside of himself and that this was more effective than throwing dirt at things. Afterwards, he realised that this works everywhere except the Void and is generally easier than turning blood into mana and using that manage to move the air into wind and using that wind to pick up a rock.

There is no Glare II or Holy II because he learned III directly from Venat in Elpis and skipped the systematic progression that a normal White Mage with more academics and less time travel would have done.

--

His definitely totally normal White Mage abilities are primarily restorative, and what little offensive skills he has are best at long range; this is not well suited to the whole Warrior of Light thing, and he uses jobstones to make up for it. He is also easily frightened and responds to threats by trying to hide behind the nearest big strong friend. Up through Stormblood, he was practically useless in combat without a jobstone.

All jobs are canon-ish for Ostercat, since he is very good with job stones and can just pick one up and let it take over in combat. He's stronger now than he was during the whole Necromancer thing (and legitimate job stones are designed to be equipped and uneqipped and shared, and not created by Necromancers trying to gain immortality through a jobstone and who dodn't care about the wellbeing of subsequent users), and can turn jobstones on and off at will.

--

Hien tried to teach Ostercat the basics of Samurai so he could at the very least have a chance of defending himself if he was caught without his bag of jobstones (something that very much did happen a few times). The result is that Ostercat knows how to hold a katana properly and can sometimes land a half-decent blow if he is very careful and the target is holding very still. Hien considers this an embarrasing failure, Ostercat is delighted with his progress. (This reflects the fact that I-the-player enjoyed playing Samurai during StB but am very bad at DPS in general and melee DPS in particular).

--

Warrior is also canon for Ostercat, and also not in a normal way. The part of Ardbert that merged with Ostercat is the part that would have gone into Ardbert's own job stone, so Ostercat has access to a full lvl 80 Warrior skill set when he sits back and lets Ardbert take over. Bloodwhetting, the lvl 82 leech heal, is Ostercat's own addition to the kit; it's just plain blood magic that he uses while Ardbert is doing all the tanking.

WoL/FFXIV OC Question(s)!

What is your WoL/OC's main class/job and why? Are they good at multiple roles? Are there any they're really bad at?