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lloydskywalkers · 4 years

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any port in a storm

Pixal and Lloyd and the evolving nature of friendship, as highlighted by the regular burning down of your city.

(desperately trying to break through writer’s block and classes again, this was supposed to be under 2k and it is...very much not hdfjkgh but! i’ve been meaning to write for Pixal and Lloyd for a while so here are a whole bunch of feelings about the two of them and s8)

Pixal meets — truly meets — Lloyd Garmadon shortly after his brother’s been blown to pieces.

She says truly, because if you ask her, Pixal will tell you she met Lloyd Garmadon at exactly 8:48 in the evening outside his father’s monastery, moments before a horde of nindroids led there by Pixal herself descended upon them.

But Lloyd argues that since they said about two words total to each other, it doesn’t really count as meeting, and by the time Pixal’s spending the better part of her day with him running high and low around Ninjago City, she’s learned that it’s easier not to press the point.

Lloyd can be stubborn, like that.

She’d first learned that when she’d met him, just after they’d lost Zane. That loss hadn’t lasted long, especially for Pixal, but the immediate aftermath of it had been devastating. She’d watched with blank eyes as the team had fractured, splitting at the seams as they all fled their separate ways, too heartsore and dizzy with grief to do much otherwise.

All of them had fled, save Lloyd. She hadn’t paid him much attention before that point, the surprisingly small bearer of the Golden Power. Of course, he wasn’t the bearer of that power anymore, but his eyes alone had shown the experience of it. There’d been a brief, lost look that had crossed his face as the others had mentioned leaving, before it had been swept under a mask of stubborn, determined blankness. He wouldn’t be leaving. Someone had to stay behind and watch out for things, he’d claimed, even as the loss had bled through his voice.

Pixal hadn’t quite grasped the concept of empathy at that point, but she’d felt something dangerously close to it.

At any rate, the only interaction they’d had alone was brief. In fact, the only one Pixal can truly remember — and her memory never fails — is the quick exchange they’d had in the hospital lobby directly after the battle. The hospital was for Mr. Borg, and for the ninja’s minor injuries.

There was nothing any hospital on earth could do for Zane.

Pixal had found herself next to Lloyd in the waiting room, trying to distract herself from those thoughts while Lloyd stared at the stark white tiling with dull eyes.

“They never mentioned what your power was,” she’d asked him, almost absently. Collecting data, processing information — anything she could do to distract from the crushing grief.

“Oh.” Lloyd had blinked, startling back into awareness. He’d suddenly looked painfully young. “It’s, ah, I guess it’s just green, now.”

It had been Pixal’s turn to blink. “Green.”

“Yeah.” Lloyd had bit his lip, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly, two habits he’ll never quite lose. “I mean — it’s more than that, but it’s like — energy, I guess, is the best way to put it?”

“Interesting,” Pixal had remarked.

“Yeah.”

They’d stared at each other in silence after that, before they’d both been called off to other errands — and then they were having Zane’s funeral and then Pixal was making realizations she never got to tell anyone, and that had been that in her early introductions to Lloyd Garmadon. Quiet, awkward, and possessing an incredible power he hardly even knew the name of.

Looking back, Pixal figures her introduction hadn’t gone much better.

They’d continued as passing acquaintances as time went on, separated by danger and the confines of Zane’s head, and Pixal had figured that’s all they’d ever be. But then their Sensei goes missing and, despite Pixal’s increasing disappearances on Zane as she rebuilds her own body, she’s been given the role of watching out for Ninjago city along with Lloyd.

She quickly learns that quiet is not a term fit for Lloyd Garmadon when you’re trapped alone with him.

************

“How is there not a single station playing actual music?” Lloyd seethes, flicking through the channels almost manically. “It’s two am, who’s gonna be listening to your stupid commercial for toothpaste now, are you kidding me?”

“Statistically speaking, this is the prime time for long-distance driving near Ninjago City,” Pixal supplies, her voice a hint scratchy where it comes through the his car’s radio speakers. “Or, if you factor in the construction in the east district, there could still be traffic from late-night bars.”

Lloyd groans, thunking his head against the steering wheel as another ad screeches through the small space. “Wonderful.”

“Your vocal tones suggest you find it otherwise.”

“Dont trust ‘em, my vocal tones are traitors.” As if to solidify his point, Lloyd’s voice cracks in the middle of his sentence, shooting up an octave higher. Lloyd goes bright red, and thunks his head against the steering wheel again.

Taking pity on him, Pixal aims for reassurance. “It is normal for your voice to break, Lloyd. It shouldn’t last too long.” She pauses, momentarily scanning through another article. “On second thought, this one suggests it could also take two to three years for your voice to stabilize.”

Lloyd gives a strangled moan. “End me.”

“Unfortunately, that would defeat the purpose of why I’m here in the first place.”

Lloyd tilts his head, cracking an eye open as he glances at the camera feed he knows she’s watching him from. “Unfortunately, huh,” he muses. “So you’re saying if Zane hadn’t made you promise to look out for me, you would end me?”

“That — no, that is not — of course I wouldn’t end you,” Pixal backtracks. An odd feeling flickers through her, almost as if she’s lost her place, floundering.

Or embarrassed might be more accurate, she thinks wryly. She briefly considers projecting a a glaring face at Lloyd from the monitor. This is his fault. She rarely stuttered before Lloyd started teasing her at all hours of the morning.

“I mean, you wouldn’t be the first,” Lloyd continues, conversationally. “And if we’re being honest, I’d definitely rather you be the one to off me, instead of like, random bad guy number eighty-five—”

“I know you think you are funny,” Pixal cuts over him. “But casually planning for your death is something Kai listed I was not to let you do. Also, it is not nearly as funny as you think it is.”

“Ouch,” Lloyd mutters, though he looks chastised. “Never mind, you just took me out in one sentence.”

Chastised might be the wrong term.

Pixal studies him through the monitor, then sighs. “I am, however, honored you think highly enough of me to offer the right to murder you,” she gives in.

She’s rewarded as Lloyd breaks into a bright grin.

He still looks painfully young these days, but it’s less obvious. His voice is pitching lower and he wears his hair different, and he’s gained a whip-like tendency to quip at people, as Pixal’s experienced firsthand. Kai calls it sass in grumbling but fond tones, and Nya calls it snark somewhere between the fourth book series she’s sent for Pixal to try.

The ninja have been kind like that, sharing the interests they have in an attempt to make her feel…well, more human, she supposes. Less confined to a voice in a computer. Of course, Pixal isn’t confined to a voice in a computer anymore, but they don’t know that yet. She’ll tell them someday soon, she promises herself. Any day now.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to keep up with Lloyd by lurking in his car radio, as he spends half his time in there anyways.

************

“You’d think we’d have found their hideout by now,” Lloyd notes, as they wait in a darkened alleyway again. It gives them an excellent view of the major highways, so if the rumored biker gang does show up, they won’t miss it.

If they show up being the key point.

“Whoever their leader is, they certainly know how to keep a low profile,” Pixal answers, closing out another dead end police report in frustration.

“It’s weird,” Lloyd says, propping the notebook he’s sketching in on his knee as he squints at the paper. “Normally the boss types aren’t this quiet. They like to show off, y’know? Make a big scene, dramatic speeches and all.”

“Are you referring to the villains, or yourselves?”

“Touché,” Lloyd snorts. “But still, you gotta admit it’s weird they haven’t even made any demands. What’s their end game here, elaborate advertising for motorcycle design?”

“I would hope not,” Pixal says. “Their color coordination is lacking.”

Lloyd fights back a smile, his pencil scratching as he shifts his notebook again. “I don’t know, I kinda like the punk look.”

“I noticed that, when you tried to redecorate the car.”

“Hey, skulls are cool.”

“They are also conspicuous, especially when they come in acid green colors.”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Lloyd sighs, making a face as he scrubs the eraser across the paper. Pixal tries to tilt the camera further, to see what he’s drawing tonight, but the angle he’s holding it at remains just out of sight.

She could probably guess what he’s drawing, if she tried. The notebook is one they’ve been steadily working their way through on these late-night patrols, the pages filled with little hangman games and Lloyd’s sketches of animals and his teammates. He’s drawn her a few times from memory, and she’s been tempted to ask him to draw her in the new Samurai X armor more than once.

Soon, she tells herself.

“What are you drawing?” she finally asks, curiosity getting the better of her.

Lloyd’s cheeks tinge pink, and he quickly plasters the notebook to his chest, hiding it entirely from view. “Nothing.”

Pixal waits, letting the silence fill with her judgement. “Lloyd, I have seen your drawings before.”

He doesn’t reply, and Pixal tries again. “It gets boring, being stuck with the car monitors for eyes.”

“I know you can hack other cameras,” Lloyd mutters, but he sighs, relenting as he turns the notebook over. Pixal’s eyes rake over the detailed sketch — it’s a comical little thing of her and Lloyd, jammed together on a tiny lifeboat in the middle of a darkening ocean. She can spot the smudges where he’s redrawn her head several times, and the numerous attempts he’s made at his own hair. Pixal studies Lloyd’s portrayal of himself, which is noticeably lacking in facial features. While Lloyd draws the others plenty, it’s a rare occasion that he draws himself, and she can’t help but be curious.

“I thought you were drawing the others again,” she admits.

“They’re on the ship,” Lloyd says, absently. “I’ll draw them when they remember to pull us back in.”

There’s nothing bitter in his tone to suggest it has any bearing on their actual lives, but the lost expressions Lloyd ends up giving their tiny caricatures feel familiar nonetheless.

“Zane has assured me they will be back as soon as they can,” Pixal speaks ups quietly.

Lloyd finally looks up fully, and flashes the monitor a smile. “I know,” he says. “So we better have this thing busted by the time they do, or they’ll never let us run a city on our own again.”

“If only we were truly running the city,” Pixal grumbles. “I could do a better job in two days than the current leaders could do in a year.”

“I’d vote for you,” Lloyd says, sincerely.

It’s a sweet gesture, but Pixal is unable to resist. “You don’t know how to vote.”

“Yes I do, it’s not hard!”

“Really? Then why are you not currently registered in the Ninjago voting system?”

Lloyd makes a strangled noise. “That’s a thing?”

She’s unable to keep the smugness from her voice. “I make my point.” Lloyd scowls, and scribbles a mustache on his drawing of her in revenge.

Pixal thinks it looks nice nonetheless.

************

She can’t really hold it against Lloyd for talking as much as he does, considering she does the same. It gets dull, sitting on patrol for hours on end, and there are only so many hours of light reading they can do before the silence begins to drive them both insane.

Pixal finds herself talking about more useless things with Lloyd than she has in her existence, pointless conversations in circles with each other. She also finds she doesn’t entirely mind. She’s become quite good at quipping back and forth with him, at least. It’s different than the kind of talk she has with Zane, lacking in the depth of feeling with the love they share. Her exchanges with Lloyd are lighter, though that’s not to say they’re less sincere.

For example, Zane hasn’t tried to teach her how to redesign a gi in poor lighting in the early hours of the morning because he’s bored out of his mind, that’s for sure.

“I’m teaching you how to sew,” Lloyd corrects, wincing as he accidentally stabs himself with the needle. “And I’m not redesigning the whole thing, I’m just adding some designs to spice it up.”

“I did not know you were allowed to wear colors other than green,” Pixal comments.

Lloyd pauses, squinting at the monitor. “You’re teasing me,” he finally says. “You’re making fun of how much green this gi has in it.”

“I would never,” Pixal replies, her tone flat and even. “The intricacies of your human humor evade me—”

“Human humor, nice—”

“—unlike the unusually bright shade of green you’ve chosen will fail to evade any eyes of your enemies.”

“I knew you were making fun of me!” Lloyd accuses, then flinches as he stabs his finger again trying to point at her. “And bright colors are our thing. Being subtle is, uh…not. Usually.”

Pixal is losing the battle to laugh at his expression by the minute. “I am shocked.”

Lloyd glares at the monitor, shifting his sewing to rest on his knees as he slouches in the car seat. “How’d you even get so good at sarcasm, anyways,” he mutters. “Zane still doesn’t get it half the time.”

“Perhaps it is part of my glowing personality,” Pixal says. Lloyd gives a huff of laughter, relenting.

“Fair enough,” he says, shifting in his seat again. “Fine, you win. The green is probably too bright, but that’s not the point. I’m gonna show you how to do a backstitch."

Pixal falls quiet, letting Lloyd gesture with the needle as he explains. There are a hundred, a thousand tutorials she could pull up online, digitized knowledge instantly learned on all the countless types of stitches she could use, sorted and categorized in neat columns of use and effectiveness. All of them more detailed, more easily understood than Lloyd’s absent rambling and unsteady hands as he struggles with the end of a knot.

Not one of them will care whether or not Pixal learns the odd way Zane likes to loop his stitches, or will quietly add which stitches knit skin back together quickest.

So Pixal ignores her programming, and does her best to follow Lloyd’s rambling instructions, watching as his scarred fingers tug another thread of dull gold through the green mess of fabric, the city quiet around them.

“You never did tell me where you learned how to sew,” Pixal says, as Lloyd starts up a new thread of black on the other side of the gi. “Was that something the others taught you in training?”

“They’d have to know how to be able to teach it,” Lloyd snickers. “And, uh, no. I taught myself to back at Darkley’s.”

“Oh,” Pixal falters. She’s heard about Darkley’s, both from Zane and the legal reports she’s read online. Neither gave a positive impression of the place. Her mind is suddenly filled with images of a younger Lloyd trying to give himself stitches, and her heart twists.

Lloyd starts, seemingly having picked up on her train of thought. “I mean, I did it for fun, mostly. I like sewing,” he explains. “It’s useful. You can pull things back together, and fix ‘em.”

Pixal is quiet, but she hopes Lloyd takes her silence as agreement with his motive. She likes to think he knows her well enough for that, by now.

************

Pixal finds, somewhere during their fourth month alone, that she’s glad the team elected to stick her and Lloyd together. Not because she doesn’t want to be with Zane — there’s never a moment she doesn’t miss him, and with every day that passes her resolve to keep her secret from him grows weaker, as the longing for actual connection grows stronger.

But there are conversations she can have with Lloyd that she can never have with Zane, and the dangerous thing about spending time with Lloyd, Pixal finds, is that they’re more similar than she’s realized.

“Sometimes I think I’m jealous,” Lloyd whispers to her one night. It’s one of the bad ones, the ones where their enemies struck too sudden to stop, and the mission ends in the hospital. “I think I’m jealous of Zane, and I hate myself for it.”

Pixal is quiet, trying to pick apart the tone of his voice in the words he’s just spoken, and factors in the victims they’ve just left behind at the hospital. She finds herself no closer to an answer.

“Is it the metal skin part?” she finally asks, though she knows that’s wrong. “The, what was it, technical immortality?”

“No,” Lloyd shakes his head. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he says emphatically, his fingers fluttering at over the steering wheel, tapping incessantly with unspent energy. “I don’t want to, but that’s — it’s not what I’m scared of. I’m more scared of how I go out.”

He swallows, and his fingers move to dance over the woven bracelet on his wrist instead, twisting at the tiny beads and tracing senseless designs in constant, steady movement. It’s a motion he does often, and it had puzzled Pixal at first. She’d decided to write it off as an odd tick, a way to spend excess energy.

Now, she recognizes the desperate kind of reassurance that movement gives. She understands too well the need to remind yourself that you can move — that your body will obey you and you alone.

Pixal thinks back to the other factors in tonight’s accident, of the way the drugged man’s eyes had cleared when they’d finally turned him over to the police, the way he’d sworn he’d never do such a thing in his right mind. She thinks of the way the first victim had thrown themselves over their companion.

That victim hadn’t made it to the hospital.

“Ah,” Pixal says, quietly.

She’s silent again, and she thinks back to when she’d met him, the very first time. She recalls the way her programming had rebelled against her in favor of the Overlord, corrupting her body and forcing it against her, twisting everything she was and wanted to be into something different.

She thinks back again, to the searing-hot anger, the terror, the despair as she was torn apart, piece by piece like a machine, burning out at the whims of another. Her end purposeless, her demise belonging to someone else, just like every other part of her.

She thinks of the last glimpse she’d caught of Zane, bright and beautiful as a supernova. Burning with the terrible brilliance of his own, determined choice. Terrible, because the death of something always is. Beautiful, because it was his own. Zane died, not a machine, not a weapon, not a tool of anyone or anything, but as himself. Zane died to save the ones he loves. Pixal could’ve died for spare parts.

Never again, she promises herself. If she goes out, she goes out on her own terms. This time, they choose the end of their own destiny themselves.

In hindsight, it’s the kind of promise they’re both too young to make, but neither of them have ever seen themselves as such, and promises like that are easy.

“Love can be terrible, sometimes,” Lloyd murmurs. Pixal watches him scrub at the blood on his uniform, and thinks how ironically well-timed it is that he finished the stitching on his new gi this morning. “Sometimes I forget how ugly it can be.”

************

The end of their nighttime stakeouts begins with a break-in at Mr. Borg’s tower. Lloyd argues that she should get to call it her father’s tower, if she wants, but the ninja aren’t the only ones Pixal’s hiding herself from.

And then Lloyd gets very tense at the thought of fathers very fast, and they never finish the conversation.

They stay at the edge of the bridge long after the parachute, emblazoned with the unmistakable visage of Lloyd’s father, disappears from sight. Pixal wonders if it’s burned into Lloyd’s eyes, like the way she’s read black spots linger in humans’ vision after they’ve looked at something too bright. The way Lloyd stares at the river, his shoulders tense and his teeth worrying at his lip, she thinks she might be right.

They’re waiting on the report from the commissioner —they’re waiting for anything, anyone who can offer them any explanation of what’s going on. Pixal’s reminded of how much she loathes this kind of waiting.

“It could be—” Lloyd begins, then breaks off, his voice wavering. He swallows, and Pixal can see the way his fists clench tightly from the cameras they’ve put in his car. There’s a fierce part of her that longs to reveal herself, to meet his eyes herself and offer some semblance of comfort. But there’s a time and place for things, and Pixal isn’t ready.

“It could be anything,” Lloyd finally continues, his voice small. “It could — it doesn’t mean anything. It could mean nothing, right?”

Pixal is silent, her mind racing. She’s run the calculations over and over in her head already, scouring the internet for anything related to the bikers. She’s been foolish, she realizes — they both have. Letting the gang go unnamed for so long, thinking nothing of it. Now, with the name flashing vibrant across Pixal’s vision, a part of her wants to let them go nameless just a bit longer.

Before she can answer, Lloyds phone goes off with a sharp ping, just as Pixal’s sensors alert her to the message from the commissioner. Lloyd snatches for his phone like it’s on fire, and Pixal’s already scanning the message frantically, as if she can salvage this if she’s fast enough, save Lloyd from this one pain.

Lloyd’s gotten much better at reading quickly though, these days.

She can pinpoint the moment he reaches the last paragraph, because his breath hitches. There’s a long, pressing pause of silence, Lloyd’s hands trembling as they clutch weakly at his phone. Then it’s punctured by a reedy, wheezing gasp, and Pixal’s suddenly wishing she’d revealed herself after all.

Instead, all she has is her voice as Lloyd crumples, crouching over in visible distress. Pixal’s mind races, recalling everything Zane’s ever told her about his team, the way their panic manifests in different shades. Lloyd’s is quiet but desperate, rapid breathes that stutter as his eyes slide more and more into a frightening kind of blankness.

“Lloyd, please, listen to my voice,” she begs, trying to reach him in the only way she can. “Please, you have to breathe—”

“He’s gone,” Lloyd rasps, unhearing of her words. “He’s s’posed to be gone, it’s supposed to be over, I’m supposed to be done—”

Pixal fights back the sense of overwhelming helplessness. She knows loss. She knows how to finish his sentence. He’s supposed to be done grieving, done mourning, done clinging to false scraps of hope that his father isn’t lost forever only to be met with heartbreak.

And now, to be met with the possibility of something so much worse.

“We’ll stop them,” she tells him, unflinching. “We won’t let it happen.”

Lloyd’s eyes are a vivid green where they stare at her through the monitor, almost ghostly in the misting light reflecting from the river.

He’s silent, but Pixal is, too.

Pixal remembers the way her head had spun when she’d first picked up the traces of Zane in the system, how the world had rushed then steadied, flooding with color as she’d realized he might not be lost after all. She remembers the surging, overwhelming flood of joy, that someone she’d thought she lost might live after all. She remembers being so happy, at even the smallest chance to get him back, because the voice was Zane’s, without a doubt.

She watches the color seep from Lloyd’s expression as his shoulders shudder, the words from the commissioner’s message almost echoing through the air. Watches the terror as the both of them fill the silence.

Will we?

The radio scratches, as if echoing Pixal’s anxiety. Love can be terrible, sometimes. She’s underestimated how it also be so cruel.

************

She’s also, apparently, underestimated how the universe on the whole could be so cruel.

She should’ve revealed herself to them from day one. That way, when Harumi’s corrupted programming suddenly ravages through her like an electric shock, she could be reassured they’d at least be familiar with the person they were fighting.

Instead, she doesn’t even get to scream. Pixal’s only able to force out a desperate, broken warning before she’s lost again, drowning in her own body as she’s forced under. Furious panic grips her as she screams without lungs, bashing herself against the overwhelming helplessness that’s taken over her.

Not again, not again, not again—

Her limbs creak and jolt against her will, lashing out at the people she cares most about, and Pixal can’t even rage back in her own voice. She’s sworn, she’s promised herself she’d never let anyone do this to her again — she’s sworn she’d die before she let someone reach into her head and snatch control away, and yet here she is, frozen as her body’s used to target her friends.

If she could cry, she might.

There’s not much more to say than that. She breaks free, her body her own once again, but by then it’s too late.

************

If Pixal had the same gift of foresight that Zane did, maybe she would have seen it coming. Maybe she’d have remembered how similar her and Lloyd are, and that this kind of pained desperation always yields impulsiveness and mistakes.

She doesn’t, though. She barely even manages to do what she’s trying to, which is convincing Lloyd to join the others while they celebrate their victory. Their off-key singing is something he normally wouldn’t hesitate to join in on, she thinks, and she hates Harumi a little more.

Maybe she’ll try his mother next. The expression on Lloyd’s face screams unapproachable, and remains fixedly sullen.

Almost to her surprise, he meets her eyes as she draws near— it’s odd, being able to meet his back — and his own eyes are dark, from despair over Harumi or despair over his father, Pixal isn’t sure. She’s thinking it might be both, when his eyebrows crease, and a flicker of concern cuts through them instead.

“You good?”

It takes her a moment to realize why he’s asking, but the answer is obvious. Her head tilts downward, and she watches as her fingers curl and uncurl. Her movements, her choices. She lets out an even breath.

“As I can be,” she replies. Lloyd nods, and his eyes are understanding. His lips twist in a scowl.

“She shouldn’t have done that to you. That was a low blow.”

Pixal’s mouth curves into a humorless smile. “That it was. She’s rather good at those, isn’t she.”

Lloyd’s eyes shadow again, and he looks away, crossing his arms. “This isn’t supposed to be about me,” he mutters.

“Yes, it is,” Pixal counters. “It is why I came over here, in the first place. She hurt—”

“All of us, and who’s fault is that,” Lloyd snaps, his arms crossing tighter.

“I would hope you know it’s hers,” she says, holding firm.

Lloyd looks away again, biting his lip, and Pixal shifts anxiously, rolling her wrists. The sensation of control sliding away still haunts her, worse than it had the first time. She should be better than this, she tells herself hotly. She’s lived without a body long enough that losing it so briefly shouldn’t effect her this much.

Curse her programming, she thinks, tapping agitatedly at the banister. She knew she should have reinforce it sooner.

“Hey, um.” Lloyd is looking at her again, hesitant. He twists at his bracelet, and his eyes lose a fraction of that darkness. “Kai made this for me, after Morro,” he says. “I kept shredding the sleeves of my uniform, so he told me to mess with this instead, when I needed to remember that…that I was in control.”

He shrugs, hesitant. “We could make you one too, if you wanted. It helps, having something.”

Pixal lets out a steady breath, despite not actually needing to. The action is grounding, she’s found. “I would like that.”

Lloyd gives her a ghost of a smile in return. “Soon as this is over, then.”

There’s a heavy weight to his words, and Pixal’s eyes narrow.

“Lloyd,” she says. He looks at her, his eyes dark. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

He’s quiet, not meeting her eyes, and this is where Pixal should stop him. This is when she should see the end of the road they’ve been on since they started this, and force him to turn before it’s too late.

“I know what I’m doing.”

She doesn’t.

************

Lloyd is battered and bleeding by the time they drag him onto the ship, a gruesome portrait of cruelty. Pixal is frozen as she watches him writhe in Kai’s hold, his screams cracked and wet as he thrashes erratically like a broken thing.

Nya is already barking orders before they’ve even gotten Lloyd fully on the ship, and Zane is running scans with a horrified, wavering focus. Pixal follows Cole as he carries Lloyd to the medbay with a blank numbness, the rush of wind streaming past the Bounty sails thunderously loud in her ears.

This isn’t Lloyd, she thinks, staring at his crumpled form. Lloyd isn’t this battered, broken shell of a person. Lloyd isn’t hazy eyes that fail to recognize them and frantic murmuring through bloody lips. Lloyd is bright-eyed and gentle and would rather die before he screams the way he does when Cole moves him to the table.

Lloyd is her friend, and this is where that promise they made has led them. She knows why Lloyd set out for the prison, hot on the collapse of his own star. She also knows he wouldn’t have chosen to burn out like this.

Cole calls out for Zane, his voice ringing in panic as Lloyd screeches in pain again. Pixal thinks of quiet words in the safety of his car, and she feels sick. This is the ugliness of love, the terrible, hideous side of it.

And Lloyd would hate it, if he could see himself, if he were any semblance of lucid. He’d hate to know just how much better he was at breaking himself than Morro ever was.

Zane is gentle as he pushes past her, but Pixal can feel the tremble in his hands. He’s every bit as rattled as she is, if not more so — Zane’s heart is larger and softer than hers has ever been, and he cares about each and every one of them with a painful intensity. It’s a cruel thing, to have to pull those same people back together with your own hands.

Kai’s eyes are streaming as he clutches at Lloyd’s wrists, pinning him in place. Zane’s hands waver again over one of the jagged wounds near Lloyd’s ribcage, the green of his uniform already dyed dark in blood, soaking over the careful stitches Pixal watched him put in himself.

Pixal finally finds her footing, reminding herself of the solid wood beneath her feet. She recalls the steady, smooth stitch Lloyd’s scarred fingers traced out for her.

“Here.” She takes the needle from Zane’s hands, squeezing his briefly before letting go. “I can do it.”

She sets the needle against Lloyd’s skin and wonders what kind of stitch it’d take to pull your heart back together.

************

Pixal cannot cry. It’s one of the features Mr. Borg spent hours debating, weighing the pros and cons of giving her the ability before he was truly sure how rust-proof she was. He’d never gotten the chance to, as the Overlord had interrupted him, then Pixal had lost any body to give the ability to cry to, which had eliminated the need entirely.

She cannot cry, but she can hurt, and the rain that streams through her hair, dripping down her forehead spotting raindrops on her cheeks, could be tears if she pretended.

She doesn’t, though, because tears are a waste of water and overall useless in the grand scheme of things. She doubts they’d have helped her fare any better in the battle with Colossi, either.

Tears won’t bring anyone back.

Lloyd cries anyways. She can’t see him, but she can hear it in his voice, the way it wavers and breaks over the radio, nasally tones pronounced.

He’s barely able to gasp a few coordinates to her before he cuts the radio off abruptly. Pixal’s spent enough time with him to envision his scarred fingers snapping it off with a particular desperation, green sparking from his hands in distress.

She reminds herself those sparks are gone, now, bled away into nothing like the vivid green of Lloyd’s eyes had. The thought makes her sadder than she’d expected. She had a joke, about his eyes, she had wanted to make. Now that she has a body, and her own set of glowing green eyes, she’d — there was something he would’ve laughed at, she thought —

It doesn’t matter, now. Neither of them are likely to laugh anytime soon.

The coordinates blink brightly in her vision, and she’s almost surprised she managed to key them in. She’s running on autopilot, she supposes. It could be ironic — she’s been so desperate for control, it’s been so important that she’s the one feeling. Now, she’d give anything not to feel at all.

She lets out a shaky breath, dispelling the mist in her vision left from the rain. She leans forward, just over the edge of the building she’s crouched on, and her loose hair falls forward, silvery and synthetic and horribly tangled. Irritated, she reaches for another hair tie, and her hands falter around her wrist.

Lloyd had promised her a bracelet there. But he’d promised Kai would make the bracelet, hadn’t he, and Kai couldn’t make the bracelet if he was dead, could he.

Pixal blinks, her breath hitching. She’s been so numb to the pain of Zane’s loss, it hasn’t yet occurred to her that she’s losing Kai, too. And Jay, and Cole, and—

She sucks in the same shuddery kind of breath she’s seen Lloyd do, and carefully fists her hand in the area of her uniform above her chest. Her fingers dig in tightly, clutching in a hopeless attempt to feel some sort of comfort she knows she’ll never find.

But perhaps, for these few seconds, she can pretend the action is holding her together.

************

“It was inevitable,” Pixal tells Lloyd blankly, as he rasps out his third apology in the dark cover of their small hideout. “That one of us would fall, eventually. It had nothing to do with you.”

Lloyd swallows thickly. “It could’ve — it should’ve been—”

He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to. Pixal’s hand shoots out, clamping tightly around his wrist, and there’s a beat of gratitude that she doesn’t need to rely on her voice alone anymore.

“Don’t.” Her voice is strung tighter than the tension in their shoulders. “You cannot change anything. You can’t, Lloyd, and you should not wish to — to change it that way.”

Lloyd jerks his hand free, wiping miserably at his eyes. He sets it back down within her reach, though, and if Pixal were any different, she’d take it.

But Pixal isn’t that different from Lloyd at all in the end, and neither of them reach for the other’s hand, no matter how desperately they crave the contact. Fear is more familiar, and it’s easier to give into it than it is the clawing need for comfort in your chest, after all.

“Still,” Lloyd finally whispers. “Still.”

Pixal swallows. She doesn’t disagree. If one of them had to fall, she knows she gladly would have taken it upon herself. She knows the others care for her, certainly, but she also knows her place in the grand scheme of things. They were six before she came along, and even now she’s kept far too many secrets to be fully counted among them.

She listens to Lloyd’s quiet, cracked voice, and she wonders if he’s thinking that they were five before he came along, younger than Pixal got to know him as.

Now they’re three, hollow and heartbroken. Though counting herself as one whole feels like cheating, right now.

Pixal squeezes her eyes shut, and wonders what it’s like to cry. Perhaps it helps, though Lloyd doesn’t look any less miserable.

************

“I was thinking,” Lloyd tells her, during one of the precious few quiet moments they have while trying to overthrow Garmadon and Harumi. Pixal’s turning the tiny tea flower he’d given her over in her hands, a part of her mind already marking articles about flower-pressing, another part wondering if it’s already too late to save the blossom. “About that promise we made, before all this.”

Pixal finally tucks the flower into the pocket of her uniform, pressed close to her chest. If anything, it can be a reminder of the lives that are safe — the life that’s coming back to her, if she has to drag him back from another realm herself. “And?”

Lloyd’s hands twist together. “Maybe we should focus more on staying alive.”

Pixal coughs out a laugh, breathless and startled. Lloyd wrinkles his nose at her, but his eyes are amused, even with their light lost. “I mean, the emphasis would be on keeping everyone else alive, but it’s kinda hard to do that if we’re dead, so…yeah. Priorities.”

“Staying alive should always be a priority,” Pixal corrects him, but she tugs the edge of his armor out of place with a smile.

“Why didn’t you teach me how to graffiti?” she nods at the designs on the green leather. “Or was this another Darkley’s tradition.”

“This is a refined art, called whatever I had on me that showed up on dark green,” Lloyd grumbles, fixing his armor. “I’ll teach it to you when we get out of this.”

“Another reason why staying alive would be a more productive focus,” Pixal points out. “I’ve heard teaching is easier when you’re alive.”

“And I’ve heard you’re a real riot,” Lloyd mutters. “It’s a promise, okay? I promise to teach you how to do cool armor design if you promise not to disappear into another realm on me.”

Pixal nods, adjusting her own armor tighter as screams ring out from a street nearby. “A promise, then.”

She keeps both the promise and the flower, the tiny blossom dried and faded by the time she’s escaped from the prison, heart racing with leftover adrenaline as Zane sweeps her into his arms. She clutches back every bit as tight, listening to his breathless laughter as cheers rise from the streets behind them, the smoke drifting across the early morning sky above them pale against the lightening blue. Pixal buries her face in his shoulder and breathes, tucking the moment away in her heart where it won’t fade. There’s a future stretching out before her, and she’s got the limbs to walk her path on her own, but all she wants right now is the steady ground beneath her feet and the bright laughter of what she’s managed to keep.

Lloyd meets them shortly after, his own promise kept as he tears his gaze from his father, handing him off to the authorities before sprinting for the others. Pixal barely snags a moment alone with him, and even then no one’s particularly keen on letting him out of their sights.

He meets her eyes as they pick their way through the wrecked streets, the city more alive around them than it’s been in weeks. In the dark of the early morning, Pixal’s eyes glow a bright green, reflecting oddly in the windows they pass. It’s always been her preferred color, in contrast to Zane’s bright blue. Lloyd glances at her, his own eerily green eyes glowing back. He bites his lip, but it’s to hold back real laughter this time.

“My eyes were green first,” she tells him.

“Sue me,” he shoots back, before Kai’s throwing an arm over his shoulders again, tucking Lloyd neatly in between him and Nya. Pixal smothers a laugh at the look on his face, and tightens her own arm further where it’s linked firmly in Zane’s.

It’s going to be an easy promise to keep, she thinks.

#lego ninjago #ninjago #lloyd garmadon #ninjago lloyd #pixal #there was a point to this but it got lost in pix and lloyd do arts and crafts #either way i'd die for both these characters #ninjago where is the pixal love i miss her #my fic

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haikyuuhimbosandhypebeasts · 3 years

Text

Heliotrope

Here’s my submission for the Forget Me Not collab for Anisylum! Please note the TW as it is VERY heavy. This piece is entirely SFW though!

Ship: Tsukishima Kei x GN! Reader Genre: Angst, but some fluff in some places. Word Count: 2.2k Trigger/Content Warnings: near death experience, hospitalization, COVID-19, vomit mention, amnesia after hospitalization, a suicide attempt is briefly mentioned, swearing because this is by me Sexy Sexy Masterlist: here!

Sand clung to skin and the harsher rays of light that usually cascaded and burnt you had died away into a fading tangerine glow. You perched comfortably on the sand, taking note of the undulating waves- they were like you in the sense that while you could crash down hard on the opposition, you would shy away in a fragile manner when faced with gentle treatment. Perhaps it was that you felt you weren’t worth such luxuries that you found it hard to make friends through your first few years of high school. Perhaps it was trying to push people away because you were afraid yet alarmingly aware of your mortality. Perhaps it was something else entirely, something you weren’t quite ready to come to terms with. What you did know was that you weren’t alone in the violent struggle through high school to make friends while you had your walls up. Next to you was someone you never thought you’d share your favorite place with; in any terms you found this boy appalling with his behavior. So appalling, you saw yourself in the way he closed himself off and cut those close with tongue lashings. You knew this only through another friend who took issue with him as you went to another school in an entire other prefecture. Words mauled their way out from your throat, breaking the silence between you and Tsukishima Kei. “I won’t ask you why you tried to do what you did today. But I will ask if there’s anyone you can talk to in your life.” You didn’t understand yourself. Why would you say that…? You don’t remember anything like this at all… His response was equally incoherent and odd. “Okay, but I’ll kill you if you go back on it.” When you opened your mouth to reply to him, the ground around you suddenly reared up like a defensive serpent. A pillar of beach sand forced its way from the ground into your throat, suffocating and trapping your lungs in permanent fullness. You could only gag and cry, unable to even see Tsukishima past the torrent of sand breaking into your body with the intent to kill you slowly…

╞═════𖠁𐂃𖠁═════╡

You woke up once more in that dull grey-blue and white room with the only sounds you could properly process being the beep of a heart monitor somewhere behind you. You had managed to halfway curl into somewhat resembling the fetal position, but something kept making you cough and gag as your throat was caught. You move your hand to whatever is catching and about to make you vomit- a tube. This tube, you followed, was in your nose good and solid, and you felt it deep enough in your sinuses you didn’t dare try to pull it out. Moving your hands felt foreign like you had forgotten how to process being human and natural motions like that. You testingly ran your right hand down the tube, taking care to not tug and cause discomfort. Your other hand came to rest on your face. It was slick from sweat, likely due to whatever the fuck you just had a dream about. At the corner of your lips was another tube and when you followed where it led it was taped to the side of your face. You lick your lips and manage to almost fall into a haze until you see movement for the first time in what feels like forever. To be fair, it is one of the most jarring appearances of a person you’ve seen in your whole life to what you can recall. A person in a full-body hazmat suit enters your room through a door you hadn’t even processed was there, then greets you as casually as they can through a plague-resistant suit. “Hey there.” You squint at them. Yeah, you have no fucking idea who this cosplayer in a hospital is, and while you should probably be polite, you feel like you got ran over not once but twice. You try to speak to them, but you can’t. You don’t have the air for it, it’s like you have no control over your breathing. Clarity washes over you. You’re hospitalized. These are tubes because you were asleep and weren’t breathing or eating right. The realization must show on your face because your nurse speaks up again. “Don’t worry about me too much, we’re just gonna check your vitals and if you feel up to it, we can see how you do without the ventilators.” You try to manage out a “whoopee”, which unimpressively comes out as some form of odd wheeze, and your nurse begins by grabbing the blood pressure cuff covered in protective plastic while they wear a sympathetic expression.

╞═════𖠁𐂃𖠁═════╡

Once you were off the ventilator, the nurse informed you about what had happened. Apparently, an ambulance was called when you were unresponsive and nearly blue in the face, sitting in front of your refrigerator with the door open. You were diagnosed with a severe case of COVID-19, something you had feared would wipe you out entirely and turn you past tense since its spread in your country. This fear wasn’t entirely irrational, either- you were immunocompromised and have been since you were a child. You grew up with being careful around others and hearing of a highly contagious new strain was something that filled you with so much paranoia you seriously considered quitting your current career and instead adopting a hermit lifestyle while completing college at home. Of course, such a thought was squashed by the slowly impending thought of rent, bills, due dates for assignments, and your bitch of a manager who lets people get close to you without a mask on. It’s not a big deal, (y/n), she once said to you. You wanted to shoehorn some tubes down her throat just to survive, see how that felt. It didn’t help that human resources wouldn’t listen to your complaint. They brushed it off since you were just a lowly sandwich maker at a chain sub place. If you had enough scraped together for lawyers right about now, they’d be totally fucked, you thought to yourself. Even more jarring is that it seemed you lost a handful of memories while in the hospital. You could remember basic outlines of people in your head- your very tall and incredibly testy roommate, your younger sister who wore glasses and was much smaller than you, and… a foggy memory of a man with messy black bedhead who had an arm wrapped around your shoulder. It hurt to think too hard. The doctor soon came by to give you test results, to check your vitals again, and to look over your records. He was a bit terse, but you can’t make the best judgments of people when they’re in plastic suits. “We’ll need to get you cleaned up by tomorrow and you should be able to head home,” he’d said, looking over your chart. You didn’t necessarily feel too ecstatic about your trip to your apartment. You remembered your roommate and how finicky he was, and you dreaded for him to belittle you over your condition. You dreaded it enough to even feel a knot of anxiety form in your stomach, wrenched in between your ribs without the intent of ever coming out. “We’ve already contacted uh…” The doctor squints at the screen, “Tsukishima… to come to pick you up tomorrow at noon. We’ll have care instructions printed out. You still have to quarantine for about a week more since your immune system isn’t at its most prime currently.” You agreed, it probably wasn’t a good recovery idea to make a couple of sammies for the public while you were recovering from a virus that had you intubated. He seemed grateful that you were lucid and cooperative, at least.

╞═════𖠁𐂃𖠁═════╡

You, predictably, didn’t sleep well after being in a medically induced haze for several days. Even more predictably, you found yourself awake from anxieties of the future. Tomorrow was only a few hours away, and then you’d be home. Home… what did that look like for you? The fog in your head was thick initially. You do remember coming home from classes at a different time than Tsukishima, how when you entered he’d often be reading over homework. You remembered how sometimes he would be in the shower and the scent of cheap green apple soap filled the living room connected to it. You remembered… You remembered holding his thin frame in your arms on a bridge, pulling him back from oncoming traffic. You remember how you both collapsed and how the cold autumn air stung your lungs. You remember wide golden eyes staring back at you, as tears slowly filled them, then his normally impartial voice breaking as he hiccuped a sob, “Why? Why did you have to be in Sendai right now?” You felt tears stinging your eyes and a lump form in your throat. You found yourself in distress of your new emotions. Maybe… maybe you can sleep this horrible feeling off. Maybe this fog in your head where you need to know how deep your relationship ran will lift once you get genuine sleep.

╞═════𖠁𐂃𖠁═════╡

Finally, a knock on the door encouraged you to rouse from your sleeping state. And eloquently, you spoke your true feelings in your sleep-deprived state, “No.” You hear the doorknob turn and the door open. There’s a lack of a greeting from your nurse nor a quick apology from your doctor for interrupting your sleep. Actually, if you’re gonna use logic, what nurse or doctor is gonna wake up their peacefully sleeping patient in recovery? Thought of it being your doctor or nurse practically evaporates once the intruder has a seat on your bed. They still haven’t spoken, so now you’re remembering what tricks of self-defense you learned online to give this person a proper ass-kicking for getting way too close. You crack your hazy eyes open to get a look at where they’re sitting and you stop dead in your thoughts as wary gold eyes peer down at you. Your eyes widen out of reflex and butterflies bloom from your stomach at seeing what you now remember is your roommate. “I knew you were awake,” He said, a wry smile on his face. His expression was betrayed by his concerned gaze, though, “Wow, you look like shit.” You don’t know entirely why past his comment feeling not as an insult, but almost as a compliment, but you smile a little, “I feel like it too.” His expression doesn’t change. He runs a large calloused hand through the tresses of your hair, though, as if to soothe you. The doctor walked in and apologized for interrupting the moment between the two of you, unsure if it was something serious. You told him it was nothing because that’s what it was to you.

╞═════𖠁𐂃𖠁═════╡

The car ride wasn’t filled with the snarky banter you had been expecting. Instead, there was plentiful comfortable silence as Tsukishima drove. You didn’t know whether to be grateful or not for the silence- you still felt quite feeble and needed way more bed rest before you could get ready to do anything for anyone. Despite the wholesome silence, you felt those round gold eyes focus on you occasionally. And even though it was comfortable, you felt a melancholy twinge in the atmosphere as he inspected you. “I know you’ll give me shit for this… but you look like you’ve lost weight. I uh…” He gripped the steering wheel harder. You glanced over at him. A shade of baby pink dusted itself across his cheekbones and nose as he focused on the road. “I’m worried about you.” Fuck, there go those butterflies again. Something in you pushed to help- to comfort- but the logical side of your brain brought you to a halt. You’d weighed it in your head a couple of times. You two act closer than just roommates, and it’s not entirely clear how or why you got up to this point… but you had a solid hunch you might be dating this guy. Maybe? You closed your eyes and rested your head on the car door as you thought. You remember how sand clung to your body and you could hear the roaring of the sea. How you watched Tsukishima focus on the waves to regulate his breathing. You vaguely remember your words breaking away from your throat and catching the salty sea air. “Why don’t we stay together?” His lanky body stiffened, then he looked at you with disbelief. “... you wouldn’t want that. I’m fucking annoying and mean.” Your eyes creased with familiarity at the line. “Yeah? So am I. We can butt heads until we balance each other out.” It looked like he wanted to cry, but his pride wouldn’t let him cry in front of you anymore today. “I won’t ask you why you tried to do what you did today. But I will ask if there’s anyone you can talk to in your life,” you reached a careful hand over to rub his back, “Kei, if there isn’t, let me be that person.” You felt how his breath shuddered. To save his pride, you looked to the ocean and watched its hypnotic movements. After a few deep, shaky inhales and exhales, he replied. “I don’t understand why you’re being nice to me. Why you didn’t let me die. I will probably come back to this point in my life several times and you’re trying to say you’ll put up with it?” There was some bite to his tone, he was trying so hard to put up walls when he had no will to do so at the moment. How long had he pushed others away from being close? If he was anything like you… it was since grade school. “Let me be your support for when you’re in pain,” You tried once more, “I’m stubborn as shit so I know I won’t give up on you.” “You’re not getting it, you fucking idiot. I’m always in pain, that’s just been life,” he snapped bitterly, glaring at you now. “Then I guess I’ll be by your side forever.” You’d said it without thinking that day. It was like the ocean grew quieter with your words as if even Poseidon became interested in your proposition. You felt heat rise to your face at the implications of what you said. He stared at you with raised eyebrows and the slightest hint of a champagne pink hue on his face. He averted his eyes almost in a panic and watched the ocean again, suddenly very aware of his own expression. You carefully peered over at him again to see he’d only grown redder, now mirroring you. “You… don’t mean that,” He said as if it were a statement. “I do. You’re a good person inside, but you’re defensive and hurt. I’ve seen that from you in the past and I’ve learned more about you today. I want to be there for you as long as you’ll have me. Will you let me?” He picked at the sand as if thinking it over for a moment. There was a brief pause as waves rolled over each other in front of both of you, the sound of their impact being the only thing to grace your ears. Finally, his cynical tone returned as he regained some form of his prior composure. “Okay, but I’ll kill you if you go back on it.”

╞═════𖠁𐂃𖠁═════╡

“Hey. (Y/n), we’re home,” Tsukishima gently shook your shoulder to rouse you from your sleep. You opened your eyes slowly and groaned out a swear. Tsukishima felt a hesitant smile creep up his face as he opted to just try and maneuver you into your shared home himself. He remembered how waking up was hard for you. Once he opened the passenger door you nearly fell out onto the pavement, only saved by your seatbelt and the giant himself. Your face fell awkwardly into his hip, and you grumbled at the interruption to your sleep. “You sleep like the fucking dead, christ,” he mused out loud and sat you up so it was safe to unbuckle your seatbelt. He urged you to get up more- it wasn’t that you were heavy, he just really wasn’t in the place to lift you at the moment and didn’t even know how to go about it. Regardless, he held you up by a shoulder and crouched to make it easier for you both to walk to the apartment. In some part of your sleep, you began to speak, “Kei.” He kept his gaze trained forward at the front door and struggled to grab his keys from his pocket, “Yes?” “Are we married?” Kei dropped his keys, then shot you a look of concern, “... No…?” He had to hold himself back from saying not yet, unsure of what you were getting to. He reached down to grab his keys and he focused back on the door. “Why are you asking?” He unlocked the door and threw it open, getting you both inside finally. He set you on your couch and sat on the floor in front of you. You looked at him suspiciously, now roused from your sleep. The only thing on your mind was that dream- it had to be a memory! You refused to understand it as anything but that. You prodded, “On the beach, I told you I’d be by your side forever.” He seemed to weigh your thoughts heavily in his mind, “... did you forget about us?” You didn’t expect what felt like cold water to hit your back so hard and so suddenly at his suggestion. He didn’t seem hurt at the thought, instead, he found himself occupied with your reaction. His hand reached out to rub the side of your face as you looked at him with wide, guilty eyes. “Don’t worry about it. Your sister told me this kind of thing might happen…” His calloused thumb traced over your lip, and he offered a smile the best he could, “I’ll try to explain it.” Tsukishima explained that what you remembered happened about four years ago and you had been living together ever since. He motioned to photos on the walls of the two of you and people who you could just hardly remember. When you rested your index finger on an individual who was much scrawnier than most of the people there, sitting on the bench with you and watching you speak with admiration, Tsukki put his hand over yours. “That’s your sister. She took most of these pictures, but she usually sits next to you when you have a space available.” You nodded and closed your eyes. You began to remember summers you spent with her in childhood and her yelling at you to do your homework when you bothered her as you got older. You smiled a bit. Once your eyes opened again, your finger traveled to possibly the tallest person in the room. He was big, but you remembered something warm and comfortable about that man… “That’s Kuroo. You both went to the same high school and you were in his friend group.” You both went on like that for a while until you’d cleared everyone in that picture. Once you did, you sat down to think over the new cluster of names you’d picked up. “... when you promised you’d be here with me forever, did you remember what I promised to you?” Kei asked as he sat next to you. “No… I just remember what happened on the beach up until you threatened to kill me if I took back my promise.” “Oh, right. I was going through that phase,” He seemed displeased with the comment. You found it almost funny but refrained from laughing for his sake. He continued, in a quieter tone, “I promised that if something happened to you, that I would always be here for you, too. That I’d get you back into shape.” His larger hand gently entwined with yours, “... so if you remember that promise and you’ll have me, I’d love to marry you once you get your memories back. … If you want to. I-” You cut him off with a hug to his side, trembling a bit as your emotions got the better of you. You smiled up at him. “I can’t promise I’ll be better fast, and I still feel like several trucks ran through me at once… but I’m happy,” you managed out. You didn’t know what your face looked like right about now and you didn’t have the nerve to look up into Kei’s glasses to check your reflection. He wrapped his arms around you in return, pressing the side of his face against your head. “Please, don’t give me an answer yet. You’re not in the right mental state. I’ll wait for you until you’re ready.” You ran your hands up and down his back. You weren’t exactly afraid of remembering things, but you were quite anxious for what tomorrow might bring for both of you. Despite that, you felt safe recovering in his arms, and you were sure you’d feel that way for a long time.

Have a link to the sexy sexy masterlist down here as well. Unless you’re done reading, then have a good day. But if you’re not there’s some fire stuff in that bad boy.

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starshipsofstarlord · 3 years

Text

A Dormant Fuse | Peter Parker and

For the last couple of weeks, Peter had been off, there was something soon to erupt from his mind. (Y/N) was worried about her boyfriend, he was never this distant, or secretive. Whatever was going on in the boy’s mind, he wasn’t overly keen on sharing it.

She respected his privacy, however she wished to spend some time with him, they had known each for so long, it was strange and discomforting for her to see him in such a solitary way. As she stood by her locker, her (Y/E/C) eyes watched as he kept his head down, as he walked out of his science class.

Ned was next to her, a frown also covering his face. He too knew that there was a shadow hanging over his best friend’s head, but alike to (Y/N), he couldn’t make out its shape. There was the structure of a web present, Peter appeared trapped in its coils, like a fly that was entangled by a spider’s convincing trap.

“Are you aware what is going through his mind, he’s different since our trip to Oscorp?” The words fell from (Y/N)’s mouth, she had already timed his untimely change in presence. He was never fully conscious of his surrounding, or he was too so. He’d pick up on the tiniest sounds, see smallest scriptures, and that was all since their field trip to the large and uprising company.

Oscorp was famous for its wrangling of power and experiments. There were so many secrets within its walls, however there was one specific piece of information that Ned tried to refrain from sharing with (Y/N). But it was difficult, she deserved to have as much truth on the matter, and Peter as a whole, as possible.

He released a sigh, knowing that later that he could possibly regret his process of involvement, but he too was also friends with (Y/N), since she moved to Queens those years ago, a touchy subject that was always evaded was Peter’s parents. They weren’t here, and they were not alive in conversation either. “He’s probably a little emotional about going there.” (Y/N) frowned lightly,

misunderstanding how that could be so, mulling her mind for the reason. “His dad used to work there, he was partners with Norman Osburne. And then one day he up and left his job, and his son, and that’s why he lives with May, his parents were assumed dead since their sideways business trip.”

It was a large toll to carry, (Y/N) couldn’t imagine how her boyfriend felt day after day. It must have been hard, and probably the most difficult thing that the boy had ever done. Dealing with Flash was one thing, but entering a building of a past, a building that his father had authority and council in, was much more complex.

“Shit.” She breathed, unsure of how to respond to Ned. There wasn’t really much that she could say, nothing would resurrect Peter’s parents, and to cut the conversation short, Peter was walking towards them, his unruly haired bowed towards the floor, as though he was doing his best impression of the invisible man.

The only thing was though, Ned and (Y/N) could see him clearly, even through the flocks of students. To them, he was the only prominence that they could see, making his silent way through the groups and towards them. His expression was readable, he didn’t want to talk, or be seen, or pretty much anything.

Life was a mystery, and so was the clamped mouths of (Y/N) and Ned. He had heard them, discussing his family’s history, but that was not all that was bothering. Whilst he looked at them, he had his face dressed in a soft frown, they were clueless, but in all respect, so was he. Things were different, as suspicious as the hushed terms written all over his friends’ faces.

He didn’t have the heart, or gut, or spleen, to tell them the truth. He was bitten, and although that sounded like the start of some teenage, supernatural show, it wasn’t something with fangs or glowing eyes that had dug its teeth in. Instead it was a spider, a simple insect, it happened on the field trip, and the after affects proceeded to continue.

A part of him thought that his body was filling with adrenaline, spiralling his senses until he would die. His hearing was now spectacular, his sight amazing, everything had increased in strength. Before he was weak, puny even, and now he was substantially different.

He felt so, as though this entire ordeal was to change who he was and what he chose to do with his life. But he was still young, there was plenty for the boy to figure out.

“Hey.” His voice rolled into their ears as a mumble, and his lips pressed lightly upon (Y/N)’s cheek. The worst part of all of this was that she was worrying about him, concerned and uncertain of how to help. He, though, wasn’t sure that he could be helped, it felt like a lifetime curse that he’d never shake.

“We still on for tonight?” May was out, and Peter had invited (Y/N) over for dinner, a bit of one on one time. Sometimes it was nice to share a moment of privacy, and this was the perfect opportunity.

“Yeah.” A tight lipped, yet honest, smile stretched across his mouth, although it came across to his mind as more of a grimace. (Y/N) grasped Peter’s hand, saluting Ned and the pair bidding goodbye, before fleeing the scene of the high school.

When they got to his apartment, the pair was fast to put their belongings on the ground, and trudge towards the kitchen out of hunger. Peter opened the fridge, pulling out a tub of leftovers that he and May had endured the night before, walking towards the fridge.

The couple stood in silence, until the microwave pinged, alerting them that their food was ready and hot. In solace, (Y/N) walked towards the cupboard that housed the plates, and grabbed a couple.

However her hand slipped from the plates, landing on the floor with a scarring crash. They were in pieces, and so was (Y/N) as she shook and fearfully looked towards Peter’s whose eyes were wide from the alerting noise.

He was most probably angry, furious maybe, (Y/N) thought. Peter was going through enough right now, more than she knew, and to top it all off, she had added to his pain and frustrations.

“Sorry.” She breathed, almost not believing in what she had done. It was a grave mistake, something that she’d have to somehow make up for. “I’m so sorry Pete, I didn’t mean to, I was just thinking, and now I can see I was doing that too much. I shouldn’t have been distracted, it’s my fault, all my fault!”

“Calm down baby.” He instantly walked over to his girlfriend, grabbing her hands in attempts to stop her from trying to collect up the porcelain pieces from the ground. “It’s okay, are you okay? You’re not hurt are you?”

His brown eyes examined her arms and hands for any signs of a breakage in the skin, to his relief he found none. He led her a little ways away from the mess, ignoring the fact that their meal was ready to be dishes up.

At his words and concerns, (Y/N) frowned, she had expected a very different reaction from the boy. However a part of her was relieved that he cared more for her than house ware.

“I’m good.” But there there was one thing on her mind. “Are you though, you’ve been acting different recently, like really so?”

Peter bit his lip, he should have expected this. It was waiting to spill from her mouth before him, he had heard her worry earlier. And that was one thing that he didn’t want her to do, worry for him in such a way.

“If you wanna know, I’ll tell you, but it’s strange...” He smiled, they were okay, and it was the truth that would set him free, and refrain his girlfriend from being so concerned for his well-being.

She deserved to know, and wanted to. If they were supposed to be, she wouldn’t freak over the affects of the small bite, she’d rub his shoulders and allow him to break upon her, in his lost and confused state.

#peter parker x y/n #peter parker x you #peter parker oneshot #peter x reader #peter x y/n #peter imagine #peter parker imagines #peter smut #peter parker #spiderman x y/n #spiderman x reader #spiderman imagines #spiderman oneshot #imagine #imagines #xreader

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asteriismos · 4 years

Text

politics - jacob thrombey

authors note : pls listen to ‘tear you apart’ by she wants revenge while reading this literally. I hope this is at least consistent i did not proofread.

warning(s) : smut, swearing, degrading stuff

words : 3.4k

summary : you’re the liberal, bernie sanders lover at your prep school and jacob is the conservative nazi. the day of your schools political rally each of you finally get rid of that underlaying tension between you two.

“and oh my god he does this thing with his tongue and it just-”

“jesus, holly, we’re supposed to be talking about the rally,” you said to your friend, giving her daggers when you glanced at her. it was a day until the rally your private school, buxton prep, had every four years for the presidency.

in usual democratic, liberal fasion, you were rallying for bernie sanders. since you were a senior this year you got to run the whole project, which was obviously more work than you thought it would be, but then again it would look good on college applications. it also got you out of going to the boring classes you didn’t want to go to. all you had to do was raise your hand and say you needed to do something for the rally, and the teacher would dismiss you like it was nothing.

when you were a little freshman four years ago during the previous election, you were a part of the democratic team as well. though at that time you were just a little fourteen year old, so the seniors and juniors basically made you their lackey. you got coffee for them, baked so many cookies, and went on too many food runs you lost track of the number. you also made so many signs your fingers bled from the amount of paper cuts you got.

overall, you were very happy that you didn’t have to do that this year. call it hazing, but it made sense that the freshman were tasked with doing all that stuff.

at your school, which was too preppy it made rival schools want to throw up, the freshman were at the bottom of the food chain. and you had worked really hard to be the senior that you were now. you were popular, always having a group of lackeys, and had one of the best grades in your entire class.

“. . . sorry y/n, but i am working, look at these signs,” holly said, holding up the sign she was working on. it was a nice sign. holly was purposely tasked with doing the designs because she wanted to be an art major, and she was just a sophomore so you didn’t feel bad about telling her she needed to make fifty.

you gave her a feigning proud smile, nodding your head. “okay, whatever you say. who are you talking about anyways?”

holly looked up from her work, a blush splaying across her face. “no one, don’t worry about it, it was a one time thing.”

her eyes, however, gave it away. they looked past you and right at the group of boys who you despised. well, some of them were good, but they were led by someone who you fucking hated it made your blood boil.

dressed in the boys uniform of your school, a dark blue sweater with a white collar popped out and black dress pants, was jacob thrombey. he was talking to some of the other boys in the senior class, motioning with his hands while he talked expressively. you looked back at holly with wide eyes, realizing that jacob was the person that she had been talking about.

“you did not sleep with jacob thrombey,” you said, mouth agape with shock.

holly laughed nervously. “like i said, it was a one time thing! it was at that party you said you were going to go with the group to and you never showed up. i was horny i don’t know.”

“oh, that party, right,” you said with a shrug. you said that you would meet your group of friends at the party that colin ( another boy of the thrombey group ) was hosting this past weekend. but then the more you thought about it, the more you didn’t want to go because getting wasted on a saturday night and possibly ending up in bed with anyone from that group did not sound like a fun time. plus you wanted to take a bath and watch netflix, have a little relaxing night. “still . . . sleeping with the enemy?”

you tuned out holly’s excuses, instead searching your bag for the flyers that you thought you had put in there that you printed in the library earlier. they weren’t there, you probably just forgot to take them and left them in the library by the printer. you groaned, excusing yourself from the group and walking out of the cafeteria.

your black dress shoes clanked against the smooth tile of the hallway. you anxiously pulled down your dark blue and black checkered skirt so that nothing you didn’t want showing was showing. the skirts were already short enough, which was a little sexist on the schools part, but it was your uniform. there was nothing that you could really do about it.

the library was unlocked, thank god. you turned the lights on and walked in, making your way to the back to the printers. once you got there you saw your flyers sitting there where they had been left by you in second period.

soft footsteps echoed closer to you and you turned around, seeing jacob walking over to the printers, phone in hand. suddenly the other printer next to you started up, signaling that he was printing something too. probably his own posters.

“hey y/n,” he greeted, glancing at you and then leaning against the table, fingers tapping against the wood.

you scoffed. “thrombey. following me?”

“no, I know this is going to be a dent in your little rich girl complex, but the world doesn’t revolve around you. i’m printing stuff for the rally,” he replied. of course he was.

jacob was running the donald trump campaign for the rally. making you hate him even more than you already did. the way that he acted like no one else in the world mattered except himself made you want to rip your hair out, and the fact that he had the audacity to act like you were the entitled one.

instead of getting political with him ( because that would be happening all day tomorrow ), you looked at him and said, “could you maybe stop fucking my friends?”

jacob looked at you quizzically. “what do you mean?”

“holly said you hooked up with her at that party, could you maybe not fuck my friends? or if you’re going to hook up with them at least stop hooking up with sophomores. i know they’re easy and can’t see how much of an asshole you are but seriously. gross,” you scoffed.

“are you jealous?”

you squinted at him. “no, i’m not fucking jealous. i just don’t want you to hook up with her again and then she comes crying to me because you wanted to do knife play or something.”

jacob only laughed, taking the pile of flyers that finished printing. “why do you think i’m such a sadist?”

“because we all know those hand marks on carissa’s neck last year weren’t just a coincidence after you hooked up with her.”

he didn’t answer, instead shrugging his shoulders and watching away. you sighed, realizing that you were never going to get him to listen to anything you said ever. he was too much of an ass, luckily soon enough you never would have to see him again after you graduate.

today was the day of the rally, and you were more than excited. the only problem was that you were stressed out of your mind trying to get everything set up in your large booth. everyone was either setting up the blue cookies that had been baked or getting the pins ready to hand out with sanders printed on them in large blue letters.

“where are the shirts?” you asked one of your helpers, giving her a condescending look. “don’t tell me you left them in mrs. prescott’s classroom.”

she had. fucking god.

you shook your head and turned on your heel, walking away from your booth and leaving someone else in charge while you were gone. you turned the corner and made your way into the big classroom.

“what the hell are you going here?” a male voice asked. it was jacob, who was looking in a box that had your name on it. it was the box with the shirts.

you walked over to where he was and grabbed the box away from him. “what are you doing with my shirts?”

“just looking, shitty design,” he said.

you scoffed. “you’re an ass you know that? no one actually likes you, you have no respect from anyone but your little meathead jocks.” you meant to get him mad, but the look he gave you realized that he was in a more angry mood than he usually is.

“you think you’re such a tough bitch,” jacob yelled at you, pushing you back with such force you felt your stomach drop. his hands came to your shoulders and pushed you again, until you were pressed all the way up against the wall. your shoulder blades dug against the cold concrete, back of your head hitting against it. “you think that you’re so fucking entitled,” he went on, his body capturing yours in a hold so you couldn’t squirm out.

your hands came to his chest, trying your best to push him away from him. his arms were pressed against the wall, still trapping you. in a leap of faith, you looked up into his piercing green eyes and gave him a smirk. “yeah? and what are you going to do about it, thrombey? teach me a lesson?”

a sadistic smile came across his face, which made you instinctively press your thighs together, realizing how wet you actually were just looking at him, just feeling how close he was to your body.

“you’d like that wouldn’t you? for me to teach you a lesson, fuck you until you can’t stand,” he hissed, his head ducked down and pressed hot kisses against your neck. his teeth grazed along that sweet spot and you gasped, your hands now balling up into fists on his chest. jacob laughed against your neck, using his tongue to lick a clean stripe all the way up your neck to the edge of your jaw. “amazing how much of a needy bitch you actually are. not really that tough, are we?”

“fuck you,” you said in a weak voice, feeling his hips grind against your own. he laughed again at your weak attempts to savor the last bit of dignity you had left in you, even though your own body was betraying your mind. your brain was going haywire, not knowing if you were going to push him all the way off of you and leave, or if you were going to give into the temptation.

the latter ended up winning and you succumbed into his touch, pulling him by his shirt to kiss you. the second his lips landed on yours his tongue slipped into your mouth, fighting with your own and ultimately winning in the little power play you had going on with him.

he pulled off your shirt, leaving you in nothing but your bra and skirt that was being hiked up by his other hand. you worked aimlessly on his own clothing, pulling off the dark blue blazer and only being left with his white collared button up undershirt to be in between the skin of both of your chests. your hands came up to take off his tie and get the buttons undone, but his own hands grabbed your wrists, tutting condescendingly.

“that’s not how this is going to go, princess,” jacob said, pulling your hands to his belt of his black dress pants. “did you really think that i was going to let you be in control? i know that you’re a brat, but i didn’t think that you were dumb.”

you whined at his words, hating that his degrading words turned you on even more. his eyes motioned down to the ground and you quickly realized what he wanted. jacob stepped away from you enough to make you slink to your knees, hands still connected to the waistband of his pants.

deciding to play the brat card with him, you looked up at him and said, “what do you want me to do, jacob?” it was in the most innocent tone you had ever made in your life and the look that he gave you almost made you cum in your pants right then and there.

your hands came to palm him through his pants, keeping your eyes on him to see jacob’s head throw back with a low groan. his hands found their way to your hair, while you gave his growing bulge a light kiss. you continued to do this until his head came back to look down at you, hand moving to hold you by your jaw. “enough of this,” he spat, undoing his belt and watching as you unzipped his pants and pull them down to the ground. he took himself into his hands and pumped lazily a few times, until letting it rest on your closed lips.

precum wiped against your kiss swollen lips as you opened your mouth, tongue falling out, waiting for him to do anything. he tutted again, other hand gripping your hair, finally pushing his dick into your mouth. he went as far as he could, hitting the back of your throat and watching you gag around it. you didn’t let yourself gag too much though, just enough to get remotely comfortable as he stilled in your throat.

then he started moving your head up and down his cock, finding a steady rhythm that had you breathing in and out rapidly through your nose, spit dripping off his shaft and down your chin. the lewd noise that came out of your mouth made you moan, the vibrations enough to make him groan himself.

he pulled you off of him, spit falling and getting everywhere on your face. “at least your pretty while i face fuck you, unlike your little friend holly. she just kept gagging and choking, which was hot at first, then a little sad,” he mentioned, wiping some of the spit off your chin with his thumb.

you were about to talk to him again, until he was pushing right back into your mouth, to which you hollowed your cheeks out as much as you could to fit all of him in there.

the sounds of his noises sent pressure right to your core, and you needed to alleviate the hot pressure that was building. sneakily ( or what you thought was sneakily ), your hands came to play with your clit, making you groan out against his dick. this caught his attention, and he pulled all the way out of you to give you a frown.

“are you actually touching yourself without my permission?” he asked, his voice teasing you and making you feel like a little girl.

your eyes widened, feeling stupid from his words and scared about what he was going to do about you getting caught in the act. he was silent, only looking at you with those dark green eyes that made you squirm under his gaze. without speaking, he pulled off the tie he was wearing and grabbed your hands, pushing your wrists together behind you.

you couldn’t see what he was going to do until you felt the fabric bite into your skin, hearing the fabric fold into a tight knot. you tried to move your hands away from the tie and you couldn’t, they were tied together, unable to do anything. you were completely in his control now.

“i'm sorry jacob . . . please i want to touch you,” you whined, though your voice was breaking from him ruining your throat.

he just laughed. “no, you wanted to touch yourself. don’t lie y/n, or i’ll just keep you like this and make you watch me finish myself off.”

you hated that you found how cruel he was being hot, that it made you even more wet at the thought of him doing anything he wanted to you now that you were completely in his control.

“get up,” he ordered, grabbing you under your arms and helping you onto your feet. it took you a moment to steady yourself since you didn’t have much balance, though you weren’t standing for long when he pulled you over a few feet away and bent you over the closest desk. your chest pressed against the cold surface, he pushed your head down too, cheek against the wood.

he pulled you by the hair to hold you up, feeling his cock press up against you. “suck on these real quick for me princess,” jacob muttered, pushing two fingers into your mouth. you moaned against them, wiping your tongue all around them, letting your spit catch along his long digits. “good girl,” he praised, pulling them out of your mouth, pulling away your panties and inserting both of them into your aching hole.

you yelped at the sudden pleasure, but pushed your hips against his hand, feeling him pump them in and out over and over again at an unforgiving pace. “is this what you wanted? just to be touched by someone you claim you hate,” his fingers pulled out of you, his hand landing to steady your hips.

you heard him fumble a little bit, pushing into you after a few seconds went by. he was so big, and didn’t waste any time to let you adjust. when he bottomed out, he pulled all the way out and then back in roughly. you clenched around him, gasping breath in and out in a desperate attempt to adjust to him.

even though he was going at an already fast pace, you could tell he was holding back. so you smirked, saying, “you said you’d fuck me till i can’t stand, but here i am standing.” jacob laughed, pulling you up by the hair again. you felt his hot breath fan against the shell of your ear as he whispered, “whatever you say.”

his hips began rutting against you at an unbelievable pace, making you almost scream, head still being held up only by his hand in your hair. his lips kissed the skin below your ear, all the way down to the back of your neck, making you shiver and lean into his touch.

your legs were already feeling tired, especially since your hands were still tied behind you by his tie and you couldn’t use them to hold yourself up. you felt like a limp rag doll against the desk while he pounded relentlessly into you.

you were already so worked up that you knew you weren’t going to last very long, and surprisingly enough the way that the edge of the desk was digging into your hip bones the more you reached closer and closer to that edge.

“fuck jacob i’m going to cum,” you yelled out, fingernails clenching into the palms of your hands. “please, please let me cum.”

“well since you asked so nicely,” jacob said. “cum then.”

you yelped out, squeezing around him and hitting your high like hitting a hard brick wall. the impact of him still rutting relentlessly and animal like into you made it hard for you to stand, riding out your high. his arm came to wrap around your waist, holding you against the desk while he chased his own high.

the sensitivity you felt was enough to make your eyes water. jacob was not that far behind you though, giving you one last good thrust then spilling inside of you. you felt the cum enter you and fill you up, and when he pulled out you felt the liquid run down your inner thighs.

the sounds of each of your breaths filled the room. your wrists were undone and you leaned against the desk, turning around and looking at them. there were deep purple bruises in a ring along them, and you knew those were going to be impossible to cover up with makeup to make your skin look natural.

each of you were silent while he got dressed and you cleaned him off of your thighs with a kleenex, getting dressed yourself. until you said, “you’re lucky i’m on birth control, asshole. you didn’t even ask me if you could come inside.”

“I figured you were, seemed like you,” he retorted.

“you’re still unbelievable,” you answered, deciding to pin up your hair because there was no way you would be able to make it look normal while it was down.

jacob tied his tie and gave himself a once over. “yeah, and you’re still a brat. see you at the rally, hopefully your voice recovers or else you’ll have to explain to all of your liberal bitches about how you got on your knees for me.”

asshole.

#jacob thrombey #jacob thrombey x reader #jacob thrombey smut #jacob thrombey imagine #knives out #knives out imagine

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tsarisfanfiction · 3 years

Note

I spun the wheel! Trapped + Beach = John :)

From Across The Ocean

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Family/Hurt/Comfort Characters: John, Scott

And this should be the last one from the original batch that came through, at least. Sorry it’s taken a whole week to answer... uni is hectic and my muses rebelled by being unco-operative.

I’m eyeing this prompt and I’m thinking this might get a little into panic attack territory, rather than anything physically whumpy, so small warning there.

Spin the wheel of whump and give me a character!

This was a bad idea. This was a terrible idea and John had no idea why he’d ever agreed to it. Had he even agreed to it, or was it one of those times where no-one had bothered to ask him and he’d just been dragged along anyway? It had been a few years since the last time that had happened, his family learning their lesson about forcing him out of his comfort zone the hard way, and he found it hard to believe that they’d make that mistake again.

Then again, his family weren’t here. His family were back home, probably fast asleep because of the time difference, leaving him with a group of college peers who had decided for some reason that the best thing to do was a day trip to the beach. He’d been dragged, entirely reluctantly, to join them with promises that it was a quiet beach and no, there wouldn’t be many people.

Clearly, they thought it was a little white lie and that he’d get over it. His course mates were still strangers, acquaintances at best, and hadn’t yet understood that his reclusive nature was entirely by choice. He wasn’t shy, he just didn’t like people.

And he hated crowds.

The beach was a hive of activity, teeming with humans in a living, breathing, pulse of people. He’d frozen up, unable to take another foot forwards, to join that monster, and his stupid, ignorant course mates had just laughed and dragged him through the sand until he was stuck right in the heart of it all.

Then they’d left him, dumped him on bag duty on the assumption that he was just being antisocial and therefore could guard their bags while they all threw themselves into the sea - teeming with almost as many bodies as the sand of the beach itself - and all John could feel was the pressure of so many people.

Packed in like sardines, people kept touching him, a hand on his shoulder as they skipped over the bags piled around him in a scrambled defensive barrier that completely failed at its designated task, tripping over his feet even though he was hugging his knees tightly to his body, trying to make himself small enough that no-one would notice him, no-one would touch him.

It didn’t help. It didn’t stop the noise, didn’t stop the people brushing past him, didn’t stop the claustrophobia or the choked-up feeling in his throat. Breathing was hard, too hard, and he should unfurl himself, but that meant making a larger surface area for people to interact with, and just the thought of that tightened his airways more.

He couldn’t get out. He didn’t care about the bags, would happily abandon them in a heartbeat if it meant escaping, no matter how his course mates would react, but getting out meant clambering over warm bodies, meant doing to other people what was being done to him, meant more physical contact, and the mere idea of it was enough to have tears running down his cheeks, air harder and harder to draw in.

He was trapped. No way out, no escape, and he curled up tighter, praying for the hell to miraculously disappear.

His phone dug into his thigh, poking through the thin shorts he’d been prodded into wearing for the trip, and it was stupid, but John was long past rational thought as he fumbled it from his pocket, almost dropping it into the sand when trembling fingers failed to grip it properly, and instinctively mashed the first number on speed dial.

Almost immediately, he went to end the call, a spike of rationality hitting again. A phone call wasn’t going to help, and the time difference meant he’d still be asleep anyway and-

“John?”

The call connected before he could cut it, his big brother’s voice distorted by the speakers and still drowsy with sleep, and his trembling fingers froze just short of the end call symbol.

“John, are you okay?”

Scott’s first instinct was concern, even though he was clearly still waking up, but perhaps that should be because he was still waking up. John knew the timezones, did the math instinctively, and never called them before dawn.

Back in Kansas, dawn was still a little way off.

“John?”

Concern was rapidly shifting to worry, and it was that familiar tone, the big brother sensing something was wrong and immediately hunting for ways to set things right, that had him whimpering his brother’s name.

Scotty. He hadn’t called him that in years. Not like this, a plea and a prayer.

“I’m here, John,” Scott promised, even though he was just a voice in his ear, not one of the warm bodies pressing against him - the only warm body John ever willingly suffered on a regular basis, because the rest of the world was one thing, but his big brother was a barrier of safety. “Can you talk to me?”

The sleep had vanished from his voice, big brother wide awake at the prospect of a little brother in distress. John hadn’t been that little brother in years.

Since the last time he’d called for Scotty in that little whimpered plea and prayer.

He tried, searched for words, attempted to vocalise them, but he couldn’t grasp them, couldn’t get his breathing to stop hitching long enough for his lips to form them.

“Okay, okay.” Scott cut through his attempts, calm and steady in a whirlwind world that wouldn’t stay still. “Okay, John, you need to breathe. Can you take a breath for me? As deep as you can.”

He tried, clinging to his brother’s voice, but his throat hitched again and it turned into the gasp of a drowning man. Scott stayed steady in his ear, reassuring him, coaxing him to try again, counting him until there was air reaching his lungs again and wrapping him in the security of a big brother.

There was no demand what was wrong. No insistence that he talk to him, even though John knew Scott had to be panicking and running through scenario after scenario in his head, trying to work out what had sparked the whole mess. Just reassurance, a steady voice in his ear keeping him grounded and helping him breathe.

“Sorry.” It slipped out, an apology for worrying his brother, for waking him up, for forcing him to help him from the other side of the Atlantic.

“Don’t apologise.” Scott’s reply was quick, automatic, and predictable. “I’m always here if you need me, John. Always.” The last word was more than a promise, it was an insistence, a full binding oath. “Where are you?”

The warm bodies were still there, but Scott’s voice was like a forcefield, keeping the full force of them from hitting him. Keeping him safe.

He told him, even though there was nothing Scott could do about it. His big brother couldn’t work miracles, no matter how hard he tried, but a small part of John clung to the childish hope that maybe, just maybe, Scott would appear in front of him and guide him out of there.

Of course, that didn’t happen. Scott was in Kansas, teleportation still only existed in fiction, and John was on a beach in England.

What did happen, a while later but John was still on the phone, still talking to Scott about anything and everything and trying desperately to forget where he was, was a flash of blond and designer sunglasses covering bright blue eyes.

“John, darling,” Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward said, delicately picking her way past the warm bodies towards him, her own forcefield of upper class and a scowling bodyguard parting them like the old story of Moses and the Red Sea. “You look rather lost.”

A perfectly manicured hand hovered in front of him, not quite touching but an invitation, and John accepted it.

The bags were forgotten, a lesson for course mates to learn, as she led him out through the crowds and into a familiar pink car.

His phone was still pressed to his ear, the call still connected even though Scott had stopped talking when John had stopped responding, and John didn’t know how he’d done it, but, “Scott?”

“Yes, John?”

“Thank you.”

“Any time, little brother.”

There was only one way Penelope could have known to come looking for him.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds are go fanfiction #tsari writes fanfiction #john tracy #scott tracy #thunderangst #drabbles #such-a-random-rambler #from across the ocean

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temptingempress · 3 years

Text

The Mafia’s Princess J.hs (2)

Summary: “I can’t loose you because if I loose you I loose myself. You’re all I have left.” she begged him to put the gun down. Her bloody knees splashed into the mud. Helicopters surrounded them and the sirens were getting closer and closer but she could think about was him. The man whom she fell in love with, standing in front of them. Gun pointed towards his head.

This is a HoseokxOc story but feel free to think of her as y/n. I just didn't want to call her y/n so I used my own character that you'll see in a lot of my stories but her mood and temperment will change in each story.

Warning: A bit of sexual interaction but nothing too much, weapons, skin damage, cursing, DIOR FREAKING HOSEOK. AKA: SUPERIOR HOSEOK.

Previous: https://temptingempress.tumblr.com/post/639443379410927616

Hauling Areum away in his arms from the vent into his arms, he opened the window just to see that the cops and dogs were guarding the entire motel, just waiting for them to come back and attack. He had to think and he had to think fast or else they’ll both be dead meat. He looked around and spotted one place where the dogs nor the cops have reached yet. The garbage bin. Of course, it was disgusting but it was the only chance they got.

Hoseok’s P.O.V

I sigh as I held Areum close to my chest, there’s no way that she could be seen by the police or else it’s pretty much over for her and her family. I quickly set Areum down being careful not to to injure her even more than I already did. I had some spare time until the cops could reach this area. Taking my jacket off, I carefully wrapped it on her wounded leg so no infection would begin to grow. I had to get her back home and I had to do it fast. There she could be met with a medic. This all has me wondering if I should just drop her off at the place she belongs and leave her be. All I am is trouble in her life. I am in everybody's and I really dont give a shit. I’ve become my own nightmare that lost it’s mercy ten years ago but when it comes to her. I swear I’d do anything. I’ve become so selfish and allowed my heart to become enslaved in chains to her love. To her affection. To the way she smiles or the way the moonlight touches her soft skin.

Love is tortuous, I feel myself going on a never ending rollercoaster with her. She was the worst thing that ever happened to me but the best thing at the same time. She can’t let me go and that’s the worst part about this relationship because I know at some point she’s going to have to let me go. Not that I want to go. I want to be her dream man and offer everything she wants that she deserves but not off of blood money. I’ve never thought that one time in my life I’d be regretting being a mafia lord. Love is powerful.

All this goes through my mind as I picked her up once more and jumped into the trash can, where there were a lot of bags. Yes, it’s risky to possibly get stabbed by glass shards or bitten by a rat but it was better than prison. Our landing sound was muffled by the plastic bags. The cops were approaching so I closed the bin and hid myself and Areum to the best of my ability. There happened to be a small hole that I peeped through to see if the cops were going along their way but they weren’t. They were just guarding the whole hotel as well as their dogs. We needed a distraction so I picked up a rusted old wrench and while they werent looking aimed it at the highest window that was out of the cop’s eyesight, so of course they wouldn’t see the wrench. Once the glass broke the cops shouted and ran towards the window, holding their guns up. I took Areum when the coast was clear and silently got out of there, running far away into the woods. Once I was far enough, I slung Areum onto my back and looked into my suitcase for a pager. “I need a car sent to Eastwood Urgently.”

Eastwood was about 5 miles away but it was the only place where I knew to navigate to from here. My pager dings before a man starts to talk “Yes sir, it will take us fifteen minutes. Parked in the garage sir.”

“Thanks Jungkook. Coming home soon, prepare med for Areum. She got a bog bite...” I looked at Areum’s leg. Lines of slightly opened bloody flesh lined along her legs “And a bit of a scratch.”

As I kept walking on the cops were soon long gone or so I think. You never know in this field of work. I had a long ways to go and there was no way Areum could walk on her feet. She wasn’t very heavy so I could handle it. Walking through nature was quite nice actually. It’s not something I usually do. I had to make it to Eastwood before the sun rose because if not I could get caught by someone. I felt Areum shift her head on my back, and soon her hips.

“Baby?” I say to her as she regains her conscious. I went to a tree and sat her down onto the leaves so she could wake up and I could take a small break before we move again.

Areum’s P.O.V

An instant sting shot onto my leg as if somebody took sharp nails and dragged it along on my skin. “Augh!” I whimpered as I reached for the long bloody scratch. I saw that a sweater was wrapped around my bloody wounds. I don’t even remembered what happened after being in that vent. All I remember was darkness. “It hurts.” my voice cracks as my hands tried to rub down the cut to attempt to make it feel better but my attempts only made it worse. I wasn’t used to all this. I mean, small scars and such were common but this? My eyes began to water as the pain only got worse. It wouldn’t go away. Hoseok knelt towards me, caressing my cheeks. “Hey, you’re alright.”

Areum felt Hoseok’s heavy breaths as he continued to walk with her in his arms. Two hours passed and they were far out of the cop’s sight. They were almost to their destination but Hoseok’s steps became slower. Areum spoke “Stop, I could walk on my own now.” Hoseok shook his head as he kept walking. Sure, he was tired and he exhausted. He could just pass out right then and there but he wasn’t going to let go of her. “Hoseok.” Areum spoke louder as her fingers gripped his shirt. “Let me go.” “You’ll get hurt more Areum, I’ve already done enough to you!” He didn’t let go her, he couldn’t let her go but soon enough he had to let her go. “Let’s take a break.” he panted. Areum’s P.O.V

I laughed a little as he had to let me go sooner or later. Some long scratched lined my leg and I still felt the sting but it wasn’t unbearable. I could walk on my own now, well, at least limb. By looking at Hoseok slumped down on a tree I had to walk at this point “Okay, just get on my shoulders.” He panted and knelt down. I chuckled a bit as I tightened the ‘band aid’ Hoseok put on my cut. “No love.” I push Hoseok’s shoulders back up. “I need to start doing things on my own.” Five years ago. Areum’s P.O.V

The evening of the ball was wonderful to say the less but as the sun set over the horizon the part I dreaded came. The dance. Where my parents set up certain men from different kingdoms to dance with me. Expecting me to find my one and only true love but the truth was I liked none of these stuck up petty men. They think they all have me at their fingertips when really they all disgust me. With their pristine suits, perfect smiles, and expensive rings. I was so sick of seeing all of them but especially one of them, Namjoon.

Namjoon was the richest prince there was. Everyone knew him, loved him, and loathed him. He was the number one running to marry in my parents list but certainly not on mine. Taking a class of champagne before the dance I saw Namjoon coming towards me. Even down to the way he walks irritates me. Even though he didn’t do anything to me I just didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t want him to take me away to wherever he lived and trap me as his little house wife. Oh yeah, might I mention, all of Namjoon’s ex wives told me not to marry him because he’s demanding, bratty, and a so called womanizer.

He gave me a smile and fixed his glasses and I returned with a nice gesture. Coming close he looked down to me, admiring every aspect of my long golden dress. He finally spoke “Good day my lady, I’m looking forward to out dance.” I just smiled and nodded, just because I hated him didn’t mean I had to be rude to the guy. Even though I really wanted to punch his ass to ten buck two. His next words to me made me gag my champagne. “Maybe I could get more than a dance by the end of tonight.” He swayed away with a wink. Now I really wanted to get out of this place. That man was the epitome of sickness. The bell rung and it was already time for the dance. All the princesses gathered in front of the princes. I took my position right in front of Namjoon. The kings and queens oversaw from the tall stories. Overlooking their daughters with binoculars, seeing if they could see anything “magical.”

The dance has begun and we all followed the elaborate and precise steps to the rhythm. Princes caught us by our waist and held onto our hands tight. Twirling all around the dance floor I soon was caught by Namjoon. My soon to be king. He smirked down onto me as his hand traveled down my waist. I gave him a naïve smile but I really knew what he was doing all along. I couldn’t be more happy to spin again into another prince’s arms but Namjoon seemed disappointed that my body left his presence.

The dance went on and on and on. “I think we have found the one for Namjoon, may he have your daughter in marriage?” Namjoon’s father exclaimed loud enough for me to hear. My body went into full shock, I just wanted to get out of there. I knew my parent’s would say yes since they’ve been rooting for us.

Spinning

My eyes caught the guards running outside of the palace, everyone seemed distracted so I decided to discreetly take my leave. I lifted my long golden dress up and ran to where the guards were running towards. They led me all the way outside. I heard one of the guards running close so I pressed my back onto the brick wall surrounded by bushes so they wouldn’t see me. “There he is!” One of them yelled and chased after a man. I tried to get a closer look but all I could see was a leather black mask and all black attire. He seemed to have a black turtle neck a buckles along his chest. Strange, how could he even get into the castle’s quarters. I knew I shouldn’t of but I followed the thief, looking for some new excitement. The guards lost him but I knew exactly where he was heading, the maze. He was taking a shortcut to the maze. One that could be missed by the guards. It was strange that he knew where everything was in this castle, was he one of our workers before? He entered the maze and I came after him. I saw something shiny in his hands, aw it was my bracelet. As I followed I stepped on the noisiest branch.

Dang

The thief turned back, pulling out a black gun and it sure did look terrifying. Something that’s never allowed on the grounds of the castle. “Who goes there.” He spoke. “Come out or I will shoot.”

I didn’t really have a choice, the last thing I wanted to do tonight was get shot. Well, maybe it was better than getting engaged to Namjoon. I came out of the bushes and allowed my dress to flow down. I bowed at the thief lifting two sides of my dress up. Once I analyzed his face might I say... He wasn’t bad looking, he looked pretty good for a thief actually. “Princess Bailey.” The thief stood there for a bit, probably in shock he’s seeing me out of anyone. Hoseok’s P.O.V

This day couldn’t get anymore stranger. I put the bracelet in my pocket but held the gun tight in my hand. I wasn’t afraid to get royal blood splattered on my clothes. “Who do you come with. Where are the guards.” For some reason she just stood in front of me. Staring me down as if I was some sort of toy in the toy store. She took a step closer to me but I took two steps back, holding my gun higher to her head. If I shot at anytime she would for sure dead. This was one bold princess. She spoke once again “That bracelet, it’s mine. But, you could have it.” “I wasn’t asking.” “What is it for might I ask? Will you pawn it?” She seemed super calm when seeing a whole criminal right in front of her. The biggest one of Korea that is. “It’s for someone.” “Oh a gift? How kind of you sir. If you asked me I would’ve gave it to you.” “You don’t even know me. “ “Who are you then.” The princess smiled as she stepped closer again “I come in peace, please lower your gun.” Not budging still I get a small intercom out of my pocket and spoke “Bring the helicopter in the maze.” “Helicopter? That’s not very discreet. This castle is filled with security tools. You’ll surely get shot down.” She sung as her heels kicked the rocks on the ground. I thought about it and she did have a point. “Cancel the helicopter..” I turned the intercom off and looked at the princess. “Okay, then what do you suggest?” The princess smiled and turned to me. Happy that I gave her an inch. This may be a big trap but at this point I didn’t have a choice.

“Follow me.” She hums.

Hello everyone, I hoped you liked the part two of the Mafia’s Princess. Now you know a little backstory, I’m curious if anybody reads my story. If so could you please comment or anonymously tell me so I am more encouraged to continue it? Thank you so much and tell me what you think so far. I might accept request pretty soon! Thank you so much for reading :)

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thdorkmagnet · 3 years

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Light of the Sun and Stars Chapter 46: A Mewman and a Monster (Preview)

Summary: His whole life Marco Diaz has been raised by monsters, living under the cruel rule of their leader, Toffee. But one day Marco escapes into Mewni where he meets a magical princess and Mewman like himself, who begins teaching him all about her world. Together they will learn about life, love, and the lights within each of them, as they change their world forever.

Chapter Synopsis: Slime has asked his crush Princess Penelope Spiderbite out on a date and needing support, both emotionally and literally, calls upon Star and Marco for help. The two graciously lend a hand in helping create the most romantic date possible but, as usual, things rarely go the way they want it too.

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Index

The dimension was completely lifeless. Once a sprawling community had dwelled there, setting up residence in its green pastures and lush landscapes, living a simple and basic life amongst the natural resources all around them. But that peaceful lifestyle had changed when technology was first introduced to the humble society. At first it had been small changes, as it always started, machines and many mechanisms made to help make life easier. Need to plow the fields? Build a machine that could do it half the time you could.

Soon people were using machines for every part of their everyday life and with the invention of robotic helpers… everything changed. Their once grassy hills were torn up to make factories, their land broken and scarred for the sake of 'progress'. Soon their dimension more closely resembled a machine than a once thriving, living place. And the numbers of robots steadily grew, until they outnumbered all living beings 10 to 1.

Sunlight was blocked by heavy smog while frequent and heavy storms began to tear apart what was left of the landscape. The dimension became virtually unlivable and the people were filled with dismay.

That was until a mysterious benefactor appeared one day, offering to buy up the remaining usable land for unknown reasons. The people happily accepted the offer, using the money to relocate to a new dimension (hopefully with better luck than the last), leaving the new owner of the dimension to do with it however they wished. Soon they began construction on a single building, employing the many robots that still inhabited the place to the effort. It took a long time, even with beings that didn’t have the need to eat nor sleep at the head of construction, but eventually it was finished, a single living place in the dimension of dead architecture.

The place was a sight to behold: a clean, cut courtyard leading up to a grand, multi-story building. The architecture was ancient, borrowed from famous castles and cathedrals throughout the multiverse, a sharp contrast to the sleek, modern buildings the dimension had been so known for.

But for as magnificent as it seemed, there was something sinister as well, something dark lurking just behind the smoothly cut stones or grand balconies. A large metal fence had been built around the building, electrified at all times to deter anyone from entering or exiting through anything but the gate. A large tower stood above the building itself, pulsing with some dark magic that had been lost to time long ago. The building's architecture was full of sharp edges and spikes that could seriously harm anyone who was not weary of their surroundings. And though the grand double doors were made of the finest wood in any dimension, they opened onto halls of endless turns and deadends, a labyrinth built to keep everyone trapped inside forever.

But the creator of this school did not care how others viewed it, because this place was serving a grand purpose, educating and enforcing positive change on the future monarchs of the multiverse. St. Olga’s Reform School for Wayward Princesses was a school like no other, standing superior to any other education system that dared to compete with it, for it was focused solely on punishment and strict results. Every young princess that was sent there, no matter how rebellious or resistant they were, would eventually be broken. It didn’t matter if it took days, weeks, or years, St. O’s and its founder and principal, Heinous , had a perfect record that had never once been broken.

That was until a certain four-armed princess blew the whistle on the academy's “less than reputable” penalties and the school was shut down by the dimensional knights. The great Miss Heinous was forced on the run, leaving every part of her life, her career, her home, her minions, her legacy, to rot. She spent years on the run, just barely managing to stay one step ahead of the dimensional knights and any other form of military power a noble might hire to capture or kill her. But through it all, Heinous only had one thought that kept her going day in and day out. Revenge. Or rather, her legacy finally fulfilled. She often confused the two but it didn’t matter. The path was the same. The path to ultimate victory and control. The path of perfection.

And that path had led back to where it all began.

Nostalgia and old memories came flooding back to the once-proud principal as she stood in front of her old, decaying school. She could still picture it back in the prime of its life, see it as clear as if it were standing in the memory itself rather than the broken dream that stared back at her. Reality was far from the picture perfect days of old. Oh how the mighty had fallen.

Her once proud school was now in desperate need of repairs, walls caved in over the course of time, entire sections of the school now gone. The courtyard was now filled with untamed weeds and overgrown plant life. The tower that had once stood as a beacon of power for her school had been the first thing taken down by those pesky knights and it lay in shambles around the area, an ever present reminder of the injustice Heinous had suffered. The fence was bent and disfigured, was now full of giant, gaping holes in its structure making it completely useless, now it couldn’t even keep out the gust of wind that blew through the empty courtyard. The school had become nothing but an empty shell that had once housed life within it. Heinous couldn’t help but scoff at the irony, her greatest masterpiece was now no different to the rest of this forgotten waste of a dimension.

She took in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. No, she couldn’t start dwelling on all that now. She had come here for more than just reliving her past failures. Today was about seizing her future. A small cough behind her caused Heinous to roll her eyes. She had almost forgotten her hired hand had come with her, just in case some dimensional knights were lurking there and needed to be disposed of. It was clear that Rasticore, unlike her, was less than content with her dimension. She could practically feel Rasticore’s discomfort as he shifted from one foot to the other, over and over again. It was obvious he wanted to get this over with, something at least they could agree on, Heinous was ready to achieve the next step of her decade-long scheme.

“So are we going inside or not?” Rasticore finally asked and Heinous turned back to him with a narrowed glare.

“Why? Don’t tell me you are frightened of my school?” she accused him, point blank.

Rasticore tensed, before gritting his fangs, clearly holding back the retort. Instead he replied, “No, just all this smog is aggravating my condition.” He then made a point to cough into his claw.

Heinous highly doubted that was the reason for his rush. Not when it was more likely her minion was playing up his sickness to hide his discomfort from her. After all, he was recovering remarkably well from the poison, ready to resume his work in just a few short weeks, so a little foul air shouldn’t be upsetting him as much as he was pretending it was.

Still, she didn’t see any reason to delay things any further so Heinous just turned to her minion and said, “Very well, follow me.”

Entering into her old home was like walking into a portrait in time, everything left exactly as she remembered it. The knights must have left things the same for evidence reasons but Heinous ws surprised her school was still mostly intact. A few rooms had been caved in or hallways blocked and everything certainly needed a good dusting but from the view outside she had been expecting much worse. Paper and pencils lay on the dusty desks, ready to use, as if some child had just set them down and then vanished from this dimension. The banners holding old phrases and mottos Heinous would often repeat in classes were decaying but still hung up even after all these years. The only thing missing was her beloved robotic staff.

Shortly after her escape she had gotten word that all robots operating under her name had been discontinued and dismantled to “prevent further harm” as they had put it. Ha, as if her precious staff could be so cruel, every punishment was fully justified and all for the greater good. If only the royals of the multiverse had seen it that way. “Cruel and unnecessary” they had called it. Hypocrites! They were always happy with the results, even quick to praise her or offer her large sums of money as thanks, but the moment they knew how their beloved child came to be cured of their faults suddenly she was the villain, torturing their bratty children by making them perfect.

Well if they were too stupid and cowardly to see her perfect vision all the way through, then it was up to her to fix this miserable, chaotic world.

Heinous entered into her old office, staring at it with wistful eyes as memories came flooding back to her all over again. Every detail of the small space was exactly as she had remembered it, not a single stone out of place, even after all these years. She ran her hands across her desk, her fingers brushing the loose pieces of paper she had been reading through when the alarm had sounded. Old student files and report cards now yellowed with age and beyond salvaging Heinous could have read them with ease, every single letter saved to her subconscious.

Rasticore stood awkwardly in the doorway, watching as his temporary boss reminisced her old life. It was shocking in all honesty, the lizard assassin hadn’t even known Heinous had a smile that wasn’t sinister but she seemed… almost genuine now. That was until she came across a certain file and the peaceful look switched to a frown, the spell she was under was broken. She picked up the piece of paper, ripping it to shreds in a matter of seconds. Rasticore jumped but didn’t say a word as his boss fell deeper and deeper into a blind rage, picking up several other files and ripping them apart as well. Soon the room was coated in paper shreds and the desk was empty. Rasticore risked a look at what remained of the original file, surprised to see it was a young curly haired princess with four arms. He couldn't imagine what she had done to invoke such fire from the level-headed woman.

Once the temper tantrum was over, Heinous straightened her clothes and smoothed down her hair, making herself look presentable again before turning to her minion. “Well, let’s get started, shall we?” she said as if nothing had even happened. She reached her hand into one of the many pockets that lined her oversized dress and pulled out a small key covered in intricate carvings. Without a word she shoved the desk to the side, Rasticore taken aback by the sudden show of strength. He certainly hadn’t expected it from such a petite woman.

Heinous bent down and inserted the key into a small slot in the ground and turned it with a click. Suddenly, the ground beneath her feet collapsed and a long spiral staircase stretching into the darkness beneath was revealed. Heinous returned the key to her pocket before looking at Rasticore expectantly, much to his confusion. He had been caught off guard thanks to the multiple, unexpected turns this trip had taken and couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she was wanting. Her sharp eyes dug into his skin before she impatiently snapped, “Well? You are the one with the light.”

Rasticore could slap himself for being so stupid and he quickly pulled the lantern out from behind his cloak, already brightly lit by phoenix embers. Without a word he started down the stairs, practically feeling Heinous roll her eyes behind his back and he had to clench his claw so tightly a few trickles of blood formed on his leathery skin. For not the first time, Rasticore seriously debated on just how bad a reputation he would get for killing his employer in cold blood. The lizard assassin cursed himself for his integrity as a killer for hire, every other job had been so easy but this one was really testing just how far he was willing to go for his reputation. He probably would have quit entirely if he weren’t for those stupid brats that eluded him mulitple times. Every attempt he made to take that worthless Princess Star resulted in complete and utter failure and the humiliation ate away at him almost as much as his anger. So if having to endure Heinous a little longer meant seeing the looks on those brats' faces when they finally got what was coming to them… well Rasticore wouldn’t miss that for the world.

Rasticore smiled, imagining the faces of Butterfly and her friends when they realized they had lost and that brought a new fire back to his soul, descending the staircase with a new vigor. The lizard got a good look at his surroundings, his night vision easily spotting what it was they were down there for: robots. Dozens of them, old and rusted over to the point Rasticore questioned if they would even activate. He looked back at his boss, who was eying the robots with a glimmer of dark ambition, not at all concerned about their obvious defectiveness.

“Thought all your robots were dismantled,” Rasticore questioned suspiciously.

Heinous shook her head. “That’s just what you would think,” the woman replied in a condescending tone. “And I knew those idiot knights would believe the same thing, hence why I had these hidden away in case I was ever found out. Imagine it, they all believed they had beaten me and yet my true power was right under their nose all along.”

“Well that explains their poor condition,” Rasticore mumbled to himself, low enough he knew Heinous couldn’t hear him.

The two reached the bottom of the staircase and Heinous began inspecting her machines closely, running her gloved fingers along their metal casings and grimacing at the layer of dirt left behind. “The truth is those robots from my time as principal were simple worker drones, but these, my dear Rasticore, are my army.”

“So you had these things hidden away this whole time and you never thought to use them before now?” Rasticore asked in a deadpan, trying to hold back his rising anger. If she had an army this whole time, why bother hiring him for her dirty work? How much time had he wasted fulfilling her goals when she could have just as easily sent a robot to do it.

“Of course I did,” Heinous replied with quite a bit of malice. “They were my plan from the beginning. I just had to wait for the right time to use them.”

“And only after I’ve been poisoned for your little mission do you suddenly decide it’s the ‘right time’,” the lizard Monster grunted, doing air-quotes for emphasis.

“Hold your tongue!” Heinous snapped, her voice echoing around the dark chamber. The two stared each other down, neither breaking eye contact for even a second. “You cannot possibly comprehend the amount of time and planning I put into this,” she continued, spitting every word violently at her minion. “I spent years concocting the perfect scheme to take back everything I lost, to regain control and create a perfect world order. And yet you dare to believe I would overlook something so carelessly. No. Everything has been planned out.” The woman turned her back to the assassin, stating smugly, “In a scheme like this, timing is everything, my dear Rasticore.”

She approached the nearest robot, wiping the dust off its metal surface, pulling out the same key from before and examining it closely. “And the time has finally come for the next phase of my master plan,” she whispered decisively. With that she rammed the key into the center of the robot’s chest, causing its eyes to blink open and light up red. Heinous took a step back as the machine slowly rose to its feet, creaking and groaning loudly, its rusted body protesting greatly. Branches that had formed around its hollow shell snapped and broke as it pushed itself upward with great strength. Finally, the machine was up, standing tall and at attention, its red eyes blinking as it waited for new orders, somehow menacing despite its deteriorating body.

Rasticore took a step towards the robot body, still eyeing it skeptically but didn’t see a point in arguing, if his boss wanted to gamble all their plans on some old, dumb robot then she could deal with the consequences. It wasn’t his problem if her plan failed, so long as he got paid. “So what, we send this hunk of junk after the Butterfly brat and finally be done with her.” He had to admit the idea of a robot taking her down instead of him left a sour taste in his mouth.

Heinous admired her machine with a satisfactory smile, her hands delicately running along its frame. “Patience, Rasticore, patience. Star Butterfly will receive her punishment in due time. But for now she is too highly guarded to risk an attack on her. We must tread carefully from here on out, no more half-witted schemes, we must deal with her delicately or all of this will be in vain.”

Rasticore grit his teeth at the small insult but kept his calm, extended time with Heinous had really helped him with his temper, the one good thing he could say about being stuck with the snooty, high-and-mighty ex-principal herself. “So who are we targeting?” Rasticore asked impatiently. “I thought the whole point of this field trip was so you could get your hands on Butterfly. You yourself said you needed a Mewman for-”

“And I what I said still holds true,” Heinous interrupted, turning to her minion with a very evil expression. “Which is why we will be targeting another old student of mine, one who is much less guarded and much more obtainable.” A dark look passed over Heinous’ face as she thought of one of her oldest and most successful students, just speaking her name again filled her with a satisfaction and pride Heinous had almost forgotten about. “Princess Penelope Spiderbite.”

#star vs #star vs AU #Light of the Sun and Stars #Preview #Starco #Spiderslime

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laneofpennies · 4 years

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ok so i’m just gonna get all my thoughts about wkm and folklore out in this post so i can stop being incomprehensible

and yes, this has ego shipping. i couldn’t stop myself.

the 1

Damien and William. I’ll start off like that. I feel like this is a melancholy ballad about a couple who didn’t work out due to maybe distance or misunderstanding- or in this case, being gay in the 1920s- and looking back on their childhood and regretting never taking that step. Also, the addition of meeting someone else and taking them home makes me think of Celine. And the singer seems successful, much like a mayor of a small city.

cardigan

Actor!Mark is written absolutely all over this song, albeit before he was entirely corrupted. But the plot, about someone still being in love despite the other having cheated and being hurt so much time after? That’s Mark, babeyyy. We know his mental state was not great after the divorce- maybe even before that. Celine was his rock.

the last great american dynasty

This tips more into my own canon, I’ll admit. But I always thought Celine and Damien weren’t exactly from the same social class as Mark. So when the marriage between the two happened, people talked. But Celine was always a badass. Even if after the divorce she was persecuted by the media, she kept her head up. Also this song makes me cry and so does Celine so I feel like that’s enough of a connection.

exile (Ft. Bon Iver)

THE MOST Celine and Mark song, well, ever. Miscommunication. References to acting as a career. The longing to make things right. Two perspectives. The third guy, who in this case is William, swooping in. Mark not having seen any of the signs of her discomfort in the lifestyle she led, and Celine just feeling shut out. I also feel like Mark was often worried about her offending other famous actors and she felt suffocated whenever they went out together.

my tears ricochet

Actor. This one might seem like a stretch, but the Mark we know is not the same from before the divorce. He was hurting, and confused as to why this had all happened to them. We know the divorce was messy and ended an entire friend group, and Celine seemed to have taken it much better, leading to the current circumstance. The fear of being home all alone- in this case because of a literal demon.

mirrorball

Since this song is revolving around someone that blends in, changes, can show a million different faces, I think it’s perfect for the DA, aka the viewer. This character had to be written so that we could all see ourselves in them, whether that be for WKM, ADWM, or AHWM. Also the metaphor about broken glass...? That’s just too perfect.

seven

More of my slight headcanons!! William and Damien growing up as friends must have been very close to this song. There’s talk about haunted houses, best friends, secrets, keeping in the closet, strict parents... I feel like they would be really cute in this song. They’ve been friends for ages, and even now, though they both look a little different. Overall, this song about childhood innocence slowly eroding fits the colonel and the politician.

august

This song is the second in the story about love affairs, excluding Illicit Affairs. This one always struck me because of how soft and tender it was, despite this being from the view of the other woman. There is a hint of regret and sadness that they can’t be publicly together, but you can tell there was genuine love between them. I like to think that William did love Celine, and saw the darkness within that house and within Mark. The affair was where it crossed the line, and he knew they couldn’t go back.

this is me trying

This one I see as mostly just about Damien. He had been the glue in this friend group for so long, and was so eager to see them all back together, it only made sense he would take the affair and divorce just as hard as those directly involved. I can imagine him pleading for reconciliation and attempting to help Mark through everything while still staying loyal to his sister. It must have been a struggle, and one he never let go of.

illicit affairs

Oddly enough, this song isn’t directly attached to August and Cardigan, but I feel like it fits perfectly for how Celine felt throughout the entire affair. She lost her love for Mark. She knew it was wrong, but she did truly did fall in love with William. The pains of being in their secret relationship and how useless she feels is perfect for how she wanted so strongly to be out of this situation even if she couldn’t be without either of them.

invisible string

Since the overall theme of this song revolves around the individual lives of two strangers having always been weaved together by fate, I feel like it fits the story Mark is building with all of these characters. Though this song is much happier, haha. This can also point to Mark now wanting us to be the love interest and trying to convince us we had been meant to be from the start, him being the hero and all.

mad woman

OBVIOUSLY Celine. She has her flaws, but she genuinely was a tough character who cared about her family. Even if she had been put down for her fieriness and her hobbies especially being a woman at the turn of the century, this madness is almost a freedom for her. Actor wasn’t the best husband, at least we can assume, and William wasn’t perfect either. And she never confided in her brother until it was too late. So all of this points back to her not trusting anyone in her life other than herself, and being trapped with her own anger and passions. I could write a whole essay on this one, guys-

epiphany

I guess this one might be fairly obvious. William. The Colonel who served more than his time. Who’s seen horrors that he still has yet to overcome. I imagine this song is specifically about him in the war, fighting to stay alive for his friends, and then him having to adjust and rely on them once he first returned home and had to deal with consequences of everything he saw overseas.

betty

gay and yearning. damien and william. next question.

peace

ok ok hear me out- The viewer about Damien. They’re life partners, whether that be romantic or platonic. Working together, studying together- it’s obvious there’s a really strong connection there. Also, the lyrics describe someone I really feel like fits Damien- honorable, has integrity, kind. Maybe this is self-indulgent but it seems like it really fits them.

hoax

This song is about a toxic relationship. Taylor knows it won’t work out, but she needs the other. The undertones of standing on the cliffside, the mentions of heroes and scars and the overall theme of faith and dependency make me, again, come back to Actor, thinking about Celine. Say what you want, but he was codependent.

#actor!mark #wkm #celine the seer #mayor damien #william j barnum #dilliam

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argumate · 4 years

Text

now I feel compelled to write an analysis of the She-Ra battle in the style of Bret Devereaux’s excellent blog, if I can pull that off.

Engagement

The Battle of Bright Moon, as depicted in the She-Ra season one finale.

Adversaries

The Horde, a dictatorship led by Hordak, is at war with The Rebellion, also known as the Princess Alliance, a loose confederation of feudal states led by Queen Angella of the kingdom of Bright Moon and her daughter, Glimmer.

The people of most interest in this engagement are Force Captain Catra, who is leading the Horde army, and Adora aka She-Ra, who is the champion of Bright Moon and leading its defence under the command of Angella and Glimmer.

Fascinatingly, Adora and Catra grew up together in the Horde and it was actually Adora who was promoted to Force Captain before finding her alternate persona as She-Ra and defecting to the Princess Alliance.

The shared history and close connection between these two adversaries gives them insight into each other’s plans, but also adds emotional complications that could compromise their judgement. They are also both very inexperienced, and this is their first major battle.

Setting

The war is taking place on the planet of Etheria, with the Horde based in the Fright Zone, an industrialised and heavily polluted region that is surprisingly close to Bright Moon, a fortified city set in idyllic hilly countryside on a river by the sea. The two sides are separated by the Whispering Woods, a magical forest full of monsters, hidden crystal temples of the ancient First Ones, and other supernatural weirdness that acts as a natural barrier and prevents direct attack over land.

Etheria is an unusual planet to say the least, and it appears to be networked in some sense between an assortment of “runestones” from which the princesses draw supernatural powers. The Horde also has one runestone, their use of which is the key to this engagement.

History

The war has been going on for a long time, but decades (?) ago there was a particularly fierce battle in which Queen Angella’s husband was killed, along with many others, and the Princess Alliance effectively disbanded. Since then they have struggled to reform and have focused on defending their own kingdoms individually instead of coordinating assaults on the Horde, leaving them vulnerable to being conquered one by one.

However this earlier battle must have devastated the Horde too, as we observe a chronic shortage of manpower that leads them to rely heavily on robots and poorly trained conscripts. In particular they seem to have lost almost all of their officer class, and are forced to train new ones starting from childhood (!) a significant investment of time and effort that limits their activities to sporadic raids and hit-and-run attacks while they rebuild their strength.

Background

Earlier Catra captured a princess, Entrapta, and convinced her to defect to the Horde and help them weaponise the runestone in their possession. In doing so they were able to drain enormous amounts of power from the other runestones through the planetary network, setting off a series of natural disasters and freezing the Whispering Woods, which neutralised its magic and made it a viable route for a land assault on Bright Moon.

As it happens, destroying the runestone at Bright Moon would set off a chain reaction that depowers all the other runestones, leaving the Princess Alliance helpless and giving the Horde effective control of the entire planet. Catra thus has the opportunity -- on her first command! -- to win the entire war with one swift strike.

Objectives

The Horde aims to destroy the runestone at Bright Moon. Since success would win the war, they commit all of their forces to the assault.

The Rebellion wishes to repel the Horde attack and protect the runestone. Ideally they would find some way to take the fight to the now undefended Fright Zone, but this is beyond their capabilities as they are in a desperate struggle to merely survive.

Forces

Force Captain Catra has the entire Horde army at her command, consisting of tanks, skiffs, attack robots, and armoured infantry. We are given little information as to their organisation or unit structure, but we can assume they have radio communication and have discussed their battle plan in advance.

Horde soldiers train together from infancy and are highly indoctrinated, so we can expect strong unit cohesion and willingness to fight. However, their training exercises are limited and unrealistic, they have little experience in battle, and are discouraged from creative problem solving, so aside from Catra we cannot expect a virtuoso display of combat skills.

Bright Moon apparently has no standing army, the guards appear to be purely ceremonial in nature, and initially they only field Adora in her She-Ra form alone against the entire Horde army, with Queen Angella providing backup via the shielding effect of the runestone.

Admittedly She-Ra is a formidable warrior, strong enough to punch through stone, wielding a sword that can shoot laser beams and slice through steel, and capable of taking a direct hit from a tank without suffering major damage. However she can only do so much at a time, and is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the sheer number of opponents.

She is reinforced by her companions, Glimmer and Bow on the flying horse Swift Wind, and two other princesses wielding magic nets, but this is not so much an army as a loose team of individual champions with highly disparate skill sets.

Logistics

The Horde army is fully mechanised and with the woods now accessible they can be in Bright Moon in a matter of hours and be back home in time for dinner, so they move fast and carry no food or supplies.

Scouting

Bright Moon observe the Horde army on the move through the woods and have time to prepare, although the extent of their preparations is limited to choosing better weapons from the armoury. The Horde’s arrival is heralded by their first shots slamming into the castle, suggesting that the expectation of protection by the woods has led to a serious lack of defensive works in the kingdom.

The Horde are attacking a fixed target, the runestone, so they head straight for it and do not send out scouts or keep watch, a fatal mistake that prevents them from cutting off any unexpected reinforcements from the other kingdoms.

Attack!

The Horde army emerges from the woods at the shallow river crossing, just opposite the Bright Moon fortress.

Conveniently for the Horde, the runestone is located outside and in front of the fortress, leaving it utterly unprotected by any defences aside from its own supernatural shielding effect, reinforced by Queen Angella in person, which places her directly in the firing line. The runestone is also mounted on a high pedestal that is vulnerable to tank fire; it’s not clear if bringing the pedestal down would destroy the runestone but it certainly looks very fragile.

Since Bright Moon’s champions are still in the armoury choosing their weapons, the Horde army is free to position their tanks as artillery pieces and fire at will, primarily at the runestone but also taking some shots at the fortress and neighbouring area, presumably to pin down any defenders that might emerge.

So far everything is looking great for Catra: Bright Moon has no ranged weapons that can counter her tanks, defenders would need to make a suicidal charge across the ford against overwhelming firepower to get close enough to do any damage, she has fast moving hover skiffs to intercept and mop up any enemy forces that attempt to encircle her position, and she can send heavily armoured robots across the river to attack the fortress while holding back her precious infantry for safety.

Response

Adora’s response is brutally direct: she transforms into She-Ra and with her terrifying strength begins to simply tear the tanks apart. But Catra is expecting this and has prepared a surprise: the lead tanks have no occupants and are booby-trapped to explode, blasting She-Ra back and stunning her while the Horde continues their pounding attack on the runestone.

A single champion, no matter how strong, cannot defeat an army! However, She-Ra can still do devastating damage with her sword beams, so Catra moves to the next stage of her plan by luring her away into a one on one fight, and Adora, still disoriented, gives chase.

Duel

Catra can hold her own against Adora but is utterly outclassed by She-Ra in a rage, who can smash boulders to fragments with her fists. However she isn’t in her right mind: dazed by the bomb, terrified of failure, and Catra cunningly exploits this, using acrobatics and taking advantage of the terrain to stay out of range of her attacks while constantly goading her to distraction.

It’s a risky ploy as Catra’s command is vital to the success of the Horde assault and She-Ra comes close to destroying her, but ultimately her gambit works: the duel takes She-Ra away from the main assault for long enough that the combined assault by tanks and robots can incapacitate the queen, leaving the runestone unprotected and vulnerable to complete destruction.

It’s Personal

She-Ra’s big mistake was allowing Catra to make it personal and forgetting that her objective was to protect the runestone. In the heat and pain of battle her focus narrowed to the point that she lost her grasp of strategy and latched on to the one familiar thing, and Catra exploited this to the full.

However, Catra also made a crucial mistake in her planning that may have hinged on her unresolved emotional entanglements: she sent all of her forces to Bright Moon and none to the other kingdoms. Was she really betting on them staying put? Or was she so determined to beat Adora specifically that she compromised her strategy by throwing her entire army at her and holding nothing back. Even sending a small raiding force against the nearby kingdoms would have kept them pinned down and unable to assist Bright Moon, and cost her almost nothing, but it seems that her focus on Adora as the primary threat left her blinkered to possibility of the Princess Alliance living up to its name.

The Tide Turns

Yes, the tide literally turns, and Catra belatedly realises the risks of fighting over a shallow estuary against an enemy that can control the sea when Mermista shows up riding her own personal tsunami.

The gaps in Catra’s strategy become even more evident when they are attacked from behind by Perfuma emerging from the woods, trapping the Horde forces between angry plants and angry water, while the snow princess fires ice crystals and Bow and Swift Wind rain destruction down from above.

This would all be moot if the runestone was destroyed, but the display of solidarity and realisation that she’s not alone gives She-Ra the power to restore Queen Angella and amplify the power of the runestone, supercharging Glimmer’s frankly terrifying teleportation powers, and blasting Catra out of the picture.

With this the battle is over, and the Horde forces that remain take advantage of their mobility to get the heck out of there and retreat to the Fright Zone.

Outcome

A victory for Bright Moon! But a sobering one, they were badly unprepared and almost lost the war as a result. Reforming the Princess Alliance and demonstrating the ability to mount a joint defence is a vital first step, but they will need to do a lot better than this in order to win, and the Horde will be back.

A defeat for the Horde, and for Catra, but Hordak is wise enough to agree with her that it was a damn good showing for a first attempt, and there will definitely be a second.

#shera

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slitherofgold · 4 years

Text

Friday Fighting~ Sam Fender

It was Friday night, and you and the girls had decided to go out clubbing to celebrate the end of a horrible, shitty week. Your two best-friends (Grace and Liv) were getting ready round yours, and it was safe to say that pre-drinks had already started. “Who’s ready to get fucking wasteddddd”, Grace sang with a drink in her hand.

“Fucking hell Grace, slow down. I’m not having you drunk before actually going out, and I’m definitely not baby-sitting you the entire night”, you said.

“Chill y/n, let yourself go a bit, have fun. If you get what I mean.” She grinned her cheeky grin and you rolled your eyes in response.

“If you mean go fuck a stranger then that’s definitely not what I had in mind. That’s how people get killed.” Liv, who had been attempting to put on her lashes, turned around to face the two of you.

“Y/n don’t have sex with the first guy you meet, but maybe actually talk to a guy, or I don’t know, dance with someone. You haven’t opened yourself up to anyone since-

“We do not speak his name!!” Grace interrupted before Liv could finish her sentence. You laughed.

“Look guys, I’m over him, I am. It’s just, guys are a waste of time at the moment, and they all turn out to be assholes anyway,” You tried to explain.

“Yeah but what about your sex life, every girl still needs to have her sex life”, Grace said. You looked towards Liv who nodded her head in agreement.

“That’s what a vibrators for. It does the trick and doesn’t emotionally damage you either.”

“Look, I know you’re a strong, independent woman and all, but please let yourself go a bit tonight and just have fun. And try not to blank every guy that comes up to you, at least give em a chance.” Liv stared into your eyes as if waiting for an answer.

“Fineeeee”, you gave in. The two girls applauded and squealed like teenagers, before turning on the music and dancing around the bedroom. You loved nights like this, where you could just let loose of all your problems and act like a child again, singing the words to your favourite songs and dancing as if no one was watching. Maybe the girls were right. Maybe it was time to start meeting new people.

After getting ready, you all left your place and got a taxi to the club. Grace was already a bit tipsy from the drinks back at yours, and you knew for a fact that she’d be passed out, face first, at the end of the night. The cold night air, hit you as soon as you got out the cab, and you wished you had bought some kind of jacket to act as layer over your sexy ass dress, that Liv had let you borrow. You could hear the music from outside, loud and blaring, and you couldn’t wait to sacrifice yourself to the music and let yourself go.

Inside it was a swarm of sweaty, drunk bodies, much like you had anticipated. Without a second thought, Grace swung herself into the crowd, jumping along and dancing to the music, already lost in it. You and Liv followed after her to be quickly engulfed by the crowd.

After a while of screaming lyrics, and grinding your bodies against random strangers, you had decided to go get drinks. You left Liv and Grace out on the dance-floor, not wanting to disrupt their fun, and headed towards the bar. It was fairly busy, and you had to squeeze past a few shoulders to make it through to the front. You waved your hand at the bartender, “Hey, can I get 3 shots of tequila!”, you shouted over the music. He smiled and nodded in return before starting on your drinks. You glanced back towards the dance-floor, and unsurprisingly, Grace and Liv were still there not having noticed you’d gone.

“The music here’s shit, don’t you think?”, you heard someone shout in a geordie accent. You inclined your head towards the voice, to see that the question was directed at you. You raised your eyebrows in surprise as you took in the stranger. He was hot in such a casual way. Jeans and a t-shit, messy hair, the accent. You were so caught up in how he looked you had forgotten what he said. He laughed, clearly amused. He leaned in closer and repeated the question, his breath warm on your cheek.

“Oh, yeah it’s not my kind of music but at least you can still dance to it. I’ve heard worse anyways.” You smiled back. The bartender tapped your shoulder and you quickly turned having forgotten the drinks. You pulled out your purse ready to pay, when a hand suddenly stopped you.

“Don’t worry, it’s on me.” The stranger smiled at you, and gave the bartender his card before you could intervene. “ 3 shots aye, I’m guessing they’re for you and your mates?”

“ Well, they would be if they were here, but unfortunately they’re still on the dance-floor.” You smiled and pointed towards them. Then as you locked eyes with Liv, you remembered what your friends had said earlier, she grinned at you as if you had spoken telepathically. “Do you wanna, um, share the shots instead, since, well you paid for them, and I don’t think they’re gonna be too bothered. They’re basically already gone.” You stammered, trying to act cool, even though you hadn’t done this in while. As if he could sense your nerves, he smiled, easing your comfort.

“Yeah sounds class that”. He seemed relieved, almost as if he had been waiting for you to ask that. “I’m Sam by the way”, he put out his hand and you happily shook it.

“Y/n”, you smiled.

“Well it’s nice to meet you y/n”, he seemed genuinely nice and after downing the shots, the two of you were already having a laugh, taking the piss out of people in the club and placing bets on the most random things.

“Do you wanna go someplace quieter, I can barely hear you over this shit”, Sam said. You nodded your head and grabbed his hand, as he led you through the club to a booth towards the back. You glanced at the girls. Grace was beyond drunk and Liv was mildly sober. They were both dancing with guys, who seemed very touchy-feely, but neither of them seemed to mind. Liv caught eyes with you once more and winked. You rolled your eyes but couldn’t withhold your smirk. Liv quickly mouthed ‘be careful’ before turning back towards the guys she was dancing with, losing herself in the music once more.

Once you reached the booth, you slid in close to Sam. He bought more drinks, that you insisted you would pay for, and carried on with your conversation. It was so nice just having some decent flirty banter, that you couldn’t help but feel comfortable with this guy. You were both laughing and talking as if you had been friends for years. Suddenly his phone started ringing. He pulled it out and checked the screen. “Oh shit, sorry I’ve really gotta take this.” He said.

“Nah, nah that’s fine don’t worry”, you insisted. He apologised once more and left the booth in search for a quieter place to have his phone-call. Since being on your own sucked, you pulled out your own phone for some temporary entertainment. You had 8 missed calls and 14 unread messages all from Liv. You opened the messages as quick as you could, panic coursing through you.

Liv: OMG Grace passed out- on the dance floor!!!! Where are you?!

Liv: Y/N WHERE ARE YOU, I CAN’T LEAVE WITHOUT YOU.

Liv: I’ve called a taxi for me and Grace, I gotta get her back home. Please let me know you’re alright??

Liv: I’ll come back for you as soon as Grace is home, are you ok?

Liv: Y/N ANSWER ME!!!!

You quickly typed out a message briefly telling her not to worry, and that you’ll get a taxi back home soon. You also asked about Grace, hoping she was alright. This was often a common occurrence when the 3 of you went out. In fact if Grace didn’t pass out, the night would be classed as shit.

“Hey, what’s a pretty thing like you doing here alone?” You heard someone say. You looked up from your phone to see a man, maybe in his late 30s, staring down out you.

“Oh, I’m not alone, I’m just waiting for my friend”, you assured the guy. Instead of buggering off, like you hoped he would, he took a seat next to you instead. He made it very clear what his intentions were, you could basically feel his eyes undressing you as he looked you up and down.

“Well, will this friend be long? Cause I think we could kill some time”. He placed his hand on your thigh and slowly moved it up your leg, making you feel sick to the bone. You pushed his hand away from you in disgust.

“Don’t touch me!” you shouted, wishing that you and Sam had chosen a busier place to sit, rather than somewhere which was remarkably quieter.

“Don’t be like that. You’re basically asking for it in a dress like that.” The guy became a lot more aggressive, and tried to push himself against you, holding your arms to stop you from fighting back.

“Help!!!” You screamed, praying someone would hear. Your legs were trapped under the table, preventing you from trying to kick him in balls. Damn it. You were about to headbutt the guy when you heard a heavy smack, and the weight of the bastard left your body as he fell and hit the table. You looked up seeing Sam, knuckles already bruised and slightly bleeding, with a look of pure rage on his face. He stormed round the table and grabbed the guys collar, lifting him up.

“Get the fuck out of here”, Sam said, the rage seething out with every word. “Or I won’t hesitate to do it again”. He chucked the guy, as if he was worthless, and unsurprisingly the guy ran off in the opposite direction, quickly forgetting you. Once Sam knew the guy had gone and was out of sight, he turned to you and rested a hand on your shoulder.

“Y/n are you alright? I knew I shouldn’t of left you. I’m so sorry.” He looked in your eyes, his own filled with concern.

“I’m fine, I’m just glad you got here in time. Fucking dirtbag. Are you alright?” You glanced at where the guy had left, worried he would reemerge, and then focused on Sam’s knuckles, holding them in your own hands.

“Don’t worry about me”, Sam chuckled. “I’m not the one who had filthy fucking hands roaming all over me. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, I’ll survive. But I should be getting back home soon, the girls already left and now they’re waiting on me”, you explained the whole situation to Sam.

“Damn that Grace party’s hard” He chuckled. “Do you want me to call you a taxi? After that whole fucking thing, the least I can do is make sure you get home safe.”

“You’ve done enough. The drinks, saving my life. If you do anything else, I’d be indebted to you.” You joked.

“See, that’s what I was hoping. Cause if you were indebted to me, you’d have to give me your number, and then we’d have to meet up, and you’d have to spend even more time with me.” He looked at you and then down at his hands, which you were still holding, and then back up at you again, a smile slowly forming across his face.

“Well, I guess you’ll just have to call me a taxi then”

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Hi guys, me again. Sorry this is a super long (for me) imagine and hasn’t really got much fluff in it but hey ho, this is how it turned out :) Sorry if it’s got loads of typos or mistakes, I finished this at 2am and honestly I am ready to pass out on my bed. Anyways hope you enjoyed, and message me for requests or anything you wanna ask/say. Goodnighttttt <3

#sam fender #sam fender imagines #imagines #fluff #sam fender x reader

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make-it-mavis · 4 years

Text

Homesick (Entry #35)

(cw: discussion of addiction) ----------

01/23/88 4:02 PM

Hey.

So. I’d admitted that I was an addict.

Which was, as I’d realize in the days after, not just a sentence you could say and be over with. It was an admission to so many things, many of which I’d been trying so hard not to believe over the course of my addiction. That it really was that bad. That it wouldn’t just go away with time. That I could not stop of my own free will. That I couldn’t fix myself alone.

That counselling really was my one chance at beating this thing for good.

Which, in itself, was a scary thought. If it was my last chance, I could not screw it up. And I’ve always loved screwing things up. It’s so, so important that I get this thing right, and it’s been really hard at points to picture myself doing that. Even as early as the second step, I felt doomed to fail.

The second step, of course, is Hope.

Hope that a higher power could save us from ourselves.

Yeah. It’s not that I don’t believe in the Devs. I do, unfortunately. It’s just that I’ve always believed they’re fickle dickwads who don’t give a crit about any of us. They’ve only ever been a source of pain for me. Honestly, I outright hate the Devs. So being faced with this idea that if I didn’t find faith, I could not complete this extremely important counselling, I was understandably more than a little stressed. I didn’t get why that had to be part of the deal. So many of the steps are built around this faith. It’s integral. I had to beg the question: Do only Devout deserve saving?

Fix-it’s response to my spirited rants was to suggest that it did not necessarily have to be the Devs, just a higher power. Something bigger than him or me, some deeper meaning to life, something I truly believed in. Like he, himself, while he is a practicing Devout, places more importance on ‘duty’ than anything else. ‘Duty’ informs his actions, ‘duty’ colors his lens of the world. I probably don’t need to tell you the jokes I made out of that. He didn’t seem to get it.

That widened things up, I’ll give him that. But it widened them too much. I could either pick the Devs, or pull something out of my ass and make a religion out of it. The latter sounds like something I’d only enjoy doing while high, for cuss’ sake. I’ve never been too big on philosophies in general. Partying hard had always been enough of a philosophy for me, but then I went and partied too damn hard and wound up the mess that I was. A junkie with no rhyme or reason.

Step two was looking even more depressing than expected.

On the night before my third session, Fix-it brought out a surprise that he thought might help me relax or cheer up or what have you. He laid down a tarp, a few blank canvases, and gave me an assortment of tubes of paint and scraggly, used brushes. I was a little taken aback. I so rarely use normal, boring, non-magical paint. I was worried that using it would just make me feel worse about my brush still being on the fritz, but I was drawn to the naked canvases anyway. Fix-it sat at the table and watched as if he had put down food for a feral raccoon and wanted to give it space. Having him watch may have bothered me at one point in time, but he had done a genuinely pretty cool thing for me. I’d deal.

And let’s be real -- I am a feral raccoon.

It didn’t take me long to decide what to paint. The one thing that had been consistently on my mind: Revenge on Worluk. All in various gruesome ways. In one painting, I’d ripped her throat out with my teeth. In another, I crushed her with a giant fly swatter. The last one, which was my favorite, showed her dismembered and built into a chair that I was sitting on.

Fix-it said they were all beautiful, and they’d look so good on the shelf in the broom closet. I argued for a place in the kitchen, but no, he insisted that they’d look better in the closet.

As I worked, as I painted the gnarly details on that bug’s face, I couldn’t help but wonder what she had done for step two. What was her higher power? What could she possibly turn to for peace after what she had done to me? The Devs? Duty? Or are there just some things you can never make peace with? That is, if she even felt remorse for it at all. I couldn’t imagine a remorseful pixel in her body.

And then that led to me thinking, of course… What about me? What could ever really bring me peace? I knew for sure that I felt remorse. I definitely wished I had not gone down the path I did over the course of… well, ever since you left. I’d seen and done some really awful things. There was Tapper, there was that poor sap I threatened for a hit of GC, there was… everyone else I’d come in contact with, really. My actions had taken a darker turn than I’d ever gone down before, even in my past pits of depression. My mind was so haunted by then, I didn’t recognize it anymore. Relentless, nightmarish thoughts plagued me all the time. Trauma, guilt, hopelessness, existential questions without answers. Your death, and the blame I placed on myself. My Dev-given, meaningless lot in life. Hatred from what felt like the entire arcade over a crime I didn’t commit, enough to nearly get me killed. All this weighed down on me. It had trapped me. And the only escape I could ever see was in buffs. The thing that I felt the most fondness for, the thing that I had come to long for above all else, was a mind-numbing high. Buffs could save me from my mind, even if they ended up killing it in the process.

That was my argument in favor of the addiction.

I had to find something, anything, that would bring a counter-argument strong enough to hold up. My guilt for hurting Tapper, while it was very deep and genuine, would only have so many legs to stand on. I even remembered my weird, buff-induced conversation with the river, wherein I realized I owed my own survival to you… and to myself. That had been a groundbreaking epiphany at the time. But it was not enough. I knew that. Because I remembered what it felt like to be in the thick of my addiction, and I remembered how no one around me mattered anymore. Nothing I owed to anyone else would make a difference to me if I relapsed and fell back into that state of mind. Neither would anything I owed myself, certainly, not with my self-preservation offline. And in the face of all those facts... I was scared.

I didn’t feel safe. I felt like the floor beneath me could have broken at any moment, and I’d lose control again. I needed something to hold onto that could actually bear my weight, because I had become quite heavily burdened. But I had no idea what that thing could be.

It was so frustrating, nearly enough to bring me to tears as I painted. I kept remembering what Wreck-it told me when we fought, about how I didn’t actually want to get better, how I just wanted to keep using everybody, so there was no use helping me. That in particular stuck with me. I didn’t understand why at first. Maybe that was true when he said it. But it wasn’t anymore.

I didn’t want to be miserable anymore. I didn’t want to be a plague on everyone around me, not really. I wanted to get better. But the means to do so felt like a cruel puzzle I couldn’t solve. Like a battle I had already lost.

Fix-it went to bed, but I stayed up into the night painting and pondering. Even after I was done, I took one of the paintings and began slowly and idly covering it with lazy patches of color. I did some serious soul-searching that night. I tried to harness whatever it was that drove me as a living being. Whatever it was, it must have been old. Older than my knowledge of the Devs, even. I tried to cast my mind back to my very first days and remember what inspired me then, before the Devs’ gospel tainted my life. But I couldn’t come up with anything substantial. Fun, mischief, laughter, all very important things, but no solid foundations for philosophies. Philosophies that could keep me away from substances, mind you.

It seemed hopeless. But I tried to relax with my painting. I took deep breaths and let the color flow, creating no image in particular. Just beautiful, abstract motions that felt self-soothing in the cleanest way I had attempted in a while. It really did feel great to have access to a full spectrum of color again, even if it was real, physical paint and not magical like mine. I so deeply missed having full functionality of my tools. All that time without it, I’d felt like I was hobbling around with a missing limb. I need my color. It’s just embedded in who I am. Always has been.

My very first coherent thoughts after being plugged in were about the color pulsing inside my code.

I froze.

Was that it?

Could that even work?

The force bigger than me, the deeper meaning to life, the one thing that had been with me since the very first second I remember entering consciousness… well, that was color. I see it and feel it in all things, and always have. It inspires me. It does guide my actions, in a sense.

But color? It felt too obvious, almost. It was one of the most important things in the world to me. But could I really pull a philosophy out of it?

I felt cold, but not in a bad way -- more like a refreshing breeze on a sweaty day. But that breeze also felt hundreds of miles high, with me suspended on this one new idea that I had to strengthen before it could break. What if there was something even bigger than the Devs? Something that ignored games, roles, class, age, gender? Something that, if I played my cards right, could free me from the life I felt trapped in?

Something strong enough to weaponize against the Devs’ presence in my mind?

Even kill it for good?

I remember bursting into Fix-it’s room and scaring the bits out of him. I leapt onto his bed and stained the blanket with my paint-splattered hands.

“Color,” I said firmly.

Fix-it stammered, reaching to turn on the lamp. “Wha-- Wha-- What’s-- Mavy?”

“Color,” I repeated. “That’s my higher power. I think. The thing I believe in? I think it might be color.”

He was quiet for a second, his hands raised cautiously, his mouth open in hesitation to speak. “Mavy-- Mavy, settle down, now--” he said, not really registering my relatively controlled demeanor after my very aggressive entrance.

“Don’t tell me to settle down,” I told him. For some reason, I was shaking with adrenaline. I was so unsure. I wanted to be right, but I barely felt like I had an idea.

“Oh, it’s-- It’s just that last time you started goin’ on about color, you went and stabbed your hand with a fork, so, I just wanna make sure you’re not gonna--”

“Oh...” I said, the memories blowing up in my brain. “The kaleidoscope. In my dreams-- trips-- whatever-- the kaleidoscope… Me becoming color…”

I held my sticky wet glove to my forehead, my mind connecting more and more wires. Every thought and memory coming into my head was telling me that I was right. I stared past Fix-it, feeling my heart pound. “That can’t be a coincidence. There’s no way. That all has to mean something, right?”

“C-Color?”

“Yes!” I jabbed him in the shoulder, at which he groaned in pain. “That’s it! My stupid higher power homework. I think I’ve got it!”

I heard him give vague and confused murmurs of encouragement as he sank back down to the pillows. “That’s great, Mavy, that’s wonderful… I’m so… so happy for you...” And he was out like a light, even with the light still on.

Whatever, I thought. Maybe he didn’t understand, but I… sort of did. That was what mattered.

The following night, though, I’d have to put that thought to the test. I went into my third session of counselling with a nervous sweat. I would have to explain my revelation to the group in words, when so much of it was just… how I felt. I’d been running through my speech again and again up until the moment I sat in that circle of chairs, and as I did, I began to doubt myself more and more. I don’t know anything about making solid philosophies, or if what I made could even be considered a philosophy. Maybe my idea was actually garbage, and they wouldn’t accept it. It was so vague. I hadn’t even worked out all the kinks in it yet. I just hoped I would understand it more as I said it out loud.

Stage fright has never been a problem for me. I’m a born performer. But this was not a performance. This was real life. I had trouble opening up like that even to you, and now here I was in a room with sprites I barely knew, including one who tried to kill me. I definitely didn’t like the idea of showing vulnerability in front of her. I didn’t want her to know anything about me.

But I knew the drill. Just deal with it.

When the turns eventually came to me, I introduced myself as an addict, and told everyone that I’d done some work on step two. There were a couple claps and nods.

“Except,” I told them, “I, uh, didn’t pick the Devs as my higher power. That’s not against the rules, is it?”

“No, no, of course not,” Clyde told me. “We have a few others here who also picked their own.”

“Charity,” someone said, waving slightly.

Another piped in, “Honor.”

Then, to my shock, the raspy voice of Worluk chimed in, with just about the most unexpected word I could think of.

“Friendship.”

Yeah. That threw me off. I tried not to raise my eyebrows so obviously at her, but I had to glance at least. I found her still not quite looking my way, but without a hint of shame in her body language. Who the hell was this chick?

I told myself to shake it off. The spotlight was on me, and I had no time to be tripped up by murderous mosquitoes.

“What about you?” Clyde asked me. “Would you like to share?”

I swallowed. Now or never. “Sure. I picked, uh… color.”

Clyde’s featureless brows raised a bit, making my stomach clench in embarrassment. “Really? Well, that’s one we haven’t heard of before. What does color mean to you, Mavis?”

I looked out at the expectant faces. Except Worluk, who was still not looking, which I tried not to read into and just carry on. She could not ruin this for me. I had to be strong and confident, like I know I am. All I had to do was say a few words. It seemed like a simple thing to do, but I felt so damn seen, and I didn’t like it. I saw some impatient frowns from sprites who still didn’t want me there, I saw some eyes full of curiosity over what I’d say, but the rest just looked… neutral. Like I was just another part of the process. Like it didn’t matter to them either way if I fumbled or stuck the landing.

Normally, I’d hate that. But in this context? It seemed to take so much pressure off. It wasn’t about them. It was my step to take, and they were just witnesses to it.

So I took a deep breath, and I just started talking.

“Color is… everything. I mean, it’s what I do, but it’s also who I am. Y’know, inside. Color is the first thing I remember from the moment I was plugged in. I don’t just see it, I feel it. And it’s… I mean, it’s in everything. Almost all of our games have color. That’s all we are at the end of the day, just blotches of color behind screens, and that’s… that’s kind of awesome, when you think about it. It’s something everyone has in common, no matter what game or role you’re programmed into. That makes things a bit simpler, y’know, to think of yourself not as a Good Guy or a Bad Guy or an Easter Egg, you’re just… a living splash of color.”

I wasn’t sure if I was actually making any sense, but to my surprise, I saw quite a few receptive faces even leaning in a bit to listen. They were intrigued, which was encouraging. So I took it a step further.

“As far as philosophies or things to live by, well… It just got me thinkin’ like... I’m an artist. And artists know that every color is useful. Any color can be mixed, or painted over, in any shade, in any shape. And usually…it takes a lot of different colors and shades to make a beautiful painting. So when you’ve been using the same color again and again, just monochrome, or even analogous, like I have… you’re not gonna be happy. There are so many things I’ve believed, so many things that I’ve thought to be absolute truths that have led me to take buffs. Like… I’ve never been into the whole Easter Egg thing. And I thought buffs were the only thing that could save me from that. But… maybe they’re not. Color, to me, feels like…”

I sighed, trying to pull the words out of myself. “...Flexibility. Possibility. An open mind, I guess. A new color is like a new way of thinking. And... there’s always another color. There’s always another way. And… y’know, it’s probably high time I started acting like it.”

There was silence for a moment.

But then I saw smiles, and I heard claps, even some small words of encouragement. They were congratulating me and thanking me for sharing. Even some sprites that had given me standoffish looks before were giving me grudging nods.

I… did it. I did it right.

I could hardly believe it. I felt like I’d just spilled out some of my ugliest, most confusing guts, but they loved it.

I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. It was too heavy. I was too vulnerable.

But all I could do was… grin.

“Mavis,” Clyde said, “thank you so much for sharing. That’s just fantastic to hear. You’re gonna do great things here -- and remember that even when you stumble, it’s that faith of yours that’s going to lift you back up again. You’re going to have to hold onto it from here on out. Don’t forget that.”

“Yeah,” I sighed so hard, it made me dizzy. “Yeah, of course.”

There was a bit more discussion, and the meeting carried on as usual, as if I hadn’t just done something incredible (for me, anyway). But I had a feeling I was going to have to get used to that. Bending myself in unnatural ways to reach this lofty goal of sobriety, and then carrying on as if everything was normal.

Because that was going to be the new normal, after all.

And my first night in that new normal, I tried to find ways to embody my colorful philosophy in whatever small way I could. I looked around at everyone in the circle, and I asked myself to examine the colors that each of them made me feel, beyond what I could see. Specifically Worluk, the one who had been giving me so much trouble, making me so much more nervous than I already was.

To me, she felt… like a toxic yellow. Barely touched with green. Just bright, garish, nauseating and impossible to ignore. While everyone else just blended into each other’s vague, muted tones. It became very apparent just how much I had been ignoring the rest of the group and honing in on her.

Surely, there was something I could do about that.

I wasn’t sure how effective it would be, but I dared to challenge myself with this: If I could not mute Worluk’s color in my mind, maybe I could at least let the rest of the group grow brighter.

#fanfiction #fanfic #wreck it ralph #fix it felix #make it mavis #original character #homesick

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polkahotness · 4 years

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SHORTAKI WEEK, DAY 4

FFN // AO3

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Adjusting to Freshmen-life at Hillwood High School had proven to be more difficult than either Arnold or Helga had anticipated. As they watched their friends thrive in their new environment, both felt as though they were still struggling to find their place within clubs, classes, and cliques. Each day during the first few weeks was a rush to navigate through the unfamiliar hallways that were filled to the brim with bustling students who had long since learned the various shortcuts and routes to most effectively get to their next hour's class.

Arnold and Helga on the other hand, were still taking the less-direct paths which led them around corners and into one another on a semi-frequent basis. And while this collision was not something that the pair had never accidently done before, on this particular afternoon, it would prove to be an encounter that would forever change their young lives.

SMACK!

Right around the corner of the 500 and 300 wing, Arnold Shortman ran directly into Helga G. Pataki, both of their armfuls of textbooks, notebooks, pens, and other high school essentials scattering around them like confetti from a canon.

"Seriously, footballhead?!" Helga exclaimed as she began collecting her various items that had mingled with Arnold's on the floor of the hallway. "Personally, I would have thought that by now, you'd know how to use your own two feet properly!"

"Sorry, Helga," Arnold grumbled as he too began feverishly gathering his things as quickly as possible. The warning bell had already rang, and both he and Helga were sure to be late if they didn't hurry. "I guess I was just in a rush."

"I'll say," the young blonde responded while glancing up to sneak a glimpse at the boy who had stolen her heart ages ago and still possessed to this day. Her eyes lingered on the boy with the oddly shaped head for a long moment as he picked up his belongings, though her gaze brought heat to his skin causing him to look up and meet eyes with his feisty classmate.

"What?" the boy asked her while pausing momentarily mid-reach for his phone which lay face-down in its black protective case.

"What, what, Arnoldo?" Helga spat back at him while maintaining their eye-contact and reaching to grab her own phone.

"You're staring at me," Arnold noted while finally palming the phone and reaching back to shove it into the pocket of his jeans. Without leaving Helga's eyes, he reached towards the next item on his horizon—his Algebra 2 textbook, which he needed for the class that he was nearly positive he would be late to after his run-in with Helga.

Out of everything she had dropped, Helga's own cellphone was the least of her worries—her focus instead on the notebook that lay just head of where Arnold was squatting before her. Inside the pages of that notebook were some of Helga's deepest thoughts and strongest feelings regarding him and their complicated relationship.

He could never find out what was written on the lines of the papers inside.

Taking the phone she'd grabbed to cram it into the side-pocket of the zip-up sweater she was wearing, she soon snatched the notebook while silently breathing a sigh of relief that Arnold was none-the-wiser as to what lay inside. "Uh, newsflash—it's not me who's doing the staring here, it's you." Her retort merely triggered Arnold to exchange a blank look with the quick-witted blonde before he picked up the last of the items he had dropped.

"Whatever you say, Helga," he recited—a typical ending to a typical conversation with the girl he still harbored feelings for even after all of these years. Oftentimes he would lie awake until the early hours of the morning while staring ahead at the stars that shone brightly above him through his skylight. His mind would endlessly replay moments the two of them had shared since their fifth-grade trip to San Lorenzo and wonder where it was that they went wrong.

Could it have been that they were too young?

Had they simply not been ready?

And more importantly, was there still a chance to remedy what the pair had seemingly lost?

For Arnold, the answers to his questions lay trapped inside the mind of one Helga G. Pataki; the object of both his desires and absolute frustration. He could never seem to wiggle himself back into her thought process, no matter how hard he tried—and he had certainly tried.

As the two parted ways for the next hour that would begin in less than a minute's time, neither realized that the phone in their pockets could hold the key to unlocking the mysteries that either teenager ruminated over time after time. Perhaps it was in their accidental switch that they would find their answers after all.

----------------------

DING. DING. DING. DING.

Just as the bell let out its final ring, Helga slid into the seat of her English class. Panting from her jog after her crash with Arnold, Helga tossed the things she'd gathered in haste onto the top of her desk. Glancing her way, Phoebe immediately knew that something was troubling her best friend.

"Is everything alright, Helga?" She asked as their teacher continued talking in the opposite corner of the room to one of their fellow students. "You seem to be… discombobulated today."

"That's the understatement of the year," Helga answered while sorting through the compilation of things she'd gathered in haste just moments ago. "I swear to you, Pheebs, if I run into Arnold one more time, I might kill him. This is the third time in two weeks that he's almost made me late for class."

"Considering how often the two of you run into one another, I think it may be improbable to expect it won't happen again," Phoebe mused with a soft smile. She knew of the mutual feelings that Helga and Arnold shared for one another. She herself had engaged in dating shortly after the infamous trip to San Lorenzo, however for Phoebe and Gerald, their partnership had proven to be successful in all of the ways that their best friends' relationship hadn't.

Despite this, both Phoebe and Gerald never let go of the hope that their friends would one day reconnect in a way that would work out for the better. From their objective points of view, Helga and Arnold were perfect for one another. To them, it seemed that their friends merely lacked the motivation at being truly honest with one another; the real kryptonite that plagued and stood in the way of their seemingly imminent relationship.

"I don't know, Phoebe," Helga finally said as she softly traced the cover of her precious notebook that Arnold had once again almost seen the contents of. "You'd think the way the universe keeps shoving us together, something would have happened by now."

"But something did happen," Phoebe offered, though Helga was less than receptive.

"Yeah. In the fifth grade," she sneered before rolling her eyes and leaning back into the chair of her desk while crossing her arms tightly over her chest. "Maybe it's time to give up and face the facts. Arnold and I are just… never going to work. We'll be forced to run into each other for the rest of our lives… our feelings littering the floor in a mess of emotional debris we keep having to pick up and hide away like some kind of… goddamn racoon, or something. A crow, maybe. They collect things, don't they?"

The question confused Phoebe who was accustomed to Helga's nonsensical rants that typically revolved around Arnold only to jut off in another direction entirely by the end. "Y-Yes, they do, but Helga—"

"Honestly, it's fine, I guess," Helga continued as though she hadn't heard a word her friend had said. "So, we collect our feelings like objects. Big deal. If he isn't willing to show me his, then I sure as hell am not willing to show him mine." Seeing that their teacher was still conversing with someone across the way about what appeared to be a previous assignment, Helga snuck her hand into the pocket of her sweater to grab the phone that lay inside.

"That's all there is to it," she said while pulling out the phone and clicking the button on the side to illuminate the screen. "I'll keep my feelings to myself and Arnold—" Helga stopped mid-sentence as she stared down at the screensaver that looked back at her.

"Helga?" Phoebe called her friend's name with a twinge of fear beneath her voice. "Helga, what is it? Is your phone alright after your hallway mishap?"

"I don't know…" she uttered before holding up the phone for Phoebe to see, "because this isn't my phone. It's Arnold's."

Meanwhile, a hallway over, Arnold Shortman had yet to notice that the phone residing safely in his pocket was not that of his own.

Slipping into his seat at the moment the bell chimed it's final chime, he too was glad that he hadn't collected another tardy slip like he had as a direct result of previous run-ins with Helga. It always seemed that the two of them found one another at the intersection of the 500 and 300 wings—Arnold silently wondered why he kept taking that route when he knew their colliding was almost fated to occur.

Perhaps he did it because he wanted them to bump into each other.

Maybe he secretly hoped that one of these times, just once, Helga might not snap at him and instead spill her feelings rather than her notebooks, pens, and papers.

"Hey, Arnold!" Gerald whispered out to his friend from the next row, and Arnold turned his head to direct his gaze towards him. "Did you get my message?"

"Huh?"

Pulling out his own phone and holding it out underneath his desk, he wiggled it back and forth as if the action would further illustrate his question. "Your phone! Did you get my text?" His voice was barely a whisper and more of a calculated soft-shout. It was a good thing their teacher spent the majority of his time playing Sudoku behind his desk rather than paying any attention to the going-ons of his classroom.

"No, why?" Arnold responded while fighting with his jeans to take out his cellphone.

"Just check it, man," Gerald instructed before continuing to explain what the message said; alleviating the need to read the text in the first place. "We're meeting at Gerald Field after school today for baseball. You in?"

"Sure. Sounds like fun," he remarked before furrowing his brow. "But why didn't I feel my phone vibrate? You must have texted me right when Helga and I ran into each other."

"Ah man, again?" his friend said with mock surprise. "Mm mm MM. Arnold, I think the universe is trying to tell you something and you'd better start listening. Next time it may do something more drastic than ramming you into each other."

As Arnold finally freed the phone from his pocket and looked down towards the screen, his eyes widened in horror. "Uh… about that…" he muttered as Gerald eyed him curiously.

"What, the universe or baseball?"

"Both," Arnold answered before holding up the phone in his possession. "This isn't my phone."

"Then who's is it?" Gerald soon asked; Arnold clicking the button on the side to light up the screen which revealed a lockscreen with the image of a pink neon heart against a dark backdrop.

"Helga's."

"No…"

"Yes," Arnold insisted with a shake of his head. "Maybe the universe already took it up another notch…"

"Yeah, maybe," Gerald affirmed before shrugging his shoulders. "Or maybe it just doesn't want you to play baseball this afternoon."

"Gerald…"

"What?" He exclaimed as their teacher rose from their desk to finally make their way towards the front of the classroom to begin the hour. Apparently, he'd finished his latest Sudoku puzzle. "So, you gotta exchange phones with Helga. Big whoop. Use it to your advantage."

"Alright class," the teacher addressed the class. "Take out your textbooks and flip to page 2-0-2," he instructed as Gerald and Arnold followed suit; the football-headed boy setting Helga's phone carefully down to rest on his lap.

"What do you mean to my advantage?" Arnold whispered over while pulling out his algebra book and turning the pages to find the appropriate number.

"You know," Gerald muttered back while flipping through his own book. "Maybe we can hack in or something."

"To her phone?!" Arnold said loudly; a few stray eyes glancing in his direction at the minor outburst. Quieting himself, he leaned over to whisper back, "I'm not breaking into Helga's phone, Gerald. That's a breach of privacy. If she ever found out, she'd kill me."

"Yeah. If she found out," he soon responded. "And she won't."

"Oh yeah? How do you figure?"

Gerald shrugged his shoulders while thinking for a moment before saying, "I don't know. I'll talk to Phoebe."

"No. Absolutely not, Gerald," Arnold insisted as silence fell over the classroom at his words. Suddenly feeling a heat surround him at the countless eyes resting on him, their teacher included, a dark-red blush filled in Arnold's cheeks as he realized he'd been caught. "Sorry," he sheepishly told the teacher, who proceeded to begin explaining the latest in their mathematical lesson-plan.

Midway through his explanation, a wad of paper landed on the top of Arnold's desk; his eyes shooting over in the direction from where it came—Gerald. Picking it up and unfurling it, his eyes scanned over the words his friend had scrawled down for him to read.

After class, meet me by my locker. I know a guy.

Frowning at the two sentences staring back at him, Arnold turned to shoot his friend a glare before shaking his head and mouthing the word, 'No.' But even though he had no intentions of breaking into Helga's phone, a part of Arnold couldn't help but wonder what lay behind the screen and inside Helga's mind.

Could the secrets Arnold seeked really be locked away inside the phone precariously perched on his lap? And to what lengths was he willing to go to discover them?

----------------------

"Gerald, I really think this is a bad idea," Arnold stated as he walked by his side from their lockers in pursuit of the 'connection' that awaited them.

"Relax, man," Gerald reassured his nervous friend while giving him a slap on the back and using it as a way to continue pushing him forward on their mission. "Fuzzy Slippers knows a guy who knows a guy who's cousins with this girl who knows how to hack into anything. They call her 'The Giant.'"

"The Giant?" he repeated with heavy skepticism. "I'm assuming that means they're tall or something?"

"No clue," the tall-haired boy admitted. "All I know is we're supposed to meet her in the 100 wing by that cluster of lockers nobody uses."

"The 100 wing?" Arnold intoned with obvious bias. "Gerald, nobody uses that hallway except to go into the wrestling room from the side door. Well, and the cafeteria, I guess. And to do shady things…"

"And just what is it you think we are doing? We're breaking into Helga G. Pataki's phone. What's shadier than that?" he emphasized. "Besides, wrestling doesn't start until after school PLUS we've already had lunch… so right now during sixth period with two more hours to go before school's done… Man, it is the perfect meeting spot."

Not wanting to argue about whether or not they should follow through with his insane plan, the flaxen-haired boy moved on to ask a different kind of question just as they rounded the corner that led to the entrance of the 100 wing. "How long do you think it'll take?" he paused as though waiting for Gerald to tell him he understood what he was saying. To be more direct, Arnold reiterated himself. "You know, the hacking-in part."

"Shh!" Gerald shushed. "Keep your voice down, alright? We don't need everybody knowing that we're over here."

"Why not?" Arnold reacted right away. "We're not not allowed to be in this hallway. There's a bathroom down here, we could always say we're going there or something." The pair continued to walk in silence for a moment as the slowly made their way down the infamous wing.

"I just can't be late to last period, again, Gerald," Arnold let out and he dropped his head back in annoyance while he continued to talk. "Mr. Nelson is a stickler for being on time—do you know that he locks the door when the bell rings?"

Perking his head up, Gerald said, "You've gotten yourself locked out of History class?" before letting out a jealous scoff. "Man! I wish I could get myself locked out of that class. History blows and Nelson's tests are impossible to pass."

"I knowthat," he replied blankly before going on to stress, "That's why I don't think this is such a good idea! Who knows how long this is going to take."

"Shouldn't take longer than a couple minutes," A shriek called out; both Arnold and Gerald looking around themselves to find the source of the high-pitched voice. Emerging from behind the grouping of unused lockers, a small girl who barely stood at five-feet-tall approached the friends while pushing up her large glasses which were sliding down her nose. "Of course, that's all depending on the make, model… year."

"Oh, uh…" Arnold stuttered while fishing out the phone from his pocket once more and holding it out for the unassuming girl in front of him. "I don't know. It's just a phone. I think it's like mine… so—"

"Hold up," Gerald interrupted as the girl took Helga's phone from Arnold's hand to begin inspecting it. "You mean to tell me that you're 'The Giant?' The school's best hacker AND Ralphio's seventeen year old cousin?"

"Wait, who's Ralphio?" Arnold questioned, though his inquiry was lost in the girl's answer.

"All that you need to know, Gerald Martin Johanssen," the girl called him by his full name which immediately made him flinch with frightening surprise, "is that I can do exactly what you're looking for and I can do it for a small, minimal, and inconsequential fee."

"If you're looking for money, we don't have any, so—" Arnold began to tell her, though 'The Giant' was quick to dismiss him.

"I'm not interested in money," she stated before looking between the both of them. "I'm far more interested in secrets."

"Secrets?" the teenage boys repeated in unison as 'The Giant' nodded her head while gently tapping the back of Helga's phone against her hand.

"There's nothing more elusive than a good secret," she explained with a mischievous smirk. "And, as a hacker, secrets are a large part of my work. So. What secret do you have for me? One secret for one code, that's the rules."

Gerald and Arnold exchanged a look for a moment before the blonde softly muttered, "Gerald… I don't know if this is worth it."

"C'mon, man! Don't you want to know about the inner workings of Helga's mind?" He whispered back as though the girl ahead of them wasn't actively listening to their every word. "What happened to the bold kid running through the jungle to save his parents or fighting the man to save the neighborhood? Huh? Where's that guy, right now?"

"It just seems… wrong," Arnold replied while reaching up to rub at the back of his neck and stealing a glance at 'The Giant' who looked on in curiosity. "I don't think I should break into Helga's private property."

"Arnold," Gerald stated blankly. "You and I both know that she's probably doing this exact thing to your phone right this minute. I'll bet you twenty bucks that she's standing in the hallway, talking to Phoebe and trying to guess your passcode so she can look at whatever secrets you've got hiding in there."

He thought this over while trying to imagine what Gerald had so precisely described for him.

"And you know what?" he went on to say, Arnold's eyes shooting back over to his friend as he continued. "With how smart Helga is… I would also bet that she doesn't even need a secrets-dealing hacker to do it either."

As Arnold considered Gerald's point, across the school and downstairs in the 600 wing Helga was staring down at the locked screen of the phone she'd mistakenly grabbed nearly an hour ago. "Stupid football-head losing his phone…" she muttered before huffing out a deep breath and dropping her arm while still holding the cellphone tightly in her grip. With exasperation, she rested her head against the metal of the lockers she leaned against while waiting for Phoebe to finish grabbing her books for their next class.

"I'm going to need a hacker if I ever want to get into Arnold's phone."

"Helga!" Phoebe scolded before shutting her locker with the appropriate book she needed in her grasp. "You can't break into Arnold's phone. It's his personal property."

"So what?"

Phoebe frowned while knitting her brows together in an expression of great concern towards Helga's judgement. "It would violate his privacy."

Helga remained in control of her tone as she brushed off the objection. "He's not going to find out. This is Arnold we're talking about, here. The kid barely knew I existed up until that nonsense on the roof of the FTi building."

"I'm not so sure that I would agree with that, Helga, but to break into Arnold's phone is another issue of which I wholeheartedly disapprove." She shook her head more to herself than to Helga before softly squeaking out, "What about his trust?"

"What about his trust?" Helga repeated while emphasizing a different part of the sentence entirely which gave it a distinctly sour aftertaste.

With a tired sigh, Phoebe said plainly, "Mutual trust is something that, once broken, is nearly impossible to repair. Suppose that Arnold didn't find out right away. Helga, I know you are smart enough to realize that Arnold would discover it eventually. It could hinder your relationship should you already be engaged in one, or… think of the damage an exposed secret of that magnitude could have on a potential relationship between the two of you. Is that something you're willing to sacrifice so you can snoop through his phone and perhaps find nothing of significance?"

Groaning at Phoebe's opinion on the matter, Helga shot her a hopeful, yet irritated look. "You could get me in though," she stated rather than asked. At Phoebe's lack of response, Helga went on. "Arnold's phone. Hypothetically speaking… you could hack into it. Am I right?"

Chewing over Helga's assumption, she decided to hint rather than answer. "Possibly."

"And you really won't help me out with this?" Helga begged yet again, an ace hiding up her sleeve as she spoke. "You'd really make me sit in the library and skip my next class, OUR next class that WE SHARE together? Hmm?"

Trying to walk away from Helga as she grew more and more persistent, Phoebe couldn't escape her longer strides that allowed her to catch up with ease. Just within reach, Helga called out as they walked, "You want me to have to watch some long parade of videos which frustrate me SO BADLY that I end up going back to you and EXPLODING like some kind of wild ape?"

"Helga, please," Phoebe ordered from over her shoulder. She was angry at how right Helga was. Maybe it would be the smart thing to skip what was implied and simply unlock the phone. At least by doing that, Helga would leave her alone with all of this nonsense.

As she thought this over with each step she took, Phoebe continued to listen while Helga kept painting the grim tale of her eventual compliance. "Picture it. There you are. You're right there in the middle of the hallway while I'm bugging you even worse than I am now. And what do you do, Phoebe?" Helga moved from talking to one side in lieu of the other. "What can you do when I'm just jib-jabbin' away like a bird on your shoulder squawking and pecking at you as I chirp, 'Help me, Phoebe! Help me! Open the phone and help me!'"

Stopping mid-stride, Phoebe pivoted around to face Helga with an angry albeit bored expression dusted over her features.

As if silently telling her to continue, Helga took the imaginary cue and began speaking to the dark-haired girl with a mock sympathy so sweet, it could cause cavities. "I'll tell you what you do, Pheebs. You, being the kind-hearted, good, and true-blue friend that you are… you give in. And I'm sorry, but you know you will, I'm not wrong, am I?"

Phoebe knew she was right. Phoebe also knew that it didn't matter. Helga would find a way regardless of her assistance or not. Helga herself went on to express her exact thoughts, but with her own words. "The only person I know better than me… is you."

Catching the glare that was sent her way, Helga soon held her hands up in defense. "It's not a bad thing, I mean, criminy! I'm pretty predictable too, we both know that."

"I guess so…" Phoebe quietly agreed, and Helga swooped in to play her final card—the ace she'd been saving for this very moment.

"Look. Phoebe," the teen began before giving her friend an exaggerated shrug. "I'm just trying to give you a shortcut here-a one-way ticket to jump you and I to the end of this headache."

"But Helga—" she tried to stand her ground, the foundation feeling flimsy beneath her weight as she began to faulter under Helga's towering presence.

"Please, Pheebs? I'm so, so close here and if you do it now, you'll save us both a stupid-long process," She paused for dramatic effect while holding out her one hand as though using it to weigh the choices she was presenting, "OR, we can give it a go and do this pointless dance which, worst case scenario, you still don't help me and I just go reach out to the depths of the 100 wing and hire someone to do it for me."

Phoebe eyed the pleading young woman who stood before her. She didn't want to give in to Helga's cries for help, but she knew in her heart of hearts that by refusing to help, she was merely prolonging the inevitable. What were the ethical ramifications of denying her friend and forcing her to find another way? Could the method that Helga ultimately finds lead to something far worse than imagined? Worse yet than any threat the consequences of Phoebe helping right away may pose to the universe?

The scowl on Phoebe's delicate face hardened as she prepared to hold her stance. "Helga, I'm sorry, but I must refuse to parti—"

"Wait, hang on a sec, Pheebs," Helga stopped her from finishing as she held out Arnold's phone to look down at the bright screen. "Arnold just got a text message," she reported flatly, and Phoebe arched her brow.

Without thinking, she blurted out, "From who?"

Flipping the phone so the screen could face her four-eyed friend, Helga replied, "From me."

----------------------

"I can't believe you told her about the dress-up thing," Arnold noted with a small smirk. "Honestly, I'd forgotten about it."

"As you rightfully should have," Gerald countered with a lone shake of his head. "I mean, we looked fabulous—"

"Right?!" the blonde agreed with excitement before toning down his demeanor. "But, you know… not everybody needs to know about it."

"I just hope that those pictures never see the light of day… ever." The two shuddered at the thought, though Arnold maintained his for a few seconds longer. Turning to look his way with worry, Gerald crossed his arms over his chest before saying, "You don't happen to have copies of those pictures on your phone, now do you, Arnold?"

Swallowing hard, he merely grimaced while managing, "Well…"

"Arnold!" Gerald shouted while throwing his arms up into the air. "Come on, man! That was like… our secret! We don't need to advertise that little experiment."

"It wasn't that bad," Arnold insisted.

"We put on make-up."

"And it looked good,"

"I know that, okay?" Gerald stage-whispered back to his unphased partner-in-crime. "Don't you think I know we looked great? It was disturbing."

"Eh," he sounded while tilting his head back and forth to weigh out his answer before speaking. "I thought it was interesting. Kind of cool, actually. You really didn't think it was fun?"

"Sure, but I'm not admitting that!"

"You might have to, now," Arnold teased while receiving the other end of an intense glare. "Why be ashamed when we looked so good?"

"Because it was last month that we did that," Gerald explained while using his hands to wildly gesture about himself. "Maybe if we were six it would be cute but we're almost sixteen now and—"

"And we put on dresses that we found in the crawlspace at the boarding house," Arnold continued to say as Gerald desperately tried to hush him without success, "and then Grandma gave us her make-up which we then used to—"

"Arnold…"

"—make ourselves, as you even described with your own words—"

"C'mon!"

"—as 'fabulous.' We were fabulous and we were wearing dresses with make-up on. What's the worst that could happen?" He patiently waited for an answer that never came. After a moment, he gave Gerald an answer of his own. "The worst that happens is Helga finds them, or 'The Giant' leaks them and then everyone can be jealous at how good we looked. I'm not ashamed."

Slowly shaking his head back and forth, Gerald watched Arnold while humming his usual song. "Mm mm MM. Arnold, I've said it once, and I'll say it again—"

"I'm a bold kid?" Arnold offered, though it wasn't what had been on his counterpart's mind.

"Nah, we established that a while ago," He said before handing over Helga's phone which he'd been holding since 'The Giant' had returned it to us opened and free from a passcode. "What I was going to say was that this is your dad's fault." Waving a hand over where Arnold stood, he continued while contorting his mouth into a twisted sneer. "All of this? I blame Miles. Dude has no shame and neither do you."

Taking the unlocked phone and easily swiping his way to the 'messages' menu, Arnold let out a single laugh. "I may have no shame about wearing a dress, but I have plenty of other kinds of shame, and those are thanks to myself."

Opening his mouth to argue, Gerald stopped when he saw his friend's fingers begin tapping away on the screen. "What are… what are you doing?"

"I'm texting Helga," he responded, then paused to look up and out thoughtfully while musing to himself, "Well, I guess I'm texting me, but, you know…" Arnold's voice trailed off as his attention returned to the message he had been feverishly typing.

"Why?" Gerald asked. "I thought we were going to explore the inner workings of Helga G. Pataki's mind!"

"Maybe that's what you would do," Arnold retorted before hitting the send button and lowering the phone altogether. "I told myself that the only way I would go through with this was that when the phone was unlocked, I would text Helga so we could arrange a switch. That's all."

"Okay, so what did you text her?"

Helga:

I know you have my phone, Helga. And I know you're probably reading this right now. Guess I'll find out in a minute when the 'read' receipt comes back.

"Would you look at that," Helga remarked, "he just has me labeled by my first name in here. The only other contact like that is Gerald's. And his parents, I guess."

"You already looked through his contacts?" Phoebe asked while looking over at the screen she'd helped to unlock.

"Doi," was all she said before beginning her own message to send back to the name she recognized as her own. All the while, she imagined Arnold receiving her text and smiling that dopey grin at the words she'd carefully typed.

Footballhead:

Took you long enough to get into my phone. Geez, Arnoldo. I take it your giant-head didn't come with an equally giant-in-size and freakishly-shaped brain, now did it?

"That Helga," Gerald commented while looking over Arnold's shoulder as he began wording his reply. "Always the clever one, isn't she."

"Always," Arnold affirmed before tapping send once again; the two-minute warning bell resounding through the 100 wing that the two still lingered in.

Helga:

No such luck, I'm afraid. But how do I know that you unlocked MY phone before I unlocked yours? After all, it was ME who texted YOU.

DING. DING. DING. DING.

"Two minutes," Helga noted while looking up to the air above her as if the noise had come out of the atmosphere rather than the speakers in the hallway. "We don't have to switch back yet…"

"Why wouldn't you want to get your phone back? I thought you didn't want Arnold looking through your things."

Helga's fingers danced across the keyboard of the screen as her body instinctively began walking towards the destination of her next class. "Because, Pheebs, he's already in," she clarified before hitting 'send' and sliding the phone safely into the pocket of her sweatshirt. "Now, we're just playing a little game."

"And where does that game end?" Phoebe probed as they took off down the hallway towards the end of the wing where the science rooms were located.

"I'm not sure yet," she responded just as they passed the threshold of their biology classroom. "Probably in us switching our phones back and going our merry way. Maybe."

"Maybe?"

Footballhead:

You may have texted me first, Hair Boy, but that doesn't mean I didn't have PLENTY of time to peruse your contact list, messages, emails, and of course, your many, MANY pictures.

Both Gerald and Arnold widened their eyes at the message that stared back at them from the bright light of Helga's phone.

"So, that's it," Gerald stated in defeat. "We're officially screwed."

"She's bluffing," Arnold immediately announced before zealously concocting his next message. "If she got into my phone, she got into it because of Phoebe, right?"

"Probably, yeah. Why?"

"If she got in because of her," he theorized, "then that means she's with Phoebe."

"So?"

"So," Arnold reiterated, "there is no way that she would let Helga go through my all of my stuff while she's still around." Clicking 'send' with a light tap of his fingertip, he added, "I think I can keep her distracted through the next couple hours until school is over."

"Why wait until school's done?" his childhood companion wondered. "You two can switch phones back after this period is over, no harm, no fowl! Why wouldn't you do it right away?"

"Because," his words were slick with amusement at the question, "I'm kind of enjoying this."

"Enjoying it? What are you, crazy, Arnold?!" Gerald practically shouted as they started on their way to the period that they may be late to after all, though Arnold hardly seemed to care anymore, despite the constant warning from his friend. "You're playing with fire, man!"

"Not fire, Gerald… only Helga."

"Which is worse," he argued; Arnold instantaneously disagreeing.

"It's all going to be fine, Gerald, I promise," he tried to reassure with a confident upturn of his lips and a light pat on the back. "Trust me."

And so began the exchange of a century.

----------------------

Helga:

I don't have anything to hide, Helga. If you want to go hunting through my phone for some kind of blackmail-material, you won't find anything.

She stared at the words of Arnold's latest message that shone from under the table she sat at in the back corner of her biology class.

Footballhead:

Who's to say that I haven't already FOUND all of your dirty little secrets and am currently planning to expose you for the weird, football-faced dingus that you are?

Arnold suppressed a laugh before replying while typing with one hand at his side and out of his teacher's sight.

Helga:

I have nothing to be ashamed of that you can find on that phone, Helga. The things I'm ashamed of are words that were never said and feelings I never acted on.

Mouth agape, Helga fought the urge to let out a loud gasp in reaction to the words Arnold had so boldly sent across the airwaves.

Footballhead:

And what words and feelings might those be, exactly?

A half-smile curled up at the corner of Arnold's mouth. This was his chance to use an inconvenience as a blessing—a way to reach out to Helga by using the only means that she seemed to understand: written word.

Helga:

You know.

"Two words?" Helga muttered to herself as she finally was able to read the message that she'd had to ignore for nearly thirty minutes to do some lame science experiment. The bell would ring any minute and she would be free to roam the halls with Arnold's phone still in tow.

Footballhead:

Why no, genius, I DON'T know. Why don't you and your dumb head enlighten me?

Walking slowly out of his class at the bell's chime, Arnold seized his moment in the back and forth he'd been enjoying—a back and forth that he knew Helga was enjoying, too.

Helga:

I guess I could do that. Only on one condition, though.

Footballhead:

Name your price.

Helga watched the bubble on the message screen appear and disappear rapidly as Arnold worked out the perfect reply. Her hands sweating, Arnold's phone became slippery no matter how tightly she held onto it, and she waited with bated breath until his message at last appeared on the screen.

Helga:

Slausen's. Today, after school. You can even order whatever you want.

It was Arnold's turn to wait anxiously as Helga typed her reply, though she didn't make him wait quite as long for a response.

Footballhead:

And what is it that YOU happen to be getting out of this little, late-afternoon ice cream social? Besides your phone, that is.

Trying to hide his growing smile, Arnold knew exactly what it was he wanted to say next.

Helga:

I get the chance at trapping you in an honest conversation with the bait of free food. You get to eat, and I get to tell you how I feel and HAVE felt since that Summer of 6th grade when we grew apart.

Chewing on her lip, Helga debated her next choice of words before sending one more question that she knew she wouldn't be getting an answer for. At least not by way of text.

Even so, she knew that she had to try.

Footballhead:

Just how was it that we grew apart? Why DID you stop talking to me? Did I scare you off?

Sighing at the words he knew Helga had struggled to successfully send, Arnold decided to give her just enough information that it would only make her want more.

Helga:

Absolutely not. It was ME who scared MYSELF off. I chickened out.

Intrigued by his vague explanation, Helga wasted no time in answering.

Footballhead:

Why?

The one word that Helga had sent brought butterflies along with it. They gathered inside of Arnold's stomach to flurry and flutter in circles as he sent her what he hoped would be an invite she would finally accept.

Helga:

Meet me at Slausen's after school and I'll tell you.

Before she could tell him that she was interested in his proposition, another message popped up on the screen.

Helga:

And make sure you bring my phone. As fun as this has been, we should probably switch back before we go home for the night. What do you say?

The 'typing' bubble didn't have to float for long before Arnold received Helga's reply; the message once again containing only one word.

Footballhead:

Deal.

#shortakiweek #shortaki week #shortakiweek2020 #shortaki #heyarnold #hey arnold #the jungle movie #hey arnold the jungle movie #tjm #arnold x helga #helga x arnold #day 4 #switch #fanfiction #fanfic

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lia-jones · 4 years

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Growing Pains - Chapter Twenty Six - The Rube Goldberg Trap

Author’s Note: Writing this first part was probably simultaneously the most scary and delightful I had done in my life. Finishing it was like the end of an era. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing, and if you did, please let me know. Your words and support are my bread and butter, and you have no idea how brighter my day becomes when I hear from you. So, it’s see you later, for now. Second part will be coming out soon! Lots of love!

Since I can remember, I have been fascinated with Rube Goldberg machines, even before I knew what they were called. A Rube Goldberg machine is also known as a chain reaction machine, which is basically a complicated contraption that requires a certain number of actions, one always leading to another, to obtain a single, usually very simple, purpose. It’s inventor, Rube Goldberg, invented them for comic purposes, but I was fascinated by how it seemed to represent the way fate affects our lives, should such a thing exist.

Because if fate was a real thing, there was a reason why I quit the piano and decided to take Economics instead. And my change of career led to me meeting Daniel, and falling in love with him. Which, of course, led to the abuse, and me coming to Loveland to change my life. Simultaneously, that also led to me taking my doctorate, as well as my internship in LFG, and meeting Victor.

If fate was a real thing, there was a reason why my car broke down in the middle of the main avenue that rainy night, and a reason for Victor to stop and help me instead of moving along. There was a reason for him to startle me in the coffee room and make me spill coffee all over myself, because otherwise he wouldn’t have asked for me to present my own reports, and I wouldn’t have argued with him and wouldn’t have tried to quit the job, and Victor would’ve gone to Creekwood by himself, and we wouldn’t get to know each other, or fall in love.

Of course, believing in fate is always a nice thought. Even if we make mistakes, we can say it was fate. It was meant to be that way, because if we didn’t mess up, this or that wouldn’t have happened. Even the faultiest of actions can be seen as part of the Rube Goldberg machine, and we can cut ourselves some slack. It is faulty when we look at it closely. But if we look at the bigger picture, after the complicated contraption does its job, it fits perfectly. Its purpose is clear.

Unless, of course, the contraption leads to an unwanted result. That is a new kind of scary.

My presence in that fashion show seemed to be the push on the button of another Rube Goldberg machine, leading to a series of events, and I still couldn’t put my finger on all of them. As far as I was concerned, the contraption was still in motion, one event leading to the other. It began at the show, which probably caused a paparazzi to see me, which piqued the interest of that reporter who wrote the article, which lead to… this.

The morning after the article, I spoke with the Dean, reassuring her that the situation would be dealt with. Since Victor Lee was one of the people involved, she was relieved almost immediately, knowing he wouldn’t possibly let anything escape his watchful eye. After my classes and a brief meeting with my research team, I headed to LFG to meet the lawyers, and see what could be done about this whole thing.

I arrived at LFG to find Victor already in the conference room with the lawyers.

“Gentleman, please inform Miss Jones of what you believe we should do.” Victor ordered as I sat down. He was in CEO mode, bossy, poker face in place.

“We believe we may sue them for violation of privacy.” One of them turned to me. “Your abuse is a serious matter, and we can allege that the fact that they interviewed your abuser actually gave him the idea to try to reconnect with you.”

“Oh my God. Please don’t remind me.” I held my head between my hands.

Victor gave me a reassuring look. It made me feel safer, and I relaxed.

“We have to say, however, this may not work.” The other lawyer advised. “But the consequences of a lawsuit, even if the publisher is deemed not guilty of the charges, will be disastrous for them. We are talking about legal expenses, long days in court, not to mention no one will want to have anything to do with the company that crossed LFG’s CEO.”

“They will lose all their investors and go bankrupt.” I concluded. They all nodded, apparently pleased that I understood it. “But is this just a threat, or are we really going to go through with it?”

“Your choice.” Victor offered. “Whatever you decide, it’s final.”

“If we go through with this, if we press charges, my abuse will be discussed to no end, right?”

They all nodded.

“I don’t want that. And I have no intention of sending hundreds of people to unemployment either. I just want this to go away and maybe to send a warning that my personal business is off-limits.”

The lawyers all looked at Victor for approval. He gave them a small nod.

Suddenly, the door to the conference room opened, and an elegant tall man in his 60’s entered, his expression unsmiling and unforgiving. That expression alone would be a dead giveaway to who he was, if I hadn’t seen his picture in Victor’s biography. It was Victor’s father, Gregory Lee. Goldman followed shortly after him, a panicked expression on his face. And everyone in the room, except for me and Victor, were immediately affected by his presence, looking all uncomfortable and suddenly ceremonious.

Mr. Lee senior turned to the lawyers, speaking like he was actually their boss and ran the whole company himself.

“I need a moment alone with my son. Make yourselves busy elsewhere.”

Without another word, they quickly left the room, practically bowing to the man. The more I looked at him, the more I saw the resemblance in Victor. It was like he was a younger version of his father… except maybe for the eyes. The elder man turned to me.

“Did you not hear me? Leave.”

I looked at him, wondering what chip he had on his shoulder to be so rude. Victor intervened.

“Father, this is-“

“I know exactly who she is.” Mr. Lee interrupted, annoyed. “Her face is all over the tabloids.”

“What exactly are you doing here?” Victor asked, showing slight annoyance.

“I came to Loveland on business.” Gregory answered, sitting down. “Imagine my disappointment when one of my assistants brings me a copy of one of those dirty tabloids, featuring my son and… her.”

“I don’t see why is that any of your business.” Victor stated, cool as a cucumber.

“Ungrateful child.” The father spoke, his tone severe. “What do you think you are doing? Is that how you take care of our name, of your reputation? By getting yourself infatuated and letting our name be dragged through the mud? First it was that producer, now this? You’re too much of a fool, always acting on your romantic whims. Look at her. She has no family name, no worth of her own. Are you really considering continuing our bloodline with this girl? With a filthy immigrant?”

“I’m sorry, I won’t let you disrespect me like that!” I stood up.

“Someone should put a muzzle on you.” Victor’s father warned.

“Someone should try.” I retorted, letting him know with my eyes I was not scared of him.

“Enough!” I heard Victor say. “You said your piece. Now leave.” He got up, and walked to the door, opening it.

Gregory Lee walked proudly towards the door. He stopped by Victor, shooting a little more venom.

“I’m glad your mother isn’t here to see this. She would be ashamed of you.” And with that he left.

Victor looked like he took a major blow to the stomach. His eyes were red, his jaw clenching in anger. I had never seen him this vulnerable. He closed the door behind his father, and for a moment I was almost afraid to go to him, fearing he would break under my touch. He looked so fragile. It was evident that Victor’s tender spot was his father… and the mention of his mother.

He leaned against the frosted glass panels of the conference room, taking a deep breath, gathering himself. He was still the same Victor, standing tall and looking dignified, but at the same time, something about him looked frail, unhinged, shaken. I stood before him, massaging his shoulders softly.

He immediately took me in his arms, and held as tight as he could, taking a deep breath. Victor has held me so many times, trying to keep me safe or soothe me, but this was different. This was for his sake. He was the one seeking comfort this time, trying to steady himself. It almost felt like he was recharging.

“I’m sorry for this.” Victor finally spoke, sounding more like his usual self.

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I really am sorry. I know he’s your father, but he’s an ass. And he has no right to just waltz in and disrespect you.”

Victor let out another sigh.

“Don’t worry, I’m used to it.” He said, looking at me, but not letting me go out of his grip. “I told you, we don’t get along well.”

“You are a good man, Victor. You are.” I said, hoping my words would sound as honest as they were. He gave me a soft kiss, his lips lingering on mine.

“Let’s go home. I had enough of this day.” Victor gathered his things to leave.

The problem with contraptions like a Rube Goldberg machine is that, if you don’t see the bigger picture, you won’t know what it will lead to until the very end. You just see the dominoes falling, and the ball rolling, and the hourglass turning, and the hammer hitting it, allowing the sand in it to be slowly poured into a bowl supported by a very fragile string that can break at any moment.

All I knew was that my study was compromised, my career was in jeopardy, my abuse was out for the world to see, and Victor was fighting with his father. All of this was weighing on me like the sand in the bowl, and I was terrified to find out what would happen should the fragile string break.

Victor and I sat on the sofa in his living room, nursing our glasses of whiskey, both lost in thought. The world had decided to throw its entire weight on our shoulders, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel strong enough to bear it. I couldn’t help but think this was all my fault. It was all a curse I seemed to carry, and I couldn’t get rid of it, no matter how hard I tried. Now it was affecting Victor as well. It broke my heart to see him hurt like that… because of me.

Victor seemed to read my mind, as he held my hand and spoke in a more upbeat tone.

“You know what we need?” He said, getting up and pulling me with him. “A distraction. Let me cook you something.”

I gladly took the suggestion. We gathered around his kitchen island, preparing ingredients, and at some point all those problems seemed so far away that it was almost funny that they existed. We were just there, living in the moment, enjoying the banter, having fun. We would get through this. We had each other.

And then the doorbell rang. With a heavy sigh, Victor went to open it.

“Mia?” I heard him say from the hallway. “What are you doing here?”

It was my turn to sigh heavily. What was she doing here?

I didn’t understand her reply, but I noticed the voices were starting to get closer and closer. I prepared my serene smile.

“Wait in the kitchen with Andrea, I’ll check in my office.” I heard Victor say.

And there she was, wearing a blue summer dress, looking chirpy and innocent as always.

“Oh, Souvenir food?” She eyed the counter, and all the ingredients on it, curiously.

“Not sure it can qualify as Souvenir food, since we are both preparing it.” I said, as I put some onions to fry in a skillet.

“I miss my days cooking with Victor in Souvenir.” She reminisced. “But I have to say I learned a lot, at least now I can make edible food for Gavin. I was helpless in the kitchen, back in the day.”

My heart sank at the thought of Victor and Mia together, sharing the same moments I just shared with him.

“You used to cook with Victor for Souvenir?” I asked, trying to look impassive.

“I was there all the time!” She beamed. “I’m sure Victor told you, we know each other from way back! The restaurant was named after a memory we shared as kids! Well, one of the happy ones, the whole kidnapping and being in captivity for years isn’t one we want to keep, right?”

I held tight to the counter, my mind reeling. First, he clearly opened the restaurant in her honor, and that made my heart pang. Second, what did she mean, kidnapping? And captivity? This time, I couldn’t keep a straight face, and Mia grew worried.

“Are you feeling alright? You look pale, all of a sudden.” I didn’t reply, I could feel the ground moving under my feet. I focused on a spot on the counter, trying to steady myself.

“What’s the matter? Andrea?” I heard Victor’s voice as he came closer, his hands resting on my shoulders. I discretely shrugged his touch away. Mia didn’t notice, but Victor clearly did.

“Mia, the files you asked for are in that envelope. You don’t need me to see you out, do you?” I heard Victor say, his voice tense.

“No, it’s fine. Feel better, Andrea, okay?”

I nodded, wanting to make her go away as soon as possible. After a while, I heard the door close. I wondered how long it would take her to leave the building so I could leave as well, unnoticed. I released my grip from the counter and walked to the living room to get my phone. Victor followed me.

“Can you fill me in on what just happened?” Victor asked, simultaneously confused and annoyed.

“Why did you close Souvenir, Victor?” I faced him, giving him an accusatory look. “And don’t tell me it was because of Mr. Mills, because I know it wasn’t. It was because of her, wasn’t it? It didn’t make sense to keep it open, because she married another guy.”

Victor froze, his expression slightly panicked. I continued my tirade.

“What about your kidnapping? And being held captive for years? My trauma was spread all over Loveland, and you can’t bother sharing yours? I have to learn about it through your ex?”

“She is not my ex! We never had anything! I don’t even understand why you are so obsessed with her, she’s married! She’s off-limits!” Victor exploded.

“Oh, I’m painfully aware of that! If she was single you wouldn’t even look at me. She was nothing to you and still you shared all your life with her, opened a restaurant for her! Yet I sleep in your bed, practically share a life with you, and I’m kept in the dark. I’m the lesser evil. Why would you want me to move here in the first place?” My eyes were filled with tears. Victor’s were filled with anger.

“Don’t make this about me, you know this is not about me.” He fought back. “This is about your unwillingness to commit! This is about you not wanting to stand by my side and fight. I may not be verbal about a lot of things, Andrea, but I do notice them. And the moment that I asked you to move in, you’ve been evasive. You’re terrified to do this. I know that things went sour when you and Daniel moved in, but I’m not Daniel! And it disgusts me to be compared to him! I have been nothing but supportive! And I wonder if you truly want my support, because the minute things get hard, you look for reasons to walk away! Things got hard back in Portugal, and you ran to Loveland! You must be mentally packing by now!”

“Don’t act like you understand what I’ve been through! And don’t you dare use my abuse against me!” I almost screamed. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so enraged with Victor, and I could see him losing it too. And it was all so unfair! I was risking everything I fought so hard for just to be with him.

Victor paused, noticing he was indeed touching a very sensitive subject. He moved closer, but didn’t touch me, using his pleading eyes to connect with me.

“You’re giving up on us, Andrea. Don’t do this because things are getting harder. We can still solve this together.”

“Things are more than hard, Victor. My career is on the line, my trauma is juicy gossip, you haven’t been honest with me about your past. And some things can’t be solved. Did you tell your father the filthy immigrant can’t actually give him grandchildren? Did you ever consider it yourself? That you may want a child someday and I can’t give it to you? Maybe some things are just meant to crash and burn. Maybe we should cut our losses and call it a day.”

I could see the pain in Victor’s eyes when I spoke those last words. It mirrored the pain I felt when I said them. We had different opinions on that matter. As his history with Mia clearly showed, Victor would go to extreme lengths for something that really mattered to him, and I was one to pick my battles. The approaches were different, but both were right. They just weren’t compatible. Maybe Victor genuinely loved me and would stay strong by my side, but I couldn’t bear to make him go through so much hell.

Victor however, headstrong as he was, only saw his side of the equation, the only right side, in his opinion. And I understand he felt rejected. In retrospect, I also understand why the look in his eyes turned from pain to icy cold rage.

“Fine.” He said, his expression defying me, the wall put in place between us. “If you want to leave, then leave. Maybe your infertility is a silver lining, at least you’ll never leave a child behind when things get rough. Abandoning them like you are doing to me right now.”

I didn’t register the seconds that followed his statement, as I acted out of pure rage and instinct. I could only conclude what I had done when I felt my right hand tingle and saw Victor’s face turned to the side, his eyes closed, my fingers printed on his cheek.

I stood for a moment, wondering if it had been just a nightmare. Victor finally opened his eyes and looked at me, and the pain I saw in them was so deep that I couldn’t help but sob in desperation.

I couldn’t believe what had just happened. But it had happened. There was no way we could take it back.

Without a word, I gathered my things, tears streaming down my face, and walked to the door. Victor stood where he was, I didn’t expect him to follow me. Things had gone way too far.

That’s the thing with chain reaction machines, you are so distracted watching the contraption work, that you forget that you can actually stop it. Our relationship had just exploded in the ugliest of ways. The fragile string supporting the bowl had broken, and sand was spilled everywhere.

#Growing Pains - Series #growingpains #victor x oc #mlqc victor #mlqc li zeyan #mister love queens choice #mlqc fanfic #love and producer

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justpan · 5 years

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Title: Roommates

Summary: While (Y/N) plans her next move, Peter is still thinking about his past mistake

Pairing: YOU THOUGHT!!!

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven Part Twelve Part Thirteen Part Fourteen Part Fifteen Part Sixteen Part Seventeen Part Eighteen

Peter had been gone for all of five minutes and already you had ran through the entire house, none of the windows opened and going out the front door only led to entering the back door.

There was no way out.

Experimentally she tossed a grape out the front door and ran to the back to see if the grape came back the way she did, but the grape wasn’t again. Then to verify her suspension she threw out an apple and found that it too didn’t re-enter the house.

It seemed that only she couldn’t leave this house.

What good did that do you? Just standing in the doorway you could see only woods, no noise from passing by cars or even foot traffic, it appeared to be the middle of nowhere.

Still she had to try something, anything to try and get out of here.

With a new sense of determination you ran back into the bedroom and rummaged through the night stand and found a pen but no paper. Damn magically conjured house, there is always something wrong or missing.

You looked everywhere in all the rooms before you finally gave up on paper, maybe you could find something else and throw it out so that someone would hopefully find it and realize something was up.

Whatever you used needed to be something Peter wouldn’t notice was missing, and that you could throw easily.

Suddenly you remember finding out that the closet of the bedroom Peter had transported all of her clothes and shoes.

Luckily she had a pair of white flats that you never wore, so you were surprised that they were not magically left behind. Peter wouldn’t notice them missing and if he did see the shoe outside of the barrier you could just say you threw it at him after he left.

With all the strength you could muster she threw the shoe out of the front door and watched it disappear in the air.

For a moment you stood there in the doorway and watched for a moment for any signs of movement, but nothing happened.

Maybe Peter really had put this house smack in the middle of nowhere so that no one would ever even be near it to see anything you threw out of it. Full of utter disappointment and downright despair, you closed the door and decided now was as good a time as any to try and find something to put on the bruises forming on your shoulders where Peter had grabbed you.

Just as you were at the top of the stairs you heard a bang on the door.

Were you surprised by how fast you got down those stairs? Yes. were you ashamed of it? Not at all.

You swung that door open so fast and hard that you were almost sure that you’d ripped the damn thing off the hinges.

Your shoe was back right at the foot of the door where you could pick it up.

There was some writing on the bottom of the shoe and immediately your eyes began to water as you read the words.

Past my last day

You would recognize those words anywhere, they were your families words. Those were the words your father put into his wedding vows, the words your mother sewed into your baby blanket before she lost her life giving birth to you.

It meant that you were family, family would love that you past the day they all died, from the great unknown space called the after life.

‘Dad.’ you sobbed.

Your dad was out there, probably right there in front in front of you, but the barrier kept you from seeing him, same way it probably kept him from seeing you.

None of that mattered, you knew he was there, he knew you were here; your dad found you and you knew that he would save you.

Full of hope you ran back up the stairs to the bedroom and put everything back to the way it had been, if your dad had found you then that meant he would have the Charmings, the Evil Queen, and Felix helping to him.

If all of them were working to save then you had faith that they would, all you had to do was try to survive Peter with as little physical damage as possible.

It was clear that Peter was obsessed with you, it showed in the way he approached you late at night in your room, how he kept pursuing. Luckily it also seemed he was also obsessed with the idea of you wanting him back, he wanted you to willing choose to be with him, maybe you could bank on him not doing anything too harsh so long as you resisted.

You were certainly not going to fall for the Stockholm Syndrome crap.

That aside Peter also practically attacked her this morning when she rejected his breakfast, so i was going to be a thin line you would be treading on from here on out. By no means did you consider yourself a psychologist, but you did take the class last year and you paid attention well enough to know that Peter was not right in the head.

What you didn’t know was that in the middle of the deli aisle Peter was thinking the exact same thing.

Obviously he couldn’t just walk in there as he was, the boy the entire town now knew was Rumple’s father, the previous leader of the Lost Boys and the Witch Doctor’s new prisoner. With his powers returned he was able to disguise himself as a middle aged man he had seen in the park once.

As he gathered things in his basket he thought over what he had done.

He did not mean to do that.

In all honesty he didn’t even realize how hard he was grabbing her until he had heard her whimpering and seen such genuine fear in her eyes.

Fear of him.

Peter had seen fear in every form there was and he did love it, the feeling that he had that kind of power over someone.

He didn’t want (Y/N) to be afraid of him.

More than anything he wanted her to look at him with soft eyes and a big smile, he wanted to hear her say that she was happy that he was around. If only because she had never said those words, at least not to him.

A least not genuinely, not the way she meant it when she speaking with that insect Felix. Whenever she said good morning to them all at breakfast she would say to all of them, but she would look at Felix first, then she’d smile to her father and that was it. She would just sit down and look at what was on the table or she’d start cooking, not giving him so much as a glance.

What made it worse was that she didn’t even seem to notice she was doing it, she just didn’t consider him worth the kindness or even fear him enough to be cautious of him.

Maybe that was why he found himself so obsessed with her so suddenly, or the fact that no matter what power he had or what transformations he went through he was still a man. A man with needs that he had been ignoring for centuries upon centuries on Neverland. Not that there was anything physically wrong with him that kept him from taking care of those needs, it’s just that there was always something more important to do. He had a camp to run, a grand master plan and a literal timer on his life.

Now things were different, he had been here for nearly four months and all he’s been able to do is mix two measly potions and sit in a room and think about one girl.

Almost overnight (Y/N) had become the one thing he wanted in this miserable realm that he was trapped in. All he wanted was her, he didn’t want to destroy the place, in fact he had come to find it quite charming with all its convenient little machines. Hell half the things he used his magic for could be done effortlessly with most machines, but that wasn’t the point of it.

Peter Pan was magic, what the hell was he without it?

As Peter moved onto the next aisle he saw a young couple holding hands, once he would have found it hilarious to send a wave of magic and make the boy piss his pants so much that it ruined the poor girl’s shoes. Now all he felt was envy, that could have been him and (Y/N) but instead he was here alone and she was probably in the house looking at the bruises he had put on her body.

With a mountain of thoughts to sort out Peter finished his shopping and got in line, an annoying thing that he hated going through with (Y/N) when she took him and Felix along with her on errands.

He paid for his groceries with a card that he had whipped up and went on his way, turning into an alley. He couldn’t very well carry so many groceries all the way through town and into the woods where the house was hidden without attracting attention.

In the alley Peter double checked to be sure no one was around or looking before he vanished in a cloud of green smoke.

When the smoke cleared he was greeted with the sight of the house he had made for him and (Y/N) to live in. It truly had been the first thing he used his magic for when it was returned to him. The overwhelming need he felt to have a place that would be just for him and her was the only thing on his mind when the magic came rushing through his body.

Peter found himself just looking at the house, avoiding walking in, and seeing her; he was finding himself feeling something he could hardly even recognized.

Regret.

He regretted hurting her, and in his blackened heart he knew that he was sorry but he didn’t know how to apologize.

Suddenly he remembered something very important, something that made him begin walking to the porch.

Peter Pan never fails.

#peter pan imagine #felix imagine #peter pan #peter pan ouat #roommates series #ouat imagine #peter x reader #felix x reader

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