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adventuringblind · 1 year

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Drive Forever With You

Chapter Two: Discoveries, birds and bees.

Max verstappen x Lando norris x Charles leclerc x reader

Genre: idk man it's a series

Summary: The reader has been used by her father for many things, resulting in some interesting quirks. When her father ends up under house arrest, she finds herself tangled in a world of fast cars, love, and inhuman abilities.

Chapter summary: Max and Reader become friends, Seb is a proud dad, and the reader is learning about people and feelings. Despite the chapter title, I swear there is nothing sexual going on.

Warnings: mentions of abuse, talks of sickness, injury descriptions, SH and Suicidal ideation

Notes: it's gonna get dark, but have no fear it will get better, I swear. Also, please don't read if you get triggered. I got triggered but read anyways because if your like me somehow reading what fictional me is doing helps immensely. I just ask that you be careful. My inbox and asks are always open :)

Previous <-

Masterlist

Max had quickly learned that this girl was the only one who understood him. She somehow knew exactly what he was thinking. Exactly what he needed. It was ridiculous because he felt that he couldn't reciprocate.

The two had formed their own little team. Max would sneak away with his data to see her, and she would tell him everything he needed to fix in a way he actually understood. Not just being talked at for hours about his mistakes.

He didn't realize someone could nicely tell him what he was doing wrong and also compliment him on things he was doing right. The concept was foreign.

He quickly found himself looking for her all the time. She looked fragile compared to everyone else. Like the wind could pull her away.

But he also couldn't get a read on her quite yet.

Seb, on the other hand, had learned much more in the span of a couple of months. Things that didn't make him any less concerned.

He quickly found that her favorite hobby was doing incredibly stupid things that could get her hurt or even killed. Even the mundane daily tasks. It's like if he didn't feel pain, then she was doing something wrong. He blames it on her prior upbringing.

He frequently caught her with bloodied arms and legs. Trying to do stupid stunts that had her neck almost snapping. She once decided to see how tall of a building she could jump off of 'for science'.

Seb could not, for the life of him, decided whether she actually wanted to die or just didn't understand the concept of safety and healing.

He tried to keep eyes on her. Not always his, but anyone's. Max included.

He was immensely grateful for the Dutch. He pratically was glued to her side. He could tell she wasn't used to the amount of interaction with people, but the smile that creeper on her face at Max's dumb jokes told him everything he needed to know.

Max had ended up catching her once. His giddy state morphed into a panicked one. He had found her messing with one of the broken ferrari engines in his downtime. He had initially been curious until he realized the engine was hot from tools, and she was doing her best to press her hands against it.

He'd fussed over her for hours. He was completely lost as to how she wasn't showing any pain. Even as he lather her hand in burn ointments and wrapped them.

Max stuck even closer to her after that.

Seb had also learned that when she wanted to protect, she wouldn't hesitate to say what she felt. including to Jos Verstappen.

He felt scared when he stumbled upon Max behind her and Jos in front. The younger Dutch is trying to look stoic but failing and the older getting increasingly angry. Y/N in between them, her mouth moving steadly, the string of compliment for Max seemingly never ending.

Seb stepped in and pulled everyone apart. He tried to talk to her, but her attention was on Max. Completely set on making sure he was okay and dragging him off to somewhere safe.

It was strange for Max to have a friend like this. He'd not had many growing up. Yet here he was, feeling close to a girl he'd known for about five months.

It was now summer break. Seb, having seen the two interact, decided to invite the Dutch over for a weekend. His dad was last then happy about it but didn't want to look bad in front of a world champion, so he said yes.

Seb had never heard her talk so much. She was happy and he was glad to see her smile.

Hanna had to force them to sleep at some point. Something that the girl was less than fond of. Sleep was always difficult. Sometimes, Sébastien would stay in her room if he had a feeling she was going to wake up screaming.

He hadn't thought tonight would be one of those nights. Max was in the spare room, and she was in hers. This means that Max woke up to the thrashing first. Her wall right up against his.

He knew it might be an invasion of privacy, but when he heard sniffling, he didn't care. He threw himself out of the bed and made for the door.

He made sure to knock before opening the door. He waited for a possible answer but is only met with the sound of sobs now.

Then the screaming starts.

Seb is out of bed in an instant. Knowing how bad her night terrors got, he knew he needed to act fast.

He was shocked to find her door already open, and Max gently crouched over her. The screams had stopped, but she was still sobbing. Hugging Max like her life depended on it.

Seb smiled at the two and gave them a moment. He was releived she found someone who cared about her.

He knew he had to get her back to bed, though. He crept over to Max and placed a hand on his shoulder.

"I'll take it from here." Max looks up at the older man. That same awkwardness about being in a world champion's house now escalated. "Thank you, for staying with her." Seb added in a hope of reassuring the Dutch.

Max just nodded his head and slipped out from her bed. Seb takeong his place and laying her head on his lap.

She was still crying. Seb didn't push her to talk. he just let her cry while he ran his fingers through her hair.

"He came back." She croaks. "He got you and Max." Her visions sometimes found their way into her dreams. It made it hard to decipher what was real and what wasn't.

"It's okay, we're here now. And with the way Max is glued to you, I doubt he's ever going away."

They both chuckle a bit. Eventually, with the calming presence of Seb, sleep comes clawing back to her once more.

Max was elated. He was finally eighteen. He was now a full fledged adult and could do adult things with the team.

And yet, despite that, he chose to spend his birthday with her. The two sprawled out on the floor on his cramped hotel room, eating his favorite foods and watching his favorite movies.

He'd never felt more at peace than in this moment. The warm smiles shared between them, making him wonder how he'd gotten so lucky.

It had been a year. She was now sixteen. Her birthday is a mere reminder that she is a murder. She killed her mother.

She didn't tell anyone. Nobody needed to know because they would want to celebrate. This was not something to he celebrated, but loathed.

But of course, her plans were foiled. She forgot Seb and Hanna had all her information. Of course they would know.

Her and Seb were away for another weekend, but Hanna flew down to surprise her. They made her breakfast that morning and gave her a present. It was odd, and she kept looking at them skeptically. She'd never received a present of her own.

She opens the pretty paper gently. She'd feel bad if she ripped such a delicate thing. The inside reveals a pair of keys.

"We thought since you can get you license now that you would need a car." Squeals Hanna.

She cries. Her hand flying to cover her mouth. She doesn't understand. Isn't this the anniversary of her killing someone? Why were they being so nice to her?

The paddock wasn't any better. Of course, Seb would have told everyone. People were giving her things left and right.

It was to overwhelming.

She snuck out of the Ferrari paddock to find Max. His presence was needed right now. Maybe he'd understand.

She spotted Max outside his garage. Her body moved faster than her mind. When she gets close enough, Max immediately pulls her into him. He grabs her hand and drags her off to his room in the motor home.

"I got you something." He smiles cheekily. Handing over a small cardboard box to her.

She opened it to reveal a slick black screen. A phone? Why had he gotten her a phone? The overwhelming feeling takes hold, and she is once again sobbing at the gesture

Max is frantically trying to get a read on her. "Do you now like it? Did I do something wrong?"

She shakes her head no frantically. Trying to find her words again. "I just don't understand why everyone is being so nice to me."

Max is taken aback. He knew she was American and as far as he's aware, Americans give eachothers presents.

He thinks he might be left to wonder. His mind escapes to thoughts that make no sense. Only to be pulled back by her continued explanation.

"I killed my mom today sixteen years ago. They should be looking away in disgust, not giving me gifts."

Max is constantly learning new things about this girl. He understands the waiver in her voice. The sadness when she looks at Hanna with her baby.

Max is hugging her again. He dosen't normally like physical contact, but for them, it was a way of communicating without words.

He sets his chin on top of her head and runs his fingers along her spine. "That was not your fault. Whoever told you that is a liar and an asshole."

"It feels like most of the things I was told growing up were lies." Sobs of anger and frustration leak out of her eyes.

"Now we get to find the truths, and I'll be here to help you."

Time flies by. Max is nineteen, and she's seventeen.

Seb had gotten her a job test driving for Ferrari and Max had been moved into redbull.

He hadn't been expecting it. He made her pinch him a few times in case he was dreaming. He cried in relief when he knew he wasn't.

Sebastian had grown even fonder of Max. He had a soft spot for the redbull team even if he wasn't driving for them.

Y/N was now diving her time between Max and Seb. And if she wasn't with them, she was probably of trying new idiotic ideas.

The voice in the front of her head said it was for experimental reasons, she she was learning something and making herself stronger as her father made her do. The voice at the back of her head knew the real reason. She liked it. She was in control of it. She deserved it.

Regardless of her reasonings, the sting of the sharp metal she was working with felt annoyingly good as it sliced into her skin.

She felt unlucky that Max had walked in on it again. She was hoping to be cleaned up before he saw her. Someone must have given out her location.

Max sighs and seats himself next to her, inspecting her crimson covered arm.

She cast her gaze downward. Shame creeping over her cheeks.

Max just pulls some bandages out of his pockets and begins trying to slow the bleeding. "Don't be scared. I can feel your body shaking."

Though it wasn't fear she was shaking with, it was anticipation. A dull throb and flash of the possible future showed her that Max was going to hit his hand on the metal and slice his knuckles open.

Just before he can, her hand falls above his, her knuckles taking the damage instead. Max it startled and stunned.

"I always forget how good your reflexes are." He smiles. The warmth of his features causes her to relax. "Next time you decided to work on something I want to be here to watch."

His protectivness over her has seemingly grown over the past couple of years.

Her powers have been coming in handy these days. Seb has been helping her in whatever ways he can. Always making sure she isn't trying to suppress the energy flowing in her veins into a box.

He'd noticed that some things are easier then others. She dosen't heal very often because of the excruciating amount of energy and pain she has to put in.

Small cuts had been getting easier but anything past that was to much.

She knew she was never going to be strong enough to fulfill her desired purpose. But she didn't need to anymore her goals have shifted.

Getting to test drive and try new things for Ferrari felt like a dream. She was able to take her mind out of those innately dark places and clear her head for a moment.

She shocked a lot of people. They weren't expecting her to be any good. Now they were eating their words.

She glides easily around the corners. Her ability to predict helping her immensely. She could see what the car was going to do before it even happened. How was a child who had rarely driven a kart before, driving a formula 1 car like a professional?

Max looked on with pure delight cheering for her as she continued to set faster lap times.

Seb and Max were there waiting for her when she got out of the car. Enveloping both in a hug.

Max hadn't yet been able to determine his feelings for the girl. He'd had partners, but none of them ended well. Mostly because none of them were her.

Curse there stupid age gap. They had met when he had barely turned seventeen, but the public image he had to keep was what was stopping him.

Other drivers on the grid had started to catch on. Seb noticed the longing glances first and the way she was always smiling at her phone second. Lewis noticed how he was always talking to her, even if both of them were busy. Daniel said they are a package deal. You can't have one without the other.

The age issues was one side of the problem, though. The other was that she was absolutely clueless.

Seb had explained to Max that she hadn't been around people much. She had barely any experience with friendships, let alone a romantic relationship. So Max didn't push. He'd let things go on their own time.

Seb had dreaded this dat for since he found out how little knowledge of the world she has. He knew it was going to be awkward and he wishes Hanna were here to save him.

The workers of the paddock and the drivers specifically are known for their lack of filter. She didn't understand half of what was being said but didn't want to seem stupid, so she just laughed with everyone else.

Having the birds and bees talk with a seventeen year old was not on his bucket list.

To his credit, he did try. Then he ended up calling Hanna.

The poor kid went through the four stages of grief.

The interesting part was when Hanna was explaining romantic interests. He took notice of the way the girls eyes lit up when Hanna was describing how it feels to be in love with somone.

Her eyes started to panic for a moment. Like she needed to ground herself because she was going to lose it.

Seb reached out for her and placed his hand over hers. "Are you alright? I know this is a lot and probably uncomfortable. We can stop now if you need."

She shook her head. "No- it's just that - what if I feel those things now?"

"It's normal and completely okay." Seb offers her a gentle smile. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Well, Hanna said that it makes your stomach feel funny and you smile more. I do those things with Max." She explains.

Seb nods his head in understanding. He already knew, but he wanted it to seem like he didn't. "I can't tell you what you're feeling. But, if you like those feelings you get with Max, I would say that you let them guide you."

It was the first time someone told her to follow her feelings and not her head.

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taylor-on-your-dash · 1 year

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Writing of 1989 Timeline

1989 changed Taylor's career forever. If Red had just sprinkles of pop sounds, 1989 was marketed as a pure pop album from the get-go.

While many fans and critics kind of expected that, it seems like:

Taylor didn't have a clear direction from the start (except for the cohesiveness): “I wanted it to be a sonically cohesive album, and it ended up really being the first I’ve done since Fearless. I also wanted the songs to sound exactly how the emotions felt. I know that’s pretty vague, so I really didn’t know where it was going to go, but I knew that I wanted to work with the collaborators I had such crazy electricity with on Red, like Max Martin. I wanted to do some things that sounded nothing like what we had done before.”

She knew that she didn't want another Red: “When people say that they like one of my albums, like when people told me that Red was their favorite album I'd done, I didn't take that as, 'So, I should make that again'. I took that as, 'Great, awsome, now I wanna make them like this new album just as much if not more than the last album.' But I want them to like it for different reasons.”

She was worried about the change of direction of her music: “I worry about everything. Some days I wake up in a mind-set of, like, ‘Okay, it’s been a good run.’ By afternoon, I could have a change of mood and feel like anything is possible and I can’t wait to make this kind of music I’ve never made before. And then by evening, I could be terrified of the whole thing again. And then at night, I’ll write a song before bed.”

October 17, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor writes This Love in LA. This will be the last song produced by Nathan Chapman and the only one recorded in Nashville.

“The last time I wrote a poem that ended up being a song, I was writing in my journal and I was writing about something that had happened in my life – it was about a year ago – and I just wrote this really really short poem. It said, 'This love is good /this love is bad / this love is alive back from the dead / these hands had to let it go free / and this love came back to me.' And I just wrote it down, closed the book and put it back on my night stand […] All of a sudden in my head I just started hearing this melody happen, and then I realized that it was going to be a song.”

Handwritten lyrics:

November 18, 2012: Taylor meets Jack Antonoff and his band, fun., for the first time in Frankfurt, Germany, while at the MTV Europe Music Awards. They bond over 80s music.

January 4, 2013: Taylor is seen in a boat without Harry Styles, ready to return to LA from the Virgin Islands.

She will wear the same dress in the Out Of The Woods music video (and also in Look What You Made Me Do)

January 10, 2013: Taylor tweets "Back in the studio. Uh oh...". She will confirm that the song was All You Had To Do Was Stay on October 27, 2014 on Tumblr.

Candids here;

“There’s a song on my album called 'All You Had To Do Was Stay.' I was having this dream, that was actually one of those embarrassing dreams, where you’re mortified in the dream, you’re like humiliated. In the dream, my ex had come to the door to beg for me to talk to him or whatever, and I opened up the door and I went to go say, 'Hi,' or 'What are you doing here?' or something — something normal — but all that came out was this high-pitched singing that said, 'Stay!' It was almost operatic. So I wrote this song, and I used that sound in the song. Weird, right? I woke up from the dream, saying the weird part into my phone, figuring I had to include it in something because it was just too strange not to. In pop, it’s fun to play around with little weird noises like that.”

January 11, 2013: Taylor is seen again at Conway Studios, likely to continue working on All You Had To Do Was Stay.

January 15, 2013: Taylor posts a picture of herself in the studio, with the caption "Somewhere in LA". She'll later reveal that she was writing How You Get The Girl.

“The song ‘How You Get The Girl’ is a song that I wrote about how you get the girl back if you ruined the relationship somehow and she won’t talk to you anymore. Like, if you broke up with her and left her on her own for six months and then you realize you miss her. All the steps you have to do to edge your way back into her life, because she’s probably pretty mad at you. So it’s kind of a tutorial. If you follow the directions in the song, chances are things will work out. Or you may get a restraining order.”

March 6, 2013: Taylor is seen going to a studio in LA.

March 23, 2013: Taylor posts a picture of herself playing guitar, which might mean that she was working on a new song: "Pre show. Columbia, South Carolina". This could be either Wonderland, New Romantics or a vault song.

May 27, 2013: While in Rhode Island for the Memorial Day weekend, Jack plays Taylor an instrumental track that will later become I Wish You Would.

“'I Wish You Would’ is a song that I wrote with Jack Antonoff and it was the first song we ever worked on together. I think, for this song, we wanted to create a sort of John Hughes movie visual with pining and, you know, one person’s over here and misses the other person but is too prideful and won’t say it. Meanwhile this other person is here and missing the same person; they’re missing each other but not saying it. And I had this happen in my life and so I wanted to kind of narrate it in a very cinematic way where it’s like you’re seeing two scenes play out and then in the bridge you’re seeing the final scene, where it resolves itself. So it says, 'It’s a crooked love in a straight line down, makes you wanna run and hide but it makes you turn right back around.’ It kind of is like that dramatic love that’s never really quite where it needs to be and that tension it creates.”

[Voice Memo Intro Transcript] “This is another way I’ve written songs recently. This is a song I did with Jack Antonoff, and Jack is one of my friends and so were hanging out and he pulled out his phone and goes ‘I made this amazing track the other day. It’s so cool, I love these guitar sounds.’ And he played it for me and immediately I could hear this finished song in my head, and I just said ‘Please, please let me have that. Let me play with it, send it to me.’ And so he sent it to me and I was on tour and this was me playing the track on my laptop recording me singing the vocal into my phone and it ended up being a song called 'I Wish You Would', because Jack wrote back and said ‘I love that’. So this is another way of writing, it’s writing to track.”

[Secret Sessions] “Taylor said that she wrote ‘I Wish You Would’ a couple of months after her and Harry Styles broke up, and they decided to become friends again and she said this was the first time she had become friends with an ex, to the point where they were comfortable enough to talk about why the relationship didn’t work out. She said he told her about how, after they broke up, he bought a house literally one road adjacent to hers. Every day he would drive home, and accidentally turn into her street, and he told her how he just wanted to stop at her house and see her, but he never did. She said this song is about while he was in the car making the decision to get out the car and see her, she was sitting in her bedroom, wishing he would make the move and go back to her and just pitch up at her house. She compared it to a classic John Hughes movie where both parties want the same thing but neither has the guts to say anything. Honestly, she spoke so fondly of that relationship.” [this is from a secret sessioner and therefore it should be taken with a grain of salt]

Between May 28 and June 2, 2013: Taylor writes I Wish You Would. She settled in Rhode Island basically all summer, so it's possible that she went to Jack's studio in New York by car without being seen and especially photographed, cause I couldn't find any pictures with the same outfit. Conway Studios are also credited but it's possible that she recorded background vocals there. Taylor was in LA in late August.

June 7, 2013: During an interview at the CMA Music Festival, Taylor confirms that she has started writing her next album.

[Transcript by me] “[The new album] is starting, all the anxiety is starting and when the anxiety starts, then the writing happens right afterward usually. I like to write for about two years before I'm finished with an album because at this point I kind of know that whenever I read in the first year is going to get away, because I'm going to like it but it's going to sound a little bit like the last project I had, and the second year usually ends up sounding like the next project. So I think at this point I feel like staying the same is the easy way to go but it's not the way that I want to go creatively. I think you need to challenge yourself, I think you need to change up your influences, I think you need to be inspired by different things that you've been inspired by before. It's harder to call people you don't know, it's harder to think of topics you haven't covered and think of new ways to say old emotions that everyone feels. I think one of the things that I'm happiest with in the last year is the acceptance level in country music for me experimenting and for me trying to evolve and challenge myself musically because I think it's never felt better to be on that stadium stage performing knowing that and so welcoming of change.”

July 13, 2013: After a show in New Jersey, Taylor has an interview with Rolling Stone, where she says that she has been writing a lot.

“The floodgates just opened the last couple weeks,” she says of the songwriting process. “I’m getting to that point where I’m irritating to be around because I’ll be with you for half the conversation and then the second half of the conversation I’m clearly editing the second verse of whatever I’m writing in my head. I really loved collaborating: you work with a lot of different people and you find the people you have this dream connection with in the studio. I know those people and I know the ones I want to go back to. But I also have a really long list of the people I admire and I would really love to go and contact. So that’s kind of where that is. I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point? It’s so overwhelming that when you’re starting a project there are such endless possibilities if you’re willing to evolve and experiment. If you’re willing to become a different version of yourself, you can really go anywhere with it. And that’s kind of where I am. The kind of the laboratory experimental stage of really catching onto a new thing that I’m liking.”

Somewhere around June and early September 2013: Taylor and Jack write Sweeter Than Fiction. No credits are available but we know that it's the second song on which Taylor and Jack worked, so that places it before I Wish You Would and Out Of The Woods.

In 2014, Lena Dunham (Jack's girlfriend at the time) posted this photo of Jack and Taylor working on the song at Jack's house.

September 15, 2013: Jack completes the instrumental track that will later become Out Of The Woods, after his show was cancelled.

[Jack Antonoff] “When I did the track for Out of the Woods, which is a Taylor song that I'm really proud of, there was some issue at a venue and our show was canceled that night and I didn't have my stuff, I had left it on the bus, so I only had these old samples on what was on my laptop, and caught up that 'oh oh'' thing, and I only had one drum kit on there, and these dumb little things sometimes turn into a great song.”

Somewhere around September and October 2013: Taylor writes Out Of The Woods.

Voice memo here;

[Jack Antonoff] Although Antonoff and Swift shared studio time for some of their other 1989 songs while working throughout 2014, “Out of the Woods” was completed as a long-distance collaboration. “She’s very natural -— when she gets an idea, it just happens very quickly. I would send her these tracks, and when an idea would happen, we’d be 5,000 miles apart or whatever, but she would start emailing me these voice notes like crazy and it would just be happening so quickly that there’d be this excitement. There’s a frantic feeling in the song,” he says. “What’s interesting about ‘Out of the Woods’ is that it doesn’t really let up. It starts with a pretty big anthemic vocal sample that’s me, and then there’s a drum sample that kicks in that’s kind of huge, and then you don’t really know how you’re going to get any bigger, but then the chorus hits and it just explodes even larger. And then the bridge hits, and it gets even more huge.“When I was working on the track, I was thinking a lot about My Morning Jacket,” Antonoff continues, “and how everything they do, every sound is louder than the last, and somehow it feels like everything is just f—ing massive. And that’s the feeling that I went for. It started out big, and then I think the obvious move would have been to do a down chorus, but the idea was to keep pushing.” Antonoff is excited to share the rest of his work with Swift on 1989, but he views “Out of the Woods” as a highlight on the project. “This song means a great deal to me. On a production level, on a writing level, Taylor’s lyrics and her melodies — there’s something very important about this song.”

[Jack Antonoff] “After 'I Wish You Would' and 'Sweeter Than Fiction', we did 'Out Of The Woods'. So it was the third thing we worked on together, and probably the easiest. I sent her the track for it, and she sent back a voice note with the verse and chorus in what felt like five seconds. And it was just perfect. It's eerie how similar it is to what the final product is.”

“It kind of conjured up all these feelings of anxiety I had in a relationship where everybody was watching, everybody was commenting on it. You’re constantly just feeling like, ‘Are we out of the woods yet? What’s the next thing gonna be? What’s the next hurdle we’re gonna have to jump over?’ It was interesting to write about a relationship where you’re just honestly like, ‘This is probably not gonna last, but how long is it gonna last?’ Those fragile relationships... It doesn’t mean they’re not supposed to happen. The whole time we were having happy memories, or crazy memories, or ridiculously anxious times, in my head it was just like, ‘Are we okay yet? Are we there yet? Are we out of this yet?’”

“That line is in there because it's not only the actual, literal narration of what happened in a particular relationship I was in, it's also a metaphor. 'Hit the brakes too soon' could mean the literal sense of, we got in an accident and we had to deal with the aftermath. But also, the relationship ended sooner than it should've because there was a lot of fear involved. And that song touches on a huge sense of anxiety that was, kind of, coursing through that particular relationship, because we really felt the heat of every single person in the media thinking they could draw up the narrative of what we were going through and debate and speculate. I don't think it's ever going to be easy for me to find love and block out all those screaming voices.”

October 21, 2013: Sweeter Than Fiction is released. Big Machine was originally not on board with the release since they wanted a dormant period between album releases.

Late 2013: Taylor writes Bad Blood, after Katy Perry announces her Prismatic World Tour.

“For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not. She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, ‘Are we friends,or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?’ Then last year, the other star crossed a line. She did something so horrible. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies.’ And it wasn’t even about a guy! It had to do with business. She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me. And I’m surprisingly non-confrontational – you would not believe how much I hate conflict. So now I have to avoid her. It’s awkward, and I don’t like it.”

“That was about losing a friend... But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.”

October 20 to 22, 2013: Taylor is in Cape Town (South Africa) shooting The Giver. One of the members of the cast is Alexsander Skarsgård. He is said to have inspired Wildest Dreams (or at least he's the most popular theory, as far as I know), because the music video is set in Africa and it features Clint Eastwood's son Scott as love interest, just like Alexsander is actor Stellan Skarsgård's son, but we don't actually know more about the song.

“I think the way I used to approach relationships was very idealistic. I used to go into them thinking, ‘Maybe this is the one – we’ll get married and have a family, this could be forever’. Whereas now I go in thinking, ‘How long do we have on the clock – before something comes along and puts a wrench in it, or your publicist calls and says this isn’t a good idea?’”

Note: Selena Gomez was present when Taylor wrote this song.

Handwritten lyrics:

November 19, 2013: Taylor records Blank Space. This is based on the wall behind her on an Instagram post from this day, the credits, and the behind the scenes clip.

Voice memo here;

Behind the Scenes here;

“Every few years, the media finds something they unanimously agree is annoying about me. 2012-2013 they thought I was dating too much, because I dated two people in a year and a half. ‘Oh, a serial dater. She only writes songs to get emotional revenge on guys. She’s a man-hater, don’t let her near your boyfriend.’ It was kind of excessive and at first it was hurtful, but then I found a little bit of comedy in it. This character is so interesting, though. If you read these gossip sites, they describe how I am so opposite to my actual life: I’m clingy, and I’m awful, and I throw fits, and there’s drama. An emotionally fragile, unpredictable mess. I painted a whole picture of this character. She lives in a mansion with marble floors, she wears Dolce & Gabbana around the house, and she wears animal print unironically. So I created this whole character and I had fun doing it.”

November 21, 2013: While at the American Music Awards, Taylor tells Billboard that she has around seven or eight songs ready.

[Transcript] “We got a lot already,” says Swift. “There are probably seven or eight songs that I know I want on the record. It’s really ahead of schedule for me. I’m just stoked because it’s already evolved into a new sound, and that’s all I wanted. And I would have taken two years to make that happen, but it just kind of happened naturally, so that’s all I could really ask for.”

December 2013: Taylor meets Diane Warren and they write Say, Don't Go.

[Diane Warren to Rolling Stone] Warren, who typically writes on her own, says the two of them “sat down and wrote the song,” which was released Friday as one of 1989 (Taylor’s Version)‘s vault tracks, “from scratch” during the last few days of 2013. She remembers being impressed with how specific Swift was with her lyricism and how considerate she was about how her fans might receive it. “She was very particular about how she said certain things. It was a really interesting experience. She gets her audience,” Warren says. “She’s deeply aware of how her fans want to hear something. I can’t explain it, but that’s probably why she’s the biggest fucking star in the world.”

2013: Taylor writes New Romantics and Wonderland. Not much is known about these songs, except that they were both written in 2013.

[About New Romantics] “People will say, 'Let me set you up with someone', and I’m just sitting there saying, ‘That’s not what I’m doing. I’m not lonely. I’m not looking.’ They just don’t get it. I’ve learned that just because someone is cute and wants to date you, that’s not a reason to sacrifice your independence and allow everyone to say whatever they want about you. I’m not doing that anymore. It’d take someone really special for me to undergo the circumstances I have to go through to experience a date. I don’t know how I would ever have another person in my world trying to have a relationship with me, or a family.”

New Romantics handwritten lyrics:

Wonderland Handwritten lyrics:

January 1, 2014: Taylor records Say, Don't Go.

[Diane Warren to Rolling Stone] Several days after writing the song together, they got into Warren’s office to record a demo, where Swift played it on her acoustic guitar. “We demoed it on New Year’s Day. And I’m a workaholic, and that’s fine for me,” she says. “But I remember being impressed that she did, too. Everybody’s on vacation, but she showed up.”

January 6, 2014: Taylor decides to look for a house in New York.

[Lover Journal] LA. So I've decided I want to look at places in New York. I know I went through this phase months ago, but it has to mean something that i've circled back to it, right? You know what they say, if you love something let it go and if it comes back... blah blah blah. so I'm leaving the day after tomorrow. Dating is awful. Love is fiction/ a myth. I'm over it all.

January 21, 2014: Taylor sends Ryan Tedder the I Know Places Voice Memo.

January 22, 2014: [From the 1989 Booklet] Taylor and Ryan finish and record I Know Places.

“I had this idea of like, when you’re in love, along the lines of 'Out of the Woods’, it’s very precious, it’s fragile. As soon as the world gets ahold of it, whether it’s your friends or people around town hear about it... it’s kind of like the first thing people want to do when they hear that people are in love is just kind of try to ruin it. I kind of was in a place where I was like, ‘No one is gonna sign up for this. There are just too many cameras pointed at me. There are too many ridiculous elaborations on my life. It’s just not ever gonna work.‘ But I decided to write a love song, just kind of like, ‘What would I say if I met someone really awesome and they were like, hey, I’m worried about all this attention you get?’ So I wrote this song called ‘I Know Places’ about, ‘Hey, I know places we can hide. We could outrun them.’ I’m so happy that it sounds like the urgency that it sings.”

January 23, 2014: Taylor and Ryan Tedder write Welcome To New York. Ryan produces a demo in three hours. This demo is the one included in the album.

“I wanted to start 1989 with this song because New York has been an important landscape and location for the story of my life in the last couple of years. I dreamt and obsessed over moving to New York, and then I did it. The inspiration that I found in that city is hard to describe and to compare to any other force of inspiration I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s an electric city.”

[Ryan Tedder] “I thought we were going to walk in and start something from scratch because that's what I was used to. Then she calls me and says, 'Is it cool if I already have an idea?' I said, 'Sure.' She said, 'I have this song, I'm obsessed with New York and I just moved there, I want to write an ode to New York because no one's done it in a long time.' And then she sent me a voice memo. She's like, 'I want it to sound like the 1980s.' So the next day I brought in a Juno-106, which is a very 1980s keyboard, and I literally programmed that entire song right in front of her. It was very much on the fly, and that song was done in about three hours. And I did the rest of the production I think later that week.”

Handwritten lyrics:

January 26, 2014: Night of the 56th Grammy Awards. Taylor delivers a legendary performance of All Too Well, but loses the Album Of The Year Award to Random Access Memory by Daft Punk. This will prompt Taylor to make a "sonically cohesive" pop album.

[Lover Journal] January 25th. LA. It's the middle of the night and I was at the Clive Davis Party tonight which means... the Grammys are tomorrow. Never have I felt so good about our chances. Never have I wanted something as badly as I want to hear them say 'Red' is the Album of the Year.

“It was the night of the Grammys this year. I remember going home and playing a lot of the new music I had recorded for some of my backup singers and one of my best friends. We were all sitting in the kitchen and I was playing them all this music, and they were just saying, ‘You know, this is very eighties. It’s very clear to us that this is so eighties.’ We were just talking and talking about how it’s kind of a rebirth in a new genre, how that’s a big, bold step. Kind of starting a part of your career over. When they left that night, I just had this very clear moment of, ‘It’s gotta be called 1989.’”

“I woke up one morning at 4 a.m. and I decided the album is called 1989. I’ve been making ‘80s synth pop, I’m just gonna do that. I’m calling it a pop record. I’m not listening to anyone at my label. I’m starting tomorrow. I liked the idea of collaborating. But with 1989 I decided to narrow down the list. It wasn’t going to be 10 producers, it was going to be a very small team of four or five people I always wanted to work with, or loved working with. And Max Martin and I were going to oversee it, and we were going to make a sonically cohesive record again.”

January 2014: Taylor writes You Are In Love. This is actually speculation but it's based on (1) Taylor going to NY in early January and (2) Jack Antonoff confirming that it was the fourth song they did and (3) it's the only Antonoff-produced song that is copyrighted in 2014. Based on the credits, I'm pretty sure that Taylor and Jack worked on the song separately, with Jack recording the instrumental at the Jungle City Studios in NY (which is a studio that Jack used in 2014 to record Bleachers' first album Strange Desire) and Taylor recording the vocals at Conway Studio in LA.

“I wrote it with my friend Jack Antonoff who’s dating my friend Lena. Jack sent me this song, it was just an instrumental track he was working on and immediately I knew the song it needed to be. And I wrote it as a kind of commentary on what their relationship has been like. So it’s actually me looking and going, ‘This happened and that happened, then that happened and that’s how you knew you are in love.’”

“I’ve never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena Dunham has told me about her and Jack Antonoff. That’s just basically stuff she’s told me. And I think that that kind of relationship — God, it sounds like it would just be so beautiful — would also be hard. It would also be mundane at times.”

“We first worked on that song together and realized we kind of have a good thing, and the next thing we did was ‘Sweeter Than Fiction,’ which was on the [One Chance] soundtrack, and after that we did ‘Out of the Woods’ and another song called ‘You Are in Love.’

January 26, 2014: At the Grammy's, Diane Warren reveals that she and Taylor wrote a song together (aka Say, Don't Go).

[Transcript] “I worked with Taylor Swift on a great song. I don't even know what she's done [for her next album], I'm excited about the one that we did, it's pretty cool.”

[Billboard 2016 Interview] “I know [Swift] likes it, so hopefully it will see the light of day. I know she really likes the song. She didn’t want me to give it away, so hopefully that means she wants it.”

February 9, 2014: [From the 1989 Booklet] While in London, during the European leg of the Red Tour, Taylor and Imogen Heap write Clean in just 9 hours at Imogen's home studio. Taylor will sing the song just two times.

Voice memo here;

“'Clean' I wrote as I was walking out of Liberty in London. Someone I used to date – it hit me that I’d been in the same city as him for two weeks and I hadn’t thought about it. When it did hit me, it was like, ‘Oh, I hope he’s doing well’. And nothing else. And you know how it is when you’re going through heartbreak. A heartbroken person is unlike any other person. Their time moves at a completely different pace than ours. It’s this mental, physical, emotional ache and feeling so conflicted. Nothing distracts you from it. Then time passes, and the more you live your life and create new habits, you get used to not having a text message every morning saying, ‘Hello, beautiful. Good morning.’ You get used to not calling someone at night to tell them how your day was. You replace these old habits with new habits, like texting your friends in a group chat all day, and planning fun dinner parties, and going out on adventures with your girlfriends, and then all of a sudden one day you’re in London and you realize you’ve been in the same place as your ex for two weeks and you’re fine. And you hope he’s fine. The first thought that came to my mind was – I’m finally clean.”

“'Clean' is the last song on the album for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it felt like the complication of this emotional process I’ve been going through for the last couple of years. You know, I feel like my personal life was really, really discussed, and criticized, and debated, and talked about to a point where it made me feel almost kind of tarnished, in a way. And the discussion wasn’t about music. It broke my heart that I had made an album that I was proud of, and I was touring the world, and playing sold-out stadiums, and still they managed to only want to talk about my personal life. At a certain point I felt a switch and it was at the end of recording this album that I began to feel like my life was mine again and my music was at the forefront again. I was living my life on my own terms and I really no longer cared what people were saying about me. That was when I started so see people talk less about the things that didn’t matter.”

“I had this metaphor in my head about being in this house, there’s been a drought but you feel like there’s a storm coming. Instead of trying to block out the storm you punch a hole in the roof and just let all the rain come in, and when you wake up in the morning, it’s washed away.”

[Imogen Heap] “We met at my studio in London. She had the bare bones of “Clean.” She had the lyric, the chorus and the chords. I thought it was brilliant.I was really writing the tiniest amount just to help her do what she does. I put some noises, played various instruments on it, including drums, and anytime she expressed she liked something I was doing, I did it more. It was a really fun day. She recorded all her vocals during that one session. She did two takes, and the second take was it. We always thought she would probably re-record it, because we thought it can’t possibly be that easy. But after we lived with it for a few months, we felt it was great. I knew she loved it. She said she loved it and her mum loved it. But I wasn’t sure it would be included on the album. But everyone felt it had something special. It came together really magically.”

Imogen's detailed blog entry about this songwriting session.

[Taylor about Imogen Heap] “The coolest thing about Imogen for me was that there was no one else in the studio. There was no assistant; there was no engineer. It was her doing everything.”

February 11, 2014: Taylor gets a haircut. (I'm including this for funsies)

February 15, 2014: Taylor, Max Martin and Shellback write Shake It Off.

Voice memo here;

[Lover Journal] LA. This week I've been in the studio with Max and Johan every day and it has been the most creatively successful and fulfilling time. The first day, Johan just made a really up tempo drum beat because we decided we needed something up and light. We worked at it for a few hours before i just started singing "shake it off, shake it off, shake it off" And then the best way i know how to describe it is that the chorus just fell out of the sky. It ended up being this song about doing your own thing even though haters are gonna hate, and you just have to dance to your own beat. We all went home and I wrote the first and second verses and brought them in the next day. We wrote this chanty cheer leader bridge that I absolutely LOVE. We spent all day doing vocals and the next day recording the background vocals. I think it'll end up being the first single and Max said it's his favorite song he's ever been a part of.

[Max Martin during the lawsuit] “Shellback started out with a drumbeat. Shellback, Taylor, and I then collaboratively developed the melody and other lines of ‘Shake It Off’ to Shellback’s drumbeat. I did not write or provide any input into any lyrics in ‘Shake It Off,’ which were written entirely by Taylor.”

“I've had every part of my life dissected – my choices, my actions, my words, my body, my style, my music. When you live your life under that kind of scrutiny, you can either let it break you, or you can get really good at dodging punches. And when one lands, you know how to deal with it. And I guess the way that I deal with it is to shake it off.”

“The message in the song is a problem I think we all deal with and an issue we deal with on a daily basis. We don’t live just in a celebrity takedown culture, we live in a takedown culture. People will find anything about you and twist it to where it’s weird or wrong or annoying or strange or bad. You have to not only live your life in spite of people who don’t understand you, you have to have more fun than they do.”

February 19, 2014: Taylor, Max Martin, Shellback and Ali Payami write Style. This is the last song made for the album.

“I loved comparing these timeless visuals with a feeling that never goes out of style. It's basically one of those relationships that's always a bit off. The two people are trying to forget each other. So, it's like, 'All right, I heard you went off with her, and well, I've done that, too.' My previous albums have also been sort of like, 'I was right, you were wrong, you did this, it made me feel like this' – a righteous sense of right and wrong in a relationship. What happens when you grow up is you realize the rules in a relationship are very blurred and that it gets very complicated very quickly, and there's not a case of who was right or who was wrong.”

“This song is about those relationships that are never really done. You always kind of have that person, that one person who you feel might interrupt your wedding and be like, ‘Don’t do it cause we’re not over yet.'”

[Guitarist Niklas Ljungfelt] “I played on “Style,” a song I started with Ali Payami for ourselves. He was playing it for Max Martin at his studio; Taylor overheard it and loved it. She and Max wrote new lyrics. But I recorded the guitar on it before it was a Taylor song. It was an instrumental. I didn’t have a clue that Taylor would sing on it. The inspiration came from Daft Punk and funky electronic music.”

1989 is officially done!

[Taylor On Ryan Seacrest] “I'm pretty sure after we finished this one I knew the record was done. Shake It Off and Style were the last two songs to be written for 1989.”

February 19, 2014: While on tour, Ryan Tedder produces another three versions of Welcome To New York.

[Ryan Tedder interview] “I was in Switzerland on a tour bus, and I did four versions of 'Welcome to New York,' one of which I liked personally more, but the thing about artists is they become very obsessed with the demo. She was in love with the demo so no matter how hard I fought, she brought it back to the demo, so really what you hear is what I did on the first day.”

March 22, 2014: Billboard reports that Taylor and Ryan Tedder have worked together in LA in January

March 24, 2014: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor moves to New York.

[Lover Journal] So in the last few weeks, I've completely moved into my apartment in Tribeca. That's right, I'm writing this from my new bed in my new place, watching Law and Order with Meredith. Strangely, I've never felt more busy.

May 1, 2014: 1989 Photoshoot (I got this date from an insider)

May 29, 2014: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor chooses another photo for the cover, after having a nightmare of the previous one being not enough.

May 30, 2014: Taylor chooses the album cover.

[Lover Journal] Shanghai. So we got to China at around 2pm and I knew it would completely ruin me if I slept when i got to the hotel, so I decided to work out. WHY IS THIS PEN RUNNING OUT?! Just went to my purse and got my pen. So a crazy story unfolded in the last 24 hours. Last night, I had this vivid dream where the photo I'd chosen for the album cover wasn't good enough, intriguing enough, artful enough. it woke me up. I couldn't shake it and it stayed with me all day. Because that nagging feeling I'd been pushing back for weeks was now confirmed in my gut... it wasn't good enough. I went to the venue, mind racing, wandering if I'd have to do an entirely new photo shoot... I got to my dressing room with newer versions of the "cover" I looked at it and felt nothing. The team pulled up this new scanned file of the polaroids we had taken during the shoot. I saw it within 10 seconds. The shot. The cover. It's a polaroid of me sitting against a beige wall with a blue seagull sweatshirt on. You can see my red lips but the photo cuts off my eyes. For some reason unknown to me it's the most intriguing photo i've seen. I think it's the mystery of not seeing my eyes. Maybe it just looks effortlessly cool. The craziest moment came when something caught my eye. The cover photo is photo 13. I kid you not. I played a sold out show in Shanghai tonight and the crowd was amazing. Tomorrow we go to Tokyo, where they'll have the whole ticker tape parade at the airport. Smile and wave...

Mid To Late 2014: Taylor and Jack write Now That We Don't Talk.

[Tumblr Music] "Now That We Don't Talk is one of my favorite songs that was left behind. It was so hard to leave it behind, but I think we wrote it a little bit towards the end of the process, and we couldn't get the production right at the time. But we had tons of time to perfect the production this time, and figure out what we wanted the song to sound like, and I just think it's, I think it's the shortest song I've ever had. I think it packs a punch. I think it really goes in for the short amount of time we have, I think it makes its point."

Conclusive notes

What 1989 represented for Taylor:

“The 1980s was a very experimental time in pop music. People realized songs didn't have to be this standard drums-guitar-bass-whatever. We can make a song with synths and a drum pad. We can do group vocals for the entire song. We can do so many different things. And I think what you saw happening with music was also happening in our culture, where people were just wearing whatever crazy colors they wanted to, because why not? There just seemed to be this energy about endless opportunities, endless possibilities, endless ways you could live your life. And so with this record, I thought, 'There are no rules to this. I don't need to use the same musicians I've used, or the same band, or the same producers, or the same formula. I can make whatever record I want.'”

“In the past, I've written mostly about heartbreak or pain that was caused by someone else and felt by me. On this album, I'm writing about more complex relationships, where the blame is kind of split 50–50 ... even if you find the right situation relationship-wise, it's always going to be a daily struggle to make it work.”

Bonus: Secret Messages

Author's note: I wrote this timeline around 2 years ago. While I found some dates later on, this is 100% my research. If you use this timeline for your posts, research or whatever, PLEASE, credit me! I'd be very thankful. This is 2 years of work.

Links to my other Timelines:

Writing of Fearless Timeline

Writing of Speak Now Timeline

Writing of Red Timeline

My Spreadsheet with a timeline overview

Credits:

Most of the quotes have been copy-pasted from Taylor Swift Switzerland.

Taylor Swift Pictures for the candids.

Heather from Nerdy by Nature for the WTNY handwritten lyrics picture.

#taylor swift #1989 #1989 taylor's version #1989 era #red era #taylor swift timelines #1989 tv #blank space #shake it off #harry styles #out of the woods #wildest dreams #style #imogen heap #1989 tour #taylor swift unreleased songs #vault songs #1989 vault

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patrineptn · 2 years

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Far From Home

Summary: Kagome is never too far from trouble, it seems. After moving to America to start over, she ends up in Hawkins just as strange things start to happen. Fandom: Inuyasha x Stranger Things (Ch 4) Crossover

Also available on FF.Net and AO3

Chapter 05

Max got antsy as the time passed. She avoided everyone and kept to herself, only glancing through the window as Steve drove. Kagome, Eddie and Lucas tried to give her space, even if it meant being squeezed on the other side of the backseat. Being smaller, Kagome ended up sitting on her side, with her legs crossed over Eddie's knee. He kept a hand on her waist for stability and to avoid pressing her back against the handle. When Steve stopped by the cemetery, Kagome released a breath - her hips were starting to cramp and her back had seen better days.

Kagome didn't look around much. Graveyards always housed spirits that needed guidance or that were still tied to the living world and wanted to share some words with anyone capable of noticing their presence. She wouldn't be able to help them at the moment. They also held a heavy grievance atmosphere that dampened her mood. Westerns had a different way of dealing with death and she was still getting used to it.

From a distance, Kagome worried about Max. Her aura was turning sour. Dustin told her the short version of what happened in the previous summer - about Max’s step-brother’s death saving her and Eleven, and how it caused her mother’s divorce and made Max much quieter and withdrawn. Dustin also disclosed to Kagome and Eddie the events around Eleven's arrival and Will’s abduction, which included Barbie, Nancy's best friend; the Demogorgon, Demodogs, and the Mind Flayer; then finally about the loss of Bob and Hopper. All of it left a tear in the group as Joyce moved away with Jonathan, Will and Eleven/Jane to try starting over somewhere else.

Kagome’s heart grew heavy. These kids were so young and fought for their lives and their friends' safety not only against monsters but also against the government and people with selfish and evil intentions. It gave her a sense of proudness for their courage at the same time it felt wrong for them to be in such danger. She wondered if that’s how her mother felt every time she came back from the past having to replenish her first-aid kit and covered in cuts and bruises. She tried hiding the worst injuries but her mother always knew. Ms Higurashi would often reassure Kagome how proud she was of her daughter, but deep inside she probably hoped it would end soon.

“You’re quiet,” said Kagome to Eddie. "What's bugging you?"

“It all happened right under my nose, under everyone’s nose. If I hadn’t seen Chrissy… breaking like a straw doll, I’d think you’re shitting me.”

“No wonder no one mentions it, duh,” mocked Steve. “It’s so crazy that I still cannot believe some things I’ve seen. And I was there!”

“Without your friend, Eleven, do you think we have any chance against Vecna?”

“Probably not, but I’m not going without a fight.”

“And we have Kagome now!” said Dustin. Kagome felt Eddie shift and stand closer to her. “Vecna cannot enter her mind. If her powers work against him as they did with demons, he will regret ever coming back to Hawkins.”

“GUYS!” Lucas screamed, “MAX ISN’T ANSWERING!”

Kagome, Eddie, Steve and Dustin ran to Billy Hargrove’s grave. Max’s eyes were wide and her blue irises turned white as she looked at nothing. Her face twitched but there was no indication she heard them. Lucas and Steve squeezed her shoulders and yelled her name. There was no response other than the tremors over her body. Lucas looked at Kagome, pleading with her to do something. Kagome already had Max’s hand between hers.

“It’s different this time. I can’t find Max, as if she's out of my reach. I think Vecna isn’t letting me get in.”

Kagome pushed more of her power into Max. Her hand stung as small cuts appeared, feeling as if she was clutching barbed wire. Sweat rolled down her face as her breathing became ragged.

The screams stopped. Everything near Kagome was frozen, including her own body which was still kneeling by Max. She tried touching herself, but her hand passed through her head - not even a strand of hair moved. Kagome looked around, but no matter the direction, it was all covered in a dense fog.

Kagome walked away from the unmoving group, following her instincts rather than any logical sense. Her surroundings changed colors. She kept her march, not seeing an inch in front of her until the smoke dissipated. She found herself inside a house.

The wooden floor, dated furniture and floral wallpaper gave the place a vintage air. She stood in a corridor, with a staircase on one side and an archway on the other side. The only source of light came from a door in front of her. Kagome tried turning the knob but it was locked. The stained glass of the door didn’t let her see through it but sounds of steps came from outside. Vecna’s voice filled the room, taunting Max. Kagome punched the door and yelled the girl’s name.

“You cannot save Maxine.” Kagome gasped. The door opened to Vecna’s gruesome face looking directly at her. The door closed again. “Who are you, Kagome Higurashi?”

Kagome put some distance between them, never losing him from her sight. “Why are you killing these people? What are you trying to achieve?”

“You’re not like us.” His head bent to the side. “Yet I cannot enter your mind.”

‘Us?’

Vecna’s figure vanished as Steve, Dustin and Lucas’ voices came calling for Max along with the melodious singing of Kate Bush. Meanwhile, Eddie’s voice entered her ear. Kagome inhaled. When she opened her eyes again, she was back in the cemetery, with Max dropping by her side right after. The group rushed to check on Maxine, who finally reacted to them.

Vecna’s aura still lingered, like a shadow on the corner of the eyes. Kagome expanded her aura, not really expecting to find anything. Only the wildlife answered her call. She finally noticed the pair of arms surrounding her.

“Welcome back.” He winked. Kagome smiled before the tiredness took over and everything was black.

In the dreamland, Kagome was back in the old house. The adjoining rooms were still dark and the light still came from the stained glass. However, this time the door was open. She crossed it to a world covered in red.

Bricks floated around while several buildings falling apart decorated the surroundings. Totems with corpses of people she never met emerged from the ground. Their faces contorted in pain and fear. Their eyes were hollow. She found Fred and Chrissy and her heart constricted. Their expression of pure horror brought tears to her eyes.

Creatures lurked around, following her every step. She felt but couldn't find Vecna. He was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Kagome walked aimlessly, aware that it was happening outside the physical world. Somewhere else, her body was safely tucked in warm arms.

A creature got closer. It was the size of a large dog, without any recognizable facial features. It crawled behind the covers, but Kagome noticed its presence long ago. Not for the first time in her life, Kagome was saddened for not having a complete priestess training to create a proper barrier or summon shikigami like Kikyo did many times. She brushed the feeling away. The last thing she needed now was a breach of her mind protection.

More creatures arrived as she walked. She must be getting somewhere important, she thought. That's when tentacles appeared. Several of them went in the same direction. Kagome quickened her steps. The creatures got agitated. They no longer tried to stay in the shadows.

Vecna stood above the ground, connected to the tentacles. His eyes were closed and he didn't seem fazed by her presence. Kagome tried getting closer but the creatures jumped on her. At the last second, she closed her eyes and severed the connection.

Kagome almost fell from the couch when she woke up. Had it not been for Eddie's arm around her shoulder keeping her in place, she would be kissing the floor. He didn't stir when she removed her head from his lap, and neither did the other occupants of the basement.

Not long after, Nancy came down the stairs with Dustin, announcing they were going to the Creel’s house. They asked Kagome how she felt after being out cold for so many hours, but she didn’t find the right words to comment on her thoughts yet. There was too much and too little information to work with.

“Are you sure you were here?” asked Eddie once they separated into groups of two.

Stained glass with roses. Creel’s house front door. Kagome gasped when they mentioned it. She recalled the previous day; seeing Vecna, hearing Running Up That Hill, then walking through that red-painted world. The same locations Max described Kagome have been at. Now everything clicked. Somehow, when Vecna was trying to absorb Max, he found a way to block Kagome from reaching the girl, but the path was left open once Max got away.

“Yeah, it’s exactly the same, minus all the dust,” she answered.

Eddie removed a spider web from a door before Kagome crossed it.

“That, my friend, is bait. Vecna is trying to bring you to his realm where he has the upper hand. Hear me out: you are the wild card in his game. He wasn’t expecting that someone could sense him, much less someone that isn’t scared of him or affected by his powers. He’s either trying to figure you out or removing you from the picture.” Eddie stopped and turned to face Kagome. “I don’t wanna see you getting hurt.”

“I could feel you." Kagome smiled. "When I went back to Vecna’s domain, I could feel your hand on me. I just know that if something happens you will be able to pull me back.”

“You shouldn’t put so much faith in me.”

“Why? Will you leave me behind?”

“No! Never.”

“Then I have nothing to worry about. Anyway, you shouldn’t be worrying about me when you have Jason and his minions hunting you down. My powers don't work on humans.”

“He will have to find me first, princess.”

#inuyasha #inuyasha crossover #inuyasha fanfic #inuyasha fanfiction #stranger things #stranger things crossover #kagome higurashi #eddie munson #dustin henderson #nancy wheeler #robin buckley #steve harrington #fanfiction #fanfic #crossover fanfic #crossover pairing

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unofferable-fic · 2 years

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“You’re just annoyed that your personal headcanon isn’t canon!”

Or; my personal thoughts (ranting) about the Loki series and its surrounding toxic discourse.

First of all, I’m going to preface this with the following: whether you loved or hated the Loki series, or you fall somewhere in between, your opinion is valid and if anyone tells you that you can’t express that in a critical manner, then they need to kindly go away. I should also mention the obvious which most people understand — death threats directed at anyone involved in making the series is disgusting and if you do so you’re fucking deluded.

Now that that’s out of the way…

I’m someone who wasn’t overly fond of the series in the end. I went in surprisingly hopeful after enjoying Wandavision and TFATWS. For the most part I really enjoyed the first 3 episodes (episode 3 being the best imo) but I found myself quickly disillusioned by how the narrative seemed to fall apart in terms of cohesiveness. Keeping it short and sweet, I feel like a lot of the relationships (whether platonic or otherwise) were rushed. I found Loki’d dynamic with both Mobius and Sylvie to be confusing, unbelievable, and all around not earned. It feels as though they had a start point and an end point (ie. Loki needs a genuine friend) but we didn’t see any of the journey in between to show how the relationship developed. The quote “after all this time…” in episode 6 sent me over. Like Loki pls you’ve known this woman for max two days or something… No, I’m not salty because he didn’t end up with Mobius. No, I’m not salty because of “selfcest”. I’m salty because I don’t think the relationships were done as well as they could have been. Also, even though no one asked, Loki x therapy is the only ship I give a rats about.

Other points include the following:

Loki felt more like a side character with little impact on the events in his own show.

Sylvie sometimes teeters into Mary-Sue territory, and at times appears to be valued only because she is a woman.

Mobius’ relationship with Loki seems inherently toxic and he is not his therapist. As someone who regularly attends therapy sessions, if your therapist ever talks to you like Mobius talks to Loki — get a new goddamn therapist, Jesus Christ…

In my opinion, the show explores very little of Loki’s character and what makes him tick, especially considering this is post-Avengers 2012 Loki. I’m aware there were only six episodes and I’m not expecting everything to be crammed in, but where Loki was in Thor 1 and the Avengers seems so disconnected from where he is in the series. It seems to portray him as someone hellbent on power and ruling, as opposed to someone desperate for respect and the love of his family/people.

But I digress, the real point of this post was to tell certain people to feck off. Obviously there’s going to be discourse around the series, but I’m starting to get really sick of one side telling the other “you put your personal headcanons on Loki”, “he’s not your character”, “you’re just annoyed because canon didn’t go how you wanted”, “you’re projecting your own abuse on him”, blah blah blah. And here was me thinking the discourse around Ragnarok was bad, but this is another level, lads.

Here’s an idea, how about people who liked the show stop acting like those who didn’t just pulled their opinion on Loki right out of their own ass? All I know is that every opinion I’ve ever formed on him was based on the first three films he appeared in. That’s it — nothing made up because I love to project as someone who went through similar shit to him.

Discuss the show, but don’t be a massive bellend about it.

In summary, Tom Hiddleston I am free next Saturday if you are free next Saturday and I’ll buy all the rounds of Jameson you need while we talk about Loki and how he — no matter what happens to him within the MCU from here on out — will always be one of favourite characters to grace the big screen.

(Anyway who cares what I think, people are just going to call me a whiny Loki apologist regardless.)

#loki #me saying shit #loki series #loki season one #loki show spoilers #anti loki series #anti loki show #found this in my drafts #and never posted idk why #so here you’s go lmao #Loki show discourse #tom hiddleston #loki series negativity

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zackcollins · 3 years

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my heart || shohei ohtani

masterlist

Author’s Note: Hello, my peeps! This was another anonymous request I got! It was a request based on a three second clip someone sent me of Ohtani hitting his bat against something in frustration. They asked me to write something based around that. I hope I did it justice for whoever sent it in! Let me know! GIF credit to canubelievethis!

Warnings: Maybe an allusion to sexual overtones? It’s nothing graphic or anything. There’s just a make out session that gets a little steamy. I’ll include the warning just to be safe because you can never be too careful, ya know?

Word Count: 1.3k+

Title: She’s Got It All by Kenny Chesney

Additional: The reader is mentioned to be a member of the Angels. So, maybe that would make them masculine since, as far as we know, every player in the MLB is masculine. That being said, I still made the language vague to make them appear to be gender-neutral because I thought it would be nice for everyone to be able to envision themselves as being a baseball player. Ya know? Also. I didn’t know who the heck the Angels were playing on the day the clip was timestamped for. So like. I just decided for the sake of the fic, they’re playing Oakland. Hope that’s okay...? Anyways! I hope everyone enjoys this. and, as always, I love hearing feedback!

From where you were sitting in the dugout, you could tell that Shohei wasn’t happy as soon as he walked down the steps. He normally gave you a smile or a nod; this time, however, he ignored you and went straight for the equipment cubby that was next to the lineup card.

Just as you turned to ask him what was wrong, you saw him slam his bat against one of the compartments and mutter something angrily in Japanese. You could tell that he wanted to slam his helmet down but you saw him think better of it because he took it off and simply placed it inside of his cubby. He carefully slid his bat and protective gear in alongside it before he walked over to the bench and sat down beside you.

“Everything alright?” You asked, though you asked in Japanese so nobody else on the team would fully pick up on what you were saying.

Shohei looked at you pointedly and shook his head. He sighed and ran a hand down his face before he looked back out over the field. “That at bat was bullshit. I should’ve gotten a hit.”

You brought your hand over and gently squeezed his knee. Shohei brought his own hand over and squeezed your knee, running his thumb along your knee briefly. You shivered a little, swallowing thickly at how nice the sensation made you feel. Shohei then brought his hand up and started massaging your thigh. Your throat went completely dry as you looked down at his hand and then up at him. He wasn’t even looking at you; he was still focused on what was happening on the field. And that appeared to be Oakland getting ready for their turn at the plate because Jared had grounded out to Matt Olson.

When you realized you hadn’t responded to what Shohei had said yet, you swallowed to collect yourself. You didn’t want to sound too distressed when you spoke for fear of giving away how Shohei rubbing your thigh was really making you feel.

“I know that’s how you feel,” you said, though your voice still came out croakier than you would’ve liked. Shohei shifted his attention from the field to look at you, his expression one of slight amusement. He had a smirk on his face as he continued to run his hand along your inner thigh, though he had moved it lower so that it was further away from your crotch. “But Sean threw a nasty pitch. I think you should be proud of yourself for even getting wood on it to pop out to Chapman.”

Shohei hummed, nodding along to what you were saying. “Maybe you’re right. A pitcher like myself should be able to recognize the talent of another pitcher such as Sean Manaea.”

“Exactly!”

Shohei smiled as he continued to run his hand along your inner thigh. You inhaled sharply when he once again got close to your crotch. Shohei raised an eyebrow and quirked the corner of his lip into a smile. He motioned his head toward the tunnel that lead to the clubhouse before he slipped off the bench and walked away. You waited a few minutes so it didn’t seem suspicious before you followed after him.

Once you were in the tunnel and away from the cameras and the prying eyes of your teammate, you smoothed out the crease Shohei’s hand had caused in your pants. Shohei only smirked as he grabbed both of your wrists, held your hands above your head, and backed you against the wall. You made a surprised noise because you hadn’t been expecting to be manhandled like that, though you weren’t exactly going to complain when you looked at Shohei and saw the look of pure determination in his eyes.

Shohei slotted his knee between your legs as he smirked at you. He grabbed both of your wrists between one hand, using the other hand to wipe some sweat off of your forehead. You breathed a couple of uneven breaths, suddenly very overwhelmed by what was transpiring. When Shohei brought his free hand down to untuck your jersey, you swallowed thickly and rocked your hips against his knee.

“How long?” Shohei asked, putting his hand underneath your jersey once it was untucked. He carefully began to move it along your skin, shifting it to your side to gently brush his fingertips over your ribs. You shivered as you rocked down against his knee again. Shohei looked at you pointedly and squeezed your wrists tightly. “How long, (Y/N)?”

“Huh... How luh—long for what?” You stuttered a little because you were having trouble keeping your breathing even from how overwhelmed Shohei was making you feel.

“How long have you wanted to do this with me?”

“Seh... Sehc—second week of the season.”

Shohei leaned in so that his lips were just barely separated from your ear. He blew a warm breath against the shell, causing you to shiver before he whispered: “Second week of spring training for me.”

You swallowed around a thick knot in your throat as Shohei dropped your wrist. Without hesitation, you brought your hands to the front of his jersey, pushed him backwards, and connected your lips to his. Shohei smirked into the kiss before he started moving his lips in tandem with yours. To make matters worse, he was gently, tortuously moving his knee against your crotch. It was making you want to hit him with the baseball bat in the same way he hit the equipment cubbies with his baseball bat earlier. It was driving you mad and you loved it.

“Uh... Shohei? (Y/N)?”

You pulled your lips apart and turned to see who had interrupted you. Standing at the top of the stairs was Max Stassi. He was holding an iPad and looking rather flustered.

“Can we help you, Max?” You asked, dropping your hands from Shohei’s jersey and sticking them in your pants pockets instead.

“I, uh, came to find you,” he pointed to you as he held up the iPad, “I wanted to discuss how we’re gonna attack the A’s hitters tomorrow since I’m the one catching your start.”

You glanced up at Shohei; Shohei nodded before he stepped backwards.

“Alright. I’ll come have a look so we can figure it out.”

“Th—Thanks.” Max rubbed the back of his neck as he looked nervously between you and Shohei. “Sorry to interrupt by the way. Do you two need a few more minutes? I’m willing to wait.”

Shohei shook his head as he ran his fingers through his hair.

“No, it’s alright. We can pick this up later.” He leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to your cheek. You felt your face heat up as you looked over at Max; Max smiled awkwardly as he shifted from foot to foot and fidgeted with the iPad in his hands. “We’ve waited this long to get together. What’s waiting a little longer?”

You reached out and patted Shohei on the chest, smiling weakly as you did. Shohei chuckled as he patted your upper arm in return. He kicked your cleat before he walked away, walking past Max and back into the dugout. You saw him slap Max’s ass and mouth ‘sorry’ as he walked past but all Max did was chuckle nervously and give a half-assed thumbs up in reply.

“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Max,” you said after a few minutes of awkward silence.

Max looked at you with a confused expression as he leaned against the doorway. He held the iPad against his chest and crossed his ankles over one another.

“I’m not uncomfortable,” he chuckled. “Trust me. I’d tell you if I was.”

“What’s the problem then? Because you look like something’s off.”

“Everyone had a bet going for how long it would take you two to get together.”

“Who won?”

Max smirked, motioning over his shoulder. “Shohei.”

“Bastard!”

“I’m your bastard, though!” Shohei yelled from somewhere in the dugout.

“Yes. Yes you are.”

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fic-for-fic-sake · 3 years

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A Happy Accident

A/N: The other day I found out that Chris Evans may possibly have a sex dungeon? I don’t write real people fics but I knew I HAD to write a Steve Rogers fic about this because I mean...c’mon. Also the text conversation in the fic is indeed a real conversation between my friend and I.

Pairing: Steve Rogers x reader

Warnings: NSFW, dirty talk, dom/sub, flogging, being tied up, penetrative sex, honorifics, praise kink

Word Count: 5.4k

You knew there was trouble before you even reached the meeting room, it was like a palpable tension you could sense coming from the conference room. You mentally prepared yourself for whatever was to come as you walked in and took your usual spot next to Natasha.

“Do you have any idea what this is about?” You questioned her, murmuring under your breath since nobody seemed keen to speak above a whisper for the time being.

“Some kind of security breach, we don’t know how bad yet, we have to wait for Stark.” She explained, speaking in clipped tones. She seemed nervous, which was understandable given the circumstances. A security breach could mean a number of things, none of them good. Anything from weapons tech to secret identities could’ve been revealed in the breach.

The tension seemed to come to a head when Tony and Steve walked into the room. Everyone erupted into a flurry of activity, peppering the two men with so many questions it was hard to make out what came from who.

“What was taken?” Someone asked.

“Was it anything serious?” Someone else wondered.

“Do we need to scrap the new suit designs?” You asked, adding your voice to the babble.

“Okay everyone settle down and give Tony some room to think.” Steve urged all of you, forming a one man barrier around Stark. Which you had to admit was rather effective. Once everyone reseated themselves and Steve gave Tony a nod, Tony cleared his throat.

“By now you all have obviously heard that there’s been a security breach. We don’t know who is behind the breach but so far all that was leaked was text conversations of the following Avengers; Wanda, Sam, Bucky, and Y/N.”

You felt your heart drop to your stomach. You were a target in the security breach. But why? Why you specifically and why just your text conversations? It seemed rather harmless considering everything else they could’ve taken.

“Luckily Wanda doesn’t really text anyone because everyone she knows is here. As far as Sam, Bucky, and Y/N are concerned they only leaked conversations from your work phones, meaning your personal phone security isn’t in question.” Tony reassured you all. Well, it reassured Sam and Bucky at least.

“Um, what do you mean ‘work phone’?” You asked, looking around with a puzzled expression on your face.

“You do have a burner phone for personal use, right?” Nat asked from beside you. Now your heart was located somewhere in your feet.

“I didn’t know I needed one.” You whispered, barely contained horror edging its way into your voice.

“Well, I mean what’s the worst that could be there?” Sam asked, trying to reassure you. Luckily, or unluckily enough, you didn’t have to answer that question because within the coming days they would all find out.

After the meeting you tried to go about your normal routine and ignore the security breach as best as you could. That got considerably harder the following morning, when the hacker released your private conversations with your friends for all the world to see. They went something like this:

Sarah: Do you think Steve Rogers is good in bed?

You: Obviously, dumb question.

Sarah: Do you think he’s kinky though?

You: Oh 100%, no way he doesn’t have a secret sex dungeon or something.

Sarah: Since you’re an Avenger now you should try to find out.

You: HAHAHAHAHA that’s hilarious and something I’ll never do, in reality. But in theory PUT ME IN COACH! I bet he would probably make me sign an NDA and I would totally be down for that.

Sarah: I’ll sign a DNR

You: HAA, I would sign the NDA but also have to tell you what’s happening and then I would make you sign an NDA.

Sarah: Then you’re breaking the NDA??

You: Not if you don’t tell anyone goddamn be cool.

Sarah: It’s the principle of the thing

You: ...I wonder what kind of dom he is

Sarah: Idk if he’s a daddy. He feels like a Sir or Master. I also think he doesn’t have soft limits, only hard limits.

You: as much as I would like to think he’s a pleasure dom I don’t think that’s true

Sarah: I agree

You: Maybe a brat tamer?

Sarah: That feels too tame for him.

You: Okay so then just a no holds bard whipping dom. I would wait all day in his sex dungeon just to lick his boots when he came home. Does that make me depraved? Probably.

Sarah: Possibly, I also think he’d degrade the shit out of you, like kinda pet play shit. I also think he has a spreader bar collection. Aaaand an overstimulation kink.

You: Oh agreed, that and edging. I feel like he would edge you for hours and then leave to go on a mission or something and you’re not allowed to touch yourself and then he comes back hours later and you’re just aching for release. And then only after you’re BEGGING he would let you come.

Sarah: Oof. How much do you wanna bet his dungeon is like a sensory deprivation thing? Think about it, hours upon hours of not having any form of relief, after begging nonstop, no real form of your senses and then BAM normal orgasm but heightened to the absolute max.

You: YEP! I bet he’s like the king of aftercare though, like 1000/10 so sweet. Like Steve Rogers is legit such a nice human being so I assume aftercare is the same.

Sarah: AYO SIR LEMME BE YOUR SUB

You: GOD FORREAL!

Needless to say, you did not leave your room that day. The next day you tried to get away with not leaving your room again but Nat was having none of that.

“Come on Y/N, I promise it’s not that bad, I’ve said much worse.” She assured you as she practically dragged you out of your room and into the elevator.

You buried your head in your hands and let out a frustrated scream. “He’s a coworker, Nat, and I totally objectified him and basically said all the filthy things I wanted him to do to me.”

“And I bet he’s real flattered about it! The man needs a good ego boost every now and then.” She replied with a laugh. To which you responded with another frustrated scream and a kick to the elevator doors as they opened. “I bet he didn’t even read it, I doubt anyone on the team did.” She said, sounding certain in her own thinking. She half convinced you until you walked into the training room and every pair of eyes turned to you, including Steve’s baby blues. Fuck.

“Okay we’re working in a group today people, focusing on enhanced individuals with external powers. Wanda and Y/N against Sam, Bucky, and Steve.” Nat announced, opening the door to the special training facility. So you and Wanda wouldn’t trash too much of Stark’s equipment with your powers.

“Hey Y/N, you been to any good sex dungeouns recently? I’m looking for one.” Sam quipped as you made your way to the starting point. Before you could even think about what you were doing the smell of ozone was ripe in the air and you sent a bolt of lightning hurtling towards Sam who was barely able to dodge it in time.

“Sorry...hand slipped.” You mock apologized, making it clear that you would have another ‘hand slip’ if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. He got the point well enough but the damage was already done. The tension was worse now than when you first found out about the breach, everyone trying not to bring up the elephant in the room.

Nat cleared her throat and started her countdown and then the training began in earnest. After an hour you were all panting and sweating, utterly spent from your session. Steve passed everyone a water bottle and you took it gratefully, chugging the cool liquid in earnest. It was then that another comment was made, this time by Bucky.

“Thanks for the aftercare daddy.” He mocked as he opened his own water bottle. Once again the smell of ozone was in the air but you didn’t have a chance to meet your target before Steve had Bucky pressed against the wall, his forearm digging into the other man’s throat.

“That’s enough.” He growled through his teeth. Everyone was silent for a minute and you almost felt sorry for the deer in the headlights look Bucky was now wearing on his face, almost. A shower of frustrated sparks extinguished all the lights in the room as you stormed from the room, embarrassment trailing after you.

That had been four hours ago and you hadn’t left your room, despite Natasha banging on the other side of your door. You had asked FRIDAY not to open it for anyone unless given your express permission. It seemed even the AI knew what kind of a mess you had landed yourself into, as she was immediately understanding of such a request. You were in the process of ordering a burner phone off of Amazon when there was a knock at your door.

“Nat, I don’t care how many books you offer to buy me, I’m NOT coming out of this room.” You yelled into the empty space of your room.

“Noted, but uh, it’s Steve. Can we talk?” You were at the door before he finished his sentence. You opened it no more than a crack, not courageous enough to do more.

“I don’t wanna talk to you, I’m mortified.” You mumbled, looking down at your feet instead of the imposing figure outside of your door. Steve gently pushed on the door with his hand and you let him open it the rest of the way. He brought gentle fingers to your chin and tilted your head back so you were looking into his eyes.

“There’s nothing to be mortified about, sweetheart. I just wanna talk.” He replied beseechingly. And maybe it was the tone of his voice, or the way he looked at you, but you relented and let him in, closing the door softly behind you.

“Listen, I’m really sorry for what I said. I obviously never thought it would see the light of day but that’s not an excuse and doesn’t make it okay. Fuck, Steve I’m so sorry. I can get reassigned if you want, have SHIELD put me somewhere else.” You rattled off apologies and half baked plans before you felt his hands gently clasp your shoulders and once again you were forced to look up into his eyes which had gone saucer wide.

“Doll what are you talking about? You don’t need to be reassigned, it's not that big of a deal.” He said, in an attempt to comfort you.

“Not a big deal? I practically accused you of having a sex dungeon and being a mega dom.” You blurted out, mortification making your voice rise half an octave.

He let out a soft sigh before he sat down on the edge of your bed, “It’s not like you were completely in the wrong.” He replied, and that’s when your brain short circuited.

“What? You have a sex dungeon?”

“Well, it’s not a dungeon, it's just my bedroom, but yes I do, partake in those types of things you described.” He explained, his voice as even and calm as if he were discussing the weather.

“Oh.” Was all you could really bring yourself to say.

“Oh? That’s all? I have to say you were much more articulate in your texts.” He teased, his voice suddenly becoming deeper and taking on an air of authority that wasn’t there a second ago. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

And again, maybe it was because of his tone or because of the absurdity of the situation you found yourself in but you answered him honestly. “I’m thinking I’m absolutely mortified that my coworker found out how badly I want him to fuck me.”

“What else?” He prompted. You couldn’t breathe properly, he was taking all the air from the room and the intensity in his gaze pinned you to the spot, like an unsuspecting doe finding itself at the barrel of a gun.

“I’m wondering how correct my predictions were. What kind of a dom you are.”

“Would you like to find out?”

“Yes.” You answered before you could think better of it. The second the word left your mouth your eyes went wide at the confession. Because you did want to find out, God did you want to find out what kind of shit Steve Rogers, the golden boy, was into.

“Then we have ourselves a deal. You want to find out what I’m into and I want to show you.”

“Right now?” You asked, breathless. You could feel your core ache at the suggestion, the want plain as day.

He chuckled before he moved to stand before you. “No pretty girl, not yet.” He whispered, bringing his right hand up to cup your cheek and stroke his thumb across the expanse of your lips. “First we have to talk about a few things.”

“Like what?” You questioned, completely enraptured by this man, finding yourself willing to submit to whatever he wanted you to. You were terrified by how much the prospect excited you.

“Like exactly what you want me to do to you. Your texts were very...explicit. But, that may have just been talk. I need to know specifics if this is going to work.” Steve explained, backing you up until you hit your dresser. Without a word he lifted you on top of it and stood between your legs, one of his hands tracing absent minded patterns on your thigh.

It was hard to think with him in such close proximity but you tried to clear your mind because you really wanted this, your mouth went dry at the thought. “I want...I want to be tied up. And I want to be blindfolded. And whipped.” It felt weird to lay your desires out plain before you like this. It made you feel exposed, but it was also oddly empowering.

Steve nodded his head at your requests. “You mentioned something to your friend about edging and orgasm denial, is that something you still wanted to try?”

“Yes, but not, not yet. I’ve never um, I haven’t- I’ve never been kinky with a partner.” You explained to him, feeling an embarrassing heat creeping up your face.

“Hey, no need to be embarrassed, we all start somewhere.” Steve insisted, bringing his hands up to settle on your hips. “Anything else?” After you shook your head he gave you a nod in reassurance. “Okay, I’ll be in touch.” He said as he stepped away from you.

That was three days ago and you hadn’t heard anything from him on the matter since. You had trained with him, went for a run with him, had the usual team meetings and exchanged the usual pleasantries but nothing out of the ordinary. You had even gone far enough in your wandering mind to think that maybe you imagined the whole interaction.

On Friday, you were told that Steve had gone away on a mission and by that point the team was done teasing you about the leaked conversation, already having moved on to the next thing. You had made plans to go out with them that night to a community outreach thing in Manhattan. You had just gotten your jeans on when a piece of paper slid across your floor from the door.

You walked over to it, thinking someone had just dropped their paper, when you saw what was written on the other side of it.

Text an excuse to Stark for the outreach and then come to my room. -SR

Your heartbeat sped up to a gallop as you read the message through two more times, just to be certain. This was it, it was happening. With shaky fingers you texted Tony a flimsy excuse about draft reports you needed to finish before you put your phone back on your desk and calmly made your way to Steve’s room.

You went to knock but found the door slightly ajar. Taking that as your cue you stepped into Steve Rogers room. While it wasn’t the first time you had been here, it was certainly a circumstance that you weren’t used to. Everything seemed...different somehow. The curtains were drawn and the only light came from dim overhead lighting. There was a faint scent of jasmine that you assumed came from a candle or incense burner you couldn’t see somewhere. On the bed, the sheets had been changed to something that looked like silk and resting on top was an eye mask and two long chords of rope. Which seemed innocuous enough, current circumstances notwithstanding.

“Shut the door and lock it please.” A voice commanded from a shadow in the corner of the room. As soon as you locked the door Steve Rogers emerged from the shadows in an all black version of his Captain America suit. You had never seen him in such a suit before and the sight of him in it made your mouth water and your knees buckle. This was really happening.

“I have to admit, when I read your text conversation I was surprised to say the least. I didn’t know how many dirty thoughts resided in that head of yours but you did not disappoint, did you sweetheart?” He questioned as he made his way over to where you stood, rooted to your spot by the door. He gently pressed against your shoulder and you followed his lead, letting him back you against the door, his strong hands landing on either side of your head, arms caging you in. “And then when we spoke, you were /very/ specific in what you wanted and I am nothing if not obliging, you’ll find.” He whispered into your ear and you couldn’t help the small moan that escaped your mouth at the implication behind his words.

“Are you ready to be my good girl? Hmm sweetheart?”

“Yes Steve.” You whispered, your mind not being able to form anything other than those words.

He made a slight tsking sound. “In here, don’t call me Steve. It’s Captain. Got it?”

“Yes Captain.” You replied obediently.

“Good girl, now get undressed for me.” He commanded, stepping back to give you room to complete his task. With nervous fingers you lifted your shirt above your head and undid the clasp on your bra. You watched as Steve’s eyes took in your exposed top half, he licked his lips which made you shiver in turn. Confidence growing by his visible excitement you unbuttoned your jeans and slipped them down your legs along with your panties, until you were gloriously naked before him.

“God, you're so beautiful sweetheart. I’m already getting hard and all you’ve done is get undressed.” He praised you as he palmed himself through his tac pants. “Come here pretty girl.” He insisted as he picked up the blindfold.

You walked over to him and turned around as he secured the blindfold against your eyes and tied it for you. “Now, we’re gonna use a color system, okay? Green means you’re okay to keep going, Yellow means to slow down, and Red means stop. Can you remember that doll?”

“Yes Captain.” You murmured as you adjusted to not being able to see. You tuned into your other senses to rely on what was happening. You felt Steve take your hand and walk you over until you reached the side of the bed. He helped you up before asking you to lay down on your back.

“Okay pretty girl I’m gonna tie you up now.” He told you as you felt both of his hands take your left arm and maneuver it above your head before securing your wrist in place with rope. He pressed a gentle kiss to the spot before repeating the process with your other arm. “How do you feel sweetheart?”

“Good Captain, I feel good.” You told him as your heartbeat kicked up another notch. You felt him take your left leg with gentle fingers and tie your ankle to the baseboard of the bed. You gasped as he secured your right ankle, knowing you were now naked and spread bare before him. You felt the bed dip as he kneeled over you and brought his mouth down to whisper in your ear.

“What’s your color baby?”

“Green.” You replied. Almost immediately you felt his lips press against yours, desperate and hungry for you. You kissed back with a fervor you didn’t know you possessed. It was a strange sensation, kissing someone you couldn’t touch let alone see, but that didn’t make it unpleasant. You felt blissfully detached from your body and the need raced down to your pussy until you had the sudden urge to close your legs and hide your arousal.

Steve chuckled against your mouth as his left hand snaked down to see what you were trying in vain to hide. “So eager for me and we’ve hardly started” He lazily swiped his fingers along your folds to feel the wetness that gathered there. He then brought the same hand up to your breast and worked your juices around your nipple, making you groan at the sheer wantonness of it all. Steve happily swallowed your groan with his mouth, his tongue taking the opportunity to pass your lips.

You fervently kissed him back as his ministrations against your nipple continued. His lips left yours and left a trail of hot kisses down your throat and over to your neglected right nipple. You felt him blow cold air on it and your back bowed against the bed, your arms straining against the restraints. He scraped his teeth against your sensitive bud and you couldn’t help the noises that escaped your mouth.

“Oh fuck, Captain.” You let out as he took your nipple into his mouth. You could feel his left hand leave your nipple and you let out a whine of protest. He only laughed against your skin before you heard the faint opening of a drawer. Your ears picked up the sound of him rummaging around for something but you couldn’t focus too much on that as the rest of your body was alight with fire as he continued to work on your nipple with his mouth. He finally found what he was looking for in the drawer and he released your nipple with a wet popping sound before you felt his weight shift and he removed himself from you.

“You mentioned something about being whipped.” He teased, and you could hear that his own arousal had made his voice hoarse. Your cunt throbbed in response. “Do you know what a flogger is pretty girl?”

“Yes Captain.” You replied from your position on the bed. Your mouth went dry at the mental image you had of Steve in his black tac suit with a flogger in hand. How would he use it on you? Would it hurt? Be pleasant? The anticipation was eating you up in the best of ways.

“Good girl. We’re gonna do some counting. Since this is your first time we won’t do too many, just ten. But you have to count them pretty girl. If you forget, or lose count, we start over. Do you understand?”

Oh fuck. “Yes Captain.” You heard him chuckle from somewhere above you before you heard the whoosh of the flogger and the sensation on your skin. You gasped as the leather straps came down hard against your left nipple. “One.” The second one came down against your right nipple and you found that your pussy clenched around nothing. “Two.”

Numbers three, four, and five were placed on your nipples and your stomach.

“Halfway there pretty girl, you’re doing so well.” Steve’s voice came from somewhere around you. A thin layer of sweat had broken out over your skin and your arousal was through the roof. You found yourself panting in anticipation of the next strike. It came, the leather striking against your dripping center and you let out a gasp as your back arched off of the silk sheets. “Six”

“Oh you liked that one didn’t you sweetheart?” Steve teased.

“Yes Captain.” You replied breathlessly. Number seven came in the same spot and another lewd sound left your mouth as the flogger found its spot. Numbers eight and nine he placed on the sensitive insides of your thighs.

“Last one pretty girl. You’ve taken it so well I’ll let you decide where this last one goes.”

“Hit my pussy again, please, I want it so bad Captain.” You practically pleaded. Under any other circumstances you would’ve been ashamed at how pathetic you sounded but you didn’t care. Steve Rogers was doing depraved things to you and you couldn’t think straight. You just wanted him to keep doing what he was doing, to take all of you, every tiny nook and cranny of your being until he knew your pleasures like the back of his hand.

“Such a needy girl, maybe after the flogger I’ll give you a reward.” He replied, sounding pleased with you, before he placed the tenth and final flog against your aching core. “God you look so sexy like this, blindfolded and tied to my bed, maybe I should leave you here as my own personal fucktoy, would you like that baby?” He asked as he inserted two fingers into your mouth.

You mumbled your response against the digits, your pussy getting wetter at the thought of him using you like that. You were only half kidding when you had texted your friend about it but now, with your arousal so strong, it sounded more and more enticing. Steve removed his fingers from your mouth and brought them down to your sensitive center, rubbing them up and down your slit before inserting them into your slick heat. You gasped at the intrusion and felt your hips buck up in response to being filled.

Your walls fluttered around his fingers as he began to pump them at a leisurely pace. You felt him make his way down your body to nestle himself between your spread legs and then his hot breath was fanning out over your cunt as his fingers continued to fuck you. “You look so good, pretty girl. Spread open for me like my own personal feast. God you’re so wet. I guess you like to be flogged.” He spoke, the filthy words that left his lips making you wetter than you already were. Without warning he brought his tongue to you and kitten licked your clit, sending a shockwave through your system.

He took your clit in his mouth and sucked as he continued to work you with his fingers. You fruitlessly tugged against your restraints and bucked your hips in an attempt to get the friction you so desperately needed.

“God sweetheart you taste better than I imagined.” Steve commented as his tongue lapped up your juices. “I bet I’ll be able to taste you on my tongue for a week.”

“Fuck, Captain, please can I cum?” You begged, tears wetting the inside of your mask from the intensity of your session.

“Come for me baby, let me feel you come on my fingers.” Steve commanded and that was your undoing. The knot that had been building inside of you was finally released and you came loudy around his fingers. You felt him lick you through the aftershocks.

“Talk to me, pretty girl, how are you feeling?” Steve questioned, voice hot once again by your ear. His suit gently pressing against your overstimulated skin. “Give me a color.” He asked, pressing a gentle kiss to your jawline.

“I’m good Captain, still Green.” You responded, coming down from your orgasm.

“Such a good girl for your Captain. You’re doin’ so well pretty girl.” He said as he left the bed. You weren’t sure where he went until you felt his dexterous fingers undoing the ropes on your left leg. “I’m undoing the leg ropes first. And then I’m going to fuck you senseless like I’ve been wanting to do since I saw those damn text messages.” Your spent cunt clenched around nothing, as you eagerly waited for him to undo the other leg restraint. You could hear him undo the many zippers and clasps on his tac suit until the bed dipped and he was once again between your legs.

This time skin met skin as you felt his upper thighs press between yours as he brought himself closer to you still. You felt the tip of his cock slide between your wet folds before slipping inside. The breath was stolen from your lungs at the feel of him sinking into your waiting cunt. A low moan left your mouth as you felt every perfect inch of him spreading you until he bottomed out and his hips nestled perfectly against your own.

You felt his forehead press against your own. “Fuck you feel perfect, you know that pretty girl? My perfect little pussy.” He breathed against your mouth as he let you adjust to him. He retracted himself from you fully before swiftly filling you up again. Any noise you may have made was swallowed as he kissed you with a hunger you didn’t think was possible. What started as a slow rhythm quickly changed until he was snapping into you with a fervor akin to a madman.

Your hips eagerly met his thrusts and soon your combined pants and skin slapping filled the room. Still blindfolded, you felt the moment his hand wrapped around your neck and squeezed just so. That had your walls flutter around him and your hips stuttered.

“Oh you like that don’t you? You like when I choke you huh pretty girl?” He asked eagerly, his voice husky from moaning.

“Yes, fuck, please Captain, fuck me.” You rasped out. You grunted as he brought his other hand down to press your hips into the mattress before he slammed into you at a relentless pace. Eventually, his hand left your throat to play with your bundle of nerves.

“Come on pretty girl. Come for me.” He ordered and you were only too happy to comply. You came hard around him, enough that you saw stars behind the blindfold and Steve let out a string of curses and praises for you as he pulled out of you and you felt his cum paint your stomach.

You had a moment to catch your breath as you heard Steve pad over to what you assumed was the bathroom. He came back and placed a warm washcloth against your skin, cleaning up the combined mess you both made. Then you felt his hands move up to untie the blindfold around your eyes. You squinted into the low light of the room and were shocked to see Steve bare chested and glistening with sweat before you.

“Hi.” You murmured shyly, finding that some of your confidence had left you along with the blindfold. Seeing him like this, because of you, because of what you had done, somehow cemented this moment in reality. There was no turning back now.

“Hi yourself, how do you feel?” He asked as he undid the ropes around your wrists.

“I um wow, I feel great.” You said and realized it was true. In the afterglow of the scene you felt amazing. Sexy and empowered and utterly spent but undeniably amazing.

“You did great.” Steve assured you as he took lotion into his hands and massaged the areas on your wrists and ankles where the ropes had been. He placed a gentle kiss on each palm when he was done and went to get you a glass of water. “Drink all of this.”

You took the glass from his hands and drank deep. Appreciating the cool feeling of the water as it slid down the column of your throat, you didn’t realize how thirsty you had become. You finished the glass and handed it back to Steve, who placed it on one of his bedside tables.

“Good girl.” He praised and you felt yourself blush in response. He noticed. “Do you like being praised, sweetheart?”

“Yes Captain.” You nodded.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He replied as he helped you into one of his shirts and placed you underneath the covers. He rested beside you and wrapped you in his strong arms. “You did so well today for your first time. It wasn’t too much for you was it?”

“No, I really liked it.” You reassured him. He pressed a gentle kiss to your forehead with a promise to discuss it more after you slept some.

#steve rogers x reader #steve x reader #captain america x reader #steve rogers fanfic #mcu fanfic #avengers fanfic #reader insert

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my-writings-and-musings · 4 years

Note

Hey I read your oxygen loss scenarios and I absolutely loved them, even if they made me really sad at first, but I still love them entirely! If you're still doing them, could you do one with Fort Max?

Thanks a bunch! Angst with a happy ending is kind of my favorite thing in the world, so I'm glad others feel the same! It absolutely works well with our big Maxy boy!

Here's the other posts for this prompt!

Part One: Here!

Part Two: Here!

Part Three: Here!

Part Four: Here!

Part Five: Here!

Part Six: Here!

Part Seven: Here!

Part Eight: You're Here!

Part Nine: Here!

Part Ten: Here!

Part Eleven: Here!

Part Twelve: Here!

Fort Max

·Somehow, he's fallen for a being so small they fit in his cupped palms, and yet the two of you fit together so well he can't complain. Though he's a tad bit overprotective, you don't mind at all, and understand what drives the behavior even if he doesn't say it. What matters is that he's improving, and adores you so much every little activity is better in his mind when done with you, even just chilling and managing his security reports. That's why you're on his desk at the moment, relaxing on the human sized furniture he occasionally uses as paperweights when you're not around. Every so often you'll look up and find him glancing your way with a loving expression just visible through his attempt to remain neutral, after which point he'll dart his optics back to his work and pretend he's been busy the whole time. You can't help but think you're the reason he can't get much done.

·In addition to his filing reports, he has his monitors open at all times, each of which feeds him the security information for the various sections and systems of the ship. Most of the time there's nothing to report, save for hijinks going wrong or an experiment accidentally knocking things offline, yet he's always quick to respond. The rapid reactions to potential threats has put him on surprisingly good terms with Red Alert. Thus you're none too alarmed when he sees something unusual on one data feed and immediately gets to investigating, his large digits tapping away for answers while he vocalizes his thought process. Curious as always as to what might be the source of the issue, you move in wordlessly and are placed on his shoulder without having to ask. Having you watch him work always makes him feel quite proud after all.

·Initially the issue appears to be a simple bug in the programming of the communication systems, an inconvenient but none too hard to fix dilemma. Seeking out the source however, he finds none of the expected signs of an internal miscalculation, and before you can ask what's wrong he's messaging the bridge with a full alert. You listen as an audibly erratic signal forces him to keep things brief; emergency defense units and protocols need to be scrambled now, the ship is suffering an encrypted hack and a physical assault is undoubtedly inbound. While you feel instinctive fear at every word, somehow being in his presence and seeing him take command lessens that to a remarkable extent, for not much can get through your partner when he's on alert. Unfortunately for him he's anything but unafraid.

·When the line inevitably goes dead, he actually struggles to recall the next phase of his crisis response plans, as having you right beside him makes doing anything but protecting his delicate partner seem insignificant. Only by reminding himself that protecting you requires him to protect the ship is he able to get moving. Double checking your position on his shoulder, he clarifies that you'll be going to the nearest secure zone before he heads off to check various rendezvous points, as the crew is trained for this and the silent alarm has already been triggered. As you settle in on the broad expanse beside his helm, he just manages to grab the last of his spare weapons before a cataclysmic tremor rocks the ship. An audible rumbling through the ship blocks out all sound as you briefly tumble through the air.

·Catching you in a mad dash, he bombards you with questions as to possible injuries before you can clarify that you're fine. Tragically the relief on his face isn't something you get to enjoy for long. A second metallic rumble through the Lost Light turns his expression to a scowl. The enemy must have snagged them with a kind of anchor, he surmises, which no doubt means they'll be boarding in very short order. He needs to get you out of here now. Knowing that high stress situations can exhaust him in ways he's still not used to, you hold one of his digits tightly from your place on his palm. You're ready, you assure him, and you know he's going to be just fine. It works in the smallest way. The two of you draw strength from shared reassuring smiles before he leaves the safety of his office to start moving.

·As usual, he's not really afraid for his own sake as he moves through the hallways, due in no small part to his massive size and strength. For you though, he has to at least admit to himself that he's terrified. Hearing and feeling the tremor as intensely as he did means it must have come from somewhere uncomfortably close by, and that means the likelihood of encountering a threat in the next few minutes was remarkably high. The intensity of Cybertronian combat made such an occurrence not unlikely to be fatal for squishy little you. Yet as he recalls the closest potential drop off spot he can secure you at, he can't help but think on his role as a protector of this ship and how his responsibilities seem divided at the moment. While he has to keep you from harm, the same is true of the crew, and he can hardly ensure your safety if the ship is compromised...

·The decision to take the route he settles on is one not made easily, but it still feels proper. By going a less direct way he can check on multiple key locations only a little out of the way, helping to ensure that protocol is being followed and that the enemy isn't overwhelming their defenses. He can get you somewhere safe, while protecting you and the rest of the crew at once. It doesn't feel ideal, but he has to do his job, right? You can't be safe without the ship, unlike a Cybertronian who can at least endure the vacuum of space and even has a fair chance of surviving a planets fiery atmosphere... Primus, he can't handle thinking about those things. Focusing on getting you to safety along with everyone else is what he has to think of instead, especially with the sensation of your tiny body so warm and delicate in his palm, which he tries to also draw comfort from.

·As you trust him above all else, you don't ask any questions as he moves through the ship, sneaking as much as a bot of his size can in the open hallways. You're hardly scared for your own sake with Fort Max holding you close to his spark. In fact, the world beyond doesn't seem scary at all from this perspective. Being such a massive bot equals out to a rather strong spark, and as close to it as you are, you can feel it humming even now. It's kind of like a miniature sun with how warm and alive it makes you feel. Silly as it sounds, you do believe it feels stronger than when you first met him, as if the healing he's done since has made his very spirit grow brighter. For the sake of that hard earned recovery you hope everything goes smoothly today. It's enough to make you hold on to him a little tighter, just to convey your support.

·Eons of training prevent him from being taken by surprise, but he feels far from prepared as he detects enemy movement down a hallway. The aliens are large, numerous, and well armed. Regardless of their intent to take prisoners, he knows he can't let them go, as the mere possibility of them hurting even a single being on this ship is too much for him to take. Knowing they have to be taken care of is unfortunate with you in his care, as he doesn't want you to see him in combat. But... he trusts himself enough not to take it too far, a realization that makes it easier for him to whisper a warning and secure you in a tiny maintenance hatch, from which you will be safe and hopefully won't observe much. As soon as you promise to stay put he takes off to end the threat as quickly as he can.

·From your spot the chaos of battle is mostly the noises that reach your ears, but through them you're still able to recognize Fort Max as the imminent victor, if only because the fight is so one sided he hardly has to make a sound. It still makes you curl up in the little shelter and hope for it to be over as soon as possible. Yet the darkness of the maintenance shaft makes worrying a tad bit difficult... in fact, it makes you oddly tired. Exhaustion you didn't even notice is suddenly weighing you down, making the battle seem so far away and insignificant, all despite how clearly you realize now isn't the time to sleep. Perhaps the rush of all this has simply worn you down?

·Max finishes off the batch of enemies quickly and without a trace of the usual thrill of battle. He doesn't want to enjoy combat the way he once did, or feel the way he used to when he was at his worst and tearing foes apart actually felt good... As soon as the last enemy is down he returns to you, actually thinking he made the right call for once in checking key locations like this, for now this batch won't be able to hurt anyone. Though his usual luck shows through when he returns and finds you extremely groggy, to the point that even as a bot without medical experience he knows something is wrong, and he scoops you up immediately to start looking for injuries. You react amicably to his concern and assure him you're fine, but your breathless tone gives away that something is obviously affecting your respiration. In a series of horrifying realizations he connects the dots.

·The ship being hacked must have affected everything, including the life support systems you need for the air to be breathable, which he should have considered as a possibility from the very beginning. Without a moment to spare, he tucks you close to his chest and charges towards the medical bay. It's painfully obvious to him now that he made the wrong decision. He should have prioritized you over everything, should have anticipated there being additional threats, should have done a million other things... Hearing your weak reassurance only makes it hurt more. Unable to comprehend what's going on and not getting anything from him but whispered apologies, you just try to stay awake to support him as he runs through the ship at full speed. The only thing that stops him is an ambush from a full legion of enemies, though thankfully he still has enough of a grip to shelter you when the energy weapons start firing. Your tiny form is shielded by the impenetrable armor of his curled body as he briefly retreats to secure you once again, but this time his charge into combat is anything but controlled.

·From a little cubby you watch him unleash total vengeance on a horde of unprepared combatants, his incredible strength reducing enemy weapons and bodies to shreds without a trace of hesitation. Yet as you slip from consciousness there's no fear in your heart. Only sadness, for his sake and your own, as his resurfaced trauma tears into him yet again. It's worse than that though, he blames himself almost more than the enemies he tears apart, because protecting you was supposed to be his job. He'd told himself you needed the ship secure to be safe, but had he even considered the air you needed to breathe? It should have been obvious. Fighting somehow dulls the pain, as if the little rush of every kill helps his processor subdue the ache, and as the enemy needs to die regardless for their crimes against you he doesn't hesitate to go all in. The heated blur of battle overtakes him so completely he almost doesn't realize when he's joined by backup Autobots on his security team until there's not an enemy left to kill.

·Your last conscious perception is his face as strong hands lift you gently, followed by muffled instructions to get you to the medical bay. Some part of you knows he won't rest until every threat on the ship is dealt with, and you're correct. As you're whisked away to the medical bay, he takes no prisoners as he initiates his defense, rallying the gathering bots to annihilate those who would have turned them into a quick profit. But with every blow, he can only think of you. As he's cheered on by his fellows, he can only think of you. At the final declaration of victory and the rebooting of the systems, he can only think of you... Not even knowing the medics saved you and that you'll fully recover assuages his guilt. If anything, as he washes the blood off his servos and forgoes the festivities to sit by your bedside, he's certain he's never felt more like a monster...

·When you wake up there's a lovely warmth all around you, coupled with a gentle hum through the air that you know has been there in the past. Open eyes let you see a familiar wall of a chest, and through the oxygen mask you happily whisper Fort Max's name, making the hulking bot twitch in surprise as he looks down to you. It's with a smile you realize he was dozing with you shielded beneath his tented form. Remembering the haze of chaos and danger, you reach out to him as he offers a gentle hand to adjust the blankets laid loosely over your small body, but despite the fact that you're both okay you only see sadness in his optics. At your first prompt he lightly deflects with a sad smile. At your second his face falls and the whole ordeal comes tumbling out of him, with particular emphasis on how he failed to protect you when it truly mattered, something that impacts him so greatly he sheds a few tears as he lays his head in his hand.

·Heart breaking at the sight, you quickly point out the multiple times he charged into battle for you, though he counters by recalling how savagely he killed his enemies in front of you. It was the kind of brutality he'd thought himself beyond, but if he isn't, how can he be safe for you? It takes all the strength you have to sit up and firmly request his attention. At what point, you ask, were any of his actions not in some way motivated by the greater good? Even if he didn't know everything that was going to happen, did he once abandon you? Of course not, because he's a good bot, and you know he is. Before he can bring up one more point about his perceived failure you remind him that he's come impossibly far, enough that no setback today could undo his progress, and that you're so proud of him. As the weakness forces you to lie back and he leans in with concern, you smile and point out that everything he's done has been to the benefit of others, whether it be you or the crew. For once he can't argue. Curling protectively around you once more, he decides to let himself be happy that you're safe, shaken but reassured by your faith in him. More than anything, it gives him faith in himself.

#transformers #maccadam #idw #lost light #ll #tf #mtmte #more than meets the eye #fort max x reader #fortress maximus #fortress maximus x reader #fort max #human reader #self insert #my writing #my asks #anon #prompts

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leemaht · 4 years

Note

Headcanon or fanfic with (Kenma, Kuroo, Tsukki,Noya ) (if it’s a fic then just one of the first 3 😂 you pic) being with one of the haikyuu boys and you’re at his game cheering him on and like every now and then when he isn’t playing He’s watching you and the game gets supper intense like keep tying kind of intense and finally, he gets the winning point and you’re like hella happy for him. And you run down and go and like hug him and he’s hella sweaty(1)

(2) and just like... h o t. And after a while of you rambling on about how well he did he just kisses you and takes you off somewhere private to “celebrate” him winning and you come back like 20 minutes later just as sweatyer

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haikyuu!! headcanons

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he watches you cheering him on during his match, and you get steamy in a changing room right after

warnings: i didn’t age the characters up here, still there is clearly suggestive if not even sexual content. i don't glorify sexualisation of minors. so please don't take their ages too seriously. just pretend they're all in college or something

pairings: kenma x reader, kuroo x reader, tsukki x reader, noya x reader

note: omg hell yes! thank you so much for this request. i am in LOVE with it👀💅🏻 and sorry that took so long to write

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kozume kenma

the match was in full blow. the crowd cheered as nekoma fought against nohebi. their opponents were strong, though they slightly had the upper hand.

you sat in the front row, well stood and jumped up and down every time nekoma made a point, especially when kenma, your boyfriend did.

he had noticed you a while ago, cheering on him making him kinda proud to do something worth your applause. he wasn't able to look at you very often as he was the brain of the team and had to watch and analyse the court, but every time they scored a point he did, just to see you with the brightest smile on your face.

so even though they were in the third set already and exhausted to the max, the motivation couldn't seem to leave him.

then finally, nohebi's ace made a mistake and spiked the ball directly at yaku, who received perfectly tossing to kenma, who set the ball to yamamoto. it came through.

the whole gym fell silent as the ball touched the opposite side of the court, before deafening cheers and applause filled the hall. the match was won.

as soon as the victory was announced you had jumped up and ran to the entrance door. kenma looked for you in the crowd like a lost puppy until he spotted you and power walked over.

he was all sweaty and beaten up but still managed to smìle at you weakly as you rambled about what a good job he did. you talked too much for his liking.

'...and that last -' he shut you up with a kiss. it was intended to be a gentle peck, to make you stop talking but after he started he just couldn't hold himself back any longer. it felt so good to kiss you right after what he had accomplished.

he put both his hands on either side of your waist, pulling your core closer to him as he slipped his tongue inside your mouth and made you slowly back up into and abandoned changing room. after you were inside he locked the door and pushed you against a wall.

in between kisses you managed to say 'kenma *kiss* what has *kiss* gotten into you?' he looked you straight in the eyes.

'i don't know, but it feels so good right now' you smiled as you flipped him over, so his back was against the wall now and kissed him just as passionately as he did before. after a few seconds you pulled away. he shot you a confused look.

you leaned in again, kissing the side of his neck, making him sigh heavily 'maybe i can make you feel even better.' you paused. 'may i?' he nodded energetically making you giggle. you kissed him one last time before sliding down, kneeling before him

you undid the knot on his uniform pants sliding them down, as well as his underpants

...

after maybe 15 minutes you left the changing room, kenma being even more out of breath than he was before, earning confused and some knowing glances from his teammates.

kuroo tetsurou

the atmosphere was tense. nobody seemed to talk as the ball switched sides again and again

kuroo heard you cheering for him lightly. it was faint but it was there, your voice apart from the big crowd

still he couldn't avert his eyes much, but after every point he looked at you. sometimes you gave him reassuring thumbs-up or smiled at him encouragely

the match was intense, one team just as strong as the other, points tied most of the time

but there it was

eveybody was tired but nekoma's defense still stood strong, completely tearing the other team's offence apart. the ace of the other team served, yaku received and passed to kenma who tossed to lev. he spiked it over the net but the opposite libero could get a hold of hit, directly passing it to the ace again, who jumped in for a spike again.

but nekoma saw it coming

kuroo and lev jumped in for a block, but in the end it was kuroo's hand that touched the ball and slammed it down.

the ball fell and it almost seemed like time went in slow motion. the players of the other team tried to reach it but failed.

the gym was completely quiet for a second, before cheering emerged from all sides.

nekoma cheered, lev and inouka giving each other high fives, yamamoto tackled kenma, but kuroo looked for you in the crowd.

he was looking up in vain, as you had already jumped up and ran down to the entrace of the court. you yelled and waved 'tetsu!'

he literally ran into your arms, lifting you up and spinning you around in his endless relief, making yaku and kai roll their eyes, but in a playful way.

'you did so great' you whispered in his ear, while the rest of the team left walking around you, knowing your display of affection might take a while. you continued to whisper sweet compliments and praises in his ear, but he seemed kinda distracted.

he started kissing you behind your ear, nibbling on your soft and sensitive skin, leaving a little red mark.

'tetsu... what are you doing? everybody can see us' you stuttered, making him smirk.

'so it'd be ok, if they didn't see us?' he muttered in this deep voice of his. he was so close to your ear that you felt the vibration of his voice on your skin.

before you could even answer he backed off in an abandoned changing room, locking the door behind him. 'we wouldn't want anybody to interrupt us, right kitten?' he groaned, still holding you up, your legs around his waist.

your eyes slowly got used to the darkness of the changing room. kuroo stoved you against the wall, making you wimper when your back hit the hard surface.

'kitten.' he looked you in the eyes, and all the playfulness from before had vanished from his face. he looked serious, desperate even. 'i need you. i need you right now.'

you nodded. 'ok' you said gently.

kuroo smiled then kissed you passionately, before pulling away and tried to open the button and zipper of your pants. his hands were twitching, maybe from the exhaustion he had gotten from the match and clearly struggled opening them. you smiled faintly, signaling him to let you down, what he did and let you do the work and slide down your pants.

then he undid his own and stepped closer again pressing his body against yours, trapping you between him and the wall again, giving you a heated kiss, while pulling you up again.

he slid down his pants and

....

about 15 minutes later both of you arrived at the school bus, clearly out of breath, but still smiling.

the team gave you annoyed looks especially yaku, who rolled his eyes yet again.

just lev was confused. 'what took you so long?' he asked rather nobody and everybody at the same time. then he turned to yaku 'yaku-san what were they doing?' he looked at lev disgusted

'i don't get paid enough to answer that kind of questions'

'you don't get paid at all, yaku'

tsukishima kei

the game was at the peak of tension right now. nobody in the crowd dared to speak as most of them had covered their lips with their hands in an attempt to hold keep their gasps inside, to not distract the players.

daichi had been switched with ennoshita after getting hit in the face and getting a nose bleed. tsukishima, your boyfriend also got no mercy. after the ace of the opposing team had spiked against a three man block of karasuno, hitting tsukishima's hand with full strength, both his pinky and ringfinger had started bleeding. still nothing that couldn't be fixed with a bit of tape.

you had been cheering for him most of the time but when that happened, it left you in shock.

he heard your faint cheers in the back of his head, and the scream you gave as he got injured. you have him a questioning look that asked if he wanted you to come down, but he shook his head, trying to calm you down.

didn't work obviously

still he continued in the match

he stole glances to you now and then, too short for you to even notice but you didn't care. you were way too tense to bother.

and then there it was.

the opposite ace spiked the ball over the net, or at least tried but hinata, tanaka and tsukishima jumped in, forming a giant umbrella. the ball rebounced off tsuki's hand and landed inside the opposite side of the court, as the other team still tried to save it, but failed miserably.

it took the guys a moment to realise their victory but when they did their emotional outbursts were amazing. tanaka, noya and the first years (except tsuki) screamed, the third years including kiyoko cried and hugged each other, tsuki pumped his fists in the air and then got tackled by noya.

yachi, who had been standing beside you in the ranks cried as well. within sobs she pulled you with her down, to congratulate the team.

the team just said their thanks and bowed to the crowd when tsukishima finally noticed that you weren't there anymore, but saw that yachi wasn't either, so he estimated that both of you were on your way down.

when they left the court to the hallways he spotted you, you who couldn't or didn't try to hide their excitement at all. you ran into his arms and he was so happy and energised still that he hugged you back and smiled the biggest, most genuine smile you've ever seen him smile.

the rest of the team took off. you'd have a small stay before the bus would be taking off.

tsuki still had you in his arms. you giggled. he was so sweaty but you off course didn't care right now.

'you did so great' you said over and over again making him even more lightheaded than he was already. abruptly he pushed you off slightly, making you give him a confused and offended look, but before you could say anything he took you by your arm an pulled you into an abandoned locker room.

after you two entered he locked the door behind you before giving you his undivided attention again. you remained silent while he approached you slowly, making you back up against a wall until you were completely cornered. he pushed a knee in between your legs, making you moan lightly and him grin.

you knew exactly what was about to happen and you let him. he deserved it.

still not moving his leg he moved his face closer until your lips finally touched in a passionate and hungry manner. not taking his mouth off yours, he opened your pants swiftly with one hand, pulled it down and moved his fingers in between your legs to your...

...

about half an hour later you and the rest of the team was to meet at a destined place at the gym.

all the other guys anyway cooled down, didn't even look sweaty anymore. just tsuki was still red and out of breath

most of them (except hinata) suspected, but nobody even dared to ask.

nishinoya yuu

everybody was exhausted from the continuous exchange of the ball. nobody wanted to give up as the ball switched sides again and again. both liberos had the most work. noya was all sweaty and out of breath, still he managed to move like it was the beginning of the game.

it wasn't. they were in their 5th set right now.

you never failed to cheer on him, calling his name over and over again. like this he couldn't slack off. you relied on him. the team relied on him. so he didn't.

and there it was.

the ace of the other team spiked the ball over the net but karasuno's block managed a one touch, noya received it in the last second and brought the ball back to kageyama.

he tossed to asahi, who broke directly through the opposites team block.

the gym fell silent

after a few seconds the cheering started. the whole fan club of karasuno including yachi and you was so excited. nobody had believed in them to win but here they were. 17-15. 3-2.

yachi and you went down to the entrance of the court, where noya and the rest of the team already waited. as soon as he saw you, all the energy seemed to come back to him as he ran into your arms and literally tackled you to the ground.

the team have you little worried glances (maybe he had hurt you) but both of you just remained on the ground for a bit giggling.

the others decided to walk around campus for a bit, leaving you all to yourself.

sfter a bit you were able to free yourself from noya 's grip, standing and pulling him up with you. you continued to hug him tightly still. telling him over and over again how great he did.

he was way more excited than you were though, bubbling on and on about how he felt.

you stopped him mid sentence with a kiss, to what he gave in immediately, closing his eyes and cupping either side of your cheeks with his hands.

a few seconds later though, he noticed that the heat from the game just didn't seem to leave him.

he felt light headed and his core literally burned as the at first soft kiss transitioned onto a passionate and hungry one.

not breaking contract with you he pulled you with him as he backed off into an empty changing room.

you went with the flow though.

he stoved you on to the wall next to the door, pressing you against it with one hand and locking the door with the other, still never breaking the kiss

you were used to noya being affectionate and open with pda but this was a fairly new experience, him just lashing out like that. he usually was pretty innocent with pda after all.

you felt like his tongue found it's way deeper and deeper into your mouth

you backed away a bit, trying to speak so his lips moved swiftly to your neck, sucking the sensible skin

'noya, what..' you managed to say before he stopped you by shoving his tongue in between your lips again.

'i can... can't i?' he gave you this puppy eyes, making you nod ever so slightly. 'i did so good today, didn't i babe? did you see? i gave it my all just for you.' you nodded again

you moved your hands away from his chest down to the waistband of his shorts. his playful expression got replaced by a more serious, questioning one, asking if it really was alright with you, getting your permission. you nodded a third time, making him smirk

he let you continue to slide his pants down and

...

about 20 minutes later you met up with the rest of the team at the front gate, both of you looking more out of breath than before

tanaka gave noya a silent but proud thumbs-up

the rest avoided eyecontact in embarrassment

271 notes · View notes

hargrove-mayfields · 3 years

Text

Just a Dream Away

Chapter 2/13 read here on ao3!

for the @harringrovebigbang!

~~~~

The news isn’t any easier to stomach after a whole night to think.

It was hard enough for Steve to cope with this decision on his own, but calling Susan on the phone and asking what she thought about pulling the plug on her stepson was next to impossible. Maybe it was just actually saying it out loud for the first time that made it so hard for him, but he was barely able to get the words out.

“Hello?” Susan sounds confused about getting a call so early on a Sunday morning.

“I need to ask you something.” Steve says quickly. Susan waits on the other end, but the words just won’t come out of his mouth. Steve is thankful she's at least more patient than her husband. “The doctors all think- and I wanted to ask you first even though I’m his representative- they think Billys not doing too good and that we should do some thinking about this but, you know he’s just been in there so long and-“

“I understand, Steve.” She isn’t going to make him say it, the words that had been tumbling around somewhere in his head since the very beginning, and he is thankful for it. “I think, if it’s time to let him go, I support that decision.”

“What about Neil?”

“This is not his choice to make.” Susan sighs, and says simply. She had seen the worst of Neils abuse and knew that, even though things weren’t always so bad, Billy wouldn’t want his dad to have any say in a decision this important had he been able to express his wishes. “You do what’s best for Billy.”

Steve thanks her and hangs up before he could break, her words threatening to ruin the promise he’d made to himself to stay strong. He repeated it over and over in his head that he was doing the right thing and there was no reason to cry or be sad.

He hadn’t caught a wink of sleep, something he was more than used to by now, but last night was especially hard on him. It had set in that he was going to do something impossible, the guilt and the heartbreak washing over him until he just had to give up on sleeping entirely. It felt like he was rushing Billy's death, no matter how much thought had actually gone into this choice of how much time into trying to save him, it would always feel like a spur of the moment decision.

But six long months don’t count as sudden. The countless nights and days dragging on as Billy only got sicker and sicker don’t count as out of nowhere. He’d been suffering and Steve knew that the whole time, he was just too scared to make the call that was sitting heavy in the back of his thoughts the entire time.

Billy was a healthy eighteen year old boy. If he wasn’t already gone, he would have woken up by now, or at least improved in the slightest. All signs pointed to him having given up the fight, or encountered some unseen obstacle keeping him unconscious. Either way, Steve has come to rationalize that it's not right to keep him around, suffering just so he could die later.

Because if he was really being honest with himself, there was zero chance of him recovering anymore, not a small chance or an unlikely one, but none at all, at least not fully enough that he’d ever be healthy or truly conscious or himself ever again, so this was for the best. Goddamn was that so much easier to say than to actually go through with though.

Steve could spend the rest of his life telling himself it was right, but he was going to meet Max and Susan at the hospital, and Billy was going to die. The boy he had fallen more in love with than he had ever been before, the boy he’d even promised himself to each with a ring they’d stolen from their mothers, was going to die.

Driving to the hospital the day before had felt bad enough, but today is worse.

Maybe one day he’d be able to see these last six months Billy spent in the hospital as a blessing, his second chance to get the closure he needed, to let Billy go peacefully instead of on the dirty floor of the ruined mall, but for now, he just felt miserable. Like all he’d done was extend his pain just to kill him anyways.

Pulling into the parking lot, he sees Neil’s truck and Nancy’s car. They were already out of their cars and waiting for Steve, Max hiding her tear stained face in her mother’s coat, and Nancy politely listening to something Susan was saying. She was only here to drop off Eleven, who had been back in Hawkins to visit Dustin on his birthday and wanted to come, and Lucas, who promised Max he’d be there to support her, no matter what he thought of her brother. What surprised them all though, was that Neil had showed up too.

He’s stood away from everyone else, arms crossed tight over his chest and a stone cold look on his face. Steve locks eyes with him through the windshield, and he can see something regret clear in Neils eyes. Maybe it was denial that things would ever get this bad that made him so insistent to not have anything to do with his son while he was sick, the idea that he’d come home someday and he could antagonize him then, but that wasn’t the reality of the situation, and perhaps that is exactly what brought him out today. Steve doesn’t feel bad for him either way.

As he kills his engine and gets out, Susan and Nancy shoot him an identical sympathetic look before the latter scampers back to her own car, wanting nothing to do with this situation. Nobody trusted Steve to drive their kids around anymore, and everybody else was busy but Nancy, so she had to drive the kids. Steve’s not sure if it’s the guilt from aiming a gun at Billy and pulling the trigger without remorse or if she still hated his guts as much as she did in high school, but again, Steve doesn’t care.

Nobody matters to him but Billy today.

The opposite wasn’t true, they were in return worried about Steve. Only a few nurses under a vow of silence and Heather who’d died with the secret ever knew about what he and Billy had, but everyone still understood how close they were, and knew that, other than Max of course, he’d be taking this the hardest.

They let him lead the way, but before they could go into room B-216, Susan stopped him with a delicate hand on his shoulder. “I don’t think I should be in there.”

“I think it’s better if you are.” Steve says, taking in a shaky deep breath, feeling strange comforting Susan of all people. “I don’t want him to be alone.”

A sob from Max echoes through the empty hallway, and that’s what does it for Susan, seeing that her daughter needed her support in there. She nods with a ghastly look on her face, and steps aside to let Steve enter the room first.

Instead of the chair where he usually sat, he sat on the side of Billy’s bed, and Max followed his lead to sit on the other. Eleven took the chair, Lucas sidled up behind Max, and Susan drifted to the corner by the window. Neil stood at the door with his arms still crossed, ever imposing. Steve just ignored his presence entirely.

A nurse had followed them into the room as well, stopping at the door with her little clipboard to say, “Whenever y’all are ready.”

They wouldn’t be ready for six more hours.

To Steve, that time feels almost more torturous than even Starcourt, than helplessly watching from across the room as Billy collapsed to the floor, because this time, he knew what was going to happen. That little gleam of hope he’d gotten when Max screamed that Billy was still breathing was not there this time. He still wasn't ready for what was going to happen now, but he supposes in a way, he should be grateful that it wasn’t the same, and he’ll have the chance to say goodbye.

Steve couldn’t speak for everyone, but he also used the time to think. About Billy, and who he had been, how much he had meant to Steve and the things he wanted in life. About all the things that led them to this moment, and everything that would come after.

It was mostly silent in the room, everyone just a little bit in shock, most of them crying at least once. But Steve swore up and down he was going to keep his composure, he would not let those kids, or his Billy, see him crack.

They make it especially hard to keep that promise though, knowing that Max was mad at him and that Lucas, who he’d never seen be anything other than headstrong and brave, even has a tear on his cheek, and when El is shaking and holding back sobs and Billy is going to die. It feels like he is underwater, with each beep of the heart monitor sinking further and further from the surface, away from his friends and from Billy.

He is in shock too, he guesses. All he can do is focus on Billy. The barely there freckles scattered across his nose, the arch of his lips, the tattoo on his shoulder, his golden curls and his long eyelashes. He wishes he could see the pretty blue eyes underneath.

Somebody says his name, he isn’t quite sure which of them it was. He feels himself turn his head in their direction, but his eyes are glued to Billy, taking in every little detail of his lover before it was too late. Before he’d never see his face again.

At one point, Susan checks the time and suggests they all go down to the cafeteria for a little break, but nobody, including her, moves at all. They all knew the longer they waited to pull the plug, the closer they got to not doing it at all. Steve kind of hopes that will be the case, that they will just keep putting it off and putting it off until visitation hours end, and they’ll have to come back the next day, and the next, and this won’t ever have to happen.

That wouldn’t work though, and in truth, he doesn’t really want it to. They are ready, and so is Billy.

At 5:30, Steve gives Max a look, and she nods sharply, a tear dripping off the end of her nose. He leans forward, and presses the orange call nurse button.

A solemn lady he doesn’t recognize, Billy's doctor probably, knocks on the door and comes in. She asked if they were sure, bringing along even more papers for him and Susan to sign about what would happen to Billy afterwards and to give written consent to pull the plug so they wouldn’t be able to open a case against the hospital for Billy's death.

She explains to them it might not be immediate, that he could live for hours, or even days without the support before he dehydrated or suffocated, but they didn’t think it would come to that. Although his heart had only really been grazed by the initial injury, it was getting weaker with every day that passed, the medicine they pumped into his body slowing its rate, ruining the muscle, and it was estimated that he probably wouldn’t make it through the night, if even for that long.

She worked around Steve and Max, removing IVs, tubes, anything that was artificial, and then it was time to wait. Immediately his heart rate slowed, and Steve felt himself starting to panic, thinking that this was already going to be it, but it plateaued and kept going steady.

Susan’s quiet voice comes from the corner, “Do you think we should talk to him?”

The doctor smiles artificially. “I think that would be the best thing you could do.” She takes the papers back and leaves.

Nobody wants to be the first to break the quiet.

El still struggled too much with her words to say anything, especially since she hadn’t had much practice with something like this. Her dad had been ripped away from her too, without so much as a goodbye. Loss wasn’t something she could articulate, so in the place of words, she holds Billy's hand in her right, and Max’s in her left.

Lucas had his hand on her back, rubbing circles there to calm her down. There were tears streaks on his cheeks, probably from seeing the girls so torn up, but he really didn’t know Billy, and he was uncomfortable enough with Neil looming. He didn’t have anything to say to him, and they all understood that.

It was hard for Max to think of anything to say, every emotion too strong within her to pick one thing to say. She was devastated, that her brother was going to die and she hadn’t been there with him every moment, and angry, that Steve got to make the choice whether he got to live and that her step father was in the room, and somewhere under the surface, relieved that Billy wouldn’t be suffering anymore. It was her best friends’ silent support that gave her the courage to speak up.

“I was supposed to say goodbye to you when you left for work that day, but I didn’t because I was being jerk and I was mad at you for something dumb. I guess this is my chance though so.. bye Billy. M’gonna miss you, or really I already do ‘cause, you know... I'm sorry for not being a good sister, but I don’t think you would’ve liked me if I was.” She chuckles wetly, a sob disguised as much at least, “I love you, bubba. I'm sorry.”

Silence blankets the room except for her sniffling, and Steve knows it’s his turn. Before he’d got there, he was planning out things he could say that would sound as platonic as possible, anything to try to save his image in front of the kids and Billy's parents apparently, but he scraps it all in the moment. These were the last moments he’d ever spend with his Billy, he couldn’t care less anymore who knew about them or not. He just needed him to know how much he loved him.

He wishes he had just a little more time to think, but Neil and Susan have nothing to say to Billy. Figures. Quite frankly, Steve is glad they hadn’t said a word either.

Billy and Susan never got along. He admitted he didn’t blame her for being complacent in his father’s abuse, but he still found it hard to move past her standing idly by while he was getting hurt. He had once swore when he’d turned up at Steve’s front door with a broken wrist that he would never forgive her for just standing by. It was for the best, Steve thinks, that she didn’t speak now.

Then there was Neil, never a man of many words, but Steve thinks he might’ve needed a second hospital bed if he’d opened his mouth. He was in some part okay with the fact that he was here, Billy would’ve wanted him to be present, but he drew the line at him opening his mouth. That man had tortured Billy, had put all kinds of terrible motions in his head about love and his worth and a thousand other things that left Billy confused and hurt, so Steve wholeheartedly blames him for his son's fate. Believes it was Neil and what he’d done to him that made Billy give up the fight.

Taking a deep breath to steel himself, Steve moves up the bed closer to Billy, and takes his hand in his. He bites his chapped lips and thinks long and hard about what he wants to say, leaving out all the bad, depressing things he could say. He got to choose what his last words would be to Billy, and he would be damned if they weren’t going to be positive.

“Bill, where do I even start? You’ve been so brave. I promised you you would become something great, and you did. You were our hero, but I’m so, so glad I know you as more than that. Because you were, you were an amazing older brother, a determined kid who could have had anything he wanted in life, and you were my partner.” There's a collective intake of breath, a sniffle from Max, and Neil leaves the room entirely, but Steve keeps going, “I’ll have the memories we made forever, and I will hold onto them as dearly as I have you all this time. I love you. I will always love you, Billy.”

The whole time he’d been speaking, his eyes had been flickering back and forth between the heart monitor and Billy’s face, checking for any sign that he could hear him and that they were doing the wrong thing, but there was nothing. Nothing but his too-slow heart beat droning on and on, maybe faltering more often than it should.

Steve knows that means it’s time to let go, so he finishes, his throat tight and his hands shaking, saying what he’d been fearing he’d have to since the very beginning, “You’ve fought hard enough, baby. You can let go.”

Twenty minutes later, at 6:19 on Sunday, January 25th, William Reuben Hargrove took his last breath.

Steve felt Max sob so hard that the bed shook, then stand up and throw herself into Lucas’ arms, and he heard Susan gasp and saw her cover her mouth with her hand and put her shaking hand on El’s shoulder. He heard a nurse open the door so far and so fast it hit the wall, but he didn’t really comprehend any of it. Deeper and deeper he continued under the water, sinking away from this reality he wanted nothing to do with.

He’s still clutching Billy's hand like his life depends on it when Susan says from behind him. “It’s time to go, Steve.”

But he can’t move. Some force is keeping him sitting in that bed next to Billy. His legs won’t work and his hand wouldn’t let go and he regrets this, just knows he can't leave him there alone. The kids are already herded out of the room, all in a huddle out in the hallway as they try to dry their tears.

The nurses wait patiently, heads down and hands crossed politely, for Susan to get Steve out of there, so they could then get Billy out too.

Steve is in shock though, and if it weren’t for the staff and his friends, he probably could, or rather would, stay there indefinitely. He was so distant from what was actually happening, that he hadn’t quite taken note of how quickly Billy had started to go.

Already the color is gone from his lips, and his hand, still held tightly in Steve’s, grows colder by the second. He’d been so weak already, it didn’t take very long at all, and they really don't think Steve should see him like this, lest the images of Billy in life be corrupted.

Susan puts her hand on his shoulder and squeezes, and it was as though he was brought back to reality. Looking up at her with his brown eyes wide and teary, he stands up. He looks back to Billy and gasps softly, stepping forward to press one final kiss just to the side of Billy’s lips, and turns to leave.

Where Susans hand is pressed into the small of his back, she can feel him shaking. As soon as he is out of the door, Max pulls him into a hug tight enough he feels like he could break.

“I had no idea.” She sobs into his shirt, “I’m sorry.”

“S’not your fault.” Steve answers numbly, a lump in his throat.

Max clings to his side, sniffling as they take the stairs down to the first floor. Steve keeps his head down, hating the sympathetic looks they were getting from the staff and from the people in plastic waiting chairs watching them as they left the hospital.

He’s halfway back to his car when Nancy, who’s been waiting to drive Max's friends back home, stops him, offering, “Let me take you home, Steve.”

He looks, and the kids are already loading up into Susan’s truck, and Steve wonders vaguely when they’d discussed this arrangement. “What about my car?”

She had already walked him to her brand new Honda CRX, a gift from her mother in case of an emergency, and opened the door, not taking no for an answer, “You can come back for it tomorrow.”

So he just lets her drive him, too numb to argue or really to drive himself. They pull into his driveway, and he mumbles out a thanks and tries to leave, but she puts her hand on his. “Listen, I don’t think you should be alone right now Steve. I can stay or I could call Robin for you if you’d like.”

“I’ll be alright, Nance.” Steve assures. Neither of them believe it.

“Are you sure, I-“ Nancy starts, but he gets out of the car and closes the door in her face, leaving her to debate with herself whether she should try to stay and force him out of isolation, or if she should leave him to grieve in privacy. Hesitantly, she chooses the latter.

Steve and her are not as close as they used to be, for reasons she does regret dearly, and she knows her company isn’t going to be what he needs right now. Staying in her car, she waits until his front doors shut behind him, and leaves, all the way home wondering if she’d done what was best for him. Ironic, that already people were worrying for Steve in the same way he alone had for the dead boy.

Back at Max’s house, Max goes straight to Billy’s room, taking initiative to claim everything in his space before Neil could come in and throw it out. She had heard about how when Billy’s mother left, Neil had gotten rid of every last one of her belongings, leaving nothing behind for his son but the picture of his mom he kept in a locket around his neck, the one he was still wearing even now, and her ring, which was already safe with Steve. She was going to make sure Neil wouldn’t touch a thing in that room, not even to dust it if she had her way.

Susan is occupied with trying to talk through what had happened at the hospital to her husband, excuse the part where Steve had outed them, watching in frustration as he remained entirely indifferent. It was only on the surface, just as it would be for any father, but still, he’d been so terrible to his son for so many years, he knew he didn’t have the right to be upset. He’d almost been the cause of Billy’s death enough times that, now that it had actually happened, it didn’t leave him devastated in the way it should’ve.

Steve on the other hand, he didn’t get that luxury of only caring with half of his heart. His whole world had been turned on its head, and he’d just lost the only thing that was keeping him going trying to get it back upright. All he had to look forward to was visiting Billy and the prospect of him waking up one day. Now that would never happen. Billy was dead.

That still hadn’t really sunk in, and some small part of Steve wonders if it ever would. Because he knows in his head he’ll never step foot in that hospital again, and that he’ll never have a reason to get ready at five o'clock on the dot every morning and drive to the hospital to stay until ten at night, but it didn’t feel real.

He throws himself down in a random armchair, a half empty bottle of whiskey already on the coffee table in front of him from the night before. He has to remind himself this isn’t that same old routine, that he’s drowning his sorrow and mourning in alcohol instead of getting the liquid courage to do this again in the morning.

The phone rings twice, but he doesn’t answer it either time. He listens to it ring and ring and ring in a tone that's so disgustingly familiar to his ears after waiting up every night and day to calls from the hospital, but he stays where he was. It was just Robin calling to check on him, but he doesn’t want to talk to her, or anybody for that matter.

Billy is dead. And Steve is ruined.

~~~~

At 6:20 on Sunday, January 25th, Billy Hargrove wakes up.

The last thing he remembers is the Camaro swerving off the road. His head was bleeding and he thinks he called the cops, but everything after that is a blank.

He realizes after he blinks away the blur times in his eyes, that he’s in the hospital, which isn’t much of a surprise, he had hit his head pretty hard and now there's a huge gap in his memory. In his time he’d had enough concussions from playing sports and being roughed up by his old man to know he was at risk for something like this, but it still makes him wonder, how long had he been out for?

The room is freezing, and it looks like it’s snowing outside. He’d crashed his car in June, or was it July? The fourth maybe? He remembered fireworks, but not much else. His dad was supposed to take them all to the festival. Why hadn’t they gone?

He decides, ignoring the sinking feeling that soemthing was wrong, that he’d probably walked away from the car crash, but then one of his stupid hick friends probably blew him up with a fire work or something idiotic like that. The dull pain in his chest would certainly attest to that.

But one thing that can’t be explained is why, despite potentially being out for months now, he isn’t hooked up to anything. As a matter of fact, there is nothing even on for him to be hooked up to. The monitors are completely silent and the ventilator is cracked. Hell, even the lights are off.

Nobody’s here to visit either, not even a nurse to attend to him. Billy knows the trust between Max and him is still shaky, and his parents don’t give a shit, but the fact that even Steve isn’t here confuses him. Makes him wonder for a moment if he’s dead, and this is some strange afterlife he's bound to because he went out with some unfinished business.

He quickly rules that out though, because he can feel the overwhelming cold, the stiff sheets beneath him, and he can hear the wind through the open window, the distant chirps of whatever creatures lurked in the woods that seemed to surround everything in this damn backwoods town. Maybe that’s only because he’s in denial.

He stands from the hospital bed, walking slow on his feet, every muscle in his body aching like he hadn’t done this in a long time, over to the window to see if maybe he could see the parking lot and check for his dad's truck or Steve’s bimmer. It’s then that’s when he realizes this is not just a normal hospital room, albeit somewhat poorly lit, because the window isn’t just open, it’s totally shattered, jagged shards of glass in its frame and scattered on the once pristine floor tiles. Through the hole there are thick black vines that twist around every corner of the room, spreading out over the far wall and wrapping around the hospital equipment, the chair in the corner, all the way to the legs of the bed, like whatever these weird plants were had broken through the window and were slowly taking over the room.

With a shudder, Billy wonders if maybe they would have eventually overtaken him too.

He decides he’s not going to stick around and find that out for himself, so he ditches the hospital entirely. There’s no reason sticking around in a place that felt so, so full of death.

Making his way through the halls, this place is definitely abandoned. Not a single other patient or doctor around, just more flickering lights that reveal even more of the rot and death that he could see from his room, and what had looked like snow outside filling the corridors inside.

Walking out of the hospital is even worse, the entire town seeming like it had just up and emptied out. It’s so dark, no moon or stars above to light his way. Everything is plagued with rot, those same vines from the hospital window taking over absolutely anything they can. From houses, to cars, to the actual roads. There’s no way there is anyone still surviving out here, so what the hell is he doing here?

Of course, there’s nobody around to ask what’s going on, the streets totally empty save for the occasional sound of echoing footfalls in the distance, and more of that chittering he heard before. He assumes it’s just animals, but it's unsettling, to say the least, this feeling that as he wanders the empty town he’s being watched, but he doesn’t let it get to him and he pushes on, looking for answers.

First thing, he has to figure out wherever this hellish place he'd been shipped off to after his accident is, and how the hell he was supposed to get home from here.

The streets are vaguely familiar, which doesn’t mean much, he’d driven through and stayed in countless towns for three days to get to Hawkins from California, but the extent of damage to the town, and his head, makes it nearly impossible to really recognize where he is. At least that is, until he stumbles upon a convenience store he knows for sure he’s been to before, and recently.

He used to buy cigarettes here every Tuesday, Fridays too if he was having a bad week. When nobody could be bothered to go all the way to the next town for groceries, Neil would send him and Max down to that little convenience store with fifty bucks, so there was always a little extra left over he'd pocket for later, or to buy Max candy with.

Last summer he remembers breaking in after dark, broken glass and blood all over the floor tiles, looking for somebody. Somebody he was supposed to kill. Wait, what?

His head hurts just thinking about that last one, memories in his head he can’t begin to understand, so he moves on. Adds that to the checklist of the many things he didn’t understand right now for later. There were more pressing things to worry about right now.

As sure as he is that he’s alive, he begins to have his doubts when he finds the newspaper displayed out front of the store, kept behind cracked and foggy plastic. The only reason he initially thinks of it is to check the date, see if there were any front page stories about the world ending or a bomb dropping on their small town or something, but what he finds instead only makes it all even more confusing.

Because on page four of the paper, he reads his own obituary.

Beneath a small copy of his senior portrait, it reads the usual, that he died on the 25th of January, that was hurt in a fire on the Fourth of July and succumbed to his injuries, where he was born and who his surviving family members were. None of that makes any damn sense to him though, because again, he’s pretty fucking sure he’s not dead. Either way, his funeral is being held next Thursday in the church Susan dragged them to on Sunday’s where he’d been barred from attending after someone at the high school (Tommy, he’s 100% sure it’s was fucking Tommy) let slip that Billy Hargrove might have a taste for dick. He tears the obit out of the paper and pockets it for later. Maybe he’ll be able to find answers there.

There has to be some mistake. Something really bad happened here, so who was updating the papers in the middle of what looked to be the damned apocalypse? And who would lie about him being dead when he’s the only damn person left seemingly in the entire city?

The one, and probably only, good thing about this situation is that he knows his way home from here, so he decides that’s his next goal. He might have no idea what’s going on, but home is still home, and he definitely could use some comfort right about now.

It would normally only be about a ten minute walk, but this cold is starting to get to him, the stabbing pains in his chest and back made even worse by the temperature, making it more like a half hour of dragging himself through the impossible dark back to Cherry Lane, wheezing and wincing all the way. Only when he does finally get home, he finds that it’s a complete disaster.

All of the windows are shattered, the whole front door is missing, everything he can see inside the house from carpet to ceiling is damp and moldy. It’s totally unlivable, but he still tries to call out for somebody. The thought of making it home just to find it completely abandoned, no signs of Max, who he knew somehow would know what to do, or anyone else around, was crushing.

So he tries, “Max?” Nothing. “Dad..?” Still nothing.

Any ideas in his head of hope were gone then. He was clueless and alone and hurting and fucking terrified about this entire situation the more he thought about it.

Whatever had happened, he knew he wasn’t going to just lay down and take it. He’d find his way back to normalcy, to his family and his friends and to Steve. God he missed Steve.

This hellhole isn’t any place for such a pretty boy, but what Billy wouldn’t give to have him by his side right now. But since he isn’t here, he tries to think instead, what would Steve do?

Well, the answer is that he would panic, but after that, he’d devise a plan. Though, a plan usually means that you have at least some idea what is going on or what you need to do, and Billy has none of that. He’s in some backwards version of Hawkins, apparently all by himself, in freezing his ass off and in pain. He figures the best thing to do right now is start with the little things, trying to fix any of those problems he possibly can.

The first he's just going to have to deal with, and the second, he’d already gone looking for people and nobody was anywhere to be found, so that wasn’t getting solved either. He can do something about being cold though, and he does, going off to his room, or what was left of it, to grab a jacket.

The second he opens the door he can tell that isn't going to happen though, there’s nothing in there but more decay. Everything but the bed and the couch are gone, and even that has been stripped of the sheets. Best he’s going to find in here is an old rotten blanket off the floor, so he closes the door and moves on.

Max’s room is next in the hall, and he’s not kidding himself about squeezing into his kid sister's clothes, so he keeps walking, pushing open his parents door. With his clothes missing from their place, he has no choice but to hope his dads haven’t been cleared out too.

Instantly he can tell their room is thankfully less destroyed than his was, the closet at least far enough away from the window it hadn’t really been damaged at all yet. The entire house is still basically a cesspit though, and some of the clothes are unsalvageable. He grabs whatever he can out of there anyways, saving a wool coat, a lined flannel, some denim, and his dad's army jacket.

He has to swallow his pride, which isn’t all too hard when his teeth start chattering from the cold, and put on the bomber jacket Neil had favored last winter, between arguments the one thing he and his dad had agreed on being that Hawkins was way too cold and that Susan was crazy for picking there to move.

It’s familiar and it’s warm and it makes him want to throw up. Makes him wish that even if his dad would probably be kicking his ass right now for wandering around aimless and scared instead of winging it like a real man, that he was here by his side. Just to have someone he knew in all this mess to make things a little easier.

Next thing to worry about once he’s done being misty eyed about a stupid jacket, is the intense aching in his body, more than what he’s used to even after ten years of hair trigger beatings, so he finds the bathroom next in the shell of his house, opening the medicine cabinet to check for some kind of painkillers.

They’ve got plenty between all the injuries that happen in this house, and Susan’s Valium addiction, but that’s something only he knows about, but there’s too much moisture in the air though, and the pill bottles are all full of something sludgey that he’s not putting anywhere near his mouth. All he gets from the bathroom is a dull ache at the front of his skull, and more detached memories like the one at the store, this time of the girl he killed.

Her blood is still on the cabinet, just above the door knob too. The memory of her wide brown eyes and screaming, so much screaming sits heavy in Billy’s mind. Had he done that? Heather was his best friend, there’s no way he would have ever hurt her.

He shakes his head, chasing those thoughts from his mind. If he was unsettled before, now he’s officially freakies the fuck out. Already in a strange place, now his body is wracked with phantom pains he couldn’t explain and memories that didn’t belong to him, leaving Billy feeling like a stranger in his own skin.

What the hell had happened to him?

#harringrove big bang 2021 #harringrove #billy hargrove #steve harrington #max mayfield #susan hargrove #neil hargrove #tw major character death #ej writer #story by ej!#the parts in italics are Billy’s pov #more tags on ao3

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salmonthestoryteller · 4 years

Text

Be My Valentine

@malex-cupid

(Wrote this up real quick, apologies if I didn’t catch all mistakes)

Be My Valentine

Roswell New Mexico Malex Fic

Michael had always hated holidays growing up. While they were supposedly designed around celebrating what you had, it often felt like it instead drove home everything you did not.

Back in high school Max had several prepared long winded rants about commercialism vs the origins of holidays. It usually ended with Isobel throwing some form of candy at him and demanding her right to be allowed her themed decorations and holiday specific indulgences.

Isobel had once mentioned she was surprised Valentine's Day was among the holidays Michael thought was a waste of time because it had to be the easiest day in the year to find a hook-up.

Michael had responded with his middle finger, and decidedly nothing about the one and only time he had bought a Valentine's Gift, only to be told he really wasn't the sort of person people had a romance with. Just fun.

Yeah, Valentine's sucked as much as any holiday, and he'd rather have to live through any Max lecture than deal with it. Sadly for him, Max was spending Valentine's with Liz, which left him to Isobel's mercy.

"Do you know what today is? Are you doing this on purpose? Trying to ruin months of planning because you have a personal vendetta against the joy holidays bring others?"

Michael rolled his eyes. "I'm on my way now. I will get your stupid light projector display set up before the dumb party."

"Light and Music display." Isobel corrected. "And it's Roswell's first Out of this World Valentine's Singles Meet and Greet."

"Yeah, sure. Be there in ten, okay?"

"You better. And please tell me you're wearing something presentable."

Michael groaned in response. "I'm hanging up now."

"You're only getting out of attending if you're magically not single by 6, Michael."

Cursing Max's timing at asking Liz out again exactly one week before Valentine's and leaving him alone to their sister's mercy, Michael hung up and tossed his phone on the empty passenger seat of his truck. He pulled his truck out of the junkyard and headed into town - this was not going to be a good night.

Bean Me Up's interior had been decorated for the occasion. Roses colored in a variety of unnatural shades mixed with heart garlands hanging from inflatable ufos. One wall had been left blank form the projected light display he'd promised Isobel. Hearts and stars that swirled to the beat of the music playing. She hadn't told him who she'd hired to do the computer programming for it. Somehow he felt he should have known before he saw Alex.

Rosa offered a grin from where she was perched on the table next to the booth by the blank wall where Alex was setting up his laptop. Greg and Kyle were seated in the booth Rosa was sitting on the table of and there was a Crashdown Bag with what looked like heart-shaped waffle fries being shared between the three.

"If you were any later your sister would have gone loco, Guerin." Rosa told him.

"What are you eating?" Michael asked instead of replying.

"Venusian Fries with Martian Sunset Mayo. Crashdown Valentine's Special." She didn't offer him any, and in fact pulled the bag closer. He was tempted to levitate it out of her hands, but held back.

"They also have Jupiter-sized Milkshakes and Sundaes, large enough to share with someone special." Greg said pointedly. Because apparently he, along with Isobel, had taken the class in How to be as Unsubtle as Possible when trying to Matchmake.

"Or you could just eat it all yourself." Rosa suggested.

"That would be a Jupiter-sized stomach ache." Kyle put in. Rosa stuck her tongue out at him.

Alex looked up, apparently much better prepared than Michael was for all this because he just offered him a smile like it wasn't supposed to make his knees feel weak. "Ready to get this display going so your sister stays sane?"

"That would require her to be sane first." Michael pointed out. The inflatable ufo behind him promptly smacked into the back of his head.

"I heard that." Isobel told him, walking up. "And you have less than an hour to get this running. If you mess this up for me, I will burn your cowboy hat."

"I couldn't allow that." Alex replied, even as he began to pull out cables to connect the light projectors to his laptop.

"It's a stupid looking hat." Rosa put in, nibbling on more fries.

"Michael makes it look good." Alex threw him a smirk, that had both Isobel and Gregory side-eyeing the two of them with smug looks.

"Gross. I am out here." Rosa hopped off the table, handing the fry back to Greg. "I'm going to have a Jupiter-sized sundae all to myself."

"Enjoy your stomach ache." Kyle called after her. Rosa only flicked him off before disappearing out the door.

"Display, chop-chop." Isobel disappeared to talk to staff.

"I'm going to see if Isobel needs help." Greg spoke up, but didn't move right away.

There was a not muffle bang, followed by Kyle cursing under his breath. "Yeah, me too." He said towards Greg with clenched teeth.

Yeah, subtle was definitely not anyone's strong suit among their friends. They also took the fries with them when they left which, rude.

"They could have left the fries." Alex muttered.

Michael had to laugh at that, as he started setting up the projectors and connecting them to the wires Alex handed them. "Great minds think alike."

"How did you get roped into this?" Alex asked him.

"Have you met Isobel?" Michael countered.

Alex chuckled at his words. "I have, in fact. But I guess, I don't know, I figured… don't worry about it." He seemed to close off slightly, concentrating on his laptop.

"You figured I would be spending Valentine's out cruising for a hook-up?" Michael couldn't help but prod. "Rather than helping one of my friends?"

"I didn't mean anything by it. It's none of my business." Something in his tone sounded the exact opposite.

Michael tested the lights, watching the pattern swirl without purpose. "I don't."

"Don't what?"

"Spend Valentine's like that. Any Valentine's." He turned the lights off, waiting for Alex to finish setting up the program.

"How do you usually spend them?"

"...alone."

"...me too."

Alex's words made him look at him. It was hard to look away when their eyes met - it always was. After a long moment, Alex lowered his eyes to the laptop, and pressed a button. The music piped in over the store speaker's changed and the light projectors he'd set up began to turn off and on in a pattern - making the lights go to the beat.

"Looks surprisingly less cheesy than I thought." Michael offered into the quiet that had fallen between them.

"It's pretty cheesy." Alex told him, a smile back in his voice.

Michael grinned over at him. "Okay, yeah."

Alex's eyes crinkled as his smile deepened, but then his face grew serious. Michael felt his own smile slide off his face, concerned. "Want to get Venusian Fries at the Crashdown with me?"

Michael hesitated, ignoring how much he wanted to say yes without questioning it. He offered a lopsided smile. "As friends?"

Alex didn't smile in return, instead shaking his head. "No, definitely not as friends."

"As a date?"

"A date. Jupiter Sized Milkshake included."

"Do I get a tacky box of candy?" Somewhere a synapse in his brain was not connecting properly. He'd worry about it later. When Alex's lips weren't beginning to curl into a teasing smile.

"Only if I do, too."

"As many as you want." Michael felt his own lips curve into a smug grin as he moved over to where Alex was sitting in the booth still. "Isn't that the kind of deal we should seal with a kiss, though?"

Alex's response was to take hold of his face with both hands, pulling him down into a kiss. When the moment was interrupted by a set of wolf whistles from their friend and siblings from across the coffee shop, Michael flicked them off before going back to kissing Alex.

#malexcupid21 #malex #rnm fic

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kiara-carrera · 3 years

Note

wait i want to hear everything u are willing to share ab max SGJDVD

okay!!! i love my new baby so i'm excited haha! this is very lengthy and just full of ramblings lmao but thank you so much for asking!!!!

so i wrote about some of her basic background-y stuff here if you wanna check that out!

but basically she's a john b x oc ship that's like ... childhood best friends to friends with benefits to ... very confusing situation

it's definitely one of those situations where they probably shouldn't have gone as far as they did but uh ... no braincells

john b has lowkey liked her for a while, but didn’t realize messing around prob wouldn’t help

inspirations for her character include alaska young, kind of jennifer check from jennifer's body (not like the demon person eating bit, but just like ... quintessential teen movie hot girl — like whatever the fuck megan fox has going on max has it), the sour album, and the songs alrighty aphrodite (peach pit) and clementine (halsey)

she's a pogue born and raised

i said this in the linked post but i reiterate SHE IS THE HOT GIRL OF THE CUT!!!!!!

spends most of her spare money on groceries for the chateau where she spends 90% of her time, as well as trips to the used book store (cue bonding moments with pope)

jj was the first to find out john b and max were macking

jj is also like their child tbfh ... will he become a child of divorce is the question

freshman year, john b was a big part in holding her together after her mom passed away

so in turn max played a very big part in holding john b together after big john went missing

why do half of my ocs not have parents this is an epidemic of fictional proportions i need to stop doing this smh

max and john b started their whole thing somewhere between his dad going missing and kiara coming back from her kook year thing

kiara is very anti max and john b

not bc she wants john b or wants max (bc pan!kie agenda is strong in this household)

but like,,,she thinks the situation is gonna blow up in their face

she's right but she doesn't need to be so loud about it

kie and max are besties at heart, but they fight a lot

in another life, max and sarah honestly would get together

like this story was originally meant to be a john b x max x sarah poly

but it just didn't feel as genuine and felt forced to me so i booted sarah but they have chemistry 100%

will 100% drink any kind of alcohol you give her, but adores the more "girly" drinks like wine coolers and shit

...john b has 100% gotten wine coolers special just for her and endured being called whipped by jj but it was worth it to see the grin on her face

has a bright pink bong that jj constantly drags her over but then he's always looking to smoke with her sooooooooo

max and jj are very similar in the reckless nothing to lose partier aspect

max and jj chaotic bi besties??? maybe so

it's very obvious that max and john b are ... something, but max will swear up and down that it's just casual

john b is like that's hurtful but alright

john b has pretty much just begun mentally treating her like his gf and like it's not that she treats him horribly in comparison bc some things she does scream relationship behavior

but like,,,labeling and the true commitment is what has her like abort abort abort

this one is subject to change but her brother's quite a bit older than her and honestly i might just make him be somewhat friends with barry just for shits and giggles

like the peak comedy of max just getting ready to leave her house and barry's just at the kitchen table with one of her books like "this thing any good?"

she's like i'm not a fucking lending library

idk i just like the concept of them interacting like that pre-ep7 when he holds the pogues at gunpoint lmao

speaking of her brother ... bastard child we hate him

he took custody of max after their mom passed and he's regretted it ever since even though he doesn't even really have to do shit like she pretty much supports herself he's just a fucking asshat

both of them speak mandarin chinese (they'd speak it around the house before their father died when max was a kid) and there's just many situations in my head where they're arguing in full blown chinese and john b is just standing there like 🧍🏻‍♂️

also the fights are about him so ... peak humor

max's book are all over the chateau and john b lets her talk about them as long as she wants because she gets so excited and into it and he's a simp that's it

those printed shirts he wears??? she will in fact steal half of them she is a menace

#asks #maxine zhu #phoebestarks

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echo-three-one · 3 years

Text

Chapter 27

Who's still reading this? Have fun!

CW : character death (This spoils a lot I'm sorry but I have to put it.)

THE ROAD SO FAR

Previous Chapter : What's behind door number two?

Staying in Shape

John Price

MacTavish Residence, Glasgow, Scotland

It has been almost three days since the culmination of the New York Attack and most of his contacts regarding Nero and Shepherd's movements were quiet. He was getting anxious to step back into the fight, but without sufficient intel, or even better weapons, they couldn't do anything.

Price scanned the room, everyone else started to pair up with each other, a dynamic he expected to happen anytime soon. With all the challenges they've been through, finding love within each other was inevitable. And Price was fine by that. Heck, when he was younger, he had his fair share of romance during missions.

With the thought of Nero and Shepherd resurfacing any moment soon, Price devised a plan, to keep his crew in shape and always prepared to deploy as soon as sufficient intel is presented.

With the help of Jack, they created a training and endurance exercise schedule, where the soldiers, including Price himself, would follow to still continue to stay in shape and prepared for battle. They asked permission from Soap who was more than willing to help, an excited grin all over his face.

"I'll help you set up." he said, gaining a nod from the old man.

"France will train at the basement gym." He added and Soap nodded.

From that moment, the team started training, improving their physical abilities and endurance. Weapons training wasn't possible at the moment as they left it all in Brazil.

Jack overlooked the team from afar, Samantha and Maxine were at the gym helping out France's version of the training. They did the regular set of training from standard 141 protocol, using everyday materials in exchange for some of the equipment Soap didn't own. Price also instructed a specific dietary plan for the soldiers instead of just eating whatever they liked.

While on break, the two girls, Samantha and Maxine approached Price with an excited look in their eyes. Priced raised an eyebrow and asked what they were up to.

"Everyone's doing their best and We both wanted to offer our help." Samantha explained as Maxine inserted.

"We'd like to apply as the team's dietician and health consultant. My resumé is that I have vast knowledge in cooking along with their nutritional information." She grinned.

"And Samantha here has little background on tending to physical wounds and pain. You could see how fast Alex's face healed!" Maxine added. Price was more than happy to accept their offer, it goes to show that they were willing to give whatever it takes for the people and cause they cared about.

"Alright. Guess you're both hired." he chuckled as the two cheered and made their way to their respective 'partners', probably out to share the good news.

Wiping his sweaty forehead with a towel, he looked around the main room where everybody was. Jack was by the office, looking up something on the laptop or probably just playing solitaire. Soap and France were at the gazebo, he could barely see them by the angle he's at but he couldn't miss that flashy mohawk.

To his left, he saw Samantha sitting on Alex's lap as she carefully cleaned Alex's bruise, Roach sat on the other end of the sofa, chugging a bottle of Gatorade while Maxine stood behind him, he could barely hear it, but it looked like the newly hired dietician was already lecturing him about the benefits of said drink, saying the word 'electrolytes' somewhere in the sentence.

He felt proud that this team stood by him ever since he made that choice. He was very grateful that he had someone whom he shared common goals with.

"Price. It's for you." Jack called from the office, causing him to immediately get up and answer the call.

"Aye, this is Price. Got anything for me?" he muttered.

"John. Looks like your friend is on the move." Kate Laswell spoke on the other end of the line, her voice was authoritative as always.

"Which one?" he chuckled, it was about time he received some news.

"Shadow Company. Looks like they're brave using the same car again. Same plate and all." she informed, giving Price the last route they went before going cold once again. It led them to an empty warehouse just by the docks.

"Just what are these bastards up to…" he muttered.

"I have no idea. Think you'll do recon? It doesn't strike as a threat to warrant an official team, this leads really calling your name, John."

Laswell hinted. Despite him being out of the force and one of Fbi's most wanted, Kate insisted to use such perk for further trapping the suspicious Shepherd.

"I worked hard forming the 141 and he easily disbands it like it's nothing…" she added, her voice sounded very bitter.

"Now now, Kate. Take it easy. We'll get him. He's bound to fuck up anytime soon. Keep in touch, mkay?" he said as they both said their goodbyes and ended the call.

"A little recon mission won't hurt, right?" he nudged to Jack who grinned proudly at the solitaire victory screen, cards bounced all around the edges of the screen.

John Price found himself unable to sleep. It was either he's actually excited to do some missions or he's too worried about what they're about to discover, what would Shadow Company be up to and what is the quiet Nero planning behind the scenes? His thoughts raced to a dozen possibilities, all calling for drastic measures and sacrifices. He knew he had allies by his side, allies that are always ready to do whatever it takes to fix this mess.

He lazily dragged his feet to get a glass of water in the kitchen, despite being huge, the house was awfully quiet. Too quiet that he could hear every soft rustling from the halls.

He wasn't one to eavesdrop but he couldn't help but hear soft murmuring near MacTavish's bedroom.

"So.. um.. same time tomorrow?" said a low Scottish voice a chuckle followed. It was obviously Soap and Price thought only enemies were doing something behind the scenes.

"You wish.." a female voice giggled.

"But seriously… Thanks for tonight John." she added.

"No problem, Francine. So.. what's stopping you from staying overnight?" he chuckled. Price knew this was wrong but his glass of water was still half full.

"You know that I'd love to… but Maxine also needs me right now. Especially that she's slowly recovering bits and pieces of the past." she reasoned and Price knew it was time to head back to his room quietly.

Maxine Winters

MacTavish Residence, Glasgow, Scotland

It felt real. She looked around and felt that this was more than just an ordinary dream. The vision was too dark with a small ray of light peeking from the slightly ajar door.

She knew where this was. She liked hiding here, her parent's closet.

She was waiting for Francine to find her, Francine always knew where she hid. But in this certain memory, she wasn't there.

She giggled quietly and hushed herself as soon as the door opened, France was going to find her. But instead, what she heard was her Dad saying words of assurance followed by heavy breathing. She was curious enough to peek through the small opening.

Her dad carried her Mom to the bed, his hands held hers tight, wiping the sweat off her forehead as her chest rose and fell quickly, her breath was labored and her eyes looked tired.

"Hang in there, love. The doctor's on the way." his father assured, making his wife comfortable as they wait for help to arrive.

"I don't think I can make it anymore…" She whispered.

"No no no. Don't do this to me Coraline, don't you want to see our angels grow up?" he sobbed, tears fell on her hands as he kissed it. Maxine remained still, she wanted to cry but she just sat inside the closet, peeking, frozen in a mix of fear and worry.

"I do , Love … but it looks like my body can't make it to that day… I'm sorry…"

"Don't! Please Coraline, stay strong, for me… for the kids…"

"I am… and I know that you know it." she exhaled, panting heavily after the last sentence. Her Dad hugged her until her breathing stabilized, while Coraline weakly raised her hand and hugged him back.

"Promise me you'll see the kids grow up…

Promise me to tell them how much I love them every single day…

And promise me that you'll never forget how much I loved you… Francis Maximus Winters." tears fell from her tired eyes. Her dad held her cheek and wiped it off, sobbing as she slowly closed them.

"I'm not sure if I could keep all of those promises… but I will try… I love you Coraline Winters, I always have and I always will, until the time we'll meet again." he muttered. Maxine witnessed it all, the way her father's face frowned when he realized he just lost his wife. It was one of her saddest memories.

Maxine gasped and opened her eyes, touching her face as soon as they opened. Tears. She was crying while asleep. She flicked the lamp and looked around her, France wasn't around. Just as she pulled the sheets so she could leave the bed, the door knob slowly turned and a soft creak was heard. It was Francine.

"France!" Maxine gasped and immediately ran to her side, hugging her tight as she began crying. France smelled different, almost masculine, but she didn't mind.

"Max! What happened? Are you okay?" France quickly hugged her, rubbing her back as she quietly bawled out her emotions.

"I saw… " She panted.

"I saw… Mom…"

"Mom died…" She exhaled as Francine escorted her downstairs to the kitchen, grabbing a glass of water to calm her heart.

"You were in the closet. We were supposed to be playing hide and seek." France muttered as Maxine turned to her.

"Francis… Maximus Winters." she recalled.

"That's dad's name. It's quite long, right? Mom actually liked him because of it." France enlightened, trying to make Max calm down.

"Yeah… is he ?" Max asked.

"Yeah… but he's kinda forgot about us now. Every time we visit he just looks for Coraline."

"Mom."

"Yes."

"He kept his promise." Max said.

"Huh?" France tilted her head.

"Mom's last words. Promise me you'll see the kids grow up…

Promise me to tell them how much I love them every single day…

And promise me that you'll never forget how much I loved you…" Max recalled from her dream and as more words were added, France's sobs were louder.

"He… he did them all…" France cried as they both hugged each other. And it was the moment that Maxine remembered what France looked like when they first met, her smile… It was the smile of someone who was finally reunited with her only family, and it was painful how the only ones she could cling to couldn't remember her.

"What's that smell?" Maxine asked as she killed the mood of the sisterly hug. France's face turned red, even in the dimly lit room, Max could tell that she was blushing.

"N-Nothing… I don't smell anything." She laughed nervously.

"I swear I passed by that scent somewhere…" she looked at her suspiciously and laughed, shrugging it off which actually made France relax her shoulders.

"Let's go back to sleep." Maxine invited her sister and they both got back to their room.

Next Chapter : Docked and Loaded

Notification Squad my Beloved

@beemybee @enderio @smokeywhalee @samatedeansbroccoli @whimsywispsblog @ricinbach

#horrayfic #codmw #john soap mactavish #john price #simon ghost riley #alex echo 3 1 #gary roach sanderson #whateverittakes

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tsarisfanfiction · 4 years

Text

Long Way From Home: Chapter 8

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Family/Friendship Characters: Scott, Tracy Family

I’m back! Including this one, I’ve now got another five chapters written so we’ll be doing weekly updates again at least for the month of February. For those that haven’t been subjected to my chatting about it in discord or DMs, I write this particular fic in chunks that could almost be called arcs, before chopping it up into chapters, hence the sudden backlog. This section was only supposed to fill a small moment, not be an entire arc, but the boys disagreed with me on that so here we are.

Therefore, we have more playing around with the differences between the universes - particularly fashion, the TOS ideas of which are loosely based on the 1960s - a couple of familiar namedrops, and there’s a warning for a panic attack in this chapter, so watch out for that if it might give you trouble! I also know basically zero about Auckland, New Zealand, or correct communications between planes and airports, so sorry if there’s any inconsistencies here. Let’s just call it future advancements and an alternative universe!

<<<Chapter 7

The coastline of New Zealand looked more or less the same as Scott was used to when they finally arrived. The analogue dial of Other-Scott’s watch continued to taunt him, but if he had to guess, the journey had taken somewhere between one and two hours, and had largely passed in silence. Whether that was because Other-Gordon needed to concentrate on piloting, or simply because he was still holding up his promise of no more questions, Scott wasn’t sure, but he appreciated it regardless.

Being a passenger instead of the pilot was always an odd situation, and more than once he’d caught himself trying to shift imaginary controls in response to the clouds and air streams they passed through. If Other-Gordon had noticed, he hadn’t commented.

“Tango Alpha Ladybird to Auckland Air Traffic Control, requesting permission to land, over.” Beneath them, the city sprawled almost coast to coast, and Scott peered down, looking for familiar landmarks. Some of them were there, some of them were not. As low as they were flying – heading for the airport, no doubt – the Sky Tower should have been easily visible, but its distinctive shape was absent.

It shouldn’t have surprised him. Sky Tower was a telecommunications tower, and he’d already discovered that this universe didn’t use the same type of technology that he was used to, so its lack of presence made sense. But it had always been there, built sometime before the millennium and a major aspect of Auckland’s skyline. He’d flown past it many times, and even used it as an unofficial navigation point.

For it to be not there, either destroyed or never existed in the first place, reminded him that no matter how familiar some things might be, he really wasn’t home.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, was a line famously quoted from an old movie. Scott had a bit of a soft spot for the Wizard of Oz – old fantasy films in general – but he’d never imagined he’d ever be playing the part of Dorothy.

At least Dorothy still had Toto, he mused sadly. If only he’d taken Mini-MAX with him on that mission, then maybe he wouldn’t be entirely alone… if Mini-MAX would even have been able to operate without a network to link into. Most likely, he’d have had nothing but the inactive husk of the small bot. Scott wasn’t sure if that would have been better or worse.

“Auckland Air Traffic Control to Tango Alpha Ladybird, clearance granted for runway four-bravo, over,” the radio crackled, yanking him back to the present.

“Tango Alpha Ladybird to Auckland Air Traffic Control, copy that, over,” Other-Gordon acknowledged. Scott watched him adjust their angle of approach accordingly and kept his mouth shut as the landing gear engaged and they gently touched down onto the tarmac scant minutes later. Other-Gordon visibly relaxed as soon as they were safely down, taxiing his way carefully over to a hangar emblazoned with a large T.A. As they entered, Scott could see several planes inside of various sizes and designs.

The one thing they had in common was the T.A. on their tails, identical to the letters on the hangar, and Scott found himself wondering what it stood for. Other-Gordon had used the same two letters as a callsign, and he eyed the nearest plane – a much larger one than the Ladybird – as Gordon rolled them to a gentle stop.

“What does T.A. stand for?” he asked, suspecting that Other-Scott would know that and having no wish to get caught out and face awkward conversations. This was the sort of information he’d tried to get out of his doppelgänger, but either he’d thought he would already know, or it was so basic he forgot about it.

The incredulous look he got from Other-Gordon as the man paused his post-flight checks suggested it was the former.

“Tracy Aerospace,” he said. “Dad’s company. Doesn’t it exist in your universe? I thought you said you were a billionaire!”

“I am,” Scott grumbled, “and it does, but it’s Tracy Industries.”

“Right,” Other-Gordon said, going back to the post-flight checks. “Rule number one: no talking.”

“Wha-”

“You look like Scott but you don’t sound like my brother and that’s something folks’ll notice, especially around here. The fellas on the ground know Scott well, so you’ve lost your voice. That’s the story.”

That made sense, but how was Scott supposed to tell Other-Gordon what he was looking for if he wasn’t allowed to talk? He asked as such as the younger man finished up the last of the checks and undid his harness.

The aquanaut just shrugged. “What are you after? Underpants… what else?”

Scott chose to ignore the not so subtle dig; it was getting old, but no doubt Other-Gordon wouldn’t let it go until he’d got changed, and likely not even then.

“Casual shirts, jeans and sneakers.” He repeated the list he’d given Other-Scott earlier and watched Other-Gordon’s face at the word ‘jeans’. He didn’t look particularly pleased, but Scott wasn’t going to back down on those. “Should probably pick up a hoodie or two as well. Pyjamas and shoes, too.”

“There is no way Scott said yes to a hoodie,” Other-Gordon frowned. “Hoodie and jeans? Those are workshop clothes; do you fellas really wear those?” Scott bristled, and he raised his hands. “Look, I am all for getting items that’ll make Scott go crazy, but I don’t want to be murdered in my sleep because the media thinks he’s gone cuckoo, so give me a minute to come up with a reason that won’t wreck his public image for the next decade.”

Scott frowned, but before he could say anything else, Other-Gordon grinned and pushed at his wrist watch. There was a dial tone for several moments before the string of numbers was replaced by Other-Scott’s face. The other man looked concerned and a little suspicious. Scott supposed he hadn’t been expecting the call, and an unexpected call from a younger brother was definitely cause for concern – especially when it was a Gordon.

“Hey there, Scott!” Other-Gordon chirped in a tone that immediately had Scott on edge, even though it wasn’t aimed at him. The faux-innocent, sing-song voice meant trouble, and he felt slightly guilty for whatever chaos was about to fall Other-Scott’s way.

Other-Scott dropped all pretence of concern and frowned at him in full-blown suspicion.

“You’ve only just arrived,” he said slowly. “You can’t have got in trouble already.”

“You underestimate me, brother dear,” Other-Gordon scoffed, before pulling a sickly-sweet grin onto his face. Other-Scott’s expression went from suspicious to mildly horrified, and Scott couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Gordon,” he warned, loud enough for the watch to pick him up. While he was all up for pranks, he couldn’t quite bring himself to let his counterpart be on the receiving end of one he was involved in. It felt uncomfortably like pranking himself.

Other-Gordon huffed. “You’re no fun,” he sulked, before turning back to the watch. Other-Scott, Scott was pleased to see, had lost the look of horror and was back in the realms of confusion. “Say, Scott, how do you feel about being a trend-setter?”

And the look of horror was straight back.

“What?” Other-Scott demanded. “Setting what trend? I’m not a fashion icon, Gordon! Set your own trends.”

Other-Gordon hummed thoughtfully. “That’s a fine plan, Scott, except anything I buy will be too small for him to wear, which somewhat defeats the objective.”

Other-Scott made a noise of frustration. “I told you, Gordon. Anything that ends up in the media is your fault.”

“Did you say that knowing your clone here wants hoodies?” Other-Gordon asked, eyebrow raised. Other-Scott choked. “Because he does and I know better than to try and talk him out of it.”

“Hoodies?” Other-Scott looked bordering on mortified. “Dad would kill me.” Something that could be guilt coiled in Scott’s gut; no matter what his feelings were about Not-Dad’s existence, the idea of Other-Scott getting in trouble with him on his behalf didn’t settle well. Other-Scott shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, Gordon, but what’s your plan?”

“I figured we could pass it off as experimentation,” Other-Gordon shrugged. “But you’re not well known for that so it would cause a stir.”

“You’re right about that,” Other-Scott mused, and Scott shook his head.

“I guess I don’t need one,” he offered reluctantly – he wanted one, but there was mildly inconveniencing someone and there was ruining someone’s reputation.

“No.” Other-Scott shook his head firmly. “We’ll make this work.”

“Well, it’s your funeral,” Other-Gordon muttered, before a grin slowly spread across his face. “You know, fellas, I think I’ve got it!”

“Do I want to know?” Other-Scott asked dubiously.

“It’s simple,” Other-Gordon continued as though his older brother hadn’t spoken. “We all know you wouldn’t willingly wear one, so we make it unwilling. Scott, you lost a bet.”

Other-Scott ran a hand through his hair. “I suppose that would work,” he conceded reluctantly. Scott could see the logic – short term embarrassment at the hands of a younger sibling would barely interest the media, but still explained why he was still in possession of a so-called workman’s outfit. “But I’m insisting on custom made. You are not coming back with some cheap off the shelf monstrosity.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” Other-Gordon chirped in a tone that said he had been considering doing exactly that. “We should start moving now, though. Jones is coming over and I think he wants to know why we haven’t left the cockpit yet.”

“I can’t say I’m in a hurry to have you wrecking my reputation but you probably shouldn’t make Jones suspicious,” Other-Scott sighed. “Hey, wait – what is this bet I’ve supposedly lost, Gordon?”

“If you don’t know, Dad can’t yell at you for it later,” Other-Gordon grinned back at him.

“Gordon.”

“What, don’t you trust me?” the ginger asked, pulling a face of fake hurt. Other-Scott scowled at him.

“With my life, yes. Not with my dignity.” Scott could relate to that.

“We’ll see you later, Scott.” Other-Gordon didn’t bother responding to the veiled accusation before signing off, returning the watch to actually looking like a watch just as a young man crossed the distance between the neighbouring plane and the Ladybird. “Here we go, remember you’ve lost your voice and let me do all the talking.”

Scott had a sinking feeling that was going to be easier said than done, but obediently followed the other man out of the cockpit just in time for the man on the ground to stride over to them.

“Gordon Tracy, is that you piloting a plane?” said man called, shaking his head in amazement. “Why, I couldn’t believe my ears when they told me it was you of all people coming in to land that red beauty of yours!”

“Gee, laugh it up why don’t you, Jones,” Other-Gordon commented dryly. “I didn’t fly all the way here with the worst backseat pilot in the world to get flack from you, too, fella.”

The man – Jones – squinted at Scott and for a heart-stopping moment he thought the man had realised he wasn’t this universe’s Scott, before he burst out laughing. “Scott Tracy letting someone else pilot? Now I’ve really seen it all. Say, how you been, old chap?” He stuck out his hand and feeling rather like a deer in headlights, Scott took it for a firm shake.

“Ah, Scott’s not so good,” Other-Gordon intervened before the silence stretched long enough to be awkward. “He’s only gone and lost his voice, but there’s shopping to be done so yours truly got the short straw.” The ginger gave a theatrical wince. “Turns out not having a voice doesn’t stop a fella from backseat piloting like crazy. He insisted on checking over all my post-flight checks! I ask you; you’d think he didn’t trust me with a plane.”

Scott shot him a look. While no doubt if Other-Scott had really lost his voice that all sounded perfectly feasible, he thought the ginger was laying it on a little thick. Other-Gordon caught the look and rolled his eyes.

“Well Mr Just Because I Can’t Talk Doesn’t Mean I Won’t Be A Pain here seems like he wants to get this over and done with,” he told Jones. Not strictly inaccurate, Scott supposed, although that hadn’t been what he’d meant. Other-Gordon lowered his voice. “Truth be told, he doesn’t want to be here; lost a bet and doesn’t like the forfeit.”

Scott put a warning hand on his shoulder and Other-Gordon laughed. Jones joined in politely, almost as though he wasn’t certain what the joke was, or if he should be responding to it.

“I’d say that means ‘hurry it up, oh favourite brother of mine’,” Other-Gordon translated. “Lock her down for me, would you? There’s a good man.”

“Yessir,” Jones agreed. “Your usual car’s been prepared for you. Mr Tracy said you didn’t want a chauffeur today?” A chauffeur? No, Scott absolutely didn’t want one of those – it was bad enough being piloted by a brother, or brother from another universe, as it happened.

“Not today, Jones,” Other-Gordon confirmed. “I wouldn’t inflict Scott in this mood on anyone,” he winked, and the man gave another awkward chuckle. “I’ll handle it all today.” Scott jammed his hands in his pockets impatiently. “See you around, Jones.”

“Likewise, Gordon, Scott.” The man nodded at both of them and Other-Gordon led the way through the hangar unerringly to where a classic vintage-looking convertible was waiting for them. With the roof down, he could see it was a right-hand drive – of course, New Zealand drove on the left; at least that was the same – so without prompting he let himself in to the front left seat and tried not to be too obvious about staring.

Plane controls might have been the same, but cars apparently weren’t. If push came to shove, he could probably figure it out – the car was at least an automatic, not stick-shift – but he was quite content to let Other-Gordon take the wheel. Hopefully he wasn’t quite as chaotic as his Gordon behind the wheel.

He wasn’t. At least, not by Scott’s standards. He was, however, still the fastest car on the road, overtaking other cars with manoeuvres just shy of being classified as swerves, with a delighted grin on his face. That, at least, was typically Gordon, and the ache that blossomed in his chest whenever any of the Other-Tracy family did something that reminded him of their counterparts – his Tracy family – made itself known again. Scott fought the instinct to clutch at his chest, instead clinging to the door with a grip far too tight for the situation.

Behind amber-tinted shades, equally amber eyes glanced over at his death grip, but Other-Gordon said nothing. Scott wasn’t sure if that was a relief or not – the younger man knew enough to know that these speeds wouldn’t phase him in the slightest, which meant he was drawing his own conclusions. Scott had no idea what those conclusions might be, and any desire to ask was quashed by the knowledge that that would open the topic up for conversation.

He’d chosen Other-Gordon to avoid more of that sort of conversation.

“What are we getting first?” he asked, turning his head away from the streets to look at Other-Gordon. With the wind whistling past their ears, the natural inclination was to raise his voice but he consciously kept his voice at normal levels. Other-Gordon should still be able to hear him, if with a bit of difficulty.

The ginger sent him an assessing look before the grin was back, and that look was too much like Gordon’s devilish grin for Scott to not know what he was going to say, despite the man not being his Gordon.

“You can’t stay in the same underpants forever!”

Scott groaned, the hand not gripping the door catching his face – ow, he forgot about the shades. He left it there, acutely aware that with any Gordon around in a non-professional setting, the facepalm was never far away.

“Okay, new underpants. Then what?”

Other-Gordon laughed, looping them around another car as the bulk of the city approached, before settling into something that seemed like he might, vaguely, be taking the excursion seriously. Whether that was due to Other-Scott’s threats – which he did seem to be wary of – or because he was actually mindful of Scott’s own wishes, he had no idea. If he had to guess, probably the former. Scott wished his Gordon respected his threats against causing chaos.

Then again, he’d never had a doppelgänger, let alone one subsequently left in the hands of his prank-loving brother.

“Francois Lemaire has a new men’s range out,” he shrugged. “Might as well start there.”

“Lemaire?” Scott asked, his voice strangled. Other-Gordon gave him a sharp look.

“He’s Tin-Tin’s favourite designer,” the younger man said. “She suggested him.”

Lemaire? Designer? Admittedly, Scott didn’t know what the rich airhead did when he wasn’t throwing himself in mortal danger and complaining loudly when they had to rescue him from his own stupidity, but he found it hard to believe that between birthday parties in the Mariana Trench and throwing himself into the coma of a comet he was designing clothes.

“Problem?” Other-Gordon asked, and Scott realised he was scowling. Taking a deep breath, he forced his expression to smooth out again.

“He won’t be there, will he?” he asked. “If he’s anything like the Lemaire I know, there is a high chance I’ll be losing my temper.”

“What’s wrong with Lemaire?” Other-Gordon actually sounded confused, which was enough for Scott to cling to the hope that maybe, maybe, the man wasn’t such an idiot here.

“Birthday party in the Mariana Trench,” he groaned. “Flying into a comet. Hunting mermaids.” And that was just the tip of the iceberg. “He calls us International Babysitting Service now.”

The hiss Other-Gordon let out implied the other man found that all as ridiculous – and insulting – as Scott did. “I guess that fella’s not your favourite human,” he observed. “We’ve not had those sorts of problems with him.” That was a relief. “I doubt he’ll be here, though. Fella lives in France.”

That was another relief, although Scott wasn’t going to relax entirely until they were done with the man’s shop. It would be just his luck that this universe’s Lemaire would be dropping by for a visit when he was there, and that was not a meeting he wanted.

“Then we might as well see if his range contains anything I want to wear,” he shrugged, realising that he hadn’t actually agreed or disagreed with Other-Gordon’s suggestion. The younger man groaned as he pulled into a parking lot tucked behind a large building emblazoned with Lemaire.

“You’re not going to be too fussy, are you?” he asked. Scott detected a tone of dread behind what was clearly supposed to be a rhetorical question.

“Not if they have decent clothes,” he answered, and Other-Gordon made another disgruntled noise as he killed the ignition.

“Sure. Now, remember: you’re my brother, you’ve lost your voice, I’m doing all the talking.” Scott rolled his eyes but nodded in agreement. “Underpants, shirts, jeans, pyjamas, shoes and a custom hoodie.” Other-Gordon still didn’t seem too happy about some of those things, even with Other-Scott’s blessing, reluctant though it had been. “Am I forgetting anything?”

Scott shook his head and Other-Gordon jumped out of the car, casually circling around to open Scott’s door before he realised the lever needed to be pulled, not pushed. What happened to doors opening at the touch of a button? He was really starting to miss familiar technology.

Maybe he could persuade Other-Gordon to let him pilot back to the island.

First, though, he had to get through this shopping trip so he could stop having to borrow Other-Scott’s clothes. Stepping out of the car, he followed Other-Gordon into the shop.

It was exactly the sort of ordered chaos Scott expected from clothes shopping. Mannequins flanked the entrance, decked out in what was presumably the latest fashions but looked totally bizarre to Scott, while a woman decked out in equally outrageous clothes – not Gordon-outrageous, but so much fabric outrageous – bustled forwards to greet them. Behind her, equally awfully dressed men and women were guiding around customers who just screamed ‘I’m rich’.

Scott was immediately reminded exactly why he did as much clothes shopping as he could get away with online.

“Monsieur Tracy, Monsieur Tracy,” the woman greeted them. “My name is Madeleine; how may I be of assistance today?”

Automatically, Scott opened his mouth to answer, but Other-Gordon jumped in before he managed to make a sound. “Scott’s looking for a new wardrobe,” he said smoothly, drawing the woman’s attention to him and away from Scott, who inwardly scolded himself for forgetting that he wasn’t supposed to talk. “Could we see your shirt selection?”

“Of course, Monsieur,” Madeleine replied. “If you would follow me?” She posed it as a question but began to walk further into the shop without waiting for a reply. Scott and Other-Gordon stepped forwards at the same time, following the woman through a maze of clothes and other customers before arriving in a booth lined with lavish couches. “Please, take a seat.” Madeleine gestured to one of the couches and Scott took the invitation. Other-Gordon settled down beside him and immediately reached out for what appeared to be a physical, gloss-paper, brochure on the table. He flipped through it for a moment before passing it over.

Scott accepted it and saw that Other-Gordon had already opened it to the shirts for him.

“Did Monsieur have a particular style in mind?” Madeleine asked after a moment. Not knowing the jargon as well as perhaps Grandma would have liked, and unable to speak without inviting awkward questions anyway, Scott shrugged.

“You’ll have to forgive my brother,” Other-Gordon jumped in before she could take offence. “The fella’s lost his voice.”

“Oh,” she gasped softly. “My apologies, Monsieur Tracy.”

Scott shot her a reassuring smile even as Other-Gordon waved off her apology. “Don’t worry about it. I’m here to work as a translator.”

Leaving Other-Gordon to keep the woman occupied in conversation, Scott leant back and flicked through the brochure, eyeing the various outrageous shirts – apparently this universe’s Lemaire liked to design clothes with far too much excess fabric – before finally locating something that looked simple enough. He’d still have to roll the sleeves up and worry at the collar until it sat comfortably, but it definitely looked like something he could wear comfortably enough.

He prodded Other-Gordon in the ribs; sharp amber eyes snapped over to him, wide in surprise for a split second before narrowing.

“You found something?” the younger man asked, after a pause that felt just a little too long. Scott nodded, belatedly realising he had no idea if that sort of thing was acceptable sibling behaviour in this universe. Realising he couldn’t clarify anything while he was pretending to have lost his voice, he pushed the thought aside to deal with later, and prodded at the picture on the page.

Madeleine made a motion to look over, and Scott swivelled the brochure so that she could see the one he’d chosen.

“A wonderful choice, Monsieur Tracy,” she beamed, while Other-Gordon made a sound that could be amused. He didn’t say whatever it was he was thinking, though, instead joining in the conversation when the woman asked how many and pulled out another brochure of fabrics and patterns.

“I dare say a few wouldn’t go amiss,” Other-Gordon told her – although Scott suspected it was a prod at him as well. He zoned out the rest of the conversation as he stared at the ridiculous variety of colours and tried to find the sensible blues. He had no desire to adopt Gordon’s sense of fashion, or John’s for that matter.

He suspected John might quite like some of the horrors he was hurriedly passing by. He’d never understood his immediate brother’s taste in clothes.

Finally, a nice plain blue, not too far off his favourite shirt at home, caught his eye, and after inspecting it to make sure there weren’t any hidden patterns he tapped at the glossy paper to draw their attention.

“The fella likes blue,” Other-Gordon shrugged at Madeleine as she pulled out a notepad and pen from somewhere and started scribbling down. “But Scott, are you really only going to get the one design? That’s a lot of identical shirts.”

Regretting zoning out the conversation about exactly how many Other-Gordon had decided he would be getting, Scott instead raised an eyebrow at him, a look his younger brothers all knew meant don’t try me. From the grin Other-Gordon gave him, he understood exactly what it meant, but was also as unimpressed by the warning as Gordon ever was. With some reluctance, because yes, variety was nice and he suspected Other-Gordon was actually telling him that buying many identical shirts was not an Other-Scott-like thing to do, he returned to the sample images and tried to find some others that didn’t look like something John would wear – or worse, something not even Gordon or John would be caught dead in.

Fashion was ridiculous here.

He was certain his choices were being memorised by the too-sharp ginger next to him as he dug out the designs he was willing to wear and had them scribbled down by an eager to please Madeleine, no doubt being added to whatever mental databank Other-Gordon was compiling about him. Maybe it would be worth dragging the differences between him and Other-Scott out of the aquanaut at some point on the flight back, if only to try and get a better understanding of what he was – temporarily, he hoped – going to be dealing with.

None of his training – Air Force, International Rescue or business – had ever covered what to do when faced with a doppelgänger of himself that wasn’t the Hood in disguise, and while Not-Dad was proving to be a problem, he didn’t have any plans to alienate the family. They were his only way home; that, he knew for certain.

“Will that be all, Monsieur Tracy?” Madeleine asked when he finally decided there was nothing else he could even consider wearing and shut the samples brochure. He wasn’t sure how many he’d selected in the end, but there was a satisfied look on Other-Gordon’s face, so he decided to call that torment to a close and nodded. Beaming what had to be a fake customer pleasing smile, she elegantly made her way to her feet, apparently not impeded by the ridiculousness of her dress. “Then if you’d like to follow me to the fitting rooms?”

What.

Fitting rooms?

Had some formal clothes snuck into his selection or something?

Other-Gordon nudged him seemingly accidentally as he stood up. Scott assumed that was another signal to just go along with it. Reluctantly, he found his way to his feet and followed Madeleine’s swirl of fabric, raising an eyebrow at Other-Gordon when the other man followed. He got a grin in return.

At least someone was having fun. Scott missed online shopping. He really hoped he wasn’t going to have to go through this rigmarole for every item they were buying.

The fitting room really should be called a fitting chamber. It was at least as big as his bedroom at home, if not bigger, with plush seats and an area designed to be screened off, presumably for changing. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be unusual for Other-Scott to use the curtains, because Scott was well aware how many scars he had from rescues, and while Other-Gordon had already briefly seen him shirtless he wasn’t sure Madeleine would be expecting that many scars on a lazy billionaire’s son.

“Please, make yourself comfortable while I collect the shirts,” the woman said, gesturing to the chairs. “I will only be a few moments.”

Then she was gone, and it was just the two of them in the room.

“You don’t get your clothes fitted?” Other-Gordon asked, quietly, a beat after the door slid shut. Scott took that as an indication that no-one would hear him if he spoke, and leaned forwards with a sigh.

“I normally shop online,” he grumbled. “Much less hassle.”

“On… Line?” Other-Gordon parroted the word with clear confusion in his voice, and Scott rolled his eyes, half at the other man, half at the world in general. He should have known that would be another difference.

“Different technology,” he dismissed. “You’re not telling me I have to go through this for everything, are you?”

“You’re getting a custom hoodie,” Other-Gordon reminded him. “And designer jeans.” Scott groaned. “But they won’t measure you for underwear.”

“You’re never going to drop that, are you?” It was so old it was ancient at this point, but from the grin on Other-Gordon’s face, that clearly didn’t matter to him. Amber eyes flashed with amusement before turning serious.

“Don’t forget the curtain,” he warned. “Scott’s scars aren’t the same as yours.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Scott assured him. He probably shouldn’t be surprised that Other-Gordon had gleaned that from when he’d borrowed Other-Scott’s clothes, but hearing a comparison still startled him. “I-”

The door slid open and he cut himself off.

“Sorry for the wait, Monsieur Tracy,” Madeleine greeted, an entire hangar of shirts trailing behind her on wheels. “According to your previous custom, these should be of an approximate fit.”

Previous-? Other-Scott also shopped there? He supposed that made sense, even if he suddenly felt the pressure to absolutely not slip up, because Madeleine probably knew Other-Scott. That might have been useful to know earlier.

There was a lot he hadn’t been told before this trip, and he was starting to wish they’d spent a little more time talking before leaving the island. The sensation of being out of his depth was starting to make itself known again from where it had settled in the relative familiarity of the flight over.

“All looks that way,” Other-Gordon said suddenly, and Scott realised he hadn’t given any sort of response. He really had to get his head in the game. “So, which one first, Scott?”

Resisting the instinct to take a deep breath in front of Madeleine, he stood and gestured at the blue one he’d picked out first from the catalogue. She took it off the hangar for him with a large smile.

“Take your time, Monsieur Tracy,” she told him. “Come out when you’re ready.”

Scott barely made it to the curtained off area, drawing the thick material across and shutting himself away from the other two, before slumping against the wall and taking a deep breath. Now was not a good time to get overwhelmed. If it was just Other-Gordon-

No, he’d done more than enough breaking down in front of other people already. He took another deep breath, looking down at the shirt gripped in his hands. His hands were trembling, the bandages over his knuckles suddenly stark against his skin. Visible. How was he supposed to explain away bandaged knuckles when he was pretending to be a lazy billionaire’s son? Madeleine must have spotted it.

He tore his gaze away from the fabric and instead looked up at the ceiling, feeling the hat on his head dig in awkwardly as his head leant against the wall. More deep breaths, each shakier than the last, and somewhere in the back of his mind he realised he was headed for a full panic attack.

No. He couldn’t do that. Not with Madeleine a single curtain away. Other-Scott had an image to maintain and he couldn’t ruin it. He had to-

“Is everything alright, Monsieur Tracy?” Madeleine’s voice was close, too close. She could probably hear his messed up breathing, knew something was wrong, knew he was falling apart the other side of the suddenly too-thin curtain, and-

“I’ll check on him,” Other-Gordon said. “Scott? I’m coming in.”

He’d slipped around the curtain before Scott registered his words, amber eyes falling on him and widening for a split second. Then, like a switch had been flicked, his whole demeanour changed. It wasn’t the jovial man that had been teasing for most of their time away from the island, but nor was it the sharp, military-like edge he’d held when he was being serious.

Instead it was calm, reassuring, and with slow, obvious movements the shorter man was taking the shirt from his hands, folding the fabric over one arm. “Sit,” he instructed, quietly.

This was his International Rescue façade, Scott realised dimly as he sank down onto a stool he hadn’t even registered was there. Other-Gordon crouched down in front of him, gently removing the shades he’d forgotten he was wearing and making firm eye contact.

“Breathe in,” he said, voice still low. “Do you want me to count you?”

Scott took in another breath, inwardly wincing at how shaky it was, before exhaling again. Slowly, deliberately choreographing his movements, Other-Gordon rested a single hand on his knee. The touch was light, but grounding, and Scott’s next attempt at a deep breath was markedly less shaky. Another, and then another, with Other-Gordon almost silently guiding him with words too quiet to be heard the other side of the curtain.

Once he had enough of a grip of himself that panic felt no longer imminent, he leant back, tension bleeding from his shoulders.

“Better?” Other-Gordon asked, and he nodded, opening his mouth to speak before a raised eyebrow reminded him otherwise. “Should we call it? You can come back-”

“No,” Scott cut him off, clamping his mouth shut when he realised his mistake. He shook his head. If they left now, he’d have to come back later, and he wasn’t sure he could do that. He certainly didn’t want to have to face Not-Dad and tell him they didn’t finish because he panicked. Better to get it over and done with now.

Other-Gordon eyed him dubiously for a moment before sighing and pulling himself to his feet. “If you say so,” he said. “Let me give you a hand.”

Give-? The blue fabric still draped over the aquanaut’s arm caught his eye. Oh yes, he was supposed to have been putting it on. He didn’t want help getting changed, and certainly didn’t need it, but there was a look in amber eyes that said quite plainly that Other-Gordon wasn’t going anywhere.

Then again, if their roles were reversed, Scott wouldn’t be going anywhere either.

Deciding the best route was to ignore him as best he could, Scott shrugged the waistcoat off, before plucking at the buttons on the shirt he was wearing. To his credit, Other-Gordon didn’t try to actively help, only taking the clothes once he’d removed them and holding out the blue shirt for him to take.

“Monsieurs?” Madeleine called just as he was fastening the last button. “Is there a problem?”

Other-Gordon pressed the sunglasses into his hands and readjusted the hat on his head before slipping back outside.

“Nothing to be worried about,” he assured her. “Whatever he’s caught that’s gone and taken his voice gives him dizzy moments, too. Fella just had a spell, but it’s passed now.”

So now he was ill instead of just having lost his voice? Scott wanted to be amused, but in reality he just felt thankful that Other-Gordon was quick at thinking on his feet.

“Oh, I understand,” she said. Scott hurried to put the sunglasses back on and took one last deep breath before pushing the curtain back. “Monsieur Tracy, we can hold the items for you if you’d rather come back at a later date?”

Remembering in time not to talk, Scott waved her off with a small grin. It was forced; smiling wasn’t something he felt like doing but the last thing he wanted was to have to come back.

“He’ll be fine,” Other-Gordon assured her. “This won’t take long, will it?”

“Oh, not at all,” Madeleine hurried to promise, and Scott’s grin felt just a little less forced at that. “If you would stand here…” She gestured to a small step and Scott obeyed, watching as she bustled around him with pins, tugging at the fabric until it lay flat across his shoulders and hung just right. Compared to some fittings he’d had, it certainly didn’t feel like it took too long; after what had to have been only a few minutes, she was nodding her approval and handing him the next shirt to put on.

Other-Gordon followed him behind the curtain this time, not giving him the opportunity to refuse the company. Scott got the feeling he wouldn’t be letting him out of his sight again until they were back on the island, but where before he might have bristled at the lack of privacy, now he found himself reassured by the other man’s presence. If nothing else, it helped keep his mind on the task at hand as he peeled the pin-infested shirt away from his body gingerly and accepted the new one while Other-Gordon hung the first on a hangar.

The rest of the fitting went in much the same fashion, Madeleine working quickly but efficiently and Other-Gordon shadowing him in a way that should have been bothersome but was somehow comforting, and before long all of the shirts – eleven, apparently – were stuck through with pins and back on the rail.

“Is there anything else you would like to order, Monsieur Tracy?” the woman asked once Scott was once again dressed in Other-Scott’s borrowed clothes. She was clearly addressing him, but her eyes were on Other-Gordon, much to Scott’s relief. While he knew what he wanted, he didn’t know where he could get them. For that, he was reliant on the other man.

“Not today,” Other-Gordon answered. “When will they be ready to collect?”

“For you, we will have them done by Tuesday,” she replied. Scott realised he had no idea what the day was.

“Perfect,” Other-Gordon grinned, before fishing out a card from his pocket and handing it to her. She beamed and scurried off, presumably to take the payment.

Scott had absolutely no idea how much that had just come to.

Whatever the damage was, Other-Gordon seemed entirely fine with it, keeping his grin on his face as she returned with the card and a paper receipt, so Scott assumed it was within expectations.

Other-Gordon and Madeleine finalised arrangements for the shirts to be collected on Tuesday, leaving Scott with the sinking feeling he’d likely be stuck borrowing Other-Scott’s clothes for however many days away that was, before bidding farewell. Following suit, Scott offered his own nod of thanks and farewell before finding himself being subtly guided back out of the shop and towards the car by the ginger.

Chapter 9>>>

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds are go fanfiction #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #tsari writes fanfiction #scott tracy #long way from home #gordon tracy

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cinnamonblueberry22 · 3 years

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Optigami Review + A big rant on Cat noir in season 4

Alright, I haven't been really active on Tumblr lately mainly because of school and all the work I've been receiving, but this is the one time I can post so just bear with me lmao.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Optigami Review:

Honestly love Ladybee, her transformation did look a bit rough, but her suit looks stunning. Too bad Cat noir didn't get to see it.

Kind of lost as to why there's only Luka, Kagami, Max, Chloe, and the other miraculous holders that Shadowmoth knew the identities of, did Gabriel just ask Adrien those specific people, and Adrien just, did not find anything suspicious about that?

Did Adrien just not question as to why Kaalki, the kwami of teleportation, was there with Rena Rouge?? And why Kaalki even teleported him somewhere so far to the Montparnasse Tower even though he's literally Cat noir and needed to fight??

Why were the kwamis magically able to be heard on the phone?? I thought they weren't able to be seen in technology, the phone is technology... So why were they heard??

Now for Alya. Honestly, she did seem a bit suspicious earlier because she wanted to be a permanent holder even though it's not the wisest decision and then completely acted like everything was fine after saying "It's your choice tho" and then immediately got to be a permanent miraculous holder... Seems like she wanted to cover her plans up by seeming sincere and then got her chance. Foreshadowing? Even if I love Alya in general, I do love some betrayal plot twist stories.

Mari is not making the right decision because, it will be okay for a moment, but Shadowmoth literally knows who Rena Rouge is. And at the end of the episode, we see him wanting to get to know Alya better. Alya is going to be in danger. This is going to affect Ladynoir. I mean, yea, I want angst but still.

Overall, I rate this episode a 7.5/10. It was impactful, we got to see Cat noir upset about not being needed, but there were also some questionable things in this episode like I mentioned previously. Other than that it was a decent episode and for once I liked Shadowmoths plan tbh.

So there's been a ton of people talking about "Cat noir is being replaced by Rena Rouge!" and all that... I just have one question, why? Why are you so upset over the fact that Rena was here for like, what, two episodes? And then saying she's replacing him? It's as if you're living in Cat noirs mind lmao. I swear I saw at least 12 videos in the span of two days after the release of Optigami saying how upset Cat noir is and how they're bashing Rena for it as if it's entirely her fault for getting to be a permanent miraculous holder and about to be replaced as the next Guardian of the miraculous box. Look, if you despise any girl that's getting more screentime over a DEUTERAGONIST, just say you're misogynistic and go. I don't mean to sound controversial, but what's up with you hating and bashing on girls that "Get in the way" of something that you cherish and baby (Ex. 'Kagami gets in the way of adrienette, Rena is replacing Cat noir, Vesperia is a replacement of Chloe and gets in the way of Ladynoir' who, may I remind you, is a racist rich girl and Cat can like anyone he wants so shut it)

Now back to the main subject, yes, you can be upset over what's happening to Cat noir, but that doesn't give you the right to completely bash the girls who have nothing to do with hurting him unintentionally (BTW, Ladybug is the one who is hurting him by not telling him anything, still doesn't mean you should hate on her, you can talk about it but bullying her over- dramatic; this is a kid show for god's sake). I am upset about Cat noir, but it's clear that the writers are planning something with him, as I will talk more about in the rest of this post.

There have been tons of foreshadowing in the past episodes about Adrien/Cat noir, so let me talk about it.

I'll start with Truth. In Truth, Cat noir gets hit by the spell, and Ladybug asks him his opinion on her role as Guardian of the Miraculous Box. He then says "If it doesn't change things between you and me, then I'm good with it!". But things are changing, and he's clearly not okay, this was some good foreshadowing I did not notice earlier lmao. This was a good part on the writers job.

In Mr. Pigeon 72, the end card is quite interesting. Practically all the photos of Adrien in this end card are of him wearing his blue scarf. When it wasn't even mentioned in this episode. Even if it wasn't said, it actually is still there. In Bubbler, when Adrien arrives to school, Nino says "Wow dude, guess adults can really change!" This line is effective to Adrien. The moment he got the scarf and apparently it was from his father, he was so happy. From the scarf, he thinks his father can change. He thinks his father is just demanding and over protective. He thinks his father just "Doesn't know how to show his love for his son" Even though, us, the audience, knows thats not true. Adrien is not blind. From the scarf, that's what's making Adrien keep on thinking his father isn't bad. And in Mr. Pigeon 72, he literally tells Marinette the moment he wants to walk with her in the rain and then sees the gorilla, "I can't, you know my father, he's demanding." Even though that's not the case. So why was it included in the end card? Foreshadowing that there will be a scarf reveal. Foreshadowing that Adrien will find out the truth. Even if the truth isn't always great.

Now for Solecrusher. I picked this scene because, I find it really upsetting. When Zoe was opening up to everyone talking about how she made different roles to please Chloe, and when Ivan hugs Zoe, Adrien is upset. Why? Because he relates to her. He makes different roles of himself or different personalities, to please everyone. That's why he's upset.

Now for the end card. Here's a little close-up. We see Adrien, Ivan, Juleka, Luka, and Rose. However, Adrien is farther from the others. He stills feels isolated and stuck. While everyone else is happy. He stills feels the need to pretend. Which is making Adrien feel worse.

This isn't specifically about Adrien, but I kind of see a little pattern here. Solecrusher shows Andre is the one who made Solitude. Queen Banana shows a movie being made. What's the next episode? Gabriel Agreste. This episode will probably be all about flashbacks. About the movie Solitude. About Emilie. Showing Gabriel, Emilie, and Adrien younger. I honestly think that Gabriel and Adriens relationship is still as bad, I just think that even if Adrien claims it was better before.

This was honestly the episode I felt the worse for Adrien. He nearly killed himself and Ladybug didn't even talk about it after. Now, I know Ladybug wouldn't know what to say, but she should at least speak up?? I mean that's all I want tbh. The end card seems.. Off. Adrien is not included even though he had a big role in comforting Juleka in the beginning of the episode. Cat noir is shown to be, smiling.. But the smile doesn't even seem genuine. He's still upset. He's still not okay. Foreshadowing that he's feeling even worse than before.

Optigami. Holy this episode. Well I already rated it before but yea. Take a look at his facial expressions. He's upset he wasn't even in the battle (Meaning he wasn't never happy with the fact that he's sometimes not even needed in fights like Style Queen), he's angry, shocked/disappointed, then pretends he's the same old Cat noir with the flirty jokes, but the moment Ladybug leaves with her superhero allies (Still questioning why she even left tho; Shadowmoth knows those identities yet Cat noir doesn't..) And Cat noir is just upset. I couldn't take the exact frame of him alone but I see him looking all moody and sad. He's now pretending to be fine as Cat noir. Which is not getting any better, but more angsty lol.

As I saw all the foreshadowing in this season, the writers seem to be isolating Adrien even more. And after the scarf reveal, I'm pretty sure he's going to pretend to be fine with that too. I feel like a lot is going to happen to him. Maybe even him possibly becoming a.. Villain? What? In Queen Banana, it shows the hero of creation, and the villain of destruction. Could mean something. Other than that, I've been thinking about a lot of angsty fake scenarios of Adrien lately lol.. Back to the subject, the possible breakdown or conflict between Ladynoir would happen in season 4. It's the most logical time.

Oh, and one more thing:

Bye!

#adrien agreste #miraculous ladybug #adrien sugar #analysis on season 4 #ladybug #sorry i had to #its just the angle i found so funny lmao #alright its nearly midnight bye

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sapphiretsuki · 5 years

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Road Trip Gone Right? <M>

Keeping my promise to myself here and writing. I am a heathen and start with a goal of like 1.5k max, but somehow I end at 4k. I’ll keep trying. T_T Also, in line with my self challenge I am again writing for a fandom outside my comfort zone. Loosely edited because its 1am and I’m tired :] @channiesmixtape Thank you again for your undying support, ilysm <3

Pairing: Felix x Y/N

Warnings: Uhhhhh, smut, oral, voice kink if you squint, nothing major really. Condoms. (safe sex is good sex too)

cr. to google for the lovely pic

It was the dreaded season of traveling and for whatever reason your school had decided that they weren't going to allow anyone to stay on campus over break. It was your tradition to bask in the quiet whilst all the other students went home and to friends and on trips, but not this year apparently. As if the universe were conspiring against you, your mother had also decided this was going to be the year that all the family, including by extension your best friends family, were all going to gather and celebrate the new year. Whatever. Why people wanted to celebrate that time was passing as it always did was beyond you, but that's how you found yourself in the front seat of your longtime friends car. Felix seemed just as dejected as you about the long drive and the mandatory mingling that was going to occur.

You and Felix had been quite the pair for as long as you could remember. You were about 7 when you met and you had saved him from some punk on the playground who thought being a little shithead was the way to be impressive. You kicked the little fucker in the shin and before you could follow through with a punch he was frantically scooting to run away. When you turned to check on what you thought was an adorable little girl you were met with a starry eyed Felix and he'd been your sidekick from that moment on. As fate would have it, he ended up being your next door neighbor. Gazing at his profile now while he was driving it struck you that at some point he'd grown to be quite masculine and incredibly striking. He always had been beautiful to you, but these days there was something more and you just couldn't put your finger on what it was.

Shaking yourself out of your thoughts, you reached out to turn on the radio. Maybe music would help whatever this feeling was. It was probably just anxiety over the long drive and the anticipation of being subjected to people you didn't get along with very well. You were unique and not quite the cookie cutter image of perfection that the rest of your cousins were and they never wasted an opportunity to let you know. As if sensing your thoughts, Felix's deep voice broke through the thoughts again, "Penny for your thoughts?" he asked. "Huh? Oh. It's nothing really. Just thinking about the cousins and wondering what brand of hell they'll try to subject me to. I haven't seen them since I started college you know."

His laughter rang out through the car and made you feel a bit better. "I'm sure that no matter what they try, you're still far smarter than them and a hell of a lot stronger too. Try not to worry Cheeks." At the mention of your special nickname you couldn't help but smile. A bit precocious growing up, and definitely the most vocal of the children, you'd earned the title of cheeky which had in turn affectionately turned into the nickname Cheeks. As much as you were dreading this visit, it made you feel infinitely better that Felix was going too. Not that he had any choice either. Just as you had become fast friends at a young age, your families had become some sort of hybrid family through strong friendship.

You must have finally relaxed enough to fall asleep at some point because you awoke with a bolt. There was a loud bang and Felix slammed on the breaks. "Shit, what the hell was that?" He put the car in park and turned the hazards on before turning to you and telling you to stay put. He pulled out his cellphone and turned on the flashlight before stepping out of the car. You anxiously watched him walk around the car and disappear as he squatted down. You were praying he hadn't hit some woodland creature because from the looks of it you were in the middle of nowhere and that was a very real possibility. You jumped as he tapped on your window. "Can you pop the trunk for me? We appear to have a flat." You nodded and unbuckled your belt and climbed over to the drivers side to hit the latch for the trunk. As you sunk back into your seat you could hear him digging around in the trunk. A flat wasn't so bad. Sure it wasn't ideal, but at least there would be no dead animals or screwed up undercarriages right?

Just as you were coming to terms with a small hiccup in the journey you heard another bang followed by a few expletives that made you quirk an eyebrow. That was unlike Felix. You were the one with the foul language problem. If he was cursing something must be terribly wrong. Curiosity getting the better of you, you snatched the keys out of the ignition and stepped out from the vehicle. "Whats going on short stack?" you called out as you approached the visibly frustrated man. "The spare has a crack in it. My roadside assistance doesn't have anyone that can help. They'll reimburse me, but we're going to have to call a tow and probably find somewhere to spend the night since I'm sure there isn't a garage open at this hour." Well shit. This was going to be a pain in the ass. "Okay, which part do you want me to start looking up? How about you figure out the tow situation and I'll see if theres a motel or something. Where are we even anyway?" you asked trying to laugh at the circumstance you found yourself in.

Two hours and a ride on the struggle bus with cellular service later you found yourselves in the lobby of a motel that made you feel like the star of a horror film. You were in some backwood town with a population of almost no one and there were nothing but trees for days. The receptionist or owner or whoever she was seemed friendly enough, but she also reminded you of a walking corpse. Her bony hand deposited a key into your palm and with a toothless grin she rasped out your room number. You thanked her and went to collect Felix and your bags and hightail it to somewhere with a lock on the door. This whole evening had made you feel uncomfortable and all you wanted was to sleep so morning could come and you could be back on your way. Funny that there was something that made you feel worse than spending time at home, but here you were.

Juggling your bag and the room key you were having trouble making the key go into the lock. A warm hand stopped yours from shaking and suddenly closer than you remembered him being, Felix silently took the key from you and ran his fingers over the back of your hand before inserting the key into the lock and opening the door. He gestured for you to go in first and continued to hold the door open as you pulled yourself together and stepped into the room. Feeling around on the wall you found the switch and flipped it. As the light flickered on, yes flickered, because your life obviously needed to resemble a horror movie down to the last detail you let out a groan as you looked around. There was only one bed. It was rather small also. You weren't sure it even qualified to be called a full. There was absolutely no way that you were going to have either one of you taking the floor though. You'd definitely indicated two beds at the desk, but something told you this wasn't a problem with a solution. The place was so ancient they still used key locks, and the lady downstairs looked like she came from 1900 directly. You turned to Felix as he was dragging your suitcases in to break the news to him.

"Looks like we're going to be revisiting our childhood tonight shorty. Theres only one bed and like hell either one of us is sleeping on the floor." His head snapped up from what he was doing to shoot you an incredulous look. "Y/n, I'm far from short anymore compared to you and that," he says pointing in the direction of the bed, "is not a bed. That's fit for a large child at best." You wondered what had him so obviously upset, but you chalked it up to the frustration of the situations that seemed to keep arising. "Felix, believe me, I realize this is less than ideal, but it's what we've got. We both have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, you especially, so we're just gonna have to suck it up and do what we gotta." You said placing a hand on your hip and turning your other palm up towards the ceiling in a gesture of both sass and nonchalance. "I'll see if theres a pizza joint or something in this town, why don't you go take a shower first? It'll help take some of the tension off." He nodded and went towards the bathroom while you dove into trying to get a signal to see if you could figure out food.

Miraculously after the fight of the century with your service you were able to locate pizza. Even better was that they delivered. Downside of the size of the town you were in was that the person on the other end of the phone knew exactly who you were, and described you as 'that poor stranded couple'. Well whatever, food was becoming more necessary by the minute since you'd relaxed a marginal amount and your stomach felt like it would eat itself. You were giddy with excitement and digging through your purse for some cash when Felix reappeared. You didn't notice him at first but when you looked up and there he was in nothing but a pair of low slung sweats with a towel hanging around his neck you let out an audible gulp. He quirked an eyebrow at you, but before he could question what your problem was, you snatched up some clothes and stuffed some money in his hand. "I'm amazing and pizza should be here any minute. I'm gonna go shower now. You don't have to wait for me to eat." You said to him as you brushed past and quickly made your way into the safety of the bathroom.

Once you shut the door, you placed a hand on your chest to calm the beating of your heart. What was wrong with you today? Sure it had been a while since you'd seen Felix shirtless. And wet. But it had never affected you like this before ever. It was like you were discovering that he wasn't the person you'd known most of your life. Just when had he gotten so toned? His lithe body was beautiful and always had been, but when had it also been appropriate to describe him as manly? Stepping into the scalding spray of the shower you prayed that you were just hungry and tired and it was making you crazy. Washing with a speed you normally reserved for things you disliked, you scrubbed away the filth of the day. Wrapping a towel around yourself you rubbed some of the fog off the mirror and after toweling your hair out as much as you could, ran a brush through it. You rubbed your skin vigorously and put on your tank top and realized you'd forgotten your panties. Laughing at the luck you'd had today you just shook your head and pulled on your pajama pants.

When you returned to the room the soft light and sounds of the TV accompanied Felix and his pizza. Belatedly you realized there wasn't likely to have been any sort of plates or anything to use and cursed yourself for not asking. Oh well, things still could have been far worse today so you were gonna stuff your face and call it a night before the bad luck that seemed to be following you around could claim any more of your energy. You plopped unceremoniously on to the bed next to Felix and snatched up a piece of pizza. As you took a bite you let out a moan at how delicious it was. "Really y/n, sometimes I think you'd be happiest with food in your hands at all times." Felix said, chest rumbling with laughter. Your face suddenly felt like it was on fire and you were oddly embarrassed even though this exact scenario had played out many times before. "I just love food and am hungry enough to eat a cow right now short stuff." You huffed out indignantly. Still slightly laughing Felix reassured you that it was fine and he was only making an observation. You felt jittery and nervous still even though you'd checked off all the things you thought were the culprits so you decided to initiate bedtime.

"I think we should get some sleep, we have a lot to do tomorrow and we still have a lot of miles to cover." Felix seemed to mull over your statement before he nodded his agreement. He began to box up the remainder of the pizza and you went to brush your teeth. Making your way back to the room you heard Felix's phone chime and picked it up from the dresser it was sitting on to hand it to him. You weren't being nosy but you saw a name that made your blood boil a little bit. It was one of your catty cousins and now you were wondering what the fuck he was doing talking to her of all people. Unable to help yourself you spat out at him, "What are you doing talking to her?" As soon as the words were out you couldn't believe yourself and your hand flew up to cover your mouth in embarrassment. "You know what, I'm tired, never mind, disregard my craziness, I'm just gonna lay down. "As he stared at you with wide eyes, he responded anyway. "They occasionally text me trying to snoop I think. I just stored the name so I'd know to ignore because I made the mistake of answering a message once before." Well now you were feeling a whole lot more awkward. Deciding that there was safety in silence you simply nodded and laid down in the bed.

Getting under the covers you scooted as far to the side as you could. You weren't sure how you were going to handle being that close to Felix's shirtless body with the maelstrom going on inside your head but you were just going to have to try. Sliding under the covers and in turn being closer to you than you thought was explicitly necessary he pulled the blanket up over you both and whispered to you, "Good night Cheeks." His deep voice laced with a tired rasp sent a shiver down your spine and it hit you then like a bolt of lightning. Holy shit, you were in love with your best friend. Your best friend turned you on. Holy shit, what the fuck. Sleep was probably going to be a problem with your heart hammering away in your chest. Staying as still as you could so as to not draw attention to yourself you mentally went over all the signs trying to figure out when the hell this had happened. You thought Felix was asleep and you turned to look at him. His breathing had evened out and his plush lips were slightly parted. The moonlight coming through the window cast a soft light and made the smattering of freckles on his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose look exceptionally gorgeous.

With his eyes still closed he shocked you when he began to speak. It was as if he could sense your restlessness even though you weren't moving at all. "I can feel your eyes y/n," he drawled and you went rigid. "Not to make things weird, or weirder, but I thought about you when I came last night." Now it was your turn to give the wide eyed stare. He cracked one eye and looked at you and slowly started to grin. "Y-you did?" you squeaked out. He turned to face you and it's not like you had anywhere to run, the bed was so tiny. You were close enough to feel his breath ghost over your face as he continued, "I thought I might have been imagining things but it seems you're just as affected by me Cheeks. You were calling me short stack still so I was a little unsure, but if you could have seen how hungry you looked earlier and I'm not talking about food." You should have known it was going to be a short lived secret but you were reeling that within such a short time of you realizing you had feelings and physical attraction he was calling you out on it. Felix had always known you better than you knew yourself sometimes.

What he didn't expect was that you wouldn't put up a fight about it. He was prepared to spell it out for your stubborn ass if need be, but you saved him the effort and planted your lips on his. You kissed him with all the hunger he described moments before and pulled away, chest heaving. "How long? How long have you known that we could have been doing this? How long have you been thinking about me when you cum?" You shoved him so he wasn't on his side anymore and climbed on top of him before he could do a thing about it. Looking at his face you were searching his eyes as if they held the answers. What you found instead was a look of lust so dark you couldn't do anything except seal your lips to his again. He didn't fight back and instead placed his hand on the back of your neck to turn your head slightly. He licked your bottom lip seeking entrance and you obliged. His plump lips felt so soft on yours and as his tongue swirled with yours you unintentionally found yourself grinding your hips into his as you let out a moan.

Felix also let out a groan at the friction and decided he'd had enough. He flipped you so your positions were switched and you found yourself again marveling at how manly was now how you'd describe him. Caged in between his arms he leaned down and nipped on your throat. Practically growling in your ear, his voice sent shivers down your spine. "I'll show you exactly what I was thinking about when I came if you want me to y/n." If you had been wearing underwear they would have been absolutely ruined. His voice was already one of your favorite sounds in the world, but right up in your ear making lewd suggestions had you feeling like you were coming unraveled. He placed open mouthed kisses along the column of your throat and reached to tug on your shirt. He pulled it up and helped you take it off only removing his mouth from your skin long enough to get it over your head. He continued down your chest and down to your hip where he hooked his fingers in the band of your pants. You lifted your hips so he could pull them down. "Well well, Cheeks, I never thought you'd go without panties, but that certainly makes things easier on me. He took a moment to appreciate your beauty and you found yourself feeling shy. He trailed a finger down your stomach and began to lightly tease your pussy until you were squirming with need. Just when you thought you couldn't take the teasing anymore he slid a finger into your slick folds and then into you.

"A-ah, Felix, more," you whined out. You were so turned on it was practically unbearable. He seemed pleased at your request and inserted another finger and started pumping in and out at a slow pace. He curled his fingers upward and began rubbing circles on your clit with his thumb as he picked up the pace. You began to feel the curling heat and tightening up in your stomach and knew you were going to cum. He could feel your walls clenching around his fingers as he brushed past your sweet spot with every pump. Just when you thought you were about to completely lose it he pulled out and immediately attached his lush lips to your clit and sucked on it. Your orgasm washed over you like a waterfall and he held your stuttering hips in place as he worked you through your high. Feeling like the personification of bliss you reached down and ran your fingers through his hair. He kissed his way back up your chest and you pulled his face to yours to taste him.

"We're not done just yet, y/n. I still haven't shown you everything I was thinking about when I came." You had just barely come down from your high but you felt as if you could cum all over again at his suggestion. He reached over to the nightstand and retrieved his wallet and pulled out a condom. As he went to tear the foil you placed a hand on his wrist, "Can I?" You asked. He allowed you to take the packet from him and he pulled off his sweats. As his cock sprang free you were absolutely stunned. He was so much bigger than you thought he'd be and now you were wondering where he hid that and how it was going to fit. You grabbed at his dick and gave it a squeeze before rolling the condom down his shaft. He moved to lay you back down and lined his cock up with your entrance. He slid the head through the slippery remnants of your earlier undoing and every time he brushed your clit you twitched with need. Finally, finally he started to slide his cock into your warmth. Slowly at first, giving you plenty of time to adjust, he inched inside until he was all the way in. Buried to the hilt he stilled so you could get used to his size and then began to pump in and out of you. You wrapped your arms around his neck and he began to pick up the pace.

He set a brutal pace and you gasped and panted. Your erotic voice was making him impossibly more turned on. As he thrust into you your cries of pleasure spurred him on. He shifted slightly and pulled your legs up so they were over his shoulders. The change in position allowed him to go deeper and with every pump he fully dragged across your g-spot and you felt the familiar ache starting to build again. He continued to thrust and reached out to rub one of your nipples. "Ahhh y/n. You look so beautiful. Look and the way your pussy just devours my cock. This is exactly, ah, what i was thinking about while I got myself off." His voice, and the pure filth coming out of his mouth were enough to send you over the edge. Your walls clamped and spasmed around him and you came on a cry of his name. "Ah F-Felix, fuck." His rhythm became sloppy as you rode out your high and soon he was spilling his release with a loud groan.

You were both sweaty, panting messes. As he began to soften up he slipped out of you and removed the condom. Tying it off he tossed it in the direction of the garbage can before returning to you and the bed. He wrapped you up in his arms and kissed you on the forehead. Before you could even get a word out his phone was chiming again. You gave him a look that said he should check it and so he grabbed it. It was your cousin again and you were struck with a brilliant idea. You knew it was probably partly them snooping like he thought, but there was also the knowledge that they were jealous of your relationship with Felix. "Lemme see your phone," you said with a smirk. He shrugged and handed it to you. You opened the camera and snapped a selfie of the two of you. Her message was some ‘what are you doing’ type thing so you sent the picture and then powered his phone off with a satisfied smile. He let out a little laugh at your antics and from your position with your head on his chest it was the best sound in the world.

Waking up much later than you intended, and certainly more sore, you reached to check the time on your phone. You were met with the family group chat notification count being astronomical, and also a notification from your favorite cousin. It read, 'I know that was you bitch'. With a smile you turned the phone towards Felix who was wondering what besides him had you so smiley this morning. You were rewarded with his eye smile and morning voice telling you, "You're something else Cheeks, but damn I love you."

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