#FIRST MULTICHAP FIC LETS GOOO

[arieswritez]

puppy love

puppy love | yandere!mark grayson x afab!reader | MULTI-CHAP: 1

cw; DARK CONTENT!!! MDNI!!! reader is neurodivergent, ableism, growing up is messy & adults suck, angst, niceguy™/slight incel mark, childhood friend/bully!mark, mark gets his powers sooner, teeny tiny implications of pseudo incest (blink and you'll miss it), violent rape, threats of violence, & canon typical violence, stalking, implied murder, gender & body dysphoria, mentions/implications of disordered eating, mark teases reader about their body once, overall asshole mark, implied grooming (mark handles it but he's a lil bitch about it later), so, victim blaming, misogyny, the inexplicable horrors of being afab, objectification, sexualization

about; snapshots of you and mark growing up together. neither of you make it to the other end of the spectrum - budding adulthood - unscathed . . . but at least you have each other. what is it they say? Sandbox love never dies.

a/n: alt title [vignettes of a life: growing pains]. here's something to make you wish you were never born xx. this came out wayy longer than i expected & i figured the only way to properly digest it was by breaking it up into chapters. this one’s pretty intense so please heed the warnings. they'll be included in every chapter forward. enjoy! ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨♡୧⋆ ˚｡⋆

1 .

you still remember the fog of childhood innocence.

the fluffy pajamas that were both comfy and scratchy all at once. the stickers on your bedroom wall, on your wooden headboard. plastic restaurant playground mazes, fishing out toys from greasy boxes. the feeling of chalk staining your fingers and gravel digging into your soft knees: chubby legs soon to be scarred.

and amidst the fog, you remember mark. the sporty, hyperactive kid who’d run across the school yard with a sweater wrapped around his neck like a cape, arms spread wide pretending he could fly.

you remember him.

vibrant, loving, quick witted.

it was glaringly obvious all the kids in your grade wanted to be friends with mark grayson. he had a posse: his very own group of 'superheroes', as the teachers used to call it. and before you learned to multiply, something inside you brewed like a poison. you wanted to be like him but you weren't, and so, your stubborn, little kid mind decided you didn't like him.

you hated him, actually. you hated the way he knew all the right answers in class. you hated his laugh. you hated how he was the fastest during sports. you hated how he was fun and smart and good at everything you weren't.

but dislike or not, that didn't stop your fixation. you continued to watch him from afar. and in your journals - to the best of your ability - you drew yourself striding across the playground with a sweater tied around your neck.

you kept to yourself. painfully shy and practically non-verbal: despite your daydreams of someday being a 'normal' kid like mark. your teachers held conferences with your parents about your struggles. despite the fog that blanketed the memories of your childhood: the feeling of dread settling deep in your tummy during the meetings is something that makes you wince to this day.

while you traced patterns into the table in front of you, they'd talk about you as if you weren't in the same room. your teacher did most of the talking. . and, like most of the time, your brain blocked out the sound of her droning voice. instead, your parent's voice was who you heard. and despite struggling to keep up with the onslaught of information, too, all your parent offered was a hushed, “I don't know what's wrong with them.”

you couldn't pay attention. you didn't talk to the other kids. you clung onto your teacher while in class. . and onto your parent during drop-off.

you were different.

intelligent.

but different.

the former a more pressing concern than the latter.

after countless tedious meetings, you soon associated being different with being singled out. being different meant spending an hour sitting in a boring office, listening to teachers repeat the same information - over and over and over again.

a mention about a doctor your parent(s) always refused.

regardless of the calming - sympathetic? - smile of your teacher, it always felt like you were in trouble. even if you couldn't quite put your finger on what you were doing wrong.

on the way home, your parent(s) would eye you through the rearview mirror. you pulled at the loose strings from your sweater and pretended not to notice.

the front door of your childhood home would creak open. your parent(s) would sit at the dinner table, silent, immobile, and - quiet as always - you'd go to your room until you were certain they were asleep to sneak either dinner or a midnight snack.

you were in trouble.

you just didn't know how to stop getting into it.

your teachers grew evermore desperate.

when suggestions of socializing would cause you to clam up: they decided to bite the bullet and break you in by force, hoping your behavior was caused by childhood timidity. one you’d soon outgrow instead of. . something else.

they’d grouped you with myriad of students in hopes you'd socialize or at least participate in something that wasn't independent school work. soon, your tears of frustration when you couldn't communicate correctly no longer held it's child-like charm. your teary, red eyed protests were ignored.

or met with indignation.

until finally - as a last ditch effort you assume - they sat you next to mark grayson.

you protested. not because he made you nervous - which he did - but because you wanted to dislike him. because being in the proximity of everything you wanted to be would be too much to bare. because mark would only make you look even weirder in comparison. but none of it mattered because as soon as the two of you met everything just. . fell into place.

much to your pleasure, he did most of the talking and didn't seem weirded out by your social skills - or lack thereof.

you found your tummy didn't hurt when he spoke to you and he didn't ask you something along the lines of why are you this way? why aren't you like the rest of us?

for the first time while in school, you were comfortable. the overwhelming pressure of having to perform was nonexistent in mark's company.

he'd ask you about your favorite cartoons and movies, and books, and “oh! do you read any comics?!”, and ranted on how unfair it was that the two of you would soon be forced to read books without pictures in them.

his excitement barely let you get a word in. his energy was contagious, all consuming, and the attention he gave you felt like the praise you'd hardly ever receive. you forgot all about your dumb vendetta, wondering why you had one in the first place. and you morphed into a mini version of him.

the two of you were attached by the hip by the end of the week. much to the dismay of your teachers, who you were sure began to rethink their decision when the two of you wouldn't behave in class.

and, perhaps, it was a mistake. they wouldn't want you to potentially stunt mark’s growth - what if it was contagious?

unbeknownst to you, your teachers did think about separating the two of you. but the risk of you reverting to your old ways and the possibility of invoking debbie grayson’s wrath must've been far too high for their liking.

ultimately, a unanimous decision was made to grit their teeth and bare it.

in the meantime, his posse reluctantly welcomed you in. mark even gave you your very own superhero name! and you tried your hardest to keep up with him. for his sake. for your own.

god knows you tried.

but you were never good at performing.

you weren't as fast or as agile as him. you couldn't jump high enough and your sound effects were nowhere near as good. and in an attempt to overcompensate, you overestimated yourself, took a leap you knew you couldn't make, and scraped your knee.

and like a true hero, mark was the first to come to your aid. he'd sat you down on the plastic playset of the playground while you sniveled - part due to embarrassment instead of the stinging, throbbing pain of a scraped knee. he'd dabbed at your injury with crumbled tissue and placed a colorful seance dog band-aid over your cut.

when you finished rubbing your eye with your tiny fist, you didn't see beading blood and irritated flesh, instead, you were met with big, dark brown eyes that glimmered as they stared into yours.

he was close enough to count his eyelashes.

“see?” he patted a chubby hand against your knee gently. “all better!”

and, yeah - heat spread across your cheeks with newfound emotion - it was all better. all evidence of injury, the throbbing pain and blood, was long gone save for the aid he’d given you.

he’d patched you up. he'd made you better. in more ways than one. and what remained was a fuzzy feeling inside your chest.

he’d grinned at you with missing front teeth.

and you found yourself grinning back.

CHAPTER 2

[secret-engima]

So I Did A Thing

And that thing was go a wee bit insane for the new year and update 4 fics and post 3 more! So rather than spam everyone with individual posts for each update, here's a list of em!!

A Heart Once Hardened (Hopes, One Day)

BNHA multichap set in the Feather-Light and Ember-Bright verse. Get your newest free dose of Enji and Dabi angst here >:3.

Good Luck Bead

Non-canon CfR oneshot where Nyx faceplants into the past and succeeds in not running into any Plot Important Characters for- less than five minutes.

A Fairytale (That's Full of Charm)

If anyone remembers me threatening to make a ground-up rewrite of RWBY the show- this is the first chapter of that. I have my au hammers and Plenty Of Ideas planned. :3

Made This Promise (Always I Dreamed About You)

Chapter 3 of Made This Promise/OC-insert Raven is UP! We get Qrow pov this time. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about- it's oc-insert as Raven in RWBY but with a bunch of other tropes and angsty things thrown in.

Broken (But Never to Pieces)

Latest entry in Blood of My Blood verse!! Cor-centric, Drautos-centric look at what happened with them to change things so much in this au. Finally. Second chapter is UP.

Worlds Unseen (Calling You and Me)

Horizon Zero Dawn/FFXV crossover where each chapter alternates in setting. Chapter 11 is finally up!! We're covering the Proving let's gooo.

Nothing But A Voice Within (Calls Me Home)

Chapter 4 of my Demon Slayer fixit fic! OC-centric, mind the tags, also the rating went from T to M for reasons that you can surmise from the tags probably. The chapter that bumps it to M has not yet been posted so you are in the clear for now if that is a concern.

And there we go! All my updates for this year so far. Make sure you're signed in on ao3 to view them, as all my fics are locked (thank you AI scraping and corpos)