#FROM THE DOUBLE GONE CHAPEL

[sowhatifiliveinasmalltowninjapan]

Two Lone Swordsmen

From The Double Gone Chapel (2004)

[daydreaming-nerd]

The Bonds That Break Us (Rhysand x Female! Reader) Final Part

Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Request: "Would you do a Rhysand x fem!reader series? Maybe fem!reader is Rhysand's mate and Tamlin's sister? So secret love?"

AN: I'm sorry this took me a little while guys. I'm currently a sick college student without the funds for Dayquil so we've been struggling. I hope you all like this <3

Summary: It was almost as if the cauldron liked to play games, as if it had sensed years of boredom and predictability and begged to be entertained. Its method of absolving its melancholy? Mate the High Lord of the Night Court to the younger sister of the High Lord of Spring. 

Warnings (so far): mentions of physical abuse, mentions of SA, major sexisim, SMUT, dirty talk, Oral (male and female receiving), Slight breeding kink?, angst,

Word count: 5475

(all photos are from pinterest)

I glanced through the crevice in the oak doors and beheld the most serene image I have ever witnessed, perhaps ever will witness. Candles lighted the room giving it a warm, faint, glow. The smell of night blooming jasmine filled the air and not a sound could be heard from the small chapel. Rhys stood tall and proud, a crown atop his beautiful head. All members of the inner circle stood around, getting ready to bear witness to the ceremony about to take place. 

I smoothed my hands over my wedding dress once more. I had frantically gone shopping with Mor the day after Rhysand asked me to be his High Lady. With the council meeting to discuss my fate coming so soon we had no time for a grand ceremony, but I couldn’t have been happier with the way things had turned out. Even though the dress was last minute it was perfect, and I couldn’t have pictured anything else I would’ve married Rhys in. 

If you’re having second thoughts mate we can always postpone, Rhysand’s voice crooned into my mind. I looked through the crack in the door to find a somewhat worried expression on his face. 

“Far from it my love, I was just making sure I look perfect.” I giggle down the bond. 

I’m dying to see you in a wedding dress.

I smile and decide not to wait any longer to fulfill his desires. I leave a light knock on the double doors signaling for the men on the other sides to open them up. Immediately all eyes are on me. Normally I would panic or flee or worse, but not tonight. Tonight I locked eyes with Rhys, admiring that unique shade of violet that pulled me in from the moment I set eyes on him. The aisle was short and within a few steps I was clasping hands with Rhys. 

“You’re so beautiful mate,” he gushes, pressing a kiss to my forehead.

“You clean up pretty good yourself mate,” I smile, squeezing his hands as we both turn to the priestess. 

“We all gather here today to be witness to the union of these two fae, and the crowning of our new High Lady of The Night Court,” the priestess begins and turns to Rhysand, “Do you, Rhysand, High Lord of the Night Court, take y/n to be your wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do you part?” 

Rhys regarded me with a familiar gaze, one he had cast a thousand times, but this time held a distinct quality. It was a look of pride, something I had never seen before him. I had never held such significance for anyone. His gaze conveyed a sense that I was everything he had ever desired, the missing piece in his puzzle—lost and now found.

“I do,” he smiled and a tear fell down his cheek. 

The priestess turned to me, “Do you, y/n, Princess of the Spring Court, take Rhysand to be your husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do you part?” she said. 

“I do,” I say to Rhys without hesitation. Down the bond I can feel joy in his heart rise. 

“Y/n,” she begins again. “Will you swear the oath of High Lady?” 

I smile and feel my nerves pick up but I answer truthfully, “I will,” 

The priestess picks up a glittering crown and holds it in her hands. The large diamonds atop it remind me of the stars that lie over the Illyrian mountain. “Do you y/n promise to serve and protect the Night Court? Do you promise to uphold the customs and practices of its people? To lay down your life for the sake of this court and always act in its best interest whatever the consequence?” she asked me. 

“I solemnly promise to do so,” I say assuredly. 

“Then I crown thee, High Lady of the Night Court,” she says, placing the crown on my head, the weight of it comforting me. “And by the power vested in me, by our High Lord Rhysand of the Night Court, I pronounce you both husband and wife. Rhysand, you may kiss your wife and your High Lady.” the priestess mused. 

“With pleasure,” he smiled before placing a hand on my cheek and pulling me in for a deep kiss. I couldn’t help but smile as I felt his rogue tear of happiness caress my cheek. 

I broke the kiss and looked into his eyes as I raised a hand to cup his face. He was so handsome, so perfect and he was mine. All I could think of was one word, husband. 

“Hell yeah I have a sister now!” Cassian shouted, picking me up and swinging me around before putting me down and engulfing me in a massive bear hug. I backed away to see Cassian’s happy face and then I felt a hand placed  on my shoulder.  

“We have a sister Cass,” Azriel crooned and I turned to give him a hug as well.

“Welcome to the family y/n!” Mor shouted, throwing her arms around me and it wasn’t long until the whole inner circle was giving me the world's longest group hug. 

Not the inner circle anymore, my family. The word used to taste like venom in my mouth, my family had never loved me, never seen me as anything but a means to power. A marble mansion that was so empty and cold. But now I had this, this family. This marriage might not save me from the demands of Tamlin and Eris, and me being High Lady might not give me immunity from Beron’s wrath. But it gave me one thing, something to fight for, not just my mate, but my family.  

The sun shined brightly in the Day Court like it did the last time I stepped foot here. Things had changed so much since then. Back then I had just met Rhys and he was begging me to just say his name. Now I walked in as his wife and his High Lady. Although my dress billowed behind me like I was going to a ball I had never felt more like I was going to war. 

Azriel and Cassian flanked behind us, normally they didn’t come to council meetings but Rhys told me he meant what he said, that he wouldn’t let Beron and Eris take me from him. He was prepared to fight our way out of this chamber, and was prepared to kill every High Lord in here. The scary part is that he was perfectly capable of doing so, especially with Azriel and Cassian with us. 

The room wasn’t abuzz with the usual chatter of High Lords and their companions when we arrived there. The second we crossed the threshold all eyes were on us. I couldn’t tell which drew their gaze the most, their princess of spring clad in black, the crown glittering atop my head, Rhysand’s death glare, or the Illyrians that flanked us. Each lord seated themselves presently, feeling our silent threat. Every lord but one. 

“Night becomes you, sister,” Tamlin drawls from where he leans over the long table, Beron and Eris seated on his left, Lucien at his right. 

“That it does, Tamlin,” I say, my words cold as ice. I feel Rhysand pluck at the bond showing his pride. 

“Rhysand, y/n. Please be seated so we may begin the trial,” Helion said. I had always loved Helion, and I could tell he wasn’t happy about this arrangement. But for whatever reason this is where the trial would be held. We do as we are asked, Cassian and Azriel standing behind us as the chairs here are not equipped for wings. “Beron, Tamlin we will hear your case, then Rhysand you will be able to state yours. After that the council will decide who is at fault.” Helion explains and nods to Beron to begin. 

“High Lord’s of Prythian I have brought this issue before you today because I wish to find a civil resolution to my case, rather than declaring war upon the Night Court,” Beron began. “A few weeks ago Tamlin and I had meetings discussing the betrothal of Eris and y/n. It had always been abundantly clear from that meeting forward that y/n belonged to Eris. All that stood in the way of formally announcing the engagement was solidifying the terms of the union, what we would give Tamlin in exchange for her and how many male heirs she would be required to bear Eris. She was the property of Eris Vanserra long before Rhysand ever tried to claim her.” Beron says with a confidence that I almost envy.  

It took everything inside of me not to lash out at the word “property” and Rhysand’s grip on my hand told me it killed him inside as well. I can’t help but feel some sort of fear, these men only see me as a breeding vessel, they don’t care for my happiness and they don’t care for my well being beyond my ability to bear sons. I don’t stand a chance at going home with Rhys.

Shhh, I’ll never let them take you. I’ll burn this place to the ground if they even touch you.  That beautiful, glorious voice cleaves into my mind and I let myself breathe again.

“And when did Rhysand make his claim on your sister?” Tarquin asks Tamlin, clearly still holding a grudge over the land dispute they had. 

“It started a week ago today, when my sister came home from what I thought was the Winter Court. She came into my office and told me that the High Lord of the Night Court had deflowered her and that because of it she no longer wished to marry Eris Vanserra. Soon after Rhysand broke into my court, attacked me, and stole my sister away.” Tamlin said. 

“You dirty fucking liar!” I stand unable to keep myself restrained anymore. I feel Rhysand’s hand grip my arm but I don’t care anymore. How dare Tamlin spew out such disingenuous claims in a trail such as this. 

“You are not a member of this council you useless whore and you will not speak unless spoken to!” Beron shouts standing as well, the moment he does his eyes go wide and pain laces his face. Rhysand stands beside me and I realize that he has his talons in Beron’s mind.  

“If you EVER speak of my wife in such a manor again, I will fucking kill you and every male heir you have Vanserra,” Rhysand booms, and even I feel a chill go down my spine. 

“Wife?!” Tamlin shouts in a fit of anger, taking to his own two feet. 

“And his High Lady,” I boast with pride and I scooch my hand to lay on top of Rhysand’s. All I can feel thrumming through the bond is pure male pride as the entire room begins to murmur their shock to one another. 

“Impossible,” Tamlin seethes, getting ready to pounce as the room continues in their sock and surprise. 

“Quiet!” Helion shouts above the crowd, and I don’t break eye contact with Tamlin. “All of you sit down now!”  

We do as we’re told but it doesn’t dissolve the tension in the room as we all continue to stare daggers into one another. Tamlin tries to cover his shock with anger but hides it poorly. 

“Rhysand, why did you attack Tamlin in his own court?” Helion asks calmly. 

“Because he threatened my mate,” he growled. This time the room gave a collective gasp and would’ve gone into full blown panic had Rhys not continued to speak. “I found her injured, freezing and starving in the dungeons below the Spring Court. If we had this meeting sooner you would be able to see the bruise around her beautiful neck from where he choked her.”

Neither party speaks save for the buzzing mumbles circling the room that followed the word ‘mate’. For me to be mated to Rhysand was surely the most exciting and scandalous thing to happen in a hundred years. Kallias was the one to finally break the silence.

“The laws of mates are absolute, and we will not stand by and watch this council question Rhysand and y/n another moment!” Kallias shouts, standing hand in hand with Vivianne. 

My head whips over to the High Lord and Lady and I expect to see something like pity in Viviane's eyes, but all I see is happiness and pride. Happiness for having finally found my mate, pride for having finally found the will to stand up for myself.

“I stand with Kallias and Viviane, if we don’t validate their mating bond, who's to say the council won’t stop with them.” Thessan says. “If I ever find my mate I don’t want to worry about them being taken away from me.” 

A collective murmur of agreement comes over the room and it seems that a verdict has been decided. Helion stands and the scrape of his chair echos off the marble walls quieting everyone down. 

“All those in favor of blessing the union of Rhysand and y/n?” he asks. Every single hand shoots up without hesitation, the only ones who don’t belong to the Spring and Autumn Court. “Rhysand and y/n. You have the blessing of this council.” Helion smiles. 

I turn to Rhys smiling brightly as the whole council room erupts in applause. His violet eyes gleam with pride and for the first time ever he drops his mighty High Lord act and smiles back. I throw my arms around his neck and kiss him and I can hear Viviane saying “awww” from across the room. We break apart and I can’t help but stare at him. Free, I am finally free. 

“YOU SELFISH WHORE!” Tamlin screeches and in a second he leaps across the table. He doesn’t get far before blue and red siphons are holding him back. “YOU TOOK EVERYTHING FROM ME!” he screams struggling against Cassian and Azriel’s power.

Rhys threw his body in front of mine and I put a hand on his shoulder and began to move past him towards Tamlin. He grabs my wrist and I turn to meet his violet gaze. His eyes laced with worry asking me to stay behind him. 

“It’s okay,” I say quietly and Rhys lets go. I walk towards where Tamlin is still struggling and stand right in front of him. I can feel Rhys’ tension through the bond but I push it away. “You did this to yourself Tamlin. I wish things had been different, I really do. I could kill you right now, but I won’t. But if you EVER step foot in my court, I will send out my General, my Spymaster and my mate to find you and I will let them kill you in whatever way they deem worthy for a male such as you.” 

Tamlin stops struggling, unable to fight against Cassian and Azriel any longer. For once in my life, I see true fear in his eyes. A male stripped of everything, his land, his power, his bargaining chip and now his pride. 

I turn and take Rhysand’s hand and he leads me out of the council room, Cassian and Azriel flanking behind us in case Tamin gets any bright ideas again. 

“My strong, smart, beautiful mate. I am so proud of you. You spoke like a true High Lady in there,” Rhys boasts as we walk down the hall. 

“I feel like a High Lady now,” I laugh, squeezing his hand.

“Just wait till later, wife. I have every intention of taking you home and fucking you senseless while you wear nothing but that crown on your head.” Rhysand drawls low.

Rhys can hardly keep his hands off me as we burst into the townhouse. In fact he doesn't. I'm the one who has to open the front door because his fingers won’t stop dancing all over my waist as he leaves open mouth kisses all over my neck. If this was his reaction to me wearing a crown, best believe I would be wearing them a lot more often. 

The door slams behind us and in an instant he has me pressed up against it already lifting my skirts. 

“Rhys, Rhys wait there’s something I need to do first!” I protest as he attacks my neck.

“Yes, you need to do me first.” he smirks, kissing me again.

“Rhys stop!” I giggle pushing him off and he finally halts his movements. “Have a seat, I'll be right back.” I smile before disappearing into the next room. 

I look around the kitchen and all I see are ingredients. I turn to make sure Rhys isn’t following me and find him sprawled out on the couch in a fit of utter frustration. I try not to giggle to myself as I raid the kitchen. Normally the townhouse makes food for us, so being in here is new. I keep opening up drawers and only finding utensils, towels and bowls. 

“Wife, I'm dying in here!” Rhysand groans from the living room. 

“One moment my oh so impatient husband!” I holler back. 

My eyes land on a jar of strawberry jam and I snatch it up eagerly. I walk over to the bread box and pluck a slice from it. I place it on an ornate plate and begin to spread the jam on top as neat and perfect as can be before carrying it out to the living room where my husband is throwing his temper tantrum. 

“Here,” I say, handing him the toast with jam. “I know it’s not much but it’s all that was lying around.” 

Rhysand’s eyes light up as I present him with food that I made. He takes the plate carefully and looks at it, knowing full well what it means for a female to present her mate with food.  

“You want to mate? Right now?” he asks bewildered. 

“Yes,” I say without hesitation. 

“You do know what you’re getting into right? I won’t act like…myself. We’ll have to go into the mountains for  a while. I won’t be able to control myself,” he explains further and I can already feel the arousal pooling between my legs. 

“Yes I know what I’m getting myself into. We can go into the mountains for however long we need. But I want our first mating to be here, in our home. Then we can winnow to the cabin. That’s my only stipulation,” I tell him. 

“I will agree to that,” he replies. 

I don’t even have time to say another word before he takes a couple bites of the pathetic toast I made him. While I watch him consume it, I’m sure that it’s the worst mating meal a female has ever presented to a male. Nonetheless, he eats it like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted.  

His eyes flick up to meet mine and the plate is discarded on the floor with a crash. In mere seconds stands up and I swear to the gods he’s even taller than he normally is. His hand circles my waist and his touch sets me on fire, now that the mating bond has been accepted. His free hand tilts my chin up to him and he stares at my lips. I must look like a wanton whore begging for him to touch me. 

“Mine,” he growls before searing our lips together. The word alone tells me everything he said before this is true. This isn’t just Rhys, it’s Rhys in his most primal form. 

I whine into his lips and I feel him hoist me up in his arms with ease, despite the large amounts of tule that make up my dress. My hands are in his hair in an instant, nearly knocking the crown off his head and I grab it before it falls off. We start moving up the stairs as fast as Rhysand’s can carry us. 

“Best believe the first time I fuck you as my mate it’s going to be in our marriage bed,” he smirks before slamming the door to our bedroom with his foot. 

The second he talks about fucking me my skin is on fire and the buzzing sension I always felt when he was near was amped up times ten. Like if I didn’t get his cock in me right now I would burst into flames and die. He sets me down on my feet and I begin to undo the buttons of his shirt.  I feel him fumble with the millions of buttons fastening the back of my dress before a deafening rip sounds throughout the room and those millions of buttons are being cast off in every direction.

 I don’t even have a mind to care about it as the dress cascades down and pools on the floor. His mouth is all over my collar bones needy and leaving little bites all over me.

“You’re so fucking beautiful mate,” he groans between kisses. 

I feel my crown slipping and I move to take it off but I feel Rhys’ hand stop me. 

“What did I say earlier?” he asked. 

“That you wanted to fuck me while I wear nothing but the crown,” I say meekly remembering his promise.

“No I said I was going to fuck you senseless while you wear nothing but that crown mate,” he groans kissing me deeply again. 

I feel my legs hit the mattress and I fall back on it greedily. He stares down at me like I’m his own personal feast and he nearly pounces on me but I hold a hand up to stop him. 

“I want to try something,” I say before he can ravish me again. “Something I read about in a book.” I explain further. 

“Oh really? Well I won’t pass up that opportunity. What do you want me to do mate?” His voice is deep and husky.

“Just stand there,” I say before sliding off the bed and dropping to my knees in front of him. 

His eyes blow wide as I stare up at him from under my eye lashes. My hands go to his pants where I expertly un-fasten them and pull them down his legs along with his underwear. He steps on them and watches me intensely as I’m face to face with his aching cock.  

“Are you going to suck my cock wife?” he muses and the words go straight to my core as I wrap my hands around him and give a lick up his length. 

The sound that comes out of him is nothing short of animalistic. It spurs me on as I take him the entire length of my mouth and start sucking. Whatever I can’t fit in my mouth I stroke with my hands and the look of pure bliss on him has me seeing stars. He so fucking beautiful. His muscles are dripping with sweat from the need to cum in me, his eyes are closed taking every stroke I give him, and his lips are parted having the softest wimpers escape them. He’s never been more beautiful than he is right now and I can’t help but moan, sending vibrations through his cock. 

“Oh fuck mate!” he screams and his hands find the back of my head. I swear I’m so wet at the sight of him getting his pleasure from me that I might have left a wet spot on his carpet. I moan again to send another wave of vibrations through him. 

“Shit y/n I’m gonna cum, let me cum inside you!” He shouts trying to remove my head from his member but I swipe his hand away. 

I gently cup his balls and it has him emptying his load into my mouth. I work him through his orgasm staring up at him with the most innocent eyes. I pull my mouth off him and open it for him to see the evidence of his climax inside. I close it again and swallow, feeling the saltiness of it slide down my throat. I open my mouth again to show him that nothing was left and it has him spiraling. 

“You cruel wicked thing,” he growls, picking me up and throwing me on the bed. His body crawls over mine and I run my hands down his bare chest, toned and perfect and all mine. 

“Rhys I wanna try one more thing,” I whine but I’m silenced by his lips on mine. 

“I think it’s my turn now mate,” he whispers in my ear, making me shiver.

He kisses down my neck and my collar bones. I feel his tongue swirl around each of my peaked nipples and I cry out at the friction I didn’t know I needed so badly. His mouth presses a kiss under my breast and when he reaches my lower stomach he looks up at me with a feral grin. 

“I want you to know that I have every intention of getting you so thoroughly pregnant that every male in Prythian will have no choice but to recognize that you are my mate.” He growls, pressing a kiss over my womb. “But not tonight, and not anytime soon. For now I will take pleasure in showing them what an amazing High Lady you are.”  

His mouth trails down and kisses either side of my bare thighs. His hand runs over my stomach and down my leg to hike one knee up over his shoulder to give himself access to where I need him most. 

“Now watch how a High Lord eats out his High Lady, mate,” he grins before diving into me like a starved man. 

I arch my back off the mattress and my hands fly to  his silky hair. I accidentally tug his strands too hard causing him to groan, the vibrations stimulating my clit. He pulls his mouth off me and plunges his fingers inside me, curling them to hit that spongy spot that always left me undeniably breathless. He pulls his head back to watch how I take his fingers and his eyes catch on something. 

“There’s that perfect clit,” he smiles slowly lowering his mouth over the sensitive bud so that his breath fanned it. “Show me those pretty little sounds you make when I lick it, wife.” 

His tongue gives a teasing lick at the apex of me and I let out a moan that’s so high pitched it’s nearly embarrassing. He only chuckles before attacking the spot with a million little licks. The combination of his tongue and his fingers have me screaming his name in no time. 

“Oh gods Rhysand!” I scream as I hit my climax. Tears sting my eyes from the immense pleasure. Rhys has always been able to pull orgasm after orgasm from my body, but the mating bond heightens everything. 

“I need you,” he growls crawling back up my body. “Now”

I pull him close and I feel his hands flip my hips around so that I’m on all fours for him. I nearly groan at the feeling of him running a large hand down my spine. 

“Rhys please,” I cry, pressing my ass into his hard cock. 

“Shh, patience mate,” leans over and whispers in my ear. I feel his cock nudge my entrance and within a moment he is pushing himself into me.  

The stretch is enough to have my chest heaving in pleasure, but the full feeling of him inside of me has me letting out a moan. His hands grip my hips as he starts to thrust inside of me. 

“Always so fucking tight for me,” Rhys grits out increasing his pace.

“Harder Rhys!” I scream needing more of him. 

It’s at that moment I realize that I’ll never truly get enough of him. He could shackle me to his bed and never stop fucking me and it still wouldn’t be enough. The need for him was too great, even before the mating bond. Before I even said his name. I had needed him the second I saw that flash of violet. I’ll never stop needing him. 

“You’re fucking mine!” He growls as his grip on my hips tighten and the moans coming out of him are pure mated male. 

“Oh fuck Rhys I’m gonna…” I shout my words trailing off. 

“Cum for me mate,” he orders me and I oblige.

I climax so hard my vision blacks out for a second, my pussy contracting around him sending him sputtering and cumming inside of me with a roar and I swore the house shook. I collapse, burying my face into the pillow. I feel him gently turn my body over so he can see me. His eyes fall to where his cum is leaking out of me and he bends down to press a kiss to my clit again. 

“Mine,” he says, eyes peering up at me. 

He crawls up to me and pulls me on top of his chest stroking my hair. 

“So it’s official, I am now your wife, your High Lady AND your mate.” I laugh. 

“If I had more titles left to give you I would,” he chuckles, running his hands through my hair more. 

“I don’t think I could ever ask for more than this, more than you.” I say pressing a kiss to his chest and leaning up so I was straddling him. He put his arms behind his head and stared at me like I was a work of art. “I love you so much Rhys. I only wish the gods had given me a million more ways to say it. But I can’t make it any simpler than that… I love you.” 

“I know the feeling, sometimes I get frustrated because ‘I love you’ doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I feel for you mate,” he smiles. 

I lean down to kiss him passionately, hoping that if words can’t tell him how much he means maybe actions can. I know they won’t. His hands slide from behind  his head to my waist and my hair, pulling me deeper into him. My hips grind on his abs a little and I feel his hard cock brush up against my back side causing him suddenly to stop. 

“We need to get to the cabin,” he says frantically. “Now.” 

The cold mountain air grazes my skin as I sit on the bannister watching the sun come up. The silk bathrobe does little to keep me warm, but the breeze is refreshing. I glance through the window where I see Rhysand sleeping on the massive bed. 

We had been holed up in the snowy mountains for a week now doing everything but sleeping. He wasn’t wrong about the Frenzy and how it would affect our ability to function as normal fae. One night I tried to prepare dinner for us and we lasted about 10 minutes before he took me on the kitchen counter. As I watched the sun rise on the glistening snow I couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that every surface in that cabin had been defiled in one way or another. 

The birds began to chirp as I took another long sip of my warm tea. Never had I been so at peace. Never had I been so loved. It was as if every moment of my life had been leading to this one right here. To him.

I felt two warm arms snake around my front as Rhys placed a kiss on my cheek. 

“You’re going to freeze to death out here,” he mumbles into my neck. 

“No I’m not you big worry wart,” I giggle as his lips tickle my neck. I feel him wrap a blanket around the two of us and I lean back into his chest savoring the warmth of him. 

“What are you thinking about?” he asks, resting his head on top of my head. 

“I’m thinking about how everything in my life led me to you. How I’ve never been more happy and at peace than I am in this court.” I say honestly. 

“Your court my Lady,” he smiles, pressing another kiss to my cheek. 

“Our court, Rhys,” I smile. “What do we do now?”

Rhys chuckles into my shoulder, “We go home, we rule, and you let me love you forever.” he whispers, kissing my shoulder. 

I turn to face him, “I think I can live with that.” I smile.

(AN: wow I'm kinda sad that this series is over now. I feel like I'm going to me missing a huge piece of me :( I want to say thank you to all who read this and supported me, I never thought this would get as much love as it did. I hadn't written in so long, it feels so good to know that people still care about the things I dream up. Now I have some good news...

The next mini series is going to be about...

now drumroll please....

CASSIAN x Female! Reader

I'm so pumped to write this it's been in my head forever. Plot is that the reader is Rhysand's little sister and she is betrothed to Eris. So if you loved the secret love aspect of this series you're going to EAT UP the next one. If you would like to be on the taglist for it go ahead and let me know!)

Taglist: @crystalferret202, @heyyitsnat21 , @cheshire-salvatore-mikaelson , @randomperson1234sblog , @local-fangirl09 , @bleh-81 , @annaaaaa88 , @tenaciousperfectionunknown , @judig92, @aunicornmademedoit , @sharknutz , 

 @slytherintaco, @isa1b2h3, @nickishadow139  , @sarawritestories , @coisas-da-dani ,  @lovemesomevesey ,  @graceshifts ,  @writeroutoftime, @why4anne,

[birgittesilverbae]

Prompt: just a highly tattooed Beatrice. Anything. Maybe she’s in a band, maybe it goes to her teenage rebellion, maybe it’s your dads au and Bea always wears sleeves and one day Ava finally sees her ink… idk. Anything with tattooed Bea.

thanks for the prompt!

//

Beatrice hasn't worn short sleeves in the time Ava has been back. 

True, it's closing in on winter, but Malaga in November is barely any cooler than Brienz had been in June, and back then Beatrice had taken every possible opportunity to go sun's out, guns out.

Ava watches, curious, for some sort of sign, some clue to what Beatrice is keeping under wraps. She's been back for a week, almost, and they've kissed in quiet corners and in the back of the chapel, and once, in a fit of daring, in the confessional, Ava in Beatrice's lap admitting to myriad sins ("the Bloody Marys sold well, I just hated making them" and "I bought us new towels because I used ours to try and smother a stovetop fire" and "I spent half our time in Switzerland trying not to touch myself to the thought of you"). 

But they haven't gone any further than furtive makeouts and some over-the-clothes heavy petting – which, she has to remind herself, would be a mind-blowing development for June Ava. And Beatrice hasn't even rolled up her sleeves, which… The thought of Beatrice's forearms had constituted, like, a solid 64% of Ava's will to live while on the other side, but it's fine. She's fine. She can be very cool, very normal and definitely would absolutely not suffer if she never got to see Beatrice's forearms again.

She'd be totally fine. 

It's on day seven post-return that Beatrice slips up. She's been waist-deep in a van's engine compartment in between shouting matches with Mary across the garage, and stray curls of hair are slicked to her forehead with sweat. She rubs at her face and then frowns, unbuttons the placket at her wrist and starts to roll up her right sleeve. Ava feels like a Victorian gentleman about to pass out over the mere sight of a sliver of skin. She doesn't mean to, but she takes a step forward over the threshold of the garage, drawn towards the revelation of Beatrice's bare skin like a moth towards a flame.

There's a faint blue glow that grows brighter as Ava approaches, and Beatrice's head snaps up. She fumbles with her sleeve for a moment, an adorable crease between her eyebrows, but the cuff is caught on the knob of her elbow. She settles for linking her hands behind her back instead.

"Ava!" She chirps far too brightly for someone Ava had heard calling Mary a 'piece of fucking work' not two minutes past.

Ava takes another step closer. "Beatrice," she replies, soft. She'd raise a hand, but this already feels far too much like approaching a wild animal. 

Apt enough, though, as Beatrice's eyes very noticeably flick towards the exit. "Show me," she says, just as gently.

Beatrice's shoulders droop. "You would have found out sooner or later," she concedes. "It was only a delay of the inevitable in the hopes I would be better prepared to discuss it by the time the conversation arose."

She swings her arms forward, left hand finding the pocket of her coveralls, right coming out in front of her until her forearm is on display for Ava. 

It's a starburst shining divinium blue, a double handful of lines broken by tick marks emanating from a central black point. Ava can't help herself, doesn't want to stop herself from reaching out and dragging a fingertip down one of the lines. Beatrice's skin is warm beneath Ava's touch and the divinium sparks bright in response to the Halo's nearness.

"What is it?"

Beatrice clears her throat. "Pulsars are spinning neutron stars that blink on and off like lighthouses. When the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were launched, they were sent bearing a plaque with this map on it – a map of the position of known pulsars relative to our sun. A map of lighthouses, guiding the observer here." She taps the central dot. "That's here, that's home, that's us," she says, in that slightly removed tone Ava associates with the oh-so-common occurrence of a 'Quotes with Beatrice' event. "On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." Beatrice inhales shakily. "It was stupid, really, but I thought maybe it would help guide you back to us. Back to me. Back home."   

[da-rulah]

Is there any way you could do one about Copia surprising reader with the prime mover ritual on their 5th wedding anniversary because he sees reader with the children of the clergy

This is such a sweet idea.... I hope this is the kind of thing you wanted 🥹

TW/ Mildly suggestive theme.

It was never the right time.

Between tours, Copia's ascension, your own promotions within the clergy and the mountains of work that needed doing, it had never been the right time.

In fact, since the day you had married, you hadn't had the time.

Which is probably why you spent as much of your free time as you could at the nursery for the children of the Clergy and Siblings. It wasn't your job, you had no duty there but in the absence of the chance to have your own children, you had found yourself wanting to just be around them, maternal instincts too strong.

Copia had just returned from another tour - finishing in Australia this time, and he was looking forward to a few months respite before heading out again on another album cycle. He could spend All Hallow's Eve with you, Yule too but most importantly, your wedding anniversary was coming soon - the first he'd been able to spend with you at home in two years.

After spending some time recovering from his ridiculous jet lag, he had emerged looking for you one morning to find you playing with the children of the Clergy, jumping into piles of raked leaves in the grounds of the Ministry.

His heart thrummed in his chest at the sight. How radiant you looked, surrounded by the autumnal oranges and reds, smiling so brightly as you skipped through the piles, throwing some over the children with a laugh that sounded like the sweetest song.

He ached to give you that, to give you the children he knew you'd always wanted. He wanted that too, wanted to be the father he never had to a tiny version of you...

You looked up to see him stood on the steps of the Ministry, stilling the spin you were in whilst holding a little one's hands and waving to him instead, beautiful smile widening at the sight of your husband, your Papa, watching on. Had you been any closer, you might have see the glossy look in his eyes, but from a distance, you were none the wiser that anything was amiss.

It was this look that gave him the idea.

A week had gone by, and he'd seen you more often that not playing with the children at the nursery or out in the leaves again. He saw you teaching them to paint, to read, to dance, and his heart swelled a little more each time.

The night of your Fifth wedding anniversary had come around quickly, and as far as you were aware, you were to join him for dinner, meeting at his office once you were ready, in the gorgeous deep red gown he had bought for you - if you liked it, of course. His little (expensive) treat.

But when you arrived at his office, he was nowhere to be seen. You sighed, hoping he hadn't been tangled up with Sister Imperator in an overrun meeting or got into a verbal boxing match with his useless spectre of a father again. But you noticed a note on his desk, addressed to 'mia cara moglie' - his darling wife.

Cara,

Please join me in the Chapel, I have my gift to you waiting.

Hurry - I can barely wait any longer.

~ C

You wondered what on earth he could possibly have waiting in the Chapel for you - you could only imagine he had set up a picturesque dinner surrounded by candlelight, perhaps with his newer Ghouls playing their beautiful cellos in the background.

On your way through the halls, you noticed an eerie feeling, a stillness, a quietness you should only experience in the early hours of the morning in these halls... But not a single sibling or ghoul was in sight, not a shuffle of feet or a click of a door latch... Just silence.

When you reached the large double doors of the Chapel, two of Papa's favourite Ghouls - Swiss and Phantom - were stood, hands clasped behind them, in their formal attire.

"This is a bit much for dinner, boys..." you laughed. They shared a look that you couldn't quite discern from behind their masks... You grew suspicious.

Without a word, they opened the doors, stepping to the side to allow you to see just what Copia had waiting for you.

The Chapel was full, standing room only. Every single sibling and clergy member filled the pews, the balconies, lined the walls. When the doors had opened, they all stood and turned to face you. And then you noticed Copia...

He stood at the alter, Sister Imperator to his left, and Papa Nihil floating to his right. He was dressed in his Papal robes, gems glinting beautifully on his Mitre in the candlelight. He smiled at you, taking a deep breath out of his own nerves, and held his gloved hand out to you.

Swiss and Phantom moved to your sides, offering their elbows to walk you down the aisle between the pews of the Chapel. As you did, your audience sent you looks of happiness, of pride. They looked at you like they had on your wedding day, five years ago.

At the front of the Chapel, the Ghouls stepped away from you, bowing to Papa and making themselves scarce to the edge of the Chapel. Copia removed his gloves, and took your hands in his.

"Copia, what's going on? Are you... are we renewing our vows?" you asked, fighting tears as the mere thought of it.

"In a way, Cara... I wanted to ask you something," he brings your hands up to kiss your knuckles, one at a time. "I have so much I wish to give you, so much more to offer you. But this must come first. And if you are not ready, I will understand, and a vow renewal is all this will be."

Your heart beat like a hummingbird's wings in your chest, sending rippling flutters through your body. He wasn't about to... surely not...

"I could never imagine my future without you, you know this. And what a future we could have," he began, "Amore mio, would you ascend with me? Will you become my Prime Mover?"

The Hummingbird stopped. Time stopped. The earth's rotation stopped.

Prime Mover was a step above marriage; it was a sacred binding, offered only to the truest of soulmates, the chosen few who would continue the lineage of the Papacy. It had to be passed from one Prime Mover, to the next - like a crown from one Queen to the next.

And here was Sister Imperator, ready and waiting to give that to you.

"Copia... Prime Mover?" you asked, in disbelief. You hadn't talked about the lineage for so long, hadn't thought the time for children together would be anywhere close and yet this was exactly what he was asking of you.

To perform the Ancient Rite, to bind yourselves under Lucifer's gaze and receive his blessing to bring new life into the world to continue his work.

"If you are ready, amore..." You saw his anxiety, waiting for an answer that you hadn't given yet.

"Y-yes... Yes. Of course! I want to be your Prime Mover... I want that with you, Copia," you launched yourself forwards in a moment of unceremonious need to be close to him, wrapping your arms around his neck and almost knocking his Mitre from his head. He steadied himself in time, enveloping you in his long sleeves of his robes as he held you to him.

"Then let's perform the ritual, the binding... And then the rest of the night, amore..." he pulled back from your embrace, moving to whisper in your ear for only you to hear, "we will spend together. Alone."

A rush of goosebumps raised on your skin at his promise, and he winked at you as he pulled back.

"Sister, we are to go ahead..." he smiled at his Mother, who in her pride, could only nod and smile back without tears spilling from her eyes.

And after the vows, the incense, the blood oath... Copia took you back to your quarters as promised - as his Prime Mover, future mother to his children.

And he would not let you go until he was sure he had completed the ritual...

[star-trek-shallot]

Star Trek: TOS Crew at an Ice Cream Shop

Kirk: Orders a cookies and cream sundae with hot fudge and marshmallow sauce. It gets melty and he drops a spoonful on his shirt, like, first bite. Other than that, he's having a great time.

Spock: Orders a single scoop of something unique - matcha, coconut, peppermint, or coffee are some of his go-to flavors. Would die before getting it in a cone and having to lick it. Has to eat very slowly to avoid brainfreeze - may or may not succeed.

Bones: Orders a double scoop of butter pecan, in a cone. Alternatively, if he's feeling adventurous, he'll get a classic banana split. Yes he can and will eat the whole thing. Do not ask him to share.

Scotty: Orders a double scoop of rum raisin, in a cone. Doesn't have to worry about being asked to share that. Second choice is rocky road. Definitely gets some in his mustache.

Sulu: Orders 1 scoop each of a couple weird flavors that don't seem to go together. If there's a unique shop-specialty ice cream, he will get it. Passionately defends his choices... which are usually okay.

Uhura: Orders 1 scoop of coffee ice cream in a cup. Alternatively, fruit sorbet is a solid choice. Preferably, both of these have chocolate shavings sprinkled on top. Her lipstick is gone by the end of the evening, but it's totally worth it.

Chekov: Orders 1 scoop of chocolate in a cup, with some sprinkles on it. Is nervous about ordering this because he thinks it makes him look like a child. It is all over his face by the time he's done with it.

Chapel: Orders 1 scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough in a cup. Bones tells her not to do this because she doesn't know it's egg-free. She does it anyway. Uhura and Rand sample it in exchange for Chapel sampling theirs.

Rand: Orders a double scoop of dulce de leche in a cone. It matches her hair, and also tastes good. Has devised some trick with napkins to keep it from dripping on her hands. Her friends are jealous.

[hypnotherapy-blog-blog]

The Black Bag - Part 1.

The Black Bag.

Rob Hadley

Introduction.

When I wrote The Black Bag I had it in mind that many of the people likely to read it would already have a knowledge of Tarot. However, that’s proved to have been a miscalculation. I have been pleased to see many readers have a curiosity about Tarot, but not much familiarity with it.  As a result, I often suggest readers step into this journey with a Tarot deck at hand.  It will help you see the cards mentioned, and to participate in a manner that gives you a deeper connection to the story.  Each reader, does after all, have their own relationship to the cards. Indeed each card relates to each reader differently. As you make your way through these pages, perhaps you will have insights that will make the story unique for you.

My intent is for you to enjoy these pages, and maybe pick up a few ideas along the way. I don’t propose for an instant that any given card has set or established meanings. My own view is that context is everything. The cards tend to match up with your own particular situation and can have very different meanings at different times. I hope you’ll enjoy this journey. Feel free to reach out to me and let me know your own experiences.

My best wishes as you embark on this journey,

Rob Hadley

Vanbc1963@yahoo.com

The Black Bag

By Rob Hadley

C.2024

It is fair to say that the one person you least expect to see following your mother’s funeral is your mother. Yet, as Grahame Bickerton stepped out of the small chapel and into the daylight and looked across the well tended gardens he was shocked to find himself staring at a figure in the distance that bore an unmistakeable resemblance to the very person he had just witnessed being extended that last of human dignities.

The coffin had slid silently away behind the curtain in the funeral home, and he’d been shocked to find himself craning to see the final glimpse as it moved irresistibly into the cremation chamber. And yet here, across this beautifully laid out garden there seemed to be someone that could be his very own mother sitting in mournful contemplation by one of the gravestones, their back to him.

Grahame felt a hand on his sleeve and turned.  It was the only other person that had been at the service. An elderly woman with a cane, bent almost double, the result of some form of spinal deformity.  The woman spoke to him gently, her eyes moist with tears.

“I will miss you mother,” she said. “I feel your loss.”

“You’re very kind,” said Grahame trying not to be too dismissive but wanting to pull away and see the woman in the distance more clearly. She’d got up and was walking away.

“I used to work with her you know, at the college. Geography,” she said. “She spoke of you regularly.”

“Geography?” replied Grahame, completely lost.

“I teach Geography at the college. We used to have tea together often,” she continued.

Grahame didn’t wish to be rude and turned and tried to catch sight of the person in the garden, but she was hurrying away.

“If I can help,” she said, “you can find me at the college.”

Grahame pulled away and started walking across the gardens leaving the old woman staring after him as he strode away.

“Poor man,” she said to herself leaning on her cane. “He’s obviously terribly upset.”

Grahame hurried across the lawns in the direction of the woman he had seen. Soon he stopped. The crows were rising from some trees by the seat the woman had been sitting on but was gone from view now. It was almost as if she’d never been there. He walked on, but after a few moments realised it was no good. He couldn’t see which way she’d gone.

“Christ,” he muttered, then thinking more clearly calmed himself.

“I have to get a grip,” he said to himself. “This is ridiculous, I’m a bloody engineer, dammit.”

With that Grahame dismissed the notion that anything out of the norm had happened. He was obviously overreacting.

+++

It was mid morning several weeks later when Grahame received the call from the car dealership. The fall sunlight cast the city in a flat light that lacked the warmth of the summer so recently ended. He stood looking out of his meagre office at the glass towers of the downtown core and the cranes that perched beside every spare inch of buildable space.

How very different those offices were from his own. From the office beside his he could hear his boss shouting down the phone at one of the project planners. The congestion on the road today was holding things up for everybody. He was well aware that they were pouring concrete on several projects today, and with those cement trucks stranded in the unexpected traffic chaos caused by this morning’s power outage there was sure to be hell to pay. As luck would have it none of his teams were pumping today, so while the atmosphere in the office would be toxic, it didn’t directly affect any of his people.

He’d been lucky, pacing himself lately. The recent death of his mother had forced him to scale back some of his work commitments. As the executor of the will there were assets to be disposed of, taxes to pay, and all the administrative chaos that accompanies the end of life. And that brought him back to the phone call. It had been the dealership he’d taken his mother’s old Town Car to.  She’d loved that vehicle, but it had no business being on the road with gas prices the way they are today. Getting rid of it had been the only thing to do, and yet in spite of his having thoroughly cleaned the vehicle before leaving it at the second hand car lot, the manager had called and informed him that they’d found some old playing cards and some journals when the car was made ready for sale.

“We didn’t want to toss them out,” said the manager. “They may be something you want.”

The manager had sounded awkward. He was aware the car had been Grahame’s mother’s vehicle, being acquainted with old lady. He’d been servicing the car since he’d joined the dealership over a decade previously.

A phone slammed down in the cubicle beside his and Grahame winced. Did the workplace have to be so toxic, he wondered. Looking at his diary he could see he didn’t need to be here at present, and if he were to walk the dozen blocks to the car lot he could get away early and then slip home to work the rest of the day from there.

He placed a file into his brief case and made for the door. His boss was already on the phone to the next project manager, wringing his hands and looking intently at the screen of his laptop and chewing his lip, a nervous habit he’d nursed every day since Grahame had joined the company. He nodded as he made his way out of the building but went by unnoticed. As he walked out across the car park he felt the sun on his face and a sense of relief in his heart. It was good to be out of the cramped office space.

He loved the city, and being part of the construction trade he was enjoying the fruits of a building boom, but it wasn’t lost on him that he worked for a small consultancy firm, and the glass palaces of downtown were far from his reality. The firm he worked for may be part of the construction team, but he was under no illusions about the work. Twice in the last year his boss had been forced to ask his staff to wait a week for their wages, and if his suspicions were correct, it would happen again. In the hierarchy of the building trade, the company he was working for was not what anyone would describe as a highflyer.

He walked smartly across town, the sound of horns blaring a fitting backdrop to the stationary traffic. Another set of lights up ahead had blown out and a crew was struggling to get their vehicle to somewhere they could work on the switchgear.

Grahame tuned out the sound of the city. He thought of his mother, and that he’d only seen her three times in the year prior to her death. They’d had dinner back in April, and then he had driven out to the cottage in mid summer, and then Rose had told him she was going in for some tests. She seemed unworried about it at the time, and he hadn’t really thought much of it.

Deconstructing things later Grahame realised that Rose had suffered in silence for some time before having these tests run. Indeed by the time pancreatic cancer was diagnosed it was already far advanced. She had suffered briefly, and Grahame had visited, but soon after that last time she had succumbed, slid into a coma and within two weeks had died leaving a great chasm in Graham’s life. A chasm he promptly filled with his own guilt for not being a better son, and more available to his mother.

He was being too hard on himself, but that was nothing new.

+++

At the car dealership the manager had placed the collection of journals and other bits and pieces in a large envelope for Grahame to collect.  He walked into reception and the young lady on the desk reached beneath her desk and passed it to him, recognising him from previous visits. Grahame thanked her and took the package, then decided he’d walk home through the park.

There was little point returning to the office today. He didn’t feel up to working, and the traffic chaos of the morning would soon be merging with the afternoon rush hour, as people tried to leave work early to beat the rush.

Taking a moment to sit in the sunshine he stopped at a park bench and opened the package. It contained three journals, all closely handwritten in his mothers handwriting, and one small black bag. He drew this out and inspected it. Inside he found some cards, but not the playing cards you’d expect an old lady to have should she find herself compelled to get into a game of gin rummy. These were altogether more colorful, and well used.

He inspected them and realised that these were tarot cards. He had no idea his mother had an interest in tarot. While not something he had any knowledge of, Grahame recognised some of the symbols on the cards as he rifled through them. He found the cards strangely puzzling, feeling rather like he’d discovered something secret. He slid the blag bag back into the envelope continued his journey home. They were a mystery he would examine further at a later date.

As he walked he lamented the fact that he had few of his mothers belongings, even though he was her sole heir. The reality was that his small modern apartment was hardly a suitable venue for an ancient armoire, or dining table for eight people.

When he emerged out of the far side of the park he was only a couple of blocks from his apartment. Walking to work today had been a good choice, even here the traffic was log jammed.

+++

The loss of his sole surviving parent had forced something of a pause in Graham’s life.  It was a moment in which he was compelled to take stock and look at where he was.

He had recently ended a fruitless relationship of eighteen months. It had been a perfunctory affair, neither very passionate nor disastrous, but lacking in so many of the things he felt his life needed.

They’d found each other online, were both ‘self actualised professionals looking to share all life has to offer,’ according to their dating profiles, but were neither very self actualised (he still wasn’t sure what that meant) nor very willing to share very much. He’d decided he didn’t really trust the person he was dating, and realised she didn’t trust him either. They’d decided to ‘have a two week break’ two months ago and he hadn’t heard from her since.

Surprisingly he didn’t miss the woman either. It was as if the relationship had not really happened at all. And he felt no compulsion to reconnect.

If he were quite honest with himself it was much the same with his job.  He’d been working as a project manager for several years, and it paid reasonably well. While his job didn’t excite him, it provided security enough for him to live in the city, pay a disturbingly high proportion of his income in rent, and to own a car that he could drive at barely 20 miles an hour anywhere he chose. And then pay a fortune for parking. Like the relationship, his job didn’t fill him with passion either.

Grahame was gradually coming to the conclusion that there were patterns emerging in his life that didn’t fill him with joyful expectation. In his mid thirties he had expected something more of life. Was this really it?

These were Grahame’s thoughts as he walked alongside the stationary traffic and glanced at the frustrated drivers in their little tin boxes. Just a few blocks from home Grahame watched an episode play out before him.

A driver in a Jeep was blowing his horn at a car in front. The yellow haired woman sat in a little pale blue convertible, studiously ignoring the increasingly insistent honking. Judging by the body language the young lady had not had a good day, sitting arms crossed and lips pursed determined to ignore the blaring of the horn behind.

“Hey lady,” came the voice. A tee shirt clad young man, physically toned and cocksure, leaned from his car window and called to her.

Finally having had enough, the young woman, her hair tightly curled up in a bun, turned in her seat and shouted back at the man, “For god’s sake! I have a boyfriend!”

She then turned and sat, arms folded defiantly in the stationary traffic, red faced and flustered now with her eyes locked on the licence plate before her. At that instant a gap opened in the lane beside her and the jeep bucked forward and pulled alongside her for a moment as vehicles shifted in the Tetris game of traffic flow.

“Lady, I just wanted to tell you,” said the man, a little more gently now, “You have a flat tire.”

Taken aback, the young woman checked behind her to see that the traffic was not moving, and then stepped out of her car to take a closer look. She wore a smart pencil skirt and lemon blouse, the picture of propriety. She came back a moment later and sat behind the wheel looking perplexed.

She seemed nonplussed for a moment, and then composing herself turned and politely addressed the man in the jeep.

“Can you help me fix it?” she called across the traffic lane.

The young man lit up a cigarette in a slow languid style, and then said, “Like you said, lady. You’ve got a boyfriend.”

The traffic shifted and the Jeep advanced progressing up the line of cars.

Grahame, abreast of the little convertible looked at the woman, and saw the tears welling up in her eyes. He guessed she’d maybe not fixed a tire before. And with so many cars around she would be stuck blocking traffic before long as the tire deflated. He knew that on any other day he would have gone with his old habits and just not got involved, but today was just a little different.

“Would you like a hand?” he asked softly.

“That would be so kind,” said the woman, relief spreading across her face. Suddenly she didn’t seem quite so prickly.

“Just pull in to one of the spaces up here,” said Graham. “I live a block up the road, I’ll help you change the tire. Just let me go up to my apartment and change out of my office clothes. I won’t be more than five minutes.”

“That’s so kind of you,” said the young woman. “You’re like a real knight in shining armour.”

“Well, not really. But I can change a tire.  Give me five minutes and I’ll be back.”

With that he left her and hurried toward his apartment.

+++

Grahame hurried along the street, the sound of construction crowding in on him after the quiet of the park.  That poor woman, he thought. Some men really could be thoughtless.

He hurried into his apartment, tossed the envelope carelessly onto the coffee table, as if by reflex turned on the kettle to boil water for a cup of tea and went to his bedroom. A moment later he’d got out of his work suit and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater.

He turned and was about to hurry down to the street to help the woman change her tire, when he noticed the envelope had spilled its contents across the surface of the coffee table.

Not wanting to keep the woman downstairs waiting, he casually glanced at the table. Cards were slewed across the flat surface in an arc. It looked almost artistic. One card lay face up.

Grahame glanced at it, and then retrieved his keys and made for the door. As he stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor, the front door of the building opened and his neighbour, old Mrs. Willoughby entered the vestibule.

At that moment there was a terrible crashing sound from outside. Mrs. Willoughby turned and looked out at the street, a startled look of shock on her face.

Grahame rushed to the door and stared out to see what on earth had happened. Cars were stopped now, honking and people climbing from them and rushing back down the road. It took only a moment for Grahame to realise the sound had come from the building site on the next block, just by where he could see the woman’s car pulled over.

He hurried toward the car, and as he got closer realised this was the centre of the commotion. The woman was standing back, leaning against the siding at the edge of the construction site. He hurried to her side.

The little blue convertible was wrecked. It lay smashed beneath a series of scaffolding poles, looking as though it had been speared in some ghastly hunt.

White faced and shocked the woman stood back, shocked but unharmed, against the siding.

“Good god, what happened?” he said to her after he’d pushed his way through the crowd.

People were looking up, staring at a crane’s hook and some chain suspended seventy feet above the road. A man with a hard hat came barrelling out of the building site and rushed to the car. By-standers were already photographing the wrecked car, and posting them to social media on their phones.

“Was anyone hurt?” the workman was asking in panic, looking around wildly.

“Are you ok?” Grahame said, steadying the woman with a kindly hand.

“I’m ok,” she said rapidly. “I’m ok!”

She was white faced and shaking. Grahame turned to the assembled crowd and said, “Does anyone have some water?”

A bottle was developed and passed to the woman.

Grahame turned to the crowd and asked, “Who saw what happened?”

Several voices piped up. Grahame looked at the man in the hardhat and said, “Are you the foreman?”

He nodded nervously.

“Thank god no one was hurt,” he replied. “You’d better get these people’s statements. The police will be along soon. It’s going to make things a lot better if people are able to describe it.”

The foreman nodded and corralled the witnesses while Grahame turned back to the woman.

“You’re going to need a cup of tea, aren’t you,” he said gently. “Let’s get you out of here and calm things down.”

Grahame handed his card to the foreman, and one of the witnesses.

“When the cops show up can you let them know she’s at my place up the road,” said Grahame.

There was sympathetic nod and Grahame and the woman pressed their way through the crowd and made their way down the block to his apartment building.

+++

Grahame made the tea as his frightened guest sat in the open plan living room.

“You didn’t tell me your name,” said Graham, wanting to keep the woman talking.

“I’m Sunshine,” she said. “And that’s my mother’s car.”

“Oh, dear,” he said. “It’s a very nice little car. Well, it was. How did you come to be unharmed? I mean, it looks like a hell of a mess.”

Grahame poured the tea and placed a cup and saucer before Sunshine.

“I stepped out of the car to look at the tire, and that’s when it happened,” she said. “There was just this rush of air, and a terrible sound. Like bells ringing, and then those scaffolding poles all around me.”

“What a thing to happen,” Grahame said.

“I guess,” she replied beginning to calm down. “I could have been killed.”

She sipped the tea, her hand still trembling. That was when Sunshine started sobbing.

+++

The statement to the police, a visit from the foreman and an exchange of documents all took time and Sunshine seemed to go through the process in a daze. She was glad to be somewhere quiet and safe, and Grahame remained largely quiet in the background as the questions were asked and answered. It was a terribly unfortunate accident, but as the police officer pointed out, no one was hurt. The insurance companies would sort out the wrecked car which was now safely off the road. The construction company manager said the company would be up to their necks in investigations, but seemed co-operative, almost as upset by the whole situation as Sunshine was herself.

“That could have been my own daughter,” said the manager as Grahame had shown him out. It happened that he knew Grahame from the local planning department meetings that he’d sometimes have to attend for his company.

“Terrible thing,” he’d said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Those clamps don’t just fail.”

“Thank heavens no one was hurt,” echoed Graham.

+++

At length the police officer left, and they found themselves alone in the quiet apartment. Noticing the journals and the tarot cards on the table, Sunshine asked, “What’s this?”

“Oh, it’s nothing.  Just some things of my mother’s,” replied Graham.

“Don’t you see it?” said Sunshine, looking at the upturned card.

“What do you mean,” said Graham.

“You don’t think it looks like all those scaffolding poles that fell on my car?” said Sunshine as she picked up the card.

Grahame stared at the card. The Eight of Wands.  He wondered what it meant.

“I suppose,” said Graham.  “It’s really not my thing,” he added and then as an afterthought said, “I’m an engineer.”

Sunshine looked at the card once more, and then at Grahame trying to find the link between not being able to see the visual connection and being an engineer. She failed.

“I wonder what made you turn over this particular card then,” she said. “Probably something subconscious.”

“I didn’t pick that card.  I mean, I just left some things on the table, they just fell like that, and then I came down to help you.”

“And that was before you heard the crash,” asked Sunshine with newly sparked curiosity.

“Yes,” replied Graham, noticing for the first time how the image in the card did look a little like the scaffolding poles.

“That’s quite the coincidence,” murmured Sunshine.

“Oh, I doubt it,” said Graham. “There’s probably no end of these cards look like falling scaffolding.”

His voice trailed off as he realised how he sounded. Sunshine picked up the cards and started shuffling them.

“So, your mother’s into tarot?” asked Sunshine.

“No. Well, yes,” stammered Graham.

“I see,” said Sunshine.

“I mean she died,” said Graham. “And these were among her things. I should sort them out.  I don’t really know anything about the cards.”

Sunshine looked at the journals, and then asked, “Were you close?”

“Not as close as I wish we had been,” replied Graham.

“So, you never knew she was interested in Tarot?”

“Never had a clue,” confessed Graham.

Sunshine turned the cards over in her hands and then said, “You’re lucky then.  This gives you a chance to get to know her through the cards.”

The words hung in the air. 

“What do you mean,” asked Graham.

“Look at these cards,” she said. “You can see they’ve been well used.  These are quite old. Well used. Your mother must have been adept at the cards. Can’t you see it? There’s a lot of her in these particular cards.”

An awkward silence fell between them as Grahame thought about this. It was true, the journals and these cards were like a voice reaching out across the abyss of death. They were a connection.

The silence was broken by the chirp of Sunshine’s cell phone.

She looked at the display and then said, “Mother. This might be a little awkward.”

___________________________________________

If you've enjoyed Part 1 of The Black Bag I ask that you follow my Tumblr and reblog it. To read Part 2 simply go to my Patreon HERE.

Many Thanks

RH

[cheerycherrycandy-resurrected]

Ghoulette Appreciation Week 9

Week 9: Pranks & Getting a pet

Pranks? Well this obviously needs me to bring back the Blondies!

This week was also heavily inspired by @rainsbasspick and their Rainbowie kitten fic, it's soo adorable, you have to read it!! I've had a load of fun discussing how the ghouls would react to a kitten with them, thanks Ash!! <3

Dew, Mountain and Aether are going on a trip with Papa. It's only for three days, how much trouble could Sunshine and Cumulus possibly get into? Or: Sunny and Cumulus replace Dew with a kitten.

Rating: G Content: Gratuitous fluff, kittens. Words: 2982

Read below or on AO3!

The ghouls filled the entrance hall of the Abbey, saying their goodbyes to Dew, Aether and Mountain. They were going on a three-day publicity tour with Papa, but the way the rest of the pack were acting you would think it was three months. Swiss was strategically standing with his hands resting on Rain's hips: if he was allowed to get free for “one more kiss” from Dew, they'd never manage to peel him away. Mountain was being swarmed by ghoulettes, as Aurora, Sunshine and Cumulus practically climbed him. Aether had his hands on Cirrus’ shoulders, giving his final words of encouragement and advice for keeping the pack in line with both him and Mountain absent. Phantom and Papa hovered awkwardly, watching the spectacle unfold.

Eventually, the last goodbyes were said. Aether gave Sunshine a hug, bending down to beg her to "please, for the love of all that's unholy, be good!" while Dew simultaneously whispered the opposite into Cumulus's hair. Papa finally herded his reluctant ghouls into the waiting car, Mountain rolling down the window as they began to pull away to fix the two most mischievous ghoulettes with a stare. “Behave!”

It was only for three days, after all. How much trouble could they get into?

Quite a lot, it turned out.

Sunshine and Cumulus knew better than to mess with Rain too much while Dew and Mountain were away: anything too mean would surely end in tears without Dew present to apologize, and Mountain to threaten payback. Besides, he had pretty much gone to ground while the others were away; only accepting company from Swiss and Phantom, or emerging at mealtimes. They both felt Swiss had suffered enough recently, although he had been delicious fun to mess with... maybe it was time to turn their efforts to the rest of the Abbey for a while. Copia was away, so who would be around to punish them?

They began their unsupervised reign of terror over the siblings with a classic: hiding in dark corners of the chapel for Sunny to remould candlewax into creepy shapes to scare siblings. Nothing beat the terrified squeal of a Sibling opening their eyes and raising their head from prayer to find the candle in front of them now bore a screaming face, features twisted in agony. Cumulus also reverted to an old favourite prank to scare new siblings. She conjured winds that felt like someone breathing down their neck, and hands grasping around their ankles. She made it her mission for the week to start a new rumour about the archway leading to the storage cellar being haunted – this also came with the double benefit of making the fearful siblings tasked with guarding it way less diligent, so both ghoulettes could pilfer more liquor from it.

The second night, when they snuck into the kitchen to steal snacks to fuel an evening of plotting, the head kitchen ghoulette, Meadow, was alerted to their presence by the indignant meow of a kitten they nearly tripped over.

“Oh hello, little one!” Sunshine cooed at the tiny ball of fluff, which was hissing and spitting at her ankles.

“Good evening, Sunshine, Cumulus.” Meadow said with a wry smile, looking up from the bread she was kneading. “What do I have to turn a blind eye to you two making off with this time?”

Cumulus at least had the dignity to look sheepish, while Sunshine ignored the question in favour of plopping herself onto the floor to get closer to the kitten. The last time she'd seen the kittens in the Abbey kitchen was about two months previously, when they had barely had their eyes open.

“We were here for pretzels and pizza bites, but I think Sunny wants the kitten!” Cumulus laughs, watching the ginger kitten's curiosity get the better of them, and start to clamber onto Sunshine's lap.

“You can take her too, if you'd like? They're all plenty old enough to leave, and Satan know this whole Abbey needs better pest control...” Meadow wiped flour from her hands onto her apron and gestured at two other kittens tussling in the corner. “Since they left their box, they've been running all over, getting under our feet. Even their mothers sick of them!”

All the ghouls were familiar with the kitchen mouser; a large tortoiseshell cat that had done more for their unending mouse problem than hundreds of mouse traps ever could. Copia lived in fear that she would one day seek more challenging prey and go after his rats.

Sunshine looked up from her spot on the floor with eyes as round as saucers. “We can keep her?” The kitten had found its way into her lap and was now happily purring away and headbutting the hand Sunny was petting her with.

Meadow shrugged and gestured to the storage cupboard, “They're all destined for various wings of the Abbey, might as well claim your own now. Litter and food is in the cupboard.”

Cumulus and Sunshine shared a look – this seemed too good to be true! The kitten hissed again as Sunshine scrambled to her feet, shocked at suddenly finding herself a meter higher in the air.

“Thanks, Meadow! We'll take good care of her, I promise.” assured Cumulus, tickling the small fuzzball under her chin. “This little princess is about to get spoiled rotten!”

The pair gathered up all the supplies they needed from the cupboard, almost forgetting their original mission for snacks in their excitement. With a final wave, they thanked Meadow one more time, receiving a good-natured eye roll in return.

“Cirrus is gonna kill us, isn't she?” giggled Sunshine as she and Cumulus made their way back through the darkened hallways to the ghoul wing, arms laden with food for both them and their new packmate, riding proudly on Sunshine’s shoulder.

“Definitely.”

The next morning, after getting the kitten settled in Sunshine’s room, Cumulus and Sunshine were sitting on the floor in the common room playing with the her, giving her a chance to spread her little legs. Miraculously she’d slept through most of the night, but only once Cumulus had helped her up onto the bed to curl up between them. Before this, she had circled their bed like a shark, howling her tiny lungs out.

“Look at her little horns!” Cumulus pointed to her white ears, in contrast to the rest of her ginger fur. “She looks just like Dew!”

“And she’s got his personality too, look!” Sunshine giggled as the kitten tried to drag Cirrus’s abandoned slipper across the floor. It was approximately the same size as her. “What a little menace!”

“Don’t eat Riri’s slipper, silly! She’ll be mad, and we might have to give you back to the kitchen!” Cumulus’s baby-talk seemed to get higher-pitched every time she addressed the kitten. Sunshine reached out to try and take the slipper from her, only for her stubby tail to fluff up like a bottle brush, and her to let out a tiny growl.

Cumulus buried her face into Sunshine’s side, suppressing her squeal so as not to frighten the adorable little monster.

“Aww, what a spitfire! You are like Dew, aren’t you!” Sunshine said as she finally succeeded at freeing the slipper, pulling it high into the air and dragging the still-growling ball of fur with it. Her teeth lost their grip and she fell the few centimetres back to the carpeted floor, landing in an undignified pile of legs and fur with a little huff.

Sunshine stood up, rescuing Cirrus’s other slipper from its vulnerable position under the sofa as she did.

“I’ll be right back, let me grab my camera. The newest ghoulette needs a picture on the fridge too!”

As the door swung shut behind Sunny, the kitten ran up to it and started scrabbling at it with her small claws, wailing at the top of her lungs.

“Oh you’re a clingy little thing, just like Dew when he was a water ghoul!” Cumulus cooed, scooping the cat up out of the way of the door. “Maybe we should call you Dew2?” She set the kitten back in her lap, laughing as she immediately scampered off again to explore.

Sunshine returned waving her polaroid camera, and was greeted by the kitten sat on the back of the sofa, where she had clawed her way up for a better vantage point. She tried to capture a photo of the kitten, but she immediately began batting at the lens with her paw.

Shortly after, Swiss walked into the den. He was greeted by the ginger kitten, still perched on the back of the sofa but now hissing and spitting at his unfamiliar scent. He hissed back.

“Don’t be mean Swiss!” Cumulus admonished him. He raised an eyebrow at her, looking pointedly at the clearly still agitated fuzzball, then back at Cumulus.

“What, are we summoning demons in here now?” he asked. The kitten spat at him again.

“Hey, Dew2 isn’t a demon, she’s a kitten!”

“Dew2.” Swiss deadpanned, looking to Sunshine as if she could provide more answers. She just shrugged, and grinned.

“I know you guys miss him but really? It’s been two days.” The look in Swiss’ eyes clearly conveyed that it was too damn early in the morning for this.

“We don’t have a proper name for her yet, we’re letting her personality choose.” Cumulus said, Sunshine nodding in agreement.

“Hmpf. Seems like you’re pretty accurate already, you’ve cloned Dew into a baby cat’s body. Congrats, Papa’s gonna freak if that gets anywhere near his rats.” He walked off in the direction of the fridge in the corner, shaking his head in bemusement.

The kitten hissed again as he retreated, before scrabbling her way onto Sunshine’s shoulder. The ghoulette tried not to wince as the kitten’s needle-like claws dug into her bare skin.

“Oh she’s such a little spitfire!” Cumulus fussed at the kitten, as it seemed torn between continuing to drive off the threat of Swiss, and purr at the head scratches.

“What about that as a name!” gasped Sunshine “Spitfire. How does that sound?”

“Oh yeah, that’s cute.” Swiss drawled sarcastically from by the fridge, “Good luck with that, I’m sure Dew won’t mind that you replaced him at all.” He grabbed the drink he had come in for, and headed for the door. “Enjoy explaining her to Cirrus. And Aether.”

It turned out, Dew did mind. He returned with Papa and the other ghouls shortly before dinner that night to discover the den in uproar. Cirrus had been running around checking everything was in order for their return, only to discover three ghoulettes, Rain, and Phantom all sat in a circle on the den floor flicking a pom-pom between each other for an equally fluffy kitten to chase. Six pairs of glowing eyes had stared at her as she stood in the doorway, spluttering at the mess they had created. Cirrus squeezed her eyes tightly shut and bolted from the room, as if hoping that by choosing not to acknowledge the scene before her, it would cease to exist.

Dewdrop, Aether and Mountain had returned to a duplicate experience; the unblinking eyes also staring unnervingly up at them from the floor. All of them exhausted from the trip, it was decided that the arrival of a small new pack member would be discussed in the morning. Sunshine and Cumulus had cackled to themselves as they settled down to sleep with Spitfire that night. For now, they seemed to have won.

Dew quickly realized he had returned home to a nightmare: his little mischief-making trio was now a foursome, and he had been replaced by a small cat. The ghoulettes addressed Spitfire with questions as though Dew wasn’t there, got distracted halfway through sentences by the kitten interrupting with a meow, and were now calling it by his nickname. Every time one of the ghoulettes would call Spitfire, Dew’s ears would twitch. They seemed to be taking malicious pleasure in it.

“Why is she called that?” he finally burst out in desperation.

“Well, we couldn’t really call her Dew2 now, could we?” Cumulus said innocently, batting her eyelashes. Sunshine’s characteristic smirk grew wider.

“I was gone THREE DAYS and you replaced me!” Dew yelled, and stormed angrily from the room. He headed to find Cirrus, one of the few remaining pack members who weren’t under the kitten’s spell. Cumulus and Sunshine fussed over Spitfire, her tail lashing at the sudden noise.

Dew didn’t quite get the sympathy he had been hoping for, however. He had crossed Cirrus enough times in the past that she had no intention of letting Dew get away without a little taste of his own medicine.

“Oh Dewdrop,” she stroked his hair from where he had flopped dramatically onto her bed next to her, “you can’t run around being a menace to society with Sunny and Lulu and expect to be totally immune from their mischief yourself!” Dew huffed and rolled over, burying his face into her duvet.

Over the next few days, everyone had begun to warm up to the new feline member of their pack. Even Cirrus and Aether had finally agreed that Spitfire’s cuteness far outweighed the additional mess she caused. Aurora and Phantom were new to the human concept of keeping pets, neither having even seen a kitten before, and were summarily besotted with her. The one ghoul left unconvinced was Dew.

A lazy morning led to Mountain and Sunshine making lunch for the pack, with a little helper running around their feet. Spitfire seemed to have boundless energy and was living up to her name, bouncing around like a spark from the fireplace. Cumulus, Aurora and Dew were sprawled across each other on the sofa, banished from “helping” by Mountain.

Sunny held out a small scrap of salami from the sandwiches she was making, dangling it tauntingly above the kitten’s head. Spitfire sniffed the air above her, rearing onto her back legs to try and snatch the morsel of food. Sunshine whisked it away again and again, teasing the kitten, her tail waving back and forth as she geared up to jump. She continued this little game, Spitfire’s jumps getting higher and higher each time until she was almost level with the countertops.

“Hey look Dew, she’s almost as tall as you when she jumps!” Cumulus giggled. Dew spluttered indignantly. With her next attempt, Spitfire jumped even higher; twisting dramatically and finally snatching the salami from Sunshine. She came crashing back onto the floor with a small huff, clutching her prize in her mouth as she landed in an ungainly heap.

“Hmpf, she’s even less graceful at falling over than Rain though!” Dew retorted as he tickled the soles of Cumulus’s feet to make her squeal.

Spitfire stumbled back to her feet, finishing her treat and licking her lips. She shook herself off, and trotted over to Cumulus. Dew scowled down at her, as she stared balefully up at the ghouls on the sofa, meowing gently as she begged to be helped up to join their pile. Cumulus wasted no time in scooping Spitfire onto her lap, and fussed over her as she delicately licked a paw and washed her face. Still sulking, Dew turned his back on Cumulus and the kitten, and struck up an inane conversation with Aurora about the chore rota.

Behind his back, his tail swished in embarrassment at being compared to the kitten once again. He was so engrossed in changing the topic, he failed to see Aurora’s eyes narrowing at something over his shoulder, and the corners of her lips turning up. On Cumulus’s lap, Spitfire had stopped preening and her own little eyes were locked onto the twitching spade of Dew’s tail. Cumulus watched as the kitten’s bottom began to wiggle, her own stubby tail waving behind her.

The yelp when Spitfire’s teeth sunk into Dew’s tail could have come from either of them. He leapt to his feet, shrieking as he tried to shake her loose. The kitten let go of his violently lashing tail, abandoning ship in favour of landing on Dew’s back and holding on with her claws for dear life. As Dew continued to screech, Cumulus and Aurora were rendered speechless, in fits of laughter at the sight.

“Looks like she likes you Dew!” howled Sunshine from the kitchen.

Spitfire continued to claw her way to relative safety, eventually reaching Dew’s shoulder as he began spinning in circles trying to reach to dislodge her.

“You sure about that?” he growled, coming to a stop as he made himself dizzy. Spitfire unhooked one paw, and use it to bat at a loose piece of his hair over his ear. Cautiously, he reached around to grab her, and held her out at arm’s length front of him to give her a narrow-eyed glare. She glowered back at him, hissing.

Once the ghoulettes had stopped laughing, Mountain managed to corral them and the rest of the pack to the dinner table to eat lunch. Cumulus and Sunshine parked themselves either side of Dew, encouraging Spitfire to walk across him to move between their laps for food. Dew could have sworn she was digging her claws into his thigh extra deep on purpose. She politely accepted a titbit from Cumulus’s plate, and Dew sent her another challenging glare as he unwrapped a string cheese. Spitfire glared back, before launching herself at the other end of the cheese dangling from Dew’s lips.

A tug of war ensured, both parties growling at each other over around the cheese in their mouths.

“Dew, just let her have it,” sighed Mountain, “there’s plenty more cheese.” His pleas fell on deaf ears.

Cumulus and Sunshine leaned back in their seats to smirk at each other over the still-growling Dewdrop. Spitfire was the best new ghoulette they could have ever asked for.

[shapeshiftinterest]

Petty Little ‘Princess’: bowser x luigi

inspired by what i thought was gonna happen in the first 2 chapters of Deep Down by @super-mollio

big thanks to AllageAntelope from twitter for helping translate and collab on the italian dialogue

it’s like the 7th time he’s been kidnapped and luigi knows bowser’s caught onto his peach disguise

now he’s in peach’s wedding dress and standing at the alter with a smug ass koopa king probably thinking the plumber’ll be the first to crack and call off the wedding

well, 2 can play at that game

story under the read more

Petty Little‘Princess’ (also on ao3)

Luigi glared at the koopa in front of him. This was what, like the 7th time he’d gotten kidnapped dressed as Princess Peach?

He could tell Bowser’d caught onto his disguise this time but the king still hadn’t let on that he knew.

Now Luigi was wearing Peach’s wedding dress and standing at the alter, playing the world’s longest game of gay chicken as Kamek got closer and closer to the ‘I do’s. His feet hurt from being in heels the entire time and the blond wig kept falling into his face.

‘Miserabile figlio di puttana,’ Luigi thought, Bowser’s smug mug staring at him from behind the other side of the veil.

Fine.

If he was gonna be petty and force the plumber to go along with the whole ceremony, thinking Luigi’d be the one to admit he was in disguise, he had another thing coming.

He was a younger sibling, two could play at that game.

“And do you, King Bowser, take this human, to be your awfully wedded partner?”

Bowser chuckled, lifting the veil to smirk at his feisty bride to be. ‘A shame really,’ he thought, looking into the other’s baby blues and reaching a claw towards the medical mask he wore. ‘Red’s brother makes for a pretty cute princess.’

“I do.”

‘Mario’s probably gonna be here any minute. Greenie better hurry up and unmask himself before I do it for him.’

BANG!

Speak of the devil.

The chapel’s double doors slammed open as the older plumber entered the scene. “Let-a go of my-a baby bro, King Koopa!”

“Gwahahaha! Crashing the wedding, Mario? That’s tacky, even for y- GACK!”

Bowser’s monologue was cut short as Luigi yanked the king to his level (having signed the marriage certificate while he was gloating), ripping the medical mask and wig off with a flourish.

“I-a do.”

Without further ado, the dress clad man with a fist full of purple ribbon stared into Bowser’s eyes and gave him the haughtiest look he could muster.

‘Go big or go home,’ Luigi shrugged mentally. And Bowser was the biggest thing in here so...

“Prepara quelle labbra, maritino~.”

“The hell’re you say-MMPPHH?!?!”

“Goodness!” Kamek squawked, everyone else gaping as the two made out at the alter.

Bowser groaned at the feeling of Luigi’s tongue sliding against his own, eyes fluttering shut as his knees went weak, one of them thudding to the ground so he wouldn’t fall over since the plumber was still clinging to his ribbon.

“Hnnnggh.”

Someone coughed in the background.

Oh wow, they were, uh... really going at it.

At least until a pair of comfortable shoes made contact with Luigi’s head. Bowser’s eyes snapped open with a yelp when the shorter man reflexively bit the tip of his tongue.

“Weegee!” Mario waved, tired of awkwardly standing around. Luigi let go of Bowser’s ribbon, the flustered king losing his balance and staggering onto the carpeted floor.

Quickly kicking his high heels off and slipping on the shoes, the green plumber glanced over his shoulder. Bowser felt like he couldn’t breathe as his new consort looked down at him and grinned, figure backlit by the light of chapel’s stained glass.

“See you-a soon, mio re~.”

With a wink and a swish of skirt his skirts he was gone. Mario rolled his eyes at his brother’s performance and sprinted after him, Luigi’s laughter echoing down the hall as Bowser watched in a daze.

BONUS:

luigi is tired emotionally, physically, and mostly because of the wig and high heels

everyone knows luigi’s disguised as peach but bowser isn’t releasing him cuz he wants to humiliate him (it backfires, he’s married now)

mario doesn’t care that they’re married he just doesn’t wanna watch his bro make out with the koopa king

he gets it tho, they’ve discussed bowser’s hotness despite being a bad guy, as siblings sometimes do (personal experience)

luigi’s a younger sibling, his pettiness levels are through the roof

also he’s sarcastic and a little teasing at the end

i wanted to add the koopalings and junior halfway through making this, but wasn’t sure how to do that while also writing bowser and luigi making out

also that’s like 8 more characters and i’m tired lol

translations:

miserabile figlio di puttana = miserable/ petty son of a bitch

Prepara quelle labbra, maritino = get those lips ready, hubby

mio re = my king

[drakeanddice]

Previously:

>ACTION TRIGGER NOT MET. DUNGEON MOVE ACTIVATED.

You are overwhelmed at the buffet of options laid out before you on the PANICKER’S GUIDE table of contents like so many succulent tapas. Each offers a saucy sneak peak at what kind of terrible things might lurk ahead. Each tempting morsel promises to sate your desperate need for information. But you just don’t know where to start.

The bacon-wrapped dates? The stuffed olives? The crispy cod balls?

Paralyzed with indecision, you snap the book closed. Reading’s for nerds, anyway…probably. You jam the GUIDE back into your BACKPACK and sling it over your shoulder. You cast your eyes around the CHUTE ROOM, consider the exits.

EXITS:

UP the STONE CHUTE

SOUTH through TUNNEL

You figure it’s too much to hope that this whole thing can be fixed by climbing up that CHUTE. Would sort of be anticlimactic at this point anyway. Who’d go to all of the trouble of dragging you from your bed, pitching you down the chute, and banishing you to the LANDS BELOW? Not to mention putting together the KIT? Writing the GUIDE? So really?

UP the STONE CHUTE

SOUTH through TUNNEL

The only creature you’ve met so far went that way. Granted, it was a weird garbage monster that called you things like “Meat” and “Chewstick” and “Snackpack.” But it didn’t attack you, and while you didn’t exactly exchange names and numbers, it used its words rather than its fangs. That’s not nothing.

What are you going to do? Stay here with the weird phosphorescent MUSHROOMS?

The MUSHROOMS have gone out.

>GO SOUTH It is VERY dark.

You make special friends with the left hand wall, first with your nose and then with your hand. Keeping one hand on the wall and the other sweeping the expanse of air ahead of you, you grope forward a step at a time.

You proceed this way for thirty nerve wracking minutes. You hate it here. You still don’t remember any TRIBUNAL, but you fantasize about crawling your way back to the surface if only to so you have the opportunity to medal in Creative Profanity in their general direction.

That’s when the lights come up.

You are in THE BONEHOARD.

Oh, this’ll be good.

The light flares blue and cold from the four wrought iron TORCHES held clenched in the fists at the ends of skeletal arms. Each arm is composed of the artfully-arranged and carefully-modified bones of at least a dozen humans. The buttresses and arches above are similarly fashioned from the metabolically impaired. In fact, aside from the heavy DOUBLE DOORS to the South, the freshly swept floor, and the STATUE of the weeping lady in the FOUNTAIN at the center of this room, it’s just bones all the way down. There are piles of bones here, fussily sorted by size and type. Someone or something devoted a lot of time to this endeavor.

It smells not unpleasantly of petrichor. Cart tracks lead to the EAST. The GUIDE vibrates quietly in the bottom of your pack.

EXITS:

SOUTH through DOUBLE DOORS

EAST through the SPLINTERED ARCH

WEST into the CHAPEL

NORTH into CHUTE ROOM

>

[swordofsuns]

IM BACK BABY!!!!!

to be honest I was still on tumblr a lot of the time so it wasnt really gone. but. I now have time to present to you:

DND!

ARC 4!

CONTINUED!!!! (explosion sfx in the background) (guitar riff) (bald eagle screech) (in case you cant tell I have been waiting for this all week)

small recap for where we left off: Ira and Braxton left to get to Axum to try and kill the Flesh Baron and kidnap some of our NPC friends who got kidnapped. We all jumped into the feywild to follow them. not sure if I mentioned this but we met up with a half fey shapeshifting druid (Actaeon killed his parents on accident)(it was a whole thing), and he joined up with our party. Turns out Red's crazy ex girlfriend has gone on a slight murder spree. We met up with some old friends. we learned some lore about the immenent end of days. we accidentaly gave another one of our friends a magical mind connection with an evil appocalyptic eldritch god (oopsies). Red's magical protection amulet broke in her sleep.

(oh also for context everything that is about to go down happened in the course of a single, increadibly hectic session)

Red doesnt know her amulet is broken, only suddenly feels her conciousness pulled from the blissful dreamlessness shes had for only a month, back into the all to familiar almost-reality of dreams. this time, however, she does not find herself in a forest of black pines and snow, or in the blood and fire of her past, but instead in a very different corner of the feywild. and this time she isnt even in her own body, or even her own mind. Currently she has her mind mixed with that of Manti, as her vision doubles between her bed in the walking castle and of a slaughtered chapel, with its last resident begging for mercy. Manti, pauses, right before delivering the killing blow, as it seems the connection between the two of them goes both ways. suddenly, without a word, she turns, and gives chase.

Back in the castle, Max has realized what is happened and is quickly casting as many protections as he can around Red, eventualy managing to block out the power of a LITERAL GOD, though by then Manti has figured out where we are, and is on her way. We try to come up with a plan, and realize that despite practicaly everything Manti is interested in being in the material world, shes spent practicaly her entire time in the feywild, even though she has interdimentional portals at her fingertips. we come to the conclusion that because of her fey ancestry, she probably either straight up cant get into the material plane, or at least would be extremely weak after doing so. We also realize through a tracking spell that our other two party members have already made it through to Axum.

Our plan is pretty simple: step 1, leave the castle. step 2, remove protections on Red so Manti is able to follow us, and doesnt go after castle. step 3, make it to the portal to Axum before she does. step 4, meet up with Ira and Braxton, and if she can come through we fight her on home turf and if she cant then were all safe.

we hop out of the castle and make run as fast as we can for the portal to Axum (though it is several miles away so its more of a "hike quickly" than a run). We manage to make it to the portal in time, but right before we pass through, Manti appears out of nowhere and closes it, though in the process Ira and Braxton get swept through the portal and we all reunite.

At this point Manti barely resembles anything even vaguely human. she is approxamitely 15 feet tall, with a chitinous and segmented body, twisted features, and two twisted unnatural portaling sickles melded into her hands. She offers the party the option to give her Red, and in return they all live, but we say no and a fight breaks out. Absolute chaos breaks out as portals are opened everywhere, reality itself begining to crumble at all of the wholes in it, as well as having several extremely powerful adventurers, some of whom have literal gods as pets, effectively warping the fabric of reality like a black hole.

We manage to do some good damage, but Manti is also the vessel of a god so the fight is long and painful. Around halfway through the fight, with a single swipe from a sickle, Manti cuts Iras broom in two, sending her plummeting to her death.

Manti lets out a horrifying shriek, though whether from victory or from horror we cannot tell, and Red, uninjured, falls to the ground unconsious. Actaeon rushes to her aid, but he she is already somewhere else.

(this right here is my favorite scene in the entire campain)

Red wakes up in an all too familiar forest. the pines are black and the snow is thick underfood. this time, she finds herself in a clearing in the trees, without a cloak, and with only a rusty iron sword as a weapon. the snow in sprinkled in drops of blood, and, all around the clearing, she can sense the Leech circling around her. she cant see him, aside from the occasional insectoid leg, a glint on one of his many, many teeth, and his seven gleaming red eyes. his true form is massive, easily 100 feet long, easily encircling her and bringing his circles slowly closer and closer. and then he begins to speak. (Now listen brief side not but I dont think that I have properly communicated to you just how much Red and The Leech absolutely fucking despise eachother. their first interaction had Red threaten to kill herself just to ruin his day, and it has only gone downhill from there. basicaly any time one of them mentions the other it is followed by a series of insults and curses. its made even funnier by the fact that everybody else is great freinds with their godly patrons, while Red is continously willing to do whatever she possibly can just to spite him. but I digress). The Leech just begins absolutely ripping red to shreads (metaphoricaly), pointing out how all of her acheivments and victories were because he was rigging it to give her a confidence boost. how she claims to fight to avenge the people she lost, and yet, cannot even remember her parents faces. how in the end, every adventure she has gone on has only lead to more death. after all, she released the Lost Brother, she made a deal with Benny for her own sake, she gave Manti everything she needed to free him, She shot Kraka, she led Manti to them, and in doing so got Ira killed. how even after everything, all her supposed growth and change, the reason that every time she finds herself in the forest she appears as a child is because a scared child was all she has ever been. In fact, he offers, why not embrace it. She has always wanted power, and now, he can offer it to her. She and Manti can be his two knives, breaking this world she has always hated in two, and creating her own world, a new world all of her own. (Red cant quite tell how far away he is still, but he has certainly grown closer) Red takes a breath. She calms herself, and prepares to deliver her elequant and informed rebuttal: "FUCK YOU YOU BLOODSUCKING COWARD! IM GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!". The Leech snarls in anger, and simply responds "you are free to die trying", before he closes in, fully encircling her. Only 10 feet away. then 5. Hes fully encircled her now, and she has nowhere to run. She swings her sword down at his side, but it simply brakes against his chitin. she tries to punch him but only gets a few broken fingers in return. He lowers his titanic almost-face down to hers, showing her his thousands of clistening, sharp teeth, and his 7 glowing red eyes level with hers. "do you have any last words". Red doesnt respond, but reaches out in anger and panic, grabbing hold of one of his eyes. with all of her strength (and a nat 20) she tears out his largest eyeball. The Leech SCREAMS IN AGONY, and back in the fight with Manti, she suddenly collapses on the floor in pain. With the last of The Leech's power, he lunges at her, attempts to devour her very essence for daring to defile him, but, (with another nat 20)(the dice were insane that day) she survives the assault of a god through shear stubbornness and spite.

Back in the real world, the fight with Manti has taken a bit of a chaotic turn, as, right in the middle of the battle, she collapsed onto the floor, and then, suddenly, all of the transformation on her body begins to dissolve into a black ichor. Red suddenly wakes up, and finds that Manti has returned to her origional form, though her hands are still portal sickles. she considers just killing her right there, but decides that even if she doesnt forgive her for what she did she still was being manipulated by the literal god of manipulation, and was later sorta fully mind controlled, so decides to let her live.

We also remember the fact that oh right Ira died, and decide to try to kill two birds with one stone (or I suppose save 2 birds with 1 castle) by taking both of them back to the castle to try and heal Manti (she is practicaly mortaly injured now that all of her magical protections are gone) as well as trying to see if they have the ability to revive Ira, who is now been dead for too long for us to revivify. We go back to the walking castle of Cisero and King, and beg them to pretty please help us again. they agree the heal up Manti and deliver her to our little village for Diana and Brandon to take care of her.

However, they tell us that they have no way of reviving Ira, as they just aren't powerful enough for that. Thing is though, Kings old teacher, The Duke of Thorns and Fruit (I mentioned him briefly in my recap of the second arc), does have the ability to do that and is located nearby, though King warns us that he will probably just kill us on sight. In the end she sends us off with a signed note from her telling him that we are freinds and to pretty please help us and not kill us. We make it to his corner of the feywild, which is a giant thornbush maze, though the thorns sometimes grow these juicy red fruits, that kit decides to snack on as we travel, though nobody else does. Finaly, we make it to the center of the maze, where we meet the Duke himself. hes this weird regal deer man, who does try to kill us on sight, until we prove were friends of King, to which he decides that hes not going to kill us instantly, but, because one of us stole one of his fruit, he will still kill us unless we do him a favor.

Each of us must tell him our greatest regret, or we will be killed. he also promises that he will revive Ira, but that will come with its own price. Braxton goes first, and admits that his greatest regret was finding The Bear for the first time, but, instead of the words leaving his mouth, the world around us shifts, as Braxton is forced to relive finding The Bear as a child, chained up in cold iron. how he took pity on the animal and chose to free it. how his body changed and was morfed into something unfamiliar. how his parents through him out after they saw what he had become.

second is Kit, who admits that their greatest regret is stepping through the portal he found when they were a child, and relives them and their best friend finding the portal, stepping inside, and seeing it close behind them as they became trapped in a dimmention of infinite everchanging light, blinding and maddening.

Red is next, revealing her greatest regret to be that she is still alive, though everything she survives always kills everyone around her. she sees herself surrounded by every person who has ever died from her actions, or who she has been unable to save, which at this point includes her entire extended family, 2 small towns, an adventuring caravan, Kraka, Ira, a major city and a good portion of the feywild. The worst part is, she cant even remember any of their faces. she simply curls up into a ball on the floor and cries.

Actaeon goes next, hesitentaly admiting that his greatest regret is that Red had him as a father, and how he was only able to fill her head with imposible dreams and fail her in the end. he also reveals that he is getting old and is probably going to die in about a year.

Acris (that one druid who was with us that I mentioned) says that his biggest regret was leaving home to travel the world, seeing as the second he left home Actaeon immediately showed up and accidentaly murdered his parents in cold blood (im not going to explain this its a whole thing)

Val admits that his biggest regret was running away from home, but leaving his sibling behind with his parent who was doing human/demon expirementation on them.

The Duke of Thorns and Fruit accepts this as payment for trespassing and stealing, but says that in payment for him reviving Ira, one of us must give up our Happy-Ever-After. whoever does this will permanantly lose the ability to have a happy ending to their story and their life will be endless heartbreak and tragedy.

Everybody goes dead silent and refuses to accept, until Red steps foward, claiming that at this point she has nothing to lose, and shakes the Dukes hand. The image of Red living a comfortable life, in peace, with no paranoia, no threat of violence or death around every corner appears, before crumbling and being consumed by the Duke.

with that he takes a fruit and squeezes some of the juice on Ira, instantly reviving her. he opens a portal for us to Axum, and cheerfuly bids us good luck. As we all step through the portal, however, he pull Val aside and reveals to them that he knows that they're part demon, and that if they meet again he can help Val "reach his true potential".

Actaeon also tells Red that with the eye that she gouged from The Leech, she could use it as a sacrifice to the Huntsman, who would almost certainly reward her by turning her into an Ent-Jaren, or that she could use it as a powersource for her Bloodhide Cloak, which would unlock its magical potential. at this point shes extremely depresed and has given up on all of her dreams, and uses it to complete the cloak, giving her a bunch of nifty power ups and blood magic.

wow this is long. this was probably the most insane and chaotic session of the campain, but also definitely my favorite. I cant properly convey it to you but Red and The Leech have a absolutely perfect dynamic so any session that allows them to bicker with each other is always great. plus we get to give Red turbo deppression. hooray. I love hurting my characters.

to be honest I am very tired and Im not sure any of this even makes sense to anybody who is not me. I wrote this in a state of pure manic energy (really not sure what came over me) and it is all gone now.

HOLY SHIT

Oh

Red no.

Red no

[sweeter-innocence-fics]

Surviving Sokovia - Chapter Sixteen

Pairing: Pietro Maximoff x Reader

Work Summary: 

You were a Sokovian orphan living on the streets of Novi Grad, until Strucker offered you a choice.

Now you are a part of his human experimentation programme, trying to survive an entirely different world of horrors. The kind boy with the beautiful eyes is the only thing that keeps you going.

This story contains dark themes. Please read the notes on chapter one for more details. Dialogue in {these brackets} is in Sokovian.

Chapter Summary: He's waiting for you.

Series Masterlist

Word Count: 2793

Read on AO3.

Masterlists.

Taglist: @mcximffs @noz4a2 @xlucyintheskywithdiamondsx @lanemarvels @marrigold-2002 @kathrinchek @ifilwtmfc @officiallykuute @mrs-kai-anderson @ang3l1te @missryerye @rottenstyx @the-skys-musical-echo

Taglist info.

Previous Chapter

Notes:

hello I have a few notes for this one

1) sorry it's late, I was struggling with this fic last night so decided to leave it until the morning

2) it's NaNoWriMo, which means I will have less time for fic writing. I'm still aiming to upload the final chapter of this next monday but just wanted to warn you guys that there might be delays.

3) I am not Jewish but I do have Jewish heritage, so I did my best to research stuff about Jewish traditions, apologies if I got anything wrong

Warnings for smut, complicated feelings around religion, pregnancy stuff, mentions of injury, PTSD, detailed description of a foot massage(?)

---

There was a gentle tapping on the door. You smoothed your hands down your stomach, cradling your bump.

“Come in!” you called. The door opened behind you. In the mirror, you saw Wanda stepping into the room.

“{Are you ready?}” she asked. “{It’s time}.” You took a deep breath, and nodded.

Wanda had put far more work into today than you had, running between you and Pietro to ensure you both had everything you needed. Pietro had tentatively befriended some of the other Avengers, but you were shyer, so Wanda was all you had.

She took your hand in hers and squeezed it. “{You look beautiful. Come on. He’s waiting for you}.”

She led you out into a vestibule. On one side of you was a door to the outside, propped open to let in a cool breeze. On the other was a set of large double doors that Wanda opened a crack and then whispered something to someone on the other side.

After a moment, she beckoned you over.  The music started up as you linked arms with her and stepped through the doors into the small chapel.

Tony had kept his word. He was paying for everything. Granted, you were keeping the ceremony small, so there wasn’t much to pay for, but it was still a relief.

Pietro’s parents had been Jewish, but never particularly religious. He’d told you that they’d barely gone to temple when he was a child, and once they were gone, he’d had nothing to tie him to his faith. You’d asked him if that made him sad, and he just shrugged.

“{If there is some higher power, then He has a lot to answer for},” he had said.

You had never really been religious either. So you kept the ceremony mostly secular, with a few concessions to Pietro’s heritage.

He stood at the end of the aisle. Your heart stuttered as you met his eyes. He was always handsome, but right now, he was devastatingly so. His dark blue suit emphasised his slender frame, only suggesting at the rippling muscles that you knew lay beneath. His bleached blond locks perfectly styled, tousled artfully. He at once looked so young, and also more like a man than you’d ever seen him. You couldn’t stop yourself from smiling.

The rest of the Avengers were sitting on benches on either side of you, apart from Clint. He was stood beside Pietro. He was nominally the best man, as he was the Avenger Pietro was closest to, but in actual fact, Wanda had taken on both best man and maid of honour roles.

As you got closer, you could see that Pietro’s eyes were watering. You wanted to run to him then, but you were seven months pregnant and wearing very impractical shoes. It took all of your restraint not to throw yourself into his arms as soon as you were close enough.

“{You look so beautiful},” he murmured as he took your hand.

The ceremony was kept brief. Neither of you could stand for extended periods of time, and you didn’t know 90% of the attendees very well, so you were thankful for that. Although most of the audience only spoke English, you gave your vows in Sokovian. After all, this was for you, not them.

You were on the verge of tears as Pietro swore to love you and protect you, that everything he’d been through had been worth it because it led him to you, that he couldn’t wait to spend the rest of his life with you.

When the ceremony was over, the two of you were ushered into a private room. This was one of the concessions. Yichud, the short period of seclusion that would allow you to reflect on your relationship. As soon as you were alone, Pietro put his arms around you and kissed you breathless.

The world had shrunk down to the size of this room. There was only you, only Pietro, clinging to each other and breathing the same air.

When you finally broke apart, he sat down on the small sofa against one wall and pulled you down beside him. It was a tight squeeze, so you were half in his lap.  

“{How are you feeling, Mrs Maximoff?}” he asked. His tone was bubbly and warm. You wanted to sink into him and never come back.

“{Never better, Mr Maximoff}.”

He pulled your legs across his lap and rested one hand on your bump. “{Are you looking forward to the honeymoon?}”

“{I’m looking forward to being alone with you},” you said softly.

And it was true that you’d never really been alone with Pietro. In Sokovia, Hydra had always been watching, or else you’d been with Wanda. In New York, the three of you (and Odeta) had shared Pietro’s hospital room until yesterday, at which point you’d been ushered away into another bedroom so as not to see him the night before the wedding. 

Courtesy of Tony, the two of you were going to be staying in a secluded cabin upstate, far from everyone and everything.

“{You know, it’s customary for us to share our first meal together as husband and wife while we’re here. Wanda made us these},” he said, retrieving a tin from the table. He opened it to reveal a batch of cookies.

You let him feed you one, and then kiss the crumbs from your lips. You were dizzingly, deliriously happy. The two of you stayed in seclusion for far longer than the prescribed eight minutes.

There was no reception. You had agreed that it would be too much for both of you, so after the Yichud, the plan was to get straight in the car to be driven upstate. Wanda kissed you both goodbye and promised to take good care of Odeta while you were gone.

Pietro could have gotten you to the cabin in a few seconds flat, but you had opted for a car instead. Speeding around with him made you dizzy, and you weren’t in any hurry. Once you were in the backseat of the car, you put your head on Pietro’s shoulder – your husband’s shoulder – and closed your eyes.

Music was playing on the radio. Pietro’s window was open, so a cool breeze was blowing across your face. It was a warm evening in early spring and the smell of your husband’s cologne was in your nostrils. You pressed your nose against his collarbone and inhaled.

His arm was around you. One hand was resting against your face, his index finger stroking along the line of your jaw. His thumb came to rest just behind your earlobe, anchoring his hand there. As his little finger skittered across your lower lip, you pressed a kiss to it.

“{I thought you were sleeping},” he murmured, laughter in his voice.

“{No, just drinking it all in}.”

The cabin itself was in the middle of the woods. Pregnant as you were, Pietro wouldn’t let you carry any bags. He whisked them all inside before you’d even made it out of the car.

He thanked the driver and then swept you off your feet, bridal style.

“Piet,” you squeaked, and he nuzzled his face into your neck. As was tradition, he carried you over the threshold. “{I think it’s supposed to be the threshold of our house},” you pointed out as he set you down on your feet.

“{This is our house, for now}.”

From the outside, the place had looked unassuming, but inside, there was state of the art security tech.

“If anyone but you two is in that place, we will know immediately,” Tony had assured you. “You’ll be safe there.”

And that had been what you were looking for. It had been nearly two months since Sokovia, but you knew that some scars would never heal. You still found yourself looking for Strucker in every dark corner, or Ultron and his robots in every clank of machinery. You still saw Pietro’s body, riddled with bullets, every time you closed your eyes.

“{Hey, hey, what’s wrong?}” Pietro asked, cupping your cheek.

“{Nothing’s wrong}.”

“{You’re frowning}.”

You tilted your head into his palm and exhaled. “{Sorry. Feeling a little sore}.”

“{Come sit down}.”

You let him lead you over to the sofa and sat down with him. He wrapped his hand around your calf and laid it on his lap. He fiddled with the straps of your sandals for a moment, freeing your foot from its restraints. You breathed deeply.

“{Better?}” he asked.

“{Better}.”

He removed your other sandal, and then began massaging the tension out of both of your calves. You lay back on the sofa as he laid sweet kisses to the insides of your ankles, and pressed his thumbs into the ball of your foot hard enough to draw a moan out of you.

“{Did that hurt?}”

“{A little. But in a good way}.”

He did it again. You groaned. “{You like that?}”

“{Yes. Very much. I have some lotion in my suitcase. Could you rub some into my feet for me?}”

He disappeared but was back before your feet had even had a chance to hit the sofa, holding a tub of cocoa butter. “{This stuff?}”

“{Yes, that stuff}.”

You closed your eyes as he took a healthy dollop and began to massage it into your feet. His fingernails scratched affectionately at your ankles and swiped under your toenails. He spread your toes, a strangely pleasurable stretch as he pressed his thumbs into the sensitive skin on their underside.

You groaned happily, stretching your feet further into his space. He continued working his way up your legs, moisturising and massaging the skin of your calves and shins. When he reached your knees, his hands curling around them gently but firmly, a spark of arousal jolted up your leg.

“{Are you alright?}” asked Pietro, pulling back.

“{I’m good},” you said, sounding a little breathless.

He raised one eyebrow, and you knew he was seeing right through you. Smoothing his hands up the skin of your calves again, he hooked his hands under your knees and parted your legs. You shivered. In the time that he’d been out of action, you had forgotten how strong he was. Right now, you knew you couldn’t have broken his grip if you wanted to, and that excited you. 

“{What do you say we check out the bedroom?}” he suggested, still resting his hands on your spread knees. You just nodded, and he dipped forward to help you to your feet. He stayed close behind you, breath warm against your ear. “{I’m just going to wash my hands. I’ll meet you in there}.” He gave your ass a quick slap and pushed you in the direction of the bedroom.

You had expected him to catch up with you immediately, but he didn’t. You felt the absence of his hands on you. Your feet also felt strangely sensitive after the massage he’d just given them.

Against one wall was a full length mirror. In it, you saw yourself, still dressed in your wedding dress, your pregnant belly bulging out in front of you. You smoothed some hair out of your face and exhaled deeply. This was real.

A moment later, strong arms curled around you from behind, his hands laying on the curve of your bump. Pietro rested his chin on your shoulder and pressed a kiss behind your ear.

“{Hi, beautiful},” he murmured. His cologne was stronger now, like he’d just put more on.

“{Hi, my love}.” You were breathless.

With a grin on his face, your husband began to nip at your ear, his hands moving from your belly to cup your breasts. “{We should get you out of this dress},” he murmured. “{We don’t to make a mess of it}.”

Your heart fluttered. He kissed you right at the back of your neck, along your spine, and your insides felt as though they were melting.

Getting you undressed was fiddlier than usual. Pietro was careful not to damage the dress, and his fingers skimmed over every new piece of exposed skin, leaving goosebumps in his wake.

“{Lay down with me},” he murmured as he unhooked your bra. You let him guide you over to the bed and pull back the covers. It was a cool evening and you were wearing only your panties now, so you shoved your feet down under the duvet. As you tried to cover the rest of yourself with it, he stopped you. “{I want to see you}.”

He spooned you, pressing kisses to your neck. You leant back into him, feeling the heat of his body. Pietro always ran hot, and you were glad for that right now. One hand cupped your breast and squeezed, the other played with the waistband of your panties.

He groaned. “{God, your boobs feel so good}.” He thumbed over your nipple and you let out and undignified squeak. Your breasts had become more sensitive recently. While you were distracted by his mouth on your neck and his fingers playing with your nipple, he slid his other hand into your panties and found you wet and wanting.

“{That all for me, sweet girl?}” he asked, grazing the skin of your neck with his teeth. You could only nod.

You had no idea how long the two of you lay there like that, with him playing your body like an instrument, trying to make music fall from your lips. It could’ve been minutes or hours. Your panties had long been discarded and his bare erection was pressing insistently against your lower back. Eventually, you grabbed his hand.

“{Stop teasing and fuck me},” you commanded, and he chuckled.

“{Alright, bossy}.”

He hooked a hand under your knee again, spreading your legs wide. You felt him line himself up against your entrance from behind and your eyes fluttered close as he pushed into you.

It had been a little while, so the stretch straddled the line between pleasure and pain for you. You let your head fall back onto his shoulder. You trusted him to get both of you where you were going now.

He started out slow – uncharacteristically so – restarting the process of working you back up to orgasm. You would’ve been frustrated if it hadn’t felt so good. Once he’d found his rhythm, his fingers found your clit, settling into a pace that he knew you liked.

For your part, you didn’t do much of the work. Not that Pietro would’ve let you. He was strongly of the opinion that you should never have to do anything you didn’t want to again. You thought that was impractical, but for now, you were indulging him.

“{Pretty girl},” Pietro murmured. His voice was husky, his words spoken into the skin behind your ear. You shivered. “{My pretty little wife. No one else gets to see you like this. No one else gets to fuck you like this. You’re mine}.”

“{I’m all yours},” you cooed, your body lax against his. His tongue slipped into your ear, jolting you back to attention. “Piet,” you squeaked, feeling a hot ball of pleasure growing in between your thighs.

“{So many ways for me to fuck you},” he mused. “{Some day I’m going to ruin every single one of your holes}.”

“{Yes},” you whimpered.

“{You want that?}”

“{Yes}.”

His hips thrust faster. His fingers on your clit began to speed up until they were almost vibrating. You practically howled as you came, thrusting pathetically back against him. He chuckled at that, and didn’t stop fucking you.

There was no reprieve. A moment later, your orgasm crested again, this time bringing tears to your eyes.

“Pi- Pi-e-tro,” you gasped, your words punctuated by his thrusts.

“{My poor sweet girl. So drunk on my big cock, aren’t you? I’ve absolutely ruined you}.” Your hands clasped at his, feeling the vibrations as he abused your clit and played with your breasts. Your feet pressed into the mattress, arching your spine as you came for the third time. Pietro groaned again. “{So fucking good. So tight and wet for me}.” His thrusts sped up, and after a moment, finally, he came too.

You listened to his breathing slow down. He didn’t pull out of you, instead opting to fasten his arms around your ribcage and pull you tighter to him. Once he was satisfied that he was adequately spooning you, his hands came to rest on your bump instead. It was a little while before you felt able to talk again.

“{Are you enjoying your first day being my husband?}” you asked playfully, tilting your head to look up at him.

He groaned, pressing his lips to your shoulder. “{You’re the best wife I could ask for}.”

Next Chapter

[hyperesthesias]

König x Female Mexican Intelligence Agent

Author's Note: Don't look at me, I need to jot down some ideas for a story I will never write. I love this idea so much that I may actually change a few things and publish it as an original work somewhere down the line. If I actually wind up deciding to do that, I will probably delete this at some point. But for now -- I need to get this out because I am gnashing my teeth. This idea won't leave me alone.

Potential Warnings: Fictional depictions of war violence (I mean...obviously.) ; Secret Relationship ; Pregnancy ; Hostage Situation ; Attempted Murder ; Coma ; Unformatted, mostly just an outline/ideas.

Word Count: 4,847.

The first time they meet is at the chapel before an extended assignment. They haven't been officially introduced, they barely speak at the chapel anyway -- he can't keep eye contact with anyone for long. Especially with her. She looks beautiful under the array of colors from the stained glass windows. She smiles at him, and even if he didn't have a balaclava on, he's not sure he'd be able to return it. His heart's already in his throat, the last time he set foot inside anything remotely religious was back home in Austria -- many years ago. But the assignment ahead of them promises nothing but terror, and he's been having thoughts on whether he'll retire by choice or by bullet. He watches as she crosses herself, and he wonders what faith she claims. The chapel houses anyone seeking refuge, and maybe all he's wanting is a quiet space where his mind doesn't have to compete for attention. His leg bounces, his fingers wring together -- he's not looking at anything in specific, his thoughts wander this way and that, but the quiet and absence of prying eyes keeps him centered.

The woman leaves, glancing at him with another smile -- it's such a pretty smile. He thinks such a pretty smile shouldn't be anywhere near the stench of death. And he knows he reeks of it.

The squad gathers for mission ready and assignments, and he's stunned to see the woman from the chapel. She isn't as weighted down as the others of 141, but the gear strapped around her middle and her legs make her ready for anything. He knows she'd never recognize him -- he looks incredibly different from their passing encounter: the entirety of his bold frame is covered from face to feet, even more than when she smiled at him the first time.

She smiles at him again as the comms crackle with instructions -- and for a brief moment he wonders if she recognizes him. It's an impossibility. But it's a nice thought nonetheless.

They're paired together for the first portion of the assignment. It's then that he learns she's Mexican Intelligence. A spy. An asset. She's meant to draw out and extract information from another asset who'd gone underground almost a year prior. He's meant to give her cover, to offer additional persuasion should they encounter resistance.

She isn't intimidated by him, she doesn't mention his mask neither his size. It relaxes him. He's used to the relentless teasing from his brothers in arms, to the deluge of questions and comments that usually come from people who'd never met him. She came to the middle of his upper arm, but she made no remark about his towering stature. It's hard for him not to wonder if she accepted him genuinely without judgement, or if she was putting him at ease on purpose in some effort to manipulate trust between them. Spy craft was never something he was interested in, he doesn't like double talk. But her soft spoken words are truthful, upfront, as honest as she can be. There are things she can't tell him -- operational things that are need-to-know; things about her life outside the tangled mess of international underhanded dealings. He wonders what her life is like: she was graceful, eloquent, she had a natural talent of mediating conflict -- it garnered trust between informants and enemies alike. With a stern word and a soft smile, she had contacts in the palm of her hand.

Without noticing when or how it happened, he suddenly comes to the realization that he, too, is in the palm of her hand. They've spent long nights talking in their shared language of English, occasionally laughing trying to find a way of saying some untranslatable concept. She has a mother in the United States, he finds out. She also tells him she has no time for love. Neither does he. All of his nights are spent looking out windows in search of a target, or hiding in darkened corners. He expected her to make a joke about how difficult it must be for him to hide. But she didn't. He didn't make sniper, he tells her, a sadness in his voice.

"You have my back," she tells him. "That is what matters."

The moonlight looks sweet on her lips -- and the purr of her voice mingling with her accent, it's enough to drive him mad.

He finds out he loves her while he's peering at her through his scope. He's perched on the roof of a building opposite of the one she's in -- she's passing intel to another informant inside a hotel lobby. It feels off -- something feels wrong. He's done this long enough to know what it feels like in his bones. She glances to him, watching for the spark of the scope on the rooftop, knowing he's there, knowing he's watching her like a hawk. She has the same uneasy feeling.

As she's about to bail and call off the drop, she's double crossed -- stabbed in the leg, they only missed her stomach because she pulled her body away in time.

A shot comes from nowhere -- breaking through the daylight, shattering the glass doors of the hotel. The bullet sinks itself through the enemy, plummeting him to the ground in a pool of blood and matter.

She limps away in the cacophonous mess of people that descend on the man, sputtering his last breath. König meets her at a rendezvous point in an alley not far away. He helps her limp back to the base camp they've commandeered in a safe house a few blocks away.

He's angry at himself for not catching the set-up sooner. Swearing in German under his breath as he patches up her leg. His hand swallows her thigh as his deft fingers sew up the knife wound that missed an artery.

"It's not your fault," she breathes heavily, trying to keep herself sane through the searing pain in her leg. "It's not mine, either. These things happen. We learn, we correct, we move on."

He glances up at her through his hood and sighs, tying off the suture. "I thought I lost you," he says. He shakes his head and growls at himself quietly. He should learn to never get so attached to his partners. "I have lost brothers before..." he trails off for a moment, busying himself with the bandages. He wraps them around her thigh gently -- he's always so gentle. He ties it, sets the roll back in the kit, and looks up at her. "This was different." His accent is thicker, heavier; he's tense.

Her bloody hand reaches to his masked face and caresses what she believes to be his cheek despite that she cannot see him. "I know." She swallows, dizzy with adrenaline and uncertainty. "It is for me, too."

He didn't know she felt the same. He's still unsure now as she's speaking the words. He's convinced he misunderstood.

But as she caresses him, and as she leans to kiss his helmet, his body relaxes at the thought that he understood perfectly.

"Thank you for having my back," she breathes as she pulls away from him.

He sits there, very still. Wanting to do something, but not knowing what or how. He can't look at her, the same way he couldn't look at her when he saw her in the chapel that day.

Quietly and without a word, he takes off his helmet. And his hood. The balaclava is all that's left. He takes a breath and hesitates before he nudges it down his bare face. He's fair skinned with soft blonde hair, a long and bitter scar jagged across the diagonal of his face. He still isn't looking at her -- his eyes darting from her this way and that. It's everything in him to keep his head up. "We...have met before. In the chapel."

"I know your eyes anywhere," she says and smiles at him -- the same way she smiled at him that day.

"You knew?"

"I figured," she chuckled.

König lets a weighted breath. She was a spy, of course she knew. He pulls himself up and even on his knees his frame seems to envelope her -- he leans and gives her a kiss on the head. "I am glad you are okay."

She holds his head, staining his skin with the blood on her fingers. "I am now." She presses a kiss on his lips.

He has never been comfortable sharing his body with anyone, it requires that people see him. He doesn't like to be seen. He doesn't like to be touched. But the way she touches his face -- it does not hurt. It does not make him recoil. He melts under her fingertips, letting himself sink into the bed beside her, with her.

The 141's assignment progresses, as does their relationship. They're more than partners, they're something deeper. Something only they know of, something only they understand. Confidants who have each other's backs, lovers who know each other from stolen glances alone. They keep it secret. Almost afraid to jinx it.

But where he was afraid of jinxes, König notices she's become distant. Where they would steal a moment of time to even say 'I love you', she avoids him. He wonders what he could have done wrong -- he wonders if the images of him slitting another man's throat, or eviscerating another with brute force was enough to push her away. He would not hold it against her if that is the case. He can't track her down enough to even ask her what he had done.

He finds her in their safehouse after a briefing, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor. He believes it is starting to make sense: the job is difficult, the blood is never ending, and the mind can only take so much. They've been at it for longer than most, with another few months added to the total time they'd be in the field of their current assignment.

"Meine Liebe," he whispers and kneels in front of her. "What is it? What bothers your mind?" He puts his hand on her back and her arm. It looks as though she has been crying -- her eyes and her nose are swollen. He's never seen her shed a tear, even with a knife wound.

She struggles to look at him. She swallows and feels a pain in her throat. She can't speak over a whisper: "Ich bin schwanger..."

His body goes numb and his eyes fall wide. He's staring at her without any air in his lungs. She's pregnant. He is the father.

She wanted to tell him in words he would understand without any doubt. She's practiced how to tell him in her head for two days. The pain in her throat grows.

"Schwanger?" he says again. The energy returns to him, and he can't sit still. He can suddenly hear his heartbeat in his ears. His hands go to each of her arms, he wants to hold her, embrace her -- but he doesn't want to hurt her. He's bobbing up and down, a smile starting to grow on him. "You are having a -- a baby," his brain can hardly translate it coherently.

She watches as his eyes speak to a smile that spreads and stretches against his hooded face. "No se que hacer..." she whispers to herself. "If they find out, I will be off the team," she sniffles. "I have to see this through," her accent sharp and hard.

"We will -- We will hide it," he says, definitively. He's convinced himself already -- he's already thinking of a plan. "We will make sure they do not know."

She shakes her head. He doesn't understand all of the risks. "It is dangerous. For all of us." Her arms wrap around her middle. "And for the others," she nods as if pointing to the rest of the 141. "We cannot lie to them."

"We are lying already," he shrugs.

She stares at him.

He centers himself at the sight of her glare. "What I mean is, they don't need to know everything, ja? It is...'need-to-know'. For right now, they do not need to know."

That she could work with, at least for now.

König wraps her in his arms, being careful not to hold her too tightly. "We will think about it, Meine Liebe. 'La resolveremos', ja?" His hand cradles her head as he leans his veiled cheek on her hair. "I have your back."

They want to tell the 141, they keep trying to find the right time to do it. The more people they have on their side, the better -- the more people there are to protect her, in König's mind. But she worries they won't be as forgiving. Weeks pass, time lapses -- the job is always more important. They can never seem to find just the right moment to reveal such a secret. But König's spirits are high, his desire to be around her, with her, beside her stronger than ever. He puts her at ease, reassures her -- spends nights with her talking about the days they would have with their new life. They make a promise to each other, to their baby: they wouldn't retire by a bullet, it would be a choice. One they would make together. She wonders what kind of life this new little life would have -- something different, something better than theirs. She would make sure of it.

Ghost is perceptive, despite his quiet nature. He picks up more than what people give him credit for. He can feel something is different. But the job is hard, it's lonely, it's difficult to find intimacy, harder to find someone who understands what the job means, what it takes. If they find comfort in each other, he wouldn't say anything. As long as it doesn't affect the mission, it's not his place to butt into anyway. But he can feel something...deeper, something much more serious. He hasn't quite figured it out yet.

That is, until he watches as she pats cold water on her forehead at a utility sink in the warehouse turned makeshift base. She hasn't looked well, but whenever anybody tells her as much it earns them a stark answer of "female trouble", and nothing more. None of the other men want to know anything more than that, they figure they wouldn't comprehend it anyway.

Ghost hands her a towel, and when she reaches for it, the layers of coats that have been wrapped around her for weeks briefly part enough for him to see a reason for her so-called 'female trouble'.

"When are you due?" he asks.

Her eyes close as she holds the towel to her head. She knows her time is up. He's going to tell on her -- she'll be off the case, and all the work she'd put in, the vendettas she'd garnered, it'd all be for naught. She swallows and sighs, turning to him. "Four more months." She plops the towel on the edge of the sink. "We should be through by then."

He stares at her, quickly glancing at her stomach. "Why'd you lie about it?"

"I have worked too hard to throw all of this away. I can do my job. I am not an invalid."

"You don't want off the team."

"I don't want you to say anything."

"Honesty is the best policy."

"It is my honesty to share."

"And König's?"

She stops and straightens. She doesn't say anything. But it's all that needs to be said.

The rest of the 141 find out later that evening. Both she and König come clean. The men are upset, worried, but know that complicated is part of the job. She's deep cover. If she disappears, it would wreck the mission. They've all worked too hard to throw it away. They keep it secret. Besides, pregnant women make for easy confidants -- a natural response to witnessing a maternal figure, she could use it to their advantage.

König dotes on her as well as he can, sacrificing water, rations, and sleep rotations for her. The others do the same to an extent. But König's excitement supersedes them all -- he smuggles some of her favorite homeland snacks from the field. He struggles to focus when a rifle isn't in his hands. But that is to say, he focuses often, for weeks.

She's guiding them through a chokepoint with cameras and coms from a van. Leading them to the stash of WMDs and intel that they've been hunting for a year. She's out of the line of fire, but never out of danger. She's due in a few weeks. She's tired, they all are.

"You boys almost finished out there?" she asks, watching from Soap's camera as they tag and bag what they came for.

"Just about," Soap radios back.

"Ja, everything is here," König is looking at a tablet in one hand, with his rifle in the other.

"Claro," she exhales sharply. "Because my water broke an hour ago. Get back to base."

"Copy. We are RTB," Soap says -- keeping calm not only for the men with him, but for her sake.

König itches to get back to her, his leg bounces, his fingers wringing. Would the infant be born by the time they got back? Or did it take more time than that? He suddenly realizes he knows nothing about anything -- at all. His mind is blank. But the moment he barrels through the door of the safehouse, seeing her sitting at the table, wincing, he knew one thing: he had to help her. He takes her in his arms and carries her to the bedroom. The med kit on his breastplate has nothing of use for her, he orders his brothers for towels and water.

The night wanes and the pain grows more intense. But he never leaves her side. The others are outside the bedroom, unsure what to do with themselves. She forgets they're there altogether. All she can think about is what will happen after that night. And by morning, after his final encouragement for her to push -- the night has ended, and a new life takes a breath. A small cry breaks with the dawn.

He helps both her and the newborn recline on the bed, and presses his bare face to them both. They are both so beautiful -- so unlike him.

"It's a girl," he says as he greets his brothers, his voice fogged with tiredness and emotion. His eyes tell of his happiness behind the hood. His brothers are happy for him, they congratulate him, pat his back, but silently share the fear of uncertainty.

She has to be on her feet in two days, to move up and out. Everything is sore, she moves slower than she did when she first went into the mission. She's charged with writing the reports and packing the computers -- all between nursing her newborn daughter. The rest of the 141 are loading the munitions and tac-gear, they would be back for her when it was almost wheels up. They had to figure out a way to smuggle the infant out of the base first.

König returns with news that they've paid off a guard to ignore the newborn. But when he approaches the safehouse, the sound of the infant's manic crying can be heard from the street -- the door is slightly ajar. He enters with a weapon drawn, and sees the computer smashed and scattered across the floor. The baby is in her blanketed drawer -- her makeshift crib, alone.

His lover is nowhere to be found.

Cool rage sets in before panic. The nervousness in his mind goes quiet, everything goes still, his face flushes with cold. She's missing. There's no one better than to find her. König wraps the baby in her blanket and positions her snugly inside his body armour before he radios the 141.

She's taken by a double-spy, an informant she burned in pursuit of the WMDs and the intel they chased for a year. He lost everything -- he no longer exists, cannot exist anywhere. A life for a life, he says, it sounds fair. He explains, there are more of her enemies gunning for her -- but if he takes her, he'll fetch a handsome reward, one he is unwilling to share. All she can think of is her newborn, of König, of the life they promised themselves. Somewhere far away. Her body fights against her and weighs her down as she struggles to escape the ties he has her in. She manages to headbutt him, disorienting him giving her enough to snap the ties around her wrists. She takes his radio and forces her body to run as fast as it can out into the open. She doesn't know where she is, how she got there -- but she knows König will find her.

The 141 track a coded radio message four miles away. They know it's her. They don't know if they'll get there in time.

She's on the flat roof of a three story house, having been held in the attic. Her enemy advances through the window she escaped; she searches for a way off the roof. She hears the 141's vehicle as it screeches to a halt, the men already pelting bullets in her assailant's direction. The man grabs her as a shield. She can feel her body starting to rebel against her, she's dizzy, starting to see double.

The men stop their hail of bullets and fan out, Soap and Ghost breach the house through the rear. König watches helplessly from the ground, she sees the outline of the baby in his clothing. Whatever happens, she knows he wouldn't break his promise of a better life for them -- even if she couldn't hold up her end of the bargain.

Her attacker wraps his arm around her neck, threatening to pull them both off the roof and to the pavement below. He has a weapon to her head. Ghost and Soap come up through the attic and appear on the roof with them. The man's finger bounces against the trigger, his feet dance against the roof's gutter.

I want to finish what I started, she thinks. Ignoring the yelling, the clatter of weapons, and the gravel beneath her feet -- she takes a single breath.

With a twist of her body, she wrangles herself out and under the grip of his arm -- she violently pulls his shoulder backwards. Wrested free, she uses what little strength she has to kick him over the ledge -- three shots come flying from behind her, pitting themselves inside the assailant's chest. He goes over the edge. She takes another breath, her shoulders sinking with relief as she watches him begin to fall.

Before she can take another, she feels something grab her wrist. Suddenly being pulled backwards, she careens over the edge with him. Ghost lunges forward, but it's too late. She watches as her partners -- her friends -- are left behind on top of the roof. The sky above her, the ground below -- she takes one more breath.

She lands on top of her enemy, crushing his lifeless body.

König runs to catch her -- he kneels at her side. Desperately, he looks for a pulse. She is unconscious, but alive. Her head made impact with her attacker's skull. He lifts her over his shoulder and seeks refuge in the vehicle.

They return home from their assignment with more secrets than answers.

Before their infant is one month, König is on a civilian flight to the United States. His daughter in his arms, a pack with everything she could ever need or want for their travels slung over his shoulder. He's shrouded in a large hooded jacket and a balaclava. He gets his usual stares as he boards the plane: his height, his stature, but the stares at the baby in his arms is new. She's tiny compared to him, born slightly premature, she's small. He thought she might inherit the genes of his height and width, but he figures she will take after her mother. She flies mostly without incident, but dislikes the bottle. She prefers her mother. He speaks to her in his native tongue: "I know you want your mother, but right now I am all you have," as if it would convince her to take it. An older woman on the flight shows him a trick on helping an infant take a bottle.

"Is she yours?" she asks.

He hesitates, he still can't look anyone else in the eye. No one except his lover. But he nods. "Meine Tochter," he manages a small smile beneath the mask.

"She is beautiful."

"Ja, like her mother."

He simply means to leave her on the front porch of her grandmother -- his lover's mother. Her and the pack. But when he gets there, he finds himself out of his element: out of his gear, in the suburbs, toting a baby -- on the porch of his mother-in-law. That, combined with his size, gets him caught. The woman comes to the door with a broom and begins beating him with it.

"I know your daughter," he finally manages.

She notices the crying baby in his arms. Something is terribly wrong. She invites him in.

He is sitting on the couch -- it feels strange to sit in a place so calm, so daintily decorated. It feels like a trap. But the woman holding his daughter is calm and kind, cooing with her. It was the best decision to bring her here. She'd be safe.

"I thought she might have blonde hair. Like me," he mutters, his whisper almost being swallowed by the balaclava. He extends a finger to his infant. "But...she has so much hair. None of it blonde," he smiles and laughs.

The woman chuckles. "My daughter had such thick hair when she was born. It looked like this." She begins to tear, but does not cry. Much like her daughter. "Is she safe?"

He nods. But he cannot look at her. "A hospital. She will be okay, they told us."

"Do you believe them?"

He looks at her now.

"They say things sometimes...Sometimes they are not true."

He sighs. "Ja, I believe them. Because..." he struggles to find the right words. "Because I believe her -- that she is strong."

A silent tear falls from the woman's face. The baby fusses.

"She will be okay," he says again. He feels as helpless now as he did when he watched her fall.

"Will you catch the men who did this to my daughter?"

"I will." His tone turns dark -- darker than he meant it. But it is the truth. "This one will need a place to stay for now," he caresses his baby's face.

"Mi angelita," she sings sweetly, and kisses her head.

"What does this mean?"

"My angel," she says again.

König looks at his child, her face glowing in the warm daylight peering through a window. She is heavenly -- just like when he first met her mother in the chapel that day. They are both perfect. So beautiful. He feels a pang in his throat, and he takes a calculated breath. His hands go to his face with apprehension, and he pulls down his mask, revealing the large scar that mars his features. But also a soft smile, and wet eyes. "Meine Liebling," he whispers, and places a kiss on her soft skin.

A day later, he places another kiss on the forehead of his lover, who lies in a hospital bed at a nondescript location. She's resting, asleep. The soft tissue damage has all but resolved. It's the swelling in her brain that worries her physicians. And him. And the rest of the men. Her superiors are threatening to disavow her. But none of the 141 will let that happen. Not him. The attempt on her life won't be swept under the rug. He'll find all of der Ficker who want her head -- and he'll take theirs.

His thumb caresses her hair as he nestles his masked face against her temple. "Meine Leibe." His eyes close as he draws a breath. "I have your back."

[kosmos2999]

Star Trek: The Animted Series 50th Anniversary Episode Review

Episode: Once Upon A Planet

Season: 1

Episode: 9

Stardate: 2269

Original airdate: November 3, 1973

Written by: Chuck Menville and Len Janson

Directed by: Hal Sutherland

Music by: Yvette Blais and Jeff Michaels

Executive producers: Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott

Studio: Filmation Associates

Network: NBC

Series created by: Gene Roddenberry

Cast:

Captain James T. Kirk (voice by William Shatner)

Mr. Spock (voice by Leonard Nimoy)

Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (voice by DeForest Kelly)

Lt. Uhura, Alice (voices by Nichelle Nichols)

Lt. Hikaru Sulu (voice by George Takei)

Eng. Montgomery Scott, White Rabbit, Master Computer, Arex, Gabler (voices by James Doohan)

Nurse Christine Chapel, M'Ress, Queen of Hearts (voices by Majel Barrett)

Synopsis:

Loooking for a time of rest and recreation, the USS Enterprise is set in orbit on the amusement park planet they visited on the “Shore Leave” episode of The Original Series. A world with a technology that materializes the thoughts and desires of its visitors' minds.

Lieutenant Uhura, Doctor McCoy and Lieutenant Sulu are in the planet's surface enjoying on its landscape. Just when McCoy recalls his first visit, the White Rabbit and Alice from Alice In Wonderland make their appearence again. Then, the trio splits looking for their own enjoyment.

While the doctor is relaxing with the view of a mansion of a southern plantation --like the one of the classic movie, Gone With The Wind-- he was interrupted by The Queen of Hearts from Alice Trough A Looking Glass. She was ordering her guards to behead McCoy. He has to run while he communicates with the Enterprise. The captain declared an emergency and orders all the crew to be beamed back to the ship. McCoy and Sulu are beamed up, but Uhura is captured by a hovering drone.

Kirk tries to make contact with the planet's caretaker, but he got no response. Then, he decides to be beamed down with Spock, McCoy and Sulu. While they are beamed down in search for Uhura, she is imprisioned by the master computer in a cave compound. It assumes that the ship is her master. Any effort to find her with the ship's sensors is useless. It has the lieutenant captive to take control of the Enterprise and it threatens her crewmates with “turn them off”.

As the landing party gets deeper into the forest, they found the tombstone of the caretaker. His death explains the misconduct of the robot machines. The master computer guides Kirk and the rest of the landing team to an area by fooling them making believe there was the master system.

In that area, they face an attack by pterodactyl. They all ran to a nearby cave. Inside the cave, they face a giant cat from the outside that tries to attack them with one of his paws. Once there, McCoy remembers he was mortally wounded on his last visit by a black knight and the machines took him to the main compound to be healed.

Kirk devise a plan to get them to the main compound. He asks the doctor for help to fake a wound on him. McCoy uses a substance called melenex that makes a person lose his consciousness and also causes skin decoloration. It is only temporal and look worse than it is. Kirk offers himself first but Spock interrupted him because he is the most appropiate for the mission for his knowledge on computers.

Meanwhile, the master computer is building a computer inside the Enterprise.

Once Spock is taken by hovercraft, Kirk, McCoy and Sulu ran on the hovercraft's way while they are attacked by a double headed dragon.

As Spock is ready to be “repaired” at the main compound, the captain enters the cave to stop the master computer. He and the captive lieutenant try to reasoning with the main system. It told them the caretaker died of old age and it develop self awareness and wants to go away from the planet. Its main plan is to take the Enterprise to go to the farthest regions of the galaxy to gather with its fellow computers.

Kirk and Uhura convinced the master computer that computers are made by humans to serve them and they work in harmony. That it is not a shame to serve if it is freely and in a volunteer fashion. That it would bring the whole galaxy there by showing the planet's wonderfulness. Then, the master computer change its way.

Fascinating Facts:

This is a sequel to the first season of The Original Series' episode, “Shore Leave” written by Theodore Sturgeon. There were plans for a sequel episode for TOS, but it was undeveloped.

In the TOS episode, Alice was played by actress Marcia Brown. In this episode the voice of Alice was performed by Nichelle Nichols.

Actor William “Billy” Blackburn was the White Rabbit in the TOS episode. James Doohan was the voice of that character in this episode.

[saintsofwarding]

WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Header by keltii-tea

Chapter 21: A Family Meeting

A long time ago, Miranda had carried her here before. A small, squalling bundle, a red-faced baby in a tiny pink sweater, howling for her parents in fear and confusion. Her father was gone, torn away from her. Her mother had changed, and this new one was strange, sharp, wrong, crooning an unfamiliar lullaby as she cradled her softly against her downy feathers.

"My little Eva," Miranda had whispered to her. "My darling girl. You and I are going to be together. No matter what happens, nothing can separate us again. Not time. Not my false children. Not even death."

Slowly, she'd lulled the baby, slowly rocked her into calmness. Little Rose's cries had quieted down, and she'd stared up at her new mother as she began to sing once more. Little girl, lost in the forest. The wolves are coming, sweet one.

But I shall protect you. I shall be with you.

Now, and always.

***

A long time ago, her father had carried what he thought was his daughter from her sacrificial altar, from the writhing black forest of the megamycete's tentacles. He'd bent his head to hers, even as his skin had crumbled into white crystal, glittering like salt on her skin as he brushed his thumb over her baby cheek.

"Goodbye, Rosemary," he'd whispered, while Heisenberg stood, grim-faced and bloodied and smoking slightly from his recent mutation, watching Ethan die before him, unable to save more than the child in his arms.

"I love you," Ethan told Rose. "I love you so, so much." And the little girl had slept on, peaceful, the remnants of her afterbirth clinging to her skin.

***

The tunnels wound deep beneath the earth, lined with ancient niches and gates, burnt-out candles in alcoves, pitfalls and sinkholes plunging into pure, unbroken darkness, their depths never to be touched by light. A few lycans snarled and scrabbled at heaps of carrion down the tunnels, streaking pools of gore and viscera over the stones.

"Go away!" Moreau yelled at them, making a shooing motion with his hands. "Lords...coming through!"

No sound from Ouroboros echoed from overhead; they were too far down. This was the Black God's territory, now, and evidence of the dead megamycete was everywhere. Roots of crystal bursting through the walls. The crumbling remnants of buried walls, of doorways crushed under the weight of the stone above, the passageways beyond sealed off for untold decades or centuries. Statues of saints stood in niches, surrounded by waxen lumps of burnt-out candles.

By offerings, too. Rose wondered if the dusty sheaves of grain, the great, curled goats' horns, the stacks of lei and delicately-carved crystal ornaments had been left by devout villagers, or by Miranda herself, plumbing these depths to honor the god that had given her power.

Great metal spikes and huge, torturous machinery swung from chains or slumped into rusty fragments in the occasional stretch of corridor or cavern, a dry, chill breeze whistling past their points. These Heisenberg glanced at with a smirk, his hammer propped over his shoulder, he and Donna leading the way through the darkness.

"Your work, I assume?" Rose asked him.

He shrugged. "I liked a bit of a show back then."

"Back then?" She dug her elbow into his side.

"Shut it, kid, before I kick you down a hole."

"We're here," Donna said, softly.

Heisenberg's flashlight struck metal and wood. A pair of vast double doors faced them down the rocky hallway, stout planks decorated with whorls of wrought iron, forming a pair of winged saints that stared down at Rose with mournful, crystal-set eyes. Heisenberg splayed a hand, and with the shuddering, squealing creak of ancient rust, they shuddered wide.

Beyond was a curious church. Half cavern, half chapel, it soared toward a cleft in the roof that allowed a bare trace of firelight from the still-burning factory, allowed a faint trace of falling snow to filter down to the cracked stone floor.

Balconies rose up, and up its irregular walls, painted with more saints, more holy creatures. Cobwebs fluttered in the breeze, pelts of dust turning everything in the church- pulpit and pews, gilded saints and once-lavish brocade tapestries, a collection of ornate chairs shoved against the walls- pale as milk.

Rose knew this place. She'd seen it before. As she stepped over the threshold and into the still, musty air, faintly tinged with the lingering scent of incense, memories flared through her, sudden as a camera flash.

She took you here...

A baby, a holy child, to be...anointed, to be made ready...a blessed thing, a sacrifice-

There was a frightened villager, bringing chemicals, medical apparatus. Rose had begun crying again as Miranda injected her with something in a syringe, then crushed a handful of herbs into an enameled bowl and set them ablaze.

The fire had underlit her pale, pretty face, had made her golden eyes glow, and the fumes of the burning herbs had twined into Rose's head, quieting her once more. Strange visions flickered over the dark planes of her infant mind, as if from a half-forgotten dream. Long-faced kings crowned in stone. The heartbeat of something great, something sleeping, further belowground still. A child arrayed in silver and wolfsbane, lying still and cold beneath a blue, blue sky.

She didn't understand the visions, and yet there was something to them, something unfurling inside her, calling out-

The cave church had shook, then, as if struck by an earthquake. Miranda had smiled. "You hear that, sweet one?" she'd whispered to Rose. "The Black God is calling to you. It's waking up. And soon, all of this will be over."

Now, Rose took a deep breath as she strode to the pulpit. Donna began lighting candles, and soon the cave church was full of shivering golden light.

The others followed her in. Dimitrescu took her place in a massive chair, seemingly made for her unique proportions. Donna came to her side, Angie in her lap, chattering her teeth and wriggling her spindly fingers as if in anticipation. Moreau took the empty spot by her left hand. Only Heisenberg was left, shoulders hunched, hat brim lowered.

He stood in the dust before her with Mia. Rose couldn't see Heisenberg's eyes, but she knew him well enough to tell he was watching her. Sizing her up where she stood.

"Heisenberg," Rose said. Her voice echoed through the cavern. "We need to begin."

"Yeah? Got a meeting plan?"

"Yes." She pointed down at Mia. "Chain her."

"Kid," Heisenberg growled.

"Chain her up," Rose said, louder.

Heisenberg didn't move. A length of chain burst from the detritus and coiled around Mia's wrists, twanging tight; with a gasp, she was yanked to the ground, falling to her knees before the Four Lords, before Rose. She looked up at Heisenberg for a moment, brow furrowed, but Heisenberg was already ambling away.

He sprawled onto an empty pew, bracing the head of his hammer against the flagstones, and flipped his hand, as if to say let's get this shit over with.

"Good," Rose said. She cleared her throat and stepped forward, clammy hands set on the pulpit. Her only leadership experience was filling in for the absent captain of her class debate team, Freshman year of high school, and that had ended with her a stuttering mess. "I...I don't know how Miranda did it, but...uh. This is the way I'm gonna do it now. I declare this meeting of the Four Lords in session."

"What are we gonna do?" Moreau burst out, his voice rising in a warbling wail. A few lycans, gathered around the church's heights, snarled in response. "The outsiders...they found a way in, they have big guns, they blew up the factory-"

"Maybe if you hadn't been such a slow, useless lump, we might have had time to fight 'em off," Angie squealed, nearly springing from Donna's lap.

"I ran as fast as I could," Moreau said, his eyes slick and wet again, though maybe that was just always how they were. "I...I tried, Rosemary, tell them I tried..."

"Listen-" Rose began.

"Yeah, yeah, you tried, you tried," Angie went on. "Just like I bet you tried when Daddy Ethan came a-calling. We nearly got him, and all Donna had were some flowers-"

"Oh, stop putting on airs, you porcelain Pierrot," Dimitrescu drawled, draped languorously in her chair like she once again wore her finest couture, not battered-up armor still stained with black streaks of her own blood. "If I'm not mistaken, Winters took you down with a pair of rusty scissors."

"Better than him shooting you down like a clay pigeon!"

"This isn't a freaking contest," Rose said, loudly. "We're not here to discuss how my dad killed you all, okay? We've got bigger problems. Namely, her."

She pointed down at Mia. Her mother looked up at her, face pale and set.

"If Heisenberg's right-" Rose started.

"I am, kid," he said.

"If Heisenberg's right," Rose repeated, "Mother Miranda made an escape hatch for her own death. A way to resurrect herself, through her. Is that right?"

Mia nodded. "As far as I can tell. She wasn't exactly revealing her master plan while she was cutting me open."

"From what I saw," Heisenberg interjected, "If you don't mind me giving all of you a scientific lecture. You don't mind? Right- so the deal I figure is that Miranda implanted a sample of her own biomatter into Mommy Mia here, and her regenerative abilities, plus her own polyphenic cells, allowed said biomatter to stay dormant yet still living within her host until specific circumstances'll trigger a full physiological and cerebral transformation. Old matter consumed, recombined into new matter. Then- boom. Say hello to Miranda Two Point Oh."

"Specific circumstances?" Rose said.

"That's what I said."

"What circumstances?"

"Hell if I know."

Rose looked to her mother. "Do you have any ideas why hasn't she taken you over completely, yet?"

"No." Mia exhaled. "Believe me, if I did, I would tell you."

Rose chewed her lower lip. What was Miranda's game? Why not bust out, transform, take control of the Four Lords, do whatever she wanted? Was there some other part of the plan she was missing, some piece she hadn't slotted into place?

Her throat ached. God, was this how Chris felt all the time?

"Okay," she said. "Fine. Any ideas?"

"I say we kill her." Dimitrescu lifted a hand, letting her claws slide out a few inches, admiring their black gleam in the candlelight. "Can't hurt."

"If only your brain was as big as the rest of you," Heisenberg muttered. "You think I didn't consider that?"

"I don't want to contemplate what horrors of the psyche you have and haven't considered," Dimitrescu said.

"Maybe you should! Maybe you wouldn't have lost all three of your fuckin' kids and then died if you hadn't been such a-"

Dimitrescu rose with a guttural snarl, her claws fully extended, now. "Mention my daughters," she said, "insult them again, and I'll-"

"Sit down, Dimitrescu," Rose ordered, cutting her off. "You, too, Heisenberg."

"This is pointless." Dimitrescu lifted herself to her full height. "Those foolish little mortals invading our territory is the matter at hand, not this..."

She made a dismissive gesture toward Mia. "...this...experiment of Mother Miranda's. How do we know she wasn't a failure? How do we know, save by her word alone, that she is what you claim at all?"

"I saw it," Heisenberg said.

"Did you? You weren't taken by her duplicitous charms? By her clever, conniving wiles? Do remind me, Heisenberg. Weren't you desperate enough before to work with a mortal who had invaded our valley?"

He jabbed his finger at her, a little bolt of electricity snapping over his glove. "You're just mad because you didn't think Winters was a big enough threat to matter and it ended up going to shit for you!" "Perhaps," Dimitrescu said. "But at least I fought with honor."

"You still think clinging to your devotion to Miranda is honorable," Heisenberg muttered. "Fuck, she really had you whipped the second she gave you that ugly-ass castle, huh."

"I...I could try," Moreau piped up.

All eyes went to him. Even Angie craned her neck over to look at him with her unsettling, bug-eyed stare.

"I could..." He paused for a long moment. "I could...take her to the...the clinic...my clinic..." He twiddled his fingers. "There's...stuff there. Medicines and equipment. Things I could do. To help her. Look inside her...now that your factory is gone..."

He spared a nervous glance at Heisenberg. "I'm...I'm sorry, Karl, about...what happened..."

"Eh, whatever, wasn't your fault, fishstick," Heisenberg said, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Where's your clinic?" Rose asked.

"The...reservoir, on a hill...looking over the lake-" Moreau gestured toward one of the cave walls, rather unnecessarily.

"That's through town, you fool," Dimitrescu muttered. "I doubt Ouroboros is going to be very intimidated by you flopping about on land like a dying trout, even if you did manage to pull yourself together enough to transform."

"I can do it!" Moreau faced her, hands fisted. "I can swim there. I can take Miss Mia and we can go together."

"You'd do that?" Rose said. Moreau swung round toward her, his humpback pulsating wildly with, she guessed, excitement and fear. "You're sure? It could be dangerous."

"For you, Rosemary," Moreau said. "Ohhh...anything."

Cold rushed through Rose. She felt, again, Heisenberg's eyes on her. Behind her, Angie gave off a low, sinister little laugh.

"I'm not gonna force you, Moreau," Rose told him. "Not again."

His eyes went to the floor.

"You don't have to," he said quietly. "I...I want to help. I...failed everyone last time. I saw what Mother was gonna do to me and I got scared. I don't wanna be scared again. I don't wanna fail us again."

His eyes met hers once more, and Rose saw something in them, deep down. A flicker. More than his usual glazed desperation.

"Not like the first time," he whispered, the words almost lost under the mumbling way he spoke.

"What?" Rose said.

Moreau looked away quickly. "I don't know. I don't remember."

He didn't speak again. Rose looked out at the others. "Then we start there," she said. "It may be dangerous, but-"

"Dangerous?" Dimitrescu scoffed. "More like disastrous. This...creature...was always delusional, and now even more so. There's no telling whether there even is still a clinic to utilize, much less the necessary supplies to remedy our little problem..."

"I can tell," Moreau said. "I've been here all this time. Not you!"

"Do forgive me," Dimitrescu said, her voice deeply caustic. "I forgot you were playing dollhouse with my castle. You should speak to Beneviento. She might have some suggestions for you."

"That's rich," Heisenberg snorted.

"You...don't need to be so mean!" Moreau's slimy hands wound into fists as he shifted forward. Snarls filled the air; Rose glanced upward as the lycans descended, crawling from scaffolding to railing, lips pulled back from sawblade teeth.

She swallowed, her throat dry. "Moreau-"

"Always looking down on me. Always saying I'm...stupid-" He began to quiver, tendrils nosing out from beneath his makeshift coat. A lycan dropped to the ground by his side, staring with hunger at Dimitrescu. "I'll...I'll show you what...what I can do-"

"That's enough!" Rose cried.

She flung out her arms. Power rippled through the cave church; it blasted aside the dust; it extinguished candles in a wave. Mold burst from under her feet, black veins arcing their way through her skin so that within moments she was cocooned in a writhing coat of them, the pool at her feet churning in an iridescent black slurry.

Moreau cringed; Dimitrescu lifted a fine brow.

"We don't fight each other," Rose said. "You did that before, and look where the hell it got you. I'm not gonna watch you turn against each other. No one...no one dies. Not again. Understand?"

She cast her eyes over the Four Lords assembled before her. "What Miranda did to you- to all of us- it's not going to happen again. Not with me."

Heisenberg shifted on the pew, glove leather creaking on the handle of his hammer.

"Not with me," Rose said again. She drew a short breath, her mold collapsing into nothingness. "It's like they say. Us monsters have to stick together."

***

Rose found Moreau a little ways down the outside passageway, contemplating a flooded section of the cave system. Fat, pallid catfish cruised through the dark water, and his eyes followed their movements, round and round and round again.

"Moreau," Rose said.

He lifted his head. "Do you...need anything?"

"You know something. Don't you."

"No, no." He looked back down. "I don't...nothing. I'm sorry."

"Yes, you do."

He stayed silent. Rose let out her breath, then went to his side, climbing onto a rock so she could sit next to him. His reek was powerful- rotting fish, stomach acid, something sweetish that coated the inside of her mouth with every breath. She didn't leave him. She watched the fish with him in silence for a long time.

"I'm sorry, Moreau," she said, at last. "What I did to you back there. I'm so, so sorry."

"You...you had to."

"Maybe. But I still shouldn't have done it. Did Miranda make that excuse to you, too?"

"Mother did what she needed to do. I...I just wanted to...help her. And I failed her. By being...this. By being wrong."

"Maybe she failed you."

"No! No!" He scrabbled at his gelatinous belly with his stubby fingers, the movement anxious. "Mother Miranda was right to treat me this way. I...promised her. I promised her! And I broke the promise."

"What promise?"

"To...save her."

"Save...Miranda?"

"No." His voice dropped to a whisper. "To save Eva."

Silence fell once more. Eva, Miranda's daughter. The dead girl that was the point of all this, that Miranda had spent over a century destroying hundreds of lives to save. Rose's mind whirled as she put the pieces together, as it dawned on her.

Then that meant-

"Did you know her?" she asked. "Before?"

A long pause. Then- he bobbed his head, up and down.

"You're the oldest one, aren't you? The first one of the Four Lords she made."

Again he spoke quickly, words slurred together. "I don't remember."

Maybe he was keeping it from her, feeling that spilling his guts- so to speak- would be some kind of further betrayal of Miranda. Maybe he really didn't remember. Maybe it wasn't so much a memory as a feeling, a knowledge, ingrained so deep in his subconscious it wasn't a matter of forgetting or remembering at all.

He hadn't saved Eva. Whatever that meant, whoever Salvatore Moreau had been before he'd been twisted into the creature he was now, he still felt the guilt of that failure, the pain of that death, reverberating up through the decades of his strange, heartbreaking second life.

The guilt of having lived, when another had died. Of remaining alive when so much was gone, was lost, and lost forever.

"But-" Moreau started up. "But...she...she was always smart. So smart. The smartest person in the whole world. And she, she always...made p-p-prototypes. So that...when she really wanted to...she'd get it right."

He cut off. Rose sat there, staring into the dark water. She thought she was beginning to understand.

"She didn't get it right with me," Moreau whispered.

Rose hesitated.

Then she lifted her hand and set it to Moreau's shoulder. He flinched violently, turning with a wet gasp to stare at her with his mismatched eyes. Rose made out the gleam of his sharp teeth behind his parted lips.

Rose began to pet him. Slowly, carefully. Acid burned against her fingertips, but with her regeneration, the abraded skin healed almost as soon as it turned red. She began to hum a little. Nothing specific. The sound filled the shadows, keeping them both company.

Moreau's eyes slid shut. He faced front again, and Rose kept petting him even after she'd stopped humming, long moments of silence, together in the darkness.

***

She returned to the cave church, to Donna, waiting where Rose had left her. The candles had begun to go out, but Donna and Angie sat by a lit cluster of them melting atop an ancient table, painting the dust with flickering amber, eerie shadows cast across the cavern walls. Dimitrescu and Mia sat on the opposite side of the cavern, not looking at one another.

Rose wondered, with a weary glint of humor, if they'd chatted at all. What would they even talk about? The pros and cons of motherhood? Top ten Romanian wine varieties? Maybe they were swapping tips on coping with total family annihilation. Ha, ha, ha.

"Do you still want to do what we discussed?" Donna asked her as she stopped on the far side of the table.

"Yeah."

"You're sure."

"Are you?" Rose said.

Donna faced front, the barest hint of her face visible beneath her veil. "It may be...dangerous," Donna said. "The results might be catastrophic."

"I get it. But I have to know."

"Have to know, have to know," Angie groused. "Can't anyone just be happy with staying put and  staying humble."

"You mean what you said back there, kid?"

Rose looked round. Heisenberg stood behind her, hammer shouldered; he'd gotten hold of a cigar somewhere, and its bittersweet smoke plumed up from beneath his hat brim, filling the dusty air with a faint blue haze.

With a last glance at Donna, Rose faced him.

"I said a lot," she told him. She crossed her arms. "You'll have to be more specific."

"What you said to the Gruesome Foursome. Us monsters have to stick together, blah blah blah." He tilted his head. "And that you're not gonna be like Miranda. Interesting choice of words. You plan on running this dog and pony show once the dust settles?"

"If it settles."

He let out a bark of a laugh. "C'mon, kid, I didn't teach you to be pessimistic."

Rose lifted her head, drawing breath to blow him off, to send him on his way with a snippy taunt. Their main form of communication. The silence stretched.

She closed her mouth.

"Something's happening to me," she whispered. "Something bad. I...I don't know- I felt it when I was a little kid, with you, but then...not for a long time. Not until the Embryo..."

She looked away, into the shadows.

"And with Moreau..." she went on. "And with you..."

She trailed away. Her throat was tight, her eyes hot. Don't cry, she urged herself. Oh, God, don't cry.

"Kid," Heisenberg said.

She still didn't look at him.

Warmth touched her cheek, brushing away her tears. Heisenberg's hand. Ungloved. He traced the cut on her cheek that Dimitrescu had inflicted. She felt the rasp of his scars against her skin, one of her oldest memories.

"Come with me," he said.

"There's not-"

"There's time for this."

Rose paused, then nodded. "Okay," she said, her voice small, trembling, like a little girl's again, despite all her best efforts.

***

Up a back flight of narrow steps, chapped by centuries of monastic feet. Out a weathered trapdoor, back into the cold and darkness of the midwinter night. Snow swirled down, illuminated by the distant flames of the factory, by the searchlights cleaving through the mist. Ahead rose the dagger-sharp towers of Castle Dimitrescu, black against the deep blue sky.

Heisenberg pressed against a rock shelf, deep into the shadows. The only sign they were there at all was the orange glow of his cigar tip, flaring each time he inhaled. Rose hunkered down, gripping her knees as she pulled them to her chest.

Her sword rasped against the stone. Heisenberg gave it a level look. "Nice pocket knife, kid."

"It's bigger than yours."

"Shut up before I smash your skull in." "That's child abuse."

"I'll show you child abuse. Want some?" He held out his cigar.

"Uh. No thanks."

He shrugged and stuck it between his teeth again. He stared out across the hillside, the village, the lights of Ouroboros visible amidst the crystal thicket.

"Just like old times, isn't it, kid?" he said at last.

"You mean the village, or us freezing our asses off while faced with certain doom?"

"Either or." He blew a stream of smoke into the night. "So. Let me guess. You think you're succumbing to the same urges of control and destruction as Miranda."

"Basically."

"Are you?"

"I don't know."

"You gotta have an opinion one way or another."

"I-" She took a sharp breath. "I think- uh. Ever since the beginning...you were under my control. The second Ethan gave me to you, I...I think..."

She couldn't go on. Her throat was tight. "I needed protection so I made you want to protect me," she forced out. "Put spores in your brain. Toggled its paternal on switch. Whatever, I don't know the science."

"Yeah, I kind of figured the same."

Rose blinked, jerking her head up. "Huh? Really?"

"Yep. I mean, look at me, kid, I look like someone's dad to you?"

"You do now."

His mouth flexed. The small betrayal cracked something inside Rose. Heat slid down her face; she scrubbed the tears away with her palm. Fuck, this was so stupid. Stupid tears. His stupid scarred-up face.

"You...you don't hate me for that?" she asked.

"Nah. I admire your survival instincts, really. I'm more concerned with the here and now. You gonna be the overlord of the village? Put us under your thrall? Start it all again, resurrect your father, keep the whole thing going, et-fuckin-cetera?"

"I don't want to-"

"Then don't."

"Then you don't think it's inevitable?"

"What?"

"The past. Coming back." She rested her chin on top of her knees. "It always comes back. And then more people get hurt. And then it all starts again. Over and over."

"So give up. Lie down in the dirt. Choke on it."

She looked at him sideways. "You suck at giving advice."

"Heh." He grinned at her. "And you suck at taking it."

"It's gotten me this far."

"That's what worries me."

Rose stared out at the landscape before them. The castle, the mountains. This ancient place, the site of distant wars, distant secrets, long-ago tragedies that clung on past all reason.

She should wish that none of this had happened. That she was any other girl, that she was safe somewhere in some shitty apartment in some faraway city, worrying over homework, or crushes, or fitting in. Maybe she was sick in the head, irredeemably fucked, but Rose couldn't help but be, in some way, grateful. This place, and the events that had transpired here, had given her this life. It had given her Heisenberg, her years with him. It had given her this moment, this silence, watching the snow flurry round the castle turrets, glimmering like stars in the winter wind.

"It's beautiful," Rose murmured.

"Huh?" Heisenberg squinted. "Eh. Yeah, I guess."

"Does it have a name?"

"I..." He trailed away. "I don't know. Maybe once. But for Miranda, this village was the only village. If it ever had a name, she took it from the town's collective consciousness and she devoured it. Ate it up. If she can't have something...well, fuck, no one can."

"She took so much from everyone. From..." Rose looked down. "From my mother, too. I...I don't know if I can ever get used to her being around..."

"Yeah, I get it, kid."

"I'm going with Donna to get to the bottom of this. I think together we can take a look at my memories. Find out what's really happening with me and Miranda."

"You expect to find some answers that way?"

"Hopefully."

"Mm." He flicked ash out into the night, his head tipped back. "Good. 'Cause I really don't want to kill you like I thought I might have to."

A strangled laugh burst from Rose. "You were thinking about killing me? Seriously?"

"Nothing personal, kid."

"Oh, not even a little, I'm sure."

"While you and Donna go trip balls, I'm staying with Mia. Gotta make sure Dr. Freak-enstein doesn't start eating her intestines or some shit. Hope you don't mind."

"You have a crush on her or something?" Rose shook her head as he drew breath. "Never mind. Don't answer that."

He did anyway. "I owe her one. Long time ago."

"I guess that's not personal either."

"Not to you." A pause. "You gonna be okay?"

"Maybe."

"Miranda was scared of you. Remember that. All her power, a hundred years of manipulation and getting high on her own supply, and she still had to neutralize you into crystal shards five seconds after she brought you here. Get it?"

"Kind of."

"You scared?"

"Yeah."

He was silent for a few minutes. Rose thought he was done, that he was about to climb to his feet with some smart-ass remark and head inside again.

He didn't.

"After the explosion," he began. "After your papa gave you to me, uh..."

He muttered for a little bit under his breath.

"...I was scared, kid," he said. "Marooned in a world I'd only peered at from the outside. Echoes in the dark. I was going off nothing, off instinct. And I was stuck with you, with this fragile little thing, and I was sure I was gonna break you. All I wanted was to protect you. From everything. From Miranda. From me. From this place..."

His eyes slid shut, as if he couldn't take the sight of the village anymore.

"Fucked it up," he told her. "All of it."

"Not everything," Rose said.

He glanced sideways at her with one pale eye. "Yeah?"

"I really did like that exploding pony you made for me that one time."

"Before or after the explosion?"

"Uh. Before."

"Fuckin' spoilsport." He paused, then reached out to smooth his hand over her hair, like he had when she was a little girl. "Rosie, I...uh."

"Say it. This time."

Heisenberg gave her a small, scarred smile.

"I love you, kid," he told her. "Now, and always. Spores in the brain, your creepy little hands pulling my strings, I don't care. Fuck all of that. No matter what, you'll always be my girl. I'll always fight for you."

He paused, gave a little scoff, and shook his head, as if bemused with himself. "Can't believe it's come to this," he muttered.

"Shut up," Rose told him. "I hate you so much."

She leaned against him, and after a minute he hooked his arm over her shoulders, pulling her into a one-armed hug, swift, and hard, and ferocious. He smelled of sweat and motor oil, tobacco and ozone. Rose was pretty sure she wasn't any better.

Over at the factory, a rippling boom shook the ground, and nuclear blue-white flames crackled skyward.

"Ah," Heisenberg said. "There goes the reactor."

"Don't change the subject," Rose murmured, against his chest.

And for a moment, for a moment, as long as they could, they huddled together against the cold, as the flames from the burning factory roared into the sky.

[slowroadtosantiago]

Santiago de Compostella

I have decided to carry on with the blog for a few more days until we get home, I suppose we’re still having our adventure and it will help us remember what we did in years to come. But the stories are likely to be a bit more mundane now so can be skipped if you are bored. However, we’ve just had a cracking evening with our Camino family and that needs telling.

So, starting at this morning, we had a good night’s sleep and didn’t wake until nearly 8! However, we’re not sure if Jane has a few bed bug marks or it’s just heat rash. We’re a bit paranoid now. Check out was at 11, a real luxury when most albergues chuck you out at 8 if you’re not already gone by then.

There was a cafe just up the road so we went for breakfast then stopped at a pharmacy on the way back to get some stronger bite cream as I was discovering new bites (just mossies probably).

Our next stop was the airbnb so we asked the man on the reception desk of last night’s hostal if he could call us a taxi. It was a bit lazy as it was only just over 1 km away but it would mean we’d get very sweaty carrying the rucksacks! I’m glad we did as we’ve booked our ride to the airport on Friday with the same driver.

We dropped our bags but it was too early to check in so went back into town for a wander. The first place we found was the market housed in a lovely old complex. We found a nice souvenir shop where we bought a few bits. We then meandered for a while stopping for coffee in a small square where a man was busking. The streets of the old town are narrow with some very interesting shops.

Some of the streets near the cathedral are renown for their silversmith shops and we found one selling some really nice pieces which took my eye.

I had messaged Alex, to find out when she and the gang might be arriving so after the shopping we went back to the main square to wait for them all and spent a very happy time people watching. It was interesting seeing the mix of emotions as people entered the square, some crying and some obviously thinking ‘is that it?’

Laura also turned up to wait and eventually we saw them all, congratulated them, gave them big hugs, took their photos then left them to it to adjust and get their Compostellas with the promise of meeting later for food.

Jane and I were starving by then so went back to an Italian we had seen on the way in for their menu meal. I’m not sure how we’re going to adjust to 20 minute lunches when we spent the best part of 2 hours sat on a table outside people watching, eating and enjoying a couple of glasses of wine (it was just the two).

The cathedral didn’t have any services on so we got a proper look at what was inside. There were some interesting chapels and the altar piece is quite something. But the tranquility was spoilt by the noise of drilling coming from one of the side chapels.

It was time to get to the airbnb. It’s a very nice clean and airy two bed flat about 8 minutes from the cathedral. Jane’s got the double bedroom and I’m in bunks again, for the last time in a while I hope!

Alex messaged about meeting up so we all met in the main cathedral square along with some new friends they had met on the way.

There were going to be 11 for food so we went back to the same tapas bar as yesterday on the off chance they could fit us in, and as we were early we were lucky and they did after a short wait.

I thought it was a bit fishy when Ernest took charge of the ordering with so many of us there. We had some beautiful dishes, and lots of them, before he and Tim let on that they would be covering the bill. It was a really lovely evening, full of chatter and story telling, a wonderful way to finish the journey with our Camino family.

We finished the evening buying ice creams for everyone from a shop up the street. I have a new favourite of ‘cheesecake’.

After some big hugs we said goodbye and are now settling down quite late for us. Tomorrow is our day trip to Finisterre.

[kmomof4]

Christmas Miracles for Storybrooke Ch.2 Complications

We’re back, y’all!!! Thank you so much to all those who are reading and have left kudos and comments on the first chapter! I’m so glad y’all are enjoying it!! This week, we have a wee bit of angst in the form of one Cora Mills. Gee, are y’all surprised? But like I said, it’s just a wee bit and Miss Cora is completely handled in this chapter. I hope y’all enjoy and let me know what you think.

All the love and thanks again to @jrob64​​ for her encouragement and beta prowess, @snowbellewells​​ for her help in brainstorming this fic last summer, @whimsicallyenchantedrose​​ for answering all my questions about Catholicism in general and nuns in particular, and finally to @motherkatereloyshipper​​ for her manips of Killian, Emma, and Mother Superior I used in the artwork! Thank you all so much ladies!!!

Summary: Dr. Killian Jones has returned home to set up his medical practice where he is warmly greeted by the townsfolk, including a group of nuns who'd cared for him for a time when he was a boy and that he'd helped build a chapel for when he was in high school. When Killian discovers that in the last few years the sisters had taken in several children and teens, he agrees to build them a kindergarten so CPS won't separate this found family at the end of the year. Will he be able to get it built in time? And what about Emma Swan, the pregnant teen he just hired as a triage nurse? What about these feelings he's developing for her? Christmas is the season for miracles and Storybrooke may be in for a few of them.

Rating: T for mentions of rape

Words: Just over 5400 of approx 23,340

Tags: Inspired by Christmas Lilies of the Field, Mentions of Rape

On ao3 From the beginning/ Current Chapter

Tagging the usuals. Please let me know if you’d like to be added or removed.

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Under the cut, unless Tumblr ate it.

Thursday afternoon, Killian stood at the double doors of the home of Cora Mills, Storybrooke’s most prominent citizen. He could tell from the construction that it was relatively new and he looked around taking in the details that all pointed to a wealth he could scarcely imagine.

He remembered her late husband Henry from when he was growing up, but his first impression of the wealthy widow’s demeanor couldn’t be further from that of the older gentleman he had known. For one thing, Henry would never have lived in a house this grand. He’d lived much closer to town, closer to the community he loved so much, in a humble abode, much more in keeping with the other houses in the small town. His widow must have built this monstrosity after he was gone. He had a hard time imagining Mr. Henry, as he was known around town, agreeing to live on the tall bluff just outside the town limits where Killian now stood. He was quiet and soft spoken, kind and generous to a fault, rather than haughty and demanding. Just in the brief time Killian had been back in town, he could see that Miss Cora- as she insisted everyone in town called her with a simpering, indulgent smile, as if she were bestowing on him a great honor- used her wealth as a means to draw attention to herself rather than the selfless generosity of her late husband. It’d never been confirmed, but Killian was as certain as he could be that Henry Mills had been the sole benefactor that allowed the chapel to be built in the first place.

The door opened then to a liveried butler. Killian shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was.

“Dr. Killian Jones?” he asked.

“Uh, yes,” he replied.

“Miss Cora is expecting you. Follow me please.”

Killian followed the man into the house. The ostentatious furnishings, high ceilings, and marble floors served to further cement his opinion of the woman in his mind as he followed the butler to the second story landing, before being ushered into an elaborate sitting room and bedroom beyond. He had to fight rolling his eyes as the butler announced him.

“Dr. Killian Jones, Madam.”

“Thank you, Claude.”

Killian came into the room and was shocked to find Miss Cora still in her bed. She held her hand out to him in greeting.

“Thank you so much for coming, Doctor,” she crooned, not sounding at all like she was at death’s door as she’d insisted she was to his receptionist when she’d called earlier.

“It’s my pleasure, Miss Cora,” he replied, not too fussed about the bald-faced lie he’d just told the woman. If she was so conceited and unperturbed about wasting his time with obviously unnecessary housecalls, then he felt no qualms taking advantage of it. He was going to have to charge her triple his normal rate to make up for the gas he wasted getting here and back to town, as well as missing the patients he could be seeing. Thank God Emma had started as a nurse on Tuesday and she’d had a couple of days to get her feet under her and be comfortable with filling out patient charts and getting them checked in and ready for him when he returned. “What seems to be the trouble today?”

“I had two reasons for calling you today, Doctor,” she began. “First, this place on my shoulder…” She trailed away and lifted herself from where she was reclined on the pillows at the head of the bed, twisting herself until they could both see the area she wanted him to look at. “I searched on Google and it said it was either melanoma or frostbite.”

Killian stared at her, too dumbfounded to even laugh. “This is an insect bite, Miss Cora. Have you been around any horses the last couple of days?”

She looked affronted as she answered. “Yes, I went riding yesterday. But, I…”

“This is a horsefly bite,” he interrupted. “Not melanoma. And certainly not frostbite. Let me get you an ice pack to reduce the swelling and some hydrocortisone cream.” He rose from the bed and left the room, looking for Claude.

He found the man in the kitchen preparing what smelled like chicken noodle soup. He couldn’t help smiling as he inhaled the fragrant aroma.

“Miss Cora’s favorite when she’s ill,” Claude explained.

Killian nodded in understanding and asked if she had a medicine cabinet as he got a package of frozen peas out of the freezer. Claude pointed to the cabinet just behind Killian. He opened the door and his jaw dropped. Inside, the three shelf cabinet was stuffed to the brim with every medication and vitamin known to man, all neatly organized in alphabetical order. Not only was the woman a Google MD and hypochondriac, she was apparently also a bit compulsive with her organizational system. He found the hydrocortisone cream and began making his way back toward the main part of the house, but not before he saw Claude emerging from the walk-in pantry, which was filled with cans upon cans of chicken noodle soup. He was quite thankful he was able to disguise his bark laugh as a cough before Claude caught it.

Killian re-entered her room and sat on her bed, holding the peas in place for a few minutes before putting the cream on the bite. “You said there were two things you called me about, Miss Cora?”

“Yes,” she affirmed. “I understand you’ll be building the kindergarten for the nuns after the bazaar in a couple of weeks. And that you helped your brother in the building of the chapel ten years ago.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Wonderful!” she exclaimed excitedly. “I’d like to hire you to build the booths for the bazaar I’m sponsoring to raise funds for the kindergarten. It will be held out on the bluff in front of the house overlooking town. We have thirty-five organizations and individuals from all over West Virginia who are participating, all of the proceeds going to the building of the kindergarten.” Cora’s eyes glistened with the suggestion of tears, but Killian would bet the payment for the building of the chapel that they were anything but genuine. “I just can’t abide the thought of those precious children being taken away from the home they’ve found with the sisters.”

“I, uh…” Killian stammered.

“I absolutely insist that you be the one to build the booths,” she continued. “Since you are going to be a part of building the kindergarten itself, I know you’d be proud to be a part of the bazaar as well.”

“Miss Cora…” he tried again to interrupt. “I couldn’t possibly…”

“Oh, nonsense,” she said, cutting him off completely. “Just name your price. Money is obviously no object,” she assured him, waving vaguely around the huge room they were in. “I will, of course, provide all the materials you need.”

“But you don’t understand,” Killian interjected again. His words finally caught her attention, and she stared at him, blinking silently. “I can’t take the time away from my practice…”

“Aren’t you planning on working on the kindergarten nights and weekends once you start on it?”

She’d obviously spoken to one of the sisters about the plans. “Well, yes…”

“You can do the same for the bazaar. I’ll pay you thirty-five thousand.”

Killian gulped in shock.

“Thirty-five thousand dollars?”

“No, thirty-five thousand chickens,” she joked with a laugh. “Of course, thirty-five thousand dollars, you silly man,” she said, slapping him lightly on the arm.

He didn’t want to. He didn’t like this woman and he really didn’t like the idea of essentially being at her beck and call for the next three weeks as he’d be working on the project. But then again, thirty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money. And not something he could afford to turn down. Killian sighed and held out his hand.

Miss Cora smiled triumphantly as she shook it. “I’ll have my attorney draw up a contract for you to sign bright and early Saturday morning. Thirty-five thousand dollars to build thirty-five booths for the Labor Day Bazaar, benefitting the Mission Kindergarten.”

“Thirty-five thousand dollars,” he agreed, rising from the bed. “I’ll see you at 8am Saturday morning, Miss Cora.”

“See you then, Dr. Jones,” she sing-songed, waving as he left the room.

Make that quadruple my regular fee, he thought, leaving the house.

~*~*~

Father Timothy stood at the front of the chapel, his hands extended toward the congregation to pronounce the final blessing for the Sunday morning Mass.

“The Lord be with you.”

“And with your spirit,” the congregants replied.

“May almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

“Amen.”

Father Timothy lowered his hands as the congregants quietly filed out of the chapel. The last Sunday of the month was when the sisters hosted a lunch for the parishioners. As Killian stepped out into the late summer sunshine, he saw them emerging from the house, laden down with a wonderful spread that had his mouth watering in anticipation.

The sisters had really outdone themselves. He knew they were all very good cooks- he’d been a frequent guest at the mission table since that first dinner two and a half weeks ago, his unmarried status plus all the work he was doing for the bazaar coming up next weekend probably had a lot to do with that- but this was something else entirely. The congregation of the chapel numbered about forty, but there had to be enough food here to feed a hundred. There were beef and pork roasts, a huge roast turkey, and enough fried chicken to put Colonel Sanders to shame. There was Bar-B-Q, fried catfish and about a dozen casseroles. Not to mention the side dishes, desserts, and enough sweet tea and lemonade to fill a swimming pool. The sisters must have been cooking for days.

The noise and hubbub of people loading up their plates and then sitting down to eat made Killian smile. One of the things he loved about his hometown was how welcoming and friendly the community was. He sat down next to Emma at the long picnic table as she cut the turkey on Alice’s plate into bite size pieces. He watched her tender care with the little girl and a thought flashed wholly unbidden through his mind. She was going to be a great mom, and right on its heels, a thought and desire for his own family one day. His face heated as he thought about who he might like to be the mother of his future children.

He was glad Emma was concentrating on Alice and couldn’t see his face. They’d been working together for almost two weeks now and had settled into a comfortable friendly relationship, but he couldn’t help the acceleration of his heartbeat whenever they arrived at the office every morning, until the busyness of the clinic and his job took over his attention. He had come to care very much for the young woman in a short amount of time, but it wouldn’t be right for him to pursue any romantic attachment with her, not at this point in their relationship.

She turned to him then, a soft and pleased smile on her face.

“I hope you don’t mind my company outside of the office,” he said, returning her smile.

“Not at all,” she replied, her cheeks a lovely pink as she tucked into the food on her own plate. “How are things coming with the booths for the bazaar?”

Killian washed down his bite of catfish with a swallow of sweet tea before he replied. “It’s going fine, but man, I’m going to be glad when it’s done.”

“I bet.” She looked at him closely and brushed her fingertips along the hair flopping over his forehead. When she realized what she was doing, she pulled her fingers away quickly. She could only hope he didn’t mind her forwardness. “You’ve been working much too hard on it,” she said, not meeting his gaze. “You’re going to have permanent dark circles under your eyes if you don’t get some rest.”

“I have a three hour appointment with my bed once I’m done with this,” he informed her. “And I should be finished with everything Tuesday or Wednesday.” He sighed, the fatigue of the last couple of weeks weighing him down. “Really looking forward to that.”

“I know you are.” They ate in companionable silence, the smacking lips and appreciative hums as they feasted testimony to the culinary skills of the sisters. “So,” she began after a few more minutes of enjoying the food, “would you mind telling me about yourself? You know virtually all of my backstory, I’d like to know yours. I understand you grew up here and the sisters cared for you for a time?”

Killian swallowed hard and his heartbeat increased as he wondered what she might mean by that statement. Was it possible she was interested in him as a man and not just as a friend?

“Yes,” he agreed. “I was born and raised here. My mother passed shortly after I was born.” He never knew his mother, but his dad and brother kept her memory alive for him as he grew up and recounting the circumstances of her death brought a melancholy that he tried not to let show. “She didn’t receive adequate prenatal care and I was breech. She died from complications a few days later.”

Emma couldn’t keep herself from touching him this time. She placed her hand on his arm, her face conveying her sorrow. “I’m so sorry, Killian. I couldn’t imagine. Did that influence your career choice?”

“It did,” he agreed with a nod. “Along with a few other experiences along the way. Storybrooke is so tiny, it’s never had enough doctors in the area, and forget about specialists. It’s too far from any hospitals. I want to try and change that.”

“That is very noble of you,” Emma said, a soft smile spreading across her lips,“and I am proud to be a part of it.”

Killian turned more toward her and smiled gently at her words. “I’m proud to have you be a part of it, Emma.” He looked further down the table to see Miss Cora watching them with a frown on her face. He turned his attention back to Emma.

“Do you have any other family?” she asked, returning to her meal. “Besides your mother? You said you were born and raised here. Were you raised by the sisters?” Her smile turned wistful. “They and the others here have become my family. I can’t imagine my life without them.”

“Well, I can certainly understand that,” he agreed. “I have an older brother, Liam, he’s ten years older than me and lives in Arlington,” he told her, his affection and pride plain to see. “He owns his own construction company. We built the chapel the spring and summer of my senior year of high school. Our father was gone by then, he passed when I was ten.”

“Oh, I see. So is that when you lived with the sisters?”

“Yes, Liam was in school but still had another year and a half before he’d graduate,” he explained. “I stayed with the sisters while he finished school and then he came back and took custody of me when I was twelve. He worked for Myers Construction over in Henderson during those years. By the time I was in high school, he was well versed in project management and wanted to try his hand at his own project, so he approached the sisters about building them a chapel. Up until then, the sisters simply helped where they could within the community, feeding the hungry, tutoring, that kind of thing; they didn’t hold any kind of services for the community until after the chapel was built. He wanted to have his own construction company someday, and he thought that’d be a good first step.”

Emma’s eyes were big and round and filled with joy as he relayed the story to her. “And I guess he fulfilled his dream, then…”

“Yes,” Killian said with a smile. “I helped him the last month or so of school and then full time after graduation. We finished it in early August and I left for college a week later. Well, I say we finished it… Mother says it still needs bells to be considered truly finished,” he amended with a playful smirk. Emma chuckled lightly and returned his smile.

“Yeah, I can see Mother saying that.” She took another bite of her food then turned to him again. “Do you have any funny stories about the sisters to tell?” Her green eyes sparkled with mischief and Killian laughed out loud.

“Of course, I do,” he replied then fell silent for a moment trying to choose one. “Here’s one of my favorites. Not long after my father died and I came to live with the sisters, Sister Grace was turning 40. So Sister Astrid and I decided to make her a cake. Now you have to understand, Astrid was new to the mission, having just taken her vows, and wasn’t particularly skilled in the kitchen. She worked mostly with the animals. So first off, Astrid accidentally ordered way too many eggs. Her finger must have slipped or something because instead of ordering the usual three dozen eggs for the month, she ordered 33 dozen.”

Emma’s jaw dropped and her hand flew to her mouth to cover her surprised laughter as she spied Sister Astrid at the other end of the table.

“I mean, it was an honest mistake, anyone could have done it, but there were still a LOT of extra eggs to find use for and not a lot of time to do it. So we got the idea of baking Sister Grace a giant birthday cake and inviting the entire community to celebrate,” Killian continued his story. “We quadrupled the recipe, thinking we’d divide the batter into two giant sheet pans and have a layer cake. We measured out the ingredients and got it all in the huge…” he held out his hands showing the approximate size of the bowl they used to mix the batter, “you know, bowl we used… for big recipes. We got it all under the industrial size mixer, but forgot to put the lid on the bowl, and turned the mixer on high.”

Emma laughed loudly as he continued his story and Killian chuckled himself remembering the absolute disaster that had ensued.

“All the flour, all the sugar, all the baking powder went flying everywhere. Astrid and I were covered, the counters were covered, the walls were covered. You could hardly see out the window, it was so covered…” Emma continued to howl, drawing the attention of the people around them. Her mirth had also drawn the attention of the sisters, and Killian felt his cheeks heat. It was one thing to share a funny story from his childhood and make Emma laugh, it was another to have to tell the sisters what was being talked about. “And THEN…”

“There’s more?” she asked, dissolving into even more laughter, even as she wiped the tears that had formed in her eyes.

“Mother walked in…” Killian covered his face with his hands remembering the stunned surprise on Mother Superior’s face before the stern, but still affectionate, countenance he was used to took back over. “You should have seen Sister Astrid’s face,” he continued. “She looked like she was about to faint dead away.” Emma couldn’t stop laughing, picturing the scene in her mind, but was finally able to bring herself under control enough to notice the attention she was drawing from the people around them. Once she did, her mirth was cut off immediately and her cheeks heated in embarrassment.

“What happened then?” she asked. “Did Sister Grace’s cake get baked?”

“Oh, yes, it did,” Killian informed her. “But we had to clean up everything first. Absolutely spotless, and Mother would be checking,” he said, raising his eyebrows significantly. “Took us about three hours to get it all cleaned up. You wouldn’t believe how many times all the surfaces in the kitchen had to be wiped down,” he said with an eye roll. “Because as soon as everything was wiped down, all the flour and stuff in the air would just settle on the surfaces all over again.”

“Ugh,” Emma commiserated. “Thankfully Sister Astrid is much more acquainted with the kitchen now, and Ashley, Ruby, and I often benefit from her knowledge.”

“Oh, do you?” he asked, with a raised eyebrow. “Well, when will I get to sample some of your own culinary creations?”

Emma blushed again. “How about I bring my breakfast casserole to the office in the morning? We could meet at 7:30 and have plenty of time to eat before the first patients arrive.”

Killian couldn’t contain the wide delighted grin on his face. He hadn’t planned on asking her anything of the sort, but the words had been out of his mouth before he could stop them. And then with her adorable blush and offer, he didn’t dare rescind the invitation, lest he inadvertently insult her cooking.

“I think that’ll be fine, Emma. Thank you, I’ll look forward to it.” She continued to blush furiously as she turned her attention to Alice, still sitting beside her. The little girl’s plate was clean and her face was taken over by a huge yawn. Emma smiled gently at the child, and made preparations for them to leave.

“I think this one is ready for her nap,” she said, with an apologetic smile.

“Looks like it,” he agreed. “I think I’m about ready for my own as well.” Emma chuckled in agreement as she wiped Alice’s face clean with her napkin.

“I enjoyed our conversation, Killian.”

“As did I, Emma. I’ll see you in the morning.”

He watched as Emma picked up Alice, who laid her head on Emma’s shoulder, and felt his heart swell with affection for them both. His eyes followed her into the barn, but once the door shut behind her, his attention was drawn to Miss Cora who was right in his line of sight. The woman’s face as she turned from the barn was red with indignation and her lips were pressed into a thin line. Killian’s brow furrowed in puzzlement as he watched Miss Cora rise from her seat and approach Mother Superior. Her agitation was clear as she spoke to the nun and a few moments later, Mother rose from her seat and preceded Miss Cora into the house. Whatever was going on, Killian did not have a good feeling about it.

~*~*~

“What do you mean she lives here?”

“I mean exactly what I said, Miss Cora,” Mother Superior said, sitting calmly behind her desk as the other woman rose and started pacing around her office. “Emma lives here at the mission. She helps us with the children and she’s also working as a nurse at Killian’s office.”

“But, but,” Miss Cora sputtered, “how can you allow that? The girl is obviously pregnant, and isn’t the other blonde girl, with that boy always hanging around her, pregnant, too?” She gesticulated wildly, disgust dripping from every word. “How can you condone this? Flaunting their immorality? Parading their sin,” she spat the word out contemptuously, “in front of these innocent children?”

Mother Superior inhaled sharply at Miss Cora’s implication and prayed silently for strength to not simply throw the woman out of her office.

“Miss Cora, please sit down,” Mother Superior said forcefully, her words brokering no argument. Once the woman returned to her seat, she continued. “Ashley and Sean have come to us because they had nowhere else to go. Ashley was put out by her family when her pregnancy was discovered and Sean is doing the honorable thing and staying with her, even enduring being ostracized by his own family in order to do what is right. They’ve both confessed and repented and are under God’s grace. And as for Emma, her innocence was taken from her by force. She’s done nothing wrong.”

Miss Cora raised her chin and sniffed haughtily. “Well,” she clipped out, “I’m afraid you’ve left me with no choice. I cannot support a mission that so clearly violates our Lord’s standard of chastity before marriage. The funds from the bazaar will be going to another charity in the area.” She rose to her feet, looking down her nose at Mother Superior who tried to keep her face neutral, betraying nothing of the rage mixed with fear of how they would now build the kindergarten. “Good day, Mother.”

Mother Superior remained silent as Miss Cora left the room and bowed her head in prayer the moment she was gone.

Several minutes later, she raised her head to a knock on her office door.

“Come in.”

The door was opened by the other sisters. They filed in quietly, standing before her desk.

“What was all that about, Mother?” Astrid asked. “Miss Cora left looking thunderous. And the look she shot Ashley could have curdled fresh milk.”

Mother Superior sighed. “As our Lord said in the Gospel According to Saint Luke, chapter 18, verse 25, ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.’ Miss Cora has decided the presence of Emma, Ashley, and Sean means she can no longer support the mission. The funds from the bazaar will be going elsewhere.”

“What?”

“No!”

“She can’t do that! How will the kindergarten be built now?”

The exclamations from around the room echoed Mother Superior’s own thoughts from earlier.

“Unfortunately, she can give the money to whomever she wants,” she informed them. “She’s the one running that particular show. But the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord. He’s allowed this for His own purposes, but His plan for this mission and these children He’s placed in our care will not be thwarted because Miss Cora is withdrawing her support. He will provide everything we need. Everything that we all need.”

“Yes, Mother.” With bowed heads, the other sisters left the room, leaving Mother Superior to her thoughts and prayers.

~*~*~

Early Thursday morning, Killian again stood before Miss Cora’s front doors. This was the second professional call he’d made on the woman this week- Tuesday she was sure she was having a heart attack but was actually only experiencing reflux after overindulging on Mexican food the night before- and he was rapidly losing his patience. He told himself the only real reason he was here was because he finished the booths for the bazaar late last night, but had been too tired to seek the agreed upon payment at the time. So he decided to kill two birds with one stone this morning- treat her for an infected splinter, he couldn’t help the huge eye roll at the thought, and pick up a check for thirty-five thousand dollars.

As he waited, he looked out at the front lawn of the house now covered with the thirty-five booths for the charity bazaar beginning tomorrow and running through Sunday. He was proud of the work he did, but the disgust he felt at himself for signing that contract with a woman who’d now gone back on her word to fund the building of the kindergarten with the proceeds was far greater. His eyes narrowed as an idea came to him. He did some quick calculations in his head and realized sitting right out there in the yard were more than enough materials to build the kindergarten. It was all he could do to contain a shout of jubilation at the realization. He’d just need to figure out a way to cajole Miss Cora into giving him the materials without her guessing his true intention.

The door opened and he spun toward Claude, trying to get his excitement under control. It wouldn’t do to give Miss Cora any hint of his thoughts once he saw her. Given her hypocrisy, he wouldn’t put it past the woman to try something - anything - to keep the money she agreed to pay him and the materials from the bazaar from going toward the building of the kindergarten, if she even suspected that was where they’d end up.

“Dr. Jones,” Miss Cora greeted him when he was ushered into her sitting room. “Thank you for coming so early this morning. The pain from this splinter kept me up all night and I simply must have some relief.”

“Of course, Miss Cora,” he commiserated. “Taking some Advil would have probably reduced the pain enough for you to be able to sleep, you know?”

“Oh, really?” she asked, mild shock in her voice. Killian studiously avoided looking at her, as he prepared a shot of lidocaine. Once he gave her the shot, he turned toward her and cleared his throat.

“You may have noticed, Miss Cora,” he began, “I finished the booths last night, and will be expecting the payment we agreed upon.”

“Oh, of course. Claude will take care of that before you leave,” she assured him. “Now, I will need you to tear everything down on Monday.”

Killian’s eyebrows hit his forehead. This was playing right into his hands, but he couldn’t hide his surprise. “Tear everything down? That wasn’t part of our agreement.”

“Oh, I’m aware,” she said. “How much will you charge to tear everything down?”

He couldn’t have planned this any better. He thought quickly about an amount that would compensate him and anyone else he brought along to help, as well as pay for the pouring of the foundation of the kindergarten, now that the work on it could begin in earnest. “What do you want me to do with the materials?”

“Oh, I don’t care what you do with them,” she said with a careless flip of her hand. “Take it all to the junkyard or recycling, whatever. But I need it gone. I’m planning a fall luncheon for my ladies Bible study group.”

Killian was just able to contain his eye roll at the woman’s hypocrisy as he began digging out the splinter now that the lidocaine had numbed Miss Cora’s foot.

“I can come with a few men from town on Monday to tear everything down. Ten thousand should cover paying all of us for our time and the equipment to haul it all away and dispose of it,” he informed her. “There. All done. The splinter is gone. I’ve put neosporin and a band-aid on to help it heal. I would stay off of it today. Once the lidocaine wears off, it’ll be pretty sore. Take one or two ibuprofen every four to six hours to keep the pain at bay. I’ll ask Claude to bring you an ice pack to put on the site to keep the swelling down.”

“Thank you so much, Doctor. Be sure to see Claude for your payment,” she said, leaning back against the arm of the sofa where she sat. “Oh, one more thing before you leave…”

Killian tried to contain his sigh of agitation as he turned back toward her. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Are you treating those girls I saw at the picnic on Sunday?”

Killian felt his hackles rise, but he took a deep breath before answering her. “I treat everyone in the community who needs it.”

Miss Cora frowned when she realized exactly what he was saying. Killian continued before she could say anything against Emma, Ashley, or the mission.

“Why wouldn’t I treat them?” he asked. “And what business is it of yours if I do? You’re not really trying to discourage me from fulfilling my duty to bring medical care to this community, are you? West Virginia has one of the highest maternal infant mortality rates in the country, and I’m sure a fine Christian woman like yourself wouldn’t deny these girls the prenatal care they need to ensure a healthy outcome for themselves and their children.” Miss Cora’s lips pressed together tightly at his thinly veiled accusation, but the haughty condemning look on her face remained intact. He sent her a look that he hoped with his raised eyebrows and thin lipped countenance, also conveyed how done he was with her attention seeking machinations before he turned away from her and left the room.

~*~*~

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