#She's one of those people who's stumbled into greatness and she's taking it in stride

[artemistorm]

Rereading through Jojo's discord lore dump stuff again and man, she reminds me of myself and of how I do things with my stories. I think it would be really fun to chat with Jojo writer-to-writer about storyplotting and storywriting, compare notes, talk about inspirations, our writer/artist journeys on how we got to where we are now in the craft, etc. Too bad there's a wall between us of her being Important and fandom famous and me being a weird little forest creature in one small corner of the sea of the fandom.

I find the processes of how different writers create their stories to be super interesting. How do you go from random plot bunny to plotted outline + completed longfic chapters? Everyone's way of doing things is wildly different and it is so fascinating. Are there any other fic writers out there who wanna chat about storywriting?

[kinardsevan]

(stop seeing me) like I'm a lifetime

rated: t | wordcount: 3.3k | read me on ao3

Evan always knew this day was coming. That there would be a day when he would wake up and it wouldn’t feel like it used to. He knew Tommy would eventually reach the point where everyone else had; where eventually the noise would get so loud that he’d be exasperated by Evan, the same way he’d had happen so many times before.

He didn’t have a clear view on how, but that didn’t really matter. Abby had promised she’d return and then left on a plane to another country, only to return engaged and having started a life with someone else. Ali could never settle into the reality that came along with his career and all the risks it entailed. Taylor…Taylor had systemtically dismantled him in ways that Ali and Abby only dreamed of. She reminded him of how needy he was, how untrustworthy he was, how exhausting he was. 

And then there was Lucy, which really was only a flirtation, but the one kiss they’d shared was enough to tell him that what he’d been chasing with Taylor wasn’t going to last. But just like everyone else, Lucy was gone before he could really know what it was, if it was meant to be anything more. 

Then there’d been his near-death. After that, he really didn’t know how to explain himself, because people didn’t seem to get it, regardless. Too often, he’d been told that people said what they said because they couldn’t relate and didn’t know what else to say. And the thing was, he didn’t need them to relate; he needed them to understand he didn’t fit inside his own life anymore. He didn’t know how to explain what it felt like to be a ghost in his own life. To wake up one day and not know who he was anymore, or how the pieces fit. To feel like his bones were too big inside his body, and his heart too small. That every little thing was too big or too small and how do you explain to people that you’re broken when they can’t see the shards? He got so sick of hearing how great it was that he’d survived because he hadn’t. Evan Buckley died for three minutes and seventeen seconds, and when his friends had managed to get his heart beating again…he wasn’t the same person. 

Which is why his foray with Natalia made sense. He didn’t know what he was looking for, didn’t know how to get comfortable in his life again. For a while, he convinced himself if he could get comfortable by being uncomfortable, that would help. So he tried to push their lives together and cram the new version of Evan Buckley into the crevices of Natalia like a jigsaw puzzle piece. If he could just make his edges match her curves, maybe they could finally settle into something real. 

But the thing about healing is, eventually the new normal just becomes normal. The dust eventually settles, and those who can’t take who you are now are just a part of the past. Those who accept who you are take it in stride, see you for who you were, and who you are now. His family had been so good at that. Eddie, Maddie, Bobby, Chimney, Athena, Hen…They never second-guessed him. They saw the way he tried to force himself to fit back into the mold of his own life even though he didn’t. And for a while, that was okay. 

Until Tommy stumbled into his life with the spin of a hurricane over the ocean in Mexican waters, landing them on a capsized ship to save his quasi-parents. Until that man looked over at him across a hangar for just a half-second too long, and then Evan couldn’t stop staring back at him, and then they were sitting side-by-side in a chopper in the morning light, saying nothing and the flurry of feelings that didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time happening inside his chest. 

At the time, he’d thought, ‘maybe this is just part of the new version of me’. Maybe meeting new people was going to be different now, now that he felt mostly healed from his near-death. He wouldn’t connect the dots from the feeling that shot through his chest when he’d touched Tommy on the deck of that ship, from the knots in his stomach when he counted down the hours after he’d asked Tommy about touring Harbor and the 217. No, it would take roughly a week and a kiss with two fingers under his chin for all the pieces to pile themselves together in the right form for him to understand.

And then…then he’d felt the cataclysm of two warring sides of his own heart. The new version of him, that wanted to fight like hell to pursue whatever the hell Tommy Kinard had woken up inside of him because it felt nothing like what he’d had before. Tommy fit into his world like he’d always been there—and hadn’t he, kind of? Maybe they were always circling each other, not entirely making a connection, always one step behind or a minute too late, but he had always been there, holding a space Evan had never even knew he needed. Until he was right there.

The problem was, there was also the part of the old him that somehow still lived at the pit of his stomach, buried beneath the rubble, rocks, rain, thunder, and lightning. The old version of him that wanted desperately to claw back to the surface and destroy things because the old Evan Buckley didn’t know how to contend with this level of security, safety, assurance. The old Evan Buckley didn’t have space for this kind of connection because he was too lost on trying to fit other people’s expectations, and even buried underneath the debris of all of those other things, he wanted to claw his way to the surface. 

But he was healed enough that he could fight the old Evan, at least for a while. It was fighting the old Evan that let him call Tommy after that failed first date. That convinced Tommy to be his plus one to Maddie’s wedding, and kissed him in the waiting room of that hospital like he wanted the whole damn world to know just how much he cared about him. And the upside was that every time the new Evan won, every time he slept next to Tommy or kissed him, or made love with him, the old Evan choked on a little more smoke, drowned a little more beneath the rubble, struggled more to find a foothold. 

At least. For a while. 

. . . 

He didn’t have a specific day. There wasn’t clarity on when the honeymoon phase ended and they were just in a relationship. Gerrard had turned up and that really didn’t knock things over for them; they were still too happy to see each other every time they turned around. The sexual side of things were still heating up, and Evan was still figuring out what he liked. He still woke up excited every day. And thank God, Gerrard only lasted a few weeks before he got himself into a world of trouble after a joint task operation had nearly gotten multiple firefighters killed, including members of the 118 and the 217. The fact of the matter was now apparent, that Gerrard really just didn’t give a damn about anyone but himself, and the man wasn’t physically up to the job anymore. 

Maybe it was in the days after, when he and Tommy had been told to go home for a week, heal up and rest. Maybe it had been after they went back to work and settled back into the routine of their careers with Bobby leading the 118 again. Maybe it was after all of that. Evan wasn’t sure. 

He just knew that at some point, he found himself staring at his boyfriend in the darkness of his bedroom, watching him sleep, knowing it was slipping. Something about it all wasn’t the same, and he’d been there before. He’d seen the look before, from Abby, Ali, Taylor. A little bit from the mirror when he’d been with Natalia. 

And so he pushed. He pushed back, made distance, tried to fill up his time again the way he had before. Told Eddie he was available more than he actually was, showed up to help out with Jee-Yun more than he needed to. Called his parents like he actually wanted to talk to them, even though things hadn’t been great since Maddie’s wedding, when he’d seen the way his mother had reacted. 

All he knew was that he needed to protect himself, protect his heart, because Tommy wasn’t Abby, or Ali, or Taylor. Tommy could break him, and if Tommy broke him, he wasn’t sure he could claw his way back from that the way he had previously. He couldn’t go through being in love with someone who wasn’t all the way in again; couldn’t watch another person leave. He couldn’t be another footnote apology in someone else’s love story. 

And it was hard. It was so, so hard, because it wasn’t like he checked out all at once. It fucking killed him, the way Tommy would kiss him like the god-damn world was ending. The way he would look at him like there were galaxies existing inside of Evan. The way his lips would ghost over Evan’s in the midst of their limbs being tangled, naked, in bed, and their gaze would catch, just for a moment, chests rolling with gasped breaths, the roll of a set of hips drawing out cries before their lips were on one another again and the moment was lost to the next one. It was so hard to remove himself from all of that, from the weight of it all, from the goddamn love he knew was going to fall out of his mouth one of these days and really break them. Because Tommy would. He would leave. He would reject Evan’s love, the same way others had in the past. He would push back at a reality that had them together. He would crush Evan beneath the rubble of it all, leave the new Evan and the old Evan side by side, and then he’d only have himself to contend with. 

. . . 

It comes on a Tuesday, and he’s not sure why that surprises him. For some reason he expected it to happen on some kind of national holiday, or during a day of importance. But, no. It’s Tuesday, two o’clock in the afternoon. Tommy’s come off shift that morning, and Evan has been avoiding him since he came off shift the night before because he’d gotten hurt on scene and he didn’t want the fight. He didn’t want to hear Tommy tell him he’d been reckless, taking twenty stitches to his forearm for breaking the glass of a car window so he could get in get the kids in the backseat. He didn’t want to hear that he was selfish and never thought about anyone else. He didn’t want to hear about how his reckless behavior was too much to deal with, too much to take on. He just…he needed more time. He wasn’t ready. 

“Were you going to call me,” Tommy asks when he slips the door shut behind himself, lets his duffel fall to the floor near the shoes inside the loft. 

Evan shifts around the kitchen counter, trying to make it look like he’s more busy working on chopping up the week’s worth of vegetable than he actually is. 

“It’s fine,” he rasps, slicing a knife down the center of a cucumber. He flips the sides, slices again and then shifts to start chopping.

“Twenty-three stitches isn’t exactly fine,” Tommy replies, crossing through the kitchen until he’s standing beside Evan. When he reaches out for his right forearm though, fingertips light against the gauze wrapped over the length of it, Evan tugs away and Tommy lets him, careful of the knife in Evan’s hands. Still, he huffs. 

“What is this?” He asks. “What are we doing?”

“I just-… I don’t need to hear it today,” Evan states, his voice more strained than he wants it to be. It makes him hate himself. The old Evan is winning right now, and that’s not what he needs. He needs to be strong, to power through this. “I get it.” 

“Do you,” Tommy asks, leaning against the counter. “I had to call Eddie after you rejected my calls three times. And then he tells me that you were in the ER last night? Evan I would’ve left work early, been there.” 

Evan shakes his head, setting the knife down and placing a bowl against the counter so he can scoop the chopped vegetables into it. When he places it on the counter, Tommy reaches out for his hands, tries to turn him, but he pulls them back, taking several steps back. 

“Look, I get it, okay? It’s too much, you want out, you’re sick of me,” he states. “I just… Not today, okay?” 

Tommy’s brow furrows at him, but when he tries to take a step forward, reach a hand out toward Evan, the younger man takes another step back, shaking his head. 

“Tommy, don’t,” he chokes out. His chest rises and falls faster, his breaths becoming more rapid. “Stop looking at me like that,” he rasps, his gaze falling to the floor. His hands are clenched tight, fingers icy with all the heat in his body being held in his face and chest. 

“Like what?” Tommy asks, and there’s that exasperated tone. Like he’s sick of him; like he can’t put up with him for one more minute because he’s sickened by him, just like everyone else. 

“Like you see a lifetime,” Evan chokes out, unable to stop the tears. He blinks them down as he shakes his head, angry at himself. This would be so much easier if he could just keep it together, but he never does, does he? The old Evan must be so happy, because he always wins. He drives everyone away, makes sure it’s just him, by himself. 

Tommy sighs. “No.” He crosses the space between them and Evan doesn’t look up as Tommy’s arms wrap around his ribs and pull him in. It makes his chest hurt more, reminds him of that feeling of not fitting in his own life. 

“S-stop,” he stammers, tries to push his hands against Tommy’s shoulders as the older man’s hand presses against the back of his head, pulls him in. 

“No,” Tommy tells him again, more firmly. 

Evan pounds his fist against his shoulder, not enough to hurt, but firm, angry. “You’ll leave. Everyone does.” 

“I’m not going anywhere,” he replies, voice steady, grip still firm. 

“I’ll lose you,” Evan chokes out. “You’ll love someone else, and you won’t look at me like that. And you’ll be fine, but I-…” 

Tommy steps back, just a single step, but it’s enough that a sob rips out of Evan’s chest before he can shut it down, and Tommy’s hands are on his face as he stares at him with a hardened expression. 

“Stop,” Evan says again, tears flooding over his waterline. “Stop looking at me like you’re going to pick me. Like you’re going to love me like it’s the last time.” 

Tommy huffs, and there are tears in his own eyes as his grip tightens on Evan’s face. 

“I do love you that much,” he says, and it’s almost a growl. “Okay? This isn’t a game to me. There’s not someone else after you, Evan. This isn’t a thing where I’m going to wake up one day and you’re the past and I just love you from the sidelines. I can’t fucking breathe when I know you’re not okay.” He drops a hand from Evan’s face, gestures to the space between them. “This? Right here? This is the lifetime you’re talking about. The way I look at you, w-when I wake up next to you? When I see you for the first time in twenty-four hours? When we’re having sex? It’s because I don’t know how I can fucking love you more, and sometimes that’s terrifying.” 

Evan hiccups a sob as Tommy’s hand comes back to his cheek, presses his forehead against Evan’s. 

“You think I’ll break you?” He murmurs, his eyes clenched tight against the tears now coming. “Baby, I won’t get up off the floor from you. I’ll be done, right there.” 

Evan shakes his head, blinking away more tears, but Tommy’s thumbs are there to brush them away before he’s pulling him in, kissing him so bruisingly that cracks the wall in Evan’s chest and his hands slip from Tommy’s shoulders, to his ribs, fisting at the fabric of his t-shirt. Old Evan, being buried under the weight of more rubble as Tommy’s tongue slides into his mouth, backing them up until Evan’s back hits the wall. Evan lets out a small ‘oomph’, wincing as something on the wall digs into his back, and Tommy pulls back. 

“I’m not going to wake up and change my mind,” Tommy murmurs to him, his lips still hovering close as he tilts his head, looking into Evan’s eyes. “Okay?” 

Evan gulps and nods, but gnaws at the inside of his bottom lip. 

“What?” Tommy lifts a hand back up, pulls on Evan’s bottom lip to get him to release it. “Say whatever it is that you’re afraid of.” 

“Just…something changed,” Evan explains. “A-and I don’t know what it was. B-but you- you stopped… I don’t know.” He shakes his head, looking down at the floor between them. 

Tommy curls fingers under his chin, tilts his head back up. 

“I stopped being terrified you were going to change your mind,” he responds. “I-If I got too comfortable-..” 

“No,” Evan insists, shaking his head quickly. “I just… I thought you were getting tired of me.” 

Tommy’s chest gives the slightest bounce with a silent laugh, the slightest upturn in the corners of his mouth as he shakes his head. “Evan, I could never get tired of you. I don’t see you for twenty minutes and I wonder what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, what new plot you’ve got up your sleeve.” He pauses for a moment, looking down between them grasping his fingers gently at Evan’s elbow and lifting his arm. “Now this? This I don’t like, because you didn’t tell me. I don’t think you’d like it if I crashed a helicopter and didn’t call.” 

Evan shakes his head, guilt seeping through his expression. Tommy lets out a long breath and lifts Evan’s arm higher, pressing his lips lightly to the gauze. 

“So you won’t do it again,” Tommy tells him. 

“No,” Evan confirms. 

Tommy nods then. He glances over to his bag on the floor and then back at Evan. “Do you want me to stay?” 

A smile pulls on Evan’s face, and there are tears again. 

“Hey now.” 

Evan shakes his head as Tommy lifts his hands, brushes his thumbs beneath his eyes to wipe away the tears. 

“No, I was…I don’t ever want you to leave,” he rasps. “So of course I want you to stay.” 

Tommy nods then, leans in and kisses him chastely. That statement will require deeper discussion; all of this will. There will be talks upon talks, discussions about abandonment issues and check-ins, spare drawers and closet space, over coffee and under the blankets. First thing in the morning and in the middle of the night. Across the expanse of a kitchen just a little too loud, and curled up tight, naked, with fingers splayed over chests and lips just a little too close. There will be choices, and questions, and equal space, too much and not nearly enough. 

“Tell me where to start then,” he responds, finally allowing some space between them. “And get an ice pack for that arm. You need to rest it.” 

[romanarose]

Darkness on the Edge of Town: Chapter 1

Joel Miller X Reader

Chapter 2

Masterlist

Summary: While heading home for a mandatory lockdown, Joel stumbles on something he wasn't supposed to see with FEDRA guards and steps in. This, unfortunately, lands with him spending unexpected time with a young woman. Oh, and there's only one bed.

warnings!: attempted gang rape, physical hard with a gun, mentions of blood, canon typical violence, lmk if I missed anything! EVENTUAL SMUT

A/N: This was supposed to be a one shot. Now I'm not sure how many chapters we're looking at. Three minimum. Also, I KNOOOOWWWWW this follows the biggest Romana trope: Protective! Man protecting a woman. I will not apologize.

EDIT: This was originally posted as an OC fic, because I had bigger plans for it, but I honestly lost a lot of steam on it. I was going to give up on it tbh but someone sent an ask asking about a chapter 2, and I hate to disappoint! So I'll be condencing the story and making it a reader fic. hoping you guys like it! ****************************

As the sun was setting, Joel walked to his home, trying to savor the last of the outside he’ll have for the next couple days. The local government had made a mandatory few day quarantine for no discernible reason other than to exercise control, remind the citizens who was in charge. A week, give or take, without work wouldn’t be great by any means, but Joel and Tess at least had a partnership, so they weren’t completely on their own. This week, however, Tess was gone. She was making a trade with Bill and Frank when the lockdown announcement came out, and Joel had to radio over for her to stay there until it ended. This meant that he had a week alone in his tiny apartment room without Tess knocking on his door for one reason or another.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” A woman shouted from the alley he was passing.

Joel’s survival instincts said to keep walking; wasn’t his business, wasn’t his problem, wasn’t him or Tess or any of their allies. He didn’t need to get involved. But Joel knew right from wrong, and as much as he liked to pretend to himself he wasn’t a good person, that he wasn’t the same person he was before Sarah died, he couldn’t keep walking. Plus, Tess would kill him if she knew he walked away from this. Turning down the alley, he saw you being pushed and pulled by some soldiers; all men. One pulled you by the shirt so you were flush against him, and you shoved him off yourself, making the young man hit the alley wall. This action earned you a pistol whip, causing blood to come out of you forehead as you cried out, stumbling backwards into the arms of another man, and Joel couldn’t stand back any longer.

“Hey!” He shouted, striding further into the alley. One of the soldiers grabbed your arm, keeping her to him and away from Joel. “What’s goin’ on here?” He said, eyeing the men. He was more or less familiar with them, some he knew their names, some he didn’t but recognized their faces.

One man he had dealt with, a trouble maker who liked to use his power to his benefit and was surround by rumors of his treatment of women. Nothing could be proven, and no real accusations were made; they wouldn’t go anywhere if there had been. His name was Ross, a younger man than Joel was by a few decades, one of those who had been teenagers when shit went south. That age had been terrible in the ‘before’, a time of confusion and soul searching for anyone, and all that had been interrupted by losing everything. This created a lot of inner turmoil that never settled for most. Some killed themselves, some managed it, some became god awful people.

Ross spoke, eyeing Joel with a smirk. “Curfew, Joel, you know the rules.”

“She’s still got ten minutes.” Joel spoke firmly, his stare intense on the younger man, letting him know he wasn’t backing down. His eyes connected with yours. Joel wasn’t an idiot, he knew there were different dangers in this world for women, something he’d likely never have to worry about outside of concern for Tess.

Not phased by Joel the way many others were, Ross continued his hold. “She lives on the other side of town, she’s not getting there on time. But don’t worry” He laughed lightly. “We’ll escort her”

If Joel wasn’t certain what they were planning, the way they laughed and smiled at each other told him. With a grunt, you kick your leg hard against his shin repeatedly, causing him to shout and push you off of him to stop the assault on his leg. Joel took the opportunity, grabbing your dirty shirt and yanking you back behind him. Surprisingly, you smack his arm in return. “Don’t fucking touch me!”

“I’m trying to help you” Joel grumbled to you.

“I don’t need it” But none the less you stood behind his broad body.

Ross was less pleased now. “Lockdown is in 5 minutes, how you gonna get her home before then, Joel?”

Joel hesitated. This was the last thing he wanted this week, a week where he had an excuse to stay home, be alone and wallow in his own misery, but there was no way he could live with himself if he just left you. “She’ll come with me”

Ross eyed him, obviously irritated that he’s losing. “You didn’t seem like the type to take in a charity case… or do you have some ulterior motives.”

Joel didn’t play games. Turning on a heel, you were now in front of him and he pushed you forward and out of the alley quickly. “Go”

You shoved him off you, whispering harshly. “Stop fucking touch me!”

“Go” But he kept his hands off you.

As they turned the corner, he heard Ross call out to them. “Four minutes Joel!” His voice echoed mockingly. “Better hurry!”

But Joel was already speed walking.

“Where are we going?” You scrambled after him.

“My place.”

You stopped in your tracks. “I’m not going with you.”

Turning around only briefly, he took one long stride towards her, pointing his finger. “You have two choices. Go with me to my shithole,” He pointed back towards the alley. “Or you can do with them. Up to you.” He saw you glare at him as he turned back around; he did his part and you were an adult, you could make her own stupid choices.

He heard you footsteps. You quickly followed him.

Joel and you barely made it in time.

The room was… a room.

One bed, a beat-up old lounge chair, a dresser, table and two chairs. The ‘kitchen’ was a small stove with a single burner, but it didn’t look very used; the microwave did. To the left there was a door, presumably to the bathroom. You stood in the doorway awkwardly, body tense and stiff.

Joel gestured vaguely around the apartment and grumbled something she didn’t quite understand, but she assumed it didn’t really matter what he said.

“Nice place” You said, looking around.

Looking slightly defensive, he replied. “No one’s making you be here”

You frowned at him. “I was trying to be polite, but fine, you live in a shithole.”

“Yeah, well, this shithole is where you’re stuck for the next few days, unless you wanna risk it with Ross” He said with a little bite, before feeling just a bit bad. When he glanced over at you, you were harshly glaring at him. “I’m Joel” He muttered under his breath.

“Yeah” You scoffed. “I picked up on that between you yanking me around”

Joel turned to face you, crossing his arms in annoyance. “You’re welcome” His voice was dripping with sarcasm.

Undeterred, you crossed your arms back, hips cocked as you stood in defiance, seeming to consider your next words. Then, as nervousness flickers around your face, you seemed to realize the position you were in. Looking away and to the floor, you spoke softer. “Thank you. I know this isn’t… ideal”

“Don’t worry about” He grabbed a flannel shirt and sweats from his drawers and tossed them abruptly at you, then motioned for the bathroom. “Showers o’er there. There's… um…” He hesitated. “Under the sink.”

You furrowed your brow, confused. “What’s under the sink?”

Running a hand through his hair, Joel turned away and pretended to be suddenly very interested in the lamp. “You’ll see.”

“Sounds like a threat, but okay.” You murmured as you shuffled into the bathroom before stopping and turning around, telling him your name.

He gave a nod, barely acknowledging you as you disappeared into the bathroom. This was going to be a long fucking week.

When you took in the dingy bathroom, you decided to see what he was talking about beneath the sink. When you opened up the small cabinet, you found possibly the last thing you were expecting to see in the bathroom of the world's grumpiest man. Pads. The initial surprise you felt was quickly overtaken with a swell of warmth. You wondered about the type of man he was before the outbreak. The last 20 years had broken some of the best people down, the need for survival tearing people apart… but you firmly believed good people remained good deep down, someone inside them, even if it only came out when necessary. And today, as you faced down a group of men with evil intentions, it was clear that this was a situation he couldn’t ignore. You’d seen a lot in your years, more than enough for several lifetimes.

The bath felt nice, even if it was cold, as did his clothes, as well worn as they were. When you padded out into the one room place, you saw him standing over what could barely be called a stove.

“It’s just shitty canned soup, you can have some. I don’t got a lot here, but enough to get us through.”

“Thank you. I can pay you back once I get home”

“Hm.” Was his non committal answer.

A pause.

“And thank you for stopping-”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I mean it-”

Joel whipped around, his eyes intense and alight. “I said, don’t mention it.”

You shut your mouth but glared at him, letting him know he was being a dick. And yet, you really weren’t in much of a position to complain, were you? He had saved you from an attempted gang rape, the act of which caused him to have to put you up in his home, share his clothes, his water, his food… All the while giving no indication he had any ill intentions of his own. How many people would do this for a stranger?

He got his food, sitting at the table and once again gesturing vaguely towards the ‘kitchen’, prompting you to get food for yourself. You didn’t feel you weren't exactly wanted at the diner table, so you looked around for another place to eat, moving over to the chair. It wasn’t the worst thing she’d sat on, but it wasn’t the best either. A new problem was glaring as they ate in silence.

There was only one bed.

You piped up. “I can sleep on this chair.”

“Yeah” Was all he responded.

Clearly, he meant for you to sleep there anyway. It was going to suck, but it was better than whatever was planned for her in the alleyway.

Wordlessly, he walked off and shut the door to the bathroom and it wasn’t long before she heard the water running to take his own cold bath. Amazing bedside manner, really. Top tier. You tried to remind yourself you were looking a gift horse in the mouth, and brushed off your bitterness. When Joel immerged, he didn’t look at her as he walked past.

“So,” You started.

“No.”

“How long have you-”

“No.”

“Do you at least-”

A loud groan as he scrubbed his face, signaling you to stop.

You sat there, staring at the wall while Joel went about his business before you heard him call to you. “Hey. C’mere”

You turned around, eyeing him suspiciously. “Why”

“If you want your fucking forehead infected, that’s on you”

“Wait!” You scrambled up, walking over towards him where he had some basic first aid. “Sorry, I-”

“Sit” He directed to the chair at the table, not making eye contact.

Doing as you were told, you sat down at the table, looking up at Joel as he bent over you. You winced as he applied the disinfectant. “You could sit-”

“No” Despite his harsh tone, his touch was gentle, careful, and moving away when you winced.

“So” You tried to start a conversation again. “Joel. That’s Hebrew, right? Are you J-”

“Stop.” Joel briefly put his hands down, standing straight up. From your view on the chair, you suddenly realized how tall he was. His eye contact, when focused on you as it was now, was all consuming. “We’re not friends, we’re not going to come out of this as friends, we’re gonna be lucky if we don’t rip each other's head off. So how about you stop talking, and I stop wondering if I can drown myself in the bathtub every time you ask me a question.” When you didn’t argue, he oh-so softly applied a bit of antibiotic ointment, careful not to waste the little he had.

“Well, that was a bit blunt” You commented as you studied his face. Handsome, older; graying but not falling apart. His accent was southern, but where? You could not place, but that would explain his sense of duty.

“You asked if I was Jewish an hour into knowing me, and out of nowhere. I don’t think I’m the blunt one here” Joel muttered again, but this time there was a hint of… something else. Not quite playful, there was nearly no change in his tone, he was just as gruff as before, but the way he spoke indicated it was almost a joke. Almost. But not quite. He stood up without another word and washed his hands of the antibiotic cream and remaining blood that had oozed out. Grabbing an extra blanket from the drawer, he tossed it at you aimlessly and hit the light.

“Go to bed”

“It’s 8pm”

“Go. To. Bed.”

“Old man”

This received no response from him, but you laughed to yourself.

“Good night Joel.”

A loud sigh was the only response you got.

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

I'VE NEVER WRITTEN FOR JOEL SO PLEASE BE NICE! I don't know a whole lot about this universe or the world building so I'm so sorry if this is wrong. But I love Pedro so so so so much and I love TLOU so far!!! Please leave a comment if you like what you see so I know people want more, and reblog if you are so inclined! It's the only way to spread my work on this sight!

Shocker. The fic is titled after a Springsteen song. Joel Miller Listens to Springsteen, Melloncamp and Petty and I will not be taking criticism at this time.

And! Be sure to check out my other Pedro character fic, Take Your Time with my boy Frankie Morales! Tagging some I think may be interested, if you aren't interested in Joel fics just comment to be removed!

My love, @welcometostayingawake @trinkets01 @my-secret-shame-but-fanfiction @luciannadraven33 @howaboutcastiel

[tar-maitime]

like my mirror years ago pt. 3

Rating: T Characters: Maedhros | Maitimo, Fingon | Findekano, Finwe, Feanor Additional: Years of the Trees, time travel, AU, fix-it WC: 1k

Read the previous installment here Apologies for the delayed update; life hit like a semitruck there for a bit.

“Maitimë? Who is this?”

Maedhros freezes in her tracks, causing Findekano to nearly stumble into her back. The plan had been for Maitimë to get them into her father’s house in Tirion, so they could explain the situation to Fëanaro and discuss their ideas for exposing Melkor. Good ideas, all of them - Maedhros would believe in them if her memories didn’t firmly contradict any of them coming true.

The plan had not involved running across...

“Haru Finwë!” Maitimë says, a little too brightly. “This is...a friend I have recently become acquainted with, and I had something here that I wished to show her. I did not know you were visiting today.”

Maedhros has a sneaking suspicion that she should bow, or do something similar. It’s been so long since she was at the court in Tirion, and even then, the rules for her and her siblings and cousins were of course different from those for strangers. She can’t remember any of the formalities properly now. All she can think of is the awful silence before the messengers finally said what she’d already begun to guess, that her grandfather was dead - the awful blankness in her father before rage had taken over - the way that her aunt Findis had put herself between Indis and anyone from Fëanaro’s family, all through the hastily arranged funeral - the broken grief-sounds that Indis had tried and failed to suppress...

Her grandfather’s death had shaped every moment of her life thereafter, and yet Maedhros had never really gotten the chance to mourn him, every moment being consumed with something that needed to be done, people who needed to be held together or managed.

And now he’s alive, right in front of her, and doesn’t know her. 

Her cloak and hood, she’s fairly sure, are covering the armor and her shorn hair, but the manifold scars on her face are still plainly visible, and she can feel Finwë’s concern as his gaze tracks over her, trying to figure out what happened to her, what’s wrong with her. 

She wants to wrap herself up in one of his hugs and cry, but that would be startling and abnormal even if he recognized her, let alone with her being presented as a stranger. 

“My king,” she murmurs, with a dip of her head, acutely aware of the roughness of her ruined voice.

Anyone who had lived in Beleriand for any length of time would have noted the things about her that don’t belong, would have disregarded politeness in favor of a healthy suspicion and investigated. Perhaps once, before the Great Journey, Finwë would have done the same. But the Finwë who is king in Valinor sees only his beloved granddaughter’s odd but harmless friend - everything here is harmless - so he merely nods and smiles benevolently and goes his way. “I shan’t keep you.”

She will keep him, though, if she can, Maedhros thinks with a sudden ache. She will keep him and her father and her cousins and brothers and Findekano, everyone she loves - keep them alive, keep them from becoming what she has had to become. She no longer cares if it is impossible. They have to try anyway.

“Come on,” she says, once Finwë has gone. “We need to find Atar.”

* * *

“Nelyafinwë! What has happened to you?”

That’s all it takes for Maedhros to feel her knees go out from under her, because. Fëanaro was looking at her when he said it. He looked at her and called her Nelyafinwë; he knows who she is.

“Atar,” she says, and that’s all she manages before she has to sit down on a mercifully uncluttered stool and Fëanaro abandons what he was tinkering with and crosses to her in three quick strides.

The actual Maitimë is beside her in another moment. “Atar, how did you know?” she asks quietly. “Even I couldn’t guess; I had to be told.”

Fëanaro looks downright offended. “She is my child. Obviously I would know who she is. Now,” he turns back to Maedhros, “Nelyafinwë - other-Nelyafinwë, I suppose - can you tell me what happened that did all this to you?”

He reaches to hold her hands, seeming disturbed when he only encounters one, but she grips his hand tightly in the one she has. Another person she’s lost, here in front of her again, alive and real.

“You’re not going to ask how I got here?” she says.

Fëanaro half-shrugs. “That is less urgent, probably, and I already have a theory or two. Travel back in time or from an alternate Singing seem the most likely. Right now I want to know what I need to do about whatever hurt you.”

She’d almost forgotten about when he was like this, when he genuinely cared for them and wasn’t lost to the grip of mania and paranoia. He’s so close already, at this point in the timeline, to falling into that, but perhaps that will change, too, if they can stop Morgoth.

“It was Melkor, Atar,” she says quietly. “A lot of things, but mostly Melkor. We have an idea of how to keep it from happening, and that’s why we came to see you. We’re going to need your help...and you’re probably not going to like the kind of help we need.”

[excelsi-or]

summoned (pt. 9)

pairing: woozi x fem!reader/fem!OC

w.c. 2.6k

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8

After some maneuvering, they make it back to the car. The hand that had been enveloped in his goes straight for one of the cool cans in the bag. She sighs in relief.

"Have you told Seokmin?"

"Not yet. Surprisingly, I need free hands to text or call." She goes to Jihoon's car screen and taps around. "Doesn't this thing do calling?"

"What?"

"You have a GPS and a touch screen in your car. There must be a way to call people."

Jihoon scoffs. "I don't know. The fancy gadgets don't interest me."

"Demons are surprisingly useless." She says it with a laugh, so it soothes some of Jihoon's annoyance. Giving up on figuring out his car, she pulls her phone out of her pocket and calls Seokmin, putting him on speaker.

"Isn't he at work?"

"You expected me to tell him when my hands were full, and now, you're concerned that he's busy?" It's the first time Jihoon's heard actual irritation in the human's voice. "Seokmin owns the company anyway."

"We dropped him off at a law firm."

She shrugs. "Perks of being the oldest, I guess." She holds the phone up between them as it rings.

"Not in human years, he's not."

"He bought the company a few years after we graduated high school." She waves him to be quiet when the phone connects. "Seokminnie."

"You need something. What is it?"

She chuckles. "The demon needs you to come on an escapade with us later this evening."

Jihoon shakes his head. "Tomorrow. We're not going to be back in time for it to all seem normal."

An idea pops into her head. "You know who we can send? Hansol. One sec, Seokminnie." She adds Hansol to the call. The boy's voice sounds distracted when he answers. "Hey, Sollie. Just five minutes."

Hansol takes a deep breath, as if he's just come up for air. "You're on a timer. What do you need?"

"I need you to go to Mrs. Han's convenience store with Seokmin today."

Hansol hesitates. "Why...?"

"I'm not trying to set you up with Ara, relax. Jihoon and I need you to get into Mrs. Han's back room."

"What?"

She catches him up. And luckily, her best friend takes all the confusing news in stride. He'll pepper her with questions later, but for now, Hansol manages to contain all of his curiosity.

"So, we need you to get into her back office and see what exactly is going on in there. I know you can't see what I can see or what Jihoon and Seokmin can see, but we know that Mrs. Han will only step away to talk with an angel. That angel is going to have to be Seokmin."

"It's most likely bodies back there, Hansol," Jihoon says. "But if you can also figure out why this angel would have those bodies, hey, that'd be great."

Hansol clears his throat, and they all hear the alarm go off on his end. Seokmin jumps in here. "We'll deal with it. Sol, I'll pick you up after I'm done at work and we'll head over there. We can even stop into the flower shop for a bit."

She smiles at Hansol's awkward sputtering. "Stay safe, you two."

That sobers Hansol up. "You too, noona."

Jihoon waits for the phone to be put away before he starts to speak. "That's only the first location."

"I know. But why did the demons choose these specific spots?" She leans back in her seat, watching the city go by. "Why the convenience store? The abandoned building makes sense, because it's unlikely that humans will stumble upon it. But people walk into Mrs. Han's convenience store all day. Why there?"

"Say your mother's hospital isn't the only place they're collecting bodies."

"Don't you need to have a susceptible host to possess?"

"We're not parasites," Jihoon argues. "I could possess you right now if I wanted."

She shakes her head. "No, because I have a strong will. You guys choose humans who are weak-willed or vulnerable."

Jihoon's eyes narrow, taking his gaze off the road for a moment.

She uses the bottom of the cola can to turn his face back to the road. "Mom made sure that I knew that none of the demons who entered our home would hurt me. And that if any of them tried anything on me, that a strong will to live was a sufficient deterrent for a demon." She motions towards Jihoon. "Clearly didn't work on you, but it's worked on every other demon I've met."

Jihoon scowls. Even if he wanted this human's soul, there is no reasonable way to get it. However, it's really difficult to tell if she even has a soul. Which has been the most unsettling part about this human among all the things that unsettle him. He's wondered a few times since meeting her parents whether the ambiguity comes from the angel and demon blood in her veins. 

"What I don't understand," Jihoon says, bringing them back to the task at hand, "is why an angel would be involved. In the off-chance event that that woman befriended a demon, why would she get involved? Your parents keep their angel and demon jobs separate."

"You and Seokmin don't." She gauges his expression and changes the subject. "We're just coming up with more questions and no solutions."

They settle into their thoughts. He can tell she's falling asleep next to him again. He digs around the center console for any CDs to pass the time (while also manipulating time and space a bit to ease the car a bit faster). 

"Here," she mumbles. Drowsily, she sits up again and plays around with the touch screen.

Jihoon watches out of the corner of his eye. "What are you doing?"

"Connecting my phone to your car." A ding sounds through the car. Now, that they don't need to call anyone, the car is completely compliant. "It's paired. So," she settles back and closes her eyes again, "just ask Siri to play music."

"Who's Siri?"

"The woman in my phone."

"The who?"

"Mom trapped a woman in my phone to do things for me."

Jihoon gapes at her, but the human has her face turned away from him and is curled up ready to sleep. "And she does them willingly?"

She hums. "She's never disobeyed me before. Only issue is if she's been sleeping a while, so the connection is bad or she just doesn't understand what I'm saying."

Jihoon's brow furrows.

"Try it. Ask her to play something." When he doesn't, she looks over at him. The expression on Jihoon's face elicits a chuckle. "When was the last time you were on Earth?"

"Just before the millennium."

She smirks before curling back onto her side. "Hey, Siri, play 90s music."

They arrive at the hospital in record time. When she wakes and sees the time, she pats her body to make sure she's still in one piece. Jihoon's grumbling under his breath to her overreaction is just a cherry on top.

"What floor does your mom work on?" Jihoon asks as they head towards the main entrance.

"Don't know the floor, but I know she works in the ICU."

Putting the ex-right hand in the ICU to source bodies for whatever the cause is, is almost too genius. Jihoon trails after the human, taking in all the people hanging around the lobby. It's teeming with people, wheelchairs, students, volunteers, nurses, and doctors. Many of them are headed to the coffee shop; others are sat in the lobby chairs.

She bypasses the volunteers at the reception desk and heads straight for the elevators.

"Do you know where you're going?" Jihoon asks.

She points to the sign that tells them the floor of the ICU before pressing the call button for the elevator. "We're going to have to look through the hospital records."

"Okay. You have a plan?"

"You're the plan."

"I'm the what?"

Luckily, the elevator is empty. "Mom sent me a list of the names of the patients that she can remember. For us to find them, alive or not, I need to find these records. And if you don't mind, I'd like if you distracted every person of authority that might ask me what the hell I'm doing." She leads him off the elevator. "And we might have to meet some of your demon friends today."

"We what?" Jihoon groans.

"She warned me that the demons are asking for more bodies. She says they didn't have anyone until today. So, your friends may be here."

"Not my friends." His hand goes red before slipping into hers. He lets out one long yawn.

"Oh, we're just done asking for permission." She adjusts her grip in his. "You've now also 1) put a timer on us, and 2) made it so we have to be seen together."

"Then you're going to have to work fast."

Jihoon swears he hears her grumbling about the uselessness of demons. She smiles at the nurses at the front desk and slips around the side. Jihoon catches the women watching them, but he easily diverts their attention back to their work.

Suddenly, she bends over as if to tie her shoe.

"You can't let go of my hand. I've already counted two demons and we've been here all of four seconds," Jihoon hisses.

She straightens up with a key card in her hand. Jihoon frowns before he realizes that it's her mother's. They continue down the hallway, her eyes darting to the doors to find the right one while trying to look casual.

Jihoon suddenly stops. "It has to be this one."

She glances around. It doesn't look that different from the others they passed. "Why?"

"Reinforced steel, key card access required, and it isn't labeled like the other doors." Jihoon tugs her closer. "Humans are so worried about personal information theft."

This time, he thinks he hears her praising him, but he isn't quite sure because the beep of the key card granting them access overpowers her voice. They duck inside and are met with not only filing cabinets, but also a computer at the desk. She leads him to the desk and shakes the mouse.

"What?" Jihoon asks. Her expression looks annoyed. Unusual for this human, which in and of itself seemed unusual for humans. The general look of annoyance seemed universal.

"We need a password, which I don't have." She turns to the filing cabinets. "Which means we need to go through these by hand." Her fingers release his hand. "Which means I need this back."

Jihoon stands by the door, his eyes closed. "I'm giving you five minutes."

Human, human, human.

He hears the frantic flipping through the files.

Human, human, de—

Jihoon jerks back towards her and grabs her hand.

She hisses in pain, the burn causing her to drop to her knees. Jihoon gies her a gentle tug to her feet. He doesn't apologize, but he does burn his other hand and takes hers until the demon passes. Grumbling and taking steadying breaths, she flips through more files with her uninjured hand. There are no letters on the front of the drawers to denote what could be contained within the files. So, she has to check. Once she learns the filing system, she's able to systematically go through her mother's short list of names.

The burning in her hand is only mildly distracting, even when he lets go to stand by the door again. She swears Jihoon's manipulating her mind.

But even though she's distracted from the pain, her body is still reacting. Her eyes well up with tears, and she catches sight of the skin blistering as she flips through file after file. Then she has to rifle through papers, taking pictures of each one.

She manages to find all nine people, though she doesn't have the wherewithal to read anything fully.

"Get me out of here," she says. She debates holding out her good hand to redistribute the pain but decides against it. Even with whatever Jihoon's doing to her head, she feels discomfort when his skin makes contact with hers.

"Okay?"

The human's eyes keep going in and out of focus.

"Well, no." She blinks a few times. "But until I look properly, I won't know how bad it is."

Just as he's about to turn the door knob, he notices her hands are empty. "Where are the files?"

"Photos are on my phone. Get me out of here, please."

Jihoon guides her out of the room, past the nurses' station, and into the elevator. Where they wind up right next to a...

Demon.

Jihoon shifts closer to her, using her to block the demon's view of him. But he can see the demon eyeing them.

"Per chance... do I...?" The demon moves closer, but she doesn't turn her head.

"Dude, give me space." She takes a step towards Jihoon, brushing against him. "You're giving me the creeps."

The change in her tone is surprising. Jihoon tries not to react.

"I did not mean to—"

"Seriously." She looks him dead in the eye. "Back. Off."

"Ah." The demon huffs, and his voice deadpans. "I do know you." He returns to his side of the elevator. "You're Xero's 'daughter'."

"Which is why I told you to back off, demon."

"That is Linnaeus to you." Linnaeus glances over at Jihoon. "Who's this? You've got a boyfriend now, hmm?"

"Yes. And you're also giving him the creeps." Luckily, the elevator doors open before Linnaeus can scrutinize them further. She squeezes Jihoon's hand to encourage him to get off first.

"A nice human boyfriend I see? Your mother surely would have preferred a demon."

"She also probably would have preferred to keep her soul and status. But needs must when the devil farts in your direction." She ignores Jihoon's snort of laughter as he drags her into the sunlight. "Have a good day, demon."

"Who says that?" Jihoon hisses, struggling to hide his smile. While he hates when humans take that sarcastic, cutting tone with him; with other demons, it's much more fun.

And from her, particularly charming.

Once out of Linnaeus's watchful eye, she slips her hand out of his. "I heard it in a Youtube video." As she walks around to her side of his car, she takes a breath before checking her hand. Her palm is warm, but surprisingly void of blisters. It also doesn't hurt as much as it had earlier. "Did you heal me?"

"I don't do that." He adjusts his hat, running his fingers through his hair before putting it back on. "Why?"

She shrugs. "Never mind. Thanks for fucking with my head in there."

Jihoon blinks in surprise. "Didn't know you noticed."

"The pain was initially excruciating." Her eyes move to her palm again. Baffled at how normal it feels. "I shouldn't have been able to focus in there."

As she begins scrolling through the pictures of the files she'd taken, Jihoon studies her profile.

"What?" She punches in the first address, triple checking that it's correct before hitting 'Go'. "You're staring."

"Does Linnaeus always talk to you like that?"

"Yeah." She opens and closes her hand. "I always tell him he doesn't blend in well because he talks quite archaic. Do you not think?" She makes a silly point of bowing, which makes Jihoon smile. Rolling her eyes, she continues, "So yeah, he's never really liked me much because of it."

"It'd help him blend in." Jihoon glances at the GPS before turning onto the route.

"And when have demons ever liked help from humans?" She snuggles back into the seat, already preparing to doze. "The other demons were more appreciative because it made it easier for them to do their demon deeds. Linnaeus just hates the constructive feedback."

"He's always been a pretentious jerk. Thought it was just to me, though." He glances at her out of the corner of his eye. "Never heard you speak like that before."

"Linnaeus is always an exception."

part 10

[mostlydeadallday]

Lost Kin | Chapter XXVIII | Darkness Like Water

Fandom: Hollow Knight Rating: Mature Characters: Hornet, Pure Vessel | Hollow Knight, Quirrel Category: Gen Content Warnings: panic attacks, body horror, self harm AO3: Lost Kin | Chapter XXIX | No More Questions First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Chronological Notes: Hornet revisits Deepnest. Hollow finds new resolve to hold to. Worldbuilding Deepnest was so fun, even for the brief period of time I spent there. I love taking bizarre and creepy locations and turning them around to imagine them from the point of view of the people who live there; for Hornet, returning home would be a great comfort, as Deepnest is the source of nearly all of her good memories. And here we also get a taste of one of my pet headcanons: vessel body language!

○

Hornet was home.

She would have known with her eyes shut, with her hands bound at her sides, with her mask wrapped in silk. The rumble of the ground beneath her claws, and the damp chill of the air against her shell, and the faint vibrations singing through the silken lines strung along every tunnel. Deepnest stretched out before her, vast and dark and beckoning, and every breath, every stride, felt lighter than the one before.

With one hand on the tunnel wall and the other on her needle, she stalked the empty passages, mouth cracked open to scent the air, though she smelled nothing more than damp stone and fungal spores, and the occasional trail of a deepling as they scurried between cracks in the walls that were too small for her to fit through. It was quiet, or as quiet as it ever got, the heavy air scattered with chattering and chirring in the distance, or the tapping of many legs across the ceiling above her. She knew where she was going; she always did. She was never lost here, not with the silk lines to guide her.

Under her fingers, one of those lines quivered.

She paused.

The line twitched again, scraping her chitin. The motion was almost large enough to be visible, the overbearing frequency blotting out the quieter hum of the other lines, practically screaming at her.

She turned back to look over her shoulder. The tunnel behind her looked no different, the faint glow of luminescent fungi silhouetting the sketched shapes of unfinished webs and the gleaming curve of an ancient shell embedded in the wall.

 The thread jerked again, and again, vibrating against her fingertips, the motions random, panicked, never quite falling still before the next shock came.

Something was caught in the lines.

Something big.

Hornet whirled and paced back along the tunnel, switching hands with her needle to skim her fingers along the wall, ensuring she did not lose the trail. The silk-lines, besides being a means of wayfinding in the pathless dark, were the pulse of Deepnest, allowing its inhabitants to keep watch on any trespassers that ventured in from hostile lands, or any beasts that rose from the lower tunnels to menace the spiders and their kin. Shape-changers and mimics, things that spread themselves out along the walls, or pressed into cracks and crevices with only the smallest feelers showing, waiting for an unsuspecting traveler to pass.

She was a hunter, and she wore the cloak to prove it. It was her responsibility to keep the tunnels safe, to string the traps and tripwires that would sing out far and wide, announcing the presence of anything clumsy or ignorant enough to stumble into them.

The line jumped beneath her hand. The farther she walked, the louder it hummed, and she broke into a low, springing lope, muffling her footsteps as best she could but willing to sacrifice stealth for speed. Whatever she had caught, it was strong, strong enough to potentially snap her silk and leave her with nothing but an empty trap.

She had never felt a motion like this. She knew most things that could fall into her traps, knew what they felt like, how they struggled, and this was not one of them. She was only a few leagues from the village. What could possibly have avoided capture for this long, creeping so far into Deepnest without her hearing about it?

The tunnel ended abruptly, spilling out into empty space illuminated only by the network of soul-silk strung from the foggy heights.

At first she could only see the motion, the frantic twitching of the lines to and fro, the unfamiliar creature trapped so deeply in her web that its form was lost beneath the tangle. She gripped her needle hilt, fine traceries of soul already threading between her fingers as she called up a defensive spell. There was no sound besides the taut humming of the traplines; this thing was either unwilling or unable to cry out, perhaps stricken mute by terror, or fearing to draw predators to its position.

Her fangs twitched. She swung up into the lattice, dancing across the bobbing threads, stringing a safety line behind her as she climbed toward the ceiling. Needle still gripped in one hand, ready to strike at whatever showed itself beneath the webbing.

She leapt the final distance and crouched atop the net, needle drawn back, soul buzzing through her veins—

A white mask jerked toward her, a white mask with slanted black eyes, a white mask with long, graceful horns—

It was Hollow in her web, twisted and trembling beneath her silk, their head arched back by a cable caught around their horn, their single arm wrenched behind them by the force of their struggles. Skeins of silk wrapped her sibling’s body, cutting into their joints and the soft places between their armor, looping round their neck and digging long gouges into their exposed shoulder.

They saw her. Their flailing stilled for an instant, though the whole web reverberated with their frantic terror, and she could see the way their chest heaved, the way their fangs glistened wetly, exposed to the light by the strained tilt of their head toward the ceiling.

Her insides knotted tight with horror. She was breathing nearly as fast as they were, panic welling up like an ice-cold spring, lost for answers, lost in the wrongness of them being here, of their neck twisted back and their claws tangled in steely threads, of their night-black shell wrapped cruelly tight with her silk.

She opened her mouth to speak, to call out to them.

Nothing came out but a spider’s hiss, rattling up her throat and splitting the chilly air.

Hollow writhed.

Fueled by terror, they thrashed against the web, arching further as the cutting threads pulled tight. Black limbs, long and clawed, yanked so hard that the trapline slipped beneath her feet. Hornet gasped, the sharp sound echoing, and snatched at the cable beside her. Her claws plucked it like a harp string and it snapped—

She dropped backward into darkness like water, like water closing in on her, sliding past her chitin like a clinging cocoon, and when she tried to scream it crept down her throat, dripping, choking, leeching the soul from her body and leaving it cold, cold, cold as death—

Hornet sat up.

The gasping was real. She’d been hauling at the air like a drowning thing, she could feel it in her throat and lungs, the way they ached and scratched within her. She kicked at the cloak she’d dragged over herself in the middle of the night, now bunched around her knees and tangled with her heel-spurs, until it was a puddle on the floor and she sat naked and chilled and panting on the hearth, claws half-clenched, stuck in midair with nothing to strike out at.

A nightmare.

Another nightmare.

The throbbing panic in her veins had no chance to drain before she spotted movement in the corner of her eye. Hollow.

Her sibling, very much awake, very much not trapped in a web in the dark, had started to push themselves up on a quivering arm, their wrist bowed so deeply that she thought it might snap, silk-sheathed talons slipping on the damp stone floor. They were fast, already halfway up before she had breath to speak, legs curling to push them into a crawl, neck trembling with the formidable task of holding up their head.

“No,” she gasped, and scrambled up, both hands extended, shaky as they were. “Stop. Stop.”

Hollow jerked to a halt, shoulders hunched, breath scraping hard through their throat.

Hornet had to beat back the memory of her nightmare, the uncanny glow of their mask in the dark, the harsh, unnatural angles of their limbs trapped in silk. They were not in Deepnest, not suffocating slowly in a web of her own making. They were safe. She was safe.

She had no one to blame for these horrors in her head but herself, though she couldn’t help another surge of impotent anger directed toward the Nightmare King, knowing he stood by and gorged himself on the terror of Hallownest’s lonely survivors. It felt good to have a god to curse, even if he was not the one responsible for her suffering.

She took a breath, and then another, until she thought she could speak without her voice cracking. “It was only a nightmare. There is no danger.”

Hollow—moved.

They broke their stillness to curl up slightly, chin tucked and head bladed sideways, presenting the smallest silhouette their ridiculous horns would allow.

She stared, frozen in the moment, in the strangeness of it. This… this was odd, especially for them. They had previously expressed very little besides fear, and that only sporadically; she suspected they were frightened much more often than they let on.

This was something different, though. This looked—

Oh, gods. On any other creature, anything else besides a vessel, she would call this shame. Or submission. A passive, self-diminishing response to a threat or an authority, a plea to be forgiven, or ignored.

Then she realized they were still holding themselves there, unsteady, in pain, because of her, because of the order she had unthinkingly given them. Expecting punishment, more than likely, for disobeying her, for acting without instruction.

Her shoulders slumped. She had been trying so hard to avoid this, to avoid treating them like—like her father, and she had already failed. That they felt the need to submit to her, to hold themselves still and wait for whatever she meant to do to them, was proof of it.

“Everything is fine,” she began, and when it sounded like she was speaking through a cracked flute, she cleared her throat and started over. “I understand that you were startled, but please—do not injure yourself trying to help me.”

They did not move, only peered up at her with their single visible eye, their head hovering near the floor in an attempt to diminish themselves. Their horns were nearly as tall as her, so the effect was useless, but it still pricked at her heart, like a shard of glass in a closed fist.

Was this what they had been trying to do during the fever? When they flinched back from her, when they stared up at her in exhausted misery she knew now had been genuine?

She could ponder that later.

Even as she thought that, she knew that she wouldn’t, that she would coil it up tight and push it down deep like everything else she could not afford to feel. Later was never, where she was concerned, and she had no intent to change that.

“You can relax. I am not upset with you,” she tried again, taking another step toward them, watching for a response, any response, any indication that she would not have to command them again. Perhaps it was futile—and she knew she was running out of time before they collapsed.

Was it selfish of her, to experiment now, at their expense? Just to salve her shame at snapping out an order while half-awake and panic-stricken?

She sighed, quietly, and swallowed her pride. “Hollow, lie down.”

They did as she asked.

Her heart was still beating hard, her limbs filled with shivers of energy, but she curled her claws into fists and shoved the crawling, clinging urgency away, on top of all the other things she told herself she would deal with later. By the time they relaxed again, that ugly rattle settling in their chest once more, she had condensed the panic into something smaller, tighter, something cold that lingered in her throat, like a drop of ice.

She would deal with it. They did not need her fear, in addition to their own.

Approaching slowly, she looked them over, walking up their length to inspect the full scope of their injuries. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch them again—she meant to give them the opportunity to ask to be touched, and didn’t want to chance that now, not with them still calming from their panic.

Her transference rune was intact. Nothing had changed appreciably since last night, nothing reopened or inflamed, though the infection still shone between the wider plates in their chest, like a slit of lamplight beneath a closed door.

Her hands clenched tighter, and she made them open slowly, made herself look away. Hollow didn’t seem to have noticed; their breathing continued to calm, the rattle dying down as their nerves subsided.

Well, today was off to a wonderful start.

Hornet nearly laughed, a sharp, biting thing that would undoubtedly have confused her sibling to no end. Or frightened them, or made them cower again, waiting for her to turn her anger against them.

She’d have to keep her reactions in a tight grip from now on. She was not on her own anymore, couldn’t let her composure slip.

The very thought made her want to bolt out the door.

She couldn’t afford to run now. The problems she had put off yesterday were still here, staring her in the face. She would just have to learn to direct her energy there, instead of vanishing every time something frightened her.

Distantly, she recalled the mental list she had begun the night before. Finish the laundry. Finish the mending. Make a nest for herself. Remake the bed for Hollow. And bathe them again. And give them a refresher on the signs she had taught them yesterday.

Hornet wanted to do anything but sit calmly and play tutor. Nevertheless, the signs would not take long, so she stepped over to the bookshelf to retrieve the sheets of sketches she had begun the day before.

Hollow’s next inhale rasped sharply, and she snapped a glance toward them. The tension she had seen bristling in their shoulders the day before was back, though they did not move while she stared at them, and she could detect no difference in the tempo of their breathing.

Hollow might not want her to play tutor, either.

She exhaled around an oath, not allowing her frustration to show, and placed the sheets back on the shelf. It could wait, at least until they were no longer stressed by her sudden awakening.

That tension did not dissipate, even as she stepped away from the bookshelf. She should have known better. Instead, she sat down and opened her sewing kit, pulling the unhemmed cloak into her lap to finish.

They would relax again eventually. All she could do was wait.

○

She was watching it.

It hadn’t intended to express its fear—it was only that after half-rising to go to her, its chest was tighter than it should be, and the unease constricted it further, until it had no choice but to make a sound as it breathed.

It should not have risen, either. She had been in no danger, and had said as much. She did not want it to protect her, especially not from a threat it had proven worthless against.

It could not protect her from nightmares when it had failed to protect the world from dreams.

Regardless, it could still see the papers resting on the shelf, waiting for—what? For its sister to finish her mending? For a moment when she could catch it unawares?

It should not feel this way. It should not be dreading her every move, lest she ask something of it that brought back the fear, the panic that cascaded down in an overwhelming wave. She would do so eventually; she could not help it. It could not predict when that might happen, when it might stumble unwittingly into a trap set by its own mind.

She wanted it to speak. She wanted information from it. It was obviously capable of providing that. And that should be enough.

It was not.

The very thought of what she might ask set its heart fluttering. What if she conceived of questions that it could not even fathom, questions that sent it tumbling into a pit so deep that it could not see the bottom?

It was weak indeed, if that was all it took to topple it.

And she knew. She changed her plans when she sensed its fear, delaying them until—until—

She had finished her task now, time spiraling away from it as it lay there in gnawing pain and apprehension, and she stood, and she would reach for the papers next, and ask it to answer her, to do what was forbidden to it, to speak of its pain—

“I’m going outside to finish the laundry,” she said, interrupting its alarming litany. “I will not be gone long.”

She did not bother to put her freshly-mended cloak on before stepping out into the rain, and it saw her hunch her shoulders through the glass as the water hit her. Her shape blurred and shifted as she stepped further away, blots of rain crossing the window and obscuring the shine of her dark shell.

Its next breath was deeper, more painful, and whispered softly as the air released, the twisted scarring in its throat giving it more of a voice than it ever had. The fear did not leave it, only changed, shifting shapes like the runnels of rain.

Watching her step out the door tightened a different thread around its heart, even as the dread of learning her purpose for it loosened.

She was plainly upset, even if she pretended not to be for its sake. And that was another puzzle entirely. Perhaps she reasoned that it was unlikely to be of any use to her—to anyone—if it was paralyzed by fear. So she hid herself away, attempting to bury her anger, her disappointment, though it sensed them in her all the same.

It did not know what she wanted.

She hated the city, the rain, the house. She had nearly torn the room apart yesterday, dissatisfied, and the vessel had wondered why she did not simply leave, as she had done after it revealed itself to her. Why had she come back? Why did she diminish herself? She was a hunter, and stasis did not suit her.

It was so caught up in its own misgivings, its own failures, that it could not obey her as it should.

If it could not force itself to do as she asked, would she finally leave it behind?

Its heartbeat surged. How long did it have before she truly tired of it? It had managed to break its constraints for her, once, twice, at the cost of its own terror, and… she had stayed, had rewarded it, and now she seemed to expect that it would do so, and it did not know what to do.

Would its sister have left it already, if it had suppressed the pain and never spoken to her? Was her renewed interest keeping her here?

It knew the Radiance had always enjoyed watching it break, when it could bear the pressure no longer.

It had so far been capable, technically, of what its sister wanted. It possessed the intelligence to understand and the physical ability to obey. But the panic was an unknown. The panic would seize it like a fist, refuse to release it, and its mind would unravel, and all of its composure would slip from it like beads from a string.

It could not unthinkingly obey. Not anymore.

A memory rose unbidden into its mind. Sister’s hand, a dark blur before its mask, trembling before it ever pressed its face into her palm. Sister’s voice, cracking like a broken plate, whispering comforts as it struggled to obey her.

She had asked it to spare itself pain. She seemed frustrated when it hurt itself, intentionally or not. And she had reacted with horror when she learned of the pain her own actions had caused.

She was not like the goddess. She was not.

The blank space in its mind was terrifying. If she did not desire its pain, its submission… if she did not value its restraint, or respect the boundaries that had been placed on it… what did she want?

It inhaled again, trembled, and its claws flexed minutely, expecting a silk binding and meeting none. Its eyes tracked the mottled blur of her through the window, as she worked to rid her things of the void-stains it had put there.

It was trying, little sister. It was trying.

Would it ever be free of this crisis? Would its own mind never cease to torment it?

And why should it matter? It was made to fulfill a purpose. Nothing else should stir it, no hardship shift it from its goal.

That goal was out of reach now, but it had found another. It would do as its sister asked. It would submit to her new purpose for it, whatever that might be, however ill-suited it was for the task.

It should be grateful, really, that she had found a use for it at all.

The fear shifted once more when Hornet returned, carrying a heap of wet laundry that nearly overtook her horns. It did not move, controlling its breathing with an effort, pushing its resolve to the forefront of its mind. It was something to focus on as its sister switched out the laundry, folding the clean linens and hanging the wet ones to drip-dry, the sound of their pattering strangely lonely in the muffled silence of the room.

The pile dwindled and was gone, the clean curtains and towels stowed away, and at last she dried herself off, and donned her clean red cloak from the hook where she had hung it, and reached for the papers on the shelf.

Taglist: @2amtime @moss-tombstone @slimeel Send an ask or reply to this post to be added to (or removed from) the taglist!

[that-fema-corps-blog]

Day 18

August 21, 2022

Woke up at 8:00 and got breakfast before the first part of our two-day race/diversity training at 10:30. (Disclaimer: I am white and also didn't type anything here during the breaks, so I definitely missed some stuff, especially since I'm going off of hours-old memory.) Engage to Change (etc...) gave the presentation. The two speakers were a black man and a white woman, and each speaker shared several personal stories to drive home the main points.

One of the first sections was on the difference between non-racist (passive, supports status quo which is often racist) and anti-racist (active efforts against racism). We had a small group discussion on times we were non-racist rather than anti-racist (ex. not calling out a friend or coworker for saying something racist). The speakers shared the following Martin Luther King Jr. quote from the Birmingham Jail:

...I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice...

We discussed how a significant part of interpersonal and institutional racism resulted from white people being non-racist (more like the "negative peace" MLK describes) rather than anti-racist ("positive peace"). So, in actuality, non-racism is passive racism. We also discussed how many white people's avoidance of discomfort often leads to the reluctance to discuss/confront racism in favor of claiming "colorblindness" and/or trying to keep the order/negative peace... "We're great allies so we support your message, but I don't like your methods, so please stop trying to change anything because it's mildly inconveniencing me and I don't want to have to think about it :)"

We then learned about the Thomas Meyer experiment, where legal firms were sent an application from a person named "Thomas Meyer" to analyze and rate. The applications had several mistakes but were all identical, with the exception that some of the applications said Meyer's race was white, and others said his race was black. When Meyer was believed to be black, those rating the papers gave him a lower score and identified more mistakes than when Meyer was believed to be white. This demonstrated how racial biases are often present in institutions even when not obvious.

Then we read and critiqued a public apology letter by a University of Oregon law professor who wore blackface to a Halloween party. She largely avoided taking responsibility, as seen here:

During a Halloween party I hosted at my house, I wore a costume inspired by a book I highly admire, Dr. Damon Tweedy’s memoir, “Black Man in a White Coat.” I intended to provoke a thoughtful discussion on racism in our society, in our educational institutions and in our professions. As part of my costume, I applied black makeup to my face and wore a white coat and stethoscope. In retrospect, my decision to wear black make up was wrong. It provoked a discussion of racism, but not as I intended. I am sorry for the resultant hurt and anger inspired by this event. It is cruelly ironic that this regrettable episode began with my admiration for a book that explores important aspects of race relations in our society, but ended up creating toxic feelings within our community. I intended to create a conversation about inequity, racism and our white blindness to them. Regrettably, I became an example of it. This has been a remarkable learning experience for me. I hope that all who are hurt or angered by my costume will accept my apology. I meant no harm to them or others.

This professor was given a year of paid leave before returning to teach an introductory class about race that students were required to take. We discussed how the refusal to reprimand the professor would likely contribute to more institutionalized racism in the area: students of color would be less likely to feel comfortable applying/attending. This would result in disproportionately fewer students of color and recent graduates in the area, eventually leading to white people being over-represented in the legal field.

The final section for today's diversity training was on invisibilized and uncompensated labor, including emotional labor, code switching, and (historical) chattel slave labor. We had a short group discussion about other types of invisible labor and were let out for the day.

We had a couple hours off before a team meeting at 18:00. We discussed which of the two projects we each wanted to take, which interstate we would take, and which landmarks we wanted to visit along the way. Then I made myself dinner, played a couple games with a teammate, and watched a movie with the group.

[imaginepirates]

Alright kids, buckle up because I have a Hot Take regarding Elizabeth, Jack, and Greek mythology. And as usual, tumblr is killing the gif quality. Click to actually read it.

I’m currently taking a mythology class, and reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. While reading about Greek myth, I stumbled upon the fact that while doves are normally seen as the birds of Aphrodite, so are swans and sparrows. I know that everyone has noticed the parallel between Elizabeth’s and Jack’s surnames, but this just adds another layer of beauty to it. The fact is, Elizabeth and Jack are just two sides of the same coin. They both represent this idea of freedom, being apart from the constraints of society. We watch them flourish in these roles, utilizing whatever assets they have to achieve their own ends.

Aphrodite is most commonly known as the goddess of love and beauty. Paris named her the most beautiful goddess. With the common depiction of Aphrodite as a young blonde woman, it’s easy to connect her with Elizabeth. Lizzie is portrayed as being desired by most of the men around her, each in their own way. Even Sao Feng finds himself inexorably attracted to her, and actually thinks that she’s a goddess. She’s also played by Keira Knightley, aka everyone’s queer awakening. That being said, Jack, too, is pictured as being attractive. Not only is he played by Johnny Depp, but we know that he’s had multiple lovers—Giselle, Scarlett, Ayisha, Angelica—just to name a few. Many others are attracted to him, as well, like Tia Dalma (dmc hints at it), Beckett, and Elizabeth herself. Beckett actually went as far as using Jack to seduce Ayisha into giving away the coordinates of Zerzura, a magical island holding great treasure. Jack and Elizabeth even flirt with each other, though they’re also portrayed as using each other to accomplish their own ends.

Hamilton writes that Aphrodite “laughed sweetly or mockingly at those her wiles had conquered; the irresistible goddess who stole away even the wits of the wise”. Both Elizabeth and Jack have coy smiles and find amusement in the people they toy with. We watch Elizabeth give that grin in cotbp when she threatens to drop the medallion overboard in front of Barbossa, mockingly, having outsmarted him. Later, we see a sweeter side of her as she smiles stupidly about Jack and James teases her for it. James, too, had his wits quite obviously stolen by her. Jack is portrayed as a trickster, smiling every time he works his way out of trouble. Sometimes convincingly, sometimes not so much. But he has a signature grin that makes the audience love him, even as he lies through his teeth.

So comes another important aspect of Aphrodite: she was seen as a goddess of war. Hamilton writes that she is “treacherous and malicious, exerting a deadly and destructive power over men”. Aphrodite wasn’t afraid to have her way, and neither were Jack or Elizabeth. Again, we see Elizabeth more as the main warrior, named King of the Brethren Court and declaring war on the EITC and navy. She progressively gets more dangerous as she gains access to weapons and better training. She utterly embraces this new role; when she’s mistaken for a goddess, she doesn’t back away from it, and when she’s named pirate king, she takes it right in stride. But Jack, too, is a figure of war. He believes, when necessary, in the principle of “fighting to run away”. He carries a pistol with one shot left in it to kill a man who wronged him. He faces the kraken with sword in hand. He gives Elizabeth his whole speech on doing things just because she wants to do them, and in the end, we watch her kill him. They’re both pirates, treacherous and deadly.

Yet another aspect of Aphrodite that hardly anybody mentions is that she was considered a goddess of the sea. She supposedly rose fully formed from the ocean. Aphros, in Greek, means ‘sea-foam’. Here, Jack is the most representative. He begins and ends the series a pirate and sailor, with his ship being the most important thing in the world to him. Pearls are another of Aphrodite’s symbols, and the Black Pearl suddenly becomes the most apt of names as Jack is often shown as the darker parallel to Elizabeth, even if in the end, we know they’re much more similar than we originally thought. Elizabeth, on the other hand, begins as a model of society and ends being mistaken for Calypso, another sea goddess. We watch as these two become tied to the sea so that the audience immediately relates both characters with the ocean.

Probably the least connected symbol is that of the apple. The apple is one of Aphrodite’s sacred fruits, and we see the apple as a symbol with Barbossa. Here, the apple is destructive, covered in poison, meant to kill the consumer. But both Jack and Elizabeth are shown eating—or nearly eating—Barbossa’s apples. They’re the only two characters, other than Barbossa himself, connected to the apple at all.

Sorry that was super long, but I thought it was worth taking a look at. I just think that the parallels are super interesting. Also, feel free to request more Hot Takes because they’re just...so fun to do. And if you have any ideas, even if half-formed, I’d love to hear and maybe expand on them.

[the-wild-wolves-around-you]

hear those bells ring: chapter 2 (a deaf!bakugo x reader fic)

Summary: Reader has to deal with the aftermath of Dynamight exploding through her window and trying to bleed out on her floor. 

Pairings: Katsuki Bakugo x Reader; Katsuki Bakugo x You

Rating: M(ature)

Warnings: Blood, descriptions of gore, and adult language. 

A/N: Here’s chapter two, hope you enjoy! ~*~*~ No spoilers or anything. This is just a self-indulgent AU fic with aged up characters. Everyone’s in their mid-20s. Fic title is from a song called “Achilles Come Down.”

AO3 Link: Here 

Ch 1 Tumblr Link: Here 

Chaos. You intellectually knew the word, in several languages in fact, but nothing could have ever prepared you for the reality of it. 

Information assaulted your senses in a deluge. The gust of cold air whistling through the broken window, raking icy fingers down your exposed arms. The bright flare of flames, even behind your clenched eyelids. The dissonant, haunting wails of several car alarms, each one just a second out of sync with the next, barely audible over the loud ringing in your ears. The taste of ash, gritty on your tongue as you sucked in heaving, panting breaths. The sharp smell of smoke and something… sweeter. Like caramelizing sugar. 

The sweet scent, incongruous with every other heinous detail, seemed to snap you fully back into your body, and your eyes flew open with a gasp. 

You were curled up in a tight ball below your now broken window, and you gaped at your ruined apartment. The lights were out, so the only illumination you had to see by were the flames behind you on the street, but it was enough. 

It looked like a tornado had torn through your home. The remnants of your window and wall—broken bits of glass, wood, and plaster—covered everything in sight in a fine layer of white dust. Your sewing desk/kitchen table was in splinters, and even with the dancing shadows, you had the distant thought that the dress you’d just finished mending was most definitely ruined. 

Then someone shouted outside on the street, and you felt it like a sledgehammer to the skull. 

Oh, god. The villain. The heroes. 

You scrambled up onto your knees, hissing when shards of glass tore through your sweatpants and bit into your skin. You’d worry about that later. For now, you focused on getting to your feet… 

And not falling out of the gaping hole in your apartment wall. 

You stumbled back a few steps from the edge, stabilizing yourself on one of your kitchen chairs that seemed to have survived the blast. The smoke was thicker now that you were off the floor, and you coughed and squinted against the hot, irritating air. 

The street in front of you was a warzone. 

The windows in the building across from you were all blown out, the empty frames like black gaping voids. The building housed a café/tea shop owned by Mr. and Mrs. Yamato, and you felt a small modicum of relief at the knowledge that they didn’t live above the shop like you did with yours. They lived in a neighborhood not too far away, and they wouldn’t be happy when they came to open in the morning, but at least they were safe. 

Safe… 

“Mr. Takeyoshi!” you gasped as you remembered your neighbor. He’d been standing on the street and nearly attacked by the villain, but a blond hero had pushed the middle-aged man out of the way. 

Your eyes scoured the street as you leaned forward as much as you dared, and just as your heart was beginning to clench, you spotted him. Mr. Takeyoshi was sitting on the curb across the street and about four storefronts down, hunched over with his head in his hands. Two heroes stood above him and seemed to be tending to him, and all three of the men looked whole for the most part. 

“God.” You exhaled shakily, your heart still stuttering in your chest, and then movement in your peripherals caught your attention. 

One hero seemed to possess a water quirk, and she was quickly working to spray down the numerous small fires still flickering up and down the road. As you watched her work, you realized the street wasn’t as badly demolished as you first assumed. It was still pretty wrecked—all of the asphalt was cracked and even just missing in some places—but aside from broken windows, the rest of the shops seemed mostly intact. The worst of the damage was centered just in front of your apartment, and as your gaze flickered over the large crater in front of you, you saw another two heroes dragging a third body out of the pit. 

The villain. 

The hero with the water quirk paused in spraying down the smoking remains of a car and turned to shout something at the other heroes. You couldn’t hear what she said over the persistent ringing in your hears, and you frowned as you focused your own quirk toward your ears. 

In your hopped-up-on-adrenaline state, you didn’t even notice the energy dip, and a moment later, your hearing returned with a loud pop. Thankfully, all of the car alarms seemed to have been cut, so you could hear the heroes pretty well.

“—still alive,” a tall hero in a red and purple suit said. You didn’t recognize him. “He’s pretty beat up, but he’ll make it.” 

“Great,” the water quirk hero sighed. “Let him be the cops’ problem now.” 

As if on cue, you could hear a siren start up in the distant, slowly moving closer. 

The threat was over. The villain was neutralized, the fires put out, and the authorities were on the way. 

So… why did you feel so on edge, like you were waiting for the other shoe to drop? 

“—fuckin’ Dynamight,” one of the heroes suddenly spat and drew you out of your thoughts. 

You frowned in confusion as the words registered. Dynamight… why did that sound familiar? 

Then your eyes widened as you remembered the blond hero, literally exploding onto the scene. His face—snarling and illuminated by the white-hot flare of his quirk—flashed in your mind’s eye, and you dropped your gaze back down to the street below. 

Dynamight, Japan’s Number Two Hero. You couldn’t believe he had been the one to turn up and save you. 

Well, not you specifically. Your neighborhood. 

You’d seen the ash-blond on television before. Usually, the media just liked to harp on his crude language or brash attitude, but you’d seen this one story of how he had saved every single person from a collapsed building. A teary blonde gushing about Dynamight rescuing her had gone briefly viral, but the clip that stuck with you was when a reporter asked the pro hero why he decided to go into the unstable building without any reinforcements. 

The blond had scowled into the camera, sweat and dirt still streaked across his pale face, his scarlet eyes flashing from beneath his black mask. 

“What was I supposed to do?” he scoffed. “Leave them in there and sit with my thumbs up my ass while the fire department takes their sweet fuckin’ time? Don’t ask me stupid questions.” 

Of course, the media had another field day with that response, but… something about it struck you as incredibly genuine. Yeah, the pro hero could have phrased it better, but the core of what he was saying was he couldn’t sit back when people were in trouble, no matter the risks. 

You had thought that very brave. 

And now you’d witnessed his bravery first hand. You weren’t confident—or really self-centered enough—to go down and thank him for what he’d done, but you thought you would just be satisfied with seeing him from afar now that things weren’t so dire. 

But, the longer you looked, the more the pit grew in your stomach. 

You couldn’t see the blond hero anywhere. He wasn’t with Mr. Takeyoshi, still hunched over on the curb. He wasn’t with the two heroes who were trying to establish a perimeter and keep out the arriving crowd of spectators. And he wasn’t with the other heroes standing watch over the unconscious villain laid out on the sidewalk. 

The rest of the heroes seemed to be arriving at the same conclusions as you. You could hear Dynamight’s name being thrown about, and then the heroes were splitting up, taking different sides of the street, peeking into broken windows. 

You wrung your hands as you watched them search from your apartment. No one had noticed you standing there yet, and you were just contemplating going downstairs to try and help in some way when a noise caught your attention. 

In the grand scheme of things, the noise wasn’t very loud, especially given the shouting on the street and the loud sirens now that the police were arriving on scene. 

But since you lived alone, someone coughing in your apartment, someone who wasn’t you, was cause for a little alarm. 

You inhaled sharply as you glanced back over your shoulder, every atom of your being standing at attention. The apartment behind you was a study in contrasts, dark shadows and the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles outside. Your eyes fell on the empty spot where your couch used to be located, and then your gaze followed the drag marks that had been carved into your wood floor. 

The couch was half embedded in the wall beside your front door, with one of the armrests denting into the plaster and the other pointing toward your gaping window/wall. The sofa’s legs had been broken, so it slumped to the floor at an angle, and some kind of stuffing spilled out of several rips in the cushions. 

But your eyes were glued to the leg sticking out over the armrest and the arm thrown over the back of the couch, which was blocking the rest of the… person from view. 

Oh, fuck. That was a person. 

Your legs reacted before your brain could even process what you should do, but you were at least cognizant enough to pick your way over the worst of the debris. Your thin, rubber-soled slippers would protect you from the small pieces of glass and rubble, but you really didn’t want to step on a nail if you could help it. 

Since your apartment was so small, and there weren’t any full pieces of furniture in the way anymore, you crossed the distance in a handful of strides, but you jerked to a stop when you reached the back of the couch. 

Your lungs seized up so suddenly they hurt. The smell of caramelized sugar was stronger now, almost overwhelming, and you actually had to grip the back of the sofa for support, your hand right next to Dynamight’s leg. 

Because it was Dynamight half-strewn across your broken couch. Even when you first saw the leg, you hadn’t imagined it could be… 

But there he was. And he looked surprisingly… human. 

His face was lax with unconsciousness, lacking the perpetual scowl or snarl he wore in pictures or on TV. His hair, which looked paler and somehow softer in person, was tinged red along his brow line, where a cut was still trickling sluggishly. He wore a non-descript black hoodie over dark jeans and darker combat boots, but a glint of color and light around his midsection caught your eye. 

You frowned and leaned down without thinking, your fingers reaching out to brush… something wet. 

“Oh, shit,” you breathed when you lifted your hand to your face and saw, even in the darkness, that the pads of your fingers were red and glistening. 

He was bleeding. 

You moved a step closer, but then your foot lost purchase, sliding, and when you glanced down, you saw your once white slippers were dark, more wetness seeping in around your toes. 

Oh, god. He was bleeding a lot. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” You fumbled for the phone in your pants pocket as you scurried around the opposite end of the couch and dropped to the ground. Glass bit into your knees again, this time deeper, a sharp, brilliant pain, but you ignored it as you tried to turn your phone’s flashlight on. The touch-screen wouldn’t register your finger at first, your blood-slicked skin skimming across the glass, and you could feel a scream building in your throat just before the light flashed on. 

If you thought things were bad in the dark, being able to see made it a thousand times worse. 

Blood had already pooled around Dynamight, dark and glinting like an oil spill. The sleeve on his left arm had been burned off, and the skin below was pink and raw. It smelled like cooked meat, and the curry you ate what felt like a lifetime ago churned hotly in your gut. 

But the burn wasn’t even the worst of it. 

A wooden stake, about as wide as three of your fingers, protruded out of the pro hero’s gut by several inches. You thought part of it might have looked like your window frame, but the thought came and went when you noticed the tip of the wooden splinter was dyed red, which meant it must have come through his body. 

That had to be where all this blood came from. Was still coming from. God, there was so much of it. 

Your eyes shot to the gaping hole in your wall, your voice rising in your throat as you prepared to scream for help, but a sudden gasp nearly made you jump out of your skin. 

You whipped back around to find wide, hazy red eyes trained on your face, and the hero’s mouth gaped open as he dragged in a ragged breath. 

“Wh—hnng!” he groaned as his body seized, his right hand coming up to clutch at his stomach. 

“Don’t!” Your phone clattered to the floor, throwing light, as you lunged forward, and you caught his hand before he could jar the piece of wood lodged inside him. “D-Don’t move, a-and try not to speak.” 

The hero panted as he cracked open his eyes and looked at you. Or maybe through you. His gaze wasn’t very focused, and blood from the cut on his brow was still dripping into his right eye. 

But the scarlet color of his irises was still striking, even in the dimness of your apartment. 

“You’ve… been hurt,” you said as you met his eyes as best you could. You weren’t a doctor or an EMT, but you knew the best way to keep people calm in emergency situations was to let them know what’s happened and reassure them. “There’s a piece of wood inside you, so you can’t move or you might hurt yourself worse. But y-you’ll be okay. I’ll go get—” 

“Villain,” Dynamight suddenly spat out, cutting you off and spattering you with a fine mist of blood. 

“What?” His voice was rough and guttural, so it took your brain a moment to translate the slurred Japanese. Did he think you were another villain? 

The blond hero winced and groaned again, and it wasn’t until he squeezed down on your hand that you realized you were still holding his. His palm was rough and calloused against yours—and warm, so inexplicably warm—but then he dug his nails into your skin, and you gasped. 

“Vil… lain?” he rasped again, and you realized it was a question. 

“Oh! The villain’s been arrested. You… you beat him.” 

Dynamight scowled at you, brow knitting in confusion, and he grunted what sounded like a questioning noise at you. 

Then he shifted his head, and you saw the dark stain of blood coming out of his ear. 

He must have ruptured his eardrums in the explosion. 

You didn’t want to shout and damage his hearing even more, so you squeezed his hand back and smiled in what you hoped was reassurance. 

“You won,” you mouthed as clearly as you could. “You won, Dynamight.” 

His narrowed eyes widened a little bit with recognition, and you could have sworn the beginnings of a smirk twitched across his lips before his eyes suddenly rolled up into his head. The tension fled his body as he went limp, like a marionette with its strings cut, and your heart lurched up into your throat. 

“Dynamight?” you asked, even though you knew he couldn’t hear you with his ears the way they were. “Dynamight?” 

You squeezed his fingers, shaking him a little, but his face remained slack. 

Dropping his hand, you reached up to flatten one of yours across his chest, the other going up to feel at the underside of his neck. A moment ticked by, two, but you found his pulse, weak and thready beneath your fingertips. His breathing was shallow beneath your other hand, and the knees of your pants were warm and soaked with his blood. 

“F-Fuck,” you breathed shakily as you sat back for a moment, your hands limp in your lap. 

He was dying. Dynamight… was dying. This was too much blood, and even if you called out to the heroes right now, and they got here in seconds, it was still ten minutes to the nearest hospital. 

He didn’t have ten minutes. You didn’t think he had five. 

You stared down at the pro hero’s blood-streaked face for half a beat before you made a decision. 

Then you were moving. Consequences be damned. 

Your hands went to the hem of his hoodie, and you flinched as you pulled it away from his belly with a wet sound. You didn’t want to hurt him, but you also didn’t think he was feeling much of anything now, so you worked the hoodie up and over the stake as best you could before you shoved the fabric the rest of the way up his chest. 

The flashing lights from outside played across the dips and valleys of Dynamight’s abs, but your eyes were immediately drawn to the wooden stake. It jutted out between the hero’s belly button and his right hip bone, and every splinter was coated in tacky, crimson blood. More of the viscous liquid bubbled up around the torn skin at the stake’s base, and it trickled across his pale, alabaster abdomen like spilled paint. 

You bit your lip as you considered your next move, but then Dynamight’s breath hitched with a wet sound, and you knew you didn’t have time for doubts. 

“Okay, steady,” you muttered to yourself as you knelt over the hero’s prone body. Your knees burned, glass digging deeper into the skin by the second, but you shoved away your own pain as you reached out and wrapped both hands around the stake. Splinters tore into your palms, and your heart hammered out a staccato rhythm beneath your sternum. 

Then panic started to creep up your spine like a million little spider legs. What if removing the stake only made him worse, killed him faster? What if you killed Japan’s Number Two Hero? 

Just as you were about to let go of the stake, Dynamight hacked out a gurgling cough, blood bubbling out of his dry, cracked lips, and you felt the warm spray of it against your collarbone and arms. 

The sound rattled something deep inside you, and before you could second guess yourself again, you tightened your grip on the stake and tugged it up and out in one single motion. 

Dynamight wheezed once more, but you were already dropping the stake, hands slapping down against his abdomen. Warm blood pulsed through your fingers like pliable clay, and bile rose in the back of your throat before you took a deep breath, closed your eyes, and called upon your quirk. 

An instant later, agony like you’ve never experienced slammed into you, ripping a gasp from your lungs. It felt like someone had stuck a white-hot poker through your gut, ignited your insides, and twisted. The pain was so intense, your ears started ringing again, and when you cracked open your eyes, your vision quickly began to tunnel until the only thing you could see was the bare outline of your hands, lined with green, against the hero’s stomach. You gritted your teeth as unconsciousness threatened to pull you under, and you groaned as you shoved as much energy as you could spare into the dying hero. 

As your quirk flooded into the blond’s body, you received vague impressions of his injuries healing. It was hard to describe, but it was kind of like you could see flashes of the tissue in your mind as it was stitched back together. First, the jagged hole on his back sealed over, and then your power wormed its way through the hero’s insides, patching up nicked arteries and punctured organs. The pain was still intense, so intense that your already limited vision was blurred by tears, but once you reached the top layers of his abs, you ripped your hands away with a gasp. 

You fell back on your ass, more glass and debris digging into your cheeks and the palms of your hands, and you sucked in ragged breaths as you tried to keep from passing out. The hero swam unsteadily before you, both from the tears in your eyes and because the entire apartment was swaying. Saliva pooled in your mouth as nausea clamped down on your stomach, but you focused on the burning in your palms to center yourself. Then you started counting deep breaths, and when you got to thirty, the darkness had receded from the corners of your vision, and the apartment more or less steadied out around you. 

You still felt like shit warmed over, like you’d been run over by a car and then dragged for several miles, but the bone-deep exhaustion could be cured with a good night’s sleep. The rest of the nicks and cuts on your body still burned like a million paper cuts, too, but your quirk was down to embers and was of no more use to you. 

But was it worth it? 

The two feet of distance between you and Dynamight felt like a canyon that stretched for miles, but somehow you found one last burst of strength to drag yourself forward a few inches. Then you held your breath and leaned over the hero’s abdomen, wiping away most of the pooling blood with the hem of his hoodie. 

There was still a significant gash carved into his skin, but when you shakily picked up your discarded phone from the floor and directed the light at him, you saw the wound was much shallower, maybe a few centimeters deep. The first few layers of skin were flayed back, but the muscles beneath were intact and healthy looking. A small trickle of blood continued to drip into the valley of the hero’s abs, but instead of a broken fire hydrant, it was just a leaky faucet. 

You dragged your tired eyes up Dynamight’s body, and you very quickly realized his breathing was deeper and not as wet sounding. Just to be doubly sure, you reached out and tentatively wrapped your fingers around his left wrist, only absently noticing that the once raw, flayed skin had been partially healed from third degree burns to first. 

You had poured more energy into him than you meant to, but it was hard to regret anything when you felt his pulse against your fingertips, strong, steady, and sure. 

“Oh, thank you,” you choked out as you closed your eyes, tears stinging in the corners. You didn’t know who you were thanking. You didn’t know if you believed in a “god” in the colloquial sense, but you felt as if the universe had given you a gift just now, and you could be nothing but grateful for it. 

You sighed as you slumped a little, and it was like weights were strapped to your eyelids as you struggled to open them and keep them open. You might have actually gone under, succumb to the exhaustion… 

If you didn’t catch sight of two crimson eyes staring back at you. 

“Fuck,” you gasped as a zap of adrenaline shocked you upright, and your phone clattered to the ground once again. 

Dynamight squinted, irises still a little glassy, but unlike last time, his gaze was very much focused on you. 

And the weight of it, the intensity, pinned you to the floor. 

“Y-You’re awake.” The words tripped off your tongue, chased out by the panic running circles in your brain. Damn it, you hadn’t even had time to come up with a plausible backstory for the pool of blood he was lying in. 

The blond hero’s eyes widened a fraction as he stared at you for an immeasurably long moment, and then you remembered with a start that he hadn’t been able to hear you before. This could work in your favor, though. You opened your mouth, ready to pantomime an elaborate story, but his voice—deep and rough, like crunching gravel or an expensive engine turning over—cut you off at the knees. 

“And you have eyes,” he said in clipped Japanese, a note of snide derision in his tone. 

You blinked in shock—at his attitude, the steadiness of his voice, and the fact he could hear you just fine all the sudden—but he just barreled onward like he had barreled through your window. 

“What happened?” he asked. No, demanded. “Who are you?” 

“I—” 

“And where’s that fuckin’ villain?” he cut you off as his split upper lip curled into a snarl, and his red eyes jumped to the gaping window over your shoulder. 

You frowned at him, pursing your lips into a thin line. “Are you going to let me answer?” 

A part of your brain was screaming at you, distantly: Are you giving Japan’s Number Two Hero attitude after he saved your life?!  You normally weren’t like this. Every inch the people pleaser, you were usually deferential to the point of your own detriment. 

But you were still so tired, every inch of you aching, blood still dripping and slick along your exposed skin, and he was the one who decided to be rude first. 

Plus, you saved his life, too, thankyouverymuch. 

Dynamight actually seemed surprised by your response because his gaze stopped its frantic search of your darkened apartment and settled on you. Those scarlet eyes raked over you quickly, a flick from head to toe, before they met your own. 

A beat of silence passed between you, and then his face pulled into a sharp frown. 

“Well?” he grunted. “Are you actually going to answer me?” 

The nerve of this man. Maybe the media had been right. 

“What happened was you decided to practically drop a bomb outside on the street, and then you crashed straight through my window and destroyed my apartment,” you said in a short, clipped tone. “But don’t worry. My couch managed to break your fall, so you’re mostly in one piece. Oh, and you beat the villain, the other heroes are outside handing him off to authorities. Satisfied with my answers?” 

You sucked in a deep breath after your little tirade, the blood roaring in your ears. Absently, you patted yourself on the back for the impromptu white lie you’d fed him. The couch did in fact break his fall… and shoved a stake through his gut, but he didn’t need to know that. Fortunately, you had dropped said impaling object behind you in your haste to keep some blood in his body, and you shifted a little now to insure it was blocked from his view. You had healed his life-threatening injury—and his hearing, apparently, though you hadn’t intended that—but he was still covered in scrapes, cuts, and minor burns along his left arm. It was a… plausible amount of wounds, so hopefully your little quirk indiscretion would go unnoticed. 

Dynamight was still staring at you in silence, and you began to fidget, on the edge of saying you were going to go flag down another hero, when he finally spoke up again. 

“No, I’m not satisfied. You didn’t answer all my damn questions. Who the hell are you?” 

A flush of heat infused your cheeks—part anger, part embarrassment for being put on the spot again and being the subject of his intense glare—and you averted your eyes as you mumbled out your name. 

“Hah?” he practically shouted as he leaned forward, bringing with him that bewildering scent of burned sugar, but he suddenly stopped with a wince that he quickly turned into a scowl. “Speak up, I hate when people mutter. Just like goddamn Deku.” 

The last sentence wasn’t directed at you, but you found his mention of Japan’s Number One Hero intriguing. 

You sighed and repeated your name for him, a little louder this time, and he grunted in what seemed like acknowledgment before he started to struggle upright again in the ruins of your couch. 

“Don’t move too fast, you’ll start bleeding again,” you chided and scooted closer to stop him from aggravating the injury on his abdomen. You’d healed the worst of it, but it was still an open wound, and he was bound to be sore as hell after smashing through a window/wall. 

“M’ fine,” he grumbled as he settled into a slightly more seated position. Then he looked down and noticed his hoodie was still partially rucked up around his arm pits, and his red eyes shot back to you. He studied you for a long moment, but his face was unreadable. “Undressing me while I was unconscious? You’re not one of those damn obsessed fangirls, are ya?” 

Your cheeks flared red-hot, but you scowled at the ash-blond hero. “N-No! I—You were bleeding, so I wanted to make sure it wasn’t too b-bad. But, uh, the gash isn’t that deep.” 

It was a little harder to make more articulate, detailed lies, especially when his blood was still drying on your hands and you could remember the exact feel of his pulse slowing beneath your fingertips. 

Dynamight narrowed his scarlet eyes at you, and you knew you weren’t being convincing. Panic started to claw up the back of your throat again. His burning gaze was charring away at your weaknesses, your resolve. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, confessing. You’d saved his life after all. That wasn’t a bad thing. 

Then you remembered all the articles you’d looked up one anxiety-filled night, soon after moving here. All the stories about people using their quirks and causing damage. Of people with healing quirks trying to help and only doing more harm. The fines, the charges, and in rare cases, imprisonment. 

You didn’t think you’d be locked up, but you couldn’t afford any fines now, and as an immigrant, any mark on your record could get you immediately deported. 

Your mouth dried up. You couldn’t be deported, sent back to your parents as a failure again. What’s more, you had people who relied on you here, like Mrs. Kojima. You weren’t a hero, not important by any means, but… you had just found something to give your life a little purpose. A little stability. 

No, you couldn’t be discovered. You just couldn’t. 

Your newfound resolve stiffened your spine a little, but when you lifted your chin and met those piercing crimson eyes again, your courage—along with your tongue—shriveled inside you. 

Fuck, how were you going to lie your way out of this? 

Unfortunately, Dynamight didn’t give you any more time to get your story straight. 

“Your hands are all fucked up.” 

You startled at his rough voice, instinctively flipping your hands palm-side down and tucking them between your legs. Then, when your brain caught up to your body, you cursed yourself. 

Could you be any more obvious, any more guilty? 

“I, uh, i-it’s nothing,” you stammered, clearing your throat before you continued. “I cut myself on the broken glass from the window, but it’s not serious. Nothing a few bandaids won’t fix, anyway. Maybe some gauze and antiseptic, but definitely not a hospital visit or anything.” 

You knew you were babbling but somehow couldn’t stop it, your anxiety just seizing control of your tongue, and you clenched your torn-up hands into fists until the stinging pain centered you a little bit. 

Once again, Dynamight studied you in silence, like he was choosing his words carefully. 

“Did you nick your damn wrist, too?” he finally asked as his neutral mask twisted into his signature scowl. “Looks like a lot of blood. Don’t be an idiot and bleed out on me. I don’t wanna deal with the fuckin’ paperwork.” 

Well, maybe not that carefully. 

“I-I’m not bleeding out,” you protested with a frown. “I’m fine.” 

“Let me see.” 

You blinked. “Excuse me? 

The hero stuck out his right hand, palm up, his scowl only deepening. “Let me see your hands.” 

Fuck. A drop of icy cold fear slid down your spine. Your hands were indeed “fucked up” like the blond said, but the cuts were all shallow and minor. They would in no way explain how you were coated in blood up past your wrists. None of your injuries would account for that. 

And none of his current ones would, either. 

“I—” You opened and closed your mouth several times like a gasping fish, and Dynamight’s eyes narrowed on you with what you were sure was suspicion. 

And then, like a gift from the heavens, a small but bright beam of light suddenly flooded your apartment from over your shoulder. 

“Dynamight?” a male voice shouted. 

The blond hero clenched his eyes shut and turned away from the light, and you. “I’m here! Turn that damn light out.” 

Said light cut out an instant later, and you seized the opportunity that had just been presented to you. 

Quick as a whip, you leaned over and snatched a large swath of dark fabric that you’d seen in the brief moment of illumination, and you reeled it into your lap quickly. The fabric had been a personal project of yours, a gown you’d started on a whim, but that didn’t matter now. Dynamight was still rubbing at his eyes, grumbling about being blinded, so you kicked half of the unfinished garment under and around the base of the ruined couch, effectively covering up the large pool of blood that had congealed under the splintered furniture. Then you reached behind you, grabbed the bloody stake, and shoved it between the folds of fabric. 

There. Now, most of the evidence was hidden. 

And not a moment too soon, because in the next breath you heard the crunch of glass as the unnamed hero stepped into the apartment behind you. 

“Hello?” 

“We’re over here,” you called back, struggling to your feet so the hero could see you over the back of the couch. 

The hero was silhouetted against your ruined window and the flashing police lights outside, so you couldn’t see much of his face, but you could tell he was tall and broad-shouldered, wrapped in a red and purple suit you didn’t recognize. 

“Are you alright, ma’am?” the hero asked in very formal Japanese. 

You opened your mouth to reply, but Dynamight cut you off. It seemed to be a habit of his. 

“We’re fine,” he grunted, and you turned to see the blond shoving himself to his feet. A gasp caught in your throat, and you made a half-aborted motion to stop him, but his red eyes snapped up and glared at you, freezing you in your tracks. “Aren’t we?” 

It took a moment for you to realize the last question was directed at you, and when Dynamight’s lip curled up into a sneer as he accusingly dropped his gaze to your hands, you realized none of your lies had convinced him after all. 

“Y-Yes.” The word stumbled out of your mouth without your permission, but you couldn’t seem to tear your eyes off the blond as you felt your world falling in around you for the second time tonight. “We’re fine.” 

The hero behind you said something, but it was lost in the static suddenly filling your head. 

He knows. He knows. Dynamight knows. 

The words cycled through your brain again and again, a broken record. What would he do? Would he tell the other hero? Or take you down to the authorities himself? And what then? Would they arrest you? Give you a few days to pack up and say your goodbyes before your deportation? 

Just as you were beginning to spiral, movement caught your attention, and you watched as if from a distance as Dynamight suddenly stepped past you, the scent of burnt sugar stinging your nose as he went. He was talking, and the low rumble of his voice vibrated through your body since he was so close, barely a hair’s breadth away, but he seemed to be talking to the other hero. 

Was he confessing your secret already? 

You couldn’t seem to turn around, your slippered feet rooted to your debris strewn floor. Even in the dark, you could see the black stain of Dynamight’s blood on your ruined couch cushions, and without thinking, you leaned down, picked up another torn and dirty piece of fabric, and threw it over the stain, blocking it from view. 

You didn’t know why you did that. It didn’t matter now. Dynamight knew, and— 

“Ma’am?” A hand touched your elbow, and you jumped, whirling around. “Whoa, careful there.” 

It was the tall hero in the red and purple suit. He was wearing a partial mask over his eyes, so only the lower half of his face was visible, framed by two pieces of dark hair. He smiled at you, a pleasant, reassuring gesture, but you could only gape at him. 

“Are you alright?” he asked you again, a frown replacing his smile. His eyes started to look you over, but you shoved your hands into the pockets of your sweats before he could see them. 

It doesn’t matter, you idiot, your brain screamed, but your body was still going through the motions of keeping your secret, twisting your hands in your pockets, trying to rub out the blood. 

“I’m fine,” you said again and then realized repeating the same trite phrase probably wasn’t convincing. So, you smiled at the hero, or at least you thought you did. Your face felt strangely stiff and numb, but you flashed your teeth and crinkled your eyes just the same. “Really. I’m just a little… shaken up is all. I have a few cuts and bruises, but nothing serious. The apartment took the worst of the damage, obviously.” 

You laughed, a hint of hysteria in your voice, as you gestured to the gaping hole in your wall behind the hero, hoping to get him away from your blood-soaked couch. And, blessedly, he did turn, so you took a few steps past him until you were both facing the broken window. 

Then you noticed Dynamight was standing near the hole, very cautiously leaning against the last remaining, exposed stud in the wall, with his hands shoved in the pocket of his hoodie. His body was facing out into the street, but his eyes were still locked on you, the red of them only intensified by the police lights still flashing on the street. 

His eyes seemed to say, I know what you did, and all the saliva dried up in your mouth. 

“Well, as bad as the damage is to your home, I’m glad you weren’t seriously injured, ma’am,” the hero at your side suddenly said, and you jolted when you realized he was responding to your inane babble from what already felt like hours ago. 

“O-Oh, yes.” You smiled again, just as forced and twice as shaky. “I was… very lucky. A-And thank you! For doing your part to s-stop that villain before he hurt anyone or caused even more damage.” 

“Yes, well, there was still more damage than I would have preferred,” the hero replied, and you didn’t miss the dirty look he shot Dynamight, who just deepened his scowl because he was still looking at you. “But let’s get you down to the street. The paramedics will look you over, and the authorities will want to take a statement. But don’t worry, they’ll also put you up in a hotel for the night since you obviously can’t stay here.” 

He threw the last part of the sentence at Dynamight like a dagger, and the blond finally tore his eyes off you to glare at the other hero. 

You waited for the explosive hero to… well, explode, but he only stared down the tall man beside you before he rolled his eyes, glanced at you one last time, and then jumped out the hole in your wall. 

“No—” you gasped, stumbling forward like you could stop him, but an instant later, you heard a mini-boom out on the street, followed by Dynamight barking orders at someone. 

Oh, yeah. You remembered how the blond had burst through the air while fighting the villain and realized he didn’t just ruin all your hard, illegal healing work by face-planting onto the concrete. 

You sighed and suddenly swayed, like the blond leaving had finally cut all of your tense strings. The adrenaline was fading at last, exhaustion leeching through your veins in its place, and you listed into the hero beside you. 

“Ma’am?” he asked, a note of concern in his voice. 

“Sorry,” you mumbled sleepily, trying and failing to find your balance. “I think… the shock is wearing off. Just… tired.” 

“Would it be alright if I carried you down to the street?” 

You wanted to protest, say you could take the stairs down to your shop, but your tongue felt sluggish in your mouth, and all you managed was a vaguely affirmative sounding hum. 

“Okay, hold on.” 

You felt one hand wrap around your shoulders while the other scooped you up around the knees, and usually, you would protest, insecure about your weight, but the hero settled you against his chest with ease. The instant you were off your feet, every muscle in your body went limp, and you were too tired to even be embarrassed when your head flopped against the hero’s collarbone. 

You had the vague thought that he didn’t smell like warm sugar, followed by a flash of disappointment, but then the hero was moving, jumping, and you were falling through the air. 

Unfortunately, you didn’t get the luxury of passing out. 

Once you hit the street, it was all sirens and shouting, flashing lights and flashes of people, so many people. 

True to his word, the hero in the red and purple suit carried you over to an ambulance and two waiting paramedics. The American in you panicked, instinctively trying to refuse care because your shop and home were just destroyed, you didn’t have money for an ambulance ride, too. 

But as the medics peppered you with rapid fire Japanese questions, you were reminded of where you were, and the bright flashlight shining into your eyes sure woke you up a little. 

The next half an hour was a blur. The paramedics tended to the wounds on your palms, knees, and, embarrassingly, ass, but all of the cuts were shallow, and none of them even required stitches. You knew they wouldn’t require stitches anyway, because once you rested up, your quirk would heal you, but you kept your mouth shut and let the medics wrap you in gauze and bandages. You seemed to have rubbed away enough of the blood on your hands that they weren’t suspicious, but it brought you no relief. 

While they worked, you watched the heroes and police out of your peripherals. They were still working to seal off the scene and tend to your neighbors, who were gathered further down the block behind some yellow tape. It didn’t look like anyone else had been injured beside you, and for that you were grateful. 

But your stomach was still in knots. 

More than once, you heard Dynamight’s brash voice bark over the sirens and other voices, and as the paramedics were finishing up the bandages on your hands, a head of ash-blond hair jutted out over the police car closest to you. Unable to stop yourself, your eyes zeroed in on that distinctive hair color, and you saw the explosive hero was speaking—well, yelling—at two police officers. 

Your mouth felt suddenly dry despite the multiple cups of water the medics had fed to you. What was Dynamight saying? 

As if he could hear your thoughts, red eyes snapped to the side and locked onto yours, and the breath hitched in your chest. That crimson gaze held you trapped, unable to look away, so when the two officers he’d been speaking to suddenly stepped into your field of vision, you gasped. 

“Apologies, didn’t mean to startle you, ma’am,” one of the officers said. He was a middle-aged man, balding, with a serious face and a no-nonsense expression. “We just wanted to ask you a few questions, if you feel up to it.” 

You swallowed, your throat clicking, and your heart stuttered into a breakneck pace beneath your sternum. 

“O-Of course,” you replied, only stumbling a little over your Japanese. You smiled at the officers, but the expression felt stilted, and fear seized you by the throat and squeezed until your breaths were shallow and grating in your ears. 

“Thank you.” The balding officer nodded. “My name is Detective Nakahara. I’ve been told you witnessed and were injured in tonight’s attack.” 

You thought the injury part was obvious, given your myriad of bandages and the fact you were sitting in the back of an ambulance, but you nodded to confirm anyway since your voice had abandoned you. 

This was it. He was going to ask you the damning question, and you were going to tell the truth. Lying to a hero in the heat of the moment had been one thing, but lying to a police officer during an official statement was another thing entirely. It would take one database search for them to confirm your quirk and Dynamight’s story, and then you really would be in trouble. Maybe imprisoned instead of deported. You cursed yourself for not knowing more about the laws that were going to quickly ruin your life. 

But… then Nakahara started asking you about the villain and what you saw, and you stuttered out an answer to the best of your ability. You thought this might have been a disarming tactic, to lull you into a false sense of security, but when you got to the part of the story where Dynamight burst through your window, the officer sighed. 

“I take it that’s your apartment there?” Detective Nakahara asked as he gestured to the gaping hole. 

“Y-Yes.” You nodded. “And I own the shop below.” 

Which you now realized looked no better than your apartment. The windows were all blown out, black scorch marks along the door frame, and you didn’t want to even think about the shape of the interior. 

“What kind of shop is it?” he followed up, but he sounded more curious than interrogatory. 

“Clothing alterations,” you said. “M-My grandparents were a tailor and seamstress. I inherited the shop about a year ago, after they passed.” 

“My condolences,” Nakahara murmured with a small dip of his head, and he seemed genuine. “For your grandparents, and your home and business.” 

You blinked in surprise at the turn in conversation. “O-Oh, thank you, that’s very kind.” 

“Do you have anywhere to go for the night, or were you on the way to the hospital?” he asked as he looked you over. 

“No,” you said quickly and then blushed. “I-I mean, my injuries aren’t serious enough for a hospital visit. Just some cuts and scrapes.” 

“Alright.” Nakahara nodded. “Is there any family we can call for you? Or take you to?” 

“N-No,” you repeated, a little more timidly this time. “My parents… don’t live around here, and I don’t really have any other family.” 

“Any friends?” he asked with a furrowed brow. 

Your face was red-hot now, and you dropped your eyes to your lap, fiddling with your bandaged fingers. What were you going to say? That you were an introvert, and the only “friends” you had were the old ladies who frequented your shop? 

“None that I would want to bother in the middle of the night,” you muttered before you suddenly remembered something. “But, um, one of the heroes said you could maybe take me to a hotel?” 

“Of course, we can take you right now, and we’ll also pay for the night,” the detective said. 

“Oh, you don’t have to—” you started to protest as you snapped your head up, but the officer held up a hand. 

“The city has funds to aid those displaced by villain attacks,” he explained. “The next forty-eight hours are guaranteed, so if I were you, I would use the opportunity to rest.” 

Detective Nakahara glanced down at your bandages, and you bit your lips as you nodded. 

“Okay, thank you for your help then, sir.” It was all you could think to say. 

“You’re welcome.” Nakahara nodded back at you and then reached out to help you out of the ambulance. “If you’ll come this way, we can have an officer collect some things from your apartment, and then we’ll head to the hotel and get you settled.” 

The finality in his tone and the idea of a hotel drew you up short. What… was happening? You had thought the detective was going to interrogate you about your quirk, not… chauffeur you to a nice hotel. 

The practical part of your brain was screaming for you to let it go, but the words were high-diving off your tongue before you could stop them. 

“I-Is that all?” 

Detective Nakahara paused and looked at you with a raised eyebrow. “Is what all?” 

“I—” Shut up, shut up, shut up! “You didn’t have any more questions for me?” 

“No,” the detective said simply. “We have your statement, and it matches the others we’ve obtained.” Here, he frowned and seemed to study you for a moment. “Did you have any other questions for me?” 

“I… was just wondering what the next steps are for my apartment and shop,” you blurted out the first thing you could think of. “Will the… city pay for repairs? Do I have to fill out some forms?” 

It was an honest question, a real one you had, but your mind was still reeling. He wasn’t going to ask about your quirk? Had… Had Dynamight not said anything? 

Nakahara sighed but held a hand out for you to take, and you absently let him help you down from the ambulance. Then he slowly began walking toward one of the police cars, and you had no choice but to follow since you were still holding onto his arm for balance. 

“Unfortunately,” the detective started, “the city will not be able to repair your home or business.” 

“Why?” you asked with a frown. “I thought you said there were funds.” 

“There are,” he said, and when you looked up at him, you noticed his lips were pursed into a thin line. “And, if the villain himself had thrown debris through your window, then the city would compensate you. But, in this situation, Dynamight caused the damaged.” 

The detective practically spat the blond hero’s name, and your surprise must have shown on your face because Nakahara quickly cleared his throat and schooled his expression. 

“Because of this, his agency will be responsible for repairs, so you will have to contact them,” the officer finished. 

Contact them? You had to contact Dynamight’s agency, which meant… fuck. You felt the blood drain from your face, and your expression must have shown your dismay because Nakahara patted your hand that was still looped through his arm 

“But you can worry about that tomorrow,” he said. “Let’s get your things and get you to the hotel so you can rest.” 

You nodded blankly and let the detective lead you to the open backseat of a police car. Nakahara called another officer over, and the woman asked you questions about where things were in your apartment. You answered numbly, listing out different clothing items and how to get to your bedroom. Then she was gone, and Nakahara stepped away to do something else, so you were suddenly left all alone. 

Unbidden, you looked up and searched for that pair of scarlet eyes, that head of ash-blond hair, but the explosive hero was suddenly nowhere to be found. 

The crime scene continued to bustle around you, but all the while, two thoughts circled each other in your head, like binary stars stuck in each other’s orbit: 

Dynamight didn’t reveal my secret. 

But I’m going to have to face him again.

[winchesterxxi]

Enough is Enough (Poe Dameron x Reader)

Rating: T (Teen and Up)

Type: Angst

Pairing: Poe Dameron x Female!Reader

Summary: Reader and Poe have been arguing for over a week and completely avoiding each other. This has come to the attention to the person that happens to be your third wheel most of the time - Finn. Along with BB8 and Rey they come up with a plan to get the two of you talking.

Word Count: 2.5k

Warnings: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Swearing

A/N: I’m back baby.

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It’s only 8am on a Monday and you already feel like murdering people.

Your fiancé to be exact.

As soon as your alarm had sounded across the room, you jumped out of bed and headed to the bathroom, closing the door behind you. You brushed your teeth and hair, got dressed and walked out into the bedroom, striding across it and out the other door.

Poe was awake, facing the door, and he saw you walk out, eyes trailing after your back but a scowl firm on his face. He really had fucked up, and he knew it. But for fuck’s sake, you’re both adults, if you are going to give him the silent treatment like a child, he is not above doing the same to you.

So out he goes. He rises from the bed, tired hand running through his unruly curls at the same time as a yawn proceeding to complete his morning routine, before striding across the same path as you, grabbing his pilot jacket in the process.

The cantina was packed – it’s a Monday morning, of course it is. Pilots, mechanics and Resistance workers from all branches crammed along the trayline trying to get the freshest pieces of toast or the juiciest pieces of fruit before the others could get to them.

Poe doesn’t blame them. Most of these people were either on the brick of hunger and homelessness or being deprived of their needs by the Empire before they had been recruited the Resistance and the fact that they now had warm meals every day for which they paid with their own sweat, was something to be cherished.

The latter case resembled that of Finn who he spotted at one of the tables, and he made a b line to seat next to his friend. Upon getting closer he noticed that Finn was sitting in front of Rey who, in her turn was sitting next to…you.

That’s fine. This is fine. This is absolutely fine.

Before going to the table, Poe decides to take a detour and get some breakfast before sitting down. Because he was hungry. Not because this would buy him some time before inevitably sitting down in front of you and try to contain the immense annoyance you’ve been causing him for the past week.

After a few moments, Poe looks down at his tray and its fullness, food about to spill out – more food than he could ever possibly stomach. He closes his eyes and sighs before an Ewok is pushing him away from where he stood in front of the pastry baskets. Straightening himself back up, Poe finally walks up to the table, flashing a smile at Finn before setting his tray down next to him and sitting in front of you.

When he passes your side you can sense his cologne invade your nostrils and, somehow, that only makes you angrier.

“Morning, pilot.” Rey teases but her smile quickly retracts once she spots the scowl on both your faces, looking from Poe to you and to him again. Finn senses the heavy energy and eyes Rey who gives him a silent clueless shrug.

“So,” Finn asks “what plans does the Dameron couple have for today?”

It’s as if the guy read your minds.

“I don’t know of any couple that goes by that name.” You mumble into your spoon of oatmeal and Poe’s eyes zero in on you.

Panic flashes across Finn and Rey’s once they hear you. Did the two of you break up? Is the wedding off?

“People are individuals, you know, Finn.” You settle down your spoon and turn your face to him, elaborating with a tone that had a slight taint of menace in it “Even though a couple is in a relationship they remain individuals.” You point the tone in word individuals, eyes narrowing to the man in front of you. Rey and Finn exchange a look.

“The fact that people are individuals doesn’t mean they can’t share a part of the other’s identity.” He snakes into the rim of his cup of coffee, eyes never leaving yours.

“It does if that meant they had to give up a part of their own identity.” You snap back, voice low.

“I’m not sure I follow.” Rey wavers and looks between the two of you.

“Thing is, Rey.” You turn to her “and Finn… there is no Dameron couple. There is a Poe Dameron and Y/N Y/L/N couple. But I’m not even too sure of that now.”

Poe puts his mug of coffee down a little too abruptly as he leaned forward, elbows on the table.

“Are you really that entitled?”

“I’m the one who’s entitled? Have you heard yourself speak lately?” you mimic his movements, leaning forward on your own side of the table

“Why is it such a big deal for you?”

“Because it’s who I am!” you borderline-scream and get all of the cantina’s attention drawn to you, specifically those of the two people sitting next to you, looking in shock at your sudden outburst, which they’d never even gotten a glimpse of.

You and Poe hold each other’s gaze for a long while, focused on nothing but each other and the mix of rage and hurt rumbling inside of you. And when you can’t help your lips from trembling and your eyes to burn with tears, you swear you can see something break inside of him.

He himself swore he was about to break this stupid game the minute he saw your face. For the glimpse of a second, he felt like reaching his hand up to cup your face, or to hold your hand or to stroke your jawline in that way that calmed you down. But before he could act on his impulses, you stormed out of the cantina, leaving behind your cooling breakfast and a torn Poe.

“What did you do?” Rey asks horrified at what she just witness and somewhat ready to throw fists at the man who seemingly broke her friend’s heart.

“It’s not what I did it’s what I said.” He mumbles and stands up from his own seat and, just like you, leaving behind an untouched tray of food and a half cup of coffee while Finn and Rey follow him with their gaze.

It was nice of Rey to ask you to go out for drinks tonight. Not just that, but she didn’t ask questions – she didn’t throw you a pity what was that about? or are you okay? Because it obviously wasn’t. It wasn’t and you don’t think it would ever be again.

So here you were, walking into a low-light bar in Canto Bight in your favourite pair of dress and shoes with nothing in your mind but the drink you were eager to order and the friend you were looking forward to meeting – a luxury that, just a few months ago would not have been possible. When you’re fighting for your own survival, a night at the bar isn’t exactly your top priority, but that was in the past.

Straightening yourself up, you smooth your dress and walk over to the table with the number she had told you – number 15. Upon reaching it, you sat down facing the door and nudging away the waiter who comes by to ask if you’d like a drink. There was no way in the galaxy you were starting the drinking night alone. Maker knows how that would end.

It had just been a few minutes of fidgeting with the table towel when you look up to the bar’s entrance and your eyes meet the last person you wanted to see. Poe. And damn, if it weren’t for the current situation he would’ve knocked the wind right out of you.

He looked good. Shinny curls and a fresh face with his good leather jacket. He looked really good. And you hated him for that.

He didn’t quite spot you until he was halfway across the bar in the direction you were sitting in, eyes coming into focus on your figure as you quickly stood up and took a small step back. Standing to your full height, Poe swears he’d never seen you look so perfect, which made the energy between the two of you all the more painful.

“What are you doing here?” you ask, hugging your arms close to your body.

“I’m here to meet Finn.” He replies, hands nervously spasming by his side, a habit you’d come to know and love.

“On this table?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I’m here to meet Rey.” You answer quietly, scoffing.

“It’s a two people table.” He says matter-of-factly.

“And they’re not here.”

“But we are.”

Realization struck the both of you and Poe runs a hand over his exasperated face as you throw your head back and close your eyes. He sighs deeply before bringing one hand up to his hip.

“Can we then at least talk?”

You scoff at him.

“No.” Is your simple one-word answer before you try and make your way to the door, which he blocks.

“Y/N –“

“No. Are you going to let me pass?” he doesn’t move.

“For fuck’s sake Y/N.”

You scowl and turn around striding to where you know to be an elevator – if you can’t get out, at least you can go up. At this point, being on a different floor was enough. You can hear him mumbling words behind you but you try to pay him no intention, beyond grateful that the elevator’s doors opened as soon as you clicked the button.

“Fuck you Dameron.”

Stepping in, your not quick enough to press the closing button before Poe is slithering between the almost-closed doors and stepping into the same space as you.

“Oh, now you’re okay with using my last name?”

“When addressing you? Yeah, totally.” You nudge him so you can reach the buttons and press R for rooftop. He does a double-take on you before running his fingers across all the floors. You look up at him incredulously. “Really mature.”

“Mature is talking. And we are going to talk.”

“There is nothing to talk about!”

“Will you talk to me?”

“I don’t want t---” you were about to scream when the elevator came to a halt and you stumbled into Poe’s arms, before standing right up, the lights above you flickering.

“Great! Just what we needed.” he throws his hands up in the air, and now you really thought you could slap him across his beautiful face.

“Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t pressed all the buttons like a kid!”

- Meanwhile, above the elevator -

“BB8.” Finn whisper yells from the open door, three floors above. “How long can you hold them?”

The poor droid, with his little tools stuck in the flashing wires, beeps in response.

“He said maybe 5 more minutes.” Rey translates, before flopping back on the floor and away from the open door and the empty elevator space. After a few moments in silence, she nudges Finn’s side.

“Don’t you think this is adding fuel to the fire?”

“They just need to talk. Plus they’ve been avoiding each other. We’re doing them a favour.”

- Back on the elevator –

Taking in a deep breath you lean back against one of the elevator’s golden mirror walls.

“Why did you get like that when I said I wanted to keep my name?”

“I… do you really hate the idea of being called a Dameron so much?” his voice is small as he stands in the middle of the floor, eyes searching yours.

“It’s not that! I just… I hate the idea that just because we’re getting married I need to give up being called by my last name. I never wanted that! It’s not because it’s you. I told myself that if I ever was to get married I’d never take another man’s name.” Tears are back at pooling at the corners of your eyes as you turn your head slightly to look into Poe’s sad face.

“Or maybe you just don’t want to be known as the ex-spice-runner’s-wife.” His statement is but a whisper as his voice gets caught in the back of his throat and you have never seen him this close to tears.

That’s what does it for you. That’s what makes you reach forward and grab his warm face in your hands, guiding him to look at you.

“Hey, hey… That is not true. Don’t you ever think that. I love you. I love you for who you were, who you are and who you’re yet to be… which I hope to be there to cherish.” The tears roll down both your cheeks as a breathy chuckle leaves you. “It’s not about your name. It’s about mine. And I… it really hurt me when you said those things. Acting as if me keeping my name was a sin or something.”

He averts your gaze, looking at the floor but you motion his face back to where it was.

“Hey. Here…” you guide one of his hands to where your heart beats “I’m already a Dameron. Have been for a long time. Just not on paper. And at the end of the day… what is more important?”

It’s his turn to cup your face and bring his forehead close to yours. “I’m so sorry. I was an idiot… thank you for…this.”

“No, thank you.”

His hands are the ones that pull your face up and wipe a stray tear from the corner of your eye, before stroking your cheekbones with a feather-light touch.

“You look beautiful-- ”

“I love you.”

It’s a short and exasperate sentence, but you’ve gone almost two weeks without saying it and Maker, how you missed the way it sounded and the way it felt rolling out of your lips. Poe could say the same, the deprivation of that sentence that he has suffered sending a bolt of warmth across his body as if this were your first date all those years ago.

For a moment your eyes cross, but before too long he is lunching forward and capturing your lips in his. The tears came again as he held onto the kiss as if that was the only thing keeping him alive.

You were reluctant to pull away from the sweet embrace, but you did. And you were met with the sweet smile you had missed.

“What do we say we go downstairs… I have a feeling there’s a table waiting just for us.” He jokes, running a quick hand over his watery eyes and you chuckle at the timely joke.

“Yeah, yeah… I’d like that.” You smile, grabbing his cheek and kissing it once again. And, as if on queue. The elevator starts working again, lights flickering for a few seconds, and the only button that was on was that of the Ground floor from which you were trying to get away from just a few minutes before.

Little did the two of you know that attached to the roof of the elevator was a happy BB8 as the compartment went down and, just a few floors above, two very content Resistance members, high-fiving.

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[bridgetserdocksketches]

We're suffering tonight, boys

Lena isn’t avoiding Kara, okay? She’s just very busy. That’s all. What with being the CEO of her own company, running her own experiments, and this new little passion project she has a lot going on. Her absence in Kara’s life these past few days has absolutely nothing to do with the black eye she’s currently sporting. Don’t be ridiculous.

Though, in hindsight, she really should’ve known she’d only be able to bail on lunch with Kara so many times before she came knocking.

Lena’s knee deep in some complex coding, trying to figure out what went wrong with this last test and fix it, when she gets the call. She barely even looks at her phone screen before answering. Not that she needs to.

“Kara, hi,” she says warmly.

“Are you avoiding me?”

Well, shit. “What? No. Of course not.”

“Are you sick? You know if you’re sick you can just tell me, right?”

“Yes, I-- no, Kara. I’m not sick.”

Lena can practically see the pinch in her brow. The confusion painted all over her face as she tries to puzzle out what’s going on with Lena.

“Okay, well you skipped lunch three times this week. Is everything alright?” Kara asks.

“Yes, everything’s perfectly fine. I’ve just been busy,” Lena assures her.

“So you’re not avoiding me?”

Lena breathes out a sigh that borders on a laugh. “No.”

“Alright, then can you come let me in?”

Before Lena can even ask where she is or what she means (as if she doesn’t already know), there’s a knocking at the door. Not the front door, of course. No, that would be far too mundane. It’s at the back door. The balcony door. The one that Lena always leaves unlocked, but Kara refuses to open without being welcomed in.

Her immediate reaction is to get up and open the door for Kara. But then Kara would see the black eye that much sooner. And if she can stall for even a few seconds longer, she will. So instead, she simply turns over her shoulder (careful to keep her left eye obscured) and calls out to Kara.

“It’s open.”

Still wearing the Supergirl suit and wielding a takeout bag, Kara strides into Lena’s apartment with a little spring in her step. Because as far as she’s concerned, Lena hasn’t been avoiding her. Lena isn’t hiding a few secrets from her and has nothing out of the ordinary going on. She’s just a little extra busy with that passion project she has outright refused to share any information about with anyone. There is absolutely nothing for her - or Lena, for that matter - to worry about.

“I figured you didn’t eat anything since you skipped lunch, again,” Kara drawls, the barest hint of disappointment in her words. “So I brought you dinner.” She walks around to get in front of Lena, finally, and plops the greasy bag of Big Belly Burger down on the counter. “Voila!”

There’s a five second gap after the delectable diabetic nightmare is presented before Lena. Five charged seconds where Lena simply waits for Kara to finally notice. At first, she’s a little too proud of herself. A grin so broad and brilliant and downright beautiful it could be considered blinding spread across her face. But then those blue eyes of hers track a little to the left and they go wide. Her mouth falls open. Her brow pinches. And several emotions flicker over her visage all at once.

Her lips work around a few words, spluttering on air briefly, before she finally settles on “Lena!”

And Lena can’t help herself. “Kara?”

Kara blinks. “What-- When-- Who did this to you?”

Lena exhales deeply and leans back in her chair. “No one did this to me.”

Kara’s around on Lena’s side of the counter in the space of a heartbeat. Her hands cradling Lena’s face like it’ll break under the slightest amount of pressure as she examines her.

“What happened?” She demands.

“Nothing. I’m fine,” Lena insists.

It’s almost believable, too. But then Kara’s thumb chances a little too close to her left eye. With a hiss of pain, Lena flinches from her hand. Kara’s brow furrows further and her frown deepens.

“Lena--”

“I’m fine, Kara. Really,” Lena says. She takes both of Kara’s hands in her own and pulls them down from her face. “It was just an experiment gone wrong.”

“What sort of experiment gives people black eyes?”

Lena breathes out an indignant little huff of air. “It’ll be easier to just show you.”

Kara’s gaze narrows. “Alright.”

Kara is right on Lena’s heels as they walk to the spare room. The room Lena has taken to calling the nursery, where Baymax is lying in wait. At this stage in his development, he’s pretty infantile at best. He knows a few key phrases and can identify a person as long as they’re standing in front of him. But he can’t hold a conversation and his object permanence is severely lacking. So, yeah. Lena’s gonna call his room a nursery.

Baymax is in his charging pod where she’d left him a few days ago (when their most recent test run failed spectacularly, leaving Lena with a shiner). There isn’t anything else in the room, though. Lena had removed a lot of it to make space for his assembly. Once that was done, she decided to keep the room empty after he broke her last laptop after a particularly nasty glitch. So the only thing in here, as far as Kara’s concerned, is some weird red luggage tucked against the back wall.

“What am I looking at?” Kara asks, the worry from before replaced with confusion and curiosity.

“Hopefully something that’ll help a lot of people,” Lena says.

It’s cryptic, she’ll admit. But it’s hard to explain exactly what Baymax is at this point. Because he’s not simply a robot anymore. He’s taken on so much more personality and life in just the few weeks since his first test run. He’s learning. Growing. Like a person.

So instead of explaining, Lena crosses the length of the room, kneels down in front of the charging pod, and activates the robot.

Later, Kara would say that Lena leapt away from the charging station as it booted up. Like she’d gotten zapped or something. Lena, however, would vehemently insist that she simply hurried away in case something went wrong. Either way, she now stands alongside Kara, watching with bated breath as Baymax comes back to life.

She counts the seconds it takes him to inflate. 23. They need to get that down. He needs to be faster. If someone is really hurt, he has to be able to help. It takes another 4 seconds for Baymax to fully boot up. His eyes blink to signify that he’s fully functional and ready to assist. A total of 27 seconds. They can do better.

Not that Kara notices. She’s staring open mouthed and wide eyed as Baymax awkwardly stumbles out of his charging pod. His steps are heavy, almost as if he thinks the floor is further down (just another thing to iron out). He stops moving about two feet away from them both. Lifts his hand limply into the air (the fingers not fully inflated or opposable yet).

“Hello. I am Baymax, your personal healthcare companion.”

And then he freezes. Standing right there. Unmoving and, to be frank, a little terrifying.

“Wow,” Kara breathes.

“Yeah,” Lena agrees. “He’s still got a lot of bugs to work out. Hence the black eye.” She gestures at her left eye vaguely. “But when he’s finished, he’s going to help a lot of people.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Kara asks.

Lena turns to her now. Her brow arched and a playful little smirk on her lips. “What? Is being Supergirl not enough for you?”

“Don't get me wrong. I love being Supergirl, but this.” She points at Baymax’s frozen form. “This will be able to do something I never could.”

Lena’s smirk falls into something softer. Something kinder. Kara finally looks at her now.

“Now, I’m not great with coding and all that… stuff. But I can help you test him out. No matter how hard he tries, he’s not going to be able to give me a black eye.”

Well, when she puts it like that…

“Do I… do I start now?” Kara asks hesitantly. She fidgets uncomfortably with the sign Lena handed her, then adjusts her glasses.

Lena smiles at her from behind her computer. “You can start whenever you like. But I do want to be done by dinner, darling.”

“Right.” Kara nods.

She looks away from Lena, her eyes landing on Baymax. And then she grins. That unfairly perfect grin. The one that is so infectious it’s a wonder the CDC aren’t investigating it yet.

“This is Kara Danvers,” She says, carefully enunciating each word. “And this is the first test of mine and Lena Luthor’s Baymax Project.”

She reaches forward, just like Lena showed her, and turns Baymax on. She grins again, up at the robot, and waits. Watches as he blinks, tilts his head down, and lifts his hand.

“Hello. I am Baymax, your personal healthcare companion.”

“Hello, Baymax!” She answers cheerily. “Would you please scan me?”

“Beginning scan now,” Baymax announces.

But that’s not what happens. No, it would be too simple if that’s what happens next. Instead, the entire system glitches. And both his arms start vibrating rapidly.

Kara’s face pales. “Uh, Lena,” she calls, not daring to look away from another rogue robot. “Is he supposed to be doing that?”

“No,” Lena says quickly. She looks between the two screens in front of her, trying to search for the error in his code to stop this from happening next time. “You gotta shut him down, Kara.”

“Uh-oh!” Kara exclaims.

Lena’s head snaps up. “Uh-oh?”

“Sorry about your laptop,” Kara says, as if it’s her fault Baymax broke yet another computer. Lena really needs to stick to her no-computers-in-the-nursery rule.

“It’s alright.” Lena waves her off, dutifully working away at the code from her tablet. “I’ll just get another one.”

“Next time I’ll stand between the two of you. That way I can better stop his renegade flying arms.”

Lena's gaze snaps to where Kara sits, finishing off the last of their fries (Lena’s fries, really. But they always share). “Next time? You still want to help after that disaster?”

“Of course,” Kara says earnestly. Then her face screws up. “But do you think we could make him look a little friendlier? A bit rounder? You know. Friend-shaped?”

Lena snickers. “Friend-shaped?”

“Yeah. Friend-shaped.”

Lena laughs lightly, and start typing again. “I think I can make that work.”

Wow. That got away from me

So this is how Kara ends up being the one to test Baymax. It's also part of what Baymax shows to Lena after telling her "Kara is here."

This scene (as in the video, not the ficlet) would serve as an emotional low point, if you couldn't tell. And it would be the moment where Lena decides she's going to let the Superfriends use Baymax to save Kara (instead of his actual purpose which is, you know, healthcare)

[honeypiehotchner]

delicate -- Hotch x Reader one-shot

Here’s that one-shot I’ve been holding for a while! Named her delicate after Taylor Swift’s song, purely because of the whole “dive bar on the east side/where you at?” imagery. I listened to the Spotify Singles (acoustic) version of the song while writing this, if you wanna listen while you read! Enjoy!! xx.

Summary: Hotch doesn’t go to bars very often. Until he meets you at one.

Warnings: age gap (reader is somewhere around 24-25), mentioning of being safe at a bar (so alluding to date rape drugs), harassment from one drunk dickhead

Hotch Masterlist

Hotch doesn’t go to bars.

When he’s not on a case, working on paperwork for a case, or caring for his son, he’s normally asleep.

Not at a bar.

But some nights, the memories are too much. Some nights, the cases take a toll on him — especially the children that never made it back home to their parents.

He doesn’t know why he’s in a bar. The only time he comes is when the team goes out and wants to drag him with. It’s normally Dave who manages to get him to agree to a beer or two.

But Aaron is alone this time.

You, on the other hand, know exactly why you’re in a bar.

You’re bored, you’ve just finished your masters degree, you need a drink and some time to yourself to people-watch.

It’s fun, really. Observing people while they’re drunk. You usually have one drink and switch over to water, wanting to remember the things you see while also staying safe.

But occasionally— or, well, more than occasionally by the sheer unfortunate fact of you being a woman alone in a bar, you get the typical man sliding into the seat next to you before he’s even all the way through his rehearsed, “Is this seat taken?”

You never answer. There is no point in trying because their ass already hits the chair before you can say, “Yes, it’s taken, by my foot, now move before I kick it up your ass.”

You never say that, not often. Sometimes the guys can be pretty big assholes, but the bartender, Vanessa, knows you well, so she usually threatens security before you get yourself in trouble.

Unfortunately, tonight looks like it’s going to be one of those nights.

The bar is packed for a reason you aren’t privy too until you see (and hear) the random band start a new song. Great. Performance.

Still, you snag the last seat at the bar, waving to the bartender when she sees you. You barely get the seat warm before she’s sliding your usual in front of you.

“It’s on the house tonight,” she yells.

“What?” You shake your head. “No the fuck it’s not.”

She leans closer so she doesn’t have to yell as loud. “You are my saving grace in this sea of assholes, so yes it is. We can fight about it later.”

“Fine,” you roll your eyes. You dip your hands underneath the bar to switch your diamond ring from your right to left hand.

Tonight, you’re married.

You got this ring when your last relationship ended so badly. It was a long time coming, and once you were finally able to see the other side, you went out and bought yourself an engagement ring. Just for you. A promise to yourself to start loving yourself harder, and going out with dickheads less.

So far, it’s been wonderful. You’re loving being alone. It was exhausting going on so many first dates, trying to love someone else instead of letting yourself heal.

It’s been two years of singleness for you now, and you’ve loved almost every day.

The “wedding” ring usually makes most of the guys turn the other way. A few that are oblivious will try talking to you, but once they glance at your hand, they excuse themselves.

It’s hysterical, if you’re honest.

But some, unfortunately, don’t give a damn.

Like the guy who has just squeezed his way into the seat next to you.

You roll your eyes and prepare yourself for the shallow conversations because, for some ungodly reason, the band decided now was a good time for a break.

“You come here often?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Nope.”

“It’s a pretty good place,” the guy says, waving down the other bartender, his name is Nick. “You should come here more often.”

“Should I, now?”

“Yeah,” the guy grins. “You’ll see me.”

You roll your eyes so hard it nearly hurts.

“Wanna dance?”

“Not in the mood.”

“Can I buy you another drink?”

“No thanks.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Why, do you work here?”

“Look, I’m just trying to be nice.” Ah, there it is. The “nice guy” line.

You turn your head, raising an eyebrow. “Good for you. I’m not interested.”

“Ooh,” he feigns hurt, holding an open hand to his chest. “Ouch.”

You shrug. “You’ll get over it.”

“Damn.”

“Mm.”

“You sure you don’t wanna dance?”

“I’m married,” you say easily, picking your glass up with your left hand to show off your ring. You don’t drink from your glass because you made the mistake of looking away for only a moment, so now you’re paranoid that he might’ve slipped something in it.

The guy looks around, then back to you. “I don’t see a husband.” Oh, he sounds so smug. Like he’s pulled one over on you. Moron.

“He’s on a work trip.”

“Well, he’s not here.”

“You don’t want to get on his bad side, dude.”

“Oh really? What’s he do for a living?”

“He works for the FBI.” The lie slips from your mouth before you can stop it, and you almost laugh.

It’s something you’ve pulled from the countless guys that have said they work for the FBI, but have no badge to show for it. It’s always cracked you up. You’re aware there’s an FBI office around here, but you doubt a greasy, blackout drunk works for them. Let alone more than five greasy, blackout drunks in one night.

“The FBI, huh?” The guy says, just taking it in stride. “What’s his name?”

Right as you’re about to make one up until Vanessa can get back over here to threaten security, two arms slip around your waist.

You’re ready to throw caution to the wind along with your fists, but the owner of the arms says, “Just go with it, I’m Aaron.”

You turn your head to see a very handsome older man peering down at you, a smile on his lips that you can’t help but mirror. Something about his face has your gut screaming that you can trust him, so you play along.

“Honey! I thought you were in Texas!” You throw your arms around his neck for good measure, and also for a moment to casually get a good whiff of his cologne. Goddamn. You’ll gladly be his fake-wife. Any day. Forever.

“I was,” Aaron says, squeezing you before letting you go. He moves to stand next to you, his arm around your waist in a protective manner. “We landed early, wanted to surprise you.” He kisses your knuckles to keep up the act, and then settles his eyes on the man who was bothering you.

“You must be the husband,” the guy mutters bitterly. “You really work for the FBI?”

Oh, fuck, you think. This guy just doesn’t give up. A few future scenarios flash before your eyes, but the one most alarming is a fight erupting, which isn’t all that far-fetched. You’d never be able to come back if you caused something like that.

But before you can stumble through some excuse, Aaron is pulling out a badge. An actual badge.

“Supervisory Special Agent Hotchner. I’m the unit chief of the BAU,” he says easily, holding his badge out for as long as it takes the guy to inspect it. You have no clue what BAU stands for, but you’re just thanking whatever Gods might be real that this is happening.

The idiot is scowling by the time Aaron puts his badge away. He leaves without a word.

Your jaw nearly drops as you watch the guy go, and literally leave the bar. You had hopes that he’d leave you alone, but leaving the bar entirely is even better.

Aaron’s arm slips from around your waist as he moves to take the now empty seat next to you. All the while you’re gawking at him like you’re in some fever dream.

When he catches your eyes, he says, “What?”

“Am I dreaming?” You blurt. “Do you really work for the FBI?”

He chuckles and pulls out his badge again, holding it out to you where you can read it. And sure as shit, he’s an actual FBI agent. What the fuck.

You look up as he pulls his badge away. “Did you hear me tell the guy my husband worked for the FBI?”

Aaron shakes his head. “That was pure luck. By the way,” he holds his hand out to you. “I’m Aaron.”

“Y/N,” you shake his hand, smiling at the fact that Aaron wanted to go through the official pleasantries and that you got to feel how soft his hand is again. “Thank you for that. I thought he’d never leave.”

“No worries. And it’s best he did, I really didn’t feel like arresting anyone tonight.”

“Arresting him? For what?”

“Well for starters, harassment. But since that usually doesn’t hold up very well, I’d have to say it was for his cocaine addiction.”

Your eyes widen. “He was doing coke?”

“Well, not out in the open, of course, but there were traces of it on his nose and his eyes had that look to them. Addicts are easy to spot when you run into them enough.”

Who the hell is this guy?

“Oh, and forgive me, what’s your husband’s name?” Aaron gestures down at your left hand. “I might know him, but I can’t say that I recognize you.”

“Oh,” you move the ring back to your right hand, much to Aaron’s surprise. “I’m not married. I only put it on the left hand to try to avoid assholes like that.”

“I see,” Aaron nods, and if you’re not mistaken, he almost looks pleased.

Vanessa returns to get Aaron’s drink, and then gives you a look.

You want to scream, yes, I’m well aware he is dangerously attractive and that he’s talking to me but don’t you dare say a word to embarrass me.

Instead, you say, “Can you make me another?”

She nods in understanding and pours out your drink, setting off to make a second after sliding Aaron his beer.

“So,” you turn your body and prop your head in your palm. “What’s got an FBI agent in a bar on a Tuesday night?”

He takes a long swig of his beer before answering. “What’s the real story behind that ring on your hand?”

“Answer for an answer,” you sing, smiling at Vanessa when she brings you your drink. She leaves without a word, raising her eyebrows at you.

“The cases can be rough,” Aaron says vaguely, bringing your attention back to him. “You?”

“Got it as a promise to myself to never date another prick ever again,” you chuckle, gazing down at the ring. “It’s worked its magic, so far.”

“So far?”

“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

He smiles through his next swig of beer.

+++

It becomes a routine, you and Aaron sharing a drink at the bar.

To your surprise, he has the same views as you about alcohol. It’s fun to have one drink, but getting wasted and blacking out isn’t.

It’s refreshing, if you’re honest. Everyone your age wants to get absolutely shitfaced every time they go out, and that’s just never been for you.

It helps that Aaron is older. Well— You’re not sure if it helps or not. Because he is significantly older, the farthest you two have gone is sharing a drink at the bar. He usually leaves first, needing to get home to his son, to do more case work, or there was one time when he actually got a call about a case mid-drink. He was gone for two weeks after that.

But he always comes back, and he always finds you here, at this bar.  

You mostly come every night to keep Vanessa company for an hour or two. To give yourself a break from the chaos of reality and to give her a familiar face in the sea of drunken customers.

Every night that Aaron isn’t here, Vanessa asks you where he is. Like you would know (you only do if he tells you of a possible up and coming case). Like you have his number (you don’t). Like you care (you don’t want to admit that you do).

“No Daddy tonight?” Vanessa teases, sliding you your drink.

“If you don’t stop calling him Daddy, I swear to God.”

“Oh, don’t swear to Him. He doesn’t need to get involved.”

You send a glare her way, but you’re holding back a laugh.

“Is he still on a case?” She asks, trying to be serious again.

You shrug. “Who knows. They can last pretty long. He was gone two weeks for the last one.”

“Keeping track, are we?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying, you two are killing me here, sharing drinks and not saying how you feel. It’s torture to watch you every week, you know.”

“He’s like...twenty years older than me. Or something.”

“And?” She scoffs. “Age is but a number. You’re an adult. He’s an adult. It’s fine.”

You shrug. “He probably just sees me as a friend. He would’ve given me his number or something by now, right?”

“I dunno, men are weird. But he’s older, he’s probably scared to make a move, scared he’ll make you uncomfortable.”

You shrug again. You appreciate her trying to show you the possibilities, the logical reasons for why the two of you haven’t gone any further from the bar, but you aren’t sure what to believe. Plus, it’s been a week since you’ve seen him. The last time you two shared a drink, he didn’t say anything about a case.

So, he’s either on a case again, or has stopped coming.

The latter thought has you debating getting shitfaced wasted for the first time in years. Being blackout drunk would probably hurt you less than if it’s true that he’s just suddenly ditched you.

But what stops you is when Vanessa runs back over, eyes wide. “Just spotted your hottie.”

Oh, now he’s my hottie? “What?” You inwardly scold yourself for sounding a little too giddy at the prospect of him being here. 

But if he’s here, why isn’t he sitting next to you?

Vanessa answers that one for you. “At a table in the back. He’s with friends I think.”

Friends? Never mind then on sharing a drink with him. “Oh, cool.”

Vanessa looks like she wants to say something, but is called away to another customer.

You don’t want to butt in with Aaron’s time with friends, so you stay at the bar, facing forward, nursing your one drink. Your mind conjures a plan in two seconds flat: finish your drink, head out for the night and discreetly look in Aaron’s direction, hopefully catch his eye, but if not, just go home and...shower and go to sleep.

Because if he wants to see you, he will. If he doesn’t, then he won’t.

Good plan.

Or at least, it is, until Aaron is sliding up beside you.

Your heart launches itself into your throat. You don’t say anything because you have no idea what to say. You were too busy assuming he’d rather be with his friends (which is...fine because it’s not like the two of you are...dating) to notice him walking up.

He says something for you, though. “Hey.”

Well, he might as well have stayed silent. What are you supposed to do with that?

“Hey,” you return casually, then offer a small smile. “Thought you’d be gone longer.” You operate on the assumption that he was on a case.

And he was. “This one actually worked in our favor.” He leans his elbows onto the bar, and naturally your eyes follow the movement. He’s not in a stuffy suit like the last few times, but he’s still in a dress shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

Arms. You’re a complete sucker for arms, and he’s practically teasing you like this.

“That’s good,” you comment, taking a sip from your drink. “Here to celebrate?”

“Yeah, we are.”

Nick brings Aaron his beer, thankfully, because you know Vanessa would’ve made some not-so-vague comment about Aaron being up here -- and maybe let an “accidental” Daddy comment slip.

To your surprise, Aaron sits down.

Your eyebrows furrow. “I thought you’re here with friends?”

Aaron looks over his shoulder and shrugs. “Just my team, yeah. I imagine they’re tired of me, though.”

You doubt that’s the case, but you know that if you say that, he’ll just brush it off.

“Not even gonna introduce me?” You tease instead, but you honestly want to smack yourself. You need to get a better hold on your word vomit. Inviting yourself is insanely rude.

Aaron’s eyebrows raise slightly, clearly not expecting you to say that — or to even want to be introduced to his team. “They’re a lot,” he says. “They’ll make a big deal out of this.”

“This?” You question, gesturing shortly between the two of you. “What is this?”

“What do you want it to be?” He asks carefully, averting his eyes shyly.

“Well,” you exhale dramatically, swirling your drink. “I think when you’ve shared a drink with a woman more than...twenty times, it should at least be considered dating.” You cut your eyes in his direction, your chest swelling as you see a grin breaking out on his face.

“I think I’m a bad date,” he says, confusing you. He chuckles, adding, “You don’t even have my number!”

“I’ll get it at the end of tonight,” you say, touching his arm gently for reassurance. “Come on, I think the back of my head is burning from how hard they’re staring.”

He looks through the corner of his eyes and sighs. “I’m sorry in advance for them.”

“No need to apologize,” you shrug. “Friends can be the worst. Vanessa has already started asking questions about you.” You nod toward the bartender that is feigning interest in clearing a space behind the bar.

“I figured,” Aaron murmurs. “Okay.” He slides off the stool, grabbing his beer in one hand, and holding his other one out to you.

Your heart jumps harshly when you take his hand. It’s warm and soft and secure, everything you want and need. You grab your drink in your free hand, giving Aaron’s hand a reassuring squeeze.

As soon as you and Aaron approach the table, the older gentleman is punching the one with tattoos. “Pay up.”

Aaron witnesses the cash exchange and stares at them tiredly. “Seriously, guys?”

Meanwhile, you’re holding back a giggle.

“Well, hello,” the woman with the colorful fashion sense says. “Introduce us!”

Aaron looks ready to pretend like he doesn’t know any of them, so you step up and say, “He told me you guys would be like this.”

That gets him laughing, and he finally says, “Y/N, this is Penelope, Emily, JJ, Spencer, Derek, and Dave.” Each person nods, waves, or smiles when their name is called.

“I’ll try to remember,” you joke. “But no promises.”

You squeeze Aaron’s hand in yours, trying to get him to loosen up. He does, barely, so when he tugs on your hand, silently asking you to step closer to him so his arm can fit around your waist, you oblige.

“What was the bet about?” You ask, nodding toward the men who exchanged cash a bit ago. It was Dave and Derek if you’re remembering names correctly.

“Rossi thought Hotch was going to bring you back over here, but I didn’t agree,” Derek says, nudging Dave’s arm. “I didn’t think you’d go for him.”

“Well, that’d be embarrassing if I went for someone else, considering we’re dating,” you chuckle, leaning your head back to look up at Aaron.

“Dating? So it’s official?” Emily asks, looking a little more excited than you thought any of them would.

“I think it was official the first time we met,” you snicker. “He pretended to be my husband so some dickhead would leave me alone.”

Aaron’s arm tightens around your waist at the memory.

“Okay,” Penelope grabs her drink, then moves over next to you, linking your arm with hers. “Hotch, we’re stealing her. We need details.”

Aaron doesn’t look like he wants to let go at all, but you press a kiss to his cheek. “Told you it’d be fine,” you whisper to him.

He surprises you by pressing a kiss on your lips. Midway through, your brain reminds you that this is technically your first kiss with him. And it’s in front of his friends. Swoon.

After so many dates with guys who were ashamed to be showing any sort of affection toward a woman, it’s nice to find a man who doesn’t care who sees his affection.

What can you say? After dating so many boys, it’s nice to finally find a man.

[atruththatyoudeny]

Happy 28th! A new month - so new fics for you to find and enjoy! I can’t say it enough: all the authors in this fandom are truly amazing! Thank you so much for continuously sharing your hard work with us ♥ Here are the 14 fics I read and enjoyed this month:

A Hungry Heart | jacaranda_bloom | Great British Bake Off AU - famous/not famous - cliches - pining - angst - smut - 27k Harry Styles, florist and Great British Bake Off contestant, loves many things. He loves his flower shop, he loves baking, and there’s also that little crush he has on pop star Louis Tomlinson. But when Louis arrives on set as the surprise guest judge, Harry’s worlds collide. Throw in a cup of cuteness, a teaspoon of teasing, and a pinch of pining, and there’s all the ingredients for an epic love story, or absolute chaos. Or the one where the Bake Off tent has never been so hot, and it’s got nothing to do with what’s in the ovens.

Teenage Rebellion Never Worked Out So Well | panda_bear21 | arranged marriage - friends to lovers - 55k “I’m an adult!” He glanced down at Harry, who seemed anything but at the moment, where he was definitely on the brink of a temper tantrum. “We’re both adults!” Jay glanced to Anne again, before breathing out a heavy sigh. “Yes, but you’re both adults that do not have jobs and who live off of our money… Which means, you have to do what we say… or you’ll have to find a new place to live.” “You wouldn’t do that.” Louis dared, hoping his glare was enough to guilt trip his mother into calling the whole thing off. Or to tell them that it had all just been a huge joke and they weren’t actually being forced into marrying a complete stranger. “Oh, but we would.” Or the super cliché arranged marriage fic where things escalate way too quickly.

Heartbreak Hotel | noellehenry | time travel - 1950s - historical - pining - 29k British popstar Harry Styles is thrown back in time after an unfortunate accident on stage. He wakes up in a small town in the US in the 1950's, where life is slightly different from 2015. With help from Niall and Liam he tries to adjust to his new life; without mobile phones and a world wide web to keep up with the world and where showing interest in nice cute boys with bright blue eyes is a no-no. Time travel and 1950's AU where Liam is an English teacher, Niall owns the Best Song Ever record shop, James runs Corden's Diner, Elvis fan Louis is the cute boy with the blue eyes and Harry..... just tries to survive really.

Playdate | Larry_you_know | getting together - misunderstandings - kid fic - fluff - 7k When Harry’s sister asked him to pick up her son at a kids' birthday party he sure didn’t expect to be stunned by the blue-eyed brother of the birthday twins. Using his nephew to see Louis again, he falls hard and fast. But how does one turn a playdate into a real date?

tread lightly on my ground | fairytalelights | a/b/o - mpreg - touch-starved - miscommunication - friends to lovers - touch deprivation - smut - 21k No, that's the tragic part of this, the part that makes Harry feel like the universe is playing a cruel joke on him. The father of his baby is exactly right, exactly who he always imagined himself having kids with. He just imagined them married, bonded. Happy. He didn't imagine them barely talking, tip-toeing around each other because neither of them is brave enough to talk about what happened between them. He didn't imagine the father of his child not loving him back. or, the one where Harry is having Louis' baby, but Louis doesn't know it's his.

Not Ready for This | berzerkshires | kid fic - single parents - smut - 18k Prompt for HLSummerFest2021: Louis and Harry are both single fathers and their children decide to go out on a date. The dads insist on meeting one another before they agree to let their child go out on this date.

Secret's Safe With Me | alltheselights | boss/employee relationship - secret relationship - toxic relationship (not h/l) - slow burn - smut - 59k But here’s the thing about secrets that people tend to forget—they’re deeply personal things. Tiny pieces of information about someone that they keep locked inside and only let out at certain moments, or to certain people, or not at all. Secrets have value, you see, even if only to the person holding them inside. If those secrets were to be told, if those tiny jagged pieces of someone, the parts they hold most dear, the parts they hide out of shame or fear or regret—if those pieces were exposed to someone, it would have the potential to change everything. When bad turbulence and three glasses of wine have Louis spilling all of his secrets to the man sitting next to him on the plane, it's embarrassing, sure, but it's also easy enough to shrug off and block out of his memory forever. Or at least, it was until Louis went into work on Monday morning and realized that the man from the plane is the new CEO of his company.

Marks On My Baby | thinlines | a/b/o - college/university - friends to lovers - hurt/comfort - angst - fluff - smut - 32k “What’s that?” Harry hadn’t meant for his voice to sound so sharp and even he winced at his own outburst. It was more of a hiss than an actual question, but for now, he was too surprised to care. “What’s what?” The omega asked, eyebrows raised and lips pinched. Harry knew he was probably mad at him for interrupting his rant, but the alpha was too on edge to bother pleasing the boy. “On your neck… Your bondmark spot…” His voice had grown low and deep, almost a growl. Who knew a single love bite on his omega friend's neck would trigger Harry this much? Certainly not the alpha himself.

Rogue | Laventriloque | a/b/o - werewolves - minor character death - hurt/comfort - past abuse - past rape/non-con - soulmates - smut - 95k “No, Liam! How many times do I have to… before you finally… NO WAY … a rogue in our pack?… cannot trust him … don’t care to know him … have enough members to worry about.” He hears more indistinct shouts before he hears pretty clearly: “His own pack didn’t want him!” Sitting here, his precious bag between his feet and everyone in the room looking at him, some with pity, some with disdain, some with curiosity, Louis feels like someone squeezed his heart in their hands and isn’t letting it go. He wills his head to stay up high and his posture to stay confident. He will not flee the room. He will not let that stupid lump in his throat get the better of him. He will stay here until Liam returns. He will take the rejection in stride and move on. Like he’s been doing all his life." -- Louis is a rogue Omega who's suffered through rejection and abuse for the biggest part of his life. He stumbles onto the Styles pack, quite possibly the kindest one he's ever met.

indian summer | docklands | strangers to lovers - hurt/comfort - banter - smut - 30k Harry runs a smoothie shop, which also happens to be an ever-moving caravan. He spends one week in each location and drives straight to the next, always eager for adventure. It isn't until his van breaks down and he needs to call for a mechanic that he starts to ponder his life choices. Louis, the said mechanic, is an anchor in Harry's wild sea, but his hard metal might be too much for Harry's unpredictable antics.

A Silver Lining In A Storm (You Were Lightning, I Was Born) | FallingLikeThis | arranged marriage - royalty - a/b/o - mpreg - minor character death - murder - non-graphic violence - angst - hurt/comfort - 7k Omega Prince Harry had always known that he was going to have an arranged marriage. But after the death of his first fiancé, a man who turned out far worse than Harry thought possible, his subsequent marriage to the man's brother leaves Harry finding it difficult to trust that everything will work out. Especially considering the only responsibility he’s aware of is to give his husband, the future king, an heir.

A Twist of Fate | myfearlesslou | a/b/o - strangers to lovers - soulmates - angst - 35k Since the moment Harry presented as an omega, all he's ever wanted was to have a baby. Fate had another idea in mind for him. Giving up on trying to conceive, he decides to adopt a new born baby boy. After months of loving and caring for the boy, a strange man comes into his life, taking him by surprise. Not wanting to lose the child he's loved from the moment he laid eyes on him, Harry does whatever he can to keep the boy safe and in his arms. Even if that means following the handsome stranger to a part of the woods he's never seen before.

Trust Me Tonight | 28sunflowers | historical - royalty - regency - arranged marriage - first time - mpreg - pwp - 10k After Harry’s eighteenth birthday, his father calls him into a meeting to say that he is to be married to Prince Louis of France in just over a week. Harry is excited, of course. The arrangement is better than any he could’ve hoped for, with such a young, handsome and kind husband. There is just one issue: Harry doesn’t know what happens on his nuptials, or how to get pregnant to give Louis the heir that he needs.

i got a heart (but i don't got a soul) | tempolarriefics | mythical beings Á creatures - enemies to lovers - childhood friends - famous/not famous - soulmates - angel/demon relationship - demon/human relationship - 19k “We’re soulmates.” Louis’ eyes flick from the tattoo back to Harry’s face, where his eyes are shining with excitement. Louis wonders if he is supposed to feel excited, too. He’s supposed to feel something, surely, besides his usual bitterness for Harry. He thinks back to how Lottie had described meeting Sam, how she had known in her heart that he was meant for her even before he said his phrase. He can’t help but wonder if he would be feeling differently if he hadn’t gone and sold his soul. Or, the one where louis sells his soul before meeting his soulmate, harry is a popstar with a heart of gold, niall is inadvertently responsible for harry's boners, liam is a meddling angel, and zayn is a demon who made a mistake

[starwarsfan2004]

She's my little flower || Chapter 4 (Kylo ren x female reader)

(Hey everyone i hope all of you guys are doing well! There is a slight delay in my writing of HBTAOAS "Held By The Arms Of A Sith" there will be more to come i promise so for now enjoy chapter 4 of She's my little flower, and as always enjoy until then)

It was early in the morning still almost you wore your usual tunnle rat look and a small smile that sometimes painted your face, it suited you straight off the bat you were off to your place where you were assigned to repair and maintain the vent in the supreme leaders quarters, you were as quite as a mouse your footsteps barely making any sound you walked with long strides while thinking what your next plan of action is going to be and ofcourse if he the masked warrior would hover over you like a hawk.

You were a bit shorter than him but still a tall tunnle rat that moves swiftly around the super star destroyer's ventilation systems maintaining any issues given to you, hell youd sometimes make a small pitstop station in the vents yo catch some air or having a small lunch break your totally not braking the hour rules of mid day break time for every soul that works on the ship, snapping out of your thoughts you didnt notice he who towers over behind you were looking through your skull to see what you were up to, you felt a bit unease as you looked over your shoulder to see him looking down at your pretty face well thats what he thinks of you..

Pretty

Smart

Talented

And above all beautiful, he couldnt bare to lose such a flower like you to a filthy worm hell he blushes alot under his mask, if it wasnt his mask you would see the true expressions and emotions he is giving off. The one thing he did notice about you was how fragile you were, he didnt want to put all his wait upon you nor would he dare to hurt you..

You turned over to greet him with a smile, "Do you always creep on people like that?" You said giveing him a small chuckle as he tilted his head a bit before giving an awnser a sudden hit what felt like the whole ship was going to crack in two you stumble trying to hold your balance to prevent from falling onto the floor as he grabbed you firmly by your shoulder and waist, this made you have alot of mixed feelings but mainly haveing the thought of what the hell is going on he had enough weight to anchor down to prevent from tumbling over too yet he felt the warmth of your soft skin with his padded gloves, you stood up and without a moment of thinking you pulled away from his grasp as you swiftly made your way to where the loud bang came from makeing almost the ship brake in two.

You know the short cuts, roots and ventilation systems at the back of your mind as you went to the upper class floors only to find a big ass patch of steel pieces and wiring scattered all over the hallway, it was unfortunate for those who got crushed by the debri, you sighed standing there with your hands restingon your kness catching breath after breath "Great more shit to fix can they not fly a ship or something-" you were cutted off as you heard an unholy scream that ended off in a low growl it sent a shiver up your spine wich made your blood run cold... you took a few steps back feeling like something is watching your every movement, your heart was raising that made your hands tremble you couldnt take this anymore as you went to to the large steel door as you were about to make your exit it closed infront of your face...

For kylo he was up the main cockpit of the ship to hear the brief situation on what hitted them, he didnt had time for this he wanted to make sure you were safe until he felt your sudden emotions this made him jolt out of the room with his cape fluttering behind him, he moved swiftly to the hallway you were stuck in he made it to the doors "Are you alright, are you hurt!" He said sending a hint of relief to your body as you replied back with alot of stutters "Y-yes and n-no theres s-something dangerous h-here, get me out of here p-please" he could hear the fear in your voice wich made his blood boil he took out his saber and started to slice through the door as you were huddled in a corner away from where the debri blocked the end of the two way hallway, your lower body and legs were buried under debri as you struggled to get free but it hurted so much.. your fragile body can easily get crushed if more weight was added to the debri..

Kylo eventually got through kicking the door down seeing a space like monster makeing its way to you, he wouldnt let that thing touch you he leaped to the monster and started to slice and dice it with his saber of ligh as the space monster sented out a shriek of pain but it fought back too, eventually kylo made the monstrosity tire itself out by ending it through the heart and then the head he breathed slowly to calm down as the sound of his saber sheath as he made his way to you in a rush he took off the debri crushing you as he saw your face glazed in fear alongside with tears flowing down your cheeks "Your safe with me theres no need to be scared anymore.." he said slowly moveing your body towards him as he scooped you gently up in his strong arms, he didnt had any trouble picking you up because of how light you were "T-thank y-you" you mustered holding onto him as you buried your face in his chest as you felt a rush of safety and reassurance rush through your body, you were soon out like a candle in his arms...

You blacked out, you could only remember the past events of what happened wich triggered your past of who you once were it gave adrenaline to your body as you woke up in shock in the medbay the haert rate monitor beeping rapidly, you scanned your surroundings as you leaned back onto the pillows relaxing as you sighed peacefully closeing your eyes once more to rest in for the day. Kylo had alot of concerned looks by those who passed by him, he didnt care but what he did care was your safety he took you into the med bay as the nurses took you from there before he lefy he took one final look at you before attending important matters.

[woodelf68]

To Drive The Dark Away

Every year at Yule, a special dance is performed to drive away the dark and welcome back the returning sun. Asgard's princes aer growing up, and take their place in the dance for the first time. A pre-canon Thor fic, rated T. CHAPTER ONE On AO3

CHAPTER TWO:

The Great Hall was ablaze with candles, their warm glow driving back the dark of the first night of Yule. The morning hunt had indeed been successful, and the hall's tables had groaned under the weight of fresh meat and all the other culinary delights that the palace's kitchens had prepared. The bowls and platters of food were much reduced now, and servants bustled about, clearing away dirty dishes and the remnants of the main courses to make room for the desserts yet to come. The air was fragrant with the fresh scent of pine from the many boughs that bedecked the walls, intermingled with the heady mix of citrus and spices from the cups of mulled wine and cider scattered about and the clove-studded oranges nestled amongst the bunches of red-berried holly arranged decoratively down the center of each table.  People leaned back, talking idly, allowing their food to settle, knowing that there would be the usual break before the dessert course would be brought out. Musicians played quietly in the background.  Finally, the servants cleared out save for those few who retreated to their unobtrusive stations along the walls of the hall, and the musicians fell quiet, long enough for the silence to be noted and for conversations to die, the noise of the hall dropping to quiet murmurs and the rustling of fabric as those not already facing the center of the hall shifted in their seats, many glancing expectantly up at the high table. And into the relative silence the first clear notes of a haunting melody floated out from a lone pipe.

It was a signal, and Frigga rose in response, holding her hand out to Odin. "Will you dance with me, husband?"

Odin stood, and offered her his arm. "I will."

She gave his arm a light squeeze as she laid her hand atop it. This was not an easy dance for him, she knew, having tried to do it once herself with a patch covering one eye. Between the lack of depth perception and the sudden inability to see what was to her right without turning her head, her usual grace had completely departed from her. And that had only been an experiment with a handful of her ladies in waiting in the privacy of her solar, not in a long line of couples in front of as many of Asgard as could fit in the feasting hall, where the music did not allow for hesitance and stumbles. But Odin refused to hear of her partnering with anyone else on the opening dance of the night, and she loved him for his effort. The rehearsal group she organised every year helped, she thought; and she always made sure to schedule it for a time that Odin could attend. In return he was sensible enough to stop by for at least a couple of run-throughs, the core group of dancers who participated every year being well-versed in looking out for each other and offering guidance with a quiet word or touch if needed . Or a not so quiet word, she remembered fondly, thinking of the years when the boys had been much younger and had been laughingly pulled into the group when they had come to watch the practice. But they had long outgrown the need to be steered through the pattern of the dance, moving through it with the ease of long familiarity and the grace imparted by their warrior training, and Frigga had seen no reason to deny their request when they had asked to be part of more than the rehearsal group for the first time.  

As their parents descended from the dais on which the high table sat, the princes rose to follow them, Thor holding out his arm with a grin. "May I have this dance?"

"You may." Loki accepted Thor's arm with a gracious expression on his face that only lasted for a few strides before he had to let go lest he dissolve into giggles and ruin the solemnity of the occasion. A small sound must have escaped him despite his best efforts, though, for his mother glanced back at them warningly. He pressed his lips together and tried to look reassuringly well-behaved, making sure not to glance at Thor. From all around the hall, other couples rose in a rustling of fabrics and a scraping back of chairs and benches, following them to the clear space that had been left in the center of the hall and arranging themselves in two rows, partners facing each other. Small children demanded to be lifted up so they could see, older ones boldly clambered up onto their benches to get a good view over the heads of the adults around them. Once it was clear that all those who were going to participate had joined the line, a servant stepped forward with a large basket full of pure white beeswax candles, a stiff parchment guard encircling each one to ensure that hot wax did not run down and burn the skin of the person holding them. The basket was carried down between the two rows of dancers, each person reaching in and taking two, a sense of anticipation thrumming in the air. When the last couple had claimed theirs, everyone straightened to attention, holding their candles out in front of them, one in each hand. The music died. Frigga glanced along the line, making sure everyone was in position, proud beyond measure to see Loki and Thor standing beside her and Odin, looking every inch the princes that they were in their new quilted velvet tunics, Thor's dark red, his brother's forest green, the metallic thread used in the stitching catching the flickering light and reflecting it back. Seeing all were ready, Frigga took a deep breath and concentrated. 

All at once, every single candle in the room snuffed out. 

Frigga listened with satisfaction as she heard several quickly indrawn breaths and more than one childish squeak of excitement. All but the youngest attendees knew what to expect, and yet it still had an effect. The hall was now lit only by the torches flickering along the walls, a light that did not reach the center aisle where the dancers stood. From within that pool of darkness she spoke, her voice carrying loud and clear.

"What night is this?" she asked.

"The longest night," answered Loki, standing beside her. Frigga's eyes were adjusting to the darkness; a faint bit of moonlight streaming in the high windows allowed her to just make out his pale face. 

"The darkest night," added Thor, from his place across from Loki and beside Odin.

Frigga smiled to hear his newly broken voice carrying easily through the high-raftered hall. It was a good voice, a man's voice, deep and resonant like his father's, a voice equally suited to commanding armies or seducing lovers.  Being Thor, she rather thought her irrepressible boy was still more interested in the former, and was glad beyond measure that the realm was at peace, that there were no war-ravaged ranks of the army needing to be filled by boys not yet fully grown into their strength or manhood. She knew the time was coming when her chicks would demand to be allowed to test their wings, but let them fly the nest into small adventures only for now, and let them come home safe again. She sent the wish out into the universe.

"What must we do to drive the dark away?" asked Odin, his voice ringing out equally clearly. 

"Burn the fires bright," answered the next person in line.

"Through the night until the day," their partner continued.

"The flames have dimmed and faded," spoke Frigga. "What then shall we do?"

"Seek the light within us,"

"That dwells in me and you." The words were ritual, each dancer having their line. 

"Set flint against the tinder," the dancer behind them went on, unprompted. 

"And nurture each bright spark,"

"And share them with each other, to drive away the dark." The words flowed smoothly down the line of dancers, one voice after another.

"As fire warms and fire burns," the entire line chanted in unison, "We call it forth, till light returns!"

The last words rang out in the darkness around them, and Frigga could have re-lit every candle in the hall with little more than a thought using the energy that rose up around them. But as dramatic as that would have been, they had instructions to follow. Share them with each other.  She mentally reached out and summoned fire back to hers and Odin's candles, letting the flames leap high as they flared  back into existence, before settling back down again. Loki was already tipping his candles towards her, and she touched her wicks to his, Odin doing the same to Thor's.  

"I give you light," they chorused, and four more points of light winked into existence. Thor and Loki then turned to the next couple beside them, repeating the words and passing on their flames, and so it continued down the line of dancers, a wave of light that spread rapidly and pushed back the darkness until they were all once more standing within the warm glow of firelight.

 In the candles' glow she could see Odin's eye fixed on her, glittering, and as one they looked to their sons, Frigga seeing their own eyes bright with excitement at being part of the dance for the first time, part of the magic. They were the youngest in the line by far, still children enough that she had already seen them in the corner of the hall set up with games for the younger guests, Loki throwing quoits with the same skill that served him so well in everything from skipping stones to flinging a knife dead center into a target, but increasingly showing hints of the young men they were growing up to be, Asgard's future. Thor could look her in the eye now, and if Loki had to lengthen his stride a bit to keep pace with the others around them, he had always been quick and nimble and was perfectly capable of doing so, his face literally glowing with pleasure as he grinned at her, and she knew he would be able to feel the energy in the air as well as she, would be able to take it and use it for his own purpose; Asked, Thor had simply said that he felt it only as a sense of anticipation, but he had never been one to sit in the sidelines when he could join in an activity, and he too looked happy to be in the center of things at last.  As soon as the last candles were lit, the dancers turned to face forward, towards the front of the hall and the half empty high table.  Frigga turned her head slightly to glance at Odin, and met his eye as he did the same. One, she thought, two, three...

The musicians began to play again, a slow, stately air. and she and Odin stepped forward in perfect unison. One step, pause, rise onto their toes. Drop back down, another step, the dancers behind them following in smooth, measured steps. They advanced until the tune shifted, then turned to face their partners, bowing or curtsying slightly, and then the weaving began, the two lines of dancers moving in and out in opposite directions, pausing back to back with each new person they came to, rising and falling, facing in, facing out, careful not to get mixed up; they kept the pattern moving with the smoothness and confidence gained in the rehearsal drills. When they got back to their original partners, Frigga had a split second to see Odin looking relieved and half breathless before the last measures of the tune repeated, in a higher pitch, and she and every other dancer in the two lines stepped back a pace for more room and began to spin slowly in place. Once, twice, Frigga made a full turn, her skirts swirling out, candles held wide, flames tracing streaks of light in the air, exhilaration singing through her veins. She was the Queen, the Allmother, the Bringer of Light, and she danced this last bit for herself and Odin alone, and sank into a deep curtsy facing him as the music ended, her skirts pooling around her. Odin shifted one foot behind him and bowed to her as he bowed to no one else, offering his arm to help her rise. Carefully shifting her grip on one candle, she laid what fingers she could spare atop his wrist and felt his muscles tense beneath her as he lifted her up. 

All down the line, candles dipped and rose again as the other dancers did likewise, and there was a moment of silence before the onlookers in the hall erupted into applause and shouts of approval, along with some enthusiastic pounding of knife hilts on the table.

"Mother," Loki asked quickly under the noise of the general cacophony, "May I relight all the candles?" 

"You're sure you can do them all at once?"

Loki reached out with his magic, sensed all the smoky charred wicks merely waiting for a word of command. "Yes," he said confidently. Fire magic had always been easy for him.

"Very well," Frigga said, her voice low, wondering if Loki had planned this and thought her less likely to refuse if he asked her at the last moment. "After I douse ours. Wait for your father's word." A thought, and the dancers' flames winked out, returning the center of the room to darkness. The hall fell quiet again.

Loki shifted both candles to one hand, ready for the closing words of the dance. As his mother had spoken the first ritual words, so his father spoke the last.

"As the year wheel turns from dark to light, we dance and feast this shortest night. Fire warms and fire burns, we hail the sun as light returns!" Odin's voice rang out loud and clear on the last two words, and Loki thought of light as he gestured, of hundreds of candle flames, and the hall blazed back into brightness. There were some gasps, and another wave of cheers.

"Oh, well done," said Frigga proudly, and Loki felt a flush of pleasure as his brother clapped him on the back and his father squeezed his shoulder, and he felt the joy of being part of the dance, part of his family, part of Asgard herself.

The dancers broke up to go back to their seats, depositing their candles back in the basket as the servant came forward and held it out. Flushed and heady with the success of the performance, Frigga reached up and threaded her fingers through her husband's hair before he sat down, holding him still for a moment and kissing him soundly, uncaring of the eyes upon them.

"Thank you," she said. "I know 'tis not your favourite dance."

"But it is one of yours," he countered, well pleased with her method of showing appreciation. "If no one objects to the occasional jostle from their king, I can manage to get through it once a year."

Loki and Thor plopped into their seats and reached for their water goblets, both almost immediately looking up from the nearly empty vessels. A watchful servant moved forward at once, picking up the pitcher of water that was bespelled to keep its contents cold and refilled their goblets.

"You danced well," she said, hoping it was not too bold of her to speak thus. It was her first time serving at the high table, and she was determined to do well.

Thor and Loki grinned. "Thank you." They drank thirstily, and the servant refilled the cups the king and queen held out to her -- both wine and water before moving back into the shadows until her service should be needed again.

A slim figure with long, dark hair braided back from her temples approached the high table. "You did not tell me you were going to dance!" Sif remembered her manners as an afterthought and dropped a small curtsey to the king and the queen. "Your majesties. Forgive me if I interrupt."

Frigga gestured unconcernedly. "Nay, please go ahead." She did not expect formalities from someone who had spent so many centuries playing with her boys. She could still picture the three of them wet and dirty and happy from an afternoon spent playing in the stream that ran through the wilder part of the palace gardens. "You look lovely tonight, by the way."

Sif glanced down at her new maroon gown. It was comfortable, soft and easy to move in, and while she normally preferred leggings and tunics, she had also been pleased with her appearance. "Thank you, your majesty." She turned her attention back to the princes, her hands on her hips. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"We didn't think you'd be interested," said Thor honestly.

"You teased us that one time when you learned we were being taught court dances," added Loki.

Sif pursed her lips. "I was probably thinking of the kinds of dances where you're supposed to make small talk with your partner and maybe flirt with them," she admitted.

"I like those kinds of dances," said Odin, winking -- as much as he could, with only one eye -- at Frigga. He picked up her free hand and kissed the back of it.

"Yes, like that," Sif gestured. "And I could not picture you doing that without finding it amusing."

"I can make small talk," objected Loki.

"And I can flirt," said Thor.

Loki snorted. "Seriously, Thor, you cannot."

"I can, too!"

"Cannot. Flirting requires subtlety. You have all the subtlety of an ox."

"Mother!"

"No one your age should be expected to know how to flirt well," Frigga said obliquely. "it's a learned skill that comes with experience." And she suspected her younger son would be the one who would be most skilled in it when he grew older; he was not wrong in that Thor tended towards directness.

Sif rolled her eyes. "Anyway, I apologise if I offended you before. But the Yule Pavane -- " She thought it might be fun.

"If you wish to join us next year, Sif, let me know a couple of weeks ahead of time. You can join our rehearsal group."

"Thank you, perhaps I shall." She glanced at the princes, and wondered if they would want to stay each other's partner next year and if so, whether she should try to convince someone else their age to join the group with her. Or perhaps Thor would have a girlfriend by then, and she could be paired off with Loki. She surveyed him thoughtfully. They were of a height, and would match well, she thought.

"Why are you looking at me like that, Sif?" Loki asked suspiciously.

"Like what?" She tried to shift her expression back to neutral from whatever it had become.

"Like I'm a prize bull that you're considering purchasing."

Thor snorted with laughter. Sif had the uncomfortable sensation of both the king and the queen looking at her with new interest. "Nay, have we not already established that Thor is the ox?"

"I am strong," Thor said thoughtfully.

"Well, I'm clever," said Loki. "What does that make me?"

"A raven," said a voice promptly from behind Odin's left shoulder.

Loki smiled at one of the black birds that perched on the back of his father's chair, looking well-fed and content. "Thank you, Munin, I shall take that as a compliment."

"Ravens smart, Loki smart," Hugin agreed.

Sif rolled her eyes, but there was something to be said for the comparison beyond Loki's inky black hair. He was always watchful, sleek, preening, and yes, clever. "Come show off your strength and your cleverness in the games corner, then. I'm looking for someone to beat."

Thor feigned a shocked look. "And you think we are so easily overcome? Brother, shall we accept her challenge?"

"I think we must, to defend the honour of our house," said Loki gravely. "Father, have we leave to go put this upstart maiden in her place?"

Amused, Odin waved a hand in permission. "Go, have fun." He watched the boys drain their cups then get up and follow Sif in the direction of the games corner. "Where exactly would you say young Sif's place is, wife?"

Frigga's lips curled up. "Most of the time, wherever she wishes it to be, husband."

Odin smirked. "Much like you, I think." He still held her hand, and lifted it to his lips again. "Now that Thor and Loki are not here for their tender ears to be scarred by such talk, I shall tell you how much I am looking forward to taking you to bed tonight."

Frigga's eyebrows rose incrementally. "Indeed."

"Mm-hm. Watching you dance -- you looked ravishing, so that is exactly what I shall do."

Frigga glanced around them; Odin was keeping his voice low but on the other side of the boys' empty seats, Lady Aelfrida was watching them with an amused expression. Catching Frigga's eye, she tactfully turned away to speak to her husband on her other side, but Frigga had no doubt her ears were still cocked their way. She didn't care though, Aelfrida was not one to spread gossip, and the magic of the dance was still fizzing in her blood. The desire between a husband and wife was nothing that needed hiding.

"Bold words, my king." Her eyes glittered in the firelight. "But 'ravishing' implies an unwilling participant."

"Faint heart never won fair lady," he countered. "And you could pretend."

"You have no need to win me; I am already yours. Wedded, bedded, carried your children." She spoke before she thought, before she remembered that she hadn't carried Loki in the way she had carried Thor, within her body. Despite the fact that they had been talking of Loki's origins just the night before, it was that easy for her to forget sometimes that Loki had not been hers from the moment of his conception; her heart knew no distinction. She lifted her chin a fraction of an inch in defiance and met Odin's eye squarely in challenge; she had carried Loki in her arms often enough; she had not spoken an untruth. But his gaze was nothing but warm and approving. She relaxed. "But if you wish to play the conquering invader; I am not averse."

"I am a fortunate man." Odin gave one last  kiss to her hand before releasing it, his mind already racing ahead with anticipation. "As are our children."

Frigga turned, glancing towards the corner where the youths in attendance at the feast had clustered around a small table where Sif and Loki were just sitting down across from each other, elbows planted on the table and hands clasped together. Thor covered their joined hands with his. "Ready?" she heard him say.

Odin turned to follow her gaze. "Set..." Thor continued. "Go!" Thor released their hands and stepped back quickly and Odin felt his own muscles tense briefly in response. He knew well the wiry strength in Loki's slim arms; although it was always Thor -- ever since he had been quite a young child -- demanding to test his strength against his father's in a bout of arm wrestling, Loki would usually take a turn afterwards if he were around, though. Odin remembered one time he had balked, more self-conscious with adolescence than he had been as a child. 

"What's the point? I know you're stronger than me; I know I won't win."

"It is in challenging ourselves that we grow stronger. And yes, I am stronger than you today, and I will be for many years yet. But with each year that passes I will have to put in a little more effort to pin your arm to the table, and I will be glad of it. And one of these days -- " Odin had smiled then. "One of these days you will pin my arm instead and you will know that you have the strength of a king. And I will be so, so proud of you." 

A shyly pleased smile had bloomed on Loki's face and without another word he had come forward to take his seat and wrapped his hand around Odin's proffered one. 

"We all are fortunate. And you've got that look on your face," Frigga murmured, leaning into his side.

"What look?"

"That soft look you get when you're remembering something from when the boys were younger. Yes?"

"Yes," he admitted. "Good times. What think you?" He watched Loki and Sif, straining against each other, their arms barely wavering back and forth, neither gaining the advantage for long. ""They are well-matched, I think; Sif trains as hard as any of the boys in her age group."

"Mm, I would not be surprised if she trains harder than some; she has more to prove." As did her own younger child, thought Frigga. "But you are right; they are well-matched indeed." And if she meant in more ways than muscle strength, Frigga did not elaborate. "But I of course must root for my own chick. I think Thor would be happy to take his turn against either one of them as winner, though."

Odin noted with amusement that Thor was cheering both his brother and his friend on indiscriminately,  his shoulders noticeably broader than either of theirs this year, changing from those of a youth's to a man's. Odin had already decided to gift him Mjolnir on his next name day; it was time to see if they would suit each other. But both of his sons were growing taller and stronger every year, and so much more besides. Odin watched them both with contentment, aware of his wife at his side, his kingdom thriving around him. The Norns had truly blessed them. "Thor would happily wrestle with a pig," he said. 

Frigga snorted with laughter, knowing it was true. "He has your love of the battlefield -- wherever it may be."  She cupped the back of his neck, turning him to face her, her fingers playing in his hair.

"Merry Yule, my love."

[legends-live-in-memories]

Picture Perfect

AYO! its me back with more content for the second time this week while i ignore my other wips again. this is a lil gift for @queen-o-leen who i promised wholesome content for! I hope you like it!

Timinette/Timari Oneshot 1.9K words (not related to my other timari oneshots)

Summary:

“Tim spends a nice day in a park in Paris and takes a picture of a pretty girl.

He somehow gets an almost date out of it.”

no warnings this time. completely family-friendly. I know i surprise myself with this one too.

without further ado

He would be the last to admit that Jason was right and that time away was what he needed at this point in life but it can’t be ignored that, for the first time in possibly three years, Tim was having a wonderful day. He was having a wonderful week actually. After one too many unsuccessful cold cases and the simmering anxiety of off-world missions, his family, primarily Jason, for some reason, demanded that he take some time off and away from his unusual brand of normal. How that meant being sent across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris of all places, he wasn’t entirely sure. Alfred probably had a hand in that decision given that, as part of his forced vacation, Tim was not allowed to actually plan any of it. Him. Timothy Jackson Drake. The guy who stalked and manoeuvred his way into Batman’s house and team. The guy who tracked and found said man when the universe thought he was dead but was actually drifting through time. Yeah, Tim was not pleased about being led blind on his vacation. 

At least Paris was a nice city. And he brought his camera. He figured he could use this time to get back into old hobbies and what better hobby to start up again in the city of love than photography? He’s taken pictures of every tourist attraction worth visiting by his second day and began to take candid shots of people and animals. Would Damian like the animal pictures? Maybe, if they came from someone who wasn’t Tim. Is he going to try and give them to him anyways? Absolutely not. He liked his liver where it is, thank you very much. They would serve as great bribing material however. But that’s a thought for another day. 

Right now he was working on capturing what could possibly be described as the stereotypical outing with friends. He’s sitting along some bushes near the entrance of a park and staring at a group of teens his own age hanging around. He spots a brunette with thick curls of hair animatedly speaking with a guy in a vibrant cap. She’s waving a camera herself, and he appreciates her taste in equipment. Her eyes spark with fox-like mischief while the cap guy has a peaceful aura about him; like an old turtle. Next he sees a blonde, her hair is in a ridiculously high ponytail and she’s in a deep conversation with a red head off to the side of the whole group; her words are rushing out of her and she’s a buzzing bee with excitement. Another blond is in the area, but he sits in a broad patch of sun possibly napping with an open book on his chest. Very cat-like Tim supposes. He barely pays them more than a second of thought however. No. 

His focus is on the quaint beauty directly in his line of sight. She’s poised up against the giant tree trunk with a sketchbook in her lap and pencils surrounding her. Her hair hangs by her shoulders in twintails and it’s a colour so dark it seems to absorb the shade of the tree. She’s scribbling furiously on the page before her and her tongue is slightly peaking out to the side. Her forehead is creased with stress lines and her shoulders hunch slightly over her frame. She’s the vision of deep concentration and dedication and Tim would be a fool not to capture her. He’s gotten wide shots of her companions but now he wants to focus on her. 

Looking through the lens of his camera he zooms in on her profile. When his camera focuses, he spots a constellation of freckles across her cheeks, barely there, almost blending in with her complexion but Tim is nothing if not hypervigilant. He goes to take another photo when a bug flies into view. It’s a ladybug. It lands precariously on the tip of her nose and it’s just the thing that breaks her out of her work-induced trance. Tim is watching her now, long forgetting to click the shutter. Her eyes cross as she stares intently at the black-spotted creature and its presence seems to amuse her. She’s giggling to herself, as if sharing an inside joke with the bug and reaches a slim finger to swipe the insect gently from her nose. She inspects it and smiles a smile so soft that not even a feather could compare. He feels like an intruder. More so than one who takes pictures of cute strangers in public. 

Coming back to his senses, he takes another picture, the final picture, and lowers the camera from his face. He looks back at his temporary muse and finds that she is already looking at him. Her head tilts in confusion. Apprehension. Possibly a bit of fear. Which is valid given that Tim was pointing a camera at her from across the public park. What should he do though to quell her fears? 

He felt his face lift into a grin; he didn’t need to look at himself to know it was awkward and forced. A shrug of his shoulders and a flimsy wave of the camera in his hand was the only thing he did. Before he could begin to stumble over himself in apology, however, she surprised him. With a cautious hunch, her shoulders brought up to her ears, and an embarrassed smile to match his own, she slowly flips her sketchbook around and he comes face to face with, well, his face. It was a portrait of him. She had drawn a portrait of him. And she was showing him. Feeling embolden, he flips his camera to show her the screen but she’s too far away. He gets up on unsteady legs, cramped from his uncomfortable position, and begins a slow stride towards her. She meets him in the middle.

“Hi.” He barely speaks those words. They’re more like an exhale or a sigh of relief that he hadn’t scared her off. 

“Hi, I hope you don’t mind the drawing.” Her voice is high and light. Like a spring breeze. She’s daintily waving at him and he sees that her fingers are rough, and calloused. Unexpected but he finds it rather charming. Before he could get another word in, she’s off like an engine. “I just saw you there, and you had your camera so I figured you were taking pictures of us and thought that if you were then you wouldn’t mind me sketching you in kind but I should have asked and I’m sorry for breaching your privacy—” 

“Wait, slow down.” He fears that if he hadn’t interrupted her when he did she would run out of oxygen. Did she even breathe during her spiel? A voice in his head, that sounds like Cass, utters a soft ‘pot, kettle’ and okay, he sees a lot of himself in her mile-a-minute style of speaking. 

“No need to apologize. I’m flattered, truly. You were right, I was taking pictures of you. And your friends!” he hastily adds that last part. He turns his camera so the display screen faces her and he feels himself hold his breath in anticipation. 

A blush rises to her cheeks, red like the ladybug that interrupted her. He quite likes that colour on her. His eyes drift to the sketch and he’s further impressed by her skill. She has an eye for detail. He notices a bird in the background. It’s a robin. That piques his interest and lights a flicker of fear within him. 

“May I ask,” he begins slowly, unsure of what that little addition could mean. Did she know? How could she? Was his identity compromised?

“Why did you draw a robin in the background? It’s lovely but I’m curious,” he finishes. He’s going to play dumb until he has more information. She seems taken off guard by the question and raises her shoulders to her ears again in an embarrassed hunch.

“Well,” she starts, but she seems unsure and the words die on her tongue. She tries again.

“I just saw it fly by and then it landed behind you. So I thought ‘why not?’ and drew it. It seemed fitting.” She wasn’t looking him in the eye and now he felt kind of felt like a jerk for baselessly accusing some random girl. Of course it was just a coincidence. This bat-paranoia was going to be the end of him one day. It’s by sheer miracles and luck why it hasn’t already. 

“Oh, no worries. It just surprised me because it’s my favourite bird.” Right. Lie to the pretty French girl. But what else could he do? Tell her the truth?

“Then it’s a cool coincidence, huh?” She seems encouraged by that tidbit of information.

“Yeah, pure luck on your part.”

“What?” She seems more startled at that than Tim thinks she should be but before he can think deeper into it she speaks again and he would be a fool to not give her his undivided attention.

“Why did you take a picture of me with the ladybug? If you don’t mind me asking.” That stumps him because, to be honest, he does not know why himself. It just felt right. So he tells her as such.

“Well that would be another coincidence because ladybugs are my favourite insects.” She gives him a full smile alongside that statement and the brilliance of it almost blinds him. He wants to capture that smile for eternity. 

The thought strikes him. He doesn’t want this moment to end. He knows by the Friday of next week he’ll be flying back to Gotham where it’s business as usual and Red Robin won’t have time for commitments and puppy love. But right now? Right now Tim Drake is on vacation with a week and half left and all the time in the world to entertain the idea of a spring romance. Making the decision, he goes for it and takes the chance.

“I was getting a bit hungry. Do you know anywhere that’s good to eat at?” It’s an offer, open to interpretation. If she just lists some place, he knows where her interests lay. If she offers to escort him somewhere, then she’s taken the bait for exactly what it is, an invitation for more; whatever more is. He hopes she takes the bait. 

“Yes I do actually! My parents own a bakery just outside the park.” Her enthusiasm is uplifting and the offer of a place so personal is a good sign in Tim’s book. “Let me show the way, and I could join you if you would like.”

“Perfect. That’s wonderful. It will be my treat since you’re going out of your way on my account.”

“Nonsense. Like I said, it’s my parents’ bakery. They’ll be more than happy to give some complimentary snacks.” She loops her arm around his and begins to drag him to the park gate. She’s strong and her grip is firm and Tim feels lightheaded at the ease with which she pulls him. He can’t help but be swept up in the tides that is this girl. 

“I’m Tim, by the way. Tim Drake.” He offers his name, something he should have done at the beginning.

She looks back at him over her shoulder and he’s caught up in the oceans of her eyes. They’re alight with joy. 

“Nice to meet you, Tim. I’m Marinette Dupain-Cheng.” 

“Nice to meet you too.”

They’re almost by the bakery now, he can smell the fresh baked goods from here, and he can’t wait to sit down and get to know this girl better. Maybe get her number by the end of their lunch.

Yeah. Tim was having a wonderful day.