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suoyou · 3 years

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[wip] 一日三秋; one day, three autumns

1633 words, rated t.

a complete chapter 2 in an incomplete series of oneshots titled 一日三秋; one day, three autumns, in which wwx is the autumn king and lwj is the winter prince.

ch 1.

they say that missing someone is the most powerful force of pain a person will know. a pain that can wilt the heart. a pain to carry. a pain that can turn one day into three autumns.

In the middle of Lan Wangji’s left thigh is a scar, round and hollow in the center, like a coin. It had been a burn once, angry blisters deadening into a purple keloid into, now, a little white moon on his skin.

Of the five floors of the castle, Lan Wangji is only allowed in three. Evidently, little does it matter that he is the only other heir to the Winter Throne should his brother ever be incapable of holding it; he’s often pictured how woefully unprepared he would be should the Kingdom of Summer ever revolt again, or, as the Defectress Luo Qingyang had promised, if the Autumn King showed up seeking revenge.

For what, Lan Wangji doesn’t know.

“You don’t need to know,” has always been his uncle’s reply.

“You won’t need to know if I have any say in it,” is what his brother says, kind, still double-edged.

“You should know,” said the Defectress Luo Qingyang, over her teacup, and jade has never looked so threatening, “that your kingdom is still carrying out the crimes of war right under your nose, and if your family does not wake up, the Autumn Kingdom will leave the decade-long peace treaty in the dust the same way you have.” She said it all like she was simply commenting on the races. The Jin Imperial Family was winning.

“How do you know? What kind of war crimes?” asked Lan Wangji. He’d spoken too brusquely, but Luo Qingyang hadn’t been fazed. All around them, the Dragon Boat Festival surged on, air humid and painted green-red-blue, an overfull tea kettle of a day. “Why is it your concern?”

“That you think it shouldn’t be my concern is the same line of thinking that got your Kingdom into this mess,” she said, and her words have been ringing in Lan Wangji’s ears ever since, an unwelcome jabber of sparrow song and raven squawks that won’t leave him hours later. The telltale signs of spring. She holds her position well.

“What kind of war crimes?” he repeated.

She’d taken her time sipping the rest of her tea before placing her empty cup on the table to be taken away. “Do you recall, when the Wen Imperial Family went rogue and the Snowfire Wars tore the lands apart,” she said, “there was a division of mages known as the Core Reapers?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t really believe, do you, that they simply vanished after those wars?”

Lan Wangji had stared at her.

The Core Reapers had vanished after the Snowfire Wars. They’d ridden through the war-torn battlegrounds after blood had been spilled like red ghosts, gathering the dying bodies of civilians and mages alike to, as Lan Wangji had heard, harvest their cores. Word was that the Wen Imperial Family was creating elixirs, weapons, medicines out of them. Hearsay had it that they were creating monsters.

He stares at his scar now, where his jade pendant had burned him through three layers of clothing thirteen years ago, and had never lit up again. In the dusk of the evening, it’s almost invisible, as if it had never existed—vanished, like the Reapers, after the war.

Lan Wangji stands up and shrugs his outer robe back on. Unthinkingly, he opens the drawer where he keeps that pendant, like it’ll have answers for him. It doesn’t. Jade does not dull with age, but in the red velvet of the drawer it could be leached bone. A small one—a skull bone.

Lying beside it is its bonded match. Once they had been identical, though Lan Wangji’s pendant was wrapped in blue ribbon. The other is broken on one side and missing a segment, red knotting and tassels unraveled, the jade circle incomplete like a horseshoe. When the Snowfire Wars raged around him, Lan Wangji wore his half of the pair with more attention and care than when he carried his sword.

“Wangye,” his attendant inclines her head when he opens his pavilion doors.

“I have some personal work to attend to. Can you see to it that, if any of my family seeks me, to let them know I will greet them accordingly when I return?”

“Yes, Wangye.”

So he goes.

Three of the Kingdom’s floors are aboveground. Two are below. He’s been to three in the middle—never the topmost, never the bottomost, and he’s not sure what he’s looking for. He has to look, to be sure, or else it will be another evening of Luo Qingyang’s voice in his head, jerking him awake long before dawn.

Strange dreams have been plaguing him since the Dragon Boat festival, the sorts of dreams that someone would tell themselves didn’t mean anything. The night of the festival Lan Wangji had gone to bed and found himself in a place where the sun never set, simply bobbing up and down in the sky, turning from green to gold and back again as the days and nights passed. Then, the next night, the scar on his thigh had opened up and begun bleeding afresh, and no matter what magic he used, it would not stop. The more magic he used, the more blood poured down his leg.

Last night, he dreamed of Wei Ying. Not in the way he’d been in life, so bright that Lan Wangji couldn’t bear to look at him sometimes.

The Kingdom of Winter had been blanketed in snow for their cycle, and Lan Wangji was in the woods outside the royal walls alone. A dark sweep of Core Reapers had passed by. Their hoods had been drawn over their heads. It looked as if the entire forest was bleeding.

One of them in the center of their tight pool of red had paused and turned their heads, and under the scarlet, mink-lined hood had been Wei Ying’s face.

Lan Wangji shakes himself as he greets the guards that stand outside the gates into the Kingdom’s undergrounds. A question floats through their expressions but they open the gates for him without question, bowing again as he passes.

He picks his way through the first underground level without wasting his time. Here they keep their forbidden texts, their spoils of war, here they hold sensitive political meetings. A damp, sweet smell of soil clutches fat little hands at his robes, happy for visitors, and he raises his hand to upright some of the overgrown vines and planters that line the walls. His hand glows a dim blue, and the drooping foliage picks its flower heads up again. Blooms are coming.

Even if he’s never made the descent into the lowest floor of the Kingdom, Lan Wangji knows there are two ways to get there—the prisoners’ entrance in the Pavilion of Discord, and the one he faces now. The jailers’ entrance, through the Hall of Justice.

He doesn’t feel particularly just, facing the round door that he knows will take him down the staircase into the Kingdom’s dungeons.

Blue fires light his way.

In times of peace, there aren’t many prisoners to speak of. The few that the Kingdom of Winter persecutes are petty thieves, suspected spies, and the occasional revolutionist, all of which are bent into fearful submission before they ever even make it to the dungeons. Lan Wangji knows it. He’s seen it.

And he’s right, almost, for at least part of the dungeon. It’s bright and clean, with mainly empty cells, but the blue fires end abruptly in the middle of the long walkway between the rows. There are scuffles, noises of things living, hushed in the gloom. He pauses and strains his eyes. Then he lifts his hand, summoning some of the fires in the torches to his palm to light his way.

He doesn’t know what he expects to see. Prisoners, perhaps, curled up like hungry mice.

The icy sheen of his fire falls over the bodies in the cells, and Lan Wangji frowns before he steps back, breath stuttering in his chest.

They are prisoners. It’s the most human thing left about them. Some of them have lost all their hair, ragged clumps gathering in rolls thick as dead cats beside them. Others have clawed their own backs bloody, as if they’d been trying to dig their own spines out of their bodies, and still others were covered in a thick, tarry ooze, as if blood and lymph had leaked out of them and gained its own sentience. One of them lay in silence with a stained white strip of cloth over his eyes, a line at his neck like his head had been stitched back on.

Lan Wangji’s stomach writhes, hot and sick, in his belly.

The end of the walkway widens into a larger chamber where no one is kept, but as he passes his fire over the space he can make out the outlines of odd contraptions—long rods with fluted holes, boards with three holes in them—one larger, two smaller, for a neck and hands. A splintered wooden gurney like a rotting log. Old blades sprout off of it like oyster mushrooms. They blink sleepily back at him, eyes in the night. A bizarre device like a chair, outfitted with two horns on both sides. Anyone sitting in it would have their head position between the mouths of both.

He frowns. A long skein of red fabric has been tossed carelessly over the back of the chair, wrinkles rounded and warm. A cloak. Someone’s just taken it off.

“Wangji,” a voice comes from behind him, “what are you doing down here?”

#fic wip #wx #incomplete

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talldarkandroguesome · 3 years

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28th of Last Seed, Loredas

I do not know what to do.

I explained to Nabine the situation as described to me.

She said she did not understand. When I began to explain again, she said that she had heard what I had said, but she did not know why this was happening. Why I could possibly change so, given that I had died far more times in Coldharbour and seemed to be without any changes whatsoever.

I tried to explain again about Daedric connections and my devotion and where my soul was, but she just cut me off again, saying there had to be more to it. That it could not possibly be quite such a thing.

I was at a loss. I told her I knew no more about it.

She began to tell me that I would need to find a way to earn back my soul from my Prince. That if I just did a bunch of deeds for Her, that surely, for the great service I provided, I could persuade Him to return my soul.

I gave her a forced smile. I know she knows better than to believe such a thing possible. The chance of that would be very slim and the price to pay would be great indeed.

Nabine was panicking. That much was obvious.

I kissed her and did not say anything against her suggestion as she began coming up with an ever more elaborate way of getting my soul back.

The whole contrived idea centered on getting myself to the Spiral Skein and serving my Prince there if necessary to drive my point home. That I would work as a sort of indentured servant with the final term resulting in my soul.

She was getting so agitated over the whole affair that eventually I had to sing her a song to soothe her.

All I said was that we could take the time to come up with a solution later, that perhaps we should take a rest for now.

She laid down and said that she thought it a good idea.

I came to give her a kiss and she recoiled as though I were some vile creature.

I said I would go and see if I could find Avon to speak with and let her rest. She just nodded, as I tried to remember that it was probably not something to take personal. That probably it was just her being overwhelmed with all that was going on right now.

I sought out Avon and noticed the Farseer returning from the edge of the encampment. When I inquired if all was well, she said she was seeing Mother off.

Mother, who left without a single word to me. No explanation. Not even a message that she was returning home.

Perhaps I have become such a disgusting creature as to no longer be worthy of the women in my family.

This would be proven later when the children had finished their lessons and Nabine whisked the girls away for some Bosmeri history lessons, which she asked for privacy to conduct.

Avon, at least took things better.

Marginally.

He, too, seemed more protective of Sildras after hearing the news.

There was pity in his eyes. Worry. Fear. Avon has never been adept at obscuring his emotions, particularly from me.

While he said all the right things, perhaps even meaning them for the most part, I knew how uncomfortable he was.

So instead of spending the night with my family, I headed out to the road and went across the river, wandering the lower parts of the coiled path, careful to avoid the marshier areas where giant snakes tend to slumber.

I found a nice, large boulder and teleported myself up to the top of it and sat down. As hot and humid as it was after the earlier storm, the cool stone felt soothing to the skin, cool enough to feel through my trousers.

I felt at a loss and so I did the only thing that I could think of. I stripped down and prayed. Prayed for a solution to fixing everything. Prayed to be worth enough of love. Prayed for not having to be so thoroughly reminded of the fact that my decisions always seemed to end in my own and others’ misery.

There came a whisper in my ear, carried along the hot, sticky breeze. In most situations I might have been angry to hear this voice after all that had happened, or ready to demand answers, but not here. Not now.

This voice was one of calm. Of comfort. A balm for all my ails.

My Prince told me that there was no such thing as a solution to everything. That my decisions were my own to make as I saw fit given what information I had. But most importantly, She told me that I was worthy of love. That I had it. That He loved me as the obedient child I was. That She would look after me as best as He could while also tending to other matters. That if I continued to serve so well over decades and centuries, that boons would be granted. Boons that would be grand enough to help soothe the fears I had.

My heart felt full to bursting. I gave praise and thanks for my Prince’s love and kind words of encouragement.

My Prince told me that a great number of things was going to occur soon. That I should prepare myself for great battle. That I should learn to master my new skills quickly so that I might aid in the battle to come.

I said that I would work hard to do that very thing. That it would be my honor and pleasure.

I could feel my Prince’s smile spread through my body. I could feel the satisfaction.

In that moment, I felt whole again. There was a warmth where my soul should be. That fullness restored.

And even after She had left, I felt so sated, that I decided not to return to the tribe for the night, spending it instead, atop the rock, my tunic draped lightly over me in case I great cold as I slumbered.

I awoke as the sun rose. I felt a pair of eyes upon me.

Startled, I turned to see a giant snake watching me.

I did not move, waiting to see what it might do.

It’s tongue flicked out into the air between us. Then to my face.

I did not move. My whole body tightened, muscles ready, my teleportation spell able to be cast in an instant.

It moved around, seemingly interested in me, but not yet in striking.

I relaxed my body and tried to even my breathing.

The snake turned and slithered off to a different rock, where it curled up in a spot the light fell upon.

I was glad not to have decided to harm the snake. Snakes are sacred to the Mabrigash and it would have greatly harmed my relationship with the Farseer and her wise women if I had come back having killed a snake when it was not necessary.

I returned to camp and Sildras and Cariel came running up to me and said they had missed me.

I lied that I was doing some training for my lessons and asked them how thiers were going, listening eagerly to the stories of what they had been doing.

I knew that Nabine might still worry about me being around our daughters, so I sent Cariel to rouse Nabine and Kuna for breakfast while Sildras and I went to work on preparing something.

It had been quite a while since he and I had an opportunity to share time together alone. And so I asked him what he would like to do when we had returned to Mournhold. Something for just the two of us. And not simply going to a library or a shop of arcane instruments or alchemy reagents.

He thought for a long while before deciding that he would like to go for a ride in the country. And that during that time, he wanted to hear some stories about what I had done while I was away.

I asked him what he meant by when I was away. He answered that when he was much younger I had been away. He wanted to know what I had done before returning to expose the imposter who had posed as me.

It was a harsh blow, though I doubt the boy meant to land it on so bare a wound.

I nodded and told him that I could do so, but that it might bring up some unpleasant truths about his mother and about me. Things he might prefer to not know.

He reminded me that he was not going to be a child for much longer and that soon he would be sent away to Shad Astula until he reached his adulthood. He wanted to do so knowing the truth.

There was a look in his eyes, one of conviction and of fear. For such a usually shy child, to ask for so bold a request, I knew I could not deny him.

I agreed that I would do so.

He seemed to let out a large breath I did not know he had been holding and he hugged me. I kissed his brow and told him that I was sorry for not having been there more. He did not seem to know how to react to this statement, but we were interrupted by Avon’s joining us.

The Three must truly be looking out for me.

The tribe shared breakfast together before I was taken for further lessons. The Farseer seemed even more driven to teach me than before. Yet, between the usual lessons, she also made sure to emphasize how important it was for me not to be frivolous with my ability to die. That I must try to refrain from dying as much as was possible. That I should act as though any death could be permanent.

I told her I understood, but she gave me a scathing look and told me that I likely did not. I stayed silent. She told me that it was more than just the effect it would have on my personality if I continued to die. That over time I might grow numb to many things living as an immortal, but that if I did not wish to share the same callous, coldness of a Daedra, I would have to respect life. My own, and others.

Being no fool, or at least, intelligent enough not to strive to be one, I told heed of her warnings. She reminded me that until I died my body would age and I could essentially live out a full life with those I loved. That I could experience everything along side them. That it would be a better act of honoring those I loved in a lifetime, to live alongside them, rather than apart.

She is not wrong.

I was distracted through much of the telekinesis lesson afterwards, still stuck on the wisdom she imparted. It earned me a quick strike of a branch on my boot to shake me back to attention. My mind is racing too quickly. I need some time to just sort through my thoughts. But during her lessons is not that time. I must earn my proficiency as soon as possible. For myself. For my family. For my Prince.

#ESO #TES #RP #Dunmer #Elder Scrolls Online #The Elder Scrolls

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wordynerdygurl · 5 years

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Echoes of You

Author’s Note: This is from a request sent in to my 500 Followers Challenge. I’ve included it below... I did have fun with it! As always, please feel free to re-blog, share, and comment! Also, I’m accepting tag list requests and story requests! *The GIF is perfect and I want to thank the original creator/ poster!* Pairing: Loki x Female Reader Summary/ Request: “Loki is badly hurt on a mission and the reader has to make some sort of deal with a dark magical entity to save him. The price she has to pay is that everyone she knows is going to forget she ever existed. She takes the deal and tries to build a new life away from the avengers, however she and Loki keep running into each other and he's very drawn to her. After a lot of pestering, she agrees to go on a date with him on the condition that he is going to leave her alone after that. Their date goes great and they're almost about to have sex, but she stops him because she thinks he would've never wanted her if he actually had his memories. Obviously he knows though, they both confess their feelings and it ends on passionate, rough smut. Hope that's not too much and you have fun with it :)” Warnings: Battle scenes of the MCU variety, talk of blood/ death, angst and SMUT

"LOKI!"

Time freezes in that screamed second.

You feel yourself running, feet sliding in the gritty sand beneath your boots, desperate. He is impossibly far away but you can make it. You have to.

Skidding into the gravel on your knees, you shout his name as you watch him crumple. He's gone pale, limp, boneless in your arms. There's blood, lots of it, too much to stop on your own. It flows freely, drenching you down to your skin, warm and sticky. There’s no way to stem the flood.

In your dreams you always catch him in time. Keeping him off the cold ground, hugging his lean body to yours, ignoring the others as they fight around you. His twinkling eyes flutter but they stay open, struggling to focus on you. You watch his soft lips part, they form words, sounds that never reach you in the vacuum of your panic.

"Hush… it's ok… I'm here. I got you." Gurgling platitudes gush from you but there's no way to know if he hears them. A smile, young and sweet spreads across his unbearably handsome face. Using his last measure of strength, Loki strokes your cheek as you press your hot lips to his too cool skin.

You wake up wailing, the pillow beneath you wet. Honestly, it's never dry, not anymore. Because every night you try to save Loki. Every night he speaks soundlessly to you. And every morning you wake up to reality.

Dawn's dark hides you and your pain. You let the loss of Loki roll over you. Pulling you under in a rip tide of shuddering sobs, drowning you with memories of what you had before and what you have now. Swallowing that hard knot of agony, bitter and jagged, your crying steadied then dried out after a few minutes.

This new existence, this new life, was lonely. Awake now, well before the sun, you pushed out of bed and geared up for a run without much enthusiasm. When you couldn't ease your mind you took it out on your body.

Stepping onto the dim sidewalk you stretched just a little. You wanted to punish your subconscious, your wayward brain, not tear a hamstring. Setting off with a sigh, your feet slapping the pavement in an even staccato, you tried to turn your mind off.

On the quiet streets of your new city, one you were struggling to make feel like home, you wanted to outrun the past. Eager to put distance between you and all that had come before, forcing your legs to go further, faster, you ran by yourself in the shadows. There was no one to disturb you, not at this ungodly hour. Not that anyone would. You used to be a SHIELD agent, one who looked mad at the world, which you were. So you ran on, giving no thought to direction or neighborhood, welcoming any and all risk if it meant peace of mind.

Most days the sweat and strain were enough to calm your demons. By running your body down, your mind would let go too. Not today. Today, your dream, like a well directed film, played on a loop in your head. Each scene was vivid, real, raw. And not true.

---

"You come here freely?"

Hitching your chin defiantly, "Yes."

The ethereal being before you seemed to float on a crimson cloud, too beautiful to be benevolent, the aura around her dusky skin crackling violet. Part sorceress, part dark queen, she was your last hope. A final step you might take to keep Loki alive.

Slinking snake like, she sidled to your side, "I know what brings you here, mortal. I know what you want."

"Then you know I need help. Your help." You weren't begging. At least not yet, anyway. But the smell of desperation curled around you, black and rotten, regardless.

"You are not the one in need. Odin's adopted boy… the prince. He is dying. Is it not so?"

Her voice was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Strong, soft and sweet, the witch's words echoed in the close quarters of her stony temple. Swirling around you in the rouge red ribbons of her eternal energy, she did not wait for your reply. "What is it to you, child? The death of a Jotun foundling can mean but little to a human. And yet, you come to me willingly. Why?"

Hot tears formed, threatening to splash, scalding your cheeks. Your breath left your body as a gutted groan tore the words from your deepest soul, "I love him."

"Love. Such a human emotion." You felt her then, the physicality of her form, as she brushed an errant tear from your face. The enchantress stilled, her beautiful dark skinned face emerging in front of you, scrutinizing your expression, reading your pain.

Questioning you quietly, "You say that you love the youngest of Odin's sons."

"I do."

"The magic you ask for, it carries a hefty price."

Hope at the thought of her assistance made you boisterous. "Anything! I will pay any price. Twice over, if it keeps Loki alive."

Glowing plum colored, her gaze took you in, measuring you and your resolve. "Your sacrifice will be great, make no mistake. It will test the love you claim to feel for this demi-god."

What did you care of sacrifices if it kept Loki alive? Was there a price too high for the life of your love? Anger flashed through you, frustrated and flustered, "I heard you the first time. Will you aid me or not?"

"So cross, so eager." Silver laughter filled the cavernous space but was short lived. "You do not know the full cost of your desires and yet... you are in a rush to see them come to fruition. Child, I can do what you ask. I will do it, if you agree. In return... no one will remember you. Only this will purchase Loki's life."

"What?"

The Sorceress took your hand, testing its weight, turning your palm up. "You heard me. If this is truly what you want… to keep Loki alive, then your life… your history will be erased."

Gulping hard, understanding hitting you like a freight train, "My life for his? Is that it?"

Violet eyes bore into yours, purple orbs that fill your vision, unblinking. "No… you will not die, little mortal. It is far worse than that. You will live, but you will live in isolation. You will be forgotten by Loki… by your family… by your friends. You will meet them as strangers. They will carry on without you."

"But Loki will live?" He had to, you had come too far to fail your God now.

"Yes. Will you be able to?"

"Me? I don't understand what you're asking me."

"Will you be able to have a life without the man you say you love?"

Could you? There had been no one like Loki in your life before. Smart and strong, sarcastic and cutting, tender and kind. Loki was all the things you needed in a partner and he made you better at the same time. Taming you, just a little, being loved by Loki had softened some of your rough edges. Would it be easy to know he was walking around, enjoying life, but not be a part of it? No. But how else could you honor the man who had given you so much?

With a straining voice, "Loving him, having been loved by him, will have to be enough to satisfy my soul. There is no other option for me."

Nodding solemnly, content at your knowledge of the bargain, the crimson conjurer drew a symbol on the pad of your hand. Watching her with widening eyes, she pulled a gossamer green thread from the center of your palm. A string of memories erasing you in order to allow Loki to survive.

"It is longer than I would've thought, deeper too." And you knew what she meant instinctively because your heart pinched as her hands gathered more and more of your time with Loki to her. Dragging him out of your life with a sharp throb. When it was over the witch had a skein of your history, emerald green and glossy, which she evaporated into a wisp of smoke.

You had a small six pointed star shaped scar in the center of your hand. It was your sole token of the life you and Loki had shared. That and the memories that you alone carried.

"It is done." There was finality in her words, a dismissive quality, and for the first time in her presence you were frightened. Not of her, but of the new world you were facing.

Solemnly, you bowed your head, "Thank you."

"We shall see, human. We shall see."

---

By the time you return home, soaked with sweat, you're tired but feeling more like yourself. It's a relief to feel the night's pain fade enough for you to shower and dress for work. It's not a career. But it is just enough to almost pay rent and buy food.

Working with people, although frustrating at times, really does keep the white light of your emptiness away. Besides, the store offered a discount on clothes, which helped, and there was always something physical to be done. Lifting boxes, moving racks, hauling trash. Anything to keep you thoughtlessly busy. Like you did everyday, you threw yourself into the job, mindlessly. It was a life raft of sorts, a buoy keeping you afloat, a thing to cling to while trying not to let the weight of your past drag you down.

Listening to the consumer safe playlist, getting into a rhythm, you bobbed your head as your folded t-shirts. Your co-workers hated restocking, rehanging, straightening the racks. So, naturally that's what you were doing, lost in your own little world.

"I really don't see why we have to be here, brother." Something about that voice made you pause. Haughty and high handed, you could swear that it was…

"Jane has a birthday, brother. I will not forget it."

"Then, for the love of Odin, bring her some lovely Asgardian silks. Jewelry in gold or silver. Or better yet, take her home, seduce her soundly. Do anything but buy that hideous sweater."

"It's not hideous. You know nothing of Midgardian fashion."

"Me? I know nothing? Dear brother, this suit is Armani. That is designer. That means something."

"It means you spent way too much coin, Loki."

Turning quickly you moved closer to the men, still listening, still in disbelief. Peeking at the mismatched pair through a clothing rack, pushing two furry sweaters apart, your heart was racing. Stunned, you recognized the strong back of the tall, broad blonde. When he moved toward another display of shits your jaw fell open. Loki was here! Not five feet away!

"Bah! I don't see her size." Thor sighed in frustration, the offending rack of clothes wobbling with the force of his displeasure.

Loki, picking lint from his sleeve, "Find a clerk… ask for the awful thing in Jane's size so we can get out of this place." Lifting his piercing blue eyes, he spied you, trying to slip away unnoticed, "You! Hello? Yes… can you help us?"

It takes you a second to register that Loki, your Loki, is addressing you. Stiffly, you straighten up, your eyes rising to his inquisitive azure ones. They snap with a vitality that was missing when you saw him last.

A cloud passes over his gaze. Shadows of recognition, maybe? Or is that just what you want to see?

"Um… sure. What… uh, what do you need, sir?" You sound like a robot. Cringing at the put on voice you're using, awkward and uncomfortable, you smile at Thor.

Loki steps closer, brushing past his brother, not quite in your space but close enough for you to smell his skin. A familiar combination of leather and vanilla, sugar and spice, reaches out to you. Your breath hitches at the nearness of him. Memories on the tip of your tongue.

He's holding a fuzzy sweater, one the color of spicy mustard, about to hand it to you when his head tilts. "Do… do I know you?"

Heat climbs your face. Yes. Yes, Loki. You know me. You know me in a way no one else could ever know me. You know the sound of my sobs and the sigh of my satisfaction. Why I love the smell of the snow and hate lima beans. You know me.

And I know you. I know the strength of your character. The depth of your love. Which thoughts haunt you, songs your mother sang over your crib, poems written for no one else to read. Oh yes, I know you.

But what you say is, "Me? No… nope. No. We've… I mean, no. You don't know me." Kicking yourself mentally, the verbal diarrhea couldn't be stopped, and now Loki's surveying you even more closely.

"Are you certain? It's just… I could swear that I know you." For the first time since meeting Loki you hear uncertainty in his voice. It's almost enough to weaken your resolve, tell him all of it, even if it's in the middle of The Loft.

"Have… have you been in the shop before? I uh, I work a lot." Looking anywhere but at the handsome man from your nightmares, you settle on the offending sweater, trying to seem like an eager employee not a stuttering mess.

"No." His smile widened, the natural flirt in him coming out to play, "We have never set foot in this place."

Your thoughts jumbled. Unprepared for facing Loki, unsure of how to handle seeing him again, you focused on the top Thor wanted to give Jane. "Oh… well, maybe I just look like someone you used to know? Um… what size did you say?"

Thor, watching the interaction between you and Loki, was just happy to get back into the conversation. "Yes. Size 2 please, my good woman."

Casting Loki a side eyed glance, chuckling at Thor, you made your way to the stockroom. Stay calm, you willed yourself. Keeping your back straight, your head level and your breathing even, you walked towards the back. Your heart? That jerk was pumping overtime. As soon as you are gone, Thor rounds on his younger brother, "She likes you, Loki! And, she is rather cute."

Rolling his eyes with a groan, "Cute? She is far more beautiful than that, brother."

Wagging his golden brows playfully, the God of Thunder teased, "You should take her on a date. To dinner. She might actually say yes!"

"It's creepy. No woman wants to be courted while they're at work. Although…" Looking longingly at the “Employees Only” sign on the door you had disappeared into, Loki sighed.

"Yes, brother?"

"Although, she does remind me of someone."

"I have never seen her before. And she is certainly Midgardian. There's no other-worldly influence in her." Thor was sliding through hangers, evaluating gift options for Jane, talking in what he thought was a whisper.

"Yes. Yes… it's just so strange. She is so familiar… too familiar." Loki left his sentence hanging in the air. You were striding his way, a soft, down turned expression on your face. The urge to kiss the corners of your mouth overwhelmed him.

"Hi again." Exhaling, you risked a full look at Loki. He was scrutinizing you, closer than before, needing to solve the mystery of your connection.

"Hello."

God, you missed his eyes. The serious way they took in every detail. How they lit up with Loki's laughing or glowed with mischief when he got up to no good.

Swallowing dryly, you remembered his eyes darkening with passion. Appraising you through dusky lashes, half closed in pleasure as you hugged his body snugly to your own. His heavy heat inside of you, both finding release, breathing hard, holding onto each other while the world around you faded away.

"I'm… I'm sorry?"

Loki, peering at you, smirked. "I said, thank you for the hideous sweater. My brother's fiancee will hate it but she will, inevitably, appreciate the oaf's effort."

Giggling, your body temperature rose a few degrees, unable to resist Loki. It was so easy to be around him. It always had been.

"My lady, thank you! Brother, I am off to find the cashier. I shall meet you outside…" Thor nodded your way, encouraging Loki, failing at being discreet.

Sharing a laugh with your former lover, Loki risked taking your hand. You didn't shrug him off. Instead, your breath caught, frozen in the familiar feeling of his fingers.

"Hmm… you say we are strangers but your body tells another story, little one. Do you know who I am?"

You could answer that honestly. Loki wasn't as popular as Thor or Captain America but his name was known publicly. His reputation was a bit tarnished, surely, but that had always been part of your attraction to him.

Finding your voice, "Yea… I do."

"Uh huh. Then you know I am not some mortal man, held to the rules and restrictions of this planet. You understand that I am a God. One who makes mischief." Dropping his voice into that silky predatory tone had made your insides go liquid.

He was too close now, his spearmint breath fanning your face, "Yes, I know where your… skills lie."

Watching your chest heave, your want apparent, Loki licked over his bottom lip, certain he could taste phantom strawberry bubblegum and grapefruit lip gloss. An odd, yet enticing, combination. One his mouth knew even if his memory couldn't recall why.

"Then you know I suss out falsehoods. It's part of the deal, dove. To lie you must spot lies. And you…", pressed into a wall mirror, hidden by a rack of wool pea coats, "aren't being truthful."

What could you say to that? “I… I am too. Like I said, You don’t know me.” Leaning into you, not touching your begging skin, but still so near, “Little liar. I think that there might be a way to solve our problem. Over dinner, tonight. My treat, assuming there��s a restaurant in this town that is not part of a chain.”

“A date? With you?” A date was not a good idea. Too much time to talk might lead to trouble. Either you’d say too much or, and this was possibly worse, do too much with Loki. Could you resist his charms? You weren’t able to the first time around. Now, knowing just how much you missed him, how lonely your nights were without him, would you be able to stop things from going too far? What if Loki learned the truth? That you had sacrificed your past together so that he might have a future, would he still want you then? Could he?

Loki, seeing all these thoughts pass over your face, “Yes. With me.” “No.” “No?” “Yes.” “So, yes then?” “No. Yes to the no.” “I don’t think you know what you want little mortal. Join me for dinner tonight and I won’t bother you ever again.” Always tricky, this could be another of Loki’s pranks, ready to backfire on you at the drop of a hat. If he kept his word, walked away after your night out, then it would be worth it. You could do one evening and not lose your head or your heart. “You won’t bother me ever again? You promise?” That sinister smile spread over Loki’s face, lifting his sharp cheekbones in triumph, “Oh, I promise. One date. Tonight.”

--- Years ago, when you and Loki enjoyed the first full flush of blossoming love, dating wasn’t always possible or convenient. With missions to go on, HYDRA cells to investigate, and near constant alien invasions of one kind or another, dinners and movies weren’t a priority. Staying alive was the rule of the day. In the moments when relaxation was possible, you and Loki found yourselves drawn to each other. Bonding over take out containers and warm beers in the early morning hours, sleep elusive, sitting on the counter tops. Sharing great music, digital from you, vinyl from Loki, led to dancing on the cool tile of the rooftop patio. Cherished books, personal poetry and moving works of art passed between you at a rate that alarmed the rest of the team.

You favorite times? Watching films and must see TV from the comfort of Tony’s leather couches. Snuggled under soft blankets, touching each other gently, testing and teasing. Letting the connection you shared grow naturally was what made it so special. Tonight though, this was different. Loki arrived at your door in full on romantic leading man mode. His suit was jet with a shirt and tie to match, making him look long and lethal, but undeniably sexy. There were flowers, an affectation that nonetheless made your heart swell. Holding your door, pulling out your chair, effortlessly making all the right moves was just Loki’s style. Why did it make your heart ache in equal measure? Because it was so different from your first time around. The love that led you here, to a place where no one knew you, had been so organic. Not forced or formulaic.

“I fear I’m boring you.” Loki’s bright eyes glittered as he swirled his fork through the rich sauce skillfully. Dabbing your mouth, “No, not at all. I just… I…” You were lost in remembering. Loki was telling a story that you had lived, but where you should have been was a hole. A gap, created when you had made your deal with the purple eyed sorceress, brought reality crashing into the conversation. It was a distracting detail. “Lost in your thoughts. You do that frequently, don’t you, dove.” Dove. Oh god, you hadn’t heard his endearments in ages. It made your stomach tense from need. Being Loki’s dove had meant something to you then. It meant more now. “My past is never far. It creeps up on me all the time. But I’m sure you know nothing about that.” Deliberately leading him to talk more about himself, you let the timbre of his voice take over, listening intently to the man who once was yours. The long night was over too soon. You had been on eggshells, carefully choosing your words, the entire time. As much as you wanted to keep him near, you knew that one night was already a calculated risk, and it couldn’t happen again. If Loki kept his promise, tomorrow you would be back to your routine, the missing him would still be there but so would running and the store. “Uh… thank you for the lovely dinner. I really enjoyed it.” “I believe you used to be a better liar.” Freezing, your key in the lock, you turned to face Loki. “What was that?” Panic rose in your throat tasting of bile and bucatini. Leaning his shoulder against your door frame, “You heard me perfectly well. Like I said, you were better at this once. At least, I think you were.”

“I don’t know what you think, but I’ve… we’ve…” “Never met? Yes, that line is familiar. But then again, so are you.” “Loki…” Pleading with him to drop it, to let it go, would never work. Besides, you hadn’t been able to.

And what would happen if you did come clean? Would the spell be reversed? You couldn’t risk that. Not after all that you’d already gone through to keep Loki alive. At the sound of his name on your lips, Loki stepped into your personal space. His long finger rested over your parted mouth, effectively silencing you, as he whispered in your ear, “No more lies. Not tonight.” Reaching around you, Loki turned your key, opening the door to your place. Clicking on your lamp, the circle of light small in the shadows of your apartment, you move towards the kitchen. “I need a drink. Do you want one?” Nodding, “I think I might need one.” Barking out a hard laugh, you lifted two glasses down from the rarely opened cabinet. Tossing in ice cubes, you quickly cover them with the amber liquid of bourbon, swirling the two ingredients together as you walk back to the man pacing in your living room. “Good stuff, right?” Ruefully chuckling at the harsh burn of the booze, you looked at your date motioning for him to take a seat on your beat up sofa next to you. Folding himself gracefully, Loki perched on the couch, his knee just barely grazing your own. The contact was electric, shorting out your speech center for a second, and you moaned softly. Moving your drink to the table, Loki’s digits circled your wrist, "Now tell me, why do I know these hands? Soft but strong, with a scar across the middle knuckle…"

Turning your palm down, brushing over that exact imperfection, Loki searched your eyes for answers. "Why am I drawn to you across space and time? You are a ghost that haunts me. The echo of a dream that is real and warm… and here."

"Loki…" Chin quivering, "There are things you don't know. Things about me… about us…"

Tilting his head, studying you, "Ah. Us. We, that is, you and I have history, do we not? I… I know that is true. Yet," Swallowing thickly, Loki struggled to control the swell of emotion bubbling through him, "Yet, I have no memory of you. Tell me why that is."

A wild sob ripped through you making your shoulders heave. "I don't think I can!"

Twining his arms around you, the smell of his skin surrounding you, comforting you, "Why is that?"

Eyes brimming with tears, you murmured, "Because… it might reverse everything. I… I don't know what would happen if I told you the truth. All of it."

"So, dark magic then. Strong… but perhaps not strong enough. Not nearly capable of keeping you and I apart." Petting your knee, savoring the nearness of Loki, you parted your thighs in anticipation of his touch. Loki, unable to resist any longer, pressed a kiss to the corner of your mouth. One of his palms skated under the hem of your dress while his other hand cupped your cheek. Tracing over your jawline with his thumb, Loki deepened the kiss, his tongue tasting you in tiny sips. Pulling away from you, “We… We were lovers.” His voice rose at the revelation no longer concealed by magic. “Yes, Loki.” Swallowing hard, the raw truth finally said out loud. “But you, you erased yourself from my mind… My life. Why did you do it? Why would you take our… happiness from me?” It was enough to break your heart all over again. Loki’s voice, trembling, unsure, and clearly hurting.

Whispering more for yourself than him, "I couldn’t let you go, Loki. I… I can't, even now. I watched you almost die. I won't do it again!" “And this? This is life? Dove. You know better than this.” “I saved your life!” Needing to defend yourself, you nearly bellowed in frustration, struggling to make Loki understand. Standing suddenly, Loki turned from you, “What kind of life have I had without you?” “I don’t know the answer to that…” Rising yourself, a hand to Loki’s chest, “But my life without you… you have no idea how hard it’s been. I dream of you every night, Loki. And in those dreams, I don’t rescue you. You die in my arms. Every night, Loki. I saved you once with the help of dark magic. But I’ve lost you every single day since.”

Crying in earnest now, you felt Loki wrap his iron arms around you, “Hush now. Hush, darling. Somehow, some way, I found you again. I’m not letting you go.” Sagging into his warmth, letting Loki comfort you, felt like home. Without realizing, you were swaying in each other's arms, dancing to the music in your souls. You curled your arms around Loki's waist, his solid figure reassuring, hugging him closer.

Loki's hands drifted down, cupping your bottom, squeezing your curves firmly. "I missed you, little minx."

Giggling at his pet name for you, one you never expected to hear again, you smiled up at your dark hued God. Standing on your toes you touched your lips to Loki's. Anticipating your move, Loki opened his mouth, capturing yours in a kiss.

Loki's grip, tugging you tightly to his firm form, became needy. His mouth plundered yours, taking your breath, absorbing your moan. A hand tangled in your hair, pulling your hungry lips from his own, giving Loki unchecked access to the column of your throat.

Closing your eyes, lost in intimate sensations that were both routine and refreshing, you lost yourself in Loki. Stepping out of his grasp, you pulled the hem of your dress up, shrugging it over your head and tossing it to the floor. "Loki, I love you. I never stopped loving you."

Watching your nearly nude form, Loki shared his sweet, secret smile with you. "I love you. And even wizardry could prevent us from finding each other."

"Please, help me remember. Let me forget." He knew what you were asking. Remember what you had shared, what you could have again. Forget this time apart, this lapse in love.

"With pleasure, little dove."

---

Your bed, usually so lonely, was suddenly too small. Loki's long body stretched across the mattress, reaching for you, impatient to relearn the things that made you melt. And you? You couldn't stop touching his satin skin.

First your fingers fluttered over his thighs, up his torso, over his chest. But that wasn't enough to satisfy. So you followed the same trail with your mouth. Licking lovingly over Loki's abdominals, nipping at his tiny nipples, sucking against his Adam's Apple.

Straddling Loki, his hands on your hips drag you against his rigid rod. Feeling his driving desire made your core quiver. When he caught your nipple in his mouth, sucking forcefully, you howled like a wild woman.

"Oh, Loki! Ah!" Your hands tangled in his hair, encouraging the exquisite agony of his teeth biting into your tender bud.

With a growl, Loki flipped you to your back, settling himself between your spread thighs. Removing your panties with a swift tug, Loki spread your lower lips, licking into your luscious folds. His tongue thrust into you, lapping at your liquid, drinking you down.

Convulsing when Loki's tactile tongue circled your clit, your core clenched in pleasure, your release is close. When you announce that to the man pleasuring you, Loki nips at your inner thigh, kissing his way over your mound. "Not yet. I'm not through with you or your bountiful body."

As his lips closed over your own, Loki shifted your hips higher, your cleft cuddling his steel length. Teasing your entrance with his wide tower, drawing a shivery moan from you, Loki slowly sunk into your yielding sheath. Inch by inch, Loki claimed more of you as you impatiently waited to be filled by his hard heat.

Stretched by his searing shaft, Loki bent your knees, bringing them closer to your chest. Rocking into you, his hips pressing your legs apart, Loki enjoyed the feeling of your velvet vice gripping his with each push. He was slow, methodically moving inside of you, taking his time.

Your body responded with slick skin, soft sighs, melting into a mewling mess. "Faster Loki! Please!"

"No. I never want to forget you again." Loki's words sparked your internal fire. Plunging into your pulsing pocket, picking up speed, Loki pursued your pleasure.

You couldn't keep your hands off of him. His neck, his shoulders, his firm bottom, the cut of his hip. Scratching your nails over his arms, along his back, across his chest, Loki grunted in delight.

"Cum with me, little dove." It wasn't a command or a request. It was a plea.

"Always, Loki!" Locking your arms behind his neck, Loki dug his fingers into the back of your thighs, your tongues tangling together. Panting through your pleasure together, clinging to each other, determined to hang onto the only other person who mattered, you pressed your forehead to Loki's.

That night you slept curled around Loki, deeply and uninterrupted. Tomorrow would bring a new dawn, a new day. And everything before today would be an echo, losing distinction over time, replaced by the new life you would build together. ---

@procrastinatinglikeabitch @iamverity @jamielea81 @archy3001 @nonsensicalobsessions @just-random-obsessions @brokenthelovely @rorybutnotgilmore @thefallenbibliophilequote @lots-of-loki @mizfit2 @vodka-and-some-sass @alexakeyloveloki @jessiejunebug

#500 followers #loki x reader #loki x you #loki smut #loki angst #hot loki #mcu smut #mcu fanfiction #loki fanfic #marvel smut

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comfort-questing · 4 years

Text

At dawn that morning - at dawn, they'd been a three-hand of mages sitting among the tents in camp, under the faint dappled shade of the overgrown oak trees more ancient than any spellcraft could tell. And if the trees could have spoken, they might have had warning to give about what happened to brave young mages who went to war for their little petty kings and kingdoms, and maybe the three of them wouldn't have come to this.

Or maybe they would have. Maybe it had always been coming to this.

"Either we get him to the other mages quickly or he's - " Kiva's voice cracked, wavered. "We don't have any other choice."

There was too much blood on the ground for Lith to think clearly. So much blood, and at the center of it, Aren, lying ghastly still but now and again twitching and moaning. The ruined dark cloth of his uniform coat was crimson-soaked from pine green to rusty black, and one empty hand fumbled at the ground, as if trying to cast a spell far too late for use now.

Lith blinked again, trying to make sense of it all. The sight of him reminded her of a broken wind-up toy from somewhere back in her distant past, shuddering just like that, and with equally terrible damage to its form. Only instead of exposing rusty gears and splintered springs, the deep gash across Aren's torso was bloody bright crimson, hiding the white and gray of bone and organs that she knew were revealed there.

Next to her, Kiva had thrown aside her archer’s gear and now had blood staining her arms all the way up to the elbows, hands pressing down hopelessly as her voice ran on between panicked breaths. "We can't stay here. We have to get help. Blast, Lith, are you listening? Look at me - "

Kiva's words rang far away. Lith gasped in another breath and tried to marshal her fleeing wits, tried to think of something other than the blood-soaked ground and her friend lying motionless where the enemy swordsman had left him. The scant cover of the bushes wouldn't be enough, someone was going to come looking, they had to move...

"Aren. It's going to be all right. Can you hear me?" Kiva's voice rocked desperately back and forth. She leaned forward, the ragged ends of her fair hair covering her flushed face, shifting the placement of her hands.

It wasn't going to do any good. Lith could have told her that. Maybe Kiva knew it already. What blood was left in Aren's body now wasn't going to remain long without more help than the two of them could provide.

She dug her teeth into her lip and began to sketch in the air, letting her sight blur the shouting battlefield beyond them, till only the shimmering lines of her casting were real to her.

Stroke, and stroke, and circle and cross-stroke, and once more bisect the quarters -

(and try not to think of the gleam of light that shone so on the sword then, and Aren falling to one knee with blood gushing from his stomach, before he found the ground and Kiva's arrow had found the swordsman - )

Behind her, Kiva's voice thinned to a panicked squeak, and she heard Aren gasp and moan again, the sound a strangled rattling in his throat.

- and interweave the corners with each other, a solid grounding, before putting the final petals on the flower blossoming at the heart of the sigil - now even with her eyes closed she could see it, burning bright -

And she opened her eyes just long enough to grab Kiva's and Aren's blood-slick hands, as the world dissolved around them.

"What - what even - " The mage apprentice in the doorway of the teleportation room took another look at them and darted away before he could find another word.

Lith's head spun like a merry-go-round, and she could have sworn she heard piping music playing somewhere to go along with. She staggered upright just enough to grab Aren under the shoulders and tug his limp body backward, off the teleportation sigil to leave it clear for the next folk behind them. Aren was motionless weight in her hands, head lolling back like a broken puppet’s, blood matting in his strands of brown hair.

The apprentice was going to have to do a lot of floor cleaning after them, but that wasn't their problem.

Kiva was sobbing, clumsily pulling at Aren's destroyed uniform coat to move him, shrieking for help in a hoarse terrified voice. "We need a healer - come quick - teleport room - please, please - "

They were clear of the circle by then, and the noise of running feet echoed in the hallway, catching in the wood-vaulted ceiling of the teleportation room. Lith tried to stand up the rest of the way but the whole of her vision swung around her dizzily, and she ended up on her knees on the floor again, staring into Aren's blank eyes where he lay sprawled beside her.

Kiva was screaming now. " - help, he's not breathing, help!"

"Let me through!" That was a voice Lith recognized - Selint, thank Heaven Selint was here, not somewhere closer to the battlefield but harder to find. The older mage dropped down next to them on the floor, twitching her graying tousle of curls back with a flick of one hand. The other hand she held outstretched, burning strands of white light already skeining off her fingertips from the forming sigil, arcing down like fountain spray towards Aren's still body.

For an instant everything seemed to pause, the world a haze around them, waiting, waiting. Then very faintly Aren breathed in, the blood-soaked folds of his coat rising and falling almost too small to see, and his eyelids flickered shut, then open again.

"What - what happened - " A ruined thread of his ordinary voice, but the sound of it made Lith’s eyes burn with tears anyway.

Once again it was Kiva who had words to give, while Lith was still fumbling for hers. “You’re hurt, stay still, Selint’s helping. We’re safe. Don’t move.”

Aren’s next words were lost in a gasp as the pale threads of magic tangled deeper into his body; he coughed, choking, cringing away from Selint’s hand. Lith reached out to hold him down, an arm across his shoulders. “Shh,” she said, pointlessly, and then, “shh, shh, we’re almost done - “

“No, we’re not,” said Selint grimly, over her shoulder. “But his heart’s beating again without direct intention on my part, so I’ll put sleep on him in a moment as soon as it won’t kill him to try. Sorry, kid.”

Kiva squeaked, and Aren screamed then, struggling weak and desperate against Lith’s restraining arm. His eyes were still closed, which seemed a mercy at least to Lith, so neither he nor she would have to deal with sights they didn’t want to behold...

The faint gossamer of a sigil from Selint’s left hand melted into air above Aren’s forehead, what seemed like forever later. The fight went out of him an instant later, as he slipped into unconsciousness properly, head turning limply sideways onto the stone floor.

Lith put her hand under his head, feeling the chill of his skin, the dampness of sweat and blood in his hair. She watched as Kiva’s hand joined hers, stroking the curls away from their friend’s face, and all of a sudden the stones of the teleportation room seemed like the most comfortable thing in the world, the tremor of voices in the hall a sweet music after the noise of battle. She let herself bow her head forward, folding onto the ground.

“I’m all right,” she murmured, hopefully loud enough not to frighten anyone. “I’m all right.”

Everything still smelled of blood. Probably best not to think of that. Only to stay still, and to feel the slow rise and fall of Aren’s breaths at her side, and the little shifting and scraping of Kiva fidgeting where she sat. Selint’s magic still hissed and sparked softly above them, but that might take a while to be done; but they were safe, the three of them, and right now Lith couldn’t bear to let herself think of anything besides that. That would come later.

...That morning at dawn beneath the oak tree, there had been no thought of anything else either. Just the three of them, staring out into the new light, two mages and an archer, waiting for what the day would bring.

Maybe that was selfish, Lith thought in after-days. Maybe you ought to have thought of other people more, the morning of the kingdom’s great defeat in the river valley. But you couldn’t ask that of yourself sometimes; sometimes it was enough to know that your friends were there, and the oak trees, and the daylight. Sometimes it had to be enough.

#whump #whump fic #hurt comfort #fantasy whump #tw gore #kind of #tw blood #unsurprisingly #crow writes a thing

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naromoreau · 6 years

Text

Snowed in

This one is for @seedsplease, you asked me for soft nsfw in front of the fire place at the Ranch. I hope you like how this turned up, because I don’t know where all the angst came from XD. Thank you! ________________________________________ Pairing: John Seed x Reader, John Seed x Deputy Raiting: NSFW You dragged the dead weight of the rifle slumping down your body, the muzzle carving a zigzag pattern on the fresh mud, and the strap digging a painful crease on the flesh of your shoulder. Maybe leaving everyone behind at Fall’s End wouldn’t be counted among your greatest decisions yet still you got what you wanted.

Striding under the heavy rain, your legs grumbled for the harsh treatment while the last rays of the winterly pale sun riddled through the foliage like through a sieve. The chill air seeped through your jacket, gnawing at your very bones, the freezing sensation magnified by your soaked clothes. If you could only find a fucking truck, before the drowsiness took over your brain, and even the voice in your head started to slur your panic.

The inclined path followed for a few yards carpeted by interspersed turfs. You lost your footing stepping into a divot, cursing between clicking teeth, until you spotted a wooden building greeting you in the distance. “Well, fuck me.” With no map and no GPS, you managed to land your ass at the front of Seed Ranch, the first place you wanted go, yet the last place it was good for you.

You hid a growl making your stealthy way around as much as your pained ankle allowed it, noticing that due to the unbearable cold all the guards had been removed. You dashed among crates and barrels while above you the now purple sky unleashed a cleansing fury, every drop of water drubbing in staccato over you, like under the direction of an overexcited conductor.

Your lungs fought to give you the air you needed, and well, perhaps it was time to actually rest for a bit. The flooded surface splashed under your boots as you sought an almost dry spot, and crouched in a secluded corner. Around you the rain turned into soft snow, delicate flakes carried by the wind, and you glanced at your nails. They were blue. It wasn’t that bad, you thought, as you forced your fingers to grip the flesh of your own arms and your teeth chattered uncontrollably, biting the tip of your tongue. The coppery flavor of your blood swamped in your mouth but the pain was almost nonexistent. The edges of your sight blurred into jagged black, before you catched faint, muffled footsteps approaching you. If you could only move your hand.

“My dear Deputy, what do I owe this honour?” John Seed ducked next to you before reaching a hand to touch your almost comatose body. “Shit, deputy, you’re freezing!” His voice tapped in your ear, the mocking tone completely gone and replaced by strained anguish as he got rid of his coat, putting it over you in a swift movement.

He lifted you from the ground, cradling you against his chest, protective hands grasping you hard. “It’s ok, my dear, everything is going to be alright,” he reassured you whispering into your ear, and the only thing you could do was shudder like a newborn pigeon.

Now he was almost running into the house, but his words still reached your words under a steady rhythm. “Hey, darling, hey!” he muttered as your conscience balanced at the edge of oblivion, “focus on my voice, don’t fall asleep Deputy, don’t!”

You tried, even if half your mind wanted to, just because it was him, and you’d go to great lengths to sour his life, but the desperation running on every word was a whiplash in your face. It must’ve been important.

“How do you get yourself in this kind of–” he trailed off, clutching you even tighter against him and you leaned into him. “It’s alright, sh, you’re safe now,” he said with a sense of finality.

You crossed the threshold of the house once you saw as an enemy fort, securely in his arms, and it irked you how good it felt. His spicy mint scent was one of the few things you were still able to recognize and it grounded you, every little wisp traveling to your haggard brain, reminding you who you were, who he was, even if you were still too weak to respond.

He placed you on the bearskin rug in front of the big fire at the center of the living room, tossing carelessly his soaked coat aside. Your entire body shuddered as he peeled the layers of sodden cloth out of your body.

“Listen to me, deputy, I’m not going to harm you,” he said taking off your boots and pulling down your jeans, “but you’ll die if I don’t get these off you, you hear me?”

You locked eyes with him, and it striked you the deep concern etched in his brow, blue eyes surveying your face almost with pain. You lied naked on the rug in no time and he dashed off your side just to comeback ten seconds later carrying two magnificent wool blankets he placed over you. He was as soaked as you, and you lifted a dainty finger to point at him.

“John,” you finally said with a gruesome effort, “your clothes– wet–cold.”

He chuckled, grasping your hand. “My dear, you’re at the verge of dying yet you still worry about me, even though I haven’t treated you in the most gracious way.”

His hands made short work of his vest, and his shirt, and kneeled as he was next to you, you reached your fingers to trace the skein of tattoos and scars. The numbing cold was dissipating slowly, but now all you wanted to do was wrap your arms around him, to live again the fleeting moment when you were able to hear his heartbeat.

“Come,” you said, blinking slowly, “please, I’m cold.”

He looked at you as if he couldn’t believe your words, and quickly shuck off his trousers, sliding next to you under the blankets. He was warmer than you and between the strong fire at your back and the maddening heat in front of you, you finally felt a bit more alive.

You closed your arms around his body, pressing every inch of you to every inch of him, and he rubbed your arms and back, trying to diminish the shivers and goosebumps that flared on your skin. You tilted your head up, catching the blush on his cheeks, as your feet bumped against his shins and your muscles relaxed.

“Are you feeling better?,” he asked you with a wavering voice, and it only took you a roll of your hips to know why.

“Yes,” you said with the faintest of whispers, “but– I don’t– why are you doing this?”

He heaved a hard sigh, that mingled with yours, his arm possessively tugged around your waist. “I– don’t know, I don’t know really, maybe you’re waiting for this groundbreaking reason, but the truth is I don’t know.” He shifted in your arms, holding you even tighter. “Maybe is a sin, and it clouds my mind, but when I saw you there, dying out of cold, I told myself I couldn’t let that happen.”

“Because of Joseph?” you offered.

“No, no, no,” he said placing his chin on the crown of your head, “no, little bird, because of me. What if I told you, you changed something,” he grabbed your hand and placed it over his heart, “in here? You unburdened me, but I know I’m a sinner, and you’d never say–”

“Yes.” You gave your hips another roll and trapped his hard cock between your legs, his chest heaving with hitching breaths.

“Are- are you sure?” he gruffed, blue eyes delving deep into yours.

You kissed him as a whole answer, his tongue warring for dominance and you let him, your hips rocking with his rock hard cock rubbing between your folds. His mouth trailed down your neck, teeth nipping at your skin hard enough to bruise. He flipped you on your back and pinned down your wrists to the rug, your thighs clasping at his hard on.

“You really have no idea what you do to me, don’t you, sweetheart?” He whispered with a sliver of something wicked in his voice, and god in heaven, a gush of liquid trickled down the apex of your thighs.

A moaned escaped you, as he palmed one breast, diving down to catch your nipple in his mouth, his other hand stealing down your abdomen, his fingers trickling at your entrance and curling over your clit. “A little excited are we not?”

You wanted to respond, but your words were dulled by your whimpers, his voice soaking into your skin. He thrust forward, the friction of his dick against your clit, dragging small hums of pleasure out of your throat.

“Please, John,” you begged, your fingernails raking as he moved, pressing against you in all the right ways.

Your legs fell open, circling around his waist and now it was his time to gasp and groan as you closed your hand around his dick, to align him to your entrance just so. He devoured your lips as he slid slowly inside you, giving you time to adjust to every inch intruding in you. And you were certainly thankful for it, because he was by far the biggest you’d ever take. Your rough exhalations fanned against his neck and a growl tore from his throat unbidden the second he was fully inside you.

“My dear, you feel like heaven,” he grunted against your lips, now rocking his hips and you realized this was going to be a very short trip to the end line. Every ridge and vein in his cock stroked in all the right angles, his tip hitting against your sweet spot making you writhe and cry out with every thrust of his hips.

You were bracketed between his arms, his body arching against yours, and your legs closed tighter around him. You wanted him closer, wanted to trip over the line of your orgasm, grazing at it with every pump, with every assault of his cock to your cunt.

“Don’t fight it,” he mumbled, and it didn’t surprised you when your walls clenched around him, your back arching as the spark of white flared up behind your eyelids.

He kneeled between your thighs, hoisting your hips up and slammed every inch of that delicious dick inside you. “God, you feel good, so wet, so tight,” he breathed to the empty living room, “and just for me, my Deputy, my little bird.”

With a feral growl he came inside you, his body shaking apart until he finally collapsed on top of you.

He propped on one elbow, kissing every free spot in your face, tucking your hair behind your ear. “I didn’t save you for you to be bound to me by an obligation,” he said with a neutral tone but a possessive hand curled around you, fastening you to him, and you suspected that pushing him away would swiftly bring back the Inquisitor from deep within him. “You can leave if you want.”

It was really lucky that what you felt, was solid enough to keep yourself steady under those hypnotic blue eyes. “I want to stay, John, because of you, not because I’m bound to,” you said, reveling in the sensation of his come now dripping down your thighs. “I’m yours.”

He smiled giving you a sloppy kiss, all fervor and yearning, as through the window the flakes eddied down in the freezing wind.

#far cry 5 #john seed #deputy rook #john seed x reader #seedsplease #request #my writing #Naro writes

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nitewrighter · 5 years

Note

my gf of 9 months just broke up w me spare some spiderbyte to convince me that love is real

I’m so sorry, friend. It’s going to be okay.

Here’s a spooky rapunzel-ish AU inspired by a short I saw a while back.

----

Once upon a time there was a demon hunter. A shrewd and quick-witted woman, no quarry was too big, too swift, or too dangerous for her to track and kill... so long as those hiring her could meet her price. Hers was a life balanced between the dark thrill of the hunt, and the creature comforts her high-stakes occupation afforded her.

One night, she was enjoying the latter half of this balance in a tavern when a man approached her table. The demon hunter’s glowing yellow eyes flicked up from the foam of her beer to the man standing before her. Humbly, he set a skein of silken violet hair on the table before her. The huntress picked up the sheaf of midnight-colored hair and felt the weight of it streaming through her fingers.

“Care telling me why you just dumped hair on my table?” asked the demon hunter, tilting her head.

“There is a creature in a tower,” said the man, “We need you to kill it.”

“I am needed to kill many things,” said the demon hunter, leaning back in her seat and sipping her beer.

The man sighed and tossed a sack of gold on the table with a clinking thud.

The demon hunter brought her pint down from her lips and smiled, “I see we understand each other,” she said with a grin.

It was a few days ride to the town, which sat in the shadow of a great tower--too high and too lonely to have ever been a part of a castle, it loomed over the land, a hideous crumbling column of dark bricks veined with the same violet of the skein of hair the demon huntress now carried at her hip. The tower was so high, in fact, that the demon huntress misjudged its distance from the town, since internally her mind kept repeating, “But surely it can’t be that tall.” But it was. It was that tall. It was nearly sunset by the time she reached it. The demon huntresses’ horse spooked once they were at the base of it, and she tethered it to a dead tree. The demon hunter examined the midnight-colored strands veining the tower, some wafting off of it, in the gathering twilight. There was a moat dug around the tower, and looking down into it, the demon hunter saw that bones and corpses in varying states of decay filled the water. It wasn’t even clear how much of the moat was water, as the Demon hunter saw that just beneath the surface, that same midnight hair choked the bodies and skeletons densely just beneath the water’s surface, like a purple seagrass. She circled the tower and the moat and found there was no drawbridge.

“Hmmm,” the demon hunter put her hands on her hips and thought for a few minutes, then took the grappling hook and rope off of her hip and aimed for an outcropping of brick a short ways up. The grappling hook found its cranny, she secured her rope around her waist, and she swung across the moat, letting go and coming to a running stop once she reached the other side. She gave her grappling hook a tug, shrugged, and began scaling the side of the tower until she reached the first point where her grappling hook had made its claim. She hooked it up to a higher precipice and continued climbing until she reached that first vein of hair spiraling around it. Unthinkingly she reached her hand out toward it. Her gloved fingers had only barely brushed up against the hair when out of the corner of her eye she could see something falling from above. She hadn’t even managed to look up when she felt something silken loop beneath her chin and get pulled taut in a heartbeat. A noose. A noose of hair.

The demon hunter managed to claw one hand between the silken noose and her own chin when the wall she was gripping fell away from her. The world now spinning dizzily beneath her, she was hoisted up and up like a fish on a line, trying desperately not to be strangled. Her hand that had previously been gripping the wall seized the dagger at her side and she slashed blindly upward. With a soft ‘shhhf’ the demon hunter suddenly found herself tumbling down. How high and how fast had she been hoisted up? She didn’t have time to think about it as she took a grip on the rope still wrapped around her hip and felt it burn and rub against her gloves, stripping at the leather in seconds as she slowed her own descent with her grip until she bounced painfully on the end of her own rope and slammed painfully against the brick of the building, her side taking most of the blow.

Her hands burning from the rope, she looked up at the strands now wafting off of the tower overhead. Her heart was thumping hard in her chest. The creature was above, she knew that much. The creature had killed many who came before the demon hunter, that was obvious. She was well within this creature’s domain, and this creature was able to outmaneuver her here more than any monster she had hunted before. But then again, the demon hunter reasoned, the man who hired her said that the creature was ‘in a tower’ not ‘rampaging through our town and the tower just so happens to be its base of operations.’ Figuring attempting to scale the tower on her own would just end up with another noose around her neck (or worse this time).

“Keeper of the Tower!” she called up, “You know I’m here! I wish to speak with you! Would you grant me audience?”

A few beats of silence passed. The demon hunter considered touching the vein of hair against the tower again to get its attention, but thought better on it. Then a massive cascade of midnight hair tumbled down from above, and the demon hunter had to clamber off to the side on the bricks of the wall just to keep from either being knocked off or drowned in hair. Again, another long gap of silence passed. A ripple went through the cascade of hair, apparently being shaken insistently from whatever had lowered it from the top of the tower, and the demon hunter reached over and grabbed one handful of hair. She waited another beat. Nothing happened. No other attacks. The demon hunter unhooked her grappling hook from its crag and hooked it back at her belt before reaching over and taking another bunch of hair in her hand.

“All right then,” she said, as she started scaling up the tower in a river of purple hair.

It was a grueling climb, hours long and exhausting. Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion wracked her body, but she feared pausing too long might allow whatever dwelled above to either noose her again or simply cut the hair she was climbing altogether. She wasn’t sure if whatever lived in the tower was willing to cut its own hair (by the looks of the hair everywhere, probably not) but she wasn’t taking any chances. By the time the demon hunter reached the great veranda at the top of the tower, the air was thin and freezing cold and the moon seemed so close she might pluck it out of the sky like an apple on a low-hanging branch. She stumbled over the parapet and collapsed to her knees, panting on the cold stone of the tower. She lifted her head and saw only grand glass doors in front of her, leading into darkness with thick rivers of hair flowing out of the black, across the stone floor, and spilling over the parapets.

“So much for the welcome party,” muttered the demon hunter, getting to her feet. Suddenly she felt something tug at her ankle and looked down to see a chord of hair looped around it.

“Shit--” the demon hunter drew her dagger from her belt but her feet were yanked out from underneath her and she was dragged rapidly across the stone and into the darkness. Sliding across the stone floor, she tried to bring her knife to the hair wrapped around her ankle, but she heard a distant whipping sound and her arm stopped short before she could reach it. Another yank and her wrist bent backward painfully, forcing the knife from her hand and sending it to the floor with a clatter. She saw it glint in the moonlight behind her as she continued zipping across the floor, flailing to try and get a grip on the tiles with her remaining free hand, but to no avail as she was dragged out under a moonlit skylight in a large chamber at the center of the tower.

All at once the demon hunter was hoisted up by that same ankle and was now suspended upside-down. She flailed to try and grab at her own ankle, to try and tear the hair loose, but found more hair lassoing around her body--at her waist, around her thighs, every new point of freedom she tried to wiggle toward was met with a lariat of hair until she found herself suspended in the air by numerous strands of hair at her waist, chest, arms, and legs. Her arms were bound together at the elbows and forced over her head, which was quite painful considering how long she had been climbing, but the rest of her was... oddly comfortable. Or at least it would have been comfortable without the panic of being bound and suspended by hair with no sign of her captor in sight. Whatever creature dwelled in this tower still hadn’t gagged her with hair, so the demon hunter yelled out, “This is how you would treat your guest!?”

A voice answered back from the darkness, “This is how you would treat your host?”

The demon hunter’s dagger clattered to the floor beneath her, so close, and yet so far. Her crossbow--apparently yanked from her back in the confusion, was lowered from a high point on the ceiling in a chord of hair.

Yellow eyes opened in the darkness and a woman stepped into the moonlight. Her skin was periwinkle, she was naked save for the hair she had wrapped around her torso and upper legs in some semblance of a bodice and smallclothes. She didn’t seem to react to the coldness of the room, nor did she seem short of breath this high up. The woman bent and picked up the dagger from the ground, then held it under the demon hunter’s chin.

“You have come to kill me,” said the woman, looking at her coldly.

“People pay me to get rid of monsters,” said the demon hunter, “That doesn’t always mean killing them. But I do have to take steps to protect myself.”

“Yes,” the woman spun the dagger in her hand in a bored manner, “You seem so very protected, now.”

“Look,” said the demon hunter, “I was just hired because you’ve killed a lot of people.”

“Trespassers,” said the woman, “Men have a bad habit of going places they have no right to go. When you stick your hand in a fire, is the fire a monster for burning you?”

The demon hunter opened her mouth, paused, then slumped a bit where she was hanging. “Okay, fair point. I mean, granted if I was one of the townspeople living with a big spooky tower of death looming over me, I would like it to no longer be a tower of death, but it’s not exactly fair to try and evict you for something like that.”

The woman tilted her head and arched an eyebrow. “You are... oddly understanding for one who has taken up a life of killing that which man does not understand.”

The demon hunter shrugged. “Dogs protect wolves from sheep, but all dogs have a bit of wolf in them. It’s nature,” she looked up at the woman with her own yellow eyes, “I take it you didn’t make yourself a problem for the locals until recently.”

“The more I kill, the longer my hair grows,” said the woman, “When I do not kill, I go to sleep. I was awakened...” she counted on her fingers, “Four months ago. Two brigands were hiding out in these ruins and one slit the other’s throat. His blood soaked into my hair and I woke up.”

“So you’re... bound to this tower?” the demon hunter ventured.

“It is where I live. It is where I hunt,” said the woman, “No curse binds me here but convenience.”

“...Because your hair is everywhere,” said the demon hunter, looking around.

The woman smiled.

“So,” the hunter said, “Let me get this straight--you kill a man, your hair gets longer, it gets easier to kill a man. Eventually you kill so many that no one comes to this tower and you go to sleep.”

“Yes,” said the woman.

“How can you stand that?” said the hunter.

“Stand it?” said the woman.

“When was the last time you felt the thrill of the hunt?” asked the hunter, “If the hunt only gets easier the more you do it... what’s the point?”

The woman narrowed her eyes at the hunter. “This is a trick,” she said.

“Well I like hunting because it takes me to interesting places,” said the hunter, swinging a little from where she hung, “It’s absolutely fair if you have a comfort zone! How about this: You let me go, I give back half of what I was paid to the people who hired me, tell them that they’re perfectly safe so long as they stay away from your tower, and you take a nice little nap! That’s fine, right?”

The woman’s lips thinned and her yellow eyes narrowed.

“But you still want to hunt,” the hunter said, a smile in her voice.

“Quiet,” said the woman, “I’m thinking.”

“Stone doesn’t burn...” said the hunter, looking around, “But hair does.”

“Is that a threat?” said the woman, looking at her sharply.

“Not at all! But if people had to choose between burning the tower down or letting the odd idiot get himself killed running into it...”

The woman frowned. She paced around, leaving the hunter feeling pretty awkward tied up and suspended there.

“You were hired so that I would no longer be a problem, yes?” said the woman, turning to the hunter.

“Yes,” said the hunter.

“You hunt,” said the woman.

“Much more interesting prey than you’re pulling in,” said the hunter with a grin.

“I would say I’ve pulled in very interesting prey,” said the woman, stepping toward the hunter and cupping her chin in her hand.

“Oh--well--that’s...” the hunter chuckled nervously, “Well your prey is very much willing to let bygones be bygones. I did say I only wanted an audience, and that my weapons were only for self defense. And that I would only kill you if I had to.”

“Mm,” the woman brushed her hair back, “So,” she said, “Beyond my tower I may kill, I may not have to suffer my tower being torn down and burned, and you would be by my side?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time a demon hunter joined forces with a being of the night,” said the hunter, attempting to shrug as best she could with her arms bound.

The woman narrowed her eyes and tucked a bit of hair away from the demon hunter’s face.

“Only if you prove interesting,” she said.

----

In the months following the demon hunter’s contract, the demon hunter would claim the creature in the tower was slain, but from then on was accompanied by a periwinkle-skinned woman whose hair dragged on the ground roughly 14 feet behind her--at least it was 14 feet last time they were seen. People claim it gets longer with every quarry.

#spiderbyte

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kelyon · 5 years

Text

Golden Cuffs Chapter 23: The Sun

Rumbelle Dark Castle BDSM AU

They feel safe in the sun (for 8000 words)

Read more on AO3

Trigger warning for Anger, Shouting, Anger-induced beating and mentions of sexy pirates.

A/N: As of now, Golden Cuffs will be posting bi-weekly instead of every week. Still on Fridays and in the evenings, but every other Friday and possibly much later in the evenings. Inbox is always open. TMI TUESDAY IS STILL EVERY WEEK I GET QUESTIONS! Thanks for sticking with me, fam!

Belle was dreaming, she had to be. Nothing she perceived made any sense unless it was a dream.

To start with, she was warm. Technically, she supposed, that wasn’t too outside the realm of possibility. Rumple had been letting her sleep in various beds, in warm rooms with piles of blankets covering her. But she had spent so many nights shivering in the dungeon that it was still strange to emerge out of sleep feeling comfortable.

The sunlight had to be her imagination. All the bedrooms in Rumpelstiltskin’s castle were heavily curtained. All the windows were covered, except for in the tower where he spun and in the dungeons. And the light that washed over Belle now was not the weak, silvery day that filtered in to her cell under the ground. This was a golden glow of warmth that had washed over her slumbering eyelids and permeated into her dreams.

She had to be dreaming. Even if the warmth and the light were real, she had to be dreaming the body lying halfway underneath her. Such a thing was impossible. There was no way that she was sleeping on a chest as it rose and fell with breath. It was impossible to feel the added heat of a person beside her, impossible to hear a calm and steady heartbeat.

With her eyes still closed, Belle draped one arm over the warm chest, nestled her head into the crook of the neck that she was dreaming. Her legs tangled into legs that couldn’t be there, but she could pretend they were just the same. She could imagine this comfort, this happiness, of being in a bed with a man she wanted. She could enjoy this dream she was having, this dream of love.

She didn’t open her eyes until Rumpelstiltskin began to snore again. Last night she had been exhausted enough to ignore the noise, but now it pulled her out of her blissful slumber. Still staying where she was, Belle blinked awake and looked around.

The sunlight had been real. A glass dome in the ceiling over their heads let in a glorious dawn. Beams of sunshine poured over them, catching motes of dust in the air. It was a warm, strong light, unusual this far into winter. Lying in the sun, Belle felt strangely anointed, like she was being blessed.

Aside from the dome, there were no windows in the room. White plaster walls arched down from the ceiling until they met a section of paneled wood. Last night, Belle had been bound to one of those panels. She grinned at the memory. Last night, she had learned more of Rumple’s body than she had ever known before.

She looked over at him in the bed next to her. His eyes were closed, his face slack. He had fallen asleep after they had coupled, after he had used magic to prolong their activities. He had made himself hard twice in a row, then used his magic to pleasure her over and over.

And then he had collapsed, falling into sleep like a dead man. Belle knew he didn’t normally need to sleep, so this must be the price he paid. She wondered if there would be anything else. How long would he have to sleep before he recovered?

He was naked under the sheepskin that covered them. He had been naked all last night, and she had been permitted to kiss his body, to know him even if she could not see him or touch him. They had made their bodies one last night, both of them naked and trembling with fear and desire.

It had been wonderful.

Belle nuzzled into him while he slept, enjoying the feeling of his skin against her skin. Her lips brushed against him in soft kisses. If she kept at it, would he wake? Would he want to wake up to her kissing him? Or would he feel it as an attack?

Frowning, she turned her head. He was so cagey about being touched, about being known. She thought she understood why, why he would constantly defend himself. If the Dark One had spent years being feared and hated, he wouldn’t know how to cope with being treated gently.

It hurt Belle to pull away from him, but she knew it was what he would want her to do. It had probably only been an oversight that he hadn’t had the cuffs lock her to the headboard of the bed so she couldn’t move at all. That was the sort of thing he normally did.

She sighed and sat up in the bed. It was a well-made piece of furniture. Solid wood-- probably chestnut. The headboard was clearly old and worn, but it was still sturdy. The mattress crinkled when she moved. Belle put her hand down on the rough canvas that covered the mattress and felt for what was inside.

It was straw.

Every bed she’d slept in since Rumple taken her out of the dungeons had been stuffed with feathers. Her mattress at home had been made of wool. But this bed, the bed in the room Rumpelstiltskin had called the safest room in the castle, was filled with noisy, uncomfortable straw.

Belle’s mind went back to the little room she had found, his son’s room. Everything in that room was like this bed--it had been good once, but it had been worn and used until it was threadbare. Only meticulous repair had prevented the little boy’s clothes from being rags. And the bed Rumpelstiltskin considered safest was the bed of a poor peasant.

This bed was wide enough to accommodate both of them with room to spare. Belle understood why. This was the only bed that would be in a poor man’s house. Typically, a man and his wife and the children would all sleep together in a bed like this. Anyone else would have a pallet on the floor. That was how the villagers lived in Belle’s town.

Had this been Rumpelstiltskin’s bed? Had it been in the home where he’d lived before had taken up residence in a castle? Had the bed been a gift from his parents? A wedding gift? Had Rumple spent his wedding night in this bed? Had he slept here, in his life before, with the woman he had loved? Had his son been conceived where Belle lay right now? Had the boy been born in this bed?

The image came into her mind, of Rumpelstiltskin in this bed, holding his wife as she held their son. A young woman, exhausted from motherhood but glowing with happiness, content in knowing she was exactly where she wanted to be. A tiny baby in an embroidered nightgown, nursing at his mother’s breast, listening to his father’s voice. A family. All of them feeling safe and comfortable and loved.

Belle pushed herself out of the bed, her heart burning with a pain she didn’t want to name. She stood by the bed and covered her face with her hands. The cuffs brushed against her cheeks when she wiped the tears from her eyes.

No matter how much Rumpelstiltskin gave her, he would never give her that. She would never bear him children, she would never have his love. He valued her, she knew that now. He cared for her. He would treat her well for the rest of her life. But she would always be his whore, his thing. She knew that he could love, that he had loved. But he would never love her. No matter how tenderly he spoke to her, no matter how much of himself he offered her, it would never be the same as the bond he had shared with his wife.

To distract herself from these melancholy thoughts, Belle looked around the room. It was a circle, of no great size, the same shape as the tower. This room seemed to be just large enough to comfortably hold exactly what it held, with no room for any additions and no need for any subtractions. The bed was in the center of the circle, directly under the dome. Different pieces of furniture covered the wooden walls and Belle realized there was no door to this room.

At least, there was no space for a door. Any of the panels could open, she supposed, or there could be some kind of trap door in the floorboards. But she didn’t see any evidence of such a thing. And in this castle of wonders, it was just as easy to believe that this room didn’t have a door, that it could only be entered by magic.

There was a worn farm table along one of the walls, almost as long as the table in the castle’s dining room. But there was only one chair at the table where Belle served Rumpelstiltskin tea, where he beat her or fucked her however the mood struck him. The table in this room had a stool at either end and a long bench on the side.

Belle swallowed and thought again of his family, the meals he would have shared with them at this shabby table. She could imagine Rumple listening patiently as his little boy breathlessly recounted the adventures of his day. She could imagine him catching his wife’s eye over their supper. He would compliment her cooking, and smile at her for no reason other than because he was happy.

Turning away, Belle saw a spinning wheel. It was a smaller wheel than what he spun with in the tower, with an old wooden stool in front of it. Like everything else, the wheel looked battered and worse for wear. It wasn’t a surprise to find a spinning wheel in Rumpelstiltskin’s room. But it did surprise her to see that the wheel was surrounded not by straw, but by piles of fluffy white wool.

As she got closer to the spinning wheel, Belle saw that there was nothing on it but wool. The bobbin was half-full of neatly spun white yarn. There was a bit of fluff coming out of the wheel’s orifice, ready for more wool to be joined to it. Behind the wheel, Belle noticed a spinner’s weasel, a wheel-like device used to stretch out yarn after it was spun. The yarn wound around the pegs measured almost a whole skein.

This had been a part of Rumpelstiltskin’s life too, hadn’t it? Spinning wool into yarn. How long had he done that before he had learned to make straw into gold? How had a life that was now so magical once been so mundane? What had changed? When had he lost his wife, his son, the home he’d once had that now he had made into a tiny part of his grand castle?

Dizzy with questions, Belle moved on around the room. There was a cupboard standing on its own like a wardrobe. She didn’t open it. Already she was learning more than Rumple would want her to know. There was no need to open doors that were shut, not now.

But the small table that seemed to function as a desk had no closed doors. All of the contents were out in the open for Belle to see. There were stacks of parchment, drawings in brown ink and black charcoal. Carefully, Belle leafed through the images. Most of them were of a baby, and then a child. They were in chronological order, she realized. Belle would be able to watch Rumpelstiltskin’s son grow up on these pages.

He had been a chubby baby, with a shock of curly hair, rendered in black. The artist had drawn him laughing, with bright eyes and dimples. There were many pictures of the baby sleeping--probably the only time he would stay still. The first drawing was of a tiny bundle, no bigger than a loaf of bread.

Belle smiled at a picture of the little boy, perhaps two years old, sleeping while lying on top of his father. Rumplestiltskin’s hair was longer then, and he looked different when depicted in charcoal, but she recognized him by his prominent nose. Father and son were both asleep, both their heads thrown back in the same posture . Did both of them snore? Even in sleep, Rumple’s arms were wrapped around his son. The artist had neglected to draw his hands.

More drawings, the boy growing bigger, laughing less often. The last ink drawing was when he was about six. He had become a thin child, wearing the sorts of ragged clothes Belle had found in the little room. He still had dark and curly hair, but his eyes had become so sad. Too large for his tiny face, the boy’s eyes looked hungry. Perhaps they yearned for food, or perhaps he needed something more. At six years old, Rumpelstiltskin’s son had turned mournful.

Belle was halfway through the stack when the drawings on the parchment changed dramatically. Now they were all a child’s drawings, crude charcoals made on the backs of public notices. This must be the work of the boy himself, drawing as he had watched his parent draw.

Most of the child’s drawings were of animals--sheep and dogs and birds. He had an eye for detail and unusual patience for a little boy. When Belle and Andre had been small, her cousin had no time to sit down to draw the lines in the feathers of a bird’s wing--not while there were games to play with the other boys. Perhaps Rumple’s son hadn’t played with other children. Perhaps he’d had no company but animals.

She found a drawing of the little boy and--Belle smiled--Rumple. The boy had drawn himself with curly dark hair, and his father with a narrow triangle for a nose. It was just the two of them in this picture. Father and son held hands and walked along a road in the forest. They must have been going on a journey, for Rumple held a walking stick in the hand that wasn’t holding the boy.

The drawings grew more advanced as the boy grew older. People did appear, though none were Rumple or his wife. Belle came upon a picture of a girl, about twelve or thirteen. She was pretty, with lightly-shaded hair and a clever-looking grin. The girl had her hand on her hip and looked steadily out from the drawing. She looked fearless and strong. The boy must have liked her.

The last drawing must have been the boy himself. He was wearing a cloak over his dark mess of hair. He wasn’t smiling, but Belle couldn’t say that he looked sad either. Determined, perhaps, or resigned. The boy couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old, but his eyes looked out at her, steady and unafraid. His life had been hard, Belle knew, but even at that tender age he had grown strong enough to bear it. He looked at peace with what his life had become. Belle wanted to weep for him.

There were no more drawings after that.

Her heart and mind heavy with thoughts of Rumpelstiltskin and his wife and his son, Belle was ready to go back to the bed and sleep for the rest of the day. But then a golden glint caught her eye. It was on the table, scattered about with all the papers and other objects. At first, she thought the gleam was just a bit of golden thread, nothing unusual, even in this room of Rumpelstiltskin’s castle.

But when she reached for the gold, it felt familiar under her fingertips. It wasn’t a thread, she saw, but a fine chain. The gold was wrapped around the black hilt of a knife that lay casually on the little table, along with a doorknob and a dozen other disorganized objects. Carefully, Belle unwound the chain and picked it up. It was a necklace. Her breath caught in her throat and she didn’t release it until she saw the fragment of unicorn horn and she knew.

It was her necklace.

After all this time, she had it again. This was where he had put it. He had said he would keep it safe, and now she knew it was in the safest room in the castle. Her necklace had been the most precious thing in the world to her, and now she found that Rumple had kept it near the things that were most precious to him.

Tears sprung into her eyes and there was no sorrow in them. Had she been wrong about Rumpelstiltskin? Did he have room for her after all? If he could keep something of hers in the literal space where he kept the memories of his family, would he have a place in his heart for her as well?

Belle clutched the necklace to her chest. This had always been something he didn’t need. It had nothing to do with their deal, with her vow to be his whore. Once, she had thought him cruel for taking it, but now it meant so much to her that he would want it. He had taken her heirloom, her memories of her mother--but he had kept them next to his memories of his son.

She ran the pendant through the chain, just like her mother used to, and then put the necklace back where she had found it. Rumple had stolen it from her, but now she was giving it to him. She trusted him to have it, to keep it safe and never use it to harm her.

Picking up the knife from the table, Belle wrapped her necklace as it had been, around the hilt.

This knife, she realized, didn’t belong with the rest of the room. Calling a blade sharp was, of course, redundant. But there was no other word to describe the knife, to contrast it with the worn and homey objects she had found everywhere else in this safe room. The weapon seemed magical. It shone with newness, but there was something ancient about it, even older than anything else here. When she held it in her hand, the blade felt older than time itself.

There was a ruby on the pommel, red as an ocean of blood. The handle and cross guard were black. The edge of the blade waved as it went down, like no weapon Belle had ever seen before. On both sides, the steel was darkly engraved in an intricate design. Turning it over, Belle saw the name carved on this dagger, Rumpelstiltskin.

“What are you doing?’

His voice was sharp and as loud as the crack of a whip. Belle turned to look at him. She was still holding the knife in both hands when the cuffs pulled her to kneel on the ground. The jerking movement made her drop the knife and it clattered on the wooden floor.

Rumpelstiltskin’s boots marched steadily over to her. He bent at the waist and picked up the knife carefully, looking it over as though Belle might have damaged it.

He had put on clothes, she saw. Scaly black leather and his coat. The Dark One was in fine form.

When he spoke, his voice was dangerously soft, his consonants clipped. He said every word slowly. “What were you doing?”

Belle thought she wasn’t afraid, but her heart still raced in her chest. “I was just looking.”

“If you were just looking I wouldn’t have felt anything. No, dearie, you were touching!”

“Yes,” Belle confessed, her head bowed. “I’m sorry, Rumpelstiltskin. I--I shouldn’t have touched the drawings.”

She couldn’t see his face, but she could tell when his posture changed. No longer a creeping menace, he stood upright, as though startled by something.

“The drawings?” he repeated, in a voice more like what Belle was used to.

“The ones on the table,” she explained. “The ones of your son. That is him, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he whispered. Behind her, Belle heard his footsteps go to the table. She heard the rustle of parchment. For a moment, there was no sound. And then Rumple said, “Is that all you were looking at? Is that all you touched?”

Belle tried to remember all she had done that morning. “I touched my necklace as well,” she said. “And that knife.”

“It’s a dagger,” Rumple said under his breath. “And I suppose you will say it is the least interesting object in this room.”

Belle nodded. “Though now I think it might be important.”

“It is.” She heard him place the blade down on the table. “Never touch it again.”

The cuffs went warm at his order and Belle stayed locked to the ground. She wanted to ask about her necklace, if she might ever touch that again, but she knew now wasn’t the time. Rumpelstiltskin remained just out of her sight. He wasn’t going to let her get away with this.

“So it seems you’ve learned a lot today, my whore. Are you ready to pay the price for that information?”

Belle nodded. She was suddenly aware of her nakedness, of her back and bottom jutting into the air while she groveled on the floor. Rumple was going to hurt her, but that was alright. She breathed. It really was alright.

The first blow was a solid thwack on her backside. Belle grunted from the shock that was no surprise. This was familiar territory, nothing she couldn’t handle. While she waited for her mind to fog, she tried to guess what he was hitting her with. It was sturdy, but not as heavy as some of the bruising implements he liked to use.

Another blow and she could feel that it was long and thin. A solid thing, not a whip or a crop. A stick perhaps. He hit her again and again and Belle swayed on her knees as she fell into a cloud of trust, that lovely paradoxical bliss that came from pain.

After a few more strikes, Rumpelstiltskin stopped. Belle heard him breathing heavily.

“Have you learned your lesson?” he panted. “Or do you still want to tempt me?”

Blinking slowly, Belle raised her head and waited for words to come. “What do you mean, Rumple?”

“Do you want me to stop?”

She lay her head back on the floor. “Am I paid up, then?”

“You are,” he breathed. “Unless you want to ask me questions about what you’ve seen today.”

Even in this state, Belle noticed the plural. “How many questions may I ask?”

“As many as you can bear, my dear. I will hurt you, and you will hurt me, until one of us breaks entirely. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

They had never played like that before, never such a clean exchange. Belle would be a fool to pass by such an opportunity.

“A strike for a question? Rumpelstiltskin, we have a deal.”

The noise he made was not the delighted giggle that she might have expected, but a more resigned and bitter sound. “Ask away, then.”

“Were you married to your son’s mother?”

“Yes,” he said, and hit her.

Belle rocked on her knees at the impact, but asked her next question without hesitation. “And it is just the boy, isn’t it? There are no other children?”

“No.” Another hit, this one pulling out a keening whine from Belle’s throat.

“Who made the drawings on the table, the ones of the baby?”

“Millah--” he said quickly and then made a face. Clearly he hadn’t intended to give Belle the woman’s name.

“That’s your wife?”

“Yes.” He hit her twice for the two questions.

“What was she like?”

This time he struck her before he answered. “She was a wild thing, who hated her cage.”

“She was unhappy?”

“Miserable.” The pain landed across Belle’s shoulders and she cried out.

“Why was she so miserable?”

“Because she never loved me!” A rain of blows fell over Belle’s back as he hit her again and again with the stick. Belle screamed and sobbed and pressed her body to the ground, begging for mercy that she knew would never come.

She didn’t know when it stopped, when there was no more new pain, when she realized that the cries she heard were not just her own. Lifting her head off the floor, Belle saw Rumple in front of the bed. His back was to her, but she could see his head bowed in his hands.

Belle heard him weeping.

“Rumple!” she shouted. Belle pulled at the cuffs, her own pain forgotten. “Rumpelstiltskin let me go! Please! Let me go to you!”

The cuffs released her and Belle scrambled to her feet. She ran the short distance to him and threw her arms around his body. Embracing him through his stiff leather coat, she held him as tightly as she could. Belle held her wrists in her hands, keeping her grip by winding her fingers around the cuffs.

Pressed against him she could feel his chest heaving. Something hot fell onto her hands--tears, his tears. After a moment of her embrace, Rumpelstiltskin grabbed at Belle’s hands, clenching them so hard she thought her bones would break.

“I was not a monster then,” his words came between gasps and sobs. “I wanted nothing but her happiness, hers and my son’s. But I had nothing to give her, nothing that she wanted. She came to hate me. And then she left us.”

Belle’s eyes widened. “She left the boy behind?”

In her village, it was a brave woman who had the fortitude to run away from an unhappy life--usually from a husband who was unfaithful or a drunkard or who let his children go hungry. But even those desperate wives would take their children with them. Often, it was only for the sake of the children’s safety that women broke away from their husbands in the first place.

“I had to tell my son that his mother was dead,” Rumple said. “Because that was kinder than the truth.”

“What was the truth?”

His hand gripped tightly into hers. “It is an ugly story, Belle.”

She rested her cheek on the back of his coat. “Tell me.”

She felt him nod. “At the time, I thought she had been kidnapped by pirates. I thought that they had taken her away with plans to make her a bed-slave for the whole crew. I thought that if I tried to fight them they would kill me and leave my son with no one.”

“Oh, Rumple.” Belle rubbed her thumb back and forth against his fingers.

His voice turned bitter. “As it turns out, Millah had not been stolen at all. She had gone away willingly. Eagerly, even. She had seduced the pirate captain and become his second in command. I imagine she spent many happy years on the high seas, enjoying her freedom and her plunder while the husband she left behind raised her son alone.”

She shook her head against the leather on his shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”

He straightened up, his voice brightened. “Well, I got my own back. A few years after I lost my son, I found my wife. I learned the truth of her deception, saw firsthand how deeply she loved her dashing pirate captain.” He gave a dark chuckle. “I ripped out her heart and crushed it while he watched.”

Belle dropped her hands, broke the embrace. “What?”

Rumpelstiltskin spun around, grinning at her with his rotted teeth. “I told you it was an ugly story.”

She stepped away from him, suddenly aware of how dangerous the Dark One was. Her back was on fire, Belle felt the pain now. She would have bruises for weeks. He had hurt her badly, and for no other reason than to satisfy his own black and twisted desires. Had he treated his wife the same way? Was that the cage she had hated? Was that why she had left?

No, Belle told herself. He was not a monster then. And even now, Rumple was not as evil as he seemed. The smiling demon’s face was nothing but a mask he wore to scare people. Even now in the sunlight, he was hiding behind his darkness. He was trying to repulse her, trying to keep her away from him. Trying to protect himself.

Belle had seen him cry. He would not frighten her so easily.

She looked steadily into his glinting eyes. She kept her voice even. “Thank you for being honest with me, Rumple.”

His smile froze for a moment, then withered into an expression of sour defeat. He looked at her, and Belle could sense his mood becoming darker. Good. If he was angry at her and had the courage to show it, then she would face him head-on. At least the emotions that welled up from him now were honest. No matter what bile he unleashed on her, Belle at least knew it was coming from his heart.

He jerked away from her and paced a sharp circle around the room. His hands clenched into fists and then unclenched over and over. “Why don’t you hate me?” he snarled.

He didn’t touch her. They weren’t playing now, he wouldn’t hurt her. Magic and rage swirled around him, an invisible but indomitable storm.

“How is it possible that you have endured one moment of life with me and not been consumed with contempt and rage?” His head swivelled sharply on his neck in different directions, as though he were having silent conversations with a dozen different people at once. “How can you know me at all and not want to rid the world of me?”

Belle stayed where she was and watched Rumpelstiltskin. In her mind’s eye she saw him as a little boat in a stormy sea, helpless against the winds and rains of his own emotions. But she was a rock, a mountain. She had nothing to fear from his thunder and lightning.

“How?” he snarled. Grabbing her shoulders, he lifted her off the ground and shook her roughly. “What is wrong with you? What kind of woman are you?”

“A better one than her,” Belle said firmly. Her anger was enough to match his. She pulled out of his grasp and landed on her feet. She stood on the floor in front of him, resolute, immovable.

Rumpelstiltskin backed away from her slowly, clearly shaken by what was happening.

“I am not that woman and I do not hate you!” She filled the words with passion, with all the conviction she could muster. “I’ve never hated you and I’ve never said I did. Please believe me!”

He looked at her and did not speak. He was trembling, Belle saw, but he kept his eyes on her.

“I do not wish you harm, Rumple.” Her voice broke, just a little. “I don’t know what happened to convince you you were unworthy of--” Her voice choked over the word she wanted to use but couldn’t. “Of human affection, of physical intimacy, of basic friendliness. But all I can tell you is that it isn’t true! You have every right to happiness and safety and--”

For the second time, a word caught in Belle’s throat. A word she couldn’t say to him, even if she tried to show it to him with every action she took of her own will. “You deserve to be a person, Rumpelstiltskin. You don’t need to think of yourself as a monster.”

She was crying now, overcome by emotion. Belle closed her eyes as she stood and let her tears fall to the ground.

His arms wrapped around her body, and he held her. She let herself melt into the embrace, sobbing into his chest. Rumpelstiltskin comforted her, while she cried for his sake.

“Thank you,” he whispered as he rubbed her back. “Thank you, Belle.”

She cried for a long time, like a soft and steady rain. She felt the weight of all she had learned about Rumple today, a lifetime of pain and loss experienced in the space of a few hours. It was so much to take in. No wonder Rumple--who had lived this tragedy--found it easier to shut it all away. It was safer not to feel anything.

Eventually, Belle sniffed and wiped her eyes. When she looked at Rumple, he was giving her a cautious smile.

“Are you hungry?” he said softly. “I’m famished.”

He wanted to eat? She had never seen him hungry before. Stunned and curious, Belle went with him to the table.

When she looked at the farm table, she almost started crying again. Apparently the meals eaten here had not been as loving as she had imagined. Her mind’s eye was filled with images of Rumple and his wife silent over their dinners--each with nothing to say to the person they no longer loved. Or Rumple and his son, alone but for each other. And then Rumple by himself, thinking he had earned that fate.

Without thinking about it, Belle knelt on the ground by the stool at the head of the table. That was the place she was used to, when he took tea in the dining room. As she knelt, she heard Rumple’s footsteps stop abruptly. She turned to look at him, saw him staring at her.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she realized. “I should serve you, shouldn’t I?” Belle stood up and began to look around. Perhaps there was a cupboard here like the one in the dining room.

“Stop,” Rumple said gently. “I don’t want you to serve me, not here. Not like that.”

“Oh,” Belle said, sinking to her knees again.

“It was a good idea, though. A good instinct.” He touched her hair as he sat down on the stool. “Would you like a tray, or shall I feed you from my hands?”

“Feed me, please, Rumple. Whatever you want to give me.”

It didn’t surprise her to find that in this room Rumpelstiltskin had very simple tastes. He fed her bites of hearty brown bread, each piece heavy with fresh butter. He passed down bits of yellow cheese--sheep cheese, if Belle guessed correctly--and slices of a soft green pear. Peasant food, all of it. Poor man’s food, but he seemed to enjoy it. Above her head, Belle heard him chewing, heard the smack of his lips as he sucked up the juicy pear. He fed her from his hand, and she kissed his fingers with every bite.

“I want to stay here,” he said when they both had eaten their fill. “For a little longer.”

Under the table, Belle leaned against his legs. “You said this room was safe.”

“It is,” he murmured. “This is the place where I allow myself to remember.”

She rested her head on his knee. “I hope there are good memories.”

Rumpelstiltskin touched her face, lifted her chin up to look at him. “There are many good memories in this room, though all are tinged with loss. Memories of my son, of my wife before it all went wrong. Someday I will come to this room and remember you, Belle.”

He seemed so sad to say it, and so sure that it would happen, that he would lose her. She supposed he would, eventually. Over time, she would grow old, then she would die while he lived on. How old was Rumpelstiltskin? How long had it been since he had been a husband and father? How many years--or decades or centuries--had he been alone?

“Will you remember last night?” Belle tried to fix her thoughts on more recent events.

“Oh yes,” he said. Then Rumple stood up and did something Belle had never seen him do before.

He took off his coat.

As he did most other things, Rumpelstiltskin undressed with fluid grace. He shrugged the scaled leather off his shoulders, caught the garment in one hand, and folded it neatly on the table.

He looked at Belle and offered his hand to help her stand up. “Last night was very good,” he said. “But I think we can make this evening even better.”

Belle licked her lips, her eyes darting to the thin silk of his shirt, the informal cravat at his neck. His tight leather trousers. “Do you think so, Rumple?”

“If you want to,” he said quickly. “If you can--”

“Yes.” She cut him off, silencing any words that would cast a pall over her desire for him. “I want to.”

Rumpelstiltskin swallowed. “Your hands are free,” he said with a showy wave. “I am at your disposal, madam.”

She looked him over again. His whole body was tense as a bowstring. She kept her voice soft, gentle. “May I undress you, Rumple?”

He gave her a tight nod.

“And you’ll tell me if I ought to stop?”

“You wear my cuffs, woman. I will make you stop when I want you to.”

Belle giggled at his ire. “Yes, Rumpelstiltskin.” She stepped closer to him. “You can make me do anything.”

As she undid the loose knot of his cravat, Belle felt his pulse pounding under her fingers. She removed the fabric and set it beside his coat on the table. She walked briefly away from him, and it gave them both a moment to breathe.

“May I kiss your neck, Rumpelstiltskin?” she asked when she faced him again.

He swallowed. The lump in his throat bobbed visibly. “You may.”

She did. Like last night, he was warm under her lips. His heartbeat thudded but his breath was steady. In the late afternoon light, she could admire the mottled green of his skin, the delicate golden flecks on the surface of him. She kissed the hollow of his collarbone and he sighed.

His waistcoat laced on either side, and Belle lifted up his arms to loosen the bindings. He breathed deeply when she removed the stiff leather. Belle remembered the formal corset she’d had to wear underneath her golden gown, back home on those times when she’d had to act the role of a lady. The garment had improved her figure and made her feel taller, made her feel like she was wearing a suit of armor--but it was always a relief to take it off and be her natural self.

She touched Rumpelstiltskin over his shirt. His flesh was hot, perspiring under her hands. Slowly, she pulled the hem of his shirt out of the waistband of his breeches. He kept his eyes closed, his face unmoving and unreadable.

“We’re running out of layers,” she said. “Should I take off your shirt or unlace your trousers? Or I could take off your boots?”

His eyes opened suddenly, as though a horrifying thought had just sprung into his mind. “Shirt,” he rasped. “Y-you should take off my shirt.”

“Thank you, Rumple.” Belle was almost cooing, her voice was so soft. He stretched his arms forward and Belle pulled the silk over his head. When they were done Rumple stood in front of her, bare-chested and glorious.

He was so small. Bigger than she was, but skinny for a man. He looked weak, even though she knew he wasn’t. Perhaps he felt weak too. Belle’s mind went to Millah, the woman who had left him to seduce a pirate. Did Rumple think women found a burlier body more desirable?

Belle put her hands on his chest, felt the lean muscles in his shoulders, the hungry bones at his collar. Her pink fingers splayed out along his green-gray skin. His nipples were darker than the rest of him, forest green, budding like new leaves about to come to life. Belle touched him, and he didn’t stop her. She cupped his cheek in her palm and trailed her hand down his neck and over his abdomen. She wrapped both hands around his waist and encircled him in her arms.

“It’s not much,” Rumpelstiltskin said. “But it’s the only body I’ve got.”

“I like it,” Belle said. “I’d like to see more of it.”

He nodded. With an air of gracious defeat, he gestured to his trousers.

There was a familiar bulge underneath the leather. Belle couldn’t help but grin to see it, to touch that hardness as she slipped the laces out of their eyelets. For all Rumple hated being naked and vulnerable in front of her, at least one part of him enjoyed it too.

Belle pressed her legs together, aware of how much she also enjoyed what they were doing. She thrilled to see him, to know his body, to feel his reactions to her actions. So often when he took her, it was for his benefit. Even her pleasure was something he wanted and he coaxed out of her body. But this way, maybe, pleasure could be something they could share. Something they could do together.

As soon as she pulled the leather trousers down from his groin, Rumple’s cock sprang up like a startled pheasant. Belle smiled when she saw it, feeling like she was greeting an old friend. It bounced up to touch his stomach, and Belle noticed that the skin of his lower abdomen grew more golden in color the closer it got to his groin. The coloration drew attention to that area, made everything stand out. The sack she had discovered last night hung loosely below his rigid manhood, a bronze-brown shadow underneath the gold.

Like his nipples, his cock was darker than the rest of his body--a lush brown-green. The tip of it, where his seed came out, was a different color, more green-gold. Her mouth watered to finally see this mysterious thing that had so dominated her days and nights.

His cock always felt so massive when it was inside her, but when she looked at it, it was only a little larger than her hand. How had she had so much trouble fitting this lovely thing inside her mouth? Had she just been intimidated? Perhaps it would be easier, now that she could see what she was working with.

“May I touch here, Rumple?”

“Yes,” he breathed. “Yes, Belle. You may touch me.”

She placed her hand on his stomach and slowly moved down to stroke the tight curls that surrounded his cock. Their eyes met, and he looked at her in wonder as she traced over his hips, touching the places where his groin met his legs. She reached out to touch his back and felt the pronounced curve a very round bottom. Could men have backsides like that, so shapely and well-formed? She resolved to learn more about that later. For now, Belle’s hands rubbed gentle circles all around his lower half, gradually making the circles smaller as she came closer to her target.

“You’re teasing me,” he whispered.

“I’m getting to know you,” she countered. “All of you, not just the pleasurable bits.”

Rumple groaned. “I want to order you,” he said through gritted teeth.

Lightly, she ran her fingers over his cock. “Order me to stop?”

“Order you to fondle my balls and ready your throat for my cock. Fuck!” He said it all in one breath, his teeth clenched, his hands balled into fists pressed at his sides.

Belle’s hand gently cupped the fleshy sack between his legs. Her fingers grazed over the strange, soft parts of him, so vulnerable, but so easily pleasured. She kept her gaze on his body. “We can do that.”

He grunted a refusal. “When you’re done with all of this, I want to go to the bed again. I want you to get on top of me. I want you to ride me, Belle. Ride my cock and take everything you want from me.”

Belle swallowed. She felt herself grow wetter at his words. “Promise me one thing, Rumple. Promise me that I will see you naked again.”

He gave out a breathy laugh. “If that’s what you want, sweet girl.”

Belle turned her attention from the sight of her pale fingers wrapped around his dark cock and looked up at his face. “It is,” she said. “May we go to the bed now?”

Without a word, Rumple picked her up and carried her to his bed, magicking away his boots and trousers as he walked. They fell on the bed together, and Rumple kissed her, slowly and deeply.

“You are wonderful, my Belle. You deserve to get everything good in the world.”

She threw her arms around his back, holding him to her. “I don’t care about getting what I deserve as long as I get what I want.”

His eyes searched her face. “And what is that?”

“You.” She kissed him. Rumple let her control the kiss, but moved them both so that he was lying underneath her. His cock pressed up in the space between them, hard and inviting, reaching out to her. Belle rubbed her slick folds along the shaft and let him feel her need.

“Fuck,” Rumple whispered. “Will you open your cunt, Belle?”

“Will you do it for me? Will you put your cock inside me, Rumple?” She wanted to touch her, wanted him to carry the smell of her pleasure on his fingers.

“If you sit up, my sweet. If you get on your knees and straddle me.”

Belle did as he said, kneeling astride his body while he lay flat on the bed. She closed her eyes as he filled her. When she opened her eyes, he was looking at her in lust-struck awe.

“You are even more beautiful in daylight.”

“So are you.” Her hips rocked over his cock as she controlled how deeply he went in to her. “In the sun, your skin looks gold.”

They took their time. Rumple coaxed and praised Belle as she learned how to pleasure them both in this new position. He fingered her, and she came around his cock, the joys of her body fitting neatly with the desires of his. She touched his face, while he was inside her, grabbed at his arms when a wave of pleasure overtook her. She rubbed his nipples and he swore and laughed. He took her breasts in his hands and made her clench until she nearly came again and only stopped when she begged for mercy. Then he made her come again anyway.

It was a slow, gentle pleasure they pursued. Even Rumplestiltskin’s orgasm was easy, almost lazy. He pulsed into her with a shudder and then pulled Belle down to lay beside him. He held her to his skin. Their sweat mingled on their pressed foreheads, even as their fluids mixed between their legs. They breathed together, both of them exhausted and both of them sated.

“By the way,” Rumple when they had recovered. “I owe you an apology, for that tantrum after we were done with the game. It wasn’t… That’s not the way I want to act around you. I’m sorry.”

Belle nuzzled into his shoulder. “You were upset.”

“That doesn’t give me licence to shout at you.”

“I shouted right back.”

He squeezed her and kissed her forehead. “I’m glad you did. But I must pay you for the harm I did to you. Is it possible you want anything other than a question?”

Belle giggled. “I still have too many questions about you to accept any other reward.”

“Alright,” he conceded. “But make it a good one. Don’t ask me what the weather’s going to be tomorrow. Ask me something that hurts.”

She didn’t want to hurt him, she never did. But she understood how his internal ledgers had to balance. He was inviting her to ask him an important question. And he would answer it, no matter what.

Belle took a deep breath. “What was your son’s name?”

For a moment, Rumpelstiltskin was silent. But as the winter sun sank from the glass dome overhead and left them in a murky twilight, he answered:

“Baelfire.”

#golden cuffs #rumbelle #rumbelle fic #baelfire #neal cassidy #spinner rum!

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hale-of-stiles-heart · 6 years

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and the autumn is bright

So this is officially the longest Kiribaku fic I’ve written to date! For the sentence starter: “You’re a what?!” Also on ao3!

Bakugo was going to fucking murder Kirishima.

He was going to explode the fuck out of his stupid fucking shitty face until he was just a pile of fucking ash. And it was going to be fucking fantastic.

No more shitty red hair, no more annoying requests to hang out and play video games or watch movies, no more being stuck eating lunch with a bunch of talkative fucking idiots. And there would be no more ridiculous, borderline inappropriate hero costume; no more constant exclamations about what was or wasn't 'manly'.

No more late-night study sessions that always resulted in Bakugo wanting to pull his own fucking hair out because as eager as Kirishima was to learn, he couldn't wrap his head around the simplest fucking math problem. Bakugo was still trying to drill the fucking quadratic formula into Kirishima's thick skull.

And maybe, just maybe, if Bakugo blasted Kirishima into fucking space there would finally be no more stupid, confusing feelings to keep him up at night. No more distracting thoughts about kissing Kirishima's stupid face and holding his stupid hand.

But before that, he had to actually kill Kirishima. Because, first, the asshole had managed to convince Bakugo to go to some stupid ass Halloween party at Ponytail's fucking mansion even though he knew damn well that Bakugo hated any kind of party that involved him being around other people.

The party was all anyone from Class-A could talk about for weeks since Ponytail had announced it a week and a half prior. She had invited everyone, even the creepy little grape-headed perv, promising a wonderful night of fun.

Bakugo had immediately written the party off as stupid and not worth going to, planning to instead spend the night in his dorm room reading. But, of course, Kirishima had other plans.

For days, Kirishima had done everything he could to convince Bakugo to go to the fucking party. From begging and pleading to bribing and cajoling, Kirishima had tried everything.

Eventually, Bakugo had grown sick and tired of Kirishima's exaggerated pouting and fluttering lashes and finally relented. He had begrudgingly agreed to go to the party, just to get Kirishima off his case.

Not at all because he genuinely didn't like seeing Kirishima so disappointed when there was something he could do about it. And it certainly wasn't because of the way Kirishima had smiled at him like he was the best thing in the world when he had agreed to go.

But now, the fucking asshole decided to flake and text Bakugo that he wasn't going to the party. And Bakugo was so not going to put up with that shit.

Not after he dragged himself to some shitty Halloween store to get a stupid fucking costume just to appease Kirishima who had insisted that he couldn't show up to a Halloween without a costume. Nope.

So, after receiving Kirishima's half-assed text, a clearly rushed sentence of 'sick, not going 2 party, sry,' Bakugo had immediately stomped out of his room to stalk over to Kirishima's.

To his surprise, Kirishima's door was locked. Because Kirishima never locked his door.

Since moving into the dorms, he had been very vocal about his open door policy, inviting anyone and everyone to feel free to come to his room if they needed anything.

Most people took advantage of it to just pop in and talk to Kirishima about their problems like he was their fucking therapist. Dunce Face would drop by to play video games and sigh about his crush on Headphones or Four Eyes would visit to discuss ideas for teamwork exercises or some other bullshit, deferring to Kirishima and his uncanny ability to bring the entire class together.

Even that Icy Hot bastard had awkwardly knocked on Kirishima's door to talk about his fucking daddy issues or whatever.

Others in the class used it as an opportunity to get some training tips. Namely, Round Face who would drop by to get some extra help with her hand-to-hand combat skills or fucking Deku who would stop in to ask Kirishima for weight training tips.

Bakugo usually just used it to stride into Kirishima's room whenever he felt like it, usually to invite him to go spar with him. But rather than fixate on the fact that he couldn't just barge in like he was now accustomed to doing, Bakugo balled his hand up into a fist and pounded it against Kirishima's door.

He waited for a response. When there was none, not even an acknowledgment of the fact that he was knocking, Bakugo impatiently snapped, "I know you're in there, hair for brains! Fucking answer me!"

From the other side of the door, Bakugo could hear a deep sigh. Kirishima's voice was clearly hesitant even as he loudly called, "Go away, I'm sick!"

"I don't care if you're dying, you're not fucking bailing on me, asshole!" Bakugo yelled back, banging on the door again with one hand while setting off a series of small, frustrated explosions in the other. Pausing his insistent knocking, he pointed out, "You're the one who convinced me to go to this stupid thing!"

"Well, I'm not going!" Kirishima said, voice slightly muffled. Whether it was because of the distance and the thick wooden door between them or due to some mysterious illness he had magically contracted in the two hours since Bakugo had last seen him, he wasn't sure.

Bakugo resumed banging on the door, beyond infuriated and seriously contemplating just kicking the fucking door down. He only stopped when he heard Kirishima speak. "You should be happy! Now you don't have to go!"

Seriously? What the fuck was that about?

"Don't be a fucking coward, Kirishima!" Bakugo groaned, though he wasn't exactly sure why. It wasn't like he actually wanted to go to the fucking party and Kirishima had just given him the perfect out.

But he wasn't a fan of Kirishima flaking on him. And he definitely wasn't a fan of Kirishima being a little bitch about it. He was about to bang on the door again when Kirishima beat him to the punch.

"I said go away!" Kirishima yelled loudly, the severity of his tone immediately disorienting Bakugo. He had never heard Kirishima raise his voice in anger. Never.

Out of excitement? Sure. Frustration? Plenty of times. But anger? Not once.

Something was seriously wrong. And Bakugo was going to figure out what.

"Fine, you fucking jackass!" Bakugo screamed at the door, kicking it for good measure before turning around to stalk back into his room. He slammed his door behind him, counting on Kirishima hearing the loud bang that shook the walls.

Kicking off his shoes in the hopes that it would muffle his footsteps, Bakugo made his way to his rarely used balcony. He shoved his blackout curtains aside to wrench open the sliding glass door that was blessedly quiet.

He shivered at the cold air as he walked out onto the balcony, grumbling to himself under his breath. This far into October, it definitely felt like fall after the long, hot summer they had been forced to endure.

The ornamental trees that dotted the UA landscape were all bare, naked branches dancing in the frigid breeze. They certainly screamed Halloween.

Above the trees, hanging in the sky like nebulous curtains, skeins of gray clouds sluggishly drifted by. Behind them, illuminating the dark night sky, the moon was full and unimaginably bright, like something out of a movie.

It was a perfect night for a Halloween party. Even Bakugo could admit that.

Turning away from the sky, Bakugo peered over at Kirishima's balcony and mentally calculated the distance between it and his own. They were only about an arm's length apart, if not a little less.

All it took was a relatively small, rather quiet explosion and Bakugo was touching down on Kirishima's balcony. He waited a moment to see if Kirishima had heard him, waiting for him to peek out onto the balcony.

After a minute, Bakugo tiptoed over to the sliding glass door to see if it was locked. It wasn't.

Bakugo let himself in like he owned the place, moving Kirishima's ridiculous fiery red curtains out of his way. As he did, he heard Kirishima repeatedly curse under his breath as there was a loud ruckus, a series of heavy thuds followed by an odd scratching sound.

"Get out!" Kirishima yelled, sounding inexplicably panicked from wherever the hell he was. It was dark in Kirishima's room, all of the lights turned off, leaving him sitting in the dark like that weird bird-headed guy from class.

Bakugo squinted into the darkness, tugging the curtains open a bit more. Just enough to let some moonlight filter into the room, enough to cast shadows around the room so he didn't end up tripping over one of Kirishima's dumbbells that he never fucking put away after using.

It didn't help much, not bright enough to let him see much. Bakugo was about to set off a couple small-scale explosions just so he could see where the hell he was going when he saw a hunched over figure on the bed, clearly Kirishima, outlined in silver.

From the little bit that Bakugo could see, he could discern that Kirishima was sitting in the center of his bed. He was bent over in a position that looked vaguely uncomfortable, face buried in his hands as he continued muttering to himself, too quiet for Bakugo to hear what he was saying.

"The fuck is up with you?" Bakugo sneered, nudging the tip of his socked foot against the side of Kirishima's bare one. Kirishima yanked his leg back so fast it shook his whole bed when his heel hit the bed frame.

Bakugo frowned. "You actually sick or something?"

Kirishima nodded. At least, Bakugo thought he did. It was hard to tell in the low light.

"C'mon, don't be a fucking baby," Bakugo instructed, rolling his eyes. Leave it to Kirishima to play through the pain of broken bones to take down villains but act like a total overdramatic wuss when he was sick.

"Go away," Kirishima groaned, voice stifled by his hands. And people called Bakugo dramatic.

Bakugo knocked his foot against Kirishima's bed frame, shaking his head when Kirishima jolted a bit. Bakugo snorted, "Man the fuck up. It's not a big deal."

That seemed to set something off in Kirishima. He immediately snapped his head up, demanding, "Get out!"

But all Bakugo could do was stare at Kirishima's eyes. His eyes that were fucking glowing.

Bakugo had never seen them do that before.

"Your eyes..." Bakugo managed to say, taking an instinctive step backwards. He stared dumbstruck at the bright red eyes that were glowing like smoldering coals in the dark. He raised a shaky hand, pointing at Kirishima as he whispered, "What the fuck's wrong with your eyes?"

Kirishima stood, going from hunched over to his full height as he stalked over to stand in front of Bakugo. He seemed to tower over Bakugo despite the fact that they were the same height, more so than usual.

He took a small step closer to Bakugo, the blond taking another step back. Eyes glowing angrily, he repeated himself, growling, "I said get out!"

A bestial snarl accompanied his words, sounding like it had been wrenched from deep down inside him. It echoed in the small room, seeming to shake the walls themselves.

Out of reflex, Bakugo set off an explosion in his hand. The blast cast just enough light for him to see Kirishima's face.

What he saw shocked him more than he could have ever expected.

Kirishima's face, usually so open and warm and happy, was twisted up into a vicious snarl. His too-sharp, too-white teeth were bared, somehow looking larger than normal.

His eyes — his weirdly glowing eyes — were narrowed in an uncharacteristic glare, brows drawn down angrily. His hair was an even worse mess than usual.

There was something off about him besides the weirdly glowing eyes. Something that felt disconcertingly primal, almost animalistic.

"Get out, Bakugo!" Kirishima yelled again as Bakugo's explosion fizzled out before he could look closer. The scent of burnt sugar filled the room as Kirishima stalked closer.

Desperation bled into Kirishima's voice as he insisted, "It's not safe! Just leave! Please!"

"What the fuck is going on?!" Bakugo demanded, feeling like he was going fucking crazy. He had to be seeing things, right?

"I'll explain later!" Kirishima barked. "Just go!"

"No, you'll explain right the fuck now!" Bakugo argued, taking a step towards Kirishima who skittered backwards like a startled animal. He seemed to trip over his own feet, falling with a shocked yelp before clambering up onto his bed.

With his eyes gradually adjusting to the dark, Bakugo could just barely make out the outline of Kirishima curling up again, burying his hands in his hair as he whined. Whined. Like a fucking dog.

Determined to get to the bottom of this fucking clusterfuck, Bakugo followed Kirishima's lead. He walked further into the room, taking a seat at the foot of the bed.

Pointing a finger at Kirishima, who curled in on himself even more, he ordered, "Spit it out, shitty hair. Just tell me what the fuck is going on!"

"I can't!" Kirishima insisted, shaking his head, tightening his grip on his hair. Trembling so much it rattled the bed, he softly moaned, "It's not safe!"

"For fuck's sake, Kirishima!" Bakugo snapped, wanting to pull out his own fucking hair. Why the hell was he being so god damn fucking difficult about this?

"When the hell have I cared about what's safe?!" Bakugo pointed out, slamming his hand down on the bed, regretting it when Kirishima jumped. "I can take whatever you can dish out. You know that."

Kirishima kept whining, clearly stalling. Bakugo folded his arms over his chest, prepared to wait as long as it took.

Eventually, Kirishima dropped his hands with a deep sigh. He mumbled something that sounded like a reluctant 'fine' under his breath.

"Probably easier to just show you..." Kirishima relented, reaching behind himself to flick on the lamp on the shelf above his bed. Bakugo drew in a sharp breath as light filled the room.

Kirishima, though still immediately recognizable, looked vastly different. Aside from his eyes that were still fucking glowing, he had grown a plethora of other physical abnormalities.

He had apparently sprouted long, sharp claws on his hands. They were wickedly curved, looking capable of tearing a person limb from limb.

His teeth, already naturally sharp, seemed to have indeed grown even larger, giving him a rather noticeable overbite. The sharp tips of his canine teeth poked out from beneath his upper lip, clearly visible.

Sticking out from his wild shock of hair was a pair of furry red ears that Bakugo couldn't believe he had missed earlier. They were flattened against his skull, like Kirishima was doing everything he could to hide them from sight.

"What the actual fuck?" Bakugo asked no one in particular, staring dumbly at the patches of red hair extending down Kirishima's sideburns like a pair of ridiculous crimson mutton chops. He was about to comment on them when something else caught his eye.

Eyes wide, he peered around Kirishima's back to see that he had apparently also grown a fucking tail, too. The same bright shade of red as Kirishima's hair, it was tucked behind him, clearly in a futile attempt to keep it hidden.

Noticing that Bakugo was staring at his tail, Kirishima cleared his throat, moving his tail behind his back. Bakugo blinked a few times, stunned that Kirishima could move his tail.

"I'm a..." Kirishima started, trailing off as he muttered something unintelligible. He kept his head down as he rubbed at the back of his neck. His left ear twitched a bit as he spoke.

"You're a what?" Bakugo pressed, frowning deeply as he tried to decipher what the fuck Kirishima was saying.

"I'm a werewolf!" Kirishima yelled, throwing his hands up in exasperation. Like Bakugo was the one being thick-headed. "Y'know, with the full moon and the silver bullets and shit."

"What?!" Bakugo nearly screamed, drowning in skepticism. There was no way Kirishima was being serious.

Shoulders nearly up to his pointed ears as he curled in on himself again, Kirishima avoided looking anywhere near Bakugo, keeping his eyes down. With a sigh, he reluctantly explained, "It's a Quirk. Well, it's the effect of one."

He glanced over at Bakugo before looking back down at his lap, pulling his legs up to hug his knees to his chest. Resting his chin on his knee, he continued, "I was like five and I was playing with some kid at the park and he bit me."

"He bit you?" Bakugo blurted, inadvertently interrupting Kirishima's story. Kirishima just nodded with a small shrug like five year olds biting each other was a common thing.

Maybe it was. Bakugo didn't know. Even when he was five, he hadn't kept many friends. Fucking Deku didn't count.

"He bit me," Kirishima confirmed, resuming his story. "Turns out his Quirk is Werewolf. Pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Including the whole passing it on with a bite thing. So... He sorta passed it on to me."

"The fuck?" Bakugo snorted. Did this mean Kirishima was like that piece of shit Deku? Fuck, how many Quirks could be passed on to others at will? "You have two fucking Quirks? Why the hell don't you use it?"

Kirishima shook his head, ears flopping around comically. Bakugo was immediately reminded of a dog shaking itself dry. He wisely kept his mouth shut about it.

"I can't control it or anything," Kirishima said, meeting Bakugo's eyes for a moment before lowering them again. He turned his head to look out the sliding glass door, staring at the luminous sliver of moon visible through the clouds.

The way the moonlight hit Kirishima's eyes seemed to intensify their glow. Kirishima's eyes remained fixated on the moon as he spoke, like he was captivated by the sight.

"It just sorta happens every full moon," he explained, voice soft as he continued staring out the door. Bakugo hummed in acknowledgment.

The mask of Kirishima's hero made a lot of sense all of a sudden. It had always struck Bakugo as rather canine, like a dog muzzle or an oni mask.

"I'm really sorry," Kirishima murmured, tearing his eyes away from the moon. Looking at Bakugo, he clarified, "About the party. I didn't realize tonight was the full moon. I'm usually a lot better at planning."

"Does anyone else know?" Bakugo asked.

Kirishima nodded again. "Yeah. All the teachers know. Principal Nezu and Recovery Girl, too. Technically it's a medical condition."

Bakugo supposed that made sense. Sprouting ears and a tail every month definitely qualified as a chronic condition. But he still didn't get why Kirishima had never told him before. They were supposed to be friends, damn it.

"So that's the big fucking deal? Why don't you just tell everyone?" He asked, shrugging casually. Kirishima let out another low whine, an involuntary response judging from the look of pure embarrassment on his face.

"I can't!" Kirishima said, shoving his hands into his hair again as he hopped to his feet beside the bed. Pacing in the middle of the room, he insisted, "It's not safe!"

He waved one of his clawed hands around, gesturing around the room. It drew Bakugo's attention to the disheveled state of Kirishima's room.

There was trash scattered across the floor, mingling with Kirishima's dumbbells and broken bits of what appeared to be the remnants of Kirishima's desk chair. Food wrappers and empty sports drink bottles littered the ground, both full of claw marks like Kirishima had been too impatient to open them properly.

The mini fridge Kirishima kept tucked under his desk was open, the interior a mess. The shelves were off their hinges and void of all their contents save for a single protein bar that had apparently survived Kirishima's ravenous hunger.

One of the legs of the desk was covered in claw marks. There looked to be a smear of blood on it as well.

Kirishima continued to pace back and forth as Bakugo's eyes followed him to and fro. Biting his lip, he went on, "I'm so hungry. No matter how much I eat, I always want more."

That certainly explained the sorry state of the poor mini fridge, a victim of moonlight cravings. But why that would be considered dangerous escaped Bakugo. Until Kirishima spoke again.

"And when I'm like this I get all aggressive," he said, tightening his grip on his hair, looking about ready to tear out chunks. He bared his teeth as he growled, "I don't want to hurt anyone."

Of fucking course, Kirishima felt that way, the selfless idiot. Putting other's needs before his own, even when he was dealing with the weird side effects of some crazy fucking Quirk. The big damn hero.

"You should go," Kirishima said, pulling Bakugo out of his thoughts. He had stopped his pacing, standing in the middle of his room, looking down at his bare feet. They, too, were tipped with sharp claws.

Another whimper echoed through the room. "I don't wanna hurt you."

His words sent a bolt of warmth through Bakugo, settling in his belly as a swarm of butterflies took flight in his stomach. Bakugo could feel his cheeks fill with heat, clearing his throat as he willed his blush away.

"Fuck that," Bakugo scoffed, leaning back against the wall. He grabbed one of Kirishima's pillows and propped it behind his back, not trying to fuck up his spine.

"I'm not leaving you alone like this, dumbass," he announced. "You'll probably end up doing something stupid like go chasing cars or howl at the moon."

Kirishima raised his head sharply, pouting at Bakugo. He dropped his arms to cross them over his chest. "I would not! I've been dealing with this for years, dude! I can handle it, I'm not stupid. I'm just so... Ugh!"

Kirishima threw his hands up again, letting out a frustrated groan. Hanging his head, he pouted again, the expression even more comical with his too-long teeth.

"The fuck are you talking about?" Bakugo frowned, narrowing his eyes at Kirishima. What the fuck did that mean?

Bakugo knew he wasn't the most emotionally intelligent person ever but he was pretty sure 'ugh' wasn't an emotion.

"There's just so much going on," Kirishima whinged, gesturing at his head with sharp, jerky motions. He looked about ready to start pacing again as he complained, "Everything's so loud and I can smell everything and it's all just too much and my head's all weird. Like there's this constant...buzzing."

So the effects of the Quirk also affected Kirishima's senses, enhancing them to the point that Kirishima was susceptible to sensory overload. Well, that definitely explained a lot.

"C'mere," Bakugo sighed, patting a spot on the bed beside his hip. Kirishima frowned at him, tipping his head to the side in a purely canine manner.

Bakugo rolled his eyes. He patted the bed again. "Just do it."

Kirishima obediently followed his instruction, cautiously climbing onto the bed to sit beside him. His ears were back, tail practically tucked between his legs.

He kept his head down, tucked up into a ball as he tried to make himself as small as possible, like he was afraid of taking up too much space in his current state. Glancing at Bakugo out of the corner of his eye, he folded his legs up beneath himself, keeping some distance between them.

Slowly reaching around Kirishima, not wanting to startle him, Bakugo grabbed Kirishima's other pillow. Kirishima watched him closely, ears swiveling around to follow the sound.

He set the pillow in his lap, making a show of fluffing it and arranging it to be as comfortable as possible. Patting the center of the pillow, Bakugo nodded towards it, repeating, "C'mon."

Kirishima looked between Bakugo and the pillow, seemingly weighing his options. He bit his bottom lip, apparently retaining his bad habit despite his even sharper teeth.

"I ain't leaving," Bakugo stated, matter-of-factly, ready to be as stubborn as necessary. "You either let me fucking help you or not. And I've got nothing else to do tonight. You know I don't wanna go to that stupid fucking party, anyway."

"But, dude..." Kirishima started, peering up at Bakugo with his big, guileless, glowing eyes. "What—" he cut himself off to swallow heavily "—What if I hurt you?"

"Then I'll kick your fucking ass," Bakugo said simply, shrugging a shoulder. Kirishima looked baffled, like he had never thought about the possibility of someone holding their own if he got a little bitey or whatever.

After a moment of deliberation, Kirishima crawled over to Bakugo, lying down beside him and setting his head on the pillow in his lap. His ears perked up a bit, tail swishing behind like he was an overgrown puppy and not a werewolf.

He pulled his legs up to his chest, rolling over onto his side, facing Bakugo. He curled his tail over his hip, the tip twitching a tiny bit.

Scoffing at Kirishima's eagerness to please, unchanged by the moon's influence or perhaps even magnified, Bakugo reached down to tangle his fingers in Kirishima's hair. Kirishima let out a breathy sigh, leaning into the familiar touch.

They had done this before. Several times. When Kirishima was having a particularly bad day or feeling shitty about his Quirk again. When he was doubting himself.

Bakugo would just run his fingers through Kirishima's hair and let his friend talk about his problems and his insecurities and his fears about the future and what it might hold. And Kirishima would rest his head in Bakugo's lap and look up at him with a soft smile after getting everything off his chest, thanking him for everything.

And Bakugo would sneer and roll his eyes and say 'whatever' while fighting the urge to just lean down and kiss that stupidly cute smile.

Now, Bakugo absentmindedly played with Kirishima's hair, feeling the tension seep out of his body. Kirishima's tail was wagging steadily like a metronome, smacking against the mattress every so often with a muted thud.

"You're overstimulated," Bakugo explained, running his blunt fingernails over Kirishima's scalp before taking a detour to scratch behind one of his furry ears, purely out of curiosity. Kirishima let out a soft huff, almost a purr.

"Your senses are heightened, aren't they?" He wondered aloud, though he was fairly sure he already knew the answer. Kirishima nodded, letting out a quiet mumble that might have been a 'yeah'.

"It's called sensory overload," he went on, scratching behind Kirishima's ear with more purpose. Kirishima's leg jolted a bit, like he was two seconds away from shaking his leg like a common mutt. "Happens when your senses get all jammed up with too much stimulation. Like all the smells and sounds that come with living in dorms."

Kirishima hummed his agreement, eyes falling closed as he leaned heavier against the pillow under his head. Bakugo smiled to himself. Dangerous, his ass.

Kirishima was just a touch-starved puppy, overwhelmed by a monthly overabundance of heightened senses and in need of a good ear scratching, wagging his tail at the smallest touch. For a second, Bakugo thought about whether or not Kirishima had ever been touched while like this.

Had his parents been too worried about getting bitten or scratched to sit up with him at night and comfort him? Had Kirishima growled at them and begged them not to go near him, the same way he had with Bakugo?

There were so many questions swirling around in Bakugo's head, about the past and the future and the present. But he knew now wasn't the time.

"Just focus on me, okay?" He instructed instead of asking any of his multiple questions. Carding his fingers through Kirishima's surprisingly soft hair, he instructed, "Forget about everything else. Just relax and focus, yeah?"

Kirishima nodded, burying his face in Bakugo's t-shirt, nuzzling against his stomach. Bakugo hummed in encouragement, smiling softly down at Kirishima as the redhead nestled closer, tail still wagging as he started to drift often.

Through the sliding glass door, moonlight streamed into the room, turning Bakugo's hair silver and deepening the red of Kirishima's hair. There was a promise in the moonlight, of a bright tomorrow and peaceful night, of a curse that maybe wasn't much of a curse after all.

How could it be when it brought two people together? Two people who were destined to be together, illuminated by the moonlight.

#fuck yes #longest fic to date #i'm so proud #amber writes #kiribaku #kiribaku fic #pining!bakugou #werewolf!kirishima #because of reasons #comfort #cuddling #4k #i'm so mad the word count is 4799 on ao3 #but on my computer is 4800 #anyway #halloween #halloween fic

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pippa-frost · 6 years

Text

Bird Skein: Red on Carpet

Part 1: Red on carpet.

Part 2: (not done yet)

I think i’ve never put TW, i’ll fix that later on! For now:

TW: Blood, Injury (described, but the way it happens isnt’s mentioned)

If you think of any others please let me know!

Tags! I know i’m missing a lot of people! I actually just copied the tags from the last fic i tagged, i’m not even sure if they’ll all get to you, but don’t worry, proper tags are coming, just not yet! To all those who have asked me i will be updating these so you can be tagged, but i said in my previous post, that won’t be until i’m fully back on track with writing and posting!

@eriysa-p @fluffbirdx @yoshimicherryopal @gayhannaford @caristars @extremepenguin10 @skylions-den @demonickittykat @the-diaries-of-a-nerd @cochroachkappa-blog @what-even-is-thiss @deafinatelyfangirling @fugitive-angel @corystssides @tiny-mudkip @parsnipit @romananalogicality @analogicalhell @starlight-sanders @dan-yuna @wingedchickadee @ana-logical @diplomatic-arsonist @killerfangirl3 @princeyandanxiety @pattonscardigan @pfftwhatnoimhuman @agentflash18 @ec-sanderssides @frustratedwaffle @inalandofmythandtimeofmagic @thagrinbery @prplzorua @ohmehgawdnotagain @analogically-prinxiety @beautiful-crimson @prinxietys @prinxiety-fandom @prinxiety-logicality-ss @starrykid @organizeddiscord @ts-sideblog @sanderships @toxicsanders

“Do you know how birds fly in a ‘v’ formation…?”

Patton is the first to wake up. He sits up, dizzy and confused, before glancing around. Everything is still and silent, and even in his not-really-awake-yet state of mind, a sense of wrong settles over his shoulders. He looks down to where his hands hold him in place. He had been lying on his belly, but there’re no blankets or pillows around. The wrong steadily grows, now heavy inside his chest. He looks up again, only this time with a sense of urgency. He’s in the living room only it looks kind of bleak, the familiar colors somehow dulled. The TV is off and lying in front of it is-

“Thomas, run!!”

It all comes back to him like a bucketful of freezing water.

Night.

Movies.

Thomas.

Oh god, Thomas.

His head turns around with enough force to cause whiplash, the image of Roman falling down fresh in his mind. Just as he remembers, Roman is lying head down on the floor a few feet behind him, unconscious still. Logan, behind him as well but closer than Roman, is lying on his right side and beginning to stir, which lifts a little of the worry churning inside him. Logan would know what to do. Logan always knew what to do.

So that left-

“Virgil” he mutters as he turns his head back around and sees him in front of the TV. His kiddo is lying on his belly, quiet and unmoving. And he has to go check on him before he wakes up frantic and scared and he can hear Logan moving behind him and he has to check on him as well, but they also have to check on Roman, and Thomas, they gotta find out what happened, is he okay? Where are they? Did someone fou-

“…Patton?” he distantly hears Logan’s hesitant call and realizes he’s stood up. It doesn’t really matter.

Because there’s red.

There’s red on the carpet beneath and next to the anxious side, some sort of puddle under him. Except that doesn’t make sense. There shouldn’t be any red. They don’t have any strawberry juice left, and they were all drinking hot chocolate during the movie, and those stains are already fading.

Without taking his eyes away from their kiddo and not really aware of his own movements, he rushes forward in an awkward dance of stumbling and falling and crawling until he makes it to Virgil’s side, kneeling right over the red.

“Virgil?” he asks with fear, hoping more than anything that he’ll receive an answer.

He doesn’t.

The latter is lying on his stomach, head to his right facing Patton, his right arm almost hiding his face.

Patton can’t help it. He looks down, and with a trembling hand places his fingers on the stain. A broken sigh escapes his mouth along with a whine. What he’s touching isn’t wet, but it still taints his fingers, and the metallic smell is impossible to ignore up close.

It’s blood.

It’s a lot of blood. A whole puddle of it.

There shouldn’t, in any way, be blood on the floor. Let alone a puddle of it. And he wants to believe that’s not what it is, it’s just juice, just some strawberry juice, that’s all this is, but he knows it isn’t and-

“Logan!” he shrieks, cause Logan will know, Logan must know, and he’ll come over here and explain to him why there’s red on the carpet, and it’ll make perfect sense, and Virgil will be A-Okay, and they’ll find out what happened and Thomas will be fi-

“Patton!” the other is kneeling next to him, a hand placed on his shoulder, eyebrows furrowed.

“Logan” his voice breaks and maybe he’s crying, he can’t really tell “L-Logan there’s- there’s” and his eyes moving downwards is all the other needs. Logan follows his line of sight, just about to interrupt Patton, and his mouth snaps shut, eyes wide open.

The logical side doesn’t say a word as he hurriedly starts turning Virgil over. Patton goes to help only to stop at Roman’s gasp. He’s now sitting up and glancing at them with terrified eyes.

“Oh my god!! Thomas!!” he yells before looking at them “What happened?!”

The oldest doesn’t really know how to explain nor does he have the voice to do so, letting his eyes show the other just like they did Logan. Roman hurries over to them just as the logical side gets their youngest on his back and starts pulling up the red soaked end of his t-shirt.

All three of them choke a gasp at the same time.

“Oh my god!!” the recently awoken side cries from Virgil’s other side “That’s blood!!”

“Yes, Roman-”

“What the hell happened?!”

“Roma-”

“Why the hell is he bleeding?!”

“Thomas was bleeding too!” Logan manages to say before being interrupted again.

“So?! You know he shouldn’t be bleeding! We aren’t bleeding!!” he motions to them and while Patton knows that’s true, he can’t help but glance at his middle to make sure. And no, no blood stains there.

“We know, Roman!!” Logan screams, making Roman stop his tirade and Patton jump next to him. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard Logan this… frustrated doesn’t even come close “And that’s all we’ll know until we gather more information, starting by locating the injury, which isn’t possible with all the blood covering his abdomen, so would you please shut up, and go get some towels and water!!”

Roman’s face is unreadable, a combination of maybe-indignation, maybe-surprise and maybe-anger, his mouth tightly shut. But after a couple of seconds he stands up and hurries to do as told.

“Patton” Logan turns his attention to him now and he can’t help but flinch “Go get the first aid kit, and bring some warm water”

Patton doesn’t need to be told twice. He does both tasks as fast as possible and soon he’s back on his spot. Roman is already there and Logan is wiping his hands with a little towel, before taking a different one and dipping it in the warm water he’s just brought.

With held breaths Roman and Patton- who has now gripped Virgil’s hoodie-, watch Logan slowly and carefully clean away the blood, leaving red streaks along the way and brownish spots on the white towel. Patton is sure he’ll have to rush away to puke any moment now.

As Logan nears the center of it all, the oldest keeps a close eye on the injured side, ready to act at any signs of pain. It turns out to be unnecessary, tho. The logical facet makes it to the source of the blood and Virgil doesn’t so much as meep. He can’t believe it, and he looks at the others to convey how wrong this is, only Logan is focused on Virgil, his eyes wide, and Roman is too busy gaping downwards. Patton follows their gaze and sees the wound.

As they knew it would, it’s placed on the youngest’s right side. Only it isn’t just a mark or some line like their injuries usually are. No, instead there’s an actual fresh looking cut pulled closed by black stitches.

Patton’s mind goes blank. He can’t process what he’s seeing. There’s a knot inside his throat and pressure on his eyes, he feels so cold, yet he can’t really move to try and fix any of it.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees something move and he’s barely able to move his head enough to get a clear view of Roman standing up, or giving it his best with wobbling legs; his hands are shaking at his sides and he looks like he’s seen a ghost.

“…Logan?” the oldest finally, alas shakily, finds his voice. The latter is staring at the injury with a shocked expression, seemingly frozen.

“W-we” the Side manages after a few gulps “We need to…” and the other two are waiting anxiously- Patton feels tears fall at the thought- for his words until he is suddenly back to his problem-solving-chop-chop-everyone self, facing them to give them instructions.

“Roman, get me a pair of scissors and a spare t-shirt for Virgil. Patton” he starts, Roman already gone “go get blankets, we’ll lay him on the couch to keep an eye on him”

Patton does so, and soon enough Logan is cutting Virgil’s shirt open with Roman’s help.

“Patton, I need you to try and see if you can get him to respond” he tells him and it’s like snapping out of a trance. Patton hadn’t even thought of that. He hadn’t even bothered to look at his kiddo, to try to wake him up, to make sure he was okay, too focused on the red, more worried about a color than his kiddo. So he looks at Virgil, really looks at him, and realizes that the red shouldn’t have been his first worry.

Virgil’s face is slack, peaceful, not unlike the little amount of times they can catch him nightmare-less-ly sleeping of the little amount of times the youngest manages to fall asleep in the first place. But he looks terrible. While the gloomy side has always had a paler complexion than the rest of them, his skin looks like he’s just been on a fight with a flour sack. His skin looks almost gray and somehow dulled, not even his lips colorful enough to show any sort of contrast. And his eyeshadow. Oh, his eyeshadow.

Patton doesn’t realize it at first, certain that something’s terribly wrong, but unable to quite place it. For some reason, Virgil looks younger, more vulnerable, more childlike, and also more like… He looks more like Thomas. And he now sees it. The eyeshadow. There’s barely any eyeshadow. He has dark bags under his eyes, yes, which make him look exhausted and sick, but other than that he looks as if he had spent hours doing his best to get the makeup off his face, the faintest fuzzy smudges left under his eyes.

Something inside his chest goes tight and it feels like an elephant is standing on his heart and lungs.

(He knows how to phrase it because he’s heard those exact same words from Virgil before. Is this truly how Anxiety has always felt like?)

Eyeshadow is Virgil’s trait. He can touch it up, play with it as with any kind of makeup; it can vary extent and intensity. But it can never be gotten rid of. It’s a part of what he is. And yet now is almost gone.

He puts a hand against the pale cheek and all he feels is cold skin.

“L-logan?” he tries, looking at the latter, because if there’s anyone who can fix this, that’s their Logic. Said side has cut Virgil’s shirt off, leaving only the sleeves hidden by his hoodie, and is now cleaning the cut and putting some cream on it, Roman getting bandages ready next to him. Logan looks at him, then at Virgil, then gulps.

“Try to wake him up” is all he says, looking at Patton right in the eyes, voice tight.

And so Patton does.

He holds Virgil’s face in both hands, thumbs caressing his skin.

“…Kiddo?” he asks, aware of the waver and fear on his voice. No change “Virgil? Hey, Kiddo, can you open your eyes for me?” he whimpers “Please, Sweetie, I just need you to answer me okay? You can even pout if you want, just anything is fine” he barely makes out “If you really don’t wanna say anything that’s fine, just- just show me you can hear me, okay?” he sobs, aware of the fact that he can’t really afford to rely on expressions alone with how blurry everything looks right now. He clears the tears away with one hand and looks again, hoping for a change.

There’s none. And he doesn’t really know how to deal with that. It’s all too much.

The sobs escape him like water from a broken dam, pain on his chest making him double over, fear for his kiddo guiding his forehead towards Virgil’s.

“Patton…” he hears Roman, hands pulling him away.

“He’s not waking up” he wails “I don’t know what’s wrong and he won’t wake up!”

“Patton, you have to let go of him, Roman needs to help me wrap the bandages” Logan orders. And he’s, of course, right. He can’t get in the way of taking care of his kiddo, so he lets go and lets the creative facet pull his sobbing body away.

He sits there, crying and worrying and fearing, while the other two wrap bandages around Virgil’s middle, Logan doing the wrapping while instructing Roman on how to carefully lift the unconscious side’s middle to get the gauze under his back. Their youngest doesn’t flinch, whine nor frown during that whole time. It makes Patton want to scream.

Once they’re done, the other two move Virgil to the couch, hoodie zipped close and blanket covering him. The oldest grabs and doesn’t let go of the latter’s hand from the moment they start moving him.

Then there’s silence. The most important thing -seeing to Virgil’s injury – has been taken care of, so now they’re painfully free to deal with the next issue.

“What the fuck happened” Roman asks with a frustrated tone, probably lacking bite due to how tired they all clearly feel. He’s sitting by Virgil’s feet, arms supporting him by his sides as if being in a constant state of about-to-get-up-and-pace-but-holding-myself-down. Patton doesn’t really have it in him to scold him.

Logan sighs from where he’s sitting on a chair he took from the dining room so he could watch Virgil, hands on his face, elbows on his knees. He pinches his nose with one hand after taking off his glasses with the other. He looks exhausted.

“We all know what happene-”

“You know what I mean” the fanciful side interrupts, serious and angry “Why is Virgil like this? What happened after I fainted?” he demands, looking to each of them. Patton himself is sitting on the floor by Virgil’s head, one hand grapping the other’s cold one. He averts his eyes, not knowing what to say. He’s just as confused, just as clueless as Princey feels.

Logan sighs again.

“I lost consciousness not long after you did. And I’m guessing it was the same for Patton” he says, glancing at him, to which he nods miserably.

“So Virge was the last one standing?” Prince asks with a touch of surprise and confusion. Patton nods again.

“He was still standing before I went night-night” he tries to lighten up with a smile, clearly failing.

Logan opens his mouth to say something but closes it before he can make any sound, only this time it seems to Patton that it isn’t because of being out of words, the other looks almost shy, as if ready to say something but choosing not to, which only makes Patton’s bad feeling grow.

“…I have a theory” Logan says after a while, and Patton finally feels something good appear between all the yucky things currently inside him, the latter’s sudden uncertainty to voice his thoughts gone in favor of any kind of explanation-equals-plan idea to hold on to; because of course Logan does, and if he does then it’s probably correct and he’ll have a way to fix it! “But I can’t truly confirm it until Thomas wakes up”

“You think he’s okay?” Patton asks with hope too strong to contain, both Roman and he looking at the logical side expectantly. The latter sighs again, before looking down. The oldest can feel worry and fear and uncertainty radiating from him in waves and the hope shrinks back down as if hurt.

“The fact that we’re having this conversation entails that Thomas is alive, otherwise we would be dead with him” and they both shudder at the thought, unable to understand how Logan can mention something like that so casually “The fact that we lost consciousness means he did so as well, and not only that, but he lost it due to something life threatening, most likely blood loss”

“Then how-?” Roman starts only to be cut off.

“The fact that we’re awake means he’s alive, which means someone treated him, so we were most likely found by someone who managed to get Thomas to a hospital. That would explain why we just woke up” Logan explains “If he was treated then he was sedated, which would keep us dormant”

“So he’s in a hospital now?” Patton asks, a huge weight lifting from his shoulders.

“He must be. Be we can’t be sure until he wakes up”

“Can’t we wake him? We’re awake so the drugs must be gone!” Roman asks as he stands up and stars pacing.

“You know we can’t” the older one sighs in frustration, standing up as well “Us awake doesn’t mean he’s no longer drugged, it means the sedation is wearing off. And not all of us are awake! He isn’t just sleeping, Roman, and even if he was, we both know the only one who maybe would be able to rouse him is Virgil, and he isn’t exactly available!”

“Is it the anesthesia?” Patton hurries to ask before Princey’s open mouth can start moving “Is that why he’s like this?” he pleads brokenly.

“… Maybe” Logan mutters, looking away from the other sides.

“What do you mean ‘maybe’?!” the younger demands “We’re awake! And that wouldn’t explain the blood!”

“I mean…” he huffs “I mean that maybe he’s unresponsive due to the sedatives. But no, he wouldn’t bleed because of them, nor would he be as… weak as he is right now.”

“Then why?!” Roman cries, heaving and trembling. Logan looks right back at him, unfazed and just as tense. The oldest looks between them with fearful eyes, scared by the all the negative emotions yet just as desperate for an answer Logan clearly suspects.

“…Because Thomas was”

Tags will be done later on (explanation in a note i just posted, i will link it later aswell!) Hope you guys like it! Don’t know when next part will be here, already have part of it ready, but it definitely won’t be before the holidays!

Also post tags will also be fixed and properly done later on!

Love you guys!

#Thomas Sanders #Sander Sides #myfic!#myfanfic!#Anxiety Sanders #Princey Sanders #Logic Sanders #Morality Sanders #Virgil Sanders #Roman Sanders #Logan Sanders #Patton Sanders #will tag more stuff later!

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politicalmamaduck · 7 years

Photo

through the darkness hails the light

My contribution to the 2017 @reylofanfictionanthology: Celebrate the Waking. Read it on AO3 here. A huge thank you to @southsidestory for the gorgeous header, and to my amazing editors @rapturousaurora, @reylotrashcompactor, and @shelikespretties!

Kylo mused on the strange young woman in his arms as they carefully traveled through the forest. There would still be many hours of travel, even on horse, before they would reach the ancient cairn.

She was clearly a sign of something, but of what? What were the gods trying to tell him?

Her presence felt like spring, even at the dawn of winter. It was incongruous and intoxicating.

She was the awakening he had felt; he knew it in his bones.

If trained, she would make a powerful ally. Her magic implied healing and nurturing more than the woman herself with the way she had fought him. He knew how intimidating he looked in his armor, and the way it must have appeared in the dark of the forest.

He was a vision from a daydream, from a nightmare, and the girl fought him anyway.

The fire within her would not be easily contained, he knew.

He wanted to be farther along in the forest before she awoke and demanded answers, answers he was not sure he could give.

Still he felt that call to the light, even more strongly with another magic user in his arms. Snoke would have ordered him to kill her on sight, and he did not. Leaving her alive was a calculated risk Kylo could not help but take.

There was something about her that drew him to her. Their paths crossing in the deep of the forest during the long dark was not a coincidence.

It was a few hours later when she awoke. They were soon to reach the night’s darkest point, and then hopefully only a few more hours would get them out of the forest. They would reach Newgrange by the solstice dawn.

They had to. It was calling to Kylo almost as strongly as the light.

The girl stirred in front of him, and he moved his arms in closer to her waist so that she would not slip from the saddle as she regained consciousness.

“Where am I?” she asked, looking about her.

“You’re my guest,” he said, trying not to frighten her and thus cause Macha to rear, sending them both flying. “We’re still in the forest,” he added, sensing her displeasure at his answer. “We should make Newgrange by the dawn.”

“Why are you taking me to Newgrange?” she asked, and he truly could not answer her, even after reflecting upon that very question during the past hours.

“You have awakened in your magic. You need a teacher. I can show you the old ways.”

“Why should I trust a creature in a mask?”

Reigning Macha in, he slowly unclasped his helmet and tucked it into his large saddle bag when she stopped. The woman twisted around to look at him, and confusion appeared on her face.

Kylo felt tendrils of her power reaching out to meet him, recognizing a kindred. His own power crackled in response, reaching out to meet hers. She felt this, and looked even more startled. He longed to see her face in the light, to read her eyes and palms. Their magic swirled around one another, searching each other out, revealing more than what could be with the naked eye in the dark.

Even as he did it, he knew why he nearly always left his helm and armor on rather than removing them. It was a sign of weakness, and an intimacy that he granted her, and he could not say why he had done it for her. A good soldier did not remove their helmet. Kylo’s magic provided him the element of surprise on the battlefield, granted him a power unseen. His helm allowed him to seem even more powerful yet, more frightening. He had taken pride in covering his face the way his grandfather had, unlike the other Roman centurions.

No one had seen his true face in quite a long time. He lived a solitary existence despite his association with the Empire.

He felt exposed, and unsure how to proceed. It was too late, and he could see better without his helm anyway.

“Tell me about your village,” he said, urging Macha to keep going and with the force of suggestion in his voice.

She had nothing by way of information to offer him, prattling about the petty dramas of Jakku village life. He noted that her village was not far from Tuanul; she had surely heard the news of the raid. She did not mention it, nor did she seem afraid.

“How did you find your magic?” he asked, and she paused.

“I had a vision,” she admitted, and then her back became straighter, rising in seeming understanding of something.

“I saw you,” she said, turning her chin to look back at him once more. “You saved me, from someone who was coming for me with a pike.” She shook her head, recalling the vision that overtook her in the firelight, only wise old Maz noticing.

“You led the attack on Tuanul, didn’t you?” she whispered, the words seemingly draining her. “You’re one of the Empire’s centurions.”

He would not, could not lie to her. “I led the attack, but I am not a centurion. I am the Master of the Knights of Ren,” he said, but the words seemingly had no impact on her.

“What was worth all the lives of those innocent people? Your Emperor wants to bring order, but he does so through bloodshed, through wrenching people away from their traditions and twisting the old ways to dark ends.”

“My master is wise, and powerful.”

“But you’re afraid. You’re afraid you’ll never be as powerful,” she spat back at him. He hissed at her, but she kept going. “You’re afraid you’ll never be as powerful as one of the Dagda’s champions.”

He flinched, and pulled back from her, reeling that she had seen through him as clearly as he had seen through her.

The night’s darkest point had come, and his dark magic should have been at its strongest. The solstice, the shortest day of the year, would dawn in hours, yet the light called to him more strongly than ever.

“I go to Newgrange to seek the Dagda’s blessing, yes,” he admitted, his voice breaking on the words.

“The gods do not take kindly to those who would undermine their influence by killing for an Empire that worships elsewhere,” she said, staring straight ahead into the forest.

They fell silent at that, and he did not know how to regain the conversation. They stopped once, when Macha was slowing. He offered his powerful horse water and an apple, and the woman the same.

It was when he offered her his skein that he realized he did not know her name.

“I’m Kylo Ren,” he offered. “And you are?”

“Rey,” she responded, quietly.

Their destinies were intertwined, the magic was telling him, and it must have been so. He did not know what would happen when they arrived at the great mound, but he knew the threads of fate had drawn him to Rey.

They mounted Macha, and continued on their journey, only hearing the distant howling of wolves once.

Hours passed, the dark not yielding, and Newgrange beckoned.

The world was quiet around them as they approached the ancient mound, even the mighty River Boyne seeming to cease its flowing.

They waited, and listened, and stepped forward and into the sacred center.

It was still dark on the interior; dawn would stretch her arms toward their green isle shortly.

The presence of the ancients and their power overwhelmed them, surrounded them, filled them. It was nearly overwhelming, as if the silence were singing and the earth breathing with the power of a pantheon of gods and warriors long gone.

Rey could scarcely breathe, yet the magic forced her to, forced her to draw it within herself with each breath. She was overcome by the ancient power in a way that she had not expected to be. She felt at peace in a way that she had not since her abandonment all those years before.

She heard rather than saw Kylo walk ahead of her, then he stopped, suddenly, as if waiting.

Grey was beginning to creep around the entrance, and they stood, waiting for the dawn.

It came upon them, suddenly and powerfully. The world was enveloped in light from the roofbox above them, and the tomb was illuminated.

Rey felt warm light embrace her, surround her, become one with her. Truly, this place was blessed by the gods. She felt more full, and alive, than ever she had before.

Kylo fell to his knees before her, his head in his hands, overcome by emotion. She turned away, wishing to allow him his moment with the gods.

The light surrounded him, called him, embraced him like his long lost mother. He had not allowed himself to realize how desperately he missed her and loved her, even after all they had been through.

Kylo began to weep. He knew in his innermost self why he had needed to come here, had craved the Dagda’s blessing. He had wanted to be free of his pain, of the conflict within him, and he had found his answer.

He could not receive the Dagda’s blessing subservient to the dark, to the Empire that sought to tame his wild green island home, to make it something it was not and could never be.

He needed his father’s forgiveness, to repair in death the rift he had not wanted to repair in life.

He sank down to his knees and truly prayed, speaking frankly to his ancestor rather than in the desperate, begging manner he had in the past when he was trying to commune with the dark.

I have come back to the light, Grandfather. I sought the wrong meaning from your bones, and I am sorry I did not listen to your message.

Neither his grandfather nor the Dagda answered at that moment, but Kylo was overwhelmed by the light surrounding them.

Perhaps that was all the answer he needed from the gods and his family.

Rey’s skin glowed in the sunlight, illuminating her eyes. She could have been the goddess Brigid, daughter of the Dagda himself for the way she looked. It took Kylo’s breath away.

She smiled at him, and took his hand, pressing it gently.

The new year would begin, and they would greet it together as they had greeted the dawn. The darkest midnight had come, and passed, and they had hailed the light.

#reylo #reylo fanfiction anthology #celebrate the waking #reylo fanfic #irish mythology #winter solstice #my writing #fan fiction

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amybessschiller · 7 years

Text

Hagar, Ishmael, DACA, and Forgiveness: The Sermon I’d Give For These High Holy Days.

I am, admittedly, not in the habit of reading the holiday Torah portion in advance. As I read the story of Hagar and Ishmael in shul on Thursday, the first day of Rosh Hashana, there appeared to me a reading of that story more topical and urgent than any other — and also more universal and evergreen.

For the story of Hagar and Ishmael is, above all else, a story of deportation.

Genesis 21:9 has our foremother, Sarah, insisting that Abraham “cast out” Hagar, the servant of her household and surrogate childbearer of Ishmael, “for the child of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

That statement cuts me to the quick. Three verses earlier, Sarah is rejoicing and a great feast is held in honor of Isaac’s birth, a moment of abundance and blessing. Yet this feeling does not last long in the text before Ishmael’s presence feels like a threat — specifically, an illegitimate claim on Abraham’s resources. Sarah’s insistence that Hagar and Ishmael be cast out for the sake of her son Isaac’s inheritance has the same vicious hostility of people who speak of undocumented immigrants “draining the system,” claiming welfare and health care that “rightfully” belongs to citizens, the “legitimate” children. This is a script that seems to only amplify the more it is refuted. Those who might be called undocumented become “illegals,” “criminals,” an abstract class of grifters. Their humanity is obscured by projections of their laziness and greed. Hagar, too, becomes an abstract symbol of illegitimacy. Sarah no longer refers to her by name, only by her status, that of “slave-woman.”

This turnaround is scary when we think of how Ishmael came to be for the very sake of Abraham and the need for his household to contain an heir. Ishmael too is defined by his role and his parentage. He came into the world because he was needed. The moment he and his mother appear to stop “contributing” to the household, they become dependents, and furthermore, threats. Ishmael too, is a child of Abraham, yet reduced to his household function.

So too, do the undocumented come to make contributions. They are, whether we like it or not, asked here, demanded even, to fulfill the needs of our household. And yet the idea lingers, that they will take more than they give. That they will claim what is not rightfully theirs. That their presence is a concession on our part. Since we need them, we must keep “their” opportunities for abusing that need under control.

Even more searing, the description of Hagar and Ishmael in the desert, the wilderness of Beer-sheva, where she “wanders,” desperate and so, so alone, and finally as their skein of water runs dry, hides her son under a bush so she does not have to watch him die. “Sitting afar, she bursts into tears.”

In my hometown of Cleveland, a woman, Leonor Garcia, has taken sanctuary at Forest Hill Presbyterian Church, just before her scheduled deportation to Mexico, which would separate her from her nineteen-year-old and three-year-old daughters. As she remained in the church, Immigration and Customs Enforcement pounded on the door of the house where her two children live, frightening them even as they were made aware that Garcia was residing in sanctuary elsewhere. Leonor had to witness her children’s fear from a distance, helpless against their intimidation. How many mothers are stuck wandering in a desert somewhere on the southern border? How many have to choose between watching their children die, and not being able to watch their children die, so great is their helplessness and grief?

Given that we read it on Rosh Hashana, what does this story actually offer to us about forgiveness? Forgiveness seems in pretty short supply here. Sure, God comforts Hagar (but opens in oblivious douchebro style with “What troubles you, Hagar?” like, “HOW ABOUT THAT BANISHMENT INTO STARVATION AND LONELINESS YOU ARRANGED FOR ME AND MY CHILD? THAT’S BEEN A LITTLE TROUBLING.”) Anyway, God summons a well, ensures that the twosome are taken care of in the desert, Ishmael eventually sires a great nation, ok fine. But these are palliative measures, happening well after the fact. There is no forgiveness in this story because there is no reckoning with what was truly *wrong.* Hagar and Ishmael present a most challenging opportunity for forgiveness: how do we deal with children, with families, who we think are not supposed to be here? Whose presence feels like a mistake?

Because when Sarah looks at Hagar and Ishmael, she sees a mistake. She sees things that are not as they should be. She sees something that has gone wrong.

And she’s right.

Something very much did go wrong.

It was wrong that Sarah could not conceive until her old age. It was wrong that she had to suffer so many years of feeling like a failure, of unmet longing, of desperate compromises.

It was wrong that Hagar’s will - her womb, her parenting - had to be subordinated to the demands of her mistress and the household. It is wrong that Hagar did not have her own domain, children that belonged to her and her spouse alone. It is wrong that she had to live a half-life.

There is very much a mistake at the center of this story. A heartbreaking, mostly blameless, searingly painful mistake.

And Sarah and Abraham’s choice — one sanctioned by God, who insists that Abraham set aside his distress and follow the orders of his wife — is to try and nullify the evidence of that mistake.

Again - Sarah reduces Hagar to her function as slave-woman. She is no longer a person, she is all but erased. Hagar is sent away to the wilderness. No other people are there to shelter her, to comfort her. Hagar no longer has a place in the world, nothing to validate or support her existence, she is a practically a ghost. All this is Sarah’s intent. To cast out the slave-woman and her son, and to move forward as if they never existed. As if they never had to exist.

As if her failure never required their existence.

As if Sarah had never failed.

How do we deal with the mistakes that dwell in the households of our souls?

I’m hard on Sarah, it’s true. This is an ugly episode for her. But my heart breaks for her too, for wouldn’t we all like to banish our mistakes, our painful histories, to the desert? Wouldn’t we all like to nullify their existence, especially when we finally do achieve our greatest dreams?

But Hagars and Ishmaels live among us. They live in our communities. Perhaps they are, in some way, a mistake. It is not they who are the mistake, though. The mistake is the desperation of their lives. The misery and fear of their original homes, the conditions so awful that they must flee or die. Either way, they too live half-lives, full of never-ending anxiety. Even as they dwell in our household they know they only get to stay as long as they do whatever we need. And stay on good behavior.

Hagars and Ishmaels dwell, too, in the households of our souls.

The remainders of our mistakes live inside us. We might like to project all of our anger, jealousy, sadness, onto some concrete being, and send it away.

But that story only ends in more tears. The saddest, loneliest, most desperate tears.

And, spoiler alert, the household of Abraham and Sarah has a lot more trauma ahead after this incident. Banishing Hagar does not exactly bring the utopian reconciliation that Sarah envisions.

What would happen if, instead, we saw our mistakes, the humans who represent all the brokenness, the wrongness of our world, and kept them as part of our households. What would happen if we found a way to let our most brilliant triumphs live alongside our greatest disappointments? For that is Isaac and Ishmael, to Sarah. And at the start of this parsha, they are playing together. Sarah’s sadness, the mistake of this son that is not hers, exists right alongside the miracle of her child’s existence. And for a moment, all are still people. No one is crying. And there is enough for everyone.

May we resist the temptation to nullify the humanity of others in an attempt to save ourselves. May we all find ways to see the people we depend on as fellow humans, rather than vessels of our frustrations. May we find ways to let our mistakes live with us, in laughter, abundance, and peace.

Ken Yehi Ratzon. G’mar Chatima Tova.

#roshhashana #newyear #jewish #torah #bible #sermon #religion #abrahamandsarah #DACA #immigration #forgiveness

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loneberry · 7 years

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“One-Story House” by Rebecca Solnit

[An extraordinary essay from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost on dreams, extinction, memory, the American landscape, the architecture of the psyche, familial figures, turtles, and place. The bottom of the pool...]

I was carrying the tortoise in both hands, holding it out in front of me like an altar boy’s Bible or a divining rod as I walked around the periphery of the room. Each plate of its ruddy shell was distinct. It leaked as I carried it. More water came forth than a tortoise that size could possibly store. The creature was a fountain, a cleft rock in my hands, and when I awoke I realized that the room in which I paced was my childhood bedroom.

I had been wandering through that house every now and again ever since I’d left it at age fourteen. A quarter century had passed, and I still wasn’t out of it, in my dreams. It was a classic suburban house of its era, single-story, L-shaped. The houses children draw look like faces with upstairs windows for eyes and a door for a mouth. They have a solidity and a centrality that makes them home as the head is home. This house, with its public rooms that opened one into another as though they were only distended passageways and its bedrooms appendix-like cul-de-sacs, had no center, but my psyche was stuck in it. The previous owners’ plantings all around it were strange, exotic, bottlebrush and artificial strawberry tree, a spruce the same powder blue as the corduroy pants boys wore then, succulents and other plants that were nameless, unrecognizable, inedible, with shiny leaves or spiky ones. One plant up a narrow side plot in perpetual shade bloomed annually with a single colossal lily that looked as though it were made of crumpled black leather from some thin-skinned creature. In front of each of the two children’s bedrooms facing the street was a misshapen juniper, and at night the headlights of passing cars made the shadows of their branches whirl around the walls like pterodactyls. Awnings, eaves, and patio roof prevented sunlight from reaching in directly to this place made of formica and tile and linoleum and dark green wall-to-wall carpeting with a nap like aerial photographs of forests. Everything about it seemed to be made of chilly alien materials, and the swimming pool was strangest of all.

The pool was unheated, too cold for skinny kids to jump in most of the year, but it always needed sweeping and skimming to get the dirt and debris out, and the tools for doing that were fantastically long, like cutlery for a Behemoth with its head up in the clouds. It was the usual pale turquoise with a pink cement rim that abraded bare feet and the sharp smell of chlorine emanating from its waters. There’s something fearful and mysterious about every body of water, murky water that promises unseen things in unseen depths, clear water that shows you the bottom far below as if you could fall into it, though the water would buoy you up in that strange space neither air nor ground. The term “a body of water” is apt, for here was a mysterious body thirty feet long, eight feet tall at the far end, a transparent captive into whose depths you could throw yourself. Even the lightest breeze patterned the water on the surface, and the sun turned those patterns into strange skeins of light that fled across the bottom, endless nets cast across a fishless sea. Afterward I dreamed over and over of the pool as well as the house. It was as though I couldn’t find my way out of the house, as though I was still lost in it, but the pool was less part of the labyrinth than its holy well.

Terrible things happened in that house, though not particularly unusual or interesting ones; suffice to say there’s a reason why therapists receive large hourly sums for listening to that kind of story. Or maybe there’s one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away. A story can be a gift like Ariadne’s thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth’s ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.

Some years ago, I dreamed that my mother had fixed up the house, or had done so in dream terms, heavy-handed ones: the swimming pool was surrounded by broken glass, the bathroom had two sunken tubs shaped like coffins, and my own small bedroom had been brightly repainted with a line of dancing skeletons on one wall. I dreamed of my father every now and again too, and long after his death, not long after the hermit taught me to shoot, there was a period in which I told him to stand back because I was armed. After this series of victories, he became harmless. Clearly, I was getting somewhere over the years. I took over the master bedroom and decided to move, I drove the family out of my own room, and then came the dream of the tortoise.

In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible. But the morning after I carried the leaking tortoise, I knew I was no longer stuck in the house. The weight of a dream is not in proportion to its size. Some dreams are made of fog, some of lace, some of lead. Some dreams seem to be made out of less the usual debris of the psyche than bolts of lightning sent from outside.

I wondered where the tortoise came from. I remembered riding a Galapagos tortoise in a zoo when I was two, remembered a box turtle my middle brother had as a pet, and the small red slider turtles painted up for Easter back when animal cruelty standards were lower, read about how the Zuni think of turtles as the spirits of the dead returned, noticed that every image of turtles and tortoises had a sort of pull on me. Months passed before I remembered an encounter with a desert tortoise almost a decade earlier, when I was camping in the Mojave with a few other women. I saw the full-grown tortoise in the center of a secondary road near Death Valley and stopped my truck. We got out to look at it, and I recited what I knew: that it is bad to touch these creatures, because they are stressed by the transformation of their environment, vulnerable to illness and to infection, particularly to a respiratory disorder, and touching could contaminate them. In crisis, they sometimes void all their stored water, water slowly extracted from leaves and gulped up from puddles after hard rain, water that can make up to forty percent of their body weight, and losing their water is a crisis itself.

But they are also prone to being run over by cars and off-road vehicles throughout their territory, the Mojave and western Colorado deserts. We watched the tortoise, which had stopped when we did, watched a few approaching cars in the distance, and then I took out a clean dish towel and, with the dish towel between my hands and its shell, lifted the creature. It had retracted its head and limbs, and so I carried a heavy dust-colored dome with each plate etched in concentric lines, a mosaic of mandalas. Holding it before me, I strode about fifty feet into the scrubby desert and set it down facing in the direction it had been going. Put down, it walked again with an odd tipping motion, its shell lurching a little with each step. One of the most famous Buddhist tales is about a pair of monks sworn to keep apart from women. One day they come to the edge of a turbulent river. A woman there implores them to help her cross—old fables are short on athletic women—and one of them carries her through the waters. After the two monks have been walking for some time on the farther shore, the other monk reproaches him for breaking his vows. His companion replies, “Why are you still carrying her? I put her down on the far side of the river.” Several years after that little encounter in the desert, I was still carrying the tortoise, but it had become a compass, a visa, an amulet. The desert tortoise is in danger of extinction—it officially received “threatened” status from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1990—because of human encroachments. The causes of its diminishing numbers are many. Nonnative plants have disrupted its diet, and grazing animals, dogs, vehicles, development, military bases have all had their impact, as has the widespread capturing of the creatures for pets. An increase in garbage dumps in the desert has vastly increased the raven population, and ravens prey on young tortoises during the five years or so before their shells harden sufficiently to protect them. (The hermit once found a young tortoise with severe pecking wounds in its shell; he brought it home and called in a zoo veterinarian he knew to try to save it with kitchen-sink surgery—I was away then, and he delivered telephone reports on “Miss Tortoise” for a few days, then told me that “Miss Tortoise didn’t make it.”) The desert tortoise can go for more than a year without food or water, hibernates several months a year in its colder northern reach, stays in its cool burrow during the hottest part of summer, seldom roams more than a mile from its burrow, walks slowly, lives slowly, to a great age, upward of a century. They have existed for sixty million years or so. The plan to save them is designed to give them a fifty percent chance of existing in five hundred years. The government is unwilling to dedicate more resources or curtail more activities than make the odds even.

In 1919, a young ethnographer fell in love with a blacksmith from the Chemehuevi tribe whose large territory is the heart of tortoise habitat. The blacksmith, George Laird, was already forty-eight, and as a boy he had learned much lore that was being forgotten and lost and diluted. The winter he was sixteen—about 1888—he nursed a man in the agonizing last stages of syphilis, and the dying man taught the boy a purer form of their language and “filled the long, sleepless nights with tales of the Immortals, the pre-human Animals Who Were People, told with great style and elegance.” During the twenty-one years the Chemehuevi man and the ethnographer, Carobeth Laird, were inseparable, she learned the language, the songs, and the stories he knew, and long after he died, when she herself was old, she turned her notes and memories into a book of ethnography. Of the tortoise, she recorded, “This reptile was desirable for food, but it also had a peculiar aura of sacredness. It was and is to this day symbolic of the spirit of the People. ‘A Chemehuevi’s heart is tough, like the turtle’s.’ This ‘tough-heartedness’ is equated with the will and the ability to endure and to survive.” But the tortoise is not surviving us well.

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?

Once I found a locket with a crescent moon and star spelled out in rhinestones on one face, unreadably intricate initials on another, and two ancient photographs inside, and someone must have missed it terribly but no one claimed it, and I have it still. Another time, traveling down a river in one of the last great wildernesses, a roadless place the size of Portugal, I lost a sock early in the trip and a pair of sunglasses later, and I think of them littering that wilderness so clear of such clutter, there still or found by someone who might have wondered as I did about the woman with the locket. On that trip I leaned over the side of the raft and stared straight down for hours at the floor of that river whose name almost no one knows that flows into another little-known river, stared at thousands of stones, hundreds of thousands of millions of stones sliding by, gray, pink, black, gold, under the clearest water in the whole world, floating for miles and days on water I drank straight out of the river. Material objects witness everything and say nothing. Animals say more. And they are disappearing.

That things should be lost to our knowledge is one thing, in which we don’t know where we are or they are; that things should be lost from the earth is another. There is a strange crossroads these days, between the actual and the known. Biologists estimate that about 1.7 million species are known, but that there are between 10 and 100 million on earth. Our discovery and categorization of species increases at a manic rate, but so does the disappearance of both known and unknown species. More is known; there is less to know; we lose both what we know and what we don’t. It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them.

In dreams I have been an eagle and a green finch, have met a three-headed coyote, wolves, foxes, lynxes, dogs, lions, songbirds, fish, snakes, cattle, seals, many horses and cats, some who talk, a woman giving birth by cesarean to a full-grown stag that ran away, still wet with the juices of birth, down a dark, tree-shrouded road, a gazelle fawn that a woman breast-fed, a brown bear who married a woman. “They are all beasts of burden in a sense,” Thoreau once remarked of animals, “made to carry some portion of our thoughts.” Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech. A man once told me that much of my writing was about loss, that that was how I imagined the world, and I thought about that comment for a long time. In that sense of loss two streams mingled. One was the historian’s yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historian’s joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. But the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. At any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural. There are more sunrises coming, but even dreams could be emptied out.

The golden age, the dreamtime, is the present, and too much in it is leaking out now. The Times Square clock that counted down to the millennium, its seconds, minutes, hours, days racing away on a digital display, could have been kept for endangered species, at least thirty lost a day, more than ten thousand a year, half of all of them to be gone in a century unless something changes radically, or everything does. Imagine the present as already a Noah’s ark, and greed and development and poison as a trio of pirates marching the animals and plants over the edge, to the bottom of the sea that is the past. No more flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the midwestern sky for hours and days in the past century, all known Sampson’s pearly mussels gone from midwestern rivers by the 1930s, no more Santa Barbara song sparrows since 1959, no more Tecopa pupfish since 1972, an estimated 142 Sonoran pronghorn left in the U.S. as of the late twentieth century but less than half that by 2002, seventy-two species of snail missing in Hawaii, the blue pike of the Great Lakes gone extinct right about when men first walked on the moon, the speckled cormorant gone from Alaska about the time of the gold rush.

During that California gold rush, Yankees in quantity first came through the heart of the desert tortoises’ territory. The Death Valley Forty-Niners were in haste to make it to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada, and because they had arrived in the Great Basin too late to go over the Sierra’s snowy passes, they hired a Mormon guide to take them down the Spanish Trail to southern California. They called themselves the Sand Walking Company, a corruption of the San Joaquin Company, because none of them recognized the saint whose Spanish name had been given to a river and valley in the southern mother lode. A twenty-year-old New Yorker named O.K. Smith showed up on the trail with pleasant stories of a more direct route to central California, and most of the wagons switched over to the alleged shortcut. The guide continued on the Spanish Trail with the few who didn’t. The strays were abetted by a map that government explorer John C. Fremont—“the pathfinder”—had drawn up, showing a long range running east-west that happened not to exist (a bad map had much to do with the Donner Party’s 1846 stranding too). “These mountains are not explored, being only seen from elevated points on the northern exploring line,” said the map, above an area marked in larger letters: “Unexplored.” The Sand Walkers thought they could travel along the foothills of the fictitious mountain range. Many turned back when the terrain became impassible for wagons, and the rest broke up into smaller parties. These parties got stranded in Death Valley, the lowest land in the Western Hemisphere, a dry lake bed like an empty mouth between two sharp rows of mountain ranges.

“We had been in the region long enough to know that the higher mountains contained the most water, and that the valleys had bad water or none at all, so that while the lower altitude to the south gave some promise of easier crossing it gave us no promise of water or grass, without which we must certainly perish,” wrote William Manly, half a century later. “In a certain sense we were lost. The clear nights and days furnished us with the means of telling the points of the compass as the sun rose and set, but not a sign of life in nature’s wide domain had been seen for a month or more. A vest pocketful of powder and shot would last a good hunter until he starved to death, for there was not a living thing to shoot, great or small.” Manly was a skilled hunter and outdoorsman, and there’s no ready explanation for why the landscape through which he traveled in the winter of 1849-50 seemed to be so without wildlife. For these pioneers, the Mojave was an empty quarter, without water, without animals, without names, without maps, without all the things that give a place life and meaning. They were afraid of Indians, though the only two survivors of one party of eleven men made it because they were rescued by Paiutes. The skeletons of the other nine were found a decade later, inside a low circle of stones. Other parties were shown the location of precious waterholes, springs, and streams by Indians they encountered. Columbus had arrived in the Caribbean he mistook for the Indies almost four hundred years before, but there had been few direct disturbances of the indigenous inhabitants of the more remote western regions, and they were not yet resisting what was not yet a crisis.

One starving pioneer attempted to buy a biscuit off a neighbor for ten dollars and was refused. Another buried $2,500 to lighten his load, having been unable to find anyone who wanted to carry the gold coins for a half share of them. He was never able to find the burial spot either. Still others found ore that suggested rich mines, had they only the food and water to survive there. The Lost Gunsight Mine, named after a silver-rich piece of ore that one of the Death Valley Forty-Niners had made into a gunsight, became famous, as did the Lost Goller Mine. The latter mine consisted of a few nuggets picked up by John Goller’s companion. Upon seeing them, Goller snapped, “I want water; gold will do me no good.” The mines themselves were legends later visitors would look for in vain, built out of bits of ore brought out by these desperadoes. It was a strange sojourn, this journey through a landscape where all their hopes of finding mineral wealth were set aside, where wealth meant nothing and water everything, where they were faced with critical decisions about sharing and surviving, where they all faced death and some met it. It was a detour into the essential and the introspective, as the desert often is, and they were lost in it.

The nomadic Chemehuevi navigated wide expanses of this arid terrain with songs. The songs gave the names of places in geographical order, and the place names were descriptive, evocative, so that a person who’d never been to a place might recognize it from the song. Carobeth Laird commented, “Nowadays when a song is sung it takes great leaps from one locality to another, because there is no one who remembers the route in its entirety.” She explained further, “How does that song go?” meant “What is the route it travels?” Men inherited songs from their father or grandfather, and the song gave them hunting rights to the terrain it described. Despite Manly’s experience, there seemed to be plenty to hunt for those who knew where to look, and when. The Salt Song describes the route of a flock made up of every sort of land bird in the region, and it “travels all night, arriving at Las Vegas about midnight, at Parker towards morning, and back home to the place of origin by sunrise. If the night on which it is sung is very short, the Salt Song—as the other hereditary songs—may be shortened so that it will not outlast the night.” In that song the birds began to leave the flock toward morning, each dropping out into its own place in this orderly world of words and places. A song was the length of the night and a map of the world, and the arid terrain around Las Vegas was the Storied Land of the great myths. The Mojave people just to the south had a turtle song that also lasted the length of a night or several nights.

The silence in which Manly and a companion walked out of Death Valley to seek help for two families stranded there forms a strange contrast. They carried only small canteens and soon ran out of water. So they “traveled along for hours, never speaking, for we found it much better for our thirst to keep our mouths closed as much as possible, and prevent the evaporation.” They were unable to eat the dried ox meat they carried because their mouths were too parched, and when they finally found a small sheet of ice like “window glass,” they quenched their thirst only to find that they were ravenous. It took Manly and his companion twenty-three days to find help and return with provisions and a route out. By that time their traveling companions had despaired of the young men’s ability and altruism, so they were surprised as well as rejoiced at their return. The whole party finally reached the settlements four months after they’d taken their shortcut. Afterward they returned to the mapped world and to their familiar way of living. “Every point of that terrible journey is indelibly fixed upon my memory, and though seventy-three years of age on April 6, 1893, I can locate every camp, and if strong enough, could follow that weary trail from Death Valley to Los Angeles with unerring accuracy,” wrote Manly in his memoir Death Valley in ’49, and it was his party who named the place where they were stuck Death Valley.

I know the Storied Land or the country a little north of it. It’s the first desert I came to know and the place that taught me to write. In my late twenties, I started going to the Nevada Test Site, where a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated over the years, started going there with thousands of others to oppose the nuclear testing, a wild mix of Western Shoshones and pagans and Mormons and Franciscans and Buddhists and anarchists and Quakers. The place demanded to be described not with the straight line of a single story but with stories like the roads that converge upon a capital, for many histories had arrived there in the decades since the Death Valley Forty-Niners, and some of the old ones had not been forgotten. The people I met there invited me into a wider sense of home in the West, and a tortoise I picked up not so far from there would carry me out of my old home, a tortoise that might have been Turtle Island itself, the old name for the whole continent, as though the whole continent could be home, and perhaps it’s this sense of place that sprung me from the house I left a quarter century before.

Six or seven blocks northwest of where I live now is the hill where the last Brown Satyr butterfly was collected in the 1870s, as that intensely local species was going extinct. Some of the individuals of the gold rush were likeable, but their cumulative effect was terrible; they worked feverishly to acquire what could be hoarded—notably the tons of gold dug out of the mountains—and for it they paid with what couldn’t be hoarded and didn’t belong to them, the clear streams and rivers filled up with miners’ mercury and dirt, the salmon runs already starting to fail in their time, the forests chopped down for smelters, the California grizzly extinct everywhere but the state flag by 1922, the languages and stories of the tribes devastated by violence and by disease in this place that was blank and unborn to the miners. It was this acquisitiveness and its increasingly sophisticated new technologies that came to extract more and more wealth from the wild and remote places of the world to empty them out, filling up banks with more money than could ever be spent, more than there are things to buy. Now the scarcity is real, and growing.

It’s not as simple as a morality tale because what came into being is partly beautiful, and it has come to have its own complexities. There’s a Catholic university on the hill where the butterfly left off being, and I have heard great poets read there and environmentalists speak. About twice as far from my white birdcage of an apartment in the opposite direction is the San Francisco Zen Center one of the key locations for the arrival of Buddhism in the West. The handsome brick building in a poor neighborhood was erected long ago as a residence for Jewish women, and a few Stars of David are still worked into the iron balconies. One morning four months after my midsummer dream of the tortoise, I woke up knowing it was time to go there. I arrived in time for the Saturday morning talk and sat behind a huge African-American man. Whenever he shifted his weight the altar appeared and it was the more interesting in glimpses. That day, someone mentioned that the stone Buddha on it was from an Afghanistan that had ceased to exist long ago. I had just given the two wool blankets I had inherited from that house in my dreams to the Quakers for winter relief in Afghanistan. The statue with its serene full face seemed to be looking back from the place where the blankets were going. Its soft brown stone spoke of an aridity and solidity that made the place real, made me see stony mountains shaped by erosion into folds like the curves of the statue’s robes.

A gaunt man with cropped gray hair sat down cross-legged, arranged his dark robes, and without preamble began to tell a story, softly, slowly, with long pauses: “Good morning. For many years there was someone who used to come here and sell us boxes of candy. Actually they were tins of candy, and they were caramel-coated in chocolate, and they looked like little chocolate turtles. So we called him the Turtle Man, and the Turtle Man would come and sell us this very sweet caramel-covered chocolate. And the Turtle Man couldn’t see. He was blind, so we bought two boxes instead of one. And then we’d put them in the desk in the office and then, even though we all thought they were way too sweet, we would eat them—quickly. The Turtle Man did this for many years. Like many blind people, he had a white cane, and he’d tap his way up the stairs and then he’d tap the door, and then he’d come in. We’d do our transaction, and then he’d leave.

“And one day I was out on the street right out here and I heard this voice go help . . . help . . . help . . . and it was the Turtle Man, and he was standing over there on the corner. He needed to cross the street and his way of crossing the street was to stand on the curb and say help and just say help until someone came along and helped him across the street. I didn’t watch him, but I assume that at each street crossing this was how the Turtle Man negotiated the crossing: he just stood there and said help, help.

“So I thought, Isn’t that really amazing? What an amazing life. You walk along and you reach a barrier and you stop and you just call out help. You don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t know who’s around if anyone, and you wait, and then somebody turns up and they help you across that barrier, and then you walk on knowing that pretty soon you’re going to meet another barrier and you’re going to have to stop again and cry out help, help, help, not knowing if anyone’s there, not knowing who it will be that will turn up to help you across the next barrier.

“And yet somehow the Turtle Man could roam around the city selling boxes of turtle candy, coming to places like Zen Center and persuading them to buy a couple of cans.

“And he was, you know, a bit of a hustler. He knew we didn’t really want them, but he knew we were good for two cans. The Turtle Man wasn’t a fool. It was always a kind of a thrill to see him. It was almost like it was a miracle. It was like the Turtle Man defied gravity, he defied common sense, he defied conventionality. It was like the Turtle Man was a superhero, so it was always a little bit exciting and a little bit joyous when he turned up at the door.

“How else could we break through the spell that we weave if we didn’t have a little piece of Turtle Man in us? But this is a very dangerous proposition because most of us don’t have the excellent training of Turtle Man. Turtle Man had no option. It was either stay in bed or get up and meet the impassable barrier and cry for help. Those were the options.

“Maybe if I really paid attention to my life I’d notice that I don’t know what’s going to happen this afternoon and I can’t be fully confident that I’m competent to deal with it. Maybe we’re willing to let in that thought. It has some reasonableness to it, I can’t exactly know, but chances are, possibilities are, it’s not going to be much different than what I’ve usually experienced and I’ll do just fine, so we close up that unsettling possibility with a reasonable response. The practice of awareness takes us below the reasonableness that we’d like to think we live with and then we start to see something quite fascinating, which is the drama of our inner dialogue, of the stories that go through our minds and the feelings that go through our heart, and we start to see in this territory it isn’t so neat and orderly and, dare I say it, safe or reasonable. So in the practice of awareness, which has gone on for centuries after centuries and millennium after millennium, human beings have asked themselves, Hmmmm, how do I engage this process in a way that I don’t become too frightened by what it might unfold or too complacent by avoiding it? This is the delicate work of awareness.

“You hear a sound, and you think, that’s a big truck going around the corner. It all happens in half a second. We see someone and make up a story about who they are, and sometimes we get ourselves into a lot of trouble with the stories we make up as we weave our world. And the practice of awareness doesn’t say don’t weave your world. That’s what we’re hardwired to do, it’s not a volitional thing to think ‘truck’ after hearing that sound. The practice of awareness says don’t grasp it too tightly, don’t be too convinced. And in that simpler way of being, it’s okay to become like the Turtle Man, it’s okay to sometimes experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier. It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped. Sometimes we’re calling out for help. Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place. It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling determined world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation. It’s not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me.”

Several months later, I was camping on the eastern side of the Sierra, in a forest of Jeffrey pines that stood far apart on that pale sand, speaking of vast root systems tapping out what moisture there was in that dry place. The pinecones fell in perfect circles under the trees, and the place seemed almost geometrically pure: the flat plain of volcanic sand, the tall straight trees, the dark circles of cones. In the warmth of day, the bark of these trees gives off a fragrance like vanilla and butter-scotch, a sweetness that added to the tranquility of the place that seemed when we were in it as though it was all there was in the world, as though the trees went on forever, as though time, history, obligation were no longer on the map. We slept in our cars on a night so cold that the water in our dishpan was frozen solid by morning. We’d camped there the year before, and that time I’d gotten my car stuck in the sand, several miles from the paved road. It had been a lovely moment to realize that I could count on my traveling companions, and they had gotten me out with good cheer and little fuss. This freezing night I dreamed I’d driven into the backyard of that childhood home and gotten the car stuck again, but the yard and house belonged to someone else, a middle-aged Asian woman who had added a second story to it. It was her house now. I wasn’t going in, and friends were coming to dislodge the car.

And then as I was preparing to write this chapter, I dreamed of the place again, from the outside again. We were burying my father’s and grandmother’s hearts by rocky graves like ornamental excrescences around the edges of the swimming pool. This time the pool had dark dirt on its bottom, and its sides were no longer straight but wavering, encrusted with big stones. It was becoming a pond. The dark hearts had been in my refrigerator, in a Ziploc bag, like butcher’s meat. A dream doesn’t have to explain how long they’d been there. Which one was bigger, my dreaming self wondered, and did the size indicate generosity, body size, or unhealthy enlargement? Both died of heart trouble. And through a knothole in the tall back fence—and there was a real knothole I had forgotten, which in real life did look out onto the hilly pasture of a little quarter horse ranch—I saw horse-drawn carriages speeding by, then horses galloping faster and glossier than ever, exuberant with power, with life.

A few months later, I went to spend a few weeks writing in the county I grew up in, not the suburban corridor whose northernmost edge that house sat upon, but its wild west, mostly parkland and dairy farms. Geese were flying south, apples were ripe on the trees, and one day a naturalist named Rich took me around to look at birds. While we were watching a pair of white-tailed kites in the tree they roost in, he mentioned that they had been thought to be extinct, and they were now doing so well that they were expanding their ecological niche and range. Almost everywhere but the black bands on their wings, the birds were as dazzlingly white as doves, though their contours were the condensed ferocity of hawks. Some people call them angel hawks. We went calling on dozens of shorebirds and waterbirds, a king-fisher, green herons half-hidden in the reeds, one gulping a blue dragonfly still whirring as it went down that long narrow throat, songbirds, and then a turtle peering above the still water of an old millpond. Reflection turned its tilted head in profile into a notched oddity with two yellow-gold eyes looking back at us. We traveled to several places not far from the road, and through this guide’s eyes and tales I saw a completely different place than this the one I had been coming back to almost all my life. My place had been made out of plants and landforms and light and some human histories. His was crowded with creatures going about their lives, each living according to a pattern, the patterns interwoven into a tapestry of formidable complexity.

Some ideas are new, but most are only recognition of what has been there all along, the mystery in the middle of the room, the secret in the mirror. Sometimes one unexpected thought becomes the bridge that lets you traverse the country of the familiar in an unprecedented way. You know the the usual story about the world, the one about ongoing encroachment that continues to escalate and thereby continues to wipe out species. Rich told a different story about how here for a hundred years or so after the gold rush the newcomers blasted away at everything that moved, an era that let up half a century ago. And so, he said, in North America at least, a lot of species have come back. In this county with so many miles of open space, he told me, even coyotes became locally extinct. I realized that the hills I roamed as a child were empty and silent compared to what they are now. It was odd to think of what had been my paradise and refuge as an impoverished landscape, though I had long known its very grass wasn’t native.

Across the continent many of the common animals are coming back, the deer, moose, bears, coyotes, and cougars, a story that hasn’t been made much of. Many of the birds endangered by DDT four or five decades ago have likewise returned, peregrines, eagles, osprey, and more. But in this county, more happened. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, tule elk were hunted into extinction altogether on this coast, and throughout their California habitat only a few survived. These survivors were discovered in 1874 in a tule marsh in the San Joaquin, the valley the Death Valley Forty-Niners had pronounced as Sand Walking. Their discoverers were in the process of draining the marsh for agriculture. A serious endeavor to save the species began in the twentieth century, and ten animals were reintroduced to this coast the year I left home and the county. Since then they had multiplied into the hundreds, and they are, in the present order of things, safe as a species.

I knew about the elk, but as Rich talked I began to see a picture I had not before, of all the animals who had hovered in the doorway of disappearance and then returned to this place. Elephant seals had vanished for a hundred and fifty years from this stretch of coast and by 1890 vanished from all their breeding grounds but one place in Baja, their numbers dwindled down to about a thousand. Four years after the elk returned, the first breeding pair was sighted here. Now, twenty years later, a couple thousand of them heave themselves up onto this county’s remotest beach in winter to quarrel and bask and give birth, and there are altogether about a hundred and fifty thousand of them in the world. Brown pelicans and crested egrets had come back from the brink, as had other waterbirds, and almost half the birds of North America are in this place at least some of the time, up to two hundred species at a time. The place also has a number of unique subspecies, evolved in isolation over tens of thousands of years, and more than a score of endangered and threatened species altogether, including coho salmon spawning in its streams. I had seen them too, golden female and ruby male thrashing their way up shallow water in the early dusk of drizzly midwinter.

After that day, I found a book at the house I was staying at, about how the land on which these creatures flourished was protected from development, and found my father’s name in the index. We moved back to California when he was hired to write the master plan for the county, and he spent the next five years working on a document that protects from development most of its western portion that wasn’t already under state, federal, or land-trust protection. The drive for protection came from citizens first, and it was their support that made it possible for the professionals to push their plan through, but it was the planners who wrote the rules of this protection and took much of the heat. The book spoke of “a revolutionary Marin Countywide Plan, which used ‘designing with nature’ as its method for preserving Marin’s extraordinary landscapes and preventing its cities from sprawling together.” I own a copy of the environmental plan whose title was drawn from a poem by Lew Welch quoted on the flyleaf, “This is the last place. / There is no where else to go,” and so it was called Can the Last Place Last? So far it has, though Welch didn’t. He walked into the Sierra Nevada wilds in 1971, and no trace of him was ever found.

The plan “went through fifty-seven public hearings and was adopted in 1973. . . . The plan was the inspiration of talented county planners Paul Zucker and Al Solnit. Zucker later lost his job after he lost a supervisorial race, and Solnit was the victim of vicious attacks by developers and hostile editorials. But the Plan was embraced by the public and has prevailed through minor revisions for over twenty-five years.” One summer evening when I was about nine, my father came home late and found a forgotten glass of chocolate milk gone sour on the kitchen counter. Waste enraged him, and since I was the principal drinker of chocolate milk, he rushed into my room, flicked the light on, and dashed it in my face as I slept, so that I woke up dripping with a giant roaring over me. (That the milk was a brother’s is only a detail; it was a very random universe in there.) Reading that account, I realized that what he had come home from was one of those rancorous meetings at which the fate of this place was being decided.

The house was a small place inside a larger one, or a small story inside a larger one; picture the stories nesting like Russian dolls, so that terrible things were happening in that house, but they were tied to the redemption happening on the larger scale of the county, which was in part reaction to the violent erasures going on across the country and the world. I had left the house for good a quarter of a century before and just gotten out of it in my dreams over the past year, but the county was something I chose to return to again and again, and on this return I’d seen the nesting of those stories, as well as some of the animals that had come back. I revisited the elk a few days before the day of the angel hawks. Most of them live out on the remotest peninsula of this remote place, a spit of land like a north-pointing finger, segregated from the rest of the world by a ten-foot-tall ring of cyclone fencing across its knuckle, a peninsula at whose tip I had realized that the end of the world could be a place as well as a time. They’d been lounging among the grasses and the domelike lupine shrubs, herds of cow elk with a few bulls among them and herds of young bulls who scrambled to their feet at the sound of my approach so that their antlers looked like a forest rising up. The end of the world was wind-scoured but peaceful, black cormorants and red starfish on wave-washed dark rocks below a sandy bluff, and beyond them all the sea spreading far and then farther.

#Rebecca Solnit #dreams #essay #literature #unconscious #extinction #nature

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