#and he doesn’t ever want to to disappear. preserving them in a perfect moment.

[aroace-poly-show]

thinking abt…siff and king…..mgnhdhshd

[some-kindofgnome]

meet me in the afterglow

After college graduation, you took an all-summer backpacking trip around Europe with your best friend. Now you've got one last night together before coming home as lovers.

characters: eijirou kirishima x f!reader

wc: 2.4k

tags: smut (18+ please!), aged-up characters, quirkless au, implied friends-to-lovers, fluff, mentions of drinking/the sliiiiightest bit of tipsiness, swedish condoms, no beta we die like that bottle of wine

notes: @the-moons-raes and I discussed travelling with BNHA boys at some length a lil while ago, so I wrote this sweet lil scene for her! Consider it a (very) belated birthday present my dear. 💖 xoxoo

MASTERLIST

The sky’s faded from powder-blue to apricot by the time you stumble together into the bedroom.

“Oh my god,” you giggle. You’ve been grinning all night, so hard it’s starting to hurt your wine-warmed cheeks. But this is the happiest you’ve been in a very long time.

“That was,” Eijirou starts, “one of the- no, the best meal I’ve ever had.”

“We should’ve ordered another bottle of that wine,” you muse. He’s got his hands on your hips and you twist in his grip, curling your fingers around his palms. His face has gone pink, but his eyes are sparkling and you’ve already decided you want to preserve this feeling for the rest of your life.

“I don’t think you need anything else to drink tonight,” he teases smoothly, pulling you close with his fingertips digging into the gauzy fabric of your dress. He leans down and pushes his lips against yours, the last tartness of the strawberry gelato you finished on the boardwalk still lingering in the tender flick of his tongue.

Tonight falls at the tail end of a long backpacking trip across Europe that you’ve been wanting to take for as long as you can remember. You’d never planned to take anybody with you at all, let alone the man you’d wind up falling for.

But Eiji’s always been pretty good at defying your expectations.

The rest of the summer hasn’t been this glamorous. You’d spent most nights shacked up in rickety little hostel beds, bunking together in rooms of six or camping out in the backseat of a tiny rental car. But the sleepless nights and sore backs and restricted luggage hadn’t changed a thing. You’ve been in heaven all summer long.

To celebrate your last couple of nights in this hemisphere, you checked into one of Naples’ top-rated hotels. It’s still not the most luxurious room on the market, but compared to the military-issue bunk beds you’ve been sleeping on for the past eight weeks, it might as well be paradise.

Especially now, given the changed nature of your relationship.

You got on the plane together two months ago nursing a deep, intense crush on your best friend. You’ve been close with Eijirou since your first year in college together, when he was assigned to the dorm room beside yours. And for as long as you’d known him, you assumed you’d be loving him from a distance.

But somewhere between Brussels and Berlin, the line between friend and lover started to blur. Since then, it’s been completely erased.

“Come on,” you protest, flinging your arms around his neck and clasping them together behind his head. “I can hardly feel a thing.”

He ran out of hair gel two weeks ago and he’s been wearing his hair down ever since, tied into a loose little ponytail at the nape of his neck. The dark roots of his natural colour are starting to show at his crown after going nearly two months without so much as a haircut.

To you, he’s never looked sweeter.

“That’s my point,” he insists, descending into tipsy, cheerful laughter. “You’re so drunk y’can’t feel a thing. C’mere, it’s time to get you to bed.”

His euphoric grin twists around the edges with mischief as he stoops, sweeping you off your feet with a quiet little grunt of effort. You burst out laughing, letting one arm drop around his neck as your head falls back in deepening mirth.

“Take me to bed,” you swoon, dropping purposely limp in his arms. You haven’t been able to do any of this since that night in Athens a couple of weeks ago where you miraculously had an entire hostel bunkroom to yourselves.

Even then, those cots didn’t make it easy.

Tonight you’ve got a king bed all to yourselves, which Kirishima plants you on before crossing to the window and throwing it open. The night air is velvety and sweet, rolling in like heady steam and waking your senses as you watch him ditch his shoes and crawl across the plush bedspread to settle down beside you.

“You are insanely beautiful,” he croons, propping one head on his arm and smoothing his fingers affectionately down your temple. “I can’t believe I get to tell you that.”

He leans in to kiss you after that, tasting you carefully as his hand drifts from your cheek to your neck to your side. He’s a careful kisser, tasting of the last hints of that sweet summer wine that’s filled both your heads.

Picking up on your eagerness, he breaks from your lips to push attentive little kisses down the side of your neck. But as he reaches the hem of the floaty little dress you wear, he pauses and finds your eye.

“Can I?”

He’s already sliding one palm down over the curve of your hip, but it pauses at your thigh, and the earnest little quirk in his brow is so cute you can’t help but giggle.

“Do you really need to ask?” you quip.

He hums thoughtfully against your skin, already mouthing at your collarbone. “Just making sure.”

There are oversized buttons lining the center front of your dress, and he takes his time popping open every single one. He opens the dress far enough that he could have easily pulled it down over your hips, but he doesn’t stop there. Instead, you get to watch as he works open the last button with quiet, deep concentration, and when he finally does, he pushes the folds open around your body with a loving little triumphant smile.

“There’s my girl,” he croons as he crawls atop you once more, shedding his sweaty t-shirt in the process. You’re chest-to-chest when he catches your lips again, and his skin is still a little warm from the afternoon you’d spent at the beach before dinner.

He kisses you long and low and slow, giving you plenty of time to let your thighs fall open around the slope of his hips. Eiji presses naturally forward, pushing the ridge of his pelvis and the stiff denim of his shorts against your flimsy underwear. He huffs quietly into your mouth, and as you shift and squirm beneath him you can feel his cock stirring against you.

“Eiji,” you whimper, turning your face sharply to one side. “Don’t make me wait.”

In the absence of your mouth, he noses attentively down the column of your throat. His eyelashes flutter at your jaw and you feel it when he purses his lips and swallows hard.

“Okay,” he rasps. “Okay, I gotcha.” He rears back, sitting up on his haunches to unbutton his shorts. Before he gets up to shed them, he rests a hand on the plane of your belly, smiling so innocently down at you it shouldn’t make you throb.

But it does.

“Ready for me already, pretty girl?” Eiji muses, and you have to bite your lip hard to keep from rolling over and screaming into your pillow as loudly as possible.

“Been ready for you since the beach,” you tease back, and it works, since his ears are turning red as he slips out of bed. He hooks his thumbs into the waistband of his undershorts and shucks both garments in one smooth motion, hunching over to let them drop to the floor while he steps unceremoniously out of them.

His cock’s half-hard already, sitting full and heavy between his thighs and swelling self-consciously under your gaze. He’s exactly as big as you always sort of knew he was. He’s not shy about it, either. He can’t afford to be.

But he doesn’t know how beautiful he is, sunburned and sweating in the fading golden-hour light of your last sunset in Italy. You want to pet the soft little bristle of dark hair that dusts his chest, follow the taper of it all the way down to that perfect trail that always used to disappear under his shorts.

Not anymore. You get to see him at his most vulnerable now.

And you will not misuse that trust.

“Come here,” you purr, pushing yourself onto your elbows so he can see the desire burning in your gaze for him.

He leans instinctively toward you, hands twitching by his sides. He snaps out of a little reverie with a hard blink, stooping in front of his shorts and fishing out his slim little travel wallet.

“Hang on.”

He flips through the creased euros and museum tickets, carding out a wrapped condom. He climbs back onto the bed and passes it to you with a shy little grin.

“I know you like to do the honours.”

The condom comes from a packet you bought in the wee hours at some twenty-four hour roadside convenience store before bedding down in a rented car together. The instructions are in Swedish, but you know what you’re doing.

By the time you get the condom unwrapped, Eiji’s on his knees in front of you and his cock is fully hard out of sheer anticipation. You reach between his thighs and wrap your fingers around his warm flesh, making him shudder. And you drop one sweet, warm kiss to his mouth before you focus.

He rolls his hips quietly into your touch as you handle the job with delicate precision, unrolling the condom all the way to his base.

“Ready?” He asks you, but you’re already laying back against the pillows and thumbing off your underwear, slick and aching for him.

“Get over here before I start without you,” you tease, and he is powerless to resist you. He anchors himself on his knees, hooking each of your legs over one of his powerful thighs. He reaches for you and his cock sweeps the inside of your thigh as it bobs between you. You’ve been wanting this from the moment you saw this room, the perfect ending to a life-changing trip.

Eiji sinks lower, letting the barrel of his chest rise and fall with a deep, steadying breath. He reaches between you to line himself up with you, casting his eyes up to yours when he feels you.

“Ready?” He repeats himself, and this time the humor’s gone. You nod quietly against the pillow and reach for his free hand, lacing your fingers together tightly.

You squeeze hard as he starts to slot himself inside you. He stretches you deeply, especially without any preparation. But he knows how to keep you comfortable, moving slowly and smoothly. He braces a hand on your belly as he bottoms out, but he does not pause there. Instead, he starts to ease into a lazy rhythm, sweeping his thumb between your folds to find the swelling nub of your clit.

“Fuck,” you whine, and he flinches a little inside you.

“God,” he gasps, bending over to press his forehead- sticky with sweat- into yours. “Tell me I’m not dreaming, yeah?”

You reach up and lightly pinch his chest with your free hand, and he grins above you.

“You’re good,” you confirm, hearing the breathlessness echo in your own voice.

“I’m not gonna last long like this,” he brushes. You shake your head.

“Don’t care. Just fuck me.”

His brow lifts against yours. After a chuckle of disbelief, he sits up.

“Aye aye, captain.”

He squeezes your fingers tightly and begins to thrust.

He does not hold back with you, keeping the pad of his thumb winding tight circles into your clit as he fucks you with eager diligence. You revel in the slap of your bodies, the fact that you can spread out and make noise, moan for him like you’ve always wanted to. Finally alone together for real. No stolen moments of privacy here. You can take as much as you want.

“Eiji,” you beg, beginning to clench around him as you feel the first twinges of your climax approaching.

“I’ve got you, baby,” he huffs, borderline incoherent as the flush spreads down his neck and chest. “Let go for me, I gotcha.”

In a dozen thrusts he’s got you falling, letting high whimpers escape your throat as your pussy clenches and flutters around his thick shaft. He rubs you diligently through your climax, fucking you steadily until you whine and paw his hand away, overstimulated and sensitive.

“I’m there,” he promises. “I’m there, I’m there, I’m….. f-fuck!” His jaw falls slack as he throws his head back, thrusting headlong into a tight climax that has him trembling against you. His hips go still, but you can feel the way his cock twitches inside your spent walls as he fills the condom.

When he’s finished he stays there for a moment, shoulders dropping while the rest of his body goes slack. He reaches up, scraping sweaty strands of hair off his forehead before he grins sleepily down at you.

“Did you…” He starts, eyes turning inquisitive. Someday he’ll be able to tell, but for now you’re just glad he’s asking.

“Yeah,” you hum, eyes bright despite the weight setting quickly into your limbs. It’s worth it for the pride that surges visibly through him, and he pulls out of you with a triumphant grin spreading his lips.

“Good,” he gushes, slipping quietly away to dispose of the condom. He’s hardly gone for a handful of seconds, and when he comes back he crawls eagerly up to your side and pulls you into his arms, curling his body attentively around yours.

“This is nice,” you confess, drifting pleasantly in the wine-and-sex-induced fog that rests heavy in your brain.

“Hmm?” Eiji’s already half-asleep above you, eyelids drooping as the light fades from the window beside the bed.

“This,” you prompt again. “Not having to get dressed again right away. We should do this more often.”

“I sure hope we do,” he enthuses. “When we get back, I’m not letting you unpack until we consummate our relationship on the right hemisphere.”

That was the longest you’d gone around him without laughing in a while. Even half-asleep, though, his wisecracks are enough to make you snort.

“Deal,” you hum, letting your eyes fall shut as the world bleeds out of focus around you. It’s not even eight o’clock and you’re sure you’ll have him again before nightfall. But for now, you’re more than happy to bask in the afterglow with the one person in the world you never thought you’d make it there with.

[beauty-and-passion]

A (not so) brief post about my favourite Sanders Sides ships

It all started with this ask:

I just wanted to write a short answer, I swear. Just a short answer with a tiny little explanation about why I like these ships in particular.

But then I got a bit carried away, my explanations became longer and so here I am, writing a full post.

One small clarification before starting: ships don’t have a place in my analyses. If I talk about connections between Sides, these connections are always in terms of friendships, cooperation or familial relationships. The romantic aspect is something different and I may joke about it sometimes, but it’s just a joke.

There is a time and space for romantic relationships - and it looks like that time has come. 

______________________________

Janus and Patton

I've always liked the canonical ship, in (almost) every fandom. So of course I like the canonical ship of this fandom as well :P

Jokes aside, this ship is incredibly mature, very interesting and terribly hard to talk about. The nature of these two characters, their roles and the episodes that had them involved proved how these two speak the same language, work in the same field and, ultimately, need each other.

* More similar that we think

If we look at them on a superficial level, Janus and Patton are completely opposites: one is cynical and cold, the other is a ball of sunshine. One is dark and suave, the other is goofy and bright. Janus' moral is "step on others and only care about yourself", Patton's moral is "help others because they are more important than you".

These differences became clearer over time, the more we learned about Janus and compared him with Patton. However, along these differences, some similarities started to emerge. Some qualities.

Janus and Patton want what's good for Thomas. They are humble enough to recognize their mistakes (the latest example was POF). They have a strong empathy. They’re kind. They’re mature adults (even if Patton doesn’t show it too often). And they both love and use puns.

But that’s not all. Along with these qualities, we found out that these two have similar flaws: they are both liars. They are incredibly persuasive to the point of manipulation. They have a huge influence over the mind (and the other Sides). They both deal with denial.

And this isn't just important, but it's a fundamental point for their character growth. Why? Because if they have similar flaws, if they are both liars and manipulators, then they cannot deceive each other.

And this is HUGE, especially for Patton! By his own admission, Patton lied multiple times, especially about his feelings (the Nostalgia episodes) and his thoughts (the most recent wedding/callback saga).

He always got away with it, because he was lying to other Sides and Thomas. But what would the point be, to lie to the literal embodiment of lies? Janus already knows what of his words are lies and what not, so it would be absolutely useless to do it.

Therefore, if Patton cannot lie to Janus, he cannot pretend everything is alright when it's not or hide his thoughts on a certain topic. He cannot shift the attention somewhere else or let a conversation drop. That means Patton cannot avoid confrontation about his thoughts/feelings and oh boy if he really needs to talk about them - especially with someone mature like Janus.

And yes, having someone who is able to see past your lies means being a lot vulnerable... but also a lot freerer. With Janus, Patton won’t have to pretend to be the strongest one: he can allow himself to be weak and confused, because if he doesn’t have an answer or if the weight of decisions is too much to carry, he has Janus with whom he can share it.

* A foundation of mutual respect

This point has never been fully addressed, but it was very well implied by their words/behaviours since Janus’ first appearance.

The first proof we have is CLBG: after Deceit revealed himself and disappeared, all the Sides and Thomas went through various degrees of shock, frustration and anger. Patton, on the other hand, was the only one who showed a pretty calm demeanor.

He should've been the angriest, considering that Janus took HIS place and pretended to be HIM the whole time. And yet, not only Patton didn't show any resentment, but he didn't talk bad about Janus (even if he had all the reasons to) and he even justified the other Side’s actions to Thomas:

[Patton]: Kiddo, simply put, Deceit is an inner coach that acts with the one intention of self-preservation.

Patton could’ve said anything, to make Janus appear as the worst. And his words could've had a lot of influence on Thomas, considering they were coming from his heart.

However, Patton didn't say anything too bad about Janus - not even in the following episodes.

Then we reach POF: Patton's monologue about his morals went so dramatically bad, he turned into a giant frog with abs and Janus had to sweep in to save Thomas.

In that moment, he could've said ANYTHING to make Patton appear as the worst Side ever. He had his chance on a silver plate: Patton was wrong, he had been wrong the whole time, he was literally ready to fight Thomas.

And yet, Janus took Patton's defense:

[Deceit]: He didn't mislead you on purpose, Thomas. I don't think the little guy... or... the big frog is capable of that sort of thing.

In addition to that, let’s consider Janus' whole attitude towards Patton in SvS: he basically spent an entire episode trying to make Patton understand his point.

[Deceit]: You can defend him all you like... But you can't change the facts. Is Thomas an innocent little lamb? Let's let them be the judge of that.

Why did he insist so much on this? Why not tricking Patton like he did with Roman or ignoring him like he did with Logan?

Because Janus knows how important Patton's role is and his whole behaviour shows respect towards the other Side. Unlike the others, who tend to diminish/forget Patton’s importance, Janus never did and always tried to reach him in the most honest, difficult way: through dialogue and confrontation.

And when he failed, instead of disregarding Patton’s importance, he just kept trying again, until his message finally reached the other Side.

* The perfect working partner

POF proved Patton can't bear the weight of the decision-making process all by himself. He needs another Side who can help him and Janus perfectly fills this role.

But why Janus? Why not Logan? Logan is a very mature Side, he can deal with a lot of stress, he's extremely organized and knows a lot. Surely he can help Patton with the decision-making process, right?

Not exactly. For his own admission, morals and ethics are not Logan's area of expertise (as it should be: logic can’t be influenced by what’s considered “good” or “bad”: logic is neutral). Secondly, Logic isn't an emotional-driven Side: logic is way less affected by emotions than other Sides - especially compared to Patton, who is the embodiment of emotions.

What Patton needs is a mature Side with a grey mentality, humble enough to respect him/not diminish his role, from his same area of expertise and enough emotional-driven to connect with him on an emotional/empathetic level.

And Janus is the only one who fills all those points. Even the latter, as we saw in the last part of POF:

[Patton]: Janus... Do you think there's a limit... on how many times someone can say sorry... before you have to admit... that they're just bad for you? [Janus]: Oh, definitely not. I'd love for someone to ruin Thomas' entire life one apology at a time. [Patton]: Okay. [Janus]: (After seeing Patton's reaction)The reality is that... it depends.

Janus' answer changed, the moment he realized Patton didn't get his sarcasm, by switching from ironic to honest. This is the kind of emotional connection Patton needs, something that doesn’t require words, but a small gesture that says more than a thousand words (yes, I’m also talking about that gaze and the small nod in the end card).

If we add to all of that the detail that Janus can nullify Patton's excuses and see past his lies, we have the perfect partner to help him grow up.

But this cooperation isn’t just one-sided: Janus needs Patton just as much as Patton needs him.

Why? First of all, to have a seat at the table. After years hiding, Janus can finally talk to Thomas, introduce his cynical mentality, make Thomas a little more selfish and help him grow up.

Secondly, by cooperating with Patton, Janus will become a better Side: he will learn to compromise, to work together and, most importantly, to trust Patton. And this is a particularly important point because, as I said in my analysis of POF, Janus isn’t used to trust others and he doesn’t want them to see past his barriers. Working with Patton might be exactly what he needs to trust the other Sides and lower these barriers, even a tiny bit.

* The romantic possibility

Considering all of the above points, the idea that their cooperation could evolve into something romantic-driven isn't so strange. The elements are all here, there's nothing weird to add nor need to bend canon, in order to make the ship happen. Their mutual acceptance can easily become need, learning more about each other can easily evolve into desiring each other and friendship could grow into passion.

And, of course, let's not forget marriage. These two can only end up in marriage. I mean, one is a dad, the other is a mom witch, so they are a perfect match XD

My point is: this ship isn't just a “cute couple being cute”. It's about dialogues. Conversations about themselves, their different points of view, their morals, their cooperation, how to help Thomas and the other Sides. It's based on listening to each other, on knowing each other a little more every day. On being silly together, working and failing together, going down and getting up, because there is someone by your side to lend a helping hand.

This is what makes Janus and Patton the most realistic, mature couple. And that's probably why it's so hard to perfectly nail it.

______________________________

Logan and Remus

Here it is, the couple that blew up after one episode and was confirmed in the most recent Aside.

But seriously, these two have a huge potential - first as friends/working partners, then as romantic partners. Logan and Remus need each other and the reasons are pretty clear:

- Having an interlocutor

Remus is Unleashed Creativity, a volcano of ideas in constant need of new stimuli, no matter if they are considered good or bad. After all "good and bad are all made up nonsense", as he said.

Logan is a walking encyclopedia in search of someone who wants to listen to him. He's pure, undiluted knowledge because that's what logic should be. No morals about what's good and what's bad, no emotions, nothing but neutral knowledge.

Considering that, it’s pretty clear these two have to come into contact. But what would they gain?

Well, Remus would have the stimuli he desperately craves. And Logan?

Logan would gain an incredibly smart interlocutor. And I’m not saying it because I am biased towards Remus, but because the canonical episodes showed us how smart he is. In both DWIT and WTIT Remus proved to be a quick thinker, with a sharp intellect and an even sharper eye. He's silly and over the top, but he's not an idiot and he uses everything he has for his own creative needs, no matter how small it is.

Just imagine this cleverness applied to everything Logan might say to him. Remus wouldn’t be the only one to benefit from it, but the whole creative process and, ultimately, Thomas himself, who will have better, richer ideas.

- Gaining a place

At this moment in time (just after WTIT) Remus has not been fully accepted yet. He is tolerated and his presence is a nuisance, but he’s neither wanted, nor banished. He’s just here and he has no voice on any matter.

Also because no one wants to give him a chance to prove how useful and worthy he can be. Thomas barely tolerates him, Patton does his best to ignore him, Roman doesn’t even want to see him and Virgil would rather not have any of the Others present.

The only Core Side who accepts Remus’ presence and is willing to give him a chance is Logan. He spent the entire DWIT to explain why Remus is useful for Thomas and shouldn’t be ignored, while in WTIT, he said: "There will be a time and place for you" - thus implying that, one day, Remus will finally be able to show how worthy he can be.

This is exactly what Remus needs: a Core Side who doesn’t see him as a nuisance or a villain, but as a fundamental part of Thomas that can be helpful, in his own way. Someone willing to give him a seat at the table (at least in the future). And, most importantly, someone who is powerful enough to control him.

Remus is and will always be a force of nature. He will never rest or stop being chaotic. This is why he needs someone strong by his side, someone who can’t be overcomed by his dark thoughts and that can put him back on track if necessary. And Logan proved to be perfect for this role not once, but twice.

- Understanding on a deeper level

However this cooperation won’t be beneficial just for Remus. As I said before, Remus could be a clever interlocutor for Logan. And this cleverness isn’t just related to creativity, but also to emotional understanding.

The Core Sides have known Logan for almost thirty years and yet, they have no idea of the inner turmoil raging inside him. They keep ignoring and dismissing him, clearly thinking everything is fine.

It took Remus one single day to realize what Logan’s problem is, how deeply frustrated he is and how much he’s actually angry at Thomas. Less than 24 hours and Remus knows Logan better than his long time friends.

That’s exactly what Logan needs. Someone sharp enough to notice his behaviour, find out the root of the problem and make Logan face it, instead of dismissing it because who cares (yes, Roman, I am talking about you and your “You'll be fine, Rome didn't fall in a day.”)

- The romantic possibility

I think almost all the fandom agrees that these two would have a great sex life. After all, Remus is the embodiment of Thomas' sexual urges, so he would definitely go for a very physical relationship.

But having a good sex life implies a lot of other great things: good chemistry, no comunication issues, great stability and greater trust. And, even more important, the desire to try new things together. Logan and Remus are both very curious Sides, they both want to know new things and experience them: so their relationship would probably be based on discussing new ideas, testing them and finding out together if they are good or not.

And this doesn't apply to just the sexual aspect: even just the romantic aspect or the working aspect of their relationship could have these characteristics. Logan and Remus can motivate each other, learn from one another and find new things together. They are clever enough to stimulate each other's mind, curious enough to do stuff together to learn something new and honest enough to not withdraw their opinions on any matter.

______________________________

Roman and Virgil

I am just recently starting to warm up to this couple, so I will keep this part short.

Just as it was for the previous two couples, these two can work together because canon made them work. The first part of their whole relationship is already all canonically established: at first Roman saw Virgil as a villain, then he slowly realized he could be a friend. Now moving from friends to lovers isn’t so difficult.

^ No need to demonstrate

Roman needs someone like Virgil, because Virgil is on his same level. Sure, Virgil’s mentality is way more gray-ish, but he still has a lot to learn, just like Roman.

Having someone on his side, who is on his same level is a huge relief: with Virgil, Roman doesn't have to pretend, nor to show off, nor to be dashing and perfect all the time. He knows Virgil won't care less, so he can relax. And for someone who is used to working all the time, having a moment of quiet with someone who has zero espectations is exactly what Roman needs.

Same goes for Virgil: he knows Roman won't care if he's gloomy and dark, because Roman already saw that side of him and appreciates him anyway. So no need to pretend to be different. He can relax too. And, because of his anxious nature, relaxing is exactly what he also needs.

So if they both need to relax, that implies they also need time to do it. And without expectations, without feeling like the other “is better than me and I’m slowing him down”, they can really take all the time they need, to grow at their own pace.

^ Growing together

Virgil and Roman’s is not a one-sided relationship, in which one knows more than the other and helps the other reach his level: since they are on the same level, if one of them learns something new, then it’s a victory for them both, because the other will be motivated to do more/learn more as well.

This isn’t just something I think, but something we saw in canon. During AA-part 2, Roman clearly stated that Virgil “make us... better”, thus implying that Virgil acted as a motivator for him.

Then we had FWSA and here we saw this sentence applied the other way around: Roman was the motivator and, thanks to him, Virgil overcame his own anxiety to push Thomas towards Nico. The final result was a victory for them both: Roman got the romance he’s desperately craving, Virgil found out a new aspect of himself: his bravery.

^ The romantic possibility

These two are a walking “enemies to friends to lovers” trope, so I don’t think there’s anything else to add XD

Only that they would both be quite passionate. One is Thomas’ romantic side, the other is heavily influenced by emotions: if the good one takes Virgil, he would probably be a very passionate partner.

______________________________

Two couples I understand

Janus and Remus -> I understand the appeal of this one and it would kinda make sense, especially from Remus’ point of view. Remus has (probably) sexual fantasies about anything, so I wouldn't be too surprised if he has a whole collection of sexual fantasies about the Side who is closest to him.

But also, I see them too much like father and son/bestest friends to imagine them having a romantic relationship.

So my take is more like that: Remus has sexual fantasies about Janus, just like he has sexual fantasies about anyone. They are his way to show his affection, how much he cares about Janus and wants to protect him.

But Remus is Remus and he's prone to lose control. That's why, since he reached adolescence and started to develop the sexual aspect, Janus put clear limits that give Remus enough space to express his fantasies, but never past a certain point.

So Remus can be very touchy (because, well, he's Remus) and extremely physical in showing his affections, but never go below a certain point. He can talk in full details about all his sexual fantasies to Janus, but never try to sexually force him. He can try to seduce him or propose sexual things, but never pretend he will accept.

And so, over time, it became a sort of internal joke between them: Remus tells his fantasies at the breakfast table, while Janus rolls his eyes with a "very interesting", they have a laugh, they keep going with their day. Remus wants to cuddle, Janus will cuddle. Remus proposes sex, Janus will just laugh and give him a forehead kiss.

In other words, they are the kind of friends who you can find sprawled on a couch, one on top of the other and imagine they're a couple, while that's just how they read a book together.

Logan and Roman -> This couple isn’t bad at all and I really like the idea of these two having a sorta-romantic crush on each other. It can lead to a lot of poetic/romantic possibilities.

The only problem is: Logan is logic, therefore he would destroy all the romance with one sentence XD and the romantic, poetic scene evoked would turn into these two arguing like madmen.

So, well, maybe the hate-sex would be great, but they would definitely spend too much time arguing. Still, I am very curious about it, so I will keep searching for stuff about them.

[rheawritessometimes]

In Bloom

{ Xiao x GN!Gardener!Reader }

{ Summary } Looking for flowers is more dangerous than it seems.

{ Warnings } Violence, Injury, Mention of Death, Not Even Proofread.

{ Notes } Reader runs on dumb luck and also is kind of like an ecologist or something. Reader is a bit of an airhead. This is probably the most serious fic I've written, with no jokes or additions stricken out. But yeah I just typed this out and didn't even read it over, so if it's bad... Just know this is just a little something while I work on longer garbage. Masterlist

{ Word Count } 2,112

Appealing to the Vigilant Yaksha was an easy, one could even say effortless, thing for you. You hadn't taken the almond tofu route as others before you had, instead, you left him some Qingxin flowers. These flowers did not come from the peaks of Huaguong Stone Forest nor the Mingyun Village, rather they were among the finest specimens you had grown in your garden. The translucent white petals were soft like velvet and entirely free from blemish.

Your small gift to the adeptus wasn't exactly intentional. In truth, you had left the flowers on the balcony of Wangshu Inn entirely by accident and when you returned to retrieve them they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was a pale man with dark hair leaning over the balcony. When you halted your approach, he turned his head towards you, indicating he had heard your footsteps.

Striking golden eyes seemed to gaze straight through you, sending a chill down your spine. His expression was entirely neutral, you couldn't get even a hint as to what he was thinking. Nothing about his outward appearance screamed danger, but the ominous aura you sensed made you take a step back.

"My apologies, I didn't mean to disturb you," you squeaked out, sounding a lot less confident than you had intended. You take a step backward, but couldn't bring yourself to tear your eyes from him.

"Don't apologize. You're welcome to stay," he replied after a few beats of silence, his tone sounding strained for a reason you couldn't discern.

"Um, okay, thank you," you replied politely, feeling it would be too awkward to leave now. It felt to you as though you were now trapped here for a little while out of social obligation. You stepped out towards the railing, deciding to at least enjoy the view if you had to stay.

The man didn't look at you, but you couldn't help but take in his appearance. He was objectively good-looking with bright amber eyes, dark hair with teal highlights, and his stoic expression. His clothing wasn't outlandish, but it's not the type you would commonly see on the streets of Liyue.

It took a while for the dark mask resting against the man's hip to catch your attention, but once it did you felt like a fool. It was not common knowledge, however, the fact an adeptus resided at the Wangshu Inn was not exactly a secret. One which you were privy to. The mask was the most obvious indication of his status as an adeptus. Not just any adeptus, not that any of them were anything to look down upon, but one of the Yakshas. The last of the five Yakshas.

"Alatus," the name escapes your lips as a whisper before you can think to stop it. Immediately your eyes widen, but before you could issue an apology the man just sighs softly. It doesn't sound particularly angered, but rather weary.

"Xiao. My name is Xiao," he says without turning to look at you. That's all he says before vanishing in a cloud of black mist and falling feathers of anemo energy. The mist and feathers are both quick to dissipate, leaving you standing with your mouth hanging open.

After that encounter, it had become a regular occurrence, at least once weekly, for you to pick one of the finest flowers from your garden and bring it to Wangshu Inn to leave on the balcony, or give directly to Xiao should he show himself. Most often you brought him a Qingxin, but occasionally you would substitute other flowers as not to end up plucking every Qingxin you had grown. You never picked the very best flower, either. Even for an adeptus you couldn't bring yourself to pick the best examples, rather letting them grow in peace for your prolonged enjoyment.

It wasn't until the third time you had come to the inn with a flower for Xiao that he was waiting for you on the balcony. Seeing the yaksha there made you pause, heart skipping a beat in surprise. He turned from his place looking out across the landscape to see you, certainly not as surprised to see you as you were him.

The way he looked expectantly at the flower in your hand has you realizing you had been standing there frozen. You moved, extending the flower out to him in offering. He took it delicately from your hand, looking it over for a moment.

"Thank you," he said softly, so quiet you almost didn't hear it at all. You could only nod stiffly in response. He scoffed at you before turning around again to lean against the balcony railing.

Just as it had the first time you met the yaksha, it felt wrong to just leave. So, you decided to survey the landscape of Liyue with him in silence. After the first few minutes, the atmosphere became rather comfortable between the two of you. Still, by the time he disappeared in a cloud of black mist and anemo feathers, neither of you had spoken a word.

This morning you were out early in the morning to explore the wilds of Liyue. You were no adventurer, though. Your purpose was to analyze the populations of certain flora and fauna. These were trips you made often to various parts of Liyue, wishing to preserve the life of endangered species, and always alone. Bringing people along to the locations of such rare organisms, be it plant or animal, was a dangerous thing. In many instances, rare means valuable and there are those who would do anything for some Mora.

Today you found yourself in Dihua Marsh to check up on the Glaze Lily population. Based on your counts, the number hadn't fluctuated greatly since your last visit, there were even a few new blooms. This brought you great relief, Glaze Lilies seemed to be somewhat of a symbol of Liyue and it would sadden you to see their wild population disappear, even if they remained in Qingce Village and at the Yujing Terrace. It wouldn't be the same.

Once you had sung a few songs to the flowers, not worried about anyone hearing you in this rather secluded area, you made your way back to one of the main roads. The long walks back to the harbor always ended up with you lost deep in thought, which wasn't always a good thing. Lost deep in your own mind, you didn't notice the slow advance of a small group of Treasure Hoarders until it was too late.

There was no time to run away as they surrounded you, it was unlikely you could have outrun them anyways. Fortunately, it didn't take very long for the Treasure Hoarders to discover you had absolutely nothing of value on you, and while they may be thieves it wasn't often a Treasure Hoarder was a murderer. Of course, they had roughed you up a bit before ultimately leaving you alone. There was a nasty scrape on your cheek and you were sure you would be bruised in the morning, but you weren't seriously injured.

By the next day, your muscles ached and bruises had appeared in various places on your body, but the scrapes had stopped bleeding and it was nothing that would stop you from bringing your usual offering to Xiao. You spent some time perusing your garden, looking for the perfect gift. You settled on a Silk Flower, there was some worry in your mind that Xiao would dislike it because they did grow right outside of the Wangshu Inn, but you hope the exceptional fragrance and color of this specimen would gain his appreciation.

Mindful not to fiddle with the flower as to preserve its pristine state, you worried the whole walk to the inn. Even if the adeptus wasn't present, if he rejected the offering you felt you would know. Maybe you would find the flower sitting where you left it on your next visit, or maybe Verr Goldet would tell you about the silk flower she found laying on the balcony. Your heart clenched at the thought and you couldn't help but wonder when you had started seeking the yaksha's approval.

You hadn't even realized you arrived at the inn until you were stepping off the elevator, lost in thought again. Shaking your head, you thought it would be good if you started paying more attention. Getting ambushed by again was the last thing you wanted, the next time it could be worse than petty thieves.

Pushing the negative thoughts from your mind, you climbed the stairs to the balcony you so often visited. Your muscles ached in quiet protest, but the pain was mild. Peeking over the stairs, you spotted Xiao.

For the first time, he was already facing you, leaning with his back against the railing. You wondered if he had spotted you on your way to the Inn, offering him a polite smile as a silent greeting. You extended the Silk Flower to him once you stepped out onto the balcony.

"What happened to you?" Xiao asked immediately, tone stern. He took the flower from you without even sparing a glance down at it. Did he not like Silk Flowers?

"Oh, um, I just bumped into some Treasure Hoarders yesterday. Nothing serious," you answered after finally processing his question, bringing your hand up to the scrape on your cheek without thinking. His frown deepened with your response and the adeptus crossed his arms over your chest.

"You were hurt," he pointed out bluntly. You felt small under his hard stare.

"Oh, it's nothing, um, serious," you assured him with a nervous laugh. He only furrowed his brows at your response.

"If ever again you find yourself in any danger, call my name. Adeptus Xiao. I will be there when you call."

At his words, your cheeks heated up. Was this some sort of special treatment, or did he offer this to anyone? It felt wrong to receive such kindness from an adeptus if it was only for you.

"Promise," he pressed when you didn't answer.

"Okay, I will. If I'm ever in danger, I'll call you," you agreed meekly, feeling a great weight put upon you under his amber gaze. He huffed before disappearing in his usual manner, and it was impossible for you to tell if he was upset with you.

The next time you visited the inn, Xiao hadn't appeared. This wasn't unusual, but the worry that you had displeased him seeped into your bones. You tried to ignore this feeling, going out often to check on wildlife populations and spending extra time tending to your garden. Keeping busy was the best way to take your mind off your worries and stay productive.

A week after your meeting with the Vigilant Yaksha, you were back at Dihua Marsh checking on the Glaze Lilies. You were sitting in the middle of the lilies, singing softly to the patch of flowers when the sound of shouting reached your ears. Looking up, you noticed two hilichurls accompanied by a mitachurl with a stone shield who was charging your way.

There would be no time for you to get up and out of the way, so you closed your eyes and braced for the impact. You could only pray it wouldn't kill you, but even if it didn't you would probably be unable to escape death by the hilichurls soon after.

The impact never came, instead, a gust of wind blew past you and you wondered if the mitachurl had somehow run past you. When you opened your eyes, you saw Glaze Lily petals swirl into the air, dancing around the familiar figure of the Vigilant Yaksha. The mitachurl was already crumbling to dust, returning to the Abyss with it's hilichurl companions.

Xiao turned to face you, mask dematerializing from his face and reappearing at his hip. When he extended his hand down to help you get up, you furrowed your brows wondering why he had been here. Was it incredible luck, or had he perhaps been following you?

Taking his hand, you let him pull you up onto shaky legs. He didn't let go, looking a little worried you'd fall. You finally looked up to his face, scanning golden eyes.

"Why are you here?" you finally asked, throat feeling a bit scratchy.

"I told you I would be there when you called."

His words only confused you further until it dawned on you, the scratchy feeling in your throat was awfully similar to that which came with yelling. Had you truly called his name without even thinking, without even realizing?

"Thank you, Xiao."

[lokilickedme]

The Way

I’m writing horror again.  I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason.  And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly.  Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note:  I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you.  But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed.  It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case.  We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to.  There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did.  If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us.  We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew.  Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care.  It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE.  There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish.  As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me.  I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

----------

This is, regrettably, a true story.  Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

----------

----------

They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

.

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway.  Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption.  Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances.  We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks.  Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well.  You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave?  The one who died under mysterious circumstances?  That one.

He left the way he always came in.  Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking.  She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998.  I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband.  He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live.  It wasn’t bad.  He’d tell you otherwise.  The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it.  I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times.  But now I know.  That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back.  It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway.  This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

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It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of.  The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon.  My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other.  James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him.  Perception bias, he said.  Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly.  We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe.  We meant it.  He made people nervous.  He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know.  It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones.  We were the smart ones, in retrospect.  I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family.  But mostly the congregation.  It was always more important than anything else.  And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking.  Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right?  The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition.  They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home.  Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed.  God’s not like that.  And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it?  I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain.  A moral code, yes.  But isn’t that what God is, really?  Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us.  But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result.  Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned.  And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water.  The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow.  He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest.  So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay.  I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that.  Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself.  It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day.  The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that.  It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further.  Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different.  What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person.  I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then.  You were just weird, or you weren’t.  And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking.  But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to.  He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known.  And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now.  I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult.  There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it.  My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later.  My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though.  He took the easy way.  He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

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December 22, 1998.  Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us.  The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work.  We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years.  The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires.  Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making.  He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot.  Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time.  I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother.  He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior.  The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong.  Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult.  It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

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My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation.  They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise.  I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son.  I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy.  She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather.  Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much.  He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders.  My grandmother couldn’t swim.  We could make another Ruthie, he said.  But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice.  I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy.  I was never close to him.  But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me.  I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life.  But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak.  I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear.  And I felt bad.  I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized.  My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying.  Granddads are supposed to be fun.  Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam.  And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him.  She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on.  She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown.  That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next.  How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand.  It affected her.  She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it.  And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for.  He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad.  The homestead.  The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived.  A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives.  James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for.  She’d wanted us all to stay.  We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said.  That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be.  We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke.  It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me.  James was dead, had been for years.  Robbie was dead now too.  Dad was gone, so was granddad.  Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them.  We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life.  And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts.  Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land.  And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew.  The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it.  It was just an old grave.  The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground.  My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him.  He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it.  He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line.  It was a cool jacket.  Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era.  He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door.  To this day I can’t sort it.  It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness.  It wasn’t grief.  It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for.  It was cold.  I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it.  And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said.  He’s in his house.  I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told.  He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants.  There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do.  And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point.  He said he didn’t know.  He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important.  Something tells me it was.  Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again.  He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow.  I’m sorry.

What do we do?  I asked him.  I’ve never felt more blank.  What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother.  I remember thinking that was a good idea.  Robbie would know what to do.  He always did.  Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them.  He would get on it, whatever needed doing.  He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut.  I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

----------

It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it.  Someone you saw just yesterday.  Someone who was alive.  Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow.  And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from.  The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life.  I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him.  I never saw him.  I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van.  I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with.  And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that.  Some days it helps.  And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped.  I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

----------

For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill.  Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable.  We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm.  Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office.  There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down.  And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice.  By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose.  The end report was obtained two months later.  It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue.  There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death.  His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life.  There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery.  He was a secretive person, intensely private.  He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family.  He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep.  There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box.  He simply hadn’t woken up to use it.  Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said.  He was melted, literally.  It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say.  He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me.  I’ll go with you if you want to go.  But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead.  I never saw any proof that he was gone.  He just wasn’t there anymore.  There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

----------

Dad was different from that day on.  He’d always been stoic, terse, strict.  My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years.  The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him.  He was nicer suddenly.  Mellow.  Kind.  After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny.  The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before.  He and I became friends.  I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it.  But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again.  And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again.  He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him?  She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished.  Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes.  I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager.  I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well.  She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority.  She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me.  I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down.  I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever.  It changed me forever.  That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either.  She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me.  It was the first of several disownings over the next few years.  I got used to it.  We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk.  It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

----------

A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together.  It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him.  The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there.  I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric.  James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end.  The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it.  I don’t know why.  It was dry.

He was gone.

----------

David and I laughed a lot that day.  James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted.  And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me.  He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him.  He was unknowable and therefore unbindable.  But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub.  I’m not sure what it went to.  Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on.  There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it.  Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before.  Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved.  David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his.  I told him to take it.  It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something.  One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

----------

My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived.  After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge.  He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another.  There had been several more on the floor around the bed.  My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone.  Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how.  Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with.  My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing!  We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common.  Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation?  Dad was the only one that spoke to them.  They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that.  My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

----------

The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it.  Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

----------

The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us.  There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway.  There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret.  In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring.  We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death.  We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me.  James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway.  The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

----------

We never felt safe on the hill again.  Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession.  She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice.  We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness.  But we knew she was evil.  We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right.  But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself.  She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive.  The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife.  He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails.  He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat.  One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death.  She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming.  She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies.  Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come.  At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized.  She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load.  She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

----------

We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house.  The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would.  She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it.  The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to.  They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out.  I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her.  She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently.  No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face.  It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment.  That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are.  I can’t do that.  I won’t let her win that way.  I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name.  I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away.  My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said.  He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered.  But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

----------

Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking.  He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west.  The way we were going.  And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

.

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today

.

[tlcwrites]

Two Hearts Make a Whole

Prompt: “Kiss me again, like you mean it.” Photo prompt below.

Summary: NYC Pride is for celebration, and occasionally, long-overdue revelations.

Word Count: 2,001

Tags/Content warnings: Marvel. Stucky. If you have a problem with it, there's the door. SFW. Slight TFATWS spoilers so read at your own risk. Platonic Reader. Two idiots in love. Technically canon-divergent because I'm still in my everyone-is-alive-and-in-this-timeline happy place that I will never ever leave fuck you very much Russo brothers but not AU. Found family. All the feels. Complete and total LGBTQ+ support. Lots of bad language words because #me. Un-beta'd.

Author’s Note: Okay so yes this is technically 4 weeks late for @autumnleaves1991-blog's Writer Wednesday weekly challenge. BUT, it was incredibly important to me to finish this one before Pride month is over. Made it by the skin of my teeth.

Happy Pride, y’all. If you’re out, you’re amazing. If you’re closeted, you’re amazing. However you identify is valid and important. Trans folx are LGBTQ+. Bisexuals are LGBTQ+. Ace folx are LGBTQ+. Anyone who identifies or thinks they may be as queer is LGBTQ+. All are welcome in the family. You have the right to choose your pronouns and we have the responsibility to use them. Live whatever your truth looks like to you and love each other. Love is love is love is love. If your family doesn’t accept you for you, I’m your mom now and I’ve got mom hugs available on demand. Homophobes and TERFS can fuck off and roll in poison ivy. Always punch Nazis. Pride shouldn't be limited to the month of June. And don’t you dare forget that Black and Brown trans women were the ones who rioted at Stonewall, and we owe everything to their bravery. Don’t forget that much of popular ‘gay’ culture was appropriated from Black women. And for more facts about Pride that you should absolutely know, Rawiyah Tariq (@ mammyisdead on Instagram) has a phenomenally good overview.

“Oh my god.” You gasp loudly. "Oh my GOD. Is that-"

“What?!” Instantly in First Avenger Protective Mode™️, Steve surveys the crowd, wishing he had an actual shield instead of the screen printed one on his shirt. “What is it?”

You gasp again, smacking Sam’s arm repeatedly. “OHMYGOD IT IS HOLY FUCK.”

“First; ow.” Now-Cap rubs his bicep. “Second; clue in the class before Steve has an aneurysm, please.”

Vibrating with excitement doesn’t begin to describe your current state. “HER ROYAL HIGHNESS MISS LEMON MERINGUE IS STANDING RIGHT FUCKING THERE.”

With the finesse of a shampoo commercial, Bucky's dark locks fly as he whips around. “What?!”

“RIGHT THERE RIGHT THERE RIGHT THERE.” You abandon a relieved Sam and latch on to Bucky’s vibranium arm. “Oh my GOD I love her so fucking much.”

“She was robbed, absolutely fucking robbed,” he agrees, craning his neck to get a better view. “Divine Tension’s lip sync was shameful.”

Sam glances at Steve, who is slowly coming out of protector mode. “What the ever-loving hell are they talking about?”

“RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Nat flicks more confetti at both Cap-the-former and Cap-the-current. “They watch it every week.”

“Really, Steven, for a guy with enhanced super senses, you miss a lot.” Tony hefts a bedazzled Morgan higher on his back. The toddler, accompanied by Scott playing air-piano on the ground, sings along with the ABBA song being blasted at full volume through the street. Tony continues as if this is an everyday occurrence. “Why do you think both of your People disappear every Friday evening?”

Ears pink, Steve mumbles something.

“What?!” The only other one with hearing enhanced enough to hear a murmur over the cacophony of several thousand people belting out the chorus of ‘Dancing Queen’ at the top of their lungs, Bucky turns to stare at his friend. “You thought we were datin’?”

Steve’s blush extends down his neck.

You and Bucky stare at each other for a moment before you both collapse on each other, exploding into stomach clenching, thigh slapping laughter.

“I’m gonna guess that’s a ‘no’?” Clint confirms with Nat.

“Oh, a big ‘no’.” She watches affectionately as you and Bucky calm down enough to look at each other, breathe for a second, and both promptly dissolve into hysterics once more. “Like, the biggest ‘no’.”

Sam crossed his arms across his chest, his stoic stance so reminiscent of Steve it’s amusing (as well as a beautiful disparity to the sequined crop top he’s sporting. Oof, those abs.). “How do I not know about this?”

“Because you’re not a former super spy?” The usually-Black-but-today-Rainbow Widow tosses the last of her confetti at Tony, who spins a jubilant Morgan into it. “Or because you and that leggy barista from the lobby coffee shop are too busy playing hide-the-“

“-Baby Shark!” Morgan suddenly shrieks, flailing towards a guy on roller blades wearing a fin and tail (and not much else).

“Yeah,” Nat finishes with a smirk, “Hide-the-Baby Shark.”

Sam flips her a gesture that makes Clint laugh and Bruce sigh.

You and Bucky have finally managed to pull yourselves together. “Oh my god, Steven Grant,” you gasp, wiping tears from your eyes. “That’s the funniest fucking shit I’ve ever fucking heard.”

“Language!”

Steve glares at Tony. “One. Time. It was one. Time.”

Bucky slings his flesh arm around Steve’s shoulders. “Oh, punk. You may have perfect vision now, but sometimes you’re still as blind as you were before.”

Visiortn himself nods sagely. “Humans can be quite unperceptive when it comes to matters of the heart.” Vision casts a fond smile at Wanda, who is using her powers to make Pietro’s tinsel wig fly on and off. “Sometimes you have to look harder to see what’s right in front of your nose.”

A confused frown on that handsome face, Captain Clueless looks at Bucky. “Why do I feel like everyone else knows something that I don’t?”

His bestie sighs deeply. “Because, Stevie, almost everyone else on this planet knows that my tastes tend towards tall, blonde, blue-eyed knuckleheads who have zero sense of self-preservation.”

“And an ass you could bounce a quarter off of,” Scott helpfully supplies.

“And that,” Bucky agrees.

Steve frowns.

You press your palms to your eyes in vexation. “You, Steve. He’s talking about you.” (Seriously, how has this idiot survived for over a century while being so dumb?)

Whatever he was expecting, it was certainly not that. “He-“ The Man With A Plan gapes as he turns to his oldest friend. “You-“

“Me,” Bucky says gently.

Even though you’re slightly surprised that Bucky is going to do this in such a public forum, you can’t help but be so proud of your friend. It has taken a long time for Bucky to believe he deserves to be happy. There are days he still sinks into that dark place, where his inner demons whisper that he should have fought harder against his Hydra captors, and that his past actions were still somehow his fault. Those are the days no amount of baking or Modern Marvels will bring him out of his funk. You, Steve, Sam, and Nat have all held those strong shoulders as they shook with sobs, overwhelmed by the shame and horror at what his hands had done without his consent.

But he’s here. He’s free. And he’s smiling nervously at his best friend.

“I-” Steve is short-circuiting. “Me?!”

“Stevie.” With the kind of tender patience that can only be born of a lifetime of keeping (or attempting to keep) an idiot such as one Steven Grant Rogers from flinging himself headlong into every fight he comes across, Bucky moves his flesh hand to the back of Steve’s neck. His face is full of such soft affection that you almost want to look away for fear of intruding on this suddenly intimate moment. “What do you think ‘til the end of the line’ means, you idiot? You’ve been it for me since I was thirteen-years-old.”

Blue eyes are locked with blue eyes as Steve processes this revelation. “I-” He shakes his head as if to declutter his thoughts. “This whole time?”

“Since the first time I saw that asshole knock you down, and your scrawny ass climbed right back up.” A wry chuckle escapes as Bucky reminices. “You were ninety pounds soaking wet, and you stood there, against a guy who was three times your size, and never waivered for a second. It was magnificent.”

“I don’t like bullies,” is Steve’s quiet response.

Bucky’s grin is adoring. “I know, sweetheart.” He gently strokes the back of Steve’s neck with his thumb. “You’ve always had a heart way bigger than your brain.”

Steve is still back on the first part of Bucky’s admission. “If you’ve felt- if you-” He’s practically pleading. “Why didn’t you say anything then?”

Bucky shrugs, attempting and failing nonchalance. “It was a different time, you know?” He’s uncharacteristically unsure of himself, the subtle waiver in his voice revealing the anxiety born of a lifetime of being forced to hide his truth. “I mean, you remember how it was; you didn’t talk about, no one talked about- about being- about people like...” He swallows thickly.  “And I was so scared you didn’t, that you weren’t-” His voice breaks.

Even though you’ve all been emotionally invested in this love story for years, the entire team respectfully pretends not to listen as the former Winter Soldier quietly admits his deepest secret to his closest friend. It’s enraging as Bucky confesses yet another way he's been a victim of his circumstances, and denied his right to live freely without derision. Once more, you’re awed by his resilience.

“-it was a risk I couldn’t take,” Bucky finally gets out, that stubborn fire back in his eyes. “I couldn’t lose you, Steve. I couldn’t chance it. I could live with just being your friend and only your friend so long it meant you were in my life.”

Stunned silence meets the end of his confession. Steve’s face is impassive, those cerulean eyes uncharacteristically inscrutable.

You can all tell Bucky is heading steadily towards dread and heartbreak the longer Steve takes to respond. You and Sam exchange a look, both ready to intervene if Steve demonstrates any of the abhorrent attitudes that were so prevalent in the society of his youth. It would be completely out of character for him, but...

Finally, Steve speaks. “You’re telling me,” he says, his words slow and deliberate, “that you made me wait ninety-three years to tell me you’ve felt the same way about me as I have about you since the day you picked me up out of that alley?!”

The whole found family breaths a collective sigh of relief as Steve pulls Bucky even closer, broad chest to broad chest.

“Okay, to be fair, you were an ice cube for most of that time and I wasn’t exactly available for a relationship.” Bucky’s grin stands in contradiction to his mullish defense. “But yeah, that’s the gist of it.” There’s the Bucky you all know and love, biting his lip with those perfect white teeth. “Now, punk, I’d really like to kiss you now, but first I need you to say you want me to.”

“You-” Steve’s throat works as he attempts- and fails- to rein in his emotions. “You jerk.”

And then the Star Spangled Man seizes the president of the Sometimes-Former-Assassins Club by his ridiculously perfect face and crashes their mouths together.

At any Pride event, seeing two men kissing is, obviously, to be expected. But seeing The First Avenger and The White Wolf attempting to swallow each other’s tongues is not at all routine. As people realize what is happening, the crowd is whipped into a frenzy the likes of which is usually reserved for the aftermath of sporting events and elections that defeat fascists.

Watching the two men embrace, Scott sniffles loudly. “I’m gonna cry, I’m so happy.”

He’s certainly not the only one. Wanda has a watery smile as she wraps her arms around Vision and Pietro; Pepper, Tony, and Bruce are watching with fond parental energy; you and Sam sandwich Peter between the two of you, grins practically splitting your faces. Even Nat’s eyes look suspiciously shiny and she and Clint sling their arms around each other with platonic affection. And that’s not counting the several thousand people who are cheering for love being love being love being love.

When they finally break their embrace, the Centennial twins are startled to see they’ve collected quite an audience.

“Uh, so…” Suddenly bashful, Steve glances back to his- partner? Boyfriend? Soulmate? Is there a word that can accurately describe two people who have found each other time and again in a world that seems hell-bent on keeping them apart?- his ears practically maroon with embarrassment. For a guy with one of the most-recognized faces in the world, Steve is still incredibly and endearingly uncomfortable with attention. “Buck?”

Bucky seems just as stunned as Steve.

Thankfully, the masses demonstrate the usual support that’s the hallmark of Pride. “LOVE IS LOVE!” someone screams in the crowd. It’s quickly echoed, and chants fill the park.

The attention momentarily off them, the former Winter Soldier and his giant himbo of a soulmate look back at each other. You pretend not to watch through the happiest tears as they embrace again, bringing their foreheads together. The relief they share is palpable, as they’re finally able to show the world- and each other- the love they’ve each hidden for so long.

Bucky’s voice is so soft you have to strain to hear it. “You have no idea how much m’in love with you, Stevie.”

“Pretty sure I do,” Steve answers, bringing a hand up to carefully wipe the tears from Bucky’s face. “‘cause it’s as much as I love you, Buck.”

Bucky's answering grin can only be described as saucy. “Then kiss me again, like you mean it.”

And Steve, for once in his long life, does exactly as ordered.

---

A/N: “The Sometimes-Former-Assassins Club” is from Starry_Emerald173’s BRILLIANT The Avengers Wrangler over on AO3. If you haven’t read it yet, drop what you’re doing and do so immediately. Make sure you're not drinking any liquids, or your keyboard/phone may be in peril.

[shysneeze]

good enough (draco malfoy x fem!reader)

Good Enough

Draco Malfoy x fem!Slytherin!Reader 

*based loosley on the song ‘line without a hook’ by ricky montgomery*  

Request: can I ask for Draco x reader where the reader is sassy, but also kind Slytherin (like one of the kind Slytherin)?? And Draco has a huge crush on her? Super fluffy? ~ @lennylangdraws 

Warnings: low self-esteem, angst, smidge of house stereotyping, i don’t know the meaning of fluff im so sorry 

Authors note: you asked for fluff and I have no excuses for how this turned out except this song has been stuck in my head for weeks now. I hope you like it anyway despite the angst... i tried to make it fluffy make up at the end?

Also, I’m not saying this is a prequel to vulnerable love, but it kinda fits... pretty sure it makes vulnerable love hurt more though.)

.

Draco wasn’t sure it was possible to want back what he’s never had.

He never knew being stuck in the awkward phase of being an ‘almost couple’ is something he could miss, that he’d ever long to feel the heat that would creep up his cheeks when their eyes met, to feel the nauseating butterflies flap in his stomach when she smiled at him or the jolt of nervous energy that would rip through him whenever their fingers accidentally grazed each other’s under tables or in corridors.

Yet now that those little things are beyond his grasp, he’s desperate for them again, desperate for her. It might be easier to miss her if she were gone, rather than just sitting at the other end of the Slytherin table, or across the room during classes, it would be easier not to see her, the constant reminder of what he’s allowed him self to ruin.

They weren’t supposed to get along, every conflicting personality trait dooming them to a life as enemies. Everyone knows her, the ‘nice’ Slytherin. It’s a title given to her by her classmates, the too-cocky Gryffindors who can’t see past Slytherin’s bad reputation as bullies and snobs, a bad-reputation fuelled by Draco Malfoy himself.

No one could have expected them to end up the way they did, dates in Hogsmeade or hushed conversations by the common room fire in the early hours of the morning and afternoons spent by the lake. No one could have expected them to get along so well.

Draco knows that everyone has expected this though, for them to fall apart before they’ve even had the chance to begin. It’s what they’ve expected of him all along after all, to break her heart.

He’s pretty sure he hasn’t got the right to be looking for her like this, seeking her out desperately to get her back, once again deluded into believing he ever had her in the first place. He’s the one who called it off in a moment of certainty that it was the right thing to do, a selfless act. And so it’s wrong for him to be here right now, back in their secret spot.

She’s exactly where he assumed she would be, curled beneath the tree she was always affectionately calling theirs. His entire body tenses painfully at the sight of her, face hidden in her palms and body shaking, not from the cold, but from the trembling of barely silenced sobs.

He wonders if it’s his racing heart that she can hear that alerts her to his presence and has her looking up from her hands, teary eyes meeting his in surprise. Then, she pulls her brows into a well-justified scowl and a lump forms in Draco’s throat that he can’t seem to swallow.

“What are you doing here?”

An incredibly valid question for which Draco can only provide selfish answers. It seems silly to tell her that he’s hear to win her back, and futile given her growing anger. Yet he won’t be able to live with himself if he doesn’t, miserable without her.

“I miss you.” He gulps honestly. “Truthfully, I’ve been a mess without you.”

“Merlin, Draco.” She gasps out a laugh of disbelief. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you started ignoring me. Frankly, that isn’t really my issue.”

“I know.” He sighs apologetically. “I know, I didn’t mean-“

“Just get it over with, Draco.” She rolls her eyes. “Say your piece and leave me alone.”

He nods, taking hesitant steps forward towards her, the frost coated grass crunching under foot. She avoids his eyes as he takes a seat beside her, staring determinedly at her lap and making a conscious attempt to hide the quickly accumulating tears.

“Aren’t you cold?”

She lets out a loud exasperated sigh and refuses him an answer. He agrees with the sentiment of it, regretted the stupidity of it the minute it left his lips. Still, he leans forward to pull the Slytherin scarf from his neck and twists himself to allow him to wrap it loosely around hers, fussing with it until he’s reassured that she’ll be warmer for it.

“You looked cold.”

“Tis’ the season.” She mumbles sarcastically.

Her sarcasm is another thing he’s missed from her, and it draws a momentary smile to his face. Then, the moment is over, and his eyes have fixed on the tear stains painting her cheeks, proof of his own fatal mistake.

“I’m so sorry, (Y/N).”

She scoffs.

“Two weeks overdue.”

“I know.” He agrees sheepishly. “I know, (Y/N).”

“Then why are you only here now?” She questions. “Why did you do it in the first place? You can’t just act like you have feelings for someone then disappear and ignore them for weeks!”

Her voice wobbles and cracks at the end, much to her own dismay, and each breath she takes is jagged in the way one’s always is when trying to conceal tears. He watches her press the balls of her palm to her eyes in frustration, letting out a small whimper that has every inch of him aching with remorse.

Part of him, a self-preserving part, tells him to lie. It’s a side of himself he’s grown to hate recently, the side that pushed him into this mess in the first place, and so he knows better than to bargain with it again. So, with a deep breath, he chooses to tell the truth, he chooses to be vulnerable.

“I’m not good enough.”

Although exhaled in a whisper the revelation is startlingly loud. Perhaps its due to the serene quiet always felt on crisp cold days like today, where the sun hangs low in the sky and the lake lies unimaginably still, or perhaps it’s the raw honestly in the statement that makes it seem so alarmingly bold.

She blinks at him, lips parting in surprise and brows furrowing in confusion or concern, Draco isn’t sure. He can hear his pulse in his ears, a slight trembling in his hands that he knows has nothing to do with the chilly breeze. He’s done something profound, terrifying even, and opened that vulnerably part of himself to someone, with no control over what happens to it next.

“What?” She manages.

“Everyone knows it, (Y/N).” He explains nervously. “I’m a terrible match for you.” 

“Who the hell is everyone” She frowns. “Since when did they matter?”

There is a certain protective edge to her voice that he doesn’t deserve, but it replays itself in his head over and over, clinging to it for hope. It takes him a moment to let it go again, to push it down and answer.

“They’re right.” He sighs. “You’re too good a person for me, I’m too Slytherin.”

The concern instantly leaves her eyes, she sits forward with an urgent look of disbelief and another of her signature scoffs. She’s giving him an inspective look, trying to figure out if he’s serious, or if he’s suddenly picked up a new, strange sense of humour.

“You’re kidding, right?”

He isn’t quite sure what to say and his silence fuels another disbelieving shake of her head.

“I am a Slytherin, Draco.” She exclaims. “No matter what those big-headed Gryffindors are always saying, I was sorted into Slytherin and I’m proud of it- you’re supposed to be proud too, not agreeing with those stupid stereotypes.”

“It’s different.” He exhales in frustration. “I am those stupid stereotypes!”

Draco Malfoy has never been considered modest.

Self-confidence isn’t a trait earned in the Malfoy family clan, but rather inherited between generations, a birth right bestowed upon them the minute they are old enough to understand. It’s a confidence Draco has always been comfortably protected by, unwaveringly sure of his own self-importance gifted to him by his ancestors

Yet something about the infamously kind (Y/N) (Y/L/N) has him constantly falling apart at the seams with the need to be good enough for her. He’s never met anyone like her, no one so capable of making him question the unwarranted self-importance he was raised on as a Malfoy.

Even now, wrapped unceremoniously in his scarf, late falling orange leaves lying in her hair and her cheeks stained with tears, he’s never felt so undeserving of a person in his life. She’s a lady, and he’s just a boy, he’s heartbreakingly inadequate.

“I just want to be someone you can be proud to call yours.”

With his eyes solemnly fixed on his lap, anywhere other than her reaction, he jumps slightly at her cold fingertips on his hand, prying them from the tightly curled fists he has no recollection of clenching and slipping her fingers into his.

“Draco, look at me.” She pleads softly. “Please.”

He does so slowly with her encouraging squeeze of his hand, she’s smiling at him, sympathetic, but unpatronizing.

“I am proud.” She states softly, but confidently. “I don’t want some perfect golden boy, I want you, Draco.”

Three words he never knew he needed from her, ‘I want you’, and they fill a space in his chest that was gaping for reassurance. She’s amazed him again as she always does, she has a talent for making him speechless than no one else has ever mastered.

“You’re so harsh on yourself you haven’t even realised how much you’ve grown, Draco.” She informs. “You’re not the bully you used to be, you’re not the carbon copy of your father anymore, and I’m sorry that no one has allowed you to move on from your past to see your present.”

She smiles sheepishly at his dumfounded expression and gives him the moment he needs to collect his thoughts and process it all. Then, slowly, he’s shaking his head in surprise, letting out a soft sigh.

“You’re too good to me.”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.” She jokes. “I think I straightened that misconception out already.”

“No but- you’re just so…”

The heat burning his cheeks is worse than ever before, he feels almost overwhelmed by it all, her compliments, her smile, that genuine look in her eyes that convinces him she’s unwaveringly sure of every word she’s said.

“Thank you.” He blurts finally. “Especially after I- well I ruined it all.”

“Yeah, I won’t lie, you really fucked up.” She admits. “But you’ve made an honest recovery…”

“Thank you for giving me a second chance.” He exhales gratefully. “You didn’t need to do that.”

“I was going to tell you to piss off after the ‘are you cold’ bit to be honest.” She chuckles. “Stayed because you gave me your scarf- which I’m stealing by the way.”

“Take it.” He urges, a smile finding his lips for what he’s sure is the first time in two weeks, since his misguided decision to end their almost-relationship. “Take whatever you want from me, it’s yours.”

She lets out a shaky breath and gulps. She purposely drops her gaze momentarily to his lips before retuning them to his eyes again, a gesture that has his eyes widening and the tips of his ears turning scarlet. Slipping her fingers from between his, she tentatively cups one of his cheeks, fingertips grazing the red colour blossoming on his pale skin.

“Can I kiss you?”

“I-“ He chokes. “Yes.”

She smiles nervously, reassuring him that he’s not the only one flustered. Then, curling her free hand around the lapel of his jacket, she pulls him closer with eyes shut. Their lips are cold when they meet, and slightly chapped by the cool air, but neither care. Draco places a hand on her waist, pulling her somehow closer as their lips begin to move hesitantly together. She lets out a soft content sigh, sending a breath of warm air into the kiss and causing him to positively melt inside. She’s done it again, completely incapacitated him with such a simple thing as a kiss.

“You’re going to be the death of me.” He exhales.

She lets out a giddy laugh as she pulls back, forehead still pressed to his and eyes still shut.

“There are worst ways to go than my lips.”

He knows, he’s very quickly decided that’s the only way he ever wants to go.  She presses her lips to his again for a split second before pulling back completely, he aches for the feeling again, greedy for it now that he’s felt it once.

“Next time, talk to me.” She pleads. “If you ever feel like you’re not good enough, I’ll be there to convince you otherwise, but don’t just disappear.”

“I won’t.” He assures. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“I know that, Draco.” She smiles sadly. “I just want you to know that you can talk to me.”

“I do.”

The hard part, that initial step, is over. He’s leapt into the unknown, flung himself into the terrifying depths of vulnerability, and there is no going back, but he never wants to, he never wants to leave her again.

“Also if I ever hear you speaking shit about our house again I swear to-“

She’s cut off by his lips once again on hers, startled only for a minute before she’s grinning, grateful to see his confidence returning. She can feel his own grin on her lips and the vibrations of a light laugh before he’s pulling back again.

“Consider me warned.”

“Good.” She exhales. “Or I’ll be confiscating your tie next.”

. 

(Authors note: its not my favourite but if i rewrote it one my time i was flinging my laptop out my window... its not particularly proofread.)

[charlotte-headcanons]

Flower name prompts for Charlotte Katakuri and Cracker

Chrysanthemum, Hibiscus, Marigold, Ivy, Violet and Zinnia.

Of course! Thanks for requesting! So excited to get to those flower headcanon asks 💕 enjoy!

CW: violence, death, angst

Chrysanthemum: How does your muse express romantic love? How do they feel about love as a concept?

Since we headcanon Katakuri as aroace, we'll talk about platonic love here, if that's alright! To him, love is all about feeling safe and comfortable. The best indication of his love is when he becomes trusting enough with someone to lean onto them slightly, close his eyes, and rest, spending time with them in comfortable silence. To those he likes, Katakuri will also often bring random trinkets: little gifts, things that he liked or that made him think of the other person. A pearl taken from a defeated pirate crew, a seashell, a picture he found pretty - he'll always give these kinds of things to the people important in his life, hoping that they will like them too.

Cracker is a complicated case. Although he kind of wants romantic love, he doesn't have yet much experience with it, and therefore (although he wouldn't admit it) he's constantly scared of fucking up. While overconfident and loud usually, around someone he likes he changes into a timid, awkward mess. A not obvious but crucial way in which he expresses affection is simply listening to the other person attentively. He's a gloat and yell kind of guy normally, who rarely listens, so once he actually pays attention to the other person...you know he's in pretty damn deep.

Hibiscus: How does your muse view the gentler, daintier things in life? As things worth preserving & caring for, or as things only bound to wither and disappear?

Katakuri likes and protects anything soft and gentle. He will take a step to the side if it means avoiding trampling over a flower, he will pick up a slug from the road to bring it to a safer location. He's a gentle giant, wholesome on the inside, although he has to always make sure he isn't seen doing those things, as it wouldn't work together with his threatening public image he adopts to keep his family safe.

Cracker is like a polar opposite of that. He's a menace wherever he appears, and as we saw in canon, he's absolutely not against destroying an entire forest (with his pure vibes I guess?? The fuck was that technique) just because he can. He'll sometimes pick on those weaker than him, and generally believes that if something's easy to break... Tough luck, natural selection, bitch. The gentler things and people in life need to get the fuck out of his way. Otherwise, they get squashed.

Ivy: What are your muse's views on marriage? Do they believe it is something strictly for love, or an institution rooted in business & social benefits? Do they desire or have they desired to be married?

Answered in detail here! Of course, both are pretty disillusioned in marriage and know well that it doesn't always happen out of love. Katakuri finds it to be a good thing for others but not really something for himself, Cracker on the other hand, would like to get married but only if it's his own choice.

Marigold: Is your muse prone to jealousy? How might they handle envious feelings?

Katakuri is not jealous often, but he does experience envious feelings sometimes. All the time he's lowkey jealous of those who get to live normally, for starters. Rarely, but sometimes he gets jealous over his favorite siblings too: since he doesn't have much free time, whenever he has time to spend with them but they choose to spend time with someone else, he feels something like a sting. He's a quiet-jealous type. Outwardly, he won't say anything, even telling them that it's okay to reschedule. However, he'll (mostly unconsciously) punish himself and them for it by throwing himself into more work and having even less time for them.

Cracker's jealousy is frequent and explosive, especially if he has a crush on someone. His high levels of envy result from his insecurities in the romantic domain; as overconfident as he is, he knows he lacks experience, and hence finds anyone else with experience to be a dangerous rival. He's a territorial guy and will absolutely stare daggers at anyone he deems dangerous, and often no reasoning will work to convince him that he has nothing to worry about.

Violet: How does your muse respond to betrayal?

Betrayed Katakuri is a Katakuri that shuts off. If required by Mama to kill the traitor, he will do so, and then sulk for months. During this time, he'll slip way more into his perfect persona and avoid vulnerability even harder than he did until now. Keeping it all inside, he'll buzz with negative emotions, and snap easily - instantly apologizing to those he snaps at and feeling guilty about it, but not being able to help it. For a visual representation, this meme describes it about perfectly:

For Cracker, it all depends on how close to him the traitor was. If they weren't that close, he'll angrily beat them up to a bloody pulp until they stop breathing, rage for a while, and call it a day. But if he genuinely trusted them, god save Totto Land. He'll make all hell break loose, destroying everything around him out of anger, and might even cry a bit; something that doesn't normally happen to him often.

Zinnia: How has the loss of fallen comrades and/or loved ones affected your muse? Has it taught them anything or given them any new perspectives?

Katakuri can say he's lucky enough to not have lost anyone very close to him yet, being normally able to help it thanks to his precognition and hyperfocused on avoiding risks to his loved ones ever since Brulee got hurt. Of course, he saw plenty of crew members, homies, and Totto Land citizens die, but fortunately, it wasn't yet anyone he'd be really broken over losing. Seeing death all around has kind of numbed him to the idea of dying himself one day (he's completely at peace with that thought) but he's still as terrified of others dying as ever. It feels like his failure every time because if he can foresee something but cannot prevent it... Then it's really on him, right?

Besides that, he has learned to appreciate the lives of those weaker than himself through seeing them fight for survival and die. Seeing their ambitions, seeing some of them smile in their death and other call out the names of their families, it all made Katakuri realize that even the smallest of people have their own great struggles, hopes, dreams. This is something not many of his siblings pay attention to, but Katakuri greatly appreciates regular people and normal everyday life, trying to protect them as much as possible.

If he lost someone very important and close to him, though, Katakuri would basically react the same way he reacted to Brulee getting her scar, except 10 times more strongly. He'd take on even more responsibilities, get overprotective, and try to be in 10 places at once to not ever let something like this happen again. Besides that, he'd visit his loved one's grave way too often, spending every moment of his free time there and actually talking to it to ease the grief he'd feel.

Likewise, Cracker isn't really that close to so many people, so he also didn't yet lose anyone he'd strongly care for, but he saw plenty soldiers and civilians die; and actually caused some deaths, even within his own ranks. To him, seeing weaklings die is kind of a power trip. Death doesn't humble him, it actually feeds his ego: after all, if he's the one surviving, he must be amazing and special.

However, if someone close to him died, Cracker would be devastated. It wouldn't teach him anything good, instead, it would only make him seek out revenge and get obsessed with destruction due to just how pissed at the entire world he'd be. He would be sad, of course, but he wouldn't really know how to accept this emotion, so he'd react with pure, unbridled rage instead.

Thank you for the ask! 💕

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

Come When You Call, Pt 3

"Did you know I used to play the piano?"

They're inside now, chased inside by the heavy summer heat. Lena's curled sideways on the couch, her feet in James' lap as he leafs through a book he's already read before. The question comes low and uninvited, offered apropo of nothing beyond Lena's deep thought.

James lifts his head, scanning his memory for any mention of the piano, or any instrument. He finds none.

"No, I didn't."

Now that he thinks about it, he has little information stored away about Lena's life before she came to National City. It was a part of her life she seemed content to leave in the past, and James was happy to let her. He'd been glad to have any part of her she was willing to share at all.

Lena nods. Her fingers trace the knitted pattern of the blanket pooled across her knees, her gaze fixed on the tip of her finger. "Used to fence too."

"Yeah?" he asks. He nudges her playfully. "Were you any good?"

He knows she must have been-- Lena isn't the person to do anything halfway. His suspicions are confirmed when Lena nods, mitigating her hubris with a slanted shrug. "Almost made the Olympics one year."

"Holy shit." James pats her shin with a smile. "You know, I might have a trophy somewhere around here for peewee football."

Lena laughs, and a weight lifts from James' chest at the genuine sound of it. Her smile brightens her entire face, and James can't help but grin.

"I would have liked to see that," Lena says.

Suddenly, James remembers the box he'd shoved into his bedroom closet. "I might just have the next best thing. Hang on."

He scoots out from under her and disappears, returning with a pile of photo albums in his arms.

"I dunno if you know this," he says, "but this house used to be my gran's. And one thing about gran is that she never threw away anything."

"Oh, no way," Lena chirps, sitting up to receive the first album with both hands. By the time James sits next to her, she's already got it open to the first page, where James sees his infant self yawning from inside a blue hospital blanket.

"Gran also liked to document everything," James explains. He taps the picture next to it, where his grandmother held him close to her chest with happy tears in her eyes. "This is probably only going to get us to about middle school."

Lena beams as they peruse the entire album, and James narrates what he can remember about each photo. His dad shows up in a few of them, which almost makes James' throat lock up with emotion, but talking about him feels natural with Lena. She drinks in every picture, every memory he shares with quiet appreciation.

"We never had anything like this," she says softly, running her fingers over the film trapping the photos to the page.

"That's a shame," James says. "It'd be a kick to see little Lena."

"I mean, we had the official portraits, and there's various press photos I'm sure you could find if you really wanted to. But memories like these?" She gazes at the photos, tracing the curve of Kelly's three-year old chin. "I don't know if there was anything worth documenting, come to think of it."

Not for the first time, James' heart goes out to the girl Lena used to be. Before he can say anything, Lena clears her throat.

"I used to wonder if my mother ever took photos like this, before she--" Lena cuts herself off. Her eyes darken for a brief moment, before she lifts her chin with a deep breath. "If she did, I never saw them. I didn't even have a picture of her, let alone myself."

James can't speak for a long moment. When he lost his dad, he'd at least had his photos-- those of him and those taken by him, each preserving different pieces of his father. He couldn't imagine trying to grieve without them.

"I'm so sorry, Lena..."

"I'm the one who's sorry." She looks up from the album and meets his gaze, her eyes focusing on him with familiar intensity. "The way I ended things between us... you deserved better than that."

James swallows, unprepared for the sudden turn. "I appreciate that..."

"And I should have kept in touch when you left," she continues. She swallows thickly. "I wasn't sure you'd want to hear from me."

"Me either." The confession comes low and soft from James' chest. He'd thought of calling Lena probably a dozen times, but talked himself out of every single one, certain that she'd want nothing to do with him.

Lena's hand settles on his knee. Her touch is warm, and singular in its rarity. For all that she craved physical intimacy, she rarely initiated it. She does so now, meeting his gaze once more. Suddenly, they seem unfathomably close.

"I'm sorry I hurt you, James."

James' hand lifts from where it rests against the back of the couch, his fingers gingerly brushing the hair from her face.

"Lena, I--"

Suddenly, the phone in James' pocket rings, launching into a jaunty jingle. Coming back to themselves, they both disengage-- James to fish out his phone and Lena to return her focus to the album still in her lap.

James clears his throat when he sees the caller id. "Kelly, hi."

"Hey, is Lena there?"

"Yeah, just a sec." Tapping the screen, he holds the phone between them. "You're on speaker," he says loudly.

"Lena?"

"I'm here. What's wrong?"

"Nothing yet," comes the reply, huffing through the phone. "No movement from Lex at this point. We're probably going to have to wait for Supergirl and the others to get back before we're able to wrap things up. But I'm not calling about that."

Lena's brow furrows, silence hanging poignantly until Kelly continues.

"I wanted to check on you, see how you're doing."

"O-oh." Lena's stutter belies her surprise, as does the flush that creeps up her neck. James bites back a smile. "I'm okay."

"And James has been behaving himself?"

"Hey!" James squawks indignantly, earning an unexpected giggle from Lena. "I'm right here, you know."

Kelly doesn't relent. "And are you behaving yourself?"

James scoffs good naturedly, leaving Lena to come to his rescue.

"Yes, he's been the perfect gentleman," she says, patting his knee. "I couldn't have asked for a better host."

"Good," Kelly declares. "If he steps out of line, just let me know and I'll come kick his butt."

Rolling his eyes, James stands to grab a drink, but as he does he gives Lena's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. She flashes a smile at him, bright and beautiful, before she takes the phone off speaker and places it to her ear.

He takes his time in the kitchen, giving them room to have a conversation without him. He wonders if either of realize that Kelly's just disproven one of Lena's fears the night before. Though she might not believe it right now, Lena does have people who care about her. Kelly is just the start.

[tallyovie-writes]

Arsonists's Lullaby R.A.B.

SONGFIC

Summary: Regulus finds a soul like his in a person he would have never guessed

Author's note: unedited, after 3 exams, 1 am, please be kind I know it starts slow but there will be more parts

1.6k words

When I was a child, I heard voices

Some would sing and some would scream

You soon find you have few choices

I learned the voices died with me

At 5 years old, Regulus Arcturus Black learned that family did not always mean blood. He had yet to figure out the true meaning of the word, but he knew what he had was a dark echo of an utopist dream.

His childhood was dominated by a gray filter, muffling the sounds, numbing the emotions, stretching the minutes forever. On certain days, the lights grew darker, shadowing the world into almost black. Black like his name, black like the soul he will grow up to have. The ticking of the clocks were too loud, the walls too high, his mothers steps on the creaking stairs too firm in a world of doubt and uncertainty.

When I was a child, I'd sit for hours

Staring into open flame

Something in it had a power

Could barely tear my eyes away

Sometimes, for split seconds, burgundy took over the darkness. The lifelessness in the manor disappeared, and compensating for life's previous absence it channelled all of its heat into hate. Hate for an empty mother from Sirius, hate for a son who did not fit traditions from his mother.

Hate from Regulus, who possessed the survival instinct of laying low and keeping to himself but his brother did not. And Regulus resented him in these moments. For all the plates in million pieces, previously broken on the wall, for all the harsh words leaving their father's mouth, for all the clever little punishments their mother put them through. Them, because getting caught in the crossfire of a traditional Black "family" argument meant everyone's suffering.

It was a flame barely extinguishable. It meant the only display of emotions aside from the rare brotherly moments he shared with Sirius.

Emotions lead to addiction. And if anger is the only feeling fuelled, darkness starts to grow.

All you have is your fire

And the place you need to reach

Don't you ever tame your demons

But always keep 'em on a leash

That fire burned a self preservation so deep in him, that Regulus recognized he needed power in order to make it in this world. Power to stay strong, make it through between his ambitious peers and most importantly to guard himself. The blatant, headstrong bravery Sirius took upon arriving at Hogwarts made school holidays a hellish wartime at home.

Regulus learned not to engage. The moment the edges of his self-made cell threatened to break, he carefully tucked in his emotions once again. He didn't want to cut out feeling at all, he deemed that too dangerous for his liking. No. He just didn't let his emotions get the best of him. A man ruled by his feelings is a terrifying sight. He mentally injected himself with an anaesthetic in public, and behind four walls he let himself carefully examine them. It wasn't easy. The tangled web of emotional strings, numbed most of the time, screamed for air. Screamed for understanding, for letting go, for caring. But he cut those last remaining ties with love the moment Sirius got sorted into Gryffindor.

When I was 16, my senses fooled me

Thought gasoline was on my clothes

I knew that something would always rule me

I knew the scent was mine alone

At 16 years old Regulus Arcturus Black saw a way in the darkness. He didn't dare call it a glimmer of hope. Hope was a privilege only offered to the good and divine, to the pure and just. He was neither, he thought.

Perhaps he was right. For now. But fate has a way of changing the tides and replacing the figures on the chessboard.

He has long lost the map to his emotions. They were carefully tucked away in a forgotten pocket somewhere around his heart, but as one man, he couldn't untangle them alone. Not like he wanted to.

His salvation arrived in the face of a charismatic leader. He had answers to Regulus's questions that he long sought to find. Ever since he was a child he associated power with stability and control over one's life, and this stranger offered power on a silver plate. He couldn't have been worse. Of course in hindsight, everything seems more clear.

But as he was shrouded in darkness, he chose to become a part of the dark as well.

All you have is your fire

And the place you need to reach

Don't you ever tame your demons

But always keep 'em on a leash

One of the main problems in Regulus's logic was that he thought that being a Death Eater would solve all of his insecurities and instability. At first it seemed to work, building a new world by idealistic wishes and getting rid of the dangers life proposed helped setting his nerves right. But as the curls of the smoke threatened to suffocate him, his decision pressed hard on his shoulder.

He knew there was no out of this. The Dark Lord's silver tongue has lost its magic, he could detect the empty lies, the manipulation, the sinister force. He could detect it, because it takes one to know another, and he was a master in the arts of manipulation and lying. Why wouldn't he be? He spent all of his childhood perfecting the image of the pureblood son his family wanted him to be. And he did not fail. Keeping it up during Hogwarts has become a natural instinct, but also demolished his true self.

What was the true soul of Regulus Arcturus Black?

When I was a man I thought it ended

When I knew love's perfect ache

But my peace has always depended

On all the ashes in my wake

He thought he would never find it out. But then you came along and wrecked his carefully planted walls. At first he hated you for that.

You were obnoxious and the true image of what a pureblood offspring should be. What he should be.

He would have never thought that someone could be a better liar and manipulator than him. Regulus needed years of careful examination to see the cracks in your armour and the rare slips in character. At first, he was sure that his mind was imagining things that were not there. After years of reading his slytherin peers, your occasional un-slytherin-like behaviour peaked his curiosity.

One day he was sitting at the Slytherin table when an idea struck. You didn't sit far away, so you had to be pulled into the conversation too.

"Snape!" Regulus called to the oily haired seventh year. "Heard He recruited you. You finally pulled your head out of your ass?"

Of course he has seen the err of his decision by now, so Regulus asked him this for two reasons.

One: he had to keep up appearances.

Two: he wanted to see how you reacted.

He had been spending the last few weeks noticing your subtle icks regarding certain subjects. So far his theory seemed to prove true.

On the outside an appraising look sat on your face.

But Regulus learned to discover the signs. And he was once again right as he noticed the tip of your ring finger hardly pushed against your thumb nail, leaving a mark. Subtle, but still a tell tale sign of someone who is not fully on board with the subject.

One day he decided to corner you.

"I know the game you are playing" he didn't mean to sound so threatening, but it came out like that.

A snake doesn't crack under pressure, so you looked him in the eye and let a sly smile spread across your face.

"Please, do enlighten me. What game am I playing? Or is it better if I ask which game of mine you are referring to? I am a busy woman."

He let your comment fly.

"I noticed the tip of your ring finger is bruised. I would bandage it. The past few weeks you must have been careless and cut it. Wouldn't want any infection, would you?" he looked deep into your eyes, transferring the other meaning of his words.

You knew what he meant. Lately, you spotted the Black boy's eyes on you. In the Great Hall, during classes, those grey orbs never left you. You thought he harbored a silly little crush on you. Now you realized your mistake. The question however remained. What will he do with this information?

You are getting careless, if I noticed, someone might too. Someone you wouldn't want to notice. His eyes said.

Your House was not meant for easy friendships. The rising of The Dark Lord supported a lot of back stabbings for meaningless praises, so you had to be careful.

With a last nod he turned his back on you and walked away, leaving you with only frustration and more questions. Could the Slytherin Silver Boy share your views? Maybe when Hell freezes over.

Regulus knew, he should have said; I know the game you are playing, because I am playing it too.

All you have is your fire

And the place you need to reach

Don't you ever tame your demons

But always keep 'em on a leash

Fate sat on her chair and watched the two young snakes step on their shared path. Neither of them knew yet what this little encounter will set into motion.

But Fate knew and mourned the loss of another great story that has not even started, but was already told.

She sipped her wine and caressed the head of one of her demons.

[azucanela]

1. FAKE DATING / ENGAGEMENT | TODOROKI SHOUTO

1K CELEBRATION MASTERLIST

SUMMARY: Dating his publicist out of pure practicality had been a pretty good bad idea, continuing to date his publicist because he was beginning to enjoy the perks of his —albeit fake— relationship was an ever better bad idea. Proposing to said publicist because he wanted to anger his father was just a bad idea in general, but hey, the look on Endeavor’s face was worth it.  

WORD COUNT: 2.7k

WARNINGS: kissing, enji todoroki deserves a warning, t

A/N: hehe shoto and a two for one

It had started out as something to piss off his father, if Shouto was honest. 

Shouto was now an upcoming Pro Hero that was rising through the charts, and Enji had been trying to mend his relationship with the rest of his family for a while now. This was something Fuyumi strongly supported seeing as she’d suggested hosting a weekly family dinner ever since Shouto was in his second year at UA. 

He hated those dinners if he was honest, but Shouto attended them out of courtesy for his sister. Natsuo wasn’t as polite as he could’ve been but Shouto found it entertaining to watch as he made several passive aggressive comments, much to Fuyumi’s dismay.

Shouto couldn’t help but feel the need to defy his father as well, in his own way. Which is why he brought along Y/N L/N, a young, quirkless, businesswoman he’d met during his second year at UA. She’d gotten into the the UA business course, and now served as a publicist on his team. Asking her to pretend to be his girlfriend was a rather... difficult task, but he managed to convince her fairly easily since they were close friends and she seemed to notice how much his father pestered him. Inviting her to one of these weekly dinners had probably been the biggest mistake he’d ever made.

That dinner had a lot of tension. 

As far as the Todoroki Family knew, Shouto had been dating Y/N for two years, and things were very serious between the two. Which is probably the reason why Enji felt the need to retaliate by beginning to invite other young Pro Heroes to the dinners, ones that seemed to have an interest in Shouto. Shortly after that, Y/N began to attend the weekly dinners more frequently, and Shouto had a feeling he was in too far when they kissed for the first time and he enjoyed it. 

Now, Shouto always had a feeling that Enji disliked Y/N, but he’d never outright expressed those feelings. Until now, that is.

“Excuse me?” 

Enji brought a hand to his temple as he inhaled deeply, “Shouto, you can’t tell me you intend to spend your life with your quirkless publicist.” 

Shouto scoffed at his words, eyes cold as he met Enji’s stare, “that’s what this is about? The fact that she’s quirkless? You can’t be serious.”

This was supposed to be a nice little family vacation, something Fuyumi had once again suggested. Shouto had brought along Y/N, feeling that he owed her some sort of enjoyable experience for putting her through the hell that was his family. It was a nice beach house, large enough that she could easily avoid his family while enjoying the perks of the it all. Not that Y/N needed to avoid his family, Natsuo and Fuyumi actually liked her quite a bit, Enji on the other hand? Well, this seemed to be Enji Todoroki’s version of an intervention.

“Shouto, you have potential-”

The room grows as cold as Shouto glares, “Y/N is one of the most impressive people I know, and if you think the fact that she’s quirkless discredits anything she’s done, then you haven’t changed at all.” He practically slams his glass onto the table beside him as he rises from his seat, heading towards the exit of the room. 

“This conversation isn’t over Shouto.”

No, it was done, very, very, very done. Because Shouto already had a plan. A very irrational, illogical, reckless plan that would likely prove to be a very big mistake.

Y/N on the other hand, had just gotten started on her daily routine. Stretching her arms above the bed she and Shouto had been forced to share in order to keep up the illusion that they were a couple. Though he’d already woken up it appeared, normally they’d both still be in bed, seeing as this was a vacation. Y/N didn’t mind sharing a bed with him if she was honest, in fact, Shouto was the perfect person to sleep beside because of his quirk. 

She didn’t mind any of this arrangement, and maybe that was a problem. 

The last thing Y/N had expected from Shouto was a request for a fake girlfriend, he’d explained how he though he should probably inform her of his plan seeing as she was his publicist. Y/N had been in shock as he continued to say he had a few people he was thinking about asking, only for Y/N to shut down the idea entirely. 

There were far too many variables, what if the person he selected exposed him for the false relationship later on in his career, what if they were bad at keeping secrets, what if they weren’t up for all the false acts of love, even worse what if they did fall in love with him?

Shouto saw the solution as having Y/N become his fake girlfriend.

And for some reason, Y/N found herself agreeing. Because she would never expose the fact that the relationship had been a lie the whole time, not when it was her job to preserve Shouto’s image. And she was perfectly okay with false displays of affection, she would surely never fall in love with Shouto Todoroki. He was her boss, and her close friend, developing feelings for him, or anyone else for that matter, just wasn’t in her cards.  

She kinda sorta failed. 

Now, Fuyumi would not stop giving her false hope, speaking of how she’d never seen Shouto so happy, how she was jealous of the way he looked at her when she wasn’t paying attention, the girl had even suggested that Shouto would propose soon.

If only she knew that this entire relationship was a petty lie, made to get back at the Pro Hero Endeavor for his not so subtle attempts at finding Shouto a partner that would likely create a... powerful grandchild to say the least. Y/N just so happened to be the most convenient person to anger the man, seeing as she was quirkless and all. 

Y/N was too busy glaring at the ceiling to hear the door unlock, lost in her thoughts, though she didn’t fail to hear the sound of the door slamming shut. Raising her brow, Y/N shifted in the bed to face the door to the room she and Shouto had claimed, which could be compared to a hotel suite. 

Shouto had moved straight to the dresser across from the bed, where his wallet, keys and a discarded tie from the dinner reservations they’d attended last night, were. Y/N propped herself up on her forearms in an attempt to get a better look at him as he grabbed his wallet and keys, shoving them into his pockets. “Shouto what are you doing?” 

He turned around almost instantly, and Y/N didn’t fail to notice the crease between his brows, though it disappeared almost instantly when he saw her. “Did I wake you?” Was his response, voice quiet as he watched her.

“You didn’t answer my question, Sho.” 

He’s silent for a moment, and Y/N wonders if he’s simply ignoring her question, though he moves closer to the bed, and Y/N watches as he takes a seat at the edge of it. “I’m going out.” 

“Can I come?” Y/N is sitting up, just for Shouto to grab her shoulder and gently push her back down.

There’s a small smile on his face as he shakes his head, “go back to bed.”

Y/N rolled her eyes, bringing her hand over his, “I happen to like hanging out with you.” She averts his gaze, which is now fixated on her, “also your family scares me.”

She can see him frown from the corner of her eyes, and Y/N is about to assure him that she’s joking, when his interlocks with his, removing them from her shoulder and laying them down in her lap as he practically examines them. The intimate action distracts her, though it’s become more frequent for Shouto to do things like this even when they are alone. Shouto’s hands are fidgeting with her own when he finally speaks, “do I scare you?” And he sounds almost scared of what her reply might be.

“No.” The answer comes without thought, and immediately after the question leaves his mouth, causing Shouto to look back up at her. “Never.”

Shouto’s eyes meet hers and Y/N can’t really decipher the look on his face, but that doesn’t really matter since his hands drop hers as he brings them to her face, only to pull her into a kiss. 

It was by no means the first time they’d kissed, but it was definitely different. The first kiss was practically oozing hesitation, gentleness, and it was purely because Enji hadn’t stopped glaring at Y/N the entire night she’d been at the dinner table. This was harsh, firm, as though he had something to prove. Y/N can feel the anger he was radiating when he entered the room, but the weirdest part of the kiss is how intimate it was. Because they’d never been in private when they kissed, everything was public, to portray the likeness of a real couple.

Y/N can’t help it when her hands find their way to Shouto’s arms, gripping them tightly as she kisses back with equal fervor. This only seems to encourage Shouto’s sudden action as he gently lays her back onto the bed, one hand slipping behind her to her back, pressing her body closer to his. Y/N’s hand begins to move up his arm and to the nape of his neck, threading into Shouto’s hair as she pulls him closer.

This was very different.

Shouto pulls away, head moving to her neck to press a kiss against it before exhaling deeply as they remained like that for a moment, before Shouto separated himself from her, “I’ll be back.”

Y/N is still laying in the bed in shock at what just happened, but when she hears the door close, she finds herself feeling tempted to scream into her pillow because what the hell just happened? There was no reason to be so... intimate in the privacy of their room, and Shouto seemed to be seething with anger when he initially entered. And there was only one thing that could’ve set Shouto off.

His father, they must’ve had a conversation already, but so early in the morning? Y/N hadn’t seen Shouto so angry since... ever.  Now, if Shouto was honest he didn’t know what possessed him to head to the jeweler he saw on their way to the beach, but here he was. Was Shouto prepared to propose purely because his father had insinuated that his —fake— relationship wouldn’t last? Yes. Did he potentially have actual feelings for Y/N? Shouto wasn’t sure. He’d never been in an actual relationship, but he’d also never felt this way.

It was horrifying. The way his heart seemed to pick up speed whenever she was around, the way his right side, the side that created ice, seemed to heat up. Or the odd flutter in his stomach whenever she smiled at him, the way he never wanted to let go once she wrapped her arms around him. 

Maybe proposing wasn’t the best idea, proposing without informing Y/N he intended to propose was probably an even worse idea, but Shouto wasn’t really thinking as he made his unlocked the door of the beach house. 

Looking back on it, he definitely should’ve told Y/N but the look on his father’s face, the pure astonishment‚ and maybe even disgust, was fantaastic Along with the claps and cheers from the strangers on the boardwalk, the support from his siblings, well it was worth it. Worth the anger that Y/N was now displaying, very clearly. She didn’t seem to mind earlier when he’d gotten down on one knee, in fact, she’d started crying, though Shouto supposed this was just another part of their act. God, he wished it wasn’t an act. 

“Shouto, what the hell was that?” 

She’d forced him to take a seat on the bed they’d spoken on earlier, and though Shouto probably should’ve been paying more attention to her words, his eyes had been glued to her hand, particularly her ring finger. “A proposal.”

“Yes! A proposal we did not discuss, at all, might I add.” Y/N ran her fingers through her hair, tugging at the roots as she inhaled deeply, “Shouto you don’t just, propose to someone out of nowehere—”

His brows furrow at this, “my understanding was that most proposals are spontaneous.”

Y/N groans, turning away from him momentarily in a last ditch attempt to collect herself. If Y/N was honest, she was finding herself getting more and more caught up in their lies, when he got down on one knee, she almost forgot that everything between them was fake.

Almost. 

“Yes, that’s true.” She mumbles, turning back to face him, “however, that’s for real couples. Every aspect of this relationship is planned because this isn’t a relationship, it’s more like— like a contract. And we agreed to have a fake break up within the next two months.” She vividly recalled the discussion, Shouto had randomly become distant, avoiding her calls despite the fact that it was her job to speak within him. When he’d finally approached her, he told her they needed to plan their break up soon.

The only part of this relationship that wasn’t planned or staged was probably that moment they had together earlier that day. 

Shouto isn’t saying anything, in fact, he looks rather deep in thought, and Y/N can’t help the frustration that bubbles up inside her as she stares at him, awaiting a response. “Shouto, are you even listening to me?”

His eyes flicker upwards, meeting hers. Y/N can see them soften, and the look on his face effectively halts her pacing. Shouto takes this as a chance to grab her hand, rubbing gentle circles onto it as he speaks, “I’m always listening to you.” He shuts his eyes temporarily, breathing deeply before looking back up at her, “what if I don’t want us to plan things anymore?”

Y/N finds herself feeling breathless as she replies, “what?” She clears her throat, “what do you mean, Shouto?”

“I don’t want to plan things.” He repeats, fingers toying with the ring she now dawned on her left hand, eyes fixated on the jewel that Y/N had a feeling was ridiculously expensive. “And I don’t want a contract.”

Confusion floods Y/N as she watches him, nothing he did today had made sense. That moment on the bed that he’d initiated, the proposal, this. Shouto just wasn’t making sense and Y/N was becoming desperate, desperate to understand what exactly he was trying to say. “Then what do you want?”

He’s silent for a moment, contemplating his next words, Shouto wonders if she feels the same way. But he’d once made a promise to her, to be honest and transparent throughout this entire arrangement they had, and Shouto kept his promises, especially if they were to her. 

So he replied, “you.” Looking up at Y/N, he could see the shock, the confusion on her face, “I want you.” He straightens in his seat on the bed, “for real.” 

He expects her to tear her hand from his, maybe rip the ring off her finger and throw it at him. Perhaps it’s dramatic, but he also expects her to ridicule him for desiring her, for wanting an actual relationship. It wouldn’t be in Y/N’s nature, he knows this, but maybe a brutal rejection would make it hurt less. 

Instead, Y/N nods slowly, allowing a shaky breath to escape her as she brings her hands to his face, “guess I’m marrying into quite the family.” She mumbles, before pressing her lips to his.

This is good. Yeah, this was good.

A/N: yeah idk kasdkashd this is unedited so oops if its bad

TAGLISTS[lmk if you want to be added or removed via asks or replies]

BNHA: @beifongsss​ @shawkneecaps​

[kitsnicket]

Okay so I was thinking about how the Baudelaires seem to give up trying to get help from the adults around them a little too quick in the early series. Like, still totally in the realm of reasonable, but for kids supposedly raised in a healthy, supportive household... hmm. So THEN I got to think about why THAT could be. And then I thought about what B+B’s childhoods must have been like. And while obviously they loved their kids and I’m sure they always did their best to make sure they were safe and loved, they also were constantly aware that their kids were in danger from VFD.

Now, other, much smarter people have already talked about how this probably fed into thing like them encouraging the kids to see themselves as a unit, and telling Violet to protect her siblings. But I think about how B+B definitely had trust issues from being raised in an organization that put such an emphasis on spying and disguises and subterfuge. And how there’s no way they trusted authorities, because I highly doubt that VFD authority was warm and fuzzy with it’s members, and they of course you can’t trust the government or anything when you technically work for a criminal organization. And of course, even anyone who leaves VFD will still have all that baggage. So I imagine that B+B probably instilled a distrust of authority in their kids too. Mostly unintentionally—when Klaus is getting bullied at school, they don’t even THINK to advise him to go to a teacher, etc. But there also must have been moments where, say, Violet makes some kind of comment. I have no idea what, but something that demonstrates trust in authority, ig? And Beatrice sits her down and explains to her that sometimes you can’t trust authority figures. Most of the time, actually. And she probably got similar talks when SHE was a kid, and looking back on it she thinks that maybe the driving force behind those was self-preservation, to make sure the little volunteers don’t accidentally get them busted for VFD activity. But Beatrice is literally only trying to protect her daughter, in the only way she knows how.

Oh I LOVE thinking about how Beatrice and Bertrand’s VFD upbringing influenced how they parented. I just wanna say real quick that I’m writing the rest of this reply under the assumption/headcanon that B&B left VFD entirely because they disagreed with the organization in some big way. I don’t think we’re ever explicitly told in canon if this is the case so I wanted to make it clear I’m working off my own, non-canon thoughts for this headcanon.

While we’re not explicitly told how vfd affected their parenting, there are little moments in canon that, imo, hint at some sort of influence (I’m thinking specifically of when Violet mentions Beatrice taught her stage makeup[I think it was how to make a scar?]). It makes total sense to me. When you’re raised with certain morals and ideals, simply leaving the place/organization that instilled those things doesn’t make them go away immediately. The headcanon that VFD’s influence is still there despite B&B leaving is a perfect example of how an organization like VFD endures.

I think this is related to what lemony was talking about in ATWQ when he recited his (plagiarized) speech.

VFD has its code books and headquarters and disguise kits and other tangible things that are part of it. These things can be easily burned, torn, otherwise ruined, but none of them are VFD’s core. It’s core is the set of beliefs, morals, and ideals the members all collectively believe in and pass down to new members(brainwashing if we’re talking cults). You can’t kill the intangible. At least, not easily. Lemony was hinting at this when he said “We’ve had different names throughout history, but all words that describe us are false and all attempts to organize us fail. Right now we’re called VFD, but all our schisms and arguments might cause us to disappear. It won’t matter. People like us always slip through the net. Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide open world”

So what did everything I said above have to do with B&B’s parenting? The headcanon that it was entrenched in VFD values means they were unconsciously ensuring VFD’s survival just simply by raising children. Despite the fact that they may have thought they were raising them as far from VFD as possible. It’s a horribly sad HC to be quite honest.

[this-is-quite-homoerotic]

I was thinking about Ianto/the Face of Boe (don’t ask) and so I started pondering the possibility of Ianto meeting an older Jack from further into the timeline, and then I had.......... a Thought™.

I’ve mentioned many times before that Ianto seems older in every season, like he looks So Babey in season 1, look at this, look at this face:

He looks so young.

BABEY

Super Babey, right?

But he looks noticeably older by season 2, and even more so by season 3. (Not a lot older, but noticeably older, you know?) Like so:

^ This is Ianto in ep 2x04

^ This is him in ep 2x10

^ And this is him in season 3, as we know.

So it occured to me that a fun explanation could be...... what if he looks older because he is older? Not just a few months to a year older between each season, but a few years older instead?

What if Ianto was thrust forward in time by the Rift or by rogue Time Agents, or by an alien artefact, or [insert plot device here], and he keeps running into different versions of Jack in the future? (Or maybe he keeps being kidnapped by an older Jack so he can spend more time with Ianto before he dies during the incident with the 456?)

Maybe the first time’s an accident, Ianto handles an artefact of unknown origin with his bare hands and he appears in the 85th century not two metres away from where Jack was standing.

So Ianto’s stuck in the future, thankfully with Jack who’ll obviously protect him and explain things, but he needs to go back because timelines, right? Jack doesn’t have a functioning Vortex Manipulator, so it takes him months to figure out a way to get him back. When he finally can, he doesn’t want to let go of Ianto, who he still remembered after all these years and who he’d grown close to again (who he’d fallen in love with again) knowing he’ll die in 2009 and Jack will never get to see him again. But as Jack warns him that he can’t tell 21st century him about his trip into the future, because Jack hadn't known back then and changing that could risk destroying the timeline, Ianto, brilliant, practical genius that he is, figures out the loophole: so long as he doesn’t tell his linear Jack, then they can do this again, can’t they? Ianto has a great poker face, he can do it. And, worst case scenario, Ianto has access to retcon. If older Jack gives him his consent to use it on younger him (he does) then he’ll even have a failsafe*. And Jack looks at him, shaken to the core, in that moment he could swear he’s never loved anyone so much as he loves Ianto Jones. So he starts planning his next trip.

*He doesn’t end up having to retcon Jack, but after Adam when they all retconned themselves, Ianto spends half a day thinking it’s because the team uncovered his little trips and he had to retcon all of them - until he finds the note he left himself in his trouser pocket to let himself know it was unrelated.

And then I had another Thought™.

The next time Ianto goes into the future, it’s deliberate. Jack all but takes him without asking, he goes for the time right after Abbadon when he left with the Doctor and takes Ianto straight to a very exclusive resort in the 93rd century to get one of those treatments to slow down aging like we see Liz 10 from DW had, except much more advanced, so he could live for several centuries and age so slowly it’d look like only a few years had passed.

And so Ianto keeps disappearing into the future and spending months or years at a time with older Jacks and his linear Jack doesn't find out because Ianto's only gone for a few minutes at a time from the 21st century; but he's staying in the future much longer. This is why he keeps such a detailed diary, he needs it to refresh his memory on where he left off things back in 2007-2009. At first they start with trips that are shorter than a year, because Ianto needs to remember what he’s coming back to. He doesn’t want Jack to grow suspicious, god only knew what he might think was going on if Ianto didn’t remember something that had happened “the day before”. But then at some point Jack acquires some tech that allows one to save memories and keep them fresh, so Ianto doesn’t have to rely solely on his diary, and they start making much, much longer trips (of several decades to a century). Jack gives Ianto some of the training he got at the Time Agency to ensure he doesn’t muddle up the timeline.

Anyway, Ianto starts keeping two diaries: one for the 2007-2009 period, and another for his trips, where he’s more relaxed about writing down details and which Jack keeps with him safe and sound in the future. Trips into the future can be domestic bliss or crazy world-saving adventures or both, you decide!

Bonus points if he isn’t meeting the older Jacks in chronological order after that first one!

Jack gets to show Ianto the stars, his own home planet, so many interesting alien species he never got to see on Earth, even working for Torchwood; he gets to show him the wonders of the galaxy and to take him beyond, further than Ianto could have ever imagined. He gets to introduce him to his mother, to so many friends, to some of his grandkids. He shows him the facilities of Torchwood 284, 740, 1371 and even later versions, and he takes him to the Torchwood Archive where there's AI holograms of the two of them living happily ever after. Hologram Jack, who was modelled after the 2009 real-life version, gets the shock of his non-life. Hologram Ianto has never looked so mischievous. He knew, of course. Hologram Ianto gets thoroughly snogged.

Jack not only gets to tell Ianto but also to show him that no matter how many thousands or even millions of years pass, he’ll never be forgotten, not while Jack’s still alive. And Jack’s gonna live for a long time. He’s gonna love Ianto for a very long time.

And because he has centuries to work it out, Jack finds a way to make Ianto immune to the virus at Thames House. He hunts down the bastards and has a cure bioengineered. He makes Ianto take it before he goes back to 2009 and he travels back to that day where Ianto “died” in Thames House, careful to arrive after the virus was released but before it dispelled enough to allow the bodies to be collected, and he takes Ianto (passed out as the cure works its magic but very much alive) and leaves behind a perfect copy.

When Ianto wakes up, perfectly healthy and well rested, it’s to find a slightly older-looking Jack grinning down at him.

For the first time since that first accidental trip, Jack knows that he doesn’t have to let Ianto go back to his past self to maintain the timeline. From then on, they can move forward together, no time jumps, no careful preserving of memories so that Ianto can pretend he never left the 21st century, no more secrets between them. They can just be.

[thewidowsghost]

The War Gone Wrong (Obviously) - Stark! Reader x Steve Rogers

This is written for @rogersrogers334​.

3rd Person POV

Tony and (Y/n) Stark, the father-daughter duo, stand in the shadows as a projection shows Maria, Howard, and a Younger Tony talking.

After the projected scene is over, both Tony and (Y/n) walk out, side by side, to the front of the stage.

"That's how I wished it happened," Tony says softly into the microphone. "Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing, or BARF."

"You really need a better acronym," (Y/n) teases which makes the crowd laugh for a minute or so before the attention turns to the two Avengers. "An extremely costly method of hijacking the hippocampus to . . . clear traumatic memories."

Tony blows out a candle, "Huh." The whole scene around Tony and (Y/n) dissolves. "It doesn't change the fact that my parents never made it to the airport . . . or all the things I did to avoid processing my grief, but . . ." Tony takes off his glasses. "Plus, six hundred eleven million dollars for my little therapeutic experiment? No one in their right mind would've ever funded it.

"Help me out, what's the MIT mission statement?" (Y/n)'s voice echoes through the hall now. "'To generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge.' And work with others," she adds, "to bring it to bear on the world's great challenges."

"Well, you are the others," Tony picks up (Y/n)'s words - the two having rehearsed this. "And, quiet as it's kept . . . the challenges facing you are the greatest mankind's ever known."

"Plus," (Y/n) says, amusement lighting in her eyes, her voice taking on a teasing tone, "most of you are broke."

The crowd chuckles again and after a moment, Tony says, "Oh, I'm sorry. Rather, you were. As of this moment . . . every student has been made an equal recipient of the Inaugural September Foundation Grant. As in . . . all of your projects have just been approved and funded."

The crowd of college students breaks out in applause and cheers.

"No strings, no takes . . . just reframe the future!" (Y/n) says over the cheering. "Starting now!"

Above the audience, the teleprompter now reads: Tony: Now I would like to introduce the head of the Foundation, Pepper Potts

Tony stares at the words sadly and then says, "Go break some eggs."

The two exit the stage, side by side.

Ignoring one of the teaches and one of her father's assistants, (Y/n) walks over to the bathroom and changes into a pair of casual clothes for the mission she was supposed to be on.

Approaching her father, (Y/n) says a quick goodbye, and the twenty-four-year-old woman closes her eyes and disappears, arriving in Lagos, Nigeria.

(Y/n), like her mother, was a mutant. (Y/n) had the powers of teleportation, absorption, and the ability to control elements, as well as the ability to shape-shift. 

Glancing around for a moment, (Y/n) pulls on a pair of sunglasses, places her COM set in her ear, and walks over to the Black Widow, who is sitting by herself with a tea in her hands.

"Morning, ma'am," (Y/n) greets Natasha Romanoff, "you mind if I sit here? There are no more open tables."

"Sure, go right ahead," Natasha says, hiding a smile at the sight of her best friend. Natasha and (Y/n) had been friends since Natasha had joined SHIELD, as (Y/n) and their partner, Clint, had recruited her.

A waitress walks over and (Y/n) orders a coffee, listening in on the conversation between Natasha, Wanda, Steve, and Sam going on.

"All right, what do you see?" Steve asks.

"Standard beat cops," Wanda murmurs around her cup of coffee in her hand. "Small station. Quiet street. It's a good target."

"There's an ATM in the south corner, which means . . ." Steve begins but Wanda cuts him off.

"Cameras," Wanda says.

"Nice Wanda," (Y/n) murmurs, and Wanda smiles softly at the approval in the older woman's voice.

"Both cross streets are one way," Steve says into the COMs.

"So, compromised escape routes," Wanda guesses.

"Means our guy doesn't care about being seen, he isn't afraid to make a mess on the way out," (Y/n) says softly.

"She's right," Steve says and (Y/n)'s cheeks dust a slightly darker color. "See that Range Rover halfway up the block?"

"Yeah, the red one?" Wanda asks. "It's cute."

"Looks like my first car," (Y/n) says with a soft laugh.

"Not the point," Natasha says and (Y/n) grins. "The point is, is that it's bulletproof, which means private security, which means more guys, which means more headaches for somebody."

"Probably us," (Y/n) adds. "I should have stayed with Dad.”

Wanda laughs but then says, her voice more serious, “You know I can move things with my mind, right?”

“You know I can set things on fire, or freeze them, or throw them at people?” (Y/n) says. 

“Looking over your shoulder needs to become second nature,” Natasha and (Y/n) say in unison. 

“Anybody ever told the two of you that you’re a little paranoid?” Sam asks. 

“Not to my face,” Natasha scoffs, exchanging an amused glance with (Y/n) for a moment. 

“Nor mine, probably cause my Dad could sue anyone for some odd reason, but, you know, whatever,” (Y/n) says. “Anyway, why?”

“Did you hear something?” Natasha asks. 

“Anybody tell you that you two are perfect together?” Sam asks and (Y/n) holds back a fit of laughter and from the expression on Natasha’s face, she was doing the same. 

“Eyes on the target, folks,” Steve says, keeping Sam from saying anything else. “This is the best lead we’ve had on Rumlow in six months. I don’t want to lose him.”

“Oh, that’s why we’re here,” (Y/n) says. “Watch me get deaded by Rumlow if he’s here.”

“Okay Crazy,” Wanda says, holding back a laugh as the sound of Natasha smacking (Y/n)’s arm sounds through the COMs. 

Unknown to everyone but Steve, a garbage truck begins pushing its way through traffic, showing no regard to pedestrians or other vehicles. 

“Sam, see that garbage truck?” Steve asks. “Tag it.”

There is a moment of silence before Sam speaks, “That truck is loaded for max weight. And the driver’s armed.”

“It’s a battering ram,” Natasha realizes and (Y/n) sets a twenty on the table and stands up, heading for the alleyway where she’d teleported from MIT. 

(Y/n) teleports on top of the truck then just outside the Institute for Infectious Diseases Ward. 

Soldiers in black armor emerge from two trucks that had driven through the entrance to the Institution. 

“Go now!” Steve orders, readying his shield. 

“What?” Wanda asks. 

“He’s not hitting the police,” Steve says. 

“Yeah, no kidding,” (Y/n) grumbles as one of the soldiers shoots where she’d been standing a few moments before, while some of the soldiers shoot gas bombs into the building above (Y/n). 

Her fists lighting on fire, (Y/n) knocks out a few of the soldiers before Steve shows up.

“Nice of you to show up,” (Y/n) says with a warm smile towards the super-soldier. 

Steve smiles and says into the COMs, “Body armor, AR-15s. We make seven hostiles.”

Sam flies in and up to a rooftop, spinning and using his wings to block the gunfire, taking out two soldiers in the process. 

“I make that five,” Sam says. 

Wanda arrives and flies over a rooftop into the courtyard, blocking bullets with her powers. She takes control of a soldier and lifts him upwards. “Sam,” she calls, and the Falcon flies down and catches the soldier with one of his wings. 

“Four,” Sam says with a grin.

One of Sam’s drones flies by, scanning the inside of the building. “Rumlow’s on the third floor.”

“Aye Wanda,” (Y/n) says, running towards the girl. “Just like we practiced.”

“What about the gas?” comes Wanda’s questioning voice, her Sokovian accent thick at the moment. 

“Get it out,” (Y/n) says. 

Wanda uses her powers to lift (Y/n) up and through a window. 

(Y/n) grabs one of the soldiers and pulls off their gas mask. 

(Y/n) advances, taking out about five solders before making her way to the Bio-Hazard area. 

“Rumlow has a biological weapon,” (Y/n) warns. 

“I’m on it,” Natasha tells her, riding in on a motorcycle. She turns it on its side and skids it towards a soldier, taking out a few more in hand-to-hand combat. Rumlow comes up behind her, dragging her onto an armored vehicle. Natasha tries to electrocute Rumlow but it doesn’t work. 

“I don’t work like that no more,” Rumlow taunts. He throws her through a roof hatch into an armored vehicle, drops in a grenade, and shuts the hatch. “Fire in the hole!”

“Get out of there Nat!” (Y/n) calls, moving to stand on a balcony. 

Rumlow catches sight of her and sends a bomb her way and (Y/n) gets blasted back into a wall. 

Scrambling her feet, (Y/n) presses a hand to her bleeding forehead and breaks into a run as another blast shakes the building behind her. 

Another blast sends (Y/n) through a window and she falls over the side of the balcony, onto a metal container, and down onto the concrete below. 

(Y/n) groans, rolling over and staggering to her feet, her arm pressed tightly to her ribs, guessing some had broken. “Oh man, those are broken,” (Y/n) grumbles and Wanda rushes over, throwing an arm around (Y/n)’s shoulders, taking some of her weight. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Wanda says. 

Steve, Sam, and Natasha rush after Rumlow and the soldiers, Steve finally pinning Rumlow to the ground. 

“Something’s about to happen,” (Y/n) says, her eyes widening, hearing the conversation between Steve and Rumlow over the COMs. Then she turns to Wanda, “You gotta trust me? All right?” Wanda nods and (Y/n) teleports them to where Steve and Rumlow are. 

(Y/n) wraps her arms around Rumlow and nods to Wanda, who shoots the two into the air, not a moment too soon it seemed, because Rumlow explodes, (Y/n) screaming as she absorbs half the blast. The remaining energy hits the side of the building, shattering glass windows and setting the building on fire. 

(Y/n) drops back towards the ground, her eyes blurring slightly and Wanda shoots her arms up, catching (Y/n) and lightly lowering her to the ground before the Scarlet Witch looks up at the building in flames and covers her mouth with her hand. 

“Oh my . . .” Steve’s bright blue eyes, wide with shock, his mouth hanging open murmurs, “Sam . . . we need . . . Fire and Rescue . . . and a MedEvac team . . . on the south side of the building. We gotta get up there.”

Wanda glances down at (Y/n), whose forehead was bleeding, her right arm resting on her stomach, and the side of her face slightly burned, the woman’s (E/c) eyes fluttering shut. 

Natasha and Sam show up a few moments later and Natasha stares wide-eyed at her best friend’s unconscious body resting in Wanda’s lap. 

Natasha rushes over and helps some of the medical workers lift (Y/n)’s body onto a stretcher. 

The next day finds Natasha and Steve fussing over (Y/n) as she sits up in the Med Bay in the Avengers’ Compound. 

“I love all of you, but stop fussing over me,” (Y/n) says, getting to her feet and shrugging off Natasha’s hand on her shoulder. “I’m injured, not dead.”

Steve smiles at the thought, the same words as he had said to Natasha and (Y/n) a few years back when they were on the run from SHIELD, well, HYDRA. 

“Steve,” (Y/n) stops the super-soldier as she, Steve, and Natasha walk out of the Med Bay together. “Would you check up on Wanda? She probably feels responsible for what happened.”

Natasha turns to (Y/n) as Steve walks away, towards Wanda’s room, (Y/n) guesses. “Don’t you ever do anything that stupid ever again,” Natasha scolds her friend. “You did it in DC and Sokovia before now. You’re going to kill yourself by the time you die.”

“That’s incredibly strange wording there Miss Romanoff,” (Y/n) says with a smile. 

Natasha goes to say something but Sam walks up and leads Natasha down to the briefing room. 

A few minutes later, after (Y/n) had changed into a pair of jeans and a loose t-shirt, she makes her way down to the briefing room, leaning on the doorway as she listens to Thunderbolt Ross, the Secretary of State, speak. 

“Five years ago,” Ross begins. “I had a heart attack. I dropped right in the middle of my back-swing. Turned out it was the best round of my life, because after 13 hours of surgery and a triple bypass . . . I found something 40 years in the Army had never taught me: Perspective. The world owes the Avengers an un-payable debt. You have fought for us, protected us, risked your lives . . . but while a great many people see you as heroes, there are some . . . who would prefer the word ‘vigilantes’.”

“And what word would you use, Mr. Secretary?” asks Natasha in a falsely respectful voice. 

“How about "dangerous"? What would you call a group of US-based, enhanced individuals who routinely ignore sovereign borders and inflict their will wherever they choose and who, frankly, seem unconcerned about what they leave behind?“ Ross says and (Y/n) steps forward into the room from the shadows. 

“You don’t think we’re unconcerned about what we leave behind, Secretary?” (Y/n) says in a soft voice, which still carries through the silent room. “I think the Avengers, above all others, know what it’s like to lose the ones they care about and the wreckage left behind.”

Steve and Natasha look over to see (Y/n) standing behind Sam’s chair at the back of the room. 

“But,” (Y/n) smiles with a look of disgust in her eyes, “if you must, please, continue.”

“Thank you, Miss Stark,” Ross says, rolling his eyes and pressing a button on a remote in his hands. 

News footage from past Avengers and SHIELD matters flash on the screen as he speaks, “New York.” A Chitauri leviathan. Terrified citizens. A soldier firing a gun. The Hulk smashing into buildings, sending dust clouds engulfing the camera.

Rhodey’s expression turns regretful and he glances over his shoulder at Natasha. 

“Washington DC,” Ross continues. Three Insight helecarriers, firing on each other. The destroyed Triskelion. A helicarrier crashes into the Potomac throwing up a massive wave while in the background, (Y/n)’s body hits the river below. 

Sam is the one who looks down this time, and Steve spares a glance at (Y/n), whose expression had hardened into one of carefully controlled anger. 

“Sokovia,” Ross says, pressing yet another button on his controller. Terrified citizens running. The city rising. A building falling over. Wanda and Tony continue to look at the screen, Wanda swallowing thickly at the sight of her former home behind destroyed. 

“Lagos,” The burning building. Paramedics moving bodies. A dead girl. An unconscious (Y/n) being lifted into an ambulance.

Wanda looks particularly affected by the footage from Lagos and (Y/n) steps forward to place a comforting hand on the young woman’s shoulder. Steve also sees how discomforted Wanda seems and intervenes. 

“Okay, that’s enough.”

Ross nods to an aide and the images disappear. 

“For the past four years, you’ve operated with unlimited power and no supervision. That’s an arrangement the governments of the world can no longer tolerate. But I think we have a solution.” Ross receives a thick book from one of his aides and slides it across the table to Wanda. She picks it up and then slides it to Rhodey. 

“The Sokovia Accords,” Ross tells the Avengers. “Approved by a hundred and seventeen countries . . . it states that the Avengers should no longer be a private organization. Instead, they’ll operate under the supervision of a United Nations panel, only when and if that panel deems it necessary. You say that it's enough to be a man. But there are gods. And the rest of us, what are we? They’re giants, we’re what they step on.”

The conversation has (Y/n) remembering what Phil Coulson had told Mike Peterson before he had become DeathLok. 

“The good ones, the real deal,” comes (Y/n)’s voice and everyone turns to look at her once again. “They’re, we’re, not heroes because of what we have that you don’t. It’s what we do with it that matters.”

Steve nods and sends (Y/n) an admiring glance. “The Avengers were formed to make the world a safer place. I feel we’ve done that,” Steve adds to (Y/n)’s words.

“Tell me, Captain, Miss Stark, do you two know where Thor and Banner are right now?” Ross asks, meeting Steve’s eyes. 

“I have a guess,” (Y/n) says, meeting Natasha’s green gaze. “Asgard.”

Ross ignores (Y/n) and says, “If I misplaced a couple of 30 megaton nukes . . . you can bet there'd be consequences. Compromise. Reassurance. That's how the world works. Believe me, this is the middle ground.”

“So, there are contingencies,” Rhodey guesses. 

“Three days from now, the UN meets in Vienna to ratify the Accords.”

Steve glances at Tony as Ross heads for the door. 

“Talk it over,” Ross finally says. 

“And if we come to a decision you don’t like?” Natasha asks. 

“Then you retire,” Ross says and Natasha stifles a smile. 

A few minutes later, (Y/n) finds herself sitting at the counter in the briefing room, her fingers pressed to her temples as Sam and Rhodey argue behind her. 

“I have an equation,” Vision interrupts. 

“Oh, this will clear it up,” Sam says, turning to listen to Vision.

“In the eight years since Mr. Stark and Miss Stark announced themselves as IronMan and Phoenix respectively, the number of known enhanced persons has grown exponentially.”

“Are you saying it’s our fault?” Steve asks his eyes remaining on (Y/n), whose fingers had begun tapping lightly on the countertop in front of her.  

“I’m saying there may be a causality. Our very strength invites challenge. Challenge incites conflict. And conflict . . . breeds catastrophe. Oversight . . . oversight is not an idea that can be dismissed out of hand.”

“Boom,” Rhodey says. 

(Y/n) glances over at her father, who was lying on one of the couches, one hand on his face. 

When Natasha speaks, he removes his hand to look at her. “Tony,” Natasha prompts. “You are being uncharacteristically non-hyper-verbal.”

“It’s because he’s already made up his mind,” Steve guesses.

“Boy, you know me so well,” Tony gets up, wincing, rubbing the back of his head. “Actually, I’m nursing an electromagnetic headache.”

He walks over towards the kitchen and grabs a mug. “That’s what’s going on, Cap. It’s just pain. It’s discomfort. Who’s putting coffee grounds in the disposal” Am I running a bed and breakfast for a biker gang?” 

Despite the negative thoughts running through her head, (Y/n) cracks a smile at her father’s question.

Tony sets his phone in a basket and taps it. The phone projects an image of a smiling young ham. Tony looks down, then back up, and pretends to notice the picture for the first time. “Oh, that's Charles Spencer, by the way. He's a great kid. Computer engineering degree, 3.6 GPA. Had a floor level gig at Intel planned for the fall. But first, he wanted to put a few miles on his soul, before he parked it behind a desk. See the world. Maybe be of service. Charlie didn't want to go to Vegas or Fort Lauderdale, which is what I would do. He didn't go to Paris or Amsterdam, which sounds fun. He decided to spend his summer building sustainable housing for the poor. Guess where Sokovia.”

(Y/n) swallows thickly and glancing at her teammates, she can tell that the others are also affected by this. 

“He wanted to make a difference, I suppose,” Tony says softly. “I mean, we won't know because we dropped a building on him while we were kicking ass.” Tony takes a pill with some coffee, then faces the others. “There's no decision-making process here. We need to be put in check! Whatever form that takes, I'm game. If we can't accept limitations, if we're boundary-less, we're no better than the bad guys.”

“Well said,” comes (Y/n)’s quiet voice, though everyone in the room heard it. 

“Tony, someone dies on your watch, you don’t give up,” Steve says. 

“Who said we’re giving up?” Tony asks. 

“We are if we're not taking responsibility for our actions. This document just shifts the blames.” 

“I’m sorry,” (Y/n) says softly and the others turn to her once again. “Steve,” she pauses for a moment. “That’s dangerously arrogant,” there is an apologetic undertone to her words and now Rhodey speaks. 

“This is the United Nations we’re talking about. It’s not the World Security Council, it’s not SHIELD, it’s not HYDRA.”

“No, but it’s run by people with agendas, and agendas change,” Steve argues. 

“That’s good,” Tony presses. “That’s why I’m here. When I realized what my weapons were capable of in the wrong hands, I shut it down and stopped manufacturing.”

“Tony, you chose to do that. If we sign this, we surrender our right to choose. What if this panel sends us somewhere we don't think we should go? What if there is somewhere we need to go, and they don't let us? We may not be perfect, but the safest hands are still our own.”

“If we don’t do this now, it’s gonna be done to us later. That’s the fact. That won’t be pretty,” Tony says, shooting an apologetic glance towards his daughter. 

“You’re saying they’ll come for me,” Wanda’s gaze flickers to the others. 

“Us,” (Y/n) corrects, meeting Wanda’s fearful green gaze. 

“We would protect you,” Vision says. 

“Maybe Tony’s right,” Natasha says, shooting a glance at (Y/n), then Wanda.

Tony looks at the former assassin, surprised. 

“If we have one had on the wheel, we can steer. If we take it off -” Sam interupts Natasha. 

“Aren’t you the same woman who told the government to kick her ass a few years ago?” Sam asks as (Y/n) rises from her place slumped against the countertop and walks over to sit by her friend. 

Natasha looks over at (Y/n) and sends her a comforting smile. 

“I’m just . . .” Natasha begins but (Y/n) continues for her. 

“She’s reading the terrain,” (Y/n) explains. “We have made . . . some -”

“Very public mistakes. We need to win everyone’s trust back,” Natasha finishes. 

“Focus up,” Tony says, still staring at Natasha in disbelief. “I’m sorry, did I mishear you or did you agree with me?”

(Y/n) cracks another smile as Natasha replies, “Oh, I want to take it back now.”

“No, no, no,” Tony argues. “You can't retract it. Thank you. Unprecedented. Okay, case closed--I win.“

Steve’s phone buzzes and he pulls it out to check it. (Y/n) glances over at Steve, a question in her eyes. 

(Y/n) knew that Steve had feelings for her - and (Y/n) did as well - and judging by the look on Steve’s face, she knew it had to be about Peggy. (Y/n) knew that, deep down, Steve still loved Peggy. 

“I have to go,” Steve says abruptly, dropping the Accords onto the coffee table and going downstairs. 

The others in the room glance at each other for a moment before Wanda stands up from her place next to Vision and (Y/n) stands up, following her. 

(Y/n) jogs after Wanda, catching up with the young brunette. “Wanda,” (Y/n) places a hand on her shoulder, but the girl continues to walk. “Wanda, stop.”

“What?” Wanda snaps, turning on (Y/n). 

“What are you going to do?” (Y/n) asks softly, her hand remaining on Wanda’s shoulder. 

“What are you going to do?” Wanda asks in return. 

“I’m going to sign,” (Y/n) says softly. “I think you should too. Like my dad said, if we don’t do this now, it’s going to happen later.”

(Y/n) gives Wanda’s shoulder a comforting squeeze before she turns, walking away. 

A few days later, (Y/n) and Natasha walk into the cathedral where Steve had just been mourning the death of Peggy Carter. 

(Y/n) smiles nervously at Steve as he speaks, “When I came out of the ice, I thought everyone I had known was gone. Then I found out that she was alive. I was just lucky to have her.”

“She had you back, too,” Natasha says, shooting (Y/n) - who was standing at her shoulder - a glance. 

“Who else signed?” Steve asks. 

“Tony. Rhodey. Vision.” (Y/n) answers. 

“Clint?” Steve asks. 

“Say’s he’s retired,” Natasha says, and (Y/n) and the redhead share an amused smile. 

“Wanda?”

“TBD,” Natasha answers. 

“We’re, well, off to Vienna for the signing of the Accords,” (Y/n) says. “There’s plenty of room on the jet,” she offers, hoping with all her heart that Steve would come. 

Steve sighs and bows his head and (Y/n)’s composer seems to fall. 

“Just because it’s the path of least resistance doesn’t mean it’s the wrong path. Staying together is more important than how we stay together,” Natasha tells Steve.

(Y/n) had the feeling that her best friend was trying to convince herself as well. 

“What are we giving up to do it?” Steve asks, avoiding meeting (Y/n)’s eyes.

Natasha sighs and Steve shakes his head, unconvinced. 

“I’m sorry, Nat, (Y/n),” Steve says softly. “I can’t sign it.”

“We know,” (Y/n) says softly. 

"Then what are you doing here?" Steve asks. 

"I didn't want you to be alone," (Y/n) says, stepping forward to wrap the super soldier in a hug. 

(Y/n) pulls back after a moment, holding back tears as she says, "Good luck, Steve." 

Natasha puts a comforting hand on (Y/n)'s arm and the two walk out of the cathedral. 

A few hours later, (Y/n) and Natasha are standing in the UN building signing papers for the Accords. 

"Excuse me, Miss Romanoff, Miss Stark?" asks a UN staffer. 

"Yes?" Natasha responds.

"We need your signatures," the staffer says. (Y/n) and Natasha sign the papers. 

"I suppose neither of us are used to the spotlight," comes a voice and the two women turn to see Prince T'Challa standing in front of them. "Though, Miss Stark, it seems to follow you everywhere."

"Well, it's not always so flattering," Natasha answers with a smile. 

"You seem to be going alright so far. Considering your last trip to Capitol Hill . . . I wouldn't think you would be particularly comfortable in this company."

"Well, I'm not," Natasha replies. 

"That alone makes me glad you're here, Miss Romanoff," T'Challa continues. 

"Why? You don't approve of all this?" (Y/n) asks. 

"The Accords, yes," T'Challa answers. "The politics, not really. Two people in a room can get more done than a hundred."

"Unless you need to move a piano," comes King T'Chaka's voice. 

"Father."

"Son. Miss Romanoff. Miss Stark," T'Chaka's says in return, nodding to his son. 

"King T'Chaka," (Y/n) says, nodding respectfully to the king. "Please let us apologize for what happened in Nigeria."

"Thank you. Thank you for agreeing to all this. I'm sad to hear that Captain Rogers will not be joining us today."

(Y/n) and Natasha share a glance. "Us as well," (Y/n) answers.

"If it is okay, I would like to have a word with Miss Stark," T'Challa says and (Y/n) nods. 

Smiling at Natasha, then nodding to the king, (Y/n) follows T'Challa to the window. 

Before T'Challa can say anything, T'Chaka begins to speak. "When stolen Wakandan vibranium was used to make a terrible weapon, we in Wakanda were forced to question our legacy. Those men and women killed in Nigeria were part of a goodwill mission from a country too long in the shadows. We will not, however, let misfortune drive us back. We will fight to improve the world we wish to join. I am grateful to the Avengers for supporting this initiative." (Y/n) spots something outside and she nudges T'Challa, pointing to a news van outside where several officers were milling around the back. "Wakanda is proud to extend its hand in peace."

"Everybody get down!" (Y/n) and T'Challa yell, sprinting towards where the king was still standing, giving his speech. 

An enormous explosion goes off between the two buildings sending (Y/n) and T'Challa flying back. 

(Y/n) staggers to her feet, her hand wrapped around her bleeding forearm, and watches, horrified as T'Challa finds his father lying on the floor with his eyes closed. The Prince grabs his father's wrist and feels for a pulse, but King T'Chaka lies still. Devastated, T'Challa lies across his father, then lifting him and rocking him. 

Natasha darts forward and pulls her friend down onto the floor and rips off part of her sleeve to wrap around (Y/n)'s arm, (Y/n)'s eyes wide with shock.

The survivors are evacuated from the buildings and fire crews begin to hose them down.

Natasha and (Y/n) sit on the bench beside T'Challa's. 

"I'm very sorry," Natasha says softly. 

T'Challa glances at the two, holding a silver ornate ring which he toys with between his fingers. "In my culture, death is not the end. It's more of a . . . stepping-off point. You reach out with both hands and Bast and Sekhmet, they lead you into the green veldt where . . . you can run forever."

"That sounds very peaceful," Natasha replies, her voice still soft. 

"My father thought so," T'Challa answers, placing the ring on his finger. "But I am not my father."

"T'Challa. Task forces will decide who brings in Barnes."

T'Challa clenches his fists, "Don't bother, Miss Romanoff. I'll kill him myself."

3rd Person POV

Steve - in his uniform - strides through an underpass, then jogs onto a private runway, heading for a grounded chopper. An electro-disabler slams onto the chopper and Steve looks up. 

Above him, Tony and Rhodey descend, landing on the ground. 

"Wow, it's so weird how you run into people at the airport. Don't you think that's weird?" Tony asks, his helmet retracting.

"Definitely weird," Rhodey answers. 

"Hear me out, Tony," Steve says. "That doctor, the psychiatrist, he's behind all of this."

T'Challa, clad in his Black Panther uniform, leaps over a truck. "Captain."

"Your highness."

"Anyway," Tony says, walking behind Rhodey. "Ross gave me thirty-six hours to bring you in. That was twenty-four hours ago. Can you help a brother out?"

"You're after the wrong guy," Steve answers calmly. 

"Your judgment is askew," Tony replies, some of his anger showing now. "Your old war buddy killed innocent people yesterday. 

"And there are five more soldiers just like him. I can't let the doctor find them first, Tony. I can't."

"Steve . . ." It was Natasha's voice now. ". . . you know what's about to happen. Do you want to punch your way out of this one?"

"All right I've run out of patience. Underoos!" Tony calls. 

A figure in blue and red spandex shoots what looks like a web, stealing Steve's shield and binding his hands, landing on a car. 

"Good job, kid," Tony praises. 

"Thanks. Well, I could've stuck the landing a little better. It's just the new suit… Well, it's nothing, Mr. Stark. It's--it's perfect. Thank you," Peter stumbles over his words.

"Yeah, we don't really need to start a conversation."

"Okay. Cap . . . Captain. Big fan, I'm Spider-Man." 

"Yeah, we'll talk about it later. Just . . ."

"Hey, everyone."

" . . . Good job."

"You've been busy," Steve interrupts. 

"And you've been a complete idiot. Dragging in Clint. 'Rescuing' Wanda from a place she doesn't even want to leave, a safe place. I'm trying to keep . . . I'm trying to keep you from tearing the Avengers apart," Tony finishes. 

“You did that when you signed,” Steve answers calmly. 

“Alright, We're done. You're gonna turn Barnes over, you're gonna come with us. NOW! Because it's us! Or a squad of J-SOC guys . . . with no compunction about being impolite,” Tony scowls at Steve. 

Steve holds up his hands and Clint shoots the web off with an arrow. “Alright, Lang.”

“Hey, guys, something . . .” Peter says. 

He gets kicked back and a full sized man is now standing beside Steve, holding out his shield.

“Oh great,” Tony says. “There’s two in the parking garage. One of them’s Maximoff I’m going to grab her.” Tony flies off in his suit. “Rhodey, you wanna take Cap?

“Got two in the terminal, Wilson and Barnes,” Rhodey answers. 

“Barnes is mine!” T’Challa shouts. 

“Hey, Mr. Stark. What should I do?” Peter asks. 

“What we discussed. Keep your distance. Web ‘em up,” Tony answers.

“Okay, copy that!” Peter uses his webs to swing away. 

Scott Lang - Ant Man - faces Natasha. “Look, I really don’t want to hurt you.”

“I wouldn’t stress about it,” Natasha replies. She kicks him in the groin and he miniaturizes, throwing her head over heels. She zaps him off her wrist and he slams into a nearby truck, leaving a small dent. 

Tony is now hovering over Wanda and Clint. “Wanda, I think you hurt Visions’s feelings.”

“You locked me in my room,” Wanda retorts. 

“Okay first, that’s an exaggeration. Second, (Y/n) wanted me to protect you. Hey, Clint.”

“Hey, man,” Clint answers, readying his bow. 

“Clearly, retirement doesn’t suit you. You get tired of shooting golf?”

“Well, I played eightteen, I shot eightteen. Just can’t seem to miss,” Clint fires an arrow which Tony deflects. 

“First time for everything,” Tony replies. 

“Made you look,” Clint smirks. 

“Suddenly a sar slams past Tony and he looks up as dozens more come crashing down. Wanda moves her glowing red hands until Tony is burried under a pile of cars. 

Tony flies over to Natasha once he unburries himself and helps her up. 

“Is this part of the plan?” the redhead asks. 

“Well, my plan was to go easy on them. You wanna switch it up?” the billionare asks. 

Clint spots the Quinjet. “There’s our ride.”

“Come on!” Steve calls. 

Steve’s team runs towards the Quinjet but they are stopped by a fizzing stream of energy slicking across the runway and they stop. Looking up they see Vision hovering overhead. 

“Captain Rogers,” Vision begins. “I know what you believe what your doing is right. But for the collective good you must surrender now.” As he speaks, the rest of Tony’s team arrives. 

“What’d we do, Cap?” Sam asks. 

“We fight,” Steve answers. 

“This is gonna end well,” Natasha says. 

The two teams stride towards each other with grim determination etched on their faces. 

“They’re not stopping,” Peter says. 

“Neither are we,” Tony replies grimly. 

Steve blocks a punch with his shield from Tony as he lands. Clint fires an arrow at Vision as Rhodey flies after Sam and and Bucky, trading blows with T’Challa.

An explosive arrow hit Tony.

Natasha throws Scott as Peter wings through the air, struggling to evade flying vehicles.

Bucky lands punches on T’Challa. 

Clint and Natasha battle with batons and eventually, Clint pins her down with his bow. 

“We’re still friends, right?” Natasha asks. 

“Depends on how hard you hit me,” Clint answers.

Natasha spins the archer with her legs and jumps to her feet. As she’s about to kick his head, her foot stops and glows bright red. With a wave of her hand, Wanda throws Natasha back. “You were pulling your punches. 

As Natasha’s thrown back, someone catches her before she can hit the ground. 

“Nice to see you,” the figure says with a ghost of a smile as she sets the redhead back on her feet. 

“(Y/n)! What are you doing here?” the redhead asks. 

“I’m making sure nobody dies today!” (Y/n) yells over her shoulder, running to where Steve was talking to Peter. 

“Look kid,” Steve says as (Y/n) comes up behind him. “There’s a lot here that you don’t understand. 

“Mr. Stark said you’d say that,” Peter replies. “Wow.” He fires webs which stick to Steve’s leg and shield. He pulls and Steve slides towards him. Peter kicks him backwards and then rolls clear. “He also said to go for you legs.” As Steve runs to get his shield, Peter webs his hands and pulls. Steve grits his teeth, spins and somersaults, propelling Peter through the air. 

Steve catches one of Peter’s webs and tugs the boy near him, knocking him down with the shield. Peter recovers and pull himself on top of a gangway. “Stark tell you anything else?” Steve asks.

“How about don’t beat up kids?” (Y/n) asks teleporting in between the kid and Steve. 

“Go,” (Y/n) tells the kid, then readies her fists at Steve. 

Growling with frustration, Steve throws his shield at (Y/n) but (Y/n) stops it with a jet of water. 

(Y/n) charges at Steve but is stopped by Bucky, who had launched himself at her and pinned her to the ground. 

Bucky goes to punch his metal fist into her face but (Y/n) teleports away. “What the!” Bucky exclaims. 

Vision had just shot a shining beam of energy at the control tower and it collapses towards the entrance of the hangar. Wanda holds other hands, keeping the tower from collapsing, letting Steve and Bucky run through it. Rhodey descends behind her and fires a sonic disruptor and Wanda holds her head and screams. The tower falls around Steve and Bucky but they make it into the hanger. 

Natasha, who was in the hangar, catches sight of the tower falling on top of another figure. The two had made eye contact before the tower had collapsed on top of her, (E/c) on green. 

“Tony!” Natasha yells, running past, completely ignoring Steve and Bucky, who run past her into the Quinjet. “We’ve got a big problem!”

“Romanoff, what is it?” Tony asks. 

“(Y/n) . . .” the redhead trails off. 

“What happened?” Tony asks frantically.

“The control tower, it collapsed on top of her,” Natasha breathes. “We need somebody who can lift heave things.”

Tony, Rhodey, Wanda, and Clint show up soon and the five dig through the rubble and Natasha heaves one chunk of rock, moving it. 

(Y/n) raises up her arm, her hand trembling and everyone rushes over to move the rest of the rock. Her hand falls, palm facing up, and she exhales, her breath ragged. 

“I hope one of y-you can c-carry me,” (Y/n) stammers. “Cause I think my leg’s b-broken.”

The last slab of rock is removed and everyone looks at each other. A sheet of metal was stuck in her abdomen, and blood was pooling under her. 

“Y-you’re gonna have t-to c-carry me.”

Tony comes out of his suit and takes his daughter’s hand in his own. Natasha moves to take the other. (Y/n)’s eyes close in pain for a moment and then she opens them again. 

“I-I think i-it’s bad,” (Y/n) voice trembles. “Cause I can’t feel it.” 

Her eyes close once more and then she opens them again, looking at her father. 

“D-dad? W-when di-id you get h-here?” (Y/n) stutters and Tony squeezes his dying daughter’s hand. 

“Oh sweetheart, I’ll always be here.” Tony says, a tear falling from his eyes. 

“T-that’s sweet,” (Y/n) slurs. Her head lolls to the side and she sees Natasha and Clint, the archer’s hand placed on his redheaded friend’s shoulder. “Nat. C-clint.” A tear streaks down Natasha’s face. “D-don’t c-cry. I-I’ll be o-okay.”

“Only you could comfort us like this,” Natasha says, tears falling onto her hands. 

(Y/n) looks over at Rhodey, and his helmet retracts. “U-uncle R-rhodey?”

The man nods. 

“W-watch m-my Dad,” she says. “H-he tends to be r-reckless sometimes.”

“I will,” Rhodey promises. 

“Doll, that’s not every nice,” Tony scolds lightly and (Y/n) lets out a soft laugh. 

“Wanda,” (Y/n) says, addressing the youngest. 

Wanda looks up from her feet. 

“Y-you’re so s-smart and t-talented,” (Y/n) tells the young girl. “And d-don’t le-et anyone tell y-you different.”

Wanda chokes down a sob as (Y/n) falls limp against the rocks under her. 

Natasha runs her hands gently through her friend’s hair and (Y/n) jolts conscious once again. 

“N-nat,” (Y/n) stammers. 

“Breathe, just breathe (Y/n/n),” Natasha murmurs. 

“N-nat, t-ell St-teve I’m sorry,” (Y/n) slurs.

Then she falls limp . . . 

She breathes her last breath . . . 

And falls silent, not moving again . . . 

Well, this was, well, this made me cry writing it, so . . .

Word Count: 7,164 words

So yeah, I don’t know if this was what @rogersrogers334​ was looking for, but here it is. 

Anyway, Imma go cry in the safety of my bed now . . .

Love,          Kaitlynn ❤️😍

[mysanderssidessideblog]

A Good Day

Warnings for Sides fading out, major character death, unsympathetic Patton, angst, gaslighting, not a happy ending.  

Written for #UnsympAndAngstSidesBingo

Link to AO3

“I'm very disappointed in you kiddo.”

Janus looked up from his book, frowning.

True, he knew his occasional appearance in the Lightside was not exactly welcome, but he had been slowly trying to help the others acclimatise to his presence by sitting quietly with a book from time to time.

He'd even carefully set out a tea set and biscuits this time, rather than his usual tea for one, making a subtle gesture that he was open to company. So far, none had taken him up on the offer.

Yet, he could not fathom source of Patton's discontent. He was <i>trying</i>, and short of dragging Virgil out by his ear to reluctantly sit with him, he was not sure what more he could do.

“Patton. Will you not join me?”  Janus had learnt that the use of the word 'not' had evolved to ambiguous meaning; 'I could care less' tended to be treated the same as 'I could not care less', even if the wording was inaccurate. As a result, he leaned heavily into the word to help mask his lies.

“No.”

Morality's face, usually lit up with a bright smile, was stern.

Janus pursed his lips, and feigned indifference. “As you like.”

“You had one job, and you have failed.”

That took him aback, Patton not usually so confrontational. lowering his book, Janus schooled his expression into neutrality, opting for addressing the accusation in a calm and civil manner. He inclined his head so that he appeared interested in what Patton had to say, while opening his stance to appear receiving to discussion.

“I am not sure I follow. Please, help me understand.”

“You were to keep the undesirable elements of Thomas hidden, secret. <i>You</i> were supposed to stay away, out of sight, out of mind.”

“Ah.”  Janus straightened, and clutched at his book, trying to hide the hurt from his voice. He had thought he and Patton had reached something of a truce, that Patton had seen that he had some merit in being known, in being active participant in the mindscape.

“I believe we agreed that repression was not of benefit. That I could keep things hidden, but it would be best for Thomas to be more self-aware, to learn that he had sides to him that were not always...”  Janus struggled for an appropriate word, “...good.” he finished lamely.

It was hard to argue with Morality; he held great power and influence, and his view of the world was parsed down into good and evil. Janus sought to teach him of the deeper complexities, but Patton was reluctant to even consider than lying could have small benefit in theory, so the idea of applying small untruths to day to day happenings was unthinkable to him.

“It is not working. Thomas is more stressed than ever with so many conflicting opinions, and then there is Remus! He is disgusting, and vile, and Thomas does not need him and his corrupting presence!”

 “And don't think I have not noticed Logan's more regular angry outbursts. The influence of the dark sides has gotten out of hand, and must be corrected.”

Janus was glad of his gloves that hid how white his knuckles had turned with how tightly he held the book.  He swallowed nervously.

“Patton, I understand that this is a time of change, and that change can be daunting, even uncomfortable. However, change is important for growth, for improved insight. This will help Thomas become a better person, eventually.”

“Thomas was already perfect before the dark sides came along! Things were better before!”

Patton's face then broke into a smile.

Janus did not like that smile, not in the slightest.

“Maybe that is answer.....”

He was about to get to his feet, about to retreat, when Patton walked towards him.

“You could not keep the dark contained.” he said, as the air around them grew dense. Janus felt uneasy, as Patton's eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “So I guess it's a father's duty to step in when a Kiddo has failed....”

Janus did try to get up then, but found himself held down by Patton by a hand upon his shoulder, surprisingly strong.

“You'll help me, won't you Kiddo? Help me fix up your little mistake...?”

“I don't understand Patton, what are you talking about?”

“You, and Remus, all the dark sides, are a bad influence on Thomas.”  Patton then stretched his lips  wider, his face a rictus parody of a smile, “It's high time someone did something about that....”

Janus shook his head. “Patton, you cannot just deny that Thomas has dark sides to him, same as everyone! We are just as much a part of him as you are!” he lifted his hand, tried to push Patton from him. He could not make Patton's hand budge at all.

“Thomas needs us. Needs all of us!”

Patton's grip shifted, instead of holding Janus down, curling his fingers past the fabric and into the flesh underneath, so tight Janus felt like Patton was reaching to leave fingerprints upon his bones.

“No. Thomas needs to be good.” Patton gave a short nod to himself. “Thomas will be good.”

Janus cried out, in pain, in fear.

“Let me go!”

“I can't do that Kiddo. See, if I'm gonna make everything right again, I'll need to borrow just a tiny bit of your power.”

“You can hide things, and I have high influence over nostalgia and memories. I think that if we really put our minds to it and work together, we can hide the memories of the dark sides so deep that they will never be thought of again!”

“Patton, Thomas needs all aspects of him. He needs to understand that others have the capacity to lie so he is not taken advantage of. He needs the ability to get angry when things are not right so he can sort it out.” “He even needs Remus, the core of his jokes that are a little crude, a little naughty....” “You cannot just.... delete those vital pieces of him; that way lies madness!”

“You are one to talk about lies mister!”

“OK, OK, I have lied, and will likely do so again, but you have been told that repression doesn't work... that didn't come from me, but Logan. And you trust Logan, right?”

Patton tipped his head, thoughtful.

“Hmm. Good point.”

Janus sagged slightly, relieved he had managed to get through to Morality.

“I guess we'll just have to remove the the dark sides entirely!” he said brightly.

Janus froze, unbelieving. If it had been anyone other than Patton, he'd have accused them of a off-tone joke..... but Patton wasn't lying.

“I will help you!” he snarled, shaking his head, the lie unsubtle and obvious.

Tutting, Patton looked down.

“If you are not part of the solution, then it seems to me you are part of the problem...”

Patton's hand clawed, and Janus felt something creak within his shoulder.

He felt Patton tug at his influence, and thrashed and fought to keep what he was whole. He hissed and bore his teeth as if he might bite.

The hand across his throat stilled him, surprised, shocked that Patton would do such a thing.

“Stop fighting me, I know what's best for Thomas.”

“I will not help you destroy the dark sides!”

Patton's grip, both on shoulder and throat tightened in irritation. Janus struggle to fight back, to even draw breath, but Morality held much more sway than he did, and he could not break free.

He struggled, cursing himself for dismissing Patton as native and weak. Janus knew he was merely stalling for time, that Patton would eventually win. There was a small hope that one of the others might happen upon them and intervene, but he was not well liked, and he did not trust that another side would not work with Patton against him.

Patton looked down over his glasses, considering, and Janus desperately tried to stop Patton from draining his power, his essence.

Patton's grip round his throat relaxed, and Janus drew desperate and painful breath.

It took him a moment to realise that Patton was stroking against the side of his neck, affectionately. “You have an affinity for self-preservation, yes? Give me your power, willingly, and I shall let you survive.”

His mismatched eyes widened as Janus took in how very serious and set on this course of action Patton was.

Terror gripped him as the fingers round his neck tightened again, and he feared for his life.

A better side would have stood up for what was right.

A stronger side would have fought harder.

A clever side would have found the words to make Patton reconsider.

But Janus was a selfish side.

Weakly, he nodded.

Janus tried to cry out as Patton syphoned his strength and his power, but he could only hiss which what remained of his breath. His gloves and cape leached their colour, turning dull and grey as Patton stole from him.

He did not hold out much hope that Patton would ever return what he had taken.

When it was done, Patton released Janus, standing tall and confident, radiating energy.

“You made the right choice. Well done kiddo.”

Janus, sagged in the chair, tired. He managed to bring his head up to look at Patton.  

“Patton, wait...” he managed to say, each word needing so much effort to utter than before, lie or not, “Please take a moment to think.. to reflect... You would be interfering beyond your realm of expertise. Do not do this!”

“Oh my silly little snake!” Patton leaned down to plant a fond kiss upon Janus's forehead.  “It's already done!”

“What? No!” Janus clutched at the chair, as if it might hold him steady against this new revelation.

“All those nasty bits that Thomas doesn't need are already disappearing from thought. If you wanted to say your goodbyes, I would hurry. They are fading fast.”

One thought came to mind.

“Remusssss!”  he hissed, and with a lurch, Janus swung himself downwards, sinking through the floor.

He landed in a landscape in disarray, the features of the darkside twisting and fragmenting, everything coming apart.

Remus was there, trying to shore up a crack in the wall with what looked like a mix of blood and cement.

“Snake-butt! Something's happening. Something's wrong!” he hollered over the low groan of the mindscape rejecting the dark.

Janus looked about in despair, only to see Remus staring at him, the crack beyond repair and stretching out. Horrifically, Janus could see the crack behind Remus, as the darker creativity grew translucent and hazy.

  “My head feels fuzzy like mould on a birthday cake, and what's up with you? You've gone all grey.”

“It's Patton, he is not unmaking the dark side!”  even in desperate times, Janus could not speak truthfully.

“What does that even mean?!”

Remus's voice was strange, softer as if he was shouting from a distance, but that did not hide the fact that he was scared. Janus could not ever recall Remus sounding scared.

Janus looked to him, halfway transparent and afraid, and the surrounding walls crumbling apart.

 He forced a smile.

“Everything will be all right.” he lied, as he reached over and wrapped his arms round Remus, so the other would not see the tears in his eyes.

The sounds of unmaking crescendoed about them, and then, grew quiet.

Remus, and the darkside, and all that it contained faded to black... no, not black.....

Nothingness.

*********

Janus had had to claw his way back from the nothingness, drawing on what little power he had left.

He shouldn't have made it, should have faded out with the rest, but Morality's promise of his own unworthy survival held true.

The effort of returning to the lightside caused him to stumble, and he landed gracelessly in the common area.

Logan, writing down something in a note book, looked up. He gave curt nod.

“Janus.” he acknowledged, and then returned to his writing.

“Logan!” Janus hissed out, struggling to his feet.

Logan looked again, and adjusted his glasses at the sight of Janus bereft of his usual colouration.

“You have a new outfit. It is... monochromatic.”

“Do not summon the others. It's not important!”

Logan frowned, “If it is of such little import, then why can you not do it?”

Hands clenched weakly at his sides, Janus swayed where he stood.

“I can!” he lied, and then cursed himself for not speaking clearly as Logan stood back expectantly.

It did not take long for Logan to realise that Janus was making no move to call the others to them.

“Oh. You are lying.” Logan's lips tightened, “Very well.”

Roman rose with a flourish, and Virgil popped up sitting on the stairs.

“Patton has not done something terrible!” Janus started, then caught himself. He took a breath.

“Patton has done something terrible. He has destroyed the darkside, and all those still connected to it.”

Virgil frowned in thought, “I thought I felt something weird... ”

“Or it could have just been your usual constant worry of something about to go wrong.” Logan reminded, to which Virgil gave reluctant nod.

“Even if that were true, which I very much doubt it is coming from you, then why are you still here?” Roman asked, sceptical.

“I....” Janus swallowed his pride and spoke aloud his grievous mistake. “I made a deal with him to survive.”

“but he took my power, and used it to unmake the darkside!”

“Patton wouldn't do something like that.” Roman said confidently.

“Patton wouldn't do something like what?”

Janus pulled back as Patton approached, smiling cheerfully.

“Janus thinks you have done something bad.” Logan explained.

“Are you sure you didn't mishear him that I've done something 'Dad'?”

Janus snarled.

“You destroyed them, all the dark sides! Pieces of Thomas, ripped apart and gone!”

Patton laughed, “As if I would do anything to hurt dear Thomas!

Roman and Logan nodded with Patton, that of the two, Patton was far more trust-worthy than Deceit.

“Anyway, Thomas doesn't have dark sides, save for you....” Janus did not like the way Patton looked at him, as if he was nothing but another problem that needed 'fixing'. He shuddered.

Patton continued, “But don't worry, we'll all help you find your place and learn to be good! Just like Virgil!”

Virgil gave an uncomfortable shrug at being pointed out.

Janus turned to Roman, desperate, “Roman, your twin! He is... he is gone Roman!! Patton killed him!”

“My brother?” Roman frowned, and reached to the back of his head to rub against a fragment of a memory.

He looked to Patton for guidance, deeply confused.

“Don't be silly, you don't have a brother.”

Roman's hand dropped, and he shrugged at Janus. “I don't even have a brother. Don't speak such lies Snake!”

“You did! His name is... is... was.....”

Janus's eyes widened in horror, as he could not bring the name to mind.... nor the face....

 Patton had not just destroyed the dark sides, but he had erased even the memories of them. How could Janus convince them of Patton's misdeed, when he had cleared every scrap of evidence from the mindscape?

How long before Janus himself forgot what Patton had done?

He lunged then at Patton, furious. He was stopped by Logan's arm easily blocking him and pushing him to the side.

Patton folded his arms, face full of fake concern.

“I was merciful before, but I think you need a time out Janus. Go to your room. In fact, I think it would be for the best if you were to stay there for the time being, and stop telling such terrible lies.”

“Roman, be a dear and take Janus to his room for me.”

“Sure thing Pat!”

As Janus let himself be led away, disbelieved and defeated, and destined to forget what he was and be moulded into whatever Patton deemed acceptable form of Deceit, Janus heard Patton address the other sides.

“Oh Kiddos, I'm just so happy! I have a feeling today is going to be a <i>good</i> day!”

[heauxplesslydevoted]

Under My Skin (Ethan x MC)

Warning: 18+, NSFW

Summary: Set in the middle of chapter 6, Ethan and Naomi have it out over the current state of the diagnostics team.

Tags: @colourmeshy @virtualrain202 @fanmantrashcan @writinghereandthere @ao719 @x-kyne-x @paulfwesley @ramseyandrys @a-i-n-a-a-s-h @perriewinklenerdie @aworldoffandoms @thatcatlady0716 @drakewalker04 @canknot @hatescapsicum @lapisreviewsstuff @akacalliope @senseofduties @badchoicesposts @ethandaddyramsey @the-soot-sprite @chasingrobbie @zodiacsign1 @choices-lurker @miyakokurono @trappedinfandoms @my-heart-beats-for-ya @adrian-motherfucking-raines @riverrune ~v~

Naomi stares at the textbook in front of her, eyes tired and blurry. She checks the time on her cell phone and 3:22 AM stares back in bold, white letters. Craning her head slightly, she spots Ethan standing at his kitchen island, looking at something on his laptop. 

She never thought she’d be back in his apartment, but he invited the entire diagnostics team over so they could get some research done on Leland Bloom’s case. Ethan wants it to be solved as quickly as possible, and he wants to be rid of the tech billionaire, so after work they all congregated in his apartment, eating Chinese food, drinking wine, passing around textbooks and throwing out theories. 

They’ve been at it for almost 6 hours now. 

The energy in the room is off. Ethan’s been pissed ever since the board told him they’d need to be for-profit and start accepting wealthy clients and potential donors, and everyone feels it. June, Baz, and Naomi have been walking on eggshells around him, but aside from occasional snark from Naomi, they’ve been extremely curt.

Jenner likes her though. The golden retriever took a shine to her the moment she crossed the threshold to Ethan’s condo, sniffing at her feet and attaching himself to her hip. He’s now lounging with her, head in her lap and she pours over this book, and she’s glad. The friendly dog provides an excellent distraction and Naomi is thankful, because his owner currently sucks.

Naomi has dealt with a lot of Ethan’s moods before: upset, defeated, angry, happy, the works. But she’s never had his ire directed at her before. They’re in this mess because of her, and it’s a tricky space to occupy. It’s not fun.

“As much as I love reading, if I look at another word, I think my brain might melt,” June says, breaking the tense silence. She stifles a yawn.

“I’ve tapped out for the night as well,” Baz adds. “I’ve looked up every possible kidney and bladder disease and disorder known to mankind. I’m on sensory overload. I think it’s time I go home.”

Ethan looks up from his laptop. He knows his team is probably exhausted. He can’t believe they’ve actually stayed over this long. “Well, thank you for staying. Go home, get some rest, I’ll see you at the hospital.”

June and Baz gather their belongings and all of the study material they brought along with them, returning Ethan’s living room to its original tidy state. Muttering goodbyes, the two of them exit the apartment. 

And then there were two. Naomi ignores the tension, ignoring the fact that they haven’t been alone together in over a week. Instead, she buries her face in her book, trying to focus on the words.

Ethan doesn’t bother sparing Naomi another glance before asking, “You didn’t want to leave with them?”

“Why, are you about to go to bed?”

“No.”

“Then, no.” She’s not going to stop now, and give him the satisfaction of thinking she’s given up for the night. Her stubbornness won’t allow it. “I don’t want to disrupt the process. I want this guy diagnosed and treated as badly as you do.”

Ethan scoffs. “I doubt it.”

Naomi has been giving as good as she gets when it comes to the passive aggressive snark, but it’s just exhausting at this point. She refuses to be his emotional punching bag any longer. She whips around in her seat. “God, is being a petulant little crybaby a second full-time job for you?”

That manages to get Ethan’s full attention. He levels a cool glare at the young resident, eyebrow raised in challenge. “You’ve gotten real comfortable calling me out of my name recently. Care to repeat that, Valentine?”

“You heard me loud and clear, Ramsey. You’re being a petulant little crybaby. You’ve been trying to pick a fight with me for the past 2 weeks. Look, I apologized, multiple times, for going behind your back or over your head, but I will not apologize for doing what I believe is right, not just for the team, but the hospital.”

“And you’re an insubordinate know-it-all!” Ethan shoots back. “You’re the type to touch the hot stove despite being repeatedly told not to because you think you’re a special snowflake who’s above getting burned. You lack foresight and analytical thought and self-preservation.”

Naomi recoils, having not expected Ethan to snap at her like that. “Excuse me?”

Jenner recognizes the change in tone between both adults. Not wanting to be caught in the crossfire, he moves from his spot on the couch and trots out of the living room, disappearing into the hallway.

“You thought this was going to be easy, that patients would just come flocking to us, but look at us, and everything would be perfect. We’re part of some social media...something or another’s video diary, we’re competing with a subpar hospital for patients despite being better than them, wasting time and resources because he wants to treat this like a reality show contest, and who knows what’s next, because you’ve opened Pandora’s box. We’re whoring ourselves out to the highest bidder, and the integrity and core foundation of this team has been compromised. So please spare me the martyr act, Naomi, and while you’re at it, please remember that I’m still your boss the next time you want to spout off at the mouth.”

Naomi’s hands are shaking, and she can practically feel the anger boiling in her blood. The nerve of this man. She stands up, ignoring the heavy book that fall out of her lap and onto the floor as she does so. She charges over to him, and sizes him up. Ethan’s almost a foot taller than her, but Naomi doesn’t care about the height disparity. She tilts her head back so she can look him in the eye.

“I’m not a martyr, but you’re a self righteous hypocrite. You’ve been pouting and waxing poetic about Naveen’s mission when you were the first one to mess with his legacy.”

Ethan’s nostrils flare at the accusation. “Excuse me?”

“Last year, you got into bed with Declan Nash and big pharma, compromising your own shaky moral code in order to save the life of one person. I’m trying to keep the team around in order to save a lot more people than just Naveen!”

“That was different!” Ethan argues. It doesn’t even feel right coming out of his mouth, but they’re far too deep in the argument for him to do anything besides dig his toes in.

“The only difference is you were the one in control then. But because it is my idea, you’re rejecting it. You’re being completely unreasonable here, Ethan. We’re standing in the middle of a sinking ship. Edenbrook is in trouble. My friends and I didn’t get our new salaries upon becoming residents, there’s talk of them shutting down the free clinic, and they’ll be coming after our team next. Who knows, maybe they’ll decide that mental health isn’t important and the entire psychiatric department should go. And then the nurses. And then they’ll start ordering less and less supplies, just to stay above water. And maybe you don’t care, because you’re Ethan Ramsey, you’re so wealthy that you only get a one dollar salary from the hospital, you’re established, your livelihood isn’t on the line, and I’m sure any hospital in the world would kill to employ you, but the rest of us? The little guys? We don’t have that option, so again, if you’re looking for me to kiss your ass and grovel because I made an executive decision, you’re going to be looking for a mighty long time.”

Ethan studies her, his gaze coolly fixated on her as she rants because he’s waiting for the second she stops talking, so he can jump back into his own argument. He realizes that it’s not an effective way to debate, and he falters slightly.

“What’s wrong?” Naomi goads, her voice taking on a singsong tone. She’s embroiled in the fight now. “Cat got your tongue?”

In his 37 years of living, Ethan can confidently say Naomi Valentine is the most infuriating woman he’s ever met. A stubborn, impulsive, hot-head with a smart mouth. 

And fuck, he’s made a mistake.

Her mouth. Now his gaze is fixated on it, her full lips that she’s repeatedly bitten down on during this argument, the tackiness of her lip gloss, the way her tongue darts in and out.

Their argument is now the furthest thing from his mind, and he’s actually annoyed by it. What is it about this…woman that completely bewitches him? He wants to argue, not be transfixed on how pretty she is. She doesn’t even have to do anything and he’s under her spell again. 

A sharp jab in the middle of his chest pulls Ethan back to reality. He looks down and realizes that Naomi poked him in the chest, out of anger or to get his attention, he’s not sure.

“Hey!” The fact that he’s ignoring her only makes her more incensed. He started this fight, he doesn’t get the right to dissociate and shut down in the middle of it. “Have you listened to a word I just said?”

“No,” Ethan answers honestly. Naomi’s eyes darken at the response. He didn’t say that to piss her off further, but he won’t lie and say he doesn’t enjoy the sight.

He can tell she’s going to launch into another tirade, one that’s completely separate from their original issue, because that’s just how things are between them; they spiral before either of them knows what’s happening.

Before she can even fix her mouth to call him another name, his hand cups her jaw, tilting her head back, and he slants his mouth over hers, kissing her fiercely.

She gasps. This is the first time he’s ever caught her off guard and initiated a kiss. She’s usually the one to be in control.

All too quickly, Ethan pulls back, locking eyes with the young woman in front of him. She’s dazed, chest heaving and eyes glazed over.

“Did you do that to get me to stop talking?”

“No, I kissed you because I wanted to. But the fact that it got you to stop running your mouth is a personal bonus.”

Naomi huffs, but doesn’t say anything else. God, he could be such an asshole at times.

“I want to do it again,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. His blue eyes pierce into her own, and it suddenly becomes hard to focus on anything other than him. “Can I?”

She doesn’t know why it’s so sexy, him asking for permission, but she feels the butterflies in her stomach rumble at the question. She’s barely able to nod her head before Ethan launches himself at her, sending her flying back into the kitchen counter.

It’s so different from any other kisses they’ve shared. This one she can feel all the way down in her toes. His tongue darts out, gliding against her bottom lip and demanding access to her mouth, which she eagerly grants him.

Everything about him invades her senses: the feel of his calloused hands touching her jaw, the scratch of his beard against her face, the smell of his cologne (something by Gucci that she’s been yet to narrow down), his taste (she can still taste the wine on him, even though he drank it earlier), his sounds (the little groans that only she’s privy to, always gravelly and smooth, that make her knees buckle). It all culminates into this one man that is so all-consuming, it makes her lose her mind.

The kisses become shorter, more teasing, allowing Naomi the opportunity to actually breathe. He leaves kisses along her jaw and neck, making her whimper.

Ethan wraps an arm around Naomi’s waist and spins them, pushing her against the wall. She winces upon contact. “Warn a girl next time.”

“You want to know what’s been on my mind recently?” Ethan asks, nipping at Naomi’s earlobe.

“W-What?”

His hands find purchase underneath the grey Henley she’s wearing and he lifts it up. Her stomach clenches under his touch and it’s maddening just how responsive she is to him. “I haven’t been able to get the sight of you out of my mind since I came to pick you up from your apartment the other day.” With trembling fingers, Naomi helps him remove the shirt, and it’s tossed somewhere behind them.

She’s not wearing the grey bra he saw the other day, this one is a soft pink, and he groans at how it contrasts against her skin. There isn’t a color that doesn’t look good on her. “I stood there…” he only pauses to place opened mouthed kisses on her collarbone. “...like a floundering idiot…” this time he kisses slightly lower, earning a sharp inhale from Naomi. The noise does nothing to soothe the erection straining in his jeans. “...while you decided to tease me.”

“You’re the one who decided to stay,” Naomi shoots back with a shrug. “So I had to put on a little show.” He hums in agreement. His tongue darts out, flattening over her lace covered nipple. “Fuck, just take it off!”

“You still have no patience,” Ethan observes. He yanks at the material, until he hears a loud tear.

“That’s La Perla!”

Ethan blinks, struggling to find the significance in that statement. Was it supposed to mean something to him? “Okay?”

“It was expensive, you jerk!”

“I’ll buy you 10 more,” he replies with a shrug before resuming his previous activity, pulling one of her nipples between his lips, sucking lightly. Naomi’s breath comes out in quick bursts, and it’s becoming harder for her to stay grounded to reality. She reaches out, wanting to touch him, but he intercepts, catching her wrist. “Hands to yourself, Valentine.”

Ethan’s fingers make work of the button holding her jeans together, and he drags down the zipper. He yanks at her jeans with the same care he afforded her shirt and bra, tugging them down until they pool at her feet. Naomi does the rest of the work, hopping around until the pants are fully off.

“You and the thin scraps you call underwear, have been driving me insane all week,” Ethan confesses. “The other day when I came to pick you up, part of me was so mad at you because of your blatant defiance, but the other part of me wanted to push you onto that bed, and do very, very inappropriate things to you.”

The wetness that floods her panties is overwhelming. She clenches her thighs together in hopes of alleviating some of the tension, but it doesn’t help. Figuring out a new strategy, she wraps a leg around his waist, pulling him flush to her. She rolls her hips, grinding into him. The growl that escapes his lips only fuels her and strokes her ego. “You should’ve.”

Ethan kisses her again, reveling in the needy way Naomi claws at him. Her fingers are desperate, fingering into his t-shirt, twisting at the fabric. He’s unsure if she wants to take it off, or if she’s impatient enough to say ‘fuck it,’ and just rip it.

Whatever the case, he doesn’t let her continue. Grabbing both of her hands, he forces them on either side of her. “You really do have a problem with listening. No. Touching.”

The gruffness in his voice sends a shiver down her spine, but whatever rebellious side of her that wants to challenge the command is squelched with one look into his eyes. She can tell he means business and now isn’t the time to challenge his authority.

With restraint she didn’t know she had, Naomi places her palms on the hall behind her, and she stays as still as she can.

“Good girl.” Ethan smirks and drops her hands. He untangles himself from her and steps back an inch to admire his work. “You followed directions for once.”

Whatever smart aleck reply that was about to fly from her mouth is stifled by Ethan pulling her soaked underwear down and slipping two digits past her folds. The noise she lets out is a mixture of a high pitched yelp and a strangled moan, something that threatens to choke her.

The pace he sets is random and uneven, never giving Naomi a chance to settle into a rhythm, and she wonders if this is his way of punishing her, keeping her keyed up and writhing on him for what feels like eternity, trapped in her own form of purgatory.

She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, and bucks her hips wildly into his hand, trying to keep pace with him.

“Stop doing that,” Ethan demands, using his free hand to pull her lip out of her mouth. “I want to hear you, Rookie.”

Something about the use of her former nickname makes her moan, and it doesn’t go unnoticed by Ethan.

“You like the nickname,” he states. “It’s funny, you know.  You take every opportunity to defy me, argue with me, and push my buttons, yet you get off on me controlling you.”

She can’t focus. He’s too close, it feels too good, and her brain can’t function properly under these conditions. He presses forward, the heel of his palm pressing into her clit, earning a hiss.

“Admit it.”

At this point Naomi would admit to committing armed robbery if it meant he’d keep doing this. She nods frantically. “Yes, Doctor.” He groans at the use of his title, and he pumps harder, curling his fingers inside of her. 

Naomi stands on tiptoes and desperately claws at the wall behind her. “Fuck Ethan, please!”

“Please, what? What do you want?” His lips find her neck again, and he sucks on her pulse point, only making things more hazy. “Use your words, Rookie.”

She wants a lot of things. She wants to cry out, she wants to dig her nails into his back until she draws blood, she wants him to keep talking her through this, his gruff voice in her ear as she shatters around him.

Unfortunately, Naomi cannot form a coherent sentence to save her life. She just rolls her hips, shamelessly grinding herself into his hand. “I...I…” The pleasure mounts, building in the pit of her stomach, spreading out. She’s so close, she can almost taste it. 

“Do you want to cum for me?”

“Yes! Yes, yes, please, I want–” Ethan rewards her for her honesty and his thumb drags into her clit and he rubs the sensitive nub in tight, quick circles. That’s all it takes, and she orgasms with a strangled cry and she’s thankful Ethan is right here because he holds her upright as her legs momentarily give out.

When Naomi regains the ability to stand on her own, Ethan lets go and slowly removes his fingers. Moving fast, Naomi grabs his hand, and without breaking eye contact with him, she slides the two digits into her mouth, licking them clean.

Ethan’s next breath is a shaky gasp that leaves his lung far too quickly. “Fuck, Rookie.”

“Why don’t we move this to the bedroom?” Naomi suggests, releasing his fingers with a loud pop.

Ethan shakes his head. “No.”

He registers the confusion on her face, but Ethan doesn’t give her a chance to respond. He grabs her by the waist and kisses her again, walking them towards the living room. He only breaks the kiss to pull his t-shirt over his head, and it joins the growing pile of discarded clothing scattered around. Naomi helps him speed the process along, getting rid of his belt and popping the button on his jeans. Her fingers hook into the belt loops of the pants and she pulls them down.

Before she can do anything else, Ethan stops her wandering hands. “Wait, wait.”

“Wait for what?”

Ethan knocks his forehead against hers and he sighs deeply. “Naomi, if you don’t want to do this, please stop me now.”

She thinks it’s cute that he’s giving her an out, but she doesn’t need it. Her fingers slip past the waistband of his soft cotton boxers, a warm dainty hand wrapping around him.

Ethan shudders as a warmth spreads through him at the touch of her hand, and he mentally curses himself. He pushes her hand away.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I’m not cumming into your hand.” Ethan spins Naomi around and bends her over the arm of his couch. 

While it’s not the desk in his office, Naomi won’t complain. She feels one of his calloused hands trace the length of her spine and her eyes flutter shut in anticipation.

No patience left, Ethan tugs down his underwear, letting the material pool at his ankles. Without another word, he lines herself up at Naomi’s entrance and thrusts into her all at once. He groans at the sensation.

Naomi has never been more thankful for couch cushions, as they muffle the scream that escapes her.

“Fuck, Naomi.” He digs his fingers into her hips before pulling out and slamming back into her. He doesn’t give her any time to adjust, but she doesn’t mind. They both know patience isn’t her forte. “You’re...so...tight.” His words are punctuated by sharp thrusts that threaten to steal the air straight from her lungs.

He leans forward slacking against her, but Naomi welcomes the weight. His beard scrapes against her shoulder blade, his breath warm against her ear, his fingers which are no doubt going to leave a bruise, all of it makes her dizzy, and god, this isn’t going to last much longer.

His thrusts become sloppier, more frenzied as the pleasure mounts, his blood boiling in his veins like molten lava. The only thing he can hear is the sound of the skin slapping, and his ragged breaths.

“Are you close?” He asks. But Naomi can’t think, let alone actually speak words, even if something monosyllabic would suffice. Why does he keep trying to make her speak? Her head drops with a thud and she mumbles something incoherent.

“For someone who had so much shit to talk earlier, you’re mighty silent.” Letting go of her hip, Ethan tangles a hand in her hair, yanking it back so she can’t hide her face in the cushions anymore. His other hand reaches around and he rolls her clit with his middle finger. Still way too sensitive from her last orgasm, she thrusts back, clawing at the couch with her nails, but he holds her in place, refusing to let her move.

“Ethan, fuck, don’t stop!” The words fly out all at once, shaky, fast and jumbled, but it’s all Ethan needs. 

With a burst of energy he didn't know he possessed, he drives into her, plunging deeper. “Cum for me, Rookie.”

Naomi screams. Loudly, and she’s sure his neighbors might be very annoyed, but she doesn’t care. Everything goes white behind her eyes as he all but pushes her over the edge. She clenches around him and Ethan hisses as she’s holding him in a vice-like grip. A few quick thrusts later, and he’s joining her in ecstasy, spilling inside of her. The hand holding her hair tightens for a second, then relaxes.

She’s pretty sure she blacked out for some period of time because when Naomi is finally able to focus, they’re no longer obscenely bent over the arm of Ethan’s couch. They’re on the floor, in the cramped space between the couch and the coffee table. 

She’s hot and sticky and absolutely exhausted. She places her hand over her heart, willing it to stop beating so erratically. Stealing a glance, Naomi peers up and looks at Ethan. He looks as disheveled as she feels, his hair tousled, lips swollen, chest and neck flushed red.

Her voice is horse and completely shot to hell when she finally speaks, “If that’s how our fights are going to play out from now on, I’ll let you pick more fights with you. And I’m a Cancer, we’re stubborn people.”

“I think we can find a happy medium somewhere.”

Naomi rolls over, until she’s nestled into his side and her head is on his chest. She can feel his heart beating rhythmically under her cheek. “Are we still fighting?”

“No.”

“Are you still mad at me?” He doesn’t answer the question right away, and a sense of dread fills her.

“I was never really mad at you,” Ethan admits after a long bout of silence. “I’m just mad at the entire situation. I’m mad at the budget cuts, I’m mad at our country’s healthcare system, I’m annoyed with your inability to listen to me. I’m mad at Leland Bloom’s obscene wealth and the fact that he gets to dangle his money in our faces like we’re horses waiting for carrots.”

“You made the right call, Naomi,” he continues. “But it’s a call you shouldn’t have been forced to make in the first place. I’m sorry for making you carry the brunt of my misplaced anger.”

“Apology accepted. And since we’re apologizing, I’m sorry for calling you a petulant little crybaby.”

Ethan chuckles. “Do you apologize for calling me a goddamn diva, as well? Don’t forget ‘entitled jackass’ and ‘spoiled child’.”

“You co-signed ‘spoiled child’ so I am not apologizing for it.”

“Fair point,” Ethan concedes.

Blindly searching with an outstretched hand, Naomi finds her cell phone and checks the time. She has to be at work in 2 hours, though she’d much rather get into Ethan’s bed and go to sleep.

“That happy medium that you mentioned? I think I have it figured out.”

Ethan raises an eyebrow, his interest piqued. “Oh, yeah?”

“First and foremost, I promise to never go over your head again, if you agree to do a trial run on whatever ideas I may come up with. You can’t shoot me down immediately.”

“I’m...willing to agree to that.”

“And once this all settles down and the hospital isn’t on the verge of complete financial collapse, maybe we can convince the board to only take on one or two billable patients a quarter.”

“That’s actually not a bad idea.” 

“Yeah, I tend to have those every once in a while,” Naomi teases.

Ethan stares at Naomi as she laughs at her own poor joke. Everything about her is an anomaly to him. She blew into his life a little over a year ago and here he is, willing to adapt his entire ethical code for her. And here they are, entangled together as if he didn’t spend 2 months on a different continent in order to get her out of his head. What is it about her that he can’t shake?

He gently cups her jaw and kisses her as if she’s a precious gem, like he didn’t just try to devour her. “What are you doing to me?”

Naomi smirks, recalling that it’s the same question he asked her in Miami. “Hopefully something good.”

He kisses her again. “Better than good actually.”

Realization washes over her that once she leaves this apartment, things are going to go back to being the way they were. He’ll go back to pushing her away. “So does this mean you want to have another reset?”

The question throws him off, but he soon understands what she means. “No.”

“No?”

“No,” Ethan repeats. If there’s a happy medium to be found between his team and the board, maybe there’s one for him and Naomi.

She doesn’t allow herself to get swept up by his words, but instead she braces herself for the chance that he pulls the rug from under her feet. “Well, what does that mean?”

“It means you and I are going to take a shower together, go to work, and we deal with our obnoxious patient. And after work, you’re going to put on something fancy because I’m taking you out to dinner. How does that sound, Dr. Valentine?”

Naomi can’t stop an annoying grin from spreading across her face. “I think it sounds pretty damn good, Dr. Ramsey.”