#and the negatives would be i just don’t want to do this for the rest of my life

[luveline]

would you ever write a ditsy!reader with sirius? where he's grumpy and she's just giggly and makes him feel a little less grumpy? I love you and your writing sending kisses <3

I love you

Fuck’s sake. Sirius glares at the TV. Fuck off. 

“What’s it say?” you call from the kitchen. 

“It’s raining all weekend.” 

“No way, really?” You appear with a tea towel in your hands, wiping your fingers dry one at a time. “Shit, sorry, baby. I guess we better get out our rain ponchos.” 

Sirius loves concerts, but he hates shitty weather. “What if they cancel?” 

“I don’t think they’ll cancel.” You put the tea towel on the coffee table and gesture for him to do something. What it is you want is unclear, but Sirius leans back, and, as usual, you make yourself at home in his lap. Gentle but not shy. “We might get a bit muddy, is all.” 

You rest your ribs half on his chest and half against the sofa. This close, he can confess to finding you the kind of beautiful that makes his jaw ache. Being around you is like a constant re-realisation that you’re his amazing girl, his one good love, as he likes to put it. Romance has never felt more real to him than when he’s with you, slipping his arm behind your back, and letting your nose at his jawline. Then the man on TV says the area is at risk of thunder and lightning on Saturday and he forgets to be in love. 

“Fucking hell,” he complains, clinging to you as though you have the power to change what the weatherman has to say. 

“It won’t be as bad as you’re thinking,” you sing-song back. 

“No, we’ll be turned to husks when we’re struck by lightning, but I’m sure it’ll be great.” 

“So negative,” you murmur, drawing along his collar. 

“I’m being realistic, lovely, our weekend is completely ruined.” 

“That’s not true, is it? Your weekend is ruined. Mine is the same as it was, because I don’t care if it rains on Metallica, I just want to spend time with you.” 

“You’re such a dick,” he says through a soft laugh. 

“Why? Because I am clearly the more loving partner?” you tease. 

“Yes. Because I don’t care about you at all, I only care about the concert, and spending time with you means nothing to me.” 

“Oh, well when you put it like that,” you murmur, leaning in to kiss his neck softly. Short presses of your lips with the faintest of sounds, then you're giggling. He’s glad you can’t see his face. You’d run with the honeyed smile he wears now. He would never hear the end of it. 

“I’ll have to find your anorak,” he says, rubbing a loving path down your back. 

“We’ll get the thermals out of the attic. Don’t worry, baby, the rain won’t ruin all your fun.” You kiss him again, and laugh like you’ve made a joke he isn’t privy to. 

“What’s funny?” he asks. 

“I just love you when you’re mad.” 

“I’m not mad.” 

“Aggrieved, then.” You lift your face only to hold his and press your nose to his cheek. You move your face back and forth, like a hurried nuzzling. “You’re such a downer.” 

“Stop it.” 

“Make me,” you say through giggles. 

He closes his eyes and turns in for a proper kiss. 

[mariacallous]

When most Americans think of fascism, they picture a Hitlerian hellscape of dramatic action: police raids, violent coups, mass executions. Indeed, such was the savagery of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Vichy France. But what many people don’t appreciate about tyranny is its “banality,” Timothy Snyder tells me. “We don’t imagine how a regime change is going to be at the dinner table. The regime change is going to be on the sidewalk. It’s going to be in your whole life.”

Snyder, a Yale history professor and leading scholar of Soviet Russia, was patching into Zoom from a hotel room in Kyiv, where the specter of authoritarianism looms large as Ukraine remains steeped in a yearslong military siege by Vladimir Putin. It was late at night and he was still winding down from, and gearing up for, a packed schedule—from launching an institution dedicated to the documentation of the war, to fundraising for robotic-demining development, to organizing a conference for a new Ukrainian history project. “I’ve had kind of a long day and a long week, and if this were going to be my sartorial first appearance in Vanity Fair, I would really want it to go otherwise,” he joked.

But the rest of our conversation was no laughing matter. It largely centered, to little surprise, on Donald Trump and how the former president has put America on a glide path to fascism. Too many commentators were late to realize this. Snyder, however, has been sounding the alarm since the dawn of Trumpism itself, invoking the cautionary tales of fascist history in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, and in The Road to Unfreedom the year after. It’s been six years since the latter, and Snyder is now out with a new book, On Freedom, a personal and philosophical attempt to flip the valence of America’s most lauded—and loaded—word. “We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this,” he writes. “Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Snyder unpacks America’s “strongman fantasy,” encourages Democrats to reclaim the concept of freedom, and critiques journalists for pushing a “war fatigue” narrative about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “There’s just something so odd about Americans being tired of this war. We can get bored of it or whatever, but how can we be tired?” he asks. “We’re not doing a damn thing.”

Vanity Fair: The things we associate with freedom—free speech, religious liberty—have been co-opted by the Republican Party. Do you think you could walk me through how that happened historically and how Democrats could take that word back?

Timothy Snyder: Yeah. I think the way it happened historically is actually quite dark there. There’s an innocent way of talking about this, which is to say, “Oh, some people believe in negative freedom and some people believe in positive freedom—and negative freedom just means less government and positive freedom means more government.” And when you say it like that, it just sounds like a question of taste. And who knows who’s right?

Whereas historically speaking, to answer your question, the reason why people believe in negative freedom is that they’re enslaving other people, or they are oppressing women, or both. The reason why you say freedom is just keeping the government off my back is that the central government is the only force that’s ever going to enfranchise those slaves. It’s the only force which is ever going to give votes to those women. And so that’s where negative freedom comes from. I’m not saying that everybody who believes in negative freedom now owns slaves or oppresses women, but that’s the tradition. That’s the reason why you would think freedom is negative, which on its face is a totally implausible idea. I mean, the notion that you can just be free because there’s no government makes no sense, unless you’re a heavily drugged anarchist.

And so, as the Republican Party has also become the party of race in our country, it’s become the party of small government. Unfortunately, this idea of freedom then goes along for the ride, because freedom becomes freedom from government. And then the next step is freedom becomes freedom for the market. That seems like a small step, but it’s a huge step because if we believe in free markets, that means that we actually have duties to the market. And Americans have by and large accepted that, even pretty far into the center or into the left. If you say that term, “free market,” Americans pretty generally won’t stop you and say, “Oh, there’s something problematic about that.” But there really is: If the market is free, that means that you have a duty to the market, and the duty is to make sure the government doesn’t intervene in it. And once you make that step, you suddenly find yourself willing to accept that, well, everybody of course has a right to advertise, and I don’t have a right to be free of it. Or freedom of speech isn’t really for me; freedom of speech is for the internet.

And that’s, to a large measure, the world we live in.

You have a quote in the book about this that distills it well: “The countries where people tend to think of freedom as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from.”

Yeah, thanks for pulling that out. Even I was a little bit struck by that one. Because if you’re American and you talk about freedom all the time and you also spend all your time judging other countries on freedom, and you decide what the measures are, then you should be close to the top of the list—but you’re not. And then you ask, “Why is that?” When you look at countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, or Ireland—that are way ahead of us—they’re having a different conversation about freedom. They don’t seem to talk about freedom as much as we do, but then when they do, they talk about it in terms of enabling people to do things.

And then you realize that an enabled population, a population that has health care and retirement and reliable schools, may be better at defending things like the right to vote and the right to freedom of religion and the right to freedom of speech—the things that we think are essential to freedom. And then you realize, Oh, wait, there can be a positive loop between freedom to and freedom from. And this is the big thing that Americans get a hundred percent wrong. We think there’s a tragic choice between freedom from and freedom to—that you’ve got to choose between negative freedom and positive freedom. And that’s entirely wrong.

What do you make of Kamala Harris’s attempt to redeem the word?

It makes me happy if it’s at the center of a political discussion. And by the way, going back to your first question, it’s interesting how the American right has actually retreated from freedom. It has been central for them for half a century, but they are now actually retreating from it, and they’ve left the ground open for the Democrats. So, politically, I’m glad they’re seizing it—not just because I want them to win, but also because I think on the center left or wherever she is, there’s more of a chance for the word to take on a fuller meaning. Because so long as the Republicans can control the word, it’s always going to mean negative freedom.

I can’t judge the politics that well, but I think it’s philosophically correct and I think we end up being truer to ourselves. Because my big underlying concern as an American is that we have this word which we’ve boxed into a corner and then beaten the pulp out of, and it really doesn’t mean anything anymore. And yet it’s the only imaginable central concept I can think of for American political theory or American political life.

Yeah, it’s conducive to the joy-and-optimism approach that the Democrats are taking to the campaign. Freedom to is about enfranchisement; it’s about empowerment; it’s about mobility.

Totally. Can I jump in there with another thought?

Of course.

I think JD Vance is the logical extension of where freedom as freedom from gets you. Because one of the things you say when freedom is negative—when it’s just freedom from—is that the government is bad, right? You say the government is bad because it’s suppressive. But then you also say government is bad because it can’t do anything. It’s incompetent and it’s dysfunctional. And it’s a small step from there to a JD Vance–type figure who is a doomer, right? He’s a doomer about everything. His politics is a politics of impotence. His whole idea is that government will fail at everything—that there’s no point using government, and in fact, life is just sort of terrible in general. And the only way to lead in life is to kind of be snarky about other people. That’s the whole JD Vance political philosophy. It’s like, “I’m impotent. You’re impotent. We’re all impotent. And therefore let’s be angry.”

Did you watch the debate?

No, I’m afraid I didn’t. I’m in the wrong time zone.

There was a moment that struck me, and I think it would strike you too: Donald Trump openly praised Viktor Orbán, as he has done repeatedly in the past. But he said, explicitly, Orbán is a good guy because he’s a “strongman,” which is a word that he clearly takes to be a compliment, not derogatory. You’ve written about the strongman fantasy in your Substack, so I’m curious: What do you think Trump is appealing to here?

Well, I’m going to answer it in a slightly different way, and then I’ll go back to the way you mean it. I think he’s tapping into one of his own inner fantasies. I think he looks around the world and he sees that there’s a person like Orbán, who’s taken a constitutional system and climbed out of it and has managed to go from being a normal prime minister to essentially being an extraconstitutional figure. And I think that’s what Trump wants for himself. And then, of course, the next step is a Putin-type figure, where he’s now an unquestioned dictator.

For the rest of us, I think he’s tapping—in a minor key—into inexperience, and that was my strongman piece that you kindly mentioned. Americans don’t really think through what it would mean to have a government without the rule of law and the possibility of throwing the bums out. I think we just haven’t thought that through in all of its banality: the neighbors denouncing you, your kids not having social mobility because you maybe did something wrong, having to be afraid all the damn time. African Americans and some immigrants have a sense of this, but in general, Americans don’t get that. They don’t get what that would be like.

So that’s a minor key. The major key, though, is the 20% or so of Americans who really, I think, authentically do want an authoritarian regime, because they would prefer to identify personally with a leader figure and feel good about it rather than enjoy freedom.

You mentioned the word banality, which makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil.” What would the banality of authoritarianism look like in America?

So let me first talk about the nonbanality of evil, because our version of evil is something like, and I don’t want to be too mean, but it’s something like this: A giant monster rises out of the ocean and then we get it with our F-16s or F-35s or whatever. That’s our version of evil. It’s corporeal, it’s obviously bad, and it can be defeated by dramatic acts of violence.

And we apply that to figures like Hitler or Stalin, and we think, Okay, what happened with Hitler was that he was suddenly defeated by a war. Of course he was defeated by a war, but he did some dramatic and violent things to come to power, but his coming to power also involved a million banalities. It involved a million assimilations, a million changes of what we think of as normal. And it’s our ability to make things normal and abnormal which is so terrifying. It’s like an animal instinct on our part: We can tell what the power wants us to do, and if we don’t think about it, we then do it. In authoritarian conditions, this means that we realize, Oh, the law doesn’t really apply anymore. That means my neighbor could have denounced me for anything, and so I better denounce my neighbor first. And before you know it, you’re in a completely different society, and the banality here is that instead of just walking down the street thinking about your own stuff, you’re thinking, Wait a minute, which of my neighbors is going to denounce me?

Americans think all the time about getting their kids into the right school. What happens in an authoritarian country is that all of that access to social mobility becomes determined by obedience. And as a parent, suddenly you realize you have to be publicly loyal all the time, because one little black mark against you ruins your child’s future. And that’s the banality right there. In Russia, everybody lives like that, because any little thing you do wrong, and your kid has no chance. They get thrown out of school; they can’t go to university.

We don’t imagine how a regime change is going to be at the dinner table. The regime change is going to be on the sidewalk. It’s going to be in your whole life. It’s not going to be some external thing. It’s not like this strongman is just going to be some bad person in the White House, and then eventually the good guys will come and knock him out. When the regime changes, you change and you adapt, and you look around as everyone else is adapting and you realize, Well, everyone else adapting is a new reality for me, and I’m probably going to have to adapt too. Trump wants to be a strongman. He’s already tried a ​​ coup d’état. He makes it clear that he wants to be a different regime. And so if you vote him in, you’re basically saying, “Okay, strongman, tell me how to adapt.”

Yeah, we could talk about Project 2025 all day. This new effort to bureaucratize tyranny—which was not in place in 2020—could really make the banal aspect a reality because it’s enforced by the administrative state, which is going to be felt by Americans at a quotidian level.

I agree with what you say. If I were in business, I would be terrified of Project 2025 because what it’s going to lead to is favoritism. You’re never going to get approvals for your stuff unless you’re politically close to administration. It’s going to push us toward a more Hungary-like situation, where the president’s pals’ or Jared Kushner’s pals’ companies are going to do fine. But everybody else is going to have to pay bribes. Everyone else is going to have to make friends.

It’s anticompetitive.

Yeah, it’s going to generate a very, very uneven playing field where certain people are going to be favored and become oligarchs. And most of the rest of us are going to have a hard time. Also, the 40,000 [loyalists Trump wants to replace the administrative state with] are going to be completely incompetent. When people stop getting their Social Security checks, they’re going to realize that the federal government—which they’ve been told is so dysfunctional—actually did do some things. It’s going to be chaos. The only way to get anything done is to have a phone number where you can call somebody at someplace in the government and say, “Make my thing a priority.” The chaos of the administration state feeds into the strongman thing. And since that’s true, the strongman view starts to become natural for you because it’s the only way to get anything done.

You’ve studied Russian information warfare pretty extensively. A few weeks ago the Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian state media outlet RT for their role in surreptitiously funding a right-wing US media outfit as part of a foreign-influence-peddling scheme, which saw them pull the wool over a bunch of right-wing media personalities. Do you think this type of thing is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Russian information warfare?

Of course. It’s the tip of the iceberg, and I want to refer back to 2016. It was much bigger in 2016 than we recognized at the time. The things that the Obama administration was concerned with—like the actual penetration of state voting systems and stuff—that was really just nothing compared to all of the internet stuff they had going. And we basically caught zilcho of that before the election itself. And I think the federal government is more aware of it this time, but also the Russians are doing different things this time, no doubt.

I’m afraid what I think is that there are probably an awful lot of people who are doing this—including people who are much more important in the media than those guys—and that there’s just no way we’re going to catch very many of them before November. That’s my gut feeling.

While we’re on Russia, I do want to talk about Ukraine, especially since you’re there right now. I think one of the most unfortunate aspects of [the media’s coverage of] foreign wars—the Ukraine war and also the Israel-Hamas war—is just the way they inevitably fade into the background of the American news cycle, especially if no American boots are on the ground. I’m curious if this dynamic frustrates you as a historian.

Oh, a couple points there. One is, I’m going to point out slightly mean-spiritedly that the stories about war fatigue in Ukraine began in March 2022. As a historian, I am a little bit upset at journalists. I don’t mean the good ones. I don’t mean the guys I just saw who just came back from the front. [I mean] the people who are sitting in DC or New York or wherever, who immediately ginned up this notion of war fatigue and kept asking everybody from the beginning, “When are you going to get tired of this war?” We turned war fatigue into a topos almost instantaneously. And I found that really irresponsible because you’re affecting the discourse. But also, I feel like there was a kind of inbuilt laziness into it. If war fatigue sets in right away, then you have an excuse never to go to the country, and you have an excuse never to figure out what’s going on, and you have an excuse never to figure out why it’s important.

So I was really upset by that, and also because there’s just something so odd about Americans being tired of this war. We can get bored of it or whatever, but how can we be tired? We’re not doing a damn thing. We’re doing nothing. I mean, there’s some great individual Americans who are volunteering and giving supplies and stuff, but as a country, we’re not doing a damn thing. I mean, a tiny percentage of our defense budget—which would be going to other stuff anyway—insead goes to Ukraine.

And by the way, Ukrainians understand that Americans have other things to think about. I was not very far from the front three days ago talking to soldiers, and their basic attitude about the election and us was, like, “Yeah, you got your own things to think about. We understand. It’s not your war.” But as a historian, the thing which troubles me is pace, because with time, all kinds of resources wear down. And the most painful is the Ukrainian human resource. That’s probably a terribly euphemistic word, but people die and people get wounded and people get traumatized. Your own side runs out of stuff.

We were played by the Russians, psychologically, about the way wars are fought. And that stretched out the war. That’s the thing which bothers me most. You win wars with pace and you win wars with surprise. You don’t win wars by allowing the other side to dictate what the rules are and stretching everything out, which is basically what’s happened. And with that has come a certain amount of American distraction and changing the subject and impatience. I think journalists have made a mistake by making it into a kind of consumer thing where they’re sort of instructing the public that it’s okay to be bored or fatigued. And then I think the Biden administration made a mistake by not doing things at pace and allowing every decision to take weeks and months and so on.

What do you think another Trump presidency would mean for the war and for America’s commitment to Ukraine?

I think Trump switches sides and puts American power on the Russian side, effectively. I think Trump cuts off. He’s a bad dealmaker—that’s the problem. I mean, he’s a good entertainer. He’s very talented; he’s very charismatic. In his way, he’s very intelligent, but he’s not a good dealmaker. And a) ending wars is not a deal the way that buying a building is a deal, and b) even if it were, he’s consistently made bad deals his whole career and lost out and gone bankrupt.

So you can’t really trust him with something like this, even if his intentions were good—and I don’t think his intentions are good. Going back to the strongman thing, I think he believes that it’s right and good that the strong defeat and dominate the weak. And I think in his instinctual view of the world, Putin is pretty much the paradigmatic strongman—the one that he admires the most. And because he thinks Putin is strong, Putin will win. The sad irony of all this is that we are so much stronger than Russia. And in my view, the only way Russia can really win is if we flip or if we do nothing. So, because Trump himself is so psychologically weak and wants to look up to another strongman, I think he’s going to flip. But even if I’m wrong about that, I think he’s incompetent to deal with a situation like this. Because he wants the quick affirmation of a deal. And if the other side knows you’re in a hurry, then you’ve already lost from the beginning.

[mangoisms]

weird question. but in ur opinion, what major would tim do at college? I was thinking comp sci but making him a business major would be so funny

good question! to be honest.. i want to say it’s difficult to pin down any one major he’d choose, especially because i feel like he’s not exactly academically inclined, at least if he’s doing vigilante stuff? school was always a big issue for him hence him dropping out to focus on The Mission and that seems like All He Is Doing right now thank you dc editorial. but if he isn’t… comp sci is a good choice but for me, i lean towards maybe something like mechanical engineering? or electrical engineering? kinda feel like he has comp sci in the bag already from having to learn it/having learned it in his time as a vigilante (largely due to babs im sure!)

but mechanical or electrical engineering just because of how much stuff he created for his suit when he was robin and how he was always reconfiguring redbird and messing with all of it. although where those skills and that degree could be applied is Another Question Entirely. my best guess is — and this is probably super basic — with WE? or maybe if we want to have a little fun. somewhere like kord industries. or even STAR labs. or maybe a teaching position? could see him being down for that as he gets older

a little more indulgent would be photography but even if not a major i would like to think he at least minors in it or something!

business major would be SO funny because he would be miserable the entire time. i think.

but yeah! he’s just. idk. probably hates prerequisites. probably wants to take ten classes at once. he’d really need to slow down i think which is the goal. ultimately. for me. in any case This got very long my bad <3 i’m just. fascinated by him and his mysterious future

[chiefguideandcentre]

I hate when my mother makes her little remarks when it comes to grandkids. My parents have 3 kids and we are all somewhere in our 30s and none of us have kids yet and (unfortunately for my parents) only one of us wants kids. My older sister doesn’t want them and has said that since she could talk, so she was ruled out for grandkids long ago. That leaves my older brother and me. he wants kids, just got married and will be having them within the next year or two. I don’t want kids, I don’t like them, don’t want them. I’ve said that, but I think my moms still convinced that I will change my mind. I won’t. So lately (ever since her twin sister became a grandmother 3 years ago) she’s been making little remarks about her lack of grandchildren. Twin sister says something about loving her grandchildren and my mother will just whip out, “oh, it must be nice” all while side eyeing me. Or when talking about herself and my dad “we got screwed”. And just mean little remarks of that nature meant to guilt trip all the time. Like I’m sorry you have 3 children and only one wants kids of their own. I know you feel like you are running out of time to be a grandparent. I know you are at that age blah blah blah. But I don’t have a responsibility to give you grandkids. Did you have children specifically so you could have grandchildren one day? No. Was I put on this earth strictly to have children? No. Yes, I know you would make great grandparents but this is not my problem. I don’t owe you fucking kids. I hate kids. They scream and cry and they are gross and I do not want them. I’m tired of the guilt tripping. Like you still have my brother who will give you 2 or 3 probably, like is that not enough? How many damn grandkids do you need to have? Will 2 or 3 not occupy you? I’m not permanently changing my body and my entire life and going through the torture that is childbirth all for something I don’t even want just so you can have some kids to play with for an hour every once in awhile and then I’m stuck with them for the rest of the time. I know I’m not suited for motherhood and I’m doing the potential children of mine a favor by not having them in the first place bc I will just be resentful. I’m not trapping myself in a situation that I ultimately do not want. I mean am I sometimes like “well it might not be so bad, it’s probably nice having children to love and watch grow”, yes I think that sometimes, but I don’t want it enough. And I hate being made to feel guilty for it. And you aren’t screwed either! My older brother will give you grandchildren, not right this damn second no, but in a year or two. Why is that not good enough? I’m sorry were we all supposed to be married with multiple children before hitting 30? I didn’t get the memo, sorry that didn’t pan out, but children aren’t a requirement for my existence.

[gobbluthbutagirl]

there is like a high probability that i will wind up getting this lead position at my job because my talk with the store director went really well and the problem with this is that i feel the exact same way about this that i did when i got my GED four years ago. and the way that i feel is the way that talk show host by radiohead sounds. which is empty(and nothing. nothing. nothing. nothing)

[tiyoin]

imagine how lowkey boring it is at nrc?

like yes teenage boys are their own form of entertainment and have their own forms of drama and gossip. but without other girls? it’s just… wrong

having no girls there would be awful because where’d all the accurate spider webs of gossup? all the petty drama over guys?? yes annoying but it something you now missed. the groups of girls who’d leave all at once to go to the bathroom? the relief you would get whenever you were in a room full with guys and then hearing a girl’s voice would no longer happen.

the days of a girl walking up to talk to you just because.

the friendships are so much different too, not just because they’re from a different world, have magic and are guys, but because there’s no crutch.

there’s no familiarity all the guys have. no longer can you laugh about being around another girl so long you guys have synched, no more sly glances whenever a cute guy passes- no more talking about cute guys period.

no more bonding with other girls over outfits or accessories or how annoying deodorant is. no laughing at horrible joke only you two would get- the guys would just give you a strange look or call you stupid.

no one to call up whenever your bored- ace and deuce and the rest of the first years are great, but… it’s not the same.

of course you missed your freedom of driving around, blasting music with your fruity little drinks. or going house shopping together, driving through neighborhoods as you muse about the future life you want to live.

conversations are bit… more boring now that you’re on your own….

no more cuddling just because you were lonely and needed a friend, no more inside jokes that only you two girls would get, no more having someone attached to your hip without people making it weird.

being friends with guys is great! no real need for dramatics or petty gossip. no having to worry about anyone sleeping with a someone’s boyfriend. or about the incest-uist friend groups that would form.

but… you missed other girls.. the solidarity, the support and the comfort…

never thought i’d have to write this about a post.

you all can have your different experiences, but don’t shit on me and the people who relate to this. do not come into my comments and spread negativity because it’s not wanted nor necessary.

this relates to me so i wrote it. i thought about how my life in twisted wonderland would be and how my interpersonal relationships today will effect it / an oc character. it’s not an evil post if you guys can’t relate or if find my perspective different from your own.

you’re always welcome to share your experiences or how you relate differently to it and that’s completely fine, i even welcome it. because having more than one perspective is always welcomed.

if you’re taking my word as canon/ gospel and are therefore angry, then stop. these aren’t even headcanons, it’s just an ‘imagine’ post.

they characters wine pick you, they won’t give you a kiss because they’re proud of you defending you- THEY’RE DUCKING CHARACTERS IN A JAPANESE MOBILE GAME.

just tell everyone in the comments ‘i have internalized misogyny and can’t handle seeing girls have fun because i couldn’t have fun with girls. and vil is different, he’s not like other guys *hair tuck*’

[rememberwren]

Weeks of bad behavior from your lieutenant have you convinced that he can't get laid. You take matters into your own hands.

Ghost/fem!reader. Rough sex, a nearly submissive Simon, PIV, unsafe sex, pullout method, flimsy premise to explain gross fucking, ruined orgasm. This has been on my laptop for ages please take it. 2.5k

-

It’s your breaking point. 

Once you reach it, a strange calm comes over you. The mission is over, Price has finished taking you all to task for your failures, and Ghost has specifically taken you to task for your own—just like a typical man to notice the speck of sawdust in his Sergeant's eye and ignore the plank in his own. For so long (far longer than just the length of this arduous mission), the friction between Ghost and the rest of the team—between Ghost and yourself—has been building. Like two fault lines grinding alongside each other, there was bound to be a break somewhere. 

You just hadn’t expected it to be you. 

And you hadn’t expected it to be like this. 

“Lieutenant, can I have a word?” you ask, walking damn near double time to keep up with Ghost’s steps. 

“Negative,” he says. “Whatever it is, save it.” 

“No can do. It’s important, sir.” 

“Doubtful.” 

“I insist, sir,” you press, pushing your speed into a light jog so that you can come to stand in front of him and block his way. He reluctantly stops, dark eyes blazing from behind his mask. He’s stripped down, gear abandoned but no less intimidating nor lacking in height or width. Still you keep your chin up, refusing to back down. Something has to give, and it won’t be you. 

“Two minutes. Go, Sergeant.” 

Your eyes scan the hallway. Here won’t do, even if it is night time and the base is quiet. You know that the quiet can be deceiving. Spotting the supply closet, you bound over to check that it is unlocked and—score. It swings open silently, the inside dark and smelling faintly of lemon-scented cleaner. 

Ghost hesitates. 

“It’s important sir,” you promise again. 

You don’t promise that it will take two minutes or less. 

Rolling those dark eyes, he sweeps past you into the closet, flicking the lightswitch. The overhead light hums to life, casting a tinny ivory glow over the room. The shelves are well stocked with supplies, most of which aren’t for cleaning but are typical office supplies instead. There is just enough room inside for a man to lay down if he wanted to. 

You’ll have to test that to see. 

“Take your cock out.” 

Silence, for the length of nearly three of your heartbeats. Ghost’s head tilts, eyes narrowing where he stares down at you. He leans down a little as if to hear you better and asks: “Excuse me, Sergeant?” 

You straighten your spine, refusing to be cowed. “You heard me. Your cock. Get it out.” 

“Why the fuck would I do that?” 

You raise your chin a hair. “The recruits have been talking. They say your bad mood is because you can’t get laid. I’m here to fix that, sir.” 

“Getting your intel from recruits was your first mistake. Of many.” 

“Either I have faith that you aren’t always this much of a bastard or I give in to the belief that you really are. For the sake of my own sanity, I’m choosing to believe the former.” You find a few pins for your hair in your uniform and begin pinning it back, keeping the extras tucked between your lips and talking around them as you prepare yourself to suck his cock. That strange calm is still over you, but beneath it you can feel your better judgment panicking. You’re propositioning your superior officer right now. This could lead to your discharge, and not an honorable one. 

But something had to give. It was either your spirit, or your mouth. 

You drop to your knees even though he hasn’t even reached for his belt yet, hoping to rush him along. His dark eyes follow you, and you see the heat in them. The fingers on his right hand twitch. 

“Do you...want me to do it for you?” you ask, your voice a conspiratory little whisper. It’s the last little push he needs and then he is reaching for his own belt, undoing the clasp and opening it. He unfastens his pants. Beneath his jeans you can already see the bulge forming; proportionately huge compared to the man it belonged to. It made your teeth ache, like the thought of eating something sweet. 

Maybe you were both crazy.

His cock is uncut, a dusky flush just a shade darker than the skin on the back of his hands. His girth is nice; his length is nearly obscene. It takes all of your self control to keep from outright balking at the size of him—though the weepy little cunt between your legs certainly is intrigued by the sight. 

“Well?” he says. “Don’t just stare at it. Suck it off.” 

You reach out and flick the sensitive head cruelly. He hisses, hips jerking away from your touch. “You don’t give the orders here, Lieutenant. If you want your dick sucked, you’re going to be nice to me, once and for all.” 

“What?” 

“You heard me. Ask me nicely.” 

“Yer the one who begged me in here—!” 

You let out a sigh. Drastic measures… leaning forward, your soft cheek brushes against the silky smooth skin of his cock. It twitches against you, burning hot. You turn and let your heated breath fan against it. For all his outrage, Ghost has grown perfectly still above you, not trying to find the perfect angle to slip his cock past your lips or anything else of the sort. 

“Come on, Ghost,” you whisper, lips brushing against him. “I’m about to do something very nice for you. Isn’t it only fair that you ask nicely for it? I’m not asking for much. Just say…please suck my cock.” 

“Suck my cock,” he says. Then, like a murderous afterthought: “Please.” 

You sigh again and shift to stand. His hand is suddenly on your shoulder, pressing you back down. 

“Don’t,” he says, sounding less like the prat he is. “Please. Go on. Will you?” 

“You want me to?” 

“Yes.” 

“Yes what?” 

“Please,” he says through his teeth. 

Leaning back on your haunches, you place the softest, chastest little kiss on the head. He’s aroused enough that the foreskin is just beginning to pull back, and you let your tongue out to lap softly at the exposed head, listening to the way his breathing stutters and stops, the way the leather of his gloves creaks as he makes fists as his sides. 

“Try to fuck my face and it’s over,” you warn him. “You might be thinking of how badly you need this—and I know that you do. But don’t forget this: I need it more. I need this more. If we’re going to work together with any semblance of civility, I need this. Do you understand?” 

“No. But I get the gist.” 

“Good enough for me.” You open your mouth and take the head past your lips, suckling on it. He lets out a harsh breath through his nose, cock jerking against your tongue. You can taste precum already, and you’ve barely done anything. No wonder he’s been such a bastard lately. Has he been fucking his own fist at all? God knows that you’ve spent more than one night with your pruning fingers buried to the knuckle inside yourself, hand over your mouth to keep from shouting Ghost’s callsign when you cum. 

Leaning forward, you take more of him into your mouth, enjoying the heavy weight of him on your tongue. He is burning hot, smells and tastes faintly of sweat from the mission, but you don’t mind; living with so many men has almost given you a strange appreciation for the scent of hard work. Maybe Ghost’s most of all. You take him as deep as you comfortably can, but there are still a few solid inches outside the wet warmth of your mouth. 

You work one hand down your pants and underwear, finding the sopping wet slit between your thighs. Using three fingers, you stroke yourself leisurely from hole to clit, soaking the digits. Above you, Ghost mutters a curse, head tilting almost curiously as he searches for a better angle to watch your hand move beneath the fabric of your pants. Removing it, you hold it up to show him the filmy slick drenching your fingers before wrapping that fist around the base of his cock. 

“You get that wet just from thinking about sucking some cock?” 

Your eyes narrow dangerously, slowly pulling back until just the flushed head rests on your tongue, wondering if he’s being mean enough that you need to stop and remind him of his manners. Apparently just the threat of it is enough; he lifts his hands in supplication, mouth twisting a little beneath his mask. 

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. Didn’t your mother teach you that, Lieutenant?” 

It’s his turn for his eyes to narrow dangerously, an expression that would likely put the fear of God in a lesser man or woman. But with your teeth so close to his cock, you’re not yet afraid. Before he can open his mouth and ruin anything else, you swallow him down as deeply as you can, feeling the thick head press at the back of your throat, your jaw aching. You can taste yourself on his cock and the thought has you whining around his length.  

“Fuck,” Ghost mutters. His hand touches your hair—not to grab, but just to pet. “Yer a pretty thing, aren’t you?”

You hum in delight at this unexpected praise. It goes straight to your soaked core, fanning the flames of the ache between your legs. You are a pretty thing, and you are glad he’s noticed. To reward his good behavior, you lean in until the head nudges the back of your mouth again. Tongue out, breath held, he slips even deeper into the warm channel of your throat. His ragged exhale is as sweet as a moan. 

You give him a few more minutes of your mouth before you grow bored without your own satisfaction. Slipping him free, you work his cock in your slick fist and say to him, voice wrecked: “Time to see if you can lay down in here.” 

Turns out he can, as long as he keeps his knees bent a little. Straddling his waist only emphasizes to you how obscenely thick he is, and you have to stand to shuck your pants and panties down and off altogether. You cast a brief glance toward the door—there is no lock from the inside—but no risk means no reward. 

“I don’t have a condom. You’ll have to pull out. Tell me when you’re close, alright?” 

“Alright.” 

His hands reach for you, gripping your wide hips as you straddle him again. You plant one hand firmly against his chest but hold no illusions that you could actually pin him in place if he decided to move. You lower yourself to brush your soaked slit along the length of his cock, back and forth, until he is soaked in your arousal. 

His mouth opens to say something smart, something that will have you gritting your teeth, but instead you rise up onto one knee and sink down on the head of his cock. It’s all you can take before that pinch of pain strikes you, freezing you in your tracks. His mouth is parted beneath the balaclava, wet, quiet pants that dampen the fabric with each breath. You take your time stretching yourself open, thighs burning in time as you lift and lower yourself over him again and again. 

“Touch me,” you demand of him. 

For all his earlier mouth, he seems content to be obedient now, his gloved fingers searching for the space where you both are joined. The leather traces along the seam where his cock disappears into your cunt before following your parted lips up to your clit. His thumb circles the aching bud with a firm touch, and it helps you ignore the pain as you take another inch of him inside. 

You ride him like that: both your hands on his chest feeling the way it hitches as it rises and falls, hips jerking and swaying as you find the angle that suits you best. 

“Lean back,” he demands. “I want to look at you.” 

“No time,” you pant. “It’s been way longer than two minutes, Lieutenant. I do hate to be wasting your time.” 

“Fucking hell,” he sighs, eyes rolling.

“Don’t forget to tell me when you’re close.” He grunts in acknowledgement, his fingers going sloppy between your thighs. That’s not good enough. You bark: “Lieutenant, do not forget to tell me!” 

He laughs. 

You go to lift off of him, but his laughter turns belly up and dies so quickly, morphing into a strange, desperate little sound as he stops working your clit and grips at your hips, pulls you down more firmly against the cradle of his thighs. 

“I mean it,” you say through your teeth, taking one of his wrists and prying a finger loose until he has no choice but to let go or have it broken. You guide his hand back between your legs. “Don’t cum before me, either.” 

He sits up, jostling you, forcing you to change your angle. His mouth comes down hard against yours, fabric on skin, but you don’t turn him away, lapping at the cotton like it’s his tongue as you kiss through the mask. 

Feeling things slipping out of your control, you press him back down with both hands, pinning him to the floor. The sound of flesh on flesh is loud in the enclosed space. At the apex of his thrusts he brushes against some deep, untouched space inside you that has you digging your nails into him, feeling that ache in your belly writhe and twist into something fearsome. 

“I’m close,” he grits out. 

“Not yet,” you hiss. 

“I said I’m fucking close—“

“Wait for me,” you growl. Then, knowing that you can catch more flies with honey, you soften your tone: “Please, don’t cum yet.”

He shuts his eyes. “Shut up,” he mutters, scrambling for control, fingers digging into your thighs, unsure whether to pull you closer or tear you off of him. “Shut up, shut up, shut the—fuck up.”

It’s your turn to laugh, feeling your release right there, coaxed forward by this pleasurable torture you’re inflicting on him. Never did you think that seeing your superior officer suffering like this would give you so much satisfaction. 

“So close,” you whisper, the tips of your fingers tingling with it. “Simon, I’m gonna—“

When it bursts, your teeth snap closed around a whine, jaw tight as your cunt clenches around him—

—and he jerks you off of him, sending you sprawling against his lower thighs as his ruddy cock twitches and spurts pearlescent seed, one dexterous hand wrapping around the shaft as he jerks himself off through it even after ruining your own. You stare, gobsmacked at his audacity, pussy still twitching and clenching around empty air, the stolen pleasure leaving behind a vicious ache. 

“You bastard,” you mutter. You bat his hand away, gripping his cock and beginning to jerk him off. When you smile, it is mostly teeth, something feral and mean. “Let’s try that again.” 

[ellecdc]

hi! i absolutely love your works, particularly your poly!marauders(w/lily). i think you write them so beautifully and harmoniously that you can't help but fall in love with them.

i wanna compliment you on your recent two-parter about remus and the whole revealing the werewolf thing. the angst to fluff had me on the edge of my seat. thank you for writing such a piece! 🤍

i hope its not too much to ask but in part 1, there's a brief mention of sirius receiving letters from i can assume is his family that lily confiscates and the group tends to love on him a bit more. let's say reader isn't in the loop about sirius' family life and she feels a bit sad that she can't comfort sirius like the rest can, and in general feels lost because it's another thing she isn't 'let in on'. i was wondering if you could write a little something on that? maybe some misunderstandings with a fluffy ending?

i hope this is something you're ok w writing 🥹 if not, its ok! still wish u the best always!

this is so sweet - thank you! & thanks for your request - hope you like it!!

pt 1 // pt 2 // pt 3 // pt 4 // pt 5

poly!marauders + lily x fem!reader who find's her own way to comfort Sirius - 2.1k

CW: brief mention of Sirius' childhood, allusions to anxiety, our shy Hufflepuff reader, hurt comfort, Sirius-centric

There was this saying that you never really understood before.

Love makes you do crazy things. 

And while the definition of crazy may be up for debate, you’re quite sure it could be understood as acting completely out of character.

So here you were, acting completely out of character; voluntarily marching towards a secluded end of the library where three Slytherin’s were sitting that you had - up until this point - managed to avoid completely. 

But you couldn’t, wouldn’t, avoid them any longer; not now, not for Sirius. 

The dust settled relatively well after the news of Remus’ lycanthropy had been shared with you; the five of you seemed to find a sort of freedom in not having to hide from one another anymore. Remus could be himself, the other’s could love him appropriately, and you could too. 

But another one of those black envelopes with  a green wax seal showed up at breakfast yesterday, and the group delved into their usual hide-the-envelope-and-coddle-Sirius practice. 

Lily took the envelope and disposed of it, James and Sirius had a floo call with the Potter’s, and Remus’ mum and dad sent baked goods from Wales via owl. 

You had since gathered that these letters were coming from his parents, or at the very least from someone in the Black family; you had also gathered that the contents of the letter’s were hurtful or upsetting to Sirius. And even though he never got to read them, a heavy cloud seemed to form and follow the young ex-heir around. 

And your heart felt heavy; not because they were keeping anything from you, per se, but rather because they seemed to have a routine that didn’t include you.

And while you didn’t want to encroach in spaces that you weren’t necessarily invited in, you couldn’t help but feel like you should be doing more. 

Lily, James, and Remus all had something they could offer Sirius; they all had some way that they could support him. 

You didn’t.

And it wasn’t for a lack of trying on your part, but rather that no one seemed particularly inclined to burden you with any negativity. 

“Don’t worry about me, babydoll; this is standard Black stuff. I’ll be just fine.” Sirius had said when you asked if he was okay; his usual salacious smile significantly dimmed as it seemingly took the majority of his effort in his response. 

The others hadn’t been much help either; Remus and James effectively telling you that you were too sweet to have to worry about such horrid people, and Lily trying to assure you that they had it under control and not to worry - Sirius would be okay. 

And that was all well and good, but it wasn’t enough for you - it was about sodding time you started pulling your weight in this relationship.

So - with nothing more than the teeniest bit of courage you were sure you pilfered from your four Gryffindors and perhaps a healthy dose of delusion - you forced your feet to take you in the direction of the only person in the entire castle you thought might possibly be able to help you. 

“My, my, my; to what do we owe the absolute pleasure, little Puffle?” Barty Crouch Junior mocked as you paused at their table; Evan Rosier and Regulus Black picking their heads up to look at you incredulously and bemusedly respectful. 

“Did ya get lost there, L/N? Need me to find you one of your Gryffindor’s?” Evan taunted, earning him what looked like a kick in the shin from Regulus, though you couldn’t be certain on account of the table impeding your view.

“Erm…I-I was sort of wondering if I could speak with you, Regulus?” You managed to murmur awkwardly.

The three Slytherin’s seemed to have a silent conversation as they shared glances before Barty shrugged and Evan rolled his eyes; both standing and leaving the two of you some privacy. 

Regulus watched as you cast a hasty muffliato around the table - another trick you’d picked up from the Gryffindor’s - and as you helped yourself to a seat with your boyfriend’s younger brother. 

“Is Sirius okay?” Regulus asked quickly, his voice no more than an urgent whisper as he looked at you imploringly.

His intensity caught you off guard; you were so certain getting anything out of the notoriously stand-offish Slytherin would be next to impossible, but he had beat you to the conversation and seemed to be just as worried about his brother as you were. 

You remembered then why you liked Slytherin’s so much; you often found a kindred spirit in them, for one thing that a Slytherin valued most was a sense of loyalty.

Well, didn’t you have enough loyalty to use to your advantage. 

You wondered rather belatedly if you had overstepped. It was admittedly too late to ask yourself this now; standing outside of the boys’ dorm with a package in your hand.

What’s done is done. You had a one-track mind, and that was to help Sirius.

With this, you raised your hand and gently knocked on the door.

It had been James to open the door; his jaw tense until he saw you, which seemed to cause his face to melt into an awkward expression you couldn’t quite decipher.

“Hi angel.” He greeted apologetically. “You okay?”

You were confused by his greeting, and his question, and the fact that he hadn’t moved out of the way of the door to invite you in as he usually did.

“I’m fine.” You responded quickly, trying to look behind him. “What’s wrong?”

James made a sound of discomfort in the back of his throat as he looked over his shoulder, still not moving to allow you entry. 

“Listen, sweetheart; I’m not sure now is a great time…”

“It’s Sirius, is it?” You asked quickly. His responding grimace proving your suspicions. “I need to see him.”

“Sweets, maybe you could come back la-”

But later wasn’t good enough, you see. You had a one-track mind, and that was to help Sirius.

So, in the name of love making you do crazy things and still acting completely out of character for you, you shoved your way past James’ hip, bending under his arm to allow yourself your own entrance to the boys’ dormitory. 

Lily sat at the end of Sirius’ bed where she had one hand resting on his ankle; her thumb stroking back-and-forth over his achilles tendon.

Remus sat against the headboard with Sirius in his arms; his lips pressed against his hair as he murmured sweet nothings to him.

And as you stepped closer, you could see an indent where James had been sitting, opposite of Lily likely serving the same support as your red-headed girlfriend.

“Siri?” You asked quietly, causing him to stiffen significantly before sitting up and feigning nonchalance.

“Hi doll.” He croaked then, wiping angrily at the tear tracks on his face and pasting on a smile. “Didn’t mean for you to see me like this. What’s up?”

You hated the faux blase act he was putting on for your sake, but you reminded yourself why you were here.

To help.

“I have something for you.” You offered quietly, procuring the parchment wrapped package and holding it out for him. 

“Awe.” He chuckled wetly with a sniffle. “You didn’t need to get me anything.”

“Well, I suppose I can’t take all the credit for it.” You replied, watching him pause in the process of opening to look at you in confusion.

“Open it.” You encouraged.

He finished ripping the parchment from the box before lifting the lid.

You felt your heart stop as the lid fell unceremoniously from his hands and a small gasp left his lips at the sight of the small, stuffed black cat sitting inside.

You’d spent the afternoon learning about the tail of two toys; Splash the cat and Padfoot the dog. The only toys the two young Black family boys were given came from their Uncle Alphard in the form of a plush cat and a plush dog; both with black fur as a nod to the family name and the boys’ hair colour. 

Even though Uncle Alphard had given the dog to Sirius and the cat to Regulus, the boys often traded, depending on their current circumstances. 

You learned that when Sirius went to Hogwarts, he had left with the cat. 

When he returned home after having been sorted into the wrong house, Regulus had given him the dog.

And when Regulus joined Sirius at Hogwarts only to be ripped from his brother - possibly for good - after being sorted into Slytherin, he pilfered the dog from Sirius and left him with the cat.

They never discussed those plush toys again.

And when Sirius fled Grimmauld place one horrible night in June between fifth and sixth year, he left with nothing but his wand, the clothes on his back, and his school trunk.

Left behind was poor Splash the cat.

Regulus - fearing his mother would go on a warpath and completely destroy everything in Sirius’ room - quickly grabbed the cat and had kept it hidden in his school trunk ever since.

Until today. Until now.

Now, he left Splash with you; trusting that you would return him to his person, the one who needed him the most.

“How…” Sirius whispered as he quietly pulled the plush toy from the box; hands painfully gentle as if the toy would simply turn to ash should he jostle it. “Where did you get this?”

“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re asking.” You tried to joke in an attempt to keep the moment light. Sirius simply turned his disbelieving gaze from the toy to you.

“You spoke with him?”

Suddenly, your fears that you had completely overstepped came flooding back; a nervous sort of nausea settling deep within your stomach that threatened to make this awkward moment horribly worse.

“I…I did- I didn’t say anything, of course! Because there was nothing to say, because I don’t actually know anything, which is fine too! I just…I couldn’t…well, you see, I just had to do something, you know? I couldn’t just-”

Your ramblings were (thankfully) cut off when the air nearly completely left your lungs as Sirius attached himself to your middle; his arms winding tightly around your body where they met in the middle of your back. You could feel the impression of Splash against your back from where he was still in Sirius’ grasp.

“I’m sorry if I upset you - I know it wasn’t my place, but-”

“You’re incredible.” Sirius whispered then. “I can’t believe you’d do this for me.”

“You’re not mad?” You whispered back, causing Sirius to pull away from you, only far enough to be able to look into your eyes with ill-hidden admiration. 

“My sweet shy girl; approaching Slytherin’s for me.” He murmured, causing Remus and Lily to snort and James to gawk.

“You did what!?” 

“You do know that a quarter of our school is made up of Slytherin’s, right?” You asked James then; Sirius pulling you back into his chest when you dared to remove your gaze from him.

“That’s entirely too many Slytherin’s, my girl.” James muttered, though he relented in his admonishment of you for your crime of daring to speak to your classmates in order to sit beside your other two lovers. 

“I can’t believe he gave this to you.” Sirius whispered; holding the cat up behind your back so he could examine it over your shoulder.

“He didn’t give it to me, Sirius.” You whispered back as you pulled away from him so you could look into his eyes. “You have a lot of people in your corner; more than you know.” 

His eyes seemed to well again, though he didn’t look nearly as heartbroken as he did when you first walked in, so you counted that as a win. 

“What did I do to deserve you, hm?” He asked then before pressing a lingering kiss to your lips.

You’re sure you could have counted at least seventeen ways in which Sirius Black deserved the nicest things you had to offer, but right now you were more focused on the feel of his lips against yours.

If love made you do crazy things, and those crazy things brought you to this; this being Sirius moulding himself to you as if he hoped he could make a home for himself inside of your soul, then you would happily spend the rest of you life mad as one could be.

You hadn’t fixed anything, not by a longshot; but you had helped, even if only just a little.

His lips tasted of salt and perhaps some sadness, but also of hope.

And for now, that was enough.

[luvlystarr]

.・。.・゜❃・.・❃・゜・。.

Prompt: Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley and the sweetheart next door

Content: Pure fluff

I just want to say thank you so much for the support on my Ghost Grumpy x Sunshine fanfic!! I didn’t expect it to reach 1k notes and I’m so grateful that you guys enjoyed it!🤍

.・。.・゜・゜

Simon kept shuffling around his bed over and over again, unable to sleep.

It was 12 PM and he had just came back from deployment. For three week straight his body was surviving off of coffee and adrenaline. He desperately wanted to sleep but unfortunately his new neighbor was moving in.

Through the thin walls he could hear the constant movement of their feet and the dropping of multiple boxes. Simon groaned into his pillow before finally trudging towards the noises. His neighbor hasn't even fully moved in and he's fed up already. He swung his door open, glaring at the door across his, but he instantly felt regret when he saw your helpless figure trying to hold multiple boxes all at once. Beads of sweat formed on your face and your chest was heaving rapidly, it looked like you were gonna faint any minute.

You saw Simon from the corner of your eyes and gave him an apologetic smile.

“Good afternoon! I hope I’m not disturbing you or anything,” you chuckled embarrassingly.

Simon couldn’t help but adore your pretty smile and your sweet voice. All of the negative thoughts in his head flew out the window in an instant.

“It’s alright, just keep it down, yeah?”

Before you could respond, one of the boxes slipped past your hands and dropped to the floor.

A small curse left your lips as you tried picking it up and, without even thinking, Simon rushed to grab it for you.

“Oh, thank you!” You beamed at his kind gesture.

Simon felt his heart melt at the sight of your pure joy.

“No problem, I could help you with the rest if you want.”

You tried insisting that he shouldn’t bother and you got everything in control. But Simon wouldn’t let you exhaust yourself. Besides, he would do anything to see that beautiful smile of yours once more.

After half an hour all the boxes were finally inside the empty apartment. It would’ve originally taken you another hour without Simon’s help. Now all you had to do was unpack, which was less work.

You were glad that your work for the day was done but Simon wasn’t. It meant that he would have to go back and say goodbye.

“I’ll see you around, Simon!” You say before you shut the door.

Your voice echoed throughout Simon’s mind, over and over again. He stood there for a moment, almost like he was in a trance.

He snapped back to reality. His hand wiped across his face at the unusual thoughts he was having. Who would’ve thought you would have such an effect on him?

The following day Simon was greeted by a knock on the door.

He opened it and there you were, the same gorgeous smile on your face while you held a container.

“Good morning! I just wanted to give you something before I leave for work.”

You open the container and reveal a dozen heart shaped cookies.

“I made you some cookies as a thank you gift!” You beamed.

At that point Simon’s heart was completely melted because of you. He couldn’t stop the stupid grin that crept across his face.

“Thanks,” he says as he takes the container.

After he took it, you stood there for a minute, fiddling with your fingers. You looked nervous about something.

“So, um.. I was thinking if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight. I don’t have friends in the city and I really want to treat you for helping me out— as long as you’re free and okay with it of course!” You stammered. Your cheeks were a rosy hue.

Simon’s mind went completely blank.

“Yeah, I don’t mind,” he quickly replied.

Hearing his words made your smile grow even wider. Your eyes were quite literally glittering with happiness.

“It’s a date then!” You giggle in a joking manner.

If only you knew how much your words caused heart rate to spike up the roof.

・゜・。. .・。.・゜・゜・。.

[miley1442111]

clingy- a.hotchner

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summary: aaron acts quite differently with his wife around, which causes eyebrowns to raise and feelings to start getting hurt.

pairing: aaron hotchner x wife! reader

warnings: mildly suggestive, negative self-talk

-----------------------

You rushed around the corner, only to be met with your brick wall of a husband, Aaron Hotchner. 

“Careful there, sweetheart,” he smiled, his hands circling your waist and holding you to him. 

“Aaron I need to-” you huffed but he cut you off with a quick kiss. 

“You don’t need to do anything,” his hands ventured lower, until he was fully squeezing your ass. 

“Your team will be here any minute,” you sighed. The team had never met you, one of Aaron’s non-negotiables when you two got married, but nothing a year of married bliss and a lot of bribing him with sex couldn’t fix. 

“And everything is ready,” he smiled. “Stop worrying so much.”

You rolled your eyes. “Oh, well that’s helpful, thank you so much Sherlock Holmes,” you responded sarcastically and Aaron’s smile turned into a full-on smirk. 

“I love you too.”

You wriggled out of his arms with great effort, and a lot of elbowing him, then it was back to your frantic cooking and cleaning. 

-----------------------

The team was in shock. They knew that newly-wed SSA Aaron Hotchner was a lot more laid back then before, but when he was with you? All bets were off. His hands stayed firmly on you at all times,  much like his attention. You were clearly used to it, but to the team, your frequent flirty banter was bizarre. How could Aaron Hotchner be this… relaxed?

-----------------------

You noticed the weird look halfway through the dinner, and kicked Aaron under the table as a way to ask him if he would tune it down. He obliged, albeit confused, and kept his hands to himself for the rest of the night, much to his own dismay. 

Throughout the night, everytime someone made a look or whispered to each other, a sense of dread grew in your stomach. By the end of the night, it got so bad that you just left the room altogether and did the dishes instead. You had a dishwasher, there was no point in hand washing the dishes, but you had to get away from their prying eyes. 

They think you’re weird. They hate that you and Aaron are together. They think he can do so much better. 

Your thoughts were cut off by a hand on the small of your back. 

“Are you alright?” Aaron asked, pressing a kiss to your temple. Usually, his touch would ground you, but tonight it felt like a fire on your skin, one you wanted to put out. You quickly stepped out of his grasp and nodded. 

“Yeah, fine, just tired.”

“Well, people are heading out now, they wanted to thank you.”

“Sounds good,” you mustered up a half-assed smile and followed behind him as the team slowly filtered out of your house in a flurry of ‘thank yous’, ‘see you soons’ and ‘it was delicious’. 

-----------------------

You spent the rest of the night slightly avoiding Aaron’s touch. When you both sat down to watch a film, you decided it would be the best time to paint your nails, meaning Aaron should obviously sit on the opposite side of the couch, right? He did so without question, but not without a quizzical look. Next it was the bathroom, you sat on the closed toilet, brushing your teeth as Aaron stood in front of the mirror, his eye trained on you. 

Now Aaron was getting worried. Had he done something to annoy you? But then you’d surely talk to him, right? You’d never been one to not communicate, so he was left feeling completely bewildered by the predicament. 

-----------------------

In bed, he tried to wrap his arms around you, but you brushed him off, saying you were too warm.

“Did I do something?” He asked, turning back on his bedside lamp. 

“No,” you answered, your back still to him.

“Then why won’t you let me touch you?” he asked, rather blatantly. 

You rolled around to look at him, and immediately regretted it. This was so silly. You were getting upset about what a bunch of strangers (to you at least) thought about you and Aaron’s relationship. Fuck them. You started to laugh, embarrassment kicking in as you hid your face in the crook of his neck. He held you there, chuckling softly as he enjoyed the closeness of you after not being close for the past few hours. One thing you hadn’t expected from Aaron is that he was clingy. 

“It’s so dumb,” you giggled. “So you can’t laugh.”

“I won’t,” he smiled and you mustered up your best stern look. “I promise!”

“I was overthinking about what your team thinks of how much we touch each other,” you admitted. Aaron burst out laughing. You playfully hit him on the arm, but started laughing with him.

“That is dumb,” he chuckled.

“Hey!” You scolded, hitting him on the arm again. “That’s-”

“Do you want to know what they said when you were out of the room?” He offered and your interest was piqued. He pulled your hips and sat you on his lap, straddling him as he began to speak again. 

“They said that you were the nicest,” KISS. “Most lovely,”KISS.  “Most beautiful,”KISS. “Woman on the planet,” KISS. “And they could see how happy you make me.”

Your heart swelled. “So… they liked me then?”

Aaron laughed again. “They liked you a lot. Just like I do.”

-----------------------

criminal minds masterlist :)

navigation for my blog :) (criminal minds, obx, the bear, marvel, top gun, the hunger games :)

[januaryembrs]

YOU CAN HEAR IT IN THE SILENCE | Spencer Reid x Prentiss!Reader [9]

description: the TWO big steps you take together.

word count: 13.5k

trigger warnings: entire mr scratch episode including drugging and suic!de, gore, violence, blood, mention of Diana's schizophrenia, mention of hotch's upbringing

author's note: lets do this again UGH. also set throughout season 10 so even though it seems like a jump its been a whole year bcus I can't write about every day my babies spend together.

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‘Cause you can hear it in the silence, you can feel it on the way home, you can see it with the lights out,

You’re in love. True love,’

The one where you meet his mom. [you have the parenthood talk]

She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, her thumbnail instinctively picking at the side of her forefinger as her eyes trailed over the dress in the mirror. 

It was a little too chesty, were the sleeves too short? Would his mom not like that it was backless? Backless meant suggestive to some people. Would she hate her piercings? She could take out a couple of her earrings just for one day, cover the hole where her nose ring slipped in with foundation easily. 

Smile, she needed to remember to smile, not that god awful resting bitch face that Elizabeth used to say looked like she’d sucked a lemon between her cheeks. Smile. No, not like that, that looks fake and awkward. 

Was her make up too much? She would hate for Spencer’s mom to think she looked like a hooker. A cheap one at that. 

She felt his hands on her shoulders before the throes of her vicious mind could nab her once more, and her eyes trailed behind her in the reflective, if not slightly fingerprinted, mirror. 

“You’re thinking loud,” Spencer said as if it was a fact, though that tended to be the way with him, since he knew damn near everything there was to know. Especially about her. “Why are you so worried, it’s my mom. Besides, what’s not to like about you?” 

She huffed, shaking her head even though she really tried her best to give him a smile, instead turning to look down at her hands with wincing, cynical twinge of her lips. 

“Maybe my tattoos or my make up or my slutty dress or my piercings that make me look like I just raided Penelope’s collection of ‘goth chic jewellery’, her words not mine,” She said pessimistically. She didn’t want to dampen the mood, honestly she was looking forward to the woman who graced the world with Spencer Reid (she wondered if a handshake or a hug would be appropriate, she would ask Spence in the car she decided,) “People don’t tend to see me the way you do, honey, I can be blunt and rude and snappy and cold. And it’s your mom, she’s like the most important person in the world to you.”

“She’s joint first, actually” Spencer corrected, trying to lift her spirits even a little. He knew none of the things she was saying were necessarily true. He suspected that voice that had overcome her was not her own at all, more likely her own mother nagging into to her for years to sit up straighter, smile more, make an effort to network and socialise, or any other piece of shit observation about how she acted for Elizabeth to badger her about. 

But then she smiled at him, her eyebrows drawn together a little like she guessed he was lying or perhaps sugarcoating things. 

“You’re allowed to have her first, you know,” Bugsy reassured him, her eyes melty and soft as she looked at him and he nodded, wrapping his arms around her stomach, almost like he was trying to suck the negativity out of her whole body through diffusion of their skin alone. “She’s your mom,” 

“I know,” Spencer said simply, their eyes never breaking the gaze at one another, and Bugsy felt herself warm inside when she saw just how besotted his forest hues were, “Please stop worrying, she’s going to love you,”

“You can’t know that for sure,” She pushed back, because when had she ever allowed herself to enjoy a good thing when she had it. She knew she was being somewhat of a Negative Nancy, and she didn’t mean to be, truly. But Diana Reid was possibly the most significant person in Spencer’s life, despite what he said. And Bugsy was… Bugsy. All teeth and chaos and bite and vicious tongue when she didn’t mean to be. 

If Diana didn’t like her, she wasn’t quite sure she’d be able to look at Spencer again without blurting out the million ways she’d try to make it up to him.

“Oh, I do know for sure actually,” He said, spinning her around so he could see her first hand, not in a reflection or a mirror image, and she smiled despite herself, pressing into his lean body and taking a big whiff of his freshly washed clothes. It was the same detergent she used, the same one he’d always used, and yet it was so Spencer it made her skin crawl with what she thought felt like warm goosebumps.

“Oh yeah?” He nodded proudly, and she progressed to a grin, her chin leaning against his chest as she spoke, and he stroked her neatly braided hair away from her face to see her better, like he’d won the second he saw her smile properly, “How do you figure that one out, wonder boy?”

“I’ve mentioned you in almost every single letter I’ve written to her for three whole years. When she saw the photo of you I sent her, she asked if I’d cut you out of a vogue magazine,” Spencer said and she burst out laughing. He couldn’t say he blamed his mom, the photo he’d sent had been one of Bugsy’s best, but then he’d be willing to argue all of them were just as newsworthy as the last. And nothing compared to the real thing. “You make me happy, happier than I ever thought I was allowed to be. Believe me, I know she’ll love you, because I love you,” 

Bugsy smushed her face into his sweater to hide her modesty, and she pressed a small, barely there kiss to where her lips met even if he wouldn’t feel it. 

“Does my hair look okay?” She checked again, her voice muffled by his thick knitted clothes, and he pressed a kiss to her forehead, stroking a gentle hand down her spine. 

“You look beautiful,” He said softly, pulling her away from his body and holding onto her right hand, “Give me a spin,”

He lifted her hand above her head, despite the fact she seemed reluctant and embarrassed, “Spence,”

“We’re not leaving until you give me a spin,” He teased, and his smile was infectious as she twirled around beneath his grasp, the long, floral, sundress fanning out around her knees, “And back again!”

“Spencer-” She said with a chuckle, but he seemed to ignore her, or judging by his smile that spread across his whole face he didn’t care.

“Sorry, it’s just the rules,” He said, though she was almost certain there wasn’t ever such a thing as a rulebook on how to make your girlfriend less of a whiny bitch.

He spun her back around, and by the time she whirled around to face him a second him, his arm dropped down to secure around her waist, yanking her towards him to press a scorching hot kiss to her lips. 

She kissed him back, her tongue trailing against his lip and Spencer’s obscenely large hand released her waist, trailing up her sides to cup her cheeks. Spencer kissed her like she was sucking air right out his lungs, like he was receiving life saving medicine, like he was being graced by an angel, a non-believer, a man of science reaching out to the white gates of heaven as if they were about to disappear under his touch. 

They parted with a small smack that reverberated in the bathroom, and Bugsy looked at him as if he’d infected her with a drug, because truthfully that was how his touch, his kiss, made her feel. 

They settled in his car, a few soft and loving affections later, because she really did look beautiful and he could apologise for smudging her lipstick another time, and Spencer it was the first time in a long time that Spencer felt like his future was laid out in front of him. 

–

She fretted some more in the lobby, the woman behind the desk at the sanitarium lighting up at the sight of Spencer walking towards her with a smile. 

“Dr. Reid,” She enthused, noting the woman next to him that squoze a book to her chest tightly like she wasn't sure what her fingers might do if they were let loose, “She’s been so excited to see you, her doctors said she’s responding well to the new medication,” 

“I heard, I’m glad to hear she’s feeling calmer,” He said, his eyes trailing past the brunette who tapped away at her keyboard idly, “Where is she?”

“She’s just in the sunroom. She’s been learning how to crochet, just like you said,” The receptionist smiled kindly at Bugsy, who looked all but terrified, though she hid it well through tight lips. 

Spencer nodded, reaching up to put a hand between Bugsy’s shoulder’s to lead her through the lounge area where a few other residents watched a black and white movie. 

“Are you sure my make up looks okay, my mascara hasn’t ran has it?” She whispered, because a few other people, some even her age, were sitting in comfy armchairs flicking through books. 

Spencer smiled at her, because she was so cute when she was nervous, usually it was the other way around, “You look lovely, you always look lovely,”

“I believe that’s what’s called voter bias, Dr Reid,” She said, because jokes and wit always seemed to release the pressure on her head when she was stressed. 

He chuckled, opening the door to a large room filled on all sides with windows, and the cosy heat hit her in the face, “Not if what I’ve said is a verifiable fact.” 

“Who’s your secondary source, Dr?” She said, because they seemed to fall into a nerdy sort of teasing when they were like this. Facts and figures were predictable, getting your boyfriend’s mother to like you based entirely on your personality was not. 

“My mom,” Spencer said, and her head whipped to his, ready to protest when he led her to the corner of the sunroom, where a woman sat with her ocean blue eyes screwed up in concentration where two blush pink hooks were crossing and bobbing between a cream thread of yarn, “Mom,”

Her eyes flew up from where she sat, immersed in the delicate movements. Spencer had said a few weeks ago her hands were becoming stiff on her new tablets, that the side effects were making her circulation poor and so Bugsy had been out to help him pick up a crochet kit from Walmart the very same day.

“Mom, this is Bugsy,” He said, and it was his turn to be almost shy as he gestured to the young woman. “The girl I was telling you about,”

Diana stopped for a moment, as if assessing the new face, the way her hair fell around her ears, and Bugsy clutched the hardback tighter to her chest, thinking that maybe she should have gone for something a little fancier than the small piece of twin that wrapped around the present. First time meeting his mom and this was the best you could do, really Bugsy? Where’s the flowers or even another ball of yarn to keep her occupied? 

Bugsy swore her breath caught, her brows furrowing together worriedly as she went to hold a shaky hand out to Diana, but then second guessed herself when she wondered if the loathing of spreading germs was shared between Spencer and his mom. She’d forgotten to check when they were in the car- stupid- stupid girl.

“H-hello, Mrs Reid,” She said quietly, shakily, holding out the book to the woman. Diana Reid looked good for her age, considering Spencer had told her on numerous occasions that she struggled to pretty herself up the way she used to before her Schizophrenia had spiralled. But her hair was a warm blonde with only small traces of grey in it, short around her neck likely for practicality, and despite the fact her face seemed somewhat grumpy, though Bugsy would describe her as lost more than anything, she lit up like a damn firework on the fourth of July the second she saw her son. 

“Spencer!” She exclaimed, holding a hand out for her son to take, which he did so without hesitation. Bugsy thought she might be going in for a hug, maybe that she’d missed the hint that Bugsy was trying to greet her, which the young girl didn’t mind one bit. She was well aware she was stepping on their time together, “Help me out of this chair, I left my glasses in my room, I want to see her,” 

Bugsy felt heat rush to her cheeks as Diana all but threw her crochet set to the little table beside what seemed to be a lukewarm mug of coffee, and Spencer helped her out of the recliner, Bugsy holding out another hand in case she needed it. She was tall once she stood to full height, taller than Bugsy would have thought she would be, and hands were on her shoulders the second Diana had released her son. 

“Oh, look at you!” Diana exclaimed, and Bugsy tried not to falter with embarrassment under her words. But his mother’s hands were soft, if not rough on the tips where she had spent her life flicking through pages on pages of literature, “I’ve always told Spence he was a looker but, my god, you’re a catch even for him,” 

“Mom,” He said indignantly, but Bugsy chuckled through flaming cheeks. Diana waved him off in favour of smiling at the girl, and the second she met eyes with the woman who had raised Spencer Reid she saw where he got his good heart from. 

“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs Reid,” She stumbled over her words, trying for a second time to give her the book, and Diana looked almost aghast that she had brought her a present, “Spencer said you’d finished all your books they let you keep here so I bought you one of my favourites-”

“How could I resist The Great Gatsby,” Diana said, running a polished thumb over the gold printed writing, a small smile playing at her lips, “I’ve been meaning to brush up on Fitzgerald,”

Spencer smiled at his mother, who seemed more full of life than she had in weeks, before she waved her hand in front of the two of them, and Bugsy wondered if she had done something wrong. 

“And none of this Mrs Reid crap. You're not the IRS, Diana is just fine, honey,” She said, and Bugsy grinned, nodding in agreement with the older woman. “Mom is even better if you’re feeling brave,” 

“O-okay, absolutely,” She said, smiling even wider when Spencer seemed almost aghast his mother was being so brazen. Though he needn’t be so prudent, Bugsy was certain she loved her already. 

“And how is my big strong FBI agent?” Diana turned to her son finally and he shook his head, his eyes full of boyish affection for the women. 

“There’s dozens of words I think would perfectly describe me yet ‘big and strong’ fall nowhere in that category, mom,” He said, smiling widely at his mother who rolled her eyes and nudged him with her shoulder. She seemed more like herself than she had in years, her eyes were clearer, her nerves weren’t shot like usual. She seemed like the mother from his best memories. 

“Alright, how does ‘contumelious’ work out for you?” She cracked back, and he laughed, shaking his head and he caught the pure warm grin radiating from Bugsy’s direction at the two of them. 

And Bugsy saw in the kind, devoted eyes that hid behind Diana’s fluffy white, blonde hair where Spencer got his gentle soul; as if no amount of medication or illness would ever make his mother let up on the tenderness she held for him. She felt it in the air alone, the way they fell into sync only blood could ever achieve, and for a flash of a thought, Bugsy wondered if Spencer would be so doting on their children. 

And for the first time all day she didn’t need to second guess herself. She already knew the answer. 

–

“And this was Spencer in the mathletes,” Bugsy’s hand flew to her mouth to suppress the ‘aww’ threatening to tumble from her lips, because she knew from the way his cheeks had turned a bright rouge that he was embarrassed and she hated to make him feel like she was finding humour in his shame. 

It was easy to see which one was him from the offset. Three college boys who had probably spent the best part of their first years begging sorority girls to fuck them and eating funny brownies stood at the back, atleast in their late teens judging by their late-adolescene acne and braces. Yet there, standing in front of them dressed in a tweed sweater vest and pressed brown trousers as if he was a small grandpa, was a scrawny pole of a boy, peeking out from behind a sweeping fringe in need of a trim and a pair of  bubble-like glasses. 

He was smiling wide, holding some sort of trophy in between his slender, little fingers, and Bugsy could bet her entire savings that he had answered almost all of his team’s questions. 

“Spence,” She murmured, taking the photo gently between her fingertips where she sat in between her partner and his mother at the foot of Diana’s bed, “You were so cute,” 

“You can just say dorky,” He corrected, fighting the urge to cover his cheeks with his hands, because he could feel the way they gave away his self-consciousness. 

But she shook her head, leaning into him with adoring eyes as she stared at the photo, “No, I mean cute. Look at your little hair, you were so tiny- aw!” 

He laughed awkwardly, not missing the way she put a hand on his leg in reassurance, and Diana handed her another photo of a toddler with thick dark hair, those hazel eyes she loved, huge and round on the baby's smiling face. Bugsy melted when she saw the milk teeth gleaming in the midst of his laugh, yet she burst into sheepish giggles when she realised baby Spencer had no clothes on. 

Spencer’s eyes widened when he saw the thing dangling between his legs as the picture captured him crawling towards where Diana had the camera. “Mom!” 

Diana rolled her eyes, producing another one of Spencer watering the flowers with the garden hose, barely one year old in a bucket hat and, yet again, nothing else. “Oh, Spencer, don’t give me that, look how cute those little butt cheeks were,” 

Bugsy slapped a hand over her mouth, her brows pulling together at the endearingly innocent photos, and she met Spencer’s gaze again, the urge to squish his cheeks in between her fingers suddenly itching her hands. Though, judging by the embarrassment in his expression, he wouldn’t like it very much even if she did mean the best of intentions.  

“You were so adorable,” She confessed, looking back down at the two tiny, round butt cheeks that made something well in her chest because it was Spencer, so small and vulnerable and helpless. She turned to Diana, her eyes wide with love, “How did you not want just millions of them?” 

The woman laughed, leaning against Bugsy and palming off another photo, this time of Spencer in swimming trunks at the beach, likely around two or three, a line of white sun cream running down his nose and cheeks as he looked to be grumbling about the sand on his legs. 

“Because I knew none of them could ever be as special as my Spencer, and then that just wouldn’t be fair on them.” She said simply, and Bugsy smiled at the woman, truly smiled, because despite everything her illness set against her, she loved her son more than anything in the world. “You don’t win the lottery and then pawn in your rings for a couple bucks, now do you?” 

Bugsy chuckled, shaking her head. Elizabeth had never been so doting on her. She knew she shouldn’t think about her, shouldn’t compare the two of them because they weren’t similar even in the slightest. Diana was a single mother of a deadbeat husband who left, she battled a disease day in-day out that threatened to eat away at her brain, her memories of her son who thought the world of her, and she was still a better mother than hers had ever been. 

Part of her felt that bitter sting that never really left her since she was thirteen, since she saw the maid at breakfast time more often than she ever saw her mother, the kid that got picked up and dropped off in another country like she was furniture, a barbie doll for her mother to primp and clean and boast about her big brain to her colleagues without ever showing a semblance of affection for the girl reading material eight years above her grade level. 

Diana was living proof that no matter what, it’s not a challenge to love your children the way Elizabeth had always made it out to be, that she was difficult to love even for her own mother. 

Bugsy bit the emotion back, knowing it was just the baby photos ramping up her hormones, and felt herself fall perhaps even more in love with Spencer Reid when she saw the photo of him at Christmas dressed as a Jedi. 

–

She was quiet on the way home, her stomach warm with fondness, her hand warm with his palm as they held hands on top of the gearstick. 

She watched the last of the sun peek through the trees in a cantaloupe orange and candy-floss pink swirl, and she let herself close her eyes under the day’s worth of laughter. 

“What are you thinking about?” Spencer said after a moment, giving her hand a small squeeze when she didn’t answer right away, and he wondered if she may have even fallen asleep, feeling immediately guilty for waking her. 

She looked at him with an uneasy smile on her face, and his brain threw up a million different reasons for it, almost all of them making him worry.

“I know my mom is a lot,” He said, his tone jittery and she started shaking her head immediately, forgetting he couldn’t see where he was looking at the road, “I know she’s-”

“She’s wonderful, Spencer. God, no, it’s not that. I loved her,” Bugsy cut him off, and his shoulder’s immediately sagged in relief. She moved her hand to tuck a single lock of hair behind his ear, and he nudged into her touch on instinct. 

“Then what’s wrong?” He asked, his brows pulled together in worry as they came to a red stop light, and he put the Beetle into neutral. He looked over at her then, and he saw the way the grin had slipped off her face, leaving her with something oddly unreadable, though if he had to put a name to it, he would say doubtful, and she swallowed thickly. 

“Do you ever worry…” She paused herself, because she already could see their picture perfect day spiralling down the drain like yesterday’s woes, “It’s nothing, just forget I said anything,”

“No, tell me,” Spencer insisted, and the road around them seemed to hold its breath waiting for her reply. He’d taken a nice route home, claiming he wanted to skip the eight pm traffic, whatever that was, had cut through one of those neighbourhoods they show on holiday brochures or estate agents' windows. The kind people with kids and volvo’s and yoga mom groups lived in.  

Her eyes snapped out the front window when four young boys zipped past them on their bikes, their knees muddy from where they’d probably spent the day playing soccer, their clothes just as messy and torn, likely waiting to be scolded by their mothers for their recklessness. And pulling up the rear was a kid smaller than the others, jogging after them, wanting to cross the road before the light turned green, his glasses slipping down his nose with every step, and some weird, small part in Bugsy’s gut wanted to throw her arms around him and walk him home to make sure he got there safely. 

Spencer’s hand was on her thigh, pulling her out of her thoughts for a second time, and she blinked a little too harshly, wishing she could just enjoy a lovely day for what it was rather than putting such a downer on things. 

“I haven’t spoken to my mom since Emily’s funeral,” She said, swallowing heavily, and understanding passed over his face then. He knew he would never have with Elizabeth what they had just had with his mother. Even if she retired tomorrow and wasn’t jetting off to another country every week, Elizabeth Prentiss was a cold, shrewd woman who could make someone, mainly her daughters, feel empty just by being in the same room. 

Her damning grey eyes, her tight lips that never smiled, her harsh brow. 

“I don’t think she even kept any of my baby photos, none that don’t have her in them at least,” She confessed, and the lights flashed to amber, then green, and he was forced to let go of her for just a moment as he pulled off again, “I don’t… I don’t think she ever liked me.”

He had no idea what to say that would make it better. Usually he was so good at wriggling her problems out from the core, proving all her worst fears were wrong with simple logic. Yet he was at an end. Because Elizabeth had never shown any sign of loving her daughters, truly loving them beyond trophies. 

“I’m sure that’s not true,” He tried, pulling over to stop at the curb because he hated speaking to her when he was distracted. “Some people just have a funny way of showing these things,” 

But she shook her head, turning her eyes to her lap, “Your mom is… Amazing. And I feel like a total asshole for complaining about mine when yours is sick most of the time. And I know things weren’t great- I mean you were just a kid, you should have never had to look after her, it’s supposed to be the other way around, you know? But you’ll know she’s always loved you, like truly, truly loved you. I mean, you’re her whole world,” She rushed, like the thoughts had been bouncing around her head all day, waiting to burst out at the seams, which they had. 

Spencer took the keys out of the ignition, shuffling in his seat to face her, and he only realised then she was watching where the four boys had taken off down the street on their bikes, the smallest one trailing at the back like a lost puppy. 

“Don’t you ever worry sometimes I’ll be..” She started, and he knew where it was going before she forced herself to finish. Taking her hand in his, weaving his fingers between hers and squeezing them tight. 

“Like your mom?” He said for her because the words were lingering in the air like alphabet soup. She nodded silently, grateful that he always seemed to know how her brain was ticking over. She reminded herself to make it up to him later, “Never,”  

“But-” She started, and he grabbed her chin then, forcing her to look at him. He smiled dopily, because usually it was him who needed to be told how other people felt, and she swore his eyes had never looked so sweet. 

“Never,” He repeated, feeling the smile spreading under his fingertips as it took the second turn for her to hear it, “If anything, I worry more about becoming like my dad,”

Her brows furrowed, and she shook her head again. Sometimes Spencer wondered if she knew she was so expressive. It was one of his favourite parts about her.

“Never,” She echoed back to him, and they shared a sombre smile, squeezing each others hand just that bit tighter, “I tell you what, the second either one of us starts becoming our parents, we have the right to call them a jackass,”

He laughed, nodding his head and leaning over the centre console to press his forehead to hers, “Alright, deal. Although I think I hear Freud rolling in his grave at that statement.” 

She kissed him, hard, because she would never be able to tell him exactly how he made her feel with words alone. Over two hundred thousand words in the English Language, at least five other languages she could speak fluently, and yet not one of them knew how to describe this feeling. Like she had been absorbed so completely, effortlessly, by Spencer Reid. That she was disease ridden, riddled with Reid. 

And the thought made her giggle into the kiss, because she would have to tell him some other time. Her hand ran through his hair, pulling him closer, and his hand skirted down to her waist to tease underneath her shirt. 

They pulled away after a moment, staring with the same dazed look in their eyes. 

“We have three more days in Vegas,” She started, fixing his collar and hair with idle fingers and pressing an absent peck to his lips, “Do you think we could go back one more time? To see your mom? If that’s okay with her, of course,” 

And he smiled widely at her, nodding and pulling her in for another long kiss. They had a dinner reservation in a half hour, but he didn’t mind being five minutes late for once in his life, not if it meant he was with her. 

The one with Scratch. [he buys a ring]

He’d walked past the jewellers three times that week on his way back from the coffee shop. Bugsy had a fair bit of paperwork to catch up on, despite him offering to halve her load with her because Hotch had already warned them once about the complaints he got from the other agents that she was using Reid’s memory as an unfair advantage, although he would argue that her brain was just as capable as his. 

So, he’d been sent on a coffee run alone. He wasn’t complaining, it was just down the road, barely even a five minute walk, and it meant he got to look at the range of neatly cut diamonds in peace.

He wasn’t looking to buy it soon, at least that was what he’d told himself the first time he’d seen the pretty one in the corner. He was just having a browse, perhaps just looking at the watches they had on display and his eye had happened to fall to the women’s section below. The second time he’d stopped for a look, it was just to see if anyone had bought that one he’d seen the first time, and when he realised they hadn’t, his heart gave a somewhat relieved sigh that he decided he would confront later. 

By the third time, the shop keeper stuck his head out the door, making Spencer jump. 

“Either you’re buying or you’re fogging up my window, kid,” The old man’s voice was gruff, but he had kind eyes, that of a romantic, and Spencer supposed you didn’t sell a dozen engagement rings a day and not feel hopeful. 

“J-just looking,” He stammered, taking a step away from the rings and double checking he hadn’t gotten any smudges on the glass, “Not to buy right now, just for future reference,”

“No one comes back that many times for future reference, son,” He said with a chuckle and Spencer hated the part of him that said that he was right, “Why not for right now?”

Spencer huffed quietly, wondering if her coffee would be cold by the time he got back at the rate he was going, “It’s still a little early. I don’t want to freak her out,”

She had been his girlfriend for one year, seven months and two weeks (and four days but who was counting). It had been her thirtieth birthday just a couple months ago, as far as he was concerned Bugsy had never dropped any hints about wanting to marry any time soon like he knew other women did at this time in their life. 

He was happy where they were, in their apartment, in their semi-public relationship, with their boys that were starting to look a little grey and rickety on their paws. Spencer didn’t want anything to ruin that, even if that one ring did seem to call out to him like a siren song. 

The jeweller grinned slyly, like he knew something Spencer didn’t, but he nodded at the kid nevertheless, “Well, that little number in the corner you’ve had your eye on has had two offers already, incase that sways your hand at all,” 

And Spencer felt the jolt of injustice in his head at the idea of someone else taking that ring, one that he couldn’t get out of his head the entire way back to the office, one that only went away when he saw her smiling up at him. 

One that only dissolved when he imagined how she would look wearing it. 

–

“Tell Penelope I said hi,” Director Axelrod murmured, turning on his heel and heading back to his car as Hotch flashed a look down at the paper, the name ‘Peter Lewis’ scribbled out on the line and he passed the paper to Bugsy where she peered around his shoulder. 

“Get this to Garcia, Lewis has his final victim already,” He said and she nodded, the two of them heading back to the car. Bugsy pulled her cell out her pocket, immediately calling their tech whizz where the rest of the team were at the office an hour away. 

“Peter Lewis, born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. To call him a Math genius would be an understatement,” Garcia reported, her press on nails clicking against the keyboard as she worked in the candlelight since Lewis had hacked into their electric systems. 

“Where was he in the foster system?” Hotch asked, Bugsy holding the phone up over the centre console so they could both speak to their team.

“He was… ugh this WiFi hotspot is the worst,” They waited, Hotch heading for the freeway, “He was not in the foster system. He had two very biological parents and they ran the foster home until it- oh dear,”

“Looks like we found Mr Scratch,” Rossi sighed, and Bugsy’s brows furrowed, waiting for a response. 

“So one of the boys in the house said Peter’s dad would dress up as the devil then the other kids would follow suit, this has to be where all the victims stayed before they were adopted and their names were changed,” JJ chimed in. 

“Did Lewis’s father serve any time?” Bugsy piped up, chewing the inside of her cheek because the whole case had given her the heebie jeebies. Grown ups reporting sights of shadow monsters and waking up with dead loved ones. She thought by now she had heard it all. 

“The case was pending and then he was killed in jail for being a paedophile. Peter’s residency is still listed as Florida,” Garcia said, her mouse whirling around at the speed of light judging by the soft ticks they heard on their end. 

“He broke into FBI files to find someone in witness protection, did any of the kids from the home end up in WITSEC?” Hotch asked, clicking the blinker down to chand lanes and overtake the ford infront of them. 

“That would be… no? No, none of them,” Garcia replied, and the team shared a confused pause. 

“Who the hell is he still hunting?” 

Hotch spoke up, his own mind whirring as to who could possibly be Lewis’ endgame, “Garcia, who ran the investigation in Florida?”

“Hold on, that would be Dr. Susannah Regan, who went into witness protection on a very nice estate in Columbia, Maryland,” Bugsy and Hotch looked at one another, sharing the same thought and the unit chief floored the gas pedal, knowing Regan didn’t have a whole load of time left if Peter had gotten to her already. 

“Send Reid the location, we’re on our way,” Hotch ordered, and Penelope was already ten steps ahead, Rossi and JJ grabbing their vests and heading for the garage. 

Bugsy hung up, checking her gun was still holstered as Hotch launched them the final five minutes to Dr Regan’s home. 

And yet she couldn’t help feel like they were walking into the belly of the beast the victims had been describing. 

–

Garcia hadn’t been kidding when she said it was a nice estate. By the time they’d gotten out the car, the entire street was silent, a quiet only lots of acres and high gates bought you. 

“You stay behind me, we watch each other's six. We get Dr Regan and we get out, are we clear?” Hotch muttered, his eyes darling to the living room window where the curtains had been pulled closed, one single lamp left lit. 

She nodded, the two of them edging towards the door that had already been left open a crack, “Crystal,” 

He took a second to breath, wondering if they should wait for back up, but Savannah didn’t have alot of time, not if the unsub was already inside like he suspected, before he raised his hand up to the knocker and snapped it a couple times, pushing the door open. 

“Dr Regan?” 

“It’s open, come in,” The woman’s voice called, though it sounded too chipper to be authentic, some sort of uncanny valley as if it was an automated response from an answering machine. 

Checking Bugsy was still behind him, he pushed on, his footsteps light and quiet, eyes scanning the large antechamber, the grand piano sat in front of a huge fireplace cold to the touch, the lights all switched off despite the owner being home. 

Maybe Dr Regan was cheaping out on her bills. But Bugsy doubted it. Something in her gut didn’t sit right. 

“Are you alright?” Aaron called, his torso squeezing against his vest as he scanned what he could see from the room, and she held up behind him, flicking a look over her shoulder every once in a while for movement from the other rooms. 

“Agent Hotchner, I got Agent Rossi’s message,” She said, again in that cheery voice, despite her words claiming she understood she was in peril, and the sound of it made Bugsy’s chest seize with suspicion. 

“Doctor, you’re in danger, you need to come with us,” She explained, her eyes squinting to see in the damning lowlight of the home. 

“I understand,” That robot voice spoke, “I’m in the study,” 

They paused for a second, exchanging another look before pressing on because they had no time to lose over silly hesitations. Passing through the entrance into the room lined with bookshelves on bookshelves, expensive tapestry on expensive tapestry, their heads flicked over to a frail older woman that somewhat resembled the woman they’d been sent from Penelope, when she had was freshly turned twenty five with a sparkly new bookdeal under her nose. 

She sighed in gratitude when the entered, and Bugsy held back a moment as Hotch moved in, keeping her finger on the trigger, “I’m so glad you’re here, you need to see this,” Savannah produced a long, glass sharp letter opener that could easily pass for a knife with the eight inch edge of it, “He wants you to see this.”

And with that, without hesitation or caution she jammed the knife through her own windpipe as if puppeteered by a master, and Bugsy leapt forward to try stop the bleeding just as Aaron did. 

Only she never got that far, because no sooner had she stepped forward a hand reached out from the darkness, grabbing her by the scruff of her hair and throwing her to the floor while she had been caught off guard. Pain exploded behind her eyes as her nose met the hardwood floor, and she swore she cracked a tooth or two. Her hand scrambled out for her gun, only to watch a large black boot stomp down on her digits that made her hiss in pain. 

She heard a scuffle up ahead where Peter had managed to grab Hotch equally unaware, and she watched her unit chief tumble to the floor, smacking his head on the table on his way down. 

And it was then that she smelled it. A raw chemically odour that ran up her bloodied nose, went into her mouth when she tried calling out for Hotch, and it made her cough up a thick mucus before it had even slid down her throat. 

She heard shots fired, and it was enough for her to reach out for her own gun again, hoping that Lewis was distracted enough to not pay attention to her, only to realise somewhere in the scuffle he had kicked her weapon across the floor. 

When had he done that? Why hadn’t she seen him? Probably because the pain behind her eyes had damn near wiped her vision into a blur of white. 

It was then the nausea hit her, the vertigo washing over her like she’d stood up too fast, only she wasn’t standing up at all, in fact she was pretty sure she was on her hands and knees trying to crawl towards Hotch. 

Hotch, who lay on the floor with his own eyes rolling like the room was spinning for him too, and she wondered how on earth anyone could have beaten Hotch. He was a rock, immovable, irreplaceable, forever. 

“Hotch-” She garbled out, her voice tragic and weak in a way he’d never heard before. 

And he opened his mouth to speak, only to find his own voice gone when he saw the figure leering over her body, a glint of a knife in his hand, and Aaron wanted to know how he had managed to emerge out of the shadows when he could have sworn Lewis was right next to him. 

The drug, it had to be the drug. God his eyelids were heavy, what had they been in this house for?

But Aaron felt a scream lodge in his mouth, sounding more like a yelp, something that could have been a mix of ‘no’ and raw anger because Peter had brought one of those big black boots behind him and kicked Bugsy so hard in the gut she flew to her side like roadkill, the wind leaving her lungs with a whimper of pain, and her eyes never left Hotch’s gaze as he did so. 

“Sorry, sweetheart, I’m going to need some alone time with Mr Hotchner here,” Lewis said, and before Aaron could plea or beg, he watched the man lean down and drive a swift line across her throat, as if he were simply gutting a pig, and her carotid artery was sliced clean in two, her blood spewing all over Aaron’s shoes, seeping into the floor. 

And Aaron went to scream, felt the tears well in his eyes because he’d failed her, only this time, unlike Hailey, he was forced to watch every second of life trickle from her face as she bled out onto the floor, choking and clawing at the floor for reprieve. 

What would he say to the team, to Spencer? What would he say to Emily?

Aaron let himself sob, shaking his head in denial and squeezing his eyes tightly shut, hoping to god medical would get here soon. It would be too late by then, he already knew it. 

Bugsy was dead. There wasn’t any miracle fix or band aids that were going to fix that. 

And yet in the next moment the sound of her body writhing in desperation against the floor, the sight of which he couldn’t even bring himself to watch, it had gone quiet. 

And Aaron peeled his eyes open, wondering if she had passed, if she was still in pain, if she wanted someone to hold her hand as she went, and he urged his heavy muscles to do something god damnit anything to help her, except his body felt like lead and even opening his eyes was too much for him. 

But there was nothing there. Not the puddle of blood he’d just watched spill over the flooring, not her hand reaching out for him, clawing at her throat for reprieve and certainly not a body of a girl he once loved like a daughter who would stay with him for a lifetime. 

All of it, just… gone. 

“Don’t you worry, Mr Hotchner, I’m saving the girl for later. Can’t have a pretty thing like that go to waste,” Lewis smiled toothily, and Aaron wanted to wrap his hands around the bastard’s throat, wring the life out of him until he was a crumpled mess on the floor, “But for now, it’s you and me, Aaron. And I think you should answer your phone. Your team are on their way for you,”

–

Her scream was piercing, cut through two walls. He could hear it the second they stepped out of the car. He’d all but thrown himself out the vehicle before Anderson had even stopped, probably would have barged right through the front door without even drawing his gun if it hadn’t been for Morgan grabbing him. 

“Reid, Reid, no-” Derek said, even though his voice wavered, his head flicking back at the house, “You can’t just head in there without backup, it could be a trap, man,” 

“She’s in there, can’t you hear her?” Spencer said, his eyes wide with terror as the sound of her screaming kicked up a whole other decibel and Spencer's stomach churned at the thought of what might be the root cause of it, “Please, Morgan, I can’t-” 

He didn’t even realise his eyes had welled up at the sound alone until he couldn’t finish his words, and Derek was staring at him with an equally solemn expression. 

JJ rounded the other SUV, Rossi at her tail, their guns drawn low to their thighs as they gave Derek a nod; ready to enter. 

“Just promise me you’ll keep your head, Reid,” Morgan said with a cautious tone. Realistically, Spencer should have stayed back at the office with Kate. He was too emotionally invested in the case, though no one wanted to be the one to argue that with him, knowing Spencer would only fight back that they would all struggle to keep their cool once they entered the house. 

Because the UnSub had Hotch and Bugsy. He’d taken family. He’d made it personal. 

And then, just as Spencer nodded, unholstering his own gun and making sure his vest was tightened at his waist, perhaps the worst happened. 

A shot fired from inside the house, loud and unmistakable over the deafening cries and Bugsy’s screaming stopped. 

–

Spencer didn’t even remember entering the house, not really, despite his promise to Morgan. He felt like his heart was in his throat, images of Maeve’s brain matter splattered over the warehouse floor flooding his head, because apparently a revolver can cut through two heads at once and still pack a punch.

Spencer was realistic, had sprung into a clinical sort of worry that told him exactly how many times he’d told her he loved her (two thousand, six hundred and seventeen times) and that maybe that wasn’t enough. It told him the amount of kisses they’d shared could have easily been doubled if he dared to steal them more often before bed, if he’d been honest with her years before he had, if he’d just taken five minutes off his showers. 

He had barely survived Maeve dying. If Bugsy was gone… there would be nothing left of him. Nothing important anyway. Just a body, limbs, a heart that would never beat again. He wagered even his blood would stop because the idea of her gone from the world had already made him cold. 

He heard movement in the living room, and judging by the way Derek’s head whipped over to their right, he had too. And before they could raise their guns up to aim, Derek edging forward to kick the door in with pure, simmering rage, a voice sounded out from the other side. 

“In here!”

Hotch. Hotch, who sounded like he was weeping, or at least had a frog in his throat, hummed his words almost. The men drew a breath of relief, Derek reaching forward to open the living room door, his weapon still tight in between his fingers as he pushed. 

“Hotch?” He said, though Spencer’s eyes cast around the room the second he confirmed his unit chief was okay. He had a nasty gash on his head, likely from where he’d fallen, and his pupils were dilated. Drugged. “Hotch, where’s Bugsy?”

“H-he took her-” Aaron slurred, attempting to get to his feet, holding out a hand to the sofa and using the furniture to claw himself up to a stand, “Upstairs I think- I need to get her- Where’s my gun-”

Morgan rushed in to grab Hotch under his arms as Rossi and JJ burst in from the kitchen, Rossi calling out behind them for medical attention. 

“Hotch, you’re not going anywhere, you need to- Reid,” Morgan yelled, but Spencer ignored him. Because he could apologise later. 

Lewis had Bugsy alone, had taken her upstairs, that was what Hotch said. And Spencer couldn’t stand by and wait while they had no idea what was happening to her. He heard JJ’s footsteps pounding behind him, following him up the stairs, and he knew he should be paying more attention for any hint if Lewis was still in the building. But he didn’t. All he could think about was those screams. Raw. Guttural. Like she was being skinned alive. 

His eyes trailed the empty bedrooms, any sign of movement whether it be Lewis or the woman he would trade his own life for in a heart beat if it came down to it. But there was nothing there, not even as JJ swept the other handful of rooms, leaving them with one small storage room at the end of the hallway, and the two of them cast a glance at one another. 

JJ nodded to him, and he reached out a shaky hand, praying on everything in the vast universe he’d spent his entire life learning about that someone heard him begging to keep his Bugsy alive. 

He slid the door open, cocking his gun up to the figure in the corner, his own weapon at his feet as he smiled in a smug manner. 

JJ took stock of their surroundings, waiting for the trap they were walking into to spring, only he held his hands out in surrender. 

Because he had already gotten what he wanted. He had killed Dr Regan, and taken two cops down with him. 

“Where is she?” Spencer spat, handing JJ cuffs as the woman grabbed him harsher than she should do, because the pleased look on his face was infuriating, only made worse by the chuckle that bubbled out of his mouth. 

“She’s in the closet,” He nodded his head to the smallest bedroom, and Spencer’s eyes narrowed, “She sure is a darling, isn’t she? So easy to tame once that smart mouth of hers was gone,” 

Spencer wanted to shoot him between the eyes there and then, put him down like the sick dog he was, but instead he fled after where Lewis had directed him, because he didn’t know if she was injured herself or if it was already too late.

For once in his life, Spencer Reid knew nothing. 

–

And then he saw her. 

She was alive, thank god she was alive, a dent in her nose that suggested he’d thrown her to the ground face first, her knees skinned, her palms scratched. 

But that wasn’t what worried him.

Because no sooner had he opened the door to the closet, reaching forward to yank her hands off her ears, or maybe pull her for a hug, or maybe break down into sobs and tell her how sorry he was he couldn’t have stopped any of it, she’d started screaming again. 

He didn’t think after so many years on the job he’d ever heard something so gut-wrenching. For a moment he thought he might even be sick. Because it was full of pure terror. Not the childish fright you get from a scary movie or a loop de loop on a rollercoaster, but blood curdling fear like he had never heard before. 

It was enough to have Morgan running up the stairs with his gun drawn, only to see Spencer frozen, his hands reaching out to grab her, and it was only then the agent realised Reid was trying to speak to her. 

“Baby, baby it’s okay, it’s me, it’s Spencer, you know me,” He said, his lip quivering, his words warbling with tears, “Please, please come back to me, I don’t know what to do- please just tell me what to do-” 

“Reid, she’s not herself. Hotch said Lewis made him see things, awful things, just like he did with the other victims,” Morgan said, holstering his gun, his own resolve crumbling when he came closer and realised she had her eyes screwed tightly shut, curling herself into a ball in the corner like a kid trying to hide from the boogey-monster.

But Spencer didn’t listen, he couldn’t accept that they had found her alive and still he had been too late, didn’t want to accept that he had her in his grasp and yet she was still living her a personal hell with no end in sight. 

“Please, please, come back to me,” He sniffled, leaning forward onto his knees to try hold her hands in his, maybe get her to hear his voice and wake up from whatever nightmare she was stuck in, “Come on, I got you,”

“No, no, no, you’re not real, you’re not real,” She screeched, shoving his hands off her, and it was then he saw the dribble of tears running off her nose, “You’re not, I won’t kill him, I won’t-”

It was the ravings of a mad woman. But Spencer didn’t doubt for one second that whatever was happening inside that big brain of hers felt entirely real. He heard Morgan draw a sharp breath, turning to face away from the girl and steady himself where his dark eyes lined with woe and salt. 

Spencer hated seeing her cry, hated not knowing how to help her even more, and he didn’t care if she pushed him away even more. He had to hold her, hold her and make her listen, make her understand she was safe because he was there. 

Spencer swore then and there that he wouldn’t let anything touch her ever again as long as he lived. 

It took everything in him to ignore the way her hands scratched at his wrists desperately, and he wondered if in her mind he’d taken the form of some beast ready to swallow her whole. But he was sure he could calm her down with some coaxing, get her to see what was real if he was patient and gentle enough. He scooped an arm under her legs that shook, and it only took him a second to realise he had peed herself in the throes of her nightmare, the sight of it causing another cry to roll from his tongue. He didn’t care about the mess, because his entire focus was on her as her hands thrashed against his chest, trying everything to get him off her, even when his other hand wrapped around the back of her head and pressed her tightly into his shoulder, squeezing her against him in his lap like she was an inconsolable child. 

“Please, please, I can’t, I can’t do it again, I don’t understand,” She wailed, her voiced croaking and pathetic and he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d damaged her vocal chords, “I don’t understand,” 

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” He cooed softly, pressing his head next to her ear and rocking her slowly, “It’s me, it’s Spencer. I’m real, this is real,”

Her hands stopped their fight against his body, his own grip tight and not showing any signs of letting go any time soon as he waited for her to wear herself out, for her body to lose its adrenaline and slip out of its fight response. She pushed him limply a few more times, with little more than the strength of a toddler, and he knew she was coming back down, at least something close to it. 

“I’m so tired,” Her voice was muddled with tears, slurring and stumbling over each other and it was then that JJ walked in with three paramedics behind her. 

The blonde’s face evened out when she saw the girl was alive, nothing but a few surface wounds, but it was then she saw over Spencer’s shoulder the way her eyes were clenched tightly together, the red marks on Spence’s alabaster skin where she had put up a fight behind cradled in his arms. 

And JJ knew then that something inside Bugsy had changed that day. 

“I know, you were so brave, you were so brave for me,” Spencer nodded, his cheeks flooding as he tried to keep his tone strong, stroking the back of her hair softly, “You did so good, I’m so sorry,” 

“I’m so tired and I don’t understand,” She said, like she was putting sentences together for the first time, and it was like suddenly the fight had been sucked out of her as she slumped against him, not even realising in her haze that she needed to be showered off desperately. 

“I know, honey,” He murmured, sniffling and pressing his face into her neck, “You can sleep now, I got you,”

She hummed like she didn’t quite believe him, like she still thought he was some figment of her imagination, but she hadn’t the strength to fight back, to call his bluff. And so she drifted in and out of sleep, as the paramedics got her on a stretcher, Spencer hovering over her face incase she woke up in a panic again, cracking her eyes open right as they got her on the back of the ambulance and suddenly it wasn’t Spencer’s face she saw flitting in and out of her eyeline, it was Hotch. 

“Hotch-” She tried, her hand swinging out at her side with her attempt of grabbing onto his face because there was a trail of blood down his cheek. Her voice was fried, just like Spencer had suspected, her words sounding as if she had swallowed stones, “Hotch, your head,”

“I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I should have known he would be there,” Hotch said, as her eyes rolled back, straining desperately to keep herself awake. But she had said it herself. She was just so tired. “I shouldn’t have taken you in there,”

“I don’t think I like dreaming anymore,” She garbled childishly, a small frown on her face, and Hotch bit his lip to hide a whimper, raising a hand to her cheek, and Spencer sat at the foot of the stretcher, his neck and wrists sore where she’d clawed him, but he didn’t care. 

Hotch gave her a long kiss to her forehead, one Spencer pretended not to see for the sake of paperwork, because he knew Hotch needed it, even as she’d been sucked right back into the reverie of sleep, their eyes never left her frail form, not even when the paramedics started hooking things up to her wrists to take her charts. 

Spencer knew then he should have bought that ring. 

–

She’d been staring at the ceiling for about five minutes before he tried to pry an answer out of her. 

He’d tried not to smother her the second she woke up, had seen the hesitation and distrust swirling in her gaze when she saw him there, and he wondered if she thought it was another one of her dreams she had yet to wake up from. But he was real, and he was worried, and he loved her. God, did he love her. Loved her so much he couldn’t stand for one more moment to see her so dissociated from a world where she was his and he was hers and everyone was missing her.  

“What did he make you see?” Spencer tried, his voice as soft as he could try make it without crying, because her gaze remained in her lap, the side effects of the drugs making her a little woozy, “Baby, I can’t help you unless you talk to me, please just, let me help you,” 

Her throat was in agony the second she opened her mouth to speak, ripping with pain when she cleared her throat and in an instant, Spencer’s hand was on her thigh drawing comforting circles with his thumb. 

“Emily was there, she came to- r-rescue me,” She started shakily, her hands trembling beneath the covers and she breathed slowly through her mouth, “S-she wasn’t wearing a vest, and when I asked her she said she’d gotten the first flight out of London to get me; and then… Doyle,”

She swallowed, and he took her hand in his, giving her a reassuring squeeze, and she tried not to let her eyes well up only to find it was already too late. 

“He stabbed her like he did that night, but it was different this time. She was on the floor, trying to get away, begging me to call for help but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything, and I was trying so hard to scream and tell someone, but I couldn’t…” She sniffled, squeezing his hand so tight it hurt, but he didn’t care, “And he wouldn’t stop. He just kept going, over and over again, and I had to watch every second of it knowing it was my fault,” 

The floor was red, a horrible midnight ichor of Emily’s blood seeping from her body, more blood than a person should ever be able to hold. Last time Doyle had killed her, there had been a hairline chance that she would pull through and Emily had beaten all the odds stacked against her. 

But this wasn’t like last time. There was no miracle escape to Europe. Bugsy would be surprised if there was even anything left of her to put in the casket. 

Her eyes were terrified as she watched Doyle drive the knife into Emily’s skin, the scream lodging in her throat for a reason she couldn’t place. She begged herself to do something, say something, tell the man that she would rip him limb from limb if she ever got the feeling back in her legs, wail for help because that was her sister, her big sister, and she’d stopped moving a while ago. 

Stop, stop it, stop it.

But the words wouldn’t come out. She was frozen. Numb. Like someone had unplugged her from the socket, and the only part of her that did work was her eyes, why did it have to be her eyes. 

And the blade was red, so red she thought she’d never see anything else other than red again, as so was the floor, and his arms, and Emily’s clothes. Red. All over. Driving into her stomach with a wet squelch that made Bugsy want to vomit. 

Over and over and over.

She burst out crying then, the first real emotion she’d shown in days, and he was out of his chair in seconds, cradling her to his chest and shuffling to sit next to her on her bed.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it wasn’t real, baby,” He soothed, and she shook her head, her tears soaking his shirt through, and all he could do was stroke her hair down and press gentle kisses to her brow, “You were so brave,”

“And his face changed, and he wasn’t Doyle, it was Hotch. And he-he gave me his gun, and said I had to pick between him or you because one of you had to die and-and I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t pick-” Her words warbled into his shirt, an amalgamation of sobs and deep breaths in between sentences, but she needed to get it out. It would eat her alive if she didn’t.

“Choose,” It was Hotch’s voice. The same rough edge, same bite he used with the UnSubs they chased, the tone he’d never used on her. 

She shook her head, because the feeling had tingled back up her spine into her neck by now, and with it brought her voice, her sorrow. 

“No, no, Hotch, please don’t make me, I can’t, I won’t-” She sniffled, looking at the thunderous eyes of her unit chief she’d known for years. He didn’t look like himself, like someone was wearing him as a mask, yet she knew it was him by his steady hands that drew his gun from its holster. He had always been sure of himself. 

How had she got here? Had Lewis got to Hotch, brainwashed him into slaughtering and terrorising his own team. Whatever it was, Bugsy knew in her chest that whatever was standing in front of her was not Aaron Hotchner. 

“Me or him,” He said simply, as if it was that easy, as if he wasn’t pressing a gun to Spencer’s head. 

The sob fell from her lips before she could help it, looking to Hotch’s feet where he held the love of her life bound, his eyes rimmed with fear. 

“I can’t, please, I can’t,” She wept, her cheeks soaked, the salt trickling down her neck and into her shirt. Or was it blood. Had she hit her head? Why did her head hurt?

She couldn’t care, couldn’t think of anything other than the fact a monster had taken over the man she thought the world of. She knew if anything happened she would never be able to hold it against him if anything happened, even if it would always be his face in her mind killing Spencer. Because it wasn’t him. It was Lewis. It wasn’t him. 

Hotch’s finger clicked a bullet into the chamber, pointing the gun at Spence’s crown, and she warbled in protest, because her legs were still numb, her body from the waist down useless, but this time she could scream and fight and yell all the ways she begged for this to stop. 

“Hotch, please, please don’t. It’s not real, it’s not real,” She yawped, her chest in agony, her head spinning because she could have sworn Emily was just here, could have sworn she had been coming to save her. Why was Emily here? And she’d usually be embarrassed to admit it at her big age, but she wanted her sister. She wanted her big sister more than anything, “Hotch,” 

But the man who looked and sounded like Aaron Hotchner wasn’t listening. Instead he looked at her with a steely glare, cocking the gun once more between his fingers, “If you’re too much a spoiled little bitch to choose, then I suppose I’ll have to do it for you,”

And with that he pulled the muzzle away from Spencer’s head, and before she could say another word, utter another plea, he angled the weapon under his chin, pointing it straight for his brain, and pulled the trigger. 

She thinks she screamed, though her hearing had gone with a staticky blur, his blood spraying across the wall like something out of a slasher movie. She remembered howling in shock, her face soaked with ichor and salted tears, and she expected Spencer to rush forward, grab her in his arms and cradle her with soft words. 

But he did. Those hazel eyes she would know in every life time stared blankly at her, all trace of terror gone from his gentle face, and in a whirl of movement, he was standing where Hotch had been, his body gone in a wisp of smoke, like he was nothing more than a magician’s magic act, like her chest hadn’t just cleaved in two at the sight of him dying. 

And Spencer took his place, the lips she’d kissed a thousand times pressed into a scowl, the hands she wanted to melt under, to hold her and tell her he was going to fix everything and make it make sense again holding the loaded gun. 

And at his feet, bound by the same rope he had been was JJ. Freightened, beaten. Mother, wife, best friend, sister. JJ.

“Choose,” Spencer said, but it was cold and unfeeling. Nothing like the saccharine tone he used with her, and she felt the pit of pain and suffering and dread that had opened in her stomach grow only deeper, “Me or her,”  

–

She had cried for about two hours after that, and he had held her for all seven thousand, two hundred seconds of it, stroking her hair, reassuring her that Lewis was gone, the drug disposed of, and more importantly, telling her he would never let anything like that happen to her again, over his cold, lifeless body. 

And he meant it. With everything in him, Spencer would never let an UnSub get so close to harming the woman he loved. Not a bruise, or a cut. Not even a scratch. 

And for the three days they’d kept her in for observation she’d slept, and slept some more like she hadn’t known a wink of rest in years. And with it came the nightmares, of all the people she loved splattering their own brains over the walls, Chose, chose, me or them?

But by the fourth day she was allowed more than one visitor in her room, the spot that had solely been filled by Spencer, who would take to his grave that he’d gone home and washed their clothes of the mess she’d made when she wasn’t herself. 

And on that fourth day, the team had arrived with love by the bucket load, because Bugsy was family, and family never let each other suffer alone.

“Oh, look at you!” It was Penelope first, ofcourse it was Penelope first, “Spencer, where’s that cardigan I told you to bring her, she could get cold, and that purple is so her colour- oh what am I saying, come here!” 

Penelope bounded over to her bedside, not completely blind to the way Spencer tensed up as she threw her arms around the girl, fighting his urge to chide Garcia into being more gentle because he knew he’d been hogging time with her while the others had been forced to wait. 

“Pen,” Bugsy said, breathing out and hugging the woman back as hard as she could, “Why do you smell like lavender?” 

Garcia released her clutches (reluctantly) and produced a big tote bag of trinkets, one of which Bugsy suspected was a candle. 

“Spencer said they might be keeping you another couple of days and so I brought you some goodies to cheer this place up,” She said with a chirp, reaching in her bag for two stuffed teddies, and Bugsy’s eyes melted when she realised they resembled Niko and Sergio, their colourings not quite identical but the thought had been there, “So you don’t miss your boys too much.”

Bugsy smiled, her chest spreading with warmth “Thankyou so much, Penelope,” 

And Garcia went to respond, her smile wide and relieved, when another voice spoke up behind her, “Quite hogging her, mama, there are people waiting to see the kid,” 

Penelope rolled her eyes which made Bugsy snicker slightly, moving out the way for Derek to lean over her bedside and give her a tight squeeze. 

“You gave us a scare and a half, baby cakes,” He said with a sigh, and she hugged him back the best she could, though his arm muscles were the size of her head. 

“I’m sorry,” She murmured, and he patted her on the back gently, before letting her go for the next person waiting to pounce on her. 

“Don’t be ridiculous, you don’t need to be sorry,” JJ shushed, her slender arms all but crushing her into her chest, and she heard the breath of relief from the woman’s throat as she stroked a hand over her spine, “Just get better for us, okay?”

And Bugsy knew she didn’t mean the crack in her nose Peter Lewis had given her when he’d grabbed her by the nape of her neck and slammed her face into the wooden door the second Hotch’s back was turned. She meant the screaming. The nightmares. The chill that ran down her spine even now when she looked at every one of her friends and remembered that night. Picturing their brains on the wall, their blood on her face-

“Henry drew you a picture,” JJ said, pulling away and presenting her with her own gift basket full of homemade goodies and fresh pyjamas because the ones she had from the hospital were starting to itch, “He said you needed magic kisses,” 

Plucking the card from the front of the wrapping, her lips quirked into a smile when she saw two stick figures, a small dot with yellow hair labelled ‘henry’ with an arrow, and a tall woman with a triangle dress and two glittery wings labelled ‘bugy’, and she was almost certain it was because they had played fairies and princes the last time she had gone over. 

She flipped the page, and saw his hand writing scrawled in a green crayon, a few spelling errors here and there where he had tried his best. 

‘to bugy

mommy said you wer hurt at work and needed somethink to make you happy agan.

I gave the card majick kisses before mommy takes it to the hospital to make you better agan. 

also plees coud we play princes again some time soon.

Love Henry’ 

She chuckled, her finger stroking over the letters gently, because she could imagine him at his little blue table writing it out for her, and she handed it off to Spencer to put on her bedside table. 

“Thankyou JJ,” She said earnestly, and the blonde nodded, squeezing her leg under the blanket gently before she moved over for Rossi to shuffle in, ruffling the girl’s hair because he would joke later that his back couldn’t handle all the movement when really he felt like she’d been mauled with enough affection for one day. 

“You okay, kid?” He said, his eyes roving over the bruise on her nose that had bled into her eyes, and she nodded, smiling up at him somewhat convincingly. 

“I’m still kicking aren’t I?” She said, and the older man chuckled, shaking his head, “Can’t get rid of me that easily,”

And it was almost true, the small seed of double planting in her own head because for a second in that house she had thought things were done for her. And Spencer had thought the same, judging by the way he nervously cleared his throat, playing with the collars of his shirt.

But Rossi nodded with her, “You kidding? There’s enough life left in you to resurrect all of my dead end marriages,” The team snickered, Rossi squeezing her arm the way grandads do, “Kate sends her love, she had to take Meg to her dance recital, she said she’s dropping by later with good coffee,” 

Bugsy took a sigh of pleasure, because she would kill for a steaming cup of good coffee, and Rossi smiled at her attitude they’d all missed in the office. 

And then there was Hotch, who looked damn near like a dog with a tail between his legs, sporting his own jagged forehead wound that had been stitched up, his lips pulled into a guilty pout unlike everyone else's grateful beams. 

“Bugsy,” He started mournfully, and he swallowed heavily, “I’m-” 

“Don’t-” She shook her head, looking up at him from where she’d sat up in the bed to accommodate everyone’s hugging, “It wasn’t your fault, so don’t give me that. He caught us both of guard,” 

But he still didn’t look like he quite accepted that answer, settling to reach out and squeeze the hand that was laying across her stomach, his skin warm and rough as he held her like she was cracking glass under his touch. 

She realised she had been wrong that day with Lewis, when she’d been damn near shaking in her spot because of the man who looked so much like Hotch, and she saw the fatal flaw that gave it all away. 

His face was set in a frown more often than not, and it was for that reason a lot of the agents on the other floors lived in fear of SSA Hotchner’s thunderous tone and barking attitude, but Bugsy knew that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Because while he could be cold and domineering and bossy, his eyes told her all she needed to know. 

He was hurt. He was guilty. He was worried. He was mourning. He couldn’t stop seeing Peter Lewis slitting her throat in that flash of a blade. He didn’t want to take his eyes off her incase it was all a dream in itself, that they had never been found, he had never woke up, they had never saved her. 

His eyes were haunted by the past twenty years of his life, perhaps what happened even before then because she wasn’t so stupid to miss how he was more rough on child beaters and abusive fathers than he was their usual UnSubs, how he was so extra gentle with Jack, how he hated raising his voice. And inside the big scary exterior, Bugsy saw a boy who only wanted to save everyone because no one was ever there to save him. 

She squeezed his hand tightly in hers, pulling him towards her and he’d resisted hugging her to start with because he knew the frog would leap into his throat, but he could never deny her. And he didn’t, he simply leaned over, caressed the back of her head over his shoulder with one of his enormous palms and gave her a warm hug no monster or demon or whatever she had seen could ever be capable of. 

And Bugsy felt stupid for ever believing anything she’d seen. 

–

They stayed for another hour or so, Derek running out to grab Bugsy a subway because the food at the hospital hadn’t been the best, and she had devoured the steak and cheese footlong so fast Rossi’s brows had raised into his hairline. Spencer handed her a strawberry flavoured pudding pot, the lid already peeled open for her and a spoon.

And it was then a figure came rushing through the door, so fast they were surprised they hadn’t heard the heels on the linoleum and the whole room stopped for a breath, Bugsy dropped her pudding cup down her shirt, barely even making her first bite count. 

“Why did no one tell me those two were screwing for eight months?” Emily barked, gesturing between the two agents that cuddled up on the hospital bed, and almost as soon as the pure joy to see her older sister had flooded her body, it ebbed again, and Bugsy rolled her eyes.

“Eleven hour flight, Em, and a buttload of head trauma and that’s all you have to say to me?” She snipped, mopping up her pudding with the edge of her finger. 

“I got weekly updates about the consistency of Sergio’s bowel movements but this you missed out?” She threw her hands up, sighing in contempt and almost immediately the girls were bickering like they hadn’t spent a single day apart from one another, but then Spencer supposed that’s what happened when you were blood. 

And part of him wondered just who was going to tell Emily about the proposal, the same small part that had gone and bought the ring just yesterday while she’d been sleeping. 

He supposed he could live with it being his secret for a few weeks longer. 

--

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[brokenmenswhore]

Hey hey! I love your Aegon fics so much that I want to know if you would write a story where after your kid with Aegon passed away, he promised never to touch you again so you wouldn't have to endure bearing more of his kids and witnessing their death. But you yearn for your husband every night and will act dirty to make him touch you again. By acting dirty I mean doing sexy things to instigate him when he's alone with you.

of all the things in this life that i’m good at, being intentionally sexy is NOT one of them, so i’m hoping this isn’t awkward :) my biggest fear is that someone’s gonna not like what i write for their request i’m on my knees pls don’t hate me

all in | aegon ii targaryen

pairing: aegon targeryen x fem!reader

warnings: angst, mentions of a deceased child, smut (MDNI 18+)

────── ☾ ──────

It had been three long, dark, and lonely months since the death of your son.

He passed away at only a few weeks of age due to health complications, and both you and your husband, Aegon, were left devastated.

Aegon had a tendency to blame himself for anything negative in his life, his self hatred running through the depths of his soul. Your son was his heir, and he felt as if he lost a piece of himself, and blamed himself for the health issues your child was having. “It must be from me,” he would whisper to himself, almost incapable of accepting that some things he could not be faulted for.

When Grand Maester Orwyle proclaimed your son dead, Aegon broke. He was hysterical, unable to speak, the only sound from his lips was an occasional scream of anger and sadness. You grieved in private, the joy you felt from your son’s birth still so recent that your stomach was still not yet back to a normal state.

The first few weeks were hard on both of you, but you at least attempted to lean on each other. However, Aegon was difficult to console when he got in his own head. You were both laying awake in bed, comforting one another when your hand ran across his chest, toying with his shirt. As difficult as the week had been, you were desperate to feel close to your husband in some capacity other than sadness and grief.

Aegon sighed and moved your hand away, rolling over on his side and turning his back toward you. You stayed stagnant and stared at him for a moment. “Aegon?”

“We can’t.”

“I know this grief is still very new, but I-“

“We can’t, ever.”

You sat in disbelief. Tears threatened to spill from your eyes at his words. You were in need of comfort, as was Aegon, and his declaration frustrated you. “And why not?”

“I refuse to risk putting you through this again.”

You were speechless. You tried to think of something to say, a few small noises leaving your lips as you tried to begin a sentence, but to no avail.

Aegon could hear your attempts. “What you have been through these past few weeks- I cannot watch you bear another one of my children, only to endure the pain of losing them again. I have never seen you happier than the day our son was born, and now-“ Aegon’s voice trailed off, “It is not worth the risk.”

Tears of sadness and frustration were now freely falling, Aegon’s back still to you as you spoke, “you do not seriously intend for us to never be intimate again. For the rest of our lives, Aegon, I need you. I am all in. Are you not? Do you not need me as well?”

“I need to relieve you of this pain more,” he responded, “and there are more than enough whores in King’s Landing.”

Your breath hitched in your throat at his final comment. You couldn’t believe he said such a thing. You knew he was hurting, and oftentimes pushed you away when he was, and you decided to assume it was an intentionally harmful comment meant to do just that. You chose to believe that he didn’t really mean it, but you still wished he didn’t say it. You understood his pain, but that didn’t make it alright to take it out on you.

You didn’t dignify his comment with a response, you simply rolled out of bed, fighting to maintain your composure as you walked out of the room, slowly shutting the door behind you.

The next morning, you returned to your shared chambers to ready yourself for the day, and Aegon was already up and dressing.

“Where did you sleep?” he asked.

You untied your robe as you approached the outfit laid out for you by your handmaidens. Handmaidens stopped assisting you and Aegon without being called into the room, as per your marital request.

“Elsewhere,” you stated.

Aegon sighed. “That is not an answer.”

“Why should it matter to you? If you get lonely, you can simply bed your whores,” you spat, throwing his comment from last night back at him.

Aegon didn’t handle you being mad at him very well. He needed everyone to like him at all times, but he didn’t cherish anyone’s opinion of him as much as he did yours. Knowing you were upset with him killed him.

“Do not be upset with me,” he pleaded, standing behind you and wrapping his arms around your waist.

“Oh? I thought we were not to touch each other any longer?”

Aegon retracted his arms, moving directly next to you so he could catch your eyes. “I don’t want you to be upset,” he said.

“Then do not promise to deprive me of something you and I both want and need.”

“I cannot put you through this again. Do you not understand that? Whatever is going on within me, it passed something bad down to our child, and if we remain intimate I risk you falling pregnant with another child we will inevitably lose. As your husband, it is my duty to ensure you do not have to go through such a thing again.”

“It is out of your control, Aegon,” you said, your voice low as you held his face in your palms, “and it is not your fault.”

He held onto your wrists, but didn’t move your hands. “This decision is not meant to hurt you.”

“I know.” Aegon was set in his decision, which meant that there was no point in arguing with it right now. You did not have the energy.

────── ☾ ──────

The next several weeks were filled with longing, your heart and body yearning to be close to your husband, now that it had been three whole months since your son passed.

You didn’t press the subject with Aegon, allowing him room to breathe. It was difficult, and you found yourself needing him more and more the longer you went without him.

You knew that despite his decisions, you always had power over Aegon. He was completely enamored with you, and oftentimes changed his mind to match yours. When he made decisions you didn’t agree with, it took a hell of a lot of fighting to get him to falter, but it was not always impossible. This particular instance couldn’t be impossible- you couldn’t survive without him.

“We we supposed to depart last hour!” Aegon called out to you, waiting by the door with his guards for you, the hour getting later and later. House Dondarrion was hosting the Targaryen family for supper at Blackhaven as a gesture of appreciation for the King’s assistance in the Stormlands.

Your handmaidens tightened and tied the final strings of your corset. It was new, and made specifically for you, only this time, you made special requests. It was the standard green and gold, and still kept you covered, but less so than usual. The garment left your chest nearly exposed, just as you had planned.

“They must have forgotten your measurements, Your Grace, there is not nearly enough fabric,” one of your handmaidens spoke, fidgeting with the seam on your cleavage.

“It will do just fine, thank you very much,” you said, “we must be going.”

You were escorted to meet up with your husband, who couldn’t look away from you the moment you came into view.

“What the fuck is this?” he whispered the moment you were next to him.

“What ever do you mean?”

“Everyone here can see too much of you in that,” he continued.

You shrugged your shoulders, playing nonchalantly dumb. “They must have forgotten my measurements.”

You gazed up at him, and he could tell you were playing him. He knew you well enough to tell.

“What are you trying to do?”

You brushed your hair from your neck to behind your shoulder, making even more skin come into view. “Waiting to leave. We are already behind, are we not?”

You started to walk away, but Aegon grabbed your arm and pulled you back. “You can’t possibly think I’m going to let you leave in such a thing.”

“It is not your choice.”

Aegon knew that despite the roles placed on both of you from a very young age, he couldn’t control you if he tried.

Throughout supper, Aegon was on alert to the gazes of other gentlemen upon his wife. Many approached you two to offer their condolences for the loss of your son, making you tense up and your breathing quicken from stress, which only made your chest more obvious.

You could tell Aegon was bothered, but that’s what you wanted, so you made no effort to be modest.

“Rather lewd tonight,” Aemond said, standing behind your chair, greeting you for the first time all night, “don’t you think?”

“Perhaps,“ you responded, taking a sip from your cup.

Aemond leaned down next to your ear and whispered, “What’s he done then, hm?”

You giggled at the question, Aemond smiling as he stood tall and moved to greet the people next to you, ending your interaction. Aegon couldn’t hear what Aemond said, but Aemond being so close to you and whispering in your ear angered him.

“What did he say?” Aegon asked, unable to help the curiosity.

“Nothing of importance,” you said, remaining stoic.

Aegon’s nostrils flared as another member of House Dondarrion approached the table.

Aegon remained observant the entire night, a possessiveness consuming him as he intentionally stared at anyone who gawked at you, his gaze intimidating them into looking away.

When you returned to King’s Landing, you retreated to your shared chambers.

“It does not befit a queen to dress in such a vulgar way. I cannot fathom why you would do such a thing tonight,” Aegon said.

You poured two cups of wine as you replied, “you cannot fathom? Dear husband, I think you can. Take a guess as to why I may behave as such.”

You handed Aegon one of the cups, taking a sip from your own and intentionally tilting it too far upward, the red liquid spilling down your neck and onto your chest.

“Fuck, what a shame,” you spoke, placing the cup down and moving your hair behind your back.

Aegon watched you swipe a thumb over your bottom lip and suck the wine off of it.

“Stop it,” he warned.

“Stop what? You cannot expect me to just stand here covered in wine,” you quipped, “do you happen to have a cloth?”

Aegon retrieved an used cloth from the table next to you, holding it out to you, as if to say ‘here’s the cloth you absolutely knew was there and only made me grab to mess with me.’

“I can’t see my own neck,” you said, “help me?”

Aegon sighed in frustration, moving the cloth to clean your chin, then your neck, moving it lower and lower. He watched the muscles in your neck flex as you swallowed, and he didn’t even think about holding his actions back before his lips were on your neck, cleaning off the wine with his tongue.

Your mouth opened and a small sigh left your lips, the feeling of his mouth on you after so fucking long making you needier than usual.

Aegon moved down to your breasts, licking and kissing the top flesh of one of your breasts before jolting back and wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “No.”

“Aegon-“

“Please, I don’t think I’m strong enough for this.”

Aegon dropped the cloth back onto the table and marched out of the room, leaving you worked up and your breasts coated in wine. You let out a disappointed huff as you called your handmaidens in to run you a bath, hoping it would help you relax.

The next morning, Aegon had council business to attend to all day, but he had made an unfortunate mistake when you first wed: he told you that you were always welcome in council meetings, and that he would cut out the tongue of anyone who tried to speak against your presence there.

You swung open the doors to the council room, all heads turning toward you as you walked over to your husband.

“What is it?” Aegon asked, sitting taller and taller the closer you got to him.

“You said I was always welcome in these meetings, Your Grace.”

You seldom ever called Aegon by his title, but you knew that doing so drove him crazy. You noticed him shift slightly in his chair.

“The current matter of discussion is rather important,” he said.

“I would hope so, you’ve been in here all day,” you said, gripping the back of Aegon’s chair and pulling it with all your might, a seated Aegon inching a tiny bit away from the table. You were giving it your all, but could only move the chair a small amount back.

“What are you doing?” he asked, as the rest of the council just watched the scene play out. They knew better than to question you in these meetings.

You then sat yourself directly on Aegon, adjusting yourself so that you were comfortable in his lap, but he could still see the table. You were acting immature, but that was the point.

“This is entirely inappropriate,” he whispered into your ear, evidently tense. He was genuinely annoyed at you for sitting on his lap in the middle of a council meeting, but you didn’t care.

“I thought that was something you liked about me?” you whispered back into his ear.

You made brief eye contact. Aegon didn’t want to embarrass you in front of the Lords at the table, so he maintained a whisper. “Get up.”

You smiled, making the council think you were not in an argument, but rather exchanging a few private sentences before returning to duty. You leaned your head back so you were in his ear again. “No.”

“Your Grace,” Lord Commander of the King’s Guard and Hand of the King, Criston Cole, interrupted, “forgive me, but this is rather urgent.”

“Right then,” Aegon said, turning his attention back to the meeting as you remained on his lap.

The men all began to speak of war strategy and politically advantageous pairings, Aegon’s arm instinctively finding its way around your waist to keep you in place.

Every few minutes, you shifted your positioning, intentionally grinding down on his cock. He gripped your waist to try to stop you every time, but it never worked.

When the meeting was finished, you hopped up and left the room before Aegon could catch you.

Later in the day, he caught you walking alone to the library, and he pulled you into an adjacent hallway.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he warned, “that little stunt you pulled during my council meeting? Never again.”

“I do not know to what you refer,” you said, slowly pulling up one side of your dress, revealing more and more of your thigh until your entire leg was exposed, giving you room to dip your fingers underneath your dress.

“What are you-“

“It seems as though I’ve forgotten to put on anything under this dress,” you said, looking up at Aegon through hooded eyes.

“Don’t you dare,” he said, watching your hand disappear fully underneath your dress.

“Would not have to, if only I found myself a husband to do it for me.”

“Don’t,” Aegon demanded, grabbing your wrist and stilling your hand.

“Please,” you pleaded, desperation in your eyes as Aegon looked at you, nearly breaking.

Instead, he dropped your wrist, walking away from you again and leaving you alone.

────── ☾ ──────

When Aegon entered your chambers that night, you were already bathing. You were resting your head against the cool metal of the bathtub, your knees visible over the water, your body partially covered by the weak bubbles on the water’s surface. You opened your eyes when you heard the door open, and Aegon approached you, pulling one of your handmaiden’s stools next to the tub and taking a seat.

“What is it, Aegon?” you asked, re-relaxing and closing your eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asked, and you didn’t see it, but his eyes ran up and down the length of your body as he spoke.

“Bathing?” you answered, almost more of a question than an answer. What you were doing was blatantly obvious, so the question confused you slightly.

“If this is another one of your dirty tricks, it won’t work.”

You let out a deep breath. “It’s not, I really just wanted to relax.”

You opened your eyes, and Aegon cocked an eyebrow at you. “I’m serious, Aegon. I’ve tried enough, and it has not worked. I give up. That’s what you wanted, right?”

You meant it. You were tired of trying to work him up, instigate something, or be lustful, if it was never going to work. You were tired of throwing yourself at someone who clearly did not want you anymore.

Aegon didn’t respond, he just continued to watch you as you closed your eyes again, relaxing into the water. He could see most of your body beneath the surface of the clear liquid, the bubbles almost entirely dissipated.

You heard a small whisper of your name, but you kept your eyes closed, allowing yourself to continue winding down for the night.

Aegon reached out to run his hand over your knee, and the feeling made you jolt slightly, your eyes opening at the sudden contact. You gave Aegon a confused, somewhat concerned look.

“You would truly risk experiencing the tragedy of losing our son again?” he asked, his voice the smallest you’d ever heard it, “just to have me?”

You placed your hand on top of his. “What happened was out of our control. If the gods did not intend for him to be your heir, so be it. It cannot be a fault of our own. We did not bring it upon him, Aegon. We have no knowledge of what could happen given another heir, and this tragedy is not reason enough for me to give up on having children. I think it unfair of you to make such a drastic decision on my behalf. If you do not wish to be intimate with me because you yourself do not desire it, then so be it, but you do not get to make these decisions for me. I did not choose to be without your touch, Aegon, and it is unfair for you to choose it for me.”

It was the most you’d said at one time since your son died.

“I miss you,” you added.

A tear fell down Aegon’s cheek. “I never want to see you in pain again.”

“There is no guarantee you would. There is not even a guarantee I will fall pregnant again.”

Aegon knew you were right. He was making decisions for you, and he knew he had no right to, he was just so scared. He hated seeing what losing your first son did to you, and he thought he was doing right by you by not risking a pregnancy and then loss of another. He did not realize the damage he was doing.

He was lost in his thoughts, and you took his silence to mean that he was sticking to his word. “Please just let me rest, Aegon, I do not wish to rehash the same argument again.”

You fell back into your relaxed position, removing your hand from Aegon’s and resting both of your hands on either side of the metal tub.

Aegon only spoke a small whisper of your name again before moving his hand down your leg, sinking beneath the water. You maintained your position. He made it clear to you he did not want intimacy anymore, so why would he actually be doing something intimate?

You were caught by surprise when his hand reached between your legs and he ran a finger between your folds. You inhaled a sharp breath, your eyes remaining shut as the feeling was too good. Even if this stopped right now, you needed to make the most of the feeling while you had it.

Only, it didn’t stop. Aegon continued to feel you, circling his finger around your clit, causing your head to fall back even further as a soft whine left your lips. Aegon hadn’t heard the sweet sound of your whines and moans in ages, and one tiny noise from you made him completely forget why he ever vowed to keep himself away from you.

The water was sloshing slightly as Aegon moved his hand, inserting a finger into your hole as his thumb took residence on your clit, keeping the stimulation there as he began to push a finger in and out of you.

He watched you writhe in the water, your hips beginning to grind up into his hand. “A-Aegon,” you tried to catch his attention, but he was so consumed in you that he took it for a moan.

He leaned over you, his face mere inches from yours. “Say my name again.”

“A-Aegon, I was t-“

Aegon cut you off by kissing you, catching you off guard and making you squeal with surprise into the kiss. He began to move his hand faster and faster, the water nearly spilling out of the tub from the movement of his arm.

You moved to grab his wrist, and he pulled away from your mouth briefly to inspect your face and make sure you were alright.

“As much as I want you,” you breathed out, “I don’t want to do anything unless you do as well.”

Aegon didn’t verbally respond, as he often didn’t, but instead kissed you, hard. You held the back of his head, deepening the kiss as he added another finger into you, a moan escaping your throat into the kiss, only egging Aegon on more.

“Fuck,” you whimpered when Aegon pulled away.

He leaned down to kiss your neck, not caring at all about the water hitting the side of his face and drenching his hair.

You moaned and whined as his fingers fucked you at a violent pace, curling when they hit the sweet spot within you that had your breathing nearly stopping for moments at a time.

“Aegon, I’m-“

Aegon lifted his head so that he was looking directly at you. Your eyes squeezed shut as your climax hit you hard, Aegon removing his hand from you to grip either side of your face and kiss you as your orgasm washed over you, your juices mixing with the bath water.

Aegon softened the kiss as he felt your breathing calm down, only pulling away when your muscles released their tension beneath him.

“Thank you,” you sighed.

“Get out of this thing,” Aegon said, standing up and holding out both of his hands to you.

You placed your hands in his, allowing him to help pull you to a standing position. You shivered as the cool air hit your bare, wet skin. You stepped out of the bathtub, anchoring your balance on Aegon. When you stepped onto the ground, Aegon pulled your waist against him so quickly that you nearly fell over.

“If you’re all in, I’m all in,” he spoke.

You gave him a genuine smile. “I’m all in. Always have been.”

Aegon leaned down to kiss you again, backing your bodies up slightly so that you were standing directly next to the stool.

Aegon then became almost carnal, having been without you for so long that he was too impatient now to wait any longer.

Aegon pulled you away from him and spun your body around, pushing you down until you were bent over the stool he was sitting on mere moments ago.

He undid his breeches and pushed his clothing down, leaving his lower half exposed.

He held a hand out in front of your face. “Spit.”

You did as you were told, giving him the lubricant that he spread on the head of his cock as he lined himself up with your entrance. He began to push into you slowly for a moment, before slamming his entire length into you.

You cried out at the feeling. One of his hands gripped your waist while the other fisted into your hair, pulling your neck back as he fucked you from behind. He was snapping his hips from the first thrust on, the pressure causing your body, and subsequently the stool, to shift forward with each hit.

“F-fuck,“ you moaned, “I missed y-you, Y-our Grace.”

The title only made him more feral, his grip on your hips destined to bruise you as he slammed into you viciously. He growled and groaned behind you, subconsciously trying to make up for months of deprivation.

You came again, the feeling of your walls squeezing his cock like a vice pushing him over the edge, despite the sex not lasting long at all. His body was in desperate need of you.

He bottomed out inside of you as he came, spilling his seed within you as he calmed down for a moment before pulling out of you.

He released his grip on your hair, allowing you to push yourself up. You nearly lost your balance, but Aegon caught your waist with his arm.

“I missed you too,” Aegon spoke, “what a fucking idiot I am.”

“Yeah, but that’s not new,” you teased, giving him a sweet kiss to show your forgiveness.

[yandere-daydreams]

tw - modern!au, unhealthy relationships, obsessive behavior, nonconsensual touching, and stalking. written for a very lovely anonymous commissioner.

“I’ve been thinking about us, again.”

He was barely trying to whisper, his voice loud enough to earn several pointed looks from the people around you. You’d tried to put yourself at a distance from the rest of the class, to sit in a deserted corner of the near-empty lecture hall, but he wouldn’t have cared if you were in the first row. That was something you’d had to learn quickly about him – Kunikuzushi was shameless at the best of times, actively vitriolic at the worst. Your public humiliation wasn’t just a pleasant side-effect of his company, but an active goal he was striving towards during every minute you spent together.

“You don’t have to look so worried – if I was going to break up with you, you’d know.” You kept your eyes trained on the lecturer, your expression schooled to practiced disinterest, but his voice lulled like you’d broken into tears. You felt him shift that much closer to you – his thigh pressing into yours. “I just don’t think we spend enough time together. I know, I know, we’re both busy, but still. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were avoiding me.”

You were. Just last week, you’d spent two hours locked in your bedroom closet – lights off and knees pulled into your chest – because Kuni had somehow gotten your address and decided it would be a good use of his time to loiter on your doorstep and refuse to leave until you came out. You planned your day-to-day schedule meticulously to make sure it would never bleed into his, went out of your way not to have to go where you knew he would be, but there was only so much you could do to get away from someone willing to blow off his classes and skip work just to spend the better part of a day sending you candid pictures from one of his countless burner phones. You could only be thankful he was too caught up in his own delusions to ever let his obsession turn violent. Lashing out at you for never acknowledging whatever relationship he thought you were in would be akin to admitting you didn’t have a relationship at all, he would never do that.

He took up your hand, his fingers soon intertwined with yours. You tried, weakly, to pull away from him, but he only let out a breathy chuckle, his head soon resting on your shoulder. Compared to how he’d acted when you first met – standoffish, bristly, constantly on the verge of losing his temper – he was practically a touch-starved puppy, happy so long as he could sit in your lap and bask in your attention, positive or negative.

If only you’d ever wanted a pet.

“I don’t know why I can’t just come out and say it.” Another laugh, a playful squeeze to your hand. “I think we should move in together.”

You snapped in his direction, your knees jolting against the bottom of your desk and earning a few pointed glares. After mouthing a sheepish apology, you dug your nails into the back of his hand, keeping your voice as low as possible. “Kuni, I— I don’t think that’s—”

“Don’t think it’s practical?” Predictably, he cut you off. “I knew you’d say that. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to find the nerve to leave your apartment.” You felt his smile against the dip of your shoulder, then the crook of your neck as he nuzzled against you. “I’ve already handled it. By the time that moron—“ He rolled his eyes towards your professor. “—shuts up, everything should be taken care of.”

You felt something heavy and sharp drop into the pit of your stomach. “But, you don’t have a key—”

“I made myself a key a couple weeks ago – got tired of waiting for you to offer. I love you, babe, but you’re too timid for your own good.” His grin, pressed the curve of your throat. “You can thank me later on, after I’ve shown you our new place.”

His hand fell to your thigh, just a touch too high not to trigger some buried, primal instinct inside of you. You didn’t think, didn’t hesitate – bolting upward and tearing yourself away from him. Your chair scaped against the tile floor, your palms slamming against the desk, and in an instant, every pair of eyes in the lecture hall were on you. The professor scowled in your direction, his ire tangible. “Do you have something to say, (L/n)?”

You opened your mouth, but your mouth was dry, your throat suddenly swollen shut. Your gaze fell back to Kuni – his smile still wide and his eyes still so, so dark.

Wordlessly, you shook your head and collapsed back into your seat. As the lecture picked back up and all concentration was returned to the front of the rom, Kuni latched onto you once again, his hold twice as strong and twice as suffocating as it had been.

It was almost a comfort to know that, this time, there wasn’t anything you could do to get away from him.

[signanothername]

Was listening to “The Court Jester” before I thought of something.

Does your version of Nightmare have like, a will of some sort? Like, if Nightmare were to die because if Dream had won against him and like, killed nightmare or nightmare just died cause he old and crusty (/hj), would Killer get his things?? Like his mansion/castle, clothing, throne, prized possessions, etc. .or would Killer just mourn over Nightmare, wander around the castle and like, get nothing but help himself to things inside of it? Finding his secrets and stuff like that?

Interesting question >:)

Ok so i feel like it’s pretty much clear Nightmare does own a lot of things, his castle one of them of course

But I feel like had Nightmare died Killer wouldn’t inherit anything after, cause to inherit something you need to be a family, which Killer isn’t, and tbh, I don’t think Killer would ever care enough to want to inherit Nightmare’s possessions regardless, he certainly wouldn’t care if Nightmare died either

Nightmare’s death would negatively impact Killer, but not in a “Killer would feel sad and mourn Nightmare” kinda way, more like “Killer had been a bit codependent on Nightmare to find purpose that now Nightmare’s dead he doesn’t truly understand what to do with his life” kinda way, but even then, it’s not like Killer truly understood if he had any purpose at all anymore other than to be someone’s killing machine, so i feel like he’d move on to do whatever the fuck he wants anywhere he wants

Killer would simply abandon the castle and go somewhere else, especially with the fact that the one who kept him trapped there no longer exists to continue keeping him there, and it’s not like Killer holds any attachment to it or Nightmare, Killer can’t feel anything most of the time anyway, and even when he does (stage 1) it’s not like he holds Nightmares in high regard (especially with how Nightmare treated him)

Know who’d actually inherit Nightmare’s possessions tho? Dream, and unlike Killer, I can see Dream actually genuinely caring about inherenting every little thing Nightmare ever owned, cause Nightmare’s possessions are the only things left of his now dead brother, Dream would heavily mourn the loss of his brother and I can even see him taking care of Nightmare’s possessions for the rest of his ageless life, making sure the castle is spotless (spring cleaning if you will) he’d take all Nightmare had, from paperwork, to photos, to books, to the crescent golden crown and keep them somewhere safe, making sure they never wear down with time

Dream knows Nightmare actually cares about keeping things prestine and he aims to keep it as prestine as he possibly can (and maybe it’s cause of the crushing guilt weighing him down about how both their lives had been, and how he couldn’t ever fix it)

And who knows, maybe Dream would start healing when he realizes that there’s a tiny part of Nightmare that still cared about him even after his corruption in the process ;)

Part 2 (of sorts)

Part 3 (a lil bit)

Part 4

[sofiawritesstuff]

Platonic

part 6

summary: When Lando's "playboy" image is setting a bad reputation for him. He turns to the person the trust most in this world for help.

pairing: landonorris x bestfriend!reader

warnings: none

part 5

AN: Before we start I do want to say that I’m sorry for how this story has turned out, I’m lowkey hating it but i will come back with a better story soon. If anyone has any longer stories they would like to see, then please leave it in my submissions box, in my comments and/or feel free to message me privately. I also apologies about the wait for this. Sorry guys and thank you.

--

Lando had woken first, the light of the early morning sun filtered through the curtains. He stretched over you, smiling to see you still asleep against him.

He kissed your head before sneaking out of bed, this was the first morning in a while that Lando woke up feeling refreshed and confident for the race, he was also early, early enough to make you breakfast.

He reached for the t-shirt that lay on the floor beside him before trotting his way to the kitchen. He began by making you both coffee before moving onto toast.

"Good morning" you said with a smiles, your voice still rough from just waking up "Well hello there princess, what woke you up?" he asks holding your hand that wrapped around his waist from behind

"The beautiful smell of coffee, and the cold bed. You're up early is everything okay?" you question, resting your head on his back "I'm feeling so good, about today, I got the best sleep last night, we've got so much time before we need to leave too" he smiles buttering your toast and sticking it in your mouth

You smile, taking it out your mouth “I’m glad” you say chewing covering a hand over your mouth “Are Max and Pietra awake?”

“I don’t think so” he smiles leaning down to kiss you

Neither you or Lando had mentioned all the kisses throughout the weekend, the ones in public and in private, but you were both enjoying whatever was going on.

“So today, I was thinking of wearing my new white summer dress, what do you think?” you tell him, sitting on the chair next to him “The one that you ordered last week?”

“Yeah”

“That’s nice, I like that” he nods pulling your legs up on top of his

--

Lando had decided to match your all white outfit today, he held your hand tightly entering the paddock, pulling you closer to him as people rushed by.

You could sense the rise of Lando's nerves, in attempt you comfort him you put your free hand on his bicep

"How are you feeling today Mr Pole Sitter?" Ted Kravitz asks walking up to you both with the camera crew in front of you "Feeling good, hopefully can perform well enough to get the win, got a lot of support here so it would be good to put a smile on peoples faces”

“And you’ve also got that support of your lovely best friend too” he nods and you and you smile at him “Yeah I love having my girlfriend at races with me, she’s my biggest supporter so”

“Oh i’m sorry i didn’t realise that you were finally in a relationship” he apologises “congratulations to you both”

You both thank him before heading into the McLaren garage, stopping to say hello to everyone

"I'm glad to see you here, I've missed you the full weekend" Will smiles opening his arms "Glad to see you too" you hug him "Stealing my girlfriend now are we?" Lando jokes wrapping an arm around your waist

"Wouldn't dream of breaking you two up, feeling good about today?" he asks Lando "Good aren't you" you answer before Lando says something negative "Yep all good" he rolls his eyes "Hey! I'm going to the bathroom, make sure I've not got moody Lando" you kiss him before leaving him with Will

"You're kissing now" Will smirks "I mean, yeah" Lando shrugs "There's no cameras about" the engineer pushes "We've actually had a few kisses back home" Lando says hiding a smile

"Well it's been a long time coming, just make sure your heads in the game today. I'm happy for you though" he pats Lando's shoulder "Trust me, that girl is the reason I'm feeling even the littlest bit confident today"

"Really?" Will asks turning to face him "Well yeah, she's the only one that really understands me. I just love her so much" he blushes

"So you're in love with her"

"What? No I'm not?" Lando scoffs "The way you talk about her is the way I first talked about my wife, now we have a child together. You need to realise how you feel about her without people telling you"

"And if I admitted I was in love with her?"

"Then you should tell her, the way she looks at you is the way Hayley looked at me. Get yourself ready mate"

Lando sighed, looking at Will one last time before heading to his drivers room where you were sat "Hi pretty boy, I've left your shirt out, your hats there too" you point to his chair

"Thank you, are you going to chill in here until the race?" he asks taking his shirt off "Yeah, I'm going to wait on Max and Pietra. I'll be watching"

"Good, I'll see you later. Let me know if you're going anywhere" he says leaning down "I will" you lean up to kiss him "Bye" he shouts leaving the room

-

As it got closer to lights out Lando walked around the garage talking to everyone he needed to, he sat with Will for a while before he needed to get into the car.

As he approached you, you knew what was coming. The dreaded moment you had before every single race.

“Be safe, I love you” you tell him, wrapping your arm around his waist “I promise I will. I love you too” he says holding out his pinky finger. You link yours with his and both of you kiss your hands.

He hugs you tightly, kissing your head before moving down to your lips.

“Come home”

“I always do” he winks before getting in the car

It never got any easier, it hadn’t since he first started in 2019. Watching him leave the garage not knowing what where he was going to finish after the race and your worst fear it he didn’t finish at all.

Max stood beside you, putting on a headset, in a selfish way you were glad he wasn’t racing anymore, it means you didn’t have to worry about two people, but you knew Max wished he continued, he could have made it to Formula 1.

“He’ll win” Max wraps an arm around your shoulder, rubbing it reassuringly “I know” you smile

“I just wish he knew that” he nods to Lando’s car on the screen “He’ll see what we see one day”

The race was tense, within the first lap six cars had locked up and people were losing positions. The upside to it was Lando keeping his place and Oscar moving up to P2, getting out of the mess without harm.

You could feel your heart beating against your chest, fighting to leave your body as the last lap of the race came closer.

Two laps to go.

He was seconds ahead of the cars behind him.

One lap to go.

The crew ran across to the pit wall, as Lando approached the final corner, as he crossed the line you could hear him screaming down the head set.

Your eyes filled up with tears, you turned to Max as he engulfed you in a hug jumping up and down.

As he came down the pit lane, you threw your head set off, pushing through the crowd of papaya to the front where Zak was.

He stood on the top of the car, throwing his hands in the air while everyone around you cheered. He took his helmet off running and jumping into the crowd of McLaren and eventually he was pulled to the other side of the barrier

“Where is she?” you saw Lando looking around, when he spotted you, he lifted you up hugging you tightly “I’m so proud of you Lando, you don’t know it”

“You’re the best, I love you, I love you so much”

“It was you that did it baby, get on the podium and get drenched in champagne”

He leans down kissing you before jumping over the barrier again. You let the nickname slip, you didn’t mean to say it but the way it made you feel was so good, it felt as if it was normal.

The media covered up how Lando felt about it, the way he was yapping in his interviews when the only thing he could think about was you and the nickname. “Baby” he wishes he could get used to that.

part 7

TAGS

@harrysdimple05 @ironmaiden1313 @charli123456789 @alltoomaples @jule239 @panicsinvirgo @cmleitora @blueberry64857959 @imboredway2much @landoslutmeout @obxstiles @morenofilm @formula1mount @dreamercrowd @brekkers-whore @sialexia @bokutos-babyowl @merchelsea @lexiecamposv @lunamelona @nightlockcornucopia

[jasmines-library]

hi love! idk if you are interested or not but i had an idea of reader being friends with lilly and severus but also with the marauders untill the oh so fateful day were sev ruined his friendship with lilly and reader. i love the idea of lilly ending up in james's arms and reader in sirius's (they are my boys sorry sev🤭)

thank you and again, only if you want! have a wonderful day lovely!

Only Human

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

Warnings: Slurs (mudblood), swearing bullying kinda, negativity but fluffy ending

Word Count: 1.7k

⛧ MARAUDERS MASTERLIST⛧

⛤⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽⛧☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅⛤

Severus Snape was resting against a tree when it happened. The castle sat opposite him, just a short way across the clear water. The small ripples created by the creatures in the lake and the summer breeze often distracted him from the book that he rested between his knees and his chest as he tucked them up closely. It was this exact reason that he hadn't noticed the band of robe-clad gryffindors trudging up the slope toward him. James Potter led the group, he wore his signature charismatic grin; a smirk that twinged the corner of his lip upwards and made his nose scrunch beneath his glasses, and he had his wand held loosely in his hand. He twisted the delicate tool between his fingers as you would a drumstick. Sauntering over to Severus, he chuckled at his friends, nudging them playfully with his shoulder. 

“Snape!” He jested, calling out to him. 

His head snapped up, but he kept his back planted firmly against the tree as the group of marauders ran up to him. He squeezed his eyes shut, just hoping that they would turn and leave. But they were bored and Severus, who had been particularly troublesome toward them, had caught their eyes. Severus inched himself up against the tree so that he rose to his feet and began to turn back in the direction of the castle. 

James frowned, a look of mock pity set on his face. “Leaving already, Snivellus?”

Snape reached for his wand, but kept his back to them.  “Fuck off, Potter. I don’t want trouble.”

“Don’t you know it’s rude to turn your back to someone when they’re talking to you, Snape.” Sirius asked him. 

Severus whipped around quickly, his wand poised to cast a spell at them but James beat him to it; with one flick of his hand Snape's wand went flying across the river bank. He paled, the four Marauders stepping closer to him. 

“Nice one, James.” Sirius cheered. 

The dark haired boy backed up slowly, setting his gaze. The four of them were edging closer, threatening him with their wands when you spotted them. You had just finished class and were heading over to the lake with Lily, arm in arm. The two of you were over there in seconds when you saw your friends threatening each other. Much to your boyfriend's dismay, you and Severus had been friends from the beginning of the first year. You met him on the train; a shy boy with long hair who didn’t quite seem certain of the world. Lily bonded with him quickly, and you followed soon after. It wasn’t long after that that you met Sirius Black. Charming, brave, daring; he was the complete opposite to Snape, but you supposed that was what drew you to him so much. It was their clash in personalities that made the two clash. It seemed as though they were always doing something to wind up the other.

This time it had gone too far. You were unsure of what Sev had done to wind up the Marauders so much, but you and Lily were skidding to a stop beside them in a heartbeat. 

James caught a glimpse of Lily’s fiery hair out of the corner of his eye. “Lilyflower-”

“Leave him alone, James.” It wasn’t quite a demand, Lily never had that sort of aggressiveness in her, but her voice was firm. She didn’t want her friend to get hurt. 

“Ah, Evans, Don’t make me hex you.” James sighed, a playful twinge on his tongue.

“I’m serious.” Lily repeated when James refused to lower his wand, letting it loll around between his fingers. 

“No,” Sirius smirked. “I am.”

You gave him a hard stare through narrow eyes, and his smirk dropped. “Siri. Please.”

The boy nodded, nudging his friend who promptly pocketed his wand. Severus seemed taken back, his steps faltering. He glanced gratefully in your direction, though his anger and embarrassment were unmistakable in his eyes. 

“You’re lucky that they were here to help you, Snape.”

“I don’t need help from filthy mudbloods.”

You had expected many things from Severus, but those words were not one of them. He spat them with venom; malice intending to bite deep. And bite deep it did. 

You froze, eyes glassing over with tears. Serverus Snape had made an incredibly low blow; as a muggleborn, it was safe to say that it took some time to come to terms with your letter to Hogwarts. You were excited, of course but your parents were far from keen. Lily experienced the same thing with her sister too. Things didn’t get much better when you arrived at Hogwarts either. Some saw you as ‘impure’. Unworthy. Sev knew this and he had chosen to use it against you. Perhaps it was in a moment of spite, perhaps he hadn’t meant to say it at all. But all that mattered in that moment was that Severus Snape was just like the rest of them.   

You could see Sirius glance your way out of the corner of your eye, but when he took a step toward you you backed away. 

“Fuck you, Snape.” You spat back at him, trying to hide the waver in your voice. 

“You should watch your mouth, Snivellus.” Lily glared at him before turning on her heel and making her way promptly back to the castle before anyone else could say a word. 

You were left standing between the two groups, both slightly shell shocked, in silence.

Sirius, now full of guilt, opened his mouth to talk, but you pursued Lily before he could even form the first syllable.

 The tears came flooding in quickly after that. 

~

Sirius hadn’t seen you for the rest of the day. and that was partly because you refused to come out of the girls bathroom. He had even tried to get Moaning Myrtle to coax you out to talk to him, but still you refused to show your face as you curled up on the bathroom tile. It made his stomach churn. 

His pit of guilt dug itself deeper as he sat in class. Sirius’ leg bounced restlessly during potions and there was just as much ink on the page at the start of the lesson as there was at the end. The detention he was also given didn’t help ease his thoughts. His mind wandered to the worse case scenarios. It was his fault for provoking Snape… What if you never wanted to talk to him again? He was up in an instant when the fateful day came to an end and he could return to the common room. He dragged his feet up to the portrait and muttered the words to open it. Every part of him itched to see your face mingling amongst the crowd. 

At first, he didn’t see you. But he managed to make out the crown of your head resting against an armchair tucked away in the corner by the fire. His face softened when he saw the tear tracks staining your face where you had failed to wipe them away properly.  

You had spent practically the last two hours crying. Everytime the flood stopped, it seemed to start up again. Severus was supposed to be your friend and he had discarded you just like that. The back of your eyes stung, glassy beads threatening to spill again. When you finally braved it enough to make it back to the common room, you couldn’t bear to go up to your room. You hardly spent any time there anyway because you spent much of it lounging around in Sirius’ bed with the other marauders…and you were angry and Sirius. 

No… perhaps angry was too strong a word. Hurt. Hurt by his actions and his and James’ thoughtlessness. Being up in your room would have just reminded you of that. So instead you settled down with a book by the fire trying to distract yourself and let the world move around you. 

It didn’t take Sirius very long to reach you. He crossed the common room in a few wide strides. 

“Love?” Siri asked hesitantly. 

You peeked up at him meekly. Your eyes were red raw and puffy, it made the boy frown. Sniffing, you wiped your eyes with the hem of your sleeve. “Oh.. hi Siri.” you mumbled, not quite meeting his eyes. 

“Oh Lovey. I’m so sorry.” He melted, sliding onto the arm of the chair beside you. 

“ ‘ts okay. It’s not your fault…”

Sirius scowled. You were far too kind for your own good. He knew exactly what you had been through and made him sick just thinking that you weren’t allowing anyone to take the blame for it. “But it is, Dove. I shouldn’t have provoked him. If I had stopped James and just kept my mouth shut then you wouldn’t have had to come over in the first place.”

A tear spilled from your eyes and all of a sudden you broke all over again. “He was supposed to be my friend, Pads.” You blubbered, voice wavering. “He’s just like the rest of them…”

Sirius took your hands in his, pressing a kiss to them. “You didn’t deserve any of this, my love. I am so, so sorry.”

“Maybe they’re right….” You trailed off. “Maybe I am worthless. If Sev thinks so too then-”

“Shh.” Sirius pressed another kiss to your temple as he scooped you up into his arms. Burying your face into his chest you continued to cry. He trailed his fingers over your back. “You’ve never been more wrong in your life, Lovey. You are worth so much more than that. You’re kind, brave and not to mention the most beautiful girl in the world. You’re worth everything to me. Who gives a crap what they think?”

You sniffled, unsure. 

“I mean it.”

You looked up at him, wiping away your tears; a ghost of a smile on your lips. 

“I love you.” Siri whispered, kissing you softly.

“I love you too.” You settled your head against his chest, shifting to curl against him. 

It was there that James and Lily found you later, entwined with each other and sleeping peacefully. Safe within each other's arms.

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