#before i go pass out from being up all night revising pale blood

[dyrewrites]

Now for something -almost- completely different! (also vampires, otherwise new)

[if you're digging because of Before Deluca, this is wrong now...but it is where it started]

“What were you like then, tell me a story about the great detective in his prime.”

“I was not a detective in my prime, flower…and you do not want those stories.”

“You were turned by an ubervamp centuries ago that's got such a hateon for you he's murdering his way through Europe about it and you're telling me I don't want that story?”

“Yes, I am. I was a different creature then, a vile thing not even fit to haunt the memories of those it destroyed.”

“Then don't tell me those bits, tell me about Lucient. Was it love, your first love?”

“No, and yes…and I maintain that you do not want this story.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“You truly want the particulars of your dear old dad’s wild nights ravishing another man while bathed in the blood and viscera of our prey?”

“... that a trick question?”

“Very well, flower. Our story began then as I begin now, on a warm summer evening, at the dawn of a new year…”

—

1700 held promise for my hometown—a tiny seaside port on the tip of Calabria—we had seen some fame and a great deal of loss and were running headlong into a fresh year with a fresh century on top.

And I, well, I was pensive, cautious, perhaps even cynical while I stood gazing at the moonlit sea. My family were silk traders primarily but we were vendors, not ferrymen. I had grown up around ships, watched them come and go and marveled at all the colorful folk who sailed them. Yet I never set foot on a ship myself.

Not until that evening…and soon after I would forget the safety and comfort of solid ground.

Ethereal, his beauty, there exists no other word. He glowed in the light, his near pearlescent skin a mesmerizing contrast to the bronze complexions I was accustomed to. Nevermind the litheness of his figure, the feline grace in every twist and curve as he walked the dock.

I couldn't look away.

Then he caught me staring, admiring, lusting.

It was later he admitted to following me to the docks, that I caught his eye in the square as the sun set and he had to meet me—taste me. But he had to be certain, had to know if I…desired the attention of men.

“Dad, tell me you didn't hop into bed with this man on the first night.”

“Do you want this story, flower?”

“I asked for it, didn't I?”

“Then refrain from interrupting, if you can.”

“Fine, but if this is going where I think it is…”

“It is, and it isn't. Patience.”

We spoke at length that night, first by the docks, lit by glimmering moonlight and then in the candle-warm glow of his ship’s cabin. Clothed, both of us, though decidedly less than we began—our stations required fashion of many layers.

I do not recall falling asleep yet I began the new year beside him at midday, groggy and weak. Later, when more was shared, he would tell me he fed on me in the throes of passion. A passion I had no recollection of. Not even a kiss could be found in my memory.

But I didn't care. Not that day, not after that night, not with the heady syrup of his voice echoing through every fiber of me.

Father was furious when I came home, too late to start the day, behaving inebriated despite the lack of drink. I slept through much of the day, tossing and turning to the sounds of my parents arguing.

Lucient came to call at sunset, at my front door. Such charm, such cunning he displayed with my parents. They all but sold me to him before he left, before we left. To begin my new life as a sailor on a merchant ship.

On Lucient’s merchant ship, the Lune Royal, his precious Regal Moon.

“So, what, he fell in lust with you and invited you onboard the next day to be his juicebox?”

“As he put it, I enchanted him, made him feel alive and he wanted me close.”

“But you guys didn't do anything that first night?”

“To my recollection, no. He said we kissed, he became impassioned and fed on me…nothing more.”

“And you believed him?”

“Then? Yes. After another forgotten evening, however, I began to doubt…”

I woke in our cabin clothed in naught but a sheet. Lucient stood before a mirror and I watched as he studied the empty space that should have been his reflection. I hadn't noticed its lack prior, but when I did I gasped.

And in that escape of breath he was by my side, cool hand on my cheek.

Does it frighten you, my sweet, to learn I am not as you, not breathing, not warm, not alive—do I?

I said nothing. His eyes shined as bright as moonlight, even in the dim of the curtained cabin. Too bright to see beyond, to find answers in. So I found his lips instead, then the cool sweetness of his skin.

He navigated mine too easily for it to have been the first I felt it was, but I didn't question it then. Didn't care then, I fell to sensation, to longing, to the ache he'd fed in me—to him.

With that act, that unspoken acknowledgement and acceptance of what he was, I became his.

[hobilluvvr]

lost ocean troubles | 2

college au! sub!armin x dom!reader

words - 2.7k

warnings - vomit, blood, mentions of abuse , injuries

parts - |

~

so incredibly sorry for this late update but testing season is approaching and I need to study sadly :/ this part is very rough with spelling errors and grammar but will be revised later !

please enjoy this update and constructive criticism is always welcomed :D . If you want to be added to the tag list please don’t hesitate to ask !

taglist - @haikyoonn @kenmas-nintendoswitch

~

The flowers had this magnificent pale blue color to them, the sun hitting them just at the right angle and the sage leaves accented the stem, the weight of the beautiful petals making the stem slightly wilt downwards .

this piqued armins interest, so much so that he walked towards them , feet trudding against the soft sand. As he comes close the overwhelming smell of coconut with a hint of sea saltseasalt overwhelmes his senses, his nose srunching up in question, the scent resembling of clean linen,a quite odd observation , even more so for a flower .

Just as he reaches to pick the flower up, the sun all of the sudden blazes furiously, the rays bouncing everywhere and blinding armin, now groaning as he squirms in abrupt discomfort. His feet dig at the sand … or what was the sand… the feeling of plush fabric instead meeting his skin, surrounding his body in comfort and warmth.

Snuggling further into this random source of heat, the sudden realization hits him. His eyes open the tiniest bit and he stops for a moment … this isnt the beach… in fact he’s laying on a bed… an unknown bed

At this his body jolts upward and armin frantically looks around his surroundings, the white pillows and the grey blanket not correlating in his mind as his. ‘This isnt my room’ the panic quickly sets in, quickly throwing the blanket aside and standing up abruptly which proves to be a grave mistake as a headache and the urge to vomit surges up his throat.

He clutches his stomach as he runs to the bathroom ,quickly kneeling over the toilet, emptying the contents of his stomach, the acidity already making his throat burn angrily. The sound of quick footsteps echo the walls and he goes to turn his head towards the door when the second round of bile threatens to escape his throat.

His ingers clutch the toilet ,violently puking when a second presence is felt . armin feels someone kneel next to him and gently rub at his back

“Its okay , its okay ,let it all out “ you push his bangs away from his face while the other hand rubs at his back . armin lifts his head up ,groaning as he moves away from the toilet feeling his head throb way too violently.

You hand him the cup of water and pain killer you set down when you entered the bathroom

“Here take this, dont move too much . your head is most likely killing you” he takes the items and pops the pill in his mouth quickly downing it with the water. When he sets the cup down he looks at you ,eyes squinting, clearly confused

“Where am i ?”

You chuckle lightly, standing up and lean against the counter “you dont remember anything do you huh?” the boy sitting on the floor thinking ...

Suddenly armin visibly stiffens, his cheeks flushing “uh w-ww di-idnt do i-it ,rig-ght?” his eyes all of the sudden finding great interest on the floor tiles .

You give him a light smile and laugh even louder this time “no, no we didnt ,dont worry about that. Here cmon” you reach out a hand to lift him up off the floor

He takes your hand sheepishly ,shoulders relaxing in relief, his red cheeks calming down “ then what happened? Why am i here ?” he asks following you out of the bathroom and into the room.

You cringe at the events that happened the previous night and you wonder if you should tell him everything. You head over to your drawers and open them, turning your back to the stumbling boy “well you got extremely wasted and this creep saw that you were alone and he tried messing with you but i took care of it”

your hands clench harshly at the shirt you were holding thinking about the old fuck. God humans can be pieces of shit

“Oh.” armins bit his lip and he desperately tried to remember exactly what happened , your answer being quite vague , but this did nothing but make his head throb once again . wincing in pain he goes to lifts his hand up to hold his head when he notices the bandages around his wrists ‘what happened ?did i get injured ?’

After picking out what you needed , you turned to face him and you catch his line of sight , looking at his wrists . as if you heard what his thoughts you say “ the perv was being really aggressive towards you and he injured you quite badly but i brought you up to my apartment and fixed you up a bit “giving him a warm smile you hold out the clothes you had previously searched for

“ here , take this and clean your self up a bit then i can take you home, yeah ? you got a little bit of a stain forming on you “ you chuckle, head nodding towards the vomit on the shirt before walking out ,leaving him in the room alone

His eyes widen at your comment immediately rushing to the bathroom and sure enough his vomit is all over the shirt , the mirror reminding him of his earlier commotion . armin sighs in embarrassment ,blue eyes scanning his appearance, finally now knowing how much of a hot mess he looks like . he notices another bandage on his face, his cheek specifically , a bit of blood staining the white bandage along with another few scratches all over his face.

His finger traces around his facial injuries ‘wow, what exaclty happened last night ?’

He shakes his head , not wanting his head to pound again, instead just focusing his attention on the shirt you gave him noticing that it looks similar to the dirty one he is wearing currently.

‘Oh god …..dont tell me …. Im wearing her clothes ‘ the realization hits him and his ears turn an angry shade of red. ‘God how much more of a burden can he be to you ?’ he groans before closing the bathroom door

…

As soon as you close the door , your eyes land on a very dishevled eren leaving his room , hand shielding his squinting eyes away from the harsh sunlight “what happened ? i heard what sounded like someone vomiting” his morning voice rasping out, following you to the kitchen and sitting down on the kitchen bar stool

“Oh he woke up and well... , you know how hangovers are like “ you open the fridge , scanning the interior “wait why is the fridge empty ? i thought i told you it was your turn to go grocery shopping this time ? what happened ? “ you frown turning towards him, crossing your arms

Eren only yawns and stretches his body, not seeming to mind that you were glaring holes at him “dont you remember ? i couldnt go so you said we’d go together after we ate something yesterday but then you got too caught up fighting someone if i recall correctly ” he confidently said, fingers tapping at his chin , eyes meeting yours, glaring back.

You sigh giving up “ ahh yeah i remember now….” you take a quick glance around the kitchen and see nothing of nutritional value “ the hell are we going to eat then ? and why didnt you clean up the medical supplies from last night ?” you badger him looking at the medical supplies messily strewn all over the counter

Eren scrunches his face , hand running through his bedhair, still groggy from just waking up a few minutes ago “ we can always just doordash something” he picks up the bottle of rubbing alcohol remebering how you carried armin into the apartment when he passed out and set him on the couch leaving eren to tend to his wounds.

*

Just as armin was falling , passing out after just vomiting all over you , you quickly grab at his waist and preventing him from hitting his head on the floor . the stench of the vomit was awfully intense and you scrunch your nose trying to stop the smell from affecting you “ can you be any faster over there ? you tease seeing him struggle with the keys , his fumbling being weirdly endearing somehow

“Im trying , im trying. I swear this cold is messing me up or something “ he puffs out now fumbling with inserting the key right . you roll your eyes upon seeing this , giving a light chuckle before reaching a hand underneath the blonde boys legs and bringing them towards your chest, effectively lifting him up bridal style.

You walk into the apartment and set the boy softly onto the couch before looking down to the mess that your clothes are in , heading towards the bathroom “ hey eren could you patch him up for me ? i have to clean myself up before he’s not the only one with body fluids all over the floor.” you smirk

Eren scoffs “dont you go throwing up on me , you hear ? i just mopped the floors yesterday and im sure as hell not letting you mess my hard work up “ he hears your distant laugh down the hallway , before the sound of boots fade, leaving him alone with the boy

Eren looks at the boy slowly sliding down on the couch and ultimately sighs before going to the cabinet where all the medical supplies are stored. He opens it while lowly muttering “just cause my dad was a doctor and he taught me a few things doesnt mean i have to tend to everyones wounds “

Grabbing a few bandages and bandaids, and rubbing alcohol, he grabs a stool and places it in front of the boy. ‘Your injuries shouldnt be that bad ‘ he thinks before he lifts the boy and positions him upright. Immediately the sight of scarce blood and vomit greets erens eyes . eren winces in slight sympathy and disgust before he wipes armins face clean with the cloth he has in hand and disinfecting the wounds next

The rubbing alcohol stirred a reaction out of the blonde boy seeing as he squirmed in discomfort , the position he was put in faltering, falling into the nearest thing, which so happened to be erens chest, more specifically his neck

Eren was flustered ,not knowing what to do he freezes , his ears turning red upon feeling the shallow breath of the boy on, his sensitive neck . Eren looks down and he admires the peaceful features on the petite boy .’he looks so peaceful, pretty even ‘ eren stares for a bit before he snaps out of it and pushes the boy off his chest , tending to his wounds , doing what he first came to do.

*

“ i left the supplies out because i knew i would have to tend to your wounds too “ he gets up , walking to the other side of the bar, heading where you are

You squint your eyes in visible confusion “ my wounds ? what are you talking about ?” he scoffs rolling his eyes, “dont play dumb with me , you beat up someone to a bloody pulp and dont expect any damage to your hands, more specifically your damn knuckles ? “

He reaches down, grabbing your hand and lifting them up as to make a point “look at this “ you look down towards your hand and the sight of multi colored bruises,blood and even some open skin greets you.

“ you didnt let me tend to them yesterday so let me do it now “ you meet eyes and his are practically pleading you, but before you get to open your mouth to say anything, you hear rustling and you look behind eren to see what it is .

Armin is awkwardly standing there in the living room, the clean shirt you gave him reaching his knees , and the sweatpants a bit too baggy . you have to physically stop yourself from cooing , the sight being way too adorable for you to handle this early in the morning

Eren senses his presence as well , turning around , both of you guys forgetting about your previous conversation . you clear your throat, sensing some sort of tension in the room “ hey youre finally out ! i was going to make you something to eat but turns out the fridge is empty “ you rub your neck sheepishly , making a mental note to go grocery shopping asap .

Armins eyes widen at this , his hands extending and quickly shaking “ oh no no , please you dont have to, i dont want to be more of a bother than i already am ,” he shyly looks down at the floor , swinging his body , slightly nervous

You smile seeing his cute habit of not making eye contact, fetching your car keys off the wall “ well i bet youre missing your home right ? i can drive you home now if you want “ you also grab the plastic bag off the floor by the corridor

Armin seems to stiffen again , eren now chuckling , his hands stuffed in his sweatpants , noticing how the blonde boy seems way to nervous around you guys . armin looks at eren momentarily before he looks at the floor again ‘ how the hell do you guys look so good this early in the morning ‘ he thinks ‘ meanwhile here he is looking all messed up ‘

“I actually dont live too far away, i can walk home by myself “ armin lies straight out of his teeth , clearly not doing it well judging by the look of your face . youre not convinced seeing as the whole reason why he’s here in the first place was because he was wandering alone.

“ id feel much better knowing that someone is walking you home , i dont want a repeat of what happened yesterday .” you bite your lip, now staring more intensely at the boy in front of you

Armin mentally groans ‘ damn you and your kindness, why cant you get the hint that he doesnt want to hassle you any longer ?’

“Well um … “ he pauses, intensely thinking of a solution that doesnt involve him burdening you guys any further when he hears some shuffling and then someone handing a phone to him. Armin looks up and green eyes stare back at him

“Do you have anyone you can call ? a friend maybe to come pick you up ? “ eren suggests , reading right through the boy

“ o-oh y-yes i do umm thank you , for your phone i mean “ armin scrambles to take the phone and calls his roommate , knowing for sure she is freaking out about his whereabouts

He hands the phone back to eren and shuffles his feet “ luckily she is around the area and can pick me up in 5 minutes , i can wait outside …” you ponder for a second at this suggestions , before ultimately nodding

“Yeah sounds like a solid plan , okay , here take this bag before you head out “ you hand it over and armin looks at you and tilts his head slightly “ its your clothes from last night , i washed them and folded them , oh and your bag is also inside “ you explain while he peeks at the contents inside grief striking his face

‘How much exaclty did you do for him , he’s the worst guest ever in history , throwing up all over your bathroom ‘ he cringes at the thought. He's definitely gonna think about this experience at night,when he reminisces about all the embarrassing moments he's had in his lifetime

“Thank you guys so much for all youve done , i really do appreciate it “ armin rubs at his nape laughing out softly “ well i should get going “ he goes to the entrance, hand on the knob

“Yeah absolutely no problem , take care pretty boy ! “ you say waving , smiling brightly when you see his cheeks flush once more , eren just nodding goodbye . he waves a small goodbye before leaving , closing the door gently . sighing in relief when he got out.

Armin walks out into the street and sure enough there is his roommate , waiting and the look on her face looks not so pleasantly happy .he knows what is going to happen. he opens the car door ready to hear her badgering soon enough

“Look , mikasa , i can ex-” not so shortly as he begins his sentence, she yells out

“WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOUVE BEEN ? DO YOU KNOW HOW WORRIED SICK I WAS WHEN YOU DIDNT PICK UP MY MANY PHONE CALLS ? ARE THOSE BANDAGES IM SEEING? “ armin winced at her reprimations, slowly sinking further into the passenger seat as she kept rambling, knowing that he has to face her wrath for the whole drive home .

he still has no clue as to what exactly happened last night, the only thing he can do is hope his memories would come back soon and clear up his many questions

[spiltscribbles]

Oooo it’s my birthday today and I neeeeeed my sweet boys, is it too greedy if I ask for you to write something absolutely adores like you always do. I can wait there’s no rush. It would really make my day a whole lot better

~Notes: HI HI BABY!!! I’m so so fucking sorry this is like two days late 😭😭😭 I am a piece of shit and I had an idea and then I scrapped it and then I came up with this crack shit! But I included singling like you wanted!! And ILU endlessly!!! I hope your birthday was at least filled with sunlight and friends and all the adoration you deserve🎉🎉🎂🥳🎈🎈🎈🎊🎊🥳🎁. And I hope this isn’t a shitty gift!😭😭

.-

Send Me A Prompt<3  |  A Reblog is like a hug!!!!

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The 4 Times People Suspected About Remus and Sirius, and The One Time They Called It By Name

.-

~I~

Peter notices it first.

He doesn’t know quite what it is, or what it means— Peter doesn’t understand what it entails when he’s watching the way Sirius gently thumbs at a high patch on Remus’s cheek while he’s sleeping on the hospital bed after the first full moon of fourth year, a fraught look in his stormy eyes. Or how Remus’s gaze always search Sirius out first after he’s made a wry comment in the expense of the Slytherins, going alight with the other boy’s laughter. Peter doesn’t comprehend the way it sometimes seems like he’s caught in some sort of static— a negative space that makes him feel out of bounds— when he’s alone with only the pair of them. When they’re all huddled around the common area or their dormitory while James is probably skulking in search of Lily Evans or cajoling the other chasers to have another lap around the court. With Remus lounging on his fourposter, or the sofa, reading one of the infinite books he’s got tucked away in his trunk, and Sirius is quietly  sat by his feet, toying with a non-magical contraption he’s found in Muggle London after sneaking out from his ancestral home while his folks were having a row. And Peter is ordinarily just fiddling with a scroll he has to finish for one of the tougher courses from a bit away, intermittently  glancing at them side long, just waiting for an excuse to leave the suffocating ambiance that feels like it’s been fitted for just the pair of them and not another soul.

But the most peculiar part about all of this is that Peter is accustomed to feeling like the spare, the cast off who’s clinging to the glimmering forms that are James and Sirius, and their ravenous appetite for any and all attention that’s given over because that’s the sort of boys they are— affluent and prominent and radiating with a sort of spark that’s all there own— the sort of boys that others find doubtless that they are something miraculous. But when Peter’s around just the pair of them, in the corner of the galaxy that the marauders have carved for them to rule like kings— It never feels quite so stilted, so weighty. Sirius and James have a gift of making everyone in the room feel like they’re in on the joke, that they could be showered with that same granger just as long as they play in the tableau. Remus and Sirius together feels the contrary of that, like there’s something pregnant lying between them, waiting to pounce. Like there’s an understanding that no one else gets to glimpse at, and no one else should try. An understanding  that’s personal and private and crackling with an energy that is far beyond anything between mere friends, beyond anything Peter could fathom with all his fifteen years.

Idly, over supper after an entire two hours being stuck between that strange tension simmering beneath the surface of Remus and Sirius, Peter wonders for the umpteenth time on whether he should ask James about this development in their small brotherhood, should ask him if he’s detected the difference there. And if he has, Peter will listen to James’s plan to ensure this doesn’t ruin anything. How whatever is brewing under the surface won’t absolutely ruin them.

But then, from the corner of his eye, Peter sees Sirius— none to gently— piling Remus’s plate with an abundance of the potatoes that Moony likes best, dipping down to whisper something in his ear— something surely lecherous— before tousling his curls in that brash, bombastic way of his that he does with Peter and James too, even if he ends it by gingerly cupping the nape of Remus’s neck with a surreptitious squeeze that ends just as quickly as it began, falling back into conversation with James and Marlene about the Wasps’s chances against the Harpies this Friday night as if it was just an innate action, even if it’s one Peter’s only ever witnessed him doing to Remus.

And even though there’s another full in two days, and even though Remus looks like a walking inferi— pale faced and exhausted posture and circles the color of midnight smudged beneath his eyes— Peter watches the ends of his lips quirk up into the best approximation of a smile Peter’s ever seen on him so close to the wolf breaking through the surface of his body that’s all skin and bones, and he isn’t sure if it’s a trick of the light or not, but Remus actually looks like he might be glowing over the strange attention that Sirius’s only ever paid to him.

So no… No, Peter doesn’t think he’ll ask James quite yet, reckons that if anything can help his moon plagued friend, that it must be something good, something that shouldn’t be tempered with.

They can figure out how the strange string pulling Remus and Sirius together will alter their brotherhood later on, there’s still time. There’ still a possibility that it won’t devastate everything.

~II~

Lily’s suspected for a while.

The thing is that she’s known about Remus since the end of third year, when he rebuffed the advances of an eager Heleen  Abed, and Lily found him on the ledge of the largest window in the vacant common room— the same one that they regularly commandeer with Mary McDonald to discuss the finer points of Muggle politics and current events, separate from the melting pot of their Gryffindor class that’s composed of either pure bloods or those with their closest Muggle relative being a long dead grandparent. And it was definitely a dangerous, knife’s edge she was playing at, but Lily had sat besides the boy who she’s cultivated a real and true friendship with— one beyond pleasant platitudes and fodder about their course work— and she told him about her cousin Joey with green spiked hair and a mischievous smile adorned with a sparkling stud and how she and Petunia had caught him holding hands with one of his friends from sixth-form in the garden of her Aunt’s cottage, and how even the sneer on her older sisters lips hadn’t deterred Lily from thinking anything but mild indifference about the situation. Only wanting her cousin to always live in that easy effervescence she’s always known when it came to him.

And nothing else was exchanged between them, but Remus had grinned in that barely perceptible way of his, and Lily had nudged his shoulder with her own and then fished out her final handful of chocolate frogs for them to share while they revise their notes for the transfiguration exam coming up. 

Two summers have past since then—they’re in the midst  of their final term of fifth year now— and she thinks that they’ve become even closer, that the frequent late nights in the library for their impending OWLs and their countless prefect rounds has helped forge a real and true bond— especially that whole snag earlier in the year when they had realized they were both snogging Leon Bennett on alternating nights behind greenhouse three. But all of that withstanding, Lily knows that there are still secrets Remus keeps tight to his chest, ones that Lily’s analytical mind— the mind of a potions expert and future healer— has suspected to do with the thin, silvery scars running down his strong hands that are all tapered fingers and slender wrists, and another across his right bicep that she saw when he had changed his robes for a jumper in front of her, and the one cutting down from the bottom of his ear and nearly across the entire length of his neck, ending at the corner of his sharp collarbone. But Lily suspects he’ll tell her about that soon enough, what she isn’t so confident about is him admitting that particularly dazed look he gets when around Black, of all people. The way he stammers his words occasionally and the way he worries on his bottom lip while averting his glance when Sirius is chatting up a very pleased looking girl, and the way he flushes when Lily is ribbing about him in particular. And Lily knows that the foursome of Gryffindor boys had a falling out of sorts before winter hols, that there’s a hairline fracture between them and Remus now— one that she’s sure no one else can pick up on after the way they had seemingly come back together in late January, right before her birthday funnily enough. But Lily’s always been the analytical  sort— the sort to absorb the barebones of a situation so she could conjure a hypothesis that she could prove after careful study.

So Lily knows that it’s something deeper, and she can see  how Remus is reticent around them in ways she’s actually worried won’t be shaken off anytime soon— which is all levels of bazaar considering she’s been telling Remus for years that he needs to shrug off his rowdy mates like a snake shedding an old coat. But before, when she’d barb as much he’d only stick out his tongue and tell her what happens to busybodies, and how she doesn’t really know them at all. But now days, he just looks particularly hurt, and more than a bit put out, and Lily catches him flickering over to wherever Sirius was holding court, longing in a way she couldn’t possibly articulate out loud.

Honestly Lily thinks it’s really quite gracious of her to have dropped the subject completely, rather, she takes up the mantel of his friend that can distract him from all those sorts of woes, biting her tongue over his lingering feelings for Sirius that are more than likely far beyond a passing fancy. And she thinks that maybe that’s a good call, maybe it’s good for Remus to beat down those sorts of emotions  that he’s harboring for the wanker. She knows Remus, and she knows he wouldn’t hold a grudge— even such a quiet one— for no reason at all. Besides, she doesn’t really think it’s her place to tell him how when he’s glancing away, Sirius is holding vigil to him with that same sort of fervor. That Sirius is the one who collects the notes for all his classes on those conspicuous absences of his when Remus is feeling poorly in the infirmary. That Sirius occasionally looks so very gutted when Remus is wilting away from them, when he seeks Lily’s company instead.

She has a heavy suspicion that Remus might already know all of those things— that maybe they’ve already discussed it at length, that maybe the falling out in December has caused a full stop of anything that could’ve potentially blossomed between them. And she just wishes she knew the entire story so she could decide on whether she should be jinxing Black’s face to a putrid orange color, or pushing Remus to actually give him a chance.

Lily just wishes she could read Black as easily as she can Remus, maybe that would help in this experiment she’s testing, because for now she’s just confused as all hell over what exactly Black feels towards him. Well that is until it’s a fortnight before Remus’s birthday, and she’s being bodily dragged into a closet on her way to charms.

“Oi— What the bloody—“

“Language, Evans,” the annoyingly familiar baritone of Sirius Black tsks, lighting up the cupboard with his wand and smirking in that jagged way she’s heard countless girls tittering over, and the one that makes her want to pop him one right against his ridiculously smug face.

“Black,” she says, caustic as all get out with her fists clenched against her sides and her brows making a really resilient effort to meet in the middle. “You’ve got thirty seconds before I hex your bollocks off.”

“Pff, and Jamie thinks you’re some sort of saint.”

“Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six.”

Sirius pulls a face at her, but must understand the credence in the words, because it’s not another moment more before he pulls out a bedraggled looking slip of paper from his robe’s pocket, and thrusts it at her face. So with an indignant huff, Lily opens it up and begins scanning the words— becoming all the more confused when she sees measurements and things like coco powder and melted butter, instead of whatever the hell else she was preparing herself to read.

“I’m being pranked, aren’t I? You’re trying to distract me so you and Potter can do something horrid to the Slytherin’s common room.”

“We’ve actually already done that today,” Sirius jeers, raising up his hands in concession with a cluck of the tongue at her scowling face. “’s from Moony’s mum, all right. I asked her to send me the recipe of this chocolate cake she use to make him for his birthdays before Hogwarts— I just thought… It might be nice is all, and you can sod right off if you look at me like that, Evans, with the soft eyes and all that rot. Are you going to help me or not?”

Lily resolutely ignores the pang to her heart, because God, this really is such a sweet gesture. “And what? you thought I could help you because I’m a bird?” She asks in the most scolding inflection she could muster in the face of this incredibly soppy gift he wants to give Remus.

“None of that, blimey, Evans.” Sirius snarls, obviously diffident, and combined with the faint flush to his cheeks, Lily suddenly realizes why he’s considered one of the best looking blokes in the entirety of their school. “There’s a whole load of Muggle mumbo jumbo, so it was between asking you, or McDonald, and I adore Mary and all, but  she has got such a mouth on her.”

“You should know,” Lily counters with a leer. “She couldn’t stop going on about your date back in October.”

Sirius’s brows hike, and he actually smiles at her— one that’s vacant from all his bravado from his upbringing in his pretentious, pure blood home, and one that isn’t trying to show off. And Lily can’t help but favoringly liken him to an excited pug. “Oh you’re wicked, Evans!” He shrills delightedly. “Oh this is great, you’re just as depraved as Remus, are all prefects like this?”

Lily snorts, shaking her head at him, indulgent. “Never mind that, Black. Most of this stuff can be found in the kitchens below, I’m sure the house elves won’t mind us borrowing anything.”

“And the ingredients that won’t be down their?” He asks worriedly.

“Well, good on you planning this so far ahead of time, we’ll just have to experiment.”

Sirius groans in retort, muttering things about Muggle potions and James thinking he’s getting off with his future wife and other ridiculous things that Lily doesn’t bother to stay and listen to. Though, when Remus’s birthday does roll around, and she sees his countenance go a thousand shades brighter as he bites into the pudding, and Sirius’s grin stretch just that much more across his face in response— their eyes meeting across the room and past the crowds— Well Lily suspects Sirius never really minded any of the things he was whinging on about, not at all, not as long as the result was a beaming Remus.

~III~

Regulus hears about it in the halls.

He’s not much for gossip or that sort of dribble, doesn’t have much patience for anyone outside his house if he’s being at all frank— and even then, it’s not as if he doesn’t frequently find himself escaping to his fourposter for a moment’s quiet. It seems that everyone in this bloody castle are just dimwitted, daft idiots, and Regulus’s never been the sort to offer allowances for that kind of behavior. He’s been raised in the home of a family as close to royalty as Wizards permit, a prince among men. And he was told that he should have patience for the dull folks beneath him, just as long as they have the correct ideals, but sometimes he can’t help but wish they would all just let him be, sometimes feels like he’s being carted around Hogwarts as the perfect pure blood,  like he was nine years old again and being shown off in the parlor of  his home when guests came to call, watching from the sidelines while his mother rave about how splendid of an heir Sirius is turning out to be. How his tutor calls him a genius for any age, and how darling he looks in Slytherin green, and how he’s already mastered three romance languages to help in his spell work. 

And Regulus can’t help but scoff at those contemplations now, thinking of the past summer when his dramatic and brash brother had made a whole production of leaving behind the values that gave him everything he has. How he escaped to that Potter git’s home the way he’s been doing for nearly every holiday since his second year, how he offered Regulus to come along as if he’s a trader just like him. What a risible excuse for an heir.

But Regulus won’t commit such follies, he’ll make his parents proud— even if his father is nearly never paying much mind and his mother goes from raving to sickly in a blink of an eye. It doesn’t matter, because he’ll carry on the Black legacy, something that his oh so perfect brother never could’ve done. Regulus is only a fifth year, will be turning sixteen in only two months after Sirius’s coming of age, and sure, this might mean he’s still young enough that the Death Eaters don’t find him adequate to fight on the line of fire, but he’ll do it eventually, feels the weight of the letter from Bellatrix praising him for as much resting heavy in his pocket. And if Regulus finds them all a bit too vicious or a bit too excitable and completely lacking a deft hand to make the changes they’re searching for, he shrugs it off. He knows what he must do, and as he stares at his brother from across the valley cusping the lake, he’s only that much more steadfast in the conviction of the fact.

Sirius is sitting and laughing with a group of his Gryffindor mates, the mudbloods, and blood traders that had warped him from the brother he knew to the stranger he is now. And there’s a dark skinned Ravenclaw bird— Meadowes if he remembers correctly from his prefect meetings— and she’s telling some sort of long winded tail with hand gestures and loud cackling coming from the group as she goes on. And Sirius is tossing around a quaffle with Potter— the glint of a handsome, silver watch on his wrist catching in the dying sunlight. And Regulus wonders who had gifted him such a personal passage to adulthood, but is soon distracted by spotting the way Sirius nearly gets smacked in the face with the ball because he was too busy gawking over  at Lupin in such a stripped down, cautious way that it makes Regulus squirm.

He doesn’t know much about the elder Prefect, only that his name had come up nearly as much as Potters during that first year when Sirius would send him correspondence on a frequent basis because he knew how lonely Regulus would get while stuck in Grimmauld all by himself. And then when he began attending Hogwarts, Regulus never could get a good reading on him. He knew Potter because of how his family is infamous for their liberal views and nouveau riche attitudes, and Pettigrews family owns a hokey herb shop in Diagon. All he’s found out about the Lupins is that his father is the son of half-bloods and his mother is a Muggle, and that this mudblood is a reserved, carefully aloof bugger, and that somehow he’s seemingly captured all of Sirius’s attentions that he’s not giving Potter or the clinger ons who follow him around like mindless fools. Beyond that, Lupin and Regulus have only traded a hand full of words whenever their roles of prefects would force them to intermingle, and it’s always been punctuated by Lupin giving Regulus a witheringly cold look anytime they were in close proximity, which is admittedly impressive considering that half the time the sickly bastard looks like he’s about ready to keel over.

So no, Regulus doesn’t know much about him, but he’s heard the rumors. He knows that it’s basically an open secret between the Gryffindor class and selected friends. The fact that  his brother is probably shagging the mudblood, convincing Regulus that Sirius really has never given a toss about the decorum and standards befalling them as the only two Black males of their generation. And he hates his brother  so scathingly right then, hates his little munblood lover probably even more. 

And when he watches Lupin straying his gaze from the novel he was reading while that red haired Muggle born was resting her head in his lap, and Regulus saw the way both of their expressions went a peculiar sort of tender— well that’s the last straw, so he stands up in a huff— so unlike himself— and he cuts the story Mulciber was crowing on about, and he tells them he needs to complete a scroll for Slughorn.

And while he prowls away from the sight of his brother continuing to ruin everything, Regulus plunges a hand into his pocket, and crunches Bellatrix’s letter in his grasp, promises himself to write her back soon, and ignores the ache in his chest that’s only been growing larger since Sirius had left permanently.

~IV~

James’s always known.

Perhaps that’s an over reach, but it’s true enough. He’s known for years, on some level, that the thing between Sirius and Remus is something completely foreign to him. Something completely separate from how Sirius licks his face when James is over sleeping and he wants to be a general nuisance. Separate from how he and Remus have begun discussing anything and everything in the wee hours of the morning, with a spot of tea between them and a blanket on their legs, because Remus can’t sleep from the moon and James has never been able to sleep through the whole night without feeling guilty over it. He thinks it stemmed from when he was younger, when his parents were feeling sickly, and before they were gifted a house elf by a family friend who recognized that the elderly Potters needed just a bit more assistance. 

James never knew whether it was obvious to him because he’s always considered Sirius as his bastard brother since Christmas of first year, and that he’s always trying to make sure that Remus is all right after finding out just how impressively the bloke can keep secrets once Sirius figured out his furry little problem. So he’s not sure what others know, or even what Remus and Sirius  know of what’s happening between them, honestly, there have been so many almosts that James has picked up on over the years. And he still shutters thinking about the near total break that happened with the prank, still isn’t quite sure what had past between them to get Sirius and Remus  speaking with each other once more, but he does know that Remus staying with James, Sirius, and  Peter the past summer after Sirius escaping the twisted place he was suppose to call a home, is what helped indefinitely. And now, a year separate from the prank, things finally feel normal between them.

Well— Erm, not normal per se. Those idiots are still blustering and bumbling and bashfully avoiding one another when anything close to romantic comes up in a discussion or when their hands touch over the Great Hall table or whenever James makes a pointed remark when he catches one of them staring a bit too slack jawed at the other in the midst of something totally bloody innocuous in the eyes of a normal person— EG: Sirius gathering his hair— that’s nearly to the bottom of his neck now a days— into a small knot on the back of his head, or Remus sucking idly on a sugar quill while he’s revising. And sure, James has to deal with the kicks at his ankles, or a spare jinx if one of them is especially pissy, but Lily’s come to join him in the ribbing, so it kind of makes everything all right. Especially when she levels her beautiful, forrest green eyes with his own brown ones, and she actually looks sort of endeared.

Yeah— that’s a fucking amazing feeling all right, and it’s probably the memory of that happening only a few hours ago that has got James all jittery now, far past midnight. So with a tired sigh, he slides open the drapes of his fourposter, is ready to go downstairs for a kitchen raid if Remus isn’t awake— Though once he sets his glasses on, and blinks a few times over to get acclimated with the dark, he’s only a bit stunned to find the shapes of Remus and Sirius crowded on the former’s bed— and they’re really not much more than suggestions beneath the shadows, but it’s enough for James to see Sirius’s head bent low, resting it against the crook of  Moony’s neck and shoulder, while the shorter boy has got his arms wrapped around Sirius’s torso. And it’s nothing obscene, not really— it’s not like they’re nude or anything— but Sirius is shirtless, and Remus does have this blissed out expression painted over his features, that James would bet good money is the same one Sirius has got on if most of his face wasn’t covered by his hair.

And in another breath, Remus’s honey colored eyes flap open, widening exponentially when he catches sight of James, and wiggling around as if he wants to move away from Sirius completely, which is of course stunted when Sirius makes a low noise under his breath, and presses closer so that his mouth is quite literally right against Remus’s neck, and his arms tug him closer.

And James is definitely convinced that he’s the best mate any bloke could ask for when instead of chuckling at the obvious show of territorialism, he just shakes his head indulgently at them, mouthing an “About time plonker,” to Remus, who replies in kind with a hefty, two fingered salute.

This time James has to bite down to prevent his chuckle from spilling out.

“And here I was, about to offer you a snack from our dear house elves.” He whispers, hopefully quiet enough so that only Remus could hear.

“Oh, just bugger off,” Remus retorts, smiling with such mirth that James can’t even feign to be affronted over it, only follows the playful command and tries figuring out just how to give the ‘If you hurt him I’ll hurt you’ talk to the pair of them without it coming across insincerely. 

~+I~

Millie was bored until she saw them.

The only reason why Millie got this boring job in this beyond posh restaurant is because her folks reckon that she needs to learn some form of responsibility before university, and she hates it. The pay is absolute shite, and most of her coworkers are all levels of boring, and the patrons are not nearly entertaining enough to try and make up some secret back story of tumultuous affairs or secret agents from the MI6, or a royal from some country on the continent meeting their star-crossed lover.

It’s all just painfully ordinary, and she’s cursing her parents while she chomps on her gum, reading some stupid note by an ugly old fart who left her his number on the receipt. 

Scoffing while she bins it, Millie glances over to the newly occupied table in her section, heart immediately leaping once she gets a good look at the pair of blokes sitting down. 

The sandy haired one is definitely cute in that reserved way her best friend Claire would definitely be mad over— the guy who could read you poetry in French or Italian and then gently kisses the back of your hand. And that’s all and well, but Millie’s every attention is laser focussed on his mate, the one that looks like he can be bloody James Bond with those smoldering eyes and that ink black hair, and God, those cheekbones! Definitely one of those beautiful, Public school boys who’s born and bread by the patrician. And while she takes their orders, she tosses him her most flattering of grins and slips in her giggle that an ex boyfriend compared to silver bells, and is sure to flip her long, chestnut hair enough times so he’d notice, even if she’s pretty sure he’s either pissed or probably more than a bit stoned. (Truly, where the bloody hell would he come up with pumpkin juice? How horrid must that taste). 

Millie may or may not spend an unreasonable amount of time spying at them from where the cooks drop off the completed plates to be sent away. He’s just so bloody good looking, and she can’t believe this awful job has finally brought her such an amazing distraction, and the arse doesn’t even pay her much mind, leaving the ordering and the conversing to his fair haired friend.

Maybe he’s sensitive, she thinks to herself. Maybe he’s just a shy soul. And yes, that must be it! The poor, beautiful sod. She’s sure to make her intentions clear next time she thinks it’s appropriate to top off their waters, because she’s so very  gracious like that.

“Enjoying yourselves?” Millie asks in her most light hearted of cadences, filling up the shorter one’s glass but smiling fully and exclusively to the boy who looks like he should be starring in some sort of Brook’s Brothers advert.

“Ta,” the sandy haired boy says, sounding a bit amused at her dilemma, but it’s kind enough so Millie doesn’t feel brassed off over it. “Do you mind pointing me to the loo?”

“Oh of course!” She crows, suddenly ecstatic as she directs him, finally getting a chance to be alone with the model. Though when she turns her attention to him once the other one leaves to take a leak, she’s kind of confused how he’s staring after him with a glance she vividly remembers on the face of her ex whenever she’d peer back around to ensure he was watching her go— Though, if Millie’s being honest, the model somehow looks simultaneously eager to watch the back of him, but also already disheartened not to have him around in ways she doubts anyone she’s ever gone out with has ever exhibited. “He’s a nice chap,” she states, instead of marinating on the strangeness of this development.

The practical model starts, seems to have forgotten about her presence all together, but then he glances over towards her with those impossibly flattering, pale gray eyes, and he nods disinterestedly. And yeah, yikes. That is a total hit to Millie’s ego.

“Ahem,” she clears her throat, begins twisting her free hand into the material of her apron. “’S nice you guys came for dinner, you don’t see much friends considering how bloody expensive it is here, hah.”

Millie feels herself going absolutely scarlet at the impassive way he drags his gaze up and down her form before taking a swig of his Bellini. “He’s not my friend.”

“Oh,” Millie practically squeaks out, suddenly wonders if maybe he’s a tutor from his class or something? Maybe the model is just taking the cute one out to dinner as a thanks for helping him pass his A-levels? Maybe this is considered cheap in the circles that the model keeps.

“’S our one year anniversary actually,” he tells her, still in that methodical, blasé way of his. And oh. Oh wow! Suddenly everything is snapping into clarity.

The way the two boys had brushed the back of their hands before being seated, how model had trusted the other boy to order for him, how model never looked away from the cute one’s mouth or collarbones or hands as they spoke. How whenever she came around to ask if they needed anything else, it felt like she was intruding on more than just a couple of mates catching up.

Oh Jesus, she feels like such an idiot, and Millie tells the model just as much.

“I’m sorry, I’m an idiot! I didn’t even put it together.”

Remarkably, the model’s rigid posture goes a bit loose at her apology, and the corner of his thin lips quirk up into a grin. “’S fine, he didn’t want to make a fuss out of it, but yeah— Just feels good telling someone.”

Millie nods eagerly, she can’t understand exactly what he means, obviously not,  but she can definitely try to, and if it feels good for him to tell a random bird about something so important, then she’s more than happy to help. “Well the point stands, yeah? He seems like a good sort, you’re lucky to have found each other.”

The model’s grin goes elastic at that, and he looks actually approachable for the first time tonight. “I’m the luckiest bloke in the world that I get to be with him.”

Millie flushes at the intensity embedded into his statement, but thankfully doesn’t have to answer when she hears the sandy haired boy walking closer now, smiling so brightly that there’s a dimple popping up on the apple of his cheek that Millie’s only just noticed— The mirth is a good color on him, she reckons. Makes him look as gorgeous as those boys on the telly dramas her Mum is always gushing about, even his eyes turn more golden than light brown. “You pestering our waitress Padfoot?”

“You know I keep my devilish tongue for you and you alone Moonbeam,” the model—Padfoot cannot be his actual name for heaven’s sake— retorts.

“Lucky me,” the sandy haired boy says wryly as he takes a seat, and while Millie walks away— intending to get them a pudding that’s on the house to celebrate the milestone of their relationship— she peers back around only once and it’s enough to see the tips of their fingers kissing across the table, and their smiles looking like a secret language not meant for anyone else to read. 

.-

My Full Wolfstar FIC Masterlist💜

[javier-pena]

bloodstain

Chapter 2 of The Hunt

Pairing: Din Djarin x fem!reader

Word Count: 6.2k

Rating: Mature

Warnings: mentions of death and trauma | very brief mention of blood | brief description of a panic attack | still a lot of hurt and just a little bit of comfort | misunderstandings | mild to moderate language | but maybe there’s also a ..... soft scene ...... | Din’s hands

Notes: First, let me start with saying that at this point taking a bullet for Dani @javierpcna​ doesn’t feel like it would be enough. She literally drops everything whenever I send her a new or revised chapter to look over and i cannot thank her enough! I kinda surprised myself with how quickly I finished this chapter, but that’s also thanks to Dani because the highlight of my day is sending her small snippets of what I’ve written and having her reply with “?????”. I also want to thank all of you who read the first chapter and left comments and sent messages, it means the world to me! I was so nervous about sharing this with you all, but I’m so glad I did. And finally, let me end this with saying happy birthday, Chrisann @darksber​!!! I hope you have a fun birthday and I hope you enjoy the second chapter as much as you enjoyed the first one.

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The snow comes over night. The cold, clean smell is the first thing your mind registers, even before it has time to make you feel confused about the strange bedsheets wrapped around you. And then you remember.

The screams.

The blaster shots

The fire, the blazing heat engulfing you, burning your skin.

Those men on their speeder bikes, laughing, looting, taking whatever the fuck they want.

And you, unable to stop them.

The feeling of cold, all-consuming despair makes a shiver run down your spine, makes you curl up in a tight ball beneath your blanket and shake so violently it makes you feel sick. Then you cry, and with the tears comes the heat until you’re so hot you feel sweat collect at the nape of your neck and run down your back in icy beads. After yesterday, you hadn’t expected there to be any tears left, but there are, so many, and they don’t stop, they seem to be endless, like a river flowing, rushing, tumbling over rocks and down a precipice, drowning everything in its way.

You hate those men, you loathe them, you want them dead, torn apart by wild animals, you want them dead after they beg you for their miserable lives, you want them dead and forgotten. That anger and that lust for revenge that seem to take up every cell and atom in your body are what finally helps you to stop crying. They don’t help you to calm yourself – you are anything but calm – but they help you to focus your rage on one goal: kill them all.

Because with the memories of the pain and the despair and the utter helplessness you felt yesterday (and still feel today) comes the memory of him. The Mandalorian. And remembering him means remembering the hope you felt when he offered his services, when he pledged himself to your cause. Shit. You shake your head. He did no such thing. He accepted a job. He only cares about the money, he doesn’t care about the cause. Yes, he will help you achieve your goal, but he’s emotionally detached from it. And you need to remember that. You need to remember it for your own sake because as soon as you assume anything else, it’ll get messy.

And he terrifies you. He terrifies you so much, especially in the light of day. Because the morning sun makes him feel real, solid, and so much more dangerous. And you have a feeling you shouldn’t keep him waiting.

You finally sit up and roll your neck and shoulders to relieve the pain the previous day’s labors have left behind. You couldn’t defend yourself against the Mandalorian, even if the muscles in your body weren’t screaming with pain. You don’t know what’s wrong with you. You don’t know why you would trust a complete stranger like that after everything that has happened to you, why you would trust a complete stranger who could snap your neck like a dry twig. Being around him feels like being constantly held at gunpoint. One wrong move and you’re dead.

But you need him.

Maker, you need him.

You get out of bed and stretch, then run your hand over your face to dry it off. There is a bowl of water on a small table next to the bed. You have to break the thin layer of ice that has formed on the surface, and when you splash it on your face, it is freezing, but at least it makes your burning cheeks feel numb and it eases the stinging in your eyes. You know you look a mess, but you don’t care. You get dressed in your soot-blackened clothes and then leave the small room. You have no idea if you’ll ever sleep in a bed again.

***

The morning air is icy cold. Two suns have risen, but the third one still hides behind the trees. The air is foggy, misty, and clouds of smoke pass you by. The settlement is already busy. In a shop next to the inn, a man heckles with the vendor in a raised voice. Two farmers lead a small herd of tauntauns down the street, while everyone tries to get out of their way. In the distance, a child is crying. It smells like fire and snow and life. You hate it.

The everyday noises are overwhelming to you; the melody of a hammer hitting metal in a nearby forge makes your skull vibrate, the voices of people talking makes you want to cover your ears with your hands and yell at them to shut up, the reverberations of the tauntauns’ claws against the frozen ground makes you want to take cover somewhere and hide until nightfall.

But you don’t run or hide or even just turn around to take a breath. Instead, you focus your attention on the Mandalorian.

He is waiting for you outside the inn. A thin layer of snow has collected on his shoulders, a sign he’s been standing motionless for a while. Even though the morning sunlight is pale and makes everything look hazy, you see him clearly. So clearly that you have to squint your eyes when you look at him. His beskar armor glistens from the sunlight it reflects, so much that the people on the street turn their heads to look at him. The wisps of smoke rushing past shroud him, but it’s not enough to dim the dancing shimmers. He carries a long staff strapped to his back, a kind of spear you’re pretty sure he didn’t have with him the previous night at the inn. And his face is hidden behind the helmet again, which probably shouldn’t surprise you, but it does. All of this just makes him look wrong. He looks so out of place standing in the middle of this dirt-poor settlement it makes you want to pretend you don’t have anything to do with him.

So you focus on what’s behind him. In one hand, he holds the reins of three orbaks, in the other a small bundle. He presses it against his chest like he’s holding a small child, not a lifeless piece of cloth. The orbaks are big, wooly beasts, dark grey in color, with two long, dangerously pointy tusks hanging from their mouths. Two of them have saddles strapped to their backs, the third one is laden with crates, saddle bags, even two long guns. The more you look at it, the more weapons you spot. What does one man need so many for? So much baggage will just slow you down. The bandits already have a day’s head start and travelling on heavily loaded orbaks will give them even more of an advantage. But this is probably the best the Mandalorian could do – the settlement is so poor, not even merchants sell speeder bikes – who would be able to afford them?

You shudder and wrap your arms around yourself, painfully aware that the fire destroyed everything except for the clothes you’re wearing. But they’re not enough to protect you from the bitter cold. You can see your breath hovering in a pale cloud in front of your face when you exhale slowly, you can feel the snowflakes on your bare lower arms as you walk toward the Mandalorian. You have no idea how he can stand there like the cold is nothing to him. Beskar doesn’t protect against low temperatures. To you, this is just further proof of how much he’s not human.

“Here,” he says, as you stop in front of him, holding the bundle out to you.

“What’s this?” you ask with a small nod at him, the bundle, and the orbaks. You don’t take it.

The Mandalorian looks behind him, then back at you. “Supplies,” he says.

You take the bundle from him and untie the chord that’s tightly wound around it. Folding back the thin cloth, you unwrap a long, dark brown leather cloak with fur linings and a thick, woolen scarf. The scarf looks itchy but feels very soft against your skin and the coat lies heavy in your arms, like a dead animal. The sight of these clothes leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, and you don’t move to put them on. Instead, you stand there, pressing the unwrapped bundle against your chest, and look at the Mandalorian with raised eyebrows.

“What’s this?” you repeat.

He doesn’t reply, just nods and makes a gesture with his now empty hand, motioning you to hurry up.

You don’t. You just look at him, shivering more and more with each passing second. You’re not sure if it’s from the cold or from the anger you’ve been feeling since yesterday, since waking up this morning, since unwrapping the bundle; everything is stoking up the fire, feeding your flaming rage

“Listen,” you start. You try not to let your feelings get the better of you, but it’s impossible. You don’t quite know yourself why this small gesture enrages you as it does, you just know you need to set some boundaries right now. “I don’t need your pity,” you continue. “I don’t need you to look out for me. I can take care of myself.”

The Mandalorian huffs. “This isn’t a gift,” he says, his voice completely level. “I’m paying for it with your money. I’m not forcing you to wear it, but if you go on the journey like that,” he nods at you, “you’ll freeze. You’re no use to me dead.”

You feel heat rush to your face and settle in your cheeks. Without another word you put on the coat and tie the scarf around your neck. The coat rests heavy on your shoulders, weighing you down. It’s a size too big, but snug, and you stop shivering immediately. You run your left hand along the right sleeve under the pretense of fixing it, but you just want to feel the material under your fingers. It’s softer than it looks, which just serves to make you feel embarrassed and … stupid.

You feel stupid, so, so stupid. Did you really expect him to make you a gift? To look out for you? To care for you? You hired him to do a job and he’s just making sure you stay alive long enough to pay him. Much like the owner of a racing stable would do with his fathier. You scold yourself for having misread the situation. You blame it on the exhaustion you still feel, on the trauma you lived through, on the need for human connection you had no idea you even felt. There is no way to come out of this situation without feeling like a fool, so you just decide to ignore it. After all, it’s best if you just forgot about the whole thing. All you need to do in future is to be more careful around him so you don’t misinterpret his intentions again.

“Supplies?” you ask to distract yourself.

You wish you could see his face when he says, “Were you just going to follow them on foot with no food or weapons?” Because it doesn’t sound as if he’s mocking you, even though he should be. Hell, you should be mocking yourself. But he just sounds genuinely curious, as if this is a discussion about a topic you’re both not emotionally invested in, not a question of life and death.

“No,” you answer slowly, then look away. You have to admit you hadn’t thought about it yet, you were too focused on the idea of hunting those men down that you didn’t even consider you needed tools, supplies, food, and a means of transportation. “Thank you,” you add.

The Mandalorian gives you a curt nod, accepting your words of gratitude. You’re glad he doesn’t press the subject, any subject really.

Without him, you would have been dead within a day.

***

It is still snowing when you and the Mandalorian leave the settlement behind. As you begin your journey into the unknown, tiny snowflakes settle in the fur of your orbak, making it appear white instead of dark grey. It blends in perfectly with your surroundings, where everything is light shades of blue, grey, and brown. And white, so much white. You squint your eyes and yet the light still stings to the point you tear up. You envy the Mandalorian his tinted visor and you wish you had something similar to protect yourself. Alvorine’s three suns hang low, their pale blue light filtered through hazy clouds. Everything you see is blurred and too bright to look at directly – it makes you feel vulnerable and exposed. Even as you enter the cover of the trees, their bare branches do little to help keep out the light and the snow and so you lower your eyes to your reddened hands holding your orbak’s reins as you trust the Mandalorian to lead the way.

The air is cold this morning, so cold you tie your new scarf over your mouth and nose and still feel it sting in your throat. Your face, still raw from crying, stings too. Your hands are frozen shut around the reins and you can’t feel your fingers. When you try to move them, the action is painfully slow. You shiver despite the heavy coat on your shoulders as you sit hunched over to give the cold air less opportunity to cover your body with icy touches. You would never admit to it out loud because you’ve already embarrassed yourself enough for one day, but the Mandalorian was right – you would have frozen to death within a few hours of leaving the shelter of the settlement.

You raise your head briefly to look at him riding ahead of you, but he is the brightest object in a 10-mile radius, you think, brighter than your orbak’s fur or the snow-covered ground. Back in the settlement, you already noticed how the suns’ light reflects off his polished beskar armor, but out here in the forest with nothing around to distract your gaze, he is like a homing beacon, like a bright, blazing fire lit in complete darkness. This brazen display makes you shiver; he is on top of the food chain, too quick and powerful and deadly to hide his presence. He could be spotted from miles away by someone on a sentry tower and yet the person keeping watch wouldn’t stand a chance. The Mandalorian would catch them sooner or later, no matter how well they were trying to hide. Nothing can escape him, so there is no reason for him to hide his presence, to sneak from cover to cover like a thief in the night.

He frightens you.

What is also bearing down on you is the silence surrounding him, you and your orbaks. Yes, there is the sound of their hooves against the frozen ground, the swoosh of their fur every time they shake their heads, the soft thud whenever they brush up against a branch, making snow glide to the ground. But that’s it. That’s all you hear. The Mandalorian travels in complete silence. His armor doesn’t squeak or thump. You cannot hear the sound of his slow, steady breathing. Even his hands lie completely silently on the nape of his orbak’s neck, the reins resting against the worn leather of his gloves. And you envy him those gloves because the further you travel into the forest, the colder it gets, and the stiffer and more unresponsive your fingers get.

You cannot recall the last time you felt this uncomfortable. You wish there was something to distract you from – well – everything. Yes, you’re grateful the Mandalorian doesn’t ask you personal questions because you buried your old life beneath wet soil and dirt yesterday, and with it you buried any desire to share it with a complete stranger. He also doesn’t ask you about the men you’re hunting, and you feel like he doesn’t have to because he just knows. Maybe he talked to the people back at the settlement, maybe it’s the years of experience he’s had hunting people for a living or maybe it’s just instinct – he knows where he needs to be going, he knows what kind of equipment to bring along, and he knows what the best strategy is to catch his quarry.

You don’t know any of these things. And the more you stray from the bare minimum of human civilization and into the wilderness of Alvorine, the more you realize you wouldn’t stand a chance without the Mandalorian. You would’ve frozen to death if he hadn’t given you the coat. Or you would have starved, or died from exhaustion from trying to carry all your supplies yourself. You would have gotten lost and eaten alive by a wild beast. Or you would, by some miracle, have caught up with the men, but would’ve gotten killed by them because you didn’t bring a weapon. By the look of it, the Mandalorian brought enough for a small army. And the more you think about it, the more you are prepared to admit that you were never seriously planning on going after the bandits. You are prepared to admit you were just looking for a way out so you wouldn’t have to live with the pain. One or two rash decisions made from a place of hurt and despair, one or two unplanned steps can mean death on Alvorine. While wallowing in your revenge fantasies, you weren’t thinking about Brea – you were just thinking about yourself.

But somehow – and this time you’re convinced it’s because of his instincts – the Mandalorian offered you a chance at success, one you might not even have wanted. He listened to the people in that inn and decided helping you with your cause is the right job for him. You’ve never heard of a Mandalorian like that. You always assumed they were only interested in money or the thrill of chasing down the rich and the powerful, in letting them know that no amount of credits can keep them safe. But here he is, content with spending a week or more in the forests of Alvorine, hunting down base criminals for the ridiculous amount of 240 credits. It doesn’t add up. And you would ask him about it if he wasn’t an unapproachable, withdrawn man, covered in impenetrable armor. You would ask him if he didn’t terrify you so much.

You wish you could talk to him about … something, you just don’t know about what.

But he makes that decision for you. “Are you hungry?” he asks.

His voice cuts so unexpectedly through the silence that you flinch. It somehow surprises you that he is real and not just a concept you’ve made up in your mind, and idea to help you live out your fantasies of revenge and vengeance.

When you don’t answer, he turns his head to look at you. You squint when you return his gaze, trying to make up your mind whether you are hungry or not (something that feels impossible when all you are is terribly, terribly cold), but then he pulls on the reins of his orbak and brings it to a halt in the middle of the path. He glides down from the animal in one swift movement; a small cloud of freshly fallen snow rises up when his feet hit the ground but there is still no sound and this is starting to unnerve you. It takes him a few steps until he’s next to you, the top of his head reaching your shoulder, even though you’re still mounted high on your orbak, and then he says in a rough, almost unkind tone of voice, “I asked you a question”.

And you remember the deal, you remember having agreed to doing as he tells you. It’s just, you don’t have an answer for him. So you just shrug.

He grabs the rein of your orbak and you finally – finally! – hear his movements make a sound, a low creak as the leather of his glove brushes against the leather of the bridle. The orbak shakes its shaggy head but he doesn’t flinch. His visor is directed at you and you know he expects an answer from you. He’s growing impatient, you can tell from the way his shoulders tense as he lets his gaze wander over your body.

“You’re hypothermic,” he observes, and as the words leave his mouth, so does the air you’ve been holding in and you start shaking uncontrollably.

Now that he’s pointed it out, there is no denying it. You’re cold, so, so cold, frozen and raw, you can’t feel your own lips, your nose, your cheeks. Your fingers are lifeless lumps against the coarse fur of your orbak. If the animal would decide to bolt at this very moment, you wouldn’t be able to hold it back. You’re not even sure you could climb down from the beast right now. Of all the deadly dangers of Alvorine it’s the cold that has finally gotten to you. It’s laughable, and you would laugh, if you could feel your face.

“Can you dismount?” he asks you then.

This is a question you can answer. “I think so,” you say, even though you know you can’t. Your legs are like two solid bricks of ice, too stiff to be moved.

“Do it then,” he says, and it sounds so much like a challenge that you’re determined to show him you can do it.

He doesn’t watch your pathetic display though. He lets go of the rein and walks to the third orbak that is carrying most of your supplies. You’re grateful for that because as soon as you try to dismount, you feel your body tense even more until you glide down from the orbak with a disgraceful plop and land in the soft snow with a force that knocks the air from your lungs. The sounds you make draw the attention of the Mandalorian back to you, but he doesn’t rush to your side to offer you help. Instead, he turns his attention back to the task at hand, looking through one of the bags strapped to the pack animal. You’re convinced he rolls his eyes under the cover of the helmet.

You try to get up, and you manage after two fruitless attempts. Your legs are shaking, but at least they’re supporting your weight. Walking on them is another topic you’re not prepared to cover yet. And then you feel it again, that hot sting of embarrassment you felt this morning, trying to make itself known by speeding up your heart rate and adding a feeling of nausea to your general discomfort. You push it down without batting an eyelash. There is no reason to feel like this, especially if you compare yourself to the Mandalorian. Not everyone can be a ruthless killing machine, immune to environmental influences.

Then he’s back by your side, and with a gruff, “Hold this,” he pushes a heating pad into your hands. You’re not sure at first if it’s switched on because you don’t feel anything, but when you move it around in your hands looking for the on button you notice it’s cranked up to the highest setting.

“You need to tell me when you’re cold,” the Mandalorian continues in the same gruff tone of voice, while he unscrews a flask.

Once it’s opened, he pushes it into your hand with such force you stumble backwards. Your whole body tenses at the contact and you realize you’re completely alone with him. There is not another living soul around for miles except for the three animals next to you, and they won’t come to your aid if he suddenly decides to kill you. And he could. He is so strong; you had no idea how strong until he pushed you back like that with a motion that didn’t seem to take any effort at all. And with another effortless motion, he could close a hand around your neck and squeeze until there is no air left in your body. You wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Drink,” he orders.

You do. It’s a hot liquid – tea, you think – but with a bitter taste to it. It warms you up instantly, much quicker than the heating pad does. You still can’t feel your fingers.

“Just tell me next time,” he repeats. “Losing a finger to hypothermia is a nasty business.”

And now you do feel embarrassed again. You’re a burden, you’re slowing him down. You already lost a quarter of an hour because you can’t handle a bit of cold. It’s not surprising he usually works alone. No one is able to keep up with him, least of all you in your weakened, exhausted state.

But you can’t turn back. You refuse to give up so easily.

You nod to show him you’ve understood his instructions. Then you let your gaze wander around, looking for something to distract you. You can feel heat rising to your cheeks, and it has nothing to do with the warm drink or the heating pad. You know it doesn’t because you’re still shivering. But you’re not going to apologize to him. For some reason, you feel like he would just brush it off, act like it’s no big deal. But it is to you, and you wouldn’t be able to bear him acting nonchalantly. The other possible response to an apology from you would be him trying to comfort you and you definitely. don’t. want. that. The mere thought makes your heart beat so rapidly it feels like it’s going to explode any second. The mere thought of one of his hands resting on your shoulder in a comforting gesture makes you want to run. You don’t want him to care for you because it’s entirely at odds with his character, his whole being. He is here to hunt and kill, not to hold and comfort. And this is what you need right now – a killer, not a caretaker.

You take a few steps, walk past him toward a fallen tree to calm your nerves. The deep breaths of cold air you take make you cough, but he doesn’t even flinch. Good. You’re usually not like this, you’re usually not someone who can’t take care of themselves. After all, you’ve lived on Alvorine your entire life, you know how harsh the winters can be and how dangerous the cold is. But yesterday’s events broke something in you, and the realization that you might never recover from it begins to dawn on you, take hold of you with a grip icier than the snow clinging to your worn-out boots. The weight of what happened to you slams into you with full force and you have to lean against a tree, its rough bark scraping uncomfortably against your cold, bare hand.

And then you see it – the bloodstain. One single, impossibly small, impossibly red bloodstain on the virgin-white snow. And everything stops.

You lurch forward and fall to your knees to examine it more closely. Yes, it’s definitely blood. You raise your head to look around, but you can’t spot anything out of the ordinary, just trees and snow and your own footprints. Your breath comes in short, labored bursts, and you suddenly don’t feel cold anymore. In fact, you don’t feel anything at all.

“What is it?”

The Mandalorian is there, crouching by your side. You point to the small, red dot, and he raises his hand to touch his helmet. His body grows rigid as he examines it, all the while not moving an inch. You don’t want to hear his verdict, don’t want to hear the conclusion he’s come to. That bloodstain stirs something inside you, a panic with such deep roots you feel it taking over your entire body, growing like weed, choking all other feelings, all life out of you.

Something in your body language must have given away this panic you feel, because suddenly the Mandalorian turns to you and says, “I need you to calm down.”

You nod, unable to speak. Then you turn your head away from him and throw up.

“Hey,” he says, and something in his voice catches your attention. It sounds almost … soft.

You turn back to him, running your hand over your mouth. “I’m sorry,” you apologize.

“I’m going to look around,” he tells you. Then he raises his hand as if to comfort you, but you flinch away from him. His hand hovers outstretched between the two of you for a brief moment before he lowers it again. “Just stay here. Try to eat something. I won’t be long.”

He pushes himself off the ground, towering over you. You stand up too, your legs shaking, but before you can embarrass yourself more by stumbling into him, he takes off in a slow-paced run and you stare after him until the trees swallow him up. And then you’re alone. Alone with three orbaks and your panicked mind.

It’s not Brea’s blood, you tell yourself.

But what if it is? a different voice asks.

It’s not. It snowed during the night, and we’re too far behind those bandits. It can’t be hers.

It can, you know it can. They could have left her here to die.

There would be more tracks.

Then why are you panicking? Why did you throw up?

You can’t argue with that. Instead, you sink to the ground again, bury your head in your hands, and scream. You scream so loudly that even though the sound comes out muffled, the orbaks still move their heads nervously. A few trees away, a flock of birds takes off, chittering in disapproval. You scream until your lungs begin to burn, until your throat stings, until you feel like you’ve just sprinted ten miles. Then you grow quiet.

***

When the Mandalorian returns, it’s almost dark. You’re not freezing anymore because you spent the last two hours or so pacing up and down the path through the undergrowth you’ve made earlier, your mind racing with scenarios of him not returning before nightfall. You fear the nights on Alvorine and you know you should have told him about the dangers these forests hold. Because how could he have known that it’s almost impossible to survive a night out in the wilderness? Almost because if anyone could do it, it would be him.

When he returns, the pauldron on his right shoulder is smeared with dirt and his chest is heaving with silent pants, but he’s alone. You’re simultaneously relieved and disappointed.

“We’ll make camp here for the night,” he decides without so much as a greeting.

You open your mouth to tell him how dangerous that would be but then close it again when you remember the nearest settlement is miles and miles away and you wouldn’t reach it in time before nightfall. You don’t have any other choice.

He sends you to collect some wood while he moves to tie up the orbaks. You scold yourself for not having done that earlier when you were waiting for him, but you had hoped it wouldn’t take him quite as long and he would be back sooner. As you move around, picking up the driest branches you can find, you glance over at him from time to time. He is lost in his own task, tying the reins to nearby tree trunks, patting one orbak’s neck, then scratching another one’s muzzle. They trust him, stand completely still in his presence while he circles them, examining them for any injuries or anything that might cause them discomfort.

Finally, curiosity gets the better of you. “What did you find?” you ask, as you break a big, dead branch into two parts.

“Nothing,” he replies in his brusque fashion you’re slowly getting used to. “A dead animal.”

You nod, then focus on the task at hand. Your small discovery and subsequent … breakdown? … panic attack? … you don’t know what to call it, has already cost you so much time. You could’ve covered twice the distance today if he hadn’t stopped here because of you. But … this isn’t a rescue mission, you keep forgetting about that. This is a quest for revenge, and those bandits will be there, no matter how long it will take you to find them. It doesn’t matter if it takes you two days or two months to reach them.

“Did you eat?” the Mandalorian asks you, interrupting your train of thought.

You shake your head and he sighs. Then he reaches into one of the saddle bags and pulls out a ration pack, tossing it to you. He proceeds to clear away the snow around the small pile of wood you’ve collected before doing something with his arm, so flames shoot out of the vambrace, igniting the stack. You can’t help but stare in fascination because you’ve never seen anything like it.

It doesn’t take him long to get a fire going. You grab one of the two bundled up, coarse blankets from the pack orbak and spread it on the ground next to the heat source, huddling up close for warmth and protection. You tear open the ration pack and begin to eat.

“I should’ve told you before, but it’s dangerous out here at night.” Your mouth full, you watch as the Mandalorian sits down opposite you, the fire between you. The warmth spreading through your body and your steadily filling stomach make you talkative. “There’s monsters in these woods.”

He chuckles softly but you’re sure it’s just your imagination. There is no way you could’ve heard a sound like that over the crackling fire. But before you can ask him about it, he raises his hand to remove the dirty pauldron from his shoulder, and you’re so distracted by that piece of steel being lifted off the body it usually protects that you stop thinking altogether for a moment. It’s stupid, you know that, but a part of you still thinks he might be a machine, and seeing that pauldron being removed from his shoulder feels almost forbidden, like you’re the audience to some ancient, sacred ritual you have no right to observe. You lower your gaze to the flickering flames.

“I’ll keep an eye out for those monsters,” he assures you, and you’re not sure if he meant for it to sound mockingly, but it doesn’t.

You still don’t think he fully believes you.

“Alvorine is a dangerous planet,” you tell him in a quiet tone of voice. “It might not seem like it compared to what you’re used to, but to us the dangers are very real.” You’re still not looking at him, but there is no point – you can’t see his face anyway.

“I believe you,” he says. “But fire is usually enough to keep the monsters at bay.”

As a response, you nod, even though you’re not sure he’s watching you. So you finally raise your head again to look at him. The pauldron is back on his shoulder, but his gaze is directed at the orbaks.

“I’m going to feed them,” he tells you. “They’re getting restless. Try to get some sleep.”

You nod again and stretch out on the cold, hard ground. Shivering, you pull your coat tighter around yourself. The fire is barely warm enough to keep your fingers and toes from falling off, and once it dies down, there won’t be anything keeping you from freezing to death. Briefly, you’re considering pulling the blanket out from beneath you to use it as a cover, but then you wouldn’t have anything to protect you from the cold ground. With a sigh, you close your eyes, trying to ignore the discomfort. Instead, you focus on the sounds around you, on the branches brushing against each other when a cold breeze tears at them, on the orbaks huffing impatiently and almost nervously, and on the crackling fire, the heat that makes a piece of wood snap in half ever so often. And then you hear another sound, footsteps, and your eyes snap open again.

The Mandalorian towers over you, and it’s the first time you were able to hear him approach. Instead of feeling proud of yourself, you bolt upright, adrenaline pumping through your veins. Whatever happens next, you know you don’t stand a chance against him. He slowly leans down, and you try to get away from him, but your muscles are frozen stiff and don’t cooperate. His arms move as if to grab you and a strangled cry escapes your throat.

But it’s just a blanket, just the other blanket, and he wraps it tightly around your shoulders. “Here,” he says with a low grunt. If he noticed your alarm, he doesn’t comment on it.

You look at his helmet reflecting the light of the dancing flames, and you wish you knew what was going on beneath it. Is he offended? Annoyed? Or maybe just as cold and exhausted as you?

“What about you?” you ask, grabbing the coarse material to hold it tightly against your body.

“I’m not cold,” he answers, standing up again. “Get some sleep. I’ll wake you before sunrise.”

You watch him walk back to the other side of the fire and settle down on the cold ground with just his cape to keep him warm. And for the first time since you met him, his stoic presence doesn’t fill you with dread or panic or trepidation – he just makes you feel calm.

tag list: @bella-ciao​, @chattychell​, @darksber​, @filthybookworm​, @frannyzooey​, @khalysa​, @leannawithacapitala​, @magicrowiswritingstuff​, @mothandpidgeon​, @mbpokemonrulez​, @mrsparknuts​, @mxsamwilson​, @mylifeofcalculatedchaos​, @pescopadral​, @piscespussybabe​, @something-tofightfor​

[adenei]

Day 4: January Word Challenge

A/N: This one is a Romione Half Blood Prince AU that is actually a follow up to “Why, are you scared of loving?” I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, so here we are.

**********

Stars

It was later in the evening when Hermione found herself with Ron outside once more, watching the sun set over the pond. She put the day’s earlier conversation behind her, and was trying to enjoy the time with her best friend. It was hard to concentrate in his proximity. 

She’d sneak sideways glances at his features when he wasn’t looking. The way his blue eyes sparkled in the setting sunlight, and the contrast of his red hair against his pale, freckly skin. It was cruel how attractive he was. Hermione found herself thinking often about what it might feel like to feel the hard muscles of his body against hers, with his arms wrapped around her. She never thought she’d appreciate quidditch quite this way, but thank Godric for what it had added to his physique.

Hermione tried to shake herself out of those thoughts. You’re only making it worse. There’s no way someone like him could ever fall for someone like you. And yet, here they were, watching the night sky appear before them, ready to gaze at the stars that would soon shine down over the Burrow. Wasn’t that something that couples did?

“It’s nice out tonight, isn’t it? Not too hot, for once,” he said, breaking the silence around them.

“Yes, it is quite comfortable. Though, I’m worried that when night sets in I’ll be a bit chilled.” English weather had a knack for that.

Ron couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ll never understand how you can always be cold.” 

Hermione smiled as the last curve of sunlight slipped away, covering the Burrow in twilight. “It’s just how I’ve always been.”

“Well, it’s a good thing our school uniform makes us wear those robes everywhere. I’ve noticed the castle gets really drafty at night when we’re on rounds.”

“Yes, it does. I actually joked with Mum one summer about adding a fleece liner in one set to keep me warmer.”

“You and your muggle ways. Just use a warming charm,” Ron suggested.

“But then everyone would know I’m constantly cold if they walked by,” Hermione said. 

She wasn’t really sure why, but she felt like arguing with him. Not real arguing, of course, but in that playful banter that she’d come to crave from their friendship. 

“Why would that matter?” Ron asked inquisitively.

“It wouldn’t, but it’d be another reminder that I’ll no doubt be alone as everyone else in our year pairs off.”

Ron looked at her. “What makes you say that?”

Hermione gave him a slight shrug of her shoulders. In all honesty, she wasn’t sure what she meant. She was thinking about her dorm mates and the other students in their year starting relationships the previous year. She knew it wasn’t true, but some days she felt like she was the only one on her own, and was none the wiser on how to alleviate that particular issue.

“Just because Harry had a go with Cho for a bit, and Ginny seems to have blokes lined up to take her out doesn’t mean everyone’s getting together,” Ron said, pulling her out of her thoughts.

Hermione scrunched her eyebrows in question at him. “Since when are you suddenly okay with Ginny’s dating life?”

“ ‘M not, but I reckon I’ll get hexed far worse than any guy who comes onto her if I don’t leave it.”

“Smart choice.”

“May not say the same for you though,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?” Hermione wasn’t sure if she’d heard him right. “Last I checked, I’m not your sibling, and I don’t think I need protecting.”

“Well, you are my best friend and I don’t want any bloke thinking he can take advantage of you.”

“Who’s to say I can’t handle myself?” Hermione felt her cheeks flush. This was not where she hoped the conversation would lead, but it’s what she got for playing with fire.

“I’m not saying that! You don’t know what the other guys- you know what? Nevermind. It’s not important,” Ron cut himself off.

“The other guys what, Ron? You can’t just cut off mid sentence like that.”

He gave her a look that clearly said, ‘did you just hear yourself?’ Okay, so she’d been guilty of doing that a lot over the years. She waited impatiently for him to answer, but when he did, it wasn’t what she was expecting.

“You know, we’ll probably see some shooting stars tonight.” He had changed the subject completely.

Hermione huffed as she lay quietly on her back, and took in a deep breath of the dewey air around them. She watched the sky as Ron laid down beside her. He was close, and she could feel the heat of his hand and arm against her own.

More and more stars appeared as the sky grew darker. It always amazed Hermione with how many they could see out in the country. It was so different from the city life she’d grown up in.

They must have been looking in the same spot at the same time, just as a faint flash darted across the sky. “Look, there! Did you see it? Shooting star, make a wish,” Ron said eagerly.

Hermione nodded as she smiled. His excitement was contagious. “Yes, I did.” She closed her eyes and made her wish. When she opened them she saw Ron had propped himself up on his elbows.

“So, what’d you wish for?” She could barely make out his lopsided grin from the faint glow of the lights in the house behind them as he asked the question.

“I can’t tell you that. Everyone knows if you share your wish it won’t come true,” Hermione laughed as she rolled her eyes at him.

“So, that means your wish is something that can happen?” Ron teased her. Her face fell slightly, and she could tell he regretted his words. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just something my brothers would say to Ginny and I when we’d all come out here. It was just a way to get us to give away our wishes.”

“No, you’re right. Wishes are just that,” Hermione said with a sigh. “No one could ever want me anyways.” She figured that even if he didn’t share the same feelings for her, she could trust him with that piece of information. He was her best friend, after all.

“What?” Ron asked, his tone serious now.

“Nevermind, it’s nothing. I just wished that I might get a boyfriend of my own this year. See what all the fuss is about.”

“That’s not impossible, though.” Ron said quietly.

Hermione gave a most ungirly like snort. “Have you looked at me lately? I’m not exactly Lavender and Parvati. Who in their right mind would choose me when I’ve got those two as my dorm mates?”

“Hermione, does this have anything to do with what we talked about earlier?”

“What do you mean?” There I go again, all but pouring my soul out to you and you completely change the subject by bringing up a different conversation, Hermione thought. 

“The whole scared of falling in love thing.”

“I’m not following, Ron,” Hermione was stifling back the scream of frustration she desperately wanted to let out. Could she ever get a straight answer out of him?

“Just what you said about not measuring up to the other girls, which I don’t think is true, by the way, and what you mentioned about being scared to fall for someone who doesn’t fancy you back.”

Hermione thought about what Ron had said. Maybe she didn’t give him enough credit. Those two things were definitely related. “I guess you’re right.”

“Well, I wouldn’t pass it off. You never know...the person you fancy might surprise you,” he said as he looked back up at the sky.

She was gaping at him. Did he know? Had she given herself away? The sheer panic was enough to make her want to jump up and run back into the house and avoid him for the rest of the night. Miraculously, though, she stayed rooted in her spot. And perhaps even more amazingly, she came up with a witty retort. 

“And how would I know if that person fancied me back?”

She heard him take a deep breath in and exhale slowly. “Well, for one, he’d enjoy spending time with you. Even if it meant giving up a whole beautiful afternoon to revise in the library.” 

Her mind was instantly thrown back to the week before O.W.L’s. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Ron had offered to go with her to the library to help her study. It was one of the few times he’d offered instead of being asked. Hermione felt her heart begin to beat faster in his chest as she waited for him to continue.

“He’d also make sure you weren’t overworking yourself because you have a tendency to do that, you know. Making sure you take breaks, actually show up and eat your meals. Oh, and even though you don’t need any more to do, he’d still help with the crazy groups you think up.” Ron grinned at her.

She had no doubt in her mind that he was referring to S.P.E.W. and the DA. “Anything else?”

“Well, I’ve been told that it’s fairly telling if a bloke gets a girl some fancy, personal gift for her birthday or Christmas. Might mean a bit more than, say, a planner.” His eyes averted her gaze at this last one, but she could hear the playful sincerity in his voice as she thought back to the bottle of perfume he’d given her for Christmas.

“Ron…” she said in almost a whisper. It was quiet, save for the rustling of the trees in the soft breeze and the occasional cricket in the field beyond. She was sure that he heard her.

“I’d say those are pretty good ideas of whether someone fancies you or not. You wouldn’t happen to have any tips for me, would you?”

Hermione stared at him. Her brain was past the point of mush and she couldn’t even begin to comprehend putting something so clever together without spilling her heart out to him. “Only one thing comes to mind,” she said softly.

“Yeah? Are you gonna share, or keep that secret to yourself?” Ron asked her.

Hermione closed her eyes and hoped what she was about to say wouldn’t backfire on her. “My suggestion would be to show her how you feel...because she feels the same way.”

Neither had realized that their faces had inched closer together throughout the entire conversation. Hermione glanced briefly down at Ron’s lips before she looked up and met his eyes with her own, bravely searching for any understanding reflecting back at her. Whatever her next thought was about to be, she’d never know as she felt Ron draw closer to her. Her eyes fluttered closed as his lips softly brushed her own.

That first encounter was tentative, but when Ron realized Hermione wasn’t pulling away, he leaned in again, more confident as he pressed his lips into hers. Hermione returned the kiss, though carefully trying to not come across as too eager. Gradually, they found a rhythm with the kiss, and neither wanted the moment to end.

Eventually, they did break apart, knowing that they should head inside before Mrs. Weasley came calling for them or sent someone out to stumble upon them. “We should head inside,” Ron said, as if someone needed to say what they were both thinking.

They stood up, and Ron reached out his hand and Hermione took it. She couldn’t help but smile as they walked back towards the house. Looks like wishes do come true, after all.

[ruluxe]

First Line Tag Game III

Hey hey hey tagged by @gaytaiga this time, tysm my dude! (ALSO tagging you back if you want to list more!!)

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line. Then tag 10 of your favorite authors!

This will likely be more finished works than wips because I deleted wattpad all other writing accounts that had wips a long time ago. I might throw in some excerpts from my unfished webcomic series though!

Tagging anyone else who wants to do this again, so make sure if you do it to tag me! 

1.  Pollution  — Character Bible Series [Christian Cavanaugh/Luca Braun wip]: The brain's ability to remember and conveniently forget is a peculiar thing. It often represses the bad memories, trauma's strange like that. Someone could live an entire lifetime without remembering anything yet the slightest sensation could trigger the worst memory locked away in the darkest depths of the psyche and worlds could come crashing down. [2019, Original Work]

2.  Pollution — Character Bible Series [Benjamin Keller/Parker Madison/Oz Hellsinger wip]: His skin is sticky beneath the mask; mouth and nose obstructed but his eyes are not. Still, it serves its purpose of concealing his identity-- or at least Benji hopes it does. The heat from his breath rises while beads of sweat swim down his brows and into his eyes so he can’t stop blinking rapidly. The contact in his right eye starts to shift and his vision is blurred momentarily before he's able to blink it back into place. Someone beside Benji urges him to hurry up. [2018-2019, Original Work]

3. (I Found You) In a Melody [galahau/abandoned]: The ivory beneath his fingertips is cool and smooth, making the stroking motion of his fingers waltzing across keys as easy of an action as breathing. Mellow notes flood the lounge as the cello kicks in, and Galahad’s eyes slide shut so he can tune into the music; the slow rattle of the snare or the bass drum kicking in at the perfect intervals, the taper of the cymbals and the resonating pluck of the cello strings. The sharps are chiming off the airwaves like dewdrops and finally the soft-silk flow of the lounge singer’s voice is the finishing touch to round off the harmony. [2015, Gangsta.]

4. Binding Patience [galahau]: Perhaps anyone with impatience wouldn't waste the time, but Hausen has all the time in the world when the end result is Galahad trembling on his knees at the edge of the bed, arms and hands bound in intricate patterns of rope behind his back, tethered and wound thick around his ankles like cast iron fetters. [2015, Gangsta.]

5. Radio Silence [galahau]: There's an audible click as the playback device ejects Doug's tag, and despite Galahad doing his best to clean off the blood, his eye still catches laces of it tarnishing the shineless metal. [2015, Gangsta.]

6. Turnabout’s Fair Play [Worick Arcangelo, character study]:  It starts with him splayed out and down on his knees, covered in the grime and filth of Ergastulum still clinging to his bruised and broken skin. He should have known better than to leave the sanctity of home by himself, but it’s getting harder and harder to look Nicolas in the face when all he sees is the shadow of his family’s blood splattered across it. [2015, Gangsta.]

7. The Aftermath [XS/1029]: Long after the chaos dies down and everyone’s left the hospital, Squalo’s not supposed to leave his bed but it doesn’t stop him from sauntering off to Xanxus’s private room. He suspects to find the other propped up against the many embroidered satin pillows he demanded from Lussuria with his brows drawn pensively, a miserable scowl on his face despite him supposed to be at peace in slumber. [2015, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!]

8. The End of Things [8059/yamagoku]: It starts with a kiss, slow and sensual, warm like the rising sun and just as bright. Yamamoto's pretty sure this will be the most memorable kiss of his life, knows it'll be the best kiss of his life, with the spicy smoke lingering off Gokudera's tongue etched into his brain; that's something he'll never forget. [2015, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!]

9.  Pyrexia [aokise]: When Kise wakes, it's to a throbbing headache and dull pain behind the eyes. His throat is burning raw and his joints ache, his muscles ache, everything is sore. He groans, feeling the heat of a fever spread through his skin like the heat of an unforgiving July sun is bearing down on him. [2015, Kuroko no Basuke]

10. Once. [deliyang]: He doesn't think before he moves, he just does. It's with snap-quick reflexes that he rips his gun from it's holster and aims it at the men in front of them. And Erica. Erica's there too... but it's not really Erica, is it. Things are never once what they seem. [2015, Alter End Series, Gangsta.]

11. Lightweight [D18/dinohiba]: It's quarter to four in the morning when Dino hears the scrape of metal against metal, the dragged out clinking of the keys against the lock. He's a little irritated, if he's being totally honest. It's not unusual for Kyoya to come home at this hour but it isn't unusual for Kyoya to not keep in contact during the day and explain himself or his whereabouts either. But perhaps there's a good reason as to why he's arriving home at four in the morning. In their line of work it's not like it isn't possible, but it had better be good if it's going to keep him in Dino's good graces. [2015, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!]

12. Mood  — Permanent Petals Epilogue [8059/yamagoku]: It isn’t that Gokudera wakes up in bad moods, in fact for the last few years waking up has been as pleasant as getting a full night’s sleep; no more shadowed insomnia plaguing the soft pale underneath his eyes, no more jittery and short cut patience – he is currently very content with his sleeping arrangements in this moment and all other moments that have passed and ones he has to look forward to in the future. [2015, Permanent Petals Gift Fic, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!]

13. Domestic [deliyang]: The house smells of eggs and rice, the heady aroma of rich-brewed coffee clings to the air. With an appreciative inhale, Delico’s lips slide into a smile easy as he makes his way downstairs.

14. : Advice [aokaga/abandoned]: Kagami isn't fond of days like these, no practise or games to keep him busy and the lack of a distraction leaves his mind to wander to thoughts that end up leaving a bad taste in his mouth.Aomine has been avoiding him lately, he's been distant and more acerbic than usual and Kagami can't bring himself to ask Aomine what the problem is. [2015, Open Spaces Series, Kuroko no Basuke]

15. When Time Stands Still [8059/yamagoku]: Sometimes you sit there for hours, your expression blank and your limbs numb and everything around you is eerily quiet but you can’t turn the volume down on the static noise that buzzes frenetically inside your head. You grit your teeth, you cover your ears but that can’t stop the sound. You get drunk, you take pills — despite your hatred for all things medicinal — but no amount of haze can muffle the shrillness. [2015, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!]

16. Broken [imahana]: It ends with Hanamiya on his knees, scuffed and scabbed and bloody and Imayoshi can’t be sorry for choosing the blacktop that’s as cracked and overused as Hanamiya is. There’s something about having him out here in the open, stripped of his clothing and dignity that sets Imayoshi’s skin on fire, gets him hot and irritated and he needs Hanamiya’s raw vulnerability to ease the itch whenever he gets it. [2014, Kuroko no Basuke]

17. Living the Dream [sourin]: Sousuke's shoulder aches and the near scalding hot water does little to soothe the pain. He's an idiot, he knows without a certain redhead having to tell him this, but determination is something that's bred into him and he just doesn't seem to know when to quit. He grits his teeth through the blinding white when he moves his shoulder just slightly and it jars him with enough force to make him nauseous. It makes him angry, makes him wish for a time machine so he can go back and do things differently. [2014, Free!]

18. Youth [S80]: It begins with standing on a ledge, too high to come off from for it's your only salvation now that you no longer have the resolve to live. But it's when the no-good boy with the large, round eyes saves you and tells you there is hope that you begin to believe. It's the smell of the baseball diamond, the warm sun and the air of dirt and sweat and perseverance that make you feel like you're where you should be. It's the fleeting feelings when you dash from base to base and slide in to home plate that make this age in time seem like an eternal stretch that you never want to leave. [2014, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!]

19. Rewind > Pause > Play [aokaga]: They had been fighting all day. Stupid, trivial, bickering arguments that had mounted into several, major shouting matches which in turn, had nearly lead to the end of their relationship. The months prior to this, Daiki thinks, should have been a warning of what was to come. [2014, 2021 REVISED, Kuroko no Basuke]

20. The Sidelines [aokaga]: Everyone thinks because you're stubborn that must make you dense. Everyone thinks because you're so self centered that all you see is you. Perhaps that were true in the later years of your Teikou run, perhaps that were true until you met him. You're curious about that enigmatic red head that has managed to surpass Kise and Midorima. You're intrigued of Tetsu's new light. When you find him out on the court that day, it isn't just coincidence. You need to know what this guy is all about. So you offer up a game of one-on-one. [2014, Kuroko no Basuke]

[angstyaches]

Charlie’s Hoodie

Alright, so here’s the first fic where Shayne is living in the Aldridge townhouse with Elliott and Felix (and Nancy and Ryan), which is in a city about three hours away from where Charlie is still living (Mulberry). This is about two days into his stay. It’s a slow-burner and very Angsty. I hope you guys enjoy!

CW; stomach ache from stress, emeto, anxiety, food mention, refusal of food, parental death mention, abusive guardian mention

Swallow the World: Three Boys in a Townhouse

He was supposed to be studying at his brand-new desk in the corner of his brand-new room in the Aldridge townhouse, but Shayne couldn’t recall how long he’d just been sitting there, hands in his lap, nails digging into his palms. It would have been a great time to get some thinking done, if thinking didn’t make his stomach ache.

He’d had a dream that morning, after falling asleep for about twenty minutes between nine and nine-thirty – probably the most sleep he’d had since arriving at the townhouse – and had woken up thinking he was with Charlie, in Charlie’s bed, in the Mulberry house. 

Remembering where he was, how far away he was, felt like a hand reaching down his throat and squeezing everything it could grab. The room had felt cold after that, not that he could do anything about it; it had a radiator, but he’d never learned how to use one. 

He’d pulled on the hoodie Charlie had given him; reluctantly, as the more he wore it, the more it smelled like him and not Charlie.

Thinking about Charlie came with its own stages. The first one was easiest to deal with because it crept in like a warm memory, or a dream. 

A second later would come the rug-pulling moment, as horrible words and disinterested looks would wash through the memory, turning it grey and making the Charlie in his head turn coldly away from him. 

The bargaining stage would come next, and Shayne would wonder if he could fix this still; and then he would remember that Charlie needed Charlie Two more than he needed him, and Shayne was a danger to Charlie Two. Plus, Charlie and his parents would be moving soon anyway.

And he would tell himself this was good, this was the best thing, for him to be here with the Aldridges, but at that point he’d be overwhelmed by the gurgling in his belly and he’d have to stop himself from thinking altogether.

A knock at the door made him jump, and the sound of a particular voice made him wince.

“Hello?”

More time must have passed than Shayne realised though, otherwise Felix wouldn’t be coming into his room to look for him. Shayne gulped and turned his desk chair to the side to see him tiptoe inside.

“Nancy and Ryan are all settled in,” Felix said gently, hanging back, halfway hidden behind the door. “They should be ready for dinner in about ten minutes, if you want to come wait downstairs with us.”

Shayne gulped again. He’d known he’d be meeting with Ryan and Nancy – who were technically his new guardians now – that evening, but he hadn’t thought about the fact that there would be food, and blood, involved. 

He’d managed to fight his nausea until now, but the thought of having to perform and force food down made his stomach feel like it wanted out of him, right there and then.

“Hey.” Felix stepped further into the room and closed the door behind him, leaning back on it with his hands. “You look a bit washed out. Are you feeling okay?”

Shayne frowned, a painful kind of relief flooding his chest as Felix visibly stiffened.

“You know, it’s – it’s normal to not feel like yourself after leaving home,” Felix said, clearing his throat. “It was a long time ago, but I remember my first few days here, when it was all new and I started realising it was my new life.”

Shayne lowered his gaze again, and heard Felix sigh lightly. The mint-haired boy shifted his feet, like he’d been about to come closer, but hesitated. Like he was nervous. Scared. Good, Shayne thought, turning his chair gently. He’d be happier knowing Felix was scared of him; anything was better than being felt sorry for.

Felix gave a low hum. “I felt sick to my stomach all the time, too.”

Shayne hadn’t even realised he’d put a hand on his stomach until he saw Felix’s eyes dart downward. His instinct was to move it away, and he did for a few seconds before he realised it was pointless. He let the hand rest on his belly again, keeping his eyes pinned on the pale wooden floorboards.

“Though for me, it was because of the blood,” Felix chuckled. His voice seemed to get higher in pitch, the more he talked. “It took me a long time to get used to it. Eventually they just had to start slipping it into my tea… Though, I – I guess this isn’t about that.”

Shayne’s stomach took a harsh dive towards the floor, and he had to tense his fingers even more just to keep control of the nausea. If the colour had drained from his face, Felix might not have noticed, or at least didn’t comment on it.

“I was already half-blooded when I got here,” Felix went on, “so I felt like I was bonded to Ryan before I even met her. Not – not that you have to worry about that. You’re practically family already, right?”

Shayne frowned and bit his lip against arguing; Felix was just trying to be nice, and possibly didn’t know anything about the Devines. But paperwork didn’t mean family. Hours clocked under someone’s roof didn’t mean family. Leaving someone in a bad situation didn’t mean family.

“I understand it’s not the same though,” Felix said. “I also had Elli when I came here, so it - it must feel weird, being here without your friend.”

The fact that he’d said ‘friend’ singular, and not ‘friends’ in general, meant that he was talking specifically about Charlie. The name hit as hard as though it had actually been said. Shayne breathed deeply as he felt his stomach churn against his hand.

“You want to talk about it?”

The natural thing for Shayne would have been to make some defensive remark, but he didn’t even want to open his mouth just then. He swallowed thickly and gave a sharp shake of his head. No, he absolutely did not want to talk about anything. How long did he have to sit here in silence before Felix fucked off?

“Buddy, you’re feeling really sick, huh?” Felix’s eyes softened when Shayne looked up at them again. “Hey, I’m positive Nancy and Ryan won’t mind if you take one more evening to rest. They’re reasonable ladies. Most of the time.”

Shayne was suddenly reminded of the heart-lifting relief of being told, as a kid and before his real parents had died, that he could stay home from school if he was feeling too sick. After that, Madelyn and Watson had always decided, on their terms, whether or not he could stay in bed. He felt the admission of weakness burning hot behind his eyes, but decided it would be worth it if he could just go to bed and try to forget the sick feeling in his stomach.

“I’ll say something to them, if you like.”

“You don’t have to,” Shayne mumbled. He cringed at hearing himself automatically try to reject the help that Felix was offering.

But Felix just flashed his little fangs again. “That doesn’t usually stop me. Look – I don’t know. If you’re up for it later, I can come back. We can talk, or – or we can move to my and Elli’s room and just watch T.V. Whatever you feel like.”

Shayne faintly shook his head, barely considering the offer. Guilt clung in the back of his throat, like his words were echoing inside him before he’d even said them. “Just leave me alone, Felix.”

Felix turned his head to stare at the floor too, so silent that he might have stopped breathing altogether. “Sure,” he chirped after a few seconds. “If – if that’s what you want.”

Shayne waited for Felix to leave before lying down on top of the blankets. He spent a few minutes like that, muscles clenched but not quite shivering from the cold, before finally getting into the bed.

He lay on his front and closed his eyes, trying not to let his thoughts wander any further from the four walls surrounding him. It worked, in a way, but then he just found himself wishing Charlie was inside those walls with him, and that was beside the point.

He tried listing the history topics he’d been supposed to revise that afternoon, imagining bullet points in his head until it all spun together and made him feel nauseous again. He told himself thank god he hadn’t had to go to that dinner, told himself to remember to thank Felix later, and apologise for being short with him. He had to be careful, now that he knew how badly it hurt when he messed up his relationships.

Restlessness and queasiness drove him out of bed again, and he dragged himself to the small ensuite bathroom attached to his room. The mirror showed him exactly how awful he looked, and it was no wonder Felix had offered to get him out of going to dinner. 

The dark circles under his eyes were deeper than usual, probably since he’d barely slept since the night at Mulberry, the night with Charlie, the night before the kiss, the night before he’d said those awful things –

No, no, no. 

He ran cold water over his hands at the sink, ignoring how they shook, and took a few sips from his palm. Small sips, barely enough to wet his lips, for fear of how the cold liquid would feel on the way down. 

Oh, but Charlie would make him drink, wouldn’t he? Charlie would be upset if he knew Shayne had barely had anything to eat or drink in so many days, he’d look so sad – if he even cared at all anymore, after hearing what Shayne had said to Elliott about him.

No...

Shayne clutched the edge of the sink in shock as he gagged, keeping his mouth clamped shut and closing his eyes. His legs had turned to mush all of a sudden, and he felt like he might sink through the floor. He shakily eased himself closer to the toilet, only letting go of the sink when he could put his hands on the cistern instead. 

He retched over and over again, until he managed to choke up a pitiful spatter of bile and acid. He lowered himself gradually so that he was kneeling down on the tiles, shaking and quietly sobbing and wishing for his friend.

___

Felix once again knocked before coming in. Shayne was still retching emptily when he found him. His stomach had emptied, and his throat had dried so quickly that it now just felt like fists clamping around his insides.

“Hey,” Felix said with an air of urgency. “Oh, gosh, is – is it alright for me to be here, Shayne? Do you need to be by yourself?”

Shayne’s chin trembled as he gasped to catch his breath. He wanted to speak, but his tongue was too heavy in his mouth, and all he could manage was a low whimper. He laid a hand on the floor next to him, fingers reaching weakly in Felix’s direction.

“Alright, I’m here.”

He felt Felix’s hand rest lightly on his shoulder, almost like he had feathers instead of bones. Shayne shivered at being touched, though he couldn’t tell for sure if it repulsed him or not because his body was too busy fighting the nausea.

“Relax, bud, I don’t think there’s anything for you to bring up,” Felix said softly. “Try to catch your breath, okay?”

When he finally got his breathing under control and the retching slowed, Shayne turned towards Felix, eyes glassy and pinned to the ground. The smaller boy helped him up from the floor and guided him back through to the bed, pulling back the blankets for him with one hand.

“Doing okay?” Felix asked softly as Shayne sat down.

“Mmhmm,” he replied. He didn’t feel overwhelmed with nausea anymore, but his belly was aching horribly, muscles tense from the dry heaving.

Felix slid onto the end of the bed and pulled his legs underneath himself. He sat and watched Shayne carefully from there. Like a puppy. Shayne slowly eased himself under the blankets, careful not to jostle Felix or himself too much. His voice was hoarse from coughing up acid, and he couldn’t bring himself to clear his throat. He leaned his back against the headrest.

“How was – how was the dinner thing?”

“Aw, bud, you probably don’t want to hear me going on about food right now,” Felix said. His eyes brightened. “But Nancy and Ryan weren’t mad, if that’s what you were worried about. They said to tell you not to worry, and they’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”

Shayne pulled at the sleeves of Charlie’s hoodie, covering his wrists and the palms of his hands. He felt Felix follow his gaze towards the thick red fabric.

“I was thinking, and – when I mentioned Charlie earlier, I hope I wasn’t overstepping or anything.” Felix was starting to sound nervous again. “I have a tendency to do that, and it can be a tad overwhelming for some people.”

Shayne bit the inside of his lip. He felt a gurgle begin in his stomach before it sounded off, and he let out a little whine alongside it.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, realising Felix must have heard it too.

“Aw, buddy, it’s fine. Look; see if you can drink some of that.”

Shayne spotted the steaming teacup next to the bed. He had a vision of Charlie bringing him tea in bed, and had to suddenly blink back tears as he looked at Felix.

“It’s just ginger tea.” Felix’s eyes widened. He frowned and played with his own hands. “I know I said earlier they used to hide blood in my tea, but it’s not – it’s not spiked or anything.”

“No, I – thank you.” Shayne reached carefully for the tea and hoping his stupid shaky hands weren’t about to spill it all over the sheets. He gulped hard, willing his breath to become steady, his eyes to become dry. “F-for coming back, too. Um, seriously.”

“Hey, it’s nothing,” Felix muttered, averting his gaze as he blushed.

Shayne let the mug rest in one hand for a few seconds, while he pressed the cuff of Charlie’s hoodie against his eyes. The sleeve brushed across his cheeks, and his head spun for a second with that familiar scent. Fuck. He screwed his eyes shut for a second before lifting his face and trying to focus on the tea, on Felix, on things that were warm.

“If you still don’t feel like talking,” Felix said slowly, “I – I thought, maybe, I’d tell you how I became an Aldridge, if Elliott hasn’t already told you.”

“He hasn’t,” Shayne admitted shakily. “I, uh, didn’t, um, didn’t even know your name until you told me yourself.”

“Are you serious?” Felix pressed a hand to his head. “Gosh, I would have made a much grander introduction for myself if I had known that.”

Shayne shook his head; with the state he’d been in when they’d first met, he was relieved Felix hadn’t tried anything more extravagant. He tentatively wrapped both hands around the mug, ignoring the handle, grateful for the warmth.

“I could have had five hot guys jump out and unzip their jackets to reveal t-shirts that spelled out F-E-L-I-X.” Felix bounced a fist against his knee. “Gosh, wasted opportunity is like – is like sashimi without soy sauce, you know what I mean?”

Shayne gave Felix a look over the rim of his mug, a look that hopefully conveyed that he had absolutely no idea what he meant. He took a slow sip, and although it was a little too hot for his tongue, his whole body seemed to thaw a bit as the heat curled down through him.

“Never mind,” Felix laughed. “Okay, well, let’s see – I guess the first thing you should know is that my name wasn’t always Felix. Only Elliott knows my real name, and it’s important that it stays that way. I’m not even sure Ryan and Nancy know I ever changed it.”

“What?” Shayne muttered as he blew gently on his tea. His stomach gave a low growl, though this time it wasn’t voicing nausea, but its anticipation of more of the warm, comforting drink. “Were you running from the law?”

“Not at the start,” Felix said, leaning back a little as he got comfortable. “I was a bit like you, actually. I was running away from home.”

[juuten]

A Twinkle in the Dark | Muku Sakisaka

This is my zine piece for A3 Tarot Zine! It was my first time writing for a zine and for Muku. I revised this a lot of times because on the first few months, I direly needed to fix my writing, and most of all, my instincts always told me that I could still improve. I really hope I portrayed Muku well. Anyway, I’m thankful for this experience and I will use it to improve more!

To commence, I am now open for requests! Please see the rules. (UPDATE: I am closed for requests)

Check out the fantastic artworks and fan fics here!

There is also an AO3 Collection of A3 Tarot Zine fan fics! I think the name collection is ‘A3 Tarot Zine.’ However, I can’t add mine there since I don’t have an account :”D

A mere injury. It took a mere injury for him to quit the track and field club. 

It has been weeks, yet the scar on his heart still dripped blood. He shut his eyes as he felt a subtle throb from his right foot. Muku hugged his legs close to his chest. It wasn’t a mere injury at all. How could it be, when it was the main reason his dream was shattered to tiny pieces? They can only be swept away into the dark corners of the bin, never to see the light again.

At the corner of his eye, Muku jumped as he noticed the vibrant colors of his room began to dissipate. When Muku adjusted his position, his eyebrows furrowed. His feet almost touched the edge of the bed, which is odd. Looking down, he gasped as he saw the bed slowly shrinking. But not only that. All of the objects, even his room, began to dwindle. 

Muku bolted to his feet and opened the door. However, instead of marble tiles, his feet pressed on black soil. 

Muku slowly looked up. 

Monochrome hues tinted his surroundings, but what made Muku’s hair stand on its end were lifeless trees towering over him. Their long and horrifyingly thin trunks acted as their bodies, while the hole served as an eye empty of white. He trembled as their branches looked like claws that would ensnare him once in reach.

But what caught his eye are the words roughly carved on the trunks.

Those memories he locked inside his mind bursted open. He remembered his ankle suddenly tilting during a running session that made his body stumble on the ground. His mind was still familiar with his reaction at the sight - wide eyes, goosebumps, and rapid beating of his heart.

Just like what he was currently feeling.

His mind urged him to run far away and escape from this horrible world. However, his body betrayed him as he sunk to his knees.

His (former) teammates had hopes that he would be the ace. They cheered him on, saying he deserved it. Until that moment, he didn’t know two words could dissipate those hopes into thin air and make him live miserably.

‘I quit.’

He didn’t know what time he slept again, but the horrid image he saw on the mirror hanging on the wall told it. His pale skin made him qualified to be a ghost in addition to the dark eyebags dangling underneath his eyes.

He knew he needed to rest, however, he wanted to read a new manga in hopes of relieving him from ‘that.’

Muku slowly stood up, approaching the tall bookshelf beside his study desk on the side. The bookshelf was full of books of all sorts, with the manga leading in number. His eyes scanned every title until it landed on one.

He touched the spine of the manga, his fingers ghosting over the smooth texture. Then he removed it from the shelf. Muku inspected the cover. He swooned as he saw the protagonist’s crown on his head, cape draped on his shoulders, and the sword beside his hip. Then he blushed as there was a woman in a dress with a bright grin that outshined the Sun behind them.

When Muku opened it, it was as if his time became parallel to the prince's world. He cheered for the protagonist when he fought a gruesome battle to protect his lady. There was also a scene wherein the prince confessed. Not only his lover cried at his words, but even the reader himself.

Muku gasped as his surroundings suddenly changed. The trees embodying the monsters appeared with that horrid word still carved on them. However, they seemed to be bolder and bigger as if they wanted it engraved in his soul. 

‘I still failed to be an ace.’ Muku choked as he attempted to hold back his tears. However, each of them escaped from his eyes. He abruptly sat on the ground, wailing out to the silent world. His heart hurt. It felt like someone wanted to rip it out and mercilessly step on it.

Through his blurry vision, he saw a twinkling light an inch before him. Its radiating glow was like a spell that stopped the flow of his tears. Muku blinked as he wiped his tears with his hand. Somehow, the twinkle glimmered like a crown as the father laid it on his son. The sunlight beamed on the crown as if approving the newly-crowned prince.

Muku’s eyes slowly widened. He opened his mouth but closed it again. Can he pursue a dream again? What if the same thing will happen? However, being a prince looked so cool like in the shojo manga, especially when he still faced battles despite losing several times. Muku wanted to be cool too.

“I don’t know if I can, but . . .” When Muku stood up, he directly looked at the twinkle. “I want to be a prince.” 

When his finger touched it, his body began to fade into a white glow. With a smile, he never noticed the word carved on the trees fading.

This was the first step in becoming a prince, but Muku was already trembling as the lights glared at him. He tried to take deep breaths to calm his racing heart, except all air was forced out of him as the Director called their attention. 

Then the words that came out from her made Muku blink. He, a good-for-nothing who can’t even say good morning confidently, will act alongside Tenma Sumeragi? But that thought disappeared when Kazunari, whom he just met minutes ago, wrapped an arm around him with a warm grin on his face. 

However, once rehearsals started, Muku was already walking on eggshells. He always stuttered out his lines, and when Tenma pointed that out, Muku’s stammering worsened. 

“I can’t deal with all of you, especially you, Sakisaka!” Tenma yelled before slamming the door shut on his way out.

Does he even have the right to act any more after being told that? His surroundings dimmed at that thought.

Muku sat on his bed, a depressive sigh escaping past his lips. He glanced down at his script with multiple sticky notes peeking between the pages. His hand reached out to it, but he stopped. It felt sinful - an unworthy actor touching a script.

Muku was about to turn away, but a small light suddenly bursted in between the pages. Out of curiosity, he opened it. Seeing his name alongside his role ‘Sinbad’, he remembered - Tsuzuru wrote the roles with them in thought, and the others were working hard to show the best play. Tenma was right - it was because of his lack of confidence that practices weren’t improving. He hindered them from performing their best, and he knew he needed to do something.

Kazunari, who was silently sitting on his bed the whole time, noticed him. “Mukkun, are you alright?” 

Muku nodded. “Yes! Thank you, Kazu-kun.”

Kazunari didn’t mirror his expression. “You sure? I’m all ears.”

“Yes, but I will work hard to meet everyone’s expectations!”

And so, before Muku slept, he stood in front of the mirror with the script and a red pencil in hand. In the first days, red lines were frequently scribbled under the dialogues. Nevertheless, the image of his team’s and audience’s smiles made him practice until he got the right feel. Kazunari sometimes joined him, adjusting his pitch and making dramatic gestures when reciting lines of other characters. The first time that happened, the session only ended with laughs. But as time passed, the red in his script quickly lessened and the exchanges looked more natural.

Though there was still a crucial step needed to be done. 

Once Muku got to borrow ‘The Arabian Nights’, he spent his free time reading the whole volume. People always see that thick book close to his face to the point Yuki told him that the book would become a part of his face one day. But if it will help his troupe mates, Muku wouldn't mind. However, he didn't expect it would be during the Summer Camp, which the director planned for a change of environment.

The other members and Director stood at the sidelines while Tenma and Yuki stood at the center of the wide rehearsal room. The marble floor reflected their image while their dialogue exchanges resonating in the room. 

“That’s not how you say it,” the leader suddenly said. “Scheherazade’s about to marry the king.”

Yuki turned around, his brows furrowed. “So what if she is?”

"Um, I know. . ." Muku, then, explained Scheherazade’s story of how she told stories with indefinite endings to keep herself alive after marrying the King. Yuki nodded his head - being forced to marry an executioner, how miserable can your life be (if ever you’ll have a life after)?

“I’ll give you credit for that,” Tenma said.

Then Yuki called the boy. “Tell me more about the story later for the costumes.”

Muku grinned. “Yes!”

After a delicious dinner of the director's curry, all of the troupe members gathered outside. The moon and stars greeted them with their light, making all of them illuminate. 

Matsukawa raised both of the plastic bags in his hand, a grin plastered on his face. “Summer is nothing without fireworks!” 

“Awesome, Sukecchi!” Kazunari said. “Guys, let’s go!”

“Will there be triangle fireworks?” Misumi asked while following Kazunari. All of them lined up towards Matsukawa to get one sparkler. Kazunari was the last as he set up the other fireworks on the ground.

“When those explode, bits will go into your head,” Yuki warned. The others laughed it off, but the leader gulped. 

When Kazunari was doing the countdown with the lit-up matchstick in his hand, Tenma grabbed a helmet out of nowhere and pushed Muku down. “Get down!”

“Woah!”

Loud crackling sounds rang throughout the camping site. Tenma shut his eyes the whole time, his hands securing his helmet while his arms covered his ears. Suddenly, a finger poked his arm. “T-Tenma-kun…” 

Once Tenma opened his eyes, he inspected Muku for burns, which he sighed in relief when he found none.

As Tenma pulled Muku to stand, Yuki cackled. He clutched his stomach, tears almost spilling from his eyes. “I can’t believe the hack fell for it!”

Tenma gawked at him. “Wh-wha…” 

Misumi cheekily giggled that infected Kazunari, until all of them were laughing. However, it was uncertain whether it’s because of Tenma’s gullibility or simply out of happiness. For Muku, it was the latter. 

A warm feeling bloomed inside him as he looked at each of his new friends. Muku never thought he would be able to break free from the hopelessness until he met them. Before, he was a boy who let his mistakes overwhelm him. Now, he’s someone who chases his dream even when he falls. A smile formed on his lips. They helped him grow through acting - an endeavor he did not consider before dreaming to be a prince. 

Another batch of fireworks painted the night sky, but Muku’s eyes were focused on the twinkle that adorned the vast. They were bright, like the hope he saw within his friends.

Muku closed his eyes, letting the tears pour out as he thanked the twinkle in the dark.

[amateurmagic]

Red [TodoDekuIida] - BNHA Secret Santa 2019

Hey there @dnd-beyond!! Surprise surprise!! I’m your secret santa for the @dailybnha Secret Santa event!! I’ve been grappling with writer’s block for the past few weeks so sorry that this meanders and rambles a bunch--I promise I tried!! 

I’ve never written anything from Iida’s POV and that turned out to be harder then I thought it’d be, considering I seriously identify with his neuroticism lmao. I also kept running out of synonyms for the three, so sorry it might get a little repetitive with me constantly reusing their names in dialogue

Because I’m a perfectionist at heart, I might try and do an edit or a rewrite of this in a few weeks. If I do, I’ll tag you in the revision if you’d like.

Anywho, happy holidays!! Hope they’re wonderful and have a happy start to the new year and new decade!!

Red.

The smell of damp concrete.

And the sound of steel clattering against the street.

Iida felt his pulse rise in his throat again, fingertips trembling against the pavement, only grasping at dust. A hoarse breath exhaled from his throat, still raw, emitting a rough snarl—just like—

Metal scraped against the ground—probably more of his armor. Iida’s eyes swiveled back against the quirk’s hold to assess the damage only for his gaze to land on something else. Something unfamiliar. A tattered piece of cloth.

Red scarf.

And the scrape of metal.

Presently he became aware of the array of chipped blades that surrounded him paralyzed on the street. His limbs now shrunken to almost skeleton-like proportions, wrapped in tattered bindings. His hands now long and bony and his fingers now too skinny from his expected proportions. Rolling his tongue around in his mouth, he felt his teeth at new angles and a new lack of space as the muscle pressed against the interior of his newly-hollow cheeks.

I am…

Pressing against the ground, his teeth gritted as he felt a new bolt of pain shoot through his arm as his brain registered the feeling of cool dampness against his skin. Bile rose in the back of his throat as the iron scent of blood invaded his senses. He choked back the urge to retch.

A pair of shadows fell over his crumpled form, heroes glowing in a backdrop of light. Their shoes only mere inches from his face.

“We’ve come to apprehend you, Hero Killer.”

Their voices made his body run cold—their authoritative tone echoing against the closing space of the alley where the shadows ran long.

Straining to look up, Iida couldn’t hold back the new series of shudders that shot down his spine as he recognized the two heroes of his judgment day.

“Todoroki,” he managed to choke out. “Midoriya.”

“Silence!” Todoroki barked sharply, his eyes cold.

“We have come to apprehend you for your crime against heroes,” Midoriya continued.

What crimes?! Hero!! I am a—

“No!! I—!!” Iida felt himself begin to protest before a small voice in the back of his mind argued otherwise. The selfishness. Ignoring Manual’s orders. The countless hero codes he’d broken the course of that one night. “I am—“

“Iida,” Todoroki’s voice sneered again, his palm reaching out as his flame began to ignite. Against the darkening peripheral shadows, a thin bolt of green energy zapped against the background.

Coward.

Iida pressed his forehead against the pavement against his mind’s conviction.

Iida.

“Iida.”

“IIDA!!”

Iida’s eyes flew open again, now met with a hazy outline of a dim room lit by only one fluorescent source. He found himself drawn to the familiar blob in the shape and hue of Midoriya’s hair as the boy continued to shake him awake. Reaching out, his left hand fumbled with his glasses on his nightstand as pain shot back up his arm.

“He—here,” Midoriya stammered retrieving his glasses from the floor and passing them to him.

Behind the familiar lenses, Iida’s eyes surveyed his surroundings as his heart continued to pound.

White. Monitors. Fluorescent lighting. Hospital gowns.

The clock on the wall read 3:07 in illuminated numbers.

Staring down at himself, Iida found himself dressed in a pale blue hospital gown, his legs tangled in his sheets, and both arms wrapped in bandages and his left one in a sling—that explained the misjudgment of his reach. His hand came up to his bare throat, now clammy with sweat, to reassure himself that there was nothing resembling a scarf there. Turning to continue to stare confused at the door, he watched Todoroki exchange a few words with a nurse at the door before shutting the doorway again and padding back across the room.

“Hey, you alright?” he asked.

“Drink this.”

Iida nodded robotically, accepting the plastic cup of water from his classmate and shakily raised it to his lips to drink. The liquid was lukewarm, likely leftover from their afternoon of mindless channel flipping on the room’s single television, but the stale taste was oddly comforting. Something about it’s overly chlorinated taste helped him calm settle his heart rate again because there was no way a liquid of this pH and cleanliness could’ve come from his imagined alleyway.

“Y-yeah. I think so.”

“You were dreaming,” Todoroki explained simply, coming to sit back at the end of his bed and pour himself a cup of water. “It sounded like a bad one.”

“Did—did I wake you both up?” Iida asked, attempting to swallow back a building lump of shame. Their expressions answered with only pity. “S—sorry.”

“Hey, it’s fine,” Midoriya replied, his better nature taking over as he hobbled over to lean against the foot of Iida’s bed. “We’re just glad you’re alright.”

Iida nodded numbly, the heel of his palm coming up to swipe away the beading sweat from his brow. Flexing his fingers slowly, he forced himself to exhale a long breath.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Midoriya asked as he settled back on his own bed. “It sounded pretty intense.”

“No, I—I don’t want to bother you two more.”

“You didn’t,” Todoroki replied simply. “I get them too. The nightmares.”

“And if you wanna talk or anything, we’ll listen.”

Iida inwardly cringed at Midoriya’s offer—the same one he’d given on the train platform, when he’d decided he didn’t want to listen. When he’d decided to bench his normally rational thinking and hand the reins over to his own anger.

“The Hero Killer,” Iida felt himself mumble. “It was me. And you two were—there to apprehend me for my crimes against the Hero Code.”

“Oh Iida,” Midoriya echoed, his large eyes softening with concern. Iida watched him begin to reach out a hand but his body felt safer to reflexively flinch away and Midoriya retreated.

“You said your crimes against the hero ideal,” Todoroki remarked, still sitting with his arms crossed. “You mean the anger you were telling us about earlier?”

Iida nodded, his eyes tracing downward.

“And you said Midoriya and me were sent as your—executioners?”

“More like Heroes sent to apprehend a villain. But executioners also sounds accurate,” Iida replied bleakly.

“And the crimes. What exactly did you mean?”

Iida paused to awkwardly adjust his glasses. Why did he have such a big mouth when he was an emotional wreck? Some class rep persona.

“I like to think psychoanalysis of my dreams might a bit of overkill guys.”

“But if it helps you get to the heart of what you’re grappling with,” Midoriya pointed out and Iida was forced to yield to that logic.

“It’s just that, at the beginning of all this, I was so angry about what happened to my brother—and still am, to be honest—that I lost all reason. All I wanted to do was find Stain and hurt him—make him feel the same pain that he caused me, my brother, and my family. In my mind, that was justified. But as we all remember that Tsuragamae-san told us, that type of thinking is neither justified nor legal for quirk users—so that leaves me as neither a hero nor a law abiding citizen—two things I always thought I’d be.”

Iida paused for a breath, his fingers still clenched around his cup.

“I admit my judgment is still clouded. I wanted to hurt Stain so much—and, honestly, I think I still do—but I can’t deny that his ideals do resonate within me.”

“Yeah,” Deku breathed, flexing his crooked hand thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking the same.”

“Really?” Iida looked over surprised.

Deku nodded, his curly-haired bedhead bouncing slightly.

“With such a strong resolve as his, I guess it’d be hard not to have a long hard look at your own morals,” Todoroki mumbled thoughtfully.

“The internet’s been having quite a go at it as well,” Deku responded. “There’s been a bunch of new forums started that’re trying to break down Stain’s ideals.”

“I don’t want to say that I agree with a criminal, but when you get down to the core of what he was saying, I have to admit he had a point,” Iida remarked thoughtfully.

Todoroki nodded, his brow still crinkled thoughtfully.

“So then, why did you see me and Midoriya as those passing judgment on you?”

“Because you two are worthy of being called heroes!”

The pair blinked back startled in response.

“At least that’s what I see,” Iida continued, deflating slightly from his initial response. “Back in the alleyway where I was ready to throw all reason down the drain in favor of my own selfish convictions. Then you two stepped in and brought me back to reality. You had no stakes in that fight but you came to help anyway. You put others first and protected the weak and injured. You two were heroes. And I was just in the way.”

“You saved me, Iida,” Todoroki responded evenly. “You deflected an attack that I left myself wide open for.”

“Yeah, and you helped me bring Stain down in that last attack,” Midoriya added, “With my injuries, there was no way I would’ve been able to deal enough damage on my own.”

“I think you’re both giving me far too much credit. In the moment, I was only focused on protecting you two because I was the one who put you in danger in the first place.”

“And of course we had a stake in the fight,” Deku continued. “You’re our friend. How could we not want to help you?”

“And protection of others is what it means to be a hero, isn’t it?” Todoroki remarked. “Stepping in and helping where needed, no matter the consequences to yourself.”

Iida felt a breath catch in his throat as he felt his friend’s words wash over him.

“I want to be a great hero. A cool kind of guy who’s always ready to step in quickly and help protect people!!”

Tensei…!!

“Woah, Iida,” Midoriya stammered, his eyes growing wide again.

“Wha—?”

“You’re crying,” Todoroki observed mildly.

I am…?

Blinking, Iida became aware of the small amount of liquid beginning to bead at the corners of his eyes. A long droplet fell loose from one eye and began to snake down the broad contours of his face before falling into the deeper furrows around his mouth. Placing his glasses on his leg, he began to look for something to dry his eyes.

“S—sorry!!” the dark-haired student sputtered, sloppily rubbing a part of his wrist not swathed in bandages under his glasses, only smearing the liquid more.

“Here,” Midoriya said, hovering closer with a tissue in hand. “Let me.”

Iida bit back a reflexive reply as he felt the fabric gently dab at the corners of his eyes, removing the discomfort and potential obstruction to his field of vision. Todoroki handed him back his glasses.

“Helping where needed, right?”

Iida gave a helpless chuckle as a reply. Todoroki offered a small smile of acceptance as a response while Midoriya grinned easily.

“That’s—that’s just what my brother said when I asked him what sort of hero he wanted to be,” Iida murmured, a new breath of relief leaving his lips.

“Well, it make sense,” Todoroki replied. “That’s a good hero mantle to strive for—it seems fitting for a hero that wears a suit of white armor.”

“Yeah,Tensei was the greate—“

“I meant you,” Todoroki clarified simply.

“I—I—!! Well—arum—Thank you,” Iida mumbled awkwardly. Wrinkling his nose in resistance, he couldn’t suspend the new heat that flushed to his face at his awkward classmate’s words. His eyes squinted at his body’s involuntary response. Straightening up against his pillows, he abruptly cleared his throat.

“So, Todoroki,” Iida began again, straightening his glasses. “You said you got these nightmares as well. May I inquire what about?”

“They’re—“ Todoroki shifted in his sitting position, taking a moment to exchange a look with Midoriya that made Iida immediately regret trying to expand the conversion. “Mostly about my family—about harder times.”

“Well your father is the number two hero, Endeavor, right?” Midoriya chirped. “That’s what you said back at the Sports Festival.”

Todoroki nodded.

“What about your mother?” Midoriya asked, his tone regressing to hesitancy.

Todoroki paused a moment, inhaling and then exhaling a full breath before continuing.

“She’s doing well,” he replied, a fond expression overtaking his prior grimace.

“And you have—two siblings?” Iida inquired, his mind drawing on the sparse bits and pieces of information procured in the past few months of being classmates.

“Yeah,” Todoroki replied, his distant expression back in place. “Just two. Older brother and sister.”

“Are they heroes too?”

Todoroki shook his head, a deeper grimace forming around his mouth.

“My brother’s studying to be a doctor. And my sister’s a teacher. She also looks after the house and keeps me and my brother out of trouble.” A fond smile worked its way over his face. “She’s been kind of like a second mother to me.”

“My mother raised me herself,” Midoriya added in. “My father—hasn’t been in the picture since I was a baby. I hardly remember him.”

Iida held back an impulsive flurry of questions. He hadn’t heard Midoriya ever mention his parents—except maybe during the first battle exercise when he’d mentioned that his first hero costume had been a gift. Listening to his classmates’ stories, Iida felt a new pit of something that resembled shame begin to form in his gut. He’d always had both his parents on his side—and Tensei who always knew what to say. And he wasn’t afraid to speak up about his lineage. The days of quirk breeding and eugenics was thankfully a habit of the past, and lineage was not the biggest talking point of a pro’s statistics. But it was certainly something Iida was more grateful to have then not.

“Maybe it’s better that way,” Todoroki mumbled, barely audible.

“What?” Midoriya responded reflexively from the other side of the room.

“Nothing,” Todoroki responded shortly and Midoriya backed down.

“We should probably get some sleep,” Iida felt himself suggesting as a wide yawn stretched over his face. “It’s almost 4:00, and ample recovery time necessitates a proper sleep schedule. That consists of approximately eight full hours for still-growing citizens such as ourselves.”

“Do you ever relax?” Torodoki mumbled, half tucking back under his cot’s top sheet while leaving his left leg to rest on top of the blankets.

“Erruhhm? Todoroki?” Iida cocked an eyebrow at his classmate’s sleeping habit.

“Side effect of my quirk,” the dual-haired boy replied simply. On the over side of the room, Deku gave a small snort of amusement. Iida chortled in agreement.

“What?” Todoroki inquired, sitting up confused. The duet of laughter only crescendoed.

“I—it’s nothing, Todoroki,” Deku finally managed to reply. “It’s just that a bunch of people in class have speculated about this—and now I think Sero owes me 1200 yen.”

“Oh, well, I’m glad to have been of service?”

The pair crescendoed into another fit of laughter leaving Todoroki to look on, partially confused, but not without a smile small content smile spread over his face. Blinking peacefully, he reached for the single light on the nightstand.

“Lights out?” he asked. Iida gave a nod of confirmation and Midoriya copied across the room. Todoroki’s fingers flicked against the switch, plunging the room back into a peaceful darkness.

Iida exhaled a long breath as he shifted onto his back, his eyes drawn to the fuzzy outline of the battery light on the smoke alarm embedded in the ceiling. His head still swum with thoughts of Stain’s ideology and the brief details Todoroki had supplied upon some prompting. Maybe he should’ve have asked so much? Todoroki had a good head on his shoulders—maybe a bit socially challenged, but certainly not at risk of being forced into revealing anything unwillingly. But a class rep should never be put in a position of being accused of prying. After all, Todoroki’s home life certainly wasn’t his business to meddle in.

Perhaps an apology was in order? Midoriya seemed to at least not be startled about any of the details revealed. Perhaps Todoroki trusted him more? Not that Iida had any complaint!! No, it was good that his classmates that were forming deeper connections with each other!! Truly a victory of the modern day high school heroic education system!!

“Hey, Iida,” Midoriya’s voice whispered after a moment. “You still awake?”

“Mmmff—yeah,” Iida mumbled, pulling himself back from his mind’s tangent thoughts. “Todoroki?”

“I’m still awake,” his voice responded. Some shuffling followed his reply, and then the shared light on the nightstand between his and Midoriya’s beds flipped back on. “Can’t sleep?”

Blinking against the new light, Iida just made out the fuzzy outline of Midoriya sitting up again, his head shaking slowly.

“No,” he mumbled. “Sorry. I—I liked talking with you both. It made me feel—“

“Safe?” Iida found himself adding. Midoriya nodded to him across the room. “Yeah, me too.”

Todoroki made a noise of agreement.

“It’s like,” Midoriya began again. “I know you two are there because I haven’t heard you get up or the door open, but—my brain won’t turn off. It’s like—I need to keep reaffirming to myself that we’re still safe. S—sorry. It’s my problem. Go back to sleep.”

Iida felt a fond smile stretch over his face as a memory replayed in his mind. Back when he and Tensei shared a room and thunderstorms still scared him. The warmth. The feeling of protection. Knowing that everything was going to be alright.

“Midoriya,” Iida interrupted as Todoroki reached for the light again. “It’s fine. I think I have an idea.”

“No no!! Iida really!!” the green haired boy sputtered. “I’ll be fine!!”

“And what class rep would ever accept that translucent answer?” Iida asked, beginning to clear off the nightstand between the beds. “And I’ve been feeling the same. Criminal or not, I can’t deny that Stain’s ideology got be thinking. But the fact that my entire worldview now needs reexamining because of a criminal’s words is beyond unsettling.” Iida cast a glance over at Todoroki, who nodded in agreement before getting up to help him. “I think we’re all in the same boat here.”

“Wh—what’re you doing?” Midoriya asked, straining to get up again.

“Midoriya, stay there,” Todoroki instructed.

“Well, science has proven the human contact can help raise levels of oxytocin in the body,” Iida began to explain as he flicked on his phone’s flashlight and bent down to unplug the lamp and drag the nightstand out of the way. “And, I figure in any case, this way we’ll all be able to confirm for ourselves that we’re all still here and safe.”

“Iida, what—?” Todoroki began to ask.

“We’re making a superbed,” he explained briefly, releasing the lock on his cot’s wheels. “When I was little, I used to be terrified of thunderstorms. And Tensei and I would always pull our futons together in the middle of the room. It always made me feel safe—so I figured… Y’know?”

Iida paused, his cot now askew in the middle of the room. A feeling of unease dropped into his stomach,

“Listen—this is just something that’s worked for me in the past. I don’t know if it’ll work here too. Sorry, I should’ve asked first. If you don’t want to, that’s fine.”

“No.” Todoroki’s grasp met Iida’s on the headboard of the cot. “It’s a good idea, class rep.”

Iida felt a wave of relief wash over him at the sight of Todoroki’s resolve. Midoriya stretched across his bed, gathering up any loose hanging sheets while Todoroki pulled his bed further away to make room for Iida’s to slot into the middle. Locking the wheels again, Iida looked over to Todoroki resetting the nightstand on his side of the superbed and plugging the lamp back in.

“You sure that I should get the middle?” Iida asked uncertainly, hesitating at the foot of his bed.

“Midoriya tosses in his sleep,” Todoroki remarked simply, resettling under his sheet again. On his other side, Deku made a sheepish noise of apology.

A smile settled on Iida’s face as he crawled over the foot of his cot and into the center position and handed his glasses to Todoroki. Resting his head back onto his pillow, he felt himself exhale a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding—maybe since the Sports Festival—as a new wave of security washed over him like sunlight. A click to his left signaled Todoroki turning the light off again and Iida’s eyes blinked open to a calming darkness. To his right, Midoriya’s breath was already thickening with sleep. Todoroki shifted under his covers before settling on his side for sleep.

Iida felt his brow unknit and his jaw loosen as he confirmed again that they all hadn’t died in that back alley. His friends had just helped him settle—again. And the world felt a little more okay again.

The smell of cotton sheets.

The rhythmic breathing of his two friends.

And a feeling of safety that he hadn’t felt since he was little.

Warmth.

Comfort.

Safety.

Red.

[toloveawarlord]

Ch. 2

Pairing: Sophia x Fenrir

Hey look, I actually completed another thing! Thanks to @plumpblueberry for loving my ocs as much as I do! <3

Sophia didn’t care for the wild party that had been thrown in her honor. Meaningless comradery. Having been at headquarters for only two hours, it seemed inappropriate to be celebrating her. She didn’t drink in excess either, knowing how alcohol affected the human body in large quantities turned her away from it. How long was this meant to last? Surely not much longer.

“A doctor that doesn’t drink, that’s a rare sight,” Sirius commented, joining her at the edge of the crowded room. Her sour expression made him worry that she would dislike the army more than before.

Her eyes flickered to him then back to the rowdy room before her. “I drink, occasionally.” She hadn’t the slightest urge to join in.

Sirius laughed. “You marked on our contract. Something you don’t like, little lady?” An entire paragraph had been struck through, maybe more. He could only see a little of the paper that she’d tugged under her arm. Never in his time in the army had a recruit marked up the contract of service, though something told him that this woman would not fit the mold of a normal recruit.

“I dislike nicknames. Sophia is perfectly acceptable.” Nicknames meant closeness, a bond that came over time. Neither of those things applied in her current position. Sophia stepped expertly out of the path of a drunken soldier coming up behind her as smoothly as one would move to a Waltz and fell back into her spot beside the Queen of Spades.

Another light chuckle passed his lips, clearly impressed with her. “You’ll fit in just fine here, Sophia.” He imagined it would take some getting used to, but someday, she might begin to feel at ease here. Nodding his head at the document, he asked, “If you’d like to discuss it, I’m free.”

The two relocated up to the office for a quieter and more private place to speak. Allowing him a moment to scan over her correction to the form, Sophia began to explain, “I took an oath as a doctor to do no harm, no matter who the patient may be. Impartial treatment. Just because I agreed to this job, doesn’t mean that I will be a soldier. I’m a doctor.”

Sirius listened with a soft smile. He saw no reason to enforce that code when he himself did not partake in fighting often. “I think we can arrange for that to be cut from the contract and your revision made.” He scanned the writing once again, bringing up the next clause. “You want to continue working for the clinic in your free time?”

“I’ll be passing my chief of staff position to another capable doctor at the clinic, but I see no reason to send in a resignation when there will be times that I can still be there to assist in taking care of patients. Our clinic is the best in Central Quarter, and as such, we get quite a lot of patients and there aren’t enough qualified doctors in Cradle to care for them,” Sophia said. It had been quite rundown when she first arrived there after medical school, having 5 staff members with only one doctor.  

Rising from the chair, she strapped her medical bag over her torso. Officially on active duty as the Black Army doctor at 8 AM the following morning, it left the remainder of the night shift open for her to work. Sirius promised to cover for her, though the rest of the men were probably too drunk to notice her absence.

Her pause at the door drew his attention. “There’s one more request I’d like to make.”

***

Central Quarter had been nearly abandoned at this hour. Shop windows were darkened, stalls cleared of all their products, awaiting the dawn of a new day. Only a handful of business had lights on: bars, clubs, and the clinic at which she worked. They were the only center in town that stayed open all night. The door creaked as she entered, announcing her arrival happily.

Passing through the waiting room, Sophia glanced over the handful of patients waiting to be seen. A few too many for her liking. Was this how the clinic would be run without her in charge? “We will be with you shortly, thank you for waiting patiently,” Sophia offered, all eyes turning on her. Many of the faces familiar.

A murmur of thank yous filled the space. Sophia entered the single door that led to the main trauma room, a half circle room with many exam rooms lining it. The nurses at the desk never lifted their heads, as if avoiding her gaze entirely. Odd behavior on their part, as the station was the main hub of chatter.

Intent on simply grabbing a patient file and setting to work, Sophia only gave a short greeting. Something was amiss.

The rustling of her bag drew her pale blue eyes downward, much too late to stop her colleague from snatching the first page of the contract. A quick skim brought a lopsided grin to his face. “Congratulations, Sophia! You’re officially the Black Army Doctor!”

Party poppers exploded around her, the nurses having been diligently awaiting the verdict. The rain of colorful confetti floated around the unamused doctor. “I’m glad that in my absence, the clinic will be in the hands of you lot.” Her hands picked at the pieces sticking to her raven hair. Highly unsanitary, yet it did bring the softest of smiles to her lips.

A round of congratulations broke out among the staff and some regular patients loitering around the check in desk. The spectacle growing bigger by the second. Sophia shook her head, holding back the laughter from their antics. “Don’t get too excited, you aren’t getting rid of me completely.”

“But you took the job, right?” Carter asked, waving the paper around as if reminding her of her own decision.

“Yes, but I will still be here from time to time, and you can always send for me,” She answered, continuing to pick pieces of confetti from her hair. Some were so tiny that it would near impossible to remove them all.

Carter gave a dramatic sigh. “Damn.”

“Don’t look so disappointed.”

The doors to the largest trauma room burst open, Marius in a frenzy. “Dr. Emerson! We have a problem. He’s crashing!” He called, shattering the light atmosphere.

Everyone moved in sync, practiced movements like a well-oiled machine. Sophia tied her hair back, snatching some gloves from a box fixed on the wall just before entering the room. Blood had begun to drip off the table, staining the white floors.

The man, Jeff Grant, had been opened on the table, the source of his bleeding come from an organ. Marius gave a hasty overview. A farming accident, barbed wire embedded in his stomach, but it had all been removed. The bleeding had been under control until a few moments ago. “I can’t find where it’s coming from. It’s too hard to see.”

“You can’t always use your eyes, Marius,” Sophia said, dipping her hand in to move the intestines out of the way. With her free hand, she prodded at the organs buried underneath. The clock was ticking. Soon, he would bleed out on the table. “Kayla, hang another bag of A positive blood. Alright, there’s a large tear in his pancreas. We need to stitch it up or he’s going to die. Marius, prep.”

His ocean blue eyes widened at her words. He had only graduated medical school a year ago and started his residency just after. “You want me to do it?” Kayla laid out the tools neatly on a rolling tray, sliding them up next to him.

Sophia’s sharp gaze rose from the patient to him. “You learn by doing. You want your patient to live, stitch him up. You’ve studied this. Now, Marius. He has five minutes before his blood volume is too low to reverse and he will be dead on this table.” She had faith in her employees, doctors and nurses alike.

Marius took a deep breath, nodding at her words. Though his mind wavered, steady hands took to the task. Sophia walked him through each step, relaying the process.

“You can’t go in there!” A shout came from just outside the door. Seconds later it burst open.

An out of breath Black Army soldier straightened up as best he could, despite having run all the way from headquarters to find her. “King Ray is calling you to the Garden. I was sent to escort you.” He gave a salute, out of respect for the new officer.

“Wait out front.” Her answer came short and with no visible signs that she would be leaving.

“It’s a direct order—” His sentence stopped at the cold gaze that greeted him. He went rigid, unsure of how to proceed.

Sophia would not be overrun by a mere soldier. This clinic might not be under her command anymore, but this soldier surely was. “Mr. Grant is going to bleed out if I let go of his intestines and Marius can’t stitch up the pancreas. So, unless you would like to take my place, I suggest you leave immediately.” His silence only infuriated her more. “Do I need to make it my first official order as the 5 of Spades?” Venom dripped from her threat.

The soldier fled, briskly exiting the room with a pale face.

“Kayla, can you get Carter in here?” Sophia requested. It would be a pain to have to deal with any backlash from being so late, but the patient came first. She was not going to let Mr. Grant die for a meeting.

Moments later, Carter whisked into the trauma room, a wicked grin gracing his features. “Is my damsel in distress?” He asked, stopping at her side. He would so miss getting to tease her as often as he had been used to. Though, the title of Chief of Staff sat well with him.

“Very funny.” Her blue eyes rolled, the signature response to his behavior. “Marius needs to close; the pancreas has been repaired. I have to step out.” She hated this, leaving a patient. Her commitment to the army was official, and she had to respect that.

“Duty calls?”

With a nod, Sophia reluctantly stepped away, disposing of her gloves. The Civic Center a mere five-minute walk away. The soldier sent to escort her never spoke a word, his face marked with unease. The Garden was a place where both armies came to meet, their top 13 leaders. The scowl grew deeper on her features.

He would be there.

A small mystery. Who’s it gonna be? Who in the Red Army does she not want to see? 

[bookwormscififan]

Absquatulate

Absquatulate: To leave without saying goodbye.

Agathokakological: Composed of both good and evill

Finally, Alto’s backstory! He’s very agathokakological.

This is an angst fic; read at your won risk (and maybe with tissues)

Word count: 1986

Look at my musical theatre knowledge! Also, this was supposed to be an Il Muto Phantom of the Opera thing, but turned out more sinister.

Oh dear, I think I put more Stories Untold vibes into it than I intended.

“Thank you, Mr Septicie. We will be in contact.” Alto smiled at the men in the seats, and left the stage.

Heading to the foyer, he looked around. A poster reading Hunchback of Notre Dame Musical Auditions Today was pasted to every available wall, people were sitting in costumes revising the audition pieces, and food was being passed around. Nobody looked at the poor people shuffling around with food.

He gulped back some water and looked at his watch. The people in seats had told him the final decisions would be announced at six, and it was currently four. He had two hours before coming back here to hear decisions, unless they called him earlier. Taking his phone out of his pocket, he made a quick call.

“Hey, honey. I just finished the audition and was wondering if I could meet you for some afternoon tea? Half an hour, the café down the street? See you there.” Hanging up, he adjusted his jacket, cracked his neck, and left the building.

Meeting his wife at the café, he ordered a chocolate cake and coffee, then told her about the audition.

“It was amazing, sweetheart. They were so engaged, asking me questions about my music background, my acting skills, my vocal range. They weren’t scared of the gravel. And when I started singing… you could have heard a pin drop. I think I’m going to get this gig.” He reached across the table and took her hand.

“As soon as I settle into this career, the kids will be happy again. And you’ll be happy, too.” She smiled at him, blonde hair covering an eye. Alto had met her on the set of the reboot movie Casablanca. She was playing Ilsa, and he was a background character. They had accidently knocked over a prop, and were trying to pick it up, when she met his eye.

They got married soon after the filming was finished. The film never saw the theatres, though. The studio with all the film had burned down two days after they went on honeymoon. Nobody could afford to film again.

“Alt, sweetie, nobody blames you for the fall of our home. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me. I was supposed to pay the bills. We’re all just happy you found this opportunity.” She smiled as he scratched his head. Opening is mouth, Alto was interrupted by his phone. He held a finger up to hold the thought, and picked up his phone.

“Yes? What? Really? Thank you so much! Yes, I’ll be right there!” Putting the phone down, Alto stood up, kissed his wife, and left the café, calling behind him that he had gotten the part.

“Alto Septicie as Quasimodo. Why does that actually fit so perfectly?” alto could hardly contain his excitement, recreating the choreography from Singing in the Rain, only without rain, or actually singing.

He dashed up the stairs to the theatre and ran to the auditorium to join the rest of the cast. It was a good selection, people from all races and musical backgrounds. Alto had auditioned just after the woman who was playing Esmeralda, and he remembered her saying she had never done musical theatre before.

He politely smiled at her when she turned to look at him, and she smiled back, confusion filling her features as she realised he was going to play Quasimodo. Alto looked at his shoes, face flushing.

“Sorry, sir. How does Mr Septicie look like Quasimodo? He doesn’t have a hunchback or any deformities. Wouldn’t you have cast someone who at least looked like the character?” Alto suppressed a chuckle. Wait till she hears my voice. The director smiled politely at her, and cleared his throat.

“Sometimes, Miss Crimson, appearance doesn’t give people roles. Mr Septicie, if you don’t mind, could you please sing a few bars for me?” Alto, smiling, nodded.

“With pleasure.” He sipped a bit of water, then cleared his throat.

“Bu̧t ͏s͞ud͟d̷e̛n̡ly ͘an a̷n̴g͟e͢l͡ h̴a̛s ͞s̛m̷íl͝ed at ̢m̡e͞/And ͝k͢is̴sèd m͢y̨ c̀h͢e̴ek̢ ẁith͡ou͜t ̷a̷ t͢r̛a͟cè ҉o̧f҉ ̀f͜r̀i̸gh̛t.” He paused, and looked at the director.

“Thank you, sir. See now, Miss Crimson? The voice holds the character. Now, do we have any more questions about your cast mates?” Everybody murmured slightly, still reeling from Alto’s singing, but nobody asked anything else.

“Hey! Alto, right? Alto, wait up!” Alto stopped in his walk down the steps as Miss Crimson called after him. Turning, he saw her running after him, dark hair escaping its confines, boots crunching in the snow.

“Geez, you’re a fast walker. I wanted to have a little talk with you. I’m Clara.” She held her gloved hand out to him, and he took it. He motioned for her to walk with him, and, smiling, she matched his pace.

“How did your voice get like that? You look like someone who would have a perfect voice. Like an…” She drifted off, giggling at her train of thought.

“Alto? Yeah, lots of people have said that.” He laughed as she blushed.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t judge. I was in the wings after I finished, and I heard you’ve had a bit of experience with musical theatre. If you don’t mind, I’d really like to learn from you.” Alto smiled, and agreed.

It was opening night, three months after the cast had been chosen. Alto was prepping his costume, making final adjustments as he heard the din outside.

“Honey, you look wonderful.” He turned and smiled as his wife peered through the dressing room door.

“You’re going to do a great job. Break a leg, I’ll be watching from the wings.” She left quietly. Alto finished dressing, then headed to the stage so he could wait in the wings for his cues. He passed Clara, who seemed a little distressed.

“Clara? Are you alright?” She turned around, face pale, and took hold of his arm. Her hair was neatly held back, and her red dress almost seemed to glow in the backstage lights.

“Oh, Alto, I’m so nervous. I’ve never done this before. I know the rehearsals went alright, but I’m so afraid something will go wrong.” Alto patted her back and smiled.

“You are going to do fine. Trust me.” She smiled, then let him go and headed to her post. Alto looked around at all the props, looking up at the sandbags hanging from the ceiling. It’s good to be back here.

“Alto! Quickly, it’s your wife!” He turned from his post to see that a crowd had gathered in the same place he was standing not ten minutes ago. Looking up, he realised a sandbag had fallen. Running through the crowd, he saw his wife on the ground, a large crater in her head, and a sandbag by her side.

“What happened?” He looked from person to person, begging for an answer. The lights flickered, turning off, then back on. Alto was alone with his wife backstage, all the people gathered had disappeared.

“Alt…” His wife reached out weakly for his hand. Taking it, he looked at her broken face.

“Remember… I love you…” Her hand went limp, and her eyes closed. Alt tried to rouse her, but each movement emitted more damage to her head. He held her close as tears streaked through his makeup.

“Oh, this is bad. You weren’t supposed to be here as she breathed her last.” Alto opened his eyes to see the glowing red fabric of Clara’s costume. As he looked up, the dress dissolved into a black garment, covering her head to toe in darkness. Death.

“What did you do?” She smiled sweetly at him, leaning down to take his wife from his hands.

“You needed a push in the right direction. Don’t worry, I got rid of the children.” Alto stood up, hands shaking and red with blood. He glared at her, cold in the pit of his stomach.

“Why…?” She smiled.

“Because sometimes things aren’t what you believe they are. People, cast members, even this performance. They aren’t what you think. Look around.” As Alto turned, he saw the backstage area was covered in cobwebs, wooden planks falling around him. There was no din outside. Stale air filled his lungs, and the stench of blood stung his nose.

Everything resurfaced as soon as Death picked up his wife. He had done this. His wife wanted to leave him, and take the children. He drove her to the abandoned theatre, the place where he first performed, trying to show her how far he had come since he met her. She was trying to change the subject.

A loose rope, a plank of wood. Alto looked down as he registered the blood on his hands, and the plank of wood beside his feet. He had pushed her under the sandbag and broken her legs with the plank. Each swing brought forth a line of anger. There was no production.

He fell to his knees as the realisation sank in.

“I… killed… her. She’s dead because of me…” He looked up at Death.

“You reversed time to make me forget. But it kept repeating. Each time, I’d beg you to bring me back, so I could change it. But it never worked.” Tears sprang to his eyes as he remembered the twenty do-overs she had given him.

“Twenty is my limit, Mr Septicie. I can’t give you anymore reruns. This is the end. What do you want to do?” Alto looked at Death, fear in his eyes.

“Take her away. Don’t let them see. I can’t go to jail. I’ll leave the country.” Death nodded.

“Go to England. Your cousins will be happy to see you again. Say hello to Juxta Position for me.” With that, she disappeared.

Alto left for England the following week. All his clothes and valuables had been shipped the day before, and he had called ahead to let his cousins know what was going on. Malvern had seemed happy to hear from him, so he had a feeling he was welcome.

As he closed the door to his apartment, he looked back on his past, and held back tears as he remembered his family. He hadn’t given any context as to why he was going back to England. Nobody needed to know what he’d done.

He shuffled down the stairs, dragging his feet and looking at the ground. Quietly he opened the door of the cab and climbed in. He barely spoke to the driver, looking out the window. The It Must Have Been Love scene from Pretty Woman played in his head as he looked out and wished it would rain.

He walked slowly onto the plane, and sat with his head in the screenplay of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was his wife’s favourite film. 

Climbing the stairs to the house, Malvern raced outside and took his bags from him. He chatted with the actor the whole way to the room, and even offered to help him unpack. Alto politely declined.

Pulling a photo from his bag, he placed it on his nightstand and looked at it with tired eyes. I’m so, so sorry.

“Well, look who followed my statement.” Death sat on his bed smiling at him. He glared at her and began to put up his movie posters.

“Aw, come on, Alt. Aren’t you even going to say hi?” Alto just waved.

“Well, at least you have a sense of humour. Hey, tell you what. I’m gonna go chat with Juxta, then I’ll play a game with you two. How does that sound?” Alto looked at her, eyes wide.

“Hey, look! A reaction. Ok, I’m off to chat with my mute friend. As soon as the rest of your cousins move back in, the game will start. Bye!” And she disappeared. Alto shook his head, and finished with his posters. Without taking his clothes off, he lay on the bed and fell asleep.

[ddaengjo]

love me like you do ┊ hwang hyunjin

genre: best friends to lovers au, fluff, angst

pairing: reader x hyunjin

warnings: cursing, drinking, infinity war spoilers

summary: you had been best friends with hwang hyunjin since grade school. you both knew each other like the back of your hand, and you shared everything with one another. in fact, all your friends joked that you’d eventually get married, settle down, and have five kids. of course, the both of you just saw that as funny, since you were both currently dating other people. but that was before everything became a complete mess.

author’s note: this is my first fic! i hope you all like it, because i definitely enjoyed writing it. (p.s. ― i use all lowercase when not writing formally, but in all my writing pieces i make sure to capitalize and use proper grammar!)

You're the light, you’re the night You’re the color of my blood You’re the cure, you’re the pain You’re the only thing I wanna touch Never knew that it could mean so much, so much

It was the sound of your phone buzzing loudly that woke you up at 2:30 a.m., groggy and angry and ready to fight the world. You groped around your bedside table, trusting your fingers rather than your sleep-blurred eyesight ― considering you were already myopic to the point that you could barely see something three feet away without your glasses on, you could trade eyesight with a bat and still be better off at this early hour. After a long while of uncomfortable straining,  you finally sighed in victorious relief, your fingers closing around the smooth case of your phone. Dropping it onto your pillow beside you, you squinted at the bright screen, trying to adjust to the sudden burst of light in the dark room. You swiped your finger across the screen, unlocking it, and opened your texts to find new messages from your best friend, Hyunjin.

[2:30 a.m.]  Y/N Y/N Y/N

You groaned, rolling your eyes and falling back against the pillows, debating on whether to answer his text or just leave him on read. Your innate sense of compassion (Hyunjin always swore that you were nothing but Satan, while everyone else who WASN’T your best friend since grade school and DIDN’T clown you for a living always called you a sweetheart) won the battle, and you ended up answering. But that didn’t mean you were going to play nice.

[2:33 a.m.]  hwang hyunjin you better have a good reason for this because if i weren’t so fucking tired i’d punch you in your perfect teeth.

[2:38 a.m.]  aw good morning to you too 💖💖💖 i’ve been up all night trying to make a head or tail of this history project and it just makes NO SENSE UGH Y/N I NEED YOUR GENIUS INTELLECT RIGHT NOW AND RIGHT HERE

[2:42 a.m.]  i absolutely hate you and your procrastinating ass.

[2:43 a.m.]  says the queen of procrastinating herself 💀💀

[2:45 a.m.]  YOU WOKE ME UP AT 2:30 AM YOU ASSHOLE SO STOP CLOWNING ME OR I’M MUTING YOUR NOTIFS AND LEAVING YOU ON READ 💀💀

[2:47 a.m.]  FINE FINE JUST COME HELP ME

[2:48 a.m.]  i’m too lazy to get out of bed so i’m just gonna skype you. but dw, you’ll still feel the salt coming off me when i talk 😘😘

[2:50 a.m.]  y/n you beautiful wonderful human being i love you so much i’d throw myself under a truck for you.

[2:53 a.m.]  lmao don’t let minjoo hear you say that unless you want her to actually throw ME under a truck buddy 😉

You couldn’t help smiling; it was impossible for you to stay angry at someone as goofy and vibrant as Hyunjin, especially because you knew him so well and for so long. You didn’t really care that you were wearing just a strap-sleeved tank top and shorts, or that you had a bedhead; Hyunjin had seen you in far worse states, like when you were in the fourth grade and had the stomach flu for a month. That was bad. You closed your texts, opening Skype instead, and clicked the very first contact, waiting for Hyunjin to pick up your video call. He picked up right on the second ring, grinning ear to ear; he was wearing his  “I ❤️ NY” shirt, his favorite gray hoodie, and khaki shorts, not to mention the goofy smile he always wore when talking to you.

“How’s Satan doing today?” he joked immediately, his face lighting up at the sight of you. His eyes twinkled with mischief as you rolled your eyes.

“Just fine, thanks,” you grumbled. “As great as one could be at almost 3 o’clock in the morning, when even the BIRDS aren’t awake.”

“For all it counts, I think your hair seems to be doing great at almost 3 o’clock in the morning,” Hyunjin said sagely, nodding his head. “I mean, it’s hiding your devil’s horns really well, and it also doesn’t look like a mama bat had a mental breakdown while making her nest!”

“I hate you.”

Hyunjin pretended to clutch his heart, wounded, despite the grin still playing on his lips. “Aww, Y/N, now you’re just being cruel. You know you don’t mean that.”

As much as you hated to admit it, you knew he was right. And he knew, too, judging by his little smirk. Had you been sitting next to him in person, you’d have thrown a pillow at him by this time.

“All right, what is it you don’t understand?” you asked, rolling your eyes yet again.

“Everything!”

You swallowed the urge to groan loudly. This was going to be one long, long night.

You're the fear, I don't care 'Cause I've never been so high Follow me to the dark Let me take you past our satellites You can see the world you brought to life, to life

You managed to get three hours of sleep that night, thanks to your dumbass of a best friend. He owed you big-time, you thought, sipping your coffee through pursed lips while glaring balefully out the window as you waited for him to show up at your house. You both had walked to school together since you were eight and he was nine; you weren’t planning on stopping that even when you were in college, since you were both hoping to major in some form of art ― he in photography, you in writing ― and attend the same university.

It was 7:30 a.m. when Hyunjin came jogging breathlessly up your driveway and let himself in using the spare key you’d given him. You had half an hour to kill before your bus arrived, so you’d not only made yourself coffee, you’d set a mug on the table for Hyunjin as well. He took it gratefully, crossing the kitchen in a few large strides ― he was a literal ten inches taller than you, with his 5’10” towering over your 5’0” ― to join you by the counter, where he wrapped an arm around your shoulders. To anyone else, it seemed as if you were both dating, but it to you both, it was merely just a gesture of affection between two old friends.

“So, Bigfoot, you took your sweet time getting here,” you commented dryly, looking him up and down with a wry little smirk. Your smile fading, you sipped your slowly cooling coffee and added, “All jokes aside, though, you look God-awful.”

“Thanks.”

“Your dark circles make it look as if you got punched in the eyes by an angry jack-in-the-box, and you’re looking pretty pale in the face,” you said bluntly, shaking your head. “Hyunjinnie, you’re driving yourself crazy. When you’re not staying up late for music lessons and photography projects, you’re staying up late doing your homework. You have to get more sleep.”

“Yeah, about that…” He ran a hand through his hair, rubbing the back of his neck absently as his eyes met yours. He guided you over to the couch, sinking into the seat next to you as he continued. “I’m sorry about last night. I know you didn't get much sleep because of me. So, to make it up to you, I called Minjoo and Yongwoon up, and we’re doing a movie night double date at my place. My treat.”

Hyunjin was so considerate. That was one thing that made you love him so much ― he didn’t just throw some fake apology at you and forget about it; he tried to make it up to you in full. He was like that with you, with his girlfriend, with your boyfriend, everyone.

As soon as the wall clock read that it was 8:00, you grabbed Hyunjin’s hand, practically hauling him out of the house as he chuckled, trying to keep pace with you. “Relax, Y/N, the bus is never early!”

“I know, but Yongwoon is!” you panted, skidding to a halt at your bus stop, where your boyfriend was waiting as usual, one hand in his tousled black hair. “Hey, Yong!”

“Y/N! You’re early!” He exclaimed; you caught sight of the odd expression that flitted across his face and realized that you were still holding Hyunjin’s hand. You let go of your best friend’s hand, seeing his girlfriend, Minjoo, standing a little distance away; Hyunjin fist-bumped you as he passed you, greeting his girlfriend with a brief peck on the lips. You turned to your own significant other, who pressed his lips to yours for a moment before asking, a little edgily, “Why were you holding Hyunjin’s hand? Y/N… do you like him?”

There was a long breath of silence after his words. Finally, you began to laugh ― not at him, but because you found his question funny. “Sorry ― sorry, Yong, that was just really funny. Babe, Hyunjin and I are just really good friends. We’ve known each other since our sandbox days! Things like holding hands and hanging out a lot are just… things we’ve been doing for a really, really long time. But it doesn’t change anything for us. We’ve been doing this for over a year, and I love you just the same, see?” You kissed him again, and this time he had no complaints.

As soon as the bus arrived, you scrambled to reserve the back row for yourself, Yongwoon, Hyunjin, and Minjoo; you’d all sat there as a group since freshman year. As usual, you slid into your window seat, with Hyunjin dropping into the one next to yours, as Minjoo and Yongwoon dropped into the seat across the aisle. You didn’t see the look that passed between his girlfriend and your boyfriend because you were too busy looking over Hyunjin’s paper and making small revisions, which were mainly just grammatical errors, since the majority of your cramming session had been last night.

“I think this is good,” you said finally, as the school came into view. The smile Hyunjin gave you was definitely worth all the grumblings and lost sleep; you loved the way his eyes sparkled and crinkled at the corners when he smiled, the way his dimples deepened, and it had been your personal goal since day one of your friendship, when he’d fallen in the sandbox and you’d helped him up, to never let him lose that smile. You were the one who was a year younger than him, but you were also the more protective one in the friendship. It was something people often teased you about, calling you a mother hen, but you wore the title proudly. You were indeed a mother hen when it came to your best friend.

Your first class was history, which you and Hyunjin had together; Yongwoon had psychology, while Minjoo had English, so you waved goodbye, promising to save them seats at lunch. Hyunjin blew an exaggerated kiss at Minjoo, who giggled as you punched him in the shoulder, pretending to gag. “Ugh, look who decided to become Romeo all of a sudden! Come on, lover boy, or we’re gonna be late for class, and I’ll get my first detention because of you.”

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my days in purgatory, if you please, ma’am, so on we go,” Hyunjin said very seriously, earning himself another punch from you. “Ow! You’re short, but you punch like a sumo wrestler! What, did you absorb the soul of a wrestler you reaped, Satan?”

“Ha ha ha, very funny,” you grumbled, sinking into your seat at the back table, across from Hyunjin, right as the bell rang. “I’ll reap your soul if you don’t shut up.”

Even as the lesson went on, you spent the class passing notes and doodling all over each other’s papers, sometimes laughing so hard your teacher, a well-dressed brunette in her early thirties, had to frown in your direction, her finger pressed against her lips in a signal of silence.

That was how every day was, with you both ― it was just you and him. You were the planets; everyone else was just a satellite. You were a technicolor movie; they were just the audience. You and Hyunjin were the world; they were just outer space.

So love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do Touch me like you do, to-to-touch me like you do What are you waiting for?

It was on the bus home that you succumbed to the sleep that had been haunting your eyelids since the morning’s coffee had worn off mid-math class. One minute you were arguing with Hyunjin over whether milk or cereal came first (you argued milk, having gotten that habit from your parents, while Hyunjin argued that it was cereal), the next you had nodded off, your petite head on his broad shoulder.

When you came to, it was in a familiar room with soft blue walls and GOT7 posters all over the wall. You sat up, squinting slightly at the pale, watery orange sunlight streaming through the window; the translucent chartreuse curtains were slightly open, showing a rapidly darkening sunset sky in the prettiest pastel shades of blue, pink, and purple. You yawned, stretching your arms, and glanced down; you were still wearing your school clothes, which were now a bit rumpled because you’d slept in them.

“Sleep well, Sleeping Beauty?” You turned your head to see Hyunjin smiling at you from where he sat working at his desk, which was a sea of scattered papers. His glasses reflected a bit of the screen of his laptop and a bit of the sunset, which didn’t seem like a beautiful combination, but somehow, he made it work. He only wore his glasses at home unless he was out of contacts to use, in which case you’d see him wear his glasses to school for about a week before going back to wearing contacts; you stuck with your glasses at all times, mainly because for one, you were terrified of putting something in your eye, and for two, you had awful bags under your eyes, which your glasses did a good job hiding ― or at least keeping anyone from noticing.

You stretched again, comfortable after a few hours of rest. “You bet I did. Like a baby, in fact. How long was I out?”

“It’s 6:05 ― you can do the math.” You could hear the smile in his voice as you took a moment to decipher his words. Then your eyes widened. “I SLEPT FOR THREE HOURS?”

“Don’t worry, you haven’t missed movie night,” Hyunjin promised. “We still have an hour till Minjoo and Yongwoon are supposed to arrive. Do you want to get changed? Maybe take a shower to freshen up?”

“Yeah ― yeah, sounds great,” you said, stretching one last time before swinging your legs out from under the covers, so that you were now sitting on the edge of his bed. “All my stuff is next door, though.”

“You can grab some clothes from my closet,” he offered, smiling in your direction. “Just like when we were kids and your parents were out.”

You got up, shaking out your legs to get some feeling back into them, and opened his closet, choosing a purple tie-dye t-shirt. “I’m wearing shorts under my skirt, anyway, so I’ll just wear this over those,” you explained, and Hyunjin nodded.

The warm water felt like a liquid hug; you spent twenty minutes under the shower before deciding you didn’t want to turn into a living prune. You found, upon wearing it, that Hyunjin’s shirt went to your knees, but what did it matter? It was cozy. You blow-dried your hair, which took another twenty minutes, before pulling it into a loose bun and glancing at the time in your watch ― 6:50 p.m., which meant Minjoo and Yongwoon would be here soon. You noticed that the light in Hyunjin’s room was now off; he must be downstairs, you realized, so you descended the stairs, knowing from the rising aroma of hot chocolate that you’d find him in the kitchen. He glanced up at the sound of your footsteps, his face lighting up with a smile as his eyes fell on you. “You look adorable. Purple is definitely your color.”

“And you look suspicious. Who are you and what have you done with Hwang Hyunjin?” you snorted, amused. “I was expecting you to clown me for how big this shirt looks on me.”

He chuckled, turning back to the stove for a moment before placing a snowflake-printed mug on the counter in front of you. “Hot cocoa?”

“Thanks!” You took the mug gratefully, blowing on the steaming liquid for a few minutes before taking a sip, appreciating the feeling of the chocolatey, sugary sweetness, mixed with a hint of cinnamon and the creaminess of whipped cream, sliding down your throat. You had just taken another sip when the doorbell rang, prompting you to move towards the door, the hot cocoa mug still in your hand. You opened it to find Yongwoon, holding a bouquet of red roses.

“Hey! You’re…” You glanced at your watch, which read that it was 6:55 p.m. “...Five minutes early! Oh my gosh, are those for me?”

“Yes, they are!” He handed you the bouquet, grinning ear to ear, until his eyes took in what you were wearing. His smile faded slightly as he added, “Is that one of Hyunjin’s, Y/N?”

“Wha ― oh, yeah ― yeah, it is,” you said, a little surprised by the question.

“She fell asleep on the bus,” Hyunjin explained, “and since she lost sleep because of me, I felt bad waking her up. So I just carried her here and let her rest up in my room while I did my homework. When she woke up, she wanted to shower, and we realized she didn’t have a change of clothes, so I let her borrow one of my shirts.”

“I see.” Yongwoon’s lips had tightened considerably at this, but he didn’t say anything. In fact, he didn’t say anything till Minjoo arrived, about fifteen minutes after him; it was just you and Hyunjin chattering away over your hot cocoa until that time.

By the time she’d arrived, Hyunjin had gotten a huge bucket of buttered popcorn ready. He had four cushions ready on the ground for everyone, but you didn’t need your cushion; you just sat down in front of Hyunjin, your head in his lap, as you grabbed a handful of popcorn, munching contentedly as your boyfriend and his girlfriend came to join you on either side. Yongwoon imitated you, grabbing his own handful of the buttery, salty popcorn, while Minjoo was more refined, choosing to take the occasional two pieces of popcorn from time to time.

“What do you guys want to watch?” Hyunjin asked, wrapping an arm around your shoulders as he leaned back, propping himself up with one elbow.

“American Horror Story,” Yongwoon volunteered immediately, earning himself identical protests from you, Hyunjin, and Minjoo. He conceded defeat, grumbling to himself before falling silent and waiting for one of you to make a choice.

“Titanic?” Minjoo suggested, earning herself a loud yawn from Yongwoon and an identical groan of rejection from yourself and Hyunjin. Her expression became a sulky one, which made all three of you laugh.

“Avengers: Infinity War?” you suggested. Hyunjin nodded enthusiastically; you two were pretty much the biggest Marvel nerds around.

“Are you sure you’re not going to soak my sleeve in tears again?” Hyunjin asked teasingly. “Remember last time, when you were bawling so hard I was afraid I’d have to pull a Noah and ark my way outta there?”

You turned and sat up to glare at him, indignant. “You were crying, too!”

He blushed, ducking his head in embarrassment. “Okay, okay, fair point. Any objections?”

Minjoo was too sulky to say anything, while Yongwoon was just too whipped for you to say a word against your wishes.

“All right! Infinity War it is,” Hyunjin declared, pulling you more closely into his lap before positioning himself comfortably, half sitting and half lying against his cushion as he tossed some more popcorn into his mouth, searching through Amazon Prime Video till he found it. Then he hit play, wrapped one arm around you, and sat back to enjoy the movie.

Fading in, fading out On the edge of paradise Every inch of your skin is a holy gray I've got to find Only you can set my heart on fire, on fire Yeah, I'll let you set the pace 'Cause I'm not thinking straight My head spinning around I can't see clear no more What are you waiting for?

Two hours and forty minutes later, you and Hyunjin were clinging to each other and sobbing your eyes out, your shoulders a mess of each other’s tears, snot, and drool. It would have been disgusting if this weren’t your usual movie-watching ritual ― you two were the sensitive ones, and if anything remotely sad were to happen in a movie, the room would be flooded within the next five minutes as you clung to each other and wept as if your hearts would break.

“I thought you said you’d be okay this time,” Hyunjin sobbed, wiping his eyes on the hem of his sleeve as he crushed you in a hug.

“I’m never emotionally prepared enough for that movie,” you sobbed back, mimicking him and wiping your eyes on the edge of your sleeve ― or at least trying to as best you could through his bone-crushingly tight embrace.

On your left, Minjoo was just staring blankly at the screen as if not sure of what to do in terms of a reaction, while Yongwoon, on your right, had his lips pursed and his fists clenched. “Damned Marvel,” he growled, shaking his fist. “Killing off Black Panther like that… that’s not fair.”

“Groot had such a bright future ahead of him,” Hyunjin hiccuped miserably, reaching for the popcorn, which was running dangerously low.

“I agree,” you sniffled. “Man, Bucky never deserves the shit he gets. He was captured by the Nazis, fell off a mountain, lost an arm, got frozen and experimented on by HYDRA, became their brainwashed puppet, killed a bunch of people, accidentally tore apart the Avengers, got frozen over again, and then right when he was spending a peaceful time in Wakanda he got drawn into the fighting and then h-he just goes ‘Steve…’ and fades away and just...” You broke down again, prompting a wince from Yongwoon and an eye roll from Minjoo.

“I know,” Hyunjin lamented, patting your back reassuringly. “Well… that was fun, right?”

“Right,” Yongwoon said unconvincingly, his eyes narrowing slightly at the sight of Hyunjin’s strong arms drawing you more tightly into an embrace. You two had been nothing but skinship since the beginning of the evening ― or, if you counted the hand-holding in the morning, since the beginning of the day ― and he was beginning to feel a bit threatened by the boy you called your closest friend. He felt threatened, jealous, every time your fingers tangled together, every time your eyes met, every time you laughed at something he said, every time you gazed at him as if he was the only boy in the world. It was getting harder and harder for him to believe you every time you declared yourself and Hyunjin “just friends”.

He didn’t like it at all.

Minjoo smiled thinly, her smile not quite meeting her movie-star eyes with their perfectly done makeup. “It was lovely.”

She, too, felt a surge of wicked jealousy every time you and Hyunjin were together. It hadn’t bothered her as much at first, but now, it was almost all she thought about. The way he smiled at you, as if there was nothing and no one more important. The way he always jumped to choose you anytime anything ― a game, a project, anything at all ― involved a partner. The way he didn’t seem to care when you saw him in his glasses, but almost always avoided wearing them around her. The way he always chose yours whenever he needed a shoulder to cry into.

The way he felt so distant from her, even if he was next to her, and yet so close to you, even when you were apart.

And she hated it.

As Yongwoon left, he turned to press his lips against yours for a long moment, the intensity almost double that of any normal kiss of yours. He stole a glance at Hyunjin, who simply smiled a bright smile at him before brushing Minjoo’s lips with his and waving goodbye as she left. “I love you, Y/N,” he whispered, stepping out into the night.

“Hey, Y/N, want to stay over for the night?” Hyunjin asked. You smiled apologetically. “Nah, I wish I could, but Mom and Dad are going to video call to check in with me in about half an hour. I have to make dinner before getting started on my homework.”

“I could join you,” Hyunjin offered, his eyes lighting up. “And, to make up for last night, I can help you with homework today!”

“Hwang Hyunjin, you legend, you’re so amazing that I could 10/10 kiss you,” you declared.

He laughed, rumpling your hair gently. “You already did once, remember? Spin the bottle, seventh grade. You were my first kiss, Y/N!”

“Oh, yeah! That girl from the classroom next door, the one who kept ogling at you, looked like she was ready to pee herself!” you snickered, choking on your own laughter and erupting in a fit of coughing that left tears in your eyes; Hyunjin rubbed circles on your back soothingly, hoping to ease the coughs. Once he deemed it safe to leave your side, he hurried back into the kitchen to grab you a glass of water, which you took and gulped down gratefully. “Thanks, Hyunjinnie.”

“Don’t worry about it. And be more careful,” he scolded, earning an amused eye roll from you.

“See you tomorrow? Noon at that bubble tea place down the block?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Good night, Hyunjinnie.”

As you left, he watched you, his fingers tingling where yours had been resting against them just a moment earlier, realizing how much you’d grown up… and wondering how he’d grown lucky enough to have you by his side during all these years.

Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do Touch me like you do, to-to-touch me like you do What are you waiting for?

Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do (like you do) Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do (yeah) Touch me like you do, to-to-touch me like you do What are you waiting for?

He didn’t fail to meet you the next day ― in fact, he was early, waiting for you at an outdoor table as you arrived, wearing a mint-green hoodie and black yoga pants, your hair tied back in a neat ponytail.

“Hey, Sasquatch,” you called jokingly, and his glance snapped up from his phone to you, his eyes brightening and the corners of his full, rich coral-pink lips tugging themselves upwards into a bright grin.

“Y/N! Nice hoodie, the color suits you,” he exclaimed, tilting his head slightly to the side as he added, “is it new? I’ve never seen you wear it before.”

“Yeah, I bought it last week,” you said, feeling a rush of warmth rise in your chest at the fact that he’d noticed that small detail. He really did pay attention to everything.

“I love the color. Does it come in men’s?”

“Not sure. I’ll check, though ― we can go together, sometime tonight or tomorrow.”

“Sounds like a plan!” he declared, then glanced at the menu card in front of him. “I’m guessing you want your usual coconut milk tea, Y/N?”

“Yep, that’s me. Boring and predictable, like the old granny I am at heart,” you quipped, earning yourself another laugh from your companion.

“Predictable, maybe, since I’ve known you for so long,” Hyunjin agreed. “But boring? No way. You could never be boring, Y/N, no matter how long I’ve known you.”

You felt the color rising in your cheeks as you flushed pleasurably at your best friend’s compliment, which meant a lot more to you than he could imagine. “You’re sweet.”

His grin melted your heart as you grabbed the menu. “Let me guess ― you want the watermelon bubble tea. Again.”

“Why, Y/N,” Hyunjin gasped mockingly, his eyes widening, “however did you know?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” you said sarcastically, shrugging. “Maybe because you decided to even dress like a freaking watermelon for Halloween? And because you completely weeded that bag of Dum-Dums ― the one you were supposed to be handing out to the trick-or-treaters ― of watermelon lollipops? I could hear the kids complaining all the way down the street!”

“Okay, okay, Y/N,” he admitted, going red in the face. “You… kind of have a point there.”

You sat back with a triumphant smirk, which earned a grin from Hyunjin; within the minute, you both had begun to laugh hopelessly, till tears of mirth gathered themselves in both of your eyes and your sides ached with laughter.

After you’d both gotten your bubble teas, you sat for a while in silence. But it wasn’t the awkward silence that needed an ice-breaker; it was a comfortable silence, where neither of you needed to say anything to enjoy the moment spent in the other’s company.

You were the one who finally broke the silence. “Hey, Hyunjinnie, do you want to try a sip of my bubble tea? I realize, in all the times we’ve come here, you’ve never tried the coconut milk tea, while I’ve never tried the watermelon tea.”

“Sounds fun!” Hyunjin unhesitatingly leaned over, his cheek brushing against yours, as he took a sip from your straw, letting the new flavor soak onto his tongue for a moment before nodding his approval, his eyes lighting up. “Holy moly ― this is good! You have good taste, Y/N!”

You smirked at him before leaning across the table to take a sip of his drink, the watermelon flavor coating your tongue and cooling your throat as you swallowed. “Heck, I could say the same for you, Hyunjin! You might just have passed your obsession with all things watermelon on to me!”

It was a perfect moment, just you and him, peacefully enjoying each other’s company… till the sound of soft sobbing drew your attention away from Hyunjin. Your eyes scanned the bubble tea café till they found the source of the sound.

Minjoo.

And judging by the tears pouring down her face, she’d seen everything.

The color drained from Hyunjin’s face as he jumped up, practically knocking the umbrella off the table as he tried to make his way towards Minjoo, who heaved a sob and took a step back.

“Minjoo!” he yelled. “Minjoo, wait!”

“Minjoo!” You joined him, calling your friend’s name. “Minjoo, it’s not what it looks like!”

“Shit,” Hyunjin muttered. “I’ll… I’ll be back. I’m sorry to cut our outing short, Y/N, but...”

“Go,” you said grimly, your heart hammering with dread as you watched your best friend take off after his girlfriend, only hoping that things would turn out okay.

I'll let you set the pace 'Cause I'm not thinking straight My head spinning around I can't see clear no more What are you waiting for?

This time, when you woke up at 3:00 a.m., it wasn’t because of your phone, which had remained painfully silent all evening, save for a single text from your boyfriend, asking if you were free for a date that night. You’d declined his offer, sick with worry for your best friend’s predicament. He and Minjoo didn’t ever quarrel, and yet, the last you’d seen them, Minjoo was shouting at him, tears rolling down her cheeks, while he pleaded for her understanding.

Icy fear bubbled in your stomach as you lay awake against the pillows; the room felt uncharacteristically cold. You sighed, finally deciding there was no way you could get to sleep with so much worry gnawing at your mind ― maybe a midnight snack would help. You slid out from under the bedcovers, shivering as the cold air touched your bare legs ― you were just wearing shorts and a t-shirt ― and went downstairs into the kitchen, where you rummaged through the refrigerator and pantry, finding absolutely nothing that fit your cravings. You stretched, going to change clothes into a pink hoodie and black leggings, pulling your hair into a messy ponytail before grabbing your purse, pulling your car keys from them as you went outside into the driveway, opening the door and getting into your car. You started up the engine, waiting for a few moments as the heater warmed the inside, before reversing out of the driveway and beginning the fifteen-minute drive to the local Lotte.

The classical music playing over the stereo did nothing to ease your nagging worry, and all the way there, nausea roiled in your stomach like a vat of acid. You arrived in the parking lot of the supermarket, locking your car before entering the store and going straight to the dairy aisle, grabbing yourself five small bottles of your favorite brand of strawberry milk and paying for them quickly before hurrying outside again, the cover on your arm. You got back into your car, slamming the door shut, and left the parking lot, embarking on your return journey. About five minutes had passed when you suddenly screeched to a halt, pulling over abruptly, the color draining from your face.

A tall figure was staggering around on the curb, a bottle in hand. A very familiar tall figure. Your blood turned to ice as you recognized Hyunjin.

You’d never seen him drunk like this. Come to mention it, you’d never even seen him touch any remotely alcoholic beverage. You got out of your car, your heart pounding more wildly than it had ever pounded in your life, running to meet the boy with a tight hug.

“Hyunjin!” you cried, mingled pain and relief in your tone as you crushed him in a hug, aware that you were shaking from head to toe ― whether it was with anger or fear, you weren’t sure. Probably a mix of both, to be honest.

“Hey… hey, Y/N,” Hyunjin slurred unsteadily, staggering and practically half collapsing on you, leaving you struggling for a minute with the task of supporting his larger weight. He smiled an unfocused smile down at you, wiping the wetness from his eyes. “Whatcha doin’ awake at this late hour, Y/N?”

“I could ask you the same,” you said anxiously, your pulse thrumming with worry. “What happened to you? I’ve never seen you drink before, and suddenly you’re holding a beer bottle and rambling around, punch-drunk, on the streets at…” You glanced at your watch. “...3:15 a.m. Hyunjin, what the fuck is going on here? Where were you? Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

“Minjoo broke up with me.” The boy’s voice was slurred with drinking, his balance completely off-kilter; he sank against you, his tears wetting the collar of your hoodie. “She left me, Y/N. She said she was done, that we were over.”

You were aware that you, too, were crying: crying for the horrible state you’d found your best friend in, for the blame you were allotting to yourself ― crying, mostly, because Hyunjin was crying, and his tears hurt worse than anything.

“Hyunjin,” you whispered, sinking to your knees and letting the male sag against you, his head nestling into your shoulder as he hiccuped and cried as if his heart would break ― which it already had, that night. You wrapped your arms around him, rubbing his back soothingly as he cried it all out, till he had no tears left in him to cry, numb at last.

“Come on,” you murmured, guiding an unprotesting Hyunjin into your car, helping him buckle himself into the passenger seat as you drove home, the quiet classical music and the feeling of your sleeping best friend’s head on your shoulder giving you an odd tingling feeling.

Once you got home, you gently shook Hyunjin awake, letting him use you as a support for his terrible balance. He didn’t shake you off, letting you guide him upstairs and into your room, where you let him grab a change of clothes (you left the room while he changed, coming back in as soon as he gave you the thumbs-up) before collapsing onto your bed. You would have let him use the guest room, but, truth be told, you wanted to keep your eye on him, too scared that he’d do something stupid again. So you went into the bathroom, changing into your typical t-shirt and shorts, before collapsing on the bed beside him, exhausted from the day’s events.

“Y/N?” You couldn’t stop the tear that slipped down your cheek at the sound of Hyunjin’s tired voice, which sounded less slurred and more… him. He scooted towards you, gently tugging your shoulder so you were now facing him, and brushed the tear from your lashes, wiping away the glittering trail the tear had left on your skin.

“Y/N, I’m sorry,” he whispered, wrapping his arms tightly around you, an embrace you returned with just as much fervor. “I’m really, really sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” you choked out, the guilt overpowering you. “It’s my fault Minjoo broke up with you. She didn’t like how much time we spent together.”

Hyunjin shook his head. “No, Y/N, this is not your fault. I should have been clearer with her, and anyway...” He hesitated, continuing, “...Maybe it’s not all bad.”

Your eyes widened with surprise. “What?”

Hyunjin flushed slightly. “This might just be the alcohol talking, Y/N… I don’t know anymore. But when you were holding me on the curb, I could feel you shaking. I could hear you crying. And I was getting my snot and drool and tears all over you, and by that time, you probably reeked of alcohol as much as I did. But you still held me. Minjoo… probably wouldn’t have.”

“Come on, I’m sure she―”

“No, Y/N,” Hyunjin interrupted, shaking his head vehemently. “The one time when you were on that family trip in France and I caught the flu, Minjoo came over. She took care of me, but… but I could see the disgust in her eyes every time she saw me throw up or cough up mucus. The one time I cried into her shoulder, she immediately went to change clothes. She’s only there in my highs, Y/N, but you’ve been there all the time. She only knows the happy Hyunjin, but you know the real Hwang Hyunjin.”

“Hyunjin...” Your voice trailed off for a long moment before you managed, “What do you mean?”

“I mean...” Hyunjin took your hands in his larger ones, hesitating for a while before answering, “I mean… or, at least, I think I mean… that in a way, it’s always been you. This was just the universe’s way of showing me. I know I make zero sense, but...”

“No,” you said slowly, his words taking a moment to register. “No, I… I kind of get what you mean.”

Suddenly, it all made sense.

Why Hyunjin and your kiss, all those years ago, had seemed better and more full of life than any that you’d shared with your boyfriend.

Why the first person you called up whenever you found yourself free ― or needed to spill some news ― was Hyunjin, not your own boyfriend.

Why, even if you were spending the entire day out with your boyfriend, you had to steal into the bathrooms at least once to hear Hyunjin’s voice on the phone for at least five minutes.

Why skinship with Hyunjin felt so much natural and easier than skinship with Yongwoon.

Why everyone naturally assumed you two were a couple.

Maybe it was because deep down, that was what you were ― the only difference was that you’d both labeled the feeling as the wrong one, assuming that you were just best friends and remaining oblivious not only to the other’s feelings, but to your own.

“Hyunjin… I’ve spent so many days wondering why none of the kisses I’ve shared with Yongwoon have even come close to matching the one we shared in the seventh grade,” you admitted. “I guess it’s because they were missing the one key ingredient: spark. I won’t deny that I really like Yongwoon ― or, at least, I did, at the beginning ― but he’s just… not right for me, and I’m shocked it took this long for me to realize. He was always trying to steal me away from you, keep you away when we were both together, while you were always ready to share me with him… all to keep me happy.”

“Y/N...” Before you knew it, Hyunjin was leaning closer, and so were you, and you didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly, your lips were pressed against his, and there it was, that spark, the one you hadn’t felt against your lips for five years.

As you both pulled away, you realized the words didn’t need to be said ― the kiss had spoken volumes more than those three simple words. That was the lovely thing about gestures ― they could explain things in ways much more nuanced than even a dictionary.

That night, you fell asleep in Hyunjin’s arms, your legs tangled with his, your heartbeats synchronizing.

Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do (like you do) Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do (yeah) Touch me like you do, to-to-touch me like you do What are you waiting for?

Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do (like you do) Love me like you do, lo-lo-love me like you do (yeah) Touch me like you do, to-to-touch me like you do What are you waiting for?

You woke up to the warm sunlight filtering through your window; that was, by far, the most peaceful sleep you’d gotten in the last few days. You stretched, yawning appreciatively, before your eyes fell on the still-sleeping form of Hwang Hyunjin beside you. You smiled fondly, pressing a kiss to his forehead ― he stirred slightly, the corners of his lips quirking upwards ever so slightly ― before slipping out from under the bedcovers, going downstairs to make yourself and Hyunjin some coffee. Right as you’d finished pouring the two mugs, your doorbell rang; you went to open the door, your mug of coffee in hand, and saw Yongwoon standing there, smiling a little sheepishly. “Oh. Hey.”

“I was worried about you,” Yongwoon said, launching right into it with no prior greeting. “You haven’t been yourself lately ― you keep refusing dates, you don’t answer my texts quickly ― I’m worried about you, Y/N.”

Footsteps made you both turn around; Hyunjin was coming downstairs, looking tired but much refreshed after having showered and changed clothes. His smile made your breath hitch; it was funny how liking someone made them even more attractive in your eyes, because before, you’d been able to notice how pretty his smile was, but now, it was as if you’d forgotten, or never fully appreciated, how breathtakingly stunning it was.

Yongwoon’s smile had faded, and he was studying Hyunjin with a frown, furrowing his brow. “Why is he here, Y/N?”

“He stayed the night. He wasn’t… feeling the best, so I thought it best if I took care of him.” Your tone made it clear you weren’t taking any arguments, which simply made your boyfriend even more uneasy.

“I don’t like it,” he said abruptly. “I don’t like it at all, Y/N. I know you call him your ‘best friend’, but as your boyfriend, I don’t like the idea of you being home alone with another guy. I won’t let you―”

“Let me? Let me?” Your eyes widened with incredulity; the anger that burned in their depths caused him to take a step back, surprised. “I only meant―”

“No, I’ve heard enough,” you decided. “You sound like my grandpa. My annoying, patriarchal grandpa.”

“Y/N―”

“This isn’t working.”

He froze, staring at you for some hint that this was just a joke, maybe a very, very early April Fools’ prank. When he saw nothing except seriousness on your face, he managed, blankly, “Y/N, I―”

“Look. Don’t get me wrong, there was a point where I really, really liked you. But that was before I realized, whatever else we had, there was no spark.”

“Y/N!” he protested, taking a step towards you. You took a step back, shaking your head quite calmly ― you didn’t know where all this calmness was coming from, but you were glad for it.

“I want you to be happy,” you said finally. “I don’t think I’m the answer to that. And I don’t think you’re my answer, either. I’m doing this for the both of us. It’d be nice if we could stay friends, but… that’s up to you.”

Yongwoon looked from Hyunjin to you, the realization dawning in his eyes, which flared with anger. He shook his head, simply leaving the house; after a moment, he turned around, pausing, his eyes slightly wet with the reality that he wasn’t yours anymore ― and hadn’t been, for a while. “I don’t know about that, Y/N.”

You hesitated for a long, long while. “Bye, Yongwoon.”

“Bye, Y/N.”

As soon as he’d left, the tears spilled out; now, it was Hyunjin’s turn to hold you as you cried against him, your tears soaking through the thin fabric of his white t-shirt as he guided you to the couch, his arms tight and warm around you as he held you till you couldn’t cry anymore.

“Thanks, Hyunjinnie,” you whispered, looking up gratefully at him. He brushed away your tears, smiling that signature fond smile he reserved only for you, and placed a warm, soft kiss on your forehead, sending that tingling feeling flooding through your body.

And as the first snow of the year began to fall, outside, you wrapped your arms around his neck, your lips meeting his in a burst of warmth.

“I love you, Hyunjin.”

“I love you more, Y/N.”

“No! Stop that, I love YOU more!”

“Y/N! Gah, stop tickling me! I love you most!”

“Surrender already! You know I love you more than most.”

“Yes… yes, I do.”

[dissonancedance]

“The barriers you’ve had to build to protect your mind have twisted you, driven you to kill who you could not control. Your executor is biding his time, but there isn’t enough of it for you to come into redemption on your own. We have to dissolve those barriers before your rehabilitation can begin.” 

The second half of this chapter is under complete revision, but since the first half has been complete for this long, let’s consider this a half-update. Chapter 94 below the cut and available to read on Archive of Our Own.

Painting is Lieto fine di un martire by Nicola Samorì, 2015.

Simone could feel Vidar’s eyes on her even after she stepped outside of Aguiyi’s office, his stare coating her in the same dread and helplessness that kept her awake night after night, too afraid of the nightmares waiting in sleep. As she paced, she found herself rubbing her neck, absentmindedly soothing the memories of the pain and panic he had strangled into her too often for her body to forget. The hunger and hatred that burned in his stare reached under her skin no matter how she had steeled herself to face him again. Failure echoed with each tap of her sandals on the ancient stones until the creak of the door opening stopped her pacing.

Bisi’s veiled head peeked out into the hallway, her brow creasing in concern when Simone looked up at her.

“They are about to put him under,” the Igbo woman said. “Are you ready?”

The strangeness of that question snagged a rueful smile at the corners of Simone’s mouth as she answered, “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

The door at the back of the office opened to a sterile white space filled with gleaming medical instruments and monitors displaying a steady stream of data from the sensors attached to her uncle’s skin. It was a stark contrast to the stuffy old-world eclecticism that steeped the room before it, the lack of garish opulence a welcomed departure after months of being trapped in the ancient mansion. Simone had been here only twice before, both times to see the bodies of her uncles. She found it just as difficult to force herself to look towards the metal table, the memories of bloodless white skin still too fresh in her mind to quite believe that they were gone. Vidar’s pale chest still rose and fell with each breath that marked him as the last of her uncles still living, nearly whole but for what she had failed to allow him to keep. The hatred from his remaining eye had dulled under the drugs, but that singular stare did not fail to latch onto her as Aguiyi beckoned her closer.

“Vidar wishes to speak with you before we intubate him,” Aguiyi whispered, his leonine beard brushing her shoulder as he loomed closer to add, “It is only a request. You needn’t fulfill it if you don’t want to.”

Of the few things she could be certain of, she knew that Vidar did not request anything of her; he only ever demanded what he could not take for himself. With him lying there, nearly paralyzed by the drugs that were lulling his brain into a pliant stupor, he could no longer take. Once this was over, he would not take from her ever again. Simone chose to go to him.

The movement of the medical staff attending the equipment around them faded into the background as she drew closer until Vidar filled her focus. The eyepatch he was wearing was gone, leaving the scarred gnarl of sunken flesh bare. Between the grisly wound and the sapphire blue of his eye, she found the wound easier to look at as she stopped at his side.

“Come closer, sweetheart,” he rasped, barely above a whisper.

Apprehension roiled in her belly, making her body slow to respond as she stepped nearer and leaned down until his scent cut through the stench of antiseptics and sterile plastics. The reactive fear that accompanied his scent splashed over her in a cold wave froze her in place.

“You wanted to speak with me, uncle?” she asked, only a little breathy from the panic that clawed at her just beneath her control.

“There you are.” He smiled, showing off the sharp points of his eyeteeth at the edge of a snarl. “I just wanted to see your face one last time before you have me executed.”

“There isn’t…” she started, abruptly aware of how many people were trying not to appear as listening around them. Leaning lower, each inch to draw nearer to Vidar grating against her instincts, she spoke softly, “The barriers you’ve had to build to protect your mind have twisted you, driven you to kill who you could not control. Your executor is biding his time, but there isn’t enough of it for you to come into redemption on your own. We have to dissolve those barriers before your rehabilitation can begin.”

The unkind smile he wore drooped under the weight of suspicion and drug-induced fatigue, his words starting to slur as he drawled, “Who the fuck put you up to this bullshit?”

“I’m just trying to do right by our family’s legacy,” she answered. “Don’t be afraid, uncle. You’re not going to die here; we won’t let you.”

  Noise buzzed and hummed through Vidar’s skull, rising from a muddled din until it collected into the sound of a voice. His head lolled, swaying with the room around him, as his eye failed to focus on the man in the wheelchair sitting across the table.

The noise mumbling out of the wheelchair man’s mouth shifted slowly towards language until he caught, “… year it is?”

Vidar frowned, or supposed he did. It was impossible to tell with how numb his face was, the numbness reaching into his mouth and rendering his tongue into a limp wad that he couldn’t figure out how to use. His answer tripped and fell flat on his too-thick tongue, managing a gargled grunt that seemed to satisfy the questioner by the way the wheelchair man wrote something down on his clipboard. Vidar watched the pen move over the paper, already having forgotten the question.

He closed his eye and opened it to darkness.

Weightlessness and silence permeated his perception. A hunger for stimulation rose from this vast nothingness in this dark space. He swallowed just to hear his esophagus click and feel it work, but the sensations were gone to the numbness as soon as they passed to leave him drifting. He could not move his hands to lift them to his face, he could not move at all. His heart raced as dread coated the aching nothingness that hollowed him, panic creeping in like ants swarming through the folds of his brain. The muscles in his body went rigid in resistance, locking his joints as he struggled to move even just a finger. He was locked inside the bleak nothing of his mind. Blood roaring in his skull, his veins bulging in thick ropes just under his skin, he tried to scream.

Relief came in the sharp sting pressed into the veins at his elbow, heat seeping through his blood until his awareness ebbed below the nothingness once more.

Hours melted into days marked by moments of vague awareness that blurred by too quickly for memory to catch. Clarity came in snapshots of insight, vague memories resurfacing to provide context to his surroundings only to dip beneath his mind’s reach a moment later. The man muttering and shuffling by in odd little steps with his head bowed low like a beaten dog was sometimes Dr. Wallace. The man in the wheelchair with his clipboard was sometimes Maier. The dark figure that occasionally watched from beyond a window was sometimes Dr. Aguiyi, sometimes he was just a demon. The pretty girl who leaned over him and whispered into his ear was only ever familiar.

“Your will is my voice, my word is your will,” she would speak into his ear as Dr. Wallace injected something into the tube running up his arm.

She turned his face to her, her hand so soft on his cheek and her silver eyes so gentle. He wanted to touch her, always starving to touch and be touched by her, but he could not move. A buzzing nothingness flooded his veins and stuffed his brain with fluff until there was no room to think, only to listen. She whispered sweetly, each word spoken so clearly and filling him with a sense of comfort, a sense of correctness. He listened as he was supposed to, only ever grateful for the hand on his cheek and the warmth in her attention.

“Follow my lead and live with purpose,” her soft tone would whisper, again and again, each syllable dripping into the emptiness with such lush and beautiful truth.

His body sang with delight and he wanted to cry out Yes, of course, but the words that gurgled up from his throat and skittered from his tongue were not words at all.

The gentle press of her thumb on his lips soothed his confusion; he did not need to speak if she did not ask it. Her hand slid down to cup his neck and delight swept any lingering regret at his ineptitude when he felt how his pulse nudged the tips of her thumb and forefinger. Tears of gratitude stung his eyes with every beat of his heart as hers to claim, every breath belonging to her as it left his parted lips. These things were all he had left to give and they were enough.

“The burden of self is too heavy to bear alone,” her quiet voice filled him until all he could do was listen. The room, the doctor watching them without ever directly looking at them, the smoldering glee from the demon on the other side of the glass, it all fell away in the distance as her voice wrapped around his mind like a soft blanket, warm and so very tight. “To live without the burden of a listless self is to be gifted with clear purpose. I am with you to bear your load and lead you to meaning.”

The comforting weight on his neck pressed down and his head swam with a tingling lightness.

Of course, he wanted to shout.

Of course he was her will. The nothing fogged up around him, thick and heavy, blotting out the light.

What a beautiful purpose to be given.

  The lab dimmed until the room was lit only by the blinking sensors and dull computer monitors, but it was enough to cast a glimmer on the liquid Vidar floated in. Simone waited for her uncle’s breathing to even out in drug-induced sleep before pulling away from the sensory deprivation bath and wiping her hand on her dress. His periods of consciousness were becoming more frequent and thankfully brief, all the better to allow this stage of the conditioning to fill in the holes the drugs were drilling through his mind.

Witnessing how much of a person could be taken, reshaped, manufactured into something so horrifyingly false was too familiar. How much of herself Simone had seen in the reconstruction of his broken mind had shaken the ramshackle foundation of identity she had pieced to hold herself together. The map of scars they were carving into her uncle’s psyche were beginning to travel the same paths that marked her own distorted damage.

She let her gaze wander over his form, his skin having lost what little color it had over the three weeks in the windowless laboratory, almost translucent now to show the blue map of veins that constantly circulated the chemical regimen to reduce his mind to malleable mush. The feeding tube diet was fighting a losing battle on maintaining his mass, but there was healing. The unexpected swelling that had been putting pressure in the Broca’s area of his brain had gone down with the integration of broader steroids strong enough for him to consistently understand speech, though he had yet to be able to form coherent responses.

This was an outcome Dr. Wallace had dubbed tolerable as they moved forward with the procedure. So long as Vidar retained the capacity to comprehend what was said to him, her words could mold him into what he had to become.

There were many aspects of this experiment they had dubbed tolerable. Beyond the calm explanations of risk versus reward, the confidence of the team, the overwhelming buzz of anticipation in the research they were all so fascinated to partake, her old wounds reached up from beneath where she had buried them to sprout new pains. It all made her sick.

Her thumb traced the ridge of Vidar’s orbital bone, so pronounced without the structure of his eyeball to plump the thin skin around it, and let the ache in her chest whisper aloud, “Isn’t life so much simpler when your choices have been reduced?”

“Let him recover, Simone,” Aguiyi’s raspy baritone came tinny and flattened through the speaker in the wall separating them. Simone jerked as she turned, surprised to see the old man still at the observation window. “He needs rest to reconstruct his neural pathways.”

Her fingers curled into a fist behind her back as her lips curled into a smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping Papa occupied?”

The old man returned her smile with an amusement she did not share. “Leif has been quite adequate at keeping himself occupied lately. Have you noticed any changes in his behavior of late?”

“Don’t be coy, Doc. If you’ve got something to say to me, I’d appreciate if you’d please swallow or spit,” she frowned.

He laughed, the wheezing huffs grating her nerves until at last he said, “No, I would rather not be the one to face his wrath for spoiling the surprise. Go on and return to your quarters, girl. I think you’ll find him waiting for you.”

[monsieuryustyn]

Dead Line

It was close to midnight. In a well-kept study room sat Jerome Martin, typing furiously in his MacBook, with a huge tower of books beside him. Jerome is definitely not ready tomorrow. His 13 outputs are NOT ready tomorrow. Although he already finished ten, he still was not pleased. That progress report lacks a summary section. Why is my reflection too short? Did I mess up my calculations? Is the text justified? What was the format again? He clears away these thoughts in his mind. Pop! All gone. But the thoughts were not gone after all, as he continued revising till 3 a.m. With the outputs all done, Jerome snored angrily at the floor, clutching his Statistics notebook in his hand and an eaten granola bar with the other. Even asleep, he still was not satisfied. Break your back to the rhythm in the midnight gloo- Jerome’s eyes flipped open at exactly seven a.m. This was no gentle fluttering of the eyes, the movement was mechanical, like a lurching cuckoo clock. He woke up with sore muscles, due to the fact that he slept at the cold floor. His mouth stank of chips and soda. His eyes were red. Because you'll reap what you sow when your tall can gets low You've had too much to think now you're drowning in the drink His hand instantaneously reached for his iPhone, struggling to stop the annoying sound of his boisterous alarm. At the stone cold floor you go- He looked at his lock screen. 7:03 was flashing harshly at his retinas. “Oh shoot! I’m late!” he groaned. Jerome hastily showered, brushed his teeth, donned his uniform and just before 7:15, sprinted towards the front steps, muttered a quick bye to his parents (who apparently didn’t notice him), and then took off to school. He was feeling a bit better when he arrived at the school grounds. But it did not last. “Miss Ablaza?” Madam Lyn asked. “Present.” “Miss Alabastro?”  “I’m here.” … “Mister Martin?”  “Present.” Jerome said happily. “Jerome Martin?”  “Present!” Jerome shouted. “He’s absent Ma’am.” said Rafael, his best friend. “Is this some sort of joke?” he laughed. But everybody was taking it seriously. “Hello! I’m right here! I’m not absent!” he cried. But nobody heard him. This continued throughout his classes, wherein nobody paid the slightest attention to him. Even his best friend, Rafael, did not acknowledge his presence. He tried interfering with the lessons by writing on the board, but it was left unnoticed. He tried everything, to no success. By the end of his classes, tears shimmered in his eyes. He was desperate. He was not able to pass his outputs since nobody acknowledged him. Why is this happening? Did I do something wrong? What will happen to my grades now? He muttered these to himself. Jerome went back to his home with a heavy heart. He was about to cry in the sofa when he heard loud sobs from his own bedroom. When he opened the door, he saw his parents sobbing uncontrollably. “Oh, my child! My poor child! I…I told him to rest early but…but he didn’t listen!” Erlinda cried. His mother looked even more older than before. Her face was stained with wet mascara, as if a baby played arts and crafts to her face. She seemed to be crying for hours already. His father, Andres, was even worse. Sadness clouded his features, the color drained out of his face. He kept on chewing his lower lip, even though it has blood already. His hands were also trembling. “Mom, I’m right here, there’s nothing to worry about. Dad, hey Dad, what’s wrong?” Jerome sobbed. Then he saw it. He saw his dead, unmoving body being put into a body bag by strangers. He saw his pale and unhealthy face. He saw his scrawny arms and his tired muscles. Everything that he saw screamed one word: exhausted. He tried to talk to them, but try as he might, he already knows that they can’t hear him. Frustrated, Jerome screams.

Wake up!

“Huh? What was that?” he asked.

…going to be late! Wake up son!

Jerome’s eyes flipped wide open. He was awake. He scanned his surroundings. Is this real? He asked to himself. He began to pinch his cheeks harshly and when he realized it was a dream, his face flushed with relief. In his mind, he discerned what had happened in his terrifying nightmare. 

“I pushed too far, I thought I was doing myself a favor. I was too caught up with academics, I wasn’t able to see the big picture of things. I was so close to death.”

These realizations sank deeply into his mind.  He hurriedly went downstairs. When he saw his parents at the dining table, he greeted them with a tight hug. Their eyebrows furrowed together in surprise.

“Are you okay, honey?” Erlinda bombarded with concern. “Son, you don’t look so good.” said Andres. “Uhm, I had a rough night.” he said happily. “Isn’t today the deadline, honey?” she said sweetly.

“Not today Mom, not today.” he smiled.

[gldnsctn]

A spiteful scar crossed his face: an ash-colored and nearly perfect arc that creased his temple at one tip and his cheek at the other. His real name is of no importance, everyone in Tacuarembó called him the Englishman from La Colorada.” Cardoso, the owner of those fields refused to sell them: I understand that the Englishman resorted to an unexpected argument: he confided to Cardoso the secret of the scar. The Englishman came from the border, from Rio Grande del Sur; there are many who say that in Brazil he had been a smuggler. The fields were overgrown with grass, the waterholes brackish; the Englishman, in order to correct those deficiencies, worked fully as hard as his laborers. They say that he was severe to the point of cruelty, but scrupulously just. They say also that he drank: a few times a year he locked himself into an upper room, not to emerge until two or three days later as if from a battle or from vertigo, pale, trembling, confused and as authoritarian as ever. I remember the glacial eyes, the energetic leanness, the gray mustache. He had no dealings with anyone; it is a fact that his Spanish was rudimentary and cluttered with Brazilian. Aside from a business letter or some pamphlet he received no mail.

The last time I passed through the northern provinces, a sudden overflowing of the Caraguatá stream compelled me to spend the night at La Colorada. Within a few moments, I seemed to sense that my appearance was inopportune, I tried to ingratiate myself with the Englishman; I resorted to the least discerning of passions: patriotism. I claimed as invincible a country with such spirit as England’s. My companion agreed. but added with a smile that he was not English. He was Irish from Hungarian. Having said this, he stopped short, as if he had revealed a secret.

After dinner we went outside to look at the sky. It had cleared up, but beyond the low hills the southern sky, streaked and gashed by lightning was conceiving another storm. Into the cleared up dining room the boy who had served dinner brought a bottle of rum. We drank for some time, in silence.

I don’t know what time it must have been when I observed that I was drunk; I don’t know what inspiration or what exultation or tedium made me mention the scar.

The Englishman’s face changed its expression; for a few seconds I thought he was going to throw me out of the house. At length he said in his normal voice:

“I’ll tell you the history of my scar under one condition that of not mitigating one bit of the opprobrium, of the infamous circumstances.”

I agreed. This is the story that he told me, mixing his English with Spanish, and even with Portuguese: “Around 1922, in one of the cities of Connaught, I was one of the many who were conspiring for the independence of Ireland. Of my comrades, some are sell living, dedicated to peaceful pursuits; others, paradoxically, are fighting on desert and sea under the English flag; another, the most worthy, died in the courtyard of a barracks, at dawn, shot by men filled with sleep; still others (not the most unfortunate) met their destiny in the anonymous and almost secret battles of the civil war. We were Republicans, Catholics; we were, I suspect, Romantics. Ireland was for us not only the utopian future and the intolerable present; it was a bitter and cherished mythology, it was the circular towed and the red marshes, it was the repudiation of Parnell and the enormous epic poems which sang of the robbing of bulls which in another incarnation were heroes and in others fish and mountains . . . One afternoon I will never forget, an affiliate from Munster joined us: one John Vincent Moon.

“He was scarcely twenty years old. He was slender and flaccid at the same time; he gave the uncomfortable impression of being invertebrate. He had studied with fervor and with vanity nearly every page of Lord knows what Communist manual; he made use of dialectical materialism to put an end to any discussion whatever. The reasons one can have for hating another man, or for loving him, are infinite: Moon reduced the history of the universe to a sordid economic conflict He affirmed that the revolution was predestined to succeed. I told him that for a gentleman only lost causes should be attractive . . . Night had already fallen; we continued our disagreement in the hall, on the stilts, then along the vague streets. The judgments Moon emitted impressed me less than his irrefutable, apodictic note. The new comrade did not discuss: he dictated opinions with scorn and with a certain anger.

“As we were arriving at the outlying houses, a sudden burst of gunfire stunned us. (Either before or afterwards we skirted the blank wall of a factory or barracks.) We moved into an unpaved street; a soldier, huge in the firelight, came out of a burning hut. Crying out, he ordered us to stop. I quickened my pace; my companion did not follow. I turned around: John Vincent Moon was motionless, fascinated, as if energized by fear. I then ran back and knocked the soldier to the ground with one blow, shook Vincent Moon, insulted him and ordered him to follow. I had to take him by the arm; the passion of fear had rendered him helpless. We fled into the night pierced by flames. A rifle volley reached out for us, and a bullet nicked Moon’s right shoulder; as we were fleeing amid pines, he broke out in weak sobbing.

“In that fall of 1923 I had taken shelter in General Berkeley’s country house. The general (whom I had never seen) was carrying out some administrative assignment or other in Bengal; the house was less than a century old, but it was decayed and shadowy and flourished in puzzling corridors and in pointless antechambers. The museum and the huge library usurped the first floor: controversial and uncongenial books which in some manner are the history of the nineteenth century; scimitars from Nishapur, along whose captured arcs there seemed to persist still the wind and violence of battle. We entered (I seem to recall) through the rear. Moon, trembling, his mouth parched, murmured that the events of the night were interesting I dressed his wound and brought him a cup of tea; I was able to determine that his ‘wound’ was superficial. Suddenly he stammered in bewilderment:

‘You know, you ran a terrible risk.’

I told him not to worry about it. (The habit of the civil war had incited me to act is I did; besides, the capture of a single member could endanger our cause.)

“By the following day Moon had recovered his poise. He accepted a cigarette and subjected me to a severe interrogation on the ‘economic resources of our revolutionary party.’ His questions were very lucid; I told him (truthfully) that the situation was serious. Deep bursts of rifle fire agitated the south. I told Moon our comrades were waiting for us. My overcoat and my revolver were in my room; when I returned, I found Moon stretched out on the sofa, his eyes closed. He imagined he had a fever; he invoked a painful spasm in his shoulder.

“At that moment I understood that his cowardice was irreparable. I clumsily entreated him to take care of himself and went out. This frightened man mortified me, as if I were the coward, not Vincent Moon. Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right. I am all other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon.

“Nine days we spent in the general’s enormous house. Of the agonies and the successes of the war I shall not speak: I propose to relate the history of the scar that insults me. In my memory, those nine days form only a single day , save for the next to the last, when our men broke into a barracks and we were able to avenge precisely the sixteen comrades who had been machine- gunned in Elphin. I slipped out of the house towards dawn, in the confusion of daybreak. At Highball I was back. My companion was waiting for me upstairs: his wound did not permit him to descend to the ground floor. I recall him having some volume of strategy in his hand, F. N. Maude or Clausewitz ‘The weapon I prefer is the artillery,’ he confessed to me one night.

He inquired into our plans; he liked to censure them or revise them. He also was accustomed to denouncing ‘our deplorable economic basis’; dogmatic and gloomy, he predicted the disastrous end.

‘C’est une affaire flambée,’ he murmured. In order to show that he was indifferent to being a physical coward, he magnified his mental arrogance. In this way, for good or for bad, nine days elapsed.

“On the tenth day the city fell definitely to the Black and Tans. Tall, silent horsemen patrolled the roads; ashes and smoke rode on the wind; on the corner I saw a corpse thrown to the ground, an Impression less firm in my memory than that of a dummy on which the soldiers endlessly practiced their marksmanship, in the middle of the square . . . I had left when dawn was in the sky, before noon I returned. Moon, in the library, was speaking with someone; the tone of his voice told me he was talking on the telephone. Then I heard my name; then that I would return at seven; then, the suggestion that they should arrest me as I was crossing the garden. My reasonable fiend was reasonably selling me out. I heard him demand guarantees of personal safety.

‘Here my story is confused and becomes lost. I know that I pursued the informer along the black, nightmarish halls and along deep stairways of dizziness. Moon knew the house very well, much better than I. One or two times I lost him. I cornered him before the soldiers stopped me. From one of the general’s collections of arms I tore a cutlass with that half moon I carved into his face forever a half moon of blood. Borges, to you, a stranger I have made this confession. Your contempt does not grieve me so much.’’

Here the narrator stopped. I noticed that his hands were shaking.

“And Moon?” I asked him.

“He collected his Judas money and fled to Brazil. That afternoon, in the square, he saw a dummy shot up by some drunken men. I waited in vain for the rest of the story. Finally I told him to go on. Then a sob went through his body; and with a weak gentleness he pointed to the whitish curved scar.

“You don’t believe me?” he stammered. “Don’t you see that I carry written on my face the mark of my infamy? I have told you the story thus so that you would hear me to the end. I denounced the man who protected me. I am Vincent Moon. Now despise me.”

The Shape of the Sword :: Jorge Luis Borges

[ash818]

happy birthday, terry mcginnis! (Can we pleaseeeeeeee get a terry Drabble, I miss him terribly)

“You’re on the next flight back to Starling,” said Mr. Wayne, sounding even more gravelly than usual by phone.

At baggage claim in Gotham International, Terry yanked his suitcase from the carousel one-handed and adjusted the phone against his ear. “You couldn’t have decided this before I got on the plane home?” Every minute in the air, he had resented being called back to work while Mrs. Queen was missing. Turning right back around was exactly what he wanted, but he could not let this pass without a grumble.

“We didn’t have the information we have now,” Mr. Wayne replied, even and businesslike. “Your flight boards in forty minutes. Before you go, there are some things you should understand.”

Terry had known Mrs. Queen for years, eaten at her dining room table, and laughed at her stories about the old man as she had known him twenty years prior. She had welcomed Terry into her house with cheerful equanimity, even moments after discovering him and Jon attempting to beat each other up in her backyard. “Boys! Dinner,” was all she yelled to stop them.

When they sat down in the dining room not long after, she had turned to Terry and said brightly, “So, you’re Jonny’s big brother. I don’t know exactly how fraternities work, but I think that makes you my Phi Psi son-in-law.”

“We’re not married, Mom,” Queen had groused.

“Son-in-bylaws,” she had revised experimentally. “Pledge stepson. Whatever.” Then she had smiled at him, warm and easy. “It means you don’t need permission to root around in the fridge.”

If there were new leads on her disappearance, Terry was champing at the bit to run them down. Not only was this a vote of confidence in him from Mr. Wayne - an away mission after only ten weeks in the cowl - but it was personal. “Do we know where she is, or at least who has her?”

“We do,” Mr. Wayne said, and stopped there. God forbid he should elaborate in a forthright manner.

“Then I need my gear,” Terry pointed out irritably, “so I really hope you’re waiting up there at departures with a bag for me to - ”

“You aren’t going in uniform,” Mr. Wayne said with finality. “Starling has her own vigilante, and you’re going to look after his family while he retrieves his wife.”

“No one’s seen the Arrow or the Canary or any of them for fifteen years! And I’m more help in the field than I am babysitting.”

“The decision has been made. Oliver was grateful to know you would be watching over his daughter and niece.”

It was at this point that Terry began to suspect he had parsed a sentence wrong somewhere along the line. A possessive pronoun had been misplaced. Perhaps there was a dangling modifier. “Wait. Back up.” It sounded a lot like Mr. Wayne was implying that Oliver Queen was the Arrow. “What’s going on, exactly?”

Mr. Wayne cleared his throat. “Oliver Queen was the Arrow.”

“Oh,” Terry said, as if that made sense. Then he waited patiently for the Tetris tile to slot in somewhere among his thoughts. It didn’t, quite. “He was the…” Don’t say it out loud in a crowded baggage claim. “Right, got it,” he muttered, which was something of a fib.

“It will make more sense the longer you think about it,” Mr. Wayne says dryly. “Neither of the children know, and you will not be the one to tell them. You’ll have to go back through security. Better get a move on.”

More instructions would follow as needed. That much, at least, Terry was used to. Mr. Wayne kept his cards close to the vest and played them only with the most judicious timing.

Terry had about five hours in the air to think about it.

When he first met Mr. Queen halfway through sophomore year, he recognized something of Mr. Wayne in him. The total self-assurance was easily explained as the product of a privileged upbringing. The alert watchfulness might have been a remnant of five years marooned; maybe instincts like that, once woken, never went completely dormant again. As for the uneasy suspicion that Mr. Queen could back up his death glare with actual death - that had never been confirmed.

Until now.

His quick reflexes were not Terry’s imagination. His bad knee was not a sports injury. The panic room on his first floor was not paranoia.

It was simple, once you knew the foundational secret, to guess at the structure of the rest. Spartan was a trained marksman with probable military experience, and there was John Diggle standing conveniently nearby. The team had tech support capable of repurposing the Pentagon’s favorite toys, and there was Felicity Smoak Queen humming innocently in the general vicinity.

“It was a disappointment, parting ways with him,” the old man once said of the Arrow. “He was one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever known.”

This, coming from someone who had traveled the world specifically to meet remarkable people and rip off their juju. That one comment had made a hell of an impression on Terry.

Oliver Queen was the Arrow. Oh, man, Jon was going to have a fit.

The sense of giddy revelation did not last. Terry touched down in Starling to news that shots had been fired on the Queen home. One injured. No word on who or how badly.

He had the whole cab ride to imagine that injury had been Jon - or worse, Abby. Terry had seen a handful of gunshot wounds up close over the past few months, and he had far too many fresh and oozing mental images at his disposal. Who would shoot at Queen and his baby sister? It was like stomping on a litter of golden retrievers.

The old man should have let Terry take the suit, damn it. There were some faces in this town that needed bouncing off a concrete floor.

At Starling General, it was not terribly difficult to find the Queen-Diggle encampment. All Terry had to do was follow the trail of Panoptic bodyguards back to the waiting room where Roy Harper stood watch. He was pacing from the doorway of a recovery room, past Jon sprawled out asleep across two chairs, over to the windows and back. That was two family members accounted for, then.

Harper turned smartly at the sound of footsteps, and Terry realized with a jolt that he was looking at another of the old guard. This was Harper the private security professional, who personally taught hand-to-hand to Panoptic employees and who, in his late forties, could still turn a backflip off a diving board. This man had been Arsenal, once upon a time.

“Terry,” he said, walking over purposefully, and there may have been a new flicker of recognition in his eyes. “I didn’t know you were still in town.”

“I’m - well, Mr. Wayne sent me back. What happened? Who’s hurt? The news reports were pretty vague.”

Harper filled in the details - Lyla Diggle gutshot on the floor of the panic room, both the Queen siblings covered in blood, Elaine shaking next to her mother - with remarkable equanimity. He also took care to provide Panoptic’s best guesses about the lone rifleman likely responsible and their threat assessment going forward. Yes, he knew who he was talking to.

“How are they now?”

“The girls are asleep in Lyla’s room,” Harper said, gesturing at the half-open door. “As for him…” He nodded at the pile of sleeping Jon in the corner. “Could you hang out here for a few hours? Just keep him company. I’ve got to take care of something.”

“Of course. Whatever you guys need.”

“Thanks.” And on his way to the door, the actual real life Arsenal clapped Terry firmly on the shoulder.

As soon as he was gone, Terry followed the route he had taken. Doors, windows, recovery room. He passed Queen and went to look in on the patient and the girls. Lyla Diggle lay pale and still in the near bed, a heart monitor beeping reassuringly. In the bed closer to the window, a mane of black curls stood out against the white pillow, and a blonde head lay next to it. Both Elaine and Abby had fallen asleep on top of the thin blanket, still in their jeans and socks.

Terry paced back to the windows. Visited the nurses’ station. Checked his emails. Glanced at Jon again.

He had every intention of letting the guy sleep. He’d had a hard day. People shot at him.

Five minutes later, Terry retrieved a bag of Cheetos from a nearby vending machine, pulled it open on his way across the waiting room, and leaned over and poked Queen in the ribs.

Jon was an agreeable sleeper, easy to wake and easy to drift right off again. You could say he was too agreeable. On road trips when half a pledge class squeezed into one hotel room, it was rock-paper-scissors to see who got stuck sharing with Queen. He was accustomed to having a huge bed to himself, and it showed. All attempts to shove him back on his side of the bed resulted in sleepy compliance followed by him starfishing out again or rolling over on your arm or doing some other jackass thing.

Since the morning Molaison woke up with an arm across his throat, Queen had been banished to the floor. “You’re my bro, and I love you, but the AC doesn’t crank high enough for your shit.”

He had taken it with good grace. Even brutally hungover, Queen woke up easy and pleasant.

This time, when Terry poked him, he sat up with a snarl.

Well, crap. “Queen.” The best thing was to do something normal, like this was a routine Sunday after a night at Fat Harry’s. Terry shoved the bag of Cheetos in his face. “You hungry?”

“What are you doing here?” Queen said, accusatory. “You’re supposed to be in Gotham.”

“I’m your big brother. Why do you think?” Terry did not say, because the kid was grumpy enough already without making a production of this. Instead he shook the Cheetos as if it were a bag of treats in front of a goldendoodle’s nose. “Hey, look, food.”

Jon extracted exactly one Cheeto from the bag, the weirdo. “How did you even know?”

The truth was unduly complicated, and a perfectly convenient explanation was hanging in the corner. Terry gestured up at the news coverage on the muted TV, where the Queen family’s business had become everyone’s business.

Jon’s lip curled faintly with resentment. “Oh.”

Serious question time: “How are you, man?”

A knee-jerk “I’m fine” was almost the answer, but to Terry’s surprise he caught himself and actually thought about it first. “We fight people for fun all the time,” he said in a slow, measured tone. “We’ve gotten in some real scrapes too.  You remember those bikers on spring break?”

The ones who hadn’t thought pool sharking was cute. Yes, they were memorable.

With his brow furrowed like that, Jon looked a lot like his dad. “But I didn’t know what it felt like to have someone honestly trying to kill me.”

The first time a bullet slammed into the Batman’s body armor and flattened Terry to the concrete, it had been rage and not terror that washed through his whole body. Some asshole had shot him. He was going to twist the fucker’s head off like a bottle cap.

“Remember that it isn’t personal,” Mr. Wayne had told him afterwards. “It’s not that they want Terry McGinnis dead in particular. They’re shooting at the uniform, at the obstacle in their way. You have to keep your head.”

“Dude shot me,” Terry had grumbled. “It felt pretty personal.”

Most people went their whole lives never knowing what it felt like to have someone look right at them and genuinely want them dead. Jon wasn’t going to be among them.

Terry sighed. “I’m sorry you found out.”

After that, neither was in much of a mood to talk. Terry kept up the occasional circuit of the doors and windows, and Queen worked his way through the bag of Cheetos. Eighty percent of managing life-or-death situations, in Terry’s few months of experience, was turning out to be waiting. You had to wait strategically, in the right place with the right equipment. But you definitely had to fucking wait.

Past midnight, something finally happened. Mr. Queen and Mr. Diggle came striding out of the elevators, and Terry was on his feet before he knew how he had gotten there.

He was acutely aware that he was no longer looking at Jon’s dad and Jon’s godfather. They were on the clock, and everything about the way they held themselves and the way they moved reflected that.

Terry reached out to shake the Arrow’s hand. “Mr. Queen.”

The recognition was clearly mutual. “Terry.” Mr. Wayne must have broken with tradition and done some explaining.

“Um,” Jon said awkwardly. “The hell are you doing?”

Shaking Spartan’s hand, that’s what. Terry had been occasionally hanging out with these guys for years and never given them their due.

“Bruce sent you?” Mr. Diggle said.

He had indeed, and Terry took more than a little pride in that. “The old man thought you could use a hand.”

“He’s not wrong. Panoptic’s compromised, and we need all the help we can get.”

“What can I do?”

“Our safe house is no longer secure,” Mr. Queen said. “Roy is making other arrangements now. If you could back him up for the duration, we’d appreciate it.”

A few hours ago, Terry had been bitching at the prospect of babysitting. Looking these two men in the face, he would gladly handle their dry cleaning if they told him it was vital mission support. “Of course. When do we leave?”

“Dad. Dig.” Jon shouldered into the circle the three of them had unconsciously formed. “You said soon. Is it soon yet?”

Terry felt bad for him - really, he did. It sucked, being locked out of the loop when your family was at stake. But he also had to bite the inside of his cheek at what a kindergartener Queen could sound like sometimes.

Mr. Diggle stepped right out of the line of fire. “I’ll go wake the girls.”

Mr. Queen watched him go for a moment, eyes lingering on the room where his daughter slept, and then he took a deep breath and turned to Jon. “We believe the organization that’s holding Mom is threatening our whole family to force her to comply with their demands. It’s not safe to rely on Panoptic’s resources right now, so Elaine and Abby only go with people we trust.”

“Um.” After a couple of startled blinks, Queen managed to say: “Oh?”

“An hour after the shooting, an extremely classified government agency suffered an attack on their secure system. Whoever did it clearly knew their way around the firewalls your mother designed.”

Jon’s head tipped slightly sideways, like a dog that’s heard a new noise. “Can you start again from ‘the organization that’s holding Mom’?”

He just needed a moment to process, and he’d catch up. Terry decided to keep the information moving. “They wanted her to hack her own work?”

Mr. Queen nodded. “Which meant putting her in front of a computer with an Internet connection.”

All unknowing, they put the Arrow’s hacker - whom the old man once described as “more frightening than an IRS auditor and a CIA analyst put together” - in front of a computer. With an Internet connection. “And they thought that was going to go well for them? That is adorable.”

“She got them in, and she did actually retrieve some files. Heavily-encrypted, extremely important-looking files. Requisitions for office supplies.”

Secret identities were the fucking best. “Adorable!”

“She also took the opportunity to pass us a message.”

“Polybius code?”

Next to Terry, Jon looked startled and slightly betrayed. “Dude, who even are you?”

Terry tried for a reassuring smile, because Team Arrow was obviously planning to explain themselves in a minute. But they were interrupted by two Diggles and a small Queen emerging from the recovery room. A pink, quilted overnight bag hung from Mr. Diggle’s shoulder. Time to relocate, then.

Abby went straight for her father - “You’re sending us away?” - and ouch, straight for the guilt trip.

“It’s only for a day or two,” he said, resting his hands on her shoulders. “Terry’s going to take you both someplace safe with Uncle Roy. Even I won’t know where it is.”

She glanced at her brother, who was still very clearly confused and very clearly pissed off about it. With big, pleading eyes, she said, “Why isn’t Jonny coming with us?”

What? Jon wasn’t coming?

“I need his help with something,” Mr. Queen said soothingly. “It’s important, honey. I wouldn’t ask either of you to do this if it wasn’t.”

He was taking Jon into the field. That was a bullshit decision if ever Terry had heard one. They had the actual Batman standing right next to them, but instead they were going to take a sophomore with zero combat experience. He could handle himself in a tournament, sure, but this wasn’t a game. For fuck’s sake, this was the guy who spent Christmas break with broken ribs because he couldn’t resist a dare. He was going to get himself killed.

The only person who looked more surprised than Terry was Jon himself. He was staring at his dad like he had just started speaking Tagalog.

“Roy is waiting for you downstairs,” Mr. Diggle said quietly to Terry, even as Mr. Queen bent down to console Abby. “East exit, over by the information desk. You know where?”

“It’s where I came in.”

Elaine sidled in close. “I don’t like leaving Mom.”

“She’ll have Panoptic looking after her,” Mr. Diggle said. “And she’d want you safe and away. I want you safe and away.”

Terry stepped back politely to let the family say their goodbyes. Mr. Queen and Mr. Diggle made a minimum of fuss, and the only hug that lingered was Abby hanging onto her brother’s neck.

All right. If this was the plan, Terry could roll with it.

“Thank you,” Mr. Diggle said quietly as he passed the pink quilted bag to Terry. “And take care.”

“Yeah, you too.” Terry hefted the bag onto his shoulder. It was surprisingly heavy. “You ready?” he asked Abby.

Finally, she let go of Jon’s neck, and she put on a brave face. “Let’s go.”

Terry led the Arrow and Spartan’s daughters away, and he felt their eyes on him all the way to the elevator.