#but they’re always out here with tens or hundreds of thousands of notes

[altschmerzes]

hate when i see a post and i just Know it’s gonna majorly prevent me from writing anything for like. a solid week.

[quietwings-fics]

Dastardly Alien Cheesecake

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Archive Warning: N/A Ship: Gen (Ten & Donna) Additional Tags: Trust, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Poison, Hurt/Comfort, Vomiting, The Doctor & Donna Noble Friendship Wordcount: 3761 Summary:

Donna eats something she’s not supposed to.

Notes:

I'm going to state it outright here so that everyone knows what they're walking into: yes, this is a fic about the doctor sticking his fingers down donna's throat to make her throw up. you have now been warned of the contents and can proceed if you so wish.

The honeymoon period of traveling across time and space is followed by the most intense bout of homesickness that Donna has ever felt, which perhaps isn't saying much when she'd never been that far from home in her life before the Doctor.

To stand on an alien planet and realize just how far away she is from her granddad is a massive step up from missing him when he's only a drive away. Her room in the TARDIS is all hers, and it even fills itself with comforts that Donna forgot to bring, — like a blanket on the heavier side and a little squeezy stress ball that always seems to roll out from under her bed when she's upset — but at the same time, it never forgets what it is, an alien ship flown by an alien man. Something about the corners where the walls meet the floor are never right, never quite what a person, a human, would have built.

She doesn’t tell the Doctor about any of this. She doesn't have to. He must see it in her eyes because he starts pointing out little details on their journeys to her. He can somehow find a little piece of home to show her no matter where they are. They wait at a train station that will take them a few hundred miles below the surface of a planet and laugh at the confusing and colorful layout of the map provided, correcting each other back and forth about which station, exactly, they're even waiting at. Another time, he fiddles with a radio (or, what she assumes is a radio) with the sonic screwdriver until it starts to call out mournfully for Major Tom, singing a signal that got sent out into space thousands of years ago all to be picked up by the two of them. Even among aliens, there are commonalities, there are always reality TV shows that play on screens no one is watching (even if the contestants are a little more green... or blue... or translucent than she's used to) and automatic doors that never work right.

Constants in the universe that she'd be lost without, really. The Doctor knows where to look for them.

(Not for the first time, she wonders if that's because of how many humans he's had to curb the homesickness of, or because while she can look up at the stars and know home is still there for her to return to, even if she has no intention of staying, he can't.

Even Timelords must have had reality TV.)

The one constant that can center her like nothing else is food. Everyone in the universe cooks.

“All your memories," the Doctor had started explaining once, and Donna had learned to measure how long he would ramble about something by his tone alone. This voice was the 'at least twenty minutes before he'll take a breath' one. "Are stored away in your hippocampus, rubbing right against where your brain lights up when something hits your tastebuds, so-" Donna had taken those few moments to weigh her willingness to listen to him babble through their entire meal and decided instead to pick up the sandwich he wasn't eating and shove it in his mouth to shut him up. It had worked pretty well.

That’s why, when the Doctor wanders off into the crowd of the party they’re technically crashing and leaves Donna alone, she doesn’t think twice about approaching the buffet table. She’s not having much luck striking up a conversation, so she might as well find something to pass the time. She doesn’t recognize any of the food — hardly surprising when she’s only the third human in the room, as far as she’s seen.

She walks along the table, taking her time and half-wishing the Doctor would come back to keep her company. Maybe he’d gone off and gotten himself kidnapped. She grinned. Now, that would give her something to do and something to gloat about when the doing’s done. 

At the end of the table, just as she begins to despair (and contemplate one of the less appealing looking snacks,) there’s a plate of cheesecake. She blinks at it. It doesn’t squirm, or bleed, or make any weird noises when she gingerly scoops a little onto her plate. It’s just cheesecake. Looks like it, smells like it… She picks up a fork and pokes it one more time before breaking off a piece and putting it in her mouth. Tastes like it. It’s deliciously sweet. 

She eats the whole piece far too quickly. She only tenses once, a scolding voice creeping up in the back of her head that sounds too much like her mother, but then, she’s a billion miles and thousands of years away. Donna can have as much cheesecake as she damn well pleases. 

With a lighter step, Donna takes another piece to wander with. It’s just as good as the first, but she takes the time to savor this one.

”Donna,” the Doctor seems to appear out of nowhere, the only warning of his approach a familiar touch on her back sliding to grip her shoulder for a moment, “oh, you’re going to love this. They’re-“ He stops. She watches the grin on his face suffocate slowly. “What do you have there?” he asks. She’s been in enough life-or-death situations with him that his excited tone dropping so quickly makes her itch with the need to run.

”Cheesecake,” she answers. The Doctor grimaces.

”Right,” he says. “No. You don’t.” Donna looks down at her plate. “Definitely not cheesecake. Very not edible for humans. How long have you been eating that?” Donna feels her appetite drop out of her and pick up a bindle to hitchhike to someone who needs it more.

”I don’t know?” She looks around, which is useless because no one in the future bothers to keep clocks on the wall. They probably just have their alarms microchipped into their brains. The Doctor takes her plate away. He sets it down, and his attention returns to her immediately. His mouth is pinched as he takes her hand in his and starts checking her fingers for… something. 

“How much did you have? Stick out your tongue,” he says.

”What?” But his gaze is deadly serious. Donna sticks out her tongue and fumbles her words around it. “One piece. One and a half.” The Doctor stares very closely at her tongue. He lets out a sigh of relief, which she takes as permission to stop looking like a fool and put her tongue back where it belongs.

”You’re alright. You’ll be alright.” She’s not sure which of them he’s reassuring, but if it’s her, he’s not doing a very good job of it. He puts a hand on her shoulder and starts guiding her through the party. “Come on. We’ll take care of this.”

”Take care of what?”

”Just a minor… major… ‘possibly fatal if we don’t handle it’ case of food poisoning. Why are you putting things in your mouth that don’t belong there?” 

“You’re always letting me eat alien food!” 

“After I’ve made sure it’s safe!” 

“Maybe you should have warned me that death by cake was an option-” She cuts herself off as she frowns at the hallway he’s leading her down now that they’ve escaped the party. “The TARDIS is the other way.”

”I know.” She turns her gaze suspiciously onto him. He dropped the argument far too quickly for him not to be playing it up for her sake. 

“So… we’re going to whatever nurse they have here to pick up the antidote?” The Doctor makes a face that’s answer enough.

”Not quite.” He herds her along to a door near the end of the hallway. The automatic door clicks twice at them like it’s annoyed at having to do its job, and then it only opens up halfway, leaving them to have to scoot in sideways one after the other. Donna goes first.

Another constant in the universe: everyone has toilets. Even species who don’t need toilets create toilets, though those were less than useful to Donna and she really didn’t feel like marveling at universal similarities when she needed to go. Bathrooms also only came in two types, through which you could tell how much the janitors (another thing that everyone had) were being paid: clean enough to eat off the floor or so disgusting that Donna would seriously consider just waiting until they got back to the TARDIS.

This one was, thankfully, the former. Donna breathed a sigh of relief before remembering why the Doctor had brought her here in the first place. He spoke before she could ask. “There’s no antidote for this. Luckily, it’s also extremely slow to break down.” 

Donna can put two and two together.

”You want me to throw up the cake.” It isn’t a question. The Doctor treats it like one.

”Sooner rather than later, yeah.” He rocks back on his heels. Donna peers around. No stalls here, but there are identifiable toilets, which is more than some places can boast of. “I’ll turn around if you want some privacy.”

”I can’t.”

”Sure you can, just-” He unsubtly mimes sticking his finger down his throat. Donna glowers at him. 

“And I’m telling you,” she repeats, “that doesn’t work.”

”How do you know that?” Donna doesn’t answer him. The Doctor grits his teeth together and looks to the side. “Okay. I’ll…” He trails off. “I’ll help?”

”Help?” Donna repeats back to him, incredulous. The Doctor turns back to the automatic door, which has taken its sweet time closing and clicks angrily at him when he moves in range again. He whips up the sonic screwdriver in a flash and quiets the door. The sensor above goes dead, locking it. 

“Donna, we have to get it out of you,” he says. “Trust me when I say this is the quickest, least unpleasant way we can do this.” She does trust him. That doesn’t mean she has to like it.

”So what?” She glances down to the screwdriver he’s fiddling with, almost nervously. “Are you going to sonic my insides?”

”What? No!” The screwdriver disappears into one of his pockets. “Look, I can just- I can help.”

”How?” she demands. 

“I can make it happen,” he replies. “If you can’t do it yourself.”

Donna fixes him with a look. It clicks.

“You are not sticking your fingers down my throat!” She takes a step back and even sweeps a hand in front of her to protect the distance between them.

”Donna-” he starts, stubbornly, but on equal footing like that, she won’t give any more ground than he will.

”Stick your fingers somewhere more useful!”

”Donna.” He tries again, but there’s no argument in it this time. His voice is quiet and serious. His eyes plead with her to let him help. (He’s doing that on purpose, she knows he is, because no one could unintentionally look so despairing. And it’s still working on her.)

”…It’s really going to kill me if we don’t, isn’t it?” she asks. She doesn’t want to look at it. Can’t. Danger is something they’re supposed to be able to run away from.

”Yes,” he confirms. There’s a reassuring lightness to his voice as he continues, stepping forward and waiting to see if she pulls back again. She doesn’t. “Death by cake. Agonizing. Embarrassing. How do I explain that to your mom and granddad?” Donna snorts. It isn’t anywhere close to a laugh. The Doctor is close enough to touch her now, and he does, hands wrapped around her own and squeezing as she takes a deep breath.

”We’ve done weirder, I guess,” she says.

”I definitely have,” he says. “You’ve got a much nicer mouth than most of the ones I’ve gone poking around in.” He squeezes her hands a second time. She looks down at them, at his fingers firmly wrapped around her, his thumb rubbing the back of her right hand. 

“You’d better wash them first,” she says. This close, she can see the Doctor’s relief in the minute drop of his shoulders and the way the lines around his eyes relax into something happier. Her hands still feel warm when he lets them go. She tucks them close to her chest almost instinctively, like she can keep a little of his presence with her. 

She has to pick out a toilet. The locked door means privacy, but the lack of stalls still sets some part of her on edge. Lavatory instincts. The desire not to be seen when she’s about to be at her lowest. No one invites a friend in to watch them throw up after having too much to drink at a party. The last time she must have had anyone around for that, she’d barely been in double digits. She wasn’t sure exactly who it had been, but she remembered having her hair held back to keep it clean while she was miserably sick. 

She got down on the floor next to the toilet. A moment later, the sink the Doctor was using had switched off, and she could hear him pad over. 

“Ready?” he asks as he gets down beside her. She takes a breath.

”No?” She turns to him. “What should I…?”

”Try not to bite me.” Donna’s mouth twitches up for a brief moment.

”No promises.”

The Doctor puts his other hand over hers again, but his fingers rest on her chin first. His touch is very light, very still, waiting to see how she reacts. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips. They feel chapped. He waits a moment before moving, lifting his fingers to place two of them against her bottom lip this time. 

“Should I stick my tongue out again?” she asks. It’s strange to speak with him touching her lip. The pressure of his fingers doesn’t impede her at all, but it is… there. His fingers bump her upper lip at certain sounds. They stay where they were when she’s finished until he answers. 

“That would make it easier.” Donna goes to lick her lips again without thinking, but  when she bumps a finger, she sucks her tongue right back into her mouth, slightly mortified. And then she snorts another almost-laugh because she has no idea what else she can do with the feeling. The Doctor smiles. He draws his fingers back to let her open her mouth.

She tries to keep her cool. The Doctor’s finger barely brushes her tongue, and… she bites him. And her tongue. Not hard enough to hurt, but they both hiss in surprise. The Doctor retreats, and she can see the pale indent of her own teeth on the top of his index finger.

”Sorry.” 

“It’s fine. Again?” She nods. This time, the Doctor lifts his other hand and places two fingers at the edge of her mouth, firm against her lower canine and lip and holding them open. She breathes, trying to relax. She doesn’t do a very good job of it. This time, when she feels his finger touch her tongue, she doesn’t bite down. Couldn’t now if she tried, but she’s proud of herself for keeping that reflex under control.

Having his finger in her mouth is… odd. He delves in with purpose. She can feel the pad of his finger slide back along her tongue as his knuckles rub against her teeth. She can hear herself breathing around it. 

He still goes slow, and so it doesn’t feel like an intrusion as much as it does an exploration she’s submitted to. Minute movements of her tongue feel amplified when they rub against his finger. A moment later and his nail bumps up against her soft palate. His eyes narrow and his finger slides deeper until Donna feels the urge to swallow around it.

”Hm.” He frowns. She did warn him. “You don’t have a very strong gag reflex.” 

She tries to respond and resorts to making an insulted noise in the back of her throat when she can’t. 

“I can still trigger it. Give me a minute.” She makes a questioning noise as his finger withdraws. He keeps her mouth open with his other hand. His thumb rests along her jaw, grounding her. Gently, he inserts his middle finger next to his index the second time he goes probing in her mouth. She grunts in discomfort.

She wonders if she should close her eyes. She would, except that whenever she tenses or makes a sound, his gaze jumps up to meet hers. It’s comforting to know that they’re stuck in this strangeness together. 

Breathing around two fingers feels more difficult. They squish against her tongue as they push back to her throat. Sensation becomes less sure the further back they are, until she can mostly feel a pressure that makes her want to pull away. She clenches the bottom of her dress up in her fists to keep still. The Doctor’s knuckles bump her teeth as he probes around in her throat.

It starts as a tingling sensation. Donna frowns. The Doctor pushes somewhere uncomfortable, and she makes an involuntary noise, her eyes welling up. He looks up to her again, and his sure expression is the only thing that keeps her calm. 

He withdraws a little. “Breathe,” he says, and Donna does, once, before he orders, “and stop.”

The constant sound of her own breathing freezes at his word. He pushes his fingers back in. 

Donna feels an awful choking sensation, her throat convulsing around some obstruction, and then a wave of nausea has her grabbing at the Doctor’s hand. He yanks his fingers out quickly as she bows forward over the toilet and throws up. Her throat burns. 

Donna sucks in a breath when it’s over. It hurts. Her mouth feels sour and disgusting. She blinks to see what mess she’s made, but aside from a splatter that she cringes from on the toilet’s side, she got the rest of it where it was supposed to go. 

She inhales again. Her eyes are watery. 

The Doctor is holding her hair. She only realizes that as she comes back to herself, but he’s got it all in his hand, the other on her shoulder holding her still. He lets go, smoothing her hair down back into place. Donna shuts her eyes to feel it better.

”Tell me it’s over,” she mutters. The Doctor doesn’t say anything. She forces her eyes open, unformed tears blurring her vision. “Doctor. Please.”

”Just one more time. I promise.” Donna makes a face, squeezing her eyes shut. She spits into the toilet, but that does very little to get rid of the sour taste flooding her mouth. 

“That better not be the hand that was in my mouth,” she mumbles. The Doctor stops touching her hair, and she regrets calling attention to it. She forces herself to sit up straight again and opens her mouth. She feels disgusting.

The Doctor touches her cheek this time before he secures her mouth open with his fingers. He doesn’t even look grossed out about touching her after she’s thrown up. 

He uses two fingers from the start this time. Donna’s jaw aches slightly. The Doctor’s fingers taste marginally better than the inside of her own mouth right now, and that’s some kind of relief. She’s never had cause to think about it before, but he tastes like… Well, he just tastes like some bloke. How fingers are supposed to taste, like skin and the salt of sweat. Not unpleasant, not enjoyable, and not alien at all. 

“Hold your breath,” he says. This time, she can brace herself as each sensation comes. The growing pressure of his fingers touching things he shouldn’t. The catch in her throat. The spasms. He pulls his fingers away. This time, when she lurches forward, she can feel the way the Doctor catches her shoulders on the way, helping her get everything into the toilet. He’s got ahold of her hair a second later, keeping it out of her way as her stomach’s contents are dragged out of her. 

Tears streak down her cheeks this time. She sniffs, and even the inside of her nose feels like it’s burning this time. She swallows, a mistake that makes her gag again, and then spits up bile from the back of her throat. 

“That’s it,” the Doctor is saying. He’s rubbing her back. It’s the only good thing she can feel right now. “It’s over. You’re safe.” She feels his lips press to her temple as she gasps in air, and then his own relieved exhale. “You’re safe.” 

Donna groans miserably.

The Doctor only moves a little to flush the toilet for her. She slumps into him, and he wraps an arm around her, resting his head atop hers.

“Never eating alien food again,” she mutters. “From now on, you’re bringing me back to Earth, and we’re ordering take-out.” 

“What about that little place on Muscolane?” he asks.

”…One exception for Muscolane.” Leaning against him like this, she can feel his chuckle as well as hear it.

He helps her to her feet. She wipes at her eyes and her nose as he brings her over to the sink. She doesn’t even bother to question it when he picks up a towel to wash her face off with. Donna stands perfectly still for him as he brushes it over her mouth and chin. She balks a little more at him picking a small paper cup from a dispenser and filling it before holding it for her to drink from. There’s something so tremendously earnest about him doing it that she allows it anyway. She sips slowly, fills her mouth and swirls it around, and then spits it into the sink as the Doctor refills the cup again. 

She takes it from him this time and drinks it at her own pace. He starts washing his hands, and her gaze darts down to his sleeve and a very conspicuous stain on it. She should feel embarrassed about that, but she’s too worn out for it. Besides, he knew what he was getting into. 

Someone rudely bangs on the door the Doctor locked. Or broke. Those words usually mean the same thing with him. The Doctor sneaks a glance at her, and when the pounding comes again, followed by demands to be let in, they both have to choke down giggles.  

“Back to the TARDIS?” he asks.

To answer, she takes his hand.

(Enjoyed it? Any interaction is welcomed. You can even support me on Ko-Fi <3)

[matan4il]

Saw your old post on Jewish rep. Curious as to your thoughts on crazy ex girlfriend?

Hi lovely Nonnie!

Oh wow. First off, thank you for reading my thoughts on Jewish representation! As for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I actually didn't know it had a Jewish angle? Which I feel says something about Tumblr. I have seen A LOT of CEG gifsets on my dash at one point and they were ALL about the bisexual man singing and dancing and having a cute younger bf. I guess, the whole thing about Tumblr is we're all in our own little fandom bubble, and then suddenly something blows up (presumably because it's SO outstanding) to a degree that it makes it into the bubble. And apparently if CEG had good Jewish rep, that was not seen as outstanding enough to blow up and cross into different bubbles.

I'm not saying anything for sure, maybe the Jewish rep on that show really didn’t deserve to blow up, and one thing is def not enough to form a bigger conclusion, but it’s not just one thing. I'm sometimes very frustrated by my Tumblr experience, precisely because this is supposedly a much more open, tolerant and accepting space than other social media sites. Yet, the first ask I ever got? Was from a Holocaust denier. May of 2021? Was hell for a lot of Jewish blogs on this site, I saw way too many getting bullied, some of them to the point where they had to delete completely. I see some blogs reblogging a post with an antisemitic libel one day and the next they reblog a "Happy Hanukkah!" post. Maybe they don’t even understand they’re helping to spread antisemitism, or maybe they’re using the congratulatory post to avoid accusations of being antisemitic, either way it’s a reminder that just because a blog shares one seemingly Jew-friendly post doesn’t actually make that blog a Jew-safe space. I see people going out of their way to love and hold up minority characters, and then leave out the Jewish ones. Posts about all kinds of global crises that affect minorities go viral regularly, but I will never forget the silence on Tumblr as the hostage situation in Texas was going on for 11 hours, and Jews were blogging about it, and some incredible non-Jews were amplifying our voices by reblogging those posts (including some amazing followers of mine), but not a single of these posts went viral, not a single one that I’ve seen made it to even 300 notes, let alone the tens and even hundreds of thousands of notes I’ve seen on other similar posts. It just tells me that something about the way western society educates on the subject of Jews as a minority and of antisemitism has failed. And I don't think it's exclusively about the inadequacies of most Jewish representation, but it's probably linked to (both shaping and being influenced by) it.

Now back to CEG... as you can gather, I have not watched it, but I will thanks to you. IDK when I'll start or how long it will take me, especially since I also just learned the other day that Hunters' s2 is going to air soon and I would like to try and express something about the Jewish representation there before this new (and final) season, which might include doing a quick binge-watch of s1. IDK if you'd like me to write about it when I do watch CEG? If so, just please be patient with me! Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Hope you have a great day and if you celebrate, have a very Happy Hanukkah! As always, here's my ask tag. xoxox

[onceuponastory]

normal - steve kemp x reader: chapter ten (FINALE): begin again

“Yeah I know I went and left you all alone Please don't think that I let you go I'll never let go.” “Cause I could touch a hundred thousand souls But none of them would ever feel like home And no matter how far and wide I roam You're the only one I'll ever know.” - anyone else by pvris

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Steve Kemp x Female!Reader Chapter Warnings: As always, 18+ ONLY PLEASE. This chapter has mentions of death, murder, stabbing, cannibalism, serial killers, kidnapping, a lot of blood, and graphic descriptions of violence and injuries. Also mentions of reader’s trauma and PTSD after everything she’s been through, and her survivors guilt. And of course, Steve Kemp and Nick Fowler, because those two are warnings all on their own, let alone together. As always, if I miss any triggers, please let me know. Notes: Well, here it is. The final chapter of Normal. I’m going to make a big post about it ending later, but from the bottom of my heart, thank you SO MUCH for reading and loving this story as much as you all have. I appreciate every note and comment so much. This chapter is not beta’d, so any mistakes are my own.

Lying on the floor, Y/N listens as the sirens sound and as the blood continues to flow from her side. She presses her hand to the wound, trying to stop the flow, but it only adds to the pain. Biting her lip, Y/N hisses as she tries to hold back her cries of pain. Lying back, she wonders where Steve is now. Hopefully, he’s safe. Even though now she wishes she went with him. The sound of the sirens gradually grows louder and louder until she realises they’re outside. Sighing, Y/N braces herself. Because once those doors open, everything changes. And this time, she doesn't know how she'll survive it on her own. 

The door soon bursts open, and she hears voices shouting. “FBI, hands in the air!” Y/N lifts her hands, even though doing so sends more pain throughout her body. Rapidly, footsteps approach her.

“I’m FBI Agent Y/N Y/L/N. Please don’t shoot.” She mumbles.

“Y/N! Oh god. What happened to you?” A familiar voice, that of her boss, sounds. “Hey, we need an ambulance over here!” He bends down, studying her bloody and bruised body. “Shit.” He murmurs, taking off his jacket and holding it against her side to stop the bleeding. “Y/N, where’s Kemp? Is he still here?” He asks. Y/N’s eyes fill with tears before she can even stop them. 

“I don’t know.” She sniffles, and her boss sighs.

“It’s okay. You’re safe now. Don’t worry about him. He can’t hurt you anymore.” If only she could tell them the truth about how truly kind Steve was to her, and how he defended her against Nick. Maybe then, things would be different. But nobody would believe her anyway. Once again, her thoughts drift to Steve and the times they spent together. They were so happy, so free. And now, she doesn’t know if she’ll ever see him again.

“Sir, there’s one body over here. It’s Fowler.” A voice sounds, cutting through her thoughts. Immediately, Y/N gasps. 

“Sir, it was Nick. The killings, everything, it was all-” she exclaims, hoping they believe her and that she’s not sent to prison on a murder charge. To her surprise, though, a look of shame crosses her boss’ expression, and he nods.

“Don’t waste your strength. It’s alright. We know.” Y/N breathes a sigh of relief. “Well done, kid. You solved the case after all.” Even though Y/N can feel herself starting to lose consciousness, a small smile crosses her lips.

“I did, didn’t I?” she murmurs.

“We better get you out of here. It looks like you’re about to end up the same way as Nick.” The sound of sirens fills the air again, and her boss breathes a sigh of relief. But Y/N can feel herself starting to slip away.

“I don’t want to die.” She whispers.

“And you won’t. I won’t let you.” Her boss promises. He looks over her body once again, swearing as he sees his jacket becoming increasingly more soaked with blood. “Where the fuck is that ambulance?!” He yells. “Come on Y/N, just stay awake for me, okay? Just hold on, please.” As Y/N’s eyes begin to drift shut, strangely, she feels oddly at peace. The nightmare is finally over. And at least she got to say goodbye to Steve. 

“You saved us both, and all those women. You did it. My beautiful Y/N.” His words echo in her mind as the doors open again, and as paramedics run up to her. And then, Y/N passes out.

Sometime later, Y/N wakes up. As her eyes take time to adjust to the bright lights of her new surroundings, she hears a voice.

“Thank fuck, she’s awake.” For a fleeting moment, in her daze, she hopes it’s Steve, risking his life and freedom to see her and make sure she’s safe. But as she realises that she’s in a hospital, she also realises that it’s not Steve beside her, just her boss. Her heart sinks, and she sighs sadly. She’s still alone. “Welcome back. You gave us all quite a scare.”

“What happened?” She frowns.

“Well, Fowler got you pretty badly in the side, but the doctors and nurses managed to patch you up. They said you’re a trooper. You’re on bedrest for the next few weeks.”

“No, I mean, how did you find me?”

“Well, you were right. Fowler was behind everything. He tried to hide the evidence, but one of his associates squealed and told us Nick went out to find you. He probably wanted to make sure Kemp killed you, and when he didn’t, he wanted to finish the job.” Y/N nods, trying to block out all the memories she has of Nick standing over her with a knife, that crazed look on his face. “There’s going to be an officer outside your door from now on, just in case Kemp comes back.” That means there’s no way for her to warn Steve, so if he comes back, he’ll be putting herself in danger. 

“Hopefully he doesn’t then.” She says, and her boss laughs.

“Well, you got lucky the first time with him, so hopefully your good luck continues.” Y/N suppresses a scoff. Luck? That’s not what she’d call it. “By the way, there are some journalists outside who want to speak to you.” Y/N frowns.

“Journalists? Plural? I thought there’d just be one reporter, if anything.” Her boss chuckles.

“Y/N, you got kidnapped by a serial killer, and stopped another's reign of terror all on your own. You’re in pretty high demand, kid.” Y/N feels her cheeks heating up.

“Oh, right.” How could she be so naive? Of course, after going through what she did, newspapers would be interested in her. She fidgets nervously in her bed, and she bites the skin around her thumb. She’s not used to having so much attention on her. She’s given a few interviews before, but definitely not on this big a scale, or with her as the subject of the story. And she’s definitely not faced it all on her own. 

“If you want, I can send them away.” Her boss offers, obviously noticing her discomfort. Sighing, she shakes her head.

“No, I’m going to have to deal with them eventually, aren’t I? Send them in.”

From that moment on, before she even leaves the hospital, Y/N’s life completely changes almost overnight. There are constant news and magazine interviews, all talking about how brave she was for going up against two cannibalistic serial killers, and not only that, but killing one of them before he could hurt anyone else. They ask her how she feels, knowing that it’s all over, and that she’s a hero. Even though she doesn’t feel much like a hero.

Her co-workers at the FBI even come to visit her too, gushing over and over about how she did such a great job and how they always trusted and believed in her. Honestly, Y/N’s glad she’s still on bedrest and attached to a drip when they come, because when they say those words to her after the hell and constant bullying they put her through, she almost punches them all. The higher ups at the FBI and CIA come to see her too, talking about how what she did will reflect on the agencies as a whole, and how much praise they’ll get for solving the case, completely ignoring how she did it on her own, with her own hard work, and almost died because of it.

Even her parents come to visit her, tears filling their eyes as they tell her how proud they are, and how much they love her. The same parents who, only a few months ago, barely acknowledged her or her job because it didn’t fit into their perfect lifestyle. Of course, deep down she’s glad to have some love from her parents again…it’s just tainted because it took her almost dying and being interviewed by almost every news and tv network around the world for her to be worthy of their pride and love. Then again, they always loved a headline.

And of course, even though everyone tells her it’s over and that they know Nick was responsible, there’s still plenty of police, FBI and CIA interviews. Those are her least favourite kinds of interviews. She didn't know how frightening it was to be on the other side of them. They all ask for her side of the story, the warning signs she saw with Nick, and the million dollar question: if she’s sure that she doesn’t know where Steve went. And in all honesty, she doesn’t. Even though she wants to know more than anything.

When she leaves the hospital, things only continue. For a while, she almost becomes America’s Sweetheart: the superhero who saved the country and its daughters from the darkness that was Nick Fowler. Yet, despite how glad she is that it’s all over, and with receiving so much praise, Y/N just wants it all to stop. She’s tired of having cameras shoved in her face wherever she goes, meaning she can’t live a normal life ever again. She’s not used to this newfound fame, and doesn’t think she ever will be. Not to mention how she’ll be tied to Nick Fowler and this awful thing that he did to her forever. And everyone just seems so…fake. They pretend to care about her physical and mental turmoil, but she knows they’re mostly just there to get clicks and engagement, and they couldn’t care less about what happens to her after this. They’re just chasing the next big story. And for a while, that’s what she’s going to be. This whole situation makes her miss Steve even more. He was the only one who was proud of her. Not because of how well she and her actions would reflect on him. He was actually proud of her. He actually loved her.

And now she’s all on her own, with no idea where he is or if he’s even alive. Her physical scars heal with time, but her emotional scars still stay. And so, the agency also provides her with a therapist to help her readjust to society. Her therapist is nice and all, but she just stares at her most of the time, expecting her to open up about all her trauma right away, when that’s the last thing she wants to do. Not that she can tell her therapist that, though. How else could she phrase that after being given the gift of survival and being hailed as a hero, she doesn’t want it? It makes her sound so ungrateful. 

All Y/N has to keep going is remembering the sweet nothings Steve whispered to her at every waking moment, hoping it’s enough to see her through the night without any nightmares of Nick standing over her with a knife. It never works. The nights are always the worst. When she wakes up, feeling or hearing the whisper of Steve’s voice, or his touch, and knowing it’s not real this time. That she can’t go back to see him and talk to him, and to stop this aching feeling in her chest. That’s what hurts the most. Having him ripped away so quickly from her.

Of course, she tries to find him herself. At least, she searches for him as much as she can before people get suspicious that either she’s not healing as well as she might be, or that her and Steve’s relationship goes far deeper than it seems. After convincing herself that Steve has kept a low enough profile for a while, Y/N even starts checking the news, waiting in case there’s any new bodies that turn up matching Steve’s MO. Because even though the thought still churns her stomach, she knows a cannibal like Steve has to survive somehow. By this point, Y/N’s sure that she knows Steve inside and out (including physically), so she’d be able to spot his work right away. 

When that doesn’t work, Y/N goes back to the cabin a few times, hoping that Steve is hiding out there, waiting for her to find him, or that he’s left her a clue. Naturally, her therapist thinks it’s a great idea, and sees it as a great way to confront what happened. Of course, Y/N didn’t tell her the real reason for her visit. When there’s still no sign of him, and the townspeople don’t know where he is either, it crushes her even more. 

The more time goes on without any word from Steve, not even a discreet note, Y/N starts to wonder if Steve has forgotten her after all. And even after being kidnapped, beaten and almost dying...the possibility that Steve doesn’t love her anymore hurts more than anything Y/N has been through.

“Mom, stop fussing over me, please!” Y/N moans, swatting away her mother’s hands as they try to fix her outfit and hair. 

“I’m sorry, darling. Your father and I just want to make sure you look good for your special night when you accept your award!” She insists. Tonight, Y/N gets an award for stopping Nick and closing the case for good. Y/N sighs. She’s still honoured to be appreciated, especially after all the pain and torment she went through. But she knows this ceremony will be full of press again, ready to plaster her face all over the newspapers and television screens once more. 

Y/N looks at herself in the mirror, staring at the fancy clothes adorning her body. She looks so…different. And she feels so uncomfortable and out of place. Thank fuck they’re not expecting a speech. She’s still too overwhelmed with everything going on with her life, and with trying to find Steve to even think straight. 

“Y/N, they’re ready for you.” Her father announces, and she nods. After her parents leave, Y/N takes a deep breath and walks out towards the stage. She peeks out at the crowd of people and journalists, all there to see her. Yet, even with such an enormous crowd of people there just to see her...Y/N’s never felt so lonely. If Steve was here, he’d be telling her how gorgeous she looks, and be unable to keep his hands off of her the entire time. If he was here, everything would be so much better. She wouldn’t have to go through this all on her own, without the one person who knows what she’s going through. The only person who matters to her. Maybe if she tried harder to find Steve, or went with him, then things would be different. Another shiver goes up her body then at the thought of Steve touching her, and Y/N tries desperately to not start crying.

But if he’s chosen a life without her, then she has to respect that. Even though that thought tears her up inside. Pushing away her thoughts of Steve, Y/N watches as the director of the FBI approaches the microphone.

“Hello ladies and gentlemen. Members of the press. Thank you all for being here as we honour Agent Y/N Y/L/N, who stopped Nick Fowler, the recent serial killer terrorising Portland, all on her own. And after being kidnapped by Steve Kemp too, another monster.” Y/N winces at his words. If only he knew that to her, Steve Kemp is the furthest thing from a monster. “Through her actions and dedicated hard work, Y/N exemplifies our values of strength and bravery. Which is why I’m honoured to call her an agent, and to give her this award. So please help me welcome her onto the stage.” And yet, Y/N stays rooted in her spot, too hesitant to go out in front of such a big crowd on her own.

So much for being a hero.

“Clearly, she’s not used to the spotlight.” The director chuckles, and further laughter ripples through the crowd. Y/N gulps, her uncomfortableness back in full force. Maybe it would be better if she ran.

“You’re a smart woman, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t let you share your thoughts.” Suddenly, Steve’s words echo in her mind again, cutting through her fears. “I’m proud of you.” 

At first, the sound of Steve’s voice makes her feel even more upset, especially since she still hasn’t heard anything from him. But then, Y/N realises that Steve, the one person who actually loves her, would want her to accept this award. So, taking a deep breath, Y/N walks out on stage.

As she does, the room erupts with the sound of cheering and the flashing of cameras. The sudden sound and brightness makes her wince as she approaches the director. He grasps her hand, shaking it tightly. “Well done.” He grins, passing over a small plaque to her. The cameras go off a few more times, and the applause starts again.

And then, thankfully, it’s over.

Later that night, as she makes the rounds greeting people and giving interviews, Y/N keeps glancing down at the award in her arms. It’s so small. She’s been through so much pain and trauma, including almost dying…and all she gets is a fucking tiny wooden plaque. Meanwhile, there’s no doubt her bosses are using this opportunity to improve their own careers, and she’ll soon be forgotten about again. She scans the room, noticing her co-workers looking at her. And she’ll soon be back to being a target for jokes and bullies by the same people praising her. Just another cog in the machine. 

“You know, you need a new job if this is how they treat you.” Steve’s words, some of the first he ever said to her, echo in her mind. Back then, she thought he was just saying them to get under her skin and play on her fear. Deep down, though, she knew he was right. And now, she’s finally going to take his advice. Because she loved her job at first, and will always be grateful to them for indirectly introducing her to Steve. Without him, her whole life wouldn’t have been turned upside down, and she probably would have died back in that church. Now though, she’s had enough, and she can’t do it anymore.

So a few days later, Y/N enters her office once more, and she packs everything up. Once she’s finished, Y/N goes to see her boss. “Why do I have a bad feeling about whatever you’re about to tell me?” He chuckles when he sees her. Y/N takes a deep breath.

“Sir, I’d like to hand in my resignation.” She passes over an envelope, which her boss studies. “I appreciate everything you’ve done, and all the opportunities I had. I just-”

“After what happened, you can’t do it anymore?” He finishes for her, and she nods. “Well Y/N, you’ve done a lot of good in your time here, arguably more so than anyone in this entire agency. But you’ve been through a lot. Including seeing enough blood and gore to last a lifetime.” He sighs, getting up to shake her hand. “I can’t say I won’t miss you…but I understand.” He grasps her hand, shaking it firmly. “And besides, you’re leaving here a hero. Few people can say that.” Y/N nods. 

“Thank you for everything you’ve done, sir.”

“No. Thank you.” He insists. “After all, you did it all on your own, remember?” Y/N feels herself blushing. If only they knew the truth, and how Steve helped her. And how she let him go. She wouldn’t have such a hero's reputation then.  Sometimes she wonders if it would change anything if she admitted how much Steve helped her. She knows it’s foolish to hope that doing so would bring Steve back and drop everything against him, but after dreaming of him for so long and finally getting him…it doesn’t hurt to try again, right? 

But unfortunately, life doesn’t work like that. And if she and Steve are over, then so be it.

“What are you going to do with yourself, then?” He asks.

“I don’t know. I just need some time to myself. Maybe I’ll do some travelling.” 

“Well, I hope life is good for you. Especially after all of this. You deserve it.”

“Thank you.” Y/N replies, blinking back her tears.

“If you want to come back, or you need anything at all, please don’t hesitate.” Y/N nods, and after saying her last goodbyes, she leaves the office. She can see all her co-workers staring at her, whispering amongst themselves once more. She was right after all: it’s not even been a week since her ceremony, and she’s already back to being the joke of the office. But not anymore. Turning away with a scoff, Y/N leaves the office for the last time.

A few days later, Y/N sighs as she looks through her mail. Bills, bills, more requests for interviews….the same as usual. But then, one letter pops out in an unfamiliar handwriting. Frowning, she tears it open and begins to read.

“Dear Y/N. My beautiful, beautiful Y/N. I’m sorry it’s been so long since I got in contact with you. I had to make sure it was safe, but I have missed you so much.” Immediately, Y/N’s eyes widen, her heart rate increases, and her body heats up with excitement. Steve. He’s alive. He’s okay. He’s alive. Trying to calm herself down, Y/N keeps reading, a huge smile on her face. “I’ve just seen you receiving your award on television, and although I’m a little hurt to not be included, I’m so proud that you’re finally receiving the recognition you deserve. I’ve never stopped thinking about you or stopped loving you, and I hope you still feel the same about me.”

“Of course I do.” She whispers without a second thought. 

“I’ve got a house now, and a new life. If you still want to be with me, come and find me.” There’s an address at the bottom of the letter. Involuntarily, Y/N lets out a squeal of excitement. 

He wants to see her again. 

He still loves her. 

She has to go see him. 

Glancing out of the window, Steve sighs. Since he’s still technically a fugitive, he’s had to move away from Portland, away from his real home and from the love of his life, and assume a new identity. He wanted to contact Y/N as soon as he left, but it was too risky, and could put either of them in danger. So, Steve waited. Even though the constant worry over how Y/N is doing is all-consuming. He knows she was at least okay a week ago, because he saw her accepting her award on TV. But after that, anything could’ve happened. The sight of her lying on the ground, blood pouring out of her, still haunts his every waking moment. He could’ve done so much more to help her. And yet…he ran, like a coward. If she’s hurt again, he’d never be able to live with himself.

Suddenly, a knock sounds at the door, and Steve goes to answer it. When he sees who’s standing there, he gasps. “Hi Steve.” Y/N smiles, her eyes filled with tears. 

“Y/N?” He whispers. “You’re here?”

Chuckling, Y/N nods. “I got your letter.” Immediately, she drops her bags and runs forward into his arms, and he squeezes her tightly. He buries his nose in her hair and her clothing, inhaling her scent once more. 

“I’m so glad you’re here…that you’re okay.” He murmurs, pressing a kiss to her lips, one full of passion and longing. Y/N moans happily. Once they’ve pulled apart, Steve still keeps her in his arms for a bit longer. If he could, he’d keep her there, safe in his embrace forever. “I love you so much. Welcome home.” He grins, kissing her forehead tenderly.

Y/N and Steve know that their relationship and lives have been a whirlwind of chaos and unpredictability, but they’re ready for their new life together.

Always and forever.

The End.

TAGLIST: @buckysboobs, @sebastianstansqueen, @lavendercitizen, @amanda-says, @enchantedbarnes, @eclecticpatrolroadlawyer, @kristophalis, babebr, @nerdypinupcrystal, @marve2014, @sgt-seabass, @themightyloki, @hallecarey1, @phoebethenarwhal, @lxdyred, @potato-with-hair, @chernayawidow, @gabewerk, @snugglingbucky, @late-to-the-party-81,  @abbieff, @shadow-dragonz, @fandomblogs-stuff, @hallecarey1, @rach2602, @littlemissthistle, @booksandbenbarnes​, @engie115

[mcmansionhell]

Underground, Part 1

[Author’s Note: A year ago, when waiting for the DC Metro, I came up with an idea for a short story involving two realtors and the infamous Las Vegas Underground House, typed up an outline, and shoved it away in my documents where it sat neglected until this month. The house recently resurfaced on Twitter, and combined with almost a year of quarantine, the story quickly materialized. Though I rarely write fiction, I decided I’d give it a shot as a kind of novelty McMansion Hell post. I’ve peppered the story with photos from the house to break up the walls of text. Hopefully you find it entertaining. I look forward to returning next month with the second installment of this as well as our regularly scheduled McMansion content. Happy New Year!

Warning: there’s lots of swearing in this.]

Underground

Back in 1997, Mathieu Rino, the son of two Finnish mechanical engineers who may or may not have worked intimately with the US State Department, changed his name to Jay Renault in order to sell more houses. It worked wonders.

He gets out of the car, shuts the door harder than he should. Renault wrinkles his nose. It’s a miserable Las Vegas afternoon - a sizzling, dry heat pools in ripples above the asphalt. The desert is a place that is full of interesting and diverse forms of life, but Jay’s the kind of American who sees it all as empty square-footage. He frowns at the dirt dusting up his alligator-skin loafers but then remembers that every lot, after all, has potential. Renault wipes the sweat from his leathery face, slicks back his stringy blond hair and adjusts the aviators on the bridge of his nose. The Breitling diving watch crowding his wrist looks especially big in the afternoon glare. He glances at it.

“Shit,” he says. The door on the other side of the car closes, as though in response. 

If Jay Renault is the consummate rich, out-of-touch Gen-Xer trying to sell houses to other rich, out-of-touch Gen-Xers, then Robert Little is his millennial counterpart. Both are very good at their jobs. Robert adjusts his tie in the reflection of the Porsche window, purses his lips. He’s Vegas-showman attractive, with dark hair, a decent tan, and a too-bright smile - the kind of attractive that ruins marriages but makes for an excellent divorcee. Mildly sleazy.

“Help me with these platters, will you?” Renault gestures, popping the trunk. Robert does not want to sweat too much before an open house, but he obliges anyway. They’re both wearing suits. The heat is unbearable. A spread of charcuterie in one hand, Jay double-checks his pockets for the house keys, presses the button that locks his car. 

Both men sigh, and their eyes slowly trail up to the little stucco house sitting smack dab in the center of an enormous lot, a sea of gravel punctuated by a few sickly palms. The house has the distinct appearance of being made of cardboard, ticky-tacky, a show prop. Burnt orange awnings don its narrow windows, which somehow makes it look even more fake. 

“Here we go again,” Jay mutters, fishing the keys out of his pocket. He jiggles them until the splintered plywood door opens with a croak, revealing a dark and drab interior – dusty, even though the cleaners were here yesterday. Robert kicks the door shut with his foot behind him.

 “Christ,” he swears, eyes trailing over the terrible ecru sponge paint adorning the walls. “This shit is so bleak.”

The surface-level house is mostly empty. There’s nothing for them to see or attend to there, and so the men step through a narrow hallway at the end of which is an elevator. They could take the stairs, but don’t want to risk it with the platters. After all, they were quite expensive. Renault elbows the button and the doors part. 

“Let’s just get this over with,” he says as they step inside. The fluorescent lights above them buzz something awful. A cheery metal sign welcomes them to “Tex’s Hideaway.” Beneath it is an eldritch image of a cave, foreboding. Robert’s stomach’s in knots. Ever since the company assigned him to this property, he’s been terrified of it. He tells himself that the house is, in fact, creepy, that it is completely normal for him to be ill at ease. The elevator’s ding is harsh and mechanical. They step out. Jay flips a switch and the basement is flooded with eerie light. 

It’s famous, this house - The Las Vegas Underground House. The two realtors refer to it simply as “the bunker.” Built by an eccentric millionaire at the height of Cold War hysteria, it’s six-thousand square feet of paranoid, aspirational fantasy. The first thing anyone notices is the carpet – too-green, meant to resemble grass, sprawling out lawn-like, bookmarked by fake trees, each a front for a steel beam. Nothing can grow here. It imitates life, unable to sustain it. The leaves of the ficuses seem particularly plastic.

Bistro sets scatter the ‘yard’ (if one can call it that), and there’s plenty of outdoor activities – a parquet dance floor complete with pole and disco ball, a putt putt course, an outdoor grill made to look like it’s nestled in a rock, but in reality better resembles a baked potato. The pool and hot tub, both sculpted in concrete and fiberglass mimicking a natural rock formation, are less Playboy grotto and more Fred Flintstone. It’s a very seventies idea of fun.

Then, of course, there’s the house. That fucking house. 

A house built underground in 1978 was always meant to be a mansard – the mansard roof was a historical inevitability. The only other option was International Style modernism, but the millionaire and his wife were red-blooded anti-Communists. Hence, the mansard. Robert thinks the house looks like a fast-food restaurant. Jay thinks it looks like a lawn and tennis club he once attended as a child where he took badminton lessons from a swarthy Czech man named Jan. It’s drab and squat, made more open by big floor-to-ceiling windows nestled under fresh-looking cedar shingles. There’s no weather down here to shrivel them up.

“Shall we?” Jay drawls. The two make their way into the kitchen and set the platters down on the white tile countertop. Robert leans up against the island, careful of the oversized hood looming over the electric stovetop. He eyes the white cabinets, accented with Barbie pink trim. The matching linoleum floor squeaks under his Italian loafers. 

“I don’t understand why we bother doing this,” Robert complains. “Nobody’s seriously going to buy this shit, and the company’s out a hundred bucks for party platters.”

“It’s the same every time,” Renault agrees. “The only people who show up are Instagram kids and the crazies - you know, the same kind of freaks who’d pay money to see Chernobyl.” 

“Dark tourism, they call it.”

Jay checks his watch again. Being in here makes him nervous.

“Still an hour until open house,” he mutters. “I wish we could get drunk.”

Robert exhales deeply. He also wishes he could get drunk, but still, a job’s a job.

“I guess we should check to see if everything’s good to go.”

The men head into the living room. The beamed, slanted ceiling gives it a mid-century vibe, but the staging muddles the aura. Jay remembers making the call to the staging company. “Give us your spares,” he told them, “Whatever it is you’re not gonna miss. Nobody’ll ever buy this house anyway.” 

The result is eclectic – a mix of office furniture, neo-Tuscan McMansion garb, and stuffy waiting-room lamps, all scattered atop popcorn-butter shag carpeting. Hideous, Robert thinks. Then there’s the ‘entertaining’ room, which is a particular pain in the ass to them, because the carpet was so disgusting, they had to replace it with that fake wood floor just to be able to stand being in there for more than five minutes. There’s a heady stone fireplace on one wall, the kind they don’t make anymore, a hearth. Next to it, equally hedonistic, a full bar. Through some doors, a red-painted room with a pool table and paintings of girls in fedoras on the wall. It’s all so cheap, really. Jay pulls out a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket along with a pen. He ticks some boxes and moves on.

The dining room’s the worst to Robert. Somehow the ugly floral pattern on the curtains stretches up in bloomer-like into a frilly cornice, carried through to the wallpaper and the ceiling, inescapable, suffocating. It smells like mothballs and old fabric. The whole house smells like that. 

The master bedroom’s the most normal – if anything in this house could be called normal. Mismatched art and staging furniture crowd blank walls. When someone comes into a house, Jay told Robert all those years ago, they should be able to picture themselves living in it. That’s the goal of staging. 

There’s two more bedrooms. The men go through them quickly. The first isn’t so bad – claustrophobic, but acceptable – but the saccharine pink tuille wallpaper of the second gives Renault a sympathetic toothache. The pair return to the kitchen to wait.

Both men are itching to check their phones, but there’s no point – there’s no signal in here, none whatsoever. Renault, cynical to the core, thinks about marketing the house to the anti-5G people. It’s unsettlingly quiet. The two men have no choice but to entertain themselves the old-fashioned way, through small talk.

“It’s really fucked up, when you think about it,” Renault muses.

“What is?”

“The house, Bob.”

Robert hates being called Bob. He’s told Jay that hundreds of times, and yet…

“Yeah,” Robert mutters, annoyed.

“No, really. Like, imagine. You’re rich, you founded a major multinational company marketing hairbrushes to stay-at-home moms, and what do you decide to do with your money? Move to Vegas and build a fucking bunker. Like, imagine thinking the end of the world is just around the corner, forcing your poor wife to live there for ten, fifteen years, and then dying, a paranoid old man.” Renault finds the whole thing rather poetic. 

“The Russkies really got to poor ol’ Henderson, didn’t they?” Robert snickers.

“The wife’s more tragic if you ask me,” Renault drawls. “The second that batshit old coot died, she called a guy to build a front house on top of this one, since she already owned the lot. Poor woman probably hadn’t seen sunlight in God knows how long.”

“Surely they had to get groceries.”

Jay frowns. Robert has no sense of drama, he thinks. Bad trait for a realtor.

“Still,” he murmurs. “It’s sad.”

“I would have gotten a divorce, if I were her,” the younger man says, as though it were obvious. It’s Jay’s turn to laugh.

“I’ve had three of those, and trust me, it’s not as easy as you think.”

“You’re seeing some new girl now, aren’t you?” Robert doesn’t really care, he just knows Jay likes to talk about himself, and talking fills the time.  

“Yeah. Casino girl. Twenty-six.”

“And how old are you again?”

“None of your business.”

“Did you see the renderings I emailed to you?” Robert asks briskly, not wanting to discuss Jay’s sex life any further.

“What renderings?”

“Of this house, what it could look like.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Jay has not seen the renderings.

“If it were rezoned,” Robert continues, feeling very smart, “It could be a tourist attraction - put a nice visitor’s center on the lot, make it sleek and modern. Sell trinkets. It’s a nice parcel, close to the Strip - some clever investor could make it into a Museum of Ice Cream-type thing, you know?”

“Museum of Ice Cream?”

“In New York. It’s, not, like, educational or anything. Really, it’s just a bunch of colorful rooms where kids come to take pictures of themselves.”

“Instagram,” Jay mutters. “You know, I just sold a penthouse the other week to an Instagram influencer. Takes pictures of herself on the beach to sell face cream or some shit. Eight-point-two million dollars.”

“Jesus,” Robert whistles. “Fat commission.”

“You’re telling me. My oldest daughter turns sixteen this year. She’s getting a Mazda for Christmas.”

“You ever see that show, My Super Sweet Sixteen? On MTV? Where rich kids got, like, rappers to perform at their birthday parties? Every time at the end, some guy would pull up in, like, an Escalade with a big pink bow on it and all the kids would scream.”

“Sounds stupid,” Jay says.

“It was stupid.”

It’s Robert’s turn to check his watch, a dainty gold Rolex.

“Fuck, still thirty minutes.”

“Time really does stand still in here, doesn’t it?” Jay remarks.

“We should have left the office a little later,” Robert complains. “The charcuterie is going to get –“

A deafening sound roars through the house and a violent, explosive tremor throws both men on the ground, shakes the walls and everything between them. The power’s out for a few seconds before there’s a flicker, and light fills the room again. Two backup generators, reads Jay’s description in the listing - an appeal to the prepper demographic, which trends higher in income than non-preppers. For a moment, the only things either are conscious of are the harsh flourescent lighting and the ringing in their ears. Time slows, everything seems muted and too bright. Robert rubs the side of his face, pulls back his hand and sees blood.

“Christ,” he chokes out. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Jay breathes, looking at his hands, trying to determine if he’s got a concussion. The results are inconclusive – everything’s slow and fuzzy, but after a moment, he thinks it might just be shock.

“It sounded like a fucking 747 just nosedived on top of us.” 

“Yeah, Jesus.” Jay’s still staring at his fingers in a daze. “You okay?”

“I think so,” Robert grumbles. Jay gives him a cursory examination.

“Nothing that needs stitches,” he reports bluntly. Robert’s relieved. His face sells a lot of houses to a lot of lonely women and a few lonely men. There’s a muffled whine, which the two men soon recognize as a throng of sirens. Both of them try to calm the panic rising in their chests, to no avail.

“Whatever the fuck happened,” Jay says, trying to make light of the situation, “At least we’re in here. The bunker.”

Fear forms in the whites of Robert’s eyes.

“What if we’re stuck in here,” he whispers, afraid to speak such a thing into the world. The fear spreads to his companion.

“Try the elevator,” Jay urges, and Robert gets up, wobbles a little as his head sorts itself out, and leaves. A moment later, Jay hears him swear a blue streak, and from the kitchen window, sees him standing before the closed metal doors, staring at his feet. His pulse racing, Renault jogs out to see for himself.

“It’s dead,” Robert murmurs. 

“Whatever happened,” Jay says cautiously, rubbing the back of his still-sore neck, “It must have been pretty bad. Like, I don’t think we should go up yet. Besides, surely the office knows we’re still down here.”

“Right, right,” the younger man breathes, trying to reassure himself.

“Let’s just wait it out. I’m sure everything’s fine.” The way Jay says it does not make Robert feel any better. 

“Okay,” the younger man grumbles. “I’m getting a fucking drink, though.”

“Yeah, Jesus. That’s the best idea you’ve had all day.” Renault shoves his hands in his suit pocket to keep them from trembling.  

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[heliads]

Touch-starved

Based on this request: “after getting close to the reader before the Orpheum through writing sessions and such and hating the fact that they “couldn’t touch”... well now that Julie freed them from Caleb... it’s game over now and Luke uses every chance he gets to express his love for y/n.”

masterlist

You sit on the edge of your bed, legs pulled up around your chest. A never ending stream of tears leaks from your eyes, and you stare unseeingly at your feet. It’s over now, isn’t it? Luke is gone, and there’s no coming back from this. Not ever.

You had thought that he might be coming back just once, when Julie walked out onto the stage of the Orpheum. You think you might have been one of the only people in the audience to see the red rims of her eyes, and realize that she would be alone for that performance. Had the boys crossed over already? You never even got the chance to say goodbye.

Then they had appeared, bursting into existence on the stage in time to the music. Luke had been there too, and you’d watched with bated breath as he flickered in and out of sight before finally making it through, away from whatever was holding him back to stay decisively with his band. You had allowed yourself a sigh of relief, the hope that he might have finally completed his unfinished business and be allowed to stay with you.

Even the thought of Luke makes you break out into a fresh wave of sobs. How long had it been since you had met him? Two weeks? Three? It didn’t really matter- it still wasn’t enough time. He had burst into your world in a splash of color and music, bringing with him endless memories and good times. At first, he’d been mainly concerned with your best friend, Julie, but after he realized your skill at songwriting, he started dropping by your house too.

Then ten minute writing sessions became half an hour, and you started visiting Julie’s studio to hear Luke play and offer advice. They became more frequent, a part of your life that you grew to depend on just like food or drink. You became close friends, and then even that wasn’t enough for the two of you. You’d look up from your notebook to see a pair of warm brown eyes hurriedly glancing away, a blush starting to form on his cheeks. You’d stare at the way his hair fell in his face and the curve of his hand as he pushed it away. You knew it when time seemed to pass far faster with him than anywhere else, or when all your songs seemed to be about him. You knew then that you loved him.

You were afraid to say anything about it, too terrified to lose those golden hours in the brightly lit studio and dark, star-studded nights. When he first told you that he loved you too, you weren’t sure what to say. Could it ever be true that Luke, this boy full of sunshine and overwhelming happiness, would ever fall for a girl like you? Yet it was, and you loved him all the more for it.

Like it or not, there was always something hovering in the corner of your mind every time his hand brushed over yours just to pass through it, or when you turned to see Luke staring at your lips, knowing that there was nothing he could do. In the end, Luke was a ghost and you were human. No amount of love could change that, although the two of you certainly gave it your best try.

But none of that mattered now, did it? You’d take a thousand missed kisses, a hundred lingering stares just to have him back. You had looked up when the boys disappeared after their final bow, and seen the look on Julie’s face. The two of you had locked eyes, and that one stare communicated a thousand words and pains, all saying the same thing. They’re gone. They won’t come back, not this time.

You knew that if you were a good friend, you would have gone to talk to Julie after her concert, but you just couldn’t bear it. You did talk to her, technically, you gave her a hurried hug and brief exclamations of pride over her performance. You both knew it was only superficial, like if you focused on the songs themselves you wouldn’t have to think about the fact that the boys were truly gone from you. She understood, and she had pulled you tight one last time before you disappeared, both of you mourning silently for the bandmates never to be seen again.

You had driven home silently, flying up the stairs and closing your bedroom door behind you with a click. Only then, with the door firmly shut and with yourself finally alone did you let the tears come. They washed over you in waves, racking your body in sobs. You missed Luke, missed him more than everything. You’ve never loved anyone like you love Luke. Loved Luke. Now he’s gone, and you cannot imagine what you’re supposed to do with yourself.

So you sit alone, crying your heart out. The tears have subsided a little bit. Gone are the loud sobs, replaced instead by inaudible agony. In a way, the silence hurts even more. There’s a sound behind you, the click of your window sliding open. You don’t bother to turn around, speaking to the person with your back facing them. “I’m sorry, Julie, but I really can’t talk right now.” You continue nursing your tissue box, but freeze when you hear a new voice instead.

“I’m not Julie, Y/N.” Your eyes widen, and you whirl around to see him. Luke. Can it really be Luke? You stand up hesitantly, your knees buckling. In the back of your mind you realize you must be a mess, with your teary eyes and everything, but none of that matters. The only thing that’s worth a fragment of your time is the fact that the boy you love is here, and walking towards you. “Luke?”

He smiles. “Guilty as charged. Oh, and I’ve got one last trick up my sleeve.” You frown at him, confused, and then he reaches out and wraps his arms around you, pulling you close to him. Stunned into silence, you return the embrace, burying your face against his shoulder. Your hands clasp around his back, and it takes everything in you to just stand there.

After a moment that seems more like a year, he leans away, tracing your cheek gently with his hands to wipe away your tears. “You don’t have to cry anymore, Y/N. I’m here. I promise.” You shake your head slowly in bewilderment. “How is this possible? I mean, you’re here, and I can-” You break off, unable to think about anything more than his hand on your cheek, your palm pressed up against the curve of his back.

Luke smiles slightly, the corners of his mouth sliding up. “I don’t know. All I know is that I’m here with you, and that’s more than I can ask for.” He looks at you for a moment, then leans forward and presses a kiss to your lips. You feel your heart race in your chest, and kiss him back.

After that, you feel like you’re on top of the world. You have Luke, even when it seemed like you’d never see him again. You find yourself making excuses to drop by the studio and feel his kiss on your cheek, to walk home with him, hands linked together, to do anything and everything with him.

On one of these days, you’re stretched out on the faded sofa in Julie’s studio, brow furrowed as you study your math notes. There’s a test tomorrow, and you’d be a lot more miserable were it not for the fact that your legs are draped across Luke’s lap, his hand tracing idle patterns into your skin as he considers his battered songwriting notebook.

Luke must feel your gaze lingering on him, because he looks up with a grin. “Hey, I know I’m good-looking and everything, but I think you should be focusing more on your math. That’s what you said you needed to do, isn’t it?” You feel your cheeks burning and roll your eyes, pretending to be unaffected. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. If anything, I should go study somewhere else so I don’t have to be distracted by your, uh, hideousness.”

Luke laughs, the sound ringing like a bell in the empty studio. “My hideousness?” You nod. “Yes. I know it can be hard to hear, but-” Luke leans forward, cutting you off with a kiss. He pulls away, noting the blush spreading about your cheeks with a grin. “You still sure about that?” You huff in irritation and look away, but can’t help a grin.

It is a frigid November afternoon, and a walk through the neighbourhood on the way to Julie’s house has only made you even colder. Rubbing your arms in an attempt to keep warm, you open the studio doors and slip inside, where it’s not much better than the outdoors. You don’t see anyone inside, so it looks like you’ll be waiting for at least a little longer. 

You glance around, hoping to see a blanket or something to keep you warm, but your eyes fall instead on a flannel jacket. It’s brown and soft, tossed casually across a chair. Nobody’s here, and you’re absolutely freezing, so you put your backpack down on the ground, picking up the jacket and sliding your arms into it. The flannel is warm, and you wrap it around yourself, breathing in the familiar scent.

You’re only in the studio for a few moments longer when Luke poofs into the room. He spies you and grins, heading towards you with a flurry of conversation. “There you are, Y/N! I was hoping you’d drop by. Alex and Julie just came up with this amazing idea for a song, it’s got a good melody but I know you’d come up with some killer lyrics if you heard it, and-”

His words die off as he comes to a stop in front of you. “Is that my jacket?” You glance up at him, then back at the flannel still wrapped around you. Your hands fly to the sleeves, and you start to tug it off. “Oh, yeah, sorry about that. It was really cold, and it was the closest thing and-” Luke’s hands cover yours, stopping you from removing the coat. “No, it’s fine.”

He grins at you. “Looks good on you.” His hands leave yours, traveling up to rest instead on the curve of your hips as he pulls you close to him. Your hands thread in the soft curls of his hair as he kisses you. You’re beginning to think that you could stay here forever, but then you hear the faint sounds of commotion drifting up from the area outside the studio doors, and Luke groans softly.

“That’s the boys.” You pull away, laughing at the disappointed look on his face. “They’re your friends, try not to look so sad about it.” Luke reaches for your hands again, slowly running his thumb against the curves of your wrist. You shiver slightly, although this time it has nothing to do with the cold. Alex and Reggie are getting closer to the studio, so Luke presses one last kiss to your forehead before it’s too late. “Tell me when you’re ready to leave so I can walk you home?” He mumbles against your cheek, and you nod, a soft smile playing on your lips. This moment, right here, so close to Luke? You wouldn’t trade it for anything, and you know right then that you’ll be in love with him forever, as long as he stays by your side and you stay by his. Forever sounds good to you.

[ktheist]

1 | play me like a toy [m]

title inspired by blackpink’s sure thing cover.

⟶ read the last part, all yours to enjoy, here.

muses. mafia heiress!reader x ex-mafia!director!hoseok

genre. age gap factor. chaebol-mafia family au. arranged marriage au. office au. modern au.

words. 5.8k

warnings. contains smut. mentions of gun use. mentions of cheating.

verse. knj. ksj. myg. kth. pjm. jjk. jhs. 

synopsis. 

sit still, look pretty. 

such were the words your maid-turned-mistress of a mother has ever taught you. the mindless marionette mask worked for the most parts. but when you find yourself hanging by a thread - or is it the beeping line of your dying father’s heart rate monitor? - you decide it’s time to shed off that mask and seek han group’s infamous loyal dog that went off radar 17 years ago.

jung hoseok.

alternatively;

“marry me or be killed.”

“is there a third option?”

“we fucked but you were too drunk to remember so that option’s invalid.”

x

jung hoseok is in a dry spell.

there was no doubt as to whether he could score a date, get laid and maybe even have his nightstand to call him up again exactly the week after.

the issue was time.

with his boss and longtime friend getting married, he ends up coming to work with a different pile of papers on his desk every day. well, it was his idea to sign a promissory note that if kim namjoon ever found a woman he loved and married, hoseok would take half of the ceo-ly workload so his overbearing boss could enjoy his honeymoon and truly, as hoseok would put it, live.

the order went a little differently but namjoon found a hole in the way the sentences were worded that got him flying away to the caribbean and leaving hoseok to fend for himself in these trying times.

oh, and it’s almost hit the third month of the newly weds going mia.

in the first place, he didn’t think namjoon would hold the agreement over his head like he was flexing a few hundred thousand dollar’s worth of lawsuit.

but the man did just that and now hoseok is slaving over his nine-to-five which actually tend to drag on till ten or, if he’s lucky, even midnight. sure, he got promoted from head secretary to director but he’s wondering if this endless cycle of coming back home only pass out in the bed and wake up earlier than a parent with a toddler - is worth it.

hoseok groans, his hand grabbing around for his phone to put a stop on that obnoxious alarm even if it’s just for five minutes before he has to hear it again.

and grab something he did, but this so called phone feels too soft to be a phone and shapes like an cup but softer and - he puts more pressure to his grasp out of confusion -

“mhm, what the hell?”

- it complains in a groggy voice too.

almost as if pricked by a needle, hoseok leaps right out of bed, sending the duvet flying to the floor and revealing the naked woman - you - who’s stretching her limbs whilst her face scrunches in displeasure at the rude awakening.

“__-___?! wh-what the- what are you doing in my bed?”

x

“so you touched my boob,” you say, legs crossed and arms folded over said boob.

“i-i-” it’s the first time you’ve ever seen hoseok opened his eyes so wide - he has pretty eyes. especially when they’re brimming with fear and bashfulness, “i’m sorry, i have no excuse.”

he hangs his head low.

“why didn’t you touch the other one?”

it’s then, when hoseok’s eyes snap up to you, gaze searching for a sign - any sign, to confirm that he misheard that, does the man realize that you’re messing with him.

that, and you doubling over with laughter trickling out of your mouth should be affirmation enough.

“god, you should’ve seen your face, hobi!” you’re still holding your stomach when hoseok’s shoulders stiffen and his round eyes turn sharp.

“that’s not something you joke about, ___,” he says, it’s easy to mistake his sternness with anger if you didn’t know him your whole life, “are you gonna let it go every time someone disrespects you? mr. han would’ve snapped their neck in half-”

“hoseok, come on,” you cut him off with a dismissive hand, “none of those gory talks about snapping necks and pulling out nails. that’s the reason i end up here in the first place.”

it’s the way silence lulls into the room and hoseok looks at you with the hardest knitted brows and eyes that seem to have retracted his soul far back into his memories, as though searching for something - that makes your heart drop.

all sense of humor now gone.

“you don’t remember what happened last night... do you?” the last part is just an addition to ease your throbbing heart.

if you’d left it as a statement, it made it more real that he did forget.

just a man, sitting at a half empty bar, three shots of vodka in and hostility in his voice that could’ve killed but so very hoseok of him, “that seat’s taken.”

aloof. distant. and every word in the book that described a man who didn’t want to be bothered and he drowned himself in alcohol.

“i’ll leave once the owner comes back,” you’d slipped into the seat anyway, despite the heat of hoseok’s stare.

not paying any heed, you ordered yourself a margarita.

“it’s been awhile, hasn’t it, hobi?”

that’s when he turned to you. truly looked at you.

“do you perhaps have a little sister who,” his eyebrows began to knit as if the screws in his head started turning, “would be about your age by now... ____?”

you didn’t really catch up. all you could remember was hoseok’s calculative stare as he watched you down one drink after the other. the the chilliness of the margarita somewhat soothing the burning sensation as it went down your throat.

“that’s the fifth for you,” his large hand covered yours, stopping you from picking up the glass as he cautioned you.

“yeah? i’m only stopping if i have something else to occupy my mouth with.”

in his distracted state as he tried to make sense of what your words meant, you lifted the glass to your mouth and downed the last of your drink.

and then, you stood up, walked the tiniest distance between your seat and his, grabbed him by the collar and crashed your lips on his.

you remembered your confidence dissipating like air with every second passing without hoseok so much as responding to your kiss.

maybe it was the shock.

because one that passed, you found his arm around your waist and his lips kissing you harder than you kissed him.

you stumbled into your car, not caring if yeojun had a front row view from the rearview mirror of the things that transpired at the back seat. you barely remember the walk from the parking lot to his apartment.

those sweet whispered promises. the hands that burned your skin with every touch. those eyes that pierced right into your eyes, as if invisible hands reached into your soul and grasped it in his palm.

“mine,” hoseok husked, voice sending ripples of pleasure dripping down your legs. he’d thrust himself balls deep inside you, like a beast who hadn’t had a drop of water since the drought, “you’re mine from head to toe.”

if that wasn’t enough, he fucked you raw until you were at your limit and he’d just... stop.

“hoseok, why-” you’d been breathless, skin glistening with sweat and knees trembling to give in but he’d banded an arm under your torso and held you to him so your bodies remained connected even if none of you moved.

“you think i’d just let you cum so easily?” he placed a hand on your ass, as if warning you what would happen if you’d pull away, “after all these years... you grew up fine as fuck.”

he’d languidly pulled out of you, as if knowing how torturous it felt for you with his fingers on your clit that sent electricity through your veins.

“what is it, hm? is it the kang’s or is it the seong’s? i guess the rumor about boss being hospitalized was true,” his words barely registered in your mind as his index finger touched your back and traced down your spine whilst he started thrusting in and out of you agonizingly slow.

“please, just fuck me,” you’d hissed, pain and pleasure and frustrations mixed in your voice.

“hm, still as tight-lipped as ever, huh?” he’d sounded completely relaxed as if the smacking sound that echoed in the air as his body slammed against your deliciously - didn’t affect him in the slightest.

as if he took no pleasure in fucking you. as if this was only for your poor little soul that came running back to him because you had no one to depend on.

“y-you have to- ah! s-swear your l-loyalty to- oh my god,” it was last night, while the citylights poured through hoseok’s window, his room was directly across another apartment building.

“loyalty, huh?” he tested the words on his mouth, as if it was a foreign candy gifted to him as present.

his body feels hot against your back as he lowered himself flush against you, his breath fanning your sweat-glistened skin, his voice brushing the shell of your ear, “you should know i’m yours as much as you’re mine. nothing i wouldn’t do for you, kiddo.”

he’d used that nickname he’d used to call you as he fucked you into his bed, and sent you moaning his name like you wouldn’t know any other name.

anyone could’ve seen.

neither of you cared though.

well-

you throw your gaze out at the twenty storey building, noticing a man vacuuming the living room three units to the left from the unit directly across from hoseok’s. above him, two kids, a boy and a girl are jumping around while holding an airplane in their hands.

-until now, that is.

hoseok had become an entirely different person last night. no - rather, he’d returned to you as the man you’d always kept in that special spot in your heart and locked it up so no one would be able to see past your steel schooled expression and the devil may care nature.

“i...”

your gaze snaps back to hoseok once again. he parts his lips for the briefest moment, as if to say something but clamps them shut again. the way his eyes gleam with guilt is enough to tell you the unspoken words that hang in the air.

and yet, your heart hardens like the steel mask you often wear on your face.

“and... to think i gave you my virginity too...”

the silence that lapses between you is tangible.

“sike, i’m kidding,” you grin, brows rising to the ceiling but when hoseok doesn’t so much as laugh or frown - he simply looked at you like a parent disappointed of his child who still didn’t see why what she did was wrong - you tilt your head to the side slightly, “or am i?”

“ugh, you’re no fun,” you throw your head back after failing to gouge a reaction from the man who screamed bloody murder as if you’re some street rat that he was so close to calling infestation control.

“i need to meet mr. han,” he announces after a whole solid minute of sitting on the edge of the bed with feet planted on the floor.

“what for? what are you gonna tell daddy? ‘i’m sorry i took your daughter’s virginity, sir, it won’t happen again?’“ you watch him get up, tongue unconsciously slipping out and sweeping over your bottom lip as you watch the curve of his ass as he walks to the closet and disappears into it.

“were you really a virgin?” he comes out dressed in fresh crisp button down tucked in a pair of black pants, a contrast to his rolled up sleeves, creased shirt and disheveled hair from last night.

“i don’t know, did it feel like i was?” you shoot him a coquettish smile.

the gentle protrusion of his adam’s apple bobs up and down, his lingering gaze on your crossed, bare legs not going unnoticed by you. you’re donned in last night’s dinner dress that hugs your curves and stops mid thighs.

but his gaze is gone too soon.

“you’re not seriously going to daddy, are you?” you tug on his sleeve just before he steps out of the door, “hobi, i’m just kidding, i’ve been with multiple guys before you,” the way his brows threaten to knit into a frown doesn’t go pass you but it’s gone too soon, “and does daddy like the idea? he’s not fond of it, but he knows he can’t stop me from doing whatever i want with my own body.”

the beep of the door as he opens it rings in the air as he looks at you in the eye, “did any of those men work for mr han?” 

only silence follows his reply as you bite your lower lip, hesitant.

“we can’t hide this- mr han might already know. he has eyes and ears-” hoseok steps out of the door only to stop dead in track when he sees at least half a dozen men lined up in front of his apartment in black suits.

“good morning, miss ____.” they bow at exactly 90 degrees angle like robots.

“-everywhere...” hoseok trails off, eyes scanning the area on high alert.

“don’t worry, they’re not daddy’s men. they’re my men,” you raise one hand, index finger pointing to the ceiling as you shoot them an expression void of any smile.

they seem to understand that as they dip into a bow again, the leader, yeojun, stops in front of the elevator when he and his men would have joined you in any other circumstances.

“it’s not about saving my own ass, ___,” hoseok begins.

the way his arms cross over his chest makes his sleeves wrap deliciously around his biceps.

his deep brown eyes appear like a hazel storm under the sunlight that pours from every crevice of the parking lot where the elevator stopped at. “mr. han asked me to protect you from everything and i’m sure he hired someone else after i left to keep trash men away from you... and to think i did exactly what he wanted me to protected you from-” 

“hobi,” nimble hands hover over his chest before you gaze up at him through your lashes, making sure to give it a slow, innocent blink before speaking, “i didn’t regret what happened last night. and you trying to apologize for someone i’m not sorry kind of hurts.”

“i’m sorry i didn’t think of it that way...” he trails off, lips pressed in a straight line as though deep in thought.

“if it makes you that uncomfortable, i won’t talk about it but promise me this stays between us, please?” you hold up a pinky finger like you would when you were younger.

the smile that makes its way to hoseok lips causes your heart to palpitate just when it’s barely calmed down.

his pinky finger is much larger than yours as it hooks around yours in a promise, a ghost of a smile tugging on his lips. as if he’s still unsure if he should be making any promises. as if he’s unsure if he should be hooking his pinky with yours instead of pushing you as far away from him as he could. but before he can come to a conclusion, a voice reverberates into the air.

“miss ____.”

the sound of hoseok sucking in a sharp breath rings in your ear as a dozen men in black suits bow at the sight of you.

before another word comes out from anyone else, you speak, voice echoing against the walls.

“listen up you sons of bitches, if i find out any of you snitched to daddy, i’ll make sure your wife, your husband, your kids, your grandparents, hell even your neighbors pay for it. got it?”

a round of rigorous “yes, miss!” follows after the splitting silence that hovered after you finished.

turning around, almost getting lost in those pretty, star entrapped eyes of his, you smile, “see, they’re loyal to me.”

“uh, i can see why.” it’s the humorous tone that finally wraps around hoseok’s words that makes your heart clench painfully.

he’s still the same hoseok you know.

some things never change.

“well, i’ll lend you one of my cars,” you say all of a sudden.

almost as if hit by a foul ball, hoseok’s eyes widen, “shi- what time is it?”

you don’t expect much when you check your phone, the digits on the screen staring back with a 9-something am - you don’t care to check the details, “late.”

“fuck, i was so focused on gathering enough balls to meet mr. han - i need to get the papers i was supposed to look over for today’s meeting,” a string of curses follow hoseok’s scampering retreat. and you simply watch in your spot - he’s always been such a klutz, forgetting the important details and scrambling to get what he’d forgotten and just remembered - done.

before the doors of the elevator close and swallow him in its belly, hoseok’s nimble fingers slip between the shutting gap, making the doors split open again, “oh,” he says, as if remembering something, “you don’t have to do that - i can drive, i got a driver’s license like, eons ago.”

right.

when he left, he was only 18 and had nothing more but a duffle bag filled with all his belongings and an acceptance letter of the university he applied to.

hoseok had been driving you around everywhere before that. he got pulled over by a cop once but your father easily handled that.

jung hoseok’s been with you for as long as you remember.

you recall bawling your eyes out and clinging onto his leg, begging him not to leave because your nanny left and you found out a few months later that her body was found washed up along the river bank near her hometown.

mr. kim, the gardener quit and said he wanted to visit his kids but the whole family ended up dying in a fire.

everyone who left ends up dead.

pushing the somber feeling that’s threatening to pull the muscles in your face into a frown, you shake your head, an amused smirk tugging on your lips as you mask away every other feeling.

“you really don’t remember anything, do you?” somewhere in that innocently clueless gaze of his, you search for a lie - it would’ve been better if he lied about forgetting for whatever reason.

but when the genuinity over pours from those pretty eyes, you push away the gnawing feeling in your heart, “we were both shit faced drunk last night so we came to your place with my driver and you left your car at the bar’s parking lot.”

“oh shit,” he begins punching the button on the inside of the elevator, “i won’t take long, i pro-”

the metal doors gradually shut, cutting off what he was about to say.

x

“p-please, i’m sorry, i’ll do anything...” the man’s words got blurred out as you stare out the window of his medium sized flat with a master bedroom, a room and a bathroom connected to the common area.

it’s been a week since you met hoseok. you want to be mad that he doesn’t call, especially after not seeing each other for so long and finally reuniting only for him to forget everything about that night.

but you didn’t even give him your number and you may or may not be mad that he didn’t think to ask.

a bloodcurdling scream drums against your eardrums, making you physically flinch as your head snaps towards the man lying on the ground with his mouth wide open and no longer any sound coming out.

his head is titled at the new guy who’s standing over him with a baton gripped in one hand. the sight itself makes the pit of your stomach churn.

“god fucking damn it, yeojun,” you shoot a glare at the head bodyguard, “didn’t you teach him rule number 1? make no sound, catch no attention?”

at that, yeojun snaps his fingers and two of the bodyguards closest to the new guy - soon? soobin? was his name? - approach him. one of them places a firm hand on his shoulder whilst he kicks soobin behind his knee, sending him kneeling with a thud.

“i’m sorry, miss ___, it seems soobin,” ah so you did get his name right, “needs to join mr. yoo here in learning a thing or two about obeying orders.”

yeojun doesn’t even flinch when one of your donned-in-black bodyguard strikes one of their own at the back of his head with that baton they usually carry around their waist.

soobin’s face scrunches up painfully as he breathes out through his nose, teeth gritting together.

“you boys, break some things and you, get the car ready,” with that, the bodyguards hovering over the middle-aged borrower and soobin begin scampering around, toppling shelves over, pushing vases to the ground and breaking plates in the kitchen.

“you were too nice,” yeojun murmurs underneath his breath once you’re in the hallway, the sound of glass shattering and furniture breaking still echo off the walls.

“i shouldn’t even be doing this shit anyway. who does he think i am? sending me to take care of small fries...” agitated, you shoot yeojun a glare.

to which he only responds with raised eyebrows, as if asking if you’d go against your brother’s orders just because you’ve never liked to see violence yet violence follows you everywhere.

“let’s see.... richest bachelor, heir to han group, one of the biggest conglomerate family that runs the underground ring...” the black haired man starts counting off with his finger until you swing your purse to his side.

“which side are you on? me or my chanyeol’s?!”

laughter trickles down his lips as he follows you into the elevator. somewhere in the distance, the hallway faintly rings with the fading sound of mr. yoo’s helpless pleas.

x

when you arrive at kimcorp, the secretary shoots up from your seat, her smile is gorgeous and welcoming but the knitted set of brows above her eyes do a poor job of hiding her anxiousness.

odd.

you didn’t use the han name to get past the receptionist, only mentioning “hoseok is expecting me, tell him i have something of his he’d really like back.”

was it the lavish dinner dress? was it the couture handbag?

“ah, it’s the fox fur, isn’t it?” you twirl on your heels, lips curling prettily as you narrow your eyes at the startled secretary.

she’s standing there like a thief caught red-handed. as if her worst nightmares came true the moment you started saying something besides the “i’m here to see jung hoseok.”

“i-i’m sorry, ma’am?” her shoulders tense up and her smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

“nothing, it’s nothing,” you put on a billion dollar smile - one that she seems to be struggling to wear.

before the poor thing peed her pants, you turn around, your back on her and push on the double doors of the office with a white plate that spells out “head director jung.”

the syllables of your name roll off the mouth of the man behind the large desk that almost takes up half of the room, piles of documents stacked up on either sides while the middle section is cleared for a mac and a macbook perched directly in front of him.

“you sound surprised, didn’t the receptionist tell you i was coming?” you put on your best smile even as you watch him push a button on a smaller-than-a-palm-sized remote directed at the cctv and dash for the blinds and close them so that the secretaries facing his room won’t have any visual access to what goes on from now on.

“yeji didn’t specify who,” he says mindlessly, still peeking through the blinds - possibly to check if anyone noticed the sudden move.

somehow, hearing the name of another woman leaving hoseok’s lips doesn’t sit right with you.

“since you easily told her to send me right up, i assume you have an idea of who it was,” a devious smile tugs in the corners of your lips as the sound of hoseok sucking in a sharp breath brushes your ears.

as he was in the middle of turning around and facing you, you managed to catch him off guard and trap him between the window and yourself. the ridges of his toned abs brushing against your front torso with only layers of clothing separating you.

the warning tone he uses to say your name with is music to your ears.

he sounded like the old him. the old hoseok who’d drive his fist into anyone’s face without batting an eye. the old hoseok who would turn to your crying frame with the sweetest smile and hand you back your backpack that fell on the ground amidst the struggle of trying to bite and kick your kidnappers in the shin.

“i missed you, you know?” your voice is tinged with playfulness but your heart skips a beat like a schoolgirl with a crush.

“i-i... we...”

the words get stuck in his throat the moment your lips brush his. what surprises you is the softest sigh that leaves his mouth before a large hand buries itself in your hair, pulling you close until he’s tasting you. licking your bottom lip as if asking for something he didn’t need to ask for in the first place.

his free hand grasps your ass as if he’s been dying to feel your soft cheeks in his palm. you part your lips for him, tasting the faintest sense of cigarette in his breath.

hoseok tends to smoke when something bothers.

you hope it’s you. you hope he lays in bed at night, staring at the ceiling. you hope you’re all he thinks about.

by the time you pull apart, you’re both heaving for air. a soft thud drums in your ears as hoseok leans his head against the blinds-covered-window. you press your cheek against his chest, face hot.

one of his hands sits on top of your ass as if paying his overdue respect for your body but yet unwilling to let you go. the other rests on the back of your head, his thumb mindlessly caressing your scalp.

“hoseok?” you’re the first to break the silence.

he simply hums in response, “hm?”

“i can’t give it back,” you turn your cheek to bury your face in his chest, your voice coming out muffled, “i can’t give back your freedom.”

x

“so you’re saying you can’t let me go...” hoseok echoes the words you say to him.

but the way his lips curl into a pleased smirk and his white shirt creasing at the front from having your bodies pressed together a moment ago, gives those words a different meaning than you intend them to.

somehow, the distance between you seems smaller.

“thanks miyeon,” hoseok’s smile switches to that of a kind, considerate superior.

miyeon, the woman who guided you to hoseok’s office returns his smile. but you don’t miss the cautious gaze she throws your way before slipping out of the room after setting down the tea cups.

he’s back to himself. the kind that jumps at every little sound and tends to wear a frightened puppy look almost too often.

“no, rather...” you trail off, chanyeol’s face burning at the back of your mind - your brother, the heir to han group and the man that will marry you off to the kang’s in order to mend the strain in the family ties as soon as your father breathes out his last breath.

you shake your head, a smile on your face, “it’s been awhile, how bout catching up over lunch?”

and so it goes, you visit hoseok every few days in a week. at times you tell the secretary to keep your visit a secret so you could surprise him, you’d end up catching him neck deep in work yet he still manages to pull off the rolled up sleeves, two buttons undone and slicked back hair with a single strand falling over his forehead, its tip grazing those set of strong eyebrows.

when you knock, he looks up and the tension in his brows seem to fade away. he shoots you a dimpled smile as if he’s been waiting for you to whisk him away from work.

and you do just that. arm looped around his, you both walk out of his office like lovers.

hoseok talks about his past - the one you’re not part of - fondly. as if looking through a lense of something he never dreamed he could have.

at first, he attracted the wrong kind of crowd with his permanently set furrowed brows. but then he finds things he enjoys doing outside of classes that he couldn’t get to enjoy when he was with han group.

dancing, tracks, boxing and more. he likes that rush of adrenaline that courses through his veins. 

and you tell him about the meetings and gatherings and social events to maintain your relationships with the vassal families. they’re usually attended by the women of the han family which means you and han chohee would be smiling and laughing together in front of the wives and daughters of the vassal families before taking off that loving step-mother-and-step-daughter facade once you walk out of the vicinity.

your lunches and dinners are spent with trips down memory lane, filling the other in on the moments each of you miss in each other’s lives. and for a moment, the hoseok in front of you who flinches at the sight of bugs and little, random noises feel familiar.

that is, until you hit your one month reunion mark.

chanyeol’s been gathering support of the vassals by personally accepting their invitations.

his presence easily overshadowed yours and yeojun confirmed that your father’s condition isn’t getting any better.

“i need you to come back and work for me, half of the men would drop everything and follow you,” you stare at the girl staring back at you on the surface of the tea. she bites her lips and you feel the faintest taste of blood in your mouth.

eyes snapping to his calculative ones - as if he already knows what you’re going to say before the words even pass your lips, “i need you by my side so i can take over han group.”

the hoseok sitting in the single couch next to you with parted legs and feet planted on the dark carpeted ground fits the head director setting better than the inked skin, cigarette smoke and gun-in-waistline setting you’re about to drag him in.

“you’re willing to go against chanyeol to become the head of the family?” he asks, eyes clouded with a sort of emotion you can’t pinpoint.

hoseok’s always been an enigma. his mind, a maze you’ll never end up figuring out.

guess that part of him is still the same.

“it’s not a choice for me to make,” a clean click! resonates in the air as you place the gun you’d pulled from your garter, point facing him, index finger on the trigger, “you have two though.”

it’s the way his eyebrows rise whilst his eyes glint with amusement tells you that hoseok - your hoseok - is still somewhere in there.

throw a sane man into an asylum and he’ll start going insane. put a mad man  back in society and he’ll trick you into believing he’s sane with his warm, dimpled smile.

“marry me or be killed,” you say simply.

that amused glint is still there, granted, it shines faintly compared to the caution that overflows from those sun-hit brown eyes as they fix themselves on the gun perched on the see-through coffee table before they travel to your knuckles, to your arm and meet your steel gaze.

his the softest protrusion of his adam’s apple drops and rises again as he swallows, “is there a third option?”

“we fucked but you were too drunk to remember so that option’s invalid.”

the air is dense with tension. it fills up your lungs and almost causes your chest to cave. you’re not sure how long to stay there, stiff and still like a rock with your back straightened as if your etiquette teacher was hovering right behind you with a long, wooden ruler that’d be ready to strike your arm at a slump of your shoulders.

but liberation comes to you in the form of a phone call.

“___, we have to go, th-the boss- the doctor says he’s not gonna make it through the night.” it’s the first time you’ve heard yeojun stammer as if he hasn’t quite yet recovered from the shock of the news he’s relaying to you.

“are you sure?” you can almost hear the thump of the organ in your chest slowing down before it ceases to throb completely, “you know how bad chanyeol wanna fuck me up, he could’ve made the doctor tell you this because he knows you’ll tell me and if... if i rush there and daddy’s laughing that obnoxious laugh while trying to make pass on the nurse like he usually does...”

yeojun grunts, “yes, ___. i have men planted there as patients, nurses, janitors and they all say the same thing - that the doctors are rushing to the vip ward and they’re trying to make it look like your usual hourly check up but it’s not... look, this is the real thing. if we mess up, there won’t be another chance. now, did you convince hoseok to come back?”

almost as if reminded that you’re not the only person in the room, your eyes snap to hoseok whose eyes are already fixed on you with a concerned expression.

“he’ll come back.” with that, you hang up the call.

“i’d love for you to think it through for a few days, realize this isn’t really a life you want and come to me on your own to sign our prenups,” you say casually, placing down the teacup and slipping your phone back into your handbag as if you’re getting ready to leave the tea party, “but...”

but before you can lift the gun and fully point it at him, a large hand covers yours. his warmth seeps through your pores and makes your body feel warmer.

“the gun’s a bit excessive,” his breath fans your face as your eyes fix on the supple skin of his neck.

it’s as if invisible hands reached out and held your head in place, forbidding you from tilting it and gazing into his eyes. his fingers reach over the back of the gun, grazing your hands.

a click cuts through the silence.

“at the very least, unlock the safety,” his teasing tone doesn’t match his saddened eyes.

and just as you thought you’d closed the distance between you and him, the circumstance forces you to take five steps back.

[tundrainafrica]

Hi! I absolutely love your levihan stories! The way they care for each other is just gaaahhhhh.

I wanted to make an ask for a while, but I didn't have an idea. I was reading a story and got this random idea suddenly. How about Levi slipping in the bathtub and nearly drowning, but Hange hears the thud of his head hitting the edge or something and has to kick the door down and finds Levi submerged having breathed in water and with a bad gash where his head hit the tub?

Title: Triage

Summary:

"Levi could count with the fingers on his two hands, and maybe some of his toes, the few times he had seen Hange angry—very angry. Those rare times, she was a full blown tornado of screaming, shouting, kicking, rambling.

Albeit terrified, Levi had to note, Hange never raged for shallow reasons. Her terrifying rage, that came once a blue moon, always seemed to have a very good point."

For the first time in many years, Levi witnesses Hange's rage again.

Notes: I took some liberties with the prompt but I hope you still enjoy. Feedback is very much appreciated :D

I wanted to make an ask for a while, but I didn't have an idea. I was reading a story and got this random idea suddenly. How about Levi slipping in the bathtub and nearly drowning, but Hange hears the thud of his head hitting the edge or something and has to kick the door down and finds Levi submerged having breathed in water and with a bad gash where his head hit the tub?

NN from the last request: maybe he slips in the bath because of his broken leg from when he and mikasa saved Eren from the female titan?

Levi could count with the fingers on his two hands, and maybe some of his toes, the few times he had seen Hange angry—very angry.

It wasn’t something he liked to remember vividly, but it was something he ended up remembering anyway because of how jarring the whole scene of Hange’s rage was. She, who was usually more of like a whirlwind anyway, would suddenly transform into a full blown tornado.

A full blown tornado of screaming, shouting, kicking, rambling.

In whirlwinds and in gusts of screaming, shouting, she clarified logical points, rehashed commands, asked questions. At first her anger was chaos. When the dust cleared though, the haze dissipated, some poor sap always came out of it a learned man.

Her anger, that came once a blue moon, always seemed to have a point.

All completely comprehensible and thus, Levi could easily see reason and consequently be able to summarize the most anger inducing situations to two: One, any utterly stupid move that Hange cannot seem to understand which could cost hundreds, or thousands of lives. Two, utter negligence that could also cost hundreds or thousands of lives.

Notably, Hange would never release the uncontrollable storm for just one person. She had always been fun loving, peace loving. Although her sudden rise to the commander position had mellowed her down just a little, Hange always had a way of building camaraderie with even the lowest from such a high position, while at the same time demanding authority.

Maybe she mastered it, maybe there had been little to no reason to show that side of herself when she was constantly dealing with peace treaties and diplomacy issues.

At times, Levi wondered though, if that part of her had ever left.

It was something he pondered on, grappled with, when days were longer and workloads were kinder. Strangely, one day in late autumn, when the days were longer, when everyone was cramming as much work as they could before the holiday season came, Levi was reflecting on it for a little bit longer.

“Hange, are you okay?” The question forced itself into the conversation uninvited. Levi liked to blame the question for popping its head in like some audacious prick. Really, it had been his own fault at having downed one drink just too quickly that had gotten him at that. Of course, that hyperfixation on Hange, who was starting to look a little pink in the face too, had been at fault as well.

“I just have to go back to the office after this,” Hange slammed the glass in front of her. “Just one drink.” She added. This is the only drink I’ll have tonight.” She added again, after a few seconds.

She had a tendency of turning a little pink with just one cup. Levi wasn’t too nervous about it. Inebriation made him much quicker and much more confident about brushing problems away. “Do you really have to finish looking into those extra papers tonight?”

“Jean will be coming for them first thing in the morning. I don’t wanna keep any more diplomats waiting,” Hange explained. Her tendency to overwork was almost understandable. After all, Paradis was decades behind the rest of the world. With the impending war, Levi could only accept, while affording her a half smile.

They agreed on just half an hour, exchanging half baked ideas over one cup for Hange, two for Levi. Not enough for any of them to end up wobbling towards the exit. Levi hadn’t drunk in years though, having abandoned it after the adults in the survey corps had dwindled to just them. He just didn’t expect that just a sip of his second cup, would have him cross eyed for a moment. Luckily, he easily forgot about it with just a few quick blinks and a quick shake of the head.

“I should be asking you if you’re okay,” Hange said wryly. Her face had an almost pensive touch to it and Levi didn’t want to contribute to any more stress or sadness she might have been harboring then.

So he kept his answer brief, no room for questions. “I’m fine.”

Hange furrowed her brows at him. “Sure…” She started hesitantly. Then, she huffed. “Just make sure to go straight to the barracks… Okay?”

Before Levi could formulate a reply, Hange’s attention was suddenly elsewhere. She turned to her right. Levi followed suit to get a good view, only to be taken aback by the scuffle that had started only a few feet away.

Maybe drunkenness had him blending songs, conversations and scuffles all into one lively sound. The bar fight only stood out like a sore thumb when he focused on the two men, one carried a poor boy by the back of his hands, while another man readied his fists.

Before Levi could process the scene for just a little longer, Hange had come in between them. “Why don’t you keep fights to people your own age? You know this boy can’t beat you.”

“This kid’s parents are in debt,” one explained, his tone aggressive.

“Then send a payment request to his parents.” Hange kept her cool.

But for how long could they maintain the peace? Levi pulled himself up from his seat and wobbled closer to make more sense of the conversations

“We can’t collect…. They’re dead…”

There were many things Levi could stomach. Abuse, unnecessary bullying weren’t among them. Particularly when the child, an orphan at that, was much weaker than they were. He was ready to blink back his own dizziness to get at least one precise kick into the most proper place for a male asshole.

Hange though had been quicker, she had bent down. It turned out she had been dodging a punch. Everything after was a flash of movements Levi couldn't comprehend at his current state.

He stepped just a few feet back, enough to take better stock of the situation. The bar was crowded that night. A bar teeming with burly and most likely ill-intentioned men wasn’t anything new and he had made one mistake in his drunken state. He focused on two men, just among the others, separating those two from the crowds in the background.

Hange was balancing everything at once, keeping the kid safe, while delivering blows when necessary. She was skillful but with two men becoming roughly ten in just a split second, there were only too many ways she could defend herself.

So Levi bit back the alcohol that lingered in his mouth, the light pounding in his head and the way the lights and the quick motions just lingered for a little longer in his vision. He put one foot forward, ready to strike at the man approaching Hange. Defense and offense at such a state, when he was still working to get his flow and his bearings had him careless, receiving a sock to his upper left. He swallowed the bile that rose at his throat, closed his eyes for a second, blinking back the lights that settled in the black.

He managed to pull out before it could have been anything worse. His fighter instincts from the underground started to kick in soon after, ignoring the protests from his left side. They undermined whatever orders his injuries were screaming then.

Maybe that had been a good thing. In the end, humanity’s strongest had taken down ten men in the bar. Hange and the young boy had come out of it completely unscathed. The adrenaline had him breathing hard.

Levi still had his bearings. He turned back to Hange and breathed out. “Pay the tab. We’re getting out of here.”

***

The young boy was quick to introduce himself as they turned the corner of the bar, and made their way far from the store lined streets.

“I’m Joseph,” He started. Soon his words transformed into some over apologetic and grateful babble. Some Levi willed himself to comprehend, others he had been too disconcerted to pick up.

There were words he picked up more than others.

Orphanage. Illness. Mother. Dead. He soon put the puzzle pieces together himself.

Joseph had been staying in an orphanage just a half an hour ride away. His mother suddenly died from illness and before he even transferred to the orphanage, the men had ransacked his house for anything worth more than a penny, to help pay back the debt of his late father.

He just wanted a locket back, a last memento of his mother.

“I’ll coordinate with the other soldiers, see what I can do for you,” Hange said, coiling one hand around the boy’s shoulders.

“The police don’t listen,” he said in between tears.

“I’ll make them listen.”

The boy believed her, maybe he didn’t. Levi saw it appropriate that he himself stayed quiet. If Hange couldn’t convince the young boy, who could? Besides, his upper left side was killing him, his breaths were coming out in some strange rhythm and if he talked, would it make it come out as any worse?

“I’ll take you back to the orphanage first and I’ll see what I can do,” she consoled. “As soon as I get anything, I’ll make sure to send it over.”

“Those men are mean, please don’t hurt yourself.” Surprisingly, the boy seemed mature. Levi though was familiar with that trend, adversity seemed to do that to people.

“I won’t.” They turned another corner and Hange quickened her pace towards the barracks.

Levi followed behind, almost painfully. The quicker strides expected of him made him a little less tolerant of pain. He pressed his hand to his side for just a second. The sky was dark and pressing his side was a flash of movement, nobody should have noticed it except him. But somehow, he was self conscious.

Hange walked ahead though, the rhythm in her stride undisturbed. She hurried towards the stables but only pulled one horse out.

“You don’t need me to come with you?” Levi asked.

Hange shook her head. “It’s a short ride.” She helped the young boy on the horse and plopped herself lightly just right behind him. “I think I’m gonna spend some time in the headquarters tonight, do some research...” She looked pointedly at the kid.

“I’ll wait in the office---”

“No, go to the hospital.”

“Wait.. Why?” Levi spat.

Just a while ago, a few blows connected,” Hange said in a more serious tone. “It might be better if you have them checked out, just for some extra reassurance.” She turned her head toward the direction of the hospital only one block away.

“I think I have a few bruises,” Levi said. “But we’ve gotten much worse on the field.”

Hange gave him a pensive smile. “Just have it checked out, for me? It’s free for soldiers and I don’t think a free cold water compress could hurt.”

“I’ll just make one in your office.” They had a teapot and a kettle and they had some ice as well.

“I’ll pick you up from there on the way back.” There was no room for argument with that tone.

“I’ll wait then,” Levi said. He didn’t say anymore as he turned on his heel. Instead, he focused on the clip clop of the hooves as Hange galloped away. That was a sound that grounded him and when he kept his ragged breaths attune to that rhythm. Levi found that a constant rhythm made it much easier to focus on the road.

Either way, it looked like the walk would last an eternity.

***

For any sane person, it was a short convenient walk. Levi though was in this seemingly eternal trance of just overestimating then underestimating himself. Again and again.

He found ways to ground himself by focusing on the lights that dotted the corridors on the way to the hospital entrance connected to their barracks. He looked at the corridor leading to the commander’s office, almost tempted to turn the heel and treat for himself whatever injuries Hange might have seen in him.

I’ll pick you up from there on the way back. He didn’t have any way to coordinate with Hange then so he trudged straight ahead. The way to meet up with Hange much faster was to just bite his lip and brave the hospital over a few seemingly small injuries.

He had to work harder to contain himself as he saw the crowds from the crack through the half opened door.

Joy. Levi thought to himself. The emergency room was completely full on a weekday night. He settled for one of the benches at the back. The nurses were going around distributing forms and fortunately, he didn’t have to go up to sign anything.

“Some bruising,” Levi answered.

“Understood sir. We’re a bit full tonight so we might have to put you at the bottom of triage.”

Levi only nodded in acceptance, not wanting to waste any more energy or time coming up with something more polite to say. He leaned his back on the bench and stared up at the ceiling. It would be a long wait.

As soon as Hange came anyway, it would be a less tortuous wait, he was sure. She’d find some way to liven up the waiting room with her own chatter. Or maybe, she would see the line, realize it was a dumb idea and have him go back to the barracks and rest.

***

Levi must have dozed off. He jumped on his seat, biting back the white pain that flashed through him at the abrupt movement that pulled him out of stupor.

“Fucking hell, Hange,” Levi hissed.

Hange made herself at home right next to him. She put a hand to his forehead. “You still look a little tipsy.”

“And being tipsy doesn’t merit a trip to the emergency room,” Levi argued.

“It’s not that…” Hange said. “How long… before they call you?” In reply, Levi looked around the room, then back at her. “It depends how pressing the situation is, right? That’s how hospitals work when too many people are injured at once,” he said with a hint of annoyance in his voice.

“I’ll see what I can do.” Hange stood up, walked ahead to the counter with the nurse. Soon, a doctor approached her and Hange was discussing, gesticulating, and she put a hand to her side.

You’re overreacting. Levi allowed himself a weak smile as he mimicked her actions, pressing his hand to his upper abdomen. He let out a hiss and swallowed once again whatever had climbed up to his throat.

It was as if Hange teleported back to the seat next to him. “I talked to the doctors, explained the situation. They should be coming back here anytime soon.”

Levi didn’t reply. He saw that as a cue for her to leave, focus on whatever was at hand. She was twiddling her thumbs, she started to play with the wood splinters that stuck out of the bench.

And Levi was constantly reminded by her own restlessness, she had things to do, she couldn’t waste her time there when she had documents to prepare, diplomats to please and some locket she promised a young boy.

His insides were on fire, his breaths were coming out uncontrollably but he saw enough reason to muster a firm order. As her friend. He reminded himself. “Go back to the office. I’ll meet you there.”

Hange was surprisingly easy to convince. All he needed to do was get through the quick back and forth that followed.

“I’ll pick you up a bit later?”

“No, just go up. Go back to work.”

“What about---”

“I’ll meet you in your office.”

Soon, Hange had made a quick trip to the counter, had a quick exchange with the nurses.

“I’ll meet you at the office,” Levi said again for emphasis. That second time was notably harder to let out though.

“I told the nurses to alert me if anything happens.”

Overreacter. “I’ll meet you in the office,” Levi said once again.

Hange walked away with nothing more than a nod. At the least, that was one source of pressure out of the way.

***

The wait didn’t last much longer after that. He was led to a room, no time for pleasantries.

There were many others waiting. Soon after that brief check up, there would be someone else waiting. Maybe they were outside the room already.

The doctor asked him to undress and Levi focused on whatever glimpse of his chest he could get then as he removed his shirt. His chest was still a raw red, maybe there were beginnings of bruises among them. Levi couldn't even bring himself to look down for fear of sending another rush of nausea through him.

“Are you feeling nauseous? Any dizziness?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Commander said, you got involved in a fist fight…”

“At a bar…”

“And you drank?”

“Just two cups.”

The doctor sighed, handing him back his shirt. “I’ll have the nurse prepare an ice pack for whatever bruises you sustained. You should be clear to leave.” The doctor scribbled something on his notebook.

A few minutes later, Levi had a cold compress and a prescription for rest and painkillers. Fortunately, he had the freedom to not be in the hospital so he headed for Hange’s office, gripping the ice pack just a little harder. It did some work to manage his overall soreness and the throbbing pain in his upper right. Levi bit his lip.

It took him thirty minutes to reach the office. He had expected it to take five minutes. Levi though had taken some breaks in between, leaning back on the wall, taking in breaths much stronger than usual.

He opened the office door with a creak and it looked like Hange hadn’t been too engrossed with whatever she was reading like she usually was. Strangely, she looked up at him, her eyes wide. “You’re here…” She said.

“You don't want me to be here?” Levi asked. He used that blessing of the moment to lean on the door to subtly catch his breath once again.

“No it’s just that… Did the doctor say anything?” Hange stood up from her desk, and quickly gathered the papers in front of her.

“Bed rest and to ice the bruises.”

Hange moved quickly. Levi didn’t even notice her come closer until she had tapped her hand on his shoulder. “I’m gonna work in the bedroom.”

“Wait, not in the office? You can’t concentrate in the bedroom right?”

“I think you should rest there for the night, and I think I’ll be better able to concentrate, knowing you’re okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re resting in the bedroom, that’s an order,” Hange said firmly.

She was playing the commander card again. By the looks of it, she would be hard to sway. She had gathered all her paperwork, slipping the thick wads of paper just under her arm. She had turned off the lights and when Hange walked a few inches ahead with that much confidence while gripping his wrist tightly, he saw no choice but to follow.

***

There was a nice bathtub in the commander’s room and Levi insisted he get enough time to himself to clean up the muck, the alcohol and the sweat that came with the fist fight. Hange had insisted he didn’t lock the door but a need for privacy had him a little naughty and a little assertive.

He pressed on the lock on the door slowly, enough to spit the sound of the click into three careful movements.

For the first time in a while, he was grateful for Hange’s pile of work. She didn’t seem to notice.

Stripping off his clothes was a methodical task and Levi realized, if he focused on the slipping movements more than the actual searing pain that followed, he could get anything done. Maybe even cover the few feet that separated the door from the bathtub.

He started off by biting his lip and bending over just far enough to be able to fiddle comfortably with the faucets. He couldn’t bring himself low enough to reach for the plug but even before that, he had made sure to twist both faucets to full blast so he wouldn’t have to deal with the bath emptying too quickly,

The soap was on the other side of the tub and Levi decided to put off grabbing it until he was submerged on the tub. He had spent just a little too much time staring at the soap bar and maybe the gears in his head were turning a little too fast, coming up with the best way to stretch out and reach for it.

There were more pressing matters at hand like the nausea, the pain at his side, the pounding in his head and his utter inability to focus. When he was dealing with those all at once, it was only natural he would run out of mind space.

The slippery part had been something he failed to consider. The last thing he remembered was stepping onto the tub, his eyes fixed on the soap in front of him. And before he could even consider anything else, his foot lost grip on the slimy bathtub.

Then his feet weren’t connected anywhere and he was free falling.

Everything blurred around him as something pulled him forward, into the water. He instinctively put his hands in front of him, once again neglecting the rim of the tub for one fatal second.

One fatal second that ended with a burst of white hot pain.

Pain had been kind for a while after that, settling as something dull at the back of his mind. It had done wonders as well to consume whatever throbbing sensation was eating at his abdomen then. He soon realized, if he closed his eyes, the pain only settled deeper into him, as something almost comforting.

And he realized there were warmer things, there were kinder things surrounding him, like the water that tickled at his sides.

Hey are you okay? There were knocks on doors.

“I’m fine.” He would have liked to muster. The water though that started with a tickle, continued to climb, up to his ears, then up to his mouth.

Her voice deadened to something faint. Faint shouts? Slams of doors. Faint, but annoying loud.

The water had done its part to blanket him, protecting him from the most annoying sounds.

Then when it deadened into nothing. Levi couldn’t help but be just a little relieved.

***

On most days, Hange was a whirlwind. On other special days, Hange was a cyclone.

Recently though, she had mellowed down into something less assertive, tamer, more predictable than a whirlwind.

Maybe a windy day? Levi would surmise when he thought comparing Hange to weather would be a good way to pass the time.

That had become a strange habit he would indulge occasionally. Something quick. Something subtle. Something he didn’t think too much of until he had enough time to be a little more observant of the weather patterns around him.

It was only when he woke up with bleary eyes, still too groggy to even do much but turn to his side, to the narrow white door, did he realize for himself. It was only when despite all that, Levi was attempting to listen intently to whatever scuffle was on the other side of the door, did he realize, god he missed that Hange.

He made out her voice, much wilder than before, her tone more dynamic and Levi was perking his ears up, attempting to break off from that sleepiness to pick up what he can.

He hadn’t heard that Hange in years. It could have been a dream for all he knew.

“The medical technique from Azumabito…. Saved his life….”

“You wouldn’t have had to rely on it if you caught it early on!”

“It was a busy night commander. He seemed fine at first---”

“Believe me… I understand but… Any other day… I gave you my own speculation doctor.” Hange’s voice had mellowed just a little bit. She had clipped the assertion with a title at least. Still, Levi couldn’t help but note that the tone sounded more like a ‘Hange’ than a ‘Commander’

“Yes--”

“No, listen to me… I may not be a doctor but I think the best course of action there was to have felt for any tenderness on his side right? Did you do that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then why did you say you did it a while ago? Believe me, if you did, if you caught this early on, I’m sure he wouldn't be in as bad of a state as he is now.”

“Still, we’re grateful we were able to---”

“Catch it on time? He. Could. Have. Died.” There were slams of feet, slams on the wall, accenting every syllable and Hange said every word like it was bitter to her lips. “I’m honestly fucking grateful he slipped on the bathtub. At least, it brought him back here and you had to give him a full body examination. I don’t think you would have done it any other way!”

“Commander, please calm down.” The voice very much sounded like Moblit. A nostalgic but also very wistful thought. Of course it wouldn’t be Moblit. Moblit was long gone.

When Levi listened for a little longer, he picked it out in the midst of Hange’s tirade. “Jean?” Even saying a one syllable name turned out to be an ordeal. He painstakingly turned his head back and stared at the ceiling, blinking a few more times, an attempt to focus.

Focus came quickly a second later, with crashes and slams of wood on wood right after the other. Enough to have Levi shift the weight to his elbows, sit up for a second long enough to realize he couldn’t stay up for longer than that.

“Commander…”

“Jean… Carelessness...negligence….” Hange’s voice was softer than a while ago. Still, it was sharp, words were emphasized. Words he had managed to pick out, just by listening closely.

The door to his room opened and Hange entered. Surprisingly, it didn’t close with a bang. Whatever remnants of anger was still very much apparent on her face.

Hey four eyes. By god, he wanted to call her four eyes. She seemed more like a ‘four eyes.’ The anger, the aftermath had left Hange looking more like the Hange back then. So Levi stared a little longer, willing himself to find that balance between widening his eyes and squinting, just to get the clearest possible picture of her.

Hange’s eyes widened as he caught her gaze but she didn’t look too happy to see him. “You should go to sleep,”

How long was I out? “How long…” He managed to say.

“You had surgery just a few hours ago. You slipped on the bath tub and the door was fucking locked. I had to break it down. And god, Levi, you almost drowned....”

To his shock, he realized he didn’t even remember much of what followed the slams on the door.

Hange continued on, her voice echoing against the four walls. “Hell, you’re not even supposed to be awake.” A bout of realization in her eyes. She put one hand on her mouth. “Was I loud? Did I wake you up?” Hange’s question was laughable and if Levi had any more energy in him, maybe he would have let out a light chuckle.

He spared a subtle smile instead.

“I was huh?” Hange said. “Sorry about that.”

Suddenly, Levi had the motivation to shake his head and spare three words despite the pounding in his head. “I missed that.”

“MIssed what?” Hange asked.

By that point, Levi didn’t have much energy to reply. Instead he let his eyes dart from left to right, trying to take in as much as he can of her at once. He trusted Hange to be perceptive of that at least.

If she did notice it.

“You’re gonna have to take more time to explain that,” Hange admitted. She dropped one light hand on his forehead. “But not now, I’d rather you took this time to rest first.” She mellowed again and Levi had to painfully note that the voice had shifted to something more serious once again.

The faint recall of the old Hange justa moment ago, behind closed doors was all he had.

Don’t be ashamed. Be yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself. There were too many things Levi would have wanted to say at that moment. The words dried up, crumbling into sawdust even before he could completely open his mouth to say it.

He closed his mouth again, ready to restart the painful process of attempting to speak. Someone knocked and the door opened again way before he even started to feel some strength.

“Commander. The military police came to pick up the documents. I kept them posted on the situation. They’ll look into it now, process the paperwork…” Jean’s eyes were on Hange as he spoke. They soon fell to Levi. “Captain, you’re awake.”

“He’ll be going back to sleep soon,” Hange said, as if it were an indirect order. It wasn’t too hard to follow. Sleep was like a phantom looming over him. He just had to let it do its work.

There were still things he hadn’t completely comprehended and curiosity was good at keeping his surroundings lucid. He reached for Hange’s hand, in one swift motion enough to even leave his hand dizzy.

Hange turned back to him. “Levi, rest.”

He didn’t have to speak. All he had to do was blink, nod his head and Hange pulled the chair to his bedside.

“If I humor you now, will you make sure to rest?”

His energy was limited but if he pickled the right words, the right syllables he could get the answers he needed.

How bad?

Hange was his closest friend for a reason. She knew it at first glance. “I rushed you to the hospital as soon as you fell unconscious.” She put a hand to her head. “You had a concussion… But you know, it wasn't the concussion that was life threatening. Your spleen… it completely ruptured. They had to take it out. You’re gonna be out of it for a while…”

If the survey corps did anymore combat, maybe Levi would have been more worried. Recently, work usually consisted of paperwork anyway.

How long?

“You’ll be here for a few weeks maybe. Then more rest when you get discharged. You’re in really bad shape…” Levi looked behind Hange to see Jean standing awkwardly. There were only too many coherent ways to ask about the kid. He moved his hand up to his chest and drew a shape.

The locket?

“We got the issue with Joseph under control,” Hange said.

Jean stepped forward, moving closer towards the bed. “Commander Hange managed to find some records on them. Joseph’s father used to work with the Reeves company. He got involved in the underground, got blackmailed into dishing a lot of his pay for their silence. With the right investigation, we might be able to turn the tables around, get them to confess and maybe return the money or even more to their son but it’s gonna take a lot of meetings, negotiations---”

As if they had heard the word, some almost recognizable recruit entered. “Commander Zoe, the military police want to clarify a few more things about the papers submitted.”

“Give me a minute.”

“They’re waiting outside, commander.”

Hange sighed. “I’ll meet them now.” She turned back to Jean. “Watch over Levi first.”

Within an hour, Hange had shifted from the angry Hange to the mellow Hange then to the serious commander Hange. Levi watched her go for a few seconds longer, noting the strides that exuded the confidence and professionalism that came with her position.

Jean took up the empty chair Hange left and Levi was slightly ticked that she could have been replaced so fast. Somehow, his head was still keeping the screaming Hange on the other side of the door on replay.

“How are you feeling captain?”

Shitty.

“Commander Hange said you should be resting.”

Levi managed a light nod.

“Please rest,” Jean said.

Levi started to notice it then with him much nearer. His shoulders were tensed up, his hands on his lap and his voice, his smile both more stiff than usual. He furrowed his brows as if to say “are you okay?”

Jean was definitely rattled. “I don’t think I’d wanna see our commander like that again...” He admitted, a weak smile on his face but Jean’s eyes showed fear more than anything else.

No shit. Levi was very familiar with that Hange, having had his own fateful encounters with her over the years.

“Before you woke up… She got mad… Very mad… ”

Oh? Levi mouthed.

Jean was starting to flail his hands a little more. “God she was like a tornado. She was kicking benches. She was slamming walls…”

First time?

“But I don’t blame her… It was really negligence on their part. Apparently Hange had told them a while back to give you a thorough check…” He gave Levi a onceover. “Turns out she was right.”

Levi put one hand to his side, noting the tight bandaging and padding, Even a light tap was enough to send painful sparks through him. He stifled a wince.

“Be careful.” Jean clutched his hand, guiding it back down to the bed. “She might just get angry again if you disobey her.”

She wouldn’t. Hange didn’t get angry like that anymore. He couldn’t help but think though, he would have liked that. Levi didn’t let that thought out as anything more than a surreptitious smile. He looked back up at the ceiling and allowed himself a ragged exhale.

“She won’t,” Levi managed to say. “She mellowed down already.” The last few syllables came out more like a raspy cough.

“Captain, don’t hurt yourself.”

When Levi bit at his lip, cleared his throat, he realized he could muster a few more words. He gave Jean an indignant look.

Jean sighed, dropping his shoulders in defeat. “Something tells me you’ve seen her like this before. You know her best... What makes her angry? You know, so we can avoid it in the future.”

Negligence. Competence. When hundreds of lives were on the line.

Levi could have answered Jean’s question clearly or maybe it came out as mumbles. When everything was starting to blur against each other, it didn’t make it worth clarifying how much left his lips.

“When hundreds of lives are on the line?” Jean asked.

Usually.

With Jean’s question hovering above them in silence for a second longer, he started to doubt himself. There was negligence, incompetence involved but hundreds of lives on the line? He was just one life.

Maybe he had been a little too hasty in concluding what went on on the other side of the door. Those last few moments before he let exhaustion take over, Levi became aware of the taste of sawdust on his lips, the smell of alcohol and his own utter sleepiness.

“I’ll have the nurses come in to refill your pain medication. For now, you should rest.”

Right. He was on medications. So his mind started to shake with questions. Ones he would have liked to answer before he gave in to the trappings of sleep.

How much of what went on behind the doors was real? Did Hange really kick, slam furniture? Did she scream like a mad man? Was she a full blown cyclone?

He would never know. Besides, there was a door between them. All he had was sounds, his own facilities marred by whatever medication they were pumping him with and his own memory to make conclusions for himself.

He fell back to bed with one conclusion, one he had built for himself over the years and came back to him as one musing before he fell back to sleep.

When Hange was angry, very angry, she was a full blown tornado of screaming, shouting, kicking, rambling. She was a full blown tornado that had the rare quality of just making sense.

Her anger, that came once a blue moon, always seemed to have a point.

At first, Levi had managed to summarize the most anger inducing situations to two: One, any utterly stupid move that Hange cannot seem to understand which could cost hundreds, or thousands of lives. Two, utter negligence that could cost hundreds or thousands of lives.

Maybe there was a third anger inducing situation that only bared its fangs then, powerful enough to release itself even outside the commander facade. And maybe it didn’t have to be a hundred lives on the line for that monster to show itself.

Half asleep, his memories a blur and with the white door between them, he couldn’t be too sure if that had really been the cyclone he had witnessed a few times before. So he left it as speculation, something to indulge.

He focused instead on sleeping, on the rustle of pages and the wind that streamed through the window.

Reminiscing on the old Hange could wait. He still had lots of recovering to do.

[xiaomomowrites]

homecoming

Genshin Impact | TartaLi/ZhongChi

Summary: “You must not give up now, alright? I, too, wish for Childe to come home. I wish to see him again, and frankly, it scares me how much I want him by my side once more,” Zhongli acquiesces, “I miss him dearly, and all I want is to be able to hear his laugh again. You feel the same about your sister, do you not? But Aether, this kind of loss is something we both must grieve. But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

Aether opens his mouth to begin responding, but his jaw quickly snaps shut as the fate between his palms disappears.

Keqing and Mona gasp loudly from where they sit back at camp. Aether startles, and pulls back to look at him with wide golden eyes.

All four of them look up to the sky, and are astonished to see a single golden star hurtling toward the ground they sit on. Aether gasps, barely containing his scream.

“Oh my god,” Traveler inhales sharply, “oh my god, you-”

“Get out of there!” Mona yells, and suddenly she’s standing up on her chair. Keqing places a steadying hand on the small of her back. “It’s going to crash right into you! Move!”

Or, Zhongli and Aether just want Childe to come home. Their wishes come true.

Find it on Ao3!

A/N: Oh my goodness I wrote this in one sitting before throwing it at my editors and wishing them the best lol. I wrote this in honor of finally pulling Childe, and wow was this a treat to write! And yes, I wrote my own team reacting to Childe coming home. Aether isn't on my team anymore (I benched him back when I was WL3), but I wanted to include him because it isn't Genshin Impact without our favorite traveler. My main team consists of Zhongli, Mona, Chongyun, and Keqing! But now that Childe is with me, he'll be slowly making his way into my main party :)

Just a heads up, Keqing and Mona were written as best friends here, but you can interpret their relationship however you'd like haha

And once again, this fic was inspired by some twitter fanart that I will link in the end notes! Enjoyyyy <3

--

Aether is especially jittery this morning. 

The blond is bouncing off the walls so early in the morning that even Zhongli was taken aback by his energy. The ex-Archon watches him with wary eyes as the traveler paces back and forth in front of the breakfast table, muttering to himself about ‘fates’ and ‘primogems’. Vaguely, Zhongli hears Aether mutter the numbers ‘one hundred and sixty’ and ‘thirty-two-eighty’ as he paces, and the deity ultimately decides he wants nothing to do with what Aether is scheming. The sun is rising and Zhongli has always loved watching the star rise with every inhale. The day starts when the sun wakes up, and it ends when the sun begins to rest. Zhongli closes his eyes, ignoring Aether’s anxious pacing in favor of the serenity of the wilderness they chose to camp out in for the night.

Mona and Keqing clamber out of their shared tent together, pinkies linked as usual. Keqing still dons her elegant silk sleeping robe and her lavender hair spills past her shoulders in cute, candid waves. Her eyes are still slightly hooded with sleep but she’s quick to blink her drowsiness away in favor of the day to come. Mona, on the other hand, is in the oversized tee shirt she bought from Majorie and her usual black tights. Her dark locks are out of their usual twin pigtails and flow down her back, tangled, and significantly less put together than Keqing. She yawns obnoxiously as she shuffles closer to the group.

The astrologist sniffles. “G’morning.” 

“Good morning, friends,” Keqing greets with a small smile of her own and drags Mona to sit across from Zhongli. He offers her a smile. Mona blinks in response. 

“Good morning, ladies. Did you sleep well?” Zhongli responds, and takes Mona’s glare as an answer in itself. “Still not a morning person, I see.”

“Never will be, Mr. Rex Lapis,” Mona sighs, thanking him quietly for the cup of tea he hands her in passing. Keqing makes a beeline for their makeshift kitchen to make the unruly bunch some breakfast. Zhongli always handles the tea, as picky as he is about his morning tea, and Keqing always handles breakfast. 

“I assume young Chongyun will not be awake for awhile,” Zhongli chuckles, bringing his cup to his lips. 

Keqing scoffs from the kitchen, “You can expect him around noon, Zhongli-xiansheng.”

Xiansheng.

Try as he might, he’s associated the suffix to a certain ginger. A ginger who he misses dearly, but hasn’t seen since he left for Snezhnaya in a hurry. Zhongli’s heart swoops. He left without so much as a goodbye, leaving Zhongli to pick up the pieces he left Liyue in and the unfortunate state of his heart. The thought of not seeing Childe ever again ate at him continuously until he felt hollow inside, and all he had left was a familiar ache every time the ginger came back to haunt his dreams. All Zhongli wanted was to know if the latter was okay, but with the way he had deceived him, he wasn’t sure if he deserved to know. As someone who greets death as if it were an old friend, never seeing Childe again simply because the circumstances do not allow it upsets him far more than he’d like to admit. Life, human life, was too short for Zhongli to be sitting around wasting time. But no matter how many times he’s preached this to himself, the ex-Archon still struggles with taking the steps to make contact. 

How would he even begin, anyway?

The Harbinger was stuck with his Harbinger duties. Childe had a family to tend to and treasure hoarders to chase. It wasn’t like Zhongli could warp to Snezhnaya and sweep him off his feet; that would be inappropriate and selfish of him. And yet the idea of seeing him again, of hearing his laugh, watching him smile, pay for his food with that adorable expression of his, it almost makes him want to leave to see him right now. But he can’t. The situation simply does not allow it. 

Right?

“Two minutes!” Aether suddenly yelps, making Mona jump in her chair. She whips around to glare at the overzealous traveler. Keqing’s head snaps in his direction and almost drops the pan she’s frying fish on. She clicks her tongue in mild annoyance. Zhongli frowns, his curiosity getting the best of him. 

“What are you so anxious about, Aether?” 

“You don’t understand, Zhongli!” Aether whips around, his crazy eyes locking onto Zhongli’s amber irises. “This team needs an archer. We need an archer. This is non-negotiable! I can’t keep bothering Keqing to shoot those stupid water birds if she can’t throw her hair pin that far! We need arrows, Zhongli, arrows!”

Keqing makes a small noise of offense.

His arms flail in the air, desperate to make everyone in the room feel the panic he is currently sinking under. 

“Alright, alright,” Zhongli hushes him, unsure of why his friend was so disgruntled in the first place. As far as he knew, it was another normal day full of daily commissions and mindless material farming. “We need someone adept at long range fighting. But what does that have to do with your current state of distress?” 

“Mona said that today, his chances are increased by two-hundred percent. Right, Mona?” Aether’s gaze suddenly locks onto hers. She blinks.

“Yeah,” she responds, “but we had this discussion already, Aether, Childe’s rates are increased but that doesn’t guarantee you the fifty-fifty-”

“Childe?” Zhongli interrupts, interest suddenly piqued. “What does this have to do with Childe?”

Fifty-fifty? The more the conversation went on, the more confused Zhongli grew. 

“Agh!” Aether scrambles, “I have to go! It’s happening!” 

Zhongli watches with twice the amount of curiosity he had two minutes earlier. The mention of Childe has his heart racing faster than he’d like to admit. 

Aether frantically pulls out a bag full of intertwined fates and rushes out to the open field ahead of them. The bag is absolutely loaded, filled to the brim and overflowing with these small, circular things that, in his six thousand years of living, he has never seen before. They are colored blue and pink, and they mix together and sparkle so divinely that Zhongli finds himself entranced by their color alone. He has read about them and their uses in the past, but he has never seen someone actually wish upon them.

Mona sighs around her teacup. “He gets like this every time I tell him someone new is coming,” she shakes her head wistfully, “I always tell him to stop spending so much of his mora on these fates! They’re not good for the economy-”

“And what do you know about the economy, Mona?” Keqing chuckles, coming around with plated food for the trio, “you spend the entirety of your paychecks immediately on the newest hot astrology item. Not that they’re not important to you but I’ve told you before that you ought to be careful with how you spend your mora.”

Mona’s jaw drops. “What!” she fumbles, “I am plenty responsible with my mora! And the things I buy are completely valid and of high rarity, thank you!”

“Hmm, is that why you almost starved and ate nothing but mushrooms for three months?” Keqing teases, nudging Mona’s mouth open with chopsticks holding fish. The astrologist pouts, but opens her mouth to eat, anyway. She’s right, but Mona would never say that to her face.

Zhongli doesn’t pay attention to their bickering. 

Instead, he fixates on the way Aether scurries out and dumps the bag of fates out on the open field before picking them up, one by one, until ten of them are bunched up in his arms. Aether flops down on the grass beneath him and folds his legs underneath himself. The traveler hunches over the fates, huddling them close to his chest, and Zhongli can barely see his mouth moving as Aether begins to wish upon ten stars. With every word spoken, each fate slowly starts to disappear. The more his mouth moves, the more the fates begin to disintegrate from his arms. 

A loud whirring noise above their heads suddenly takes place. It gets louder as it gets closer, and Zhongli cranes his neck to see stars hurtling toward Teyvat. He feels panic bubbling up in his chest as he sees the bunch go straight for his friend.

“Aether!” he yells, “Get over here, it’s dangerous out in the open!”

“I’m fine!” he hollers back like a stubborn child. “Ugh, dammit!”

Zhongli looks back up, and is baffled to see that one of the stars has turned purple. What in Celestia’s name-

Barbara appears before them, and Zhongli’s eyes all but bulge out of his head. Celestia, he’s too old for this. The young nurse is not the only thing to appear, though. Zhongli observes the various weapons that litter the ground and surround Aether’s feet. The blond observes them with a scrutinizing gaze, nudging the three star weapons with his foot and pushing the four star weapons aside for later. How peculiar.

Mona, on the other hand, smiles and waves a hand at her fellow water catalyst. “Barbara!” She hollers, “It’s good to see you!” 

“Mona!” the young idol responds with a blinding smile, before focusing her attention back on Aether. The traveler sighs, gives her a quick hug in greeting, and sends her on her merry way back to Mondstadt after apologizing profusely for the inconvenience. 

Keqing snickers. “It’s always so funny watching him get so intense about wishing.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Mona adds, “Remember how much he screamed when he finally got us?” 

“Oh yes,” Keqing smiles around her cup, “I remember him throwing these strange artifacts at me and shoving a sword in my face, demanding that I use it, as if I don’t already have my own weapon!” She waves her hand dismissively, reminiscing her days when she was first introduced to the team. 

Mona tips her head back and laughs heartily. “Oh, yes. He took my book away from me and gave me my lovely eye of perception. I must say, it’s a bit of a downgrade from my five star weapon, but I do feel as if I deal more damage this way.”

Keqing hums in agreement. “Likewise.”

Zhongli is quiet. 

All he remembers from joining Aether’s team is being pulled at the last minute and being tackled into a hug as soon as he appeared. The traveler had all but pushed the skyward spine into his hands, and told him to hold onto what looked to be archaic petra artifacts. Zhongli had cocked his head, confused, but followed along anyway. What Aether was doing seemed important, regardless, and he decided to support his endeavours from there on out.

Now he watches with bated breath as Aether curls around another set of ten fates. Zhongli is beginning to understand what he is doing, but he fails to decipher what Childe has to do with any of this. His rates are increased? What in Celestia’s name does that even mean?

Aether begins wishing upon ten more fates and the abrupt whooshing above their heads starts up once more. One of the stars morph midair into purple once again. 

Keqing and Mona sigh. 

Zhongli just wants to understand.

Aether punches the grass beneath him. 

A young woman appears before them along with another unnecessary plethora of weapons. She’s blonde, just like the last one, but she dons two pigtails and an eyepatch. A strange electric bird hovers around her, too, and Zhongli can’t help but wonder why she is dressed the way she is; she’s covered in purple and black, cocking one hip as if she owned the world. Zhongli is unsure about the energy she exudes. But in fairness, it is far too early to judge one’s character on nothing but appearance. Still, he watches carefully. 

“Fischl,” Aether breathes, slumping against the floor, “hello.”

“Traveler,” she greets. “What exactly am I doing here? I will have you know, as Prinzessin-”

“Der Verteilung, you have many duties at home you must attend to, lest the kingdom you rule with grace and elegance burn to the ground without your remarkable leadership,” Aether finishes for her, “I know, I know. Sorry about that, I didn’t mean to grab you. You can go home.”

Fischl harrumphs. “I’m relieved to know you are aware of my importance. Good day to you, strange traveler.”

And then she’s gone. 

Zhongli sighs, pushing himself up from the table and ignoring the way his knees disagree with the sudden movement. 

“Where are you going?” Keqing asks, helping herself to another cup of tea.

“I’m going to talk to Aether,” Zhongli declares, “He seems...rather troubled, and I wish to help.”

“He gets like this every time,” Mona reminds him, voice softer than it was two minutes ago, “it’s really nothing new.”

Zhongli shakes his head. “It does not make it right to let him sit in his anxiety like this. Perhaps he could use a friend.”

Mona shrugs and lets him go. As he walks away, he hears the girls behind him begin to talk. 

“Does Zhongli have a thing for Childe?” Mona asks in a hushed breath. Keqing’s eyes widened comically.

“Not that I know of? Why, did you sense something?” She leans in closer, ever the gossip. Mona shuffles so they’re speaking in hushed tones, even though Zhongli can definitely still hear them. He chuckles, shaking his head disapprovingly.

The ex-Archon pads over to where Aether sits, frantically bunching together ten more fates. Zhongli sighs, and bends to sit next to him. His back screams in protest. Goodness, mortal life is getting to him. 

“Aether,” he begins, “I worry for your health.”

“I’m fine, Zhongli. I’ll be fine as soon as he gets here,” Aether answers without even sparing the elder a glance. He picks up fates and observes them carefully to inspect their quality, as if he were picking ripe apples out from the grocery. 

“And who exactly are you waiting for?” Zhongli asks, indulging the blond for a moment.

“Childe!” he yells, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. The latter sighs. He, too, wishes for Childe to appear, but it simply did not work like that. One cannot summon another’s presence upon demand. Childe was too busy for that, anyway.

“Aether,” he begins, “you are anxious, friend, and I implore you to take a break from this please-”

“Zhongli,” traveler shuffles on his knees to look at him, “I have spent the last three months working my ass off for these fates, I’ve spent more mora than I’d like to admit, and I’ve spent far too long in that godforsaken spiral abyss scraping for three hundred primogems each time I freeze my ass off in floors nine and ten and it sucked, Zhongli, but I’ve worked hard and I need this, okay? I need Childe to come home. Because I need to get stronger, and I need a stronger team because I need to find my sister because I know she’s out there and, and-”

Zhongli raises a hand to quiet him. Oh, there was much to unpack here. His heart breaks for his friend’s state of distress. He places a comforting palm on Aether’s shoulder, lowering himself even more to look his friend in the eyes. The traveler looks a bit haggard, obviously from waking up early in anticipation. Zhongli wishes he could take his pain; he wishes he could take away the longing he desperately felt for his sister. But unfortunately, there was nothing he could do, so he offers his best comfort, instead.

“It’s alright,” Zhongli mutters, “I understand. You have worked hard, and you deserve a win. But Aether, whatever comes will come. Whether or not you ‘win the fifty-fifty’, you will be pushed in the right direction toward your sister, I promise you that. No amount of artifacts or talent books or weapon upgrades can compare to the strength you already harbor, looking for your sister every day despite knowing where she is. You face a battle against the unknown, and that in itself is commendable. Acknowledge your strength, Aether. You have come very far.”

Aether sags against him, letting himself lean forward until his forehead thumps against Zhongli’s chest. The contact is comforting. Everything about Zhongli is so warm and homey, and he smells of sleep and sandalwood. The calming effect is immediate, but his brain is still plagued with anxiety. Oh, Aether can’t bear the thought of Childe not coming this morning. It makes the blond sick to his stomach. Zhongli pats the top of his head soothingly. 

“I know you miss her, but you will find her,” Zhongli continues. Aether squeezes the single fate in his hand anxiously. The blond fidgets with the single intertwined fate, pressing it up against Zhongli’s stomach as he squeezes his eyes shut, willing the tears to go away. He’s so, so tired.

 “You must not give up now, alright? I, too, wish for Childe to come home. I wish to see him again, and frankly, it scares me how much I want him by my side once more,” Zhongli acquiesces, “I miss him dearly, and all I want is to be able to hear his laugh again. You feel the same about your sister, do you not? But Aether, this kind of loss is something we both must grieve. But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

Aether opens his mouth to begin responding, but his jaw quickly snaps shut as the fate between his palms disappears. 

Keqing and Mona gasp loudly from where they sit back at camp. Aether startles, and pulls back to look at him with wide golden eyes. 

All four of them look up to the sky, and are astonished to see a single golden star hurtling toward the ground they sit on. Aether gasps, barely containing his scream. 

“Oh my god,” Traveler inhales sharply, “oh my god, you-”

“Get out of there!” Mona yells, and suddenly she’s standing up on her chair. Keqing places a steadying hand on the small of her back. “It’s going to crash right into you! Move!” 

Aether scrambles backward as soon as he sees the pseudo asteroid plummeting directly toward where they’re both situated. “Zhongli!” he yells, “Move!”

The man in question shakes his head, unable to look away from the shooting star.

“It’s alright,” he responds, a sudden calm washing over him at the sight. Something about it feels so undeniably right. His heart tugs impatiently, desperately wishing to make contact with the ethereal being threatening to crash right into him, like a magnet reaching for its other half. “It’s alright, Aether.”

Seconds before it lands, Childe materializes right in front of him, arms flung wide open and a smile so bright that Zhongli almost winces. 

The wind is knocked straight out his lungs upon seeing Childe’s gleeful face in front of him. It’s no longer a dream, Zhongli realizes. Ajax is here and he is very real and he is definitely plunging toward him at breakneck speed. This is no longer a figment of his imagination, and he has all but less than two seconds to comprehend that before the ginger barrels right into him. 

Zhongi regains himself and digs his feet into the ground, summoning geo shackles from the ground to wrap around his ankles and lock him into place. He braces himself for impact. 

Keqing screams. Mona looks away. Aether watches with wide, disbelieving eyes as Tartaglia comes plummeting out of the sky. He lets out an ugly mix between a sigh and a broken sob of relief. Finally. Celestia knows how much Aether needed this. He’s never been so happy to see an obnoxious red head of hair in his life.

Childe, Tartaglia, Ajax, slams into Zhongli at full force and immediately latches onto him like a lifeline. He wraps his arms around Zhongli’s neck, legs winding around his waist, and clings to him like a koala around a tree. Zhongli responds in kind, pressing Childe to his chest with strong arms that hold him impossibly close. The weights around his ankles drop as soon as he stabilizes the both of them, and the ex-Archon swings him around gleefully. 

Tartaglia laughs, the noise slightly muffled from where his face is pressed into Zhongli’s collar. Tartaglia squeezes him tighter, and Zhongli eventually has to put him down because his back simply does not want to cooperate today. Tartaglia looks at him then, a little winded from his trek through the sky of all things. Cerulean eyes meet gold, and the sight of his freckled cheeks in front of him makes Zhongli feel as if he can do anything, gnosis or not. He is so filled with joy, heart so full of glee that he feels like he might burst. Celestia could redact his position as a god in its entirety and in this moment, he wouldn’t care. He couldn’t care, because immortality has been nothing but a curse to him so far, and growing old with the love of his life is all he ever desired.

“I can’t believe it,” Zhongli breathes, “you’re here?” he cups Ajax’s face gently, holding him as if he were made of glass.

“You called,” Childe responds, hands grasping at Zhongli’s waist. The Harbinger leans forward until their foreheads knock together. “I heard you, xiansheng. So I came.”

“Huh,” Zhongli says dumbly, “that’s all I had to do?” 

“It’s all you had to do, idiot,” Childe scolds him, “I could feel you overthinking all the way from Snezhnaya!” he thumps a fist against Zhongli’s chest playfully. And to his delight, the sound that echoes is no longer hollow. Zhongli’s smile reaches his eyes for the first time in an abysmally long time.

“Childe!” Aether screams. They let go of each other in favor of looking at the one who made their reconciliation possible. “You son of a bitch!” 

Childe’s eyes widen at the unprovoked insult. “What did I do?!” 

“What did you do?” Aether is quick to rip his shoe off and fling it at Childe’s head. It misses, but only narrowly. “What took you so long, asshole!”

Tartaglia cocks his head to the side. “You were wishing for me, too? I only heard Zhongli’s voice, comrade!”

Aether squawks a noise of indignation. “You-!”

“Aether,” Zhongli interrupts their squabble. His hand never leaves the small of Childe’s back. “Thank you.”

The traveler lets himself slump forward, exhausted from draining all his emotional energy so early in the morning. “You’re welcome. Couldn’t have done it without you, Mr. Zhongli.”

“Is everything okay?” Keqing hollers from where she’s helping Mona down from her chair. “I hear a lot of yelling!” 

“Everything is fine!” Aether yells back. Zhongli takes that as their cue to make their way back to camp.

When they arrive, the sun has risen well up into the sky and looms over all of their heads. Chongyun finally clambers out of his tent after he’s completed his ten hours of sleep. His light blue hair is ruffled adorably and he rubs the sleep out of his eyes. He stretches, yawns, and coughs when he takes too deep of an inhale. The exorcist summons one of his famous popsicles and sucks on it absentmindedly in place of a proper breakfast. He’s exquisite. 

“Morning everyone,” he greets, nodding at the girls at the table. “I heard a lot of screaming. Who’s the new guy?” 

Chongyun watches Childe blearily through sleepy eyes. He blinks, before taking in the newcomer. The first thing the young exorcist notices is the obnoxious head of red hair that barely looks styled. Next, is the mask he wears askew. And finally, the abnormal length of his femurs. Chongyun’s eyebrows furrow. He scratches his head. Why are his legs so long?

Childe leans into Zhongli’s side and grins wickedly upon noticing his vision.

“A cryo wielder, huh?” he snickers, “this is going to be fun.”

--

Mona is horrified to see the way the two never leave each other’s side. 

Where there is Childe, there is Zhongli. Where there is Zhongli, there is Childe. Frankly, it is quite concerning. Do the two ever separate? Do they ever have an individual thought? Do they share those, too? Honestly, Mona thought she and Keqing were attached at the hip. But the fact that they can at least go to the bathroom separately says a lot more than what she can say for Zhongli and Childe. Seriously, these two act as if they’re never going to see each other again.

Regardless, Mona can’t bring herself to be surprised. From the moment she met the wild card that is Tartaglia, she knew that he and Zhongli were a good match. It was undeniable that the two had chemistry. Mona may not have been there for Aether’s adventures in Liyue, but she has seen enough of these two to know that they have quite the history. Although, that’s not the only thing about them that catches her attention. What was especially strange, however, was the way their pinkies would twitch anytime one would stray too far from the other. 

It has been happening for a little over a week. Take, for example, this morning when the two had taken over the kitchen to allow Keqing to sleep in. Tartaglia moved to the far left side of camp to gather some ingredients, and Zhongli’s pinky had twitched and stretched out to where Childe was, not too far from him. At first, Mona had thought it was a Liyuan custom that she had no knowledge of, like the way Zhongli always told her to raise her pinky whenever she would drink. But this felt different. It looked effortless and candid, almost like Zhongli had no idea that it was happening. 

The second occurrence was later in the afternoon when Aether had given them a new list of commissions for the day. Tartaglia was practically vibrating with excitement at the mention of four separate battles, and even offered to handle two of them on his own while the other four (Keqing requested a day off) separated and completed the other two. Aether had looked at him pointedly and shook his head no. They either did this as a team, or not at all. 

Mid battle, while Childe was up against a blazing axe mitachurl, the jade shield that Zhongli had put up for him withered and dropped as soon as the mitachurl raised its weapon to swing violently at Childe. The wild look in its eyes made it very clear that the creature was out for blood, ready to defend the land that belonged to it. If Childe were to fumble for even a second and meet the brandished blade of the axe, it would have been the end for him. 

His eyes widened.

Almost immediately, both of their pinkies twitched in place and stretched out as if reaching for the other. Mona watched the duo from the sidelines with curiosity as she and Chongyun froze a group of hilichurls together. She had sent out an illusory Phantom to continuously deal hydro damage and allowed Chongyun to go crazy with his claymore. The astrologist had sat back and observed the two on the opposite side of the battle field. 

It had gone like this: the jade shield drops, their pinkies flutter, and Zhongli whips around with a level of ferocity and speed she’s never seen before to frantically summon a geo pillar right in between Childe and the mitachurl. 

The Harbinger moves backwards just in time for the pillar to bear the brunt force of the swing, and his head snaps to where Zhongli stood. He stares at him, pointedly unamused with Childe’s recklessness, while he holds two hilichurls away from him with the butt end of his polearm. Childe grin and nods his thanks, and Zhongli rolls his eyes at the overzealous soldier. With a flick of his wrist, the geo wielder summons another shield to encompass Tartaglia as he lets loose on the battlefield. Though this time, Mona can see how the ex-Archon doesn’t let him out of his sight. 

Childe switches to his melee style then. He forgoes his bow in favor of his hydro blades and launches forward while the mitachurl’s axe is stuck in Zhongli’s pillar. 

Mona gasps, and a hand flies up to cover her mouth. Chongyun’s attention snaps to where she stands and gives her a once over to check for injuries. She waves him away, telling him to shut up even if he hadn’t said a word.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but the water Childe summons bends the sun’s rays a certain way until a very obvious, very crimson, very rare string of fate is revealed between Zhongli and Childe. It hangs between them languidly, but anytime either of them moves away too far, it’ll be pulled taut. They’re linked together by an invisible thread that Mona has only ever heard stories of; they were stories that spoke of a whimsical and eternal love that lasted liftimes and exceeded generations. The first time Mona had heard about it, she scoffed at the idea of having your partner chosen for you. But as she stands now, looking at Zhongli and Childe as they treat the battlefield as if it were a dance floor reserved for them, it felt almost illegal for either of them to be with anyone other than each other.

Her mind comes to a screeching halt when she realizes just how long Zhongli must have waited to meet him. Six thousand years, Mona ponders. But doesn’t the wait make the reconciliation all the more delicious?

Would you look at that, the astrologist thinks smugly, they’re tied by the pinkies. 

It was never an accident, after all. These two souls, regardless of the six thousand year old gap between them, were meant to be together.

Oh, she has so much to tell Keqing when she gets back.

--

Lovely fanart!

My twitter!

[ohayohimawari]

And Everyone Else Knew It

A drabble for Day 5 of @kakaobiweek Blue | Safe | Mutual Pining

Brief mature humor, romance, and fluff. I hope that you enjoy reading it!

And Everyone Else Knew It

Kakashi combed his cowlicks with his fingers and tried to steady his heart as he hurried to meet with Obito.

It was part of the latter’s conditional release to have regular meetings with a member of Konoha’s security force. As Hokage, Kakashi was not only the top of the law and order food chain in the village, he was also the only one with authority to pardon anyone for war crimes. As such, the Council of Elders decided that he would be the one assigned to supervise Obito’s rehabilitation and integration back into society. But there was a problem with this arrangement.

Obito was hot, and Kakashi had it bad for him.

His attraction to his old teammate and hero set in almost the exact moment they were reunited on the battlefield during the Fourth Great Shinobi War. The shock over the fact that Obito was most certainly not dead lasted for a fraction of a second, replaced by the shock over the handsome man he’d become. Kakashi barely had an opportunity to make sense of his conflicted feelings before they fought in their Kamui dimension, where he wished they were exchanging blows of an entirely different variety.

But that would be impossible, even after the impossible became possible.

Just because Obito was alive didn’t mean he could return Kakashi’s feelings. Any daydream in which the Rokudaime might indulge quickly ended with the cold, hard fact that a man who would start an international war over a female was probably, most likely, definitely not into dudes.

Even though he wore a watch these days, Kakashi checked the sun’s position in the sky to determine the time. He quickened his pace when he realized he was running late. Running late was Obito’s schtick, and now that he was back, it seemed silly to Kakashi to mimic the habit. At least, that’s what he told himself to explain why he would always hurry to their meetings, not because he was excited to see him or anything.

The funny thing was, was that Obito wasn’t arriving late to their meetings, either.

Kakashi attributed Obito’s punctuality to his desire to make a good impression on his parole officer instead of desiring his parole officer. But what a delicious fantasy that was; it was one that Kakashi turned to often in private and one that he shook clear from his mind as he opened the door to the restaurant where they agreed to meet. They had important things to discuss this time.

Obito said he'd undergone many changes recently, so Kakashi suggested they'd meet in a more casual atmosphere than his office. That way, it could be more like two friends having a conversation instead of abiding by the guidelines of Obito’s punishment.

However, when Kakashi spied Obito waving to him from where he was already seated in a booth, the Rokudaime wondered if he’d set himself up for additional hurt by arranging what could feel more like a date to him than a meeting.

Kakashi nodded a curt greeting at the three remaining members of Team Ten, who enjoyed their weekly dinner together in the booth next to Obito before joining his unrequited crush.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’m starving, so I already ordered for us,” Obito said as soon as Kakashi sat down.

“That’s fine,” Kakashi was too nervous to have an appetite, anyway. “So, you mentioned that a lot has happened since the last time we met,” he folded his hands in front of him on the table, “you should be moved into your new apartment by now.”

“I am,” Obito nodded.

“How do you like it?”

“I mean, it’s an apartment,” Obito looked down at his lap. “It’s small, but it’s bigger than my prison cell and comfier than a cave.”

Kakashi hummed thoughtfully in response, quietly considering how Obito lived for so long in hiding and doing his best to ignore how his heart ached for the man.

“My neighbor is a kind woman,” Obito continued, briefly meeting Kakashi’s gaze. “She’s elderly; her eyesight isn’t great, and I don’t think she knows who I am,” he smirked sheepishly. “I help her carry her groceries up the stairs, and she brings a plate of whatever she bakes that day, which is really nice.”

This sent Kakashi’s aching heart into somersaults, and he figured he better say something while he still could talk. “Are you forming connections and friendships with others?”

“Yeah, y’know, Gai comes around with his student, Lee, and they invite me to train with them. They, uh,” Obito chuckled, “gave me a matching leotard, and I like sparring with them, but I don’t think green is my color,” he laughed. “It’s nice to feel included, though.”

“Gai is pretty great that way,” Kakashi agreed, thankful for his old friend and rival.

“Kurenai smiles and waves at me when I see her at the cemetery these days, so I hope that we’ll become closer over time.”

Kakashi nodded, shifting uncomfortably in his seat and ignoring how his stomach tightened.

“I dunno, there’s only one person that I talk to a lot since I’ve come back, and that’s, well,” Obito mirrored Kakashi’s discomfort across the table, “I mean, everything about my life is complicated, but that’s really complicated.”

“How so?”

“Well, they’re pretty great,” Obito’s sheepish smile returned. 

Kakashi noted that when it seemed that everything else about his old teammate had changed, that expression remained the same. Then he realized that he was lost in thought, not listening as Obito continued to talk.

“...And they make me feel safe. Which, after everything I’ve been through, that’s pretty important.”

Kakashi kicked himself for not paying attention to Obito because whatever he said made him blush.

“Anyway, that’s hopeless,” Obito muttered.

“Why?” Kakashi asked.

“Well, I was kind of a jerk to them when I was a kid, and… and then I went and messed everything up.”

Kakashi leaned over the table closer to Obito to emphasize his earnestness. “People are learning that you were taken advantage of, Obito. Yes, you did terrible things, but you were manipulated when you were vulnerable. Then, you fought alongside the Allied Shinobi Forces when we needed it, and most importantly, you aren’t running from the repercussions of your actions. That’s why I could pardon you, and it’s why people are able and willing to forgive you.”

“Do you forgive me?”

“Here’s your broiled saury,” a waitress interrupted, and Kakashi sat back in his seat so she could set his dinner down on the table in front of him.

Obito thanked her and assured her that they had everything they needed before leaving them alone at their table.

“This is my favorite,” Kakashi muttered.

“Yeah, I know,” Obito replied off-handed, reaching for his utensils.

As casual as it seemed to Obito, the gesture touched Kakashi. He swallowed down the dangerous beginnings of hope before it could take hold of his exhausted heart and sought to encourage Obito in all of his pursuits. “If I’ve learned anything from being Naruto’s teacher, it’s that nothing is ever truly hopeless.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Obito spoke through a mouthful of food, and it amazed Kakashi that he could find even that attractive.

“They’re popular, like, really popular, internationally popular,” Obito’s eyes bulged as he stressed the point. “They could seriously have just about anyone they wanted, and I can’t exactly compete with that,” he finished, clearly crestfallen. “Anyway, let’s talk about something else.”

Kakashi was not a romantic man, and he knew it, and he also knew that he didn’t have a chance in hell with the man that sat across from him, no matter how much he yearned to reach out and reassure Obito that he was worth loving, and—

Kakashi chewed his dinner and choked on the word ‘love’ when it crossed his mind. He was in way deeper than he thought and decided that a change of subject was probably best. “You mentioned that you found a job,” he offered.

“Oh, yeah!” Obito perked up at the opportunity to share his good news. “I may not be a ninja anymore, but I’m still in pretty good shape.”

Really good shape, Kakashi thought.

“So, I was offered a modeling contract.”

Kakashi dropped his fork in his surprise, and it clattered on the table.

Obito laughed at him. “I know, it’s unexpected, but,” he chuckled again and awkwardly scratched the back of his head. “Looks like I’m going to be the next bad boy in Blue Boy.”

“Blue Boy?” Kakashi repeated, astonished. “The gay men’s lifestyle magazine?”

“You know it?” Obito asked, wide-eyed.

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you were into— I-I, I mean, I’ve bought a few editions,” Kakashi felt his mouth go dry, “for the articles.” And if Obito would be featured in its photo spreads, he’d be buying a subscription.

“Right,” Obito drawled sarcastically, and Kakashi felt seen. “Anyway, to be honest, I was amazed too,” he fiddled with the straw in his drink, “I don’t exactly consider myself to be fashion model material.”

“You’re hot!” Kakashi was juggling too many surprises, and as a result, dropped his filter. Then he did his best to pick it up and put it back on when Obito’s eyes snapped to his face. “I mean, that’s hot, I mean, good for you,” he wished for the earth to open up and swallow him, or for an assassin to show up intent on taking him out, or—

“You think I’m hot?” Obito asked quietly, tenderly, longingly.

Kakashi licked his lips and opened his mouth to speak but closed it when everyone heard Shikamaru’s groan from the table next to them.

“Mendokusē! Would you two just kiss already?”

Both men sat in silence, staring at each other. Kakashi felt as flushed as Obito looked.

“Shikamaru’s right,” Choji agreed. “You two are worse than a one-hundred-thousand-word slow burn fanfic.”

“Oh, I love those!” Ino gasped.

“A what?” Kakashi asked.

“Who cares,” Obito answered, his eyes beginning to smolder in a way that Kakashi had only dreamed. “Let’s pay the bill and—”

“My place or yours?” Kakashi flagged down their waitress.

“How about ours?” Obito asked, his Sharingan eye already spinning.

[naferty]

It’s been a while for incubus and demons au, but I’ve been chatting with @athletiger and they inspired me to write this! The MCU version of the au. 

~~~

Steve wakes up groggy and disoriented. Two words that are not associated with his name. Except for the one time he briefly felt it after narrowly escaping a reaper back when he and Bucky were only a hundred years old. Considered barely children to their people. They had been very stubborn and unwisely curious. 

The reaper they had run into scared years out of their lives. Hundreds of years. Steve wouldn’t be surprised if he only lived to be a thousand, instead of a demon’s usual two thousand. The reaper did its job and cut his life already. 

Bottom line. Steve has not felt this in a long time. It instantly put him on edge. The room is bare with brown walls and a radio on the nightstand reporting a game. He scans the space, suspicious of every nook and cranny. He half expects a Hydra goon to burst through the window or for Carter to come through the door and berate him for the stunt he pulled with the plane. 

Someone does eventually come through the door. It’s not Carter and it’s not Hydra. It’s a woman. A human woman. Wearing the uniform he has grown accustomed to seeing each time he and the others had been at camp, but something is wrong. The uniform is wrong. The woman is wrong. 

Steve studies the outfit and notes… the top is off. Her chest, it’s smooth. The cloth humans created for their human women, her bra, it’s not pointed. The bra has changed drastically. In a manner that is not possible overnight. A new style. Progressive fashion. 

Steve is familiar with the fashion changing among humans and mythos. A large change such as this usually occurs in ten to twenty years. Meaning, ten to twenty years have passed while he was knocked unconscious. 

His theory is only proven right when the radio mentions two teams that have played each other long before Steve even followed Tony and joined in the war. 

This is all a lie. Created to make Steve believe no time had passed. Steve is no moron and he’s not about to let simple humans trick him like this. Not the American humans and not Hydra. No matter who has him captured, he’s not about to play along. 

He looks out the window. The buildings outside. He can barely see them, but already he knows they’re vastly different. He’s in a city. He doesn’t know which one, but a city means people and people means figuring it out sooner. 

He looks at the human woman. Gives her a cold stare. She fidgets. Steve will give her credit for hiding it well, but nothing hides from his sharp eyes. Then he feels it. In his chest. The bind. His Tony. He’s alive and he’s out there. Close. Behind these fake walls. 

He moves fast. He uses his demon speed, breaking through the wall and ignoring the human woman screaming for him to stand down. Steve does catch her calling for backup, so he knows he won’t be alone for long. He runs down the street as fast as his numb legs can, but his speed is a mockery of his usual capability. He moves as slow as a human does. No, that’s far too generous. He moves as slow as an elf. It’s ridiculous, but he pushes on, running next to what are now the cars of this time. 

They’re fast and they’re glossy and exactly what years of progress would give. The more he looks around the area the more he notes it can’t possibly have been twenty years gone. It’s more. Much more. 

He doesn’t recognize where he is, but the human faces, body structures and the languages scattered around are familiar. He’s in America. He’s sure of it, and his Tony is around here somewhere. 

Using the bind, he seeks his little incubus. The bind guides him further down the street, around corners, taking him exactly where Tony is. At one point he’s stopped by an eye-patched wearing person, who Steve suspects is a mythos, but he doesn’t bother guessing. The person tells him it’s been seventy years. Steve has missed seventy-years. The world moved on and advanced without him. He hadn’t been there to watch Tony grow its technology. Steve missed it. 

He nods at the eye-patch man and then continues running, evading the man attempting to strike him with what he presumes is a device meant to sedate. It only encourages him to move faster. His body is finally catching up. His speed increases. From one second to the next he disappears within the crowd and is not seen by human eyes. 

Within moments he comes upon a building. Not as grand or tall as the ones next to it, but it’s large and it’s ugly. It’s not where Steve expected to find Tony, but his bind is pulling him here. Quick as a flash, he enters and runs around, searching for the floor, for the room, where his little incubus is located. 

He eventually does find where the bind is pulling him. It’s up to the highest floor. Almost the very top. There are large windows that give a great view of the city. Blue skies and white clouds everywhere. Tony is standing by one, looking at the civilians walking and driving the streets. He’s wearing a suit with polished, expensive-looking shoes and has a glass in his hand. 

Steve stalks over, not really wanting to scare him but desperately wanting to hold him. Seventy-years is an awfully long time. Even if Steve doesn’t remember it, his body certainly does. He wants to hold his little incubus and never let go. 

Only when he’s inches behind his Tony, does he finally speak. “Tony.” 

Tony jumps. Literally jumps. His glass goes flying. His glamour fails and his wings, tail and horns come out. He whips around, arm coming closer to Steve to strike, but Steve has always been faster and he easily catches the offending appendage. The shock of it makes Tony freeze. Then his little incubus finally notices who is standing before him. 

“Steve?” 

“Hey,” Steve says, moving his hand to hold Tony’s fingers between his own. “Am I late for our dance?” 

Tony’s face is fuller and his facial hair has grown. No longer is it a simple stubble. Now, it covers his chin and jaw. A new style for the new time, Steve assumes. It looks good on him. 

“Y-you -” Tony stutters and it does make Steve feel guilty. He didn’t mean to disappear for seventy-years. It wasn’t part of his plan. 

He’s about to apologize for it, when Tony snaps. It’s seventy-years in the making and well-deserved, Steve admits. 

“You fucking asshole!” Tony smacks his chest with his free hand. Over and over again. “You fucking demon asshole! How could you leave me like that?! You didn’t need to go down with that fucking plane. You have fucking wings! Why didn’t you fly?! You left me alone for seventy-years you selfish fucker!” 

Steve lets him strike. They’re weak little smacks on him. He hardly feels it, but he knows Tony needs this. He was being selfish when he decided to stay with the plane at the last possible second. His arrogance playing a part in it. He had assumed he’d be able to escape with little trouble, but he misjudged the timing and the freezing temperature. His body gave out before he could even see the sight of land. Before he knew it, years passed without him, but it didn’t stop for Tony. 

Tony went for seventy-years without him. Without his touch. Without his love. More importantly, without his main source of food. 

Tony fed on someone other than Steve, and if not for Steve feeling guilty, he’d be royally pissed at the people who fed his incubus. 

Tony kept striking until he eventually tired out. Steve panics a little when Tony starts shedding tears. Real, genuine tears. It’s not something he ever expected from his incubus, and yet here they were. Rolling down his cheeks and all meant for him. 

Steve pulls him close, tucking him against his chest Tony just abused seconds ago. “I know. I’m sorry. I got cocky and we paid for it. I didn’t mean to leave you alone for seventy-years.”

Tony’s hiccups are muffled against his shirt. He doesn’t pull away. Not that Steve would let him. He holds him for minutes, rocking him until he settles and waits and waits. It’s Tony’s move. Steve currently has no right. 

Tony eventually pulls back and looks up at Steve. His eyes are red and puffy, but he’s no longer shedding tears. It’s all out and smeared on Steve’s shirt. 

Steve tilts his head in question. It prompts Tony to move closer and kiss him. Steve kisses back. Eager to give this to his little incubus. The kiss is soft, gentle. It’s seventy-years in the making. He expresses his remorse through it. All his remorse and guilt and regret, asking his Tony for forgiveness for his arrogance. 

Tony’s hands move to hold Steve’s head and the little incubus drags Steve down. The kiss goes fierce very quickly after that. Tony jumps into Steve’s arms and wraps his legs around Steve’s hips. Steve lets go of everything. The glamour he managed to hold onto disappears and out comes his wings and tail and horns. His claws hold Tony up. Placed just below Tony’s glorious ass. One claw strokes the base of Tony’s tail, making Tony shudder. He knows the little incubus absolutely loves it, just as Tony knows Steve loves him stroking his horns. 

This is a meal Tony has been waiting for seventy-years and Steve is very happy to provide. Luckily there’s a couch in the room they are in. Steve takes the few steps to reach it and drops them on it. Tony’s back hits the cushions as Steve pins him down. His claws make quick work of Tony’s suit. The incubus probably needs it for a meeting, but right then all that mattered is getting them naked and provide for his little incubus. 

Tony makes a wounded nose when his suit is left tattered, pieces on the couch and ground. He’s left showing miles of glorious skin. Steve notes Tony has grown. Has gotten bigger. No longer is Tony the tiny, youthful and inexperienced incubus of before. No, now Tony has muscle and weight. He’s plump and shapely. It makes Steve nearly drool. He loved Tony’s appearance seventy-years ago, but now - now he’s completely smitten. The incubus is mature and muscular and everything Steve wants all in one, and he’s still completely Steve’s. 

Steve doesn’t take Tony slow. No, he’s kept his little incubus waiting too long for slow and gentle on their reunion. He bites and nibbles every inch of skin given. He re-marks everything he can. He makes sure Tony’s body remembers all his touches and caresses and bruises. He goes rough. Harsh. Makes Tony cry those glorious cries Steve takes pride in hearing. 

Tony moans at every touch and groans at every thrust. He never begs Steve to go slow or to stop. He feeds and he feeds and he asks for more. Steve gives it all to him. He doesn’t remember the seventy-years that passed, but his body does and it’s ready to make up for the time. 

The pent up energy he carried upon waking up is released all at once. All inside his little incubus. He gives it all and makes sure not to waste a single drop. His Tony deserved him. Deserved to be fed a proper course. Deserved to taste the delicious meal Steve could only offer and time prevented. 

Steve kept going and going until Tony got full and begged for him to stop. Steve did, but he never took his hands off his incubus. Steve held him tightly as he rubbed the bloated belly of his groaning Tony. He took pride in the way Tony relaxed in his hold and purred at his touches. He kissed every little sigh of discomfort. 

Steve finally reunited with his little incubus and he’s not planning on disappearing ever again. 

[chandelier-s-notebook]

Yoo! I’m back in with an 11 Chapter (subject to change) story. This was made for the TWB Fic Flip, unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish the whole thing by the deadline, but chap 1 is out.

Let me know if you wanna get tagged when I post new chapters. @sleepysnails.

Ao3 Link

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

Techno Blade strode into the old gas station on the corner opposite the local mall. He winced at the harsh fluorescent lighting that welcomed him in from the crisp evening air.

He lowered his hood and ran his fingers through his short pink hair. His roots were coming in, he’d need to grab some dye as well tonight. Taking off his backpack, he began placing items in--trying to fit as much as possible: beef jerky, canned peaches, chocolate bars, a couple energy drinks a pack of Tic Tacs, and some box dye from the ends of the isle.

Techno glanced at the cashier. He liked when Tango was on shift; that guy didn’t give a shit about anything and cared more about Clash of Clans than whatever thievery Techno was doing whenever he came by.

“You plan on paying for that stuff?” Tango shouted across the room, still immersed in his game. “You know I don’t get commission if you steal it?”

“Of course!” Techno called back. He snorted to himself, it said a lot about his life that he and the cashier could joke about him stealing from the store. Techno grabbed another bag of beef jerky, slipping it into his steadily filling backpack. He heard the ding of Tango opening the till and the sound of coins splattering on the counter. “For Tommy,” he muttered, reminding himself why he was risking a criminal record.

There was an emergency exit he knew he could use down by the bathrooms. Techno studied the monitor that was supposed to display feeds from the four security cameras, but those were still busted from when those college seniors ransacked the place the week prior. Four different static patterns danced back at him. At least that would make his escape easier, not that Tango couldn’t point him out in a line up.

He grabbed a pack of gummy worms and put them at the top of his bag. “For Tommy to share with his friends.” He smiled to himself. Gosh he was going soft for the kid.

“Get down!” The front door was kicked open with so much force that the previously fractured glass shattered upon impact with the wall. “Hands where I can see them!” a male voice yelled.

Techno didn’t do that, his confrontation response telling him to stay put and out of it rather than submitting. Instead he crouched down and leaned his back against the aisle shelves, peaking out towards the counter. There were two guys pointing guns at Tango; one was ginger, black jacket, medium height, orange bandana peaking over his collar; the other was taller, but he was also less confident in his stance, blond, and he was wearing a purple sweatshirt--one that Techno was certain he had seen a thousand times before.

“Guys guys,” Tango said, trying to placate them. “I’m in the middle of something. Can this wait?”

“No. No it can’t,” he voice said again, clearly put off by Tango’s causal demeanor.

“Really? Cause I gotta get back to my Clan War…” he trailed off.

“Aren’t there more important things than a Clan War right now?” a new voice asked.

A voice that Techno recognized. If he thought the hoodie gave it away then the voice was the nail in the coffin. He let out an involuntary “Why?” before he could stop himself.

All three heads turn to him. “Like I said, in the middle of something; there’s a customer here.” Tango spoke slowly, as if the situation was finally dawning on him.

The ginger turned his gun towards the store. “Show yourself!” he demanded.

“Isn’t this place a little low profile for Las Nevadas?” Techno tried to joke. Eyes darting towards the door, Techno put his hands up. “I’m just shopping.”

“Not you’re not.” Fundy Soot smiled menacingly. “We’re doing a robbery, if you couldn’t tell. Take what you need and scram. Don’t call the cops either.”

“Got it.” Once Fundy turned his attention back to Tango, Techno grabbed a pack of M&Ms and shoved them in his backpack as well. He leaned down to zip it up, before tossing it over his shoulder and snagging a tube of toothpaste on his way out. Sue him, he needed a refill.

Techno carefully stepped over the shattered glass, and made his way out of the building. He regretted leaving Tango to deal with the gang, but sometimes he needed to put himself first. Always. Always put himself first. Techno vaguely wonders if he’s ever actually bought anything from this gas station.

“It’s immoral to steal,” yet another voice from the left side of the door called.

Techno whipped around and took in the man next to him. Techno first took notice of the red fabric folded neatly into a handkerchief pocket: a bandana. “You with those guys?” he asked, taking a step back.

“Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.”

“Then why aren’t you calling this in?”

“Why aren’t you?” the man countered.

Techno gave him a sarcastic look, the sides of his mouth twitching in displeasure. “Because the guy with the gun told me to run, so excuse me.” He pivoted to make his escape.

“Say I said I was with those guys,” he said before Techno could make his escape. “What would you do?”

“I would assume you are Wilbur Soot. Brown trench coats and fluffy hair are the signature look of that guy. Looks like you’re watching over your brother and the new kid.” He shifted uneasily on his feet, ready to bolt. “Las Nevadas, saw the marker, figured it was polite to ask.”

Wilbur nodded, a gleeful smile taking over his face. He held out his hand. “Gimme the bag.”

“I need this.”

“Give it here.”

“Please,” Techno said, taking another step closer to his car. “Why do you need to take my stuff? You have two guys in there with guns.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

Wilbur opened his palm, getting impatient. “I just want the M&Ms, kid.”

Techno glared at him, but he nonetheless opened his bag and handed them to the man. At least he could keep everything else in the bag.

“Thanks.” Wilbur ripped open the packaging and tipped his head back, sliding half of the bag into his mouth.

Techno took a tentative step back and waited a second for Wilbur to wave him off. “Hope Tango’s okay,” he muttered to himself on the brisk, stiff walk back to his car.

He threw the bag into the passenger seat and rested his head against the steering wheel--trying to slow down his beating heart--for thirty seconds before remembering that there was a robbery taking place ten meters from him, and he did not want to deal with the police.

Techno snorted to himself, and turned on the engine. As if he hadn’t gone in there with the express purpose of stealing.

He sighed deeply as he took stock of himself. He didn’t get shot--which was great. He also had a lot more food to add to his stash. His and Tommy’s stash.

Techno groaned out loud. Tommy. The person in the purple sweatshirt was definitely the kid’s friend Purpled and now he was going around robbing gas stations with Las Nevadas. “Why? It could have been anything else, but no: he just had to go and join a gang.” Techno slammed on the gas pedal more than was necessary. Techno parked his car a couple streets away from his foster home. He waited for a few minutes to collect himself. “Eleven thirty,” he read off the car’s dashboard. “Gonna have to use the window.”

He arrived at the house. Through the ground floor window he could see that the lights were on at the back of the house. The house he was in is quite old, and he’d managed to snag a room in the attic with a bay window jutting out the side of the roof. He’d had it for as long as he could remember, in fact the Foster Bitch’s was the only house he’d ever had the displeasure of living in.

Unfortunately, Techno was in the circumstance of having had to do this a hundred times. He hopped up one of the columns holding the overhang above the porch, feet slotting into familiar grooves. Swinging himself up on the shingles and quickly making his way to the concave corner of the building, he used his momentum to push himself up the next two stories. Finding the familiar scruff marks on the window frame, he hoisted himself up to the top of the roof.

Techno looked out at the street below, it was a nice few all things considered. He went to open the window.

Locked.

Right. It had been storming the night before and he forgot to open it in his rush to get to school that morning.

Techno looked up at the sky. It was nice out, and he wasn’t one to be bothered about sleeping in day clothes--better than facing the wrath of the Foster Bitch for entering the house at such a late hour. He’d have to sleep on the side facing the backyard, he remembered what happened last time he slept on the roof.

Techno knocked on the window. Yes, Tommy should be asleep right now, but it didn’t hurt to check. After a minute he knocked once more.

Techno smiled at Tommy through the glass when the kid finally dragged himself out of bed to let his roommate in. The blond stuck out his tongue and opened the window. “Evening Blade,” he whispered. “What brings you back so late?”

“Sleep,” Techno said, slipping into the room. He snorted at the sleepy, unamused look Tommy gave him. “Stuff. Did you eat?”

“No. The other kids got to it first.” Tommy closed the window behind them, leaving the latch unlocked. “Like always.”

Techno hummed and unzipped his bag. He dumped the contents out and started organizing them.

“How did you get that?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Techno dug through the pile and pulled out a pack of beef jerky. He tossed it in the general direction of Tommy’s head. “Leave a slice for me.”

Tommy caught the bag and quickly tore it open. He watched Techno disperse the food around their shared room, taking note where each item would be. “Techno?” he called in a small voice.

“I know, Tommy. I’m careful.”

Tommy’s shoulders relaxed slightly. “Techno if you’re caught they’re going to send you away!” he said, still a little distressed. “Then how am I going to survive here?”

“I won’t get caught.” Techno reassured him. “And if I do, I’m not getting sent away. If that was the case I’d have been gone before you even showed up here last year.” Techno hummed; he remembered that party. Some kid he’d never spoken to couldn’t afford to lose their scholarship so little seventh grade Techno had taken the blame for the alcohol serving party held at the house that night. He chuckled as he remembered gaslighting the whole community that it was his idea, not his finest moment, but one he was proud of nonetheless.

Being barred from the dinner buffet for two weeks had been worth the reputation points. Plus, he learnt valuable hoarding skills in that time. The Foster Bitch was fine--all things considered--but she was under the impression that if she put out a bunch of food on the table, everyone would get an equal portion in the mad dash for sustenance.

That wasn't the case. Techno could get food just fine, but Tommy was a gangly fourteen year old with too much height and not enough bulk; it was virtually impossible for him to grab food off the table.

“I’m not going to get caught.” Techno said putting the gummy worms on Tommy’s night stand. He held out his pinky, “I promise. I’m safe.”

“Techno,” Tommy whined, unhappy with the response--ignoring Techno’s hand. “That stash is bigger than normal.”

“I know.”

“Techno.”

“The cashier was busy with something else.”

Tommy’s voice took on a colder tone. “Techno.”

“Tommy.”

“What was the cashier busy with?”

“Stuff.”

Tommy huffed. “It wasn’t a Dream Team thing was it? You shouldn’t be hanging out with them.”

Techno snorted. “I’m older than you. Aren’t I the one who’s supposed to tell you to stop hanging out with the wrong crowd? Dream’s fine. Besides, you hang out with his little brother.”

“Well yeah!” Tommy’s voice got defensive. “But Tubbo’s Tubbo. Dream’s in the news for stealing and shit.” Tommy munched on his jerky angrily, even if he was going to stay oblivious: they both knew that Techno didn’t have the money to pay for this. Tommy dropped the friend’s point and moved to double down on the previous one. “What was the cashier busy with?”

“Stuff. Not Dream. Not death. Just stuff okay?”

“Not death?”

“Not death,” Techno agreed sagely.

“You aren’t going to tell me?”

Techno took off his hoodie and belt, but otherwise didn’t bother with pajamas. “Nope.” He settled into bed and held out his hand for Tommy to pass him the food.

Tommy stared him dead in the eye as he ate the last piece of beef jerky from that particular package. Techno rolled his eyes, but he understood; Tommy had heard that from Techno before: the not explaining where he’d been. He knew not to bother his foster brother, but that didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.

The next morning Techno and Tommy didn’t bother going to the kitchen for breakfast. Instead, they ate last night’s stolen granola bars in the comfort of their dingy penthouse suite--attic room--and listened to the thundering feet of the ten other foster’s in the house racing to get some food.

“If you want another, then take another.” It had taken a long time for Techno to teach Tommy that it was safe to take food from his stash; as far as he was concerned it was their stash. Hopefully, Tommy would stop feeling guilty about not asking, although that didn’t seem like it was happening any time soon.

Tommy sent him a half smile and scoffed down another bar. The two of them got ready for school, and were soon in Techno’s car. It was a ten minute drive to the high school, and Tommy sang along with the radio at the top of his lungs. It would be endearing if Techno wasn’t socially exhausted from the extrovert living in his room.

“I’m on top of the world, eh!” Tommy shouted, flipping off their foster siblings waiting at the bus station.

“Tommy.”

“What?”

“Don’t be a dick.”

“ I’m on top of the world! ”

Techno kept his smile to himself.

He rolled the car to a stop in the school parking lot. Before Tommy could open the door and vault out, Techno spoke. “Today’s a ‘going to Bad’s after school’ type of day.”

“What? Why?”

“Hanging out with Dream.”

Tommy’s face soured.

“Come on, don't be like that.”

“It’s not that I don’t like Bad. I just don’t like Dream. He’s bad news, and in the news.”

“It’s just an English project. We need to make a PowerPoint on something or other.”

“Okay,” Tommy said stiffly.

“I don’t police your friends. You don’t police mine.”

“Tubbo’s not in the news. Neither is Purpled. And you can’t complain about Ranboo.”

Techno thinks back to last night with the Soot brothers and the new kid in a purple sweatshirt. “Put a pin in Purpled.”

“No!” Tommy looked appalled at the insinuation Techno just made about his friend. “Have some faith. Tubbo and Purpled won’t turn out like their older brothers. Crime isn’t a gene that runs in families!”

Techno smiled sadly. “I hope not. Get out.”

“What do you mean ‘put a pin in Purpled?’” Tommy demanded.

Techno shrugged him off. “Text me if you leave Bad’s, I’ll come pick you up later.”

Tommy harshly pulled at the car door. “Tubbo won’t be like Dream, and Purpled won’t be like Punz.”

“I never said Purpled was a mercenary!”

Tommy got out of the car, slammed the door, and flipped his brother off before marching away.

Techno was so glad that they didn’t share any DNA. Could you imagine that? But just because they were brother’s out of necessity and foster placement didn’t mean he didn’t care about the kid.

[mygalfriday]

Things you always meant to say but never got the chance

Coaxed you into paradise and left you there 

{ao3}

Despite the many interruptions, he hopes he has actually managed to salvage the first night of their honeymoon. The unwelcome reminder – in the form of their future selves – of how finite their time together is has only made him more desperate to make this evening perfect. River deserves that and more.

She’d changed despite his insistence she never needed to, exchanging her prison uniform for something flouncy and flirtatious that makes his fingertips itch. She’s close enough to touch but he doesn’t, twirling his top hat between his hands and watching out of the corner of his eye as she helps herself to some more chips. The stars are set to appear any moment now and her gaze is pinned to the sky, waiting for the impressive show he’d promised her.

It’s a marked change from the woman who had been so determined to seduce him in the TARDIS and he fidgets anxiously, secretly wanting a bit of that back but unsure how to get them there. River has always been the instigator and he’s at a loss now that she’s so terribly young and it’s his turn to lead. He grips his hat in one hand and lifts the other to straighten his bowtie, inching a bit closer where they’ve settled on a massive tree branch.

Clearly still as alert to his every move as she’d been as Mels, River glances at him out of the corner of her eye the moment he so much as twitches in her direction. When she notices him hovering, she places a protective hand over her chips and says, “I told you to get your own, sweetie.”

He frowns. “First of all, River Song,” he says, wagging a finger at her and refusing to soften at the way her eyes light up when he uses her name. “I wasn’t trying to steal your chips. And second of all, are you telling me you wouldn’t share? On our honeymoon?”

She whirls to stare at him, blonde curls bouncing around her shoulders and her eyes wide. “Honeymoon?” She laughs once, strained and nervous. “We’re not married.”

He squints at her, fearing for a moment he’d picked up the wrong River. But no, he’d gotten her on her first night in prison – she’d said so herself. So she must have already done Area 52. “Of course we’re married.” He waves a hand, gesturing between them. “There was a bowtie and a kiss-”

River interrupts him in the middle of his kissy-face impression, still eyeing him incredulously. “Yes, where you were a robot. In a timeline that no longer exists. I’ll hardly hold you to it, Doctor.” She smiles when he merely stares at her, the expression somehow unbearably sad despite the softness in her eyes. “You think I didn’t notice in all my research of you how often you get married and swan off, never to see your poor lovestruck bride again?”

“I haven’t swanned off,” he points out, wounded despite the truth of her words. River is different. Surely she knows that. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

“Of course you are.” She reaches out a hand, patting his bowtie fondly. “I’m the child of your best friends.”

He stares at her. “You think I married you out of guilt?”

“There are worse reasons to get married.” With a shrug, she turns back to the night sky spread out before them and her hand drops from his bowtie to reach for another chip. “But it wasn’t a real marriage, remember? You’re off the hook.”

“River,” he sighs, tugging at his hair. Why is she making him do this? Doesn’t she know he’s rubbish at this? “I don’t want to be off the hook. I want-” Blimey, what does he want? Twelve hundred years old and he still has no idea. He just knows that whatever this is – sitting here, bickering and pretending he doesn’t want any of her chips – he wants every last terrifying moment of it. With her. “I want -”

The sky lights up over their heads, brilliantly illuminated with the glow of a billion stars. It brightens their surroundings like sunlight. Ordinarily, this natural phenomenon wouldn’t be enough to distract him from the issue at hand but River tips up her face to stare at it like she’s never seen anything so wondrous. Her eyes widen and the most beautiful smile bursts to life on her face. It’s a thousand times more distracting than any star has ever been. The Doctor finds himself caught, gazing at her like a new Time Lord staring at his first planet.

Without looking away from the view above, River nudges the plate of chips toward him. A peace offering. The Doctor grins and ignores them, leaning in to press a smacking kiss to her cheek. She swats him, turning her head to seek out a proper snog. He sinks into her with a sigh, fingers finding her wild curls, and doesn’t stop to wonder why he feels like he’s forgotten to say something important.  

-

He knows what he feels. He has known what he feels for far longer than he’d ever admit to any version himself. He hasn’t said the words since he was a young man on Gallifrey, unburdened by loss and the weight of ages. He might have said them once or twice to Susan when she was a child. The point is, it has been so long that the words don’t even feel tangible anymore – nothing but brittle bones and dust taking up space at the base of his throat. He worries if he tries to say them now, nothing will escape but ash.

He isn’t stupid enough to do nothing and merely hope River understands through osmosis but those words aren’t enough. They’re imaginary and ephemeral, easily lost and forgotten in this wide, unknowable universe. So many days he and River will spend apart, separated by space and time – yearning across worlds. He wants River to remember, even when she forgets everything else. He wants River to have more than brittle words.

So he gives her memories. Big, flashy, unforgettable memories that could cast a giant neon sign across the universe in 50 foot capital letters. You. Are. Loved. Stevie Wonder sings it for her under London Bridge; mysteriously inspired poets pen her sonnets; da Vinci sketches her likeness in La Scapigliata. Sunflowers remind him of her and he scatters seeds all over the fields of Spain so every summer people flock there to admire her beauty; he goes back in time and leaves notes throughout history for her to find during her excavations; he takes lessons with Julia Child and Fernand Point so he can make all her favorite dishes. He makes love to her at the start of the universe and the end of it so their love is a bookend to the beginning and the end of everything.

He never asks her if she understands what he isn’t saying. Instead he smiles when she finds another of his surprises and drinks in her laugh when he spins her around another ballroom, hoping she sees it for what it is. Not a showy distraction from a magician, but the last precious coin from a penniless man. All he has to offer. Someday, he might dust off those meagre words humans so love to abuse and see if he can make them shine again – make them pretty enough to deserve her – but for now, surely all this is enough? It must be.

-

Despite her hesitance around them, children gravitate naturally towards River. He thinks it must be the hair. There is no other possible explanation for why they’re all gathered around her when he’s the one sitting by the bonfire introducing these people to the roasted marshmallow about ten thousand years too early. Considering himself a bit of an expert on the subject, he appoints himself the overseer of their technique, teaching the locals how to get the outside nice and crisp without making the insides a gooey mess.

Most of them are understandably fascinated but every time the Doctor looks up in search of his wife, he finds her sitting just to the left of all the excitement and surrounded by a group of tiny humans. A few of them sit at her feet, two sit on either side of her, one stands behind her poking curiously at her hair, and another seems to have made himself a nice comfy home on her lap. To her credit, River isn’t as horrified by all the attention as she used to be when she was younger.

She seems to be telling them all a story, judging by enraptured looks on their faces and the way River keeps leaning in close like she always does when imparting a secret. Unable to conceal his grin, the Doctor puts the nearest villager in charge of marshmallow roasting and slips away to investigate. As he gets closer, the soft murmur of River’s voice becomes clearer until he can make out exactly which story she’s regaling her audience with.

“And of course, because he’s a man he thinks he always knows exactly where he’s going but he never does. None of them do.” She offers them all an exasperated look, as though inviting them to commiserate with her on the hopelessness of men. Every single little girl in the group nods sagely. “Now, who do you think actually found the gemstone and restored the High Chancellor to his natural form?”

One of them ventures confidently, “You did!”

River beams. “And don’t you forget it.”

Shaking his head and biting back a smile, the Doctor folds his arms over his chest and attempts to look cross. “Just so we’re clear, I did know exactly where I was going, River Song. I was… testing you.”

She glances up, apparently unsurprised to find him eavesdropping. “And the part where you twisted your ankle in the mines and I had to carry you for five miles back to the TARDIS?” She smiles innocently. “Was that part of the test too?”

“Yes. No.” He scowls, dropping his arms to his sides. “Shut up. Dear.”

River grins and he leans in, bopping her fondly on the nose. She turns her head coyly away when he tries to kiss her, teasing, “Not in front of the children, honey.”

“Ah. Right.” He turns to their rapt audience, pasting on a nervous grin. “Oi you lot, you’re missing out on all the sweets.” He claps his hands together, watching them scramble to their feet. “Off your pop, before your parents eat them all.”

Only the little one on River’s lap refuses to budge, curled up there like he belongs. The Doctor sighs, giving up on stealing a kiss for the moment as he settles onto the log beside his wife. Elbows on his knees, he peeks at her through his fringe and confesses, “I wasn’t actually testing you.”

River spares him an exasperated glance, preoccupied with the toddler currently clinging to the front of her shirt. “I know, sweetie.”

“And the whole carrying me thing was a tiny bit…” He risks a glance at their tiny audience and whispers, “Sexy.”

She rolls her eyes. “I know, sweetie.”

“Right. Good.”

He thinks about offering to fetch her a marshmallow but the sight of her hesitantly dropping a hand to stroke the little tot’s hair from his forehead stops the Doctor in his tracks. Despite her reticence, she’s a natural with kids. She always knows what to do, even when she doesn’t seem to trust her own instincts. He’s sure her hesitance must come from her own unusual upbringing and the complete lack of parental figures who didn’t have an eyepatch and a villainous agenda but he finds himself wishing she would give herself more credit. She knows what kids need – even if only because they need the things no one ever gave her.

Elbowing her gently, he says, “You’re good with them.”

River scoffs, glancing away. “I’m really not.”

“Could have fooled me.” He shrugs, studying the boy with sleepy eyes still clinging to her. “He seems very fond of you.”

River glances down at the boy, biting her lip. “I probably just look like someone he knows.”

“Someone else with this hair?” He plucks at a curl fondly. “Impossible.”

River swats at him, adorably and uncharacteristically flushed. The Doctor chooses not to mention it, watching in silence the way she cradles the boy to her and bounces him a bit in her arms to nudge him gently to sleep. Not for the first time, he thinks she’d probably make a brilliant mother if she wanted to be. He wonders briefly if she does want it. Maybe she does and just hasn’t said anything. What if he brought it up? Would she want it, if he offered?

Could he offer?

No. Of course not. It’s a terrible idea. The universe would come after any child of the Doctor and River Song. It would hardly be fair to ask a tiny little being to carry the weight and hatred of an entire universe. Besides, their lives are hardly the right environment in which to raise a child – what with the running and the prison and the timey-wimey-ness of it all.

But… if River really wanted it he might consider it in spite of all that. He might even sort of fancy the idea. He can’t ever see himself sitting still long enough to have a proper family life but the image of a miniature version of him and River asking for bedtime stories and refusing to eat their vegetables and begging for another trip to the intergalactic zoo? With anyone else, the very notion would send him running far and fast but with River it’s… Well. He’s grown to like all sorts of things so long as River is involved.

“Matteo?”

The Doctor lifts his head, snapping back to the present just in time to watch a woman – the boy’s mother, probably – lift the sleeping tot out of River’s arms with a murmur of thanks. River nods stiffly, watching the woman cradle her baby and sway with him toward the warmth of the bonfire. The ache of her longing is clear in her eyes.

The Doctor swallows, wanting nothing but for that look to disappear. Wanting her to have everything it’s within his power to give her. “You know, we could-”

“Doctor? We’re out of marshmallows!”

He sighs. “I warned them about rationing.”

River turns to him with a smirk, oblivious to what he’d been about to offer. “I’ll fetch some more from the TARDIS.”

“Thanks, dear.” He finally steals that kiss he’d been after, smiling as she slips away. The courage to ask her what had been on his mind goes with her. He never finds the nerve to bring it up again.

-

After they lose her parents, River spends most of her time in her study writing the book that will start it all. He knows he isn’t strong enough to be of any assistance to her, far more apt to make suggestions like taking the manuscript and pitching it into a black hole, but he also knows River would likely rebuff any offers of help from him right now anyway. She’s avoiding him.

The Doctor can’t blame her. He’s hardly been desirable company in recent days. All these centuries knocking about the universe and he’s still that same selfish old man he’s always been, mourning the loss of his Ponds as though he’s the only one who has lost something. River deserves far better than a selfish mad man like him but apparently she isn’t going anywhere despite his many faults and foibles. It’s this strange, terrible combination of guilt and gratitude, contrition and devotion that finds him standing outside the door to her study holding a cup of tea and listening to the soft click of typewriter keys coming from within the room.

“River?”

Balancing the cup in the palm of one hand, he raps his knuckles softly against the door. The typing doesn’t even pause. He sighs, nudging the door open with his hip and peering inside. The hinges creak but River doesn’t glance up, typing away as though he hasn’t interrupted. Reluctant to intrude on her space without permission after all the things he has said and done recently, the Doctor hovers in the doorway and wraps his fingers around the warm ceramic of the mug he’d brought her.

“I made tea.”

Again, she doesn’t look up from her notes. Pencil between her teeth, she taps her fingers against the keys of her typewriter and says, “Thanks.”

Figuring this may well be the closest he’ll get to permission to approach, the Doctor shoves off the doorframe and picks his way across the floor – careful not to step on the crumpled wads of paper scattered everywhere that River must have tossed in various pits of pique. He settles the mug on the corner of her desk, within reach if she wants it but not so close she’ll accidentally knock it over with an elbow. His job done, he lingers beside her desk uncertainly. She hasn’t asked him to leave but she’s hardly rolled out the welcome mat either.

Squirming, the Doctor touches a fingertip to a stack of field journals and ventures hesitantly, “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” comes the short, clipped reply. “I’ll be done soon and then I’ll go.”

He lifts his head from scrutinizing the contents of her desk, frowning. “Go?”

“Hmm.”

River lifts her glasses from the top of her head, relocating them to the bridge of her nose. Usually the sight of her in them does funny things to his insides but today, he only feels a cold knot of dread beginning to tighten in the pit of his stomach. Why hadn’t he noticed how tired she looks? She isn’t dressed to impress anyone today, wearing a pair of leggings and one of Rory’s old jumpers. He thinks the fuzzy socks on her feet might have belonged to Amy once. Her wild curls are piled on top of her head but keep spilling over her forehead every time she bends to peer at her notes. There are new lines of weariness around her eyes and mouth, a dullness to her gaze he has never seen before. And she still hasn’t looked at him.

The Doctor swallows, inching closer. “Actually I wanted to ask if you were hungry. I could cook…” He brightens. “Or we could have dinner somewhere. Anywhere you like, Professor Song.”

She shakes her head. “I need to get this done.”

He scoffs. “There’s plenty of time to finish it-”

“Not if you want me out of your hair sooner rather than later.” She sighs when he goes still, staring at her in silence. Her eyes remain locked on her half-finished manuscript. “It has to be done now.”

Studying her clenched jaw and the tightly contained way she holds herself – so very still, as though the slightest wrong move might make something explode in her face – the Doctor begins to understand he might have buggered things up quite a bit more than he’d realized. “What makes you think I want you out of my hair?”

Despite her every attempt to appear unaffected, the words slip out with an incredulous huff of laughter. “You mean besides your every word and action in the last week?”

He flinches. “River, no. I didn’t mean-”

She sighs, the bitterness slipping away like it had never been. At times it alarms him how easily she forgives his transgressions. Taking off her glasses and letting them clatter to her desk, River pinches the bridge of her nose and closes her eyes for a moment. Gathering patience, though she probably thinks he doesn’t know what she’s doing. As if he doesn’t know all of her little tells by now, even the ones he pretends he doesn’t see.

“I know you didn’t,” she says, and the sound of her voice is more familiar to him now. Soft. Warm. Forgiving. He really doesn’t deserve her. She lifts her head and finally meets his worried gaze since the first time he walked into her study. The utter lack of light in her eyes scares the hell out of him. “But it’s clear you need space. So I’ll finish the manuscript and I’ll go.”

“Stay,” he insists, bracing himself with his hands against the edge of her desk. He leans in toward her, forcing a smile. “We’ll pay Vastra and Jenny a visit. Or we’ll go to Egypt and see how the pyramids are coming along, eh? Get married again while we’re there – how’s that?”

“Doctor,” she begins, and he hates it when she says his name like that. It sounds like no. “I’m not going to stay just because you don’t want to be alone.”

He pushes off her desk with a low growl. “That’s not what this is.”

“Isn’t it?” The amount of resignation in her patient voice is maddening. “It’s alright, honey. We’ll go our separate ways for a while and I’ll pop round to see how you’re faring after I get back.”

“Back?” Pacing to her bookshelves across the room and preparing to pout a bit and possibly make childish comments about the amount of archeology texts she owns, the Doctor scowls and prods irritably at a scroll wedged between suspiciously authentic looking manuscripts of Macbeth and The Importance of Being Earnest – stolen, no doubt. “Back from where?”

Already sliding her glasses back on and returning her attention to her notes, River mutters absently, “I got an invitation to lead the first expedition to the Library planet. Thought I might go – get my mind off things.”

The Doctor goes cold. That slowly growing and widening knot of dread in the pit of his stomach yawns open like a black hole. He grips the edge of a bookshelf until his knuckles turn white and the wood begins to creak beneath his fingers, threatening to splinter. With his back turned to her, River doesn’t see the way the blood drains away from his face. The way his mouth can only silently form no over and over again until it doesn’t even feel like a real word anymore. It screams in his head anyway, blaring like a siren until it loses some of its power with repetition and he feels just as helpless as he had the day he watched her die.

No.

Not yet.

He just watched an ending unfold right before his eyes. He cannot – will not – do it again. He will not lose another precious person to this goddamned thief called Time. The pain of losing the Ponds is still raw and fresh in his mind, reminders of them at every turn and memories lurking like ghosts out of the corner of his eye. It hurts now; and it always will. He has lost companions before. It always feels like this; like being ripped open and left to bleed out. It heals eventually, despite all his best intentions to cling to his grief. Another scar to bear in his long, lonely life.

But this, he knows, would break him.

“Don’t pout, sweetie,” she says, mistaking his silence for something else. Still typing away like she hasn’t destroyed his whole world. “Far better we have some time to ourselves than stay together and say more things we don’t mean.”

He won’t lose her. The only solution is to change it. The Doctor lifts his head, resolve slipping down his spine like cold steel. Not one line echoes in his head but he pushes it away with a grim smile. “I meant them.”

The typing stops. “What?”

“What I said when we lost Amy.” He doesn’t turn to look at her yet, struggling to school his features into something expressionless and cold – the mighty Time Lord instead of the devastated husband. It’s easier when he can’t see the look on her face. “If you hadn’t told her to go -”

River’s voice grows brittle. “She’d be here and miserable without my father.”

“She’d be here.” Clenching his jaw, the Doctor forces himself to turn from the bookshelf and face her properly. River sits utterly still at her desk, staring at him like he’s a particularly bad dream she’s waiting to wake up from. “And that’s really what it comes down to in the end, wife. If not for you, my Amelia would still be here.”

In the silence of the room, he can hear the hitch in River’s breath.

He directs his gaze elsewhere before he can see her eyes begin to water, glaring at a spot in the carpet instead. His hands tremble and he clenches them into fists, forcing the words out around the lump in his throat. “How can you expect me to look at you, knowing you’re the reason we lost them both? If you’d been quicker or cleverer or just… more. I expected better of you.” He stops when he sees her flinch out of the corner of his eye, unable to bear hurting her for another second with such poisonous lies. His eyes begin to burn and he snaps out, “I can’t wait for you to finish the manuscript. Go now. And take your bloody book with you.”

He stalks from the room before she can say a word and he doesn’t dare look at her as he leaves, knowing the moment he sees her face he’ll drop to his knees and beg forgiveness. So he walks and he walks until his vision blurs and the TARDIS opens a door, letting him stumble into a room at the end of the corridor.

Their bedroom. Of course.

With a growl, the Doctor picks up the nearest thing to hand – one of River’s high heels – and hurls it at the wall. It cracks the plaster and he stares at the split along the wall, his chest heaving and his eyes burning. In the ensuing silence, there is only the rasp of his shaky breathing and the sound of River’s footsteps as she leaves.

-

It’s only standing in his tomb with her ghost in front of him that he understands he had certainly changed things that day in the TARDIS – just not how he’d hoped. River still went to the Library; she still died in his place and wound up trapped in the data core. The only thing he had changed was letting her die believing he blamed her. Believing he didn’t love her.

Cradling her face in his hands, he looks into her eyes and realizes this may very well be his last chance to tell her all the things he’d never had the chance to say to her before. So many of those things seem pointless now. What does it matter that he’d always considered Area 52 their wedding day or that he would have given her children if she’d only asked? What does it matter if he never once blamed her for what happened to her parents or that he loves her so much he chokes on the words every time he tries to say them? It’s too late for any of it to matter now.

She’s gone and he’s looking at an echo.

River doesn’t ask him to say any of those things anyway. She wants something far more difficult to give. A goodbye.

“Say it like you’re going to come back.”

And it’s this – the thing he wants desperately to refuse to ever say – that he doesn’t have the hearts to deny her. Mouth full of lost opportunities and a lifetime of regrets, the Doctor swallows it all back with a smile. “See around, Professor River Song.”

[raziroo]

Chapter Four | I Take A Liking To Lilac All Of A Sudden

Pairing: Lotor x Reader (There you go)

Genre: Angst? I don't knowww

Warnings: Mentions of cancer, mild swearing

Word Count: 1,676

Author’s Note: This is kind of a filler? I can't write long shit in one sitting, so. It's important to reader and lotor's relationship, tho.

‘Good luck. Come back alive, all of you, alright?’ I asked, my eyes roving over the three people standing before me – Matt, Pidge, and Shiro. ‘It’s, like, one of the simplest things you could do. You give Lotor, you get Mr. Holt. Simple. Very simple and easily doable. Right?’ My gaze dragged over all of them once more as I picked at my nails nervously. As much as I was aware of the fact that this trade wasn’t simple and easily doable, I knew that I would legitimately have a nervous breakdown if I didn’t spew lies through my teeth.

Shiro smiled at me lightly. ‘Of course. I’ll make sure nothing goes wrong. You guys take care too.’

‘If, however, anything happens,’ Allura chided, ‘the other lions will arrive as soon as possible.’

‘Yeah,’ Pidge said with a wry smirk, ‘so try not to pass out.’

‘Okay,’ I nodded my head rapidly, ‘yeah, okay, I – I can do that.’

‘Good. Well, we’ll get going then,’ Shiro announced, and turned around, the others following him.

Hopefully, all would go well.

. . . . .

You know what? Everything actually went relatively well. Yes, my hunch turned out to be correct and Zarkon chose to go through with the ‘I was lying all along! Bwahahaha!’ route and ended up getting himself killed at the hands of his son, but overall, I’d say it was a win-win, seeing that we got Pidge’s father back (thank God, who knows what havoc she’d wreak if we ended up not getting Sam back) and the evil maniacal tyrant who’d been ruling over the universe for ten thousand years died.

The one downside was that now there needed to be a new Emperor, because following Zarkon’s death, not only the Galra empire, but simultaneously the entire universe had gone into a state of chaos too. There was no doubt that underlings and generals would try to take over smaller parts of the empire, and once that happened, Voltron being able to do anything would be a stretch.

And, according to Lotor, a ceremony to crown the new emperor, the Kral Zera, would now be taking place. Once he said that, he really didn’t need to say more – it was obvious what his implications were. A new emperor was to be crowned, and if Voltron was to achieve peace, Lotor would have to go and secure the throne. It was a sensible thought to be had, no problem. The thing was, to reach the Kral Zera, which was taking place in two days, in itself was a decision to be taken with utmost thought. The Paladins just didn’t have enough time to decide.

On the one hand, Shiro and Lotor were adamant that the latter be crowned emperor; the other Paladins, however, were justifiably hesitant. I had been standing there listening to them going back and forth, not saying a word myself, like always.

To be honest, I just wanted to go sleep. For some reason, I’d been feeling overly anxious these past few days. White was still not responding to me, I was having regular dreams about the day I woke up here. It was always that one day, that first conversation I had with Shiro. It was as if my subconsciousness too wanted me to reach out to Shiro because there was clearly something weird going on with him.

My suspicions only solidified when I heard Shiro’s voice boom through the room. My head snapped up. Lance with a look of shock and the slightest bit of fear on his face, Shiro’s visage twisted with uncharacteristic anger.

‘Shiro. I think you should just relax a little.’ The man turned to me, brows pinched.

‘I am relaxed -’

‘No, I really think you aren’t… so, like… take it easy, yeah?’ I asked, jumping my eyebrows, arms still folded in front of me, maintaining a calm yet defensive posture. I could feel the entire room’s gazes on me. After all, I almost never spoke in such discussions, or any discussions, really, and indirectly opposing Shiro, of all people, was way too brave a thing for me to do.

Shiro looked at me with slight disbelief, a glint in his eye challenging me to speak up. ‘You want me to take it easy? Take it easy? The fate of the universe depends on this, taking it easy is really not an option right now. I’ve put my foot down – as the Leader of Voltron, I’ve taken this decision. You aren’t someone befitted to oppose me.’

Ok, wow. Everyone shared the same opinion apparently, as now the silence seemed piercing. Clicking my tongue, I tilted my head. ‘Well, maybe not as a Paladin, which I’m not, or a member of the coalition. But as a friend, Shiro, you’ve been acting strange. Everyone realises this. You realise this. … Maybe, I don’t know… maybe all this reflecting on you’ve been doing, maybe the role of leader is taking a toll on you? I, heh,’ I chuckle, ‘I really am not sure. But you’re not relaxed, and you’re not acting yourself.’

‘Could you please not tell me how to be a Paladin?’

‘While you all waste time squabbling, sinister forces are conspiring to fill the Galra power void. If I don’t return to claim the throne, there’s no telling who will.’

Does being royalty instantly make you a hundred times more dramatic? Sinister forces? Deadass?

I walked out.

. . . . .

Shiro went behind our back.

Yeah.

Acting like a complete bitch, he took Lotor to the Kral Zera, where, for your information, he could’ve been blown up. By Keith.

I wanted to deck Shiro. Instead, I visited White. I had hopes she’d respond to me, since I’d been brave and spoken my mind. I prayed on all the Gods and Deities above that my expectations became reality.

Yeah, they didn’t. She didn’t budge. The whole entire two goddamned hours I sat in front of White, she ignored me. Frustrated, I ended up punching her, resulting in bleeding knuckles. Lotor saw that, by the way. He seemed to always be keeping an eye on White, regardless of me being there or not, which I admit is a little strange, but I wasn’t judging. These aliens seemed to worship the Lions.

Lotor also invited us to the Galra headquarters, and lord oh my lord, was it fancy. Allura had gone off to do research with Lotor (I’d been about to make a joke about what “research” those two were really about to do, if you catch my drift, but then I saw Lance looking at the pair glumly, and thought better of it. I’d lightly punched Lance on the shoulder, and raised my eyebrows so as to say ‘They’re gorgeous aliens who could give Bella Hadid and Harry Styles a run for their money, it can’t be helped.’ He laughed.) I accompanied Hunk, Lance and Pidge in their shenanigans for a while, but ended up wandering around the place.

Space was beautiful. Even through a window, I wanted to just stare at it for as long as I could, enjoying a show more realistic than ever before. It was really similar to all the Marvel movies I’d watched; I felt a weird sense of pride at that realization. I remembered how I’d cried at the end of Infinity War, my friends clinging to me and bawling as well; how loud I’d squealed at an absolutely steamy piece of Kakashi fanart Cory had drawn; how happy I’d been when Sasha, my neighbour and childhood friend, had come out victorious after battling cancer for years.

I hadn’t realized when the tears had started slipping down my cheeks. I wiped at them, but they wouldn’t go. Sniffling and wiping so furiously my skin would get burned when I heard footsteps, I turned to see Lotor approaching me.

‘Hey -’ shit, my voice was so thick. Clearing my throat obnoxiously loud, I greeted him again. ‘Hey, uh… what… how’s yours and Allura’s research going?’

‘The research has been going quite smoothly.’

‘Hmm. Nice.’

Lotor was staring – no, correction - scrutinising me. I could feel it, his intense as hell eyes burning into the side of my face. I wasn’t going to give up, though. I stared at the window with as much concentration as he me.

He was the first to speak up. Ha.

‘You’re not of the Paladins.’

‘Really? I didn’t know, thanks,’ I still wasn’t looking at him.

‘Deepest apologies if I offended you -’

‘You didn’t, it’s okay.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘…If you wish to answer, why do you appear… distant, compared to the other Paladins? You say they are your friends, but there’s such scarce interaction… you seem acquaintances at best.’

‘… They are my friends. I like to think so, because, well… because I don’t have anyone to go back home to.’

‘Oh. My apologies, I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘You didn’t pry, chill. It’s not that my family’s dead or anything, it’s just that… no, well, my family is dead, but… like, they’ve been dead for around three hundred or so years…?’ I turned to Lotor, brows furrowed. He looked less confused than me.

‘Sorry, no, that’s – that’s shit explanation, um… you could say… I… I’ve lived past my time. I’m alive when I’m not supposed to be.’

I didn’t explicitly mention, as you can see, that I was a time traveller, because I wasn’t really one with that fact yet. I’d accepted it, yes, but that didn’t mean I was comfortable with it. It was still a foreign truth, something I didn’t take great joy in talking or thinking about.

When I turned to Lotor, I felt like he’d understood what he needed to already.

It was bizarre. A lilac alien was the last person I would expect to understand me so easily, but it was what it was.

[doorsclosingslowly]

A Private Sunrise

Ever since Jesper found out he’s the Sun Summoner, he’s been on the run. Well, sort of. He got side-tracked in Ketterdam, but now that Kaz is talking to Grisha of the Second Army, his five-year reprieve is over. Or is it?

7.8k | Kaz/Jesper, pre-Kaz/Jesper/Inej | content note: explicit sex

Jesper’s already in position when the tell-tale clacks of the cane herald Kaz’ arrival. He’s hidden behind the cracked-open door inside of a sick sleeping widow’s house, with a clear getaway path out the back, just within earshot—the perfect spot to find out just how his boss plans to sell him out.

The meeting’s on the docks in Fifth Harbour. Out in the open, but safely within Dregs territory, and in the old well-functioning part of the area that’s used for trade in everyday goods besides. The boring part. Bustling when there are cargo ships arriving and leaving, but this early in the morning and right after a storm, there’s no-one here but Kaz’ new clients: two Grisha from Ravka in their proud blue keftas, conspicuous and unafraid. Soldiers of the Second Army. Emissaries of the Darkling, on the hunt for the Sun Summoner, and they’ve finally caught up to—

Kaz is shadowed by Anika. Hers would have been Jesper’s place, if he’d been around to get asked. If he hadn’t overheard the exchange between Inej and Pim thirty minutes ago and bolted to the meeting place alone. If he hadn’t been on edge for the whole day because it was clear Kaz had his claws in a lucrative offer that involved some sort of fancy political parleying and yet he hadn’t told Jesper to clean his guns and stop drinking. Right behind Kaz’ shoulder, guarding his back, that would have been Jesper’s place.

And most likely, Kaz would have handed him right over.

Even Kaz, blind as he’s been despite the obsession with the Sun Summoner that started just a few months after Jesper joined the Dregs… but then it sometimes feels like Kaz is Ketterdam, and he always claimed his mother’s the harbour, and really it’s Ketterdam who got obsessed with the Sun Summoner. Trinkets everywhere, renamed bars, even plays based on hastily-written romance novels. A new gaudy cult. Kaz just followed his city, and his interest was always tinged with enough private wry amusement that Jesper could make himself believe it wasn’t any danger, that maybe Kaz didn’t actually think of the Sun Summoner as a real physical person that could be hiding right inside the Dregs. Faith is its own thing, after all. And he had faith that maybe Kaz just didn’t want to follow the clues to Jesper, because he knew this would happen, and he didn’t want his second dragged away in chains. Despite everything Jesper let slip, all those mistakes; despite that time Kaz found him passed out in a mercher’s cellar who’d earlier cut him into lighting up. Despite everything, maybe he wouldn’t find out. Jesper’s desperate heart hoped so.

Not enough to not spy on the meeting, though. Not even he’sgoing to continue staking his life on those odds.

Kaz was bound to catch a clue sooner or later as to the prize hiding right inside his grasp. With the right motivation, and the presence of Ravkan Grisha soldiers means Ravkan official business which means a reward from the deep coffers of the Ravkan crown…

Jesper’s been doing his best to hide, but if it’s his own mind against that of Kaz Brekker, yeah, he knows which one he’s betting on. He’s fucked. Obviously, Kaz knows. He’s Kaz.

So when Kaz starts talking to those Etherealki, niceties first obviously, yada yada yada, My time is not cheap, do not bore me with children’s stories, Jesper’s already heard enough.

He shouldn’t even have come here. He just wanted—but that’s stupid, the height of sentimentality and Kaz is going to smirk with that smirk he does when a particularly dumb mark walks into the most obvious of traps. Kaz is going to mock him when he hands Jesper over to the Darkling and collects his two hundred thousand million kruge or whatever, and he’s going to say, “You stayed in one place, with the Dregs, with me the criminal genius, for five entire years despite an international manhunt and a massive bounty and then, when you had advance warning so you could have escaped, instead you went to spy on the meeting hoping it would be a false alarm? Because you’re in love with me? With the Bastard of the Barrel who never tells you anything? Dirtyhands who’s bound to get bored of all your mistakes? Me, who can barely even tolerate you?” (And not all of that is true, Jesper knows he’s catastrophizing out of panic, but that still doesn’t mean Kaz would give up a fat reward for him.) “And you’re even greedier, because you love Inej too. She’ll choose me, you know, and I’ll choose her and the kruge, but you’re just so happy being a third wheel, aren’t you? Anything for those scraps. Well, thanks for the money.” Or something like that, anyway. Jesper’s Kaz impression is much better when he isn’t running. Or trying not to panic. It’s better out loud, too, when he can do the rasp.

(Fuck, the Kaz inside his head is mean. And yeah, Jesper does enjoy that kind of thing sometimes, but not… not when it’s his entire life on the line. His heart. Not when it’s everything he’s ever tried to deny is true, or is that the panic lying to him again?)

It’s just that this was home.

Ketterdam was his home, and the Barrel was, and the Slat… It was home, and after what happened to Da’s farm, he never thought he could have a home again. That cheap bar over there with beer that’s three quarters rainwater so it always tastes of the soothing grime of the rooftops, the mercher statue that’s a pissoir for a perpetually drunk night- and daylife… The house against which on the eve of last Fastebreek he sucked off a guy dressed in a particularly good costume of Matz Drescher, so good he almost looked like the real… so okay, he’s not writing a particularly good tourist brochure right now, but the point is. This was home.

Every single cobblestone he treads on on his way right back to the Slat, because he bolted off tonight nearly skint since he usually doesn’t carry around big sacks of kruge because the children of Ketterdam are impressive little bastard thieves and he’s too soft to break their thumbs and he’d just gamble everything away usually anyway… but now he needs to secure passage off Kerch and so he needs serious money, and that means he needs to go back to his stash before he leaves. Needs to waste precious time. And every stone. Every single house. It’s all calling to him to stay home. Because it was.

For five years, it’s been his home. Five years. Fuck. That’s longer by a factor of ten than any place he’s stayed in ever since people found out Jesper can shoot sunlight from his skin. Since he was a boy, lighting up a room with his stupid hands in his Da’s farm right in front an open window and loose-lipped neighbours. Five years, and now it’s gone.

He can’t even blame Kaz. Sure, Kaz is right now selling him to the Darkling and if Jesper’s got any luck left—he should have, because it all has to balance out, and today has otherwise been a shitshow, plus all those thousands of gambled-away kruge must count for something, right?—if he’s got any luck, if Ghezen starts giving a fuck and shows any mercy to his runaway saint, it’ll take a sweet minute until they can agree on a price because Kaz is a greedy bastard and—yeah, Kaz is a greedy bastard. And a superb haggler. He’s already got a good deal. He’s coming. Jesper can’t even blame him. He’s known all along that Kaz would sell his brother for a few kruge and still he went and fell in love with the guy. Because Jesper’s the stupidest person who ever lived, and honestly, can’t they make Saints out of people who’ve got it together a little more? Anti-Jespers, if you will. Because sure, Jesper’s a man of many talents, but mind-blowing sex and stellar wit and incredible beauty aren’t exactly—or at least they don’t feature prominently in Inej’s tales, and she’s the premier source of sainthood in his life, so—

He’s panicking, and it’s not even the good panic of a fight, the kind of panic that makes everything sharp and clear and narrows the world to the gun and the target. The panic that orders his thoughts. That keeps him on track. This is cornered animal panic. Everything solid’s dissolving into air around him, inside him, and he can’t hold the gas in his fingers, can’t hold onto home, onto friends, onto his brain. His thoughts are flickering even quicker than usual, and they’re even more useless.

He’s losing it, both figuratively, and, well, actually. It. He’s losing it. He’s losing everything. If only there was something he could cling to, something soft, but he’s completely and utterly alone now. And forever. He’s lost both Kaz and Inej.

At least he’s finally arrived at the Slat. No-one stops him when he goes in (though really, why would they? It’s the going out again part that might get tricky) and no-one even talks to him when he dashes to his room. There’s two empty bottles of his favourite rum in front of Jesper’s door that he didn’t put there, but that’s a mystery he will carry forever. What should he—but actually, getting to his room was pointless, even if it’s full of a million little trinkets and some shirts he really wants—but Kaz is laughing at his sentimentality from somewhere in the harbour, a private little rumble that usually Jesper would give his left pinkie to have caused, but—anyway, no. He doesn’t have enough money in his room to pay for last-minute passage. Six months ago, he started dipping into his emergency escape fund to pay off gambling debts, and there’s not nearly enough left. Stupid Jesper. He felt too safe. Somewhere, Kaz is laughing. Kaz, who’s surely got enough squirreled away…

And yeah, breaking into Kaz’ office and bedroom is a challenge and, even worse, a violation of trust, but either Jesper gets on a boat or Jesper gets on a boat, this time shackled to within an inch of his life and flanked by dour Second Army Grisha on the way to a militaristic creep, so Kaz’ rooms it’ll have to be. He’s watched Kaz lock the door often enough. Breaking in won’t be easy or fun, but then, this isn’t the night for either.

In the wood next to the doorknob, someone scratched a tiny blessing of the Sun Summoner, and Jesper’s still not sure what Kaz believes (he talks of the Sun Summoner enough that everyone in the Barrel knows of his interest, but that could just be—and anyway, he’s working with the Darkling to sell out Jesper. Whatever he believes of the Sun Summoner, he believes in kruge more. But sometimes, on desperate jobs in deep dark cellars when they’re alone and the last light’s flickered out, Kaz will say, “The Sun Summoner could illuminate this—” and Jesper’ll cringe away lest he accidentally does what Kaz asks) but anyway. Jesper’ll never know. He’ll never see Kaz again. And it was probably Inej, that blessing. Kaz’ fascination with the Sun Summoner’s always had a weird edge, as if it’s a joke only he’s privy too, and that’s made Jesper feel safe, but. Maybe it was at his expense. Maybe he was taunting Jesper—

Please please please, Jesper keeps begging the door while he jiggles the lockpick because the stress is actually making him lose his mind, please I don’t want to betray him I just want to live, and when that doesn’t work, he shoots the lock until it gives in. Crude, desperate, not his style—but then, his life’s over. Why should he even care about being a good thief anymore?

The office is the more promising room in terms of small hidden sacks of kruge, but it’s also the place that Jesper’s already been inside, and the bedroom—well, it’s dark. Blacker than the night. Blacker than Dirtyhands’ soul, people would say, and Jesper almost laughs, but. Focus. No hysterics until he’s on the boat. The dark’s unnatural, deeper than the night was outside, almost like the Darkling—but it’s just some sort of specialty extra heavy black curtains, and when Jesper’s pulled them aside to let the moonlight in, the room just looks ordinary.

Well, slightly bigger than Jesper’s room, enough for a small bed and a wardrobe and paintings Jesper only recognizes because some mercher or other made a big stink about losing them and a dinky old chair and a set of storage racks, piled with—seriously? Okay, Jesper actually likes that book. In it, the Sun Summoner’s a young woman plucked from an orphanage, caught between duty to destroy the Fold—or is it duty? She’s manipulated, so—but anyway, she’s caught between duty and love. Of course, she chooses love. It’s a bit sappy, but Jesper likes to think he would, too, if he got the chance. But of course, his loves are not a devoted childhood friend but Dirtyhands and his Wraith, and they’re gonna sell him out. They already have. He’s not going to choose despairing self-sacrifice on the altar of their greed, and, well. Going against duty and love for cowardice and self-pity and gambling doesn’t sound nearly as good. It’ll have to do, though. It’s all he has left. He moves on.

A statuette and some trinkets and knives and more terrible cheap books about fake Jesper and—oh, this is too good. This is actually hilarious. A Saint in Ketterdam, or The Misfortunes of Virtue is the worst of them all. Out of all the books that appeared in Ketterdam in that weird craze for Sun Summoner pulp fiction that started three years ago and nearly gave Jesper a heart attack, it’s the most ludicrously verbose and metaphorical, and the most downright pornographic, so much it makes even Jesper blush, and Jesper’s seen some shit. Once. He didn’t know she was into coprophilia, okay? But the point is, it’s full-on detailed and depraved. It also does Jesper—well, the Sun Summoner, but they’re one and the same which is in fact the root of every single one of his problems—a huge disservice. The sister, he could see himself as: gay, wanton and unprincipled sounds about right, but a naïve virtuous maiden unwittingly seduced? The corruption of innocence? He’s no good for that kind of fetish. He gambles, okay. He has guns. He knows what sex is. He’s had lots of it. Most of it even good. Spectacular, actually. He wasn’t even that much of a pigeon when he first stumbled into Ketterdam, or Kaz wouldn’t have swept him up into the Dregs so quickly.

Really, the only redeeming factor of the book is Matz Drescher, the villain. Seductive and hot and thinly patterned on… oh, he owns this book and the veiling is thin as gossamer, of courseKaz knows that it’s supposed to be him. Bulked up and far more touchy and the writer fucking robbed him of his limp and he’s not nearly as deadpan funny, but with enough of a squint and enough wishful fantasizing, the vile King of Ketterdam might be Kaz, a little grown up and ready to fuck. He’s the only reason Jesper can quote some parts. But sadly, Kaz’ copy doesn’t even have those thin-page-crinkles of a well-used book, so he definitely didn’t appreciate certain scenes the way Jesper did. At least the sequel’s nowhere to be found. What it did to Kaz—well, Matz, and anyway, what kind of lust-killing come-one is Why is there straw laying around here? anyway? Who the fuck would be seduced by—except he can think of a couple scenarios where—focus, Jesper. Kruge. You’re looking for kruge. So you can escape. Stop panicking. Stop distracting yourself from panicking. Just stop.

Being inside Kaz’ bedroom is doing weird things to his brain, but he has to—

Fuck.

Soft dark eyes on the windowsill. Set in a soft face, dark layered clothes, and, thankfully, no knives out. Yet. Still. Inej.

Inej.

She’s caught him.

Caught him rifling hastily through Kaz’ collection of Sun Summoner paraphernalia, not his coins that he still hasn’t found yet, but still. She’s the favourite, and she has her favourites, too. If there’s a choice between him and Kaz, he knows which way she’ll go. So if she’s here, she surely knows what Kaz has in store for him and she’s going to—

“What are you doing, Jesper?” she asks, gently, sadly. He’s never before thought her cruel, and yet—if at least she was gloating, he could try to fight his way out and be at peace with it.

“Just let me leave,” Jesper begs instead, guns in his hands and blinking so the stupid tears stop blurring his eyes. He could aim blind, but—he needs to see. Needs to see if there’s any chance he gets out of this without hurting her. And Inej is soft. She’s good. She’ll do it for Kaz, do anything, but—she likes Jesper, and so he needs to not cry. It’ll hurt her too much if she knows he’s in pain while they betray him. “I won’t even get far. You know the schedules of every boat leaving Ketterdam, but just let me try, please. Just let me—”

“Jes.”

She’s not making it easy. She still doesn’t have a knife out yet; she’s just sitting on the windowsill looking worried and kind and beautiful. Oh, Inej. Jesper knows she believes in the Saints. Maybe if he made her believe in him and then asked her to let him—but no, he can’t make her choose between her faith and Kaz. He wants to live and be free, but he’s not that cruel. Or is he?

Jesper’s not survived nearly seven years of hiding from the most powerful Grisha in existence and the entire country of Ravka and every kruge-drunk idiot who fancies himself a bounty hunter by being kind or by hesitating. Hesitating isn’t his thing in general.

If Kaz had sent anyone else to drag him to his doom, he’d have put a bullet in their chest before they could even say his name no matter how much he likes them, but this is Inej. The scared young girl newly clad in Barrel garb that he tried to impress—but mostly to entertain, to lessen her fear, by trying to climb after her onto the roof of the Slab and then, because Inej’s a human anti-gravity miracle and following her was definitely way harder than he expected, nearly falling to his death. She’d caught his wrist, just in time, and then patiently pushed his legs to foothold after foothold so he'd climb back down safely. Inej, the woman who gives him a heart attack every second day by mysteriously appearing right in front of him, just because she can and because she still thinks it’s funny. Inej, who leaves food and water on his windowsill on the anniversary of the day when Jesper got his Da killed and makes excuses (to Kaz!) for his two-day benders. Inej, who ducks her head at his jokes. Inej.

He can’t hurt Inej. That’s why she’s here. Kaz knows he can’t.

At least she doesn’t look any happier than he is. “Whatever trouble you’re in, Jesper, just get out of this room and go to sleep. Get blackout drunk so he won’t suspect a thing,” she entreats. “I won’t say anything. I’ll help you. I’ll get you the money. Kaz doesn’t have to know.”

“Unfortunately, Kaz does know,” comes a dry rasp from the doorway, and Jesper’s trapped in the middle of his two favourite people in the entire world. It feels like a waking nightmare.

Love is a cruel master. He should have shot Inej and run when he had the chance.

“We were simply testing your security,” she says, like an absolutely atrocious liar who’s already realized there is no point in dissembling, and then suddenly Inej is standing right in-between Jesper and Kaz. It’s a tactically stupid move, because now he can throw himself out of the attic window, but he doesn’t jump to his death because—well, Inej’s protection won’t change his ultimate fate, and yet—he doesn’t want her to watch him jump. He’s stupidly, embarrassingly grateful she doesn’t want him to get hurt. He’ll remember this, when he’s locked up deep inside the Little Palace. He’ll remember Inej trying to shield him. Fuck, he’s going to miss her.

Kaz, though, doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. Not at Inej’s blatant teleportation (how is she real?), not at her lie, not even at the fact that Jesper completely betrayed him and broke into his bedroom. He looked tense at first, but then he always is, and now his shoulders are drooping slightly and his words are calm and measured even if they also absolutely make no fucking sense whatsoever. “You’re accompanying me to the parley with the Razorgulls tomorrow, Jesper,” Kaz orders, as if nothing about this night had happened at all. “Do not be late again. We all know what happened tonight. I had to find Anika because you decided to get blind drunk even though you knewyou had a job to do—”

And that’s news to Jesper. He didn’t have any orders yesterday whatsoever, and yeah, he drank a little last evening before he heard Inej and Pim talk about the Grisha—the Grisha who wanted to talk to Kaz in a meeting he definitely was never officially informed about, but—could he have forgotten—no, he didn’t miss anything. A stupid part inside Jesper really wants to believe Kaz when he’s talking with that much conviction, but he’s fucking lying. For no reason Jesper can understand. He’s—

“—and don’t deny it, everyone’s seen the bottles—”

Right, the rum. The empty bottles of rum outside his door that Jesper definitely didn’t drink. He doesn’t even have the money to buy them. He’s broke. That’s why he’s still here.

“So you’ll have to make it up to me, of course. I cannot have a second who gets dead drunk on a day he is supposed to be at work, but I won’t demote you just yet. Anika isn’t as good a shot as you and I need a gunslinger for the Razorgulls. But only because tonight was a waste of time anyway—”

Wait, what?! Jesper hardly dares hope—

“—and you’ll help Kerstjen practice her card dealing, too, however hungover you are. It’s your punishment. Eight bells sharp, later this morning. Do not disappoint me again.”

“Tonight was a waste of time!?” Jesper asks breathlessly, and then mentally kicks himself. The man he’s pretending to be who definitely isn’t a mythic Grisha hunted for profit by half the entire world has no reason to sound that eager.

Luckily Kaz seems to miss his mistake, though, because he just explains, “It seems the military command of Ravka have read one too many novels and lost their grip on reality. I wouldn’t have expected it, but then, merit and brains hardly factor into promotions in Ravka, I suppose.” He looks very pleased with himself when he primly adds, “So I had to explain to them that pornography is not, in fact, real. We all would like to see the Sun Summoner, but here in Ketterdam, seduced by a rakish criminal? That’s ludicrous. The book isn’t even good. Every single person in Ketterdam could have told them to stop announcing they’re perverts in public. ‘Have you seen the Sun Summoner in Ketterdam?’ Please, there are children here. They left.”

It’s too good to be true. Far too good. Wait—

“Back to business. This morning, since you’ll be gambling with Kerstjen on my behalf and will inevitably get distracted by another game, you can have a tab of a hundred kruge. No more,” and—

Fuck. Even terrified and utterly flummoxed as he is, Jesper can’t help himself. “Kaz, are you bribing me to go to work?” he teases.

“Do I have to?” Kaz asks, but he still looks far too amused. His stare is intense and tearing right into Jesper’s soul, and—he knows.

The bastard knows.

Jesper’s face burns. His most awful secret, and of course Kaz knows it. He’s probably always known. Jesper, for five entire years, was hiding right next to the most terrifyingly clever man in all of Ketterdam. All of Kerch. The world. Of course Kaz knows, and now he’s taunting Jesper. Taunting Jesper by pretending everything is okay and that he sent the Ravkans right back home when he could have gained a million thousand kruge by handing over their Saint. Kaz looks weirdly happy while he’s telling a completely made-up story about a world where Jesper gets to have good things too, and nothing makes any sense whatsoever.

Jesper shoots a glance over at Inej, but she looks just as lost as Jesper is right now.

He should—Jesper could play along now with Kaz’ pretend ignorance, and maybe Kaz isn’t just totally toying with his heart, maybe the Ravkans are gone, but even if it’s okay for a while… the next guy will come for the Sun Summoner and they’ll be right back here and the only way out of this is though. He swallows. “What are you talking about, boss?” And so Kaz can’t just spin more bullshit, he presents Dirtyhands his naked, shivering heart. “You know, right? You knowabout me.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jesper,” Kaz says. “The Sun Summoner’s a living Saint. He has dignity. We both know you’re just an idiot. Absolutely no-one could mix you up.”

And that’s the last straw. The terror of the last hour, of five years with the Dregs, of nearly seven years of running and hiding and mourning and the absolute certainty he’ll end up caged somewhere in the deepest basement of the Little Palace for the rest of his life if he starts trusting anyone ever bursts out of him, and Jesper starts laughing. Sobbing. Whatever. “You knew. You fucking knew, you bastard, you knew all along.”

“Inej, close the curtains,” Kaz hisses suddenly, but Jesper’s too busy to pay much attention.

“You knew—”

“Everyone’s talking about the Sun Summoner now. Everywhere. Sightings, every year, every month, but it’ll turn out to be a woman playing dress-up or a child’s flights of fancy after an all-book diet. In five weeks, there’ll be an explosion that looks like sunlight. It will take months to determine that it was an explosive, but they will find hard evidence it was a fraud. They’ll get jaded eventually. They’ll never find the needle in this haystack,” Kaz rasps idly. “Maybe I’ll even set the explosion off in Fjerda. The bomb’s very realistic. You’d like the guy who makes them. Wylan’s a very talented young man.”

“You did all of that—for me?”

“A decent sharp-shooter is hard to come by. I had to protect my investment,” Kaz replies, like Jesper knew he would. But Jesper also knows he’s baldly, gloriously fucking lying.

Kaz doesn’t just give up a million trillion kruge reward for nothing.

But he did it for Jesper.

He should have known better than to believe he can predict Kaz fucking Brekker. He should have expected Kaz to turn his world upside down, to pull off the utterly unthinkable. To profane a Saint so he could disguise him in a sea of romantic stories and idiosyncratic cults. He should have trusted Kaz. He should never have believed his own insecurities about his place in Kaz’ life. By trying so hard not to underestimate Kaz’ greed, ironically, Jesper completely underestimated him in everything else. What a miracle of a man.

For so long Jesper’s been trying to understand what drives the Bastard of the Barrel, hanging onto every scrap of information, desperate to get close to the true Kaz and never managing, two steps forward and two steps back, and for every moment he’s been silently rejected, left in the dark or wondering if after the next mistake Kaz would wash his hands of him—for every hope dashed there was a conversation, a look, something that left Jesper wondering if Kaz actually did like him back.

It’s addictive, that kind of uncertainty. If you play that card, are you going to win or lose? Is it wise to bet on black? And the next time?

Jesper never could walk away from a gamble.

And now all his terrible luck at the tables makes sense. You don’t get unlimited luck, after all, and it turns out he spent all of his years ago, spent many lifetimes of it: Jesper was the luckiest person in the entire world the day he got Kaz Brekker on his side.

“I could kiss you, Kaz,” he bursts out and—

“Not necessary—”

—before Jesper’s brain has caught up to his feet he’s already clear across the room and grabbing Kaz by the shoulder.

Kaz flinches.

Fuck.

Fuck Jesper’s luck. Fuck his brain. Did he really have to fuck everything up now? But when he tries to pull his hand away it doesn’t move because wrapped around his wrist, holding him still, is a strong slim hand in a tight leather glove, and—

“Oh,” comes Kaz’ small, breathy rasp. “That doesn’t feel like bloated corpses.”

Some small part of Jesper’s brain that is greedy for anything Kaz will gave him wants to latch onto this frankly disturbing detail (why would Jesper’s hand on his shoulder feel like a corpse? What the fuck, Brekker?!) but a much larger part of him, equally greedy, wants to bask in his hand on Kaz’ shoulder—his own hand! on Kaz!—and Kaz’ hand on his wrist—Kaz’ hand! Kaz is still touching him!—for as long as he can.

The remaining, utterly horrified part has just realized that Jesper’s hand is glowing like a supernova.

He pulls away again, desperately.

Kaz’ hand is like a bear trap. It still won’t let him move. His voice, though, is still soft and small when he rasps, “You’re safe. Those curtains are Fabrikator-made. No light will penetrate them.”

And Jesper hadn’t even thought of that problem, because— “Kaz, I’m burning you!”

“It’s alright. You’re hot, but far less hot than I thought.”

“Ouch. That’s harsh, boss. Kick a man while he’s down,” Jesper jokes, because he can’t not, and—there are bright red splotches now high up on Kaz’ gaunt cheeks. The sunlight that—fuck, the light that Jesper’s shooting from his pores has turned his dark brown irises almost golden, and his pupils are blown wide. The light reflects too from whatever pomade he’s used to slick back his floppy hair into something severe. He’s flushing even more red from the heat, and he’s worrying his thin lower lip with his teeth. When he releases it, it’s bruised and slick.

He’s the most beautiful man that Jesper’s ever seen.

“You don’t need to—can you—” Kaz is pulling Jesper’s hand from his arm now, and Jesper’s already resigned to another rejection—it’s pathetic, but he’ll feed off this moment forever—but he’s not pushing but pulling Jesper’s glowing hand upwards, and then he pauses. Looks at Jesper, with uncharacteristic trepidation.

“Anything, boss,” Jesper gasps. “Anything you want. Anything. It’s yours.”

And Kaz pushes his cheek against Jesper’s hand.

It feels just like touching a normal human cheek. Except not, because this is Kaz’ actual physical bare human skinthat Jesper’s touching for the first time, and also because now he’s focused on the sensation his own hand doesn’t quite feel like his. It’s buzzing, pulsing, the sensory equivalent of glowing, but it’s also Jesper’s right hand that he’s had his whole life simultaneously and really, he’d love to sort this conundrum out, but he’s busy. He’s touching Kaz. Kaz Brekker. Dirtyhands. Kaz.

Kaz’ eyes are closed now. He’s pushing his cheek faintly, rhythmically, against Jesper’s hand—his cheek’s flushed but there’s no actual burns under Jesper’s fingers, thank everything, and he doesn’t look like he’s in pain. Although he is trembling, shuddering, shaking, so hard that it actually looks like he might fall over, and proactively Jesper gently pushes against his cheek so he starts taking jerky limping half-steps backward until his legs hit the edge of his bed and he sinks gratefully downward, hand still pulling Jesper’s hand against his cheek, a drunk look on his face.

“What do you want, boss?” Jesper whispers, swallowing down the suave seduction that is his area of excellence for something patient and gentle. It’s not a tone of voice he can imagine anyone ever having used for the Bastard of the Barrel, but it feels right, inevitable, when Kaz is underneath him so responsive and debauched from a single hand against his cheek. “We can just stay like this. You can have my hand forever. Or you can have my other hand too, wherever you like it, my mouth, anything. You know it’s yours.”

“It’s—so much,” Kaz whispers hoarsely. “Trail that hand down. No, the other one.”

Fair. Jesper should have known that Kaz isn’t going to let him have his right hand back considering his hand’s still clamped around the wrist tight as a vice. Jesper’s going to have a massive bruise tomorrow. Intense arousal, though, has always been great at turning sensations on their head and it’s no different for this pain. It just feels sweet right now. Promising.

And Kaz wants the second hand as well.

Kaz wants—

Kaz wants him.

It doesn’t even matter right now if it’s just because Jesper’s the Sun Summoner. For the first time, that power doesn’t feel like a curse anymore but actually, like his mom used to say, zowa. A blessing. A part of him, a blessed part that Kaz wants to be touched by, and anyway, Kaz is hiding him. Kaz has put years of work into hiding him, into constructing bombs and spreading rumours and bribing authors and making the Sun Summoner the butt of a thousand jokes, just for Jesper.

Some part of Jesper—the part that drives him again and again to the gambling tables when he can ill afford to lose any more money, the part that feels most alive with his guns in his hands—is thrilling with excitement. Not just because this is Kaz, whom he’s adored for years without any expectation of return, but because this is Dirtyhands, the Bastard of the Barrel, ruthless thief and violent killer and feared by all, far more terrifying and more lovely than Matz Drescher and alive, panting as he pushes his straining dick up to meet Jesper’s left hand.

This isn’t any kind of lewd fiction. This isn’t a boy in costume.

This is real.

This is Kaz.

This is Kaz that he’s bent over, and he isn’t anything like what Jesper dreamed of. He isn’t ordering Jesper to get down on his knees or present his naked ass on the bed, like he did in certain fantasies that Jesper allowed himself a moment to feel sad and pathetic about, once he’d finished wiping the come off his dick. He isn’t demanding his own pleasure, and even the light thrusting of his hips feels very polite. He isn’t saying anything. He’s biting his lips more often than not, and when moans manage to escape the walls he’s built they are small and breathy. He looks so sweet and so incredibly stunned that they’re here at all, and his eyes dart down to Jesper’s hand rubbing his prick through his trousers sometimes but they always come back up to Jesper’s face, as if he doesn’t want to forget for a second that this is Jesper he’s doing it with.

He’s still clutching Jesper’s other hand against his cheek.

Daringly, Jesper presses a small kiss against the wrist of the hand that’s holding him captive. He’s never kissed leather before. He likes it.

Loves it.

His back’s starting to cramp from the awkward stoop he’s doing to reach Kaz without touching him with anything but his hands, but he could do this forever, he could make love like this forever, he could—

Fuck.

Fuck.

Inej. He’s totally forgotten about Inej, and as turned on as Jesper is right now and as drunk as Kaz is on lust, on touch, on the willing explicit devotion of the most expensive Grisha in the world, whatever—as hot as this weird thing they’re doing is, Jesper should have made sure that everyonein this room is good with every single thing that happens. It’s his responsibility as a decent human criminal. No sex without everyone’s consent.

Kaz isn’t talking, but Kaz is fine; he seems more likely to break Jesper’s hand if he stops right now than if he keeps going, but Inej… It wasn’t just Jesper and Kaz in this room. Inej was here too, and he completely forgot about her.

He just started feeling Kaz up without a care in the world like the impulsive idiot he is, but he should have talked to her first, talked it out with both of them or given her the chance to leave, and he didn’t, and that’s bad. It’s horrendous. It’s the worst thing he’s ever done in his miscreant life, worse than anything he’s ever imagined himself capable of doing. Inej clamped up the one time Jesper jokingly flirted with her, way back long before he found out what happened to her at the Menagerie, and he just turned her into an unwilling voyeuristic participant. Fuck.

He cranes his head for her, subtly, because Kaz finally opened up and Jesper can’t spook him now, he can’t destroy both people he loves in one night, he just can’t, but—

She’s gone already.

Inej silently slipped out of the room and closed the door to the office that Kaz had left open, and if Ghezen has any luck left for Jesper, she did it a while ago.

Jesper’s erection has officially vacated the premises after that shock. Kaz is still hard, though; he’s still making lovely punched-out little noises when Jesper grinds the heel of his palm against his crotch, and—why stop now. What’s done with Inej is done. Maybe she left early enough, and if not—he still has the entire rest of his life to loathe himself. Just let him have this now; let Kaz have it, everything that Jesper can give him and more, and it’s not like either of them was making any use of Jesper’s dick in the first place. Who cares his arousal got killed. This is more than enough.

Just abusing the heat and pressure of the sun to give a handjob to Kaz Brekker. No big deal.

Kaz is as quiet when he comes as he was all along. Just his hips stuttering more and more and his breath growing harsh and his head turning to the side, away from Jesper’s hand that he’s still crushing in his grip, and then the front of his trousers turns wet under Jesper’s palm. (Jesper idly wonders whether he can use the sun to dry it again, but firstly it would just get stiff and also, sure Jesper himself likes it when he’s still sensitive after the orgasm and the stimulation’s so intense it hurts, but he probably has to clear that up with Kaz first before he touches him spent.)

Jesper stays right where he was, forcing himself to be motionless, unwilling to let the moment break yet, and it takes a long while until Kaz turns his head back.

His eyes are even brighter now, and sunlight’s reflecting in streaks on his cheeks, because he’s—crying?

“I didn’t think I was that bad of a lay,” Jesper whispers, just to pierce the tension a little.

“Shut up, Jesper. Fishing for compliments is beneath you. Your ego doesn’t need to get any bigger,” Kaz rasps out, his voice almost back to normal even if it’s still a little soft, and Jesper clings both to that softness and to the familiar rasp, prays this wasn’t a mistake, that he hasn’t just fucked up what he and Kaz had, and then Kaz drops back down onto the bed.

A few minutes later, he starts snoring.

“I should have known you’re that kind of guy,” Jesper grumbles fondly as he stretches out his cramping back. But really. How could he have known? The Kaz inside his head never let him stay afterwards, and the real one never even showed any interest before that he didn’t immediately contradict. And Matz Drescher from the book wasn’t realistic at all, it turned out.

“At least put on bedclothes. Lay down properly,” Jesper exhorts his sleeping boss—lover—Kaz, but he doesn’t dare do it any louder than barely moving his lips. It’s who knows how early in the morning, after all, and Kaz sleeps too little as it is. He can’t be comfortable, laying sideways at the foot of his narrow bed with his entire legs stretching off the edge, spread wide while Jesper’s still standing in-between his thighs, but also, if he wakes up, he might want to talk, and Jesper’s barely processed that what just happened was real let alone dealt with the tears and This doesn’t feel like corpses and the insanity of Kaz’ plan to protect the Sun Summoner by making him the star of a million romantic stories and the incredible, unexpected sweetness that is Kaz in bed. Plus, he’s probably super grumpy when he’s woken up. He’s grumpy at all other times, so it stands to reason.

Jesper, meanwhile, is still a lightshow, (though maybe it’s his wishful thinking but he looks dimmer than before he fucked Kaz), and as far as he knows this is the only room in Ketterdam with curtains that hide his presence. He can’t leave just yet.

So Jesper picks up the cane and leans it against the foot of the bed and then he sinks down to his knees between Kaz’ splayed thighs. Calming his breathing, basking in the afterglow, and then—bored. While he’s here lit up by his unwanted power, he may as well do some good. Heat is good for pain, right? Alternatively, etiquette demands he also clean off the semen, but Kaz definitely won’t like him fumbling with his trousers while he’s asleep. But simple Sun Summoner touch… Maybe Kaz won’t mind. He clutched that burning hand to his face as hard as he clings to sackfuls of kruge. And so Jesper softly touches Kaz’ bad leg, and, when Kaz shows no signs of waking, starts massaging the sunlight deeper into the muscle.

He doesn’t know how long it takes until the light fades. It does, though, finally, and as soon as it does he lets go. Corpses, after all. Wouldn’t want to wake him up like that, not when he fell apart over a simple touch to his cheek, and so in the unnatural safe dark of the Fabrikator curtains, Jesper stays kneeling like a saint before his silent god.

The door creaks.

A growing slither of sunlight bathes the floor, bathes still-snoring Kaz and Jesper before him, and hastily, he scrambles up, careful not to touch either of the legs around him. He scurries out the door and stops dead, right in front of Inej.

“It’s past seven bells,” she says. “If you want to get to the Crow Club in time you should start getting ready.”

“What,” Jesper says, intelligently.

“Kerstjen? The ‘punishment’ for your absence? He is serious about that, even if everything else was him messing with you.”

Oh. Right. Kaz did talk about something to do with her before he told Jesper he knew he was the Sun Summoner and that he’d been secretly scheming to hide him and was also madly in love with him, or at least liked the feeling of the sun on his face. Or his dick. Both. Focus, Jesper. Right. Kerstjen. And the hundred kruge tab.

And Inej.

“Thanks. But listen, Inej, I don’t know how much you’ve seen…” No, that’s not a good apology. “I’m sorry. I should have checked in with you. I knew you were in the room while me and Kaz—anyway, I should have stopped and made sure you were okay or given you the time to leave. I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

“I slipped out when you touched his cheek. It seemed you were busy, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Inej’s words are light—and they lift a thousand heavy stones off his heart—but there’s something in her face that seems melancholy, that seems familiar, almost like… jealousy. Jesper’s always known that Kaz tells her more, that he trusts her more, that he loves Inej more than he does Jesper. He’s been jealous of Inej for so long. It feels wrong to see the emotion on her face now.

“I wouldn’t have minded if you’d stayed,” he says quietly. “If you’d joined in. I don’t know how Kaz feels about it, if there’s even going to be a next time, and it’s only if you want to, of course, if you want me too—”

“Jesper,” she whispers, touching something at her neck.

“—we really need to talk about this, talk about what each of us wants, but yeah. I’d like it.”

She nods. She’s smiling more brightly now, the sadness almost gone, but what she says is, “So. You are Sankt Jesper. Hiding right here in the Barrel.”

“Hey. I’m a really shit saint. I’m not meant to be locked in a palace—could you imagine depriving the good people of Ketterdam of this gorgeous face? A tragedy. Nay, a crime!” He winks exaggeratedly, and to his joy, she grins. “I plan to keep running from my responsibilities forever, and I’d really like it if you help me do it.”

“Kaz has everybody convinced already that the Sun Summoner is a character from awful books and that those who talk about him are delusional or, at best, perverted. So I don’t see how you need my help. But you have it.”

“Thank you. I knew you were my favourite for a reason, Inej Ghafa.” Jesper kisses her left hand softly, and when she glows with delight, her right hand too and then both her cheeks. “I love you.” He looks back into the bedroom, where Kaz is still half hanging off his bed, completely dressed in his mercher’s clothes and still wearing his coat, with a barely visible stain on the front of his pants and snoring softly. “I love you.”

[scripttorture]

Hello! I've browsed this blog a bit and came across the idea that torturers often develop mental illness because of their repeated exposure to the violence/trauma of seeing another person in pain, which I'd never considered before. A) Do you believe torturers can therefore be a type of victim as well, depending on the circumstances, and therefore deserving of compassion/therapy? B) Can you point me to more information about this/what kinds of mental illnesses develop in torturers? (1/2)

C) Do you think it's possible for a mass murderer/torturer character to have a realistic, satisfying redemption arc? Do you know any media that's pulled it off believably? Thank you so much for taking the time to read/answer this if you do! And for this excellent resource!

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The most accessible sources that cover this are O’Mara’s Why Torture Doesn’t Work (good grounding, start with him), Rejali’s Torture and Democracy and the appendices to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth where he describes treating two torturers.

 The most current research is about 600 pages of print on demand untranslated French. If you’re fluent in French (I am not and lock down etc has got in the way of me getting this translated) Sironi Comment devient-on tortionnaire?

 Broadly speaking the symptoms appear to be the same as those survivors and witnesses develop.

 And I will go into this in more depth later but keep in mind there is not anywhere near enough research on torturers for us to be entirely sure about most of this. I’m working with the best information we have right now.

 The other two questions are subjective and sort of complicated. By definition a lot of this is going to be my opinion because well that’s what you’re asking for.

 I think we need to be really careful about describing torturers as ‘victims’.

 Yes they’re put in this situation by social structures beyond their control. It is not their fault that they weren’t given training or support in their job. It’s also not their fault that we have this global message that violence is effective or that so many workplaces are unnecessarily pressured/stressful. Most of the time they are drawn in to abusing others because of the social groups and structures within the organisation they join.

 Oversight (with a drive to eradicate torture), funding, training and clear consistent messages about the right way to handle difficult situations would probably prevent most cases of torture.

 This does not change the fact that on an individual level each of them chose to hurt other people.

 Some of them will have made that choice understanding there was a threat to their own safety if they did not. Some of them will have made that choice just because it was what everyone else was doing. Some of them genuinely believe what they did was the ‘right’ decision at the time.

 They still made that choice. And given that we have records of people in similar positions refusing, even when it put them at risk of attack or death, I don’t have a lot of sympathy with the choice torturers made.

 The fact I’m a pacifist factors into this. Consider my biases.

 Torturers typically show a very low understanding of the impact their actions have had on other people.

 They might regret their actions but this is typically framed in a very self-centred way. They usually don’t express more then cursory regard for the victims. They regret it because they’re suffering now, because they have nightmares, because they can’t keep a job. And oh it’s all so unfair.

 I don’t know why this is the case. But it’s a feature Sironi described in interviews about her work. And I’ve seen it over and over again in interviews with torturers.

 Yes torturers suffer. The symptoms they develop are terrible and have a lasting impact on their lives. They typically can’t hold down jobs and struggle to re-integrate into society in any meaningful fashion.

 And yes I believe they should be treated. I believe that anyone with a disease or condition which requires treatment should have access to care and treatment. Whoever they are. Whatever they did.

 I believe that as fellow human beings torturers are entitled to a degree of compassion. When I say that torture and mistreatment are wrong I mean it. My position doesn’t change just because the theoretical victim is a former torturer.

 I do not think that treatment and compassion should be dependant on a person being suitably victimised. For me the only thing it depends on is their need and their humanity. In the literal physical sense of them being a human.

 But we tend to think of ‘victim’ as a simple category that doesn’t overlap with mass murderers.

 And I don’t believe the position of torturers is that simple.

 Especially when so few of them are charged. Torture trials are rare. Convictions are rare. And sentences are short.

 And their victims deserve justice too.

 I feel conflicted about calling torturers ‘victims’ because of this complex reality. And because in fiction we have a tendency to focus on the torturers prioritising their voices over the survivors. I feel like presenting torturers as simple victims of society could risk adding to that.

 For me the focus has always got to be the survivors.

 And I think all of this feeds into how we handle redemption arcs.

 I don’t think that writing redemption arcs for villains, even torturers or mass murderers is ‘wrong’. In fact I think that it can be a really good idea. Showing how toxic the environments these people are in is a good thing. Puncturing the way it’s romanticised is a good thing. And showing a way out of it, even if it’s imagined, is not a bad thing.

 But if we’re going to do that in our stories then I think we need to think about what redemption means and in whose eyes the character is redeemed.

 There’s also a small problem: we don’t really know what recovery for torturers looks like.

 There isn’t enough research on them. Partly because of lack of interest but partly because the low conviction rates means sample sizes are small. We’re talking about a limited number of individuals who are jailed and we can’t really ‘prove’ that individuals who weren’t convicted were torturers. We don’t really know what the long term outcomes are, what treatments might be effective or- Much of anything.

 Studies on torturers are typically based on very small numbers of individuals. (For a long time Fanon’s work was the only example of a mental health professional talking about torturers specifically. He saw two of them.) They are not statistically sound. And a lot of resources were simply journalists or mental health professionals compiling notes on the handful of individuals they talked to.

 Everything I say about torturers is based on things like interviews, a handful of studies that have flaws and anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately as of right now it’s the best we’ve got.

 Personally I don’t think there’s enough research on torture generally. Or enough attempts to collate relevant research from other fields. But that’s a rant for another day.

 Let’s get back to that central question: what does redemption mean?

 I think that it’s pretty easy to write a character changing for the better. You can build up the character’s level of insight into what they’re doing/did over the course of the story. You can show them choosing to stop. You can show them shifting to oppose their former allies.

 But bundled up in the idea of a redemption arc is this: is it enough? And who is it enough for?

 I don’t think survivors should be obliged to forgive former torturers. I also don’t think they’re likely to interact positively.

 I’ve talked about this now and again when asked about the difference between legally defined torture and abuse. Because of the organised and widespread nature of legally defined torture there are usually communities of survivors. And communities that are collectively moving through a recovery process because even those people who weren’t directly attacked are likely to be witnesses, carers and relatives or friends of survivors.

 These things echo down generations.

 Cyprus gained independence from the British in 1960, my father is too young to have any real memory of the violence during the colonial period. But he referenced it in arguments with my English mother during my childhood. There are people throughout China today who won’t buy anything Japanese because of Japanese war crimes there during World War 2. There are people who won’t eat fish from the Black Sea, because the bodies of their ancestors were thrown into that sea during a genocide over a hundred years ago.

 I know that as a both a Greek Cypriot and an English person there are people all over the world who will not want anything to do with me based on what my people have done to theirs. And the fact I wasn’t alive at the time does not really factor into it.

 What I’m trying to illustrate here is that this is much bigger, broader and more complex then individual acts of forgiveness.

 Survivors are a highly varied group of individuals. And each torturer can have thousands or tens of thousands of victims. Expecting each impacted individual, and any witnesses and all their family members and friends, to forgive these people is… let’s say ‘unlikely’.

 So does redemption require forgiveness from the wounded party? Is there any possible action that can atone for the sheer scale of these atrocities?

 If we play a simple number game causing this level of harm can be achieved in months or years, but saving the equivalent number of lives takes decades of skilled, dedicated work. If we look at concepts like wergild or jail as ‘paying your debt to society’ then how do we measure something like torture where the numbers are so big?

 I haven’t seen a piece of fiction seriously tackle these questions. But then again I also haven’t actively looked for that fiction.

 I feel like a lot of fictional redemption arcs judge a character to be sufficiently redeemed based on audience sympathy and the main cast forgiving the character. They don’t typically go on to broaden the scope of the narrative and question whether any one else impacted by the former villain’s actions also sees the character as redeemed.

 One of my stories has a former torturer as a major character and I think they are a sympathetic character in many ways. I think that my readers would empathise with them through a lot of the story (which takes place decades after they stopped torturing).

 They’re a mentor figure to some of the younger cast members. They’ve acted as a protector to them and taught the younger generation a lot about the minority culture they themselves are from. And they do genuinely care about these people that they helped to raise, consistently sacrificing to protect these ‘kids’. (The ‘kids’ are 30s-20s at the time of the story.)

 But they’re also incredibly self centred. They don’t really interact with or have a lot of sympathy for the people they hurt. And while this particular family loves and forgives them society at large views them as a monster. Albeit one that is now leashed.

 Is this a redemption story? Is this character redeemed? I genuinely don’t know. In fact that’s part of my interest in writing the story: trying to work out if there is a point, as this character grows, develops and helps others, when I believe they’ve done ‘enough’.

 I think that redemption means different things for different people. A satisfying redemption story is different for different people. And if we can disagree so strongly about it with much simpler, smaller scale crimes then where does that leave us with torture?

 There isn’t a simple answer or a one-size-fits-all writing solution. There can’t be.

 My approach is to try and use the story to see if I can find an answer. Even if it’s only a limited one. For me the story itself is a forum for exploring human complexity and difficult ethical questions.

 I don’t think we have a good solution for how to deal with these people in reality yet. But I do hold out hope that a good solution is possible. Fiction is an arena where we can safely explore possible solutions.

 I guess in the end I’m not sure if there’s any story or arc that will work for everyone. I don’t think there are any hard rules for writing anything and I don’t think there’s ever a way to please everyone.

 Redemption and forgiveness are complicated topics. I think we do a much better job when we engage with that complexity then when we assume a character just has to do a, b and c in order to achieve it.

 When you consider someone to be truly redeemed is an ethical question that I can’t answer for you. I don’t think I should. The chances are you’ll know when you think your character has done enough.

 Just be open to the fact that it won’t be enough for everyone. Consider reflecting that with the characters, because that can make for truly powerful moments.

 In Midnight’s Children Shiva never forgives Saleem, even though Saleem isn’t responsible for Shiva ‘losing’ his life and family because they were both infants at the time. And damn there are a lot of flaws in the movie adaptation but that scene between them in the jail, when Saleem throws that in Shiva’s face hits hard. It shows us so much about both characters.

 And I think that’s a better way to approach it then trying to figure out if a character is redeemed yet: figuring out how they’ve progressed, how others respond to that progression and why.

 I hope that helps :)

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