#did the impossible and barely managed to get us ALL out alive NO MAN left behind | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

epithet-beloved · 1 year

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HI. NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE. NO CLUE HOW IT WORKS. LOVE this page so far❗️It’s so clear to see how much love has been poured into it and I hope you all have nothing but good fortune coming your way. so… a heem heem herrmmm…may I request a romantic Jericho Felocity post…an imagine…a heem…

SAVE POINT

synopsis… Your boyfriend was a master escape artist. It was really only a matter of time before he escaped from prison and came home.

ft. Jericho Felocity

tags… epithet erased spoilers, fluff, post jailbreak reunion, mentions of prison gang, use of nicknames, established relationship, reader and Jericho live together

word count… 1144

a/n… YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HAPPY I WAS TO SEE OUR FIRST REQUEST WAS FOR JERICHO!!! LIVE LAUGH LOVE JERICHO I EAT SLEEP AND BREATHE JERICHO!!!!!!!!!! ✧🦄

It had been about half past four when you received the phone call. Despite the risk of it being spam, you admittedly hadn’t looked away from the TV when you answered it. Things had been slow ever since your speedy boyfriend got taken to prison, so you might as well cure your loneliness by listening to an automated voice message.

“Hi!”

The single word had you shooting up from your slouched position instantly. That polite, unbothered tone and cheery voice could only belong to one person.

“Jerry?!” It was impossible to conceal your excitement. “I thought they didn’t give you phone calls!”

“Oh, they don’t!” A brief pause before he followed up, “I broke out. Me and some other people. They were my party members!”

…..I mean, could you expect anything less? You wondered why he didn’t just glitch out of his cell on the first day.

“We all left the party, so I should be coming home now.”

“Now?” You parroted his words.

“Is now not soon enough? I can try to shave off a couple more seconds if I backwards long jump over some of the cars if you want.”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant! Now is good. Great, even, I’m just glad you’re finally—“

Jericho’s apologetic voice cut you off. “Oh, hold on, this is starting to phase through my hand. I’m gonna have to talk to you—“

The garbage noise on the other end informed you that your boyfriend had disconnected, but you weren’t upset at all. No, you were just left sitting on the couch with the timer app open.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

Four—

A knock on the door nearly caused you to drop your phone, but you managed to stop the timer at 4.97 seconds. It probably would’ve taken shorter if he didn’t go through the effort of knocking. It always took him a few tries to get his hand to actually touch the door.

You couldn’t beat his time, even if it was just going from the living room to the front door, but you knew he would forgive you. Despite being the fastest man alive, Jericho was never anything but patient with you. Loving you wasn’t a part of a speedrun, he said. He’s with you for a 100% completion run.

God, you love that dork.

Even if you didn’t open the door as quickly as you could, your prize was still there waiting for you when you did. Your boyfriend, grinning wide and sort of shaking in place. Just the way you liked him.

“Hi! I’m back. I really missed you!” He would say in quick succession, making the muscles of your face tug harder at the corners of your mouth with each sentence.

With a grin wider than you thought yourself capable of, you instructed him, “Stand really still for me, okay?”

“Okay!” Jericho Felocity mustered all the strength in his body to try and stand as close to still as possible for himself. The fact that Jericho could stand still for you was nothing short of a testament to how much he loved you.

When you were sure he was standing ‘still’, albeit shaking slowly, you would launch yourself onto him, wrapping your arms around his waist and burying your face in his shoulder. Jericho was stronger than he looked, barely budging even after you’d flung your entire body weight at him.

“Oh!” Taking the hint, his trembling hands found their place on your upper back. “Why are you crying? Are you okay?”

It was only when he’d said this did you feel your own tears wetting your cheeks. Ah, so you were.

“Yes, yes, more than okay,” a long sniffle interrupted your words, “just…..really happy to see you.

“I’m happy to see you too!” His reply was simple and matter of fact, like there was no reason he’d ever feel otherwise. These simple words along with the quick circles being traced into your shirt were Jericho’s unique yet effective method of comfort.

After a long yet comfortable period of silence, you would ask, “So, who were these ‘party members’ of yours? Were they all nice to you?”

“Oh, yeah! There was Ramsey, Indus and Mera, Dixon, Slim—“

“Slim?” You pulled back from the hug to shoot him a quizzical look. “Like California Slim?”

Jericho nodded. “Yep!”

“The murderer?”

And nodded again. “Yep!"

Well, that didn’t bode well. “You sure that guy is your friend?”

“I don’t see why not. He was actually kinda nice if you weren’t on his bad side.” Your boyfriend’s good nature prevented you from being even a little bit mad at him.

“Jerry, you are way too trusting. You’re just impossible to hate.”

A light blush coated Jericho’s cheeks, which you didn’t fail to notice. “Aw, c’mon……I wanna have you meet them someday! They’d love you.” He said that with such confidence, which in turn made you blush. “They were all so surprised when I said I was dating someone. Except Dixon. Dixon said he knew it.”

“I think Dixon is my favorite so far.” Your remark earned a frankly adorable laugh from Jericho. His hands lingered on your back, still drawing little shapes and patterns while you thought. “So where are they, do you know? I assume you all had to split and take care of business.”

“Oh, yeah.” His nods were so fast that you sometimes didn’t notice that his head had moved at all. “Ramsey did offer to all go get takeout together, but Slim didn’t want to, Mera and Indus had to leave, and…..” emerald green eyes averted from your face sheepishly, “…..I just really wanted to get home as quick as I could, honestly.”

“Oh?” You cocked a brow. “Another speedrun?”

A blurry shake of his head again, this time from side to side. “It’s not really like that, no. Just…..” you felt the strange, fuzzy feeling of his hands phasing through your body to rest on your shoulders instead. “It’s been a really long quest, and you always need to save after a long quest, right? I just really missed my save point.”

Save point? You scrunched up your nose. You don’t remember Jericho keeping anything that looked like a save point in the house. Did he pick one up from one of his wacky adventures at some point?

“Oh, I don’t know where that is, sorry Jer….maybe I put it away by accident?”

A hearty laugh was not the response that you expected from your boyfriend. It was rare for him to laugh that hard. Not that you were complaining, you just……weren’t sure what you said?

“No, no, I mean….” His bright smile warmed your heart, but not as much as his words.

“You’re my save point.”

Another thing you loved about Jericho Felocity was that his kisses were always electric.

#🦄’s writings #anime campaign #epithet erased spoilers #epithet spoilers #𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪 request !#anime campaign x reader #anime campaign imagines #epithet erased x reader #epithet erased imagines #Jericho Felocity #Jericho Felocity x reader #Jericho Felocity imagines

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stesierra · 1 year

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@winterandwords tagged me! Sorry to be so slow to get to this! I'm just getting my brain back in gear after some med changes.

You visit your own grave and someone asks "did you know them?"

What's your answer? Tell us what your OC/s would say to this, bonus points if it's in their voice/a mini snippet

I'll tag @anonymousfoz and @teacupsandstarlight and @dyrewrites.

You guys ready for this? I have a lot of OCs. I'm going to interpret this a bit loosely. Hope that's ok.

Antea from Stitches and Memories

"That's Antea's grave," the stranger said. "Did you know her?"

It was an impossible statement, or should have been, but the truth screamed in Antea's head, in the little space her headache left free. She was buried there, three feet down in a shallow hole made by someone who couldn't be bothered, and her skin was already degloving from her hands as she rotted and became one with the dirt. She was dead, some version of her, and Jadan had died with her. He was curled around her in that pit, for eternity.

Behind her, Jadan was telling the stranger that he was wrong, that she was alive. But Antea said nothing. She fell to her knees and threw up.

Nelone from As Immortality Fades

"Nelone's grave?" I said, gazing up at the elaborate mausoleum that had been added to the City of the Dead. It certainly looked like the grave of a beloved queen, one that her subjects had spared no expense to honor. There was one problem: I wasn't dead.

"Did you ever meet her?" the stranger asked. "They say she ruled for five hundred years as a teenager before her age caught up with her all in one day."

I laughed and touched the lines on my face. "It was bound to happen eventually. And yes. I knew her."

Zisha from Cast Out

I stared down at the plain, unmarked stone. I wanted to ask, are you sure? Is this really me? But instead I signed, "A little" and sat down in the loose dirt where someone (me?) had just been buried. The stone needed a painting. A face, immortalized forever. But I didn't know if I would paint myself there or a stranger.

Elise from the Bone Queen

I stared at the grave for a long moment. And then, without thinking about it much, I started to laugh.

Mausart put a hand on my shoulder. He murmured in my ear, "It can't be true, love. You're not in there."

I giggled, utterly delighted. "But if I AM, I'm peaceful and in a grave. Idony didn't chain my ghost to my bones. She didn't lock me in servitude forever! And do you know what that means?"

"What?"

I spun towards him. "She lost."

Adam from Triangle Park

Adam stared down at the gravestone. It was carved with angels and his name and dated to a year ago. The birth date had been left blank completely. It looked like a human grave, except no human was just named Adam, of no last name in particular. But faeries didn't carve gravestones.

Lizzy shuffled her Birkenstocks beside him and said, "Sorry. I thought you were dead. I thought... I just wanted something nice. To commemorate you. You know?"

"That's, ah, very thoughtful," Adam managed.

Rabbit tugged on his hand and leaned her head against his side. "What's this? Why's there a big rock?"

Adam crouched beside her. "To remember the dead. It's a grave."

Rabbit wrinkled up her nose. "But it's got your name on it!"

He cast a glance up at Lizzy. "Yes, well..."

Rabbit stuck out her lower lip. "Maybe it's a different Adam. Because you're not dead. Not like Sniffer."

"Maybe it is," Adam agreed.

She beamed up at him, her face full of relief. "Did you know him?"

"I can't say I did."

Mindral from the Halfway Revenant

"We dug you a grave," the man said, gesturing down at the open pit. "A grave for Mindral Thideet, who destroyed her family."

Mindral's fingernails cut into her palms. "How kind of you."

"A grave for Mindral, who is dead. Go on. Climb in."

She snapped, "I'm not dead. Do I smell like a woman who died a month ago?"

He leered at her, perfect teeth bared. "There's an unbinding symbol carved into your brow. That body's heart may beat, but Mindral Thideet's soul is with the gods. You're nothing but a filthy godkin."

"Would a godkin do this?" Mindral asked. And she shoved him into the grave.

Kerra from Court Phoenix

I cradled Hes against my chest and looked at Chujulan through the curtain of flame that danced across the phoenix's back. "What do you mean, I died?"

The sister of my heart stared at me, her shoulders rigid and feet set as though she expected to weather a charge. "You died, Kerra. That's your grave. I lowered your body into it. Mounded up the dirt with my own hands. I wept. I haven't wept since Cherin died." Her voice was a raw, wounded thing, the cry of an animal dying in a corner.

My blood rushed in my ears, whum whum whum. "But--"

Her green eyes flashed. "You died, and I've spent my whole life refusing to believe in ghosts. I've mocked all the lordly who hide from them by sleeping through their days. I've walked outside of the city wards and laughed. So how dare you come back."

Hes screamed, a mournful wail that didn't even sound like it came from a bird's throat.

I wanted to say something. But the words didn't come.

Juniper from School of Souls

I stood in front of my grave. And the worst thing, the thing that made me want to run through the streets until someone ran a red light and put me out of my misery, was that it really WAS my grave. My aunt had stuffed my body into a pretty, sterile coffin and laid it to rest next to Mom and Dad. The school had so helpfully sent my corpse to my next of kin. And now I could never go home.

Besides me, Ophelia smiled like a shark and said, "Oh, look at that! Little dead Juniper Fellows. Rotting in a pit in the ground. How sad. Do you need me to help you forget? I can make you think you've never heard the name."

Franklin, on my other side, balled his hands into fists. "Fuck you, Ophelia. Shut up."

Ameryi from the Many-faced Princess

I didn't need him to defend me. I found my voice. "Like you forgot your name? It wasn't Ophelia, was it? You just stole Ophelia's body and her life and forgot everything that came before."

Ophelia laughed joyfully. "And why not? Why shouldn't I forget?"

"Because you're a murderer? Because you're a thief? Because you're DEAD, like we're all dead?" I was shouting by now, and my voice should have echoed off the manicured cemetery lawn and rows of polished stones. But instead they swallowed it. Franklin put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged him off. "We shouldn't be here. None of us. We don't deserve it."

I was crying now. But not for me and my dead body. For the girl whose body I wore. Because she was dead, too, only no one would ever give her a grave.

Rebeka from Mud-Child

Ameryi stared down at the little mound of dirt. "Princess Ameryi is buried here? There isn't even a marker."

The gravekeeper spat. "She was a face-shifter. She worshipped Akihel. She's lucky they didn't feed her to the dogs."

Ameryi kept a pleasant smile on her borrowed face. "What did she look like when she was buried? Herself?"

He spat again, this time right on the grave. "Does it matter? Dead's dead."

It didn't. Ameryi already knew the answer. She knew who had died in her name, who she would never be able to repay. And she would blame herself forever.

Rebeka said, "Fuck that. I ain't dead."

Tag list for everything

@anonymousfoz

@moremysteriesthantragedies

@elizababie

@sm-writes-chaos

@bellascarousel

@macabremoons

@the-dragon-chronicler

@teacupsandstarlight

@vorskra

@wrenofthewords

@amostdelectablescribbler

@mysticstarlightduck

@phantommill

@gracewritesbooks

@aziz-reads

@owlsandwich

@symbioticsimplicity

@squarebracket-trick

@fishythewriter

@koala2all

@rmgrey-author

@atomatowriter

Just chapters and snippets

@da-na-hae

#tag game

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stars-and-cows · 9 months

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Omg Shima post!?!?!?!?!? I'm still a newbie when it comes to writing so sorry if some things don't make sense/are badly written, I'm working on becoming better. I really appreciate any critique you have and no, I won't get offended (yes I am aware I mess up times a lot, English is hard). Enjoy

Previous || Next

"The guilt" part 1

The red filled the sight as she opened her eyes. The whole vision was blurry from the tears that were still forming and running down her face. The body of her aunt was massacred, forcefully ripped in half. The eyes lost all of their shine and became as lifeless as those of the doll. Her hand was still in the same position as she remembered her aunt being when she was still alive. Her desperate reaching out, with the hand now only millimetres away from Shima's face.

Her grip was still in a book that caused it all. She managed to grab it only seconds before this whole mess.

"It was supposed to be you" She heard repeated over and over again in her head. It couldn't be right, it just couldn't. Her aunt couldn't have said that. She must have imagined it all from the fear. Surely.

Once the dead body finally fell on the face, she saw a tall man dressed in blue. He was blocking the exit, looking around the room but he didn't seem to notice Shima. At least just yet.

She slowly got up a bit, but the tiniest sound gave her away. The man quickly turned his head towards her. All the left working instincts of Shima told her to run. As she got up and moved away from the spot she was sitting in he reached there with his hand. Shima just barely avoided a big, sharp ice that grew in the place he reached to. Only her cheek was lightly scratched in it all. If she didn't move at all, she would be dead.

The man moved away, walking towards the dead body. But all Shima was thinking about was that he unlocked the exit. She threw herself to the door. The man reached out again, trying his best to catch Shimla with his ice spikes. She was shaking and crying but the adrenaline rush was still strong enough for her to grab the doorknob and shut the door behind her. Once she closed it, she heard and felt the spikes. He accidentally cut himself off from exiting.

Shima immediately ran away, hiding in the labyrinth of the bookshelves. Soon after she heard the door being destroyed completely. If she had stood there for any longer... The thought was just too cruel to think about. She used all of her remaining strength to run as far as she could but the adrenaline was slowly wearing off. One careless step and she tripped. The fall left her now not only crying but bleeding from her nose.

It was all hopeless. What could she, an 11 year old scared kid, do? Just wait for this stranger to kill her? Just like he did with her aunt? She hugged the book closer. The memories of her and her aunt came back. Their time spent reading books from their shared favourite author. The time she made Shima feel valuable. For the first time she was irreplaceable. And now it will all be taken away? She knew life was cruel, her parents used to tell her that all the time, but this was truly miserable.

The book started slowly pulsing. Like a heart would. Shima shook off her worries just for a moment to check why it was. The book was magical too, right? Maybe there was a solution to all this after all. She promised herself to never give up and she wasn't the type to break promises.

She quickly riffled through the pages to find something useful. The footsteps were getting louder and louder. Until the man appeared right behind her. She didn't have the strength to look at him. The words on the pages began to slowly merge and twist. Her tears made it basically impossible to read. Her fingers shaking from the fear were also slowly losing their ability to properly hold and turn over the pages.

But when all the hope was lost she saw a big circle in the middle of the book. Like her and her aunt made for the summoning. It was flickering. And though her eyes were all wet from crying and the blood that was dripping out of the stitches of the book, she managed to see a text at the very bottom.

"4 summons left"

She could feel fingers slowly grabbing her shoulder. In the last ditch of effort she threw the book behind her at the man. She covered her face with her hands to not witness the last blow that would be dealt to her. But instead of that, she heard a bunch of books falling, a man and... Another person screaming? Some bookshelves even came crashing down. The curiosity got the better of her and she opened her eyes.

In front of her eyes was the man from before, stuck to the wall, kept with a huge chunk of ice. And right next to him was another person. By his four eyes and four arms it was obvious her plan worked and she summoned him. It was definitely something to celebrate, she's still alive after all. But now she's stuck with not one, but two magical... People? The second one looked nothing like a human. Twice as many problems.

The... thing, came up to her with a big smile. They had blood on their face and religious clothes. Though it was barely visible on the dark pattern that was going through the right side of their skin. Three eyes, all on the right side of the head, all opened up revealing dark scleras. Shima wanted to run away again but her body was refusing to move. And the thing was getting even closer.

"I'm sorry, I don't know..." She started only to be cut off by the thing bowing to her. It was definitely a sight. They slowly lifted their head and smiled at Shima.

"Thank you my lord!"

#Shima: Villains' Tales #writing #writeblr #newbie writer #I just think putting my works out there might help me get better at writing #Instead of just putting everything into my drawer and never showing it the light of day #cows-writing #<- Also that's my sideblog for writing stuff #writblr

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berenwrites · 1 year

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Beyond the Battle - Chapter 6 - Stranger Things - Steddie

Beyond the Battle: Action & Consequence

Click here for All Posted Chapters

Summary: Steve hits things with a bat or gets hit depending on who you ask. He definitely does not have anything to do with the psychic stuff. That is El’s domain. However, as Vecna is defeated, the rules change.

Pairing: steddie (Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson)

Other Relationships: Steve & Robin, Steve & Dustin, Eddie & Dustin

Rating: Teen

A/N: Multi-chapter story, updated regularly. Honestly not sure how many chapters it will have yet because it's still a bit hand wavy in the middle, but definitely more than 12. Thank you to my beta for find my mistakes and to all those who read/like/reblog.💖 Follow #st:beyond-the-battle for updates.

Also on AO3

Chapter 6. Waking World

Steve stood staring into his pool, unable to look away from the red glint at the bottom. He knew he should be picking up the phone or the walkie, letting someone know a gate was opening up again, but it was calling to him. His mind whispered impossible things. He could hear the voice asking for his help, Eddie’s voice.

It was so easy to step up to the edge and dive in, right down into the dark depths. Cold prickled across his skin, but it was like an afterthought. He could barely see without all the pool lights on, but the red glow drew him. There were no vines on this one, no remnants of Vecna, and he acted before he could change his mind. His arm disappeared into it right up to the shoulder until his flailing hand found something alive.

Acting on instinct rather than thought, he gripped it and pulled.

It was hard, ridiculously so, as if the gate did not want to give up what he was trying to pull through it, but he persisted. When a pale, limp hand finally appeared on his side, illuminated by the glow from the gate, he pulled even harder.

It didn’t feel like just a physical thing, either. The pull on his mind he had felt in his dreams with Eddie was replicated, only worse, and he could sense the energy being leeched from him far faster.

All he could compare it to was a birth, as he pulled and pulled, until finally, Eddie’s head and shoulders popped through the gate and the rest of him slid out like a baby from a birth canal, naked as the day he was born. Refusing to waste a second, Steve powered to the surface, treading water with Eddie’s limp form in his arms as he gasped in precious air.

The water around him began to froth, but he couldn’t look down to see what was happening. He also couldn’t climb the ladder with Eddie, he just didn’t have the strength left, so he swam to the side, using everything he had to push Eddie up and over it. He managed to get half of his burden up the first time and then boosted Eddie a second time, rolling him away from the edge.

All he could manage after that was clinging on to the side himself, eyes closed, panting with the exertion as the once still pool rippled and spluttered around him. It shouldn’t have exhausted him like it had, but there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t even have enough strength to pull himself out of the water. He barely had enough to hang on, and that was fading. It was as if whatever was going on wasn’t quite finished and it was taking everything he had left.

He began to slip, and he couldn’t stop. There was blood in the water, he could just make it out under the lights from the house, and he was pretty sure it was his. To go through everything with the Upside Down and then drown in a pool would be a really shitty way to go.

Then, just when he thought he was going in, a hand came over the edge of the pool, snagging his wrist. It was his turn to be pulled as Eddie dragged him over the lip. He did his best to help, but it was more by luck than judgement that he ended up in a heap next to the other man.

“Thanks,” he slurred, only to be answered by a slightly hysterical laugh, but he was passing out, so he didn’t really care.

~*~

“Steve! Steve! Oh God, Steve, can you hear me?”

The frantic words and someone patting his face quite hard, dragged him back to consciousness. When he opened his eyes, it was way too bright, so he shut them again very quickly.

“Get him up,” he heard Nancy’s familiar voice instruct.

He didn’t have much say in the matter as he was sat up and someone wrapped him in something nice and warm. That’s when he realised, he was cold.

“Eddie?” he asked, opening his eyes again and squinting.

“Jon and Argyle are looking after Eddie,” Robin said from just in front of his face. “What have you been up to this time, Steve?”

“He was in my pool,” he said rather stupidly, but he couldn’t really be blamed since his brain was not firing on all cylinders.

“Eddie was dead, Steve, remember?” Robin asked him.

“Not dead anymore,” he replied.

“We noticed,” Nancy commented. “Let’s get them inside.”

With Robin on one side and, as it turned out, now Argyle on the other, Steve found himself hauled to his feet. He discovered he could just about hold himself up with help and the pair slowly walked him back to the house, one under each arm. They sat him on one of the chairs in the pool room and wrapped him back up in what was a nice fluffy blanket.

“Thanks,” he said, feeling a little more with it even though it was hard to keep his eyes open.

He watched as Nancy and Johnathan put Eddie on the other chair, also wrapped in a blanket and apparently mostly still out of it.

“Steve,” Robin said, crouching down so they were at eye level, “what happened?”

“I’ve been dreaming,” he said quietly, “of the Void. That’s where I saw Eddie.”

“Steve,” Nancy said, joining Robin and blocking his view of Eddie, which he didn’t really like, “you’ve been going to the Void, by yourself?”

“They were dreams,” he protested.

“The Void isn’t a dream,” Nancy said, studying him with one of her pinched little frowns, “it’s something else.”

“Felt like a dream,” he replied.

“What did you do when you found Eddie there?” Robin asked in a much gentler tone than Nancy.

“Vecna brought him back, but he was dying again,” Steve told her, “so I healed him.”

“You healed him?” Robin asked.

He nodded.

“How?”

“It was a dream. I wanted to so I did,” he replied. “I don’t know how. But then …” he trailed off for a moment, “then he was in my pool, and it wasn’t a dream anymore.”

“Holy fuck,” Nancy said, and he couldn’t help agreeing.

A dream was one thing, finding out that it was reality was completely another.

“How did I do that?” he asked, suddenly afraid of what it might mean.

“I’m calling Hopper and getting El over here,” Nancy decided while Steve had a mini-meltdown. “She’s the closest thing to an expert we have.”

“I think this situation is screaming for delicious chocolaty goodness,” Argyle decided. “Lovely and warm deliciousness in a mug.”

“Good idea,” Jonathan agreed.

“Everything you’ll need is in the first cupboard on the left and in the refrigerator,” Robin told their pot loving friend.

Steve was very glad when she didn’t offer to show him, because right at the moment, Robin was his anchor.

“How long were you out there?” she asked, perching on the chair next to him.

“Went out there about three, I think,” he replied vaguely forcing his brain to recall the numbers on the clock as he burrowed down into his blanket a bit more.

“Jesus, Steve, we’re not even in May yet. Now is not the weather to be lying outside half naked and drenched for seven hours,” Robin scolded him, even as she threw an arm around him and began rubbing his back. “If I hadn’t panicked and called Nancy when you didn’t answer the walkie, you’d still be out there.”

“Not like I planned that part,” he complained.

“Did you plan any part at all, Dingus?” Robin said, giving him one of her looks.

“Thought it was a dream, remember,” he said somewhat petulantly.

He was much happier now he could see Eddie again.

“Yeah, well all this is making me think all my cuts and bruises going away so quickly was more than a coincidence now,” she said, leaning into his side.

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he kept his mouth shut. The warmth from the blanket was helping him to wake up more, but it didn’t help with explanations. Some of the ideas floating around in the back of his brain scared him. When Eddie made a noise and finally lifted his head, Steve was very glad to have something else to focus on.

“Jesus Christ, Harrington Manor,” Eddie whispered, staring around in wonder.

“Hey, Eddie,” Johnathan said, putting a steadying hand on Eddie’s shoulder, “remember me from school? It’s Jon.”

“Byers,” Eddie said, “course I remember you. Did I really die, or have I been having an incredibly bad trip for what feels like weeks?”

“You really died,” Johnathan said in a sympathetic tone.

“And that means, Steve really put me back together and pulled me from there to here through a hole in reality in his pool and then nearly drowned,” Eddie said. “Holy fuck.”

Steve could see Robin glaring at him from the corner of his eye. He shrunk down a bit more into his blanket and hoped she wasn’t about to scold him again. Luckily for him, Argyle chose that moment to reappear with steaming mugs.

“Eddie, my dude,” Argyle said, “it’s nice to finally meet you. The gang told me so much about you after the pre-apocalypse apocalypse. You missed an awesome end of days.”

“Yeah, no, I was kind of on the other side for that,” Eddie said. “Don’t really remember much of it though, so I have that to be thankful for.”

“Yeah, I imagine that would have been a real bummer,” Argyle agreed and simply handed him a mug of hot chocolate.

Steve accepted his a few moments later and tried not to think too hard for a while.

“Hopper is bringing El, Joyce and Will,” Nancy said when she came back a few minutes after that.

Steve went back to not thinking.

End of Chapter 6

Chapter 7

#stranger things fanfiction #steddie #steve harrington/eddie munson #steve x eddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #eddie lives #stranger things #st:beyond-the-battle #fanfic #post season 4 #vampire eddie #hurt/comfort #vampire eddie munson #platonic stobin #psychic stuff #steve harrington has powers

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gustavgunnarsson · 1 year

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@ledaholland

Midnight. It was basically when his day was just starting, but for most, their days ended hours ago. But not all. No, some people considered the night to be for them and thus they went to party away their hard earned money. Those were his favorite people. They were dolled up and clean, intoxicated and weak, and they were out in the darkest corners without a care for their safety. It was practically a buffet just to walk down the street. Some time around eleven, Gustav had left the sprawling estate that him and his fanged family were now calling home, black jeans and a leather jacket clinging to his body over a black tank top and very expensive Italian made shoes that were a great conversation starter. Women often saw a well dressed man as a target for free drinks or a one night stand, some seeing him and hoping he would become their meal ticket in some way, shape, or form. Little did they know, they were the meals.

He had prowled the streets for a short while before ducking into a club, opting to bribe the bouncer rather than use his powers out of sheer laziness. Once inside, the black interior and flashing lights were like camouflage. No one could see him staring them down, But Gustav? He could see every single one of them. Within the next hour he had drank, danced, seduced, and lured away a pretty young redhead away from her friends. She was barely drunk, but clearly very horny, as they hadn't made it past the backdoor before she was clinging to him via her mouth. Being a man, Gustav enjoyed the special kind of attention she was giving, but the more her passion rose, the harder her heart pumped and the hotter and faster her blood ran. It took a lot not to feed on her then and there, but they were still freshly settled into this new country, and Gustav wasn't ready to flee it so soon.

Instead, he managed to pry the woman off him long enough to get into a cab, taking her all the way back to the castle. Her giggles filled the car all the way, the driver looking at them making out with a mix of disgust and envy. Gustav almost felt sorry for him; this would be his last night alive too, given the fact that there could be no witnesses that saw her arrive and tell the cops. The moment they exited the car, Gustav ushered the woman inside to wait for him as he made an excuse about paying the driver. She was out of view in under a minute and Gustav was free to snap the man's neck and quickly move the car out of view. He then hurried inside just in time to catch the woman in awe of their home. The next few minutes were a blur. Gustav lead the woman to one of the large sitting rooms, his eyes dark and hungry. She lunged for him, eager to kiss him again, and after one sweet goodbye kiss, Gustav grabbed the woman's neck, tilted her head, and bared his fangs, sinking them into her flesh and causing blood to fly from her. He drank greedily and deep for what felt like ages, only to stop when he heard footsteps. Looking up, he saw her. His 'mother', watching him, an unreadable expression in her eyes that he should have known, but women were impossible to understand. Dropping the woman, Gustav held back a smirk as he looked at the blood stain he'd made on the rug below his feet. " Sorry, mommy. I made a mess again, didn't I?"

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stressedoutcanary · 3 years

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Do You Ever Feel Like A Misfit (Everything Inside You Is Dark & Twisted)

Dick Grayson x Reader

Word Count: 3.5K (I don't know how tf that happened)

Warnings: Explicit language, Blood and Violence, lots of angst, Hurt/Comfort ✌

A/N: Guess who's back! Just for some context the reader is a magic user and her style is similar to that of Zatanna <3

•°•°•°•°

She’d have reasoned with herself that stealing from one of the most secure and heavily guarded safe-houses of a deranged sociopath was probably not the brightest idea she’s had all day. It never even made it on her to-do-list for the weekend, but here she was, running across rooftops, holding on to the stolen totem like her life depended on it, it probably did. The three assassins sent after her were no Lady Shiva or Talia Al Ghul but they weren’t exactly amateurs either. The deep cuts and two broken ribs she got from their earlier encounter were proof of that.

She glanced back and even though there was no sign of her would-be-killers she knew better than to assume they’d just let her be. They were sticking to the shadows, exploiting her blind spots. The only thing she was sure of was that they were still hot on her trail and would happily plunge a dagger into her back given the opportunity.

She was right. As of this moment she hated being right.

She caught the glint of the two sharp objects slicing through the air, hurtling towards her at full speed. A slight shift of her upper body was all she could manage as one of the daggers got embedded right into her scapula while the other one, fortunately so, whirled past her, slightly grazing her left hip. The impact of the blade on her shoulder made her lose what little balance she had left. Despite her best efforts, when the wounded shoulder made contact with the hard concrete, a loud, ear-piercing cry ripped out from her throat before she could push it back down.

Cursing under her breath she knew, she knew all she had were those few seconds of numbness and disorientation to get a grip and figure out her exit strategy. However, all her hopes started to sink as she saw one of the assassins come closer, appearing more of a blur than a person. Then again that was probably because of the nice, little concussion she got from her fall. The assassin walked over to her, unsheathed their sword and placed it right on her neck, blocking any and every way out.

“You were warned. The Demon’s Head does not tolerate treachery. We are here under his orders to bring back the totem along with the witch’s head; your head”

If she could, she would’ve rolled her eyes at the classic villainous dialogues thrown at her.

“Witch? Who’re you calling a witch Snow White? I’m clearly a sorceress, don’t they teach you the difference between the two in assassin school or something? Hell, I’d even let you call me an enchantress, though that name’s already been taken but you get my poin-”

The remaining words died in her throat as the sword on her neck shifted slightly. She knew she had extremely poor self preservation skills considering she’s clearly been instigating the very person sent to kill her, but even she wasn’t dumb enough to keep talking when the tiniest movement on either part could result in her having a severed jugular or carotid.

‘This is a pretty shitty way to die’

She thought back to how she used the last of her mystic energy to hide the totem away before her fall and how stupid that decision really was because now she could actually feel the agonizing pain coming from her shoulder. It started to spread throughout her back like wildfire, eyelids grew heavy against her wishes. Suddenly she felt really tired and the idea to close her eyes just felt so goddamn appealing.

‘No (Y/N) that’s the blood loss talking. Blood loss doesn’t get to make decisions’, she mentally scolded herself, still not breaking her eye contact with the person standing above her.

“Give us what you stole and we shall grant you the mercy of a quick death.”

That made her raise an eyebrow, “Ah, lemme think...the correct response here would be…”, she hummed, making a show of how hard she was thinking about the offer she was granted, “How about a fuck you? How would that do for you?”, she gave them a vicious grin, it was all teeth. They probably weren’t impressed by her response and it showed.

She knew there was no way out but she had promised herself once that if she were to die, that if she ever goes out, she’d be anything but a whimpering and sobbing mess. She was scared shitless, more so than she’d ever been while fending off the league, she won’t deny that but she would rather die than let them know that. ‘Well at least I got that ‘rather die’ part down to a T.’ she thought, eyeing the sharpness of the blade which was now raised up in the air

She felt bad for just giving up the way she did. Her whole life she was told to fight her way through the impossible, to attain the strength rivaling that of Zatanna Zatara, John Constantine and Doctor Fate himself. To be better than them, and there she was lying on the ground limp as a sword came down on her throat; all for a silly necklace. She would’ve huffed out a laugh if only her ribs weren’t broken, if only her body wasn’t screaming in pain, if only she had a way out. She didn’t. She was too tired, too drained, too numb to do anything else. Closing her eyes she stopped fighting, she let her growing unconsciousness claim her.

‘This is what you deserve anyway’, her barely there conscience remarked.

‘Fuck you too.’ she replied.

Everything went pitch black. The darkness encompassing her was peaceful, unlike the pain she had felt before. It was nice for a change. It sounded pathetic but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

•°•°

When she came to, the first thing she observed was the feeling of something soft against her back, next was a dull rhythmic sound which she realized was her own heartbeat. Though opening her eyes was a tiring task. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. She used all the energy she had into it and her eyelids fluttered open. She stared at the white ceiling and stayed like that for a few seconds; a few minutes? She couldn’t tell, but the pain was back now, not too much but enough to tell her it was there, to tell she was still alive.

She saw something shift in her peripheral vision and her body instinctively went stiff. Her mind which was blank before now ran in all directions.

‘Could be Ra’s Al Ghul… Could be worse’, she tried not to think about the worst case scenario, but she knew she had pissed off a lot of beings, beings far more powerful and far crueler than Ra’s himself. An involuntary shudder passed through her at the thought. That must’ve caught her captor’s attention as she felt the person move closer to her. Begrudgingly, she tore her gaze from the spot on the ceiling which she had been staring at this whole time and tilted her head. The man in black and blue who appeared, was probably the last person she had expected to see.

“Nightwing…”

Her voice was barely above a whisper and the hoarseness with which it came out it took her by surprise, but her body visibly relaxed at the sight of the familiar figure, at the sight of someone who would never hurt her.

She watched him pull out a chair from the desk nearby. He sat next to the bed she was lying on and gave her a soft smile, a smile that spelled one word ‘relieve’. She remembered how when she first met him two years ago, she found that particular smile extremely annoying, she had no reason to, but she did. What she couldn’t remember was when she had grown so fond of it.

“How do you feel?”

“Like shit.”

He snorted a laugh which made her pout. She was planning to point out how he was being mean; laughing at her when her response truly defined the way she was feeling, but any words she thought of were cut off by the change in his expression. His smile faltered, lips were now pressed in a thin line, face contorted in a way which showed his genuine concern.

“This is the second time, this week.”

That you almost died, he didn’t say. That I had to save you and bring you back from the clutches of death, he didn’t say.

“I know.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

“I know.”

The silence that settled, stretched far too long for comfort, but she wasn’t going to be the one to break it. She wanted to, but there was nothing she could say, that would make it better. Nightwing ran his fingers through the locks of hair, burying his face in his hands.

For the first time since she woke up, she took in his appearance, he looked disheveled, his suit was torn in different places along visible faint cuts, most likely he got them when he rescued her. She felt a pang of guilt rising in her chest. He risked his life for her, she knew he had done it before, she didn’t get it then and she didn’t get it now. Why would someone do that? Why would he? She was pulled back from her spiraling thoughts when he spoke again, exhaustion evident in his voice.

“Why are you so reckless?”

“Excuse me?”

She looked at him like he had grown another head. She wasn’t ready for this conversation but by the looks of it they were gonna have it anyway.

“What if I hadn’t been there today? Or any of the other days you almost died. What then?”

“My best guess? I would’ve been dead.”

“And that fact doesn’t bother you at all?!”

She flinched at little when his voice rose, but she stood her ground, at least figuratively since she was still in bed.

“I don’t know, should it?” She didn’t try and tone down the venom dripping from her words. Her words cut deeper than the wounds he got from the assassins; she saw it clear as day on his face. She let out a deep sigh but continued. She had to get it out and he had to hear it, that’s the reason she gave herself for the confession that followed.

“I don’t need your help, Dick. I don’t know what gave you the impression that I did but I’ve never needed it.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘Why was it getting harder to speak?’ “I don’t need you to save me every time. I don’t need you to risk your life for me and I definitely don’t…” She moved to sit up straight, her back resting on the headboard. She shifted her gaze on her open palms resting in her lap; palms covered in blood, in her blood, not very long ago.

“I don’t need you to care...”

The last part was a whisper and Dick was silent, so silent that for a brief moment she wondered if the man she’d come to care about even heard her, admitting something that was so painful for her to say out loud.

Dick moved to sit beside her, his shoulder bumping hers. He didn’t know where all this was coming from but he knew better to leave it unattended.

“(Y/N) I help you because I care about you. I always will, you know that.”

“Why? You have nothing to gain from it”, blinking back the unshed tears in her eyes, she looked at him with a hurt expression as if she couldn’t bring herself to understand.

“Why… as in why do I care?”, Dick tilted his head to look her in the eyes, trying to understand what she meant all the while making sure not to let his own surprise at her words show. She nodded not trusting her voice to not betray her anymore than it already had.

“I don’t care about you because I feel like you need it nor because I would gain something from it”, Dick knew he shouldn’t have to explain it to her. He briefly wondered what she had gone through to make her think that she needed to be useful to be cared for or that she had to need it to be cared for. He felt something pull at his heart at the thought; It was sorrow.

“I care about you because… well I do and there’s nothing you could or couldn’t do to change that. And it is because I care about you that I ask you to be better at taking care of yourself. Now I know for a fact that whatever you stole from The League’s safehouse definitely did not belong there, but I also know that whatever it was, it wasn’t worth your life (Y/N) It never will be.”

Dick grasped one of her hands, interlacing his gloved fingers with hers; she hadn’t even realized she was shaking until he did so. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to take a deep breath despite her protesting ribs. Opening the palm of her free hand she muttered an incantation with practiced ease

“Eveirter tahw saw neddih “, her hand glowed, the golden aura taking the shape of a object. When the light subsided, Dick saw the object in her palm as she rubbed her thumb across it, quietly leaning her head on his shoulder.

“It was this totem. It belongs to Madame Xanadu. Don’t know what Ra’s wanted it for though”, she shrugged as best as she could with an injured shoulder then continued, voice firmer than it had been the whole evening,“ She asked me to retrieve it in exchange for information on a girl I was looking for. The girl was somehow sucked into some other dimension, a mystic one and her mother was so desperate when she approached me that I just couldn’t say no. So when I say the Totem was important, then I want you to know that it really is.”

Dick shook his head at that. “Still not worth your life.”

“Dick…”, she sighed. It was all she could do at the moment because she was really getting tired from all the arguing.

“Do you remember the first time we met?”

“You mean the time I met the infamous vigilante Nightwing in a dumpster of all places.”

“In my defense I was badly injured”, she hummed in agreement.

“You smelled bad”

“You try smelling like flowers after falling from a building and into an open dumpster.”

His playful grumbling pulled a short laugh out of her. She was more than a little confused at the sudden trip into the past but happily accepted it as a change of topic. She should’ve know better than to think he’d have let the matter go.

“Anyway my point is when you saw me that day, you first instinct was to help me. You pulled me out and used your magic to heal my wounds. You didn’t have to. You could’ve dropped me at a hospital. You could’ve even walked away and pretended that you never saw me, but you didn’t. Why is that?”

“Because I thought you were handsome?”, she said trying to lighten this too-heavy-for-comfort conversation he was trying to have.

“Nice try. I know you. You saved me because you cared. You helped me and the Titans save the city more than once because you cared. It is who you are. I’ve seen you care about and worry over complete strangers without conditions. So why do you think that there has to be some kind of a barter system when it comes to you? Why think that I would want to gain something if I cared about you?”

“Because everyone else did.”

The words shot out from her mouth quicker than she realized. She had voiced her greatest insecurity to the one person who never had anything to add to it and Dick’s heart clenched at the implications of her words, ‘She has never been loved unconditionally before’ his brain provided.

The tears she blinked back earlier came back with full force. She felt two strong arms that wrapped around her, all the while being mindful of her injuries. Dick pulled her into a hug and that was it. She couldn’t control the sobs that tore through her throat, the pain in her body flared due her erratic movements. She knew once the tears started flowing they wouldn’t stop at least not for a while, but now that her façade had been broken she couldn’t bring herself to give it another thought.

He waited for her to let it out, let out all the pent up emotions she had. Now that he thought about it he had never seen her cry. He never questioned it, maybe he should’ve.

“I don’t know who’s responsible for hurting you (Y/N), God, how much I wish I did”, his arms slightly tighten around her at that. “I am so sorry that you have felt like you have to have your walls up all the time, even around me and I should’ve seen that, I should’ve realized that before but I didn’t and I am so sorry for that. I can’t undo the damage you’ve endured and I will not pretend that I can. What I can do is promise you that I’d never let you down like that, never.”

The words he spoke were clear. He didn’t try to tell her to put her walls down, to trust him when she had no reason to. He also didn’t need to justify himself or make such over the top promises but it felt nice to hear it. She had already stopped crying the moment he started speaking again but she still had her forehead pressed against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, it was calming in a way she couldn’t describe. She pulled her head back to look at him, and the honesty in his voice earlier matched the one in his eyes.

“Okay”

Hearing her response, he gave her his signature grin. It sent unexpected warmth through her, he always had that effect on her. She was sure she was just blushing at this point and was suddenly thankful for the dim lighting in the room.

She ended up composing herself rather quickly, jabbing a finger at his armored chest with her usual smirk plastered on her face.

“Now that you’ve made that promise, know this, Dick Grayson, if you let me down I will drop a mountain on you.”

“You mean that figuratively?”

“No I mean that geologically”, he waited for her to say she was kidding. She didn’t.

“Alright, alright”, He held his hands out in mock surrender. After considering the look in her eyes, Dick refrained from questioning the feasibility of that action nor did he want to question her magical abilities or intent. Last he remembered, Wally did that and that conversation ended with him being teleported to Sahara and Dick would very much like to avoid the same fate as his best friend.

Deciding that was more than enough exhaustion for one night, he got up from the bed and kissed her goodnight, informing her that he’d be sleeping on the couch so that he wouldn’t accidently hit her injuries in his sleep. She agreed and watched him slip out of the room before falling into the blissful sleep she had been putting off since forever.

•°•°

She knew Dick Grayson was full of surprises but the next morning when he put forward the offer of become a full time Titan, in front of her, she wondered if she fell from the bed in her sleep and ended up getting another concussion because he was so not making any sense.

“So let me get this straight, you want me to come live with you and your superhero friends, in the Titans freaking Tower?!”

“I was hoping for a little less yelling after an emotional evening but yes that is exactly what I’m asking.”

“Dick that’s just ridiculous!”

“Look, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

He looked like a kicked puppy which made her feel kinda guilty for all the yelling.

“It’s not that…It’s just there is still a lot about me I haven’t told them. There is still a lot I haven’t told you. I don’t see a reason why you all would want to trust a possible threat, let alone live with it”, she gestured to herself.

Dick felt like there was a deeper meaning behind her words, as if she was voicing her own fear rather than theirs but he trusted her enough to tell him about it when she was ready, on her own terms. He could wait till then but for now he crossed the short distance between them, going around the breakfast table till he stood in front of her. He grasped both of her hands in his and ran his thumb soothingly across her knuckles. He bent down to place a soft kiss on her forehead, and then moved to meet her gaze.

“(Y/N), I know you and I trust you and…It sounds silly considering I was raised by the worlds greatest detective but I believe that you don’t have to know every little detail about someone as long as you already know what’s in their heart.” Bruce probably would’ve disagreed but he wasn’t Bruce.

“And you know what’s in mine?”

“And I know what’s in yours.” His statement was firm and left no room for argument, not when it came to this.

“If you’re sure about this, then I guess...”

“Is that a yes I’m hearing?”, There was that smile again, seriously what was up with him and his smile that made her giddy inside.

In between thoughts she realized he was still waiting for a response so she nodded. Any underlying doubts she had about her answer vanished when she took in how happy it made him. As cheesy as it sounded seeing him happy made her happy. A part of her said it wouldn’t last long, but seeing her boyfriend hop onto the couch full of joy as he called his friends about the latest development in their lives, she wanted to believe otherwise.

°•°•°•°•

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robininthelabyrinth · 3 years

Text

Spite in Misery - ao3

(rather silly AU of Delight in Misery, only even more petty and passive aggressive, and also slightly more JC/LWJ)

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

“What do you want?” Jiang Cheng asked.

“Sanctuary,” Lan Wangji said, prim and proper as he always was, the perfect untouchable iceberg as always, except maybe for the small child he was holding. “For me and my son.”

“Wait, you fuck?”

Wait, that wasn’t the right question.

“Why do you need sanctuary here?” Jiang Cheng asked, utterly bemused. “There isn’t a single place in the cultivation world you wouldn’t be welcomed –”

Except here.

“– and anyway, your brother, his sworn brothers, and your sect would demolish anyone who even thought about hurting you. Who in the world could you need sanctuary from?”

“My brother,” Lan Wangji said. “His sworn brothers, and my sect.”

Jiang Cheng stared at him.

Lan Wangji stared right back at him.

And then he collapsed.

“No,” Jiang Cheng said to the unconscious or possibly dead body currently lying across the threshold of the Lotus Pier and the small feverish-looking child in barely better state splayed out beside it. “I refuse to take responsibility for this!”

“You will not say anything about the room I have chosen to house you in,” Jiang Cheng said. “You will not complain about the food, the amenities, or make any requests whatsoever. Do you hear me?”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji said.

Jiang Cheng ought to have expected as much.

“And don’t think this means I’m going to like you or anything,” Jiang Cheng added self-righteously.

“I despise you with every drop of blood in my body,” Lan Wangji said.

“…so noted,” Jiang Cheng said.

After a moment, he added, “I don’t care!” and stormed out.

After yet another moment, he came right back into the room where he’d put Lan Wangji – it was just a convenient room, not specifically Wei Wuxian’s room, and if putting Lan Wangji in there meant he could delay having to clean out all the personal possessions left in there and actually repurpose it, that was his business and no one else’s – and said, “Why do you hate me, exactly?”

“Do you care?” Lan Wangji asked. He was examining the small cot Jiang Cheng had set up to put the still-unconscious and therefore nameless child on.

“Obviously,” Jiang Cheng said. “Or I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji said.

Jiang Cheng waited a few moments, moments that grew longer and longer, and finally he realized – “You’re not planning on telling me?”

“I despise you,” Lan Wangji reminded him.

“Oh, you – you…!” Jiang Cheng ground his teeth together. “I’m the one giving you sanctuary, remember?”

“I came to you because you were the only one powerful enough to accomplish the task and spiteful enough to do it. I did not come here to owe you any favors.”

“Well, you’re going to owe me one anyway,” Jiang Cheng said, scowling at him. “You – you – ugh. Forget it!”

He stormed back out.

And then he realized he hadn’t actually brought the medicine that he’d intended to bring to Lan Wangji, so he had to go in and drop it off, but then he was finally able to storm away properly.

“I was under the belief we had agreed it would be best for us to see each other as little as possible,” Lan Wangji said, his voice even icier than usual – which was saying something.

“That’s right,” Jiang Cheng agreed, eying him warily. “I’m only here personally to drop off your medicine because it means fewer people know that you’re here.”

He’d thought that he would need to bring in a doctor for Lan Wangji’s injuries, but it turned out to be whip marks from a discipline whip and Jiang Cheng – well. Jiang Cheng knew everything there was to know about injuries like that.

Sure, he’d had to take A-Yuan to a doctor, he didn’t know shit about pediatric illnesses, but that was fine, it didn’t give the whole game away. Jiang Cheng was able to pass him off as some random sad orphan he’d taken pity on, which wasn’t far from what he suspected to be the truth.

“In that case,” and Lan Wangji’s voice was even colder, which how, “why do you live next door?”

“This was the only room available,” Jiang Cheng lied.

Lan Wangji glared death at him.

“Beggars can’t be choosers. I’m giving you sanctuary, aren’t I?” Jiang Cheng scowled. “Anyway, I told you that you weren’t allowed to complain about the room.”

Lan Wangji did not appear impressed.

“How’d you know I was next door, anyway?”

“You have nightmares.”

…right.

“I’ll invest in better soundproofing, then,” Jiang Cheng said haughtily. He wasn’t ashamed of having nightmares. After the life he’d lived, it was only to be expected.

“I don’t want to be around you at all,” Lan Wangji clarified.

“Too bad.”

“I don’t want you spending time with A-Yuan.”

Oh, so that was the real issue here. Well, in that case, the answer was still – “Too bad.”

“He’s my son.”

“He’s in my house,” Jiang Cheng said. “In my sect, in my lands, in my part of the cultivation world, which is the only reason you came here rather than literally anywhere else, remember? Because I’m a territorial bastard with a paranoid streak that won’t let anyone come look for you in here without hovering over their backs like a shadow, making it impossible for them to actually find you – sound familiar?”

Lan Wangji’s face twitched. “I did not say that.”

“You thought it,” Jiang Cheng said, and Lan Wangji’s silence proved he was right. “Anyway, I don’t care if you don’t like me spending time with A-Yuan. He’s one of the only people who can make Jin Ling laugh.”

“He wants to be his big brother,” Lan Wangji said. He sounded like he had swallowed glass.

“Okay,” Jiang Cheng said, not understanding. “Good for him?”

Brothers didn’t have to be biological, he thought, and that old pain tore through his heart the way it always did when he thought about Wei Wuxian.

“Worthless,” Lan Wangji said, glaring at him, and Jiang Cheng almost agreed with that assessment of himself – thoughts of Wei Wuxian usually had that effect – except of course it was Lan Wangji saying it, so naturally he had to disagree.

It was oddly reaffirming, actually. He might beat himself up as being worthless, useless and pathetic, a broken shell of a man who couldn’t keep a single member of his family alive, who had nothing and lived for nothing and existed purely for the sake of his sect and Jin Ling –

But the second Lan Wangji said that he was worthless, Lan Wangji who was wrong about everything, Jiang Cheng was immediately convinced that he was the best thing that had ever been invented.

Wait, was this how Wei Wuxian used to feel all the time?

No wonder he was always tormenting Lan Wangji.

“I brought you some books on physical rehabilitation,” Jiang Cheng announced. “No, don’t thank me - the sooner you’re better, the sooner you can leave.”

“It will not be too soon,” Lan Wangji said.

Personally, Jiang Cheng didn’t think Lan Wangji was going to be leaving for at least another year, maybe a few more years, not with that many strikes of the discipline whip to heal and his disordered qi to straighten out, but it was nice for both of them to see a destination at the end of the road in which they didn’t have to see each other all the time. Either way, he agreed, so he wasn’t going to ruin the rare moment of complete harmony by being persnickety.

“You should knock before entering,” Lan Wangji added, prissy as always.

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. He probably should have, yes, but he always had the ‘it’s my house’ thing to fall back on. This was the Lotus Pier where the rules of the Lan sect didn’t apply, and as far as he was concerned, that was reason enough to ignore etiquette. Anyway, Lan Wangji was here alone and healing just the way he’d been doing the past few months, what exactly was he going to be doing that Jiang Cheng might walk in on –

“Oh,” Jiang Cheng said when Lan Wangji attempted, with dignity, to extract his hands from inside his clothing, which was unfortunately not something he could do subtly. “Were you trying to jerk off?”

Lan Wangji looked mutinous.

“…were you failing to jerk off?”

Lan Wangji now looked like he wanted to rip Jiang Cheng limb from limb, even though it ought to have been clear enough that Jiang Cheng would only think to ask the question because he’d had a similar issue for a while there. The time after his family had died had been brutal, and he couldn’t even use getting off as a shortcut to fall asleep because every time he tried he couldn’t keep it up; it’d been awful. He’d been terrified that he’d broken his own dick somehow, which led to worries that he wouldn’t be able to have kids in the future and thereby fail his parents and ancestors in a brand new and yet unexplored way, which led to even more panic and even less sleeping. It hadn’t been until someone (he suspected Nie Mingjue, bizarrely enough) shoved a medical treatise about trauma reactions under his door that he’d realized it was a fairly normal aftereffect and managed to calm down a little.

Nie Mingjue had also given him so much work to do that Jiang Cheng hadn’t had time to even think about that sort of thing until nearly half a year later, at which point everything was working again and he’d completely forgotten it was even an issue until halfway into the afterglow.

Good man, that Nie Mingjue.

“If it’s a symptom, you need to tell me these things,” Jiang Cheng said, taking far too much wretched enjoyment out of the whole thing. He’d give Lan Wangji the trauma book, of course – he still had it – but he had to get his wins in where he could against the perfect iceberg, cheap shots or no. “As your current attending doctor, I’m responsible for your care –”

“It is unwanted but necessary. It is simply something that I must endure,” Lan Wangji said grimly, and Jiang Cheng raised his eyebrows.

The book had covered that, too, although that hadn’t been his problem, personally.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You keep getting hard, is that it? And then retraumatizing yourself when you try to jerk off, which means you can’t satisfy the need, which means you can’t solve the getting hard all the time problem, which in turn affects your cultivation and so your healing…yeah, I see the issue. You should probably get someone else to do it for you if you get really desperate.”

“I see no one but you,” Lan Wangji said through gritted teeth.

A problem, Jiang Cheng admitted.

Still mostly Lan Wangji’s problem, though.

“Well,” he said with the smarmiest smirk he could manage, “as your attending doctor –”

Lan Wanjgji threw a book at his head.

“What are you planning on doing once you’re better?” Jiang Cheng wondered.

“Why are you talking to me?” Lan Wangji replied.

“Oh come on,” Jiang Cheng said. “How can you say such a thing after taking advantage of me? I let you into my home –”

“You will not be able to rely upon that fact forever.”

“I will be able to rely on that fact for eternity,” Jiang Cheng disagreed. “I let you into my home, I hid you away from the world – which isn’t actually as easy as I make it look, just so you know! Your brother is practically scouring the earth –”

Lan Wangji looked like he’d bitten into something extremely sour.

“I’m sorry, did you think he was not going to do that? And recruit his sworn brothers to help him?” Jiang Cheng asked. “I thought the whole point of this was – well –”

“It was.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I do not enjoy hearing of it.”

“Listen, if you’re going to decide to torture someone by turning your back on them and disappearing without a word, you should at least have the guts to own it.”

“You speak from experience, I take it.”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Did you somehow forget everything that happened back then with Wei Wuxian?”

“…you were the one who turned your back on Wei Ying.”

Jiang Cheng laughed disbelievingly. “Oh, yeah, sure,” he jeered. “Because I was so well-known for my backbone when it came to Wei Wuxian. I definitely was the one to come up with the idea to throw him out of my sect and cut ties, yeah, definitely, that’s completely what happened. I mean, obviously, I always got my way when dealing with him, every time, that’s how it always was between us. He had nothing to do with it.”

Lan Wangji was glaring at him. “Not then,” he said, each word cutting like a sword. “The Nightless City.”

“You mean the time he arrogantly and completely without warning started a fight that got my sister killed and then murdered three thousand people, including some of the very few family members and friends I had left?”

Lan Wangji was silent.

“You do mean that time,” Jiang Cheng said, marveling. “Are you insane? Even if I wanted to, if I took his side then, I’d have had no claim later on to grab him as a prisoner before anyone else did. The Jin would have executed him for sure! And slowly!”

“The Burial Mounds –”

“He imploded in front of my face!” Jiang Cheng shouted. “I had to see – when he – he died! He was – he did – you don’t even know – no, you know what, I’m not talking about this. Not with you of all people; you hated him.”

Lan Wangji’s hands were fists. “I did not.”

“No? You did a good job of acting like you did,” Jiang Cheng sneered. “Always talking about how you wanted to drag him back to Gusu just because it would make you feel better –”

“Better than leaving him.”

“I did what he wanted! And yes, fine, maybe that was my mistake. Maybe I should’ve ignored what he wanted, maybe I should’ve dragged him back to the Lotus Pier and locked him in a little room for the rest of his life the way everyone knows your dad did to your mom – ”

Lan Wangji flinched.

In fairness, Jiang Cheng was exaggerating about everyone knowing. He only knew about it because he’d heard his mother spit it out at his father during one of their nastier fights, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to have known about it, either.

“– but stupid me, I thought he’d be happier being free and alone than stuck with someone he clearly didn’t want to be around him anymore! But what do I know? Maybe I should ask you, you selfish bastard. You’re the one in his position this time, you’re the one who’s doing the turning away – I bet you don’t even know what it’s like to be the one that’s not wanted.”

Lan Wangji stared down at his hands as Jiang Cheng jumped up to his feet, Zidian crackling to life in his hand despite himself, persisting even though he tried to suppress it.

“I’m going to go hunt down some demonic cultivators,” he said, trying in vain to keep his temper even a little bit and knowing it was a lost cause. “And then I’m going to bring them back here and make them scream somewhere you can hear it. You can chew on that with some glass for all I care!”

“You handled that last one well,” Lan Wangji said. It sounded like someone was pulling teeth from his head.

“You’re sick,” Jiang Cheng announced. “I will go get some fever medicine at once. Are you experiencing any other symptoms in addition to hallucinations? Or should I be checking for signs of possession instead?”

Lan Wangji was back to glaring at him.

“I don’t know what drove that sudden spurt of niceness and I don’t care to know,” Jiang Cheng informed him. “I don’t need your approval.”

Lan Wangji ignored him. That was more customary.

Also unfortunate, because Jiang Cheng managed to get less than half a shichen of work done before coming back into Lan Wangji’s room (not Wei Wuxian’s room) and saying, “Okay, what exactly did I do?”

Lan Wangji looked at him sidelong.

“Seriously,” Jiang Cheng said. “What did I do that was so impressive that even you approved of it?”

“The demonic cultivator. The last one.”

Jiang Cheng frowned, thinking about it. “The – stupid one, you mean?”

Lan Wangji stared at him, and then looked at the ceiling, long-suffering. “The one from Yunping.”

“The stupid one,” Jiang Cheng confirmed, and then he was ranting again because he couldn’t seem to stop ranting about it. “I can’t believe the idiot got into demonic cultivation as a way to make money! That’s just – it’s just – if I ever figure out who paid him, I’m going to rearrange their guts with my sword. Lousy rotten opportunistic…!” He coughed, realizing he’d gotten started again when he’d promised Jiang Meimei that he’d stop. It apparently got old after the sixth repetition. “Anyway, what’s so notable about that?”

“You accepted him as an outer disciple of your own sect.”

“Well, yeah. What else was I going to do with him? He’s clearly got some talent for cultivation if he figured out demonic cultivation without dying. It’d be a waste to send him back to be a fisherman or a dockworker or something.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“I’m not going to kill someone who got into demonic cultivation as a way to raise funds to get medicine for his sick mother,” Jiang Cheng said, rolling his eyes. “The idiot’s on tomb-sweeping duty for the next year to make up for having manipulated corpses the way he did, that’s punishment enough. It’s not at all comparable to the usual sort of amateur demonic cultivator, the ones that summon corpses to torment former lovers or murder business partners or that sort of thing – those are the ones I use as an example to warn everyone else. What’s the big deal?”

Lan Wangji said nothing.

“Fine, keep your secrets. Can you watch Jin Ling today? I have a – uh – important meeting.”

“Another woman that you have no intention of actually marrying?”

“Shut up and mind your own business.”

“No, but seriously,” Jiang Cheng said. “What are you going to do once you’re better?”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Lan Wangji said, his voice muffled on account of his face being firmly in his hands. “Go away.”

“Listen, we’re still neighbors, we still need to talk. There’s no point in being suddenly shy about it just because you’re still in the acceptance phase of grief in connection with the whole me helping you with getting off business –”

“Never speak of it.”

Jiang Cheng sniggered. He wouldn’t have pegged the Lan sect as having uncontrolled libidos, much less Lan Wangji, but apparently the situation had gotten truly dire. Anyway, really, getting mockery rights was totally worth an arm work-out and having to put up with Lan Wangji, the latter of which he had to do anyway.

“You really are taking advantage of me now, though! My poor virtue –”

Lan Wangji looked at him through his fingers. “You don’t have any virtue.”

“Really?” Jiang Cheng asked, suddenly curious. “I strike you as someone with a lot of experience –”

“I meant morally.”

“Oh. Hey!”

Lan Wangji rolled his eyes. “Pathetic.”

“Not as pathetic as someone who won’t answer a straight question,” Jiang Cheng said. “What’s your plan for after you’re healed? Are you going back to the Lan sect? Or start traveling as a rogue cultivator?”

“Why do you care?” Lan Wangji asked.

“I can care!”

“But you don’t. Not about my affairs.”

Jiang Cheng had to admit this was correct. “Fine,” he said. “I need a name.”

Lan Wangji frowned at him.

“For A-Yuan,” Jiang Cheng said. “It’s been a year. The kid’s as healthy as he’s ever going to be, and he’s old enough for me to shove him in with the rest of the younger generation now that we’re starting lessons back up – cultivation, swordsmanship, shooting, etiquette, all the usual. But I can’t register him in the class without a surname, and I need to know if that surname’s going to be Lan or if you plan on changing it to something else.”

Lan Wangji was frowning at him.

“I know, I know, you’re in hiding,” Jiang Cheng said. “It’s fine, it won’t give you away even if you do pick ‘Lan’. I can register him as a Yunmeng Lan instead of a Gusu Lan, the surname’s common enough that no one will suspect anything unless you make him start wearing a forehead ribbon, which I don’t think you lot do at this age yet anyway. But if you’re planning on continuing to hide from your family after you get better, you’re going to need to do something about all of that.”

Lan Wangji looked sour.

“Anyway, long story short, that’s it. Your plans, I need to know them.”

Lan Wangji looked even more sour.

“Well? What is it?”

“We will return to the Lan sect,” Lan Wangji said.

“Not that hard, was it,” Jiang Cheng said. “I knew you were just throwing a temper tantrum.”

Lan Wangji rolled his eyes.

After a moment, he said, “What do we do about Jin Ling?”

“What do you mean, ‘what do we do about Jin Ling’?” Jiang Cheng asked suspiciously. “I had to fight half of Lanling Jin for the right to raise him here, we’re not doing anything about Jin Ling – anyway, who’s ‘we’? He’s my nephew!”

“A-Yuan sees him as a little brother.”

This was true.

“They will not want to part.”

…also true.

“Moreover,” and here Lan Wangji looked especially sour, “I believe A-Yuan has taken you as something of a – second parent.”

“Well, that’s nice,” Jiang Cheng said. “He’s a cute kid. Anyway, don’t take it so personally. Kids just do that, they adopt any adult in the vicinity as their own. I mean, certainly Jin Ling thinks of you as…wait. Wait. Are we co-parenting?!”

“Mm. Took you long enough to notice.”

It had been a bad day, a bad week, and a bad month, and Jiang Cheng’s temper, never good, was on the verge of imploding, so naturally that was when he completely lost all self-control he might have had and marched over to Lan Wangji’s room to blurt out, “Why do you hate me?”

Lan Wangji’s hands stilled over his guqin.

“I know why I hate you, even putting aside the fact that you’re a jackass with the emotional capacity of a brick,” Jiang Cheng said. “But I really have no idea what I did to you to make you hate me.”

There were so many options, after all. He was a cruel, vicious, and bitter man – he was a terrible parent, unlikable as a friend, barely sufficient as a sect leader, and such a failure at connecting socially with anyone that he’d been blacklisted as a marriage prospect despite being handsome, young, rich, and powerful. There were so many reasons to hate him.

But he didn’t know which one was the one that made Lan Wangji look at him with disdain, even if he thought that perhaps there was slightly less of that these days than there had been before.

“I hate you because you abandoned Wei Ying when he needed you,” Lan Wangji said. “He was your brother, and you left him behind – more than that, you led the charge against him, resulting in his death.”

…that was a good reason.

Jiang Cheng wouldn’t mind being hated for that reason, actually. It was a nice change from all those people who congratulated him for having done the right thing: all those smug sect leaders that comforted him for having raised a white-eyed wolf in the family, the ones that said his actions showed that he had a good backbone and a righteous bearing, the ones that had the gall to send him gifts of congratulation on the anniversary of Wei Wuxian’s death to thank him for his contribution to the cultivation world when all he wanted was to be left alone to mourn…

“That’s fine,” he croaked. “Okay. Yes. That’s – fine.”

“Why do you hate me?” Lan Wangji asked in turn. “You said you knew.”

“Oh, that,” Jiang Cheng said. “Same reason.”

Lan Wangji stared.

Jiang Cheng shrugged. “I mean, I know you were always harsh on him when we were together at your uncle’s lectures, which was completely fair given how much he was always bothering you. But he really did try sincerely to help you when we were all the Wen sect’s camp, and in the cave with the Xuanwu – but after, in the war, when he showed up with his demonic cultivation, you suddenly turned on him even though he was just doing it to help. You kept telling him he had to stop, even though you knew he was doing so much for the war effort, and you wanted to take him back to Gusu to do who-knows-what to him…you even snatched him away during the battle of the Nightless City! I saw you. I was so afraid you were going to kill him, I completely lost my head. I looked for you everywhere – I really don’t know how he was lucky enough to get away from you that time.”

Lan Wangji stared at him.

“And then you didn’t even bother to show up to the siege of the Burial Mounds in person,” Jiang Cheng added, feeling bitter. “After I heard from the Lan sect that he escaped from you, I briefly thought that you’d changed your mind and let him go. I was counting on you to be at the Burial Mounds to support me in claiming him as a Jiang sect prisoner – I had Chifeng-zun signed on, if reluctantly, and with you leading the Lan I could’ve made a decent argument. But then you didn’t show, either you or your brother; instead you sent your uncle, and of course there wasn’t even any point in asking him, was there?”

“…I didn’t know,” Lan Wangji said. His voice sounded strangely hoarse. “I wasn’t informed. It was shortly after…”

He nodded at his own shoulder, meaning the disaster on his back. Jiang Cheng hadn’t asked how it happened – he really wanted to know, as in really, really, really wanted to know, but even he was aware that actually asking would be unbearably rude. Still, he was surprised by the timing of it. How had Lan Wangji managed to end up in the hands of his enemies then? Who had even been left to do it to him?

“Yeah, well,” Jiang Cheng said, shaking his head to try to kick away his curiosity the way he would something clinging to his foot. “You were still a bastard to him when he needed you, so I hate you.”

He frowned.

“Also, you hate me,” he said. “So I hated you back just for that. Though I guess, since your reason for hating me is valid, maybe I should stop hating you back for that?”

He considered it.

“No,” he decided. “You’re too annoying not to hate.”

“The same for you,” Lan Wangji said after an unusual hesitation.

Jiang Cheng nodded and, feeling oddly relieved at not having found a new basis for self-hatred, departs.

“So once you’ve reestablished yourself at the Cloud Recesses, we’ll exchange extended visits on a regular basis so the kids can see each other,” Jiang Cheng said, and Lan Wangji nodded. “A minimum of three weeks per season, whether in the Lotus Pier or Cloud Recesses, and preferably double that.”

“Agreed.”

“In the meantime, you’ll work on getting the trade agreement we hammered out through your brother and sect elders as recompense for the time you spent here.”

“Mm.”

“An agreement whose source you will be disclosing very carefully because the Venerated Triad will not hesitate to murder me if they figure out without adequate warning it was me that was housing you for all this time.”

Lan Wangji said nothing and promised nothing.

Bastard.

Still, after nearly three years, Jiang Cheng was pretty used to it.

“Okay,” Jiang Cheng said. “Is there anything I’ve left out?”

“Joint night-hunts.”

“Right, right, we’ll make a point of regularly going on joint night-hunts – wait, why are we doing that? You don’t need me to watch your back now that you’re fully healed.”

Lan Wangji’s gaze wandered.

“Oh,” Jiang Cheng said. “So we can keep having hate-sex on the regular?”

“…mm.”

“Why didn’t you just say so? It’s not like I’m doing anything else – or anyone else. Blacklisted, remember?”

“Unsurprising,” Lan Wangji said, like the bastard he was.

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, whatever. The set-up works, doesn’t it? I’m blacklisted, you’re apparently eternally pining for Wei Wuxian of all people – your taste is the worst – so who’s going to call us out on it? Go on, get out of here already. I’ll see you next month.”

“Well,” Jiang Cheng said, looking between the newly resurrected Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, abruptly made of an issue he had hitherto not considered based on Lan Wangji’s screaming body language. “This is. Uh. Awkward?”

#mdzs #jiang cheng #lan wangji #my fic #my fics #spite in misery #delight in misery #sometimes you get a silly idea #and then you write it

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hobidreams · 4 years

Text

january 1870.

what can you do? what power do you have?

pairing: joseon king!yoongi x reader genre: angst, drama words: 1.3k warning: this drabble contains a form of disordered eating.

moonlit throne index. this is drabble 28. start from the beginning?

“…uinyeo-nim…! …ease wake up…!”

“Can…hear us?”

The world comes back to you somehow piece by piece and all at once.

Words, hurried ones, pierce the haze of darkness that is thick in your mind, tugging you insistently to the surface. You think there are hands on you, taking your temperature from your forehead, checking your pulse, placing a pillow beneath your head. Part of you would like to keep your eyes shut for a little while longer, wanting to rest, but you cannot bear the worry in the familiar voices that call your name over and over and over. Wake up, you think, wake up.

Open your eyes.

In the dim light, the first thing you see is Scholar Park. His face has gone utterly pale, sweat beading down his brow as he frets, biting at a fingernail. But when he realizes you’ve surfaced, his eyes blow wide. He breathes an enormous sigh of relief that turns quickly into a half-delirious smile. “You’re awake!”

“S-Scholar Park…” You try to sit up and it’s a mistake. You feel aches all over; your limbs are slow as if they’re pinned down, made impossibly weighty with fatigue.

A warm hand lands on your shoulder, and you turn to see one of the younger uinyeo, Min-ji, by your side. “Please, stay on the bed, su-uinyeo-nim.”

You nod, settling back as you slowly blink, blink, blink. You don’t remember how you got here. You don’t remember what has happened to make you feel like this, like you’re hollowed out, weak. “But Min-ji, what—”

The door to your room bursts open. Wood scrapes harsh against wood, slamming into its frame.

Your incredulous eyes fall upon the king: the only man who could make such an entrance and demand every ounce of your attention.

“Jeonha!”

Immediately the other two in the room drop into deep bows.

“What the hell is going on here?” He stalks into the room, Eunuch Kim not far behind with concern etched on his features. “What happened?”

Scholar Park is slightly shriveling under the fury of the king’s glare but he manages to say, “we were walking to the library when uinyeo-nim suddenly collapsed. I immediately brought her here with the eunuchs, and called for another uinyeo to treat her. She awoke just a few minutes ago.”

“What?” He whips his head to the side. “You. Why did she collapse?”

Min-ji’s voice is so small as she replies, “I… believe it is fatigue b-brought on by m-malnutrition, jeonha.”

Then Min-ji is shrinking back too, for the king’s scowl grows infinitely at her words. He gives their meaning but a moment to settle in before he bristles. Bares his teeth.

“Let us be alone.”

“Jeonha…” Eunuch Kim starts. You can’t tell if he’s more worried for his charge or for you by the way he casts worried looks between you both.

“Alone.”

It is only after the door shuts behind the others that the king turns on you.

He walks to your bedside until he is close, but he doesn’t touch.

You stare at each other, your labored breaths the only sound in the space until he asks with a low tone, “you have not been eating?” Though he might sound angry, thoroughly annoyed in fact, you think there might be confusion there too. You are silent, so he continues. “Yet, when I ask, the cooks inform me that they have delivered your meals to you as I have instructed. So.” The syllable dips low, dangerous. “Who exactly is the liar here? Who shall get the punishment?”

You… did not realize he kept such a careful eye on you. How much should you reveal? What excuse could you come up with that could spare everyone?

“Not going to answer me? Then I shall have to call someone else. Jin-young. What would she tell me, hm?”

Pressing your lips together, you recognize his subtle look of triumph as you both know you could not drag the beloved cook into this. Your only option left is the truth.

“She… would say that I have... been asking for my meals to be uncooked. That I— I told her I wanted the ingredients to attempt to better my skills in the craft. But instead…” you scrunch the fabric of your skirt tight within your fingers. You take a deep breath, and then confess, “I have been distributing most of the grain, vegetables, and meats to those in town who are in need of it more than I.”

His scowl is so, so deep. “You... have been starving yourself instead?”

“I-I am eating as much as necessary, jeonha.” You don’t tell him that means two small bowls of rice porridge a day.

“Yet you collapsed.”

“I merely overworked myself today, that is all.”

“No. No, I do not accept that excuse. You collapsed. You fell unconscious, due to malnutrition.”

“But jeonha, the famine.” You push yourself onto your elbows. You need him to take you seriously, even as you wince from the action. “The people. The people have so much less than I. Often less than a single grain of rice to pass an entire day and much less any real sustenance to keep them alive. They— they are the truly malnourished here!”

“That is absolutely none of your concern.” Though he never raises his volume to a shout, his tone is no less intense, no less furious as he carefully articulates every word. Biting every damn truth at you. “You are not part of the royal family. You are not responsible for the people like this.”

Rare anger trickles into your veins as you fist your hands. You’ve backed down to him one too many times and this will not be one of them. “I need to do something! Am I meant to just watch them die, jeonha? To pretend that my life is perfect and lavish while I watch them suffer and struggle for want of nothing more than a hot meal?”

“Then would you rather die in exchange?!”

Your breath catches in shock. Your fury tampers down, simmering but not extinguished when faced with his overwhelming intensity, snapped at you as he wraps a firm hand around your arm.

Like a predator, he brings his face mere inches from yours. “I won’t hear of this anymore. You are not to do such things. Do not overstep your position.”

He squeezes you once before he pulls away and proceeds to leave completely, abandoning you to the absolute silence of your room.

You wait three pensive seconds before the door shuts before you let yourself collapse back onto the bed. What little strength you regained feels completely drained from you again. You didn’t mean for him to find out. You had no idea how he’d react but you never thought, never ever thought, that he would actually threaten your life like this. That harsh question repeats in your mind, the implications behind it more exhausting than any fatigue could ever be.

Silly you, to think there’d been a change in all these months. That things between you were progressing and getting back to a point where you could be comfortable with each other again. In the end, you were just deluding yourself. Letting yourself get caught up in the play-pretend that you could be the one to stand by the king’s side instead of the whore at his feet. (“What power do you have?” he asked you all those months ago, his voice abrupt, too coarse as he claimed you. You have none, as he has proved to you yet again. Not even enough to save yourself.)

#ficswithluv #btsghostie #yoongi x reader #min yoongi #yoongi angst #bts angst #bts imagines #bts scenarios #historical au #rain writes #moonlit throne #remember: there are two sides to every coin

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jackrrabbit · 3 years

Text

🤍 Haikyuu WIP excerpts

preview post for hq because recently i showed sara a list of my works in progress and she laughed at me and then made a dn joke like this is 2015 or something. we got:

🤍 communal property /// ushijima x f!reader x tendou 🤍 sunshower /// atsumu x f!reader x osamu 🤍 corporate ethics /// kuroo x f!reader

anyway these are all terrible first drafts and i'm not sorry. however i am very very into these pieces and if you're interested in seeing them finished, you should tell me fr fr

🤍 communal property /// Ushijima x f!Reader x Tendou

Summary: Tendou shares everything with Ushijima—his food, his dorm room, even the AVs he likes. Why not his girlfriend, too?

Tags/warnings: poly relationship in progress (only you and Tendou are dating at this point), mild suggestiveness ??, s*ze k*nk

Status: 10k words written (holy fuck lol) out of ~11k total? this bitch better get finished is2g

After the match, your voice is hoarse from screaming but you still manage to yell congratulations for your boyfriend when you meet him and Ushijima outside the locker room in the stadium. You’re pumped on the adrenaline of the game, so you don’t even protest like you usually would when Tendou picks you up in the middle of your hug and lifts you off the ground effortlessly. “How was I? Awesome, right? I told you we would beat them!”

“You did, you so did—“ Even though your throat hurts, you can’t help gushing about every rally, every soul-crushing block, every impossible spike. “—and then the guy on the left thought he was clear to shoot it but you just—“ You throw your arms in the air and mime hitting the ball down like a blocker. “Wha-bam!—and the look on his face! I thought he was going to punch you!”

Tendou laughs and lays a sloppy kiss on your cheek, just as thrilled as you are by the win. “You really liked it that much? I thought you weren’t into sports.”

“I loved it! You were so cool! I can’t believe I’m dating someone so cool!” You wrap your legs around his back and hug his face close to yours, reveling in the fact that this weirdo belongs to you wholly and entirely, that you get to have him to yourself (well, other than his roommate). “And I’m not into sports, I’m into you.”

Tendou smiles in a way that makes the sides of his eyes crinkle up and little red patches bloom over his cheeks, a look that says, I like you so much (Y/N), I like you I like you I like you, except he’s probably trying not to be mushy like that since Ushijima is standing off to the side.

You feel a little bad for ignoring him (no one likes being the third wheel, even if he never shows signs of caring) so when Tendou sets you down you turn to Ushijima. “And you! Holy shit, Tendou said you were good, but I didn’t know you were that good. The ball when you hit it was super loud—honestly, how are your hands okay? If I hit it that hard I’d probably break something.”

“My hands are fine…this is normal for me.”

But just because you’ve got them here in front of you and you’re still pumped from the exhilaration of the win, you can’t help grabbing Ushijima’s hand and flipping it palm-up to inspect. True to his word, there’s no redness, just the calluses he’s built up on his long fingers. “Wow.”

“You don’t need to worry about Wakatoshi,” Tendou tells you, grinning and then making a face. “He’s a monster, he can handle it.”

“No kidding. You’re both monsters.” You put the base of your palm up against Ushijima’s to gauge the size of his hand against yours, and without prompting Tendou grabs your other hand to press against his own. Tendou’s fingers are a bit longer, but Ushijima’s are…thicker, more solid. Your hands look like a little kid’s in comparison. “Can I be honest? Half the time I was thinking I actually feel bad for the other team. If I had to take on both of you at the same time, I’d probably cry.”

You’re (mostly) joking, but it’s still a complete shock when you see the side of Ushijima’s mouth curl up a tiny bit. You’ve known each other for months at this point, but you’ve never seen him smile until now. Half of you is wondering if this is some kind of optical illusion caused by the atmosphere and the dim light of the stadium cutting through the evening, but the other half of you enjoys it. You made Ushijima smile. You did that.

“Don’t sell yourself short, (Y/N).” Ushijima says, tipping his head to the side.

“Yeah!” Tendou chimes in, resting his chin on top of your head and folding his arms around your neck from his place behind you. “I’m sure you could take both of us. Right, Wakatoshi?”

So that’s probably a sign.

🤍 sunshower /// Atsumu x f!Reader x Osamu

Summary: [Kitsune AU] You find an old Ō-Inari shrine in the woods that may not be as abandoned as it looks.

Tags/warnings: Shinto religion, this preview is biased toward tsumu oops, yearning/soft vibes

Status: 3.9k words written out of 5–6k? total

Atsumu was the one who found you.

That’s how he likes to talk about it, that he found you, like you’d still be wandering around lost in the woods if it weren’t for him. Osamu thinks you would have found your way back home eventually but Atsumu likes it better this way, this framing that makes it seem like they saved you.

It’s hard for him to tell time linearly the way humans do but you mention once that you’ve known them for a year and that seems to fit. It’s spring now, almost barely tipping into summer, and it was spring when Atsumu found you. He remembers because of the way it was raining: light and tender, a summer rain early in the season, each little drop tapping off a leaf and then rolling into the forest bed to be eaten up by the grass and the soil.

Atsumu likes the rain, likes the sweet earthy smell it makes and the way the plants look so lush and green and alive, like they’d bleed if he sunk his teeth into them. He was out in the woods because of the rain ('Samu was in the shrine, as usual, attempting to set buckets under the millions of holes in the roof so the rainwater wouldn’t pool and rot through the wood underneath). But Atsumu was half asleep in a tree when he heard you crashing through the undergrowth, tripping over ferns and snapping every twig in your path (thought ya might be a bear, he tells you later, that’s how loud ya were) but he wouldn’t really have woken up if he hadn’t heard you singing.

(The odd thing is, you weren’t actually singing. You remember that day as vividly as they do: the warm, humid air making your skin feel sticky under your yellow raincoat; the tiny raindrops filtering through the canopy and kissing your cheeks; the ink feathering out on the damp xerox of the old map you found in your great-aunt’s attic so you could barely make out the “X” that was supposed to mark the location of the lost Inari shrine… You were cursing how stupid you’d been to go on a wild goose chase into the mountains with no cell service and no marked trail to look for a shrine that no one had seen in decades. You definitely weren’t singing.)

But Atsumu remembers it differently. No matter how many times you explain that you were just talking to yourself, when he replays the sound of your voice back then (reaching and lilting and falling, the way the birds talk to each other in the early morning, except the music of it was poured into syllables and words), it sounds like you’re singing. He wasn’t sure at first, hadn’t heard a voice that wasn’t Osamu’s in so many years that he gets tired counting them, but then he saw you push into view from between two bushes and he thought, a human!

A girl, too—it was hard to say at first because you were wearing that weird, slick jacket of yours, so bright yellow it was like an oversized flower blooming out of the grass, but then you tilted your head up to feel the rain on your face and the hood fell down and he knew. Not just a human, a girl! Atsumu wanted to yell for Osamu, make him come and confirm that there was a person wandering around not a mile from the shrine. A real person! Singing and smiling and wiping the rain off her cheeks (does that mean you like the rain, just like he does? did you come out to feel it too?) But he also wanted to surprise Osamu so he hid his tails and his ears and came down from the tree and asked if you had lost your way in the forest, since you were so far from any path…

When you think back on this yourself you’re amazed that you just went with him: a strange boy (man?) wearing a fox mask and traditional Shinto priest robes, which were somehow pristine white and red despite him having appeared from nowhere in the middle of a dense forest, who told you he had no idea what direction the village was but he could take you to the Inari shrine you’d been searching for…well. Maybe you were too surprised to be wary, or maybe you were just exhausted and lost. But you like to think you had a sense of it even then, the irrational belief that the boy in the woods was not just a boy in the woods.

Atsumu thinks you knew. Humans always understand, even when they try not to… He remembers, he took your hand that day in the forest and you saw that the claws on his fingers were too long to be human, and you said nothing because on some level you already felt it. Your skin was cool then, smooth and damp from the rain; he wanted to stop, run his hands up your arms, touch the places on your face where your mouth had been turned up at the corners and press his fingers into your cheeks.

🤍 corporate ethics /// Kuroo x f!Reader

Summary: [Office AU] The new junior marketing associate just happens to be Kuroo’s favorite camgirl, and he’s having trouble keeping his hands to himself.

Tags/Warnings: boss/employee, businessman!Kuroo as a reformed player, camgirl reader, this excerpt has a lil bit of 18+ content 👀

Status: 1.2k words written out of 4k? words total

Kuroo doesn’t watch porn.

It’s not, like, a moral principle or something. He has nothing against pornography. As far as he knows, it’s perfectly normal for single men. He just doesn’t like it…unless it’s you.

When he was in school it was easy. Being a teenager meant being so flooded with hormones that a warm breeze could get him up, and the adrenaline rush of winning a game was better than any big-titted porn actress faking moans into a shit-quality boom mic. Sure, he watched porn back then (what teenage boy didn’t?), but it was more out of curiosity than necessity. It was all kind of a mystery at that point, the way it can only be when you’re a clueless virgin and you and all your friends are too busy practicing for the next game to get girls.

Somehow Bokuto was the first one in their friend group to lose his virginity, and the memory of the dumbass self-consciously describing the experience has been lodged in Kuroo’s brain for the 10+ years since. “It was…I don’t know. She smelled good. You know how girls always smell good?” Bokuto’s hands twitched and his face was pink. “It’s just really…soft.”

Soft was right, Kuroo would reflect when he got laid for the first time a few months later. Soft, warm, wet. Sex was awkward at first, but before he knew it it was more natural than breathing.

It didn’t change much after high school, either. He didn’t get into volleyball for the groupies, but they didn’t hurt. There were girls when he played for his college team, more girls when he joined a business frat, so many girls he couldn’t keep track…they blurred together after a while. It didn’t take effort. You don’t need game when you’re 6’2 and you’re in the gym 40 hours a week, and you definitely don’t need porn.

So he never got into it. Now that he’s promoting volleyball instead of playing, things are more complicated. Kuroo’s never been the type who expects things to fall in his lap, but there are so many rules when it comes to dating in the real world. Good morning texts, anniversaries, flowers, parents. It’s exhausting. One time—seriously, just one time—Kuroo misses his girlfriend’s birthday to go watch a Jackals game, and the next time he sees her she throws her drink on him in public and keys his car. After that, Kuroo decides that until he’s ready to settle down there will be no more girlfriends. Which means no more reliable sex. Which means resorting to porn.

Which means you.

You, batting your eyelashes at the camera and biting the side of your lip. You, purring and mewing like a kitten. You, lying back on your pretty pink bedsheets in your pretty pink lingerie, sliding your hands between your legs. It takes Kuroo a full month to decide to pay for access to your website (Kenma’s unsolicited recommendation) but it takes less than five minutes for him to upgrade access to premium. You look like a wet dream—no, you look like the centerfold of every dirty magazine Kuroo managed to get his hands on when he was younger. Pristine and alluring and so deliciously out of reach.

And you make it so simple. No delicate emotional games with rules Kuroo never bothered to learn. No pretending to care how your day was. You untie the little bows on the side of your panties and lick your fingers and Kuroo just has to take his dick out and watch you. Getting off hasn’t been this easy for him since college. You’re a camgirl, you exist on his computer screen, and that’s how he likes it.

Which makes it a lot more awkward when Kuroo finds out that the only woman he’s gotten off to in the past…year, maybe?…somehow just got hired in JVA’s sports promotion department as his junior associate.

Your prim work blouse is buttoned up to the collar and your makeup is different, but he knows it’s you. You have to tell him your name twice because he’s too stunned to respond the first time, and even then he can’t summon up more of a response than a curt nod because his mouth tastes like dirt.

You smile a little awkwardly at his cool reception, and the hand you’d extended out to shake swings back down to your side. “Um, the guy at HR said he sent up my info yesterday…I’ll be working directly underneath you?”

Directly underneath me. Kuroo is taking a sip of his coffee when you say this. He doesn’t spit it out, but it’s close.

#haikyuu x reader #ushijima x reader #tendou x reader #atsumu x reader #osamu x reader #kuroo x reader #hq x reader #haikyuu #ushijima wakatoshi x reader #tendou satori x reader #atsumu miya x reader #osamu miya x reader #kuroo tetsuro x reader #haikyuu imagines

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cdroloisms · 3 years

Note

imagine though... a confrontation between sapnap and quackity when he finds out what he's been doing to dream...

ohhh man i REALLY hope we get smth along these lines soon ,, especially with that c!sapnap lore teaser ,, but at the same time im so SCARED ,,, c!fiances *holds gently while sobbing*

hope you enjoy this !! it’s a bit shorter than usual AJSDLKfas but yeah :D

tw: mentioned torture, abuse, violence, dehumanization, abuse apologism, emotional distress, toxic relationships, prison arc/pandora’s vault, c!quackity critical ? kinda ? they’re both unreliable narrators HsHSH

Quackity can’t beat Sapnap in a fight.

It’s a simple fact, and a hardly shocking one. Quackity knows that he’s lacking, to put it lightly, as a fighter, and Sapnap is among the most skilled people he knows on the battlefield, wielding a sword and axe and shield with ease. He’s a force of nature, a firestorm, and Quackity had admired him, once, and the blaze-bright fury that had swirled around every lash of his sword. Staring at the opposite side of his Nether-forged anger, smoke shaking through the air off the skin of his hands, the sight is far more intimidating than it is beautiful.

“Sap-“ he tries, wincing hard when Sapnap answers him with little more than an axe swinging down towards his head, only barely blocked by the shield he had managed to snag from a chest just before the fight, the wood creaking dangerously in protest. The axe in his own hand feels strangely heavy and unbalanced; he’s become much more comfortable with one in the last few months, thanks to his visits with Dream, but- he hisses, rolls out of the way of the next strike, shield hanging uselessly as his arm struggles in the aftermath of the last blow - as he’s found, here, using one against a defenseless, unhealthy opponent is much different to one that is hale and very, very armed.

“Sapnap,” he shakes his head, words reedy in a near beg, and sucks in a gasp that leaves him lightheaded when a sword lashes forward fast enough to catch the fabric of his shirt, carving a tear in the fabric. “Sapnap!”

“What?” Sapnap snarls, drawing back into himself in preparation for the next strike. Embers fall from his mouth at the words, smoke curling from his flared nostrils. His eyes, narrowed but still shining with tears, seem to glow golden. “What the fuck do you want, Quackity?”

Quackity’s chest seizes at the hatred that coats his fiancé’s - are they even fiancés anymore? - call of his name, thick and bitter and awful in a way that sends a spear of pain in his chest greater than the burning of his lungs from exertion. His eyes heat with tears that he stubbornly blinks back, and he pulls his shield back in front of him, heart in his throat at the sight of the enchanted netherite sword Sapnap has held between them.

“Please- just let me talk-“ he tries, scrambling back, and Sapnap’s expression darkens.

“Talk? About what?” The words are harsh, spit from the back of his throat in a spray of sparks and contempt. “About how you left me and Karl for months for some fucking plan to scam everyone out of their money? About how you ignored us completely, not knowing if you were alive or dead, for some harebrained shitty vision of glory? About how you’ve been apparently torturing my brother for ninety fucking days?”

“I DID IT FOR YOU!”

The words leave his lips without thinking, rising with a swell of acrid indignation at Sapnap’s self-righteousness - how dare he act like he was in the right, when he didn’t even try to check in once? How dare he pretend to care about the monster locked in the vault where he belongs and had only ever gotten the punishment he deserves, when he only visited him once? How dare he pretend to be a hero, how dare he act like Karl and him ever gave a single goddamn shit when Quackity had done it all for them? Las Nevadas, El Rapids, Mexican L’manburg, the revive book - it was always for them. He gave his entire goddamn world to them, carved his heart out of his own damn chest to give them as a gift and trusted them not to let it break, how dare they how dare he-

“You did it for us?”

Sapnap’s voice has gone deathly quiet, hand tightening on the handle of his sword until his knuckles turn white. Quackity shakes his head, breaking him out of the swirl of angry thoughts that had begun to circle his head, suddenly unnerved at the tone of Sapnap’s voice, foreign in its cold.

“Sap?”

Sapnap laughs.

“You did it for us-“ His sword disappears in a flash of light, palms going up to dig into the sockets of his eyes. His shoulders shake and Quackity hesitates, not knowing whether to move closer or step away, Sapnap’s laughter warbling and scattered and off. “Prime, you sound exactly like him.”

“What?”

“Let’s get this straight, Quackity,” Sapnap growls, stalking closer. “You didn’t do jack shit for us. Making your mark on the world was for you. Obsessing over a stupid legacy was for you. Getting your sick revenge on Dream, torturing him every single goddamn day-“ his voice breaks off, breathing ragged. “That was for you. That was because you wanted it. You’re fucking selfish.”

Quackity shakes his head, unable to think past the denial rearing up in his head, “No- no you don’t fuckin’ understand- I made a whole wedding venue, I made an Eiffel Tower, we were going to be great together, all three of us and George-“

“I don’t want to be great, Quackity!” Sapnap screams, tears falling down his face, hissing at the contact with his skin and rising in threads of steam, “I don’t want to be great. I- I didn’t- want anything but what we already had. I wanted you to be with us. I wanted you to come home.”

The words freeze in Quackity’s throat, a thousand scattered thoughts making themselves known but refusing to leave his lungs. Sapnap steps back, wiping roughly at his face.

“I- I can’t look at you right now. I’m not sitting around and waiting for you to destroy yourself like Dream did.”

I’m nothing like him, Quackity nearly shouts, but Sapnap turns away, already walking back on the worn wooden path. There is something dark and thick lodged in the back of his throat, impossible to swallow around, and for a second, Quackity wonders if it’s guilt.

“I’m going back to Karl. Don’t- don’t come back.”

#tw abuse #tw torture #tw dehumanization #tw abuse apologism #tw emotional distress #tw toxic relationship #prison arc #pandora's vault #c!quackity critical #tw violence #-> my writing #my writing :D #my asks !!#-> my asks

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thefanficmonster · 3 years

Text

Vulnerability

Karl Heisenberg (Resident Evil 8: Village) x Reader (Female)

Warnings: Mentions of blood and injury, Swearing, Spoilers for RE8

Genre: Angst, Romance

Summary: With the only person he’s ever truly cared about, the only person who can calm him down and force him to take care of himself and balance his life out is taken from him, it’s safe to say the takers are bound to pay.

Requested by Anon. Hi dear! Thank you so much for your request and I’m so sorry for the long wait you’ve had to endure but here it finally is - I hope you still come across the fic and take the time to read it despite the long time that’s passed. If you do so, I hope you enjoy it! Love, Vy ❤

“THAT BITCH DID WHAT?!“

The unlucky maid that was sent to Heisenberg’s factory as an alternate way to be killed rather than turned into wine cowers in fear as the metal-controlling man sends the majority of the objects around them flying across the room, crashing into against the walls in his state of uncontrollable anger that has the girl frightened to no end. Although, if she’s being honest, Heisenberg has every right to be furious right now. Who wouldn’t be after being told their enemy snatched their lover to use as blackmail.

And this poor maid was the messenger who had to deliver the news to Heisenberg about two days after the capturing of Y/N, Karl’s lover.

The two weren’t known to be a couple by anyone but rumors started floating around - especially among the rest of the Lords - when they kept seeing this woman around the factory and by Heisenberg’s side, sometimes even during the meetings of the Lords.

Leaving her out in the open and so vulnerable, so easy to be grabbed by the filthy, ill-meaning hands of the Dimitrescus, is a fault of his own he’ll never get over. He’ll never not regret not keeping a watchful eye on her at all times, even when she claimed she needed space after the two had an argument.

When that happens - though rarely, it still happens - Y/N tends to wander off, either in the village or in a complete separate part of the factory which is thankfully large enough for them both to enjoy their privacy without running into each other unless they want to. So, when Karl hadn’t heard from Y/N for a day and a half he didn’t think much of it, seeing as how she had a tendency of leaving him in silence for a day or two to cool her head and let him cool his and avoid further complications of their argument.

But when she didn’t show even after those regular forty eight hours of silence, Karl started worrying. And, as he’s come learn only minutes ago, he was right to do so - Alcina had snatched Y/N while the girl was walking around the outskirts, not far away from the factory itself. The girl barely had time to scream before being knocked out cold and dragged to the Dimitrescu castle.

Heisenberg should’ve known showing off his vulnerability so openly would only bring him headaches and heartaches - he knew having a vulnerability in the first place would be a huge inconvenience and a risk, especially when said vulnerability is vulnerable in and of itself.

“What does that bitch want?!“ He growls at the girl who’s gone as pale as a ghost, looking so tiny and fragile in comparison to the enraged man towering over her. He’s already taller and bigger than her, but this anger only adds to his huge presence and intimidating appearance.

“S-she told me to tell you her and M-Mother Miranda knew of...your plans. They’ll give you back the girl when you agree to lay off the plans and...“ The girl trails off, terrified of the reaction she’ll receive for the last bit of the negotiation.

“And?!“ Karl has no patience for reluctance and most certainly has no time to waste when the girl he loves is in the clutches of one of the people he’d want to drain the life out of with his own two hands.

“And, as proof, burn the factory down...with everything in it.“ The girl finishes, grimacing and hiding her face behind her arms when she does, expecting to be hit or screamed at or even killed. This man has never been in his right mind to begin with let alone now that the most important person in his life has been taken from him and is in grave danger.

The long moment of silence she’s met with surprises her. It’s gotta be the calm before the storm, she thinks to herself, slowly lowering her arms to look around in search of the man who she thinks has already left the room. But no, Karl is standing in front of her, wearing a smile upon his face. A menacing one. One promising that it is indeed the calm before the storm.

“Alright.“ He says in a scarily light-hearted tone of voice, one that is so calm it sends chills down the maid’s spine, “Return to your Mistress and report back that I agree to her terms as long as Y/N’s delivered to me by tomorrow morning.“

The maid cannot believe her ears nor her eyes but there he is - Karl Heisenberg, the most dangerous of the Lords, agreeing to drop his reputation in the water to save the love of his life. All with an unfaltering smile across his face.

* * *

“Mother Miranda? I’m calling with some great news to share with you.“ Alcina Dimitrescu smiles a pleased smile as she looks at her reflection in the vanity mirror before her, “Heisenberg has chosen to stand down. Yes Mother, you heard me correctly, the stupid man-thing has chosen the pathetic woman over his own reign which I’m sure he wouldn’t have had the chance to carry out anyway thanks to your unmatched power, Mother Miranda, but now it’s official. He’s taken the ultimatum and has agreed to all the terms we laid out for him. In exchange, he hopes to get the girl back by tomorrow morning.“ A reply comes from the other side and Alcina laughs a low, mocking laugh, “Oh, he will be receiving her tomorrow morning, he needn’t worry. I’ll make sure to send him the wine bottles she’ll help us produce.“ The other woman on the line laughs as well, filling the Vampire Mistress with a sense of pride and accomplishment. “I have no doubt the gift will find him we-“ The tall woman’s word die down in her throat when a sharp pain spreads throughout her chest, leaving her breathless and disoriented. The ache spreads to her head where the screams of her daughters echo like an agonizing chant.

“Mother! Mother please help us!

“Mother these monsters will kill us!“

“Mother, save us!“

The hurting mother drops the phone, attempting to get up to her feet, just to be knocked back down by the intense pain. The pain of a mother losing her daughters.

The daughters that were about to gruesomely murder Karl’s lover in the dungeons right below the castle. The three vampire girls were no match for Heisenberg and his army of lycans which he unleashed upon the whole castle, sending them in search of Y/N who he was quick to find in the dark torture chambers, beaten and bloodied but alive nonetheless.

“Darling, please, talk to me. Don’t do this to me, Y/N, please wake up.“ Karl ducks down in front of the seemingly lifeless body of Y/N, taking her face in his hands, gently holding her head up after he unchained her from the cuffs and contraptions meant to ensure her escape impossible. “Look at me, doll, come on. You’re safe now, you’re safe. Those bitches won’t live to see the light of day tomorrow let alone thing to bring you harm again.“

Although exhausted and weakened past the point of a lifeless doll, Y/N manages to force her eyes open and look into the concerned ones of her lover, Karl. “You came for me.”

“And what else was I gonna do, Y/N?“ He asks softly, gently smoothing back the hair stuck to her sweaty and bloodied forehead, “I would’ve come sooner had I known...“

She cuts him off, “But you didn’t, and that’s ok, you couldn’t have known. I knew you’d save me eventually. I never lost hope.” Her voice is coarse and low, each word painful to push past her sore throat. “I knew you would never let me die.”

“I could never, doll. I don’t know what I’d do without you.“ He presses his forehead against hers lovingly, allowing her a moment to catch her breath before carefully swiping her up in his arms, “Come on, angel, let’s go home.“

Y/N may be his vulnerability, but she’s also his greatest strength. Without her, he would’ve never taken revenge on the Dimitrescus and would’ve never been this determined to end Miranda’s reign and ruin her plans. Without her, he would be half the man he is now.

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shurisneakers · 3 years

Text

shut in [14]

Summary: When your high profile mission goes terribly wrong, you’re forced to hide in a safehouse with a man you’ve never met before. With seemingly nowhere else to go, you’re forced to work together to figure out who is trying to have you assassinated before it’s too late. (Sam Wilson x Reader, Hitman AU)

Warnings: anxiety, violence, guns, death, ptsd, swearing, abuse

Word count: 6.3k

A/N: last chapter you guys :’’’’) im too emo about a fanfic i s2g. there’s an epilogue but this is the official last chapter.

i really appreciate feedback so if you would like to, please consider dropping me an ask or comment ly guys!

Previous Part || Shut In Masterlist

You had only heard of the warehouse before, never actually seen it.

Its reputation preceded it. It was only mentioned in passing as a place for the worst of the worst.

It was murky and smelled like rust, concrete and rotting corpses. You had no doubt a few of them would be littering the place. A few tube lights shone over you graciously like a spotlight, barely illuminating the area.

The room you were in was utterly silent. The only exception were noises outside the door; loud shouts and clanging of metal. You assumed it to be people in the other rooms. Your assessment on how tight the ropes were coiled around you earned a few grunts and odd squeaks, but nothing major.

You were bound to a chair, of course, with knots you had used before on others. It felt like a convoluted form of irony. It was firmly nailed to the ground to prevent you from using it against captors. You were gagged; pretty well, by the look of it.

A noise from beside you threw you off track. A quick look to your left and you found Sam in a similar predicament. He shook his head slightly, implying that it was useless to find an opening. At least he was alive and breathing.

“Are you done?” A voice came from behind you, echoing within the four walls. “I really want to get going and you’re taking too long.”

You knew who it was. It was impossible for you to mistake it at this point.

“Don’t mind the noise outside. We’re just torturing a bunch of people to death.”

You roll your eyes out of sheer instinct. The footsteps slowly moved towards the front of the room, heavy and deliberate. The expensive material of his suit shone under the light as he edged in front of you. Only he’d wear Armani to a murder.

The dramatic fuck clearly rehearsed it.

“Hey Buttercup,” Ransone smiled, distinctly proud of himself. Your bite on the bundle of cloth haphazardly shoved in your mouth tightened. “Been waitin’ on you for a while now. Wilson’s no good company.”

You sneak a glance at Sam’s side profile and he looks relatively untouched. There were a few cuts on his face that you could make out under the harsh light but that was it.

“You can’t get out of those, if you're wondering.” He gestured to your current set up. “I told you, Sam. I save my warehouse for special guests. All your fun tools are gone. Took ‘em when you were brought in.”

As your eyes adjusted to the lighting, you faintly make out the presence of two men in the corners of the room, stiff as cardboard. His security.

“Oh! Except this.” He brandished the paper airplane you had brought with you in the utility belt. He’d use anything to potentially get a rise out of you.

“Gettin’ sentimental now, are we?” He tested the tip of the plane with his finger.

You prayed he wouldn’t destroy it. It had more value than he was willing to bet on.

“You must be asking yourselves why you ended up here,” Ransone mused, looking at the plane from all angles. “No need to worry, I’ll tell you.”

You didn't expect anything less from him. Everything about this felt cinematic; the inconvenient lighting, the men standing in the corner. This man oozed drama over efficiency.

“When I was just starting out, people warned me. Told me I wasn’t going to get anywhere, that we’d always stay in the same position because that’s how it’s been for all these years.” He tested the plane, holding onto the body sturdily.

“There were too many big names already. We were one of them, of course. My father did a good job of giving us a solid foundation.” He pulled his wrist back like he was going to launch it, only to never actually do it. He carried it through the air, simulating its flight pattern.

“You remember my father, don’t you? The guy who cut off someone’s finger because they didn’t finish the job.” Ransone really only had one story to tell about his father and he worked it to death. Other than a few handful of times, his father never bothered about his presence much from what you heard. He favoured the ones who were brutal and Ransone- well, he was a glorified theatre kid.

“Of course you do. He was an incredible man.” He laughed crisply. “But he had no real ambition. No drive. I told him we could have been at the top, the ones parents warn their kids about. He didn’t listen to me. He never really paid attention.”

His tone got wistful in the end, eyes distant like he was living the scene out in his head.

“So obviously when he died, I had the chance to really make a difference. Really set us apart. Ten Rings and Hydra had their own niche; they had some ties with the military and the government and whatnot. Crazy motherfuckers, all of them.” He shook his dead in distaste. “But Serpentine- that was closer to home. Same market as us.”

You wondered how long he would take to get to the point. The only distraction you had were the noises that continued outside. An odd gunshot here and there really pulled your attention away from the story.

“Serpentine with their stupid code names. They really thought they were all that.” He sounded embarrassingly like a bitchy teenager. “Who do they think they were fooling with the Norse Gods thing, huh? Naming your leader Odin, his wife Frigga.”

“I fucking hated them,” he spat, face twisting into anger. “Told them to watch out, that I’d end their legacy. They laughed in my face.”

He spun around, a wicked gleam in his eyes as he pointed to Sam, “That’s where you come in.”

Sam looked thoroughly irritated with the show that was going on in front of him. If he wasn’t gagged you had no doubt he’d have a few comments to pass. Ones that would get the both of you killed.

“I told you to kill their leader. One job. You fucked that up.” Sam recalling the story of his first mission flashed in your memory. “Let that old nutjob into your head and allowed him to escape. We didn’t know where he was for years.”

“I let it go because I thought Serpentine was done for. Radio silence after Odin disappeared. And they were, until a few years ago when I get news that they have a new leader. Odin’s son, the new heir.” He waved around his hands, mocking the last part of his sentence. “Word on the street was that he wanted to kill whoever murdered his mother in front of his eyes.”

“I thought that was hilarious. You know why?” He laughed humourlessly. “Because that was you. You were the one who killed his mother. You remember that? Your big mission?”

“You killed my mom,” he jeered, unmoving.

“I’m sorry. I had to.” Your voice was quiet. Your hand clutched at the hood of the car to keep your balance. “But I don’t want to hurt you. Go.”

“He wasn’t supposed to be there. No one had even heard of him. His brother’s too soft to take on anything like this. He’s some farmer in England now. But he was supposed to be Odin’s only son. Yet somehow, the only person who could have known this other son existed and actually seen him… was you.”

“Turns out he’s like you. A secret adoption. No record of him anywhere.” You didn’t blink, not once taking your eyes off him in case he decided to go wild. “He should have died that day. You were supposed to kill them.”

Only Ransone would justify killing a kid because it fit his agenda. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done it before, and though he tried very hard to shove his ideology onto you, you never complied.

“Goes by Loki now, another stupid codename. Trained by his father who this idiot let go of.” He gestured to Sam callously, “and mad about the murder of his mother that you committed. Serpentine came back pretty quickly after he took control.”

A particularly loud sound of metal slamming would have made you jump had you not been tied down. Ransone swung around in anger, loudly cursing at them for ruining his train of thought. He muttered some more curses under his breath before plastering a fake smile on his face and continuing.

“I’ll admit, he’s a sneaky one. But they grew faster than any other cartel. They somehow knew all our connections, all our targets, our key players. It wasn’t possible,” he shook his head low as he paced up and down slowly. You knew where this was headed. “Unless we had someone giving them information from the inside.”

He stops to look at you.

“I would have forgiven you, Y/N, I really would. You know how I am about second chances.” He looked at you, eyebrows upturned with regretful eyes. “But then you had to go and spy on me for two years.”

You could see Sam turn to you from the corner of your eye, assessing your reaction. You didn't extend the same courtesy to him. You didn’t have any reaction.

“We found out very late, of course. I taught you well,” he chided, his inescapable narcissism making an appearance once more. “But then we had to figure out why. Why you’d betray me and everything I’ve done for you.”

“I still can’t figure that out.” You wanted to scream at him, everything he had taken away from you, everything he forced you to be. “I treated you the best out of everyone I had. You had the best training, the best resources. You wouldn’t have made it anywhere if I didn’t drag you out of that shithole orphanage.”

You had heard of blissfully ignorant, but he was well beyond that at this point.

“Didn’t take too long to connect the dots. What, with Wilson’s great act of charity and your lack of better judgement, both of you managed to fuck up enough to screw me over years later.”

“I initially was only going to have you killed, Buttercup,” he admitted nonchalantly, like your life had no value. “But then we found out that Sam’s been lying to me for a long time too. Been hidin’ his friend a few states away.”

“It was meant to be,” he cooed. “Such a similar past. You could have met each other before, you know? Pierce wouldn’t be the first time you were at the same house on the same day.”

You couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like if you had known Sam earlier. Would you have been friends or would you have been forced to kill each other in his sick ‘survival of the fittest’ game?

“It felt poetic to have you both die together, you know? On a mission gone wrong. A full circle.” God, he spent too long planning something elaborate when he could have just put a bullet in your head and ended you the day he found out. Fucking weirdo.

“Made sure I sent you to the same place at the same time. Pierce was dead long before you came, the poor fuck. But then again, collateral damage. No mercy.” He shrugged. “Had everyone at the ready. You should have died that night.”

“But like everything you do,” his voice suddenly rose like a child throwing a tantrum, “you fucked that up for me too. Escaped with his stupid fucking car.”

“None of those useless agents could find you. How could they?” The beauty was that Ransone must have spent too long looking when you were basically right there, just miles away. “You didn’t go to one of our locations and Serpentine hides their safehouses well.”

You still remembered the relief when the door accepted your fingerprint.

It was a long shot but you didn't have anywhere else to go. You weren’t even sure that this house existed.

Another loud crash arrived from the outside with noises that sounded like more gunshots, making Ransone jump this time. Just how many people were being tortured here?

“Keep the volume down, you stupid fucking imbeciles!” he screeched, pounding at the metal door. The decibel reduced, but still continued on.

He dragged his palm across his face in exasperation, talking under his breath to himself. He shook his head before turning back to you.

"Oh, by the way, don't think about escaping. Got every last one of my best agents out here after that stunt you pulled at Pierce’s house,” he says offhandedly.

He takes a second to regroup, get back into character.

“So we released your pictures to the public. Can’t go very far if people are looking for you constantly. It was the only way we could get you to stay in one place.” Ransone raised his shoulders casually. “We had every lowlife out there waiting for one of you to show up.”

“We eventually had someone report Wilson in a town a while away from Pierce. I was making my way there but then you sent me your location on your own. Had men outside your house that night.” He paused, peering at the plane in his hand.

He finally let it go, watching as it barely went any distance before nose diving to the ground. Your eyes trailed after it, hoping he wouldn’t crush it with his foot.

“This is the worst fucking paper plane I’ve ever seen. The balance is completely off.” He stared at it in wonder, picking it up again and shoving it back into his pocket. You let out a breath you didn’t realise you were holding. “Anyway one of them heard you talkin’ about how you’re leaving the next day so we just got ready at the door.”

“Et voila.” He grinned, spreading his arms. “Here we are. Brilliant, wasn’t it?”

Unnecessarily long, but you weren’t going to complain.

“Oh, I forgot you can’t talk.” His mouth quirked downwards into a ‘whoops’.

He took a long pause right in front of you before his hand reached out to cradle your face. “I wouldn’t let those idiots kill you, Buttercup. You deserved better than that.”

He stared unnervingly into your eyes, looking for a hint of anything, any sort of remorse. He wasn’t going to find any. You wished he saw nothing but hatred.

“It’s why I had to kill you myself.” He sighed when you pulled your face away the best you could from his palm in disgust. “But I’ll do you a solid. I’ll give you a chance to beg for forgiveness. Maybe if you’re good enough I’ll let you go.”

You knew he was lying. He had no intention of doing that. He only wanted you to grovel in submission, plead for your life for a fucking power trip.

He ripped off the tape that was over your mouth, making you flinch at the burn. He pulled out the cloth faster than you could spit it out at him.

“Go ahead,” Ransone said smugly. His ego would outlive all of you.

“Him first.” Your mouth was dry and your lips felt chapped. You had clearly been knocked out for a while by then. You had no idea how far away you were from the original location.

“What?” His smile dropped to a frown rather quickly.

“Him first.” You mentioned towards Sam with your head.

“That’s cute.” He laughed, stopping when you didn’t join in. “Oh, you’re serious.”

“I’m not saying shit till he does too.” You were bemused, monotonous. You just wanted to get this over as quickly as possible.

“Fine,” he huffed when your expression didn’t change. “It’d be fun to watch him beg anyway.”

You hear the rip of the tape from his face, the scrunch of the material before he balled it up and threw it on the floor.

Sam shook his head furiously, forcing Ransone to take a step back swiftly before he hit him.

“Right.” Ransone clapped his hands together. “Let’s get star-”

He was interjected by another loud bang followed by a series of gunshots. Another victim massacred. He groaned in frustration, stamping his feet at the constant interruption. The universe was determined to not let him finish his monologue in peace, and for that, you thanked her.

You looked at Sam, nodding slightly. He gave you a small smile in return, calming the nerves you were beginning to feel.

“Where were we?” Ransone did not look happy; a vein was dangerously visible on his forehead. Now would not be the best time to do anything that angered him. “Yes, go ahead. Beg.”

“Ransone,” Sam began, exhaling lightly. “We knew.”

The smile on Ransone’s face faltered. “What did you say?”

“He said we knew,” you cut in. “You melodramatic fuck.”

Ransone’s grin faded abruptly and it was by far the most satisfying experience you had ever experienced.

“Yeah, we figured it out ourselves a while ago.” Sam had the slightest smirk on his face. “Y/N did, actually.”

“Fuck,” you cursed.

You could feel his muscle shift as he looked at you.

“What’s wrong?”

You opened your mouth but shut it again. How do you explain it to him without sounding utterly ridiculous?

“I need to tell you something and I need you to hear me out before saying anything,” you pulled away from him, shuddering at the sudden cold that enveloped you.

“I’m listening.”

“I think it’s Ransone. He’s been trying to kill us.”

“Why?” He didn’t sound judgemental, hardly even fazed, like it was a completely plausible suggestion. You couldn’t express how glad you were.

“The guy you didn't kill, if he’s the old head of Serpentine, then... I know his son.” Your mouth was dry as your mind raced to piece it together. “He’s the one I didn’t kill.”

“What?” Sam’s eyebrows furrowed, and you could see him trying to figure out the connection. “How are you so sure?”

You closed your eyes, letting out a deep exhale. “I’m going to need you to not react to what I’m going to tell you.”

“Okay...” he trailed off.

“I’ve been working with him for two years. Passing information on to him about Ransone.”

“Wait so that means-”

“I’m the spy. And I think Ransone figured it out. He wants to kill me.”

“You knew,” Ransone stated. He looked like he was in a daze.

Sam looked at you once before nodding. “If you would shut up and let someone else talk for once, we would have told you a while ago.”

“It helped that you confirmed details about Pierce’s death without us having to tell you.” The last conversation you had with him replayed in your head verbatim. “There’s no way you would have known he was dead before we got there unless we told you. Or you did it.”

“We knew you had agents outside the house. Kinda expected that when we gave you the address,” you shrugged the best you could, “Sam’s security cameras got all of them.”

“Made sure that one fuck behind the tree could hear us planning outside,” Sam added. “He wasn’t very stealthy, by the way.”

“Have you decided on a day?”

You nod, looking straight ahead into the darkness. “Tomorrow.”

“You sure? Our timing has to be right.”

“Yeah.” Your voice is coarse. “I’ll have to tell him.”

He nodded, leaning his elbows on his knees. He was too tall for the stairs, almost like he was crouching instead of sitting.

His voice dropped to a whisper like it’s a secret only meant for you.

“You knew you were going to be ambushed.”

“No shit.” You nodded.

The loud bangs continued outside the door but you paid no heed to it. The closer it got, the more your stomach jumped, hoping that more people you pissed off didn’t storm in. You had quite a list anyway.

“You knew they were coming,” Ransone appeared like he had gears turning in his own head, trying to add everything up on his own. “Then why didn’t you run?”

“Well, we kinda needed all of you in one place.”

“Huh?” He blinked, not listening to all the commotion that was going on around him. If he didn’t, he was choosing to focus on this instead.

“We had to take out all of you at once,” you disclosed, fidgeting with the rope to see if it would give. “Kinda knew you were waiting to kill us yourself when we gave you the location and nothing happened immediately. You’re too much of a sissy to kill us without backup so we wanted you in one place with the rest of them.”

You tilted your head towards the two men standing in the corner.

“You knew all this while and lied,” Ransone jeered, face twisting into something rather indiscernible; a nice mix of shame and rage.

“Not like we had another choice, man.” You just knew Sam was rolling his eyes. “You think I would voluntarily listen to you monologue like an idiot?”

“You did gag us,” you added, trying to buy as much time as you could. “That’s on you.”

The ropes were still tight as could be and the chair wouldn’t budge. Even your feet were too tightly tied together to do anything. It was what you expected, but that wasn’t going to stop you.

“Shut up!” Ranone’s face was hideously red.

“You rehearsed it, didn’t you?” Sam called out, taunt in his tone. “With the lighting and shit.”

“He doesn’t have to. He does one a week to some poor fuck who has to listen.”

You couldn’t believe the both of you were teaming up to bully a man who literally held the fate of your lives in his hands. It was something you never imagined yourself doing.

“How do people take you seriously?” Sam laughed. More than yours, his remarks seemed to be ticking Ransone off.

Ransone let out a guttural cry, knuckles so white you were afraid they were going to break. He whips around, stomping over to pull the gun from the hand of one of his bodyguards.

“Easy there, DeNiro, that’s not a stage prop.” Sam chided.

The concrete in front of him suddenly cracks loudly. He looked up, slightly taken aback.

“Next time it’ll be your fucking face,” Ransone snarled, waving the gun around like a maniac. You send a cautionary glance to Sam, telling him to back off. Ransone was volatile. He would act without thinking.

“Why did you kill everyone I was friends with, Vincent?” you asked slowly, trying to divert his mind.

He turned to you, a crazed look in his eyes.

“Why did you take everyone from me?” The more you asked, the more it became about genuine curiosity rather than a distraction from shooting Sam in the head.

“Take everyone from- none of them were going to last anyway!” He throws his hands up in the air angrily. “I was saving you from yourself. From the eventual pain.”

His face was desperate, and you for a second forced yourself to think from his perspective. He looked like he truly believed in what he was saying, like he genuinely thought he was supporting you. Like he cared. The thought that maybe he truly wanted to help you was the only way you could comfort yourself for so many years.

“If you were in pain, you wouldn’t perform. I was only pushing you to your full potential,” he continued, a wild smile on his face mixed with eyes rimmed red like he was ready to cry.

Your stomach sank, even though you hated it. It wasn’t about you, it was about what he could get from you.

There was silence. Even the noises outside seemed to have stopped, all waiting for your next move.

“You’re a sick, conniving fuck,” your words waver, and you hope it hits him as hard as it can, “And I can’t wait till you’re dead.”

His face morphed from one of helplessness to slow fury once more. Manipulative prick.

“Do I have to remind you that you’re the one tied up?” He wipes at his nose, voice returning to normal. “The only reason you’re alive right now is because I need to know why you let yourself be captured so willingly.”

Your incessant need to know everything stemmed from him and the paranoia he induced in you from when you were a kid. Everything you thought was wrong about you came from him.

“We told you, you overdramatic fuck.” Sam drew the attention away from you thankfully. You took a deep breath, stabilizing yourself.

“What, that you needed the team in one place to take us out?” Ransone asked, to no one’s answer. “You and what army?”

“Well, the one who’s been here for a while now,” you pipe up.

No one says anything. Pin drop silence reigns free.

“You said he’d be here,” Sam hissed at you. “How much longer do we keep this going?”

“He said he would,” you argued back, feeling the heat creep into your cheeks.

“What the fuck are you both talking about?” Ransone asked, but you continued to ignore him.

“What are we going to do if he-”

The door violently exploded off its hinges, sending debris flying everywhere. You clenched your eyes shut and ducked your head to avoid getting smacked in the face with rubble

The dust hadn’t even cleared before multiple rounds were fired. You flinched when your ringing ears hurt more at the sound of gunshots.

You struggle against your ropes, trying to get to Sam. They only get tighter until suddenly your arms break free. Your neck and legs soon follow as you shrug off the ropes that were cleanly sliced off.

Your ears were still getting used to the chaos when you notice someone humming behind you. It took a second to register that it was a fucking Britney Spears song.

“What took you so long?” You coughed, waving the air in front of you to clear it as you stumbled towards Sam.

“I wanted to make an entrance,” Loki said dismissively, following you. “I think I may have overshot it by a few seconds.”

You fell to your knees in front of Sam, quickly moving to untie the familiar knots. He lifted his head to look at you, a thin layer of dust covering his face.

“Are you okay?” you asked in concern, simultaneously untying as fast as you could. It was one you had used many times before; a complicated knot that guaranteed you wouldn’t have been able to make it out of the bondage.

“I think my leg’s asleep but other than that I’m good.”

You give him a small smile, thankful that he wasn’t hurt enough to lose his dry sense of humour. Your hand involuntarily reached up to brush some dust off his cheekbone. The intensity with which he looked at you had you swallowing thickly.

You snapped out of it quickly, working on freeing his legs as Loki took a step behind his chair to cut the rest of him loose.

“This him?” Sam mentioned to Loki, massaging his wrist to return some feeling into it.

“You can just ask me, you know,” Loki commented, but clearly not taking any offence.

“I’m sorry about your family, man.”

You didn’t expect Sam to say that, and from the looks of it, neither did Loki. He stopped for a moment, before continuing to cut the last rope.

“You let my father go,” he said, sawing the last part off, “and although I personally think you should have killed the miserable old bastard, he made it clear that he owed you one.”

The both of you stood up. You glanced around the room, noting how both of Ransone’s bodyguards were on the floor, bullet holes riddling their body.

He himself was beside them, lying facefront on the ground. Armani suit be damned.

“How many more are outside?” Sam asked, tearing your attention away from the bodies on the floor.

“All taken care of.” Loki put the knife back into its sheath on his thigh. “We made quite a commotion. I’m surprised he didn’t do anything.”

“He’s a little dense,” Sam remarked. Most of the noises you heard earlier weren’t just other victims being tortured, although you knew that it was still a large fraction of it.

“Should we go?” you asked, doing a quick sweep of the room. You found nothing moving among the pile of rubble.

“Unless you got anything else left to do.” Loki gestured to the large hole in the wall where the door was.

“I think we’re done.”

He simply nodded, spinning on his heel to walk out the room when someone yelled from behind you.

You all halted what you were doing, slowly turning to look at where the noise was coming from.

“Don’t take another step,” Ransone warned, a gun pointed straight at you, barely able to stand straight. He looked worse than you’d ever seen him. His suit was torn and he had a few streaks of blood down his face. His hair was tousled and unkempt, rougher than it had ever been before. “Or I swear I’ll-”

“Oh, shut up,” Loki interjected, firing a shot into Ransone’s stomach before anyone could even react. He returned the gun to its holster that you didn’t even notice was there on his waist. “He talks too much.”

Ransone staggered back until he hit the wall, knees buckling beneath his weight as he slid to the ground. The gun he pried off his bodyguards lay where he was standing previously.

You ignored Sam’s uneasy questions as you took a step forward.

You picked the gun up, cautiously making your way to Ransone. You crouched next to his body. He looked at you before looking down. You followed his line of sight, watching as he lifted his hands. They were covered in blood.

“How’d he know where to find you?” Ransone’s voice was more subdued than you’d ever heard him.

You reached over, slipping your fingers into his jacket pocket and pulled out the paper airplane that was flattened due to the impact.

“Hey, you can put a message in it. Maybe one of those button trackers, a microphone. The possibilities are endless.” He laughed, folding another one out of the limited supply of paper he had left.

You unfolded it, letting a small object, not bigger than a button, fall into your palm. He stared at it before realisation dawned on him.

“I knew you’d take all my weapons, but you wouldn’t get rid of this,” you disclosed, folding the paper plane back to what it was and gently putting it into your pocket. It was still salvageable. “Not if you could use it to hurt me.”

You watched him take a shaky breath, flinching when more blood rushed out of him.

“You can still help me, Y/N. We can get out of here together,” he rasped. “Think about everything we’ve been through. We can work it out. I love you.”

You involuntarily let out a strangled cry at the last part. It was nothing but a last ditch attempt to persuade you, pull you back in.

“Look- look at me. Buttercup,” he croaked when you wouldn’t oblige. “I love you. I’m your home.”

You finally look at him. Look right into his eyes, red rimmed and fading. You look for it, the adoration he spoke of. The care he promised. Anything to make sense of why he would tear you apart time and time again. The love he had for you.

You find nothing. Gray eyes look back at you blankly, desperately, in pain.

“You never were,” you whisper, standing up abruptly.

You raised your arm, pointing the gun at him. He sputtered out more half baked apologies, unaware of anything that was coming out of his own mouth.

You clench your eyes shut, pulling the trigger. He lets out a cry when the bullet lodges in his shoulder.

You take a step back, letting the scene imprint itself in your brain of him powerless on the ground at your will. If you followed what he preached, you’d have ended his life right there. No mercy.

But you weren’t him. And you didn’t ever want to be.

“I need to do something too,” you heard Sam say. You can feel him near you, brushing against you for a moment as he gently reached for the gun you held. You gave it to him, feeling him squeeze your hand in reassurance.

Ransone looked at Sam as he stood beside you. He fired a single shot into his leg, clearly hitting bone. You hear the same wail from before, mixed with sputtering as blood leaked from his mouth.

“That was from Riley. He says fuck you.” Sam let his hand fall again. “All yours, man.”

“You already know what this is for,” Loki said simply.

You chose not to look away as he shot the last round right into his forehead. Ransone’s head slumped over. Dead, glassy eyes stared beyond you.

None of you say anything. Just stare at the lifeless body in front of you.

“It’s really over, huh?” Sam’s voice is quiet, like he's having trouble processing what just happened.

You don’t answer. Only take a step towards him, and intertwine your fingers with his, continuing to stare at the corpse of your lifelong abuser.

____

The sun was beating down on you. You didn’t expect it to be evening when you stepped out of the warehouse.

“Where are we?” you asked, shielding your eyes from the sudden brightness that left you squinting.

“Middle of nowhere, I’d say.” Loki stares with disdain at the old building that looked worse for wear. “Would it kill the man to have a bit of taste?”

That reminded you. “Thanks for the house. And… sorry we showed up uninvited.”

“You didn’t do too much damage to it, I hope.”

You looked at him guiltily, mind flashing to the many bullet holes that decorated the back wall. “I’ll pay for the repairs.”

“Forget it. It’s of no use since everyone knows it exists now.” He dismissed with a wave of his hand. “So, Y/N. I guess that concludes our deal?”

“I guess it does.” You nodded,

Sam wraps his arms around your shoulder and you lean into him with a sigh, allowing the comfort his touch brought to seep into you.

“How’d you guys make a deal anyway?” he inquired. You closed your eyes, chest rising and falling steadily.

“Well, I was going to kill you at first,” Loki explained offhandedly, gesturing to you. “But then-”

He trailed off.

You remember, clear as day, when Loki confronted you in the early hours of the morning outside the park you went on runs. He had a gun pulled on you before you could fathom what was going on, before you could even realise who he was.

“But then?” Sam prodded.

“Did he make it?”

“He did,” you divulged the information you had found out a while ago. It was a messy confrontation to say the least but you got out unscathed.

“Saw something that I recognised,” he said dryly, eyeing you up and down. “We were both pulled into something we didn’t have a say in. Stuck, you could say. I just thought that it was a win-win situation if we worked together to kill that idiot back there.”

“So you agreed to spy on him,” Sam concluded. “You got revenge. What was your incentive?”

You look at Loki who just smiled at you. You return one half heartedly.

“I’d say freedom is a pretty big reward, wouldn’t you?” And it was. You couldn’t even begin to explain the weight that would be lifted off your shoulders. “I can’t guarantee you’ll have a perfectly normal life. Might have to change your identity, move around a bit.”

“Everyone’s looking for us as wanted criminals,” Sam voiced everything you were forgetting about in the surge of emotions rushing through you.

“I got some connections,” Loki said dismissively. You peered at him from under Sam's arm. “I can have it traced back to a dead mobster in a warehouse, no problem. If they think it’s a gang war there’s no way they’ll try to get too involved. Consider it a gift from my father.”

Sam nodded, relaxing slightly now that most things were taken care of.

“That’s sorted then.” Loki examined the barren land that surrounded you. “You’re going to need a ride back to civilization, aren’t you?”

“If that’s possible.”

“I’ll have someone drop you off. You got any place to go? At least to stay low for a while.”

You didn’t have anyone. The only one you had was the man beside you. Nothing was settling in at the moment, and you realised that it would be a long road until it did. But you had a shot. A real shot at something even resembling recovery.

Sam and you looked at each other before he turned back to Loki and nodded.

“New Orleans.”

Next part

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