#have i been unconscious or had a gap in my memory recently?

[somnolent-scout]

So uhh.. as everyone has probably noticed, I have not been feeling well lately.

Alongside being mentally unstable thanks to the various internet disasters I've been shoved into, I've been feeling very physically sick. For the past three days, I've woken up with a sick stomach and extreme queasiness. I have yet to actually lose it, but it certainly feels like shit. My throat has been sore, scratchy, and has a weird waste taste to it. My vertigo has increased with zero explanation or cause. I also recently popped (possibly dislocated) my hip while trying to use the restroom. My head and body have been overheating, but no fever has been recorded. I can't seem to drink a whole lot of water either. I don't know what's wrong with me.

My symptoms have only worsened over the past few days, and they have yet to come to a peak or settle down at all. I don't know what to even test for at this point. I don't have a fever or loss of smell. It's not COVID-19.

Idk

[maltmealo]

Chapter 3:analog_mannquin

Where did they come from?

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

Optimus looked at the tiny human, she was asleep again. Questions upon questions ran through his mind, how was she alive? If what she said was true then she should not be here in Jasper. Optimus watched as Ratchet measured the EMF around her, Bulkhead was standing to the side nervously tapping his digits together.

“Ratchet, did I hurt her?” he asked, leaning back on the wall, “Optimus didn't get anywhere near her head though! I just kept her from falling,” he trailed off, going back to staring at the floor.

“No, you didn’t, and there is nothing there! Like she just magically healed herself, there is not even a cut on her.” the old doctor said pointing towards her now-cleaned forehead. “This is weird, a human falling out of a ground bridge that isn't an actual ground bridge, saying she got hit by a truck, and then bleeding like this?”

Optimus shakes his head, staring at the human on the cold metal table, “I do not believe she is in league with the deceptions, if she was, she wouldn’t let herself be so vulnerable, it is unlike a Decepticon to risk death for a chance that we would save them.” Optimus says, staring at the human's energon on my hand, “Ratchet are you sure the human is okay? This is an obscene amount of energon loss for a human, and I do not believe it should be red like this.”

Ratchet let out a short snort, “Optimus, humans don’t have energon, they have blood, and blood is supposed to be red,” he said smugly, “The government human that comes here made me take a human ‘biology’ class like i’d ever need to use that.”

Optimus sighed and looked up at him, “His name is agent fowler, and even if he did make you take that class, it was useful was it not?” Ratchet huffs and turns around, mumbling a yes. Optimus shook his head and turned to look at the small human unconscious on the table, she wasn’t bleeding anymore, which was good. His mind races as Optimus recalls the fresh memory of what had happened.

“Optimus, there is an unusual EMF reading west of the base,” Ratchet spoke, pointing at the screen, “looks like a ground bridge signal but it's different, stronger.”

Optimus snapped out of his daze, the dull anger building up inside him stopping as he spoke. Megatron’s army had been destroying them, the recent losses weighing heavily on his mind. Optimus walks up to him, looking at the screen, the dull beeping of machines running cutting off his trail of thought. Optimus looked around, spotting Bulkhead, the rest of the team had gone to recharge, Bulkhead almost going with them.

“Bulkhead, you and I will go to find out the source of the EMF signal.” Optimus says as Bulkhead turns around and nods, “Ratchet, open the ground bridge.”

The ground bridge opens, Bulkhead and Optimus run into the ground bridge, running off into the desert night. A faint purple glow emanates above them, a rift in the sky had opened, the rough yellow sand almost glowing, reflecting the purple gap’s light. Optimus and Bulkhead stopped, readying for a fight. But none comes, only a tiny human limply falling to the ground like a rock. Bulkhead being closer, somehow managed to catch them.

"Optimus… what do we do?" Bulkhead asks, curling his digits around their body, water dripping into the sand. They looked like they just swam through the Pacific Ocean, pale and drenched.

"Are they breathing?" Optimus questioned, hovering his hand over the human. Humans need oxygen to survive, if they didn't breathe, they would die, he remembered that. Bulkhead scanned their body, nodding.

"They're alive, should take 'em to ratchet though." He confirmed, waiting for the prime to agree with him, "Right?"

Before Optimus could answer, the loud sound of energon guns firing drew his attention from the soaked human in Bulkhead's servo. A group of Decepticons was charging at them, the Decepticons had tracked the strange EMF signal as well.

"Ratchet, open the ground bridge at our coordinates," Optimus commands into his communicator, firing back at the Decepticons. He didn't have time to think of the potential consequences of taking a strange human into their base, if they didn't leave now, they would be overwhelmed by Decepticons. “Bulkhead, we’re bringing the human with us.”

Bulkhead nodded and fired a couple of shots at the Decepticons to slow them down, keeping the human close to his chest as he began to back up. Optimus fired his energon gun at the top of the ridge, making boulders fall in front of the Decepticons, slowing them temporarily. The bright blue glow of the ground bridge opened behind them, illuminating the silhouettes of the two giants. The two quickly ran through the bridge, leaving the Decepticons, who were now over the boulders, in the middle of the dark desert.

Optimus and Bulkhead, walk into the metal hanger, Ratchet waiting for them. He almost looked offended when they produced the human, his face changing from shock to horror.

“A human was caught in between the fight?” he asked, his voice wavering between fear and shock. He quickly snatches the human from Bulkhead’s servo, setting her on a way too big, metal table meant for the Autobots when they get hurt. A translucent blue light scans over the human’s body, their scans popping up on the screen behind Ratchet, as he turned around, he visibly relaxed, although a look of confusion was on his face.

“Ratchet, is something wrong?” Bulkhead asked, anxiously wringing his servos, the human resting on the table seemed to have dried off, only being slightly damp now, they were shaking on the table, still recharging. “Why are they shaking like that?”

“I don’t know, I'm a cybertronian doctor, not a human one.” Ratchets states, watching the human, “But the EMF reading is coming from this human.”

“But humans don’t emit EMF right?” Bulkhead looked to Ratchet for confirmation, confused as to why a human was giving off electromagnetic signals.

“Not to this level,” Ratchet remarked, gesturing to the screen, “This EMF level is comparable to high amounts of Energon, it’s a wonder we didn’t find them sooner.”

“Oh that's ‘cause they fell out of a portal thingy.” Bulkhead proclaimed, an excited look on his face, “Do you think this human has magic?”

“Bulkhead, humans don’t have magic, you’ve been watching too many of those human shows.” Ratchet expressed, slightly annoyed, “It’s most likely they’ve been exposed to some sort of cybertronian device that opened that ‘portal’ and left an EMF on them.”

Optimus who had been silent up until this point spoke up, “Will they be okay?” Ratchet shrugged and turned back towards the screen.

“She needs a human doctor to tell her that,” Ratchet stated, his face plate contorting into a grimace, his voice suddenly changing from concern to fearful anger, “Did you two not consider the fact that this human might be a Decepticon spy?”

Optimus inwardly cringed at the thought, humans were small and weak creatures compared to them, but the human government had proved to be able to do at least some damage to the Decepticons, he had never thought that maybe these small fleshy creatures would be on the Decepticons side. Although he highly doubted the fact that this human was one of the Decepticons, he was ashamed that he didn’t think fast enough to think of the possible danger he just put his team in.

“Ratchet, I made the decision to bring them here, and it seemed as if the Decepticons were investigating the portal as well,” Optimus stated, unable to tear his optics away from the human.

“Are you sure that they fell out of a portal? Not that they were just thrown there by the Decepticons?” Ratchet questioned, leaning on the table the human was on.

“I’m sure that they fell from some sorta portal!” Bulkhead yelled, agitated that Ratchet was accusing the human of being a spy.

“And then you brought them here? Bulkhead, what if they were a Decepticon spy!” Ratchet proclaimed, not looking for an answer.

“Ratchet is right, bulkhead,” Optimus answered, “But then again, they appeared to be in distress, and as Autobots, it is our duty to help those in distress.”

As Ratchet was about to speak up, a scream came from the human, who was now awake. Their gazes flicked down to the tiny human who was scampering away from the middle of the table.

The flashback ended as Arcee and Cliffjumper entered the room, greeting the three. Cliffjumper gasped as he saw the human on the table, basically running over and slamming his hands on the table, leaning in to get a better look.

“A new human? Did Bulkhead crush this one’s car again?” Cliffjumper joked as Ratchet pushed him away from the table gently. Arcee came up beside him and looked at the human, asking the same question.

“Why do we have a human on the table?” she questioned, keeping her partner from poking at the small human.

“Bulkhead and Optimus found her falling from a portal,” Ratchet answered gruffly, “Why are the two of you here, weren’t you guys recharging?”

“Not tired anymore, who are they?” he ask, poking the human's side, their body jolting in response. Optimus let out a small inaudible exvent, relieved to see that the human was at least responding in some capacity. Arcee swatched Cliffjumper’s hand away.

Ratchet relays their name to the two, “Fowler has been informed and we’re running their name through this slow human database.” Ratchet scoffs, smearing at the screen.

The beeping of computers overwhelms the noise in the room, Cliffjumper trying to continuously poke at the human as Arcee prevents him, Ratchet looking through the data on the screen, various individuals of the same name popping up, but none looking quite like the human on the table. Optimus walks off, entrusting the human to the good doctor's service. He needed to recharge, at least for a moment, not really tired but something pulling him towards the alluring haze of sleep.

[semisgroupie]

part two: the hole that replaced my heart

vampire!choso x fem. reader

wc: 10.8k

warnings: main character death, blood (blood consumption), age gap, monsterfucking, creampie, unprotected sex, a slap, this part is heavily angsty but has some smut, minor character deaths (none are named), biting, reincarnation au, mentions of god and other religious elements (angels)

note: all flashbacks/events in the past are italicized

series masterlist | previous | next

It had been three weeks since Kento last came for the interview.

During this time Choso did what he normally did, read and reminisce on the past. That’s the pain with immortality, the longer you live the more memories you carry with you. No matter if they’re good or bad, you just have to carry the burden and that’s what Choso hated most.

When you have motivation to survive and live on, then everything is worth it but when the motivation has depleted then you’re stuck in a loop of repetitive actions. Day in and day out, each breath that fills your lungs meant nothing if there was no motivation.

Today Choso just sat in his room for a little while longer after he woke up. His empty eyes flit over to the painting by his bed and a small smile found its way to his lips. “Beautiful.” The word was barely spoken above a whisper and he leaned in closer, brushing his finger against the frame then pulled back. “Absolutely beautiful.”

He brushed some of his hair out of his face and stood, deciding not to change his clothes since he wasn’t planning on leaving the penthouse. The neckline of his shirt plunged a bit, showing his chiseled collarbones and his pajama pants hung loosely on his hips. He slipped his feet into his slippers and trudged his way into the kitchen. He opened his fridge and took out a bag of blood, setting it down on the counter while he grabbed a bowl to put it in. Just as he had poured the contents of the bag inside, there was a knock on his door.

He set the bowl to the side and made his way to the door, he opened it and to his surprise, Kento stood at the other end of the doorway. “Hey old friend, sorry I came unannounced but I figured you weren’t doing much today.” Choso pulled the blonde male into a hug and patted his back before letting him go so he could walk inside.

“It’s good to see you Kento, what have you been up to these past few weeks?” He shut the door behind the blonde and made his way into the kitchen to grab his bowl and a spoon. Kento shrugged his jacket off and set it down, “I recently moved, my wife and I are planning to start a family. Maybe have our own white picket fence dream.” The blonde chuckled and glanced over at Choso. “Oh I’m sorry, did I interrupt? I could come back later.”

Choso shook his head and made his way over to Kento, “don’t worry about it, I’ll be quick and then we can start with the session for today. But go on, tell me more about the Mrs. and how wonderful your married life is.” Kento nodded and started talking about it all, Choso listened intently, nodding along and adding little comments here and there while he ate. While he spoke, Kento took note of Choso’s expression, while it wasn’t something that was being unconsciously done, Choso had a small frown on his face and any light that was just in his eyes had dimmed. It made him want to stop talking but he knew if he did then Choso would just push him to continue, trying to reassure him that everything was fine when it really wasn’t. So, he just continued but in the back of his mind he felt like he was rubbing his happiness in Choso’s face, he didn’t like it one bit.

Choso ate and then once he finished he put the bowl and the spoon he used into the dishwasher then made his way back to Kento. “Let’s move back to the living room, we’ll get comfy then we can start the session.” Kento nodded and made his way to the living room, Choso following behind. “I’m really happy for you Kento, make sure to bring the little ones around once you and your wife have them. I’ll make sure to stock up on toys kids like.” He smiled softly as he thought about it, kids, a joy in life he never got to experience. That opportunity was ripped from his hands a long time ago but maybe there was something hopeful written in the cards of fate, maybe he would get the chance one day.

The men sat down in the same seats they sat in a few weeks prior, Kento took everything out that he needed and glanced over at Choso. “Are you ready?” The dark haired male nodded and brushed some hair from his face. Kento brought the recorder to his lips and pressed record, “The date is October 19th, 2002 and I am here again with Choso Kamo. You can start whenever you’re ready.” He placed the recorder in the middle of the table and Choso started.

“So the last thing I discussed was my first meeting with Y/N.” He crossed one leg over the other to get more comfortable and continued, “so I was anxious the whole day. I could barely focus on my work because I kept thinking about her, thinking about what her response would be to waking up and seeing my note. If she was upset and never wanted to see me, I would have understood. I mean, what kind of guy would I be to take her virginity and then ditch her in the middle of the night? It’s not like she knew or could’ve known that I can’t go out in the middle of the day without being burnt to a crisp. But for the first time in a long time I prayed, I prayed that she would meet me at the fountain, I prayed that I would get to see her beautiful face again. Even if it was for just a second, I would have been the happiest man alive. I just wanted to see her and be with her, not just sexually, I just wanted to be in her presence.”

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

You read the note’s contents again then sat down on the bed. What should you do? You wanted to see him again but what if he wasn’t there? What if he just wrote that note to just make you believe he wasn’t some kind of asshole? As the questions of doubt swarmed your mind they couldn’t overpower the voice that was screaming at you to go, screaming at you to meet him tonight. So, you made the decision to meet him at that time.

You dressed yourself, deciding not to put on the corset since it would be too annoying to tie it yourself then made your way out of the bedroom. Just as you made it down the first flight of steps you heard a shocked gasp that made you whip your head around to the direction of it. “You naughty girl! I never would have thought that I would meet Miss ‘I’m never looking for a man’ after a wild night like this, half dressed, slightly limping, had a fun night?” You rolled your eyes as Satoru made his way over to you, Suguru following behind lightly chuckling.

“That’s none of your business Satoru, now let’s go downstairs and maybe if I feel like it, I’ll tell you.” Satoru took your hand and started pulling you down the steps, “come on, don’t take so long! I want to hear all the dirty details.” Once you three were on the ground floor, you told them everything and showed them the note, they looked at it then looked at you.

“You need to go, if he made you feel like that then you can’t let him go. You need to give him a chance and he’ll explain why he left.” Suguru spoke as he handed you the note and Satoru nodded. “I was planning on going but what if he’s not there? What if he just wrote the note to give me a false sense of hope?”

Satoru shook his head and placed his hands on your shoulders, slightly shaking you, “just go. Because if you don’t I know you’ll regret it for as long as you live. If he’s not there then we’ll trash his shop or just pay him a little visit.” You nodded and gave him a small smile, you clutched the note tighter and prayed a silent prayer, praying that Choso wasn’t messing with you, praying that Choso would be there at the fountain when the time came.

The next hours went by quickly, too fast for your liking. Your heart pounded in your chest so quickly and it only got worse as you made your way closer to the fountain. You wore one of your more casual dresses but that was only decided after going through your entire wardrobe twice. You knew you were a little early so you took a seat near the fountain, watching everyone as they walked past. You leaned over to an older man sitting nearby and asked him for the time and once he spoke the answer your heart sank.

Choso was late.

Ten minutes past eight, you sighed and looked down at your hands on your lap to try to hold back tears. You shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up, you shouldn’t have listened to that voice inside, you should’ve just stood home.

“Y/N!”

Your head shot up as you heard your name being called and relief washed over your body when you saw who called it out. Choso ran over to you with flowers in his hand, his hair was slightly disheveled from running and you stood up and walked over to meet him. “I’m so sorry I’m late, the florist was closed by the time I got there and it took a lot of begging to get him to open up his shop.” He handed you the flowers and you held them close to your chest, a smile growing on your lips. “Thank you, it’s beautiful.”

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

“I wish I could say how relieved I was to see her there waiting for me. I thought she would’ve left after seeing that it was past the time I told her. But at that moment I would’ve ran to the nearest church and thanked god until my face turned blue.”

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

You held the bouquet in one hand while he held your other hand, “I was thinking that we should go get dinner. I owe you a proper date after last night.” You nodded and held onto his hand tighter as you followed him to a local restaurant. You two sat in front of each other and Choso didn’t let go of your hand for a moment, “was work busy today?” Small talk ensued and it wasn’t awkward at all, something that you both were thankful for. Choso kept his eyes on you the entire meal, watching as you ate with a soft smile on his face. You wanted to question why he didn’t get anything for himself but decided not to.

After the meal he took you out for a walk around town, just letting you steer the conversation as you passed different buildings. “I understand if I’m stepping any lines by asking this, but why did you leave last night?” A small sense of panic filled his senses but quickly faded once he met your eyes, they were filled with interest and sincerity and it pained him to know that he had to lie to you for now.

“I had to open up the shop early for a shipment of new fabrics and I had some leftover work I needed to finish. For some reason it filled my head and disrupted my sleep so I had to leave. I didn’t want to leave but if I didn’t finish that work then I would have had to deal with a lecture from my most uptight customer. I am so sorry for leaving you last night, so sorry.” He looked down at you as your eyes scanned his, trying to see if there was anything he was hiding. You took his hand in one of yours and gently squeezed it as a smile grew on your face. Another wave of relief washed over him, he couldn’t imagine conjuring another lie for you, he was already surrounded by a web of them like a fly caught on the sticky netting.

He held your hand in his as you two walked with no particular destination to go. He could walk to the next country and continue on if you were by his side. You gave him a sense of comfort and a sense of humanity, he didn’t want to let that or you go. You two made your way to a local park, “there’s a pond here that I love to visit. I like to just sit by and watch the water ripple as the wind pushes it.” You looked into the open greenery as you spoke, your eyes lighting up due to a combination of the moonlight hitting you and thinking about going to the pond, showing him a more personal side of you. “Sounds perfect, lead the way, beautiful.” Heat rose to your cheeks at the name and you walked with him to the pond, the moonlight reflected on the body of water perfectly as you moved to sit with him on a bench nearby.

He still held your hand in his and he moved closer to you so your knees touched as you sat, “I’ve always loved coming here since I was a little girl. A friend of mine taught me how to skip rocks here and there’s many more memories I’ve been able to make here. It’s also been a place of protection and it’s pulled me away from any restless nights. Just being able to sit by the water and just think about everything is something that I’ll always cherish about this pond.” Another smile graced your lips as you spoke and Choso felt himself melt just by looking at you, he was honored to hear you speak about the importance of this pond, he didn’t deserve to share this moment with you, he didn’t even feel like he deserved to be with you. You looked at the water while he just stared at you then you turned your attention away to meet his eyes. “Is everything okay?” Your eyebrows furrowed slightly as you asked the question but quickly relaxed once he nodded.

“Mhm, I’m fine. You just look so beautiful, I couldn’t help but stare.” The genuine tone of his voice flustered you completely and you pressed your face to his arm. “You can’t keep saying things like that,” you whined, your words slightly muffled by the fabric of his shirt. He chuckled at your reaction and moved his free hand to hook two fingers under your chin and lifted your head up, “why can’t I? I’ve always thought it was important to tell the truth so I’m just voicing my truth.” You looked at him with big eyes, the moonlight reflected off the side of his face as he looked at you, highlighting his chiseled features, making him even more handsome than he already was. He moved his thumb to run against your bottom lip then leaned in until his lips met yours. It mirrored the first kiss you two shared the night before, soft and passionate all at once.

He caressed your cheek with the thumb that ran across your bottom lip just mere seconds ago then pulled back to break the kiss. “I wanted to do that all night.” You smiled and leaned in to peck his lips softly, “I did too, why didn’t you do it sooner?”

He chuckled and kissed you again before mumbling against your lips, “was just waiting for the perfect moment.” He held your face in his hands as your lips molded against his, it was perfect, you were perfect. It was your turn to break the kiss and you rested your forehead against his. “I want to keep seeing you, Choso. I enjoy how I am with you, even in such a small time.” His heart jumped in his chest at your words, your honesty and he moved back a bit so he could catch your gaze.

“I want the same. I haven’t felt like this before and I want to keep this feeling. So every night we’ll meet at the same spot as tonight and enjoy each other’s company.” He smiled softly and you wanted to question him. Why did he only want to see you at night? But you answered your own question by remembering that he owned his own business, maybe night is the only time he’s free. But deep down you wondered if there was someone else in the picture, someone else in his life, that made him want to see you late. You didn’t want to be the other woman in his life, you wanted to be the only woman. You were so wrapped up in your thoughts you didn’t notice that he caught on, probably reading every single question, doubt, and thought in your head. “Hey,” he gripped your chin gently and made you look at him, “what’s going on in that pretty head of yours?”

Heat rose to your cheeks as you met his eyes and you shook your head, “sorry, something popped into my head and I got a little distracted.” It wasn’t a complete lie, just a general umbrella of the truth. He nodded and leaned down to kiss you softly then pulled back slightly. “It’s getting late, I’ll take you back home.” You nodded and pressed your lips against his once more before pulling back completely.

Maybe one day you’ll get the courage to voice your thoughts, just not today.

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

“I felt so fucking giddy once I dropped her off. I was excited for what was to come and what the future would hold for us. It was exciting and nerve wracking all at once.” A smile made its way onto his face as he spoke and it made Kento smile softly. “Everything was going beautifully, we met every single night and I felt some form of relief since I didn’t have to explain myself to her. But I knew something was up, there was something lingering in the back of her mind during our peaceful moments of silence. There were questions unanswered and questions that I knew she was too scared to ask. Then around three months into dating she finally asked them.”

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

You two walked hand in hand by the pond he took you on your first date. You loved being with him but you wanted to walk out with him in the daylight, you wanted to show your relationship off like all the other couples. This felt like you two were hiding something and you didn’t like it. Choso noticed that there was something up but he didn’t want to force you to bring anything up unless you wanted to, so he decided to wait.

“Choso, can I ask you something?” You stopped in your tracks and looked up at him, his hair was pulled back loosely so strands of his hair framed his perfectly sculpted face. “Of course you can, darling. What’s on your mind?”

“Why do we always have to meet at night? I love spending time with you but I don’t want to be someone’s secret. I can’t be someone’s secret.” You sighed as he chuckled and scratched the back of his neck, expecting him to tell you he had a wife and kids. Expecting him to break your heart.

“I knew you were going to ask me this but no planning could ever help me figure out how to respond so I’ll just tell you the truth.” You waited with bated breaths for his response. “I can’t go out during the day because the sun would kill me. It would burn my skin like I was put in an incinerator. I can only go out after the sun sets because the darkness protects me. I’m a vampire, my love.” Your eyes widened at his words and you moved back from him. Nothing in his eyes showed you that he was deceiving you but maybe he was that good at lying.

“Are you fucking kidding me? You’re going to look me in the eye and tell me that bullshit?” You were beyond furious, how could he say that and expect you to believe him? “I would rather you just say that I was your mistress. Just forget about me, forget I exist, forget about everything that has to do with me.” You turned your back to him and made your first step to walk away from him until he tried to stop you by grabbing your wrist.

You tried to hold yourself back from slapping him, you really did try but the second he made contact with you, you couldn’t hold yourself back anymore. You turned to him and your open hand collided with his cheek. The next moments were a blur and the next thing you knew you were pinned against a tree.

That was when you saw it, his eyes were practically glowing red as he stared you down. “What more do I need to do to show you? What possible desire would I have to lie to you?” Your eyes moved down to look at his mouth as he spoke, you saw his sharpened canines, sharper than the finest blade. Your chest rose and fell, all feelings of anger and frustration were swapped with curiosity and fear. He shut his eyes and dropped his head to try to collect himself, trying to calm down before doing something he would regret.

It was like your throat was closing in on itself, no words could escape you in the moment but your mind ran with questions. He lifted his head and everything was back to normal, “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry. I didn’t want you to ever see me like this.” He let go of you and took a step back. “I’ll leave you be, I know there’s no way you’d want to be associated with a monster like me. I’ve done so many things in my life that’s deplorable, I’ve ruined so many people's lives and I don’t want to do that to you. You’re so sweet, so beautiful, so pure, I can’t taint you. I couldn’t live with myself if I did.”

His voice broke a bit as he spoke and you slowly reached out to him, holding onto the sleeve of his shirt. “No.” It was all you could choke out. You gripped the sleeve of his shirt tightly and pulled yourself to him, burying your face in his chest while you shook your head and repeated that word. Letting it get swallowed into the fabric. He wrapped his arms around you and held you until you lifted your head up. “You won’t taint me, I won’t let you leave and you’re not a monster. I don’t know what you did but I know you must’ve done it to survive. I can’t let you leave, you’ve made me so happy and made me feel so loved. I don’t want to lose this feeling and I don’t want to lose you. Please don’t go.”

He moved one hand to cup your cheek and wiped a stray tear that escaped from the corner of your eye. He leaned in and kissed you softly, “I won’t leave. I promise.” He muttered against your lips before kissing you again, deepening the kiss before pulling back. He slid his thumb along your kiss swollen bottom lip and smiled. “I think we should take this somewhere else, I don’t want anyone to get a glimpse of you. Call me selfish but I want you all to myself.”

You nodded and pressed a kiss to his thumb, “take me to yours.” He nodded and did just that. Once you two were confined in the space of his home he kissed you deeply while his hands pulled at your clothes, almost ripping them off before undressing himself. He held you close to him and gripped and groped at your body. “Jump, I’m taking you to my bedroom.” You wrapped your arms around his neck and held onto him tightly as you jumped up, wrapping your legs around his waist. He gripped your ass tightly, massaging the flesh while you kissed and sucked on his neck, your fingers moved up the nape of his neck and pulled at the tie holding his hair back so the raven locks could fall freely.

He walked up the stairs quickly and kicked the door to his bedroom open so he could lay you on the bed. The plush fabric of his blanket swarmed you before he leaned down to kiss you again, his lips molded against yours hungrily. His cock throbbed as he gripped it, guiding it to your wet entrance. He broke the kiss and looked into your eyes, “I’m sorry my love but we need to skip the foreplay for now. I need you badly, I need to feel you again.” He pushed inside you and dropped his forehead against yours. Your back arched off the bed and your hands gripped his shoulders.

You couldn’t stop thinking about the first night you were intimate with him since it happened. On the nights after your dates with him, when you were in the lonely confines of your bedroom you would touch yourself to the thought of him and that night. Wondering if he would do the same to you if you had the chance to experience a moment like that again. Now that you finally have him here with you like this, you couldn’t wait to see what he had in store for you.

Your back arched to press your chest to his while he bottomed out inside you, he felt even better than what you dreamt of since that night. His cock twitched inside you and one of his hands fisted the sheets by your head while the other gripped your waist as he started thrusting. His hips slapped against yours with each heavy thrust. It was completely different from how he was when he was first intimate with you, any sense of fragility he had with you was completely out the window and replaced with animalistic need.

“Missed feeling you like this, you feel so fucking perfect for me. Just taking me perfectly, fuck.” He groaned and fisted the sheets in his hand tighter while his grip on your waist was bruising. All you could do was whimper and moan his name, the pleasure was completely overwhelming you. His eyes scanned your face, watching how it scrunched up then his eyes trailed down to your neck, he could practically hear the blood rush through your veins. If only he could have a taste of the saccharine nectar, but he had to control himself, especially in a moment of passion like this, he didn’t want to push anything too far. Your hands moved up to hook around the back of his neck to bring him even closer to you, he put more of his body weight on you and moved his other hand from your waist to the other side of your head.

“Kiss me, I want to feel you everywhere.” Your tone was drenched in lust and he couldn’t deny you. He captured your lips in his again, kissing you hungrily and sloppily, sucking on your tongue and pulling on your bottom lip between his teeth as he trailed his kisses down. Kissing along the side of your mouth and jaw until he could reach your neck. His hips snapped against yours harder and faster, maybe if he made you cum he wouldn’t be tempted to bite down on the soft skin of your neck. You tangled your fingers in his hair, tugging on the dark strands as he pounded into you. He licked up the length of your neck and he couldn’t help but bare his teeth, dragging the sharp points of them along your pulse point, which made you shiver underneath him.

You didn’t know what took over you in that moment, whether it was the drag and pull of his cock in your warm, wet walls or if it was something you wanted but didn’t realize until now. “ Bite me please.” Your voice was barely above a whisper and he wouldn’t have been able to hear you but thanks to how close you two were to each other, he could hear your plea clearly. He pulled back from your neck and looked at you with wide eyes and stopped moving his hips, earning a whine from you and a buck from your hips. “I can’t, I don't want to do something stupid and hurt you. I let myself lose control now by even letting my teeth drag against you but I can’t bite you.”

You lifted your hands to cup his face and shook your head. “Please. I know you won’t hurt me, I know you wouldn’t take it too far. I just want to feel it, I want to feel everything you can offer me, I need it so badly.” He looked into your eyes and he felt more conflicted than ever, you wanted it and deep down he wanted it even more than you, but then whatever shred of his conscience was left was screaming at him to rethink everything. “Please Choso, I want to be more connected to you. I’m all yours, mark me as such.” You let go of his face and held onto his arms as you tilted your head to the side, presenting yourself to him.

He let out a shaky breath and started moving his hips again, quickly finding the brutal pace he set earlier while dipping his head down. He kissed and sucked along your pulse point, still thinking about what he should do. He wanted to give you what you wanted but there was always a chance that he might end up hurting you. He groaned as his hips slammed into yours, his kisses and sucks grew hungrier as he kept thrusting. He had to hold himself back, he couldn’t succumb to his carnal desires…but he just couldn’t hold back any longer.

His fangs grazed against your skin once more before he sank them into you. Your back arched and tears pricked your eyes from the mix of pleasure and pain and your body reacted beautifully to him. “Cumming! Oh fuck.” Your body shook under him and his hips somehow started moving even faster. The mix of the saccharine that fell on his tongue and the way your walls clenched around and massaged his cock, he was cumming in no time. He rested his hips against yours as he filled you with his cum and somehow came back to his senses so he could pull away from your neck. He licked over the bite marks to clean off any blood that dripped and looked down at you.

You had a blissed out smile on his face, you looked like a masterpiece underneath him, so flawless. He leaned down and kissed you softly, you tasted the iron on your lips and pulled back slightly. “Sorry, I’m just not used to the iron taste.” He chuckled and leaned in to press a kiss to the corner of your lips, slowly pulling out of you as he did so. You whimpered as he pulled out completely then relaxed against his bed, feeling completely exhausted from the strength of your orgasm and the blood you lost. He left to go grab some tissues to clean you off and get you a glass of water but when he came back you were sound asleep. He chuckled and cleaned away any leaking cum and then set the glass of water down on the nightstand, just in case you woke up thirsty.

When he finally laid down next to you, he pulled you close to him and kissed the top of your head. He felt like the weight of the whole universe was lifted off his shoulders, especially since he could be honest with you. He hated that he had to keep the secret from you but now he could leave everything bare with you and know that you would accept him entirely.

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

“It felt amazing to get everything off my chest and to have her accept me for who I was. We continued going on dates and our relationship progressed. After the five month period of us dating, I told her I loved her and she reciprocated my feelings. I can’t describe how I felt around her, there wouldn’t be enough words to do so but she was my everything. The sun to my cloudy day, the stars to brighten my night sky, the budding sprout that livened my dead garden, the air that I breathe.” He let out a small sigh and rested his head back against the couch he was seated on, thinking about all the time he had with you. A smile broke out on his face and he closed his eyes for a moment before opening them up again. “I think it was a few weeks short of our two year anniversary when I asked her to marry me. I was so nervous. But she said yes and a month afterwards our wedding came. The Astors offered to let us use their backyard as a wedding venue and they gave us all access to one of their properties for our honeymoon.”

Kento adjusted his position and leaned in, “so, did the Astors know about you being a vampire?” Choso chuckled in response and shook his head, “oh no, at that time the only people that knew were Y/N, Satoru and Suguru. We just convinced them that a wedding at night would be more romantic and they believed us.”

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

You stood in front of the mirror and adjusted the veil on your head, making sure it draped over your shoulders perfectly. Mrs. Astor walked next to you and placed a gentle hand on your shoulder while your mother draped your grandmother’s necklace around your neck. “You look beautiful, sweetheart. Choso is so lucky to be the one to marry you and I’m so happy for you. I didn’t think you would be the type to get married but it makes me happy to see you so in love.” You smiled at her and placed a hand over your grandmother’s necklace.

“I was still hoping that you would marry Satoru but Choso is a nice guy, mysterious looking but he hasn’t given me a reason to not like him.” You turned to face your mother and hugged her tightly, she returned the loving embrace and squeezed you tightly. “Your father would have been so proud to see you like this, seeing his precious angel all dolled up for her wedding day.” You pulled back to look at her and wiped a few tears that escaped her eyes. “I wish he was here mom but I’m glad that I have you, thank you for accepting Choso even though he wasn’t your first choice for a son-in-law. But enough crying, we still have a wedding to get through.”

Choso was more nervous than he had ever been in his life and nothing Satoru or Suguru did to try to calm him down worked. “What if she changes her mind? What if she doesn’t want to marry me? What if I rushed everything?” He paced around the room while Satoru and Suguru tried to think of something to say, then there was a knock on the door and it opened to reveal Mr. Astor.

“Choso, what’s the matter? I can hear your footsteps from outside.” The older gentleman joked but sighed as he recognized all the telltale signs. “Come sit down with me, son.” He sat down on the bench in the room and patted the empty space, Choso looked at it for a moment before moving to sit down. “I’ll tell you this, you’re probably more nervous than she is. I was the same way when I got married to Charlotte, I felt like my heart was going to beat right out of my chest and all the doubts swarmed in. I thought about all my fuck ups when we first started dating. Even on our first date, I spilled my wine all over her beautiful dress, she had just bought it and within moments of us getting our drinks I dumped the entirety of the glass on her. But I can tell you this, when you see your soon-to-be bride walking down the aisle, every doubt leaves your mind. The only thing that you can think of is how beautiful she looks, like God sent down one of his angels for you. That’s what matters, not those pesky thoughts.” He placed his hand on Choso’s shoulder and stood, “now, fix your mop that you call hair and head outside, the sun just set and your bride is almost ready.” With that Mr. Astor left the room and Choso felt like a weight was lifted off his shoulders. Like that was what he needed to hear.

Within the hour the ceremony started and Choso stood next to the priest waiting for you. The door that led to the backyard opened and there you were with Satoru, he insisted on walking you down the aisle and wouldn’t take no for an answer. When Choso met your eyes he felt his heart stop, “James was right” he thought to himself as you started walking to him. The dress hugged your figure beautifully, a cinched waist and the high neckline made you look like a goddess. As you walked down some of the guests poured some flower petals on the train of your dress and offered whispered compliments of your beauty.

Tears threatened to brim Choso’s eyes but he quickly blinked and wiped them away, he couldn’t explain to the guests why his tears were crimson instead of translucent. Then, you stood there in front of him, you handed your bouquet to Satoru and took Choso’s hands in yours. “You look stunning, my love.” “And you look even more handsome than the first time I saw you.”

The priest began the ceremony and before you knew it, it was time for your vows. Choso spoke first, “my darling angel, I did not think I could love someone as much as I love you. You’re the reason why my heart beats every second and why air fills my lungs with each breath I take. I was in a dark place, I had lost all those who I had loved and I thought I would roam the earth in solitude but then you appeared and my life was introduced to light once again. Your smile rivals the sun, your skin is better than the softest silk, your eyes hold novels in them and your heart is bigger than any other. Your heart is a heart that is intertwined with mine for all of eternity. If I ask for one thing, all I ask is if one of us meets our timely demise without the other, I ask that we find each other again and live out our love over and over until the earth stops turning.”

You released one of his hands to wipe the tears that spilled from your eyes before speaking, “I had never believed in love until I met you. I had never been interested in relationships and devoting my time to another until that night we met. From that moment on you have shown me the beauty of love, a beauty that I have never been able to understand. You appeared in my life as a mysterious stranger of the night and now you are to be my husband, my soulmate. I have yearned for you all my life, I have loved you before knowing you, I dedicate myself to you. You have never failed to put a smile on my face and you always sweep me off my feet. Choso, I am yours forever as you are mine. Our souls are entangled and they will never part. I love you, for now, forever and always.”

You both put your wedding bands on each other's fingers and the priest said his closing words. “May God bless this marriage, you may kiss your wife.” Choso pulled you close and pressed one hand to your back before dipping you down and kissing you passionately, pouring his overflowing love onto your lips. You held onto his suit jacket tightly until he lifted you upright and broke the kiss. Every guest cheered for you both as you walked down the aisle hand in hand.

Everything went by quickly, the night was filled with laughter, tears, dancing, kisses but most importantly, love. Then you two were being ushered out by the Astors to a horse drawn carriage, “you’ll be taken to your honeymoon residence now, enjoy your night and congratulations.”

The ride to the cottage was fairly quick and once the carriage stopped, Choso got out then scooped you into his arms so he could walk through the door. Once you two crossed the threshold, he kicked the door shut and made his way up the wooden stairs to the master bedroom. “You look magnificent my love, you were glowing.” He made his way up the stairs quickly and set you on the bed. He quickly got rid of his clothes then captured your lips in his. The kiss was hungry and filled with a mix of love and lust. His hands moved along your body to try to find the buttons of your dress but when he started struggling with the first two he opted for the easier solution, tearing the dress off of you.

You gasped against his lips and broke the kiss when you heard the fabric tear. “Choso! What if we want to pass this dress down to our children?” He slid the dress off your shoulders and started peppering kisses along all the open skin he could get his lips on. “I’ll fix it, I’m the best tailor in town anyways.” His hands moved swiftly to undress you until you were both completely naked in front of each other. It was a sight that you both have seen hundreds of times but now it was different, now you two were a married couple and now it was more than just lust between you two. It was pure love. Something so pure it rivaled a virgin’s purity.

He gently pushed you back against the bed and leaned in to kiss you, this time he was much softer with his movements, he took his time to savor you and feel you. Your hands wrapped around the back of his neck to keep him close to you, pulling him so close that you could feel his heartbeat mold with yours once his chest was pressed to yours. He used one arm to hold himself up and his hand moved down to grip his cock, pumping it in his hand as he guided it to your awaiting entrance. He broke the kiss and looked down at you, “do you want me to prep you, my love?”

You shook your head and pulled the elastic that held his hair back, “no, I want you. I want all of you inside me.” He pressed his forehead against yours and slowly pushed himself inside you. It felt like the night he took your virginity, the first night he met you and the night you gave yourself to him. Your back arched slightly and your eyes fluttered shut as a moan left your lips. It was a sight he could never get tired of for as long as he lived.

“I love you.” He groaned out the words as he bottomed out inside you and moved his other arm to rest by your head. He gave you a moment to adjust and started thrusting, slow and deep thrusts as his cock worked through your plush walls. “I love you so much, my husband.” Your words came out through breathy moans and your nails dug into his toned arms, digging at the flesh but only leaving red marks in its wake.

His hips slowly picked up speed, it was still nothing like how he would normally fuck you. There was no animalistic nature, no brutal snapping of his hips against yours, no headboard banging against the wall so hard you would think it would break. He was slow, meticulous, and thorough with each thrust. It was as if he was reciting his vows and pouring his heart to you once more each time his hips met yours. He captured your lips in his again and moved his left hand down to rub your clit.

You two shared moans and groans against each other's lips and nothing needed to be said. What else could there be when your bodies were speaking for you?

While his movements were slower than normal, the buildup to your orgasm was just the same. Your toes curled and your back arched as you felt the coil tighten in your stomach. Each thrust tightened it more and more until it just snapped. You broke the kiss and moaned his name in the most beautiful sound he had ever heard, it was as if angels were singing in his ears. To him, you were the angel singing in his ear. He thrusted a few more times before filling you to the brim with cum, he let out a guttural groan of your name and dropped his head in the crook of your neck. He placed gentle kisses on the skin until his lips felt the all too familiar marks from his fangs. He licked over them and lifted his head to look up at you.

Your eyes were already half shut, you were fighting sleep like you always tried to do and it made him chuckle. He pressed a kiss to the tip of your nose then kissed your lips softly. “Get some rest my love, we have the rest of eternity to relive moments like these. Just close your eyes and dream peaceful dreams of our future together.” You let out a small whine, trying to say something back but fatigue took over. He watched your eyes close and listened to the gentle hum of your even breaths. He slowly pulled out of you and laid next to you. He covered you both with a blanket and watched as you slept, his eyes traced over your features until they were etched into his mind.

If he could put all of his emotions into writing he would write best selling novels on everything he loves about you, if he was a musician, he would write symphonies about the little things that make you, you.

This chance that he had felt like he was finally going to have his happily ever after.

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

“Now, every love story has an ending and the hope is that the ending would be a happy one but not this love story. Kento, would you follow me? Take your recorder too.” Choso stood from where he was sitting and waited for Kento to follow as he made his way to his bedroom. On the wall facing the bed was a large painting of a woman, most likely in her late 20s, a soft smile was on her face and Kento followed Choso closer to it.

As he moved closer the gears turned in his head and his eyes widened as he made the realization. “Y/N.” His mouth moved before he could properly gather his thoughts and Choso turned to face him, nodding. “This is Y/N. This was finished three months before that dreaded day, done by a young man that recently moved to the town we lived in. He did it for free so in return I promised him free alterations for life. She was so happy when she saw it, she said that it didn’t even look like her but she was so wrong. While the boy was talented he could never capture her beauty, no one could.”

Choso stood silent for a moment while he brought his hand up to the painting, his fingers lightly grazing the glass of the frame that protected the painting. Kento’s eyes trailed back and forth from the painting to Choso and back until they focused on Choso. His eyes widened a bit as he saw the tears that spilled from the raven haired male, the tears of blood that spilled so freely. Kento had never seen Choso show this much emotion, Choso was always quick to wipe at his tears but not now.

Kento slowly approached him and rubbed his back. “It’s okay, please take your time. I can’t imagine how difficult this is for you to recollect all this, all the pain.” Choso nodded and took a deep breath before wiping the tears away. “It’s just that I haven’t spoken about that day with anyone, I’ve tried to bury it but whenever I see her face, everything just comes to the surface and drowns me. I miss her, I miss her so much.”

Kento set the recorder down and hugged Choso, squeezed him tightly and stood there with him. “Let it out, you need to let it all out.” Choso hugged him back, more tears streamed down his face and a red stain grew on Kento’s shirt. After a few moments of silence Choso broke the hug. “Thank you, I’m ready to speak about her now.” Choso looked at your picture and sighed. “It was just after her 33rd birthday, the year was 1909 and I was at my shop when I received the call. Y/N was out running some late errands with Satoru and she was supposed to meet me at the shop.”

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

He held the two fabrics up to Suguru and held them to the pants he had against his work table. “The left matches these pants more right?”

Suguru sighed and looked at Choso with a raised eyebrow. “And why are you asking me?” Choso chuckled and set the fabrics down, “well you’re in my shop and you’re not asking for alterations so I’m making you do some work. You know, for taking up space.” Suguru narrowed his eyes but jumped when the phone rang. “Can you be a dear and answer the phone? You’re not much help with color matching.”

Suguru sucked his teeth and answered the phone, his eyes widening at the frantic voice on the other end. “Satoru, calm down! I can’t understand you when you’re frantic, calm down!” Choso’s eyes widened and looked over at Suguru. As he stood there waiting his heart sunk to his stomach, the anticipation was all too much. “What’s going on?”

Suguru hung up the phone and his face looked like it was drained of its blood. “It’s Y/N, she’s dead.” Choso ran over to him and gripped his shirt in his fists tightly, his eyes changed to a glowing burgundy. “Stop joking around and tell me the fucking truth. My wife isn’t dead.” Suguru placed his hands over Choso’s and took in a shaky breath. “She’s dead. She was in the store with Satoru and she just collapsed. When they were on the way to the hospital she had no pulse. She’s gone. We need to go to the hospital now.”

Choso let go of the now crying male and quickly left his shop.

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

“I kept on telling myself that it couldn’t be true. She was healthy, she had recently gone to the doctor and she was in perfect health. But when I saw her body covered with a white sheet, that’s when reality hit me.”

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

Choso sank to his knees when he saw your lifeless body on the table. He gripped your hand and squeezed it, all warmth was gone. “Baby, please. I need you. What happened to the life we were going to live? What about the children we were supposed to have? What about living for the rest of eternity together? Baby please. Please get up, please let this be a sick joke. I won’t be mad I promise. Just please let me hear your voice once more, let me hear your laughter, let me see your smile. Please.”

Tears streamed down his face and he banged his fist on the ground as he turned his head up to the ceiling. “I was good! I’ve done nothing wrong! Why did you have to take her from me? Why punish me now when I was truly happy? I’ve atoned for my sins, I’ve prayed for forgiveness and this is how I get repaid? What the fuck kind of sick judgement is that? What more do I need to do? You’ve given me this curse, now I have to live alone? Why take her when you could’ve taken me? She’s done nothing to you. She’s your most perfect creation and now you take her back? Fuck you! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” He spent the rest of his time sobbing until Satoru came in, his face stained with tears.

“I’m so sorry, I should’ve never invited her with me. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened.” Choso lifted his head, “you apologizing means nothing, it won’t bring her back. Just leave.” His tone was sharp and cold, Satoru just nodded and left.

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

“Later on I had learned that her death wasn’t preventable. It just happened and there was nothing I could’ve done about it. Maybe it was a good thing that I wasn’t there when she died but I wish I could’ve been there in her final moments. I wish that I could’ve been the last face she saw but maybe I wasn’t meant to see it. I still dream of Yuuji during his final moments, so maybe this was God’s way of looking out for me. I mean, who wants to see their soulmate die in front of them? But it’s the selfish side of me that wishes I was there.” He took a deep breath and sighed, Kento drew closer and rubbed his back in some form of consolation.

“Within the following weeks we held a funeral for her. What hurt the most was seeing her mother so upset, I have never seen someone cry so much in my life. The Astors paid for a beautiful tombstone and her mother visited her grave every single day until she met her own demise. I patched things up with Satoru and Suguru and I was with them until they died. Then I was alone again.” He sighed and looked up at the painting. “But I changed. Even before Y/N I had never thought about killing for sport but when she was ripped from my life I killed innocent people just for the hell of it. It wasn’t just people who deserved it, it was people who had so much to live for and I took that away from them. I don’t want pity for what I’m saying, I’ve prayed for forgiveness and I have changed for the better. I mean, you see I only drink from blood bags, it’s donated blood so I’m not hurting anyone to ease my pain. About 10 years ago I saw Y/N in a dream. This is something I’ve kept to myself and not even mentioned to you during our personal conversations.”

Choso tapped his fingers against the frame of the painting and walked out of the room, Kento following close behind. “She looked divine. She was glowing and she had such a beautiful smile on her face but she also looked pained. I know it must have been because she was aware of all the damage I caused after her death and also because I was alone again. But when she approached me all she did was hold me in her arms, I babbled and blubbered like a newborn baby. I apologized to her and told her how much I miss her and she just held me. Then when it was time for her to go and time for me to wake up she just told me one thing, she told me, ‘look for me, I will be in your life again and we will fulfill our promise of being together for eternity.’ Then I woke up, tear stains were on my face and pillow and I’ve held onto that message ever since. I have no clue what she could’ve meant but God, I hope I’ll be able to find that answer soon.”

Choso turned to Kento and nodded, signaling that he was done for today’s interview. Kento stopped the recording and sat down on the couch and Choso followed. “Thank you for sharing that with me. I really do appreciate it. I know she’s watching over you and I know that you two will find each other again. I just hope that it happens soon.” Choso nodded at his words and offered a small smile, “I hope so too but now let’s change to something a little happier. So how many children are you two planning to have?”

Kento chuckled and combed his fingers through his hair, “well I personally just want one but she wants at least two so I’ll have to adjust to that number. But once we do have children, I want you to be their godfather, I want you to be involved in their lives.” Choso sucked in a breath and sat silent for a moment, trying to gather the right words. “I know you don’t want to face more loss in your life but I want someone to be there for you. You have isolated yourself in this cold, cold place. I know you don’t even go out for anything anymore but you need to live. If not for yourself, then for Y/N. How could you find her again if you’re cooped up in here?”

Choso narrowed his eyes at the blonde and tensed at his words. “I know, it’s just hard. I’ve tried to will myself but I just can’t. I don’t want to make myself vulnerable again, I know she’s out there somewhere but what if she’s not ready for me just yet. What if she’s with another? I can’t live knowing she’s loving someone else that isn’t me.” His voice cracked a bit and he shook his head. Kento moved a bit closer and gripped his shoulder, “you don’t know that, you don’t know. Stop living with hypotheticals. Live with the truth and the truth is in the outside world. Go out there. You know, I actually saw a new nightclub opened up a few blocks from here. Go out and experience life in the modern world. And who knows? She might be there waiting for you. And if you don’t go, I’ll drag you there myself. Your inhuman strength is no match for my determination.”

Choso laughed at the poor joke and shrugged. “Fine, I’ll go but don’t expect me to go to this place every night. I think I’ll go insane if I do.”

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

After a few hours of conversation Kento left and Choso got himself ready to go out. He looked at himself in the mirror as he styled his hair one last time then walked over to the painting. “Please be out there tonight, I feel ridiculous doing this. But for you, I’ll do anything.” He pressed two fingers against his lips then pressed them against the frame of the painting before leaving. His nerves shouted at him as he walked down to the club, he saw the long line forming when he approached the block and let out a deep sigh, “of course the line is long, lucky me.” He glanced at the people already on the line as he moved to the back and there was no sign that you would be there. And as the time passed on the line, he started losing hope.

There would be no chance in hell that he could find you again the first night he started searching for you, it was an unrealistic dream but there was still a glimmer of hope. Maybe he would be lucky for one more time in his miserable life. Maybe, just maybe.

After what felt like forever, he finally made his way inside. He smelled the booze, sweat, cheap perfumes and colognes, just everything. It was a nice club, had two floors and the top was presumably for VIPs and celebrities and the bottom was for the common folk who wanted a wild night. The bass of the music thrummed in his ears and he started thinking about heading back home. This wasn’t his scene and he didn’t want to be there longer than he had to but he had to see if you were around. Just some form of you. He made his way through the sweaty bodies all packed together like sardines so he could go to the bar. Maybe if he had a few drinks in him, this environment would be just slightly tolerable.

After about an hour and about five whiskeys, the situation was seemingly getting worse. His body needed more alcohol and the alcohol already in his system was just making him irritable. He stood at one end of the bar, far away from the drunken club-goers that stumbled and were on the brink of toppling over. His eyes scanned around to see if there was a trace of you and just when he was about to give up, he saw you.

You were at the other end of the bar, trying to catch the bartender's attention while she was flirting with someone else. His heart felt like it was about to leap out of his chest and his body started moving before his mind could process anything. He had to confirm what he saw, he had to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. He maneuvered his way through the drunken people, almost shoving a few out of the way to get closer to you. Then he was there, standing next to you. His throat was dry but he had to get something out.

“Y/N.” Your name tumbled from his lips and somehow you were able to hear it through the loud music and all surrounding noise. You turned to face him and you lifted your head to meet his gaze. “Hi”, you froze for a moment before continuing, “do we know each other from somewhere?” Your question was asked so gently and there Choso stood frozen.

Everything was the same from all those centuries ago. Like the same angel was sent back down to earth to grace his eyes once more. Your eyes crinkled when you smiled just as they did all that time ago, your voice was the same, only slightly raspier since you have spent the past few minutes yelling for the bartender’s attention, everything was the same. Choso couldn’t believe his eyes, how could he have been so lucky to see you reborn again?

You asked the question again, assuming that he didn’t hear you but again you only received silence as a response. This stranger just stood in front of you, completely frozen but you couldn’t seem to tear yourself away from him. Like there was this magnet that kept you captivated by him. A sense of familiarity washed over you but there was also confusion since you couldn’t trace back to where you knew him from. But if you two didn’t know each other, how could he possibly know your name?

Then he finally gained his train of thought, “sorry, I have to go.” Choso moved through the crowd and you followed behind him, like there was some tether tied to the both of you. You had to follow him or else the invisible tie would snap. Tears gathered in Choso’s eyes as he made his way through to the exit and once he was outside it was like he had gotten even faster. You ran after him as best as you could then stood on the corner when you lost sight of him.

One of your friends who witnessed the whole thing go down approached you and gently gripped your shoulder, “hey, did you know that guy?” You turned to face her and furrowed your eyebrows as you thought about it, you didn’t necessarily know him but you felt like you had. He knew you but you knew relatively nothing about him but you felt like you knew everything about him. Your friend gently shook you to grab your attention, “did you?”

“I think I did.”

Choso looked around to see if you were still following him and once he noticed you weren’t he leaned against the abandoned building and sank down to his knees. Crimson tears streamed down his face and one of his hands clutched the fabric of his shirt near his heart while he muttered to himself.

“I found her, I found you.”

taglist: @blueparadis @ajaxkinnie @cherribxio @gloomiigloom @aki-and-saltfish

[rin-and-jade]

Hey, I've been questioning whether I'm a system or not recently. I just wonder if you have any insight of how you discovered you were plural and how hard it was to deal with the realisation/coming to terms with it.

If this has already been discussed im so sorry for wasting your time

It has never been discussed so don’t worry it isn’t going to waste my time, it will be in a form of a story you can learn from, so why not indulge in a simplified story (in parts) of how we discovered and come to terms about it ourselves shall we;

Part one, the backstory

As a kid, we had numerous amounts of stressful events that shouldn’t happen to a child, it started since kindergarten as i recalled and even that was already hectic, there used to be fights among adults and that scared the hell out of us. Middle school was fine until kids started bugging us with those milder forms of bullying and whatnot, they actively felt like excluding us as well as taking advantage so that isn’t nice, we bared with it along side the horrors of home that teachers and counselors didn’t know as we grow up. Our mom is one monster, i believe if it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t have been plural. She had daily bickering and punishments just for us free of cost, lovely. Now couple this with the depleted mental health, school and house had taken a toll on us which nearly made teachers think we gotta drop out for good. This is where the funny things happen..

Part two, the discovery

Due to the impending doom of staying a year back at the same grade we took on extra teaching lessons on evening after school is over, we have made an online friend in this time. Now the thing is, we would have different states telling how they feel unconsciously to our friend here, and thats funny,, singlets don’t do that. Until one day we started getting threats from our own head and thought to ourselves “this isn’t right.. it feels way too alive and real” and thankfully we’re correct, for the better and the worse, it also knew it was alive only to instantly threaten this same friend to f off. It want us to be miserable, to fail, to suffer in general means. This is more than just a negative inside voice..

Part three, the aftermath

We instantly googled with whatever coherent sense for this situation and found DID, it aligns with most of our troubles such as unnecessary memory gaps, out of body feelings, internal dialogues, which what we thought was normal. We thought we’re the same person but the truth is we are all trying to be a person we remembered as, that we are not. It feels like everyone was panicking, having immense denial, but the truth cannot be avoided so we slowly worked on accepting the truth for 4 months before actually fostering cooperation. Boy, we used to fight lots because of it, so authority in-system is also created, in this time there are many hidden parts that made their appearance known, the dormant back alive again. It has been atleast 3 years from where we officially self diagnosed as a system now, everything has been going well and persecutors repented to heal their wrong deeds.

This may serve as an answer because its actually hard to do it in a different form, i really hope you had taken the highlights (are bolded for clarity) to use it in figuring out if you truly are a system!

- j

[snippetsearch]

The ghost in the corner of the screen

I've been doing my best to avoid thinking about a certain person in any way for months, but I was reminded of him today in a way I hadn't accounted for at all.

Months ago, I'd blocked him on twitter, deleted his work from my computer, and all the rest in an effort to move on from the time in our lives that we were friends. It had been successful, we're now at almost a year without any contact. Today, I booted up Soulseek (A peer-to-peer file sharing client with a focus on music) to download several albums by musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had passed away recently. But as I went about searching through the list of available files, I was presented with a little notification in the corner of my screen, telling me that he had logged in – this gave me pause: What the hell was I supposed to do with this information? I had set up the reminder years ago so that I'd be able to download tracks from him when he was online, but now it had become a weirdly detached, accidentally voyeuristic moment where I had gleamed the tiniest of tiniest pieces of intimate information on current activity.

The nature of this notification is set up is inherently one-way: totally un-reciprocal, extremely basic. The other user has no clue that you've created the alert – Soulseek doesn't even have a "friends" system, just an index of users. This is an aspect that I enjoy about Soulseek. In its quasi-illegal status as a file-sharing client used by thousands of users to share music, its design and features haven't been updated in a major way for almost a decade, resisting the web's slow tide of social network feature creep.

For a brief, brief moment, I had become an unwilling spy into the intimate world of a person I had done my best to scrub from my life. Reflexively, my brain conjured a picture of him on his MacBook, file-sharing client open, perched on the edge of his bed in his room with the curtains closed maybe, or sat at his desk by a window overlooking the street beneath his building. What was the weather even like in Chicago right now? For some reason, I decided it ought to be rainy. I was reminded of how many memories of him live on in my brain, images fixed in time from when we were friends. I was an invisible onlooker in a place I'd never been, staring through a hole opened by an accidental connection between our two computers.

The timing of the notification was totally typical for him – Oversleeping deep into the day, then logging into soulseek first thing out of bed. You could set a watch by it. When we had known each-other, I'd leave soulseek open so that, separated by a transatlantic timezone gap, I'd receive a little unwitting indicator of when he had woken up. I was aware that if he knew, he'd have found it a little obsessive, but since it was a one-way setup, he had no way to know.

My brain flashed different, conflicting impulses in the moments after the notification appeared. Maybe I could open his user directory and take a look through his shared files. What was he listening to nowadays? He used to send me music excitedly, imploring me to share my thoughts on each track he sent every day. Now, I was faced with an opportunity to recreating that connection, one of my favourite parts of our friendship, in a form that required no knowledge or consent on his part. If I did that, I felt like I would be interfacing with a strange kind of unconscious version of him, playing out a little puppet-string version of our everyday friendship where my co-conspirator was a list of files on his hard drive. But doing so would have felt like some kind of twisted violation, like forming a hollow replica of him with which to act out my imaginary version of friendship without his knowledge.

Instead, I moved quickly to remove the traces of him from my client. I clicked through each menu as fast as I could, so that I wouldn't hesitate and consider the temptation to lurk on his profile. Almost faster than I could think, I had clicked on his username, opened a drop-down menu, and selected the option to remove him from my list of bookmarked users. The traces of his ghost on my screen had been deleted as easily as deleting any other thing. There was only a blank space where his username had briefly been displayed.

I took a moment to think about how strange it was, what an odd reminder of a person I'd been trying to forget. It seems like when you try to push someone out of your life, these fingerprints of the space they used to fill leave themselves smudged across your screen, and no matter how much you try to wall them off, their presence seeps through in un-anticipatable ways, and you're forced momentarily to imagine them with the same shade of care with which you viewed them as a friend. Maybe he too had been presented with some moment in which he had to reckon with artefacts of our split. Where should he put the book I sent him among the others on his shelf? Did he still hold on to all of the drawings of mine that he had saved to his computer? Or did he have to go through carefully and pick my traces from his life one-by-one, just as I had erased his? Did he find himself accidentally imagining me, creating his own version of where I was now, cued by some minuscule leftover from our past?

It doesn't matter. Spending more time inventing useless questions is just a use of time that moves you nowhere. I downloaded Sakamoto's album 'Cendre' from 2007, which he created in collaboration with german musician Christian Fennesz. It was their second release as a pair, the two of them subsequently trading remixes and collaborating for years and years after. It's a slow, hauntingly beatiful album that pairs Fennesz's distorted pads with Sakamoto's impressionistic piano improvisation. When Sakamoto passed away, Fennesz posted this short message to his website:

RIP Ryuichi Sakamoto. One of the greatest ever. I am grateful for the friendship and the music we made.

The cover of the album is a grainy photo of empty bedroom. The photographer must have been sat at a weird angle within the room, crouched behind the bed. On the left, a mirror tilts down, pointing towards the floor at the foot of the bed, as if avoiding eye-contact. On the right of the image, an open door leads to an empty bathroom, where another mirror is hung on the wall in the back. Through that mirror is the reflection of the room behind the photographer, and at the very back is a tiny sliver of a window looking out on a rainy blue-hour sky.

[ghoultramp]

dream, interrupted [bakugou x reader]

▷       bnha

↳ pairing: katsuki bakugou x f!reader

↳ content: masturbation, somnophilia, thigh fucking, praise, cockwarming

↳ words: 2k

⇢ summary: katsuki is frustrated that he can’t sleep, and also just a bit horny.

also available on ao3

⇢ note: i would say this is tamer, softer even, than my last few pieces, considering the content. there are a few mentions of alcohol being consumed the previous evening (which has been tagged), but this was written with two consenting adults in a secure relationship in mind.

i do hope you enjoy this bakugou fic that almost caused me to have an existential crisis - aha~

The dull drone of the traffic beyond the apartment windows were beginning to grind away at his sanity. How long had he been awake for this time? With a grunt, he rolled over to check his phone, once again, for the time. 

“Fucking damn it,” Katsuki cursed under his breath.

His angular features twisted as he scowled, how had it only been 10 minutes? It didn't seem possible. 

He returned the phone to its resting place, under his pillow, before begrudgingly turning onto his back. He brought his hands to his face and dragged thick fingers through his disheveled blond hair. He let out an exasperated sigh, rubbing his palms hard against his eyes, pulling them down his cheeks to rest idly on his chest.

Katsuki’s ruby eyes wandered over to the lump next to him, watching the cover rise and fall softly with your breathing. The recent longer, more arduous workdays were uncharacteristically weighing him down; the lack of sleep was making him grumpier, easier to anger - both of which becoming a boiling pot - and the sheer workload was now more than a little overwhelming. 

His eyelids felt heavy recalling memories of the previous evening; Katsuki had come home in a revolting mood, worse than usual, and instead of using his words like a big boy, he took out his frustrations on you and your body after unwinding with a few drinks. But then again...

You never complained.

It was no secret that you loved how he could become so unrestrained during those 'bad day at work' sessions, passionate and explosive. 

Trying to simulate your light touch, he traced the outlines of his well-defined abdominal muscles. He shuddered when his fingers brushed along the sensitive skin of his tight obliques, visualizing your delicate fingers repeating these same motions from last night. He let his eyelids finally fall as he recalled you positioned over him, your drunk needy eyes taking in his statuesque body as he scratched at your back hungrily.

Settling himself in further, Katsuki shifted his hips and shoulders. He reached an eager hand down to his hardening cock, cautiously fondling it as his eyes peered over to assess your level of consciousness.

"Hnnn--" Katsuki failed to hold back his groan, his abdominal muscles twisting and tightening as you let out a gratifying sound in your sleep.

His cock convulsed and the feedback spurred him to grip tighter. He could feel it throbbing beneath his grip, he stroked his cock harder upon hearing the gift of another delicious noise from you.

“You sure seem like you’re having a nice dream,” Katsuki murmured, opening one eye as he turned his head to look at the back of yours. 

He bit his lip, imagining that he was reaching his free hand out to stroke your hair, gently at first, before he would then spread his fingers to take a hold of you tightly. A low growl escaped his throat, he was frustrated.

Katsuki grunted as he turned onto his side, shifting closer to you. He was careful to position his dick-holding hand so as not to hamper its performance. He halted immediately when you shuffled ever so slightly, a strangled moan caught in his throat as the leaking head of his tender, hard cock made contact with the bare skin of your ass.

His breathing was now shallow and irregular as he extended his unoccupied hand, he could feel himself quiver as he brought it to rest cautiously high on your thigh. He let his thumb press gently against your hip. 

The sweet song of a soft whimpering encouraged him.

“Such a cute thing,” he whispered as he traced faint circles against your ass with his precum tipped cock. “Those good dreams better be about me, princess.” 

His grip around his cock tightened when you groaned, shifting your leg in your sleep. Katsuki inhaled sharply, biting his lip hard. It took tremendous effort to quell the moans he so desperately wanted to release, as he felt the warmth of your pussy envelop him.

Katsuki felt the aching pull in his hips as he rubbed himself unashamedly against your rear. He continued caressing your hip while he fought hard against the urge to dig his in his nails and mercilessly fuck you right there and then.

“Fuuuck,” he hissed, caught in the thought as he leaned his head back.

Breathlessly, he finally brought himself to meet your enticing entrance. It took all his strength not to cum right there when he brushed against you, your tight cunt already dripping wet. He followed your slick juices to your thighs.

“God, you’re fucking soaked,” he breathed, rubbing the head of his cock against your inner thighs.

He imagined that your thighs - the way they were tightly shut, the way your juices had trickled down - were a completely different part of your anatomy. Katsuki almost yowled, caught deep in his reverie, when you quivered in response to his touch. He’d not expected that another one of your movements would cause him to penetrate the tight gap between your thighs. 

Straining his neck, he observed with bated breath as you shifted yet again, this time it was your arms. He exhaled, relieved when he saw they had only moved closer to your head. He found the way you nuzzled your lightly blushed cheeks into the pillow quite precious. 

Katsuki’s breath shuddered as he let go of his cock, his need was agonizing. He had to do something. He was allowed to, surely? 

He found himself slowly rolling against you as he fucked the space between your legs. As he moved his hand from your hip to your thigh, he felt the overwhelming need to knead his fingers against you; the succulently soft, long moan escaping your lips caused his eyes to roll back, his eyelids flutter, and his hips quiver.

Katsuki shook his head, trying to collect himself. There was no way he could allow himself to cum yet, not before he'd claimed your sweet, ripe cunt in your unconscious state.

"Focus," he scolded himself with a grumble.

Now taking the base of his tender, pulsating cock between his thumb and forefingers, Katsuki maneuvered himself until he was poised within reach of your sweet hole. He was feeling more inebriated from your warmth and scent alone than from any of the drinks you’d both shared last night.

He gently pressed on, feeling your cunt quiver; with the mess that had already been made between the pair of you, it didn’t take much for the head of Katsuki’s cock to intrude your tight walls. He let out a low groan when he heard the sopping wet sound your pussy made upon contact.

Katsuki gently rocked on his hips, he couldn’t refrain from panting as the friction against sensitive nerves vibrated throughout his body. How much longer would he be able to edge himself like this?

He didn’t care to halt when you made a sound this time, he was far too lost in these short, shallow, pleasurable thrusts. That was until he heard a whimper, louder than any of the sounds you'd made before; he stopped with his full head nestled in your cunt, wincing sharply when you tightened around it, the warning before hearing your dozy, broken voice.

“Kacchan?” The word strained against your dry throat, your eyelids too heavy to open.

“Shh, shh,” Katsuki reassured you, his voice cracking.

You weren't even vaguely aware that his hand had been on your thigh until he moved it, your body was still comfortably numb from the alcohol in your system. You felt your abdomen flutter as he delicately trailed his fingers over your silhouette, resting when he lay it on your head. 

“Go back to sleep, sweetheart,” he purred.

You mumbled incoherently, discombobulated as you tried to make sense of what was going on; you found yourself drifting away softly with the way he stroked your hair, the warmth of his body so close to yours. You thought you heard his voice waver as he hummed.

Katsuki was shaking now, your lack of awareness was even more tantalizing, you were so innocent. He growled low in his throat, taking your hair in his fist just as he’d imagined. He felt you spasm as well as heard the shuddering moan that broke free beyond your lips.

“I’ll be gentle,” he whispered, his voice gruff and heady with arousal, “I promise.”

Katsuki kept his word; he gently lifted his pelvis, you both moaned in blissful unison as he took his time plugging you up completely. You felt his teeth make contact with your shoulder, trying his best to only gently nibble as your walls clamped down him around him. 

“S-stop doing that,” he breathed against your shoulder.

You tried so hard to stifle your chuckle, he only growled when your insides mirrored pulses that corresponded to your laugh. Katsuki tugged on your hair playfully, he was pleased with the way you whimpered and backed up into him in response.

You relaxed your back into his strong chest, groaning as you moved just enough for him to reach under and around you. His hand gently fondled at your breast and he released his grip on your hair as you rolled your neck, resting your head against him, gasping.

Both of your hips swayed in unison, even just these gentle movements were sending delicious quakes throughout your entire body. Katsuki’s unoccupied hand reached around your thigh, you could feel him tremble as he placed his palm on your abdomen. 

“I’ll never get enough of feeling this,” he whispered, you shuddered from his warm breath, lips caressing your earlobe. “Feeling me inside you right--” he pushed down with a palm ever so gently, the back of your head pushed further into him as you moaned without restraint, “--here.”

“Please, make me cum, Kaachan, fill me up,” you begged, whining as you ground against him, “please, Kaachan.”

“Well,” he began, his breathing heavy as turned his palm 90 degrees to point downward, “since you asked so nicely…”

Katsuki’s hand travelled down and you almost yelped when he took your engorged clit between his forefingers. He gently rolled your agonizingly sensitive nub between the first and second knuckles of his fingers, massaging gently as his thrusts picked up pace; just that bit harder and deeper.

Pitiful whines escaped your lips as he hit each one of your nerves, expertly navigating your body as you moved your hips in unison. Your chest heaved with your erratic breathing, lost in the waves of pleasure that seemed to vibrate to the very tip of your limbs. 

Strangled cries escaped your slightly parted, dry lips, your body convulsing as Katsuki pulled out to the tip before one last thrust, bottoming out inside of you.

“There’s a good girl,” he declared as you writhed beneath him.

You felt him nuzzle the side of your face while you grabbed tightly at the sheet and pillow beneath you. Your cries were shaky and broken between luscious moans as you felt the gushing release of your climax, Katsuki’s fingers still gently massaged at your overstimulated clit. 

He let out a long groan as his hips spasmed and you felt him collide with your cervix, Katsuki’s arm shot up to wrap around you as you let out a sob, overwhelmed by the sheer pressure of his cum filling you up. He held you while you both quivered with the rippling aftershocks of your orgasms.

Katsuki pulled you closer to him, his cock still nestled in your cunt, plugging you up nicely. He wriggled and made an oddly happy-sounding noise.

“I love you, y’know that, right?” Katsuki’s voice was hoarse and exhausted. He nuzzled you and you gave a sweet, equally tired sounding giggle; his cocked tensed just a little at that.

“I love you too, dumbass,” you told him, smiling softly.

You reached for the edge of the quilt and tugged it closely to your face before drifting off to the sound of Katsuki’s breathing and the dull drone of the traffic beyond the apartment windows.

[dandelion-wings]

ignoring all my other WIPs this morning to poke at the deaging-Jean one that I haven’t touched in a year and a half, because recent talk of Eula made me finally figure out how one possible direction for it could flow:

Jean peers out through the crack in the library door at the people passing through the Ordo foyer. She has to hold the door with her fingers underneath the edge to keep from accidentally pushing it open into the legs of the knight standing in front. He makes a good screen, though, to keep the people she's watching from seeing her looking through the narrow crack.

The woman who claims to be the librarian has already gone into Uncle Varka's office, and the young blond man, Klee's Mr. Albedo, has just come up from the basement and is headed after her. So is a brown-haired woman with captain's tabs who comes in through the front doors, pausing to greet Mr. Albedo with a smile and then accompanying him in. Before the door to the office closes behind them, Jean catches a glimpse of the one-eyed man who'd called himself cavalry captain, but no sign at all of Uncle Varka.

For a few minutes the foyer is quiet. Jean is about to retreat and pull the door closed when the front doors crash open and another person, a blue-haired woman with a greatsword in a back-scabbard like Uncle Varka's, comes marching in. All the knights on guard at the various doors draw themselves up, and the one in front of Jean salutes hard and fast enough that his gauntlet clangs against his helm.

"Captain Lawrence!"

She acknowledges the salute and greeting with an aristocratic nod, then strides up to the office door and knocks with loud, crisp precision. Her hand freezes in place midway through the third knock as it swings open, the one-eyed man smiling at her on the other side.

"Sir Eula, punctual as always," he says, gesturing her in with a little half-bow and an elegant sweep of his hand. "I'm sorry to drag you away from your mission, but we have something of a situation."

"Where is the Acting Grand Master?" she asks as she steps inside. "If you're wasting my time without her sanction, Sir Kaeya, I *will* make you pay for it."

"Ah, that's actually-" And then the door closes behind her, and the rest of his sentence is muffled by the heavy wood.

Jean's heard all that she needs to. Now she does pull back, closing the door as slowly and carefully as she'd opened it. Again, the knight guarding it doesn't even notice the tiny click as she turns the knob.

Everything makes far too much sense now that she knows the Lawrences are involved. The strangers throughout headquarters, the nonsensical explanations and obvious lies, even the plush new carpets and scoured walls--she swallows hard at the thought of the blood that would have had to be spilled for them to take the headquarters of the Ordo. Maybe it hadn't been so bad as all that. Maybe they'd had spies or agents inside the walls and conducted a less violent coup, though that's not any better a thought. But either way, it's clear that they must have organized their own force, mercenaries or foreign soldiers or even those families of retainers that went with them and are said to still serve them a thousand years on, and somehow seized power in Mondstadt.

It still doesn't explain the gap in Jean's memories, but if they'd stormed the Ordo while she was here, chances are she hit her head--or *was* hit on the head--after all. If their librarian is half as good with potions as she'd bragged, she could have kept Jean unconscious for more than long enough for any bumps to heal. Why they let her wake up or bothered to lie to her about alchemical experiments or come up with all the other fanciful tales, she has no idea. They could have just told her from the first that she was a hostage. Which is the only reason they'd have to keep her alive.

Jean feels a little spark of hope, amidst the dread, at the realization that Father must still be alive. Mother is Gunnhildr through and through, and the Lawrences know the Gunnhildrs well enough to know how little good holding Jean against her would do, but Father is kinder, and gentler, and might bend if she was in danger. And Barbara was with him that day, so if he's safe, so is she. Mother- Mother would die before she let the Ordo be overrun while she was in it, but her mission should have taken her out of the city, so if she'd left before the coup, maybe-

That's not important. What's important is that now that Jean knows the situation, she knows what she has to do. She trots away from the door and off through the stacks, looking for Klee. She's still not sure what to make of the girl, and even less so now that she knows the Lawrences have taken over; was she truly sent to the Knights, perhaps at the worst possible timing, or is she part of their subterfuge? But she's just a child, no older than Barbara, and Jean isn't going to leave her behind.

She finds the little girl in the engineering section, of all places, poring over a book full of equations and diagrams that Jean has no idea what to make of. Maybe Klee likes them as pictures.

"Klee!" Jean tries to keep her voice hushed, but some of her urgency leaks out in her tone. "Klee, do you know any ways out of the library that wouldn't be guarded?"

Klee looks up at her in confusion. "But Albedo and Lisa both told us to stay here. I thought you were going to read?"

"I overheard some things," Jean says, which is true. She hesitates, not sure how much to explain to Klee--she might *be* a Lawrence, for all Jean knows--and settles at last on something vague. "Some bad things are going on, and it's important that we go and find my parents and let them know. But we have to keep it secret, because some of the adults here might be mad at us if they know we're leaving."

"Oooooh," Klee says, nodding, and closes her book. She climbs down off the chair she'd been standing on and drags it over to the shelf she must have taken the book from, clambering back up to slide it back into place. "Like Master Jean, when I do something she said not to do. We could ask Kaeya! He never gets mad at me, no matter what I do, and he helps me hide mistakes from Master Jean sometimes. Mr. Albedo would help us, too, but he might tell her."

Kaeya is the one-eyed man. Jean feels a cold stab of fear at Klee's innocent suggestion. He seems to be running this whole operation, unless the Lawrence who had shown up outranks him, but surely in that case he'll report straight to her. She shakes her head frantically.

"He's busy with Mr. Albedo. And this is urgent. I don't want to interrupt them. Don't you know any way out where we don't have to talk to an adult?"

"Ummmm...." Klee hops down from the chair and stands there biting her lip, hands behind her back, swaying uncertainly back and forth. "There's lots of knights on guard today. I know *one* way, but I'd be breaking a really big rule, and Master Jean would be *really* mad. Lisa would be really mad too. I don't think Kaeya could hide it."

Jean takes a deep breath. She's still shaking a little from the horror of her realization, and the urgency it's left her with, but she makes herself stand up straight and tall and smile at Klee with her most confident expression, the one she uses on Barbara when they're out late and it's dark and Barbara gets scared. It's always easier not to be afraid when she's taking care of someone littler.

"My father is a Cardinal of the Church, and this will be very important to him. I promise as soon as we find him, I'll ask him to talk to your Master Jean, and he'll make sure you don't get in trouble." The lie is frighteningly easy to tell. It's only a little bit a lie, she comforts herself; once she's gotten to Father, he'll take care of everything, and he won't let Klee be in trouble. Even if she turns out to be a Lawrence. Mother might be stern about that, but Father will understand she's just a child.

"Wow, your dad can do that? Okay!" Klee straightens up and beams at Jean like she's just been given a treat. Then she turns and starts bounding away through the shelves. "Come on! I just have to get a treasure out from under Lisa's desk, and then I can show you something really fun!"

Taking a deep breath, Jean follows.

[tails89]

Like an anchor

Sterek

937w

Read on AO3

Inspired by this gifset by @hoechloin that has been doing the rounds recently.

I have so many feelings about season 6 and the ghost riders and 100% believe Derek would be the one to remember Stiles.

This is for @princecharmingwinks who said the loveliest things to me, so of course I was going to write something :)

~

Derek wakes with a strange compulsion, a desperate need to return to Beacon Hills. The pull is strong. It echoes the pull of the full moon – it’s instinct, pure and simple – and it tugs at him, telling Derek he needs to return.

There are no messages in his phone, no calls for assistance, but regardless, Derek finds himself in the Camaro speeding south towards the town he had no interest in returning to.

Derek knows something is wrong as soon as he crosses the border into Beacon Hills.

Something is missing.

There’s a gap, a void in his chest where something, someone used to be.

He drives into town, following the pull that keeps drawing him on. It leads him to the high school.

It’s a Saturday, so the parking lot sits empty but for a battered blue Jeep, hidden away at the far end. Derek pulls up beside it and cuts the engine.

The echoes of a familiar scent cling to the car, they curl around him, reminding Derek of safety, of home.

He tries one of the handles, the door is locked.

His keys are in his hand. He stares at them. There’s a key that doesn’t belong, it’s old and tarnished and doesn’t match anything Derek owns. He tries it on a hunch, blinking in surprise when the door clicks unlocked.

The scent is stronger inside. It settles in the well worn leather of the seats, billowing around Derek as he slides in behind the steering wheel.

The radio crackles to life.

~

“Derek?” Scott opens the door. “What are you doing here?”

“How long as he been missing?” he asks, pushing past Scott into the hall. “Why didn’t anyone call me?”

“Wait—” Scott blinks blankly at him. “You know who we’re looking for?”

That stops Derek in his tracks. “You don’t?”

“Derek, wait—" Scott chases him out the front door. “Just—where are you going?” He stumbles down the porch steps, following Derek to his car.

“Get in,” Derek growls.

Scott doesn’t argue, but he keeps up his litany of questions while they drive. Derek follows that same pull, the one that had guided him to the Jeep, weaving through the quiet suburban streets.

“Isn’t this the Sheriff’s house?” Scott asks, staring out the window. “What are we doing here?”

Cutting the engine, Derek exits the car and makes a beeline for the back of the house.

“Derek, wait.”

Derek ignores him, using the tree in the backyard to scale up the side of the house.

“You can’t break into the Sheriff’s house.” Scott hisses up at him from the grassy lawn. “Dude, stop.”

With a practiced ease, Derek slides with window and climbs inside. The room is... different, bare, and the wall is patched over where Derek assumes a door would be.

Scott climbs in through the window behind him. “What are you doing?”

Derek paces the edge of the room, trailing his hand along the wall. The memories are hazy, almost dream-like.

“I was paralysed in a pool and survived. I wouldn’t have made it on my own.” He looks back at Scott, voice soft as the words fall from his lips. There’s a scent, same as the Jeep, almost too faint to make out. “I was knocked out in an elevator, and unconscious at Deaton’s. But there was always someone who brought me back.”

“Derek, we can’t be here.” Scott glances nervously back towards the window.

“Boyd died and there was a hand on my shoulder to comfort me.” The scent is stronger now. It’s honey and cinnamon spice and it wraps around Derek like blanket. “And I swear I can still feel that hand on me sometimes.” His own arm raises, of its own volition to trace down a shadow on the wall where the paint had faded. “Like an anchor.”

The room is no longer empty- a desk sits, undisturbed by the window. Derek wanders over to it, brushing his hand through the loose-leaf printouts.

“There were times when I was ready to sacrifice myself just to keep them safe.” A bed appears in the corner, messy and unmade like someone’s just left it. Derek can almost imagine that if he touched the sheets, they would still be warm. “There was a person in Beacon Hills, and they made me want to stay.”

Scott looks around, wide-eyed.

“Do you remember who it was?”

Derek turns to the far end of the room where the door has appeared.

“His name is Stiles.”

~

It takes another day to find the rift.

Derek knows when they’ve found it. It calls to him, like the moon calls to the wolf. There’s a thrum, an energy that draws him in towards the shimmering space hanging in the air.

When he presses his hand to it, he can feel Stiles’ presence on the other side.

“Stiles?”

The response when it comes is faint, echoing across the barrier.

“Derek?”

The air burns bright for a second, crackling as it heats.

“Derek!” A silhouette takes shape, just out of reach.

“Stiles!”

A hand stretches out and Derek reaches for it, fingers curling around a warm wrist as Stiles stumbles forward and into his arms.

“You didn’t forget me.” Stiles stares up at Derek in bewildered awe. “How?”

“How could I ever forget you?” Derek asks, a smile tugging at his lips. “You’re an annoying little shit. That’s not hard to remember.”

“Aw, you like me,” Stiles teases. “I knew it.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Derek tells him, but their fingers are still tangled together and Derek isn’t letting go again anytime soon.

[howdoyouknowaboutgandalf]

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Do you remember me?

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@caritobbg

Based on this ask; https://howdoyouknowaboutgandalf.tumblr.com/post/662794548148420608/hi-em-how-are-you-love-over-here-with

Warnings; guns, parental abuse, violence, death, mention of hospitals.

Word count; 1055

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September 12th, 2015

“Please! I don’t hurt me!” Y/n cried. She was scared. She had so many many memories like this. Men in black suits and masked helmets dragging her from safety. She kicked and screamed, but the men were too strong, she was too weak. Her lungs burned, she felt she was running out of air. After an hour of struggle, it all went black.

Y/n woke up to the silence of a small room. White artificial lights blinded her. “Hello?” She asked. A blurry figure came towards her. “Miss Y/ln. You’re awake.” The man paused. He kneeled down. “My name is Tony. I need you to tell me everything you know about the Winter Soldier. Your family was connected to the program, correct?” Y/n shuddered. “Yes sir.” Tony noticed she was shaky. “You’re safe here.” He said softly. “Can you tell me a little about your past? Start as far as you can remember.”

Several hours passed. Y/n was exhausted. She had never had to share her past. But Tony was kind. For once in a long time, Y/n felt safe. “I’d like you to meet someone.” Tony led Y/n through long corridors. Y/n had never seen anything as advanced. They walked into a large room. It had pretty white couches and a large black tv. "Wanda?” Tony called out. A pretty women with dark brown hair and a heavy accent came around a corner. “Yes?” She locked eyes with Y/n. “Wanda, I’d like you to meet someone. She was found recently and has had some bad experiences, similar to yours. She needs a place to stay. Can you help her with clothes and other… lady things for the time being?” Wanda smiled. “Of course. You can come with me.” Tony watched as Y/n walked away with Wanda before moving on to another task.

“This is your bedroom. Don’t worry. You’re safe here. Hydra can’t reach this place.” Wanda spoke in a soft tone. “Thank you, I… how did you know?” Y/n glanced at Wanda. “Oh, my apologies, I’m a telepath.” Y/n began to worry. “You saw all of it?” Wanda looked shocked. “No, only who the victimizer was.” Y/n sighed. “Good night Wanda.”

…

March 2nd, 2016

“I’m going to look!” Y/n yelled in Bucky’s direction. “I’ll guard you!” He yelled back. Y/n was standing at a computer with a flash drive when she heard the most deafening crack. “Bucky!” She screamed. Her ears were ringing. She ran around the corner. “No!” Bucky was nearly unconscious , he had been obliterated. If his arm wasn’t already metal, he would have lost it. His entire left side had been hit with an array of bullets. Luckily, y/n found they had all missed his heart. The man who shot him was already dead. “I love you.” Bucky’s eyes closed. Y/n grabbed her headset. “I need medical! As soon as you can!”

Once they had arrived back at the compound they immediately took Bucky to the hospital. Steve walked to Y/n. “What did you do?” Steve had never looked so hostile. He had never liked Y/n, but now he was starting to scare her. “I.. told Buck I was going to look. I don’t know what happened.” Y/n shook. She was on the brink of tears. “Give me the flash drive.” Steve growled. “There’s nothing on it.” Y/n lied. “Give it to me now.” Y/n refused. Steve ripped it out of her tactical pocket. “Wait!” Y/n yelled, “You don’t need it. I know everything.” Steve glanced at her. “It was me,”Y/n started, “I was his nurse. He doesn’t remember, but I remember all of it. I didn’t want to tell you.” Steve calmed a little. “That’s impossible, what are you 25?” Y/n looked at the floor. “I’m 79. I was put in cryo too.” Steve’s eyebrows furrowed. “It was you. You escaped. Why did you leave him? You did nothing. You knew everything that happened.” Y/n looked confused. “I couldn’t have.” Steve huffed. “Yes you could. You could have said something. If it weren’t for your selfishness we would have found him sooner.” Wanda walked in. “Steve! Enough! It wasn’t her fault. She was just a girl.” Y/n was crying now. She always had that guilt. She just hadn’t been confronted about it. “Can I see him? Please?” Steve glanced at her, “Absolutely not.” he said. Wanda stepped over. “She can. Move or I’ll make you.” Steve shut up after that. “Come on.” Wanda said softly. Y/n glanced through a window into his hospital room. She gasped at the sight of him. She watched as the doctors preformed surgery. His heartbeat was slowing. She was already crying, but Y/n started to weep. Her vision went blurry, she started to fall. Wanda picked her up. “Tony!” She yelled.

…

“She’s waking up.” The doctor spoke to Tony, Wanda, Steve, Sam, and Natasha. Y/n eyes opened. “Is Bucky ok?” Tony nodded. “He woke up a few hours ago.” Y/n spoke up. “Hours? How long was I out?” Wanda answered. “2 days.” Y/n’s eyes widened. “Can I see him?” She asked. “We’ll bring you to him in a wheelchair.” Tony went to the corner to grab it. Steve lifted her up and placed her in it. “I’m sorry for earlier. I really didn’t know what all you’ve been through. Can you forgive me.” Y/n let out a soft, “yes”. He wheeled her through the hall to Bucky’s hospital room. Steve pushed her through the door just before leaving. “Y/n.” Bucky said, “You’re ok.” Y/n stood up. She asked first, then softly bent down to hug him. “I need to tell you something.” She whispered. “It was me. I was your nurse. I didn’t want to say anything because I thought you’d hate me. I couldn’t handle it because I’m in love with you. I have been for a long time. They wanted me to fear you. But I never could. You were to broken. I’m so sorry I left you there.” Y/n was crying again, and so was Bucky. “It’s all coming back. It was you. You were the only semblance of kindness I had. Thank you. I could never blame you. You just found a chance and you took it. I’m here now, please don’t feel guilty.” They both smiled. Bucky spoke again. “I love you too.” Y/n looked at him. “May I kiss you?”

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Disclaimer: Bucky DID NOT fall in love with reader when she was 14. Reader is supposed to be in her 20’s in this fic. (Out of cryo age) So really the age gap would be less than ten years. Don’t come at me. This IS NOT depicting pedophilia.

[plainlo-inthemorning]

A little written-in-the-middle-of-the-night Loki fic snippet that just grew another leg. TVA Loki + Lokane. Rating T.

(First part is here)

Shine a Light, part II

The tempad feels hot and slippery in his palm as he stalks down the hallway, quickly putting distance between himself and the hunter he left unconscious amidst overturned chairs and tables in the canteen.

The mess had already been there, leftovers from workers rushing panicked to man their stations. He had simply added one more touch.

Tiny droplets of sweat bead his brow and blood has started seeping though the tear in his crumbled shirt.

The fabric is clinging wetly to his bicep, but in the mayhem unfolding around him, nobody gives him a second glance.

For the first time, he is thankful at least to be wearing the anonymous uniform dictated by the oppressors.

He reaches the kill me kind of room again and shuts the door behind him.

You were meant to cause suffering and death.

You’re a cosmic mistake.

You were meant to die at the hands of the mad titan.

Lies.

All lies.

Still projected on the wall is the paused image of a lost memory of his unfulfilled fate.

He sees himself, Thor and her on the barren planet with the black soil. The man he never became is lying on the ground, Thor cradling him.

She watches them both in shock.

It resonates in his bones. He has to go there.

He has to reach his brother at this precise, excruciatingly rare moment of heroism. His act of heroism.

Before the scheming and deceit poison their bond once more in an endless loop of disappointment.

In this moment, all is forgiven. Thor will listen and help. A different path will branch.

And he has to go to her.

It is ludicrous, this riddle, yet the truth of it presses hard on his chest.

On the grainy roll of film, he saved her life and her eyes bore into his with such intensity, his acute need still reverberates like an echo between the walls of the kill me kind of room.

The smell of lilacs lingers.

What will happen when he faces his own self on the timeline, he can’t imagine. Also, he gives it little thought at this late stage with universal logic already suspended as it is. Hopefully he can reason with the man he was meant to be.

He has had quite enough of being his own past, present and future selves’ worst enemy.

And so he pushes the buttons on the tempad.

//

Something is very wrong.

The sky is too blue, the distant sound of waves lapping calmly at a shore is misplaced.

He has emerged from the door onto a quiet gravel road lined with tall grass and low pines. A single, white wooden house stands to his left, surrounded by a lawn dotted with wildflowers. The sun is warm on his back.

This is Midgard, he is sure of it.

How could he shoot past his destination so spectacularly?

He is about to scroll down the list of numbers and names on the tiny screen of the tempad when he notices a man approaching. Old, walking leisurely with a round, short-legged dog much the same white color as the mortal’s own wispy hair.

The latter starts a little when he spots Loki.

And then he does the most unexpected thing and speaks his name.

Loki’s name.

He almost drops the tempad (no! Not again) and the old one grins good-naturedly. “Hold on to your fancy phone there. Far away, were we?”

Loki only just about stops himself from shaking the man by his shoulders. His fists clench uncontrollably.

“What year is this?! How do you know my name?”

His voice sounds shrill, feverish, and unsurprisingly the eyes in the lined face before him go wide with puzzlement and … something else.

“Loki, what on Earth? Are you quite alright?”

Shock washing over him, Loki staggers back. H-how?

But the man is closing the gap between them, oozing concern. “Have you - are you drunk?” he asks incredulously.

He reaches out.

What is happening?

Loki shies away from the touch, his mind spinning.

Forcibly gathering his composure, he straightens and wills his words to come out steady. “No, I’m okay. Apologies. A bad joke”.

He smiles reassuringly. It takes more effort than parting an ocean.

The dog is sniffing insistently at his ankles.

The man looks him over with suspicion but the worry is subsiding. “Okay, then… no harm, no foul. You know, sometimes these peculiar ‘jokes’ of yours can make a neighbor all kinds of slightly worried”.

Neighbor?

“Most understandably, won’t happen again. Sorry to have bothered you”. Loki cuts him off smoothly. “Have a nice day”. He nods and turns before hysteria can creep into his voice.

“In case you need it for your punchline, the year is 2016”, the man calls over his shoulder as he shuffles away, pulling the reluctant dog after him.

Loki’s blood runs cold. 2016. Oh, this is so wrong. Three years wrong.

Did he hit another button at the last minute? He had been clutching the tempad so hard the edges cut into his fingers.

He curses his own impatience. Tech savvy indeed.

Holding up the blasted piece of TVA wizardry, he tries to enter a new series of numbers when his name rings out again.

And again, he almost jumps. But this time, his heart stays in his throat.

//

“Loki? What are you doing out here? I’ve been looking all over for you”.

Her voice reaches him from the porch of the white house. She is skipping lightly down the steps, the screen doors left open behind her. Music drifts into the garden from somewhere inside.

She is crossing the lawn. He is no longer breathing.

Her long auburn hair is tied back in a ponytail, and she is wearing a light blue summer dress. Her feet are bare.

Absurdly, he notes that she looks more tanned than the last time he saw her through the visor of the destroyer in the desert. A year and a lifetime ago. To him.

His grip on whatever reality he’s been clinging to since New York is seriously faltering.

She is beaming. He cannot move a muscle.

She comes all the way up to him and without pause wraps her slender arms around his neck. He can feel the warmth of her body through his shirt, smell the perfume of her skin. She smells of … -

“Where did you go, handsome?” She smiles playfully.

“Pepper called earlier to say that she actually got Tony out of the door on time, if you can believe it, so they’ll be here any minute. And her and I agreed that you two hotheads are going to play nice tonight, okay?”

She is teasing him but he hardly understands the words she’s saying. It makes no sense.

And then, before he can begin to form a response, she stands on tiptoes and kisses him and the world falls away.

Reflexively, he puts his arms around her, drawing her close to him. She moans happily. He leans into the kiss, not knowing what he’s doing other than that he never wants to stop.

Her mouth is soft and warm and new and familiar all at the same time, and the way her fingers curl in his hair sends electricity shooting down his spine.

It should be all anguish and tragic confusion, like before in the castle beyond time, but it is not.

It feels more right that anything he can remember since before his fall from the Bifrost, more real and yet more magical than his recent journeys into mystery.

Then it’s over all too soon and she draws away.

His arms are suddenly much too empty and he almost reaches for her again, craving her touch.

For a fleeting heartbeat, his soul had no longer felt torn apart to the point of forgetting he’d ever been whole.

The chaos had crumbled in on itself like a bad dream.

He is surprised he still knows what peace of mind feels like after what has happened to him since arriving at the TVA.

But now she looks at him with alarm in those beautiful brown eyes and he is crudely reminded that he is an intruder in her reality.

What she thought she saw, she clearly no longer recognizes.

It takes him all of three stupidly long seconds to remember that she said his name. That he’s wearing his own face and not a disguise.

That she knew him immediately, just like the old man.

She kissed him.

Too many impossible possibilities and the thunderous sound of his own heartbeat (surely she can hear it too) blur his vision.

He’s only vaguely aware that he is stepping towards her, trying to say something without the faintest idea of what’s going to come out of his mouth.

If it’ll even be words.

Her eyes dart over his clothes, his face.

“Loki, what - Why are you dressed like that? Have you been gone? Is that … blood?”

She retreats further, fear building.

“Jane, I-“

Her name rolls of his tongue with a sweet-tasting intimacy like he has said it a thousand times before.

But he doesn’t get to dwell on this, nor gather his thoughts to say anything else before something abruptly lifts him off the ground and hurls his body across the road.

“How dare you touch her, beast?!”

Immediately as his back connects with the rough gravel, someone is there, a knee pushing him down, fingers closing around his throat. A sharp object presses against his chin.

There is a dangerous, unhinged growl as his attacker breathes hotly in his ear. “You will die for this!”

The man is strong and somehow blocking Loki’s own magic, but he still manages to twist his head -

And looks right up into his own eyes, nearly black with rage.

//

“Speak! What are you??”

The man with a face exactly like his presses the tip of his blade closer to Loki’s left eye. “You will show yourself right now or -“

Gathering his magic tightly around him (focus!), Loki pushes back, hard.

With a surge of energy, their bodies are separated, and the other version of him lands heavily in the middle of the road some meters away.

Both of them are on their feet with the fluid movements of two panthers ready to pounce, the other now in full armor.

He has to leave, right now, even if means leaving her which is a catastrophe that might either kill him or make him try to kill his other self if he stays here another minute.

This timeline is clearly not his own.

It cannot be.

Arm outstretched to ward off his furious twin with a shield of magic, he tries to work the tempad with one hand.

“Well, well, what do we have here?”

A booming voice above their heads.

“You know, when Jane pressed the panic button just now, I thought we had an actual emergency. Not that you were preparing a little dinner show for us, Reindeer Games. Gotta be honest though, this doppelgänger stunt was never my favorite -“

“Stark!”

The variant - for he must be a variant - angrily interrupts the man in the metal suit hovering in the air.

Of course, Loki remembers him all too clearly.

What has it been, less than a week since he threw him, or a version of him, out the window of the glass tower?

“This is not my creation”, the variant hisses with venom dripping from every word. “I caught him assaulting Jane. Kissing her”.

“What?!”

Stark focuses all his attention (and one of his iron fists) on Loki. A metallic humming rises steadily from inside the suit.

“A man on a suicide mission then. Boy, did you smooch the wrong wizard’s baby-mama. He may look all domesticated and cute now, but I assure you he’s still all kinds of crazy. In fact-”.

“Hey!”

“What?”

“I know it’s asking a lot, of you in particular, Stark, but could we possibly save the personal insults till we have dealt with this right here?”

Wait, just wait.

Damn it, he can’t tap in the destination on the tempad without looking at it.

Green smoke is swirling around the hands of his other self. He knows what’s coming.

“This is your last warning, devil! I will not have you hiding behind my face as I -“

“This is my face! I’m you, you fool! Bigger things are at large here and-“ Loki falters, his silver tongue failing once more with rising predictability within what seems a disconcertingly short period of time.

Although he honestly can’t tell anymore.

“Please, take a minute -“

He can’t help but shout, sounding hopelessly desperate.

In another life, he might have felt humiliated, but letting pride dictate his emotions is no longer a luxury he can afford to indulge.

Still, the silence that follows his outburst is not nearly as long as he needs it to be.

The variant stares blankly at him, mouth slightly ajar, but Stark recovers easily, his voice now icy.

“Yeah, dude, that one might have worked better if you’d put on a clean shirt. Time to fess up real quick or we’ll have to-“

Drawing what might become his last breath, Loki looks away and down at the tempad. He presses the button. No more time to double check.

“What the?!”

Both Stark and the variant visibly flinch as the door appears.

He quickly makes for it. “I - I’m sorry. Truly, I am”. He looks to their stunned faces before turning to his exit.

Out of the corner of his eye, he registers the variant move (he has to be a variant). His mouth twists in an ugly snarl and two familiar daggers are appearing by his sides.

Before the door snaps completely shut, Loki sees Jane run up to the man and grab his arm.

“Love, no, don’t!”

He sees the slight bump under her dress that he didn’t notice before.

And then the scene disappears and he’s gone.

Part III

[hargrove-mayfields]

Just A Dream Away

Chapter 1/13 read here on ao3!

my piece for @harringrovebigbang!

Art and moodboard from my amazing team, @monochromegee and @shewritesdirty respectively, to come soon!

~~~~

Six months. Six months and twelve days.

That’s how long Billy has been in the hospital. In a coma. His health rapidly deteriorating.

After one month it was required he be put on a ventilator. Two and his wounds started getting infected. By month three, the hospital asked that a representative be chosen for him, just in case he didn’t pull through.

Neil Hargrove refused. Barked into the receiver something along the lines of, “What do I care if the boy wanted to go and get himself killed?” It was entirely defensive, his voice cracking as he finished his sentence, but the hospital still never contacted him again, not for updates or bills or anything. His wife was far too busy taking care of one grieving child and a lazy husband already to worry about an additional burden.

All of Billy’s extended family was still in California, had written him off years before they’d even left home for Indiana anyways. The moment his mother walked out the door, nobody else wanted him either, so they were off the table too.

The town of Hawkins had been turned inside out by the deaths of more than thirty community members, some of which were still being reported as missing so many months later. Nobody had the time, or in many cases the heart, to take care of the lone survivor.

That left only one person. The one who’d been taking care of him even before he’d fallen into a coma. The one who’d understood him better than anyone else, who’d given him a chance, who’d loved him more than anything.

Steve gets a call from the hospital, the way he is usually woken up these days. Every other morning, as soon as visitation opens, a nurse calls him for a quick update. The duties of a representative for someone unconscious, for his Billy in a coma.

He’s beyond exhausted, dragging himself to and from Hawkins General day in and day out, sometimes bringing Max or a few of the other kids along with him. Mostly because every day is the same thing, walking through the halls, facing the polite smiles from nurses who deal with this on the daily, don’t understand the way it feels to see the one you love on that bed.

If he does hear anything new, it’s usually not good news. He knows Billy is getting worse, but still he sits in that room for countless hours, watching and waiting for the moment he’s struck with a miracle, and he comes back to him.

The hospital is not quite as patient though, and since about month four of Billy’s hospital stay, they’d been encouraging Steve to consider his wards right to die. After so much time had passed by without signs of improvement, the nurses had started hesitating in the doorway when he was around, and offering kind little suggestions that were supposed to push him towards the decision to let Billy go.

Things like, “It’s not really him anymore, honey.” and, “He’s getting worse by the minute, poor thing.”, and Steve’s favorite, the one that made him leave the hospital in tears, “If he wanted to wake up, he would have done it by now.”

But no matter how true what they were saying may have been, Steve really did not want to hear it. The only reason the thought of letting Billy go had ever crossed the minds of doctors and nurses was because of what was on the news, all these up and coming stories about hospital ethics committees that were popping up all over the country recently.

They were being selfish, willing to let Billy die just because they were scared they wouldn’t be able to stand the heat that would come from keeping an eighteen year old boy on life support for as long as they had. Whether or not they actually thought they could save him was a question for another day.

So they would mail Steve countless papers and claims and pamphlets to try to reason with him, to persuade him that the best thing to do was to kill Billy because they didn’t want to deal with him anymore. It made him sick to his stomach, to think that people who were supposedly trained to help people were so hellbent on giving up on a patient.

He wonders sometimes, if they wouldn’t be so hasty to pull the plug had he been an easier case. If his father was more supportive and his biological mother present, or if the government hadn’t worked so hard to cover up the origin of his injuries. Maybe even if his representative was a nice young woman instead.

But there’s nothing he can do about it, so he just crumples the papers and ignores their premature condolences, and goes to visit Billy at every moment he can.

The drive to the hospital that particular morning feels like it takes a whole day instead of the 20 minutes the route actually is, Steve feeling like he’s suspended in time. It doesn’t seem real, taking the stairs up to the second floor, elevators were a no go after the free fall he took at Starcourt, and taking a visitor sticker and a bunch of papers from the woman at the reception desk.

He’s walked this route more times than he can count, but this time he can feel that something is wrong, different. On the top of the very first sheet the desk lady hands him, in bold black letters, are the printed words “Right-to-Die” and Steve already knows what is coming.

The woman gives him a half sympathetic look and reads off her scripted spiel. “The Hargrove boy has been unresponsive for six months now, with no signs of improvement in his condition. The recently instituted hospital ethics board wants you to seriously consider the contents of these forms.”

The words are so hollow, the look on her face mostly bored. Steve guesses this same speech was probably given to a thousand other people who’d come through this hospital, and it makes him feel nauseated just listening to it, her less than genuine pity as she reads off her clipboard, making it seem like she doesn’t even care what she is asking of him.

“It’s of course among your rights as representative to say no, but we want to remind you that he has no quality of life being artificially kept alive, and it might be best to let him go.”

“No, they told me he couldn’t feel anything. He’s not suffering.” Steve insists, and as much as he believes that he is right, the confidence in his voice is false. This was something he’d been thinking about every day for the last half a year. “You’ve kept him alive this long, right? That’s got to mean something.”

“Still, this is about him. We just want you to think about if keeping him alive is the right thing to do anymore when we can’t be sure what he’s going through. When he isn’t himself.”

Of course this was something he’d considered in his own mind, six months is a long time, and it was inevitable that a few times on his worst days, he’d have to think about pulling the plug. It was just so different hearing this nurse who didn’t know Billy insisting on it, it was just so impersonal, and it made him think about the hospital's greed, and how they probably just wanted to save money on ventilators and open up another bed.

Without saying another word to her, Steve walks away without the clipboard of papers, and off to room B-216. Of course he'd known this was coming. They’d been trying to drop hints since the moment Billy stopped being able to breathe on his own, but he’d been in denial. As long as Billy's heart was still beating, Steve had hope that he would recover if the doctors would just try.

Still, as he sits down in the chair next to Billy’s bed, he decides he doesn’t want to call Max today. He takes the desk woman's advice, as angry as it made him, and takes the time to truly reflect on the boy in that bed, with the feeding tube down his throat, the respirator breathing for him beside his bed, the IV in his neck, there because the veins in his arms had been so overused.

His hair is much longer now, just past his collarbones, but without maintenance, his blonde curls are knotted and dull. His skin is unnaturally pale, his freckles faded to nothing, and his whole body is littered with angry, dark red scars. The hole in the center of his chest still isn’t all the way healed, and the nurses are constantly fighting to keep it free of infection.

When he wakes up, they say he will be in immense pain and that he will have forgotten how to walk and talk and probably even breathe on his own. There was a chance too that his memory will have gaps in it, which could mean anything from forgetting what happened to him in July, to not even knowing his own name.

Basically if, no- when he wakes up, he won’t really be Billy.

Steve had always heard about and seen in the movies coma patients who twitch their fingers or moved their eyes, or who really give any signs of life, miraculously waking up and being themselves again, but Billy, he had only done the opposite.

At some point, he has to accept that Billy won’t be like one of those other patients, and, in the condition he is in, all pale skin and open wounds and zero signs of responsiveness, they were only prolonging his death. They had tried just about everything they could thanks to Steve’s willingness to cover the expenses, and, although he didn’t want to believe it, maybe just couldn’t accept it quite yet, it was, as the nurse had said, time to think about letting Billy go.

Not today though. He’d spend today with him at the very least, trying to push those thoughts to the back of his mind while he still could. The nurses used to say, when Billy had first been admitted and they still thought there was a chance of recovery, that Steve and Max, whenever she could come, should try talking to him, and Steve always did.

He never really has a whole lot to say, not since everything has been calming down recently. There were no more funerals to attend, no more grieving families to take a hot dish and his condolences to. The kids didn’t need him to watch them anymore, and Family Video had decided to lay him off until he didn’t have to make daily hospital commutes and he could work again. Basically, Steve’s entire world was Billy.

So it was only fair that Billy was what he usually talked about, reminiscing about everything they’d gotten to do together before the accident, telling him about what was happening with his sister now that she was getting older, and giving him updates on how many days it had been and how much he missed and loved him. One of the nurses had heard him say that once, seen him lean forwards and press a kiss to Billys forehead, but she had only turned away, pretending she hadn’t noticed.

Today though, it was much harder than usual to think of something to say to him. He always tried to leave all of the bad stuff at the door, didn’t think it would do Billy any good if he could even hear, to be listening to him always complaining or moping about their situation, but with death weighing heavy on his mind, what else was there to think about?

The anger and the remorse and the depression would be for when he went home tonight and downed a whole bottle of Fireball, Billy’s favorite whiskey, and called Robin drunk off his ass at two in the morning to tell her about how terrible he felt.

It was because he loved Billy with all of his heart that he wouldn’t put him through that. Even if it hurt more than anything else to see his love broken down and dying, which was, in Steve’s opinion, the worst thing that had ever happened to him, he always wore a smile on his face every day he walked into that hospital room.

As hard as that was, and as guilty as it made him feel to admit, Billy's sickness wasn’t the only thing making Steve miserable. He had also been through some unimaginable things himself while trapped in the Starcourt mall, and he didn't come out the other side the same.

Nightmares plagued him constantly, so that when he would eventually come back home from the hospital, he didn’t sleep more than fifteen minutes through the night. Being alone for too long warped his perception of reality, made him think everyone he knew and loved was gone, that he’d been abandoned or all his friends killed. He would constantly call to check on them, most of the time drunk and panicking, but they’d stopped picking up after the first few times. There were so many triggers too that could send him back to that night in an instant, where he’d just get stuck again.

And perhaps that is exactly why he can’t let Billy go so easily, because even if it is heartbreaking and makes him feel so empty inside being there with a version of his Billy who couldn’t speak to him or who he couldn’t hold, he was still alive. If he died now, Steve would have nothing. It would be no different from the losses everyone had suffered, the death of the chief of police and at least thirty other community members robbing them of their soundness of mind.

Letting go of Billy would just be another blow, to him and to the tight-knit community who had come so close together after the accident that rocked their little town. You wouldn't be able to tell from the fact that his room was always empty except for Steve or his sister, but the papers had revered him as a hero. Who he’d become after being hospitalized meant his death wouldn't just affect loved ones.

But more than any of that, he just didn’t want to give up on him. Pulling the plug meant sacrificing so many more moments they could have together, losing the chance to move on from what had happened. How could Steve ever know when it was the right time to do that?

When was it safe to say that Billy wouldn’t ever recover, and that they were just stretching out the inevitable? When could he feel right in letting his very best friend and the love of his life die? Deep down, past his initial reaction of shock and heartbreak, he knows he’ll never truly be ready to say goodbye, but that now was that time regardless.

Just like the nurses said, he wasn’t really Billy anymore. Who he’d been was a teenage boy with too much energy to burn, always getting into trouble and always in motion, bouncing his knee, twisting the ring on his middle finger or the locket around his neck, chain smoking cigarette after cigarette. It used to drive Steve insane how he wouldn’t sit still for anything, but now he would give anything just to have that back.

There was no personality left in him, no stupid jokes to cheer Steve up, no pestering his sister and her friends like a big brother does, nothing left in him at all that made him distinctly Billy. Steve wondered if maybe he had already given up.

If maybe, Billy wasn’t even in there at all anymore, and they were holding on to nothing just to feed their own selfishness. Steve wasn’t the most emotional of people, usually panicking before he got upset, but he could feel tears pricking at his eyes now, as he watched the slow rise and fall of Billy’s, or not Billy’s, chest, and listened to the beeps and hums of the machines that kept him going.

He knew what needed to be done. Just not today.

For now, he holds Billy's hand, unmoving and just warm enough that he could tell he was alive, and whispered to him anything that came to his mind.

If Billy could hear him, he knew he was probably tired of hearing the same stories over and over, thinking of Billy waking up and complaining about Steve being too boring made him chuckle to himself. An instant pang of regret tightens his chest, feeling guilty for being happy.

There was a really sweet nurse about the age of his mother who always checked in on him at the same time everyday, like he was the one with tubes and machines sticking out of his body. Her name was Dale, and she always peeked her head into the room around meal times to ask if he had been down to the cafeteria yet. Usually he hadn’t, and sometimes he still forgot to eat anyways, but it meant a lot to him.

Today though, she came all the way in the room, a sad look on her face, and he had to avoid her gaze entirely to keep himself from breaking down, choosing instead to focus on Billy’s slender fingers where he’d laced them through his own.

“Steve, honey, I know this is really hard for you, it’s hard for all of us when something like this happens, but you need to take care of yourself.” She was just being kind, but he wouldn’t hear it.

If this was going to be the last full day he’d ever spend with Billy, he was going to make it count. A soggy sandwich in the dingy old cafeteria wasn’t worth spending a single moment away from the other boy's bedside. He feels vaguely guilty about it, but he ignores the well meaning nurse, even as she says her generic condolences that all of them were trained to say.

He smooths out Billy's hair, brushing the part that always hung in his eyes to the side carefully, something Billy himself had always seemed to do when he was nervous. It reminds him of the time they tried to do each other's hair and Billy taught him how to make a braid, so he tells Billy about it.

When he hears the distant roar of a car's engine from the open window, it reminds him of the first time Billy drove him home in the now totaled beyond recognition Camaro, so he talks about that. A bird landing on the windowsill reminds him of sitting on Billy’s bed and talking about the seagulls and the beaches back in California where Billy had grown up, so he tells Billy that story too. The phone ringing at the receptionist's desk down the hallway reminds him of the time Billy had called him in the middle of the night to invite him out to the quarry, where they’d kissed for the first time and Steve clumsily asked him to make things official, so again, he told Billy all about it.

It's mostly a comfort to himself, keeping his mind off of the reality of the situation, but then the desk lady announces over the overhead system that visiting hours are over, and it’s time for him to go.

They had been giving him a lot of leeway here at Hawkins General, allowing him to visit every single day and sometimes with a 14 year old, which was strictly against the rules of the ICU. The end of visiting hours was a rule they always stood by though, and despite how much it crushed him to leave Billy by himself overnight, he always did it.

On his way out, he grabbed the stack of papers the receptionist tried to give him off of her desk. He would call Susan in the morning and ask her what she thought. He would try to involve her in the choice, since she’d technically claimed Billy as her dependent after her marriage to his father, who had given enough verbal and written agreements that he wanted nothing at all to do with his son while he was hospitalized that his wife could, and had, stepped in.

He went home that night with the thought in his head that this was the last time he’d do this, and by this time tomorrow, Billy would be dead.

[sweetestlamb]

Bring Me To Life

Summary: Kang Sujin has never had anyone to turn to, hiding behind a façade her entire life. Someone begins to peek behind the mask. 

Author’s note: My two favorite characters in TB are Seojun and Sujin, both characters who are honestly treated like trash by the writers. I cannot begin to tell how upsetting it was to see Sujin’s character assassination or how painful it is to watch her being physically abused knowing that the writers will not give her therapy or a true happy ending. She’s just here to be beaten and vilified. Seojun, I won’t even rant everyone knows what the problem is (idk who told them we wanted to see Start-Up the high school edition.) So I wrote this after watching the most recent episode and hating most of it for these reasons. I don’t know how far it’ll go or how often I can update, but I need my two babies to have a happy ending preferably together because the visuals are just a dreammmm. 

The rain crashes down loudly from aggrieved storm clouds bellowing above her in the sky, the chilled condensation plastering her thin satin pajamas to her trembling body. She had to get out, the pain in her cheek numbing and electrifying all at once.

How dare she tell him that she didn't want to get married, want to stand on her own two feet without a man giving her value?

His hand had flown across the room before she could sidestep the blow, the fragile glass filled with water in her hand- the very reason she'd left her room in the dead of night- shattering into jagged pieces as it collided with a greater force. Just like her.

She hadn't been trying to eavesdrop but it was hard not to hear him chuckling deeply on the phone, offering up his only child like she was an item on a menu.

"Yes we should set them up. It seems Suho isn't interested and she should marry young, that's when women are worth the most."

Nausea rolled like waves in the pits of her stomach and before she could think logically, her feet were sprinting into the living room, air barely filling her lungs as she stared at the man she'd never once thought of as a father. The last time she'd made the grave mistake of calling him daddy he'd smacked her so hard that was how she lost her first tooth. He'd been father ever since or Mr. Kang. She tried her best to avoid him at all cost, she would never be good enough and it was getting harder to hide the marks he left behind.

It was difficult to remember clearly what occurred seconds after her refusal to marry a man she didn't know left her lips, his fist connected and she was knocked back onto their coffee table the sharp edge cutting at her cheek. As she looked at him, anger painting his face a demonic red, fear crippled her and her hands twitched desperately wanting to wash them raw. Then he grabbed a thick marble ashtray from the table and her instincts took over and she was out the door, running as fast as she could, knowing her life was at stake and she couldn't afford to stop.

When the cloud in her head cleared that was when she found herself at the bus stop.

Judgmental whispers breeze by her ears as people passed by with umbrellas, shocked to see the young girl crying in her pajamas at the stop, but none stopped to offer her help or inquire about her situation, happy just to pass judgement. She ignores them all, panicking racing through her blood until she's unable to breathe, choking on nothing as she twitches in the harsh air. Her throat constricts as she screams at herself, breathe. 

Breathe.

BREATHE! 

But it's useless as her body shuts down, forgetting how to do the basic function, she sways as she starts to feel light headed from the lack of oxygen and with a final wheeze she collapses. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

He signs as he weaves past cars moving far too slowly, adrenaline rushing through his veins as he marginally misses nipping a car to the left of him, easily dragging his motorcycle away with the fluid movements of his body. He glares up at the sky before cursing, "Fucking weather report didn't say anything about a sudden rainstorm." If he'd known he would have stayed home, always hating the rain. It brought back bad memories.

Halting at a red light, he puts his leg down for balance bouncing slightly in place. Pulling the shield up on his helmet he glances around, recognizing the area easily, before something in his peripheral catches his attention, a lump on the ground. Tilting his head he revs his trusty iron steed to live, riding over to the direction of the mysterious mass on the wet ground. As he gets closer his heart falters, it's too evident now. 

It's a person.

Jumping off his bike and pushing out the kickstand he flings his helmet off, his hair immediately drenched under the downpour as he races over to help. As he nears the figure, it becomes clearer it's a woman wearing what looks like sleep clothes. Momentarily he wonders if this is a crazy person and if he should just mind his business but a frightening image of his little sister unconscious on the ground and no one coming to her aid flashes in his mind.

"I'll just check if she's breathing and call an ambulance. That's all, if she tries to attack me I'll just ride away." He takes a deep breath, collecting his courage before closing the gap between him and the unconscious woman.

Crouching beside her, he reaches out a hand hesitating before sighing and shaking at her cold shoulder. No response. He shakes harder now, watching the motion quake through her entire body, but still she is unresponsive.

"Hey! Hey! Are you okay? Wake up, you're scaring me!" He starts to jiggle her with both hands, before he crawls into her space not caring about his safety any longer, the idea that this unknown woman might be dead is making him nauseous. People are always dying without his permission. It's so frustrating.

"Wake up! Come on!" He shouts at the figure now holding both her shoulders and turning the woman over, lifting her face from its place on the ground, cradling her limp body in his lap. After two more vicious shakes, she starts to cough and groan in his arms. Relief swims through his veins as he watches her come back to life, anxiously watching as her dewy long lashes flutter open and he's caught in a lifeless deep gaze.

"Han Seo-Jun?"

It takes a long pause for him to register that the woman has said his name and then a longer moment to recognize who she is.

"Kang Su-Jin?" He replies in genuine shock, taking in the wom--young girl in his arms. She's shivering so violently that it's becoming difficult to hold onto her, vibrating out of his hold before he grips her tighter, whipping off his jacket without second thought and wrapping it around her. Goosebumps raising on his skin as his body mentally berates his lack of survival skills.

"What are you doing here?" She looks at him bewildered as if the stranger occurrence is his presence and not her own.

He squints his eyes looking back at her, "I could ask you the same thing. I found you unconscious here. I thought you were...." He trails off unable to utter the rest of his sentence.

"You should have left me here. Maybe I would have. If I was that lucky."

"What? Are you crazy, you want to die? Did you do this to yourself, what are you on?!" He roars at her, rage flooding his system as he shouts at the stupid girl, how dare she try to kill herself and leave her body for him to find? He wishes he had taken a different route, that he'd never come across her. He was in no state to comfort someone who was suicidal, still too raw and hurt. What was so hard about living that made people want to do that? Hot tears gather in his eyes as he abruptly pulls away from Sujin, unapologetic as she tumbles to the ground without his support.

She starts at him, stunned before righteous fury twists her features and she roars back at him.

"Who are you to judge me! I didn't ask you to help me, leave me alone!"

He glares back at her ready to yank his jacket away and run away from her but a small movement stops him, as she's screaming at him a small muscle twitches in her cheek bringing his attention to said cheek. It's nearly purple, standing out obscenely on her pale skin and then he notices the split lip and the bruises on her neck and he's so ashamed of himself he could bawl.

He deflates before speaking to her, "What happened to your face? Who did this to you?"

He doesn't know what kind of look he has on his face but before his questions can even settle between them she's sneering and twisting away from him, throwing his jacket on the ground before making her escape. Unprepared for her sudden departure he reacts too late, before chasing after her. It's easy to close the distance separating them with his long legs and within seconds she's merely inches in front of him, he reaches out a large hand to grab her wrist but hesitates recalling the bruises littering her frame. Instead he races past her, blocking her with his body swerving to the left and then the right when she tries to dodge him. They play this cat and mouse game before she finally gives up, glaring up at him with moist enraged eyes.

"Why do you care? We aren't even friends!"

Her piercing shout rings in his ears as he looks down at her passively. He can't answer that question, doesn't know what brought him to this area so late and not understanding why he was the one to find her in this condition. He doesn't know why he cares. But maybe things could have been different if Se-Yeon had someone to chase him. Maybe he'd still be alive...

So he answers her honestly.

"I don't want anymore people to die."

To his complete shock she starts to cry, tears falling rapidly from her eyes before she crumples to the ground, the rain pounding on her head and he stands still unsure of what to do before he drapes the jacket he'd rescued from the ground over her head, shielding her from most of the thunderous downpour. When she looks up to see the jacket protecting her, he almost falls backwards as her head slams into his chest, her tears simmering hot on his chilled body. It's almost painfully uncomfortable but he doesn't move away. Letting her cry on his chest, his shirt is soaked anyway this makes no difference.

He doesn't know how long they are crouched there on the ground, so dark that the sidewalk is completely devoid of anyone else, it feels like they are the only two people left on Earth.

"If we stay here you're going to get a cold."

He voices his concern but the only reply he receives is a gross sounding sniffle and he grimaces, knowing that his poor shirt is probably damaged beyond repair covered in snot and tears.

Sighing he starts to repeat himself before she whispers, "I don't have anywhere to go."

"I can take you home." Her fists tighten in his drenched shirt, he can practically feel the fear wafting off her, he'd assumed the marks on her face were from a possessive unhinged boyfriend but her reaction makes him uneasy. He tries to push those unpleasant thoughts to the corner.

"What about your friends? Why don't you call Su-ah or Ju-Kyung, I’m sure they’ll help you.” 

She stiffens in his arms before shaking her head in decline.

"No. I can't let anyone else see me like this. I don't need them looking at me the way you did, like I'm a sad pitiful puppy. I never want anyone look at me like that again."

He can respect that, he never wants to appear weak in front of others. It was easier to become angry and lash out rather than showing your true heart, nobody could hurt you that way.

"Then what? Where do you want to go?"

"I have nowhere to go. I'll stay here until morning. I'll be fine, you can go."

He looks at her dumbfounded, what kind of man would leave a battered woman alone in the rain? He wasn't raised by animals, damn it.

"Let's go." He makes a point not to touch her, their only point of connection are her hands twisted in his shirt.

"What?"

He bulldozes past her confusion, looking at her with what he hopes are comforting eyes.

"I'm taking you to my house. I can't just leave you here."

"Are you crazy? Don't you live with your mother and sister, what will they say?"

He winces at the logical inquiry, he had already considered that himself, thinking of his mother's subsequent smacks and his sister's teasing once they learned what he'd done but still deciding that he has no other choice. He can't just leave her here.

He shrugs, "That's my problem to worry about. I'm not leaving you here, I'd really like to get out of his rain. Let's go." He repeats himself harder, pleading with her.

She looks away and he's prepared to throw her over his shoulders and face the consequences when he hears her response, "Okay. Let's go."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It's a quiet ride back, the engine rumbling through the aching bones of her frozen body. Han Seojun. The last person she ever expected to see after being roused from her panic induced collapse. Her arms tighten around his thin waist as he swerves around a car, adrenaline and fear battling for dominance in her body. When her fingers accidentally brush across wet bare skin she quickly moves her hands higher, fighting the embarrassment that washes over her.

If he notices she can't hear his reaction over the roar of the motorcycle.

When they finally pull up to a small apartment, she loosens her hold on him cracking her frozen digits.

"You didn't need to hold that tightly, I wasn't going to let anything happen to you. I ride this everyday you know."

She doesn't reply focusing on getting off the bike, swinging her leg over and hopping off not graceful but effective, a small proud smile spreads on her face before she gazes back at him.

He stares back before shaking his head, as if lost in a daze before he stomps off for her to follow.

Wordlessly she trails behind him, feeling foolish in her duck pajamas, a gift from Su-ah.

When he pushes his front door open, letting her in first she steps out of her sopping wet house slippers standing awkwardly looking around.

"Stay here. I'll get towels so we don't trail too much water."

She nods at his command, gazing at the floor and seeing how much water is already pooling around her feet.

"Here." He hands her a fluffy pink towel, she raises an eyebrow at the color.

"It's the guest towel. I wouldn't give you my towel."

That makes sense, sharing towels is far too intimate for the relationship they have. That being none. 

She rapidly towels at her hair, before running the towel down her body and wrapping it around her waist.

"You can use the bathroom. It's the second door on the right. I'll bring you dry clothes."

She steps cross the doorway, finally entering his home. Before she turns back to him staring directly into his eyes, "Than.... You didn't have to do this." She loses her confidence but his answering smirk lets her know he understood enough, with that she walks to the bathroom locking herself inside.

The sight of her bruised face in the mirror makes her pause, reaching up to finger at the stark purple mark on her cheek. She's crying before she can control her emotions, tears dripping into the sink as she remembers her night, how close she was to the end despite what she said to Seojun she wanted to live. As her father stood above her ready to snuff her out like a mere nuisance in his life, she realized with a burning passion how desperately she wanted to live.

A soft knock drags her back to reality as she rapidly wipes her tears away.

"I'm leaving clothes by the door. You can come out whenever you're ready. I'm making tea."

When she hears the light steps of his feet moving away from the door she opens the door a crack, picking up the neatly folded pile of clothes. Sending the boy a mental thank you before closing the door quietly.

It's clear that these clothes belong to Seojun, draping off her body, too large for her frame, a black T-shirt with a microphone on the center and sweatpants that cover her feet as well, he'd even remembered to bring her socks. Instantly she feels her body warming as her body temperature returns to normal. 

Folding her wet clothes and splashing water on her face then using the towel to rub it dry, she exits the bathroom walking towards the light she sees assuming that's the kitchen.

"The water's almost done boiling. Sit down."

His deep voice greets her as she follows his orders and takes a seat.

"Are these your clothes?"

"What? Oh yeah they're mine, sorry my sister locked her door. They're very old though, I haven't worn them in years I thought they would fit you better." He eyes her as he says the last sentence, "I guess it didn't make much of a difference I'm just too tall and manly for my own good."

She scoffs at his narcissistic comment rolling her eyes "Tall and manly my foot. You're so skinny I could probably pick you up with one arm."

He immediately turns at her comment, affronted look on his face, "Shut up! It's hard for me to put on weight, I'm not that skinny."

He places his hands on his hips, looking down at himself before puffing his chest out to make himself appear broader, it's so ridiculous that she can't control her reaction.

Sudden uncontrollable laughter.

She laughs breathlessly, folding onto her lap trying to contain her giggles but his scandalized look makes her laugh harder and she has to stuff her face in her elbow to prevent herself from waking his family.

After a few minutes of random spasms of laughter she finally peers back up at him.

He looks just like he did outside when she'd smiled after successively getting off his motorcycle.

"What? What are you looking at?"

"Nothing. I just never see you smile at school."

"Well you never do anything worth smiling about." She quips back, wondering if she'd gone too far but he doesn't reply beyond a slight smile that's gone too fast to even be titled that, he places her steaming cup of tea before her sipping at his own after blowing on it.

They drink in comfortable silence.

She's the first to rapture the silence, "I don't need pity."

"I don't pity yo--"

"But thank you. Thank you for stopping. Thank you for this, thank you."

He stares wordlessly before nodding, a slight blush on his cheeks before he hides his face in the cup of tea. She doesn't bring attention to it.

"You can sleep in my room. It's the door next to the bathroom."

Humming she looks up, fatigue hitting her like a brick at the mention of sleeping.

"Where will you sleep?"

"I have a perfectly good couch, don't argue you're sleeping in my room. That's final. It's better that my mother doesn't see a strange woman on the couch when she wakes up."

Well, she can't argue with that logic.

"Okay." Drinking the last of the soothing beverage, she stands up walking over to place the cup in the sink.

"Good night." She starts to walk back in the direction of the bathroom, seeing another door next to it. Seojun's room. Twisting the doorknob she pushes it open, before she hears his voice from behind her.

"If you need anything I'm right outside."

Blinking her tears away, she nods without looking back, too vulnerable with his palpable concern.

When she lays her head down on his pillow, his scent fills her senses and she falls into a deep restless slumber feeling safer than she has in long time.

Tomorrow will be horrible.

But tonight, she will allow herself to breath easy knowing that someone is on her side.

[soggyjulpod]

—blaster shots & confessions

[sabine wren x fem!reader]

a/n: this was a self-indulgent piece bc there’s barely any sabine content out there but i guess y’all can enjoy it too🙄🙄

warning: mention of injury, slight angst, sabine is a worry-wart, emotional fluff

word count: 1.7k

—

the first three things [y/n] noticed when she woke up was a slight pain on her side and head, the mop of colorful hair resting on the edge of the bed she was laying in, and a hand holding hers. speaking of which, a bed she had no recollection of getting in. 

she tries to sit up but stops as a sharp pain erupted in her side. the girl winces, at the slight sound of her discomfort sabine’s head shoots up, “hey, hey don’t try to move.” 

“what happened?” [y/n] asks as sabine helps her lay back down with the hand that wasn't clutched, “do you remember that kanan assigned us to intercept an imperial shipment?” 

“yeah, we were supposed to get relief supplies but…” [y/n] trails off, unsure of what happened during the mission. she looks to her friend to fill in the gap in her memory.

“we got into some trouble and had to split up. you got shot [y/n] when we were apart, the blaster shot hit your side. you fell over and hit your head really hard.” sabine explains, “you’ve been out for six days.” [y/n]’s eyes popped out, “oh karabast” she exclaims. 

“we were all so worried.” sabine says with an unreadable expression on her face. “well it's a good thing i’m awake now,” [y/n] smiles.

“how are you feeling?” sabine asks. “like shit.” the two girls laugh. it was good that she at least still had her humor.

“i’ll go get the medic and let the others know you’re awake.” the mandalorian says before giving her hand a squeeze and leaving her friend in their recovery room.

her face heated up as she thought, was sabine with me this entire time? was she also holding my hand the entire time?

the thought of the girl she’d been crushing on for the past year and half staying by her side for days brought butterflies in her stomach. she stares at the hand that sabine had been holding ever since she had awoken.

“hey there stranger.” a voice jokes bringing her out of her thoughts. “hera!” she beams, instantly recognizing the voice. the twi’lek sits down at the edge of the bed.

“you gave us all a scare, especially sabine.” hera says, [y/n] lets out a noise of acknowledgement. “you know she barely left your side when you were unconscious, she cares so much for you.” hera noted. a small flush creeps onto [y/n]’s face, “yeah she’s a great friend.” she agrees, pursing her lips, it almost physically hurt her to call sabine her friend when she harbored such strong feelings for her so called friend.

hera gives her a quizzical glance. [y/n] notices the weird look on hera’s face, “what?” she asks. the twi’lek laughs to herself, “nothing.” 

moments after, the rest of the crew piled in along with the medic to check up on her.

—

slowly but surely [y/n] was recovering, sabine had practically been glued to her side the entire time. sabine had been there to bring her food and help her change her bandages once she was discharged out of the recovery room.

the fall to her head had messed up her coordination and balance but after a few weeks with the help of sabine she had been able to regain her ability to walk again.

currently the girls were in an intense game of sabacc in their shared quarters.

“hey [y/n], kanan needs you.” it was hera, the twi’lek enters room. [y/n] gets up to leave, “let me help you.” sabine says swooping in to help. “sabine, i can walk by myself.” [y/n] says, shooing her away and leaves the room.

“how’s she feeling?” hera asks as she sits down across from the mandalorian. “good, she can walk around now and her spirits are up, she’s really been liking to play card games recently.” she smiles motioning to the sabacc cards sprawled over the table. 

“you should tell her,” hera says blunty, the girl gives her a puzzled look. “tell her what?” she stammers feigning confusion.

the twi’lek laughs, “don’t play dumb with me sabine. i’ve seen the way you look at her. it's painfully obvious to everyone but her that you like her.” sabine felt her face flush. 

“i don't know what youre talking about,” she denies. hera chuckles, “whatever kid. just do it before it’s too late.” with that [y/n] came back in, leaving sabine to understand hera’s slightly cryptic message.

“are you ok? you look a little lost” [y/n] says looking at her friend. “yeah i’m fine, its nothing” she lies.

—

it had been over five weeks since [y/n] got shot and she felt good as new. hera and kanan had been unsure about assigning her to a mission so soon, after all she had just recently gained fully coordinated mobility. but with the reassurance of the medic, the pair now had full confidence in her.

[y/n] sat in her room preparing for her mission when sabine burst in. “what the hell [y/n]?! hera and kanan just told me they assigned you to a mission with ezra!” she shouts with a furious expression on her face. [y/n] jumps in surprise, clutching at her chest.

“force sabine! you scared the shit out of me.” [y/n] laughs but she quickly stops as she realizes the expression on her friend’s face.

“you can’t be going on missions without me.” she exclaims with her hands on her hips. the girl frowns at her friend’s behavior.

“thanks for the concern but i'll be fine sabine. the medic already cleared me for missions last week.” [y/n] reassures her friend. she gets up to leave but the mandalorian’s hand grabs her wrist.

“the last time we were apart, you got shot.” she scoffs giving her a hard gaze. [y/n] sighs, “sabine, i’m ok now, there’s no need to worry. plus i’ll have the galaxy’s most annoying jedi with me.” she attempts to joke.

“no, you’re not understanding.” the mandalorian’s voice was stern but had a slight quiver to it. “then help me understand.” [y/n] pleads softly.

sabine struggles to put her words together, she has never been an outwardly emotional person, hell, it took her months to fully be comfortable around [y/n]. with their friendship she’d always been more of a listener than a talker, she recalled on multiple occasions when [y/n] would tell her about personal and intimate topics. sabine always appreciated those moments, it was just a little reminder of how [y/n] saw her as trustworthy. but now it was her turn to let out what was eating her up from the inside.

“i thought you were going to die for a moment,” her voice was a whisper, for all the time [y/n] had known sabine she had never seen her so emotional and vulnerable. “when i found you there was so much blood on your head. my heart was beating so fast i thought it was going to jump out. i was so scared. even when we got back to base and the medic stabilized you, i was terrified, i couldn’t leave you. kanan and hera basically had to force me to eat and sleep. seeing you like that was my worst nightmare. and it’s all my fault, i left you.” she cried out her emotions. 

that's when [y/n] understood, sabine wasn’t angry at her, she was scared and blamed herself.

sabine’s eyes were glassy and her breaths were shaky. [y/n] cups sabine’s face with her hands, the mandalorian leans into her touch. “i just can't lose you.” she cries out, her eyes shut and tears fall. “sabine. please look at me,” she breathes out. the colorful haired girl opens her eyes, sniffling a bit. “none of what happened was your fault, it was just bad luck. don’t blame yourself.”

the two girls now stared at each other, neither of them being sure what to do in their position.

it was now or never

“[y/n] i need to tell you something,” the mandalorian says as her shaky hands reach up to grab [y/n]’s. “i never thought i would ever say it to you but...” her jittery voice trails off. she takes a deep breath to compose herself, 

“i love you, [y/n], i’m so in love with you” 

the mandalorian kept her gaze down, waiting for a response. [y/n]’s eyes widened, she almost couldn’t believe the words that just came out sabine’s mouth, but a smile creeped onto her face.

“i love you too” she says, squeezing their hands together. sabine’s head perked up, a small smile graced her features. 

“really?” she muttered, “yeah, really, like a lot.” [y/n] giggles. their faces were mere inches apart, the mandalorian’s eyes flicker down to her lips.

and without a thought sabine presses her lips to hers. [y/n]’s arms instinctively wrap around sabine’s neck, pulling her closer. the mandalorian’s arms snake around her waist to hold her. the kiss was sloppy because of the excitement between them but they didn’t mind one bit. the kiss seemed to go on forever, so many buried feelings between them were spilling out.

the two pulled apart, both of them having goofy, love sick grins on their faces.

“i can't believe it took me getting shot for you to confess.” [y/n] laughs out. “i know.” sabine sniffles out but with a smile on her face.

“[y/n]!” she hears hera call her, breaking up the tender moment. the two girls laugh at the awful timing.

“i guess that's my cue.” [y/n] turns to leave their room but a hand stops her again, she turns around to sabine. “come back to me in one piece.” 

“you got it.” she says then giving her now girlfriend a peck on the lips. as [y/n] leaves the room, sabine sits back down on the bottom bunk. both girls having a smile plastered on their face as they continued on with their day.

[athenasbloodyspear]

The Viper - Chapter 6

Surprise! I’m back with another chapter. Thank you for your encouragement and patience. 

Bucky Barnes x Female Reader

Find this fic on Ao3.

This fic is 18+ for violence and eventual sexual content. Please read at your own risk.

Master list

“What the fuck do you mean that little girl is Vipers sister? Where did you find this photo?” Bucky snapped at Bruce. 

“This is an old family photo that I came across when scanning databases for evidence of this little girl. The infant in the photo is the young child currently in our custody. From what I read in the files Nat cracked, the girl holding the infant would be another sibling to Viper.” Bruce coughed. “My best guess is that Viper is the one who took this polaroid of her younger sisters.” 

“Where’s the middle sister now? Do the documents say anything about her?” Nat asked. 

Bruce coughed again and looked at his feet. “They show a young girl with DNA that matches both this little girl and Viper’s entered the Red Rooms custody around four years ago. Approximately two years after that the data on her ends abruptly.” 

Nat sucks in a breath next to Bucky as Bucky feels the wind rush out of his lungs. 

“It’s unclear if that means that she was…” Bruce winces as he continues his thought “Terminated. We do have gaps in info on that flash drive so we may uncover more.”

“So you’re saying that Hydra likely had all three of these girls in their custody at one point?” Tony questioned. 

“Yes. It seems that once they found out that The Viper’s DNA was compatible with their genetic tests, they started hunting everyone in her family.” Bruce finally dropped into a seat and seemed disinclined to speak any further. 

Bucky felt choked himself. Her whole family. He imagined his sister being hunted by those monsters. His mother. He felt sick. 

__

The pounding in your skull was bad, but the way the world seemed to be spinning around you was worse. 

God you had really thought this most recent time you slipped into unconsciousness was gonna finally be your last. Apparently you were going to have to live another day. 

You took a moment to attempt to recalibrate your sense of hearing and smell before you bothered to open your eyes and add another sense to the mix. You could hear faint beeping that indicated you were in a medical ward somewhere. You could smell antiseptic but also the lingering aroma of stale coffee. 

You continue to lay still as you attempt to sort out your memories. You’d gotten significantly better at keeping your brain organized and under your own control in the last few years, but all of the physical trauma inflicted on your body recently made it hard to keep your memories straight. 

Where am I again? 

I remember an explosion that nearly killed me, running for days, fighting so hard it nearly killed me, running more… 

Oh. Yeah. The avengers compound. 

Suddenly you remembered what you arrived here with. You jerked up in bed only to be promptly halted by straps wrapped around your arms that tied you to the bed. A low groan escaped you as the pain of the fabric tugging at your arms compounded with the throbbing in your head and the needle-like pain in your eyes from the bright lights. 

Through your hazy fog of pain you heard a quick intake of breath through someone's nose followed by some shuffling as someone got up from a seated position and moved closer to where you lay. 

You knew who was with you the moment his scent hit your nose. It had been years since you’d cried, but you began to again. For the second time in front of him in a short amount of time. 

You felt the bed dip down near your left hip and felt one warm and one cold hand begin to tug at the straps on your left arm. A voice you’d never been able to forget no matter how hard you tried was whispering “Fuck you, Tony.”

It took all of your courage to peel your eyes open. Seeing him this close made your chest feel like it was caving in on itself. This time, there was nowhere you could run. You were tied down, completely helpless. 

__

Bucky was gonna kill Tony. He’d threatened it before, but this time he really would do it for tying you down to the bed like that.  

He was working carefully to remove the straps on your left arm so he could check to make sure you hadn’t injured yourself when you had jerked in your sleep. You were injured enough, the last thing you needed was for your arms to be covered in rope burns and bruises. When he finished pulling the straps away from you he began to softly rub the skin of your left arm, his eyes trained on each movement to check for any muscle tension he could massage away. It was instinctual, this need to make sure you were comfortable.

His gaze traveled over your arms and confirmed that you were okay, so he finally lifted his eyes to your face. He stopped cold when he realized that you were awake, watching him. Your luminous eyes locked on his face. Bucky felt like a deer in the headlights. He knew he should move, but he was paralyzed in awe and fear. The raw ache in his chest that he couldn’t explain was back in full force. 

“It’s okay.” 

He started a bit at the rusty sound of your voice. Did he really hear you correctly? 

“It felt kind of nice actually.” You said with a tiny smile. His heart restarted and his hands started to tingle. Reflexively he offered you a small smile in return. He did not resume his ministrations on your arm, but he couldn’t bring himself to let go of you completely. He compromised with himself and settled for holding your hand. 

“How are you feeling?” Bucky asked. He was struck in that moment how normal it felt to sit with you like this. That asking you a simple question like that felt as natural as breathing. He tried not to let panic take over the moment. He clearly had a history with you that he couldn’t remember, but he didn’t want his old fears to swallow him now. 

“Achy.” You responded softly. “Where is she?” 

“Sleeping. Banner operated on her to stabilize her… or something like that. I honestly didn’t hear much after he said she was okay.” Bucky trailed off before he could admit something insane like As soon as he said she was okay I sprinted here to check on you or I couldn’t really process anything else because I was so worried about you. 

He watches as you sink a little more into the hospital bed. A small amount of tension seemed to seep out of your body at the news that your sister was okay. The same small amount of tension seeped out of him watching you relax. 

You both sit in silence for a while, the only sounds are the beeping of the monitors. 

“Tony’s gonna freak if he sees you unstrapped her.” A smooth voice breaks the serene room.

Bucky didn’t even look over his shoulder at Natasha to respond. “Let him.” 

She scoffs, taking slow steps into the room before perching on the end of the hospital bed, eyes on you. You’re watching her calmly, but carefully. Bucky shivers at the eerie resemblance in your stares. It’s a little like watching someone look at themselves in a mirror, how similar you two are. After a beat, you tilt your head to the right and smirk. 

“Playing the silent game, again?” 

Nat chuckles. “I think you already know what I want to know.” 

Bucky watches you heave a massive sigh, wincing a bit when the movement jostles your various stitches and bandages.  

“Maybe let her rest for more than a few hours.” 

“It’s okay.” You pipe up. “Just trying to decide where to start actually.” 

“The beginning.” Nat says. “I should also be fully transparent and say that Friday is recording this conversation and broadcasting it to the conference room where Steve, Sam and Tony are.” 

You look down at your hands and mutter “I know. I can hear it.” 

Bucky looks at you and then Nat, confused. “What do you mean you can hear it?” 

“You hear that faint buzzing?” You ask. Bucky waits, letting silence fall over the room. If he focuses really hard, he can hear just a tiny buzz in the room, but it’s nearly impossible to hear. 

“Start at the beginning.” Nat prompts again. 

You wring your hands nervously in front of you, hesitating a bit. Both Bucky and Nat stay still, calm and open. 

You begin.

“I was taken to the Red Room from my home in Adair, Michigan in 1999. I was five years old. I was the sole witness to a widow’s assignment and therefore was a loose end. I don’t know why she chose to take me back rather than kill me, but she did. When I arrived, I was isolated for a large chunk of time. I believe the reports say that Dreykov hadn’t decided if he wanted me dead or not. After five years, he remembered I was down there and decided at that point I might as well be a widow. At that point in their creation, the widow project had gotten more streamlined. They were starting younger. The girls they trafficked in there were starting around age two, so at ten I had a long way to go. I climbed rank quickly, adopting ruthlessness faster. I guess being isolated for five years with only an old Russian man guarding you for company will do that to you.” 

“I remember that.” Natasha spoke up. 

“You were nearly graduated I think by the time they brought me out of the basement.” 

Bucky watched as you both shared solemn looks. The look of people who may be the only two people who understand the trauma you both went through. 

“In 2011, Hydra approached the Red Room, offering large sums of money for test subjects for a new hybrid program they were testing. It seemed they were starting to get nervous about the winter soldier project's viability, and were looking for alternatives.”

Bucky saw your eyes flick to him before settling back on Natasha. “We were essentially sold off like cattle. I arrived in Siberia in 2012, where I was initiated into the Serpent Project.” 

“The serpent project?” Natasha queried. 

“The most classified project they were working on at the time. More classified than even the winter soldier project. They were bragging about that to their friends. Getting money and recruits. They kept the serpent project quiet, as it was really just a plan B. They were doing a smaller scale genetic modification on test subjects. Increasing their strength and resilience incrementally. Just enough to withstand a certain level of mind wiping.” 

Bucky flinched, thinking about metal pads surrounding his face and the smell of burnt hair. 

“Apparently non genetically modified bodies couldn’t withstand the mind wiping like the super soldiers could. They were working to find a middle ground, with operatives that they could control completely and wipe when necessary, that didn’t cost as much as winter soldiers to create.”

You paused again, this time your eyes landing on Bucky for a significant moment. He could have sworn he saw your eyes go shiny with tears before you turned back to Nat. 

“I was an operative for Hydra from 2012 until 2018. I broke away sometime last year. However, during that time I was not always as… controlled as they thought I was. They believed me MIA for about 9 months until they discovered the information I stole, causing them to put a hit out on me. This brings us to the present.” 

“There’s a lot in there you’re not saying.” Nat remarked. 

“What do you know already off that file?” 

“Basically what you just told us.” 

You shifted again in your seat. “What is it that you actually want to know? Surely there’s certain information you want more than others. Help me prioritize.” 

“She’s your sister.” Nat comments. You suck in a sharp breath and Bucky instinctively reaches for your hand again. “Yes.” 

“Care to explain that?” 

“It’s related, but not very important.” 

“But--” 

“Nat stop.” Bucky snaps. “What do you really need to know?” 

Nat looks at you again. “Why did you give us the information?” 

“I wanted your help.” Bucky’s throat constricts as your voice cracks. He can tell it’s nearly agony saying those words out loud. He gets it. After so long being alone and relying only on yourself, needing help is agony. He’s sure you’d rather burn yourself alive than say that out loud. 

“Help with what?” Nat prompts. 

“Stopping them.” 

“Why?” 

“BECAUSE!” Both Bucky and Natasha are startled by the sudden outburst. Up until that point you’d been calm. Clinical almost in your dictation. “Because they’re stealing more little girls from their mothers and messing with their bodies and wiping their memories and turning them into killers.” The words pour out of your mouth like they’re painful. 

You pause and clear your throat, a mask snapping back over your features. “Because I am trained only to follow orders and kill, I don’t have the expertise to take down a project like this. When I finally… became aware… I knew I had to do something. So I transferred as much data as I could onto a drive and I disappeared. Then I had to figure out how to get you to actually listen to me instead of just killing me on the spot. By the time I had a plan in mind, Hydra ordered the hit on me.” 

“How does your sister factor into this?” Nat asked softly. 

“Natasha.” Bucky warned. 

Your voice wavered a bit more as you spoke this time, the clinical calm you’d snapped over yourself shredding a bit at the seams. “When I say… became aware… I’m referencing the year 2016.” 

Natasha and Bucky share a look. 

“When Hydra lost the winter soldier project, and their favorite toy finally was free of their clutches, they fell into a tailspin. They were… less focused on me, which meant they were less thorough with my… treatments.” The haunted look in your eye told Bucky everything he needed to know about those treatments. The memory of crackling electricity was like a ghost in his ear. “I became aware that they thought I was genetically predisposed to their modifications. They’d been… hunting my family for years. Trying to find anyone genetically related to me for experimentation.” 

Bucky’s fist that wasn’t wrapped around your hand clenched in his lap. 

“I was able to convince them I was still under their control enough to send me on an unrelated mission in the U.S. After completing it, I quickly did what I needed to in order to neutralize the threat to my family. However, they were able to bring in my middle sister a few months later. If I kept up good behavior, they said they’d stop looking for other extended family. I tried my best to make them believe I was theirs, followed every order, killed everyone they asked me to. Meanwhile I was stockpiling information onto that drive whenever I could.” 

“What do you mean by ‘neutralize the threat’ to your family?” 

“Irrelevant.” 

“No it’s not--” 

“Nat.” 

“Fine. We’ll come back to that. Continue.” 

“I did what I could to keep them from finding Sophie.” 

Sophie. Bucky remembered Banner telling them Viper’s little sister's name. 

“I was content to stay under their control as long as they left her out of it. However, once I started to really sift through the information, I discovered that they knew exactly where she was and were planning to take her anyway. It became imperative that I get help before they did so. Thus me breaking from the project and running. I was going to let you handle it, but I had to get Sophie out before I quit.” 

You took a deep breath, before finally looking Natasha in the eyes again. 

“Please help those girls. I’ll fuck off the grid and you’ll never hear or see me ever again. I’ll never hurt another soul, not even a spider. If you want to detain me for life to maintain control, that’s fine too. If you’d like to kill me and be done with it, I won’t fight you. I will comply with any order you give me as long as you save those girls.” 

There was silence as Natasha regarded you. 

“Why?” 

“Because I don’t want them to become monsters like me.” 

Bucky’s heart had been through a lot that day already, but it shattered then. He knew. He knew exactly what you thought of yourself. How little you regarded your own well being and safety. He knew you believed you deserved whatever hell you went through, because of things that you couldn’t have stopped if you’d tried. Self loathing was an old friend of his. He knew it was an old friend of yours as well. 

“Viper.” Nat said softly. “Where’s your middle sister?” 

Bucky’s heart stopped as a single tear rolled down your right cheek. It was the only tell of emotion to be seen or heard when you replied. 

“She’s dead.”

.

.

.

.

Taglist:

@maxsaturdayhatesnarwhals

@daddysfavoritesexkitten

@creator-appreciator

[the-courage-to-heal]

Childhood:

The book Sybil and the subsequent 1976 movie in which Sally Field portrayed a girl with more than a dozen different personalities were the result of a collaboration between psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur and author Flora Rheta Schreiber. The goal was to have people better understand a child abuse victim who developed alternative personalities as a coping mechanism.

While the book and movie raised the profile of what is now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID), they also created some significant misconceptions.

“Do people come into my office and switch personalities in a dramatic way, with different voices. Does their makeup suddenly change? No,” said Milissa Kaufman, MD, PhD, about the character Sybil. “It may feel like that to them internally, but there’s no dramatic thing that happens.”

Kaufman, director of the Dissociative Disorders and Trauma Research Program at McLean Hospital and medical director of McLean’s Hill Center for Women, said patients with DID, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), often carry on very normal, high-functioning lives. She pointed to Robert Oxnam, a China scholar and president emeritus of The Asia Society, who shared his life story in the 2005 book A Fractured Mind: My Life With Multiple Personality Disorder.

That is because DID is a coping mechanism, usually brought on by childhood abuse, and is a kind of ingenious, unconscious way of displacing situations onto other aspects of themselves.

“It’s the ‘not me’ phenomenon,” said Kaufman. “Little children have magical thinking. It’s at this age in development where you believe in Santa Claus, or where little children personify stuffed animals. There are displaced thoughts and feelings that are difficult for them, so they are put on these other entities. It’s a normal developmental stage that children go through.”

Where DID veers from “not me” is when abuse—physical, sexual, or emotional—is introduced into their young lives.

“If you’re being abused at night, you think to yourself that can’t possibly be happening. It has to be happening to some other little girl. It’s not me,” she said. “If a little girl is being abused at night and has to wake up the next morning and go to school and do sports and do homework and have to do as much as they can to not have people get angry at them, they displace it onto another aspect of themselves.”

“A child doesn’t have many other ways to cope. They can’t go to their parents, since that is the origin. They feel like there are other people inside of them, and they can’t tell anybody.”

Dissociation can be found in 1-3% of the general population and as high as 20-30% in psychiatric populations, about the same prevalence as schizophrenia, Kaufman said. A 1986 study by Frank W. Putman and others in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found the average patient with DID has been in the mental health delivery system for an average of 6.8 years and has received three other diagnoses. This reflected either misdiagnoses or occurrences of other diagnoses or symptoms that delayed an accurate diagnosis.

Dissociation occurs along a spectrum, from “spacing out” while driving and missing an exit to being hyper-focused on a topic. Along the range are memory issues, like gaps in recall, often associated with PTSD. Further along are depersonalization and derealization—which Kaufman described as a profound detachment from sense of self or sense of body, a sensation of being apart from one’s self, perhaps viewing what is happening from a distance.

The furthest end of the spectrum is fragmentation of identity, where “my feelings or my thoughts or my body feel like they don’t belong to me,” she said.

Richard Loewenstein, MD, a psychiatrist in the Trauma Disorders Program at the Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore, noted in a 2018 paper in Dialogues in Clinical Neurosciencethat dissociative identity disorders are among the oldest reported psychiatric disorders, with case reports appearing at the end of the 18th century.In more recent times, DID was viewed as being “rare and exotic,” except during wartime. Yet, the diagnosis was not without controversy, even among mental health professionals, with a history going back to Freud and questions about what real memories are. That was rekindled in the 1980s cases involving child abuse at day care centers in many parts of the country. Among the models developed at the time, one suggested DID could be produced in highly hypnotized, suggestible patients.

Rather than simply reveal forgotten traumas, the theory went, hypnosis could be used to implant false memories.DID can also be wrongly connected to malingering (exaggerated) and factitious (inauthentic) disorders, where patients make claims either with or without a motivation for personal gain. The best-known example of factitious disorder is the severe form once known as Munchausen syndrome.“That’s not what it looks like,” said Kaufman. “It’s a very real, very well-studied psychiatric disorder.”“It most often is chronic,” she continued. “It typically is at the hands of a caretaker. It can be sexual abuse, it can be physical abuse, it can be emotional abuse. But generally, people who have DID have had many different types of abuse at the hands of multiple perpetrators.

The women she works with at the Hill Center usually arrive with histories of childhood abuse, PTSD, co-occurring disorders such as eating disorders, or substance abuse issues. While DID affects men, she believes many are less likely to come forward for help.“I think there’s even more of a stigma for men to talk,” she said. “It may be that, or a lot of mental health professionals are not trained to ask questions. They may not be on alert for it, because the media depicts women most often as having this disorder, so maybe they don’t even ask.

”DID is also treatable with a three-stage set of professional guidelines established through expert consensus.The initial stage focuses on stabilization and safety. The goal is to

“get things calmed down and life in order. It can take a while for someone to feel comfortable and safe. It can take years.”

Once that is achieved, clinicians move on to the second stage, where the patient begins to process the traumatic events that have affected them. In the final stage, the emphasis is on

”getting your life back, mourning what you have lost and moving on without dissociation, learning how to be in the world without dissociating.”At the same time, scientists are exploring potential biological or genetic links that could predispose a person to DID. Studies to date have shown that in the classic form of PTSD, the brain’s amygdala—which controls the “fight-or-flight” response—is overactive while the prefrontal cortex is not, generating a hyper-aroused state. But in the dissociative subtype of PTSD, Kaufman said, the prefrontal cortex is overactive to the point where a person can be numb and detached.In fact, she explained, both the amygdala and prefrontal cortex become overactive in patients with DID.

“The trauma state in DID looks like classic PTSD,” said Kaufman. “In a numbed state of mind, it looks more like the dissociative subtype, where, the brakes are on too tight.”Scientists are also looking at the brain’s attentional activation system, how a person concentrates.“People who are dissociative have a really refined ability to focus attention, particularly in multitasking,” she said, saying researchers are working to understand how the brains of people with DID have a different allocation of resources toward attentional systems.Finally, there are also studies on potential genetic links.“You aren’t born with DID, but you can have a genetic predisposition to dissociate, so we are also looking for genetic markers.”But Kaufman stressed that people with DID should not give up hope.“It’s treatable. It’s a pretty phenomenal coping mechanism when you are growing up, but it becomes disruptive when you don’t need it anymore.”

source

[albatrossmuffin]

Birthday Story: Nao

Translation of Birthday Story: Nao can be found...right here for once lol:

So this is the temporary home of Nao’s story until pillowfort gets its shit together; once they let me post there again I’ll post this there with the scans and stuff as usual (sorry I still don’t trust tumblr not to mark me mature content lol); at that time I’ll reblog this with the updated link here. 

Pillowfort has returned! Here’s the proper post.

In the meantime, I strongly suggest reading Natsuya’s first here, as they are directly related.

[Please forgive the weird spacing and nonsensical verb tense changing, it does that and I wanted you to feel my pain enjoy it as...intended? lol]

Birthday Story #04 Nao

In a gap in the clouds, I saw a rainbow in the clear blue sky. A seven-colored arch that stretches lengthwise. I feel like something good is going to happen today.

This year, practical training and assignments have increased, and the hectic days continue. On the other hand, I was able to once again meet Makoto and the others, who have come to Tokyo, so there is also a pleasant sensation.

Today I’ve been invited by Ikuya to Natsuya’s birthday party.  Very fidgety messages such as “Not yet?”, “Where are you now?” arrived from the starring player. Jeez, even though I’m sure I had told him that ‘today I’d be late because of a lecture, so I want you to start without me’. However, mysteriously I don’t feel displeased. Rather, I even feel relieved at the same-as-always Natsuya. By the time I realize, I’m caught up in Natsuya’s pace.

Come to think of it, next week I’ll have a birthday as well. Suddenly, I remembered Natsuya from around high school age.

“Rather, why don’t we celebrate our birthdays together? You see, these things are more fun when they’re lively, right!” 

In the end, the “joint birthday party” at that time did not happen. I too had passed it off as one of his funny stories. As for why I remembered a story from when we were in high school at this time, even I don’t know.     

Strength flows into the hand on the door of the building where Natsuya and the others are waiting. Now, with what kind of expression is the starring player that loves festivals awaiting with? 

“Happy birthday, Nao!” 

“Happy birthday, Nao-senpai!” 

Natsuya and Ikuya, and Hiyori’s smiles are lined up. I was involuntarily taken aback. That Natsuya, did he remember that time? 

“Why, what a surprise.” 

Murmuring that was all I could manage. Natsuya seemed dissatisfied with my reaction, and he protested with a snort of hmph. Ikuya and Hiyori are laughing happily. I pulled myself together and told them, “thanks.” 

The inside of the room was neatly divided into a space for celebrating Natsuya, and a space that appeared to be prepared for celebrating me. I discover a small aquaterrarium. It’s an item about which I had muttered, Should I buy it?, when I had gone shopping with Natsuya over a year ago.  Had he gone out of his way to buy it? I’m surprised by Natsuya’s memory and ability to take action. Even though he is this quick-thinking, why is he so clumsy, I wonder? 

In front of me, Natsuya and Ikuya are fighting about something like Natsuya ate the cake before he blew out the candles on it. I almost burst into laughter unconsciously. 

I talked with Haruka, Makoto, and Asahi, who had come earlier, about what’s going on in each other’s lives. Next to them were the students, which Makoto had brought along. 

“Coach Serizawa, happy birthday!” 

Saying that, Misaki-kun handed me a flower that he was holding with great care. Meeting his eye level, I accept it. Apparently he’d heard about today from Makoto, and had stopped by on his way home from the swimming club. 

“Thanks. I’ll come to see practice again.” 

“Okay, I’ll be able to swim much much faster than I can now!” 

I feel the growth in Misaki-kun, who smiles dependably, and in Makoto, who supports it, and my chest warms. This is why I can’t stop swimming. 

I heard about recent matches from Haruka and Asahi, and we discussed them including reflection. I keenly felt from the two of them the strength of their competitive spirit. The leopard can’t change…you know the rest.* I remembered when I was in middle school and grew nostalgic.

Even while enjoying the party, I was a little concerned if Natsuya was drinking too much. I thought I’d lightly chastise Natsuya who had, sure enough, begun to drowsily nod off, but I stopped myself. I’ll overlook it for today. Because it’s our first joint birthday party, after all. 

On the way home I lent Natsuya my shoulder. Natsuya’s body is quite heavier than it looks. Did he gain muscle again, I wonder? I’ve heard that inspired by Ikuya, the amount he’s practicing is increasing, too. 

Arriving at the station, when we were sitting on the platform bench, Natsuya murmured: 

“……Did you find out about it? I mean, the surprise……” 

If it was the usual, I probably would have replied with “I see right through a thing that Natsuya is likely to do.” 

However, at that time I just vaguely replied with “I wonder?”. I sensed that I was feeling a little peaceful. Surely, it was because of the gentle night breeze. 

I hear the sound of fireworks going up in the distance. 

Next year where will I, and Natsuya, be I wonder? It’s strange; because as I think such a thing, the sound of the fireworks, which should be stirring, sounds like a lonely sound in some way. With or without knowledge of my feelings, Natsuya suddenly laughed powerfully. 

“Next year I’ll surprise you even more.” 

“Okay. I’m counting on you*.” 

Natsuya surely doesn’t know that I have been saved by this smile. 

What will he surprise me with next, I wonder? I’ll secretly look forward to it.

 Notes:

“the leopard” – Japanese proverb time! Literally it says something like “the soul of a child of three (is the same) at 100,” meaning that the personality you have when you’re young doesn’t change even when you get older. The leopard can’t change its spots is the most recognizable translation option I found, so I went with that one. Also, he doesn’t say the entire proverb and cuts it off at the end, which is (according to the internet) a thing a lot of Japanese people do as a kind of nuance of both respecting that the person obviously knows the rest, and kind of avoiding showing off or being offensive by saying the entire thing. An interesting tie in to the subtlety of the linguistic culture I’d never heard before (like how people don’t say no directly).

“counting on” – this is one of the ways to translate this phrase but I don’t feel like it gives the full meaning so I must add lol; it has the nuance of “I’m expecting good things/I’m anticipating [it],” but in English I can’t have Nao say ‘I’m expecting great things of you/I’m anticipating you do this’ here without sounding like an asshole lololol