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morihaus · 3 years

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Apotheosis

Winds howl outside of the Imperial Palace. Belharza, son of the Emperor Alessia, sits alone in his chair in the chamber of the council. The weather has not been the only thing weighing on the city of Rumarium; for days now the Emperor has been poor of health, the toll of all her life's toil and struggle finally arriving to meet her on her deathbed, the somber hand of Arkay, the bitter kiss of Kyne.

Twelve hours hence, she has been dead. Her son survives her as only child and heir to her throne. The city mourns her, and as word spreads, all of Cyrod mourns its mother, its liberator and caretaker, its Emperor for 23 years- just 23, such a pittance when stacked up to the tyranny of the Ayleid hegemony, which to men seemed to stretched beyond the farthest point of remembrance, so many lives ago that the time before exists only in myth. The First-crowned Queen-ut-Cyrod deserved better than this. Belharza's mother deserved better.

He feels a breeze blow in from behind him, a wind coursing through the marble halls of the palace, blowing his long dark hair over his shoulders. It is only wind, and then, footfalls on the floor, slow and heavy, in stark contrast to the flight of the wind. Belharza lifts his head and glances over his shoulder. A massive minotaur fills the doorway to the council chamber, long hair waving and curling down his shoulders like a sky of black clouds. His horns are tall and proud, wrapped with rings of gold and ebony, strung with strings of hawk's feathers. Two large wings are folded on his back. The cold wind blows behind him.

He regards his son with deep blue eyes, clouded and gray, belying his true age. The old bull looks weary. "Belharza." His voice is deep, carried and reverberated by the chambers even as he addresses him gently. He steps forward, his armor of fur and iron the only noise apart from his footsteps, and the gentle wind that surrounds him.

Belharza stands up from his seat. He meets the eye of Morihaus- he can see now why his mother has often remarked their resemblance with a melancholy smile, although his own hair does not roll like the clouds do, his own eyes do not hold the dangerous glimmer of lightning, nor does his form hold the foreboding rumble of thunder. He did, however, sprout a small pair of wings from an early age- too small to be useful, but just enough to be there. It is among the only things his father has ever given him.

"Father." Belharza speaks flatly, his mood dark, unfit for this meeting he had always dreamed of. He never knew Morihaus growing up, he'd taken flight from the Imperial City before he was born, something his mother had never been bitter over, and for the most part, he'd followed her line of thinking. He had often wondered, though, speaking with the clan of Morihaus- for he was a great uncle to many war chiefs and soothsayers- and hearing tales of his greatness, his good humor and passion for song, and he wondered too while speaking to the Paravanics who had fought alongside him and his mother, who spoke of him as a great general, savior of men, one who could clear a treeline with his voice- he wondered what it would be to meet his father, this mythical figure of his boyhood who so many grownups seemed to know.

He wondered, but he had never pictured the meeting like this.

Morihaus walked so that there was only a small distance between the father and son, and then bowed his head- in sympathy, in apology, in reverence, Belharza could not say.

But he says this: "She is gone." And when his father does not move, he continues. "She has left us. Gone to join you, I suppose." His words are without venom, he states them as a fact he wishes to grow used to. His father raises back up to meet him. His features are set in a worried frown. "I am sorry, Belharza." He breathes into the room as a whisper. "For my loss?" He asks plainly. "Or, do you wish to amend your own absence from my life?" His face does not change. "I should like to apologize on both accounts, dear Bel."

"Did you come to see her?" Belharza asks, neutral once again.

Morihaus nods. "I felt her time approach and made haste." The face of a minotaur is not extraordinarily emotive to a man, but to a man-bull, like Belharza, he can interpret the subtleties, the shame painted on his face, the guilt in his eyes. "In service to my Mother Kyne, I have carried many souls of great warriors on wing to her realm, or to the realm of Shor... it was understood between us, your mother was a great warrior, an ardent follower of her ways, and she would have her place there. But when I arrived..." He becomes quiet, his full and melodious voice withdrawing back down his throat, filling his lungs up heavy with bitter words.

Belharza makes no motion to speak. He only looks at his father, expectantly. He continues, eventually.

"What I witnessed is... difficult to explain. You were present- did you see? As she passed?" Morihaus asks. Belharza nods. "I was there." He pauses. "...I may have seen, something. I see many things that others do not. Mother always said you were to thank for that, your divine blood." The old bull nods at him. "Aye, that is the truth. The mortal and the divine, they see things differently. On that balcony, at her side... he arrived before me."

"The Crusader." He says, half-questioningly. "Pelinal."

A huff of hair blows out from Morihaus's snout. "It looked that way. But Pelinal is dead. He was torn asunder in this tower, he spoke to me as his spirit passed into a place I could not follow. And this... apparition, in it, I did not sense his spirit. Did you hear?" Belharza nods quietly, Morihaus continues. "What he spoke of, the et'ada, the beginning place, the movements of the heavens... in life, he never did say much of the gods. He served them, and I knew him as kin, but he has always held a distaste for spiritual matters, spoken in mortal tongues. I cannot fathom why he came to Paravania, nor what he meant to say."

"He took her," Belharza says, glancing to the floor. "I saw- I thought I saw. It looked as though he carried her up, up into the heavens."

"He steals mine own honor." Morihaus snorts, almost laughs. Then, again, he grows serious. "My uncle was never one to covet in life. He hungered, he wanted, but he did not covet that which was another's. He would have nothing to do with Perrif's soul, nothing before my mother and I."

His son looks back up to him. "Where... where did he take her? To the halls of Shor?"

Morihaus shakes his head. "I have been myself- Pelinal's spirit does not reside there. It cannot reside there. I would have carried him myself if he could." He hangs his head some, recalling the passing of his uncle, and finding himself on complicated ground betwixt mundane and immortal once again. "I have thought on it in these past years. At times, I blew through the great fields and forests, delved into the deep oceans, soared to the highest points in the clouds, hunting his spirit, without luck. I am wise enough to confess my stubborn nature, for divine I may be, I am still a bull, and I hunted for long on my own before thinking to ask my mother."

Belharza tries to conceive of what his father says- the shape of a bull with the wings of a hawk, darting throughout all of creation to find a departed soul. He suspects it may be more complicated than that, some divine metaphor twisting around it, but then again, he recalls fondly-remembered stories his mother would share of Morihaus, his willfulness and the strange places it could take him- times he would cross over the Jerrals, travel half the continent while meant to be petitioning in Skyrim, to return to Cyrod and meet with her at night.

The image of his father, flighty and wild, turning over logs and stones searching for the lost Pelinal, it's almost enough to lighten his expression. But this is just his own mind wandering. Perhaps they are more alike than he knows.

"Understanding my mother is no mean feat," He says, regarding his son. "Strange as I must seem to you, know that to me, my divine parent is just as alien. I am her, but as am I my mortal mother, my mortal people, my mortal self, and some of her perceptions are all but lost on me. She told me little, she told that Pelinal had done what was needed of him, and to die with the revolution's victory was a good end... but as to his whereabouts, she said he was not her soul to keep." "Then whose?" Belharza asks. He is met with silence, frustrating silence. He asks more forcefully. "Whose? Where is my mother's soul? What did he do to her?" "He pulled her up- made her from mortal to spirit, so she might lay among the heavens forever. Queen-ut-Cyrod, brighter than the stars-" "I don't care for your poetry-" Belharza loudly asserts, his own voice now booming in the hall. "I don't care for your god-talk- dammit!" He turns to one side with a huff, boots clattering against the tiles of the chamber. He paces away from his father in no particular direction, approaching a column and glaring into it.

Morihaus looks on, forlorn. He sighs, and the breeze almost wraps itself around Belharza's shoulders as it tussles his hanging braids, like some form of comfort. "I'm sorry. This... is what I hope for, Bel, but whether it is the truth, I cannot say."

"What do I care?" Belharza shakes his head, clenching his fists at his sides. "Whether her spirit is in one place or another- she's gone, that's what has happened today, and that is the grief I will carry for the rest of my life. What is the point in wondering where she is? The realm of Kyne, of Shor, of Akatosh, it makes no difference, she is gone to me any way." His voice grows ragged as he chokes with tears, his eyes stinging with bitter sorrows. Though a grown man, he feels helpless like a child in the face of such a loss- his mother had been his world, and now the shadow of death had ripped her away from him, and she was gone, forever.

His father approaches him, but leaves a fair distance, just slight enough for his whispering voice to carry to him. "Do you remember what she told you, Bel, about me? When I was gone to you?" Belharza does not reply, only taking a breath as he remains fixed on the pillar in front of him. "...I am a spirit, Bel. I am more than my body, more than a man-bull. I am the skies and storms, the thunder; I am movement, I am the movements in the hearts of men, I am their battlecry; I am the wind in the rolling hills, blowing the grasses and flowers; I am the breeze in the canopy of the forest, swaying the branches; I am the gale upon the sea, the scent of it in your lungs, I am the very breath that you take." Belharza finally turns to face his father again, without expression, with tears on his face. Morihaus is not shaken from his words. "When a mortal dies, their spirit is released into a vast cosmos. They are gone from their lives, from their loved ones, but from there, there are many roads, countless paths that a soul can take... do you understand?"

He only receives an expectant look. Belharza's face lightens somewhat. There is hope in the winding words of Morihaus.

"Though I was forced to leave you, and could no longer walk this world as I had, I found my ways to you- to both of you. It has been, and will be forever, a great pain that I could not stay... but there are some ways in which my presence could be felt, some ways in which I was there all along." Morihaus steps forward, slowly raising his hand to brush Belharza's hair from his face, as gently as the breeze, as his own mother's hand. "Your mother will be gone as I was. You will feel her. She will still be with you."

---

Belharza was anointed Emperor before the Elder Council and the citizens of the Imperial City, including his divine father, who could not stay for long, but was pleased to see and know his son as a man, and content to answer the questions of the citizenry to the best of his ability, or at least his want.

The new emperor spends the first weeks of his reign still in mourning, but more hopeful for having spoken with his father and his other relatives, who gave him heart to imagine his mother at peace. He spends much of his days outdoors, honoring her memory in the gardens and outside the city walls, even beyond the shores of the Rumare and into the jungles. On one occasion, which would be a moment only for him to know and remember, he stumbles upon a field of flowers below a small hill. He finds it a good place to say his piece, and there he would speak to his mother, expressing his deepest affections and tearful goodbyes. All of the sudden, he feels drops of water landing on his bowed head, and he looks up to see a spring running from the rock, a spring which had most definitely not been there before. As though the land of Cyrod itself were weeping for him.

At this, Belharza only smiles knowingly.

#tesfest21 #mori writing #belharza #morihaus #cw for death and grief

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shootybangbang · 3 years

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[Talking Bird] Ch 16: In which the plot finally makes an appearance

[Ao3 Link]

[Content Warning]: suicidal ideation, mild gore

[Note]: this fic has gone through some serious revisions — mostly expanded scenes/dialogue. The chapters most heavily affected are 1, 2, 3, and 7, but I’ve added a changelog to the end notes of each previous chapter detailing the edits that have been made. To save you some time though, here are the three main things to note:

The reader character does not have the bonds

The reader character refers to Arthur by his last name due to unfamiliarity

The horniness from last chapter has been moved to a future chapter. sorry!

This chapter is also pretty long in comparison to the others. From here on out, the chapters will probably be 2000+ words.

———

You look out into the plains, at the last pale band of light disappearing beneath a horizon of prairie grass and dark, looming buttes. The shadows of the scant trees stretch long and thin, their branches like a thousand spindly fingers grasping, searching. The landscape is dimmed to a tableau of reds and blacks, anything not illuminated by the fire slowly sinking into the featureless canvas of night. All of it blurred and indistinct behind a curtain of rain.

It’s a prettier sight by far than any you’ve had in St Denis. Or San Francisco. Or anywhere else you’ve lived, really.

And yet it hangs like featureless gauze behind the endless reel playing out over and over behind your eyes, spinning round like the printed images on a zoetrope.

The O’Driscoll’s hands wet with blood and mud. His eyes wide and uncomprehending. Trying to put himself back together the way one might a broken toy, sieving his viscera between his fingers and scooping it into the cavity of his chest. That initial, stunned bemusement giving way at last to the dawning horror of his own end.

And accompanying it, the numb realization that what bothered you more was the bare abstraction of the act. The burden of this sin weighing heavy with all the others, its addition tipping some moral scale, and —

“Hey.”

Morgan’s voice, jarringly brusque against the murmurings of your own private judge and jury, is almost mercifully irritating.

“What do you want?” you snap.

“Get up,” he says. “Start strippin’ the wet bark off the firewood.”

“For chrissakes, at least give me a second to catch my breath.”

“Why, so you can keep sittin’ there feeling sorry for yourself?” He leans one hand against the stone wall of the outcrop and drags himself back to his feet. The barest shadow of a grimace flits across his face as he straightens his back. “C’mon. Sooner we get set up proper, the sooner we can get back to ignorin’ each other. Then you can sulk all night in peace.”

The cottonwood branches are covered in cracked, ash brown bark that scrapes rough against your palms and fingers, rasping the skin raw as you hold the wood firm for carving. One of the downsides of living easy for so many years, you suppose — all the protective calluses atrophy to nothing, and what remains becomes susceptible to old and familiar hurts. But habits run deeper than skin, and what the mind forgets the body keeps.

As you work your way through the firewood, Boadicea nickers and paws impatiently at the dirt.

“I’m sorry girl,” you hear Morgan say. “Been a hard day for us both.”

You snort contemptuously. Out of the corner of your eye, you watch as he unhooks the horse’s bridle and lifts away the saddle, then starts grooming her with a battered looking brush, brushing with quick, circular motions, going against the grain and fluffing up her coat to dry out her fur with a solicitous measure of care that seems wholly unfitting of a man of his temperament and occupation.

Boadicea makes a low, rumbly noise in the back of her throat that sounds almost like a purr. She dips her head down and chomps at the yellowed prairie grass lining the floor of the outcrop, tearing up mouthfuls with a sedate contentedness that makes you sorely wish you could share in her circumstances.

A sense of fatigue more complete than any you’ve ever felt before settles over you like heavy snow. For the moment, you feel blank and washed out, stripped bare of all pretense.

“Morgan,” you admit. “I don’t have the bonds.”

“Yeah,” he replies. “I know.” He unpacks his canvas roll and yanks free from it the saddle blanket of coarse, undyed wool, then unfurls it over the horse’s back, pulling it over her flank and adjusting the fit. “Figured as much before we left Strawberry.”

“Oh.” At this point, you haven’t even the energy to be surprised. “Huh.”

For a long while, the only sound is that of the knife scraping against bark and the intensifying patter of rain, fat droplets coming down hard and fast.

In a small voice, you ask him, “You’re not really gonna sell me to a brothel, are you?”

He scoffs. “What makes y’think that ?”

“Thought you seemed too… too decent to do something like that.”

“Me? Decent?” Morgan lets out a low, disbelieving whistle. “Thought you’d know better by now.”

He turns partway to face you. In the dim light of the fire only half of him is lit bright enough to see, the rest tapering sharp into dark silhouette. For the lapse of a heartbeat it’s as if all the irreverence and bravado has been ripped away like a sheet of paper, and underneath a viciousness, a suppressed violence that you’ve been too blind to see.

This whole time you’ve been treating him like a dog, when the teeth at your throat are those of a wolf.

Your mouth goes dry and your fingers tighten around the knife in your hand. You stare up at him like a deer caught in his sights — blind panic rising up in your chest and throat like cold water. You swallow hard and try to force it down so you can maintain at least a semblance of control.

“Mr. Morgan…?”

“You ain’t been half as scared of me as you should be,” he says. “holed up with a wanted man, nobody around for miles. Some of the men I’ve run with, they…”

He lets the sentence trail off, the implications clear enough without him saying so. Then he shakes his head, and there is a weariness in him, a kind of cynical exhaustion that ages him far beyond his years. “Girl,” he says. “You keep at this line of work, I guarantee you’ll be dead in a year.”

Morgan slicks his fingers through his wet hair to keep rainwater from dripping into his eyes, and you can see that the hangdog look is back on his face, all his suggested cruelty vanished like smoke. He shifts his attention back to the saddlebags. “No, I ain’t decent,” he continues. He pulls out a tin cup and the individual components of what looks to be a collapsible grill. “But I ain’t so far gone that I’d hurt a woman. Or sell one.”

“But you’d ransom one.”

“Figured it out, did you?” he says. “Thought you might.”

He sits back beside the fire and pieces the grill together, twists its winch tight and positions it over the fire. Then he fills the tin cup with water from the canteen and sets it atop to heat.

“If you don’t hurt women,” you say slowly, your right hand still holding the knife tight as a vise. “Then what’re you going to do to me when you find out I’m not worth ransoming?”

“Doubt that’s gonna be a problem.”

“Why not?”

“Had a brand new Mauser on ya. You know how much those things cost?”

Mentally, you kick yourself. Looks like begging the gunsmith to lend you the best pistol he had in stock has come back to bite you in the ass.

“The gun’s not mine,” you say quickly. “It’s a loan.”

“Those bloomers in your room were real silk. You gonna tell me those were a loan too?”

“You — my bloomers?! Why were you going through my bloomers, you fucking degen—”

Of all the things you’ve accused him of today, somehow this is the one that actually rankles him. “You think I like rummaging through women’s underwear? Had to go through ‘em to get to your billfold.”

You flush hard enough that even the tips of your ears feel hot. “I… I saved up for those bloomers. Not that I’d expect you to understand the importance of—

“That shirt’s custom tailored, ain’t it? Those boots, too. And that’s good leather right there. Far too good for your typical drug mule. Either you come from money, or you got rich friends.”

There’s not much you can rebut here. All you can manage is a lame, “You don’t even know who I am .”

“Got a friend not too far from here who’s plenty familiar with St Denis. He’ll know.” Morgan holds his hand out towards you. “Gimme that knife a second.”

The knife is the only scrap of protection you’ve managed to grab hold of through this entire ordeal. You squeeze its handle tight.

He lets out a short, impatient sigh. “If I wanted to hurt you, I’d have done it by now. So c’mere and hand it over.”

You’ve known men who take a certain vicious pleasure in abusing women. Merchants with cringing wives. Clients with kind faces who’d leave working girls battered and bruised. There’s usually a certain mien about them that sets you on edge and that Morgan, brusque as he is, thoroughly lacks.

You brush the wood shavings off your lap and approach him. When you reach his place beside the fire, he tilts his head upwards to meet your eyes, the look on his face calm and expectant. A self-assured confidence that you’ve seen many times before, in the guises of many different men. It sends a familiar shiver of resentment down your spine.

You could cut out his eye right now. You could sink the blade into the thick cord of his neck. And he’d shoot you dead just for trying it — oh, you’ve no doubt of that — but it’d be quick and it’d be painless, and here comes that pathetic urge again, that little whisper coaxing you deeper, deeper towards the welcoming dark —

But equally pathetic is the nagging insistence that always stays your hand, that strident, desperate plea born from bodily instinct. The shared fear of all life from the inevitable. Cowardice — that’s what it is. A cowardice you’ve never been able to shake, a resentful, stubborn tether that you’ve bitten and clawed at over the years, but that still stays looped firm around your neck.

( And what about Mei? What about her son? )

You hand him the knife, and he receives it without incident.

The water in the tin cup is boiling. Morgan slips the point of the knife through the cup’s metal handle, and delicately removes it from the grate to cool. As you stand there, wet and cold and resentful, but not sure what else to do, he saws the top off a can of beans and sets it on the grill to warm, then pulls something out of his satchel and tosses it in your direction.

Somehow, you manage to not fumble the catch. It’s a can of peaches.

“Don’t eat ‘em yet,” he says. “I wanna take a look at your arm first. Roll up your sleeve for me.”

You grimace. One of the pros of tailored shirts is having sleeves that actually fit. “It doesn’t roll up that far.”

“Then I’ll cut it off for you,” he says, putting the knife to the shoulder seam.

“Like hell you will. This is my last decent shirt.”

Morgan shrugs. “No way around it, unless you wanna take it off.”

A shirt nice enough to present a veneer of respectability costs at least $4. Your usual tailor’s fee runs about $2, plus tip. That’s $6 total: the equivalent of two week’s worth of food for Mei and her son. Good food — white rice and cabbage, maybe even a bit of pork belly. Not the bits of offal scrounged from the butcher and wilted produce she’d resort to otherwise.

You hold out your hand and say, “Give me something to cover myself with.”

Your time spent reading Ovid in college would have probably been better served learning to dress like him, you think to yourself as you try and try again to wrap Morgan’s blanket around yourself like a toga.

“I said I’d give you a minute to yourself,” he says. “It’s been more than three now. I’m gonna turn around.”

“Just ten more seconds,” you respond, hastily tucking the corner of the blanket into the horizontal swathe pulled taut across your torso.

The sheer amount of irritation he manages to convey in the sigh he lets out is really quite impressive. In it, you can somehow hear him rolling his eyes.

When you finally let him know you’re ready, he takes one look at you and has to stifle a laugh. “You could’ve just wrapped it around your chest. Woulda been more practical.”

“Oh, excuse me for wanting to preserve what’s left of my dignity,” you snap, keeping one arm pressed against your chest to keep the whole improvised garment from falling apart.

“Alright Caesar, c’mere. Let me see.”

The cut looks like an angry red furrow ploughed through the field of your skin. Its edges are ragged and torn, separated like poorly cut cloth. In between, the wound itself gleams red and raw, with particles and fibers mixed in with blood and indeterminate tissue.

Earlier, when you’d gingerly untied the makeshift bandage and taken off your shirt, you’d taken a silent moment to survey the damage, wondering with horrified fascination if it was perhaps your own muscle you were glimpsing, that particular facet of your body surfacing through its dermal barrier for the first time.

“I’m gonna hold your arm,” Morgan says. “That ok with you?”

You nod, a little dumbfounded that he of all people would have the foresight to ask for permission.

He lifts your arm towards the firelight so he can better examine the wound, and in doing so handles you with more care than you can remember any lover ever giving you. You tell yourself that it’s a rebuke of your own terrible taste than an indication of any extraordinary kindness on his part, then forcibly dredge up the memory of his gun at your back for good measure.

“You’re gonna have a hell of a scar after this,” he says, running his thumb along the unbroken skin below the cut. “No inflammation, which is good. I’ll patch you up the best I can, but we’re still gonna want to check on it every couple hours to make sure it doesn’t get infected.”

He gets up to rummage through his saddlebags and returns holding a roll of gauze and a bottle of clear liquid. “You’ll be wanting this,” he says, handing over the latter. “This’ll hurt.”

You take a swig and nearly choke on it. “What the hell is this?”

“Grain alcohol.”

Grimacing, you bring it to your lips again and take in two more mouthfuls of the stuff before handing it back, gulping it down quick to get the burn of it down your throat and off of your tongue.

Morgan hovers his hand over the tin cup to test its temperature. “This needs to cool down first. Gives you some time for that liquor to set in too.”

“I think it’s going to my head already,” you admit.

Heat is spreading from the warm pit of your stomach to your neck and face, branching through your veins as sure as blood. The thud of your heart, previously an imperceptible thing, now asserts itself like a metronome.

He glances over at you and whistles low. “Not much of a drinker, are you?”

“Not usually.” You press your palm against your cheek. “Am I turning red?”

“Gettin’ there.”

It’s strange, settling into this oddly comfortable limbo between cordiality and aggression. Your sustained caution of him is beginning to wane so steadily that you have to consciously remind yourself the only reason he hasn’t shot you dead or at least seriously injured you is due to the fact that you’re worth more intact than otherwise.

“So,” Morgan says. “What’s someone with silk bloomers doin’ all the way out here runnin’ opium to Strawberry?”

“It’s a very long and stupid story.”

“Then give me the short version.”

You stare at the ground as though it’ll offer you some way to condense the sordid affair of your life into a couple easy sentences. He’d asked the question with what sounded like genuine curiosity instead of interrogation, and for once you feel inclined to blurt out the whole of it, like a girl in confession.

You want to tell him about how small the missionaries had seemed when you’d waved at them through the train’s grime-smudged window, not knowing it’d be the last time. The tweed jacket tossed carelessly onto the floor, and the cool, smooth sheen of mahogany against your skin. Feng fishing you out from the dark water lapping at the docks. The money, the opium, the blood.

The sight of the Heartlands for the first time, its blue horizon impossibly vast.

“I owe someone a lot of money,” you say finally, fiddling with a piece of grass between your fingers, tearing into halves and halves and halves. “He said it was either this or the brothel.”

“And you chose this. Runnin’ dope to those poor bastards working the railroads.”

It’s not the first time you’ve heard this particular tone of voice. The kind that implies its speaker’s higher moral ground as it categorically condemns you. But coming from him makes its sting especially hard.

“I don’t force them to buy it,” you say hotly. “It’s not just me that’s at fault here.”

“You ever seen a dope addict? They ain’t got a goddamn choice —”

“Well, d’you know what the average lifespan of a Chinatown whore is?” You don’t bother waiting for a response before plummeting to the answer. “Two years. After that she’s either dead from syphilis or suicide. At least with the opium I’ll die out here in the open and not in some squalid closet of a room that smells like piss and men.”

The liquor is starting to hit hard , and a part of you is fiercely grateful for it. It’s been a long time since you’ve been given an excuse to scream out the inequities of your life to someone, and a man who’s holding you for ransom seems as good a target for your vitriol as any.

“You think that just ‘cause it’d be better for the greater good or some shit, they should get to fuck me over? Is that what you think?”

Morgan seems a little taken aback. “I didn’t say th—”

“I don’t give a shit about the addicts. I don’t give a shit who’s life I’m ruining, as long as it isn’t mine. I don’t… I don’t care about anyone else because I’m a terrible excuse for a human being. That’s what you want to hear me say, right?” At this point, you realize that you’ve transitioned into a hysterical rant, that you don’t properly mean half the things you’re saying, but saying it out loud feels good nonetheless, like sucking venom from a festering wound. “But people like you don’t get to tell me so. Because at least I don’t hold people at fucking gunpoint . I don’t rob banks or kidnap women or beat debtors. I’m not a fucking murderer like you—”

The last statement barely clears the air before the image of the dead O’Driscoll, sprawled across the ground with his belly torn open, flashes through your head. You immediately clap your hand over your mouth, as if doing so will let you swallow back your words.

“No,” Morgan says, “You ain’t a murderer. And that’s why you won’t last long.”

“Good,” you seethe. The hot sting of tears begins prickling again at the corners of your eyes. “I don’t want to.”

He raises his eyebrows and regards you with a vague, detached kind of pity that makes you almost wish he’d just outright condemn you instead, then touches his fingers to the tin cup. “Water’s cool enough now, I think.”

You feel like a petulant child who’s just thrown an ineffectual tantrum. Rendered self-conscious and obedient for the time being, you allow him to secure your elbow with his hand and begin irrigating the wound with warm water.

“Jesus fucking god,” you hiss. You reflexively try and jerk away, but he holds you still and tells you to stop squirming, his grip firm as iron.

It’s the worst pain you’ve felt in years. Like a lick of flame passing over your skin, echoing its progenitor again and again as he washes the cut with a series of short, measured trickles of water, flushing away the combined grime of dried blood, dust, and lint.

“You think this is bad,” he says, unscrewing the bottle of grain alcohol. “Wait’ll I sterilize it.”

If the water was flame, then the alcohol is a streak of molten lava, wet fire soaking through the wound in a rush of white-hot burning pain. You don’t scream — you let out a weak, choking sob so pathetic that you cover your mouth again in an attempt to stifle it.

But you’re a little drunk and your subconscious recognizes this as an excellent excuse to cry, and so it lets flood the tears you’ve kept stoppered up for hours now. You whimper, meet his eyes briefly, then start bawling.

Your crying before hadn’t seemed to bother him, but now he looks almost comically alarmed. He must think it’s the physical pain sending you into hysterics, because he starts trying to comfort you the same way he did Boadicea when he’d led her into the river.

“You’re doin’ good,” he says, cajoling you in a soft, affectionate voice. He sets the bottle of alcohol on the ground and pats you awkwardly on the shoulder. “Just a little more to go, and we’ll be done.”

Another agonizing, scorching splash of fire. He doesn’t chide you this time when you try to pull away.

“Shhhh… I know, I know. Hurts like a bitch, don’t it? I’m gonna give it one more rinse, and — yeah, there we go. You’re alright.”

Morgan wraps the bandage over your arm with deft, practiced fingers, and you wonder briefly how many times he’s had to do this for himself, with no one to soothe him. Though better that than the shoddy job you’d done on him six weeks ago, frantically patching him up with just the barest idea of what you were doing.

He ties off the bandage, then picks the can of peaches off the ground, pops open its metal lid with the tip of his knife and proffers it to you like a peace offering. “Here. You’re hungry, right?”

It’s very hard to cry and eat at the same time. You decide to concentrate on the latter.

After tapering your sobs down to a series of quiet, resentful sniffles, you begin gulping down mouthful after messy mouthful of sliced peach. It’s the first morsel of food you’ve had in over ten hours, and you wolf it down so quickly you hardly taste it. Just an impression of cloying sweetness mixed with something faintly aromatic (cinnamon, you think) lingering as an aftertaste.

The old instincts of hunger are hard to shake off. All decorum thoroughly discarded, you raise the can to your lips and drink down what syrup remains, tilting it nearly perpendicular to the ground to get at the last few drops.

“My god,” Morgan says. “I seen dogs with better manners.”

“If you’d fed me earlier, then I— what’re you doing.”

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” he asks. He holds his bandolier in one hand. The other is working at his shirtcollar. “I’m gettin’ the hell outta these wet clothes.”

You clutch at the empty can of peaches as his union suit reveals itself in a revelation of blue. A blue which, you admit to yourself with an uncomfortable surge of appreciation, suits the shade of his eyes extremely well. But when he begins unbuckling his belt, you quickly avert your eyes. “Really?” you ask. The scandalization you probably ought to have felt from the very moment he’d begun undressing finally begins to surface. “Your pants, too?”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’m keepin’ the union suit on.”

“Are you usually this brazen with the women you kidnap?”

“D’you usually sit around half-naked with the men who kidnap you?” he asks, jabbing his thumb towards your own discarded shirt, which you’d spread out neatly beside the fire to dry.

“That’s different,” you hiss, knowing very well that it isn’t. “I had a medical reason.”

“Yeah, and so do I. I don’t wanna get pneumonia.”

He has a point. You look down at your own sodden trousers, which cling to your skin in a cold, wet embrace, and your internal scale of comfort versus propriety tips decidedly towards the former.

“Turn your back again,” you tell him.

“What for?”

“I’m gonna take my pants off too, and I don’t want you trying to sneak a peek at my bloomers.”

He laughs, then winces and gingerly splays his fingers across his ribs. It’s the first sign of real levity you’ve seen from him. “Oh, that is the last thing on my mind right now, girl.” There’s a tired grin on his face, and were it not for the events of the day, you might have almost found it endearing. “Besides, you ain’t hardly my type.”

“Well that’s good to hear,” you reply, a little offended. “Because I’m not interested in men with terrible taste.”

But he does as he’s told, and when you’re satisfied with the oblique angle of his range of sight, you let the borrowed blanket fall from your shoulders and pull the ribbon securing your braid free. You rake your fingers through your hair until it hangs loose, then gather the ends of it in one hand and twist it tight to wring out the rainwater. Only then do you pull the blanket back over your shoulders and begin to undress.

First, your boots. Then the knee-length woolen socks, which have left their cable-knit weave as an imprint on your skin. After glancing at him one more time to make sure his face is turned discreetly away, you unbuckle your belt and wriggle your way out of your trousers. It takes some maneuvering, and some thoroughly indecent posturing, to finally get them off. You leave your cotton bloomers on, figuring that the warmth of the fire will dry the thin material soon enough.

When you look back at Morgan, you find that he’s since turned back towards you. Not to gawk, but to get a better look at his own wounds in the firelight.

His union suit is half-unbuttoned. Most of his bare chest is visible, and along with it, the bruises from the ricocheted bullet. A mottle of blue and violet, like a spill of ink that radiates from the negative imprint of the flask that took the impact in his place. And right below it, a glimpse of your own handiwork.

When you’d first found him, the cut had spanned diagonal across his torso, trailing shallow from his chest and biting deep near the ridge of his hip. Most of it’s healed over since, but the edges are angry and inflamed still, and you can see the fading marks of your inexpert stitches laid like railroad tracks over the land of his skin.

“Don’t worry, I ain’t looked at you,” Morgan says. He probes gently at an indigo patch and inhales sharply. “Too busy lickin’ my own wounds.”

If you look closer, you can see the remnants of multiple scuffs and scratches. A history of violence storied across his body, told in the pale lettering of scars, many of them recent. An unwelcome pang of guilt settles itself low in your belly. It looks like he’s been on the road for a while, healing sporadically through long stretches of hard journeying. Hard journeying made worse, no doubt, by your theft of his bonds.

“You… uh. You want me to keep carving off wet bark?”

“Nah,” he says distractedly, still trying to determine the depth of the damage left behind. “Should be fine leavin’ the rest of it to dry out by the fire.”

You draw the blanket tighter around your shoulders, then root around your head for something, anything to talk about. Anything to get this burgeoning sympathy for Arthur Morgan out of your head.

“Your friend in St Denis,” you say finally. “He’s not gonna know much about me if he doesn’t speak Chinese.”

Morgan absentmindedly scratches his chin as he begins buttoning his union suit back up. “Wouldn’t put it past him. I know he’s had dealings with ‘em in the past.”

Something clicks in the back of your head. Long overdue recognition like puzzle pieces fitting together. “What’s his name?”

“Josiah,” he says.

“Josiah,” you echo. The spark of some fit of emotion is beginning to rise in your throat. “Josiah… Trelawney?”

His bewildered face is enough to confirm your suspicions. Relief, anger, confusion — all of them flood you at once with such intensity that you have to take a moment to squeeze your eyes shut. When you open them, you take a deep breath and swallow hard. “Josiah Trelawney’s the son of a bitch I sold your bonds to.”

———

Massive thanks to @reddeaddufus for editing not only this chapter, but the entirety of this fic. This whole thing would be a lot more disjointed if it weren't for her.

Definitely give her fic Red Dead Pursuit a look. The main character is extremely compelling, the plot is fast-paced, and the porn is A+. Her writing style is also a delight to read.

#arthur morgan #arthur morgan/reader #arthur morgan/oc #fic #red dead redemption #rdr2 #my work #talking bird

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blkmxrvel · 3 years

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Haven’t Forgotten My Way Home (22) - [CONVERTED]

Pairing: Kara Zor-El x Female!Reader

Summary: In the D/s society of National City, men and women abandoned by their Dom/mes or otherwise deemed unfit for life “outside” end up at the Mount Overland House for Orphaned Submissives. It is here that Kara Zor-El finds Y/N Hastings, broken and fearful from mistreatment at the hands of her former Dom. Can Kara coax Y/N back into the world that once so terrified her, and show her the true meaning of care and submission?

Warnings: Domestic Violence (Flashbacks, Mentions and Descriptions), Misogyny, Domination/Submission.

Miss Kara held fast to her hand – discreetly – as she and Y/N walked down the hallway of the administrative building, toward the room where Lena said she would meet them, along with Y/N’s advocate. Y/N’s eyes darted this way and that, at all of the people passing by them, feeling a little nervous that someone would stop and ask her just what she was doing with Miss Kara. She still didn’t really understand how Miss Kara could get into trouble with their relationship, yet she was determined to protect her as much as she could. Y/N didn’t think she could be taken away from Miss Kara, but that didn’t mean she was going to test that theory. But Miss Kara strode forward, her jaw set and her eyes determined, as if she was on a mission.

It had taken Y/N two hours to calm Miss Kara down after the phone call from Maggie. She’d been alternately angry and inconsolable, pacing up and down her fathers’ living room floor, gesturing wildly as words Y/N had never heard before came spilling out. She wanted to go to the council and demand that Alex recuse herself, but really there was no precedent for that. Alex wasn’t a lawyer, she could choose to advocate for anyone she wished. That didn’t make it right, Miss Kara had snapped, when David Zor-El had pointed it out. Her fathers had tried to talk to her, giving various reasons why Alex would’ve chosen to represent the man who had hurt Y/N, but Miss Kara had been so personally hurt that she couldn’t stop ranting enough to listen to their arguments.

At one point she had turned to Y/N.

“Why aren’t you angry?” she’d asked simply.

And Y/N had just shrugged. “I-I’m used to it?”

That had sent Miss Kara on another bout of tears, and Y/N ended up sat on the couch in the living room, cuddling her close and stroking her hair. That she wasn’t used to, but it was nice, to feel like for once she could be the comforting one, even if what she had said was true. She hadn’t been all that surprised to hear that Alex would be assisting in James’s defense. Y/N knew that Miss Kara was taking it as some sort of betrayal, but for Y/N life before had been a constant expectation of betrayal.

It was hard to be let down when you believed that’s the way things were always supposed to be.

And now three days later, it was time for Y/N to start her case against the one who had let her down the most.

She was filled with nervous energy, and also a kind of dread. For the last few days she’d been trying to imagine what it would be like to finally face him. Each time she thought of it she’d ended up shaking, and had to find something to calm herself down. Miss Kara had tried to talk to her about it once or twice, but each time she’d had to cuddle Y/N and whisper soft words to her, or sing to her, to keep the girl out of her own head.

The door at the end of the hall read 108. Miss Kara squeezed Y/N’s hand with a smile, knocked on the door and opened it, stepping inside with Y/N hanging back a little.

“Kara!” the dark-haired woman said, standing up from the desk. Y/N quirked an eyebrow, sure that Lena didn’t actually work there, but Lena was certainly acting like she owned the place in the way that she came around the desk and walked over to them.

Lena was smartly dressed in a black suit, with perfect hair and a casual, almost smirk on her face as Miss Kara accepted Lena’s hug, allowing herself to be folded up and held for entirely too long, and Y/N felt something rise in her stomach that she’d never felt before.

“And this must be Y/N,” Lena said warmly, at last separating from Miss Kara and smiling at her. “I’m Lena; it’s wonderful to finally meet the girl Kara constantly talks about.”

Miss Kara had told Y/N all about Lena, about her training and how that had blossomed into a romantic and sexual relationship. She’d been completely honest about everything, and careful to reassure Y/N that those feelings were long gone, replaced by something maybe just as strong but completely different. She wasn’t a mother, Miss Kara had explained, because that would be just awkward; but she was more than a friend, too. Y/N wasn’t sure she understood it, and so she found herself looking from Lena to Miss Kara, and back again.

“Mine,” Y/N blurted out, pointing to Miss Kara, and Lena’s eyebrows rose. “M-mine.”

The sound was instant, like a gunshot in the quiet room.

Miss Kara snapped her fingers, and then pointed to the floor, and Y/N sank to her knees. She found the form Miss Kara loved, with her hands open resting on her thighs, but she couldn’t bring herself to look up.

They’d discussed this earlier, when Miss Kara had talked to her about Lena, and also about Y/N’s relationship with Miss Kara not being limited to just her home. Y/N hated public punishment, because all she had to go on was what James had made her endure in front of his friends. But Miss Kara had promised her that if it was ever needed, she’d only correct her in front of Lena behind closed doors, and Y/N knew Miss Kara would never take advantage of it the way James had. So she had agreed.

“You thought to embarrass me by speaking to my friend that way?” Miss Kara asked, and Y/N’s cheeks flooded hot with shame, even as Miss Kara’s hand was soft and gentle on her shoulder.

Touch was important, they’d discovered together. Y/N craved it, needed it, and no matter what was happening, whether she was being punished or they were playing a game or fixing dinner, Miss Kara was sure to touch Y/N frequently. It was usually just a hand, resting steady on her, or sometimes a light brush of her hair or cheek. It didn’t matter what it was; it meant Miss Kara was there. And it even made punishment not so bad.

Not so bad.

“No, Miss Kara,” Y/N said. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need your apology,” Miss Kara said, and reached down to lift Y/N’s chin so that she was looking directly at Lena.

Y/N nodded, the implication understood. She shifted a little on her knees, and then sighed. “I’m sorry, Lena,” she said quietly. “I was disrespectful to you and embarrassed Miss Kara. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Y/N,” and she glanced at her in surprise, hearing the slight tone of amusement in Lena’s voice, coupled by a twinkle in her eyes. Y/N had expected anger, harshness, not… near merriment. “It’s evident Kara has told you about us, and believe me, I can understand how you must feel.”

Y/N nodded miserably. It was strange, this feeling that what if Miss Kara wanted Lena instead of her, especially when Y/N knew she’d be nowhere good enough… She found herself breaking form, reaching her hand up to her shoulder. Miss Kara’s fingers grasped hers and squeezed, before releasing.

“Hand down, little one.”

“Yes, Miss Kara.” Y/N looked back at Lena.

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Lena said; she moved to place her hand on Y/N’s head, but was stopped when Miss Kara’s hand came to rest there instead.

“Mine,” Kara said.

Y/N fought back a grin. It was okay. They were okay.

“Kara and I are no longer lovers,” Lena continued, with a roll of her eyes. “I love Kara, but not like that. I’m with someone now, someone wonderful, who is pregnant with our child.” Behind Y/N, Miss Kara squeaked, and Lena’s smile grew wider. “So you needn’t worry, Y/N. I believe wholeheartedly that Kara is, in fact, completely yours, and that she doesn’t want it any other way.”

Y/N ducked her head, smiling down at the carpet as the shamed blush of her cheeks gave way to Lena’s gentle reassurances. She nodded. “Thank you, Lena. I really am sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. You can get up now, Y/N.”

She stayed on her knees.

Miss Kara lightly stroked Y/N’s hair. “You can get up now, little one,” she said, and Y/N rose to her feet.

Lena chuckled, and there was a smirk on Miss Kara’s face as she regarded Y/N. “Good girl,” she said, and gave her a quick kiss. Y/N searched her face and saw no sign of anger; Miss Kara cupped her cheek with her hand.

“You have nothing to worry about,” she reiterated, looking into Y/N’s eyes, and Y/N nodded. Miss Kara kissed her again and hugged Y/N close.

“Well, Lena?” she said over Y/N’s shoulder. “What do you think?”

“Does it matter what I think?” Lena had moved to sit on the edge of the desk with her legs crossed as she looked at Y/N and Miss Kara. “All that matters is what you and Y/N think.”

“I still want to know,” Miss Kara insisted, and Y/N looked at Lena.

Lena smiled. “She’s beautiful. And apparently takes orders from no one else but you.”

“That’s right,” Y/N said, lifting her chin.

Miss Kara laughed and pulled Y/N over to one of the leather couches up against the wall of the office. They sat down and Miss Kara wrapped her arm around Y/N’s shoulders. “I like it that way,” she said. “And I like to be the only one giving the orders.”

“Noted,” Lena said, laughing, and Y/N decided that she liked her.

“I’m proud of you, Kara. By what I’ve seen just now, you’re taking everything I said to heart. You’re really coming into your own.”

“Thank you, Miss Lena,” Miss Kara said, and as foreign as that sounded to Y/N, she recognized the dynamic that was still in play between the two of them. She guessed Lena was something of a mentor, and there was a connection that Y/N couldn’t hope to understand, a connection she’d probably never share with Miss Kara.

But it didn’t seem to matter, because Miss Kara had said “mine.”

Claim or not, Y/N was hers.

Kara’s former Dominant turned her attention back to Y/N. “Kara says you’ve been improving with your therapy, I’m glad to hear that.”

Y/N looked at Miss Kara, wondering what else she’d told Lena, but it didn’t really matter. Miss Kara was smiling with pride at her, and it made Y/N feel suddenly shy, made her want to bury her face in Miss Kara’s neck.

“It’s hard,” Y/N admitted, “Sometimes it still hurts to walk and I get tired easily, but I haven’t used the chair in a long time. Brainy says my strength will come back the more I walk, and Miss Kara makes sure I get plenty of rest.”

As she’d done yesterday, after Y/N had gone out to lunch with Kelly, she thought with a small smile. Kelly had had the day off and so they’d stayed away from the mall, preferring instead to go to a little Italian restaurant on the other side of town. They’d ended up lingering for a few hours and probably annoying the waiters, but it had been fun. It was nice for Y/N to finally have someone to talk to, but she couldn’t deny that a part of her felt strange about being friends with a Dominant, someone who wasn’t hers. It was weird to not have any formality with Kelly, even though Y/N tried to stay polite and respectful, because she expected that of herself, whether Kelly was her Domme or not. That was the hardest part of navigating this “new world,” for Y/N. For so long it had just been Y/N and James. With James’s friends he was Sir, if she had to go for medical treatment he was Sir. He was the only Sir. Her interactions with anyone else had been limited to necessity, or the people he wanted her to come into contact with. She was constantly on her guard, trying to keep from angering him by showing even the tiniest amount of disrespect to him or to his friends. Other than that, the rule had been don’t talk. Ever. And if you were spoken to, use the smallest amount of words possible. Now every day she was expected to talk to people, from Miss Kara to Nia to Kelly to the waiter who had taken their order, and for Y/N it was a constant war in her head, trying to figure out how she was meant to talk to everyone.

Kelly for her part had been happy and breathless, because she’d called her old boyfriend Mike the day before, and they’d arranged a date. Her excitement was infectious, and Y/N couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to laugh and giggle with someone that wasn’t Miss Kara, and so it had been a good day.

But she’d been overwhelmingly tired when she finally made it to Miss Kara’s for the evening, so much so that Miss Kara had nearly sent her back to Nia’s to sleep. But Y/N had begged, and finally Miss Kara relented. Y/N had fallen asleep a half hour into the visit, with her head on Miss Kara’s lap. When she woke up the next morning, she discovered that Miss Kara had slept sitting up on the couch, so she wouldn’t have to move.

“Well, you need to preserve your strength,” Lena was saying, and her smile had disappeared as she gave Y/N a sobering look. “Are you ready for this?”

She felt Miss Kara’s arm tighten around her as Y/N considered Lena’s question. Was she ready for it? The idea of facing James chilled her, and Y/N shivered. But the chance to finally, maybe see him own up to what he had done? She didn’t know if he would though. Part of her said that James would never admit to it, that he would never realize he’d done anything wrong. And part of her wondered what she would do if he did admit to it, and apologized.

Pigs would fly before that ever happened, she knew.

So Y/N shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Well then we’ll just have to help you get ready,” Miss Kara said soothingly. “That’s why we’re here. And… someone else is not.” She looked at Lena.

“It’s been a rough morning.”

“Is a submissive really representing me?” Y/N wondered aloud, her eyes wide.

It seemed almost incomprehensible to her, even though she knew that submissives worked, that they had jobs. David was chief of staff of a hospital, for goodness’ sake. Still, the idea of a submissive helping her stand up to James…

“Well, she’s not just any submissive,” Lena said, once again smirking. “She’s—“

At that moment the door flew open, so hard that it bounced off the wall on the opposite side, and the brunette woman entering the room glowered, her hands on her jean-clad hips, at the three women who had been waiting for her.

“All right,” she said. “A parasite the size of a pea has kept me throwing up in the bathroom for the last two hours, and yesterday Madam made me start drinking decaf. How soon can we kill this James bastard?”

Y/N blinked. “I-I think she’ll do.”

“Sam,” Lena said drily, indicating the woman who immediately crossed the floor over to her and accepted a kiss. “My love, one of the mothers of our child, and my brat.”

“If I promise not to be a brat for the rest of our daughter or son’s natural life can I please have a coffee? A real one?”

“No.”

“Coke?”

“No.”

“Coffee bean? Just one?”

“Sam.”

“Fine, just for that I’m a brat.”

“I didn’t expect anything less. And I made you some decaf.”

Y/N watched, her mouth open a little, as Sam grinned and kissed Lena soundly on the lips. “Thank you, Madam,” she said, her voice softening into a slightly more submissive tone. Going behind the desk she made quick work of pouring out coffee from the thermos, and then looked at Y/N.

“He was a dick,” she announced, and Y/N briefly wondered when Sam had had time to talk to Maggie. “And we’re going to shrink it down a few inches.”

“Sam,” Lena said again with a shake of her head. “Why don’t you tell us all how you plan to help Y/N, instead of indulging in your vulgar fantasies?”

“That wasn’t a vulgar fantasy,” Sam said, taking a drink of her coffee. “You want vulgar fantasies wait till I get you alone, Madam.”

“Is she always like this?” Miss Kara asked, laughing at Lena’s snort of exasperation.

“All day, every day.”

“I’ve read your file,” Sam said to Y/N, moving to sit on the floor in front of the couch and look up at her. She tilted her head back toward the desk, where a manila folder was resting, unnoticed earlier. “It’s from when you first arrived at the House. Gave me a pretty good indication of what the fucker did to you. Scars on your back and legs, think they called that ‘evidence of being severely beaten, possibly as a result of improper use of implements.’ He broke your right arm. Twice. When that truck hit you, you already had a broken rib that had never reset properly. And under emotional trauma, ‘unknown, most likely severe and damaging.’”

“I-I don’t want to hear anymore,” Y/N stuttered, shrinking back into Miss Kara, who kissed the top of her head and made soft noises of comfort.

She both wanted to see the file and burn it, to read the black and white account of what he’d done to her, and watch it filter up in smoke so she could pretend it never existed.

“I know,” Sam said sympathetically, and she reached out to touch Y/N’s knee. Y/N didn’t flinch, and Sam smiled at her a little.

“But you’re going to hear that and worse at the trial, kid. I’m just trying to prepare you.”

“How bad do you think it’ll be?” Kara asked.

“Now that your best friend is helping to represent him, it’s not going to be pretty, and that’s the best I can give you.”

“Sam’s the best advocate you could have, Y/N,” Lena said, and Sam shot her a grateful look. “And I’m not saying that because she’s my girl. I’m saying it because she’s good, and she’s not afraid.”

“I-I’m not either,” Y/N said, sitting up a little straighter, and once again Sam patted her knee.

“Yeah, you are,” she said, and raised her hand when Y/N started to object. “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but you are scared, and you’ve got damn good reason to be. I had a rough relationship or two before I met Madam, but they were nothing like what you’ve been through.”

Sam stood up and walked back to the desk, picking up Y/N’s file. “Nothing like what’s in this. So if I were you I’d be scared.” She threw the file back onto the desk and rested her palms on the wood, leaning forward. For a split second Y/N thought she almost looked like she was readying herself for a spanking.

“But I’m not scared,” Sam said, and Y/N knew she was telling the truth. “I’m not scared of James Olsen, and you’re going to have your day in court, Y/N. When I get through with you you’re going to be able to look him in the eyes and let everyone know what he did to you. He’s not getting away with it, Y/N.”

Looking at Sam, and hearing the confident way in which she spoke, made Y/N almost inclined to believe her. Here was a submissive, strong and bratty, secure in the relationship she had with her Dominant, but more importantly, secure in herself. It was apparent in the way Sam walked, in how she talked, her take-no-prisoners way of interacting with life and everyone around her. Y/N didn’t think she could ever dream of being that bratty with Miss Kara, but for Sam it seemed to be easy – because she knew what to expect from Lena, and she knew that… Lena wouldn’t be mean to her? For Y/N, being with Miss Kara was still something like navigating a minefield. Every day she grew a little more comfortable with their dynamic, but still in the back of her mind was always that worry, that fear that she’d do something wrong. But with Sam… it was almost like she knew she’d do things wrong, but that was okay. Because the relationship she had with Lena made even getting things wrong… not that big of a deal.

“Because they confront it and move on,” Miss Kara said later that night when Y/N talked to her about it, and she snuggled Y/N closer on the couch. “Discipline and correction doesn’t mean that I can remind you of it two weeks after the fact, Y/N. I’m not going to punish you and hold it over your head months later, unless you repeat the same behavior that you were punished for initially. I don’t hold grudges, little one, and they don’t have any place in a relationship like this.”

“H-he’ll bring up everything I did wrong,” Y/N said, her arms tight around Miss Kara’s waist. “And everyone will hear it and they’ll know—“

“They’ll know that none of this was your fault,” Kara said firmly.

“But what if they don’t? What if all they see is me and everything he says and—“

“Come with me.”

Miss Kara stood up suddenly, and Y/N pouted, annoyed at the lack of warm contact, but also more than a little worried. Miss Kara’s voice had taken on That Tone, and Y/N wondered what she had done that warranted punishment.

“Miss Kara? I-I’m sorry?”

“Shh.” Miss Kara took her hand and led Y/N into the guest bedroom, stopping just in front of the wide mirror on the wall that spanned the width of the dresser underneath it. She stepped behind Y/N and turned her to face the mirror.

“What do you see?”

Y/N shook her head and looked away. “I don’t want to…”

“I know. What do you see?”

Y/N sighed, and looked. She made a face, watching as her reflection wrinkled up its nose. Her nose. “I don’t like my nose,” she said. “James always said it was too big. And… my chest is too small; he always said there was nothing for him to do anything with.” She let her eyes scan her body, and she shook her head. “My skin is all wrong, my butt is too big. My thighs, I… can we stop, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“In just a moment,” Miss Kara said, and moved so that her arms were wrapped around Y/N’s waist from behind, and her chin rested on Y/N’s shoulder.

“Do you want to know how I see you?”

Y/N nodded, and Miss Kara kissed her cheek. “I see a beautiful young woman. I see a perfect, cute little button nose.” She reached around to bop it with her finger, and Y/N giggled. “I see the most striking Y/E/C eyes I’ve ever seen, and your chest…” Miss Kara cleared her throat, and Y/N thought she detected a faint blush on her cheeks. She grinned in spite of herself. “Let’s just say that your chest and your rear end are absolutely lovely, and he had no clue what he was talking about. Your skin is beautiful, your smile is gorgeous. Everything about you, Y/N, is amazing.”

“Yes, but—“

“I’m not finished,” Miss Kara reprimanded, and Y/N snapped her mouth shut. “Our image of ourselves is always going to be different from what is reflected to others. James saw you as one thing. I see you as something completely different. There are people at that trial who are going to see James’s side. They’re going to be idiots, but that’s beside the point. I know you think it’s all your fault, but there are those of us who know that it isn’t, and you’ll find out at the trial that more people will believe you than you think. They’ll see you for the beautiful woman I know and love.”

“Love?” Y/N whispered, staring at Miss Kara’s reflection in the mirror.

Miss Kara smiled, though it seemed a little sad. “Just try to trust me,” she said, and kissed Y/N’s cheek again.

“Now come on, you can help me fix dinner.”

“Yes, Miss Kara.”

Hours later, Y/N lay in her bed, words coursing through her head and keeping her from sleep. Strength. Trust. Trial. James. Fear.

But most of all, Miss Kara.

And love.

#supergirl #supergirl x reader #kara danvers x reader #kara zor el x reader #kara danvers #madi converts #kara zor el

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caxsthetic · 4 years

Text

In Circle

Type: Short Clip (Blurt Drabble)

Cast: Suna Rintarou

Storyline: Not everything will fall into places. At least, not by its own.

Genre: Romance, Slice of Life

Bzzt bzzt~ Bzzt bzzt~

You let out a groan the second your phone vibrates. Hands mindlessly searching for the said item as you don’t even budge from your bed. Your alarm is not even ringing, so who will it be that calls you when the sun still hiding from the horizon?

You squint your eyes when the light from the screen attacks your vision, making you hiss like a vampire. Right now you really want to curse anyone who wakes you up. But when your eyes finally adjust with your phone, you can’t stop a smile to grace on your lips.

Rintarou

His name works wonder in your life, as if by just hearing or seeing the name that you have known since high school — is enough to boost your entire day. Without wasting another second, you slide your phone and pick up the call.

"Don't you know that this is a fucking 4 am?" You coat the excitement with an exasperated groan, rolling into the cold sheet of your bed as your eyes stare at the ceiling. "What do you want?"

Ever since high school, you always give him the snark side of you. Every word that rolling down from your lips is something that supposed to make him go away, or maybe just some distances. But even after years had passed, even when the two of you are now having a steady job and can take care of yourself — he never leaves, not even taking a step backwards.

"It's cold you know?" His voice is a little raspy, a sign that makes you wonder if he just wakes up like you. "To have no one by your side." But the statement makes you raise one of your eyebrows, wanting to snort because you are sure your best friend will never say something as melancholic as this. At least not when he is sober.

"Rintarou, you are drunk aren't you?" Now you are worried though as you sit upon your bed, back leaning towards the headboard. "Where are you right now? Can you send me the address?"

You wait for him to say anything, to maybe give some hint for his whereabouts. But nothing comes out from his lips for seconds, and right now you can’t help but wear your jacket to cover the thin pyjama that you wear, ready to search him. "Rin, please tell me you are at least with—"

"But it's warm now." He chuckles all of a sudden, making you stop whatever you are doing right now as you focus on his voice. You try to hear anything from the other line that can give you a hint of where he is right now. Though, there’s nothing but his fading breath. "It felt so warm, I love it here."

You swallow a huge lump. Is he perhaps inside a hotel or something? Maybe he’s with someone — a gorgeous model which he always caught being together with for the past few days. Is that why there's nothing but silence? But then again why? Why did he call you when he already in the accompany of someone?

"She is pretty." You snort, very unladylike as you try to coat the pain that starts to seep into your heart. "Such a beautiful creature." Like yourself, Rin? You really want to blurt that out, but as if it can change something. "She made me feel like home."

This is like a routine to you, to hear him ramble about all of his lovers or hookup as he wants to find the one. You are the kind best friend who will always be there through thick and thin, you are the best friend which he can trust. The very same best friend, that support him on every step of the way.

Even if someday he stood on the aisle to kiss someone, you still would be there — always.

"Yeah?" You lean your body on the wall, trying to steady your breath. "So I guess you are safe right now, right? You are with her, she will always keep you safe after all, isn't she?" You promise yourself that no matter how the stories unfold between you and the professional middle blocker, you will stay anyway.

But why your soul screams at you, begging for you to hang up the call and say goodbye?

"Maybe, I hope so. But I don't know yet." You grit your teeth, listening to his low, sleepy voice. "She never says anything, but I am pretty confident she loves me too." How lucky. You let your hand falls to the side for a moment, preventing him from hearing you — sobbing, as your heart is being tested at this very moment. How lucky to be loved by you.

You know at a certain point he will belong to someone else, someone that can replace your existent as he will find comfort from them instead of you. He’s never yours in the first place, but for years he never settle down completely, he never utters the word love.

So now when he finally found them, the reality reminds you that there is no chance for you to make him yours. From the start, there’s always a line between you and him, and no matter how many flirty words being thrown, no matter how many cuddles and affection that you two shared, at the end you and him is just a best friend.

"So where are you right now?" You ask one more time, at least you want to know that he will be safe and sound, in the arms of someone that probably he will share his life with.

"I am home." His voice becoming more distance. "With her, I am home. I have always been." Peaceful, the love that he harbours for the mysterious woman is something that can make him; Suna Rintarou — the silent yet a sarcastic man — head over heels and so much in love.

You bite your lips softly, lids fluttering close as you try to erase the tears which pleading to escape from the corner of your eyes. You should be happy, to know that he will no longer become your parasite, no longer clinging into you as if his life depended on it.

Yet every second pass, you wish that you are back in high school days and stuck at the moment. The time when he would come to you every day, asking silently for your attention. And you, you would always comply, running your fingers on his strands that smell so sweet like strawberry.

But time changes and you have to wake up.

"I hope she can make you happy, Rin." It’s a sincere declaration, coming from you. "I hope she can give you the warm, never once lessening as time goes by." Because no matter how much you want to rip your heart apart, you only wanted the best for him.

Somehow you can see him on the other side of the line, having a lovely smile that shaped on his face, just like how it always been. Just like how he always looks — beautiful. He chuckles softly around ten seconds after, a little bit delayed processing your words, maybe due to the alcohol that he consumed.

“I am sure she will.”

You breathe out, sounds a little bit wavered as you compose yourself. It is the last thing that you heard from him, the assurance that he will be alright from now on. That now, he will have someone that can be his home, giving him the warm that once was your job.

And just like that, you are left alone as you still standing in the dark of the room. Leaving you with just an empty feeling. Perhaps your heart fills with regret, with the wonder of what if. What if you dare enough to confess, or what if he’s bold enough to say something between the two of you.

Looking down, you just realize that you wear the familiar maroon track jacket. With black line adorned the side of the arms, the size that’s unfit with yours — it’s easy to recognize that this jacket belongs to him.

It is the only remnant of the warm that you can have. Nothing else but just a piece of clothes. You don’t want to cry, you are an adult and well matured. There is no reason for you to give in to the petty crush that you have for him. But even then you can't lie to yourself. Since you know your feelings are not just puppy feelings.

You love him, you love him that even at one point, you declined every date because you know how pouty he could be. And for him, you never once complained when he came to your house unexpected, scented with feminine expensive perfume that always made you feel so sick.

How come anyone else could touch him so intimately? How come a stranger could plant a kiss on his plump lips, tracing their fingers on the places that you never reached? While you who was always there for him — only got a taste of the softness of his dark brown strands.

Knock. Knock.

You really want to scream right now when you heard the soft knock. You had enough for today, so you ignore it. You don’t want to meet with anyone, you are not ready to show yourself to the world as you still have tears running down your cheeks.

Knock. Knock.

But whoever it is in front of your door is one persistent person. They knock, just twice, yet it continues for every few seconds.

You groan and furiously wipes the tears from your face with the jacket. So rough that it stings a little. You have enough, you don’t care anymore at this point if they end up pitying your state. You just want to be left alone, and if that means you have to face them for a second, then it will be the price that you are willing to pay.

Your feet stomp to the hardwood floor, hearts thummering as you breath out. It’s enough for your heart to be treated like this at one fine morning, it’s enough emotion for you to handle, you don't need more. Your hand unlocks the keys with such force, taking one last deep breath before you open up the door and show them your usual friendly smile.

Yet like as fast as the smile emerges on your face, it falters within seconds when your eyes catch the familiar green orbs. You swear you can feel your heart stops when you see him, maybe it’s just your mind playing tricks. The intense love that you feel for him makes you become delusional.

It feels so real though, as his face illuminates by the light that shines from your living room. The strands of his hair sway softly as the wind moves past him. A little puff of air slip from his lips due to the cold temperature.

His cheek is even producing a pinkish hue, notifying you that he is indeed, under the influence of alcohol.

But you don’t want to believe it. You can’t believe your own eyes as he takes some steps closer. Just like always, he never asks for permission. Just like always, he immediately goes inside your house, closing the door and face you. Instead of dropping his bags and search for some waters or snack though, he just has his eyes on you.

There is this smile that only appears when he wins something, the smile that only emerges on his face when he feels contented. He doesn’t say anything as he just let his gaze that fills with adoration fall on your face. It’s always like this, round and round without end, without a confession or any explanation about why he gives you such looks.

“I am home.”

Just three words, three words that he whispers under his breath. It can be platonic, it can be just his drunken state telling you that he is indeed home since he’s inside your house where he crashed a lot to for the past years.

Though somehow, those three words are enough to replace the sorrow on your face from before as your lips now turn into a smile. He chuckles, snorting a little. And you chuckle too, rolling your eyes as you shake your head in amusement.

Your eyes finally lock on each other, he gingerly raise his hand and cup one of your cheek. As if he’s asking you if it’s alright, if it’s alright to touch you first — since for the past years it’s always you who lay your hand on him.

And the second you give him a nod, a sign that you are alright with his sudden appearance, he have you fall into his embrace.

“With you, I am home.” He mutter softly under his breath, pulling you even closer. He’s now the one who initiate the affection. He want to show you that he already found the one, and he will no longer searching for the last destination. “I have always been.”

Because even though it needs years for the two of you to round around in circle, maybe this time, it wouldn’t be so bad.

Since now, everything start to fall into places.

Requested by @sredamancy I hope you like it👉👈

#haikyuu #haikyuu imagine #haikyuu!!#haikyuu x reader #rintarou suna #suna rintarou imagine #suna rintarou x reader #suna rintarou #suna rintarou scenario #suna x reader

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misedejem · 3 years

Text

Date Nights

Series: Persona 4 Ship: Kannao (Kanji Tatsumi/Naoto Shirogane) Word count: 9196

If ever Naoto was feeling low, Kanji would try harder than ever to show her how much he cared. Little gestures of good will and love that would go towards easing the pain. It had been that way from when they first met, and was still the case after over fifteen years.

So when Naoto found herself with Kanji in a slump and a few hours to spare, she took it upon herself to do the same.

(Basically lots of domestic future headcanon shenaningans~ As a note, Naoto is genderfluid in my fics, and this one uses she/her. AO3 link in the notes)

It had been an awfully long time since the Shiroganes had been working away from home at the same time.

Kanji had become unemployed almost two years ago and had been pooling his resources into his online store since then. And Naoto had been on leave a full year now, because of Chihiro, and then the upheaval and transfer of half the Shirogane agency from Tokyo to Yasoinaba. Save the odd local case, she’d effectively been forced to hang up the detective cap until life calmed down enough for her to return.

It was… a much-needed break. They could mutually agree on that.

Then, less than a month between moving into a house and the agency reopening, Yu Narukami had appeared on their doorstep one evening with ‘encouragement bentos’ and a request. The middle school he worked in as guidance counsellor had suddenly lost a teacher temporarily due to illness. The art teacher. She’d probably need at least six months to recover, but the new semester started in September and it was far too tight a deadline for the board to submit a request for a replacement.

“I mentioned you used to work as an art teacher in Tokyo, Kanji, and they said to ask you as soon as possible.”

Neither of them could have foreseen such a thing… But in a week, their situation had changed from both of them being at home, to both of them returning to work just a day apart from one another.

One day.

What a rare commodity that was.

As much as she adored it, Naoto’s career had always been taxing, keeping her late at night and seldom offering her a chance to catch her breath. After all, the Shirogane agency was lauded all across the country. Grampa had made such a name for it before he had died, and the attention she had gained from the media as the ‘first Detective Prince’ had only served to bolster the Shirogane name’s shining reputation once she’d taken over. That, and the fact that it was the only remaining detective agency in the country that specialised in Shadow-related incidents. They’d become ever more prevalent since the mental shutdowns and the Phantom Thieves incidents a decade ago had made knowledge of them more widespread in the seedier depths of society, and the Shadow Operatives had ensured to keep her busy when the cases grew too complex for them to handle.

That’s why they’d come back to Inaba of all places. With the TV World still very much active, it was the most potent place for illicit Shadow activities to occur in all Japan. And with the murmurings of new information cropping up, the higher ups had figured it may be a good idea to have a team of investigators to hand.

The detective had a lot of work waiting for her when her leave expired.

So, for her to be the one left with the house instead of Kanji for a full day… Well, she couldn’t exactly waste such an occasion.

“Momo, no -! Don’t… climb in there…” Naoto sighed, watching as her orange tabby clambered her way into one of the cardboard boxes at the far end of the room. She knew it was a fruitless effort to try and stop her. Their other cat didn’t house much love for boxes, but Mochi had been found in one as a kitten and clearly had developed a natural affinity towards them as a result. Half their move had been spent trying to keep her out of them long enough to fill them.

“If you wish to help, the very least you could do would be to climb into the ones I haven’t yet searched,” she told her, crossing over to the box and hoisting Mochi out. “That way, I won’t be wasting any time by delving into boxes twice when I retrieve you.”

Unfortunately, Naoto’s request was not met with much approval. The cat just mewled indignantly, clearly unimpressed and unwilling to cooperate, and scampered behind the large pile in the centre of the garage, leaving the detective to continue her investigation on her own.

It was frankly impressive that all the miscellany crammed into these boxes had fit into their Tokyo apartment; big though it was, it had been severely lacking in storage. Half their belongings – all the stuff they didn’t desperately need - were all packed up in this room, waiting for a spare moment to be put in their rightful place. They’d had five weeks to unpack, and perhaps if they’d still been living as just the two of them, they’d have made more of a dent in it. That would certainly have made Naoto’s current task a considerable deal easier. But all the free time they had now was devoted to Chihiro. She was only just coming up on her first birthday, and she was still very much dependant on her parents every moment that she was awake. Even now, Naoto was only able to search the room because the infant was taking her midmorning nap.

She was looking for a binder Kanji had put together, containing a collection of their favourite recipes that he’d found online or written down over the years. Somehow, it had gotten separated from the recipe books when they had packed away their kitchen, and it had not yet resurfaced. This was a major blockade in her plan for the day. She needed that binder. Desperately.

Kanji had seemed rather perturbed as he’d prepared for work that morning. In fact, he’d seemed uneasy about it from the moment Yu had asked him to take it. It was… unlike him. He’d worked as an art teacher in a middle school back in the city for four years, and he’d loved every minute of it.

“Hmm? Course I want the job,” he’d told her when she’d questioned him about it over breakfast. “I miss this kinda shit, you know that.”

He had a smile on his face as he tried spooning a blob of mushed fruits into Chihiro’s mouth, but it was a strained smile if nothing else.

“You just seem tense, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well… So do you. Goin’ back to work after havin’ a kid is s’posed to be kinda rough.” He shrugged.

“I can’t deny that…” Naoto sighed. “Even knowing that your mother will be there for her, and that you’re only doing part time hours, the idea of leaving her alone at all is more taxing on me than I could ever have expected… That’s all it is though?”

Naoto could think of several other reasons Kanji might have to be nervous about this particular job. But on the off chance that they hadn’t crossed his mind yet, she refrained from bringing them up. The last thing she wanted was to make him feel worse.

There was a pause, filled only by Chihiro’s babbles and the sound of the cats zooming about the living room after one another in a burst of energy. As he scraped the last of the baby food from the pot and offered it to their daughter, Kanji’s face began to fall ever so slightly, and before long he was sighing.

“I really gotta… stop overlookin’ that I’m married to a detective. I am scared shitless of leavin’ Chihiro for the first time. If anythin’s wrong, it’s that most of all. But uh… Otherwise I’m just a little weirded out.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Middle school – this middle school – is kinda… where I started to get a bad rep… What… I dunno, what if they take one look at me and realise who I am and kick me out? Like, they don’t realise ‘Shirogane Kanji’ is actually ‘Tatsumi Kanji’ an’ once they do they won’t want me anymore? They don’t know why I resigned from my last job either, what if they think I did something bad an’–”

As his voice grew louder and more sporadic, his panic becoming so apparent that it was palpable, Naoto scooted her way over to him and slipped her arms around his waist, resting her head gently on his chest.

“You left on your own terms because you disliked the way the school was being run. You don’t have to disclose why. And Kan-chan… you don’t mean to tell me that I’ve kept you from your hometown for so long that you’ve forgotten what it’s like? Inaba isn’t overly massive – rumours spread fast. I daresay there isn’t a person here who doesn’t know that the Tatsumi boy married that Detective Shirogane person. Especially not with how much your mother talks about us.”

She held him close for a while, rubbing her hand across his back even after his heart stopped pounding so hard, and his muscles began to relax.

“Yeah… I know… I know it’s a stupid thing to worry about, an’ that there ain’t no point in getting’ worked up about it…”

“Well, it’s not… stupid. I’d say it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be concerned about, given the impact it had on you in the past. But I can assure you of this: they wouldn’t have hired you if they thought you were unfit for the position.”

He nodded, and a smile appeared on his face again – a genuine one, this time. For the rest of the morning, his dour disposition had dissipated somewhat, and his spirits certainly seemed higher when he had left the house.

But even if she had managed to cheer him up, Naoto knew the day would be a challenge for him no matter how many positive sentiments she sent his way. Returning to a place you had been mistreated, even after nearly twenty years had passed, was difficult enough as it was, without the thought of leaving your baby for the first time nagging at you as well.

That’s why she needed that binder. It contained the recipe for one of Kanji’s all-time favourite curries, one she believed even she could produce, and she figured he might need something like that when he returned home.

He often did little ‘date nights’ from home for them, for birthdays or anniversaries, or even just when Naoto was struggling with a tough case and needed a distraction or treat. They would put on whatever was comfortable, sit down with a meal and a drink, and more often than not, end up in a snuggled-up heap on the couch with a movie flickering on in the background. She hosted her fair share of them as well, but admittedly hers often involved an expensive night out at a restaurant. Kanji was the better cook, and he considered it a hobby more than simply something one needed to do to survive, but Naoto lacked the skill or drive to make a hand-crafted date night even without her long hours.

But this night would be an exception. She suddenly found herself with eight hours at home without him, and she would be a fool not to use that time to surprise him in the same way he always would with her. She’d throw him a date night so damn enjoyable that he’d forget all about his anxieties, no matter the cost.

That was… if she could find the damned recipe she needed to carry out her plan.

And so, she perused box after box in her investigation, leaving not even one overlooked. Old case files she’d had sent over from the Shirogane estate that had once belonged to her grandfather. An assortment of holiday decorations that really needed separating by date. Kanji’s miscellaneous box of scrap material. A box marked for charity of Naoto’s old clothes that had stopped fitting since she’d had Chihiro. Plushies. More plushies. Even the container of extra crockery, things that had come from the kitchen itself, bore no sign of the item she sought. An hour passed as though it were seconds, yielding nothing of value.

Had Kanji already moved it? It wasn’t as though she could ask him… Had they forgotten it? No, that apartment was spotless when they’d moved out. She’d triple checked it herself.

She foresaw herself spending all day searching at this rate… but she didn’t have all day. He’d be staying late for a debriefing, but even so, Kanji would still probably be home for five o’clock, and she still had to go to Junes to fetch the ingredients she was going to need.

Perhaps she could look it up online again? That was where Kanji had found it originally…

She sat herself, cross legged, on an old rug and pulled out her phone, plugging in the name of the recipe into a search engine, lifting her arm so that Mochi – tired of hiding – could come and curl up in her lap. And then, running the fingers of her free hand through Mochi’s fur, she began to scroll and click every site she could find.

But she recalled vividly the constitution of the page she was searching for, and none of these were it. She’d never read the words herself – having never made the recipe – and Kanji had decided to crop the name of the site it was from to maintain the ‘aesthetic’ of the folder, but she knew what it looked like. The colours, the typeface, the accompanying picture.

Nothing.

It was entirely possible the site had been redesigned or deleted. In which case she was out of luck online… It wouldn’t work for her to try a different recipe, it had to be that one. If it wasn’t that one, it wouldn’t taste the same, and then it wouldn’t be his favourite. Irritation began to swell within her as her endeavour began to look more fruitless, and she had to take a few moments to breathe and calm a little before moving onto her last resort: checking with Mrs. Tatsumi, with Yakushiji, and the Investigation Team on the off chance that maybe Kanji had lent them the recipe at some point.

Nos all around.

The irritation grew stronger.

And then, as though a timer had gone off signifying the end of her allotted time, the baby monitor sprung to life.

***

“Are… You even listening?”

Naoto huffed and folded her arms, wearing her most devastating expression of disappointment as she shook her head. She’d been talking for a good ten minutes, and she was beginning to wonder if any of it had been heard at all.

“’Course we are. You want to do something cute and romantic for the big guy, because you’re secretly a massive softie, but your first idea went bust.”

Yosuke offered her a cheeky wink and raised his soda cup in a mock toast, before turning back to fawn over Chihiro in Chie’s arms.

“But I dunno how you expect us to concentrate on anything else when you’ve brought this adorable little muffin along,” Chie added, putting on a baby voice and ‘booping’ said muffin on the nose. Chihiro giggled, her tiny face absolutely beaming with delight.

“Oh, I expect you to manage perfectly. If I can – if Kanji can – despite seeing every cute thing she ever does, then it should be no problem for somebody only exposed to it for a short while.”

A couple of hours had passed since Naoto had given up her search for the original recipe and had elected to change tactic. She would simply have to find… a different meal entirely. One that would still mean as much to Kanji. But a quick scour of the recipe books they had on hand in the kitchen yielded nothing. And so, once Chihiro was fed and dressed appropriately for the late summer warmth, she walked her over to Junes to grab some supplies, hoping that by some pure miracle, looking at the ingredients on offer would spark some form of inspiration within her. Only, out of sheer coincidence, she had managed to time her visit perfectly with the end of Yosuke’s shift, and Chie’s day off.

The two of them could often be found talking in the food court on their off-hours. It had been that way since high school, through all the changes and remodels they’d made to the layout of the store over the years and would likely continue to be that way as long as Junes stood and they remained in Inaba. It was the secret headquarters of the Investigation Team, after all. It wasn’t a place you could so easily give up.

So, guided by tradition, they all sat together, sharing a Takoyaki selection in the summer breeze – a welcome change from the mustiness of the Shirogane residence garage – Yosuke and Chie completely spellbound by the baby while Naoto explained her predicament. She had hoped they’d be a little more attentive, and frankly more helpful, but… she supposed she couldn’t fault them. Chihiro was effectively their niece, and she’d been in Tokyo for the past year.

But at least they were making her happy. Seeing her so ecstatic, despite Kanji being gone for so long, certainly helped ease some of the anxieties she had been feeling about leaving her. Getting her acquainted properly with the people who would likely be babysitting her until well into her teens was certainly not a bad thing… although… Naoto was on a tight schedule.

“Aaanyway.” She rapped the table lightly with the tips of her fingers. “Regretfully my first idea – the one that was ah… ‘bust’, as you said – was also my only idea. I’m currently running at a loss on where to proceed from here…”

At the very least they were nodding along now, and looking at her as she spoke.

“…Chie-chan, do you have date nights? What do you usually do?”

“Hmm? Yeah, of course we do! But, uh… Yukiko and I always go out for ‘em. You know, because the inn keeps her so busy and I –”

“Can’t cook anything without it coming out tasting of cardboard?” Yosuke supplied, grinning. Chie shot him a mean look, but nodded nonetheless.

“Pretty much…”

“In most instances, that would be my go-to as well,” Naoto said, holding back a grin at Yosuke’s comment. “Hand-crafted anything is Kanji’s forte, not mine, but… we both agree the ones at home are more enjoyable, no matter how good the food may be in a restaurant.”

“You’re like… the most private people I’ve ever known, so that isn’t surprising.”

She gave an affirming nod. Lovely as it was to go all out sometimes at an expensive eatery, there were always… stares. No matter where they were, people would see them and notice. Sometimes they’d simply recognise the Detective Prince, and that was all they’d see. But other times their eyes would linger longer. They’d take note of Kanji’s piercings and spikes combined with the cute animals and soft colours, analyse Naoto’s dedication to old English fashion and deliberate lack of conformity to any gender, and then keep their gazes trained on the two of them as they attempted to pick apart every contrasting aspect. The way they looked and dressed alone, the way they looked and dressed together… it made going out in public difficult for two people who both struggled to some degree with social anxieties and a history of being scrutinised for the way they were.

Kanji had left the house worrying he was going to be judged. She didn’t want to put him through that twice in one day.

“Well, is there anything else you’ve made before that you know he likes?” Yosuke asked, helping himself to the Takoyaki

Naoto frowned. “Well, yes, but all of it is rather… typical? I have a small repertoire, you see.”

“So you want something different? Hmm… Why don’t you just go ham?” Chie suggested with a genuine smile. “Grab stuff you think’ll go together and make a totally new curry. Heck, doesn’t even gotta be curry.”

“That’s how you end up with Mystery Food X: Redux,” Yosuke warned, and Chie’s smile instantly vanished. “Though actually, Naoto… In your sensible hands you’d probably be okay. You actually know how to cook.”

“If I wasn’t holding a baby right now, I would kick you.”

“Without a recipe at all…?” For a moment, the detective was left perplexed. But before long, a thought came across her mind, and that irritation from earlier came grumbling back into her periphery. “Yosuke-kun. Please. I simply don’t have the time to spare for your… japes and mockery. I need you to be serious.”

She expected him to laugh, as he often would when she caught him out while he was joking. She didn’t do so very often, loathe as she was to admit it, and it had become something of a game to Yosuke to see how long he could keep pushing her buttons.

But this time he threw up his hands instead, with… was that his face now contorted in confusion as well?

“H-hey, I am being serious. Promise. If you genuinely have no other ideas, then I begrudgingly accept that Chie might be onto something.”

“And I’m supposed to do that without instructions?” She asked incredulously, raising her eyebrows. Was she being foolish and naïve? Or was Yosuke the one reeking of inexperience? “You act as though you believe I have time to memorise every food combination, and how to make them work. I am a detective, not a chef, Yosuke-kun. Recipes exist so that I don’t have to preoccupy my brain with trivialities such as cooking from memory.”

“Hey, it was Chie’s idea, not mine!”

“You should know better.”

The raised voices and snipes were a staple of any conversation involving Yosuke and Chie, and at this point Naoto had come to learn that it was largely performative. They ‘fought’ with warm regards. She’d even reached a point where she was able to go along with it without utterly deflating the mood. But to Chihiro, with no grasp of the concept of banter, it was all just loud, frightening noises coming from people she didn’t know all too well. The conversation very quickly had to switch courses when a crying spell threatened to rear its head.

“You know… you never asked me what I do for date nights,” Yosuke pointed out once the baby had been settled. She now lay propped up on Naoto’s lap, nodding off with her little head resting on her chest. Naoto constantly considered herself fortunate that Chihiro wasn’t especially fussy. Sometimes on a good day all she needed to calm right down was a cuddle.

“Hmm?” she looked up. If Yosuke had said anything before that, she had been too preoccupied with gently coaxing her daughter to nap to hear it. “Oh, no, I suppose I didn’t…”

Chie, who had moved into the more comfortable position of resting her chin on her hand now her arms were free, scoffed slightly.

“Dude. Maybe because you don’t have anybody to date?”

“Well… No, but I’ve been on dates. More than one with the same person. I have experience, I’m just… not experiencing it right now.” He rubbed the back of his neck, casting his gaze off to the side. “Dinner dates aren’t really my thing though…”

“So, why’d you even bring it up?”

“Hey! I’ve been on… like, one dinner date. I’m just not the guru of them!” He shrugged. “It’s an interesting story actually… I got set up a few years ago by my bandmates, and it turns out the guy isn’t my type at all. But I didn’t want to say no without at least giving him a chance, so… Y’know. He wants to go out to this fancy French place, but we get there and they’re closing early because of… Uh, I think the kitchen flooded or something like that? So, he takes me back to his place and leaves me there, runs off to go shopping, and comes back and cooks a three-course French meal himself.”

“And you didn’t marry him on the spot?”

“Nah. We did a couple more dates but it didn’t really work out. We weren’t super compatible...”

“Is this why you get Rise to vet anybody you’re gonna date now?”

“Pretty much. You guys know me best, so…”

The two of them continued to talk, but from Naoto’s perspective, their voices had been drowned by her thoughts into a dull and distant murmur. From the moment Yosuke had finished his story, the gears in her brain had whirred into motion, working their way into fabricating a plan formed from his words.

It had hit her at last. A wave of inspiration and relief, tantamount to the feeling she would have when she’d finally cracked the secret to a particularly arduous case.

A plan. Followed by a conjured image of how Kanji’s face might look when he saw it.

“Yosuke-kun…” she began, standing slowly so that she did not wake the baby and gently lowering her into the buggy she had parked next to her seat. “Would you be able to look something up for me? While my hands are full.”

***

January 19th, 2025. Little over a year and a half ago. London, England. They’d been abroad for a few weeks at that point, Naoto on a case for the Shadow Operatives, and Kanji taking advantage of her hotel room to table at an artist’s alley in a convention.

It was something of a special occasion. Kanji’s 29th birthday had been the original cause for celebration, but to him at least that was very much an aside. It was, what, only three hours prior to reaching the restaurant that they’d found out Naoto was pregnant.

There had been several sources for the reasoning behind Naoto’s choice in establishment, and unlike most of her destination picks while they’d been in London, none of them had a single thing to do with Sherlock Holmes. The ones that stood out the most: a churning in her stomach – simultaneously a mental and a physical reaction to her current condition – and a particularly mournful image of her mother-in-law from a few months prior.

“There was this little place my late husband and I would always take Kanji when he was young, if we had to travel to Okina. Italian, it was, family run. I just heard from a customer that it was recently shut down because the owner passed. It has me a little down to think of, that’s all Naoto dear.”

A precious memory from Kanji’s childhood was no small matter, harrowing as such a thing was to think. And Italian… parsing through her options in her mind as she browsed the local restaurants on one of those food apps, Naoto took note of how the one being advertised made her insides turn the least at the thoughts of it. It was one of those smaller, more community-based places, while the others were either going to be full of too-rich smells for her poor stomach to handle, or full of classy, antiquated rules and stares that she didn’t feel up to taking that day.

She didn’t want to make her husband eat hotel food on his birthday… And nor did she want to worry him all evening by being exceptionally edgy. So it didn’t take very long at all for her to have dialled the number for the family-run Italian place, and had booked them a table for two that evening.

The food had been… good. Standard fare for that kind of place. But Naoto was a harsh critic – even without feeling deeply unwell, she had been to Italy. And yet, in all the fifteen years she had known Kanji, she could not recall a single meal out where he seemed to have enjoyed himself quite as much as that. The rush of euphoria from learning he was going to be a father had apparently been enough to turn any experience he may have had that night into the best date night of his life. And Naoto knew the kind of man he was. Sentimental, perceptive, prone to dwelling on the little things. He’d remember, starkly, what he had eaten then.

It was just a pasta meal. She recalled it being made with chicken and a creamy, pesto-based sauce, and Yosuke’s internet search had quickly pulled up a recipe for something along those lines. It wouldn’t be the same – these places kept their recipes close to the heart – but that didn’t matter. Her plan had now become a case of finding something symbolic, over finding something that tasted good.

“I think he’s really starting to rub off on you,” Yosuke had noted as Naoto had prepared to rush off to grab the ingredients from the recipe he had found. “Kanji, I mean. In a good way.”

She’d queried him on that. Her own sharpness didn’t exactly extend to analysing herself.

“I just meant that five years ago, I don’t think you’d ever have thought to do something like this. I always took you for the… less cliché of the two of you. Didn’t you propose to him spontaneously in a cat café? If you don’t mind me asking… why is this the first thing you thought to do for him?”

A pause for Naoto to collect her thoughts. One that, much to everyone’s surprise, didn’t last nearly as long as it might have.

“It’s… because this is logical to me. A dinner date – it’s the simplest, most common activity in the books. It’s a cliché because its effective. Because food is one of those love languages that transcends barriers, and to somebody who struggles in most social situations, like Kanji, like me, you must understand that something like this is a life saver. It’s a change to our routine that really doesn’t change all that much.” She smiled to herself. “Kanji does this to make me feel happy. So many people do, for the person they love. It only makes sense to me that I follow their lead.”

It was that way for most matters of the heart, she thought to herself as she balanced a packet of chicken on the hood of the buggy. She had never known how to act in these situations, how to express the feelings she had. And while she’d devised some unique little ways that she had managed to convey to Kanji, oftentimes the most effective means of telling him that she loved him was to simply use another person’s idea as a foundation. She had her own experiences as proof that it worked. After all, Kanji was a person who had been so starved for and scared of affection as a child that now, almost anything that said ‘I care about you’ was enough to draw him to tears. And Naoto was no different. He was more physical than her, and really that was the only major way in which their feelings towards romance diverged. The things that made one of them happy was sure to leave the other in the same state.

***

Naoto loved Kanji more than she hated cooking. That was really the defining fact that made this entire plan of hers possible at all.

Because she really hated cooking.

“I’ll prolly be home in like… forty minutes,” Kanji had told her over the phone when she’d given him a tentative call at just gone four to gauge how long she had. Pasta wasn’t exactly something she could make well in advance – just the thought of reheating it or overcooking it made her skin crawl. It was one of those things she needed to be perfect. Kanji, thankfully, didn’t have a preference.

So, she’d had to leave making the actual meal until as close to Kanji’s arrival as she could predict. But it wasn’t as though she had time to spare… She had to make the table, feed the cats, feed the baby, put the baby down for a nap…

Then she had to cook the chicken and the pasta… that was fine, it just… radiated a lot of heat for a day that was already rather warm. Inaba’s houses were old, and they didn’t yet have much ventilation or air conditioning.

Then was the sauce, and she had to do some vegetables, but she had to keep stirring the sauce so it didn’t ruin the consistency, and she had to keep turning the meat and the veggies so they wouldn’t burn, and oh, the pasta might stick or become overdone if she wasn’t careful. Then it would just become stressful. Every meal, every time. No matter how methodical she tried to be, it would always devolve into this.

It was a focus thing, she was sure. When she homed in on a task or a detail, it became quite difficult to switch gears on the fly. A useful skill for analysing a murder case. Not so much for cooking.

It was why, when they were both at home, she and Kanji would often just cook dinner together.

But occasionally, and for the sake of somebody she cared about, it was worth it.

She was just at the stage where she was plating up the food, trying to get it to look as it did in the picture on the website, when the familiar sight of an old, dusty car that had at one point been purple staggered its way up their driveway, starkly contrasted with the shiny motorcycle it had pulled up next to. As Kanji climbed from the car, Naoto carefully studied his face, trying to glean from his expression how exactly he was feeling in that moment. But Kanji had a naturally angry look to him, so such a task was often difficult to undertake.

“You makin’ garlic bread, Nao?” he called from the porch almost as soon as the door had slid shut.

“You’ll see,” was all she said in response. With Kanji just moments away from seeing what she had done, she found herself buzzing with anticipation.

“Wuzzat s’posed to mean?” he asked, sticking his head around the door into the kitchen.

For a moment, his forehead crinkled as he took everything in, his eyes lingering on the table made up as closely to that of a restaurant as Naoto could manage, with cloth, candles, and an arrangement of Kanji’s favourite red roses (albeit that was rather haphazardly done).

And in that moment Naoto felt as though her heart had somehow managed to stall.

But the tension was brief, quickly dissipated by the biggest, goofiest grin taking up a huge portion of Kanji’s face.

He strode into the room and pulled his partner into a powerful hug all in a motion that was so fluid, you wouldn’t think it was Kanji performing it.

“I can see you’re ready to reopen the agency, huh?”

Naoto smiled and shook her head, before snuggling her cheek into Kanji’s chest. “Don’t mistake this for a fit of boredom – I’ve been anything but. Welcome to our first date night back in Inaba.”

“Huh? W-wait, hold up… Date night? You did this… fer me?”

His eyes threatened to grow wider than his smile had those few moments earlier, as the realisation of the circumstances slowly began to dawn on him.

Then, as was customary for Kanji whenever Naoto would do anything for him ever, his face turned a brilliant shade of scarlet, and he began stammering unintelligible gibberish.

“Quickly now, before it cools down!”

“Y…Yuh…”

This was… odd. Kanji seemed unequivocally, unprecedentedly broken. His movements as he crossed to the counter and grabbed his plate, were mechanical, shaken, even. They weren’t unheard of for him, but it was as though they had suddenly been transported fifteen years into the past once more. Before they had fallen in love, before they’d even been close friends, when Kanji was so overcome with embarrassment whenever they spoke that he would be unable to function.

Now they were married, it wasn’t exactly commonplace.

Had something happened to him at work which had left him overwhelmed?

“Kanji?” Naoto called out tentatively as they took their seats.

“…huh?”

“You seem… Rather out of it.”

He blinked a couple of times and shook his head. “Right. Yeah… Sorry…”

He cleared his throat and repeated the process of shaking his head.

“It’s just, uh… ‘M kinda at a loss for words. This is… Wow.”

A tension she hadn’t recognised until it was gone suddenly flooded from her body with a sigh of relief.

“For a moment there I was concerned that something was wrong, so –”

“More like… everythin’ is right. I never pegged you fer someone who’d do date nights Tatsumi style.”

“…Tatsumi style? So this…” she waved an arm across the table. “This is something you observed… what, from your parents?”

He nodded. Naoto didn’t realise it was possible for him to turn redder until just then.

“Ain’t really a lotta options for fancy restaurants like what you do out here. Ma and my old man always improvised at home. I know cookin’ yer partner a meal ain’t somethin’ my folks made up, they just ended up callin’ it that… Nickname kinda stuck.” He rubbed the back of his head.

“Well, I suppose I have rather adopted a Tatsumi way of behaving today. Our roles have been utterly reversed. Why, I daresay after dinner, I shall take up a crochet project, and you’ll lull our Chihiro to sleep by reading her more of ‘A Study in Scarlet’.”

“I love you, Naoto.”

“Eh?”

But instead of elaborating, Kanji simply left his partner to turn an equally furious shade of red while he took a bite of the food. Naoto found herself so flustered that she didn’t even have time to be nervous about him trying the dish.

But, she supposed, she didn’t really have anything to worry about. This was Kanji.

“…I better never hear the words ‘I’m not very good at cooking’ comin’ from yer mouth again.”

“Well… Regardless of the quality of the food –” she began, about to launch into a spiel about how the mess she made, and how stressful it was for her, suggested that she technically wasn’t exactly on the level of a master. But all it took from Kanji was a single glare, and she stopped herself.

This was supposed to be a pleasant evening. And he did hate when she was self-deprecating in any capacity.

“I’m glad you like it Kan-chan.” She smiled, taking her own first bite. Hmm. Not bad. She wasn’t sure how this was supposed to taste – she’d been feeling far too unwell that night in London to eat much at all, so she’d ordered a lighter dish – but how it did taste was pleasant.

“Better than it was on my birthday that one time. Dunno if you remember, but at that one Italian place when we were in England –”

“Where do you suppose I gained the inspiration to make this particular meal?”

“Huh? Well shit, haha. Last time I ever doubt yer memory.”

“Hm, well… I don’t think I’m capable of forgetting that day…”

Kanji slid his free hand across the table and placed it atop hers, rubbing his thumb soothingly over her knuckles. Strange, she noted, that the nail was still painted black; she was sure the school would make him take the colour off alongside his piercings.

A nagging feeling in her chest, her stomach, her mind was begging her to ask him how it had gone. But it was not the only train of thought on the feeling that she had. What if Kanji didn’t want to talk about it yet? What if it was best to simply… enjoy the meal in ignorant bliss? Was he waiting for the right time, or for her to say something?

He looked as though he were about to speak now, was that the subject he was going to bring up?

“How has Chihiro been today?”

No. Of course not. The subject of work would have to wait.

As with… most of their conversations over the past year, the rest of the meal was largely dominated with Chihiro. Naoto describing, in detail, exactly what she had done, and Kanji’s expression growing fonder and fonder with every word. By the time they were done eating, he looked as though he were going to cry.

“Kinda sad that this is our lives goin’ forwards…”

“Hm?”

“Nothin’… just been missin’ her at work is all.”

The nagging feeling was very quickly becoming anxiety. The first mention of his day all evening, and it was something negative.

“Kanji, was everything –”

A sound suddenly stole her words before she had the chance to finish. A baby crying, as audible through the walls as it was the baby monitor on the counter.

“Prolly needs changing, huh?” Kanji smiled, rising to his feet. “Mind if I take this?”

“Please… She probably misses you too.”

In the time that Kanji was attending to the baby, Naoto managed to load everything that needed cleaning into the dishwasher, and found her way to the living room, and then to the couch. But her mind wasn’t exactly responsive as she did so.

Kanji… was worse than she had anticipated… More than just a simple meal could possibly hope to fix. Why on earth… What delusion had she been under to think, with how he’d been these past few days, that a little romantic gesture would be all he needed to feel better.

Amidst the haze that was buzzing in her mind, she vaguely registered her hands clenching into fists.

At some point, goodness knew when, Kanji had reappeared in the room and had sat down next to her, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“She’s back down. Heh… Wanted to play as soon as she saw me, the little tyke, but could barely keep her eyes open long enough to do it.”

“She’s had… a busy day.”

“Ain’t we all?” he said with an air of exhaustion about him, placing his glasses gently on the kotatsu in front of them and then sinking back into the couch. “You ready for tomorrow?”

“I’ve been ready for weeks. Waiting on other people…” Naoto mumbled in response. Her gaze had fallen as she’d spoken to her socks, and she could not bring herself to remove it until Kanji nudged her with his arm.

“Hey. You good, Nao?”

“…Are you?”

That brought the conversation to a standstill.

“Would ya believe me if I told ya I was jus’ tired?”

“Only… partially.”

He gave her a half smile and repositioned himself so that his head lay on her shoulder.

“It was… a pretty exhaustin’ day… Lotta new stuff. Lotta old stuff too… that school ain’t changed in twenty years. Amazing it’s managed so long.”

Naoto just made an affirming noise and let her hand come to rest on his shoulder, pressing her cheek onto the top of his head. Best just to let him speak, she thought.

“Ain’t none of the people I knew still there but… they knew who I was. Course they did… didn’t expect any different. An’ you know what?”

“Hm?”

“Most of ‘em just complimented me on the plushies. They knew me ‘cause of the shop, not… ‘cause of the delinquent shit.”

“Well, that’s… good, is it not? That’s what we hoped would happen.”

She felt him shift his head as though he were trying to nod. His arm had worked its way around her waist, and she felt him bunching up the fabric of her dress shirt in his fingers as he spoke. It was an unconscious habit of his. Most notable when he was nervous.

“Yeah… Never said it weren’t good. Jus’ that I was tired. And that I missed my kid. And you.”

Naoto drew a deep breath. “It seemed like something was wrong, that’s all. I’ve been worried about you. All day. All week.”

“…That why you’re not okay?”

“Yes! Effectively!”

Another brief standstill.

“Sorry ‘bout that… Really… Last thing I wanted was for my bullshit worrying over nothing to affect you too.”

Naoto squeezed his shoulder slightly.

“You should know by now that such a thing is impossible. The same can be said of you, to me. We’ve been in this partnership since we were in high-school, Kan-chan, we can’t simply… hide our true feelings any longer. We know each other too well to be caught out.”

“Yeah… s’pose you’re right… I did appreciate it though. Back before I went in today and realised my worries were a load ‘a crap. I… I dunno, I guess comin’ back to Inaba after so long had me thinkin’ that everythin’ was gonna go back to the way it was.”

“Kanji… You weren’t… Please don’t tell me you’ve been thinking that way since we first planned to come.”

Silence. Naoto’s heart dropped. Obviously, that meant she was right on the mark.

Good lord, she had still been expecting when they’d first discussed moving back! Their daughter was one in a week!

“’s in the past now though. All of it,” he said eventually. “Physically this place ain’t no different, but I guess the vibe has changed since we were kids. Maybe… Enough time has passed now that I ain’t gotta worry about… the guy I was.”

“Kanji… I rescind what I said earlier. About how it’s impossible to hide our feelings from each other. Please… when it’s something serious like this, I implore you to tell me.”

Her eyes stung, but she refused to cry. If she did, he’d try to make this about her, and dammit, she was tired of it being about her. The entire point of everything she had done that day was to make it about Kanji for once in his life.

“…’M sorry, Nao…”

After that, for a long while neither of them spoke. They simply adjusted themselves into a position where they could more easily cuddle and sat there, snuggled into each other as the dwindling oranges and purples of the twilight sky gave way to darkness.

Kanji was the one to break the silence, his voice so slick with sleepiness that it was demure in a way which was much unlike him.

“Hey Nao… Yer still awake, right?”

“Mmhmm…” she responded. It was… mostly true.

“Y’know, I’ve been thinkin’. I got a new goal now we’re back here… I wanna be able to look that bastard in the eye and tell him he ain’t me. Not because I’m denyin’ anythin’, but because he ain’t.”

“Him? Your Shadow?”

“Yeah. Like you can, y’know? If your Shadow popped their head back up and started sayin’ the same shit as before, you could just tell ‘em: ‘you’re wrong.’ ‘Cause they would be.”

“But they wouldn’t say something like that. My age and gender no longer cause me grief to the level they had in my youth, so my Shadow wouldn’t bring them up.”

Of course, they wouldn’t. Naoto thought that was obvious. She was thirty-one, very much an adult, and any doubt she had about whether she was a man or a woman were significantly eased when she had learned that she could be both and neither. She had no lack of confidence in those aspects of herself, regardless now of what other people thought, so there was no way the Shadow could use them as ammunition if they were to reappear.

But based on Kanji’s next statement, suddenly full of more vigour than his words prior, she wondered if perhaps she had misunderstood where he was coming from.

“Yeah, but that’s what I’m saying! The stuff your Shadow said back then… It ain’t even crossin’ your mind anymore. I wanna be the same… I mean… It’s not that I ain’t happy with who I am. I like cute shit, and sewing, and all the stuff like that. Shit, I’m bi as hell. I can say that stuff proudly. It’s…” he huffed. “For some reason, it’s like I can be confident in myself all I want, but in my head it don’t mean shit unless everyone else feels the same way. An' as long as I got a history as 'the guy who beats up bikers', it's like that day ain't gonna come... I’m… still scared shitless of bein’ rejected after all these years... It’s like… every time I meet a new group of people, I just end up wonderin’ how long its gonna be before they brand me a thug and cut me and everyone I care about off. Think that’s kinda the reason it’s been weighin’ on me again so much more recently. I start comin’ up with scenarios in my head where it gets outta hand and Chihiro gets hurt ‘cause of it.”

As he spoke, his hug became tighter.

“Kan-chan…”

“So, my goal is to get to a place where I don’t constantly worry about that stuff. Where if that bastard showed up again and said that kinda shit, I could deny him with my whole heart and know for certain that I’m right an’ he’s wrong. An’ before you say shit, I know that ain’t how Shadows work. That’s jus’ the image I use in my head to try an’ visualise what I’m itchin’ to do.”

He added that last part with a hint of a laugh to his tone.

So that was why he took a job he was so caught up about? As some concrete way of proving to himself that he would be okay if he did?

A self-destructive means of gathering evidence for a hypothesis… hm… perhaps Naoto’s inheritance of Kanji’s traits over the years had gone the other way as well.

“I didn’t realise it was possible to be so unbelievably proud of somebody, while simultaneously thinking them a fool…” Naoto ensured to keep her own tone bright, so that he would know she spoke in endearing terms. “You know I would have supported you through this if only you had told me –”

“Hah. Yer actin’ like you take me for the kinda guy who thinks this shit through… this ain’t exactly something I’ve been plannin’ or nothin’, it just sorta… came to me now.”

Oh, so it was a subconscious instinct?

Then perhaps he would be safe from her bad influence for just a little while longer…

“Well… regardless of how much preparation has gone into it… it is a good goal to have in mind, so long as you’re comfortable with the pain it may bring in the process.”

“Yeah. No problem. Anyway…” he sat up and looked her in the eyes. “What was that you were implyin’ with the whole ‘you know I would have supported you’ bull you just said?”

Naoto frowned. “It’s the truth –”

“Yeah, I know it’s the truth. Because you have been supportin’ me, dumbass. You ain’t ever stopped.” He thrust his arm in the vague, general direction of the kitchen, a wild delight dancing in his eyes. “You spent the last day of yer maternity leave makin’ sure I’d have a good evenin’ because you thought I needed cheerin’ up.”

Naoto felt her cheeks heat up. “I… I only did what you would do for me…”

“Yeah, but it ain’t like I made you do it. You still made the decision. It’s amazin’, an yer incredible, and adorable, an’ you make a freakin’ awesome pasta, an’ I can’t believe how lucky I am to have you.”

She knew she was blushing harder and harder with every word, to the point where all she could think to do was bury her face into his shoulder.

“Feel kinda bad that we kinda got side-tracked from the ‘date night’ though… Sorry if you had anything else planned.”

“No, no, don’t feel bad. I did this because I thought you needed it, Kanji. And I don’t suppose I’m wrong in suggesting that you very much needed this talk as well?”

“…You ain’t wrong… Not at all.”

“And do you feel any better for having it?”

“Mmhmm.”

Naoto lifted her head and gave him her warmest smile. “Then I can safely declare this date night a resounding success.”

“Damn right, you can! But uh… I don’t wanna take away from anythin’ else you mighta wanted to do, so –”

The heat in her cheeks returned as quickly as it had vanished, and she sheepishly averted his gaze. Right. Date night was usually more than a meal.

“Uhm... About that. Kanji, I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I… I was so caught up in trying to find a recipe for dinner that it never even occurred to me to look for a movie or something to do afterwards.”

She offered him an apologetic look, but his immediate response was only to laugh and hold her closer.

“Don’t think I coulda made it through a movie anyway… I’m beat…”

“As am I. I think I may drift off here…”

It quickly became apparent that each of their ideal end to the evening would be to turn in early and hope to gain a restful night – something that was near impossible with a small child. Whether such a thing was an indication of how eventful their day had been, or whether it was simply a sign of them getting older, neither really cared to consider. Instead, they just ensured the house was secure, called the cats to follow them, and moved upstairs as quietly as they could so that their footsteps wouldn’t cause Chihiro to stir.

It wasn’t until Naoto had switched her outfit for one of Kanji’s old shirts and was brushing her teeth in the upstairs bathroom that it dawned on her: there was still one aspect of her day that had yet to be cleared up.

And now that it had come to mind, she feared she may be unable to sleep until she had an answer.

“Kan-chan?”

“Hm?”

“You know the binder you keep with recipe print-outs…? Do you have any idea what box it’s in?”

His face was mostly buried by the bedsheets by now, but she could tell from the part she could see that he was thinking hard.

“Uh… Oh! My car.”

“…Your car?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want the other kitchen stuff to squash it, so I put it separate. I see it every time I go in there an’ I keep saying I’ll bring it in and never do. How come…?”

Naoto heaved a great sigh and flopped on the bed besides him. It wasn’t until her face hit the pillow that she realised exactly how exhausting her day had been. “So you had it all along… I never would have found it.”

“You were lookin’ for it?”

“I was. I wanted to make you that curry instead, the one you called your favourite.”

“Ohhhh. I getcha now." He laughed. "That woulda been a good choice. But y’know anythin’ would have been fine. I got a real soft-spot for Italian food, hehe.”

“I like that curry myself though,” she added, as she shuffled under the covers. “It’s rare to find something spicy that you can handle as much as I…”

“You do, huh? I see.”

There was silence for a while. And then…

“Hey, Naoto…?”

“Mmm?”

“When’s your next day off?”

“My next day off…? That would be Sunday… Why?”

But Kanji didn’t answer. Instead, he just leaned over to kiss her goodnight, and then, with a sleepy smile, he rolled over and went to sleep.

#persona 4 #kanji tatsumi #naoto shirogane #kannao #misede writes

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dorminchu · 3 years

Text

Insult to Injury: The Director’s Cut — Chapter 01 [PREVIEW]

Note: Please view on the main blog page for an optimal reading experience. :D Chapter One is about 95% revised to my liking. Here is a somewhat lengthier preview whilst work begins on 02 & 03.

June crawled by. Currently the MSF were in the process of dealing with a new influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the surrounding prefectures and villages, all of whom had to be tested and separated from those not stricken with disease—as this did not necessarily mean they weren’t carrying others. Thanks to the cooperation with the local civilians and tireless efforts on part of the medical staff, there had been a forty-five-percent decrease in fatalities compared to the start of the year.

The atmosphere within the hospital was not improving. The topic of insurgence was the new favourite with patients. Allegedly there had been several attacks on neighbouring villages; a sign of impatience at the lack of tangible progress coupled with deep-seated mistrust of government officials. Now the Force Sécurité/Protection, or FSP, had been brought on in collaboration with an additional Protective Services Detail (PSD) by the name of Kerberos, to ensure the hospital and surrounding property remained untouched.

Their project coordinator called them all in for the sake of reviewing protocol in the event of an attack, starting to seem like more of a possibility. Criticism of the government’s method in handling the situation was discouraged during their meetings with the project coordinator. Madeleine was savvy enough to keep herself abreast of any controversy. For the rest of the Psychosocial Unit, she presumed they were either too naïve or willing to look the other way.

The only exception to this was the Vaccines Medical Advisor, Francis Karner; a stoic older man with thinning hair and glasses. He and Madeleine had cooperated a handful of times at the behest of the Medical Coordinator. Madeleine had found nothing wrong with his conduct. A diligent worker, he acknowledged her judgement fairly but did not overextend his gratitude. Outside of his work he was straight-laced and private. Whenever they had a break, he would often disappear frequently on calls. He’d been coming back tenser as of late and apologised to Madeleine.

“I was supposed to be sent home last month, but with the situation being what it is, I decided to stay on until things are resolved.” He did not sit down. “It’s madness. We’ve already waited until things are too severe to think of bringing in a proper security detail—who the hell does the project coordinator think we’re fooling?” Madeleine ignored him. “Dr Swann. The Medical Coordinator tells me you’ve been involved in volunteer work for a while.”

“Five years, as of March.”

“Perhaps they would be more willing to listen to someone with your expertise.”

“Well, it’s fortunate that I was not selected for my personal opinion.”

Karner chuckled. “You’ll go far.”

Madeleine had no interest in pursuing this topic any further. “Who were you speaking to?” Francis didn’t answer immediately. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have been so blunt. But you leave often enough and it appears to be taking a toll on you.”

“Just my wife. This past month has been no easier on her. But I find that it can help somewhat, just talking to someone outside of this element.” Madeleine nodded. Francis paused. “I’ve never seen you contact anyone outside of your unit.” Madeleine did not anticipate the conversation to take such a turn, nor did she particularly wish to divulge much about herself. But she could not deflect as she could in the clinic back home, and Francis seemed forthright enough to warrant a harmless response.

“I’m living with a friend. We graduated from college together.”

“And you keep in touch while you are abroad?”

“He tends to lead his own life while I am away.”

“That’s a great deal to ask of someone.” Madeleine inclined her head in his direction. This was not a man that emoted often; now the thin mouth was set, and the eyes behind the glasses disillusioned. “Few women your age would devote themselves to a thankless vocation. Not everyone is going to want to stick around until you decide you want to settle down.”

Madeleine’s smile did not touch her eyes. She hadn’t even mentioned the nature of her relationship to Arnaud. “We have an understanding, that’s all. Besides, I don’t bother him about his social life.”

Karner shook his head. In a few minutes the break subsided and they were back to work as usual. By the end of the day, Madeleine resolved to let him dig his own grave without further interference.

The next few days blurred together in her recollection. Karner made no attempt to converse with her. Madeleine found her mind snagging easily on technicalities. She became less tolerant of the Psychological Unit’s personal hang-ups with the lack of resources and lack of any obvious moral closure. Smell of rot and disinfectant permeated into her clothing and hair until she had begun to associate the smell itself with a total lack of progress.

She left the window to her hotel room cracked most nights, afraid to open it completely. Alone with her own mind and the recorder. The conversations now circled back readily to death and terrorism. An overwhelming fear of retaliation from insurrection.

It was just past one in the morning. In six hours she would return to Donka Hospital and repeat the process. A month and a half from now she would be on a flight back to Paris. Her mind refused to settle in either direction.

Outside her window she heard the distant voice of Francis Karner. He was conversing in German, from a few storeys down, but as Madeleine came over to the window she understood him clearly:

“…I’ve been saying it for weeks, and they dismiss me every time. These wounds are the result of prolonged exposure from chemicals. We’ve seen evidence of IDPs coming through, exhibiting the same symptoms as the PMCs we treated back in February. How we can expect to make any progress if the project coordinator refuses to bring this up? We’re putting God-knows how many lives at risk waiting for a vaccine that we don’t know if we need—and even so, it won’t be ready for another week. There’s not enough time to justify keeping silent….”

Madeleine closed the window carefully. She’d never been one to intrude on family matters.

⁂

When Madeleine exited her room the next morning, she found the project coordinator waiting for her in the hallway, along with the head of security from Kerberos and a couple Donka Hospital staff Madeleine knew by sight but not intimately.

The vaccines had arrived earlier than anticipated. Several members of the Medical Unit had stayed on-site in order to determine if all had been accounted for and subsequently realised it was rigged. Thanks to the intervention of the FSP the losses were minimal. Several doctors, including Herrmann, had suffered chemical exposure and were currently isolated from the rest of the IDPs to receive immediate medical attention. A few others, including Dr Karner, had been less fortunate.

Now there was additional pressure from the doctors and Logistics Team to begin moving the high-risk patients to a safer area. The fear that this story would circulate and any chance of obtaining vaccines would be discouraged could not be ruled out. So they would not be reporting this as a chemical attack to the government, but as an interception of an attack by local terrorists.

“Dr Swann.” The head of security, Lucifer Safin, gave Madeleine pause. His accent and complexion would presume a Czech or Russian background but he could have come from a variety of surrounding countries. The MSF on staff commonly referred to him by surname; perhaps Lucifer was simply an alias. What set him apart was his face. Gruesomely scarred from his right temple to the base of his left jaw, though the structure of his eyes and nose remained intact. In spite of the weather, she had never seen him without gloves. “I understand that you were one of the last to speak with Dr Karner?”

His manner wasn’t explicitly taciturn, more akin to the disconcerting silence one might experience while looking into a body of still-water—met only with your reflection.

“Yes,” said Madeleine, “but that was nearly five days ago.”

“You were instructed to monitor him during that period by the Medical Coordinator?”

“That’s correct.”

Safin glanced at the project coordinator. “I’ll speak with her alone.”

“Of course.”

Safin nodded. They walked down the length of the hall back to her room. His gait was purposeful and direct. He had a rifle strapped to him. Madeleine tried to avoid concentrating on it. Her attention went to the window. She had not locked it.

“Dr Swann.” The early morning light put his disfigurement into a new, unsettling clarity. Too intricate to be leprosy or a typical burn wound, it was more as if his very face were made of porcelain and had suffered a nasty blow, then glued together again. “What was the extent of your relationship to Dr Karner?”

“I did not work with him often. We talked once or twice but that was all. I have my own responsibilities with the Psychosocial Unit. From what I could tell, he never made an effort to befriend anyone.”

“You were asked to monitor Dr Karner. Why?”

“I was requested to do so on behalf of the Medical Coordinator. There were concerns that Dr Karner was somehow unqualified to continue his work. In observing him, I had no reason to suspect he was unfit for the position psychologically.” Safin said nothing. “The only issue I could see worth disqualifying him for, was that Karner and the project coordinator had very differing views on protocol.”

“He spoke to you about his views?”

“He expressed to me once, in confidence, that he did not understand the project coordinator’s hesitance to bring in a security detail.” Safin’s attention on her was razor-sharp, unwavering. She’d said too much. “He also told me he’d elected to continue volunteering here past his contract duration, just to ensure the operation was successful. That was my only conversation with him outside of a work-related context. You would be better off asking the other doctors about this.”

“We have video surveillance in place on the Grand Hotel de L’independence. At around one in the morning, Dr Karner exited the building and contacted an unknown party by mobile phone. Then, a minute later, you were at your window.”

“Oh, yes. I have been forgetting to close it. With so many longer days, it can be difficult to remember these things.”

“Your room was the only one to show signs of activity at that hour.”

“I was reviewing my notes from that day’s session. I heard a voice from outside, though not clearly. It was distracting me from my work, so I closed the window.”

“Do you commonly review your notes in the early hours of the morning with an unlocked window?”

“I just wanted some quiet. And I leave the windows open because otherwise I seem to find myself trapped with the smell of rotting flesh as well as humidity.”

Safin’s expression became easier to read, but not in a positive sense. This was not a man you wanted to be on opposing sides with. Madeleine kept the apprehension away from her face and her voice tightly controlled.

“Look. Without information about Dr Karner’s lifestyle outside MSF, I cannot give you an answer in good faith. I was assigned to survey him. He showed no signs of dereliction in his work, and to my knowledge kept his personal views separate from his duties. Whatever he said to me during outside hours was assumed to be in confidence. Many people say things to one another in what they believe to be confidence that they would not admit to otherwise. If I had reason to suspect he was unfit to work, I would have contacted the Medical Advisor privately.”

Safin held her gaze. She did not dare avert her face. Then he said: “The project coordinator is waiting for you downstairs. Thank you for your time.”

The rest of the day she spent in a different wing of the hospital. The Psychosocial Team was cut down from four members to three. Another inconsequential day of thankless work that never seemed quite good enough. That night Madeleine laid back on her bed and watched the shadows on the ceiling stretch over peeling paint, slowly overtaken by daybreak.

When she’d first arrived at the airport she could stave off her doubts with shallow, private reassurances. As long as you are here, you are just Dr Swann the psychologist consultant. Your father is many miles away and he won’t contact you. No one else of importance will come for you in a place like this.

With a guy like Safin around, she was safer than she would have been with the FSPs alone.

Safer, but no longer invisible.

#fanfic #fanfiction #upcoming projects #no time to die #technically this takes place a year after skyfall though #madeleine swann #lyutsifer safin #slow build #crime drama #still can't believe he's actually named lucifer and I have to work with this... somehow #at least he isn't named nacho that would be unsalvagable #the part of karner will be played by uh... gene hackmann I guess?#been thinking about The Conversation man what a nice film #good ost too

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really-sleep-deprived-nerd · 4 years

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I dreamt an entire hurt/comfort Bakudeku Fantasy AU:

Okay, so it kind of was a Medieval/Fantasy BNHA AU? Basically Bakugou was a disgraced barbarian prince that had to run away from his kingdom because the queen, his own mother, thought him too dangerous because of his power mixed with his overall awful temper and, therefore, unfit to take the throne, so, she wanted to kill him so there would be no backlash from their people when she put someone who didn't have royal blood as the next in line. People can’t riot and demand for their “Rightful ruler” if there isn't one to begin with, right?. So, Bakugou, being 11 when this shitshow happened, flees.

He takes refuge in a neighbouring kingdom and is taken in by a very kind woman that finds him, battered and bruised, shivering on the streets.

The woman, whose name is Inko, has a son named Izuku who due to undisclosed circumstances is, secretly, the King’s apprentice and very close to him. Bakugou suspects some Bastard Son shenanigans but wisely keeps his mouth shut because, hey, these people are being nice to me when they don't have to! And they don't want anything in return! That has never happened before! (Well, except for Kirishima, but he wasn’t human so he didn’t count. Wonder what he is up to these days.)

At some point Izuku introduces him to king Toshinori, who is incredibly saddened by Bakugou’s situation and, because he thinks he is an incredibly brave young man for having made it this far, promises him a place between the Knights the moment he reaches 18. Bakugou accepts the offer gleefully because he honestly misses training with others and a good fight.

So, the years go by and of course Bakugou and Izuku fall for each other because I am predictable even in my dreams. The worst thing is that it was just full of pining, both of them saying Nothing about their obvious feelings because they didn't want to scare the other away.

By this point some nobles have found out about the king's protegees and while they can tolerate the commoner (He is a very bright young man and they also suspect Bastard Son Shenanigans), they cannot stand the disgraced prince. They are deeply wary of him because of his power and, hey, there has to be a good reason about WHY his own mother wanted him gone, and with that temper and violent attitude of his they seem to understand why.

The King´s health has always been shit, but it started to get even worse recently and so he has to leave the capital for a couple of months to get help from a healer that lives in a far away village. The journey just to get there is at least a week long. He leaves the kingdom in the “Capable and trusty” hands of his number two, who while he is technically good at running a kingdom when the king’s away, is also a huge piece of shit, and knowing that the king wouldn't be here for awhile thought that, hey, wouldn't it be a shame if someone reached his mother to tell her where that disgrace of a son of hers is so she can end what she started? It would truly be terrible if something happened to that monster while the king was too far away to do shit to stop it!

So, yeah, he sends a pigeon to the Queen and asks her for advice on how to, hypothetically speaking of course, one would neatly get rid of a runaway barbarian prince, to which she replies with a recipe to imitate the explosions Bakugou can make and a letter that says something along the lines of “I am unable to give you advice on how to do that, since its something I myself failed at, however, I reckon that if he went on a rampage, exploding people's homes, then you would be able to publicly execute him with very little issue.”

While this is going on, Izuku notices how the nobles have been giving Kachan nastier looks than usual, coupled with also some very evil and sharp smiles and immediately suspects that they are planning some shit. He tells Kachan this and they both agree that just to avoid any possible poisonings, it would be better for Bakugou to just kind of spend the entirety of the King’s absence inside Inko’s home and not leave for anything. After that, while Izuku is visiting the castle because he needed some books, he sees a messenger hawk carrying a letter with the Barbarian Kingdom’s emblem and immediately freaks the fuck out and runs home to send a pigeon to the King because, Heeey, Toshinori? I know you are busy and stuff, but I think your nobles are planning to kill Kachan?? I saw a hawk with his kingdom's emblem and if they actually try to do it we won't be able to stop it without you here.

So, yeah, it seems that those explosives were harder to make than they originally thought because 5 days pass before, in the middle of the night, a couple of houses in the lower town erupt in flames with a loud BOOM. There are a lot of casualties that night, both from those that were asleep before the explosion and both for those that were trying to help people get out.

The sixth day was spent in mourning and cleaning up, the seventh day was spent on the funerals, the eighth day was spent with people pointing their fingers at Bakugou while they demanded his head on a stick. They protested outside Inko’s home and outside the castle, saying that they wanted justice for what this monster clearly did.

Bakugou feels like shit for those three days, because he thinks it's his fault those people died. He knew his mother wouldn’t rest until he was dead, but he had figured that he was safe as long as he was under the King’s protection, but no, innocent people died because he was too comfortable, too attached to a home, to his friends, to Izuku, to leave like he should have.

The Noble Piece Of Shit, makes an announcement that the people have been heard and that they will get their justice. He sends some knights to retrieve Bakugou from Inko’s home, so they can bring him to the court, where he would be immediately hanged for his crimes.

The knights are very much reluctant to follow this order because they know Bakugou and the brat would never do something like this. The brat wanted to be a knight to save people, for goodness’ sake! But, if they didn’t comply, it would have been their head on the chopping block, so they go get him.

When they get there Izuku is a broken mess. He is sobbing his eyes out while clinging to Bakugou for dear life, who is just hugging him tightly and, in a surprisingly soft voice for him, reassuring Izuku that it would be okay, that this was bound to happen at some point, that he shouldn't cry for him. Izuku just tightens his grip and cries harder.

The knights ask Bakugou to come with them, and he does, but neither the knights nor the prince have the heart to drag Izuku away from him. Inko follows after them, her sobs more quiet than her son’s but still just as noticeable.

When they get to the court/plaza and Izuku sees the gallow, he lets out such a heart-wrenching wail that it makes people pause in their clamoring for blood. What gives them pause is less the wail itself and more of the way Izuku has his head hidden in Bakugou’s neck, his arm is tightly hugging Izuku’s shaking frame while the other one is resting on Izuku’s hair, gently carding his fingers through it. What gives them pause is the eyebags under Bakugou’s eyes and the unshed tears in them. What gives them pause is just how utterly young Bakugou looks when he doesn't have his typical scowl on his face.

Muttering starts among the crowd, because suddenly they aren't clamoring about the death of a monster, but instead the death of a child, and there isn't a single person present who is entirely comfortable with that. The crowd is no longer bloodthirsty as much as it is wary and nervous.

Once Bakugou stands in front of the gallow, surrounded by knights and Izuku still by his side, the Noble Piece Of Shit, standing in a balcony overviewing this entire thing with a wicked smile explains why they are here today and what Bakugou is going to be executed for.

Inko can’t take anymore of this shit and just. Snaps. She screams that they are going to kill an innocent, that the night of the fire she SAW Bakugou fall asleep with her son in front of the fireplace, that it was IMPOSSIBLE for him to have done this. That they are going to kill a 14-year-old innocent CHILD because they are to incompetent to think things trough, or worse, they are going to do it on purpose.

The NPOS (Noble Piece of Shit) demands that the knights subdue that crazy woman and take her to the dungeons and do the same with that wailing child. By this point, the entire crowd has gone “Cool, cool, on second thoughts, after much deliberation, let's hang that piece of shit instead of the innocent child.” The crowd Riots, starts demanding that they investigate things properly instead of rushing a kid to the gallows, which, hey, kinda hypocritical of them but you won’t see Izuku complaining.

The chaos finally ends with the King entering the court riding on top of a FUCKING DRAGON and demanding Silence. The king angrily demands someone explain to him WHY are they trying to kill one of his protegees. The knights take a moment to answer because, uh, that is a Dragon and-uh, okay, its shapeshifting into a red haired man that is running straight at Bakugou and Izuku to hug them- cool, cool, uh, ah, the king asked a question? Ah, yes! The question! The knights explain to him what happened and that it was the NPOS orders, who by this point has made the wise decision to make himself scarce. The King is fuming, but while he announces that he was going to be having Words with his second in command, that this is ridiculous, the kid had an alibi and, while difficult, it's possible to create a serum that acted similarly to Young Bakugou’s sweat when ignited, so this is clearly someone trying to frame him.

After this, the crowd that was warily eyeing the former dragon that was excitedly chatting with a grinning Izuku and a softly smiling Bakugou, decide that this has been enough weird shit for today, take the word of the king as the truth and finally disperse.

#bakudeku #katsuki bakugou #bakugou katsuki #izuku midoriya #midoriya izuku #toshinori yagi #yagi toshinori #bnha fantasy au #bakugou x midoriya #The NPOS may or may not have been endeavor but I honestly cant remember #Im also like 60% sure that one of the knights was Aizawa??? but yeah cant remember #anyways feel free to add to this

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malewifegrantaire · 3 years

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The Birthday Thing

READ PART ONE HERE

PART TWO: Guess who’s coming to dinner hang out for no apparent reason (as far as Grantaire can tell)?

Combeferre had inadvertently ruined the rest of Grantaire’s week. It wasn’t his fault, of course. He couldn’t be blamed for Grantaire’s Incredibly Bad Brain. But still, “I just know Enjolras and I know he likes you” is a very reckless phrase to pepper into a conversation with someone of Grantaire’s constitution. He could hardly fall asleep that night because the words I know he likes you were clanging too loudly against the bars of the jail cell he called a mind. He didn’t mind too much though. The clanging was because Enjolras liked him, which made all of the noise sound a bit like music.

Grantaire picked out an outfit for the party and laid it out like he was a little kid excited for a school trip. Embarrassed with himself, he threw the entire outfit into his clothing hamper so he wouldn’t have to look at it lying out on his dresser anymore. Which was obviously a mistake, because now the clothes were are wrinkled and they were touching his actually dirty clothes. Which meant now he had to do a half load of laundry on a weekday, which he really didn’t like doing.

As he folded his laundry, Grantaire felt his phone buzz in his pocket. Huh. It was from Combeferre. Odd.

hey, are u free? sorry lol i am bored and wanted to know if u wanna hang out ??

Very odd. Maybe the wrong number? Just to be safe, Grantaire texted back:

grantaire is folding laundry right now, like a responsible adult.

Two texts back:

very interesting use of third person..

i can help if u want! i love 2 fold things

So this was Grantaire’s life. He used to be young and wild, and now he’s the sort of person that makes plans with people who text him sentences like “i love 2 fold things.” He typed his response.

uh, sure? might get boring, but i’ll never say no to an extra set of hands.

About fifteen minutes later, Combeferre was inside of Grantaire’s apartment. “You got here fast.” Grantaire said.

“I was in the neighborhood.”

“Aren’t you always?”

Combeferre took in Grantaire’s apartment, which gave Grantaire such a wave of self-consciousness that he thought he might be sick. It was a fine apartment, kept clean mostly because Grantaire hardly spent any time in it. The ceilings were far too low for Combeferre.

“This is a really nice place.” Combeferre said. “Have you lived here long?”

“Five years, I think.” Grantaire said. “I think the landlord thought I’d have left by now, but, well. I’m still here.”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s nice. Good windows. Not easy to come by.”

Grantaire laughed at that. “Hey, was there something you wanted to talk about? Or are you just here to admire my big beautiful windows?”

Combeferre looked slightly embarrassed. “Uh, the latter, I guess.” he said. “I mean, just what I texted, I was bored, and I guess . . . I don’t know. I guess I thought we could just hang out?”

Now it was Grantaire’s turn to be embarrassed. Of course. Combeferre is the sort of person who’s actually, you know, decent. He was just trying to be nice and Grantaire was accusing him of having an ulterior motive. Way to go. Grantaire cleared his throat. “Well, thanks for coming. Feel free to park wherever. I only did a half load of laundry so I’m finished folding, sorry. I know how much you love to fold.”

“I went through a very intense Marie Kondo phase.” Combeferre grinned. “Let me know if you ever need your closet to be reorganized.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Grantaire said. It was dawning on him that, being more of the roaming type than the nesting type, Grantaire almost never had people over his apartment, and therefore had very little hosting experience. So he did what he always did in situations like this - said what people say in movies and books and all that.

“Can I offer you a beverage of some kind? I’ve got . . . tap water. And orange juice. And maybe beer?”

“I’m alright, thanks.” Combeferre said kindly. Combeferre’s fridge was probably fully stocked with sparkling water in every flavor for guests to sip on, the bastard. He sat down in a little chair by the kitchenette. “What, what is it?” he asked, looking at Grantaire’s expression. “Why are you - what’s funny?”

“Everything is too small for you in here. It’s like shoving a Barbie doll into a Polly Pocket house.” Grantaire said with a laugh. Combeferre tucked his long legs a bit closer to himself.

“Well, Barbie is a good role model, so I’ll take that.”

“I think an averaged sized woman or two might disagree. Anyways, you’ve got impeccable timing.”

“What do you mean?” Combeferre inquired.

“I mean that someone must have wanted us to hang out today. God, the Fates, some non-denominational arbiter of Destiny.” Grantaire was doing that thing he always did where he ended sentences in a way that begged the listener to ask him to explain himself. Why he chose to speak in these irritating circles? We will likely never know. Grantaire sure as hell didn’t.

Combeferre rolled his eyes, but he seemed more amused than annoyed. “You’re impossible.”

“It’s been said before.” was Grantaire’s reply. “What I mean to say is I’m literally never home. Not literally-literally, but, you know. This apartment is basically a glorified storage unit that I visit when there is absolutely nothing else to do. So the fact that you happened to be passing by on a laundry day...”

“... a work of divine intervention?” Combeferre finished.

“I’d go so far as to call it a miracle if I believed in that sort of thing.” Grantaire said.

Combeferre’s next question caught Grantaire off-guard somewhat. “So you’re an atheist, then?”

Grantaire had never actually seen a shrink, but he had the passing sensation of being sprawled out on some brown leather fainting sofa. Maybe that’s what this was, a psych eval. He’d get a message from the official Les Amis de l’ABC e-mail account later in the week saying “sorry, R, you’ve been deemed mentally unfit to be a part of this organization. We know the Musain is public property, but if you could avoid the premises during our scheduled meeting times we all think that’d be for the best.”

“Well, yeah, aren’t all of the lefties heathens nowadays? At least that’s what Twitter tells me.” he said. His paranoia would not rob him of his (debatable) sense of humor.

Combeferre just shrugged. “I guess if I had to call myself something I’d say I’m agnostic.”

“Huh!” Grantaire said, genuinely surprised. “A member of the ‘namby-pamby, mushy pap, weak-tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitter’ brigade, are we?”

Two things occurred to Combeferre at once: One, that Grantaire was quoting Richard Dawkins, and two, that Grantaire could not have been certain that Combeferre would recognize the quote when he said it. Grantaire was both the sort of person that committed Dawkins to memory and the sort that didn’t really care if someone mistook his references for a string of improvised insults. The more Grantaire spoke, the more Combeferre became aware of how little speaking they’d ever done.

“I guess I just think one can never be sure.” Combeferre said.

Grantaire thought now would be a good time for a subject change. “So, how is party planning going?” he asked.

Combeferre sighed. “It’s . . . it’s going.” he said. “Well, okay, I’m being dramatic. Courfeyrac is actually the one doing most of the planning. I just get weird about stuff like this. I want Enjolras to like everything, you know?”

“I don’t think Enjolras is capable of disliking anything you do.” Grantaire said in a way that to the untrained ear might sound like a veiled insult, but that Combeferre suspected was an attempt at genuine sincerity.

“Well, thanks.” Combeferre smiled gratefully. “I just want him to have a good time.”

“He will. It’s the rest of us you’ll have to work to entertain.”

“Well, Courfeyrac has a slew of party games he’s preparing. Oh, and, uh, Enjolras mentioned he’s glad you’ll be able to make it. By the way.” Combeferre said, which made Grantaire blush, which made Combeferre smile.

Grantaire hated that. Not just when Combeferre did it, when any of them did. Making faces or little comments, as if they were in on some big secret. It’s like they were proud of themselves for noticing Grantaire’s little crush, like they knew something funny or scandalous or cute. But they didn’t know anything, not really. Grantaire didn’t have a crush on Enjolras at all. It was more like a religion. Maybe he’d been too quick to brand himself an atheist earlier.

His annoyance with Combeferre soured the rest of their conversation. He became mean, curt, and downright humorless. This wasn’t at all fair, he knew. Grantaire probably annoyed Combeferre every third sentence (maybe every third word) and that had never stopped Combeferre from being his usual amiable self. There was another difference between the two: Grantaire lacked both grace and graciousness, and Combeferre, it seemed, never ran out of either.

“Well, I guess I should be leaving.” Combeferre said after a while, rising from the squat chair he was sitting in.

“I guess.”

“Uh, thank you for having me over. We should do this again some time. I had fun.” Combeferre lied.

Grantaire smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes. “Yeah, why don’t we all do brunch some time? You can bring your friends, it’ll be a real party. Everyone can sit around admiring my huge windows. What a blast!”

Combeferre knew he was joking, but he couldn’t decipher the punchline. What would be so bad about having all of their friends over for brunch? Why did he say the word “friends” like that, all sardonic and italicized? Combeferre almost asked him, but instead he just shook his head and smiled.

“Okay. Well. Bye!”

Grantaire waved lazily. “See you around.”

Under normal circumstances, the phrase “Enjolras mentioned he’s glad you’ll be able to make it” would have found itself fluttering in the pit of Grantaire’s stomach. Instead, there was something else sitting in there. Something that felt a bit like failure, a bit like guilt, and - most surprising of all - a bit like affection.

This is precisely why he didn’t like having people over.

#LOL this was fun.#next up: the actual birthday thing!#ok tags time #grantaire #combeferre #les amis #les miserables #my fic #uhhhhh what else....#cw alcohol mention #it’s sort of blink and you miss it but you know #again it’s peripheral but might as well:#e/r #i’ll come back if i think of anything else

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queentargary3n · 4 years

Text

blessings

SasuSaku month 2020 Day 17

Reincarnation AU - Police Officer Sasuke AU

There isn’t a single day of his life that Uchiha Sasuke isn’t thankful for his life. For his mother’s gentle smile and kind nature, for his father’s silent praises, for his brother’s company and support. He’s even grateful for his loud mouthed, blond, best friend, who annoys him most of the time, but has his back when he needs it the most. He doesn’t know what he did to deserve such great people in his life.

At 24, having graduated college, and finished training in the police academy, he sets up for a bright career as a police officer and hopes to make detective before he is 30.

So, he goes to work every day, knowing he is making a change. Watching over the people he grew up with, protecting his beloved town, and actually doing something about the crime that has begun to infest it.

Sasuke knows his life is good, he was born in a good family, went to a top tier university, he never lacked for anything. He knows that having his family, being able to afford his own place, buy a new car, and work in something he actually likes is a luxury many don’t actually have.

But even as he counts his blessings every day, he can’t escape the feeling that he is missing something. Like there is a hole inside of him, he can’t seem to fill with anything.

He doesn’t remember when his nightmares started, perhaps he’s always had them. Sometimes it’s the bloody corpses of his parents that terrorize him during the night, the sadness of his brother’s eyes, as he looks at him from afar, eyes shining red and spinning unnaturally. Other nights it’s a white-faced man, with snake-like features that hunts him, forcing him to drink potions that taste horrible and burn down his throat, telling him that they will make him stronger. On other nights he dreams of facing gigantic humanoid creatures, dead bodies littering the ground he steps on.

But some nights, he dreams of pink cherry blossom hair and green eyes. The spring girl, as he calls her, cries behind him, begging him not to leave, or stands in front of him as one of his hands reaches for her neck and the other holds lightning, readying to electrocute her, he assumes.

Not every dream is violent with the spring girl, sometimes it’s just him and her. She hugs him or holds his hand as they look over magnificent vistas he’s never actually seen in real life. Sometimes they are children, sometimes they are grown, sometimes he taps his fingers to a strange diamond tattoo on her forehead and she blushes. Sometimes he kisses her and makes love to her. He wakes up to a feeling of sadness and tears rolling down his eyes. He doesn’t know who the girl with the cherry blossom hair is, or why is she a constant in his dreams, but the dreams bring him to tears he’s not one to usually shed. He can never shake the feeling that there is someone out there in the world, waiting for him.

On the day of his annual mental evaluation he is very concerned. He always seems to be expecting something to happen. Someone to attack him or his family. He has so much fear over losing it all, it causes him anxiety and panic attacks in the most unexpected times. He’s afraid the new department psychologist will find out and deemed him unfit for service.

It’s unnerving, feeling this way, because in reality what does he even know about pain? He’s never seen blood; he’s never even had to fire his gun on the job, what could possibly be the explanation for his nightmares? He wonders.

Itachi, who’s on the department of youth and family services, always tells him that is not how mental illnesses work, his anxiety has nothing to do with how good his life is or how lucky he is, and that he should never dismiss his own struggles or be comparing his suffering to others.

Sasuke understands but doesn’t actually believe it.

“I think you should be honest with the psychologist” He tells Sasuke, even if they take you off duty Itachi thinks, but he leaves it unsaid.

“I’m not going to tell her anything she doesn’t ask me… It’s not like having bad dreams makes me unfit for work” Sasuke responds.

“Maybe you should go see my psychic” Izumi chirps in from the doorway to Itachi’s office. “I wasn’t eavesdropping I promise! I was just coming to take my boyfriend out to lunch and I just happen to overhear”

Sasuke only glares at her, he doesn’t like anyone meddling in this, it feels too personal to share with his soon-to-be-but-not-quite-yet-sister-in-law. Itachi gives him an apologetic look on her behalf but says nothing.

“Still those dreams huh? She has really interesting ideas about those! Do you believe in reincarnation?” She asks him.

“That you believe all that craps she sells you, tells me so much, you’re crazy for starters” Sasuke tells her, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

“No but hear me out!” Izumi tells him, ignoring his previous comment. “Like, our dreams don’t just make things up, right? You have to have seen those things somewhere, like that girl you keep dreaming about, you met her somewhere, your brain didn’t just invent her, but the circumstances you dream her in don’t match your life, right? Maybe you met in another life! And my psychic can tell you all about that!” she looks in her massive handbag and produces a presentation card that Sasuke takes, out of politeness, but doesn’t bother to look at.

Sasuke doesn’t even believe in that sort of thing, his beliefs always been on the more secular side of things, but even if there is a remote chance he might have lived another life before, where he saw wars, and monsters, and his parents death, he sure as hell doesn’t want to know about it.

So, he goes about his day, entirely forgetting the non-sense Izumi was blabbing on about. He goes to lunch with Naruto, ramen again unsurprisingly, makes a visit to a home for a noise complaint, files his paperwork, and tries to go home early for a change.

He attempted to postpone his psych evaluation as much as he could, that is, until his father, the head of the police department catches him on his way out, and orders him to medical immediately so he can get it over with.

“Go on, you know its protocol, she’s there now” His father chastises.

Sasuke is irritated to no end, but he still obediently makes his way to the new psychologist’s office in the back of the building.

Just keep it simple, don’t elaborate, it’ll be fine, he thinks to himself.

The door to the psychologist’s office is open, so Sasuke stands in the entrance and knocks on the door to announce his arrival. The space is completely littered with boxes and mountains of papers, stacked on top of another and covering the desk in its entirety, so much so that he can’t even see the person seating behind it.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m new, I’m still getting everything settled! Are you here for an eval? Did I get your file? Where are my files!? What’s your name?” She says in a rapid succession.

He stays quiet, so she can gather herself, and takes a seat in front of her crowded desk, and it isn’t until she moves the two gigantic boxes of documents in front of them that he is able to see her.

He sits complete frozen, utterly speechless upon setting eyes on her. Because the person seating in front of him now, is unbelievably and irrevocably the Spring girl.

The shiny pink hair, wide emerald colored eyes and a blushing face he’d never mistake for anyone else’s are facing him now, with a look of surprise on it.

And he is sure his face mirrors hers, especially since the next thing she says to him, is an almost whispered, “Sasuke-kun….”

“I can’t believe this…” She mumbles and looks like she’s about to jump on him, but the look on his face stops her. “Do you… am… do you know who I am?” She asks, a hint of hope sparkling in her eyes.

“The new psychologist… about to perform my yearly eval?…” He responds, unsure of himself.

He can see the deflated expression and disappointment spreading thought her. “Right… I haven’t seen your file… ahem sorry… I think we are going to have to postpone this… maybe someone else can do your evaluations tomorrow, I apologize” She tells him, in a more composed and professional tone.

She stands and grabs a small purse from one of the drawers and tries to make a quick exit.

Sasuke stares at her unable to say anything. He observes every detail he can about her, every slender curve of her body, the way her neat short hair hangs on her delicate neck, and he is suddenly overcome with the image of her, wearing a red tunic instead of the sensible suit, a red and white fan crest in the center of her back.

His hand moves almost of its own accord and grabs her tiny wrist to prevent her from leaving, and she turns to look at him, green eyes wide and full of emotions he’s not able to understand.

“I know you from somewhere” He says, in a statement not a question.

“Do you? I don’t think so, sorry” She responds and tries to shake his hold on her wrist.

“You said you hadn’t seen my file; how did you know my name?” Sasuke asks her, in the demanding voice she remembers so well.

“I… just… ahem… I don’t….”

“What are you hiding?”

“Do you remember something… anything… about me?” She asks, the adorable blush from earlier spreading through her face again.

Sasuke isn’t sure what she means, but now that she’s facing him, he becomes completely lost in her eyes, his instincts screaming at him to hold her, and never let go. “Who are you?” He asks. Because saying, yeah, I remember you from a dream sounds entirely too stupid to mention.

The moment feels as if suspended from time, the atmosphere too suffocating, he’s afraid of even closing his eyes, sure that the moment he reopens them, she’d be gone like every dream he’s ever had.

“My name is Sakura” she says, and her name sounds like music to his ears. “This is going to sound really strange, and possibly unprofessional, but do you want to go get a drink?” She says, biting her lower lip and taking a strand of hair behind her ear nervously.

He only nods his head yes and releases her hand. “Just… how do I know you?” He whispers.

She giggles in response, her face more assertive than before. “It’s a long story Sasuke-kun… maybe… I’ll tell you later” She says, poking his forehead with two fingers before grabbing his hand and pulling him to follow.

He doesn’t know anything about the strange girl with the cherry blossom pink hair other than her name, still he would follow her anywhere. He can’t help but to feel his blessings are finally complete.

#ssm20 #ssm20d17 #sasusaku #sasusaku fanfic #sasusaku fic #sasusaku ficlet

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tev-the-random · 4 years

Text

What it Ursa took her children with her? - Pt.2

As we were saying:

Little over year has passed since the family arrived in Hira’a, and fateful news gets to them: Ozai remarried. His new wife is someone who is honoured to marry the Firelord and doesn’t mind the fact that his head is so deep up his own arse- anyway, and they are expecting a child, who is to be the Firelord’s legitimate heir.

Azula’s hopes and dreams are shattered. At age ten, she is quite literally being replaced in her beloved father’s life. It’s like she’s never even existed, and she can’t help but wonder what she did wrong.

Zuko is also upset, of course. All those years when Ozai told him he was unfit and worthless come flooding back. But somehow, he already expected things to turn out like this. Unlike Azula, he wasn’t so deeply feeding on hopes that things would go back to normal. He sees it more as a situation that was out of everyone’s control.

He convinces Azula it’s not her fault, and these kids will still be trying to understand and defend their father later down the road. There must be a reason for all of this, right? They start thinking of a reasonable scenario…

Ursa just feels sorry for the poor woman who has to deal with Ozai now.

So we get a timeskip: about three years came and went. Zuko and Azula – treated as kids and not as weapons – lead a peaceful and happy life whenever they’re not thinking of their father and everything they could be doing out there.

They have become known local troublemakers in their spare time. Kids know better than to challenge them, people know not to leave flammable goods out in the open – a strict policy regarding fireworks has been established after a chaotic incident – and failure to keep an eye on them this one time led to… well, let’s just say that the town is still unsure of whether or not they’re is being haunted by evil spirits.

They aren’t allowed anywhere near Forgetful Valley, but bold of you to assume they never tried. In-jokes arise.

‘No, I’m serious: that tree’s face looked exactly like yours, Zuzu. You really should befriend it,’ Azula mocks, remembering a particularly ugly tree they encountered in their adventure.

‘Sorry, I wasn’t looking at it. I was busy looking for whoever it was that asked you,’ Zuko retorts. ‘Since Forgetful Valley has all the kinds of crazy stuff.’

‘Maybe we should go back and look for your impulse control, then.’

‘None of you are going back in there,’ Ursa reprehends. ‘It was very irresponsible of you. Forgetful Valley is a dangerous place, you could have gotten hurt!’

‘Your mother is right, you know?’ Noren comments. ‘I’ve been to that jungle before, and it’s definitely not a playground. But I swear…’ He makes a dramatic pause. ‘I once saw Ursa’s sense of humour in there.’

The kids burst out laughing while Ursa sighs. ‘Since you can find such amazing things in the valley, dear, why don’t you go back there and find yourself actual funny jokes? I’m sure my sense of humour will be around the same corner.’

*More laughter*

(IDK, I write crappy comedy, ok?)

They still have a bit of a hard time making friends. I wouldn’t say they are shy, but they definitely have a talent to say the wrong things at the wrong times, and it’s hard to make deep connections. Sure, they would play with other kids from time to time, but in the end, Zuko and Azula are each other’s best friend.

They’ve cleared an area by the beach that any Hira’a resident knows to stay away from when they’re training.

Azula discovered a great passion for theatre. Not only are her acting skills fantastic, she also seems to be naturally aware of what makes a good scene. People say she’s Noren’s Little Assistant.

She hates being called Noren’s Little Assistant. She would much rather be called Ursa’s Little Star, because goddamn is she a good actress and she needs everyone to know that.

Zuko is more of a plant-lover guy. Unfortunately, he hasn’t inherited his grandmother’s green thumb, and despite Ursa’s best efforts to teach him, it seems like everything he touches dies.

He has grown to show a way with animals, however. Any variety of frogs and toads love him; lizards of all kinds are attracted to him like he’s a magnet; furry animals big and small adore him and any type of bird-like creature seems to think he is the best human being in existence. But his favourite animals are still the turtleducks.

Back in the palace, Iroh eventually learns of Ozai’s bullshit and how he got the throne in the first place. And you know what? The time has come for Iroh to draw a line in the sand. He confronts his little brother, who confronts him back by telling him that, should he try to tell anyone in the Fire Nation the truth – that Ozai was a top-grade traitor who actually had no right to the throne –, no one would believe him. Since his brother won’t be sensible, Iroh decides that’s it: he’s fucking out.

Now a fugitive from the Fire Nation, he somehow winds up owning a lovely traveling tea shop called the Jasmin Dragon. Most people don’t even suspect he is the fearful Dragon of the West, because he’s just so nice?

You can bet he serves blends of tea from all across the nations.

The tea shop is also a good cover up for his exchanges with the Order of the White Lotus. He gives and receives information, and does his best to help villages to either defend themselves or evacuate during Fire Nation attacks.

One day a member of the White Lotus travels to Hira’a for one reason or another and finds Zuko and Azula. This person then sends a letter to Iroh.

Iroh comes to Hira’a to visit the family. He’s glad to see they’re ok, even if he can’t stay for too long. But long enough for some Quality Time – these kids have grown so much!

Iroh doesn’t know of Ursa’s part in Azulon’s assassination, and only assumes she knew of Ozai’s plan. But now, it’s time that her children learned a couple of things, and he is willing to teach them, so that when the time arrives for them to meet their destiny, they should be able to choose wisely and face whatever comes their way. So he asks the children to accompany him in his travels.

Ursa doesn’t want to let them go. They’re children, they should be here living a peaceful life, not meeting some grand, dangerous destiny! What if something horrible happened to them?

Iroh understands the pain of losing a child. He doesn’t want to make Ursa spend her time worrying about losing two, so he respects her decision and soon leaves the town.

But the siblings are not about to just sit here when they know they’re destined for something greater. What incredible knowledge did their uncle hold? Did their father have something to do with this? They always knew there was more to their fate than just living in Hira’a for the rest of their lives, and this is their chance; it’s now or never.

Zuko and Azula are about to sneak out and follow Iroh when Noren spots them. But instead of trying to stop them – he is well aware that he can’t – he gives them two masks and some advice about never forgetting who they were.

Why yes, I am saying that they eventually take the masks and become partners in crime, Zuko as the Blue Spirit and Azula as the Red Spirit, because parallels.

They catch up with their uncle and adventures and shenanigans issue as Zuko, Azula and Iroh cross the Earth Kingdom.

Now imagine this trio: two of the most awkward firebending teenagers travelling with their old tea-loving uncle, who spits proverbs like he’s made of them. The possibilities for both hilarious and heart-warming moments are endless.

Iroh thinks himself a matchmaker. Whenever he thinks he sees some romance going on, he encourages his nephew or niece to make a move. His flaming cupid arrows do more damage than good, yet he only has good intentions at heart. Teens all around the kingdom encourage you to stop, sir.

Their new life is even more humbling than in Hira’a, since they are constantly travelling. But they manage, and they know their uncle is nothing but wise… even if Azula is still quite arrogant and manipulative, and Zuko is impatient and hot-headed, which can lead to a lot of conflict.

Iroh teaches them both how to create and redirect lightning. Zuko is better at redirecting than Azula. Creating it, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated, and both of them get their fair share of explosions while learning. Neither of them really gets a hang of it – although Azula is better at it than Zuko, that’s not saying much – for they still have a lot of identity-related turmoil inside them that won’t let them grasp the energy.

Guess who else teaches them? Other members of the White Lotus. Both Zuko and Azula get some swordsmanship Skills™ from Piandao, some different (and somewhat unwillingly taught) firebending technics from Jeong-Jeong and a lot of things from Bumi, including but not limited to: creative thinking, the art of patience, strategic planning, dealing with pirates and a surprising amount of rocks-related knowledge.

Bumi adopted Zuko and Azula and gave himself the role of Second Uncle. You cannot convince me otherwise.

So one day, little over a year after the siblings joined Iroh, they wind up in a city where this big circus is performing. Uncle Iroh decides to take his niece and nephew to see it. And oh, aren’t they surprised by who they see performing?

Even though Ty Lee was essentially the only one between her sisters to befriend Azula – and consequentially, the only one to periodically spend time in the palace with her –, Zuko and Iroh still have a hard time distinguishing her from the six other girls who look exactly like her, uncertainly calling her all different names before Azula snaps ‘you idiots, that’s Ty Lee!’.

The acrobat is so glad to see her friend again, because damn: it’s been nearly four years since they last saw or even heard from each other! And Zuko, I thought you were dead? This is such a neat reunion, there’s so much for them to talk about! And sure, the circus has to leave soon and so do the siblings, but Ty Lee reassures them that, if they ever needed her, she wasn’t hard to find. This isn’t the last we’ll see of Ty Lee.

Azula doesn’t let it show, but she resents Ty Lee a little bit for choosing to abandon her noble life. She really wishes she could have had a choice.

Uncle Iroh tells the siblings stories about the war that would have some day mesmerized them. But now, his opinions about those events and what he did as a prince general have changed; that, along with what the family sees in their journey – all the horrors brought to innocent people – gives Zuko and Azula a new perspective on what they used to think was a greater good. It will still take a while for Azula to understand that no, these people are no lesser than her and for Zuko to understand why any of that matters.

Iroh eventually tells them the truth about Azulon’s death. Or at least, what he knows of it: their father killed Azulon, banished them, took the throne by force and planned to gain more power at the expense of everyone. This is a lot to take in, and the siblings don’t quite believe it.

After four years thinking about it, Zuko and Azula decided to take their mother’s early words – they went to Hira’a to be safe – and formulate what for them was a reasonable scenario. They believe that Ozai never actually wanted any of this to happen. The whole family had to have been in danger, be it due to some political, social or personal threat, and Ozai wanted to take it all by himself to protect them. So he sent his wife and children away, concocted a plan with Azulon to cover for them and, once Azulon died and left him the throne, remarried to keep appearances. To Zuko and Azula, this makes perfect sense. And they thoroughly convince themselves of that.

They initiate an argument, thinking that Iroh is jealous of Ozai.

Their uncle sees these children are starting to stray from their path, but he knows this is a necessary journey for them. They will never be able to deal with reality unless they face it.

The siblings leave Iroh, planning to head straight to the Fire Nation capital and find out what really happened. Maybe now that they are older, it would be a perfect time to come back home; they surely could defend themselves from any threats.

Of course, they’ll be very disappointed to know that Ozai was just a bitch and never actually cared for any of them.

I don’t have a full formed idea about how their reencounter with their father would go down, but I say Ozai would officially banish both his children from the Fire Nation for trying to cause a commotion – which could easily be perceived as a threat. Not only that, but Zuko and Azula are the children of a traitor; cue for Ozai revealing what happened that night four years ago, confirming that he was the one to kill Azulon with Ursa’s help.

I also think that, after that day, the Firelord would have discreetly helped spread rumours about Ursa that would drag her name through the mud in the Capital – was she cheating on Ozai? Was she selling Fire Nation information to the Earth Kingdom? Was she planning a coup against the Firelord? Her crimes change from mouth to mouth. In the end, no one would take Zuko or Azula back unless Ozai wanted it. But he doesn’t. Not now, at least…

But Ozai also decides to play with his options: he plants a seed of doubt in his children’s minds; should they prove themselves useful later on, it would only take pulling a few strings for them to come crawling back to him. So he tells them that they needed to prove themselves for everyone to see that they weren’t traitors like their mother. They needed to prove their worth so that he could accept them.

Ozai goes a step further with Azula and tells her that, before his demise, Firelord Azulon had a plan. A plan to bring her back and put her in the leading, prestigious role she was always meant to get. But they needed to wait for the right time. There is a right time, Princess Azula. Your hopes were right all along, they will come for you eventually if you prove yourself.

The siblings have a lot to think about while they’re leaving the Fire Nation. They idolized Ozai so much all these years. But the undeniable truth came crashing down on their heads, spoken by the man himself. What would they do now? They didn’t think it possible, but their harsh actions made things so much worse: they couldn’t come back to their mother, they didn’t have many hopes of running into Iroh again, they can’t even set foot in their homeland anymore; Zuko and Azula are all on their own.

Maybe it’s time to turn a new leaf. It starts with them being fairly neutral, not completely loyal to either the Fire Nation or to the rest of the world. During this period, they would argue a lot about what to do or where to go next, getting separated and going their own ways before destiny makes them stick together again, over and over.

They manage to get a few deals and own a few favours here and there, become known thieves as the Spirits, and maybe meet up with Ty Lee’s circus every now and again. Life is hard.

But there is one thing that is about to be a beacon in their darkness…

Time to catch up to the show. Oh, you thought I wouldn’t go there?

Part 3 coming right up!

(I know I said this would be a two-parter, but it got ridiculously long, so I split it again. Three-parter now.)

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icharchivist · 3 years

Note

Thank you for answering the previous asks and hope you're prepared!

How much, out of ten, are you of each winter troupe member?

Have a good day :3c

ahah thank you for doing that all the way!

and oh boy i thought i was prepared but turns out-

okay notewise.:

Tsumugi: 7/10, Tasuku: 3/10, Homare: 4/10 Hisoka: 9.5/10, Azuma: 10/10, Guy: 6/10

(if you're supprised Azuma is actually my ultimate kin and it's not Hisoka: congratz i fooled all of u. the only reason i don't have an Azuma icon is that i genuinely think he looks too sexy in some arts and it doesn't feel Me despite everything else. The more u know.)

And. i need to warn that i went much more into personal details for Hisoka and Azuma under the cut to the point where it may be overwhelming. And that Azuma's entry alone is 2.1k words long. What the fuck me.

Relating to team "we have so much trauma" is going to be so much fun.

coughs, anyway take care :3c

(Links: Spring, Summer, Autumn , Winter ranking)

Winter my beloved, this is going to be a normal, non emotional ranking at all.

Tsumugi: 7/10 I relate to his lack of confidence, and the way he gave up on everything he loved when his spirit was crushed (re what I was talking about with my Kumon rant). On my down time I did study a bit of psychology and though I wouldn’t put myself at the same level as a psy student I’m often told I read people mostly in an accurate way so I can relate to that. I can use my powers for Evil like nudging people in some direction or knowing where to attack, but I am super aware of that and I’ve been extra conscious about not having it happen again for over ten years now DLKFJDLF (Azuma is kinda like that too). But yeah the fact he is like that too makes it relatable.

I also think that the whole “feeling you fucked up and took all the responsibility when a friendship broke apart” is also something very relatable. So is “ghosting your friends after that”. I relate to the fact he’s a nerd too. I relate to him more than not but I guess I just removed points because of how while I relate to specificities the whole thing doesn’t connect as much as it could?

Tasuku: 3/10 he’s probably the one I relate the least to. I honestly didn’t understand Tasuku much until Nocturnality on my first read, and it’s only then that things clicked. Legit I saw him the way Azuma saw him dLKFJDKFJDF. But I do feel it relatable that he feels responsible for failing his friend and that he took it upon himself to try to read more into how people are behaving to try to prevent it from happening again. But else he’s. genuinely not like me KDJFKLDFJDFL

Homare: 4/10 mhmm. I think I relate to the way he is passionate and how much he genuinely loves. I also relate to the fact he is pretty analytic, though the details of what makes his struggles are not something I relate to easily. I have felt broken before, I was told i was broken or unfit in some ways, so this particular pain is something I completely understand. I also did use to be an artist and a writer so I can relate to that passion of his, although as I mentioned in others ranking *shrugs*. That said he’s very much more exuberant and confident than I am and I would assume I know how to deal with people emotionally a bit more.

Hisoka: 9.5/10 oh boy where to start. This is going to be a tough one to get into without getting extremely personal. To start with, I’m a sleepy baby. I sleep a lot DLKJFDF though not much at night. I used to fall asleep in class all the time my friends had to always be on the watch out for me. I don’t have much energies. I love plushy and I love being comfortable in some places. I also really love sweets tho not as much as him. I also do care ways too much for my specific plushies and pillows (I do have huge penguins plushies too).

I, too, have memories issues, though of course to a lesser extend. I have a lot of trauma and for a lot of them I ended up getting fuzzy memories. I used to be in a pretty toxic environment where I constantly had to make use of my memory to survive, and so when my memory started failing me, I was terrified. My parents gaslight me all the time and pretends a lot of things that happened didn’t happen and that I’m crazy for believing it happened, so the moment my memory started to fail me I started to panic a lot. It terrified me to not being completely sure whenever I could trust myself or not. It made me feel extremely unreliable. It’s still something I struggle with a lot.

This would have been my answer pre-awakening moon at least. I always related to him to some degree so Awakening moon was a slap in the face in a way I wasn’t ready to deal with, and this is where I have to be uncomfortably personal.

I am the youngest sibling of 3. My eldest sister ran away from home when I was 6, never to be seen again. My other sister resented me because I used to be very close to the eldest and she was jealous about it, and while the reasons were linked to our parents, who were extremely toxic to us and kept us into this toxic environment for years on end, my sister took all her anger out on me. While we’ve discussed it as adults now, our relationships is too strained to fix it nowadays.

It took me a long while – it took me Azuma’s arc actually – to realize that the way I feel for my eldest sister is more akin to grief than to abandon. I don’t even remember her. I don’t remember her and still apparently the way I was close to her was the reason my sibling hold it against me. I couldn’t even remember *why* my sister was mad at me because I don’t even remember being close to my sister that much. All I know is that she left because the situation at home was too toxic. It was.. so messy.

I have. Much more trauma linked to that specifically but that’s the root of something that hit me in the face with Hisoka’s arc. Because I can’t remember a person that disappeared from my life, and yet it was enough for it to break and shape everything I’ve lived through since. I couldn’t even start to talk about how it still impacts me now 20 years later. I’m just now making peace with the fact this was grief. This is the gist of the reason Hisoka’s arc hit me as hard as it did (and the fact that Chikage is actively undoing all the bad things his own grief pushed him to do on Hisoka is the reason Chikage is so compelling to me. My sister could never lol.).

I felt also that I had to take all the responsibilities for what happened. I felt like I could make things easier for the family after this trauma, at the rip age of 7, and no one stopped to think maybe a child shouldn’t have to be dealing with a collective family trauma like this. But well. Here we are.

I relate to the fact Hisoka also struggles to accept everything that happened. And that now he’s trying to make things better for others people he can relate to. It’s so… complicated.

Also I can’t forget the fact Hisoka tried to kill himself and :/ as someone who has had a lot of suicidal idealization in my life this really hit a lot harder than it should have.

In general I would just say that socially I’m not really like him except with people I’m comfortable with teasing. Hisoka can be a little too rude and it’s where I can’t relate lol. But otherwise man I care him so much I feel so seen. I’m just removing 0.5 points for that and I don’t give him full mark because of what I’ll explain next.

Azuma: 10/10 This one is going to be a trip. It’s about twice the length of the Hisoka’s rant. Mister took me by the throat too. As I think it’s clear now I cannot relate to the fact he genuinely loved his family and how much his family cared for him. Yet I relate… to about everything else.

On the surface I do think I seem more approachable and easy to talk with. I try to be the kindest person I can be, to not be judgmental. I’m conflict avoidant, just like he can be, and if I’m annoyed with someone I’m muuuuch more likely to use passive aggressiveness like he does with Tasuku when he’s pissed at him. (sidenote: I do find it funny that Tasuku was the only character I really felt I didn’t get until Nocturnality, while Azuma was having the exact same problem, and then he became one of my fav the moment it clicked. Azuma is my braincell.)

More often than not, there’s a smile on my face and I try to be soft in the way I can be. I’m generally pretty calm, I’ve been told I was soothing, or give good hugs, this sort of stuff.

Now onto the heavy stuff.

I have a lot of nightmares and night terrors linked to a lot of my traumas. I’m honestly scared sometimes to go to sleep ^^”. But in general, if Hisoka reflects a lot of a personal trauma and how it would personally affect me, Azuma reflects a lot on how I would behave with others people in general and especially when I’m unwell. I’ve coped most of my life with, everything that happened to me, by just. Trying to keep people at armlength. I don’t want to let people close to me, especially irl. Discussing all of that online gives me a distance that allows me to discuss it but, I remember in high school I was going through very bad things, and a few years later I was hanging out with a friend and I happened to open up about those things. And she was going livid because, she had known me for what, 6 years at that point? And she never knew any of this. We talked a lot then, we were close, but she never knew all those things about me until years later. It kinda scared her because to her I was always a sweet and cheerful person and she never expected that I was doing this badly. I remember then she brought up something we discussed back in a party with many of our others friends from high school and similarly they were all. “how did we never know any of this.”. Seeing Azuma in Nocturnality kinda brought me back to that convo tbh LKDJFLKDFJFD.

But I’m good at pretending I’m closer to people than they think. I’m an excellent listener. A lot of my friends tended to rely on me as the person they could talk about their problems to. I used to do it much more back then but I also used to pour a lot of energy trying to make it easier for people, solving their problems. Full on Therapist Friend:tm:. It does help that, as I said with Tsumu, I have basis in psychology so sometimes some observations I can make help much more than expected. Just like Azu tbh lol.

Oh also I am cuddly with my friends in general. I’m super touch starved but also to the point I feel uncomfortable to seek hugs because I just don’t get any on a normal basis and my body isn’t used, but I’m super cuddly and when I’m with my closest friends I’m like a koala.

And it gives people the impression to people that I’m very close to them because I know them well, and I know the ins and outs of why they behave the way they do. But. I kinda feel like it’s one sided more than not. And it’s all because of me, because I keep my walls up very high and it means people don’t generally expect that I’m hiding things.

I’m good at distracting too. I don’t relate to how flirty Azuma is but I keep seeing it as him distracting others. It’s flattering, and just embarrassing enough that the person ends up dropping whatever they may be pressing on Azuma to talk about. And, while not with flirting, I do that a lot, especially using compliments like that. (That said my kindness or teasing has been misinterpreted as flirting before DLKFJDLKF I’m trying to be extra conscious about not having that misunderstanding happen nowadays but man it happened a lot).

Azuma knows a lot of people, and has been supporting a lot of people, but he doesn’t let people in as much.

And a lot of it is linked to his own sense of grief. Of the fact he has lost so much he can’t afford to go through the pain of losing something again, so he distances himself from it before it can hurt. And I do that a lot.

I mentioned in the previous rant but it’s seeing Azuma’s arc that made me understand how much it’s more grief than abandon that makes it so hard for me to move on. And a part of me kinda just. Grieves the family I could never have, the normal life I wish I could have lived and clang too all of my life. When Azuma told Guy “I was always so lonely. Everyone had families they could take for granted but I had no one.” Oh my god it destroyed me. And how he mentions just afterward that while he has new people to rely on, it couldn’t change the fact he was still feeling this pain of losing his family and it just. Man. Might be crying right now.

It’s like… I think the reason I especially related to that is that, in therapy I’ve often discussed my problems in the lenses of neglect and abandon but the problem with that lenses is that, at least with the therapists I had, they tend to focus on the fact that therefore I /must/ be still yearning for them to change and turn around, like I could change something. But I don’t. I was resigned at some point. And it’s really only when I read that that I felt this exact resignation I have been feeling all that time. I think I mentioned once how reading a3 felt like going one step toward recovery I didn’t know I could get and this was exactly the scene I meant. It legit took a weight off my heart that i've been carrying for decades. It was the strangest feeling in the world.

Anyway more in general too, on top of keeping people at distance, I am also a pro at “suddenly disappearing/ghosting when I get too close and/or have a relapse”. When Azuma starts to pull his relapses like we see in Nocturnality, I see myself. Legit had a friend who read a3 who called me out about that DLKJFDKLFJ. Acting weird like this, closing yourself in like this, coming back to some harmful coping mechanism as a way to connect back with your own self, those are all things I do. And it sucks. Like. The things I put my friends though sucks. But I really can’t help it sometimes.

I’m good at listening and observing, I’m generally good at picking up why people act a certain way, but I’m still very distant. I do everything I can to pretend I’m not distant and generally it fakes an idea of intimacy that I don’t specifically see as such.

And I see all of that in Azuma in ways that are terrifyingly relatable. Another thing Azuma says in this convo with Guy, about how “Everytime I would go to sleep, I would wish the morning would never come” me. Mood. Holy shit. Feel seen. I hate it. Just in general though the way he talks about morning as this terrifying thing is me. Between the night terrors and the fact morning genuinely makes me feel horrible, that’s kinda why I end up oversleeping until the afternoon DLKFJDF Azuma my lord I feel you.

Because of my nightly panic attacks I do try to come up with ways around it mainly by drinking some relaxing tisanes and stuff. Oh and I did have a huge period in life where I HATED being in the sun, and I fucked over all of my melanin because of that. as a kid I would tan very easily, but now the sun hates me as much as I used to hate it. So when Azuma is a drama queen about not wanting to stay in the UV too much I’m just like. How dare you pull out a mirror on me I didn’t ask for this. (also I have been called a vampire by people esp when I was a teen but that’s just how people called edgelords like me. Still. Reo my beloved.)

There is honestly so many little things with Azuma that reminds me of myself like this that it makes me go nuts. If Hisoka is who I relate to in term of specific trauma and how I cope personally, Azuma is more like, the direct physical impact of my trauma on me and the way it makes me relate to others people, as well as just every little behaviors here and there that are just so specific.

One of the only thing I really don’t relate to Azuma about is his love for Alcohol but I think if you replace it with like, my addiction to juice it works out the same.

Oh and, that’s a stupid but funny thing to me, I project hard on how much the reason he keeps his hair long is a form of mental stability for him, because I legit keep my hair long for my own mental stability. I have tied ways too much of my recovery process to my hair that when I see Azuma coping with grief with his hairstyle and how almost cutting it would be him spiraling down, I felt seen.

also i have 0 stamina just like him.

ANOTHER THING is also the fact Azuma is genuinely yearning for connections with people but he spent so much of his life keeping people away that as much as he’s yearning for it, it takes him so long to be able to lower those walls because he’s been so used to keep people away that he can’t reply to this yearning. And the way how, once he actually ends up feeling this bit of vulnerability toward people, he would suddenly shut in like it suddenly scares him? Mood.

One last thing (i promise) (i think) is that, if it wasn't obvious from all my ranting.... So much of myself and the way i view myself is defined by my trauma. I struggle to exactly come to term with my identity in any shape or form that isn't deeply related to my trauma. Even if you asked me what my sexuality is (please don't), my actual answer would be completely shaped by the fact i have so much trauma linked to sexuality, romance and gender, that i don't want to process it at all and can't actually manage to "fit the boxes" because i cannot see myself as something else than my trauma, or explain my feelings without linking it to my trauma. Honestly at times i find it kinda cringeworthy from me because i really, really can't tell about anything about my identity without thinking of my various traumas (i talked about a few of them in those rankings but it's not even the tip of the iceberg for a lot of stuff.) And when i see the way Azuma is in particular, maybe i'm projecting, but i feel like a lot of it is the same. Like not processing his age because if he does it reminds him of how he outlived those he loved (which is an headcanon but com'on.) or how even his hair is linked to his trauma. Or how he doesn't drive because it's linked to his trauma. I feel SO seen.

If it wasn’t for the fact he genuinely loved and was loved by his family, I would have felt exactly the same about everything regarding him.

But I still give him a full mark because the way Azuma’s arc has affected me is beyond any possible words I could use. And also because I legit wrote above 2100 words just on how much I related to Azuma ALONE. Even Hisoka took me 800 WORDS. HELLO. Guy: 6/10 Back to general coping here, Guy isn’t exactly relatable to me except in well. For exemple the ways the others relate to him, especially Hisoka and Azuma. So his memory loss to cope with intense family trauma is relatable to me, the way he can have nightmares and night terrors is also hella relatable to me.

But something that’s more Guy that I relate to is the whole “Step dad kept talking down on him and verbally abusing him until Guy basically completely closed himself in” because man. I won’t elaborate but I’ve really felt from reading that verbal abuse the same way I felt thinking back to how my ex-step dad used to talk to me. It made me so angry on his behalf. And the way he internalized it to cope was something deeply relatable.

Another thing with Guy is the fact that Guy did genuinely believes himself inhuman and tbh there was a time when I was very young where I would catch myself unable to feel a bit of humanity mostly from how I kept shutting myself in. (The reason I don’t relate to it with Homare is that this “inhumanity” was never actually there even if Homare did believe in it. But for Guy he went the extra mile convincing himself to the point where he denied this humanity as far as possible in a self destructive way and :/).

SO YEAH Winter is like. Therapy for me. The problem with “Trauma: The Troupe” is that saying “I relate to the Winter troupe” means “I may have problems and so what.” And it sucks.

if you read that wordvomit, congratulation, was it worth it?

Take care!

#closes eyes and pretends i didn't just type all of that for azuma ANYWAY #bows down thank you for indulging in my fav passion of 'therapy via a3' the more we go #ichafantalks a3 #pandapillow #ichareply #also man Risky Game is going to absolutly murder me isn't it.

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radioactive-synth · 4 years

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#FOOCtober2020 - Oct 9 - Loadout and Living Space OR Grudge

Vaughn has some unresolved business with his long-dead father.

a big thank you for @theartofblossoming for proofreading this drabble for me!

"Why you have done this to me?"

He could not comprehend this.

Years later, and he still could not find an explanation for the abuse that he'd suffered. Emotional trauma, unseen wounds that still bled, low self-esteem, you name it, he has it.

But he cannot say he had a horrible childhood. A loving mother, a caring uncle and a cousin that was as close to him as a brother.

"I had a more decent living than others."

Even when the war started and the resources were less and less, he always ate well, wore good clothes and had access to higher education.

"Thanks to your payroll."

'He has a lot of money, that's why I can't say anything', was his habitual response to his cousin's oft repeated question on why he did not tell the truth. 'I'm too young to work, and mom's payroll cannot cover all our necessities'.

Ryan Hudson. For twenty two years, he was known as Ryan Hudson-Zander. Born of Séan and Maryanne Hudson, he was their eldest son. Being young parents, Séan and Maryanne did not know how to properly show affection to their first son. Séan was mostly away on his army duties, whilst Maryanne worked as a nurse. Eight years later, their second son, Michael, was born.

'You see, our old man needed him to be perfect, so he could be my role model', his uncle had said. 'And he was. But he was not perfect.'

"It was not my fault that you never received love."

Being put under a lot of pressure, Ryan needed to meet the expectations his father had of him. The world was changing, and they could not afford to let emotions take over their judgement. He finished military school and entered the ranks easily. He was already a Master Sergeant even before his brother had finished military school, too. Just like his father wanted.

'It's hard to believe that they were brothers', his mom said. 'One was cold and calculated, the other warm and gentle. How did I even fallen in love with the wrong one?'

Ryan had met Olivia long before she had finished her own studies. They had liked each other and dated before Ryan asked her to marry him. Olivia's father, Theodore Zander, was a kind, but unphased man. He was not impressed by the young American soldier, but he couldn't help but notice how his daughter was head over heels for him. He only agreed to let them marry if Ryan would take her last name.

'Papa thought that the Hudson name was too American, so he wanted me to keep our last name after marriage. And for what offspring we had, to also be Zander. That was his only requirement.'

"You never deserved the Zander name."

Even before they had their own child, Olivia showed that she had maternal instincts. Michael and Miriam had their first and only child, Vincent Nathaniel Hudson. Even before the kid formed his first word, his aunt was more present in raising him than his own mother. Whilst Michael was away doing his duty, he had no idea that his wife used his sister-in-law to take care of their son for a long time.

'I always dreamed of having my own children. Taking care of your cousin... that made me wish to have you. The day I found out I was pregnant, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I can't remember how he reacted, but I know your uncle was more happy than Ryan was.'

"Did you even want me?"

On the thirteenth of February, 2045, he was born. His father and uncle received some time off to come and visit Olivia at the hospital.

'Michael was happier than him. He had come to visit with your cousin, who was almost three years old. Vinnie said that you were as small as a toy and asked if I would keep you', Olivia laughed at the memory.

His father did not give any sign of affection. Olivia thought that the war troubled him but that could not be the reason. His uncle was an army medic, who retired a few years later and was still the same warm, kind person he always knew. His duty meant that he needed to face the horrors of the war and yet Michael's heart never changed.

"What war wounds had you received?"

As a young child, Vaughn had always tried to get Ryan's attention and affection by trying to initiate hugs, asking him questions, or just hanging around, yet his father considered him 'an inconvenience', to put it mildly. The only times Ryan ever spoke to his son were in a neutral or cold tone. He never raised his voice nor his hand toward his son... unless his wife was at work.

'Why do you always need to get on my nerves, boy?'

Vaughn still shudders at the memories of being taken up and then thrown on the couch, then told to sit still if he wanted to move on his own again.

"I was just a child, how could have you done that?"

'I can't forgive myself for what you endured, my baby. You didn't deserve any of that', his mom had said.

'You can't take the blame for another person's actions, mána'.

No. He never blamed her, or felt any remorse towards his mom. Yet she never got rid of the guilt that gnawed at her for years.

"It was my fault that I was silent."

'Michael was so much better. I know how much he cared for us.'

That was true. Michael Hudson always cared for the Zander family. He was best friends with Olivia and loved Vaughn just as much as he loved his own son.

'There were times when I wished I had called Michael 'Dad'.', he had told Nick and Hancock.

"I miss you, uncle Michael."

Years had passed, yet no sign of improvement was shown from Ryan. But as Vaughn got taller and heavier, Ryan could no longer throw him away yet the insults never stopped.

"Only to destroy me emotionally."

'You look just like him!', he heard other people say, comparing him to his father but they stopped saying that after the 'incident' with the blade.

"You pushed me to do this."

'I can't believe you did that, Vonnie! What you were thinking?' Vincent had asked after seeing the deep cut on his cousin's cheek.

"I found it hard to look in a mirror because of you."

'I do not want to be him! I'm tired of people telling me I look like him! Not anymore!', Vaughn cried out.

'There are other ways to be your own person. Now let's see what we can do with that cut, then later we'll look in the mirror, alright?'

Ronin bun and beard. Yes, he had worn the same style ever since he was 14 years old. His cousin was right. He was always right.

'What are you trying to achieve with your hair? This is not how men should look!' his father commented. When he had tried to cut Vaughn's hair, he had ended up with a broken hand, just hours before he needed to leave on duty. No-one had known the truth besides his cousin, who was feeling so proud of him.

"I never wanted to be like you."

Vaughn figured out what he wanted to do when he grew up.

'A Doctor! So I can help people.'

'You are breaking the Hudson tradition! Why the hell d'you want to play doctor?'

"I am a Zander. Not a Hudson."

Vaughn never had any problems at school, as far as lessons were concerned. He was the perfect student, or as some bullies liked to say, the 'teachers's pet'.

'At some point, you will be taken away. Don't think you will stay like a parasite until you finish school.'

"You wished your own son to sign up for certain death."

But the army never came for him. Olivia had faked his medical documents, making him unfit for drafting due to 'bad eye-sight and other health issues'.

"Your dream never came true."

He had graduated med school and got a job as a family doctor in a small clinic.

"But mine became true."

'Have you ever seen a girl in your life or what?', his father asked.

"You never allowed me to love who I wanted."

He had met Thomas at the Library. Two years older than him, Thomas was a very gentle man, smart and fun loving. He was mesmerized by the charm Thomas had. But it was not to be for the long term.

‘You seem to meet that boy more often than your group of friends. Better not be what I think it is, or you will be dead.’

He needed to break up for both their safety. He could not stop crying for two weeks.

“But now I am free to love who I want.”

-------

His hands were grabbed by each of his husbands'. He didn’t look, but smiled slightly at the gesture.

'You are free to do more than to love who you want.'

'He wounded you, but you are better than him. You need to remember what you have achieved.'

'And the people that surround you.'

They were right. They were always right. He had lost his family because of the bombs, but found a new one. He had reunited with his mom. And now, not only does he lives his dream as a doctor, but he is in charge of a growing group of people that defend the innocents. But most importantly, he was married to two wonderful men, and together, they raise their adopted son, Oliver.

'You were wrong about everything. I am not a Hudson, I am not worthless, I am not a parasite. People appreciate and respect me, because I help them. I earned their respect with my actions, not with my rank. And yet, I have a higher rank than you ever had. I am married, we have a son, we have a big house and a castle. I have a big family, that love and respect me. You never thought that I would have any of these, but I do. You hurt me, and I will never forgive you.’

His husbands had let go of his hands and he had slid his power fist, ‘Ares’, onto his right arm.

‘You don’t deserve to have your name remembered on a stone. You don’t deserve to be buried next to your brother. You had done nothing to deserve anything you had. Not the Zander name. Not even the Hudson name. You were the worst husband. The worst father. The worst uncle. The worst brother. Eíthe na kápseis stin kólasi, árrostos bástardos.’

He stepped closer, and hit the power fist on the tombstone, shattering it into pieces with just one blow.

He could not remember what he had said, nor in what language he had yelled but what the other two knew that he was letting out all the pent up rage he had felt over the years. It would not erase the memories but at least, he could move on.

They only sat a few meters away from him, and kept an eye out. Minutes passed, and his knees gave up. He was breathing heavily and the other two got closer cautiously. They each put one of their hands on his back. The reaction they got was a sob, followed by crying. They also kneeled beside him and wrapped their arms around him, as best they could.

‘We are here, love. It’s ok now. You are ok now.’

They couldn’t remember how much had passed, until he finally calmed down. He raised his head just slightly toward the nearby tombstone.

‘I am… so-sorry, uncle. I am sorry that you had to see that.’

#fooctober2020 #oc vaughn zander #fallout oc #fallout 4 #sole survivor #fallout #fallout ocs #blue.txt #y'all i did wrote something for once

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humanoidmindbox · 4 years

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Us Vs. Them

Abstract

In this essay, I will be assessing my personal feelings and attitudes toward different and defined groups. During this analysis, I will be breaking up the population into four groups: Us, Them, Allies, and Enemies. These groups have been formulated by and based on the workings and fields of psychology, psychiatry, individuals with mental illnesses (including me) and how societal norms fit into issues raised in this paper. I hope you find this to be worthwhile and I hope this sparks the fire of your intellectual flame.

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The American population, in the terms of mental illness, psychology, and sociology, fall into one of four categories which are detailed below:

This group of people are those who suffer from profound mental illness. The affliction must be (Your illness doesn't have to be all of these things, but it must be most of them):

Chronic; recurring; cause suffering; affect your relationships with others; make it so you cannot keep a job; make it so you cannot function in society; possibly get government compensation for your illness; *been hospitalized in the psych ward; been arrested when your symptoms were active; reckless and/or impulsive behaviors; suicide attempt(s); and became violent when your symptoms were active.

Them

These people are the majority of the population. They blindly follow pop culture and buy into what the masses are doing, believing, and saying. They do not have severe mental illness although they may be diagnosed with the garden-variety depression and anxiety. They have never been to inpatient for mental disorders, except maybe once, a long time ago. They will try to relate to you when it comes to mental health but they are just regurgitating what the trendy treatments and hardships are (the commonplace “social anxiety” is on the rage right now). In the inpatient hospital, the Them are the hospital staff. Especially the ones who give you the shot and put you in isolation. They are the ones who pink slip you and call the police. They think drugs are bad. You can’t truly trust Them. They don’t understand you and they probably never will. Most of Them are not hateful or mean. They are just ignorant, inexperienced, and constantly lecturing you or preaching to you. Most of Them view you as less-than, whether it is intended or not.

Allies

Imagine a straight line down the middle of a square. This divides the “Us” and “Them” that we already went over. But directly on that line, not leaning to one side or the other, sits the “Allies.” The Us’s allies have most likely not gone to the mental hospital except maybe once, long ago. But they have a mental illness that brings them suffering. They may be in mental health treatment. They struggle almost every day and their behaviors reflect that. They are a part of society and will never and have never been deemed unfit to be a working part of society. They get along with others although they feel like no one completely understands them. They do not blindly follow all of pop culture’s rules and trends. They support the Us. We can trust them somewhat. They are our allies.

Enemies

The Enemies only exist within the “Them” group. They are the ones we must watch the most carefully and never trust. Most of “Us'' do not have many Enemies on the outside but we have plenty of Enemies on the inside (inpatient). The Enemies at the hospital are those who give you the shot after they have to hold you down when you’re screaming and thrashing around because you’re so fucking freaked out. They are the ones who put you in four point restraints and let you “tire yourself out.” On the outside, the police are the Enemy for apprehending you while they get a pink slip. They are anyone who pink slips you. The Enemy tells you that you’re crazy when you know you are doing well. They threaten the hospital and hang it over your head. The Enemy treats you unfairly because something that you cannot control or help is wrong with you. The reason why Them can never be fully trusted is because any one of Them could become the Enemy at any time.

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

I first felt the “Us Vs. Them” divide when I started frequenting mental hospitals. And when I started showing signs of severe symptoms of mental illness. In the hospital, you are a “rat in a cage” (Smashing Pumpkins song) with the staff holding the only key to get out. A drastic power imbalance exists between the staff and the patient: we are the prisoners and they are the guards. All we want to do is get out. All we want to do is go home. And if not home, then at least to a different, free place.

When I had my major mental breakdown/manic episode of winter 2019, I had been taking my medications- they were just the wrong ones. In the cage, you must take your medications, whether you want to or not. Whether you trust Them or not. If you refuse medication, They take you to court and get a court order forcing you to take your medication while you are inpatient.

There are some key ways that the “Us” and the “Them” are different in the mental hospital dynamic. They own your body: you are forced to take medications, you are locked in a box (hopefully not isolation). You can’t hurt yourself and if you do, you will stay longer (same goes for violence against others). They control your behaviors: They deem what is “appropriate” and “inappropriate” behaviors. If you break the rules surrounding these behaviors, you will get the shot, isolation, moved to a worse ward (for the more violent and disruptive patients), restraint holds, staying longer, or any combination of these events. The worst one I can think of is moving wards up a number. They try to brain-wash you: They say: “There is only one way to live life and we know the correct way to live it.” “The correct way to live is only what we arbitrarily and subjectively call “healthy coping mechanisms” and you must abandon all “unhealthy” ones in order to live life correctly and avoid being society’s pariah.” “Your only hope to be a functioning person is to abide by the teachings of CBT and DBT. All other methods will not work.” They have the opinion that their methods of recovery always work and if you are not having positive effects from their treatments, you must be doing it wrong- they deny that their treatments do not work for everybody and fail to recognize that the “bad” coping mechanisms are the only way that certain people can get by.

When you are mandated as an inpatient in the hospital, you have no rights. They take away your rights as a person. They tell you where to go, what to eat, and they control how long you are in there, what medication you take, and worst of all- when you get put down like a dog with a shot or when you switch to a more severe level. You are treated like an animal in a cage, and there is nothing that you can do about it. Losing control of your own body to this degree leads to something inside of you breaking and you turning into a feral animal (hospital song). After that happens (especially if it happens multiple times), you are never the same.

There are laws to keep other people from harming you or your property. I believe that it is a good thing that these laws are in place and that they should be upheld. But there are also laws that are made to prevent you from harming yourself and I don’t think such laws should exist. Once again, I question what the authorities, our working society (Them) and the masses (Them) deem “harmful” and ultimately illegal.

Most people in society simply follow popular culture. They just look to what the majority of others do and follow suit. But they have blinders on: they don’t see that they come up with justifications and sorry attempts at reasons to back-up their choice to blindly follow the majority.

The authorities and society says:

Drugs = Bad→ Laws against it.

Self-harm = Bad→ No laws against it but there is intense societal disapproval and shaming connected to it.

*It is the least harmful on this list because it does not alter your mood or drastically change your brain chemistry for prolonged periods of time. But, apparently, it is the most shocking and the most taboo.

Medication = Good→ Sometimes there are laws enforcing it.

I believe all of these things can be good or bad depending on the specific person that it affects. Everyone is different and if you simply follow what pop culture’s opinion is on these issues without looking into them further, it shows ignorance, a lack of curiosity and exploration, rigidity, and a propensity towards the judgement of others. It often signifies that the “Them” in question is too weak to think for themselves and to withstand society’s brainwashing.

I will never think of cutting or drugs as “bad coping skills.” “Good coping skills” consist of talking about your issues and crying according to the “Them.” And according to the hospitals, CBT, and DBT, good coping skills include activities like aroma therapy and drawing. But what do these things do? Nothing. You need a release or a change in the state of mind. Talking about what upsets you is just reliving it all over again. Plus, what if you do not trust anyone enough to tell them what's on your mind? Crying is bullshit. I feel that it is pathetic for me to cry. That’s just how I feel. I have trained myself not to. So why should I do something detrimental to myself when I am already in distress? “Good” coping skills don’t really work and only the simple-minded buy into them. “Bad” coping skills shouldn’t be judged as bad or taboo just because others have all-or-none thinking about them when it's the only thing that helps some people.

Medication: Taking medication should be the mentally ill’s choice. Medication is not right for everybody; it is not always the best thing to do. Not everyone likes themselves on medication. Who are we to judge if a person is the “correct” version of themselves or not? Forcing someone to take psychiatric medications is rooted in a power and control structure that overshadows others. I believe that we should leave others alone when it comes to this and let them live how they want to live. Just because we’re mentally ill, doesn't mean we have to do what you want with our bodies anymore.

In conclusion, I believe individuals and society as a whole should look beyond the systems of the law, procedures in mental health facilities, standard practices of therapies, pop culture trends/rules , and societal norms to find each of our unique spots in this society. We need to rethink what is considered “unhealthy” and what is “healthy” and why we put actions into those categories. We need to be more open and steer clear of letting others dictate what we believe. I’m tired of being lectured and shamed. Let's move on together.

#mental hospital #mental illness #mental health #mental disorder #essay #prose #prose essay #sociology #abnormal psychology #psych #psychology #psychology student

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dinfeanoriel · 4 years

Text

Dusk Falls

I am back! I’ve been gone for a long time so I decided to make up for it by writing this lengthy fic! It is the longest I have written on Tumblr. Hope you guys enjoy!

~~~~

It all happened in a muddled blur. The past couple of days nothing more than a hazy memory for him. Time had difficulty recalling what exactly had gone down to lead up to this point.

“Stay with me, Old Man!”

Time had seen him with his very eye. Vibrant and healthy. His complexion not at all pale. His cerulean eyes, so alive and full of emotion. There was worry, fear, anguish, and pain.

There was no sign of injury or illness.

No hint of poison or gradual decline in fitness.

Nothing.

“Take it, Old Man! I won’t allow you to die on me!”

He’d sounded so earnest. So heartfelt and passionate. The fire that blazed within him only grew brighter and more difficult to ignore. It was what drew the others to him.

His confidence. His assurance and unwavering faith. They turned to him for guidance.

The Hero had given him their last Red Potion. Time had been foolish to drink it. He realized this now.

His heart was heavy and his eyes stung as bitter regret and agonized grief clutched him tightly within its grasp.

How had he not noticed?

~~~~

“Do you have to wear all this armor, Pops?” He griped, Time’s arm limply draped over his strong shoulders, his own wrapped securely around Time’s waist as he forced the Leader to walk, “You weigh a ton!” His jab was weak at best. A futile effort to lighten the tense atmosphere and hide the fear reflected in his tone.

He was scared for Time.

Terrified he would lose him.

~~~~

Perhaps there had been signs, and he hadn’t seen them. There was a chance he’d been oblivious to them. To the agony in those eyes and the facade the Hero had thrown up to keep him from growing suspicious.

Of course, the blood loss Time had suffered prevented him from thinking clearly. From noting the tender manner in which the Hero had moved. The way the other’s arm would shoot to his side and his hand would press firmly against it, a wince crossing his strained features.

Time had known his companion had been hit. Neither of them had escaped unscathed.

But he’d trusted in the Hero’s promise that he had already taken care of his own hurts.

A mistake he should never have made.

~~~~

“I need you to stay conscious, alright? Just listen to my voice and don’t you dare close your eyes!”

Time was mercilessly shaken, and a sharp gasp was torn from him.

“I know, I know, sorry,” The other grimly apologized, a hint of remorse in his tone, “But I can’t risk you falling asleep.”

Time would have made a smart remark, but found himself unable to. The white-hot fire that raced through his veins and burned him so viciously stole his very breath away.

The Red Potion had only done so much.

“The others- they need you. You can’t give up on them, do you hear me? Think of Twilight and Wild. What will happen to them if you go?”

Time’s eye fluttered. His boys. Twilight and Wild...Sky, Legend, Wind, Four, Hyrule, and Warrior.

Fear and worry briefly overcame the pain that swallowed him whole.Yes, what would become of them if he were to fall here and now?

But, his companion was wrong.

Time didn’t only care for Twilight and Wild. He cared for them all. He viewed them as children he needed to protect and watch over. Little ones that looked to him for guidance, support, and encouragement- who turned to him for stability and clung to his unwavering presence.

He was the foundation they built themselves off of in their little group.

“Come on. A few more steps,” The other encouraged. Time forced himself to move- to lighten some of the burden, but the arduous task was growing more difficult. His movements were gradually growing more sluggish and clunky. “You have to stay with me, Time!”

Please!

There were tears in his voice, no longer strong and brave but a strained and wretched whisper.

“You can’t die on me! Not like my Pops did!” He choked, a sob caught in his throat. He was growing desperate and afraid.

Sorely afraid.

The words struck a chord in Time’s heart. It fed the fire of determination that had been nothing more than embers waiting to be stoked within him.

He felt his body trembling, but it wasn’t from exertion or his life-threatening injuries.

“I won’t let you! I refuse to let you! Do you hear me, Old Man?!”

The shout echoed down the dismal corridor of the dungeon, bouncing off the stone walls and back at them.

~~~~

Yes, Time had heard him. His every word. It had helped keep him conscious. They had reigned him in and kept him anchored on this side of the veil.

The smile he’d been graced with when Time had raised his head and looked to him. It was shaky and frail, but still a smile.

Time knew then and there, that he couldn’t leave him.

~~~~

“They’ve found us!”

Dread coiled in the pit of Time’s stomach at the harsh whisper. A nauseating and sickening feeling of horror and concern. He knew exactly who “they” were.

“Go...” He murmured hoarsely, his throat gritty. He was nothing more than a burden. He was slowing them down. He wasn’t fit to fight- to protect. Both knew this.

The younger Hero looked to him in shock and incensed despair.

“Have you lost your mind?!” The Hero snatched at Time’s tunic, digging his fingers into the fabric and shaking him slightly in fury, “I am not leaving you, Time!”

Time wanted to argue with him. He wanted to convince him to leave. To save himself from their impending doom. To spare him from what he knew was to come.

He should have known better.

“You’re going to live! You’re going to make it out of this alive!”

Time didn’t know why, but he knew his companion spoke the truth. His cerulean eyes glinted in the little light leaking into the dreary and decaying dungeons. The blazing look of resoluteness and courage could not be mistaken.

Exhaustion and weariness seeped deep into his bones. Time was robbed of his strength and all he could do was slump back against the wall as the Hero gently set him down and reclined him against it.

The coolness of the stone momentarily distracted him from his pain.

“I’ll be back,” The golden-blonde Hero promised, unwrapping his beloved blue scarf from around his neck and tucking it around Time. The silken fabric provided him with some warmth in contrast to the cold hanging thickly in the air.

The tension and apprehension lingering in the air heightened. A sense of foreboding overcame him and alarm trickled down Time’s spine when he recognized the resignation the Hero carefully hid.

“War-” He attempted to say, yearning to dissuade the other from confronting their enemies when both of them were unfit to fight them off. He was interrupted by a cough, his vocal chords screeching from their use.

A strong hand gripped his shoulder and he was met by another grim smile.

“Even if I don’t return, the others will find you.”

Time weakly shook his head. He wanted to tell him to flee. To run. But he knew the Knight would not listen.

Swallowing thickly, blinking back his own emotions, Warrior stood and forced himself to go. He steeled himself, exhaling a deep, shaky, breath to calm his nerves and regain his bearings.

“No!” Time lurched forward, hand outstretched, only to stop short and crumple into an undignified heap on the ground. Excruciating pain lanced through his screaming body, “Warrior...!” He rasped- pleading and fearful- unable to speak louder than an anguished whisper. “Don’t...”

It was too late.

Warrior was already gone.

And Time was helpless to do anything.

He hated it.

So. Very. Much!

“Warrior...” He breathed, clenching his fist and shaking terribly. His whole body cried for relief, but Time knew better than to give in.

Why couldn’t he protect those he cared for?

Why was he always the one left behind?

~~~~

Time hadn’t known how much time had passed. It might have been mere seconds, mere minutes, or neither. To Time, it was an eternity of waiting in agony. The sense of unknowing.

Warrior knew. He knew all of the possibilities. Of what could become of him.

It did not frighten him. He never gave it much thought.

He’d always known the dangers of warfare and battle. Of the potential outcomes. As a knight, he’d become well-acquainted with the dangers that accompanied combat and fighting. He knew that each and every battle he was involved in could end with him being mortally wounded or dead.

Time waited.

And waited.

The light seeping through the cracks and holes in the crumbling walls encasing him slowly darkened as dusk fell.

He could hear the distant sounds of metal screeching against metal. The shrieks and wails of those being ruthlessly slaughtered.

Warrior’s yells and battle cries mingled with the sounds. Time’s heart thundered, pulsing in his ears and threatening to burst from his chest. The anticipation, harrowing fear, and panic...

It was too much for him to handle..!

He tried to drag himself upright so he could peer around the corner and see for himself that Warrior was safe and sound.

He was living his worst nightmare and Time feared what the ending might be.

Why did he have to be crippled and useless when Warrior needed him the most?

His gaze slid to Warrior’s pack. The Knight had left it there.

Time knew he had done so for a reason. Warrior was Captain of the Guard. He was not foolish. He was thorough, clever, and thoughtful. For Warrior to have left his pack...

He had done so on purpose.

Time’s vision blurred. His head was becoming lighter, his body faint. Numbness was beginning to spread, and he knew these were grave signs.

He shook his head, blinking owlishly to rid himself of the strange tingling sensation spreading through him.

He forced himself to move. Stubbornly ignoring how his body protested acutely to him dragging himself to Warrior’s pack, he extended his shaking hand and grasped pathetically at the bag.

He finally managed to hook a couple fingers beneath the strap and tugged. Once it was close enough, he curled an arm around it and pulled it close. Flicking the flap open, Time blearily dug through the items Warrior had organized within.

That was when he struck something solid and made of glass.

A bottle.

Time didn’t know what impressed him to grab it, but he did. He pulled the bottle out and looked-

And cursed Warrior.

It was a fairy.

The only fairy left.

Warrior had told him they had no potions or fairies left.

Why would he have lied?

And then it hit him like a sledgehammer.

Time’s world screeched to a halt, and he slammed into a metaphorical wall.

Warrior didn’t believe he would live.

And he’d sworn to Time that the elder Hero would make it out alive.

He’d lied on purpose.

He’d left his pack for Time. He’d saved the fairy. For Time. He’d known it would come to this.

Time’s eye burned. Conflicting emotions swelled within him. Anger, disbelief, denial...

Warrior had sacrificed himself, knowing the odds were stacked against him, to ensure Time’s survival.

“You foolish soldier!” Time hissed venomously, spitting out the word ‘soldier.’ A fire burst to life within him, burning as rage built within him, overshadowing the agony crippling him.

Warrior knew what was important. He knew what mattered. His life compared to Time’s was meaningless. He was expendable. The Links needed Time to stand against Dark Link and to save their homes. Time was their leader. Warrior was a soldier- a Knight- who was willing to die for him in order to secure their success.

Time released a shaky breath, clutching the bottle tightly.

If those creatures didn’t kill Warrior, he would!

“You self-sacrificing idiot!” Time harshly whispered, mustering his strength and unscrewing the fairy, “Why do you think we have lived this long? Who do you think has ensured our survival this whole time? Who do we turn to for strategies and guidance through battles and conflicts?”

Without Warrior...

The Heroes would be severely weakened and broken.

Yes, Time could lead them. Yes, he could fire tactic after tactic, order after order, but he wasn’t an expert. Warrior was.

And the Heroes would be nothing without him. It would never be the same. Warrior was as much a part of them as they were to him.

They were closely knit- an unbreakable bond tying them together.

The fairy was soon set free and encircled Time three times, healing his wounds and sealing the worst so they were nothing more than scabs that would later turn into scars.

Time felt his strength return. His body no longer felt incredibly light and the dazed sensation was gone.

The Old Man gathered himself to his feet, Warrior’s pack slung over his shoulder, and sword gripped tightly in his hand. There was a fierce expression fixed on his face, replacing his typically stern and neutral visage. His eye blazed.

Although his wounds were not completely healed, and some still bled, Time’s strength and vigor was not to be undermined.

He was seething deep within.

Once he found Warrior and they escaped this horrid place, the two of them would be taking a seat and having a long and lengthy chat.

~~~~

The Leader needn’t have looked far for Warrior. He’d barely moved three meters when the Knight came careening around a corner and smacked into him.

The sound the impact of Warrior’s head connecting with Time’s golden armor resonated through the air as the Captain staggered back with a pained grimace, a hand flying up to his forehead.

“Ow-what-?!” He flailed wildly when Time’s hand shot out and wrested a handful of his tunic, yanking him close. The older Hero leaned down, growling out,

“You and I will be having words, young man,”

Warrior shuddered with a gulp. Good, Time thought to himself, he should be afraid. Incurring his wrath was never a pretty or wise thing to do. It was after he’d released Warrior that Time noticed the paleness of his skin and the glazed look of his eyes.

His stern demeanor softened, worry replacing his previous ire.

“How badly are you hurt?” He demanded to know, but Warrior brushed him off, urgent and jittery.

“There’s no time! We have to go- now!” He breezed past Time, yanking the Old Man behind him until Time recovered himself and matched his pace.

“What is it?”

“Those traitors called for backup,” Warrior breathlessly informed him, sprinting as fast as his legs could carry him, “I don’t know what’s coming, but I know it can’t be good!”

Time’s eye narrowed, “Then we need to leave this place as soon as possible.”

Warrior nodded with a wince. His teeth were grit together, his eyes full of pain.

Time would have asked what ailed him, but never had the chance to.

An explosion from behind wrenched the ground beneath their feet and sent them flying from the force of the blast.

Time heard Warrior’s agonized cry. His heart withered and died at the sound, his very soul shuddering as his fear skyrocketed. The Old Man was sent crashing into a wall and crumpled onto the ground with a grunt.

Dust and debris polluted the air, filling Time’s lungs when he could finally inhale and inducing a painful coughing fit. The deafening sound of heavy objects falling and the walls collapsing were all Time could hear and he threw his arms up above his head to protect it from the rubble crashing all around him.

The old, decomposing dungeon released a deep, guttural, groan as it shuddered and quaked violently.

Time winced when a large boulder-sized rock burst into pieces near him. That had been too close for comfort.

Darkness encased him, swallowing him whole.

After what felt to be an eternity, the quivering building settled and the world grew still and silent.

He waited for the dust to clear the air before he risked moving.

Slowly, carefully, Time drew himself to his hands and knees, doing his best to see through the darkness.

It was impossible.

But there was a fear that gripped him in an unrelenting grasp, very nearly stealing his breath away. His chest constricted and his heart felt ready to burst from the anticipation and cold tendrils of terror that curled around it, squeezing viciously.

“Warrior..?” He called softly, his voice wavering in uncertainty.

His eyes darted about uselessly, scouring the impenetrable darkness.

“Warrior!” He tried again, earnest and searching.

Nothing.

Trepidation and paralyzing dread slowly began to take over him.

“Warrior!”

Silence sang its song.

“Link!” He cried hoarsely, inwardly pleading for the Knight to answer him- to let him know somehow, someway, that he was alive.

He could not lose him! No.Time would not allow him to die! Not on his watch!

Warrior wasn’t supposed to die before him! They were supposed to outlive him! They were supposed to return to their homes, triumphant and safe. Back to their loved ones.

A wet cough that did not bode well for Time pierced the agonizing quiet atmosphere.

“...Old...Man..?”

By the Goddess...He sound so frail and weak.

“Link, where are you?” Time demanded to know, snapping his head in the direction he thought Warrior’s voice had come from.

“I...” Warrior tried, wheezing in a sickeningly frail manner, “I...don’t know...Can’t tell...S’all dark...” He slurred.

Time’s heart pounded madly against his chest. He willed himself to remain calm and poured all of his effort in keeping his voice steady,

“It’s alright, Link,” He soothed the ailing Knight, “Just keep talking and I’ll come find you.”

He was so very afraid. Terrified of what he might find.

What condition would the Knight be in? Was he crushed beneath the rocks and debris? Had a wall collapsed on him? Was he bleeding out?

“Link?” He questioned, fighting to keep his voice steady when Warrior didn’t respond.

“Still here...” Came the quiet reply. “Old Man...We...We have to find...a way out.”

“I know we do,” Time murmured, his voice carrying over to where the Knight lay, “Are you able to move?”

He heard a shuffling sound as Warrior shifted.

A pained wheeze pierce the air and Time felt something pierce his very heart. There was a faint rattling noise that accompanied Warrior’s every breath.

Never had Time felt true fear until then.

Just how badly was Warrior hurt?

“Link, I want you to be honest with me, do you understand?”

“...sure.”

“How badly are you hurt?”

Warrior said nothing for a while. Time figured he was assessing himself.

“...pretty...badly...”

The honest admittance scared Time more than if Warrior had lied.

“I can’t...I can’t feel my legs...”

Time’s heart broke at the wavering of Warrior’s voice.

“Time...”

“Hush, Link, it’s alright.”

But it wasn’t, and both knew this.

A shuddery exhale caressed Time’s ear.

“Time, where are you?”

Time didn’t think his heart capable of breaking even more, but it completely shattered at how childlike Warrior sounded.

The Old Man swallowed thickly, choking on his own emotions threatening to surface.

“I’m coming, Link,” His voice cracked and died and Time cleared his throat to start again, “I’m almost there. I want you to stay strong for me, alright?”

“Yeah...yeah...” Warrior weakly whispered.

“The others will find us. You said so yourself.”

Warrior laughed- a wet and awful sound. He choked and Time’s fear and worry skyrocketed.

Once Warrior had recovered, gasping and wheezing still, he whispered hoarsely, “I said...they’d...find you...Pops.”

“I won’t have that kind of talk from you, Link!” Time sharply rebuked, his mind and heart warring against what he knew was happening, “Do you understand? You’ve survived worse. You will survive this!” He sternly told him, refusing to believe otherwise.

He was getting closer. He could tell from the raspy breaths escaping Warrior growing in volume as he drew nearer.

“It’s so dark, Time...”

“I know it is, Link.” Time murmured lowly, the stinging of his eye intensifying, “Not even I can see.”

“Where’s the light..?”

“Link,”

“...yeah?”

Time finally reached him.

“If you do see light,” He swallowed thickly, striving to remain strong, “Promise me-” He had to take a moment to gather himself, “-promise you won’t go to it, alright? Don’t you dare go towards the light.”

Warrior never said anything.

Time blindly reached out. His hand landed on something wet and sticky.

Blood.

And a lot of it.

He felt sick. Nauseous and afraid.

But he needed to be strong. Warrior needed him.

“You’re going to live.”

Warrior wanted to believe him. But he knew the severity of his wounds. The amount of blood he was losing, the broken ribs that he knew most likely punctured a lung...

He’d known he would die one day.

But now that he was experiencing what it was like to die...

Never had it felt so real.

“You know, Time...It’s funny...” Warrior managed to say, blood trickling from his lips. His legs were pinned beneath heavy pieces of debris and he could no longer feel them.

His spine had to have been horribly damaged.

“What’s funny?” Time asked him, and a smile stretched Warrior’s blood-flecked lips. The Old Man was trying to keep him talking.

He felt a hand drift to his hair, fingers threading through the strands and stroking in a comforting manner.

Warrior reveled in Time’s unwavering presence. The sense of safety and security. It encompassed him like a warm blanket.

In several ways, Time reminded him of his own Father. Both were similar, and yet, so very different.

But Warrior was glad to have Time with him. He didn’t know if he could handle being alone.

Licking his lips, Warrior croaked, “It’s...It’s not death people fear...”

“Link-” Time sharply chided, but his voice withered.

“It’s dying,” Warrior admitted in a frail, quivering whisper. Because he was scared.

Dying scared him.

“Please, Link,” Time’s anguished plea was not lost to Warrior. A strong arm slipped underneath him and Warrior’s upper half was lifted off the cold, unforgiving, ground and cradled against the Old Man’s chest.

Warrior’s head was tucked beneath Time’s chin as the eldest Hero begged the Goddess to let him live- to grant him a miracle.

“Don’t you dare give in...”

The arms tightened around him and although Warrior knew it should have hurt, he felt comforted. He sagged in Time’s hold, the numbness spreading from his legs up his spine and through his arms.

His head was growing light, his body faint. A surreal and altogether frightening feeling.

“You have to stay with me. The others will be here soon. They can heal you.”

Whoever he was trying to reassure, neither knew. Warrior? Time himself? Or both? It mattered not.

“We can’t lose you.”

I can’t lose you.

“You’ll...” Warrior coughed again, crimson splattering on Time’s golden armor. Warrior was glad he could no longer feel the pain. He knew it would have been too excruciating.

He would have been crippled with agony.

The pain would have been unbearable. It had been only moments prior until his body started to fail him.

“You’ll take care...of the others...right?”

Time was stricken. He blinked furiously, tears threatening to fall.

“No, no, Link, you and I are both going to take care of them,” He tried to say, but the words were jumbled together as his voice shook terribly. He was almost incoherent, but Warrior understood him perfectly.

The Captain weakly shook his head, his eyes fluttering shut. His lashes were suddenly heavy. The urge to sleep, to give in to the welcoming darkness became prominent.

“Wind...Tell him...Tell him he’s one of the...strongest Heroes...I’ve ever met...And that...I love...my little...brother...”

The dam cracked, the slivers spreading as a couple of droplets of silver rain slipped down Time’s cheeks.

The man who prided himself in staying strong no matter what circumstance or situation he found himself in. The man many believed incapable of feeling emotions so keenly and intensely as others did.

But he did.

He did feel.

And it always hurt. More than words could ever convey.

“And Legend...”

“Please, Link,” Time pleaded, clutching the dying Hero in his arms, pressing his forehead to Warrior’s temple. He listened with a sinking heart as Warrior told Time everything he wanted the Old Man to say to the others.

To Sky.

To Twilight.

To Wild.

To Four.

To Hyrule.

He felt as if something were tearing him apart inside-out. As though some unforgiving monster had ripped out his heart and repeatedly stomped on it, pulverizing it until it was nothing more than dust to be gathered by the wind and spread throughout far away lands.

A parent shouldn’t have to bury their child.

Never.

Warrior’s voice was slowly growing fainter and fainter, the Knight growing limp in Time’s hold.

“I never...regretted it...not...once...” The Knight murmured, his breath hitching, “I’m glad...you’re here...Time.”

“Link, you have to stay.”

Don’t go. Don’t leave us.

Don’t leave me.

Warrior’s eyes drifted shut with a soft smile.

There...

He could see it in the distance.

A light.

Beckoning to him.

But there was a lingering sense of guilt holding him back.

His eyes glistened with unshed tears.

He didn’t want to go.

He didn’t want to leave. But he was slipping away. His consciousness barely hung by a thread, and that thread was stretching itself thin.

“Hey, Time...”

It was no more than the ghost of a whisper, but Time heard it nonetheless.

Time hummed in a wobbly manner, not trusting his voice.

“What is it, Link..?”

Warrior looked up at Time, unable to see him but knowing he was there. And that was all that mattered.

Time was there. Time was with him.

“I...I can’t...” “You can’t what?” Time weakly asked, voice thick with emotion.

“...stay...awake...I can’t...”

And those were the last words Time heard Warrior say.

Silence reigned.

Time’s breath caught.

His heart plummeted.

His throat constricted.

The dam burst.

And for the first time in a long while, Time cried and sobbed and mourned as he clutched tightly to the cold and pale form of the child he held in his arms.

A child whose life had been stolen from him far too soon.

He buried his face into Warrior’s hair, wretched sounds of grief and turmoil tearing from his throat as he despaired and grieved over this great loss.

Nothing could ever compare to the excruciating agony and heartbreak he felt now. A void formed within Time’s heart as a chunk of it broke off and disappeared.

How could the Goddess be so merciless? So heartless?

Time had never truly believed in prayer. He’d never believed in faith. After all he had gone through, how could he?

But as he held the dying boy in his arms, he prayed like never before. Hoping, yearning, pleading with Her to spare his life.

But She hadn’t.

She’d cruelly ripped Link away from him.

~~~~ He extended his hands, respectfully returning the Ocarina of Time back to the instrument’s original owner.

“I have done all there was to do with the Ocarina,” He quietly said to the Queen as her gloved fingers curled around the beloved instrument. She looked to him expectantly, silently encouraging him to continue, “I have no need for it now that I have returned,” He stepped back and met her gaze evenly.

The Queen only smiled, sorrow and understanding in her eyes. She knew, without him having to say, what he had suffered and done.

“That is where you are wrong,” She lowered her gaze, brushing her hand along the top of the Ocarina, “This Ocarina belongs to you more than it does to me.”

They stood in the Courtyard of the newly furnished Hyrule Castle. The War had destroyed Old Hyrule, forcing Zelda to lead her people to a new home and start anew. This was where Link had found them years later.

The newly-turned Queen delicately placed the Ocarina back into his hands, her blue eyes dark and stormy.

“Keep it with you always, Link. There may come a time when you will need it, and if you should not have it...” She trailed off meaningfully, and Link was stricken. He knew not to take her words lightly, “Let us hope that day will never come.”

But it would.

Both knew but refused to acknowledge it.

~~~~

The memory from so long ago came unwarranted to Time’s mind, yet, it was not altogether an unwanted one.

The older Hero’s head snapped up, eye wide in remembrance and unbridled hope.

Could it be possible..?

He looked down to the still and cold form he held and a flicker of conviction flared to life within him. Zelda might not have known then but he had taken her words to heart and carried the Ocarina with him wherever he went.

Gently, carefully, Time placed Warrior onto the unforgiving, stone, ground and snatched at the pack attached to his belt. He flicked the flap open, digging through the few items it held.

Miraculously enough, the contents within were unbroken and unaffected by the blast and terrible fall Time had suffered. At the very bottom, Time’s blood-stained fingers curled around the familiar outline of his beloved Ocarina.

Now cradling the instrument in his hands, Time whispered a plea to Farore,

“Let this work. Just this once, grant me this miracle, Goddess of Courage,”

After all I have done and all that I have sacrificed-

And he raised the Ocarina and played the tune he had memorized decades ago as a little boy in green.

The Song of Time echoed ominously throughout the impenetrable darkness, ricocheting off the solid debris surrounding them and caressing his ears. The melody was pure, untainted, and only when he completed it, the last note fading into nothingness did the world around him begin to change.

It twisted, warped, and turned. Colors burst to life and blended together until all Time saw was white.

Time came to a halt.

The clock rewound.

Scenes that had already played out reversed. Rips and tears in his clothing, stains, dust, grime, and blood were removed and Time’s eye burned when he came to understand the Blessing he had been given by the Goddess.

Then, just as suddenly as it had stopped, it started again. The hands unfroze and the clock began ticking, each tick a deafening echo in his ears.

A countdown.

Time found himself standing in the decrepit hallway Warrior had left him in. Only, this time around, he was not slumped helplessly against the wall, waiting in agony for Warrior to return.

Without wasting a second, Time sprinted away. Steely resolve fed this newfound strength and adrenaline racing through his body and he whipped around the corner in time to see a disheveled, bloodied, Warrior bolting his way.

A very much alive Warrior.

Cerulean blues so alike his own widened in shock and surprise when Warrior spotted him and skidded to a halt, only just preventing what would have been a painful collision.

-the sound the impact of Warrior’s head connecting with Time’s golden armor resonated through the air as the Captain staggered back with a pained grimace, a hand flying up to his forehead,

“Ow-what-?!”

“Time?” Pure confusion flit across his features, overshadowed by worry, strain, and a hint of pain.

A flood of relief- so powerful and undiluted- cascaded over the older Hero and nearly swept him off his feet. His hand snapped out before a thought crossed his mind and the knight flailed when Time seized his collar-

-Time’s hand shot out and wrested a handful of his tunic, yanking him close. The older Hero leaned down, growling out,

“You and I will be having words, young man-”

- and pulled him close, ordering tersely,

“Don’t do that again,”

Ever.

His eye flashed with something unrecognizable. Emotions raged within that deep pool of blue, roiling thunderously and creating a storm Warrior had never before seen from their Leader.

All the Knight could do was swallow and nod.

Time accepted the timid response then gripped the injured Knight’s shoulder to lead him down the corridor.

“How badly are you hurt?” He asked at once, noticing for the first time the limp the younger Hero had. He snatched Warrior’s pack from the ground. The one he had left behind.

It slowed them a little but not too much. Time’s only motive was to get them out as soon as possible.

-Warrior brushed him off, urgent and jittery,

“There’s no time! We have to go- now!” He breezed past Time, yanking the Old Man behind him until Time recovered himself and matched his pace.

“What is it?”

“Those traitors called for backup,” -

Time’s concern increased when the Knight leaned a little more heavily against his side and it was then he noticed the wheezing. He wrapped a strong arm around Warrior’s back, helping to keep him upright.

Warrior weakly waved a dismissive hand in the air,

“No time to worry about that,” He hissed and Time almost whipped his hand back as if he’d been scalded. Gingerly, Time placed his hand higher up to keep from agitating whatever wound Warrior had earned, “They called for backup. We need to leave-” “I know,” Time calmly interrupted, eyeing the dank tunnel ahead in search for an escape. He did not want to go through the ordeal he had before.

The agony and excruciating pain, the keen sense of loss, and having his heart torn to shreds... It was still fresh. A wound that would scar but never truly heal.

Had it only been minutes since he turned back the hands of time? Hours?

- covered in dust and grime, blood that wasn’t his own seeping into the fabric of his clothing as he clutched the Knight close and hoarsely pleaded with the Goddess to save him-

“You know?” Warrior blinked, pain and befuddlement contorting his features. He looked to Time, appraising him as they hurried through the dark corridor in the hopes of escaping their enemies that were sure to be pursuing them.

The unspoken how? was heard but not answered.

“Stay close to me,”

As if Warrior could go anywhere else but the Knight still nodded. Something within Time settled but he still tightened his grip on him, as if afraid if he were to let go, Warrior would vanish and Time would find this was nothing more than a deceitful dream.

Then, as if to prove to him that this was no dream, an explosion rocked the earth behind them. Although they were farther ahead of the blast than the first time around, the force was still enough to send them sailing.

Time crashed into the unforgiving ground, his shoulder wrenching and side screaming from the harsh landing.

His ears rang, his mind swam, and a coil of unmitigated terror lanced through him as his world was once again plunged into darkness.

The walls of the dungeon shook violently and crumbled. The stone ceiling above caved in and Time threw his arms above his head to protect himself from the debris that crashed around him.

Warrior.

Where was Warrior?

Everything around him quaked and trembled destructively as the tunnels collapsed, trapping them within its deepest confines.

After what felt to be ages, the shaking stopped and the world grew eerily still and silent.

Time wasted no time in dragging himself onto his arms and knees, cracking his eye open and striving to pierce through the darkness.

“Warrior?” He called immediately.

There was no answer.

His breath caught.

No no no..!

He had gone back to prevent this! He had gone back to save Warrior! To keep him alive! He couldn’t fail!

“LINK!” His voice reverberated through the air, rebounding back to him and Time could have sworn his world had come to an end.

Where was he? He couldn’t have fallen far from Time.

“Farore, please,”

All I ask is for him to be alive..!

Could They not give him this? Surely, he had sacrificed and done enough in his life to be granted this miracle.

A rustle and slight movement to his left pulled Time from his whirling thoughts and he snapped his head to the side with barely restrained hope.

“Link?”

-Link, where are you?” Time demanded to know, snapping his head in the direction he thought Warrior’s voice had come from.

“I...” Warrior tried, wheezing in a sickeningly frail manner, “I...don’t know...Can’t tell...S’all dark...” He slurred.

Time’s heart pounded madly against his chest. He willed himself to remain calm.

“It’s alright, Link,” He soothingly told the ailing Knight, “Just keep talking and I’ll come find you.”

A few stone pebbles tumbled, having been disturbed by something. Time didn’t know what impressed him to, but he turned in the direction of the sound. The closer he came to the source, he realized he could make out a faint, extremely dim, pink glowing light coming from behind a particularly large stone brick.

Time rested his hand along the edge of it, crawling around it and looking to see what was causing the light.

He immediately stiffened, heart leaping into his throat, when his searching gaze landed on an altogether disturbing and terrifying sight.

There, not too far from him, lay a crumpled and motionless Warrior. He was on his side, back facing Time, and temple resting on the cool stone.

Fear clawed its way up Time’s chest and wound around him. Unable to speak, unable to breathe, Time ignored the protest of his aching body and threw himself to Warrior’s side. He turned the Knight onto his back and cradled his face in his hands.

The Captain’s eyes were closed, pale features undisturbed and serene. One could almost mistake him for sleeping...

“Not this time, Warrior,” Time harshly told the Knight, ignoring the stinging of his eye and giving the teen a stern shake, “I did not come this far only to have you die again,”

But what could he do? He had nothing to help Warrior and he had no inclination as to how far the others were or when they’d noticed their elongated absence.

-“The others will find us. You said so yourself.”

Warrior laughed- a wet and painful sound. He choked and Time’s fear and worry skyrocketed.

Once Warrior had recovered, gasping and wheezing, he whispered hoarsely, “I said...they’d...find you...Pops.”

Time banished the memory from his mind.

He had to do something- anything! He looked around helplessly and it was then his attention was captured by the fluctuating pink light within Warrior’s pack Time had dropped when he’d been sent flying.

That glow...

Time’s hand snapped out and he clutched the pack, yanking it close. He rifled through it, his fingers closing in on a glass bottle Warrior always carried.

Disbelief mingled with hope seared through Time and he tugged the bottle out.

The Hero could have laughed or cried. Perhaps both.

A fairy.

There was a fairy fluttering aimlessly within the glass, unaware of the going-ons of the outside world.

The fairy he’d previously used to heal the worst of his wounds before he’d turned back time.

Since he’d rewound the clock, he’d never used the fairy. He hadn’t had the need to.

Time didn’t know when he’d uncorked the bottle or when he’d asked the fairy to heal Warrior- if he’d asked her at all. His attention was solely focused on the unconscious and deathly still Knight before him.

Once the fairy completed her work, she disappeared to return back to whatever fountain they’d whisked her from and Time waited tensely.

After what felt to be an eternity but was in actuality only a couple of seconds, Warrior’s brow creased, his features contorted, and a cough rattled his chest.

The sheer elation and overwhelming relief Time experienced was nothing compared to the moment when Warrior’s chest rose and fell with the first intake of breath.

He carefully maneuvered his arms underneath the unconscious teen and lifted him from the uneven ground to clutch him close.

“You’re alive,” Time whispered hoarsely, squeezing his eye shut and giving thanks to the Goddess, “You’re alive,” He placed a hand on the back of Warrior’s head, pressing it against his shoulder and reveling in the fact that he was alive and breathing, “I didn’t fail you...”

~~~~

The light of the new dawn pierced the murky darkness as a hole high above was incessantly chipped away at. Muffled voices, distant and incomprehensible, talked one over another, determination and worry coating their tones.

There was a brief pause and then a shadow blocked the warm filtering sunlight to peer into the abyss below.

They started when they saw the bent form of Time, covered with dust and grime, clinging to the ghostly pale and bloodied form of Warrior.

“Goddess,”

Another shadow forced itself beside the first and went stock still, back rigid and shoulders tense.

“Old Man! Warrior!” Was called down to them, fingers digging into the stone surrounding the hole that had been made.

The Old Man’s face was hidden from them by a curtain of disheveled hair, one hand buried in Warrior’s hair and the other holding him close.

When Time felt and registered the warmth of the light on him, heard the familiar voices from above, he lifted his head with great effort.

He must look terrible but the profound relief and gratitude blooming within him were enough to make Time smile.

~~~~

Time remained vigil by Warrior’s bedside, tensely waiting for the younger Hero to awaken. He kept watch of the steady rise and fall of Warrior’s chest as he breathed with ease. There was no rattle, no wet cough, no blood...

Warrior’s pale face was littered with bruises and small slivers here and there. A bandage was wrapped around his head and arms...but he was alive.

However, only when Warrior woke up would Time be able to rest and relax. knowing for a certainty he would be alright.

Sky, Twilight, Wild, Hyrule, Four, Wind, and Legend would often peer into the room to check on the both of them only to find Time in the same spot, still and unmoving.

Two days had passed since their rescue. It had been Wind who’d noticed Warrior’s absence and Four who mentioned Time’s. Immediately afterwards, the group set off to find them.

With Time’s mind having been preoccupied by Warrior’s well-being and the physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion taking its toll on him, he’d only caught snippets of what the others had done leading up to the point where they’d discovered and dug Warrior and Time out.

The story had been partially explained then. According to Malon, a ransom note had been left on the gate of Lon Lon Ranch. There was no need for her to say more. Time already knew.

The incensed rage and palpable fury mingled with a subdued tone of remorse was easily recognizable in the tenseness of Time’s form and single eye.

Time had sent Twilight and Four to track down the headquarters of these anti-monarch turncoats. With Twilight’s ability, he’d known his descendant and Four would most certainly find them.

He’d recognized the questions the younger Heroes wanted to ask him but they respectfully bit them back.

Time didn’t think he could have answered if he’d tried.

“...Pops..?”

Time blinked slowly, his mind registering the frail, hoarse voice quietly calling to him.

A voice he had not heard in two days and had been impatiently waiting to.

Snapping his head to the right, Time’s eye widened marginally at the sight of two, familiar, cerulean pools of blue blearily looking to him.

“Link?” Time could hardly believe it. A relieved, genuine, smile curved his lips and the Hero placed a calloused hand on the Knight’s shoulder, “About time you woke up.”

Warrior hummed quietly, wincing from the aches and pangs shooting throughout his beaten and bruised body.

“Some deep thinking you were doing there...” A yawn broke from him, “Everything alright?” He drowsily asked, trying to blink the sleep clinging heavily to his lashes away.

Time’s expression softened at the sight and he knocked Warrior lightly on the head, careful not to agitate his wound.

“It is now,” His chest rumbled as he spoke, the tenseness in his shoulders and back lessening now that Warrior had regained conscious, “You gave all of us quite the scare, Link,”

You gave me more than a scare...

Warrior’s brow creased and he rolled his head to meet Time’s gaze, searching the Old Man for whatever answers he sought.

“Scare..?” He mumbled, eyes wandering as he thought long and hard about what Time meant.

Time knew the instant the memories began returning to him and Warrior breathed a sigh of relief and slumped deeper into the mattress of his bed.

“We made it out, Pops,”

The Knight would never know the true cost of their attempted escape. Of Time rewinding the clock to save him. Still, Warrior’s second brush with death hadn’t completely released Time from its grasp.

It had been a harrowing experience. One Time had no want or wish to repeat ever again. He knew, should it happen a second time, he would not be granted the miracle he had been for Warrior.

“Time?”

The older Hylian blinked and turned to find Warrior watching him with a hint of concern,

“Something wrong?”

It was then Time realized his thoughts were being reflected by his expression and he quickly smoothed his features and shook his head in response to the Captain’s question.

“No, no, nothing is wrong, however,” His eye glinted and a stern, displeased stare pierced Warrior as Time rounded on him crossing his arms, “What you did was reckless and nonsensical.”

Warrior shrunk back into the pillows propped behind him. He was in for it now. The sound scolding he was sure to get would be one to last for a lifetime.

Surprisingly, Time elected to skip the lecture and jumped straight into the conclusion. He gripped the Knight’s shoulder tightly,

“Never again, Link,” Time locked gazes with Warrior, striving to drive his point across, “I don’t want you to ever foolishly toss your life away, am I understood?”

All Warrior could do was nod.

It was amazing, how Time could make him feel like a small child.

“Sure thing, Pops,” Warrior dutifully answered when Time raised an eyebrow.

Time narrowed his eye on him, searching for any hint of deceit. Finding none, he released his shoulder and leaned back into his chair.

Warrior frowned, guilt and remorse churning in his stomach.

Time understood that Warrior must have come to the realization of just how badly he’d shaken Time.

Although he would never know the full extent of the terrible ordeal, Warrior was sure to think twice in the future.

A comfortable silence settled between them and Time picked up the Ocarina lying in his lap and blew softly into it, testing the notes before he began to play.

The dulcet tones encompassed the room, simple and melodic.

“Hey, Pops,” Warrior’s quiet, thoughtful voice broke Time’s concentration and the Old Man lowered the Ocarina to hum in question, ”Thanks,”

This drew Time’s attention to the healing adolescent, “For what?”

Warrior made a strange face, brows drawing together and lips pursed. Time curiously rested his hands bearing the Ocarina in his lap,

“Link?”

Warrior shook his head, cringing when it protested against the sudden movement.

“Everything, I guess, but most of all, for being there.”

Time stiffened at the words.

“I’m glad...you’re here...Time.”

“You were an idiot,” Was all the leader said, “Never again, Warrior. Promise to never again risk your life the way you did...” There was a deep-rooted pain and heart-rending grief etched into his typically stoic features that Warrior couldn’t deny. It made him wonder what had happened.

“It was too close a call,” Time whispered mostly to himself, eye faraway and voice distant as he recalled whatever it was Warrior couldn’t, “We nearly lost you.”

But Warrior knew their leader well enough to recognize the words he didn’t say.

We did lose you.

“If it hadn’t been for your fairy,” Time looked away, dark and brooding.

Warrior understood. He recognized how narrowly he’d avoided death. Then, his brows drew together when a faint memory wriggled itself from the far back of his mind and crawled to the front.

“Wait...didn’t you use my fairy?” He questioned, confusion lacing his tone. “I think...I remember...I left you with my pack. The fairy was in it. You- you used it didn’t you?”

Were Warrior’s eyes not sharp, he would have missed the light cough Time stifled with the back of his hand.

“No. I had no need for it.”

“What..?” But that made no sense, “But when I ran into you, you were perfectly fine..?”

Wasn’t he? Warrior couldn’t recall seeing any of the grave and mortally fatal wounds the Leader had earned before they attempted their escape.

A large, calloused, hand gently pat his shoulder and Time sternly said, “You need to rest, Warrior. Everything will be explained later- once you’ve regained your strength and healed. What matters is we made it out alive. The others found us and dug us out,” The older Hero then rested his hands on his knees with a wry smile, “Speaking of the others, they will want to know you’re awake,”

Warrior only frowned at the deflection. He didn’t pursue the matter, however. Time’s tone was enough to tell him the subject was closed and the conversation over.

Time stood and with one last look to Warrior, crossed the room to the door and opened it just enough to poke his head out and call down the hallway to the others.

The scrambling of feet and joyful voices filled the air as the Heroes came darting to the room, and Time smiled with content as he watched them burst into the room and crowd around Warrior’s bed.

Malon walked in afterwards, drying her hands with a dish towel. She smiled at the sight of the Heroes and took her place beside Time, her presence a great comfort to the older Hero.

Time knew he would have given anything for this moment.

He had.

And he always would.

#Linked Universe #linkeduniverse #Warrior #Time #angst #Legend of Zelda #Din finally writes

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