#i feel like ive betrayed younger me by not already being there | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

burnedbyshoto · 4 years

Text

shinsou and the very terrible, horrible, no good, very bad shift

— You, a new sidekick, screw up a case for a Pro Hero Shinsou, and he demands compensation.

⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆

pairing: older!shinsou hitoshi x younger fem!reader

warnings: age gap (shinsou 25, reader 18), nsfw, 18+, pwp, DEGRADATION, power imbalance, spanking, marking, cursing, shinsou is a major asshole, mindbreak, sorta subspace, happy ending for shinsou, depending on person unhappy ending for reader, public sex, dubcon because of power imbalance

word count: 3,892

a/n: happy halloween. this is mean degradation imo like I thought ive done degradation but this made all those look like praise kink. be careful and click out if its too much

kinktober day 20 main kink: degradation | kinktober masterlist

⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆

How you ever forgot that as a high school hero-in-training student, you were a big fish in a tiny pond was beyond you. Well, to be quite honest, you never thought yourself to be a big fish, to begin with.

You were eighteen, a few months from turning nineteen and had just graduated from the hero course over at UA. That in itself was a huge accomplishment, one that you should take with bubbling pride and joy, but to be quite honest, having such a big name attached to you only made you nervous. To tell the truth, you often wondered just why a hero within the top 50 even scouted you to work as an intern with them and then offer you a position as a sidekick as soon as you entered your third year. Still, it seemed to be a common predicament with BMI Hero: FatGum.

Today was your first day on the job, no longer a student part of a hero work-study, but as a physical, government paid hero — a fickle sidekick! You shuddered as you slipped on the shoes to your outfit, your teeth gnawing at your bottom lip as you made your way out of the locker room, ready to report to your first assignment.

FatGum agency was quite a lovely place, loud and warm, being the first two adjectives you thought of when you first joined their ranks. It did wonders for your self-esteem, and seeing newly turned Pro Hero Suneater, who apparently was a million times more of a nervous mess than you were, made you feel oddly in good hands.

But still, nothing could keep you from the shock that ran through your body when FatGum proudly thrust forward a patrol route for you to follow.

“Alright, pipsqueak,” FatGum jovially spoke, his eyes closed while he smiled. “This is your route for the day! It should take about an hour to get through unless anything happens! You’ll go on the route every three hours, and in between those patrols, it’s the same paper system as before! Good luck out there, y/h/n, you got this!”

“Oh my god, no, I do not?!” you spluttered, hands shaking wildly as you went through the folder Fat had so quickly presented. “What if I die?!”

“You’ll be fine. Remember how Deku and Ground Zero complimented you the other day?”

“Yeah!” you exclaim, your face burning with your shame as you remembered that confrontation. “But that only happened because Deku is a living saint, and I spilled my noodles all over him and Ground Zero! Ground Zero was also, by the way, forced to compliment me by Deku! And all he said was that my combat skills were absolutely shitty but not as shitty as he thought they would be!”

“Ah yes, I remember Red Riot discussing how his friend was less than inept at expressing his gratitude,” FatGum hummed in memory, although that dumb, proud smile never left his face. “If I remember correctly, that means he has great respect for you!”

You made a dying noise at the back of your throat.

“But Deku doesn’t lie! He speaks honestly, so all his compliments were definitely true. Now, y/h/n, let's get through this day together, ne?”

You didn’t agree, but that wouldn’t stop him from throwing you out to the streets, your heart hammering in your throat as you walked through the path he used to take you on every day. Your smile was shaky and wobbly as the people you recognized waved and cheered you on. They were all excited to see you on your own.

However, they did point out that you were here an entire hour earlier than usual, but hey! That’s what happened when you went from being a student to trying to function as an adult!

“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” you chanted as you passed by the spookiest alleyway on your patrol.

The hour-long patrol was almost done if your watch wasn’t lying to you: a full patrol and not a single instance of needing to help. Well, you had assisted some people in carrying groceries and holding a child as a mother shopped for dinner that night, but there were no altercations, nothing out of the ordinary.

You marched through the alleyway, your fists in a shaky clenched grip as cold, nervous sweat dripped down your neck.

You were okay, you are okay, you will be okay.

“Nothing to be afraid of! Just a normal, average, no villains insight day!” you spoke to yourself, your body shaking as you pass an opening in the alleyway, and you turn your head to look and freeze.

“Alright, and I don’t want fucking nobody hearing goddamn shit about this drug, got it?!” a man with a quirk that made him look like a blowfish snapped.

Six men stood in the alleyway, all with tall, massive, threatening vibes. You didn’t make a single noise; you knew that for a fact, but their gazes still fell on you the moment the man stopped speaking. A horrible, stupid movie cliche that happened too often in hero life.

Your life probably flashed before your eyes at that single moment, your body and mind instinctively moving to call the heroes before realizing that you were the hero now. What do you do?! What could you do?! Drugs?! Did they have drugs?!

Panicking greatly, you watched their mouths move, but you couldn’t hear them as you took in their faces in a blur. Before you knew it, your mind shut down, and your body took over. You weren’t sure what it was. If you were way stronger than the entire group or if you just had an untapped potential that burst open right now, because you blinked and suddenly there were all thrown onto the floor, busted and bloody and tied up.

You… you did it?!

“Oh my god!” you exclaimed, your hands rising to your mouth as you looked at each and every one of their smushed, dirty faces. “I WON?! I won, oh my god, I won — wait?!”

You stepped over to the purple-haired man on the floor, his mouth stuffed with a cloth fabric you probably shoved in there at some point.

“M-Mindjack-sensei?!” you cried, your excitement of betting this drug handoff simmering off immediately. “W-What are you doing? Were you gonna stop this drug handoff? I — oh my god, let me get this off!” You scrambled to get the restraints off of Shinsou, unaware of the way the other captured men glared at Shinsou, utterly shocked and betrayed as you cleared him.

“Thank you for the capture, y/h/n!” a police officer congratulated you as you freed Shinsou, and you smiled, nodding your head. “Is it just four of them?”

You froze.

You had counted six men at first, and with Shinsou recovered, that made five men.

“I didn’t… I lost one of them?” you deflated, all sense of confidence draining you as Shinsou remained on the floor.

“Ah,” the police officer grimaced, his head shaking before he paused and looked up at you with a halfhearted smile. “Well, you still did good work! We’ll see what drug they were talking about, and if it’s nothing too crazy, they’ll be good to go!”

“Yeah, of course,” you smile weakly, feeling ready to cry as you hold onto your wrist.

“But, uh, who’s the guy on the ground?” he nodded towards Shinsou, who was looking entirely pissed off and ready to bite like some cornered, raging animal.

“Oh, Mindjack!” you respond, hands motioning toward one of the other older Pro Heroes you looked up to.

The police officer stared at Shinsou, an unconvinced look on his face.

“I thought he was… ah, well, old? And didn’t he have black hair?” he muttered before shrugging. You didn’t manage to stutter out your knowledge of the older man with black hair being Eraserhead because he was long gone already, fingers pressed to his radio, chatting with his HQ.

Breathing out a nervous sigh, you turned to Shinsou with a shy and fully apologetic smile. “I am so sorry for hurting you! Are you okay?” you asked, your eyes scanning the older heroes' stance, unable to read anything but annoyance radiating from his body.

“No, I’m not okay, actually,” Shinsou spat, his face finally looking up from the floor, and you felt your throat run thick at the rage and anger simmering from his face.

“W-Wha—” you stammer, taking a step back, overwhelmed.

“You just fucking ruined six months of undercover work,” he seethed, his feet moving to stalk towards you. You found yourself stumbling backward, looking everywhere but at him. You can feel your balance giving; the cold filth of the alleyway wall your saving grace as his fingers grabbed your jaw, forcing you to face him. His purple eyes black in his fury. “I don’t think you realized just how badly you fucked up?! You stupid fucking child!”

A wash of ice-cold realization flooded through you, the horror of what you knew you just did completely dawning on you as tears sprung in your eyes. You felt nauseous, utterly sick to your stomach because this seasoned Pro Hero definitely had shit to do, and you practically shat all over it.

“I am so sorry,” you whimper, pain shooting through you just slightly at the grip he has on your chin. “I am so so sorry, i-is there anything that I c-can do?! How can I-I fix it?!”

“You think I need help from some crybaby?” Shinsou snapped, thoroughly unimpressed by you, his eyes narrowing further. You didn’t even realize you were crying already.

“I-I’m useful, I promise!” you cry a bit more, your body struggling as the older hero trapped you against the wall, his face glowering down at you with the intensity of a million suns. “I-I’m a sidekick over a-at Fatgum’s agency, but, oh fuck, I’m so sorry! I’ll do anything you ask of me!”

There’s a looming silence, a heavy tension as his eyes drop from your eyes to your parted wet lips. He’s much taller than you, and you can feel every heavy breath expelling on your face.

“You think a pathetic, worthless little sidekick is able to do anything for me?” Shinsou snapped, his eyes narrowing as he loomed even closer. “A pathetic fucking bitch like you? I don’t think you can give me even a simple fucking action that would prove your worth.”

The words are hot embers on your ears, making your jaw drop, and your body trembles at the simple degradation. You feel your tears hot on your cheeks, your parted lips invaded by his dirt-covered fingers as he pressed onto your tongue. It had to be the shock of it, the reality of the hot, hard dick pressing into your stomach and the way he was staring at you like some piece of fucking meat, but you gagged around his fingers.

“Why am I not fucking surprised, you goddamn fucking whore,” he sneered, his fingers shoving faster into your mouth, pressing dangerously hard against your tongue, trying to get you to gag and choke around his fingers. “You fucking sure you’re a fucking sidekick? Look at you, pathetic, stupid, crying like a baby in an alleyway? You’re a hero, aren’t you? Fucking save yourself from this, you fucking bitch.”

You violently shake, your hands finding themselves tethered to his shirt, your head shaking nonetheless.

“Oh, you don’t want to save yourself?” He coos, his expression turning the slightest bit amused, maybe a bit possessive, but it lasts a second. You blink, and anger has replaced the amusement, red streaking in his vision. “Why the fuck not?”

“B-Because,” you strangle, your tongue flat against your mouth, your throat instinctively opening and closing against his fingers. “I said I’ll do anything y-you wanted!”

There’s another pause, and you wait pressed against the wall, your chest heaving with your anxiety and weird turned-on state. Shinsou was a Pro Hero, someone who was eight years older than you, someone you had respected since you were in grade school. Yet, here you were, looking nothing more than a slab of meat to him, a hole for him to abuse in his anger because you had fucked up.

“Oh, you stupid fucking slut,” he laughed, his teethed bared into a feral smirk. “You want this, huh. You want to please me any way I see fucking fit, fucking perfect. Turn around.”

There’s no room to argue or think; he turns you around without a second's notice. His hand shoving your chest into the wall, and you cry at the discomfort. He grabs your ass, pushing you uncomfortably into an arched position as he tears your pants down from your legs.

“You’re a worthless fucking cumdump. Not even noon yet, and I’m going use your fucking body however I see fit.” Shinsou promises, fingers raking down your supple ass. Nails tearing into your skin, fingers slapping your covered cunt. “You worthless fucking slut, dirty fucking whore, already goddamn wet.”

“I’m n-not wet!” you cry, hips spasming against his rough hold, and slaps to your aching cunt. You know it’s a lie, you know that clear as day, but it doesn’t keep you from lying. Doesn’t stop you from shivering when he pinches at the cloth of your panties and removes them from your sopping wet folds.

“You think I don’t know if you’re wet or not?” Shinsou growled in warning, his fingers pinching together your soaked folds. An action that makes you cry loudly, the sharp pain too much for you. “You think I’m some fucking idiot?”

“N-No!” you cry, his fingers shifting to where your throbbing entrance is and his other hand going to your mouth, once again claiming your lips as his nails purposefully impose pain on your heated cunt.

“You must think that since you’re lying to me,” he snaps, his mouth pressed to your ear, his hot breaths making your eyes roll to the back of your head. You want to speak up, say something, but his fingers are fucking your mouth, keeping you from speaking back. “But again, you aren’t fucking worth anything, are you? You’re not fucking anything.”

Those words whip against your skin, making you twist in his arms, hot tears pushing past your eyes again as you cry.

“Oh, you don’t like that?” Shinsou comments, his fingers pinching and pulling your tongue, and his hips begin to grind his hot, burning flesh into your ass. “Well, you better stop fucking crying because I’m not gonna stop until I’m fucking done — until I’m fucking relieved. This isn’t about you; this is for me. You aren’t shit, fucking worthless piece of shit whore.”

You sob into the brick wall, the tears unable to be stopped, unable to clear as his fingers that were scraping at your folds begin to fuck you at the same time as he fingers your mouth faster. The sensation of being outside, finger fucked in an alleyway by a Pro Hero you admired and respected beyond comparison, made you tremble with want and need. His cruel, completely degrading words a warm fire in your belly and against your skin.

The sounds of the wet caverns he was currently fucking begin to echo in the wall, his throbbing cock grinding against your ass. It’s a sensation that makes you cry with need, your ass shifting back to feel him more, to get more from the contact he’s giving you.

“Of course some screwup like you likes this shit,” Shinsou grunted, his fingers fishing and rubbing against the spongy warmth of your walls, fingers scraping ever so gently against the velvetiness. You spasm against his touch, your whiney, pleasure-filled noises filling up the alleyway almost as loudly as the choking and the squelching of your pussy.

His hands suddenly leave your mouth, and you’re heaving at the deserted feeling in your mouth. You whip your head around, trying to see just why he had abandoned your mouth, desperate to please him more in any way he saw fit. But instead, you’re met with the sicky coldness of your saliva spread across your face. Almost instantly drying against your face as your still tear-soaked eyes looked into his dark ones.

“Don’t look so fucking sad, stupid cockslut,” Shinsou snapped, his hand that had been fucking your cunt abandoning your warmth and meeting your face. You whined, unable to come up with words as he spreads your slick against your face. A shiver wrecks your spine, a pathetic whimper at the smell, and the feel of the warm thickness of your slick. “You wanted this, fucking asked me to wreck your worthless holes.”

“I-I’m not sad,” you try to defend yourself, your body shaking as you feel the heated warmth of his cock suddenly between the curves of your ass. It presses heavily onto you, skin twitching and throbbing with its emitting warmth and simmering heat.

Shinsou pauses, his eyes deadly and threatening as he glares at you. Unamusement heavy in his gaze, his mouth set in a small, teeth-baring snarl. “Then why the fuck are you crying? You think you deserve to be crying right now? No. You fucking worthless slut, you don’t. You ruined my damn shift, my damn case, I should be the one fucking crying. Your pathetic ass is worthless and tried to make my life the same, and that won’t fucking fly.”

The words tighten at your throat, your body trembling as tears continue to flow. His words are white-hot against your skin, and although it hurts to hear it, your cunt clenches in response, slicking even more.

His hand comes down suddenly onto your ass. The slap sharp and stinging, echoing loudly against the alleyway walls as you scream in pain. It throbs, your back contorting as you try to stretch the skin that makes you ache. But Shinsou spanks your ass again, without warning, his hand unmerciful against your soft, swelling flesh. You yelp again.

He spanks again, and again, and again. Each echoing action sending your voice screaming, counting them without even being told, succumbed to him and his every action and thought without needing to be. He spanks you until your ass feels raw and bloody, the bruises undoubtedly forming as he pinches the folds of your dripping cunt.

“Stick your ass out more,” he growls, tugging at the fold, making you stumble. The cock pressing onto the split of your ass feels heavy, and you twitch at the seeping pre-cum dripping onto your muscled rim. The bricks scratch at your face, and you find your ass wiggling out further from the wall, your back arched more as the cold wall sings through the clothes on your breast. “I’m not gonna put more fucking effort into fucking a goddamn worthless bitch than I should.”

And with that, your ass perfectly exposed for him to use and fuck. His throbbing cock presses through your pussy and slams all the way into you.

There were many pains you were used to as an aspiring hero. You were used to being punched, kicked, stabbed, thrown about, etc. Each of those pains were something you had been taught to make feel better, each pain demonstrated to you so that it wouldn’t be the thing that took you out. But there was no training for the way that his thick cock pressed through your impossibly tight entrance. There was no pain that could relate to the white fire of your rapidly fluttering entrance that was trying too hard to keep up with his slamming thick cock.

“IT HURTS!” you shriek, body twisting, tears flooding your cheeks as you feel weak in the legs. Body moments from falling. “It hurts so much! Please! It hurts!”

“Oh? It hurts? It's supposed to fucking hurt you fucking idiot, fucking whore,” Shinsou snapped in return, his hips firing into even faster than before. His massive body practically caving onto you as his cock rockets into you. Unforgiving, relentless, and with the drive to make him cum. Your vision swirls and spins as the pain reaches its peak, your mouth opening, your voice no longer working. But oh, how the saliva dripped from your mouth as his hands abandoned your waist to grab onto your stretched cheeks. He held onto your cheeks like some gag, slamming your head into his chest so your dazed eyes could stare up at him as his menacing gaze bore down on you. “You think this was supposed to make you feel good? I don’t give a shit if you cum. This is for me. I’m not fucking stopping until I’m done using you, so shut the fuck up.”

Your whimper is soft, no longer able to keep up with the pleasure your body begins to reach as the pain becomes one of pure bliss. Your eyes crossing as every thrust of his welcomed cock drives you further and further up the wall. The squelching of your meeting sexes almost sounds like a nursery rhyme. A pleasant noise that makes you giggle deliriously as Shinsou continues to degrade you continues to spout how insignificant you are.

“Your only purpose in your shit life is to be my fucking cumdump, fucking bitch, do you understand me?” Shinsou spat, his thrusting becoming barbaric, stammering in his power and speed. You laugh, your head nodding as you stare up at him with loving eyes, the drool and tears on your face trailing down your throat, soaking your uniform. “Tell me what your purpose is?”

“To be your cumdump!” you laugh, elation bubbling in your chest, fluttering deep around your cunt until you felt Shinsou’s teeth sink into your throat.

The feeling of hot, sticky cum expelling into your cunt feels like blistering euphoria, his heavy, rough breathing on your skin, making you moan softly. Your own orgasm hits, much softer, much more controlled than his as your walls clamp down like a vice around him. Your orgasm is warm, sounding deep within you that you almost didn’t realize you were dropped to the floor.

A soft, pitiful moan sounds from your lip, your eyes focused on Shinsou, who’s shoving his limp cock back into his pants, but his eyes are on the skyline.

“I-I’m sorry for messing up your… your case,” you rasp on the floor.

Shinsou shifts on his feet, his gaze lingering longer onto the skyline before finally setting onto you. The anger seems to have disappeared, a look of slight boredom but the excitement in his eyes as he leans down over you. You feel breathless when his mouth presses against yours in a short, chaste kiss.

“I think you just helped me keep my cover, slut; maybe you do have some worth,” he laughed against your mouth.

He leaves you there, your body going limp and blackness taking over the moment he disappears.

#shinsou x reader #shinsou smut #bnha #bnha x reader #mha #tw: dubcon #bbs kinktober 2020

453 notes · View notes

flowerwrites06 · 4 years

Text

break my mind’s eye X — jjk

Plot: Jungkook thinks marriage is the only way to seal a deal.

Pairing(s): Druglord!Jungkook x Fashion Designer!OC (Name: Belle)

Rating: G | PG | M | R 18+

Type: Drabble | Oneshot | Two Parter | Series

Word Count: 7k+

Genre: Mafia | Angst/Smut/Fluff

Tags & Warnings (for entire series): drug dealing, marriage through trickery, explicit smut, drug use, dubious consent, prostitution, miscarriage, lots of manipulation, impregnation through manipulation

The entire house descended into an ominous silence. Yoongi could hear murmurs coming from through the door where Saito and Belle were still conversing. No one could really hear what they were talking about. He had a few ideas however. Taehyung sat down at the small dining table while Jungkook had his back faced to everyone, leaning over the study table.

Time was running out. In only a few minutes those doors were going to burst open and Yoongi knew he had to keep his heart hardened. Exposing and arresting Jungkook was not just an act of heroism but it broke so many manipulative ties. So many dens used vulnerable people as bait, Taehyung being one of those victims. The countless amounts of people who died or were severely damaged while Jungkook made money off of that suffering.

Those thoughts provided him with a new boost of determination. He was doing this for good. It was a heartless act for a broken hearted man but it was the right thing.

Glancing over at Taehyung, Yoongi tried to give him an apologetic look knowing this was not the right time to be adding more stress. But they both knew this was for their freedom.

Heat erupted like a volcano from his toes right up to his head. Hands trembling and eyes burning as Yoongi reached into his holster, carefully hearing the rustling outside of the house.

Heartbeat pounded in his ears muffling all sound for a moment but his chest felt the thud.

The door burst open as a small crowd of police officers marched in almost like an army of cockroaches except more organized. Dark uniforms contrasting with the soft warm tones of the house design.

One of the officers pointed a gun at Taehyung making him stand up from the chair and raise his arms in defense.

“Stand down, he’s not the one we want. Niether are the two women inside the bedroom.” Yoongi ordered simply glancing over his shoulder as he pulled the gun out of the holster. He watched Jungkooks’ movements carefully but the younger male stayed still. Almost like a statue of sorts. Even Yoongi grew convinced that the world finally froze for a moment to give them time to breathe except he could only hold his right now.

Then Jungkook turned his body around, reddened gaze and an unreadable expression adorned on his broken features. Eyes merely glanced at the officers as if he already expected their presence…or was just too heartbroken to really care. Finally that same eerie gaze fixated on Yoongi. “Suppose I should’ve guessed it. No medical apprentice would know how to work a gun that well.” He smiled sadly, eyes still a little glossy.

“Jeon Jungkook…” Yoongi sighed, tightening his grip on the gun and pretending he was dreaming for a moment to make it easier not to shake. “You’re under arrest. Don’t make this harder on yourself and just come with us.”

“I’ll go.” Jungkook nodded a lot longer than Yoongi was comfortable with.

He could recognize that silence from far too many arrests already. Not a single person went so willingly, even the innocent ones.

Before anyone was prepared, Jungkook grabbed the gun from the table and shot the guard next to the older male.

Almost like machines all the standing officers raised their guns while injured officer groaned, bleeding on the floor.

“No! Stand down!” Yoongi ordered in more of a growl now ensuring no shots were fired from the police officers to prevent casualties. Especially since Taehyung was still standing there, breathing heavily. Raising his own gun at the Jungkook, both men now had their weapons pointed at each other.

None of them made a move for the trigger nor were they determined on lowering their guns either.

Belle and Saito jumped at the sound of a gunshot from the other side. The younger womans’ memory now jolting to what was to be done today, she pushed herself off the bed. Pain shot through her entire lower body as she moved her legs to the side and got to her feet. Belle leaned onto the wall with a light groan.

Saito immediately held onto her arms to keep her from moving any further. “You need to stay here if there’s danger happening.”

“No—” She shook his head, gently patting her hand. “He’s not going to listen. I need to talk to him.”

“If someone pulls the trigger accidentally—”

“Then I’ll get shot.” Belle replied simply, walking past the woman trying to be as kind as possible. There wasn’t really anything else that was going to surprise her anymore. If death was the next option for her continued torture then it didn’t look too bad.

She opened the door harshly causing a gust of wind and dust to flow through her hair and dress. Belle’s heart dropped when she saw Jungkook and Yoongi pointing a gun to each other. She hated not knowing which side scared her most. Either way her trembling feet moved forward.

If both Yoongi and Jungkook were stubborn before, it quickly faded to a numbing feeling when they saw Belle stand smack damn in the middle of them.

Yoongis’ eyes widened seeing his gun pointed right at her back and Jungkook lost all his anger for a moment seeing the end of his weapon aimed at his wifes’ forehead.

“Belle, what’re you doing?” Jungkook asked in a breathy voice, immediately putting his gun down as Yoongi did too not wanting to have that view ever again.

“Turn yourself in.” Belles’ lips quivered but she stood her ground, not wanting to succumb to the pain anymore even though it felt so easy to do so now.

Jungkooks’ mouth moved in a subtle manner attempting to form words, eyes momentarily glancing over at Saito who stood at the door before looking back at Belle. “Yoongi betrayed us—” He leaned in as if to try and reason with the woman in an attempt of a private conversation.

“You—” Belle corrected. “He betrayed you. Not us.” Her features twisted welcoming another brewing sob as more tears gathering at her stinging eyes. “He’s helping me.”

Jungkooks’ expression deflated. A disquiet silence plunged into the warm room. “No…n-no you’re just tired, you’re saying things.” He forced out a chuckle but it quickly faded into a confused frown. “Just go back to the bedroom.” He reached out to hold onto her arms.

Belle pushed his arms away and shook her head. “It’s over, Jungkook.” She gulped down the lump in her throat. “Please let it be over. I don’t want to do this anymore.” Tears overflooded and streamed down her cheeks, voice crackling at every word. “It hurts too much now, I tried—” She gasped lightly. “I really tried to be good for you but it has to end. Let it end.”

It didn’t take a mind reader to see Jungkooks’ whole world crash and shatter right in front of eyes when his lips parted and he lost control of his tears again. As his body shook and his heart clenched until it grew ten times smaller, the grip on his gun loosened. Metal clanged onto wood making Belle jump a little.

Yoongi gestured over to four officers making them immediately rush over to where Jungkook backed away and grab him by the arms.

Belle stood frozen as she watched her husband being dragged away out of the house. Letting out a drawling breath, the girl had to stop for a moment to ensure this wasn’t some kind of sick dream. Looking over her shoulder she saw Taehyung slowly walking towards her.

Immediately the older male engulfed his sister into a warm hug.

As if another dam broke down when Belle let out a series of sobs, a strange mixture of hurt and that little tingle of relief that she so longed for. It wasn’t fake anymore. Her sobs muffled a little into his shoulder. For a few seconds the woman could take a breath and quite happily cry her suppressed pain out without the pressure of smiling again.

She was hurt, broken and deeply damaged. But she survived. That was all that mattered in this moment of heartwarming vulnerability where a brother and sister could finally walk towards freedom.

A week almost flew by without Belle fully realizing her world changed overnight. The sun shone a bright golden high in the sky as she sat in one of the biggest law firms in the city where divorce papers were being filed and signed. Cool air brushed through her grey bodycon dress, the extra swell on her belly still poking out when she sat but it definitely dialed down significantly after all the check-ups and treatments.

Saito seemed to lose her smile for the past few days finding out the unfair game her biggest customer had been playing with none other than own protégé. A part of her felt guilt settle in her upset stomach letting all this happen under her nose without, even for a minute, checking if everything was okay.

Once Belle’s signature etched onto the paper, the papers were enveloped and made to be sent to the prison where Jungkook was held. Apparently the now convicted drug lord specifically asked to have a private cell as far away as possible from the city.

No pleas for bail. Nothing. Just quiet acceptance of the fate given to him.

Standing up from the chair after bidding farewell to the legal team, Saito guided Belle out of the office to the elevator.

With a pleasant ding, the doors slid open to reveal that the elevator was empty and the two women walked inside in silence.

As the doors closed and Belle felt a lift in her stomach as it descended down, she heard Saitos’ voice break the silence.

“I’m sorry, Belle.” Saito murmured not facing her but looking at the blurry reflection of her figure against the doors. “I should’ve known something was wrong from the beginning. Maybe—maybe none of this would’ve happened.”

Belle turned her head to face the older woman immediately shaking her head. “I’m the one who accepted the deal. And I’d do it again if I had to.” She spoke with any confidence mustered in the past few days.

All the daily interrogations really built a wall of confidence over her. Investigators really liked asking questions about the impregnation ritual and miscarriage on how it was not technically Jungkooks’ fault she said yes to him.

Even Namjoon, Yoongis partner, in all his ability to be patient, grew frustrated at the inappropriate and misogynistic questions thrown at her which really did not bring them closer to thickening Jungkooks’ case.

Both officers were struggling to find a decent number of years fit for Jungkooks’ sentence. That would only work if the investigators were not trying so hard to make Belle look like the real personification of Lady Macbeth, using her wit and beauty to ‘trick’ Jungkook in to committing the crimes he did.

Eventually that mindset was debunked considering how long Jungkook and his whole family had reigned over the city.

Out the elevator, Belles’ thoughts seemed to come to life when the two women were welcomed by two familiar officers at the lobby.

Namjoon and Yoongi stood waiting, with coffees in hand and badges flashing from their belts looking utterly out of place in an area infested by people wearing suits.

To her though, the familiar look brought a smile across her face.

“Can I say I’m out of the woods now?” Belle chuckled nervously looking at Namjoon and Yoongis’ expression twist into a mixture of a smile and some splashes of disappointment. “What was the verdict?”

The two men met each other’s gaze for a few moments before Yoongi took a breath to speak.

“Five years.” The answer lingered amongst the group with an eerie note.

Belle’s smile disappeared as she shifted where she stood, trying to immediately reassure herself with any comforting words that could be conjured. A lot of things could happen in five years. Which brought a sink in her belly wondering whether the life she makes at that time would be interrupted by a ghost of her past.

“You’ll be under court protection so he can’t come near you whether in prison or not.” Namjoon explained in the calm tone.

“It’s not him I’m worried about.” She smiled sadly. The couple were ripped apart in the heat of swirling events that overwhelmed the both of them. Despite the brush of freedom Belle now felt, there was still the nagging feeling at the back of her mind that something needed to be said. Like a chapter unfinished or a song stopped smack damn in the middle.

“There’s no need to worry about something that long away now.” Saito patted the younger womans’ back. “I’m going to work. You are going to get a whole day off and try not to think about anything else but yourself.” A comforting smile spread across her lips.

Belles’ gaze flickered over to Yoongi, her heart jumping a little to see his eyes already fixated on her.

Walking out of the firm building, the heat was pleasant on her skin after the chill of the air conditioners for hours. Saito took her own car to drive her around because Belle started getting a bit too jumpy to drive for a while. The younger woman was not so sure why because she had already seen and heard so many things that no person should in their lifetime.

Saito walked to her car and climbed inside.

As Belle tried to follow her, Yoongi lightly touched her shoulder to bring attention back to him.

“There’s something I need to show you.” He murmured, his tone serious.

Belle looked over at the male, confusion gripping her features but she did not argue much further.

Giving a quick farewell to Saito, she opted to climb into the SUV the two officers drove in. Apparently police protection had to be done in the subtle way possible to prevent spies from getting way too observant on when they were coming to watch Belle.

Climbing into the vehicle, the AC once again bursting throughout as Namjoon already started the engine while Yoongi got into the car. They drove off almost immediately and kept a strange level of silence in the air. Not that Belle was in mood for any kind of conversation, it still brought a small tinge of discomfort.

Passing the building at a somewhat snail pace as the traffic thickened, Yoongi finally built up some kind of courage to structure the words in his mind. The piece of paper in his hands itching to be given to the woman. The letter that could have potentially determined Jungkooks’ fate that night. If anyone found out that the man handed this confidential document to someone so close to the criminal, he would lose his job almost instantly. But it had to be done. Despite all the things happened Belle deserved to know Jungkooks’ plan prior to his arrest.

“What did you want to show me?” Belle broke the silence out of pure lack of patience with the thickening quiet.

Yoongi let out a deep sigh glancing over at Namjoon who kept his focus on the road rather than any of them. Pushing himself to a jolt of courage, he held the folded piece of paper behind him gesturing it closer to her. “This.”

Brows furrowed, Belle gingerly accepted the paper and unfolded it revealing handwritten words that only went through half the page.

“It’s the last letter he wrote before getting arrested.” He stated. Somehow the exchange proved to be a thousand times easier when Yoongi could not actually face the woman. However the deafening silence very quickly grew unbearable.

Eyes scanned across the words carefully written with the extra ink spreads at the end of most of the letters. Little dots scattered after a sentence because he was probably thinking up the best way to say something. Then the words themselves. Jungkook planned to give everything up to raise their family. He chose to give up his riches, power and reputation for family.

It was a lie. It had to be, right?

Why would he lie to his parents however? There was no reason to dramatically announce giving up his empire for his wife and child for people who were not even in the country. His parents wouldn’t want him to give up the empire. Jungkook didn’t say what his parents probably wanted to hear. Nor was there any use to lie to them about how much he cared about his own growing family.

It couldn’t be the other thing.

That wasn’t real, remember?

Belle felt her eyes sting and burn forcing her to rip her gaze away from the letter. Staring out the window, the buildings began blurring into one another either from her teary vision or the speed of the car. “Did you find this before or after the arrest?” She asked in a mixture of a murmur and whisper.

Yoongi pursed his lips together. “Belle—”

“Before…or after?” She emphasized her words in a more firm tone.

The male glanced up at the ceiling feeling a light constraint in his chest. A part of him prepared for this very moment where he would tell Belle the truth about Jungkooks’ intentions. Maybe his need to abide by duty overpowered it. Or maybe it was something a little more selfish than just his job. “Before. I found it before the show.”

Belle let out a shaky sigh, body deflating into the leather seat as she hugged the paper to her chest. “Why—why did you keep it from me?” Her voice cracked a little.

“What would you have done if I had told you?” Yoongis’ stomach may have dropped the slightest thinking of a very different turnout if Jungkook actually went through with his plan.

“You still shouldn’t have hid it from me.” Her heart began pounding and racing so hard, they could almost crack through her ribcages at this point. Did she do the wrong thing helping Jungkook get arrested? “He was—” Belle tried to let out a deep breath but it all collected in her throat preventing any of her nerves to calm down. They only grew more frazzled, tightening and numbing any ability to hear things clearly. “He was going to stop.”

“People like that don’t just stop.” Yoongi replied simply. “Give him three years of keeping his promise and he’s going to be back at it again.”

“That still didn’t give you the right to go behind my back like that!” Chest rose and fell as the woman struggled to gain a normal pattern of breathing. Her body burned like a volcano erupted from her belly, shooting uncomfortably through each vein.

“I was undercover, that was my job.” He spoke through gritted teeth.

“I was helping you! The whole time I thought—” At this point all Belle could do was heave as all the heat rushed through her head, tears melting down her cheeks and dripping onto her chest.

“He—”

“Yoongi!” Namjoon finally spoke up glancing over at the older male before indicating to the left. “She’s getting anxious, stop it.”

Yoongi had no stubbornness to fight any further anyway except now he wished there was anger to at least numb down that twisting feeling in his stomach. He could hear the way the girl heaved to get a deep breath out while the car slowed down gradually coming to the side emergency lane.

Namjoon puts the car to a complete stop and Belle immediately climbs out before Yoongi could mentally prepare himself for it.

The fresh breeze of air felt new as if Belle had not been breathing it a few minutes ago. Her body cooled down although it merely touched the surface; heart still beat far too fast to really think in a proper pattern. Everything felt like a kaleidoscope of emotions. Reddening from anger, then blue splotches of deep rooted sadness, deep maroon when she found the space next to her bed empty and her own apartment looked foreign all the while accompanied with a vibrant yellow to reassure her everything was going to be okay. The best and worst feeling that brought confusion to her vulnerable, healing body.

These momentary crashes of panic were happening a lot more often than she liked to admit. Belle remembered the first time was two nights after the arrest. Her whole night completely spent with Taehyung trying to help her regulate her breathing until at an ungodly hour of four in the morning, they managed to get some shut eye. Although not enough to keep them alert the next day.

Being in the car usually caused the worst of it and it didn’t help with the letter now swirling in her mind. It was so much more easy to think that Jungkook was a horrible, tyrannous drug lord who didn’t care for anyone but himself and his empire. To think that he had other priorities in mind while Belle helped his enemy brought an unwelcome twinge of guilt.

After a few moments’ of leaving the woman alone to her space, Yoongi climbed out of the car into the cool air. Sighing, he spoke up to break the silence. “Belle I’m sorry I didn’t—”

“I would’ve stayed with him.” Belle answered hugging herself as tightly as she could before nodding briefly. “If you told me about the letter, I would’ve protected him.” Her features twisted, not a face of pride for a loved one but one of submission and desperation. “At first it was because I was pregnant, I couldn’t raise the baby on my own, I knew that, I knew that my baby deserved a good family away from the world he was in. So if Jungkook ever told me he was going to give the whole life up…I would’ve gone with him.” A long drawling breath passed through her lips as the words seemed to loosen a few knots in her body.

For a minute she tried to searching deep into her mind wondering if the words coming out of her mouth were true. But there was nothing. “Why didn’t the police ask me about this?” Belle held up the paper not really knowing she was still holding.

“I am the police.” Yoongi shrugged. “I just didn’t give it to them. They had enough evidence to ensure Jungkook was the culprit for all the drug dens. The assassination on the mayor was more information for the mayor only.” He dug his hands into his pockets. “About you going with him…” He let out a brief sigh. “Is it just for the baby?”

Tears dried up from the wind, her face feeling a little tight. She shook her head. A part of Belle still grew so used to pretending like she had to sugarcoat things or make it sound like she was in control. However once you allow something to feel broken, it’ll feel like falling and falling into an endless abyss until all you can do is get back up again. “No…it wasn’t just for the baby.” Belle’s bottom lip quivered. “I didn’t want to…I really didn’t want to—” She closed her eyes before hanging her head. “But I do.” Shaky hands held onto the letter again.

Yoongi could almost feel a dark cloud over them. Belle should have been moving towards a path of healing, not wondering what it would been like all her life. Granted there was no way to know whether she was going to continue helping him after reading the letter but it still didn’t give him any right to keep this truth away from her. The last thing she needed was getting played into another lie.

Belle took another deep breath as her body now slowly calmed itself down. “It’s okay though, right? You did it to protect me and other people.” She sucked in her bottom lip. “There’s no reason to cry about it now.”

“Belle…” He murmured taking a small step closer.

“It’s okay, Yoongi.” Reddened eyes met his gaze. “Just take me home please.” Belle padded past the male and climbed back into the car leaving Yoongi with a question of whether he just helped the woman or rushed through a mission just so he could get what he wanted.

The drive back to her apartment reverted back to its original silence. Belle placed the letter into her purse despite a few sensible sides of her advising she get rid of it. It would only hurt more to keep it and wonder but her body seemed to grow weak whenever the thought crossed her mind.

Namjoon parked in front of the apartment building and Belle gave the two officers a quick ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ before climbing out of the car.

Up the elevator and through the hallways, Belle felt a rush of relief coming back to her home again. At least she tried to call it her home now. It almost felt like coming into a hotel or just a really strong déjà vu as the old memories of her time here seemed so long ago.

Walking through the entrance, Belle tossed her purse on the kitchen island, leaning against the edge of the counter, fingers ran through her hair only to get a little caught in the middle. Pulling them out, she merely pushed the strands back and grabbed scrunchie from her purse to tie it back up into a loose ponytail. “Tae?” She called out softly.

The apartment was fairly silent at least until she heard ruffling on the spare room. Belle had moved most of her designs from the room to her own while some of her steel stands scattered around the living room.

Eventually the door opened with a half-naked Taehyung padded out of the room, ruffling his hair as his lips pouted out, eyes squinting into the light. “Hey…how’d the signing go?”

Belle shrugged, rummaged through her purse and seeing the piece of paper just sitting there. “I guess the same as any other divorce.”

“If you marry a mob boss, sure.” Taehyung stopped near the edge of the counter.

“What were you doing today?”

Taehyung rubbed his face trying to hide the wide smile that tugged at the corners of his lips. Despite the exhaustion across his expression, there was still this aura of joy. It was not hard to guess who may have caused that smile. Seokjin had created full freedom for Taehyung to visit Angel without any rules involved but for her protection against her ex-husband, she had to publicly stay married to him. That is until some solid legal actions were made to properly keep Angel protected so they could think of something more serious with their new blooming relationship. “Little this, little that.” The struggle to keep his smile failed terribly as the biggest damn grin graced his features.

Belles’ heart swelled, a more comforting warmth spreading across her body compared to the one she felt during the drive. For a moment she could remind herself that things were actually more okay now. Taehyung looked so much happier and she even saw him sketching the other day. Things were looking to be normal again. Except for the secret in her purse. Gulping down, she pulled the paper out. “Tae…” Eyes stared down at the folded paper before placing it on the table.

The older males’ smile faded away into one of curiosity when he saw the paper in her hands. “What is it?”

“Yoongi gave me this…” She murmured, fingers caressing over the surface. Much to her slight shame Belle could imagine caressing Jungkooks’ cheek. How warm he felt and he would almost always lean into her touch naturally. The thought made her abruptly stop the action, gulping those feelings down. “It’s a letter…from Jungkook.” Belle took a deep breath. “It says that he was going to give everything up for me…” Her stomach twisted. “For the me and the—the baby.”

It didn’t take a genius to feel the heat of anger already radiating from her older brother as he tightened his jaw. “He’s just lying.” Taehyungs’ voice grew dark, making it even more raspier than it already was.

“It was a letter to his parents.” Sharing the same thought as the other male would have been comforting but Belle knew better than to lie to herself just for the sake of making things easier to bear.

“Doesn’t matter. He’d never do that, he loves his power too much.” Taehyung shook his head.

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t care about his family.” Belle glanced down at the letter.

“There isn’t any family now.” He corrected. “You’re divorced, he’s not your responsibility and the kid—” Taehyung immediately pursed his lips to calm his frustrations down before he said anything he was going to regret.

Belle stayed silent staring down at her dress, lump growing in her throat. With the whirlwind of things that had been happening in such a short time, the miscarriage seemed a distant memory. At least until she was reminded of how fresh the wound still was. “I know all that.” She murmured.

Taehyung immediately padded closer to the younger standing next to her. His arm moved over her back, rubbing up and down her arm while his forehead pressed against her temple. “I’m sorry…” He whispered. “I know everything hurts right now but it’ll be okay.” He tilted his head to try and search her expression. “You gave up so much to take care of me. Let me take care of you.” Long fingers brushed back a few strands of her hair behind her ear.

Chest fell and pushed out with a small sob passing Belle’s lips, the heat from Taehyungs’ body in such close proximity providing her comfort. “Okay.” She whispered. Turning her body around with a light sniffle, she buried her face into his bare chest, arms hooking back and hands gripping at his shoulders.

How freeing it was to be able to curl up into Taehyung’s arms whenever her mind decided to play tricks on her. Belle knew she was strong, so many people including the reporters on the news continuously tried to tell her. But it never reassured her. Strength was what got her into this mess. For once, Belle truly felt happy knowing she was strong but could still rely on the people she loved when her strength wasn’t enough.

Tonight had exactly been that night where Belle’s mind opted not to give her a break. Hazy visions of running around the dark Jeon mansion, not even the guards were present. Then it faded to the house she grew up in with her parents celebrating Taehyungs’ birthday party while she peeked out from her bedroom to watch it.

Then her bedroom now in this current apartment. She forcefully looked to her side and saw a familiar sleeping figure, blurry phoenix tattoo on his chest. His large hand came over to rest of her belly but now she wore a white dress. As he raised his hand up, blood spread from one point all across until the color changed.

Pain jolted in her head when she heard a gunshot.

Belle’s eyes opened.

Everything stilled, light ringing in her ears like she just walked out of a club. Sweat layered in on her skin as if she was really running before passing out on her bed. The ringing got louder. Belle realized it was not coming from her ears but from somewhere in her bedroom.

Exhaustion still pulling at her form, she pushed herself up from the bed to look at her nightstand. Her phone lighting up the entire room as it vibrated against the wood and sounded a ring. A familiar name on the screen: Yoongi.

Brows furrowed, Belle turned on a lamp since going back to sleep again after a dream like that was not likely. She pressed the green button and put the device to her ear. “Yoongi? What’s wrong?” For a moment it felt strange hearing her own voice, still raspy from her slumber.

“Sorry I know it’s late.” Yoongi murmured through the phone.

“It’s alright, I’m up anyway.” Belle scratched the back of her neck lightly, eyes still closing but her mind still too frazzled to let her be pulled back in again. “What is it?”

“Could you—could you come outside? Bring your stuff with you.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah, it’s important. I can’t do it during the day so—” Yoongi cleared his throat.

Belle pouted looking at the clock for a moment to see that it was two in the morning. “I’ll be down in five minutes.” She replied quickly before completely getting off her bed and walking to her closet. Leaving her deep blue pajama set on, she merely draped a big coat over her body. Messy hair tied up in a somewhat decent bun as the girl stared in the mirror with a subtle pink tint on her lips to make her look less exhausted. Though the puffiness under her eyes spoke the truth.

Tiptoeing out of her bedroom, she glanced around before seeing the door to Taehyung’s bedroom closed. A part of Belle wanted to let him know that she was going somewhere but at this point, the older male wouldn’t really wake up so it didn’t seem necessary.

So giving one more look over her shoulder the woman placed on some shoes and walked out of the apartment as quietly as she could.

The crisp night air was both refreshing and unwelcoming as the moon still smiled onto the world from where Belle was looking. Across the path from the building to the curb where Yoongihad his van parked, she noticed the dew on the grass glimmering under the silver light while the trees whistled in the wind.

Eventually Belles’ gaze fully set on the van where Yoongi had his lights on to ensure she could confirm it was him and not someone trying to lure her. There had been a lot of looming danger for Jungkooks’ enemies to try and put the woman in danger despite their end in marriage. Which was also why the police protection was put in place rather than just keeping her safe from her ex-husband.

Walking to the passenger seat, she opened the door and climbed in without a word spoken until her seatbelt was fully fastened.

“Where’re you taking me?” Belle asked in a calm tone though the lack of information made her heart beat a little too fast for comfort.

“Somewhere I’m not allowed to.” Yoongi answered simply, turning on the engine and letting it purr for a moment before driving off into the street.

Silence took over the cool air of the vehicle adding more fuel to the confusion filling Belle. The streets slowly faded into main roads and then it turned to a highway. She pulled her knees into her chest, looking out the window wondering whether to ask again or just figure it out when the car stopped.

But then Yoongi spoke up for her. “You deserve closure.” His eyes were completely focused on the road, finding it easy to explain himself when he wasn’t meeting her gaze. “We got our jail sentence for Jungkook.” He shrugged. “That was all we wanted. To break his empire down in a status that was manageable. But you—” He glanced for a second after gaining some courage but looked at the road. “Your relationship with Jungkook is more personal than anyone else who wanted him down.” Yoongi took a sharp right turn.

“Aren’t you going to get into trouble?”

“Not if you can keep a secret.” He smirked.

Belle couldn’t help but smile a little. Although now there was a light sink in her belly having to prepare for a meeting she never thought she would have. Police and even her lawyer reassured that she would never see the male again but somehow it didn’t reassure her as much as seeing him on more time did.

The car drove into a dark yard, the building towering over the car park with some bright white lights shining inside the cement fences. Yoongi drove towards the metal date, letting the guard at the booth know who he was. A piercing clang echoed through the air as the gate slid open, creaking terribly in its journey.

Slowly inching into the car park, the male drove closest to the building before turning the engine off.

Belle climbed out of the car and stepped towards the entrance. Footsteps crunched against the gravel until the older male stood next to her.

Through the entrance, the two were already welcomed in by the guards. However welcomed was a strong word for blank expressions and monotonous voices. Yoongi was told to stay outside while Belle walked in because only one person was allowed to visit at a time.

Past the dank looking halls, Belle walked under the greenish light, all the while hearing howling and moaning from the other side. Indistinctive words but it wasn’t hard to tell they were all expressing misery. Her mind now filled with the vision of that wide sweet smile and warm gaze stuffed into this crowd.

The guard opened a door for her revealing a room with a line of seats. A glass division in front of it. It was mostly empty aside from an elderly woman sobbing while talking to a younger prisoner on the other side.

Belle was gestured to sit in one of the center booths. Hugging her bag to her chest, she did as she was told. Eyes flickered over to the guard on the other side keeping a close on the younger prisoner at the other side. A metal door closed next to him. In the slight silence the girl attempted to take a deep breath and organize what she could say.

Then the metal door clanged open making her jump back a little.

A figure wearing bright orange padded in and sat on the center, eyes not meeting hers yet. He slouched down on the chair, hair mostly tied up except for large piece handing over the side of his face.

When his gaze flickered up, his expression softened and his posture straightened. Jungkook stammered glancing around the room before looking back at Belle almost convinced that this could be a dream. “I thought you weren’t allowed to be here.”

“Do you want me to go?” Belle gripped at her purse tightly, heart pounding against her ribcages at the anticipation of his answer.

“No.” Jungkook pursed his lips together.

Silence plunged between them. Whether it was comfortable or disconcerting was up for debate.

Belle leaned in a little resting her elbows on the little table before her, eyes momentarily glancing down at the little holes made to be one of their ways of clear communication. “I saw the letter.”

It didn’t take Jungkook far too long for his face to soften into one of recognition.

“Were you lying?”

“Would it make you feel better if I said I was?”

Belle let out a shaky sigh, another small lump growing her throat but she swallowed it down. “No.” She shook her head slowly. “I want the truth.”

Jungkook shifted in his position causing the handcuffs around his wrists to clink. “That day I yelled at you…” He stayed silent for a few seconds to take a deep breath. “I realized my priorities were muddled and I needed to figure out what was more important.” Adams apple bobbed up and down as his glossy eyes met hers now. “What I loved the most.”

Lips quivered as the lump only grew in her throat until she had to hang her head. “I didn’t know.” Belle whispered, breathing shakily. “I thought—I thought you didn’t care about us and then I saw Yoongi and—”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” He answered simply. “Yoongi was going to expose me with how close he was anyway. The new mayor was at my tail, it was bound to—”

“It’s not about the mission.” Belle closed her eyes and emphasized her words, fingers trembling a little. “I hated your job. I hated everything about it but I didn’t hate you.” She sucked in her bottom lip. “When I read that letter that you were going to give everything up for me, I felt—I—”

Jungkook searched the beauty’s expression, leaning in a bit more to maybe catch some warmth from her body or her scent. “What did you feel?” His voice came out in a whisper.

“I felt like I just—gave up something. Something that might’ve made me happy.” Belles’ eyes flooded with tears making her irises blurry before a single drop escaped down her cheek. “I kept thinking about how different it could’ve been if you weren’t who you were. Maybe if you were just… Jungkook and none of this happened. Maybe we’d be happy together.” She chuckled sadly before briefly covering her mouth.

“Would I have made you happy?” He sniffled lightly. “Even after all I did?”

His question floated in the air freely for a few moments as Belle wiped away the escaped tears staining her skin. “Maybe…” She shifted closer. Eyes flickered down at the holes again. Shaky fingers slyly hooked onto two of them not looking back at Jungkooks’ gaze rather looking at down her digits and sighed. “But I can’t…do this all over again on a ‘maybe’.”

Jungkook almost had his forehead pressing against the glass just to feel her close again. Instead the woman initiated the second best thing by putting her fingers through the opening of the glass division. His own rough fingers reached in to caress her soft skin before hooking them on top of hers.

Belle couldn’t help but feel a jolt in her belly feeling his familiar fingers on her again. It was a subtle action but it brought so many long slumbered feelings through her body. They both know this electric magnet between them was a ruse to hide the real truth. What they needed to say but could never admit in real life.

Until now.

“Do you feel happier now?” Jungkook asked, breaking the warm silence.

The real truth. The reason why Belle wanted to come here. Was it a real feeling of longing? Or just a strong attractions towards the comforts she created in the fantasy of her past? No matter how heartbreaking. It was a moment of weakness where the woman could only remember giggling under the sheets with Jungkooks’ warm hands all over her body, eating ice-cream late at night or giving each other reassuring words.

It was at this moment, Belle needed to remember that was only part of the story. Part of the beautiful fantasy they built together but now the show needed to end before anyone else got hurt.

Belle now spoke out the truth.

“I do.” She nodded, smiling through her light tears. “I do feel happier.”

Jungkook couldn’t control a wide smile of his own stretching across his lips hearing those words. “That’s good.” He let out a faint chuckle. “That’s all that should matter to you now, okay?”

Belle hummed lightly in agreement. “I hope you feel happier soon too. Once you’re out of here.”

He nodded finally succumbing to pressing his head gently against the glass, breath fogged up the surface as he spoke. “I’ll try.”

That was all they both needed to hear.

The curtains had been lifted and the fantasy dissipated. All that could be seen now was two broken individuals in their rawest form, making their slow but healthy path to a happier life. One they could finally choose for themselves.

<< PREV CHAP | NEXT CHAP >>

#jungkook #jungkook imagines #bts imagines #jungkook fanfic #bts fanfic #jungkook fanfiction #bts fanfiction #jungkook mafia au #bts mafia au

150 notes · View notes

writingsfromhome · 4 years

Text

Nuclear Family II

Part 2: Miscommunications

A/N: part 2!! I was so overwhelmed w how much you guys enjoyed the first part, kind of made my head go blank lol. But now I rewrote it and added more ~spice. Sorry it took so long but I so appreciate all of you engaging w it! 💖

Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV / Part V

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

Sleeping in was not something that existed when you had a child and Harry learns that the hard way. By half past 7, I’m already up because of the poking on my cheeks and when I come out from brushing my teeth, I hear shouts from upstairs.

“Charlotte!” I shout up but I'm ignored. I climb the stairs and locate the door to the small voice. “Charlotte let your dad sleep!” I open the door to Charlie jumping on Harry's bed and Harry rubbing his eyes. His eyes go to mine when the door opens and he lets out a chuckle.

“Parenthood,” I sigh and try to grab Charlie from the bed. She moans to come back and wiggles her way out to run back to the bed. Harry's sitting up at this point and I blush realising he didn’t have on a shirt. I had to stop acting 12.

“I want to play!” Charlie shouts, still jumping.

“Alright you crazy monkey!” Harry grabs our daughter and whispers something to her before attacking her in tickles. She shouts for me to help but when I try to help Harry pulls me into the covers and Charlie climbs atop me to tickle me instead.

“You two sneaks!” I shout between fits of laughter but Charlie soon tires and lays beside me, her head resting on my chest. Harry lies down on the other side of her, propped up on his elbow.

“I’m just going to…” Harry grabs his phone from his bedside table and holds it above us. Charlie already loved posing for cameras, so she grins but I cover my face. “Y/N come on! One photo!”

“Fine but I get to take it,” I bargain. Harry agrees and hands me the phone, shoving in closer so our heads almost touch. I ignore the closeness and stretch the phone above us, getting my good side, and just before I click it I shout “please!” a phrase Charlie used to say when she was younger instead of cheese. It gets a giggle out of her and in the photo her eyes are squinted and her grin is pure joy. Harry is glancing at me with a faint smile on his face while my expression is stretched out in 'please.’

Suddenly the cute family photo disappears as the phone vibrates and a picture of a woman smiling on a boat appears. Harry's girlfriend. My smile curdles as I awkwardly hand over the phone to Harry. It was an abrupt reminder of what Harry and I weren’t, despite the illusion of the photo.

"Let's give your dad some privacy," I pick up Charlotte despite her protests and bring her outside.

"Who's on the phone?" She asks as I seat her on the kitchen counter. I glance at her concerned face and remember that kids were a lot more intuitive than we gave them credit for.

"His friend," I answer as truthfully as I could without breaking her heart. The weeks following our trip Charlie talked so often about having both her mom and dad together-like we were getting together forever. Even though I broke it to her gently, she still carried that flame--I didn't want to extinguish those hopes so early on.

"Is she your friend too?" Charlie asks innocently.

"Just your dad's." I kiss her forehead and then get breakfast started, so by the time Harry comes down it's almost done.

"Shit," Harry says and then glances at our daughter who's too busy with Oreo to notice his language. "I was meant to make you two breakfast your first morning here!"

"It's alright," I shrug, unable to make eye contact. "Just grab a plate."

"I feel awful," Harry joins me in the kitchen. "Have you made coffee yet?"

"No," I glance at the machine.

"I'll do that then."

"Three sugars-"

"And a drop of milk," Harry finishes. "I remember."

"Right," I flush. How odd that we keep tiny details of one another, however useless, for years after we split.

"So I sort of forgot but-"

"Mom!" Charlie interrupts Harry and I tell her it would be a minute.

"Right, well when I was talking just now w-"

"Mom! I'm starving!"

"Charlotte! Give me a minute!" I say sternly before putting the last of her strawberries on the plate. I set Charlie's breakfast up and Harry joins with our coffees. Before we even sit, Charlie begins her monologue about coffee and how she was going to drink it when she's old enough.

"That won't be for a while," I comment, glancing up at Harry who was still standing by his chair.

"I'll drink it when I'm five," she holds up her fingers and counts them down. "Then I can drink it."

Harry and I share a brief glance, him opening his mouth to say something before the doorbell rings.

"Oh sh-uh-I'll get that," Harry rushes to get the door. Charlie spills her juice in the process so I pick up the sippy cup and grab paper towels to mop the spill.

"They're right through here," Harry's voice carries over and he enters again with his...friend.

"Hi," she has a pleasant smile and hips that had obviously never carried a child. My own had never quite recovered.

"Hi," I hold up the dirty towels and quickly lower them, painfully aware of how terrible I looked. I couldn't help but compare myself to Harry's girlfriend-especially when she looked like that.

"You're daddy's friend," Charlotte says matter-of-factly.

"I am!" Her voice raises an octave as she walks towards my daughter. "I'm Miranda it's nice to finally meet you!"

Charlie looks up at me and then back to her. "Why aren't you mommy's friend?"

An awkward silence follows and I can't help but glance at Harry. He rubs the back of his neck before stepping forward towards Charlie.

"I've only just met your mommy," Miranda glances up at me with another smile but this time it's stretched too tight. "But we can all be friends! It's nice to meet you."

Charlie looks at me and I smile at her in encouragement. "Okay," she concedes before going back to her piece of toast.

"Have you had breakfast?" Harry asks her quietly.

"I had a coffee," she answers. "But we'll be late if we don't leave now."

"Have you got somewhere to be?" I ask, unaware as Harry hadn't mentioned it yesterday.

"A friend of mine has a wedding thing," she keeps glancing at Harry even though she talks to me.

"I forgot about it," Harry says. "Miranda reminded me this morning I meant to tell you but the pancake monster kept shouting for her pancakes!"

Charlie giggles and tears into another one.

"We've got to be there half past ten," Miranda says quietly to Harry.

"I'm not even ready!" Harry looks down. "I need to shower too. Give me a half hour."

"This is why I had to come early," she shakes her head at me as if we shared an inside joke. I smile knowing how fake it felt. Harry gives me a pleading look as if to say he was sorry before heading upstairs but I shake my head and go to the kitchen to wash the sticky juice off my hands. I hear Miranda talking to Charlie and stay longer than I needed to in the kitchen before heading out again.

"It was really nice to finally meet you," Miranda tells me after Harry finishes up and they get going. She bends down to high-five Charlotte. "And you too!"

"I'll see you around 5," Harry tells me. "I've left keys so you can just come and go whenever."

"I thought we were going to have lunch together," Charlie pouts, suddenly realizing what this all meant.

"I know love," Harry picks her up. "I forgot about this party I had to go to."

"You never forgot at home," Charlie's bottom lip quivers.

"Dad will be home soon," I take Charlie from Harry before the waterworks could start. "And we're gonna have so much fun together right?"

"It's bullshit!" Charlie shouts. My cheeks colour and Harry's jaw drops before he bites back a laugh.

"Charlotte!" I scold but she runs away from my arms. I meet Miranda's eyes and they're wide as saucers.

"I don't know where she...picked up on that." I say lamely. I never swore in front of her-well rarely did. She must have been listening yesterday. Harry tries to say something about it but I cut him off. "Just go. I'll deal with her."

He hesitates but leaves with Miranda who looks relieved to go. I feel bad for Charlotte, knowing how excited she was to spending her whole first day with Harry and I find myself annoyed at him too for forgetting the event and ruining the plans.

I find our daughter curled up in bed and before I could give her a warning about swearing she's wrapped her arms around my neck and shoves her snotty face in my shoulder, apologizing for saying the bad word.

"As long as I don't hear it again," I say without much conviction. I was too upset with Harry to be upset with her too.

I put Charlotte in front of the TV as I clean up breakfast and try to work through my feelings. I couldn't tell if I was more upset about Harry bailing on us or seeing him with his girlfriend; anyone with eyesight could see they had good chemistry and it bothered me. But I came here knowing he was dating somebody else and knowing nothing would happen between us. But then last night, Harry was more affectionate than he needed to be. Maybe he was working through old emotions too, I figure. Maybe I didn't need to read into every single thing.

I decide that Charlie and I wouldn't feel sorry for ourselves and dress us up to step out. I pay a visit to an old friend and we all go out to lunch-Charlie being kept company by my friend's five year old. As we head out I check my phone to see nine missed calls from Harry and a few texts asking where I was-it was already 6 and I hadn't even noticed.

I text Harry simply saying we were on our way home and listen to Charlie talk about her new friend the whole tube ride home. But once we reach Harry's flat, my mood sours. For starters, his girlfriend is still over and Harry is really upset I hadn't picked up.

"Where've you been?" Harry asks calmly but his annoyance betrays his true feelings.

"Hey," I let Charlotte down. "We were just having a late lunch with y/f/n and time got away from us."

"I've been calling and texting-you didn't hear?" Harry, surprisingly, is still trying to remain calm.

"My phone was away," I laugh off the tension noting that Miranda sat awkwardly at the dining table. "We had the keys so-"

"I was worried," Harry glances at Charlie who was preoccupied.

"You told us we could spend the day out--that's why you gave the keys," I say a little aggressively.

"I wanted-I thought we could go out before dinner since I couldn't spend the morning with Charlotte." Charlie looks up at the sound of her full name.

"I had lots of fun with my new friend," Charlie states and I could tell she was still angry at Harry with the stubborn set of her chin. She'd gotten that from me.

"Just mixed signals," I interrupt. "It's not a big deal-we just need to communicate our plans better, okay?"

"I booked us tickets for a movie," Harry's continues, his voice is definitely bordering on aggressive and I wonder why he was so upset and making such a show while his girlfriend was still here. "And dinner reservations and now that's gone to waste! Keep your phone on you if-"

"No," I say assertively to stop Harry as his voice rises. "I understand I'm living at your place because I had no choice, but you don't get to speak to me like that. We're Charlotte's parents but we're nothing to each other. Next time, don't forget your own plans and communicate to me clearly if you want to go out with all three of us. Now excuse me."

I pick my bag up again and head to the room, my eyes burning and my heart racing. I hear Charlie's little footsteps behind me and I feel guilty that it hadn't even been a day and she had to witness us arguing. Why was parenting so hard?

I stay in the room and don't come out even as Charlie heads back out again when Harry calls us for dinner or when I hear Miranda leave or a movie being put on. I stay on my laptop, working, and ignoring the slight hunger at the back of my mind.

A sharp knock on the door catches my attention. The door opens slightly and Harry stands looking the complete opposite from the afternoon.

"Hi," he lets himself in and leans against the wall. "I wanted to say sorry. I didn't mean to get that upset with you I was more frustrated with myself for forgetting the party in the morning and ruining Charlie's first day here. And I was upset that she was upset with me so I planned something fun with her to make up for it and it fell through too."

I stay silent for a moment, after Harry finishes. I was still upset with him. And that wasn't a good excuse to chew me out in front of his girlfriend.

"I understand that," I shrug. "But I don't appreciate the way you just came at me with all those accusations. Especially in front of our daughter and while your girlfriend was there."

"Miranda's fine," Harry says. "She wouldn't have minded-"

"I minded!" I exclaim. "Oh my god Harry I've only just met her! This isn't my house or my city and to have a stranger sit through an argument with my baby daddy is not very fun."

"Right," Harry gets it. "Sorry. I just...keep feeling like I'm fucking up everything. I wanted Charlie here and to be with her as much as I could and now I have an angry three year old. She only just started talking to me because I gave her extra dessert."

I freeze, "Harry if you gave her extra dessert you're dealing with the consequences."

"What do you mean?" Harry perches on the bed.

"She's going to stay up and be super hyper and I'm not dealing with that."

"Ugh," Harry falls back onto the bed. "This is why I need you. You can't be angry at me, I'm such an amateur at this parenting thing and you're the wise one with all the knowledge like don't give your kid a second helping of dessert."

Harry rubs his eyes from where he lays, his shirt riding up to expose his stomach. I glance away, old feelings stirring up.

"Is there still dinner?" I change the subject.

"Of course," Harry shoots up. "I'll warm some up for you."

As I eat, I'm entertained first by the children's movie and then by Harry dealing with a hyperactive Charlie. She begins hopping around and jumping from couch to couch, tackling Harry and then coming my way. I pick her up and blow raspberries on her belly as she laughs.

"Tire her out quickly," I advise Harry as I go to clean up. "She'll fall asleep faster."

As I settle into bed, my heart twinges hearing the voices outside my room. It sounded like a family, like a family that could be mine. And the thought keeps me up even after the voices die down and Harry carries a sleeping Charlie into the room.

I keep my eyes closed and feel him tuck her in beside me. I sense him standing above the bed, the smell of him grows stronger as he leans over and kisses Charlie goodnight. I feel him hesitate before he presses his lips to my temple. I relive that single moment as he closes the door behind him and Charlie snuggles into me. And I start to realise that staying with Harry was one of my worst ideas yet.

#harry styles fic #harry styles x reader #harry styles fanfic #fic #harry styles imagine #dad!harry #I can't decide if I want more drama or fluff #if ur reading this pls help #lol #harry styles #harry styles angst #harry styles fluff #writingsfromhome

311 notes · View notes

medusinestories · 3 years

Text

Black Sails, IV (S1, ep 04)

- Silver's horrified face when he finds out he's going to have to roast pigs is a Journey, starting with shock, then fake smiling, and then this horrified shuddery expression. It's just as interesting when they drop the dead pig at his feet and he clearly doesn't know what to do with it and also finds it disgusting. I can absolutely see where all the Jewish John Silver headcanons come from, especially since it's unlikely that a London urchin has never seen a dead pig and raw meat in general before.

- Here we have the first performance of Cassandra DeGroot: he knows that the bay they'd chosen to do the careening was too dangerous, and warns the crew. He's immediately countered by Flint, who has much more persuasive arguments to get the careening done fast but in a risky manner. (this whole thing reminds me of our current COVID/climate situation, where scientists get talked over by politicians, and people prefer listening to the latter because they seem to offer much better prospects than the “catastrophist” former)

- In this episode Billy is now quartermaster and he shows himself to actually be really good at disciplining the crew, something Gates, DeGroot and even Flint recognise. However, he also agreed to do the careening only because he's afraid to say no to Flint and allowed the men to have a fuck tent, which he feared would distract them - and it did, the two men who placed the rope on the wrong tree decided not to follow his orders and go fuck instead. This all weighs on him enormously after the disaster with Randall and Morley, who accuses him minutes before his death of already being in Flint's pocket. It's pretty clear that more responsibility doesn't do Billy's mental state any good.

- Morley's story about the Maria Aleyne gives some idea of a timeline, albeit a faint one. The incident took place "a number of years back", before Billy joined. This means that Billy is a somewhat new addition to the crew. We know that Randall was bosun when Billy joined. This also establishes that Lord Hamilton has been dead for several years, which now begs the question: who is the Lord Proprietor that Richard Guthrie is now in touch with? Did Thomas have a younger brother who inherited the Bahamas? Was someone new appointed? Was there a gap between Proprietors that allowed the pirates to establish themselves even more after Lord Alfred's death?

- I just adore the fact that Miranda actually went to stinking, violent Nassau because she was just too impatient to wait at home and wanted to be there when the Walrus came in and immediately hear the news of Lord Alfred's death. She is that vengeful and angry and I love her <3

- Speaking of which, this episode gives us the Passive-Agressive Sex Scene which makes so many people doubt of Flint's attraction to Miranda. Just look at Flint’s face: this man isn't uncomfortable or sad he is PISSED. He plays starfish and glares at Miranda all through it (while maintaining an erection all the same!). Miranda must be hella frustrated (or determined) because she manages to get off in spite of all of this (also, how uncommon is it for a sex scene to end when the woman climaxes rather than the man?) It's only when it ends that both Flint and Miranda are both shown as vulnerable and sad and reflective, with Flint reaching up to touch her but not quite getting there - imo because he's still angry but knows that she (and he) needs comfort.

- This leads into the argument over Meditations, and Miranda explicitly talking about Thomas and not wanting to forget him. The book hasn't been touched in a long time, confirming the idea that Miranda shared it with Richard Guthrie because Flint refuses to touch it. Her grief, her loneliness, are incredibly poignant in this scene, and we see Flint shift from bristling and stonily glaring at her, to absolutely melting (Toby's facial expression shifts here are just *chef's kiss*) and finally being gentle and tender with her. However, even though he promises to make things better, Miranda clearly doesn't believe him anymore.

- This brings in a big theme in the episode: betrayal from people you care for/trust. Mr Scott asks Eleanor not to do anything rash in order to get the Andromache’s guns, only to discover her Plan B: to kill Bryson if he didn't comply. In the meantime, Richard Guthrie tells (a very sceptical) Miranda that he can only support Eleanor and Flint, because he pretty much has no choice in the matter. He then proceeds to betray his daughter by making a deal with Bryson and with Mr Scott, who’s still smarting from Eleanor’s betrayal and who Guthrie tries to convince by saying that Eleanor's endeavour will lead to her death and Nassau’s destruction (considering what we later find out about Mr Scott, Eleanor’s safety is probably not be the argument that actually compels Mr Scott - but he certainly doesn't want the Navy searching the area and finding Maroon Island, and needs a stable Nassau to continue supplying his island).

- The Undercooked Pig scene and Silver's attempts at communicating with Flint will never not be funny. Silver looks so small when Flint glares him down, but that doesn't last all that long: once Flint has taught him how to cook the pork, Silver seems much more bold, asking Flint how he learned to glaze the pig, insisting that Flint should trust him and not Billy. This is also a moment where Silver shows that, unlike Flint, he is incredibly perceptive: he noticed that Billy is "straining at the seams" because of the lie he told. And while Flint spits a "there is no we" and calls Silver a rodent, it's obvious that Silver's words still have an impact on him. Their collaboration is sealed when Silver hands him the cleaver so that he can save Randall (and himself). When Flint returns the cleaver to Silver, he's ready to accept that Silver is actually on his side (albeit for selfish reasons) and listens to him for the first time.

- Max believed that she could charm Vane's remaining crew into being kind to her - and overall it seems to have worked. While again I hate this plot, it does give an interesting insight into how even the worst pirate crew is portrayed: most of the men are happy to comply with Max and get sexual rewards "for gentle obedience". Most of them, basically, aren't violent monsters deep down. However there's always one, in this case That Big Bastard (I'm sure he has a name, I just can't be bothered to google it), who clearly gets a kick out of torturing/raping people and hates the idea of a woman taking the lead.

- Fuck You Jack is another theme of this episode. Vane is high on opium and booze and has basically lost the will to do anything. Anne has been courted by several other crews, but Jack hasn't received any offers (note there's no loyalty to Vane here, Jack’s ready to leave, but nobody will have him) and nobody is willing to help him after the pearl cock-up. Then Noonan wants Max back, which Jack refuses because she's the only thing keeping the few members of his crew loyal - and Anne isn't on board with that, leading to her telling him to fuck himself. This, btw, might have crossed Jack’s mind considering the position she was in when he found her. I think it’s easy to forget that Jack is portrayed as pretty callous and happily willing to treat people like pawns too.

- When Richard Guthrie talks about Nassau, he describes it as a place "a place where she [Eleanor] matters, a place where you [Mr Scott] matter", and adds that a place like this isn't meant to last. Nassau, then, is currently an utopia where women and black people can have some semblance of power - and he doesn't believe that this will ever be allowed to exist because this kind of story never has a happy ending in their current society. But when Flint talks to Eleanor about their project, he's of the opposite view: people don't believe that it's possible, but when they succeed, they'll say it was inevitable. It seems Flint is firmly in the camp of "winners get to tell the story", and that the story will influence how the rest of the world sees them.

- When the Walrus tilts and squashes Randall, Flint stops Billy from intervening and rushes to rescue Randall himself - even though he knows the ship will be cut loose at any moment. He puts himself into incredible danger in this moment. Why? Theoretically, it could be for a manipulative purpose: to look good to the crew, or to get rid of Morley. But Flint seems genuinely involved in the struggle to save Randall, and he barely had time to think before he ran off. I feel that this is a rare spontaneous moment for Flint, where instead of thinking about his plans or his position as Captain, he just thinks like a person in an emergency who wants to rescue someone else. He absolutely could have died out there. And while Billy seems to suspect him of having killed Morley, I don't find that reading compatible with what we're shown of Flint trying to save Randall. True, he may have kicked/pushed Morley at the very last second, but we’ll never know that for sure.

- Back to the theme of people betraying their loved ones, we have Richard Guthrie getting back to Miranda, telling her he knows who she is and revealing the "Thomas went mad because Miranda and Flint cheated" story which he heard from Lord Alfred himself. So now Miranda knows that her identity has been revealed and that Richard could spread the story to, say, Pastor Lambrick (let's not pretend this didn't cross her mind, she keeps her identity secret for a reason). And then Guthrie offers her a way back to civilisation. This, right after a kid threw a stone at her, calling her a witch. This, after Flint has promised to make things better, even as he goes deeper into reckless/utopian plans of fortifying Nassau. Backed into a corner, was Miranda ever going to refuse, if she could be safe and have him be safe? And obviously, Richard Guthrie isn't doing this out of the kindness of his heart. He apparently figured out that Miranda was a way to get in touch with Pastor Lambrick and that ridding New Providence of Flint and winning over the “good”, normal inhabitants would be a perfect beginning to buying back his influence on the Island - the end goal being named Governor, of course.

- If there was any doubt that Vane’s tough guy thing is part of an act, his opium hallucination of Eleanor makes it crystal clear: "you're alone, you don't have to pretend with me". That is, pretend that he's not afraid and that he's not vulnerable. The hallucination also offers Vane an explanation for why Eleanor is how she is: like him she's afraid of appearing weak. He's actually spot on, a big problem in their relationship is that they're too alike and are struggling for dominance. Which is probably why Vane wants to overcome his fear and weakness, and regain power by confronting his old slave master (btw, nice parallel with Flint haunted by Miranda in S3). The scene where Vane kills Noonan also shows him in a very animalistic light - at first he's cornered and somewhat pathetic, beaten, throwing up, only saved by the fact that a gun misfires. Then he turns violent: quick, instinctive and relentless, deaf to Noonan's plea to leave him alive, even if theoretically it could have been profitable for him.

- I have to say, I snickered quite a bit when Pastor Lambrick sees Richard Guthrie and tells him "God teaches us not to cheer when someone stumbles, in your case I may ask his forgiveness". I mean, I really see his point. He leads a group of Puritans who are trying to make a life for themselves on this island. Historically, people who lived and farmed in New Providence were constant targets for errant pirates, who robbed, raped and killed a lot of them. This is what the Pastor is trying to protect his congregation from (and Miranda, since he doesn't understand why she's with Flint and is likely terrified that a pirate lives so close to his congregation, hence the spies he sends out). There's a bit of a parallel with Billy, where both Lambrick and Billy are presented as being very preoccupied with the well-being of the group they're responsible for, and both are presented as, well, Goody-Two-Shoes - (self-)righteous, loyal, honest, caring. Except they're both human, and sooner or later they falter.

46 notes · View notes

ashesandhackles · 4 years

Text

Inferius

(They are corpses that have been bewitched to do a Dark Wizard's bidding)

(i)

To the Dark Lord

His brother may call him an idiot for believing in their parent's spiel, but Regulus Black was never a fool. He understood what was going to happen when the Grimmauld Place went a week without fights, in deadly silence that he didn't have to keep to his room, or the basement (when things got uglier between his brother and parents) anymore. He understood the phrase calm before the storm better than anyone, and eyeing the ugly resentment on his brother's face during the meal, Regulus decided to spend the rest of the day in the basement.

Kreacher was the one who came to him in the night with sandwiches after the muffled shouting from upstairs had stopped, and said, "Master Sirius ran away."

Regulus nodded, throat dry, "Good riddance" because he couldn't have said anything else, he knew where his brother was going to go. He knew what it meant, (he is going to be the heir, no longer the shadow, the spare) and yet, it curiously felt like a sting of betrayal and abandonment.

The night when he ordered Kreacher to come back after the elf's service to the Dark Lord, he had kept the elf in the basement within his own blankets as the elf tried to calm his violent shivering, a curious ringing in Regulus's ear and the phrase calm before the storm struck his mind again. He was scared, the same fear he felt when he had watched Sirius spit blood in the basin. He asked his brother, furiously back then, "Why do you keep provoking them?"

"Because it feels good" Sirius had replied, wiping his mouth. The curious ringing in his ear happened then, and he knew what was going to happen before it did. He wasn't prepared then, for his brother leaving. He wasn't prepared for his instincts to be right. But he had to be prepared now, he owes it to this elf who had paid for his foolishness, for his trust in Dark Lord and if he was right, because this time he was sure he was, because as they say, truth is bitter, betrayal burns and both of them are churning in his system, and what he was about to do never felt more right.

He is not the child who hides in his basement so that he cannot see the evidence of his parent's cruelty, he is not the child who will ignore Dark Lord's cryptic sentences about his immortality, he is not a child who does not feel the horror of what he has been asked to do in name of an ideology. So when Kreacher wakes up, Regulus asks him quietly, "What happened?"

This time, he was prepared for his instincts to be right.

(ii)

I know I will be dead long before you read this

Mulciber had Regulus Black in a chokehold, he probably would have spit in that arrogant face that now looked so much like Sirius Black's that he would have happily choked the younger boy to death. However, this boy looked much thinner and almost ghostly, as if he hadn't eaten or slept for days, and whatever his resemblence to his blood traitor brother, he liked the kid until he chokes, "Fuck..", he struggled against the hold and decides to put on a sneer, "..you".

"You are rethinking your loyalties? Right bit of coward, aren't you, Regulus? Blood traitor like your brother to boot," Mulciber had gotten what he wanted when the offense at being compared to his brother, once again, registered in the boy's eyes. The kid seemed to want to protest his difference from his elder brother, but the moment had passed and Regulus Black said nothing.

With enormous satisfaction, Mulciber let him go, and Regulus massaged his throat and started to laugh, a hollow, desperate sound of a madman, "What a little piece of gormless shit you are, Mulciber. And a fool - I am betraying the Dark Lord? He is going to betray us all. All of us, every last bootlicker."

Mulciber snarled, "The moment you are disloyal, you are marked for death Regulus. Our disloyalty would be paid for by our life. You knew that as soon as the mark had been branded to our skin."

The boy's grey's eyes narrowed and he seemed to spit with spite Mulciber didn't know he was capable of, "And yet, Mulciber, he wouldn't have any qualms treating you like a throwaway servant. Forgive me if I have a bit more pride than that. I have had enough."

Mulciber gnashed his teeth, "Listen to me, he will kill you. Or he'll make one of us kill you. If this is the time you have chosen to worship your blood traitor brother's path, then you are going to be sorry. You are going to get yourself captured, tortured and killed, hopefully not in that order. You are the heir of the most influential pureblood family - surely you know what happens?"

Regulus's eyes were cold, as if he was calculating something. Mulciber thought the kid looked rather like a corpse already. How pitiful.

When Regulus spoke, it was a whisper, "I do. I really do", after which he promptly wrenched the door open and left. That was the last Mulciber saw of the young heir.

(iii)

but I want you to know it was I who discovered your secret.

He was thirsty, so thirsty- he crawls to the edge, ignoring Kreacher's sobs. Why was he doing this? his tired brain demands an answer. Why?

This was a moment of glorious Gryffindor heroism, he would have thought. He is doing what his brother would have done, he had been born to replace his brother again, and again. To be an heir Sirius refused to be, to be a Death Eater because that is what is expected of him and that is what he believed in, he was the much better son and heir the Blacks deserved but not wanted.

So he cups water in his hand, because even in the tale of glorious heroism, he is playing the part his brother would have done, and now he was forever resigned to play his shadow. He could hear Kreacher sob harder when hands from the water grabbed him- but for one infinite, one brilliant moment, he realised. Sirius would have never been put in this position in the first place, because Sirius isn't foolish enough to join the Death Eaters. This strike against the Dark Lord, a covert strike of a follower who had been disillusioned, like a docile snake rising from the grass, so Slytherin, was completely his own. The thought made him smile as bodies dragged him underwater.

(iv)

I have stolen the real Horcrux and intend to destroy it as soon as I can.

Regulus's fingers broke the surface, he had been clawing ferociously at the water as if it was a wall he could climb, he opened his mouth to scream, to ask someone to help him and when his mouth formed the words, water rushed in, choking him.

A little part of him is glad the water cuts off his scream, because he knew whose name he was about to scream to come and help. Because that was the name that had been screaming in his head for days since Kreacher's return, Help me, Sirius!

The dead hands were pulling him under and his life was dwindling out of him,the blackness covered his lids, he could feel the hands choke him, (to be one of them, to serve the Dark Lord by protecting the fake locket he had planted) and that little part of him is glad he is dying like this, and not by the Dark Lord's hand.

He didn't think he could have tolerated the fact that his last second of life would be spent staring at the end of the Dark Lord's wand, the man who was going to betray them all, the man who cares about nothing but his own power.

Regulus had known his death was looming the moment he made up his mind, and yet, he struggles with Inferi as if he wants to live.

Help me, Sirius.

(v)

I face death in hope that when you meet your match,

If Mulciber thought he'd been in this position with the half breed pointing his wand between his eyes back during Hogwarts, he would have laughed himself hoarse. And yet, when he looked at the deranged face of Remus Lupin who looked more like a beast than a man at the moment, the fear of God was knocked into him. Remus Lupin's voice was both a desperate demand and a threat, "Where is Regulus Black?"

How the hell should I know? Mulciber wanted to say. Did you ever see this coming? The Dark Lord gone because of -good lord- an infant, and Sirius Black thrown into Azkaban for betraying the Potters. For all Mulciber knows, the world had gone mad. He could hear Regulus's sneer in his head as he stared up at the half breed and started to speak. Remus Lupin looked like he wanted explanations as well, from him, from anyone, to understand how the world had gone bleeding mad.

"Tell me where he is"

(vi)

you will be mortal once more.

No one knew where and what happened to Regulus Black, (except Kreacher but no one thinks to ask a house elf) and no one would recognise him if they did.

Not even the long awaited Dark Lord's equal, because all the bright green eyes saw was a grey, decayed dead body attacking him along with the mob (if Regulus Black were alive, he would smirk at the irony, oh the allegory of it all).

And briefly, briefly, within the ring of fire which the rest of the Inferi's collapsed against each other to move away from, Regulus Black's body recognised the light.

R.A.B

*Note: Lupin makes an appearance because he gave Harry information about how Regulus managed to stay alive for few days after defection in HBP when talking of Karkaroff's death. He obviously got that info second hand. Sirius's info is also second hand : "From what I found out after he died, he got in so far, panicked and tried to leave-". Hence the Mulciber scenes.

#regulus black #sirius and regulus #the black family #kreacher #regulus and kreacher #black brothers #sirius black #inferi #inferius #horcrux #remus lupin #posting old fanfics on here #with some tweaks #harry potter fanfic #regulus black fanfics #regulus black oneshot #hp fanfic #hp characters #character study

42 notes · View notes

ficforce · 4 years

Text

Little Wound Part 1

Joker x Little Lady Reader SFW There will be mentions of noncon and other abuse in this and the coming chapters

Joker stared up at the steel ceiling, his eye was unfocused as his mind drifted back to the rooftop nearly three months before. He wasn’t sure how he had survived because he had been pretty far gone; it was a miracle he had even been able to get a signal out to Licht. He loved her. He loved her so much and he had ruined her life because of his selfish desire to be free. He tried to recall her happy smiles and the way she would tell him off but the images kept morphing into her dead stare and her cruel words. She didn’t love him back, it had all been a lie to get close to him and slip a knife between his ribs. “I changed your IV drip - ya know I’m not this kinda doctor, right? I’m the experimenting kind.” Licht tapped on the rail of the hospital bed they had acquired, “The actual doctor did say you should start getting up and about… start eating more.” It didn’t take a genius - even though he was one - to realise the Joker was depressed. He had to be. Joker hadn’t left the hideout once since they had set up the bed, borrowed some simple hospital monitoring equipment, they also acquired blood and medicine for him. They had other allies working with them, all of them trying to work out why people kept catching fire - one of those people was a surgeon and he had barely saved the man’s life. “You can’t find the truth laying on your back.” “This word sucks, the truth just makes it suck more…” “But you wanted to find out why it sucked, remember?” This wasn’t his friend, this wasn’t the awkward, dangerous man he knew, “So you’re gonna just wait for the world to burn? Become a different kind of shadow that disappears into the dark all alone?” Nothing. Not a twitch. Joker turned his head away from Licht, figuring he’d disappear if he hoped long enough. “Damn it, Joker!” his fist hit the rail and the metal hinges of the bed squeaked, “Get up and do something - every second you waste in that bed is another second Y/N is trapped.” A sharp inhale followed by a shaky breath out was the only reaction he gave outwardly. The words stung but they did start a wheel turning in his head, one that hadn’t turned in three months, Y/N was trapped. She was likely back with the shadows under the Holy Sol Temple. Going through the hell he had run away from and damned her to. “Get outta here… I’m tired.”

x - -

‘You never belonged to the shadows’ Sometimes those words echoed around his head. Some of her parting words to him and he didn’t know if she was rejecting him or comforting him. Joker relived the night over and over, every word, every detail until he started to realise the minuscule things. Like the fact she had stabbed him in a way that deliberately missed his heart. She would have known exactly where to land a killing blow but she didn’t; she had nearly killed him. She hadn’t finished the job either. She had told him that she wanted him to remember her being different and special - not part of the collective. She didn’t want to be with the Shadows. She wanted to be free just like him and he wished he had recognised the pain in her eyes - the tension in her jaw. ‘The Captain always finds fault with me’ Joker knew what she meant because he had experienced it. He should have stormed tin there a year earlier and saved her, instead, he had felt sorry for himself whilst the Captain did Sol only knew what to her. Because she was his replacement, because he had tainted the Five-Two name.

Breaking into the Holy Sol Temple with Benimaru had been to seek the truth but it was also a partial rescue mission. However, when Joker saw those dead green eyes of the man who beat and violated him day in and day out, who had ordered the murder of the family who had taken him in and forced him out of the sun again… He forgot all about Y/N and set Benimaru loose on the Shadows. The very idea of finally ripping out the bastard’s heart gave him the edge, his hatred of the Captain and what he had done - not only to him - gave Joker an odd kind of joy.

A pained yelp went through Joker’s ear like an arrow and he felt a heated blade catch his leg. This wasn’t the time to get distracted but the sound had caught him off guard and his head whipped around to see Benimaru kick one of the masked assassins in the stomach to send them skidding along the floor. They weren’t supposed to make a sound, even if their bones were snapped. Joker lit up three cards to deflect his opponent’s whip sword, keeping his eye on the other whilst shouting over to the other man, “Oi, not that one, Mr Almighty - I got business with the Little Lady.” Maybe it would be considered cheating; the way he had used a hallucinogenic on the Captain. Scaring the shit out of the man before dicing him up into pieces. Dead was dead.

Joker took a deep breath and straightened out his clothing, the adrenaline was buzzing under his skin from finishing off his once Captain, a man who had been hard to erase from his scarred mind and nightmares. However, things just weren’t that easy, now he had to deal with Leonard Burns and he was out of drugged up cigarettes. “Really?” He turned to face his old acquaintance, “So to get the holy scriptures, I’ll have to defeat you…”

“For someone who has been hiding in the shadows, this is pretty daring of you.” Captain Burns wasn’t surprised to see who had been causing all the trouble, there were only a few people as dumb as Joker to attach the Church head-on.

The dark-haired man spread out his hands and called up his cards, “That’s because I don’t want the truth to stay hidden…”

Leonard took a breath and beckoned to him, “Come.”

They were at the ready to fight and then Benimaru’s voice broke the heavy tension, “Sounds like fun. Let me join the fight too.” There was a long pause, a three-man standoff that ended with Leonard turning his back on them and declining to fight - much to Joker’s surprise. It had been a strange turn of events but now Joker had a neutral ally in the church and more evidence that something stank in the Empire. That just left his other business… Y/N’s body shook uncontrollably in the corner Benimaru had forced her into, he had tied up her wrists and around her body to secure her arms to her sides, “Whatever it was that you used to send these bastards mad also affected her, figured I’d tie her up for her own safety.” The younger man crossed his arms and watched silently as Joker knelt beside the assassin to remove the faceless, white mask, he could see that the woman’s eyes were blown wide and tears streamed down her cheeks - he wondered what she was seeing in her head.

Joker’s voice was quiet, his tone soft as he started to undo the ties, noting that they were quite intricate knots that indicated Benimaru had certain hobbies with ropes, he smiled gently as he eyes tried to focus on his face, “Hey there, Little Lady. You’re a bit high but I promise it’ll wear off in a few minutes.” Her eyes widened all of a sudden and Joker flinched as she began to scream, Y/N’s legs kicked at him and began begging for her life. “Please, please don’t kill me! Not like that, don’t cut me up into pieces! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I- I’ll… I’ll do it myself but please -!” She had betrayed him, she had played his heart and his mind, poured her drink over him as he bled out; she deserved his punishment but she couldn’t stand being tortured anymore. “I’m begging you… Please…” Y/N’s voice began to break and she was sobbing too hard to be understood.

Joker stared at her in silence. Watching the woman he still loved fall to pieces and begging for a swift death. He pulled a playing card out of his breast pocket and lit it up - she had always liked his card tricks before but the sound of the burning card only seemed to terrify her more. Y/N cowered into herself, her freed hands covered her head as she buried it into her knees. “Tch!” Benimaru’s click was loud enough to be heard over Y/N’s whimpering and he stepped closer to them, the air rippling with heat as his crimson eyes lit up, “Revenge is fine but I’m not gonna let you fuck up some woman who’s already given up.”

“Relax, Mr Almighty, I’m not planning on hurting her…” The card went out and Joker sighed almost sadly as he watched her, “This was a rescue mission too.” Reaching out, he stroked her head lightly, pointedly ignoring her increased sobbing as the man tried to offer her some sort of comfort, “It’s just the hallucinogenic making everything worse.” Feeling Benimaru come off the offensive Joker began to hum some nonsense song to Y/N, picking her up into his arms once he realised she was paralysed with fear - it was time to leave the Shadows and monsters behind.

#joker/52 #reader #fire force #enen no shouboutai #enn enn no shouboutai #garth ennis

29 notes · View notes

justalitlecreacher · 4 years

Text

Ok as much as I hate the events of the Rako Hardeen arc in Clone Wars and deeply wish that the council/Obi-Wan had at the very least told Anakin and Ahsoka what they were planning, I feel like the arc represents a very important turning point in Anakin’s fall and actually shows an important bit of character growth from Attack of the Clones.

Tl;Dr: The Rako Hardeen arc is my favorite and least favorite arc in all of Clone Wars because while it puts Anakin through unnecessary pain it also gives a lot of insight into why he may have fallen in Revenge of the Sith and shows some important character growth

Ok; the most important part of this post/analysis (I think) is to remember how close Anakin and Obi-Wan are. Anakin was placed in Obi-Wan’s care at the age of 9 and from then on Obi-Wan practically raised him. In Attack of the Clones we see Anakin refer to Obi-Wan as the closest thing he has to a father not once, but twice, and one of those two times was directly to Obi-Wan.”OBI-WAN: Why do I think you are going to be the death of me?! ANAKIN: Don't say that Master... You're the closest thing I have to a father... I love you. I don't want to cause you pain.”(Attack of the Clones) and later to Padmé “...He's [Obi-Wan] like my father,...”. This is especially important because when Anakin leaves his mother to become a Jedi in The Phantom Menace, Obi-Wan is literally the only friendly/familiar face in the Temple. Plus in the comics (disclaimer: I have not read all the comics just bits and pieces) we get a glimpse of Anakin training with the other padawans and it’s made clear that at least some of them don’t like Anakin at all. One padawan even refers to him as “just a slave” when shit talking him during training.(which like super fucked up; they def should’ve gotten in trouble cause that don’t seem very Jedi of them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Anyway; we’ve established Anakin and Obi-Wan’s bond. So let’s turn our attention towards someone who deserved so much better; Shmi Skywalker. Her death in Attack of the Clones was the first major turning point in Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side. There is really no excuse for Anakin’s actions after Shmi’s death; he goes to a very dark place, and likely taps into the dark side of the force during the massacre of the Tusken Raiders. But that’s not what we’re talking about rn so back on track.

I bring Shmi’s death up to say that while Anakin was tracking down Obi-Wan’s “murderer” I didn’t fully realize that Obi-Wan had disguised himself as Hardeen and I was genuinely worried that Anakin was about to unalive an innocent man. I really believe that the only thing that stopped Anakin from trying (and maybe succeeding) to kill Obi/Rako was like he said: he knew that Obi-Wan wouldn’t have wanted him to. This is important because the last time Anakin lost a family member he brutally murdered an entire village of Tusken Raiders, children included, and I think it’s safe to say that Shmi “the biggest problem in the universe is nobody helps each other” Skywalker would not have wanted that. I’ve finally arrived at one of my main points; this arc shows a crucial bit of character growth by showing an Anakin that is capable of thinking his actions through and not just reacting out of anger even after the loss of one of the most important people in his life; something he was previously shown incapable of when his anger and grief blind him. This turns this arc into an sort of midway point on Anakin’s fall; he’s clearly tempted to give into his anger and pain again, but he is able to resist this time. A younger Anakin may have killed “Hardeen” then and there.

This scene really contrasts with Anakin’s actions in Revenge of the Sith in a way im not sure how i feel about yet. On one hand it has potential to make Anakin’s actions in Revenge of the Sith feel too out of character. We just saw Anakin able to see past his own emotions in the wake of the death of a loved one so what makes this different? On the other hand this arc can be used to show just how desperate Anakin is to not have to feel that way ever again. It’s also good for showing how much influence Palpatine has had on Anakin in the space between this arc and Revenge of the Sith. As for why Anakin may be unable to think past his own feelings in Revenge of the Sith when he appeared perfectly capable in the arc, a likely reason is that there really wasn't anything Anakin thought he could do for Obi-Wan anymore because he believed him to be dead, but with Padmé, Anakin knew she could be saved if he could just get her the proper care. But his fear of being exiled from the Jedi Order, and his increasing lack of faith in the council led him to believe that he had no choice other than to trust in Palpatine. And no hate to Yoda but im sure when Anakin did try to reach out (even as vaguely as he did) Yoda’s response of “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” didn't appear to be very helpful (especially considering that he is well aware that listening to Ahsoka’s visions and responding appropriately saved Padmé’s life (not sure if Anakin knows about that though)). These three episodes show pretty well how/why Anakin may have felt that he had nowhere to turn but Palpatine.

These groups of episodes actually show negative character growth (is that the right term?) in Anakin. He goes from commiting mass murder rated E for everyone to understanding that his loved ones would not want him to seek revenge in this way, but then he backslides into this lightsaber is rated E for everyone by Revenge of the Sith. Logically he should know that Padmé would never have wanted him to do what he did; he has to know what he’s doing is wrong, but he’s incapable of seeing another way out because he cannot handle even the thought of losing Padmé. He’s too desperate to not lose her, and so sure that there’s no other option that he manages to convince himself that he needs to do this for her. I find this entire arc really interesting but unless i want to be here all day the most i can do here is point out that it exists and that it peaks in the Rako Hardeen arc. Surprisingly i do have a life outside of writing long posts, and i lack the time and energy to analyze all of Clone Wars and write about every event that led to Darth Vader (there are so many). On top of that i actually haven’t seen all of Clone Wars; just the episodes most important to understanding Anakin’s fall.

Onto my next point, we just talked about the growth Anakin showed in this episode; now onto why i believe that this arc was instrumental in Anakin’s fall. (Disclaimer: I do not think that removing this arc alone could have saved Anakin, but i do believe it would have helped a good bit). I’ve already touched on Anakin and Obi-Wan’s bond so im not gonna do that again.

Ive said it before and i will say it again; it was super fucked up of Obi-Wan and everyone else on the Council to use Anakin’s (and Ahsoka’s) reactions Obi-Wan’s “death” for their own gain. It was super manipulative and they absolutely knew what they were doing. Obi-Wan even explicitly says, “Keeping Anakin on the outside was critical. Everyone knows how close we are. It was his reaction that sold the sniper. I'm sure of it.”(Deception season 2 episode 15). He knows just how devastated Anakin would be by his death, and he uses like Anakin and his mental and emotional well-being mean nothing to him (I know this isn’t true but its probably not hard to believe that someone doesn't care about your feelings when they’ve just tricked you into thinking they’ve died for their own gain). The Council really proves time and time again that they do not care about Anakin’s (or maybe anyone’s; Anakin was far from the only one close to Obi-Wan left unaware of his deception) mental or emotional wellbeing, but tbh i think this is the worst example of how callous the Council can be. And on top of all of that it was Obi-Wan who decided to keep Anakin in the dark Obi-Wan who should have known better; if we assume that Anakin is at least 20 in Clone Wars; Obi-Wan has known Anakin for at least 10 years, and has practically raised him from the age of 9, and yet somehow, somehow he had this idea and didn't see a single thing wrong with it. (And they really picked the worst possible person for this; like yea let’s trick the most unstable Jedi we have into thinking his closest friend/ father figure was murdered)

This arc’s main purpose (IMO) is to really show the beginnings of Anakin losing faith in the Jedi and putting more and more faith in Palpatine. Anakin trusted Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan betrayed that trust. Beyond that Palpatine is able to make Anakin begin to doubt how much the Council is telling him if they didnt tell him something as crucial as this. We even see Anakin parroting Palpatine’s “concerns” of the council not telling Anakin the full truth the Obi-Wan and the end of the arc. This arc is instrumental is establishing Anakin’s loss of faith in the council and shows how much he trusts Palpatine and sees him as a real friend.

Anyway I’m sure I had more I wanted to touch onand if I remember I will definitely edit this post but for the now I just wanna say. A) I love Obi-Wan a lot; this arc just really was not it. I do not understand how he thought this was in any way acceptable but I do still really like him. B) i fully understand that Anakin’s actions are his own and he does take a share of the blame for his own fall.

#what am i doing?#anakin skywalker #obi wan kenobi #rako hardeen #star wars #clone wars #deception arc #clone wars deception #long post #ramble #im so sorry except im not #i hesitate to use the word hyperfixation but not a day has gone by that i havent thougt of Anakin Skywalker at least once #in so long #i have a problem

23 notes · View notes

hiirunakaarchive · 4 years

Text

– to act in haste (pt. 4)

↳ preview

Dr. Sakurai, between acknowledging her company and putting on a smile for the press, let her eyes flit away momentarily from whoever it was she was shaking hands with at that moment. Her lips were pursed in a tight smile in an attempt to keep herself collected amongst the overwhelming attention, and her eyes wandered outside of her immediate surroundings.

And he recognized it. The moment her face fell and her smile faded, he realized that Haruna’s eyes had already met his.

Her lips parted slightly and then back shut at the sight of him, as if to stop herself just before reacquainting with the feel of Dr. Ramsey’s name on her tongue.

“Ethan...?”

↳ (pt 1), (pt 2), (pt 3)

◇ pairing: ethan ramsey x mc (haruna sakurai)

◇ genre: angst, a lot of yearning, maybe a little break in between :/

◇ word count: 3.3k+

◇ tags: @aworldoffandoms, @perriewinklenerdie, @jooous, @senseofduties, @moteestro, @haesselnut, @princessfuzzy12,

◇ author’s note: to the very limited audience who actually enjoy this fic: thank u for ur patience!! this chapter was so mf hard to write and FOR WHAT. after a couple months of sitting on google docs at 4am trying to update this fic instead of doing my schoolwork like i was supposed to, it turns out this chapter is not the finale at all🤡 ive considered incorporating smut into this since those seem to get notes but that’s one of my literary shortcomings so im gonna refrain and save face✨ feedback appreciated, yall know the drill xoxoxo luv u guys

chapter four

Diamonds. Oh, how that woman loved diamonds.

Carbon atoms arranged in a tetrahedral structure. The hardest natural substance on Earth. Yet another natural phenomenon upon which mankind had imposed their shallow, materialistic beliefs.

But he bought one anyway; kept that damn two carat, marquise cut ring in the bottom drawer of his bedside table for five years. The velvet box sat in the dark that entire time, unworn and collecting dust, thus Dr. Ramsey couldn’t help but wonder if it was still suitable for the hospital heiress it was intended for.

“Dr. Sakurai will be present as the keynote speaker.”

Harper regarded Ethan carefully when she said it, far too aware of his and the younger doctor’s history. Ethan met her pensiveness with a simple nod of his head.

“I see. She’s made quite a name for herself.”

“You’re taking this surprisingly well.” Dr. Emery observed, raising a brow, “I was expecting a bit of protest in attending, but you seem fine.”

But Dr. Ethan Ramsey was not, in fact, fine.

“Have you seen her?” Harper continued,

“Aurora ran into her in Manila, doing some philanthropy it seems. She looks different, might be the afterglow of success. Might be that boyfriend she brought along too.”

That what?

It didn’t necessarily come as a surprise, but he still stopped listening. He’d tuned Harper out, something about the boy being on Haruna’s research team in Japan, a prodigy that interned at the WHO when he was only fourteen; Harper said they were a good match, but Dr. Ramsey, as a final form of consolation, hoped he’d heard her wrong.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, because Dr. Ethan Ramsey was far too old and far too calculated to rely on something as subjective as a “marriage pact”. Blurted on a whim, didn’t keep in touch, hell, he wasn’t even sure if he still remembered her face. That shallow promise they made five years ago came with too many uncertainties, and far be it from him to be bitter over her newfound happiness.

So his silence spoke for him, living a life of 52 seconds before Harper noticed he’d gone quiet. He earned a glance from his colleague, Dr. Emery trailing off and sparing him a thoughtful look. Her gaze softened in realization, and she bit her lip regretfully.

“Oh, Ethan, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you still-”

“I don’t.” He snapped.

Bullshit.

He released a long, drawn out breath and pinched the bridge of his nose, collecting himself. But the damage had been done, and nothing he could say would wipe the suspicion off Harper’s face. The rueful shake of her head and the sympathetic pat of his arm told him all he needed to know.

“I mean it.” Ethan said, the excessive sternness of his tone taking away the credibility of his statement.

“Dr. Sakurai is…”

A pause.

“She’s nothing to me.”

–––––

And he was so damn wrong.

Ethan and June boarded a flight to Kyoto two days later, and for the entire duration until the conference, Dr. Ramsey was concerned at his own indifference.

Concerned, but desperate to believe it.

He wasn’t sure what to expect out of seeing her again, but some sick part of him wanted to have fallen out of love with her. Then that meant he wouldn’t have to care at the blatant reminder that she was with someone else. He wouldn’t have to admit that she was probably better off with someone that wasn’t him. Most of all, he wouldn’t have to pretend that the idea of them never getting a second chance didn’t absolutely shatter him.

But it wasn’t that easy. It was never that easy.

Because there he was, standing on the outer circle of a ring of reporters and conference guests that demanded the young doctor’s attention. Like the crowd, Ethan was completely and wholly entranced by her and it was in the moment that he realized–

Haruna Sakurai still meant everything to him.

Her hair had been cut short, its length reaching her chin and dyed a shade alike to walnuts. She wore glasses now and on the bridge of her nose rested thin circular frames that accentuated her ovular face, Haruna’s features fixed in a permanent smize as she charmed the crowd with a polite smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. The woman trickled in ivory and quartz from head to toe, and Ethan’s breath caught in his throat at the memory of how much he loved her.

How much he still loves her.

And he recognized it. The moment her face fell and her smile faded, he realized that Haruna’s eyes had already met his.

Her lips parted slightly and then back shut at the sight of him, as if to stop herself just before reacquainting with the feel of Dr. Ramsey’s name on her tongue.

“Ethan...?”

She looked at him like he was some figment of her imagination, breathing his name like saying it was an anchor to keep the man from disappearing. Dr. Ramsey could almost feel himself unravel if not for the deadwood that entered the scene.

Satoshi Date.

The boyfriend.

God, her fucking boyfriend.

He was stuck to her like glue, a hand protectively encased around her shoulder as Haruna caught herself and resumed in indulging the crowd. She smiled proudly and crossed her arms, everything but her wrists and beautifully manicured hands hiding underneath the cape of her white pantsuit. Her male company, just as charismatic and smartly dressed, entertained the representatives of Big Pharma.

From what Ethan could see, Date was young. Bright. Approachable with an award-winning smile that was almost too friendly for his liking. Together, the doctor and scientist looked invincible and Ethan found himself for admitting that they actually complimented each other.

“What a tool.” He couldn’t help but scoff. “...Spit it out, Hirata.”

Beside him, June’s shoulders were shaking with silent laughter. She brought a hand up to her mouth and turned away, responding between giggles she tried to suppress. Ethan rolled his eyes.

“I apologize, it’s nothing. It’s nothing. Don’t let it bother you, you and Sakurai were always the better- pft.”

Dr. Hirata failed to contain herself and released a snort, shaking her head as she walked away to scout for their seats in the lecture hall. Ethan’s irritant gaze followed her retreating form and his chest bubbled with annoyance as he remained clueless towards the reason behind his colleague’s laughter.

He looked over his shoulder one more time to where Haruna and Satoshi stood, close as ever, and the jealousy weaved knots in Dr. Ramsey’s stomach to the point that he settled in looking for his assigned seat instead. Ethan glanced at his watch; fifteen minutes before the official start of the conference, and from his peripheral vision he could see Haruna beginning to make her way backstage to prepare for her speech.

Finding his spot beside Dr. Hirata, Ethan looked up to the stage, sat in the very front row and directly in front of the podium.

Fuck.

The lights finally began to dim at ten o’clock, and Dr. Sakurai, clad in white, appeared on stage.

The woman’s presence commanded the attention of the room as she made her way to the centre in a powerful stride. The anticipant stillness of the crowd broke and Haruna’s entrance was greeted with a light smattering of applause as she enveloped the audience in warm welcome and a dazzling smile. Ethan watched her with bated breath, wondering when she had become this beautiful.

“It warms my heart to see so many familiar faces.” She began.

Her kind eyes scanned the audience and Dr. Sakurai’s gaze fell momentarily on Dr. Ramsey, conflicted, before getting to the punchline of the joke.

“Forgive me when I say I wasn’t expecting so many of you to still have a full head of hair the next time we met.”

–––––

The next 45 minutes passed that way, with Haruna completely and wholly engaging the crowd as she shared knowledge and humour, establishing a pleasant tone for the remainder of the conference. Ethan could sense the nearing end of her speech as Haruna began to smoothly transition from the central theme to her concluding words.

“A very important person to me once said that as doctors, all we do is delay the inevitable-”

Ethan leaned back in his seat, arms crossed and with a valiant effort, careful not to let his emotions betray the nonchalance in his face. The reminder of that lesson he taught her so long ago revived something in the older doctor that he thought had died when Sakurai left for Japan.

Then he remembered her obsidian hair dipped in red. Her long delicate fingers that he held in his when they first met, steadying the tremor before saving a life. He remembered her downcast eyes when he reprimanded her over a patient, and the embarrassment in her voice when she admitted to crying in the storage room.

Now here she stood, six years later. Confident. Unshaken. A poetic opposite of the young intern he once knew.

“—to healthcare professionals,” The sound of Haruna’s voice interrupted his thoughts, “one word immediately comes to mind when discussing the inevitable.” She said the words with air quotes.

“Death. Mortality. Demise. I always found it ironic how we, doctors who so value life, were the very crowd who imposed such negative connotations on the word.”

“We follow the paved path of the Inevitable because it’s the only one we know. It provides a definitive answer. But inevitably, we grow tired of this tedious destination. We inevitably seek more, strive for more and thus deviate from that paved path and become drawn to the unexplored dirt road; you find that it leads to so much more. My research team has offered me invaluable guidance on this road to the unknown, which is why I’m proud to officially announce that the Sakurai Medical Centre has discovered a cure for multiple sclerosis.”

And a stunned silence instilled itself into the audience.

Ethan stared at her in silent disbelief. Hirata’s jaw hung open before she threw her head back in proud laughter and clapped. Suddenly, a frenzy ensued with the commotion of the crowd, the entire room suddenly engulfed in cameras and flashing lights and the vocal disbelief of the fellow doctors around them. Haruna held up a hand and the guests, still buzzing with excitement, toned down to audible murmurs.

“I will answer any questions anyone might have about this medical feat throughout the day, but as I conclude this speech I’d like you all to do one thing–”

“Question yourself. Question the world. Challenge the things thought to be set in stone, and when all is said and done, ask yourself-”

Haruna looked meaningfully at the hundreds of people seated in front of her, a sharp tension emanating in the room as her cat-like gaze scrutinized the crowd. Her eyes finally fell on Dr. Ramsey, and the hold of her stare made it clear that this was no accident. She directed her query at her former lover and in a voice dripping with purpose demanded an answer.

“Is the inevitable really as dreadful as we might think?”

And he could do nothing but applaud.

–––––

The continuous ticking of the clock in Ethan’s hotel room was the only sound that intercepted a dead silence. Alone yet with his thoughts, he packed his luggage in preparation for his flight the next morning, pondering his weekend in Japan.

They met at the evening reception. Purely coincidence. She stood alone at an accent table, her back to him with a flute of rosé, and he approached her in an honest mistake.

“June.” Ethan sighed exasperatedly. “It wouldn’t have killed you to wait two minutes instead of making me scout you out in this crowded room for your damn blue dress-“

“Hey, I happen to like this damn blue dress.”

Then he found himself met with pearls and a gown of charmeuse silk. She came to him in the shade of blue orchids, her gown pooling at the floor like a blossom at its prime and Dr. Ramsey remembered just how perfect she’d always been.

They spoke. Briefly. Awkwardly. Watching their words like untested waters though the two were the furthest thing from strangers.

“Hi.”

Was what she said.

“...Hi.”

Was how he responded.

Then he couldn’t look at her. She was within arms reach, too easy to pull towards him and trap against his chest. Too easy to blurt out something he’d regret with her just close enough to hear it. Too easy to meet her eyes and remember that she was with someone else.

So he brushed past her, putting as much distance between himself and Dr. Sakurai before he lost himself. Before the crushing weight on Ethan’s chest pressed on until the words piggy-backed the next breath he released.

I still love you.

And he should have let it, because he hasn’t seen her since.

Zipping up his luggage and setting it upright, the sudden sound of Ethan’s default ringtone reverberating through the room made him jolt. He snatched his phone off the bedside table, eyebrows furrowed in annoyance, only to relax as he saw Naveen’s name flash across the screen for a FaceTime call.

“You have work.” Ethan observed, unimpressed upon recognition of Naveen’s office from the background.

“Which starts in an hour, I’m simply early! Speaking of work, administration wants you to bring back souvenirs.”

“By administration, you mean yourself.”

“Humor me a little. Dr. Tanaka tells me they have exclusive KitKat flavours and I’m absolutely beside myself with curiosity. Pick up a pack or two, your retirement gift to me.”

Ethan sighed in surrender.

“...What flavour do you want.”

“Dr. Tanaka recommends Hokkaido melon with mascarpone cheese, but I also recall June mentioning sakura matcha latte. I’ll leave it up to you.”

“What? You can’t possibly expect me to find such arbritary— hello?”

So fate let him out onto the Kyoto streets, into a grocery store, towards the snack aisle and right in Haruna Sakurai’s line of fire. She was on her way to the cash, he was still searching for those fucking KitKats, and they lightly bumped shoulders before meeting each other’s eyes for a polite apology.

“Ah, I’m sorry-“

“My apologies-“

And they both froze.

At first, they refused to acknowledge the familiarity in each other’s voice. She spoke in Japanese, but he recognized her assertive tone. Firm but pleasant, like running your hands across a velvet seat. She had a unique accent given her history of travel, and Ethan remembered how much he used to love hearing her talk.

It was the English for her. They weren’t too far off from the hotel where the conference was held, so Haruna immediately deduced that the stranger was one of the guests. But she knew Dr. Ramsey’s voice. All too well. His words uttered in low timbre, deep and rich like fertile soil that only further nurtured her adoration for him. The articulate nature of his speech that would substantiate the validity of his advice. Intimidating delivery of his words that grabbed her attention in fistfuls. It wasn’t until Haruna had her own intern that she became aware of how much she had begun to sound like him, and it was then that she realized she loved hearing him talk too.

“Dr. Ramsey.” Haruna didn’t bother to mask the surprise in her voice. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

The collectedness in Dr. Sakurai’s voice almost irked him. She looked nothing short of amicable, pretending like Saturday evening never happened where he fled from her after a one-word exchange. And her nonchalance, amidst Ethan’s struggle to find words, rapid heartbeat and sandpaper-dry throat, was only further confirmation that she moved on from their past.

“We’re on the same boat, Dr. Sakurai. I wasn’t expecting to be here but you know how Naveen is.” He struggled to maintain the apathy in his voice.

“Let me guess, KitKats?”

“Right on the nail. He’s looking for–”

Ethan stopped himself as Haruna turned to the shelf on her right, dragging a finger across the plastic wraps before swiftly plucking several packages out from under each other and tossing them into his basket. He peered into his bin of potential expenses and looked up at Dr. Sakurai as she tossed one more his way.

“Rook- Dr. Sakurai, Naveen is going to end up with diabetes.”

She retracted her hand from another pack and glanced at him once, then to his near-full basket in something alike to realization. Then she laughed. Like, really laughed. Her disciplined features melted into a toothy grin, replaced with something youthful. Something real. Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose to hide his own smile beginning to form.

“Oh, I’m sorry-” Haruna gathered herself as she breathed out a chuckle. “You know how much of a sweet tooth he has.”

She tilted her gaze up to meet Ethan’s eyes, an almost distant look brewing on her face until she caught herself and her smile faded.

“But it wasn’t all for him.”

Ethan raised a brow, and the female doctor’s attention flickered to the pack she last threw into his basket. He looked down, and his forehead creased with inexplicable conflict.

“That one’s for you. Didn’t you really used to like those back then?”

Yuzu flavoured KitKats. She used to love those, and he wondered if she still did. They were saved for special occasions and only shared with special people, but those “care packages” Haruna’s doting parents sent every once in a while from Japan never lasted. The original five that shared the penthouse used to come with snack sized versions, and Dr. Ramsey had to hide his in the drawer of his desk.

She would loiter in his office sometimes during her break, sitting across from her mentor as they passed the time talking.

“Snacking in my office? I’ve grown too lenient with you, Rookie.”

She popped a piece into her mouth and grinned with full cheeks.

“So you have.”

“Yeah… your influence– don’t get ahead of yourself.” He rolled his eyes good-naturedly as Haruna pressed a hand to her chest in faux flattery. He failed to suppress a smile and she returned her own, the awkwardness and the tension slowly alleviating between the two of them.

They grew silent, but it was a comfortable silence. The two doctors shifted on their feet, waiting for someone make the first statement, and Ethan racked his brain for words to say. What could he say?

“I meant to congratulate you,” He settled.

“These past five years have been good to you, Haruna. You’ve accomplished something great.”

Her smile widened at her ex-mentors praise.

“Thank you, I had an amazing team behind me.”

And as if on cue, the shrill marimba ringtone sounded in the air and made them both jump. Dr. Sakurai’s recognized it as hers and patted around her sweatpants, fishing her phone out of her pocket. Looking at Dr. Ramsey apologetically, she accepted the call and pressed her phone to her ear.

“Toshi?”

And the bitter reality settled back in. She turned her back to him, mumbling in rapid Japanese and Ethan breathed in deeply. Starting towards the cash register, he snuck past Haruna quietly, squeezing her shoulder in goodbye. A subtle alarm weaved itself into her features, and her gaze followed his back, unable to leave the call. Ethan rushed through the payment and took long strides out of the grocery store, pulling on the collar of his sweater as his throat began to constrict.

Get back to your damn hotel and finish packing your things. You’re going to get on that plane tomorrow morning, start work the day after and start forgetting about Haruna Sakurai.

He exhaled in a long breath. He could do this.

“Dr. Ramsey…?”

He could do this.

“Didn’t you really used to like those back then?”

He could do this.

“Is the inevitable really as dreadful as we might think?”

He couldn’t fucking do this.

Ethan slowed to a stop, and he cursed at himself. For developing feelings towards the one person he shouldn’t have fallen for. For being the root of the cause in this mess they entangled themselves in. For loving this woman so damn much that his own medical expertise couldn’t suffice in explaining the tight feeling in his chest whenever he missed her. Whenever he saw her.

Dr. Ramsey looked up to the sky, met with a streetlight hovering above his head and despite himself, he laughed.

He just couldn’t forget about Haruna Sakurai.

“Christ, I’m too old for this.”

And back towards the direction he came from, he began to run.

#choices #playchoices #open heart fanfiction #open heart #ethan ramsey #ethan ramsey fanfiction #ethan x mc #ethan ramsey x mc

44 notes · View notes

clean-bands-dirty-stories · 4 years

Text

The Best Things ~ J.V. (Part 9)

A/n: Lol there's like... the most minor gayness between reader and Jeremiah in this part and it means nothing but I'm living for Jeremiah's sexual awakening behind both Wayne brothers just like SEND ME HELP IVE BUSTED A LUNG

Word Count: 4700+

Playlist

Masterlist

"We're going to your uncle's diner?"

"Yes," Jerome confirmed for maybe the hundreth time. He was starting to get irritated.

"Your mother's brother?" Y/n continued, his voice rising into near hysterics.

Jerome groaned, turning to face the other boy. "What is confusing you?"

Y/n hesitated, his eyes roaming the streets. He hadn't been free in Gotham for a long time. The idea that someone he knew - anyone he knew - could pop up at any time gave him anxiety. "I mean, isn't this one of the many people that sat around and beat you up all the time? What could you want from him?"

Rolling his head back and forth, Jerome tried to reel in his patience. "I need information. You stay here and make sure I don't die okay? I don't trust you not to kill the old guy, and he can't die yet."

Y/n glared at the diner but nodded. As Jerome walked away, Y/n caught his arm and pulled him closer into a kiss. Jerome tensed before relaxing and nearly melting into him. Y/n smiled as he leaned away. "You better haunt me if you die in there."

Jerome grinned. "What else would I spend my ghost time doing?" He winked before leaving Y/n alone, entering the shop. Y/n stayed outside as he'd been told to, keeping his eyes on what was happening inside. He saw police coming and tensed, but Jerome had the gun out and was ducking under the counter in no time, not coming out again until they were gone. Things seemed to be going well as they moved to the back, only to return quickly with bowls of soup. Jerome began eating and they started talking again. It all seemed to be chill and casual... maybe Jerome's uncle wasn't as bad as he had seemed.

Just as Y/n had that thought, he saw the big man approaching the pair in the booth from behind. Y/n was running immediately. He needed a weapon, and by the looks of the man who's muscles were defined even from this distanced, he'd need something durable. He ran to the back door- something he'd noticed as they approached the diner before- and looked for something thick. He saw a pan and hefted it a second before nodding, also reaching over to grab a knife. With his two weapons, he moved toward the main room just in time to hear Jerome scream. He picked up his pace, peeking around. Then he was close enough to hear what the distance voices were saying.

The uncle was standing, a bowl of soup in his hand. "And the hot one is for you!" He slipped it in the microwave, heating the green liquid again. Y/n could smell the fumes of half burned soup- it was being far too overheated. Y/n felt sick. These were the kind of men Jerome grew up with? If his uncle was this bad, how bad was his mom?

Y/n crept carefully, moving quietly as he'd learned to in his time trying to stay away from Jameson in Gotham before the beatings had been stopped. He sprung up, slamming the pot across the big man's head and then brandishing his knife just as the uncle began to move closer, the heated bowl of soup in his hand and a sick excitement in his eyes. "Now this can go two ways," Y/n began. He moved between the big man- who had stumbled away - and Jerome, who was on the ground and gasping in relief only a moment before he was rejuvenated and standing next to the armed boy. "You can stop underestimating us and tell the man what he wants to know, or you can get a few more jabs in before we kill you both and go on our merry way.

Jerome cackled. "That's my boy!" His arm went around Y/n, almost knocking away his concentration. "You see boys, I'm not as easy as I used to be to push around." Jerome kissed Y/n's cheek and his uncle recoiled. The big man rose his eyebrows but seemed otherwise unaffected. Y/n wondered if there really were people that didn't mind two men being romantic with each other. He seemed surprised but otherwise chill. It was interesting.

Before anything else could happen, the door busted open. Y/n almost dropped his knife.

Bruce Wayne was standing in the doorway, his face twisted with emotion as he made an obvious effort to not look at Y/n, his eyes focusing on the big man. He carried a pole that went around the man's neck and the two began to struggle as the big man was obviously much stronger but Bruce seemed more than capable of handling himself as he threw his weight. As the two distracted each other, Jerome snagged a gun that had landed on the ground at some point. Y/n hadn't noticed it in the chaos, but he recognized it now as the gun Jerome had been carrying when the police had been around before. Jerome turned to his uncle, pointing the gun at the man. "Now we have some hot soup here..." Jerome grinned. "But, as I am a good host, we do have better options than microwaved, burned soup." He strutted off, returning with a bottle of bleach. "Open wide, Unc!"

"STOP! STOP STOP!" The man screamed as Jerome brought the bottle close to his mouth. "I'll tell you what you want to know." Jerome grinned, lowering the bottle. Y/n rose an eyebrow. "She picked St. Ignatius! The school is St. Ignatius."

"Got it." Jerome paused and looked over at Y/n who was already handing over a small piece of paper and pen he'd seen on the counter- probably what Jerome's uncle used to take orders. "Lost it," he relented, taking the paper from Y/n and handing it to his uncle. "Write it down." The older man did just that as Bruce and the big man struggled in the background. Y/n tried not to notice them too much, but as each second passed, it got harder for him to stand idly by and do nothing. He didn't care about a lot of people, but he did care about Bruce and after losing Harley... "Thanks," Jerome remarked in an overly cheery way as his uncle handed him the paper. It's been quite a visit, Uncle Zach." Ah so that was the asshole's name. "You really brought back the utter helplessness of childhood." Jerome began walking away and Y/n almost stopped him. "Well, see you around-" He turned back to Zach, hefting the gun. "Well, except the opposite." The gun went off and red splattered against Y/n's clothes and the counter. "Oh red's a good color on you," Jerome complimented.

Y/n grinned. "Maybe I oughtta wear it more often then."

Attention was turned to Bruce and the big man finally as the younger boy was aggressively pinned to the counter. Jerome clapped, getting the both of them to look at the other two. Bruce's eyes fell to the dead man now on the floor, his face flecking with regret. "Billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, coming to my rescue," Jerome drawled, as if considering the words. "Now, I did not see that one coming." He sighed, half laughing. "You know, with uncle Zach, the beatings never stopped. But nobody ever helped me." It got very quiet as Y/n looked at Jerome, his face twisted with concern. His eyes fell to the still untouched bowl of hot soup. He imagined how scared Jerome must have been. Today. Back then. Helpless and at the mercy of people who hated him for no reason. "Ever," the red head continued. Y/n looked over and reached out, his fingers almost intertwining with Jerome's... but the moment felt too real. Too serious. He felt like if he did something like that in a moment like this, it would mean something more than escaping Arkham or sharing jokes or killing people together. Comforting each other in genuine situations was a boyfriend thing to do. Was a love thing to feel. Was Y/n anything to Jerome but an easy way to pass time? He thought to Oswald, who considered friends useless. Who preferred to have lackies to companions, and who kept his enemies closest because he had to make sure they didn't betray him. Was Y/n just a follower Jerome could depend on to keep him out of bad situations? "It makes me wonder..." Jerome kept going, his voice low and slow. "What's wrong with you?" He began cackling, the mood breaking, causing Y/n to jump in surprise. "You know anything funnier than you saving my life?" Y/n perked up, suddenly panicked but not sure what to do. He couldn't handle seeing his brother die. "Is if I saved yours." He rose the gun, pointing it to the big man.

Y/n was surprised, but before anything could happen, Bruce yelled out a, "No!" Pathetic.

Jerome paused, humming in thought. "No," he agreed. "What would be funnier is if you were choked to death by the guy you saved me from. Yeah, yeah we'll do that instead." The big man hesitated but Jerome motioned him to continue. "Do your thing."

Y/n glared at the ground for a second before suddenly making up his mind, eyes finding the back of the man's head and aimin g before throwing the knife he was still holding. To probably everyone in the room's shock, the knife stuck and the man went down. "NO!" Bruce screamed.

Jerome looked back at Y/n, intrigued. "I didn't know you could do that."

"Neither did I," Y/n replied, shrugging. Oswald had people teach Y/n a few tricks here or there but Y/n hadn't really picked up on any of them. He had to be angry or protecting someone he cared about to kill someone. He wasn't driven enough when he was calm. His training had kicked in easily now, though.

"What did you do?" The boys looked over to Bruce, who looked beside himself. "Why did you do that, Y/n? That doesn't make you any better than Jerome!"

Y/n scoffed, stepping forward as he crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm NOT any better than Jerome, Bruce."

Bruce shook his head. "I don't believe that. You're a good person Y/n. It wasn't until you started to talk to these creeps that that changed. Penguin and Jerome and-" Bruce scoffed. "What are you doing?"

"Penguin," Y/n mused, rolling the name in his mouth. He thought back to his conversation with Harley about nicknames. Harley. "You know, I'm not Y/n anymore Bruce you're right. Y/n painted pictures and made friends and took all the shit everyone gave him with a smile. I'm stronger now. BETTER now." Y/n scoffed. "You know Bruce, tell everyone you know. Y/n Wayne is dead." He stood maybe a foot away from Bruce, his smile growing. "Harley Quinn is here instead." He winked, moving to the side. Bruce gasped as he looked over to see Jerome pointing a gun at him. "And that's our exit." Jerome looked at Y/n- at Harley - seeming to be looking for the go ahead to kill Bruce. Y/n shook his head. Jerome seemed disappointed but followed after Y/n anyway, moving slowly out of the room.

"Y/N STOP!" Bruce screamed, desperate to save his brother. Sure that he would find some remnant of who he used to be. "Y/N!" Both boys disappeared and the second they were outside, they started running. Bruce tried to take off after them but Jerome shot behind him, just well enough to slow Bruce down so they could get away. They were gone too fast, and Bruce lost them. The boy stood there, running his hands through his hair. "Fuck," he whispered.

They got clothes, picked up Jervis, and then they were on their way. They went to St. Ignatius, wired up the dude in charge after they got their information, and were off again.

Harley tried to be patient. He really did. But even Jervis and Crane seemed to know more than he did. At the brunch Jerome was very vague, and didn't give even a little lee way of information to the others, giving little run arounds to allude to information Jervis and Crane knew. It was very frustrating.

"So," Oswald began at one point when Jerome was talking to Jervis about... something. "Harley?"

He smiled, happy for the distraction. "Harley," he confirmed. "You go by Penguin. Ed has that whole Riddler schtick." Harley shrugged. "Firefly," he continued to list. "Mr. Freeze."

Oswald nodded. "I see what you mean." He gave a small smile. "So you're officially one of us now?"

"I kill people and everything." The men smiled at each other before giggling softly.

Oswald calmed, still smiling but more curious than amused now. "And... you and Jerome?"

Harley was suddenly very interested in his food. "What about it?"

Oswald seemed to sense his reluctance to talk about the subject at hand, but kept pushing. "Are you two together?"

A soft sigh escaped Harley just then as he looked away, setting down his food and silverware quietly. He pursed his lips, frowning. "I don't know." He looked at Jervis and Jonathan. "I don't even know what's going on here. He seems to trust them more than me, and seems totally unhinged. He's distracted and uninterested, which is fine because he seems really focused on something. And I mean he brought me along..." Harley shrugged. "I just feel like, I don't know-" he shrugged hopelessly.

"You're an extra piece to a complete puzzle?" Oswald offered, his expression full of understanding.

Harley's expression became pained. "Yeah."

Oswald reached over, patting Harley on the shoulder. "Love is an irritating, fickle thing Y/n- Harley." Both smiled. "You're one of the few people I trust. If you need anything, I'll be there."

"Likewise," Harley returned. "Of course." Oswald's eyes moved past him, his expression changing to surprise. "What?" Harley asked as he looked back, just in time to see Jerome turn away sharply, as if being caught doing something and trying to hide it. Harley looked back, confusion written all over his face.

Oswald was grinning, but this look was full of mischief instead of sincerity. "My dear Harley, would you like to see just how much your precious little redhead cares about you?"

Harley rose an eyebrow. "Well, you know me Oswald. Have I ever turned down the opportunity for information?" Oswald's smile only grew.

“He was glaring at me,” Oswald announced victoriously.

"He was glaring at you?"

Oswald rolled his eyes. "I see you haven't gotten over your habit to repeat when you're feeling dubious." Harley's mouth snapped shut. He hadn't realized that he asked questions repetitively when he was unsure of the answer, but as he thought back- yeah. That tracks. "Before you ask, it's significant because we were being affectionate and Jerome glared at me. He has no other reason to be mad at from the brunch, and if he'd been mad at me beforehand he would have tried to kill me or not invited me to begin with."

Harley nodded along slowly. "So your solution to him ignoring me is to... make him jealous?" Oswald nodded. "Won't that just get him more mad?" Oswald nodded again, as if that was the point. Harley frowned. "Getting Jerome mad has never been a good idea."

Oswald rolled his eyes. "If he gets possessive, he cares for you some way or another. If he doesn't... then you know." His excitement died down and Harley swallowed.

Well. Here goes nothing.

The worst idea probably ever had by anyone occurred to Harley the second he lay eyes on who he'd been told was a man named Xander Wild. Harley might not have known his real name, but the man's identity was clear. After all, when you look exactly like Jerome Valeska himself, who could you be other than the famous younger brother Harley had heard about only one other time.

Harley had been dragged along when Jervis had been tittering about how Jerome had an errand for them. They had convinced Harley to go when they said that if they didn't work quickly, Jerome might actually be in danger.

So then here they were, strutting around the tunnels of some maze chasing down the not-Xander-Wild in favor of finding Jerome. It was easy once they got the blonde. She tracked down not only one redhead they sought after, but both of them. First Jerome, then-

"Hello brother." Jonathan, Harley, and Jervis stood behind Jeremiah until Jerome sent the other two away to take care of Harvey and Jim. Harley sat here, leaning against the wall and listening to the exchange between the twins. The non-redhead rose his eyebrows, getting more and more shocked as it went on. The revelation that Jeremiah had manipulated their whole family because he was paranoid about Jerome...

"So you're saying you turned your whole family against your brother because you were afraid of what he might become?" Jeremiah looked at Harley and his face relaxed. He stuttered physically, almost as if he was going to step closer to him but then thought better of the action. "You realize that when they thought he was the problem child or whatever, they thought the solution was just beating the shit out of him. And not just with fists- that Uncle Zach of yours has a colorful way with skin and heated assorted soups." Jeremiah looked away. "If you were afraid of Jerome's insanity that didn't yet exist, you doomed yourself. People deserve love when they're struggling. By putting him through more suffering all you did was create who he is now."

"Don't give him all the credit," Jerome whined. "I have added some color to his original recipe."

Harley hummed, moving to Jeremiah's side. His finger brushed against the back of his shoulders, his arm resting across when he reached the end. Harley giggled. "He's kind of cute though. Makes sense why people believe him so much-" he raised his free hand, squishing Jeremiah's face. "Little puppy couldn't do any wrong, eh?" He giggled again, stepping away from him when Jerome donned an odd expression, shifting, obviously uncomfortable at watching Harley... flirt with Jeremiah. It became clear when Harley winked that that's what it was indeed.

The party was crashed when Gordon and Bullock showed up, guns at the ready. Jerome attempted a bluff but didn't pull it off, and soon enough they were all running for their lives, Jeremiah left behind. There was a car they'd gotten here in- they were all in it again. They'd gotten Jerome, but it seemed to have been marked a failure that they didn't manage to grab Jeremiah as well. Jerome seemed far more bothered by something else though. "Why were you doing that?"

"Doing what?" Harley asked lightly, eyes on the outside world.

Jerome made a frustrated half grunting noise. "With Jeremiah."

Harley didn't even look over. "Oh, him?" Harley shrugged. "Just having some fun."

Jerome was quiet for a long time. For far too long a time actually, as he was never one to be quiet for very long if ever. Even for a normal person it was considered quite a stretch of silence; Jervis' knuckles whitened on the wheel as he drove under the weight of the tension. It was when they were finally back to their little hideout that Jerome spoke again- only once the two men were in private. "Am I not enough fun for you?" He was smiling, advancing in an almost sexual way. It was strained though- he was obviously upset.

Harley was unsure how to go about this. "Jerome, dear, what am I to you?"

That seemed to confuse the redhead even more. "What?"

"Am I your boyfriend?" Harley offered, raising his eyebrows and crossing his arms.

Jerome scoffed. "Why would you wanna be something like that? So serious and boring. I'd prefer-"

"Friends?" Harley tried again, tilting his head. Tilting his head back and forth, Jerome considered. Harley scoffed, rolling his eyes at the extended hesitation. Jerome seemed to be confused again. He couldn't figure out why Harley was upset. "You can't be all possessive and expect me to only ever be interested in you if you can't even claim friendship with me, J. You want to say I'm yours? That's a two way street." Harley tapped his nose with a finger. "You don't own me, sweetheart. I'm free market. Don't be jealous that I'm acting with the freedom you've forced on me." Harley chuckled softly, shaking his head. "Makes you look pathetic, honestly." Then he turned and left. He'd felt a weight lift off of his chest, but he could feel Jerome's eyes burning holes into his back every step he got further away.

Jerome started acting weird after that. He got overly clingy with everyone except Harley. That was the only way to explain it. Whether it be putting his arm around Oswald's shoulders or leaning too close to Bridget or laughing too loudly at a joke that it was obvious he didn't even find that funny, or speaking way too loudly every time he named Jervis or Jonathan as his 'best friends' - directing a look he thought was subtle but very much wasn't at Harley - he just got overbearing and over the top. He was over compensating.

One day Oswald mumbled, "So he took the breakup hard I assume."

Harley scoffed. "What breakup? He won't even call me his friend, let alone his boyfriend." Harley rolled his eyes. "He's adorable but getting on my nerves." Harley smiled as he pretended to check his nails. He was thriving off the chaos he was creating, relishing how much of a fool Jerome was making of himself. Perhaps he shouldn't have been loving making someone he cared about suffer so much but fuck it. He did. Maybe he was some kind of sadist now. Maybe he just had a lower tolerance and a more eager thirst for revenge. Maybe he was just pettier nowadays. Whatever it was, it didn't bother him as much as it would have in the past.

Definitely not enough to back off or try to apologize and make peace.

People started to try and get the two back together as Jerome got even more on edge. Whether the request was to calm him down or take the reins on the whole affection thing or just to fuck him so he'd chill, Y/n was getting off on how even the other villains seemed to be struggling to handle Jerome acting like a child who's toy had been taken away. Well, Harley wasn't a toy and he wasn't an accessory. He was tired of being treated as such. Children who throw fits when told no don't get rewards. Men who own up to their feelings on even a minute level? They might get what they want if they ask really nicely. Jerome was taking the child route. Harley was too stubborn to give in.

It was better when Jerome was distracted. Whether it was shooting people in Russian Roulette until the gun went off or kidnapping powerful people and spraying them with some gas he was trying to create - obviously for Jeremiah, if his "or one bad spray" comment to his brother back at the end of the maze meant anything - Jerome kept his mind going and his day full. Harley kept his distance. There was no need to set him off too much. He was beginning to understand the thrill of slowly driving someone mad though.

Despite everything, Harley still seemed to be Jerome's go to. Jerome took him on every outing. Bounced ideas off of him. Shared jokes with him. Jerome was beginning to give away little pieces at a time to Harley, just by having him around constantly. He figured out the gas was for Jeremiah pretty early on, and steps were becoming clear as he tried to succeed in that. Harley knew what they were doing when they took out the band in the middle of the public square even before James Gordon had popped up as asked.

Harley had gotten his hands on a metal bat. He had begun to use it like an arm rest, hanging his arms over it limply as it balanced over his shoulders. He was casual as Jerome played his game. Smiling. Laughing. Then Gordon showed up and Jerome made a demand that caught Harley off guard. He had two extra seats in his little line of heads he wanted to blow. Jeremiah- obviously. And...

"Bring me my brother. Bring me Wayne. Bring them to me now."

As the remains of the now dead, headless dude bled out for everyone to see and Gordon ran off to get Jerome what he wanted before he killed more people, Harley moved to Jerome. "Why do you want Bruce?"

Jerome had lowered the microphone so other people couldn't hear him. "What's wrong little Harley?" Jerome tittered. He was grinning, his expression dark.

Harley nearly decked him. "You're going to put my brother in danger, why?"

Jerome tilted his head. "Why do you even care?" He scoffed. "I'm going to kill both of our brothers. People we spent our whole lives sitting in the shadows of. Been chosen second to. Been hated for, because everyone thought they were so much better." He scoffed. "Have you heard what they say about you? How they talk about Bruce and you in comparison?" He shook his head and Harley found he couldn't find words to say to parry this. "Even what they said about you in Arkham." His jaw tightened.

Harley took in a slow breath. "It makes sense that I care about Bruce, Jerome. I was actually close to my brother. We had a god relationship." He shook his head. "That doesn't matter now, but still." He frowned. "But why do you care about what people have to say about me?"

Jerome let out a slow breath through his nose. "Maybe I care about you, Harley." Harley's eyes widened, his lips parting in surprise. Jerome was completely calm and serious, shrugging as if it was the most casual thing. Jerome wasn't ever casual though. He wasn't calm. This was very unlike him. Almost like that first night, on the Ferris Wheel. When Jerome had sat, quiet, just listening to Harley go on and on about shit that shouldn't have mattered to him at all. He rose a hand to brush softly against Harley's cheek." His eyes flickered away. "We'll talk about it later."

Harley stepped back, allowing Jerome to take the stage as Gordon showed up with Bruce and Jeremiah in tow. "Just don't kill him please." Jerome didn't respond, but his smile wavered so Harley knew he heard. Jerome gave Harley Bruce's collar. Harley took it and put it on without hesitation. Bruce caught Harley's wrist as his hands dropped after the collar was on. The brothers made eye contact but Harley didn't hold it long. Bruce held a look of betrayal that shook Harley to his core. If Harley did have a weakness, it had always been that. Bruce used to look up to Harley... no, to Y/n. Now it was all over. Harley had chosen his path. He sighed, shaking his head of the heavy thoughts he'd been thinking and replacing each one instead with images of the real Harley. Harleen Quinzel, bloody and draped and dead. This hardened him again. Games and chaos and romance and familyhood aside: Harley was done being a Wayne. Done being sane and functional. He'd chosen Jerome, and he would continue to choose Jerome because despite everything, for some reason, Jerome was choosing him too. Harley moved to Jerome's side, resting his elbow on Jerome's shoulders. He leaned close, whispering, "Unless you really want to."

Jerome recognize the change in tone immediately. His lips turned up in a grin. His smile was brilliant, and Harley matched it perfectly.

The duo was back, and nothing was going to get between them again.

#jerome valeska #jeroma velaska #joker #jerome valeska imagine #jerome valeska x reader #gotham #valeska twins #joker x reader #joker imagine #cameron monaghan #cameron monaghan x reader #cameron monaghan imagine #valeska twins imagine #valeska twins x reader #gotham imagine #gotham x reader #male reader

79 notes · View notes

riaflicke · 4 years

Text

The saying went something like, monsters are created not born. And that was exactly how Ria Flicke felt about the demon - or demons, plural, depending on the day - inside of her. It wasn’t always dark, but it was fed enough that it grew and grew until she didn’t know what it felt like to not have the darkness inside of her.

Some of the creation was self-inflicted. It wasn’t like she knew how to walk away from a bad situation or how to let the light win out, no, she let the darkness win and that was her own fault. Over the past few months of alone time and wrestling with questions and curiosities, she managed to figure out how and where the darkness was cultivated, fed and nurtured by the people that were meant to protect her.

AUGUST 17th, 2010, FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT (14 years old)

Move in day for Faircrest Preparatory School. Day one of one million of learning to be a spy. Mariana thought that it would be a good idea for Leon to drive Ria to move in. After all, he worked at Faircrest, and she thought it’d be good for the younger Flicke to finally get to know her father.

Needless to say, it did not get off to a good start. Ria knew two things: her mother was cryptic about her father and the only way to get adults to pay attention to her was to be annoying. And she had lots of questions for Leon which meant she would be extra annoying.

“Don’t put your feet up there,” Leon turned over to his daughter, who had perched her feet on the all white car dash. “You’re going to get it dirty.” “What?” Ria didn’t dignify him with even a glance, she instead focused on picking a scab on her calf. “Maria-” “Ria.” “Maria,” Leon huffed, “Take your feet off the dash or we’re not leaving this driveway… What did you do to yourself anyway?” “Fell off my bike.” “Don’t you know how to ride a bike?” Picking at the scab until she got it to bleed again (because it definitely made her dad cringe), “Yes. I let go.” “Why?” “It made mom freak out.” She finally moved her feet from the dash, pleased with the furrowed brow her father now had. “And why in the world would you want to do that?” Leon asked in a deadpan tone, clearly frustrated with his daughter’s antics. “It proved mom cares. Somewhere. She got worried.”

The frustration on Leon’s face morphed into one of pride, but in the blink of an eye it was back to neutral. “You’re already thinking like a spy. What has your mother taught you so far?” “Nothing, I’ve known for all of like, three months.” “Alright. Well, we have about six hours ahead of us-” “Joy.” “Don’t interrupt me, Maria. I can’t have my daughter not knowing anything about spyhood. You’re already starting Faircrest at a disadvantage.”

That spoke to the competitive side of Ria and all, but she thought that this ride would be a way to get to know the man she’d wondered about for years. “You’re going to spend six hours talking to me about spy stuff and not like… anything about me?” “I didn’t say that. Anyways, I’ll see you all year on campus, we have plenty of time to get to know each other.” “Ooookay. Weird, but, fine, talk to me about your spy life or whatever…” Her voice trailed off into silence.

Leon glanced over at her, “What were you about to say?” Chewing on her bottom lip, Ria was silent for a little longer before speaking up. “I wanted to ask you a question.” “Fine, ask it then.” “Do you love me?” The words sounded sharp to hide the fear inside. “I don’t know.” Sitting up straighter, the blonde’s face dropped, “How do you not know? I’m your daughter.” “We just met.” “So?” “So, I need time to decide.” “Do you think you ever will?” “We’ll see.” And he wouldn’t. ‘I love you’ were three words he’d never say. “Fine… Tell me about this spy shit.” “Language.”

JUNE 8th, 2010, FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT (17 years old) Whether she wanted to listen to her father or not (spoiler: she didn’t!), Ria wanted to be top of her class. Success was something she could control. Success gave her purpose. Success made it all worth it. So as much as she hated Leon Calder with everything in her being, she kept note of all of his rules and the subsequent tests and trials in a tiny leather bound notebook. It was a pale pink, embossed with “Maria” on the cover - which she had since scratched up with pens and keys until it only read Ria.

With graduation on the corner - and a four year break from spyhood (her parents hated that one) on the horizon - she flicked through the pages, a walk down a very bumpy memory lane.

Rule 1: Control the conversation What’s it mean: - Have conviction in what you say - Stand by your words, even if they’re questionable - Don’t get stuck in webs of lies - Take pride in attention - good or bad - throws people off their game when you embrace an insult

Rule 2: Head not heart What’s it mean: - Don’t lead with emotions ever - Look at things logically bc that’s trustworthy, emotions are fickle - Tears are weakness - avoid at all costs!!!

8/30/10 - first week @ faircrest, dad got me a xanax prescription. told me it’s better to feel nothing than something. haven’t tried it yet 2/1/12 - (middle of soph. year.) - i think i’m addicted 4/29/14 - i’m graduating in 2 months. Idk how to feel bc i don’t think i’ve felt anything in four years. 8/2/14 - i don’t trust my own head

Rule 3: Don’t have a blindspot What’s it mean: - Falling in love means youre caught up in another person - Getting caught up in another person is a weak point - A lover will betray you or will be used against you - Lust =/= love, lust is ok.

11/1/13 - i don’t think ive cared about a single person ive slept with. like at all.

Rule 4: Know what you’re walking into What’s it mean: - Awareness is key - Evaluate every situation in full - ALWAYS keep your guard up or you’ll get backstabbed

12/21/10 - was @ home for christmas, dad snuck up behind me and threw a knife. i ducked in time. said i need to get better at awareness. Wtf.

After twenty or so blank pages, one page of the notebook had a few words written on it in all capitals. They were written more cleanly than the notes and scribbles of yesteryear, clearly written by an older Ria with stronger penmanship.

I THINK IM A MONSTER.

SEPTEMBER THROUGH NOVEMBER, 2020, ROSEVILLE, VA (24 years old)

The fires the year prior had been the first time that Ria remembered crying in over ten years. Something cracked inside of her as the buildings and all she’d used to ground herself started to fall and crackle apart. It was what pushed her to look inside of her. To know why she held so tightly onto the lessons and learnings from two people that couldn’t care less about her. It was what sent her to therapy.

There were no diagnoses to be found, apart from a self-inflicted dependence on unhealthy relationships and her vices. She lacked the remorse and violence to be a psychopath, and she didn’t have the swings of anger that hallmarked aggression disorders. What was there instead was a shell, a guard that presented itself as sociopathy - but she knew what she was doing, she had remorse, that was where the questions began. How could you display every trait in the book but be ‘normal’ inside?

The revelation of Blackthorne as a school for assassins had opened up even more of a can of worms, but she ignored it until the start of her third year, as she continued to try and understand what was going on inside of her head. Leon had gone to Blackthorne, yet the alumni didn’t seem to recognize his name. Something was up.

With the help of one of her Faircrest friends, Tobi, she was able to find more on her father. More on his employment records and his history. He’d begun going by his middle name after graduating Blackthorne, Leon Calder instead of Malcolm Calder. Hardly a criminal offense. He had a cross listing with the MI5 (expected, she knew her parents met in London) and a private agency ‘Atkinson Associates’. Further digging revealed it as a hitman agency, one that her father was still actively employed with.

Once she had that, and access to the files of the company, she went to dig on her own - not wanting to pull anyone else deeper into the mess. The employee roster and files were what she really wanted. Clicking on her father’s, she read through the notes, feeling a gross pit building in her stomach as she learned more. Kill count: 117. Use for: High profile, quickturn jobs. Works both individually and with partners.

Noting that the word partners was linked, Ria clicked on it, skimming quickly over unknown names until she settled on the name of a former partner. One she knew too well. Mariana Alice Flicke.

“No…. no no no…” But she couldn’t stop, she had to know more about her mother. Kill count: 2. Use for: Track erasure and evidence destruction.

She didn’t know if it made her feel better or worse that her mother was typically non-violent… Even if she condoned the violence. Blue eyes kept scanning the profile of her mom. Employment Terminated: September 30, 1995 Reason: Pregnancy.

“No wonder he hates me so fucking much.” She took Mariana out of the field, she took his partner away… But that wasn’t her fault! Hovering over the word pregnancy, Ria’s brow furrowed. Another link. There was no reason that needed to be linked. Everyone knew how pregnancy worked!

After a long stare off with the link, she finally clicked on it. The curiosity eating away at her. It pulled up what looked like an incomplete profile, one with nothing but the key statistics. And she didn’t even need to read them, they were ones she knew by heart. Name: Maria Grace Flicke Date of Birth: June 6, 1996 Start Date: To Be Determined.

She wanted to stop scrolling, but her hand kept moving, the answers were finally there. Whether she liked them or not.

Current Status:

Atkinson Associates Case study 001.: Nature versus Nurture

- Developing the mindset of an assassin from day one - Utilizing upbringing to control later characteristics, thought processes, and disposition

None of her mania was an accident. It was all part of a bigger plan that she never wanted to be a part of. Each demon was planted inside of her by the people that were supposed to love her most.

And the only way she could deal with this was to let out an ear-piercing wail.

#dev | ria #i'm sorry #drugs tw

11 notes · View notes

bxthharmon · 4 years

Text

White Butterflies, pt v || Hvitserk Lothbrok x Reader

Words: 1374

Warnings: Mentions of suicide and death

Summary: Seers have a higher knowledge

A/N: sorry this took a whileee

i | ii | iii | iv | v

This story doesn’t follow the plot, so you don’t have to know the story to understand it.

The gull soared over the sea, fighting the strong winds, the bird journeying towards the dots on the horizon. The sea, the waves, meters high, the clouds and lightning trying to dishearten the creature, but it fought on. Within minutes, the sails and shields of the longboats were clear, and battered by the storm. The sails were being pulled down to form tents, Hvitserk and his brother visible on the leading boat. Ivar swore, turning to his brother, “Your wife was right.” he roared, his voice contending with the storm, “We’re scattered, and we’ve lost ships.”

Hvitserk, swinging off a rope, leaned out of the boat, staring at the bird. His stare softened, and turned back. “You heard yourself, she had Njord’s favour,” he kept his eyes on the bird, “We will survive this storm, and we will gather our ships again.”

“Brother,” Ubbe came out from the half-formed tent, “I hope you are right. Come on.” he pulled Hvitserk back, and they retreated to the shelter of the tent.”

When your eyes opened, you could feel yourself sick with worry. You’d been sick with worry for days now, and your suspicions had been confirmed. You sat up, looking around your room, and saw that all of the candles in your room had blown out even though the wax wasn't even half melted. Uneasily, you rolled out of bed and dressed, letting Solveig braid your hair, the pair of you chatting idly. You mentioned the candles blowing out and your dream, making worry obvious across her face.

“Solveig,” you frowned, “what’s wrong?”

She looked to the floor, “Have you been to the Seer?” she questioned, and you shook your head. “My Princess, if I was in your position, I’d go to see him, he holds a wisdom beyond us.”

You nodded, and smiled at her, “Go with me?”

“Of course, as your thrall.” She confirmed.

“No, as my friend.” you assured her, “Now, we shall go after we eat, yes?”

The hut thinly walled, decorated with ornaments and symbols strung up, and candles arranged in the corners and sides of the room. The Seer himself sat before you, skin marred over his eyes and lips black, looking unnatural and unsettling. “I have waited for your visit for months now, Y/N Lothbrok, Christian turned to Heathen.” He had greeted you, and you had frowned, but no said anything.

“You want to ask me about your husband.” The Seer stated, and you agreed.

“Will he come back unharmed?” You asked.

“His fate lies here, and any harm to become him will be in an emotional mutiny. He would survive being dropped from the skies, but only suffer in his soul, not his body.” the Seer riddled, and you nodded.

“Will I give him children?”

“Twice,” he sighed, “They will form a legacy in your name, and in the name of justice.”

You nodded again.

“Your mind…” he rasped, “Is plagued with questions.”

“How are my brothers?” you asked, thinking of Theo.

“Two prosper, but will fall for their fury, one dies slowly, unrealised for now, by no one’s hand but his Christian God’s.”

“He is ill?” you frowned, “Which brother, tell me which of my brothers is dying?”

“You ask too many questions.” the Seer croaked, “You thirst for knowledge the Gods wish to hide… it is futile, the Gods’ will is iron.

You felt angry, you knew he knew, and what if it was Theo? Arthur or Geoffrey, you could live with. But Theo? A tear slipped down your cheek. “Is it Theo?” you asked, your voice wavering.

The Seer looked at you, or turned its head to you, seeing without eyes, “Your instinct is strong, and trustworthy. Do not doubt it, do not doubt yourself, and do not doubt another.”

He presented his hand to you, and you glanced at Solveig, who nodded at you, miming licking her hand. You took the Seer’s hand and licked it, as she had directed you, before standing and walking out of the hut.

“Solveig.” you turned to her as she followed you out. “Can I trust you?” she nodded. “I know servants talk. But please, don’t repeat what you heard there to anyone. No servants, no visitors, and especially not the Ragnarssons upon their return. Okay?”

“Of course,” she nodded. You held your head up high, looking over her shoulder.

“If you do, I’ll know. And I would hate the consequences.” you sighed, looking back to her. “I am not betraying your King, but I don’t want things to escalate.”

She nodded, and you smiled, the pair of you heading back to the town.

The sun hung low in the sky, streaks of scarlet and peach painting the sky, the last lights beaming through the gaps in the trees. The yew tree stood tall over you, as you prayed. You asked for Njord to carry your husband’s longboats to your country safely, and for the raids to go well. You prayed that they would spare your younger brother, and you prayed that the fate the seer bestowed on him was not painful.

You wondered if this fate was an illness, or self-inflicted. There was a woman at your old court, who had gone crazy, preaching that God had spoken to her in the night about her descent to Hell, and two days later had been found hanging from a rope in the stables. You’d been friends with the stable boy who found her, and he had insisted on telling you the gruesome details of her corpse. You were ten at the time and to this day didn’t know which details you believed. And there was a boy, a young boy, only twelve or so, who had died of internal injuries after falling from his horse. Arthur had taken great delight in telling you about how he had died in great agony, screaming and crying as his insides had ripped and his body began to falter and die. It was one of the hunting trip, when you were seventeen and your mother had finally stopped you from going.

Dinner was solemn, everyone had been dressed in black, with you and Mother wearing veils as well. The Lord’s son, who had fallen, was buried, and his family would be leaving to travel back to their own lands the following morning. You watched as people told Arthur how sorry they were after having to witness such a thing, and you saw how he played up to it, always such a good actor. He was the only one there, and he was angry at the Lord for trying to gain more lands off of Father. He was horrible, but he was always acting for the family, wanting more power, more money, more fame. Father supported it, knowing Arthur would be the driver when Geoffrey became king, so incidents like this would happen, and everyone would pretend they didn’t know it was him. You stood with Theo as your mother made a speech about the boy’s memory, and Arthur stood by her, pretending to be upset. As the court clapped, Theo nudged you, pointing at Arthur. He smirked at the pair of you, and you felt sick. “Oh, Theo,” you sighed, “Why are we cursed with him for a brother?”

He’d laughed, “Oh Y/N,” He’d sighed, mocking you, “We just all missed out on father’s talent for always wanting more power.”

“I’m not sure I’d call it missing out.” You murmured, as you looped your arm in his, “Now we need to escape Mother, she’s determinedly walking towards us and I don’t want another lecture, I’ve already had two today.”

You thought of how you and Theo had spent the evening evading your parents and getting drunk. You missed him, and how it felt to have a brother who truly cared. You knew the Ragnarssons cared for you, but you wouldn’t let yourself be drunk like that in front of any of them, and you doubted any of them, other than Hvitserk, would be willing to look after you when you were drunk or would gossip with you about whatever drama was going on in the court. You sighed, and prayed once more, this time, for a real family.

tags: @soleil-dor @siliethkaijuy

33 notes · View notes

stevemoffett · 4 years

Text

A Hard Nap, The Fall of Math, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Disco Point, and There You Are

In January last year, I noticed a sign in myself of the same cancer my dad had back in 2008. Unlike the usual symptoms that set off my paranoia, it wasn’t some vague feeling, it wasn’t an intermittent pain, and it wasn’t a general ill feeling—it was clear and unambiguous, out of the ordinary and one of those symptoms that, if you google it, is under the list of “call your doctor if you experience any of the following.”

It was also nonspecific: this symptom could mean cancer, but it could also mean about five other cancer-unrelated conditions. I called for an appointment that morning with my general practitioner, who said that the earliest available date was about two weeks later.

I knew that the only way my fear would be effectively relieved was with the one sure-fire diagnostic tool for this type of cancer, one that’s recommended for everyone, but not until about age 50: a colonoscopy.

For the two weeks before my GP appointment, I mentally prepared for death. For the record, I do this every time I interpret my body’s signals as cancerous, but the mental preparation usually stops after a few days when the symptom either goes away or when a clear alternative cause presents itself. This time, I didn’t get that kind of relief and, in fact, the symptom repeated more than once between setting the appointment and going to it. Each time, it was like an intrusive thought come to life: you’re going to die. You’re going to go through surgery and chemotherapy like Dad and you’re either going to die early, or find out like he did that the cure is worse than the disease, or maybe you’ll hang on just long enough to experience both.

Winter mornings in Texas can sometimes be surprisingly cold. While stepping out the door on a midsummer morning is like walking into someone’s hot exhale, as you might expect, a 33-degree morning is more like a slap in the face. When I packed everything I figured I’d need to move here a couple of years ago, I threw away my winter coat, thinking, I won’t be needing this anymore. (The coat was also about ten years old at that point.)

My first winter in Texas, I layered a bunch of shirts underneath a light jacket and wore a scarf on freezing days. The second winter, I decided that I’d had enough of being cold. After all, I rationalized, here in Texas it was monetarily possible to never have to feel cold again if you really don’t want to. So I bought the warmest coat I could find, an unstylish, bulky parka made by Caterpillar, the company that makes construction vehicles. No more layering, no more checking the weather before leaving in the morning. I could just put this coat on and not worry about it.

But now, under the shadow of a cancer scare these January mornings, wearing the big coat made me feel less like I was smarter than the weather and more like I was trying to smuggle a terminal disease wherever I went. Under my coat, tie, button-down shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, and muscle, something was growing silently in the dark. While maybe it had slipped up and showed some of its handiwork to me, it was already too late to do much about it now.

Since it has affected my life several times before, and since it is such an exquisite mixture of dread and uncertainty, cancer is one of my mind’s biggest bogeymen. I feel personally insulted by the idea of it. I treat you so well, body—why would you betray me? Was I not nice enough? Is this poetic justice for my vanity? Is it, as the old anecdotal saying goes, due to my worrying?

Not only did I feel like I was smuggling cancer under the big coat, I was also warming it up by drinking my coffee. I was feeding it directly when I ate something too sugary. And I was probably even giving it an evil sense of satisfaction when I got stressed out about it. If I was able to keep my mind off it by working in the lab, mixing and pipetting, using kits, and doing arithmetic in my head, it would come crashing back into focus when I was pulling my gloves off to wash my hands.

I pulled up incognito mode on my phone’s browser during my breaks, googling “5-year survival rate colon cancer age 35.” “Cancer staging colon prognosis.” “Colon cancer smoking.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack in college.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack 18 years ago.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack after seeing Luke Wilson smoking in The Royal Tenenbaums.”

At home, I suddenly started noticing the expiration dates on my nonperishables. What will last longer, I thought, the freshness of this baking soda, or me.

I knew I wasn’t going to be comforted by the first GP visit. After all, they’re usually the first stop to a specialist, unless you have a PPO insurance plan, which I don’t. The doctor listened to my symptoms and family history. “Well,” he said, “Given your history, it’s a good idea to refer you to a GI. But, you seem like you lead a healthy lifestyle otherwise, with none of the other risk factors, so we’ll see what he says.”

I made the GI appointment and had to wait two more weeks for it, with the same circular worrying and googling. At the GI appointment, I sat in the waiting room, the youngest patient there by a few decades, and I felt a little bit ridiculous. On the other hand, I’d also just read a harrowing story about a woman in her late 20s who had colon cancer and died from it. That was a real person, I thought, who at the first phase of it probably went through all the same feelings I was now, the I’m-being-ridiculous and is-this-worth-the-time-and-vacation-days, all the way up until her diagnosis. Not just because I was scared, I felt a pang of sympathy. A disease of the old picking a victim from the young is terrible luck.

And I figured, if it could be her, it could be anyone. But most of all, it could be me.

That last bit, I think, is one of—one of—my greatest flaws, the vanity of always thinking that the worst things will happen to you, in spite of the odds. It’s a way of making yourself feel special, but it has no upside. You don’t feel confidence with this type of special-feeling. In fact, you’re more likely to be timid and self-centered, and you just come across as weird to the outside observer. They might think, There’s only a few steps between that guy and Howard Hughes. Somewhere, deep in your mind, they think: Wires are crossed.

Shortly before I went in, another patient arrived, a man around my age or maybe younger who, despite a dozen or so free seats, declined to sit down. My name was called, and I passed a sign on the way to the back that said, “If you have recently traveled to China and have a fever you must let our staff know.”

This doctor’s exam rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind you’d see in a movie, instead of the usual dull and bulby, off-white plastic exam room interior. A Spanish medical student came in to give a pre-appointment questionnaire and to take my vitals. He asked, in much better English than I could have mustered in Spanish, “So. There is some blood in they crep?”

When he came in, the GI repeated what my GP had said, and since he was also the person who would be performing a colonoscopy, he said I should set an appointment for one with him. I managed to get a date three weeks later.

From other people’s stories, I knew two things about colonoscopies: they are no fun, especially the night before, but the general anesthesia on the day of the procedure, on the other hand, is fun. I was nervous enough on the day before that I actually asked someone at the pharmacy for help finding the items I was looking for: Polyethylene Glycol (or PEG, which we use all the time for lab experiments, and which I was going to have to drink 2 liters of), Gatorade, and laxative pills. I had to take about 800% of their recommended dosages, each.

The bodily effect of those chemicals was dramatic, and I will spare the details. The worst parts of it, I found, were the generally exhausting physical toll it took, and the feeling by the end that I had some kind of dangerous sodium imbalance: I was sweating between my fingers, for example, but the rest of me felt as dry as paper. At 10PM, I was too tired to do anything, but too nervous to sleep for more than a few hours.

One smaller worry that I felt the next morning, as I took a selfie in my hospital gown to send to a friend back home, making a backward peace sign to show off the IV sticking into my hand and also how brave I was being, was that I might just die right there on the table from the general anesthesia. Part of my grad school research was on Propofol, the most-used general anesthesia nowadays (which, incidentally, also killed Michael Jackson). This was the same drug I was to be given.

I’d never been fully put under anesthesia before. It was astronomically improbable that I’d have an adverse reaction to it and die (and by the way, Michael Jackson abused it, using it far outside of medical praxis—if you’re afraid to get a colonoscopy yourself, don’t be, it could save your life), but keep in mind what I said about my vanity.

“Hey, I’m really scared,” I told the anesthesiologist. He said something, muffled by his mask, that sounded like, “It’ll be all right.” Then he busied himself with a syringe, connecting it to my IV. He depressed it about a third of the way. “This should help you,” he said.

The last thing I said was, “Whoa…I feel it.”

After what felt like a hard, late-afternoon nap, I said, “Hello?”

My head was wrapped with something. When I touched my face, I could feel that there were cotton pads underneath the wrapping, holding my eyes shut. I guess that at some point either mid-procedure or after, my eyes had opened, unseeing, and they’d done this to keep them from drying out. “Hang on, sir,” I heard a nurse say, and my head was unwrapped.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“You’re all done,” he said.

“Gimme a minute, please,” I said, my South Jersey accent peeking out. “I feel a little weird.”

Eventually, I sat up. Two of the nurses helped me stand, and I pumped my arms like I was lifting light, invisible dumbbells. As I put my glasses on and looked around, I thought that they all seemed like they were fighting to not smirk. What did I say while I was blacked out? I wondered, with a twinge of panic, before deciding that it would be worthless to speculate. It could have been anything. There are literally millions of possibilities. Again—it would be worthless to speculate, I told myself, firmly.

An Uber driver, I had been told by hospital staff during a consultation, was not a legally strong enough party to take responsibility for me at discharge. Someone I knew would have to escort me to my apartment. Also, they said, they really would do that thing where you’re back in your own clothes, and they push you to the exit in a wheelchair when you’re all finished. After my procedure, my co-worker stood waiting in the discharge zone with his car as an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital exit. I stood up from the wheelchair and got into the passenger seat of his car, for some reason more aware than usual of the heat coming from the vent and the smell of the car’s leather upholstery. “I still feel weird from the anesthesia,” I said to my friend.

“I’ll bet you do,” he replied.

It was about lunch time, and I had taken the rest of the day off from work. When I got home, I ordered a pizza and lay on my bed. I ate the pizza and watched Star Wars. I had not felt any euphoria when I woke up, I thought hollowly. And my first solid meal in almost forty hours tasted unremarkable. I was still groggy, but not in a pleasant way. I felt cheated.

The hospital staff had put a manilla envelope into my hands as I left. It contained sheets of images the doctor had taken during the procedure. Once lucid, I leafed through them and compared the thumbnail-sized images on printer paper with googled images of cancerous tumors viewed through a colonoscope, trying to diagnose myself.

A couple of the images on the papers had shapes that looked weird, with what seemed like variations in the texture or color of my colon wall that to me, at least, appeared one hundred percent fatal. It was another two weeks before I had a follow-up appointment to go over them with the surgeon.

“See this?” The GI said, two weeks later, pointing to one of the images that had seemed completely normal to me, unlike other ones I had thought were much more scary and unusual-looking. “That’s a low-risk polyp. Of course, now it’s a no-risk polyp, ‘cause it’s gone.”

This medical episode ended only three or so weeks before the whole world changed, but I was all the more grateful for that. If I’d waited to be checked out, then I would have been weighing whether it was worth getting tested against the possibility of being infected with COVID.

The doctor recommended that I get a colonoscopy every five years from now on, but added, “If you want, you can go earlier than that.” I told him thanks, but once every five years sounded fine.

I wrote about the first seven weeks of the pandemic in my last entry. After that, May and June passed in the same way as March and April had. I went back to work in mid-June for two weeks before the first summer COVID spike closed things back up. I continued to play Quake, and I continued to fret about my family.

I had a job interview for a position in northern Maryland in April. I didn’t get it, but I had a good idea why I’d been turned down: the position wanted people with proven math skills. Which makes sense—for the last few years I’d said repeatedly that I wanted to have a job that involves less lab work and more data analysis. This was one of those jobs.

My graduate program gave me a degree in “Computational and Integrative Biology.” Sometimes I shorten it to “Integrative Biology,” or “Computational Biology,” but I always feel sort of dishonest when I tell people my degree. (Apparently this feeling is common among grad students). My own reason for feeling dishonest was because, in any other college, the work I was doing would probably just fall under normal old “Biology.” While it was true I had done course work that reflected “Computational and Integrative” Biology, they were courses taught in a remedial way.

When I say remedial, I mean that they were courses designed to get biologists up to speed on how to do higher-level data analyses with their experiments. For instance, in my “Biomath” course, we went over ordinary differential equations and graph theory. Those are both intermediate-level math types, ones you’d encounter in the later part of an undergraduate math degree program. Throughout that course, there was a lot of handwaving whenever I asked questions.

“Eh…,” the professor might have responded to something I had asked, “that requires a lot of background explanation we don’t need right now to handle the problem here. Just take it as a given for what we’re working on.”

In grad school, it’s common to be well-versed in only your narrow little research tunnel that leads outward to the edge of “known” biology. But a few times each month, several of us students would head to the bar down at the city’s waterfront after work to talk about our research. It usually began with a complaint—“This is the third time this kit wouldn’t work this week and it takes twelve fucking hours to run it each time,”—but to give us a more context for their problem, whoever was griping would have to go back and start at the beginning, recounting all the steps leading to their experiment’s failure.

This was a useful exercise, since a pair of new eyes on your work meant that at least you could get feedback on how to better relate the subject matter when you talked to a non-science audience, and at most, you might get a real solution for the problem you were bumping up against.

But I would sometimes get privately upset, as I sipped my beer and glanced out the window at the river, when a math-centered Computational and Integrative Biology student would start talking about their research. As someone who feels an unpleasant, TV static-like anxiety in my chest the moment I see letters in italics, or one of those big, orphan sorority sigmas following an equal sign during a math seminar, this upset feeling was directed at myself. Because, as a result of my insecurity, I would start listening to the beginning of the math student’s explanation of their research, trip over the first unfamiliar term I heard, lose the thread of what they were talking about, give up, and zone out. The math students, overall, just seemed light years ahead of me.

A critical vocabulary word that I began to mentally tie to the situation—slumming, these math types were slumming when talking to us biologists—was the grain of sand to my insecurity’s oyster. By the time I got my diploma a few years later, it had developed into a little pearl; now I had the feeling that I was, relative to those who’d come from a math background, a fake computational biologist.

Unhelpfully, the people in charge of hiring for the jobs I want nowadays seemed to agree. All the job listings I was interested in applying for made me feel the same panic that advanced math symbols on powerpoint slides did. The subjects they wanted their applicants to have experience in—machine learning, deep learning, regression analyses—were all frightening, impregnable terms, reminding me either of some kind of giant machine made up of endless tubes and valves, all spitting dangerously hot steam, or of a highly secure, underground bomb shelter that requires fingerprints or eyeball scans to get into. I knew from my previous learning experiences that if I didn’t understand the fundamentals and learned only the higher-level, applied stuff, it was just going to make me feel unworthy, and I’d forget it at once.

But summer had come—it was midsummer now, in fact. The pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, so what was I going to do if I didn’t start learning something? I ended up registering for three classes at a community college back home, which offered their fall semester online. For two thousand dollars, including textbooks, I got a spot in Introductory Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Calculus III.

Calculus III was a risk. I’d taken Calc I and II in undergrad, now about seventeen years ago, and I had earned Bs back then. I didn’t remember much of the material from either class. I’d tried watching Khan Academy videos at various points in the meantime, but could never stick with it. I’d watch several videos in a row, feel like I understood things, try a practice problem, get it wrong, and forget about it after a day or two. But now, I had put actual money into it and, in a few months, a grade would be spit back out, so this time I had real skin in the game.

But I had misgivings that I was too old to learn new stuff, or that I would be one of those students I remember when I was in undergrad, the older students who would grind class to a halt with their endless questions. Or maybe I would get worse grades than I had in undergrad, despite taking things more seriously now.

Two of the classes were taught asynchronously, meaning each lecture was a video that you could pause or replay at your leisure, and all tests were take-home, but the other class, Statistics, was done over Zoom. You might think a Zoom class could be a better way to learn—clarifying questions can be asked immediately, for instance—but for me, at least, it was not. Instead of focusing on the material being taught, the whole time I’d be thinking, “They can see me. Everyone here can see me. I can see me, and I have a dumbass expression on my face. Can they tell that I have a bedsheet instead of a curtain over my window blinds?”

My mind wandered during class just as much as it had while sitting in a lecture hall when I was eighteen, but now, these classes were held later at night, after I’d been working all day and had eaten dinner. As a result of this, and the fact that I find Statistics to be boring when it’s taught as a series of don’t-worry-about-how-we-derived-it formulas to plug numbers into, I did the worst in Statistics.

But Calc and Linear Algebra were more interesting. When I watched the class videos, I got familiar with the disembodied voices of the teachers, who each seemed to be trying to do an impression of Khan Academy videos. My Calc teacher, with his strong Vietnamese accent, would punctuate every few lines of derivation or proof with, “So what does that mean then?” Every time—new topic, new chapter, new problem, exactly the same tone of voice: “So what does that mean then?”

Eventually, in my head, his cadence merged with the tones of Woody Woodpecker’s laugh, and I began saying it to myself as I did chores around my apartment. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d half-sing at my garbage can liner as I cinched it shut. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to a wrinkled button-down shirt, enjoying the pepper shaker-y smell of my iron when it’s turned up to its hottest setting. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to the window blinds, when considering whether I should replace the bedsheet I’d hung there with an actual curtain, before answering myself that No, this apartment is too temporary for something as tony as curtains.

Sometimes I’d say it three times in a row, like Woody Woodpecker himself:

“So what does that mean, then?”

I kept a Google Sheet of how much time I spent doing work for each class, and found that I averaged about 20 hours a week total. That broke down to approximately an hour and a half each weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday I would go for about six or seven hours each. I’d get up at 7:30 those weekend mornings and brew a pot of coffee, then sit taking notes and working through every part of each assigned homework, not moving on from a problem until I understood everything about it.

I think that those Saturday and Sunday mornings may have been the happiest I felt during the year 2020. In the middle of a difficult Calc problem, not having the answer yet but certain I was on the right track, while also buzzing on caffeine, as a beam of early horizontal sunlight hit my kitchen backsplash and filled the apartment with more brightness than all my lightbulbs put together, I for once did not feel worried. I was unworried about my parents, my sisters, my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, and all the pets. Unworried about COVID, or cancer, or the work stresses of the week. Unworried about getting older, about being alone still, or about enjoying being alone too much; unworried about letting all of this time go by and still feeling like real life hasn’t started; unworried about my dad having another stroke, or about my mom just suddenly up and dying out of nowhere, or cancer, or whether my hairline is changing, or the fact that my heart has been skipping a beat sometimes lately, or whether my friends who I speak to on the phone were getting sick of me, or whether I am too graphic when I describe symptoms I am afraid mean I might have cancer, or whether my apartment neighbors will keep me up with their noise again tonight, or whether the tooth sensitivity I feel drinking cold water lately means I need to risk a dentist visit during a pandemic, or whether I will be able to have healthier boundaries with my parents whenever I return to the northeast, or whether I’ll ever feel truly satisfied and content, or whether I’ll ever feel actual joy some day, or whether my hang-ups, and anxieties, and fears, and regrets about my personal and professional choices will end up all ganging up on me at once, or, of course, whether at any given moment, I might have cancer.

My attitude going into the classes was that I would disregard whatever grades I got and simply aim for as much comprehension as possible. But about halfway through the semester, I lost my nerve and began to think of my grades as a direct indicator of my level of understanding. So I started fretting about my grades, and on days of Calc III exams during the second half of the semester, I took vacation time so I could spend the whole day working on them.

It got a little crazy toward the end, but finally, it was over, and I managed to get all As. That made me happy, even if I knew that that kind of satisfaction is a bit immature. But I felt like I was making up for some of the sins I had committed as a college student, my laziness and my previous lack of appreciation for education finally, in a small way, absolved.

I spent Christmas here in Texas. When I think back on Christmases from previous years I find that I can remember the past two years very well because I flew home and packed a lot of family and friend time into a few short days. Before 2018, though, I can’t remember any specific Christmas well enough to recount anything that happened on the day.

But when I was a little kid, I remembered each Christmas perfectly, mainly due to the gifts I got and the room where we put the Christmas tree—where “Christmas happened”: in 1990, it was in the back room and we got a magic set, and also my brother pretended to faint when he saw he’d gotten Reebok Pumps. In 1991, it was in the family room, and my brother and I got the Nintendo game “Base Wars.” In 1992, it was in the living room and we got a Sega Genesis along with the game “Sonic 2.” In 1993, it was in the family room again, and I got a Hot Wheels Key Force car, and my brother got the Genesis game “Hard Ball 3 With Al Michaels.”

In 1994, my grandfather died a few weeks before Christmas, and we got a Sega CD. That was the year I became aware that the Christmas spirit was vulnerable to external forces, one’s first experience with death being the most offensive of those forces, and after a few months I also became aware that a hot new gaming console like the Sega CD could “fail,” slipping into obscurity with a small and unremarkable library of games. As a result, the indestructible-seeming sheen of Christmas fell away, leaving behind a better idea of what Christmas really is: a bare, thin-glassed lightbulb plugged into the middle of the year’s darkest period. After 1994, I can’t really remember what happened each Christmas.

This past Christmas will always be memorable, though, because I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pretty much doing one of three things: playing Quake (yes, that hobby still refuses to die), watching something Star Wars-related, or video chatting with my family. At any time when I wasn’t speaking to family, I had Christmas music playing in the background, including while Star Wars was on. I turned the heat up in my apartment to 75 degrees and enjoyed how money-wastingly hot it was getting, until my nose started to bleed from the dry air.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I much prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is generally all anticipation and guest arrivals, buoying the mood long into the falling night. From the viewpoint of Christmas Eve, any miracle might happen the following morning. But then after a late, over-buttered breakfast on Christmas Day, there’s nothing much else to do except think about cleaning up and regret how much you’ve eaten. The “anything could happen” feeling is now all gone, collapsed from a dazzling infinity’s worth of possibilities down to one homely outcome.

I hadn’t put up any decorations for my apartment, unless the Christmas music can be considered a decoration. This ended up being a good thing, though, since I didn’t have to take anything down once the holiday was over.

I started taking walks pretty early in the pandemic, my first walk happening after about one week of lockdown. That day there was a surprisingly large amount of people also walking. We all stayed far away from one another, since none of us were wearing masks—the width of even a modest suburban Texas street is still impressively wide, so there was no safety issue. I always took the initiative to be the one who crossed the street if I saw someone, exaggeratedly swinging my arms as I crossed so the person walking toward me could see my intentions even from far away. I did this because I figured it would be harder for the dog-walkers to wrangle their dog across the street and get out of my way, and the people without dogs were either old or were walking in a group.

In the beginning I was walking maybe twice a week, which then became three times, which became five. It held at five times a week during the fall semester because I’d have to be on Zoom from 6:30-8:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays, which took up the whole span of time in which I would usually walk. Nowadays, no longer taking classes, I walk every night.

For a while, I tried to get home before sunset, because I’m afraid of being hit by a car in the dark. After the clocks shifted back, I had to choose between walking earlier, during rush hour when everyone was arriving back at their houses from work, or waiting to walk until after the sun has set. I ended up buying one of those reflective construction worker’s vests for $8 on Amazon and waiting for nighttime. I feel like a dork when I wear the vest, but most of the people walking at night who I see are also wearing reflective clothes. Theirs are more chic than my vest, though, looking like they were ordered through an expensive fitness-wear catalogue. I’d buy the same type, but to me, walking is a meditative, solitary act, and I don’t want to feel that I’m catering to externalities like looking stylish while I’m trying to feel solitary. It also acts as a tacit acknowledgement that I’m not a criminal: “I’m making myself as visible as possible! I’m not casing your houses to break into them later on!”

Even though the focus of COVID is on the transmission of disease through shared, respired air, I still pay a lot of attention to contaminated surfaces. When I go out anywhere, I have a routine: first, I put on my going-out clothes (newly clean), then my shoes, which are possibly dirty, since I have to re-tie them sometimes with unwashed hands, so before I touch anything else after tying my shoes, I wash my hands. Then, I put on a mask, turn off all the lights except the one at the front door, pick up my keys with my right hand, slip my phone into my left pocket, and walk to the door. I put my keys in my right pocket (my wallet is already there), open the door with my right hand, turn out the light, step out the door, and take the keys out of my pocket to lock the door with, again, only my right hand.

I use my right hand pretty much everywhere outside—to push or pull open doors, to open my car to retrieve something from it, to open my mailbox and carry my mail in—because I know that if I use my left hand, my phone-operating hand, I’m going to have to put the phone into a little UV light phone-sterilizing box that I bought when I get home. And for some reason, I feel like it’s a small moral failure to have to use that UV box, so I try to keep my left hand from touching anything except for the phone. But I know that if I drive anywhere, all bets are off—both my hands touch the steering wheel, my left hand touches the car door handle while getting out, and I push open doors with both hands whenever I get somewhere. I’m sure that my left hand ends up touching something that may have SARS-CoV-2 on it as I carry out an errand, and therefore into the UV box my phone must go when I get home. But, when I go out to walk, there’s a good chance that I won’t need to touch anything with my left hand between leaving the apartment and coming back. If that’s the case, I can use my phone freely while walking if I want to, but when I get home, I can still just take it from my pocket and place it on my desk, no ultraviolet sterilizing waves needed. But of course then I still have to wash my right hand.

The walk is the same route every night now. It’s a vaguely circular, level 2.7 miles, starting northbound, bearing west, south, then east. It takes about forty minutes for me to walk the whole thing, plus or minus four minutes, depending on how warmed up I get while walking. My heart rate generally goes up to about 115 beats per minute for most of the walk, according to my watch, then spikes to 135 as I climb the stairs to my fourth floor apartment at the end.

Insulated by the sound of music or an audiobook on my headphones, and with my hands stuck in my pockets, actually holding onto the cloth pocket linings themselves, I feel less like a person on a walk and more like someone steering a large, inertia-filled thing—a sailboat that I have to tack against an unfavorable wind, or a bobsled whose blades I have to turn out of deep ruts on the ice. But despite feeling bodily awkward, I find suburbia to be a soothing place to move through. I really don’t understand how some people think of the suburbs as some kind of dystopia, to be honest. My neighborhood has wide streets, as I mentioned, and the houses are almost all ranch-style. The trees, like the houses, are shorter than they are in the northeast. Some of the trees look more like very tall shrubbery. As for the ground, the blades of grass are wider, and the soil is just a bit sandier. Sometimes, I see two-inch-long cockroaches, what people back home would call “water bugs,” creeping across the sidewalks.

I can’t remember the names of the streets on the walk, except for Forrest Street, which I noticed once when I saw the street sign while I was running and it made me think of “Run, Forrest, run!” and Kenilworth Street, which has the same name as a street back at home. Other than those, I only know points along the route by the informal names I’ve assigned to them. There’s a road where it changes direction from heading north to heading east, and it looks over a little park. The lack of houses there gives an unobstructed view of the western horizon. For that reason, I call that part of the route “Sunset Bend.” At another point on the route there is a house where, in the beginning of lockdown last spring, a family was always outside, the parents sitting motionless in Adirondack chairs while their kids all went nuts on the front lawn, playing with the sprinkler, or doing hopscotch, or sitting at one of those tiny plastic picnic tables, playing some board game. That part of the walk I called “Kidville.”

There were other houses that were always so inactive, so abandoned-seeming—the blinds were always closed and there wasn’t a car in the driveway—that I started to wonder if anyone lived there at all, and whether maybe the neighborhood association was mowing its lawn to stave off the shabbiness. But after the switch from walking in daylight to nighttime, I saw that some of those houses, while still shut up and silent, had lights on inside in rooms not facing the street. Looking at those houses is like staring into the vents of a space heater in a dark room.

Eventually I started thinking about how the walk is exactly 2.7 miles. Then, idly, I realized that if you multiply 2.7 by 30, you get 81. That number of years, eighty-one, seems like a decent amount of years to hope to live—it’s not greedy, you’re not asking for a hundred years, for example—but also, maybe when I get closer to 81, there will be better medical treatments and 81 will seem younger. Assuming that doesn’t happen, though, I think of 81 years as more or less “a complete life.” It is very sad, but not exactly a tragedy, to die at 81.

With this in mind, I started translating the distance along my walk to human ages. For instance, 1.0 miles into the walk, times 30, would equal 30 years. And 1.2 miles times 30 would equal 36 years, which is how old I am now. Since by the time I’d discovered this “conversion formula,” the walk was already so familiar to me that I had a very good perspective on how far into the walk any given point felt—the precise moment when I sense that I’m transitioning from the middle to the end phase of the walk, for example. So when I came up with the multiply-by-30 conversion formula, I was interested to see exactly what part of the walk 1.2 miles, or 36 years old, corresponded to.

The answer is that it was later in the walk than I’d hoped. The moment I reach 1.2 miles is long past the most scenic parts of the route; it’s just after a left turn that puts me on a long straightaway of modest houses leading to an arterial road, known to me as the hook-around part of the circuit where in past walks, I had thought, “Now I’m on my way back home.”

Over the next few evenings, I noted other points, ones that had come before the 1.2 mile marker, and compared them to parts of my already-lived life: I graduated high school at 0.6 miles into the walk, which was the beginning of Sunset Bend. I got my master’s degree in a spot where, at nighttime, a streetlight shines through the leaves on a tree, giving the street a dance hall, disco-ball kind of lighting (hence, “Disco Point”). That friendly, lighted patch of street, with a jaunty-looking house standing next to it, makes it my favorite part of the walk. As for points I have not yet reached: still ahead of my current age distance, at around 1.5 miles, is Kidville, but I haven’t seen anyone in the front yard there in months now.

Toward the end, almost back home, there’s a large school property. I’ve never seen anyone on the grounds, except for the occasional person who sneaks onto the running track to jog it. Along one of the fences that borders the school, in springtime last year, someone started zip-tying laminated sheets of paper with jokes written on them to the chain links. The jokes are all clean, and pretty lame—these days it seems like almost all kid-friendly jokes are just puns, like “How did the farmer find his wife? He tractor down!”

One time, I saw a kid about ten years old on his bike, riding along the sidewalk and stopping to read each joke. The fence ends at a small park for toddlers. There’s a big plastic sign at the entrance of the park, faded but still legible, that has a boy’s name displayed on it. Below his name is written a tragically short span of years, and below that, a message: “This park is dedicated to the memory of (the boy’s name), and to all of the little tykes of (the neighborhood).” Whoever it was putting up jokes on the schoolyard fence stopped replacing them with new ones some time during the fall, and I walk too late to ever see anyone playing at the playground. Well, that’s not quite true: very rarely, around 9 PM on warm nights, I might see what appears to be a young mother scrutinizing her phone as her kid swings in the dark.

I haven’t been to the gym to lift any weights since lockdown started. I’ve been able to do cardio in my apartment, but the result of all the cardio and all the walking is that I’ve lost a decent amount of lifting strength, as well as about ten pounds. This is consistent with how life in general has evolved: I have also reduced the list of spaces I travel to, leaving my apartment only to go to work, to pick up groceries, and to walk through my neighborhood. My body, and the edges of my life, have gone through a great miniaturization, but my perspective has adapted with it—each feature within this smaller space seems more detailed, and the day’s moments are of a finer grain. Inside my apartment, I have realized how much the lighting affects the atmosphere, and as a result the mood, so I can change which lights are on when to reflect the mood of each time of day. When I walk at night, sometimes I have the same feeling I did the week before I moved here from New Jersey, a sort of farewell feeling. That feeling started in the fall as a dessert-like flipside to my happy mornings spent doing math homework. Those evenings, I also felt like I was saying goodbye, to a more insecure, more ignorant version of myself, I guess. Nowadays, I get the feeling that I’m saying goodbye to the person who had, until now, always feared that he was missing out on things.

There will be a time, closer to now than now is to the beginning of the pandemic, when I will leave Texas. I will be happy and relieved to return home, whenever that is. But at the same time, there’s a new feeling that is starting to take root, and it’s a weird one: for all the hardship that the pandemic has presented to me, the anxiety for my family and the limitations it’s put on my mobility, social life, and career, for more than ten months now, its most memorable effect, unless I’m affected by the illness itself, will be that it made me love my neighborhood. I have walked more than 500 miles of it over the months, and scores of miles remain to be walked before I move away. I’ve walked during steaming afternoons, during cloudy sunsets, in pre-dawn twilight on cool mornings, and during soft, breezy evenings. It’s always picturesque, pleasant, very green. The houses look inviting, and the dog-walkers wave to me. I listen to music that suits my mood and do the geographical equivalent of palm reading. That’s all, really.

Can a person love a place? Feel gratitude toward landscaping, houses, parked cars, and people viewed only from a distance? Can someone feel affinity to a fox seen in a churchyard and streetlights shining through leaves in the night? Affection for lawn mower exhaust, for the noise of an approaching SUV slowly carving out a bend? Love for landmarks that correspond to moments in one’s past, or to moments that one might encounter in the future?

There will be a time, I hope, when my years in Texas are far in the past. But some day, I will hear a song, or see a house with a certain architecture, or smell a variety of grass, and Texas will return to me. At the same time, I also hope that it isn’t too overwhelming. I’ve found that I can never tell how potent a memory of a particular time or place will be until there’s a lot of distance between me and it. Sometimes, a memory will come gently, settling on me like a haze, ready to be indulged, even laughed at. In such cases I turn up the music that brought the memory, or take a luxuriating whiff of the scent, and I think back on the time, feeling only a little bit sad.

But other memories swoop down like some kind of predatory bird, and in those cases, the nostalgia feels more like the punch of the bird’s talons in the back of my neck. The sense of missing is so strong that it feels less like nostalgia and more like a distilled, portable homesickness. Ridiculously, I’ll even want to return to the memory’s time and place, despite knowing that in reality it had been fraught with pain or unease. Which makes the sneaking feeling growing during this time, at this place, all the more uncanny. I mean, all that this span of time has been, is me, and some terrain, and the wind, and the light of the sun or the moon. No one else. My nostalgia for anything before this was always about times and places with other people. So who will I be missing?

Someone once said, Wherever you go, there you are. But now, I wonder: is that really true?

3 notes · View notes

jackryanfanfic · 4 years

Text

I, His Isthmus | Chapter Two

Pairing | Jack Ryan x Cathy Muller

Genre | H/C, Angst, Friendship, Romance

Warnings | Blood, PTSD, Nightmares, Medical procedures

Word Count | 2K+

Rating | T

Summary: In which Jack takes an unexpected nap and Cathy battles her demons.

Cathy snipped the last stitch on Greer's wound and reached for a cloth to wipe away any remaining blood. Once she had sterilized the area yet again, she applied a patch bandage and removed her gloves.

Leaning back in her chair, she stretched, lips turning up in amusement as she watched Jack pace the limited floorspace.

He looked a little better now; it seemed he'd had a clean set of clothes in his backpack, if not a comb.

Something twisted at Cathy's heart and her smile faded. Jack's very posture exuded a weariness deeper than mere physical exhaustion. His eyes held that distant, haunted expression she had once tried so hard to chase away. How long it had been since he'd slept?

She pursed her lips, remembering his response to her message.

Jack caught her looking. "My turn?"

"Yeah, almost." She paused, crossing her arms. "Um, earlier, when you said you were relatively okay...What exactly did that mean? Because we've already established that your idea of relatively okay and mine are very different."

He shook his head. "A few cuts and bruises. Nothing significant. I think somebody's bullet must've nicked my arm at some point."

"Let me see."

He sat on the vacant bed and began to unbutton his shirt. "Let the record state that compared to him," he nodded in Greer's direction, "I'm just peachy." Wincing, he pulled his left arm from its sleeve. A once-white washcloth was sloppily folded over his bicep, held in place with a few rounds of masking tape.

Cathy snorted. "Don't quit your day job. This is a shoddy piece of work." She tugged at the tape.

"My day job is the reason you broke up with me."

And there it was.

"Jack..." She sighed. "No, this is the reason I broke up with you." She gestured to his arm, now bleeding freely. "That's the reason I broke up with you." She swept her hand back to include Greer. "I can't do this, Jack. You can't even do this. Look at you--it's eating you up now, just like it was then. I wanted to help you, Jack. I did. But you wouldn't let me in, and I..." She shook her head. "It wasn't healthy. For either of us." Her fingers stilled, voice softening. "I had to get out, Jack."

He bowed his head. His face was turned away, but she could see that her words had cut deep.

The tense quiet that followed gave Cathy more than enough time to agonize over her choice of words.

Jack broke it, his voice a whisper. "I miss you."

She looked up. Jack's eyes were on her face, his intent gaze disarming. A second that felt like an eternity passed, but then he gave a half-hearted smirk and turned away.

"I miss you too," Cathy said softly, surprising herself with her sudden transparency.

He let out a sigh so deep that Cathy had to move her hands away for a moment to avoid hurting him. She passed her hand over his shoulder. "Try and sit still for me?"

"Sorry."

"You'll need stitches." Turning his face toward the room's single lamp, she examined the cut on his cheek. "Maybe here, too." Their eyes met suddenly, and she removed her hand. "But that can wait until after the transfusion."

"Right," he said, rising.

"Ah--you will want to be lying down."

He complied.

Moving the chair so it sat between the beds, she set up her equipment on Jack's. She frowned, scanning the room for something she could repurpose as an IV pole. There was a coat hanger in the corner. That'll do.

Dragging it over, she hung up two plastic pouches, one empty, and one filled with a clear liquid. She rubbed an alcohol wipe over Greer's wrist and inserted a needle, which she taped in place and then connected to the full bag via a thin rubber tube. "Fluids," she explained, "water, electrolytes, et cetera." Two more tubes were connected to the empty bag. "Now for the tricky part. I hope you don't get queasy around blood?" Now there was something that had never come up over dinner at Buster's.

He chuckled. "Not lately."

Greer was now hooked up to the second bag, and she moved over to Jack. "Roll up your sleeve? You will experience moderate to severe dizziness and/or nausea, possibly fainting or a tingling sensation." She tied a band just above his elbow, pulling it tight and proceeding to swab the crook of his arm. "All are perfectly normal with a procedure like this. Make a fist for me?" She found his vein and inserted the needle, quickly connecting the last available tube to the needle's small attachment. She shifted the empty bag a bit. "Alright. That should do it."

Sure enough, blood began to flow almost immediately through the tube and up to the bag on the coat hanger. Cathy nodded in satisfaction.

"Wow. That stuff makes good time," Jack observed as Cathy crossed to the other side of the bed.

She sat, re-opening the small case that held her suture equipment and resumed her work on his arm. "Mm. So, why don't you tell me what happened? And why you're in this charming establishment with me instead of at a hospital with an on-duty doctor who specializes in something other than epidemiology?"

He hesitated. "Suffice to say I stumbled across a paper trail that incriminated some very powerful people. I guess I got too close. Greer picked me up at the airport today, and on the way back to Langley...all hell broke loose." He sighed. "They'd, uh...They'd look for us at the hospitals."

She nodded. "Okay. So what's next? What will you do after this? Greer is in no condition to go running around chasing terrorists, or whatever this is."

"I know a guy who can set us up with a safe house. I guess...I guess we'll go from there." He gently grasped her wrist, effectively halting her work. "I didn't plan this, Cathy."

Her expression softened. "I know. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to accuse. What you do...it's important. I know that. And I know it's necessary." She attempted a smile. "I just hate to see you in trouble."

He opened his mouth to speak, but afraid of what he would say, Cathy beat him to it.

"Try not to move that." She nodded towards his arm. "You'll jostle the needle and tear the vein. Then you'll be needing a transfusion."

He let her wrist go, gingerly repositioning his arm at his side.

Well, that's one way to kill a moment.

After a few minutes of Cathy working in silence and Jack staring at the ceiling, he started, hands bracing against the mattress.

"What's wrong?" Cathy asked in alarm.

He blinked a few times. "You weren't joking about the dizziness," he huffed, slowly settling into the mattress once more. "Sorry."

She waved his apology away. "Nothing quite like feeling like you're going to fall when you're already lying down." Checking the monitor clipped to Jack's IV, she added, "It won't be too much longer."

His eyelids fluttered. "Tha's probably a good thing."

She squeezed his shoulder. "You know, you're probably saving his life."

A few more moments passed, Jack struggling to remain conscious. Cathy put a hand on his face, trying to draw his focus. "Jack. Hey, it's okay. You're safe here, and you need rest. You can let go."

His eyes found hers once more before they rolled back and his lids slipped closed.

She rubbed her thumb in a circle over his cheek. Tears sprang into her eyes. Seeing him again, in pain and alone, left her with the same cold hopelessness she felt when there was a patient who was beyond her help. It was a pain that even the practiced professionalism which shielded her from so much else in the workplace had never been able to fully shut out. But this was worse. The tears spilled over, and she swiped them away, refocusing her attention on Jack's arm.

She completed the stitches and had just finished wrapping it in gauze when she spotted something.

A white tear in the skin of his left shoulder, about three inches below his collar bone. She stopped short. The last time she had seen that scar, it was still a red and angry wound. She had tended to it herself. It healed better than she had expected it to--Jack hadn't done the best job of limiting his movement in the weeks after his injury, notably prolonging the healing process. A week or two before they parted ways, she had given him a salve to help with the scarring. She never expected him to actually use it, but looking at it now...The corners of her mouth turned up of their own accord. He must have been using it.

She looked at his battered face, and her heart swelled until she thought she could not bear it. She loved him.

A sliver of doubt about her decision wormed its way into her mind, and for the first time since she had left him, she didn't push it away. "I truly do miss you," she whispered.

Why did you leave? The voice was accusatory. "I loved you," she whispered, looking at his face, which somehow seemed much younger in sleep. No, the voice rebuked, not loved.

The truth socked her in the gut.

I love you.

She pressed a hand to her face as guilt broiled up inside of her. "That's why I left," she whispered. It had been a pattern in her life--a lesson she learned early on. The people she loved would leave or betray her, breaking her heart and making implicit trust nearly impossible. It was easier to shut people out before the inevitable hurt they would cause. She still remembered the way her father had slurred the words at her on the night her mother died, his hot breath reeking of scotch in her face. "You can' trust anybody, Cathy girl; the people y' trust always come back ta bite'cha."

He had proved that statement time and time again himself as she grew up. The disappointments and broken promises piled up as she watched him become swallowed up by a business where success depended on being the first to strike and the last one standing. There was no trust, just business. If she had a dollar for every time she'd heard him say that..."It's just business, just business, just business."

So she learned. She kept everyone at arm's length, too far for a double-crossing to cause much pain, all the while vowing that she would never be like her father. Her work relationships were just that--work relationships. There had been times over the years when she found herself speaking to a date in her "doctor" voice, and there were times when her date responded in kind. Just business.

She had armored herself in loneliness and told herself she was happy that way. Pathetic.

Jack had been...different. He was honest, genuine. Perhaps too much so. In an environment where half-truths and cryptic answers were all too common, she had been drawn to it like a moth to a flame. He took her off guard, kept her guessing, made her laugh. She learned, of course, that part of his honesty was an act--he had skeletons and secrets just like everyone else, but those core virtues remained true of him. Her walls had crumbled. For the first time she could remember, she hadn't felt so alone. She was happy--not merely satisfied or content, but happy.

Then a terrorist tried to blow up the hospital she worked in, and Jack had been shot. It was a minor wound that would cause little-to-no lasting issues, but if that bullet had hit two inches to the right?

Even now, she closed her eyes against the thought.

Now, alone and without the excuse of distraction, she could see that the pain she felt had been as much her own fault as Jack's. She had drawn away, gradually, subconsciously allowing her fear to dictate her next move.

Remorse burned her throat, and she angrily smeared at the tears that were now dropping rapidly. Jack needed her. He had told her once, a few weeks after he had opened up to her about the crash. She asked him about the nightmares, cautiously, afraid he would shut her down with an "it's fine, I'm fine, don't worry about me." Instead, he met her gaze, a small smile on his face and an enormous glow in his eyes. "Yeah, uh...They've been a little better."

And she had left him alone because she was scared. Scared she would lose him, scared he would leave, scared of the vulnerability they were opening themselves up to. Her lip curled down in scorn. Selfless Doctor Cathy.

On auto-pilot, she stood, checking the monitor and disconnecting Jack and Greer from the transfusion equipment. You messed up. Fix it. Her mind raced for an answer, and she desperately tried to quiet it as she checked on her patients.

Greer's color was a bit more human, but Jack's skin was now pale, cast yellow by the dim glow of the lamp. She pressed her thumb and index finger to her eyes, trying to rub away the dull ache developing behind them. "Electrolytes," she muttered. They'll need electrolytes. Gatorade?

She thought she had seen a vending machine at the end of the hall. Neither showed signs of waking any time soon, so she snatched the key from the nightstand, her wallet from her purse, and stepped into the hall, locking the door behind her.

Sure enough, there was an ancient vending machine rumbling against the far wall. As she neared, she saw that the face of the machine was dented and cracked, as though the people who had come before her had held boxing matches with the poor thing rather than getting drinks.

Scanning the options, she was relieved to see Gatorade. She fed in two dollars and smacked the appropriate button, waiting as it hissed a sputtered before releasing the bottle with a clunk loud enough to make her jump. Struggling with crumpled bills, she repeated the process. This time she braced herself for the clunk.

She checked the expiration date on the bottles, just to be sure. Grabbing her change, she turned to go--

And hesitated.

The hall suddenly seemed like far too short of a walk. The questions she had momentarily pushed aside descended upon her once more like smog.

Breathing deeply, she lifted her chin and walked.

Her feet moved slowly even as her mind raced, and by the time she reached the door, she had reached a decision.

________________________________

A/N: I hope this brought some enjoyment to everyone’s quarantined lives. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this chapter! Chapter three should be up soon--it’s all written, I just have to find the time to post. :)

If you missed any preceeding chapters, I’ll link them here. Questions/comments/crit always very welcome. Also, ask box is open for requests/prompts anytime!

Be well, yall. Take your vitamins, drink your water, and hang in there. The sun will shine on us again. ;) <3

P.S. I have a couple fanarts for this fandom. I was considering posting them here, but they’re not fanfiction, so...thoughts?

Prologue:

https://jackryanfanfic.tumblr.com/post/611939538664882176/pairing-jack-ryan-x-cathy-muller-genre-hc

Chapter One:

https://jackryanfanfic.tumblr.com/post/612751574766321664/i-his-isthmus-chapter-one

Request Guidelines:

https://jackryanfanfic.tumblr.com/post/190676569367/taking-requests-yayyy

#Jack Ryan #jack ryan fanfic #John Krasinski #fanfc #tom clancy's jack ryan #abbie cornish #fanfiction community #fanfiction #writers on tumblr #angst #romance #h/c #emotional h/c #cathy muller

14 notes · View notes