#i feel so sane about him bending over completely in half for no goddamn reason not once but TWICE

[kindahoping4forever]

Youngblood outro @ When We Were Young Fest Day 2

[rhosinthorn]

For the second half of an anon request, I present to you a superhero!AU CoLu. Strong T.

Careful hands removed the blindfold, and Lucy found herself looking at a single purple eye, set into tanned skin, maroon half mask matching the shock of hair above it.

“Cobra?” she said, or tried to say before she remembered the gag in her mouth.

His mouth moved, but she couldn’t hear him. Feeling the panic rising up, she looked at him, only to find the city’s most morally dubious hero reaching for her ears. Pulling something out, he frowned as sound rushed back into her ears and he showed her the pink earplug he had removed.

“Anything hurt?” he asked gruffly.

She shook her head, flinching as a knife seemed to fall out of his sleeve and into his hand, opening with a sharp shnick. “I’m going to cut off the gag, so hold still.”

Lucy went motionless as the blade neared her face, holding perfectly still until he moved, taking the gag with him.

“There you go,” he murmured, chucking the gag on the floor. “Let’s get you out of these ropes.”

“How did you know I was here?” she asked as he started cutting through the rope binding her right ankle to the corresponding chair leg. “And where are we?”

“Oracion Laboratory,” he grunted, and she heard the knife being set down on the floor as warm hands wrapped around her ankle, calloused but gentle. “And this is going to hurt, but bear with me.”

As his hands massaged the circulation back into her ankle, Lucy looked around, taking in the room she was held in instead of focusing on the pain of the blood returning to normal in her feet. It looked like an abandoned mental hospital, with a rickety bed, complete with warped metal frame, the only furniture other than the chair she was sitting in. There were sturdy bars on the tiny window, which was frosted over to keep from seeing out. But most noticeable were the craters that marred the walls and much of the floor, edges rippled and twisted in ways that made her think of extreme heat or acid.

Without a word, Cobra’s hands left her ankle and moved to the next one, releasing the bonds and then massaging gently to restore circulation. Feeling the need to break the silence, Lucy joked. “You seem pretty good at this. Get tied up often?”

“It’s interesting that your legs were not only bound, but separated and bound to the chair,” Cobra said in response, fingers still working on her ankle. “And earplugs and a blindfold are not standard in abductions.”

“Again, you seem oddly knowledgeable.” Lucy winced as her attempt at humor failed again. “I might have taken a kick at them a few times,” she admitted. “So they blindfolded me, but I could still locate my kicks pretty accurately, so that’s when they put the earplugs in. After that, they must have decided to cut their losses because they tied my feet together, but I’m guessing that just made things worse because they separated them and left me as you found me.”

“That explains why they went to all this trouble instead of just using the restraints on the bed,” her rescuer muttered, eye focused on her ankle, but there was an undercurrent in his voice that made her certain he’d have been looking at the bed without anything else to focus on.”

“What is this place?”

“Oracion Laboratories.”

“You said that earlier,” Lucy retorted. “I’ve never heard of it. Is it some type of hospital?”

Cobra let out a low laugh that seemed more mocking than anything. “Thank your lucky stars princess. This ain’t the type of place you ever want to see.”

“What did they do that was so terrible?” Lucy felt her ego smarting from the unexpected harshness to his voice.

“The head here was anxious to follow in Dragneel’s footsteps,” Cobra hissed, fingers stilling on her ankle. “This was a lab where children went to die. The lucky ones, anyway.”

Lucy swallowed hard. Laboratories had sprung up after the first superhumans were revealed, trying to figure out what made them different, and how to replicate it in other people. Zeref Dragneel was easily the least ethical of the researchers, his experiments killing or maiming thousands of men, women, and children before he disappeared. But despite the public outcry, there were others who followed in his footsteps. Copies of his research still circulated; despite its unethical origins it was some of the most comprehensive profiling of superhumans in the world.

“Was that why they took me?” Lucy whispered. She wasn’t a superhuman, but some of the labs reportedly tried to induce some type of a superpower, usually in ways that ended up killing the test subjects. “To use me in their research?”

“Zero’s been out of the game for years,” Cobra said shortly, rising from the crouch he had been in while he freed her ankles and shifting to stand behind her. Moments later, the pressure on her wrists disappeared and she bit her lip as the pins and needles sensation started there too. Gentle hands shifted her arms back around and rested them in her lap before he moved to crouch in front of her again, reaching for one of her hands. “Ever since he got busted the first time.”

“So what did he want from me?” Lucy was confused, and the pins and needles in her hands weren’t doing anything to help her think. “If he wasn’t going to use me to experiment on, why did he kidnap me?”

“Because of me,” Cobra said bluntly, eye boring into her own as he massaged her hand. “He wanted to get my attention.”

“So that’s why you told me to stay away?” Lucy hazarded, nodding as she saw the truth of it in his face. “He took me because I didn’t.”

“You’re too damn smart for your own good,” the man grunted, switching hands. “Couldn’t you just take the hint when I told you to find someone else to pester?”

“But I already had you, Erik,” she said, watching him flinch at the name. “And honestly, if I get tied up every so often, what’s the big deal? Our...friendship,” she said, trying to hide the pause where there was another word she wanted to use, “is worth more to me than any false security.”

“I have a lot of enemies,” he said quietly, hands stilling on hers. “More than just Zero. I was...not always a hero. Zero didn’t make heroes. He made tools.”

He made tools. Another piece of the puzzle that was Erik. “Was this your cell?” she asked quietly.

“Until the day I broke down the door,” Erik said, rising to stare uselessly out the window. “Then he had me whipped within an inch of my life and moved me into his barracks.” He spat the word like it had a bad taste. “There were...five of us who survived. Five, and one girl who he must have triggered some dormant ability, managing to get her stuck in a snake’s body. We were his own personal army, taking on heroes, villains, and cops. Whoever he wanted out of the way, we made it happen.”

“How did you get away?”

“Cops finally got enough evidence on him that he couldn’t make disappear. He was part of that big organization they busted when we were ten, but they never found his connection, and he took a bunch of the children and falsified the records so they thought we didn’t exist. Most of them…” he took a ragged breath. “They’re dead. All but the five of us. If the experiments didn’t kill them, we did. A test, he called it. A test of our abilities.”

Lucy swallowed hard. When she had guessed that he was one of the children experimented on, she had never expected this.

“Don’t worry,” he growled, turning around to face her. “I’ll be out of your life as soon as I get you back home. You won’t have to worry about if I’m going to snap and kill you too one of these days. Come on, let’s go. After this long, you shouldn’t have any issues walking.”

“What do you mean, out of your life?” Lucy snapped, balling her fists as she got up and stalked over to him. “You think I’m going to just let you walked away because a lunatic screwed up your childhood?”

“Sane people would,” Erik muttered.

“Well, my sanity’s always been up for debate,” Lucy said shortly. “Now, are you going to take off that mask and kiss me, or are we going to enact some fantasy where I’m dating both Erik and the notorious hero Cobra and gossip rags everywhere will call me a slut because of it?” The last time she had seen him, they had been so close to kissing, something they had been dancing around for ages, which had served to ratchet up her frustration levels to new heights when he ran out.

In two quick steps he had her pinned against the wall, mask fluttering to rest on the ground next to the sliced remains of her bonds. “If we’re going to do this,” he murmured, hot breath caressing her ear and making her shiver. “You’re going to have to agree to a few things.”

“Like what?” she retorted, rolling her hips into his and relishing in the choked off groan she managed to provoke. So he’s just as anxious for this as I am.

“Like self-defense classes,” he grunted, bending slightly so he could get a grip on her legs before hoisting her up, causing her to instinctively lock them around her waist, grinding into him again in retribution. “And a lock on your goddamn door that actually works.”

“I think I can agree to that,” she breathed, nipping at his ear, which produced an even better groan from him, one that he wasn’t able to cut off. “Only if I can add a few of my own?”

“You can try,” he smirked against her neck as he nibbled at the skin there, teasing her into a full body shudder that had both of them struggling to breathe normally.

“No more of this abandon ship, protect yourself bullshit,” Lucy dug her hands into his hair as his lips peppered her collarbone with kisses before dipping lower, following the (admittedly low) cut of her shirt. “You have a problem with us, you bring it to me before you go making decisions.”

“Reasonable,” he said before sliding his hands under her shirt, creeping up to much more interesting areas that she was very interested in having him explore, preferably without clothes. “Any others?”

“That’s the big one-” She moaned into his kiss as his lips, those perfectly kissable- slightly dry from the winter but really, who cares?- lips darted up to engage hers. All talk of conditions flew out of her head as he rolled his hips into hers, a contact that made both of them groan in unison and caused her to pull gently on his hair.

“Before you start screwing,” someone said in a flat voice from the direction of the doorway, the words like a bucket of water being dumped over their heads. “I thought I’d warn you that Angel’s on her way up, and she’s pissed.”

“Damn it Midnight,” Erik grunted, gently lowering Lucy to the floor and stepping away. “Couldn’t you head her off?”

“I did,” the other man said flatly, leaning against the doorway. “That’s why she searched the first floor and I took the second.”

Trying to smooth out her breathing, Lucy discreetly adjusted her shirt, watching their interaction from under her eyelashes. Midnight was another of the morally dubious heroes that roamed Fiore, although he rarely made an appearance. He had never been seen with Cobra, but based on their interactions, she was willing to bet that he was one of the five who survived Zero.

“And the others?” Erik was asking, sliding his mask back into place.

“Hoteye’s bullshitting the authorities so we could find you ahead of them,” Midnight said. “Your work was rather obvious, so Racer’s making sure it’s not directly traced back to you. Not that you would go to jail, probably, given who he was, but they do frown on slipping back into old habits.”

“Thanks,” Erik said quietly, before turning to Lucy. “Lucy Heartfilia, Midnight. Midnight, Lucy Heartfilia.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Lucy said politely, holding out her hand.

Midnight just looked at it before turning to leave the room. “We had better get out of here before the cops decide to start nosing around.”

Slightly hurt by the rejection, Lucy looked to Erik for cues. He shrugged, adjusting how his coat fell, and said: “He’s like that. It took us years to warm up to each other, and he’s still not used to life outside who Zero made us into. Don’t take it personally.”

From the hallway, Midnight’s voice floated down to them. “You have a minute before Angel’s up here, so if you can refrain from screwing against the wall in that time, I’ll contrive to find enough errands out of the apartment that you’ll have several hours of privacy to do with what you will.”

Perhaps, Lucy thought as a sudden warmth blazed in her as she saw the lust in Erik’s lone eye return as he looked at her, he’s not so bad after all.