#i guess we all have a taste for tragedy

[duu-kiwi]

grow back your sharpest teeth you know my desire

[bamboozledbird]

IGNITE: A Teen Wolf S1 AU // Chapter 1 (reader version)

Characters: Stiles Stilinski, Sheriff Stilinski, Reader (You) Pairing: Eventual Stiles x Reader, but man are we talking slow burn Word Count: 4.8k Warnings: Canon typical gore/violence, parental death (rip to your fake mom), descriptions of burning, depictions of depression (apathy, dissociation, 'numb little bug' vibes) Tags: Canon has been lovingly scrapped for parts, author is a chaotic bi and it shows, prolific overuse of the em dash, the slowest of burns i fear

Summary: You can always smell ash long after the fire is gone. Perhaps, that’s why you still can’t breathe without choking on the past. It’s been four years since your mom died. Four years since she burned alive. For years since you didn’t. You survived, but they must have buried your heart with her because you feel like something halfway between a ghost and a lamb for slaughter. 

You can’t wash the smell of hospital out of clothes, not really. Maybe, that’s why death and disease follows Stiles wherever he goes now. It’s been eight years since his mom died. Eight years since he didn’t. Eight years since he decided that he wouldn’t let anyone he loved die ever again. He survived, but Scott’s new-found abilities and the murky world they’ve been dragged into is making it pretty damn hard to keep his promise. 

Time never stops turning. The grief never dissipates. Children soldier on—but in a town where all the monsters under the bed are real and old family skeletons rattle in every closet, how long can two fragile, breakable humans survive? 

Maybe, the real question is how long will they want to? Chapter Summary: After your annual interrogation with Sheriff Stilinski, you meet his son who turns out to be very handy with jumper cables and incoherent babbling.

A/N: Does this look familiar? It should lmao. I gave into the peer pressure. All the messages and requests were too powerful. Here is a reader version of my ofc season 1 fic. Obviously some things have been removed to get rid of specific names/descriptions, so you want to read the full thing you can read the og version and check me out on ao3 (dork_knight)! For the sake of not clogging tags, I'll probably just do my reader version on tumblr and the full oc lore version on ao3 from now on. xx

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.

Before your mother’s death, you would have picked fire. Every single time. 

You never liked the cold; never really had to get used to it growing up in central California—but the crux of your argument, the twisted logic behind it all, was that most burn victims died from suffocation before they felt the flames. A small mercy, really, in the face of unspeakable tragedy. 

In the end, however, statistics were just numbers, your mother didn't die from smoke inhalation, and there was no mercy in burying a parent before you were old enough to have children of your own. Nothing ever ended poetically off the page. Death was just death, and it was always ugly. Someone should really tell that to Robert Frost, you mused, biting at a raw hangnail.

The medical examiner said the actual cause of death was pulmonary edema; at least, that was his best guess based on the state of the body. He didn’t say that she felt everything, her skin peeling back into her flesh, her flesh liquefying into fuel, her joints flexing into contorted pleas until the fire incinerated her last nerve ending. He didn’t have to; you connected those dots all on your own. You’d been twelve at the time, not an imbecile. 

“I’m sorry to drag you through this all again.”

You flitted your eyes away from the flickering lightbulb above Sheriff Stilinski’s head and met his gaze; it was nauseatingly sympathetic. Your responding shrug was a small, little thing—more like a twitch in practice, “Not your fault.” 

Your yearly visits to Sheriff Stilinski’s office were solely your father’s doing, even if no one wanted to admit it to your face. Most mayors would use their political power to get their child out of a police station, not into it, but perhaps he stopped being your dad somewhere between the funeral and now. 

“If you could start—”

“From the beginning,” you smoothed your thumb in small circles over the armrest of your chair, attentively tracing patterns into the polished wood, “I know.” This was, after all, the fourth anniversary of your first interrogation. You’d become somewhat of an expert at being a useless witness. You picked at your uneven cuticles before continuing, “Mom put me to bed around 10:00—which was kind of late for a school night, honestly, but she let me stay up to finish another chapter anyway.” The right corner of your mouth twitched for a brief moment, “Nancy Drew: Password to Larkspur Lane. I told her that forcing someone to go to sleep in the middle of a mystery was specifically forbidden in Geneva Protocol II.” Your mom had been far too indulgent of your lip on most occasions, but that night she didn’t smile at your snarky aside. She let you finish the chapter because she was too tired to argue; you could tell. At the time, you saw it as a victory. Now, it kept you up at night, the drooping lines of your mother’s mouth spilling over the pages of whatever book you were trying to read.

You bit down on your tongue when a stray splinter snagged against the soft pad of your thumb, “Dad was out of town, so it was just the two of us. Mom always put me to bed when Dad was gone; said it was the only way she could get to sleep. Had to make sure my window was locked.” You paused for a long moment: everything went dark after this. Your mother kissed the top of your head, murmured, ‘Love you,’ turned out the light, and then that was it. You woke up in the hospital, and your mom was dead. 

A bead of sweat dripped onto your top lip. The air in the Beacon Hills police station was, without fail, sticky with heat and body odor—and it wasn’t just the oppressive Californian sun. Even in the winter, a person could choke on the stifling warmth. Idly, you wondered if it was a matter of interrogatory tactics or budgetary constraints. 

“And then,” Sheriff Stilinski prompted gently, though you both knew how the story went from here. You had told it to him and a dozen other officials at least a hundred times in the last four years. 

You bit down on your thumbnail and winced when your teeth snagged on the tender nail bed, “And then nothing. I opened my eyes, and a nurse said that you found me on the front lawn.” 

“You don’t remember how you got outside?” 

You shook your head, staring past the Sheriff's shoulder. Large pieces of dust floated through the air, highlighted by the slivers of light trickling through the blinds. Suddenly, you had a newfound appreciation for the lack of fans in the room. 

Sheriff Stilinski cleared his throat and rubbed his hand over his jaw, “You don’t remember saying it was an angel?”

Blinking slowly, you looked at the grim line of the Sheriff’s mouth and gripped your knees tightly, digging your fingers into fragile skin until your wrist cracked, “I should, right? I was twelve. I should remember something—that’s what everyone thinks. That’s what my dad thinks.” Your eyelids fluttered to a tight close, and your voice went so quiet you could barely be heard over the hum of the copier outside the door, “He thinks it was me. That’s why he makes you question me every year.” Copper flooded your mouth as the soft lining of your cheek split under the brunt of your teeth, “He thinks you’ll finally figure out how I did it.” 

You were scared to open your eyes as the silence stretched between the two of you. You’d danced around the subject before, hinted and spun around the heart of it, but you’d never truly discussed how it looked from the outside. Sheriff Stilinski had been kind enough to give you a few different excuses over the years: trauma, head injury, oxygen deprivation, just plain ol’ grief—but whatever caused your temporary amnesia wasn’t so conveniently explained. In fact, currently, you had no explanation at all. When you finally peeked through your lashes, clumped together with frustrated tears, you couldn’t quite figure out what expression the Sheriff was making. He leaned back in his desk chair and frowned, “I’m sure he doesn’t—”

“He does,” you cut him off. Your eyes went flinty, irises darkening to something far more ashen with the resolve of your anger. You never had any trouble reading your father’s face; the disgust was thinly-veiled between the flickers of fear. 

Sheriff Stilinksi leaned forward so that you had no choice but to look him in the eyes. They were kind—more tired than usual, but still kind. They always were. That was one thing you remembered from that day, waking up in the hospital to Sheriff Stilinski’s kind, watery blue eyes, just before the entire world fell apart. His voice was gentle, but firm, when he finally spoke, “I don’t.” 

You nodded numbly and pulled at a fraying string on the hem of your denim skirt until the thread snapped. 

“I mean it, kid. They couldn’t identify the source of the fire. They couldn’t even find an origin point; no twelve-year-old could pull that off.”

You chewed on your bottom lip, “Could anyone?”

Sheriff Stilinski’s brow furrowed, and his mouth screwed up into a crooked line, like he was chewing on his words and deciding if he should swallow them or spit them out. “I wish I had all the answers for you. I really do. Not knowing, it’s worse than any truth.”

You blinked up at him for a moment, once again taken aback by his raw sincerity, and swallowed hard. He wasn’t the one who was supposed to have the answers; he was the one who was supposed to ask the questions. There was one failure in his muggy office, and it wasn’t the Sheriff. “It’s okay,” you said quietly. “Not your fault.”

He looked like he wanted to argue the point, but whatever he wanted to say was interrupted by the sharp ringing of the phone on his desk. “I have to take this, but if you remember something, or if you just need to talk—”

“My dad spends a small fortune on a psychiatrist and a behavioral therapist for that,” you stood up quickly, shouldering your bag. You forced the corners of your mouth into a small smile, tight at the edges like a sheet that had been stretched too thin, “But thank you. For everything.” 

The Sheriff’s gaze darted to a framed photo on his desk. You had seen it before, on one of your many visits to his office. It was of a boy—his son, you assumed—he looked like he was around five or six at the time. He was grinning, wide enough to show off his missing incisors, and his fingers and wrist were stained cotton-candy blue from a melting popsicle. You must’ve been that happy once, right? In the beginning, everyone was unencumbered by the weight of imminent mortality. Maybe that’s what Sheriff Stilinski was thinking, too. He looked away from the photo and gave you a small smile, “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

You gave a half-hearted wave before wrapping your fingers around the strap of your backpack and walking to the parking lot. 

Outside, the sky was grim, a mocking reflection of the dour expression on your face. The spite in your eyes hardened when big, fat raindrops splattered against the apples of your cheeks. For a moment, you just stood there, glaring at the rain and cursing the cosmos for their utterly unamusing sense of humor.

A jeep pulled into the parking lot, and the squealing engine startled you back into reality. The search for your car keys was, of course, a considerable endeavor. Nothing could be easy. Not here. Not today. Not ever, you thought. A bit melodramatic maybe, but the weather was certainly ripe for a bit of self-pity.

You stacked your textbooks and binders onto the hood of your sedan, haphazardly throwing your jacket on top of the pile to protect your painstakingly penned Kafka essay from the rain. By the time your fingertips brushed against the cool metal of your car keys, your hair was damp and curling at the ends. 

The momentary relief was short-lived when you pressed the unlock button five times and the accompanying beep didn’t sound, not even once. For an absurdly long minute, all you could do was rest your forehead against the driver’s side window, breathing heavily until condensation gathered next to your mouth and the drizzle speckled dots onto the sleeves of your thin cotton shirt.

“If you’re trying to charge the battery through osmosis, it’d probably be more effective to smash your head against the hood.”

You jumped, and then flinched again when your keys clattered against the ground. You caught a glimpse of the phantom speaker in the side-view mirror; bizarrely, he looked just as surprised as you felt. You turned around, trepidatiously—objects may be closer than they appear n’all—and tried to swallow your rapidly rising heart. 

“Sorry,” the boy pulled the hood of his sweatshirt down and had the decency to look contrite, “big mouth.” He rubbed a hand over his chapped lips. “It’s a real problem. It’s so big, actually, that my foot just slides right in there like…all the time,” he gestured animatedly with a flat hand, a quick sliding motion, like a fish through water.

You blinked at him, slowly, and bent down to reach for your keys, “Might wanna see someone about that. Sounds unsanitary.”

“Eh, it’s hardly the worst thing I’ve put in my mouth,” he said, eyes widening into horrified round circles the second he stopped talking. A faint flush creeped up his neck to his ears, and your heart dropped back into your chest. Slashers and ax murderers didn’t blush. Probably. You hadn’t ever met one, but it seemed like sound logic.

“Choking hazard,” you hummed, leaning back against your car. Your fingers traced a small dent in the door, the cause long forgotten, “It’s definitely still a choking hazard.”

The boy grinned before fixing his expression into something on the cusp of severity, “I’m about 95.7% sure that anything bigger than a fist is completely mouth-safe.” He held up his fist and nodded sharply, “Make that 98.3% sure.”

“98.3?” your brow arched.

“Maybe even 98.9.” 

The buzz of a lamp post hummed above your heads as you stared at each other with little smirks until the quiet made you sink your teeth into your bottom lip and big-mouth drum his fingers against his forearm. 

“So,” his sneakers squeaked against the slick asphalt as he shifted his weight, “you need a jump?”

You pursed your lips and ran your eyes over the front of your car, “I might give osmosis another shot. 30 seconds is hardly a fair trial.”

“Of course,” he hummed, “you gotta be fair.”

“We are in front of a police station.”

“Well,” he scratched his cheek, “it’s not a courthouse.”

“Technicality.” You were slightly horrified when you finally noticed that you were smiling. The sensation felt like it had escaped straight out of the uncanny valley and latched onto your face like a parasite in need of a host. It only took two weeks for muscles to atrophy; years must have completely decimated the fibers in your cheeks. “I guess I could use a jump. If your offer was an offer and not a hypothetical.” 

“Smart choice.” The boy rapped his knuckles against the hood of your car and said, “Steel’s probably pretty low on the permeability scale.”

“As opposed to a skull.”

He snorted and then nodded towards the large lump of books and papers covered by your freshly dampened jean jacket, “You should probably move your stuff. Y’know, ‘cause of the very un-permeable battery.”

“There’s that,” you sighed and started stuffing your things back into your backpack, shaking it violently until your notebook finally slid past your chemistry textbook, “and flunking English isn’t high on my list of things to do this weekend.”

His gaze flickered back and forth, rapidly cataloging every corner and crevice of your face. You tilted your head, brows pinched, and stared back at him with your arms crossed tightly over your chest. His eyes, you noticed, became a peculiar shade of brown in the yellow glow of the setting sun and the fluorescent light of the lamppost. More like honey, you realized, more like honey than irises. Something finally clicked behind them. "You,” he pointed aggressively, “you go to Beacon Hills.”

You pushed his finger away from your face with your own, “Safe bet, considering there’s exactly one option for the next 2,000 square miles.”

“You’re kind of a smartass, you know that,” he muttered. He struggled with the trunk of the jeep parked next to your car, cursing under his breath until he finally wrenched it open with an almost guttural grunt.

Your lips parted briefly, and then you grinned drolly. It was refreshing, not being treated like some fragile little creature who would buckle in the knees—or possibly set something on fire—at the slightest confrontation. “Kind of?”

“Total.” He nodded decisively before sticking his head and torso into the depths of his trunk. “Completely, entirely, and wholly a smartass.” There were various clanging sounds until he re-emerged with a pair of jumper cables, “Never noticed that in class. You don’t really…say anything.”

You bit back the snark poised on the tip of your tongue. When people looked at you, the only thing they saw was the worst thing that had ever happened to you. You were the daughter of the woman who burned to death on Cedar Street; your mom died, and you were there. It seemed like that was all you would ever be in Beacon Hills. 

In the grand scheme of things, it was better to be no one. 

High school had been your chance to slip into social obscurity—more kids, more drama, less discussion of homicide by arson—so you took it, wholeheartedly. You kept to the corners of classrooms, away from extracurriculars, and your mouth resolutely shut. 

“I try to exclusively bring the smart and leave the ass at home,” you finally replied.

The boy’s eyes drifted downwards for a moment, and his voice did a funny, squeaky thing when he said, “I should give that a go sometime.”

“10/10 would recommend. No one bugs you—and teachers never throw erasers at your face.”

“So you do remember me,” he grinned a little and rolled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt before unlatching the jeep’s hood and propping it open.

Slanting your head, you watched his profile. There were moles scattered across his cheek and neck, and his angular jaw clenched as he struggled with the knotted cords in his willowy fingers. “Vaguely,” you said faintly. It was coming back to you in pieces. That was life after twelve for you: bits and pieces. Everything was made up of the disquieting moments when you surfaced from the haze and into the present. It should’ve felt like a lungful of air, but it didn’t. It always felt like choking. 

He wiped his grease-smudged hand on his jeans and then extended it towards you, “Stiles.”

You took his hand, despite the strange formality, and shook it—mainly because of the black streaks staining his pants. “Y/N.”

His fingers twitched a few times when he connected the clamp to the coordinating battery terminal, and your eyes widened. You held your breath in your sternum until you registered that he hadn’t been electrocuted. He was just naturally tweaky, you concluded. It was either that, or he had jumped one-too-many engines in the last 24 hours…unless it was hidden option C, and he was actually tweaking. Unlikely, given he was on his way into a building teeming with cops, but far stranger things had happened in Beacon Hills.  

You sighed a little as you listened to the rain patter against the asphalt and the roof of your car, rubbing your palms over your arms until the goosebumps prickling along your biceps receded into your skin. Stiles looked back at you again, and his mouth wormed its way into a little frown. His head disappeared into his trunk, and after a moment a lumpy maroon mass hurtled towards your face. You caught it before it could smack into your nose, and you clutched at the soft material until you realized that the projectile missile was actually just a sweatshirt. 

Stiles was staring at you when you looked up from your hands. A small, unsure…something squirmed over his face, and you felt a little stupid, just standing there, hoodie limp in your arms. It happened a lot—more than it should after so many years. The invisible quicksand materialized in the strangest, most insignificant moments. You blinked, completely brainless, at simple questions, stared aimlessly into your closet until your second alarm startled you into snatching the first shirt you came across—clasped at a stranger’s hoodie until the rainwater pooled on your lashes dripped into your eyes.

Robotically, you thrust your arms through the sleeves and tugged it over your head, “Thanks.” The sweet scent of grass clung to the fabric, and there was something earthier underneath it, something like evergreen. You smiled slightly, combing your baby hairs behind your ears, “I guess I forgive you for attempting to blind me in the process.”

Stiles’s shoulders unwound as he scoffed, “That was an excellent throw. First-line material, honestly.”

You looked at him and tilted your head, eyebrows crawling towards your hairline, and Stiles sighed loudly, “Okay, so I’m not an ‘athlete’ or whatever—but I’m working on it. You’ll see—you’ll all see.”

You hummed softly, unconvinced but grateful enough to not comment further. Another bout of silence fell between you, but it wasn’t so restless this time—even after Stiles torpedoed his body through his passenger seat. He fought with his keys for a while until the correct one slid into the ignition. 

The jeep’s engine hummed pleasantly in the background as you let out a soft sigh, dropping your head back against your car window. The rain had stopped somewhere between trying to unlock your car and now, but you couldn’t quite recall when. The chill wasn’t so bad, you realized, without your foul mood casting a shadow over your head.

Stiles landed back on his feet and leaned against the jeep. You could feel his gaze on you again. A tickling sensation trailed down your spine as you fiddled with your keychain. You took a step backwards and bit your bottom lip, “I should probably try start my car…y’know, before you throw something else at my face.’”

He nodded, taking a step towards his jeep, “Solid plan. A tire iron was next.”

You slid into your car and stared at the steering wheel, forgetting to laugh at his joke. You wrapped your fingers around 10 and 2 and silently called upon every deity you’d ever heard of to end your suffering. Stiles seemed nice enough, but you seriously doubted your smalltalk capabilities were up-to ‘ride home’ standards. Perhaps, you should revisit your resounding dedication to atheism, you thought, as the engine sputtered in protest a few times and then came back to life. 

Stiles flashed two thumbs up through the window. The smile on his face was positively goofy, but his dismount from the jeep was somehow even goofier. He stumbled over his large feet a few times before regaining stability. You bit back a smile when he shot you another thumbs up, this time through the dash as he removed the jumper cables from your car’s battery.

He wiped his hands off on his jeans again; at this point, you were convinced that they were beyond saving, but Stiles didn’t seem concerned. He tapped against your window before stepping around the open door, “You should probably let it run for a while. Take the scenic route home; enjoy all the Beacon Hills hotspots open past 8:00 pm on a weeknight. I personally recommend the Rite Aid or Walmart.”

You snorted, “Maybe I’ll swing by the Preserve. I hear the woods are especially beautiful in the foreboding darkness.”

“Don’t.” Serious was an odd look on Stiles’s face. You decided that you much preferred the goofy grin. “Don’t go anywhere near the Preserve. It’s officially cordoned off—totally locked down, quarantine-zone-central. Something about flesh-eating, parasitic plant life.”

“As completely real and unobtrusive as that sounds,” you drawled, “don’t worry about it. Literally every single person in town knows about the body they found in the woods.” It was bound to happen, small town and all—and ‘woman dies in deadly animal attack’ was the most interesting thing that had happened in Beacon Hills since the intersection got a Target two years ago. “I’ve seen every installment of Friday the 13th and The Blair Witch Project. If I’m going to be murdered, I refuse to also be humiliated by a cliché C.O.D.” 

The manic expression on his face softened to a relieved smile and then again to a little smirk, “So what’s a certified fresh murder, then? Not that I doubt the depths of human depravity, but I think society killed off originality a few centuries ago.”

You thought back to a house fire with no origin, accelerant, or discernible cause. Apparently, not. “You know what they say,” you sighed, “life finds a way.”

Stiles tilted his head, “And death.”

“And death,” you agreed, staring at a small chip in your windshield. The cracks had just begun to spiderweb out from the pit. 

Stiles looked like he wanted to say something, and he looked so much like the Sheriff with his face twisted around thoughtful contemplation that you couldn’t believe it had taken you this long to make the connection. The boy in the photo had grown up. How unfortunate for him. Stiles swallowed whatever it was that was lingering on his tongue and shut your door. He leaned his elbow against the window frame and cocked his hand in a stiff little wave, “Seeya at school. I’ll bring something fun for target practice—maybe grapes. You like grapes? Don’t answer that—I’ll surprise you.”

You put your car in drive once Stiles was safely a few feet from the wheels and gave him a dry smile, “The anticipation is killing me.”

What a scary place to be, you thought as you watched Stiles disappear in your rearview mirror. Anticipation. Hope. Life. You were chronically good at surviving; cockroached your way out of every horrible thing life squashed you with. Lately, all you could do was cling to your heartbeat and the warmth of your skin, until you were barely more than roadkill. A walking carcass was a far cry from living, but death would not stop for you, so you stopped looking for him. You kept treading water, took your pills, stopped existing—you were a lot like Schrödinger’s cat that way: too stubborn to live, too stubborn to die. You didn’t know what to do if someone unsealed the box and forced you to choose. That was the trouble with possibility; it required far too much uncertainty.

Your dad’s SUV was parked in the garage when you finally pulled into your circle driveway. It was a rare sight; your dead battery had disrupted your usual routine. You were supposed to be safely tucked away in your room after an early dinner—take-out usually, sometimes a quesadilla if you were feeling exceptionally inspired—by the time your dad got home from work. It was dysfunctional in every sense of the word, but it was the only way you could function in the same space. 

He used to stare at you from the other end of the dinner table: not eating, not speaking. The only way you knew he was alive was the slow rise and fall of his chest. After a while, he moved dinner to his office. ‘Working dinner,’ he’d say in passing, ‘budgets are due.’ Eventually, he stopped coming home altogether. It was better that way, you thought. You loved each other better from afar, where the power of nostalgia could cloud all the present unpleasantries. You wondered what he saw when he looked at you now. You wondered, and you desperately didn’t want to find out.  

You shouldered your backpack and made sure your car lights were off twice before quietly creeping into the mudroom. You could hear the buzz of the microwave as you toed off your sneakers and tried to discern the smell emanating from the kitchen. Something with garlic and tomato. Bona Vita, probably. Your dad loved their al pomodoro. 

You tried to make yourself as small as possible as you skulked into the kitchen, shoulders hunched to your ears and grip tight around the strap of your backpack. Your dad’s back was to you; you could see the wrinkles in his collar from where he tugged at it when he was agitated. He stopped stirring his pasta once you reached the island. 

“Did…” your dad trailed off for a moment, still facing the kitchen counter, “did everything go alright with the Sheriff?” 

You shrugged even though he couldn’t see you, “I guess.”

“It’s just,” he rubbed at his jaw and looked down towards the oven, “it’s almost eight. I was wondering…worrying.”

He still wasn’t looking at you. You stared at the back of his head and sucked your bottom lip between your teeth. Look at me. Your brows pinched, and your back molars ground together. Look at me. 

“I called him. Sheriff Stilinski. He said that you didn’t speak for long.”

“Didn’t have anything new to say,” you shoved your hands into hoodie pockets, realizing belatedly that you forgot to give Stiles his sweatshirt back. Another problem for another time. 

“That’s not what I—” your dad grasped the lip of the counter and hung his head like it suddenly weighed too much for his spine, “I was wondering what happened to you.” 

“Oh,” you shifted your weight onto your other foot, “dead battery. I think it was the door light.”

Your dad nodded a little, “Do you need someone to pick up your car?”

“Got a jump from a friend.” Not a friend, not really, but you supposed it was the closest you’d come to one in the last four years. That was just a little too sad to say out loud. 

“Good.” He nodded again, “Good.” 

You nodded because it seemed like the only thing to do and slipped towards the hallway. You’d taken no less than five steps out of the kitchen when your dad said, “You could call me. Next time, you could call me.”

Maybe. Maybe you could if he would look at you.

[goldensunset]

💎 lokiss

🔁 traumaadcaelum Follow

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💎 lokiss

i think a snickers would’ve fixed baldr tbh

🙅 traumaadcaelum Follow

hi! can you NOT make jokes about the worst massacre that’s happened here in centuries?? my girlfriend was murdered that day but i guess people like you just love taking advantage of tragedies for funny internet clout. i hope you lose your heart in another world.

💎 lokiss

she baldr on my dr until i bald

#get off my post i literally lost someone too

479 notes

💐 my-other-car-is-a-keyblade-glider

my missing brother, brani, is finally back!!!! i’ve been so so worried for forever. thank you everyone who prayed with me 🙏

#he is acting a little weird though if i’m being honest #freya speaks

5 notes

🌸 dandelioneater

🔁 the-fourteenth-original-darkness

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🍎 valkyrie-of-dreams Follow

sometimes i feel like my taste in men is bad and then i remember there are multiple secret societies entirely dedicated to thirsting after master brain

🔑 its-kee-not-kai

you ever see a post that just looks like someone swinging a keyblade at a flappy bugs nest

#kingdom hearts grant me the serenity to not look at the notes #courage to not look at the notes #and wisdom to not look at the notes

56907 notes

🌕 tardyfleetfoot

Asking for a friend what do you do when a cable car stops in midair and starts shaking and swaying on the wire while you’re in there up there way high above the ground? Time sensitive question asking for a friend.

3 notes

🌚 the-fourteenth-original-darkness

🔁 my-other-car-is-a-keyblade-glider

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🧜🏻‍♀️ ieatchesspieces Follow

let’s explore the nearby abandoned towns together!

108500 notes

🔑its-kee-not-kai

🔁 master-odin-retire-challenge

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💍 ladyofsilver-fountains Follow

it’s really awful how people are acting like it’s illegal to have a sense of humor anymore. even in the wake of tragedy, humans have always been humans. plus it’s been almost a year now. life goes on, you know?

👢master-odin-retire-challenge

the context for this post is op lost their job and reputation because they laughed at the funeral of a little girl named vör when the person giving the eulogy couldn’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce her name correctly. please for the love of light stop blindly reblogging things like this.

#oh ewww i hate people

239 notes

🌘 xehanerd

to the anon who just sent that long-winded ask: my blog is my space. if you don’t like what i post then move on.

#xe.post #delete later

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🌘 xehanerd

🔁 dajokerofscala Follow

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🌗 balancewillprevail Follow

It drives me insane whenever people frame it like Baldr 'succumbing to darkness' and going crazy was inevitable. Sure, darkness played a part in that tragedy, but it completely overlooks the reality of how Master Odin failed to take care of that child at every step of the way. The boy was lost in grief, and the adult who was supposed to take care of him shoved him in an asylum-like room alone? Are we really going to leave that part out in favor of pushing the narrative that people prone to darkness are simply evil at heart? He could have lived a happy life being himself if he had been supported and nurtured. It didn’t have to be this way.

🌕 tardyfleetfoot

Right? We could have saved him from his darkness! He was our friend….

🌗 balancewillprevail Follow

That’s… not at all what I was saying, but I suppose a stupid comment like this is to be expected from somebody with ‘darkness dni’ in their bio. Thanks for trying.

🐓 everyoneshutupplease Follow

‘darkness played a part in that tragedy’ not you sugarcoating what happened for the sake of pushing YOUR narrative that the thing that’s been killing people since the dawn of time can possibly be anything but toxic. how many people have to die before people like you get in touch with reality???

🌗 balancewillprevail Follow

Sounds about right from someone who went through the Scala Ad Caelum public school system. Have you ever tried reading a book other than what was assigned for class? Please check your natural-light privilege and ignorance. Thanks.

🪐 fenrir-fanatic

look out lads we got another conspiracy theorist ‘homeschool your kids’ dork lmao

🌗 balancewillprevail Follow

And do you read anything other than sigurd x reader fanfiction, based on the first seven posts on your blog?

📈 whats-your-favorite-staircase-to-heaven Follow

the notes on this post were so toxic staff just axed ‘em

#sent to me #thank you joker

0 notes

[pandora-writes-one-piece]

AYYYYY CONGRATS ABOUT 100 FOLLOWERS!! You totally deserve them all and even more!! I mean, your story with Kid and reader about scottish mafia was 11/1 score! Truly mesmerising!!!

And I wondered if you wouldn’t have anything against writing Killer x male!reader, nothing nsfw, maybe a little smooch and cuddle session in the end, that would be awesome!

And this is one of the ideas I had roaming in my head; original OP au would fit the best)

Killer went to investigate area, got bitten by a wild wolf-alike thing, got back to the crew, he acted normal after going to infirmary, but every hour it got darker outside he was ‘not like himself’, while Victoria Punk is still docked at an island — he transforms and freaks out completely, then he runs away and reader is beyond than worried, crew was alarmed and they all went to search for him, he’s a grown ass man — we all know — but the unpredictable happened and it’s all going to the point of reader finding him inside a forest, then… you decide what happens. Comfort? Tragedy? Attack? Peace?

I understand that it may not be your cup of tea and I totally understand, anyways, thanks for reading this! (It may be Kid x male!reader also huehue)

Hello anon!!

First of all, thank you soooo much for your kind words! They truly warm my heart! Second, I'm so sorry for the delay on this request, but with vacation, wanting to finish the Highlander Kid story, and... well, life (!) this took a while. Also, I meant this to be short and sweet, but it turned out long and a bit angsty! I guess my need for angst keeps showing... 😫 I do hope you still like it! I had fun with this story because it explored so many new things I'd never written about! Without further ado, and seriously hoping you'll like it, read on!

Source for Pic

Word Count: 5112

Tags: Male!Reader x Killer; Supernatural AU; Mentions of blood; Cursing; Fluff and angst; Angst with hopefull ending (if you squint hard enough); Feelings;

Special Warning: English is not my first language, I apologise for any possible spelling or grammar mistakes.

Summary: Killer gets bitten on a routine scouting mission and dismisses it as a minor wound. Turns out it was anything but a minor wound. As he starts to transform into something else, you try with all your might to bring him back home. Back to you.

Tag List: @rosidaze @beachaddict48 @armiliadawn @jintaka-hane @sprinkklz

MASTERLIST

It was routine. 

Scouting a new island was routine work. Boring, repetitive, mind-numbing routine work. And Killer wasn't even the one who usually did it. But this island was special. This island was fabled to have a single tree, hidden somewhere in the midst of a thick forest, that was said to produce the most fragrant, delicious, mouth-watering fruits known in the New World. 

And Killer just had to get his hands on it. Period. 

Perhaps if he wasn’t so worried about finding this fruit, he would’ve noticed the unnatural fog that permeated the forest. How its thick tendrils wisped their way around him, grasping, enveloping, and suffocating. 

Perhaps if he wasn’t so keen on tasting that new flavour, he would’ve seen a pair of glowing, bright yellow eyes, following him from the shadows, moving as swiftly as the fog.

Perhaps if he wasn’t already inventing recipes in his head, trying to figure out if the fruit paired better with meat, fish, or dessert, he would’ve heard the faint rustle of the leaves, the low snarl of the wolf-like creature, the soft crunch of twigs beneath its paws as it jumped to strike.

Perhaps if he had turned a second earlier, or ducked, or rolled over… perhaps, only perhaps, he wouldn’t have been bitten. Instead, he felt a sharp, intense pain right on the shoulder blade, sending throbbing jolts of discomfort through his neck and down his arm. 

A heavy grunt left his painted lips, muffled by his mask, as he turned, releasing his punisher and fending off the creature that fled with a loud yelp. It was bigger than a wolf, larger than a wolf, heavier than a wolf. 

And it disappeared just as fast as it appeared.

-*-

Killer passed by you on the deck of the Victoria. His mask had a streak of red across it and he was clutching his right arm against his bare chest, his shirt pressed hard against his shoulder blade. Under normal circumstances, the sight of the Massacre Soldier half-naked, usually brought a grunt and pulled a smile from your - often - pursed lips: he was a sight!

Today was different though. 

He seemed to be in pain, from the slight strain with which he carried his arm, his steps heavy while grunts and puffs left his veiled lips. 

“Kill, you alright?” You asked, worry lacing your voice, his hisses of pain shadowing any previous lewd thoughts that crossed your mind. 

“Yes, yes. I'll manage. It’s a minor wound, I just need to get it stitched. Go back to your duties.” His barks were laced with a commanding tone and a very out of character irritable timbre. You and Killer were very good friends - in fact, he was much more than that to you. He was an unattainable crush, the recurring wet dream, the never-possible love story you wished to fulfil. 

Yet, you knew better than to disobey an order from the first mate. So you stayed on deck and finished your duties, a slight hurry to your step and gestures, a frown of worry distorting your face. 

-*-

“What the fuck is that?” Kid barked as he got his face close to Killer’s wound, nose scrunched in disgust and lips pulled upwards, showing his sharp teeth. 

“Fuck off, Kid. I got bit by a fucking wolf. Where’s Doc?” Killer grabbed a whole bottle of rum and poured it on his shoulder, hissing and grunting as the golden-brown liquid poured down his back and front, dripping onto the floor. 

“Hey! That’s a waste of good rum!” Kid growled as Killer lifted a bit of his mask and took a swig of the liquid before pouring the rest over the wound. 

“Fuck, it hurts!” The first mate threw the bottle on the floor and punched the wooden table, gritting his teeth under his mask.

“Doc went to buy supplies. I can stitch that up.” Kid offered. Killer’s snickers were muffled by the mask, but still heard.

“No, it’s better if you don't. I’ll wait. It’s just a minor injury.” Killer grabbed a bunch of bandages from a nearby cabinet and sat down, a disgruntled groan leaving his lips. “Just help me bandage it up.”

-*-

Your duties took way longer than expected and by the time you finished, the orange in the sky was turning into a purplish blue, nighttime approaching fast. That meant Killer would be by the galley. It was Thursday, and Killer usually indulged the crew with some pasta on Thursdays. 

After washing up, you decided to help him - it was not an excuse to check how he was! - since from the looks of it, his arm might’ve been too wounded to cook properly. 

Yet, as soon as you got to the galley, the kitchen was eerily empty. There were pots with simmering water that still hadn’t reached the boiling point, and half-peeled tomatoes on the counter. 

But no Killer in sight. 

“Kill?” You tried to sound cheerful, but worry laced your voice turning it raspy and hoarse. “I came to see if you needed help.”

Listening carefully, you tilted your head to the side as you slowly went around the counter. “Kill?” You heard a soft sound - a muffled whine - coming from the pantry. The door was closed so you approached carefully. Each step you took seemed to be met with another whine. Was it Killer?

Your heart beat rapidly against your chest, your breath came in shallow, fast waves and you felt a drip of sweat run down your back. Inhaling, and unconsciously holding your breath, you pushed the door open. 

“Kill?” You almost didn’t recognize your own voice. It came out in an altered timbre, much higher than usual. And much more frightened. Because the man cowering in the corner of the pantry, curling his body against the lower shelf, was Killer. 

Yet… not quite.

“Are you alright?” You started, taking a very small step inside. He had removed his shirt - or never put it back on - and had ripped the bloody bandages he must have used to wrap his wound, as they were scattered on the floor, all around him. 

But what startled you the most, was the fact that he had removed his mask. You had never seen him without his mask on. Though his face was still obscured by his long, blonde bangs, you could make out the smeared purple lipstick on his lips and - gods, this made your heart jump into your throat - his tear-stained cheeks.

That set your fears to the back of your mind and your determination took the spotlight as you took two big strides towards him, hands outstretched and eyes wide open. “I’m here, Kill. Whatever you need, I’ll help. Need me to go get Doc? Kid? What do you need? Speak to me.”

You urged as you knelt in front of him. 

A ragged cry left his lips as he wrapped his arms around his torso. He seemed to be in pain, yet you were confused, wasn’t it his shoulder that got hurt? Why was he clutching his body?

“My wound!” His desperation cut like knives through your heart. “It’s almost healed!” He moved his shoulder towards you and you gasped. You weren’t quite sure what he meant by ‘almost healed’, because the whole thing seemed pretty inflamed to you. 

He had an assortment of red gashes, the middle ones more pronounced than the others, and the flesh seemed torn. As if something had bitten and just ripped it apart, leaving tendons and muscles exposed. It was a wound that required stitches! Yet, upon closer inspection, you realised he was right. The smaller gashes seemed to have scabbed over, and the bruises around them were already turning a greenish-yellow, instead of being at their most inflamed. 

From a wound made a few hours ago, that seemed impossible! In addition to that, the veins in his arm seemed to be protruding and were dark and purple, almost visibly pulsating . 

“Okay, okay, I can see that. Let’s get you to the infirmary and see what the Doc can do to help you, alright?” You said calmly, your hands reaching towards him, but he whined again as he shrank deeper beneath the shelf.

“No, no, no. I don’t feel like myself! I don’t want to hurt you!” He grunted as his hands clawed against his chest, leaving angry red marks across it and you managed to glimpse his fingernails. They looked sharp - almost claw like - and blackened. “It hurts! On the inside! It’s like I’m being ripped apart! Fuuuuck!” His animalistic, primal roar made you take a step back.

Whatever the fuck had bitten Killer was not a normal beast.

“You won’t hurt me, trust me.” Extending your hand to him, you prayed that Doc knew some mythical way to heal him, because from what you were seeing, you had already come to a conclusion about what was happening.

And you didn’t want to be right about it. 

Though you were rarely wrong.

“Get the fuck away! I can't hurt you! Not you! I-...” Except he didn’t finish his thought because in the next moment, Killer let out an ear-piercing, mind-shattering scream that bristled all the hairs on your body, trapping your next breath in your throat. 

A quiet, eerie silence surrounded you as Killer crouched, his breath coming out in ragged pants as he got on all fours. You could barely describe what you were seeing to anyone who dared ask. His back was twitching, expanding, growing bigger and bulgier. His blonde mane fused to his back creating what seemed like a coat of fur that spread to his body. His arms and legs twisted and turned into unnatural shapes as bones cracked and elongated. 

You could scarcely believe your eyes as you realised that, where once there were hands and feet, now stood paw-like extremities, complete with sharpened nails - resembling lethal claws - perfect instruments to hunt prey and run through thick forests. 

Your initial thought was right.

He was transforming into some kind of creature, a werewolf would be your first guess.

Killer’s scream died out in a decrescendo as his ragged pants dissolved into a heavy, guttural breathing. As he crawled out from under the shelf, his hands - paws? - clicked against the wooden floor in slow, deliberate motions, you glimpsed his eyes peering at you from behind his fur-like bangs. 

The blue had turned into a sickly yellow, his pupils enlarged and black as the darkest night. His face seemed to have elongated somewhat, though he still had some humanity left in him. However, what terrified you the most was his smile. A feral-like grin that showcased large, sharp canines. 

He didn’t seem like the Killer you knew at all. 

“Kill?” You tried hesitantly. You didn’t know much about werewolves, as you thought them to be mere lore and myth. Yet, here you were. Face to face with one. The man you loved, to be more precise. “Are you still there?”

A deep growl was your answer. 

If he wasn’t completely gone, he was teetering on the edge. “Stay with me, Kill. We’ll find you a cure.” As with any animal, you were sure that if you showed fear, he would attack you. So you needed to remain in control. Cool and collected. 

Which was easier said than done. 

“Come on, Kill. I’ll help. Come out of it.” A sure step forward elicited a small, gentle yelp from him as he shook his furry head. Though, just as his eyes turned more blue than yellow, and his body lost tension, the door to the galley burst open and boisterous crew members came inside laughing and jeering, asking for pasta, startling Killer into a frenzy.

He growled and snarled as he lowered his head in position to strike. “No, Kill. It’s okay, it’s just our crewmembers, it’s alright.” You tried to remain calm, but the way his paws retracted, his claws leaving deep scratch marks against the wood, was making you tremble.

It took just one surprised scream.

And Killer leaped over you. His hind legs hitting your head with such brutal force that they knocked the breath right out of your lungs. And just like that he was gone.

-*-

“What the fuck do ya mean Killer’s gone?” Kid’s snarl was visceral.

You gulped as you pressed the ice pack against your temple, which was still throbbing. The crew members who had seen Killer rush out of the galley were gathered around Kid, relaying all the information they could to your flabbergasted captain. 

You were being seen by Doc a few paces away. 

“He turned into a werewolf, Captain.” You groaned, nausea hitting you as you bent, placing your head between your knees to stop the world from spinning and keep bile from rising up from your stomach again. 

“Lad, ya’ve said that three times. I can’t hear it one more time. The fuck do ya mean by that? Doc, are werewolves real?”

“Yes!” You hissed as you swallowed hard, a bitter taste in your mouth from the earlier vomiting you’d done. 

“There’s some records, Cap,” Doc began. “But not specific, concrete evidence of it.”

“What fucking concrete evidence? We’ve all seen it!” You stated, getting upright with a swift motion and grasping the table until your knuckles turned white as your vision blurred. “He turned right in front of me! He jumped over me! They all saw it!”

Kid looked at you in disbelief. Your tale was so wild he had no idea what to believe. 

“Even so, what are we all waiting for? He ran onto an unknown island and he’s all alone! Let’s go after him before he hurts himself or anyone else!” Anger kept rising within you every minute Kill was away from you. But the fear… the fear was overwhelming. It clutched your chest in its grasp, snaking cold tendrils to your stomach and bowels, twisting and turning, making you feel helpless and agonised. 

“He's a grown ass-man.” Kid said gruffly, though the strain in his voice betrayed the worry he was feeling. 

Silence surrounded the crew as Kid's scowl became more pronounced. After a moment he got up, determination setting his pace. “Fine. Four search parties, no fewer than three men on each. Careful if he's really turned into… something else. Avoid hurting him.” The Kid pirates exclaimed ‘Aye Captain!’ in unison as they started to disband. 

You got up on wobbly legs, discarding the pack of ice and taking a deep steadying breath. “Where the fuck ya think ya going? Ya stay behind.” Kid snarled at you. 

“I'm the best hunter on this fucking ship. I can track a snow leopard in the middle of a fucking snowstorm. That's how good I am.” Rage seethed through your pores, urgency filled your veins, and desperation gripped your heart. 

“Yer compromised, lad.” Kid stated gravely. 

“You mean my wound? I won't let it slow me down. I can-...”

“Ain’t yer wound. Everyone with two eyes and ears can see ya care about Killer. Care, care.” He grunted with a smirk and you were left speechless. But Kid continued. “What if the unthinkable needs to be done? Can ya do it?”

The unthinkable? Was he talking about… hurting him, or killing him? Would it come to that? Would Killer want that? There had to be a cure somewhere. Lycanthropy had to have been around for ages. Someone must've found something out, at least how to snuff out the symptoms. Still… Kid’s question was a pertinent one. Could you do it? 

“Can you?” Defiance laced your voice and Kid’s snarky laugh reached your ears. 

“Valid point, lad. Yer still staying. Captain's orders.”

Fuck.

-*-

The search parties kept returning, each more dismayed than the last. And your heart kept wanting to flee from your chest. What had happened? Was he safe? Kid still hadn't returned so there was still some semblance of hope. Kid would never give up on his first mate - his friend - like that. 

But you could no longer sit still. 

You had been restless and preoccupied. Fortunately the worst of the nausea had gone away and your strength had returned, though your head was still throbbing like a son of a bitch. 

So you decided to mutiny. And you knew you would be punished - severely, even - yet you could not help it, for how could you stay still when part of your heart was out there? Alone, scared, maybe even hurt? 

Gathering your weapons, you stealthily left the ship, eluding some stationed crewmates guarding the deck, and immediately started to look for tracks. You tried to identify some wolf markings, yet, with all the search parties that had left the ship earlier, the tracks were all muddled together. 

Clicking your tongue, you cursed your hot-headed captain. If you had gone out earlier, you would have tracked him faster. 

Instead, it took the better part of an hour just to - finally - be on the right track. The full moon was shining brightly in the sky, casting its glowing light against the tops of the dense trees. The hoots of the owls lent a semblance of sobriety to your hunt and the approaching howls of wolves told you that you were near. 

The only other thing you could hear was the disjointed beat of your heart thrumming in your eardrums. 

After a few moments you tensed. The thick mist had come out of nowhere and surrounded you completely, the forest had suddenly turned eerily still and you could vaguely make out distant shapes of yellowish orbs staring right at you. 

You counted eight different pairs of eyes. 

You were surrounded. And, most likely, very dead in the next few seconds. Gripping the handles of your weapons and gritting your teeth, you vowed not to go down without a fight. 

At least there would be no punishment awaiting you back on the Victoria. 

However, before the wolves launched an attack, you heard pained and muffled grunts in the short distance. Your heart jumped to your mouth as your eyes widened. You could identify your counterpart in the middle of a crowd, blindfolded and with your ears covered. 

Killer. 

You made a move to rush forward but all the wolves growled at you, turning your legs to jelly and halting your movements. After a few moments, Killer - your Killer, not the thing he transformed into - came into view. He looked dishevelled, tired and still in pain.

Grunting your name, he fell to his knees, clutching his head between his hands. “Kill!” You urged, surging forward and kneeling near him. “You're fine! You're all right!” Were you assuring him, or yourself? 

A groan escaped his lips as his face contorted. It almost seemed as if he was using all his strength to stop from turning. “I'm not fine!” He hissed between his teeth, every word coming out of his mouth strained and hoarse. “And you shouldn't be here.”

“I came to get you, Kill. The Doc knows what's up. They're working on a cure now. You need to come back with me, come home.” 

His blond locks shook at the same time as his head. He had twigs, leaves and dirt on his once pristine golden mane and you longed to help him clean it. “They're calling me.” He uttered as he retreated from you. 

“Who's calling you?” You didn't push into his space, but you didn't fall back either. Your arm reached for him, just to assure him you were still there, as he had his eyes shut with tension and hurt. 

“Them!” 

The wolves surrounding you started to howl at the moon. Killer repeated the word ‘them’ incessantly, as if it were a litany, a sort of prayer to a God you were not privy to. Then, he started to howl at the moon with them and the sound that escaped his lips was feral and primal and terrifying. 

“They need me. They need a leader of the pack, an Alpha. They want me to be their Alpha. Without one, they’re mere prey for other packs.”

A surge of questions begging to be answered swallowed your brain, yet, what frightened you the most, was the very real possibility of him staying behind. 

“What do you mean, Kill?” Your voice was a mere whisper. You crawled forward, tentatively approaching his crouching form. He whimpered and groaned and your heart clenched some more. This was not your Killer. The Killer you knew and loved was strong and self-assured. You’d never seen him like this.

It was very disarming.

“I have to stay!” Your name came out of his lips in a low snarl. “They need me!” He repeated, and this time he looked up at you. One yellow eye seemed determined and set with fiery will; the other one carried a very soft blue and with it a frightened, disconsolate look. 

“You can't stay, Kill… What about your dream?”

His dismissive scoff was very uncharacteristic and it sent a cold shiver down your spine. “I don’t have any dreams…”

Lies. He had dreams. He had to have them, right?

“Even if I did, they don’t matter. They’re nowhere near as important as Kid’s.” He shook his head fiercely, grunting and snarling at the same time.

“Fine, then. What about Kid’s dream?” Once he was safe back on the Victoria, once he was resting in your embrace, or at least within your sight, you could speak calmly about his own dreams. What mattered now was bringing him back.

He stuttered, his mismatched eyes staring back at you, both very uncertain and wounded. “Like this I can only slow him down.” He sounded resigned. “At least they can use me like this. They need me!” He returned to the same line of thought. 

“Kill…” You approached again and he didn’t pull away, so you leaned your face closer to him, focusing on the blue eye, the one that held the soul of the man you loved deep within. “I need you. So, so much.”

As your words reached him, the yellow eye trembled and Killer shut both eyes, cursing and clenching his jaw. Was it working? You just wanted to bring him home. You could all think about the consequences and cures later. He was all that mattered - his safety.

“I go to bed thinking about you;” You placed a rough calloused hand against his tangled hair. “I dream about you;” Another one of your hands cupped his cheek, your thumb tracing his soft lips. God, he was beautiful. “I wake up thinking about you.” With a deep breath you pressed your forehead against his. He shivered, whined and stilled against your touch.

“I love you Kill. I need you. With me, near me! You can’t stay here. The… pack is not your family. The Kid Pirates are.” Could you reach him? Far away in the confines of his mind where he was running to?

When he opened his eyes, there was blue staring back at you. In both of them. There was a tenderness in his gaze, a softness that you didn’t know if it was always there or not, because you had never gazed at his eyes. 

At his beautiful eyes. 

Whispering your name softly, Kill leaned his head slightly, his breath tickling your lips, his warmth warming your heart. 

“I also-...” A deep growl interrupted his sentence. The wolves restarted their howling at the moon and Killer stepped back from you, his hands clutching his head again.

“No, no! Kill, come back! This is not you, we can do this together! Killer!” You pleaded, getting up and trying to reach him once more, but then you noticed - with horror and surprise - that he was, once again, transforming into the beast from before. 

Faster this time, and more complete. He resembled a fully grown wolf. But so much bigger and much more frightening. 

And the way he stared at you stole all the bravado you had left. This was definitely not your Killer. 

When he lunged and struck, you immediately lost consciousness.

-*-

By the time you woke up, you were aboard the Victoria. The ship swayed gently, lulled by the soft waves. Your bed was familiar to you, the briny air of the seawater and the roughness of the sheets waking you up to a throbbing headache.

You opened your eyes slowly, feeling bandages wrapping around your head, with moisture in some places indicating that whatever wound you had was still recent and slightly bleeding.

You winced and closed your eyes again, trying to regain your bearings. 

Until the events of the past night came rushing in, all of a sudden and all at once. Unrelenting, savage, and unbridled images and memories.

And your extremely painful loss.

“Killer!” You grunted as you got up. Everything was still spinning and you didn’t get too far, but someone must’ve been near you to relay the news of your state of consciousness, because after a few moments your captain was by your side. 

Kid donned a more pronounced scowl on his lips, the lines near his eyes deep and worried. He was angry.

Gulping, you realised you had disobeyed his order, last night. 

“Lad.” He barked as he took a seat and you leaned against the bunk bed. “Ya didn’t do as I told ya.”

“I’m sorry, I-...”

“Shut the fuck up, ya speak when I tell ya to.” 

Lowering your head, you nodded while clenching your teeth. “Yes, sir.”

“Ya didn’t do as I told ya, and ya could’ve died. Killer brought ya to Victoria.” You raised your head, already opening your mouth to ask about Killer, but Kid’s look told you that he would not be lenient if you interrupted him again, so you stood still, hanging on every word your captain uttered. “We’re sailing now. He stayed behind. Something about the pack needing him. Ya were right. He turned into a wolf-... werewolf-thing. But he managed to turn back after he hurt ya and came to find us.”

You slumped down on the ground, your knees hitting the hardwood floor as you felt air leaving your lungs in heavy, ragged breaths. 

“He hurt ya. Ya were bleeding so much he thought he killed ya, he was inconsolable. But it turned out ya were only out cold.” Kid sighed as he pressed his flesh index finger and thumb against his nose. “We are finding him a cure. I can guarantee ya that. Even if I have to visit every goddamned island in the world.” Kid clenched his metal fist and you could feel the slight tremble of all the metallic objects around you. “Until then, and until we come back, Killer said to tell ya that he also needs ya and that he’s always thinking about ya too.” When your lower lip trembled, Kid scoffed. “Sappy motherfuckers.”

The air was too thick to inhale. Your breaths were too shallow and the pain in your chest kept building up and up in unrelenting waves. He left you. He stayed behind. 

Yet you mattered to him. He cared about you.

But he was gone. And he was not himself.

“Lad, calm down. I’m upset about this situation too. I hated having to leave him behind.” Kid cursed as he slammed his hand on a desk near him, splinters of wood flying everywhere. “But this was his choice. He didn’t want to endanger anyone on the crew, nor did he want to leave those wolves behind.”

“He’s too good for a fucking pirate…” You muttered against your will, the scowl on your lips deepening as you felt the pricking of tears behind your eyes. 

Kid’s laugh was like a balm to your ears. Kid understood. And he was hurting just as much as you were. “He fucking is, that wanker.” Your captain sighed as he got up. “Once ya’ve rested from that nasty wound, ya have a month of bathroom cleaning duties to attend to, starting today. I’ll figure out the rest of yer punishment as I go.”

You nodded. It was less than you deserved, really. 

But the ache in your chest was terrible and you just wanted to let your sorrow out. Killer was gone from the Victoria and you could barely conceive of a normal life without him by your side. How could you wake up to a cold Killer-less galley? How could you go to sleep without telling him goodnight? 

How were you supposed to live? Period.

“He’s strong. He’ll be fine. And we’ll fix him.” Kid assured you as he got up and placed a hand on your shoulder. However, before he left, you stopped him with your words.

“He told me he didn’t have dreams, that your dream was the only one that mattered, and that he’d only slow you down like this.” You sighed, biting back a sob. “If he realises you’re giving up your dream to find him a cure, he’ll never forgive himself.” You were as sure of this as the sun rising every day.

Kid stood in silence for a moment, his jaw moving as he clenched and unclenched it, tension filling the room. “That fucking arse.” Another scoff. “When we find him a cure and he comes back, I’ll let him know that my dream ain’t worth shit without him by my side. And ya, lad, can show him he’s yer dream. Maybe that’ll keep him focused on himself more.”

Kid was not a man of tender, gentle words. So this soft speech about the man you loved left you speechless. Without another word he left the quarters, leaving you to your misery, probably chasing his own at the bottom of a rum bottle. 

He was right, though. Killer was tough. As tough as they come. And this had been his choice, though it stung a little to know he had chosen to stand by a pack he wasn’t familiar with instead of being with you.

Even if he thought that he was doing it to protect all of you.

Lying back down on the bed you let the beginning of your tears mar your dirt and blood-stricken face. Kid was also right about something else. Killer was your dream. A dream you didn’t think you could fulfil, until he told you otherwise. 

So you would be relentless. You would cross every single island off the map, visit every goddamned civilization there ever was (in the mountains, in the woods, underwater or in the sky) and you would buy, steal, beg and kill, if you had to.

Just to find him a cure.

Just to get your dream back.

That was a vow you didn’t intend to break.

[ak-vintage]

Quarry - Chapter 3

Pairing: Din Djarin (The Mandalorian) x f!reader

Summary: Din Djarin is on what he expects to be his last bounty hunt for Greef Karga. After all, Nevarro is swiftly moving away from its previous reputation as a Guild member’s paradise, and Din has more important concerns now, like finding a Jedi to train his mysterious foundling. However, after capturing a wanted starship engineer who would rather go anywhere other than “home,” the Mandalorian is forced to reassess his priorities.

Your taste of freedom had been brief but glorious. Now you are a prisoner of the most infamous bounty hunter in the Outer Rim – it’s only a matter of time before he turns you in. There isn’t much you would not do to keep from being sent home, but as you find yourself growing closer to your captor and his strange little companion, you start to wonder whether escape is really what you want.

Set after Chapter 13: The Jedi but before Chapter 14: The Tragedy.

Chapter Tags & Warnings: Reader is Mando's bounty, second-person POV, no use of Y/N, minimal descriptors of reader character, starship mechanics

Series Masterlist | Read on AO3

As Mando vanished from sight, the brash, curly-headed engineer he had left you with sighed heavily and grinned down at Grogu, cradled contentedly in her arms.

“All right, kiddo – what do you say we have a little something to eat, and then we get started on those repairs, eh?” Peli said, tapping him softly on the nose. Grogu squealed and wiggled his ears in agreement, and you couldn’t help but smile a bit at that. You admittedly hadn’t known him for very long, but you were beginning to understand that nothing inspired as much enthusiasm in the kid as the suggestion of food.

“How about you, missy? You hungry?” she added, this time directed at you.

What a question. Were you hungry, you wondered? At this point, you had fully lost track of how long you had been with Mando, how many hours – or days – it had been since you had last eaten. Or drank anything. Or relieved yourself. Or done anything even remotely close to caring for yourself.

In that moment, with that single question, if felt as though all your neglected needs came crashing into your body at the same time. Hunger yawned, wide and all-consuming, in your gut, leaving you feeling a bit faint. Your throat was drier than Tatooine’s characteristic desert air. And you found that you might end up making a fool of yourself if you didn’t find a refresher soon.

“Actually,” you said tentatively, “would it be all right if I used your ‘fresher? I was going to ask Mando before he took off, but – ”

“But he’s got that kriffing awful ship head all exposed out in the open, right?” Peli finished knowingly.

You nodded. “Yeah. Not used to having passengers, I guess,” you replied as you tried not to bounce up and down on your toes waiting for her response.

The engineer laughed, loud and easy. “I guess that just goes to show that no matter where you are in the galaxy, a bachelor is a bachelor!” You offered a small chuckle in response – she was right, of course, but you had more pressing matters to deal with than commiserating about the galaxy’s men. “Have at it, honey,” she said finally, waving you deeper into the hangar. “Inside the office, all the way in the back. You’ll see it. But – make it quick!” she added, pointing a finger at you that clearly communicated that she would be coming after you if you were gone for a suspicious amount of time.

“Sure, of course, thank you,” you reassured her hurriedly, and before the chatty woman could say anything more, you darted toward the enclosed office space.

Luckily for you, the office was small, and your new babysitter had been right – the ‘fresher was mercifully easy to find. You accomplished what you needed to accomplish with little fuss after that, thank the Maker, and you were even able to take a few moments to freshen up at the sink. The water was surprisingly cool on your face and neck as you washed away the dirt and sweat from the last few days, and your long, disheveled hair greatly benefited from the rough finger comb you were able to give it before re-doing your braid. There wasn’t much you could do about your dusty boilersuit, but you at least managed to cuff your sleeves up to your elbows and unbutton a few buttons to help with the desert heat. By the time you re-entered the hangar, you were almost feeling like yourself again – apart from the gnawing hunger and biting thirst, of course.

You spotted Peli settled in the shady portion of the hangar on a small barrel that she had pulled up to a rickety, rusted card table, while Grogu sat beside her on his own stool. He was eagerly chugging some thick, viscous liquid you didn’t recognize from a steel mug, and he cooed happily when he saw you approaching.

“Come on, pull up a seat,” Peli said, gesturing at the various storage containers and crates scattered around the space. “It’s not much, but we’ve got some bantha jerky, a few lamtas, some ahrisa I picked up at the market yesterday… I already gave the kid all the blue milk I had, though, so you missed out on that.” She shrugged good-naturedly, and Grogu let out a gratified burp, his upper lip sporting a pale blue mustache from the liquid in his cup.

Your eyes landed on a plasteel crate a few feet away, and at an encouraging nod from Peli, you kicked it over to the card table and sat down. “Thank you,” you said softly, your stomach giving a powerful rumble at the sight of the modest lunch. You weren’t exactly familiar with anything you were looking at, but you knew meat, fruit, and baked goods when you saw them, and you would take any of these things over the mealy ration bar in your pocket that even Grogu had rejected. You would save that for when you were back in deep space, when you didn’t have the luxury of food that wasn’t synthesized in a lab somewhere and optimized for its caloric and nutritional density.

The three of you ate in relative quiet for a few minutes, the only sound the child’s munching as he moved on from his blue milk to the bantha jerky. For your part, you found that while lamtas were a bit too sour for your taste, the baked balls of ahrisa packed a pleasant spice that was somehow refreshing even in the arid heat.

“So,” Peli began through a mouthful of food, breaking the silence. “What are you in for?”

You felt your eyebrows raise, immediately back on the defensive regardless of her casual tone. “I’m sorry?”

“Mando called you ‘part of the job.’ Said I’m not allowed to let you wander off. So you gotta be a bounty, right?” she explained, gesturing at you with a piece of jerky. “What’s he turning you in for? Assume you’re wanted for…something?”

You swallowed the remaining bite of ahrisa in your mouth, and it settled like lead in your stomach. “I…I ran away,” you said eventually. You hoped she would leave it at that.

“What, like from home? From prison?”

Yes. Both, you thought instantly. “Why do you ask?” you demanded instead, a touch of annoyance making its way into your voice.

“Usually, it’s just me and the little guy when Mando comes into town. He’s never left anyone else with me before,” Peli answered bluntly. “Look, I’m just trying to figure out if I need to keep a blaster on you the whole time you’re here, or if maybe I’m actually going to get to crawl up in that ship and get my hands on that carbonite unit instead of letting my droids have all the fun.”

This startled a laugh out of you. The two of you may not have gotten off on a particularly good foot, but you found yourself enjoying Peli’s honesty, her unpretentious way of communicating. And you supposed you could appreciate that this probably wasn’t the type of job she got every day.

“Got it,” you said, nodding. “You need to know if I’m dangerous.”

“Exactly!” the engineer cried. Her voice was loud, her gestures broad and uninhibited. “It’s a fair question since you’re gonna be hanging out here for a few days. I can take care of myself, of course, but I gotta know what I’m getting into. You understand.”

“I could lie to you. I could tell you I’m not dangerous when really, I’m a wanted murderer or maybe a spice smuggler. How will you know if I’m telling you the truth?”

Peli laughed sharply at that. “You think I’ve lasted this long in a place like Mos Eisley without picking up a thing or two? And I’m a hell of a judge of character. I could tell if you were lying, easy.”

A wry smile tugged at the corner of your mouth. You imagined she was telling the truth. For a moment, you contemplated how much of your story you wanted to share with her. If all she needed was the reassurance that you weren’t going to hit her over the head with a hydrospanner when she wasn’t looking, you reckoned you could give that to her.

“Would it be enough for me to tell you that I’m not…violent?” you asked, genuine. “What I’m wanted for…I didn’t hurt anybody. I’m not going to hurt you. Or the kid.”

This much you could be honest with her about. You had never had a taste for violence, for bloodshed. Your only crime was fleeing a place that had inflicted more pain on you and your family than you could measure. You weren’t about to hurt someone else.

Peli studied you for a beat or two, then nodded slowly, seemingly reassured by whatever she found on your face. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I can work with that,” she said. With a heavy sigh, she slapped her knees, dusted her hands, and stood. “Well, day’s not getting any younger! Better get to work!” She brought her thumb and index finger to her lips and whistled shrilly. “Pit droids! Get up in the cargo hold! Start disassembling the Razor Crest’s carbonite unit!”

The pit droids, who had been puttering aimlessly around the hangar, quickly jumped and scattered, beeping and whirring as they loaded several tool bags up the gangplank and into the hold of the ship.

“Feel free to pop a squat wherever you like,” she added to you. “Maybe just stay where I could see you easy, eh?”

You offered her a small, tight smile in response. “Sure. No problem.” Nodding at Grogu, who was currently waving a halved lamta around and giggling, you asked, “What do you want to do with him? Is he okay on his own?”

“Oh yeah, he’s fine,” Peli replied with a wave of her hand. “Usually, he just sits and watches me work. He gets into stuff on occasion, but this place isn’t exactly baby-proof, so what can you expect?” She shrugged. “If he gets up to too much mischief, holler for me, and I’ll have BD-72 follow him around.”

You nodded, and with a quick pat on the head for the child, the woman disappeared into the ship, and two of you were left in the dusty hangar.

___

For a while, you found it pleasant enough to simply sit in relative quiet with Grogu, enjoying the satisfaction of a full belly and quenched thirst after so many hours without. The ambient heat of Tatooine’s atmosphere would take some getting used to, but shaded as you were under the sandstone overhang, you found it manageable. In the distance, you could hear the sparking of a fusion cutter and the banging of metal on metal, as well as the occasional squeal from a put-upon droid. On the whole, there were certainly worse ways to spend the afternoon.

Of course, that didn’t stop the open door into the hangar complex from calling your name. It would be so easy, you knew. Peli was occupied and would be for hours yet. There were no droids you could see who might sound the alarm if you slipped out the door. And Grogu? Well, he was only a child – and an exceptionally small one, at that. What could he do to stop you if you really had a mind to leave?

As though he could sense the direction your thoughts had taken, the boy cooed at you, and you glanced over at him with a small smile. He had what appeared to be the last piece of bantha jerky gripped in his tiny, green hand, and with a wiggle of his oversized ears, he offered it to you.

The air left your lungs, and everything inside you melted at the gesture. You had always had a soft spot for children, ever since you were barely out of childhood yourself. But this one… Somehow, in a matter of hours and a handful of interactions, this one had wormed his way under your skin and buried himself in your chest, dangerously close to your heart. You wondered if perhaps it had been the same for Mando – if Grogu’s purity and innocence had inspired the same affection, the same devotion in the bounty hunter as he was beginning to in you.

Gently, you reached out and accepted the offered morsel of food, bringing it to your mouth. Grogu grinned toothily, and his answering laugh echoed off the walls of the hangar.

Perhaps you would try to escape tomorrow.

___

You jumped into action after that, needing something to occupy your hands and needing even more to distract your mind from the fact that you were willingly choosing to not run away. First, you collected the leftover food from lunch and put it away in the cooler locker Peli kept in her office. Then, the dishes, which made their way to a utility sink near the back of the hangar. Finally, mindful of the engineer’s instructions to stay where she could see you if she were to poke her head out, you found a large basket of worn, heavily stained work rags sitting on an equipment rack, brought them back to your seat on the durasteel crate, and got to work folding them.

When the basket was full to the brim with neatly folded rags, organized by size, color, and approximate level of wear, you were tempted to tackle the equipment rack itself, but you knew from experience how particular starship engineers could be about their tools. What looked to you like a disorganized jumble not unlike a shelf in a pawnshop could have been how Peli preferred to store her tools. You supposed it wasn’t your place to judge. You resolved to try to find things to do that didn’t have anything to do with her equipment.

For his part, Grogu proved Peli’s prediction to be correct. He appeared quite content watching you wander around as you tried to entertain yourself, though occasionally he would drift off to follow an insect or prod a little clawed finger at a derelict piece of equipment. The soft wonder with which he seemed to view the world made your heart clench, and you found yourself trailing after him as he toddled from one end of the hangar to the other, not out of concern for his safety, but just for the simple joy of watching him explore.

Time passed quickly then, and it wasn’t until you heard shouting coming from the ship’s cargo hold that you realized that the twin suns were sinking behind the high sandstone walls, casting shadows into the hangar bay.

“Oh, for kriff’s sake…” you heard Peli curse, emphatic and frustrated.

A minute passed, and then, “Fragging bantha crap!”

A handful of seconds, along with some straining sounds and the echo of a heavy piece of metal. “Damn it! Hey, missy! Come give me a hand here!”

Your brow raised in surprise, and you made eye contact with Grogu, who had been tracking a lizard across the ground with an eager gaze.

“I don’t have all day!” Peli bellowed.

You both startled at the urgency in her voice, and without another thought, you reached down and scooped Grogu from his perch. “C’mon, kiddo,” you said, propping him against your hip. He babbled softly at you as you carried him across the hangar and toward Peli’s voice, into the open belly of Mando’s ship.

The cargo hold was a disaster zone. Wires and tubes hung from the ceiling and sprouted from the walls like vines in an overgrown jungle, a seemingly endless array of tools lay scattered across the deck, and the padded back panel of the carbonite unit lay in pieces around the prone form of the engineer, who was currently laying on her back with her head and arms tucked into a gaping hole in the exposed bulkhead. Her three loyal pit droids hovered anxiously around her, one of them holding a mechanic’s light steady above its rusted head while the other two held various pieces of the ship aloft, as though they had been in the middle of a task and had paused partway through.

“Stars,” you muttered to yourself, taking in the sheer mechanical carnage before you. “What kind of bomb went off in here?”

“Funny,” came Peli’s deadpan reply from inside the wall.

You quickly smothered an amused grin. “You okay?” you asked. “What do you need?”

“Ideally?” she replied, wiggling her arms out from where she had been working and dropping a fusion cutter to the ground with a thunk. “Like six extra hands? Maybe a vibrohammer? Might be more effective than what I’ve got going on here.”

With a weary groan, she used her gloved palms to push against the walls surrounding her workspace and slid the rest of her body out of the hole. Her curly hair was even more wild than usual, fluffed up in some places and matted down with sweat in others, and dust and engine oil streaked across her pale face, darkening her safety goggles.

“I need to get back in there another layer. The carbonite unit is more than just these panels, goes deeper than I thought,” she said as she rose to her feet, kicking the toe of her boot against one of the padded panels on the floor. “I reckoned maybe I could just reach on through, but I can’t move my kriffing arms in there, it’s too tight. Help me get this bulkhead off its bolts, will you?”

You nodded. “Sure – let me put the kid down.”

You did a quick scan of the cargo hold, looking for anywhere you could reasonably sit Grogu that wouldn’t result in him getting crushed by falling starship parts or electrocuted by hanging wires. After a moment, your eyes landed on the bare, militaristic bunk tucked into the back corner. Above it, in the little steel-walled alcove, hung a hammock that you knew immediately was the ideal size for your tiny friend. That must have been where Grogu slept when he was traveling with Mando, hanging directly above his caregiver’s bed.

Picking your way through the detritus, you gently tucked the child into the hammock. “Stay here, okay? It’s not safe for you down on the floor,” you told him. With a little scratch behind one of his ears, you made your way back to where Peli was waiting.

“Got a spare hydrospanner?” you asked, and she nodded, tossing one in your direction.

“You take the left side; I’ll take the right.”

Peli had been right about needing another pair of hands for this task. The durasteel bulkhead that she had exposed by removing the outer layer of the carbonite unit was massive – taller than the both of you by several feet, wide enough to accommodate the frame of most humanoid species, and completely solid. Even with each of you loosening your own set of bolts, it took several minutes for you to be able to release it from the ship’s frame.

After the last bolt dropped from the bulkhead and into Peli’s waiting hand, you asked, “Are we pulling this out of here, then?”

She nodded, dragging the back of her wrist across her sweating forehead. “Yep. You wanna grab that side?”

Quickly, you pulled the sleeves of your boilersuit down from around your elbows, tucking the palms of your hands into your sleeves for a bit of protection as you grasped your side of the durasteel sheet. “Sure. On three?”

The engineer mirrored your stance as she braced her feet wide apart and took hold of the bulkhead on her side. “One, two three – ”

With a grunt, the two of you heaved the massive metal panel away from the ship’s frame and slid it off to the side. It took a bit of panting, strained debate to decide where you wanted to settle it, but eventually you elected to lean it precariously against a part of the wall that hadn’t yet been disassembled.

“Damn, girlie. Stronger than you look,” Peli said breathlessly as she pulled back her goggles. They left an outline of conspicuously fair skin around her eyes, the rest of her face grimy.

You offered her a somewhat puzzled smile and wiped the sweat from the back of your neck with your sleeve. “I think that’s a compliment?” you replied, also a bit winded.

The other woman chuckled. “Sure, it is.”

“So, what’s going on in here? Sounded like you were having a rough time, and not just with the bulkhead,” you observed, leaning back against Mando’s pile of shipping containers to catch your breath.

Peli groaned heavily and sank to the floor. She folded her legs and accepted an offered canteen from one of her droids. “Well. First of all, these mobile carbonite units…the original tech is complicated enough. You take all those mechanicals and condense them into a fraction of the space, when they were originally designed for mining transportation, it’s almost impossible to tell up from down. Everything looks the same.” She took a deep pull from the canteen, screwed the cap back on, and tossed it over to you to share. “And to get to anything to repair it, you basically have to take the whole damn thing apart… Then, of course, you take into account that this one is integrated into pre-Empire hardware, and you’re just asking for trouble.”

You nodded along and took a heavy drink from the canteen, encouraging her to continue.

“Everything about this is…temperamental. By all accounts, this thing shouldn’t work in the Razor Crest. But it does. Or I guess…it did,” she winced with a shrug.

The engineer fell silent then, leaving each of you to contemplate the ship’s predicament on your own. You thought back to what Mando had said when he had asked Peli about the job. He had referred to the malfunction with the carbonite unit as a pressurization issue. That was consistent with what you had experienced when he tried to freeze you – how there had been a moment when ice-cold gases had shot out near your ankles, but there hadn’t been nearly enough, and the force with which the gases expressed had been noticeably weak.

You wondered…

You took the opportunity to briefly survey the disassembled parts cluttering the floor, the wires and tubes dangling uselessly from the ceiling and the walls. However, despite the amount of time Peli and her droids had spent tearing the ship apart in and around the tech in question, the specific parts you were looking for hadn’t been exposed yet. She would have to go deeper before you would know for sure.

Just as this occurred to you, Peli broke the tense silence. “Well, since you’re here, why don’t you make yourself useful?” she said as she hauled herself back onto her feet and tugged her goggles back down over her eyes. “Hand me that power prybar, will you?”

Another hour or two passed in this fashion – Peli working in quiet concentration, occasionally asking for you to pass her a tool or carry away a chunk of hardware, and frequently tossing scrap in the direction of her droids, who gamely caught each fragment and placed it off to the side for later use. Inch by inch, piece by piece, you watched as Peli disassembled the rest of the carbonite unit and surrounding mounting hardware, all the way back to the external hull of the ship.

It wasn’t until you could tell she was nearly finished that you found what you were looking for.

Tibanna gas hoses. These would run from tanks stored inside the ship’s bulkheads, to the canisters stacked along the frame of the carbonite unit’s main freezing chamber, and then out. You took a step forward, then another, your eyes narrowed as you examined the flexible tubing. It looped over and back on itself in a complex network, with many branching arms and connection points that clearly indicated that not only was this design retrofitted to function with the ship’s original systems, but it was also intended to support more than just the carbonite unit. Likely the hyperdrive or the weapons array, if you had to guess.

Angling an ear toward the exposed hose network, you closed your eyes and listened intently. You knew what the problem was now. You just needed confirmation…

After just a moment, it happened. Softly, distantly, almost imperceptibly, you could hear hissing.

A triumphant grin split your face before you could reign it in. It was a gas leak. You knew it.

You stepped back then, allowing Peli into the place where you had been standing to continue her work. You had no doubt that she would come to the same conclusion you had once she examined everything more closely. Despite her earlier proclamations that she had seen the inside of just about every variety of ship in the galaxy, it was becoming clear to you that she had never actually worked on carbonite technology before. But you couldn’t deny – the older woman was tenacious and whip smart. She would figure it out eventually.

As Peli bent to inspect the gas hoses herself, you watched as a frizzy curl at the crown of her forehead danced as though caught in a faint breeze. That was it, you knew. Right there was the leak – unable to be seen otherwise, but able to be felt, heard. Any moment now, she would shout her victory and begin her repairs in earnest.

Except…she didn’t. Peli didn’t notice the delicate whisper of tibanna across her forehead or hear its hiss in her ear. Instead, she reached for a plasma torch and brought it up near her face, as though ready to peel back more of the ship’s durasteel underpinnings.

You moved without thinking, shouted without breathing.

“Peli, no!”

You nearly tackled her to the deck in your haste, wrenching the plasma torch from her outstretched hands and flinging it as far away as you could manage. Distantly, you heard a raucous clang and a mechanical scream as it collided with one of the pit droids, knocking it to its mechanical knees, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care about that just then. Your heart was pounding heavily in your chest, your breath catching in your throat. You were sweating in a way that had nothing to do with the Mos Eisley heat. That had been…too close.

Peli, however, was livid. “Fragging hell, girl, are you trying to scare the shit out of me?! What is wrong with you?!”

Wordlessly, you took hold of one of her hands and brought it to hover just over the faulty hose.

As you watched, her eyes grew wide, her face grave. She waved her hand over the leak, feeling the cold air on the bits of her skin exposed by her fingerless gloves, and you knew she understood what she had just avoided.

“Well. I’ll be damned,” she said, her voice more serious than you had ever heard. “That’s a gas leak, isn’t it?”

You nodded once. “Tibanna gas. Highly combustible.”

Peli’s pale, sweaty throat worked as she swallowed thickly. “I just about blew up this whole ship.”

“Yeah.”

“How in the nine hells did you spot that? If I couldn’t feel it on my own hand, I wouldn’t know it was there!” she demanded, incredulous.

You worried your bottom lip between your teeth, suddenly a bit self-conscious. “I heard it first. Then I saw it blow your hair,” you admitted. “Not a lot, just a little. But…I was looking for a leak, so…maybe I wouldn’t have seen it if I weren’t really looking.” You shrugged.

“You were looking for a gas leak?” Peli’s eyebrows were almost to her hairline. You made an affirmative noise in response. “Why?”

You sighed and looked away. This was it, you supposed. “Because Mando said the issue was mainly with initial pressurization. And when he tried to freeze me, I noticed that the tibanna gas in particular wasn’t nearly as pressurized as it needed to be to maintain stasis inside the carbonite. I didn’t notice anything wrong with the inductors or the gas mix gauges when you were taking the unit apart – everything was calibrated to the proper settings. So I knew it had to be a leak. It was only a matter of time before you found it.”

The other woman folded her arms across her chest and leaned back against the nearest bulkhead, clearly processing your explanation as best as she could. “And what would you have done if I hadn’t had  a plasma torch out right by the leak?” she asked after a moment, and you wondered if perhaps she already knew the answer.

With a deep breath, you replied, “You would have figured out the problem on your own. You just needed more time. Without the plasma torch…I would have just let you get there.”

Peli cocked her head at that, her gaze shrewd and something like a smirk hovering at the corner of her mouth. “I just needed more time, huh?”

You nodded. “You’re clearly capable,” you added softly, hoping desperately that that didn’t sound as condescending to her ears as it did to yours. You meant the compliment sincerely – in the brief time that you had gotten to watch her work, you had observed her to be a skilled engineer, and you had known your fair share of those in your life.

“‘Capable,’” the older woman echoed with a scoff. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, missy?”

“I suppose so.” You couldn’t tell if she was impressed or annoyed.

“What do you make of the containment issue, then? A gas leak isn’t going to cause that. Do you have any theories there?”

Her tone seemed more sincere than it was mocking, so you indulged her. “I think it’s a problem with the power. Either the connectors are old and need replacing, or the ship – the Razor Crest, did you call it? It could be the Razor Crest’s hardware. Or…maybe the amount of power the engine is able to divert to the carbonite unit in comparison to the rest of the ship.” You paused for a moment, twirling the end of your braid around your finger as you mulled it over. “I’d have to take a look at it myself to be sure, but I’d be willing to bet if we can get a reading on how much power the unit is actually receiving, we’ll be able to tell.”

Peli blinked back at you in silence for a spell, and you felt your nerves start to get the better of you in the stillness. However, before you could begin babbling additional explanations or apologies, her face softened, and she began to laugh. “Well, call me a bantha’s uncle,” she said, good-natured and amused rather than frustrated. “When you mentioned that…hundred-hour certification course in carbonite tech earlier, that was you speaking from experience, wasn’t it?”

“Actually, it was 200 hours,” you replied shyly.

She smiled at that, nodding in understanding. “So what you’re telling me is I’m not the only starship engineer in this hangar right now. Am I right?”

You hesitated. “Technically, I was never an engineer. But…yes. That’s what I’m telling you.”

Peli appeared to consider your response, and after a moment of indecision on her face, she said, “You know, on Tatooine, we have this kind of…unspoken rule. Your past, before arriving on this planet, is no one’s business but yours. You’re certainly not the only one around here with secrets to keep. So I won’t ask you anything else.” You could feel your shoulders loosen at her words, not realizing how much tension you had been holding throughout this conversation. You could tell she understood – that there were some things you just couldn’t talk about, couldn’t explain to her just yet – and you deeply appreciated it.

“But, for what it’s worth,” she added, gesturing to the veritable explosion of ship parts surrounding both of you, “I think we both know that this is a big job. And I think we also both know that the carbonite unit isn’t the only Razor Crest system that could use a little attention. If you’re willing to help out, and I mean really help, like I know you’re capable of, we’ll get a lot more done before Mando gets back than if I did it all myself.”

“And that would mean that you could charge Mando more for the additional repairs. Right?” you asked, grinning at the audacity of her suggestion.

“Naturally,” Peli shrugged. “Girl’s gotta make a living. And Mando’s generous. I know him, he’s good for it.”

“You should open a parts warehouse. You’d make a decent saleswoman,” you countered.

She scoffed, immediately wise to your attempt to stall the conversation. “C’mon. It’s gotta be better than sitting around on your exhaust port for who knows how long until he gets back.”

You smiled wryly. “You’re not wrong there.” You thought of that basket of stained work rags out in the hangar, the almost neurotic way you had folded and organized every piece of fabric with a level of care completely inappropriate for the task just to have something to do with your hands. “I’m…not exactly used to idleness.”

“You and me both, sister!” Peli agreed heartily. “Now, I won’t take no for an answer. You’re absolutely wasted just lazing around here. Have one of the pit droids grab you some goggles and a pair of gloves. We’ve got work to do!”

And so, with very little opportunity to protest, and very little desire to argue, you and Peli fell into work alongside each other for the remainder of your stay.

[storiesbyrhi]

Witch!Reader x Bat/Vampire!Eddie Munson Series Masterlist The Grimoire The Timeline

Warnings: canon typical violence, horror genre typical violence/some infrequent gore, swearing, animal death, no beta, death in childbirth (mentioned, not described), abusive parents, suicide, spiders/bugs, grief/mourning; warnings updated each chapter.

Synopsis: No witch has stepped foot in Hawkins since 1845, but when Vecna opens the ground and poisons the town, a voice begins to call to you. Have you been brought back to this cursed place to heal the townspeople’s wounds, to save a hexed bat that always finds its way to you, or to redefine your history with a reunion 150 years in the making?

Chapter Summary: Magic for magic. 2552 words.

1986

Aeschylus, often considered the father of Greek tragedy, once said that, “He who learns must suffer.” In your experience, learning was a good and pure thing. Though, since coming to Hawkins, all you had learned only served to cause you pain. Aeschylus continued, “And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forgot falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

So, sleep you did.

Once the grieving teens had left the trailer, you were left alone with your thoughts. Eddie hadn’t come out of the bedroom, and you suspected he wouldn’t until he was invited to. You curled up on the couch, felt the warmth left in the wake of Steve Harrington’s ghost dissipate, and napped.

From the bedroom, Eddie listened to your breathing even out. He smiled at the small snores and sounds of your sleep; those, he remembered, he knew well. He remembered how you slept and how you woke. How you walked and talked. Thought and felt. He remembered falling in love with you then, and now. He’d stay in that bedroom for as long as you needed him to.

An hour later, you woke hungry and sad. Sleep, though, did as Aeschylus had said. It allowed what you had learned and all your pain to be distilled into a strange sort of wisdom. There was only one question that mattered in the moment. Did you want Eddie to tell the story of your history, or did you want to recover your memories first through magic?

With your plate piled with fruit and cheese, you made your way down the hall and into the bedroom. It was still equipped to block out the sun. Dark as dark could be.

“I’m turning the light on.”

Eddie was sitting on the floor next to the bed, on the opposite side to you. He’d picked up your copy of The Lord of the Rings and was making good progress. He stood up.

“Didn’t know vampires like to read,”

“I don’t know about the others. But I do. It slows time down. I can’t read any faster than a human can.”

He was different. He held himself different now that he knew who he was.

You sat cross-legged on the bed and began to eat.

“It was the blood from your lip,” he told. You still tasted how you did then, on the banks of the stream.

You nodded. “I figured. I didn’t think it would be that easy though,”

“I would not call any of this easy.” There was an innocence or naivety that came with having no memories, and it had often manifested in Eddie’s tone and speech pattern. It was gone now.

“Were we right? All our guesses about what happened?”

Eddie sat on the bed, his back to the wall and legs stretched out in front of him. He clasped his hands together and blinked slowly. When he looked at you, you were overwhelmed by the expression. You crumpled, lost under the weight of Eddie’s gaze.

“My love,” he murmured, reaching out to move your plate and pull you into his lap.

You curled your arms between your body and his, letting him hold you, enclosing you entirely. When you cried, it wasn’t just out of frustration at Eddie keeping the truth from you. It was a release of all the tension. It was grief for Steve and the teenage soldiers. It was anger on behalf of Hawkins, the decades it had spent suffering with the plagues unleashed by the lab. The horror of knowing your memories had been tinkered with by the people who were meant to protect you. The loneliness in that. And, the pain of betrayal.

The shame of being a bad witch and wrong on some deep subatomic level. The longing for love. The fear of everything to come.

Your emotions were making you feel claustrophobic. Paranoid. Disorientated.

“My little witch. My love…” Eddie struggled with what to say, for he knew that whatever picture you were painting in your mind, the truth was worse. Although he didn’t know what happened to you after he sunk to the bottom of the stream, transformed into the bat, it did not take much thought to finish your story. Sally, Gillian, and Penelope, stripping you of your memories.

Eddie held you tighter, let you sob until you ran dry. Dehydrated and with a pounding headache, you sat up with a blurry expression.

“My apple’s gone brown,” you pouted.

Eddie laughed, feeling himself come alive with love.

“You keep looking at me like that,” you said, rubbing your face with your hands.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m… a little mewling kitten… or… I don’t know…”

He knew what you meant. He was looking at you like he knew you and was devastatingly in love with you and could watch you pout about apples forever.

“Sorry,” Eddie replied.

You narrowed your eyes at him. “You’re not sorry,”

“No,” he agreed. “But I will try not to think of you as a mewling kitten. Would you prefer to be an ally cat or-” He was cut off when you threw a piece of brie at him. Eddie laughed again.

You shuffled around to sit cross-legged again. Breathing in deeply, you let it out and decided. “I don’t want you to tell me everything. I don’t want to feel like it’s all just… theory… You know? I’m real. I’m here. But I was there and that was real, and I need to feel it. I need to remember it for myself.”

Eddie nodded. “I understand,”

“Do you know anything specific about how the memories were taken? Like, the spell?”

“No. Just that… I believe they were taken against your will,”

“Yeah. They were. A witch would never give up a part of herself like that…”

It was a solemn conclusion, but the conversation had a glimmer of hope. You were a spell away from your memories, so close to that pain falling drop by drop into your heart until it turned to wisdom.

…

“You can send me away,” Eddie offered from where he sat on the kitchen bench, his legs swinging. “I won’t be offended,”

“Mmm. Because not offending you is at the top of my list of concerns right now.”

He held in a smirk. Even without your memories and with a new name, you were still his little witch.

“I was simply offering privacy,”

“I’d prefer if you’d offer to go and pick some chicory flowers. They’re the blue-”

“Blue flowers on long stems. I know. Not native to this area but grow where it is hot and dry.”

You blinked at him, taken aback by his knowledge of wildflowers.

He liked the surprised look on your face. “Shall I continue? The plant can be used for a variety of magic purposes. European folklore claims it can open locked doors. This belief has also been traced to Ancient Egypt. Chicory root can be used as an amplifier, while the rest of the plant has its uses in spells relating to time, curses, and invisibility.”

Eddie watched your lips part as you breathed out. The craft was your love language, and your blown pupils were evidence that he was fluent enough.  

“Forgive me for revealing this, but you used to teach me things. Not everything. Nothing that could be dangerous for a vampire to know. But when you did teach, I listened.” He slid from the bench and moved towards the door. “Chicory awaits.”

You stood for a moment, unsure how to disentangle all the emotions, waiting for one of them to dominate and guide your mood. Grief. It was always grief. And the knowledge that memories like teaching Eddie about the natural world had been taken from you was sharpening that grief into a blade.

Eddie had left just as the sun had set, returning within the hour. You had expected him to be back in the blink of an eye, but he’d moved slowly, giving you some time in private, regardless of what you’d said about needing it.

As he came to sit at the alter opposite you, he frowned. The bowl of syrupy black liquid looked evil. You ignored his expression and took the chicory from him.

“What are you to do with that?” he asked when you didn’t volunteer the information.

You quirked an eyebrow. “I’m to drink it.”

He nodded. “As I feared.”

Laughing at his intensity, you shook your head and began to weave a crown from the chicory. “This spell will put me to sleep. Not long. I don’t think,”

“You don’t think?!”

“Magic is not an exact science,”

“Yes, but still… Can you not find a way to be more sure?” He just got you back; he could not fathom losing you again.

“No. Now if you don’t mind-”

“What’s in it?” Eddie interrupted.

While you agreed the potion did not look safe, let alone appetising, it was the only way forward. You had consulted the grimoires and had done your best work. Maybe the coven would have a better spell, but you were on your own.

“Rosemary,” you answered.

“Black… sludge… rosemary?”

“Do you really want one of your special lessons right now?”

“I want you to remember the special lessons,”

“Okay, then stop-” You waved your hand around. “-all this and be quiet. Please.”

Eddie put his hands up in surrender and moved away from the altar. You looked from him back to the chicory crown you were making.

“In our memories,

Our magic is stored.

And of mine,

An act abhorred.

Petals blue.

Night new.

Remember me,

As I remember you.”

Shaking hands held the completed crown but you mustered as much bravery as possible and put it on your head. You took the potion bowl and held it to your lips.

“In our memories,

Our self is forged.

And of mine,

Let them be restored.

Rosemary green.

Witch blood clean.

What has come to pass,

Let it now be seen.”

The blackness tasted of nothing. It coated your mouth the nothingness. It pulled you into a void by the teeth and within seconds, you’d fallen into a magically induced sleep, Eddie moving to catch your head from hitting the floor. He placed a pillow in his lap, then rested your head on top. By what alchemy your memories were taken, Eddie didn’t know, but he hoped it had been as peaceful a process as this.

…

The apple almost sparkled as it flew through the air. You watched mesmerised by the red as it spun and hit its peak. It followed the laws of gravity down, down, and into the hands of a man.

“I do not agree to that.”

Your voice had changed since 1836. Small tweaks in accent and enunciation. Just enough to continue to blend in with an ever-changing society. You wondered if you still had that righteous tone.

“Then name your price.”

Eddie. Eddie, remarkable from the very first moment you met him.

From across the stream, you saw Eddie watching you. You looked so small, hunched by the water, cleansing crystals like it was of epic importance. He emerged from the darkness and spoke in a lowered voice. Then, milkweed silk and doe with soft fur and long lashes. Building a forest gate.

You witnessed it all as if you were a fly on the wall, a ghost in the memory.

“This comes with warning, Amabel. What you have done is beyond comprehension and reason. You are escaping due punishment. This is mercy at best. Nepotism at worst. The creature will be taken now and you will not see it again.”

The claustrophobia of Penelope’s hut made you ache and itch. It all played out before your eyes, a replication of 1836. It was agony. First, the horror of what happened. Then, having to bear witness. Finally, the recollection firing in your brain, all your emotions and muscles searing with re-traumatisation.

There was doubt written on Sally’s face that you could not see then but could now. She poured the potion into your mouth, believing that regardless of whether cursing the vampire was the right thing to do or not, taking your heartache away was as much mercy as a mother could show.

As your recovered memories aligned with what you remembered, you saw yourself sitting by Penelope’s fire, an emptiness opening up inside you. You would try to fill it with the bloody and sacred duty of protecting humans from vampires. You’d try to fill it with magic and music and everything the twentieth century had to offer. It never went away. It was a dark thing that hibernated until destiny saw Henry Creel. Saw the potential in a hexed creature sitting in the treetops of Hawkins. Saw the love in your heart sealed over by what you’d forgotten.

Destiny saw you, and you… you saw it all.

…

In the Catskills, the cold had claws. Gillian had pulled on her thickest pair of socks that morning, before brewing a fresh pot of tea. She could feel it coming, though she wasn’t quite ready to admit that she didn’t know what exactly ‘it’ was.

Sally emerged from her bedroom not long after her sister. She wore the same sad expression she had ever since you packed up and left for Hawkins. Gillian tracked her slow movements to the tea, and then the small round kitchen table they shared.

“I haven’t seen Kelsey around in a little while. Do you think she’s avoiding us?”

Sally sighed and looked at her sister with weary. “I would think after this many lifetimes, you would just state your business.”

Gillian smiled. It wasn’t just you and Kelsey who were changed in 1836. Sally never fully recovered from what had happened. She was more inclined to being blunt, and often it walked over the line into the realm of callousness. Gillian though, forgave her sister. She owed her at least that.

“Fine. She is avoiding us. She is the only one in contact with-”

“I know,” Sally interrupted on cue – she hated hearing your name out loud. “So?”

“So… They are up to something. Or, at least, one of them is… And we know which one.”

Sally considered her sister’s theory. She’d grown tired of her sister’s theories though. Really, she’d grown tired of a lot of things. When they left Hawkins, she wouldn’t bother with another lustrating ritual and didn’t argue when Gillian kept her own name too. Sally hardly got involved with the coven’s comings and goings. She simply set up her cabin in the mountains and let everyone buzz around her like happy little bees.

“Let them be up to something,” Sally finally said.

Gillian had known the reply would be worth waiting for. She smiled at her sister again and nodded.

They would go about their day as usual. They would tend to their garden and the patches of magical herbs and flowers they had planted all around the forest. They would brew potions and read books. Talk to bobcats and watch the sun set. They would go about their day as usual, but both sisters felt it coming.

The day of judgment was upon them.  

End Note: This one is for @chestylarouxx, who helped me find a home for the coven.

Aeschylus lived in fear of a prophecy that foretold his death would come at the hands of a falling object. He figured something heavy falling from a shelf or a roof caving in. So, he spent much time outdoors in the countryside. Legend goes, he died when an eagle mistook his bald head for a rock, and dropped a turtle on him from a great height. Can you fucking imagine if this is true? That the father of the Greek tragedy died like this? I hope it is.

As always, super keen to hear your thoughts and feelings!

Fic Taglist:  @paranoidmunson  @idkidknemore @paprikaquinn @stardustworlds @loz-brooke @wyverntatty @vintagehellfire @dark-academia-slut @scarletwitchwhore @becks1002 @mrsdollardog @heyndrix @luceneraium @rosaline-black @devilinthepalemoonlite @goldencherriess @iamwhisperingstars @wiltedwonderland @blueywrites @breezybeesposts @jadehowlettthewolf @spikesvamp79 @foreveranexpatsposts @tortoiseshellspells @wingedpeachjudgegiant @stardustmunson @live-love-be-unique @fangirling-4-ever @reanimated-alice @b-irock @gh0stlybunnie @myown-worstenemy-2003 @woozzz @cyberxlust @hiscrimsonangel @buckysbarne @m00nlight101 @word-wytch @spicysix @briasnow-blog @goth-cowgirl-03

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[zmediaoutlet]

Two hundred miles north of Bodega Bay, Sam taps his fingers on his thigh in a particular pattern. Dean pulls off the 101 at Eureka, driving easy. Trying to make it look that way at least. Familiar roads off the highway—gas, fast food. Motels, and he picks the third he sees, a long low building with a cracked and unfilled pool, and he looks sidelong at Sam across the seat and Sam nods and goes into the office to get whatever room can be got.

Idling in the dark. He clears his throat, feels like an idiot. Says out loud, anyway, "Hey, uh. You there? 'Cause, I know—I mean, I guess, ghosts don't sleep, right? But me and Sammy have gotta get some shuteye before we go all guns blazing, so. Hope you're good to—to hang out, and…"

And what? Read their Dick Roman research in the dark in the parking lot? The idiot feeling hasn't gone away and intensifies when there's no answer but silence. There's this other thing squeezing his guts, though, a shiver that he's trying not to acknowledge so it won't rattle all the way through and make his bones leap fully a foot to the left of his body—and he jumps when there's a knock on the window, but it's just Sam. He holds up his fingers, backlit by neon and the white light of the motel office—room seven—and sets off walking, so Dean's left to pull the car around, the radio off, silence ringing through the car like a struck gong, shattering.

Big truck parked directly in front of room seven. Dean picks a spot a few down and mutters loud enough to be heard, "Take your half out of the middle, huh?" Sam meets him at the trunk, spinning the keys into his palm, and they don't look at each other while they pick up their duffles of clothes, the weapon bag Dean usually packs, the supply bag Sam tends to haul when they need to haul it, with its load of iron, and silver, and salt. Sam goes over to open up the room and Dean heaves his bags up onto one shoulder and sees the flask wink parking lot light back up at him from where it's stuck by the box of IDs. He says, "Night," easy, like it's easy, and then he shuts the trunk and follows Sam into the room and flicks the lamp and closes the door firmly behind them with his heart in his throat, and Sam opens his mouth and Dean shakes his head and Sam looks at the closed door and then turns away, his shoulders high and stiff, and dumps his bags on the further bed, and unzips the supply bag and picks up the salt.

Heavy pour at the line of the doorway and under the gross pink polyester curtain. Dean wants to toss it up into the vent in the bathroom but that's probably overkill. "Van Ness house gave me the creeps, what can I say," he says, to Sam, loud enough maybe to be heard on the sidewalk outside.

Sam blows out air. "You think they're stuck to your shoe?"

Dean licks his lips, checks his pockets. No flask—no, he checked, it's in the trunk, and now with salt heavy between them and what should be the past, that panic scrapes again at his gut. Sam lifts the EMF meter out of his bag, where it's been turned on, and there's not a blip, and Dean feels like all the tendons in his legs have dissolved when he drops onto the free bed, and he says, "What are we—Sam, we—"

How long has it been? Sam shakes his head but Dean knows he's thinking the same thing. Since that godawful day in the hospital, since they burned the bones, the blood-stained hat, and they'd gone back to the abandoned shitty house they'd squatted in and stared in at its grey wreck with dry eyes and they'd—fucked, that night, miserable and not even enjoying it but doing something that was other than death, that stupid instinctive defiance against the night that they'd perfected over all these years of tragedy, and Dean had—he'd filled the flask, after, with the sweat barely cooling on his shoulders, and sipped whiskey and swallowed with a mouth that still tasted like his brother, and it was—unthinkable. After all those years of secrets. On top of everything, this couldn't—they couldn't have—

Sam's dragging his thumb back and forth over his other palm, slowly. Hair hanging over his face. "Ghosts—they don't show up right away, right?" he says. He clenches his hands together, weird and cramped-looking. "And then once they form, it's because they've got—a goal. One thing they're focused on."

"Revenge," Dean says, and Sam looks up at him, and nods. No panic on his face, at least. Even the vague sickness drained away. Dean watches Sam's hands, the clawing in his gut not—fixed, exactly, but not worse.

All these hard-fought years and he didn't—think about it. After all they'd gone through it was just part of the fabric of the world and he knew there was no changing it and he thinks, he's pretty sure at least, that Sam's in the same boat. They'd either keep sailing it or go down with the ship and that's just the way it was, and now—with everything they'd lost—there'd been this kind of… raw and horrible freedom. He hadn't thought about it that way until he'd looked up and seen the ghost and known, after the initial shock and the fear and the thinking-through what it meant, that the veil had been drawn back and not fully closed—had known that raw hot terror of what—being seen would mean. Hadn't felt that horror since his real father had died. And, now—

"Got me wishing for a real private foxhole," Dean says. Mostly evenly, he thinks.

Sam looks at the closed motel door behind Dean's back and takes a deep breath. "If we win here, we will win everywhere," he says, quiet, and it sounds like he's quoting something but Dean doesn't know what. But there's salt thick over every gap and a closed curtain and three parking spots between that flask and here, and so Dean leans forward and grabs Sam's clenched hands. Sam looks at him, surprised, but he lets Dean worm a thumb in between his palms and touch the scar.

"We're not crazy, at least," Dean says.

Sam snorts. "Yeah," he says, a little ironic but not as ironic as he could be. He grips Dean's wrist very tightly before he gets up, putting space between them, and shuts off the EMF reader.

[moonspirit]

Hey, info I am one of those people who get really sad headcannons so I have to ask who do u think will die first Armin or Annie? I think Annie at around 32 when their daughter is 4 leaving Armin to be a single dad

🙃 Oh man. I bet you enjoy severe pain hahaaha...

Frankly speaking, I have zero regular thoughts about either Armin or Annie dying, but for the sake of your headcanon, let's think.

If we have to say one of them dies, then it's going to be extremely tragic whether that's Armin or Annie. If it's Annie, leaving Armin behind as a single dad, then it will eat away at him every single day of his life; the fact that Annie barely 'lived' during the short time she was alive, and four years of that he put her in the crystal too. Building a family with Armin by having a baby girl--a girl who'd have such a different life to Annie's own-- would've been like a taste of heaven with the promise of a beautiful future. But as it turns out, Annie dies, barely having taken a long, free breath in a better world. Armin would grow older and so would his daughter, and one day he'll be left alone with the memories of a fleeting time that he spent with a woman who had the palest, clearest blue eyes and a heart of steel that loved him back.

If Armin dies, the tragedy takes on a slightly different colour. It would be sheer cruelty that he's stolen of life, because nobody could've loved life and living and the exploration of the unknown he like did. Armin hung his hopes on the possibility of a world that's still beautiful and exciting, so then to be denied it would be a pain of unbearable magnitude. He'd leave Annie behind then, to raise her daughter all alone, and perhaps there will always be those days that she'll spend missing his touch, his voice and his scent. She'll tell her daughter how her father was; the kindest and brightest man who managed to make even her icy heart melt, who wanted beyond anything in the world to take his wife and baby girl across the seas, but who was robbed of time and life, instead.

🙃... K guess I'll go cry now.

[lailyn]

Only When I Sleep (the full fic!)

TW: Gun violence, Idiots In Love

“Did either of you put poison in my food?”

“What? Of course not!” Tony cast Stephen a doubtful look. “I didn’t.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Stark,” Stephen growled. He turned his attention back to Loki. “More importantly, why do you think someone’s poisoned you?”

“It tastes a bit strange…”

Tony grabbed a clean fork from the cutlery drawer. Before Stephen could stop him, he scooped a mound of cauliflower rice and shovelled it into his mouth.

“Tony!” Stephen yelled.

Tony chewed thoughtfully. “Tastes fine to me.”

“Just give it a minute or two, it will come,” Loki said ominously.

“Are you crazy? Do you have a death wish or something?” Stephen berated.

“If it was really poisoned, there really isn’t any point in living anymore, is there?” Tony lamented. “A life without Loki is a tragedy too terrible to contemplate.”

“Tony, you idiot.” Loki’s eyes shone. “I love you.”

“What about me?” Stephen asked, almost fearfully. “Do you love me too?”

“Out of necessity, I suppose I must,” Loki sniffed. “You know CPR.”

________________

"I don't think Loki loves me very much."

"Don't be ridiculous," Tony said mildly. "Of course he does."

"He loves the things that I can do, sure," Stephen said glumly. "Like making the best eggs Benedict on this side of Manhattan. Or turning cheap wine into the best vintage. Or getting him authentic momo dumplings from Nepal - "

Tony sneaked an amused glance at his morose lover over his Starkpad. "I never realised that your achievements were all food-related."

"Can you be serious for once? I'm in the middle of a crisis here!" Stephen glowered. "And that cauliflower rice recipe had five stars on Good Eats!"

Tony sighed. "Look, Doc. Loki's not a big fan of our planet, as you very well know. The fact that he's staying here, with us? He must love you a little."

Stephen snorted. "That's not saying much."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, he's obviously staying for you," Stephen pointed out. "I'm…baggage."

"Baggage," Tony said flatly. He snapped his fingers. "Hey. Levi. Get over here."

The Cloak of Levitation wafted over from where it had been hovering by the windows for the past few hours people-watching.

Tony pointed at Stephen. "Can you knock some sense into your Master here for me?"

The Cloak gave Stephen a few sympathetic pats on the cheek, before returning to its station and favourite pastime.

"See?" Stephen cocked his head unhappily. "Even Levi agrees with me."

"Have you ever heard of 'opposites attract'? Loki's a closed book, and you…" Tony waved a hand, making vague gestures that alluded to something Stephen could only guess the meaning of. "You gotta open up! Tell him you love him in public! Shout it from the rooftop!"

Stephen blinked. "But we live on the hundredth and thirtieth floor. No one's gonna hear it."

Tony rolled his eyes. "That is not the point, you dumbass."

"Then what is your point?" Stephen asked, exasperated.

"Put aside your ego and show him some love! And I don't mean the tough kind."

"But I only know just the one kind," Stephen grumbled, blushing a little.

Tony stared. "You're hopeless."

"I knooow…" Stephen moaned, listlessly dropping his chin onto the table. "I'm screwed."

"Hmm, what to do, what to do…" Tony drummed his fingers on his desk. "I've got it. Remember that scene in The Sixth Sense? When the 'I See Dead People' kid told Bruce Willis how to get through to his wife?"

"What about it?"

"Say it when he's asleep," Tony said excitedly. "Tell him you love him, and to please love you back."

"But that's ridi - " Stephen paused. "Actually, that's kind of brilliant."

Tony gave a modest shrug. "Well, I am known for my genius."

Stephen snorted. "Thanks, Mr. M. Night Shyamalan."

_________________

"That was a stupid plan," Stephen growled as he emerged from their bedroom the next morning.

Get out of my head, a half-asleep Loki had hollered at the top of his lungs in the middle of the night, waking the entire household in the process. Stephen, being the closest to him in terms of physical distance, had received the brunt of Loki's wrath, which explained his brand-new shiner.

"Serves you right for being a creep," a fully-awake Loki glowered. "And you!" Tony cowered under the intensity of his glare, "Enable him further and we shall see how you fare."

With that parting warning, Loki stormed away, presumably to make himself a hangry sandwich before they were due to join the Avengers in battle in a few minutes, something Tony had neglected to mention to either of his husbands.

"So…planting subliminal messages is a no," Tony said sheepishly. "We should have thought about that, huh?"

Stephen heaved a sigh of despair, and hung his head. "I'm screwed."

____________

"We're screwed," Stephen announced an hour later; the enemy had utilised an impressive new weapon, a magic dampener that had basically rendered him powerless. "Hand-to-hand combat is not my forte!"

"Hang on," Tony grunted through the communicator. "I'm coming!"

Stephen frantically looked around for his other husband, and his blood ran cold.

A sniper on the roof had Loki in his sight, right in the line of fire, magicless and as helpless as a kitten.

And Stephen ran.

"Loki!" he shouted, "Look out!"

____________

Stephen awakened to a startling brightness and his whole body hurting with an unidentifiable pain. "Urgh."

"You fool."

Stephen saw the tears in Tony's eyes and his heart began to pound. "Tony?"

"You brave, crazy fool."

"What's wrong? Is Loki okay?" He asked anxiously. "Is that why you're crying? Did he get shot?"

"No, but you did. You pushed Loki out of the way, and got hit instead."

"What?" Then Stephen remembered the barrage of bullets hitting his chest. "How am I not dead?"

"You were bleeding to death on the damn battlefield, right in front of my eyes," Tony said, his voice stricken.

"Tony…" Stephen reached for Tony's hand. It was shaking terribly. "Tony, I'm alright."

"I nearly lost you. I nearly lost you both."

Stephen stilled. "Loki?"

"He's resting." Tony nodded at the other bed across the room. "He nearly drained every drop of magic but it worked. He got you back."

"Help me up," Stephen mumbled. "I need to tell him something."

"Can't this wait? He's still sleeping, and you should be sleeping too - "

"No. It has to be now."

With herculean effort, Stephen dragged himself to Loki's bed. He climbed in beside his slumbering husband.

One look at Loki's exhausted face and the memories came rushing back: the pain, the geyser of blood spurting from his torso -

Damn you, Stephen!

- the sensation of Loki's healing magic pouring into him, dousing the agony in his chest like ice water.

But most of all, he remembered Loki's desperate whispers, I love you. I love you. I love you.

"I love you too, Loki," Stephen whispered in Loki's ear, hugging him tight.

Loki sighed in his sleep. A tell-tale smile began to tug at the corners of his lips. His hands palmed the silk sheets as if looking for something.

"You too, Tony," Stephen ordered. "Get in here."

Grabbing one of Loki's flailing hands, Stephen watched as Tony clambered up onto the bed and grabbed the other.

As they cuddled each other,

"Should we just order in breakfast?"

"For the rest of our lives, yeah."

[ayoharuko]

Valentines with Him! Part 2: Xavier

Hello! Welcome to part 2 of Valentines with Him! This time make way for our not so innocent boi. Xavier!

If you haven't read part 1: Click this - Valentines with Zayne!

Reader here is Female! (She/Her)

I hope you guys enjoy your time with Xavier~!

Reminder: The character belongs to INFOLD/ its respective creators; this is all just fictional work so please try to not take these too seriously :)

“Are you sure you wanna make a min cake for Y/n?” A girl with brown hair asked as she nervously stares at the boy standing in front of her.

“Mhm…I wanna make something special for Y/n this once..” He said and Tara sighed….guess he was very much lovesick for her bestie; And so, the baking lesson had began..and ended in tragedy- ahem ahem I mean…it ended in an ambivalenttype of way.

It was 2 days before Valentines day, you and Xavier had taken a day off on that day and had made plans for it, but you've noticed a few things about Xavier these past few days.

“Tara and I were assigned to an assignment together…is that alright with you? He asked a few days prior and you had agreed it was fine since Tara was your friend and you actually just didn't mind…

However, when it started happening in the later days you couldn't help but grow suspicious of their relationship. I mean you trust your boyfriend and best friend but you couldn't help but grow a little jealous that he was spending more time with her than you. But when the day Valentines finally came you believed that you were finally going to get him all to yourself.

.Oh how wrong you were.

It has almost been an hour since you came to the arcade you both were supposed to meet up at, you were early yet when the actual time for the meet up strike you knew that Xavier is officially late to your date.

You pulled out your phone to text him and you sent a text asking where was he, which he replied with a 'I'm sorry…something came up, I'll be there in a few minutes.' He text back….

I bit my lip and I went to a nearby cafe to wait there instead so I can sit on a chair.

“Xavier! Tha-Thats not how the cakes supposed to look like!” Tara screamed through the phone as Xavier packed the min questionable yummy looking cake inside a small box.

“This will have to do, it might not look appetizing but I'm positive it tastes amazing.” He said quickly ending the call with Tara who was yelling at him to NOT give it to you…

He quickly put on the clothes he prepared beforehand and he ran to your location (using your shared location to find you) and when he got there he was surprised to see that you weren't at the front of the entrance of the arcade.

He pulled out his phone from his pocket and text you; asking where you were, to which you responded that you were already walking towards the entrance of the arcade. He looked up from his phone and saw you walking towards him dressed in beautiful clothing.

“Oh…were you waiting for a long time Y/n?” Xavier said putting his back in his pocket as he gripped the box tightly; “Why were you late…?” I asked in a low tone, looking down at my shoes.

He muttered for quite awhile but finally spoke and I didn't quite expect the words that came out of his mouth that made me look up at him in shock.

“I…baked a cake for you, but something went wrong so I called Tara to help me and she gave me a lot of instructions so it took awhile and I eventually lost track of time — I'm sorry….” He said bowing his head in shame; my heart fluttered and filled with guilt.

My heart fluttered because he went on his way to bake me a cake — even asking Tara for help; my heart filled with guilt because I suspected that he had some type of relationship or feelings for Tara. As a full minute passed filled with silence, I let out a chuckle and slowly intertwined my hand with his; slowly rubbing my thumb along his; I could have swore I saw bunny ears appear on his head as light (figuratively) radiated from him.

I smiled and took the box from him, “Uhm..should we go to a nearby park to sit on a bench and eat this first?” I asked smiling at him and he seemed more then pleased to do what I suggested.

After we got to the park and found a bench to sit on, he took out the cake from the box as well as two forks; when I took a gazed at the cake I mentally died instead.

“Ahh…it looks…” I tried to smile brightly at him as he looked at me with expectation; “It looks delicious! Thanks so much for working hard on this Xavier…although you really didn't have do” I said as he took a LARGE chunk of cake with the fork and slowly moved it to my mouth…

“its alright, I really wanted to surprise you; I'm confident in my baking skills” He said proudly smiling; right… 'baking skills'

I gulped and prayed to whatever God was up there to wish me luck. I took the bite with my eyes closed.

?

Eh?

The taste of strawberry, vanilla, and cream was present and the sweetness filled my entire mouth; “Its..it's delicious Xavier!” I yelled out in surprise and he just chuckled softly at my reaction. I can't believe it, he actually made something delicious — I might have to thank Tara later. We both sat in silence and ate the cake while talking about our past missions together.

Instead of continuing our date at the arcade we both decided to just watch the sunset and stargaze. As the sunset and the stars started to appear me and I was admiring the beautiful sky which later the bright moon had appeared as well.

“The moon is beautiful, ain't it?” I asked setting my eyes on Xavier whom was already staring at me with warmth in his diamond eyes….

“Xa-Xavier…?” I said his name aloud as he seem to be in a daze which he snapped out of quickly; “The moon is beautiful…yet you're more beautiful.” He suddenly said and my face immediately bursted up in shades of red as I processed what he had just said.

“Your so cheesy Xavier….” I said pouting a little as I heard him chuckle; “But it's true?” He said making me look at him once more, we both gazed at each other. Silently admiring each others features, as I felt his hands intertwine against mines.

Slowly and slowly our faces had inched towards each other, I could feel his breathe against mines; soon I felt his lips intertwine with mines giving me a soft and tender kiss.

I soon felt his lips leave mines and I opened my eyes to see him smiling at me, bringing his other hand to slowly stroke my cheek; to which I leaned against letting out a small sigh.

“I love you..your the best boyfriend I could ever ask for, thanks for baking the cake for me” I said giving him peck on the nose. I saw a little red on his cheeks as he inched his face close to mines again, however this time; he kissed my forehead and I heard him tenderly whisper….

“I love you more. I'll never leave you again.”

The awaited second part has come! I had some trouble writing this for Xavier, expect his lore I kinda know nothing about him-

I'm working on it...aka spending but I'll write him better next time~

I hope you guys enjoyed reading and thanks for reading this far! See you in part 3~!

Reblogs are appreciated and Feedback/Comments are always appreciated! :3

(Note: please don't copy and paste my works anywhere, and if you do see them on other platform please inform me.)

[eyra]

winning arguments without crying

Three years ago I liked you and now I think you’re hideous That’s really all it is. Crumbling stone above your sink in a houseshare bathroom that feels like an aeroplane toilet. A corona of snakes that couldn’t be saved by a beautiful tragedy. You have to train them, you see To bite beautifully and in a tragic sort of way A literary way You can’t just wash your red hair and let it dry like that. I would know. Mine are revered and I think people are afraid of them but in a beautiful sort of way.

That’s another story that I’m trying to write and I wish I could block you from the pages like I’ll block you on Instagram.

I think you’re hideous A gradual  and then very sudden descent into a cramping hatred like the way you think hot weather is just fantastic and I think the sun is fucking obnoxious Like you A loudly epic microcosm  A study in how to learn to hate a stranger measured by unprecedented times and a handful of afternoons eating  blue cheese and crackers on London grass waiting for the time to pass If nobody likes you and everybody likes me then does that make me awful too? or does it just mean I’m right

You glittered like a mirror for a morning our sisterly reflections in mourning A summer snapshot from the lens I’m still in charge of Now you’re a black hole or something worse probably an empty shell pretending to be a whole person. Boring boring boring Everything about you is boring I’m bored with how boring I find you This poem is boring. It’s boring to talk about you but I can’t stop none of us can stop we’re all awful. You were a mirror and isn’t that funny considering how much you fucking love looking at yourself now Is this fucking play about us? as long as it’s all focused on you Tell us to knock the f-stop back as far as we can until it’s just The You Show again but you’ll say you hate the lens I’m standing behind. Apparently it’s all so condescending of me but I think you just don’t understand what that word means and what you actually mean is I’m older than you and know how to win arguments? What you actually mean is I can fight without shaking and my face doesn’t turn red when I’m angry? and I’ve always thought that a very lucky trait to have I think I probably got that from my dad although he doesn’t really get angry. I think you should write a poem about what you got from your dad But you’ll never do that even if  it’s the easy pick to the door you say someone else bolted you behind screaming. I unpicked mine when I was twenty and I’ll always shoot if someone slags off my closet And you think you’re the gunmaster here

But that’s a totally separate conversation and I can’t be bothered having it with you so can we just move on because you’re too narrow to get that.

The most caring person in the world until empathy starts unearthing your enemies As if you don’t already have a thousand. And none of it feels important anymore so I’m embarrassed that I even care but it’s not a caring sort of caring. If you’re compelled by right and wrong I’m compelled by love and hate I think that’s my coin and one day soon I’ll stop spending it on you But for now I’m solvent Even if I’m letting you steal from me and your steel city state is richer than my ancient woodland but your vaults are beneath iron girders of fantastic and thanks so much and so it becomes a girlish and quietly-biting sort of coin that burns lips and makes everything taste like copper mine is just a mist and then you accuse me of being non-confrontational when actually I’ve always quite liked confrontation.

It’s something I’m good at

and yet you keep trying and honestly I find that mortifying But you’re a child so I don’t even care. Maybe I should swaddle you but you said you're wise beyond your years so I guess let’s go with that? And if everyone hates you and nobody hates me then maybe you should go back to your mirror and look there instead of at your front-facing camera because that’s mortifying too  and you should’ve gone to university because you would’ve met other mirrors there And at least I know I’m a bitch

I met my mirrors ages ago.

But you run from reflection and choose your front-facing camera instead because it does that thing where it flips the image and you get to pretend that you’re the opposite thing to the thing you actually are and you get to tell yourself that you’re so tiny and the world is the Big Bad pecking at your nest. But you’re the awful thing And everything is backwards And everything is mirrored to you And if I saw myself in you then send me the invoice and finish your email with  thanks so much  for teaching me how to be something else because honestly if I became what you already are I think I’d just die  I can see you rolling your eyes on the playground because someone else was enjoying the swings but in a stupid way and the tarmac was hotter in Germany but that doesn’t make you more interesting. God I wish I could tell you that.

I told you once that sometimes I pretend I’m on Graham Norton when I’m in the car I thought everyone did that but apparently they don’t But that’s fine I think and you didn’t need to laugh about it with your fiancée But she's left you too and I found that funny So let’s call it even.

I dive headfirst into the oil when it comes to you because it feels so hotly delicious  To nestle in the anonymous ranks of whatever armies you think you did nothing to provoke You’ve got spears for crutches but your armour is accountancy note paper With lecture notes too boring to comprehend I don’t think you’re actually interested in investment risk and taxation or fraud analytics Is anyone? It’s just something else to put on your brown sash and on your HER profile. Tell them about how you’re on every battlefield and I’m just softly at home writing a stupid poem about you And if you’re reading this now because you keep tabs on everyone and everything and if you were waiting for me Don’t flatter yourself. This isn’t about you. Because I already don’t remember how old you are but I think you get a notification when I post an Instagram story of myself as a child.

I have a pitchy black well of everything that you don’t have and I throw myself into it and you screw your face up lime-sour when actually I think you’d love to build one for yourself  but you can’t stop looking at your Instagram followers for long enough to work out  How to cast bricks or divine water or whatever else you need to build a well

You don’t even have the land for it yet.

I’d rather write a stupid poem than be your blank piece of paper I’d rather write myself as a villain than play your antagonist  Write me out of your boring story I’m begging you. It’s been a year and you’re still looking up how to spell my name  Between notes about investment management and derivatives And I don’t even know what that means Thank God. God it’s so boring But I’m laughing at the idea of one day forgetting your name.

I can be rotten but I think the thing that saves you from Hell is the welcoming of the rot and if I can be this but also sleep with my friends and love my American cereal and the little squares of sun my mirrorballs cast to my blue walls Then what does it matter I don’t think it matters. But you can’t be told about any of that Because you’re too busy romancing your front-facing camera and  one-hundred-and-thirty-three people in fluorescent ceiling panels who won’t ever clap at a volume that fills you So I’ll leave you waiting for your lean applause And I’ll just be lighter.

I watched a video today of my niece on a ride-on lawnmower Grinning with my dad in the field behind our house and that was me twenty-two years ago. God I love that I can love.

[bamboozledbird]

IGNITE: A Teen Wolf S1 AU // Chapter 1

Characters: Stiles Stilinski, Sheriff Stilinski, Original Female Character Pairing: eventual Stiles x OFC, but man are we talking slow burn Word Count: 4.9k Warnings: canon typical gore/violence, parental death, descriptions of burning, depictions of depression (apathy, dissociation, 'numb little bug' vibes) Tags: canon has been lovingly scrapped for parts, author loves lesbian poets and it shows, prolific overuse of the em dash, the slowest of burns i fear

Summary: Four years ago, Drea Dickinson's entire life fell apart. Her mom died, her best friend replaced her, and all she could do was watch listlessly while everything else burned down around her. All she wants is to forget and maybe get through her sophomore year without flunking chemistry and completely unraveling at the seams—a seemingly impossible task with the sudden appearance of ghosts from her mother's mysterious past and a hair-raising beast ripping people apart all over town. It would be easier to pretend if she hadn't accidentally entwined her life with the most interrogatory bastard in town. She could have gone her whole life without meeting Stiles Stilinski, and she would've been perfectly fine, but now she's stuck knowing that she's made her bed in the fragile, breakable bones of the boy with all the answers. Chapter Summary: After her annual interrogation with Sheriff Stilinski, Drea meets his son who turns out to be very handy with jumper cables, poetry recitation, and incoherent babbling.

A/N: This is an entirely selfish project. This rewrite has been so incredibly nostalgic, and I may or may not have cried a few times because the TW era was such a special time of my life. To be 17 again, sigh. I wrote a very bad version of this in 2014, and I cannot believe it has been 10 years!!! I'm almost 30! Impossible! The 10-year anniversary is entirely coincidental but still a wonderful, serendipitous happenstance. I'm re-watching the entire series with my little sister, who is coincidentally 17, and good god I just miss the TW, TVD era. Bring back the cheesy teen monster shows that give perpetual fall vibes PLEASE. You can also check me out on ao3 (dork_knight)!

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Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.

Before her mother’s death, Drea would have picked fire. Every single time. 

She never liked the cold; never really had to get used to it growing up in central California—but the crux of her argument, the twisted logic behind it all, was that most burn victims died from suffocation before they felt the flames. A small mercy, really, in the face of unspeakable tragedy. 

In the end, however, statistics were just numbers, her mother didn't die from smoke inhalation, and there was no mercy in burying a parent before you were old enough to have children of your own. Nothing ever ended poetically off the page. Death was just death, and it was always ugly. Someone should really tell that to Robert Frost, Drea mused, biting at a raw hangnail.

The medical examiner said the actual cause of death was pulmonary edema; at least, that was his best guess based on the state of the body. He didn’t say that she felt everything, her skin peeling back into her flesh, her flesh liquefying into fuel, her joints flexing into contorted pleas until the fire incinerated her last nerve ending. He didn’t have to; Drea connected those dots all on her own. She’d been twelve at the time, not an imbecile. 

“I’m sorry to drag you through this all again.”

Drea flitted her eyes away from the flickering lightbulb above Sheriff Stilinski’s head and met his gaze; it was nauseatingly sympathetic. Her responding shrug was a small, little thing—more like a twitch in practice, “Not your fault.” 

Her yearly visits to Sheriff Stilinski’s office were solely her father’s doing, even if no one wanted to admit it to her face. Most mayors would use their political power to get their child out of a police station, not into it, but perhaps Mayor Dickinson stopped being her dad somewhere between the funeral and now. 

“If you could start—”

“From the beginning,” Drea smoothed her thumb in small circles over the armrest of her chair, attentively tracing patterns into the polished wood, “I know.” This was, after all, the fourth anniversary of her first interrogation. She’d become somewhat of an expert at being a useless witness. Drea picked at her uneven cuticles before continuing, “Mom put me to bed around 10:00—which was kind of late for a school night, honestly, but she let me stay up to finish another chapter anyway.” The right corner of her mouth twitched for a brief moment, “Nancy Drew: Password to Larkspur Lane. I told her that forcing someone to go to sleep in the middle of a mystery was specifically forbidden in Geneva Protocol II.” Her mom had been far too indulgent of her lip on most occasions, but that night she didn’t smile at her snarky aside. She let her finish the chapter because she was too tired to argue; Drea could tell. At the time, she saw it as a victory. Now, it kept her up at night, the drooping lines of her mother’s mouth spilling over the pages of whatever book she was trying to read.

Drea bit down on her tongue when a stray splinter snagged against the soft pad of her thumb, “Dad was out of town, so it was just the two of us. Mom always put me to bed when Dad was gone; said it was the only way she could get to sleep. Had to make sure my window was locked.” She paused for a long moment: everything went dark after this. Her mother kissed the top of her head, murmured, ‘Love you,’ turned out the light, and then that was it. Drea woke up in the hospital, and her mom was dead. 

A bead of sweat dripped onto her top lip. The air in the Beacon Hills police station was, without fail, sticky with heat and body odor—and it wasn’t just the oppressive Californian sun. Even in the winter, a person could choke on the stifling warmth. Idly, she wondered if it was a matter of interrogatory tactics or budgetary constraints. 

“And then,” Sheriff Stilinski prompted gently, though they both knew how the story went from here. She had told it to him and a dozen other officials at least a hundred times in the last four years. 

Drea bit down on her thumbnail and winced when her teeth snagged on the tender nail bed, “And then nothing. I opened my eyes, and a nurse said that you found me on the front lawn.” 

“You don’t remember how you got outside?” 

Drea shook her head, staring past the Sheriff's shoulder. Large pieces of dust floated through the air, highlighted by the slivers of light trickling through the blinds. Suddenly, she had a newfound appreciation for the lack of fans in the room. 

Sheriff Stilinski cleared his throat and rubbed his hand over his jaw, “You don’t remember saying it was an angel?”

Blinking slowly, Drea looked at the grim line of the Sheriff’s mouth and gripped her knees tightly, digging her fingers into tawny skin until her wrist cracked, “I should, right? I was twelve. I should remember something—that’s what everyone thinks. That’s what my dad thinks.” Her eyelids fluttered to a tight close, and her voice went so quiet she could barely be heard over the hum of the copier outside the door, “He thinks it was me. That’s why he makes you question me every year.” She pulled the sleeves of her jacket over her fists and gnawed on the soft lining of her cheek, “He thinks you’ll finally figure out how I did it.” 

Drea was scared to open her eyes as the silence stretched between them. They’d danced around the subject before, hinted and twisted around the heart of it, but they’d never truly discussed how it looked from the outside. Sheriff Stilinski had been kind enough to give her a few different excuses over the years: trauma, head injury, oxygen deprivation, plain old grief—but whatever caused her temporary amnesia wasn’t so conveniently explained. In fact, currently, she still had no explanation at all. When she finally peeked through her lashes, clumped together with frustrated tears, Drea couldn’t quite figure out what expression the Sheriff was making. He leaned back in his desk chair and frowned, “I’m sure he doesn’t—”

“He does,” Drea cut him off. Her eyes went flinty, deep brown darkening to something far more ashen with the resolve of her anger. She never had any trouble reading her father’s face; the disgust was thinly-veiled between the flickers of fear. 

Sheriff Stilinksi leaned forward so that she had no choice but to look him in the eyes. They were kind—more tired than usual, but still kind. They always were. That was one thing Drea remembered from that day, waking up in the hospital to Sheriff Stilinski’s kind, watery blue eyes, just before the entire world fell apart. His voice was gentle, but firm, when he finally spoke, “I don’t.” 

Drea nodded numbly and pulled at a fraying string on the hem of her denim skirt until the thread snapped. 

“I mean it, kid. They couldn’t identify the source of the fire. They couldn’t even find an origin point; no twelve-year-old could pull that off.”

Drea chewed on her bottom lip, “Could anyone?”

Sheriff Stilinski’s brow furrowed, and his mouth screwed up into a crooked line, like he was chewing on his words and deciding if he should swallow them or spit them out. “I wish I had all the answers for you. I really do. Not knowing, it’s worse than any truth.”

Drea blinked up at him for a moment, once again taken aback by his raw sincerity, and swallowed hard. He wasn’t the one who was supposed to have the answers; he was the one who was supposed to ask the questions. There was one failure in his muggy office, and it wasn’t the Sheriff. “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Not your fault.”

He looked like he wanted to argue the point, but whatever he wanted to say was interrupted by the sharp ringing of the phone on his desk. “I have to take this, but if you remember something, or if you just need to talk—”

“My dad spends a small fortune on a psychiatrist and a behavioral therapist for that,” Drea stood up quickly, shouldering her bag. She forced the corners of her mouth into a small smile, tight at the edges like a sheet that had been stretched too thin, “But thank you. For everything.” 

The Sheriff’s gaze darted to a framed photo on his desk. Drea had seen it before, on one of her many visits to his office. It was of a boy—his son, she assumed—he looked like he was around five or six at the time. He was grinning, wide enough to show off his missing incisors, and his fingers and wrist were stained cotton-candy blue from a melting popsicle. She must’ve been that happy once, right? In the beginning, everyone was unencumbered by the weight of imminent mortality. Maybe that’s what Sheriff Stilinski was thinking, too. He looked away from the photo and gave Drea a small smile, “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

Drea gave a half-hearted wave before wrapping her fingers around the strap of her backpack and walking to the parking lot. 

The sky was grim, a mocking reflection of expression on her face. The spite in her eyes hardened when big, fat raindrops splattered against the apples of her cheeks. For a moment, she just stood there, glaring at the rain and cursing the cosmos for their utterly unamusing sense of humor. A jeep pulled into the parking lot, and the squealing engine startled her back into reality. 

Unfortunately, the search for her car keys was a considerable endeavor. Typical. Drea stacked her textbooks and binders onto the hood of her sedan, haphazardly throwing her jacket on top of the pile to protect her painstakingly penned Kafka essay from the rain. By the time her fingertips brushed against the cool metal of her keys, her hair was damp and curling at the ends. 

The momentary relief was short-lived when she pressed the unlock button five times and the accompanying beep didn’t sound, not even once. For an absurdly long minute, all she could do was rest her forehead against the driver’s side window, breathing heavily until condensation gathered next to her mouth and the drizzle speckled dots onto the sleeves of her thin cotton shirt.

“If you’re trying to charge the battery through osmosis, it’d probably be more effective to smash your head against the hood.”

Drea jumped, and then flinched again when her keys clattered against the ground. She caught a glimpse of the phantom speaker in the side-view mirror; bizarrely, he looked just as surprised as she felt. She turned around, apprehensively—objects may be closer than they appear n’all—and tried to swallow her rapidly rising heart. 

“Sorry,” the boy pulled the hood of his sweatshirt down and had the decency to look contrite, “big mouth.” He rubbed a hand over his chapped lips. “It’s a real problem. It’s so big, actually, that my foot just slides right in there like…all the time,” he gestured animatedly with a flat hand, a quick sliding motion, like a fish through water.

Drea blinked at him, slowly, and bent down to reach for her keys, “Might wanna see someone about that. Sounds unsanitary.”

“Eh, it’s hardly the worst thing I’ve put in my mouth,” he said, eyes widening into horrified round circles the second he stopped talking. A faint flush creeped up his neck to his ears, and Drea’s heart dropped back into her chest. Slashers and ax murderers didn’t blush. Probably. She hadn’t ever met one, but it seemed like sound logic.

“Choking hazard,” Drea hummed, leaning back against her car. Her fingers traced a small dent in the door, the cause long forgotten, “It’s definitely still a choking hazard.”

The boy grinned before fixing his expression into something on the cusp of severity, “I’m about 95.7% sure that anything bigger than a fist is completely mouth-safe.” He held up his fist and nodded sharply, “Make that 98.3% sure.”

“98.3?” Drea’s brow arched.

“Maybe even 98.9.” 

The buzz of a lamp post hummed above their heads as they stared at each other with little smirks until the quiet made Drea sink her teeth into her bottom lip and big-mouth drum his fingers against his forearm. 

“So,” his sneakers squeaked against the slick asphalt as he shifted his weight, “you need a jump?”

Drea pursed her lips and ran her eyes over the front of her car, “I might give osmosis another shot. 30 seconds is hardly a fair trial.”

“Of course,” he hummed, “you gotta be fair.”

“We are in front of a police station.”

“Well,” he scratched his cheek, “it’s not a courthouse.”

“Technicality.” Drea was slightly horrified when she finally noticed that she was smiling. The sensation felt like it had escaped straight out of the uncanny valley and latched onto her face like a parasite in need of a host. It only took two weeks for muscles to atrophy; years must have completely decimated the fibers in her cheeks. “I guess I could use a jump. If your offer was an offer and not a hypothetical.” 

“Smart choice.” The boy rapped his knuckles against the hood of her car and said, “Steel’s probably pretty low on the permeability scale.”

“As opposed to a skull.”

He snorted and then nodded towards the large lump of books and papers covered by her freshly dampened jean jacket, “You should probably move your stuff. Y’know, ‘cause of the very un-permeable battery.”

“There’s that,” Drea sighed and started stuffing her things back into her backpack, shaking it violently until her notebook finally slid past her chemistry textbook, “and flunking English isn’t high on my list of things to do this weekend.”

His gaze flickered back and forth, rapidly cataloging every corner and crevice of her face. Drea tilted her head, brows pinched, and stared back at him with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. His eyes, she noticed, became a peculiar shade of brown in the yellow glow of the setting sun and the fluorescent light of the lamppost. More like honey, she realized, more like honey than irises. Something finally clicked behind them. "You,” he pointed aggressively, “you go to Beacon Hills.”

Drea pushed his finger away from her face with her own, “Safe bet, considering there’s exactly one option for the next 2,000 square miles.”

“You’re kind of a smartass, you know that,” he muttered as he struggled with the trunk of the jeep parked one space to her right until he finally wrenched it open with an almost guttural grunt.

Her lips parted briefly, and then she grinned drolly. It was refreshing, not being treated like some fragile little creature who would buckle in the knees—or possibly set something on fire—at the slightest confrontation. “Kind of?”

“Total.” He nodded decisively before sticking his head and torso into the depths of his trunk. “Completely, entirely, and wholly a smartass.” There were various clanging sounds until he re-emerged with a pair of jumper cables, “Never noticed that in class. You don’t really…say anything.”

Drea bit back the snark poised on the tip of her tongue. When people looked at her, the only thing they saw was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She was the daughter of the woman who burned to death on Cedar Street; Drea Dickinson’s mom died, and she was there. It seemed like that was all she would ever be in Beacon Hills. 

In the grand scheme of things, it was better to be no one. 

High school had been her chance to slip into social obscurity—more kids, more drama, less discussion of homicide by arson—so she took it, wholeheartedly. She kept to the corners of classrooms, away from extracurriculars, and her mouth resolutely shut. 

“I try to exclusively bring the smart and leave the ass at home,” Drea finally replied.

The boy’s eyes drifted downwards for a moment, and his voice did a funny, squeaky thing when he said, “I should give that a go sometime.”

“10/10 would recommend. No one bugs you—and teachers never throw erasers at your face.”

“So you do remember me,” he grinned a little and rolled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt before unlatching the jeep’s hood and propping it open.

Slanting her head, Drea watched his profile. There were moles scattered across his cheek and neck, and his angular jaw clenched as he struggled with the knotted cords in his willowy fingers. “Vaguely,” she said faintly. It was coming back to her in pieces. That was life after twelve for Drea Dickinson: bits and pieces. Everything was made up of the disquieting moments when she surfaced from the haze and into the present. It should’ve felt like a lungful of air, but it didn’t. It always felt like choking. 

He wiped his grease-smudged hand on his jeans and then extended it towards her, “Stiles.”

She took his hand, despite the strange formality, and shook it—mainly because of the black streaks staining his pants. “Drea.”

Stiles’s brow wrinkled, “I thought it was Andy.”

Drea hadn’t been Andy for what felt like a very long time. Four years, in fact. There were several reasons: her mom called her Andy, and she wanted to become someone else, anybody else—but ultimately the deciding factor was ‘Andy Arson.’ The nickname stuck around far longer than she thought it would. With a last name like Dickinson, Drea really thought the tweenager taunting would go in a different direction, but thirteen-year-olds had a knack for latching onto a person’s deepest-seated insecurities. Middle school, she mused, was a tragedy all on its own. 

“Nope. Just Drea.”

Stiles examined her face, and she saw that flicker in his eyes again: the light of recognition. “Well, Drea’s cool, y’know, in comparison.” His fingers twitched a few times when he connected the clamp to the coordinating battery terminal, and Drea’s eyes widened. She held her breath in her sternum until she registered that he hadn’t been electrocuted. He was just naturally tweaky, she concluded. It was either that, or he had jumped one-too-many engines in the last 24 hours…unless it was hidden option C, and he was actually tweaking. Unlikely, given he was on his way into a building teeming with cops, but far stranger things had happened in Beacon Hills. 

The longer she remained silent the more parts of his body started to move. Stile squeezed and unsqueezed the black clamp in his hand and drummed on the side of her car with his unoccupied fingers, “Like, Andy—no offense—doesn’t exactly strike fear or confidence in the heart. I mean, I wouldn’t trust Officer Andy to save my ass in a shoot-out, and I definitely wouldn’t trust Dr. Andy to cure my unknown, incredibly rare, incurable disease.” 

“No one could cure your incurable disease. That’s quite literally the entire definition of the word.”

“Sure,” Stiles connected the last clamp and glanced at her over his shoulder, almost checking himself in the chin with a large shrug, “but I’d buy that Dr. Drea could.”

Her mouth parted for a second, and then she closed it before she could say something impulsive. “That’s not even how it works; I’d be Dr. Dickinson.” 

Stiles winced, “Brutal.”

“Yeah,” Drea sighed and rubbed her palms over her arms until the goosebumps prickling her biceps receded into her skin.

Stiles looked back at her again, and his mouth wormed its way into a little frown. His head disappeared into his trunk, and after a moment a lumpy maroon mass hurtled towards her face. She caught it before it could smack into her nose, and she clutched at the soft material until she realized that the projectile missile was actually just a sweatshirt. 

Stiles was staring at her when she looked up from her hands. A small, unsure…something squirmed over his face, and she felt a little stupid, just standing there, hoodie limp in her arms. It happened a lot—more than it should after so many years. The invisible quicksand materialized in the strangest, most insignificant moments. Drea blinked, completely brainless, at simple questions, stared aimlessly into her closet until her second alarm startled her into snatching the first shirt her fingers came in contact with—clasped at a stranger’s hoodie until the rainwater pooled on her lashes dripped into her eyes.

Robotically, Drea thrust her arms through the sleeves and tugged it over her head, “Thanks.” The sweet scent of grass clung to the fabric, and there was something earthier underneath it, something like evergreen. She smiled slightly, combing her baby hairs behind her ears, “I almost forgive you for being a dick about my name.”

Stiles’s shoulders unwound as he scoffed, “At least people can say it without seizing.”

Drea looked at him and tilted her head, eyebrows crawling towards the bridge of her nose.

Stiles waved his hand in the air and extrapolated, “My full name is—just trust me. Dick jokes aren’t the worst thing in the world.”

“No,” Drea chewed on her lip, “they aren’t.”

There was a moment in middle school where she was tempted to plant the seed of something incredibly stupid and irresistibly raunchy, something like, ‘Andrea wants ‘Dickinsideher,’ because even that was better than a name with matricide as the punchline. But it didn’t take when Jared Cartwright soft-launched it in PE, so Drea seriously doubted it would ever catch-on from the target herself.

She cleared her throat, “But they are almost as bad as stye jokes.”

“Uh, absolutely not. Eyesores are nowhere near as gross as dick’n nu—” Stiles coughed, throat bobbing as he swallowed, before finishing his sentence with an audible question mark, “…phallic imagery.”

Drea pursed her lips, “Pus beats penis on the ick meter by at least 23 points.”

Stiles’s eyes glimmered in the fading light, “23?”

“Maybe even 24.”

Another bout of silence fell between them, but it wasn’t so restless this time—even after Stiles torpedoed his body through his passenger seat. He fought with his keys for a while until the correct one slid into the ignition. 

The jeep’s engine hummed pleasantly in the quiet as Drea let out a soft sigh, dropping her head back against her car window. The rain had stopped somewhere between trying to unlock her car and now, but she couldn’t quite recall when. The chill wasn’t so bad, she realized, without her foul mood casting a shadow over her head.

Stiles landed back on his feet and leaned against the jeep. Drea could feel his gaze on her again. A tickling sensation trailed down her spine as she fiddled with her keychain. It was old, a gift from her parents on some birthday she couldn’t remember. Paint had chipped off in most places after thoughtlessly throwing her keys every time she came home, but she could still make out the M and Y of the orange ‘Mystery Machine’ logo.

Stiles hummed for a moment and then said, “I’m Nobody. Who are you?”

Drea stared at him and waited for the punchline. It didn’t come. Instead, he shifted from one foot to the other and fumbled over each following syllable. “You know, like…Dickinson,” he waved his hands around, seemingly searching for some sort of cosmic relief. “I thought it would better than a dick joke, but upon some seriously belated reflection, I realize that you’re probably tired of corny assholes qu—”

“How dreary,” Drea interrupted, quietly but loud enough to be heard over the rumbling jeep, “to be Somebody.”

Stiles’s jaw snapped shut; it was his turn to blink at her stupidly. He smiled a little and ran his hand over his buzzed head, “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t know what she was agreeing with, only that she wholeheartedly did.

“I forgot that part.”

Drea clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and shook her head, “It’s the best line.”

“It might have something to do with my species landing somewhere between microscopic bacteria and radioactive cockroach on the high-school social food chain,” Stiles said dryly. His face remained impassive, like he was talking about something benign as the weather. 

Drea tilted her head a little and a timid smile unfurled over her face in time with the swell of familiarity blooming beneath her ribcage, “Then there’s a pair of us.”

His cheeks dimpled when he smiled back at her, “I do remember that one.”

“Well,” Drea slid her hands into her back pockets and shrugged, “it is the best part.”

Stiles squinted at her and then laughed.

Drea felt a bit like laughing too, so she swallowed thickly before she could choke on the impulse. She took a step backwards and curled her fingers around her keys in her back pocket, “I should probably try start my car…y’know, before you start reciting, ‘I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain.’”

He nodded, taking a step towards his jeep, “Solid plan. ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ would be next.”

Drea slid into her car and stared at the steering wheel, wrapping her fingers around 10 and 2 and silently calling upon every deity she’d ever heard of to end her suffering. Stiles seemed nice enough, but she seriously doubted her smalltalk capabilities were up-to ‘ride home’ standards. Perhaps, she should revisit her resounding dedication to atheism, she thought, as the engine sputtered in protest a few times and then came back to life. 

Stiles flashed two thumbs up through the window. The smile on his face was positively goofy, but his dismount from the jeep was somehow even goofier. He stumbled over his large feet a few times before regaining stability. Drea bit back a smile when he shot her another thumbs up, this time through the dash as he removed the jumper cables from her battery.

He wiped his hands off on his jeans again; at this point, she was convinced that they were beyond saving, but Stiles didn’t seem concerned. He tapped against her window before stepping around the open door, “You should probably let it run for a while. Take the scenic route home; enjoy all the Beacon Hills hotspots open past 8:00 pm on a weeknight. I personally recommend the Rite Aid or Walmart.”

Drea snorted, “Maybe I’ll swing by the Preserve. I hear the woods are especially beautiful in the foreboding darkness.”

“Don’t.” Serious was an odd look on Stiles’s face. Drea decided that she much preferred the goofy grin. “Don’t go anywhere near the Preserve. It’s officially cordoned off—totally locked down, quarantine-zone-central. Something about flesh-eating, parasitic plant life.”

“As completely real and unobtrusive as that sounds,” Drea drawled, “don’t worry about it. Literally every single person in town knows about the body they found in the woods.” It was bound to happen, small town and all—and ‘woman dies in deadly animal attack’ was the most interesting thing that had happened in Beacon Hills since the intersection got a Target two years ago. “I’ve seen every installment of Friday the 13th and The Blair Witch Project. If I’m going to be murdered, I refuse to also be humiliated by a cliché C.O.D.” 

The manic expression on his face softened to a relieved smile and then again to a little smirk, “So what’s a certified fresh murder, then? Not that I doubt the depths of human depravity, but I think society killed off originality a few centuries ago.”

Drea thought back to a house fire with no origin, accelerant, or discernible cause. Apparently, not. “You know what they say,” she sighed, “life finds a way.”

Stiles tilted his head, “And death.”

“And death,” Drea agreed, staring at a small chip in her windshield. The cracks had just begun to spiderweb out from the pit. 

Stiles looked like he wanted to say something, and he looked so much like the Sheriff with his face twisted around thoughtful contemplation that she couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to make the connection. The boy in the photo had grown up. How unfortunate for him. Stiles swallowed whatever it was that was lingering on his tongue and shut Drea’s door. He leaned his elbow against the window frame and cocked his hand in a stiff little wave, “See ya in English, Dickinson—both of you.”

“Awful,” Drea’s nose scrunched as she buckled her seatbelt, “terrible, dreadful. A solid 25 on the ick meter.”

Stiles grinned and held up his hands, “I’ll think of something better by Monday, promise.” 

Drea put her car in drive once Stiles was safely a few feet from the wheels and flicked her damp hair over her shoulder, “I dwell in Possibility.” What a scary place to be, she thought as she watched Stiles disappear in her rearview mirror. Possibility. Hope. Life. She was chronically good at surviving; cockroached her way out of every horrible thing life squashed her with. Lately, all she could do was cling to her heartbeat and the warmth of her skin, until she was barely more than roadkill. A walking carcass was a far cry from living, but Death would not stop for her, so she stopped looking for him. She kept treading water, took her pills, stopped existing—she was a lot like Schrödinger’s cat that way: too stubborn to live, too stubborn to die. She didn’t know what to do if someone unsealed the box and forced her to choose. That was the trouble with possibility; it required far too much uncertainty.

[ryuichirou]

Replies

Only two today, but long ones!

Anonymous asked:

Out of curiosity, are there any tropes in Media/Fanfiction that you and katsu Hate/Love...? or even Neutral about it?

I think don't you guys talked about that before unless I somehow missed it?

Anon! Sorry for the late reply. I had to think about it for some time, but I also feel like there is no way to answer this question in a definitive 100% conclusive way; there will always be some exceptions when the trope that we hate somehow still works okay, or when our favourite tropes don’t do the story justice at all. So this is more of a list of first things that come to mind! Mostly because these are the tropes we discuss the most.

We really tend to not like a lot of family-related tropes, especially when characters settle down and start a family and start living a slow domestic life and stuff, and when it’s painted as an endpoint or a happy ending of sorts. This is why we don’t really like talking about characters having kids or headcanon OC kids for our ships, the idea just doesn’t have the appeal to us. Maybe it’s because we don’t want children ourselves so it doesn’t click with us/we don’t get it; maybe it’s just because of how overwhelmingly popular this trope is, and how a lot of times it tends to make characters lose their unique characteristics and boil them down to just being a mom and/or a dad. Even if it’s not fanfiction but an original piece, we don’t really resonate with stories like that. Hmm, I guess it’s mostly about the nuclear families though, because I personally would find a story about a broken household more interesting. But if it’s just a “he is a papa, he is another papa, and here is their sunshine baby” is just boring to us personally… Where are my stories about characters going through divorce and fighting over their children? lol

Same goes for anything pregnancy related. We really don’t resonate with tropes that are related to pregnancy, the only possible exception being some horror stories.

Our favourite tropes… we love a despair-filled story! A tragedy, I guess. “Yes, everything is that bad; no, there is nothing you can realistically do to fix it” type of story, maybe a good example would be Shingeki no Kyojin.

When a super powerful being is somehow linked to one person and doesn’t stop being a super powerful being and doesn’t develop empathy or humanity! I don’t know how to explain it lol We love it when someone super powerful and inhuman favours a character, either due to having plans for this character or due to its selfish obsession, but it doesn’t go the typical route of “and then the demon learned how to care and love someone”. Like, the obsession is still there, but the creature doesn’t experience it in the same way that humans do, even if it looks like it, there is still this creepy gap that could never be closed. Whenever this gap closes and the creature starts feeling love, it turns into the trope that we really don’t like lol

Somehow related to this, but not really? I’ve said it multiple times, but: character A loves character B so much that they are willing to do horrible things for them (things that character B never asked for). We also love selflessly loyal type, sadodere or yangire boys, anything that makes characters’ relationship with each other almost cartoonishly exaggerated and extreme. I hope it makes sense.

Also! A character is bored and does whatever they want in the story, dancing to the beat of their own drums. Like chaotic neutral, but without any common sense? Hisoka from HxH or the Tweels would be good examples. You never know whether they are an ally or a foe because you can never guess what exactly they’re thinking about.

I can talk about it for ages, but these are the tropes that come to mind first!

Anonymous asked:

Any fav writers/artists you two follow bc of their work or ships?

Im new to bsky and want to follow ppl with similar taste first

Sorry for the late reply, Anon!

To be completely honest with you, we don’t have a lot of people who we follow on bsky; well, we do have a lot of our favourite jp artists who made an account there when it became publically available, but a lot of them don’t post there regularly and prefer to still use twi. Still, I’ll give you the links in case they start posting again!

I wish I could give you more recommendations, so if anyone wants to add to this list, feel free to comment under this post.

Here are some of our faves:

https://bsky.app/profile/thumaru.bsky.social - not shippy, but a lot of very good character art; their Vil is top notch.

https://bsky.app/profile/rakugakityou03.bsky.social - also not shippy; absolute god of illustration, their art is gorgeous.

https://bsky.app/profile/akiseizon.bsky.social  - I physically can’t NOT post a link to Futairo-san; I am so obsessed with their art it’s pathetic at this point.

https://bsky.app/profile/moketaros.bsky.social - one of the best rkvl artists out there, even though they haven’t updated their bsky in a bit…

https://bsky.app/profile/chocomaimai.bsky.social - one of my favourite Shroud artists! They don’t post much on bsky unfortunately, but their collection of artworks on pixiv and twi is great.

https://bsky.app/profile/rikuaso.bsky.social - another one of my favourite Shroud artists! Their Shroudcest is gorgeous :”)

https://bsky.app/profile/ingtakou6910.bsky.social - pretty Jamils!! Very pretty Jamils!!

Once again, the list isn’t as big because I’m limiting it to bsky, but if you ever want a twi/pixiv list, let me know. 😔

[kaylinalexanderbooks]

OC questionnaire

Thanks to @elsie-writes here, @mysticstarlightduck here, @riverkaplan here, and @somethingclevermahogony here!

My previous questionnaires:

Robbie, Gwen, Maddie, Noelle, Jedi, and Kelsey here.

Carmen, George, Akash, Sam, Lexi, and Ash here.

Gabriel, Carla, Parker, Rose, Alex, and Ewan here.

Liam, Hye-Jin, Wendy, Wade, Issa, and CJ here.

Below the cut I will do: Teo, Niri, Jazlyn, Anathi!

#1- Teo

Do you believe in the paranormal?

“Sis, my boyfriend literally can heal a broken arm in seconds. You would not believe the shit I've seen Parker do just because Wade can heal him. Oh yeah, and Parker literally is an airbender. How can I not? If a vampire walked into the school I wouldn't blink.”

What oddly-specific T-shirt would you wear?

“This shirt that says ‘born to shit, forced to wipe,’ I want it so much you don't understand.”

Do you usually cry at sad moments or happy moments or both?

“Definitely sad moments. I mean, I would not put it past me to cry when happy, but I can't make it through sad movies, man. Not at all.”

#2- Niri

Where is your favorite place in the world?

“I have an easy answer to this. Carla and George have a quiet room in their house. I can go there if I feel too overwhelmed or if I want to be alone for a bit. The room also has good lighting. I like it if someone joins me, though usually just a few people at the same time. Otherwise my reason for going into the room is ruined. [He smiles slightly.] I like everyone in the Aequales. Although there is a lot of people.”

What food do you hate the most?

“I dislike pasta. Pasta is not bad. It tastes good. But the texture really bothers me. I cannot eat spaghetti.”

Do you like watching sunsets or sunrises?

“Yes. I 100-percent love sunsets and sunrises. I am an artist. Maybe that's the reason. I feel inspired. New day, too.”

#3- Jazlyn

If you could only wear one outfit for the rest of your life, what would it be?

“I would wear a tank top and shorts, easily. Why? Well, I think it would be fun, definitely make me stick out among the modest Utahns I'm forced to interact with. But also they show off how good of shape I'm in. And girl, I'm in good shape. It's hard to find pants for me, since I'm mostly legs. So why not show them off? I'd probably wear cute sandals, the necklace Ewan gave me, and my gorgeous hoop earrings.”

Who's the person you trust more than anyone else in the world?

“Obviously, Ewan. He is the kindest person I know. He would never do anything wrong.”

What's your dream job?

“I would actually find sales fun. I plan to get a marketing degree when I go to college next year. It seems fun to convince people what to buy.”

More Jazlyn: OC interview

#4- Anathi

Who in this world do you trust most, and why?

“... I guess Tyler. Kinda by default. He actually listens to me. Always kept promises, too. I relied on him for many reasons.”

What was your favorite place in the world when you were young

“The park. Where I could hang out with other kids. Before my powers kicked in.”

What is your favorite memory?

“When Tyler and I first met, we talked for hours. I would like to experience that feeling again.”

I haven't written for Anathi yet so this was probably only okay. Shorter responses are intentional tho

Your questions:

Tagging @writernopal @aziz-reads @mk-writes-stuff @romances-not-tragedies @little-peril-stories

@evilgabe29 @maggiekwest @chauceryfairytales @pluppsauthor @willtheweaver

@winterandwords @melpomene-grey @i-can-even-burn-salad @mysticstarlightduck @talesofsorrowandofruin

+ ANYONE ELSE WHO WANTS TO DO THIS

How do you make decisions? Long deliberation, or impulse? Logic or emotions?

What is the best thing that could happen within five minutes after waking up? Does it signal that the entire day will be good?

Is there anything that you find difficult that you feel should be easy?

TSP intro

TSP tag list (ask to be +/-): @thepeculiarbird @illarian-rambling @televisionjester @finchwrites

@nebula--nix @literarynecromancy

[o-uncle-newt]

I guess the only person who can really be trusted to describe the greatness of Agatha Christie is Dorothy L Sayers...?

A while back, the always-sharp @thesarahshay sent me an ask that caught me up on something that I'd carelessly written in some tags- I said that Agatha Christie was good at writing romance into her detective fiction, without really elaborating. I then spent multiple paragraphs attempting to elaborate, I'm not sure with how much success. Essentially, and you can click above to see for yourself, my thesis was that while Sayers was a much better literary stylist (and certainly better at writing romance) than Christie, when writing a detective novel, her seams show; Christie had a natural talent for knowing exactly what belongs in a detective story and creating and fitting all the right pieces together that create a seamless detective story, including motivations drawn by romance (though I think the actual romances are among the weaker elements- still MUCH better than those written by most of her peers, for the record).

I'd had trouble putting into words what I wanted to say (there was a convoluted metaphor about Barbies and Lego in there), and I'm not sure I was too convincing; but turns out that the person who said what I wanted to say the best was, in fact the great DLS herself.

There's a fabulous book that I 100% recommend called Taking Detective Stories Seriously, which is a compilation of about two years' worth of detective story reviews that Sayers wrote. I hadn't heard of most of the authors, and even when I had heard of the authors I'd rarely read the books, but it didn't matter, frankly. She's just such a great writer, so thoughtful and incisive and passionate about both the genre and good craftsmanship (not to mention good English), that everything she has to say including on novels that haven't been in print since the 30s is worth reading. She has generally great taste, though she has a much higher opinion of Margery Allingham than I do and doesn't like Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery as much as I'd thought she might (though the fact that a character in it insulted Unnatural Death may not have helped lol); but she also likes, to pick two very different writers who I too enjoy, HC Bailey and Mignon G Eberhart, and so she clearly has a good eye. (It's also entertaining to see her slowly force herself to admit that she likes Perry Mason...)

BUT ANYWAY.

She has three reviews of Agatha Christie books in the volume: Murder on the Orient Express, Why Didn't They Ask Evans, and Three Act Tragedy. She reviews all of them very positively, but it's her review of Three Act Tragedy (in my opinion, funnily enough, the weakest of the three) that she really gets to the core of Christie's genius. And it's actually fitting that it's for a book of hers that's on the more meh end of the scale- because it just shows how even meh Christie has an element of genius that other authors have to work hard for even in their best works.

She says:

Some time ago this column contained the statement that Hercule Poirot was "one of the few real detectives." It was a well-sounding phrase, and I have no quarrel with it, except that I am not quite clear what it meant. What I meant to write and what I thought I had written and what I now propose to write clearly with no mistake about it was and is this: Hercule Poirot is one of the few detectives with real charm. Plenty of authors assure us that their detectives are charming, but that is quite another thing. I don't know that Mrs Christie has ever said a word about the matter. She merely puts Poirot there, with all his little oddities and weaknesses, and there he is- a really charming person. And it is true, too, that he is "real," in the sense that we never stop to enquire whether his words and actions are suited to his character; they are his character, and we accept them as we accept the words and actions of any living person because they are a part of himself. Le style c'est l'homme. Indeed, when Mrs Christie is writing at the top of her form, as she is in Three Act Tragedy, all her characters have this reality. She does not postulate a character- retired actor, West End mannequin, family retainer- and put into its mouth sentiments appropriate to its station in life. She shows us character and behavior all of a piece. However surprising or enigmatic the behavior, we believe that everything took place just as she says it did, because we believe in the reality of the people. Poirot is charming, not because anybody says so, but because is is, and all her other people exist for us in the same objective manner. This is the great gift that distinguishes the novelist from the manufacturer of plots. Mrs Christie has given us an excellent plot, a clever mystery, and an exciting story, but her chief strength lies in this power to compel belief in these characters. [emphasis mine]

Sayers then proceeds to compare another author (or rather authors, the husband and wife pair GDH and M Cole) to Christie in this regard, moving on to another review. But in these three paragraphs she has, I think, said it better than anyone- that Christie's skill is in her naturalness, and how that naturalness compels us to believe in and immerse ourselves in her world. She is effortless and seamless.

To be clear, Sayers praises a lot of people in this book, and a lot of people's writing; but mostly she is praising their skill and ability to create what they have created. Here, she isn't quite praising that- she's praising the fact that the final product is so good that you can't even see the craftsmanship behind it, and that's, I think, what separates Christie from her peers. It's a power, and not one that can be broken down by a critic. She just has it.

I've said before that I don't think Sayers had this as a mystery writer, and I think she'd probably be the first to agree with that assessment; she certainly had a seemingly effortless skill as a prose writer (as these reviews show), but as a novelist she took construction seriously and wanted us to know this. That said, another person who I don't think has this, who I mention because he's someone who a lot of people compare Christie to (often negatively), is John Dickson Carr.

I've seen plenty of people say that Carr is a more sophisticated version of Christie, not just in mystery construction but in writing style, and equally prolific, creative, and versatile. I don't agree with this on most counts, but I think, honestly, that Carr is fine- but you can see the seams easily. He might have been prolific but his formulae are visible and his writing required intentionality on his part. By which I mean- Carr when he's trying to be funny is generally hilarious. Carr when he's trying to be scary is generally spine-tingling. But Carr when he's just trying to get to the next good bit is dull and mechanical. He needs to be paying attention and making an effort in order to be good, and we notice him doing this. Christie never has this problem; even when the actual stuff she's writing isn't high quality, she's never dull. Everything feels purposeful and organic, somehow.

Obviously, all of this is fundamentally subjective, and if there's one redeeming element it's that an incredibly smart lady agrees with me (by my interpretation, at least) and says it extremely well. But I'll be holding on to this one, if nothing else.

[alex-perry]

name: alexander “alex” perry (no relation to katy perry)

age: 32

birthday: january 22

zodiac: aqua sun, libra moon, virgo rising

place of birth: minneapolis, minnesota

occupation: architect 

neighborhood: asbury bay

mbti: infp

pinterest

this is alex and he is the most beige human you could ever imagine.

he is THAT guy who considers “meal prepping” an extreme sport.

bio:

he’s from minnesota, which is like just a giant icy wasteland filled with nice, boring people who think a wild night is a trip to ikea (maybe that's what shaped his taste in interior design but we will get into that soon). his father frank is a civil engineer. his mother susan is an english teacher. he has a younger sister named amelia, who recently graduated from college. his parents' whole philosophy is hard work and practicality, which is just code for “let’s suck all the fun out of life.”

alex's dad richard was raised uber christian in small-town in lexington nebraska, but everything changed when he went to college. cue the culture shock: he met new people, encountered different ideas, and quickly realized the world wasn’t quite like the way he was told in his little church. he met susan, a free-spirited liberal who basically turned his worldview upside down. when they decided to get married, as you can guess, richard's family did not take that well and all hell broke loose. his family basically went all 'THIS IS THE FUTURE THE LIBERALS WANT!!!' route ofc.

because of this divine union, his dad has been banished from the good ol' conservative family circle. they probably think he’s gone to the dark side. he only keeps in touch with one of his cousins. (the one happens to be the father of alex's quirky cousin andrew. and andrew is a chaotic entrepreneur, who lives in silicon valley).

he is also cousins with miss dakota @dakota-perry

so it's safe to say they don't spend much time with his father's siblings. the Perry fam only visits them during holidays.....

little alex was the type who actually did his homework on time and actually got excited about things like mowing the lawn. so it wasn't a surprise when he graduated top of his class and got a scholarship to mit. he studied architecture because.... well, bc he had no other hobbies. and i guess alex wanting to become an architect ever since he was a middle schooler played a role in that decision too.....

he aced his courses, probably wearing one of those dreadful beige cardigans, and designed buildings that weren’t about to fall anytime soon. in MIT he was the one who did all the work in a group project while everyone else was off having a good time. not because he was a control freak, it's bc he actually loved architecture. nothing got his blood pumping like a well-drafted blueprint. and as you can guess, he wasn't exactly fending off crowds of admirers with his passion for structural integrity lsfkslafkalsf

alex in a group project:

after mit, he moved to new york cityyyyyyyyyyy (pls read that with laszlo's voice). he got a job at an architecture firm called thompson & rivera architects, a mid-sized firm with just the right amount of prestige without the snobbery. he had a little apartment in hell's kitchen. his place looked like someone took an ikea catalog, sucked out all the personality, and called it home. minimalist to the point of tragedy, with a potted plant that only survived because it couldn’t be bothered to die.

alex didn’t just wake up and decide to move to asbury for the fun of it(that would be far too spontaneous for the practical prince). his design firm, landed a new project: a modern, trendy boutique hotel in town. he was picked as one of the junior architects to join the senior architects in overseeing the project. he’s not the lead designer OBVIOUSLY, but he's definitely in the inner circle, making sure everything’s structurally correct.

personality:

alex is awfully practical, grounded, and a bit of a perfectionist. and he justifies this by saying "i’m not being picky, i’m being precise". alex's idea of a VERY WILD night would be marie kondo-ing his collection of architectural books and magazines. despite his boring demeanor, he actually has a sense of humor and SURPRISINGLY he can take a joke. to mingle with the local folks, he joined the local bowling team. tbh he’s not the most outgoing person, but he values deep, meaningful relationships over casual friendships. once he is your friend, that means it's going to last forever.

outside of work alex enjoys cycling. (actually a little bit too much, he is cycling around as if he is training for tour de france). and then there’s his cooking obsession. during quarantine, he got into cooking and suddenly became that person who binged every jamie oliver video in existence. next thing you know, he be baking his own sourdough.

well, he has 'mild' ocd. and when I say mild, that's actually an understatement. he is very particular when it comes to organizing his workspace—everything has its place, and he gets mildly irritated if someone moves his things. he’s known to be a bit of a coffee snob, always in search of the perfect cup, and can be annoyingly particular about his brew (as someone who does not know shit about the coffee, I wonder how am i gonna write about this little quirk but we shall see).

OH OH OH ALSO HE IS A HUGE FAN OF THE KILLERS

connection ideas

cycling buddy: soo this dumbass is in a cycling group called "the pedal -pushers," (so original, i know). the group is full of people who take their biking way too seriously. their conversations are not the most entertaining to be honest, such as the best tire pressure or which helmet brand is the best. alex usually shows up in full cycling gear, complete with a helmet with green reflective stripes. that was his way of celebrating the brat summer.

barista (friend or nemesis depending how much they can tolerate alex): a local barista and fellow coffee enthusiast who shares his love for a perfect cup of coffee. orrr simply hating him because he always finds some fault in his coffee.

bowling team / squad: he also recently joined a bowling team. i'd love to discuss the team name and its details, so feel free to hmuuuuu