#i mean i have a few little. like. plot bunnies

[tangledinink]

Do you know where you want tmwn to end? Like will it end around the same time the movie ended (in the bridge) or will there be a few more chapters with an aftermath of the movie that later leads to it closing off?

My current plan is for TMWN to 'end' after defeating the Shredder. The fic already stupid long, lmao, if I took us all the way through the movie and beyond it would end up being a ridiculous length. (Did you know it's already longer than Dune? I am deranged. It's my favorite fun fact to tell people outside of the fandom space. Their reactions are incredible.)

I do have this very vague thought of perhaps one day writing a 'sequel' fic that goes through the events of the movie, but I really want to finish the original fic, first, and I'm also not 1000% sold on the idea yet! My relationship with Apocalypse Timelines and such is a little complicated so I'm not sure right now. ^^;

[flowersandbigteeth]

Your wolf king husband defends your honor

General Plot: A visiting king and his son start trouble with Joel and Sterling

Wolf King (Sterling) x female bunny reader

Word Count: 2.5k

💕 SFW MASTERPOST 💕

W: sfw werewolf fluff, some fighting

“I’m going to grind you into mush!” Joel shouted and your attention flickered from the servant holding china patterns for you to choose across the garden where he should have been playing. 

“Joel! Get off of him!” you howled as you rushed across the lawn in your fluffy dress. You hurriedly tried to peel your newly adopted son off of the lion cub he was pummeling. Hearing your voice he threw another solid punch into the cub’s nose before standing in front of you defensively, growling and frothing at the mouth. 

“She’s not a real queen!” the lion cub, who happened to be the son of a visiting King pouted, smearing the blood that was running down his nose across his face. Joel had done a number on the slightly larger cub, leaving him with a big black eye in addition to the bloody nose. 

“I’m telling my father! We’ll- we’ll go to war with you and then I’ll eat her for dinner!” he cried as he ran away. 

You sighed watching the little prince go before turning your attention to Joel. 

“Baby, what’s going on?” you asked, turning his face to you to examine the little scratches the cub had given him trying to fight back. 

“He said you’re not my momma and that a herbivore can’t even be Queen, but he’s wrong. You are Queen and you are my momma!” 

You sighed, pulling him into your skirt and giving him a hug before reprimanding him. 

“While I agree with you,” you stated, “being a Prince means you have to use your words not your fists. You can’t start a whole war over me!”

He pouted up at you. 

“Yes I CAN!” he snapped back at you. 

You frowned and he at least looked a little contrite. 

“Do not raise your voice at me Joel,” you said firmly. 

He pouted but nodded. 

“Now let’s get you to the doctor to look after your cuts,” you said, taking his hand and leading him out of the castle garden. 

“He doesn’t know anything,” Joel said to you, squeezing your hand as you made your way through the castle, “he’s just a stupid lion. If he starts a war with me, I’m starting a war with him and MY daddy will win!” 

“There will be no wars,” you assured him, carefully hiding your smile. It was sweet that he was so protective of you. He’d declared himself your hero and went all around the castle correcting anyone who dared disrespect you. 

“We still have to have dinner with King Harold and his son this evening. It’s your duty as a prince to receive your guests with kindness and grace.” 

“But he disrespected you!” he argued. 

“Lots of people disrespect me, but I don’t go around punching every one of them in the nose!” you replied. 

He laughed. 

“Of course not! You’re a bunny! That’s my job! I’m a strong wolf. I will protect you.”

You wouldn’t lower his self esteem telling him he wasn’t quite a strong wolf, yet. 

“Sometimes we can protect people with words,” you explained, “you don’t have to fight everyone.” 

Joel bit his lip and you hoped he’d heard what you were trying to teach him as you showed the doctor the cuts and bruises he’d gathered. 

“How dare you?!” a high pitched voice echoed in the doctor’s office and a very angry looking lion Queen came barging in holding the lion prince in her arms as if he were just a baby despite his size. Her eyes immediately focused on you as you placed yourself between her and Joel. 

“That child is a monster! Look what he did to my boy!” she snarled and the sniveling prince peeked out over her arms looking as pathetic as he could, “he’s just like his mother! Unhinged! Unstable! A complete disgrace!”  

You had to hold in your sigh as the little boy appeared to be just fine, just with a few bruises, but everyone knew about Joel’s biological mother. How she’d gone mad and tried to set the castle on fire, in the end killing herself and several servants. She’d never been well liked to start with. She was a cruel wolf despite Sterling’s attempts to tame her and her legacy hung over Joel like a dark cloud. 

“I'm very sorry Amelia,” you said trying to placate the visiting Queen, “the boys were just roughhousing and I think things got out of hand. Joel is very sorry.”

“No I’m not!” Joel announced from behind you.  

“Well of course the boy is running wild with a weak mother…if I can even call you that!” she snapped, glaring at you, “and it’s QUEEN Amelia to you.” 

You tried not to narrow your eyes at her, Joel was technically in the wrong, but the little cub should have been well trained enough not to insult another prince in his own castle. Trying to be diplomatic, you brushed the insults away, turning your attention to the doctor. 

“I think he’s finished with Joel, Amelia,” you said evenly, “let’s have the doctor have a look at those bruises. I’m sure a lion cub can withstand a couple of bumps, don’t you? Or is Joel that much stronger than him?”

Amelia looked like she would have eaten you whole if she could, but you didn’t bother sticking around to continue taunting her, picking Joel up and plopping him on the floor so you could guide him out of the doctor’s office.  

“I told you lions are jerks,” Joel pouted as you made your way to your living quarters, hoping to keep the precocious pup occupied until dinner. 

“It’s not right to say all lions are jerks, you don’t know all lions,” you said and then gave him a little smile, “only she is a jerk.” 

Joel grinned up at you and you gave his hand a conspiratorial squeeze. 

—

Dinner started about as well as you had expected, which was not great. Amelia shot lasers at you from across the table, while Joel made faces at the little lion cub, whose name was Harry, after his father. 

“The chicken is dry, take it away and bring me another,” Amelia complained to your servants and with a flick of your eyes you gave your servant your approval to replace it. 

It had taken some time for the carnivores in the castle to accept you as their Queen, but the herbivores, which made up most of the staff adopted you immediately, thrilled to have a bunny represented in the aristocracy. They were always hovering around you, worried that you weren’t being cared for properly. 

A sheep servant gracefully set a new plate of chicken in front of Queen Amelia and you smiled your thanks. 

“I heard the boys had a bit of a tussle today,” Sterling said as he worked on his steak and you winced, hoping no one would bring it up. 

“Yes,” Amelia snarled, “your brat attacked my son and his so-called mother did absolutely nothing about it!” 

“Well of course not, Amelia,” Harold spat, “she’s just a bunny with a crown, what do you expect her to do with a wild wolf pup? He needs a carnivore mother to keep him in line.” 

“Maybe the boy is just too young to play with Joel,” Sterling commented, “Joel’s quite a bit stronger. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt the young prince. He just doesn’t know his strength and didn’t realize he needed to be delicate with him.” 

“Are you implying my son is weak?!” Harold snapped. 

Sterling shrugged.

“I’m only stating the obvious,” he said, “your boy lost the fight, he’s clearly not at Joel’s level.” 

Harold’s eyes flashed and his fork dropped. 

“My boy is NOT weak! Your son is a little monster, just like his mother,” he snapped. 

Sterling held back a growl, but he bared a sliver of fang. 

“His mother is sitting at the table with us and she is very gentle, I assure you,” he said, glancing over at you. 

You gave him a small pleading smile to stop this nonsense, but he only winked at you. 

“It’s unnatural,” Harold growled, “a herbivore mothering a carnivore…” 

“Your son’s nanny is a herbivore, is she not?” Sterling went on, poking the proverbial bear, “I’m sure she does more mothering than Amelia. I’m told she spends most of her time drunk…that’s probably why your son is so weak. He’s got poor role models.” 

Amelia growled, but it couldn’t be denied that she’d already had a whole bottle of wine by herself, not to mention whatever she drank before dinner. 

Trying desperately to guide the conversation elsewhere you inquired after Amelia’s meal. 

“Is the chicken better?” you asked, looking up from your mushroom bolognese. 

“No,” she snapped, “but of course a staff full of herbivores wouldn’t know how to cook meat properly. It’s disgusting. You should have carnivore cooks.” 

She glared at Sterling. 

“Are you letting this silly herbivore drain this castle of what’s left of its dignity?” 

“Queen (Y/N) has arranged a healthy, delicious meal that suits our tastes just fine,” he snapped, “perhaps the wine has dulled your senses.” 

“What are you implying?” Harold growled. 

“I’m not implying anything,” he snapped back, “I’m very clearly stating that your drunk wife can’t taste anything but spirits. Our cooks can’t perform miracles!” 

At that Harold jumped up from the table and bared his teeth. 

“Say that again, I dare you!” he snarled. 

“Your wife is a lush, and that’s why your son is soft,” he hissed back. 

You quickly looked at Joel who was watching the whole interaction with interest. When you glanced back Harold was flying across the table at Sterling, who was happy to receive him with a punch to the jaw. The two of them hit the ground in a pile of fists and fur and you quickly gathered Joel as your guards surrounded the two of you. 

For his part Joel was cheering his dad on, grinning from ear to ear. 

You couldn’t help but be frightened by the fight, but Sterling was significantly more fit than the lazy lion king and quickly had him pinned, while the rest of your guards surrounded Amelia and her son. Sparing the children the sight of his throat being ripped out in front of them, Sterling had the foreign king arrested and taken to the dungeon, while his wife and son were sequestered in their quarters. 

—

“What sort of example are you setting for Joel?” you pouted as you swabbed one of Sterling’s cuts with some cleanser, “I just got done telling him he can’t fight everyone!” 

He gave you a big grin. He didn’t need you to patch him up, but he liked when you did. So he’d forgone the doctor and you were standing in his bedroom while he sat on his bed applying ointment to his cuts. 

“He came at me first!” he argued, smirking at you, “I had to defend myself!” 

You crossed your arms and gave him a look. 

“You provoked him and you know it!” you said. 

He snorted and waved his hand, sweeping you towards him by the waist with the other. 

“He provoked me,” he said, one hand drifting up to play with your ear, as he seemed to like to do, “no one insults my Queen and the mother of my child and certainly not in my own castle.” 

“Fine,” you said, sighing, “but what now? You’ve probably started a war!” 

He shrugged. 

“We were going to war anyways. They came here with a bad attitude, intending to start trouble, not to make peace.” 

His fingers dropped to cup your chin. 

“And it was worth every lick to defend your honor.” 

Your cheeks warmed and you fluttered your eyelashes finding somewhere else to look.

“I’m not worth a whole war,” you muttered, focusing on his shoulder and brushing off a bit of dirt. 

He made a noise in the back of his throat. 

“Look at me,” he said a bit more gently, holding your chin between his large fingers he met your eyes with his shining black orbs, “you are worth this whole kingdom and more. You’re the glue that holds this family together and always have been, since Joel was just a baby and Gina…It doesn’t matter what you eat or what kind of teeth you have. You’re worth a thousand of those lions.” 

You balked a bit that Sterling didn’t even refer to her as Joel’s mother anymore. 

“I can’t do what I need to do without you and I don’t want to,” he went on, focusing on you again, “you are everything to me and Joel.” 

He leaned in to you and brushed his lips over yours. You gasped into his mouth as this was the first physical affection he’d shown you since you’d become Queen. You didn’t think romance would be part of your new job, that it was all just for Joel’s sake, but your heart pounded in your chest as warmth spread over you. He gave you another light kiss and leaned back to look at you, fingering your long ear gently. 

“So yes, I will take an insult to you as if I’d been insulted personally and I will defend you until the day I die,” he promised, squeezing your waist and holding you to him, “even if I have to go to war to do it.” 

Then he winked at you, his usual mischievousness returning. 

“And don’t bother fussing about it,” he said, “we’re going to show those lazy lions exactly how wolves protect what’s theirs, and we’ve already captured their King, so I anticipate it will be short. You’re a strong, elegant, beautiful Queen and the people love you. Don’t ever doubt yourself.” 

You nodded a bit weakly at him, a smile sneaking its way onto your lips. He gave you a gentle look and smiled back. 

“Momma! Did you see how Daddy took down that stupid lion!” Joel exclaimed, barrelling into the room, oblivious to the rising tension. 

“Yes, I saw,” you sighed, gathering Joel in your arms and giving him a little smile, “your father is very, very impressive and we are lucky to have him.”  

tag: @pinkrose1422

[fic-over-cannon]

Nothing Fucks With My Baby (Part 2)

link to part 1

jason todd x f!reader

summary: jason has always feared he’d be the monster of his life. what he doesn’t realize is that between the two of you, you will always be the bigger monster, and you will love him anyway.

tags: violence, murder, implied child abuse, manipulation, implied sexual content

rating: mature | wc: 5.8k

a/n: this plot bunny took over my brain and wouldn’t let me go until i’d finished it. reader’s pov can get pretty twisted, so please mind the tags on this one and let me know if i’ve missed any.

Lucy Nesbit dies remarkably young. Only eight years old and she had drowned in a stormwater overflow. Poor thing, the adults had all said. Should have minded her step better, shouldn’t have been playing in dangerous places. The school had held a week of mourning. A tragedy. It hadn’t taken much effort to kill her. A sharp shove, then kneeling on her back until the bubbles stopped, and suddenly there went Lucy. Stones thrown at recess, scissors searching for your hair, harsh names and turned backs all stopped with just a few moments of effort.

The killing of Lucy Nesbit is likely the most important lesson you learned from that school. No one at the foster home had noticed you come home soaking wet, blood on the tip of your shoe. No one had asked you any questions when you didn’t gasp with the rest of your class as the principal announced the death of poor little Lucy, gone too soon. Nobody had noticed that you had been the one to make the world a less scary place. It is a lesson you keep close to you.

Only Jason Todd had noticed anything different at all. Found you in the corner of the yard staring down at the pavement during recess. Tucked his hands and looked up at the sky, squinted.

“Don’t need me to look out for you anymore,” he sighs. Nudges your shoulder with his and says “Lucy won’t be pickin’ on you again.” He’s right, of course. She won’t be doing anything important really.

“Sometimes I wished she’d die so they’d leave me alone,” you whisper. “‘Cause it was bad when you were there but when she’d wait for you to leave it was always worse. Does that mean I’m a bad person?” It’s a thought that’s crossed your mind before. Is there something so wrong, so terrible about you that the well-fed well-heeled could just look at you and know there was something awful about you? The same thing that led to getting left behind, bullied, belittled. Had Lucy Nesbit taken one look at you and known you were something to be destroyed?

“Nah. You’re my best friend and I wouldn’t be best friends with anyone bad.” He grins at you, front left tooth still missing from where you’d helped him pull it out three weeks ago. The bell rings, shrill and discordant, signaling the end of recess.

It’s only years later that you understand the tremble of her lips and the wobble of her chin before she would call you names, dig her nails into the meat of your arm, lead the other girls in pretending you didn’t exist. Lovely Lucy Nesbit, sweet cheeked with glossy curls, had been afraid. She should have been. The new girl who’d only moved to the Alley recently after her father’s embezzlement conviction, oh she should have been afraid of the children chewing her up and spitting her out like a rotten peach. Instead, she chose someone else to make afraid. The little girl with only one friend and no one waiting for her at home. All of that glitz and Diamond District shine wasn’t enough to bury the ugly truth of Lucy.

Jason Todd dies at 11 years old. He dies at the hand of the Batman, Gotham’s own protector.

Three weeks after Catherine had died and two weeks after he stopped showing up to school, Jason shows up at your foster home. More particularly, at the window of the bathroom you’re currently hiding in. The knocking startles you, hands coming away from where they’d been pressed to your ears to block out the fighting. He grins and waves at you through the window, suspicious smears across his nose and temple. You have to stand on the very tips of your toes to push open the latch but you manage it. He presses his face to the bars, hands wrapping around the solid metal.

“Jason?” you ask, tone tinged with wonder. “What are you doing here?”

“Jus’ wanted to tell you I’m okay.” Something smashes within the house and the voices raise. “Couldn’t stick around for long after the funer— after. Didn’t wanna stick around to see if they’d stick me in a place like this.”

“But what are you going to do? Where do you live?”

“Found an empty building that’s pretty warm. Sometimes I find stuff and Mr. Baker at the garage buys ‘em from me so I can buy loads of snacks. You know—” there’s a loud pounding on the bathroom door, staccato sharp, that causes you both to jump. One of the older foster kids yells at you to hurry the fuck up, then slams on the door again for good measure. In a hurried whisper, Jason continues “You know the old building across the park with the purple window sills? Come find me there.”

The night Jason Todd dies, you’d managed to sneak out again. Knew from previous trips the best way to get to the old house was to go out the back and use the garbage bins to boost over the fence. Jason’s not there when you let yourself in, hands careful to put the loose board back exactly the same. He does this sometimes. ‘Finds’ things to sell to Mr. Baker so he can come back with candy from the bodega to share with you. You settle yourself in to wait in the blanket you’d snuck out for him when there’s a noise from the lane behind the house. Clutching the scratchy blanket closer to you, you feel your way through the dark, breath held in your chest like a treasure. The slats nailed over the painted window sills have just enough of a gap that you can see between them without being seen yourself. What you see out in the night causes you to grip the old wood until splinters dig into your palms.

The Bat holds Jason in his grip even as he struggles, even as he swears. Jason’s angry, snarling face is nothing like his smiles for you. The Bat shakes him as Jason tries to twirl out of his grip, head lolling like a doll’s. Jason goes limp as he is bundled into the looming machine parked down the lane. The last thing you see of him is his eyes, wide and fearful.

Jason Wayne puppets the body of your friend for years after. He is not the boy that stood between you and Lucy Nesbit and matched her stone for stone. This Jason Wayne smiles for pictures without baring his teeth as a warning. He doesn’t remember cruel words or the way the world works. He doesn’t remember the lessons and the secrets the two of you had passed between you. No, this Jason Wayne doesn’t remember you at all. The only explanation is that your friend is dead. The fine sweet thing with his round cheeks and charming school uniform you only glimpse in the paparazzi photos printed in gossip rags half-melted into garbage heaps is not your friend. Just another leech of the city with pretty powder and paint, fattened on too much while there exists too little.

You get the news that Jason Wayne has died while at your third foster home since the one Jason had found you in. You find out the same way everyone else in Gotham does, the public broadcast of Bruce Wayne’s press conference. It steals the breath from you, the anger that slams into you. Heat surges through you and it is all you can do to uncurl your fingers from their fists. It hadn’t escaped you that four months after Jason Todd died there was a new Robin in town. That this Robin had a gaped tooth grin that would make even the dull mourning for a girl you hated seem bearable. The red rimmed eyes of Bruce Wayne on the staticky screen of the common room television confirms what you already know: Bruce Wayne is the Bat and he has killed your friend twice over.

Screaming into your pillow that night, your understanding of how the city works crystallizes. The Bat does not protect you, does not make your city better. He takes and he takes until there is nothing left for you. He throws out in a week food that would sustain you for a month, drops money on batted eyelashes and shiny new toys for him to destroy more of the city with. He is not the saviour some people say he is. He will not save you.

You are the Alley girl with the strange knobbly knees and the eyes that see too much. You will save yourself. You will keep your lessons about the ways the world works and what it takes to change them close to your heart.

The City of Gotham is never short of two things: crime and government money to prosecute it. Certifying as a court stenographer isn’t cheap, not with juggling your ejection from the foster system at 18 and having no funds to speak of. Second and third jobs keep you afloat until the scholarships and grants kick in. But by 20 your future is secured, government pension squirreling away into your accounts. You even manage to buy the house with the purple windows. It goes for a song on account of the murder that took place there all those years ago, but brand new flooring takes care of the more suspicious stains. It should be enough, to have saved yourself. It isn’t.

Every day you go to work and dutifully take down every damning word said. You record the lies and the horrors and the not guilty verdicts and every word you transcribe breaks your faith a little more. You have not saved yourself. The world has not changed, you aren’t any safer than you were at 13 and scared that the drunk man calling out crude words might actually carry them out on your walk home. No safety exists save for the pretty little lie you had painted for yourself. The only thing that has changed is that you are not scrabbling in the dirt.

Somewhere along the way, in the mess of bureaucratic paperwork that had become your life, you had forgotten the lessons you were meant to remember. Forgetting had not served you well. It takes a drunken night out gone badly to force you to remember.

A coworker pressures you to come out with the rest of the stenographers, a newly opened bar just close enough to the edge of the Alley to give the old money blood suckers the illusion of danger. The dance floor is crowded but you choose to stay hunched over your drink, wary of this glittering crowd. A man sidles up to you, rests his forearm against yours and offers you a smile that reeks of Texas oil wells and Manhattan construction firms. You look him in the eye as he fumbles through some pickup lines, nearly sick with the realization that he doesn’t recognize you. DUI, ran through a school crosswalk at the end of the school day, one child dead and two permanently disfigured. Got off with community service and a hefty donation. He wants to fuck you.

The police find him behind the bar the next morning, throat slashed and wallet missing, and chalk it up to a mugging gone wrong. He should have known better than to go flashing so much cash so close to where criminals live, the news anchors tut. Unable to withstand the scandal, the bar closes. You savour the top shelf whiskey bottle you’d bought at their closing, the same one he’d tried to buy you and drug you with, and attribute the glow in your belly to having done a good thing. His driver’s license finds a home under your living room floorboards.

The Red Hood arrives and the Alley almost seems to reverberate with the shockwaves. Still, pretty young things with a hankering for a bit of rough to tell all their friends about with champagne glasses in their hands and haughty titters wind up dead. You don’t recognize all of them from work, some of them you simply want power over. To reveal to these silver spoon fed creatures exactly how fragile their influence is. Disposing of them does not save you, but it makes you feel safe to know that the world does not turn solely around those shiny, fragile things. You are careful and you are not caught.

At the courthouse, you watch the aftermath of the Hood’s vendettas play out. Chat about cases with your coworkers between trials just to get a feel for what his game is. He’s an unknown to most of them, but not to you. You look at how the number of drug convictions of minors plummet this quarter, watch at how fewer pimps get brought in for killing their girls, note the way gang violence reduces down to just the Hood’s own orders and you understand. Whoever the Hood is, whatever he is, he knows the same lessons engraved on your heart. That the world is not safe unless you make it, and that the world doesn’t care what methods it takes to get it done.

Your first run in with Gotham’s newest crime lord isn’t planned. Quite specifically, you had never intended to make your way onto his radar at all. He had different plans, however. Taking out the garbage, you all but trip over his feet one late night. He’s slumped against your fence with one hand pressed against his neck. Blood dribbles between his fingers, dark under the fluorescent burn of the street lights.

The gun pointing at your head does not dissuade you from attempting to push him into a standing position.

“If you wanted to die in my yard, the least you could have done is climbed in through the back,” you say, voice measured and cold. “I’m not letting you bleed out in my front yard and make me a target for whoever carved you that second smile.” That jolts a reaction out of him, gun wavering from it’s unerring focus on your face. “So what we’re going to do is get you out of the open and then I’m going to call whoever you want to come stitch you up.”

A man of his size dwarfs the chair set in your kitchen but he will not be moved from his vantage point. Defensive, back to the wall and all entrances in sight. The wound still bleeds sluggishly. Determined not to have this man die in your kitchen, not when he’s actually out there doing some good in the world, you lay out your first aid kit and go for his throat. The gun jamming into the side of your ribs immediately lets you know just how badly you’ve not thought this idea out.

“You’re still bleeding, pretty badly too. I just want to take a look to see if I can patch you up long enough until whoever gets here can do something.”

The moment draws out, neither of you saying anything. With every breath you can feel the muzzle of the gun dig into you further. Something must read as sincere on your face, not that you’d ever be able to name what it was, and he reaches up for his helmet. Pushes a button at the nape of his neck to release it, before deliberately placing it on the kitchen table one handed. He smiles at you with bloodied teeth and, oh, that’s your boy.

“Well,” he rasps, “get to it.”

At that exact moment you press down with gauze, forcing a grunt out of him. Good. Jason’s scared you enough for a single lifetime. Trying to secure the gauze with medical tape and spite, you’re forced to lean into him until the feverish glow of his skin warms your own.

“Not afraid ‘m gonna bite?”

“I know you’re not going to hurt me because you’re my best friend and I wouldn’t be friends with a bad person.” Leaning back, you inspect your work. Shoddy, but it’ll do until someone actually medically trained can stitch him up. Finally, you let yourself actually look at him. Behind the domino mask you’d swear there’s slack jawed wonder. A brusque knock at the back door interrupts the moment and then great big hulking men are carrying Jason away. You know he’ll be back.

The next time you run into the man who might be Jason, you are tripping out of a bar on the arm of your next pretty bright thing, too whiskey-headed to tell that you’re nowhere near as disoriented as you should be after what you’d knocked back. He knocks over a homeless man’s collection bowl and snickers when the coins get knocked down a grate. Grabbing your wrist, he tugs, pulls you into the side alley and tries to pin you behind the dumpster. The broken bottle shard is already in your hand when the man drops down dead. A neat hole in his head sending droplets all over your blouse. There’s no way dry cleaning will save it. The Red Hood steps into sight, gun muzzle lowered. And just like that, Jason Todd — not Jason Wayne — is back from the dead.

Jason kisses you sweetly for the first time after he drives you home from the traveling fair that had set up on the outskirts of the city. The feeling of his lips — soft, chapped, heartbreakingly gentle — slots something broken back into the hollow between your ribs. He kisses you and the axis of your world shifts. He kisses you, and you know that he will look at you like you are everything good and kind that you pretend to be if only you will love him back. The tender thing in your chest growing claws, fanning hunger into conflagration. Loving him will save you both.

He pulls back and you let him. Look up at him from below mascara-lengthened lashes and allow yourself a smile. Fiddle with the hem of your dress and tell him haltingly just how much you’d enjoyed the evening and how excited you were to do this again. Jason’s declared himself as yours for the taking and you will not let him slip through your greedy fingers.

You let Jason court you. Accept the flowers he brings to your door with quiet murmurs of appreciation. Wear soft dresses that invite him to touch but are just enough out of season for the weather so he’ll wrap his own jacket around you. Send him off to patrol with packets of his favourite candies tucked into his jacket pockets and laugh with him over the meals he cooks for you in the same kitchen he had nearly bled out in. You would have done most of these things for him anyway, but now they are your weapons. Each action meant to pierce another hook into his heart until he is as unable to leave you behind as you could him. You will never believe the world is safe without him in it.

The number of Gotham’s most elite reprobates coming to unfortunate ends zeroes out. You’ve got the prettiest up and comer on your arm these days, with his many scars and fearsome attitude. Jason in his many forms makes the world a better place, makes you safer with every bullet lodged in a skull. He is not the same boy that yelled at Lucy Nesbit for you or split a chocolate bar with you in an abandoned house. The cracks show through. Violence drips out of his every pore despite his hand wringing to you late at night. You are his confessor and absolve him of any sin. A fangless creature is useless to you, though you would grudgingly love it nonetheless.

The first time Jason sleeps with you, you engineer it, encourage it. Why? Because it ties him to you. Binds him through sweat and flesh in a way that nothing else but the kiss of death can. Lean in and wrap your arms low around his stomach as he drives you home on his motorcycle. Linger in his good night kiss before inviting him in to see how the flowers he gave you are doing. Sweep your hair away from your neck as you bend down to place his mug of tea on the rickety coffee table. You close your eyes and smile where he can’t see at the feeling of warm lips pressed to your spine.

It’s slow. It’s sweet. You’ve never felt like a more precious thing than in his arms. He looks at you like you’ve hung the moon in the sky and set the sun to burning. You kiss his scars and tell him to give you his stories when he’s ready. One day there will be nothing you don’t know about him. If Jason wasn’t in love with you before tonight, he is now.

You are told the tale of Jason’s deaths and rebirths only once, but it is enough to open up the yawning chasm of fear under you again. The world is not safe, not for Jason, not for you, not when so many of your enemies still walk this side of the grave. Gotham is safer after the Red Hood. Jason is still in as much danger as he ever was. The horror, the possibility that he could be cut down — by Falcone, by Sionis, by the Joker, by the Bat — it shakes you to your core. You want to scream, to rage. What you do instead is kiss Jason on the forehead and let him go to pieces in your arms.

Jason always says you bring out the best in him. If that is true, then he brings out the darkest parts of you. The parts that twist and grow cold until you see the world as sets of acceptable losses for acceptable benefits. In your eyes, any loss is acceptable for Jason’s sake. He becomes lighter after the revelation, no more secrets between you he says. Accepts your heartbreak on his behalf with teary eyes and a wry smile. The day he tells you that Bruce — his father, the Bat — had been the one to carve him open the time he’d turned up in your garden is the day he becomes wholly yours.

“Jason, Jason he shouldn’t have done that to you,” you say gently, cupping his wet cheeks in your palms. He won’t look you in the eyes.

“He was— he was lookin’ at me like I was the monster, like my murderer wasn’t standing there too,” he confesses. “I just wanted him to love me like when I was a kid.” He shatters. “I just wanted to feel safe again.”

“Oh honey,” you coo, shears tucked into your hand. “I love you, and you’re no monster to me. You know me, do you think I could love something truly evil? You do so much good, you help so many people and you ask for so little in return,” your gaze is tender, loving. “I’d keep you safe, Jay, if I could. And I’d do it because I love you. Someone that won’t do that, well, it’s no kind of love at all.” You see the blow land, have already calculated its trajectory and velocity.

“I don’t— but he loved me. He loves me,” Jason insists, plaintive and raw voiced. “Doesn’t he?”

“I think he might’ve once. When you were younger, sweeter. But Jason, everything he’s done since then hasn’t been love. If he still loves you, it wouldn’t matter that you came back different, came back changed.” You can feel the last threads of his relationship with the Bat fraying under the blades of your words. It’s time to make the final cut. “Can you really say he loves who you are now?”

Jason asks, once, if you ever thought about kids.

“I thought maybe I’d foster some day. Save some poor kids the same trouble I went through, so that others don’t run off scared like you did.” It’s a lie, of course, but you know it makes him feel better to think of you as anything but selfish. “Not now though, not with the way the world is.” You rest your head on his shoulder, curl your fingers into his shirt. “Besides, the life you lead is dangerous enough. It would be cruel to bring children into our lives right now. Maybe one day, if the world ever becomes a little safer.”

He hums, thoughtfully, and leaves the matter there. But the seed has been planted in the dark corners of his mind and one day they will bear fruit.

The house with the purple window sills is officially only a home to you, but Jason comes round for dinner, to spend the night in your bed so often, that it may as well be his home too. He listens to you talk about your long days at work, the court cases that worm their way under your skin and won’t leave until you purge yourself of them. Really, he’s more horrified than you were at the beginning of this at how badly broken the system is. You give no names, simply the crimes and the sentences, and even those details are too much to bear.

One night you come home from work silent. Red rimmed eyes dry and sightless, you collapse into him. It takes an hour, more if you count the time spent panicking over a hypothetical injury, to coax the story out of you. A snake in the grass of a financial adviser, stolen pensions, and three suicides. All charges dropped. The testimony of crying grandchildren still not enough to make a difference. It is the first time he demands a name from you. It is not the last.

The day your old foster father comes across your judge’s docket is the day the world finally feels less terrifying. He is acquitted, of course. The testimony of trauma victims are notoriously inconsistent after all, if the witness is truly traumatized and not just lying for attention. It hurts to hear his public defender say those things, but it does make what you have planned easier.

The moment Jason comes through the door you are on him. Clinging to him all weak limbs and fought back tears. He holds you gently and strokes your hair.

“I need… I need you to do something for me Jay,” you whisper into his chest.

“Just gotta ask baby.”

“I need you to kill somebody and I need you to let me watch.” He stiffens under you, but you will not lose him here. “D’you remember when you came to find me at the foster home, the one with the yelling?” He nods, presses a kiss to the top of your head. “That foster father walked free today, acquitted and all charges dropped. I need to know he’s not gonna stay that way Jay, that someone cared enough to stop him, or otherwise I’ll go crazy.” He exhales sharply through his nose.

“I’ll take care of him, jus’ like I take care of all those names you give me. But do you hafta be there? Isn’t it enough to just know he’s dead? I don’t wanna drag you down into the dirt with me.”

“You’re not tainting me, honey. You’re freeing me.”

You watch the man die, a slow drawn out thing as he begs for kindness. His pain means nothing to you. Only the final blow, dealt by Jason’s bloodied hands, shifts the burden of memory from you. You stop being afraid of this particular threat. The body is found scattered across the railroad tracks. Police mark it down as a suicide.

This victory is twofold. Your world is a little safer and Jason has killed for you, on your express order and with you as witness. There is no greater high than this, the power that sings through your blood. Jason will reshape the world to keep you safe. Now you will reshape the world for him.

It takes three more months of witnessing his work and not flinching before Jason brings him to you. In the end, it’s really quite simple. You ask for the chance to show Jason how much he is loved, to let you take care of this one thing to keep him safe. He puts up a token fight, insistent on keeping your hands clean of his business, but the two of you know that your hands are far from pristine. The Joker is bound at your feet by the end of the day. A quick drag of your wrist and he is just another thing to be taken out with Saturday’s trash to eventually be illegally dumped in the harbour. Jason sobs in your arms that night.

He is not the boy you’d wished to have returned to you as a child. Jason is not quite the Bat’s son, or the weapon of the League either. He is some half-raised creature of the city’s own design and you love him because of that. You know he does not see you half as clearly as you see him, but you will accept his wonderful naïveté for all the ways it will let you protect him. Protect you by extension. Jason’s trust, his devotion to you, it is everything you’ve ever wanted. It is more than you have ever expected to have. That forgotten little Alley girl, now the centre of someone’s world.

And so you plan. A list of names a mile long of people who make this city worse just by breathing. Kingpins and crime lords and all their networks, culled from your networks and court cases. Heroes and vigilantes who already work tirelessly to hamstring the work the Red Hood does, uncaring of all the lives he’s saved. A list that, when all of the occupants are dead, will mean you are finally safe in a world that belongs to Jason. Convincing Jason, with all of his infinite love for you, to wipe the slate clean of them all is still no easy matter. Instead, you let the Bat make your argument for you.

Another bar, another drunk cell-less jailbird, only this time you know that Jason is waiting in the shadows, that the Bat is in the rafters. The man stumbles, his too shiny shoes catching on the cracks in the pavement. Jason moves to raise his gun and a flicker of metal sends his aim wide. The man on your arm shies at the sound of gunfire but your grip is iron. A body slides between Jason and his prey and you refuse to let this one escape. The pen knife lodges beneath the jaw bone, catches on something and sticks. His death rattle is unsightly but he goes down easy, life slipping away down the sewer grate. A booted step, heavier than Jason’s, causes your head to snap up.

A wraith looms over you and it’s pure terror that sends your stomach into free fall. The Bat turns on you, advances until your back is pressed up against the brick. A gloved hand reaches for you but pulls back like stung when a bullet narrowly misses a finger.

“Last warning. Back. Off.” growls the modulated voice of the Red Hood. He prowls forward, legs eating up the distance. The Bat simply grunts. Back to the wall, you try to inch away, but the feeling of cold metal stops you. The cuff around your wrist cinches shut so tightly you can feel the bones of your wrist grind together. You whimper, high in your throat. Jason’s fist goes crashing into the cowl.

“I said back off!” the Bat catches his next punch, before returning a hit of his own.

“She just killed someone in cold blood, Hood. You’re protecting a murderer.”

“At least she did something, Bruce! D’you even know what that man did? What you let him do to this city?” he screams the last word then headbutts the Bat.

The alley descends into a flurry of blows, bodies colliding with metal and concrete. Neither of them notice you pick yourself up from knees and flee. Home’s not safe, not until Jason tells you. But he’ll come back for you. You’ve gotten so good at waiting for Jason, what’s a few hours more?

He finds you in the safe house he’d made you memorize the address of way back in the infancy of your relationship. Nerves have you sitting in the dark, too afraid that even a light will give you away. It is a cold kind of silence that blankets the small kitchen with its empty cupboards. Dried blood has started to flake off of your skin and you begin to pick at it. For a moment, the repetitive motions distract you until you can’t bear the prickly feeling on your skin anymore. With a clatter you rush to the tap, the trailing handcuff clanging against the metal sink. A stone rolls in your gut and you retch until there is nothing left in it. Everything rests on this. The future rests on this. You lean back and rest your forehead on the cool edge of the sink.

The sound of the window jimmying open causes you to jump, whirling around to face the threat. It’s Jason, only Jason, flailing around in the dark. The streetlights reflect off of his helmet, revealing the cracks in the patina. You launch yourself at him, fingers curling into the collar of his coat. He smells of blood and grime, but beneath it all, warmth. Jason crushes you to him, hand cradling the back of your head with a tenderness that overwhelms you.

“M’sorry I’m late baby,” he murmurs. “Why’s it so dark in here?” Unable to form words, you simply shake your head and press yourself closer. Fear has always dogged you, but never have you gotten so close to the source of it. Jason raises a hand and wraps it reassuringly around your wrist. “Let’s get some light and we’ll get this thing off of you,” he says while stroking a thumb over where the cuff digs into your skin.

You have to stifle a giggle at the absurd parallel to the night he tore back into your life. The two of you sat at a table tending to wounds inflicted by Gotham’s self-titled vengeance, the uncertainty of the future hanging over you. Hands gentler than they’ve ever been, Jason traces over the blooming bruises on your wrist, handcuffs discarded on the table.

“He’s never going to stop chasing me, is he?” you whisper, slow fear poisoning your voice. “He’s never gonna stop trying to take me away from you. Not while I’m alive.” Jason trails his grip to your palm and turns it over, brings it to his lips and places a featherlight kiss on your fourth knuckle.

“No, baby. Not while he’s alive.”

[infamous-if]

There's been some discussion recently about MC that caught my attention because I agree. MC feels like a loser when you think about all of the other characters. When I play an MC who did nothing wrong to Seven it just feels like Seven is angry for no reason. Seven is allowed to act like a child while MC has to take it? Doesn't seem fair.

Everyone has something going for them and what about MC? No one likes them and everyone hates their guts. Aren't they supposed to be the main character? Why does everyone hate them? Why aren't they considered more talented? It just feels like MC is a doormat while Seven and the other ROs are these talented superstars.

I don't want this to come off any way but I feel like the story would be stronger if you made MC a bit meaner or at least made people acknowledge MC as a better singer.

I don't want to sound rude but I'm very much exhausted by this topic. I've probably explained this 5+ times but I'll try to break it down one last time just so people can understand what I'm trying to do.

First, to get it out of the way, we are only on Chapter 2. I just want to reiterate that. The story just started.

It just feels like MC is a doormat while Seven and the other ROs are these talented superstars.

Secondly, MC is a character I try to give as much customization to, both personality and appearance wise. There's a variety of ways you can approach everything, or I at least try to in a way that doesn't sacrifice what I want to write for the plot, but I think people are under the impression MC is 100% a blank slate character when it's not true.

MC is still dependent on the plot and I always strived for MC to have their own narrative arc. The same way the ROs have their own character arcs, MC will have their own, because they are a character in their own right and going through some that fundamentally changes their life. That means the MC from Chapter 1 will not be the MC at Chapter 20. They will be different. That's what a character arc is. Character development is expected. How can you expect a slew of ROs to grow and change and MC remaining stagnant? Doesn't make sense narratively and it seems unfair to MC.

The MC is not a completely blank slate, and that's where people are getting it confused. In the beginning, MC is going through such a change with BOTB, without their family, and on the heels of a band breakup that's still impacting them today. MC is a little down, maybe even depressed if that's how you read it, and they're getting pushed to be leader by their manager. They are not really okay right now. They have to be professional and put on a brave face for the sake of their band, who, if you paid attention to what Rowan said in Chapter 2, are all depending on this. This is what they worked for since high school. MC is not going to flip a damn table on Day 1 just because you want them to. MC can fight, if you choose, against UWB. That's not supposed to be a smart choice, but emotions get the best of all of us.

They are only just navigating a worldwide globally famous show with a cheating allegation hanging over their heads, and a manager who wants them to be leader when, up until now, they haven't been. They've just been friends making music and miraculously having a fanbase. Now they're really in it. They have been thrust head first into the industry in a way that is so big that MC has to go from singer playing with their friends to a leader of a band who may just become globally famous in a few months if they play their cards right.

A lot of their actions are influenced by the fact that their band almost broke up and it's a thing that hangs over their head. Their past influences them. That's...how people work.

Now, if we're at Chapter 20 and MC is still acting like a scared bunny who doesn't know what they're doing, then be my guest. Scream in my inbox, I'd understand. That would be terrible writing, but we're not. The tour just started.

I play an MC who did nothing wrong to Seven it just feels like Seven is angry for no reason. Seven is allowed to act like a child while MC has to take it? Doesn't seem fair.

MC doesn't have to take it lol. I've always given an option to be rude to Seven/try to put them in their place.

People think I favor Seven when that's not true. (Seven isn't even my favorite RO)(That title goes to August lol). Seven acts the way they act because they are not in a healthy headspace. Their actions are not meant to be understood, because they are not entirely justified. Seven has a lot of growing up to do, but I have never sat here and advertised Seven's emotions as correct. Everyone knows Seven is childish, everyone knows Seven is handling everything terribly. People in the story have mentioned it. Their abandonment issues GREATLY influence their characterization and actions. MC has abandonment issues as well, of course, but MC is not as emotionally unstable as Seven. That's canon. It is what it is. Seven has a whole subplot about it.

As do other ROs. The only difference is that they're not so open about their struggles. Seven just doesn't care. Their emotions guide them. They can't control it. That's who they are. I have also said that many times.

I don't know why you think Seven can get away with everything when 1) it's only been 2 chapters and 2) no one knows how anyone feels about Sev because it's in MC's POV. Seven goes through their own trial by fire. As every RO does......thats a narrative arc.

Seven was always going to be a plot point, whether they were an RO or not. They were always going to be MC's former best friend.

Everyone has something going for them and what about MC? No one likes them and everyone hates their guts. Aren't they supposed to be the main character? Why does everyone hate them? Why aren't they considered more talented? It just feels like MC is a doormat while Seven and the other ROs are these talented superstars.

This one bothers me the most, mostly because I don't know where this came from. "No one likes them" Jenna and The Jewels does. Slow Crawl does. Their fans do. We haven't even properly met the other bands. Of course there will be bands who don't like MC: they're competitors. They're not friends. They don't know MC, why would they be biased towards them? Because they're the main character? They don't care about that?? It's how fiction works.

Maya is following the band around because of how much she admires MC.

Orion quit his job because MC's singing inspired him that much.

G listened to MC and saw something in them. Literally calls them the 'Chosen One'

Fans of the old band preferred MC over Seven. They liked the songs where MC sang solo. MC was better for their future over Seven. Hence why it was Seven getting demoted, not MC. I've said this. It's in the story.

I don't see how being the lead singer of a band on a global show at 26 makes anyone an actual loser but I digress.

Literally in Part 2 MC is acknowledged so maybe it'd be better if we waited? Say a good few chapters...?

If you wanted a story where MC is Queen level famous right out the gate and the #1 draft pick for BOTB and has no problems and better than everyone, then I'd advise you to look elsewhere. I don't like that. I like giving MC obstacles because conflict creates story. I like MC having to fight for their spot. It's more realistic, and this has never been a story of fame. It's been a story of their journey to fame.

That's their narrative arc. They grow into it.

You are allowed to hate/dislike Seven. I encourage it. I have given MC the option to hate Seven, because I'm aware that what Seven is doing is unfair. I am not punishing you for hating Seven. And this goes for all the ROs. It does not bother me if you dislike my characters. It means I haven't made them squeaky clean and have made them realistic enough to have people both dislike and like them, much like real life. I get it.

I've always advertised Infamous as a messy, angsty and dramatic story. I've used the term 'melodrama' for it often. I've always said the ROs--especially Seven--are flawed. Some more than others. I've said, verbatim, they are not wholly good people. I don't know why people act so shocked when they act some type of way. Like...I've always stayed true to what the story is. Half the dynamics aren't healthy right now...but that's the 'growing up part' of the story we haven't even gotten to yet?

If that doesn't interest you, then that's perfectly okay! If you don't like the narrative arc I have planned for MC, that's fine too! It just becomes a bit disheartening when people ignore the narrative.

I will try harder to write in a way that specifies my intentions. I always believe that if more than a handful of readers have the same complaint, then it's on the writer to fix it.

I hope my tone didn't come off rude, I'm just really really tired of this. I've had to deal with this since even before the demo dropped :) but your critiques are valid and everyone is always free to express themselves however they want. <3

[suzukiblu]

Some assorted Smallville headcanons from some of my assorted WIPs for Plot Bunny. They did not specify which WIP they preferred, so I just picked a bunch of different ones and went from there! 

Smallville does not approve of Clark Kent’s parenting style: Smallville is a tight-knit, proud little community where everyone looks out for each other that is full of people who want to continue living in a tight-knit, proud little community where everyone looks out for each other. The population at large still considers Clark one of their temporarily-displaced own and were therefore very willing to pretend to believe the “cousin” story when “Conner” showed up–right up until they found out it was NOT a story meant to help Clark’s displaced kid he’d just found out about settle into the Kent family in a low-pressure environment while he got over whatever obvious trauma had happened to him. Now? Now there are pitchforks being sharpened and torches being lit. CLARK JOSEPH KENT, YOUR HOMETOWN IS NOT MAD, JUST DISAPPOINTED. 

Kara gets to Earth on time and the Kents get a two-for-one special on free kids: Smallville is pretty sure Jonathan and Martha did NOT get this emotionally-fraught teen mom and her weird but adorable little baby from any actual adoption agency, Norwegian or not, but what’s a little illegal immigration and identity fraud between neighbors? None of THEIR business, no sir. Especially not if any strangers ever show up in town asking QUESTIONS. 

Jon and Martha, professional soulparents: Oh Jon and Martha absolutely will be clearing out the attic to make Conner a bedroom the absolute SECOND they get back to Smallville. And also being heartbroken about Clark, obviously. Everyone in Smallville is going to cry on them when they hear about Conner and be both very sad and very happy for them. And then they’re all gonna be Weird About Conner, who isn’t gonna know how to talk to ANY of them. He’s gonna get his cheek pinched by so, so many old ladies and SO many manly back-claps and it’s gonna be a pain controlling his TTK enough to actually let people do it. Meanwhile, everyone in Smallville, internally: oh he’s exactly as weird as Clark was when he first showed up, noted. Jfc, Jon and Martha, AGAIN?? WHERE DO YOU EVEN FIND THESE KIDS. 

Kon is too trans for this pregnancy shit: No one in Smallville knew a thing about Kon’s physical sex, so they’re all gonna be VERY surprised very soon, but also Smallville in general is gonna take that whole reveal like CHAMPS and just roll with it, even if it might require some people having some Talks With Their Kids And/Or Slightly Bigoted Relatives. Like, there will be a few assholes and a few over-inquisitive weirdos around, because nowhere is a monolith, but overall Smallville is gonna roll with it and be chill about it while ALSO being incredibly out of touch with the up-to-date terminology/language and having very little grasp of the minutiae of queerness in general ( aside from a couple of very quiet people who are gonna feel a WAY about finding out that Conner Kent is trans and went completely unclocked all this time, and seeing how most of the town’s taking finding out really well, and does that maybe mean . . . ). 

the one where Kon isn’t the father: Smallville has politely not asked any questions about Tim aside from if he wanted a baby shower or not, but also ALL of Smallville knows Tim was Conner’s “boyfriend” and Kyra is “his” daughter. That’s just gossip-by-osmosis that all of Smallville knows. A lot of casseroles and crocheted things and quilts have happened to the Kent household since Tim showed up pregnant and traumatized. And baby stuff donations. And babysitting offers. And general helpfulness in general. People weren’t necessarily close to Kon, but a lot of people felt very bad about what HAPPENED to Kon, especially after finding out about Kyra. Not that any of them actually KNOW what actually happened to Kon or the truth about Kyra, but that’s a clone of a different gene donor, okay?? OKAY.

[queers-gambit]

My Date With the President's Daughter

part one: Blue Bunny

prompt: your father finds out about Tangerine in the worst way during a charity gala before marauders try to rob it.

pairing: Tangerine x female!reader

fandom masterlist: Bullet Train

word count: 6.3k+

note: a little Disney Channel throwback in the title anyone?

warnings: use of Irish names that DO NOT dictate race, more Mafia antics, short smut / interrupted smut (you'll see), NSFW i think, mature content, cursing, chaos and violence, weapons: guns and knives, blood. dead bodies, reader's a Daddy's Girl, abrupt ending, slight angst, more hurt and comfort i guess, author still has no idea what this plot is - revoke her internet access.

The theme of the gala that night was inspired by the Palace of Versailles; regal, royal, glittering and so very, very gold. It was held at one of the most expensive hotels in the city, the entire building rented out in preparation with three different caterers and expensive bottles of alcohol being served. The gala was THE place to be - most people vying for an invitation, everyone who was anyone in attendance; dripping in designer clothes, shoes, and jewelry that sparkled in candlelight.

Every single year for the past 25 years, your legendary father hosted a large charity event that your mother was project manager of - meaning she chose the themes, decor, and the invite list. Only elite persons (both in the public and private eye) with deep pockets were invited, knowing they'd cut a large check if they wanted your father to stay out of their business territories. So, in honor of the richer-than-rich attendees, your mother used grand and golden decorations; creating a tastefully regal atmosphere for those who didn't actually have a drop of royal blood in their veins.

You father, Fallon, meaning "leader" in the ancient Celtic language, looked as handsome and dapper as ever; his tux dry cleaned, steamed, ironed, and tailored, paired with clean and shining dress shoes that had a bright red sole. His hair was slicked back, tattoos on his neck visible from the swept-back style.

Your mother, Maeve, whose name meant "she who rules", looked like she had just walked off a runway. Her dress hugged her slender and impressive figure, the material shimmering under the soft lighting. Her heels were high, hair pinned off her neck to show off bright diamond earrings that matched the thin chain of glittering gems around her collarbones, the sparkling tennis bracelet, and the absurdly large wedding ring on her finger. Her face was lightly painted with make-up, always a woman who didn't need much - if any at all. You prayed to age as gracefully as she.

Your brother, Oisín - pronounced [Oh - Sheen] - meant "little deer"; a cheeky but shy lad at the ripe age of 10. He wore a matching tux as your father, and had an emerald broach pinned on his lapel to indicate he belonged to your family. His au pair was supposed to be watching him so you could mingle with donors, but Oisín didn't stray from your side; a wee hand holding the material of your expensive dress on your hip to keep himself from getting lost.

The gala was crowded. Large event room stifling, requiring the air be turned on. Perfume assaulting the senses in a clash of scents.

The trademark "cha-ching" sound effect echoed in your mind as you shmoozed a few guests into their donations; impressing your brother by how easy you made it look. You thanked each donor with a pretty smile and fluttering lashes, floating around the room to meet other investors; giving them your family's charity's mission statement and explained where their money would go. Most of the people in this room were seedy criminals - similar to your father - and the other few were corrupt politicians who were nestled in the criminal's pockets.

By no means was the night boring, but this was work for you; all business, no pleasure.

The decor your mother chose had a lot of glittering gold details; a few imported busts and statues, an entire wall full of sculpted grass to mimic the Palace's own garden designs; artwork hung in thick, intricate frames, bright crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The event hall was specifically chosen for the floor-to-ceiling windows, sculpted shrubbery planted around the room; banquet tables covered in white cloth and chairs made of white plush - complimenting the detailed golden accents. It was gorgeous, you were impressed by your mother's attention to detail.

You wore a dress made of fine silk, the pretty green hue complimenting your skin tone; hair left down, pinned at the sides, showing off the dangling, expensive earrings your father gifted you on your 18th birthday. You, too, wore heels that forced you to walk taller and with calculated steps; rimmed eyes darting around to ensure there wasn't any shady business transpiring. But when surrounded by people who made their living by being sketchy, it was hard to clock each and every movement; being why your father had hired a very specific (and loyal) security service.

With several checks in hand, you visited your father's banker, a mute man named Bradley, and handed them over for safe keeping; your brother able to practice his sign language. Bradley was happy to reply, your entire family versed in multiple languages, and showed the young lad his process of collecting and documenting the donations. After tallying your new checks to the grand total, he used British Sign Language to inform you and Oisín of the updated tally generated so far.

"Why does Daddy need to do this?" The young lad asked, holding your hand tightly; not being a fan of social interactions - especially to this magnitude.

"To keep business moving squeaky clean," you answered softly, smiling at a few who passed you. "Money makes the world go 'round, don't it?"

He sighed, "Do we know all these people?"

"We do, they're Daddy's associates," you nodded, "and you best believe, they all know us. See, one day, you'll learn their names and what businesses they provide, how Daddy keeps them all employed."

Oisín looked uncomfortable, wondering, "Are they dangerous? Like the guys that came for Christmas?"

You came to a halt around the edge of the room, caressing his head while being careful not to muse his hair out of place. "They're all dangerous, in their own way, yes, lovie. But," you lowered into a squat so you could look your brother in his eyes, "you'll learn, Daddy's much more dangerous. So, we host events like this t'keep everyone happy and in line, you see? It's a power play."

He nodded, glancing around the room of adults. "Do I have to stay the whole time, though? Mommy said I could invite Darrel and Kevin - they're over there," he pointed towards one of the round tables, two of his classmates laughing with their mothers standing off to the side. "And I'm hungry!"

"Oh, you're a hungry lad, is it?" You smiled, watching his head bob. "Well then, in that case, we should feed you, huh? C'mon," you straightened and offered your hand, which he took gratefully. "We'll get yah fed, sweetums, and you can hang with your friends, yeah?"

"Daddy won't be mad?"

"No, I'll tell him you did really well tonight, helping me collect donations," you winked, leading him to one of the catering tables. You made up his plate with different options, carrying it to the table his friends, Darrel and Kevin, were sat at.

The boys - who looked adorably dapper in suits and bowties - greeted your brother happily; letting you set his plate down and greet the mothers kindly to thank them for their attendance that night.

"Oh, Miss!" Your brother's au pair, Lisa, hustled up to you, "I'm so sorry, I lost track - "

"No, no, 's fine, you're all right, deep breath, love," you assured, squeezing her upper arm. "Having a good night so far?"

"Oh, it's magical, Miss, innit?" She beamed, looking around in wonder. "Never been before despite working for your family all these years, I'm grateful for your mother's invitation tonight."

"Oh, we're very happy to host yah, sweetheart," you smiled. "But, uh, you mind keepin' an eye on Oisín for me? I've gotta work a bit more. He just wants t'hang with his friends, think he's a bit tired."

"Of course," she rushed.

"I'd wager you can take him t'bed after Daddy's speech, hmm? I know he'll want Oisín here for that, at the very least."

Lisa agreed, mingling with the other mothers as you pecked Oisín's head and told him to behave, that you were gonna go back to working the gala; which he at least acknowledged before being sucked back into a card game with Darrel. You didn't mind the blow off, liking the idea that he had as normal of a life as possible - a farfetched idea considering your father ran the bloody Irish Mafia and all. He's attended three different schools since he started his educational career, so you were content to leave him with his friends; letting boys be boys.

After making another deposit to Bradley, you visited one of the modern and unique glass bars (one of three stations) while feeling somewhat dejected by the night's missing guest. But speak (or think) of the Devil and He shall appear.

"You weren't kiddin' when you said your family goes all out for events like this. Jesus fuckin' Christ," a familiar, accented voice crooned; a body saddling up to the bar beside you. You first saw his hands clasped together on the bar, recognizing the golden rings and single bracelet, smirking as your eyes lifted to meet that of Aaron - or Tangerine.

"You're late," you mused, locking eyes with the bartender and holding up two fingers; indicating you now wanted two of the drinks you ordered, him nodding.

"Sorry 'bout that, love, yeah, no, Lem and I got caught up in somethin', had ta deal, then get cleaned up for yah. Figured you wouldn't want us walkin' in here with blood on us."

"You'd be right," you hummed, red painted lips stretching in amusement as you both casually leaned on the glass bartop with your forearms. "Doesn't matter, you're here now - thank God."

"That bad, huh?"

"Not like previous years," you admitted, sending a glance over your shoulder at the group of milling socialites. "Since Daddy inducted The Agency, some traction's picked up believe it or not. Seems like a lot of people like the idea of contract killers for hire and investing in the Black Market. Seems like you lot really up the ante, don't'cha?"

"Ah," he smirked, "you're welcome, then. Happy t'be of service."

"I'll only thank you when you make a donation to the cause."

"Yeah?" He smirked. "Well, you got anywhere private for me to write a check, then, love? Can't have anyone knowin' I'm charitable, got a reputation to uphold, know what I mean?" Then he leaned in real close, lips ghosted against your ear and making a shiver shoot down your spine, "C'mon, doll, 's been 3 weeks since I've seen yah."

"I know," you sighed, "but we've been busy tonight. Plus, Daddy would kill you - like, actually kill you - 'cause he's listed you specifically for me to stay away from."

"And yet, here you are, naughty girl, huh? Disobeying orders?" He smirked and put a space between you for the sake of appearances, two glasses of whiskey set before you. "Your Daddy's been preoccupied all night, love - don't think he'd even notice if we pop out for a bit. 'Fraid to admit but if I don't get you alone soon, I might actually lose my shit, darlin', honestly."

"Aaron, sweetheart, my family is hosting this event and we're responsible for collections," you deadpanned, but smirked, "'s a bit inappropriate to abandon such an important night by sneaking off."

"Can't tell me you're not tempted."

Now, you full-on grinned, "I didn't wear panties for a reason."

"You fuckin' tease," he growled over the rim of the crystal glass. When he tasted the whiskey, he hummed in shock, looking at the amber liquid, "Fuck me, that's nice."

"My family may or may not own several distilleries. You're drinking an exquisite, 15-year ol' whiskey, love." You took your own sip, casting another look around the room, finding your brother first, still with his friends before locating your parents. They were pleasantly distracted by an ambassador, making you grin at Tangerine, "C'mon."

"Hey?" He wondered, quickly setting his half-drank glass down as you snatched his free hand to quickly lead him away. He smirked and casted a look over his shoulder, instantly meeting Lemon's eyes - finding him laughing at the pair of you, toasting his drink at his brother in impression as if he knew what you two were up to.

Thanks to Thomas the Tank Engine, Lemon definitely knew what you two were doing - being excellent at reading people.

You lead your lover out of the event hall, checking up and down the empty hall and missing the way one of the security guards clocked your escape. You lead Tangerine into the large, private, unisex bathroom; shoving him against the closed door and instantly latching onto him in a deep kiss.

He was fully prepared, catching your hips; hissing a breath in through his nose, releasing a gentle moan out of sheer relief. When you pulled back, he grinned, "Got no idea how much I fuckin' missed yah, darlin'."

"Missed you more," you whispered in a rush, arms wrapping around his neck as he simultaneously began backing you up. It was a hungry kiss; heated, passionate, teeth clanking from impact, both attempting to make up for lost time. Ever in-sync, both your mouths opened to push your tongues against one another; exchanging saliva and the taste of expensive whiskey.

"C'mere," he panted after having backed you into the sink counter, seizing hold of your silken hips and hoisting you upwards. Your mouths were never far apart, joining together once more now that you were sat at a vantage point. Your hands shoved his navy blue suit jacket from his shoulders, it being set aside to the other end of the counter while you worked on his belt. "Never goin' this long again," he mumbled into your kiss, pushing the material of your dress up to let your legs spread wider in accommodation. Your lover rushed, "Jesus, fuck, feels like forever, don't it?"

You nodded as his hands pushed under the bunched material to grip the plush meat of your thighs; giving a gentle massage before sliding them higher until he met your bare hips. The cold counter bit into your exposed flesh.

"Oh, fuck me, you really didn't wear panties?" He groaned, glancing down as he lifted silk from your lap to catch a glimpse of your bare cunt - ready to greet him.

"Had a feelin' you'd show up, you just can't stay away, can yah?" You smirked, cheekily licking his lips as his belt clattered open. "Thought you'd might appreciate it," your chuckle was swallowed by his moan as the zipper of his trousers sounded almost shrilly to your over heightened senses. "Just need you close, so fuckin' close, please, missed you, baby - "

"No idea how much I've missed you, love, fuckin' hell," he rushed, reaching into his briefs the moment you had loosened the waistband of his tailored trousers to take hold of his cock. "This ain't gonna be nice an' easy, love, yeah? All right?" He checked, feeling you slide to the edge of the counter.

"Didn't think anything else," you grinned, gasping lightly when the head of his cock swept up and down your slit. "Plenty of time for that later, just need you fuckin' close - closer than close."

"Feel how fuckin' wet you are already? Goddamnit - "

"All for you, baby, c'mon, don't tease - "

In a single motion, Tangerine sheathed himself in your warmth, grinning in mischief, "Huh? Sayin' somethin', weren't yah, doll? Go 'head, finish your sentence, 'M listening."

You only chuckled, hands holding his neck and bicep in vice grips to keep yourself anchored as close as possible to him. "Three weeks without yah, and you wanna provoke me?" You whispered, feeling him begin to thrust in agonizing movements.

"Wouldn't be me if I didn't, huh?"

You chuckled breathlessly - gasping when, suddenly, the bathroom door burst open. You were facing that way, looking up from Tangerine's shoulder, only to discover your worst fear. "Holy shit! Daddy!?" You squeaked, Tangerine jolting and cursing in a hushed tone as he instantly yanked out of your wet warmth.

"Oh, you betta be fuckin' kiddin' me," your father seethed. "The fuck is goin' on here!? What the fuck are you goin'!? Who the fuck is that - is-is-is that who I think it is?" He growled, your lover fumbling to tuck himself away and pull his trousers back together - not moving from between your legs in an effort to preserve your modesty. But he had turned slightly to give your father a glimpse of his face, making your Daddy snarl, "Oh, bloody fuckin' hell! You serious? Fuckin' Tangerine, is it? You lost your mind, girl!?"

"Daddy, please," you warbled nervously, tears of anxiety gathering.

"Get the fuck out here - now! Boff of yah's!" He commanded in a roar, stepping out of the doorway.

"Oh, holy fuck," Aaron breathed, latching his belt and looking at you with wide eyes. "Well, was nice while this lasted, huh? Gonna miss yah, pretty girl - "

"The fuck are you - "

"He's gonna fuckin' kill me, sugar," Tangerine frowned, your dress falling gracefully into place when you slid off the counter. "Your father's gonna fuckin' kill me, Goddamnit," he pulled his suit jacket back on. "Think I can make it out that window?"

"He already knows it's you, runnin' now won't help," you sniffled, shaking your head and moving for the still-opened door. "You didn't think to fucking lock the door? Jesus fuck, Aaron..."

He followed after you, meeting your father in the empty hallway outside where the gala was in full-swing. He looked enraged, jaw clenched and wide eyes ablaze, looking the both of you over in disgust. "You out of your bloody mind you stupid girl? Huh?" He demanded, "I told you - very clearly - you weren't to fuckin' see him again."

"Daddy - "

"And this is how I find out? Huh? That my daughter doesn't respect my authority or listen to my words? How the fuck do you think people would react to that? They see you disobeying and get the idea to do the same."

"I'm not yours to command - "

"You're my daughter!" Fallon barked in anger, "My only fuckin' daughter, which means, you are, indeed, mine to command - just like everyone else in this fucking organization! You understand? My word is law - "

"This isn't just some petty fling, Daddy, that I'm engaged in to pass the time! I'm in love with him!" You blurted out, eyes widening when you heard your own words and watched your father's face fall.

"Beg your pardon?" He seethed slowly. "Have you gone mental? Finally fuckin' lost it? Huh? You must be outta your Goddamn mind if you think you love this silly fuck! He doesn't love you back, Y/N, you're just a coveted prize because you're my daughter - it's a thrill to men like him! Women like you, you're just trophies! There's no authenticity - "

"With all due respect," Tangerine interrupted boldly with anger lacing his words, "but you've got it all wrong, sir. Your daughter is the most important person t'me - outside my bruva, of course. She's not a trophy to collect, she's not a dainty object for me to store onna shelf - she's not a notch on my belt. But you're right about one thing," his arm extended around your waist, "she is the most coveted prize - but that's because of who she is, not who her father is. She's my prize, yeah, because she's the end goal men search their whole lives for and for whatever reason, she fuckin' chose me. I consider it the greatest honor - "

"You got some fuckin' nerve, don't'cha?" Your father growled. "You know what, lad? Since it's evident my daughter doesn't take me seriously, maybe you'll be smart enough to heed my warning. You leave her the fuck alone or - "

"I can't do that, sir," Tan refused, "'cause like it or not, I'm mad for her. Absolutely stupid for her. I love your daughter past words, don't even think I've ever loved someone 'cause bein' with her feels so fuckin' different in comparison.

"That so?"

Tangerine nodded, other hand shoving into his pocket to toy with the cool metal of golden brass knuckles. "There's nobody in this world like your daughter, sir. Bein' in love with her is like euphoria, yeah? Makes me think back and realize how wrong I was about my feelings for anyone else 'cause of how I feel for her. I say there ain't no way I've ever loved anyone else 'cause I've never felt this way before - I've only felt this type of love with your daughter. Yeah? She's fuckin' everything to me, so, with respect, I can't stay away. I won't."

"Yeah? Yeah? Fuckin' fine. All right, sure, let's see if The Agency has anythin' t'say about this, huh? When I pull the plug on this deal, I'll be sure to tell your employers why and let them deal with you for ruining this business partnership."

"Daddy," you gasped, rushing when he turned for the event hall's doors, Aaron following swiftly. You caught the metal doors when your father yanked them open and strode into the room, doing your best to catch him before he did anything too rash. "Wait, wait, Daddy, please, just listen, listen to me - I didn't mean for this to happen!"

"Didn't mean for what? Me findin' yah fuckin' in the bathroom like a desperate whore?" He snarled over his shoulder, the thick crowd slowing him.

"Well, yes, but I also didn't mean to fall in love with him! All right? But you know better than all of us that it's not a choice, it just happens! Look at you and Mum - "

He rounded on you, Tan at your flank, opening his mouth to scold you when something caught his eye behind you. You didn't have time to question him as rapid shots filled the air, a telltale sign of an automatic gun being fired in the crowded room. You flinched slightly, Tangerine instantly grabbing your waist to cover your body with his; turning to locate the threat, only to discover a gaggle of men in all black wearing ski masks and duffel bags on their shoulders.

"Friends of yours?" Tan snipped at your father, keeping you low as the crowd shrieked in panic - all trying to escape, still being shot at. This caused the seedy individuals with guns to take a stand and shoot back at the intruders, creating mass confusion and limited advantages.

"Bruv!"

"Brian," Aaron panted, people bumping into one another as they panicked in a flood of bodies. He looked down at you and then to your father, Fallon, only to find blood blooming under his white button up. "Oh, fuck," his eyes widened, gunshots still sounding, "right, we gotta move - can deal with everything else later. Here, here, here," Tangerine plucked a cloth napkin from a nearby table and shoved it over your father's wound to help staunch the bleeding.

"They got the doors, mate," Lemon shook his head when you noticed your father's wound. Luckily, it didn't appear to be in a fatal location, his hand holding pressure as the security detail were being gunned down. "The fuck do we do now?" Lemon asked over shrill shrieks.

"What we do best," Tangerine answered, pushing your father into action and brandishing his gun. "Stay close - "

"I'm not leaving without my wife and son!" Your father growled.

"Lem!"

"On it," he agreed, disappearing into the swarm of people.

Your lover kept you close, shoving through the crowd to lead towards a set of heavy metal doors. Several men stepped in your way, Tan sneering, "Right, fuck this." He opened fire.

You squeaked in shock when a different body tackled Aaron from the side to knock him out of sight, your father keeping a hold on you as straggling bodies dropped around you. "There he is!" You heard over the confusion, locating a set of men surging towards you.

There was nowhere to go, leaving you to physically block your father in a bid to protect him - not needing to when Tangerine intercepted the two threats. He didn't have his gun anymore, lost in a stampede of feet on bloody marble floors, opting to use his fists and brute strength against the robbers. The brass knuckles helped.

You had to admit, it was the perfect night to attack considering how much money Bradley was keeping track of. Plus the fact that everyone's guard was down made tonight the perfect opportunity for marauders to act against your family.

However, in a sea of confusion, you were separated from your father's side; losing him amongst the people and feeling a tight hand seize your upper arm. "I got the daughter!" The man in a ski mask informed through the visible comms system. "Moving for the south wing, bring the van around t'the alley."

"Aaron!" You begged, trying to wrangle free but discovering your strength was nothing compared to the 6'3'' goon's. "Aaron! Aaron, please! Help!"

"Shut the fuck up," the man snapped, backhanding you and never releasing his grip. A single trickle of blood oozed from one nostril as the man's ring split your bottom lip. "Fuckin' move!" He barked at you in a thick accent, "Move, bitch, let's go!"

"What do you want!? Please, just - just tell me! I can give you whatever it is - please! Fucking let go!"

Another enemy joined you, sneering, "Oi! The fuck you doin'? Don't damage the goods, fuckin' idiot, we gotta keep her in decent shape for the ransom! Fallon ain't payin' if his daughter's been assaulted - "

But a gunshot boomed and the other man's body jolted before falling flat on his back - dead with a hole in his forehead. You tried to capitalize on your captor's shock, unsuccessful, feeling blood splatter on your back from a different fallen body. You saw your father under the wing of his security, his own gun being used in defense, begging, "Daddy! Daddy, help!"

The one night you don't ensure your thigh holster's filled, of course this happens!

Fallon was only able to watch as Tangerine fought his way up to you struggling in the bulky man's grip; impressed when one contract killer engaged another. "Oi!" Tan barked, "Hands off my girl, yah fuckin' lunatic!" He threw several punches, the goon forced to release you to defend himself. Fallon watched as Tangerine waited until you were freed and a step to the side before opening fire again - killing the man who dared touch you. He realized that Tangerine had waited until you were clear to take the shot - feeling impression plant in his gut. Yet there was no time to dwell as intruders circled him.

"Oh, my God!" You whimpered, bodies left in growing pools of blood; your dress dragging in the tacky substance to paint abstract swirls on the shining floor; trying to avoid being swept up in the streams of panicking people. Your name was barked, another hand grabbing you, but this time, it was Lemon - sprayed in enemy blood.

"C'mon, doll, I got'cha!" He promised, being engaged by another robber. You sobbed in shock when an arm caught you in a headlock and forcefully drug you backwards; heeled feet scrambling in an attempt to keep up and avoid falling over.

"Lemon! Please! Fuck's sake!"

Breathing was hard to do in a headlock, dancing black spots blurring your vision slowly and your heart hammering in fear. A machine gun sounded again. The bicep tightened, dramatically limiting air.

"Fuckin' get off her, arsehole!" Recognizing Aaron's voice was a sheer relief, gasping for air when the arm constricted around your neck released suddenly. However, the momentum made you stumble to the ground at the same time for the goon's dead body to drop right next to you. His wide, dead eyes stared unseeingly at you, forcing a shiver down your spine and for your stomach to knot.

"Jesus Christ, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God," you panted, scrambling when blood spread closer.

"C'mon, love, c'mere, c'mere," Tangerine grunted, hauling you to your feet and protectively keeping you to his side. Being in front of you now, you could note the blood on his button up, how the robber's own punches had bruised and bloodied his face; figuring you looked somewhat similar. "Right, listen please, need yah t'do somethin' for me, love," he kept a sharp eye out for other threats as he tugged up one of his trouser legs. He pulled out the gun strapped in the holster, handing it to you with the instruction, "Shoot first, answers later. Yeah? Hey?"

You nodded and accepted the weapon, unlocking the safety. "I have to find Mum and Oisín," you worried, men and women screaming as the brutal fight continued.

"Just stay close, love, 's fuckin' madhouse - FUCK!" He snapped, aiming and firing at a man racing for you two. "C'mon, we gotta move, gotta get you out of here - right to the fuck now - "

Your gun sounded, Tangerine watching another robber drop only feet away. He pushed you through the people, both with your heads on a swivel; working in tandem to clear the banquet hall of robbers and direct survivors to get out. Your curly-haired boyfriend held one of the robbers by the neck and repeatedly punching his face into a pulp after the other man had attempted to snatch you, too.

Nobody came remotely close to you again, not when Tangerine was on guard; protecting you, defending you, killing for you. The skin on his bare knuckles had split open, but Tangerine didn't even notice; he just moved on to the next threat.

Soon, the gunfire ceased, leaving a ringing in survivor's ears, and after a quick look around the room, Tangerine confirmed the threats were all eliminated - but so were several guests of the charity gala.

You gasped in guilt, hand slapping over your mouth when you nearly tripped over Lisa's body; bullet holes shredding her flesh.

"Bruv," Lemon panted, approaching the two of you and making Tan flinch. "Woah, hey, easy, 's just me," he held his hands up, your lover sighing in relief and keeping you sheltered behind him. "You two good?" Brian asked, sheen of sweat coating his skin.

"You hit, love? Hey?" Tangerine looked down at you, keeping one arm around you and his body at a protective angle. "Shit, your face - your fucking face, sweetheart, look at me, look at me, lemme see," he frowned, holstering his gun to take both your cheeks in his hands and look for other injury.

"I'm okay, promise I'm not hurt," you panted, hands trembling. "Are you two?"

"I'm good," he nodded, eyeing Lemon. "Yeah?"

"Good, yeah, I'm good," Brian confirmed, "but I got some bad news. Looks like they got the banker. I can't tell if they made off with the money or not."

"They couldn't've, we only accepted checks tonight," you explained. "No cash, no assets to steal."

"Take it that's not public knowledge," Lemon sighed. "Probably thought they could rob y'all blind in one move, thinkin' tonight would have cash donations."

You sniffled, "You seen my family?"

"Uh," Lemon looked around, nodding, "yeah, your dad's over there."

Peering around Tangerine's form, you located your father slowly stalking around the room; taking note of the dead bodies left behind, survivors clearing out into the hallways. Fallon made his way up to you three, your voice trembling, "Daddy? You all right? Where's Mum and Oisín?"

"They're safe, with the paramedics," he reported, instantly taking you in his embrace. "Ah, fuck, lost sight of yah in this mess, had me worried, girl."

"I'm sorry."

"Nah," he whispered, caressing the back of your head, "don't apologize, you ain't do nothin'." He took a breath, keeping you caressed to his shoulder, "Gotta admit, felt a helluva lot better knowin' your man had your six." You pulled back slowly, watching your father sigh and nod at the Twins, admitting, "Thank you for protectin' my daughter, don't know how t'repay yah."

"Wasn't nothin' to it, sir," Tangerine assured, adjusting his suit jacket, "just wanted to protect my woman."

"I saw," he nodded. "You boys okay?"

"Yes, sir," Lemon nodded, Tangerine doing the same.

"Very good... Then I think I owe you an apology," your father told Tan, shocking you - not knowing the last time you ever heard you father admit to an apology.

"Not necessary, sir, I understand," Tan deflected, skin glistening in a thin sheen of sweat, blood dabbed around from the robber's fists, "I'm just relieved your family's safe."

"No, listen, I was wrong," Fallon admitted, "sayin' all that shit to you - about you. You know, makin' my assumptions, goin' based on rumors. You've got a bit of a reputation, I was just tryna protect my daughter from gettin' her heart broke." He sighed, shaking his head, "Can protect her from damn near everything - except the complications of her own heart; the woes of a relationship."

"I understand, sir."

"But seein' you tonight, fightin' for her, fightin' to get back to her... I was wrong," Fallon sighed, offering his hand. When Tan shook it, your father offered, "For what it's worth, you've got my permission to... Continue whatever this is. Any lad willing t'put themselves in harms way for my girl is all right in my books."

"I appreciate that," Tangerine sniffled, meeting your eye and smirking slightly. "Your daughter means a lot t'me, swear I won't make yah regret givin' us your approval."

Fallon sighed, nodding, "Yeah, all right, good. 'Cause she's precious to me, you know? I'll fuckin' gut you if you hurt her."

"I believe it," Tan sighed, a single twinge of nervousness to his tone, "but you don't gotta worry, sir, right, 'cause last thing I want is t'hurt the woman I love. She's precious to me, too."

"Right, good, uh, well... Thank you, both, for helping tonight. Would've been a fuckin' bloodbath without yah."

You frowned, gazing around the marble floors, "Still a bloodbath, ain't it? Half our men are dead, several investors... Daddy, who the fuck were these men?"

"That's what I'm gonna find out," he growled, his surviving personnel taking note of the event-room-turned-battlefield, slowly starting to move bodies. Little known fact: the hotel had an industrial size furnace in the boiler room - somewhere your father could burn bodies without the police being tipped off.

"Th-They said something about a ransom," you told the trio in a trembling tone, "about ransoming me back to you, Daddy. Said you wouldn't pay if I was injured, so they shouldn't rough me up."

"Hey," Tan whispered, pulling you into his side securely, "don't gotta worry 'bout that - know there's nowhere for anyone to hide you that I wouldn't find."

Fallon actually liked that sentiment, watching you nod and for your lover to hold you securely and placing a kiss to your forehead. So, he asked, knowing the answer, "Can I trust you to take care of my daughter, lad?"

"Absolutely."

"Don't make me regret this."

"Not in this lifetime, sir."

"Good. I'll find you lot in the mornin', get gone."

After a brief reunion with your mother and brother, learning they were uninjured and safe, you boyfriend finally opened the door to the hotel room you two had been assigned. Lemon was right next door, and when you entered, your luggage was left on the bed for you both. It was quiet as you both cleaned up and prepared for bed; silent tears trickling down your cheeks, mind replaying the night's events over and over and over... Like a never ending nightmare.

In the shower, you sat on the floor with arms tight around your knees, Tangerine sitting with you as warm water cascaded; cocooning steam around you. Blood washed off in waves of pink, circling the drain; your boyfriend gently massaging your body with a washcloth, discovering a scattering of injury - some still open and weeping. He was forced to blink back tears when your neck revealed a significant bruise; considering it a reminder of his failure to protect you, not knowing you felt the direct opposite and knew, if he hadn't been there, things would've been much, much worse.

When you joined Aaron in bed, the silence continued. Your heads laid on plush, stark white pillows; on your sides to stare at one another with hands clasped together between you. No words were needed, no explanation or thanks necessary, neither feeling the need to speak on what happened that night. Tangerine let go of your one hand, slowly reaching out to caress your cheek and jaw, fingertip tracing soft lines; shuffling closer to rest his cut forehead on yours.

In the dark of the room, over the sounds of the humming air conditioner unit, Tangerine whispered, "I love you, doll."

"I love you, too, Aaron. Thank you for... You know, tonight... All you did."

"You being safe, in my arms, is enough thanks."

"I-I'm glad you were here."

He nodded in agreement, "So am I. Don't know what I'd of done if I wasn't - if I had t'hear about this later... If they had succeeded in snatching you. Might not have been able to forgive myself."

"Good thing we don't have to know." Your eyes danced between his, admitting, "I don't think I want t'go without you, love. I don't think I feel secure unless you're with me."

"Yeah?" He smirked slightly, "That your way of sayin' you wanna spend more time with me?"

"Might be my way of sayin' I wanna spend all my time with you," you whispered, tears glazing your eyes. "And Daddy approves, so we don't have to sneak around anymore, right?"

"Right, get yah all t'myself," Tan agreed softly. "We'll talk in the morning, sweetheart, yeah?" He stretched slightly to peck your lips, encouraging, "Get some rest, Bunny. 'S been a helluva night."

Tangerine made you feel safe, he protected you and killed for you - so while you were unsure how sleep would find you when your mind was plagued with replaying chaotic memories from that evening, you let yourself relax.

requesting rules and masterlist

Bullet Train masterlist

[fastboatsmojito]

I’m poison either way - 18+ ☾⋆｡✩

Chef Luca x Fem! Reader one-shot

|AN: long ass list of cws MY FAULT it gets intense, obviously inspired by ‘imgonnagetyouback’ by TS. Lost my mind one million times while writing this. Enjoy <33 also thinking about making this a series so we can see him being your boss if anyone wants that 🫶🏼

|WC: 5.9k

|CW: Smut BTC!!! Some Angst, Exes to Lovers but worse freakier, Friends with benefits relationship with Carm mentioned, Porn With a lot of Plot, Eventual nasty dirty filthy smut, Luca gets kinda mean, almost public? fingering, orgasm denial - just momentarily, oral (fem receiving), mentions of past relationships, a splash of drinking, names used -all for reader; slut, bunny, ‘my girl’, etc. some jealousy from Luca and a little accidental Carm Slander SORRY

You hadn’t seen him in over a year. It felt like longer. The memories of nights spent surrounded by each other’s warmth echoing in your head. You missed him, but you cared about him too much to tell him that.

Last time you saw him you were getting on a plane. You didn’t want to leave him but you didn’t have a choice.

You wanted to ask if he’d come with you. He would’ve. You never did, fear of abandonment and rejection covering your rational thinking in a thick, gray, fog.

You left him with a just out of reach promise of forever and five words.

“I love you, I’m sorry.”

—————-

You only left to go back to Chicago for family matters, knowing once you got back you’d get sucked into everything again and have to stay.

Once you got back you met Carm who provided you with a job and soon after, the closest friends you’d ever had.

Over the past few months the lines of your relationship started to blur.

You didn’t mean for it to happen, long nights in the restaurant ending with some stress-relieving back alley make outs, and eventually his office with one of his hands over your mouth while the other was drifting under your apron.

It was a little messy, sure, but It was also fun. Casual. You ignored the pangs of guilt you felt every time he called you ‘my girl’ even if he didn’t mean it.

You might’ve closed your eyes a few times and imagined it was Luca groaning and breathing your name instead, but who was counting.

And now you were going back to Denmark. Well, kind of. You weren’t going back for Luca, though when Syd first suggested it he was all you could think of.

You were going for work, to ‘better yourself and your work’ in the words of Carm.

More likely you were going because they already bought the ticket and Marcus wanted to stay with his mom.

It’s a big enough country, there’s no way you’ll bump into him. Right?

You were both so close. You almost had it- the kind of love people tell stories about. It was all yours, you were the happiest you’d ever been, and then it was gone. You held the weapon that stabbed right through your chest, severing the life of the only real love you ever had.

It didn’t matter anyway, you haven’t spoken since you left. Surely he’s moved on by now, God knows you were pretending you did. Even if he hadn’t, there’s a high chance he hated you. You knew it wasn’t like him to hold a grudge but he had every right to.

As you said goodbye to everyone Carm reassured you that he had no hold over you.

“Y’should have some fun, get out there. Dont hold back.” He muttered, patting your back like he always did as he hugged you.

“Thanks, Carm. See you in a few weeks.”

—————————

You texted Syd as soon as you stepped off the plane, leftover anxiety from the flight still in your stomach mixing with the newfound nostalgia of the city.

:In Denmark! Still just as beautiful as I remember it, maybe even more. Hope you’re having a good one, call me when you get off <3

You walked around the city you still knew like the back of your hand to grab some food before heading to your temporary home. Deciding to exasperate the nostalgia, you went to one of your old favorite brunch spots.

As soon as you walked in you were met with the sweet smells you dreamed about in Chicago. You ordered your old usual and sat down, memories of sitting here with Luca and your shared friends watering your eyes as someone called your name, pulling you out of it.

“Is that you?” A familiar voice called from behind you, turning around to find Mai, one of said shared friends waving at you.

She looked just as cute as she was before you left, coily red hair flowing just over her shoulders. Always adorned in the coolest jacket you’ve ever seen and a bright smile.

“I haven’t seen you in so long!” She exclaimed, walking up to hug you.

“Mai! I missed you.” Her hugs were always the sweetest, her bubbly personality floating off of her and engulfing everyone around her in a warm light.

“I missed you more! How are you? How’s Chicago?” You reluctantly pulled away, order numbers suddenly being called.

“Come sit with me, we can catch up.” You said, grinning as she walked with you to grab your orders before sitting down.

You told her everything. She always had a way of pulling things out of people, compassion and understanding leaking from her pores. You talked about your family, Luca, your new job, your ‘fun!’ thing with Carm, all of it.

“That’s.. intense!” She giggled, grabbing a sip of her coffee.

“In a good way?” You joked with a quirked eyebrow.

“As long as you’re happy.” She replied, grabbing one of your hands with both of her own.

You looked down at that, not sure if you were or weren’t. You had friends, a job you enjoyed, good sex without any attachment, you lived in your favorite city and were currently sitting in the second, but something was missing. Someone was missing.

“Speaking of being happy,” she added, grounding you back out of your head.

“there’s a party downtown tonight, everyone will be there. You should come with me!” You thought for a second, remembering what Carm had said earlier and what you promised yourself. ‘Don’t hold back.’

“Sounds great!”

——————

Mai was meeting you there and the party wasn’t for a few hours so you went to go check out where you’d be staying and get ready.

You double checked the location from Carm once got to the dock, obviously you were staying on a boat. Sick. Once you found the right one you were pleasantly surprised. It was cozy, which was perfect since it was just you.

You accidentally unpacked rather quickly, throwing clothes around as you searched for something to wear to the party. A few distraught moments later you found it.

Thank god you decided against the voice in your head telling you it was ridiculous to pack such a showy dress for a work trip. It was perfect, the little black dress of dreams, comfortable material that fit you just right.

You still had a while until you really had to get ready so you took a nice long shower and tried to organize a bit before starting on your makeup.

You looked incredible and you knew it. You were close to sending a few pictures to Carm but decided against it, instead sending them to Syd, excited to tell her all about your night later.

:attached; 3 photos. Going to a party with an old friend! Detes to come 💓

You grabbed your bag and necessities before texting Mai that you were on the way.

———————

You knew you were at the right place when you found yourself surrounded by a bunch of hot people smoking.

“Over here!” Mai’s soft voice cut through the crowd, waving you towards her and a few others. You grinned as you walked over, greeting her with a hug.

“You look gorgeous, Mai.” You caught up with the everyone else, two of your other old friends, all sharing new important details of your lives as you waited to go inside.

Once you were all in Mai went to grab some drinks as you continued chatting, laughing about something you can’t remember suddenly, hearing an eerily familiar voice from somewhere in the sea of people behind you.

Your stomach dropped, goosebumps forming on your warmed skin. You’d recognize that voice anywhere.

“Hey! Sorry I’m late I spilled somethin’ on my shirt and had to change it real quick-“

He stopped in his tracks as soon as he saw you, smile slowly fading, standing in front of the three of you wordless.

Your mouth was dry, lump in the back of your throat forming right along with the water in your eyes just at the sight of him. He stared into you as you did him, quickly blinking to make sure he was real.

“Luca, you came!” Called Mai from behind you. Shots in hand as she walked up to all of you, her hand on your shoulder breaking you out of the trance of eye contact you were stuck in.

“Why’re you guys so quiet? Let’s have some-“ She looked at Luca and then back at you, realization of your earlier conversation just hitting her.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry guys. Is this too weird?” You were looking at the ground, closing your eyes for a second hoping the ground would open and swallow you up.

“No it’s- I mean as long as you’re okay with it,” He gestured towards you, giving you a shy smile when you looked up. “it’s not weird.”

He was being nice. Of course he was being nice. You knew he would, but a part of you wanted him to be mean. To tell you to fuck off and get your own friends, to tell you how shitty you were for leaving.

You nodded and spared the same smile, “All good.”

All good? Jesus, you could hardly believe you were still standing. The sight of him in that tight button-up enough to knock you out even without the skin dissolving pain of remembering what you had.

You shook it off, assuming he wanted to ignore it as much as you did. Mai handed each of you a shot, four glasses clinking together before being downed along with your anxiety.

Mai and the others went off to dance, leaving you and Luca to stand there, awkwardly smiling at each other.

“You look great, y’know.” He nodded to you, hands placed over each other, thumb stroking over the tattooed pepper on his other hand. A nervous habit of his you used to look for, always placing his hands in yours.

You looked up from his hands to give him a real smile this time, “You too.”

Shit.

——————-

The soft low lighting and the sounds of music and people talking over each other filled your senses, Mai dragged you away from the pit in your stomach like she always did to dance with her.

“You okay?” She whisper-yelled in front of you. Her hands were on your shoulders, moving you with her to the music.

“I’m okay.” You nodded, and she tilted her head at you, wordlessly urging you to continue.

“It’s just-“ you sighed before continuing, “I missed him, of course, and I want to talk to him but- this isn’t exactly the place for that. I don’t wanna ruin his night.”

She grabbed your hands and led you back to the table, where Luca was talking with one of your shared his other friends.

She whispered something in his ear, before taking his friend to dance leaving you two alone once again. His arms were crossed as he stood, looking around for something.

Was he leaving? If anything you should be the one leaving, he should be having fun.

“I can leave if you-“ He turned back to you and shook his head, moving to ask for your hand with his own.

“No just- come with me.” You instinctively took his hand as soon as it was out to you, reflexes of forgotten parties he led you to and from etched into your muscle memory.

His hand was warm and steady as always over your smaller, shaky one as he guided you out, leading you out into the quiet of an alley you’re sure you’ve seen before.

He didn’t let go of your hand, standing in front of you with an expression you couldn’t quite place.

“Mai told me you wanted to talk to me, and I thought that was a good idea. Been a while.” You nodded as he spoke, noticing his thumb start mindlessly stroking your thumb like he always did to calm you down.

“Yeah it’s- that’s my fault. I should’ve reached out, I’m sorry. I wanted to but-“

You paused, trying to keep your words coherent as the feeling of his hand still over yours was making the heart in your chest, still engraved with his name, beat faster.

“I didn’t think you wanted to talk to me.”

He squeezed your hand at that and gave you an apologetic smile. God. Why did he have to be so nice to you?

“I could’ve called too, y’know. It’s not all your fault, I just wanted you to be happy.”

He squeezed your hand again, three times.

Fuck.

Tears forming in your eyes once again, unable to be held back this time, your voice wavering.

“Luca, I really missed you. I’m so sorry.”

He said your name like he always did when you were crying, full of all the love he had.

He took your other hand in his and pulled you in, covering you in warmth and the comfortingly familiar smell of his cologne as you sobbed into him.

“I missed you too. It’s okay, baby.” He whispered into your hair like a promise. The name slipped out, you were sure he didn’t notice but you did. He was smoothing a hand over your hair as the other held you against him.

You stayed like that for a while, just leaning into him. Someone cleared their throat behind you and you reluctantly pulled away, hand still in his.

“You guys coming back in?” Mai was standing at the door, smiling softly as you wiped the tears away.

You looked at Luca, who looked at you before nodding, bringing you back in with him.

————

The light and sounds reentering your senses were gentle now, beckoning you to relax into them instead of suffocating you.

You were dancing with Mai again, really leaning into it and having fun now. You still missed him, just being in the same room was never enough, but you were okay now knowing he didn’t hate you.

He was being dragged by your other friends to dance with them behind you, eyes locked on the back of your head and the way you were moving your hips. Your eyes were closed as you moved, not registering Mai tell you she was getting a drink until you smelled his cologne right behind you.

“Hey.” He muttered close to your ear, hand hovering over your waist. Always a gentleman.

“Luca!” You turned and smiled at him, throwing your arms around his neck to dance with you.

“Havin’ fun?” He leaned down to ask, hands still hovering before you placed them on your waist.

“I am.” You beamed, “are you?”

He smiled down at you, squeezing your waist for just a second.

“I am-“ He paused, smile suddenly fading as you moved your heated hair off of your neck.

You gave Luca a confused look until you looked down where he was staring.

Shit.

You were giving him an accidental direct look at the mark you told Carm not to leave. He never listened. This wasn’t his fault though, this was all you.

Luca dropped his hands and walked away, gently moving past an oblivious Mai, who knew something was wrong as soon as she saw you.

“Shit.”

———————

You told Mai what happened, trying to stop yourself from following him out. You should’ve told him about Carm sooner but you didn’t think it was that important, you weren’t dating anyone.

“Alright, it’s okay. I’ll go talk to him.” She said, setting her drink down.

“No, wait- I think I need to go. It’s on me, let me handle it.”

She nodded and gave you a supportive smile as you walked back out.

It wasn’t as cold as Chicago but it was much cooler than inside. You looked around for a while, collecting annoyed glances from everyone you asked about seeing him.

You eventually found him back in the alley you were standing together in almost an hour ago, sitting against a wall.

“Luca.” You said softly as you walked up to him, “I’m sorry just- let me explain.” He didn’t move or say anything, looking at the ground as his moved one of his hands over the other.

And you did. You stood there explaining everything, from the day you met Carm to the day you left. He didn’t say anything, quick glances at you as you explained not giving you any hints to his thoughts.

“I should’ve told you earlier, I just didn’t think you’d really care. I haven’t dated anyone since you, I couldn’t. And I wouldn’t have danced with you if I had a boyfriend.”

You stopped, waiting with an apology written all over your face as he thought.

He got up after a few more drawn out seconds, shaking his head.

“It’s been over a year. You’re allowed to do whatever you want, if Carm’s who you want then that’s just fine. I’m happy for you.” He muttered, hand touching your shoulder for just a second before turning to go back in.

“Luca wait-“ You said, grabbing one of his hands. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you- I don’t want Carm, I want you.”

He turned back to you, removing his hand from yours.

“You left me.”

“But I didn’t want to. Luca, I wanted you to come with me.” He shook his head again, closing his eyes for a moment.

“You never asked-“ You interrupted him without thinking.

“I thought you’d say no. I didn’t want to drag you away from this place, you love it here.” He looked into your eyes, tears threatening to fall from his own.

“I love- I loved you.” He muttered, voice wavering, before walking back in.

Fuck.

———————

When you walked back in he was sitting down, you were about to walk up to talk to him again when someone else got there first.

A girl? She was placing a hand on his shoulder and laughing. Great.

You sighed and walked back to Mai, ignoring the burning feeling in your chest.

“You good?” She gave you a sweet smile and beckoned you closer.

You shook your head and glanced over at Luca and whoever he was laughing with.

“It’s okay though, I probably deserve it.”

She shrugged and shook her head.

“He hasn’t dated anyone since you left, I don’t think it’ll go anywhere.”

Really? You assumed he wasn’t dating anyone at the moment when he showed up alone, but the whole time? Maybe you had a chance. You felt eyes on you and looked back at Luca glancing at you before turning away again. Maybe.

You decided you might as well still have a good time instead of feeling sorry for yourself all night, dancing with Mai and whoever else was around you.

After a while your feet were getting tired and the only person you could place was Mai, talking to the girl she whispered to you about a few moments earlier.

You teased her for having a crush before taking her hand and guiding her towards her, giving them an opener before you left to ‘go to the bathroom.’ Giving them some room and dancing on your own.

You went to get some water since it was getting late, running into someone on your way to the table, spilling your glass all over them.

“Shit sorry-“ You looked up to see Luca, shirt now wet and sticking to his skin.

He looked down at the spill and up at you. “It’s fine. I’ll go get some paper towels.”

You stopped him.

“No, let me. Come on.” You grabbed his hand and guided him to the bathroom, figuring a hand dryer would do the job quicker.

You brought him in and he leaned against the sink, starting to unbutton his shirt.

“Sorry I didn’t see you, I just thought I dropped something and-“ You tried not to stare at the now shirtless man in front of you. He interrupted your apology.

“It’s really okay. It’s just water, no big deal.”

You looked at him then, letting go of the button for the dryer so he could hear you.

“Jesus, Luca, would you just tell me to fuck off.”

He looked at you like you were trying to explain astrophysics in the club bathroom.

“What?”

“Just-“ You rubbed your hands over your face, thinking about what you were about to say.

“Just be fucking mean to me for a second. You’re too nice. I left you, and then came back and danced on you with a hickey on my neck from someone else, and then I spilled water on you to make it worse. Call me a bitch, tell me I’m fucking stupid, I don’t care, just please. Don’t be so nice.”

He blinked and looked around, trying to process what you were saying.

“You want me to be mean to you?”

“Yes! God please, say anything, just don’t tell me that it’s okay.”

He turned the dryer back on himself then, drying it slowly as he sat quietly, thinking. It was torture, standing there waiting for him to call you selfish for needing that. But he never did. The dryer stopped after what felt like forever and he sat his shirt down, getting up to lock the door before towering over you.

“You really fucked me up. For a while, I thought I was going to marry you. I would’ve. But you left.” You nodded, listening. Breath faltering at the confession as he kept walking towards you, one more step and you were against a wall.

“What you did was awful. Leaving wasn’t enough for you, you didn’t even talk to me. And then you show up here and it all comes back, the feelings and memories and shit I was just starting to get over, everything. I think I might just have you for a second and you tell me you’ve been fucking my old friend.”

You were so close now, noses practically touching as you tried to catch your breath under him.

“I didn’t know you knew-“ He stopped you, putting a hand over your mouth.

“Let me finish.” He leaned over, mouth right over your ear, leaving goosebumps on your skin as his deep voice drove you crazy.

“You’re fucking horrible for me. And y’know what’s worse? I still want you. Even now, while you beg me to be mean to you, I want you. Like you never even left, I think about you all the time. I think about you at work, when I’m with friends, at home, in my sleep, Every second you’re on my mind. You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted. You like that though, don’t you?”

Your eyes were closed, focusing on controlling your breathing as the warmth between your legs grew. Hearing his voice so close to you again, his cologne almost drowning you, arms boxing you in, it was all so much.

“Don’t you?” He repeated, moving his hand from your mouth to your jaw, opening your eyes to look at him.

You nodded and he kissed you. Moving his hands to your waist and telling you to jump, picking you up so you were between him and the wall. He was kissing you quick, sloppy mouths sliding against each other as you moved your hands all over him.

He pulled away, looking at your kiss-swollen lips. “d’you want this?”

You nodded your head again, trying to pull him impossibly closer to you, “Please.”

He moved to kiss your neck, biting the spot Carm left a few days before, making you shiver.

“‘s he good? Fuck you better than I did?” He was groaning into your skin as you tried to grind your hips into his.

You shook your head quickly, “No.” You whined, jealousy in his voice turning you on further.

“No?” He moved the hand not keeping you up to the hem of your dress, waiting for your nod before continuing. He pulled your dress up just over your hips to feel how soaked you were. “He get you this wet?” He was right next to your ear again, groaning when you tried to push down against his fingers.

“No. Just you.” You said between gasps. Thick fingers finding your clit through the drenched material and leaving light circles there.

“You like it when I’m mean to you, baby?” There was that name again. He had a lot for you, all of them making you need him even more.

You nodded and he removed his hand suddenly, grabbing your jaw with his slick fingers. “Words.”

“Yes.” You sighed at the loss before he moved his fingers back,

“There’s my girl.” You moaned at the nickname as he pulled your underwear to the side, running his fingers up and down your slick as you clenched around nothing.

“You miss these fingers?” He breathed into your skin as he sunk two into you suddenly, stretching you out as your mouth dropped open.

“Missed all ‘f you.”

“Yeah? Carm not fucking you enough, then?” He moved his thumb to your clit as he curled his fingers in and out of you, watching you struggle to respond.

You shook your head, “He’s just- he’s busy a lot.” You stuttered through choked moans.

“Doesn’t make enough time for you, does he? Poor thing.” You cried out as he repeatedly hit that spot inside of you that always made you think of him as he kept his thumb on your clit.

“Fuck, Luca-“

“I know, bunny. You’re so close, aren’t you? That’s too bad.” He whispered the last part, pulling his hand away from you just as the tension in your stomach was about to snap.

“Wh- But-“ He interrupted your whines, whispering in your ear once more as you protested.

“Sluts don’t get to cum.”

You gasped, surprised at the filth coming out of his mouth. He put you down gently, snapping your underwear back into place before pulling your dress back down.

He grabbed his shirt, putting it on quickly before grabbing your hand and unlocking the door, leading you out with the hand still covered in you.

—————

You followed him out, cool air cooling your fiery skin. He walked you to his car, opening the door for you and making sure you were buckled in before closing it.

He got in, glancing at your clenched thighs before starting the car. “You wanna go to mine or d’you want me to drop you off?”

“Yours, please.” He smirked when you tried to close your thighs even more after he placed a hand right where your dress stops.

Every red light had you glaring over at him, you hated how hot he was right now, shirt left open enough to see one of his chest tattoos, hair messy from your hands. He looked good enough to eat, and you had to stop yourself from touching him every chance you got.

You eventually made it to his apartment without moving your hand to his pants and distracting him from the road. Thank god. He got out first and opened your door, hand out to you. He still lived where he always had, grateful he hadn’t moved so you knew how to get to his door quickly.

You made it into the elevator, practically jogging the way there. Slick from his fingers still pooling between your thighs, almost dripping down your leg. As soon as the door closed you were pushed against the wall. He enveloped your body in his own, kissing you with fervor as his hands moved over your ass and thighs.

The door opened and if there had been people standing there they might’ve called security at the messy sight out you. He grabbed your hand and rushed you to his door, unlocking it and immediately pulling you in before kicking it shut.

You were against the door. Hands moving to take his shirt off as he picked you up again, mouths still connecting as he brought you to his room. Throbbing dick hard against your thigh, you were nearly drooling when he laid you down on the bed.

He leaned down over you and put your legs around his waist.

“I want you in my mouth.” You moaned into his mouth, pulling him into you with your legs.

“Fuck- yeah? You want my dick to fill that pretty little mouth of yours?” He punctuated with a kiss to your forehead.

“Please.” He moved to take off his pants, standing up as you sat on your knees.

“I wanna see you cum on my mouth first. ‘s that okay pretty girl?”

You nodded eagerly, “yes.”

“Look at you using your words.” He moved you to lay down again, hands gripping your waist as you squirmed when he started kissing down your body.

His mouth stopped next to your ear, hand pushing your dress up. “You like being good for me, don’t you?” He kissed right under it, lifting your dress up to expose your chest.

“I knew it.” He breathed, looking down at your uncovered tits as he licked his lips.

“Could see your nipples through your dress as soon as we stepped outside. Dirty girl.”

You let out a moan as his fingers brushed over them, moving back and forth over the hardened nubs.

He moved down, kissing his way to your chest and lifting your head up to remove your dress, leaving you shivering under his stare. He laid over you, staring hungrily down at you for what felt like forever.

“Luca, please.” He glanced back up at your face, need painting your every feature.

“What’d you need from me, pretty girl? Talk to me.”

“Touch me. Please.” He gave in, leaning down to lick over each of your nipples, hands grabbing the unoccupied breast as he moved.

He kissed, licked, bit at every inch of your skin, drawing the prettiest whines out of you as you tried to rub your thighs together for relief. He got to your thighs, spreading your legs open around his head.

“You’re fucking soaked. You want me that bad, baby?” He said, tongue tracing over the innermost part of your thigh next to the hem of your underwear. You could hardly breathe now let alone think but you knew he wanted answers.

“Need you so bad, Luc’”

At that, he licked a slow, featherlight stripe up your clothed cunt. You could cry. You couldn’t remember the last time you were so horny. It wasn’t enough and he knew it, continuing to give light kitten licks over you. You were really crying then, tears mindlessly falling over your face from the lack of stimulation.

“‘re you crying, sweet girl? Just tell me what you need, baby.”

“More, please, need your mouth on me.”

“Yeah? You want me to put my mouth on your pretty pussy?”

Fuck, did he always sound like this?

“Please, please, please.” You were almost sobbing, memories of being together like this before you left hitting you.

“I got you, baby.” He pulled the drenched fabric off of you, tossing it with your dress on the floor.

The cool air hitting the wet warmth almost had you moaning out already as he gazed down at you. He brought two fingers up to run through your folds, spreading you out all for him. You couldn’t hold back the noises coming out of you and you didn’t care anymore.

His name falling repeatedly from your lips like you were asking for his forgiveness as he attached his mouth to you.

“Luca- fuck,” you started a sentence you had no intention of finishing as he practically made out with your aching cunt.

“You think about me when he fucked you?” He murmured against you, tongue lapping every drop of juice that he drug out of you.

“Wh-“ You had to think for a second before you understood what he was asking - thoughts that weren��t Luca and how his tongue felt on you pushed out of your mind.

“Yes- most times, actually. I-“ You struggled to get through your sentence, moaning out at every lick or suck over your clit. “-I tried not to but it- I couldn’t stop it.”

He groaned at your confession, pushing his hips into the mattress as he continued lapping at you. One of his hands moved up to grab at your tits while the other moved with his tongue, sinking two of his fingers into you.

“Shit,” You cried out when he curled his fingers just right.

“You’re so fucking good to me, Luca. So good.” You grabbed a fistful of his hair as he sped his fingers up, bringing his mouth away for just a second to spit on your clit before sucking it back into his mouth.

“I’m so close, baby, please.”

He moved away for a second to lightly bite at your thigh while his fingers continued, moving in and out of you at a mind-numbing pace.

“Gonna cum all over my mouth and fingers, pretty girl?” He gave you a quick kiss, tongue slipping over your own to let you taste yourself before moving back down, letting his mouth suck around your clit once more.

Praises and moans falling from your lips as your eyes were shut tight, all you could hear were his soft groans into your cunt and the wet smacking sounds from his fingers moving in and out of you.

He moaned your name into you, voice vibrating as you clenched around his fingers, tension in your stomach finally snapping as you finally came all over him.

He moved his thumb to take the place of his tongue as his fingers kept working you through it. He was back at your ear as his pace continued.

“Just like that. Good girl, coming all over my fingers like I told you to.”

“I got you, baby, it’s okay. Feels good, huh?”

“Missed you and this perfect pussy so bad.”

His fingers slowed as you started squirming away from overstimulation, he gave one last rub at your clit, your legs shaking before he stopped.

“So pretty like this, just for me.” You opened your eyes to him next to you, gently stroking your check with his thumb.

“You okay?” He moved stray strands of hair out of your face,

“‘m okay.” You reassured him, leaning into his touch and kissing his hand.

You reached over to feel him through his boxers, finding a wet spot.

“Did you-“

“Yeah,” He shrugged, face reddening.

“You sounded really hot. Missed you.”

You grinned at him, leaning over for a kiss.

“I missed you too.”

He took your hand in his, running his thumb over your own.

“Luca?” You wondered if he meant everything he said, he usually did, but you had to make sure.

He hummed, leaning down at you.

“Did you mean all of that?”

He moved so you were laying your head on his chest while he stroked your hair.

“Well,” He paused to think, “I don’t really think you’re horrible for me but I do think about you all the time. And.. I did want to marry you. Still do, if you’d let me.” He punctuated with a kiss to the top of your head.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Shit.

——————————

BFFBHFFNFBBSHDJRBDHRBFD

[angelwings-crossbowstrings]

Remember My Heart, How Bright I Used to Shine

Pairing: Daryl Dixon x Fem!Reader

Setting: Daryl’s Camp (During Time Jump)

Warnings: Typical TWD Violence and Gore; Angst; Illness

Summary: You had always thought he was invincible. Then your world came crashing down.

A/N: DO NOT PANIC. It’s a little bit a ride but if you start, hang in there. It’s probably been done before. Probably cliche. Meh. This plot bunny wouldn’t leave me alone and had to be set free. I know it’s rushed and not my best but it’s done now and I feel better.

gif by @daryl-dixon-daydreams

You stared, eyes wide and unblinking, as if you could make it go away by sheer force of will alone. At first, you couldn’t even cry but when the tears came, they came with a vengeance, hot and endless over your cheeks and down your neck. It’s not real. It can’t be real. 

The day was like any other. You were up and helping around Alexandria. The air always felt different to you now. Like you could physically feel his absence. You had simply learned to breathe it in and mold it into a way to have him near. You had seen him a few times in the last five years, when you could pull away from the needs of the community and trek into the woods, or when he would come around to help out and just visit with everyone. He would give you a smile and you would return it. You never went to him because if you touched him, you’d never let go. Carol usually kept you up to speed via letters from the Kingdom. Knowing he was safe and healthy proved to be enough. 

It wasn’t though. Not really. No letter would keep you from crying yourself to sleep with your hand on the empty space next to you. No letter would keep you from staring hopefully each time the gates opened, waiting for him to walk through. No letter would convince you that he was out of your reach and you would have to move on. 

You had just finished covering a section of the crops now that cold weather was setting in, dragging your feet after a long day when Michonne jogged over with an envelope. You returned her smile, yours tired and grateful while hers was gentle and understanding. You had both lost the men you loved. Michonne felt guilty that it was Rick keeping Daryl away from you, though you had asserted time after time that she had nothing to be sorry about. 

You decided to read the letter in your room, weary to your very bones. Your bed was calling your name but you only sat on the edge. If you laid down, you’d be asleep before you could get the envelope open. Carol’s fancy handwriting was on the outside, beautiful lines and curves that spelled out your name. You opened the envelope with a sniff, ready to cry when she informed you that he was fine and grumpy as ever.

Except that’s not what it said. 

You dropped the letter and grabbed your bag, out the door and running to the gate with weapons in hand, not even on your belt. 

‘Come to the camp. NOW.’

And that’s how you came to be here now, just inside Daryl’s tent, Carol off to the side, not crying but her face and eyes puffy as if she’d already had her time. Daryl was pale, his shirt off, and leaning back on his hands. 

The bite on his ribs was inflamed, taunting you. Laughing at your dreams of happily ever after with that man. 

“Daryl.” Your words wobbled, the tears just not stopping. 

“C’mere.” You fell into him, muffling your wail against his already too warm skin. He had sat up to hold you tight, rocking you back and forth with his lips pressed into your hair. Whispered reassurance against your ear. “S’gonna be alright.”

“How?” You sat back, wet eyes pleading. “How is it gonna be alright, Daryl?” 

He shared a look with Carol and dropped his gaze. “Just wanted to see ya ‘fore—‘fore I take care’a it.” 

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the meaning behind that. “No.” You shook your head adamantly, crawling on your knees to grab his face, a little rougher than you had intended. “You’re gonna fight, you hear me? You’re gonna fight this until the end.”

“Y/N—”

“No!” You barked at Carol with a finger pointed at her. “Call me selfish. Yes, I’m fucking selfish.” Daryl wrapped his hand around the one you held out, leading it to his mouth. He kissed your palm but kept his fingers around yours, lowering them to the small space between you. 

“Shouldn’t hafta do it. Neither’a ya.”

“It should always be someone who loves you.” He smiled at you, sad and hopeless. “And I love you, Daryl Dixon. I’m not leaving you and I’m not letting you eat a bullet for my sake.” He opened his mouth to once again object, your arms around his neck, your face buried against his shoulder, gave him pause. “Please. I haven’t been with you in so long. Let me have this. I’ll take care of you. And—I’ll do what has to be done.” Your lip began to quiver. “I won’t let you turn, Daryl. I swear it.”

You couldn’t see the exchange between him and Carol, but after a few tense moments, his hands were on your back, holding you tighter. He sighed. “Okay.”

It was hard to watch. His skin had dulled to nearly gray, deep dark circles around dull blue eyes. He had stopped giving you those reassuring smiles. They just took too much energy. 

His skin was burning, a fever raging that you knew no medication could affect. You could only wipe him down with a damp, cool cloth. He would always sigh with relief, whether it was for the reprieve from the heat or just to make you feel better, you’d probably never know. 

Sometimes he would just tense and grit his teeth. He never told you what hurt, knowing there was nothing you could do. He simply didn’t want you to feel worse; like you had failed him. You already held that miserable guilt close to your heart. 

The cough had come gradually, from small utterances to deep, ragged barks that would not only send specks of blood flying but had him crying out when the force of them jarred his entire body. 

It was when everything had quieted that you felt the most terrified. You were just outside the tent, giving Carol some privacy with him. You could see but not hear. She was leaning over him, crying. He was so weak that he couldn’t even lift his arm to wipe her tears. You knew he would if it were possible. 

The other woman was nodding, most likely hearing his wishes for certain things. Things like Dog, who laid a few feet away from you, his ears twitching. Daryl had asked for him to let in a while earlier. The canine seemed to understand, moving slowly around his papa before lying close to his head. It pained Daryl to even be touched, Dog whined but never tried to lick him. After a few moments, the animal had trotted out and laid where he was in front of you. 

When you turned back to the tent, Carol was coming out. Her distress was written clearly across her expression. She was losing her best friend. Still, she offered you a hand and helped you to your feet. Before you could enter, she flicked her finger over the buckle holding your knife at your thigh. 

“You promised him. If you can’t do it, call for me. But don’t wait.” It wasn’t cruel. You nodded and she let go. 

You didn���t say anything as you crawled to a spot beside him, almost touching but not quite. There was a moment of just watching him breathe. You could feel the heat of the fever from where you laid. His breaths were shallow rasps. His eyes were closed. 

“Daryl?” You nearly whispered. 

“M’here.” He still didn’t open his eyes. 

“I love you.”

“Don’t let that stop ya from livin’, ya hear me?” He coughed, his face contorting into a pained grimace. “Ya find someone that sees you. Ya don’t settle fer less.”

“There’ll never be anyone else, Daryl.”

A tear slid down his temple. “That’s what ‘m afraid of—”

“I love you.” You repeated. Daryl wasn’t a words kinda guy. Never had been. He said things through actions. It was one of the things you loved about him. Still, just this once, you wanted to hear it. Needed to hear it. 

“I love ya too, woman. Pain in my ass.”

You laughed wetly, the sound shifting into sobs when his head lulled to the side. You were going to have to do what you promised soon, allowing him to finally rest. He would be taking your heart with him. You couldn’t even begin to think of how you would survive this. 

Seconds turned into minutes of watching his chest rise and fall, shallow and wheezing. Minutes turned into hours. You kept watch diligently, shifting positions around him to get comfortable or keep yourself awake. It had been at least 3 hours, well into the night when Carol peeked inside, her eyes bloodshot, exhaustion radiating from her. 

“Is it—done?” She whispered. 

You shook your head. “He’s still with us. He even feels a little cooler. Maybe it’s just me. Would you check?” With a sharp breath, she crawled into the tent and clumsily made her way to the archer’s side. Her palm hesitated just above his forehead, a look of trepidation on her face when she looked to you and back. His skin was warm against her palm but not frighteningly hot. She flipped her hand, sure she was mistaken. 

“He’s cooler. He—he’s breathing easier. Y/N, I don’t understand.” You crawled over to meet her on the opposite side, feeling his forehead again for yourself. Carol continued as if his temperature would alter in the mere seconds that had passed while you pulled down the blankets covering his torso. The bite was still red, the veins around it a sickly black. 

“Carol, he should—he should be gone. Look at this.” Frozen and befuddled, the two of you stared at the wound, wondering if you had finally been pushed over the edge by grief. 

Another twenty four hours passed in nervous silence. Carol was forging and hunting while you saw to Daryl’s care. The bite was less inflamed but the black veins remained. His fever had broken during the night, and the rattling in his lungs had lessened to a quiet wheeze. 

“I don’t know what’s going on,” you whispered, applying a fresh bandage to his ribs, “but I am freaked the fuck out.” You flinched back when Daryl let out a moan, your hand reflexively sitting on the hilt of your knife. He moved, shifting his shoulders and trying to sit up, uncoordinated and robotic. It did not inspire confidence. “Daryl?”

The heel of his hand was pressed into his forehead but dropped to his lap when he heard his name. When he turned toward your voice, your heart sank. His eyes were milky and yellow. 

“No.” You whimpered, scrambling back as far as the tent allowed. You drew your knife slowly. You had promised you wouldn’t let him turn. Promised. Your naivety had caused you to slip, and you’d live with the guilt for the rest of your life. “I’m sorry.” You sobbed, moving toward him slowly though he had yet to even attempt to approach you. “I’m so sorry.”

His head tilted curiously. “What for?”

You sucked in a breath while your knife fell from suddenly inept fingers. “Oh my god.” Your jaw hung open, there was just no other way to react. “Daryl?”

“Yeah?”

“Daryl?” You repeated, inching closer with a hand outstretched. His brow creased. 

“Ya hit your head or somethin’?”

“I just—you were—you look—”

“Guess if I look as rough as I feel, s’prolly ‘nough’a a reason to be actin’ all weird.” He ran a hand through his hair and coughed, rubbing at his throat. “What happened anyway?” 

Your hand finally connected with his stubbled cheek, the skin warm. He watched you in confusion, uttering your name in a questioning tone as you placed two fingers against his neck, finding a pulse easily. 

“Daryl—Daryl, you were bit.” You were retracting your hand, the archer looking at you with horror etched in every line of his face when you heard a bow string pulling taut. “Carol, no!” If you had been one second later or couldn’t have reached her at all, the arrow would have hit its mark. Instead, it nicked his ear and arched into a bag of supplies behind him. 

“What the fuck, Carol?!” He shouted, gingerly touching his ear and staring at the blood on his fingertips. Yet another indicator of life. His blood was red. 

Carol gasped and stumbled backwards, narrowly missing the firepit when her ass hit the ground. “It’s not—Y/N, he’s—”

“Can one’a ya please fill me in here? I was bit?!” You crawled back into the tent and reached for his ribs. He hadn’t noticed the bandage until then, his gaze on the tendrils of black running from beneath. “What—what the fuck?” Petite fingers peeled away the fresh gauze and revealed the jagged bite, the shape being the key indicator of what it truly was since the teeth had dragged a bit when he fought off the walker. “How the fuck m’I still here?”

“That’s not all, Daryl.” You looked around for anything reflective, considering beating the mirror from his bike but you didn’t want to give the guy an aneurysm along with the news he’d just received. “Something metal, something reflective.” You said hastily as you passed Carol, who remained sprawled on the ground. She pointed to one of the cooking pots without taking her eyes off her best friend. A spoon!

Grabbing it up you jogged down to the river to quickly wash it, looking at your own reflection to ensure it was enough. “Here.” You were holding it out before you had even entered the tent. There was a fear in his expression that you couldn’t see in those lifeless eyes, and that unsettled you. 

He didn’t say anything when he saw, but stared for a long while. “Need a minute.”

You shook your head. “Daryl, I really don’t want to—”

“Please.” He was still staring at the spoon and didn’t see your nod. You zipped up the tent behind you and sat down beside Carol. Both of you wore dazed expressions. 

“He didn’t die.” She whispered. 

“He didn’t turn.” You continued. “What does this mean? Carol, do you think he’s—do you think he’s immune?”

It was more than an hour later when you heard a soft call of your name. You and Carol had settled into anxious silence, every scenario running through your mind, good or bad. What if he turned later? What if he was still sick and infectious? What if he needed to eat people to survive?

You dusted off your pants after you stood, crouching to open the zipper and crawl inside with him. Daryl was lying on his side, facing away from you. 

“Are you okay?” Gentle fingers grazed up and down his spine, an attempt at comfort that you weren’t sure he’d even want. 

“Would you be?” He asked quietly. 

“No,” you answered in kind, “no, I suppose not.” He wasn’t crying, he was just still and somehow that was worse. “Hey.” You crawled around his legs to lie down next to him, your face inches from his. His eyes were closed, his brow still drawn. “I don’t know for sure, but I think you may be immune.” His eyes peeled open slowly, squinted in fear of your impending repulsion. All you saw was a beautiful set of ice blue orbs staring back at you. “Your eyes—”

“They freak me out, too.” He whispered with a slight curl of his lip. 

“No, they’re normal.” You made a grab for the spoon and held it up for him. He didn’t appear to be relieved. “It’s okay, Daryl. You’re okay.”

“We don’t know jack shit ‘bout what’s goin’ on. Can’t say m’okay when we don’t know.” He was right. You knew he was, but you didn’t know how to proceed. “Maybe I can head out. Find someone that can gimme some answers.”

“No.” You answered immediately, your eyes wide with fear. “Daryl, you can’t tell anyone.”

“Why not?” He stared at you intently, never looking away even when you touched his cheek and he leaned into it. “What if I can help? If I’m immune, maybe we can get a cure or a vaccine.”

“I won’t have someone poking and prodding at you, fucking carving into you for answers. I won’t.” You snapped. You weren’t angry but you were serious. “Someone could hurt you, use you. They could kill you for answers, and I can’t watch that happen.”

“But if—”

“I give in on a lot of things, Daryl. I even stayed behind so you could come out here and handle your grief your own way.” His warm hand rested on your face so he could wipe away the moisture there. “Giving in, letting you always do things your way damn near cost me the most important thing in my life.”

“But—”

“Please, Daryl. If you do nothing else for me, please do this one thing.” 

He studied you quietly, mulling over your words for an amount of time that had you building your resolve to continue your argument. “Okay.” You were able to breathe, not even realizing you were holding it. 

“Thank you.”

“Some things gonna hafta change ‘til we know more.”

“I know.” You answered with only the slightest hint of regret. Physical intimacy would be out of the question, you knew for certain that’s what he meant. He wouldn’t risk you. However, if it kept him alive and in your arms, you’d make that trade without a second thought. “It’s okay.”

He nodded in agreement. “Ain’t gonna like not bein’ able to touch ya.” 

You smiled and moved closer, pressing your forehead to his. “I can think of a few things we can still do.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah.” You pressed a chaste kiss to his lips and laughed at the terrified expression when you pulled away. “We didn’t swap spit, it’s fine.”

“Oh. Right.” One side of his mouth twitched up. 

“We really should talk to Carol. I think she may be on the verge of a stroke out there.” You rubbed your cheek against his. 

“Long as she leaves her bow outside.”

[sametsyun]

I HAVE A FANFIC IDEA!!

Alright you guys know that Moon Goddess from Over the Moon??

What if the reader was Chang'e and she and Lucifer used to go wayyy back, setting aside the whole plot of Over the Moon and changing it to god creating her as an angel to watch the moon or something bla bla bla, and Lucifer would frequently visit that moon she falls in love and so does he. And since Chang'e does wishes n' after she's been given a gift or something like that, I forgot, Lucifer would bring her like little ducks and stuff and she'd grant him every little wish she could.

And here comes the angst, Lucifer stops frequenting at the moon making the reader all sad and confused. She looks for him all over heaven but he isn't there. Why was he ignoring her? Did he not like the wish she granted him? He's probably busy right now.

And he comes back all of a sudden with a big ass smile that makes her think he was happy to see her after not visiting her for a long time only for that thought to be crushed when he simply gives her a gift with no thoughts and asks for a heavy wish

She hesitates because it was slightly against what she was only allowed to grant but still does it anyways.

Here comes Lucifer's trial, and reader is just shocked af to see him there only to realize what he truly needed that wish for and bro she Gon be hurt hurt af when she sees him with Lilith.

The angels then ask for the details and Lucifer panics and straight up snitches on reader for giving him that wish.

So long story short, they casted him down to hell with Lilith. And the reader was sentenced to a lesser sentence since she didn't know what that wish was going to do or what it was going to cause.

But she was still cast out of heaven, never able to enter those gates ever again and is thrown over to the moon alone.

She is left alone in that dark moon desert with a single green bunny that had been gifted to her by Lucifer.

The reader just cries out of heartbreak and betrayal. A tear drops on the bunny and Jade comes to life. Reader is no longer alone and is a tad bit happy she has company.

Then timeskip to a few ion years, and the moon is bustling with lights, fun and parties, just like the movie.

Then we follow Chang'e story, trying so many things to figure how to see Lucifer again.

Well that was long idea. BUT I NEED THIS WRITTEN PLEASE. ADD TWISTS AND MORE STUFF TO IT I JUST WANNA READ IT.

I know I can write this but, I WANNA READ IT IN SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK YOU GET WHAT I MEAN?

[charlottecutepie]

☥ Bunny meat (William Afton x fem!reader x Michael Afton)

Summary: He was a likeable middle-aged man who had wonderful children, his dream job and a beautiful wife. He never blamed himself for his own actions, or to be more exact, he never thought about their consequences.

author note: Ive been thinking for a very long time whether I should publish this fic here. this is my fav fic I wrote for fnaf, I especially like the way I portrayed William here. so please, if any of you would like to see this story here, can you leave a comment? It’ll help me to understand. I’m just unsure if I should post this fic here :’’)

tags: darkfic, unhealthy relationship, angst, smut with plot, p in v, dubcon, oral sex, rough and gentle sex, daddy kink, blood play, knife play, fear play, hurt/comfort, violence, gore/murders, child abuse, follows fnaf lore, moral and physical abuse, virginity kink, anxiety disorder, age gap, daddy issues, unreliable narrator, hallucinations, hidden pairing, William is sick, psychopathy, unhealthy narcissism

Chapter 2.

Chapter 1. Thoughts

Chilly spring night. Light wind and rain. It's so fresh outside that the opposite effect appears: you feel as if you are suffocating from excess air. Outside is your favourite smell of wet grass after the rain. Light smile appears on your lips, and you carelessly go out on the porch of your house, looking at the beautiful view in front of you.

At such moments, everything around seems to be a part of you, you feel some kind of connection with nature and this world. Peace, tranquility, two things what you lack in life.

Today was a bad day. Maybe tomorrow will be better? Tomorrow will be the same. And when will it be better? Does this hell have an end?

Your head is filled with bad thoughts. It feels like every day is getting a little worse than the previous one. You never understood why you deserved such treatment from your father. It was as if he was doing everything so that you wouldn't feel like his daughter. He never even called you that. Something bad happened in your family every day, mom and dad always argued, and you always ran into your room in a state of panic, anxiety. What if father does something to her? That's what happened a few years ago. When you called your aunt in tears, begging her to come, because your father broke your mom's leg and beat her to a concussion. You could have been next if your aunt hadn't arrived on time. That evening, the picture of father changed dramatically in your little child's head.

“Father” means something cold, something cruel. The one who can punch, beat, shout, scream. Abuse.

You live with this thought to this day, but the only thing that has changed is that now there is no father anymore. He died a month ago, which was a shock to your whole little family. You hardly remember what happened exactly on the day of his death, but you clearly memorised your mother who cried all night because she knew well that the only one who could work to feed the family was her husband.

And now, because of this husband she cannot find a well-paid job, because he took care to provide her with a serious disability. And you're too young to work, first you must finish school and university.

Your skin was covered with goosebumps, you went back into the house. Passing by mom's room, you made sure that she was asleep and went to your own one.

Tomorrow is another day.

…

June 22.

“Y/n, breakfast is ready.” you heard mom's voice from the kitchen. Telling her you'd be coming soon, you headed to the bathroom to comb your hair and wash your face.

On the dining table you saw a plate with your favorite breakfast. Pancakes with honey, it couldn't not make you happy. You smiled and sat down opposite your mom. Woman was in a joyful mood.

“Good morning, dear, how did you sleep?” she asked gently, examining your face expression. That's how your conversation started, about everything and nothing at once. She told something about her plans for today, for a week, about her friends, about how one of them gave birth again. You just enjoyed her monologue, sometimes nodding and shaking your head. It was nice for you to see a sparkle in mom's eyes, it was something strange and unique for you, but warming soul. “I absolutely forgot that soon is your birthday!”

“Oh, really? If you hadn't told me, I wouldn't have remembered…” you answered in confusion, fidgeting in your chair and twitching your leg. For some reason, the mention of your birthday made you uncomfortable. Probably because it will be your first birthday without your father. After all, when he was alive, you never really celebrated it. The maximum that was — sweets that your mother gave you in secret from him. You wonder what will happen this time?

“How are we going to celebrate?” Mom asked, smile on her face.

You looked at the floor, nervously fiddling with your shorts. You scratched your head, trying to think of something, but no idea came to mind. Your thoughts are empty again.

“It's your 18th birthday… We need to celebrate it well somehow.” for a second she paused, before looking at you with cheerful face. “Oh… Mr. Afton!”

Your eyes widened in surprise, because after the funeral, your family stopped communicating with Afton family.

“Mom, what are you up to?” you frowned. To be honest, you always got shivers running down your spine from his name, because your last meeting was at that cemetery, on the day of your father's funeral. Memories have entered your mind, forcing you to remember your last dialogue with Mr. Afton.

After the burial itself happened, you ran away from the crowd away. Your heart was racing like crazy, trying to jump out of your chest. You sat down on a wet bench, covering your face in hysterics. Tears streamed down your cheeks, dripping onto a puddle under the bench.

“Young lady,” a low-pitched male voice called you out of hysteria. “Everything is okay? You've been sitting here for hour.”

You opened your eyes and raised your head. Next to you was standing was a tall, middle-aged man with dark brown hair, dressed in black trousers and a jacket. He leaned towards you, holding an umbrella over your head. His face seemed painfully familiar, but because of the hysteria, you couldn't remember who it was.

“Oh god, Y/n? I didn't recognize you, little one. Why are you sitting here all alone?” he smiled broadly as he sat down next to you on the bench, still holding the umbrella for you. “Your mom is looking for you, she's so worried. Her beloved girl is lost.”

You recognised this man. It was none other than William Afton. One of your father's friends, he often came to visit you, and your family also visited him. You were embarrassed by ignoring his questions because you didn't know what to respond. He's been staring at your face the whole time.

“Come on, princess, I see how cold you are.” with these words, he took off his jacket, putting it on your shoulders. “I understand how hard it is for you, honey.”

You haven't received so many nicknames from any men for all your 17 years of life. Never, not once. His voice at some point began to seem more comfortable and soothing. Because of all the surging emotions, you burst into tears again in front of him, no longer hiding your face. William, not wasting a minute, threw umbrella and took you in his arms, so that your face was hidden in his chest. His cold hands stroked your hair, soothing you, calming you. It may have looked strange from out of context, but you really needed support in such hard moment.

“Don't cry, Y/n. You'll be fine, little one.” he talked and talked endlessly, but because of your own tears and sobs, you ignored everything, only burying your nose in his chest more.

“He's the owner of a pizzeria! Do you want to celebrate there? I'm sure he'll give us a discount in honor of such an event.” her smile never disappeared for a second. You were already beginning to doubt at how real her emotions were.

“Are you sure? We don't have much money anyway…”

“Never mind, I want you to finally have the best birthday, dear.” she winked and got up from the table, putting the plates and mugs in the sink.

Your lips curled at the thought of having to see William again.

[ae-azile]

If I ever catch up with my WIPs, I have (another) plot bunny in my head...

Chay is still so angry. He's angry at Porsche for lying to him and joining the mafia. He's angry at Korn for likely killing his father, taking their mother away, and making her into whatever shell of a person she is now. He's even angry at Kinn for making his brother happier than Chay has ever seen him, because that means they are never going to leave this place.

But most of all - despite how fucked up those reasons are - he is still so angry with Kim. He still won't talk to him, but he dreams about him every single night. It isn't fair.

So when he wakes up after a rare dreamless sleep, he feels grateful for about five seconds until he realizes where he is. He's back in his old room, his old house, and completely alone. And when he finds his phone plugged in on the nightstand, it is almost a year behind. If he weren't so freaked out by waking up in his old bed without knowing how he got there, he would smash his phone against the wall. The screen displaying the date he went on that college tour and first met Kim is NOT doing his brain and heart any favors. He calms down for about five minutes when he convinces himself this must be some kind of dream, one that doesn't directly include Kim yet still somehow inserts him into the overall narrative.

But Ohm calls and asks if they are still meeting at their go-to coffee shop so they can gush about Wik before seeing him perform in person - just like he had asked the day it actually happened. So Chay tells him he'd rather die, hangs up the phone, and decides to eat breakfast instead. He makes it down four steps before tripping down the rest and promptly breaking his neck.

Then he wakes up. Again. In his old bed on the day of the tour. When he decides to ignore Ohm's call and take a shower instead, he slips against the porcelain and cracks his head against the wall.

He takes a hint by the third time and goes to the college to see Kim. Kim looks as good as he did the first time and doesn't pay Chay any mind until Chay obnoxiously shouts out the answers to Kim's stupid trivia questions. For some reason, that is an offense that makes getting tased by security justified.

To give Kim a little credit, Chay hears him yelling stop before losing consciousness.

When he wakes up for the fourth time, he realizes he is going to have to go about this a little differently. He goes to the school tour, attends the concert, corrects the girl's answer, and approaches Kim after the show when Ohm drags him over to get his shirt. Chay knows there is no shirt and that Kim's signature, lessons, and expensive guitar aren't worth the heartbreak. Chay wants to tell him as much.

But Kim smiles at him kindly, no recognition in his eyes as he looks towards his friend in hopes to give Chay a shirt. It's then that it truly clicks that Kim doesn't know him, at least not yet. He may have figured out who he was shortly after meeting him and offered the lessons for information, but right now? He has no clue.

Chay is suddenly the one who knows everything and has the upperhand.

So Chay - against every instinct he has - asks Kim for those lessons once again. This time, it's going to be different.

This time, Chay is going to break Kim's heart first.

Notes for plot:

- Chay will die every so often, causing the loop to start once more. Sometimes he gets a month or two in, other times he gets a few days, hours, or even minutes in.

- Chay will occasionally get sidetracked from his mission to destroy Kim. He thinks it could be an opportunity to pull his brother away from the mafia prior to Porsche becoming so attached to and in love with Kinn. He also tries to save his mother singlehandedly. It does not go well.

- After several loops and a couple of long, interrupted bouts, Kim starts becoming more aware. He recognizes Chay in the crowd and starts breaking script.

- It becomes clear this isn't some simulation. Somehow, Kim is now getting trapped into this curse too, but it's more gradual.

- They end up having to work together, all while Kim is struggling to remember what happened in the original timeline.

- Kim and Chay end up falling in love in a way that is more authentic and based in truth - after Chay gets a few loops where he one ups Kim, breaks his heart first, and gets it out of his system.

- Other characters start becoming more aware when Chay regularly deviates from the loop in ways that won't kill him. This results in allies, as well as bringing more of the ensemble into the loop. Sorry for the pun.

*Loosely inspired by the episode "Mystery Spot" from Supernatural, but more complicated * 😂

[elephant-in-the-pride-parade]

Prodigy Recap

I love it I love it I love it I could watch it forever

I'm truly irrevokably in love. I'm done for. I'm probably going to rewatch this all month before I am satisfied I've fully taken it all in. I NEED to rewatch Mindwalk and Supernova again ASAP because knowing what I know now about the memories HJ had just recovered. I know it is going to wreck me to watch her in those episodes with S2 in mind.

My ship HELD HANDS GUYSSS. HE TOLD HER SHES HIS HOME. HE DIDNT FEEL LIKE HE BELONGED ANYWHERE UNTIL THEY MET. SHE BROKE TIME FOR HIM AGAIN AND AGAIN. HER EYES GOT SO BIG! THAT HUG LOOKED SO GOOD. (I'm getting off topic a lot but i need to get the "my ship is canon - in a way i don't hate!!!" fangirling out of my system.) breathe. breathe. okay gonna keep going.

Its gonna take me a few more watch throughs to fully wrap my head around the paradox. And around how you fit a humpback whale in the original ISS Voyager (seriously. has that been there the whole time? does OG Voyager have a whale? was she retrofitted in the AQ? did Mirror J steal a whale from 1996?) And if that timeline where KJ was lost on the infinity means shes also trapped on future solum with Chakotay or just dead. and and and... so many things. so many fic ideas. so many plot bunnies

(wait no -- shoves the plot bunnies away -- go away. not ready for more wips yet)

There. was. so. much. that I loved. it was such an ambitious story to tell in 2 seasons and oh my god, i really feel they mostly pulled it off. They brought back Voyagers legacy characters and put them to work in a plot that fit them, and it was such a joy to see them again. They stay true to who they were on Voyager - thoroughly wonderfully 100x better than on Voyager in Chakotays case. and i really believe theyre the same characters with a few more years of life since ive last met them.

And the new characters too. I love Dal and Gwyn and Rok and Murf and Zero and Jankom and Maj'el to pieces. (Majel!!! is such a perfect tribute!) I want to see so much more of Noum and Tysses. I am in tears over Adreek. God how much i want Season 3 just to see how their stories continue.

But I think... what strikes me most and what I appreciated the most was how much this show wholeheartedly respects its fans!!!

It never dumbs things down or babies it's younger audience. its very mature for a kids show. it is a great introduction to star trek and the universe without over explaining. there are storylines in these 40 episodes that would be right at home in TNG or Voyager. it's really more of a fun for the whole family show than a kids show in that way. (it says something that it's the first "cartoon" my parents have ever cared for and they are watching it wholely for themselves.) It really manages to tell the story in a framing thats aimed at kids without taking anything away from the story its telling for all ages.

And it's adult audience...

I worried about how it would feel to have enjoyed such a rich fanon universe in the 3 decades since the show ended. There were advantages to having a ship with very little canon. the fan universe thrived on how much room there was to work within. After that - having headcanoned and written and imagined so many futures for the characters - I feared having some new canon come in and make a new story for them that would invalidate so much if that imagination, or create something so unsatisfying or rigid or antithical to their last canon encounter that nothing new would be inspired by it. (P/C in Picard was like that for me)

Prodigy didnt do that. Prodigy made no grand sweeping canon for the years in between Voyagers homecoming and the new show. Prodigy didnt shoe horn any character into a rigid relationship status. Prodigy picked them up, set them on a new adventure, sprinkled in tantalyzing new details, and left a wealth of room around the events of the season and the relationships between the characters for so much fan imagination to thrive. The possibilities before and during and after the seasons for the characters are bountiful and perfect for imagining their other adventures. I couldnt have imagined my ship becoming canon (or maybe affirmed by the canon is a clearer way to put it) in a better way.

And then they went and added Tank Top Action Janeway in there as a treat.

Truly a masterpiece. i'm so grateful for this show. i hope it gets the 3rd season it so dearly deserves.

[anika-ann]

Little Miss Red (R.D.)

Type: blurb, one-shot, drabble (for me it's drabble-length okay)

Pairing: Ransom Drysdale x reader          Word count: 1800

Summary: Ransom’s looking for a good time tonight.

When you walk through the door, he knows he’ll get it. And you? Oh you’ll get it too. He's going to make sure of it.

Warnings: NSFW FILTH, 18+, smut!!! I mean it. Filth, y’all. Fingering, oral sex. Written in Ransom’s voice, so language and greyish lizard brain. Hints of degradation, praise kink and innocence kink.

A/N: this is COMPLETELY on @chase-your-dreams-away who claimed she has no time to write it after just throwing the plot bunny out here with @murdock-and-the-sea supporting her.

A/N: divider by amazing @firefly-graphics; the title of the fic does not refer to dd/lg dynamics nor the actual body proportions of the reader

Ransom knew he was going to have fun with you the moment you walked through the door.

A little unsteady on your feet, but deeply embarrassed expression coating your face when you stumbled and swiftly righted yourself; unsure on your high heels, not drunk out of your mind. Little red dress hugging your ass and not much else lower, the hem riding up higher than midthigh as it had probably been intended, your hands quick to remedy it. Cheap make-up which he could spot a mile away, a courtesy of being the child of small-business-loving mother.

You looked so out of place in the luxurious club and so out of your debt that Ransom knew he wanted to play cat and mouse with you.

Except you were definitely a kitten; there was no arguing it later when you nervously tasted the head of his cock, shy kitten licks turning into a small purr around his head when you tried to wrap your lips around him, clearly doing so for the first time.

He knew that was what you were looking for when you came in. He was good at reading people – that was what made him so good at his game. Your sinfully red lipstick spoke for itself and he predicted that the night was going to end up with that colour smeared all over him, with mascara running down your cheeks. He had you blinking up at him with tender wonder and want with just a few sweet words and lured you in into the private saloon with a promise of a good time and being a gentleman.

When his mouth found yours after two minutes of idle meaningless chitchat, you had smiled contentedly into the kiss. Your breath quickened as soon as his tongue pushed between your lips, a silent squeak into his mouth – but leaning into his touch eagerly, heart like a cute little hummingbird – when his hands started wandering to your breasts, so prettily wrapped in the crimson dress. Yes. You might be of limited experience and playing coy, but you came here for one thing and Ransom was happy to give it as long as he got to take from you much more.

You responded to even the faintest touch. When he ran his fingers through your folds over the absurdly thin excuse for an underwear, you were already soaking and fuck, the needy whine that escaped your swollen lips when he circled your puffy nub… it almost made him cum in his damn pants. He was going to eat you up.

If he wasn’t so determined to see your red mouth around him, he’d take your cunt. She was sucking his fingers right in, greedy for more, and yet it was almost as tight as if you were a virgin and was just as sensitive. He’d know; he had taken plenty. He loved stealing their innocence, ruining them for other men. He breathed in the power he gained when he was the first to claim that territory, all warm, wet and so damn snug; having them cry his name as their pain, that delicious pain he both caused and took away, blended into pleasure and pleas for more. Breathy. Needy. Begging so sweet and filthy, obscenities spilling from those good girl lips that had trembled a bit at the size of his cock and yet took it so well.  

You asked for more too, weak voice coming out in gasps as he stuffed the third finger in, the squelch of your juices filling the space and sending blood straight under his belt. By the time you were trapping his fingers in with how hard he made you cum, he was ready to burst the second you’d take him to your throat. It was a thrilling game of control and self-control; and he’d always win.

You were a fast learner. After paying attention to the head, you took him in and sucked experimentally, eyes fluttering shut when he placed his big hand on your nape, encouraging you to take more. And so you did. Fast learner; eager learner. Ransom loved them eager to please him, especially when they were first timers, face all flushed at the mere suggestion of sucking him off at first. Now? Your nose was on his pubic bone, hair ruffled from how he gripped you close for his tip to brush your throat, your pretty cheap make-up running, lipstick all where he needed it.

As a bonus, you clawed your hands on him all over; over his thighs, over his ass, pushing away and pulling closer, your hips bucking forward in search of friction. And fuck if that didn’t get him going; his Little Miss Red enjoyed the hell out of sucking a cock and choking at it, gagging and grabbing at him as if she didn’t feel him deep enough. Who would have thought.

“That’s it, kitten, that’s it, take my load…” he coaxed you and caressed your hair with his free hand, lost to the vibration around him when you hummed in agreement, purring like a little obedient affection-hungry kitten indeed.

“Oh baby, look at you, a good little girl acting like such a whore for a big cock, hm? Fucking love that virgin mouth. Look at the mess you’re making of yourself for me.”

You had. You struggled to swallow and breathe, saliva pooling and escaping your mouth but damn, you were so excited to do better, holding onto his ass, his inner thighs, trying to brush your weepy core against his shin to earn some of that friction you so obviously craved.

Your fingers stroked over his balls and he spilled down your throat with a satisfied groan, fingers in your hair flexing to keep you there and swallow it all as you coughed and sputters, more black streaks painted your pretty face, throat spasming with a choked sound.

You curiously left him in your mouth as he softened, that little experimental lick almost enough for him to get hard again. He pulled you up and walked back to the couch to tug you into his lap, claiming your mouth with his own, tasting his victory in the salty tang on your tongue. What a sweet picture you made; a fucked out mess, eager for more, innocence ruined. He almost took a photo to make the euphoria last longer.

But you got shy again, all wide-eyed, when he pulled out a wipe from his breast pocket, spitting a bit to clean your face up from the worst smudges.

“Told you I’d be a gentleman, didn’t I, kitten? Can’t have you walk around the club like this, everyone would know what you’ve been up to,” he smirked, cock twitching at your meek thank you and the little spark in your eye that told him that you might like that. You might enjoy other people knowing what was in your mouth and now in your belly, wear your ruined cute face like a badge of honour.

Fuck, he could keep you. If he only cared enough for the shit that came with keeping just one girl at his arm. Keeping anyone, really.

Your legs were a little wobbly after he tested you were wet for him again and you buckled into his touch, but he sent you walking out with your purse all alone, satisfied for the night – or at least half of it. Still sprawled on the couch, he tucked himself in and gathered his breath and composure before he returned to the few bearable members of his fraternity fraction. They hit up a club every once in a while, a little hunting trip for pussy. The one who’d score first during the night out paid for the drinks.

Ransom’s smirk widened as he stepped back into the main room. He had no doubt he was the winner tonight; that feeling was damn worth the few hundred bucks he’d pull out of his Valentino-

The smirk slipped from his face when all his palm was the fabric of his empty pocket, his lips parting with mute shock, anger flaring up in an instant.

“Son of bitch-“

His head snapped up, instinctively searching for you; and finding you by the entrance again. You smiled at him sweetly, one corner of your sinfully red lips higher in a smirk as you waved his wallet at him. He froze mid-step.

Blowing him a cheeky kiss, you dropped your timid demeanour like a paper-thin mask, letting it drift towards the floor as slowly as you sunk to your knees for him.

An act. He had fallen for a cheap fucking act. You were no first timer; you were far from shy, apparently.

With bitter clarity, he recalled your hands clawing at his ass when he had thought he had it all under his control, including you, as you struggled to breathe. Your throat spasmed so sweetly, showing him heaven, while he dragged you to hell.

Or he had believed so. Now, watching you disappear behind the door as if you had been nothing but a fever dream, it was easy to see it was the other way around; or maybe you were both going to hell already.

A fist bumped into his shoulder, laughter of his wannabe friends reaching his ears.

“Well, well, well, looks like someone already scored tonight,” Harold howled, cackling as other guys booed and whistled. “Drinks are on Drysdale tonight, y’all!”

Oh Ransom would be drinking tonight, alright. Son of a bitch. That little, little bitch.

“She stole my wallet,” Ransom muttered, barely audible, still hypnotizing the door as if you were to come back. Yeah right.

“Wait what? Dude! You gotta block your credit card and call the cops before she buys a fucking Ferrari at your expense or something! Come on!”

The outrage in his Bryan’s voice snapped Ransom from his stupor, his head slowly turning to the man who spoke the sound advice.

The image of the check Little Miss Red buying a luxury sports car just as red for his money. It should strike him with terror. It should make his blood boil. It should make him want to grab your cute little neck and choke the life out of you.

But his surprise and exasperation gradually blended into the strangest feeling of pride.

You participated in his game of cat and mouse; you were the kitten. You were the cat.

You won fair and square even as both of you played more than dirty.

He could respect that.

“Nah. I’ll let her have it for a bit. It’s kinda like having a sugar baby…” Ransom mused, shrugging it off. “When she least expects it, I’m gonna find her and make her show how sorry she is. …or maybe make her my sugar thing for real. I mean… those lips looked really pretty around my dick after all.”

Mics masterlist

Yeah, the stealing the wallet bit and Ransom kinda respecting the reader for it was the “innocent remark” @chase and @murdock came with and my brain went hggggnnnn, because yeah, he would.

Thank you for reading. I'm gonna go bath in holy water, excuse me.

(the convo that inspired this filth... we know he would)

[meowmeowriley]

Dude... Does this count as NSFW? Well I'm gonna ask anyway and you can decide. I'm not sure how you feel about the reproductive possibility %, if it changes at all with Bun!Ghost. But I'm imagining Bun!Ghost who gets classically moody/impatient/entitled during mating season. Tries to hide it but around Soap he fails miserably. And the end result is Ghost and Soap with an entire litter of these adorable little babies.

I don't even know how that works, trans Ghost? I love that. Sorry I'm dumping and running (like Soap 😳) but the idea of them having a large litter was just too adorable a mental picture not to share. Bye bye now.

Mmmmmmmm i think Tumblr will let us talk about it, it's fine. 😁 and Ghost is trans in this fic, I was persuaded and honestly it works so well.

Rabbit breeding season is all summer long, practically half the year. It doesn't take a genius to notice the difference in Ghost as soon as fall sets in, and he suddenly mellows out. It hadn't always been a problem. Before he found himself attracted to Soap, he did just fine satisfying himself quickly and quietly. Once he'd realized he was so drawn to Soap, so desperate for him, he was doomed. His mood stayed a bit more sour because he couldn't have the man for himself, and he frequently came back to base from leave smelling like other rabbits that were also ready to breed. How very dare he.

Now I don't wanna give too much away, but I will say there will be no babies between the two, for plot reasons. However, that doesn't stop Soap from dreaming about it, once they get together.

Soap hadn't realized before finally bagging Ghost that he really liked the idea of having a few kids. He didn't care about gender, they could decide that for themselves. He wanted to teach them all there was about all he knew. How to draw, how to fight, how to shoot, how to skin a rab-... oh. Okay maybe not that.

He finds himself imagining how weird it would be, to be half rabbit and then find out that half your family makes a living killing them. Would the kids resent him for that? Would they fear him? It keeps him up at night, long after Ghost had nodded off, loafing beside or on top of Soap. (Sometimes shifted, sometimes not. Sometimes he's a full ass man sleeping curled up with his knees and arms underneath himself, face down in the mattress or Soap's gut. Fluffy bunny tail peeking out of the band of his sleep pants. Sorry, I got sidetracked 😅)

Maybe it's just as well they won't be having kids together. The implications of his own offspring looking at him like Simon's family does, like he could snap at any moment, skin and eat them alive. It makes him sick to his stomach.

It doesn't stop him from doing his best to keep Ghost satisfied during breeding season, but he does start to get a bit melancholic when Ghost murmurs about getting bred like a rabbit should in the heat of the moment. He doesn't mean it, he's just caught up in hormones. Tis the season. They rarely address their embarrasing pillow talk outside of doing the deed. Ghost doesn't actually want to get pregnant, he loves his career. Soap hates the idea of being seen as a monster by his own flesh and blood. They won't have children.

Sorry I took your wholesome happy family daydream and ruined it 😂 but thats what I do. Shouldn't stop you, Soap, or anyone from dreaming about them having a huge family of bun babies though!

[be-my-ally]

The Seatbelt Sign is On

A Big Bunny Vignette.

Bunny wants to get tied up, so uh, here we are. Playboy!Reader x 76/77 Elvis - this little plot-less smutty fic is set between The Lisa-Marie & Crash Landing. Although I think it could be read as a standalone. This is pretty much totally unedited, so apologies for any typos.

warnings: 18+ 18+ 18+. Light bondage. No safewords or anything but it is clearly pretty ssc**. Oral, and penetrative sex (p in v), slight overstimulation. 

75-77 elvis x playboybunny!reader (established relationship - here's the link for the rest of the series)

wc: 4.2k (miss concise smut is back baby!!)

** ((Spoiler: Elvis does say he has scissors in case she needs to be cut out - but he’s pretty much just holding her down with some ribbon and a seatbelt.))

Elvis often climbed up the stairs with his last burst of energy post-show - happy to collapse and settle in or onto the nearest chair, sometimes not even making it to his bed, taking in the precious hours of rest before the next stop. It meant that even though you were spending a serious number of hours with Elvis, it didn’t leave a whole lot of time that he was lucid or awake enough to actually spend it with you. 

You’d worried it was you, to start with, but you’d heard the guys whispering about him lately. About his lack of interest in the girls he flew out to meet him, or the ones waiting back home for him. You’d watched Sam looking you up and down a little smugly in the middle of the conversation as if saying without a word that there was a lack of interest in you too. The rumours that he couldn’t get it up at the moment followed raucous retellings of salacious events from years before that you were sure were heavily embellished if they’d even happened at all.  But, despite what they would gossip about, you never would describe Elvis as lacking in some way, and certainly not out loud. Sure, he didn’t always (or even often) have the energy to be intimate with you but when he did he was as considerate and, usually, as fun as ever.

Sometimes though you couldn’t help but feel like it was just…a bit bland. You still blush when you think about those first few flights on Big Bunny, meeting him in next to nothing for that rehearsal. Nothing has really come close in a long time. He certainly wasn’t behaving in the same way, and you felt a little like maybe you had become too comfortable together, or like a married couple or something. A distinct lack of excitement together. 

The issue, you thought while brainstorming ways of keeping it interesting, was that despite how brash and forward Elvis could be, he ultimately became quite shy and almost too respectful towards you while you were alone. You knew enough about how his brain worked to know that part of the appeal of the opposite sex was, for him, the perceived softness and ability to at least perform an act of gentle innocence. He could be brazen and arrogant while ordering you to dance for him, to roll his latest dirty film acquisition, yet when he had you alone he’d be almost apologetic, gentle. You didn’t want him to be mean to you, but maybe a little less of the…desperation. If he could just take a little more control again. 

It was at the end of a run of shows, Elvis tired but with it, when the answer came to you. He’d been carefully kissing the inside of your thighs, where you lay, still fully dressed on the bed of the Lisa-Marie when you’d moved your hands onto his head in an attempt to impatiently guide him. He’d tutted at you, immediately pulling away from your fingertips trying to bury themselves into his longer hair. 

“No, no, no, keep your hands outta the way, baby, gotta let me work.” He returned, but a kiss to a sensitive crease sent your leg knocking into his shoulder. It’s been a while. You can feel his grin even as he pulls away again to look up his lashes at you. 

“I told you you gotta stay still, I need my hands for this, can’t be holdin’ you down.” You’re not sure the noise that came out of your mouth could be heard by anything but dogs but he laughs, shaking his head, “What m’I gonna do with you?” You wiggle a little, and there’s a clunk of metal hitting the floor. You both turn to look, and your wide eyes meet his calculating ones. 

“You can. You know, if you want.” He stares at the seatbelt now trailing on the floor for a moment longer before responding, turning bashful; 

“Uh, well, I don’t know. I wouldn’t wanna pin you - I wouldn’t want you to be uncomfortable… I was really only jokin-“ He runs a hand through his hair, pushing it off of his forehead. 

“El- it’s ok, really, I think I’d like it.” 

“I didn’t, uh, I didn’t - do girls, do ya, do ya, uh, really like that kinda thing?” 

“Uh-huh, I think so, or well, maybe not every girl, but I like the sound of it, all tied up and ready for you, just having to take whatever you wanted to give me? Doesn’t that sound good to you too?” While you were talking you could see him looking at the belt, gently stroking your wrist as he considered the proposition, he swallows. You can tell he likes the idea. 

“You’d… you just, you’d just let me know if you want out right?” You laugh at his nervous questioning; 

“Lord Elvis, what’s running through that mind of yours to do to me that I’d want out?” He shrugs, glancing at the clock. 

“Well, not today, baby, gotta be ready for the show in an hour, ‘m gonna, gonna freshen’ up.” And with a pat to your side, he headed to the bathroom, leaving you there.

You realised you might have made an error in judgement bringing it up just then, just when he’d started to get going now you were left with your panties twisted to one side, skirt hitched, alone on the bed with the plane seemingly whizzing past any prospect of an orgasm today. 

——————————————————————

“We’re uh, going to Denver, you know, for the uh, burgers.” You pull the headset from your ear, as if blinking at it was staring at him and he would offer you more explanations.

“Oh, yeah… sure, ok.”

“Well, don’t ya wanna come too?” He sounds offended at your noncommittal response, but you don’t really. Truthfully, you still didn’t quite feel like you were rested from the tour yet and you knew it was only a matter of days before you’d be up all hours of the night and day and running ragged after him again. But, he made that dejected sort of hopeful hum that made you cringe at the mere thought of not agreeing to his plans. 

“Of course I do - I’ll uh, I’ll be there just as soon as I can.” It’s silent on the other end, and then, 

“We’re leavin’ now, so hurry.” Of course he was. 

It didn’t occur to you until much later that he didn’t want to go to Denver at all, and definitely not for the burgers - you’d heard Joe ringing from the comfort of Elvis’ fancy car-phone to make sure someone, presumably a pretty Miss Colorado of some sort, was home. Assuring them down the line that Elvis couldn’t come to the phone right now, but if they made sure they were at the airport he’d be there in a few hours for a flying visit. Somehow, you were able to listen to this - your legs nudging his, and his nudging Joe’s, without the slightest jealousy - just a mild sympathy for this girl desperate for the crumbs he was willing to lay. It would be much later that you would realise Denver had nothing to do with this girl either, that it was all an excuse for you. You’d realised there was some kind of ulterior motive to a lesser extent though as soon as you were, quite frankly,  shoved into the bedroom as soon as you had boarded. 

“Elvis! I’ve got a job to do!” He shakes his head, grinning at you and standing in the way of the door, 

“Nu-uh baby, I been thinking about what you said last time.” You didn’t expect that. 

“Oh?” 

“Yes ma’am, and you’re right.” You really didn’t expect that, 

“Oh! Well I can’t say I’m surpr-” You yelp as he pinches your side, 

“‘Nough of that, on the bed! I got ‘quipment.” You pause your stride towards the bed, looking at him grinning with his hands on his hips, it was all a bit sudden.

“Um, I didn’t, I mean, I’m not su-” He grins at you, 

“I thought you were Miss Confident?” He gets that sly look on his face, his eyes narrowing and crinkling in their corners, “You know… I’ve been readin’ up and I don’t know if I oughta be worried, liking this kind of thing is listed in the DSM you know…” You gulp, your stomach twisting a little, feeling a flush rise up from your chest to your cheeks. 

“Jesus El - I’m not the one with equipment! I just like a little…I’m an adult, and I know what I like and I think it’s unfair of you to say that kind of thing, especially when I know what you’ve been up to, and you know Hugh -  Elvis stop laughing at me!” 

“You’d have thought I was secretly sending you off to the nuthouse baby, the way you were carrying on then,” He manages to get the words out past his giggles, “ ‘s just a bit of ribbon, honey-bunny.” You both feel the rumble of the engine starting up, “C’mon we’re on a time limit.” 

“Well, if you’re - if you’re sure…” You bite your lip in nerves. 

“Where’d my conf’dent l’il bunny go huh? C’mon baby, ‘s no worries - you’ll like it .” 

“Are you - you know what you’re doing?” His mouth gapes a little, wide-eyed. 

“Of course!” He looks genuinely offended, for a second before grinning, “I got good at knots in the army don’t you worry.” He winks at you as he salutes, his feet knocking together and you giggle, your tension relieving itself.

“I’d be more reassured if you’d been in the navy.” He swats at you, 

“ ‘M better than any of them boys playin’ out on their little boats I tell ya, now hush and let me work here.”  Your breath catches again, “don’t worry darlin’ I saw this in a uh, blue movie, don’t ya worry, I know how you like it.” 

That did little to calm your nerves - his reassurance that he knew what he was doing too often led to some kind of mild disaster. “Well, ok, but - you’ve got, you’re prepared, right? You got some scissors or, something, haven’t you? In case you hafta get me out quick?” 

Elvis puts the bag back onto the bed, holding three fingers up - but his solemn face belies the comedy of the action; “I swear, swear to you, I’ll get you out if you want to be. Not gonna let anythin’ happen to my best bunny.” You look into his eyes pausing for a moment and nod, lying back on the bed. He situates himself between your legs, bending to place a feather-light kiss on the corner of your mouth, 

“Aren’t you gonna…?” You shake your wrists at him and he huffs a laugh, his breath fanning over you, 

“Gotta get you worked up first baby, ain’t no fun if you’re not ready to wriggle and jiggle around, is it? Now, hush,” He whispers against your skin, “let me work my magic.” 

He might not have been focussing his energy through his ‘healing hands’ this time, but you couldn’t deny he did have the magic touch, he barely had to brush his fingers over you, press a thigh against your side, and you were gone from the world, levitating above the bed, above the plane, into the sky above. You’re embarrassingly quick to turn on, making out with Elvis enough to make you squirm. After a minute or so he presses kisses against your clavicle, open-mouthed while his fingers fumble with opening the buttons that stretch from your neck to your thighs, almost immediately shoving his hands around the waistband of your tights and he tugs hard enough that there’s the tell-tale ripping sound of the nylon falling apart - if you’d been more conscious of it you would have rolled your eyes, somehow you never seem to be able to keep a pair for long around Elvis. As it was you were far too distracted to care, relieved simply to be divested of the fabric and you lift your hips to let him roll them off - throwing the destroyed fabric to the corner of the room. His hand supports your back as you lean forward, pulling your arms out of your dress, immediately wrapping them around his neck once you were free. 

He’s all-encompassing, someone else might find him smothering, the way his arms seem to be everywhere all at once, caging you against him. But you can’t get enough. Your underwear ends up somewhere, god knows where. You’re reminded again of that revelatory first time when he’s biting nibbling kisses across your chest, tiny pink bruises sucked onto your soft skin, Elvis’ hands pawing at you in that somehow hot clumsy way. He tweaks a nipple and your back arches to meet him, you don’t know when your eyes closed but you open them at the sudden loss of any sensation, 

Elvis is sat back on his heels, assessing you, rubbing your thighs firmly. He nods with satisfaction at whatever he sees, reaching up the bed for the ribbon and tugging your wrists towards him. He kisses your pulse, and you wonder if he can feel how it jumps. He tuts when the ribbon twists, wrapping it around several times and looping it over and under before finishing it off with his best attempt at a bow. You make eye contact with each other, and you open your mouth to tease him about it, but he stops you with a pointed finger, his eyes alight. 

“Don’t say a word.” You swallow your words, playfully snapping at his finger instead, and he laughs, holding your newly tied wrists above your head as he leans down to kiss you again. It’s somehow dirtier this time, whether because you just feel that way, or because he doesn’t take his time, biting your lip and pushing his tongue into you; forcefully mapping out your mouth. He works his way down, sucking a small, darker bruise on the underside of your left breast, you wonder if it was intentionally close to your heart. You tremble, wriggling against him and after a moment he evidently grows tired of pinning your wrists, his long arms not able to keep them pressed flat while he works down your body and he looks for a way to secure them better. 

“Well, I guess we didn’t think this through, honey, it’s not the right kind of headboard, so I s’pose you’ll just hafta keep ‘em there.” He presses your newly tied wrists against the pillows, fingertips brushing the velvet of the headboard and your back arches with the effort of keeping them there. His breath tickles when he returns to his place, and the air over the sticky wetness of your inner thighs makes your arms involuntarily attempt to come back down to hold him in place. Elvis tuts at you, leaning back.

“’S no good. You’re wriggling around too much.” He stands up, his hands on his hips to assess your predicament. He sits back down and peers down the side of the bed. “C’mere.” He hauls your body up and you wriggle up with him until you were high enough up the bed that your back was now supported by one of the cream-golden reading cushions and he was able to pull the seatbelt across your stomach.“Keep your hands there.” He pats them at the top, and you grip the top of the headboard as best you can. “Where was I?” 

You’ve lost all ability to speak, simply too turned on to comprehend what’s going on. There’s the barest hint of sweat beading above his eyebrow and glistening on his dark, longer, sideburns. Your hands twitch to cup his face and you whine in frustration, unable to reach where he kneels between your legs, your fingers clutching the dusty top of the headboard, desperate not to ruin the game. He grins, tongue running over his teeth, and you thump your head back against the hard cushion, 

“Elvis, c’mon.”

“I’m havin’ fun now, baby,” He sing-songs it delicately and you shiver, “Gonna get you so worked up.” His thick hands grasp your thighs, fingertips digging in, “C’mon, bunny, open up for me.” You have no idea if the growl that comes from his mouth was intentional, or if it just had the unintended side effect of your legs immediately spreading, your breath hitching. He leans in and you feel yourself tense, hairs pricking with the tension of the moment, desperately anticipating his next move. 

Elvis is clearly not unaffected by the sight of you - his breathing much harder than before and it tickles as he gently kisses your inner thigh, his pouty lips open. The very tip of his tongue ghosts across your skin, and you shudder at the sensation, aching for him. 

“Elvis you’ve gotta - you’ve gotta touch me.” 

“I am touching you.” His fingertips continue to dance, and you try to squirm a little, the seatbelt trapping you in place. 

“Nooo. Properly.” He chuckles, 

“Properly” He teases with a shake of his head and you whine again, 

“Ssh, shhh, I’mma take real good care of you, bunny, just relax baby,” He firmly rubs at your thighs, as if he wasn’t the reason you were squirming. You let your head roll back again, suddenly distracted as he teases you by the sight of yourself in the mirror at the end of the room, the dark mahogany of the wood-covered room and the dim light reflecting off of the creamy ceiling putting you into a soft-glow focus. You can barely see yourself beyond him, he takes up the majority of your view, and though the concept is hot to you, fully clothed as he was, it left little to look at - just your twitching tied wrists, above both of your bodies, really visible. 

Finally he’s kissing across your bare skin and you’d forgotten somehow, impossibly, in the time since you’d last been together like this, just how good he was at this. You’re already so sensitive, you can feel the cooling dampness in the air, and yet it still comes as a surprise at his first kitten licks how responsive you were to him. He presses one hand against your thigh, fingers leaving bruises from his tight grip, holding you totally open to him. Elvis leans back a little, grinning at your attempts to grind on nothing, and you might be ashamed at such a wanton display in the morning but right now you just need the pressure back. He spreads your slick folds with his flattened tongue, moving his fingers in to keep you spread open so that he can lick up to your clit, sucking on the little nub and sending you shuddering. 

Your legs are the only part of you able to move, and you wrap them around his, now thicker, waist holding him against you until the movement of his talented tongue and fingers make them kick out. For some reason, even though he wasn’t doing anything new, being secured down like this was making everything feel ten times more - like someone had turned your sensitivity up on a dial. He tongue-fucks into you, and it’s so hard to keep your hands where they are, writhing around as you were, desperate to hold him in place - gain better purchase to grind against his clever, talented tongue.

The singular focus he dedicates to this task always reminds you of that first time and having him so committed only adds to your enjoyment. Elvis renews his efforts, suckling like he needs you for oxygen, and the warm wet pressure builds until finally, you’re shuddering over the edge of orgasm, legs spasming and your back arching as much as it was able to do so - and the tension of the seatbelt across your body - pinning you down far more than you would usually be held, has you electrified, adding to your startling passion. You pant, trembling as he leans back, it’s scandalous how he smiles at you, catching his breath, lips glistening with your slick and you try to form words to tell him how earth-shattering that vision is, but you struggle from the sheer anticipation of watching him stand up. 

“El- Honestl-El, how’d you, it’s so good. You need, I need you -“

You cut yourself off, panting, as Elvis finally, finally, slips out of his lounge pants and jacket.  His tanned hairy chest unveiled itself, a perfect trail leading down to his hard cock, its pink head poking out, glossy with his precum. You shudder, and he grins at you wildly for a moment, before seemingly focussing on the task at hand, clambering back atop you. He mutters the same thing he always mutters as he presses himself into you, 

“Y’re good, y’re a good girl, bunny, swear it - y’re so, fuck, so tight.” It probably shouldn’t make your chest glow so much. He presses a hand on your stomach, just below where the seatbelt pins you to the bed - holding you in place for him to get himself situated. The firm pressure is almost enough to tip you over the cliff again. You realise you’re babbling, muttering pleas when Elvis kisses your sweaty cheek, hushing you. He jerks his hips once, twice, in time with your gasps before he growls, evidently incapable of getting the angle right and you suddenly feel yourself being tugged down the bed, hands leaving the headboard and seatbelt scraping your skin until you were lying mainly flat, mostly immobile.

“That’s it, that’s - that’s better - that good for you Bunny?” He doesn’t give you time to respond, laughing to himself, “ ‘course it is. You’re like one of them kids toys, what’re they called, those, those, slip n’, slip n’ slides. So fucking wet down here.” You nod frantically in agreement, stuttering out that you were fine, it was all good - but please, Elvis, please, just move. 

It’s a strange sensation, being unable to use yourself to get leverage, and it feels almost objectifying. Lying there just to be used, but you liked it, and Elvis took advantage, pulling and tugging to exactly the pace and angle he needed to chase his own pleasure. You plant your feet, when you manage to get purchase, able to use your thighs to your advantage a little. You can feel the edge rising, but before you get there Elvis stills, his mouth agape, sweat beading at his forehead and eyebrow, upper lip aglow with it, and you feel him pulsing. His hand comes down to stroke between your folds, as he slowly pulls out, and you shake your head - it was almost too much, but he hushes you, 

“Shh. Wanna see you go again, it’s only fair - ’n’t that the reason I got you all tied up like this.” You tremble, and he presses his thumb against you, it’s filthy, the viscous mix of your fluids. Elvis deftly rubs your clit, and your body shakes through the waves of orgasm until you squirm away from his fingers, completely overstimulated, 

“El- El, that’s that’s enough, I can’t - fuck, that’s too much - too much,” He laughs at you, stroking you a final time as your legs twitch. You lie there panting for a long while, and Elvis gets up before you do, cutting the ribbon off of you, not bothering to deal with the knots that had tightened as you struggled, and heading to grab a drink from the little dressing table alcove at the end of the room while you caught your breath.

The ribbon had done pretty well at keeping your hands together, he’d done them up tight enough that they’d laid fairly flat and untwisted, but still, when you rubbed your wrists there was a light mark and the hint of soreness, especially around the outside edge of your forearm. You unbuckle yourself, sitting upright slowly.

Clearly, there’s a reason people don’t usually use seatbelts like this. The rough edge of the nylon had rubbed you where you’d wriggled around, the lines criss-crossing, while the heavy weight of the gold buckle had left indents - several of which you were sure were going to bruise. You didn’t mind that so much, pressing a finger into the darkest of the marks. 

“Good Lord Elvis, I look like I’ve been whipped or something!” He glances back at you in the mirror where you’re now fully upright, brushing your fingers over the pink marks. He points a finger at your reflection, 

“No chance in goddamn hell. Nope. There’s not enough space - don’t you go gettin’ any ideas now, li’l girl. Absolutely fuckin’ no.” 

---------

taglist: @lookingforrainbows @ellie-24 @thatbanditqueen @whositmcwhatsit @vintageshanny, @doll-elvis @18lkpeters @prompted-wordsmith @richardslady121 @meetmeatyourworst @marriedtopresley @steph-speaks @a-literal-no-name @elvisabutler @precious-little-scoundrel  @eliseinmemphis @iloveelvis @literally-just-elvis-fics @livelaughlove-talia @angelborn1 @amydarcimarie @peskybedtime @shakerattlescroll @i-r-i-n-a-a @saintomie @literally-just-elvis-fics @missmaywemeetagain @rainyday10-4 @chelsaiswerid @landlockedmermaid77 @mydarlingelvis @ooihcnoiwlerh @from-memphis-with-love

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

forever ago you mentioned in an ask post that you have a story in your head about college-aged Matt saving Frank’s kids and in return the Castle family forcibly enfolds him into their tribe. There is literal kidnapping involved, and every word in your little summary was fucking hilarious. I want you to know that that scenario has lived in my head rent free ever since—I am astounded by your brain and that concept makes me want to eat dirt (in the best way)(that is a compliment of the highest degree)

anyways! Please don’t think this is me asking “when will you write that” bc i get it, some plot bunnies are just bunnies, and time/real world is a bitch, BUT—if you ever have any little ramblings about it, I’d love to hear them :) the Castle family is Insane and I love them dearly and I am forever entranced by your characterizations of Matt and Frank

Have a good one!!

Christmas with the Castles my beloved. I love this one so much that I typed out an outline of the fic entirely. It is long. Please, take my ramblings if you want them:

It's Christmas at Columbia, hohoho, peace and goodwill to all mankind. The dorms are closed over winter break to replace the pipes and Matt's out on his ass for the holidays, so get fucked, blind little orphan with no surviving family, and God bless us everyone.

Normally the Nelson clan would have taken him in but Foggy's bitch of a Great Aunt Bertha insists on holding the entire family hostage for the holidays with the will as collateral, and she sucks in many respects but even more in the sense that she doesn't want any blind orphans schlepping around her holiday table. But the Nelson clan will risk it all for Matt, who they think is neat. They'll put the whole fucking will on the line, buddy.

Matt assures them that he's got it all under control and has a place to stay. Yes, with a person. Yes, a real one. An old friend of his dad's. No, he's not going to be homeless. Stop asking questions.

This is a lie.

His plan is to simply be homeless. Peace and goodwill to all mankind.

Except Foggy knows when Matt's on his bullshit and insists on speaking to the guy he's staying with, which means he needs to get Fogwell to lie for him. Except Fogwell knows when Matt's on his bullshit and won't let him off the fucking hook until he knows Matt won't be homeless for the holidays.

Matt unequivocally refuses to come home with him. Stop asking. He'll find someone else to do the phone call.

They compromise with Matt staying in the fucking boiler room of the gym. Peace and goodwill to all mankind.

Except Matt sort of makes Fogwell think that he only needs to crash for a few days, and Foggy's family is going to take him in for the rest. This is also a lie. He is fucking off to be homeless for the rest of the holiday season.

Peace and goodwill to all mankind.

He's swallowing his misgivings and putting up with staying in the boiler room of the gym for a few days so Fogwell won't freak out. Which he now regrets. Because it puts him right in the earshot of an active hostage situation. Are those kids? Those are fucking kids.

Anyway he tries to call the police anonymously like ten times but this just tips off the hostage takers, who apparently have a mole in the police, surprising no one. Now they're going to kill the fucking kids.

Matt can't listen to this.

Peace and fucking goodwill to all mankind.

Okay. Fuck. He's doing this now.

Fuck.

THE CASTLE'S HOLIDAY SEASON, THUS FAR:

The kids got kidnapped.

like

fuck.

that happened.

The thing is that some random NSA guy got into contact with Frank and in this AU he actually blew the whistle on the the CIA's bullshit. His family was in protective custody, until his best friend and pseudo brother stabbed him in the fucking back and sold them out. Now they have his kids.

He then kills a lot of people.

Like a lot.

But he can't find his kids. They have his kids.

They're going to kill his kids.

MATT'S NIGHT, THUS FAR:

He's an asshole in sweatpants with a t-shirt wrapped around the top part of his face and no fucking plan, and there are so many assholes with guns in there. Like. So many.

But fuck it. He's doing this now.

fuck.

He fights a lot of guys. He gets super shot. Some guy tries to shoot him with arrows. Like, what the fuck even is this, Robin Hood? Honestly, fuck this night.

Anyway, he saves the kids. Wheee.

It's sort of nice? They bond, when the crying stops. The kids like him a lot. He calls their parents. Sets up a place for them to get picked up. The boy gives him the sweatshirt he's wearing under his jacket, which is kind of him, because it's fuck-off cold and Matt's about ten minutes from going into shock. Anyway, he drops them off at the spot and fucks off into the night before their oddly bloodstained dad can stop him like the world's shittiest off-brand batman.

He then goes to exercise the right of any God-fearing American citizen, which is to bleed out in the basement of his childhood church.

Fogwell's never gonna be okay again if he finds Matt's blood-soaked body in the gym. Matt figures he can just break into that basement no one uses, steal a med kit, make a solid confession about breaking into and stealing from a church if he lives long enough, and hopefully no one will even notice he was there.

This does not pan out.

A really angry nun finds him and narcs him out to Father Lanthom and they bitch him out for "dying" and "not seeking life-saving medical attention" and drag his ass to to the hospital.

NOW THE CASTLE FAMILY, REUNITED AT LAST:

The kids' will be in therapy forever but the danger is gone, because frank killed them all very dead.

He then received a presidential pardon for All The Murder.

Peace and goodwill to all mankind.

Anyway he's testified about the CIA corruption, the government is occupying itself with the coverup to end all coverups, and his only remaining concerns is (1) taking care of his family and (2) making sure the bleeding dipshit who saved his kids lives doesn't die in the streets. He's gotta find that dumb asshole.

Then he gets a phone call from a very concerned nurse at Metro General about the bleeding dipshit that got brought in with his kid's sweatshirt. They're calling because he keeps trying to goddamn leave while very fucking shot and he had a jacket with Frankie's information written on it in magic marker. Do they know him? Can they please come pick him up? They think he's going to die in the streets if someone does not pick him up.

And Yeah. Yeah, Frank Can Do That.

Matt.

Yeah.

The magic marker, he didn't.

Didn't

Didn't see that part.

Fuck.

Anyway, Matt's On His Way Out To Be Homeless For The Holiday Season, Peace And Goodwill To All Mankind, As Soon As The Goddamn Nurses Stop Hiding The Leave Against Medical Advice Forms. He lied and said he got jumped by a lot of guys, no, he didn't see who did it, because, you know. Blind. Just a regular ol' blind guy here. Poor fucking blind orphan alone and shot for the holiday season. Just give him the goddamn form.

And then that fucking guy shows up in his hospital room. The suspiciously bloody father of the kids he just got shot over. He's here, he's insisting that Matt's one of his family's closest friends and they're paying all of Matt's medical bills, and he's not commenting on the blind bit, but Matt can literally smell his curiosity. Matt's insisting that some random guy gave him the jacket, no, he didn't see his face, because, you know. Blind. He's not the guy Frank thinks he is. Nope. Please fuck off now.

They do not fuck off. Maria Castle blows through the hospital room like a hurricane, hugs him very genuinely, cries a little, and tells him that the Castle family pays their debts, and they've never had a greater one. Then the kids show up, and they fucking recognize him. Fuck.

Matt: imindanger.exe

Matt keeps feigning ignorance. Then, he waits until they leave the room and he fucking books it.

Anyway the Castle family minivan catches up to him when he's legging it a block away. They keep pace with him, and ask to just take him where he's going, and they swear they're not going to hurt him. They just want to help him out. He saved their kids.

And he can hear that they're telling the truth.

And it's so goddamn cold.

And he can hear his own internal bleeding.

And he's so, so tired.

So he tells them that no one would ever believe them. And he gets in the car. and he gives them Fogwell's address. And he tells himself he'll crash there for a day or two and fuck off to be homeless in the streets, peace and good-fucking-will to all mankind.

WHAT THE CASTLE FAMILY DID NOT SCHEDULE FOR THE DAY:

A kidnapping.

WHAT THE CASTLE FAMILY DOES:

It's. It's a kidnapping. They do a kidnapping.

Look. Look. they pay their debts. They pay their fucking debts. It's what they do. And they get to Fogwell's boiler room and rapidly fucking realize that the guy who they owe their everything to is a terminally stupid 20-something and living in the rundown boiler room of an empty gym. And they simply cannot have that.

Frank? Frank, show Matthew back to the car, will he? Maria's going to pack up his things for him.

Matt: what.exe

WHAT MATT DID NOT SCHEDULE FOR THE DAY:

it's.

It's the kidnapping.

it's that.

This fic is fundamentally founded in my premise that the entire Castle family is simply fucking insane. They're just all like that. Frank is not an outlier.

For the Castles, they're being perfectly reasonable. It's obvious that no one's taking care of this lovely young man who saved their kids, so no one will mind if they do it instead. He definitely needs it. So they sit their kids down and explain that sometimes Stockholm Syndrome is for someone's own good, which sounds perfectly reasonable to them. They then proceed to treat this like when you somewhat impulsively get a sick puppy from a Home Depot parking lot, and, well, he's a bit poorly behaved, and he keeps trying to run away, but the kids had wanted it so badly and eventually he's going to settle into his new home and then maybe you can stick felt reindeer antlers on him for the Christmas card, so you keep shoving his meds in peanut butter and forcing them down his throat and keeping the door blocked so the puppy can't slip out into the freezing new york night.

Matt treats this for what it is, which is a fucking kidnapping.

He is now fucking handcuffed to these crazy assholes' guest bed in their suburban home. It's by definition a kidnapping. they're acting like he's the unreasonable one for pointing this out. Except every time he wriggles out of his handcuffs, Frank just lugs his ass back to bed and chains him back up while they scold him. As if he's the unreasonable one for trying to escape his own kidnapping. They make him take his meds and eat three meals a day and the kids watch fucking Christmas movies with him while narrating the screen, as if this wasn't a kidnapping. This is insane. They're all insane.

Which is what he eventually tells them, out loud and to their faces.

And then Maria cries.

Stop.

Stop that.

That thing she's doing with her face. Stop that thing.

And Maria's like. Maybe they were over enthusiastic. But, being a mother, she just wants to take care of the nice young man who saved her little angels. And if that makes her a criminal, then she guesses she's a criminal. Because she cares.

Matt: shoving me into a van and handcuffing me to a bed against my will makes you by definition a criminal

maria: *cries harder*

Matt: stop

And Matt's like. Fine. Fine. He'll give into their crazy fucking kidnapping. Saves him the trouble of being homeless. Just. It's only until Christmas, and then he's gone.

maria, tearfully: and new years too?

Matt: don't push your luck

So fuck it. He's doing this now. But he's not going to like it. And he gets to come and go when he wants.

Frank: no.

matt: seriously fuck you

Except Matt's got shit they didn't pack at Fogwells. Shit they didn't realize belonged to him. His dad's shit. And he's absolutely desperate to get his dad's shit before some well-meaning janitor tosses it. So he very reluctantly agrees to let Frank go in his stead. Just. Just don't talk to people. And don't tell anyone he kidnapped matt. matt does not want to deal with that fucking court case.

Fogwell, immediately catching Frank gathering Matt's stuff for him, when he finds out that Matt sent him: are you a Nelson?

Frank, not a Nelson: Guilty.

And Fogs is just. Thrilled. So fucking thrilled that Matt has the Nelsons. Matt needs people like that, you know? People that'll welcome him home.

He's a good kid. And he hasn't had a home in a good long time. And Fogs--he's so fucking sorry that he couldn't give Matt that. And he. He.

Just tell him Merry Christmas from him? He understands why Matt didn't want to spend it with him.

Just tell him ol' Fogs was thinking of him. Tell him he really, really cares and hopes his holidays are good.

Fuck. Tell him he loves him. Just. Just tell him that. Fogs should have done it a long time ago.

What follows from there is a lot of wholesome, family-friendly Christmas activities, like:

making gingerbread houses

ice-skating

having a total mental breakdown when you get the message passed along from your pseudo-grandfather that he wishes he could have given him a home.

drinking cocoa

getting shit-faced drunk out on the town with the somewhat insane mother of those kids you saved, only to both be lugged home by a very exasperated Frank Castle.

watching Christmas movies

Visiting the grave of your dead father whose loss you've never recovered from

drinking eggnog

Confessing about your superpowers to the crazy fuckers who may or may not have given you stockholm syndrome, as well as your lasting trauma around the fact that you were child-soldierified and your soul-crushing terror that it will happen again

Making paper snowflakes

(Matt may not have meant to do all those things.)

I really like having backstories in communication with each other across my fics taking place in the same fandom? And Fogs is a great example of that. He tends to show up in all of my Daredevil fics, and he usually does something that brings Matt in from the cold in his backstory.

But in this world, that Fogs didn't do it.

In this one, he had the chance, and he failed.

Matt came to him. He ran away from the foster care system when he was a teen, and he went to Fogs as a desperate, last ditch effort. He begged Fogs to still love him the way he did when he was a kid. He begged Fogs to take him in the way he once took in Jack Murdock. He'd help Fogs around the gym. He'd do anything Fogs asked. He just wants to go home.

All he's wanted for years was to just go home.

And Fogs hugged him. He held him. He let him sleep on the couch.

And he called the police.

He wanted to do it the right away around, this time. He didn't want Matt to be hiding from the system for the rest of his youth the way his daddy once did. He wanted him to still get to go to school. He wanted him to be a kid. He wanted to adopt him proper, and didn't think of the fact that no one was gonna let him do it.

And he didn't account for how Matt would never trust him again.

He didn't account for Matt ending up on the streets, and he didn't account for matt refusing to come for him for help again, and he didn't account for Matt refusing to have anything to do with him until he hit law school and barely tolerated hanging around the gym at night again, and he didn't account for Matt not being able to stand the idea of spending the holidays with him.

There's a lot Fogs won't ever forgive himself for.

Anyway, Matt's stockholm syndrome was a great success. They fucking did it. They now have a crazy motherfucker with superpowers who's occupying this space as a the kid's new pseudo uncle. Unmitigated success. God, what an addition to the family. He's just as crazy as them.

Except Matt gets a call. From a very upset Foggy Nelson. Who says that they decided to burn the defunct bridge that was their relationship with their torrid bitch of a great aunt after she said something homophobic to Foggy's sister, and they went to go surprise Matt for the holidays, only to find out that he was already supposed to be with them. Matthew.

The thing is, foggy knows who Matt is as a person. He knows who Matt is as a person. There is such a very real chance that his blind best friend has been living under an overpass in subzero weather for the past few weeks and not telling him. He's having a heart attack and needs to come pick him up immediately before Matt starts selling his body or something.

And like, good news is that Matt was kidnapped by a lovely suburban family who have been keeping him warm and fed and dry, and they're going to be baking gingerbread today. The bad news is that Matt will literally have a heart attack if he has to explain to foggy how he got here so he just. Panics.

And hangs up the phone.

And matts panicking about how he hung up the phone, because foggy will absolutely call the police and report him as a missing person, holy shit will he call the police on him, Matt was literally kidnapped but he likes his kidnappers now and doesn't want them to be arrested, they're making gingerbread you see and that would be inconvenient to the gingerbread making. So Maria and Frank and the kids are watching this weird feral law student they forcibly adopted go through every single stage of grief in a two minute span, wonder how he made it through life so far on his own, and Maria wrangles the phone from him and calls Foggy back and politely tells him that this is Maria Castle, matts basically a part of their family and has been staying with them through the holidays, they've heard so much about foggy, won't he come visit? How about tomorrow at two? They're making gingerbread today.

Matt: MARIA

Matt is panicking. Foggy knows he doesn't have a family. Foggy is his family. Foggy has unlocked his tragic backstory. Foggy is going to wonder how he acquired a family in like a two and a half week span.

Foggy is panicking. He knows Matt doesn't have a family. He has unlocked matts tragic backstory. Matt was in their fucking Christmas cards because he has no family's Christmas cards to be in.

Maria is not panicking. They're taking a step back and making gingerbread now. Take deep breaths, Matthew.

FOGGY NELSON'S THEORIES ABOUT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH HIS BEST FRIEND (ABRIDGED):

Matt has started a polycule with a suburban couple and is raising their children with them now.

Matt was switched at birth and that's his newly discovered real family and he just never told Foggy.

Matt has been kidnapped by a family in the suburbs and they've enslaved him to make gingerbread with their children.

Which is true, weirdly enough.

Matt is having a spiraling panic attack because while he's like, not on deaths door anymore, he's still healing and clearly beat to shit and foggys going to think the castles did it and freak out and he doesn't have a lie for this prepped. And the castles are like "okay okay but, quick point, you've even prattling on about this kid for like, a minimum of four hours per day, you are more likely than not in love with him, have you considered the truth"

And Matt doesn't know what to do with that, is the thing.

Foggy comes by. He is four hours early. He arrived immediately after he got the address. Maria is lovely and kind and welcoming. Frank pumps his arm firmly and is built like a brickshit house and sort of intimidating.

Matt is absolutely beat to shit.

Matt is absolutely beat to shit.

Foggy: AHAHAHA HEY BUDDY IMMA GIVE YOU A HUG BECAUSE I MISSED YOU AND LOVE YOU SO MUCH IN THIS THE SEASON OF GOODWILL AMONG MEN. did they do this to you cough twice for yes

Matt: oh for the love of god.

And the problem is. For a family that commits felonies. They're weirdly open about that fact.

Foggy: how did Matt end up staying with you

Lisa: oh we gave him Stockholm syndrome after kidnapping him

matt: ahahaha kids say the darndest things

Frankie: no really dad kept having to drag him off the windowsill when he tried to climb out and we had to be extra welcoming to him so he'd stop trying to escape

Matt: AHAHAHA KIDS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS

Foggy told his cop friend Brett to be on standby before he came here and now he's rapidly wondering if he needs to actualize that.

There's a good deal bit more after that, but this is getting long. There's emotional honesty. There's homosexuality. There's confessions about superpowers that Matt may or may not have. There's discussing trauma.

There's the fucking shadow government showing up to recruit Matt.

The thing is that Frank Castle is one of the best military operatives, like. Ever. And SHIELD was interested in recruiting that. And they thought, hey, saving his kids may do that. And they sent Hawkeye to infiltrate the mercenaries that had taken them.

Except they were fuck-off guns there and while he could take them all out if it was just him, he'd have to be 90% crazier of motherfucker than he actually is to try that shit with two kids in the line of fire.

And then an absolutely crazy motherfucker showed up and did exactly that. Caught his arrow mid-backflip. Kicked his ass too. It was sort of sick as hell. He hasn't met anyone so good at hand to hand since black widow.

They couldn't not recruit that guy.

And like. They found him. They found him really easily. The castle family kidnapped him. It was kind of obvious.

So Clint and Coulson roll up with the recruitment pitch and Clints like "hey, haha, I'm Clint, you stabbed me, wow you're like, completely insane, I mean that literally and in a figurative impressiveness sense, want to be best friends" and matts a fucking centimeter from launching himself out the window and starting a new life in Mexico.

And coulson's good at what he does. He can tell that matts not at all buying what he's selling, is more than a little freaked out at the idea of being identified as enhanced, and is almost definitely a former child soldier if their background was accurate about who took him from his orphanage for a few months. He also knows that Matt's abilities are too unique and too useful to just walk away from them. Nothing can be hidden from him. And if a fucking nuke is missing and they need someone to sniff it out, they need to be able to set Matt loose on a city for it. So he makes the pitch of "what if I keep you out of all databases, tell no one your name, and have you as a strictly as needed member of the roster," to which Matt replies with something along the line of "you can go and get fucked with you fascist shadow agency bullshit, you fucking totalitarian nightmare freaks, you try and drag me off to your freak show org to be a fucking dog on a leash for your illegal agency and I'll bite your goddamn face off, the world would have to end for me to come within a hundred godforsaken feet of you," which is… a coarse but technically affirmative answer that Coulson takes to mean as "Yes, if the world is ending, I will come to your agency." He honestly tells him that he'll keep matts secret and leaves. And Matt is still considering the Mexico plan but decides that he has a family to keep him here now in foggy and the castles and decides to risk staying. And that's that.

Which leads into my semi-crack fic of Matt being in the original Avengers, which I won't subject you to here. but some highlights:

Matt misses the first day of world-saving because he took off the second the SHIELD guy came by to pick him up. He managed to hide for 27 consecutive hours before they dragged his ass to the helicarrier.

He wasn't briefed at all because they ask him if he read the files they gave him and he just tosses them on the table and asks "does this look like fucking Braille to you." He repeatedly threatens to sue them for a lack of ada compliance.

He keeps getting stuck in rooms because this nightmare space ship only uses screens for everything, including door handles.

The hulk: *is the hulk*

Matt, has a stick: WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THAT

Tony: in a few minutes I'll know every secret SHIELD has ever had

Matt, has listened to at least eight top secret HYDRA meetings since being locked into this fucking hell ship: MHMM

They save the day, he's in a mask, the press asks them all whats next for the avengers and he's like "well I have a day job, I'm going home" and just. Walks away.

Three weeks later he starts fighting crime of his own volition and whenever anyone mentions hey is it maybe that avenger fellow he replies to the official inquiries with "oh no you see I have a day job" which should not work but does

Of course, Matt learning about HYDRA leads into my other semi-crack fic involving Matt simply immediately telling Captain America about the fucking Nazi's, and Cap rediscovering his life's passion, which is punching some fucking Nazi's. Except, he really needs Matt to spy on HYDRA for this to work, and Matt's identity is still almost entirely secret even within SHIELD and he doesn't want to endanger that. So they embark on introducing everyone to Matt Murdock, his totally normal, blind attorney boyfriend who is not at all a superpowered ultimate spy who happens to be secretly a very reluctant Avenger. It is now a fake dating AU.