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sophi-s · 4 years

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After three days. Three freaking days.

It is finished.

A kiss to die for

By: sophi-s (me)

Words: 4,531

Franchise: Darksiders video games

Characters: Fallen!Astarte, Abaddon

Warnings: Graphic descriptions of violence, blood and gore, near death experience, angst, necromancy, I changed the storyline just a tiny bit for the purposes of this, Abaddon gets his ass handed to him by his ex :P.

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Eden. The first gift from the Creator himself to the Humanity. A home for the First Ones. Once, an indescribably beautiful place full of grand trees and fresh, soft grass, flowing with cool, crystal clear waters. Colorful fruits growing in the trees, a delight to eye and tongue. Within, no danger could reach Humanity's ancestors. Truly a paradise the first humans rightfully called it. But now, after a great war that took place here, seemingly not that long ago, the great garden was left scarred and burning. Made into a tomb for those who sought to claim it. Bodies of Nephilim were left to burn and decay, forgotten and abandoned.

However, something has changed. A dark shadow passed over the sacred graveyard, leaving only madness and corruption in its wake. Those who perished picked themselves up from the ground and lashed out at Eden's guardians. Surprised and unable to respond with a coordinated defensive, the Faneguard had to call for retreat after their leader, Malahidael fell to the blades and arrows of the living dead. Amongst the scattered angels was the general of Heaven's Legions. Trying his best to keep his brethren focused and plan a tactical escape.

At least that's what he was trying before. Before he saw the cause of this nightmare. Now, outstretched on the ground in the dust, he forced himself up onto his elbow as he crawled towards his discarded blade, clutching at his chest that felt as though it had been caved in after a charging monstrosity trampled him in full speed.

How could this happen?

Fighting with his chaotic thoughts, he finally got a hold of the hilt but when he turned around, it was already too late. A large paw armed with razor-sharp claws landed on him, pinning him down and successfully immobilizing his lower half. And then his own blue eyes stared up into a pair of white ones, the same eyes that doomed him from the moment he met their gaze for the first time. The eyes that occupied his thoughts when he was awake and his dreams while he slept. Eyes of Astarte.

But what stood above him… this thing, this monster was Astarte no longer. From the waist up, the woman was stunningly beautiful as she always was, with her pale white eyes and long flowing, platinum blonde hair. But her legs have been replaced by a body of a feline beast with wings coated in blackness of corruption, feathers shimmering with red glyphs. A wicked smile was twisting her petal like lips and wherever her clawed paws fell, the dead bodies shivered and rose, called back into the accursed unlife. Utter insanity shone in her eyes.. Keeping his stone façade was no longer possible as inwardly he was falling apart. Astarte. The same Astarte who would kill and die for him, the same who he trusted more than anyone. The same Astarte he dared to love. Her smirk grew wider as she chuckled.

"Who do we have here? The great general of Heaven's Legions Abaddon himself!"

The unfamiliar taunting tone of her voice sent a shiver down his spine, as did the way she bared her teeth in a disturbing grin. Giving the large paw a tug to try and wriggle free, quickly realising it's pointless as the damned thing didn't even budge, Abaddon took a struggling breath, pretty sure his sternum was damaged if not broken.

"Astarte…"

His voice came out as a broken, pleading whisper. He still couldn't… or maybe he didn't want to… cope with what he was seeing clearly like on the palm of his hand. Astarte, his most formidable soldier, the strongest of them all, and the only woman in the Universe he felt something special for… Fallen into the vice-like grip of Lucifer's corrupting influence. Gone was the gentle smile that crawled its way up onto her face whenever she spotted him. Abaddon swallowed thickly when he noticed the spear in her hand poised to strike and carve his broken heart out from his chest. Astarte would never harm him…

"I was wondering when you'd show up."

She scoffed and used her other paw to press his right arm to the ground should he try to take a swipe at her. But they both knew far too well that he couldn't have, even if he wanted to. Astarte leaning over him was still the one his heart yearned for, still beautiful just… in a different, more horrifying way. Through the ringing in his ears after his head cracked against a rock, he could hear someone call out to him but whoever it was, they were successfully pushed back by the horde of undead Nephilim.

"Astarte, don't do it.."

He quietly begged, even though he never begs. Seeing her like this, twisted and bestial, did something to him he couldn't quite comprehend. Touched that part of his soul he didn't even know about. Strangely enough, even in her madness, Astarte must've sensed something in him that gave her a pause as she curiously tilted her head to one side. All the moments, even the shortest ones, he'd spent with Astarte in the past were flashing before his eyes. Every time they had one another's back in battle, every time one saved the other's life, every time they spoke about the things they would never tell anyone else whenever they were alone. And that memorable moment when they stood together, away from the prying eyes that moonlit night. Abaddon was listening to her as she asked him if what she feels is right, if there's any possible way he feels that way as well. He almost laughed at her obliviousness and the fact that his love was there before she even realised her own. Of course.. He took her hands in his and gazed into her eyes, absolutely mesmerized, waiting for permission to finally grant her the proof of his love and devotion, one which she silently gave him with a nod and a smile.

"I would walk through the fire of Nine Hells for you."

He said before leaning down to place a chaste kiss on her lips. A kiss, stolen kiss he was dying to receive. It was very brief but still felt like his first flight over the White City. Liberating, wonderful and equally as intoxicating. Those were the most beautiful memories he'd ever made but now they were like a parasite buried deeply into his brain, one that refused to leave his head, reminding him of better times and cackling maniacally at him as the present was coming undone before his very eyes. He wanted those memories to go. But there was no escape. Neither from them nor from Astarte herself.

"Look at me.."

"I am."

"Please, come to your senses. It's not you.. You need to fight it, I know you have it in you. Don't leave me like this… Don't you remember everything I'd done for you? Everything you'd done for me ?"

For a second, Astarte's grin fell, making place for a thoughtful expression and for this short second Abaddon dared to hope that there's still light in her. That he somehow managed to get to her. But all these hopes were taken away when she shook her head and looked at him… not with anger. It was pity, plain and simple as she spoke in a condescending tone.

"Fool. So loyal and righteous. Look around! The war had ended long ago, yet we remain stranded in this forsaken tomb! We've been abandoned and no one will set us free if we don't do so ourselves! Don't tell me you cannot see it."

He couldn't believe his ears. It wasn't the honorable and just angel he used to know. The Astarte he knew was gone. This was a twisted monster bearing the visage of his dearest, taunting him with her beauty that was always keeping his hand paralyzed whenever he tried to strike her even though his life depended from it.

"I have chosen my path, Abaddon. And you can walk it with me.."

Abaddon eyed her hand warily as she stretched it out to him, offering him help in standing up. He was torn. On the one hand, he so, so wanted to accept and be with Astarte as he used to. No one would take her from him ever again. But taking her hand would also mean slipping into the hateful darkness. Welcoming the sullying blackness inside and succumbing to madness. Straying from the light and forsaking his duty in favor of the same accursed power that destroyed her.

It was a dangerous thing, this love.. Pushing even the most reasonable people to do unthinkable and dangerous things in the name of it. More often than not at costs that rarely make it worth it. Lucifer knew this. And he used it as a weapon against Abaddon by turning Astarte. He knew not what the Dark Prince offered her but it must've been worth losing oneself. Astarte was now Lucifer's servant, not the love of Abaddon's eternal life. He couldn't… he couldn't end up like her. His already bleeding heart screamed out with anguish when he finally gathered himself to speak.. and refused.

"I… can't do this, Astarte. Not even for you…"

"That's a pity…"

Abaddon grunted in pain when the pressure on his wrist increased to the point when he could feel his bones beginning to crack. And then as suddenly as it appeared, the crushing weight was gone, both from his arm and his chest. But he wasn't free. His breath was abruptly cut off when Astarte's slender fingers, which often fiddled with his hair when he had a moment to lie down and rest after a hard day, looking up at her sitting beside his head, before all this, mercilessly curled around his throat and lifted him up to her eye level until his toes could no longer reach the ground. She was strong. Stronger than he remembered. His left hand grasped Astarte's wrist as he tried to struggle free while he raised his sword to attack. But… looking deep into her eyes, at her face, mouth curved in a poisonous sweet smile, the silken skin of her cheeks… His hand trembled. Once again he proved her and himself he doesn't have it in him to do this. Damn it all. This one, seemingly harmless emotion was what ultimately led him to his own doom. If he'd never fallen for Astarte he wouldn't be here, flapping his wings madly in an attempt to wriggle out of her hold. But he couldn't command his heart. It would not listen to him.. Abaddon couldn't simply stop loving Astarte. Her eyebrows furrowed in a gentle frown and he felt the tip of her gilded spear press insistently against his abdomen, right under his ribs. Cold sweat began to bead around his brow. Oh Creator…

"Fret not, love.."

Astarte purred, making him finally stop beating his wings and look her in the eye again only to see an unsettling spark in there. Despite the obvious danger, hearing her call him her "love" in this deceivingly sweet voice still made his racing heart skip a beat.

"It won't be long.. And when you die, you'll be forever at my side. Just as you desired."

As a monster, not unlike her. A living corpse that defiled the natural order by its existence itself. He didn't want to go like this. What an end it is for a general of Heaven? Killed by his own lieutenant and brought back to life as a shambling husk of what he used to be? Preposterous. Cold lump of fear settled into the pit of his stomach. He could only count seconds. One.. two… it didn't even come to three when the blade sunk deeply into his flesh, piercing the armor as though it wasn't even there in the first place and running him through. After all, the spear was created specifically to fight armored opponents… Abaddon wanted to scream out in pain but the wail of agony was cut short by the firm grasp on his throat that stopped the air escaping his lungs. Pain clouded his vision but did not silence his racing thoughts. He was weak. He couldn't strike Astarte down as his enemy, denying her the well deserved rest and falling to her blade like a fool he felt like. He struggled to breathe and keep his eyes opened when he felt Astarte loosen her ironclad grip on his neck and move her hand to his face, oh so gently pulling the strands of his hair, matted with sweat, to the side and behind his ear before placing the same hand on the back of his neck to keep his head still. He gasped for air through his opened mouth as blood was beginning to well up in his throat and dribble down his chin. And then Astarte unexpectedly leaned in and decisively captured his lips with her own, granting him the final kiss for a farewell.

Abaddon's eyes widened in fear and shock but even though the pain of the spear through his side, he found himself going slack in Astarte's arms. His ornate blade clattered to the ground when his fingers unfurled and let it slip out. No strength remained within him to even try and respond to Astarte's lips, even if he wanted to. But what he hoped to be his last comfort turned out to be nothing more than a cruel torment with how cold and meaningless the kiss felt. It was nothing like the one back in the White City. Hollow seconds ticked by. It tasted only of the blood flooding his tongue and the bitter defeat. No love, no passion and no feelings remained in her black heart. Only the empty void and tasteless ashes… Monster. Astarte no longer… She would never hurt him…

Astarte knew him and all of his weak spots all too well. She knew how and where to strike to make it hurt. And this last kiss was only a tool to her. There wasn't any physical pain anymore when she finally pulled away with his blood painting her lips in deep crimson and let his body slip down the spear to collapse onto the shriveled grass. The last thing Abaddon saw before numbing darkness swallowed him was Astarte delightedly licking his scarlet life essence on her mouth and teeth before she hummed contentedly

"Farewell, my love. I'll see you again soon enough…"

She stood close, gazing at the distant stars shimmering in the black sky.

"The night sure is beautiful."

"It is. Even more so with you around."

"Tsk. Sweet-talker…"

In the impenetrable black, Abaddon heard nothing, saw nothing and felt nothing aside from the dull ache within his chest. Betrayal… Every beat of his heart was a torture. He couldn't even tell if it was really beating or not anymore. It bled ceaselessly. Craving for the lost love. Crying out to Astarte as something started to tug at the strings of his very soul. Trying to pull him free from his still body that refused to move no matter how much he wished to stand or at least sit up. Memories were passing all too quickly through his head. Eyes shining with uncertainty, a relieved smile as he staggered upright with a pained grimace that was supposed to be a comforting smile..

" Are you certain everything is alright? For a moment there I was afraid you were gone.."

"Never, my light. I would never leave you."

He wasn't going to the Kingdom of the Dead, he was certain. Astarte would make sure of it.. Curse Lucifer.. curse this wretched feeling still coiled in his chest, like a festering plague. Warriors of Heaven are people of unbreakable steel. Calm and collected beings of logic. But when it comes to honest feelings, there's nothing in between. They either don't care or love to the death. And when they love and it all falls apart, their hearts break like no one else's. No, they don't even break… they shatter to a million pieces like a frozen flower. And even if they are ever put back together, they're never the same. Those scars run too deep to ever disappear. Curse everything… Soft hair he tangled his fingers in, a heartbeat right beside his… warm presence next to him and a misleadingly delicate cheek pressed to the skin on top of his chest..

"What happens now then?"

"Doesn't matter. As long as we stay together."

"We will, Abaddon…"

He tasted the copper tinge of blood again as Astarte's voice echoed in his head when she swore to him. When he believed her..

I P R O M I S E .

Those two words… They meant a world to him. Even after he saw what Astarte had become… Abaddon desperately clung to those words like a drowning man holds onto the final breath until the very last second. And that was his downfall. She promised me…

The last memory of Astarte before all this chaos wormed its way into his mind. A less pleasant one. He could see there was something wrong with her back then. This was the first time they had a true falling out. Well.. can this really be called a falling out if it was just him being yelled at? Astarte was changed already. Something happened to her after the Nephilim slaughter. Something he had foolishly overlooked. Maybe he was just too preoccupied with his own grief? Blood tumbled down from her wound, painting both her and his armor in vibrant red from where a crude spear met her body…

It didn't take long for the last of the Nephilim to fall when this happened. She held onto life tightly as he led her deeper into the garden where healers would take care of her. Abaddon waited outside the tent, pacing back and forth until Azrael, who'd been tending to Astarte himself, walked out. A slender hand fell onto his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks and making him look at his old friend bearing a sullen expression. He'd never been so terrified in his life like in this short moment when he waited for Azrael to inevitably tell him that it was too late to help her but he merely asked Abaddon to come with him inside. Somehow, it was even worse. He saw her sitting on the edge of a cot, face pale, lips pressed into a thin line, staring at nothing. Eyes of other angels were on the three of them as the two archangels walked in. It was a relief to see her alive but there was no doubt that something was wrong. The patches of fresh crimson staining her trousers on her inner thighs only confirmed his suspicions. And Azrael didn't keep him waiting for an explanation.

"She was with child.."

The news hit him like a slug to the face. With a sack of bricks no less. Astarte, his beloved, bearing his blood in her womb. By all means he should feel ecstatic. He should rejoice. But this one word, this tiny word filled him with absolute dread. Was.

"The blade went deep.. There was nothing I could do. I'm sorry."

Who knows how long he stood there like a wooden stake? There was nothing I could do. Azrael was inarguably the best healer in the White City. He knew what he was saying. And yet… Abaddon found it difficult to believe his words. A child. His child. Died before they even had a chance to live.. It hurt more than any wound he'd ever received. When he finally could move, he approached Astarte and sat beside her, reaching for her hand to give her something to hold on to. But her violent reaction caught him off guard. She jerked away, her words dripped like acid.

"It's your fault. Get away from me!"

"Astarte, listen.."

"No! It never should've happened! Why would you do this to me?!"

This was the first time she called him per "you" in the presence of other angels. He knew not what she was truly going through but if his own sorrow was any indication, it must've been a nightmare. They'd lost something they didn't even know they had and it felt like the end of the world they'd built together. In a way, it was... Abaddon tried reaching out again but Astarte batted his hand away and leaped up to her feet despite the pain.

"Don't touch me! Do not speak to me, get off!"

"Astarte!"

He managed to call out before she stormed out of the tent, wrapping her wings around herself as a barrier that could protect her from the world around. Were it not for a firm grip on his arm, he would've gone after her. It was Nathaniel who stopped him. Abaddon looked at his friend, the right side of his face wrapped up in bandages just like his side he was keeping his hand over.

"It's not going to help. Let her go for now."

It's been a long time since he felt this lonely. He left the tent without another word, ignoring whatever it was Azrael was saying, and walked away from the camp like a wandering spectre who lost its way to the Well. And when he was far enough, he found himself collapsing on the ground, angrily hitting it with his fist as though it was the culprit here. They died without so much of a name.. Abaddon knew that what Astarte said wasn't true. He had no idea, it can't have been his fault… and yet this thought kept bothering him.

I should've protected you better. I have failed you.. both of you…

It took a couple of shaky breaths to collect his thoughts. Unable to do anything else, he pulled himself to his knees, clasped his hands together and started to whisper a prayer, seeking compassion in the Creator and his silent presence.

Astarte was already slipping after that and the prolonged stay in Eden only made it worse. She became distant and irritable, constantly itching for a fight, be it with words or blades. He thought she needed time to grieve. But this was something else. Something more sinister. Perhaps if he noticed it earlier.. done something… If only…

The odd tugging suddenly ceased and moments later a wave of comforting warmth washed all over him, gathering in his side where he was impaled. Deep within his chest, he felt his heart quiver, desperately fighting to keep beating. At first he thought he was merely waiting for Astarte to pull him back into the land of the living as a detestable abomination but no.. He yet lived. His thoughts were abruptly dispersed when he heard voices, very familiar and concerned voices, break through, the buzzing in his head.

"Did that do it?"

"Is he even alive ?"

"Hard to tell. It doesn't look good.."

"No, it doesn't.. Do you think we got to him on time?"

"I do not know. I'm not even sure if- Wait, I think he moved."

Abaddon indeed stirred, prying his eyes open with no small effort, immediately regretting his choice after a far too bright light intruded underneath his eyelids, and descending into a fit of uncontrollable coughs, spitting out all the blood that remained within as soon as he took a deeper breath. Pain. Horrible, excruciating pain filled his chest. He had been right. His sternum was definitely broken.

Damn all of it. Damn Lucifer, damn the Nephilim and damn the blasted air that hurt his lungs with every breath. Mist eventually fell from his sights, revealing to him familiar, tired faces of angelic soldiers leaning over him with distressed looks. His men. The Faneguard. They survived. Some of them at least… Malahidael wasn't so lucky.. One of them, Fariel if his memory doesn't deceive him, was holding up Abaddon's hand in his, and held between his curled fingers, Abaddon noticed an emptied crystal, a used up healing shard glimmering in the sunlight as the energy that was channelled into his body began to close the torn blood vessels.

"Lord Abaddon. Can you hear me?"

Gasping for another bit of air, horribly weakened but still very much alive and likely to stay that way, Abaddon gurgled out a disturbing sound that was supposed to be a miserable chuckle. In honesty, it sounded more like a dying demon than a laugh.. It only served to agitate them even further until he breathed out with relief and nodded as no coherent word could form in his mouth. What happened to Astarte when he was on death's door, he could only guess. But one thing he was sure of. She was still out there. Raving mad and dangerous to all who step into Eden. The law was clear. Astarte had fallen into darkness, defiled the dead and raised her weapon against her brethren. This was not an easy decision but after what he'd seen and lived through, Abaddon was certain now. He tried to bring her back, save her from the hate that grew within her like a malicious weed. But she was clearly too far gone. He couldn't help her.. Too late. As always, he was too late. Whether Abaddon likes it or not, Astarte needs to die. There was nothing more he could do for her. But he won't be the one to play the executioner and the hand of justice. He knew he couldn't. He'd failed twice already.. It will be done, just… not now.

Perhaps another time… They were safe for now. And he needed to think… Abaddon lifted his free hand to his mouth. It was still there, this horrid sensation.. and he knew it won't go away for a long, long time. Resting his head against the ground, he exhaled heavily as blessed unconsciousness started to take a hold on him once more. He needed to rest. They all did…

Even as he was falling into the dark again, he could still feel Astarte's venomous kiss upon his lips. Burning like fire and sinking cruel claws into his chest. Would he ever forgive her for tearing his heart apart? Probably. It wasn't her fault after all. It can't be, can it? Would he ever forget, though? Unlikely.. Abaddon couldn't help but wonder… if it was all his fault? He couldn't command his feelings and order them to leave him. But still, he felt guilty. Not even for Astarte's fall anymore but for ever letting this infatuation control him. That's where this love had gotten him so far. It left him weak and vulnerable. It was beautiful while it lasted but now? Only suffering remained.

No wonder Heaven has such a disdain for love. It causes naught but misery and ruin. A dire thought invaded his hazy mind. It matters not what Astarte had done. He still loved her. Soon, she will be put to rest. And him? Well.. Every, even the greatest warrior has to fall in battle. Eventually… And when that day comes, he will be ready to embrace his end. When that day comes.. they will meet again. Maybe... But until then… His heart hastened even still as he took another breath and silently told himself…

…Never again…

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It.. it was supposed to be short? I did say short fic, didn't I? Uhh.. Whoops 😓

Also, Gimp 2 has nearly succeed in driving me nuts. In Poland we say "stand on eyelashes and clap one's ears" when something is nigh impossible. Yeah. That was that.

Btw, I take back everything I said about Abaddon's shoulder pads , they're mf'ing gorgeous 👌

#darksiders #darksiders fan fiction #darksiders genesis #my fic #darksiders astarte #astarte #darksiders abaddon #abaddon #here I go writing about that arsehole again XD #idk #I can't tag properly :P #my art #fan art #darksiders art #also .I.. Gimp #it's so hard to do decent stuff #it's not even that good :/

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evendeadlmthehero · 5 years

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The Five Year Promise: Double Edged Sword (9/10)

Summary: Y/N Stark, a 20 year old superhero, makes a promise to a 16 year old Peter Parker that if 5 years pass and she still hasn’t found love, that they’d finally go on a date. And then the snap happens; Y/N’s gone and Peter isn’t.

Warnings: angst, violence and swearing

The Five Year Promise Masterlist

Based on the events of Avengers: Endgame (2023)

Your eyes flutter open. All you saw was smoke. Dust. A ringing sound was playing in your ear, amplifying the pounding headache you currently had.

You couldn’t see properly, everything blurry as your eyes took time to register. Your whole body felt weird, as if you had woken up from a deep, long sleep. You cough, your throat feeling dry and itchy from the lack of water.

It takes time, before your eyes finally concentrate. You look around, before your mind finally realised where you were. It was Titan. You were fighting Thanos minutes ago. You got hit in the head after Thanos threw you but after that, you don’t remember a thing. How long were you out? 15 mins? An hour?

At least, that’s what you thought.

You heard someone groan a few meters away. You finally get up from your position, your whole back and neck aching. You see Quill, Drax and Mantis. But your father and Peter? They were nowhere to be found. “W-where is everyone?”

You look down at your body, seeing that your suit was off. It was weird, you never remember turning off your suit. A wave of fear consumed your body. Drax was helping Mantis to her feet whereas Quill was looking for someone, perhaps Nebula. You dusted your suit, getting up from your position.

You couldn’t place your finger on it. But you knew it. You knew something was wrong. The atmosphere was cloudy and orange. It was also more colder then before you passed out from Thanos knocking you into a rock. And the ship was gone. The rocks around you also looked like they had moved an inch or two. Everything seemed out of place. “F.R.I.D.A.Y back online.”

Your suit turned back on, the blue stripes of light on the side of your suit now glowing. You felt Quantum energy surge your body, filling up your veins and cells. “Hello Miss Stark, it’s nice to finally hear you again.”

“Wh-what do you mean ‘finally’,” you spoke to your suit, your heart thumping rapidly. Something was wrong, you kept thinking to yourself. Your father and Peter were gone. Nebula was gone. And Strange was sitting down breathing, looking like he was waiting for something. And the way that F.R.I.D.A.Y. was speaking to you was one of surprise. “I’ve been gone for 15 minutes.”

“You’ve been dead for 5 years, Miss Stark.”

Your face faltered, your eyes making your way to the remaining Guardians who were also in shock. Your eyes then fall on Dr. Strange who got up abruptly from his position, looking like the news didn’t phase him a bit. The surgeon had wasted no time getting straight to the point . “We need to head down to Earth. The Avengers will be taking on Thanos and they need our help.”

“I-Is it true?” You whispered, your eyes tearing up. Your whole body was shaking in shock. 5 years? How has your father dealt with it? Is he even alive? You couldn’t bear to go back and hear the people who had grown up or passed away in your time of absence. “Is it true Stephen!”

“Yes,” He replied back, his eyes full of sorrow and sadness towards the young girl. He had felt guilty, not telling her what was about to happen. He sighed, shaking his head. “It- it was the only way.”

You nodded, your face now full of determination. The Titan had taken away 5 years of your life. He had made everyone grow up without you. He had taken away special experiences from you.

“He made me miss my fucking date.”

Peter groaned, pushing Clint off his body. His whole body ached as he clenched his eyes in anguish. He could hear water trinkling nearby and it was hot from the various flames that ignited throughout the room.

“You-“ Peter begun, panting as he got up from his position, holding his stomach. Hawkeye did the same thing, just not in as much pain due to Peter taking his fall. “You okay man?”

“A-are you?” Clint breathed out heavily, his adrenalin kicking in as he realised someone had bombed the Avenger’s compound. “You, you broke my fall man. I’m grateful, but you didn’t need to I mean, I could’ve handled- hey Spider-guy are you even listening?”

Peter lifted a finger up, telling Clint to be quiet as he listened. The hairs in his arm stood up and goosebumps hit his body like waves as he felt something coming. Then, the faint pattern of multiple feet was heard. “Something’s coming.”

Clint picked up the infinity Gauntlet from the floor, nodding at Peter. Peter nodded back before nanoparticles formed a mask around his face. The sounds of feet got louder and louder before Clint and Peter started running.

Thousands and thousands of outriders ran in their direction as both men were running, Clint keeping the Gauntlet close his chest. The outriders were about to overwhelm them before Peter turned back, slinging a web bomb towards their direction.

Peter and Clint were thrown back as the corridor erupted in flames, blocking the outriders during the process. Peter let out the secound groan of today as he fell on his back. At least they didn’t have to deal with the hoard of outriders that almost got them.

Clint and Peter looked up as a familiar blue female walked into the room. Peter remembered her from Titan and when he came back to the Avengers compound, not knowing it was Nebula from 2014.

“Oh, hey! I know you,” Clint spoke, as he handed her the Gauntlet, too much in pain to hold on to it. Peter’s face tilted to the side as he watched Nebula. He could feel it in his gut. Something wasn’t right about this.

“Father,” Nebula spoke, making both Clint and Peter’s eyes widen. They knew. They knew that Nebula’s father was. The mad Titan. It was Thanos himself that bombed the Avengers compound. “I have the stones.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“So five years huh?” You spoke to Dr Strange as he was readying up the Portals. You guys had been waiting 32 minutes to join the battle. You didn’t understand why you had to wait, but you guessed it had to do with ‘the only way’ concept.

“Yeah,” Dr Strange replied back as you, Drax, Quill and Mantis stood behind him, ready to fight. Drax had his knives, Mantis had her mean face on and Peter had guns and various bombs attached to his belt.

“Are they all um-“ your voice wavered, finding difficulty asking the question. Your eyes teared before you bit your lip, stopping yourself from getting emotional. “Are they all alive? My friends? M-my family?”

Dr Strange grabbed your hand, giving it a tight squeeze as he smiled at you for the first time ever. You noticed the look of grief in his face. You knew he was lying the moment he smiled at you, seeing the small twitch in his smile. The way he avoided eye contact. “Everything will be fine.”

You gave him a small smile before he turned back around. He let out a sign before nodding to himself. “It’s time.”

Your heart started to beat rapidly as Dr Strange created a portal. He moved his hands in a circular and systematic manner. Your feet tapped away impatiently, eager to get back to your family. You peered over his shoulder after a couple of secounds, goosebumps arising from your skin as you saw a dark sky and ash lying everywhere. You also heard loud Wakandian chanting as the portal got bigger and bigger.

When the portal was big enough, you stepped out, your heart beating rapidly. You were in awe as you watched thousands and thousands of warriors and heroes from all over the world. But you couldn’t see your father, Nat or Peter.

You moved through the crowd, trying to find them, muttering ‘excuse me’ every now and then. You then heard a familiar voice yell meters away from you. “Avengers!”

You didn’t hear what Steve had said after that, but everyone begun running. You stayed in your position, trying to find someone. Trying to find your dad, Peter or anyone. You had to see them first. Because you knew Dr Strange was lying. Someone was gone. You can feel it.

Whilst you were looking for them, a group aliens were running towards you. You rolled your eyes at them before marching towards them. You jumped up and flew a meter high, pulling your elbow back before slamming your fist on the ground, creating an energy surge that knocked them down. You then dusted your hands before continuing your quest to find your friends and family.

Unbeknownst to you, Peter was also running around the battlefield, looking for you. You guys were meters away from each other, but you both didn’t know it yet. You kept running around the place, looking for everyone. You had seen Thor and Steve, but not Nat, your father or Pete.

Peter was also trying to find you. He saw Wanda fighting Thanos and also saw T’Challa. But he just needed to see you. He wanted to make sure this was real. That you were also back and safe. He missed you. By God, he missed you a lot. And he made it his sole mission to find you right now.

Your breath faltered as you saw the back of a very familiar person wearing a blue, red and golden suit with a mask on his head. A smile formed on your lips as a tear rolled down your cheek. You found someone.

You found Peter.

“P-Peter?” You whispered, your voice cracking as tears continued streaming down your face. Peter’s heart stopped, now turning around to look at you.

Your hands were trembling, and you didn’t know why. This was different, because he hasn’t seen you in five years. What if he didn’t care about you anymore? What if he had moved on and didn’t love you like before?

You waited for him to make the first move. He had still not taken his mask off. Peter stood there in shock, looking at you. You then saw him move towards you, at first very slow. You had no idea what he was doing.

Peter was breathing heavily, his whole body shaking as he saw you. Five years. Five fucking years without you, Peter had thought. And here you are, not a day older. Like nothing had happened. Like he didn’t just go through the hardest five years because everyone he had loved was gone.

His legs begun moving at a fast pace before he collapsed on his knees, clutching onto your legs like a little child. Peter let out a gut wrenching cry as he tightened his grip onto your legs. It was out of frustration and desperation. You had left him. He was alone. He had no body. And now you’re here. You’re back. It was like another shot of redemption. Peter never felt religious after the snap, but having you back had him thanking God.

You were shocked. You didn’t expect that reaction. You were thankful that a Boulder was covering you guys from Thanos’ army so that you guys could get the chance to reunite. You felt his body shaking, as he held your legs tightly, afraid to let go.

“I’m sorry,” Peter sobbed out, as he continued holding on to you. “I’m so fucking sorry. I-I let you down. I- I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to, I swear I didn’t mean to, please- just please don’t leave me- I’m sorry-“

“Hey, hey Peter,” you moved down, wrapping your arms around his neck as you rubbed his back. “I’m here. I’m here. How about you take off your mask so I can see you, yeah? C-can I see you? P-please?”

Peter moved away, his head now down. He let out a deep breath before mask had disappeared. You placed a hand on his jaw, forcing him to look up.

He looked older. Much older. You saw the tattoos creeping up from his suit around the neck area. He had it rough. You could tell. The longish hair, the unkept beard and the tattoos that consumed his neck and probably his whole body. The old Peter would’ve squirmed under a tattoo gun. Now he was covered in tattoos.

“You look beautiful,” you whispered to him, tracing the tattoos with your fingertips as Peter glanced up at you. That wasn’t the reaction he was looking for, which is why he was so shocked at your choice of words. “You look like a warrior. Like you’ve been through hell and still fought everyday.”

“No,” Peter shook his head, his heart beating rapidly as he felt your fingertips on him. “I’m not a warrior. I killed people. I left your dad when I promised I wouldn’t. I-I slept with- with a lot of women. I understand really, if- if you don’t want to be around me. I fucked up. I let you down. I don’t deserve-“

Peter was cut off when he felt the softness of your lips. He was taken back, not expecting that. His mind didn’t register what was going on. After a few seconds, you felt Peter kissing you back. His hand grazed your jaw before settling softly against your cheek.

Peter’s mouth was experienced. It was no lie to you that he knew what he was doing. He knew he had to start of slow, before his wet tongue slowly traced your bottom lip. You parted your lip ever so hungrily, before his tongue reached yours.

This kiss was breathtaking. It made up for the all the years that you were gone. It made the pain that Peter went through worth it. Your hand reached his hair, giving it a gentle tug. This had made Peter want you more.

Realising where you were, you pulled back, your forehead against his. You were smirking at him as you panted. Peter too was breathing heavily, but his face was one of shock and pure bliss. He always dreamed about this and it had been better than he expected.

“I love you,” you whispered, your lips brushing against his. You closed your eyes momentarily, trying to take in the moment before looking back at him.

“You don’t know how fucking bad I needed to hear that,” Peter’s chuckled bitterly as you gently stroked his beard. He looked at you like you gave him purpose again. Like you were the one who had placed the stars in the sky and the planets in space. He looked at you like you were a wonder.

“No hug for your old man?” You heard a voice say. You quickly got up, your eyes tearing up. Your father was standing a couple of meters away from you. He had grown up too. White hairs on his head and beard. He had more wrinkles than before in your time of absense.

He looked at you in happiness. His eyes were welling up, taking in your appearance. He let out a small gasp before a sob as you ran over to him, wrapping your arms around his neck. He held you tightly, like he was afraid you turn to dust again. “I- I’m sorry dad- I didn’t mean to leave you.”

“It’s- it’s fine”, your father replied back, caressing your hair as he breathed in your smell, trying to take as much of you in. “The good thing is you’re back. Alive and healthy.”

You moved back from the hug, smiling as you looked at him. You ruffled his hair, as you both laughed at each other. “White hair suits you.”

Tony scoffed at that but a smile broke on his face. He didn’t care how he looked, he was just happy you were back. You then let out a sigh, before looking around to survey the area. People were still fighting as you three hid behind the boulder.

“I saw Cap and Thor too but um,” you started, looking around the battlefield for a particular someone but not finding them. You then looked at your father and now Peter who stood beside your father. “Where’s- where’s Nat?”

After those words left your lips, it had went quiet. Your father looked away, a look of grief in his face. Peter had looked down and started playing with his hands. No one had the guts to tell you.

Your hands fell on your mouth before you shook your head, not believing what you think you know. She can’t be? Nat can’t be. She has to be around here somewhere, fighting some aliens. You haven’t seen her since 2016, and now she’s gone. Just like that? No that can’t be it.

“No, no, no!” You yelled, anger consuming your body. You don’t know who you were mad at. Your father and Peter, Thanos or at yourself for not seeing her or being with her since 2016. “She- she can’t be dead! Have- have you seen her fight! No one can kill her, she can’t be killed! She-“

All the sudden you were thrown back. You could hear multiple bullets come from the sky continuously. But you didn’t care. You were thinking about Natasha. Your sister. Your Aunt. Your best friend. Gone. And you didn’t see her for 7 years. 7 years you haven’t seen Natasha and she was just swept under your feet.

You started breathing in heavily out of anger. That’s it, you had thought. This was your breaking point. Your were going to kill Thanos. You were going to kill his army. You were going to end him. “Y/N? Y/N? Are you okay? You’re eyes, they’re-“

Peter didn’t finish his sentence as he watched you in fascination. You stood up, bullets piercing your body like it was nothing. Your hair was flying around as it glowed and your eyes? It was also glowing. Quantum energy was surging heavily around your body. It had seemed like all the anger had activated the strongest version of your suit. Of you.

You looked at the ship that was shooting bullets at you before jumping up, emitting a rocket-like sound as you flew up. Everyone watched, from the heroes to Thanos’ army to Thanos himself as they saw a comet like structure easily go through the ship.

“What the-“ your father spoke as he watched you just fly into the ship. He then saw you circle it before flying through it again, causing the ship to now go on fire, some parts of it exploding.

Peter gets up when he sees T’Challa running towards him with the Gauntlet before he passed it over to Peter. T’Challa then turned around and finished the remaining the aliens that were chasing him. He drew back his fist before he punched the floor, kinetic energy throwing them back.

Peter’s eyes widened as he saw a hoard of aliens running towards him. He then heard someone landing next to him, looking around to see it was you, your eyes and hair still glowing. “Pete, give me the Gauntlet.”

Peter passed you the gauntlet, looking at you unsurely. He then looked back at the hoard coming towards you. “I don't know how you're gonna get it through all that.”

“I might have to reschedule on our date,” you told him, wanting to see his reaction. Peter’s ears perked up, a smile adorning his face. He remembered. He remembered the five year promise, and that made you happy. “Next Friday?”

Peter smiled at you, giving you a nod. By God he was so in love with you. Wanda then arrived, standing next to you. You look at her with a smile. You see another women flying on her Pegasus as she arrives, looking at the hoard with determination. “Don't worry.”

“She's got help,” Okoye finished off for Wanda. You gave Peter a smirk before looking back at your enemy. Pepper lands next to Okoye, followed by Mantis and Shuri, the Wasp, 2014 Gamora and Nebula.

Thanos' army charges while the women help you fly through the Outriders and Chitauri. You rip them apart one by one, the infinity gauntlet close to your chest. 2014 Gamora takes out a gorilla, while Okoye takes out Corvus Glaive. Wanda and Valkyrie destroy two leviathans as you fly through one of those giant worm aliens that you fought in New York 2012.

You then start flying towards the van with the Gauntlet, flying past enemies and going through enemy blockades that are in your way with ease. Thanos, seeing this, starts running towards you but is stopped by Pepper, Shuri and The Wasp, who blast him backwards.

Thanos, after seeing you fly past him, throws his double sword at the van, destroying it and the quantum realm tunnel, throwing you backwards and losing your grip on the Gauntlet, which falls to the ground.

Your father sees the Gauntlet and runs to get it, but sees Thanos, who he instead tackles. Thanos smacks your father away, knocking him out.

Thor arrives with Stormbreaker and 2013 Mjolnir in an attempt to pin Thanos' arm down, with assistance from Captain America. However, Thanos overpowers them and knocks them both out.

After gaining back concious, you flew back to the fight and punched Thanos right in the jaw, throwing him back. You keep punching him, but Thanos grabs you by the arm and flings you away. Thanos puts on the gauntlet, gamma radiation from the stones eating at him as he tries to snap. You fly back again stopping his fingers from snapping, opening up his hand just like you remember Dr Strange was doing when fighting Thanos in Titan.

Thanos headbutts you, but it does nothing. Quantum energy was surging in you so strongly that your pain tolerance had increased. Just as you were gaining the upper hand by rising up and forcing Thanos onto his knees, Thanos pulls the Power Stone out of the Gauntlet and uses it in his free hand to hit knock you away.

The rest happen in slow motion. You try get back up but you couldn’t. It was weird. You then looked up to what was holding you back, your face in confusion as you realised it was Stephen. He had used his powers to create a cosmic band that held down your legs, body and hands.

You and your father then look up in question at Strange, who raises his hand shakingly, a single finger up. You shook your head at him as you realised. You knew it was going to happen. Before you could yell at your father, Strange had put a band on your mouth.

You kicked and you screamed as you tried to escape the bands that Strange had casted on to you. But you couldn’t. You started crying profusely as you thrashed and kicked around as you watch your father makes one last attack on Thanos, pulling on the Gauntlet before Thanos punches him away.

“I am inevitable,” Thanos spoke to your father, before snapping his finger. Nothing happened. Everything went silence. But you didn’t care. Your eyes were on your father as his body looked like it was on fire. You shook your head rapidly, trying to pull out of the grasps of the band.

“And I am,” Your father spoke before his eyes landed on yours, a smile on his face. You looked at him with tears welling up in your eyes as you gave him the best smile you could muster, not knowing that Strange had removed the band around your mouth. “A Father.”

Your father snaps, a blinding white light covering up the skies. You feel the the tightness of the bands come off before you quickly run over to your father who made his way over to a rock with Rhoudey beside him.

Your whole body was shaking as you saw half of your father burnt. He was dying. Your father was dying. The man that raised you, changed your diapers was dying. He will never get to walk you down the aisle. See your child. Become a grandfather.

“Daddy?” You spoke like a child as you watched the life leave from your fathers eyes. Your hand trembled as it landed on your fathers jaw. “F.R.I.D.A.Y?”

“All body systems are malfunctioning,” she spoke back. You grabbed you moved your father’s head towards you, smiling as he looked at you in the eyes. He weakly smiled back at you.

“Y/N,” you heard him faintly whisper to you as you held him.

“Dad I love you. I love you so much. I can’t thank you enough, but I can try. I can try to,” you told him, caressing his cheek. “Thank you for being the best father ever, the one you never had. Thank you for telling me to get back up every time I fell from my bike. Thank you for teaching me how to cook, for making time for me. I know I was a hard and bratty daughter sometimes.”

You laughed, your father giving you a smile as he remained quiet, tears welling up in his eyes as he watched you, his daughter, speak. The one he was leaving behind because of his action. You felt Pepper and Peter beside you, Pepper rubbing your back. “But you stayed. You always stayed. Even when the world was against you and everyone had told you to leave me behind, that you were putting me in danger, you stayed. You always did.”

“You’ve raised me to be the best person I can. You’ve raised me to love myself before anyone else. You’ve taken a lot of hits for me. I could never ever have a better father than you. I know you were scared to turn out like your father, but you had nothing to be afraid of. You are perfect. The best father any daughter could have. And I was fortunate that it was me.” You spoke, your hands still on his jaw as you put his forehead on yours. You then placed your hand on his arc reactor, feeling his heartbeat get faint.

“But- but it’s your time now dad, you have to go,” you told him, as Pepper smiled at him, grabbing his hand. You were trying your best not to cry as you saw life being drained from your father. You found it hard to utter the next words but you had to, you had to tell him that it was okay. It was okay to die and he didn’t need to feel bad about it. “We’ll be okay, but you have to rest now.”

With that being said, your father’s arc reactor flickered off for good. Pepper can no longer contain her grief and starts crying on his shoulder. You whole body starts to shake rapidly, staring at your fathers lifeless body before you too cling on to your father, sobs shattering your body uncontrollably.

Peter holds on to you as he watched you mourn your father’s death. He too had tears falling down his face. All the other Avengers had tears in their eyes, especially the ones that had been there from the start. Steve then went down on his knee out of respect, before all remaining warriors started doing the same. All warriors from earth till space got on one knee. Because today?

Tony Stark, Iron Man, Earth's Best Defender, is dead.

TAGLIST (CLOSED)

@kissingtrutharchives

@isabella-bby

@jonsnowdoesknow

@fangirlingonrhys

@trenchcoatedwhiskers

@platonictrashh

@misswritingintherain

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@autobotgirl15-blog

@clockblobber

@im-a-stranger-thing

1K notes · View notes

queen-scribbles · 4 years

Text

Shepherds of Haven Recruit Form--Xaeryn

Biographical Info

Name, Nicknames: Xaeryn Shrike, Ryn, Xaer (though pretty much only Red gets to call her that) Callsign: Oracle Gender: Female Sexuality:Straight Pronouns: she/her Age: 28

Background Info

Weapon: Dagger Magic Specialization: Argentis (Divination) Racial Heritage, Birthplace: Norm, Westwood Education: Circle-trained

Miscellaneous Info

Past Jobs: Caravan guide, scholar, private investigator, bodyguard Likes: Books, knowledge, mysteries, khav, the color blue, classical music (esp stringed instruments), peace and quiet, engaging narratives, whether fictional or historical, listening to Red talk Dislikes: Being ignored, bullies, willful ignorance, bigotry, charch (sorry, Trouble :P), heat, liars Strengths: Confident, creative, pragmatic, protective, caring, loyal Weaknesses: Proud, comes across standoffish til you get to know her, borderline terrible social skills, stubborn, pushy(especially when she thinks she’s right) Hobbies/Special Skills: Reading, sketching (mostly landscapes, though she occasionally will do people), people-watching through both natural and magical means Guardian Animal/Daemon/Patronus: Bear/Wild cat/Owl Major Arcana: The Moon DnD Morality Alignment: Lawful Good Hogwarts House: Ravenclaw(by a hair; Gryffindor’s a really close second) Meyers-Briggs Personality Type: ISTJ (Logistician)

Personality

(Bold which way your recruit leans.)

Heart of Gold/Will of Iron Rebellious/Loyal Independent/Social Tactful/Straightforward Bold/Cautious Charming/Stoic/Intimidating Witty/Sincere Resentful/Forgiving Self-Preserving/Self-Sacrificing Book-Smart/Street-Smart One-God/Atheist/Old Faith

Relationships

Best Friend(s): Red, Riel, Shery, (Halek’s not too far behind)

Preferred Mission Partner(s): Blade, Red, Halek

Friendly Rival(s): n/a

Love Interest(s): Red, eventually, once the two of them can stop hinting/pining and just admit they’ve had crushes on each other forever

Ship Name(s): ...don’t have one yet. Will probably involve books.

First Kiss Scenario: Your first kiss with Red is against the bookshelves in the library. (I MEAN. It probably will be, these nerds :3)

Enemies: Haha Ebert for sure. She went Merchants Guild route, so she got that jackass kicked out. :3

Quote: “No matter what anyone tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” ~John Keating, Dead Poets Society

Art

(theheroofoakvale)

#xaeryn shrike #shepherds of haven #shoh

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miracle-sham · 5 years

Text

Plan D for Dicey.

| {MaribatMarch2020 – Week 1, Day 6: Unconventional Weapon} |

| [Ao3 Link] | | [Masterlist Link] |

| Triggers/Warnings: D&D typical Violence, kidnapping/imprisoning of Player Characters, Explicit Language/Swearing, (Also not so much a Trigger/Warning but this a gen/platonic fic). |

| The Wayne (bat)family attempt to play their first streamed session of Warriors and Warlocks. Unpredictably, things go surprisingly well. |

| Word Count: 4323 |

==–==

| A/N: So firstly, I got really carried away writing this so it's being posted a day late. Sorry! But fun fact, this means I'm posting this on my birthday, so wooh! Also if you can't tell yet, I'm a massive D&D geek (been playing for roughly five years now but I still fell like a complete noob whenever I play or DM :P). And DC has its own version of D&D (W&W/Warriors and Warlocks) and upon reading Day 6's prompt, my immediate thought was the improvised weapons mechanic from D&D. Also also, I originally intended for this fic to be MariTim (hence the tags) but I got caught up in all the platonic fun of the family playing D&D I kinda forgot to write in the shippy bits? |

| A/N cont.: Writing this was actually a massive challenge because at the start of this I had absolutely zero idea on how to write a D&D session as a ficlet. So this might be a bit more clunky and unrefined compared to my normal work (or that could just be my self-doubt talking). As I mentioned earlier, I got really carried away writing this because I love D&D so much. I would have written more but this ficlet is long enough and late enough as is. But if I were to continue this ficlet in additional parts, I definitely can already think of so many ways to improve writing this sort of fic (and maybe next time I won't forget to add in shippy stuff). Anyway, thanks to those who read these A/Ns, and I hope you guys enjoy reading this! |

| If you want to be tagged in future oneshots/fics, or a specific Au, then comment or send me a DM/ask! |

| Also side note, Don't Like? Don't Read. Also also, please do not criticise any of my writing. This was written for fun and receiving criticism, even in a compliment/criticism sandwich, is the exact opposite of fun. |

==–==

Marinette, with Tikki on her shoulder, bursts into the Wayne Manor games room, barely able to contain her excitement. As the first in the room, she can't help but glance across the square conference U-table already set up with everyone's character sheets, dice equipment, other equipment, and snacks and drinks. Bounding over to her designated seat (right side, place nearest to the DM's section of the table), she pulls her chair out and sits down.

The rest of the Wayne (bat)family, including Steph but sans Alfred and Barbara, slowly filter into the room and take their designated seats. Jason takes his seat next to Marinette whilst Dick takes the seat directly opposite. Steph nabs the seat beside Jason, Damian stakes a claim to the seat next to Dick (despite it already being his designated seat), Cass sits down in the seat beside Steph, leaving Bruce to take his seat next to Damian.

Tim's the last of the family to enter. He slips into his seat, the DM's seat—as he is the most experienced Warriors and Warlocks player at the table—and grins downright ferally at his players.

He looks up at the cameras and recording equipment that is set up in the middle of the open space in the square U-table. “Hello and welcome to Plan D for Dicey, the first-ever Wayne Family Warriors and Warlocks fifth edition stream. We weren't quite expecting so many people to petition that we stream our sessions after a few people—” Tim fake coughs twice, “—Dick and Marinette—” Tim fake coughs twice again (whilst Marinette and Dick both grin and wave cheerfully at the cameras), “—rambled about their characters and some highlights from previous sessions, on Twitter. So we decided to give this a go and see how the session pans out whilst being streamed. So as a word of warning, prepare yourselves for the Venators, probably one of the most dysfunctional parties in W&W to miraculously band together.”

As soon as he says this, the rest of the table burst into grins and cheers (excluding Bruce who despite also smiling, looks like he's just aged five years). Marinette's side of the table all high five each other in their excitement.

Tim pauses for a second. “For anyone unfamiliar with who I am, I'm Tim. And as you can probably tell from the table set up, I'm the Dungeon Master for this campaign. That's because I've been playing W&W for just over five years now and have had experience DMing before. But for the rest of the players here, this is their first campaign and by extension first time playing. So before we begin our session, first let us introduce our players and their characters.” He nods to Marinette's side of the table.

She immediately slaps her hands on the table, pushes her chair out and stands, she waves at the cameras again. “Hi, I'm Marinette and my character is Nella Septa-Punctata. She's a Protector Aasimar Celestial Pact of the Chain Warlock, and she has a Sprite Familiar called Tikki. Nella's Chaotic Good and a little anxious but she tries her best to be a kind and heroic adventurer.” She then sits back down, scraping her chair back in again.

Jason raises an eye at Marinette's antics but shrugs. “I'm Jay, I play a Winged Variant Feral Tiefling Gunslinger called Rehodros. He's Chaotic Neutral, verging on Chaotic Evil at times, and he only joined the Venators because they helped save him from backstory related stuff and he ended up getting reluctantly attached to them.”

Deciding to also stand up from her chair as well as slap the table with both hands, Steph smirks at the cameras. “I'm Stephanie, my character's Speilsol Leyer, and she's a Chaotic Good Variant Human Ancestral Guardian Barbarian with the Tavern Brawler Feat. She lives for beating up bad guys and doing good, even if it goes against the law.”

Cass decides to take things one step further and moves to sit on the back of the chair, balancing it carefully as to not let herself fall. She waves at the cameras. “Hi, I Cass. Play Balabitara. Neutral Good, Kalashtar Shadow Monk.” She then sits back down on the chair normally.

With one half of the table introduced, Tim nods towards the other side of the table.

Dick winks at the cameras, “I'm Dick and I play Niriwyse, a Chaotic Good Eladrin Glamour Bard who's along for the ride and just wants to have a good time.” At that, he wiggles his eyebrows.

Scoffing, Damian glares at the cameras. “I am Damian and my character is Rokian. He is a Firbolg Circle of the Shepherd Druid and is Lawful Neutral in the sense that he believes the only laws that should be obeyed in the world, are that or the laws of nature. He begrudgingly joined this party of adventurers after they saved an animal friend of his.”

This leaves Bruce as the only one to have not introduced himself and his character yet. He smiles his Brucie Wayne smile at the cameras. “My name's Brucie and my character is called Chirop. He's a Chaotic Good Bugbear Swashbuckler Rogue. He comes across as very gruff, but he's just a big old teddy bear at heart.”

Tim coughs under his breath. “Alright, with our introductions over, let's get on with the show.” The lights in the room suddenly dim and turn a dark red shade whilst creepy echoing organ music begins to play from hidden speakers. “Last session, our brave party of seven adventurers were captured by the evil Lich Dreldaz whilst trying to rescue the beautiful princess Theophania—”

“—Timothea!” Corrects the rest of the table.

Rolling his eyes, Tim continues. “—from the cursed castle in which she has been trapped in, by Dreldaz.” He pauses, steepling his fingers as the dim red lighting becomes a dark grey shade. “The Venators awaken, only to find themselves shackled to the walls, in individual stone brick cells and stripped of any and all equipment bar the clothes on their backs. From what you all can immediately tell upon waking, these cells are small, cold, dark and dingy. What do you do?”

The seven players all exchange glances between themselves.

“I'd like to look around my cell, see if I can find anything or if I can get an idea of what the cellblock we're in looks like?” Jason announces after a few seconds.

Tim nods. “Roll a perception check, please.”

Jason narrows his eyes Tim. He reaches towards the red and black dice set beside his character sheet and picks up the D20. He shakes the dice in his hands before rolling it into the dice box. It lands on a 7. “Alright so because I don't have my gear any more, that means I don't have my eyes of the eagle right?”

“That's right,” Tim responds.

“Mmk, that's a seven then, plus my perception modifier… Fourteen total.” Jason glances up at Tim once he finishes calculating.

Humming, Tim glances down at his Mysterious™ DM notes. “With your Darkvision, you manage to make out that there are two small barred windows on the walls adjacent to the wall with the cell door. The door luckily has a barred window in it too, but you're too far away to glean anything from peering at it.”

Marinette purses her lips and double-checks her character sheet. “Is there anything magical about the darkness in these cells?”

“Roll an Arcana check to see.” Is Tim's response.

She reaches over to the pink and gold dice set beside her character sheet and picks up the D20. She shakes the dice in her hands before rolling it into the dice box. The D20 lands on a 16. “Sixteen! Wait, plus my arcana modifier, uh…” She scans her sheet for the relevant modifier, “plus six, so that's uh… oh heck maths, uhh I think that's twenty-two total? Yeah.” She nods to herself at calculating the maths.

Jason snorts and addresses the cameras. “This is why you should stay in school kids!”

Huffing, Marinette elbows him in the side. “Fight me!”

Not evening flinching at the elbowing, Jason pats her on the top of her head. “Friendly fire, Mari! Friendly fire!”

Tim waits for silence with his best poker face on. “As far as you can tell, there is nothing magical about the darkness!”

“Really?” She furrows her brows. “Alright then.”

He smiles in response.

Dick glances down at his character sheet then up at Tim, he taps his fingers against the table idly as he speaks. “The walls of the cells are stone? So I can use my Cli Lyre to cast Stone Shape and create a hole in the stone where the metal shackles connect, which would free me, right!”

Clicking his tongue, Tim shakes his head. “Nope, you don't have your Cli Lyre on you right now, so you can't cast any spells from it.”

Cursing under his breath, Dick frantically scans his character sheet for anything. He reaches his spells and freezes and slaps the spell sheet (and by extension, the table). “Ah hah!” He crows, “I will cast Knock on the shackles!”

Tim raises an eyebrow, then looks down to flip through his spell cheat sheet. “When you cast the spell, it makes a loud knock that's audible for up to three hundred feet. Are you sure you want to cast this?”

Dick falters and furrows his brow, then glances around the table at the rest of the party. “I think I'll wait and see if anyone else has a way to escape this first? Wait we can all hear each other speaking from our cells, right?”

“You can indeed.” Tim answers.

“I got nothin',” Jason admits, putting on his Rehodros voice, which is just his normal voice but deeper and with a raspy—almost hissing—clipped tone.

Steph, using her Speilsol Leyer voice (which sounds like she's putting on a weak German accent), shrugs. “I could try breaking the shackles? I'm strong enough to do cool things like that?”

“But that will also be fairly loud.” Bruce points out, speaking with a gruff tone of voice (which is significantly different from his gravelly Batman tone of voice) for Chirop. “If I had my lockpicks, it would be easy to escape stealthily. But without them, I can't see a way for me to get out of these shackles.”

Damian wrinkles his nose. “I might be able to summon creatures, elementals, or fey but what I get is determined by the DM and may not be entirely helpful. However, I could try wildshaping?”

Tim smiles cryptically and the lighting behind him changes from dark grey to lime green. “You could.”

Damian nods. “Alright then, I will use my wildshape ability to transform into a spider.”

The lime green light fades to flickering orange-red light. “As you try to use your druidic abilities to magically assume the shape of a spider, you feel a burning sensation around your wrists, right where the shackles are. You are unable to transform and take…” Tim pauses as he pulls out his black and red dragon dice and rolls a D6 behind the DM screen. “Five points of fire damage.”

Cursing under his breath in Arabic, Damian glares at Tim. He crosses out his current hp and writes down the new amount.

Jason taps Marinette on the shoulder. “What about Nells, Mari? She got any tricks up her sleeve to escape?”

Marinette startles at that, having been chewing her lip and staring intently at her character sheet since her arcana check. She licks her lips then glances up. “I might…”

She taps a small stat block card with a pencil and turns to Tim with an intense stare. “Is Tikki nearby?”

At that, Tim grins widely and raises a finger. “That,” He says, flipping through his notes, “is a very good question.”

“Because on my notes, here it says that last session Tikki was invisible when we all got captured.” Marinette picks up her session notes journal and shows it to him.

“Would you say Tikki followed after you when you got caught?”

Marinette tilts her head to the side and Tikki whispers in her ear. Of course, the cameras inability to record kwamis means it just looks like she's thinking instead of listening to a flying red bug deity. “Yep, I would say that. I would also like to telepathically communicate with Tikki and ask if she can come and pick the locks because we gave her a spare Thieves' Tools kit last shopping session in case she needed to pick the locks during an invisible scouting mission!”

“Indeed you did, so Tikki flies over to your cell and will try to pick the locks on your door first. So roll a d20 and add Tikki's Dex bonus.” He instructs.

Marinette nods and picks up the dice, cupping her hands underneath it so Tikki can shake then roll it without it looking suspicious on camera. Tikki shakes the dice and drops it as Marinette separates her hands. The dice lands in the box and rolls a 16. “Plus Tikki's Dex mod, that's uh…” She scrambles for the Sprite Familiar statblock card, “Plus four, so dirty twenty!”

“That's enough to pick the lock. Do you want Tikki to enter the cell and try to pick the lock?” He asks.

She nods and repeats the roll with Tikki, this time rolling an eleven. “With mods, fifteen.” Tikki then returns to her place on Marinette's shoulder.

“Tikki barely manages to get the locks open. The shackles open and you land on the cell floor.”

Marinette punches the air. “Wooh! Freedom!”

Cass then waves her hand in the air. “Shadowstep out?”

Tim cocks his head to the side. “As you don't have Darkvision, you can't see outside your cell but you manage to use your shadowstep ability to escape the shackles. Then by peering out the barred window in the door, you manage to shadow step into the cellblock corridor.”

Marinette and Cass share a high-five.

“Let's go free everyone else!”

==–==

It takes them ten minutes to finish freeing everyone else, and start making their way out of the dungeon cell block. The Venators now make their way through the bowels of the castle, searching for the armoury in which all their belongings have been stored.

“As you push open the grand oak doors, the faint scent of sickly sweet rotting food and fire hits your noses. The doors reveal the next room to be a grand dining room with a long oak table, set as though prepared for a grand feast expecting many a guest. It's adequately lit but the two corners of the room above the door seem to glow with a dim greenish glow.” Tim pauses in his description as lighting changing to a dim greenish light behind him; he rolls a D8 four times (6, 7, 2, 4), behind the DM screen, followed by the rolling of a D20 four times (3, 19, 13, 18).

“Oh god…” Dick mutters,

Jason huffs. “What are you going to torture us with now, oh great DM?”

Tim smiles cruelly. “Four rays of fire are shot towards the party from somewhere within the dining room. First attack is an eight versus Chirop's AC?”

Bruce sighs in relief. “That's a miss.”

Tim continues to smile. “Mmk, the rest of the attacks are, twenty-four versus Balabitara's AC, eighteen versus Niriwyse's AC, and twenty-three verses Rokian's AC. I assume those hit.”

Damian narrows his eyes at Tim, whilst Dick winces and Cass pouts.

Tim rolls a D6 nine times, behind the DM screen. “Balabitara takes four points of fire damage, Niriwyse and Rokian both take eight points of fire damage.”

The three all jot down the damage taken.

Still smiling, like the truly evil DM that he is, Tim clasps his hands together. “Two skulls, enveloped with green flames, descend from the ceiling. One hovers over the grand table and the other hovers but the top of the opened doors, giving itself cover.” He pauses, then grins. “With the surprise round over, everyone roll initiative!”

Out of habit, all seven players, and Tikki, roll their D20s in almost perfect sync. Dick rolls an 18, Cass rolls a 9, Jason rolls a 14, Bruce rolls a 16, Steph rolls a 17 with advantage, Damian rolls a 2, Marinette rolls a 10, and Tikki rolls a 14.

“Twenty or above?” Tim asks.

“Twenty three,” Bruce announces.

Jason rolls his eyes. “Twenty-one.”

Dick grins, “Twenty one as well!”

Tim scribbles down the rolls on the initiative table. “D'awww, you both rolled twenty-one. Anyway, fifteen or above?”

“Tikki rolled an eighteen.” Informs Marinette.

“I got nineteen!” Steph exclaims.

Jotting down those rolls as well, Tim asks “Alright, anyone ten or above?”

Cass signs her roll, ‘fourteen.’

“Thirteen.” Marinette answers.

Tim glances at the initiative table, then at Damian. “And you Damian?”

Damian scoffs. “Three.”

“Okay.” Tim then rolls a D20 twice. “Chirop! You're up first!”

Bruce looks slightly bewildered. He clears his throat. “Can I grab the nearest sharp pieces of cutlery and sneak behind a chair?”

Tim nods. “Roll stealth.”

He rolls an 18. “My stealth modifier is plus thirteen, so thirty-one to stealth.”

Tim whistles, “To the rest of the Venators, it looks like Chirop just vanishes into thin air.”

“Are any of the enemies close enough that I could move into melee range?” He questions.

“There's one floating Flameskull hovering five foot in the air, with your Long-Limbed trait, it's well within reach,” Tim informs.

Bruce narrows his eyes. “I would like to stab the Flameskull with the sharp cutlery, knives are preferable.”

“Roll to hit. As knives are close enough to daggers, I'll say you can get away with adding your proficiency bonus as well.”

Bruce rolls, with advantage, a 19. “Plus my modifiers, that's twenty-eight to hit.”

“That hits.”

Bruce rolls for damage, 2. “That's two, so seven.” He then rolls for Surprise damage, 8 (5, 3), and Sneak Attack damage, 24 (6, 2, 5, 6, 5). “That's a total of 39 piercing damage. Then I'll use my bonus action to stab it again,” He rolls a 16, “Twenty-one to hit.”

Tim puts on his best poker face. “That also hits.”

“Then that'll be…” He rolls a 1. “One damage from the second attack.”

“The Flameskull you hit screeches in fury as it crumbles to bone dust.” Tim then proceeds to make a horrific screeching sound, for immersion of course.

“What the fuck, Timbo?” Jason asks, wincing.

Dick cringes. “At least you aren't right beside him! My poor ears!”

“Rip us closest seats.” Mumbles Marinette, wrinkling her nose.

“Rehodros, you're up next!” Tim announces gleefully, ignoring his suffering players.

Jason narrows his eyes at Tim, “I want to run over to the table, grab any food on the table that's not rotten, and yeet it at the nearest Flameskull.”

Tim hums, “Okay, the only non-rotten food you can find, is a block of aged cheese and a bowl of hardened sugar cubes.

Snorting, Jason cracks his knuckles. “Oh, I have to pick the block of aged cheese.”

“Roll your attack then. But make sure you only add your Dex modifier to the attack as you're not proficient in improvised weaponry.”

Jason rolls to attack and also gets a 19. “Twenty four to hit.”

Tim snorts. “Yeah, that definitely hits, go ahead and roll damage.”

Jason nods and rolls a 1D4, managing to get max damage. “Four! Wooh! Plus my Dex mod, that's nine damage!”

“You lob the cheese at the Flameskull, managing to cause a couple of cracks to form on its skull. It turns it's furious gaze to you, intending to intimidate you but the effect is somewhat hindered by the melting cheese covering half of its skull.” Tim flips through his notes and marks down the damage taken.

“Okay, then I want to grab the bowl of sugar and using my extra attack to throw that at the Flameskull, in the jaw.” Jason smirks and switches to his Rehodros voice, “You look like you've got a sssweet tooth, bonehead!” He rolls to attack and gets a 12. “Seventeen to hit?”

“That will hit.”

Jason rolls a 3 on the D4. “That's eight damage total.”

“As the bowl of sugar starts to melt from the heat of the fire, the sickly sweet scent of hot sugar begins to emanate from the Flameskull. The Flameskull does not look happy.” Tim pauses to glance at the initiative table. “Niriwyse! You're up.”

Dick glances down at his spell list and beams. “I'm going to cast Vicious Mockery. And say,” he puts on his Niriwyse voice, which is just his voice but higher pitch and with a British Estuary accent, “Green is so not your colour!”

Tim hums, then flips through his notes. “What's the spell Save DC on that again?”

Quickly checking his spell sheet, Dick answers, “DC 16.”

“Mmk,” Tim responds non-committally, before rolling a D20 twice from behind the DM screen. “That, unfortunately for you, is a nat 20. Which means it takes no damage and suffers no disadvantage. The Flameskull turns to you briefly, to cackle in your face, before turning its attention back to Rehodros.”

Dick frowns. “Aww that failed, welp I'll use my bonus action to give Speilsol Leyer inspiration.” He clears his throat and puts on his Niriwyse voice to sing. “Let's get down to business! To defeat, this skull! Did they order heroes, no they asked for none! We're the saddest party you'll ever meet! But you can bet before we're through, Flameskull, we'll make dust out of you!”

The rest of the table burst into cheers and groans.

“Beautiful, Speilsol Leyer, you get 1D10 bardic inspiration,” Tim confirms. “And now it's your turn. Show the audience what you've got.”

Steph giggles. “Okay, okay, I've got a really dumb idea.”

Tim raises an eyebrow at her.

“So, firstly, is there anything on the walls, like paintings? Wall sconces? Y'know.” She asks.

“There's a painting of a naked elven lady on one wall, and a taxidermied fox head on the other,” Tim informs.

Steph bounces in her seat. “Cool! So I'm gonna rage! Rip the taxidermied fox head off the wall, then run and leap up into the air to bludgeon the Flameskull with the fox head!”

“Right. Make an athletics roll.”

Rolling a D20, she gets 13. “Twenty one!”

“You manage to jump into the air with expert grace. Roll to hit.”

She rolls a 16. “That's a twenty-four to hit because I've got the Tavern Brawler Feat so I've got proficiency with improvised and-slash-or unconventional weapons!”

He snorts. “That'll definitely hit, roll damage.”

Steph picks up her D4 and rolls it, getting a 3. “Do with my strength modifier and Rage damage, that's ten damage! And uh, that's the end of my turn!”

Tim scribbles down the damage taken, he then checks his notes quickly. “The sugary cheese-covered Flameskull starts to cackle madly. It casts fireball on the party, everyone make dexterity saving throws.”

On cue, everyone in the party rolls their D20s. Tikki rolls an 18, Damian and Marinette both roll 16s, and Dick rolls a 4.

Before Bruce rolls his dice, he proclaims, “I'd like to use evasion!” He then rolls and gets a 5. “Fourteen total.”

“Evasion too!” Cass declares with a smile, she rolls her D20, getting 18. She then signs her result, ‘twenty-seven

“Shit!” Jason mutters, staring at his roll of 2.

“Nat one?” Tim questions.

Jason shakes his head. “Natural two, so seven total.”

“I also got seven,” Dick adds.

“Seventeen,” Damian announces.

“I rolled a nineteen and Tikki rolled a twenty-two.” Marinette pipes up.

Steph frowns at her roll of nine. “Eleven…” She glances at her character sheet again. “Wait, no! I get advantage on dexterity saving throws!” She shakes the dice in her hands and blows on it for good luck, then rolls it into the dice box. It lands on an 18. Fist pumping the air, she cheers. “Yes! Dirty twenty, fuck yeah!”

“Alright. Niriwyse and Rehodros both take…” Tim rolls a D6 eight times, behind the DM screen. “Twenty-three fire damage. And everyone else except Chirop and Balabitara take half that, so eleven damage. And of course, Chirop and Balabitara take no damage whatsoever.”

“Wooh,” Bruce cheers.

“Wait a second!” Jason interrupts, triple-checking his character sheet, “I've got fire resistance!”

“Then you also take eleven damage instead of the full twenty-three.” Tim corrects. “And that's the end of the Flameskull's turn. Tikki's up now.”

Marinette tilts her head to the side as Tikki whispers in her again. “Tikki is going to hold her turn.”

Tim nods. “Okay then, it's Balabitara's turn.”

Cass smiles sweetly. “Jump and punch?”

“Roll an athletics check then, please.”

She rolls a 13, and signs her results, ‘eighteen.’

“You barely manage to leap within melee range of the Flameskull,” Tim narrates. “Roll to hit.”

She rolls her dice again, rolling a flat 17. Again, she signs her result, ‘twenty-six.’

“That will definitely hit.” He acknowledges.

Cass then rolls damage, gets a 4, and signs the total, ‘nine.’ She glances down at her character sheet, and then back up at Tim. “Second attack?”

Tim nods again, still jotting down the damage taken. “Go ahead and roll.”

Rolling again, she gets a nine, so she signs the result, ‘eighteen.’

He hums, “That'll also hit, roll damage.”

She rolls and gets a 3. ‘Eight,’ she signs.

Tim chuckles, “As you punch the Flameskull twice, the skull shatters and turns into sugary and cheesy skull dust.”

Cass grins and fist-pumps the air as the rest of the table breaks into cheers.

“Everyone breathe a sigh of relief! Encounter over.” He comments. “And I think we've reached our halfway mark, so we'll take a quick five minutes break to grab something to eat and drink, and we'll continue on after the break.”

==–==

| Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this little oneshot! Comments, likes, and reblogs are much appreciated! |

| @maribat-march2020 | | @vixen-uchiha |

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goodfortune-au · 4 years

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Good Fortune (Soulmate AU) Chapter 11: All Alone

She took a bath that night, deciding she was in very dire need of something, anything relaxing to take her mind off the discovery. Her mind races with thoughts as she peels off her clothes, standing naked in the bathroom as she turns the faucet on. The sound of it is therapeutic, a soothing balm to her battered mind as she watches its journey into the basin, loud and boisterous but conversely soothing in its torrent. She’s itching to get in and warm her aching bones, placate her anxiety, but she decides to let it fill for a little longer. She deliberates for a moment, and then adds a liberal splash of lavender-scented bubble bath under the running faucet. When it’s three quarters of the way full she shuts it off, and in the silence of the room all she can hear is the water dripping from the entrance of the spigot accompanied by her racing thoughts. She delicately submerges one foot, savoring the heat that envelops her skin, that spreads throughout her entire body with a titillating shiver. Her other leg follows suit and she finally sits down within the modest confines of the porcelain, the water shifting rhythmically around her naked curves before settling into still tranquility. The steam of the bath is filling the room like a calming, ethereal mist, lulling her into peaceful and steady repose as she allows the stress in her bones to melt away in the water.

As much as Angel didn’t want to admit it, this, all of this, was getting to her. She didn’t know what it meant, to tell the truth. She didn’t truly understand the implications, because all of it was too much for her. She goes over it all in her head, starting with the ghost from the transmission on Channel 27, before the gifts had started. She thinks about how the gifts had shown up not long after that, that she had interpreted them as having been from something protecting her from the ghost or, worse yet, the thing behind the disappearances. She thinks about the concert and about Halloween, about the mysterious figure that had kept trying to help her, how their eyes had been like distant stars calling to her from far away. She thinks of her dreams about Pennywise, and how his eyes had been near the same as those distant stars. All the times she’d been low only to find that her guardian angel was there with her, leaving her gifts in her time of need so she’d know she wasn’t alone. She thinks about the monster that attacked Patrick, that must have taken the shopkeeper of Secondhand Rose. That… Must have taken Georgie too. And she thinks about the doll, that she’d known was a gift intended just for her. She’d known it, she’d felt it. So just what was it doing here? What was it doing here after she’d had that run-in with the shopkeeper, who’d disappeared not long after she’d left the store? What did it all mean?

Some part of her knew what it all meant, or at least she thought she did. She didn’t want to even consider it. Her mind is awash with feelings she can’t escape, feelings of shame, of guilt, despair. She hadn’t wanted to consider it before when the shopkeeper had gone missing, and she wanted even less to consider it now. The implication that… The implication, that her guardian angel… Oh god, she didn’t want to even think of it. What was she supposed to do, how was she supposed to feel, being courted by something potentially responsible for all the disappearances, the deaths, the grim atmosphere perpetually plaguing the town? How was she supposed to deal with that? How’s she supposed to deal with the guilt of being involved with something that made the shopkeeper disappear, and Patrick, and so many others? Georgie… Georgie too... It’s even worse that she’s bonded with them, has grown to love and to trust them, depending on them to bring her solace in her every time of need. If it really was true, she was something of an accomplice, she had empowered them in what they had done, what they will surely continue to do. The worst part of it being that she had no way to speak to them, to know for sure what their identity was, to have any way to know for certain whether or not her suspicions were correct. It was all simply up to speculation, and Angel was the furthest from an effective investigator that a person could possibly be. She didn’t know what to think.

As she stares at the yellow light fixtures above her bathroom sink, her mind starts to wander someplace else, to another train of thought. She needed to stop, needed to stop being so paranoid. She was thinking too hard about all of this. The doll was clearly intended for her by her guardian angel. She’d known it the moment she’d laid eyes on it. She’d felt it. The shopkeeper had gotten in the way of that, but there was absolutely no way to know that they were responsible for the disappearance, or for Patrick’s, or Georgie’s for that matter. She wants so badly to believe that her guardian angel was just that, a guardian protecting her from the menacing nature of Derry, even if she didn’t quite understand their motives in having chosen her. She’d spent so long getting to know this thing, whatever or whoever it was, and she didn’t get the sense that they meant her or anyone else harm. They were sweet, they were thoughtful, they clearly cared about her happiness. How could she sully their good reputation with a few bad thoughts and feelings? How could she? She feels her mind slowing as she continues to rationalize it all, as she feels all the dread seeping away from her in the water, and the yellow lights above the sink are more striking by the second, almost searing, almost blinding. For some reason, she feels like she’s getting sleepy, though she can’t bear the thought of moving now, can’t summon the energy to lift herself from the tub. Her eyes are starting to glaze over; her limbs feel like dead weights in the water, and despite her meek mental objection she starts to drift away into lavender dreams…

Her eyes open when she feels something behind her. The tub feels much bigger, impossibly so, big enough to accommodate someone else and she figures she must be dreaming. The lights above the sink are now the same as they ever were, dim and unassuming and she feels like she’s sitting in something’s lap. There’s the delicious feeling of something like silk pressed up against her naked back and she shivers when it shifts behind her. It tucks a wet lock of hair behind her ear and leans in close.

“Hello, Angel.” It whispers huskily. She knows that voice, it’s him.

“P-Pennywise?” She asks, her voice small.

“Ding-ding-ding, my sweet. When I saw you here I couldn’t resist. You looked so beautiful in here, like a lovely little water nymph…”

She’s speechless and he laughs. It echoes.

“What’s the matter, pet? Are you not pleased to see me?”

“N-no!” She exclaims, flustered. “I just… I didn’t expect-”

“Didn’t expect to find me here? Yes, well, us clowns are full of surprises.” He says. She can hear the twinkle in his eye. “Now you… You’re something else… Look at you, my dear, entirely predictable.” He cups her face from behind, one playful hand on either side of her face. “So cute, so red you are, and you can’t even see my face. Don’t tell me…” He says, leaning in again. “...You’ve got a little crush on ol’ Pennywise?”

She squeaks and he looses a fit of impish giggles. He doesn’t even give her a chance to deny it.

“Yes, yes, I knew it! Pennywise can tell, oh yes he can! Can tell it by your pretty red face, all your cute little noises. Tell me, my sweet, would you like it if I… Did this?”

His hand slides down from her cheek and trails lower, and lower… It dances down her neck, down the curve of her collarbone, and finally settles just above her breast.

“Would you, hmm?” It trails just a little lower, and she whines. “Hmm? Oh, look at you, you can’t even speak. Tell me, pretty girl. Tell me what you want.”

His hand ghosts over her breast, his finger swirling delicately around the tender bud of her nipple. It hardens under his touch.

“Puh-please… I…” She’s weak, can hardly muster the strength. Where had all her composure gone? She was usually much more eloquent than this. But here with him, like this, all she could seem to manage were a few whimpered words.

He cups her breast, massaging it gently with his hand. “Is this what you want?” He breathes into her ear. She throws her head over his shoulder with a mewl.

“Y-yes…” She whines. “Yes...Please…”

He grins. His hand travels lower, over her stomach, caressing her curves. “Is this...What you want? Do you want me… Here?” He tickles her tummy mischievously and she bursts out in laughter.

“Yuh-yes!” She squeals. “Yes!” He laughs with her too, and then he’s silent. His hand is moving again.

“...Is this what you want?”

His hand has gone lower, lower, lower, trailing over the delicate flesh of her thighs and lingering there for a moment before moving again. It finally finds a place in the tender spot between her legs and her breath hitches in her throat. He fondles her down there, one devious finger trailing up and down the lips of her pussy, slowly, deliciously… And then… And then, it dips inside ever so slightly…

She arches her spine, throwing her head back again as a breathy moan escapes her throat.

“P-Pennywise!”

“Is this what you want, my dear?” That finger is moving deeper inside, the rest of his hand resting gently on her mound. She’s squirming in his hold, bucking her hips up into his hand ever so slightly, unconsciously spreading her legs in the tub as far as she was able as he simply continues his ministrations. A second finger has delved inside, rubbing at her clit, and the first simply carries on in its exploration. “Tell me, sweetness…Do you want Pennywise… Here?”

She freezes up when his finger brushes up against it. He tap tap taps on her clit and then, at long last… His finger dips inside.

She wakes up. She jerks suddenly, sitting upright as the water in the tub jostles around her. The sound of the faucet drip drip dripping into the tub is there to ground her, an amiable dialogue to bring her back into reality. It echoes faintly in the silence of the room. Her face is still scarlet even as she towels off and retires to her bedroom, even as she warily regards the doll while she’s getting into her pajamas, that is, a big baggy t-shirt and a pair of panties. When she crawls into bed that night, she’s shaking; not out of fear but, rather, titillation. That dream had been the best one yet by a thousand miles and she still can’t believe everything that had happened, everything she had felt. Forget dreams about Pennywise, she’d… Never had a dream like that before, period. Angel had never been fortunate enough to have wet dreams. Her brain was particularly cruel to her in that regard, choosing to deny her something that would have made sexual frustration of the past much more bearable. But now, just like everything else, things were changing, and for why she had no idea. But that didn’t matter, not at this moment, when she could still feel the lingering sensation of his touch on her skin. She lays in bed, stewing in it all, burning with desire and then she can’t take it anymore. She reaches into her bedside table drawer and extracts something to help soothe, to help scratch the itch that so desperately needed to be scratched. She’d bought it some weeks ago during Christmas, and had only used it once prior to this. But now… Now, she needed to.

She peels her panties from her legs and falls back onto her bed, spreading her thighs as she does so. Breathless, she wastes no time; she positions it between her legs, rubbing it up and down the wetness of her slit and pushing it firmly into the tightness within. When she finally pushes in the tip she hisses in pure, unabated pleasure, pulling it back out and pushing in again, deeper this time. With each movement of the toy she’s rocking into it with her hips, pushing it deeper and deeper with every simulated thrust, until she’s finally worked it all the way in to the hilt. She turns the dial on the end, and delicious vibrations start to work their way through her body until she’s gasping, breathless, panting. And as she f*cks herself on the toy, Pennywise can see, can hear her crying out for him in ecstasy. He can see her, touching herself, letting one hand wander over the most sensitive parts of her body, cupping her own breast, throwing an arm over her face as she squeaks and shudders and shivers in absolute pleasure. Can see, even as she readjusts herself, positioning the toy over her pile of pillows and riding it, the way she arches her back and moans into the emptiness of the room. Rolling her hips with slow, deep, deliberate thrusts, she makes delicate, fragile sounds and keeps her hands firmly on the mattress.

“P-Pennywise…” She mutters under her breath. She continues, even as the vibration of the toy sends dim frissons of pleasure tingling through her loins. Continues, even as those frissons of pleasure build and bubble in her gut until they are ever-present in her mind, until all she can think about is this one simple end. She moves her hips faster now, and her noises grow increasingly more insistent, more frantic. She doesn’t notice the eyes trained on her, never leaving her form. She doesn’t notice the deep rumbling that underscores her own noises, the way the ground beneath Derry seems to tremor with something powerful and beastly. She doesn’t notice any of it, too caught up in her own world of carnal self-indulgence.

“Pennywise, P-Pennywise…! I- Oh god, oh f*ck…” It’s faster and faster. She’s riding the toy with reckless abandon now, bouncing on it, consumed in the way it makes her feel, the way the thought of him touching her makes her feel. All she can see in her mind’s eye is him. All she can see is the two of them together, their bodies pressed together, drinking in each other’s lust and longing. It spurs her on, drives her toward that ultimate end, and she couldn’t stop now even if she’d wanted to. All she can do is keep riding, keep fantasizing, keep thinking of him. She falls forward onto her chest and keeps humping the pillow, caught in a relentless rhythm now, chasing that sweet, sweet bliss that was so close within her grasp until it’s inescapable. It's coming, she can feel it, and as she passes the point of no return she seizes up.

“P-PENNYWIIIISE!” She squeals, letting her orgasm roll over her in deliciously sinful waves. She manages a few more weak thrusts and then she collapses forward into her bed, burying her face into the pillows beneath her.

“P-P-Pennywise… Pennywise…” She mumbles brokenly. The night is still and listening.

Once she’d gotten herself cleaned up and drifted off to sleep, it had been the most peaceful sleep Angel had had in a very long time. She hadn’t dreamt after that, but after something so ridiculously indulgent as the bath she could hardly be disappointed about it when she woke up the next morning. She doesn’t so much roll out of bed as she buoyantly hops out, and as she gets ready for work that morning she has to stop herself grinning ear to ear, fighting back the blush that’s staining her cheeks, that wonderfully lewd feeling blossoming between her legs whenever she recalled the sound of his voice rasping in her ear. She regards the knit doll staring at her from her clown shelf with a cock of her head, thinking on it in silence, and sighs as she picks it up and studies it in her hands. It really was quite adorable. She couldn’t very well resent such a thoughtful offering, and she’d paid for it in the end, after all. She studies its googly eyes and the red yarn hair peeking out of the white cap atop its head, and she starts to smile as she hugs it to her chest. Her. It was a her. She simply felt it in her guts, and she’d even thought of a name. When she places her back on the shelf along with the other clowns, she pauses for a moment as she looks over them, and she’s about to shut the closet door but then she stops. No. She picks her up again and, after a moment of deliberation, turns and deposits her against the center pillow on her bed. She carefully tucks in the doll and pulls her arms out to rest over the covers. Pepper. Her name was Pepper.

Work that day was painless. Angel took her duties in stride, attending to the shelves and putting back returns with relative, quick-footed ease. Quite a few people needed help with book selections that day but she wasn’t fazed by it; she would direct them to where they needed to go and then she would return to what she was doing, passing the hours quickly as she let herself get swallowed up by thoughts of Pennywise and the dream she’d had last night. Thoughts about what he had done, what he would have continued to do if she hadn’t woken up burn in her mind, consuming her like a tepid fever. As she continues her shift she has to stop herself from zoning out too much, knowing better than to invoke the wrath of the looming librarian who always seemed to be one step ahead of her. When she was on break, however, she would go into full-on daydream mode, sighing contentedly with elbows propped on her knees as she let the pictures in her head play out like the most breathtaking movie in existence.

It had been such a long time since she’d had a crush of this magnitude. To be completely and totally frank, she didn’t think she’d ever had a crush of this magnitude period. She’d had fixations on fictional characters in the past (one of the earliest and most memorable being a blue-skinned space prince from an old cartoon about a giant robot), but even they hadn’t been so enchanting to her that she spent this much time thinking about them. Pennywise seemed to be on her mind in some capacity twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Always wandering into the forefront of her mind at the most inopportune times, taking the most precedence in her thoughts whenever he did and distracting her from whatever she happened to be doing at the time. One day when she was grocery shopping she dropped a jar of pickles on the floor simply because she saw someone with near the same color hair. It was a little embarrassing, but Angel could hardly fault herself for coping in the only ways she knew how during these difficult times. She lived in a small town by herself, surrounded by people who either ignored her or had it out for her, she felt excruciatingly lonely, people were dropping like flies around her and there was a very distinct possibility that whoever was making these people disappear was after her, maybe even the kids too. She needed distractions, even if those distractions were copious and unhealthy. It was the only thing keeping her sane.

When she goes home, she’s still in good spirits. The commute is pleasant, and she finds a gift from her guardian angel, the disembodied head of a doll lying in a curb next to a manhole cover at the corner of Jackson and Witcham. Anyone else would have looked on this offering with frozen, abject horror, but not Angel. Angel picks it up with a smile, replacing it with a ticket stub from one of her very first concerts (Bad Brains in 1981, which her parents had somewhat reluctantly driven her to on their way back from a trip after she’d begged them) and idly continues on her way back. When she greets Mayor Jello after she steps through the threshold of the front door, she picks him up and nuzzles him, only stopping to let him down when he fights to break free of her arms. Dinner that night was leftovers from the day before. Angel goes to bed that night stewing in some kind of excitement, vainly hoping that her little hallucination in the bathtub was a signifier of some kind that the dreams had returned. She hadn’t been so lucky after New Years, but who knows, right? She’s still reliving it, still caught in the web of its influence, and it takes her some time to finally drift off to sleep…

She wakes up, groggy and disoriented, and her alarm is particularly jarring on this morning in particular. No Pennywise dream. Par for the course, but something else was strange. She hadn’t had any dreams at all. None. Nada, zip, zilch. It had been quite a while since that happened, and she finds it utterly strange and a little disarming. Nevertheless, she gets dressed and goes about her day. Back to normal, she supposed. Except normal, as it turned out, was turning out to be not so normal. As the days wore on, as January came and went and became February, Angel had continued this strange and unusual pattern. Sleep was a featureless black void from the moment her eyes fluttered shut to the moment they opened again to the sound of her morning alarm and even as she slept in on the weekend. Angel didn’t quite know what to make of it at first, but then something else caught her attention. Slowly but surely, the gifts from her guardian angel were dwindling into nothing. She didn’t notice so much the first week or so; it was not often she found gifts every single day, after all. Usually she would find one every one to two days. She was truthfully thankful for the gaps between gifts, because it gave her time to find something new to offer in return. But now the gaps were just… Getting bigger. The first week she’d only found about three at most. The second, only two. The third she’d only found one gift, and she hadn’t felt that familiar warmth at all when she did.

Angel had found herself growing more in tune to things around town whether she liked it or not, and this, whatever it was, felt like an omen. She couldn’t help herself from feeling those bad, bad feelings, from thinking such bad, bad thoughts, and with the growing absence of her guardian angel she was starting to feel very much unsafe around town now. Whenever she left the house she felt the distinct sense that she wasn’t alone, that she was being watched, and it wasn’t at all pleasant or comforting like it had been before. She was starting to withdraw, she was becoming a recluse, avoiding leaving the house whenever it was physically possible. It was true she wasn’t much for the outdoors before this, but she at least had the confidence to be able to walk over to the local pharmacy and go home with a couple bags full of groceries. Now, she simply didn’t want to chance it. The kids hadn’t stopped by in a while; had been busy with school, and she couldn’t very well blame them for getting caught up in their studies or other such adolescent happenings as it were. No, it was simply Angel by herself, and this was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in the sense that she didn’t need to put on an act for anybody, but a curse in the sense that she was just so afraid. She was left alone with her own thoughts, and it's not as though she wasn’t already left to her own thoughts on a regular basis, but now that her guardian angel seems to have shuffled off all of a sudden, all she could do was frantically wonder what had happened so suddenly. What had she done, if anything at all, to ward them off?

It’s all she could think about for days going into weeks. What if her guardian angel really had abandoned her? It’s a terrible thought, and one she can hardly stomach. Had they stopped liking her gifts? Were they jealous of her feelings for Pennywise? Did they think she was spurning them for him? Did the monster possibly get the last laugh over them, and now they were no more? All she can feel is fear and guilt. Fear for herself, fear for the children, fear on behalf of her guardian angel, fear that there was nothing to stop the monster from taking her now that they were out of the picture. Guilt for her inadequacy, guilt for her feelings about Pennywise, guilt for some instinctual feeling in her gut that she can’t truly put words to. She is lost and scared and now more than ever she dreads living alone, but still she wouldn’t dare to communicate that to her family. Even if she’d somehow mustered the nerve, how would she even begin to explain why she suddenly wanted to jump ship on this whole thing? She needed to be strong, she needed to commit, even if it was hard. Even if it was getting harder to sleep at night, harder and harder to pretend that she was holding everything together.

Still no dreams. Angel had given up again on that whole business by now and was now concerned mostly with the continued absence of her guardian. Things were… Just so cold now. Before, even when things had been at their worst, there was still the warmth of being, of feeling protected, that she could cherish and hold onto. But now that they were gone, she just felt like she was always trekking through an unforgiving frozen tundra, always sinking knee deep into frigid snow with each step. She wished now more than ever that she could feel that heat, like a warm blanket about her shoulders, keeping her safe and shielded from all that would possibly do her harm but it wasn’t there. There was only the cold, dead nothing, and she didn’t know how she was supposed to cope with it on top of everything else. Everything else, everything that had been eating away at her; Georgie’s disappearance, the death of Patrick, the shopkeeper from Secondhand Rose… Her depression and mood swings, her body issues… Her loneliness… It was all still there, and it was crushing her into the ground.

Her loneliness was especially prominent lately, that’s why Pennywise had become so important to her. It was a very particular and very agonizing pain, and it was one he could alleviate so effortlessly. Whether he did so in dreams or through her TV screen didn’t matter; she just wanted to see him, because seeing him made her forget it all, even if just for a short while. There was something about him that was so innately comforting to her and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. In a sense, he gave her the same warm feeling that her guardian angel did, and that was remarkable, for she had no way to truly describe the sensation she would feel when she would find those beloved offerings, of knowing in some cosmic way that they were meant just for her. She could hardly question it though, not now. Now, here, in all this uncertainty, in all this fear and apprehension, she desperately craved that warmth in any way that it would come to her, so she gave herself to her most recent obsession in any and every way possible. Would think of him at night while she shivered under the covers and tried to fall asleep, would draw and paint him during the day when there was nothing else to fill the hours; imagined him escorting her to wherever she needed to go when she left the house. She clung to those ever-cherished blocks when the Derry Children’s Hour would come on and she could see him again in the flesh or, as close to in the flesh as he could possibly be anyway. She’d keep her eyes rooted to the television screen, no longer in the doe-eyed adoration of before but rather, in pure need. She needed him, now more than ever.

February was chugging along at a snail’s pace, and every day was uncertain to Angel now. She felt so insecure and so vulnerable that she’d started carrying Pepper around with her wherever she went; wore her pearl heart around the clock, even every night when she crawled into bed and took Pepper with her under the covers. She hoped, she prayed that the protection of her guardian angel didn’t end with their mere presence, and that their gifts were somehow imbued with that security, that they would keep her safe from the monster, from whatever was snatching people up from the town. It was taking everything she had not to cry her eyes out on a daily basis, from calling out of work or even quitting her job, packing up and leaving Derry behind forever. It seemed rash, it seemed unreasonable, but she couldn’t help herself from entertaining these trains of thought nonetheless. The only thing that stopped her was the thought of crawling back to her family, of admitting that she couldn’t handle things on her own like she’d said she could. And though she didn’t want to think about it too hard lest she get her hopes up for nothing, she had the faintest sliver of hope that her guardian angel was still around somehow, was still looking out for her even if she couldn’t feel their presence.

He was watching her throughout all of this. He had never truly stopped watching her, not since the bath. Truth be told, it had been hard to restrain himself during that last dream. He wanted to take her, take her right then and there, in every conceivable sense of the word. He wanted to shove her wet, dripping body up against the plaster wall and make her wail with absolute pleasure, take her back with him to the sewers beneath Derry where she would become his now and forever. But he couldn’t. That wasn’t it, wasn’t the time. He needed to still himself, needed to be patient. It was so close within his grasp that he could feel it, but all the same he needed to keep his composure and continue to dangle the carrot as it were. She was eating right out of the palm of his hand, had been ever since the gifts had started, ever since he��d started appearing on that silly little television show. All his efforts to draw her in were slowly but surely bearing fruit, and it was only a matter of time before the inevitable harvest. It was so close… He salivates at the thought of holding her, of touching her, feeling her fragile skin beneath his merciful claws. No, he wouldn’t hurt her, would never hurt her unless she wanted him to, unless she begged for it. He would always treat her with kindness and consideration, because he knew she would do the same for him.

He watched as she struggled with everything she didn’t understand, everything she didn’t know, watched as she struggled with the morality of possibly developing feelings for a monster. He found it adorable, all of her confusion, her belief that her guardian angel was a force different altogether than that of the eater of worlds, the way some small part of her wondered if they might be one and the same nonetheless. He loved how unsure and uncertain she was of it all, loved how she kept second-guessing everything she was discovering, the way that she would rationalize everything that didn’t quite sit right in an effort to soothe her own battered conscience. It made her all the more vulnerable to his manipulations and he could see the path ahead, could see her morality slowly but surely degrading as a result of him tweaking her strings. He watched as he ceased his attentions, how she had grown to feel defenseless and abandoned in the apparent absence of her protector. He watched as she grew more fearful and reclusive as a result, deciding to flex the might of his dreadful influence on the town now in an effort to shut her off more from the world, all so she would feel unsafe. Watched as she leaned headfirst into her little crush, trying to bury her head in the sand so it all wouldn’t feel so terrible and frightening. Though he loved her and wanted only her happiness, he knew this was necessary to bring them together. It would all be worth it in the end. It was almost time.

Angel could not be less prepared to cope with the arrival of Valentine’s Day, her least favorite holiday of them all by far. It had always been a bitter occasion; even in elementary school, before she’d fully understood the depth or scope of romantic feelings she’d grown up spurned by the majority of her classmates, and things had only worsened as she grew into an adolescent and the kids got colder, more cruel. The growing rumors didn't help matters either. It was true, she had a liking for the aesthetic of the holiday but that was really as far as it went for her. Beyond that, she either couldn’t care less or she would count the seconds until the day was finally over. Most of the time, it was the latter. As much as Angel hated to admit it, this was a vulnerable day for her, with all her insecurities and problems with self worth tending to peak at their highest during this juncture in the year. They would reach an apex, in critical danger of bubbling over, and this was a time that Angel would dive headfirst into her worst coping mechanisms. She would eat her feelings until she felt nothing but numb, and then she would try her best to just forget it. That is, until the next year rolled around.

Seeing Derry all decked out in hearts was a pleasant sight if irritating, and Angel is at least thankfully safe from the emotional peril of the holiday in the confines of the library, where she spends most of the day simply throwing herself into her routine as much as humanly possible. Once her shift is over she takes the quickest route home, still terrified and paranoid as a result of her protector’s recent disappearance, and practically kicks in the door as she rushes inside and slams it behind her. Mayor Jello has been pensive lately, soaking in his owner’s bad vibes, and is often absent from the living room now when she comes in. She doesn’t particularly notice. Once the adrenaline from the walk home has worn off she’s left tired and lethargic, and all she wants to do now is get undressed and watch TV. Once she’s set everything down she strips off her pants right there in the living room (not like there was anyone around that could see her anyway) and peels off her bra from underneath her silk sweater. She discards both articles of clothing into the basket in her room and finally settles into the crook of the couch with the remote. Turning it on, she surveys the channels.

Angel was able to forget it all for a couple hours, finding that today was actually a rather good day in terms of what was available to watch on TV. She’d gone to Channel 27 first and unfortunately hadn’t found anything, so she flipped through the other channels instead. She actually managed to catch an entire episode of the Golden Girls this time rather than stumbling on it in the last five minutes of its runtime, and after that she found a late afternoon block of Family Feud that had just started. Overall impressive considering the track record of Derry’s typical broadcast range. She lingers on that channel for a great while, wasting away the hours and trying to distract herself from dwelling on the godforsaken holiday she dreaded so much. When the Family Feud block comes to an end it transitions into a series of re-runs for a show about a seasoned police officer-turned-attorney and his plucky younger sidekick. Angel had never been too particularly fond of this program so she picks up the remote and sifts through the channels again. It would seem Derry had returned to its routine predictability, offering little more than its usual catalog of tired news broadcasts and sports reruns now. She sighs, thumbing through the list of channels with half-hearted indifference until she cycles back around again. She looks at the clock. It’s later. Maybe… She flips forward on the remote, counting the channels until she gets to 27, and the familiar sight of the quirky town set she’s grown to know and love flickers into view on the screen. It appears to have just started or, at the very least, she seemed to have caught it right after commercial break. Yes!

“Hello, and welcome back to the Derry Children’s Hour!”

She can tell that it’s a recent broadcast, because the set is all decked out with hearts and balloons. It was clearly a Valentine’s Day special of some kind. She’s filled with hope as she watches the hostess speak, wanting more than anything to see him, here in her time of most desperate need. He’s absent for the time being and it's simply the hostess engaging happily with the children and the children engaging back in turn. She asks the children if they know what they’re celebrating today, and they all answer the obvious question in perfect unison. She smiles brightly and continues the conversation, and Angel starts to find herself the slightest bit irritated. He was almost assuredly present for pretty much every conceivable special occasion on the show, so she had almost no doubt in her mind that he would be here. She just needed to wait for her to stop talking and introduce him. Just needed to wait, and be patient. For god’s sake, Angel, it’s just a TV show. It seemed an eternity passed of her simply shooting the breeze with the children, and she’s about to tune out completely, but then-

“Say hello to our special guest, kids! He’s back to tell us all about today’s big topic!”

Her heart skips a beat. He pops up from behind the bleachers as he always does, and she swoons, drunk with delight as she watches him dance into view. He introduces himself to the kids, and the camera fixes on his face as he begins to speak. Angel doesn’t blink. She doesn’t breathe.

“Now, as you know,” He begins. “Today’s big topic is love. Tell me kids, do you love anyone? Your friends, your family? Tell ol' Pennywise- who makes you feel special?"

The kids speak in scattered discordance, all giving their own answer to his question at the same time.

"Wonderful, wonderful! He's so happy to hear it! The world is filled with love, you know. Even ol' Pennywise feels it..." He pantomimes a beating heart over his chest. "Riiiiiight here."

"You love someone too, Pennywise?" A girl in pigtails asks, leaning forward in apparent interest. "Who?"

He pauses and points to himself quizzically. The kids nod their heads enthusiastically. "Oh, me? Someone very special, kids. Very special."

"Who is it?"

"Yeah, who?"

She swallows hard, her eyes glued to the screen, her heart pounding restlessly in her chest.

"A very special person indeed, Pennywise has. Someone meant just for him. Have you ever had anyone like that, kids? Someone who you know that makes you super happy inside, just thinking about them? Someone who, when you think of a smile on their face, you can't help smiling too?"

Some agree, some shake their heads.

"Oh, well, you'll all find someone kids! Every one of you! My special person, see, she doesn't know yet just how special she is. She's out there waiting for me, right now."

"She is?"

"Yes, yes indeed! And Pennywise is so happy when he thinks of her, and he can't wait to be with her, more than anything."

She’s staring at him bashfully from behind a pillow now, her face beet red. All she can think about is… The thought of being that special person, of being the person he speaks about so fondly. It’s a fantasy she can’t help but indulge, the pang of something familiar sending butterflies fluttering in her stomach again as she stares unblinkingly at the screen. She feels so warm as she watches him continue, talking about just how beautiful she was, the person in question, how many talents she had (cooking, making art and playing music, as he listed off the top of his head), how it was almost time for him to be with her. She can’t stop herself from imagining herself in that position, projecting herself onto the person he describes and finding that she fit almost every descriptor to some varying degree. All of it, well...

Except for the beautiful part maybe.

"How long will she have to wait Pennywise?"

"It's not long now, kids." He says with a warm smile. His eyes are dazzlingly blue, and there's a lighthearted twinkle in them. "Pennywise just has to be patient a little bit longer, has to wait for the right moment."

"There's a right moment?"

"Oh yes. It's important to know when that is, kids, it makes a world of difference. Have to think, have to see, feel. You have to trust your instincts, that feeling down, deep doooowwwwn in your gut."

"You think so?"

"I know so, kids."

The host then comes in to announce a commercial break and the clown says his cordial goodbye to all the children.

"Now don't worry, kids. Pennywise will be back, real real soon, okay?" He tells them. His eyes flicker toward the center of the screen, and he winks, blowing a playful kiss.

“Promise promise.”

The show cuts out and she can do nothing but stare, slackjawed and enchanted at the screen. She’s still caught in the throes of the fantasy, like a fly caught in gossamer strands of spider silk, caught up in thoughts of him taking her in his arms, telling her how lovely and special and talented she was; praising her, validating her, loving her. Thoughts of her being with him, being his special person… She replays the broadcast in her mind, replays everything that he said and her memory harkens back to the dream she’d had in the bath, the way he had spoken to her and everything that he had done to make her feel just that, special. She buries her face in the pillow and muffles a squeak, letting that wanton tingle gently wash over her body again at the thought of it. She lays on the couch for quite some time, having turned off the TV now. She didn’t care about the rest of it. She’d gotten what she’d wanted, she’d gotten to see him, and on a day where she truly needed him. It was all that she wanted.

The euphoria is still fresh and vivid in her mind, but as time goes on it starts to wear and suddenly before she can process her emotions she’s blinking back tears in her eyes. And then, those tears roll down her cheeks, and when she drags herself off the couch and into her bedroom she’s weeping. When she numbly crawls into bed she’s sobbing inconsolably, and she can hardly breathe as she cries into her pillows. She wants the dreams back, she wants to feel like she can be with him. Anything was better than nothing. She just… Wanted to see him… She hugs her mound of pillows in desperation, clinging to them for dear life as she dampens them with her misery. She imagines him there, holding her, consoling her, comforting her as she bawls her eyes out. She wanted to feel loved, she wanted to feel safe, she wanted to feel anything but this. Her sobbing is momentarily placated when she finally falls asleep, thinking of him all the while in the hopes of finding him in her dreams. There is nothing but black, and she stirs uncomfortably in her sleep as the hours pass. She doesn’t feel him, she doesn’t see him. Doesn’t see anything. She wanders through the blank ether for an impossible amount of time, and then, when her eyes flutter open again in the darkness, she finds herself turned away from her pillows. No dream, no sign of him anywhere, not even in the vacant recesses of her thoughts. With a helpless whimper, she’s about to loose a frustrated scream in the darkness but she’s rendered mute, petrified by the sensation of something drawing its way up the skin of her thigh from behind. Something leans down to snuffle into the pulse of her throat, and from there it plants soft, wet kisses from her neck all the way up to her cheek. There’s hot breath as he whispers in her ear, and she shivers at the sound of his voice.

“I’m here now, my darling.”

#pennywise #daddywise #chapter eleven #all alone #it 2017 #it chapter one #pennywise x oc #pennywise x angel #good fortune #smut #oh boy here we go

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therefractory · 4 years

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The clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool | Boris Johnson | The Guardian The Guardian · by Edward Docx The long-running German satirical show Extra 3 recently featured a sketch with the following voiceover: “From the people who brought you The Crown – the epic saga of the Queen – now comes the ridiculous story of this guy, a notorious buffoon at the head of a country … The Clown.” The word “clown” has often been used in a flippant or dismissive way with regard to Boris Johnson. But the underlying paradox is that it is only as a clown – a fool in the oldest and deepest sense of the word – that his character can truly be understood. What happens when you make the clown king is what we in the UK have been witnessing in real time. With the success of the vaccine, though, a new question emerges: can one archetype transform into the other? Can Johnson creep away from his clownish past altogether? Clowns, of course, are very serious and important people. At their simplest, they remind us of the silliness of things: that the world we have created is ridiculous. They reassure us in this observation by appealing to our innate understanding of the absurd. They relieve the endless tension and trauma of reality. At a deeper level, the clown is the mirror image of the priest. Both represent two ancient sides of our nature. Both elucidate what it means to be human. The priest summons, celebrates and interrogates the sacred; the clown does the same with the profane. The one is concerned with the eschatological, the other with the scatological. The priest propounds abstinence and fasting; the clown gluttony and indulgence. The one solemnifies sex, the other carnalises. As David Bridel, founder of the Clown School in Los Angeles, says, clowns are often roundly welcomed because they “remind us that we are as practised in falling over, shitting and humping, as we are in prayer and purification”. Would-be biographers of Johnson might do worse than to read Paul Bouissac, the leading scholar on the semiotics of clowning. Clowns are “transgressors”, he writes, cultural subversives who enact rituals and dramatic tableaux that “ignore the tacit rules of social games to indulge in symbolic actions that … toy with these norms as if they were arbitrary, dispensable convention.” Clowns “undermine the ground upon which our language and our society rest by revealing their fragility”. They “foreground the tension” between “instinct” and “constraint”. Bouissac could be writing directly of Johnson when he adds: “Their performing identities transcend the rules of propriety.” They are, he says, “improper by essence”. Observe classic Johnson closely as he arrives at an event. See how his entire being and bearing is bent towards satire, subversion, mockery. The hair is his clown’s disguise. Just as the makeup and the red nose bestow upon the circus clown a form of anonymity and thus freedom to overturn conventions, so Johnson’s candy-floss mop announces his licence. His clothes are often baggy – ill-fitting; a reminder of the clothes of the clown. He walks towards us quizzically, as if to mock the affected “power walking” of other leaders. Absurdity seems to be wrestling with solemnity in every expression and limb. Notice how he sometimes feigns to lose his way as if to suggest the ridiculousness of the event, the ridiculousness of his presence there, the ridiculousness of any human being going in any direction at all. His weight, meanwhile, invites us to consider that the trouble with the world (if only we’d admit it) is that it’s really all about appetite and greed. (His convoluted affairs and uncountable children whisper the same about sex.) Before he says a word, he has transmitted his core message – that the human conventions of styling hair, fitting clothes and curbing desires are all … ludicrous. And we are encouraged – laughingly – to agree. And, of course, we do. Because, in a sense, they are ludicrous. He goes further, though – pushing the clown’s confetti-stuffed envelope: isn’t pretending you don’t want to eat great trolleys of cake and squire an endless carousel of medieval barmaids … dishonest? Oh, come on, it’s so tiresome trying to be slim, groomed or monogamous – when what you really want is more cake and more sex. Right? I know it. You know it. We all know it. Why lie? Forget the subject under discussion – Europe, social care, Ireland – am I not telling it like it is, deep down? Am I not the most honest politician you’ve ever come across? Herein the clown’s perverse appeal to reason. Next, witness how, in the company of a journalist, Johnson’s whole demeanour transmits the sense of him saying: “Aha! An interview! How absurd! This is no way to find anything out! But, yes, if you want, I will play ‘prime minister’ and you can reprise my old role – if that’s what the audience is here for.” Notice how often he asks (knowingly) “Are you sure our viewers wouldn’t want to hear … ?” or “You really want to know this?” This is because the clown is always in a deeper relationship with the audience than with his ostensible subject. See how he rocks on his feet as if to lampoon a politician emphasising his words. Hear how his speech is not – in truth – eloquent, but rather a caricature of eloquence. The dominant mode is not fluency, but a kind of stop-start oratio interruptus; hesitancy followed by sudden spasms of effusion. The hesitancy is designed to involve us in the confected drama of his choosing the next word. The sudden effusion that follows can then be marketed as clinching evidence of his oratorical elan. You do not have to be a dramatist to recognise the clown archetype immediately. Johnson’s impulsiveness. The self-summoned crises. His attitude to truth, to authority, to every construct of law and art and politics, to power and to pleasure. His personal relationships and his relationship to the public. The self-conscious ungainliness. His blithe conjuring of fantasy and fairytale. The way he toys with norms – inverts, switches, tricks, reverses. The collusive warmth oddly symbiotic with a distancing coldness. Anything for a laugh. Everything preposterous. All of it richly articulate of the antic spirit that animates his being. Indeed, Johnson is an apex-clown – capable of the most sophisticated existential mockery while simultaneously maintaining the low moment-by-moment physical comedy of the buffoon. Recall general election Johnson of 2019. Think of the famous moment where he drove a JCB through a polystyrene wall on which was written the word “Gridlock”. His union jack-painted digger burst through the polystyrene with the legend “Get Brexit Done” written on its loader. His subsequent speech even mentioned custard: “I think it is time,” he said, smirking, “for the whole country – symbolically – to get in the cab of a JCB – of a custard colossus – and remove the current blockage that we have in our parliamentary system.” This scene must surely be as close to the actual circus as politics in the UK has ever come. Boris Johnson at the JCB headquarters in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, December 2019. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images Consider what is actually going on here. The wall is a wall that he helped create. Now he wants everyone to join him demolishing it. And he’s the man to lead the charge. Why? Because he’s the only one who can smash through the nonsense that is … the wall. Yet, he built the wall. Most of this nonsense is his doing – figuratively, literally, in the studio, in the country. And why are the hazard lights on? Because, of course, this is an emergency, for the clown must forever be concocting drama. An emergency that he has conjured and staged – to place himself in the cab of the rescue vehicle. Which is not a rescue vehicle. But a JCB. (Paradox inside paradox; is he destroying or rescuing?) A JCB painted as a union jack. Why? To celebrate the flag? Not quite. To mock it, then? Also, not quite. But in order to toy with it – to clown with it – to move back and forth across the borders of the serious and the comic. “Time for the whole country,” he says, “symbolically – to get in the cab of the JCB.” Symbolically? Was ever a word deployed with so many layers of foolery? What – we thought he might mean we all get in the JCB? Of course, we didn’t. So who is he mocking with that word? He’s mocking everything – the stunt, us, himself – even in the moment of performance, he mocks his own performance. We cannot take him seriously and yet we must take him seriously. And note how that word “symbolically” steps up from the backstage of Johnson’s consciousness when talking of Brexit – which, as he well knows, is an act of symbolism at the expense of everything else. The JCBs, the polystyrene walls, the stuck-on-a-zipwire-with-two-mini-union-jacks, the hiding in fridges, the waving of fish, the thumbs up, the pants down, this is the realm of the mock heroic – to which Johnson returns again and again. This is where he’s most at home. This is where he’s world-king. And he urges us to join him there. Nudges our elbows. Offers us a drink. Beckons us in. Smirks. Winks. Johnson’s novel Seventy-Two Virgins is one long tour of the territory. The book is beyond merely bad and into some hitherto unvisited hinterland of anti-art. More or less everything about it is ersatz. Commentators who fall for his self-conjured comparisons to Waugh and Wodehouse miss the point entirely and do both writers an oafish ill-service. Because here again: Johnson is not seriously interested in writing novels at all. It’s not that he’s a fraud. Rather, as ever, he is a jester-dilettante peddling parody and pastiche. In truth, the attentive reader is not invited to take anything seriously about the novel – not its title; not its handling of character, dialogue, plot or point of view; not its dramatic construction, nor its stylistic impersonations. And certainly not its thematic dabbling. In fact, for more than 300 ingenious pages, Johnson manages to commit to nothing in the art of writing a novel so much as the attempt to be entertaining in the act of mocking a commitment to the art of writing of a novel. There is no heroic; it’s all mock. “To a man like Roger Barlow,” Johnson writes of his clownishly named hero in the book, “the whole world just seemed to be a complicated joke … everything was always up for grabs, capable of dispute; and religion, laws, principle, custom – these were nothing but sticks from the wayside to support our faltering steps.” Clowns have been with us through history. They turn up in Greek drama as sklêro-paiktês – childlike figures. During the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a clown-king was chosen and all commerce was suspended in favour of a wild cavort. (“Fuck business.”) In Norse mythology, the archetype is the figure of Loki – silver-tongued trickster and shape-shifter who turns himself into horse, seal, fly, and fish. (Note the echo of the reference by a close ally of Joe Biden to Johnson as a “shape-shifting creep”.) In the Italian commedia dell’arte, there is the character of Pierrot. There is Badin in France, Bobo in Spain, Hanswurst in Germany. And here in Britain: Shakespeare’s many famous fools. We need our clever fools, of course. Too much solemnity is sickly. We need the carnival. We need reminders of our absurdity. The culture should be subverted. The sacred should be disparaged. Institutions should be derided when they become sclerotic. We live in an age of posturing and zealotry and never needed our satirists and our clowns more. But the transgressor is licensed precisely because they are not in power. The satirist ridicules the government – fairly, unfairly – and we smile because (ordinarily) they are not in charge of the hospitals, the schools, our livelihoods or the borders. We laugh and clap at the circus, the theatre and the cinema because we can go home at the end of the evening, confident that the performers are not in charge of the reality in which we must live. Boris Johnson stuck on a zipline in Victoria Park, London, August 2012. Photograph: Getty Images Previously, of course, this was Johnson’s relationship to power. He was the clown-journalist tilting idly at straight bananas, Tony Blair, political correctness gone mad. When he was made mayor of London, he was in effect elevated to quasi-official court jester. There he was stranded on the zipwire (the buffoon parodies the circus trapeze act) but real power still remained elsewhere. Even during the referendum campaign, David Cameron and George Osborne were the government … whereas Johnson was continuing to perform the role of fool – holding up a kipper here, draped in sausages there, arriving in town squares with his red circus bus and a farrago of misdirection and fallacy. He was stoutly devoid of any real idea or concern for what might replace the structures he disparaged. His humour, his glee, his energy, his campaigning brilliance – it delighted and sparkled because he was free of responsibility, free to be himself, free to throw the biggest custard pies yet dreamed of in the UK. Vanishingly few people had any serious idea of what was involved in leaving the EU; and resoundingly not Johnson. But those who simply wanted to leave because their gut instinct told them it was right to do so would have failed and failed miserably without him. These men and women – the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Steve Baker, Nigel Farage, Mark Francois, John Redwood, Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey et al – were never more than a dim congregation of rude mechanicals. And what they required to win was someone who instinctively understood how to conduct a form of protracted public masque. Someone who could distract, charm, rouse and delight with mischief and inversion and a thousand airy nothings. (The clown was ever the perfect ambassador of meaninglessness.) But even Puck sends the audience home with an apology and the reassurance that all we have witnessed was but a dream. We, however, have made our clown a real-world king. And from that moment on, we became a country in which there was only the mock heroic – a “world beating” country that would “strain every sinew” and give “cast-iron guarantees” while bungling its plans and breaking its promises. A country “ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles” and act “as the supercharged champion” of X, Y, Z. A country on stilts – pretending that we had a test and trace system that was head and shoulders above the rest of the world. A country performing U-turns on the teetering unicycle of Johnsonian buffoonery – A-levels, school meals, foreign health workers and more. A country of tumbling catastrophes. Trampolining absurdities. Go to work. Don’t go to work. A country proroguing parliament illegally here, trying to break international law there. Paying its citizens to “eat out to help out” in the midst of a lethal pandemic. A country testing its eyesight in lockdown by driving to distant castles with infant and spouse during a travel ban. A country whose leadership stitched up the NHS in the morning and then clapped for them at night. A country opening schools for a single day, threatening to sue schools, shutting schools. A country on holiday during its own emergency meetings. A country locking down too late; opening up too early. A country sending its elderly to die in care homes. A country unwilling to feed its own children. A country spaffing £37bn up the wall one moment and refusing to pay its own nurses a decent salary the next. A country doing pretend magic tricks with the existence of its own borders – no, there won’t be a border in the sea; oh yes there will; oh no there won’t; it’s behind you …. A country of gimmicks and slapstick and hollow, honking horns. This is Eastcheap Britain and Falstaff is in charge. It is in the two Henry IV plays that Shakespeare most clearly illuminates the gulf between his great, theatre-filling clown, Falstaff, and the young Prince Hal who will go on to become the archetype of the king – Henry V. At the mock-court of Falstaff’s tavern, we are invited to laugh and drink more ale, pinch barmaid’s bottoms, dance with dead cats and put bedpans on our heads while Falstaff entertains us with stories of his bravery and heroism that we all know are flagrant lies. Says Prince Hal to the portly purveyor of falsehoods: “These lies are like their father that begets them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” Meanwhile, the realm falls apart. Since we have no Hal and have crowned the clown instead, the play we are now watching in the UK asks an ever more pressing question: can Falstaff become Henry V and lead his country with true seriousness and purpose? Or is the vaccine-cloaked transformation now being enacted merely superficial – a shifting of the scenery? The lies themselves are the problem. The kingly archetype embodies at least the ambition of sincerity, meaning and good purpose at the heart of the state. Whereas deceit continues to be the default setting on Johnson’s hard drive. Rory Stewart calls Johnson “the best liar ever to serve as prime minister” but writes that “what makes him unusual in a politician is that his dishonesty has no clear political intent”. But Stewart does not quite see that Johnson is the purest form of clown there is – “improper by essence” – and that truth and lies are like two sides of the argument to him: equally tedious, equally interesting, equally absurd, both a distant second in their service of tricks, drama, distraction, invention, manipulation. He will write you two columns, four, 10, 100 – pro-Marmite, anti-Marmite; pro-EU, anti-EU. And then he’ll tell you all about them. All about how he couldn’t decide. Because not deciding is where all the drama is to be found and who cares about the arguments anyway? No, what the trickster wants is neither your agreement nor your disagreement. (For he himself agrees and disagrees.) What the trickster wants most of all … is for you to admire his trickery. Heinrich Böll, the German Nobel-prize winner and author of the truly great novel The Clown, answers Stewart’s question when he says: “You go too far in order to know how far you can go.”

The clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool | Boris Johnson | The Guardian

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arolla-pine · 4 years

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I, Marinette - p.4

(4) – The questioning

Surprisingly, I survived the art classes without ruining Marinette’s reputation. It was like a body’s memory – my hands did their job with no need to use my brain. Of course, I knew some basics of sewing or knitting, but I was a complete amateur when it comes to designing. Luckily, Marinette had started a new project last time, so all I had to do was continue.

While I was sewing I could try to analyse my current situation. Those lucky coincidences were a bit weird. Was it possible that Ladybug’s Miraculous could influence the reality and protect me from a total disaster? Or was it only ‘a beginner’s luck’?

Although I didn’t figure out why I avoided being compromised, an hour of the art classes was a nice relax after morning sensations. Actually, I had an earthquake one after another, so this calm time was a nice break from them.

After a school bell I left the school immediately and ran back home. I needed to start investigating why I’d appeared in the Miraculous universe.

I entered the apartment like a hurricane and that surprised Sabine.

“I have to read a book for the afternoon classes, mom!” I explained quickly.

“You don’t have much time, darling…” She commented. “I’ll call you when lunch is ready!” She added, but I was already on the stairs, so I ignored her words.

I closed the trapdoor and sighed with relief. I was finally safe. Or not… Five seconds later I knew I was in troubles.

A red kwami flew out of my purse and stopped just in front of my face.

“Hands up!” Tikki glared at me. “Who are you and how did you get here?!”

I could expect that kwami would find out that I wasn’t real Marinette. But I didn’t expect that Tikki would assume the offensive instantly.

“I’ll answer your first question right away, but bear in mind that it can be a shock for you. When it comes to your second question I don’t have answers but I need to find them soon… Sooner than later, I’d say… Maybe Master Fu could help?”

“Master Fu left. He gave up the Miracle Box. He doesn’t remember anything…”

Holy crap! That meant we were just after the Season 3 finale…

“Don’t tell me I’m the Great Guardian of the Miraculouses…” I groaned. Anything else?!

“You are. Marinette… What happened? Why don’t you remember anything? Why do you act so different?”

“Because I’m not Marinette. My name is Lena Klimka and I live in Poland. I’m adult, I have a family… I don’t know why I’m here… And I have no idea how to go back…”

Tikki watched me carefully for a while, like she was checking my truthfulness. Then she began flying around me, that looked like a weird dance, buzzling as if she was filled with sparkled water. I felt like I was examined with a lie detector – in a Miraculous edition.

“Maybe it’s Hawkmoth’s trick?” Tikki asked when she’d finished her dance. Apparently I passed the truthfulness exam.

“I don’t think he’s so powerful.” I replied, shrugging, and then I added: “Unless he akumatised someone and gave them a power of transferring souls between bodies…”

“That’s quite plausible. He has already given many strange superpowers.”

“No, it’s not.” I denied. “That was a wild guess. Because… it doesn’t make sense. Why me? Why someone chose me to be exchanged with Marinette?”

Tikki looked at me thoughtful.

“Is there anyone who could want you to be in troubles?”

“Even if, I’m not aware of that. Besides, that should be someone from here. We’ve already known that Hawkmoth doesn’t have powers from afar.”

“How do you know that?” Kwami asked.

‘From the Startrain episode��’ I was about to say, but I held my tongue.

“He couldn’t control the akuma when Marinette’s class was in the space…” I said instead.

“How do you know that?!” Tikki repeated in an alarmed tone.

“I’ve seen…” I mumbled.

“Where?”

“Oh, Tikki… This might sound a bit unreal, but it is the same for me. ‘Miraculous Ladybug’ is a TV series. Fans from all over the world watch Marinette and Adrien’s adventures and wait for the moment when they’ll finally learn about each other. They ship them… I know Cat Noir’s identity. I know who Hawkmoth is…”

“Who is Hawkmoth?!” Kwami asked immediately, ignoring my previous news.

Gabriel Agreste. That was on the tip of my tongue. However, I couldn’t speak because of a sudden knot in my throat.

“Well?” Tikki insisted.

“I’m trying to say that but somehow I can’t. Maybe I’ll write it down…” I suggested, taking a piece of paper. All four pencils broke and pens didn’t work. “What’s happening?!” I muttered irritated.

“Magic.” Kwami explained immediately. “Same as the spell that doesn’t let us share our holders’ names.”

“I know.” I nodded and added under my breath. “Although I had a theory that it was only to delay the reveal of identities…”

“It’s so weird to talk with you like that, Marinette… You know, like I was talking with Master Fu, not with you…”

“Because you’re not talking with Marinette. And believe me, it’s much more irrational for me. Like a million times more…”

“So you can’t tell me anything?” Tikki came back to the subject.

“It looks like I get a knot in my throat every time I try to tell you something that would lead you to Hawkmoth. I could help. I could tell you that you’re really close to find out who he is. Lila helps him…” I added and stopped surprised that I could say that. “Oh, it’s not always that knot…” I commented staring at my kwami.

“Let’s check what you can say.” Tikki proposed.

“Cat Noir is… Thomas.”

“What a Thomas?” Kwami laughed.

“Not Thomas!” I snorted. “I know it’s A… Thomas.”

“You keep saying that…”

“Damn you, ‘no-spoiler-man’!” I exclaimed irritated. “Thomas Astruc, I believe…”

“That director?”

“Exactly. Every time I try tell you something I have his name instead of a knot.”

“Magic.” Tikki repeated, nodding as if my symptoms were something normal. “What else can you tell me?”

“Mayura is… Thomas. Damn! I know what happened to Adrien’s mum. I know what would happen if Ladybug revealed her identity to Adrien… I know that… Thomas… Urgh!” I groaned because that was all I could say.

“You know quite a lot and don’t know why you’re here?”

“Not a clue.”

“If that’s an akuma behind this, you will have to find it, capture and purify. Then you must repair all damage.”

“With ‘Miraculous Ladybug’, I know.” I muttered. “If I manage…”

“You need to learn quickly.”

“I know the theory, but I have no idea how it works in practice…”

I started walking around the bedroom. It usually helped with thinking. Kwami observed me and waited.

“I could trust Ladybug’s instinct.” I discovered. “When Ladybug and Cat Noir lost their memories by Oblivio, they managed to defeat him anyway. Their instinct was stronger than the memory. Maybe it’ll work this time as well…”

“You’ve seen that too?!”

“Oh, it’s my favourite episode ever!” I admitted.

“Uh! Episode! I still can’t believe we’re in some TV series!” Tikki exclaimed outraged.

Suddenly, a thought occurred to me and I looked at her in horror.

“Oh, my God…”

“What?”

“If Marinette woke up this morning at my home, she’ll be exposed to some information… If she survived the first shock…” I muttered.

“What do you mean?”

“I have plenty of books about Miraculous, including a written version of some episodes. Marinette will learn about Cat Noir’s identity. She’ll learn about Hawkmoth’s identity! If my daughter shows her some episodes on TV, Marinette will see everything! That may have significant consequences for your world! Like a butterfly effect. Or rather an akuma effect…”

“Maybe Marinette is protected by the same magic as you are here?”

“Do you think that this magic can work from afar?” I asked doubtful.

“This magic doesn’t have limits. If Marinette appeared in Poland because of an akuma, she’s bound by the Magic of the Miraculous. The question is: who the supervillain is and why they chose you.”

“I have no idea why me… I’m just a writer. I write short stories. Actually, I’m quite anonymous. I’m sure that nobody in France even knows me!”

“You write? What do you write?” Tikki was curious.

“Fanfiction.”

“What’s that?”

“Stories written by fans for fans. It happened that I fell in love with the Miraculous universe and I’ve already written some fanfics about Marinette and Adrien. You know, some theories how they could reveal their identities or how they defeated Hawkmoth… Sometimes I fixed the plot if I was disappointed with the actual episode…”

“You fixed?”

“I wrote an alternative plot development…”

My voice fainted. I remembered a popular sitcom, where one of characters was a soap opera star. In an interview he said that sometimes he improved his lines written by screenwriters. In consequence, he was killed in the next episode.

What were the chances that I was a victim of a similar intrigue?

What were the chances that Thomas Astruc had read one of my stories and he took revenge on me by setting me in the middle of the world created by him?

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I, Marinette - p.3 <- Previous part | Next part -> I, Marinette - p.5

Read the story from the beginning

#miraculous ladybug #fanfiction #fanfic #I Marinette #Tikki #Lena Klimka #season 3 spoilers #season 3 finale #after season 3

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makoto-nanami · 4 years

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Miraculous Rewrite: Origins Part 2 (Chapter 4)

Heyo, sorry for not updating... I’ve been working on uni prep, setting up a games documentation takes more time than you’d think... and I keep forgetting how long it takes me... Well, Alice finally runs into Adrien, gives him a rundown oh how things will work and makes it clear that she won’t put up with any misuse. There’s also Chloe... Chloe. Enjoy! Tagged - @blue-peach14

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After staying the night at Fu’s; apparently, he wanted to make sure I had all my paperwork and belongings sorted before I moved to Eva’s French dollhouse… I really hope it’s not like that… anything but that… I turned on the small tv and watched the news. The reporter from yesterday was updating the rest of Paris on the stone creatures that stood still around the city.

“The stone beings are scattered all over Paris, and for the time being, they seem to be showing no signs of movement. Police have cordoned off the areas around these beings.”

The screen switches to the mayor and the police officer from yesterday, he must oversee the Akuma cases. The mayor speaks, attempting to put on a brave face, however, he was glancing at the officer in fear and confusion, he has no clue on how to deal with this.

“We won’t stop until we find a way to get these people back to their normal selves, but for now, we’re not making much headway.”

The camera footage flips back to the reporter who stands next to a photo that worries me to no end, Ladybug and Chat Noir…

“Paris is relying on our new guardian angels, Ladybug and Chat Noir, to save us all. Our lives depend on them.”

Fu walks in from the other room, Wayzz following him. He looks at me, his eyes full of worry.

“Are you okay, Alice? You look unwell, are you perhaps worried for our young heroes?” I didn’t even realise I was clutching the tv remote so tightly that the plastic was bending, when did I…

“That’s just it, isn’t it Fu? They’re young. They messed up, and now they’re afraid of doing it again. Or at least that’s how Marinette feels, I have no clue about Adrien Agreste. I did my research, the only time he’s seen in public is at photoshoots. How exactly did you want me to help and watch a famous model with a bodyguard and strict schedule when I can’t even get close to him?”

“The boy needed freedom and has a pure heart; he was the perfect fit to Plagg at the time. As for young Marinette, I am sure she will pull though, she has a strong heart, she –“

I stand up and grab my bag. He looks at me, still worried but confident in his words. “Fu, how am I supposed to help them, watch them, guide them, if I can’t talk to them or explain why we threw them in the deep-end? I hope you’re right about them, cause while I agree they will be fine heroes, I can’t agree with the current path they’ll travel alone, I guess we’ll have to hope for some miracles.” I take an apple and grab my jacket and stuffing both into my backpack. “I better get to school before I’m late.” Fu chuckles at that.

“From what Evangeline has told me, you are not the most punctual person.” I frown at the accusation, I mean… not wrong but still. I wave him off and start jogging to Dupont.

As I make my way through the streets, I’m quite literally sent flying by a blond boy, damn moron, watch where you’re going! I grumble gathering my bearings and direct my glare at this oblivious idiot. He has blond pristine styled hair and soft green eyes, freaking out and apologising profusely… wait… I know that face…

“You’re Adrien Agreste.” The boy paled and started looking around before putting on a tight smile.

“Ermm… I think you’ve got the wrong guy miss, Adrien who. Never heard of him. Heh…Heh…” He laughs weakly, I roll my eyes at him.

“Oh, maybe I should call you Chat Noir then?” His face filled with fear. “Right Plagg?”

A blur of black whizzed out of the kids’ pocket and it’s green cat eyes stared at me, wonder, confusion, but finally acceptance. Plagg floated up to my face, mischief evident on the tiny god of destruction’s own. “So, you’re the old fart’s new vessel, huh?”

“Apparently, though he can go and find another body to take over for all I care, I’m me, not him. Understand that, and we’ll get along, right?” Plagg looked a little shocked but gave me a sly grin.

“I got it, you’re a lot more fun than the last few! The kid’s lucky!” Ironic coming from the embodiment of misfortune. Adrien then decided he had had enough with being left out of the conversation, and spoke up, his voice cracking slightly, prolly confused.

“Ermm… just who are you? And… how do you know who I… I mean you know?” Plagg butted in before I could open my mouth.

“This kid is the one who watches over the Miraculous like yours and Bug-Girl’s. She’ll make sure that if you do anything stupid, you’ll know about it.” He still looked lost.

“I’m an observer. I watch how you’ll use the Miraculous; use it wisely, then you keep being the wielder of the cat for as long as you are needed. Of course, you misuse it and I will take it away or punish you.”

“P-punish?”

“I realise you are just a kid, a kid with too much responsibility, I get that. However, if you are to misuse this power, people can get hurt, and that will have consequences. I’ll understand any rashness and mistakes, such as this Akuma, but any intentional misuse or repeated actions that you refuse to own up to, I will make sure you understand the weight of your choices. Understood?”

He nodded, still a little worried, but it’ll have to do. I sigh. “Hey, Agreste. You don’t need to worry. Seriously, you may not be able to tell anyone about your double life, sometimes it’ll feel like the world is suffocating you… I know the feeling, but that’s why I’ve decided to reveal myself to both of you. To help you through this. If you want to talk, if you need help, just ask and I’ll try. HOWEVER, I will say after I researched you, I will say this right now, I won’t accept the excuse of your sheltered life being the cause of any misunderstandings, you feel confused about anything that most would think is normal, you ask me or any friends you make at school, got it, I’m not gonna baby you, this is high school son, grow a pair!”

He stares at me completely shocked at my words, before quickly nodding again. I laugh at his quick nod and he starts chuckling too, before looking at his phone and alarm spread across him. “I’m going to be late!” Oh right… school.

“You’re such a strange kid. Who would want to be at school when he can stay at home all day?” Plagg darts back to his pocket peeking his head out, rolling his own eyes. We start jogging to school.

“You don’t get it, Plagg. I’ve had enough of being locked up at home by my father. I want to meet people, make friends.” He looks at me with a hopeful smile. “Learn about normal things! Go to a normal school like everyone else!” I roll my eyes at that, that place is far from normal.

“Arghhh… Uhhh, I think I’m feeling weak…” Plagg dramatically groans. Adrien stops running grabbing his bag, searching for something.

“You know what’s strange?” He pulls out a wedge of cheese that smelt horrible. Oh yeah… Plagg eats the stuff… poor kid’s gonna stink. “The fact that all you eat is this disgusting, rotten smelling camembert cheese, and I then have to smell like it 24/7. That’s strange.” He looks at me as if pleading for me to convince the tiny cat to eat something else. I shrug, you’re on your own for this one kid. He groans and glares at Plagg in disgust, but the god just stuffs his mouth with the cheese.

“If you want to be able to transform into a superhero, then stinky cheese is the deal, my friend!” Adrien sighs in defeat before continuing our jog to school.

We make it to the school’s steps, but we hear a beep from a car behind us. A tall, professional-looking woman leaves a nice-looking car and quickly paces towards Adrien. I recognise her from my research about the young cat holder, she’s Nathalie Sancoeur, Gabriel Agreste's assistant who manages his fashion work, his mansion, and takes care of his son Adrien. She must be here to take him back home… speaking of which, how the heck did Adrien enrol in the first place without a parent’s permission? As I’m about to grab the kid and get him to class, I feel the same dark feeling as yesterday, briefly, fleeting but just as dark.

“Adrien! Don’t do this! Your father will be furious!”

“Tell him you got here too late. Please!” Adrien turns around and runs into the school, I follow quickly after him and see Alya arguing with Chloe.

“How could you say that to Ivan? You’re the real Stoneheart!” Stoneheart? That must be what people are calling Ivan’s Akuma form.

“Ugh, so I’m the one who broke Sabrina’s dad’s arm, am I?” Fair, but still wrong, it’s not Ivan’s fault either. Also… Sabrina’s dad is the officer in charge of the Akuma cases… my belief in the Parisian police force is dwindling, this is why I want to be a P.I. Chloe the scoffs at the new girl and glares. “Just because your footage of those lame superheroes was shown on tv, doesn’t mean you have to get so high and mighty.” She blows her bubble gum at Alya popping it close to her face, luckily not sticking but I cringed at it and walk up Alya.

“You little…” Alya growled, about to retaliate before I stepped in.

“Ew… gross, Chloe that was so gross, you basically spat in her face, actually, I think you have a little spit on your glasses there Alya.” I say, however luckily there wasn’t anything on the glasses but Alya cringed at the thought, taking off her glasses and furiously wiping them, muttering how gross can anyone be. The glares and undecided look of the people around them all turned to barely hidden disgust at Chloe who was turning red and glared daggers at me. Alya after cleaning her already clean glasses huffed and walks off to the classroom. Chloe attempting to regain control taunted the girl.

“Lookout, she’s angry! She’s going to split the underwear and turn into a huge muscly monster!” She laughs obnoxiously.

“I’d be angry too; I mean what you did was kinda disgusting.” She spins back to me about to blow up at me, however, her face instantly lights up as she looks over my head.

“Hey, Chloe!” Adrien pipes up… oh no… I forgot… they’re friends. Chloe pushes past me and glomps the naive kid.

“Adrikins! You came!” Adrikins… oh, gods… I cringe at the two, Adrien noticing my face and his confusion is clear… did he just ignore all she did just now? Before I can call him out Chloe drags him to the classroom and the other students recognise the famous model and start rushing over. I slump in defeat and make my way to class.

Everyone is clamouring for Adrien’s autograph, and for once Chloe does something remotely good, albeit with less than pure intentions and makes a path to the classroom causing the fans to go back to their own classes. “Okay. This is your seat, Adrikins. I saved it for you. Right in front of me!”

“That’s creepy.” I blurt out, and Chloe growls at me.

“Well, no one cares what you think, Wattson!” Adrien glances at me in worry and unsure at who to support. I walk past him patting his shoulder.

“Get new friends, kid.” I say solemnly to him. His eyes widen at this but he turns to Chloe with a tight smile.

“Thanks, Chloe.” He turns to the Nino guy and tries to introduce himself othering him a handshake, but Nino just looks at him with distrust and ignores the hand. “Uh… Hey! Adrien.” The boy shows a model smile laced with nerves, but Nino didn’t react.

“You’re friends with Chloe then, huh?” He turns back to his phone. Hopefully, he’ll get the message.

I’m about to continue walking to my seat but I hear snide laughing coming from the front bench, obviously coming from Chloe and her lapdog Sabrina, I turn and see them sticking the gum that had recently been in Chloe’s mouth onto Marinette’s seat. Anger washing over me. “Hey! What the hell is your problem Bourgeois?!” Adrien turns around and spots what I’m yelling about.

“Hey! Chloe! What’s that all about?” He looks disappointed in her.

“The brat’s that sat here yesterday need a little attitude adjustment. I’m just commanding a bit of respect, that’s all.”

“No, if anyone here needs an attitude adjustment, it’s you! I thought you were gross, but this is just disgusting.”

“I am not disgusting!” She screams in my face, I pull out my phone and hit the emergency record button, I’d use during Eva’s interviews with her problematic clients. “You think you’re some sort of hero, I’ll get you kicked out of school, or maybe I’ll just tell my daddy to rethink your student visa.” I smile at her and she shrinks back. Adrien then interrupts sensing the danger this could lead to.

“Chloe, you think that’s really necessary?” I raise an eyebrow at that, it’s completely insane, but he’s still trying to keep his friendship with the girl. But said girl just scoffs at him, turning back with a hair flip and batting her eyes.

“Ah, you’ve got a lot to learn about school culture, Adrikins. Watch the master.”

Adrien then kneels down to Marinette’s seat, trying to pick the gum up with his pencil, only making it worse. I grab his arm trying to stop him from making it worse, till I hear a gasp. Great.

“Hey! What do you think you’re doing!?”

This day just keeps getting worse.

#miraculous ladybug #ml rewrite #adrien agreste #chloe bourgeois #alya cesaire #ml plagg #oc #no beta read #adrien salt #chloe salt

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iturbide · 4 years

Note

For the prompt thing, if I'm in sending in time for it: ok, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to request Fates related stuff like I have in the past, but due to a recent FEH announcement and also the discussion about dads, if it is allowed in the context of Heroes: can I get 49 with sane!Anankos and Lilith? (If not allowed, then 15 with Grima and a creche member of your choice.) ((as you can tell, I'm going the familial route.))

Oh trust me there’s no time limit on this at present these are going to be open for the foreseeable future since affection is something we all could probably use a little more right about now.

49. Giving them a tight hug that makes them lose their breath.

Lilith breathed in the scent of clear flowing water, felt the warmth of the sun on her face…and smiled, breathing a quiet sigh. A bad dream. That was all it had been: just a nightmare, born of too many battles. She must have fallen asleep outside the shrine…

But when she opened her eyes, it was not the castle that greeted her.

Or not the one she expected, at least. She had seen others before, fortresses and palaces both, but this was unlike any of those: great arches, towering spires, sheltered walks lined with windows…and beneath her feet, ancient stone worn smooth by countless steps, fresh water flowing through the grooves carved deep within its face.

As she looked up, she caught sight of a stranger in a gilt white hood. “O-oh!!” she yelped, clasping her hands before her. “P-please forgive me! I didn’t mean to intrude–”

“No!” they insisted, hurrying toward her. “No no no, you’re absolutely fine – you’re not intruding at all! In fact, we’ve been looking forward to having you.”

That gave her pause. “We?” she repeated.

They beamed, nodding so vigorously that they nearly unseated their hood. “I’m sure you’re confused – this definitely takes some getting used to. Welcome to Askr! I’m Kiran, and I’ll be your guide for the moment – please, come with me.”

Curiosity got the better of her as they made their way inside. “Uhm…perchance have you seen someone with black and silver armor? And a blue cape?”

“You mean Corrin?” they replied. When she nodded, an even wider smile cut across their face. “Which one?”

“Which…one?”

“Lilith!!!”

She had perhaps three seconds to process the myriad voices before she found herself crushed within a multifold embrace. It took her another moment still to realize that the voices were all familiar – and belonged to an array of equally familiar faces. “M-my…Lord Corrin? Lady Corrin?” she squeaked, watching them all beam in turn. Three bore instantly recognizable armor, one a Hoshidan kimono, another a swimsuit of all things, and two what appeared to be Vallite attire. “H-how is this possible?”

“Askr is…a very strange place,” one of them replied.

“Everyone’s going to be so excited to see you, we’ve all been waiting so long!” another added. “We even started trying to make good luck charms so you’d come sooner, see?” She briefly caught sight of a tag bearing her dragon form, tied to an arrow the one in the kimono held high over their heads.

“We’ve been waiting so long,” yet another insisted, hugging Lilith tight. “We were starting to worry we’d never see you again.”

“Well, some of us were – but we knew you’d make it.”

“All right, all right, everybody, give her some room to breathe,” Kiran laughed, shooing them all off. “Now, who wants to give her the grand tour?”

The group instantly set to arguing amongst themselves while the stranger stood back at Lilith’s side. “I’ve been wanting to do that for ages,” they confided, offering a mischievous grin. She couldn’t help but smile herself, muffling a giggle in one hand as she watched them all bickering. It was indeed strange, seeing so many of them in such odd garb, and she began to wonder if this was not the dream in truth…but truth be told she rather liked it, even knowing it was only a figment…

A movement caught her attention. Looking up, she saw another cloaked and hooded figure at the far end of the hall, stooping to hold the hands of two small children with silver hair. The little ones broke away after a mere second’s hesitation, scampering around the Corrins (and she swore she heard them calling for ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’)…but Lilith had too little attention to spare as the man rose to his full height, the Vallite robe rippling around him as she met his shocking red eyes.

“…Father?”

The word was barely more than a whisper, and even that lodged in her throat. But perhaps he heard it, even still, for before she could blink he had crossed half the distance, and before she could breathe he had crossed the rest. He towered over her, and all she could do was stare at a man she was certain had died – she had witnessed it, she was sure of it, it was why she’d sworn her oath to safeguard Corrin, and yet…

He smiled. And then he stooped to pull her against him, his embrace crushing the breath from her in a tiny, startled squeak of surprise. “My daughter,” he whispered with a voice like rain across the flagstones. “You’ve come at last.”

Finding her own voice was a struggle, not least because of his embrace (and for all his apparent humanity she could feel the deep sea’s crushing strength in how he held her, and for all that she feared that this might be the dream she did not wake even as her lungs began to burn). “But I thought…y-you…”

When he finally did release her, he was smiling. “What is this place?” she asked, barely daring to speak for fear that it might shatter the dream but needing to know, all the same.

His hands settled on her shoulders, light as wavelets on a sunny shore. “This is Askr,” he replied. “It is a curious place, where streams of fate twist and flow through one another. But it is real. For all that it feels a dream sometimes, it is real.”

She glanced at the group of Corrins, watched them nod, saw the children bobbing their own heads in agreement. “This has become our home. Strange, beautiful, yet…for so long something has been missing. But now…” He pulled her close again, enfolding her in arms warm as the summer seas. “Now you have come, and it is finally complete. Welcome home, my daughter.”

She lifted her hands to return his embrace, feeling them tremble as her fingers snared in his coat. “…I’m home,” she whispered. And the joy of that word, echoed in Corrin’s voice so many times over, promised that this was not a dream that would dissolve with morning, but one that had miraculously come true.

/////

And because I’m never going to pass up a chance to write me some Grima

15. Calming them down when they have a bad dream.

Fire.

The flames made an unfamiliar landscape as Grima fought his way through, smoke burning in his vessel’s lungs and heat searing through his garments. The violet wisps that surrounded him paled in the face of such an inferno, and offered no protection in spite of his best efforts to maintain a shield.

But he did not stop, pushing his way through the blaze along the path ingrained within his mind. He needed to reach the creche, get them out before the sea of fire consumed them all…

He stumbled over the threshold, blinking in a desperate, futile attempt to clear his vision. But he saw no one, and heard nothing when he called beyond the roar of fire. Had someone collected them already? Were they already safe? What was this dread searing through him, then–

A staggering blow felled him from behind, and he sprawled across the smouldering remains of blankets and toys. The pain made his vision waver and blur…but as he fought to right himself, his hand fell on something sharp. A fragment of crystal, charred, shattered beyond any hope of repair…

…and the same bright blue as a Summoning gem.

“They burned poorly.”

He forced himself up to meet Surtr’s gaze, baring his fangs even as he cradled the shard against his chest. He could see others, now, scattered across the floor, scorched and broken, crunching beneath the emperor’s boots as he advanced on the fell dragon. “They said that you would save them,” the man sneered. “I hope you burn better than they did.”

The blazing axe rose high, and he felt the roar of rage and grief tear through his chest…

“Wake up!”

Grima jerked awake, his heart racing as he struggled to get his bearings. The creche’s bedroom, still whole, untouched by fire – no flames to light it, no smoke to taint its air…

And at his side, a dragon child, her hands still shaking on his sleeve and her bright eyes frantic. “…Tiki,” he sighed – and she smiled, her anxiety seeming to dim slightly as she crawled into his lap. “What is it?”

“Did you have a bad dream?” she asked, pressing in close.

“…yes,” he agreed, wrapping his coat around her.

“Me, too,” she whispered. “I didn’t know you had bad dreams.”

“…on occasion,” he admitted.

She snuggled in closer, peeking up out of the gilt trim. “Was it scary?”

It was fading now. But he could still recall too clearly the blackened shards of blue crystal he’d held. “…yes.”

The little dragon made a small, thoughtful noise…and wrapped her arms around him. “It’s okay. It wasn’t real.”

But it could be. That was what shook him: they might all be lost for a misstep, a lapse, even a simple chance that saw him absent when they were in need…

“I know it’s scary. It scares me, too. It felt real, and…I’m scared it could happen for real. Not just in a dream. But…I know it won’t. I won’t ever be all alone. Not really. Even if there’s nobody around, I’m not ever alone, because I’ll always have you and Ban-Ban and Mar-Mar and Tak-Tak and all my friends. And when I think about that, I don’t feel so scared anymore.”

…when had she grown so wise? With the nightmare swiftly fading, reason at last began to fill the void it left. The creche was never truly unprotected: there were other guardians, all manner of caretakers, on top of the parents and friends who always kept watch over not just Askr but the youngest within its castle walls. A slip on his part would not bring ruin with it, not with so many others lending their support…

“Do you feel better?” she mumbled.

“Yes,” he chuckled, settling back into the cushions. “And you?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” she nodded, snuggling closer. “It’s always less scary when you’re not alone.”

“Then try to find some more rest, tiny one,” he smiled, holding her close within his coat as she yawned and closed her eyes.

The weight tucked against him calmed his mind, allowing it to drift once more toward sleep as her words echoed softly through the dark. They were not alone. And they were all the stronger for it.

50 Wordless Ways to Say ‘I Love You’

#answered #teamelementaldorks #meme #fanfiction #fire emblem: heroes #anankos #corrin #lilith #grima #tiki #i love this prompt list so much #i went way overboard on both of these i feel like #but it was worth it even if it did take a while to get through #fingers crossed i did anakos okay #also i can't help throwing all the water metaphors in for his descriptors #snippets

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wedreamedlove · 5 years

Text

[FIC] Isomorphism

Rating: G Characters: Zhou Qiluo, Bai Qi, Xu Mo, Li Zeyan, Reader Word Count: 1886

A/N: Hello to new followers from the analyses posts I put up! I like to write stories too so feel free to browse my Masterlist if you enjoy my writing. The tabs are fun to press, I promise.

Tags: Daemon!verse (His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman).

Summary: First meeting blurbs with the men and their daemons. I tried to keep the Reader's vague, so you can project your own but unfortunately it's on the small side.

Beware spoilers on Zhou Qiluo and Xu Mo up to Chapter 17.

The first time you meet him is over the last bag of chips in the convenience store.

A stranger's hand on the bag of chips makes you look over and, rather than his sunshine hair and sky blue eyes, it's actually the small polar bear cub that pokes its head up from behind his shoulder which confirmed that it is Zhou Qiluo in front of you.

Both of you get on like a house on fire, clicking immediately, and through your relationship with him you find that his chubby daemon cub is as adorable as it looks and presents itself in interviews.

However, you wonder sometimes why his daemon appears as a cub when Qiluo is an adult already. Normally, daemons reflect the age of their guardian but you never end up asking, thinking it's too personal.

This leads to your first thought, upon making your acquaintance with the hacker KEY, about needing to tell Qiluo that KEY has an enormous adult polar bear as a daemon. You can imagine the pout on Qiluo's face already.

So imagine your surprise when KEY comes to your rescue and his hood falls back to reveal that he was Zhou Qiluo all along.

When the two of you manage to get a breather in the secret room underneath the conference, you ask him how his cub is now an adult. Your daemon noses at Qiluo's daemon and, despite its large size, Qiluo's daemon retains its gentle and foolish personality, being careful when it paws at your daemon before it rolls over onto its back, watching you two.

"She's always been able to do this," Qiluo shrugs with a grin, "It's pretty convenient when I'm traveling around on tours. Besides, don't you think her cub form suits the idol Zhou Qiluo much better?"

He glances at her when he says this and, right before your eyes, you see Qiluo's daemon shrink until she returns to her familiar cub form, blinking her large black eyes.

You take this newfound knowledge in stride, feeling even closer to Qiluo now after he shares this secret ability with you.

But you realize, when you see him for the last time, that it's like you've never really known him at all. He's always kept a side of himself far away from you, as distant as the moon, and in fact you don't even recognize that it's him until you hear the intoned words.

"I command you---"

Zhang Chenxi's daemon tries to flee the moment the words land on Zhang Chenxi, but a large polar bear rushes out from between the bookshelves and slams the daemon down, biting it viciously. Your ears echo with its shrieks.

Your own daemon tries to escape as well when Qiluo turns those words on you, knowing instinctively that you want to preserve some semblance of recognition of him. But your daemon gets pinned down by Qiluo's polar bear, although her actions are as gentle as she can make it.

Both of them have golden eyes, you notice through teary eyes even as you shake your head helplessly, not wanting Qiluo to leave you.

But in the end the sun disappears before your eyes.

When you come out of the darkness there's a stuffed polar bear on your bed.

~~~

"Do you still remember me?"

Even without hearing him, seeing him, or being prompted, there's no way you would forget your senior in high school because his relationship with you had always been one of the school's mysteries. He had a terrifying reputation and an equally terrifyingly standoffish attitude, yet the heavy weight of the grey wolf leaning against your leg is the same as always.

Your daemon curls deeper into your arms, wary of the large predator below it, and you find yourself standing a bit stiffly as well.

It's an extreme faux pas to touch another person's daemon, and the only exceptions are violent fights or between lovers. To your knowledge, none of these apply to you and Bai Qi right now.

However, Bai Qi doesn't seem to have any thoughts about his daemon clinging to you like this. He just flicks his eyes down to his daemon, confirming it's not troubling you too much, before he looks back at you, a smile playing on his lips.

You do your best to ignore his daemon at your feet and respond to his question, starting up a conversation. But, in the end, his daemon rests too much of its weight against you and you stumble to the side, reaching out instinctively to steady yourself with a hand on its head.

Immediately, you retract your hand like it's burned and open your mouth to apologize to Bai Qi for touching his daemon. But he beats you to speaking first.

"Hey, none of that. Behave yourself." His voice is low.

For a second you think he's talking to you and you straighten your back, feeling a chill run through your body when you recall his temper and exploits at school.

But then you see his daemon flatten its ears against its skull and tuck its tail in tighter, looking chastised. Your heart melts when it peeks up at you with soft brown eyes and you quickly tell Bai Qi that you know his daemon didn't mean any harm and you were just unprepared for its weight.

He looks at you, somewhat surprised, and then clears his throat and averts his eyes. "Feel free to nudge her back if she gets to be too much."

The tinge of red on his ears must be your imagination when he passes by you, handing you documents at the same time, and takes the lead to bring you along on his investigation.

As you head off with Bai Qi to look into the strange happenings in this city for Miracle Finder, his gray wolf keeps pace beside you, a steady warmth against your leg that hasn't changed from high school.

~~~

"Hm? You're looking for Xu Mo?"

From the start of the conversation to the end, as you and Xu Mo wrap up the details of his cooperation with Miracle Finder, he has been nothing but polite and warm. However there's something that nags at you, tugging at your instincts (and you're briefly reminded of his earlier words), until you realize what it is and cast a glance around the room curiously.

You haven't seen Xu Mo's daemon since he opened the door. It's unusual for a person and their daemon to be separated for long periods of time. Or is he one of those who don't have one? It'd be insensitive to bring that up though.

Xu Mo shifts, leaning back against his desk and crossing his legs at the ankles. He seems to have noticed your wandering gaze and says with an amused smile, "Ask. You're curious about something."

Flushing a bit at being caught, you still end up asking hesitantly where his daemon is.

"Right in front of you."

His answer makes you blink and you take another look around. It's only when he makes a coaxing noise though that you see a white ball, which had blended in with the stack of binders and papers on his desk, stir that you see the nose and whiskers and intelligent black eyes of an arctic fox.

It has been watching you and your daemon this entire time and you hadn't even noticed.

Xu Mo extends his arm and his daemon uncurls itself, stretching and shaking out its cloud-like fur, before it slides up his arm to balance on his shoulders behind his head. The motion is so sinuous that you think you see something else for a second. But that's ridiculous. Going by Xu Mo's age, his daemon should have long settled its form by now.

Much later, you realize your thoughts back in those innocent days weren't ridiculous at all when you find yourself standing in a park, pressing Iridescent to your own throat with shaky hands and blinking past tears.

Through your blurry vision you can see the sinuous white snake curled around Xu Mo's --- no, Ares's --- shoulder. Its head rests at the hollow of his throat, black eyes watching you without blinking just like how the fox watched you back then, and its tongue as it flicks it out to taste the air is red.

The color is a vicious slash across his pale throat, painting an illusion that his throat is bleeding, and you feel an answering trickle of blood down your own throat from Iridescent's sharp tip.

As your heart breaks under his words, you wonder if you ever truly knew him. Is he Xu Mo? Is he Ares? Is his daemon a fox, a snake, or something else entirely? Is he someone whose name you don't even know?

His daemon flicks its tongue out again and, faintly, you wonder what it tastes from you. Betrayal? Grief? Hurt? Or just an aching numbness?

~~~

It's actually the second time you meet Li Zeyan when you see him next, but you never got his name in the first meeting, after he saved you from the car, and things were so hectic that you also didn't see his daemon.

Which makes you question your sight because how could you have possibly missed the massive lion by his side? The apex predator strides down the hallway in front of the CEO who is talking to his aides. One of its paws is easily the size of your head.

Nevertheless, despite your sudden reservation at confronting Li Zeyan when his daemon is exuding such a heavy presence, you still step out when it looks like Li Zeyan will pass by without even sparing you a glance. You ignore the low rumble that comes from the lion.

Li Zeyan pauses and looks at you.

You lock your legs together to keep yourself standing, hyperaware of the gaze from Li Zeyan's daemon. Your own daemon bristles in your arms, sharing your mix of nervousness and resolve.

Inwardly, you reassure yourself about how you've never heard of a daemon savaging someone before. But the instinctual fear of being in front of a deadly beast weighs on your shoulders. Still, you push through all this to argue your case in front of the poker-faced man.

He gives you 5 minutes of his time and gestures for you to head into his office.

The door to his office suddenly looks like the mouth of a cave though and you recall the idiom of bearding a lion in his den. This sensation is magnified when Li Zeyan's daemon precedes you into the office, lying down beside the desk and looking imposing as it flicks its tail.

You miraculously keep your calm though as you focus your attention on Li Zeyan, and it helps when his daemon looks away and starts to clean its paws, paying you and your daemon no more attention.

In the end, you manage to wrestle a promise out of Li Zeyan to fund your company and, as you leave as quickly as naturally possible so that you can let out your breath which you've been holding and give your wobbly legs a rest, you miss the intrigued look in Li Zeyan's eyes and the curious tilt of his daemon's head, both of them watching you leave.

#mr love queen's choice #love and producer #mlqc gavin #mlqc victor #mlqc #mlqc kiro #mlqc lucien #spoilers: my headcanon is that xu mo's daemon really is a fox but foxes in asian folklore are masters of illusion so...#spoilers: daemons are usually opposite gender but li zeyan is special because i wanted a lion with a mane oops #(there have been cases with lionesses growing manes too though... nature says screw the gender system)

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silwenworld · 4 years

Note

TMI: What's your favorite episode of SGU and OUAT, and why? :)

I have a very soft spot for H/C trope so you can guess what most of the episodes were about 😅 Long post ahead as I’m unable to choose just one from either of these shows, so brace yourself :P Be that as it may, I had to google the episode names for SGU as not to write the one with Rush in the chair and so on XD So for SGU: My absolute favourite -“Human”. I love how it shows Rush’s ‘human’ side. Yes, he’s a genius, but more than that he’s a broken man afraid of making connections with others, harbouring an immense level of guilt. He loves, he cares and really needs a hug. Also, the music score in this one is one of my favourites. And he’s a math teacher, not a space boy, give the man a break. “Time” - I like time-loops episodes and that’s just it :D “Pain” - That was a nice one. I mean it got into the heads of the infected characters quite well, playing with their fears and helped understand them a little better. The only minus would have been Scott and James as I can’t stand those two. “Aftermath” - this one was a tough one as I really liked Riley, but it’s a good episode for Young, showing him in a somewhat different light and later on it’s nice they don’t brush over about what he had done and that it hunts him. Moral dilemmas are just the worst. “The Greater Good” - Young and Rush finally come to an understanding, yey! (after beating the crap out of each other first, but still.) “Malice” - my second top favourite - human Rush strikes again and this time everybody sees it. Heartbreaking, because this man just can’t catch a break, deserves to be happy but the universe keeps knocking him down again and again. “Twin Destinies” - two Rushes, one more broken than the other. Oh, and Young deciding to stay behind with Rush will always be one of the highlights. “Epilogue” - Alternative Young and TJ had a baby, and I couldn’t be happier for them. Now for OUAT (that’s a more tricky part xD): "The Price of Gold” - a.k.a the episode when I’ve definitely fallen hard for Rumplestiltskin xD I mean, he was the damned cinderella’s fairy godmother and I’m still in stitches about that xD “Desperate Souls” - Papafire. The backstory. Break my heart, why don’t you. “Skin Deep” - obviously. “Red-Handed” - Red Ridding Hood is a werewolf that’s pretty much the reason xD “The Crocodile” - again - Rumple is the Crocodile from Peter Pan and I’m loving it xD Gold and David’s bromance and find yourself a man who gives you a library to make amends. “Manhattan” - Papafire strikes again with a full force. “There’s No Place Like Home” - the wedding!!!!! “The Tale of Two Sisters” - the Dance!!!! I’m still emotional about this one xD “Darkness on the Edge of Town” - it had Cruella xD and I loved the dynamic of the trio+Rumple. “The Bear and the Bow” - hero Rumple to the rescue. Great H/C material and the man went against a giant bear with nothing but a cane and punch of magic powder. “Her Handsome Hero” - I don’t know but I liked this one and would love to see more of Rumbelle bickering in the way they had in this episode. “Ill-Boding Patterns” - hated the part with Beowulf but loved the one with Gideon. And the hug! The goddamned hug that finally said they’re going to be alright! The Final Battle” - Rumbelle finally are well and good, my heart is melting and the scene when Gold speaks with the Imp!Rumple is still one of my favourite scenes. “The Beauty” - I. Cry. Every. Time. It’s emotional and beautiful and I can’t. “The Guardian” - aka Robert Carlyle’s masterclass in acting. Seeing Rumple act like an Imp while still looking like Gold still gives me chills. Also, I love the relationship he had with Alice/Tilly. The list has gotten long xD I would pretty much rewatch every Rumbelle episode and think that seasons 1-2 were the best, but I think that would be it if I would want to name the whole episodes instead of the scenes :)

#tmi tuesday #anonymous

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axther · 4 years

Text

the dead things we carry

in the end, it’s all dust to dust.

oc x reader

warnings: blood, lovecraftian horror, swearing

To live is to suffer.

That was what Fredrich Nietzsche said, anyway. But mortal opinions were not what Gazadrdiel brought himself to be part of. He had one job, one fate, and one opinion alone.

Watch the child.

The child in question, a female by the name of YN LN, was not quite a child anymore. She had grown and persisted for almost eighteen years under Gazadrdiel’s watchful eye and created her own thoughts, despite the hive mind that Gazadrdiel always observed in humans. Though, he couldn’t truly expect her to have a mind like humans. Not when she wasn’t one.

Gazadrdiel glanced down at the young woman, watching her murmur over her phone. He couldn’t care less who she was talking to; merely that she stayed out of harm’s way. Two others were at her side. One was a human girl, with a pep in her step and hair she had dyed half pink, half blue. She was pastel aesthetics from head to toe, and she seemed to flit from one sight to the other with wide brown eyes.

Speaking of sights, the other one was a boy. He was by no means human, with a writhing tattoo that crawled over his skin like black tentacles, but he kept the guise with black hair and blue eyes. He glared at anyone that so much as glanced at the quartet before looking over YN’s shoulder at her phone.

“Yo, Gaz.” YN didn’t look up at him but fiddled with a headphone in one ear. She leaned into the mic like she was on the phone. “D’ulli’s supposed to be around here, right?”

“Supposedly.” Gazadrdiel floated upside down, letting his snowy wings flop down like dead fish. Mortals couldn’t see him, but the boy stifled a laugh when he turned like a rotisserie chicken. “Chances are, she’d notice Nikolai first, then you. Mates, you know.” Gazadrdiel couldn’t care less, but a quelled, laughing joy rose in him when YN pointed a finger into her mouth and gagged.

“Hets. So disturbing.” YN shook her head and Nikolai stifled another laugh with his hand while looking away.

“Hey!” The girl turned around while walking with a light glare. “We are not disturbing! We’ve actually got an incredibly diverse culture, and we…” She rambled off, crossing her arms and turning around again before she could see YN and Nikolai exchange a look.

“Why is she here, again?” YN pulled the mic up again but Gazadrdiel heard her clearly. He shrugged.

“Mandatory human presence.”

YN gave the girl’s back a disgusted look before dropping it. “Why does she even act like that? It’s gotta be something that I don’t have…”

“Extra brain cells. She doesn’t know what to do with them.” Nikolai gave a short huff before fondling his hair, making the mess flop in front of his left eye. YN looked at him with confusion.

“You gotta stop doing that. You look like...I dunno, a cringy Gerard Way? We’re in twenty-twenty, dude. We have better taste than that.”

“My taste is better than that. It’s my style.” He stuck out his tongue.

“You don’t even look like you should have that hair. You dress like you should be an e-boy or something.” YN pulled at a lock of Nikolai’s hair before he swatted her hand away.

“She’s got a point.” Gazadrdiel raised a relenting eyebrow. Nikolai huffed before looking off to the side. YN dropped the mic and went back to looking over her phone, texting someone that Gazadrdiel didn’t care to check. His eyes drifted over to the girl herself, watching the same black tattoo as Nikolai’s crawl around her neck and shift like a snake. It remained just under the ponytail she had, enough that it was out of eyesight, but with Gazadrdiel floating above her, it was clear within his sight.

The guardian remembered back to the first time that he truly met YN. It was her thirteenth birthday, she had just been considered ‘of age’, and Gazadrdiel had been ordered to inform her of her status.

“You’re not human.”

Thirteen-year-old YN stared up at Gazadrdiel with wide, confused eyes. Her hair fell into her eyes and she was on her bed, playing with a stray feather from Gazadrdiel’s wings. Her shyness gave way to her confusion and awe.

“What?”

“You are not human. You are one of an elite race of remote, ancient entities that oversee the lives of humans.”

“Like...God?” YN looked from Gazadrdiel to the feather, and back. “Are you my guardian angel?”

“If it’s easier for you to think that way, then yes.”

“If my dad’s God-”

“Not God. There is not one god. Not here.”

YN faltered. “Why am I here?” Her brow was furrowed with confusion and sadness that no child should feel. “Where is here?”

“Earth. You are here because your father, Azyrre of the stars and sky, is the eldest and most superior of the Ionians. Your parent’s best friends, Xothrith’ri of the mountain and Vhozi of the trees, decided to send you here because of the unparalleled risk and power you represent, and the fact that your father’s old lover has and will attempt to kill you using their child, who killed the Ionian of the tides, Z’undi.” Gazadrdiel nodded, like he was checking off a list, eyes half-lidded with his white eyelashes getting in the way of his slitted eyes. YN had a mixed look of disgust and confusion, with one side of her nose tilted up.

“So...some lady-”

“We can’t really say Iuhxyu’s a female, to be honest. It gets confusing with all the tentacles.”

“Decided to send their kid-”

“N’ikicite of the fire.”

“After me, who killed my...mom?”

“Again, genders aren’t really a thing with the Ionians, but essentially.”

YN groaned and covered her eyes. She flopped onto her back and the plush comforter puffed around her, sending a teddy bear to the ground. Gazadrdiel leaned over and picked it up, letting his tanned fingers barely trace over a beady black eyeball before placing it gently at YN’s feet.

“I’ve been instructed to watch over you. Since your father is so…” Gazadrdiel waved his hands a bit, trying to find the right words. “Elite amongst the Ionians, and with Iuhxyu deciding to prove their dedication to your father through killing you, there are many enemies after you. And that’s where I’ve been instructed to come in.”

YN said nothing but brought up a pillow to her face. Gazadrdiel sat at the edge of her bed, letting his bare feet touch the carpet with a grimace. He shelved it, though, seeing as the child in front of him was having a breakdown.

“Amongst Ionians, you are Angyosz of the moon. You are a living legend, for having avoided Iuhxyu for so long.” He paused. “You can thank me for that.”

YN said nothing for a moment, before moving the pillow so one eye peered at Gazadrdiel.

“Who are you?”

Gazadrdiel hesitated. “I am Gazadrdiel, subservient of the ridge.”

“Gazadriel?”

“Gazadrdiel.”

“Gazadriel.”

“Gazadrdiel.” Gazadrdiel huffed, wrinkling his nose. “Gaz.”

“Gaz it is.” YN moved the pillow back across her whole face. “How come we look normal? Except for your...wings.”

“Earth cannot contain our true forms.” Gazadrdiel hummed. “Mortals cannot see me, and you haven’t decided your true form yet. So you copy everyone else off of instinct.”

“Instinct?” The shocked cry was muffled until YN threw the pillow off and sat straight up. “Wait, this isn’t what I really look like?”

“Nope,” Gazadrdiel popped the ‘p’. “No one will know what you look like until you turn eighteen.”

“Ugh,” YN fell back onto the pillows. “And I gotta deal with a kid after me, too.”

“Not quite.” Gazadrdiel stood and walked over to YN’s desk, picking up a book with a phoenix on the cover. “You’ve already got that covered.”

“Huh? Wait, how?”

“Nikolai. Nikolai Volatire.”

“Wait, Nicky?” YN tittered. “No way he’s tryna kill me! Unless he, like, killed the kid or something...”

“You’ve managed to befriend N’ikicite.” Gazadrdiel put the book down. “How, I have no idea, but you have. And he’s no longer hunting you.”

“Wow. How many other…?” YN looked directly at Gazadrdiel for the first time since he first appeared in her room.

“Many. Earth is essentially a nursery. They all should theoretically kneel to you, but there’s no one to stop them from slitting your throat. So it’s best that you find the local ones and befriend them.”

“You guys are twisted.” YN wrinkled her nose but hopped out of her bed. “How am I supposed to find others like me?”

Gazadrdiel shrugged. “You think up of a way. Humans made the internet. Use that.”

YN gave him a half-hearted glare before nodding.

“Alright.” YN paused, looking at her hands before looking back up at Gazadrdiel. “What are we called?”

Gazadrdiel looked at her with surprise, honestly having not expected her to ask. He closed his eyes with a soft smile.

“Hionera. The Ionian youth are called the Hionera.”

“You think that’s her?”

YN’s voice snapped Gazadrdiel out of his thoughts and he glanced down at her. She was looking intently at something across the street, and Nikolai stopped playing a game on YN’s phone to look up. The other girl had been walking in her own little world and ignored when YN pointed across the street, into a little cafe.

Indeed, there was someone there. She was a young woman, in a sleek black dress with red hair that oozed maturity. There was a squad of humans around her, chattering loudly and trying to get attention. More than one man was leaning across the table, talking in hopes she would lend her ear. People that passed by did double takes and some tried to discreetly pull out their phones and take pictures. Like she was struck, she stiffened and turned her head ever so slowly and discreetly over to where YN, Nikolai, Gaz, and the girl were. Her eyes, a vivid purple, lowered slightly, and it was clear that she had zeroed in on Nikolai. She looked him up and down before licking her top lip, slightly. Nikolai flushed, played with his hair a bit more, and took back YN’s phone.

“Oh, yeah.” Nikolai looked back down at his game. “That’s gotta be her.”

“Hehhh.” YN let her chuckle drone. “Gaz, you were right.”

“Naturally,” Gazadrdiel hummed.

“Should we send Nicky to the wolves?” YN gave a malicious but animated chuckle when Nikolai snapped his head up with a furious flush.

“Don’t call me Nicky! And no! You do it!”

“We could send Cassie,” YN mused, and the girl snapped to attention.

“You could at least introduce me as Cassiopia to her! It’s a cuter name! And it makes me sound special.”

“No,” Gazadrdiel shut down the suggestion. “You go, YN. We can’t force N’ikicite.”

“Don’t call me N’ikicite-!”

“Bet.” YN began strutting across the street, looking almost hunched over. She walked to the cafe with a purpose, and the crowd around the woman parted in awe at her blatancy. The woman narrowed her eyes before relaxing them and checking out her nails.

“What do you want?” Her voice was deep and edgy, like she smoked.

“D’ulli?�� YN raised her hand like she was in class. The three others trailed behind her, with Nikolai almost trying to hide his entire self behind YN. “Right?”

D’ulli narrowed her eyes, and the crowd around her seemed to shift. “What do you want?”

“This is N’ikicite, that’s Gaz, and I’m Angyosz.”

D’ulli’s face went from restrained disgust to piqued curiosity. “And who’s the girl?”

“Oh.” YN waved a lackadaisical hand. “That’s just Cassie. She’s normal.” “Hey!” Cassie snapped out of her daze and crossed her arms. “What do you mean, normal? I’m about as weird as they get, and I embrace it! Not only do I…”

The four others ignored Cassie as YN sat on the spare seat, and the crowd let out a gasp. Nikolai gave an uncharacteristic squeak and made a dive for the next seat over, and Cassie took the seat next to him and D’ulli. YN propped her feet on the table, and the men on it scattered like cockroaches.

“D’ulli of the rains, we have come to make an oath of allegiance. Ihuxyu of the earth core is after me and I want allies.” YN crossed her arms casually, and D’ulli raised an eyebrow.

“If Ihuxyu is after you, then why is her son with you?” She looked at Nikolai and gave a flirty wink. The poor boy took a deep breath in and looked like his soul left his body. “Tell me, N’ikicite of the fire. Why are you with your mother’s mortal enemy?”

YN snorted before Nikolai could answer, and he glared. “She’s not my enemy…”

“Or you’re just a simp.”

“I’m not a simp-!”

D’ulli raised a hand. “I get it. You two aren’t at each other’s throats-”

“Most of the time.” YN mused.

“Here I am called Daenerys.” The entire table fell silent, and D’ulli flushed. “What?”

“Daenerys? Seriously?” Nikolai raised an eyebrow, and YN took her feet off the table to stare at D’ulli with shock and confusion.

“My copy was reading it.” D’ulli reared up, clearly threatened. “It’s the name she said when I met her…”

No one spoke, but YN blinked owlishly. There was a moment of awkward silence before D’ulli broke it again.

“A-Anyway, I’ll be your ally.” She stiffened, placing her hands on her lap. YN smiled and put her feet back up on the table.

“Great! Then I’ll-”

“At a price.”

“Name it.”

“A night with N’ikicite.”

“Wait, what-?”

“Deal.”

“Wait, what-!”

“No, YN.” Gazadrdiel smacked YN at the back of her head, and she whined and rubbed the sore spot. “You can’t offer up N’ikicite.”

“Thank you, Gaz!” Nikolai stood. The side of his arm had caught fire from nothing, but YN didn't so much as flinch. She flicked a hand and a jet of water from D’ulli’s drink doused the flame. “And don’t call me N’ikicite!”

“Why not, N’ikicite?” D’ulli batted her eyes at Nikolai, who reared up.

“Because I just met you!” He waved his hands. “And I like someone else-!”

“You can say ‘YN’, we won’t judge you.” Cassie piped in.

“Shut up! And it’s more than that! You can’t just do that, YN!” Nikolai whined, looking ready to cry. “That’s not fair!”

YN pursed her lips. “You can just say no.”

Nikolai paused, his eyes popping open. “Huh?”

“Deal’s off,” YN turned to D’ulli, standing and bowing a bit. “Thanks, but you heard the man.”

D’ulli sputtered as YN took Nikolai’s hand and began dragging him away, leaving Gaz and Cassie to trail behind them. She watched them go, with Nikolai gasping and stammering the way into the distance, blinking as the crowd around her murmured to life. She looked down at the table and noticed a scrap of paper. She snatched it and popped it open with a nail, before her eyes went wide.

719 266 2837, in case you change your mind.

“I still have no idea what happened.”

Gazadrdiel was floating above YN’s bed, watching Nikolai hold his head in his hands. YN’s room hadn’t changed much from when she was thirteen, and she still sported the same desk-one that she sat at with her computer open. She was on Craigslist, updating an ad for Hionera she had.

“D’ulli wanted to fuck you. You didn’t want to. We left. Bada bing, bada boom.” She finished her sentence with a definitive tap to the period key and say back with a sigh. “It’s whatever. What can rain do against the earth’s core?” YN made jazz hands when she said and it put a joking accent on ‘the earth’s core’.

“But still…” Nikolai watched as YN checked her phone. “What, you waiting on a call?”

“Kinda. Don’t worry, dude.” She waved a hand and pointed at Gazadrdiel. “So that’s...what? The third that we’ve turned down so far?”

“Fourth.”

“I can go back and say yes.” Nikolai looked like a kicked puppy. “I guess I was just surprised.”

“Nah. Like I said, what’s she gonna do? Rain on your mom?” YN paused. “Heh. Your momma so big…”

“We need to make sure that the next couple Hionera we talk to, we accept. The more we reject, the more likely word’s gonna spread that we’re picky.” Gazadrdiel plucked off a stray feather from his moulting wings. It fell onto Nikolai’s head, but he said nothing about it.

“I can just talk to her-!” Nikolai started, but YN cut him off.

“If the rumour spreads, then technically, it just makes everyone think we have an elite force. And then it’s like...people are gonna want to join.”

“That’s wishful thinking.” Gazadrdiel hummed. “If you think the Ionians are proud, then the Hionera are devils.”

“Guys!” Nikolai barked. Both YN and Gazadrdiel jumped, looking at him.

“What’s up?” YN said a bit sheepishly.

“I don’t mind spending the night with Daenerys! I can just tell her I don’t want to...you know…” He flushed, but before anyone could say anything else, Mother Mother began blasting from YN’s phone. Hayloft played as YN picked up her phone and squinted to see who the caller was.

“You need to get glasses,” Nikolai murmured.

“Shut up, shut up. If we’re lucky, we won’t have to talk to D’ulli again.” She waved a hand, put the phone to her ear, and answered. “This is YN. Or Angyosz, depending on whether or not you’re mortal. Uhh...whatcha need?”

The room was tense and silent.

“Uh-huh. Yeah, this is her.” YN nodded, pursing her lips. “Yup. Yeah.” She glanced at Nikolai. “Well, you heard him…”

Nikolai shot up from the bed, realising who YN was talking to. Gazadrdiel flew out of the trajectory of Nikolai’s head when he began trying to pry at YN’s arm to get the phone, and his own braid smacked him in the face.

“Gimmie, I can-” Nikolai whispered urgently, but YN smacked his arm.

“Dude, shut up!” She whispered back. “Fucking-yeah! I’m still here!” Her voice rose again, and Gazadrdiel watched the two fight over the phone while trying to not insult D’ulli on the other end.

“Yeah, he’s a bit shy, that’s all-”

“YN, give me-!”

“And he’s kinda stupid too!”

“YN, just gimme the-!”

“Nicky, I swear to god-!”

“YN, there is no god for us!”

“Yeah! We’d really appreciate it!” All the struggling ceased when YN gave him a pointed look with a smile. “Seriously, that’s super nice of you. Is it okay if I save your number?”

Nikolai backed up when YN rose and grabbed a piece of paper and a pen.

“We can do the pact over text, it doesn’t really matter. Just so long as we have your consent. Yeah, no problem. Thanks again!” She gave a thumbs-up to Nikolai and Gazadrdiel, both of who sighed in relief. She hung up and shot a finger gun to Nikolai.

“Ayeeee...gotcha!” She threw the paper in the trash and began typing on her phone, presumably to write the pact to D’ulli. “She was touched by the fact that we ‘forsook’ her for your comfort, and now she’s in the squad!” She made a sing-song voice for ‘squad’ and danced a little bit. “Now that’s what? Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-eight,” Gazadrdiel smiled softly. “We got lucky.”

“We always do, Gaz.” YN closed the tabs on her computer with a wiggle. “We always do.”

There was a comfortable silence for a moment before YN stood with a satisfied sigh.

“That’s probably all we’re gonna manage to squeeze before the date, lads.”

“Wait, what?” Nikolai looked disturbed, and Gazadrdiel’s brow furrowed.

“We have a day before your eighteenth birthday. Can no other Hionera answer the ad?” He floated over to YN, who shrugged.

“No one could make it before the week is over. It’s Wednesday, my dudes.” She plopped onto her bed with a sigh. “It’s pregame season, or whatever football nerds say. Shit will be fucked...soon.” She waved her hands before placing a spare pillow over her face and resting her hands over her stomach.

“It’s too soon.” Nikolai sat on the edge of her bed. “What’s gonna happen, Gaz?”

“I…” Gazadrdiel faltered. “I don’t know. YN’s been my only ward for...for a while. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen. Chances are, they’ll just ask what you want your true form to be like. It’ll be nothing too drastic, since Iuhxyu is after you. If they do take you away, then...the chances are high we’d never see you again.”

YN groaned into the pillow, and Gazadrdiel was viscously reminded of when he first told her, all those years ago.

“Big yikes.” She murmured before going silent. Nikolai laid across her legs with a huff and Gazadrdiel wrapped himself up into his wings. He hated seeing YN so nervous, no matter how either of them hid it. If anything, Nikolai was the most expressive of them all. At least he took the liberties he wanted.

Gazadrdiel shook his head with a sigh and leaned over Nikolai. “Are you going to stay the night again?”

Nikolai nodded, tossing an arm over his eyes before scooting across the bed so he was parallel to YN. There was space between them, but Gazadrdiel still gave a stare at the two’s closeness.

“And did you check off the calendar, YN?”

There was an affirmative groan, and he pursed his lips and floated over to the light switch to flip it off. He still glowed ever so vaguely in the dark, but both Nikolai and YN seemed undisturbed.

And like a sentient cloud, he hovered over the desk and hid himself within his wings, and he fell asleep, only hoping that he could protect her a day more.

Gazadrdiel woke up right before it happened.

Gazadrdiel didn’t get dreams. But that night he did, with a thousand voices screaming at him and the night sky staring down at him with a million eyes. The sea crawled up his legs and pulled him under, and when he finally opened his eyes, he saw the moon. It was beautifully glowing and pristine, and when he held out his hands to hold it, it fit. Tears came to his eyes, even underwater, and a choking sensation overtook him.

Then, the voice came.

His eyes snapped open right before the glass broke, and before he knew what he was doing, he was kneeling over both Nikolai and YN. The hefty glass doors and windows burst just as he laid his wings over YN’s sleeping face, and immediately the shards embedded into his wings. Gazadrdiel let out a howl, and both Nikolai and YN woke. The younger of the two leapt up in his seat, panting and face to face with Gazadrdiel, but YN simply laid there with wide eyes. She was shaky but rose and began assessing the damage.

“What the fuck?” She bit, and a wind began tearing through her room. It was ferocious, like a hurricane, and Gazadrdiel brought his wings up to protect them again, despite the pain. Rain pummeled in, and YN stuck a hand out through Gazadrdiel’s wings. He let out a yelp of worry, but she poked her head out and glared through the rain and the leaves.

“There’s something out there!” She gasped, and nudged Gazadrdiel’s wing ever so slightly. Before he could shove her back under the protection, she ran out, and both Nikolai and Gazadrdiel yelled, at the same time.

“Jesus Christ! It’s a hurricane out there! Come back!”

“YN! Get back here!”

YN ignored them both, soldiering through the rain and the wind until she came to the edge of her balcony. She held a hand in front of her eyes to try and shield from stray debris, but a rock clocked her in the cheek and made her lose her balance. She glared into the darkness. A thousand beady lights glared right back at her, and she reared up.

“You’re a day early!” YN howled, before wincing. The tattoo on her neck had begun worming left and right across her skin, and it felt as though it was searing her skin. She brought her spare hand up to try and hold it in place, but it wriggled in and out of her fingers. Finally, she slapped it on her bicep with full force, and it writhed pathetically like a dying snake before going still. At once, the rain stopped and held itself in mid air, suspended like diamonds. She panted, staring into the abyss as Nikolai rushed past Gazadrdiel and onto the balcony, and the guardian himself cautiously approached.

“Why are they here? Gaz!” Nikolai spun around and glared at Gazadrdiel. “They’re a day early!”

“No,” Gazadrdiel stared at the little lights before grabbing Nikolai’s shoulder and pulling him back. “I think...we’re a day late.”

YN ignored them both, watching as the darkness moved. A cancerous, insipid, coarse, solemn fear came over her, and her glare fell into a fearful look. Something, something baleful and sleepless and terrible, crawled out of the darkness. It had no mouth, but eyes upon eyes upon eyes and horrible lanky arms. It had tentacles for hair and it’s entire torso was a bloody, exposed ribcage, and it crawled on all fours across nothing but air. It looked as though it should have reeked, but YN smelled nothing.

Another thing came out of the shadows, and this time, it had not one, not four, but nine arms, all snowy white and long-fingered. It’s face was long, like a horse’s might be, but huge human teeth jutted out at painful angles. In the middle of it, it looked like there might have been a human nose, and a human eye to the right, but the left was so deliriously disfigured that it looked like something from a corpse pile. It had hair light straw and a torso that looked malnourished, but all in all, it could have once been a man.

“What are you here for?” Nikolai spat, only somewhat trying to fight against Gazadrdiel’s hold. YN’s face went from fear to being perfectly blank, head tilted and eyes wide. From just beyond the clouds, the moon came out, and like a bloodstained pearl, there were blotches of red and gold across the great light.

The second Ionian began to speak, it’s mouth moving but no sound coming out. It only looked at YN, like she was the only thing in the world. The hand that YN had over her eyes fell, and a single tear fell out. Nikolai started struggling harder against Gazadrdiel’s grip, but it was no use.

“Go! We have one more day! Why…!” Nikolai began to plead. “Why are you here?”

“They came to take me back,” YN whispered in a mournful reverence. She began to blink quickly, but tears began falling out nonetheless. Some, in the bloody moonlight, looked pink, as though tinted with blood. Nikolai howled like a dog, but Gazadrdiel still held him back.

“No! No! No! We still had a day! You promised us!” He didn’t seem to be talking to YN or the Ionians in particular, but cursing the air itself. It grew thick and warm, but no one else seemed to notice. The first Ionian leaned forward and extended a long and bony arm, letting a long, claw-like nail poke at the exposed skin of YN’s shoulder and drag across. It cut like a knife through butter, and blood began to pool out. But instead of flowing down and dripping across the balcony, it perfectly dissolved, evaporating into the air like water. YN didn’t even seem to feel it, but gave a fish-eyed stare at the second Ionian, who never looked away.

The first Ionian let it’s claw hang in front of YN, and the hand that held the tattoo let go and began to slowly drift towards the hand. Gazadrdiel gasped.

“YN, think before you do this. Once you accept the bloodbond, you can’t go back. If you wait until you’re twenty-one, you can bide your time. You don’t have to leave yet.” He tried to not let the fear of her going leak into his voice, but he had no idea she would go so soon.

YN’s hand stopped moving, but the second Ionian’s mouth started moving again. Her eyes went blank and just before her hand touched the first Ionian’s, Gazadrdiel let out a yell.

“You were supposed to tell her! To tell her the full consequences!” He looked not at her, but at the second Ionian. “Vhozi! That was your job!”

Vhozi tilted it’s head, finally looking away from YN and looking dead on Gazadrdiel. The guardian didn’t falter, but he would be lying if he said he wasn’t terrified. Vhozi spoke, and still no sound came out. Gazadrdiel felt his blood freeze.

“I don’t know all the consequences.” He stood firm, and for a moment, Nikolai stopped struggling. “I can’t tell her. You or Xothrith’ri has to, and Xothrith’ri doesn’t have a mouth.”

Vhozi’s eyes narrowed, and it was bone chilling. It’s mouth moved again, and then it looked back to YN. She looked at him, and at once, a thousand emotions ran through her face. Fear seemed the most prominent, but at the end, she seemed calm. Vhozi gave a shadow of a smile and moved to the right, letting Xothrith’ri take center stage. Nikolai let out a scream that felt so earth-shatteringly heartbroken that Gazadrdiel nearly let him go.

“No! Oh my god! I wasn’t ready! I-I love you! YN! For fuck’s sake, let go, Gaz!” He choked on his own tears and spit, flailing like a crazed man and lighting Gazadrdiel’s wings on fire. “You can’t go! Not yet! We could go together! I can’t let you go!”

YN closed her eyes, a blissed expression taking over her entire being. The moon glowed brighter, Vhozi was grinning, and quietly, YN took Xothrith’ri’s hand.

The next thing that happened was like a silent bomb. There was no noise, nothing to prove that it had happened. But it erupted in a brilliant light, white and red and gold, all at once, and YN had her mouth open in a scream that would never sound. Her eyes were no longer e/c, but a blank white, and when she bent over in pain, her spine looked ready to burst out of her skin. She threw her head back, and Nikolai fought, and the Ionians watched, and Gazadrdiel could only silently cry as she let out one last bone-chilling, blood curdling scream. It was the scream of a soul being ripped apart, of something dying a thousand times and being reborn only once.

Then, the light burst, and there was only darkness.

Gazadrdiel didn’t know how long they had been there.

Morning had come and gone, with a sobbing Nikolai in Gazadrdiel’s arms. YN’s apartment had been completely destroyed, and the bed was nothing more than stuffing and feathers from the pillows. Neighbours stepped out and stared, but with a tired wave of Gazadrdiel’s hand, they all turned and spoke no more of it. Nikolai didn’t move besides his body-shaking sobs, and the fires he had induced on Gazadrdiel’s wings had long gone out. The guardian himself was still in pain, with the blood from the glass shards and the burns from the fire almost definitely disfiguring them forever. But at the moment, all Gazadrdiel had on his mind was comforting Nikolai. The Hionera seemed as though he would never move again, with how he refused to move from the fetal position.

Gazadrdiel watched him, and then eyed the bright sun above them. It seemed to be getting later in the afternoon, and Gazadrdiel knew that if he didn’t get Nikolai to his mortal parents, he would have more trouble on his hands than what he was at all emotionally capable of.

“Nikolai,” Gazadrdiel whispered. “Nikolai, we have to go. I need to get you home.”

Nikolai said nothing but responded with a fresh wave of sobs, curling even further into himself. Gazadrdiel sighed.

“N’ikicite.”

Still nothing.

“I’ll carry you.”

Gazadrdiel picked up Nikolai bridal-style and walked across the ruined balcony, letting the glass and splinters dig into his bare feet. Nikolai popped an eye when they entered YN’s room, only to wail louder and curl into Gazadrdiel’s embrace. Gazadrdiel himself felt tears beginning to come on, but ignored them in favour of walking through YN’s apartment door and beginning the trek to Nikolai’s house. He knew that if he pushed using his wings, they would be irreversibly ruined, but seeing as he couldn’t just waltz into Nikolai’s house with the Hionera in his arms, he knew it was a sacrifice he had to make.

The sun was shining, people were staring, the flowers were blooming, and at once, Gazadrdiel felt the great grief of the loss of what was his only friend. He knew he couldn’t mourn, not until Nikolai was safely home, but he had no idea what YN was doing, or if she even survived the encounter. For all he knew, she was launched to Pakistan and was trying to make her way back home. The bloodbonds were so disambiguous that he could only hope that by some miracle, YN was still on earth, and all she had to do was crawl her way back to Gazadrdiel and Nikolai.

He stopped, right in front of a tree that led up into Nikolai’s room, and Gazadrdiel looked at his wings with a grimace. They were charred and a bloody brown, but Gazadrdiel still spread them and gave one last push.

Gazadrdiel let out a subdued scream, feeling the pain rocket through his system as he landed on a branch. Trying to ignore the urge to drop everything, including Nikolai, and cry, he pried open Nikolai’s bedroom window and slipped in. Nikolai peeked out from his huddled self and watched as Gazadrdiel gently placed him on his bed, before standing perfectly still. Nikolai sniffed.

“Thanks,” He murmured, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He looked up at Gazadrdiel, who was staring at the ground and swaying from side to side. His wings seemed almost clipped, like they could fall off at any moment, and wounds covered his entire body. Gazadrdiel nodded, and reached up to his shoulder. He pulled out a large shard of glass and dropped it onto Nikolai’s carpet. They both watched as it bounced and landed, and Nikolai looked back up to Gazadrdiel.

“Are you okay?” Nikolai croaked.

Gazadrdiel dropped to the floor, and all he knew was darkness.

“Let her go, Gaz.”

#the dead things we carry #oc x reader #lovecraft #i really got to invested writing this in a compitition with like one other teenager #i played myself #etsi's og works #Original Work

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flourchildwrites · 5 years

Note

Edwin 26 and 92 please.

A/N: Hey, anon! Thank you for dropping this FANFICTION TROPE MASH UP into my ask box. I hope you check back in now that I’ve finally got around to responding. You requested numbers 26 (massage fic) and 92 (kink) with an edwin ship. I’m sensing a theme here, lol. However, I’ve got to warn you that I’ve been in a heavy mood lately, and it’s coming out in my writing. Trigger warnings for chronic pain and sacrilegious undertones. This fic is also lemon flavored below the cut. :P Here goes… something.

Special thanks to @bearonthecouch for the read through!

Read on AO3

Truth was a mixed bag. At least, that was Winry Rockbell’s opinion. In the years that followed the Promised Day, Ed described them as an amorphous being of indiscernible power, a haughty guardian of the veil between the physical and metaphysical realms or alternatively… “That uppity bastard who stole my leg, my arm and my brother’s body!”

Let it never be said that Edward Elric, adoring husband and doting father did not have a way with words.

Nevertheless, on the subject of the past, Winry kept her own counsel. She neither delved deeply into the regrets of the yesteryear nor dwelled on impracticalities like God, Truth or the meaning of life. Like the stalwart woman who raised her, Winry’s very existence was a testament to patience and persistence. And yet, she’d be remiss to deny that, while Truth might have been a capricious guardian of the scales, they were most certainly a shitty surgeon.

Ed’s arm was all the proof she needed. A mangled scar spilled across his shoulder, three inches deep with puckered flesh in all shades of ruddy red, yellow and purple. Nuts and wires had jutted out from his restored skin, and if anything, the internal damage proved permanent. Veins inextricably intertwined with threads of metal, a ghastly union of organic and manmade parts. Secretly and silently, the young automail engineer sometimes wondered if Truth had bestowed Ed with a blessing or a curse.

Bathed in moonlight, Winry waddled down the staircase of the Elrics’ Resembool home with heavy footfalls. One hand clutched her swollen stomach, and the other grasped the sturdy wooden banister. Even in darkness, Winry knew that the walls were pristine, covered in pretty pictures and pastel paints that suited the quiet, country life that Ed and Winry enjoyed when they could get away from the hustle and bustle of Rush Valley. And though baby Trisha’s nursery was only half finished, Winry could see Ed’s labor of love coming together, just as sure as she knew she was having a girl this time.

Winry smiled to herself as she appreciated the work that human hands had made.

“Ed,” Winry quietly called out from the foot of the staircase, careful not to wake little Yuriy.

“In here.”

The expecting mother made her way toward the sitting room and stumbled upon a familiar sight: Edward Elric had, yet again, turned her elegant sitting room into an office. Nevermind the actual study upstairs. Books were haphazardly strewn across the small space interspersed with parchment bearing nearly illegible scribbles in Ed’s native Amestrian as well as flawed Xingese characters. Winry had half a mind to chide her husband, but she refrained in light of the ice pack draped over his right shoulder.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked knowingly, coming close enough to admire the narrow spectacles Ed now wore when reading, the ones he obstinately swore he didn’t need.

“Nothing to worry about, Win,” the blond shot back, injecting confidence into his voice. “It’s just a little sore. The weather is changing, and Yuriy is getting bigger. Besides, I need to get this work done for Al. No time like the present.”

“You mean 3 a.m.” Winry shot back wryly as she placed her hands on her hips, “when our 2-year-old is finally sleeping, and we’ve got a full day of toddler tantrums ahead of us? Why didn’t you just tell me it was hurting again? Not for nothing, but I am one of the best automail mechanics around. I think I know my way around human anatomy enough to ease a few tense muscles.”

Ed chuckled and rose from the couch, a merry glint in his light amber eyes. “Well, not for nothing, but you are 25 weeks pregnant if I’m not mistaken.” He wasn’t. “What kind of husband would I be if I let you take care of me without taking care of you first?”

Ed moved quickly across the small living space and wrapped his arms around Winry. His fingers moved restlessly, seeking purchase in the folds of her lightweight nightgown. With eyes wide shut, she hummed as Ed reached around to massage the tight muscles of her lower back. Winry buried her face in the soft cotton of his shirt, relishing the faint scent of sweat and freshly cut grass. She loved Ed. She loved being tenderly caressed by the warm hands that had never hesitated to pick her up when she was down. To protect her just as she patched him back together time and time again.

Winry reluctantly summoned her wits in spite of Ed’s efforts and a raging case of momnesia.

“Not so fast, Edward,” Winry interjected, gently stepping back and placing a firm hand on her husband’s chest. “Let’s have a look at that shoulder. Then, you can take me upstairs and have your way with your bloated, pregnant wife.”

The glint in Ed’s eyes was inexplicably obscene. “That a promise?”

Winry rolled her eyes despite the smirk on her lips.

“Take a seat, Fullmetal,” she said, gesturing toward the couch with an authoritative edge to her voice. Though he practiced restraint, Ed’s features darkened hungrily as he took a seat on the floor near Winry’s usual perch on the couch, and if she had reminded him of a certain former commanding officer at that moment, he didn’t show it.

…

The bible according to Pinako Rockbell was pretty damn clear when it concerned the intersection of automail and pain. It was merely the body’s way of communicating that something wasn’t working properly. And though Winry still struggled to comprehend Edward’s refusal to dignify the pain he occasionally felt, she was all too familiar with his anatomy, right down to the battle scars hidden beneath the hem of his well-pressed shirts.

The young mother’s hands kneaded and pressed at her husband’s scarred skin, searching for knots and avoiding the places where she knew metal was permanently embedded within his flesh. As her strokes turned long and languid, Winry felt Ed relax under her deft hands. His arm and shoulder began to pulse as she stimulated blood flow alongside delicious friction and finally, she finished with a series of firm taps.

“Oh God, Winry,” Ed gasped. “Do you have to tap it like that? You’re killing the mood.”

“What mood?” she teased. “Between the stretch marks and my swollen ankles, I don’t see how I can be the least bit appealing right now. Then again, you are stuck with me. I guess I can’t blame you for making the best of it.”

Winry’s words carried a self-deprecating edge, and she laughed with a good-natured timbre that belied the harsh truths sugarcoated by her humor. The second time mother knew she’d grown bigger faster this time around. Her ankles were puffy, and the stretch marks on her tummy had reasserted themselves in angry streaks of red. Between her business and Yuriy, Winry found it difficult to think of herself as a sexual being, and honestly, Ed was more a partner in the trenches of childrearing than a lover now.

“Making the best of it? Of our life together?” Ed scoffed. ��What makes you think that you aren’t exactly the person I want to be with? Especially when you’re pregnant.”

“Especially when I’m pregnant?” Winry shot back. “My stomach’s big. My boobs are ridiculous. In another month or so, I’ll be unable to see my feet. Enlighten me, oh great alchemist, what’s there to like about all that?”

Ed paused in a rare show of speechlessness as he shifted at Winry’s feet and allowed his eyes to trace the outline of her figure. It had been years since their first sleepless night together, but the way he looked at her was wondrous, reminiscent of their first fumbling time as well as the many happy endings they’d enjoyed after that. Winry felt reborn when she considered herself from Ed’s perfective and saw all that she considered a nuisance as ancient symbols of power, unequaled by modern medicine or other mystic arts.

He took her hands in his and turned them, running his thumbs across her palms. “I see hands that give life,” he said, kissing her callouses. “And strong arms that cradle it lovingly.”

Ed turned his attention to her feet and massaged her ankles tenderly. “I see legs that stood up for me when I couldn’t stand on my own.” Winry shivered as she felt her husband place light kisses up her ankles, calves and thighs. He gently pushed her nightgown up to reveal her round stomach, and as Winry’s pulse quickened, the baby inside her belly stirred. Ed chuckled and pressed his hands against her, grinning as he felt his child’s movement.

“I love you like this,” he stated, almost breathless. “I love seeing our child growing inside you, and you’ve got this raw, powerful beauty that makes me crazy. You’re glowing, Winry.”

She started to tell him that it was just her acid reflux, but with those words, Ed kissed the top of her thigh near the plain white fabric of her panties. Slowly, his tongue pressed against her, and Winry couldn’t hide the soft sigh which followed. She leaned back, enjoying Ed’s attention as his mouth began sucking and pulling at her skin. As was only fair, he repeated the same series on the inside of her other thigh, moving ever closer to her warm center.

As her breathing grew fevered Ed delved deeper, running his lips over the outside of her underwear in a way that made Winry sigh. He sucked the fabric, and his fingers toyed with the low waistband, bowed by her growing baby bump. One hand settled on the width of her hips, and again Ed caressed her belly as his tongue lapped at her through a pesky layer of cotton.

Winry moaned and pleaded for her pleasure until Ed finally kissed her clit.

“Oh, God!” Winry exclaimed, feeling both breathless and beautiful in the eyes of the person who mattered most.

He smirked in response, all humor and bravado intact. “I prefer Ed.”

Winry laughed in a throaty register as she gave in to her husband’s skillful ministrations. Pushing her panties to one side, his tongue set out to do its best, returning the favor for all Winry’s earlier efforts. Ed was insufferable at times, Winry knew, and yet, as he cracked a blasphemous joke and ate her like it was his last supper, she couldn’t help but revel in her good fortune. If no higher power had brought them together during their difficult childhoods or made them as mirror images of one another, being with him was a miracle all the same.

Like what you read? Send me a prompt!

#you ask i answer #fanfiction trope mash up #fullmetal alchemist brotherhood #fma #edwin #parental!edwin #winry rockbell #edward elric #massage #pregnancy kink

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aharris00britney · 6 years

Photo

ASKS 10

‘less weird hairs,’ pics of me, real life questions, seasons thoughts, kpop stuff, ‘are you a boy’ erhdfnv, tutorial questions, edits, ‘safe’ cc, and umm yeah never go camping in the actual woods ok

Anonymous said: Can you do Less weird hair? I Like how good Mesh You make but all styles look Really Weird I never Would use them. I just want Usual hair? Thanks you

Firstly, thank you for the meshing compliment, but tbh I think I make pretty simple hair styles? Like I don’t do many crazy things especially recently? Idk, I hope you like some of my hairs and can find something that fits in your liking :/

Anonymous said: Hi I really love you content and I was wondering if you’d ever do a “goddess locs” hairstyle?

Ok I am gonna be super straight forward about this, making hairstyles like this is really challenging for me. I have tried a ton of times and I just can’t get the meshes to work out the way I like. UV mapping is a pain in the ass, making the hairline match well, and making sure none of the mesh strands are broken is next to impossible for me. Most creators that make hairstyles like this do them from scratch or spend a long time working on them for them to look right. I’m not saying ‘no’ because I am going to try to play around with some seasons meshes (I have hair ideas) but no promises :(

Anonymous said: BLACKPINK COMEBACK

i know omg jennie snapped, I wasn’t planning on buying the physical album but I ended up caving in and getting the pink versions ;-; I hope I get Jennie or Lisa photocards

Anonymous said: i know your theme is by gukthemes, but what is it called?

PAPILLON by GUKTHEMES

Anonymous said: Are you ever gonna do a face reveal?

I have posted a pic of myself before in one of these ask posts, here are three more from the past few months :P

Anonymous said: Fav kpop group(s)???

1). LOONA (bias Kim Lip) 2). BLACKPINK (bias Jennie) 3). RED VELVET (bias Joy) 4). CLC (bias Yeeun) 5). DREAMCATCHER (idk their names but the rapper)

Anonymous said: You play pokemon go still?

Yes! I collected cards/figures growing up and watched the show before school every morning. I’m not a ‘game’ fan but the mobile app is fun. Actually I played the Wii U Pokemon tournament game but it was boring so :/

Anonymous said: are you going to buy seasons? do you think it is worth it?

I got it from CDkeys for $25 lmao, so yes :P I can’t run the live mode so I kind of am just getting it for the new CAS assets :/ but I think the pack looks really good. Everyone always says ‘it looks like the best EP so far’ every time something new comes out so I’m not gonna say that but we will see :D

Anonymous said: whats ur skin blend called?

Fruitpunch! You can get it here

Anonymous said: when are you going to be done camping?

I am back home now lmao I assume you sent this when I posted about not having service there :P but I was camping for 3 days? I know it was 2 nights at least refdbv also omg some camping stories:

► I didn’t have my voice for the entire trip bc I got sick with laryngitis, and now koby (the guy i shared a tent with) has it too erfdbvc

► It was blazing hot like omg I was dying, there werent showers, bathrooms, anything with AC. The tents were boiling hot, the ground fucking hurt, and it was just hell ok this isnt even a story I just need to complain.

► There was a racoon family outside the tents the first night, and we thought it was a bear bc we were literally in the middle of the woods, like it wasn’t a campsite with other people, it was the forest ;-; anyways we were legit so freaked out and up for 2 hours just listening to them walk around the tents and god it was so scary rfbdv

► As I said, I had no service so I missed the larvitar community day in pokemon go -_-

► I suck at cornhole so I was the cheer leader for a team UwU

► A deer jumped out right in front of the fucking car like RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT omg we were so close to hitting it like... it was fucking scary

► We went walking on a trail that was down a mountain and once we got down we discovered that the chairlift up was CLOSED so we had to walk back up and it was a nightmare bc we had all just drove like 30 minutes to shower in crappy no pressure no heat showers and we were all sweaty again by the time we got back to the top ;-;

dont go camping

Anonymous said: Your last edit creeps me out.

LMAO why? It isnt meant to be sexual or scary?

@achinghearts88 said: I really love Sims 4 cc but I constantly struggle with finding safe sites and have accidentally downloaded a virus trying to get cc before so I'm kinda frightened now. What advice do you have for getting safe cc? Thanks!

Hello! I use an adfly skipper + adblock, and if both of those don’t work then I just don’t download the cc. For some creators (nolan-sims, simduction, isjao, ivo-sims, and others) I will turn them off because I know these creators aren’t ones that use the sketchy adfly stuff, but for others that I don’t know well I leave it on. I use: U Block origin and adfly skipper (both on firefox)

Anonymous said: I couldn't find a "contact me" thing but your AHarris00Britney has a broken mesh I think.

??? idk what this means im sorry ;-; what hair are you referring to?

Anonymous said: an amazing creator and a loona fan???? i stan

My mind... your mind... our mind..

@chocooosims said: hey, I love your cc, you are such a good creator! :) I'm not sure if someone already ask you that, but have you ever considered making a tutorial where you show us how you create maxis match hair? I mean, I know that I can already find on Internet tutorials about frankenmeshing hair. But the thing is that you are one of the only creator who do more than simply merge 2 EA's hair together. So, I would really love to see a tutorial of how you are creating your cc! :) Thx for your time!!

I am making a BIG tutorial right now of me making a hair from start-finish and it is around 3 hours not speed up. My guardian angel is going to edit it for me tonight and then I will try to have it posted next week sometime

Anonymous said: what university are you going to?

Radford :D it is in Virginia

Anonymous said: Just wanted to let you know you're a king

thank you lmao I wish it were true, stan loona or be beheaded

Anonymous said: r u a guy or girl or non binary etc. also are you lgbtq+ at all? not to judge, just wondering :)

uuh, I’m a gay guy lmao idk about all the other terms like cis/bianary ;-; i like the anatomy exclusive to the male body

edit: rip so someone messaged me asking what I meant by “anatomy exclusive to the male body” and I was like ?? bc I meant i like d**k, and i explained that i didn't like using cuss words on my blog bc my account got shut down/deleted/reported last year and was completely gone for two days while I emailed my butt off to get it back. Also, I was trying to be funny by sounding proper and using big terms like anatomy/exclusive instead of just saying “i like penis” bc that just isnt as fun to say imo. My anatomy teacher never used words like v*gina/p*nis and would say stuff like that, and I always found it funny and I guess that was another reason I worded it that way. Anyways if you think I was being transphobic, I apologize. I hope you don’t think that I am transphobic bc of that? If you want to message me and talk to me about how I can word stuff better then I am around 24/7 mostly, but I’m not going to fight with anyone who is just looking to argue because that is childish. I am sorry to those that got offended but I got one message about this so if something like this happens, message me like this person and ask what I meant so that it isn’t blown out of proportion. Again, I did not think that it would be taken that way and I am sorry if you felt that I was making fun of a trans person. <3

Anonymous said: What do you see in the corner of your room when you get sleep paralysis (;

James Charles with breasts on the beach and im not sharing this photo anymore it is demonic OK

Anonymous said: hi! i installed your non-default eye recolors but i'm having a glitch with them. my female sims lose their face in cas and it's just like an empty spot where the face should be. i have the default eyes installed too so i know it's not an issue with a missing mesh but i'm not sure how to fix it.

Hello!! I don’t think this is my eyes because I’m not experiencing this glitch? Did you run a S4S batch fix over everything? I think that causes this glitch sometimes but I am unsure. Try repairing your game and if you have the “no EA eyelash” mod then redownload that and replace the old file.

@sephirajo said: I found your sims 4 mods and I love the hairs! They're so amazing and pretty.

thank you so much!

Anonymous said: In your collab with wildpixel, I F**KING love the Ivy hair; do you have any recolours of it or any of the other hairs in the collab?

all the hairs in that pack are recolored in the anathema and sacharinne palette :) and I reblog all recolors of my cc over on @aharris00britneyrecolors

#asks

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