#if u are wondering where the last chapter of my fic is. it exists in my brain

[formula-fun]

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[sixosix]

SOBBING EUEU UEUEGEH EUGEUE UEHEUUEUEE

(got a lil shy while drawing them doing the smooch🫣)

im so getting emotional rn like THERES ONE MORE CHAPTER LEFT😭😭🤧 i feel like it was just last month where i sent u the first ask HHAHAHHS rizzney is actually a myth look at him at his KNEES for mc bro is a tomato, a strawberry, hes the same color as his bow headass. also yeah aether its probably best to get your hands off mc now LMAOOOO. LYNETTEEEE i love u ueegheheg eueh ueh. also CHILDE😍🥰🥰😍🤩😍😍🥰my man lesgo, my mc childe sibling boat is sailing HAHHSHHSHX

on the side note, im hella hyped for the aether series💥💥💥 trust that I'll still be w u in that journey as much as i am in this one. your writings breathe life into me like actually. Thawed has relieved me from artblock lots of times and im greatful for that. As long as i live, thawed exists alr. like this fic is injected into my brain HAHHAHHSHHSHSN

i might draw more even after the series is over tho LMAOOOO like just my headcanons and stuff. THATS HOW MUCH I LOVE THAWED OK U DONT UNDERSTAND this the thawed impact😭😭😭😭

but yeah, have a nice day six!! i love u very much❤️❤️

AKAAGIIIII im tearing up again 😢 U DREW THE KISS SCENE WAAAAAAAHHH. omg. They look so soft im sobbing i can feel the warmth ARRGHHHH THEIR HEIGHT DIFFERENCE TOO IMGOING CRAZY the way hes holding her... Okay. okay.

im so emotional too like I CANT BELIEVE ITS THE LAST CHAPTER NEXT.... I stared at my phone after i posted that recent chapter like wt f am i gonna do now. well obviously we know what im gonna do next but thawed impact was real to me too 😢😢 thats my baby and im letting her go NOOOOO

IM SO HAPPY TO HEAR THAT!!! im glad we met through thawed and im forever grateful that youre still sticking to my blog. 🙏🙏🙏 i swear and wholeheartedly believe that thawed wouldn't have been the same without your art. TRUST ME I WROTE IT.

and ofc ill still welcome (and BEG) for thawed content from you even after i officially end it. i have attachment to your thawed!mc and i dont think its gonna go away ever. I LOVE U SO MUCHH U ARE WONDERFUL HAVE AN AMAZING EVERY DAY

[pebblysand]

HERE WE GO! WELCOME TO THE PAGE PALS PROJECT! THIS IS YOUR CONVERSATION STARTER FOR CHAPTER ONE. FEEL FREE TO SEND IN ASKS OR JOIN THE DISCORD FOR MORE!

HANDY LINKS/INFO:

chapter: i. out of sand (baby girl)

wordcount: 10, 157

playlist: notes here

castles FAQ: here

g e n e r a l t h o u g h t s:

I felt very emotional, beginning this chapter. There is a sense of finality in this project that I hadn't quite grasped before. This is - in all probability - the last time I read this fic. This is the last time I read this chapter. A chapter I have read dozens of times in the past few years - every time I was stuck, every time I needed to 'get back in.' Most of these paragraphs roll off the tip of my tongue when I read them out loud, because I've seen them so many times. And, I know that for you, reading this, this might not be the last time. Because you will go back, re-read this fic as many times as you like for as long as the internet exists. But I won't. That's not how my brain works, and I need to put projects behind me. To make room for new ones. And, so there is a sense of excitement, yes, reaching the end, but also a sense of grief.

If everything goes well, and if I do post the last chapter when I intend to, castles will have been four years of my life, almost to the day. COVID came and went, so did a couple of jobs, a relationship, a parent. I recently listened to an interview from Alexandre Astier where he described meeting someone in a supermarket once, who asked for an autograph for her husband. 'Ah, he's a massive fan,' she said. 'Though, to be honest, I never got into your work myself.' He was talking about how, for 'normal' people, people who aren't artists, someone else's art is just that: something that you like or don't like. But, for us, it's a part of ourselves. It's thousands of hours of work. And, sometimes, I wonder what castles says about me. What these thousands of hours have come down to. If I die tomorrow, which I hope I do not, this is one the things that I will leave behind me. And, so: what does it say about me? I mean: beyond the politics and the feminism and the quirky little interests. I mean: me, as a person. What do castles readers know about me? I'm not sure I even want to know.

t h e r e - r e a d:

I really enjoyed re-reading this chapter. It's funny to me how for you guys, depending on when you started the fic, you might have read multiple versions of this. I didn't make any big changes, nothing massive, but I did add a couple of scenes/lines here and there throughout the years, I'm curious to see whether you will notice.

in terms of the chapter itself, i think one of the things i like most about it is how it flows. it has that very distinctive castles prose to it, with the timeline that moves back and forth, the run-on sentences, the spiralling in and out of scenes. i recently got a comment on ff.net (lol) that said the chapter was messy and unreadable. and i think in a way, i like that. because frankly, if that bothers you in chapter 1, then you're probably not the right person for this fic, you know? i think chapter one serves its function well. a first chapter is supposed to be an intro, a taste of what you will read next, and i think it is perfect in that. it introduces the plot, the dynamic between the characters. it's long enough to signal that this isn't a fic where you'll read fifteen chapters in half an hour. i think you can read chapter one and tell if this is a fic you'll enjoy or not. and, that's what i want, really. that's what a first chapter should do.

having said that, i think there are two things i want to specifically dive into.

t h e h y p o:

early in the writing of castles, i used to get a lot of criticism about my version of post-war harry and ginny. particularly, there seems to be a subsection of the hinny-shipping crowd that basically thinks that harry and ginny would just meet after the war, scream at each other (or, that at least, ginny would be angry at harry for leaving her behind), kiss and make up, and pour their hearts out to each other about past events. specifically, these people believe that ginny is very good at weeding secrets out of harry, at getting him to talk, and thus the events of castles are not canon compliant with both of these characters.

i feel like objectively, it's not really my place to say whether that's correct. i think multiple versions of the same thing can be 'correct' depending on how you write them. but, if that's what floats your boat, if you have a very strong headcanon about this, then fine - by all means, go read something else (again, that's also the point of chapter 1). but i think this hypothesis sort of stuck in my head for a while, in light of the comments i was getting, because i couldn't help but wonder if that version of things isn't simply an idealised version of reality.

because, to read the books strictly: 1) ginny's anger at harry isn't obvious. you could argue it is there but she's actually quite calm in the break up scene. i am not sure she is that angry with him, especially when you think that she's just been through a war, lost a brother, etc. i think ginny is someone who knows there is a time and place for anger, and who is also incredibly strong and resilient. she still kisses him even after the break-up, after he's clearly decided to leave her behind , so i'm not sure she would lash out in these circumstances. additionally, 2) there's actually not that much evidence that harry and ginny talk to each other - ever. they're a hot and heavy thing, but they don't share much emotional stuff on screen. you can interpret the 'sunlit days' however you want, in the absence of further information, but it's not a given that ginny ever shares anything of importance about her past or her traumas, like what happened with tom. the one scene everyone always points to is the 'lucky you' scene, but that's a mutual understanding more than it is a conversation. she actually never mentions anything beyond very utilitarian details meant to help harry realise he's not being possessed. and, harry never canonically tells ginny about anything of importance in his life either.

and so what all of these comments drove me to do, a few months ago (i think i added this in september 2023) was to link that to the theme of those early chapters of castles. because one of the key elements of chapters 1-3, specifically, is this idea of the lifeline. of the way harry and ginny have spent months, at this point, idealising each other, idealising their reunion, for it to later come crashing down on them. and so i thought i would use the opportunity of chapter one to 1) try and address the 'criticism' above, and 2) make it fit within the world of castles. it led to this:

In his head, their reunion would have been something sweet, like her lips moving against his, the taste of the raspberry-flavoured lip balm she used to wear the year before. He would have confessed to all of his sins, to almost dying, to Hallows and Horcruxes, to the fear and the nightmares, to leaving her behind. ‘I’m sorry,’ he would have said. ‘I am so, so sorry.’  And, he would have tried to explain like he did last year, that all he ever wanted was to protect her, to keep her safe, and she would have yelled. Shouted at the top of her lungs in a rapid succession of angry jabs about what an arsehole he was. ‘I can take care of myself!’ she would have thrown back. ‘You left me!’  He would have looked to his feet. With time, he hopes that they would have fixed it. In reality, though, Ginny Weasley hands him a toothbrush that morning, as he sits back on his heels. Her stare digs holes into the side of his face and he wonders if, had he been Hermione or Luna (had he been a friend, still), she would have cajoled him. Handed him a wet towel for his forehead. Instead, she closes the door behind her on her way out. ‘You should shower,’ she says.

i love the sort of whiplash effect this scenes gives, of the fantasy v. post-war reality, which is obviously a massive theme in castles. and i also love the way it subtly signals that ginny might have changed (just like he has) throughout the war. because, obviously, she has, and we later find out why.

s e x a n d f u n e r a l s:

i cannot express how attached i am to that scene, and to that line in particular. i think there's a number of reasons for this:

first, it's the line that basically motivated me to start castles for real in 2020. i have said this before in other posts but i started drafting some sort of post-war hinny fic as early as 2007. i never finished anything, then when i was 17 (2010), i did a re-read and actually drafted something new. then dropped it again. and, that file transferred from laptop to laptop, from file to file for ten years without me touching it much. until covid came and i was looking through my drive, and i tenderly read what 17-year-old me had written back then, including this 'first time' sex scene which, to be honest, has mostly remained untouched in the final version of this. and, i remember finding it, reading it, and thinking the rest of what i had written was a bit cringe, but that one scene seemed to work. and then, i got to the (now famous) line: to him, the spring of '98 is about sex and funerals, and thought fuck, that's a good line. like, a really good line. and i didn't want to let it go to waste. and, so, four years later, here we are.

i think that line is a very good symbol of what this story is about. 'sex and funerals' - it's a metaphor for how life is about the good and the bad things. that they co-exist as one single entity, and that the beauty of what we do, of the way we live, resides somewhere in between. it's why i chose it as the summary back then, and why it is still the summary now. i really built the entire fic around that line. so, yeah, 17-year-old jo, you already had something going for you, darling.

l a s t l y:

a thought i had while re-reading (and please don't come at me for this), is that... this could have been a one-shot. like, it really could have. i finished chapter 1 and there's a sort of finality to it, isn't there? like, i'm glad i continued this fic, but part of me thinks that all i've been trying to say in the past four years actually is in this chapter. obviously, not as detailed or subtle, but it's there, you know? it could have been a one-shot, lmao.

but anyway, i'm curious, did you guys enjoy your re-read? did you notice the changes i made throughout the years? did you enjoy them? feel free to send me an ask or join the discord server to discuss. i'm so excited to get this discussion started and hear your thoughts!

[rentenesen]

Woven - Chapter 4

Gale x Astarion BG3 fanfiction

Summary: A/U, modern day, exploring a world where fae exist (non-dnd). Gale, once a very special child with the ability to see fae, is now a regular almost middle aged man, working as a professor. Last night, he let a strange, pale fae Astarion into his house, thinking he may have a message from his mistress. Gale learns too late that he was mistaken and it seems it won't be so simple to kick this man out, now that he's wormed his way in.

Word Count: 1.6k The early chapters of the fic are PG (including this one) but will have more adult themes later on.

When Gale awoke it was still dark out. He was sweating through his sheets, and felt a little shaky. What had happened last night? Gale felt a tightness in his chest and reached up grasping at it for relief. He had mean to sort this out yesterday but he had clearly left it too long.

Looking over at his bedside table the clock read 3:47 AM. He pushed himself up and out of the warm comfort of his bed. He would go now, into the forest and find something to help his condition. He might have to make a trade for it if he could not garner an audience in front of his mistress or her followers but he was past desperate.

Gale had fallen asleep with his slacks still on, and quickly changed into something a bit more casual and warm for the journey. He had planned on going into the University to get some work done today, but there were no classes scheduled so he would call in and let them know he wasn't coming. Gale's stomach growled loudly as he bound down the stairs. Ah, a quick breakfast would be in order before he set off.

But when he reached the landing of his home something felt… off. What had happened last night? Gale remembered had a foggy memory of a dream about a beautiful seelie man. It felt like a nice dream but the specifics wouldn't come to him. What had they been doing?

When he stumbled into his kitchen things were not as he remembered them. For one, there was food left out, scattered on the counter, a bottle of wine sat open on the kitchen island. While Gale couldn't remember if he had been drinking or not, the bottle was nice, one from his collection and he was certain he would not have simple popped it open like that on a random Tuesday. Memories started to drift back to him like whispers from last night, not a dream, the seelie man standing had been outside his house. Gale had let him in.

The man must still be here Gale thought feeling a shock of adrenaline run up his spine. But where? His head turned back to the stairs, wondering if he had somehow missed the stranger lurking in the shadows, but before he could move his body he tuned in to a faint crackle coming from the other room.

It sounded like a fire. "Seriously?"

Gale cautiously crossed his kitchen, creeping towards the door that lead to his library. Sure enough a feint glow spread from under the door onto the linoleum.

Gale took a quick breath in and opened the door to see the seelie man, squeezed into the alcove by the garden window. Astarion's long legs were stretched up onto a bookshelf, book in hand and a few more messily stacked on a little side table he had pulled close, along with a almost empty wineglass, a small fire dim, but alight in the fireplace.

"Are you drinking my wine?" Gale said in disbelief. Astarion looked up as if he'd been expecting him.

"Ah good, you're awake" He closed the book and set it atop the precarious pile, sitting up to face Gale, stretching out his body, "I was worried about you, you know. You have quite the collection, it's kept me busy enough." He wasn't wrong. Gale's book shelves took up practically the whole room, each overflowing with different tomes he had collected over the years.

Scoffing Gale couldn't believe the audacity of this stranger to make himself at home while the owner was passed out upstairs. Like a stray cat that had just let himself in. Gale couldn't help but think it was almost kind of cute before he shook the though from his head "I didn't say you could stay last night" …he hadn't right? No, of course not, Gale convinced himself, this was trespassing, plain and simple and the man needed to leave.

"Well I'm already here, aren't I? So what's the harm really" he elegantly picked up the wineglass striding toward the kitchen "Did you want some?"

Gale stared dumbfounded as Astarion slipped past him, comfortably topping up his glass. "Offering me my own wine? That's expensive you know. And i see you're wearing my clothing!" Gale looked him over, Astarion had clearly also helped himself to a shower and whatever he could find in Gale's closet. He was much cleaner now, if not a bit awkward looking as Gale's clothes sat a little short.

He shot a look that Astarion seemed to ignore simply pulling out another wine glass and holding up the bottle gesturing to Gale.

He sighed exasperated, "No, I won't have some, it's four in the goddamn morning. I should be going to work in a few hours." Gale rubbed his face with his hands. He didn't have the time or the patience to deal with this right now.

"Ah I forgot you mortals live such ridged lives. It's been a while since I've concerned myself with the day-to-day of your society." He took sip from his glass then set it down focusing all of his attention on Gale "Now. I'm not one to pry but I couldn't help but noticed you seem unwell, given you passed out in the middle of our conversation. What's wrong with you?"

Gale slumped into a stool next to the kitchen island defeated. "I have… a condition" he said cautiously "Which is why I need you to leave. I need to go get this sorted out" instinctually his hand gently rubbed his chest, where he could feel it burning. Astarion's eyes followed Gale's hand.

"It's related to that mark on your chest?" Astarion peered the spot as if looking right through him "It's magical in nature is it not? I saw it last night when I was putting you to bed" Gale could feel another blush spread through his body. Astarion took a short sip of wine then moved his eyes up to meet Gale's "You should be grateful, by the way, you're rather heavy, I was inclined to just leave you down here."

Gale rolled his eyes, "Sure, thanks" he muttered "Anyways I guess there is no use hiding it, yes, it's a condition that causes me a great deal of pain. I.. need to consume magik, to feed it and let's just say I'm running dangerously low"

"Consume magik as in…?"

"As in, the magik from enchantments, or enchanted items, which I am fresh out of unfortunately"

"Is that all?" Astarion let out a light laugh, "I told you we would make good allies," he teased, sliding a ring off his finger. He held it out for Gale to see. He could feel the energy coming off of it.

It was no powerful magik but it would more the satiate Gale's deep hunger, "Astarion I" he said, shocked by this act of generosity, reaching out to take the ring " I don't know what to say, thank-"

But before his fingers could close around it Astarion flipped the ring back, palming it, "Not so fast" he purred

Of course. Gale was so stupid. Why did he think he could so easily trust a fae, he knew how they worked. His jaw tightened as he looked into Astarion's eyes waiting for the catch

"It was very generous of you agreeing to let me stay here."

He didn't

"…but with me taking care of you and all I'd say we're about even, wouldn't you?"

No

"In which case I can't simply go around giving out favours for free, you understand."

"What do you want", Gale growled, trying to hold back his anger, at Astarion for being the little trickster he knew he was, at himself for getting tangled up with this man in the first place.

"A simple promise" he smiled sweetly "That's all. I just want to know that you'll have my back if I need you to"

"Oh is that all?" Gale mused sarcastically

"Don't be like that, darling. I won't ask you for anything big, after all this is, but a trinket, and I am not a greedy man. I simply need a guarantee that you do, in fact, wish to be my ally."

They sat there in an uncomfortably long silence as Gale contemplated his options. If he took this he would be beholden to a favour he knew nothing about. Astarion could ask for anything and fae were not known to be kind when being asking for pay back.

Still. His other options were not exactly good. There was no guarantee he would find the help he sought if he ventured off on his own. This might be the best chance he had at making a deal.

"All right" he said, reluctantly "You have my word" Gale held out his hand and Astarion acquiesced dropping the ring gingerly into his palm.

"I'm so glad we could come to an agreement"

"Uh huh," Gale replied, closing his fingers around the ring, feeling the rush of energy sink into him. He felt refreshed, awakened, better than he had in a long time. Breathing in the energy around him Gale felt new again. He opened his eyes to see Astarion studying him curiously, wide-eyed when Gale opened his hand to reveal the ring had disappeared.

"You are rather special aren't you?"

Gale, despite his common sense, couldn't help but feel a little special in that moment. He knew already, this man would be his unwinding. He had stepped down a dangerous path with no way of knowing where it was leading, only that it would not end well for him. Then again when had Gale ever done what was good for him.

"Pour me a glass of wine" he said and Astarion grinned, with teeth that looked like they could tear him apart.

[plothooksinc]

2 and 9 for the fanfic ask game!! 👀

😁😁Hi!

2. What fanfic do you wish you got more response on?

Honestly, I'm lucky in that my fics generally get an acceptable response. The closest I can get is when a particular chapter comes out and the comments are really low on the ground and it makes me second guess whether the chapter is any good and and and--

I actually had that with NRFTW, where chapter one got a good response and chapter two... did not at the time of its release, I got two neutral comments and a critical one, and I spent a night making sad faces at it and wondering whether I should stop. (Then logic asserted itself and I kept going.) And the last chapter of Zaibatsu Project, I think every response I got was "oh yay you exist" but nothing really about the actual chapter... but in general, sometimes you're just gonna have a chapter that hits at the wrong time or whatever and you've gotta keep going.

9. What’s your favorite line(s) or scene(s) that you have written?

OH BOY how do I narrow that down (I can't, lmao)

I have scenes I like in just about everything I write and lines that stand out. SO let's just go with my latest fic!

Donnie's whole fragmenting stream of consciousness and Raph pulling him out of the last little corner of his mind; Raph watching the goggles fall and realising how to save Donnie; Casey's gentle emotional kneecapping of Bishop; Mikey opening the portal directly to his big brother (and April going SUP and blinding Sister Krang); the deaths of both Krang and Mikey and Leo both insisting they're completely fine to spite each other (and then yelling about it some more in the mind meld). ♪♫~These scenes are a few of my favourite things ~♪♫

Lines?

Just this once, it could be a hug and a rescue.

"Don't kill yourself for a corpse."

 “I think at this point I need to be laid delicately upon the pile of liars.”

NeonLeon > man 0 for 2 and u still havent succeeded???  its almost like u dont want me dead 😘

...and honestly, practically every line Donnie has in the big rescue scene, how is it Leo is my fave but this damn theatre kid keeps stealing the show--

I have a lot of favourite scenes etc in different fanfics, so I'm just gonna leave it at this one

Thank you! ♥

Fanfic writer ask game here.

[baladric]

🎈💥🕯️<-- that's meant to be the fandom/social one, the candle emoji is there twice for me (???) and also please don't feel bad for being Earnest it is wonderful and makes me feel more excited about like, being alive in a world where people care deeply about things

see, i agree re: earnestness, it's just didn't know that when it's ME doing it, it's CRINGE? (a;lkdfjalwfd this is a callout for my own fallacious internal voice) thank u and i love u!!!!!!

🎈 Describe your style as a writer; is it fixed? does it change?

ohh this is a good one! i'd say it's a little of both? i notice that my rhythm and diction change depending on what sort of genre i'm writing in or the fandom i'm writing for (my goblin emperor stuff is less florid than, say, my raven cycle fic, and far crunchier than all the unfinished stranger things shit in my docs, which is a lot punchier and quippier [and VIOLENT ;alkdfjwd and ohh what a weird discovery to find that i enjoy writing physical fights]) but! my motivations as a writer stay the same through each piece! anyone who read both my v old king falls am fic and, say, sweet hope (a person that i doubt exists, since these are both WAY too niche) would see that underneath the very different language and social dynamics, the thing i'm really committed to the bit for is healing and vulnerability (and music as essential catharsis). that said, i will always, always abuse the humble adverb a;lkdfjlaw;djsl

💥 Find your least kudos'd fic - say something wonderful about it.

least kudos'd is this charming man, for whom i will say: this is Punchy, Funny and so evocative of the very very important conceit of First Nohecharis Codependency. honestly i'm still very fond of this one!!!

🕯️ Was there a fic that was really hard on you to write, or took you to a place you didn't think it would take you?

surprising probably no one—yes, sweet hope destroyed me. i say in the intro notes to it that it took me 10 months to write, and i'm not lying when i say that a good 2/3 of that time was me refusing to write anything at all because i wrote myself into a corner and broke my own trust in my writing. that story started as a fairly surface level story about fair turnabout—maia, learning to ask for help, and then csevet being forced into a very ugly position that demanded he figure out how to accept help—and it was, to be mean to myself, very fucking contrived and Not Good. i wrote about 25k words of it, looked back at it at the end of one writing session, and then deleted everything but the first half of the first chapter (so that was about 22k words hucked into the ether) and didn't write for about 5 months. it was awful, but my weirdly routine January Writing Frenzy last year yanked a pearl in my hand out of me in a very harried couple of days, and that not only restored my trust in myself, but like. tripled it, at least, and that's when i came back to sweet hope and it became what it is—which, for all the grumbly things i can and do say about it, is still a rose in my mind. lovely and complete and tender, and i do love where it went and what it became. it surprised me again and again, and it made me three times the writer i was, and i'm so grateful for every minute of its conception.

fic writer ask meme!

[kenta-rin]

Ch 5-6

[I DID NOT WRITE THIS, just uploading for posterity]

Tips For Expanding Your Business On An International Scale

013

Chapter 5

Notes:

hey it's me again. couple of notes here: first of all please drive safe and distracted driving is bad dont eat and drive. second of all theres a line here thats like, "jesses a disgusting american who loves fast food" and i just wanted to say, i love americans some of my best friends are american, and i love fast food some of my best friends are fast food, the only person im calling disgusting here is jesse mccree. i will never shame u for being american or eating fast food, i will only shame mccree. for existing. ok, next up last time we talked there was one fanart for this fic drawn by the wonderful nance well now there's... 6. unbelievable. i am so incredibly grateful & overwhelemd & humbled by the fact that MULTIPLE human beings on earth read my fic and were like, hey, that's good, i'm gonna draw that. thank you all so much... and thank you to everyone who's left kudos! and left comments! you're all so good, kind, wonderful, i dont deserve u... links to art in end notes

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

For the first time in almost a week, it’s not a voice calling his name that wakes Jesse.

He jolts up from his pillow, hand instinctively closing around the handle of the gun that’s still holstered at his hip. He’d fallen asleep without taking off his gear and he already regrets it. He feels grimy.

He hears the noise that woke him again: a knock on the door. The room is dark, but that doesn’t mean much; the love hotel (Jesse wants to cringe just thinking those words) has electronic blinds that are tightly shuttered. He glances at the clock.

It’s just after nine PM, and someone is knocking on the door of the hotel room no one is supposed to know he’s in.

“It’s me,” a voice calls through the door.

Jesse raises his eyebrows in disbelief. On the one hand, the way the voice is muffled makes its owner ambiguous. On the other hand, there’s only one person Jesse can think of who’d think he’d open the door to that kind of message.

He opens the door. It’s Genji. Of course it’s Genji. Jesse lets him in.

“Do you think it’s smart to come here? You don’t think your dad’s gonna be suspicious?”

Genji shrugs. “My father never knows where I am.” He has a bag slung over one of his shoulders. He dumps it on the bed as Jesse locks the door. “I brought you a phone so you can call your gang.”

Jesse practically snatches it out of Genji’s hands. “Give me a minute,” Jesse tells him, and then he retreats to a corner of the room and starts dialling. Genji settles himself down on top of the bed, crossing his legs and rifling through whatever else he brought. He looks like he’s settling in for a long stay. Jesse resolves to ignore him, for now.

The call to New Mexico rings for a distressing amount of time. He hopes they’re not blocking him because it’s an unknown number. It’s more likely that no one feels like picking up the phone, but Jesse’s trying to give his fellow Deadlock Gang members the benefit of the doubt in believing they won’t leave him to die in a foreign country out of sheer laziness.

Finally, someone answers. “Oh, thank God,” Jesse breathes. “It’s McCree.”

“McCree?” The voice asks, incredulous. “You’re still alive? Shit, boy, you must be tougher than we all thought!”

Jesse grits his teeth, trying not to read too much into that. “Yeah. Look, I need -”

“Hang on a sec, lemme get you on speaker. Boys, McCree’s still alive!”

When the call goes to speaker Jesse has to hold the phone away from his ear. The cacophony on the other side is ungodly. He can make out a few distinct shouts of “Atta boy!” and other sundry encouragements, but mostly it seems to just be wordless yelling.

“I won’t be alive for long if you don’t get me a goddamn shuttle back to America!” He shouts back down the line. He’s not even sure anyone hears him.

The noise dies down after a minute.

“He won’t be alive for long if we don’t rescue him,” someone says, to a chorus of hoots and hollers. Jesse clenches his fist around his phone because first of all, he’d just said that and they would have heard it if they’d been listening, and second of all, he wouldn’t need rescuing at all if they hadn’t sent him on a suicide mission.

“When can you get a plane out here?” Jesse asks, knowing he’s in no position to argue semantics.

“We’ve been making calls,” someone answers, and Jesse’s almost relieved to know that at least one person is taking this seriously. “The Hanamura airport’s pretty much impossible to get into without Shimada’s permission. You need to get outta that city, Jesse.”

Jesse leans his forehead against the wall nearest him. That is so, so much easier said than done. He glances over at Genji, who’s flopped back onto the bed and is playing with his own phone.

“If I gotta, I gotta,” he sighs.

“If you get to a big city like Osaka or Tokyo you can catch the next flight to the States, then we can arrange pick-up from there.”

Jesse’s starting to wonder what the point of having a gang is. They’ve basically told him to take care of himself throughout this whole crisis. He breathes a deep sigh.

“Got it,” he says. His annoyance shines through the short syllables, but he doesn’t give anyone a chance to reply. “I’ll contact you soon.” He ends the call.

When he turns back to face the room again, Genji bounces up from his reclining position. “God, that took forever,” he says cheerfully. Genji seems to find an inordinate amount of joy in Jesse’s life-threatening peril.

“I need to get to a city with an airport your dad doesn’t control. As soon as possible.” Jesse rubs at his eyes, feeling tired and cranky. When he looks at Genji again, Jesse sees a smile on his face that he doesn’t particularly like.

“So, what you are saying is,” Genji begins, his grin taking up half his face, “We need to go on a roadtrip.”

“No,” Jesse answers quickly, feeling dread filling him up. “No, God, I just meant - I need a way to get there, I didn’t mean that we should go together -” Genji continues to grin at Jesse relentlessly. “Oh God, please, my life is in danger, you should be taking this seriously!”

“I am taking this seriously,” Genji says, and he schools his face into a mockery of sternness for about five seconds before he’s smiling again. “You cannot drive yourself because you do not know the way. I can drive!”

“If you can drive then why’s Yuri always carting you around?”

“Because I like Yuri, and Yuri likes to be useful. I can totally drive. I’m good at it. I have a car!”

Jesse considers this. The son of the man who’s trying to kill him (and the brother of the man who betrayed him, but he’s trying not to think about that) is offering him a ride out of the city so that he can flee the country. Genji has a car, which is what Jesse really needs right now. He’s probablynot a great driver, because he’s eighteen, and Jesse’s skeptical about him “knowing the way,” because the Shimada family would probably fly in a plane to the grocery store (if they ever went to the grocery store, which they wouldn’t, because they could just send other people to the grocery store for them).

There’s always GPS, though. And cars mostly drive themselves, these days. Put ‘em on the road and watch ‘em hover placidly to their destination. As long as no one tries to blow ‘em up.

For a moment Jesse wonders if having Genji in the car with him would deter Shimada from blowing it up. He honestly can’t decide.

“How long will it take?” He finally asks.

Genji beams, knowing that Jesse has resigned himself to the roadtrip. “Probably only two or three hours. We will have to go slow. Be stealthy.”

Jesse thinks of that circuitous route Genji took him on through the gardens to get to the beach party. He can already feel a headache coming on.

“Genji, if I die because of you I’m gonna be pissed,” Jesse tells him, rubbing his forehead wearily.

Genji makes a face at him. “If you are going to be like that maybe I will just leave you here.”

Jesse exhales loudly through his nose. “Fine. I’ll behave. Where’s your goddamn car?”

“In the parking lot,” Genji tells him.

“Of this hotel?” Jesse asks, his eyebrows raising (and his blood pressure too, probably).

“Yes, but don’t worry,” Genji answers, apparently anticipating Jesse’s loss of temper, “it has an undercover mode.”

“An undercover mode,” Jesse repeats flatly.

“Yes. Normally it has these green flame decals,” Genji explains.

“Jesus Christ.”

“No, they are really cool!” The slang is a little stiff in Genji’s mouth. Jesse feels like he should be pausing for a laugh track. “But when I need to hide from my dad I can make the flames black so they cannot be seen.”

“Oh.”

“Come on, I’ll show you,” Genji says, gathering his bag and slinging it over his shoulder. “We should leave here anyway. It is better to travel at night when you’re on the run.”

Jesse can’t argue with that, and he’s eager to get the hell out of this town anyway, so he grabs the suitcase he never bothered unpacking and follows Genji out of the hotel room. He wishes he’d been able to shower before committing to a couple of hours in a car, but he can shower all he wants once he’s safe in New Mexico. Relatively safe. Also, he probably can’t shower all he wants, because the gang pays their water bills sporadically and there’s no guarantee he’ll come home at a time when they haven’t been cut off.

Genji’s car looks just as generic as the next one parked in the lot, plain black with tinted windows.

“You know, people can still track the license plates and the registration number,” Jesse points out, but his heart’s not really in it.

Genji actually laughs in reply. “My father runs a criminal empire. The license plate is holographic and changes at random. There is no registration number.”

Jesse sighs and allows Genji to win this one, at least. He climbs into the car without further complaint. Genji settles himself behind the wheel, but he doesn’t start driving.

He’s not smiling, for once. There’s something hesitant, almost worried in his expression. Jesse tries not to presume the worst, but it’s a challenge.

“So,” Genji begins, fingers fidgeting.

“What,” Jesse prompts, not even a question; it’s nothing more than an exhausted gust of breath.

“Hanzo did not show up at the hotel room?” Genji asks, trying his best to seem casual.

“No.” Jesse has had more bad feelings in the past few days than he wants to count, but this is one of the worst. “Why would he?” His voice is almost as tight as the fingers clenched on his thighs.

“Well.” Genji seems to be very interested in the bright neon of the love hotel sign judging by the way he’s staring out the window and refusing to look at Jesse. “After Yuri and I brought you here, we went back home. And of course everyone was looking for you. They had no idea where you could have gone. My father locked himself in his office and said no one should talk to him unless they had found you.”

Genji’s started speaking faster and faster with each sentence. “Nobody was paying any attention to me, so I thought I had gotten away with it. But then Hanzo cornered me on my way to my room. And he said he knew what I’d done. And I thought he was going to kill me or something,” Genji laughs nervously, “but instead he just asked where you were? And I was not going to tell him. But he said that he could not leave things the way they were. He said that… You... “ Genji blushes. Jesse’s fingers are like claws digging into his thighs.

“I have never heard my brother speak the way he spoke about you,” Genji says. “I have never seen a look on his face like the one I saw.”

Jesse closes his eyes. “You told him where I was.”

There’s a very long, telling moment of silence.

“But he did not come to the hotel room after all,” Genji concludes. Jesse’s not sure if Genji means that to be tragic or reassuring.

Hanzo probably didn’t come to the hotel room because he went straight to his daddy with that information. They’re probably gathering a small army to come and shoot Jesse at this very moment.

“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Jesse says, peering out the window and expecting men with guns to appear at any moment.

“Right.” Genji stills sounds nervous. He jams his finger against the ignition and the car purrs to life. Then he very, very slowly reverses the car.

“What are you doing,” Jesse asks flatly. He wonders if Genji missed the memo on the whole urgency thing.

“I do not want to hit any cars,” Genji explains. He’s sitting very stiffly in his seat, neck craning over his shoulder, taking it one inch at a time. Genji’s only eighteen. He’s probably had his license for a few months at most.

Jesse resigns himself to being shot to death in a love hotel parking lot.

Then Genji finally shifts the car from reverse to drive, and he slams the accelerator.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Jesse yells, scrabbling for a place to hold on to. He’s really fucking glad he’d decided to wear his seatbelt.

“I thought you wanted to go fast!” Genji yells back, but he sounds just as frantic and alarmed as Jesse.

He swings the car into traffic and the automatic sensors adjust the speed, a chiding Japanese voice saying something that Jesse’s pretty sure means ‘stop endangering people’s lives.’ Genji snaps something back, but the car doesn’t answer.

Genji starts messing with the GPS. “Where’s the nearest airport?” Jesse asks.

“Oh,” Genji says distractedly, fiddling with something. “It’s not too far, but I was thinking… First, we should go through a drive through.” He’s grinning again.

Jesse wants to smack him for not taking this seriously (again), but he actually hasn’t eaten since breakfast. He’s starving.

“Let’s get out of Hanamura first,” he compromises. “Then we can go wherever you want.”

Genji mulls that over for a moment, then starts tapping at the GPS screen. Jesse wants to tell him to keep his eyes on the road, but he’s pretty sure that would actually make things worse. The car is a much better driver than Genji is.

“Okay,” Genji says finally, leaning back in his seat. After a moment he startles and puts his hand on the steering wheel, like he’d forgotten he was driving it all. It’s pretty much just for show, and the car’s only going in a straight line so far, but once they need to turn Genji’s input will be required.

Jesse is honestly dreading that time.

“What should we talk about?” Genji asks brightly, eyes darting here and there at the scenery they drive by. Jesse wonders if Genji actually has a driver’s license. Maybe his father had one forged for him.

“We shouldn’t talk about anything,” Jesse says, leaning his head against the window. He’s ready and willing to pass this drive asleep. Then again, if he leaves Genji unsupervised he’ll probably never wake up.

“No, no,” Genji shakes his head emphatically. “We have to bond. That’s what road trips are for.”

Jesse is too afraid to ask about which movie, exactly, Genji learned his road trip knowledge from. What if it’s the 2002 classic starring Britney Spears, Crossroads? Not that Jesse’s ever seen the movie, of course. Only he can’t stop picturing these horrifying mental images of him and Genji doing karaoke to Joan Jett in denim short-shorts.

“Usually road trips are longer than two hours,” Jesse informs Genji grumpily.

“That can be arranged,” Genji says with a smirk that fills Jesse with regret.

“No! Genji, no, I’m serious, I could die. Your dad wants to kill me. Please help me get out of the country.”

Genji pouts a little. “I’m not going to let my father kill you. Have a little faith in me.”

Jesse stares at the eighteen year old World’s Worst Driver in the seat next to him. He’s torn between being touched that Genji’s offering to protect him and exasperated that he thinks he can.

They lapse into silence for the half hour it takes to leave Hanamura, which they do without incident, though somehow that doesn’t do much to relieve Jesse’s paranoia. Genji only breaks the silence when he points through the windshield at a big lit-up sign down the road.

“Fast food?” He asks, sounding way too hopeful.

Jesse’s tempted to put up a fuss on principle, but first of all he’s really hungry and second of all he’s a disgusting American who loves fast food.

“What do they have?” he asks.

“McDonald’s has the same menu all over the world, does it not?”

“Oh, you’re not going to take me somewhere uniquely Japanese? What kind of enriching cultural experience is this?”

“I enriched your culture yesterday, with ramen,” Genji scolds. “Besides, I can’t eat with chopsticks while I’m driving.”

“You shouldn’t eat with your hands while driving, either,” Jesse points out, but they pull into the drive through and get burgers anyway.

“How far is it to the airport from here?” Jesse asks with his mouth full.

“An hour and a half,” Genji replies, one hand on the wheel and the other shoving a handful of fries into his face.

“Is that the direct route, or the ‘stealthy’ route?” Jesse asks sardonically.

“Stealthy.” Genji grins so wide Jesse can see potatoes mashed in his teeth.

“You’re disgusting,” he says, wiping his fingers on his pants.

They continue to eat in silence until Genji finishes his burger and throws his ketchup-stained wrapper at Jesse’s head, which leads to a rant peppered with some of Jesse’s most creative curses. This, in turn, leads to Genji requesting that Jesse teach him more American swear words, which passes a long time because Jesse knows a lot. When he’s done, he asks Genji to teach him some Japanese swear words, and before they know it they’re in the city.

“I know you want to leave as soon as possible,” Genji begins to say, his attention fixed on the bumper of the car in front of them. Even now, when it’s around midnight, the traffic is incredibly dense. “But it might be a better idea to check into a hotel for tonight, buy a plane ticket online, and get to the airport tomorrow.”

“How do you figure?” Jesse asks. He’s in a surprisingly good mood considering he’s been stuck in a vehicle in dirty clothes for so long, but Genji’s putting him on edge again.

“What is your plan for when you get to the airport? Run up to the desk and start demanding a ticket for the next flight to America?” Genji chews on his lip. “That might raise some suspicion. And suspicion is not what you want right now. You are supposed to be lying low.”

Jesse rubs at his beard thoughtfully. “Alright. I guess you’re right about that,” he concedes. He’s not sure he’s gonna be able to sleep tonight, too worried about Shimada somehow tracking him down.

But in all honesty, for all the grief Jesse’s given him Genji’s gotten him out of Hanamura and fairly well-hidden here in this city. He probably shouldn’t have doubted Genji as much as he did in the first place, considering Genji’s had years of experience hiding from his father.

“I know a hotel around here,” Genji says.

“A love hotel.” Jesse says flatly. He can tell by the way Genji’s failing to suppress a grin.

“It is even better than the last one,” Genji says with a wide smile.

Better is, of course, a subjective concept. This love hotel has a baffling mermaid theme. It’s so lit up with neon that Jesse feels like it’ll act like a beacon drawing Shimada’s eye. The brilliance of it is that it does the exact opposite. Hide in plain sight. No one would suspect a man undercover to sequester himself in the brightest building on the block. Especially if that building has a giant sexy mermaid on its roof.

Genji, thank God and all the angels and saints, books them two separate rooms. Jesse has grown very, very fond of Genji over the past few days. That does not mean he wants their road trip to become a sleepover.

Genji follows Jesse into his room anyway, and Jesse would be embarrassed at the implication if there was anyone around to witness it, but the hotel hallways are deserted. Jesse is very glad there seems to be sturdy soundproofing insulation in the walls.

Flopping onto Jesse’s bed without compunction, Genji digs into his shoulder bag and pulls out a tiny laptop.

“So, flights to America,” he says conversationally. Jesse busies himself with peeling off his outer clothing.

“What’s the earliest I can catch?” He asks.

Genji clicks his tongue thoughtfully. “I mean, taking security into account, you’ll need to get there a few hours early… There’s one for New York City at 5 AM.”

“Yanks,” Jesse admonishes idly, his spurs rattling as he pulls off his boots. Genji laughs.

“You can fly directly to Santa Fe at eleven,” Genji says. Jesse mulls it over.

“Guess that’d be for the best,” he says slowly. He wonders if he’ll drive himself insane with paranoia between now and then. After the nap he took earlier he’s going to be wide awake, thinking every sound he hears is Shimada Clan thugs out to get him.

“Alright, I have purchased your ticket. Give me the phone I gave you, I’ll download the boarding pass to it.”

Jesse thinks, for possibly the hundredth time tonight, that Genji is going to get him shot. “You bought me my ticket to Santa Fe. With your credit card. That your dad is definitely tracking.” Jesse sucks on his teeth, trying to keep his temper. “When he sees that purchase he’s gonna kill you too, not just me.”

Genji shakes his head. “No, I did not. You think I’m a fool.” He snatches Jesse’s phone out of his hands impatiently. “I bought the ticket with my personal account. My father does not know it exists. The money is… my own.”

Jesse only raises his eyebrows in response. He wonders if Genji steals his father’s product and deals to his friends on the side.

“Don’t mock me for this,” Genji says, his eyes lowered shyly, and Jesse wonders what could possibly embarrass Genji Shimada, frequenter of love hotels. “I have a part-time job.”

The answer is so normal Jesse almost laughs, but he stops himself before he injures Genji’s pride. Where Jesse grew up, eighteen year olds whodidn’t have part-time jobs were the ones who got mocked. Got called lazy. Got called deadbeats. Got called “Jesse McCree, when are you ever going to get your life together and stop running around with that gang? You’re making your mother sick with worry!”

Genji continues, hurrying to explain himself, “I was spending a lot of time at the arcade, and one day I saw they had a help wanted sign, so I talked to the owner about it. I knew my father would never approve…” Genji gets a little bit of a glint in his eye. “Maybe that’s why I applied in the first place.”

This time, Jesse can’t stop himself from laughing. “My God, what a rebel,” he says. “Standing up to your mean ol’ dad by becoming a respectable citizen.”

Genji starts to laugh too. “I told you not to mock me,” he chides, faking a pout.

In a moment of brotherly affection, Jesse jumps onto the gross love hotel bed and squishes Genji. “I’ll mock you all I want,” he says, and tickles Genji’s ribs ruthlessly.

Genji starts crying almost immediately. “Stop! Stop!” He’s gasping out laughter, but he manages to tell Jesse: “You smell really bad! You’re so sweaty!”

Jesse rolls off the bed, offended. “I wouldn’t be so sweaty if you hadn’t almost killed me via automobile incident so many times.”

“I am a very good driver!” Genji protests, voice muffled because he’s busy wiping tears off his face. “You need to shower.”

“Well if you’d get out of my room, maybe I could,” Jesse points out, raising an eyebrow.

For a moment Genji glares at him from the bed, then he sighs and gets to his feet. “Fine,” he says. “I guess I will see you tomorrow.”

“Wait,” Jesse calls, just as Genji gets to the door. Jesse shuffles a little in place. “Thank you, Genji. Thank you for doing this for me.”

Genji looks thoughtful for a moment, then he grins. “It was fun,” he says, and then he leaves.

Jesse wanders into the shower grumbling to himself about how helping him evade certain death shouldn’t be fun.

He spends a half-hour under the spray of hot water, and he would spend more, just to pass the time until his flight, except that he’s used to taking five minute showers and he actually finds it boring to be confined in that little space with nothing to distract him but his own thoughts. He tries singing a little, but the acoustics make him sound really loud, and he gets paranoid about people walking by in the hallway somehow being able to hear him even through the soundproofing.

Jesse’d dragged his whole suitcase into the bathroom earlier instead of digging out his shaving kit, so he takes his time brushing his teeth, towelling off, pulling on a fresh pair of boxers, and generally dicking around.

When he finally unlocks the bathroom door and gets back in his room he’s managed to kill… about an hour. He still has about seven hours until he needs to get to the airport. He wonders if the hotel TV will let him watch anything other than porn.

It’s because he’s staring at the blank TV screen that he sees the silent figure move in behind him, raising a hand.

Jesse drops to a crouch, narrowly avoiding the arm that’s reaching out to incapacitate him, and twists his body to tackle his assailant to the ground. Jesse’s still wearing nothing but his boxers, doesn’t have a gun on him, doesn’t have a gun anywhere within his reach, which is fucking stupid. He should never have let his guard down.

The attacker slips out of Jesse’s clumsy grip like an eel, landing in a graceful crouch, while Jesse’s momentum leaves him much less gracefully on his hands and knees.

In the light spilling from the bathroom Jesse can make out his attacker’s face.

It’s Hanzo.

Jesse’s heart stops for a moment. Then, when Hanzo starts moving, it kicks into overdrive, adrenaline flooding Jesse’s system. He springs to his feet, determined not to let Hanzo get the jump on him.

Hanzo has trained in various martial arts and with various weapons his whole life. Jesse’s the quickest draw he knows and a damn good shot, but his only hand-to-hand training is in bar fights.

He has two advantages, as far as he can see: the first is that Hanzo’s not using a weapon, and the second is that he seems to be aiming to incapacitate Jesse, not to kill him. If Jesse had a moment to ponder the situation he’d definitely wonder about that, but as it is - Hanzo strikes like a snake and all Jesse can do is recoil, trying to avoid being hit.

The room isn’t big enough for Jesse to keep fighting like that, but at the same time, that might be an advantage for him. The love hotel isn’t a dojo; there’s furniture, there’s close walls. Back Hanzo into a corner and maybe Jesse can use his superior weight and height to pin him down, but…

He can’t concentrate on strategy when Hanzo’s flying at him with all the fury and grace of an enraged cat. For lack of better options, Jesse puts his dukes up.

The fight is - messy. Jesse jabs a punch at Hanzo just as a warning, trying to make Hanzo keep his distance, but Hanzo latches onto his arms and pulls Jesse in. They end up grappling each other around the shoulders, legs spread wide for balance.

Hanzo kicks one of Jesse’s legs out from under him, but the momentum of their fall leaves Jesse on top, using his weight to keep Hanzo’s arms down. They’re both already panting.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Jesse gasps out, searching Hanzo’s face. He can’t see anything in his expression but anger.

Hanzo slides a leg between Jesse’s and flips them in a move that almost seems effortless. All of the air in Jesse’s lungs hisses out of him as his back slams into the floor. He stares up at Hanzo, mouth hanging open.

“My father told me to kill you,” Hanzo growls. He lets go of Jesse’s wrists to slip his hands around his throat, but Jesse gets an elbow in his stomach before he can apply enough pressure. It takes three successive punches before Hanzo finally groans and rolls off him, giving Jesse room to back up, crawl to his feet again.

“You think if you kill me, your dad’s gonna magically start loving you?” Jesse spits, and - he probably shouldn’t have. Hanzo leaps at him, snarling. It’s a sloppy move, and Jesse sidesteps, using the force of the motion to push Hanzo up against the wall. “He’s never going to love you,” Jesse hisses into Hanzo’s ear, bending one arm against his back painfully.

“You do not know that!” Hanzo roars, thrashing. But Jesse’s bigger than Hanzo, even if he’s not necessarily stronger, and physics are on his side here. Hanzo tries his trick again, looking to loop his ankle around Jesse’s leg, but Jesse’s caught on to that play, has built up a counter.

Hanzo goes abruptly limp, but Jesse doesn’t fall for it. He increases the pressure rather than giving into his instinct to relax his grip. They stand there, nothing between them but their harsh breathing.

It reminds Jesse, in a sudden, aching moment of clarity, of the two of them wrestling in the water at the artificial beach.

He resists the urge to lean his head forward onto Hanzo’s shoulder, wary of being headbutted, but he does allow himself to say, “God, I don’t wanna hurt you.”

He’s a sappy goddamn fool.

“I guess there are a lot of things you do not want to do with me,” Hanzo growls.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Jesse asks him, but instead of answering Hanzo starts struggling again.

He jerks so violently in Jesse’s grip that he wrenches one of Jesse’s arms. Jesse draws back without thinking about it, trying to distance himself from the source of the pain. Hanzo reverses their positions for a second time, pinning Jesse’s hands to the wall on either side of his head.

Jesse expects this to be the moment where Hanzo finally closes his hands around Jesse’s windpipe and fulfills his duty to his father.

Instead, Hanzo stares at Jesse, and his expression is less violent hate and more… lost.

“I hate you,” he whispers. There’s not enough conviction behind it for Jesse to believe him.

“You’re not the one who should be angry here. You made me believe you… wanted me,” Jesse snaps back. “Just to get me to sign a contract. Your daddy asked you to be his little whore and you did it!”

Hanzo releases one of Jesse’s wrists to slap him across the face.

Somewhere beyond the shock of the sting Jesse realizes that he could use his free hand to knock Hanzo down, to incapacitate him, to buy himself time to go get Genji for backup, or to flee the hotel altogether.

He doesn’t. He’s still agonizingly, magnetically drawn to Hanzo. Even now, when he should hate him for betraying him, he can’t look away.

“How dare you,” Hanzo says, low and dangerous, the hand that slapped Jesse splaying across his collarbone and pushing him back against the wall. “I did nothing for my father. You came into my home… You spent three days doing nothing but flirting with me… You sent me,” Hanzo’s cheeks flush red, and he grits his teeth angrily against it, “a picture of your penis. And then… you left.”

“Your father threatened to kill me,” Jesse points out, anger surging in him. He’s not sure how Hanzo thinks he’s going to paint Jesse as the bad guy, here. Jesse’s done falling for Hanzo’s tricks.

“My father is Genji’s father too, but I have seen that you do not hate him,” Hanzo spits.

“When Genji heard your dad wanted me dead, he didn’t try to convince me to stay by fucking me,” Jesse throws back with equal venom.

“You think I had some kind of evil plot! You think I was laying a trap, that all along I was doing what my father wanted me to!” Hanzo’s shouting now, right up in Jesse’s face. “I did not know, Jesse! I had no idea that you would be so offended by my father’s crimes! I thought you had done your research!”

For a moment, Jesse is cowed. Naïve. People keep telling him that.

Hanzo’s eyes drop, for just a split second, to Jesse’s lips. “When I came to your room,” his voice is so much quieter, slower. “I thought that you and I would…”

He doesn’t need to finish that sentence. Jesse’s the one who sent the texts.

“So your excuse is that you didn’t mean to hurt me, you’re just a bad person,” Jesse growls.

Hanzo lifts his chin defiantly, meets Jesse’s gaze sharply. “You did not think so before.”

“Human trafficking is wrong,” Jesse says flatly, amazed that he needs to point this out.

“I have no control over that,” Hanzo answers defensively.

“You will, someday. You gonna do something about it?”

There’s a brief pause.

“I don’t know.” Hanzo looks lost when he says it, his gaze lowered, fixated on his hand against Jesse’s bare chest.

He looks young, suddenly. He’s twenty-one. He’s the son of a crime lord. He doesn’t leave the compound that often. ”He’s never going to love you.”

”You don’t know that."

Jesse starts to feel it: that ache again. The one that’s becoming familiar. And its ol’ pal. Virgin.

“Hanzo,” Jesse says, all of the anger drained out of him. Hanzo’s father sent him here to kill Jesse, and he hasn’t. He never even tried, not really. He could have killed Jesse when he was singing in the shower, or when he was carefully manicuring his beard, or when Hanzo snuck up behind him. He hadn’t even had a weapon.

“When you texted me,” Jesse begins to ask, hesitant. He’s not sure he wants to know the truth, not sure if he can trust the answer Hanzo gives him. “Were you lying?”

He can tell by the colour rising in Hanzo’s face that he understands exactly what Jesse’s asking. “No.” His voice is soft.

Jesse raises a hand, threading the ends of Hanzo’s hair through his fingers gently. “Your father told you to get to know me,” he says, because he knows that for sure.

“My father told me to give you a tour of the gardens the first day you were here,” Hanzo replies.

“That’s it?” Jesse asks. “What did you tell him? Does he know about the beach? About the messages?” His voice remains soft, but he needs to know.

“I told him about the beach, because he wanted to know why I came home so late. I told him I was getting to know you for the sake of our alliance.” Hanzo tilts his head to one side, eyes dropping down to Jesse’s lips again. “I was lying, then. Not to you, to him.”

Jesse lets out a short breath, trying to keep his head. He’s been in this exact same position with Hanzo before, admiring the sweep of his eyelashes.

“I didn’t tell him about the messages,” Hanzo whispers. Their little secret.

“How did he know, then? About us?”

Hanzo’s eyes drop to the floor. His face twists into something ugly, a scowl. “He suspects that I’m fucking every man who stays on the compound.”

Jesse’s heart stings, sudden and painful. “You’re not,” he says, and it’s a statement, but there’s a question in there, too. A request for confirmation.

“You were the first one I wanted to,” Hanzo breathes.

A virgin.

Jesse kisses him, finally. After days that have felt like weeks, stretched thin and taut with longing, Jesse dips his head and presses his lips against Hanzo’s.

Jesse goes gentle, slow, as he runs his tongue across the seam of Hanzo’s lips, but Hanzo makes a noise in his throat, opens his mouth, presses forward. Brings the hand that was pressed to Jesse’s chest up to cradle Jesse’s jaw, urging him closer.

Hanzo is needy, demanding. Jesse can feel himself starting to sweat.

Hanzo licks his way into Jesse’s mouth, sends shivers through Jesse’s core, presses him back against the wall with his insistence. Jesse’s legs fall open all on their own and Hanzo fits himself neatly in between. There’s nothing shy in the way he presses their hips together, and Jesse can feel Hanzo’s dick through his pants.

Jesse drops his head back, gasping for air. Hanzo nuzzles at his exposed jaw, his neck.

“I want to see,” Hanzo murmurs against Jesse’s skin. His fingers are hovering at the hem of Jesse’s boxers.

Jesse’s stomach drops. “You already saw,” he teases, trying to pretend Hanzo isn’t fucking destroying him.

Hanzo presses his face a little more firmly into Jesse’s neck, tilts his head a little so his lips brush against Jesse’s ear when he says, “I want to touch.”

Jesse moans helplessly. “You’re gonna kill me,” he says. Hanzo’s fingers are still flirting around his waistline, but Jesse pushes them away gently.

Hanzo looks up at him, wide-eyed and stung. Jess realizes there’s a parallel here, between this moment and a very unpleasant one they’d had before.

“Hush, darlin’,” Jesse whispers, though Hanzo hasn’t said a thing. “It ain’t fair - me in my undies, and you all dressed up…” He trails off, plucking at the collar of Hanzo’s yukata - less formal than the ones he wore on the compound, and cut shorter down his thighs, with pants underneath. All black. Assassin’s clothes.

Jesse smiles idiotically against the crown of Hanzo’s head. Hanzo’s daddy thinks he’s killing Jesse right now. God, but he is, in the best possible way.

Hanzo makes quick work of his clothes, dropping his shirt, unbuttoning his pants.

“Where’s the fire?” Jesse teases, eyes taking in every inch of skin that gets bared.

Hanzo makes an exasperated face at him, but instead of answering he pushes Jesse firmly back against the wall and kisses him again, and again, and again.

Jesse considers himself thoroughly chastised.

His hands drift to Hanzo’s hips, then slide back. This time he’s the one whose fingers are dipping just past the elastic of Hanzo’s underwear. Hanzo breaks off from his aggressive kissing; Jesse can feel a shiver run through him.

The first person to touch him there. Jesse feels unaccountably emotional for a moment. He distracts himself by slipping his hands down, grabbing two handfuls of Hanzo’s bare ass. Hanzo lets out a little startled noise, ducking his head to hide the way he turns red.

“Aw, come on,” Jesse mutters, his voice hoarse. “Look at me, darlin’.”

Hanzo does; he raises his chin in that defiant way Jesse’s come to know so well, and it feels like his heart is swelling in his chest.

“Gorgeous,” Jesse whispers, one hand abandoning its post to tuck a stray piece of hair back behind Hanzo’s ear. Hanzo makes a quiet noise of protest, but the way he looks up at Jesse, lit only by the stream of light that’s falling in from the bathroom, hair messy from their fight, eyelashes long, cheekbones high and sloping, bare skin all the way down his torso -

It’s undeniable. Hanzo is so fucking gorgeous. Jesse kisses him again, because he can, and the fact that he can makes his heart surge in his chest, so he does it twice.

And then Jesse turns his head a little, rubbing his nose against Hanzo’s temple, and tells him, soft and sweet, “Baby, I’m gonna make you come.”

Hanzo breathes in sharply; his hand, resting on Jesse’s shoulder, tightens its grip.

Jesse allows the hand tucked in the back of Hanzo’s boxer to wander to the front, dragging teasingly across Hanzo’s skin. Hanzo squirms, and Jesse wonders if Hanzo’s ticklish, smiles at the thought. He pulls his head back, wanting to see Hanzo’s face as he finally closes his hand around Hanzo’s dick.

Hanzo gasps like the breath’s been punched out of him. Jesse can’t help the smirk that tilts the corners of his lips up. He takes a moment to pull Hanzo’s boxers down, and they both look down at Hanzo’s dick. Jesse wraps his hand around it again, makes a show of pumping up and down while they both watch.

“Feel good?” Jesse drawls, into the intense silence of the room.

Hanzo looks up at him. His eyes are half-lidded with pleasure, his mouth wet and open like he’s shocked at how it feels. Jesse’d thought he’d been keeping his cool up til then, but with Hanzo staring at him like that - his dick twitches in his boxers and he closes his eyes, swallowing a deep, almost pained noise.

“Look at me,” Hanzo pants at him, echoing his words from earlier. A hapless smile spreads across Jesse’s face as he obeys, utterly fucking besotted.

And then Hanzo really takes initiative: he slides his hands down Jesse’s waist, pushes his boxers down his thighs. He looks, and Jesse momentarily forgets that he’s supposed to be giving a handjob. That sharp gaze is fixed on him, and it’s not the first time Hanzo’s seen his dick, but even that is making it harder to breathe.

Just having Hanzo’s eyes on him makes Jesse’s dick pulse. Jesse moans a little, half from embarrassment and half from being so fucking turned on.

He lets Hanzo study his dick for a few minutes before he starts making impatient little noises. Hanzo raises an eyebrow at him, drawing out another sappy grin. It dies an abrupt death when Hanzo puts his hand on Jesse’s dick.

His grip is tentative, feeling the shape of it, thumb gliding delicately over the head, smearing the precome gathered there. It feels so fucking good Jesse wants to cry.

“God,” he whispers, and he’d be happy to let Hanzo touch him soft and gentle like that all day, only he wants to come, and he wants to come with Hanzo. He wants them to come together.

He loops the hand that’s not still weakly grasping Hanzo’s dick around Hanzo’s back and pulls him forward a few steps. He presses their erections together, opening his hand to encompass both of them.

Hanzo makes a muted noise at the sensation, his unoccupied hand tightening once again on Jesse’s shoulder. His other hand moves over to Jesse’s hip, giving Jesse more room to spread his fingers. Jesse latches his mouth onto Hanzo’s throat, kisses softly, sucks at the skin.

He starts to stroke the two of them, his owns eyes fluttering shut at how good it feels. He wishes he could watch Hanzo’s face while he does this, but the noises are already too much. Hanzo’s breath is stuttering, both of his hands clenching convulsively on Jesse’s skin. Jesse lifts his mouth to breathe against Hanzo’s ear.

“You sound so good,” he whispers. Hanzo lets out a groan. Jesse’s not sure if it’s from the barely-there stimulation against his ear, or because Jesse’s picking up the pace with his hand, adjusting his grip to be a little firmer, a little tighter.

“I -” Hanzo gasps, trying to speak, but he can’t seem to catch his breath. Jesse releases his grip on the both of them, and Hanzo’s eyes fall open, looking for an answer.

Jesse closes his hand again around just Hanzo. He drags his thumb torturously across the sensitive area under the head. Hanzo’s mouth drops open. Jesse moves his hand up and down, slow and tight.

Hanzo’s hips buck. Jesse’s about to open his mouth, tease him a little more, but - Hanzo’s already coming, hot and wet on Jesse’s stomach.

Jesse’s dick pulses in sympathy, heat burning through him at the sight of it; Hanzo’s grimacing like he’s in pain, teeth grit and utterly silent. Jesse keeps stroking him through, keeps stroking him until Hanzo groans, pushes his hands away, drops forward bonelessly onto Jesse’s shoulder.

“You okay, darlin’?” Jesse asks, low and teasing. Hanzo makes a weak noise against Jesse’s shoulder. Jesse kisses his temple.

With Hanzo still leaning against him like that, Jesse grasps his own dick, starts to touch himself.

“Hanzo,” he murmurs. Hanzo turns his head on Jesse’s shoulder, an acknowledgement. “When I was texting you,” he begins, voice slow and thick as molasses, “Where were you?”

Hanzo buries his face back into Jesse’s neck. “Osaka,” he whispers.

“With your dad?”

“Yes.”

“You touched yourself?” Jesse prompts, hand already speeding up, stomach already tense with excitement.

“Yes,” Hanzo breathes, and Jesse’s getting ready to ask another question, to play twenty questions, but Hanzo continues, “I read your messages under the table at the restaurant we were eating lunch at. When you sent the picture I went to the washroom.”

Jesse closes his eyes, his hand fast and tight, his tongue wetting his dry lips, his stomach clenching.

“I locked the door,” Hanzo tells him, step-by-step, “I touched myself. I thought of this. I looked at the picture and I wanted to touch you.”

Jesse groans as he comes, loud and long. He grips himself tight, riding the waves of his orgasm, and Hanzo kisses his neck.

He feels exhausted afterwards, like he hasn’t slept in years.

He manhandles Hanzo over to the bed, pushes him in under the covers.

For a moment there’s a look of doubt on Hanzo’s face, like he knows he’s supposed to be saying that he shouldn’t stay - but he doesn’t say it. Jesses climbs in after him, spoons up behind him. He thinks that he should have set an alarm. He has a plane to catch.

He can’t think about that. Not with Hanzo’s breath already deepening, warm in his arms. Not with sleep blacking out his peripheral vision, filling his sight with nothing but Hanzo, his inky black hair spreading across the sheets, achingly beautiful.

Notes:

warmsierramist@twitter (takes place in the Darkest Timeline where hanzos dad has seen mccree's dick pic... bone-chilling... i love it, i love it, i love this art) almadraws@twitter (godddd.... sometimes the only way to cope with an awful, heartbreaking scene in a fic is to lovingly draw it out in beautiful detail i guess lmfao THIS IS PAINFUL TO LOOK AT and i love it.) almadraws@twitter (MULTIPLE!!! CAN U BELIEVE.... genjis shirt is so good, and, this picture is good, i LOVE genji saying lmao out loud, fucking same) rokudo@twitter (this piece of art, is beautiful, and i love it, but i keep picturing hanzo saying "oh jesse, if only somebody loved you" which actually, would be better dialogue than whatever i wrote in my fic, didnt frozen win an oscar, ive never even seen that movie) badookie@tumblr (beach party mccree and hanzo....... im so emotional about the painstaking accuracy of their outfits tbh and ALSO it wasnt like expressly written but actually yes you were supposed to be visualizing genji wearing a naruto forehead protector in the beach party scene, so if you weren't please go back and re-read, thanks. I LOVE THIS ARt....)

 Tips for Expanding Your Business On An International Scale

013

Chapter 6: these violent delights have violent ends Summary:

first 2200-ish words are porn sorry :^) then there's some plot.

Notes:

thank you for reading

the best way to contact me is twitter.com/broyaji. if you'd prefer to contact me anonymously my personal blog is banken-man.tumblr.com

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Jesse wakes all wrapped up around Hanzo.

Despite getting off enthusiastically the night before, his dick is hard and throbbing against Hanzo’s hip. Hanzo’s still asleep, as far as Jesse can tell.

He strokes one hand down Hanzo’s bare arm, nuzzles his face a little deeper against Hanzo’s warm shoulder.

“Your beard feels unpleasant,” Hanzo says. Jesse can’t help the way he smiles at that.

With one hand on Hanzo’s shoulder Jesse rolls Hanzo onto his back, straddles his hips. Looks down at him. He’s caught up all over again in admiring all of Hanzo’s sharp, angular features. He lifts a hand to trace over the line of Hanzo’s cheekbone, then the thick cut of his eyebrow. Hanzo’s face reddens under the attention.

“Mornin’, darlin’,” Jesse purrs, voice deepened by the clinging grasp of sleep and his accent syrup-thick. Hanzo seems to become aware of Jesse’s hardness in that moment. He pushes his hips up experimentally, just a hint of pressure.

It makes Jesse gasp, his own hips arching into the friction. He brings his mouth down to Hanzo’s ear, kissing the shell of it, his breaths coming heavy.

“Are you going to fuck me?” Hanzo asks, soft and shy. Jesse can feel the way the words make his face heat where his nose makes contact with Hanzo’s skin. The way Hanzo’s voice drops, gets quieter like his mouth doesn’t fit quite right around the expletive makes his heart clench. He wants to ask, Who taught you a word like that?

It was probably Genji.

“Baby, I’m gonna make love to you,” Jesse promises, breathy and fucking romantic. He continues kissing behind Hanzo’s ear, moves his lips down to his jaw, his neck. His hand is on Hanzo’s thigh, conveniently bared by the cut of Hanzo’s boxers. The sensations make Hanzo gasp, his eyes already losing focus. He’s so good; he’s so fucking good, and Jesse could never deserve this.

“Please do not say that,” Hanzo murmurs, trying to kill the mood even as his legs are falling open under Jesse’s caresses.

“Which part?” Jesse asks, teasing. “You don’t like me calling you baby?” He runs his fingers lightly over Hanzo’s chest. “Or you don’t like making love?” He kisses Hanzo’s collarbones through a grin.

“Both,” Hanzo replies, his tone flat, at first, and then breaking when Jesse bites gently at his skin.

“Okay,” Jesse allows, easy. He leans back, gazing down at Hanzo from above. “I’m gonna make you feel good, though,” he says, like it’s a warning. Then, as he strokes a thumb over one of Hanzo’s nipples he whispers, “Darlin’.” His other hand finally stops teasing, closes around Hanzo’s dick, strokes once, twice, and he whispers, “Honey.” He leans down and presses his lips against Hanzo’s, and against his lips he whispers, “Sweetheart.”

Hanzo is so immediately responsive to the stimulation Jesse gives him. He takes deep, shuddering breaths, he shifts his hips, he arches his back.

Jesse hates to leave him, but he rolls out of bed anyway.

“Where are you going?” Hanzo asks, eyes snapping open as he sits bolt upright.

“Don’t you worry,” Jesse mutters. He’s on his knees digging through his suitcase. It takes him a long, frustrating minute to find his bottle of lube. He stumbles back over to the bed, rifles through the drawer of the side table. It’s a love hotel: there are condoms of every size provided. For a whimsical - perhaps foolish - moment, he toys with grabbing the largest.

He picks out the appropriate size, instead. Safe sex is no joke.

When he fits himself back into the vee of Hanzo’s legs, he finds that he’s ruined the mood a little with his practicality. He smiles ruefully, ducks his head a little. Resumes his lazy kisses. Hanzo remains recalcitrant against him for almost a minute, but all Jesse has to do is slide his hand back up Hanzo’s thigh before his legs are yielding open again. He’s so easy it sends shocks of pleasure down Jesse’s spine.

Maybe after last night he’s not exactly a virgin anymore. But when Jesse closes his hand around Hanzo’s dick again and hears that wounded little gasp, feels the tension in his spine, Jesse’s brain starts chanting it all over again. A virgin, and now, something new: Mine.

Jesse probably couldn’t stop kissing Hanzo if he tried. He has an agenda, knows at some point he’ll have to draw back, take stock of the situation, move on, but right now he’s in this haze of contentment, chest full of this glowing heat that occasionally sparks when Hanzo does something clever with his tongue - God, he’s a quick learner - or rubs his thigh - probably by accident - against Jesse’s groin.

He lifts his head, tries to steady his breathing. It sounds easy in theory, but when he pulls away Hanzo makes a soft, disappointed noise and opens his eyes little, gazing blearily up at Jesse through his eyelashes. Jesse groans, but he forces himself to sit back.

“I’d love to lie in bed with you all day,” he murmurs, opening the foil condom packet. Hanzo gaze sharpens as he watches, and he shifts against the sheets. Jesse thinks he must be nervous. He rolls the condom onto Hanzo’s dick wondering if sex has ever made him feel so ridiculously tender before. “But I gotta leave, so we better get this show on the road.”

And the thing about that is - it must have been the wrong thing to say, because Hanzo goes absolutely still under him. It’s possible that he even stops breathing.

“You’re going?” Hanzo asks, voice a hoarse whisper.

Jesse hadn’t been thinking much about it, but the sadness of it hits him right then. “I gotta,” he says, brushing a strand of hair behind Hanzo’s ear. With a bitter smile, he reminds Hanzo, “Your daddy’s still out to kill me.”

Hanzo frowns this awful, fierce, thoughtful frown that turns his eyebrows into angry slants. Then he surges up out of the bed, catches his arms around Jesse’s shoulders, and pulls him down for one of the most intense kisses Jesse’s ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

It goes on, and then it goes on a little longer, and then Jesse realizes they’re in danger of falling into that same hazy trance as before, so he pulls back again and flicks open the cap of the lube. Hanzo’s attention zeroes in on it immediately.

“I thought that you would be the one to -” He can’t quite seem to finish the thought, cheeks reddening a little.

Jesse can’t quite figure out what the best answer would be. We don’t have enough time is too callous, would kill the mood all over. I wanted your first time to be as pleasant as possible would probably scare Hanzo off fingering, which definitely isn’t what he wants.

I really like taking it up the ass would just make him sound slutty. Which he is, but. Well.

Jesse elects not to answer, instead shifting back onto his knees and spreading his legs. It’s probably a good thing Hanzo can’t see what he’s doing from this angle, because he’s definitely rushing it and that’s not the ideal way to teach by example.

It feels good anyway, and Jesse’s mouth drops open as he works his fingers in. Hanzo’s eyes smoulder darkly as they dart from the slackness of his jaw to the movement of his arm.

“Does it hurt?” Hanzo asks, voice rough. He’s started stroking himself a little.

Jesse clenches his jaw against a whine, has to close his eyes. “God, no,” he breathes. Having Hanzo watch him makes the stretch so much better, makes the elusivity of that angle irrelevant, because he feels like he could come just from this, just from having those eyes fixed on him.

He’s getting a little carried away. He eases his fingers out, opens his eyes, blinks a few times. “It hurts when you’re not used to it,” he amends. “If you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to be careful.” Hanzo’s a virgin. Jesse shouldn’t lead him astray.

Hanzo’s half lidded eyes tell him he’s not really listening anyway, isn’t viewing this as a learning opportunity. His hand has unconsciously started moving a little faster on his dick. Jesse feels very pleased with himself.

“You ready, baby?” He asks, solicitous. He remembers that he promised he wouldn’t call Hanzo baby. Hanzo doesn’t seem like he’s even noticed. He’s nodding, planting his feet against the sheets. The pace of his breathing has picked up. Jesse can see it in the rise and fall of his chest.

Once again, that feeling that he could never deserve this, that overwhelming tenderness. Jesse closes his eyes against it. He settles himself carefully over Hanzo’s hips. He positions Hanzo’s dick. When he finally eases the head of it in, his eyes snap open.

The look on Hanzo’s face is - lost. Astonished. Anguished. When Jesse eases himself further down, Hanzo throws his head to his side, eyes shut tight. Jesse’s insides are clenching around Hanzo, and he knows it’s probably bordering on overwhelming, but he can’t stop himself. It’s been so long since he’s been properly fucked. And God, he’s going to - he’s not going to waste this opportunity.

He sinks himself down fully and lets out this full-throated moan at the exact same time as Hanzo keens like he’s in pain. And then, when Jesse’s not expecting it - Hanzo’s been so placid, so docile, lying there and being so good - Hanzo suddenly fucks his hip up wild and desperate. He impales Jesse so deep that Jesse curls forward gasping for air, shocks of pleasure shooting through him like electricity.

“Christ, Hanzo,” he pants, and Hanzo looks at him, wide-eyed, just as stunned, and then he does it again.

Over and over, Hanzo bucks, using his feet on the bed for leverage, hands twisting in the sheets, and what can Jesse do but ride him, take it, yell every time the angle hits that spot, that spot he can’t reach with his fingers, God, this is everything he’d hoped it would be, virgin, virgin, virgin,but in all things Hanzo is proud, shockingly strong, indomitable.

Jesse’s starting to wonder if that tender feeling that keeps filling him up is some kind of close relative to love, which he’s sure would horrify him if he could fucking think, but he can’t, so instead he bends his body into some awkward, unsatisfying angle because God help him, he just wants to kiss Hanzo.

It doesn’t last, though, not this time, because Jesse misses the way he felt so full before, so he sits himself back up, and when Hanzo slots back into place, warm, full, deep, fitting perfectly into him, Jesse throws back his head in pleasure.

“Jesse,” Hanzo groans.

It hits Jesse like a lightning bolt, it makes him clench and shudder and convulse on Hanzo’s dick, it makes precum spill out of him. He never knew hearing his own name could elicit pleasure like that, but it does, and he wants to hear it again, wants to hear Hanzo desperate, blatant in his wanting, wants to know that it’s because of him.

“Jesse,” Hanzo starts to chant, just his name over and over. His hips are starting to stutter and Jesse knows he must be close, and he doesn’t want this to end but it has to, and when it does it’s gonna be fucking glorious.

So he takes himself in hand and jerks off quickly, only has to stroke himself a few times, the feeling of it a counterpoint to Hanzo’s jack rabbiting hips, the flex and grind of them as he keeps trying to push himself deeper, and Jesse can’t stand how good it feels.

He comes, body rigid, crying out ridiculously loudly, and thank God they’re in a love hotel, actually, with its soundproof walls, because Jesse’s coming like he’s in a porno, throwing his head back and bouncing his hips and shouting Hanzo’s name.

Jesse looks down and sees Hanzo’s eyes fixed on him, a look of awe on his face. There’s a muscle in his jaw twitching and his fists are knotting the sheets and that’s when Jesse realizes Hanzo’s coming too, his hips pressed flush to Jesse’s ass and making tiny movements, not much more than muscle spasms. He’s buried deep, so deep, and it makes Jesse start groaning all over again.

In the aftermath he finds himself wondering: is it sad that it was Hanzo’s first time, and this is still the best sex he’s ever had?

Hanzo’s a quick learner, though. The concession must be made.

Jesse pulls himself off of Hanzo in one move and flops backwards onto the bed. He thinks he would be happy to never move again.

Apparently Hanzo doesn’t feel the same way. He sits up, back alarmingly straight considering the rigorous exercise they’ve just been through. He pulls off the condom and then, to Jesse’s horror, he gets out of the bed.

“Where are you going?” Jesse asks. He wishes he sounded less forlorn. He’s never considered himself the clingy type, but he’s barely even been allowed three minutes of afterglow.

“I am going to shower,” Hanzo says. He shuts the bathroom door behind him. Jesse feels - stunned. First of all, Hanzo’s not the one who’s asshole is still wet with lube. Very rude. Very bad sex etiquette.

Maybe Jesse’s fucked up somehow. That would be pretty par for the course. He’s just not sure… He’d thought he’d done pretty well. He’d been pretty satisfied with his performance.

He’s lying there agonizing about it when there’s a knock on the door. Jesse glances at the clock on the bedside table. It’s half past eight. He’s also not wearing any pants, or underwear, and, actually, now that he’s taking stock of the situation his ass is still gross and sticky. He closes his eyes and breathes a deep, anguished sigh.

“Room service!” Calls the person at the door. There are several problems with that. One of them is that Jesse hasn’t ordered any room service. One of them is that the person behind the door has somehow intuited that he speaks English. Yet another is that he’s fairly sure that love hotels don’t have room service.

Jesse gingerly gets out of bed and pulls on the boxers he’d discarded earlier. On the bright side of things, he’s not walking with a limp.

He puts on the most deprecating look he can muster as he pulls the door open. Genji’s modelling some truly radical bedhead and still wearing the clothes he wore in the car yesterday.

“Just wake up?” Jesse asks, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m eighteen,” Genji explains, waving an arm. “I never wake up before noon unless my life depends on it.” That comment would probably be a little funnier if it hadn’t been for the fact that Genji’s father would kill them both if he found them.

Genji cocks his head to one side suddenly. “There’s someone in your shower,” he says, uncertain. As if he’s not sure Jesse’s aware.

Jesse shuffles his feet awkwardly. “Your brother followed us here.” It seems weird that Genji has no idea. Last night feels like it was years ago. He can’t believe he was grappling with Hanzo in this hotel room less than twelve hours ago.

Genji’s eyes fall, unfortunately, onto the mussed bed sheets. He makes a weird face like he can’t decide what kind of expression he wants to use. Jesse can feel his face going red. There’s no way he’s going to be able to deny what happened here.

“Okay,” Genji says. He carefully averts his eyes, staring blankly at the door Jesse is still holding open. “Well. We should. Get ready. And head out to the airport. I was thinking around nine. See you then.”

And Genji leaves. Jesse feels even worse than he did before. He’s somehow fucked up and made Hanzo mad (is he mad? Or is it some other emotion? Jesse can’t tell) and now he’s alienated Genji too. At least he can be certain what he did wrong in Genji’s books.

It had sort of seemed yesterday like Genji wanted Jesse and Hanzo to… Get along? Make up? He’d given Hanzo the address of the last hotel, after all.

Then again, getting along didn’t necessarily mean fucking each others’ brains out. Which Jesse can’t even be happy about, because Hanzo’s still locked in the bathroom, and God, how long has he been in there, anyway? Jesse’s ass is starting to dry and the lube is getting uncomfortable and with each second that passes he’s starting to feel closer to a temper tantrum.

When Hanzo finally emerges from behind the closed door, a cloud of steam wafting all around him, he's dressed again - in the same clothes as last night, but you couldn't tell that by looking at him. His hair is drawn back into a sleek ponytail. He looks put-together and sharp-angled; his jaw is tightly clenched.

In short, he's the very picture of restraint. No evidence of what they'd done earlier remains. No sign shows that he's the same man Jesse had under him on the mattress, the one Jesse kissed and kissed and felt tenderly for.

Jesse can't stand to look at him. He pushes past into the bathroom.

His normal five minute shower routine gets stretched into ten as he tries to clean up the mess Hanzo made. He grimaces at himself in the mirror afterwards, brushes his teeth fiercely. He dresses in plain clothes that won't attract attention at the airport, won't get him stopped by security. A white button-up shirt, blue jeans. Yes, he wears cowboy boots with them, but they don't have spurs.

He’ll look like any other American tourist, probably. He shoves all of his belongings back into his suitcase and exits the bathroom.

Hanzo has made the bed. He's probably ashamed, Jesse thinks. He doesn't want anyway to know what happened here. Not even the maids at a love hotel.

Jesse’s chest clenches. This is all he amounts to: another shameful secret for the Shimada clan to hide.

God. He's not gonna let that happen.

“What, are you mad at me?” Jesse snaps, because Hanzo’s standing there by the bed not looking at him.

Hanzo actually winces, as if the words have hurt him. But he doesn't make any reply.

Jesse’s fists clench. He crosses the room in a couple of strides, buries a few fingers in the front of Hanzo’s shirt so he’s forced to look Jesse in the face.

“What do you want from me?” He asks. He’d thought he was angry. The way his voice comes out is just sad.

Hanzo, despite the proximity of their faces, drops his eyes to Jesse’s chin to avoid making eye contact. He's quiet for so long Jesse thinks he's trying to get away with not answering.

Then he says, “It was supposed to change things,” and his voice is so soft. Fragile. This is a confession Jesse has forced out of Hanzo with a fist gripping his shirt.

“What do you mean?” Jesse asks. His voice has gone rough. Hanzo’s eyelashes are drooping. Shame, like always. Frustration. Tears are shining in Hanzo’s eyes. Hadn't Jesse predicted, days and days ago, that Hanzo would be the type to cry out of frustration?

“When I had sex with you,” Hanzo looks up into Jesse’s eyes, suddenly fierce and sharp and edged with anger. “It was supposed to change things. You wanted me to. You wanted me to give you my virginity, so I did. But it didn't change anything.”

Jesse - doesn't know what to say. He doesn't understand. “What was it supposed to change?”

Hanzo pulls out of Jesse’s grip so he can turn away. Jesse can see that he's the one with clenched fists this time.

“You're leaving,” Hanzo says.

“Yeah,” Jesse agrees readily. It had never been up for debate. “As long as your daddy’s around to try and kill me, I can't stay.”

“You're leaving me,” Hanzo clarifies. He half turns his head, glares at Jesse out of the corner of his eye.

Jesse doesn't have any quick draw answer to that. He can't say that he'll come back, he can't say that they'll see each other again someday. Even if they were true he couldn't say them, because they don't fix anything.

They don't fix this, they don't fix anything. This is big and broken. This thing between Hanzo and Jesse - or maybe he's being too self-involved. Maybe it’s Hanzo himself. All that misery and loneliness and self-loathing. Jesse’s leaving it all behind.

“I wish I wasn't,” he says. That doesn't fix anything either.

Still, the corner of Hanzo’s mouth pulls up a little bit. It's not really a smile.

There's a knock on the door. Jesse opens it. Genji takes a good, hard look at Hanzo - who looks spotless, not a hair out of place, dressed to kill in his black clothes - and says nothing. The three of them leave the love hotel in total silence.

In the parking lot, Shimada is waiting for them, with twenty armed guards.

He smiles.

Genji looks at Hanzo. Jesse thinks, What was he doing in the bathroom all that time?

When they were in bed together, there was a moment. Jesse’d said, I’d love to lie in bed with you all day, but I’ve gotta leave. Hanzo had gone still. Stopped moving. And after that, he’d changed. He’d gotten more aggressive. He’d been - distracting.

Jesse is a fucking fool, and he’s been reminded of it constantly the last few days. He keeps falling for these little tricks. It’s gonna be the death of him. Shimada’s standing there with a gun - well, Shimada doesn't have a gun. But his henchmen does.

Ha ha. Jesse’s starting to get a little loopy. Caught up on the details.

Hanzo shifts slightly where he's standing, a few steps ahead of Jesse. He's put himself in the line of fire. On purpose.

Jesse’s eyes catch on Hanzo’s ponytail.

He wants to laugh. A fool.

Hanzo spent that time in the bathroom blow drying his hair.

Now he's putting himself at risk of being shot by his own father to save Jesse’s ungrateful, undeserving ass.

That tender feeling? Fuck it, it’s love. One week is enough. One week is enough to know that Jesse McCree would blow up a country to get back to Hanzo, because it doesn't fix anything but it matters anyway, because it has the chance to make Hanzo smile.

That's so goddamn sappy. That's the most romantic thing Jesse’s ever thought in his life. Shit, it’s love, isn't it?

He pushes Hanzo out of the line of fire and puts his hands up.

Shimada beams, evidently pleased with his obedience. He makes a gesture at Hanzo.

Hanzo’s fists clench again, and by now Jesse knows that means he’s feeling defiant.

“Just do it,” Jesse mutters to him. Hanzo glares.

Genji picks up the slack, folding Jesse’s arms behind his back and making it look really realistic. Which is to say - “Ow, Genji, that hurts.”

“Shut up, prisoner,” Genji breathes, and then marches Jesse over to his father.

“What pleasant surprise,” Shimada says. He doesn’t sound very pleased at all.

The knowledge that he needs to act fast presses persistently and uselessly at the back of Jesse’s mind. He doesn’t have a gun on him. Of course he doesn’t. He’d been on his way to the airport. As far as he can tell, Hanzo isn’t armed either. Jesse’d gotten pretty closely acquainted with that outfit last night, and there were definitely no swords or guns hidden under the fabric.

Genji… Genji’s wearing jeans with little patches sewed on. Jesse recognizes Hello Kitty on the back pocket. There’s also a blonde-haired, blue-eyed anime kid who looks familiar. Little headband across his forehead. Jesse can’t remember what he’s called.

Anyway. Jesse can tell Genji would be worse than useless in a fight. He’d be distracting.

Jesse stands before Shimada, mind racing. He’s slightly bent over from the way Genji’s holding on to him. The grunt beside Shimada begins to raise his gun, aiming for Jesse’s head.

Genji relaxes his grip on Jesse’s arm. Jesse honestly can’t tell if he did it on purpose or not. It doesn’t matter; it’s enough. He breaks his arms free and grabs the gun. One hard tug and the gun comes into Jesse’s possession. One pivot and the gun is pressed tight against Shimada’s temple.

Shimada’s bodyguards all freeze, weapons half-raised.

“If you move, I’ll shoot,” Jesse says. His voice is completely level. This is not his first hostage situation. Beneath the hand gripping Shimada’s shoulder tightly, he can feel the way Shimada’s breaths are short and shallow. The man isn’t immune to fear after all.

Genji’s car is still in the parking lot. Jesse makes eye contact with Genji for a second, twitches his head toward it. Genji hesitates. Jesse has no idea what goes through his mind in that moment. He’s staring at the gun pressed to his father’s head.

Before Jesse can really start to worry about it, Genji climbs into the driver’s seat and starts the engine.

Jesse’s eyes meet Hanzo’s. “Get in the car,” he orders, adjusting his grip on the gun. Hanzo’s eyes, like Genji’s, seem drawn to the point where the muzzle meets Shimada’s greying hair. Hanzo climbs into the passenger seat.

“Time for a family road trip,” Jesse mutters to Shimada. He forces him to turn so that Jesse can keep the bodyguards in his sight while they walk backwards toward the car.

For a moment after the door shuts the four of them sit in silence. It’s like they’re all waiting for a cue. Jesse’s mind is racing. He doesn’t know when the thugs outside are going to start shooting, but he feels like, inevitably, they will.

“It sure would solve a lot of my problems if I blew your brains out,” he tells Shimada conversationally.

In the front seat, Hanzo and Genji both go tense.

He doesn’t understand it. Despite everything, they’re both terrified of their father dying.

“Drive, Genji. I got a plane to catch.” Jesse keeps the gun pressed to Shimada’s head, ready for the first sign that things are going south.

The car lurches into motion. Apparently, stress isn’t good for Genji’s already erratic, dangerous driving.

“Christ, Genji, I’m holding a loaded gun back here,” Jesse gripes. Genji replies with a wordless noise of distress. Right, Jesse probably should have handled that one a bit better.

The car proceeds more or less smoothly out of the parking lot from there, merges into traffic on the street. Jesse tries to carefully divide his attention between keeping the gun trained on Shimada and watching out the back window for signs that the armed guards are following. There’s no doubt in Jesse’s mind that they’ll follow; they’re too loyal, too well-trained to give up on their leader. The question is still how Jesse’s going to get out of this alive.

It occurs to him as the vehicle slows for gridlock traffic. “Hanzo,” he calls. Hanzo turns to face him, brow pinched with anxiety. “Come back here,” he orders.

Once again, Jesse is met with that tense moment of hesitation where he doesn’t know if his order will be followed. The thing about Genji or Hanzo disobeying him is that he won’t shoot them if they do. Shimada rebelling against him is no problem. In fact, it might actually be a relief.

But if Genji stops driving the car, or Hanzo refuses to crawl into the back with him… Then he’s stuck. No back-up plan. Probably doomed to die in Hanamura, the way the Deadlock Gang expects him to.

Hanzo undoes his seatbelt and gingerly moves between the two front seats.

Shimada strikes like a snake, hands grappling at Jesse’s wrist for the gun.

The car erupts into incoherent yelling. Traffic has started moving again, so Genji has to keep his eyes on the road. There’s a loaded, cocked gun being wrestled over in the back seat. Shimada has a grip on Jesse like a pitbull and won’t let go. Hanzo crouches there, frozen with indecision until a stray limb catches him in the face, and he reels back for a moment before launching forward to join the fray properly.

It ends when Jesse gets an elbow in Shimada’s stomach, bending him over double in the seat. Hanzo has the gun. Jesse’s panting. One of them is bleeding, but it’s not clear who.

Hanzo makes eye contact with Jesse over his father’s head. Jesse doesn’t look at the gun. He refuses to look at the gun. If Hanzo’s about to shoot him, he doesn’t want to know.

They stop at a traffic light. Jesse pushes the door beside him open. He seizes Shimada, who’s still clutching at his stomach and wheezing, gets a hand around his collar, and throws him out the door of the car. The man stumbles a few times, completely taken by surprise, and then he trips and falls.

In a few minutes, his henchmen will find him there. They’ll get him back into one of their cars and continue to chase Jesse to the airport. The chances of Jesse making it out of here are still close to zero.

Hanzo practically crawls into Jesse’s lap, staring at his father on the side of the road with his mouth half-open. He turns his head, meets Jesse’s eyes again.

Something like understanding passes between them - it’s only like understanding, because it leaves Jesse totally confused about what’s been understood. It doesn’t matter much, really, because the next thing he knows, Hanzo’s leaning forward a little, pressing their lips together.

Earlier that morning, Jesse’d thought he’d never been kissed so intensely by anyone as he’d been kissed by Hanzo. Now he’s thinking he’s never been kissed so softly.

Maybe that tender feeling is mutual.

Hanzo jumps out of the car. He grabs his father by the arm and drags him off the road, into an alley and out of sight. As he disappears, Jesse sees him pull a phone out of his father’s pocket.

Jesse suddenly realizes what he was supposed to understand from that look. Hanzo’s buying him time.

He pulls the car door closed. Genji starts driving again. There’s a weight in Jesse’s lap. When he inspects it, he finds the gun. Just in case.

Jesse touches his lips like he's trying to feel the impression Hanzo left there. He’ll probably do it again, a week from now, thousands of miles away. He'll probably keep doing it. For months, maybe. Keep trying to remember what it felt like.

He’s going to live through this. He’s going to survive Hanamura. Genji weaves through traffic with the help of his GPS, but he keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the road. Jesse keeps looking out the back window, but he doesn’t see anything suspicious at all. No cars following them. No gunfire. Nothing.

That doesn’t mean he can relax. Even when they pull onto the winding drive that leads to the airport, he doesn’t relax. He sits forward in his seat, puts his hand on Genji’s headrest.

“Thank you,” he says. It’s not nearly adequate. Genji’s knuckles are white with the way his hands are clenched upon the steering wheel.

Jesse sighs softly as he pulls away. They stop in the drop-off lane. Before he can shuffle out of the car, leaving the gun behind on the seat, Genji grabs his shoulder.

“It was nice meeting you, Jesse McCree,” Genji says, managing a smile. It’s not the same carefree smile Jesse’d seen at that beach rave party - God, that feels like years ago. But it’s a smile Jesse is glad to return.

“If I’m ever back in Hanamura, I’ll look you up,” he says. Genji laughs.

Jesse gets out of the car. At least half of him expects someone to shoot him dead right there. Nothing happens at all. Genji drives away under the stern instruction of a traffic attendant. Jesse enters the airport and wanders his way toward the departures area.

He approaches the security lineup with no luggage, just the phone Genji gave him in his hand. It has his boarding pass and fake passport information loaded onto it. One of the sleeves of his shirt is stained red with blood. A quick catalogue of his body tells him he's not bleeding, so it must be from somebody else. He has no idea who.

The security officer at the checkpoint takes one look at him and summons someone else - someone who speaks English, he discovers.

Jesse speaks slowly and tries to stomp out his accent to better be understood as he explains: “I took one of them shuttle buses to get here, and I fell asleep on the way.” So far, so good. Nothing too suspicious. Innocuous.

“When the bus stopped I slammed my face into the window and gave myself a nosebleed. I had to use my sleeve to stop the bleeding,” he holds up his arm demonstratively. The security guard grimaces.

“I was so distracted that by the time I realized I didn't have my luggage, the bus was already gone. I can't afford to pay the exchange fee for my ticket, so I need to get on my flight now. Guess I’ll probably never see my suitcase again.”

If I was her, I wouldn't let me through, Jesse thinks glumly to himself.

But he must look as pathetic and hangdog as he feels. The security officer grimaces again - sympathetically, this time - and waves him through.

“You have to do something about that shirt,” she warns him. “They won't let you on the plane if you're covered in blood.”

That seems like a sound general rule. Jesse thanks the officer profusely as he passes to the other side - to safety. Maybe. They won't let Shimada through with weapons, right?

The paranoia doesn't leave him. It probably won't for a long time. Jesse buys a ridiculously expensive shirt with some kind of cute anime character on it from a kiosk aimed at tourists. Genji would get a kick out of it. They should have exchanged numbers. Jesse could have sent him a picture.

In the airport bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror in that special airport bathroom lighting that makes everything look grey, washed out and tired, Jesse gets hit by a crushing wave of sadness. He's trying not to think about - anything. About the words - it was supposed to change things. About other words. Virgin. Mine.

Neither of those words are true now.

Jesse puts the t-shirt on. He throws his old shirt on the garbage. He thumbs the phone on and checks the contacts list. There’s only one name in the address book: Genji.

Jesse takes a picture of himself and that silly anime shirt in the bathroom mirror and sends it.

Forty-five minutes later, he boards his flight. Thirty minutes after that, the plane takes off.

Jesse closes his eyes. One week in Hanamura. He's still alive, but irrevocably changed.

Notes:

thesis: the way the fluorescent lights take everything from you - standing alone in the airport bathroom, nothing left but this lousy t-shirt; to be reshaped by love is a form of violence.

[lilac-5ky]

AGHFGHFHJAHJFHJSHJFSJG hear me screaming in the middle of the night bc this chapter was so gooood?

XXX spoilers for who didn't yet read ch 7 XXX

I honestly didn't expect they have kissed in the past. idk, guess I kinda imagined their first kiss is gonna happen in the present coz of how much Takasugi seemed to be on guard around her then-- as if he had set a line for himself that he shouldn't cross bc of his plans and how they would affect the Tsugaru sole heir? but it makes sense he let his guard down on one vulnerable drunken night,,, hajhjfhsjgjsahhhh look at me read this with a stupid grin on my face lol… the entire scene is so beautiful and serene (one rare moment of calm before the storm before shit hits the fan smh)

also why is this line so sad: "just tonight allow me to sheathe my sword" (and how do you come up with such meaningful lines????)

the drinking part with the boys was so funny! I can totally see that scene happening--nah it's just completely canon hehehe,, the fact that shoyo never met sakomoto makes me sad too :c he'd have been amused by sakomoto 100% lmao,,, and the part where Takasugi hallucinates about shoyo TT_TT </3 </3

for the present: nah, I didn't feel the way reader "changes" her mind comes off as abrupt or anything. for one, she is still in love with Takasugi and the feelings were mutual in the past (yk, the kiss cough cough) even if she was bitter before, thinking he had merely been toying with her feelings to achieve his own goals-- but to almost die saving the life of a "pawn"???? that is either utter stupidity or a sign of his true feelings hehehehe (ntm why you two bickering like kids in the cell?)

ahhh the poetic rain imagery for tears is back!! (although here it's from reader's pov but I have to say-> in canon this boy is just so poetic with his inner thoughts~ the rain monologue from the rakoyou arc is my favorite and also his last words to gintoki were also so tragically poetic ;-; had he not been a terrorist, he should have become a writer/poet imo lmao)

and you ended the chapter with a cliffhanger grrr jkjk ;~; wondering if there is a twist somewhere, like in nobume's case? it can't be, right? it is Takasugi who killed the Tsugaru clan, right? I mean, he had been the one making plans to get rid of this clan but did he change his mind at the last moment and someone else intercepted him to the deed and he managed to save only Harumi before reader's arrival? lol idk what to think….

on the whole, another excellent chapter, author-san! this has to be my favorite fics among all you have written so far *_* thank you once again for bringing this story into existence orz ^^

FIRST OF ALL, omg thank you again for the precious feedback <3

about the past, well you aren't wrong! Shinsuke was the more upright/uptight one for sure between the two of them, considering how 1)he knew what would happen and 2)he is still heavily depressed about the shouyou thing :( and that's why he has a hard time resisting and keeping his guard up. she is so carefree and forward about the way she feels, that he gets carried away. PLUS let's not forget, he is still a teenager at that time, it's heartbreaking if u consider how he never got to live as one :((( and she can afford to do that, but lacks the freedom to live freely, so while on polar situations, they do understand one another!

i won't go into much detail regarding how their relationship "ended" back then, since i'll explain that in future chapters :p so stay tuned ^^

about the present: I feel like this is where the whole tsundere Takasugi trope shines best LMAO. he's always been the kind of person to "reject" his emotions and act as if they don't matter, while acting solely on emotion (aka him acting as if gin and the others arent his comrades while constantly being up their asses, him starting an entire rebellion bcs of shouyou, claiming that people are his pawns despite saving sooooo many of them) and you know, this is one of his charms that goes unnoticed!

It's easy to assume that someone doesn't care enough or that are pure evil based on things they say, while neglecting their actions. In this case, she doesn't really know what to believe. Part of her blames herself bcs she thinks that she fell for his lies, but he never lied to her. Even if he acted coldly towards her in the past, he saved her and taught her things that shouyou taught him. He took care of her in his own way and even now, he didn't have it in him to harm her.

So yeah, in her mind he definitely is responsible for killing her father, and because of that she tried to see the "evil" in all of his actions, ignoring the possibility of them being real and that's exactly why he kissed her. Because he doesn't have an easy time communicating his emotions and he can only hope she sees the truth in his actions. It's hard on him to keep pushing her away and keep acting as if he is the bad guy all the time, despite being accountable for his actions .-. THEY ARE BOTH VICTIMS OKAY LMAO

Back to what you said, SHINSUKE WOULD DEFINITELY BE ONE OF THOSE SECRETLY ARTSY THEATER KIDS IN SCHOOL LMAO I mean he is very poetic like you said! I love that about him, and in general, I'm a huge fan of metaphors myself. Seeing one thing and connecting it to something else, it's just beautiful imo. As to how I come with meaningful lines, WELL they just happen :p I literally have a notebook on me 24/7 so I can always note things down as I think of them :p They always come in handy in future ffs or chapters.

And to end this loooooong ass response, about him being the actual killer or not, you'll have to wait and see :p next chapter will once again be Takasugi POV heavy since I'll finally reveal what the hell went down in the past. Just know that the scene in the first chapter where she had her nightmare, is not 100% correct. I mean, it was just a dream, things didn't necessarily happen like that :p

For real though, thank you for your kind words ahahaha it makes my day to read such comments, really! you are so nice ;-;

[madschiavelique]

𝐛𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐝𝐲𝐬, 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐲𝐬

mentions of : alcohol - being drunk, blood, death, murder, war and battlefield moments, fights, crushed jaw, general violence summary : reader is very drunk, and when Machine Herald comes back from negotiations, he is very surprised to find them in such a state some extra information on this : gender-neutral reader, I mostly use Viktor instead of repeating Machine Herald in this, viktor tends to reader's wounds from a fight they had, kind of an enemies to lovers situation, "who did this to you" author's note : hey besties hope y'all are doing well :) this is a little treat for y'all, currently working on some multiple chapter fic with our fav skeleton material man but for the moment u can have this 10,4k word thing hehe enjoy! (also sorry if you find any grammar mistakes English is not my native language so hfehjxs yeah)

( @wincestisasincest here is a treat, mwah <3)

The flickering fluorescent blue liquid from your bottle of Nedys glows in the darkness. It's a vibrant blue, a jellyfish blue. You wouldn't think at first that this drink was made of brewed Thal. At least if you didn't know the drink was made of blue crabs you wouldn't have guessed it. It looks like a mixture of milk and water that has been dyed, and if you didn't know what it was you might have bet on a coloured kid's juice. This Nedys is not bad, it apparently comes from a tiny countryside called Celirr whose presence on this continent you barely remember. But you didn't ask yourself any more questions about its origin or its producers. What interests you in this bottle is its content and its effects, that is to say: to make you a minimum of sober up. You spent your whole night downing bottles of Carmethys, you don't even remember where you put them. Anyway, it's effective. It's strange, alcohol, it numbs you, tickles you, and turns you into a child. A few shots and you're as happy as a newbie passing his first engineering exam. A few more and you become as sentimental and depressed as a moon or a retrograde. And if you continue, you can even become dangerous, temperamental and angry. As far as you are concerned, you are in the middle of the stage that could be considered the pensive state. It is in these moments that your mind starts to pull out topics and memories, to lose yourself. You go so far as to wonder what the last thing you ate was and then think about how long it would take you to start a Thal farm yourself and brew your own Nedys.

Thinking about it, you take another sip of the drink, putting the bottle back on the floor. You rest your head against the cool wall, your legs stretched out and slightly apart on the floor. You must look like a poor puppet, a slouching marionette without the bonds that hold it together. And that's how you feel, like a puppet manipulated by something bigger. This feeling has been running through your mind since today, since a few hours in fact. The revelation hit you just before you started your chain of black bottles of Carmethys. You feel like a mere pawn in Singed's Machiavellian chessboard. You are lucky... You giggle alone like an idiot in the silence of his flats. You are lucky to have graduated from the College of Tecmaturgy as one of the first in engineering, an inconsiderate and incomparable privilege that has opened many doors and opportunities for you. Pfft, let them take that damn degree back, you don't want it, you don't want it anymore, you never really wanted it anyway. It's brought you nothing but trouble so far.

Eight months ago, that 'benefactor' Singed took you on as an apprentice. What apparently turned him on to you were your skills that you were willing to contribute for the good of Zaun and not Piltover. You never really appreciated it, but the opportunity was golden, how could you not jump on it? To be housed, clothed, fed, for the modest sum of existing. You couldn't find a better deal.

Of course it's not enough for you to breathe the filtered air of his laboratory compared to the polluted and dusty air of Zaun's bowels, no.

These last few months of your life have consisted of nothing but things that never change, only their order varied: assisting Singed in his work, training to fight, killing your 'enemies' and spending time in the lab developing new technologies for the sake of Zaun's Glorious Evolution. Some of these points are not much different, the violence performed is almost the same. It seems that it is this attraction to advanced and revolutionary technologies that justified him taking you on as his second apprentice. You would be surprised if he took you on for your physical appearance and subtle charms. Yet the previous months had begun to rebuild your body and its abilities, taking you from puny and malnourished to athletic and healthy. Why as a second apprentice? Well, because there's that other idiot who was there before. The tall, dark, gloomy guy who rocked the whole Entresol Level and destroyed the Pilties by taking on their Golden Boy and his armies.

The one who hides behind a helmet and perpetually rebuilds his body, the one who thinks he's the most powerful and glorious, to whom everything is owed, and who thinks he's right no matter what he does when he's blinded by this lust for change. He's probably going to hate you when he sees the state you're in and where you are... Not that it changes anything about the relationship. It's quite simple, from the moment you arrived as Singed's second apprentice, our dearest dark-haired man never stopped thinking of you as the dirt on his perfectly polished leather boots from whatever droid he designed: the sticky dirt that you have to get rid of in order to get everything back to normal, the dirt that bothers you, that's hard to clean. What an asshole... However, you feel betrayed by that inner limb, the one that pumps blood, the one that decides whether to keep you alive or to stop everything, and the one that against all odds condemns you to enjoy other souls more than you need to. For your attraction to him is now undeniable, which is one of the reasons you're drinking tonight among others. You think it's far too harsh a realisation with the fact that you no longer want to be Singed's apprentice. All that killing, that blood soaked into your hands, staining them. Painful to get rid of on your skin and clothes, but tattooed with indelible ink in your memory. If you close your eyes you can still see the little spark of life in the eyes of an innocent disappear as quickly as a flake melting on the heat of your tongue.

Your nights are haunted by the screams, by the sound his third arm makes, slicing the air with its laser, piercing skin as easily as a knife through butter. Its buzzing, sizzling, humming like a death whisper, invades your rare moments of peace. And that smell... that smell of grilled flesh, of smoke, that metallic scent of blood makes you sick to your stomach. But you restrain yourself from spilling your insides, you don't want to soil mister's beautiful, clean and polished polyurethane floors. Because yes, in your absent-mindedness and drunkenness, you found yourself in his chambers instead of yours. "He's going to kill me..." Your voice is slightly broken, you screamed the day before yesterday on the battlefield as someone kept coming back for more. The alcohol doesn't help, of course, with its heat in your throat, but it does have the advantage of numbing the painful parts.

Alcohol numbs everything. Thoughts, nightmares, sensations. But it strengthens your emotions, makes you melancholic, maybe joker who knows. The effect varies for everyone after all. But that's why you fill yourself with it tonight, to forget everything, to numb everything. You don't want any more of this, you don't want your own thoughts to make you want to vomit, you don't want murder to be your daily routine, you don't want to feel forced to leave the room when the other one is around to prevent him from trying to probe your vitals and discover the hidden truth of your feelings for him. You're hopeful that your thoughts will be clouded enough that he won't notice, but you're probably dreaming. At this point you don't care, he could shout the worst insults in the world at you and you wouldn't react. Alcohol also has that effect, giving you courage, or underlining your madness, your silliness and your weaknesses. You look down, staring at your chest, face to face with your heart. "What were you thinking, you idiot… why did it have to be him, hum?" What a fool you are, talking to your heart, what the hell. Your eyes return to the void. Maybe you'd better move before he returns. He's due back today from negotiations with the same enemies you were fighting the day before yesterday. Or maybe it's morning? It's hard to tell when you spend most of your time in a city deep in the ground, it's always dark outside the lab windows.

And now you don't know what to do.

Leave? You don't even know if you have the strength to get up, you're tired and there's too much alcohol coursing through your veins. The effort would probably knock you out and you would have even more problems when you wake up. Stay and face your "teammate"? Staying risks a lot, one of the last sometimes unpleasant virtues of alcohol is that it unties your tongue. You might say something you'd regret. You'd be kicked out, at least he'd have helped you move, if he deigns to help you. And as you continue this inner monologue, weighing the pros and cons, you hear the distinct sound of a pad being keyed with a security code and an airlock opening. Damn, he's back. Viktor. Heavy footsteps echo on the smooth floor, the heaviness of leather and metal is incomparable, there is only one pair of boots with the same heaviness in this city. The airlock closes with a sound of sucked-in air.

Viktor always has this weight in his step, as if he is constantly carrying all the crimes he has committed. There are so many of them, and some in which you participated willingly. But his gait is by no means melancholic, it is dark and threatening. He's so hard to follow, his long legs always moving at twice the pace of yours, his cloak flapping in the air on missions and his arm twisting mechanically like a third eye that sees everything as a target. You'd step on his damn cape, it would strangle him a bit and surprise him, although his throat isn't really fleshy anymore...

It's so complicated to detect emotions under his helmet, this mask he wears and that changes him so much. The famous one he wears almost constantly, obscuring his voice, making it sunless and static. From what you can hear so far, he didn't take it off when he came in. The lights switch on suddenly, causing you to squeak and groan. You squeeze your eyelids tightly, grumbling. He could have left the lights off.

Your complains must not have been the quietest, because you hear his heavy footsteps coming towards where you are slumped. It's surprising that he didn't sense your presence as soon as he entered, as he is so sensitive to heat sources and the presence of those within fifty metres of him. He has this bad habit of trying to get into the mind of everything that moves, which is obviously most annoying.

Among the many improvements to his body that Viktor had been able to make during his evolution, he had managed in a way that escaped you to allow him, via particular waves, to read the thoughts of others – an improvement particularly useful for his enemies and concerning other negotiations that allowed him to test the sincerity of potential allies. At the beginning of your cooperation, he was constantly intruding into your mind. You quickly learned to block him by creating a chip that developed magnetic fields capable of interrupting this enhancement. Keeping some semblance of privacy within Zaun is an imperative, albeit complex, thing. You have repeatedly caught him trying to break in, without success. Your body was alerting you to a change in the waves surrounding you to warn you of his attempts. And that's for the best, he doesn't need to see your weaknesses and even less to know that he's part of them. " What are you doing here?" His mechanical voice, slightly pierced by a static hum, sounds annoyed, cold. His accent is as always monotonous, separating each syllable as if his tongue cut each one distinctly and took little care in pronouncing the vowels.

You open your eyes again, he's standing two meters in front of you, his eternal helmet in place and his cloak floating slightly above the ground, his third arm examining you. His tone is visibly exasperated, not surprisingly, he would probably have preferred to spend a quiet evening without having to deal with the second apprentice who is drunk at the moment. "Do you really care?" You push slightly on your voice, raw and cracked. You don't really like the situation, though you are your own executioner. Letting Viktor see you in this weakened state upsets you. Why is he so stoic, so inexpressive with that mask? He is motionless, not moving a millimetre, his cloak stabilising in the absence of movement. There is a small silence, your answer apparently does not satisfy him. "What are you doing here?" he repeats, his tone slightly different but not deviating from his irritation. You take your bottle of Nedys in hand and take a sip to help your throat respond. You are lucky enough that he did not raise his voice. You put the bottle back down. "I think it's pretty obvious. I am sobering up." He says nothing again, who knows the way his eyes look at you through his helmet.

Honestly, you don't know if you'd rather find out, it's probably better that way.

The show must satisfy him : you, his daily pain in the ass, completely wrecked to Carmethys.

"How did you get in?" You don't even think you know the answer to his question anymore. Both of your flats open with codes that you enter on a HoloPad. Maybe you opened it with an accidental malfunction? You don't remember, alcohol scrambles your mind. "How were the negotiations?" Bravo, deflecting the subject, it will get you out of the question if he doesn't push more on this one. He knows full well that you have no interest in negotiation discussions, which is why he takes care of every meeting with the other councils in Zaun and other regions. And of the two of you, he is undoubtedly the most convincing. There is a silence, you wonder what he thinks. Although you probably have the ability to rack your brains and produce an improvement similar to Viktor's for penetrating minds, you had never started a construction like this. Obviously, you had been curious about the ideas in that skull of his, but you had never tried. His meddling in your mind makes you feel as if he always knows everything, ready to say "I'll crack your head open like an egg and fry your thoughts".

Compared to him, you are still under-trained. Your mastery of various weapons and technologies is improving, and you will soon be able to build a weapon for your own use and of your own design.

You made some progress in chemistry, helping you greatly in some of the advances in biological weapons. Singed says that you need to call upon the biggest darkness, the deepest shadows within you and transform all these aspects into your motivation. You never thought it would be so complicated, you just have to be angry. It makes you wonder if Viktor has been intentionally playing on your nerves from the beginning to release your hatred and drive forward your training as a devotion to your work... No, Viktor doesn't help, he gets rid of the things that get in the way of his plans as quickly and efficiently as possible. He's probably already thought about killing you. Maybe he's thinking about finishing you off right now. What a perfect opportunity, with you at his mercy : weak, drunk, and unable to defend yourself. You are going to be wiped out, like a word on a blackboard, one swoosh of the duster on complicated equations because you are the problem in the problem.

It would be a thorn out of his side to remove you. Maybe he'd do it the easy way, a quick, smoking hole betwee, your eyes with his third arm. Or if he's feeling theatrical and sadistic he might eventually want to thrust his sceptre slowly into your flesh, revelling in your disappearance from his life and the end of the little spark in your eyes. Right now your inner euphoria is ebbing, fading, you're starting to feel sad now, gloomy. You feel Viktor trying to intrude your mind, but your chip still manages to push him away. "Are you drunk?" It doesn't take an upgrade or enhancement to figure this out, your attitude and what you said earlier certify his words. Nevertheless, his tone suggests surprise. "We can't hide anything from you." He remains motionless, probably wondering how he will get rid of you. Supposedly, he could throw you out of the room, his anger would be enough to lift you off the floor and move you. But would he spend his energy and time to do such an action? Especially if it involves you? You doubt it very much. This voiceless observation of each other is beginning to bother you. Viktor is not chatty by nature. Whenever you get together it is for training or on the battlefield. He doesn't really like to collaborate with you to build anything, totally preferring to be alone in his laboratory and make his own advances. In any case, you don't get together to chitchat. The few times you do meet, the peaceful state doesn't last long and one of you starts an exchange of reproaches and insults, or one of you leaves before the other has had time to say anything.

But occasionally he doesn't wear his mask for training, which surprises you every time. His features are not graceful, but the depths of his eyes could consume you like acid, and his hair looks so soft against the harshness of what he presents. His eyes... you want to see them, right here, right now. Contemplate their honeyed amber colour, their sunny hue. Those same irises that transform when anger consumes them and turn them into a lake of ink with golden, dark, deep reflections. Your reignited fever prompts you to say: "Can you take off your mask?" Your voice is tired, terribly small, vulnerable. And Viktor remains as imposing as ever, towering over you as if you were a miserable ant that he could simply crush under his heavy boots or disintegrate with a beam. It's as if he's barely breathing, inaudible. After all, you're not even sure if his lungs are real or metallic and cold. He takes a small breath, as if he's about to say something... but you cut him off, almost surprised by what you're saying but not letting it show, at least you hope not... "Please..." You feel exhausted, but you resist sleep. Your physical and inner discomfort keeps you awake. Time stands still, is he hesitating, or is he just frustrated by your state? It wouldn't be news if he was exasperated with you. He lets out a sigh, his shoulders barely drooping under the movement. You wait for his move, will he refuse? Probably, what were you thinking when you said that... As if he would listen to you. And yet you wait for his next gesture, without promising yourself the moon of course.

It's painful to get your hopes up, especially with Viktor, but sometimes he's so unpredictable that a part of you still foolishly hopes that something will happen. Then, suddenly, he tilts his head slightly forward. You don't leave him, eyes wide open, mouth closed, just waiting for what he's about to do. He slowly raises his gloved hands to his mask. You have rarely seen his hands, he often wears his gloves even during training. To tell the truth, you only know Viktor's dark clothes and his rarely visible face, you don't know his torso, you don't know his legs, you don't know his arms. Everything is covered and uncovered in an indefinite mix of metal, fabric and armour that never lets you know where the machine begins and the man ends. You remember the first time you saw him without his mask. You expected an older man, in his late forties, but when you saw him you didn't expect to see a remnant of youth. How could anyone be so tough and hardened? Why did he always have to show only his fortress and never who he really was?

Was he ashamed of it? In the moment, the question seems absurd. Pfft, ashamed? Viktor? You think you would never have put those two words in the same sentence before. But what if he is really hiding, what if he is simply ashamed, even afraid? His hands look so big, you are sure they are bigger than your head. He places them on either side of his head. You look at those two slits where his eyes should be, they seem to burn with a fierce, angry fire. He places his thumbs on the sides of the helmet and presses two buttons that you cannot. The gesture causes pressure and a sound of rapidly blowing air can be heard coming from the mask. The central part of the helmet, a sort of geometric heart of meticulously polished steel, moves forward and upwards as you hear Viktor take a breath, still modified by the device. The mechanism makes a small metallic noise, like air on a blade, like a knife being sharpened. Then he lifts it, and you look at him like a child desperate for an answer to its question. Thick chocolate-brown hair falls in front of his face, shiny, parted in a central parting and combed back with an unconscious charm. You then discover his pale forehead, calm, proud, leading to arched and slightly frowning eyebrows.

With his eyelids closed at the moment, you discover his nose. It had never been thin, in fact it was quite prominent, and you find yourself thinking that it might be a physical complex. What if he was hiding his face for this? No, that's absurd. His sharp cheekbones meet the metal, accentuating a jaw marked by the matte steel. A mole sits under one of his bluish rings. A sharp cupid's bow leads to his thin, shaped lips, contrasting their pale pink with the light tone of his skin, a mole placed above them. You regain his eyes and hold your breath. Under drooping eyelids are hidden his two irises, the same colour as an autumn leaf caressed by the sun, as beautiful, luminous and dark as two solar eclipses. And these eyes, they look at you, contrite, curious, annoyed... and yet you seem to discern something else in their reflection, under those lashes that protect them.  It takes you a while to work this out and you decide to ignore it, but he seems to be unwilling to admit something: he looks worried about your state. The mutual contemplation is silent, honestly you don't know if asking him to take off his mask was a good idea. He unsettles you, and you know that the feeling is not only due to the alcohol.

Everything is so much more expressive all of a sudden, but one thing remains in your mind: he really listened to you, he took off his mask. You know for a fact that since he is in his flats, he would have taken it off sooner or later, whether you asked him to or not. However, he could very well have continued this exchange with it, as he always does. And it's strange that he listened to this request, he who is usually stubborn and doesn't listen to anything you might say. "You're wounded." At first you don't understand his sentence, if it's a question, if it's a statement, you only understand until when you frown and your head hurts. Before he arrived, the alcohol had completely anaesthetised you, it had annihilated your sensations, dulled your senses. But you feel in the moment, as you crease your forehead, that it's pulling, it hurts in three places. One of the pains comes from your forehead near your hairline on your right, the second spreads over part of your cheek, and the third is on your lip. The lip, you noticed. It hurt every time you brought the neck of the bottle to your mouth. You had to cut it open. As for your forehead, you had an idea of how that pain and potential bruise had come about. "What happened to you?" You don't want to answer his question, simply because you are ashamed of the answer. You didn't help yourself to these bottles from Singed's storage room. Amongst all his vials and strange elixirs, you didn't want to risk taking something that wasn't supposed to be consumed to get drunk. So you went to The Last Drop to buy a few bottles.

There were, as most evenings and times, Zaunites. However, luckily, the bar was not very full, just a few drinkers and other shimmerers having a good time. You weren't really going to The Last Drop often, because drinking while working with Viktor and Singed is not a common thing. After all, why would you want to spend precious time of your life having fun and pleasing yourself in a selfish way when you could be putting your knowledge to work on something revolutionary and great like the Glorious Evolution? But you had made an exception for tonight, just this once. All you had to do was to go there, get your things, and leave as quickly as you had come. You were originally going for a single glass of very strong alcohol to quench this feeling that was eating away at you unpleasantly from the inside like a rat digging its way out from a fire. One of the civilians had called you. A group of some competitors, some with chemtech and some with simpler gear, had invited you. They were running some kind of shot contest, similar in principle to all other drinking competitions. They asked you to join them, wondering how one of Singed's apprentices could handle alcohol. You had come to get drunk, you were not losing anything in exchange for this commitment, so you simply accepted.

While three guys had already rolled under the table and others had given up, you were affronting the last one still standing. He was wobbling, his eyes fighting the irresistible urge to close his lids and fall asleep. You weren't far from surrendering to sleep either, but probably less so than he was. You took the next shot, not taking your eyes off each other. You were getting tired of this game, it was getting late and who knows what your schedule would look like the next day. As you returned your glass on the table, lining up with all the others in a grotesque group, you let out a simple but convincing: "you look exhausted, wouldn't it be better if you stopped resisting? And, as if he was absolutely manipulated and obsessed by your words, he let go. He fell head first onto the table. Except that one of his comrades, staggering with alcohol coursing through his veins, thought he noticed a shortcut to victory. He accused you of having taken advantage of a technology that could put others to sleep. While denying it, you kept his idea in the back of your mind. You were nearing the end of your latest invention in the lab, and developing a soporific weapon could perhaps lead to something useful. A violent and heated argument between hammered people, including yourself, broke out. The dispute escalated quickly, you felt your arm being firmly grasped, and that was enough to start the fight. You gave a violent punch in the ribs to a guy who was sent against a wall, crushing a chair or two in the process. One of them gave you a loose but powerful blow on the skull with his fist, sending sparkles in your skull and stars in your eyes. You threw your fist in his face and knocked the table over him with all your strength. Another one leapt on you, sending a right on your cheek and partly on your mouth followed by a big knee in the stomach, bringing you inevitably to the ground. You grabbed one of the broken legs of a chair and with it sent him an impressive blow in the belly and then the back of his skull. Breathless, he fell back to the ground, swallowing large gulps of air, better than he swallowed alcohol. Your strength increased by various personal improvements is so much easier to use under alcohol and anger. Everything pulses through your veins like a frenzied drum encouraging you to hurt more and hit harder. You looked at the damage and then spat into one of your old shot glasses: saliva mixed with the carmine of blood, your lip had split open. The Last Drop looked like a small battlefield. No other civilians would step forward. They were right, it seemed you were having trouble controlling yourself. You then made your way to the counter one last time. The bartender seemed startled, but this was nothing new to him. You asked him for a bottle of Carmethys. Slowly he told you that he had no more, as you and the group of competitors had finished all the bottles.

You sighed and took a deep breath. The rest of the room was holding theirs. You then asked for a bottle of Nedys. You had to curb the alcohol for tonight, Nedys would probably help you sober up a bit. He hastily placed a glass bottle in which the famous blue glistening liquid was floating. You reached into your pockets for a credit. After the tiny massacre you had just made in the room, you could at least tip the poor barman. You put the golden coin on the varnished steel. Bottle in hand, unsteady, you walked back to the exit under the gaze of all the drinkers. Indeed, telling Viktor about this disreputable episode was something you wanted to avoid. You simply replied: "You will probably hear about a slight incident to The Last Drop that is not of my making." He tilts his head back slightly, as if he doesn't dominate you enough. The judgment in his eyes is so intense that you struggle not to look away. He is displeased, there is no need to ask. If you condense your glamorous actions so far, they can be summed up as you drinking quite a lot of alcohol with simple Zaunites, starting a fight that resulted in several people being injured and furniture having to be replaced, and breaking into Viktor's flat without his permission. All this, in one evening. So yes, you don't need to read his mind or posess any enhancement to know that all this nonsense was done in record time during his absence. He must even wonder how much stupidity you could have done during the rest of his stay. Two days, it had only been two days since he had left and you were left in a pathetic state. The consequences would probably fall on him. As apprentice number two, and a "newbie" at that, you couldn't carry all that responsibility. You looked very silly there, with your bottle of Nedys, of which you had only drunk a third. All the alcohol coursing through your veins was beginning to carry all the regrets, and the traffic was smooth on the highway of Guilt. He seems to be detailing your scratches, it's not something new on your body. The blows from some training sessions sometimes form clouds of bruises on your skin, staying for weeks. And yet, you still feel like he's holding back. "What have you been drinking?" His question sounds like an order. The second part of his interrogation would probably have been "to end up so wasted that you thought coming here would be a good idea?" You don't answer him, feeling ashamed and afraid that the next part of his question is about quantity.

However, as strange as it may seem and despite all this, you and Viktor understand each other. You can't stand each other for more than a couple of minutes, but you do have occasional moments of strange understanding, moments when you don't care how the other one will take it. You start to stare at him, he looks tired, his shadowy circles darkening his eyes and looking even bluer than they usually do. You feel guilty, the two days he's been gone must have been really hard, especially when you know that Viktor sleeps very little. He always comes to training sessions with dark circles on the rare occasions when he's not wearing his mask, you doubt he's getting a full night's sleep. He is often busy with battles, experiments, reports and letters for negotiations... He never seems to get a full night's rest, and here you are, annoying him when all he's probably looking for is rest? What an egotistical, stupid person you are. Your attention drifts to his hair, so sombre. It looks like the calm black current of an oil stream. It must be so soft to the touch, slipping through your fingers, caressing your palm as it escapes.

Suddenly he asks: "Why are you looking at me like that? And there are so many things you would like to say to him, that you would like to scream at him until your voice fails you, that you would like to cry until you have no more tears to shed, so many, so many... How can you tell him that his gestures and his voice fly you miles above the clouds? But you could hardly speak, your heart was so full that even those works seemed to choke you. It must be something wrong with your lungs, for you don't seem ever to get enough air when you're around him. Always that same feeling, that warmth that takes place when his eyes meet yours. And you can't think of anything else to say in response except a weak question that surprises you almost as much as it does him: "Where has your smile gone, Viktor? You have never, ever seen him smile, heard him laugh, seen any joy other than satisfaction in him. You had only seen his eyes crinkle in anger and hide under his bushy eyelashes, his lips curling up like a wolf's and showing his fangs to prepare to shout. Joy for him seemed to be a commodity that consumed more energy than it provided, like a chemical drink not strong enough to keep his circuits constantly energized, a fuel too expensive and luxurious that he could not afford to consume regularly. His favourite oil was fuelled by painful things: regrets and secrets. For it is well known: Pain is as cheap as clay, and twice as common. What matters is what you do with it. And Machine Herald had decided to make it its constant and inexhaustible source, its purpose. With all the atrocities he was causing, perhaps he was denying himself joy. Perhaps the problem was simply that a constant guilt forbade him to be happy.

He has lost his smile, and you have never seen it. His eyes glow like a cat's, like lights in the night. "Are you in pain?" This answer surprises you even more than your previous rhetorical question, because of all the possible possibilities it is probably the one you least expected. You were rather expecting a "get out" or a "does Singed know ?". You almost thought he would have left without saying another word and let you sleep there. You expected everything but this: that he would ask you how you were. So surprised, and so dazed, you feel amused by the situation. It's like a little pink bird chirping in your chest, its giggles rising up into your throat. You breathe out of your nose, then start to laugh slightly. Your mouth stretches into a smile, but your suddenly stretched split lip sends a burst of burning. You squint one eye and wrinkle your nose at the sudden and sharp pain. Your laughter has made you breathe too suddenly and your red knuckled hand comes to your belly where you can still feel the blow of the knee cutting off your air. Some nice bruises are likely to show up in a few places on your body unfortunately. " A band-aid and off I go " you lie, gritting your teeth as you rest your head against the wall and close your eyelids firmly.

You'll get an extra bump, most likely. You open your eyes again, your gaze drifting to the leather of Viktor's boots. Clean, aged with time, and heavy, so heavy. You saw them kicking, walking on land you had never seen before. You saw them crush the head of a fallen soldier who probably didn't deserve to die squashed under the weight of boots like his. You didn't come on missions very often, and have been trying less and less lately to come specifically for these reasons. At night when you dream and are not busy with various inventions, you find yourself in the gallery of scenes from your life. It's a focus, where your eyes zoom in on moments, skip them, try to avoid them or loop some of them - maybe because they please you, or maybe because you want to remember the horrors you committed with him. In the darkest, most shady corner of the gallery, you hang up all the pictures of him, all the battles he's been in. Close-ups of his hand as he aims his third arm at his victims, the great judge of life and death. Landscape shots where pools of blood feed the ground. And like in a museum, there is a description and sometimes even an audio recording. It's the same ones that come back: his accent, the buzz of the laser, the howls of rage and fear that intermingle with the harsh clash of iron against iron. You wish you could find the rain that would erase the past. You look at that wave that will never reach the moon, like it, you lie down and remember

You hear him sigh, the sound even more dramatic than if he were wearing his mask. You dare not meet his gaze. You don't have the strength to raise your eyes and meet his. Your eyes still riveted to his legs, you notice another move you have never seen him make towards you: he bends his knees. His cloak hits the ground like cherry juice, folding into shapes you don't notice in your peripheral vision. You still watch the leather crack and pucker like wrinkles on aged skin. He is close to you, knees bent, facing you, you know it but you still don't look up. You are immobile, unable to move. He is unreadable in his silence, and that is undoubtedly what frightens you the most. You have rarely seen him so unpredictable, but it was probably unpredictable for him to find you slumped over, there in his flats, drunk and moreover injured. You don't know what to expect. Will he stand there, at your height, knees bent, facing you so closely for a long time? Because for you the seconds seem as long as minutes. Everything passes without transition in your head. Maybe he will finally kill you, do as you originally thought and finish you off right there with his third arm or his sceptre. Maybe he had asked what you had done that night, only to come back the next day and tell The Last Drop that such an incident would not happen again because he had taken care of it personally. Perhaps he had finally asked if you were in pain so that he could enjoy playing with you even more when he killed you. His favourite oil was fuelled by painful things.

It applied both ways, after all: his pain, and the pain he was inflicting on others. You were going to end up under one of his boots, your jaw crumbling under the heavy weight of steel, your teeth cracking on the ground like pearls in a pool of blood as his would show from beneath his lips to finally smile. And the only smile you'd ever see from him in your life would be the first and last one before you died. You shudder as an ice-cold sensation lifts your chin, bringing your head up. His index finger has just raised your chin. And when your eyes finally meet his through your eyelashes: you feel as if they are burning your skin like two suns, warming your cheeks with their heat. He is close, so close that you can feel your own breath washing over his face. He details you, or at least he details your wounds. His eyes are locked on your forehead, where dried, crimson blood has run down your brow like a small waterfall. The wound must have reopened because you feel an intense burn emanating from where the cut should be. His other hand comes to pull a strand of hair out from in front of the cut, and you inhale through your teeth as his finger ventures too close to it. It stings, very hard, but somehow the spawn of his metallic hands tenderizes your swollen flesh. His eyes drop for a brief moment to scan yours, then he continues his gestures.

He must have taken off his gloves in your moments of loss on his shoes, leaving his fingers, a combination of light studs and cables, to take the air. You watch him, your head still held up by his other hand. He looks upset, but who wouldn't be? His fingers continue down to your cheekbone, a large bruise seems to form there, as he presses lightly on your skin with his thumb your cheek feels throbbing, feeling stiff and firm. You press your lips together in a thin line but even so a burn catches you as the cut on your lip tugs. It must have reopened when you smiled, because you can distinctly feel its metallic taste spilling into your mouth. You breathe quickly, the pain on all sides seeming to scorch you everywhere. But a sudden chill sends a jolt through you and your eyes flutter from the shock. The thumb of the hand Viktor was using to hold you in place has just landed on the cut on your lip. Your mouth trembles with pain, and you're sure that your trembling is spreading to the fresh metal that the skin of your lip touches. A flap of flesh in your mouth is bitten between your upper and lower canine teeth, trying as best you can to prevent a few complaints and groans of pain.

But what is he doing? Is he doing it intentionally? That's probably it, yes, it can't be anything else. In any case, your face can't escape, his other hand kept on your sore cheek. You can feel clicks whispering under his palm. Your eyes stop their blinking frenzy and return to his. He is definitely angry. His eyebrows are furrowed, his nose wrinkles. His upper lip is slightly raised and twitching. And his eyes, oh, his eyes - they are burning as ever. He parted his lips, his thumb coming slightly away from your own, but not leaving its place much. "Who did this to you?" His tone is almost scolding, his accent becoming even more jerky and clipped. He's probably annoyed that the novice apprentice got screwed like that, shaming the Glorious Evolution by strutting to The Last Drop and engaging in combat with civilians who aren't even worth a glance. Yeah, that's probably why he's so angry... isn't it? He would never care about you and your physical health... would he? "You don't know, neither do I."

His face does not change, his gaze never ceasing to dwell on your cheek and lips. A muscle tenses near his eyes. He's probably thinking that this will teach you a lesson, that after all it's your fault that you got into this situation, not his. He is not satisfied with the answer you give him, but he moves on to the next subject as he has understood that you could not answer any further. "Can you stand up?" Here comes the moment when he's going to get you out of his chambers and let you go back to your own so that you don't disturb him anymore. "There's only one way to find out." You place your hand on the floor, your second one slowly and boredly following its twin's gesture. You bring one knee towards you, the second following with the same delay. Viktor gets up with ridiculous ease compared to the trouble you are taking to raise yourself. Your feet push against the floor, your back pressing further against it to allow you to push off your legs and slide onto the cool surface. You stagger slightly, and your teammate's hand grabs your forearm to hold you up. His grip is firm, but it doesn't hurt, it only supports you. As you stand up, you realise that you've been a bit heavy on the drinks. You feel heavy, as if you have leaden bones. You feel that if you try to take a step, you'll just collapse and never get up again.

"I think staying on the ground and crawling would have been easier," you gasp as your gaze seems to widen and give you the impression one moment that the ground is closing in on your face very quickly and the next that you're standing on top of the Old Hungry. Viktor is ranting at himself. You've been nothing but trouble for the last few minut-months, yes for the last few months. "You could have drunk a little less..." is all he mutters before he stoops. And the next thing he does surprises you even more than the rest of the evening you've just spent. One of his hands goes below your knees, the other behind your back. It feels strange, as if your whole body is made of cotton and his hands are just water, refreshing you and grounding you in this reality where you feel light and volatile like the flame of a candle. A hiccup of surprise escapes your lips, mingling with a complaint, as he lifts you off the ground. He couldn't have looked more disinterested than he does now, as if you barely weighed anything. You often forgot that not all his limbs were made of flesh and bone, and that most of them were made of aluminium and steel, so that the strength he possessed was far more committed and powerful than mere ordinary muscles. You might have expected him to have an iron fist, but he seemed to hold you as if a fragile spider's web was woven between his fingers.

Your eyes were glued to him, and you wondered if you had hallucinated or imagined the whole of the previous exchange and in your drunken delirium you had dozed off until you finally fell asleep. Your tired mind must have done the rest and dragged you into this strange fantasy. But the cracked and painful parts of your body keep you far too awake for it to be the fault of the dreams. He moves forward, slowly, out of his chambers. It's dim in the hallway, contrasting with the stark, blistering light of the room. His flat is not very big, yours is a carbon copy except for a few details. For example, Viktor has no kitchen. It's quite simple, with all the improvements made to his body, his internal organs had been affected and replaced by various artificial substitutes. As a result, the nutrients he needed were not up to your or any other nutrition standards. You had made some enhancements to yourself as well here and there, but you were far from Viktor's stage where almost his entire body had been replaced by mechanics. You wondered what was left of his humanity, what he had kept since then. Of course, he still had his head, but what about his abdomen? And what was below... You refocused yourself as best you could to avoid keeping any libidinous thoughts in the moment. It would not be good if he tried to probe your mind again while you were thinking such things. As you gazed at him with half-closed eyelids, he stopped. His eyes were down on something in front of him. You followed his gaze. He seemed to be having a determined staring match with your HoloPad. Perhaps he thought he could disrupt it via a magnetic field that some kind of enhancement might have launched?

He must have managed to hit some of the circuits, because the blue grid of numbers set for you to enter a code had gone out, leaving instead a small plate a few inches wide. He frowned even more. "What's that?" He looked frustrated, but mostly curious. There was no way he was going to get past this stage of the code though, Viktor didn't know the subtlety of it. How could he after all, he no longer possessed one of the necessities that activated the mechanism. You hold out your hand, bringing it close to the plate. You place your thumb on it, a white ray passing underneath it before it glows green. You hear a sound of air being sucked in before the door slides open on its own into a slot in the wall. " Digital imprint," you whisper to him. He looks singularly surprised. Of course he would never have thought of that.

He walks through your flat, stopping in your living room. It's dark, and the only things that light the way are the little orange emergency exit light boxes scattered on some of the walls acting as nightlights. "To the left, last door in the corridor," you murmur. You don't dare speak loudly. It's as if, by raising your voice, you risk chasing away this moment. If it's a dream, you don't want it to burst like a bubble. You don't dare admit it out loud, and you probably never will, but you feel good, there, in his arms. You're almost lulled to sleep by the muffled whirring, clattering gears and purring engines that blow through the steel of his body. His embrace is cold, but comforting. You've never had such closeness with him, so you try to think of every possible detail to make a new picture that would end up in the gallery of your life. He arrives at your room, where the door is already half-open, allowing him to enter the room. He brings you in and lays you down on your bed, gently, and even though everything seems to be blurred like the horizon by the heat, you know that he is taking the greatest care to lay you down. He sets you up so that your back is against the wall that touches one side of your bed. "In the next room, the bathroom, the cupboard above the sink..." you stammer, as if your lips were long like waves and tangled as they tried to wash up on the sandy shores of speech. You give him this information because, after all, Viktor does not heal himself as you do. His improvements don't require medical attention or bandages like yours. He's given up disinfectant alcohol, plasters, ointments or medicinal pills a while ago. The advantage of not being 100% human anymore, you suppose.

But maybe he's not going to fix you, maybe he's going to leave you there to sleep and he just wanted to get you out of his flat and have a peaceful night. He leans over to turn on your bedside lamp, leaving you grumbling again. And then he leaves you and goes out into the hallway. If the light wasn't there and on like it is, you would probably have crashed from sleep right away. You still wonder what it must be like for him to sleep. You always see him with dark circles, but does every mechanism in his body really need to sleep or rest? Does he sleep? Is he constantly awake? How could you know, you hardly see him these days. He leaves, you stay, and it's been a while since his presence at the labs diminished. He's always out of town, you pass him two days a week, and you find yourself feeling lonely. He comes back into the room, a whole kit in hand. He lays out all his finds on the cover of the bed: a pack of cotton balls, a large bottle of disinfectant alcohol, healing strips, a tube of ointment, a pan with metal tweezers and a plate of painkillers. You look up, in his hand he is holding a glass of water which he hands to you. You reach out to grab it, holding on to it with both hands to make sure it doesn't fall in your lap. A sound of thin aluminium breaking, and Viktor hands you a tablet. You take it without hesitation, its floury feel leaving an unpleasant trace in your throat which you chase with more sips of water.

"Did you go to the toilet?" he asks as he uncaps the bottle of disinfectant and grabs cotton balls. On the spot the question almost makes you laugh, but although your mind is muddled you soon realise that the question is a medical check. It would be a pity if you ended up in an ethylic coma. You think back to the evening. You remember that on several occasions during your trip to The Last Drop you went to the toilet between shots. "Yes," you mumble. The care and attention to detail with which he prepares the necessities to treat you is remarkable. He then moves considerably closer to you, a metal clamp holding the alcohol-soaked cotton ball. "Ouch," you complain as he presses it to your forehead near your roots. He doesn't press like a madman, he's not a brute, but he's very careful. He squeezes the cotton wool enough for a trickle of alcohol to run in a straight line down your forehead. The first few moments seem to be as hot as two fires meeting and bickering in the square. Viktor then changes the cotton pad, and you can see that before he puts it in the iron cup, it is all red with scabs stuck between the white filaments. He dabs gently with the second pad, and the fire at your hairline lessens, the cotton leaving your skin feeling like kisses of thorns and feathers. You look at him, entranced. Viktor was a man devoted to his work, living for it, and the concentration he showed when he attended to something with interest was unyielding.

You understood him. It was as if, around him, the world became silent, that only his spirit reigned over the place and that neither time nor energy directed him, only one thing: devotion. "How many were there?" His question cuts you off in your contemplation, bringing you back to reality. "A real fierce army of three soldiers," you babble, "but be aware, they were this big and this tall," you mime, spreading your arms like a child who is still old enough to count the days in sleep. "Stop moving," he hisses, annoyed by your childish behaviour. "Anyway, I won the shot contest," you laugh to yourself, "they were so lame. But one of them made a very pertinent remark." You pause to regain your composure and not lose the idea you had on the tip of your tongue.

"He accused me of having chemtech that put his mate to sleep. Can you imagine, chemtech that could put anyone but yourself to sleep around you?" you smile naively as you lower your eyes to his chest. "It would be useful, it would prevent fighting and killing." "If there's no death or casualties, people don't retain anything." "A big scare would be enough," you sulk. "No, they have to understand that we are ready to take action and kill if the opportunity arises," he says, placing a simple white sticky bar bandage horizontally on your wound to help it close better. You don't like this idea, it's too radical, too violent and without any search for a potential agreement that would spare the bloodbath. He grabs the tube of ointment, squeezing a dab of the colour of morning mist onto his metal index before reaching for your swollen cheek. It feels like someone has aggressively smashed a handful of blackberries and cherries into your cheekbone. You feel the coolness of his fingers applying the cream, and although the sensation is not the most pleasant, it is not as bothersome as you might expect. Your eyes are still riveted on his torso, watching the patterns that the metal alloys form in a finely crafted and symmetrically ordered assembly of sometimes matte and sometimes polished plates of his armour. You know it, alcohol loosens the tongue. So you can't help the question that escapes from your mouth like soap from wet hands : " Did you keep your heart? "

The question is sincere, so sincere that Viktor's fingers stop massaging your sore cheek. His eyes finally meet yours. Since he took you in his arms, he hadn't looked you in the eye once. But for some reason you don't know, this simple question was enough to stop him from his rigorous task. His eyes seem to detail yours in a strange way, with a look you can't quite define. He blinks suddenly, restarting his task to properly massage your cheek and apply the ointment to the entire bruise. "No," is his simple answer. No beating heart, no blood pumping through its veins, no hidden organ like the one you have. Only a motor linked to clusters of tubes that propel energy substances and enough electricity through his body to keep him alive. " Did someone steal it from you?" It's at this very moment that you ask yourself: did Viktor ever love?

Has he ever loved someone who made him smile constantly? Has he ever loved someone so much that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with them? Has he ever known what it feels like to be afraid of death for the simple reason that it has the power to take away the person he loves?

A heart doesn't carry emotions, it carries life, that's why we love it so much: it keeps those we love alive, and we dread the day it stops beating.

You feel like a child who asks "why?" at every opportunity, and Viktor, having now finished applying the ointment, replies:

"I changed it."

Of course, nobody stole it from him. You can't fear that death is lurking for him in the same way as it is for you. You can only fear that a cable will blow, a bolt will unscrew, or his skull will be hit.

It's not fair, he stole your heart.

He wipes his ointment-coated fingers to pick up a pair of clamps and a clean cotton ball again. The next and final step is your split lip. With his free hand, he gently grasps your chin.

Compared to the rest of your wounds, this one requires surgical attention and patience apparently.

He squeezes the compress tenderly, and your head reflexes to turn. But Viktor's firm grip holds you in place. You feel his thumb press gently into your cheek, the skin inside your mouth meeting the side of your teeth.

He continues to press the cotton lightly against the wound.

You feel as if a warm cloud is spreading in your belly as he looks at your lips. It's as if they, despite all the words they've spoken in your life, have never had as much attention as they have at this very moment.

Perhaps it is this sudden attention that lets them say the following question:

"Have you ever loved anyone?" you wait until the cotton is no longer on your lip, "can you still love?"

Alcohol apparently makes you chatty, but at least you can use it as an excuse. Tomorrow when you see Viktor you can always say, "Sorry I was drunk last night, I probably didn't mean what I thought." Maybe that will be enough.

His movements have stopped. His eyes leave your lips, gaining your gaze. They are full of secrets, full of spleen, full of things he lets fly in his eyes but you can never make out what they are.

He's so close, so close... He takes a breath, and you can feel the gears underneath the metal hissing and sighing. His gaze is tender, while he still hasn't let go of yours.

Maybe his heart has already been stolen, after all, robbed and destroyed with a hammer. Maybe he took his heart back, and ripped it out so hard that he had to fix it with bolts and try to harden it because it hurt too much.

His cool fingers come to walk over your blue cheek one last time, bringing his thumb close to the end of your eyes where he dreamily runs it over the film of oil on your lid, the grip he has under your chin has softened.

He moves both hands away from your cheeks, gathering all the things he had brought with him into his fingers and arms. He leans in close to your bedside table one last time, speaking softly in a voice like amber, fluid and wispy.

"Good night."

And the light went out, giving you just enough time to see something you never thought you would: he was smiling.

ps : had to try to post that bad boi 3 times i'm in pain

[doctorstethoscope]

Moment || Aaron Hotchner x gn Reader

A/N: hiiii besties expanding on a lil prompt from the weekend due to popular demand! Thank you to @the-modernmary for  helping me with it!! If u liked this teeny bit of angst u will love her fics!!

just a little note for those of you who read The Right: I am going on vacation this coming Saturday-Wednesday. I will have the chapters queued to post for y’all, but I will not be able to respond to taglist requests or update the masterlist until I come back! Still let me know what you think about the chapters though, they’re some good ones! ok onto this fic.

contains: slight cursing, alcohol consumption

wc: 1.7k

You take a deep breath as you walk out of Strauss’s office, taking exactly one beat to regain your composure before hastily making your way over to Hotch’s office, letting yourself in without knocking. 

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” you said by way of greeting as you crossed his office and settled into one of the chairs across from his desk.

“Tell you what?” Hotch asks, looking up from his paperwork with confusion knit across his brow. 

“That Strauss was going to harangue me the second I walked into the building this morning. I seriously didn’t even make it past security before she nabbed me.” You told him, disgruntled. 

“I didn’t know. What did she want?” Aaron asks, and you look up and see that he’s telling the truth-- he really didn’t know. 

“Oh… I assumed she would have cleared it with you before she asked me.” You said, your boisterous energy deflating the longer you sat in the chair. 

“Is she pulling you for undercover work? She always does that, and she never asks if we have anything coming up or what your consult workload is--” 

“No, Hotch. She’s, uh, she’s not pulling me for undercover work.”

“What is it?” 

“She said the director tapped me to lead the field office in Vegas.” You confessed, looking up and seeing the air leave Aaron’s chest. 

“Wow.” Aaron says, blinking. 

“Yeah,” you agreed. 

“And you’re going to take it?” He asked. 

“I told her that I needed some time to think about it.” You answer him.

“What’s there to think about?” He wonders. 

There’s a moment where you think you might actually roll your eyes at him. There’s a moment where you consider begging him to give you a reason to stay. There’s a moment where you consider crossing the desk and depositing yourself in his lap, kissing him with the weight of all of the feelings that had you wanting to stay. 

But, after a moment, you realize that none of that’s happening. He’s sitting across from you, looking at you like you’d be the biggest fool in the world not to take advantage of this opportunity, and maybe he was right. Maybe you would spend the rest of your life wanting him one-sidedly, wondering what good you could have done for the world if you had simply accepted that he’d never love you back. 

“Nothing,” you answered, after a moment. “There’s absolutely nothing to think about at all.”

****************************

Aaron’s barely even distracted when you swing his door open and plop yourself into one of his chairs first thing in the morning. He’s used to it, by now. He may have been a less-than-willing participant in your friendship at the beginning of your relationship, but now he was glad to call you someone he was close to. His closest friend, really. 

His ears perk up when you mention Strauss. “Is she pulling you for undercover work?’ He starts to rant, already planning the tirade he’s going to deliver to Erin when he notices your demeanor change. You’re… shy, all of a sudden. You’ve never hidden from him before. He doesn’t like it. 

“She said the director tapped me for the field director position in Vegas,” You revealed. The sentence hit him like a punch in the gut.

“Wow,” is all he can manage to get out, fighting the way his throat threatens to close up. “And you’re going to take it?” He asks, although he knows the answer will break his heart. 

“I told her I needed some time to think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?’ He asked, allowing himself to hope for a moment that you’ll make some grand confession, to imagine for a moment that you might possibly feel the same way he does, to believe for a moment that he’s worthy of your love. But he’s not.

“Nothing. There’s absolutely nothing to think about at all,” you tell him, standing up and leaving with a forced casualness. 

Aaron had been married long enough to know that that tone and those words together mean the exact opposite of what they are supposed to mean-- but he was still confused. What could possibly make you stay? And how could he find it before you left? 

*****************

The following days between you and Aaron had been chilly, to say the least. You didn’t bounce ideas off of each other on cases like you normally would. You came to the opposite conclusions at every turn. You were out of sync, and everyone felt it. So when the case wrapped up on a Friday afternoon, you were more than happy to rush home to a bottle of wine, a pint of ice cream, your moving boxes and some trashy reality television.

You’d given up on packing after about an hour. Your heart just wasn’t in it. So instead, you lounged in your pajamas, sipping at your wine in the hopes that it would guide you to your first full night of sleep since you’d spoken with Strauss. You’re just about to head to bed when there’s a knock at your door. You swing it open, revealing Aaron, holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. 

“I was an asshole.” He offers. “Am I interrupting anything, or?”

“Just packing,” you say, wanting to twist the knife a little bit even if it wasn’t truthful. Aaron is undeterred, and steps inside anyways. 

“I didn’t want you to leave with us still in the middle of the fight. You can be as mad as you want in the morning, but have a glass of champagne with me?” He asks, with those big brown eyes you could never refuse. 

“Fine,” you sighed, still easily won over by him, even when you were heartbroken and mad. 

“Here, you open it. Congratulations,” he tells you, handing over the bottle. You start picking at the foil, and he speaks up in the silence. “Things are going to be different without you, you know. I like that our team is structured the way it is… as a team, but you know, in a lot of ways, it was nice to have a partner in you.”

“You know, come to think of it, I’m not sure if I even have cups. They might be packed away,” you say, still picking at the foil and decidedly not looking Aaron in the eye. He chuckles a little at your comment.

 “I don’t know what I’m going to do when you’re gone. I mean, who else can rein in Derek, or get to see me the big picture, or talk Emily off the ledge when I’m sure she’s about to go rogue?’ 

“It’s going to be okay,” you tell him, setting the bottle on the counter, still unopened. Aaron heaves a sigh. 

“You should stay.” He says, after a moment. 

“What?” You say, blinking, because surely you must be drunk or dreaming or something else. 

“You should stay here. You don’t have to take the job in Vegas.” 

“Haha, very funny,” you joked, bringing your attention back to the bottle to avoid looking him in the eye. 

“I’m serious. Listen, I know I said there was nothing to think about, but I changed my mind.” 

“Oh, did you? And what if I haven’t changed mine?” You asked, getting angry now. 

Not able to hold back for another second, he takes your face in both of his hands and kisses you. “Just, think about that before you board a plane. Okay?” He says, and before you can even speak, you hear the door swing shut behind him. 

Damn you, Hotchner. 

You don’t sleep a wink.  When 8am finally rolls around, you pull yourself out of bed and get dressed, heading over to Aaron’s. As you buckle your seatbelt, you realize that you know you have to go over there but you have no clue what it is you even want to say to him. You hope you’ll figure it out without sounding completely insane as you knock on Aaron’s door, and he swings it open, still in his sweatpants and incredibly surprised to find you on his doorstep.

“I’m even more mad at you right now than I was last night,” you tell him by way of greeting.

“That’s understandable. I haven’t been very fair to you,” he agrees, and the fact that he’s being so reasonable only makes you angrier. You slip past him and step inside the apartment. 

“I don’t get it. You couldn’t just let me move on, start a new life and forget about the torch I’ve been burning for my boss the entire time I’ve worked here? You had to have the last word, even if I was leaving forever.” 

“No,” Aaron says, and you bite your tongue, trying to allow him a moment to respond even if you weren’t feeling all that gracious. “No, I couldn’t let you move on thinking the torch you were carrying ws unrequited.”

You’re struck by his words. “What are you trying to say?” 

“I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter. It’s a great opportunity for you in Vegas. I’m happy for you, and you shouldn’t let this--” 

“Hotch, what are you trying to say?”

“Just that I’m proud of you, and I know that you’ll do excellent work, and--”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to hide from me.” You call him out, and he looks at you for a moment. This time, you don’t break his glance. 

“I’m not trying to hide. I’m just too late.” He tells you, looking down at the floor. 

“Tell me, Hotchner. Tell me, please.” You beg of him, shifting to try to get him to look you in the eye.

“I love you, and I figured it out too late.” 

You draw in a sharp breath, and he’s sure he’s ruined any vestiges of friendship that still existed between the two of you in this moment, and that you’ll board your plane to Las Vegas and he’ll become a creepy old boss that you never think about again. He takes a moment to look at you, a moment to mourn what might have been, a moment to remember the way your laugh made him smile while the memories were still fresh. He takes a moment, and then you speak up.

“No,” you correct him. “You figured it out just in time.”

tagging: @choppa-style @wanniiieeee @zheezs14 @torykjamie @maureen4y

@ssavanessa22 @isthatme-thatsme @g-l-pierce @ssahotchie @infinite-tides

 @itsmytimetoodream @averyhotchner @msmarvelsmain @hotforhotchner11 @hotchinkevlar

hi besties I tried to tag everyone who said they wanted to be on my regular hotch list and a few of y’all who regularly interact with the right but if i made a mistake/u want to be removed u can lmk I will not be offended!!!

[sinnamonrasinslut]

The Ease With Which We Hurt [I] ICorpse Husband x Fem!ReaderI

A/N: You guys. I have never simultaneously loved AND hated a piece that I wrote. I really don’t know how I feel about this, but I promised myself last year that I wouldn’t overthink my writing, so here we are. This is part one of most likely four, but we’ll see about that. Thank you to everyone in my inbox who gave me ideas to turn this into a multi chapter fic! They’re all coming, I promise :)

SYNOPSIS: Corpse loves her, she loves Corpse. But both of them are too dumb to realize it, and too afraid to admit it. 

It started, like most good things in his life, out of the blue.

He met her three years ago. Well, not met, but befriended her three years ago when her podcast was just taking off. He remembers sending her a DM about how great her work was, remembers her being gracious in her praise of his own narrations after and he remembers talking to her well into the night until she fell asleep. The rest, to Corpse, is history.

And yet, all he knows of her is a voice, a name, and the prettiest eyes he’s ever seen. she chooses to wear a mask every time they FaceTime, just for the formality of the entire ‘faceless’ situation. She’s told him she thinks it’s ironic, how she feels like he knows her inside out, and she’s still afraid to show him her face. It’s not like corpse can blame her. She doesn’t even know his name, let alone what he looks like, and it’s a miracle she hasn’t filed him away as some no face creep by this point. 

But she hasn’t. She’s still here, after three years of being her friend, and almost a year of seeing her eyes and convincing himself that she’s his friend, damnit, she’s still here. It’s already a lot more than he can ask for.

He’s been holding himself back from falling in love. Or rather, he’s been in love for as long as he can remember, but he's been adamant on denying it; because he knows how this goes. It’s never gone well for him in the past. And he’s not ashamed to admit that he’s afraid. But sometimes, she tells him things that make his heart break, just out of the realization of how absolutely fucking stupid he's being, holding back from her.

He’s convinced that when he dies, she’s going to be the light at the end of his tunnel. That heaven means nothing more to him than a place in her world, however small, however insignificant, as long as he gets to see her eyes for the rest of eternity.

Every part of corpse tells him that it's love. But he tries to push it away, suppress his own feelings till he's nothing but a walking contradiction, overflowing with voices that only say her name.

But he’s tired. And he's scared. Because he’s been down that road before, opened himself up to people who haven’t liked what they saw and left with pieces of him he’s not sure how to tape back. He’s unsure if he's willing to let her try.

So, he settles for a small corner of her world, a little piece of her existence that gives him life, and every time he talks to her, hands flailing as she animatedly tells another story, he pushes the yearning to the back of his head till it crawls down and clings to his windpipe, unsure and immeasurable, and he can’t speak anymore without choking. But then she says things that make his heart jump into his throat, and then he’s choking but for entirely different reasons.

“What would you do if I was gone?”

He doesn’t mean it like that. Well, he does, a little bit, but his brain isn’t taking over every part of his body trying to convince him he’s unwanted, so he doesn’t mean it like that. He’s only curious, maybe in need of a little reassurance. And nobody does reassurance better than her.

She doesn’t say anything for a very long moment. Corpse knows the gist of her impending answer but the pause still blooms unnecessarily in his chest. But it’s not like they haven’t done this before.

“I’d write about you.”

“Huh?”

She only huffs a laugh at his confusion. She pulls a blanket closer around her and props up her phone to rest against what he assumes is a wall.

“You’re not easy to forget, Corpse,” her voice is soft, truthful without flattery, provides comfort without justification. “if you were gone, I’d write about you. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, that’s the least I’d need to cope.”

It’s not what he thought he’d hear, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to him that it’s exactly what he needed. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her. 

“Besides,” she continues, hair falling in her face as she adjusts the blanket, “there is no place for me in a world without you in it.” 

 And he physically feels his heart stop and clench in his chest. The thought of meaning this much to anyone, to her in particular, is more than he knows how to handle. So, he doesn’t follow that up with a quip, no teasing laughter, no suggestive, exaggerated winks that only he can see. He only lets himself bask in the warmth of her honesty, lets her smile at him in that way only she does, the way that makes him freeze and ache and crumble.

He chooses not to talk after that, settles for listening to her tell stories about her childhood. Her voice is the purest thing he’s ever heard, he’d hear her talk till the world ended if he could, and the sweet lilt of her voice lulls him to sleep hours after she’s hung up the phone.

He doesn’t get to talk to her for almost two weeks after that. He misses her a little, but he keeps that to himself, and instead, tags her under dumb twitter memes and sends her pictures of cats that he’s saved specifically for times like these, and another video of two geckos fighting on a tree captioned ‘u and me’ .

There’s no place for me in a world without you in it.

The words wrap around his ribs like a noose, tightening by the second. Some days, when his heart is fast enough to beat out of his ribcage, it grounds him just as much as it hurts. But when she’d said it to him, it passed through him like a train wreck, distorting all semblance of control he’d convinced himself he had.

He knows it’s ridiculous, but he loves her. She’s only a voice through his phone and eyes on his screen and he has no clue what the rest of her looks like, but he’d be damned if he lets himself deny it one more time. He loves her. And that’s the most terrifying thought he’s ever entertained.

It doesn’t take long after that realization takes root, for him to send her a picture. He doesn’t let himself think too much about it. Taking pictures of himself is still new to him, but he tries his best. Don't think about it too much, he reminds himself, and unsurprisingly, it's her voice in his head that does all the soothing. He captions it something stupid, more out of habit than anything else (my hair makes me look like Dora the exploraH), with his name across his forehead and ‘Dora’ in brackets beside it. 

Momentarily, he wonders if he’s ever asked her if she even wants to see his face. (He has, and he distantly remembers her agreeing as long as he’s comfortable with it.)

He hits send before he has the chance to stop and think. 

Then he waits. 

Her response is quicker than he’s prepared for, her name flashing across the facetime request on his phone. He’s giggling before he even picks it up. 

“CORPSE, WHAT THE FUCK!” 

For a very long moment, they just stare, taking each other in. This is his endgame, corpse thinks, he’s never going to need to show anyone his face after this, nothing, no one will matter as much. 

With a jolt, he realizes that she’s not wearing her mask. He can see her, all of her, and that on its own should be enough to take him out.

And then she smiles. 

If there was any doubt in his mind before about how head over heels he is, she’s taken it out of his mind and stomped it to the ground. He’s not the poet in this friendship, but he’s assured he could write entire paragraphs about the way she smiles. And he tells her exactly that. 

“I’m curious to see how that would fit with fine lass nice ass cat ears and she uwu,” she teases, eye twinkling with mirth, “but I'm sure you’ll figure it out.” 

He’s both amazed and amused at how quickly they go from fawning to bantering. But perhaps that’s the thing about her that feels so familiar.

“I will write a song about you baby, don’t tempt me.” 

“Is that a threat?” 

“It’s a confession,” he shrugs, suddenly shy, unsure of where to lead with this. Thankfully, she interjects before he has to say anything else. 

“That’s an awfully bold confession for a man called Corpse.”

“I’m also awfully alive for a man called Corpse, but you don’t see me complaining.” Awfully alive and not enough husband, he wants to say, but he keeps that to himself. 

“You complain about being alive everyday, Mister Husband,” she counters and Corpse groans, dropping his head into his hands. 

“I say that to you in confidence,” he grits out, playfully glazing at her.

“You also tell about a million people on stream, I’m not special,” she laughs. 

“You are very special to me.” His voice is soft, shy, almost afraid to tell her the things he’s saying, “I did say I’d write a song about you. Pretty special if you ask me.”

She hums, taking a huge gulp of water and nodding enthusiastically. 

“Correct, me, the cat girl and the e girl. What’s the next single, Corpse? Faceless Girls are ruining my life?” 

“You’re a rascal,” he chides as a familiar warmth settles around his heart, and grips. 

“It is one of my finer qualities, yes.” 

Distantly, some part of his brain registers that this is the first time he’s seen her, but there is no sense of hesitation in his head about her. It feels just like it always has, with her on the phone saying the silliest things, and him responding with equal enthusiasm. This is the way they’ve always been. 

While she talks, hands animatedly moving around, Corpse allows himself a small moment of reprieve to think. He knows he loves her, but he wonders briefly if it’s too soon to be in love with her (he concludes that probably it is, given that she remains unaware of his feelings, but he finds that it doesn’t really matter)

Because while Corpse loves her, he’s sure he doesn't know how to love her. Doesn’t know her favourite flowers even if he knows her coffee order by heart, doesn’t know her ideal date even if he’s memorized every poem she loves. 

The meanest parts of his brain tell him she deserves better, and he knows they’re wrong. But a small part of him can’t help but dwell. He’d rather have her and her unnecessary hand movements in his life as his friend than not at all. So he pushes away his feelings for another day, and just listens to her talk. 

Corpse is perfectly content with that. 

[momtaku]

i feel like one of the biggest issues in the levi fandom in general all comes down to superbowl. i know you're convinced you're right which is cool. but i've read many different metas and takes and i have to say all of them are pretty well supported too. in my honest opinion, i truly think it could go either way. the way u view the super bowl really defines how you view eruris relationship. i just wish people could accept that. we have peoples on both side claiming theyre 100% right and there’s no other way to view it, both using parts of interviews and smartpasses that appeal to them. i wonder why it’s so hard to understand that isym left it so vague that it could go either way. eruris devotion is not as “obvious” as you claim. before stumbling across your blog i didn’t even think it was that significant a relationship. i cant deny it now but i wonder why it’s so hard for you or tsuki to get that not everyone is going to agree with your takes just because you think it’s textually supported. there’s soo many fans who watch the show and have no idea eruri is a thing until they join the fandom. it doesn’t make them stupid it just means we took different things from the manga. for some the devotion was plain obvious, for others it wasn’t. for some the devotion is interesting, for others it isn’t. why not just accept that?

Oh god please don’t lump Tsuki in with the likes of me 😂 What I am about to say about Tsuki has a Disclaimer for mistakes and misinterpretation because what follows are my thoughts about her--but I’d say her bias is best summed up as “the intricacies and possibilities of language”. If you’ve perceived a ship bias on her blog, I think it’s more that she sometimes pushes back on mistranslations she sees. She takes translation more seriously than anyone I’ve met. She’d rather lose an arm than contribute to a false narrative running loose in the wild. She realizes translation is a powerful weapon and wants it wielded fairly.  For instance, one thing she’s expressed to me is that the Japanese ship fandoms are usually careful to preface “this is one way you can read this”, but when those thoughts come over to tumblr it becomes “this is the only way to read this.” I think that bothers Tsuki both because it’s unfair to the language she loves and to those who don’t speak it. And argh... let me just toss heart eyes all over tsuki. I really appreciate what she does. Helpful fandom translators are a gift. I appreciate that she’s open to eruri and levihan. I respect that she enjoys both ships and can see both sides. She’s not the enemy here. She’s helped me be more balanced and fair. 

But otherwise this is such a good ask and I agree with much of what you're saying.  I want to be clear that I don’t see it as my job to convince people. I'm not writing for that reason. I'm offering a viewpoint, so I'm not pressed or bothered by the existence of other viewpoints. I'm happy they exist because thinking about things from various angles has benefitted me and is a great way to consume media.

I make it clear on my about page that I write my opinions and not the canon thoughts of Hajime Isayama. My blog description plainly states my shipping bias. With me you can say the ingredients are clearly on the tin.  I don’t try to hide that. There's not a lot that ruffles my feathers in fandom but I will say that when I happen upon "unbiased" meta writers I do sigh deeply. We all have biases and like it or not it’s obvious to anyone reading. 

I will say at this point though in the manga there are topics where I'm done looking at all the angles. I've followed the snk meta community for 7 years. I've been open minded. I've read everything there is to read and spent my time examining my ideas to see how they hold up. I've changed my mind on plenty of topics because of this. My shipping preference being one of those actually. My words probably have a level of confidence that they didn't in my early meta writing days. So yeah, there are topics where I think I am 100% right, but the important point is I don’t call anyone else 100% wrong. I don’t take potshots at other shipping communities. 

I think the main thing I’d push back on from your ask is that I’d say the way people define serum bowl is less about how you view Eruri and more how you view Erwin himself. At least that's what I've seen. Erwin’s negative qualities are a starting point for many. In sports terms I’d say it’s like some people automatically handicap him at -20 and he has to pull out from there. Part of that may be the anime’s harsher portrayal. I’ve heard some say his trope is one they don’t like. Others admit to an inherent bias against strong male authority figures. As you say, we all see things differently. We all bring baggage and bias into what we read. Cultural bias is there as well. Some themes go down better with certain audiences. Erwin being viewed as a cold emotionless leader who wrongly hid his motivations is a largely Western read. Some of Tsuki’s writings have touched on this.  I’ll link to a few if you want to read more: cultural consideration about Erwin in general, chapter 72 from a cultural lens and a Japanese article on Erwin’s charms.

Regarding your last sentence, I don’t know what you want me to accept here.  As I said initially, I’m not interested in convincing anyone. I don’t think anyone is stupid for thinking differently. I’m writing for me. I’m writing for anyone who wants to read my thoughts. The anons I get have asked for my opinion so I share that with them. I’m sorry if this frustrates you. 

One thing I’ve been told is unique to the AoT community is the prevalence of meta writers and the authority they wield. Basically the criticism is that meta writers are the BNFs and not the artists and fic writers. I haven’t been in many communities so I can’t say if that’s true, but the idea has always bothered me. My meta is opinion and bias spoken in a (hopefully) coherent and entertaining way. It’s to be read, weighed and then discarded as a reader forms their own opinions. If I haven’t made that clear enough, I am now.

Thanks for the ask and the discussion it opened up.

[infini-tree]

FANFIC: in post

Summary: A unexpected reunion takes place. Captain may be the one who starts it, but its Benjamin who ends it.

A/N: (alternate title - i don’t know what possessed me to write this post in fic form, but its here now and you all have to deal with it)

in post stuff isn’t going to be an ongoing multi-chapter thing, let alone in order, but just a place to put all the little drabbles I have. Unlike what the name suggests not all of them happen after the main story of the AU, though this one definitely does. The only way I can imagine this is after years after the main story has wrapped up.

though lbr i mostly because I got tired of trying to figure out titles for WIPs.

And just in case: slight content warning for verbal abuse from a parent. Its nothing explicit and is just a flashback, but it does take up the entire paragraph chunk its in and starts with “Suddenly he was back at his living room”.

                                                        ——–

Captain comes back to a gymnasium full of people and music, which wasn’t the weirdest part. Nor was the fact that the people were grown-ups. 

No, the weirdest part was that the gym wasn’t the one he had come to associate with Jerome Horwitz. Though, it was difficult to appreciate the novelty; between the sudden noise and people, he feels out of his depth.

His body moved automatically. Every accidental bump into someone was a shock, each trumpet blare was like a blow to his skull, and he dimly recalled thinking ah, that’s it when hearing the sound of snapping in the music. The clothes, while leagues comfier than his counterpart’s go-to, it was still there.

After what felt like ages of wading through a sea of people, he stumbled into a hallway just as unfamiliar as the gym. He really, really wanted to get out of this place quickly-- or at least, bring Benjamin back to deal with whatever this place is himself.

(Which bears the question: why did Benjamin come here? Parties aren’t exactly his Thing.)

The music faded as he moved away from the gymnasium, which helped a little.  Captain forced himself to look around. The walls looked the same as Jerome Horwitz was, but if the details were reshuffled. The lockers were in different places, the corridors weren’t exactly where he expected them to be and neither were the bulletin boards with posters on it-- wait, posters!

There were a lot of random stuff about clubs and other announcements, but one stood out. Its top edges curled in on itself, so he couldn’t read the top part, but the rest read: REUNION.

“Welcome back, class of--” Captain repeated, until--

Someone cleared their throat. He leapt up in the air with a short yell, nearly stumbling over his shoe-covered feet.

The newcomer winced, but nonetheless stayed silent. If the Waistband Warrior could describe her, then it would be... sharp. Sharp look, sharp flat top, sharp gaze. Not mean, though it could be. It reminded her of his sidekicks’ freshly sharpened pencils, ready and full of potential.

“...Are you lost?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You’ve been wandering the same hallway intersection and--” she pointed a thumb towards a distant hallway. “The gymnasium is over there.”

Captain blinked for a moment, letting her words sink in. “Oh-- ohhh. Oh no, I meant to get out of the gymnasium,” he said matter-of-factly. “Though yes, I am lost. Do you, ah, could you show me where the nearest washroom or... water fountain is around here, er--”

“Moxie.” It looked like she was expecting something, but when nothing did, her shoulders untensed.

“Captain!” he beamed.

The sharp look turned severe. “Is that a joke?”

He flinched, unsure of what set her off. “U-- uh, no?”

Sensing his nervous energy, the severe look shifted to apprehension. Her brow furrowed. Did she not know either?

“Ma’am?”

“...Do I know you from somewhere?” she asked, crossing her arms. “I’m no good with faces.”

Captain paled. Either she knew Benjamin-- which was not a conversation he was equipped for-- or she recognized him as Captain Underpants-- which was a whole other, potentially dangerous can of worms.

“Uh, nope!” he chirped. “About that washroom--”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” she said after a moment, pointing a thumb down a nearby corridor. “There should be one down the hall.”

"Alrighty, thank you! Have a lovely night, Moxie.” And with that, Captain rushed to the washroom to wash his face and get out of whatever that was.

And only when he looked in the mirror of the dingy washroom, to the clothes that made it hard to think did he slap a hand to his forehead. He really did just introduce himself as himself while dressed up as Benjamin. 

He was definitely going to read an essay’s worth of complaining after this whole thing.

                                                       ——–

“Hey, Captain.”

Benjamin gripped at his chest at the sudden voice. He just stepped outside and into the parking lot only to find Moxie Swaggerman, straight A student, the envy of literally half the school, now astronaut just...

“Uh, what are you doing out here?” his lip curls up wryly out of old habit-- he’ll address the whole Captain thing later-- what did that idiot do while he was out?! “Got tired of people asking for your autograph?”

She tilted her head, adjusting her aviator glasses. “Oh, so you do know me.” She almost seemed... disappointed by that. “Why, you want one?”

“Urgh, no.” He crinkled his nose. Opinions about her aside, that just sounded... weird to ask from someone he knew, even if said knowledge was periphery at best and non-existent at worst.

Moxie let out an amused huff. “Good, because I can only take so much people trying to kiss up to me.”

Despite himself, Benjamin couldn’t help but let out a laugh, short and loud and practically a cackle. The woman’s brow quirked up as she regarded him.

“What?” he snapped back.

“The lack of hair threw me off, since I remember you with that weird swoop back, but I finally figured it out--” And he couldn’t help but adjust his toupee as she swept back her hands on both sides as a pale imitation of how his hair was all those decades ago. “You were the one who competed against me for Prom Queen.”

Benjamin wanted to say something, but all that came out was half-noises. His entire body grew hot and his hands became clammy as she just... continued to stare. The worst part about all this was that, with the low light of outside, he couldn’t tell why. 

Suddenly he was back at his living room-- but not his, not anymore, he refused to consider that place his own-- staring down at the floor and clutching at the hems. Seeing his brother just peering in in his periphery vision as his mother continued her tirade, each word bullwhip-precise at hitting him in his core. But this was different; he was older and under no one’s thumb.

“A-- and what about it,” he managed to pry out of his throat.

Moxie’s posture shifted, and he could see her surprised expression now. If the circumstances were a bit different, then he would be reveling in the fact. Right now, though, he felt exposed, which was saying something considering who his counterpart was.

“Whoa-- hey, I didn’t mean it like that,” she clarified, and was that a hint of awkwardness? Remorse in her voice? “Honestly, it’s... nice to see you again.”

It was his turn to gawk. “...Really?”

“I mean, yeah. It’s uh-- like, its nice to see, ah... people like me still kicking.”

And it was then that Benjamin remembered the old rumors about Swaggerman-- about why she couldn’t get a nice guy to fall for her, and the girl from the rival school that clung by her side like a second shadow during summer vacation.

“I’ve always wondered for the longest time if you did that whole thing as a...” she paused, pursing her lips. “A joke, or something.”

“Oh,” he managed. “No, it wasn’t.”

“OK.” She nodded. “OK. Good to know.”

“Why, was that eating away at you?”

A passing car lit up her features in relief. When had her annoyingly cool façade been just that? It looked guarded now. A little more awkward. Funny how a few decades of separation can do.

Moxie shrugged. “Would have been nice to know back then.”

Benjamin wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he shrugged sympathetically and began to fiddle with the keys in his hand-- he had almost forgotten why he was out here in the first place.

She gaze followed the source of the glint. “Leaving early? Figure I should head out too.” She sighed. “Thanks.”

“...For what?”

“For making my last night before I get put to my paces a little more bearable.” She stretched her arms in front of her.

“Really, last night before you go to space and you choose to come here,” Benjamin deadpanned.

“First of all, no that’s not--” she shook her head. “Never mind. Basically, I wanted a normal night, and at least I got a bit of that. So, thanks, Captain.”

Benjamin had half a mind to correct her, but the moment had long passed and frankly he didn’t want to break the moment he was in now.

“Uh, yeah.” He waved her off awkwardly. “See you later.” 

She's going to space, idiot, not a weekend road trip, his own mind admonished.

Moxie only nodded in reply before she went off as well-- presumably to her own car.

[theleftovertaco]

April Fools

I’ve always wondered if April Fools existed in the wizarding world. I’ve come to the conclusion for this fic that it doesnt so the reader can introduce the Weasley twins to it. Chaos ensues. This takes place in harrys 3rd year and the twins 5th year. Technically you would be in 5th year as well, but your gender nor house are specified.

-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-

You were writing your potions essay in the quidditch stands when an identical set of loud voices brought you out of your trance.

“Hey, short stack.” Fred and George flew up to your section.

“Oh look, it’s the demonic duo.”

George smirked, “Because we’re so devilishly handsome?”

“No, because your both so ugly that even Jesus couldnt save your face so satan had to take you.” You heard two squawks of indignation but continued on.

“Also, I’m not that short. Y/H is average.”

“Ah,” Fred sat down to your right, “but your shorter than us, so your short.”

“Everyone’s shorter than you two beanstalks.”

“You’re still short.” You stuck your tongue out at George and he mirrored you.

“What do you two want?”

“I’m hurt... always assuming we want something..” Fred trailed off.

“Yeah, we can’t have a conversation with our best friend?”

“I feel betrayed.”

“Depressed.”

“Cheated!”

“Is our friendship a lie?”

“Enough!” You giggled out.

“You don’t have to need something, but you stopped in the middle of practice for a reason.”

“Well... Gryffindor team likes to listen to music when we practice right?” Fred leaned in and put his chin on your shoulder.

“Ok and?”

“Well, all we have is Celestina Warbeck music and your muggle music just is much better than ‘a cauldron full of strong, hot love’”, George sung that last bit.

“So we wanna know if we can borrow your CDs and player?”

“Flawless impression. Yes you can use them, I’ll bring them out next practice. Though honestly, I really ought to get you one of your own so you don’t have to keep asking every time u want to listen to music.”

George hummed in agreement next to you.

“Maybe that’ll be your birthday gift. When is it anyways... I’ve known you two for almost a year and you never told me.”

“It’s in about a month. April 1st.” George confirmed.

You let out a bark of laughter. “Yeah, that checks out.”

You got a rare pause of silence.

“What do you mean ‘that checks out’?” Fred looked honestly confused, and so did George.

“Are you both messing with me? You have to know what holiday is on April 1st right?” They shook their heads no.

“Really? Hold on a second let me ask Hermione if she knows anything. ‘Mione!” You got her attention from a few stands over and she jogged over to the three of you.

“Yeah, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, can you answer a question?” She nodded and you continued, “ without saying it out loud, you know what holiday is on April 1st, right?” She nodded again.

“Yea, why is that relevant?”

“Because they don’t!” You motioned frantically to the twins behind you and Hermione shook her head.

“Do not tell them they don’t need another reason to go around causing more chaos.”

“Oooh,” Fred lifted up his head in interest, “this sounds interesting. What holiday is on April 1st that we don’t know about?”

Hermione shook her head as Harry flew over and dismounted. “What’s going on, practice is over, why aren’t you lot leaving?”

You turned to him quickly, “Harry, without saying it, you know what holiday is on, April 1st, right?” He nodded before realizing what was going on and started laughing.

“Don’t encourage them Harry!” Hermione pushed him slightly.

“Why not? It would be funny to see what they do with that.”

Fred and George were getting frustrated, “With what?”

“Don’t tell them, Y/N!”

“Tell them, Y/N!” “Tell us, Y/N!”

“Ok ok I’ll tell you!” You conceded and Hermione threw her hands up in exasperation and left to collect her bag.

“On two conditions!”

Fred and George whispered to each other for a second before turnin to you and nodding.

“Of course.” Said George with a sly grin.

“What are these conditions?” Fred finished for him.

“Number 1. When I tell you the holiday, I get full immunity from the days effects.”

“But of course.” They spoke in unison

“Number 2. Anyone asks, I had nothing to do with this.”

Fred shrugged, “That’s fair. So, what holiday is on April 1st?”

You grinned before replying, “April Fool’s!”

“What is April Fool’s?” George’s eyes went wide.

“A holiday dedicated to playing pranks on people. Muggles prank their friends, family, teachers, principal. In my primary school one of my friends put a bunch of live chickens in a teachers car.”

They looked at you with pure glee.

“Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!” Fred and George each planted a kiss on you cheek and ran off.

-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-

Fred and George dropped into the library chairs in front of you two weeks later.

“So we were thinking.” Fred grinned from the chair closest to you.

“And since you were the one to tell us about this glorious holiday, you should be part of the celebration.”

“No.”

“Why nooooot?” George whined, setting his chin on the table and looking at you with his best puppy eyes.

“I’m not going to get in trouble for a holiday and besides, its your holiday. You don’t need me interfering.”

“But we want you there so you should do it, right? And you wouldn’t be interfering. Please?” Fred joined his brother in puppy eyeing you.

You sighed and nodded in agreement.

“Yay! So we were thinking that maybe we could pull something minor on each of the teachers and then something major on the whole school. What do you think?”

“It could work, but you would have to tailor it to each teacher. Snape can’t stand background noise and high pitches, McGonagall hates being even remotely interrupted, Flitwick can’t stand his bookstack being messed with, and Lupin, for whatever reason, doesn’t like fish.”

“Fish?” George tilted his head like a confused puppy.

“Yeah, he thinks they’re gross or something.”

They both nodded before Fred spoke up, “Ok, so what are you suggesting?”

You thought for a moment before responding, “For snape, I have this little old transportable music player. We could charm it to follow him around and play a bunch of kazoo noises in the background. The more he tries to get rid of it the higher pitch and louder it gets.”

“Ooh, I like that. What else?” George nodded for you to continue.

“We could find a spell where every time McGonagall tries to speak, she gets interrupted by, I don’t know, a horn or something? Flitwick I don’t really have anything.”

“I like the way you think.” Fred grinned and added in, “ . We could turn Lupin’s class into a tiny lake and fill it with fish while he’s up in his office?”

George nodded, “And we could make Flitwick's stack fly around the room while he’s on it?”

“You’re both evil. It’s fantastic.” You high fived them and the three of you left to enact your plans.

-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-•-

The next two weeks were a never-ending whirlwind of prank planning and late night kitchen runs, but finally the three of you were done. The plans were set up and now all there was to do was wait.

First class of the day was McGonagall’s and the three of you walked in trying to wipe the grins off your face.

“Good morning class, please turn to-” *HONK* Your professor whipped her head around to see where the sound was coming from to no avail. She shook her head and continued on.

“As I was-” *HONK HONK* “Where is that noise coming from?”

The class stifled laughter as she ran around looking for the origin of the honking.

For twenty minutes.

“I swear to” *HONK*

“Oh for the love of” *HOOOOONK*

Eventually McGonagall grew tired and dismissed the class half an hour early.

Snape was next on the hit list.

Your professor strode into the classroom, looking obviously annoyed. A tiny radio followed after him playing a nonsense tune with kazoos. The class  burst into laughter but was promptly shut up by a particularly harsh glare.

The next hour was trademarked by Snape repeatedly trying to destroy the radio physically or through magic while he had the class make a healing potion. The noise just got louder and louder and when the bell rang for the last class before lunch Snape barked at everyone to “GET OUT NOW”.

At lunch, you, Fred, and George each grabbed a sandwich and an apple and were about to rush out to have time to set up Lupin’s prank when Harry, Ron, and Hermione stopped you.

“The radio in Snape’s class, who’s bloody idea was that?” Fred and George pointed to you and Ron responded with a high five.

As you three left you could hear Hermione reprimanding Ron for encouraging you.

Lupin’s class took time to set up, but he always took lunch in his office and rarely opened the door.

The three of you placed a tiny device in the center of the floor, rushed out of the classroom, and waited.

You heard a loud BANG and then a stream of curses before running off to hide.

By the time you three returned for class, a student had opened the door to find Lupin taking refuge at the staircase and yelling that class was cancelled for the day and to read Chapter 17!

This brings us to Flitwick’s class.

The plan for his had already been enacted. Since when the three of you stepped into his class, he was clutching onto  Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2 and yelling out instructions while also asking that someone help him down.

You three took pity halfway through class and found a ladder for him to use.

The four pranks had gone off without a hitch, now you just needed to pull of dinner and everything would be perfect.

Fred and George snuck into the kitchens and as food was being prepared to go out, they placed a few drops of a specialized potion on about half of the platters.

So they reconvened with you at dinner.

You each sat there, and then you waited as people dug into their food.

After about thirty seconds the chaos you had been waiting for occurred. Half the Great Hall turned into various zoo creatures, all frantically running around the tables and crashing into people. The human half of the hall was torn between laughing and running.

They ultimately settled on running.

As everyone cleared out of the hall, the students were ushered back to their respective dorms, and the three of you escaped to the kitchens.

As soon as the portrait entrance was closed, the three of you looked at each other before bursting into laughter.

“AHAHAHAHA- OH that was BRILLIANT!” You half screamed.

“Did you see the look on Sprouts face when Snape turned into a peacock? A PEACOCK!” Fred screeched, nearly on the floor.

“I don’t know if we could ever outdo that!” George replied, who was on the floor.

Eventually the three of you calmed down and you caught your breath to reply.

“Knowing you two, you could. Before we leave, come on. I got you something.”

You brought them over to a table in the middle of the kitchens where two cupcakes and a CD player was set up, along with around 10 CDs next to it.

“I completely forgot about that!” Fred exclaimed.

“Thank you so much!” George and Fred leaned down a little to hug you at the same time.

“Uh, guys, getting a little crushed here.”

“Right, sorry.” George detangled himself from the hug.

“I’m not, gonna keep crushing you.” Fred squeezed tighter.

You laughed and hugged him back.

“Happy Birthday.”

[rqsie]

bts fanfic recommendations.

(hiiii, these are my favorite fics ever. i highly recommend all of them. btw these are all manxwoman bc i dont really read manxman

btwww i couldnt tag all accounts cuz for some annoying ass reason tumblr only lets u tag 50 accounts.... sorry)

kim seokjin:

dont wanna fall (m) by @9uk

sugar daddy!seokjin

love bite (m) by @taetaesbaebaepsae

vampire!y/n

these wicked delights (m) by @ditzymax

incubus!seokjin

the leather loafers by @jimlingss

cinderella au (cinderella aus are superior and ofc jimlingss is a queen. everything she writes is a 10/10)

min yoongi:

heaven’s winter (m) by @matchakoo

seraph!yoongi

2.1 out of 5.0 (m) by @minflix

black mirror au

mixtape (m) by @jungblue

baby, you can drive my car (m) by @jungshookz

mechanic!yoongi

jung hoseok:

heartbeat (m) by @joonbird

gang au (i LOVEE heartbeat so much. everybody should read it, its so good)

the worst wonderful time of the year by @lamourche

christmas au, office au

my soul to reap (m) by @readyplayerhobi

reaper!hoseok, harpy!y/n

the purge by @jungblue

purge au

distractions (m) by @dreamscript

may the odds ever be in your favor (m) by @yandearest

hunger games au, yandere!hoseok

hot rod (m) @kinktae

greaser!hoseok (yes i think its the best of all of the rewind fics. sorry bitchin' stans 😴)

kim namjoon:

a taste of heaven (m) by @joonited

(read this NOW!! its really short anyway)

runaways (m) by @littlemisskookie

nerd!namjoon (yall read all the warnings first cuz its honestly kinda fucked up 😳)

thrills found on solid ground (m) by @bibbykins

soft yandere!namjoon (even though its a yandere au its really really soft yandere, i could hardly tell tbh, and its literally so good)

castaways (m) by @rmnamjoons

desert island au (this took me so long to read but definitely worth it)

wrap it up (m) by @1997jk

the dragons lair (m) by @solastia

hybrid!namjoon

park jimin:

otherworldly (m) by @sinning-on-a-sunday

coraline au, yandere!jimin (coraline and jimin. it doesnt get better than that me thinks)

ragdoll (m) by @ausblack

hybrid!jimin

i love you by @seokjinchuriki

vampire!jimin (GUYSSS,,,,, this one is so short but fuck i love it so much.... 😭😭 i would die for vampire jimin)

chained to you (m) by @addicktjimin

fuckboy!jimin

peaches & piercings (m) by @matchakoo

cheerleader!y/n, punk!jimin

kim taehyung:

stuck with you (m) by @jungshookz

roommates au (i think the best thing about all this fic are the drabbles. they really make her characters feel so alive)

tempting (m) by @kinktae

demon!taehyung (again literally everything this queen writes is amazing!!!!!!! but im not afraid to admit that i think tempting is her best work 😌)

pretty kitten (m) by @sweetheartjeongguk

hybrid au, camgirl!y/n

worshippers of the sky by @jimlingss

greek goddess!y/n (my second favorite series ever i think. i deadass cried at the end of the last chapter purly because it was over and loved it so much)

dont ask, dont tell (m) by @jingabitch

hybrid!taehyung

the seven seas (m) by @readyplayerhobi

atlantis au

forbidden by @namjoonbby1

try my luck (m) by @drquinzelharleen

teacher!taehyung

jeon jungkook:

secrets of silk (m) by @nochugguk

camboy!jungkook

by its cover (m) by @gimmesumsuga

the devil’s change up (m) @jungblue

baseball player!jungkook

raising demons (m) by @jeonseok

demon!jungkook

énouement (m) by @littlemisskookie

mulan au

gold rush (m) by @nochugguk

track runner!jungkook (i literally was obsessed with this fic, i have read it sooo many times)

streamy (m) by @jungkookiebus

angel in darkness (m) by @icyhobi

mafia au, prostitution au

new romantics by @cupofteaguk

hogwarts au (if you like hogwarts aus,, this is a must read)

hunting a hybrid (m) by @btswrckd

hybrid!jungkook

under the moonlight (m) by @katobobato

werewolf!jungkook

the sea & the storm (m) by @jamaisjoons

sea spirit!y/n (this one is also really good, but i especially loved the ending. it deadass made me so happy)

shimmers by @boywivlove

hogwarts au

finding beauty in your darkest places (m) by @dreamingofkoo

mental clinic au

what happened in vegas (m) by @namjoonbby1

stripper!y/n

offside (m) by @daddychims

soccer player!jungkook (omg i only just realized that this is on tumblr too. ive always read it on ao3 cuz i didnt know it was on here. but im happy i can add it cuz its one of my fave fics ever and i always recommend it to my friends)

quarter quell by @chinkbihh

hunger games au, yandere!jungkook (omg someone else reminded me of this fic. and like thank u,,, cuz i literally forgot it existed. but i remember reading the first part and being in love with it so i read part 2 and now i love it even more 🥳 i highly recommend and im really existed for part 3. also everything on this account is a gem for yandere!bts fans)

jimin + taehyung:

baby, baby (m) by @hobiwonder

surrogacy au (i really love this one. especially jimin, he is so cute)

namjoon + seokjin:

zodiac (m) by @honeymoonjin

(i honestly dont even know how to discribe this one but its like soooo good.

hoseok + namjoon:

for the crown @seokoloqy

royality au (its an interactive which is so cool tbh)

ot7:

enjoy your stay (m) by @honeymoonjin

hotel!au (its been a while since i read this one but i did really enjoy it. i just really love hotel type aus for some reason)

armed to the fangs (m) by @jingabitch

vampire!bts, hunter!y/n (i actually really like how slowburn it is. im getting so tired of fics where y/n is like “i hate you guys,,, im not easy like other girls” and then jumps on their dick the next chapter lmao. but yes,,, this one is really good)

men on the 13th floor (m) by @khyunni

hotel au, ghost au (i love this one so much)

the iris hotel by @sugakookiecrumble

hotel au, horror au (again,,,, i really like hotel aus)

catalyst (m) by @untilspringdays

mafia au

oasis by @secret-kpoplibrary

hybrid!bts (yall this fic is so cute. i always reread when i want something fluffy)

all is fair in love & war by @smoljamswrites

mafia au

undecided by @nomimits7

detective au (i really love these type of aus!!)

thesis it by @xherxx

roommates au (this fic has a special place in my heart cuz i remember loving it so much that i stayed up the whole night to read it and skipped school the next day cuz i was too tired. good times)

moth to flame (m) by @bang-to-the-tan

vampire!bts (not to be controversial lol but im my opinion this is the best smut. its just sooo good lmfao. also vampire bts 😋 what else could u want)

ethereal orbit (m) by @miamorjoon

alien au (saving the best for last ofc. seriously i think ethereal orbit is my favorite fic ever. i just love it so much. also yall don’t understand how whipped i am for eo namjoon and jungkook. theyre the best. you have to read this one)

anyway thats all for now. i might update it later. i hope this helps u find new pics. btw sorry for the lack of yoongi and seokjin,,, 💔😾

[beingemotionalsince2003]

Chapter 2 of my Kieutou fic "hush baby", up! 😊

https://archiveofourown.org/works/29620743

Friday 20:05 Kieu My stranded Fatou while the latter kept her lips on hers and grabbed her by the waist. For some reason, she couldn't restrain herself from biting her girlfriend's lips, which made Fatou moan. Kieu My smiled at that, still pinning her lip. When Fatou saw the other girl wasn't planning on letting go any soon, she pinched her side repeatedly, tickling her until she couldn't hold the laughter and opened her teeth. "Jesus, Kieu My" Fatou pouted while grabbing her (now red) lips. "That hurt". "Oh, I'm so sorry. Are you okay?" She said with (honestly) fake regret. Fatou just nodded with a small grin and pulled her close again. Kieu My melted. Whenever Fatou kissed her, she could swear the whole world paused and the only thing that existed was them. Them and this huge whole in her stomach that she thought couldn't get bigger. That was, until the moment she felt Fatou's hands slip through her blouse, run slowly through the sides of her back and settle beneath the clasp of her top. Her heart stopped, and Fatou did too. "Are we going too fast?" "No" she managed to say, out of breath "But you have way too many clothes". "I'm wearing as much clothes as you are". "WE are wearing too much, then". Kieu My answered, scrunching her nose. Fatou laughed shortly and looked at Kieu My for a second. "You really are beautiful". A blush appeared on Kieu My's face and she couldn't hold a huge grin from forming.  "Do you really think so?" "U think I don't?" "I'm not sure…" She lied. "Show me". Fatou moved her hands from where they previously were, grabbed Kieu My's cheeks as if she were holding something sacred, and then kissed her softly, with all the intensity of her love pouring out. She thought she was beautiful. She truly did.  Fatou moved backwards, falling on her back, and then turned so she would be on top of the other girl, who quickly tugged the end of Fatou's sweater, letting her know her intentions, and then pulled it up, getting rid of it. Kieu My felt impatient, desperate to show Fatou she was beautiful too. Show her how much she loved her. Fatou also grabbed the edge of her blouse and took it off. She did the same with her pants. Kieu My placed her legs on Fatou's sides and she responded by running her hands through her thighs and by kissing her neck.  Kieu My couldn't hold back a (shamefully loud) moan from coming out when she felt Fatou suck at her skin.  It was so awkward, being so high for someone. So obviously turned on. But when she reached for Fatou's chest and she heard her whimper at the hickey she left her: Kieu My felt better. Fatou backed up once more, as if trying to memorize Kieu My's sight, mesmerized. "Damn" She said, meeting Kieu My's gaze. She could see Fatou's eyes shining brighter than a meteor shower, and it almost made her want to cry. The last thing Kieu My remembers after that is Fatou making a way down her body with her lips and… Maybe some things more. ~~~~~ "I think I need to leave" Fatou whispered, tugging a strand of hair behind her girlfriend's ear. They were side to side, as they have been their first morning together, just looking at each other. Fatou's words took Kieu My by surprise.  "Already? Aren't you staying?" She said with that baby voice of hers. "I'd really like to; but this week I've been out of home very often and everyone probably wonders what it's going on with my life. Besides, hadn't you told me your parents were arriving soon? They can't see us like this". "Yeah… That's true" Kieu My added sadly. Suddenly, an idea popped in her mind. Perhaps it was too soon… But she was sure about it. Fatou looked at her with curiosity. "Why don't you have dinner with us? I'd like you to meet them. And you can still have breakfast with your family tomorrow" "You mean your parents?" Fatou said. Perplex. "Yes… But I also understand if it's too soon for you or if you don't want to do that yet. I know meeting them would make this serious and you probably wanna go slow. I get that. And y