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crowtrinkets · 4 years

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Your Weary Widow Marches

A Gender Neutral MCxFelix fic in which our dear barista educates their teacher and shows him some music from their home.

I’ve never really written fanfiction before but I thought Id give it a shot. The formatting looks weird on my end so if it looks weird after posting I apologize I couldn’t figure it out. Hope you enjoy!

—-

The crackling fire and pages being turned were the only sounds heard for the past few hours. Felix and I sat on either side of a couch placed in Anisa’s office silently reading our respective books. I’ve been in Astraea for nearly a week and had I known that Felix’s teaching method would be done via reading books the size of an encyclopedia I probably would have chosen Sage or Anisa instead... probably

I glance up at Felix, he’s sitting with legs crossed slouching on the arm rest of the couch, glasses on and enthralled in his book. I'm leaning with my back against the arm rest facing Felix, peering at him from behind my knees. I watch as his eyes scan the pages, partially hiding behind my book so he doesn’t notice me stare. I rub my eyes, dry from the endless reading of Astraean history. I know plenty of history and lore from this world thanks to countless hours of playing Last Legacy and stalking forums, but I don’t think I could’ve convinced Felix of that without having to explain what video games are let alone the internet. He thought if I were to learn magic I should at least know part of its history and it’s contribution to their society.

Despite spending some time with Felix I'm still amazed at the attention span he has for reading. I scan the room trying not to move too much lest I be scolded by the warden. I glance over at the high back chair across the room. The one Anisa sat me in after my jaunt through Felix’s portal and painfully onto Anisa's desk. My mind begins to wander.

I’ve only been here a short time but I feel like I’ve adjusted well. I wonder what's happening on Earth. Does time pass the same at home like how it does in this realm? World? Alternate universe? I still don’t exactly know how to explain my predicament. Has anyone noticed I'm gone yet? I wonder if I’m on the missing persons list, someone at work will have noticed I didn’t show up for my shifts. I cringe slightly at that last thought, my open book now resting on my chest. Ah damn it, I’m definitely fired aren’t I. How am I gonna pay my bills.... and my home, I miss my bed....my plants. SHIT MY PLANTS. I bring my hand to my face and cringe, my beloved house plants they’re going to wither away in my absence. Fate is such a cruel mistress.

“Bored of reading are we?” I slightly jump at Felix’s comment. I bring my hand down and look at him. Staring at me through his glasses a smirk on his lips. I flush slightly and close my book.

“No I just, got to thinking about Earth, and my life, I guess I’m just a little home sick,” I mumble out those last words. I want to be honest with Felix but I don’t want him beating himself up for my situation. I mean yes he is the reason I’m stuck here but I don't hate him for it. Felix frowns and closes his own book.

“Ah... I am sorry about that, I-“ I sit up interrupting him.

“No no no, I'm not mad at you, I’m actually quite enjoying my time here. I mean I don’t have to make drinks for annoying customers everyday here,” I force a laugh but it comes out awkwardly. Felix gives me a quizzical look. I then realize, with the amount of times he calls “dear barista” I just assumed he knew what it meant. “Yknow, my job? A barista?” Felix flushes and avoids looking at me.

“I must admit.. I do not actually know what that is,” I cant help but chuckle, the great necromancer Felix, is embarrassed to not know something.

“Well my dear teacher," I emphasize the word teacher mimicking the way he calls me, "allow me to educate you on some Earth information,” I sit cross legged and scoot closer to him book in my lap. Felix adjusts to face me properly and removes his glasses. I clear my throat and smile at him. “My part time occupation of being a Barista, requires me to make drinks for customers and sell them, more often I make coffee but sometimes people order tea. We sell pastries as well,” Felix gives me yet another confused look.

“All you do is prepare drinks and flakey confectioneries?” I nod in response with a smile, I can only imagine what he assumed a Barista was. Felix chuckles and runs a hand through his hair, “All this time I thought it was something more complicated, you described your customers as being annoying? I am assuming you do not like this particular job?”

“Well, I don't hate it but the customers can get a little rude and for the dumbest reasons too. One time a woman threw her drink at me claiming I added 3 1/2 shots of espresso and rather than 3,” I laugh to my self looking back at the memory, chuckling more when I see Felix’s horrified expression.

“A woman... threw a drink at you? Because she deemed it made incorrectly? I did not except Earth customs to be so. . . Barbaric,” Felix looks at me astonished and confused but all I can do is laugh. “And why are you laughing? Are you alright did she hit your head when she assaulted you with a beverage?” Felix is now standing while I clutch my stomach in pain, the combination of the story and Felix’s confusion is too much to bare. After a minute I manage to calm down enough to speak.

“No no, she did not hit me in the head, I’m just laughing cause it was funny, well at the time it wasn’t but my co workers took pictures and I looked ridiculous. I can laugh about it now,” I wipe a stray tear from my eye as I recount the experience. Thank god her drink was iced.

“Picture?” Felix chimes in. I try to think of how to explain how photography works but I come up with an idea.

“Why don’t I show you?” I stand handing Felix my book and I jaunt over to Anisa’s desk. I let her peruse my backpack because she seemed so interested in my “Earthly items” as she called them. I walked back over and sit on the floor, patting the ground next to me so Felix can join.

“You known there is a perfectly good sofa right next to you, I don’t understand why you wish to sit on the ground like we are mere children,” but despite his protests Felix sits next to me still clutching our books. I rummage through my back tossing the other items to the side. My wallet, a flyer, a jacket, that granola bar which has definitely crumbled to pieces in its package. Until I finally find it, my phone. My first night here I instinctively tried to use it, forgetting I am now stuck in a world without wifi or cell towers. In an effort to hopefully conserve its battery I hard shut off my phone I did not think I would need it but now is an opportunity for me to educate Felix about my world rather than his and tell him a little about myself. Really I just want a reason to prolong my time from reading anymore history. I hold the power button and silently pray. Please have some battery left, please please. Felix is leaning towards me, his face inching closer to mine, I glance at him studying his expression. He looks confused, and curious at the same time, there's a slight scrunch in his brow like he’s trying to seem like he understands what I’m doing, but I know he doesn’t. In that moment his eyes meet mine, I turn my head to fully face him, a blush creeps up his face and I can feel mine begin to warm as well. “Felix-“

BING

We both jump at the sound of my phone turning on. Damn phone, well I guess I kinda asked for that. Felix sits back and clears his throat.

“Um, what, what is that?” His voice wavers slightly but I choose to ignore it to save him some dignity.

“Its my phone, on Earth nearly everyone has one of these. You can use it to communicate with other people, take pictures, look things up, and listen to music.” I begin to unlock it and open my photo album.

“You can communicate with other people? On this... this flat brick?” Felix points accusatory at my phone the scrunch in his eyebrows have intensified creating deep crevices on his forehead. I nod while I scroll through trying to find the photo.

“Yup and take pictures, such as this one,” I turn my phone to face Felix revealing the image documenting the after affects of being assaulted with coffee. He leans over to get a better look. In the picture I'm standing by the cash register, soaked through my clothes in an extra large coffee's amount of liquid. The brown liquid stains my apron and the parts on my white shirt poking out from underneath. There's smeared whipped cream going across my shoulder up my neck and partially along my jaw, and the scowl on my face could kill a man. The instant I show the picture to Felix he plants a hand over his mouth to stifle his laughter. He turns away in an attempt to hide his amusement but I know he wont last.

“Im-I must apologize I did not mean to laugh but, but the look on your face is hilarious,” Felix faces me again trying to hide his smile with the back of his hand. I start to chuckle, I turn the phone back to me and swipe to the next picture. Its a similar picture but in this one my co worker put whipped cream on top of my head, something about it “completing the look”. When I show this picture to Felix it breaks his terrible attempt of remaining poise. He laughs loudly, and it’s extremely contagious. I laugh along with him reminiscing in his beautiful laugh. Every once in a while we calm down until we look at the picture and we start up again. After a bit I’m able to calm down enough to speak.

“Don’t feel bad for laughing, at the time I was pissed but my co workers cheered me up and now I have these memories to laugh at,” I start to look through my album again as Felix calms down from his laughing high. I find more pictures to show him. Some are of me at work with my co workers, one picture of me laughing as I held a dog that jumped through the drive through window. I show him more pictures, some are of earth sunsets which Felix claimed to look like they belong in a painting. I also show him a picture of some Geese I saw while on a walk, and then a picture of said Geese chasing me. This gets Felix to laugh again but not as hard.

“You lead an interesting life on Earth, it seems similar to Sage you are also prone to provoke others into attacking you,” I roll my eyes at Felix’s joke and give him a friendly shoulder bump. Its at this moment I realize how close he’s sitting. Our books set aside and Felix is leaning on one arm politely looking over my shoulder at my phone, I can tell he doesn’t really understand how it works but it seems he’s enjoying this moment to much to ask. In an attempt to keep the sweet moment I change the subject.

“Hey do you want to listen to some Earth music?” With a nod from Felix I close the app and instinctively go to press my streaming app. Damn no Internet. I think for a second and remember I have some music I bought in times before streaming apps existed. I find the app and open it. Dear god my taste was cringey. I scroll through the songs until I stumble across a less than embarrassing song. “This is a classic where I come from, everyone has heard this song at least once. I lay back onto the floor so I can properly listen to the music. Felix looks at me and awkwardly lays down as well, I click on the song allowing it to play.

Just a small town girl

Livin' in a lonely world

She took the midnight train goin' anywhere

Just a city boy

Born and raised in South Detroit

He took the midnight train goin' anywhere

Felix gives me a puzzled look but I just shrug and look up at the ceiling. I close my eyes and take in the song as it plays. If I concentrate hard enough I can imagine my self back on Earth. Sitting in my room listening to 80s music while I do laundry or cook my dinner. I start to feel nostalgic again but I try not let my emotions take over. The song ends and I pause it before it plays the next song. I roll onto my side and rest my head on my hand.

“So what’d you think?” I beam at Felix, I genuinely want to know what he thinks of Earth music, and more specifically a song that I am quite fond of. Felix is laying flat on his back, he ankles crossed and his hands laying on his chest. He looks nervous to be laying on the ground next to me but has made no attempts to leave.

“I thought it was... interesting to say the least. It had quite a captivating story although I was confused when the subject changed multiple times, and what exactly are they trying to “not stop believing” in” Felix does air quotes and seems genuinely enthralled in the “story” of the song. I smile and start to look for another song.

“How about you choose the next one?” I tilt my phone towards him. Felix sits up at my question.

“I dont feel very well versed in Earth music though,” He mumbles. I shrug at his comment.

“Just pick one with a name that sounds interesting to you” I show Felix how to use the phone and hand it to him laying back down. I peek at Felix, he’s holding the phone in one hand and is scrolling with the other, he’s holding it like an old man. I watch his face, he’s thoroughly looking at every single song title and determining whether they are interesting or not. I find it... cute, his concentration face is cute. Oh if he caught me staring I know he would become a blubbering blushing mess, I mean I would be too. I close my eyes again as I wait for him to pick.

“This one seems interesting,” I hum in response, but when Felix says the title out-loud and panic seizes through me. I sit up and shout WAIT but I'm too late. He already pressed it. And then I hear it.

That dreaded, infamous G note. Felix turns towards me surprised and hastily hands the phone to me, I pause it before another note can play.

“Hells MC what will that song make my head explode or something??? You nearly made my heart stop.” Felix takes a deep breath with his hand on his chest.

“I'm sorry, that song its kind of embarrassing actually,” I can feel myself flushing, I look away in embarrassment at the fact that I had that song downloaded and the fact that I nearly sent my teacher into cardiac arrest.

“Embarrassing how?” Felix looks at me puzzled. I open my mouth to speak but then stop. Hold on a second, Felix doesn’t know this band, let alone what an emo phase is. Well judging by his raven skull necklace he does but not in the way I do. I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if we listened to it. I do still like their music. But god did it HAVE to be this song. I clear my throat and look back at Felix.

“Nothing, it’s nothing I was just being dramatic,” I stifle a laugh. “We can listen to it, I actually quite like this band,” Felix nods and turns to face my direction, were now both sitting cross legged and I press play on the song. I smile a little as the song plays and close my eyes again. I cant even remember the last time I listened to this song. My mind begins to wander again, to my younger years when I first heard this song.

I was such a try hard back then, wanting so badly to “be different” but also to mend the emotional pain I was going through, and this band really helped me through it. This song is a little more narrative than the last one so I hope Felix would like it. I can’t believe I freaked out like I did god he must think I'm crazy, or maybe that lady really did hit my head when she threw that drink at me. As the song plays I silently hum to it, quiet enough so that Felix might not hear. I drink in the lyrics and instruments and it feels like I'm listening to it again for the first time.

The song ends and I open my eyes again to pause the music before it plays another one.

“So what did you think of tha-“ before I can continue I'm stopped by the sight of Felix’s face. His eyes are misty and his nose is colored pink. Was he... was he crying? Felix looks at me and his eyes go wide. He quickly turns away and rubs at his face.

“There-there is quite a lot of dust on this floor, honestly you would think Annie would have any sense to clean in here every once in a while,” I cant help but smile, wow he really is a goth child.

“It’s ok Felix, this song makes me cry sometimes too,” Felix side eyes me and sniffles.

“I-I was not crying, yes I admit the song was... moving to say the least…. But, but I will not be mocked by you for my emotions,” Felix turns to face me again refusing to meet my eyes, his voice turning accusatory. I scoot closer to Felix and place a hand on his shoulder. He looks at me astonished and slightly flushed, either from the contact or the crying, I mean dust, I will never know.

“Congratulations” I say with a smile. Felix’s puzzled look twists even more.

“What ever are you talking about,” Felix questions.

“You’re emo now,”

#fictif games #fictif #fictif last legacy #last legacy fictif #last legacy #fictif felix #felix iskandar escellun #felix escellun #fictif sage #fictif anisa #crow writes

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docholligay · 4 years

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An Overwatch Christmas Carol: Stave I-- Morrison’s Ghost

All thanks for the sponsorship to @keyofjetwolf. 4,500 words

Jack Morrison was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. HIs death was registered in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and his small pittance of a savings account and a life given over to a quick signature. Jack Morrison was as dead as a door-nail.

Wilhelm Reinhardt was dead, to begin with. Died that same grey and cloudy day in a pile of rubble. His coffin, sent to the Lindholm family plot in Sweden, with nary a stir from the occupant, and buried there, a name carved in stone, dead as the man below it.

Lena Oxton was dead, to begin with, though her grave had not yet even sunk into the ground, dirt still piled high over the top of it, but please know that it was no less sure, that she was dead. Angela Zeigler had pronounced her herself, and while a bit harried, these last months, she was never one to miss a heartbeat.

No, all of them were dead, when our story begins.

Did Ana know they were dead? Of course she did! Ana was Jack’s partner and roommate and perhaps sole great friend in this earth, and Reinhardt was her sometimes companion and always admirer, and the silence of Tracer ever missing from a room was impossible to ignore. She saw their pictures hung in the Overwatch headquarters, having given their lives in the pursuit of making the world they occupied a better one.

Besides all that, she was no great fool in matters of the mind, however you might find her in matters of the heart, once I allow the tale to truly begin.

And so, you might say, why all the preamble? Why not let the story speak for itself? Well, I tell you this, because if you do not remember that our assembled parties have all taken their last breath long before this day, nothing wonderful can come of the story laid before you here.

But enough. This is a story you know, and a story you do not know, and like all stories known and unknown it begins with a hero, or perhaps a villain, or, in the best stories of all, simply a main character, with affiliation to good and evil fleeting and half-decided.

So brings us to Ana Amari.

There are people, in this world, immediately assured of their own correctness, and Ana was one of them. This is not to say that she thought of herself as having done everything in the most perfect way possible, or that there had never been something that might have gone differently, given different choices, but simply that she had nothing on this earth for which to apologize. Ana was a child of revolution and struggle, and it was well known that all people did what they had to do, and she had always and ever done that.

Ana was a genius in some respects, as most of us are, and a particular point of her genius was her ability to justify everything she had ever done as being rooted in a good idea, an impossible choice only she was willing to make, and her skill in deciding others were simply looking for someone to blame.She had changed, she reasoned, in the way many people who fail to see the original problem do. The balance of power no longer held her, and her child was grown, and these changed circumstances allowed her to believe that it was a changed self.

Ana moved through her life as if she were on trial, every conversation twisted into something that made her into a criminal. She would not be forced to speak against her own effort, and so she antagonized and snapped and refused to answer. They would not force her to admit guilt, to imprison herself.

Only the weak did such things.

It was a terribly chill December day, and the grey pall of a London winter cast out of the city as she moved to the cafe on her side of the Thames. She watched London always--she had never learned quite how to not pay attention to every given moment and movement--looking at the people who passed by, their clothing and manner changing as she moved through the city.

The city was dressed up for Christmas, tinsel in windows, softly glowing lights strung up inexpertly, banners of evergreen strung over the streets as the inhabitants of the areas got richer. Happy Christmases were exchanged along the street between shopkeepers and customers, acting as if they knew or cared for each other at all. It was not a time of year Ana especially relished, not so much for the fact that she had never celebrated it herself, though she did not and would not, but for the fact that it reminded her even more keenly of a universally held truth.

They were fragile. Londoners were mostly spoiled children who had no idea of what a harsh life might look like. The Omnics had come, those years ago, but they had not needed to rebuild a society out of the flames of the old one. They did not know what it was to have to be strong. To be firm. They were the sorts of people who let a date on a calendar upend their entire lives, pretending at all these childlike ideas. Take away some ridiculous pudding, and the whole of society might collapse.

A mother crouched down by her daughter on the sidewalk, holding her small hand and telling her that it was was very disappointing when we couldn’t get a little cake to take home, she understood.

Ana chuffed and shook her head as she walked by, her mental point proven. This was how children were prepared for the world to listen, to give them what they wanted. To hide from them the fact that sacrifice was demanded of people who wanted any good to come of it. It was no question that the sorts of people who attempted to empathize with a four year old’s want of pastry couldn’t understand Ana.

In some ways, she found comfort in this. If people accustomed to the plush robes of a gentle life could not understand her, it was merely that they did not understand the sort of things that needed to be done. She almost could not fault them, though she certainly found occasion to do so anyhow. Sheep do not understand the sheepdog. People like her were made to protect the world for people who did not have the strength to be like her, to do difficult things.

The cafe was a simple affair with a black awning, and in summers, Ana imagined there must be plenty of seating on the sidewalk in summer, but now there were only a few small tables crowded into the place, covered in a red gingham plastic. Black and white photography covered the walls, every square inch devoted to a memory that was certainly somewhat different from the lived experience of it. It smelled of bacon and beans and eggs, and it didn’t make much sense for Ana to be there, but the coffee was some of the most competent she’d found, the prices were right, and the English insistence on beans at breakfast was one of the few sensible things about them, this place preparing them with a bit of cheddar, if lacking much else by way of seasoning. They had a ready selection of newspapers, it was at nearly the halfway point between her apartment and her work, and she was accustomed to her little spot in the corner.

Today, there was somebody in it. Not a tourist, but perhaps worse. A blonde woman with a round, almost dollish face, and bright blue eyes, a cozy pink sweater wrapping her like a blanket.

Ana found sentimentality a crime, regret a worse one, and found weakness in softness. For these reasons, Ana Amari had never particularly bonded with Mercy, who had encompassed all of these things from the first time Ana had met her. She was a brilliant doctor, and few people could reasonably say otherwise. Her work was integral to the development of several new weapons. She was a private physician to Overwatch’s most complex cases. She was all of this, and Ana could admit it, but she was also the sort of person who cried in her office at times, who questioned the good of what they were doing because the means made her uncomfortable, the sort of person who let her heart overtake. Mercy was as bad as Moira, in her own way, Tracer had once struck her for saying, even if it was true.

All of this might have been complicated enough, but then, while Ana was temporarily dead, Mercy had gone and married her daughter.

Mercy sat looking at Ana with a small smile on her face, hands folded in her lap and what seemed to be salmon on toast in front of her. Across the table, there was a steaming cup of coffee and a plate of beans with cheese on toast.

“I asked them what it was you were ordering every day.” Mercy nodded. “They know you very well.”

Ana closed her eye and sighed. Mercy never knew when to leave anything alone. Which might have been fine, if she had ever bent Pharah’s ear to understanding what Ana had done was all to the good. But she seemed to constantly be needling Ana to apologize, to reach out to Pharah. When was it going to be Pharah’s responsibility to admit that she was wrong? The she had never tried to understand her mother?

“Do I look like I need you to buy me breakfast?” She stood, looking down at Mercy, who shook her head.

“Ana, please. Sit?”

“I don’t know what possibly we could share here.” But she sighed and sat down anyway. At least there was breakfast, and the order was right. “But go on.”

Mercy nodded hopefully. “The baby is doing well, the doctor tells me,” she gave a small giggle, looking off away from Ana, “Though, I am not needing too much input, I remember my rotation and have been studying up. A new mother’s anxiety, it must be, you know how that feels.”

Ana took a drink of her coffee. “I was running an operation to my eighth month. But then,” she shrugged, “ I was so much younger. Less to worry about.”

She looked back to Ana a moment, and then looked down at her salmon toast. “Yes. We have....we want this very badly, so I am, more nervous.”

Ana said nothing, simply began to eat her beans and sip at her coffee.

“Ana,” Mercy straightened her back, “I was thinking. Wondering. If you’d like to come for dinner, on Christmas.”

Ana looked over at her with a long, flat stare.

“Not to celebrate! But, we always, everything is closed, and, Fareeha is making a wonderful dinner, we watch movies, you would be alone, and with it almost being Fareeha’s birthday,” She leaned forward, “And the new year, there are so many changes that will be coming. I thought that, maybe, since there are so many new things--.”

Ana set down her fork with a high clink, and chuckled. “Now we get to it. What do you want?”

“Nothing. For me. Ana, you can snap at me, and be--be dismissive of me, all you are wanting for the rest of your life, that was before Fareeha, even, but I love her--”

“You have never understood things between me and Fareeha. You can’t.”

“All you would need to be doing is apologizing. Things have been,” Mercy gave a little sigh, “Fareeha, I think, would forgive you, if you tried. With the baby, and with the sadness of Lena--”

Ana chuckled. “Just because you will hold my grandchild hostage doesn’t mean I’ll apologize, Angela,” she shook her head, “I did what I had to do. There is absolutely nothing to forgive. Just because Fareeha refuses to understand, does not, even for a minute, mean I will bend my knee to--”

Mercy stood up, hands balled at her sides. “Then--then don’t! I--” she lost the words a moment, tears streaming down her face, and she wiped at them, buying her face in her hands, “I was wanting to help you, is all of it! I want to help her! I want,” She let out a sob, and continued, very softly, “My parents are dead, Ana. For our child, I was wanting…” She shook her head and wiped her eyes. “No. I will go, now. I won’t try again. You can...win, if you are thinking this is winning.”

She stood up and smoothed the front of her skirt, puling the coat over her shoulders, tears still streaming down her face. Mercy was like this, Ana thought. She was soft, in all the ways Ana was happy she wasn’t, and she good too emotional about things, things that didn’t even really concern her. What she and Pharah had as problems, was her and Pharah’s business.

As she moved to leave the table, dropping a few pound coins next to her coffee, she turned back, stopped, and then took one look back.

“You, are a terrible person,” she jutted out her chin, feigning strength, “Fareeha deserved much better than you. But,” she took a deep breath, “I still hope she forgives you, someday. Someday, I hope you will deserve it.”

Ana sat back in her chair, and picked up a newspaper.

Ridiculous.

____________

Ana lived alone, now, in that tiny and dark apartment in Brixton with the two small bedrooms barely enough to be called such. It had never occurred to her to live anywhere else. The hallways were dark and dank in the best of times, but the place was cheap, and she didn’t need any kind of frills to entertain all the guests she didn’t have.

There was a chill coming up the stairs, and Ana attributed it to the cool of the December air, wet and icy on her face, and the poor maintenance of the building. It hardly mattered. The hallway was dim and still, a lightbulb at the end of it flickering out the last of its life in some desperate Morse code Ana could not decipher. She turned to unlock the door, when her sniper’s eye caught the movement, just a little.

She turned toward the flicker and shadow. Silence. Nothing. Of course nothing, this hallway was always quiet as the grave, small people in their small lives coming and going like mice nibbling for crumbs. Another flicker, and he was there.

The dark shadow at the end of the hall, strong and bricked and dead for years. Darkness again.

Ana dropped her keys in the moment, and bent down to pick them up. Had she eaten today? Clearly she was seeing things, if she needed to--

She raised her head, and he was there, grey and dead and big as life, standing next to her. She did not even have the time to gasp before his mouth through open and emitted a yell of pain and agony and deep loneliness, one that cut into her spine and made her shiver. She jumped back to ready herself to fight, but another flicker and it was gone. Nothing there, just the dingy carpet that always had been.

She took a slow breath. Another.

“Ridiculous.” She opened the door and went into her apartment.

It was spartan, only a few small things giving any identity to the people who had lived there at all. Ana had made few changes since Jack’s death, other than emptying out his bedroom not because she needed it so much as she wanted the memory gone. There were two pictures on the mantle. A small television. Two tea cups in the small area that passed for a kitchen.

She was unnerved, no matter how much of a hallucination the incident in the hallway had been, and her training kicked in. She swept the place quietly, examining every space, every nook every corner for signs of life. There was nothing, nothing at all but the long shadows the light cast across the floor.

Her shoulders relaxed. Of course there was nothing. She needed to eat something, was all, she was no longer young and could not rely upon her body in the same way she had. There was a carton of soup in the refrigerator, and she dumped it into a pot unceremoniously, stirring it until it boiled and she put it into a deep, wide mug that served as a bowl nowadays.

She turned off the unpleasant florescent overhead light, and flipped on her small lamp next to the couch, the one small bit of soft warmth in the place, something that had been her mother’s from a lifetime ago. There was a book on the table, though she likely couldn’t have told you what it was, simply something to wile away the hour while she ate her soup.

Her only minor concession was the knife set upon the coffee table.

The night had been dark, but somehow grew darker, the shadows drawing into the room, as if night itself was being sucked into that tiny apartment that served as fortress for Ana’s personal war. Ana tried not to notice it, at first. It was silly. She was unnerved by the hallucination in the hallway, and part of that had probably been thinking about the past. It was quite natural to think of the past, when someone stalked you to your cafe and tried to wield it as a weapon.

Then someone knocked at the door.

She looked down at the knife, and went to grab it, and then Jack’s bedroom door started knocking too, and then her bedroom door, and the knocking continued, louder and louder and louder, echoing around her as the darkness closed into the room.

Ana opened her mouth to yell, but nothing came out.

It stopped. As suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

Ana considered herself to be grounded and logical, as a person. She wasn’t given to flights of fancy, she didn’t see the world as she wished it were, and she knew what to believe with her own eye and her own sense of instinct. She had never doubted her senses, before. She was a creature that fully inhabited them, that required them to survive. The day she could no longer assess a situation would be the day she died.

It nearly had been, years ago.

But now a prickling doubt hung over her head, that she might be losing touch with those same protective senses, even in the silent darkness of her small apartment. Losing her edge. She had always assumed death would come first. It had for the rest of them.

But there was no angel of death in the corners of this room, only the silence being broken by the sound of heavy, slow footsteps, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. The floor creaked beneath the thing she could not see, and a low groan of pain and deep sorrow came echoed off the walls.

Ana leapt to her feet, grabbing the knife off the table and exposing the blade.

“You picked the wrong flat for this.” She growled. “I’ve had enough for today.”

But the room was so small, Ana could not figure where the creeping, moaning, creaking came from. She looked behind the couch, only to find nothing. Behind her bedroom door, only shadows. Jack’s room had been closed since London, and it was windowless besides. But still the footsteps, and still the creaking, and still the sense of being watched.

A face.

Ana jumped into action, slashing at it quickly, sticking the blade where between the ribs would be, and coming up with only shadow and smoke in her hands. The face became a body, and the body took shape, even in the dull lamplight, as real as it was spectral, shimmering in the line between life and death.

“Who are you?!” she barked, refusing fear.

The ghost took full form now, a familiar shape against the darkness. “When I was alive, I was your partner. I was your best friend. I was your roommate, Ana. You know me.”

The ghost glowered and Ana cocked her head slightly. It occurred to her, briefly, that she had also once been dead, but that was a different matter entirely. It couldn’t be. Jack had died in the Battle for London, she had selected how to deal with his body herself, she had seen him taken away and she had gone home to that same empty apartment that they had shared. She knew Jack. She had known Jack for more than 30 years. Jack was dead. These things she knew.

“Ridiculous.” she spat. “Impossible.”

And yet, it had to be. She moved closer to him as he looked at her, shaking his head in frustration and irritation at another one of Ana’s petty arguments. He did not wear his visor now, the shattered eyes he had only let her see fully visible in the shimmer of his presence. There were chains coming from him, dragging across his back and binding him, some attached to rocks, some attached to nails, all of them heavy, and hard, and he moved slowly even as he did not stop.

“Jack? Jack.” Even his name sounded strange in her mouth.

She nearly reached out to touch him, and then stopped herself. “No. No,” she waved him off, “This isn’t real.”

There were ideas that were worse than losing your edge.

He paced around the living room slowly. “Yeah, because you’ve always been a hallucinator. Why would this be fake? You don’t drink. You don’t do drugs.”

“I buy sushi from Tesco. There’s the reason all itself.” Ana stopped at the side table, and sipped at her tea. “I have some sort of brain tapeworm from a fish. That is all, and I will go to bed, and, that will be all of it.”

“Ana.” He said in that tone, that tone that was too close to real, that too carefully mimicked his annoyance and affection, “Come on now.”

Ana sat down at the edge of the couch and looked over the chair near her. “Can you sit?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, yeah, I can sit.”

Jack, for lack of another thing to call him, did so, setting himself in the chair he had occupied so many times in life. Ana herself was still unsure that she believed any of it.

“Chains? How dramatic.” She sipped at her tea, determined to be unruffled, even as a chill hit across her back.

“I made these chains, and I’m stuck with them. I made them every single time I set myself apart, every time I used my work as an excuse to build a wall,” he indicated to the rock near his foot, “I build this myself, link by link, with my own excuses and my own behavior.”

Ana leaned back. “Comfortable.”

“Don’t joke, Ana. You should see the chain you’re wearing.” He shook his head. “It’s too late for me, but it doesn’t have to be for you.”

Ana sat a moment, looking into her tea, considering all that she had seen, considering the things in her life that she knew were impossible and yet were somehow, still possible. This could be so many things. It could be the beginnings of some mental illness. It could be a hallucination borne out of stress or loneliness. It could be the aforementioned Tesco. But it could also be real, and if it were real, than the world at larger had it all wrong about them.

“You did what you had to do. To save the world. We both did.” She waved a hand and scoffed. “We gave up so much for it, and then they hated us for it. We never got any reprieve.” She leaned toward him, pointing, “We made the sacrifice.”

Jack gave a weak chuckle. “Did we? Or was it just always easier to fight?” He smiled softly. “We could have had families. We could have...built connections. The crisis ended, but we never stopped being there. We forgot how to be people, me, and you, and Gabe.”

“I--”

“You were the most important person I had.” Jack rose to his feet. “I’m here to help you. I don’t want this to happen to you.”

“And how, exactly,” she raised an eyebrow, “Are you going to help me, with all of my supposed problems?”

“There will be three spirits: The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present--”

She stood up, laughing. “Why Christmas? I don’t even celebrate Christmas. I’ve never celebrated Christmas. I--”

“It’s for narrative structure, Ana. Call them the ghosts of Last Tuesday Past, I don’t--”

She crossed her arms. “I don’t know why we need to--”

He shook his head again, “You will be visited by three spirits, one tonight, at midnight--”

“I don’t have time for this, have them all come at once, so I can go back to--”

“ANA!” He howled, and raged toward her and the force of it knocked her into the wall, those empty eyes burning, burning like coals in the darkness of his own death, “I am trying to help you! Do you want to die alone? Do you want to be completely separated from every human being? You can live a long time Ana, and start to realize it’s a hell, and all you’ll do is wait, and stare, at visitors that are never coming, and birthdays you’ll never celebrate, and you’ll know,” He pointed his finger in you’re face, “You’ll know! That you put yourself there.”

“Jack…”

He sighed heavily and plopped into the chair, his hand at his temples. ‘While I was alive, I couldn’t help you, or save you. You were so damn--we--were so damn determined to put walls around ourselves, thick ones, like we were fortresses, and keep everyone else out. And we did a good fucking job, didn’t we? You and me, side by side, shooting down anyone who tried to come over.” He removed his hand but did not look at her, “When I died, who truly mourned me? You?” he chuckled, “Maybe not even that.”

“I did.”

She hated herself for saying it, at first, and knowing that it was true, and then there was a second, smaller hate there, one she could not place.

“Okay. If you say so.” He looked out the window. ‘This isn’t a discussion. You’re going to be visited, and for God’s sake Ana, please just listen. I could never get you to listen. I...that’s all the time I have. Listen.”

He stood up and stepped toward the window as if not under his own power, drifting more than walking toward the dark London night. Ana stumbled to her feet, confused and angry and afraid, calling after him.

“Jack? Jack, why can’t you just--Jack!”

He faded through the window, though Ana knew it to be double tight, and she was left alone in the dark, with but one word, surrounding her and echoing off the walls.

“Listen.”

#HON HON HON #yes it's actually part of the canon ahaha

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artsy0wl · 3 years

Text

He Needs You (A VLD fic)

I don’t care if I was late to the Voltron train, but I did enjoy most of it. I finally got around to it around the time season 8 had been released. This was a fic that I had written back when I had finished season six and then rewritten a month or two back.

It’s basically a post season 6 au addressing where Keith's mind may have been.

Since getting settled back on Earth, everyone started getting into a routine. When not forming Voltron or assisting new recruits, each Paladin found hobbies to keep their minds and bodies at ease. And with it, thoughts and emotions were finally beginning to sink in. Unfortunately, they were not all positive as fatigue and anxiety settled. While three of the Paladins were settling in well enough, over time, one had became noticeably absent.

It had been a few days and Keith had refused to make an appearance. He may have been known to withdraw when needed, but now, it was getting into concerning territory. And for those who were observant enough, the last time he was seen, he appeared exhausted. He never stuck around for questioning, so whether or not it was physical or emotional, it could not be determined.

Shiro was the first to really get concerned. The others, though uncertain, weren't too sure if it was as concerning as Shiro was. And while he couldn't blame them, Shiro seemed to be the only one who could affirm that this was a problem. Keith's sudden disappearance heightened the need to deal with concerns that have progressively been building up in Shiro. He entered the lounge area, hoping to find him hiding there. Unfortunately, it appeared to be a dead end. However, since Coran was in the room, there was a small amount of hope that he might have seen Keith.

"Have you seen Keith?" Shiro asked.

"Oh, Shiro." Coran greeted approaching him. "I was just about to ask you the same thing." He let out a sigh. "I'm starting to worry. I know he can get quite sullen, but never for this long."

"I know, that's why I'm worried." It was disappointing that Coran did not know, but it was a possibility. "I'll keep looking. If you see him, tell me immediately."

"Of course. You have my word."

The doors to the kitchen slid open. It had been a few hours since Shiro had spoke to Coran, and Shiro still wasn't having any luck finding the missing Paladin. He soon realized that he wasn't alone. Krolia was in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, snacking on some of Hunk's leftover lasagna. She was in a tank top and a towel was draped around her neck, clearly indicating that she had recently finished some training. Shiro grabbed a glass of water, frustrated by the lack of progress.

"I think I saw a red bundle go into the dark room." Krolia stated.

Shiro nearly choked on the water. T He was both shocked and intrigued by the statement. This was one of the few times she referred to her son in such a soft way. On top of that, this was the break he needed.

"And you're just bringing this up know?" Shiro choked.

"Well he's been staking out in the infirmary, the armory, and the library up until today." Krolia admitted. "With how often he was there, I thought you were aware. But based on your reaction, I guess not. I bring this up now because photography doesn't quite seem like his thing."

Shiro couldn't deny her observation. He was usually spotted in those places along with the training room. Keith must have been shuffling it up recently, so that no one knew which place he was in at what time in an attempt to hide from everyone. The dark room was initially added as a recreational space for some of the crew and to show Allura and Coran an old, but still enjoyable, way to develop photos. That said, photography wasn't really Keith's strong suit, so it was the perfect hiding place when he finally did disappear. Not that he was open to being photographed much.

"He's become a bit of a recluse these days." Shiro explained, setting the cup down. "At first we thought it was Keith being Keith. But I started to notice that it got progressively worse the last few days and he pretty much disappeared yesterday."

"He does seem to have a lot bothering him lately."

It was good to know that she seemed aware of the situation. However, her tone signified that she hadn't talked to him about it herself. Shiro wasn't sure if that had to do with her unable to get to Keith before he hid, if she tried and he shut her out, or if she was still catching up on all of those years of being absent and was unsure how to approach this kind of situation.

"And you haven't talked to him?" Shiro curiously inquired.

Krolia set her plate down and hopped of the counter so she could give Shiro her full attention. She clearly had something on her mind and might have known something that Shiro didn't. She leaned against the counter for a moment, thinking of how to word it.

"Well, I think I know what's troubling him, but I don't feel like it's my place to intervene." Krolia explained.

Her reason was a little confusing. She knew, but why she didn't want to get involved was a curious thing. Shiro didn't believe it was a Galra way of parenting, given how she wanted to be in his life compared to Zarkon, but it was still a little weird. Was it because they had only been reunited as recently as they were? Or was there more to it? Krolia noticed this and knew she had to elaborate.

"Keith's shook up about the whole clone incident." Krolia stated. "Part of him did fall for it, not wanting to believe that they truly lost you. However, when your clone went A.W.O.L., it wasn't the kindest experience to him." Krolia flinched slightly as she recalled what her son told him about the incident. "In short, he ended up having to fight you, someone he cares deeply for. And you weren't exactly the nicest person to him in that moment. Quite the opposite in fact." She recalled the pain in his eyes not long after that fight. "Your clone fought him, degraded him, and even tried to kill him. He still has the burn mark to prove it. Permanently at that." Krolia stood up, a little disheartened. "He's confused. Scared that such a prominent figure in his life turned evil and tried to kill him. I bet that image hasn't fully gone away despite your return." Krolia sighed, looking at Shiro with concern. "As his mother, I want to do what I can for him. I want to help him get through this and tell him that everything's okay. However, I think he needs you to help him with this. He needs to talk to you. I know you were not the one that did this to him, something I'm sure he's aware of in some part, but it was a physical copy of you that caused it. It's your image that's imprinted on the memory. I can't talk him through something that I know you would be better handling."

Krolia began walking towards the door. One quick whiff of her shirt was all she needed to tell her she needed a shower. She looked back at Shiro, urgency in her eyes.

"I'd hurry of I were you." Krolia emphasized. "Who knows how long he'll be there."

The red tint of the dark room was enough to make the search for Keith difficult. Shiro could manage once his eyes adjusted, but it was still a bit of a challenge. When he didn't see Keith out in the open, Shiro began opening the cabinets. He eventually found Keith hiding in one with his kneels held against his chest. Kneeling down, Shiro got as good of a look as he could at Keith. Hair blocked Keith's face for the most part, denying Shiro access to a visual of his face and expression even more so than the already hindering lighting of the room did. Keith wasn't moving outside of shifting whenever he breathed.

"Hey Keith." Shiro greeted.

Keith didn't acknowledge Shiro's presence. Or at least he didn't appear to. Keith still didn't move either. Shiro thought about what to say next.

"Mind if I join you?" Shiro asked. When he didn't get a respond, he tried to think of something to lighten the mood. "You're right, even with a levitating arm, I still couldn't fit in a cabinet like this. I'm a little too husky."

When Keith ignored his attempt at, albeit dark, humor, Shiro knew he had to do something. His arm reached inside, aiming to grab Keith's right shoulder and nudge Keith out. The motion startled Keith, causing him to panic. He started writhing in the grip, wanting to get out of it.

"Let me go!" Keith gasped.

Shiro refused Keith's demands, not wanting Keith to disappear again. Once he managed to nudge Keith out enough, Shiro wrapped his other arm around Keith and yanked him out and set Keith on his lap. The movement caused Keith to start kicking his feet out. Not hard enough to hurt Shiro, as even in his panic, Keith didn't want to hurt Shiro, but enough to try fighting back. Shiro didn't care, tightening his hold. He didn't say a word, wanting to wait for Keith to calm down. Shiro didn't have to wait long as Keith's exhaustion took over and slowed his movement down. Once Keith stopped, Shiro finally gave Keith room to move.

Keith almost bolted, but Shiro's prosthetic arm was already behind him, stopping him. Keith gave up the option to run as he locked eyes with Shiro, silently letting Shiro know he wasn't leaving. Shiro's arm returned to his side, accepting Keith's admission of defeat.

The duo got comfortable, sitting on their knees. Shrio began inspecting Keith for damage, lightly brushed Keith's bangs aside. The first thing Shiro noticed was the dark circles under Keith's eyes. From what Shiro could tell, Keith hadn't slept in days. If he had to guess, at least four days by his estimation. However, exhaustion wasn't the only problem. Keith was clearly suffering physically. Not only did Keith have noticeable dark circles under his eyes, but he also seemed thinner. It wasn't at an absolutely terrible state, but Keith's cheekbones were starting to show through, which was a sign that Keith had been starving himself.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the only reason why Shiro was there. These were just the physical symptoms to a much larger problem. Keith's emotional turmoil. Shiro knew he had to address the anxiety and stress. As much as they both were going to hate it, for Keith's health, it had to be dealt with.

"Talk to me." Shiro requested. "I can't watch you suffer like this."

The room went silent. Waiting for Keith to speak up, Shiro hoped that Keith knew that he would always be there for him. Keith's pride may have prevented him from opening up as easily as the others, but his isolation was not the way to go about fixing the issue.

"I didn't give up on you." Keith whispered. "I knew something was wrong. I knew you wouldn't hurt us. They were suspecting something was wrong, but I knew it wasn't like you." Keith bit his lip, shaking slightly. "The next thing I knew, I found myself having to fight my closest friend. And no matter what I said, he wanted to kill everyone. To kill me."

Shiro was relieved that Keith wasn't being difficult. Be it due to his exhaustion or knowing he couldn't run forever, Shiro welcomed Keith's honesty. However, hos honesty was not painless. Hearing Keith go from hopeful to confused, from calm to near death hurt Shiro. It was a lot to put on Keith, and he hated that it was his own imaged that caused it. Keith flinched slightly, almost closing his eyes. His body was trying to speak to him, but Keith refused to listen.

"You need to sleep." Shiro advised.

Keith shook his head in refusal. The thought of sleep seemed problematic. An enigma that was undesirable to Keith.

"Every time I close my eyes I see you trying to kill me." Keith stated, picturing the fight. "I see glowing eyes and a voice demanding for my death." Keith's breath hitched. "I know everything's fine, and that it wasn't really you, but I can't let it go. I'm terrible."

Shiro had no response to that. He knew Keith was demeaning himself out of grief, but he did not wish to speak incorrectly. Keith repositioned himself, bringing his knees to his chest. Shiro may have been able to get through to Keith and help save everyone, but he wasn't able to prevent this. The pain of losing Shiro. Realizing that a fake was in their midst and led the team while Keith was away. Having to fight someone that Keith held close. Keith's stress and emotional baggage had to be through the roof. it was a lot to process, but Shiro didn't blame him for any of it.

Looking at the scar on Keith's face put something else entirely on Shiro, guilt. A hand gently traced along it as Shiro thought about its cause. All of this was caused by Keith's dedication and an outcome that wasn't deserved.

"I'm sorry." Shiro apologized. "I'm sorry you had to suffer because of a manipulative witch and a clone. You didn't deserve what you went through."

"No I'm sorry." Keith argued. "You did everything you could, died even, to make sure everyone was safe. I just took over for you and failed as their leader."

Shiro's hand stayed on the side of Keith's face, wanting to give Keith a sense of security. A sense of reality, letting him know that Shiro was there. Shiro hated that Keith was blaming himself for the situation. While maybe not perfect, Keith did so well with the Paladins and Marmora, and he deserved credit for it.

"That's not true." Shiro disagreed. "You did so good with Voltron and the Blades of Mamora. You led the Paladins so well and I'm impressed with how well you took control of situations given to you. I just wish you didn't have to suffer to the extent you did. I am so proud of you Keith."

Grabbing Keith's shoulders, Shiro brought him in for a hug. Keith didn't have the strength to really fight back, but he did attempt to squirm away to no avail. Keith just accepted the embrace, actually wanting it deep down. He wanted that feeling of comfort in Shiro's arms.

"It's okay." Shrio reaffirmed. "I'm here now Keith and everything is going to be okay. Those dreams aren't real, and the clone no longer exists."

Keith rested his head against Shiro, soaking in his surroundings. Being with Shiro, the real Shiro, was surreal. The black and grey uniform, Shiro's voice, the smell of Shiro's aftershave, all of it was familiar. And none of it threatening or fake. This was real. Shiro was real. Tears sprinkled down Keith's face. He didn't want to cry, but he couldn't stop.

"It's okay." Shiro whispered, gently rubbing the back of Keith's head. "Everything's going to be okay."

Several hours later, Krolia went looking for her son and Shiro. Figuring that Shiro successfully made it to Keith in time, she entered the dark room. Scanning the room, a dark lump on the ground caught her eye and caused her to grin softly.

Shiro was sitting on the floor with his back against one of the cabinets. His eyes were shut and he was softly snoring. In his arms was Keith, who was comfortably sitting in Shiro's lap. His head was resting on Shiro's chest and he too had his eyes closed. Keith was finally sleeping, and Krolia was glad that he was. Based on their position, she knew they must have talked it out and Keith must have accepted Shiro's comfort. She knelt down, softly patting Keith's head. He unconsciously shuffled slightly, loving the affection.

"Good night." Krolia whispered.

She exited the dark room, not wanting to disturb them. She got the answers she wanted and her son got the peace that he deserved. In the back of her mind, Krolia was thankful for Shiro's help. everything was going to be okay, and that was all that mattered.

#Voltron legendary defenders #VLD #keith kogane #krolia #shiro #takashi shirogane #fanfic #fanfiction #feels #AU #Shiro and Keith #Angst

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tumbleweed-palmer · 3 years

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Unexpected: Jimmy Palmer x Original Character Chapter Two

Tony regretted the words the moment they left his lips. He had taken it way too far and he’d done the worst possible thing he could ever do in his eyes. He’d made his baby sister cry. He could see the tears pooling in her eyes as she’d screamed at him to leave her apartment.

He’d hurt her. That was the worst sin he could ever possibly commit. He’d always had that classic big brother attitude of “If you make my baby sister cry, I’ll break your legs.” He had always been the one who protected her and made sure she didn’t get hurt. He’d never considered he’d be the one who hurt her.

He felt like garbage at the moment. He felt lower than garbage. He was pretty sure he was akin to that gross layer of slime and bacteria filled liquid that developed at the bottom of a dumpster on a particularly hot day.

As Tony paced his apartment he found himself agonizing over this entire mess. This was so unexpected. He’d never imagined this would be a possibility.

He was just so angry to see Jimmy Palmer in Olivia’s apartment and to realize just what they’d been doing all this time. Tony felt betrayed even more so as they’d explained exactly what was going on. This had been going on a full year. It had been an entire year of both Olivia and Jimmy lying straight to his face.

He’d worked closer than usual with Jimmy this past year especially during that period of time when Gibbs had taken a short retirement. Tony had stepped up then leading the unit for months and he’d learned to turn to Jimmy for advice on cases more than once. Jimmy was a great confidant and Tony knew he could go to him trusting that the words they exchanged would stay between them. Jimmy had spent all that time working by Tony’s side and letting Tony confide in him, all while Jimmy was betraying him and carrying on with Tony’s little sister. Jimmy had been working with Tony during the day and going straight to Olivia every night.

He had known Jimmy for years now and Jimmy was the last person Tony would ever dream would mislead him. Sure, Jimmy had lied to everyone during his fling with Michelle Lee, but it had been so obvious what was going on to anyone with two working eyes. Jimmy was a terrible liar. He had a guilty conscience and never could keep up a lie. Clearly though Jimmy was a far more proficient liar than Tony had ever given him credit for. He’d kept such a massive secret from Tony. It was such an act of deception. Tony had even asked Jimmy point blank what was going on with Olivia and he. Jimmy had told Tony that there was nothing going on, just a friendship. Tony had thought he’d made it perfectly clear that his baby sister was untouchable.

It was supposed to be part of the bro-code wasn’t it? You didn’t hook up with your friend’s little sister. That was an unspoken rule. Oh, crap, was this how Probie felt when Tony flirted with his little sister? This was so much worse than just a little harmless flirting though.

Jimmy and Olivia had been sneaking around behind Tony’s back all this time. Olivia had left evidence of it along Jimmy’s neck for months now. The thought of his little sister doing that to Jimmy made Tony feel sick to his stomach. He’d spent all that time teasing Jimmy over the hickies unaware that Olivia was the culprit behind all those lovebites. The fact that Tony had made jokes about “lady gremlin being frisky” had made him feel sick. Not to mention Tony had made plenty of jokes about the suggested hotness of Jimmy’s little lady friend and all the experience she must have. The fact that Olivia was the Lady Gremlin made Tony’s skin crawl.

Olivia had lied to Tony’s face more than once over this past year. The fact that his sister who he loved more than anyone on the planet had lied to his face hurt the most.

Tony had definitely noticed that his little sister and the Autopsy Gremlin were occasionally spending time together. He’d not been shy about interrogating Olivia over her new friendship with Jimmy. She’d always insisted that Jimmy was just a friend and that they only spent time together when Olivia needed a second opinion on whatever art piece she was working on at the time. She’d seemed so sincere about it all as she’d spoken to Tony. “Trust me, Jimmy is just helping me out and giving me some feedback on how the anatomy is looking on a few of my paintings. I’m really wanting to turn more of my focus towards painting, but I’m insecure about it. Photography was always my bigger focus back in school. You know getting the anatomy down has always been a weak point for me when it comes to painting. I want to make sure everything looks reasonable and realistic. Jimmy is a really excellent resource to have. He has such a deep understanding of the structure of a human body and he’s actually pretty artistically gifted as well. He’s shown me some of the sketches he’s done. He drew up this amazing sketch of a human heart. It looks so realistic and he really nailed all the fine details. So, he’s the perfect person for me to ask for some guidance. We just meet up for coffee occasionally and he helps me out in exchange for me buying him a pastry and giving him feedback on his own sketches. He’s self taught for the most part, so he really appreciates having the feedback from someone who went to school for art. It’s no big deal. He’s a nice guy, a little awkward, but still good enough company. We don’t even discuss anything but art.”

Tony of course hadn’t liked the idea of Olivia spending time with Jimmy even with her insistence that it was all perfectly innocent. She’d always been so insistent that it was just a friendship and nothing more.

To find out that she’d lied about everything between Jimmy and she was such a betrayal. She’d had so many opportunities to come clean about it all, and she’d taken not one of them.

Tony had been so upset and he’d wanted Olivia to hurt just as badly as she’d hurt him. Tony had always been gifted when it came to really going for the jugular during fights. He could find a weak spot in whoever he was fighting with and destroy them emotionally. He could find your biggest insecurity and use it to break you. Tony guessed he’d learned it from his father. Dinozzo Senior had always had a way of using people’s insecurities to drag them down and Tony guessed that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

The realization that he’d been no better than his father made Tony feel sick. He’d always sworn he’d be nothing like Dinozzo Senior.

Maybe this anger had been building for a while. Tony would be lying if he tried to say that he didn’t feel some resentment for his sister deep down inside.

After all it seemed as though Olivia Sofia Dinozzo could do no wrong in Dinozzo Senior’s eyes. No matter how much she fucked up Dinozzo Senior kept feeding her trust fund and cleaning up her messes at least when it came to situations where he thought the answer was “throw money at it”.

No, Dinozzo Senior hadn’t exactly given Olivia the affection and adoration that most father’s gave their daughters, but he still had never cut her off.

Tony had been cut off from the family fortune for the simple sin of wanting to go his own way. He hadn’t wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the family business. Tony had wanted to go into law enforcement in some capacity and forge his own path. This choice had been unacceptable to Dinozzo Sr. After all Tony was his only son, his namesake. Tony rejecting the expected path of following in his father’s footsteps had been enough of an unforgivable sin to be cut off financially and tossed out into the world to fend for himself.

Olivia had never been given that treatment. Even when she’d decided to pursue art Dinozzo Sr. hadn’t cut her off.

Of course, Tony knew that there were different expectations for him and his sister. Dinozzo Sr. had made that obvious.

Tony was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and maintain the family name. Olivia was expected to be quiet, look pretty, and eventually marry someone of equal social status.

Dinozzo Senior had seen her artistic endeavors as something to placate her and keep her busy until she found a well-to-do man to marry. He’d seen it as a passing fancy and not a serious way for her to make a career.

She was expected to marry one of her father’s friend’s sons and be a some entitled rich kid's wife. She was expected to keep up the Dinozzo family tradition of keeping up one's social status. She was expected to be the pretty socialite who went to charity functions and kept her mouth shut.

Olivia had rebelled against this of course, but her resistance to playing happy socialite hadn’t been met with the same harshness Tony’s choice to go his own way had been met with.

Deep down Tony knew that Olivia had been failed by their father just as much as he had. She may have had the advantage of not being cut off but she hadn’t had the freedom. Tony had been given the freedom but not the security of the family fortune.

Dinozzo Sr. had turned a blind eye to his daughter’s indiscretions and multitude of fuck ups. He’d ignored her cries for help and taken the path of just giving her more money instead of actually addressing the problem.

Tony was always the one who looked out for her. After all, he adored his sister.

He could remember that when she was born he’d been allowed to come home from boarding school for a week, most likely Olivia’s mother’s attempts to merge the family before she’d realized that Dinozzo Sr. wasn’t a family man. Still though Tony had adored Olivia from the moment he saw her for the first time. He’d been almost a decade older than her, but he’d still adored her so dearly. He’d been so delighted to have a baby sister.

He hadn’t acted the way most older brothers had. He may have pestered her but he never treated her like she was a pain or a burden. If anything he’d always treated her like a little princess, always doting on her and giving into her wants

When their father and her mother had divorced Tony had been despondent fearing he’d never see his sister again. After all, Dinozzo Sr. most likely wasn’t the type to seek out visitation.

When Olivia’s mother had died so suddenly and she’d been sent back to Dinozzo Sr., Tony had been left with a feeling of guilt convinced his heartache over the possibility of never seeing Olivia again had resulted in fate deciding to force her back into his life. Perhaps he’d been so desperate to have his sister back in the family home that fate had heard him and decided to “help” him out.

He knew it was irrational to think that Olivia’s mother’s death had been fate tipping in his favor instead of a terrible accident. Tony had been a teenager when it had happened, but he’d still been young enough to fear that perhaps this had somehow been all his fault.

He guessed that perhaps that sense of guilt had made him overcompensate when it came to his relationship with Olivia.

He made sure to include her in his interests, sharing his favorite movies with her and covering for her when she’d gotten herself into trouble.

He’d set a precedent of always emotionally supporting her and looking out for her, almost as though he was her father instead of her brother.

There had been several times over the years where Tony had seriously feared for her safety. He’d dreaded late night phone calls unsure if it would be his scared sister calling for his help or someone calling to tell him she was hurt or worse dead.

Olivia had made impulsive stupid choices and surrounded herself with people who were making far worse choices.

Olivia may have had the security of the family fortune but she’d never really felt secure. She’d never felt peace with herself. She’d always been troubled. Even when she was a child, she’d been so starved for love. She’d always searched for affection and security from other sources realizing she wasn’t getting it from her father.

She found herself clinging to men who didn’t even care about her. They were more interested in getting in her pants than actually loving her. She found herself attaching herself to anyone who gave her even the smallest bit of attention and praise. She didn’t care if the affection only lasted one night. She just seemed so starved for acceptance.

She remained in toxic friendships with people who didn’t actually care about her. She’d figured any company was better than being left alone with her thoughts. She convinced herself that they understood her because they’d come from the same social circles and had the same familial issues. She’d ignored red flags telling herself that it was nothing to worry about.

Tony had been relieved that she’d at least stayed away from anything harder than alcohol and pot. She hadn’t stayed away from her friends though and her friends hadn’t stayed away from much harder substances.

Tony lost count of the nights where he’d gone out searching for her through nightclubs and penthouse parties. He’d lost count of the times he’d dragged her from some house party pretending that he didn’t notice the lines of cocaine her friends were indulging in. He’d pretended that getting phone calls from her where she was drunk and needed him to come get her was just a normal part of his Friday night.

Anytime he’d pressed the issue and confronted her about her friend’s behavior or her reckless choices she’d brushed off his concerns.

The conversation always went the same. She always had the same responses. She’d always been so fast to insist. “I’m a big girl Tony. I’m perfectly capable of handling myself. I’m not an idiot. I don’t touch the hard stuff. My friends have offered but I have no interest in it. I know that stuff ruins you. I only smoke the occasional joint and I drink, but nothing more. Trust me, I’m fine. I know you do it because you love me but trust me you don’t have to worry so much about me. I’m okay. Please, don’t freak out on me and act like I’m some kind of junkie. I’m fine, It’s not a big deal. I’m still young, I’m supposed to be out having a good time. I’m maintaining my coursework and managing my life fine.”

She’d always paused before speaking again pointing out the obvious. “Besides you don’t have much room to lecture me about the company I keep or my indiscretions, especially when we both know you have a revolving door of women in your life and you so aren’t the poster boy for clean living. It’s hypocritical to lecture me about my bad choices.”

There was only so much Tony could do. After all she was a grown woman. Even when she was still a teenager making the same choices his hands had been tied. Dinozzo Sr. had been her guardian and he wasn’t going to do a thing about it. So Tony had been left doing what he could do for her as she’d entered her early twenties and continued to make the same bad choices.

There was only so much you could do for someone who clearly was not interested in changing.

He hadn’t seen it as enabling her. He’d seen it as giving her a lifeline.

He’d made sure she had his phone number programmed into her cell phone and had made sure she knew she could call him anytime no matter how late it was and no matter what situation she was in.

She’d always called him when it became too much and Tony had counted it as a small victory. At least she called him to come get her instead of sticking out bad situations. He was was able to collect her from danger and he knew she was safe.

When she’d finally hit rock bottom it had been a relief.

A friend’s drug overdose had been enough to scare her into admitting she needed to change. She’d admitted that she was scared and in over her head and she needed help.

It had been painful but for the first time Tony felt like he could breathe. She was safe and she was going to be okay.

He’d helped her straighten her life out. She’d started therapy and had kicked the party lifestyle. She’d dropped her toxic friends and awful boyfriends and had gotten her head on straight. She’d thrown herself into her art and had managed to find some freelance work that had allowed her to travel.

Sure, Tony had worried about her traveling but she’d kept in contact with him calling him at least once a week. She’d seemed so much lighter and so much happier. She’d actually been at peace with being on her own. It seemed as though she’d finally dropped her unhealthy coping mechanisms. She’d seemed to be at peace with herself.

When Olivia had announced to Tony that she’d found a local job and would be moving to the Virginia DC area it had been a relief. He’d have her close by where he could keep a closer eye on her.

He had thought having her so close by so near his support would be good for her.

He’d never imagined that having her in the same city would mean having her hook up with one of his coworkers.

What could she even possibly see in Jimmy? Of all the guys she could have gone for she went for the Autopsy Gremlin?

What about him was even slightly appealing to her? When Tony thought of Jimmy he saw an awkward mess of a human being. Jimmy with his tendency to slouch, and his all too large ears and thin lips. Jimmy with the same out of style glasses he’d been wearing since college. Jimmy who had the ghoulish career path and the less than appropriate sense of humor. Jimmy who honestly seemed like a total nerd. Jimmy so didn’t seem like the type of guy Olivia usually went for.

What did they even have in common?

Was this just the old Olivia making a reappearance, going for anyone who showed her affection? This did seem to follow her M.O.

Tony didn’t think anyone could blame him for assuming the worst given what he knew about his sister’s past approach to romance.

Then again Olivia and Jimmy had both seemed so sincere. Jimmy definitely didn’t seem to be the kind of guy to use a girl for a good time. Jimmy seemed to be more the type to be grateful for any kind of female attention. Tony didn’t think this was just a case of Olivia using Jimmy; attaching herself to him because she knew he’d give her all the affection and loyalty on the planet.

If anything, it all seemed to be the real deal. Jimmy did seem sincere in his declarations of love for Olivia. Maybe that meant Olivia was just as sincere?

Maybe Tony had been wrong?

Still though that didn’t excuse the lies. Still though, the lies didn’t excuse his reaction.

A little voice in the back of Tony’s brain told him that if he loved Olivia half as much as he claimed to, didn’t he owe it to her to at least hear her out? Didn’t she deserve a little trust?

Would she even want to speak to him now though? Now that he’d upset her, chances are she wouldn’t want to hear from him anytime soon.

Tony groaned at the thought. He’d really screwed up and he wasn’t sure if there was a way of fixing it.

He made a last ditch effort reaching for his cell, typing up the text message knowing it was better than nothing.

“We need to talk.”

He tossed his cell down on his sofa knowing he had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually hearing anything back, but he didn’t know what to do.

He’d made his bed and now he had to lie in it.

……………………………………………………………………………………

Jimmy could admit he felt so lost. He’d been putting on a brave face for Olivia’s sake. He’d thrown himself face first into soothing her and doting on her, trying his best to make her feel loved and reassured.

He felt so lost though. He didn’t know how to fix any of this. Wasn’t he partially to blame for this entire mess?

He should have manned up a long time ago. He should have reassured Olivia that it was okay to tell Tony about them. He should have put his foot down and insisted that they tell Tony about their relationship a long time ago.

He’d been so resistant to do so though. He’d told himself that he needed to follow Olivia’s lead on this.

Now he had to watch Olivia cry over their failures.

He could have saved her so much heartache had he just insisted that they step up and tell Tony everything consequences be damned. Sure Tony might have freaked out, he may have even punched Jimmy, but at least the truth would have been revealed on their own terms.

Jimmy knew that he should have cast aside his doubts and fears and just told Tony everything. He could have convinced Olivia to come clean and they could have been saved from this heartache.

Jimmy knew it was too little too late though. They had made their bed and now they were lying in it.

That didn’t erase the guilt he felt over this entire situation though.

His head felt like a mess as he laid in her bed Olivia’s sleeping form in his arms. At least he’d gotten her to fall asleep but there had still been plenty of tears from Olivia all day. When he’d thought she might have run out of tears she somehow found more.

He knew her heart was so broken.

Tony Dinozzo had always been Olivia’s hero. She’d admitted that much to Jimmy. Jimmy had always appreciated being able to see Tony through Olivia’s eyes. She’d described a big brother who would give her the world if she asked for it. She’d described a man who fretted over her and taught her to throw her first punch. She’d described a man who had taught her to drive and had snuck her into her first R rated movie. She’d talked about how heartbroken she’d been when their father had disowned Tony. She’d talked about how Tony had still made an effort to keep in contact with her even if he was out of contact with Dinozzo Sr. Tony had never forgotten her even after he’d been cast out into the world by their father with out a safety net.

She talked about Tony with such reverence. She’d described a man who doted on her and shared such a tight bond with her. It had always been Tony and her against the world, or at least Tony and her against Dinozzo Sr.

Tony was the one who had always shown her unconditional love. She’d never been able to expect unconditional love from Dinozzo Sr. Her father was more the type to remind his children that his love had terms and conditions. Tony had never made her feel as though his love for her had any sort of conditions though. The fact that her brother loved her had always been an absolute understanding. No matter what she did, Olivia knew that her brother would always love her.

The words he’d said to her tonight though, had shown her that the love Tony felt wasn’t as unconditional as she’d believed.

He had let out so much resentment for her, so much bitterness for all the times he’d had to rescue her from herself. He had thrown her past right in her face and insinuated that she was just picking back up all her old habits. He’d insinuated that what she had with Jimmy was nothing more than her falling into bed with Jimmy because he gave her some sense of approval. Tony had ignored her insistence that she had changed for the better.

Tony told her she was too much to put up with and too hard to love. He could have shot her and it would have been less painful than hearing those words.

Jimmy was left feeling trapped between rage towards Tony and heartbreak for Olivia.

Jimmy had done the only thing he could think to do for her. He’d taken a good long bath with her knowing that baths were always a place of comfort for Olivia. She’d even confessed to him that the main reason she’d signed a lease on this apartment in particular was the massive soaking tub that had been recently installed into the bathroom.

She’d always loved baths and she’d taught Jimmy to enjoy them as well. She’d had to do very little coaxing to talk him into joining her in a bath the first time. He’d had to admit it was pretty nice. He was pretty sure if anyone ever accused him of being less than masculine for taking a bubble bath then he could very easily point out that he got to be in a warm bath with a beautiful nude woman pressed against him.

He’d adored taking baths with her enough that he’d even requested doing so on his birthday months ago. She’d definitely indulged him; sitting on the edge of the tub and washing his hair before joining him in the tub where she continued to pamper him. It had been the best birthday he’d ever had by far.

Today’s bath had been less of a joyous occasion though. She’d been quiet for the longest time Jimmy holding her against him running his hands along her body attempting to soothe her.

He’d done his best to keep her distracted, his voice soft and gentle. “Did I ever tell you the moment I realized I was in love with you?”

He’d spoken again as she shook her head, her voice soft “No.”

He’d continued to caress her skin, the memory still so fresh. “It was when we went to Virginia Beach. It was so hot, just ridiculously so. I didn’t have the heart to tell you I’m not too fond of the beach and that sand makes me all itchy. You seemed so excited about the beach and I decided I’d suffer through the beach if it made you happy. It was hard to be too annoyed when you looked so perfect. You wore that green bikini and those big sunglasses and that blue sundress. You looked so amazing and I felt like I didn’t look like I belonged by your side at all. I actually had a good time, even though we got way too overheated. We got cherry snow cones and sat under a beach umbrella to avoid the heat. I ate mine way too fast. It gave me an awful brain freeze and I’ll never forget what you did. You leaned up and pressed a kiss to my forehead. It was such a silly little action but it was the sweetest thing. I remember thinking I adored you at that moment. How could I not adore a girl whose first thought was to kiss my forehead because I had brain freeze. It hit me that I more than adored you, I loved you so much it almost took my breath away.”

“We hadn’t been dating for that long then. That was only our second official date after we’d confessed that we were into each other.” She spoke her voice soft. He nodded his head, his lips pressing to her neck as he responded.

“True, I was pretty enamored with you long before that though. I’m pretty sure some deep part of me knew that I loved you from the moment you stepped on the elevator that first day we met at NCIS. I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but I think it was a sense of belonging…like my heart knew it belonged with yours as stupid as that sounds. You met my eyes that day in the elevator and it’s like my heart knew that it was going to be you. I thought I was dumb for being so upset at the thought of never seeing you again…I mean we barely spoke that day. I thought maybe I was just lonely and you were so kind to me despite my awkwardness. So, maybe I just felt drawn to you out of loneliness and I’d forget about you before I even knew it….but then we met again at the park two weeks later and it just made me believe that my heart knew it was yours all the more. It was like it was fate pushing us towards each other. I don’t know if I fully believe in soulmates or what have you, but I think that maybe sometime way back before the universe was formed that maybe we were part of the same star or atom or whatever we were before we were us. How else can I explain how my heart knew it belonged to you?”

Olivia felt her eyes water this time for a completely different reason than the sorrow that had washed over her all day long.

She felt even more come as Jimmy spoke, needing to say the words. “No matter what happens with Tony, the fact that my heart belongs to yours is never going to change. I love you Oli, I don’t care what anyone has to say about it. I promise you the fact that I love you will never change.”

“I love you too.” She managed to work out, turning to snuggle a little closer to him despite the awkward angle she had to turn her body in the bath to make this happen.

Jimmy managed to wipe her tears relieved that the bubbles in the bath had disappeared enough to not leave soap behind on his hands.

He managed to speak knowing it wasn’t the first time he’d said the words today but he knew she needed to keep hearing them. “Tony is wrong. You aren’t hard to love. You’ve never been too much for me. I cannot begin to express just how wrong Tony was about everything he had to say.”

She managed to speak her voice so weak. “He resents me. I put him through hell for years. I was a mess and he had to clean up after me. We’ve never really talked about it…I put him through hell and scared him. I never made my amends with him for any of it. I know he already resented me because our dad never cut me off. Senior let me get away with a lot. I don’t know if Senior didn’t cut me off out of some weird form of paternal love or maybe just to keep face with his friends and avoid the shame of having two disowned kids. Either way I know Tony resents me for it. Tony got cut off for way less than I ever pulled. Tony still cleaned up my messes and supported me though. I know he was so scared for me for so long.”

“That doesn’t mean he has the right to throw it in your face as some attempt to hurt you because he’s pissed off. You made mistakes but you’ve changed. I don’t see a trace of the girl he described. Frankly I don’t care that you were that girl. I know who you are now. I understand why you were that girl Oli. I mean, you know we’ve talked about my issues with my own dad…I understand why you did what you did…Hurt people hurt themselves. It doesn’t change how I feel about you. You’ve been honest with me about that part of your life. Knowing about your past choices has never given me any hesitation when it comes to being with you. You may have given Tony hell but he doesn’t have the right to make you feel awful for it when you’ve worked so hard to do better.” Jimmy insisted trying his best to make her understand.

Why’d she make excuses for Tony? Surely she didn’t think she’d deserved any harshness from him?

He let out a shaky breath unable to stop himself from saying it. “If Tony was here right now I’d tell him exactly what I think about what he had to say to you. It was wrong and he was out of line. I don’t care how upset he was. You didn’t deserve that.”

Olivia spoke knowing she sounded so desperate pleading with him. “Don’t confront him Jimmy. Please, just leave it. I just, it won’t do any good to confront him about any of this. Please, just leave it…for me.”

Jimmy sighed knowing he had no choice. He’d do anything for her. It was his greatest downfall. “Okay, I promise. I’ll leave it.”

Jimmy did intend on leaving it. He knew that he couldn’t betray her request to just leave it be.

He loved her far too much to go against her requests.

It was because he loved her that seeing her so heartbroken hurt him so much.

He thought about calling his mother for some advice, but his mother wasn’t exactly aware of the secrecy surrounding Olivia’s and his relationship. The last thing he wanted to do was explain the situation to his mom.

So, Jimmy did the only thing he could think to do. He left her sleeping form and picked up his cell phone deciding to call the closest thing to a father he had.

He cringed realizing how late it was judging by the sleepy tone to Dr. Mallard’s voice. “Mr. Palmer? Is something wrong?”

Jimmy let out a sigh as he took a seat on the arm of a sofa in Olivia’s living room. He felt the words leave him knowing that there was no point in beating around the bush. “Tony found out about Olivia and me.”

“And I’m guessing by the tone of your voice that Agent Dinozzo didn’t find out on your terms?” Dr. Mallard replied, easily catching on.

Jimmy rubbed his eyes the stress of the day making his head ache. “He showed up to her apartment unannounced and I walked into the room…it was clear by our appearance that we couldn’t just explain away what I was doing there.”

He paused his cheeks flushing, relieved that he had found a way to explain the scene without having to go too in depth. He was sure that mentioning anything surrounding his sex life to his mentor was something he could live without.

He spoke again, another sigh leaving him. “Tony was…angry. I can take him being upset with me…I’d rather he just have hit me…the way he spoke to Olivia. He threw a few things from her past in her face…things she’s ashamed of. She’s so hurt. I just feel so guilty. I should have insisted we come clean to Tony a long time ago. I could have saved her so much pain had I convinced her to let us tell Tony the truth a long time ago.”

“You were doing what you felt was right Mr. Palmer. The woman you love asked you to keep a secret and you couldn’t deny her request. Men in love have done far more foolish things throughout history.” Dr. Mallard insisted.

He spoke again before Jimmy had a chance to respond. “As far as Tony goes, he will have to live with the consequences of lashing out at Olivia.”

Jimmy let out another sigh nodding his head his voice tight. “Olivia doesn’t want me to confront him about it. I feel like an awful boyfriend letting him speak to her like that without confronting him about it. I don’t care what he does to me, I just want him to know that he doesn’t have the right to talk to her that way. I don’t care if he’s her brother, he has no right making her cry.”

“If Olivia has asked you to stand by, you’d be wise to listen to her. Trust me, Mr. Palmer, upsetting the woman who knows where you sleep at night isn’t advisable. Just ask Agent Gibbs or one of his ex wives.” Dr. Mallard pointed out causing a small smile to at least cross Jimmy’s lips.

He nodded his head, a sense of relief washing over him as Dr. Mallard spoke again. “The only thing you can do in the meantime is offer reassurance to Olivia. From the sparse time I have been able to spend with Miss. Dinozzo and you together, I do think it’s very apparent she does love you deeply. She just needs to be reminded that you feel the same for her.”

“I do, I love her so much.” Jimmy admitted not hesitating to say it more sure of the words each time he said them.

“Then keep loving her. Let Tony sort through his emotions. His actions are not your responsibility.” Dr. Mallard pointed out Jimmy nodding his head in agreement.

Ducky was right, Jimmy knew it.

He couldn’t force Tony to make amends with Olivia. The only thing he could do was provide Olivia with the reassurance she needed.

He just hoped and prayed that he could give her enough to soothe her heartache.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Olivia had thought that after a few days she’d start feeling more like herself, but she actually felt miserable.

It had to be stress. She was so distressed that she was making herself sick. It had to be the stress.

The stress was becoming overwhelming enough that she’d been getting sick to her stomach though. This was new. She’d never had stress give her this reaction. Then again, she’d never had a huge argument with her brother either.

Sure, there had been times where Tony had irritated the ever loving crap out of her, but they’d never had a falling out like this.

Tony had texted her once since the weekend, but only once and she had no idea how to interpret his text “We need to talk.”

Hadn’t he done enough talking for them both?

She knew it might be petty, but she’d refused to acknowledge the text message.

She couldn’t force herself to acknowledge it. Responding to it would just lead to more heartbreak.

She’d never dreamed Tony could hurt her. He was the last person she ever believed could hurt her.

He had though. He’d been so cruel. He wouldn’t even shut up for one second and hear Jimmy and her out. Sure, they had fucked up keeping their relationship from him, but that didn’t give him the right to throw every mistake she’d ever made right back in her face.

What had hurt her the most was the implication that this entire thing had just been sex with Jimmy. Yes, Olivia knew she hadn’t exactly always slept with men in the confines of it being within a relationship. She wasn’t ashamed of it.

Tony was completely hypocritical to bring it up though. He wasn’t the poster boy for commitment. He was the one who had a string of never ending sexual partners.

Why was it such a sin for her to have had hook ups in the past? It wasn’t as though Tony had some false belief that she was a virgin.

She resented that Tony would basically imply what he’d implied, even going as far as to ask her why she hadn’t taken McGee to bed while she was at it. If Tony was going to call her a slut, then Olivia would prefer that he had the balls to just come out and say it.

It hurt to think that Tony seemed to think she was incapable of finally finding a stable relationship with someone who loved her so genuinely. Jimmy loved her without any hesitation or fear. Once it had become clear to him that she saw him as far more than just a friend he’d been so unafraid to love her.

Why was that so hard for Tony to wrap his brain around?

Did she really give off the aura that she was so undeserving or far too unstable for love?

Did he really resent her that much?

As the days went on her sorrow molded into anger and back into heartbreak and then back into anger all over again.

She’d at least finally forced Jimmy to go back to work this morning. He’d missed two days of work insisting that Dr. Mallard would understand and Jimmy had plenty of PTO anyway.

She knew he was just worried about her. He’d spent the entire weekend and two days now doting over her and fretting over her.

He’d become even more distressed when she’d puked yesterday and once again this morning. It was just the stress she’d reassured him, but he still seemed so worried.

She was amazed that he hadn’t defied her insistence that he go to work this morning after she’d vomited.

She’d only managed to get him to leave the house with the reassurance that she would call him the second she started feeling nauseous again.

Of course he’d texted her several times during the day thus far until his final text had read that Dr. Mallard was making him stop now but please call him at his lunch break.

Olivia had decided to at least take Jimmy’s ban from texting her as a sign that she should at least try to clean up her apartment a little.

She’d managed to get someone to cover her at work, deciding that teaching kids to make ceramics probably wasn’t advisable when she felt a little nauseous. The concept of going near squishy clay made her stomach turn.

She was a little saddened to miss out on it, after all she loved her job teaching art classes at a local community center.

Most of the time she taught kids and the elderly given that was who seemed to take the most interest in the art classes she’d been hired to teach at this particular community center. It was still an enjoyable job though.

No, she didn’t exactly need to work given her trust fund gave her more than enough money to live off of and focus on her art fulltime, but she loved the routine of having a job. She liked having a routine.

She’d actually come to love her life here after spending a few years constantly travelling with her last job.

It felt good to stay in one place and have one job at the same location. It felt good to have the routine of waking up every morning and knowing exactly what her day would bring.

She had a distinct feeling that Jimmy helped aid into her satisfaction with this period of her life.

He’d definitely made her life seem all the brighter. Even with all the events of the past few days and her falling out with her brother, Olivia was more than sure that Jimmy made her world a brighter place. She loved him enough that she was sure he was worth any amount of stress.

She tried her best to pull her mind from her troubles, choosing instead to focus on cleaning knowing that her apartment had become a bit of a mess over these past few days. Jimmy and she really hadn’t felt up to actually leaving the apartment. They’d been more focused on trying to reassure one another and heal from the events of the weekend.

It was high time to give the place a good deep clean. Besides, cleaning always did help her cope with her anxieties.

She started with the bathroom knowing it was always her least favorite part of the process of housework.

It wasn’t until she was down on her knees sorting through the contents under the bathroom sink that she came across a particular box of items that made her heart drop.

She stared down at the box of tampons in her hand, a sudden realization hitting her. She was late. No, she wasn’t too terribly late, but still late enough to give her pause.

She knew everyone insisted that they ran like clockwork and everyone else insisted that wasn’t possible, but she was pretty sure ran as close to being like clockwork as possible. She had at least some concept of how her cycle ran most of the time.

It would explain a lot a little voice in the back of her brain exclaimed; the nausea, the exhaustion…the late period.

Jimmy and she used protection though…then again hadn’t they occasionally had their little slip ups?

She felt her heart begin to slam in her chest as she tried her best to remember every single sexual experience they’d had over the past few months.

Olivia groaned it hitting her that there was only one way to figure this all out.

She stood up dropping the box of tampons, her mind going on autopilot as she made her way out to the living room searching for her car keys.

Soon enough she would know the truth.

………………………………………………………

Olivia had never imagined that she’d find herself in a bathroom at a CVS with a comically large bottle of lemonade and a plastic bag filled with pregnancy tests.

It would be amusing if it was happening to anyone but her.

She debated calling Jimmy and explaining her current situation but she couldn’t imagine how to even begin to have that conversation over the phone “So how’s Dr. Mallard? How’s Autopsy today? Anything interesting happening because oh, boy on my end things sure have gotten interesting. I’ve peed on three pregnancy tests and I don’t even know where I found the pee in my bladder to manage it!”

She was pretty sure that wasn’t how you were supposed to have the “don’t freak out but we may be pregnant” talk with your boyfriend.

This couldn’t be happening, not now. This was so not the time for this.

Jimmy and she had barely even broached the subject of having kids. The few times they’d discussed it they had been in agreement that it was something they both wanted but it had always been framed as something that would happen in the future.

Hell, they’d not even shared news of their relationship with her brother, so any talk of kids was always framed as some far off idea of what they might want in the future or what they pictured in a future together.

She had zero doubts in her mind that Jimmy Palmer would be an incredible father. He was an incredible boyfriend after all. He was far too sweet to be anything less than amazing. He just had that personality; that gentle heart that had made her fall for him in the first place. The man was a sweetheart. He loved kids and he loved her. Men like Jimmy were made to be fathers.

Olivia would be lying if she tried to pretend that the idea of having his baby didn’t make her feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

It just was absolutely the worst time possible for this to be happening.

Sure Olivia had met Jimmy’s family and it was clear that their relationship was serious. Things were just so complicated though.

Jimmy hadn’t met Dinozzo Sr…not that that was a bad thing but still…she might be pregnant and her father didn’t even know he existed.

Jimmy and Olivia didn’t even live together.

Where would they put a crib? Their apartments were only one bedroom. Would they have to get a new place?

Oh God, what would Tony do?

He was pissed off enough when it had come out that Jimmy was dating her, so what was he going to do if it came out that Jimmy had knocked her up while he was at it?

Olivia felt her blood run cold when the alarm she’d set on her cell phone chimed notifying her that it was time.

She took a deep breath trying to calm her nerves as she picked up the first test with a shaky hand

She stared at it, her brain suddenly struggling to make sense of the blue plus on the screen in front of her.

She picked up the other test sorting through the instructions trying to make sense of the result on this test her stomach turning as she realized just what it meant.

It meant the same thing that the other two tests were telling her.

She was so screwed.

#Jimmy Palmer #NCIS #Jimmy Palmer/OC #Jimmy Palmer X OC #NCIS Fanfic #Jimmy Palmer Fanfiction

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stillroamer · 4 years

Text

History Repeats

It's TRUE that blessings are often disguised as bitter trials. In Pick and Rome's case their blessing came in the form of a Freaky Friday episode that lasted a week. An entire week spent living each others lives forcing them to self-reflect and recall who they were as individuals and as a couple.

In Rome's case, Rome had to remember that while his boyfriend wasn't big on public displays of affection, it didnt mean he loved him any less. In fact, the way Pick loved Rome meant more to Rome than mere kisses and hand holding in the park ever would. Rome just felt ashamed It had taken this whole body switch experience for him to see that.

(Truth be told, a small part of Rome had always feared his boyfriend would wake up one day and realize that Rome wasn't what or who he wanted. Realize that he wanted more than what Rome could ever give. It was an unreasonable and unfounded fear, but it was always there at the back of his mind. The doubt convincing him that he was running on borrowed time. Convincing him that he had best treasure the moments with his P'Pick because one day he might not have him anymore. )

It took Rome having to live as P'Pick for Rome to remember his boyfriend's love had always been shown not spoken. His P'Pick was a man of action after all. The man whose "I love yous" were displayed in the way he helped Rome reach his cereal from the highest shelf, in the way he, also, drove Rome to work every morning without complaint, the way he kept a picture of them together hidden away on his desk, the way he blew off his coworkers just so he could rush back home straight after work to see him, and in the way he indulged Rome's every whim no matter how small. P'Pick might not openly declare his love but it was always there in other ways that mattered. Rome could see that now.

Moreover, the final confirmation that completely destroyed any remaining doubt Rome had was the fact that P'Pick confessed his workaholic attitude was born out of his need to see for THEIR future. It was in that moment that Rome had been able to see past his fears and insecurities and finally see the man his P'Pick had become.

Pick, on the other hand, had realized that his workaholic tendencies had infringed on his time with the one person he had been doing everything for. He hadn't realized he had made his boyfriend feel like a burden to him. That Rome had been burning himself making coffee because he didnt want Pick to carry the weight of their living expenses all on his own. It made Pick mad that it took a whole curse for him to notice how neglectful he had become to the love of his life. What kind of boyfriend was he that he hadn't even noticed the burns on Rome nor the sacrifices Rome had been making. The curse had been a rather needed wake up call for him.

Thus, Pick found himself requesting a day off from work, much to the shock of his boss and coworkers, to accompany his boyfriend to register for his last semester of college. His presence wasn't necessary but he wanted to be there for moral support. It was also good to be back walking the halls where they had met and fell in love.

"You think once you're done we can sneak into the red room and finish what we started that one time" Pick teased loving the way Rome's entire face flushed in embarrassment.

"Well technically what I started but that's beside the point." He continued ignoring the scandalized 'P'Pick!' from his boyfriend. "I'm quite curious how far you were willing to go had I not stopped"

"Now you're definitely NOT coming inside with me." Rome shook his head motioning for Pick to sit on the benches right outside the Photography room. Just like the old times. "Wait here until I'm done registering"

"Before you graduate, I will have you in that red room" Pick promised laughing at Rome's cheeky "we'll see" response before entering the photography room alone.

Doing as told Pick patiently sat on the bench to wait on Rome. Well he tried to at least. Once the games on his phone no longer held their appeal, Pick got up to inspect the bulletin board on the wall. The bulletin was completely filled to the brim with flyers of all kinds of school activities. Although one in particular caught his eye. It was a flyer announcing the annual exhibition for the photography club's photos.

Suddenly, Pick was reminiscing about THAT disastrous camping trip of Rome's sophomore year. The trip where he had practically almost pushed Rome away from him for good. God he had been such an idiot in denial. Pick had always regretted his behavior during that trip. (Although the kiss that happened right after was definitely something he did not regret. )

Luckily, Rome had still accepted him and had forgave him almost immediately. Pick, on the other hand, wished he could give Rome a better camping experience, preferably WITHOUT a third wheel. Given that this was Rome's last year, Pick figured he could still make it happen.

Just as Pick began trying to plan the trip in his head he was interrupted by someone calling his name. "P'Pick?"

"Oi! Nong Pete, how are you?" Pick greeted happy to see his cousin, Pete.

"I've been good," Pete politely replied, though Pick could tell he was confused, "I thought you had graduated already what are you doing here? Did my dad send you here to spy on me?"

Pick laughed at the annoyed look on Pete's face. Pick really couldn't blame Pete for the accusation. In the past, when Pete had been in high school, Pick had been sent by his uncle to look after his rebellious cousin. Pete's temper had always gotten him in trouble.

"Actually no I'm not here to spy on you. I'm waiting on somebody. Why? Should I be here to look after you? Still getting into trouble Pete?" Pick asked. "Besides isn't the engineer department on the other side of campus what are you doing here?"

"Well, I- I- I'm waiting on someone too" Pete's blush didnt escape Pick's notice nor the fact that Pete suddenly had a new fascination with the floor.

Oh.

Pick laughed "With your temper? Who did you trick into dating you? "

"Hey! " Pete defended himself. "You're..."

The rest of Pete's remark was lost to Pick and his teasing mood gone when he noticed Rome walking out with another man the same flyer he was looking at just moments ago in both their hands.

Disregarding his cousin, Pick walked up to Rome and this other man to announce his presence, hoping he wasn't too late in preventing another terrible camping experience.

" Did you make a new FRIEND?" Pick asked as he gently inserted himself between the two men and emphasizing the word FRIEND. After the whole Din experience , Pick was not keen on having another person thinking they could have HIS boyfriend.

"Ah P'Pick this is Nong Kao, he is my beloved junior from middle school who is now joining the photography club. " Rome happily introduced " Nong Kao this is P'Pick he is our senior who has just recently graduated."

Pick and Kao politely bowed at one another.

"I'm not just your senior you cheeky boy" Pick thought.

"Actually this is the senior I was just telling you about, " Rome continued excitedly "if P'Pick is okay with it, we can borrow his car and go to Phuket to take pictures for the exhibit."

Pick inwardly facepalmed as Rome rambled on about the details of the trip. So much for his plans.

"You're going on a trip?" Pete interrupted, staring intently at Kao.

"Oi Pete, when did you get here?" Kao nervously replied.

" Oh this is Nong Pete!" Rome exclaimed then quickly turned to Kao to mock whisper "He is very handsome."

"Rome" Pick warned whilst Kao turned bright red and Pete gloated. "Dont. Nong Pete is my cousin"

At Rome's happy gasp, Pick wanted to bang his head against the wall. He didn't like the mischievous twinkle in his boyfriend's eyes.

"All four of us should go on a trip!" Rome proposed, much to Pick's dismay.

This was going to be a disaster.

____________________________________________

A/N: I just found this on my phone and decided to post. This was going to be my attempt at a funny fic but I am always tired from work and this has been sitting on my phone for months. SO I'll just leave it here and hopefully someone will like it enough to continue it. If not just imagine offguntaynew's camping episode on offgun's show as the trip 😅.

#pickrome #petekao #pick and pete are cousins bc i say so #idk what this is i just found it on my phone and decided to post #kao and rome would 100% be close friends

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shotgun--rider · 4 years

Text

Always On My Mind

A Jarevieve x Reader Oneshot

Y/N knows Jared and Gen have been hiding something, and she’s pretty sure they’re just trying to figure out how to break up with her. After all, she’s just the relationship’s third wheel.

Word Count: 6300

Warnings: Angst, poor communication skills, the Ackles being so done with this situation

A/N: It kind of grew into a monster and I’m not sure how it turned out but I’m just throwing this one out into the void. PS communicate in your relationships, folks.

You thought you knew heartbreak when you were twelve, and caught your middle school crush kissing some other girl out by the buses after school. You had been devastated, because everything was a big deal in seventh grade, and had gone home in tears to your mother, who kissed the top of your head and made brownies and promised you that everything would be okay.

You thought the world was going to end at fifteen, in the back of your first real boyfriend’s car, pulling your shorts back on with tears in your eyes after the lackluster loss of your virginity and subsequent breakup. Your older brother put his fist through the dining room wall when he heard about it, and somehow that made you feel better. You retained the low-burning anger at that kid for the rest of high school, but you were okay.

Then you were eighteen, your heart in your throat outside the loud, neon club you’d snuck into with your best friend, leaning on the brick wall and trying to process. That was the first time you kissed a girl, and the ensuing sexuality panic took a while to work though, but at the end of it, you were still okay.

Life as you’d known it did end when you were twenty five, and you decided to leave not just the state but the country to get away from your ex-fiance and the girl he’d been fucking in your bed. You packed up your photography business and hopped on the first plane to Vancouver, and when an old woman in the seat next to you told you to stop crying, you choked out, “I’m okay.”

In all of those moments it had never really felt like a lie, because even if you weren’t okay, you were going to get there. It was future-focused thinking, or something like that. Or maybe it was just that none of those experiences had really, actually broken your heart.

And now here you were two years later, telling the biggest lie you had maybe ever uttered in your life to the innocent, beautiful little girl that looked up to you.

“Don’t cry, Y/N/N,” Odette said anxiously, her hands on your knee and her own lip wobbling dangerously as she looked up at you with wide eyes. You blinked at her words, suddenly registering the wetness on your cheeks, and took a shaky breath as you reached out and pulled her into your arms.

“I’m okay,” you whispered into her hair, hugging her tighter. “Don’t you worry about me.” You weren’t, and you weren’t sure you ever would be again, but you were hardly up to the task of explaining to a three year old that her parents didn’t love you anymore.

Odette squirmed in your grasp until she was facing you, apparently unwilling to drop the subject. “But, Y/N/N, you’re sad.”

You reached up quickly to swipe away your tears, putting a smile on your face for her. It wasn’t quite as hard as you thought it would be to ignore the ache in your chest; she always had a way of making you feel better. “I promise I’m okay, O.” you reassured her. “I was just a little bit sad, and I’m not anymore,” Lie.

Her brow wrinkled adorably. “Do you want me to get Daddy?” she ventured, taking her favorite person’s tears very seriously.

Alarm flashed through you at that, and you hugged her a little tighter, as if she might escape and actually try to get Jared. You were pretty sure you’d break down completely if you saw his face right now. “No, baby, I think your Daddy’s busy. Your hug made me feel better, I promise. Why don’t you go find your brothers?”

You watched Odette run out of the room with a leaden feeling of numbness caught in your chest, leaning back on your palms on the bed that didn’t used to be yours. You’d occupied the guest bedroom just once in two years, and it was when you’d had such a wrecking ball of a flu that you’d been practically dead for a week. It had been a miracle that the attempt to quarantine yourself even worked, because Gen and Jared had been in the room to hover every five minutes whenever they could.

Now, you’d spent the last three nights alone in here, and nobody had said a word except Shep, who’d looked at you in abject confusion when you emerged from the wrong bedroom in the morning. Because apparently a six year old cared more than either of your partners.

You shook your head bitterly, willing yourself not to start crying again. Part of you wanted to believe there was an explanation. But the bigger part of you knew that if there was an explanation, it would have been offered already. The bigger part of you knew that this was just the end of something that had always been temporary.

After all, it was Jared and Gen who were married, who were the kids’ parents, who were older and had been together longer. Maybe they’d loved you once, or maybe you’d just been a novelty. In any case, they weren’t bothering to keep up the charade any longer.

You’d realized about a month ago that there was something they weren’t telling you, when Jared had almost bitten his own tongue off during dinner one night to stop himself from saying something--the man was terrible at secrets. Gen had kicked him under the table and both of them had worn nervous, guilty expressions that became a regularity in the house after that. Their conversations stopped when you walked into the room, they slipped off on dates and left you as a glorified babysitter--not that you’d ever really been able to go out in public with them anyway. In the beginning, you’d understood that you couldn’t come right out to the world with your relationship, and you were okay with that. You just hadn’t expected to feel so much like their dirty little secret.

And as you began to pull away, you watched Gen and Jared seemingly seamlessly close the gap, curling into each other without you and acting like the perfect little family, with you on the outside looking in.

You didn’t belong there anymore, and they weren’t even going to fight for you. They weren’t even going to give you the decency of a formal breakup, either, apparently, just let you drift away like so much discarded waste.

You’d come up here to pack a bag, before Odette had run after you. And you hadn’t had the heart to tell her, and now you were just sitting there, the duffel still folded up empty in the closet and your heart breaking in your chest.

You still remembered the first time you met Jared, when you had picked up a photoshoot gig mostly by accident for a TV show you’d never bothered to watch, and he’d made your heart stop the first time he smiled at you. And then you’d met Gen, and it was like the sun lived in her eyes when she laughed. And you never wanted to stop making her laugh. It had been months of complicated and guilty and terrifying before all of you had finally figured out that Gen and Jared had both liked you, and you remembered thinking that it was like some inexplicable missing part of you finally made sense.

And the kids had loved you from the start. The kids, who you’d never expected to love so hard, who weren’t at fault for any of this, who were going to break your heart all over again when you left them. But neither could you stand to stay where you knew you weren’t wanted.

With a resolute sigh that felt dragged out of your soul, you stood, walking determinedly to go get that duffel bag, and practically slammed into Gen around the doorframe.

She reached out to you immediately, her hand closing around your upper arm and a worried expression on her face. “Hey, are you okay?”

You tensed under her touch, pulling out of her grip even though you knew it was a little bit petty. “I’m fine,” you said tightly, hoping your eyes weren’t still red.

Gen had a hurt look on her face, and her hand fell uselessly to her side. “O said something about you being upset. Y/N, you can tell me if something’s bothering you. Or--or Jared. I--” she trailed off, eyes searching your face.

Not for the first time, you cursed the blunt honesty of three year olds. “I said I was fine,” It had come out as more of a growl than you’d originally intended, but now you were getting angry. Blowing out your breath and trying to ignore the tightness in your chest, you brushed past her impatiently, continuing down the hallway.

“Well you’re obviously not!” Gen’s voice raised to a half-shout, stopping you in your tracks as she threw her hands up. “Y/N, baby, please,”

You risked a look at her, turning around to find her eyes swimming with tears. In any other situation you would have had your arms around her in a heartbeat, holding her while she cried and kissing the tears away. In any other situation, Jared would inevitably have found the both of you, wrapping the two of you up together in his hold, and whatever it was would suddenly seem much less insurmountable with the three of you together.

As it was, you were angry. Angry, and brokenhearted, and so done with being yanked around. “My god, Gen, stop pretending like you care!” you burst out, rolling your eyes half in frustration and half to stave off your own tears.

Gen suddenly looked very small standing in the middle of the hallway, her bottom lip anxiously trapped between her teeth. She was wearing one of the outfits she usually gardened in, you realized randomly, and why was this so hard. “Why are you saying this?” she finally whispered, and you felt the last bit of your heart shatter. “Y/N, where did this come from?”

“Come on,” you scoffed nonetheless. “You both forgot about me like a month ago, and you’re going to do this now?” You crossed your arms protectively over your chest, wincing internally at the sound of Jared’s feet thundering hastily up the stairs a few seconds before his head appeared, panicked, evidently drawn by the shouting.

“What is going on?” He looked between the both of you, caught on the top step like he wasn’t sure which one of you to go to first.

Gen opened her mouth to answer and broke off immediately with a sob into her hand, and Jared was immediately at her side, an arm drawing her protectively into his chest as he looked at you with a raised eyebrow. “Y/N, what is happening?” He glanced briefly down at his sobbing wife. “What did you do?”

Of course this whole thing would be your fault. You were the interloper in this relationship, after all. It didn’t matter that there was a gaping hole in your chest at the sight of the two of them together, you literally six feet away and figuratively so much further. Apparently you still had to be the one to do this, because everyone else was hellbent on dragging it out. You pinched the bridge of your nose, feeling vaguely sick. “Look, all of my relationships come with deadlines eventually,” You’d hoped to be wrong this time, but some part of you had always known that. Nobody ever really stayed with you. Why should this time be any different? “Here we are, what are you going to do?”

“I love you,” Jared said, almost inaudibly, and god but that felt like a sucker punch. Clearing his throat, he went on, louder, “We both do,”

“No,” you corrected hollowly. “You only loved me sometimes.” The rest of the time, you were the babysitter, their dirty secret, vaguely passed off as a friend of Gen’s if you went somewhere with them.

Jared’s mouth was hanging open, his entire face wearing an expression of shocked hurt. “Y/N, babe, we--”

Gen swiped impatiently under her eyes, halfway between crying and glaring at you. “Well, I’m so sorry we didn’t live up to expectations,” she bit out, her expression turning cold. “It was hard for us, too, you know.”

“Gen,” Jared murmured, but you were already moving.

“Sorry I was such an inconvenience,” you spat back. Forget packing a bag, you just had to get out of here. You turned your shoulders sideways to slide past the two of them, dodging Jared’s hand as he reached out, and half-ran down the stairs, nearly tripping Shep in your haste.

“Sorry, hon,” you murmured. “I’m just--I’m really sorry.” It was an overkill apology for bumping him, and Shep stared up at you with a look that said he had no idea what in the world you were doing. Which was fair, because you didn’t either.

You bent swiftly and planted a kiss on the top of his head, tears blurring your vision, and then you swiped your car keys out of the entry and, shoving your feet hastily into a pair of shoes, shut the door behind you. You didn’t stop until you were driving halfway down the street, the silence ringing in your ears as you realized that, once again, nobody had really bothered to stop you.

You had been in the car for maybe fifteen minutes when it started raining. You were driving aimlessly, unable to even begin to think about a destination. There was nowhere to go. Your entire life was in the house that had already disappeared from your rearview mirror, and you weren’t exactly in the mood to drive across the entire country just to admit to your conservative parents that your relationship with two people had blown up in your face.

Memories played in your head as you took another random right turn, and you stopped trying to fight the tears. Jared, fumbling awkwardly as he tried to work out how to ask you to dinner for that very first time. A random morning with Gen, her head thrown back in laughter at something neither of you could remember. The first time Tom had run up and hugged you, falling over himself in his excitement to tell you about something that had happened at school. Falling asleep on the couch with Gen and Odette snuggled between you, and the picture Jared took of it later. The way Jared could wrap you up in his arms and make you feel completely, totally safe, and loved, and whole.

A sob escaped your throat, and you blinked tears out of your eyes impatiently so you could see the road. Not that it did much good; the rain was coming down in sheets now, your windshield wipers useless at their highest setting and thunder cracking overhead. You couldn’t see more than five feet in front of you, and you could feel your tires doing a lot more slipping-on-water than actually grabbing the road. It was the worst storm you’d seen in a while and you knew you had to stop driving; you may have been upset but that didn’t mean it was time to be stupid.

A flash of lightning illuminated the sign of an unfamiliar church, and you swung abruptly into the parking lot, your heart in your throat as the car slid dangerously for a few feet before straightening, and you put it in park in the empty lot. You didn’t know if you were even close to being in an actual parking space, and it didn’t matter.

It was pouring harder than any storm in recent memory, and you had no idea where you even were. You hadn’t paid any attention to the roads you were driving, and you hadn’t recognized the name of the church as anything remotely local. A quick glance at the phone in your back pocket showed that it was completely dead, and of course your charger was still at the house. Hollow and defeated, you turned the car off completely and pulled your legs up, knees braced on the steering wheel, buried your head in your hands, and cried.

Eventually, the rain calmed down a bit, and your tears ran out. You had no idea how long you’d been sitting there--it felt like hours--and you weren’t sure you even cared. Still, sitting cramped up in your car wasn’t doing you any favors, and you were eventually going to have to get out of this parking lot. You’d left pretty much everything back at the house, but the back of your phone case had a sleeve with your license and a couple of cards in it. Turning on the car showed you a half tank of gas, and now you just needed a destination. It was going to suck without having any of your things, but you couldn’t even begin to contemplate going back for them. You’d have to get them shipped later. Maybe, if you were feeling particularly wimpy, you could even try begging the Ackles to pick them up for you.

Then again, Jensen was Jared’s friend first, and that probably wouldn’t go over too well. Sighing again, you leaned your head down on the steering wheel, trying not to think about everything you were losing. That wouldn’t do you any good now.

A knock on your window jolted you suddenly upright, and you fumbled for the button to roll down your window enough to speak, immediately wincing as cold rain blew into your car.

“Hi,” Danneel said simply, soaked in spite of the umbrella she was valiantly holding over her head. “Can I come in?”

“Uh--I--yeah,” you stuttered out, concern for your friend overriding the panic you felt at anyone seeing you right now.

Danneel ran hastily around to the passenger’s side, letting herself in with a rush of water and wincing as she peeled strands of soaked red hair off of her face. “Sorry for getting your car wet,”

“No, it’s fine,” you said automatically, still staring in shock at the last person you’d ever expected to see. “Just, uh, what--how did you even find me?” you fumbled out.

Danneel had a warm smile on her face that almost made you start tearing up again. “Do you remember when we got lost trying to get to the airport?” she asked instead, making you snort at the memory. You’d both missed the flight and spent seven extra hours sitting in the airport waiting for the next one, which, in the end, had marked the start of your friendship. “You were picking streets randomly and you turned right every single time. You always do that,”

You looked at her incredulously. “So, what, you took every right turn between Austin and here?”

Danneel shrugged. “It was mostly luck. That, and the car that was parked across three lanes in a Catholic church parking lot was a dead giveaway.” She stayed silent for a moment, watching you, and then asked softly, “So, are you gonna tell me what happened?”

You shrugged listlessly, looking away from her. “We just broke up, Dee. It’s done,” you whispered dully. “They’re done with me.”

Danneel looked at you sideways. “Y/N, have you even looked at your phone?”

You shrugged noncommittally. “It’s dead,”

Danneel rolled her eyes, immediately reaching into the little purse she’d brought with her. “Here, we have the same phone, right?” She was holding a flat, rectangular portable phone charger. “Turn your phone on and check your messages, and then we’ll talk,”

You did as she directed, not even sure what you were expecting to see as you watched your phone’s logo spin while the battery came back to life. In any case, it certainly wasn’t this.

Your phone’s lock screen finally appeared with a banner of fifty-six missed calls, and enough combined text messages that the app lagged trying to open them. It was pointless to try to read through every one, so you scrolled hastily, skimming, with your heart lodged somewhere painfully out of order in your chest.

Jared: Y/N please answer the phone (3:23pm)

Jared: Tell me where you are? (3:25pm)

Jared: Just let us know you’re safe (3:31pm)

Jared: I love you (3:31pm)

Jared: Y/N? (3:40pm)

Gen: Babe we’re not mad (3:44pm)

Gen: I promise (3:44pm)

Gen: Please call me back (3:50pm)

Jared: Please come home (3:56pm)

Gen: Where are you? (4:01pm)

Jared: Don’t leave (4:12pm)

Gen: Y/N just come home and we’ll talk (4:14pm)

Gen: Please tell me you’re not driving in this (4:20pm)

Gen: I promise we’ll figure everything out just come home (4:21pm)

Gen: I love you so much I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you more (4:45pm)

Gen: You’re not an inconvenience (4:50pm)

Gen: Just tell me you’re ok (5:13pm)

Jared: Y/N you shouldn’t be out in this (5:22pm)

Gen: Where are you (5:31pm)

Gen: Y/N please (5:57pm)

Gen: You’re scaring me (6:03pm)

Gen: Y/N answer your phone (6:30pm)

Gen: Where are you???? (7:02pm)

Jensen: Y/N what is happening (7:30pm)

Jensen: Jared is freaking out (7:32pm)

Danneel: What is going on? (7:33pm)

Danneel: Where are you (7:34pm)

Danneel: I can’t fix it if you don’t tell me what happened (7: 52pm)

Jensen: Gen says you broke up with them (8:07pm)

Jensen: Did you actually break up with them (8:19pm)

Jensen: Where are you (8:41pm)

Jensen: Can you let one of us know you’re alive (9:02pm)

Jensen: You better not be in a ditch Y/N I swear (9:05pm)

Danneel: Call me? (9:17pm)

Danneel: Look up (9:48pm)

Danneel: Okay guess I’m getting wet hold on (9:49pm)

You finally raised your head from your phone, looking at Danneel with tears swimming in your eyes for the millionth time. “I don’t--” you started.

Danneel reached over, squeezing your hand in hers. “They love you so much, Y/N. I still don’t know what happened, exactly, but they both love you so much.”

“I don’t fit, Dee!” you finally burst out, your voice higher-pitched from tears. “I never did, I don’t know why anybody thought it was ever a good idea--” you sucked in a shuddering breath. “They’re already a family, Dee, they don’t need me. I didn’t mean to make a big deal out of it, but...maybe it’s better if I just bow out quietly, you know?”

Danneel shook her head fiercely, no room for doubt left in her expression. “No, Y/N. No. Not unless that’s what you want. But if you think they just want you to get out of the way…” she shook her head again. “You need to go home and talk to them, sweetie.”

“Dee, I can’t,” you whispered. And what were you even supposed to say now? ‘Hey, sorry I caused a huge scene, hope you still like me’? Even if Danneel was right, and Gen and Jared didn’t completely hate you before, they would now.

“Yes, you can,” Danneel returned firmly, squeezing your hand. “Come on, I’ll drive you. We can get your car later.”

You didn’t have the energy to argue with her about it, grabbing your phone and wearily following her through the rain and into the passenger seat of the car she’d parked a few spaces away, both of you on the unpleasant side of damp when you got inside.

The drive back to your house was mostly silent, exhaustion dragging at you and Danneel leaving you alone. A glance at your phone showed a time edging closer to midnight, and you winced briefly, thinking about all of the sleep that nobody was getting. Because of you. You’d made a big deal out of this whole mess, and this entire thing was your fault. You thumped your head back against the seat, prompting a concerned glance from Danneel.

“You okay?”

You blew out your breath. “I should have left quietly, Dee,”

She fixed you with a sharp look before returning her focus to the road. At the last moment, though, she seemed to change her mind, and the only thing she said was a soft, “It’ll be okay,”

Your stomach was thoroughly tangled up in anxious knots by the time Danneel pulled to a stop in your driveway, and even though you knew this was the part where you were supposed to get out of the car, your legs felt like lead. Somehow, seeing all of the lights on in the middle of the night just made the guilt worse, and that was before you noticed Jared’s silhouette in the doorway. Arms crossed, his face too shadowed to make out, he seemed more impassively angry than anything neighboring relieved.

You swallowed hard. As nice as it was for Dee to make the effort, this was only going to end one way. You arched a brow at her in bitter sarcasm. “Call you in ten minutes to go get my car?”

Danneel shook her head immediately, seeing your feeble joke for what it was. “They’re not going to throw you out.”

You made a noise of disbelief in the back of your throat. “Yeah, well, I’d throw me out. Thanks for the ride.” Not wanting to hear any more of her hopeful promises, you opened the door without another word and climbed out into the rain, feeling unbearably small standing in the middle of the driveway while Danneel’s tail lights faded down the street.

That was about all the delaying you could manage, and you did want to get out of the rain, so, feeling vaguely stuck between throwing up and passing out, you shuffled up to the house to face Jared and Gen.

Jared held the door open for you wordlessly, letting you into the house to slowly drip a damp puddle on the front rug. Up close, he looked shockingly older than he had been...had it only been eight hours ago? You watched him clench his hand into a fist at his side, but he said nothing, and didn’t reach toward you.

You swallowed hard and focused on kicking off your wet shoes, only looking up at the aborted squeaking noise Gen made as she rounded into the hallway in a rush and then stopped short, wearing the same wrecked look as her husband. So neither of them knew what to do with you, and that made three of you.

“Y/N,” Jared finally started, voice low, at the same time as Gen choked out, “Baby,”

And you knew exactly how much of a coward you were being, but you couldn’t let them finish, couldn’t stay to hear them tell you exactly how done with you they were. Feeling numb, you held up a hand. “I’m tired, I’m wet, can we do this tomorrow?” Your feet were already moving toward the stairs before you’d finished, and you didn’t realize until your heart was breaking all over again at the top of the staircase that some part of you had wanted them to protest.

Your wet clothes were methodically stripped off and left in a pile in the guest bathroom, and you briefly eyed the shower before deciding you were too tired and empty to sustain anything more than lying down and pretending the world didn’t exist. You cursed yourself for forgetting to bring dry clothes with you, before you came to the conclusion that you didn’t have the emotional capacity to care about that either.

You opened the door back into the guest bedroom, flinching immediately in surprise as you were met with the twin stares of your partners, lined up on the edge of the guest bed like children waiting to be scolded. “Jesus!” you blurted out, something just barely easing in your chest when Jared’s mouth twitched infinitesimally at your outburst. “Okay, I guess I needed clothes after all,” you went on wryly, looking a little lost as you realized there wasn’t anything in the room for you.

Jared immediately shrugged off the flannel shirt he was wearing, tossing it to you before you could change your mind--not that you would. You wrapped yourself up in it gratefully, letting yourself imagine for a heartbeat that the warmth and familiar smell was a real hug.

Then, you buttoned the last button and looked up, squaring your shoulders like you were preparing to take a blow. In a way, you were, it just wouldn’t be a physical one. “So…”

That was all it took for Gen to crack, her head bowing forward as a sob shuddered through her. “I’m so sorry,” she got out, and you watched Jared reach out to squeeze her hand. Once again, you were standing apart while they were together, and you didn’t know what to do about any of this but you could fix that much.

You crossed the handful of steps between you and the bed, your arms going on autopilot to wrap around your girlfriend, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head while Gen cried into you.

Jared’s hands went around your waist, pulling you sideways and guiding you down to sit between them, Gen still attached to your left side. You felt Jared’s quivering lips press against your skin as he leaned into you, keeping you thoroughly squished between them, and something else fitted back into place inside you.

Still, there was more of a mess between you now than could be fixed with hugs, and you couldn’t help but stay tensed up between the two of them, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Jared cleared his throat after a few moments, but he didn’t move away from you.

“Y/N, do we make you feel...second best?” he got out after a pause.

Your knee jerk reaction was to deny it, to put them at ease. But wasn’t that how this whole thing had gotten started? You only love me sometimes, you’d said. “No! Yes...maybe sometimes. I don’t know.” You leaned harder against Gen, taking comfort from the closeness, and took a shuddering breath. It wasn’t like you could make it any worse. “I just...I knew there was something you weren’t telling me, and everybody seemed to function so much better without me there. I don’t know why I’m here,” a tear finally made its way down your cheek. “You’re already a family, you never needed me. I’ve just been the dirty secret. I figured I’d just sleep somewhere else, go quietly...let you have your space.”

“Baby, no,” Gen sounded horrified, lifting her head so she could look into your face. “We don’t--I didn’t--we were trying to give you space because we were afraid you didn’t want to stay with us,”

Jared pulled you in tighter, practically curled around your smaller frame at this point. “I love you,” he whispered into the top of your hair. “Both of you. You’re just as much a part of me as Gen is. Y/N, you are our family.” His hand on your chin turned you to meet his eyes, swimming with unshed tears. “Tell us how to fix it, Y/N. I don’t know how to do this without you,”

Those words, compared with the expression on Jared’s face, broke you completely, and you lurched forward into his chest with a sob. He caught you easily, and you felt him pull Gen in behind you. “I’m sorry,” you mumbled into the fabric of his t-shirt. “I should have said something, I should have--”

“We all should have said something,” Gen’s voice was muffled in your hair, but she sounded lighter. “So. You are not our dirty secret, and we are not ashamed of you, and I love you,” she squeezed her arms around your ribs to drive home the point. “So much, baby.” Gen paused, having some sort of silent conversation with Jared over your head, and then went on, “You were right though. We were...kind of lying to you. Very badly, apparently.”

Jared shifted, gently peeling you away from him and depositing you back into the safety of Gen’s hold as he moved to get off the bed. Panic seized you irrationally and you reached out toward him, some garbled noise that was meant to be no wait choking out of your throat.

Gen shushed you gently, lightly kissing her way across your shoulder, bared by Jared’s shirt falling off of your smaller body. “Just wait,” she murmured. She seemed infinitely calmer, now that the worst of “talking about it” seemed to be over, but you still felt a low hum of guilt in your chest. This was your doing, your overreaction, your fault still.

Your girlfriend seemed to know what you were thinking, and leaned her forehead against yours with a soft smile. “We’re okay, babe,” She kissed you slow and easy, a soft promise of love that still tasted like salty tears, and then pulled away with a smile at Jared in the doorway.

Then she, too, got off the bed, leaving you suddenly cold and trying not to worry. You told yourself that if they were going to break up with you, they would have done it by now. Still, your hands fidgeted anxiously, picking at the blue polish you’d let Odette put on a few days ago. Gen’s hand slid into Jared’s, and they both turned to face you with vaguely deer-in-the-headlights expressions. You swallowed hard.

“This wasn’t the original plan--” Jared started, looking to his wife for support. “But I think it makes more sense now anyway,”

“We meant what we said to you, Y/N, you mean everything to us,” Gen picked up the thread, smiling at you. “So about a month ago, Jared and I realized we were thinking the same thing,”

“And asked you to watch the kids so we could go out and argue about what you’d like--”

Gen scowled briefly up at her husband. “We weren’t arguing,”

“Fine, we had a lot of polite discussions,” Jared’s eyes still looked tired and red-rimmed but they were shining, looking at you, and you had no idea anymore where any of this was going.

“And we weren’t very good about hiding our secret,” Gen bit her lip guiltily. “So we’re very sorry for scaring you, Y/N,”

“But we don’t want you to leave. And we want to be able to show you off. We love you probably almost as much as the kids do--”

Gen squeezed his hand, cutting him off. “So what we are actually trying to figure out how to say is, um--”

“Now that everybody knows no one is trying to break up with anyone--”

A hysterical laugh ripped out of your throat, and you watched your partners awkwardly ping-ponging sentence fragments around with mounting confusion. “Yes?” you prompted cautiously, wondering if it would help one of them get to the point.

Jared and Gen shared a glance, and then both of them sank down to one knee, slightly out of sync. You hadn’t noticed Jared keeping one hand behind him until he pulled out a little black velvet box, and then you clapped a hand over your mouth in pure, unfiltered shock.

“We want you to marry us,” Gen said with a hopeful little smile, and Jared thumbed the box open to show you not one, but three rings nestled inside.

“I know we can’t do it for real, but we picked these out for all of us,” Jared was watching you nervously, and you realized with a jolt that you were still staring in shock, that you hadn’t given an answer yet.

“Yes! Yes--I’m sorry, I spaced--yes!” you burst out, sliding off of the edge of the mattress in a rush to fall against both of them, Jared hastily raising the hand still holding the rings out of your way.

“Yeah?” Gen whispered hopefully, cupping your face in her hands as she kissed you before you could answer. You nodded, returning her kiss until Jared’s gentle fingertips on your arm had you pulling away to launch yourself in his direction instead.

You spent a long while with the three of you in a slightly chaotic tangle on the floor before Jared pulled the rings out and finally offered two of the bands out to you and Gen. They were different, you realized, delicate diamond designs that suited each of you, and a smile crept over your lips as you imagined your partners having a “polite discussion” over the style in the jewelry store.

Your girlfriend--fiancee?--immediately slipped the wedding band she already had off of her finger, reaching for the one in Jared’s outstretched hand, and you blinked. “Wait, I--you should--”

Gen shrugged and shook her head, already reading your thoughts before you could verbalize them. “I’ll keep it,” she promised you, “but this is only half.” She gestured to the new rings, to all three of you. “I want to wear my promise to both of you.”

“I love you,” Jared said thickly as he helped slide the ring onto your finger, drawing both you and Gen into an embrace. “Now please don’t ever leave without talking to us again,”

You laughed softly into his shoulder, the last shattered bit inside you falling back into place. “Promise,”

And in the morning, for the fourth day in a row, you woke up under the blankets in the guest bedroom. This time, though, Gen was tucked against you, the length of her entire body pressed against yours, and she was breathing softly against your neck with one of her hands curled over your ribcage. Jared had commandeered your other side, one leg thrown over yours and wrapped around you so that he could sleep with his head pillowed on your chest, his hand on top of Gen’s.

You smiled briefly before closing your eyes again, raising your own hand to cover theirs, the ring on your finger glinting in the dawn light.

#supernatural fanfiction #supernatural rpf #jared x gen x reader #jared padalecki x reader #genevieve padalecki x reader #jarevieve x reader #spn #rpf #poly #x reader #reader insert #oneshot

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bowsie22 · 4 years

Text

Pingxie Week 2021 Day 2

Summary: For a city with such a high rate of criminal activity, Wu Xie has always been safe. Now if only he could figure out why? Photography student Wu Xie/Triad leader Xiaoge

It was weird. Despite being open for eight months, Wushanju had never been robbed. The stores around it had all been robbed multiple times in that period. He’d never been attacked on the street, despite multiple robberies happening every day. Pangzi put it down to Wu Xie’s stupid luck, but Wu Xie thought it was weird. Anytime he was cornered, or a Triad member came into the shop for their protection money, there was always a moment. A moment where the men would stare at him like they knew him from somewhere and they’d run. Literally run from him like bats out of hell. It made no sense. And he knew it was a weird thing to be upset by, but he was.

Which led to now. Wu Xie, in a moment of stupidity, decided to go into the city at night to complete one of his final projects for a photography class. Sure, he had his own store/gallery/studio, but that was more due to his uncles making sure he could look after himself. And to a lesser extent, Pangzi. But he still had to finish college, no matter what Sanxing said. And after taking his two-year break, possibly due to an emotional and mental breakdown after the disappearance of the love of his life, Wu Xie was more determined than ever to ace his courses and make his uncles proud. And again, to a lesser extent, Pangzi.

Hence the moment of stupidity. While the city was beautiful at night, it was also dangerous. Especially for someone was still trying to get himself back to full health after the aforementioned disappearance. Not that Wu Xie couldn’t defend himself. He had learned something from Heiye and Pangzi.

So, he wasn’t too nervous about being followed by the two men creeping behind him. Honestly, they weren’t subtle. He wasn’t surprised by the bruising grip on his wrist, as the men pulled him into an alleyway, slamming him against the wall. Wu Xie groaned as his head bounced off the wall, attacker one holding him against the wall, attacker two standing in the mouth of the alleyway, cutting off any escape attempt.

“Ok, suppose my luck had to run out sooner or later.”

Pangzi always said that his sarcasm would hurt him. Never mentioned a mugger slapping him around the face though. Spitting out the blood, Wu Xie realised a second too late that he should have aimed away from the expensive looking shoes.

“You little bitch.”

A punch to the gut had Wu Xie gasping for air, the one to the back of his head had him on the ground and the following kicks to his stomach and chest had him spitting up more blood. Typical. The first time he gets robbed and he’s going to get murdered too. Attacker one grabbed his hair, forcing Wu Xie to his knees. That was a knife against his throat. Oh God, he was really going to die here.

“Whatever you’re doing, make it quick. Traffic is starting to pick up.”

At those words, a car drove past, Wu Xie wincing as the lights shone in his eyes.

“Shit!”

He was thrown to the ground, the two men backing away from him. Looking up, Wu Xie could make out the scales tattooed on their necks meaning that they were from the Zhang Clan. Shit, why were the Triad attacking him, he thought robbery was a bit beneath them? More concerning, why weren’t they doing anything anymore? The two were staring at him, wide eyed and pale. Wait a minute, why were they scared? They were the ones who attacked him!

“Shit, it’s him. We’re not meant to touch him. He’s going to kill us!”

“No, he’s going to torture us and kill us in the most painful way possible. The top of the list. The one person in this city, this country that you are not meant to touch and you chose him!”

“We were behind him! It’s not like we were given a picture of his ass! Look, don’t worry I know what to do.”

Wu Xie had a head injury. That was the only explanation for attacker one to slip a business card into his pocket and beg him to visit their boss and explain that this was all just some terrible mistake. What kind of self-respecting Triad member did that? Reaching for his phone, Wu Xie decided that it would be a tomorrow problem. Right now, he needed to contact Pangzi and make sure neither uncle heard about this.

“Are you serious? No!”

Pangzi swiped the card from his friend’s hand, glaring at the younger man.

“Like hell you are walking into a Triad building. To do what? Speak to the boss, demand reparations of some kind?”

“Of course not Pangzi. I just want to know what happened last night.”

“You didn’t hit your head that hard Tianzhen. You got attacked last night and had to be treated for bruised ribs, a sprained wrist and get stitches on that head wound.”

“I know all that. I meant after that.”

“After that you were concussed and probably imagining things!”

“So, I imagined that business card into reality?”

Groaning, Pangzi dropped the card in front of Wu Xie, recognising the stubborn pout on Wu Xie’s lips.

“There’s nothing I can say is there?”

“You can say that you’ll drive me there and wait outside like a good friend.”

“Damnit Wu Xie.”

Wu Xie was used to people staring at him. He was emotional, loud and the nephew to two of the wealthiest people in the city. But something was different about this. Normally people looked down at him, the rich boy who used his uncle’s money to open his own shop/studio. Or he was looked at like something to be used. Get into the Wu heir’s good books and you have an in with the brothers.

Here though, people looked afraid of him. Steeling himself, Wu Xie stepped away from the entrance, heading for the receptionist. Taking the card out of his pocket, Wu Xie pasted his biggest, friendliest smile on his lips and waited for the young man to hang up the phone. Considering he worked for the Triad, the man looked fairly unthreatening. Long hair, glasses, nice jaw bone, Wu Xie supposed he was attractive, if not a bit twinky. Hanging up, the man smiled nervously at him.

“Hello sir. The boss will see you now.”

“What?”

“Kan Jian here will show to you to the head office.”

Wu Xie was so distracted by the man’s blazer with the sleeves ripped off that he was standing in an elevator before he knew what was happening.

“I’m sorry, what the hell is going on?”

“Don’t worry sir, the boss will explain it all. Just two more floors aaaannd here we are!”

The elevator doors opened onto an office that even his uncle Erbai would be jealous of. A wall of windows looked over the city, there was a fully stocked bar against one wall, a couch beside it, while a large TV took up the majority of the wall opposite. Directly across from the elevator doors stood a large, wooden desk, mahogany if Wu Xie were to guess, these desks usually were. More importantly behind that desk sat the boss, the head of the Triad. And Wu Xie’s waste of an ex who had abandoned him two years ago.

“Xiaoge?”

His ex-boyfriend was the head of the Triad. And still, Wu Xie was annoyed to say, stupidly handsome, especially in an all-black three-piece suit. Wu Xie had always been weak for a man in suits, especially when it was Xiaoge.

“It always felt like you were hiding something from me. Never would have guessed this though.”

Accepting the drink from the other man, Wu Xie tried to ignore the eyes running over his body and the frown on Xiaoge’s face.

“Wait! You’re why I’ve never been robbed or attacked. Until now at least. Why?”

Xiaoge settled onto the couch beside the younger man, an odd look on his face. Wu Xie knew Xiaoge, knew that he always needed a minute or two to think over his words.

“It was the only way I could keep you safe. I always knew I’d have to take over. Zhang Rishan gave me a few years to be normal. I wasn’t expecting to meet you and fall in love. When I took over, I sent out a picture of you and informed everyone that touching you meant instant death. Clearly, not everyone understood.”

“This is why you had to leave, isn’t it?”

“This life isn’t safe. If I involved you, you’d be in danger. I had to keep you safe Wu Xie. You were and still are the most important person to me. If you got hurt because of me, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Wasn’t that my decision to make!? Xiaoge, I was a mess after you left. I didn’t eat, I didn’t look after myself, I dropped out of university! You leaving ruined me. And now you tell me it was to protect me and you did it because you love me so much? What am I meant to say to that?”

“Tell me what to do. Wu Xie, please. I’ll do anything to make it up to you if you’ll let me.”

Wu Xie looked at his ex, mind racing. He knew what Xiaoge was expecting. That Wu Xie would give him some impossible task. But damnit, Wu Xie loved him. The last two years had been the most difficult of his life. Wu Xie had spent the entire time feeling like something was missing, searching for Xiaoge in every crowd, dreaming about him every night. Even just being in the same room as the other man made him feel better.

“Dinner. At the fanciest restaurant in town, tonight.”

Xiaoge looked at him, a small smile on his face, the one Pangzi always used to call his Wu Xie smile.

“Dinner, that’s it?”

“That’s it. And a very long, overdue conversation.”

“I can do that.”

“Good, see you tonight Xiaoge.”

Wu Xie turned to the elevator, making sure to add extra sway to his hips, aware that the older man was watching him. When the elevator doors closed behind him, Wu Xie realised that Pangzi was going to kill him for this.

Eh, worth it.

#pingxie #pingxie week 2021

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peaceisadirtyword · 4 years

Note

I don't know if this is any good. But can you maybe write something about: You are an exchange student in CPH. You already made some friends and you get invited to a houseparty. Where Alex also is (cause of multual friends). When you arrive he noticed you quiet quick, as you are 'new'. In a subtle way he asks about you to his friends. And later that night he tries to start a conversation with you. Turns out you guys get along very well. Through you're whole stay in CPH you become friends...(1/2)

A/N: Hello! First of all, sorry for disappearing again (I don’t feel good :( but nothing serious). I was going to finish this and post it for Alex’s bday (more than a week ago lol) but I couldn’t write that week so I'm really sorry I'm too late💔 but I finished it!

This hit me hard because I was given an scholarship to go and study in Copenhagen this year, but coronavirus said: I don’t think so, love🌚 so this was like daydreaming about it. I might have cried a bit lol. But I really liked the request, so I wanted to “celebrate” Alex’s birthday with this. I’m really late and this is absolutely terrible :( but at least I have it. So I hope you enjoy it and don’t hate me too much lol

Thank you for the request dear anon! 💕

Btw there’s a second part to this! I took another request I thought it could “match” and I'll post it tomorrow!

Warnings: none I think... an attempt of fluff and... my bad writing

Words: 1726

gif belongs to @yungonie

You followed Ingrid into the house shyly. You only knew her in Copenhagen, and to enter a party in a house full of people you didn't know made you nervous, but she insisted and you didn't feel like staying at home all alone on a Friday night.

Besides, it was a chance to meet some new people and make friends, which was the main reason you started this whole exchange thing.

"Seriously, everyone is really nice, and I already spoke to some of them about you, they're dying to meet you" Ingrid winked at you "Come on!" she chuckled.

You bit your lip as she stopped in front of a huge group of people, greeting them in danish happily.

Looking around, you tried to recognize someone from university. You had seen some of them at the cafeteria and the library, but had barely talk to a couple of them. You saw a guy that was on your History class; he was really nice and let you take a look at his notes last week, but he was with his friends and you were too shy to go and say hello.

In that moment, Ingrid called your name and started introducing you to her friends.

Alex took another sip of his beer. The fourth one. He had been wanting to go out for the entire week, and he loved parties and have fun with his friends, but this party was unusually boring, and he even started missing his bed and Netflix.

He nearly decided to leave when he spotted you. It was the first time he saw you, he knew that because he would have remembered you if he did. He frowned softly, staring at you intensely as you greeted some people with a wide smile... Until his friend called his name.

"What?" he cleared his throat "Sorry, I was... Distracted"

"Do you want another beer?" his friend leaned into his ear so he would hear him over the loud music. Alex nodded and left the empty bottle on the table near him.

"So... Ingrid brought a friend" he commented in a casual tone, hoping he didn't sound as curious as he actually was.

One of his friends turned to look at Ingrid, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, that's Y/N, her new roommate" he nodded "She's an exchange student, we have History together, she's really nice" he smiled "And hot"

Alex held himself back from glaring at him, nodding softly.

"Oh, okay, I've never seen her before"

"She arrived a few weeks ago, I think" he shrugged "She's learning Danish, sounds cute when she tries" he chuckled.

Alex nodded, but before he could keep asking, someone changed the topic. His eyes, though, didn't leave you.

_________________________________

Alex sighed in relief as he managed to get out of the house. He was already tipsy and started to get a bit overwhelmed inside the house. He needed some air and a cigarette.

But just when he was about to walk next to the door, to lean on the wall, he bumped into someone.

"Undskyld" he muttered as he turned around quickly. He froze when he saw you, looking at him with widened eyes and an apologetic smile.

"Sorry" you bit your lip "I was distracted"

"It's okay" he changed quickly to English, smiling back at you "You're Ingrid's friend, right?"

"Yeah, I'm Y/N" you nodded shyly, intimidated by the most beautiful man you had ever seen.

"I'm Alex" he extended his hand and you took it, shaking it softly "Nice to meet you"

"Nice to meet you too"

"So... Are you okay?" He looked around, maybe looking for Ingrid, but the two of you were all alone on the street.

"Yeah, it's okay, I just... Needed some fresh air" you chuckled.

Alex hummed, lighting up the cigarette.

"We have plenty of fresh air in Denmark" he chuckled.

"Yeah" you raised an eyebrow as your smile widened "I noticed"

"I'm sure you had a lot of warmer places to choose... Why Copenhagen?" He tilted his head. He was genuinely curious, but also hoping you'd stay there with him for a while.

"I don't know, I always wanted to come to Scandinavia, it's different from my country" you shrugged.

"And do you like it?" He smirked at you, and you had to take a deep breath before answering.

"Yes, a lot" you blushed "People are really nice"

"We try to be" he nodded, also blushing a bit and looking down.

The both of you stood in silence for a couple of minutes until you spoke again, nervously.

"I haven't seen you around on campus" you bit your lip.

"Me neither" he smirked "I'd remember you"

You decided to ignore the last part so you wouldn't start giggling in front of him.

"What do you study?"

"Photography" he winked at you as you raised your eyebrow with interest "Yes, I'd love to take photos of you" he chuckled.

"I wasn't going to ask you that" you smirked playfully "But if you insist..."

Alex laughed.

"I'm offering you an entire photoshoot in some of the best places in Copenhagen" he nodded "I can give you a tour at the same time"

"Sounds nice" you agreed with a nod. The smirk on his face widened and the two of you stared at each other intensely before he looked away again.

"You'll have plenty of photos for your Tinder profile" he bit his lip, waiting for your reaction.

"I don't use Tinder"

"Boyfriend?" this time he was the one raising an eyebrow with interest, and it made you tremble a bit.

"No" you shrugged "He broke up with me, he felt betrayed because I decided to do an exchange without telling him first"

"I don't know whether I should say I'm sorry or congratulate you" he chuckled.

"Probably the second" you smiled at him "He was an asshole"

Alex nodded, actually agreeing with you. He finished his cigarette and pointed at the door.

"Want a drink?"

You bit your lip, holding back an excited smile.

"Sure"

_________________________________________

All the doubts you could have before coming to Copenhagen, when you thought you would be all alone during your exchange, were completely forgotten as you got to know more people. Everyone was really nice to you, and soon you were one more in the group, and got invited to every party.

During your whole exchange, you got closer to Alex. Surprisingly, you ended up spending more time with him than with your roommate or with other friends -they seemed to find this really amusing, as everyone always smirked and giggled every time you mentioned you were going to meet Alex-. He was fun, easy to talk to, always willing to help you -your Danish improved thanks to him- and so sweet that you honestly thought about asking him to marry you more than once. You'd lie if you said you didn't like him, but didn't want to ruin your friendship. You preferred to keep things as they were.

That Friday night you were at one of your friend's house, like you usually did every weekend. This time, you were all having dinner, celebrating the good weather and the end of the exams while planning to spend a weekend away at a summer cottage in Jutland to celebrate Alex's birthday.

"You'll come, right?" Alex, sitting next to you, eyed you carefully. He was surprised you were so quiet, as you were always the most excited with that kind of plans.

"Yeah, of course" you smiled at him "I was just realizing this is going to end soon" you pouted "And I'll go back home and this will be over" you muttered.

Alex frowned. He had thought about it more than once, but now he was realizing it, and his heart broke a bit.

"But... You can still come back, right?"

"Yeah" you smiled "Of course, I'll come back, but it won't be the same, I think..."

He licked his lips, nodding slowly.

"Then we can also take it as a goodbye too" he smiled back at you "So it won't be that sad"

"Okay" you giggled "I agree... Now let's just enjoy this, okay?"

An hour later, you were already tipsy. It was already dark and everyone chatted in small groups on the backyard of the house. You had drank way more than you intended at first, and you were starting to regret it.

Getting up from your chair, you apologized to the group of girls you were talking to.

"I'm going to drink some water" you bit your lip as they giggled softly. They thought it was cute you weren't as used to drink as they were "I'll be right back"

Entering the house, you made your way into the empty kitchen, taking a glass and filling it with cold water that felt like heaven when you started drinking.

Suddenly, you heard some steps just behind you. Startled, you turned around with widened eyes.

"Alex" you sighed "Fuck, you scared me" you left the glass on the counter and rubbing your face. He didn't answer, but approached you while biting his lip "I drank too much, I think... Do you want some w...?"

He leant into you and suddenly you felt his lips against yours. His hand cupped your cheek as the other one caressed your waist. You gasped in surprise, but kissed him back as soon as you realized what was happening, putting your hands on his shoulders to stabilize yourself.

His lips felt were soft. He tasted like the red wine and the beer he had been drinking the whole evening, but also sweet.

Alex was the one who broke the kiss. You blinked a couple of times as he moved away from you, blushing and looking everywhere but to you.

"I'm sorry" he muttered "I... I just realized I'm an idiot and I should have told you I like you much earlier"

You gasped, still in shock.

"I shouldn't have kissed you before asking, I'm really sorry" he cleared his throat, nervous as you didn't say anything.

"Don't be" you bit your lip "I... I like you too"

He looked genuinely surprised, but his lips curved in a wide, adorable smile that made you giggle.

"So... I didn't fuck everything up?"

"No" you bit your lip and leaned into him again "You didn't"

____________________________________________

Tags: @mblaqgi @alicedopey @lol-haha-joke @hallowed-heathen @naaladareia @tephi101 @captstefanbrandt @love-hate-love @titty-teetee @readsalot73 @moondustmemories @thevikingsheaux @therealcalicali @chimera4plums @blushingskywalker @awkwardfangirl02 @credulouskhaleesi @gruffle1 @justacripple @heartbeats-wildly @inforapound @winchesterwife27 @hecohansen31 @xinyourdreamsx @funmadnessandbadassvikings @tgrrose @jadelynlace @flokidottirsstuff @lovessce @tootie-fruity @didiintheblog @alexhandersenx @belovedcherry @fantasydevil2002

#alex høgh andersen #alex høgh imagine #vikings #vikings imagine #vikings drabble #drabble #request

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hannahrose533 · 3 years

Text

Berlin

Levi x Eren

some smut

nsfw

Levi doesn’t know about the new model until he’s standing right in front of him – all six feet of tan skin, bright eyes and wiry muscles wrapped up tight in a package labelled Eren Jaeger.

Oh shit, Levi thinks.

“Levi,” Hanji grins, completely oblivious to the way Levi is standing frozen still with his camera slipping loose between sweaty fingers. “This is Eren. He’s our model for the upcoming summer shoot. Eren, this is Levi – he’s our lead photographer.”

“Yeah,” Eren says, and his voice is exactly like Levi remembers – suddenly he’s right back where he was ten years ago. “We’ve met.”

The only reason the slam of Eren’s knuckles into the side of his face doesn’t hurt half as much is because Levi has been preparing for it the moment he saw him.

It was late July and Levi had spent the last three years traveling across half the fucking world just to build up his portfolio.

He’d started in his birthplace of Paris and worked his way through Milan and London and New York, even a brief flit across Asia – Tokyo and Seoul mostly – before landing in Berlin.

He was starting to carve out his nook in the world of fashion photography, but he was still young – just scraping twenty-five by the time his one-sided love affair with Korea had sent him packing for Germany – and the newbies to the business didn’t get shit like fancy hotel rooms or bedsits.

He meets the Jaegers through a mutual friend and Carla graciously welcomes him into their home for as long as he plans on staying in Berlin. They live just far enough out of the city to be away from the clutter and bustle of central life, but near enough to it to count. They have room, she says, and their son would be delighted by the company.

All Levi has to his name at this point is about fifty Euros and his camera so he’s not really in any position to say no.

He accepts her offer and hitches a ride back to their house just on the outskirts of the city where concrete gives way to dirt and the red stained smog of the sky turns a bitter blue.

Stepping out of the back of the pickup he raps loudly on the side of the vehicle to let the driver know his help was appreciated before slinging his bag up over his shoulder and stepping away from the ensuing spray of dust as the wheels spit gravel and grit that stings his eyes as the car races away.

Rather suddenly Levi is alone in front of a two story country-style house with nothing but the clothes on his back and the camera heavy and beautiful in his bag.

The door shudders open in a rusted squeal and a boy steps out – the son, Levi supposes.

“Sie müssen Levi sein, richtig?” He asks as he shuts the door.

Levi shakes his head to let the kid know that he doesn’t speak a word of German.

The kid frowns; although Levi can’t really see much of his face from where he’s standing under the shadows cast by the roof, only the burnished shine of brown hair and the golden glint of sun-beaten skin.

Levi doesn’t think the kid would understand French so he takes a wild stab and asks: “English?”

An expression of intense relief skids over his face and the kid says flawlessly and with only the barest blip of accent: “You’re Levi, right? That photographer guy that’s staying with us for a while.”

Levi goes to answer – probably with something snarky and terribly rude – but the kid chooses this exact moment to step out from beneath the midday shadows and for the first time Levi properly sees his face.

The back of his neck is hot from the sun and his eyes are still watering from the spew of dust left behind by his ride – his words trip and stumble at his lips and suddenly it’s all very hard to breathe.

Eren’s gorgeous in a way that is purely physical – face cut in perfect angles and lips curved in just the right way – but it’s his eyes that do it to him.

Levi can’t look away from those eyes.

“Its fine,” Levi says for the third time around a fistful of tissues, wincing not just at the way his nose feels raw and tender beneath his bloody fingers, but at the way his voice comes out funny as voices do when you can’t breathe through your fucking nose. “Its fine, Hanji; it’ll stop in a moment.”

“I can’t believe it,” Hanji says again – the third time herself – as she holds out a box of tissues. Levi gratefully takes another dozen. “That’s so unlike him. I mean, I know he has a temper but I’ve never seen him attack someone unprovoked like that.”

It wasn’t unprovoked, Levi thinks but doesn’t say aloud as he drops the soggy tissues in his hand so they splat loudly in the bathroom sink and looks up into the mirror.

Eren had done a good number on him. For one punch that came completely out of the blue with no windup it probably couldn’t have been much worse if he’d tried.

Levi’s nose wasn’t broken – thank fuck for small mercies – but it was bruising fast in a way that let the spread of bumpy purple sprawl out under his eyes as well. Levi didn’t normally look like the most well rested person in the world, but on the same note the bags underneath his eyes weren’t usually violet either.

Kid should have been a boxer instead of a model – Levi would certainly bet on him.

Levi glances down and makes a noise of disgust. His nose might not be bleeding anymore, but his hands are a revolting mess of fast clotting blood that’s making his palms tacky and brown as it dries.

Without a word Hanji reaches past and turns on the tap for him and Levi grunts out his thanks as he sticks his hands beneath the gush of water and lets slip an audible sigh.

“So,” Hanji says when Levi makes no attempt to speak. “You and Eren, huh?”

Levi’s blood runs as cold as the water feels on his skin. “I don’t know what you mean,” he lies.

Hanji snorts and sets aside the box of tissues she’d been carrying. “I know a break-up punch when I see one, Levi. That?” She waves at Levi’s miscoloured face. “That right there is definitely the work of a break-up punch.”

The sharp shriek of the soap dispenser as Levi pours copious amounts on his palms isn’t enough to drown her out.

“So my question,” Hanji continues, “is when? Because Eren’s only just recently broken out as a model. He only came to the states about three years ago – and I know you haven’t had any interaction with him seeing as how he’s actually spent the better part of his stay jumping between here and Toronto.”

“Hanji,” Levi says tiredly as he leaves the tap running and reaches for some paper towel. “Just let it go, okay?”

Hanji’s watching him carefully in the mirror and Levi wants nothing more than to just walk away and end this whole conversation here but he can’t – not won’t, literally can’t – because his palms still itch with the feel of his own blood and Levi can’t handle his camera until he knows they’re clean, that he won’t dirty his only precious thing.

He squirts more soap on his hands and avoids Hanji’s eyes.

He’s tired. He’s just so, so tired.

“Now that I think about it,” Hanji says, “you’ve been to Berlin, haven’t you?”

“Hanji,” Levi warns.

“But that would have been nearly ten years ago, wouldn’t it?” She muses.

“Hanji,” he hisses again, and her name comes out like a curse. He pulls his hands out from the basin and slams the tap off with his elbow, dripping water and soap suds as he tears more paper towel free. “Just let it go.”

Levi kicks open the bathroom door with enough force that it slams vicious and unrelenting behind him as he exits, leaving Hanji watching him with concerned eyes by the sink.

He stalks down the hallway until he’s far enough away from the bathroom that he feels okay to fumble his phone free and hit fucking number one speed-dial.

Erwin picks up after two rings. “Levi,” he greets easily. “I assume this is about Eren?”

Levi grits his teeth together hard enough he’s surprised they don’t chip as he fights down the burgeoning sense of betrayal. “You didn’t even think you should warn me?”

“I thought it might be best if you weren’t given a chance to run. You have a history of resorting to extreme means to escape small problems.”

“Fuck you,” he hisses. “I told you –.”

“You told me if I ever sent you to Berlin you’d quit on the spot. I haven’t sent you to Berlin, Levi; Berlin has come to you.”

Levi sucks in a deep breath and follows that up with another as he tries to keep from screaming down the phone at Erwin because twelve year-old tantrums rarely solve problems and Erwin is still technically his boss.

“What are you playing at?”

“Eren is a talented model,” Erwin says firmly. “We are lucky to be working with him. I’m sorry but your past with him does not nullify his value to us; not everything is about you. This discussion is over.”

Levi hangs up without another word before he does something he’ll really regret.

The hallway is empty enough that Levi can lean against the wall and close his eyes without risking an awkward explanation, grinding the palms of his hands into his sockets and ignoring the way it flares up the bruising burn.

Eren Jaeger was from ten years in his past and Levi had been so sure that would be where he’d stay for the rest of ever. He’d never thought – never allowed himself to believe – that their paths would ever cross again, not in this lifetime.

There’s a photo Levi has in a shoebox in his apartment that he hasn’t looked at since he put it there eight years ago. He’s not even thought of it in at least three.

Ten years ago in Berlin he’d taken seven photos of Eren Jaeger and deleted every single one except the last.

Levi lets out an uneven breath and drops his hands from his eyes.

His face feels like it’s on fire and he suspects it might take a good few days for the swelling to go down enough that he can properly use his camera.

He thinks of Eren lying on the floor in the Jaeger household, his eyes closed and his shoulders rising up and down in even breaths, the blue of Levi’s blanket around his bare shoulders; how for that brief second when Levi had peered through his camera everything had felt right.

His face hurts and he can feel his nose bleeding again.

It’s probably no less than he deserves.

“I still don’t get why I can’t come with you when you go into the city,” Eren whines as he kicks his feet absently against the wooden beams of the underside of the deck. “Do you even understand how boring it is just to hang around here all day? Fuck, I swear I’m going insane.”

“Oi, watch your language shithead,” Levi scolds but doesn’t look up from where he’s cleaning the various lenses of his camera. “If your mother hears you talking like that I’m the one who’s going to cop the blame.”

Eren smirks and leans back on his hands, peering at Levi over his shoulder. “Well maybe you should just let me come with you into Berlin and I’ll make an effort to clean up my language.”

Levi snorts as he carefully wipes the delicate glass with a cloth. “Your parents think you’re the sweetest little thing when in reality you’re nothing but a manipulative little shit.”

“What can I say; I’m learning from the best.”

It was dry and hot and Levi doesn’t understand why it’s making him so desperately uncomfortable when he’d been to much hotter countries before. He’d had a stint in Australia during the middle of December, yet he didn’t sweat nearly as much as he is now sitting cross-legged on the floor of the guest room with the sliding glass door open to the veranda out front, Eren sitting with his legs hanging over the side as he bugged Levi in that way that fifteen year old boys bugged everybody they met.

Eren lets out a sigh and flops backwards against the decking in a spray of lanky limbs. “It’s too hot for this,” he mumbles as his eyes slip closed.

Levi tries not to stare at the line of his neck, the sweat trickling down to lick at his collarbone, easily visible beneath the neck of his shirt which was too large on him and gliding loose at his shoulder.

It feels like there’s a rock in Levi’s stomach and his throat goes very dry.

“If the heat’s bothering you that much piss off and take a shower or something; leave me the fuck alone,” he rasps and turns his attention back to the unassembled camera, trying desperately to ignore the way his hands shake.

Eren pouts and rolls over, opening up his eyes to watch Levi click and unlick his lenses.

Levi has been here long enough by now to build up a certain – immunity wasn’t the word – tolerance against Eren’s gaze, but when he looks at him like that; nothing but sheer intensity in blue-green eyes … Levi can hardly take it.

“What are you doing?” Eren asks.

Levi doesn’t look, only reaches for another lens. “Making sure I keep my camera in good condition,” he says steadily. “Otherwise I’d ruin the lenses.”

“Is your camera that important to you?” Eren asks and he’s still doing it – looking at Levi like this whole thing is the most important thing in the world to him right now.

“Very,” Levi answers.

“Why?”

“Because,” he says as places the cloth down and reaches for some cotton buds, “it was the very first thing I ever bought for me.”

They fall into silence for a moment, the only sounds the gentle swabbing of cotton buds against the delicate curve of the lens and the outside chirp of cicadas.

“Can I help?” Eren asks and Levi falters.

“With the cleaning?” He specifies, and Eren simply nods.

He means to say ‘no’ – he means to tell Eren that this camera is too precious to him to be handled by a brat who doesn’t know the first thing about photography – but Eren just looks so earnest; like all he wants in life right now is for Levi to let him help.

Levi sighs and pats the floorboards next to him and Eren scurries over eagerly.

“If you drop this,” Levi threatens as he passes Eren his camera, “I fucking swear I’ll kill you and leave you somewhere to be turned to pig shit.”

“Yes, sir,” Eren grins like the brat he is, but his hands are soft and gentle as he weighs it between his fingers and Levi knows without a doubt that Eren would probably sooner cut off his own arm than damage the camera now knowing how much Levi values it.

They sit silently, knees bumping as Levi passes a cotton swab to Eren, watching critically as he starts to clean the camera. He’s not actually doing that bad of a job, if Levi is honest, but it’s not perfect and when it comes to his work everything has to be perfect.

“More like…” he pauses and Eren raises an eyebrow.

“More like what?”

“I don’t know – just not like that.”

Eren sighs and it is loud and obvious and clearly faked. He looks Levi right in the eye. “Well,” he says as he settles in closer and drifts his hands to hover over Levi’s lap, “if I’m doing such a bad job, you’ll just have to show me then, won’t you?”

Eren’s looking right at him, meeting his eyes without flinching, and he knows exactly what he’s doing – Levi can fucking see it in the sharp corners of his mouth, the intensity of his gaze; can feel it in the way he’s brushing much too close to be accidental and leaning in near enough to be nothing short of completely intentional.

Levi has no clue what he’s doing – why he’s reaching for Eren’s hands when he should be putting as much distance between them as possible – but he keeps going anyway, fingers wrapping loose around Eren’s as he guides his wrist slowly in a circle.

They stay like that long after the camera is clean.

The thing about photo studios is that they’re always unerringly bright – lit in sprays of artificial light that bounce off sheets of silver here and camera flashes that flare like the sun there.

It’s never really bothered Levi before – it’s his playground, his reason to live – but the thing is he’d never had to try and work with two black eyes before.

Hanji had kept her mouth shut about what had happened and nobody had actually been game enough to ask why Levi looked like he went three rounds with a heavy weight boxer and then some, but he can feel the concerned glances flicked his way every time his back is turned.

It’s all Levi can do to grit his teeth and act professional.

“To the left,” he calls and Eren moves flawlessly, tilting his head so that Levi has a better view of his perfectly angled jawline.

He raises his camera and clicks.

Last time he’d seen Eren he’d been fifteen with more testosterone than brains and a body that was just crossing the line from teenage awkwardness in fits and starts, barely taller than Levi. Now he had an entire five inches on him and was muscular in that lanky way that everybody wanted to be but so few managed.

He looked like a model – he was a model.

Levi raises his camera and Eren’s eyes flicker over, meeting his own for a brief, powerful second.

Then he looks away.

Breathe, Levi reminds himself as he clicks another photo. You’re thirty-five now and you can handle this.

Somebody calls an end to the shoot and as Eren steps out of the light his skin almost ripples in a golden glow.

Levi cannot handle this.

Eren had been gorgeous enough when he was fifteen and had no clue about the effect he had on people. At twenty-four he looks like a fucking sex-god and knows it.

Levi steps away from the shoot set-up and waits patiently for a techie to unplug his camera before he heads for the table in the office where he keeps his padded camera bag. He’s come a long way from the twenty-something that stepped off the back of a pickup in Germany with one set of clothes and a satchel over his shoulder and one of the perks is being able to afford nice things like memory-foam cases.

The office is empty and Levi breathes a sigh of relief as he places his camera gently on the table and zips open his camera bag.

“Good work today,” Eren says behind him and Levi jumps – he’d never even heard him come in.

Eren’s face is unreadable and Levi has no clue how fucking quickly he must have changed to be standing there so easily in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

Levi watches him cautiously. “You’re not going to punch me again, are you?” He asks. “Because you got a free hit in last time but I will hit you back if you try again.”

Eren snorts and holds up his palms in the universal symbol of surrender. “I’m not stupid; I know if it came to a fight you could probably kick my ass. I’ve seen how surprisingly toned you are.”

It’s an innocent comment but a loaded statement and Levi just wishes fervently and with passion that he had perfected a method of coping with his problems that didn’t just involve running away until they could no longer catch him.

Eren was one problem he never thought would, and look where that got him now.

Eren’s gaze flicks behind Levi and he nods at the table. “Is that the same camera?”

Is that the same camera I used to seduce you ten years ago in another country entirely?

Levi turns away from him and busies himself with slipping it back into the case, nestling it comfortably in the foam. “Yeah. I told you before it was important to me.”

Eren laughs. “Oh, I wasn’t sure. I mean, you’ve got a bit of a history of leaving things behind.”

Levi tells himself that the comment doesn’t hurt – that it shouldn’t hurt because it was the fucking truth – but the words still lance and barb all the same and suddenly instead of just being hurt he’s angry too.

Levi spins around and takes a step forward until he’s in Eren’s space, grabbing him by the shirt and yanking him down to eye level. Something that somehow both is and isn’t shock flits over Eren’s face but he makes no move to escape, only raises a hand to grab Levi’s wrist to keep the pair of them steady.

“Listen to me you complete shit for brains retard,” Levi hisses. “I know I fucked up, but it’s been ten years and I’m sorry. Whether you choose to believe me is your own problem, but I will not have you come into my workplace and remind me that I screwed up. It was a mistake and I regret it every day, but you sassing me every time I see you isn’t going to make it go away.”

Something complicated was happening on Eren’s face and he opens his mouth to say something only to shut it again and laugh – a breathless painful twist of a sound as his eyes slip closed.

“Jesus fuck, you don’t get anything, do you?” He asks, and Levi feels like he should be offended but before he can make up his mind Eren is speaking again. “I just… God, Levi. I was fifteen and I was so fucking in love with you that I barely knew what to do with myself when you were around.”

There’s something tight in Levi’s throat and it hurts to breathe past it, but he does anyway. “I know,” he says.

Eren’s eyes fly open and suddenly he grips Levi’s wrist hard enough that Levi’s hand flies open on reflex and Eren’s shirt slips from his fingers, but Eren makes no move to step away only to step in closer, backing Levi against the table with frightening ease and never letting go once.

“No,” he says, and Levi can see the anger plain on his face. “You don’t know. You know why you don’t know? Because when I woke up you were gone. Do you realize how fucking dumb I felt standing in the kitchen with your teeth marks on my neck listening to my mother tell me you’d left for Paris while I was sleeping?” He laughs again but this one is more self-deprecating, a good deal angrier. “It wasn’t like I had any illusions that it was anything more than a fucking joke to you – but it was serious to me.”

Levi’s heart is beating too fast and he can barely think past the nerves live-wiring hot from where Eren’s skin is touching his, but he tries anyway. “You were fifteen,” he says and somehow his voice doesn’t waver. “You were fifteen and there was no way out that didn’t involve hurting you. I shouldn’t have done it at all; but I did and after that all I could do was damage control.”

“Well then,” Eren snaps, his hold almost painful now. “You didn’t do a fucking good job of that, did you?”

Levi closes his eyes and says for what feels like the thousandth time but will still never feel like enough: “I’m sorry.”

It’s silent for a moment except for the steady thump of Levi’s heart and Eren’s harsh breaths.

After a moment Eren’s fingers loosen and Levi’s hand slides free.

“Whatever,” Eren says and Levi has never heard him sound so exhausted. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Levi doesn’t open his eyes; just breathes deeply until he feels Eren step away, the thump of his footsteps as he turns towards the office door.

“Levi?” He says, and it’s only the way it sounds more like a statement than a question that makes Levi look.

Eren is standing still by the door, one hand on the frame and his head turned slightly although he’s not actually looking at him. Levi can see the minute flex of his fingertips against the wood like his fingers want to curl into a fist.

His jaw tightens.

“You were the reason I became a model,” he says.

And then he’s gone.

It’d been building for a while between them, but somehow Levi is still unprepared when the dam breaks.

Levi’s shirtless – “fuck, don’t look at me like that Eren, it’s too hot for shirts” – and they’re in his room with nothing but the slow whirl of the fan above for company and the steady shuffle of Eren sorting through some of his photos as he lays sprawled on his stomach on the floorboards, shirt hitching slightly and shorts barely hanging onto his hips.

Levi’s camera is in his hands and it takes everything he has not to just raise it then and there and snap a photo.

Eren shifts slightly and his shirt catches on a loose nail in the floor.

“Eren,” Levi says and points when Eren glances at him. “Carla’s not going to be pleased if you tear your shirt.”

Eren groans and sits up, placing the photos he was flicking through reverently aside – and something in Levi aches at that, the way they’re important to Eren just because they’re important to him – and tugging at the hem with slender fingers.

“Fuck it,” he says, and then repeats with deliberate intent: “It’s too hot for shirts.”

Please no, Levi thinks desperately but Eren’s hands have already slipped under the fabric and he’s stripping it off – not just taking, because Eren Jaeger doesn’t do things by halves, but stripping – and Levi cannot look away from the flex of his spine, the contours of his developing chest, the lines of his collarbone.

He’s beaded with sweat all over.

Levi can barely breathe and his fingers hurt from how tight he’s squeezing his camera.

Eren drops his shirt to the ground with a relieved sigh, raising his arms over his head in a careless stretch. “Much better,” he groans and his eyes flick up to look at Levi and there’s something in them that he doesn’t know how to name. “What?”

“I want to take your picture,” Levi blurts before he can think – before he realizes he’s asking a half-naked fifteen year old boy this question.

Eren blinks at him. “Sure, if you want. I thought you only took photos of like, models and stuff though.”

“Only for a living,” Levi says more calmly than he actually feels as he raises his camera. “I take photos of anything I find beautiful. You ready?”

Eren stares at him and Levi has a suspicion he’s not actually breathing. “Uh, yeah. Whenever is good.”

Eren sits back a bit, rolls his shoulder unintentionally as he leans so his palms are splayed behind him on the floor.

His neck is shiny with sweat and through the viewfinder Levi sees a drop cling to his neck.

He snaps a picture.

It wasn’t like Levi didn’t know – he knew alright. He’d known since the first night Eren had snuck into his room with a grin and a really bad lie that he wanted Levi’s help on his homework. Had known with the way Eren always sat too close, always listened too carefully.

Eren Jaeger’s crush on him was as obvious to him as the inherent beauty of film grain and darkrooms – Levi had just been hoping the fact that he returned the sentiment two fold hadn’t been.

Eren takes in a breath and changes positions slightly, tilting his head and lengthening his neck with a kind of natural ease and grace that was completely at odds with the awkward spread of his shoulders, the way his limbs were gangly in their growth.

Levi snaps another photo and the sound of the shutter going off is achingly loud.

Eren glances up from beneath his lashes and there is something about it that seems intentional in a way that makes all of Levi’s blood run hot at once.

“What should I be doing?” He asks, voice so low and quiet it was almost a murmur.

“Just…” Levi breathes. “Whatever you want.”

Eren’s eyes darken. “Whatever I want?” He repeats – and then he smiles.

Before Levi can realize his intentions Eren has unbuttoned his shorts, unzipped his fly so that Levi can see the black fabric of his boxer-briefs and is leaning backwards on his elbows with his pants barely fucking on looking like a pinup from an adult magazine.

Levi can’t move – the camera is still in his hands.

“Well?” Eren asks, and his voice is low and silky and the faint burr of his accent makes the breath hiss out of Levi all at once. “I was promised you’d be taking pictures.”

Levi swallows deeply and gets to his knees for a better angle, hearing the uneven creak of the floorboards beneath him as he manages to steady the camera in his hands and take another shot.

Eren’s eyes drift from his face, tracing down his body eagerly and coming to a rest on the definite erection Levi has been sporting since Eren all but made taking his shirt off into a fucking striptease.

“Oi,” Levi rasps and Eren’s eyes flick back up but his cheeks are flushed desperately and his breathing is more panting than anything else now. Levi can barely see the green of his irises, his pupils blown wide.

He clicks another photo, shuffles nearer on his knees and takes another and he just keeps moving closer until he’s hovering above Eren, kneeling between his spread legs and close enough that all he’d have to do is shift his hips to brush his groin against Eren’s.

Eren is so painfully and obviously aroused that he’s nearly trembling with it all as Levi aims the camera down at him – and Levi wonders how they’d look if someone took a picture of the both of them right now, shirtless and sweaty and desperately hard for each other.

Levi’s fingers are shaking so much he can barely press the shutter button and every exhale he makes sounds like it could be his last.

Eren’s eyes close and a drop of sweat rolls down his face to curve along his upper lip and Levi has never wanted to taste anything so badly in his whole life.

“Fuck,” he spits and throws – throws – his camera aside.

The noises Eren makes as Levi’s lips crash into his are needy and pained and desperate – pitched gasps and groans as Levi forcibly knocks him flat to the ground, his hands on Eren’s waist as Eren’s own fingers fly up to clutch hard and tight in Levi’s hair.

“Levi,” he all but moans and Levi’s hips stutter all on their own, pushing down against Eren’s and making him shout as they start grinding together desperately without a single thought, just mindless pressure and pain.

It briefly crosses Levi’s mind that Carla and Grisha were out – that’s it, that’s why Eren was even in his room in the first place – and the relief he feels is immense and overwhelming because he doesn’t think he could stop himself right now if he tried.

“Eren,” he gasps as Eren somehow manages to get his legs around his waist. “Fuck, Eren. I need you to – shit – I need you to slow down.”

Eren whines at that and just ruts them together harder yet and Levi’s vision starts to waver black, the tightness in his gut stretching so taut he feels like nothing short of a grenade.

He’s not going to last long.

Levi fumbles with Eren’s pants, pushing them down far enough that he manages to slide his hand into Eren’s boxers and wrap his fingers around him, feeling the hot weight and wetness as he squeezes.

The sound Eren makes against his lips is a ripped gasp and the grip he has in Levi’s hair should be painful but everything is just intense heat and crippling pleasure and all it does is add a sharp spike in sensation that tears a groan from him as he slides his hand along Eren’s erection in a slick pump.

“Levi, Levi,” Eren gasps and his legs are tight at Levi’s waist and he’s pushing his hips up fervently into his hand, positively writhing beneath him, head titlted back and sweat rippling across his face as he groans and groans, bucking without pause into Levi’s hand.

Levi can’t – he just can’t. Everything is Eren and he doesn’t know why he’s been fighting against this for so long because he’s never felt so good in his life, never wants to not feel this good again, and he thinks he could probably come just from feeling Eren twitching and wet in his hand, seeing how truly desperate he is for him.

“Levi,” Eren pants as one hand slips from his hair to cradle the back of his neck like Eren is holding on for dear life. “I’m going to – I want – please,” he gasps. “I need you to – not just – not just me, okay? I want…” The rest of his sentence trails off but his eyes are suddenly focused and intense, locked completely with Levi’s own. “Please.”

And it’s the same eyes that Levi saw a month ago when he stood outside of this very house covered in travel-grime and sweat and he’s helpless against it, powerless to do anything but bury his face in the crook of Eren’s neck and groan as he fumbles his hand free and manages to finally steady his shaking fingers enough to dig them under his waistband and tug down. Eren raises his hips to help them slide free – moaning as the elastic drags over his dick – before finally pooling at his ankles and being kicked free.

Just like that Eren is naked and panting and flushed beneath Levi, dick hard and slick against his abs and stomach heaving with every desperate inhale and exhale.

Levi wants to touch him – leave nothing untouched – wants to burn this moment into Eren’s skin forever, to make it so every inch of him will remember all the things Levi is going to do to him.

More than that – he wants Eren to want it too. He needs Eren to need him as much as he needs Eren right now.

Eren’s fingers tighten on his shoulders. “Please,” he says again and his voice cracks. “Levi, please.”

Levi swears and it’s all he can do to press a kiss to Eren’s exposed throat before he turns to fumble blindly in his satchel which is lying abandoned behind him.

It takes several painful seconds of searching with his fingertips before he manages to feel the crinkle of the needed little silver packages that have been at the bottom of his bag untouched for all his stay in Berlin.

When he turns back Eren is watching him with wide eyes.

“If you want me to stop,” he says, “you need to tell me now. Eren, I can’t –.”

Eren is shaking his head before Levi can even finish speaking. “What I need,” he says, and he sounds almost coherent, “is for you to get the fuck back over here and touch me before I have to do it myself.”

Christ, Levi thinks as he leans forward and shoves Eren back on the floor as he somehow manages to rip a package of lube open with his teeth because he doesn’t trust himself not to drop it with his fingers. Jesus fucking Christ – I’m doomed.

He opens Eren up as slowly as he possibly can, listening intently for any sign that this is too much, that Eren needs him to stop, but the only thing Eren does is breathe evenly and deeply through the initial uncomfortableness as Levi’s first finger slides slick but deep in him, digging his nails hard enough into Levi’s shoulder blades that he feels the skin break.

It shouldn’t turn him on but it does because everything right now has narrowed to Eren’s touch on his skin and the sound he makes when Levi spreads him open with another finger, leaning forward to take a nipple gently between his teeth so that the pained hiss turns into a groan.

By the time he has a third finger in he manages to find Eren’s prostate, scraping against it as he presses so that Eren actually cries out and clings to Levi in a shaking, sobbing mess as he pushes back on his fingers, trying to get him to find the spot again and Levi just can’t hold out anymore.

He pulls away and Eren makes a garbled complaint that Levi can’t even understand because he slipped back into German a while ago, but when he sees Levi tearing open the condom packet his breath hitches and he turns his head away, but the way his dick is twitching against his stomach tells Levi it’s out of embarrassment rather than fear.

Still, he pauses as he settles between Eren’s legs and smooths one hand along his cheek until he can once again see the green – so fucking intense, god – of Eren’s eyes.

“Okay?” He asks, and he hasn’t touched his own cock once and he’s so fucking hard and desperate but he needs one final affirmation from Eren before he can allow himself to do this.

Eren’s lashes cast spider-web shadows on his cheeks as his eyes close and he raises one arm to cover them, but he nods firmly, gripping at Levi’s shoulder with a hand.

Levi takes a breath and pushes in.

It takes everything he has not to hold Eren down and fuck him mercilessly – he feels his breath knocked out of him as Eren tenses around him and he’d known Eren was a virgin but any memories Levi has about first-time sex are foggy at best so he’s completely unprepared for the way Eren’s body feels so tight it rips every last piece of oxygen from him as thoroughly as if he’d stepped into a vacuum.

Eren’s hiding his face behind his arm but his chest is rising and falling so rapidly that Levi feels a flare of alarm. “Hey,” he coaxes as he takes Eren’s wrist to pull his arm away. Eren resists for a second but ultimately allows Levi to move it. “Do you need me to stop?”

The idea of stopping is nearly physically painful with the way his cock is throbbing and his brain is urging him to just slam his hips forward, but Levi’s not a fucking animal and if this is too much – if Eren can’t – he’ll end it as easily as he’d begun it.

“That’s not…” Eren’s voice is hoarse and gasping. “Just… Slowly, okay?”

Levi bends and presses a kiss to his forehead before he starts them at a rhythm.

It’s so slow it hurts but with each steady roll of his hips Eren grows less and less tense, arms coming up to circle Levi’s back as he makes an effort to move with him, face buried in Levi’s shoulder until Levi manages to find his sweet spot and he lets out a strangled shout and presses his fingers hard enough into Levi’s back to bruise.

“Again,” he begs and Levi angles and pushes and is rewarded by a strained groan as Eren buckles beneath him and urges Levi’s hips harder and harder – faster, faster, faster.

“Fuck,” Levi gasps as he presses his hands into the floor either side of Eren’s twisting body, thrusting with abandon and feeling the clench in his stomach, the white-out of his vision. Eren’s so warm and hot and fucking beautiful and Levi’s not going to be able to hold out any longer he’s –

Eren cries out and tenses around him hard, back arching off the floor and eyes flying wide open as his orgasm hits.

The sight of him – the hot feel of his come spurting against his stomach – is too much for Levi and he shudders desperately as he feels everything inside him snap and he’s only dimly aware of one of his hands on Eren’s hips as he holds him to the ground, of pushing himself deep inside of him, but it’s all background noise to the thrumming in his head and the hot spill of his blood. “Eren,” he gasps aloud; and he keeps on gasping it until he can see again.

They’re both still, panting against each other’s skins, and it takes Levi a long moment before he can move, pulling out of Eren as gently as he can. A small hiss of pain escapes him anyway and Levi can do nothing but press his lips to his collarbone in apology because he might not remember much about his first time but he does remember how raw it tends to leave you.

He doesn’t look at Eren as he shuffles back, stripping the condom off and tying it as he drops it in the bin by his desk before grabbing a handful of tissues and wiping Eren’s come off his stomach.

Levi doesn’t really know what to do now – if there’s a protocol for this. Everything in him is screaming to just do up his pants, find a shirt and run as far away as he possibly can.

Eren’s still lying on his back but he’s staring at the ceiling, not even looking at him.

Levi wonders if he’s just fucked things up beyond repair because Eren is fifteen – and he knows he hasn’t done anything technically illegal; consent in Germany is fourteen so Eren’s been legal for close to two years – but illegal and wrong don’t always coincide.

“I don’t suppose,” Eren says into the silence and Levi starts, “that I could convince you to just stop thinking about things for a second and lie down with me?”

Eren looks at him and smiles – eyes bright and clear but tired in a way that losing your virginity to a man ten years your senior will leave you.

Levi hesitates – considers just getting up and bolting – but Eren’s just staring at him wordlessly with nick and scrapes from Levi’s teeth on his neck and bruises from his fingers on his waist and Levi doesn’t want to say no.

Slowly – and Levi doesn’t know who he thinks will bolt if he moves too quickly; him or Eren – he crawls along the floor until he’s by Eren’s side and it’s too hot for this, they’re covered in sweat from heat and sex and it is definitely too hot for this, but when Eren cautiously takes his arm and drapes it behind his shoulders Levi can’t help but pull him close.

They stay like that for so long Levi loses track of time. At some point the sun goes down and Eren’s breathing goes from being deep and measured to soft and even and Levi realizes he’s fallen asleep.

He’s twenty-five years old and he’s lying on a floor in Berlin with his arms around a teenager whose virginity he’s just taken.

Levi closes his eyes and breathes deeply through the sheer onslaught of panic.

Eren is fifteen and has his whole life ahead of him and if the Jaegers learn that Levi has essentially deflowered their barely-legal teenage son he can’t even pretend he knows the shit show that would go down.

He turns his head slightly and feels the brush of Eren’s dark hair against his chin as he looks down at him.

He’s gorgeous and tenacious and everything he says and does makes Levi never want to let him go.

It’s that thought more than anything – the possessive urge to stay and give up on all his dreams, to put aside his rising status as an international photographer and fuck what anybody else thought – that galvanises Levi into action.

Slowly, so as not wake Eren, he shifts his arm from underneath him and rolls away.

Eren’s eyes flutter slightly but he doesn’t wake as Levi gets to his feet, doesn’t stir when Levi drags the blanket off his bed and drops it over him.

It’s a mark of how few possessions he has that he manages to be packed in under five minutes.

Standing at the doorway with his bag slung over one shoulder and his camera in his hands Levi feels inexplicably lost. He doesn’t know what he’s doing – where the fuck he plans on going now – and it’s all he can do just to take a moment to stare at Eren, the naked sprawl of his skin and the snarls of his hair brushing loose along his brow.

This will be the last time Levi ever sees him.

The snap of his shutter is lonely and loud in the room and by the time Eren wakes up five hours later – confused and hurt and alone – Levi is on a plane to France.

Levi doesn’t remember how he figured out where Eren lives – doesn’t remember anything that seems to have happened before that fifth drink, really – but somehow he’s standing out front of his apartment door with no clue how he got there.

Eren answers after the first knock and Levi doesn’t wait to catch the look of shock or disgust or whatever else he’d be after discovering Levi standing outside at one in the morning, only steps in so suddenly Eren has no choice but to step back and kicks the door aggressively closed behind him.

“What –.” Eren starts to say but Levi reaches up and grabs his shirt and shoves;topples them both to the ground in one fluid movement so that Eren is sprawled on his back and Levi is straddling his waist, legs folded either side of his hips while his fingers clench tight in Eren’s shirt – the second time in less than twenty-four hours.

“Do you hate me?” He growls and Eren just gapes.

“Levi, what the –.”

“It’s a simple question, you shithead. Four words and a question mark – don’t act like you can’t fucking understand me. Do you hate me?”

Eren just stares up at him with wide eyes and Levi can’t – he’s just so fucking angry. Angry because Eren had to come back into his life, angry because he couldn’t fucking leave well enough alone, angry because Eren had grown up in ten years but still managed to be exactly the same person and angry because some part of him thinks he’s been stuck on standstill ever since the day he left Eren lying there on the floor.

He was just angry.

“Are you drunk?” Eren asks after a pause and Levi averts his gaze. Eren sighs, runs a hand through his hair and somehow manages to look more exasperated than anything else, like Levi hadn’t just stalked him to his goddamn apartment and practically assaulted him. “Do you need me to like, I don’t know, call a cab for you or something?”

Levi narrows his eyes and tightens his grip on Eren’s shirt, settling himself properly on his chest so that Eren winces under the pressure of his weight. “I can walk home just fine,” – except for the fact he probably can’t, because he doesn’t even remember getting here, doesn’t even really remember where here is – “and I’ll leave just as soon as you answer my question.”

“Levi,” Eren says, and Levi can hear the patronizing tone before he even starts speaking, feels it boil his blood because ten years ago Eren worshiped the ground he walked on and now here he is speaking like Levi is a particularly dull child – he doesn’t know why he’s so upset when this is exactly what he should want. “You’re drunk off your face and white as a sheet. We’ve got work tomorrow, so you should probably go home.”

“Answer the question.”

“Or alternatively,” Eren proposes without skipping a beat, “you can sleep on the sofa if you think you can’t make it back to your apartment.”

It occurs to Levi that Eren is dodging the question but the realization doesn’t make it to anywhere in his brain that is saturated with ten ounces of vodka. “You don’t want me in your apartment,” he scoffs.

“Whether I want you in my apartment or not isn’t the point,” Eren hisses. “You’re drunk and unfortunately you’re here and I’m not the kind of person to let a co-worker – fuck, anybody – walk home when they’re too smashed to see straight.”

Levi closes his eyes and takes in a deep breath but doesn’t move from his perch, feeling the steady rise of Eren’s chest beneath his thighs. “All you have to say is ‘yes’ and I’m gone,” he says. “One word is all it takes, Eren. Do you hate me?”

Eren stays silent beneath him.

Levi’s eyes fly open and without meaning to – without thinking about what he’s doing – he yanks Eren up by his shirt so their faces are barely half an inch apart. “I need you to tell me you hate me,” he snaps. “I – just – fuck. You need to say yes – why the fuck won’t you say it? Is this your way of getting revenge? You think if you just stay silent long enough you’ll hurt me so bad I can’t recover? Fuck, I always knew you were a manipulative shit. Is that what this is about, Eren? Revenge?”

“I don’t know what this is about because I have no clue what the fuck you’re saying!” Eren roars so suddenly that Levi’s heart freezes because he’s never heard Eren raise his voice like that– never seen that look on his face before.

Bad move, he thinks suddenly, abort.

Levi goes to move, to dismount and back away as quickly as possible, but he’s drunk and Eren’s not and he stands no chance when Eren lurches to his knees with enough force that Levi falls to the ground, Eren looming over him, boxing him in with hands either side of his head as he glares down at Levi with enough intensity that something that had been unhinged in his mind since he’d decided drinking away his sorrows was the best course of action slots into place.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Eren spits. “Do you want the truth, Levi? Because the truth is I’ve spent ten years of my life being pissed off at you but not once in all of those years have I ever thought I hated you.”

No, Levi thinks as he stares blankly up at him, fingers curling into fists at his sides because this isn’t going the way he needs it to go. He needs Eren to say it – he needs Eren to tell him how much he hates him, how despicable and horrible he is. He needs Eren to cut off that last connection between them because Levi can’t do it himself.

He needs to give up on Eren and yet Eren is – typically – making it all very difficult.

“You’ve been so hung up on the fact that I was fifteen that it seems to slip your mind that I’m not anymore.” Eren’s jaw is set in that distinct way he’s had all of his life, a tight line of effortless tension as he breathes in shallow breaths. “I was so angry at you – I still fucking am – but more than that, I thought if I ever met you again I’d like you to treat me like I’m worth something. I thought…” Eren trails off and makes a pained noise. “I thought it’d be nice if – just once – you could look at me the way you look at the world through your camera.”

Levi stares at him, at the way his expression has slipped from fury to wistfulness to earnestness all in the course of a single confession. The furrow between his brows is familiar – the light in his eyes and the tight corners of his mouth.

It’s the same expression it’s always been.

Levi’s drunk – he’s sobered up some since coming here, but he’s still drunk enough to count – so when he speaks, when the words blurt out of his mouth like fucking verbal diarrhoea, he chooses to blame it on that.

“I still have a photo of you,” he says and Eren’s eyes go wide. “The last one I ever took – snapped it as I was walking out the door.” He laughs, low and a little desperate. “It’s pathetic, isn’t it? I deleted every copy of the other shots and kept that one all because I remember thinking ‘this is the last time I’ll ever see him’ – and yet here you are; because apparently it’s not enough to fuck up my life without meaning to ten years ago, you have to do it again now.”

“You’re drunk,” Eren says, but he says it like he’s trying to convince himself of something.

“I am,” Levi admits. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not telling you the truth.”

Eren moves; shifting in closer so his body is lying pretty much parallel to Levi’s, lowering himself down onto his elbow to free his hands so he can cup Levi’s face gently between them, stroking his thumbs over the bruising beneath his eyes.

Levi’s breath falters and all he can see above him is green.

“If I were to kiss you,” Eren whispers and the words ghost soft over Levi’s skin, “would you let me?”

God yes, Levi thinks but no words come out of his mouth – it’s like his brain froze somewhere between admitting that he’s never been – never will be – over Eren Jaeger and now this whole situation is no longer in his hands.

Eren pushes his hair out of his eyes and it’s so tender and careful and the way that Eren is looking at him isn’t much better.

“You don’t have to answer me now,” Eren says. “And if you did I wouldn’t hold you to it. Actually, no. Never mind. Forget it. You’re still drunk and I just, I shouldn’t…”

Eren goes to move back and finally something in Levi snaps into life as Eren shifts to his knees and away from him.

He doesn’t think – doesn’t stop to doubt himself or remember – only reaches up to fist his hand in Eren’s hair and yank him back to him.

It’s been ten years since the last time they did this and Levi can feel every single one of them in the way that Eren responds to his kiss – that is to say immediately and with skill and confidence that hadn’t been there before, but the clear enthusiasm with which he whole-heartedly devotes himself to it is exactly the same.

The feel of his lips moving against his own, the soft push as he manoeuvres Levi’s mouth open and deepens the kiss with a careful flick of his tongue – all of it fills something up inside of Levi that hasn’t been whole since Berlin.

Levi’s drunk enough that it could have devolved into sex right then and there, but it’s Eren who pulls away first, pressing one last quick peck to Levi’s lips.

“Where are you going?” Levi demands as Eren moves away from him, making grabbing gestures in his general direction. “Get the fuck back down here.”

Eren smiles and catches one of his hands, bringing it up to his lips and laying a light kiss along his knuckles. “No, if we’re doing this we’re doing it right,” he says, and his voice is so determined that Levi suddenly doesn’t doubt that they can do this. “I don’t think sex while you’re drunk is a good idea right now.”

“Says you,” Levi snorts but he allows Eren to pull him up. “I think it’s an excellent idea.”

Eren laughs and doesn’t let go of his hand as he leads him through the apartment. “Of course you do; and if you still think that when you wake up maybe we’ll give it a shot.”

“When I wake up?” Levi asks and raises an eyebrow.

“Well,” Eren mulls as he pushes open the door to the bedroom. “I did say you could stay at my apartment tonight. I’m even going to be nice and say you don’t have to take the couch.”

“How generous,” Levi says when what he really means is: are we really going to try this after everything that’s happened and Eren squeezes his hand when what he really means is: I’m willing to try if you are.

It’s dark in the room when Eren clicks the door shut and Levi sits down on the edge of the bed and waits.

He doesn’t wait long.

For a gesture that is so traditionally associated with the erotic there’s nothing even remotely sexual about it when Eren slips his fingers under the hem of Levi’s shirt and levers it over his head, folding it neatly at the end of the bed because he remembers how much Levi hates crumpled clothing. Levi reaches up and helps Eren out of his; expertly folding it atop of his own because he knows Eren won’t do it himself.

The covers rustle loudly as they slip under them and – for a moment – Levi can’t bring himself to actually close the little strip of no-man’s land between them because last time he let himself hold Eren everything had gone to shit.

“You’re thinking too much again,” Eren says and it comes out rather quiet in the moon painted silence of the bedroom.

Levi closes his eyes and works to still the panicked thrumming of his heart. The combination of nerves and alcohol is making him dizzy in an uncomfortable way.

“Hey,” Eren says, and Levi feels his fingers on his arms as he slides in close. “You alright?”

No, Levi thinks desperately because he’s a little afraid this is all a dream; that maybe Eren did show up in his life three days ago but the fist to his face sent him into a coma along the way.

It seems like the only rational explanation right now.

“If this whole thing turns out to be because of brain swelling, I swear I’ll hunt you down and murder you myself,” Levi whispers into Eren’s shoulder and feels the way he shakes with laughter against him.

“You say the most romantic things,” Eren snickers, but his fingers comb softly though his hair and Levi can feel him sombre up. “I’m not saying this is going to be easy. I’m not going to pretend that you didn’t hurt me, but I’m starting to realize it was a lot more about hurting each other. We were young and you were stupid,” Levi snorts into his skin and Eren allows himself a brief smile before continuing, “and we both fucked each other up good. It’s not going to fix itself overnight, but I’m thinking we just might get there in the end.”

Levi sucks in a deep breath and then another and everything smells like warmth and summer and Berlin – like Eren.

He could get used to this, he thinks as Eren’s fingers trace shapeless patterns on his shoulders, the warmth at his side and the skin so close to his – he could get used to it.

Levi’s life is a mess for a year and a half before he caves and calls Erwin.

“I fucked up,” he says the second he answers the phone. “I fucked up so bad, Erwin, I really did.”

Erwin doesn’t ask him what he means or where he is or even what he’s been doing since he left a note on the Jaeger’s kitchen table nearly eighteen months ago and vanished without a trace. He doesn’t even pause or go silent or ask why Levi is calling him now of all times; the only thing he says is: “What do you need?”

Erwin gets him on the first flight from Amsterdam to New York and is waiting for him at Kennedy when his plane lands nine hours later.

“You reek,” he says by way of greeting and it’s a mark of how well he knows him that he doesn’t even try to take his bag, only hands him a coffee and turns to walk, expecting Levi to follow him without a word.

He does.

There’s a car outside with Hanji at the wheel and when Levi slides into the backseat looking like a fucking bum she simply grins and asks if he’d settle the debate that 90’s rock will always be better than 80’s, thank you very much Erwin.

Levi doesn’t say a word, just watches as New York whizzes by outside the window and wonders vaguely when he let himself gets so bad that his hands shake hard enough that he can’t even hold his camera.

They pull in at a hotel and Hanji hands the keys over to the valet before sauntering off towards the nearest shopping centre with the intention of probably buying Levi a whole new wardrobe, wiggling her fingers over her shoulder at him as she goes.

Erwin checks him into a sprawling room on the thirteenth floor and doesn’t comment when Levi veers straight for the bathroom upon arrival and shuts the door firmly behind himself.

He looks at the shower – large and gorgeous and spacious – and imagines trying to stand for long enough to get clean, imagines not and collapsing on the tiles so Erwin has to kick down the door and drag his naked, shivering ass to the emergency room.

Levi turns to the tub and tries not to be ashamed of how badly his legs shake as he strips off and slides in, holding heavily to the rim as he goes because the fucking bathtub is nearly as deep as he is tall when he sits down.

Because Levi is someone who has spent the past several months with infrequent access to things like soap and shampoo he stays in the bathroom for over an hour and washes his hair no less than six times until strands of it come away in his soaped up hands and his fingertips start to swell from the constant rubbing.

He goes to get out only to discover that sometime in the last seventy-odd minutes his legs had given up on him and he can do nothing but slosh water everywhere as he staggers to his knees on the ground, sopping wet and cold and trembling.

His vision goes black and he can’t move, only sink to the floor and try to breathe through the way the room spins fast enough around him that he’s almost sick on the expensive marble beneath him.

He hears the door creak behind him but if he opens his eyes to look he’ll be sick.

“You’re a mess,” Erwin says bluntly and Levi laughs so hard he ends up winded.

Erwin waits until Levi’s breathing evens out and his vision comes back in sprays of shuddering colour before he approaches, tossing a towel over his shoulders so that it settles on his damp skin and Levi levers himself upright, pulling the towel around him as he leans against the bath for support.

Erwin’s sleeves are rolled up to his elbows as he bends over to unplug the tub and the sharp rattle of the water draining is unnecessarily loud in Levi’s ears.

“Hanji dropped some clothes off,” Erwin says. “Do you want me to bring them in?”

Levi considers his chances of being able to stand long enough to get on a fucking pair of pants and then considers the alternative of having Erwin dress him like a toddler. His pride is in fucking tatters as it is sitting butt-fuck naked on the floor of a hotel room he hadn’t even paid for and he doesn’t think he could handle the idea of sinking even lower.

He shakes his head. “I’ll just sit here for a second,” he says as nonchalantly as he can. “Catch my breath.”

Erwin eyes him in that completely impassive way he has before sighing and lowering himself to the floor to sit beside him without a word.

The wall across from the tub is completely made up of mirrors and Levi has been making a concentrated effort not to look since he’d realized, but with Erwin sitting quietly beside him and soft shivers racking his shoulders he finds his eyes drawn to it.

He’s pale and skinny and his hair has grown long enough that it licks at his shoulders and his eyes are sallow and rimmed black. Levi hasn’t even made a token attempt at modesty with the towel only hanging loose around his shoulders and his shuddering frame is visibly gaunt.

There are obvious needle marks in the insides of his elbows.

Erwin meets his eyes in the mirror and Levi looks away.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Erwin asks, voice casual like asking after lunch plans. “I’m not going to make you but I can’t help until I know what I’m dealing with.”

Levi closes his eyes and feels his stomach twist again because he doesn’t even know where to begin. He chooses to go for the simplest explanation.

“I fucked the Jaeger's fifteen year old kid,” he says tiredly. “And, if I’m being honest, I probably would have done it again if I’d stuck around.”

It’s silent except for the drip of water.

“Well,” Erwin says after a considerable pause, “if I had been aware you planned on sleeping with their barely-legal son I might not have told them that you’d be the perfect guest to have in their home.”

Levi snorts and the way it almost hurts is pathetic. “I’m fully aware I fucked up.”

“The thing is; I don’t think you are. You made a mistake – but running off all over Europe for eighteen months making a thousand more doesn’t solve anything. What did you think you were accomplishing by disappearing off the map? You can’t unfuck Eren by torturing yourself like this.”

“I’m not torturing myself,” Levi snaps.

“Levi,” Erwin says without missing a beat. “You can’t even hold your camera right now. Forget whatever you’ve been doing in the interim; that alone tells me everything I need to know.”

Levi wants to laugh at him – or maybe at himself – but he’s tired and thin and cold. The best he can do is shrug because Erwin’s right and Levi has been doing a lot of stupid shit since Berlin; diving into the seediest worlds of fashion and photography until he emerged in a completely different world entirely.

It had been a distraction from dreaming about green eyes and gold skin and every time it didn’t work – every time Levi woke hard and panting with the taste of Eren on his lips – the angrier he got.

“I don’t know what to do,” Levi admits suddenly, and runs shaky fingers through his hair. The towel slips off the flex of his shoulders. “You’re right. Fuck. I’m a goddamn mess. I don’t even remember the last time I worked. I don’t remember the last time I took a fucking picture.” He laughs even though he knows it’ll hurt and he’s not wrong. “Look at me; I’m sitting naked on the floor of a bathroom because I don’t trust myself not to fall the moment I stand up. If this isn’t rock bottom I don’t know what is.”

Levi doesn’t really know how to cry – doesn’t remember the last time he did, if ever – so the most he’s capable of doing with his sheer frustration is squeezing his fingers into fists as his shoulders shake.

There’s the sound of expensive shoes on water-slick marble as Erwin gets back to his feet, dusting his hands lightly on his trousers as he stands. “You might not have been aware during your little spree of self-pity, but in the past few months quite a few of your photos have made it into well respected magazines,” Erwin says evenly and Levi frowns, uncertain where he was taking this. “It’s probably just as well you disappeared for no verifiable reason because at least nobody has seen the wreck you’ve become. Your reputation is still intact and your work admired.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Levi asks flatly as Erwin bends to pick up the fallen towel, draping it carefully over Levi’s shoulders again before extending a hand to help him to his feet. Levi stares at it for a moment before taking it and letting Erwin slowly pull him up. His legs ache and the action leaves him annoyingly breathless but he doesn’t fall.

“What I’m trying to say is you can still come back. One of my lead photographers quit just the other week and I’ve not yet looked into hiring a new one.”

“You want me to work for you?” Levi asks skeptically as his fingers slip from Erwin’s.

“If you’d like,” Erwin says neutrally. “I’m not offering you a job just as a friend; I’m offering you a job because of your talent.”

Levi considers it for a moment and then decides why the fuck not. It’s not like he’s got other plans and he thinks he’s probably done with the international circuit for a while.

“I’m homeless and poor and I’m probably going to go through the worst detox in the world in the next few weeks,” he says flatly to Erwin as he raises his fingers to the edge of the towel, pulling it closer around him. “I’m going to be hell to be around for a while until I get back on my feet and if you ever ask me to go anywhere near Berlin I’ll probably quit on the spot.” He raises an eyebrow. “Is that okay with you?”

“Sounds perfect,” Erwin agrees.

Six months later Levi has an apartment with his name on the lease and a job with fucking dental benefits.

People at work call him ‘Sir’ and Levi can’t remember the last time someone who wasn’t a back-alley drug dealer looked at him and saw a ‘Sir’.

Nobody asks what he did while he was on what Erwin has explained as a Hiatus and nobody asks why there isn’t a single photo he’s published from his time in Berlin.

The truth is Levi has a lot of photos from Berlin – of the fashion shows and the magazines that commissioned him – and he’d thought about publishing them once or twice because Hanji seemed to be a firm believer in better late than never, but every time he looks at them he’s reminded of long days shirtless beneath the soft whirl of his fan and the way Eren laughed.

Levi gives the whole lot to Erwin and tells him to do as he pleases; which is evidently nothing, because he never sees them again.

The photos of Eren are a different story entirely.

The first time Levi picks up his camera again and sees them he panics.

He’d never actually looked at them after they were taken and it’s highly possible that it had been the last time he’d used his camera since. He’d all but forgotten their existence so busy pushing anything and everything related to Eren to the back of his mind.

They seem endless as he flicks through and Levi wants nothing more than to delete them all – to never have to be reminded of the way Eren’s face flushed when aroused or how his eyes clouded dark when Levi towered over him.

So he does.

His finger on the delete button is heavy as he mashes it repeatedly and watches Eren’s face vanish in seconds. He hits it again and again – six times endlessly.

The last photo stops him in his tracks.

It’s Eren still but it’s not the seductive sprawl of his body, the smirk on his lips – it’s that one last photo Levi snapped as he walked out the door.

He needs to delete it.

Eren’s gone and they’re done and Levi just needs to let it go.

He’s over it now. He’s moved on.

He prints the picture off ten minutes later and deletes the digital from his camera. He can’t explain to himself why he does it without sounding pathetic – only that of all the photos that came from Berlin; this is the only one that feels beautiful.

The only problem is the moment he has it in his hand, he knows he’s never going to be able to look at it again.

The photo goes in a box at the back of his closet and never comes out.

He knows he’s not moving on – can’t possibly be if he can’t bear not to have a reminder of Berlin – but as he closes the closet door he convinces himself he will.

He’ll get over Eren Jaeger one day and in the meantime he’s willing to wait.

Levi wakes up to soft morning sunlight and green eyes.

“Hey,” Eren smiles as Levi blinks blearily at him.

“What time is it?” He rasps, staring groggily at the way Eren’s hair stood up in all directions like he was actually a dog rather than a goddamn model.

“Just past nine.”

Levi frowns. “We’re late for work.”

“Already called Erwin,” Eren says in reply. He raises his brow and smirks. “Somehow, he didn’t seem all that surprised to hear from me. He says the both of us should take the day off.”

Levi starts and goes to sit up only for Eren to grab his wrist and haul him back down. “You told him?”

“No, no,” Eren assures him as he strokes his fingers soothingly along Levi’s arm in a way that relaxes him embarrassingly fast. “He just seemed to know.”

It does sound like Erwin, Levi has to admit, and while he doesn’t think Erwin is quite devious enough to have plotted this outcome from the start – although he would certainly be capable of it – he thinks that Erwin probably considered it a pleasant bonus.

Reluctantly Levi relaxes back into the mattress and Eren immediately shuffles in closer, tilting Levi’s jaw with two fingers and smiling at him.

“I have gross morning breath,” Levi warns.

Eren laughs. “I really could care less,” he says and leans in to kiss him.

The kiss is lazy and pointless in a way that none of their kisses in the past had been – there is nothing intentional in the way they move their lips; no desired outcome or objective. It’s just Levi’s hands on Eren’s bare shoulders and Eren’s hair tickling his face. When Eren pulls back after a solid minute it takes everything Levi has not to just stare at him blankly.

“You have no idea how long I’ve waited to do that,” Eren whispers like it’s a secret and something in Levi breaks.

“I love you,” he blurts. “You’re a little shit and you annoy the fucking piss out of me and probably will until the day I die; but fucking hell, I love you.”

Eren’s mouth drops and he stares at him for such a long moment that Levi’s heart trips in his chest and he digs his fingers into Eren’s shoulders to keep from rolling out of bed and running because it’s about time he took a chance on something.

“You’re … you’re not just saying that to shut me up or something, are you?” Eren asks, although his voice is weak and his eyes are wide.

Levi huffs and nudges him in the calf with his toe. “Have I ever done something so stupid?”

And then – slowly, like the sun coming out on a cloudy day – Eren smiles; stupidly happy and a little baffled but mostly like Levi’s just given him a fucking gold ring and asked him if he fancies a trip to the altar.

He doesn’t say anything back and Levi doesn’t need to hear it anyway; Levi has never been a fan of words because it’s all too easy to lie, but Eren has never been a fan of actions because ten years ago Levi taught him they’re easy enough to walk away from.

“We should probably go shower,” Eren says as he tucks his face into the small of Levi’s neck and places a gentle kiss to his throat. “You smell like you’ve been rolling around behind the bar at the world’s most illegal nightclub.”

Levi snorts but threads his fingers through Eren’s hair and tries to act like the honest domesticity of the situation isn’t vaguely frightening. “And by shower do you mean actually shower or something else entirely?”

Eren smirks against his skin. “That depends,” he says, “on your definition of ‘something else entirely’.”

Levi’s not sure on his definition but Eren’s apparently involves pinning Levi to the shower wall by his hips and sucking him off with such ease that Levi is hissing out curses with his fingers in Eren’s hair to avoid coming in under five minutes.

“Fuck,” he swears as Eren does a thing with his tongue that makes him throw his head back hard enough to hurt when it hits the wall.

Eren pulls away. “Too quick?” He asks, and it should sound like he’s teasing but instead it just sounds like he’s genuinely wondering if he needs to slow down or not.

“It’s going to be over very quickly if you keep that up,” he warns and Eren laughs at him but lets Levi tug him back up for a kiss.

Levi’s arms are around Eren’s shoulders as Eren grinds against him with enough force that Levi is all but helplessly pinned to the wall beneath him. It’s been a long time and Eren’s fucking grown and not just goddamn physically either; the way he moves is much more practiced and Levi tries to stamp down on the jealousy that pumps through him at the thought.

“Levi,” Eren groans as he sucks a bruise against his neck, rutting their hips together easily. The water makes their cocks drag against each other with just the right amount of friction and when Eren manages to get a hand between them to jerk them both off Levi rakes his nails hard enough down the length of his spine that Eren nearly shouts.

It’s over pretty quickly after that – Eren squeezes so hard that Levi near goddamn sees stars and everything whites out for one pure, blissful minute as he comes.

When he settles back down to reality his forehead is resting in the crook of Eren’s neck and Eren’s fingers are loose on his hips – the spray of the showerhead is alarmingly cool on his heated skin.

“Wow,” Eren says into his hair and Levi snorts.

“Don’t pretend like you haven’t had completely mind-blowing sex that knocks this out of the water,” he mutters and he feels Eren’s fingers tighten on his hips.

“It’s not about the sex you have but who you have it with,” Eren replies and Levi’s heart actually freezes because he may not believe in the value of words, but he’s about a hundred percent sure Eren just told him that this is then, now and forever.

“You’re an idiot,” he says into his shoulder and tries to fight the smile he can feel building. “You’re a fucking dork. I have no clue what I see in you.”

“Well,” Eren ponders and Levi can feel him smirking against his forehead, “someone told me a long time ago that he only takes pictures of things he finds beautiful and I like to think he might have been talking about more than the fact I grew up to become a model.”

Levi closes his eyes shut and grins.

He’s thirty-five years old and standing naked under a shower with the man he’s spent the last ten years thinking was a dead-end. Tomorrow he’s going to have to go into work wearing Eren’s teeth marks on his neck and he’s sure makeup is going to flip when they see the scratches he just left on Eren’s back. Erwin’s going to be unbearably smug about the whole thing and Hanji’s going to be completely insufferable.

Levi finds for the first time in his life he really doesn’t care.

“You know what,” he says as he moves his lips to hover over Eren’s.

“What?” Eren smiles against his mouth.

“I think you might be right,” he says, and pulls him down for a kiss.

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soyforramen · 5 years

Note

Ok, here's a prompt: bughead + their friends trying to trap the two of them under the mistletoe

I loved that this entire thing played out in my head in 2.6 seconds after reading this. Send me a prompt!

——–

“And where do you think you’re going?”

Archie was yanked back almost off his feet when Veronica grabbed the back of his shirt.

“The sna-”

She tutted and shook her head. “If you ruin this for me Andrews -”

With a gasp, Veronica pointed towards the archway where she’d hung an obnoxiously large bunch of mistletoe. Archie watched as Jughead walked towards it from the right, nodding at the occasional person while he grazed off the snack table. From the opposite end of the room, Betty and Ethel chatted as they made their way towards the kitchen. Before their paths met, Jughead was pulled into conversation with Dilton while Betty and Ethel continued on towards the kitchen.

Veronica huffed and stomped her foot. Frustration radiated off her and Archie saw yet another long drawn-out strategy session in his future, only this time instead of mistletoe it would involve champagne, countdowns, and midnight kissing.

For close to six months Veronica had been plotting for a relationship to happen between their respective best friends. Archie wanted the best for Betty, he always had. And Veronica wanted the same for her friend nee high school frenemy Jughead. But like two stubborn, obtuse ships in the night, the pair had terrible timing.

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask if they wanted to double?”

Veronica rolled her eyes. “This has to happen organically. If Jughead knew I was trying to interfere in his lack of a love-life he’d refuse to speak to me until I swore on my abuelita’s Bible and my first edition of Bradley’s 1896 Harper’s Bazaar.”

“But it would be easier -”

“It’s about the romance, Archibald. The once in a lifetime chance -”

“Of your underpants in France,” Reggie finished as he stopped next to them. He handed Archie a plastic cup overfilled with beer.

“I’m surrounded by infants,” Veronica said with a curled lip. She shot Reggie a withering look and went after Betty.

“What’s her deal?”

“Romance,” Archie said, though the word was a question that lingered in the air long enough to turn stale.

“That’s why she brought in the giant bouquet of hookup material,” Reggie said with a smirk. He tilted his head up at Josie across the room only to receive a peal of laughter in response. “She digs me.”

Archie shrugged and took a careful sip of the drink. Pabst. He fought back a grimace and set the cup down on the table behind him. It was worth getting yelled at for rings on the wood if it meant he didn’t have to drink that.

“So, who’s she trying to set up this time?” Reggie asked none the wiser.

“Bet- some of our mutual friends.” Archie caught himself in time. The last thing he needed was a primer from Betty and Veronica’s mutual ex about how to chase after either one of them.

“Bet you five bucks and a shot of Tabasco she’ll have a toll booth set up around that mistletoe before the end of the night.

Archie shook his head. “No bet. She’s already staking out potential quarantine areas. Twenty and a shot of chocolate syrup and vinegar she’ll come up with an elaborate reason to take a photo under the mistletoe.”

“Nah, too amateur hour,” Reggie scoffed.

“It’s always amateur hour where you two are,” Moose said as he joined them.

He and Reggie fist-bumped a greeting. Sensing a golden opportunity, Archie picked up his abandoned beer and handed it to Moose who gladly downed it in one go.

“What’s going on this time?” Moose asked as he wiped his lip.

“Veronica’s playing matchmaker,” Archie and Reggie said in unison.

Moose turned a shade of green even the Grinch would be jealous of. Archie squeezed his shoulder in sympathy. Veronica’s attempts to set up her friends were practically legendary. The rumors, as yet still unconfirmed, about what happened the last time Veronica subjected Moose to her romantic machinations were enough to make everyone think thrice about accepting any invitation to a Lodge social gathering.

“I think I need something stronger,” Moose muttered. He shoved his plate of half finished food into Reggie’s hand and rushed to find something stronger that might erase that night before last Christmas from his mind.

“Do I want to know why Moose looks like the wrong end of an elf?” Kevin asked as he sidled up to them.

He handed them both a small piece of paper and a golf pencil. In his other hand he held a tin can wrapped in candy cane paper.

“Christmas movie, sex position, and favorite celebrity for dirty mad-libs. Why is Veronica glaring at Midge harder than Margaret Thatcher serving turkey dinner at a homeless shelter?”

“Matchmaking,” Reggie said as he scribbled something down on a piece of paper. “My money’s on her holding us hostage until they kiss. Thirty dollars and…. an egg, cilantro, and maple shot.”

Kevin gagged and shoved the paper into his tin can. “No bet. She’s been blocking out this friend-fiction scene for weeks now. I’m surprised she didn’t lock them in a closet with a neon sign that says ‘Now Kiss’.”

Archie handed over his own paper. “Friend fiction?”

“Dude,” Reggie sighed. “You really need to catch up on Kevin’s blog. Wait, is Midge single again?”

They watched as Reggie waded out into the crowd ever hopeful.

“He really can’t stand being alone for a single night, huh?” Kevin asked as if Reggie’s philandering ways were a blight upon his very soul. “Why can’t Veronica just -”

“Romance,” Archie said in an attempt to mimic Veronica’s dramatics. “Organic, once-in-a-life-time -”

“Bibbity Bobbity Boo, what’s that witch of yours now up to?”

“Cheryl,” Kevin said by way of greeting. The smile on his face was tight enough to stretch tinsel. “Don’t you have presents to steal?”

“Charming.” When he didn’t move Cheryl’s smile dropped into a sneer. “This is a two way conversation, so see your way out of it.”

“That’s not even the right -” Kevin shook his head and muttered, “whatever,” as he turned to a different partygoer with papers in hand.

Archie eyed Cheryl warily; the last time she wanted to have a chat he’d ended up at a charity auction event that required very little clothes and Mantle levels of self-esteem.

“Don’t worry, Archiekins,” Cheryl said with a smile. She pressed a finger into the middle of his forehead. “You’ll get frown lines like that.”

“What do you want Cheryl?”

“Jughead and Toni are friends, right?”

Archie nodded.

“Has he mentioned anything about her?” Cheryl asked, her smile becoming as forced as Santa coming down the chimney. “I mean, about what she might want for Christmas? We haven’t even been dating a year, so diamonds are obviously too much, and probably a trip to the Cacos, that’s more of a year-anniversary trip, but -”

Archie knew from personal experience that it was best to jump in quickly in these types of conversations. He’d had a similar conversation with Veronica last year over a ‘normal’ person’s gift budget. She’d been so stuck on what Betty might want for Christmas Veronica had almost missed that it wasn’t the present that mattered so much as the thought behind it. Still, Betty had been over the moon about the new wrench set even Archie had gotten a thank you note from her.

“She likes photography?” he offered. “Is there a gallery opening you could take her to, then dinner? Sometimes just being together is more important than anything you could buy her.”

Cheryl frowned. “Oh you poor naive thing. What has Veronica been teaching you? But, I will admit, photography is a good idea. Your girlfriend chasing people out of the kitchen, not so much.”

Archie turned and found that Veronica had, indeed, cleared out the kitchen of everyone but Betty and Ethel who watched her with curiosity. Veronica then proceeded to drag Jughead towards the kitchen all the while waving for Betty to join them. In the confusion, Ethel met Jughead under the mistletoe.

Obligingly she pecked him on the check to Veronica’s increasing consternation.

“I’ll be back,” Archie said before rushing over to keep his girlfriend from causing a scene large enough to get her back onto Santa’s naughty list.

Much, much later that night, at a time when all the good little children were dreaming of sugarplums and sending fruitcakes to all their teachers, Jughead and Betty were putting lost solo cups and abandoned utensils in a large trash bag. Veronica insisted they weren’t obligated to help, but Betty had volunteered and Jughead followed suit. Now the living room was almost back to normal, if one ignored the candy canes stuck to the ceiling.

“Did you notice Veronica being weird tonight?” Jughead asked as he up a precarious tower of trash.

“You mean how she was desperately trying to trap you under the mistletoe?” Betty said with a note of amusement in her voice despite the dark stain of cherry syrup that stained the cuff of her sweater.

Jughead looked up at the archway, understanding dawning on his face as if it were the first time he’d seen it that night. “Huh. Guess that’s why the kitchen was on lockdown. I thought it was Archie’s tuna salad.”

“For someone so observant, you can be rather oblivious” Betty laughed and set another stack of cups in the trash.

He grinned, a sly quirk of his mouth that drew her attention. “Too bad she wasted so much time. I am spoken for after all.”

Betty bit her lower lip and met him under the archway, her hips leading the way. She slipped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer. “It would be bad luck to break tradition.”

“Very bad luck.” He slipped his hands around her waist and tucked them into the back pockets of her jeans. “Might carry over into the next year. And I had such high hopes for where this was going.”

Jughead leaned down to press a kiss to Betty’s collarbone. His nose brushed along her neck and she drew in a sharp breath.

“Elizabeth Ann Cooper!” came a scandalized voice. “I hope you have a good explanation for this.”

They broke apart only to find Veronica staring at them, mouth agape. Behind her Archie raised his own trash bag in a congratulatory salute.

“It’s a Christmas miracle?” Betty said with a half smile and a shrug.

“And there’s the bad luck,” Jughead muttered.

Veronica, however, wasn’t having it. She stormed over and dragged Betty along behind her to the kitchen.

“So,” Archie said. “Halloween party?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

Jughead gave him a sidelong glance. “That’s it? No ‘How did it happen’? No ‘Is it serious’? Nothing?”

Archie shrugged. “This is all Veronica’s going to talk about until next Christmas. And she refuses to leave any detail out. Dining room next?”

“Sure.”

Jughead followed him to the dining room. On the way, Veronica yelled out, “You’re next Jones!”

Normally the threat would have sent shivers down his spine, but Betty’s amused glance that held the promise of later made it all worth it.

#tis the season #riverdale fanfiction #bughead fanfiction

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valeriacastaneda · 4 years

Text

My Autobiography

I remember being pretty young when all this inner turmoil began to stir. I remember an intense hatred of myself for no good reason. I was always too emotional. I don’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t hate myself. I remember being a little girl and feeling abandoned. I always had my parents around me but they weren’t very supportive and I don’t think they meant it to be that way. I felt like no one cared about me and I didn’t feel like I had anyone to turn to as I was growing up. I longed for my mother to put her arm around me and protect her little girl. But my parents were completely absorbed in the constant drama and fights that their relationship entailed. I just wanted my parents to get along. I was a really sensitive child and it was completely agonizing to be dragged into their fights. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy to write but anything worthwhile is going to be a bit painful. It’s been difficult to go through all of this while trying to be as honest and thorough as possible. This isn’t the first “timeline/autobiography” I had to write. I wrote one in my first rehab. But the last one wasn’t very honest- it was as honest as I could be at the time, I still had a lot to go through.

I grew up with two immigrant parents. In an immigrant home there’s a lot of stress behind closed doors. I always saw casual drinking and even binge drinking as a child, as a way to cope with emotions. I grew up on the east side of San Jose in the late 90’s. I feel like I had a complicated childhood. I was a happy child but I was also shy and incredibly anxious. I never had many friends, I felt like I always had to hide a part of myself. I dreamt of being a social butterfly cos that’s how I felt on the inside. But I was such a shy kid, I didn’t trust anyone and I had no sense of stability. It was hands growing up feeling completely alone. I even feel like there was a disconnect between me and my siblings because of how I felt about myself. Since I was a toddler, I remember feeling a deep sense of shame that I couldn’t shake. Anything that triggered this deep internal shame was to be avoided at all costs. I always felt deeply embarrassed for my existence, I always felt insecure.

I looked for stability in all the wrong places. I tried to cling to people, begging to be saved from being drowned only to drag them under the current with me. I didn’t understand that salvation could be found within myself. I looked in all the wrong places and I let my heart be broken countless times before I was able to look within myself to find the strength to push forward. I feel like I had a lonely childhood at times because I remember crying a lot. I remember feeling a deep sorrowful sadness as a child, a sadness I couldn’t express. My mother suffered from postpartum depression after I was born, maybe we had a difficult time bonding. People who know us probably wouldn’t say that we weren’t close. I felt abandoned by my parents at a very young age. They argued so loudly it shook the house and the core to my being. My dad would storm out of the house and slam the doors. I would feel shaken to my core. There was always yelling and cussing in Spanish. Words I could never whimper or my mother would strike them from my lips as soon as the thought crossed my mind.

I felt like my siblings had a bond with each other that I could never be apart of. I was too sensitive, always too emotional. I remember being a child and hiding in the darkness of the closet while my entire body shook from sobbing because of the constant torment I felt inside my soul. I never fit into my family. I always felt like the odd one out, the black sheep, and the ugly duckling. My brother’s would tease me and call me the ugly duckling and that definitely got into my head. When I grew up I started looking for the attention I never received from my father in guys my age, and eventually men. I was always looking for attention in all the wrong places. I was waiting for someone to come and save me from myself. It took me many years to realize that no one would come to rescue me. I had to do that work myself so I could be a decent partner but I didn’t realize that for many years.

Some of the happiest moments of my childhood include me learning how to read. I remember being so enthralled with my ability to read books and escape. I always had a need to escape my reality. I remember being a kid and staying in an after school program. My childhood was short and sweet and I look back on it fondly. I loved playing make-believe on the playground with my two friends. I always kept a small circle. I loved art and crafts and as an adult I learned embroidery, sewing, and cross-stitch as a hobby. I enjoyed photography and showing people my art. I was always extremely imaginative and that’s something I continue to hold onto as an adult. My parents never demanded straight A’s from me but at one point I felt like the pressure was so intense and I didn’t feel like it was fair. My other siblings weren’t held to the same standards as I was but as an adult, I now see that my parents were encouraging me to do my absolute best.

When I was a young child, someone abused me. I never shared what happened to me with anyone else in my family and if anyone had a clue about it, or would ask about it I would pretend I had no memory of what they were talking about. I remember struggling with the constant shame throughout my life. Guilt and shame are themes that pop up into my life.

I fell in love for the first time when I was 16 in high school. I was at my new school after getting transferred out of my local high school because of my emotional issues and drug abuse. I was sitting on the bus on my way to the trade school that I would go to for half the day, I was taking a forensics class. There was a handsome football player that would ride the bus with me and I was sitting with my friend when he leaned over and asked for my number. His name was Tarunbir but I always called him T. I tried not paying any attention to him but he was persistent and it made him all the more attractive. I was smoking meth constantly at this period of my life and he asked me on a date to go eat somewhere and I clearly remember replying with, “I don’t eat.” and smirking at my friend. He asked for my phone so he could call his mom and I let him but he put his number into my phone and asked me to text him.

I had absolutely no intention of talking to him but the next day I was bored at home so I decided to text him. I had no idea this interaction would change the course of my life forever. We became entangled in this relationship or more accurately described as a “trauma bond”. There were clear red flags that I chose to ignore because I thought his jealousy and possessiveness meant he actually loved and cared about me. I was always trying to break up with him but he would show up at my door crying, begging for me back with flowers and gifts. I would always give in. He physically, mentally, and sexually abused me. He abused me in every way but I stayed with him on and off for four years. I was addicted to him like I was addicted to escaping my reality. We gave into each other’s drug abuse and eventually I could only cope by constantly being high. I truly felt stuck with him and I knew I wouldn’t be able to leave him until he left me first. I remember him pushing me and forcing my head into the concrete one night. I remember an incident that happened between us that led me to a trip to the emergency room. I still have the scar on the back of my head. He went to jail but it wasn’t long before we were back together; entangled in a cycle of abuse and denial.

I constantly dealt with suicidal ideation. I remember being 18 years old when I decided I didn’t want to live a moment longer. For a bit of background, I was struggling with my sobriety and I badly wanted out. Earlier that day I had received a message on my blog from someone anonymous telling me to kill myself. Unfortunately I was so sick, I listened. I bought some pills off my dealer and I popped them all. I took one handful after another. I finished them off with my own medications, that I had somehow stockpiled. I was hanging out while my boyfriend, T, went off somewhere. I remember having a soft drink in my hand and a snack with me. I was at the apartment complex that he lived at. I started walking around after I had taken them and I don’t remember much after that. I just know what I was told afterwards. T found me unconscious and not breathing at the bottom of the concrete stairs. He started doing compressions on my chest and I remember the pain of him nearly breaking my ribs as he sobbed on the phone to the paramedics. I don’t remember what he said only that I never heard him cry like that in my life. I remember saying, “Ow” to get him to stop cos the pain was so intense. I was put into a medical coma for a few days. When I woke up, two days later my mom told me they pumped my stomach. I remember while I was intubated how much it bothered me to have that uncomfortable machine in me. I kept attempting to pull it out so they had to tie my arms down. I was basically dead. They didn’t know what was going to happen to me when I woke up. I remember waking up from that coma and asking for my baby sister, Lilibeth. I remember the dry, scratchy feeling in my throat and the hoarseness in my voice. I still carry so much guilt from that day because I know I hurt my siblings irreparably and that’s probably why I’ll never be close with them again. They saw me in so many terrible situations that I’ll never stop feeling guilty about. Words could never describe how sorry I am and I know words will never soothe their pain.

T helped me talk to my parents about sending me to rehab when I was 19 and I couldn’t stop shooting up. I was addicted to feeling the needle as much as I was addicted to drugs slipping into my vein- I could romanticize what I felt and describe it to you in detail. It’s kind of sick. The excitement I felt when I would finally register and push the plunger down was almost better than the high itself. Almost but not quite. I remember sitting on the floor of his room in his mother’s apartment for hours on end trying to hit a vein. It was pure agony because I tried every vein in my arms and legs until I was covered in small pin pricks and bruises. When I finally registered, I can’t even describe to you the calm that would wash over my body. Some people get tweaked out and start bouncing off the walls on meth, but not me. I lay back and felt the iciness crawl up my throat, and I would cough as my heart tried to pound it’s way out of my chest. My rock bottom was when I was filled with agony, covered in pricks and bruises and spending hours on end trying to get high without success. After rehab, T picked me up and brought me home. Not before I relapsed again. My parents made a huge sacrifice financially for me so how did I relapse leaving rehab? I had a Xanax prescription that a doctor had prescribed for me so I didn’t think that was an issue. T still had some of my script on him and I asked him for some. That’s how the slippery slope began. Before I knew it, I was back to shooting meth and then, I fell in love with heroin too. I started hanging out with adults who were ten years older than me and I started dealing drugs to support myself and my habit. I was filled with so much self-hatred and I felt like using drugs was the only way I could escape feeling the constant bombardment of emotions that I was constantly subjected to. I was always miserable and I didn’t know the key to true contentment was within myself.

By October of 2016, I was 20 years old with two rehab stints under my belt which also happened to be wrapped around my arm. I clenched the leather between my teeth as I tirelessly attempted to shoot up a mixture of meth and heroin. I remember being so frustrated because my hands were shaking so hard from withdrawal that when I finally did register, I slipped the rig out of my vein and ruined my drugs because the blood in the syringe had coagulated. I was trying to get high and I ruined my drugs so I chose not to use it had to shoot it into the trash because if I would’ve used it, I was risking a blood clot going to my brain and killing me. I didn’t care about those consequences- but I did care about continuing to get high. A recurring theme in my 7life is a need for escapism and I needed to escape the everlasting depression and misery I constantly felt that tormented me. I felt like I had tried to get clean so many times on my own and I felt like I couldn’t get it right. I wanted so badly to be clean even though I truly believed in my soul that I could only be happy on drugs. I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom when I truly realized how tormented I was, I knew that I was failing at my attempts at sobriety. I couldn’t understand how people in sobriety could “have fun” without drugs. I remember going to young people’s Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and not being able to understand how they could achieve long-term sobriety and be happy. It seemed so fake and unattainable to me but I knew what I kept trying was failing, I had to try something new. T had broken up with me by now, because of my addiction. At the time, I truly loved heroin more than him anyways. Heroin was awful but it never put me through the various types of abuse that he put me through. I was so hurt and angry with him that I swore to myself that I would never go back to him for leaving me when I needed someone there for me. I know it sounds twisted but I’m honestly so thankful that he had left me because it left me with resolve to do something about my situation. I didn’t have the strength to leave and stay gone during our years together because of how vulnerable I was at that point in my life.

I always knew something was different about me. I have a hazy memory about being a small child in elementary school and being attracted to a girl in a way that I had never felt about anyone. I was 6 years old when I had my first “crush” on a girl but I felt shame deeply in my young soul even then. I never pursued my interest in girls until I was an adult and I had my first girlfriend, Kemi. I was still struggling with my sobriety at the time that I met her. She had been sober for two years by the time we were together. I remember her and I sitting on the floor of my bedroom while I fixed myself a shot. I don’t remember exactly what was happening but my parents were throwing a party. I had to wear something to cover the track marks and bruises on my arms even though it was a hot August day. My memories from the time are a bit hazy from the drugs but I made her look away while I did what I had to do. I remember feeling guilty but ultimately not caring that I was possibly risking her sobriety by using around her. I was so self-centered that nothing mattered to me but having the feeling of calmness wash over me. Things ultimately didn’t work out between us but that’s okay. She was good to me and she brought me around A.A. and introduced me to what sobriety had to offer me.

I attempted sobriety again in November of 2016 and I can’t pinpoint exactly what changed this time around. I no longer desired to keep up the facade that I had perfectly crafted. Anyways, it was all crumbling down around me pretty quickly. I remember having a sort of epiphany about the state of my life. I was 20 years old and I was speeding down the highway and into my grave. I don’t think I instantly wanted to live a righteous life or anything close to it, I just needed to try something different. Especially with turning 21 years old in a few days looming over my head. I couldn’t believe I legally couldn’t drink alcohol yet but I could buy heroin and I was a pretty decent hobbyist phlebotomist at this point.

I broke up with Rami last year. I was pretty unhappy with myself and where the relationship was going so I took our dog and moved back into my parent’s house. I needed to start figuring out what I was going to do with myself and my sobriety. The stress I put on myself after Rami relapsed after we broke up in December of 2018 and it absolutely ruined me. It helped lead me here, to Center for Discovery but not before I was hospitalized at Stanford for my low body weight. Rami never asked me to be with him while he struggled with his sobriety. I blamed myself for his relapse even though the rational side of my brain knew it had nothing to do with me. My anxiety was so bad I started restricting and I wasn’t even really aware of it at the time. I just knew that my mind was constantly spinning and I was on the edge of breaking down every day. I would take some anti-anxiety medication and it was like magic, I could finally be calm enough to eat. Rami continued to relapse and I continued to work hard and skip meal after meal. I was becoming frail and I was losing my ability to think clearly. I was worried about how I would pay my bills. I didn’t want to lose the independence from my parents that I finally felt I had earned. The heavy medications I had been taking made it impossible for me to hold down a job. I was finally able to prove to myself that I could work long shifts and over 40 hour weeks. I remember when a 4 hour shift was absolute agony for me. I could never go back to how things were. I earned my independence and I didn’t care if I starved myself to death for it, I wasn’t willing to give it up even though I was sacrificing my health.

Earlier this year I started a new job and it was extremely demanding. It ruined me. Or maybe it put me on the fast track so that I could ruin myself easier. I had to work long hours extremely hungry. My boss didn’t care about me, he saw me as another dispensable person: to be used up until I wasn’t worth anything and he could easily throw me away. I quickly became aware of what kind of person he was and I wondered what I could do. My best bet was finding another job but he paid me pretty well and I didn’t have to worry about a lot of things anymore. I was becoming independent for the first time in my life and that was all I ever wanted. I started skipping meals cos I had so many routes to do. I worked for a cannabis service that existed in a gray area in California law. I worked as a delivery driver and eventually I started working the desk. There was no human resources for me to ever turn to. He called me into work when he needed me and if I didn’t drop everything in that moment to help him, he wouldn’t call me for a few days to make my pockets run dry. I was constantly stressed and unhappy- but the money was good so I stayed. I didn’t have any confidence to go and find another job and he worked me so hard that I was constantly an anxious mess. I was constantly crying and on the edge of a breakdown. I think me staying irregardless of any abuse I faced is a problematic recurring theme in my life.

I was misdiagnosed bipolar for many years. I took every medication they could prescribe me. I’m sure there are a few I hadn’t tried but antidepressants cause a manic reaction in me and make me suicidal. But nonetheless, I took my medication religiously but I was medicating the after-effects of my drug abuse. I kept trying to fix something by taking drugs or taking medications but I didn’t realize the answer was in years of therapy. There’s a lot in my history that I can’t explain or find an answer for but that’s okay, I don’t need to understand everything that happened. All that matters is now. I don’t know how I managed to have so many clinicians misdiagnose me. Even when I tried avoiding the bipolar label I still got diagnosed with cyclothymia. To me that made it pretty clear to me that I was on that spectrum. A few months ago my doctor came to me with a diagnosis that frankly, pissed me off. I had heard it before but I felt like I had been in therapy long enough that I didn’t warrant that diagnosis or the stigma attached to it. When I heard the words “borderline personality disorder” it made me angry and defensive immediately. I definitely feel like that reaction made sense with the diagnosis. The doctors didn’t realize that some of my symptoms may have been residual from my drug use.

I never really realized I was anorexic until I started feeling the pressure to keep up an appearance. And I don’t mean that literally. I didn’t have time to look in the mirror and I hated the skeletal mess that always met my eyes when I would make the mistake of looking at my reflection. I didn’t think I was anorexic but my mind is much clearer now and I see that although a lot of stereotypical behaviors weren’t there, they didn’t need to be. I started looking at what made sense. I took being perfect to a flaw. I couldn’t leave the house unless I was fashionably dressed and if I didn’t have the nicest clothes then I felt bad about myself. If my makeup wasn’t impeccable I wasn’t shit. All I had to hold onto was my appearance of a well put together girl. I still don’t fit into that label, my anxiety has made it feel impossible to eat. I look back on my years of drug use and I see that I definitely used for weight control as well as mood management throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. Labels really don't mean much though cos we're in the same place for similar reasons. I feel like at a time of my life I honestly did hate my body. I think I might have hated it for a long time- for keeping me alive when I’ve wanted so badly to give up. I’ve hated it for not being the same shape or silhouette as other women. But I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m beautiful, scars and all.

I’ve shared the deepest, darkest moments of my life for only one reason: in hopes that someone hears this and knows it doesn’t always have to be so dark. Things get better, maybe not all at once but I promise they do. I never thought I would be able to climb my way out of the pits of hell. I struggled with constantly feeling like I was just digging myself into a deeper hole. Through the adversity that I’ve experienced in my life, I’ve grown as a person and I’ve turned into a woman that I can say that I’m proud to be. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows but I know that the clouds in the sky will part and the rays of the sun will kiss my skin. I always carry hope in my heart and I truly believe things will be okay as long as I continue to keep my goals in mind. I finally understand that I have a purpose in life and that’s to help people. I know I can only achieve that goal if I continue to better myself and it’s been hard work but it’s had to be done.

#autobiography #writing #book

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