#no idea what to make of these thoughts but they’ve been rattling around in my head SOOOOOO much

[blueringbeetle]

Loving comes easily to me and I’m honestly seething with rage that it is a piece of me that was almost completely killed. I know I would’ve gone with it.

I love picking flowers and taping them into my sketchbook, I love drawing things I’ll never think about again purely because I love the act of drawing, I love creating things that become massive projects and things that never pass the stage of notes in the borders, I love my dogs, I love it when they annoy the shit out of me because it means they’re here. I love clear skies and rainy ones. I love watching movies. I love going swimming. I love doing a good job and doing a bad job. I love doing a middle-of-the-road job. I love starting, I love ending. I love day dreaming. I love music. I love eating from the pan before the meal is even finished because I love what I’m cooking so much, it all ends up in the same place anyway. I love failing. Miserably, even. So horribly it feels like I’ll never recover but I always do. I let myself feel that feeling till it passes because all things do pass eventually. I love how I feel grief and I love how I feel hope.

My spark, the thing that keeps you warm when nothing else does, it was dead for I don’t know how long and now that I’m gently bringing it back to life I am genuinely awestruck that I survived how long I did completely without it. The inertia and muscle memory could only take me so far and I’m glad I collapsed into a heap when I did.

I think the scariest part was that it came so slowly and carefully that by the time I realised where I was, it felt so close to the end I didn’t know what to do. I think smothered is close to the right word, like my innate brightness could only be met with ‘why are you doing that? You shouldn’t do that?’ I’m only sort of beginning to understand what happened, it was slow, nit picky, and near disgust. A quiet ‘oh’ and then I made myself smaller. It was a cutting and minimising act pretending to be refinement and discernment.

I seethe. And I seethe and I seethe and I seethe. It’s a kind of seething that builds and erupts into laughter because I can’t believe how stupid it all is at the end of the day. I’m allowed to play my favourite songs and dance in the kitchen, more than that, I should play my favourite songs and dance in the kitchen. Each time I scrape together the energy to do something purely for fun I am rewarded tenfold with the energy to do it again and something else too.

If someone sees me dancing or laughing, or picking flowers, or being joyful, digging out happiness from between the cracks in the pavement and enjoying my limited time here, and their first act is to point, scoff, sneer, and say ‘wrong.’ I will burn them to the ground with how much I love being myself. I don’t want people who enjoy picking at the happiness of others like a scab to find me easy to be around.

It’s not been easy to recover. It hurts to pick myself up when I am an engine with no fuel but I’m lucky and have people around me who know how to fan my flames. That’s what makes it so easy, even when it’s not easy, is if you have people who know how help works for you. Luck is part of it too, a good breeze can carry you far, and I’ve learnt that to get a good breeze you need to be in places where there is wind. So I dragged myself, at times kicking and screaming, into the tree tops and valleys and I let preparation meet opportunity.

I’m relearning to trust myself. Not in a blind way, importantly. In the way that when I feel internal resistance and terror I’m able to hold myself and move in the direction that I know in my heart and mind is the right direction. Failure and success are both big changes and I need about the same level of self care to deal with either.

I am a warm person because I seek joy like I’m starving and now I find it everywhere. I am hard to kill because all things give me life. I will never let someone leer down at me and my uncomplicated contentment and scoff at me for it. Never again. My sketchbook is full of flowers, my belly is full of food, my heart is full of love and anger and grief. I am alive and learning how to be. All I am is a human, and my god, what a thing that is to be.

[soodoonimin]

I have had this idea for a story rattling around in my brain. I’m thinking a Soulmate AU where the weapon plus program happened much much earlier in history and Wade was born much earlier too:

And Wade gets his healing factor/powers kind of like he did in the comics but instead of him getting it as an adult he gets them as a kid (Logan is also experimented on as a kid during the same time) the two only know about each other bc they’d see each other briefly before every surgery

(The one time they’re able to talk is when they confirm that they are soulmates bc of the name on their wrists but while Wade seems excited about it Logan (James) is ambivalent at best. Wade just thinks he’s scared because of their situation.) 

Anyway, Logan escapes but doesn’t save Wade (bc he’s trying to save himself) and it’s bc of this that Wade grows up a prisoner of the weapon plus program & grows to hate Logan

Wade eventually escapes on his own, and the first thing he does is hunt Logan down. He finds him pretty early on and sees that he has a life w/o him and has basically forgotten him (he’s hurt)

Wade starts a fist fight with him at a local bar and it’s only towards the end of the fight that Logan realizes who he is. He stops fighting but he doesn’t know what to say to make Wade feel better. He isn’t going to leave his life behind and he knows he made a mistake he should have saved Wade but…but what? It’s too late for that now.

Wade thinks he wants to avoid him but he can’t help but want to check in on Logan from a distance ofc, even if he’s happy with someone else. One of times he checks in on him, he’s gone. So Wade has to track him down on his own bc not only did they capture Logan, they killed his wife.

At some point Logan got captured by the weapon plus program again and Wade debates if he even should save Logan bc it serves him right

But he ultimately decides to go and save him. And when they fully escape he realizes that they wiped Logan’s memory and not just that but they removed his soul mark. Wade is devastated not just because Logan doesn’t remember him and not just because they’re technically not soulmates anymore but also because Logan doesn’t even remember he had a family that was killed. (He doesn’t know where this selfless thought came from btw)

He decides to stay with Logan who for his part thinks Wade is annoying but doesn’t really know their history and so he kind of lets Wade take care of him even if doesn’t fully trust him

Logan slowly starts to remember and this is when he realizes he might have feelings for Wade (he doesn’t know why though) but he doesn’t know how to tell him bc they’ve been “friends” for so long

Logan does ask about people’s soul marks and he asks why he doesn’t have one (Wade tell him) but he lies to Logan and tells him that his soulmate rejected him a long time ago and he absolutely refuses to let Logan see his mark

“The fuckers in that lab didn’t just ruin your life, peanut. That’s why I’m taking care of you. I know what’s it like to lose yourself and someone you care about.”

One night Logan comes back from chopping wood and something about Wade’s words finally break free that one memory of what they are to each other.

He comes back home:

“I thought you hated me?”

And Wade is replies “No I don’t hate you, what would give you that idea?”

And Logan answers “I don’t know, maybe I didn’t save you. Because I left and tried my best to forget about you until…” He holds up his blank wrist, “Be careful what you wish for right?”

And that’s when Wade knows this is *his* Logan. He doesn’t even hesitate to kiss him and he is SURPRISED that Logan kisses him back

There are still big chunks of Logan’s past that he’s missing and he doesn’t know how much of that he wants back. So he and Logan decided that for now it’s best they think about the present.

Bonus: one could maybe say they’re kind of like soulmates but whether that’s a natural thing or an artificial bond created by the weapon plus program, not even they know but it doesn’t matter.

Let me just finish my cute little dancing one shot (I should have it done by Friday) and I’ll get right on this fic lmao bc I fucking love soulmates and I LOVE tragic soulmates more than that! And who is more tragic than these twooo??? (Okay I lied I know two others who are maybe a little more tragic but you get my point)

[junowritings]

Hi friend, I hope I'm not bothering you. I stumbled across your twisted wonderland writings a little bit ago and fell in love with them. They're so good! I was wondering if you could do an angst comfort imagine with Jamil or Kalim where MC overblots? In game, Crowley piles so much work on poor MC, along with MC being the college's resident problem solver, and some of the students have called them worthless due to their inability to cast magic. I was wondering if you could play around with that idea? Regardless, thank you for doing what you do! Hope you have a lovely day.

Hiyya friend thank you for the love <3 I'm glad you've been having fun with these~! I'll admit this started off as a little thing but then the overblot brainrot kicked in thinking about the effects of blot on a non magic user and it spiraled from there lmao. Please do enjoy this though I had a bunch of fun giving my Scarabia boys some love,even if it is filled with angst!

The realization of what’s happening comes too late, as it always does. 

Eyes have been everywhere, watching your every move since you clawed your way from that coffin into this twisted wonderland. And each of them have expected something from you, saw fit to use you and take advantage of your situation for their own gains. Making yourself useful seemed to be the only way you could earn any modicum of respect, and so the pressure mounted and mounted as every day saw you taking on more responsibilities than you could handle. But you’d been so hopeful that it wouldn’t be that way forever - things would get easier, and you only needed to put up with the pressure until you got home; Crowley promised you that the day you enrolled at the school, and he wouldn’t lie when he was the only one capable of making that a reality, right?Right?

You should never have believed him; maybe that would have saved you.

This shouldn’t have been possible; with no magic to your name or even a magical presence to call your own the thought of you of all people overblotting was laughable, some cruel joke that was humored for the few seconds before you were deemed magicless, and thus no longer a concern. And yet the impossible pools at your feet and clings to your skin and clothes like a parasite as your brain spirals into a frenzy. All you can think about is what they’ve done to you, what they made you do. You were so useless to all of these people until you had some kind of purpose to serve, was that it? Running their errands; being a personal therapist and caretaker to so many dorms when you were still nursing your own wounds; having to take care of everyone else's problems only to return to your dilapidated corpse of a dorm at the end of the day. 

Perhaps it’s the stress, the mental fatigue drawing in all of that leftover magical waste with nowhere to go that accumulated the blot, allowing it to take root after months of being subjected to the worst that magic could do. It’s there which it festered until the pressure became too great, until it now seeps through your bones, your eyes, your fingertips in thick, viscous globs of ink for all to see. And from that blot comes the monster, a patchwork mockery of all of those overblots you’ve dealt with before taking shape of your deepest insecurities and regrets; and your own despondent sobs are drowned out by the screams of its birth as it rises to its full height, writhing and looming overhead.

But it’s imperfect; with no stable magic source to siphon its energy from the blotted creature latched onto you fights only to stay alive. The noises it releases are distorted, a hollow rattle that has the students taking an unconscious step back as a chill settles in the air. Many were smart enough to flee, yet there are those that stay, either foolish or frozen in fear at the sight in front of them.

You’re conscious, barely, the remaining dregs fading in and out of your control as your eyes, half blinded by the inky mass that pours from the blotted thing above you scans the sea of horrified faces. Friends, dormmates, and finally….

…Jamil

♡ Jamil feels the rush of students tripping over themselves to flee, can hear the screams of people too confused or too terrified to understand the impossibility of the situation, but his focus is trained solely on you and the thing that leeches off of you to stay alive. He watches it twist, heaving ink as it takes a defensive stance ready to attack anything that tries to get in its way. Your friends around you all make vain attempts to reach out to you; Ace and Deuce are frantically screaming out for you as they bat away an onslaught of inky limbs, and Grim gets close enough to barely brush your shoulder with his paw before the frantic swipe of the creature nearly sends him careening back in a torn mess had Jack not yanked him back to safety.

♡ For that moment he takes in the scene unfolding in front of him, watching the person who has fought to earn his respect and gain his trust being taken over by the flood of bottled up emotions preyed upon by the blot, and it hits him. Is this what you’d seen during his overblot? Is this how you felt seeing the person you cared for being reduced to a shadow of their deepest hatred and pains? If he closes his eyes he can vaguely recall the horrified look on your face in the muddled memories from his own overblot, but there’s no time to dwell, no time to panic, or scream, or cry when the most important thing is separating you from the blot and making sure you survive. And so he takes a steadying breath, steeling his resolve and shelving his emotions until you’re freed.

♡ Your friends are already mounting an offensive against the overblot and Jamil is right there in stride acting as a defensive force for those better equipped to attack. Each hit has the beast screaming, chunk by chunk being wrested away from its patchwork frame that’s barely holding itself together as is. Your screams echo along with it, only making the fight harder as hesitation hits your friends, Jamil himself almost making the mistake of stepping towards you before catching himself and refocusing on the fight at hand.

♡ He’d caught glimpses of the strain your situation had forced you under, he’d be a fool not to have noticed the pressure you’d been settled with. He knows the pressure well, having to play the part and live your life restricted by the whims of others. And yet every time he’d reached out to you, pulled you to the side away from prying eyes you’d only smiled and told him that you were fine, even if the sallow eyes and the constant tremble in your hands screamed otherwise. Jamil should have never taken you at your word, so sure that if whatever you were dealing with became overwhelming you would open up to someone - open up to him - before it was too much. Who could have ever imagined that it would get to this point? Jamil feels a sickness welling in the pit of his stomach just thinking about it, and the momentary lapse in attention nearly costs him a limb as a writhing hand slams down at his side when the overblot monster lunges forward, warbled voice screaming “-𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐...𝔾𝔼𝕋 𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐-!” again and again.

♡ Your overblot fights harder than anything they’ve faced before, even as the half formed twitching mass of energy that it is. Like an animal caged and surrounded it’s got no qualms pulling every ounce of power it can muster to ensure its survival even if it means turning you into little more than a husk. All it takes is watching you crumble, heaving and choking on some invisible force that saps everything from you for everything to finally snap. Whatever strength the creature pulls from you isn’t enough to keep it standing, and no sooner have you dropped the blot caves in on itself, still reaching out to you for more even in its final moments. In the wake of its dissipation the air is thick with an unspoken pressure, and the remaining students even torn up and bruised all make a beeline for your crumpled body, surrounding you in a wall of frantic calls of your name. 

♡There’s a lump in his throat as Jamil approaches the crowd, elbowing his way between Ace and Deuce kneeling before you. His breathing all but stops at the glimpses he catches of you among the hands cradling you, body limp as the remaining blot flakes from your skin and turns to whisps. Those seconds last for an eternity, bated breaths unwilling to ask the question that’s burning on everyone’s tongue. 

♡Are you…?

♡The next moment you’re gasping for air, rocketing up and narrowly missing headbutting the vice dormhead as you all but throw yourself up to retch. You miss the collective breath that everyone releases as the world starts to turn once again, relief flooding the atmosphere now that the imminent danger has passed. Someone mentions making sure you’re taken to the infirmary and Jamil can practically see the cogs turning in your head as you panic, finally coming back to your senses. You insist that you can take yourself there, scrambling groggily to your feet and shaking away the mass of hands supporting you only to immediately buckle the second your feet touch the floor. 

♡How lucky you are that Jamil catches you before you fall, one arm firmly gripping your elbow and the other pressed against your back to make sure you don’t try getting away on your own again. Surprisingly you don’t argue, in fact you hardly even say a word as Jamil whisks you away from the crowd; the silence is only broken on the walk there when Jamil has to stop you from nearly bucking again. You’re gripping his jacket for support when you ask “Did I hurt them?” focused on your hand wrapped into the fabric and not willing to look at him. There’s a pause, and Jamil watches your knuckles turning pale from your grip like you’re afraid of the answer. “It takes more than that to hurt any of those guys;They’ll be fine.” 

♡ Whether it’s the answer you wanted or not your grip loosens on his jacket but never truly lets go the entire walk there even as the infirmary sign comes into view around the corner. There’s no saying what effect the overblot had on you both physically and mentally, so the staff are on high alert as soon as you’re led into the infirmary. The nurse tries to take you off of his hands but you’re still holding onto Jamil for support and he’s quick to take the lead in getting you onto the bed so you can finally be seen to.

♡Jamil only allows the gravity of the situation to hit him once you’re in the capable hands of NRC medical staff, giving you some space to recover without being hounded by people as he tries to collect his thoughts. A part of him wants to stay there with you, especially with the way you’re so reluctant to let go of him during the initial checkup, but you’re drained both physically and mentally and need time to rest, and he needs to start picking up the pieces of the aftermath.

♡ The work keeps Jamil’s mind occupied, and provides a welcome buffer to the what ifs that are already beginning to creep in. But the moment he’s given a moment to finally rest it’s like all his energy’s been drained, using the nearest surface to keep himself upright as the events of the day finally fully sink in. You’ll live but all he can think about is what if you hadn’t; those few seconds where you weren’t moving, repeating over again and again. It’s an image that’s burned into his brain no matter how much he loathes having it there, and it forces his feet to move without thinking, heading straight back to the infirmary where he’d left you. Jamil needs to see that you’re really there, that you’re really safe in that bed and not taken whole by that creature again, and it’s something he finds himself doing long afterwards if only to set his own nerves at ease.  

…Kalim

♡ Kalim is horrified to see what’s happening to you, watching the creature that rises from your barely standing form like it’s tearing itself free from your very shadow. For a split second it’s as though he’s back at Scarabia watching his childhood friend overcome the overblot and change right before his eyes. That familiar chill of fear that he’s hoped to never have to experience again hits him square in the chest and his entire body goes cold as the reality of the situation settles with the wheezing howl that the overblot creature lets loose into the air. 

♡ Even though he can see it with his own eyes it’s almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that this is you. The one who always went out of your way to help people, who was so kind and there for everyone to help deal with their problems with hardly ever a thanks in return - there’s no way that the trembling, half coherent body looking out at the world with nothing but hatred burning behind ink stained eyes is really you. But it is, and there’s a beat, a split second where your eyes meet his and that anger flickers to grief, a lapse of the real you looking back at him before the hatred consumes you once again.

♡ It’s hard to think straight, and Kalim’s got little concern for his own safety as he joins Ace, Deuce and Grim in trying to reach out to you however pointless it may seem. He has to reach you, has to get to you somehow to make sure that you’re safe and get you away from that thing; he has to-!

♡ There’s a whoosh of air barely inches from his face, and Kalim only has a second to process the mangled claw that makes a swipe for him before there’s a hand winding into the back of his clothes , pulling him back into the dirt before those claws can bury themselves into his skull. It's enough to shock him back into the present moment, only now hearing the panicked voices of his friends and classmates as the chaos unfolds; there’s others here, and every single one of them is in danger the longer that this overblot is free to wreak havoc onto its new domain.

♡He hesitates to fight you - he just can’t bring himself to do anything that risks hurting you even though he knows that standing by and doing nothing it’s only going to make the problem worse. So he calls out to you, shouting your name with a near frantic desperation begging you to come to your senses even as the creature you’ve summoned continues it’s assault, gouging into the earth in its attempts to get at him with half formed joints. His cries are drowned out by the overblot monster’s screams, garbled words sounding like white noise ringing in the air only ever cut off when a sudden blast of magic from behind Kalim has the beast reeling. 

♡Your friends round up to make a wall effectively creating a barrier between it and the students, their faces grave as they realize what it’s going to take to make sure everyone gets out of this situation alive. The last thing he sees before they close in is you, the blot still dripping down your face as you let out an enraged scream, the months of bottled up emotions sending goosebumps up Kalims skin before you disappear back into the overblot’s hold.

♡Hesitating will only result in you getting more hurt, so Kalim tries to pour his focus onto helping elsewhere. Hoisting himself to his feet he takes charge in making sure that everyone not directly involved in the fight has a clear path to get to safety, ensuring that the debris scattering through the air never has a chance of hitting any of the students and causing more damage. All the while he’s fighting not to be distracted by the sounds of fighting - the gurgling of the overblot, the shouts of everyone co-ordinating together and struggling to turn the tide of the fight. He can’t allow himself to think too hard about what’s happening to you; the people he’s helping are looking to him as dorm leader to keep them safe and get them out of there, and if he thinks about it for too long he knows he’s going to slip up and someone’s going to end up hurt or worse. 

♡ A bloodcurdling howl brings everything to a standstill, and all at once something snaps in the air, the pressure on the back of Kalim’s skull dissipating as the blot that has soaked into every corner of the area breaks apart and disappears, no longer held together by magic. That means only one thing, and Kalim immediately drops everything that he’s doing to get back to where you are. The terrain is a mess and he trips up more than a few times on the huge chunks torn out of the earth beneath his feet as he grows more desperate to see you, to get to you. 

♡His heart drops into his stomach once he finds you through the sea of people who were fighting you not moments before, now crowded around you in a protective circle. You’re curled up on yourself, unresponsive and Kalim immediately sinks down onto his knees in front of you, not caring for the last broken pieces of the overblot that try to claw at legs for purchase even as it sinks back into the mindless puddle of waste it came from. Hands trembling, Kalim holds you as close to him as he can, wide eyes scanning your face for any sign of reaction, a sign that you’re back. The time stretches on and he feels his throat burn the longer you go without waking up; he’s here, calling your name over and over again, can’t you hear him? It’s okay to wake up now, everyone’s safe! You're okay right?... right?!

♡A groan cuts his thinking off, and there’s no holding back the sob he almost chokes on when you finally come to. You’re blinking away the haze that’s making your head pound and finally make out his face, caked in mud and debris and smeared with stark tear tracks as he cries. You bring a hand up to try and wipe away the tears and grime but that only makes him cry harder, though you don’t have time to feel bad before he’s pulling you even closer, pressing your face against his shoulder and wrapping his arms around you so tight that your ribs groan in protest. It’s not like you have the heart to push him away though - you’re so tired and drained and all you can think about is how glad you are that he’s here as you zone in and out of him gushing about how he’s so glad that you’re going to be okay.

♡Kalim refuses to let you go even as the others begin to crowd around to check on you for themselves; now that this is all over the last thing he wants to do is leave you on your own again much to the frustration of Grim and your other friends. It takes Jamil stepping in and none too subtly warning him that there’s a chance you’re still suffering from complications unless you get to a nurse and find out for sure before he relents, but even then he’s going right with you to the infirmary, taking a seat right next to the bed you’re propped up in and holding your hand and supporting you through the entire checkup.

♡All he can focus on is how tired you look, the exhaustion palpable now that the blot has washed away from your skin and clothes. He knows that it isn’t from the blot though; Kalim may be naive but he knows you were suffering before the overblot overwhelmed you. He’d tried so hard to help - offered you to stay at Scarabia any time you needed a break, insisted that you could always rely on him for anything, to tell him anything, just say it and he’ll be there! And yet it wasn’t enough to save you from all of this, and he can’t help but feel guilty that he couldn’t help you when you needed him the most…♡ You have to convince him not to call in the best doctors from back home just to come and see you the second the nurses are finished with their tests, insisting that he really doesn’t need to go that far despite his protests that he wants to make sure that you’re really okay. He’s already rattling off about how things are going to be better once you’re all healed up - he’ll come to see you everyday, of course, and he’ll make sure to bring plenty of things to keep you happy so that you can focus on resting and feeling better! It’s almost enough to forget the fact that everything that happened wasn’t just some dream your stress addled mind conjured up; however, even so exhausted you don’t miss the concern hiding behind his seemingly carefree smile, grip on your hand squeezing every once in a while as though to reassure himself that you’re both still here - he hasn’t lost you yet.

[estrellami-1]

For steddie prompts, what about….Eddie introducing Steve to the band!

Maybe they’ve been quietly together for a while and Eddie finally feels ready to be more public. BUT he’s dating “king” Steve. How will his friends react?

Feel free to skip if you’ve written something similar ❤️

Ooh okay I LOVE this idea. Please keep in mind I know nothing about the band or how to do their voices so. Like I’m only 84% sure it’s Gareth, Jeff and Freak. Whom I’m naming Frank. Also I don’t remember who coined Emerson as Gareth’s last name but yes you are correct and I’m stealing it please and thank you.

“Hey, uh, guys?” Eddie coughs, turning around to face the rest of the band. “Listen, you, uh. You’ve been really cool, about the whole framed for murder thing, and the whole…” he wiggles his fingers, signifying everything he can’t talk about. “All of it. And, uh. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Gareth shares a look with Jeff. “We know, man. You’re seeing someone.”

Eddie blinks. “How?”

“You smile, like, all the time, dude. It’s kinda concerning. Your face is gonna get stuck like that.”

“Fuck off,” Eddie says, but he’s laughing. “Shit, man. It’s that obvious?”

“Kinda,” Jeff agrees.

“At least it is to us,” Frank adds. “We know you, man.”

“Listen,” Gareth says. “Whoever this person is. Do they make you happy?”

Eddie pulls a piece of hair across his face. “Yeah,” he murmurs.

“He’s blushing!” Jeff crows. Eddie flips him off.

Gareth flaps his hands at both of them. “Shut up! Children, both of you! Eddie!” He grasps Eddie’s shoulders. “They treat you well?”

“Better than I thought I deserved.”

“Goddamn,” Frank mutters. “Where do I find someone like that?”

“Right here,” Jeff croons, batting his eyelashes and leaning in. Frank, unimpressed, pokes his forehead with a drumstick.

“I work with children,” Gareth mutters, which is funny considering he’s the youngest in their ragtag group. Eddie chooses not to mention it. “Listen, man, we’re not gonna care. Man, woman, somewhere in between, as long as they make you happy.”

“Exactly,” Jeff adds. “As long as it’s not, like, Jason Carver or some shit.”

“Or a kid,” Frank points out. Eddie makes a face.

“God, no, never. To either of those. Listen, just. He’s changed, alright? Can you trust that?”

Gareth and Jeff share another look. Jeff steps closer. “You’re the best judge of character we know, Eddie. If you say he’s changed, we’ll do our best to listen.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. “Because he, uh. He’s gonna come pick me up today.”

Frank hits the hi-hat, letting it rattle. “You’re shitting me. We’re gonna meet him?”

Eddie nods, pulling another piece of hair in front of his face.

“Oh, man,” Jeff says. “You’re gone on this dude. Can you tell us anything about him?”

Eddie bites his lip. “I mean, you’re about to see him. But during the whole… everything. He saved my life more than once.”

“Then we owe him a whole lot,” Gareth says seriously.

Eddie smiles at his friends. “Thanks, guys. Alright, back to practice, Frank, count us in!”

Towards the end of practice, a car pulls up. Eddie doesn’t notice, he’s got his eyes closed, focused on what he’s playing. Jeff and Gareth give each other another look.

Steve Harrington steps out.

Frank misses a beat.

Eddie turns around, brow furrowed in question, then turning back to the front and grinning when he sees Steve walk up.

The song’s barely over before Eddie’s putting his guitar down and practically launching himself at Steve, who laughs and wraps his arms around Eddie. “Hey, Eds.”

“Stevie,” Eddie murmurs, hugging him tighter before just as suddenly releasing him and turning to the rest of the band. “Steve, these are the guys. Gareth, Jeff and Frank. Guys, Steve.”

“Nice to meet you, Steve, Eddie’s said literally only good things about you. Today.” Gareth offers him a hand, and he accepts, laughing.

“Yeah, we’ve been wanting to tell you for a while, but he never did it. I finally realized I’d have to actually come up here if he’s ever gonna do it.”

Jeff frowns, cutting his eyes over to Eddie. “You wanted to tell us, though?”

“Yes, definitely! It was my idea, actually, just. You know how my brain is about things sometimes.”

Steve frowns, poking Eddie’s head. “Be nice.”

Eddie pretends to bite at Steve’s retreating finger. “To who? I am!”

“To yourself,” Steve laughs.

“Oh,” Eddie says, then grins slyly. “Why would I, when I have you to do it for me?”

Steve grins back. “Because if you don’t,” he starts, finishing by whispering something in Eddie’s ear that has him gasping.

“You wouldn’t.”

“See, that’s your choice, isn’t it?”

Eddie frowns. “You’re mean.” But he leans into Steve’s side anyways.

“Eddie,” Frank says, “how in the hell did you get together with your high school crush?”

“Aw, you had a crush on me?” Steve says happily. “How embarrassing.”

“We’re dating, Steve.”

He just shrugs. “Still.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “To answer your question, Frank…” he locks eyes with Steve, and they both start giggling. “Threaten him in a boat shed?”

“Try to get him back with his ex?”

Eddie groans, hiding his face in Steve’s shoulder. “Are you ever gonna let that go?”

“Probably not.”

“Somehow I have more questions now than I started with,” Frank says, “and I’m scared of what the answers might be.”

“Hey,” Gareth says suddenly, loud enough Steve and Eddie jump apart. “What the hell are you thinking, man?” He addresses Eddie, walking past them to the mouth of the garage. He doesn’t miss the way Steve angles himself in front of Eddie, trying to protect him. Good. He shuts the garage door. “You know how nosy my neighbors are, man, you can’t just do whatever you want! If people see-”

“Shit, man,” Eddie says, relaxing. “You’re right. Sorry. Thank you.”

“I’m happy for you,” he says, noting the way Steve’s shoulders go down. “But you’ve gotta be careful, man, we just got you back.”

“I know,” Eddie says. “You’re right.”

Gareth smiles, then. “Let’s go inside. You know my mom made lemonade, and I think we all want to hear how exactly this happened.” He smirks, gesturing at Steve and Eddie.

“You guys go ahead,” Eddie tells them. “I’d like to say hi to him first.”

Gareth rolls his eyes, moving towards the door. “I’m coming back out here in two minutes,” he warns.

He gives them ten.

[ya-zz]

okay hear me out, playing video games with ramattra. completely sfw and fluffy (unless you wanna make it nsfw somehow, idm lol), just introducing him to video games - maybe like Mario or WiSports or Minecraft or something

btw i love you (platonically ofc) and my pugs say hi!

Aaaa this is hella cute!! Imagine him sitting down next to you and he's playing minecraft because it keeps him calm, omg omg, maybe a drabble will come off of that, but anyway! You're request as requested!

Ramattra x Reader (gen)

Word count: 1544

What Ramattra did in his spare time you never knew. Sure, he would read or work on something in the workshop, but what does the omnic do to wind down? Surely meditating was all he did? How does one meditate for so long without getting bored?

He’s an omnic. A war machine built to kill. An R-7000 who had never experienced joy. He has never experienced comfort… Warmth… Love. Ramattra has never felt… content. 

His stress level were alarmingly high, and the humming of his worn out chassis rattled every time he moved. He was in need of repair and you were the only one capable of helping him. The only one capable of repairing him. His joints were getting stiff and while he hadn’t been in the world for that long, he had never taken care of himself. He never found a need. There was no other purpose for Ramattra to take care of himself and by the time he had met you, he was already too far gone. 

He approached you one day, albeit against his own thought systems, and he asked for you to help him. He asked for you to repair him and that was exactly what you did.

Keeping him online, you listened to him talk about his past, what he remembered from back then, his pain and directives. You made sure to clean the crevices, fix the broken parts of him, repair what was damaged, rewire what wires had been frayed and became useless.

You had never felt closer with the omnic, and while you considered him a good friend, you were sure he saw you as just a other human. So when Ramattra admitted that he enjoyed spending his time with you, that he enjoyed your presence, a warm feeling flooded throughout your body. 

It took nearly a day to get Ramattra fixed, but the moment he could stand, he sighs. 

“Thank you.” He says, placing a hand on your shoulder. “Though… My joints are still stiff.”

“They will be. They’re new parts so they need to loosen up a little.” You smile gently at him as you begin to clean up.

“New?” He seems shocked by the fact that they are ‘new’. 

You let out an airy laugh. “Well, technically yes, they’re new, but they’ve been sat in the box for years. It’s hard to come across your models replacement parts.” 

“I was not made to be replaced.” Ramattra looks off to the distance. 

“I know, so I did what I could to get some parts in just in case.” You place a hand onto his jawline, feeling the metal against your palm. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t hot either. It was warm. 

Ramattra stares at you but as he goes to move his hand to replicate yours, wanting to touch your face, his fingers don’t open as easily as they did previously. You look down at his hand before an idea pops into your head. 

“Come with me.” You don’t give him a choice as you practically drag him upstairs and into your personal home. “Take a seat, I’ll be back in just a moment.”

Ramattra stands in the living room for a moment before taking a seat, his knees uncomfortably high on the low sofa. He hears you moving and complaining from a different room. Something drops, a quiet expletive follows after. All the while, he’s looking around the living room. A tidy place, one that is kept clean. There isn’t much here, but he figures it’s because you are always busy. 

A few minutes later you return holding a box in your arms.

“That looks heavy.” Ramattra looks between you and the box. 

“I can assure you that I have carried heavier.” You smile, placing the box down on the floor before sitting next to it. “Let’s see…” 

“What are you doing?” Ramattra stands and kneels beside you, watching you open the cardboard box. Inside of it was a bunch of wires, consoles and controllers. “What is all of this?” 

“This…” You start, pulling out a series of cables and a console. “This is a Nintendo system, a Wii specifically.”

“A what?” 

You laugh at his reaction. “A Wii. It’s a motion console. God, I haven’t set this up in years.”

Ramattra picks up the console and examines it. “How old is this?”

“I don’t know precisely, but they were released back in 2006.” You push the box aside after retrieving two controllers and the sensor. 

“That was-” 

“Yeah… This was my fathers.” You smile as you work on connecting it to the TV. 

“How is this going to help me?” Ramattra cocks his head to the side. 

“You have to move to play.” Looking back at him, you notice that he had picked up one of the remotes. “There are more advanced systems out there now, but this is a great starting point.”

Ramattra hums as he watches the TV light up. 

“By moving, it will loosen those joints.” You smile at the omnic. “Come on, stand up.” Offering a hand to him, your smile grows a little more when he accepts it. 

“What exactly are we playing?” His optics watch the screen as he watches the little cursor move across it. He looks back at your arm, watching it move in the direction of the cursor. 

“Wii Sports. An all time fan favourite.” You laugh, looking at him hold his controller. You explain to him how to turn it on before your fingers are touching his wrist, putting on the safety strap. “This is so you don’t break anything.” 

“Have you broken a TV before?” Ramattra asks, a warmth passing through his circuitry at your motions. 

“Never, surprisingly. I’m not as much as a clutz as you think I am.” 

Ramattra chuckles before turning his attention back to the screen. 

“Just follow the instructions- oh my, I didn’t think the save data would still be here.” You smile as you look at your character. 

“Is that supposed to be you?” The omnic asks. 

“Yes.” 

“It does not look like you.” 

“It used to look like me. It has been many years since I pulled this out.” The character was childhood you. A small, derpy looking character you thought was cute. 

Ramattra doesn’t seem convinced but he leaves it at that. 

“What game mode do you want to play first?” You ask while looking up at him. 

The omnic notices the mischieves glint in your eyes and scoffs. “Do not think you will beat me just because I have never played this.” 

You laugh at his response. “Omnics learn quickly, I’m sure I can win a few games before you truly do beat my ass.” 

Ramattra laughs alongside you before he grabs your arm, making you move the cursor over the games. He stops on baseball and hums in confirmation. 

You nod before clicking the game, watching as Ramattra selects his temporary profile and his hand. 

—

One game turned into two, then to three. 

Then it turned into the whole evening. With each game, you won the first two, at a push three, but then after that, Ramattra started getting good. Too good. Of course, he let you win a few games in between, blaming it on his joints when in fact they were loosening up quickly from all the movement. 

Ramattra, for once, was having fun. Hearing you laugh and joke as he spent time with you made him feel warm. His systems were calm, but there were times when you had accidentally brushed his arm and his systems flared up like he was blushing. 

Hours of fun had gone by, neither of you getting bored of playing the same games on repeat, but it was getting late and now it was your turn to feel achy. 

“Are you okay?” Ramattra asks, watching you slump back on the sofa behind. 

“Yeah, just worn out.” You smile, leaning forward and taking the remote off of your wrist. 

“It is late.” Ramattra states, fiddling around with his remote strap. 

“Here.” You stand up and help him take it off. “How are your joints?” 

It takes a moment for Ramattra to speak. The feeling of your hand on his nearly made him short circuit. “Loose. Thank you.” 

“I’m glad.” 

“Though my fingers still need some loosening.” He admits. 

You stare at him for a moment, cheeks instantly burning up. 

“What is it?” Ramattra notices your sudden flustered state. 

“N-Nothing!” 

“Oh?” The omnic takes a step forward towards you and towers over you. “I do still owe you for fixing me…” His hand touches your cheek, finger joins still stiff. 

“I-”

“Perhaps there is a way we can both settle this.” His tone changes, low and sultry. 

He backs you up against the wall, trapping you in with arms either side of you. 

“Ram-” Your voice was barely a whisper, light and breathy. Ramattra chuckles at the reaction. 

“What do you say?” He tilts his head, leaning down slightly as his optics are fixed with your eyes. 

With burning cheeks, all you could do was stare back, mouth slightly open as if you couldn’t believe this was happening. 

Ramattra tilts your head up, thumb resting on your bottom lip.

“Let me play with you.”

[andromedism]

June 2017

“What’re you doing, bro?” 

“I’m twirling!” Charlie yells over the booming bass, a blur of rainbow beads rattling around his neck. They shimmer in the strobe lights, casting specks of refracting light across his army jacket and his upturned face. 

The dance floor parts slightly, a red sea of narrow-faced gays scowling at him as he overtakes their space with his revolution. It’s making Mac dizzy, but he needs to stay sharp. 

“He’s twirling!” Dee confirms. She’s swaying at Mac’s side, a large rainbow flag tied around her neck. One of her gaudy fake lashes is sticking to her eyelid. 

They’re both tipsier than Mac; the stale beer tolerance they’ve built up at Paddy’s is an unworthy match for the dangerously fruity drinks The Rainbow hands out like candy during Pride. Mac’s a pro by now and can knock back watermelon daiquiris with the best of them, but tonight isn’t the night for dicking around. 

He grips Charlie’s shoulder, stopping him. “Take it easy. You don’t wanna pull trig on the dance floor, dude. People’ll get pissed.” 

It’s not that this dance floor hasn’t seen its fair share of vomit—it has. Much of it, Mac’s. It’s just that the hundreds of glittery bodies swaying to the house music are giving him vertigo, and he didn’t really want to come, and Charlie and Dee cannot be left alone together without committing at least one felony. If one of them angers the wrong gay, he’ll have to bust out his jiu-jitsu training, and this isn’t the venue for that. 

Someone needs to reign them in, be the straight man in the gay bar, and it has to be him—there’s no one else, anymore. 

“You’re being such a buzz kill, man! This is your night!” Charlie cries, nodding his head to the beat of the music. He hasn’t stopped moving since Elton John’s tenor broke through the speaker on the first parade float earlier that afternoon. Mac’s always loved how Charlie absorbs the musicality in everything; tapping his feet to the rhythm of the leaky tap in the bar or pulling a piano riff from thin air after sniffing paint. It’s second nature for him. And then there’s Dee.

“Yeah! This is your night!” she parrots. She takes a swig from the penis-shaped cup she’s spilled the contents of on everyone in her orbit since they arrived. Mac has no idea where she got it from. The Rainbow doesn’t supply these. “Hey, this is blue flavored. What fruit is blue? Mac, d’you know?”

Charlie whirls on her, tipping back onto his heels as his legs catch up with his upper body. “Now hold on a minute, Dee. Why are you asking him, huh? Feels homophobic for you to assume he’s the fruit expert, here.”

“I’m not—” she huffs loudly and rolls her eyes in that eerie way that reminds Mac she’s someone’s twin, “—I’m not saying he’s the fruit expert ‘cause he’s gay, dipshit! I just—he’s been working out a lot and eating boring health food. Thought he’d know his fruits.” 

Charlie turns to look at Mac, eyes skidding over his biceps. He doesn’t pay attention to things like this. If Mac showed up at the bar tomorrow with D-cups and ass implants, he wouldn’t bat an eye and doesn’t now. “He hasn’t been working out.” 

“Yeah, he has! My god, do you pay attention to anything?” 

They’ve been doing this a lot: talking about Mac like he isn’t standing right in front of them. His own friends treat him like a dog, hinting they’ll take him for a walk without saying it because they think if he hears the word, he’ll scamper around excitedly until they leash him. Or put him down.

Charlie plants his hands on his hips. “Well who’s to say between the two of us, I’m not the one with the fruit expertise?” 

“Oh, what do you know about fruits, Charlie?” Dee challenges, walking up on him. 

Charlie bounces on his toes as he shouts in Dee’s face. “I know a lot about fruits! I know a lot about fruits! My areas of expertise are bird law, woodworking, and then fruit—”

“Woodworking, what the hell are you talking about!?” Dee shouts back. She’s gesturing so violently that blue liquid is flying everywhere. Mac is strategically dodging drops of it as he steps forward to break them up. 

It’s just then that the song changes and Charlie shoves his hand over Dee’s mouth to silence her. “Shut up! Shut up! Dee, shut up.” 

She pushes him away, spitting wildly. “What the hell is on your hands!? Glue!?”

“I said shut up!” Charlie shrieks. He takes a deep breath and extends his arms, palms outstretched like a prophet. “I have to twirl about this.” Before Madonna can get a word of Express Yourself in edge-wise, he’s spinning again, off into the crowd.

Mac steps forward to follow him, but a sharp, quippy ‘Hey, boner!’ stops him in his tracks. When he turns to look at Dee, she’s staring at him. It’s so unnatural that he can only blink back at her. These past few years, they haven’t paid much attention to each other—only to fight like cats; their dynamic always defined by their gravitational proximity to another man. 

“Are you—are you talking to me?”

“Yeah, duh. What’s up your ass?” She accents her question with a long swig from her dick cup. There’s a familial likeness there that keeps Mac from ever looking her directly in the eye. 

Mac crosses his arms, standing a little straighter. “Nothing. Just trying to keep you two safe.”

She arches an eyebrow at him, dumbfounded. “From who?” 

And yeah, that’s a good question. The threat level in the room is pretty low. Mac knows because he assessed it when they first walked in. 

He shrugs. “I dunno. Anyone could be lurking here. Spies, henchman, a ninja maybe—”

“A ninja?” she interrupts, and there’s skepticism in her tone that makes him nervous. Why can’t she mind her own business? 

“They could be anywhere, Dee. You don’t understand because you’re thinking like a civilian.” He taps his forehead for good measure. 

“You’re a civilian, jerk ass.” She pulls the little umbrella out of her cup and twirls it in between her fingers. “You’re thinkin’ ‘bout your buddy, huh? Yikes!” 

He’s been trying really hard not to think about anything at all; the door in his apartment that’s always closed; the room behind it that’s always empty; the one-way ticket to North Dakota that made it all so.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yeah y’are.” She shoves the dick cup in his face until he takes a swig. It feels like water going up his nose. 

“Holy shit. What is this, Windex?” He eyes the sloshing blue substance, suspiciously. Maybe it will poison her and she’ll stop asking him so many pointed questions. 

“No, it’s a blue lagoon. I got it from Estevan.” Dee flicks her hand behind her lazily, and Mac follows the direction of her flippant gesture into a crowd of strangers. 

“Who’s Estevan?”

“He’s over th—” She turns to point at an empty space on the far wall. “Oh. I could’ve sworn he was…” She cocks her head back at Mac. “Hey, what d’you think was in those edibles?”

Mac swallows dryly. “I don’t think those were edibles, Dee.” 

There was something kind of wonky about the little pink gummies Frank dropped into each of their palms, hours earlier. ‘You kids stay woke and don’t mix these with poppers or you’ll end up ass up in an airfield,’ he’d said before descending the stairs to a sketchy basement bar with Artemis. He hadn’t meant it in the liberal sense. There’s nothing woke about Frank. If Mac had a dime for every homophobic thing the guy said today, he’d be able to buy everyone in the bar a round. What’s the word for that? Reparations, maybe? 

He looks to his side to ask the person who’s always standing there, the person who always knows the answer. There’s no one.

Dee pokes Mac in the pec with the toothpick end of the umbrella. “Look, I don’t care if you go home and sob into his pillow every night—“

“Estevan’s? I still don’t know who that is.”

Dee furrows her brow. “Est—what? No! Not Estevan’s! You know who! And you can mope about him all you want on your own time! But tonight’s supposed to be fun and you’re shitting on everything!” 

“I am not shitting on everything!” Mac shoots back. He holds up the dick cup, pointedly. “You’re the one collecting souvenirs like a tourist! You should really give that kid her flag back!”

“Finders keepers!” Dee clutches at the ends of the flag and wraps them around her body, possessively, cocooning herself like a big ugly moth. 

“You didn’t find it! You stole it!” She’d ripped it out of a college girl’s hands in line outside and told her to suck a fat chode before parading past the bouncer. If Mac’s retained anything from the Star Wars prequels he’s been marathoning in his now-infinite free time, it’s that not all heroes wear capes, and not all people who wear capes are heroes.

“Oh don’t make this about me!” Dee snaps. “We’re doin’ your thing tonight and you’re not even enjoying it, like an ungrateful asshole!” She gestures broadly to the dance floor, the ends of her pride cape flaring out around her in a blur of color. “Look around you! Everyone’s having a great time but you! If I were you, I’d be dancing my ass off! Not thinkin’ ‘bout my loser roommate.” 

Mac clenches his fists. “He’s not a loser, Dee! He’s a dad!” 

“What’s the difference!?” she yells, stomping her feet like a toddler. 

There’s a huge difference, obviously–and she’s too drunk and dumb to see it. Dads can’t be losers. Take Mac’s for example. He’s a total badass. What, with all of his tattoos, and his secrets, and his criminal record? Bad. Ass. 

Mac shoves the dick cup back into her hands. “Can we stop? Can we stop!? This is stupid! You’re drunk, we’re all high, Frank totally poisoned us which is probably a hate crime, at least in my case! This night has been shitty and I wanna go home! I’d rather be finishing Revenge of the Sith right now and that’s saying a lot. I’m gonna go find Charlie.”

“Whatever! Go do that! But remember, the night wasn’t shitty until you started shitting on it!” As Dee flings her hand out, liquid sloshes from the dick cup and hits Mac’s chest in a cold splatter. 

“Hey!” he cries, grasping at the wet fabric of his tank top. “Oh god damnit, Dee!”

She cups a hand over her mouth. “Oh, I fucked it.”

“Yeah, you fucked it! Get me something to clean this up! Shit!” 

“Fine!” She starts to tromp off, but then stops. Turning on her heels, she walks up into Mac’s space and jabs a sharp finger into his chest. “Stop. Shitting.” 

They scoff at each other before she’s off again, stomping into the crowd. Mac flexes his fingers, fighting off the urge to trip her as her pride cape blurs with the other rainbow apparel. It’s just him, now. Him and a hundred other gay people. That thought alone is enough to unnerve him from his sticky spot on the floor. 

Mac drifts aimlessly through the flock of sweaty bodies, eyes fixed on the blue stain blooming over his heart. Something’s kicking in: the edible, or Dee’s molotov cocktail, or the big horrible feeling he has in crowded rooms now that there’s no one to turn to and say ‘ It’s crowded in here, huh? ’.

The DJ has switched things up, opting for a slow song. People are pairing up to dance a boozy waltz. Bodies slotting together, hands grasping for broad shoulders, and Mac, all alone, covered in glitter and suspiciously blue liquor. 

A couple in matching leathers bumps into him in the scramble, muttering apologies. A server lifts a tray of tequila shots high above their heads as she skirts past him. She’s wearing a tee shirt that says 'Love who you love' in big bold lettering. How? That’s all he’s been asking himself his entire life. How do you love someone the way they need it? How do you cope when they leave? How do you come out without immediately locking yourself in a brand-new box? 

There’s a lull in the crowd finally, a clearing in the musky haze, where he can take a long deep breath. He blots at the stain with clammy fingers to no avail, barely noticing the hands ducking into his line of sight to press a napkin to his shirt. 

“She’s so fucking annoying.” 

Everyone sounds a little like this these days, so he doesn’t react anymore. In coffee shops, and grocery stores, and clubs like this one, Mac hears the familiar pert inflection that used to fill the space between him and the other end of the couch. And every time he turns to look, the face isn’t right. 

“So annoying,” Mac agrees. “You know her?” 

“You might say I know her better than anyone,” the stranger says with a theatrical inflection. He was always so dramatic. 

Mac is still staring at the long, slim fingers fussing with the stain, the manicured nails grazing his bare chest as they hold fast to the fabric, lighting his skin up with goosebumps. He shifts on his feet. “Wow, you that close with her? Dee Reynolds? Bro, that’s—”

“Look at me, asshole.” 

He won’t. 

Because this is the same nightmare he’s been having for months. And it ends badly. It always has. It will never be different. 

“Mac,” the stranger says, softly, in that tone he used to take in their kitchen at midnight, when they’d have tea together after a long day at the bar, when they’d share stories they’ve heard each other tell a million times like secrets. “Look at me.”

To Mac’s great pleasure and horror, he is just as easy to look at as he was the last time they saw each other. The vivid club lighting is cutting through the moving shadows, catching the arc of his cheek, the soft curl of his hair, his prim mouth set in an intent line. 

As dancers and servers pass them by like ships in the night, Mac can feel it: the gossamer thin thread keeping him tethered to reality snapping as those slim hands drop the napkin and press hot to his neck, pulling him forward.

“What are you—” Mac starts, but it’s no use, because Dennis Reynolds, South Philadelphia’s most infamous ghost, is kissing him soft and open-mouthed in the middle of a gay bar. 

And everything is blue like the sky on an autumn day when they were children, and Charlie would push him on the rusty swing set in the park. That fluttering deep in his stomach, as he’d dropped back down to earth, returning to him now like an old friend. Returning to him now, like Dennis. 

And there’s something unnervingly gentle about the pale hand, reaching up to brush a stray hair off Mac’s forehead as they press closer to each other.

And Mac is gripping at the collar of a familiar button-up for dear life, wanting to anchor them both in this moment so that he won’t wake up in a cold sweat, any minute now, legs sticking to his sheets. 

And the planets are all marbles, rolling out of orbit into the black universe, where everything tastes like the lip gloss Dennis left on the counter when he walked out of Mac’s life.

You never text me back, he wants to say. You never call. But he can’t speak, he can only sigh into the mouth of this beautiful, horrible stranger, who is kissing him like it’s the last time they’ll ever see each other. Maybe it is. Fear bubbles up in Mac’s throat at the idea that this is the closest he’ll ever be to Dennis again: hallucinating his likeness in crowded rooms he’ll never be in for all of eternity. 

But when the stranger breaks the kiss, it’s still Dennis; still sharp lines and a rigid brow, pursed lips, and something rare and open in those wide, blue eyes flickering out as the mask is tied back on. 

In all of Mac’s dreams, they don’t get this far. They don’t kiss. He always wakes up before they do it. Which only means one thing:

“This is a nightmare,” Mac whispers. It’s all he can think to say. It’s the only explanation. 

“Yours or mine, buddy?” Dennis says softly. It’s quiet enough that Mac shouldn’t be able to hear it, but he does because he’s watching Dennis’ mouth so intently he could probably draw it later, from memory. His eyes linger there as Dennis turns in the other direction, walking away before Mac can take a breath. 

“Wait!” Mac calls after him, trying to catch up, weaving through the crowd. It’s so like Dennis to power walk out of any compromising situation. Mac should know - he’s seen him do it a million times and not once has he been able to keep up. The guy’s got the stamina of a show pony. The last time he did it, he didn’t come back, and Mac’s reliving it again, for the hundredth night in a row. Remembering everything he didn’t say, or tried to say but it came out wrong. 

“Dennis, wait!” Mac calls again, shoving the server from earlier aside as she walks between them. “Move, bitch!” 

One moment he sees Dennis’ silhouette in the crowd, curls haloed by the overhead lighting, fingers digging into his palms in that way he does when he’s nervous, the arc of his tensed shoulders, shifting through the masses. The next, he’s gone. 

“There you are!” Dee’s hand is on Mac’s shoulder, spinning him around. She and Charlie are staring at him with twin looks of concern. “Where the hell have you been!? We’ve been looking everywhere for you!” 

Everything is ten times louder all of a sudden like someone ripped his headphones out of his ears at the gym.

“I was…” Mac presses his hand to his mouth. His fingers are trembling. “Did you two see him?”

“Who, Estevan?” Dee asks, head cocked inquisitively—yes, like a bird. 

“Estev—no. No.” Mac lifts his hand from his mouth to his forehead, massaging the skin there. It takes everything to move, suddenly. He feels like a bug, suspended in amber. “Guys, I think those edibles were laced with something.”

“I think you’re right, man.” Charlie says, “I just spun so much I wore a hole in the dance floor” 

“It’s true,” Dee says, “I tripped over it and got blue everywhere.” 

“Yeah, it’s everywhere. There’s blue everywhere,” Charlie adds.

Mac’s heart is beating so fast he can feel it in his ears, over the beat of the poppy synth music. Reality has rushed back in, the bar buzzing with energy once again. Maybe it always was. 

“I—I think we should call it a night, guys. I need to get some air. I’m seeing things.”

Dee and Charlie exchange a look. Maybe they’ll take him for a walk after all. “Yeah,” Charlie says, “I think that’s the right move. Not that this hasn’t been so fun!”

“Oh! So fun!” Dee parrots, unconvincingly. 

“But yeah, let’s go.” As Charlie motions toward the door, Dee flashes a bundle of paper towels.

“Oh, I almost forgot, I brought you this for the—” she stops, staring at Mac’s chest. “What the hell? Did you change your shirt?”

“No, why would I…”

He looks down, padding at the spot where there was once a blue stain. Now, nothing. 

They all look at each other, letting the beat of confusion hang between them before deciding at once: “The edibles.” 

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Dee says. She flares out her cape dramatically and leads them through the crowd. 

Mac trails behind her, eyes unfocused, the desire to be curled up on the couch watching Anakin burn to death in the lava river greater than he could have ever imagined. ‘I hate you,’ he’d said. ‘I loved you.’ Obi-Wan had replied. It’s where Mac had left off.

A wet napkin gets stuck to the sole of Charlie’s sneaker. He kicks it off and stumbles after them. “So wait, who’s Estevan?”

read more here <3

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 3: Adversary

“Hey, Chapman! The yooj?” Jill projects her question around me like a professional thespian, grabbing the attention of the startled customer.

Chapman jerks, looks up at her, and opens their mouth to talk, but takes a quick breath first. Then they look a little relieved but still rattled, and say, “Yyyyyeah. That’d be great!”

Their voice sounds like dark maple syrup, and I’m noticing the complexity of their hairdo this time.

It is a side cut, with the right side of their head shaved clean and showing off a tattoo of three fuchsias hanging down from the top of their scalp where their new hairline is. And the rest of their hair is short in the back and thick and long in the front and styled in a wavy pompadour, with a pointy and groomed sideburn that comes down half an inch below their left earlobe. And the hair is an immaculate dark hot pink.

Everything about them, their name, their voice, their haircut, all keep telling me to keep sticking to they/them for them, for now, until I actually learn their pronoun. Which I’m told is what I should do for everyone, and I try. But there’s something about their whole thing, what they’ve got going on, that transfixes me just a little bit more each time I look at them, and the sense that they’re probably an enby feels like part of it.

But now they look perplexed and still hesitant, like they’re trying to figure out whether they should try to solve a puzzle that’s been presented to them.

“Hey, Meghan, your drink’s ready,” Jill mutters at me.

Oh!

I’m in the way.

I make what I think of as a startled but cheerful sound and reach for my tablet to put it in my purse. But we all notice that the noise that comes from deep in my throat sounds almost exactly like the door chime. And everyone looks delighted and surprised by that, including me I assume.

Then I duck and fluidly bound toward my table, low, quiet, and way more graceful than I even want to be, my tail wiggling in behind me in the process. It’s embarrassing how it feels like my body is suddenly showing off for some reason.

Then I try to hide behind my table and bury my face in my drink.

But I can still clearly see Chapman in my peripheral vision and this display of mine does not seem to have unflustered them.

I may be new to physically being a dragon, and I may have a lot of trouble recognizing things like, say, flirting. But I’m not new to this. 

Whatever Chapman actually thinks of me, I feel like I’m in high school again. And I don’t even know what I think of Chapman, but my limbic system seems to have its ideas. I almost did a mating dance on the way to my table, and I really don’t know what to do about it, so now I’m remaining as still as possible now.

I have no clue what Chapman’s age is, as I watch them finally step forward to engage in their transaction. I’ve always been bad at judging ages. Humans all age at wildly different rates anyway. But also, we’re not even the same species.

Why am I reacting to them like this?

I find myself wondering if maybe they’re another dragon, just still disguised as a human, like I’d been just a week ago.

What if I’m only the first, and there’s more to come? Would I be able to sense the others, kind of in the way that Jill and Cerce already sensed these things about me?

Then I have a super wild thought, and lose myself in it as a way of distracting myself. What if there are no actual humans. What if we’re all mythical creatures waiting to shed our disguises, and that’s why we can sometimes recognize each other?

It seems as likely an explanation for what’s going on with me as anything else I can imagine. And I think I’d really like it to be true.

I decide I’m not going to pursue my feelings. They don’t make any sense. Not sexually, anyway. I wouldn’t mind being Chapman’s friend if they decide they can be friends with me. But I won’t try. They’re clearly unsettled by me, and I don’t want to impose myself on them in any way.

So the real challenge is just being normal when we’re sharing the same space, so I don’t make them more uncomfortable.

I figure that the best way to do this right now is to look around at the other customers.

There’s quite a mix of people today, and all of them are ignoring what’s going on in the front of the shop. They’re ignoring me. As usual.

And it strikes me, as I’m glancing around, now aware of my actual gender and how people seem to see me, that of all the variety of people who look like they might be women here, I share nothing in common with them.

So many of them wear some degree of makeup, and must have some sort of skin care routine. They wear jewelry of various sorts, and know how to put their hair up or get it styled the way they like. Their gestures and ways of speaking aren’t all the same, but seem like a myriad of ways of expressing femininity that I do wish I could mimic.

But, I don’t have hair. Or bare skin to apply anything to. I haven’t bothered with anything like clothes for four days now. And I don’t think I have vocal chords. I have something else that feels like it’s between my lungs. There’s no way I’m going to be using my tongue to craft soft vowels and breathy fricatives. No one alive right now is going to know how to give me vocal lessons.

And it doesn’t matter, because I’m a dragon and I really don’t have to adhere to common human beauty standards to be seen as what I am. But I do feel left out all the same.

And even if I still had a human body and was transitioning like normal, I don’t think I could stand putting stuff on my face to smooth out my complexion and adorn it. But I feel like I should.

I guess I’ve been raised by humans, and spent the first 50 years of my life soaking in human socialization. I shouldn’t be surprised I have this trouble.

Let’s say I decided to wear jewelry as a dragon. That’s something I could probably do. I could wrap necklaces or bracelets around my horns or something like that. I can’t decide if I’d be doing that for myself or to signal to everyone else that I’m female.

And at 50 years old, you’d think I’d be above this sort of quandary, because I’m well past the typical dating age. I’m settled. I’m disabled, too. I have my routines. I know who and what I am, and that’s all that matters. And what I present to the world is what the world gets. Like, other 50 year old women brag about how free they feel, no longer trying to be attractive to mates or meet societal standards.

Obviously, I’m not like other girls my age.

I turn back to my mocha to discover that Chapman is sitting at my table opposite me, composing themself with drink in both hands.

I recall seeing the movement in my peripheral vision earlier, but hadn’t made sense of it because I had successfully lost myself in thought.

I tilt my head to the side, eyes wide.

“Hi,” they say.

—

So I didn’t get a chance to compose my questions, and now Rhoda wants to hear all about Chapman while she tidies up my apartment.

As I knuckle out my explanation for Chapman’s interest in me, Rhoda is holding up things that are scattered around my livingroom and giving me a questioning look. I glance up and either smile or turn my head away, and she decides based on that whether to save it or throw it away.

So many things are just destroyed, and I have to let them go. But with anything that’s still intact, whether it’s useful to me or not, I just can’t get rid of it. I’ve got to have my things.

At certain point, she says, “Meg. Darling. We can’t store all of this in here. There isn’t room for your wings and tail, otherwise. Can you even afford a storage garage?”

In answer, I knuckle out the last few characters and then hit the talk button. “Autistic special interest,” I say.

She quirks her head and asks, “Chapman?”

I smile.

“Oh, that’s sweet. Maybe sie can help you figure out dragon things you might not otherwise know yet,” she says. We’d covered Chapman’s pronouns just a little bit earlier. Rhoda looks around at everything and sighs. Then she suggests, “What if we make your bedroom your hoard room, and turn the livingroom into your new sleeping den? I think the layout works better for that. I mean. Yes, your torso and legs aren’t all that much bigger than a human’s, but with those huge wings and that tail of yours, you know, well…” She gestures and nods at everything, “You do know.”

I acknowledge the truth of that with a gentle, tentative bob of my head.

“We’re going to need some help removing some of this wrecked furniture, too. But I’ve got a line on that. Don’t worry about it.” She tosses some obviously trashed things into the garbage and says, “OK. So. Chapman. Have you got another date with hir lined up?”

“Not date,” I respond. “Yes.”

“Sure,” she says, obviously not agreeing with my assessment. “What’cha gonna do?”

“Talk.”

“Where?”

“Park.”

“Oh, that sounds nice! Lots of room to move around. You can go for a little walk while you chat. I love it,” she says.

“Not date,” I repeat.

“I know,” she says. “My boy always liked going for walks with his friends. They'd all talk and talk and talk, and pace around the whole time even if they were just in the living room. But going places to connect and blab about anything and everything gave them all a sense of purpose, I'm sure. And stimuli and new things to talk about.” She organizes a few things, then continues, “He was autistic, too, you know. And pacing and walking was one of his stims. I wouldn't be surprised if Chapman's the same way.”

“OK, yes,” I reply. Then determined to delve into subjects of my own curiosity, I change the subject by asking the one question I do have cued up, “Why aren’t you freaking out about me being a dragon?”

Rhoda assesses me with tight lips, then replies, “It’s like you shed your old skin that night, you know. Maybe ate it in your sleep. Everyone could see this coming. It's just your new phase of growth.”

“Not you? You not do this?” I ask.

She blinks and wrinkles up her face and says, “Heavens, no! How even would I?” Then she holds up a finger. “Mind you, if I could, I would have. Ages ago! I saw how you were suffering. You were miserable under that old hide of yours. I imagine everyone saw it.”

So, I'm not getting answers from her. At least, not the ones I wanted to hear.

“Tell me,” she says. “What else are you experiencing along with this? Can you see things you couldn't see before? Are your senses sharper?”

“Yes. Thermals,” I reply.

Her eyebrows go up, “Can you fly?”

“Yes!”

“Fantastic!” she exclaims. “That must be amazing! I bet Chapman will love it!”

I’d roll my eyes, but I can’t. I do the big exaggerated head circle again.

“Oh come now,” Rhoda says. “I’m not teasing you about dating. I just genuinely think Chapman would appreciate a demonstration and you should give it to hir.”

She’s right, of course. And I agree to do so.

“In fact, I’d like to see you fly, myself,” she adds.

I look out one of my windows. I’ve got a third story apartment, two stories from the top. And there’s a small parking lot directly across the street. If I were to climb out the window and glide across that lot, I could catch the big thermal there and get some lift before wheeling out over into one of the streets. Some wing work, and I could probably get above the low buildings of that block. Without more experience, it feels really iffy, but I might be able to do it.

But I figure that a creature as big as I am is in real danger of seriously hurting itself in a crash. Too much inertia for bone density. Hell, starlings kill themselves on windows every day.

Intellectually, I know it’s a bad idea to test myself that way, but I find I’m not actually afraid.

I turn my head to look at Rhoda and open my mouth to talk, momentarily forgetting that I can’t really do that anymore, when I catch something big moving swiftly just outside my window.

My memory of it now is just a snapshot flash of an image, another dragon, wings, head, and tail pulled back, and all four feet extended outward to brace for impact with the wall between windows.

The very next moment of memory is bricks, plaster, insulation, wood, wires, and dragon billowing into my partially tidied living room and destroying it.

And I’m somehow turned 180 degrees, facing the monster who is picking themself up from the middle of the rubble of my apartment as Rhoda, who was safe in a corner near the outer wall, away from the impact and out of line of flying debris, shouts.

My tail is curled up awkwardly in the corner of the room near the door to the kitchen, and I’m already crouched and ready to leap upon the intruder, wondering how I got here, wings held tightly to my back.

And I’m also thinking that this maybe answers my questions about the durability of my body.

We are not exactly the same kind of beast, though.

Anyone looking at either of us would call us both dragons. And we have the same number of limbs. But that’s where our similarities end.

I’ve got iridescent blue and indigo scales with a pattern of diamonds down my back. I’ve got fiery orange and gold markings as well, and tan belly scales. I have a pair of horns that sweep back from my skull, and ear canals that are almost hidden behind protective scales. And I’m lithe and pointy, and look something like a cross between a gecko and a caiman, but with wings.

Then there’s this fuzzy brown asshole that looks like if you crossed a bat with a hippo and gave the result a feathered dinosaur tail. And I know that I cannot let that gaping maw anywhere near anything I care about.

I hear a rumbling that is as deep and soul shaking as you’d expect from an earthquake, and realize that it’s me. I’m making that noise with something in my ribcage.

Rhoda is pushing herself further and further back into her corner of the room, even though she’s already pressed up against the walls.

The moment my sudden adversary is free of rubble, they jump forward and let out a croak of a yawp.

In response, I jerk my head up and let out the strangest squawk that starts from the infrasonic rumble that’s been building in the depths of my body and rises to a cracking cry that sounds like an angry parrot. And then as I close my mouth afterward, a clacking noise like a raven’s comes out and I find myself jerking my head with each knock.

It’s not exactly involuntary, I just find myself doing what feels right. And I’m pretty sure the other dragon knows exactly what it means.

I’m not quite as big as my challenger, but my vocal prowess causes them to pause.

I don’t know why this is happening and I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but two things are extremely obvious.

I’ve got to do whatever I can to keep Rhoda safe, because she is squishy and cannot survive being squished by either of us dragons.

And I’m definitely not getting my damage deposit back.

Also, I decide that hesitating is bad and I want this fucker out of my apartment.

I do a little zigzag. I leap slightly toward the outside wall, to my right, in the direction of my opponent. Then, still accelerating forward, I bound left, pushing off the floor to launch at a spot on the inner wall, twisting my body to plant my feet there so that I can leap off that wall.

I never in my life imagined doing anything like this with my old body. It was just entirely inconceivable, especially as my chronic illness set in. But, I’ve spent countless hours visualizing this exact maneuver with a body nearly identical to the one I have now, in situations I’ve really only seen in action movies.

My tail acts as a springing counterweight that also pushes off the wall just after my hind legs have launched me in the direction of the flying hippo beast. My wings have also made a measured stroke to grab some air and swim through it without slamming into floor or ceiling, but I do feel them brushing surfaces and things in the process.

Head bowed and turned sideways, I slam the peak of my shoulders into the side of the other dragon, and then straighten my neck out and sink my horns into their haunch.

I manage to make them slide about two feet, and squeeze an agonized “grawp” from their throat.

It’s not enough, though. I need them out.

I get smacked repeatedly with their right wing as they try to twist to bite me. But I’m more agile and serpentine than they are, and I’m climbing over the base of their tail and wrapping my own around their legs, hooking my tail barb in one of their ankles and pulling.

Scrabbling and clawing my way to the huge hole in the wall, I manage to get them to spin in place just to reduce the pain caused by my tail barb.

A good nine tenths of the apartment is now flapping wings, dust, and enraged screaming and roaring the likes of which Hollywood has never managed to imitate.

And then I do the thing. If this asshole wants to challenge and fight me, let them do it outside, away from people.

I unhook my tail and leap from my apartment, rumbling and clacking the whole way, and dive across the street to the parking lot.

The sun is going down, so the air is cooling. But it’s been a long summer day and the pavement of the parking lot is still rising with heat, and I spread my wings as wide as I can to catch it.

The lift keeps me from slamming into a car. And, with a beat of my wings and a curve of my spine, I manage to clear a tree near the street and avoid becoming part of the mural painted on the nearest building.

I let out a cackling challenge as I work to gain altitude flying down the street and toward the bay, away from what used to be my home.

I don’t have to turn my head far to see behind me, and a flurry of movement in my peripheral vision tells me I’m being pursued.

Perfect.

How in the God damned hell can that thing fly?

---

copyright 2024 the Inmara Fenumera

if you see a typo, report a typo

[dragonwitch77]

Tiny

Chapter 4: Clones

A heavy thick tension was in the air.

Bittergiggle sat on the floor, legs crossed with the tiny jester nestled within. Across from him, the two half-finished clones sat quietly.

It had taken a while for everyone to stop screaming, even longer for Bittergiggle to stop slapping and poking eyes whenever the two went too long without speaking and moving just to be sure they were still alive and hadn’t died on him suddenly.

This only led to more screaming and yelling that went on for another hour or so before the pair finally got Bittergiggle to stop, getting fed up with the jabs and slaps from the jester.

Said jester who was now currently glaring at the pair before him, eyeing them for a long time with a deep frown and thin line on both halves of his face.

The large head and top-half jester had their gazes averted, looking anywhere but the angry jester sitting in front of them. One of the big head’s eyes was almost shut and had swollen slightly from constant poking assault, and the top-half jester had some dents in his cheeks from the slaps.

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

“Me? I thought you were going to talk!”

“What? What gave you that idea?!”

“Uh, you kept glancing at me? Making eye signals, remember?”

“I was signaling you to talk first, dummy!”

“Oh! Well excuse me! I can’t read blank stares and side glances!”

“We’ve Been Over This! If I’m Looking AT YOU, I Expect YOU To Say Something FIRST!”

“ME?! We agreed that YOU were going to talk to him first!”

“We Never Agreed To That!”

“Yes we did! Remember, we were arguing about the spots we were left in last time and we agreed that you would be the one to talk to him first with one of your dumb poems and–”

“My poems are not dumb!”

“Yes they are! They’re not even that good!”

“Speak for yourself! Your magic tricks are hardly magical at all!”

“Hey! I worked hard on those! Do you know how much effort I put into those tricks?”

“All the effort you put in for your tricks doesn’t amount to much when all you can even manage to do is open and close a door by saying ‘open sesame’. And even then I’m only convinced you managed to open it with a hidden button.”

“Wha–?! THERE’S NO BUTTON! I Told You! It’s All MAGIC! MAGIC!”

“Yeah, of course. It’s magic. The magic of technology that is.”

“I HEARD THAT!”

“WELL IT’S TRUE!”

“NO IT’S NOT!”

“IS TOO!”

“IS NOT!”

“IS TOO!”

“IS NOT!”

“IS TOO TIMES INFINITY!”

“THAT’S IT!”

The top-half jester grabbed the big head, shaking them around like a child with a rattle. He screamed at the head to take back what he said, but the head bit down on his hand, causing the top-half jester to scream and flail his arms about.

Bittergiggle… was honestly confused.

He had just wanted answers from the two. He wanted to know when, and how, the two came to life.

Had they always been alive? Were they just pretending to be dead? Or did they just spontaneously come to life?

… No, they acted like they’ve been alive for a while. But if that was the case, why had they pretended to be inanimate for so long? Why did they never respond when he tried talking to them before? Why did they move and speak only NOW?

Bittergiggle’s eyes went from the pair down to the tiny jester nestled in his legs.

Had seeing the kid been what did it? Neither moved until the head saw the tiny thing. Maybe seeing her had been a shock? It certainly had been for him.

He stared at the tiny jester for a moment or two before looking back up at the pair and wondered what to do with them.

He couldn’t kick them out. As much as they weren’t good company before, Bittergiggle had grown too attached to them. He had spent long nights talking to them when his loneliness grew too much to bear, and even if they never spoke back, it helped him keep his dwindling sanity in check.

Plus, he was sure that they wouldn’t get very far due to obvious reasons. And he didn’t want the Sheriff stumbling across them and having them spill the beans to where his hideout was.

But now, what was he to do with them? A legless jester and a giant head seemed more trouble than anything. They were more of reminders of his failures at cloning.

Even worse, they didn’t even seem interested in making jokes.

The whole point of his cloning plan, and these two were only interested in magic tricks and poetry. He REALLY screwed up with these two.

Taking a deep breath, Bittergiggle counted up to twenty to calm his nerves, letting his breath out slowly as his body relaxed.

“…”

SLAP

SMACK

Loud cries of pain echoed in the small room. Bittergiggle’s arms retreated back to his sides as the two clones groaned and whined in pain. “Are you both finished yet?”

“Dude! What was that for?!” The top-half jester cried holding his cheek, making the large head envious.

“Two things.” Bittergiggle held up his green hand. “First and foremost was to get you both to shut up. And second of all to get you both to stop fighting and pay attention to me.”

“You could have just said something!” Top-half grumbled, rubbing his sore cheek.

“I could have. Or I could have just added fuel to the flames and made the arguing worse.” Bittergiggle shrugged. “Now then! Since I have both of your attention, let’s start with a few questions, shall we?” A dark look passed Bittergiggle’s face, one that made the cloned pair freeze up. “First question. How long have you two been pretending to be inanimate?”

The jester narrowed his eyes at the pair as they averted their gazes away from him. “It’s. Been. YEARS. And not once did either of you say anything or do anything that indicated that you were alive! I’ve tried talking to you SO MANY TIMES, and I’m only figuring out NOW that you both can talk?! What was the big deal?! Were you planning on pretending to be dead the whole time?!”

“W-well no.” The big head spoke up. “We were just waiting for the right time.”

“Which was hard!” Top-half huffed. “It was hard to figure out what the right time was, and how we were going to go about it. And you didn’t make it easy for us either!”

“Excuse you?”

“What he means is, you had some… ‘moments’ that made us both a little hesitant to try and talk to you.”

“A little? We were downright TERRIFIED! Especially after that one incident with that human!”

Bittergiggle’s eyes widened in alarm. “You saw–?!” He let out a sigh, pressing a hand to his temple. “What am I-of course you saw. You were obviously there and saw the whole thing.”

“Yep! Wish we hadn’t, but yeah.” Top-half shrugged.

“We really hadn’t meant to wait so long to tell you but…” The big head shifted his eyes away, looking nervous. “W-well–”

“No, no, I get it.” Bittergiggle ran his fingers through his fur. He didn’t like remembering that particular day, but in his defense, he hadn’t had much of a choice. It had been either that or be taken away or worse.

Still, the jester wished the two had spoken up sooner.

All those nights. He could have had decent conversations if the two had spoken up sooner. Real actual not one-sided conversations.

A deep yearning in the jester’s chest twisted as memories of fonder times passed in front of his eyes. Shaking his head, Bittergiggle let out a sigh, crossing his arms. “So… what now?”

The clones looked at each other. It was clear that neither of them knew what to do now that introductions were out of the way. And Bittergiggle didn’t know what to do now that most of the important things had been dealt with.

Minus one.

His eyes trailed down to the mini jester. The tiny being was still curled up in his legs. Despite all the shouting and commotion, the little jester continued to sleep soundly. Bittergiggle was almost worried that she wasn’t alive, but a slight twitch of her small chubby limbs or subtle movement on her face put his worry to slight ease.

“Sooooooo… who’d you get frisky with?”

“… EXCUSE YOU?!” Bittergiggle screamed, his whole face becoming hot as he glared at the top-half jester.

“What?” Top-half held up his hands, looking confused at the mortified faces.

“F-FRISK-WHAT?! WHAT?! WHAT?!” Bittergiggle sputtered, unable to comprehend what he was hearing.

“RUDE!” Big head shouted, glaring at the other clone.

“What?! I’m just saying.”

“Saying?! You don’t outright ask someone if they–! God! Do you have no brain up there?!”

“Hey! He literally disappears for a month and comes back with a KID!”

“That’s not how that works!”

“Uh, of course it is! It’s basic autonomy one-o-one!”

“For NORMAL people! We don’t have the parts for such stuff!”

“… It’s not nice to point out what we’re lacking, dude.”

“EVERY MUTANT LACKS THOSE PARTS! IT’S NOT JUST US! GOD, YOU CAN BE AS DUMB AS A BRICK SOMETIMES!”

“AND YOU CAN BE SUCH A BIG MOPE! WHAT, IS BEING A HEAD THAT BAD?!”

“YES! DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW HARD IT–”

“OH HERE WE GO AGAIN! BLAH BLAH–!”

“BEING A HEAD IS NOT EASY–!”

“LACKING LEGS IT’S VERY FUN–!”

“LISTING YOU GO ON AND ON ABOUT–!”

“YOUR POEMS ARE TRASH! JUST ADMIT IT AL–!”

“YOU CAN’T EVEN DO A SIMPLE MAGIC–!”

Bittergiggle ran a hand down his face, watching the pair argue.

Wordlessly, he got up off the floor, taking the small jester with him as the two clones continued to argue in the hideout. They continued to argue, even as the jester left the room and shut the door, having enough of the two.

Plopping himself down on one of the couches against the walls, Bittergiggle let out a sigh for the hundredth time today, feeling drained and exhausted beyond anything he ever felt before.

What was he going to do with those two?

His eyes drifted down to the small child.

What was he going to do with her?

Bittergiggle wasn’t sure what to do now. He’d give it a while to think first in silence before doing anything.

Maybe after a nap. A nap sounded nice right now.

<Previous/Next>

[symbiotic-slime]

Excuse me, did you say Venom TMA AU????

yes!!! it’s been rattling around in my head for a couple of months now, so if u want more in depth lore I’m more than happy to indulge but I’ll give a basic run down! there’s two separate ideas for this. I’ve categorized Eddie (a mixture of the movies and comics versions of him) and Flash based on what they’d be an avatar of and what they’d be a victim of so—

Avatar AU:

Eddie is an avatar of the Corruption, and the Venom symbiote is a manifestation of the Corruption! it starts out as a mould growing in Eddie’s apartment, but eventually its influence gets him and he bonds with them and becomes an avatar! there’s a lot of body horror in it, I basically went ham with adding anything and everything I thought would be cool. he’s basically a Flesh Hive, but instead of worms coming out of the holes in his skin it’s Venom’s goop! also since the corruption deals with obsessive and toxic love, the body horror element of that is Venom ripping Eddie’s ribcage open to curl around his heart >:3 I have a playlist for this AU, so check it out if u want to!

Flash is an avatar of the Slaughter (I know, making the soldier an avatar of the Slaughter how original)! his is a lot more tragic than Eddie’s, since his arc starts with the abuse he suffered as a kid and the fear of his dad’s unexpected violence marking him for the slaughter! then it kind of goes through his life being an avatar (think kind of what Elias pulled from Daisy’s life if you’ve listened to that part — where she’s not fully an avatar but definitely influenced by it). the timeline is a bit warped, I wanted for him to join the army pre- making up with Peter in this AU since war is such a big part of the Slaughter. it ends with him getting his legs amputated like in canon and since he’s unable to continue feeding the slaughter, its influence on him starts to wain. he basically becomes an avatar in recovery, growing weaker but refusing to give into the urges again. him and Peter become friends and he gets a “happy” ending (well, as happy of an ending is anyone in a tma au can hope for)!

Victim AU:

this one does not have as much substance to it, I just thought about what their greatest fear would be and like. I haven’t actually come up with any interesting supernatural ideas for this yet lmao

Eddie would be a victim of the Lonely (he goes off the deep end literally every time the symbiote leaves him or when he thinks they’ve died)

the Venom symbiote would be a victim of the Desolation (literally everyone they love either is “dead” or has died at some point — I’d ignore Flash’s resurrection and the whole Eddie and Dylan being able to come back I think from the current run)

Flash would be a victim of the Web (especially with the addiction themes from s5)

S5 SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT

I’ve also thought about what domain they’d be placed in following the eyepocalypse. literally the definition of putting them in situations because I’ve basically assigned them their own personal hell

Eddie would be placed in the Fog House domain or Martin’s domain

the Venom symbiote would be placed in the Furnace domain

Flash would be put in the Theatre domain. this one is literally a perfect fit for him since what we see of it is a guy being forced into his alcohol addiction over and over again.

[deepspacedukat]

Pulse

I just...I had an idea and I had to write it. In my defense, Shran pinned me to the wall and made me. 👉👈 🥺 Set during Season 5 which never came to fruition, in which Shran is a member of the Enterprise crew. Listen, my brain goes places when AO3 is down...

Cross-posted to AO3 here.

~*~

Thy’lek Shran (ST:ENT) x Reader

[A/N: This is just fluff. Nothing constructive or useful to say here this time.]

Warnings: Interspecies kissing, human/Andorian kissing, made up Andorian culture stuff for the purposes of flirting (but hopefully it’s plausible?), it’s implied that they’ve been pining for like 3-4 whole seasons so it’s time for them to make out, mutual pining, they both think their feelings are unrequited, but they’re idiots.

~*~

To say we’d had a bumpy landing was an understatement. There was some sort of interference in the atmosphere of the planet we were attempting to scout out, and the shuttle I was in with Commander Shran came crashing to a halt after the engines died. We’d both been startled and a little rattled by our rather unexpected descent, but apart from a few bruises we were ultimately uninjured.

We gave the shuttle a quick once over from inside and found that external sensors and our communications array were the only things that appeared to be working. Enterprise wouldn’t be at our rendezvous point for at least another twenty four hours, so all we had to do was survive until then. Easy.

Or so I thought. Checking the external sensors, we found that the temperature outside the shuttle cabin was well below freezing. A fact that would be no problem for the Commander, but for my human physiology, I knew I’d have to be a little more careful when the cold started leeching inside.

“Well, look at it this way, Lieutenant, you might get a preview of what Andoria is like,” Shran quipped as we checked our emergency supplies. Something shiny landed beside me, and when I looked, I saw the silvery sheen of a thermal blanket. “You’ll need this much more quickly than I will.”

I could hear amusement dripping from his every syllable. Playfully nudging him with my elbow, I shook my head and started setting up the distress beacon with a warning about the atmospheric interference so that Enterprise could find us when it eventually came back.

The Commander and I passed several hours busying ourselves with various small tasks around the shuttle before eventually settling in to wait. I took a seat at the back of the shuttle with a data PADD, tapping away at a preliminary analysis of whatever the hell kind of interference was in the planet’s atmosphere. 

“I admire your dedication, but I think there’ll be plenty of time to finish that back on Enterprise,” Shran said as he took a seat beside me and offered me a glass of something blue. Andorian ale, perhaps? But where the hell had he gotten that? I raised an eyebrow in silent curiosity, but he proffered no explanation. Fair enough. Setting my PADD aside, I accepted the glass from him with a quiet nod of gratitude. He tapped his glass gently against mine - a gesture he’d picked up from the Captain - and we both lifted our drinks to our lips. “You’ve been quiet tonight. I was going to surprise you with this next month, but I thought maybe you could use a drink after today.”

“Why, thank you, Commander. You’re always so attentive to your officers’ needs,” I noted as I swirled the remaining liquid in my glass. Being in close proximity to him always made me fidgety. I could only hope that he wouldn’t notice. When his arm nudged mine, I looked over at him to find him already watching me with a smile across his mouth.

“I think it’s safe for us to drop the formalities, don’t you?” The soft rasp in his tone felt smoother than the ale he’d poured for me and a great deal more satisfying. A murmur of my name from him sent my heart thudding in my chest, and I wondered a bit belatedly just how strong this Andorian style alcohol was. He’d said my name before, so why was the sound of it affecting me so much more now than it usually did? Maybe it was the relative calm inside the shuttle or maybe it was the lack of other crewmen in close proximity. “Is it still alright if I call you that?”

“Of course. Are you still alright with me calling you Thy’lek?” I asked catching myself staring at his lips for about the thousandth time since we met.

“You know you never have to ask,” he said refilling his glass and mine when they were both empty. Despite the pleasant warmth that spread through my limbs from the ale, a few hours later it became clear that the cold had begun to seep in just as we’d both anticipated. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d pressed my side against Shran’s until he wrapped his arm around my shoulders and his voice sounded from much closer than I remembered. “Need that thermal blanket?”

“Not yet. Maybe in a couple of hours, but right now I’m alright.” I was almost proud of how steady I sounded despite the Commander’s nearness. Coaxing my empty glass carefully from my fingers, he set both vessels down and drew me to lean more fully against him.

“Then I’d suggest you try to get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.” Rest did seem like a tempting option. I started to protest that I was fine, but barely a few words in a yawn tore from my throat betraying just how exhausted I was. Ceding to the wisdom of his suggestion, I staunchly ignored the blush heating my cheeks and rested my head on Shran’s shoulder. Sleep found me much easier than I’d ever admit. Within moments I was out like a light.

--

The cold seemed to be all around me, with the exception of one warm spot. Nuzzling sleepily into it, I practically purred at the feeling of heat brushing up against my face. A deep, rumbling sound shook the...whatever I was resting on, and blearily I forced my eyes open. When I did, though, all I was met with was a wall of two blue shades. One I recognized instantly as the blue of a Starfleet uniform. The other was a little harder to place until I leaned back slightly and saw that my makeshift pillow was Commander Shran.

Oh shit. Had I just been pressing my face against his neck like a cat? Startled fully into consciousness, I sat up rather abruptly, carefully avoiding meeting Thy’lek’s eyes. I knew there would probably be disgust there, and honestly, I didn’t think I was strong enough to take that. Forcing myself to my feet, I went over to one of the few working consoles and checked the sensors. Everything seemed fine, and I’d slept for something like six hours. 

A murmur of my name from beside me startled me out of my thoughts. I hadn’t even heard Shran get up, but there he was looking at me all concerned. There was no hiding the way I jumped at the sound of his voice so close to me.

“Are you alright?” One of his hands rested lightly on my shoulder, and couldn’t help but look down at the point of contact. No doubt I had an expression of dumbfounded amazement on my face. Lifting his hand and brushing the backs of his knuckles lightly down my cheek, followed by the gentle caress of his gaze. Without a thought, I leaned into his touch. His other hand slid down to my waist, steadying me as he stepped closer. “You’re trembling.”

“Am I?” My voice came out as barely a breath. He nodded his head and started rubbing his hands up and down my arms.

Oh. He just thought I was cold. I mean, I was, but...I guessed he didn’t notice that it was his proximity that was causing me to shake. Why did that simultaneously relieve and disappoint me?

“If you’re ever going to visit Andoria, pretty girl, you’ll have to get used to being cold,” Shran said as a small smile wove across his lips. I tried my hardest to ignore the fact that we were practically sharing our breaths.

“I don’t mind being cold, but I wasn’t exactly dressed for sub-freezing temperatures.” I spoke through a huff of laughter as I started rubbing my fingers together to create some warming friction. At a hefty shiver from me - one actually due to the cold, this time - the Commander grasped my forearms and led me over to the little area we’d been using. He took a seat and eased me onto his lap. Grasping my hands, Thy’lek tucked them beneath the collar of his uniform. The warmth of his pulse beneath my fingers began seeping into my skin and I felt myself blushing at the intimacy of our position. Shran wrapped a thermal blanket around the two of us and settled his arms around my back to keep me steady.

“We can’t have you freezing, now can we?” Mischief and something else trickled into his tone. “You seem surprised.”

“Is this how you warm each other up on Andoria?” I asked hoping he couldn’t tell how flustered I was. His eyes skimmed lightly over my face, pausing over my lips. Surely I was imagining it. He’d done the same things dozens of times before, but he’d never been any more forward than that.

“Sometimes. Usually, though, this particular method is reserved for those we trust with our lives. Most commonly our families or those we see as prospective mates,” he explained, and my eyes went wide as I looked up at him. A thousand responses bubbled up in my throat, but what came out was measurably less steady than I’d intended.

“And in your considered opinion...do I fit into one of those categories?” I asked barely able to meet his gaze. A slow, intimate smile spread across his lips and beneath the thermal blanket we were wrapped up in, his hands drew me closer to his chest.

“You do. You always have, even if I haven’t exactly made my feelings obvious,” he murmured. I took a shaky breath and touched my forehead to his, allowing my eyelids to flutter closed. “Our loved ones are precious to us. To warm each other like this...to use the heat from our very blood...our life essence...that is the most intimate form of protection. You certainly don’t need it, but I very much want to be your defender, if you’ll allow me.”

His hands rubbed quietly up and down my back. My thumbs skimmed lightly over his thrumming pulse, and satisfaction rolled through me when I felt it speed up beneath my fingertips.

“I’d like that,” I admitted, almost too terrified to hope that we were on the same page. Tilting my head slightly, I let my lips brush over his. Shran’s hold on me tightened and he remained absolutely still as if he was afraid I would leave if he moved. With minimal hesitation, I closed what little distance was still between us and kissed him like I’d always wanted to.

When a signal from Enterprise crackled through the comm system, we were so wrapped up in each other that we almost didn’t hear it.

[womanenthusiast]

Accomplice (Keith/Tenebris & Custom MC)

No romance, just a no good very bad day for everyone involved. Bambi and Keith discover they’ve been cheated on at the same time and things go from bad to worse. Inspired by this ask.

TW: blood & gore, swearing

AN: I haven’t written anything since 2017/2018, but the call of the @dualityvn fanfic contest was too strong. Please forgive any issues, I have no idea what I’m doing.

The knock at the door was unexpected, the rattle of a key in the lock even moreso. When Keith stepped out of the bedroom to see what was going on, his partner, Sam, met his eyes with a guilty look. She seemed to know what was about to happen, her shoulders straightening resolutely as the door opened.

Another woman stumbled in, arms were weighed down by groceries making her unsteady. Sam stepped forward to take a bag and balanced the woman with a hand on her elbow. The motion was domestic, familiar. Keith’s stomach sank.

“I’m so sorry to drop in unannounced, I noticed you were low on some things the other day and wanted to make sure you had enough for the week, I know how crazy work’s been.” The stranger was pulling out items and restocking Sam’s cabinets with practiced movements. When she finally spotted him, she jolted with surprise. Keith tensed too, readying himself for a confrontation. It didn’t happen. Instead, her face brightened into a welcoming smile. “Shit sorry, I didn’t even see you there! You must be a friend of Sam’s.” 

The woman’s attitude caught him off guard. She didn’t seem to be aware that anything was wrong. His brain rushed to smooth the edges of his assumptions; maybe he wasn’t being cheated on, maybe he’d been too hasty to assume. A sister or cousin? A friend? An assistant? Tenebris stirred in the back of his mind, drawn out by the frantic chaos of his thoughts. The woman’s next words startled them both into silence.

“My name’s Bambi, I’m Sam’s fiance.” Bambi wiped her hands on her jeans and offered one to him to shake. “I just stopped by to drop off some groceries, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll be out of your hair in a sec.” 

Keith took her hand without thinking, but couldn’t bring himself to shake it. Bambi’s smile wilted at the look in his eye. They both heard Sam cough behind her. 

“Keith, listen-” His hand tightened around the stranger’s at the sound of Sam’s voice, colored with guilt. The remnants of Bambi’s smile crumbled away as the pieces began to fall into place and she squeezed his hand back involuntarily. They stared at each other, frozen.

Keith looked pale. Bambi would later come to see the omen in the blue splotches crawling up his neck and the uncanny curl to the corner of his mouth, but at the time her frantic brain twisted the strangeness into something she could understand. A lifetime of self-imposed service pushed her legs toward the window, the clamminess building in her hands making it easy to slide out of his grasp. 

“What are you doing?” Sam asked, incredulous.

She blustered about the lock with hands numb and shaking as though she’d just plunged them in ice water. An old routine turned awkward and clumsy with the shock to her system. “He needs air.” 

Did he? Keith wasn’t sure. His head was a mess of his own swirling thoughts and the frustrated prodding of Tenebris. The other inhabitant knew something was happening and wanted to step in, but Keith wouldn’t yet relinquish control, regardless of the temptation to just let go. There was an innocent here and he could tell by her demeanor that Bambi hadn’t known, either. He didn’t know how far Tenebris’ rage would extend if he didn’t take the time to sort his thoughts and inform him of the situation properly.

Sam seemed to take pity on Bambi and nudged her away so she could undo the lock and slide the window open herself. Bambi looked confusedly at her own trembling hands. Sam wasn’t shaking at all, which seemed wrong. She felt like it should’ve been the opposite. 

Bambi had learned young that relationships were fleeting, frequently slipping through her fingers. She refused to be lonely but kept a loose grip, letting one relationship go and then reaching back into the bucket for more. Made herself useful so they’d have a reason to keep her around a little longer, but not begrudging them when they left. The way her mother had held a white knuckled grip to her cheating father had seemed embarrassing to her in her adolescence. The longer it had gone on, the more Bambi had wanted to take a hammer to those fingers so her mother would finally let go and fall away somewhere better. The desperation of wanting to hold on to someone like that became associated with the sympathetic humiliation Bambi had felt for her. She’d vowed to never do that to herself long ago, so why was this affecting her so? 

She squeezed crescents into her palms, shame coloring her cheeks as everything came together for her. She’d gotten too comfortable, held on too tight. Just like her mother. A toothbrush wrapped in a paper towel, found shoved into the back of the medicine cabinet. A sweater, out of place in Sam’s pile of laundry. The orchid that had been thriving on the windowsill despite Sam’s self proclaimed touch of death. How long had she willingly ignored the signs? She’d let Sam become important, let the ring on her finger dig a mark into her skin. Hers. Mine. 

She willed herself to feel anything else about her own lot, but embarrassment reigned over all. In the face of that, she decided instead to feel for Keith. There was more there to work with, bubbling up in her chest like a witch’s brew. Indignation. Anger. Offense. Sadness. Pain. She tended to those emotions, urging them to loosen her own grip on the relationship, pop her fingers off the ledge one at a time as though breaking a seal. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. A deep breath, a release of tension.

“What the hell, Sam? How long has this been going on?” 

“Not long, I swear! It was just some fun, I wanted to try something new before we tied everything down.” She mistook Bambi’s anger as hurt for her own self, a loose thread in the sweater that Sam could pull to unravel her into forgiveness. She knew Bambi didn’t like to fight, that she’d roll over and show her belly if it would make the conflict stop, regardless of her own feelings. This wasn’t about Bambi’s feelings, though. Her need to defend overshadowed her aversion to conflict.

“Something? He’s a person and he’s right here!” She didn’t bother asking if he knew, the truth was written in his wide eyes, turned towards the floor, and the distressed pinch to his brows. His mouth was clenched shut and a muscle twitched in his jaw. Keith looked like he was having a conversation in his head and feared he’d speak it aloud if he eased up even a fraction. 

“Keith, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know, I-” She didn’t know why she was apologizing, maybe because she didn’t know if Sam would. Someone had to be sorry. “I don’t know what to say.” 

He didn’t either, a small part of him just wanted to take her hand again. There was comfort in being tethered to someone as lost in the situation as himself. 

Seeing that placation wouldn’t work, Sam bristled and turned defensive. “I’m sorry it turned out like this, but Bambi you’re so fucking hard to love! You keep everyone away, even me!”

“What?”

“I thought we could make things work, that you’d open up if things between us were more stable but you’re so damn cold! I was lonely, that’s it.” Sam scoffed, “you’re not even crying! You cried watching a fucking documentary last week but not over this?” 

There was a stabbing feeling in Bambi’s chest, a rage clawing to the surface at Sam’s assessment of her. She wasn’t wrong, but she didn’t want to hear it. She wanted to strike back, find a soft spot in the other woman’s armor and dig her nails into it, but she didn’t know what to say. 

She didn’t have to say anything. A blur of movement tore past her line of sight and collided into Sam. The snap of a rubber band pulled too tight. For a moment Bambi didn’t move, only to stumble back a heartbeat later as though hit with the shockwave of Sam and Keith’s impact. 

He drew back a blue fist -was it always that color?- and something wet landed on her cheek. As though in a trance, she brought a finger to it. Red. Oh shit. 

“APOLOGIZE!” He shouted, his voice was raspier than she’d expected. There were other words too, but they all sounded garbled and incoherent to her. Through the fog of the shock, she thought the sound of it didn’t quite suit Keith’s delicate features.

Sam didn’t apologize, Bambi doubted she could anymore. She couldn’t see much past the haze of his movement, but each thud of contact was beginning to sound like an open palm slapping the surface of a pool. 

Bambi was on the ground. She didn’t remember dropping, but her tailbone ached so it couldn’t have been graceful. When she tried to scoot away, her sock slid tractionless through the pool of blood lazily inching towards her. When had she taken her shoe off? 

It wasn’t long before he stopped moving, shoulders hunched, and she noticed the faint shape of a women's size nine and a half printed on his sleeve in dirt. Her other, still shoe-covered, foot managed to gain a bit of traction and she shot back into the cabinets behind her hard enough to knock the wind out of herself. 

He turned to face her and she saw that he was different. Blue skin, eyes wide and bloodshot with pinprick violet irises. Odd lines stretched from the corners of his mouth which pulled back in a grimace full of knifelike teeth. She wasn’t as hung up as she thought she should be on this change in appearance. Perhaps she was fresh out of shocks to her system. What else could today throw at her? Why not this, too? 

“Are you okay?”

What an odd question to ask her when her former fiance was a pile of meat beside him. She shook her head violently, not wanting to test his patience by not answering quickly enough.

“Keith doesn’t want me to kill you.” He let out a puff of air through his nose, “Sam hurt you too?”

She nodded. Should she call the cops? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Her phone was in the car. Not-Keith was between her and the door. Fuck. 

“Do you talk?”

He wasn’t hostile yet, maybe she could get out of this if she played her cards right. Talk her way out of this horror show. Bambi nodded, eyes flicking momentarily to her feet. The blood puddle was encroaching on her space again. She’d always suspected the floor in this code violation of an apartment building wasn’t level, what a way to have that confirmed. She turned her gaze back to him. “Who are you?”

He tilted his head like he was surprised she wasn’t running screaming out the door. To be honest, so was she. She might’ve had a chance to escape back when he was busy with Sam and she was genuinely baffled that the shoe had been her first instinct instead. “Tenebris. I’m a part of him.” 

Sure. Normal. Tenebris sat down across from her. Very normal. Just two people and a puddle of blood. Having a conversation. 

Bambi opened her mouth but a knock sounded at the door before she could say anything. Both of them straightened, making startled eye contact.

“Is everything okay? I thought I heard yelling.” Bambi recognized the voice of Sam’s neighbor, two doors down. She’d met him once. What was his name? Luke? Lake? Lance?

Tenebris was looking at her, his eyes narrowed slightly: this was a test. Her mouth was still open so she snapped it shut with an audible clack. The motion caused a tear to streak down her cheek. 

“Sam? You in there?” 

She tried to read what Tenebris wanted her to do in his face. He gave her a small nod; great, he wanted her to cover. She took a deep breath and held it for a moment, steadying herself. “We’re good, man. Thanks for checking up. I sat on the remote and it blasted the volume.” She clenched her hands into fists on the floor, distantly aware that they were now wet.

Panic was beginning to set in. The fear of being caught, the fear of Tenebris sitting across from her, the distress of sitting in the blood of the woman whose name was next to hers on a pile of wedding invitations in her living room. She was shaking badly, every muscle in her body taut as though bracing for some sort of impact. 

Tenebris didn’t look impressed with her improv, but he wasn’t turning her into a human smoothie so she suspected she’d done well enough. 

Luke or Lake or Lance scoffed on the other side of the door, “well don’t fucking do that again, I have a night shift tonight.” Neither of them moved until they heard his footfalls disappear down the hall and his apartment door open and shut. 

When the coast was clear, Tenebris rose and offered a hand to Bambi. She took it without thinking, but cringed when her brain finally caught up. He pulled her up easily and she tried not to slip back onto her ass in her haste to pull away again. 

“What’s your name?”

“Bambi.” 

“Like the deer?” 

She tried not to let the instinctive disdain for the question show on her face. “Just like the deer.” 

He nodded, making an expression like he was proud to have correctly made the connection. “Do you know where she keeps the cleaning supplies?” A nod. “Show me.” 

Bambi led the way, wet sock slapping against the vinyl flooring, to the half bath that contained the cleaning closet. Everything was where she’d left it last time she’d cleaned. Sam had always hated cleaning but Bambi found it relaxing and would stop by to vacuum, mop, and do her laundry for her quite frequently. Most of the things inside had been purchased by Bambi herself. Tenebris filled his arms with supplies and indicated for Bambi to do the same. 

“We’ve gotta make sure this place is spotless before dark so we don’t have to come back after we get rid of the body.” 

He strode out of the bathroom after dropping that bombshell and she watched his back disappear around the corner towards the kitchen. Bambi nearly dropped the bleach on her foot. Fucking we?

From the other room, Tenebris barked a laugh, “Is this your shoe? Did you throw that at me?” His tone seemed a touch too casual for the situation, if you asked her.

Bambi laughed back, though there was no humor in it. Her brain had finally caught up to what was going on and she felt the weight of everything that had and would happen fall onto her shoulders. Their lives were about to become very tightly intertwined.

Son of a bitch, he was making her an accomplice. 

[masterwords]

Hotchgan 9 please: …in public.

In public it is!

Here is a little 1.9k word trip through 8x23 - Brothers Hotchner/The Replicator ending in a public kiss. <3 Thank you for sending this in! (If anyone wants to send in a kiss prompt, they are here!)

Warnings: canon-typical/casefic stuff mentioned (strauss' death, bombing, drugs/alcohol, guns...if you've seen these episodes then you know.)

**** and your sparks ****

They’ve been back and forth on the logistics of it for months. The team knows, more or less. It isn’t a secret, they aren’t sneaking around anymore...but they’ve never seen it. The live show.

Them.

What they have seen is boring old business as usual. It’s hard for them, then, to know when it all started. If they find out something that shakes the very ground they all stand on and it doesn’t look any different than it did before they knew...how long have they been in the dark?

That thought was unsettling, probably, for most people but to a team of people whose only job was to study behavior it was downright insulting on top of it. Were any of them even any good at their jobs?

Once the initial shock wore off, once the “you’re pulling our legs” of it all ran its course, they realized that what they’d really witnessed was not the big bang but one long evolutionary crawl from a single celled organism in the sea to a walking, talking, sentient being.

They sort of stopped looking so closely after that.

From the moment they found out, they haven’t had any time to do anything but work. And at work, they were the same old them they always were. There were no stolen kisses, no secret hand on the thigh moments, no emotional outbursts or airing of dirty laundry. You’d never know they lived together, they didn’t even show up in the same car every day.

The first inkling of something that ran a little deeper than co-workers came in New York, during a case involving Aaron’s brother Sean. He’d been a wreck though you’d have to know him pretty well to see it. To a casual observer he looked cool as a cucumber, pensive but it seemed to come with the territory. The nature of this kind of case. The entire idea that his worlds were colliding again, that his family was involved in his work, had him rattled to the core though and he was doing everything in his power not to recuse himself from the case. It would be a first for anyone on their team. Maybe he was older, wiser...however, he didn’t bother to give in when those logical notions kicked in. His proximity to the case would help him solve it, not get in the way.

“Would you please sit in the van with me?” Aaron asked quietly, standing perhaps a little too close to Derek to just be colleagues. “I know I should probably ask someone else, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have watching my brother than you.”

“Of course, man,” Derek said with that solemn nod, that I was going to insist I do it anyway look already on his face.

Aaron could tell what he was thinking. “You don’t think I should be in there.”

“I don’t, not even a little, but I’m not gonna stop you. That’s your brother, I get it. I’d be right there if it was one of my sisters...’course, my sisters aren’t dumbasses like Sean…” That last bit was said with a smirk, a quiet little ribbing to try and lighten the dour mood some. It almost worked.

It wasn’t as if Aaron was behaving in a way he wouldn’t normally, he would always have asked Derek. When it came to field work, to the real dangerous stuff, to using the big weapons and serious tactical force it had always been the two of them. So even in that sense, this made sense, but Rossi and JJ shared a glance when Derek texted and said they’d be in the van so they were going dark for a bit. That shared glance was amusement with an air of superiority.

“Think they’re gonna make out?” JJ asked in a hushed whisper to try and lighten the mood. Rossi couldn’t help laughing.

Derek did give Aaron a kiss on the temple once they were on their own, before he said to let him make the call when things went sour. Not if, when. Aaron couldn’t argue. He knew Derek would make the call and he’d do it fast. Sean might be a dumbass, but he was also one of Derek’s favorite people. They both probably should have let someone else be in charge here.

The second time in as many days that offered the team a little glimpse into their secret lives came back at the BAU, when Rossi pulled his gun on Derek. Aaron had been on the phone with the Director, a very intense, very serious phone call that Aaron briefly thought would end with him being canned. He’d already started thinking about how many boxes it would take to clear out his office. He’d let his Section Chief die on his watch, on his case, what could be worse? He could still smell her on his skin, her shampoo or perfume lightly floral and musky at the same time. And through the phone call, putting up his shields to block out the carefully venomous words of his superior, he heard a sound that froze the blood in his veins.

Derek, just a few steps away in Rossi’s office, sounded scared. His voice had ticked up an octave, his words had quickened, he was genuinely afraid and that struck fear like a dagger in Aaron’s chest. “Excuse me, sir,” he said and without actually saying goodbye, he hung up his phone and shoved it into his pocket. Possibly career suicide but it didn’t make any difference.

If Dave hadn’t been drugged he would have seen it, seen the way Aaron put his body in front of Derek, ready to take the bullet if it came down to it. He would have known it when Aaron reached out and disarmed him, still standing there in a way that shielded Derek from harm.

No one else was in the room, but the team afterward could feel the tension. Could tell how shaken they both were. The furtive glances.

And then Aaron’s helicopter crash landed and Derek thought he might actually lose his entire fucking mind at their string of shitty luck. He had to admit, Aaron did look a little adorable with his hair all mussed up, the dazed look in his eye that said he was okay and didn’t entirely remember what had happened. It didn’t take him long to figure it out, to charge ahead again like it never happened. The rest of the week was filled with aching joints and headaches, sleepless nights as he began pulling double duty (triple, perhaps) at work.

Derek didn’t see him much after the explosion. He and Jessica were juggling Jack’s school pick-ups and obligations, his sports, his homework. Aaron was...working himself to death. He didn’t leave his desk for seven hours straight one day, he’d begun timing it just to see. Tying up Strauss’ loose ends, picking up the projects she’d been in the middle of, introducing himself to her other teams, making his presence known. It was a temporary assignment...probably. They hadn’t offered him anything yet but the expectations were piled on him anyway.

So it really wasn’t any surprise that they ended up where they did at Rossi’s party after Strauss’ funeral. Showing up separately, Aaron coming directly from work while Derek had come from home. Promising Jessica that he was going to make Aaron leave his car at Rossi’s and bring him home for the first night that week to sleep in his own bed. To take a shower in his home and not in the gym at work. To eat real food. To relax, even for just a few hours.

They seated themselves on opposite sides of the table, as if that could somehow erase the electricity crackling like a storm between them. They had tried to play it cool, knowing for sure in the days that followed that stretch of bad luck (which neither of them believed in) had helped cool their jets a little. But not enough.

Maybe it was talking about Strauss, maybe not. Maybe it was apropos of nothing. It kind of always had been. They didn’t need a situation to charge them up, they lived that way, right on the brink.

“Who wants more wine?” Derek asked, raising his empty glass abruptly, waiting for the briefest lull in conversation. He was met with a sea of empty glasses raised into the air, the one exception being Aaron’s which was still more than half full. He was thinking about his brother, about the ecstasy tainted wine, about the glass of scotch that broke on the floor when Foyet drove him to the ground. He didn’t drink much anymore, and when he did it was rarely a comfortable experience. The astringent smell of alcohol set him on edge unless the circumstances were exactly right.

“I’ll help you,” Aaron offered quietly, standing to follow Derek back into the house. “You’ll need more hands.”

JJ winked at Rossi, another silent moment of inappropriate humor batted between them. More hands...where? She mouthed and Rossi chuckled and shrugged.

Halfway across the dark yard, just as they skirted the edge of the pool, Aaron reached out and hooked Derek’s hand. The sudden shock of cold fingers in his stopped Derek in his tracks and he whirled around, almost like he was shocked to find Aaron so close.

“Slow down,” Aaron said, tugging him. Closing the gap. He hadn’t been this close to Derek in almost a week and the smell of him was intoxicating. He craved more. His body responded instantly to the proximity, the scent, the hungry look in Derek’s eye. If Derek asked him to leave right now he would without a backward glance. He held a woman in his arms as she died, he stood in front of a loaded gun, he was knocked out in a helicopter crash. He sent his brother to jail. It was all weighing on him and he found he had little control of his body. Exhausted and turned on, he just stared across at the other man waiting for the words to make themselves known. He hadn’t planned this far ahead.

“What’s up?” Derek asked, a trickle of dread in his low voice. Aaron smiled and shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said quietly, leaning forward, deciding words weren’t what he was looking for. He wanted something physical. Kissing Derek was where it started, all he wanted. He draped his arms over Derek’s shoulders, hugging around his neck, shielding their faces from the team of onlookers. He had almost an inch on Derek and it came in handy in situations like this.

JJ noticed it first and cleared her throat, getting Penelope’s attention. She elbowed Reid who nudged Blake who nodded her head at Rossi. A silent game of telephone, but they all arrived at their destination in tact. Derek and Aaron were kissing right there, like they had the place to themselves.

And they all found that it didn’t seem nearly as shocking as any of them had imagined. They could see it now and it seemed suddenly to make perfect sense.

“Hey! There’s a guest room upstairs for that kind of tomfoolery!”

“We were promised more wine!”

“Yeah! WHERE’S THE WINE!”

Derek lifted one hand from where they’d been curved around Aaron’s hips and flipped off the table as a whole. Aaron smiled into the kiss and tried to hide the burn of the flush rising in his neck by shifting his arms, raising his shoulder a little. Derek thought for sure that Aaron would break away, would move a little too fast toward the kitchen to get another bottle or two of wine, but he didn’t. He just stayed planted where he was, and eventually the team lost interest and went back to their conversations.

[gummybear1178]

F-14 (Family of 14) Chapter 7: Not Sliding Away

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

Chapter 6:

Also on AO3:  

This one can be read as a stand alone

Hope you guys enjoy! If you want on the taglist let me know! (See guys I am learning Tumblr)

Not fully sure where this story is going other than it will be IceMav and their 12 adopted dagger squadron kids!

The dagger squad is determined to find out who Maverick is married to, leading to some shenanigans and eventually the reveal! Followed by one shots featuring MavDad Icemav and Dadmiral with the Daggers!

Feel free to leave requests and ideas

Maverick plotted a family grill, and he did so with great pleasure and a many a devious smirks. Though most of the smirks were for the days following the grill, but the grill was to be eventful as well.

That should have been the first sign of danger, but what really should have set off the daggers, was that Ice was plotting with a smirk too. When both of them were plotting and deviously smirking, then well, let's just say the world should fear for its safety.

The Daggers unknowingly walked right into the trap.

Phoenix and Bob were the first to arrive, always the timely ones. Rapidly followed by Fanboy and Payback, who forced to be early by Fanboy who insisted if they weren't early they were late and they needed to be ahead for good parking and if there was any traffic.

Not long after the rest of the squad appeared, Bradley and Jake being the last to arrive having been hanging out and then losing track of time.

No one asked questions on that one, but Maverick and Ice gave each other a look.

"Looks like everyone's here." Jake announced waltzing into the backyard.

"Not quiet, there is still a one more on their way." Maverick replied turning away to hide his smirk as he tended to the burgers.

"One more has arrived." Slider announced from the backyard door.

The Dagger's eyes went wide, all suddenly going to attention and just barely managing to restrain themselves from saluting realizing it was Admiral Kerner

"Daggers, same rule applies to for Slider as it does for me, no titles and no saluting in my house. This applies to all ranking officers in my house unless I say otherwise, and I do not intend to say otherwise." Ice announces walking up to Slider with a smirk.

Bradley slowly made his way to the back of the crowd of Daggers, hoping to evade being focused on as long as he could.

"Daggers, this is Slider, Ice's Rio." Maverick introduced.

"Daggers, I have heard a lot about you." Slider greeted, his eyes scanning the group recognizing each from pictures he had been sent. His eyes paused on the most familiar of faces, one hiding in the back: Bradley Bradshaw.

"They've heard about you too Sli, don't worry." Maverick assured, rolling his eyes.

"Oh, I have no doubt, however, I bet they haven't heard many stories about you two. I still like your aprons by the way." Slider smirked, and the Dagger's eyes lit up.

"Told you this would happen Ice." Maverick said as Slider became surrounded by 11 highly attentive Daggers. Fanboy already rattling off questions at a speed that would rival Maverick's flying.

Bradley held back in the crowd, uncertain of how to proceed. Causing Jake to give him a strange look and stay towards the back as well. Occasionally giving Bradley a questioning look between stories.

---

Eventually the Daggers calmed down and began to mingle around the backyard once more. Though Slider pulled off from the rest and gave a look to the one Dagger who had mostly avoided him thus far.

The Dagger continued to shy away even from the look, pretending to have missed it, thought Slider knew Bradley well enough to know, he didn't miss the look.

Slider decided he was taking this into his own hands, and swiftly walked across the backyard until he was right next to Bradley and grabbed his arm, not tight enough to hurt him, but enough to make it known he wasn't getting out of this.

"Come on kid, we have some stuff to talk about." Slider spoke with a decepitvely calm smile, though Bradley knew otherwise. Jake looked over with a questioning look, not trusting the calm, especially after noticing Bradley shy away from Ice's Rio. One of the rare times he wasn't the life of the party.

Ice gave Slider a look of warning from across the yard.

Slider just tilted his head and raised his eyebrows, effectively telling Ice, you knew this was coming and you shouldn't expect any less.

Ice nodded back in a sign of trust.

Slider guided Bradley upstairs to the guest bedroom, away from prying eyes and interupttions.

"Bradley." Slider greeted, waiting to see how Bradley would address him.

"Uncle Slider." Bradley said softly looking down.

Slider wasn't sure what name he would be called, but that was the one he was hoping for, or atleast it was as close as he was expecting to his usual 'Uncle Sli', but he doubted he would get that one yet. It had been too long and there was unresolved tension.

"Glad you atleast still consider me your Uncle."

Bradley just nodded. He knew what was comign to a certain degree, adn was already feeling the guilt.

"I'm sure you already know why I pulled you aside."

Bradley once again nodded, paying close attention to the details on the bedding rather than his uncle.

"I know Maverick probably let you back in with open arms, and Ice probably gave you a quick lecture then let you right on in after everything that happened."

Bradley silently nodded once more.

"I also know, that they did that because they love you so much and have waited years to have you back in their lives. I know they don't want to risk losing you again and quickly forgave some things that might should've still been spoke about. I do not fault them for it, they did what they felt the should. However, that means I am going to do what I feel I should."

Bradley didn't even bother to nod, he just let his head hang.

"Baby Goose, look at me." Slider said softly, the whole time he had been there Bradley had never once looked up at him.

Slowly, Bradley looked up at his uncle, and Slider saw the guilt in his eyes.

"I am telling you all of this as your Uncle who loves you, do not doubt that as I speak." Slider started, placing a hand on Bradley's shoulder and looking him straight in the eye.

"You screwed up kid, so did Mav and Ice, but so did you. Mav and Ice, they did what they did to protect you. As twisted as it was, it was out of love. Should they have not done it? Maybe, we will never know what would have happened, but you messed up that night too. Maverick, he helped raise you from the day you were born from what I've heard. After Goose, he grasped on even tighter. Ice helped raise you, especially after your mom. Maverick did a lot for you, and he did it out of love. So did Ice. That does not make everything they do right, they mess up just like everyone else. However, you reaction to them messing up, that is a problem. You threw everything you had at Ice and Mav, but especially Mav. You know them best and you used that to your advantage and you hurt them. They hurt you, but they did it out of love. You hurt them and did it out of anger. Maverick was a mess after you left, and Ice wasn't much better. You are their kid. You hurled every insult in the book at them and even wrote a few more. I don't care what is going on, you should never, and I mean never, throw your fathers death in your Dad or Pop's faces. You've seen the effects of that self imposed guilt. You've seen the reports. You know it wasn't their fault. I saw it first hand. Mistakes were made but no one was at fault. Maverick tried everything to save you dad. Ice watched over from above with me as we waited for help for them. So I don't ever want to hear that you threw that in either of their faces again."

Bradley had tears running down his face, he knew how much he had screwed up that night. He hadn't fully understood why Maverick and Ice had let him back in so easily, but that was because he didn't want to think about it, because he already knew: no matter how badly he screwed up they were still his family and they loved him unconditionally.

He also knew that he had already thrown it in Maverick's face again.

"I know Ice alreayd lecture you on when you did it a few weeks ago. So I will stop there for that. However, there is stuff they won't tell you that I will. When you left, they were devastated. They did everything to keep up with you without getting too close. They did their best to give you space once they realized you weren't going to answer a phone call or a text. They watched from afar. They were there fro every milestone they could be, usually hiding out in the back. They cared even when you said you hated them. They showed up. Maverick's flying became something else entirely. No one could tell if he was flying dangerously, or if he just used it to control the chaos. You know Mav, he can do anything in a plane, but those months after you left, I saw him do things he never dared try before, but he did it all while in control. Because that was the only chaos he could control. Ice, well many of his subordinates quickly came to further conclusions on why he was called Iceman. He shut down, he was cold as ice. He didn't waiver, he didn't show any emotion. He just was cold. Only when he was home did he let anythign out adn even that was rare. He just shut down. So did Maverick. Ice, people were used to seeing him steel up, but Maverick, that's a scary sight. Maverick just wasn't Maverick. If he wasn't in the sky, he was hollow. He just went through the motions."

Slider paused for a moment letting Bradley take in what he was saying.

"I tell you all of this, because I need to know, that the next time you get mad you won't just run out again. Because they cannot take it again, and I will not accept it again. They told us we couldn't go after you and drag you back, that you had to come back on your own. Though even Ice grew tired of that. He pulled you and Maverick together for the mission, though yall were the only options. He chose becuase of skill not becuase of family. Know that, you earned your place in the mission. I need to know though, that you won't ever do that again."

"I don't plan on ever leaving again." Bradley said, despite the tears in his eyes and those streaming down his face filled with guilt, his voice was strong. If only for that line.

"Now come here Baby Goose, I've missed you." Slider opened his arms for a hug which Bradley quickly accepted. Slider held him tight.

"I've missed you too Uncle Sli."

After a few moments, Bradley's tears had dried up and they split away from one another.

"I'll give you the warned, I'm not the only uncle back in town."

"So training tomorrow is going to be really interesting?

"Yep."

.

.

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Hey yall! Sorry it's been so long, classes were crazy and life in general was crazy, I will try and update more as time becomes available, but for now I hope you enjoyed this chapter (Sorry it's a little short). Next up will be the arrival of the rest of the fly boy uncles, and don't worry Hangster is still being built up, I add tid bits each chapter! Also more IceMav scenes soon too, because those are just amazing.

Let me know what you think and what you want to see happen in future chapters!

[vinnie2757]

"are you equipped to deal with this?" "absolutely not"

Tumblr appears to have eaten this prompt from like??? a year ago??? i can’t find it anywhere on mine or anyone else’s blogs, so here, have it again lol

Of course it happens when they’ve got nobody around; it’s late, later than either of them should be up there, but this is just the way they are. They’ve got headtorches, and they’ve got their back-and-forth to make sure the other’s there, and that’s enough to be getting on with. There’s only a few things they want to get done in the interior before tomorrow, just so that they don’t have to do it tomorrow. It’s their way. Dinner had been wolfed down, and they’d bolted back to the rocket, so eager to get the job finished, and Cid had not missed the casual aside tossed to his back as they’d made for the door.

Honest-fucking-ly, if he wanted to cause all sorts of chaos by – what was it Livas had said, railing her? – he wouldn’t be so fucking obvious as to do it immediately after dinner!

He’d at least wait until everyone else had gone to bed before sneaking into the inn and coercing her back to the cabin so he could make her scream.

Not that he’s thought about that at all, nope. Not at all.

Naturally, then, Shera slips as she goes to descend the ladder and finish bolting the oxygen tank into place. They don’t need an oxygen tank on this run, but she wants to make sure the technology works before they present the idea to Palmer. They’re both disgustingly eager to make this work, and Cid’s distracted, thinking about how he might like to ask her to dinner if this all goes off without a hitch, because that’s absolutely what his attention should be on. Absolutely. Think about taking your chief engineer to pieces while she’s trying to stop you getting blown to pieces at some point in the future. Incredible.

Naturally, then, she slips. Because that’s her way; she doesn’t secure her footing as she lowers her weight, and for a second the only indicator Cid has that she’s slipped is the light from the torch flashing as she drops. She lets out a strangled yelp, and there’s an enormous, rattling series of bangs as she hits the rungs, a thump as she hits the floor, and then a choked sob.

He barks out a curse and lurches to the ladder, peers down it. There’s blood on the rungs, and she’s in a heap at the bottom, and he wrinkles his nose.

‘You alive?’ he calls, and she chokes out an affirmative.

For fuck’s sake, this is all he needs. She’s going to be black and blue, and he was just about to get that last washer in place. Fucking bullshit. Careful not to slip on the damp spots of her blood, he makes his way down the ladder, adjusting his head torch to see her better without blinding her.

Her face is covered in blood; she’s bitten her tongue, judging by the state of her mouth, and she hasn’t broken her nose, but she has given herself a nosebleed.

‘Nice,’ he says, because he’s a jackass.

‘Thanks,’ she slurs back, dribbles blood down her chin.

It’s only as he’s helping her to her feet that he realises her leg is pointing in the wrong-ish direction.

‘Not the worst break,’ he tells her, jovial, and she grips his arms tight as the shock comes in, knees giving. ‘No, no, no, don’t go all soft on me, come on.’

‘My leg,’ she chokes out, spits some more blood down herself.

He’s never bitten his tongue so hard it’s bled. He’s not sure it’s meant to bleed like this.

‘We need to get you back up there,’ he says, looks up at the top of the ladder.

It looks a very long way away, even though it’s only ten or so rungs. Bollocks.

Shera is white-knuckling his arms, her nails digging in, and he’ll have the little crescent moons gouged into his skin for days. Careful, he lowers her back down, so that she can dribble and sob in a more comfortable position.

‘How the fuck am I going to get up there?’ he asks himself, because there’s something like panic burning under his skin.

He never thought he’d panic at an injury. He never normally panics at an injury. He nearly took his hand off a few months ago, and he didn’t even flinch.

Okay, he ended up passing out, but that was blood loss.

Still.

‘Are you even remotely equipped to deal with this?’ she asks him, which is far drier than it needs to be given the blood in her mouth.

‘Absolutely not,’ he replies, because he might as well be honest. ‘You’ve seen how I deal with injuries.’

He uses duct tape on cuts and grinds his nose back into place when it breaks, he has absolutely not right to claim authority on this.

But the fact remains he’s going to have to get her out of here.

‘Right,’ he huffs after a moment spent focusing mostly on breathing. Her blood smells so incredibly strong, far stronger than he expected blood to smell, but he supposes it’s just an enclosed space, and there’s an awful lot of it, considering. ‘Right. Okay. You aren’t getting up the ladder with that leg, and I ain’t getting up that ladder without you, so you’re going to have to play the monkey, four-eyes.’

‘What?’ she asks, but he’s already got one of her wrists, drags her arm up and around his neck, uses his hand to force hers into gripping his t-shirt. ‘Captain, no.’

‘Shut up, four-eyes,’ he tells her, and does his best to hike her up into a piggyback, despite her slack grip and pissing about. ‘You’re going to hold on, or you’re going to fall off and break the other leg, so do as you’re told.’

The shift in his tone seems to startle her into gripping tight. She only whimpers a little when the change in her gravity moves her leg, but he’s got a sturdy grip on her thigh, and she soon learns to brace her good leg against his hip. Not exactly how he’d imagined – in those rare occasions he can’t avoid the thought! – having her legs around him, but he’s not going to argue if it gets her up and out of the rocket. Once they’re off the ladder, he can carry her in a less dangerous way for her leg, but for now, it’s all he’s got. She’s not nearly stupid enough to drag herself up the rocket with a broken leg. He would, but he’s been certifiable for most of his life.

Though it’s only ten or so rungs, it takes a lifetime to get to the top of the ladder. She’s dribbled so much blood in his hair and across his shoulder that he worries he’ll never be clean, and she’s apologising all the time, which is just making it worse, and he’d hoped he wouldn’t need a bath tonight. He had hoped. But alas.

If he puts his hand on her arse to help steady her as he levers them up and over the edge of the ladder, well, she’s not going to talk about it, and neither is he. He needed a more central place to balance her weight, and he can justify himself till he dies.

They sprawl out over the gridding, and he rests his head on it for a moment, two.

‘Why the fuck didn’t you secure your footing?’ he asks her, and she makes a choking noise as she rolls onto her back, blood and spit obviously sinking into her throat. ‘Pain in my arse, come on.’

Anger is safer, he knows this, because the panic will not help him. He’ll end up fretting more than helping and fretting where Shera’s concerned gets nobody anywhere fast. Fuck sake, why didn’t he watch her go down the ladder, why didn’t he make sure she was safe, why didn’t he make sure she was fine to be up here? He knows she’s an absolute moron at the best of times, but she’s even more stupid after she’s had a big dinner, she gets slow and – he’d never accuse her of laziness, but – sluggish, perhaps. She gets sluggish. Dinner is her body’s cue to start winding down for the evening, and he knows her body’s routine is stronger than anything he could ever be taught. He knows the time of day by how much she flags, and he shouldn’t have brought her up here, this is his fault. He’s done this to her. For fuck’s sake, he should have taken Livas’ advice and railed her instead, then at least she’d be walking bow-legged instead of not walking at all. Fucking idiot.

‘Captain?’ she dribbles, and he turns his head to look at her.

‘Yes?’

‘Can you – I think we need Reine to look.’

‘You’re probably right,’ he agrees, and pushes to his feet.

She’s much easier to carry in his arms, a slip of a thing, and her head on his shoulder is nice, despite the dampness of his shoulder, because she’s still crying, and dribbling blood, and he does his best to ease her down the stairs without disturbing her leg too much.

John is throwing a bin bag in the outside bin when Cid comes into sight, and for a moment he laughs, starts joking about them finally making some kind of – and then he stops, actually sees what he’s looking at.

‘What in the lifestream happened? You were up there for an hour.’

‘She fell down the fucking ladder,’ Cid explains, in as dry as tone as he can manage, because he’s worried. Shera’s mouth and nose are still bleeding, and he’s very damp, and her leg is bent at an angle that legs don’t bend at.

‘Right,’ John says, ‘you’d best take her to her room, I’ll get Reine.’

He lets them in and gestures vaguely at the stairs, which Cid climbs at an angle, avoiding the wall and the handrail while John disappears into the back, towards the kitchen. Stood on the landing, staring down the hall at the rooms, Cid hesitates, realises that despite the years Shera has been here, he has no idea which room she occupies. He’s always waited downstairs for her, because that’s the polite thing to do, and his mother may have raised a hooligan, but he has manners.

‘Third on the right,’ Shera tells him, unhooks a hand from its grip over his heart to point.

Because it’s summer, she’s in shorts, so he doesn’t – actually, he doesn’t know if that’s better. On the one hand, he won’t have to peel her out of her trousers, but on the other, he can see the black and blue mottling on her leg coming already, the awkward jab of bone, foot twisted at an angle that feet aren’t meant to twist.

‘The light’s by the door,’ she tells him, and he takes the hint, goes to smack the switch, flood the room with the dim yellow light of the poor wiring in the overhead.

She looks worse in the light, and for a moment, they just stare at each other before Shera heaves a sigh and sniffles, wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

‘There’s a bathroom two doors down,’ she says, ‘I need some – some water, and tissues.’

He blinks at her stupidly for a moment; now that she knows she’s safe, and someone actually equipped to deal with this is coming to look at her, she’s calmer, remarkably so. Feeling a little, he supposes embarrassed is the closest he can come to describing the bubbling in his lungs, he turns on his heel and goes to the bathroom to collect water and tissues. On his way back, he finds Reine, armed with her box of first-aid supplies and a frown.

‘You’re a fucking idiot,’ she tells him, ‘what were you thinking, letting her go down a ladder after dinner?’

‘She looked like she had it under control,’ he protests, and she just tuts at him, gestures him through first.

Shera is grateful for the water, and just as grateful for the bowl Reine supplies so she can spit bloody water into it. Her tongue has mostly stopped bleeding now, and as Reine examines her leg, she dips her fingers into the water, wipes her face with it and misses most of the blood. Shaking his head, and trying not to watch Reine from the corner of his eye, because he’s not paranoid about the care his chief engineer is receiving, and he doesn’t even give a shit, not at all, not one fucking bit, he takes the water and tissue from her, dunks the latter in the former, and cups her jaw with one hand to get the bits she’s missed.

A sudden yelp and a crack, and Shera is breathing hard against his wrist, breath hot and fast. She whimpers, makes a little sing-song sort of noise, and then she exhales hard, as if to steady herself.

‘Worst part over,’ Reine assures them, because Cid is eyeing her, and he’d been so focused on getting the blood from the corner of Shera’s mouth and from under her nose and down her neck that he hadn’t even noticed Reine gearing up to set the break.

‘Worst part over,’ he echoes, and Shera looks very grey.

He obligingly holds the bowl under her chin with one hand and scrapes her hair back with the other as she throws up.

Surprised as he is with how calmly she’s taking this nonsense, he doesn’t pay Reine the slightest attention to the rest of the treatment. Potion applied and bandage wrapped tight, she tuts and huffs and puffs about how sometimes, these idiot children and their abject refusal to use materia causes far more trouble than it’s worth. He focuses instead of getting the last of the blood from Shera’s face, and out from between her fingers and the swoop of her collar. She watches him, something warm in her eyes, and the dark circles stand stark against the greyness of her cheeks. He offers her a smile, but he’s not sure it sticks to his face, and she doesn’t much return it either.

‘I’m tired,’ she admits, quietly, because of course she is.

‘Right,’ he breathes, just as quiet, turns his head to Reine, still carefully winding the bandage around Shera’s foot. ‘She’s tired.’

Reine hums. ‘I imagine so. She won’t be on the rocket for another few weeks, I’ll check how the potion’s doing in the morning and we’ll go from there. But she won’t be walking.’

Cid thinks in another circumstance, he’d open his mouth. Instead, he takes a breath and nods. He understands that, of course he does. She won’t even be going downstairs for a few days. His fingers sweep through her fringe, comb it somewhat off her face, though it doesn’t stay tucked behind her ear. The little ring in her helix catches his fingertip, and he hums, had forgotten about it.

‘She’s a steady sleeper,’ Reine says, ‘I’ve come in before, when she’s been ill, and she’s steady. But I’d like her supervised, at least for tonight.’ It’s very pointed, and Cid doesn’t miss the way her eyebrows climb in his direction.

‘I’m fine,’ Shera tries to protest, but she sounds worn out, sounds exhausted.

Reine levels her with a look, and she cows, shoulders curling.

‘Get the Captain to take you to the bathroom to get ready for bed,’ she says, ‘and I’ll – I’d make cocoa, but you won’t want any with your tongue.’

Shera sticks her tongue out, and Cid can see the marks of her teeth. It’s a miracle she didn’t bite her tongue off, the size of the scabs. She touches it, gingerly, and winces.

‘No,’ she admits. ‘But juice, maybe.’

‘Cordial,’ Reine counters, ‘you’re not having juice this late.’

Shera pouts, but accepts this concession. Then she extends a hand to the Captain, hovering beside the bed. He takes it, and she swings her legs over the side of the bed, about to get to her feet when Reine barks out a no.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ she says, ‘he can carry you. He got you into this mess, he can make up for it by taking you where you need to go.’

‘I can walk,’ Shera protests, ‘with help.’

‘Not tonight you’re not.’

Cid cuts her a look, but she cuts one straight back, and he huffs, takes the hand he’s still holding and pulls the attached arm around his neck, curling his arms underneath her to lift. Shera giggles, marks her glasses with fingerprints as she tries to disguise the pinkness in her ears.

‘Thank you,’ she murmurs, as Cid makes his way down the hall. ‘I’m sorry you have to do this.’

He sets her down on the edge of the tub as she asks, and hands her the toothbrush and paste she indicates. Watching her brush her teeth and lean over the sink to spit bloody foam, he thinks, privately, that he’s – he’s not glad, because his chief engineer is injured because of his impatience and now the build is going to be set back weeks – but he’s glad, in a way. That he’s helping, that he’s doing these jobs. He’s not equipped to deal with the injuries, not at all, but this, taking her where she needs to go, handing her things she needs, helping her find a comfortable position in bed with spare pillows under her leg to keep it elevated, he can do that. He’s equipped for that.

She starts shivering in the night, and he’d been in the chair by the window, alternating between watching her and watching the stars. It hadn’t taken her long to fall asleep, and he’s sure she’d forgotten he was in the room by the time she dozed off. But she’s shivering, and no quiet rooting in the cupboards finds him another blanket. Rolling his eyes to the heavens, he shucks his boots, his socks, unbuckles his belt as quietly as he can and shoves his trousers down and off, leaves them in a pile by the chair and – careful not to disturb her leg – climbs into bed behind her. He remembers nearly braining himself on the stairs working in a storm, and waking to find her curled around him, half-naked because body heat was the cure for hypothermia, so they fucking said.

He's not half-naked, still in his t-shirt and boxers, but he’s warm, knows he is, and she settles almost immediately in his arms, shivers abating to steady, deep breaths. He breathes in the smell of her hair, the citrus soap of her skin, and runs his fingers up and down her arm. It’s only fair to return the favour, after all.

Somewhere between then and dawn, he dozes off, half-asleep even as the door shushes open, Reine entering with tea. If she thinks anything of him cradling her in sleep, she never says anything of it. At least not until long after the marriage is finalised and there’s an audience enough to embarrass him.

[captainericvgc]

EPISODE I: CAPTAIN ERIC VS THE MYSTERIOUS MIMIC

Captain Eric muses on deleting twitter hopefully for good, a gold grabbing ghost and the distribution of Pokemon teased for Scarlet and Violet

So with Twitter dead and gone, I’m going back to the old days of the internet, long form blogging. It has been refreshing the past two days not posting every stray thought that comes to mind and (more importantly) not seeing everyone else’s stray thoughts. I’ll do a longer form obituary on my time on twitter later and what finally drove me off (spoiler: the top trending topics of a day being “The Jews” and “#IStandWithKyrie” were a big motivator) but for today’s topic we’re going to be talking about the latest Pokemon revealed: Gimmighoul

(source: bulbapedia.com) On November 5th, a Pokemon started showing up in Pokemon Go and following you around if you collected coins at Pokestops. The same day Pokemon launched a site that showed a treasure chest being progressively filled with more and more coins over time. Then finally on November 6th, Gimmighoul was officially revealed. Now I know there’d been dex leaks and a “Coin” Pokémon was teased in those leaks (and hey another advantage of leaving twitter I will know nothing about the game early) so this is our guy.  Designwise, I love this lil dude. A mimic Pokemon is a very interesting concept and I’m hoping it gets some kind of signature move to take advantage of its two forms. While we’re on the topic of two forms, Gimmighoul has the chest form that I have in the image and then the Roaming Form that’s just the lil grey guy by himself but the Pokemon’s ability is Rattled (boost speed if hit by Ghost, Dark or Bug attacks) which means that changing between forms is not going to be dependent on the ability like other Pokemon who can change forms between battle (Eiscue, Aegislash, Darmanitan and Mimikyu for example). It is stated that the Roaming form is very fast and evasive but the Chest Form is slow and defensive. If it’s not based on ability and the Roaming Form is said to be uncatchable, I wonder how they union these two ideas. The next thing that struck me was that this was yet another Ghost Pokemon to be revealed and that it had felt like Ghost was getting alot of representation so far this gen. Prior to Gimmighoul’s release, Ghost-type Pokemon were the sole 2nd rarest type in the game ahead of Ice (they’ve now moved into a tie with Fairy). I checked it out and my feelings were confirmed. Of the 18 Pokemon that have been revealed and had their types disclosed 3 have a Ghost typing, tying it with Psychic for the 2nd most common type of revealed Pokemon. Normal is first with 5, which I think makes sense. But what interests me is that there are a ton of types that have had no rep at all yet this pre-release cycle. Bug, Dark, Fighting, Flying, Ground and Steel have all yet to be shown. Bug and Flying would be represented by our Route 1 bird and bug which is odd we haven’t seen since Lechonk likely fills the Rattata role. As I was writing this, Pokemon announced there will be a trailer tomorrow which I would expect to be the final trailer before release. I imagine this is going to be the starter evolution reveal, then again they didn’t release the starters evos for SwSh so who knows? I suppose we will in 22 hours.

WEIGH ANCHOR

[kookieswan]

Red Light - Fair Warning

Nightmare!Hoseok x Psychologist!Reader

Word Count: 1.3k

Genre: Horror AU, Monster AU, Psychological horror, the angst train is still here.

Warnings: Use of profanity, talk of killing, talk of sexism/ableism and workplace mistreatment. It should be noted that this story will contain themes of horror/psychological horror and also explore obsessive behaviors and codependency. Many characters are morally gray. Please be warned!

Summary: You’re new Nightmare isn’t happy to be in the facility, but his arrival has sparked new ideas. New ideas and new warnings.

Notes: How are we feeling about the mad snake boy? This takes place immediately after ‘Snake Eyes’!

This is the 18th part of the Red Light series. Find the Masterlist here ♥️

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“I don’t have anything to fucking say to you. Those assholes decided it would be fun to rip me away from my life to ‘study me’, so now I’m here. Fucking losers.” It makes you feel bad almost immediately; the fact that they were taken from whatever life they had before, and now… But there’s nothing you can really do. Nothing besides listening to them and trying to understand.

“It’s more than understandable that this situation bothers you. If you want to we can talk about that? Anything you’d like really.” It’s worth a shot, your newest Nightmare clearly isn’t willing to talk about how he’s feeling in a serious manner. 061313 bristles where he sits, flexing his tail just barely enough to move it, chains rattling loudly in the mostly empty room. He gives you a deadpan look, plump lips pursed before he scoffs.

“There’s nothing to talk about lady. I’m down here against my will and I can already tell I’m gonna fucking hate it” Nodding, it makes you think of the others. They’ve got to be bored sitting in their bare cells all day, and this cements your thoughts; it’s time to bring in some sort of stimuli. You make a mental note as you reposition yourself, 061313’s head slowly cocking to the side.

They’ll fight you about it tooth and nail, insisting the Nightmares don’t actually need it. Perhaps they don’t, but it could help some of them. Namjoon with expressing himself, Yoongi with controlling his behavior, Hoseok… Hoseok. You don’t know what to do with him, his anger flashing through your memories as he warned you to keep a low profile. Fighting them on things isn’t even close to keeping a low profile, but-

“What about you? You went looking for this job and like working down here for these fuckers?” It snaps you out of your thoughts, his voice searing and blunt. If only he knew. You shake your head, trying your best not to scoff like he had as he glances around the room, slitted eyes wide and alert. You can barely stand a majority of your coworkers, but getting to study the Nightmares and getting to know them have been mostly worth it. Even if you’ve nearly died.

“It’s a very long story. I can’t say I’m terribly excited about the conditions down here, but it’s what I have to do for now. I genuinely want to understand my patients and help them if I can.” He stares then, stares and stares as the both of you remain quiet. You’re not lying in the slightest; you do wish to help them, even if you really can’t in reality.

“Well, that’s very fucking kind of you to help out monsters doctor.” He says it, monsters, with mild disgust. Interesting since most of the others speak about themselves and other Nightmares without much emotion. This man, however…

“You’re not monsters, not really. You’re just a bit different from regular humans. I think if we were to better understand each other, things wouldn’t be this way.” From all your research, you’ve found that Nightmares and humans have a lot in common. So much in fact that you know there’s got to be a large amount of them be minding in with human society. Even if a majority of them love to cause chaos and even kill, that doesn’t take away from their basic needs, similar to a human. Security, affection, comfort…

061313 bites his lip and chews on it for a bit before his tongue pokes out. It’s long, long enough to reach the bottom of his chin as he seems to ponder your words. Critical a he may feel about the situation, he seems to have calmed down quite a bit, and so you give yourself a small pat on the back. Pulling his tongue back, he stretches his neck from side to side before he huffs haughtily.

“Your plight might be admirable, but these assholes down here; they’re the kind to never let shit go. Once a monster, always a fucking monster. Wouldn’t even matter if I was a saint the rest of my life.” And you know that’s true. The men down here disgust you to no end; sexist, ableist, their dislike for Nightmares more than apparent, you could go on. Still, it’s clear he’s talking from experience, and you can’t stop yourself from asking.

“You’ve dealt with a situation similar to this before…?” The man goes rigid in his place, tale no longer wiggling about. His eyes glaze over slightly, and for a solid minute you wait, wait as he slowly snaps himself out of it. He hums, or perhaps mumbles, and it sounds somewhat like a song. This goes on for a bit before his words come out slow, sluggish as he works himself through memories you’re sure aren’t pleasant, voice still nearly a song with how light it is.

“Sure, you could say that. I haven’t been around for long but I’ve experience my fair share of horror.” It makes you feel sad, a heavy weight falling over your shoulders. You’ve never really thought about the lives the others had faced outside of the facility, not here long enough to ask. For some of them, you’re not even sure it’s a good idea to. Deciding that that’s enough talk for the day, and in hopes of staying on 061313’s good graces, you start to wrap things up.

“I see… Well 061313, even if you don’t believe me, it was a pleasure to meet you. Even if the circumstances are unfortunate, I look forward to speaking with you more in the future. We’ll have scheduled meetings set up, but you’re also welcome to call for me at any point in time if you wish to speak…” He’s looking at you still as you rise, but you’re not sure if he’s really absorbing the information. What he has seemed to absorb is the fact that he’s stuck in chains and powerless, face now crestfallen and lacking the rage it held earlier… and so you do something you’re not sure you should. You warn him.

“… My advice to you is to not act out. I know you want to, but please don’t. They’ll send you to isolation or worse yet, more levels down and I don’t want that for you or any of my other patients. I’m not sure what goes on there but I know it’s not good. Do not test them.” He hisses, a low sound, but you don’t think it’s geared toward you. Not as he curses toward the ceiling, profanities that almost make you cringe, eyes closed and neck straining back.

You keep your eyes on him with intensity as you take a few steps closer to his cell, trying to communicate that you mean it. That you’re serious and that this isn’t something to be taken lightly. He wiggles a few more times in the chair, looking uncomfortable, before he sighs a defeated sigh. A sad sigh. A sigh that signals that his hold on his emotions is somewhat exceptional for a young Nightmare. Hmm…

“I’ll try my best, but no damn promises. I tend to break those.” Drawing your lips into what can only be described as a grim smile, you just nod and uncross your arms, turning to pick up your notes and make you way toward the exit. Pausing, you knock slowly and whisper out a final sentiment, one you hope he takes to heart.

“For you and me both, I hope your best is good enough.”